The Moon God

By Shine LeFlur

The Moon God is a futuristic, very believable, computer and weapon device placed on the moon by Earth's Superpowers to monitor Earth activities and put an end to conflicts among nations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shine LeFlur
• Release date: Dec 7, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465771629

Shine LeFlur

Shine LeFlur is primarily a Chronicler of East Texas, Nacogdoches County, and especially the fictional Martins Landing rural life of the 1950's. Dallas, Houston, Shreveport, New Orleans, and Monterey, CA also garnered his attention for the fabulous 50's. Other LeFlur tales are international in flavor, set in Japan, Thailand, the Philippines, and Saudi Arabia, and reflect the 60's, 70's, and 80's periods. Equally notable are Shine's fantasy yarns, mostly futuristic, improbable but realistic.

Book preview

The Moon God

Shine LeFlur

Copyright 2011 by Shine LeFlur

All rights reserved

This is a work of fiction and any actual names, places, and events are used fictitiously.

Smashwords Edition

Prologue

How long shall we go on like this? Will we forever be a petty, bickering people who constantly war among ourselves and refuse to share knowledge and resources?

Merciful God above, deliver us from envy and evil. Help us, Heavenly Father, to find the promised land… – Excerpt from a prayer by 90 year old (although the new Centurion looked 50) US Senator Mot Justice, Christmas Day 2049, in the National Cathedral.

Chapter 1

A good idea, almost everyone said it was a good idea. Visionaries had proposed such a plan long ago, but politics and bickering over details kept actual construction and enactment in limbo. Until now, in the last half of the 21st century.

Technology had not been a problem for several decades. With outer space construction techniques and long-range laser weapons a given, and Super intelligent computers already running everything from brooms to nightclubs, design and implementation should be a snap. This, at least, garnered general agreement.

The sticking point was software parameters, operational criteria. This was not to be an ordinary Supercomputer. This would be Numero Uno: the Mother of all Computers. The one with a digital finger on the trigger. The Decider.

This computer would police the earth, eliminating forever the wars that had plagued humankind since the days of cave dwellers. It would be sited in outer space, resistant to attack, and virtually self-sustaining. This Cop would monitor Earth activities and employ powerful laser beams to destroy aggressors and their weapons. A modern-day Wyatt Earp for the whole planet.

Therein lay the problem. In order to be free of human politics and folly, the computer needed autonomy: the ability and power to judge and act on its own. But world leaders by way of the governing body known as the Federation agreed that their directors, the Council of Seven, were invested by law with authority over country states and should be consulted by the machine before it took action. The Council demanded this.

We cannot allow a heartless, godless robotic 'Bully in the Sky' to have sovereignty over our precious human lives, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So said the Council President from his winter home in Cuba, speaking to a reporter as he moved a pile of casino chips beside a roulette wheel, evincing squeals of delight from his two nubile Latino companions.

Federation opponents said this amounted to no more than what the Federation already did. And rather poorly at that. They pointed out that, although the Federation had absolute Charter authority over all nations, in practice it was not greatly improved from the long defunct United Nations, which had been anything but United. Again the most rich and powerful countries had formed a block, and thus tended to get their way in Council decisions.

Nationalism is a natural human outgrowth of racial or ethnic pride, a progression of a desire to protect and promulgate one's own family and by extension, neighborhood. Successful protection leads to feelings of Superiority and then exclusion of others and aggression toward them.

Nations (family groups) band together only when they have a common enemy. If a nation has no enemy, all other nations are the enemy. Evolutionary genes rule, and humans merely dance to their song and rhythm. Kill and maim each other in the name of peace or religion. The winners then construct histories of facts to prove and justify their case.

Against this backdrop, it is hardly surprising that the League of Nations, born in the early 20th century, or its successor, the United Nations, coming in 1945 on the heels of the Second World War, were doomed from the start because the most powerful nations would not cede their military power or even individual veto power.

Indeed, any one member of this group, the Security Council, could veto decisions for any reason or for no reason. Only small, rogue nations with no powerful friends were ever judged and policed by this august body. Finally, when the United States itself, supposedly a paragon of virtue and the rule of law, ignored the UN and romped helter-skelter into the Mideast on a pretext in order to eliminate a thuggish ruler the American President did not like, the death knell sounded. The United Nations fell apart except for a few humanitarian projects.

The extremism which had engulfed the United States and held it hostage after the New York City Twin Towers destruction in 2001 engendered a mass political backlash, and the pendulum swung. Bitter destructive paranoia gave way to more reasoned and enlightened internal and external policies. The decade from 2010 to 2020 was likened by some to the halcyon days of the 1960s. Of course the 60s were not all that great in actuality, with the Vietnam War, political assassinations, and race riots.

A new young generation with their Internet connectedness left their studies in virtual worlds and rose up en masse to turn out the Congressional dinosaurs. Old laws disappeared and new laws put lobbyists from Statehouses to Washington looking for honest work again.

The decade was not all fun and games. Cuba had become the 51st state after a bloodless internal revolution followed the discovery that a Castro look a like had been running the country for years. No one ever knew for sure when the real Fidel had died and disappeared, but it seemed obvious he had finally become the victim of his own paranoia and intrigue.

On the eve of the long-anticipated reunification of the Korean Peninsula, a crazed North Korean General managed somehow to loose a nuclear missile aimed at Tokyo, Japan. His wife's father had been a Japanese soldier, and the General decided this genetic deficiency had been responsible for the woman's craziness and intractability. Wiping the Japanese out was his recourse.

The missile launched flawlessly and its guidance module, a Chinese unit, steered it away as programed on coordinates that would impact Tokyo at the conclusion of its flight. Still in the upper atmosphere, however, a hidden subroutine in a module firmware nudged the trajectory into a new course northward.

A few minutes later, the missile blew a horrific crater in a main boulevard of Taipei, Taiwan. The atomic warhead, sabotaged at assembly by a South Korean sleeper agent, failed to detonate, but it scattered deadly plutonium around the site.

American missiles trained on the North Korean site were aimed and ready, but the renegade General had been almost immediately discovered. He shot himself as security agents closed in, so was unable to launch additional missiles.

US intelligence had tracked the missile, but decided it had gone off course by accident, the usual North Korean faulty design. So they did nothing. Then, a half-hour later, it was too late to take preemptive action. Chinese forces, alerted by their own agents in Pyongyang, had occupied the capital. In control of the air and sea ports, they proclaimed to the world that they had come as humanitarians bringing aid and relief to their brother victims. And they did.

Chapter 2

The old alliances, never much more than stalking horses for their strongest patron members, atrophied and became irrelevant. The Warsaw Pact first, with the demise of the old Soviet Union in 1990. NATO held on longer, tried to justify its existence by periodically volunteering a few troops to support UN peacekeeping operations, but it was a paper tiger.

Newer alliances, such as the European Union and the Pacific conference, had economic power as their primary organizing principle. Since several of the EU members were pacifist militarily, any discussion of the alliance involving itself in even regional public policing activities went nowhere. Tariffs, fair trade, and currently regulation were their raison d'etre and only that.

Nevertheless, the Korean-Chinese debacle and continuing nuclear proliferation demanded attention. Citizens of all major countries were in an uproar. Big cities began to suffer as residents en masse moved out toward less populated areas. Brazil, Iran, Japan, and South Korea had joined the original nuclear club, rounding out an official dozen. Several giant multinationals were even rumored to either already possess or be debating the development of defensive tactical nukes.

Hence came the Federation. Inaugurated in early 2020, the fourth year of the first American female president's initial term of office, the Federation Charter resembled the defunct UN Charter in many respects. The main difference was that this organization had primacy over