Abyss (Songs of Megiddo) (16 page)

I found myself asking
– again and again – a very unfamiliar, and, to a person of my political orientation, seemingly idiotic question.

Who is John Galt?

The question was the famous first line of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. It was bigger than that, though. In a very real sense, the question defined the core – and articulated the apotheosis: the purest and most basic distillation – of Rand’s philosophy of ‘Objectivism’. Now...the thing about Objectivism...is that it’s not really all that relevant to the lives of basically everyone who isn’t exponentially wealthier and better connected than the high-water-mark of the social bell-curve. The fundamental idea, here, is that the individual has a right to happiness and freedom...and shouldn’t be impinged upon by the needs of the masses in their pursuit of that happiness and their ability to exercise that freedom. Of course...the supporting consensus, is that people do well if they deserve to do well, and if people aren’t doing well, then clearly they just don’t want it enough.

Victorian Brit
ain...with its mess of plutocracy and rampant inequality, for example, was a pretty Objectivist place. The lives of the so-called ‘one percent’ in the United States?
Super
Objectivist. If you’ve ever looked at your yearly income; dragged your finger down to ‘tax’, and thought to yourself: ‘Hell no. If
anything
, it’s the Government who owes
me
’? Then you’re
probably
a bit of an Objectivist.

So
...in Atlas Shrugged, there’s this guy called ‘John Galt’. And, like many narcissistic, self-important dickheads before him, John Galt lets the other characters in the book wander around, asking after him for two-whole-thirds of the overall narrative, before finally turning up in the third and final act: apparently expecting a massive round of applause for his unimaginative, two-dimensional evaluations of a variety of highly complex social and economic issues. And yeah...he absolutely gets that applause. Not because he deserves it, but because he’s the author’s personal wank-fodder, as it were...and so, of course, he gets ‘special privileges’. Because apparently...that’s what happens when authors package themselves into their characters and then attempt to peddle subjective perspectives on the world around them as objective fact.

Ahem?
Glass houses?

Yes, well
...

The point is, that when it comes down to it, there’s something fundamentally
Human
about the righteous meritocracy advocated by Rand. At least...there is – and you can say it with me, if you like – ‘in theory’. We all crave recognition and – let’s face it – something we feel comfortable describing as an ‘appropriate reward’ for the work we do and the change we affect in the world around us. And we all like to see the deserving rewarded, as they deserve. It’s really just a question of who you think is ‘deserving’, and how much you think they ‘deserve’.

Even for Australians like myself
– victims of a cultural tendency towards the pathological fetishisation of Schadenfreude; also known as ‘tall poppy syndrome’ – when we think someone is genuinely ‘deserving’, we want to see them being rewarded. And, of course, it’s fine – better than fine; it’s good – to believe that you have value, and should be adequately remunerated for the contributions you make. Unless you’re in Australia, of course, in which case: people will judge the shit out of you for it. That’s because – back home – a precondition of being seen as ‘deserving’ is, at the very least, the pretence that you don’t think that you’re any more deserving than anyone else.

But...t
he primary problem with Rand’s philosophy, is that – as Humans – the greater our achievements and the loftier our ambitions, the more unobtainable any reward we might class as ‘appropriate’ for ourselves becomes. After a certain point, it’s not at all difficult to lose touch with the difference between ‘deserve’ and ‘want’. Particularly when, up to that point, you were told – or it didn’t matter what other people thought because of all that money you had – that the things you ‘wanted’ were, interchangeably, also things that you ‘deserved’.

§§§

Who is John Galt?

I decided to
...using that question...take the data that I was working with, and try to put myself in the shoes of the people whose lives it related to...in order to attempt to determine if, by any chance, the answer could be: ‘me’. If it could, they went on my revised list. If it couldn’t, they didn’t. This was my baseline. This was how I defined ‘average’.

And y
es. I know. Incredibly scientifically rigorous. Totally objective. Especially when – working with the sheer volume of names that I was – I got to the point of glancing over a handful of ‘status updates’ people had made – selected because they matched for certain keywords – and making snap judgements. Or when, in a not insignificant number of cases, I just looked at job descriptions and decided: ‘yay’ or ‘nay’. Me, who talks about ‘political correctness’.

Beyond the
possible flaws in the system itself, I was aware that most of the data I was working with had been personally and selectively mined: and from such reputable sources as Facebook, Wikipedia, Twitter and Sym.PTic0, no less. But while this made my results seem questionable – and by ‘questionable’ I mean ‘probably bullshit’ – my gut instinct told me that I was right. Or, at the very least, on the right track. Not really reassured, so much as encouraged by that belief, I began to examine the new breakdown.

It was, essentially, a heavily a refined version of what I
’d been looking at before. Refined enough, that is, to make all the difference. Now it was obvious – near-undeniably obvious – that the cases fit neatly into a series of clusters, each of which spanned a specific period of time, and a specific geographic area. The areas were always comprised of one or more adjacent States, and there didn’t seem to be any overlap at all between Disappearances specific to a given area. The difference that the exclusion of between five and six hundred names in thousands made was startling. It was the difference between a blurry outline and a scale model. I was aware that I’d probably missed some, or excluded some that I shouldn’t have...but honestly, it didn’t seem to matter. I knew, looking at it, that this was what was there to be found.

Let me walk you through it.

The first area, chronologically speaking, had been the tight, concentrated collection of states in the north-eastern region of the U.S.A. known as New England. Well over two hundred of the Disappearances that had made my list occurred there over the space of five days. The cases from the rest of the Atlantic coast had followed over the course of about a week. Then there’d been a lull of about a week where no new Disappearances had made the cut. This lull had been broken by a spate of fresh cases spreading west into the eastern continental interior – first a northern and then a southern group of states – with all the Disappearances in a given group occurring over no more than three days. Florida was next, followed by Texas.

Next had been the rest of the landlocked interior
, with the exception of Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. This was, by far, the most concentrated cluster – in terms of how many cases occurred over a given period of time – with three hundred and forty nine new Disappearances making my list over a single, massive, three-day flurry. After that, a single day passed before the Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico cases – only twenty-two in all – which had taken place over two days.

Then there was another lull: a quiet period of almost exactly a week, followed by a dozen listings for Sacramento, one hundred and twelve in Los Angeles and ninety seven throug
hout the rest of California, Oregon, and Washington over the space of two days.

Finally, three days later, there were a handful of cases in Hawaii and Alaska, and,
possibly – there were rumours, but the information was still classified – several high-ranking naval officers from an unspecified Pacific Island command centre.

If the revised data was taken at face value, it showed an unbroken, highly regimented ge
ographical and chronological progression: Eastern Seaboard, Centre-Eastern States, Centre-Western States, Western Seaboard, and, finally, Alaska and Hawaii. To me that suggested...tactics. Organisation. Purpose.

The thought occurred to me that it also seemed far too obvious to not have been noticed by virtually
everyone who had access to the documents. But then I took the information I’d started with and compared it to what I’d come up with. There was no bread-crumb trail linking the two; just a tenuous, extremely conjectural hypothesis, stretched almost too taught to be plausible. Still. I wasn’t a rocket scientist. I couldn’t have been the only one. There should have been others.

If so, why wasn’t it being mentioned? It should have been old news.
Literally. Of course, there was always the possibility that it was being actively dismissed, and the more I thought about it, the more sense that made. After all, the simplicity of it all gave nothing useful away, and, in all the important areas, the revelation raised a number of new questions while failing to provide remotely satisfying answers for old ones. Looking at my own reactions, I found myself even more overwhelmed by questions of ‘what’, ‘why’, and ‘how’ than I had been before I’d had a clear vision of the ‘who’, ‘when’, and ‘where’.

Ultimately, beyond a statement in the direction of the completely obvious
– that there was definitely some kind of ‘long con’ being played out – the new information was useless. Potentially terrifying, sure...but essentially useless. On the other hand...for many journalists, all around the world, ‘obvious and unhelpful’ was the bread-and-butter of their contribution to the news cycle. So the question remained: had it somehow slipped under the radar? Was it just...hidden in plain sight?

As it turned out
...the answer to my question was a resounding ‘no’. It
had
been noticed. And not just by the other journalists. Adjacent to the fractious, factionalised groups of squabbling, posturing hacks, disseminating their neat, rigorously edited and stylistically adherent – but, in this case, uncharacteristically avoidant – articles, were three other groups showing an equal degree of interest. Therein lay the problem. It took a little while to get to grips with the politics of it all, but it turned out that – while I’d been doing the minimum possible to not get fired, and focussing all of my attention on Naithe and the wedding – a silent standoff had been playing out between the journalists, the
tabloid
journalists, the bloggers and hacktivists, and the US Government.

§§§

So this is what I found at the heart of it:

The involvement of tabloid journalists was
...tricky. Like many journalists, the ‘line in the sand’ that I drew between ‘us’ and ‘them’ was a very different one than most of the general public would have. On the one hand, there were the
traditional
tabloid journalists, whose articles were, by and large, lowbrow and sensationalist enough that no
one took any of them remotely seriously. But then there was the ‘Murdochracy’.

Even though Rupert Murdoch himself
– a long-time front-runner in my personal list of assholes who made me embarrassed to be an Australian – was dead and gone, his legacy remained: a monolithic, internationally enabled cacophony of sneering sell-outs who were constantly underfoot, and constantly making the professional lives of real journalists much, much harder. Like cockroaches – like rats – they hung back in the shadows, skittering forth to greedily scoff down the mouldering remnants of the remotely newsworthy; the scraps that were left untouched by the rest of the media.

Back when I’d been working in Melbourne, they’d been a constant frustration. News Corp Australia and its various subsidiaries dominated the Australian media landscape, and, on a
good day, the bulk of their output was sensationalist trash, riddled with gratuitous hyperbole and conservative bias. On every other day? Well...I don’t
want
to use the term ‘propaganda network’, but hey: I guess I just did.

When it came to T
he Disappearances, these kinds of organisations had produced a decent proportion of the early coverage. There was no real political agenda to push, and so the unifying trend had been thinly veiled fear-mongering. Any and all remotely possible explanations had been touched on at some point, with the clear majority falling somewhere between ‘flimsy’ and ‘fanciful’, replete with equally dubious quotes and ‘expert’ sourcing. It was depressing. It was unprofessional. It sold. And, more importantly, it raised eyebrows just as efficiently as it raised sales. So, when real evidence – or ‘
less
completely ridiculous’ evidence – began to appear that supported the proposition that The Disappearances did, in fact, reflect a staged and highly organised process...the likelihood of producing copy that would just be lumped in with the tabloid coverage was significant enough to give most journalists pause.

The evaluation and analysis from the ‘blogosphere’ had made this situation ten times worse. Beyond the one
-off contributions, there were a handful of bloggers who had actively devoted themselves to following the story. It was pretty common to see little cliques like that forming around big stories; passionate amateurs, mostly, peddling an ‘open-source’ alternative to the professional coverage. Normally, in my experience, they were kind of just
there
: doing their thing online. Sometimes they did good work. Good enough, every so often, to threaten the hell out of a few professional journalists. More often, though, their output was sloppy at best. Whatever the case...the extent of their involvement with the rest of the media, was – more often than not – being laughed at by them while their backs were turned.