"That must be our victim," Lisa said, pointing as they approached the solar system's tallest building. Sitting outside one of the side entrances on a planter in the street was a middle-aged man in a business suit. He was holding a towel to his face while two Agricorp security guards flanked him.
"Must be," Brian said, pulling to the curb next to them. "Looks like an officious Earthling prick to me."
"One of the ones that's been fucking and raping us all these years," she agreed. "I can't imagine why anyone would want to assault him."
"He probably can't either," Brian said.
They stepped out of the cart and shut the doors, both pausing to adjust their weapons belts before walking over to their victim. The security guards, both of whom were undoubtedly Martians, were clearly amused by the predicament of the man they were supposed to be protecting. Dressed in light blue armor that was more decorative than functional, they had barely concealed smiles upon their faces. One of them, the male half of the team, walked over and met them halfway.
"What do we got?" Lisa asked, pulling her patrol computer from her belt and flipping it open. "An upset corporate manager?"
"You know it," the guard said, letting his smile come forth now that he was no longer in view of the victim. "Mr. Ronald Jerome the Third there is one of the bigwigs in the subsidiary accounting division. It seems that as he was leaving the building to go home this afternoon a group of vermin happened across him and roughed him up a bit."
"I guess the vermin are good for something, aren't they?" Brian said whimsically.
"It's only 1500," Lisa said, checking her watch. "What the hell is he doing leaving work now for?"
"He's one of the upper echelon pricks," the guard replied. "They make the fresh meat work ninety hours a week here but the bosses pretty much come and go whenever the hell they feel like it. They come staggering in here between 1100 and 1300 and then go staggering back out again a few hours later. No one is really sure what it is they even do in there but it must not be very important."
"Are you kidding?" Brian said. "They're the ones that keep this great planet running. Where would we be without Agricorp and their bad-ass management team?"
"Free?" Lisa asked.
"You got that shit right," the guard said. "Anyway, he's all livid that he got manhandled by this 'gang of thugs' as he calls them. He's demanding that you go find them and take them to prison."
This cracked both of the cops up. "Prison for simple assault on an Earthling," Lisa said, shaking her head a little. "What fucking planet does he think he lives on? Christ."
"Let's go talk to him," Brian suggested. "This oughtta be fun."
They walked over, both making little effort to put their professional faces back on. There had been a time not too long before when an assault by a welfare class person upon a corporate person would have been a big deal. A full investigation would have been launched and teams of police officers would have been sent out to comb the ghettos until the perpetrator of perpetrators were found. Once arrested they would have had the proverbial book thrown at them, very likely receiving an extended prison sentence. In WestHem society the question was not what the crime was but who the victim had been. Crimes against corporations and corporate employees were considered much graver than crimes — up to and including murder — against working or welfare class.
But that had been before the inauguration of Laura Whiting and her bi-weekly speeches on MarsGroup. Her dissertations on the inner workings of the various corporations, of how they achieved the blatant political manipulation that kept them in perpetual power, had had a tremendous effect on the people of Mars, both welfare and working class. True everyone had always known that the corporations were the real government of the planet and of WestHem itself, but human nature had commanded that they not think about things that they could not change. What Whiting had done was force them to think about the way things were and to think about the fairness of the situation.
"Life is not fair," Whiting had said in one of her speeches shortly after the successful deflection of the impeachment proceedings. "That is one of our most common sayings as a species. Life is not fair and there's nothing you can do about it. We're taught that in school, in our Internet programming, in the movies that we watch and in the literature that we read. Everyone knows — they know — that life is just not fair and that is that. We know that because that is what they tell us. Isn't that right?
"But has it ever occurred to you, fellow Martians, that they only tell people things like that so that we will accept it, so that we will not try to change the system and come up with something that is fair? Because when you think about it, who is life not fair to? Is it not fair to you, the common people of this planet, or is it not fair to the leaders and the corporations that rule us?
"I don't think I have to have an opinion poll put out to hear your answers. You know and I know that life is not fair to you. The advantages go to those that have the money and the power. And if you were to try and take some of those advantages, some of that fairness, and shift it over to your side, that would necessarily take some of it away from their side. They don't want that. So they tell you just to accept the fact that life isn't fair. They tell you that in a thousand different ways each and every day from the time you are born throughout your entire life until you and everyone else becomes convinced that this is an indisputable fact of life, an unbreakable natural law. It carries the same weight as a law of physics. Parents teach this concept to their children, they believe in it so much. Teachers teach it to their students. Life is not fair and you'll just have to live with that and do the best that you can with the crumbs that you've been given. Isn't that how it is?
"But did you ever stop to think, even for a moment, even just fleetingly, why life has to be unfair? There really are no natural laws that say this has to be so. Fairness and unfairness is a human state of mind and their executions are products of human society. Why shouldn't life be fair? Why couldn't it?"
Of all of the speeches of Laura Whiting it had been this one that had done the most to open the eyes of the Martian people. The power of her words lie not in her presentation but in the blatant simplicity. Why couldn't life be fair? Why couldn't a system that insured life was fair to everyone be developed and put in place? There really was no reason except for the obvious one: the corporations and the government that they controlled did not want life to be fair. They did not want fairness and they would fight with everything that they had to keep it away, to banish it from the very thoughts of the people that had been without it for so long.
And after the speech in which the Martians had it explained to them that life did not really have to be unfair, Laura Whiting had then followed this up with other speeches outlining just how things were unfair in specific instances and just how this benefited those in power. She laid out the inner workings of the Martian and the WestHem systems in a way that high school civics instructors would never have dreamed of. "Money," she told them. "Everything comes down to the common denominator of money. Those that have the most of it are able to use it to pervert even the most moral of us to do their bidding. And who has the most money on this planet? Who controls the flow of money on this planet? Who runs the industries that make this planet such a valuable commodity to the WestHem system?"
Nobody had to be told that Earthlings was the answer to this question. Earthlings owned more than ninety-six percent of the holdings on Mars yet they made up less than two percent of the population at any given time. They made decisions each and every day from their glittering high-rise buildings, decisions that could take away the livelihood of thousands upon thousands of Martians, yet the Earthlings were never laid off and sentenced to perpetual welfare status. The Earthlings employed Martians in their corporations and had them do all of the manual labor, all of the paperwork, all of the cleaning and guarding, yet the Martians were rarely, if ever, invited into upper management positions within those companies. Martians were rarely if ever put in charge of decision making. Martians were allowed into the WestHem armed services where they served with distinction in all branches but they were rarely promoted to officer rank and they were never promoted to command rank.