Suspended In Dusk (13 page)

Non-disclosure agreements were par for the course in advertising. Never mind government secrets; the shit would really hit the fan if WikiLeaks were ever to get its hands on half of what goes on in the commercial world.

Still, I’d never been asked to sign the Official Secrets Act before.

The Cadaver glanced at the signed document before secreting it within his briefcase.

“You may find this illuminating.” He pressed the button on a remote control and a face appeared on the projector screen. A woman’s face, contorted in anger, the light of hell burning in her eyes. The eyes. Beneath the fury there was something almost happy about them. A joy at being permitted such anger.

The picture panned sideways and zoomed out, revealing that the woman was merely one of a crowd, all of whom shared the same expression of ecstatic fury.

“This is what we have been tasked to control. Not far beneath the veneer of civilization lurk these barely human monsters.” Despite the emotive turn of phrase, the Cadaver’s voice sounded measured and calm, a voiceover from a documentary about the twenty-first century from several hundred years hence.

“Where’s this from?” It looked familiar but it was the kind of thing you saw in the newspapers on an almost weekly basis these days—I might have just been recognising the look rather than the actual scene.

“A year ago. Outside a courthouse inside which an alleged child-killer was on trial. Look at the crowd’s depth of feeling. How angry they are. You would hardly credit that the human brain had the capacity for such sustained negative emotion.”

“Alleged?” I was curious about the Cadaver’s turn of phrase.

“How many of these people do you think knew the victim or her family?” On the face of it the Cadaver was ignoring my question but I could tell from the intelligent glint in his eye that this was his way of replying.

“Difficult to say, given mob mentality,” I thought about it and erred on the side of caution, “Say… less than five per cent of them? Depends upon the size of the community of course.”

“An intelligent guess,” the Cadaver pulled out a sheaf of papers from beneath the table and leafed through it looking for the answer, “it’s Northampton, population approximately two hundred thousand. The size of the crowd outside the courthouse was over five hundred so that’s more than a quarter of one per cent of the population. And of this percentage… precisely
none
of them knew the victim.”

“Really?” I raised my eyebrows, “How can you be certain? I’m not surprised, given what people are like—but
none
? Really?”

“We can be absolutely certain of these facts,” the Cadaver shut the dossier with a snap, “Because there was no victim. The entire case was a fabrication, the officers concerned are in the employ of our department and the perpetrator is an actor, also in our employ. It might surprise you to learn that once these people are supposedly locked up everyone forgets about them, no matter how many of them were vowing bloody murder and threatening dire consequences for them upon release. This is a very… useful amnesia.”

“But why? Why bother?”

The Cadaver gestured with the remote again and the picture on the screen changed to a close-up of the woman first displayed.

“Because of this. “He walked over to the screen and tapped at it with a fingernail. “This untapped anger. We have to drain it off somehow.”

“But isn’t faking these outrages stirring up the anger in the first place?”

“Alas no,” the Cadaver shook his head with a kind smile, “Without these distractions the anger and violence inherent in humanity would build up and explode. Probably directed at the government.”

“So why…” I must admit I was puzzled. I’d always thought of the human race en mass as toothless cattle, a resource to be exploited by judicious use of pretty colours, pictures and lights. I didn’t like the idea of having been wrong about something or having been in the dark. It felt against nature. Against
my
nature.

However, there was something about the Cadaver’s demeanour that prevented any resentment building up against him. Despite his benign, almost frail, aspect there was something very dangerous about him. If I crossed him I wouldn’t even know about it. I’d just wake one day to discover I’d never existed in the first place.

Besides, who was to say that cattle couldn’t be dangerous? Tell that to someone trapped in the path of a stampede.

“It seems to be a property of civilization. Once population and technology reach a certain level, it’s only a matter of time before society tears itself apart. A tricky subject to study, given the vast amounts of time and huge volumes of data to process, but our computer models suggest it’s something to do with the nature of consciousness en masse. Revolution is nature’s way of resetting the civilization clock, cutting the population back, emptying the gene pool and starting again. We can’t allow that.”

“How long has this been going on?” I had no doubt that what the Cadaver was saying was true. There was an undertone to his voice that forbade disbelief. He’d have made a marvellous politician. I wondered why he’d chosen to bury himself so deeply in the bowels of the civil service instead.

“Our control of this phenomenon started shortly after World War Two. Students of history could see that the revolutions and the rise of extremism of one stripe or another was the beginning of the end. If we weren’t careful our two thousand-year-old civilisation was going to start tearing itself apart in a pointless war. People needed something else to get angry about. Something other than their own governments.

“For a while they used other governments or ideologies as an external threat, but that never really worked. For every five people who swallowed the line about the Soviets there were five more who’d decide to join them. Even when they dismantled that particular structure and chose groups such as Al-Qaida instead there was always the danger that people would see them as an attractive alternative. After a while these organisations became far more popular than they otherwise would have.”

“But surely that’s quite recent?” I was confused, “Have you only just changed your mind?”

“Ah no, forgive me” the Cadaver raised a skeletal hand in apology. “That was the external wing of the ministry, in liaison with similar ministries all over the world. But the internal office has been active just as long and with a greater degree of success I would say. You see, whilst there is always a possibility that external threats could divide the people we want to unite, what
we’ve
been doing is finding enemies within; enemies that no one in their right mind would want to support.

“We made some mistakes at first, of course. In the fifties and sixties we thought that drugs and the counterculture would be suitable candidates for demonization but they proved more attractive than repulsive. We hadn’t taken the Beatles into account. They were a real wildcard.

“So we turned our hand to declawing popular music—although one operative thought we just needed to get the right angle on it. He tried again in 1976 and nearly succeeded but even a phenomenon as nihilistic as punk was attractive to some. So we had to find something else. We stripped drugs of their glamour and introduced cheap heroin into the country. This seemed to work for a while. You may remember?”

“
Heroin screws you up
,” I smiled, “Those scary public information films were one of the reasons I wanted to go into advertising in the first place.”

“I can see we’ve picked the right man.” The Cadaver smiled and I felt good. Why did I find his approval so pleasing? Perhaps he was adept at speaking a very reassuring dialect of body language.

“After a while it became clear that even though it was an effective enemy to have chosen and one that did frighten people, it didn’t make them angry. And bleeding off the anger was central to maintaining the control we required. Fear wasn’t enough.

“Then we discovered the ideal demon. The paedophile, the kiddy-fiddler, the molester. Even vague rumours of such monsters were enough to whip the voters into a massive frenzy of anger. Have a look at this expression.” With a gesture the Cadaver brought the close-up of the angry woman’s face back into focus on the screen. “Can you see any empathy or sadness here? Is she thinking of the child she believes has been abused and killed? Absolutely not. She is revelling in the knowledge that she has been
allowed to hate
. Allowed to express violent, sadistic urges in an arena where none would dare censure her.

“For our purposes it’s the perfect stimulus. If paedophiles didn’t exist it would be necessary to invent them. The appetite for such bile is staggering.

“And it’s not just paedophiles that are useful. Anything that drives self-styled right-thinking individuals to subhuman mob frenzy can be used. Pensioners mugged for twenty pee. Happy slappers.

“If you come across a news story that makes you wonder how human beings are able to sink lower that you ever thought possible—you’re probably right. They didn’t. We crafted the story to syphon off negative energy. If you’ve ever wondered why some crimes remain unsolved it’s because they never happened in the first place. Handcrafting a solution as well as the crime would take far too much effort when all we need is the outrage.”

“I see,” I replied. I was excited, as if a curtain had been lifted and I was seeing the ropes and pulleys back stage. This was how the world worked. It made sense. People were incapable of committing heinous enough crimes and yet not intelligent enough to realise that if they couldn’t then only the most deranged could.

“It takes artistry and a certain kind of imagination. We have software to predict where and when the pressure needs to be relieved, but how to release that pressure… Well, that’s where individuals such as yourself come in. Artists. Creatives. Art is a lie—and the best lies are ones that people believe. People are becoming cynical about advertising, but most of them still believe what they hear on the news. The ultimate commission for a true artist. Are you in?” The Cadaver stood up and reached out a hand. As if he needed to ask. Of course I was in.

“Absolutely.” I shook his hand.

“Welcome to the team.” From the expression on his face the Cadaver had never been in any doubt as to the result of my recruitment.

* * *

I had developed an almost symbiotic relationship with the NewsMill software. Like the brush in a painter’s hand, it was the tool of my trade, an extension of my brain. It was connected to a government database somewhere, but I had no idea from where this database obtained its information.

Every morning I studied a colour coded map of the United Kingdom. Red indicated the hotspots: the regions to which I should pay the most attention, the regions where intervention was needed, the regions where anger engineering was required.

Drilling down into the details for a particular area, I had access to an array of supporting variables with intriguing names like Strategic Social Spectrum, End-means Coefficient and Political Mobility Rate. It had taken a while, but I now had an instinctive feel for what kind of intervention was needed when I looked at the pattern of the numbers. On this particular morning I noted that a red spot down in Brighton and Hove required a medium sized media intervention. A newspaper report or a few lines on a website would not be enough; we’d need to fake some footage.

The eggheads over at the ministry were working on NewsMill
3.0 which would automatically generate the footage using CGI. This would save time. I had worried that my own skills might one day be superseded, but the Cadaver had reassured me that this wasn’t the case. They’d tried automatically generating the stories in response to the figures but had ended up with nonsense—one scenario suggested by the computer was that a gang of toddlers had terrorised a war veteran with a syringe full of HIV positive blood.

No, for the stories to retain the ring of truth and to be palatable enough for the masses to swallow them, human creativity was required. Artistry. I was, above everything else, an artist. I took pride in my work. I was, in many ways, an auteur—a director whose artistic vision and deft hand imprinted his work with his own personal stamp—and was free to dream up and implement scenarios that fitted perfectly to the societies for which they had been designed.

I hoped one day to be put in charge of a major project with national scope. These events happened every year or so; the population as a whole required checks and balances to be applied. I’d advised and worked on smaller areas of bigger national campaigns, but had yet to be given one of my own. I lived in hope. It was only a matter of time; I already knew that individuals higher up the chain of command than the Cadaver had begun to notice me.

There was a risk with the bigger jobs of course. The terse manuals I’d read containing the history of such ministries worldwide mentioned their widespread failure in Eastern Europe at the close of the nineteen eighties. The last thing we needed was for that to happen here—and it was a risky business. One push in the wrong direction, a misjudgement of the mood of the people and we could have a revolution on our hands, no matter how many jubilees, Olympics, or royal weddings we threw at them.

I looked into the Brighton and Hove case. A three-minute news slot on BBC South Today (with associated web coverage) would suffice. Sneaking something onto the BBC was often the best thing to do as many other news agencies stole from them. We had contacts in all the regions, people working for the police and media who would do whatever was required of them without question.