A Song Called Youth (61 page)

“Now I got something to tell you that you maybe didn’t know.”

He waited. She’d genuinely startled him.

“About my brother. I told you he was working overseas for SOCK-Vuh . . . ”

“For what?”

“Shell-Oil-Coca-Cola-Viacom.”

“Oh. SOCCV. Pronounce it Sock-Vee. What about it?”

“That was a lie. There’s another reason you never met him. Stu’s in New York. He’s in the Black Freedom Brotherhood. But so far as we know, he hasn’t got warrants out on him. I don’t condone the Brotherhood, they’re terrorists. That’s what I told him too. But . . . he’s my brother.”

“Okay. You think the Company knows about him?”

“We don’t know if they do. There’s nobody looking for him as far as I’m aware. You people know about all of ’em?”

“Of course not.” He shook his head. “Christ, what if Agency finds out . . . ”

“I know. Eventually . . . so, I was thinking . . . well, first: What’re you going to do about all this?”

“Do? I’m going to see how bad it looks. Try to confirm my suspicions. If it looks bad, I take you and Cindy and we run.”

“Uh-huh. Where? Where that’s worth going to?”

“What else you want me to do?”

She hesitated.

“Go on,” he said.

“Okay, um—well, look, honey . . . if we got to run, it’s better if we have something to run to. An umbrella. Some people have already got shelters set up. Now, I don’t condone the Brotherhood—and I wouldn’t want to join them. But they could help us, put us in touch with these other people . . . ”

“What other people?”

“The New Resistance.”

His eyes widened. “You want to join the NR?”

She shook her head. “But they could
help
us. Maybe they’d expect something in return. Information, something. Why not?”

“But they’re guerrillas. Criminals.”

She shrugged. “Supposedly. And supposedly—so is my brother. But if you think the Company is going to kill you . . . what else have we got?”

He tried to think of a reply. He couldn’t. He heard the TV talking with newscaster semi-seriousness in the next room, something about another acid-rain alert. Secretary of the Interior warning that acid rain falling in the Midwest could cause wheat and corn shortages, but “
famine
is too strong a word.” At this time.

That morning, the president had asked Congress to give her emergency powers of absolute authority on a temporary basis—to keep order as the danger of a New-Soviet first strike increased; citing the New-Soviet destruction of two US orbital antimissile battle stations; citing also increased domestic terrorism from “race extremists on the left”—meaning black and Jewish activists.
Insisting
that the grant of absolute authority was only temporary . . . 

They were making it sound as if the threat of all-out nuclear war was nearing the flashpoint. Hearing that, he should have been scared. But all he could think about was:
Criminals. We’ll become criminals if we run to those people.

When Janet asked again, “What else can we do?” he still had nothing to say.

The Island of Merino, the Caribbean.

“The strange truth is,” Smoke was saying as his crow, Richard Pryor, fluttered restlessly on his shoulder, “most people don’t see the Grid. That is, they don’t know it for what it is when they see it. They aren’t able to step back from it. Or they think it’s only the Internet or the Web or something—and that’s only a quadrant of it. Let’s step back from it now and look at it squarely . . . ” He turned and switched on the big videoscreen that stretched across the wall like a blackboard behind him. It hummed, flickered with light . . . 

It was hot in the briefing room, though it was seven in the evening. The windows were open. Mosquitoes whined and ticked at the screens. Glancing out the window, Charlie saw the searchlight on the guard tower swinging over the sandy ground outside the NR’s Coordination Center.

He looked back at Smoke, and shifted on the metal chair, wincing at the pain in his buttocks. His fingers hovered over the keyboard of his lap console.

Charlie Chesterton was one of the people they didn’t make metal chairs for; he was too skinny for them. He was tall, bony, a little round-shouldered, a touch weak-chinned. He was twenty-three, and he wore his hair in a young man’s fashion: the triple Mohawk; three fins, each a different color and each color significant, the middle one signifying he was a Technicki Radical Unionist; the one on his right was blue for his profession, digitech; the one on the left was green for the neighborhood he’d grown up in the floating boro of New Brooklyn. He was wearing a sleeveless clip T-shirt, this one looping through a Jerome-X video, the same scenes over and over.

There were six other NR trainees in the hot room, in the New Resistance CC, on the tiny island of Merino.

Behind Smoke, the screen, volume muted, flashed through its parade of media baubles, a weirdly inappropriate backdrop for him.

Smoke, in his sleeveless black jumpsuit, was gaunt, hawk-nosed, tired-eyed, dark; his movements were swift, almost abrupt. But sometimes he’d slide seamlessly into a deep calm that seemed so smooth, so untouchable, you felt you were looking into the face of a man who’d spent his life in a monastery.

He had a look on his face like that now as he paused, faintly smiling, looking sedately at them from the front of the briefing room.

And then he came out of it with a sudden slash of his hand, making them rock back in their seats, his crow flapping irritably to a perch on the windowsill, as he said, “It’s going to shape you, your family, your friends, unless you—unless we—shape the Grid first! Learning to shape it starts with redefining it. The Grid is a three-leveled system. The first level is Worldtalk-type packaging of products, people, ideas, styles of behavior, socially useful prejudices, and, of course, some ‘news,’ all mixed into a solution of entertainment or simple distraction. That level is then fed into the second level, which is all the transmissions: all forms of TV and holo transmission; Internet, obviously; standard radio and bone-implant receiver radio; home consoles, schools consoles; smartfone tabloids; daily news-sheets you buy at the printout kiosk; electronic billboards, video billboards; every other kind of long-range communications between computers. Visorclips, earmites, downloads: all filtered through the Grid in some way. Even Charlie’s T-shirt there . . . ”

Charlie shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Smoke’s crow tilted its head to peer at him suspiciously with its glittering eyes.

Charlie wanted badly for Smoke to like him. He’d read all of Smoke’s essays, books of them written before Smoke had been caught up in the chaos surrounding the war in Europe. Smoke had been abducted by the Second Alliance, tortured, escaped through one of the war’s multitude of wild variables; wandered lost in the deepest circles of a private hell. And had come back, resurrected from what his public had thought was his death and what had been, at least, the death of his sanity. He had emerged not unscathed but unbroken. Jack Brendan Smoke was a legend in the underground.

Smoke went on, “The third level of the Grid are the receivers, the public. The electronically enhanced collective unconscious. The important thing to remember is that while the Grid is made up of three levels, it’s
all one system.
And the third level dovetails back to feed into the first . . . It is a baseline, common-denominator system, in service of someone’s zero-sum game—except when it is used for something greater. It has the potential—as we have seen in the Internet—for a horrible abuse or a transcendent usage. It can be a sketch of our potential greatness. Let me just drop in this quote . . . ” He shuffled through some papers, found the quote. “From Teilhard de Chardin: ‘In the perspective of a noogenesis, time and space become truly humanized—or rather super-humanized. Far from being mutually exclusive, the Universal and Personal . . . grow in the same directions and culminate simultaneously in each other.’ ”

Charlie blinked. “Noogenesis”?

There was only the downside of the Grid, so far as Charlie could see, on the big screen . . . 

As if bemusedly sharing Charlie’s thought, Smoke paused and looked at the screen, shaking his head, smiling sadly. On the screen, a sex-com sniggered by, then a commercial for a new securicomp that monitored the entry of strangers into a subscribing neighborhood—delivery men, workmen of all kinds, would-be renters, shoppers: all were observed, digitized, analyzed. The camera/computer system looked for type-anomalies, such as racial variations, economic class variations, clothing style variations; a scaling up of type anomalies might mean the neighborhood was in danger, would send a signal for hyperalertness.

The neighborhood security team that used a TADS—Type Anomalies Discrimination System—protects its neighborhood in advance, the commercial suggested soothingly. The slogan:
“TADS weeds out weirdos!”

“There you go,” Smoke said, tapping the words appearing at the bottom of the screen under the TADS ad:
A Second Alliance International Security Corporation product . . . 

“Jaysiz,” Charlie murmured.

“Yes,” Smoke said. “They are becoming ubiquitous.”

The screen flicked to a newsblip of the successful retaking of Vienna, and President Bester saying, “We’re making great strides! With your support we’ll win the war—and without recourse to nuclear weapons!”

Then: a ten-minute “Science Special” suggesting “new studies by experts would seem to indicate that interracial marriages create offspring who seem to be unusually vulnerable to disease or birth defect.” The study, of course, was a lie. And then came a five-minute evangelical program . . . and then a sitcom—which Smoke fast-forwarded through, using delay-programming, to show a white couple, Dan and Joanie Clifton, are annoyed by Mr. and Mrs. Wog, the Pakistani couple who’d moved in next door; whose overwhelming curry cooking smells and practice of defecating in the hallway give rise to a number of hilarious remarks on the part of Mr. Clifton . . . and then a public-service commercial informing the public that New-Soviet spies are rife in the tech centers, best not to speak to anyone you haven’t known for years . . . 

“That sitcom is only available in Fundie regions,” Smoke remarked, “—parts of the South, Idaho, southern Washington State. It’s not syndicated in California, and other places where American minorities and progressives still have some power. But for how long? It’s available over the Internet, of course—as so much racist propaganda is . . . ”

Smoke thoughtfully scratched the crow under the beak. “In the hands of the Second Alliance the Grid saturates the public with wave after wave of pseudo-information, each wave hitting all the local receiving centers, the cities, more or less simultaneously. There’s more, and coming faster, than ever before. Doesn’t matter if it’s a lie or not, it’s all information.

“People receive the information simultaneously, and they soak it up passively. If for example the government claims there’s a new strain of AIDS that you get only from talking to antiwar-activists, then fifty-seven percent of the people hooked into the Grid will believe the antiwar-activist-AIDS story implicitly, instantly. Everyone they run into has heard the same thing. They all got it at once. So it seems to confirm itself by its very instantaneous prevalence. Since no real substance exists in this hypothetical broadcast, there’s nothing much to stimulate questioning. There’s simply the basic bullshit story line, and ‘testimony’ from a few ‘experts’ the government keeps on tap for when it needs their tailor-made quotes to give the appearance of credibility. Maybe a visual flash of a chart to give us an impression that some serious study’s been done. And bang! everyone believes it. And it becomes ‘true’ for the public, as a kind of Consensus Reality develops from the instantaneousness and ubiquity of the story. That sort of thing makes the Grid a powerful tool for shaping society.

“And none of this was lost on Crandall and the other planners for the SA. The SA had the foresight to buy the world’s biggest PR outfit, Worldtalk.

“They’re still reasonably subtle in their use of the Grid, but they’re getting bolder. They’re blaming the depression on immigrants, non-Christians, the so-called ‘Zionist conspiracy’; and they can blame the war on the New-Soviet, of course. Although our intelligence indicates that the New-Soviet has been trying to broker a peace deal, an effort Mrs. Bester has ignored.” He looked at the crow—and smiled. The bird seemed to be listening to him raptly. “The public’s being programmed to be knee-jerk supportive of the government and, by extension, the SA, which, as a ‘private-sector’ security and peacekeeping force, is now operating under a government contract. All classes of the Caucasian public are being programmed to blame its ills on outsiders, immigrants, non-Caucasians. It’s being set up to give its backing to a race war.”

On the screen was a “public-service ad” warning that “visitors from other countries” have “inadvertently introduced” a series of new flu viruses recently, particularly one strain that may be fatal to children.
Until the crisis is past, it might be best if your children played only with native-born Americans.

US Weather Service acid-rain alert, keep windows closed, don’t go out without goggles tonight.

Fallout shelter drills for all public schools announced tomorrow. Public service announcement: “Remember, harboring draft resisters or deserters is giving aid to the New-Soviets.” The announcement concludes with a slogan from the US Department of Public Information: “The only way to win the war is to win together! Warning: Illegal TV or radio transmissions will be traced! Perpetrators will be prosecuted! The underGrid is the underworld—don’t let criminals whisper in your ears!” Premiere of a new night-time drama,
Ghetto Cop.
Slogan:
“He does what he has to.”

Smoke continued. “And there’s only one way to sensibly fight it. We break into the Grid, we reprogram it where we can, we use Jim Kessler’s antipropaganda software to force the Grid to reveal itself for what it is. We step up our input into the underGrid. We try to reach concerned journalists in the overGrid—sure, there are some. The Grid is really too vast for the SA or the government to control effectively. It’s more porous than they know. We
can
get into it. Jim Kessler’s going to be here . . . ” He glanced at the wall clock. “ . . . in just a few minutes, to train you in doing just that.”