Authors: Project Itoh
“They let me use their research to help my own research into the grammar of genocide. The lines that connected one point to another. The nodes and edges. Digraphs that incorporated directional markers showing the trends of information flow. Add a little bit of SNDGA, and it’s easy to work out where the most important sources of communication are. You don’t always need access to a president or a general. In fact, in one country I chose to play the role of a priest, and in another I was part of an influential NGO. More chance to propagate the genocidal grammar that way—a more extensive network, you see? Of course, the specifics vary from country to country.”
This man was calmly describing the results of a series of experiments to me as if they were entirely theoretical. It was as if he had conveniently forgotten that his research into genocide was built on top of a mountain of human misery.
“I don’t believe it,” I said. “I don’t believe that language has the ability to influence our subconscious in such a way. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has already been comprehensively discredited. Human thought isn’t regulated by language. Are you seriously trying to say that this weird function has been left in our brains as a result of evolution? Impossible!”
For some reason this made John Paul laugh out loud. It wasn’t a villain’s laugh, but a healthy, hearty, normal laugh. And that made it all the more freakish.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“Nothing, nothing. I just never expected to come across a spy who was so up to date on linguistic theory, that’s all.”
I sneered at him. “Spending time with the lovely Ms. Lucia has been very educational.”
“Yes, it seems the two of you have been spending a fair bit of time together,” John Paul said. His voice was that of supreme indifference. Damn. I’d hoped that would have affected him at least a little bit. But it seemed there was nothing I could do or say that would have any effect on this man.
John Paul started speaking again. “Do you ever think to yourself that perhaps words have no meaning?”
I said nothing. I had no idea where he was trying to go with this.
“I wonder who it was who first said that they liked something,” John Paul continued. “Or that they didn’t like something. Such simple expressions. Compare those with the conversation that the two of us are having now. Aren’t we basically saying the same thing, just in a much more long-winded and circumlocutory way? We’re basically just expressing primitive emotions, no different from saying that something tastes good or that we feel bad.”
I squirmed in embarrassment as I thought of the long conversation I had had with Lucia about my mother’s death, when I poured my heart out to her. Maybe John Paul was right. Was that not just a roundabout way of telling her that I liked her?
“Whenever I’ve studied a country undergoing a period of militarization, I entertained this charming little theory. It’s occurred to me that the slogans that inevitably end up being scrawled on the street corners aren’t really about the words at all. They’re more primitive than that. The slogans are just manifestations of a deep, primeval resonance. ‘Hate enemy.’ ‘Protect self.’ I like to think of them as little fragments of music in an underlying symphony of primeval urges.”
“People aren’t animals,” I said. “Human language is different from the howling of wild beasts.”
“Do you really believe that? I’m not sure that I do,” John Paul said. “Goethe himself admitted that something as simple as a military march could cause him to feel his spine tingling to attention. And it’s not just airports and cafés that have background music playing. Auschwitz had a soundtrack too. The sound of the wake-up bell in the morning, the drums to make the prisoners march. However exhausted and utterly despondent the Jewish inmates were, as soon as the drums broke out in rhythm they found their bodies moving along with the beat whether they wanted them to or not. Unlike what we see, what we hear has the capacity to touch our souls directly. Music rapes our senses. Meaning? What meaning? Pure sound can and will bypass all that noble-sounding guff.”
The thing that lurks under the words we use.
Meaning is just skin deep.
That’s what John Paul was trying to say. When we speak, it’s not just the contents of our words that matter. The “meaning” of the words is only ever a small part of the equation. That’s what John Paul meant: there was also music, rhythm, hidden esoteric layers that I couldn’t hope to grasp or notice or understand.
“People can close their eyes, but they can never completely block off their ears. No one is immune to my words,” John Paul explained.
I forced myself to look into the moonlight and at John Paul’s eyes. I was expecting, hoping that I would see madness there, that I would find a lunatic bathed in a lunar glow. But I was granted no such satisfaction. All I could see was a perfectly rational and calm pair of eyes, staring down at me. If anything, they were twinged with melancholy, not madness.
“You’re insane.”
I didn’t believe it, but I had to say it anyway.
7
John Paul left the room, and about fifteen minutes later I found myself being prodded along a dirty corridor by one of my other assailants. The corridor was covered in graffiti that, by the looks of it, had been done fairly recently. This wasn’t a scene I expected to see in this day and age when all petty crimes could be traced quickly back to the perpetrator.
I was nudged through a doorway, my assailant’s gun still in my back. I emerged on the other side to find myself in a fairly large room that contained a bar lined with glass bottles and an open space with its floor covered with a nanolayer portraying the image of an unending abyss.
Lucius’s club.
“Nice to see you again so soon,” I said to the emerging figures of Lucius, Lucia, and a number of men who could only be described as underlings. The men were all armed and looking at me warily. “You surprise me, Lucius. To think you’re on the same side as John Paul.”
Lucius shook his head. “John is our client, nothing more. We just did what we had to do in order to protect ourselves.”
“And who is ‘we’ exactly?” I asked, looking at both Lucius and Lucia, who was standing next to him with a bewildered expression on her face. So was she not on Lucius’s—or John Paul’s—side? Had she been unwittingly duped into becoming an accomplice?
Lucius paused for a while, as if trying to remember something. Then he spoke.
“ ‘And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria. And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.’ Are you familiar with this passage?”
It was Lucia who answered, before I had a chance to focus on what was going on. “No, although it sounds like something from the Bible.”
Lucius turned to me. “And what about you, sir?”
“I’m an atheist. I don’t go to church,” I said.
“It’s Luke, chapter 1. Even back then, citizens were turned into numbers and counted,” Lucius said.
“So what?” I asked. Lucia was looking at my bound wrists. She was obviously concerned.
“Well, we here are the uncounted,” said Lucius, looking at the armed men around him. “We are nothing more than an unidentifiable mass in the eyes of the surveillance society. We are vagabonds who slip through the cracks of security behemoths.”
“You live under false identities?” I asked. I was incredulous. Only Forces and governments should have been able to fake IDs. It was virtually impossible to hack the InfoSec company databases, and its employees were basically incorruptible. The slightest leak, whether internally or from outside hackers, was treated with the utmost seriousness, with long jail sentences for anyone who even tried. No, security breaches were all but unheard of.
“It’s practically impossible to assume a false identity as such, more’s the pity,” Lucius said, shaking his head. “But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t certain workarounds. We can start with low-tech methods. Mapping the locations of sensors, for example. We’re inundated with a multitude of sensors, but individually they tend to be monofunctional. They scan just your retina, or just your veins, or just your fingerprints. Then here’s a brainwave scan, and here’s a camera. Well, by painstakingly entering all the details of these sensors we’ve managed to come up with maps of all major American and European cities. A Rough Guide for the Surveillance Evader. Using computer analysis it’s been possible to find loopholes, shortcuts—paths of least resistance. There are ways to trick some of the sensors, and then all you need is a fake set of nanolayer fingerprints and somebody else’s eyes, and suddenly it becomes very difficult for them to track you.”
Come to think of it, that youth I roughed up had had different retina and fingerprint IDs.
“But surely you still need fake IDs, even if just for the fake fingers and the fake eyes,” I said.
Lucius shrugged. “We cultivated our ID database carefully and over a long period of time. Babies who died shortly after birth, before they were fully registered. Travelers who went missing abroad. Civilian contractors and PMCs who went MIA in war zones. And, most of all, Sarajevo.”
The corpses that never even had the chance to become corpses. The missing.
Names in purgatory.
“We carefully select IDs from among the missing and make them live again. We archive them so that they are out of the sights of governments and can be drawn on at a moments’ notice if needed. You can imagine how valuable this archive is to us. Short of terrorism and genocide we’ll do whatever we need to protect it,” Lucius said.
“And yet I remember a time only a few short hours ago when you were telling me how there was no such thing as pure freedom, how everything was a matter of checks and balances,” I said. I never would have guessed from his demeanor at the time that Lucius was such a radical ideologue.
“I stand by that. The issue we have is that the trade-off society forces us to make is massively one-sided. The privacy we’ve been asked to give up just isn’t rewarded with a corresponding increase in security.” Lucius advanced so that he was now standing right in front of me. “The current security regime is pointless. After 9/11, the world steadily increased its surveillance levels on individuals. ‘Traceability’ became the order of the day. And yet, the more the screws were tightened, the more terrorist incidents there were across the world’s major cities.”
“That’s a lie,” I said.
“It’s not a lie,” Lucius snapped. “Even you have to acknowledge the truth about Sarajevo. Am I wrong? Even the official published statistics show a correlation between the surveillance clampdown and increased terrorist activity—just take any government data and plot it on a graph. It’s all there, in black and white, for anyone to see. And yet for some reason most people choose not to.”
“In that case, why does everybody believe that personal traceability is the best protection against terrorists?” I asked.
Lucius’s lips twisted into an ironic smile. “Is that what people believe? Or just what people
want
to believe?” He laughed, a sad, hollow sound. “It’s not as if the government is lying to us. Or rather, it’s not as if it’s
only
the government that’s lying to us. The media lie too, and, worst of all, so do the people, the citizens. We all lie to each other. We’ve all been taken in by this collective myth of traceability, and that’s how our modern surveillance state was born. It might be true that terrorist activity has died down recently, but that’s only because most terrorists have been diverted by the recent explosion of civil wars and ethnic conflicts around the world. It’s nothing to do with the security crackdown.”
We see what we want to see.
We believe what we want to believe.
What good was hard statistical evidence in the face of belief? The government, industry, the people—none were interested in looking at graphs, not when mere facts contradicted their core beliefs.
“Reality is such a pathetic and weak thing,” Lucius continued, shaking his head sadly. “There are so many horrific things in the world that go unreported. Do you know, for example, how artificial flesh is created? Genetically modified dolphins. Aquatic mammals engineered to be able to live in freshwater. They’re raised—or maybe ‘cultured’ is a better word, given the circumstances—in Lake Victoria, before being dissected alive so that their muscle can be put to industrial use. The rest of them becomes animal feed. Children on starvation wages work round the clock in giant sweatshop factories off the shores of Lake Victoria, forcing the red blubbery flesh into giant cans using biostaplers.”
“Live dolphin muscle …” I trailed off.
The Intruder Pods that we used to penetrate enemy lines. The short-range jets that hopped us from continent to continent. All covered in raw flesh. How many people knew that sex lotion was made out of seaweed?
“No one. No one knows. Just as no one will try and stop you from selling dyed lumpfish roe as caviar,” Lucius said.
“But how can that—”
“Anyone remotely interested in doing so can work all this out for themselves. Just use your AR contact lenses to track the provenance of whatever is in front of you. Where and when an object is made. The space and the time is there for all to see. We live in what the science fiction author Bruce Sterling might have called a spime society. People want to know whether their Budweiser is brewed under sanitary conditions and which ranch a burger can be traced back to. You can even find out which forest provided the trees for your house. The metahistory of everything in the universe is bare, raw, there for the taking. And yet no one is interested in anything other than their own little personal narratives. No one wants to know about the tragedy of the origins of artificial flesh, they just want to know that it will continue to provide the airplanes and machines that will prop up their comfortable lifestyle.”