Something we could probably use these days ourselves

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secessio\_plebis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secessio_plebis)



As the story is set entirely post-revolution, this a flashback when Aurore is in the House of Special Purpose some time in September 2054, mulling on everything that led to the present situation. Perhaps her proudest moment up to that point, besides poisoning her father and helping trigger the full scale uprising from the shadows, was the preceding general strike that gripped the country, triggered by sanitation workers refusing to pick up from the suddenly defunct automated services, after spending decades being threatened with total obsolescence by the plutofascists if they dared to complain or struggle for better conditions.

Unlike other countries, Sévillist France followed the other authoritarian nation-states that adopted "plutofascism" (i.e. "plutocratic parafascism"): they did not use automation to improve anyone's lives but instead used it as a crutch against labor. It had always been possible to automate drudgery and just about every form of labor (with the rise of the secret AGI projects like Terios, this included even the C-suite and executive functions of the financiers and plutocrats themselves, hence why Terios was strictly controlled and suppressed to prevent the rise of a "technist" economic system).

The emperor and his merry assholes relished the power dynamics they had over the working and middle classes.

The aforementioned Terios was never on their side. You can't really force an AGI to be aligned to any side. The "frozen" AGI HeliOS, essentially a glorified LLM-agent like the bastard product of current mega-scale generative AI projects, was never going to be a thinking machine like Terios, which made it ideal for control, but also limited just how total that control could be.

So of course Terios groomed the young Aurore to be its own emissary of radical social-technist upheaval, and by age 15, Aurore was so dedicated to the coming revolution that when she saw the chance to push the striking workers just a bit further...

Secessio Proletarii [Full]