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.”
At this point, Lucius’s warped smile surfaced again. “And you, Mr. Bishop. You know all too well about the massacres that happen all over the globe. How many of those is the world interested in? As you know all too well, only a fraction are ever reported. People are designed to see only what they want to see.”