Re: The Show Must Go Off

The Show Must Go Off–part two

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MCL-BeltMiner#C485640624
For anyone to truly understand my motives, they’d have to know the truth about The Great Extortion. Back in ’38, when Yoshi got famous? The popblogs and ‘casts all claimed he’d charmed top scientists into DOING the study that accidentally revealed the link from corn syrup overconsumption in parents to their kids’ autism. Sham. Yoshi didn’t have the idea. He didn’t prompt the labcoated losers to do the study, and he didn’t prompt the bureaucrats to give grants. He didn’t even get all those former programmers jobs.
I was doing data mining, hero-worshipping Yoshi along with everyone when I DID have an idea of my own. When does a study convince people? I was still young in ’40 when there was a resurgence in the Flat Earthers [snort] so it was on my mind. And what more trackable than purchases? I did a term’s software project on market research data mining and then hacked in to get purchase profiles of three scientists on the study, three programmers and TRIED for Yoshi’s. Then a simple subroutine to look up which sweeteners in guesstimates of ‘doses’ and a longer program to compare those six to a population of 100 random citizens. I expected the programmers to slow eating corn syrup in ’37, you know, when the study contracts were made? As part of their endorsing the project. I expected the scientists to start later, [bah humbug, no REAL evidence till WE say so. . .] and was I wrong. The programmers slowed when I thought. The scientists had slowed back in [uh?!] ’21. It took me nearly a year to backtrace by location and eliminate other customers from where Yoshi shopped. He’d known since ’23. I extorted my hero. I was, after all, doing pretty much what he had done.
Somehow he’d hacked the original study and extorted his way out of being sentenced for computer crimes. Then he got amnesty and had the bureaucrats and scientists involved buy their way out by duping the study nearly EIGHTEEN years later and going public. 9.3 MILLION autistic kids were born in those eighteen years, if you count the colonies, stations, and orbiting farms. All over one dirty secret. He teletutored me in programming, data-mining, hacking, anything I wanted before ‘awarding’ his fortune to his ‘brightest and favorite pupil’ in his will. He went to his grave still a hero, using his good name to praise turning the scramble for resources into a collective of prison workers. The Belt Mine Prison System was well underway in ’46 when he died. So you see it’s fitting that when I did get sent up, I got sent here. My hero’s meal tickets got the place started after all. “Ice, Iron, and Iodine” people were saying. Water, metal, and trace minerals from the asteroid belt to grow sugar cane, soy, fruit, blue agave, and the tweaks. Little did I know my part in making my future home. The history books can stay wrong. Why be a famous target when I could be a rich healthy happy nobody?
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