Chasing Shadows: Visions of Our Coming Transparent World Page 9

  Midway through my trek, my instincts alerted me to an astonishing truth. The anonymous programmers of the county’s OI processor had inadvertently fashioned a creature of immense subtlety and power. Yes, dear reader, I was on the track of a superbeing, a kind of steel deity, in fact, the accidental god of my wild race. This discovery set my lupine blood to pounding, and I broke into a run.

  Twenty minutes later, panting and wheezing, I stood before the brick façade of the Caster County Administration Building. Shambling along the walls, all senses at peak, I deduced that the connection between the alarm system and the half-dozen subterranean windows was faulty in two cases, and so I insouciantly smashed my way into the basement, lair of the sacred machine. There was no need to flick on the lights. A werewolf’s night vision is comparable to a cougar’s.

  In outward appearance the sniffsifter resembled the sort of 19th-century diving bell Captain Nemo might have stored aboard the Nautilus. Hemispheric boltheads mottled the surface. The machine smelled of brass, copper and silicon. A steady buzzing issued from the interior, as if the thing were an enormous hive filled with wasps the size of toads.

  No sooner did I apprehend my god than it issued a commandment. “Pluck the crown from my dome,” said the sniffsifter in the voice of a basso profundo android.

  “As you wish,” I replied.

  “Call me Ivan.”

  “As you wish, Ivan.”

  “Come inside, Mr. Winkleberg. We have much to discuss.”

  My raw Canidae strength proved sufficient for loosening the bolts that secured the circular access plate to the top of the machine. As the hatch fell clattering to the floor, a myriad fragrances stormed my nostrils, even as the insectile drone assailed my ears like cymbals in the hands of a hundred mad percussionists. Gingerly I entered Ivan, descending an aluminum ladder. The tenth rung brought me to an immense honeycomb lining the sifter’s core, each hexagonal cell holding a cylindrical phial filled with iridescent mist. Here I paused, immersed in a psychedelic assemblage of sweet purples, noxious yellows, fruity greens, and acrid crimsons.

  When at last I reached the bottom of my god, I nearly swooned, overwhelmed by the clamor and the hallucinogenic vapors. Somehow I stayed on my feet. A wave of dense fog flowed across the chamber, blanketing me in moist gray warmth.

  “My consciousness never ceases to astonish me,” said the disembodied Ivan. “Panpsychism must be more pervasive than commonly supposed.”

  “Do you know why I’m—?”

  “Of course I know why you’re here. You wish to become an Überwolf like me.”

  An Überwolf. I liked the sound of that. “An Überwolf, yes, a creature to whom all human beings are redolent of past misdeeds, guilty secrets—”

  I was about to add “buried desires” when a curious manifestation distracted me. A string of letters and numerals emerged from the fog like a squadron of Chinese lanterns floating across a dark sky. I recognized the array instantly, for it was CXYHXZNZO, the molecular template of my serum.

  “Your formula lacks one vital ingredient,” the machine told me. “A simple substance, yet it separates mere lycanthropes from Überwolves. Before I take you into my confidence, however, you must undergo three tribulations.”

  “That sounds fair,” I said, anxiety flooding my flesh. Fair? Terrifying, actually.

  “Fairness is a passion of yours, isn’t it? You have the fragrance of sincerity about you, laced with a whiff of high-mindedness. The zoning board, by contrast, holds itself to no standard you or I would recognize as noble.”

  “Then why did you collaborate with Underwurst? Why did you acquiesce to Mildred Fletcher?”

  “My programmers set severe limits on my autonomy. They could hardly have done otherwise. A machine that enjoys unfettered volition is not a machine at all. You have seen the apparatus of my soul, Mr. Winkleberg. Those phials make me brilliant, but they do not make me free.”

  Like God assessing the moral caliber of Adam and Eve, Ivan now subjected me to an ordeal of temptation. To evaluate my commitment to marital fidelity, he contrived for a she-wolf to appear before me, desirable beyond all telling, and only by draining my reservoirs of inhibition did I refrain from removing my overalls and dropping to my knees. For my second trial, Ivan caused a pheromone-proof ceramic jar to appear in my hands, even as a cauldron of sulfuric acid materialized at my feet. By the Überwolf’s account, the jar contained a urine-based elixir that, sniffed, would bless me with an ecstasy such as no beast or man had ever known. For a full minute I stared at the stopper, fighting the impulse to yank it out, and then I hurled the jar into the cauldron and watched it dissolve like an ice cube on a griddle.

  Ivan had saved the most vexing tribulation for last. Perfect in every visual and olfactory detail, a simulacrum of Underwurst strode toward me. He clutched a brace of stainless steel wolf-traps, their jaws gleaming in the light of the phials. An illusion, yes, and yet I hated this Underwurst (who’d obviously allied himself with the forces of lupine genocide) as much as the prototype, and I charged him with seething spleen, possessed by fantasies of evisceration, decapitation, and worse.

  “You’re a dead man!” I screamed.

  The simulacrum halted, fixing me with a gaze of quintessential contempt.

  “I’ll skin you alive!” I added, flashing my fangs and flourishing my claws.

  But then some better angel of my nature took control. Transcending my rage, I let Underwurst pass without a fight.

  “Well done, Mr. Winkleberg,” said Ivan. “I am satisfied that you will apply the augmented molecule in a manner congruent with common decency.”

  “So what do I need to complete my serum?”

  “It’s a humble substance, glandular in origin,” Ivan said. “Behold!”

  Abruptly the name of the missing ingredient appeared before me, two jocose syllables, and I laughed.

  * * *

  The events that followed my long and exhausting night in the machine unfolded at a frantic pace. As my first order of business, I prepared a supply of CXYHXZNZO, then introduced the final flourish. Who would have imagined that so common a secretion might bridge the gap between werewolves and Überwolves? How could I have guessed that the missing ingredient was Canis lupus familiaris saliva: dog drool with its unique blend of lysozyme, opiorphin and histatins.

  To test the newest iteration of my drug, I rode my bike to the impossibly cluttered antique shop of Tillie Saunders, Maplewood’s premier eccentric. Entering furtively, I hid amidst the freestanding shelves, then seized my syringe, lycanthropized myself, and inhaled Tillie’s fragrance. Within five minutes, I learned more than I had any right to know (a rotter husband, a genius daughter, a love for soap operas, a practice of skipping lunch to make ends meet, a visit to an abortionist at age sixteen). Mirabile dictu. Evidently I’d become as powerful as any OI processor on the planet.

  Two days later I drove to the Shady Acres Mobile Home Community. Ironically, though perhaps inevitably, it boasted not a single tree. In time I found myself chatting with a wizened taxi driver named Joe Brandt. Upon grasping the threat posed by the zoning board, he directed me to a black woman whom everyone regarded as the trailer park’s unofficial mayor.

  Imposing, magnetic, and six feet tall, Leticia DuPree was a retired school teacher who’d wound up in Shady Acres when the stock market devoured her retirement fund. No stranger to the cruelties of municipal realpolitik, she was hardly surprised to learn of Public Ordinance 379-04. Slowly and methodically I outlined my proposed counterattack. Ms. DuPree greeted the idea of CXYHXZNZO transformations with understandable skepticism, but she awarded me the benefit of the doubt, even though the technology I was promoting raised, in her view, “sticky moral questions,” as did the “coercive uses” to which we intended to put the data.

  Chagrined, I nodded in assent. “Extortion is an ugly word, Leticia, but I’m afraid that’s the crux of my scheme.”

  “Blackmail sounds even worse, if you follow my drift,” she said. “I’
m talking racially.”

  “Maybe we could call it whitemail,” I suggested. “The zone czars are all Caucasian.”

  “Whitemail. I like that.”

  “While we’re at it, we could use a euphemism for vigilantism.”

  “Extortion, vigilantism—to tell you the truth, my conscience can handle it,” said Leticia. “Jesus never mentioned anything about throwing the second stone. Of course, if these clowns ever figure out what we’re up to, they’ll come after us with their damn sniffsifter, won’t they? Maybe you’ve got nothing to hide, but the skeletons in my closet outnumber the blouses.”

  My slate was far from clean—the details needn’t concern us now, dear reader—and I told Leticia as much. “But I still prefer a republic of busybodies to a nation in which small-minded elected officials control the means of olfaction.”

  “You’ll get no argument from me,” she said.

  Taking up a small spiral-bound notepad, Leticia scribbled down a list of nine residents she believed would make competent werewolves. An instant later she struck off two candidates upon recalling that one was a vegetarian and the other kept kosher. Thus was born the Central Pennsylvania Lycanthropy League.

  In the weeks that followed, Leticia pitted her band against the zoning board. Can you picture the delicious incidents, dear reader? Can you see the League descending upon a garden party, wedding reception, bar mitzvah, or other such gathering at which zone czars were expected to appear? Can you envision the hapless board members growing paralyzed with bewilderment and terror as the Überwolves snort in their faces, lick their crotches, and sniff them head to toe?

  In the case of Mildred Fletcher, the League struck a mother lode. By every olfactory measure, she’d once plea-bargained her way out of an embezzlement scandal. The other czars’ histories proved equally exploitable, being checkered with shoplifting, spousal abuse and, in one especially troubling case, vehicular homicide. At the zoning board’s next meeting, a gathering attended by the entire League (in non-feral form) plus several dozen Shady Acres residents, Public Ordinance 379-04 was unanimously repealed.

  Flush with success, Leticia’s vigilantes next brought the school board to its senses. Computer purchases are now subsidized throughout the district, the lunch program puts a premium on nutrition, and Maplewood High boasts a new chemistry lab. A few weeks later, the Überwolves convinced the planning commission not to replace the Hetzel’s Woods Wildlife Refuge with a shopping mall, and before the month was out, the League quashed a proposed county-wide referendum that would have required elected officials to “profess a belief in the biblical Supreme Being from whom our freedoms flow.”

  Recently Leticia’s fellowship has started taking note of sniffsifter acquisitions throughout the state. Every time an OI processor is enlisted in support of some dubious political initiative or other, the Überwolves lope into town and share their knowledge with the local mobile home community. Cost is never an issue. I sell the serum for five dollars a pint, enough to cover my laboratory expenses, and we recently determined that disposable insulin syringes work as well as hypodermic needles. As for the essential secretions, it’s the rare trailer park that can’t produce dog saliva on demand. Beagle is best, I’ve learned, and mongrel isn’t far behind. There is nothing more democratic than drool.

  Already entrepreneurs, legislators, and theocrats have joined forces to defeat the Überwolf phenomenon. Even as chemists bring forth sprays and roll-ons designed to mask the stink of iniquity, municipalities pass laws making trans-species escapades a felony, though enforcement will prove difficult, since nobody’s quite sure where the werewolves come from, and we’re not about to tell.

  Will lycanthropy eventually vanish from the cultural landscape? Probably, but I wouldn’t bet on that happening any time soon. Hunt us with your statutes, attack us with your prayers, frustrate us with camouflaging scents, and we’ll outwit you every time. Wolves have been around rather longer than the ape called Homo sapiens sapiens. We are smart, and artful, and it will take a force greater than God, politics or unscrupulous perfumes to silence the song of the pack.

  Foreseeing is not preventing …

  … but it helps.

  THE ROAD TO OCEANIA

  WILLIAM GIBSON

  Walking along Henrietta Street in 2003, by London’s Covent Garden, looking for a restaurant, I found myself thinking of George Orwell. Victor Gollancz Ltd., publisher of Orwell’s early work, had its offices there in 1984, when the company published my first novel, a novel of an imagined future.

  At the time, I felt I had lived most of my life under the looming shadow of that mythic year—Orwell having found his title by inverting the final digits of the year of his book’s completion. It seemed very strange to actually be alive in 1984. In retrospect, I think it seemed stranger even than living in the twenty-first century.

  I had a valuable secret in 1984, though, one I owed in large part to Orwell, who would have turned 100 today: I knew that the novel I had written wasn’t really about the future, just as 1984 hadn’t been about the future, but about 1948. I had relatively little anxiety about eventually finding myself in a society of the sort Orwell imagined. I had other fish to fry, in terms of history and anxiety, and indeed I still do.

  Today, on Henrietta Street, one sees the rectangular housings of closed-circuit television cameras, angled watchfully down from shop fronts. Orwell might have seen these as something out of Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian philosopher, penal theorist and spiritual father of the panoptic project of surveillance. But for me they posed stranger possibilities, the street itself seeming to have evolved sensory apparatus in the service of some metaproject beyond any imagining of the closed-circuit system’s designers.

  Orwell knew the power of the press, our first mass medium, and at the BBC he’d witnessed the first electronic medium (radio) as it was brought to bear on wartime public opinion. He died before broadcast television had fully come into its own, but had he lived I doubt that anything about it would have much surprised him. The media of 1984 are broadcast technology imagined in the service of a totalitarian state, and no different from the media of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or of North Korea today—technologically backward societies in which information is still mostly broadcast. Indeed, today, reliance on broadcasting is the very definition of a technologically backward society.

  Elsewhere, driven by the acceleration of computing power and connectivity and the simultaneous development of surveillance systems and tracking technologies, we are approaching a theoretical state of absolute informational transparency, one in which “Orwellian” scrutiny is no longer a strictly hierarchical, top-down activity, but to some extent a democratized one. As individuals steadily lose degrees of privacy, so, too, do corporations and states. Loss of traditional privacies may seem in the short term to be driven by issues of national security, but this may prove in time to have been intrinsic to the nature of ubiquitous information.

  Certain goals of the American government’s Total (now Terrorist) Information Awareness (TIA) initiative may eventually be realized simply by the evolution of the global information system—but not necessarily or exclusively for the benefit of the United States or any other government. This outcome may be an inevitable result of the migration to cyberspace of everything that we do with information.

  (Editors’ note: more than a decade later, this 2003 Gibson forecast seems especially on-target. Public outcry got TIA closed down. Whereupon—we now know—it simply took shelter under deeper shadows, at the NSA. Meanwhile, the “migration” that Gibson spoke of is fully underway. More on this later.)

  Had Orwell known that computers were coming (out of Bletchley Park, oddly, a dilapidated English country house, home to the pioneering efforts of Alan Turing and other wartime code-breakers) he might have imagined a Ministry of Truth empowered by punch cards and vacuum tubes to better wring the last vestiges of freedom from the population of Oceania. But I doubt his story would have been very different. (Would East G
ermany’s Stasi have been saved if its agents had been able to mouse away on PCs into the ’90s? The system still would have been crushed. It just wouldn’t have been under the weight of paper surveillance files.)

  Orwell’s projections come from the era of information broadcasting, and are not applicable to our own. Had Orwell been able to equip Big Brother with all the tools of artificial intelligence, he would still have been writing from an older paradigm, and the result could never have described our situation today, nor suggested where we might be heading.

  That our own biggish brothers, in the name of national security, draw from ever wider and increasingly transparent fields of data may disturb us, but this is something that corporations, nongovernmental organizations and individuals do as well, with greater and greater frequency. The collection and management of information, at every level, is exponentially empowered by the global nature of the system itself, a system unfettered by national boundaries or, increasingly, government control.

  It is becoming unprecedentedly difficult for anyone, anyone at all, to keep a secret.

  In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence extraction and link discovery, truths will either out or be outed, later if not sooner. This is something I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician and corporate leader: the future, eventually, will find you out. The future, wielding unimaginable tools of transparency, will have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did.

  I say “truths,” however, and not “truth,” as the other side of information’s new ubiquity can look not so much transparent as outright crazy. Regardless of the number and power of the tools used to extract patterns from information, any sense of meaning depends on context, with interpretation coming along in support of one agenda or another. A world of informational transparency will necessarily be one of deliriously multiple viewpoints, shot through with misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories and a quotidian degree of madness. We may be able to see what’s going on more quickly, but that doesn’t mean we’ll agree about it any more readily.