The chairman glanced around the room. Everybody here? Just for the record, let’s do a roll call.

From around the long table came a series of replies: Jones here, security, Chen, health, Almato, information, Ellison, public relations.

Good, that’s everybody. First of all, let me remind you that this is an absolutely confidential meeting. We’re here to come up with advice for the government on how to handle this issue. Some of the options we’ll discuss won’t be adopted and none of them should ever be discussed with anyone outside this room. That means for the rest of your life. Got it?

A chorus of assent came back.

Alright, let’s get started. I’m sure you’ve seen the briefing notes on the undocumented problem. Out of our total population of two hundred million, we’ve now got ninety-five percent participation in the Sharing Act. That leaves about ten million refuseniks. They’re the problem we’re discussing today. Let’s start by going round the table to hear the current state of affairs. Almato, why don’t we start with you?

Almato surveyed the room and began: Let me remind you how far we’ve come. Seventy-five years ago we had the first network to connect military nodes. Then the internet, then the web, then social media. The vast majority of the population now voluntarily share most of their personal information. Combining that with cell phones, computer use, banking and commerce, street level surveillance, government data, police reports, and reporting by other people, we can now produce a detailed portrait of almost anyone we want, including current location and travel, personal relations, attitudes and actions, communications and even facial recognition from street level surveillance, video chats and screen sharing. The results have been especially positive in areas like crime reduction and political tranquility.

Chen continued in her soft medical voice. We’ve also been able to show that sharing information has provided significant medical benefits. During the last two pandemics, we’ve been able to replace unpopular lockdowns with targeted identification and treatment of affected persons. We’ve also reduced health costs by almost twenty percent from our mining of the actuarial data at our disposal to identify cases where health care, beyond palliative, is just not cost effective. We’ve had resistance in areas like vaccination but the precision of our information is now allowing us to deal with those people by less intrusive means like targeted airborne vaccines. All in all we’re very pleased.

Ellison took over. But it’s still messy. You’ve all seen the legislative attempts to bring order to this mass of information. The earliest ones were clunky and riddled with loopholes. They were also slowed down by leakers who broadcast worst case scenarios and by a few foreign governments who put up roadblocks to better sharing. We’ve learned a few lessons from those early attempts. First, buy-in from the public is crucial. We’ve played the cards of child pornography and terrorism and that’s helped. Second, we need the courts to be airtight in their support and that’s beginning to show progress. Finally, we need proactive combat against resisting organizations. Our lawsuits on that score have been effective up to a point. The crown jewel in all this is the Sharing Act. It’s now been in place for just under five years, including rollout in the media, in schools beginning at the preschool level, and through incentives based on access to employment and to government grants. Most people are now happy to share their information, to be chipped and to cooperate.

The chairman cut in. Except for the refuseniks. We’ve still got ten million who refuse to share. He turned to Jones. Bring us up to date on that.

Jones’ gruff voice rapped out the response. We’ve hit a wall. Everyone is chipped from birth but there are now enough rogue surgeons that a refusenik can lose their chip for less than a week’s wages. Official jobs are off limits to the non-chipped but there’s always under the table work. In fact there’s a whole off-grid economy for someone who wants to stay dark. At the same time refusenik beliefs are pushing them to have lots of kids so we risk being replaced by them if we don’t deal with the problem soon. So far our political masters have lacked the courage to apply more robust methods to deal with the issue.

The chairman’s gaze rounded the room. The refusenik problem is growing. Our political masters need advice. You’ve seen what we’ve accomplished so far but also the challenges. So, ideas? Our guidance is to leave no stone unturned in our deliberations.

Almato began. I don’t have a fix but I might have a tool. We know a lot about the chipped but a lot less about the refuseniks. That’s mostly because we’ve concentrated our efforts on mining what we know. Maybe it’s time to turn our efforts around?

Faced with puzzled stares, he continued. Suppose you’ve got a pile of red disks and blue disks all mixed together. So far we’ve studied the red disks in the pile and we know a lot. We’ve used it to make their life better. In the case of the blue disks we know a lot less but maybe we can sort of filter them out by a process of elimination.

More puzzled stares. OK, suppose you’re a normal chipped person and you’re trying to get into an official building or take a flight or open a bank account. You have to show your chip, right? No chip, no entry, no flight, no account. More importantly, since we track activity, movements and pretty much everything else for anyone with a chip, it means you’ve got a digital pedigree. We know where you’ve been and what you’ve done so we know you’re OK. Now imagine someone comes into our net, maybe by online cameras, someone who’s not recognized, who has no pedigree and no chip. Until now we haven’t done anything since they still do have the choice not to go into the government office or take the flight or open the bank account. But what if we turn that on its head? If we can’t see your chip and your pedigree, it means you’re guilty. Now, what to do after that is up to the rest of you...

After a long silence Ellison spoke. It’s always best to get voluntary buy-in. Let’s suppose a campaign where we show that refuseniks are a selfish danger. They value their own privacy and autonomy but they put everyone else at risk. That could help to encourage the chipped to identify and ostracize them. Rewards for identifying a refusenik would help and publication of all the details on a refusenik would be even better. That way they’d be isolated. Associating with them would be dangerous.

Jones cut in. You’re missing the point that refuseniks are like cockroaches. They hide in the shadows and slip out of your hand like quicksilver. It’s fine to identify one, and by the way, I agree with the enhanced turning in strategy, but we need something more robust as a followup.

Almato asked. Could we consider incarceration or deportation?

Jones replied curtly. Prisons are expensive and they’d just slip back into the country if they were deported.

Chen asked in her soft voice. Could we use some anticonception device on the unchipped? Perhaps targeted vaccination like we do for vaccine deniers?

Ellison replied. The political sensitivities are too great. Targeting a population for active negative measures would expose us to all sorts of legal worries and it would be a hard sell. Folks might ask whether they would the next to be targeted.

So we’re at an impasse, intoned the chairman.

There is one other option, said Chen after another long silence. It’s based on Almato’s idea. Suppose we administer to the entire population some substance that does one thing if you’re chipped and has some other effect if you’re not. Like giving better disease protection to the chipped. Or enhancing the ability to conceive. That way the refuseniks would only have themselves to blame if fewer of them had children and more of them died of disease.

I like this, exclaimed Ellison. I could sell that. Think back to campaigns to flouridate or chlorinate water or pasteurize milk. There’s scientific evidence to show the public health benefits so the population will buy it for the most part. The negative effects on refuseniks could be presented as a kind of justice. At the end of the day, if you share, you prosper, and if you refuse, you don’t.

A chorus of assent greeted this summary.

Smiling, the chairman said to the group. A very nice discussion. I think I have something to present to our masters. We won’t see instant results but with luck the problem will disappear in a decade or two. And before then, even the refuseniks will start to see the writing on the wall.