Arms Race (19 page)

No? But why stop there? Let's all just meet in a paddock and slaughter each other
with sharpened sticks. Or our bare hands. You and me. Right now. Let's scratch and
kick and tear each other to bloodied pieces, right here on this stage. Because that's
what war was—before it was privatised. Is that what you want? Is that your idea of
peace?

Alex turned back to face the general. She'd just worked out how her film would end.
She removed her steel helmet, felt its weight in her hand. She felt calm; peaceful,
even.

Let me ask you again, Hurtz was saying. In your heart, would you prefer this war
was real? Or will you accept our war, and so accept peace? You know this is the better
path. Not one person injured. Not one person killed. Say it with me. Us, Them, Civilians—

Us, Them, Civilians, the crowd chanted. Zero, Zero, Zero.

Us, Them, Civilians, Alex said. One, Zero, Zero.

One
, Zero, Zero? Hurtz said, frowning.

Sorry, Alex said, crossing the stage. I never was any good at math.

FACEBOOK REDUX

MICHAEL SHOWERS and shaves, then snaps a few self-portraits in the mirror. He lifts
his phone high, tilts his head and pouts.
Click.

He's a substantial man, with ruddy jowls, a small, pleasant mouth and cheerful eyes.
At sixty-seven his head is a gleaming dome. Most of his male friends are doing that
ridiculous neo-combover thing: a few last pathetic hairs brushed down over one eye,
emo-style. He prefers total baldness—chemo-style.
Click.

Michael stands back and takes a coy full-length shot, half turned to hide his cock.
He's in good shape these days. He used to have to watch his weight, with all the
dinner parties and long lunches, the breakfasts in bed with Margot.
Click.

His smile is captured mid-collapse. He deletes the shot. These days he mostly steams
a few vegetables. He really has lost a lot of weight. He thinks of it as a small,
positive side effect of his wife's death.

In the kitchen there's no sign of Sophie. It's half seven, and she has classes at
eight. While Michael waits for coffee, morning images from friends blink up in his
retina overlay. He's intrigued, and mildly annoyed, that the system keeps choosing
sequences from women his age. There's more from Bernadette. Her dyed black hair is
glossy and tousled, and she holds one hand across her breasts. She looks wonderful
at seventy, though the effect hasn't been the same since her mastectomy.

These days, he thinks, we're all a bit maimed.

There's a knock at the front door. Michael blinks. Odd—nothing registers in his overlay.
He hears Sophie's bedroom door open, then the shower. He carries his coffee down
the hall and opens the door.

He can't see anyone there; just a jogger across the street, kids ambling off to school,
two gaunt shanty-dwellers having their morning bucket bath on the footpath. Each
of them appears in his overlay as a faint swarm of data, visible, available.

Morning!

It's Sophie's friend Eloise, standing on the bottom
step. He stares. She's wearing
an emerald headscarf that surrounds her face like a cowl. Is Sophie ready? she asks.

Surprise makes Michael abrupt. No, he says. What's with the scarf?

I've taken the vow. Sophie didn't tell you?

No. Come in.

He stands aside and sips his coffee to hide his distaste. He sees more kids wearing
the scarves every day. To him, their cloistered faces look like they have something
to hide. He wonders what her parents think. It was one of the few things he and Margot
had argued about. He agreed with the papers: privacy led to political unrest. Nonsense,
Margot had said. They've got every right to disappear.

So you're just—disconnected? Michael asks Eloise at the kitchen table. He finds it
unnerving, talking to someone with zero data presence. It's like sitting across from
a small black hole.

We can still access everything, Eloise says. We're just not sending anything out.

And what brought this on? Is it a religious thing?

No, it was History of Privacy. You should hear the lectures. People used to just
give it up, for free. There was this thing called Facebook, where you—

Facebook.
The word comes to him out of a dream.

You mean the website? he says.

Yeah. Have you heard of it?

I used to use it.

Eloise sits forward with a kind of excited repulsion. Really? You were one of them?
So did you just give away your—everything?

That's a personal question, he says. He's joking, but she blushes anyway.

Sophie bangs into the kitchen, hair damp from the shower. Are you hassling Lou?

She's hassling me, Michael says. About my time on Facebook.

Sophie looks dismayed. You were on
Facebook
?

I was. Your mother, too. We—

Michael trails off. He's suddenly wide awake. He had completely forgotten: Margot
was on Facebook.

Two years on, his natural memory of Margot is as frayed as old rope. He has a wealth
of digital captures, but he's exhausting them too. There was one he used to loop,
of Margo singing in the shower. He went about his day with the hiss of water and
her sweet, off-key high notes ghosting down the hall. Over time it had become background
noise: a radio left on in another room.

But Margot was on Facebook. She would have posted videos and photos, decades ago.
It's like he's discovered a forgotten chamber of his mind. The thought is exquisite.

Michael realises Sophie has asked him a question. Sorry? he says.

You do own your data, don't you?

Absolutely not, he says. Everything's out in the open. Why lock yourself away?

Eloise smiles at Sophie. PP, she murmurs. Sophie looks embarrassed.

What's that? Michael says.

You're PP, Eloise says. Post Privacy. We call it Publicly Promiscuous.

He laughs. The wall clock chimes eight.

Merde
, Sophie says. We're late.

They're halfway down the hall when the thought strikes him.

Hey, girls, he calls. If I'm PP, what are you?

PPP, Eloise says. She flashes a small gold ring over her shoulder. Post Post Privacy.
We're saving our data for someone special.

Michael has no appointments in the morning. He calls his secretary. With your permission,
he says, I'd like to engage in a little senile leisure time.

He sits at the desk in his study and thinks about Facebook. His retina and cortex
are hardwired, like everyone else on his income, and the results come up in his overlay.
There's a wealth of historical analysis and old news items. Then he finds what he's
looking for. In a grey zone of southern Russia's deep web, buried in the sediment
of an archival server, is a copy of the Facebook data. A fossilised social network.

He's not expecting much when his system attempts to connect, but a moment later,
there it is: the homepage. It's surprisingly familiar, right down to the precise
shade of blue. At the top is a link:
Recover your profile.

Not bloody likely, he says aloud. It's been forty-odd years. But he follows the link,
skips the privacy statement and fills in a form. His overlay shows ancient code routines
waking from sleep on the host server. Obsolete analytics grasp at new filaments of
data. There's another procedure too, shimmering just below the intelligible horizon,
that his own system does not recognise.

While he waits, Michael crosses to the window. Another mainland family is building
a tarpaulin shanty on the nature strip. The young father waves; he's not too badly
burned. Michael would have been about that age when social media took over his life.
Twenty-three? Twenty-three and full of love, and full of himself. He remembers Margot
teasing him about wasting his life self-promoting on Facebook. So much so that he
deleted the thing…Shit. They both did. It felt like a spiritual breakthrough at the
time. They deleted their profiles, went to Thailand, got married, got on with their
lives, and now she's dead.

Michael's in the kitchen, trying to summon enthusiasm for work, when it blinks up
in his overlay.
Profile reactivated. Welcome back.

His profile picture stares at him across the decades. His head is shaved, cocked
to one side, lit with an insolent grin. It's eerily similar to the picture he snapped
this morning. He runs a hand over the wearied flesh of his face. What skin—what a
pup!

Beneath his photo is a random-seeming list of things he'd claimed to like. Cormac
McCarthy. Someone called Seamus Heaney.
The Wire
. It seems so archaic—that you would
tell a system what you liked, rather than trusting it to tell you. There is an invitation
to something called a Permablitzkrieg, and one to a Climate Action Rally, back when
they thought they stood a chance. He didn't want to think about it then, and he doesn't
want to think about it now. He scrolls down.

His heart lurches. There's something from Margot.

It's a photo, too small to properly make out, but she looks to be pulling a face.
Below, it says:
This content has been removed by the user.

Michael clicks through to her profile. That same line is repeated, time and again.
He clicks through messages, events and comments, drumming his fingers in irritation.
The same fuzzy avatar makes the same taunting declaration. It's as if Margot removed
herself to spite him.

He scrolls through photos, hoping to glimpse her in other people's shots, and before
long he's distracted. Long-dead friends beam their vitality through the years. They're
in and out of clubs, crammed in the back of cars, camped
among valleys of tangled
bush. He lingers over a shot of himself diving off the side of a boat at dawn. He
is reaching down through the bright and liquid air, an instant before the surface
is broken. He can't find a single person crying, or angry. Everyone seems brand new.

Halfway down the page, Michael finds a sequence from a woman with an expressive,
intelligent mouth and smoky eyes. It only takes a second to remember who she is.

June-Mee! he says aloud.

Michael clicks through to her profile. There's a new entry at the top of the page,
exactly the same as his own.

Profile reactivated. Welcome back.

Michael gradually becomes conscious of a rattling from the air purifier on the wall.
He stretches over and gives it a whack that makes his hand sting. He can't believe
he's found someone else on the network.

He loses an hour trawling through old photos. She's lazing on a beach in Greece,
hiking in the Yellow Mountains out past Shanghai. The images stir something in him.
Curiosity, and nostalgia.

They'd met at a party. He'd walked into the crowded bathroom and she was reclined
in the bathtub, laughing among the ice and beer, reciting some speech she was studying.
Their eyes had met.

Free at last, she cried. Free at last!

On a whim, he sends her a message.

Later, he is propped in bed reading, still carefully
on his own side of the bed,
when a reply comes through.

Michael, what a surprise! Are you well?

He gives a wriggle of delight and kicks off the sheets. The chatter in his overlay
is immediate and positive: eighty-eight per cent of his friends are intrigued. Sophie,
studying in her room, sends a
WTF.
She turns up her music, and it seeps through their
shared wall.

Michael starts each day searching for traces of Margot, and ends up chatting with
June-Mee. He finds her quick and funny. It seems she's the only other living person
on Facebook, and he likes the irony: from a billion people down to two. She hints
at a simple, affluent life. They both live in the leafy suburbs of Tasmania's Greater
Melbourne, and he gets the feeling she's recently divorced. He doesn't ask for details.
He mentions Margot's death and Sophie's presence, in passing. They talk as if they're
still twenty-one.

June-Mee recalls a night when they took ecstasy in his bedroom, then cried with laughter
through a dinner with scandalised friends. She had a boyfriend who lived interstate.
He recalls the sexual tension of their nights out, a gaunt stranger in a club asking
if they were lovers. They weren't—but if he's honest, he wishes they had been.

Michael
wakes a few days later with a good restlessness in him. He catches Sophie at the
breakfast table. Her hair is getting long, and she's taken to wearing it pulled across
her face. She ignores his questions about school. She won't be drawn on the History
of Privacy. He stops trying to sidle up to the conversation.

I discovered an old friend on Facebook, he says.

I know, she says. It's creepy. Don't you think it's weird how she just found you?

I found her. June-Mee is a lovely woman. She makes me feel—

Just don't, she says. It's private.

It's not private, he says, amused. I want to share it with you.

Sophie stares into her coffee mug. You've already shared it with anyone who'll listen.

It's worth sharing.

You think brushing your teeth is worth sharing. Eloise says you make your life cheap
by just giving it away.

That's ridiculous, he says. What does it cost you to be open about your life?

It costs—something.

Rubbish. It costs to be private. Do you have any idea how much Eloise's parents will
be spending to let her turn off her—

He catches himself.

Sorry, he says. Look, do you think this is disrespectful
to your mother? To have
dinner with June-Mee?

Maybe, Sophie says. Yes. And to you. Couldn't you just do something for yourself?

You mean, do something private? he says.

Yes.

Turn everything off?