Sanction

by Roman McClay

  Nathan’s immune system would respond in one of two ways to the seemingly anodyne toxin depending on what his Evo modulator was consumed with at the time. The 3.2’s baseline dump was extremely taxing on the ancillary systems of the individual; and while it camouflaged the systems that were normally investigated by one’s rivals, it left the other systems, like one’s immune system and cognitive load indicators -like slowed speech, or neuro-transmitter uptake- naked to this kind of invigilation.

  The magician directs your gaze away from the loci of deception, so whatever system your rival is ostensibly masking, overtly obfuscating, this is the one he wants you to investigate. The axis mundi of true deception must not appear to even be worthy of hiding for it to remain safe from inspection.

  Nathan’s speech contained all the evidence the Governor needed; and yet he listened to the words as if they were ends in themselves. The mansion’s system would do all the work for him; he could relax and listen to his lieutenant’s -not unlettered- rejoinder. These were the nuances of the enhanced CNS apps that would have evaded the people thinking on the future a decade ago.

  It allowed him to let down his guard, not to have to be -and always remain- hypervigilant; the man with trait openness could relax around all those who felt no need to share their thoughts. It -his PGC- was a personal assistant, bodyguard and intelligence agency all rolled up into a few nano-tubes, less than 100 nanometers in length, and insinuated in his brain and blood. The tiny computer that set at the corpus callosum -in the ditch between each hemisphere of his brain- was in constant communication with the satellite systems in his home, vehicles and all over his western state.

  “I see the studies on that, yeah, and there has been quite a bit of work done on deception and self-deception over the last decade or so. It really is pervasive at every level of the biosphere. What interests me is the desire to overcome it; the need in some people -maybe all people- to some degree, to be honest, even when it has a negative effect on them; arguing against one’s position for example. It’s a real phenomenon in us, you know, this need to be honest for its own sake,” Nathan saddled his hands in his pockets and rocked in ersatz insouciance on his heels.

  “The need to be perceived as trustworthy, for certain, but,” the Governor paused, “but, well, I should rephrase that. I think you are right, sometimes it has nothing to do with others, we just want to be, to have integrity for our own satisfaction, but even that, the desire to feel righteous and authentic is the proximate cause, like hunger or lust. But the ultimate cause is what we are not innately aware of, that feeling of hunger is the only way we’ll eat enough to survive, feeling amorous is the only way to ensure reproduction; especially given how much each sex despises each other when they are not actually engaged in sexual congress. For us, the desire for righteousness is the feeling, the result -however- is behavior that molds public opinion of us in a vector that benefits us in the long-term.

  “Mark Twain said, give a man a reputation as an early riser, and that man can sleep ‘til noon the rest of his days ,” the Governor smirked and tapped his nub of a cigar, ashing on the slate floor. He knew that Nathan would never guess his gubernatorial module had been turned off for nearly 20 minutes; and that the facility he had with data retrieval and articulation, including that bit of literary garnish with the Twain quote, would serve to reinforce the deception.

  The PGCs had elevated men’s speech by shaping their diction, word choice, accurate quotes from history or literary sources, and mathematics facility so much that to speak to a man without the coder upgrade was like speaking to an illiterate man of the 17th century. The unenhanced man’s language would be demotic, and devoid of higher-level functions unless that man could quote facts, stats, dates, and historical quotes accurately from memory and do differential equations in their heads without the help of the nano-computer they had all come to rely upon. Unless you were speaking to a natural polymath , he thought, the un-augmented man would seem retarded.

  To turn off one’s PGC was to have to rely on one’s native brain and cognition, and most men, the average man, would seem even worse than he was in the eyes of the enhanced CNS of the man who was in possession of -and availing himself of- a post-genetic coder.

  Nathan would only worry himself of such a total sweep if he suspected the Governor’s own module was off-line; he knew how security measures worked; he had help design them. Unconcerned as he was for such a sweep, the lieutenant was defending himself against an invigilation that wasn’t even happening. The Governor’s back was turned to all the normal cues, and he could truly just enjoy the conversation and let the mansion’s system do all the work detecting Nathan M. Lee’s obfuscation and treachery; if the man , he thought, was indeed engaged in such behavior.

  “Religious bifurcation, that is to say, internecine fracturing of a religious sect, maps directly onto parasite load in every region on the earth. The more parasites the more religions; keeping people segregated from each other via strongly held religious beliefs. That sentence construction is off, but you get my meaning. Once you recognize the difference between proximate cause and ultimate cause, then, and only then, can you begin to attempt to act freely,” he stopped, flung the cigar butt into the fireplace and turned his coder back on. The house system sent him the results of Nathan’s substratum system metrics; and the Governor turned to face his lieutenant.

  He didn’t even open the file; he knew that the best way to keep Nathan from knowing what the Governor knew, was for the Governor not to know it just yet himself. Self-deception v.2.0, he thought, and his grin got larger and more genuine as he extended his own -and shook the aide’s- hand. He liked the young man and hoped that Nathan was telling the truth. They had worked together almost from day one, and they had accomplished a lot. It would be a shame if he was the one leaking the Governor’s data to the Chinese or sabotaging his plans with the Democrats or giving those shallow, low-brows in the legacy media bits and pieces of tawdry details.

  “Let’s take a drive,” the Governor said, and they both walked back into the main ballroom of the mansion; the Governor taking the time to shake hands with a few people he did not like as they headed toward the garage.

  Nathan’s fMRI app scanned the Governor’s limbic region and endocrine system for any evidence of anger. But all the neurotransmitter and limbic metrics, including hormonal levels, and region micro-atrophy measurements indicated the man’s CNS had been genuinely at-ease and content for the last 30 minutes. He showed no signs of anger and almost no malice, and no indicators -like capillary constriction or cognitive load- of mendacity in affect or word. As far as Nathan could tell, his boss’ countenance matched his internal landscape. He was as he appeared.

  “Do you know the story of the Vicar of Bray?” the Governor asked.

  It was still the way men and women -born and inculcated before the Post-Gen technologies came on line- spoke to one another: asking if people knew previously esoteric or abstruse phenomena before moving on. They asked such things as if their audience didn’t have instant access to any and all information on the public database.

  People of that age -anyone older than 20- still reflexively assumed that much of literary and scientific culture was hidden from whomever they were speaking to; and they weren’t really sure if whomever it was would understand the reference they were making in a short-hand kind of way. Thus, they asked -oh, do you know so and so? - to avoid making in depth explanations -redundancies, even ponderous ones to the erudite- and conversely, to avoid glossing over something that needed explained to the ignorant.

  If -in the old days- their captive audiences knew the reference then one could just get on with the point, but if not, which was likely the case before the first PGCs were available to the public, then a more robust explanation of context, history, and the meaning of the reference were in order. The more one knew the more one had to explain, the more time and space it took.

  But, while the Vicar of Bray was never known to Nathan before the
words left the Governor’s mouth, as soon as he had finished asking the polite, pro-forma , but silly question, Nathan -and as would have anyone with a PGC more advanced than the first two generations of them- downloaded the public and congressional database -the latter of which was restricted- on the old Vicar and had assimilated the database’s wiki-page on his own platform.

  Nathan was up-to-date on the reference by the time the Governor had paused to ask.

  These database entries were crafted for easy downloading, bit-wise, and for easy uptake at the cognitive level. They were bullet points. Fuller descriptions were available, but they would take minutes, even hours to digest depending on the entry; the way books would be read over days and even weeks in the past.

  “I’ve got the BPs on him now,” Nathan said, admitting he had to download the reference. Both men stepped into the oversized garage and the lights came on in sequence from exit to entryway, illuminating 13 old gasoline or diesel cars, trucks, and three gasoline motorcycles, all of which were clean, fueled up and backed into their stalls.

  Nathan rarely went into this part of the mansion, these were the Governor’s private vehicles, and whenever on business -and they were always on business, seemingly- the Governor’s motorcade drove them. The motorcade consisted of a series of heavily armored M5 sedans that ran on electric motors. These cars were parked in the entryway to the mansion, waiting in the alcove at all times.

  “Well, the bullet points will not tell you that the Vicar’s milieu was as mercurial as the poem describes. It was no hyperbole to describe the English monarchical system of the time; we’re talking from the 16th to 18th centuries, as highly unreliable; or often shifting , let’s say. From Catholic to Protestant and all the vagaries in between, as many as there are minutes, or even seconds, on a clock face, were the many regimes.

  “At any rate, the moral flexibility, shall we say, the deference shown by the Vicar to, whatsoever king shall reign, was no doubt as much an indictment of the times as it was of the man himself, or the archetype of man described in that work of satire.

  “This to me seems the more interesting point, the conceit of the innate instability of the crown in this case, and extrapolating out, in all systems of governance, from school board or even nuclear family up to board room or modern corporations or slightly below that to the office of the Presidency of these here United States,” the Governor looked at Nathan under that tilted brow again.

  “More or less,” Nathan added with a slightly sardonic smile.

  “More or less indeed, young man, but you glean my point,” a word like glean might not be known to Nathan and if he suffered some instant confusion -measured metabolically by the PGC- his searching module would automatically send a synaptic prompt to his gathering modules which would import the definition to his hub in .5 seconds or less. The word would travel from a state of being absent in one’s vocabulary, searched for, located and defined and then integrated in under 1.25 seconds from the time the Governor uttered it; and thus, Nathan wouldn’t miss a beat.

  “I do,” Nathan could honestly report.

  “Well, the Vicar of Bray could be said to be the primogeniture of this highly complex and mercurial system; and we are his progeny. The highly adaptive neuron in a sea of flux.

  “You see, I knew an old weirdo, well, I didn’t know him, but a guy I know, knew a guy, excuse me, knew the guy, the weirdo, and he ran a cult of sorts. And one of the central tenets of their little religion was that the universe was built on a foundation of truth.

  “They believed that the whole universe was in love with truth and that humans were the only liars extant; the only ones who went against the grain of the entire floating cosmos with our dissembling. In fact, it was this incessant and novel lying of ours that was the epicenter of our pain, our discontent, and the havoc we were visiting upon the planet itself,” the Governor had walked them to the starboard side of the 2006 Chrysler 300SRT8 that while nearly 30 years old had only 31,000 miles on it; he opened the passenger door and stood there and held it for Nathan in a reflex of chivalry. He then felt embarrassed by this, as if it seemed a bit too chivalrous and bordered on being gay; he shook his head slightly to connote this awareness of the faux pas.

  He knew this would seem odd to Nathan; but not sure of how odd or what the exact character of the oddity would seem like; he usually felt in control of how he was perceived, an illusion of course, but now, he was truly unsettled by these types of slip ups.

  “Is that Zendak?” Nathan asked, slightly mispronouncing the old Sanskrit name. He and the Governor had spoken from time to time of the inmate. But, that was unnecessary for Nathan to follow along.

  “Zendik,” the Governor corrected, “and it’s an old desert word that means outlaw , but not against the law, more just outside it.”

  Nathan had not needed to ask; the Governor’s entire official biography was available to him and anyone else with the Congressional Library download app ; and further, Zendik Farm had been talked about between the Governor and inmate 16180339; the details -most of the details- of which were on the PraXis corporate cloud.

  “To hear the guy tell it, and look, this was 40 some-odd years ago, but to hear him tell it, the old man died still thinking this shit was true and the queen bee herself, Arol, thought it until she died; although maybe she faked her death you know? To avoid the lawsuits; anyway, she’d be 140 by now anyway,” he smiled and then realized that joke wouldn’t seem that funny to a man like Nathan, just 28 years old, and had been raised in the modern world -with nanotech- to think that life-spans like that were as plausible as they were in the Bible.

  Nathan remained standing in the doorway of the all-black sedan and watched his boss circle the car and continue to speak; his black suit and shirt and tie subsumed into the black hood before him and the black background of the garage beyond.

  “Anyway, she’d be in her 100’s by now, and she had cancer for real so it’s unlikely she survived. The daughter, Fawn, is still alive, and one wonders what she thinks -but anyway- the point is that these people were so insular and galactically full-of-shit that they had no clue as to the nature of the bio-sphere on this here planet. If they had read just one or two books even back then in the 90s and first decade of this century, they’d known that deception strategies and lie-detection modules are ubiquitous in every species known. It’s in the brain, like genetically, man.

  “Robert Trivers laid out some illuminating examples, including birds who foist their own offspring onto the rearing burden of other bird species by surreptitiously adding their own eggs to the nest of some unsuspecting bird.

  “Now, look, only a few species of bird will tolerate this ruse; most are hip to it; and frankly, this is as much evidence one needs to show that most species can see deception in this rudimentary form and that this is a trait that is common. Right? If they were all duped by it, then it would show that lying was so novel and unique as to be undefended against.

  “In other words, if no species could detect deception then all birds would be rearing these illegitimate scions at quite a genetic expense to themselves,” he said.

  “Like our own taxpayer paying to rear illegal alien babies?” Nathan asserted while pretending to ask.

  “But,” the Governor just moved forward, “if everyone could tell, if everyone was hip to the deception, if no birds were fooled, then the brood parasites would have gone extinct long ago. But, rather, we have a few bird species that try this shit, and a few who fall for it and the majority neither lie nor suffer from credulity,” the Governor paused slightly and felt a déjà vu but couldn’t place it; then realizing these feelings weren’t worth ruminating over, he went on.

  “But, birds lie in other ways; that is merely one strategy,” Boyd Sou continued on with that opaque but dismissed web of déjà vu in his mind. Nathan felt no such numinous or nebulous feeling, no vague worry. He knew that the Governor had repeated himself from only 30 minutes ago in almost exact duplication; only this time with more re
fined and robust details. It was the kind of thing a man did when he toggled between his implant functions; or re-booted it. It was a common side-effect of powering it down; the mind would allow a repeat that would normally be obviated by the hyper-memory recall of the modules.

  Nathan knew that the Governor had just repeated himself and that this was evidence of his PGC being shut down .

  The previous story seemed flat now, like it came from the unaugment mind; the atavistic mind of the man without his interface upgrade. Nathan narrowed in; he felt compelled to listen even more closely to the man; and his own coder system ran a parallel scan of every game theory paradigm the man was using on him.

  “Another bird,” the Governor went on, “has learned another tactic; this time for acquiring food through trickery. Birds use warning calls to alert their compadres to imminent predatory doom. These calls, however, are sometimes made in the presence of other birds who have just secured a bit of food in their mouths. Upon hearing the call from this frenemy , they drop their bounty and fly away, still thankful, no doubt, for the warning. Then the false-call bird, the chicken-little , swoops in to pick up the food dropped by his fellow bird and flies away with his stolen meal,” Governor Sou tapped the roof of the car and looked at Nathan because he felt like sometimes he went on and on too much and this alienated the listener and looking at them in silence was a sign of respect; it gave them a chance to add something.

  “This is sophisticated mendacity too, but let’s go,” Sou began after Nathan didn’t say anything; he dropped into the sedan with his lieutenant following suit.

  “Because,” he continued once inside the black sedan, “it indicates a certain theory of mind. Now, this may be a stretch, but it does make me wonder if the bird who makes the false call somehow knows the other bird will think it is a genuine warning and thus drop the food and escape; or if the bird -the lying bird- merely makes the call reflexively -like a tic- and only notices the abandoned foodstuff afterwards; and thus merely takes advantage of a situation, not exactly aware of creating it.” He rolled his tongue around in his mouth and let his head bounce a little back and forth like a pendulum. He was undecided.