Beyond the Rift (36 page)

You could also argue that, having spent most of my adult life hanging out with scientists and academics, my range is just too limited to craft any other kind of character. Fair enough.

I’m not claiming that I don’t tell my stories against a dystopian backdrop. Take the Rifters trilogy, for example. The desperate rearguard against ongoing environmental collapse, the neurochemically enslaved bureaucrats deciding which part of the world they’ll incinerate today to hold back the latest plague, the exploitation of abuse victims to run power plants on the deep-ocean floor—none of this is the stuff of Hallmark Theatre. But in a very real sense, these are not
my
inventions; they are essential features of any plausible vision of the future. The thing that distinguishes science fiction, after all—what sets it apart from magic realism and horror and the rest of speculative horde—is that it is
fiction
based on
science
. It has to be at least semiplausible in its extrapolations from
here
to
there
.

Where can we go, from
here
? Where can we go, starting with seven billion hominids who can’t control their appetites, who wipe out thirty species a day with the weight of their bootprints, who are too busy rejecting evolution and building killer drones to notice that the icecaps are melting? How do you write a plausible near-future in which we somehow stopped the flooding and the water wars, in which we
didn’t
wipe out entire ecosystems and turn millions into environmental refugees?

You can’t. That ship—that massive, lumbering, world-sized ship— has already sailed, and it turns so very slowly. The only way you can head off those consequences by 2050 is by telling a tale in which we got serious about climate change back in the nineteen-seventies—and then you’re not talking science fiction any more, you’re talking fantasy.

So if my writing tends toward the dystopic it’s not because I’m in love with dystopias; it’s because reality has forced dystopia upon me. A ravaged environment is no longer optional when writing about the near future. All I can do now is imagine how my characters might react to the hand they’ve been dealt. The fact that they resort to implanting false memories and neurological shackles in their employees, that they may order the immolation of ten thousand innocent refugees—that’s not what makes dystopia. What makes dystopia is an inheritance in which these awful actions are the
best ones available
, where every other alternative is even worse; a world where people commit mass murder not because they are sadists or sociopaths, but because they are trying to do the least harm. It is not a world my characters built. It is only the world we left them.

There are no real villains in Wattsworld. If you want villains, you know where to look.

Dystopia is not always an unhappy place. There are, as it happens, certain dystopias in which it’s perfectly possible to be happy as a clam. Vast numbers of people go through life never even realizing that they’re in one, might live through the real-time decay from freedom to tyranny and never notice the change.

It basically comes down to wanderlust.

Imagine your life as a path extending through time and society. To either side are fences festooned with signs:
No Trespassing
,
Keep Off the Grass, Thou Shalt Not Kill
. These are the constraints on your behavior, the legal limits of acceptable conduct. You are free to wander anywhere between these barriers—but cross one and you risk the weight of the law.

Now imagine that someone starts moving those fences closer together.

How you react—whether you even notice—depends entirely on how much you wandered beforehand. A lot of people never deviate from the center of the path their whole lives, wouldn’t deviate even if there
were
no fences. They’re the ones who can never understand what all those fringe radicals are whining about; after all,
their
lives haven’t changed any. It makes no difference to them whether the fences are right on the shoulder or out past the horizon.

For the rest of us, though, it’s only a matter of time before you wander back to a point you’ve always been free to visit in the past, only to find a fence suddenly blocking your way.

When that happens, you might be surprised at how close those things have crept when you weren’t looking. I know I was. I’m not what you’d call a hardened criminal. I’ve found myself in the little white room at US Customs somewhat more often than might be expected from a “random” selection process, but I suspect that’s just because your average customs agent doesn’t quite know what to make of the self-employed (“Biostatistical consultant and writer? What the hell is that supposed to be?”)
³
I may have once been guilty of associating with tewwowists, back when my dad was still alive—a retired preacher and the General Secretary of the Baptist Convention of Ontario and Quebec, I’m told he earned a CSIS
⁴
file for his efforts on behalf of unpatriotic groups like Amnesty International—but none of Obama’s flying terminators were likely to get all twinkly-eyed when they ran me through facial recognition.

Which is not to say that I was
intellectually
unaware of the ongoing erosion of civil rights on this continent. Only that, as a well-educated white dude with a relatively sheltered life, my awareness was more academic than visceral, more second- than first-hand. So while returning to Toronto with a friend after a trip to Nebraska, I expected to be stopped at the Canadian border, by Canadian Customs. I expected that if they decided to search the vehicle, they’d inform me first, and ask me to pop the trunk.
⁵

And when none of this happened—when I was pulled over by US border guards two kilometres from the Canadian border, and looked over my shoulder to find eager guards already going through our luggage like a swarm of army ants—I expected no real trouble when I got out of the car to ask what was going on.

I imagine a number of readers rolling their eyes at this point.
Well, of
course
. You
never
get out of a vehicle unless ordered. You
never
make eye contact. You
never
ask questions; if you do, you deserve what you get
. I have nothing to say to these people. To the rest of you I say: see what we’ve come to. We have criminalized the expectation of reasonable communication with those who are supposed to protect us.
And people approve
.

(One of the things we tend to forget about Ray Bradbury’s classic
Fahrenheit 451
is that the banning of books was not imposed against the will of the people by some tyrannical authority. The grass roots in that dystopian novel didn’t
want
to read.)

I learned more than I wanted to about Michigan’s legal system in the months that followed. I learned of a miraculous little statute—750.81(d) by name—which bundles everything from murder down to “failure to comply with a lawful command” into one felonious little package. It spends almost half a page defining what constitutes a “person”; nowhere does it define what makes a command “lawful.” If you happen to be crossing the border and a “person” tells you to get down on all fours and bark like a dog, you might want to keep that in mind. (Fun fact: according to US law, “the border” is actually a
zone
extending a hundred miles from the actual line on the map. The rights-free atmosphere one encounters at Customs—warrantless searches, detention without cause, the whole shebang—extends throughout that band. If the Border Patrol decides on a whim to kick in the door of some poor sap living in Potsdam, there’s not a lot anyone can do about it; it’s a “border search,” exempt from the usual checks and balances.)

In the end, of course, I was convicted. Not of assault, despite what you may have heard. The trial established that there was no aggression on my part, not so much as an expletive or a raised voice, despite prosecutorial allegations that I “resisted,” that I “choked an officer.”
⁶
What the prosecution fell back on, ultimately, was that just after I’d been repeatedly punched in the face and just before I got maced, I’d been ordered to get on the ground—and instead of immediately complying, I’d said, “What is the
problem
?” It didn’t matter that I
had
been punched in the face, or that the guards themselves had lied under oath. (The jury threw out their testimony wholesale because—as one of them stated on the record—“they couldn’t keep their stories straight.”) It didn’t matter that DHS itself, called up from Detroit in hopes of boosting the charges (my arrest sheet originally accused me of “Assaulting a Federal Officer”) refused to participate in the case once they’d interviewed those involved. It didn’t even matter that jury members publicly opined that the
guards
should have been the ones on trial. 750.81(d) forced them to convict regardless.

It’s important to note that what happened to me was
not
an abuse of the law. The law functioned exactly as it was supposed to; it gave carte blanche to authority, while criminalizing any act—even asking a question—short of immediate and unthinking compliance. We live in a society where laws are designed to protect not the populace, but the right to
abuse
the populace under almost any circumstance.

I’m focusing on the US here because that’s where I encountered my own personal fence; it’s also where most of you happen to live. But lest you think I’m just another smug Canuck taking a fashionable dump on the Ugly American, let me emphasize that I hold my own country in no greater esteem. The Canadian government routinely muzzles its own scientists and is currently busy dismantling even the rudimentary environmental protections with which we once made do. My home town of Toronto was the site of Canada’s largest violations of civil rights, during the G20 protests in 2010: over a thousand people arrested and detained, the vast majority of them without charge.
⁷
Hundreds kettled for hours in a freezing downpour: ordered to leave, prevented from leaving, arrested for noncompliance. Preemptive gunpoint roustings in private bedrooms, 4 a.m. arrests on the chance that some activist might otherwise commit a crime later in the day. And what kind of party would it have been without the traditional beating of unarmed, unresisting protestors by officers with obscured badge numbers, who then leveled charges of “assaulting police” on their victims? Thank the gods for cell-phone cameras. Thank the gods for YouTube.

Should you be tempted to suggest that North America—with all its authoritarian abuses—is still a paragon of liberty next to the likes of Iran or communist China or North Korea, I will not argue the point. In fact, I will emphasize it. From the saturation surveillance of central London to the Toronto PD arresting people for failure to obey search-and-seizure laws that don’t actually exist, the systemic abuse of civil rights seems to be a feature of freedom-loving democracies everywhere. This, apparently, is the best we can do.

I’m still quite a cheerful guy in person. Apparently people are surprised by this.

Especially now.

I’ve been asked if recent experience has altered my worldview, if my tango with the US justice system might birth even darker visions to come. I don’t think so. After all, it’s not as if I was unaware of this stuff before it happened to me; one or two journalists have even highlighted parallels between my real-life experiences and the things I’ve inflicted on fictional protagonists, as though my imaginings of police brutality were somehow prescient because they happened to occur in the future.

If anything, though, my perspective has
brightened
. I came out of it relatively unscathed, after all; I was convicted, but despite the prosecution’s best efforts I didn’t go to jail. I’m not welcome back in the US any time soon—maybe not ever—but at this point that’s more of a badge of honor than a professional impediment.

In a very real way, I
won
.

Most would not have. Most people, up against an enemy bureaucracy with deep pockets and only the most token accountability, would have been swallowed whole. There would have been surrender regardless of guilt; desperate plea-bargains to avoid crippling court costs. If the accused did somehow summon the audacity to fight back there would have been a lopsided battle and captivity and years of debt. Michigan bills you for your time behind bars: thirty bucks a day, as if you were staying at a fucking Motel 6, as though you’d chosen to bunk up for the room service and free cable. The longer you’re incarcerated, the higher the bill they shove in your face when you get out.

I’ve stopped getting those little yellow cards in the mail. Maybe they gave up, maybe they lost track of me when I moved, maybe the fact that I’m on the far side of an international boundary makes me not worth going after for the price of one measly night in the clink.
⁸
Those poor bastards I shared beans and Kool-Aid with, though: no protective borders, no sanctuary, no breaks for
them
. A year in jail and they walk out ten thousand dollars in debt. And even
they
have it pretty damn easy next to a family friend whose activist husband was disappeared in Latin America, who was gang-raped and gave birth in jail. Conversations with such folk leave you a bit less inclined to whinge about the injustice of Michigan’s legal leg-hold traps.