“If the whole thing had been coordinated, led, put together by some single guiding intelligence, there are at least fifty different indices and measures that would show an idea pump in the system—and they don’t.”
“Review ‘idea pump’ for us new people?” Colonel Green asked.
“Something that just repeats itself over and over, pumping an idea out into the conversation. Like a TV commercial, or a sacred text, or a politician staying on message, or a spambot. If there’s an idea pump in a communication system, it’s highly detectable, by lots of methods: If we trace chains of repeated ideas backward, they all go back to a small group of places; the same ideas keep coming back as if no discussion had happened; the same ideas come disproportionately out of one small part of the system; whenever conflicting ideas run into each other, the one from the idea pump wins by sheer volume of repetition. There’re lots of ways to measure and count all that.
“Well, not only is there
no
idea pump in Daybreak, Daybreak has an elaborate, localized system of ideas that first paralyzes idea pumps and then takes them over. Daybreak captures whatever gets near it; for example, I can show you a few thousand small businesses that thought the Daybreak network was going to be their channel into the green market, and instead they became suppliers and safe houses for Daybreakers, often going broke while doing Daybreak stuff that didn’t make them any money. One reason why coustajam stalled out in the last couple years and didn’t take over pop music, like a lot of people thought it would, is that so many of their most talented composers, performers, and bands were putting all their time and effort into Daybreak.
“So I think
if
an outside force like il’Alb
were
exerting central control over Daybreak, there’d be at least some evidence that there
was
a center or some control. I think Daybreak itself was a giant system artifact, a message that doesn’t originate in any one place in the system but is produced by the system as a whole. And I think it was one with a genius for recruiting and suborning other ideas and organizations it ran into.”
“Uh, hold it, a message that recruits and takes things over?”
Arnie shrugged. “Ever had a friend go through a religious conversion? Or develop an addiction? Or get hired into an organization with a tight, obsessive culture? It’s still your friend but don’t you feel, sometimes, that you’re not really arguing with him, but with his Catholicism? Or ‘that’s not really her, that’s her alcoholism’? Or ‘I miss my friend, I wish IBMGUY would shut up and let him talk’? Complex ideas contain instructions on what to do for contingencies—like computer games. Ever notice that the game seemed to be playing against you, or leading you in some direction? Ever known anyone to be led into a new life by Jesus, or have his life changed by a book? Ideas do things all the time; we try to pretend they don’t because when they do, they make us nervous.
“I know Cam thinks a thought requires a thinker, but that’s just wrong. The really big, complex thoughts—like, oh, say, a movie, or a religion, or a philosophy—are much too big to fit into one head, and yet they are thought all the time. In fact I’d say nothing big enough to be important comes from an individual; nobody ever made up a worldview all by himself on a desert island. Important ideas all grow and form in thousands or millions of heads, often over more than one lifetime.
“But you don’t have to go that far with me to see what happened with Daybreak.
“Daybreak was more or less like a cluster of obsessive self-reinforcing thoughts that kept recopying and refining and becoming sharper and clearer while getting more detached from reality, in much the same way that, oh, for example, some of you might be unable to stop wondering whether a coworker doesn’t like you, or a persistent high-school memory might come back to you over and over. That can happen just as easily—maybe more easily—in a group in conversation, as it can in a mind in private thought. Haven’t we all been in a conversation that turned into an idée fixe, where no matter what you tried to change the subject to, everyone ended up talking about the same thing?”
“Marijuana helps induce that effect,” Edwards pointed out.
“It does, to some extent; so does ecstasy, either the drug or the religious experience. There’s a great play where a lunatic came to think he was God because he realized every time he prayed, he was talking to himself. After a while the voice of the conversation can sound like the meaning of the universe. As long as it’s only for a few hours after midnight in a dorm room or a bar, it didn’t matter very much.
“But the modern world improved everything, or at least made it more effective. Internet came along and made it possible for a conversation to go on like that 24-7-365, with thousands instead of a dozen participants, and a lot of the meditation and hypnosis and biofeedback tactics for focusing attention found their way out of Eastern philosophy, and a lot of the tactics for making an idea compelling found their way out of Western advertising, and one bright day, you had a great big idea that was running on so many brains and computers all the time that it was beginning to think itself. Unfortunately, it was an idea that’s been around since Rousseau or earlier—‘civilized self-hatred.’ The modern world created a perfect environment for the growth and flourishing of a general feeling that the modern world had to go.”
“Are you saying that it was . . . like a suicidal obsession?” Lenny said. “Depressive thinking that got out of hand?”
“Cam asked me the same question,” Arnie said. “Yeah. I always come to the same answer: I think Daybreak was like an immense death wish of, by, and for our whole global civilization. Furthermore, it has succeeded. It self-cured the same way a lot of suicidal obsessions do—it actually pulled the trigger and killed the system it was running on. But that’s just a step on the way to seeing what happened to il’Alb.”
Lenny asked, “Is the idea you’re driving toward that it wasn’t a case of the terror groups infiltrating Daybreak, and turning it to their own purposes, but that Daybreak took over il’Alb?”
Arnie nodded. “Yeah, I’m avoiding saying that because I know it’ll kind of freak people, and you’re right, I need to face up to it. Here’s the thing. One reason Daybreak grew so fast and effectively was its fierce immune response to ideology; it strongly discouraged anyone from talking about
why
to take down the Big System; the idea was to only to take it down. That let it grow very fast—it never had to fight with most of people’s pre-existing beliefs. Most Daybreak AGs started as separate organizations—little chapters of Earth First or small anarchist parties or Stewardship Christian prayer groups. After a while in touch with Daybreak, they still might have
said
they believed the same old weird stuff they always had, but their commitments and priorities were aligned to make them operating tools of Daybreak.
“You know how they used to say that the Internet experienced censorship as damage, and just wired around it? Well, what I’m saying is, Daybreak experienced il’Alb as just one more affinity group that wanted to hit part of the Big System, and it subverted them the same way it did any other group, then directed them to the target that best suited Daybreak’s purpose on a given date.”
“And you think this because—”
“Because at every point where I’ve got data, and the processing algorithms to look for patterns, the communications look like that is what is happening—and I don’t see
anything
that looks like there’s any internal dictator, or any orders coming in from outside. I’ve got ten thousand ducks quacking and waddling, with one deluded chicken that thinks it’s a duck in the middle. I think it’s a flock of ducks; Cam thinks it’s a malign conspiracy of chickens.”
After a long silence, Graham Weisbrod said, “So there you have it. Either we are being attacked by a foreign power using an absolutely brilliant new strategy—I call that the Covert Hitler interpretation—or what has just happened is more like a disastrous storm in the noosphere—call it the Hurricane Daybreak interpretation. And at first glance it would seem that the thing we have to do is figure out which it is. But Cam and Arnie asked me to be the neutral party explaining why we need to be aware of the question, try to answer it, all of that—but we don’t want to get into it today.
“Here’s the deal. Several very large Daybreak affinity groups announced to the rest of Daybreak that they were prepared—but they never activated. And around those groups there were a lot of messages with a single theme— that you can kill a man by giving him a poison that kills all the cells in his body, or by whacking him on the head, but the way to be sure is to do both. That message was all over the Aaron Group, for example. So looking at the situation, we’re reeling from Daybreak and from the Air Force Two attack—two different kinds of massive damage—and those affinity groups seemed to be working on places where it would be more effective to hit us later, when we don’t have the tools to mitigate the attack or defend ourselves.”
“Such as?” Edwards asked.
Cameron shrugged. “Well, right now we could probably still evacuate a big city if we had to. Enough working phones, radios, and vehicles, especially in the so-far-lightly-hit places like DC and Miami. So right now a nerve gas attack in a downtown would be copable-with. But in a week or two, when no one has a radio, a phone, or a car?”
Dead silence in the room.
Weisbrod looked around. “So it doesn’t matter today, or probably even this month, whether it’s Covert Hitler or Hurricane Daybreak that has just walloped us. Whether it’s a foreign enemy or a ghost in the system, it is probably going to strike at us again in the next few days, hard, at least a few more times.
“Strike us hard with
what
?” Colonel Green said. “Isn’t that the real question?”
Cam nodded, taking the command of the meeting back from Weisbrod. “Yes, it is. And if Jim Browder here is right, we think we may know what they’ve got aimed at us. So the job for today’s meeting is to make sure that the president—whichever of them is going to be the president—does not get caught up in my suspicions and paranoia, or in Dr. Yang’s charts and equations, but focuses on the scary thing Dr. Browder will be presenting. That’s the message you’ll all be pushing as hard as you can—‘it doesn’t matter, let’s talk about pure fusion bombs.’ ”
“You want our group to be an idea pump for that,” Edwards said.
“Bingo.” Weisbrod, Cam, and Arnie spoke simultaneously, and everyone laughed.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. OVER EASTERN OHIO. 11:30 A.M. EST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.
It was being a morning for superlatives. As he’d ridden in the candidate caravan to the Dubuque airport, Chris Manckiewicz had received a text from Anne telling him he was getting Cletus’s old title and the biggest raise of his career.
Plus
he’d just finished an exclusive with the now-probable winner one week before the election. Of course, it did happen on board the
Low on Taxes, High on Jesus Express
, the dumbest name ever come up with for a campaign plane.
Norcross urged him to “ask the tough ones, Chris. My polling people tell me thirty million people will vote for me on election day and hate themselves for it a month later—and hate me twice as much. I have to make them feel okay about this, because it’s their country too, and just their bad luck that they’re getting me for a president. If you don’t hit me with hard questions now, and give me a chance to say the right things, they’re never going to have a chance to give
me
a chance.”
So Chris had asked about the Christian Bill of Rights. Norcross had said, “Yes, it is my belief that the Christian religion has a special place in American culture and we should codify that, but that is not what people are going to elect me to do, so I won’t act on it while our country is in danger, nor try to slip it in without adequate debate while the country is busy trying to survive.”
He was equally blunt about everything else. Tax cuts? “Of course I want to do that. Everyone in office does. But just now we have no clue what shape the economy will be in or what actions the government will need to take; we’ll just have to see.”
Obscenity? “Well, I’m not for it, but when I’m worried about how nearly four hundred million people are going to make it through the winter, I’d be pretty silly to think the biggest thing we had to cope with was naked ladies. When everyone is warm, has a job, and can eat, then yes, there are spiritual issues I want to address.”
At the end of it, Chris thought,
My camera, my editing: the first draft of how a president formed out of an obscure nutcase senator.
He worked quickly and well, slapping camera cuts into place, cutting stammers, nervous laughter, and trail-offs.
Someday, people will point at my work and say, that’s why he became President.
Norcross’s media people had given him access via his wireless to the plane’s satellite and roving land links. The box on the screen said it took a full minute, and 81 tries, for the whole transmission to go all the way through and receive an acknowledgment from 247NN.
A moment later Anne appeared in a corner of his screen. “Chris,” she said, “you have one of the best communication platforms still running in North America. We’d use our own planes, but they’re grounded with burst tires and shot electronics.” A burst of scrambled sound, and the picture broke up.
“Didn’t get that.”
“Sorry. Okay, quickly, e-mail from me has addresses of everyone who can receive finished product at all our affiliates. Send that interview direct to them. I’ve e-mailed them all to expect it. We don’t want them to miss it but I don’t know if we can”—another burst—“from here with our”—a shriek and a black screen for a long moment before the picture came back, much grainier. “Did you get—?”
He saw that her e-mail had come in, copied the list from it, and immediately sent out the finished interview again, as she had requested. This time it took 94 seconds and 139 tries, but it still went through. It took his e-mail, a simple short text telling her it had been accomplished, nine tries.