Infinite Detail

by Tim Maughan

  We used to think we could own it, that we were fighting to build communities for ourselves. That it was ours for the taking. To stake a claim for a place we could control and belong, a fight to make “safe spaces” for ourselves. It was a noble thing to think, that we were fighting for our own spaces, but we were kidding ourselves. We never owned these spaces, we never could. They were never ours to own, never ours to control. Instead we watched our battles turn into spectator sports, our revolutions turn to infighting. We watched our new communities dissolve into civil wars. We watched our political activists and community leaders become celebrity brands, our tech-utopian visionaries bow to capital and shareholders.

  Without knowing — although somehow always expecting it — we let ourselves become nothing more than the content between adverts. Our battles, our beliefs, our loves — nothing more than the filler before the next ad break. We fought battles that we didn’t need to fight — battles that ripped our solidarity apart and distracted us from the causes we once believed in — just to create clicks and blinks and eyeballs for the advertising networks. We were nothing more than squatters in a space we wanted to believe we owned, paying our rent by giving ourselves away in the name of capital. Our revolution was a sideshow.

  Well, not anymore, friends. This has to stop. And it will.

  But back to those ads for a second. Back to a word from our sponsors, dear friends. What are those adverts for? Whatever the algorithms decide. What they decide they should be, based on what they know about us. Based on what we love, hate, talk about. Everything we do is data now, every move we make, every word we speak or type, every photo we take, everything we see or touch. All data. Data we don’t own, even though we made it, carried on networks we don’t own. Data mined so that the algorithms can know us, watch us, judge us, analyze us — predict us. So they can tell us what to think. What to do. What to buy.

  The algorithms control everything now. And it goes up much further than just ads in your timeline. The algorithms control all the networks — both the physical and the digital ones, if there’s any real use in pretending there’s a difference anymore. From plastic-spewing gulags in China to the automated trading floors, from the bridges of container ships to the warehouses of Amazon, the algorithms decide everything.

  Our politicians and corporations and leaders and economists and bankers — they all do nothing now. They do nothing more than serve the algorithms. They lack the ability to override them, to make real decisions. We don’t have powerful leaders anymore, we just have middle managers. That’s who we employ and elect — political debates and boardroom battles are no longer about ideas or visions, they’re just about who can manage the network most efficiently. They’re about trying to find the best people to interface with a system that’s so complex that mere people can’t comprehend — let alone change or control — it anymore.

  We were all busy on the Internet when this happened. Some of us might have been reading stories or watching movies or playing video games about THE ROBOT UPRISING when it happened, which is kind of funny, isn’t it, friends? Entertaining ourselves by worrying about a massive inhuman artificial intelligence rising up and enslaving us, when in fact a massive inhuman artificial intelligence WAS rising up and enslaving us. Haha, isn’t that funny, friends? It’s ironic. What’s different is that the massive inhuman artificial intelligence wasn’t enslaving us with nuclear bombs or turning us into batteries (how WOULD that work?) or crushing our feeble human skulls with its metal feet, but by finding the best ways to sell us stuff. SkyNet is real, and it wants to sell you shoes made by child slaves.

  “Ho ho ho,” you say, friends. “Have you finally gone mad, Dronegod$? Where are your tinfoil hats?”

  The sad thing is, though, lovely friends, this is not a conspiracy theory. We’re not imagining things. And nobody planned this, no cabal of evil old white men in a smoky room. Nobody is in control, and believing that someone might be is where we all start to fail. This is just the political reality, it is just what happened. It’s what we all let happen. It’s the endgame of capitalism.

  (Notice, friends, how we said “endgame” there.)

  And we can’t even discuss all this anymore, can we, friends? We can’t argue with anyone, or explain to them why they might be wrong. We’re all so stuck in our echo chambers that we hear only what we want to hear, read only what we want. The algorithms make sure of that. The only news we get is the news the algorithms give us — even if it’s wrong, or lies, or just plain fake, it doesn’t matter as long as the algorithms think it’s what we want to hear.

  Capitalism, and its algorithms, have crushed democracy. And as a result democracy has resorted to its last death throes — snooping, spying, killing its enemies by remote control, police brutality. And how has the public responded? What has been our response, friends, if we are all honest? Anger, despair, confusion. Shouting at one another on the Internet. Blaming those that should be close to us. Fighting more battles on battlefields we can never own. By going on shooting sprees. By getting depressed and mentally ill. By embracing anger, hate, and fascism. But most of all, most usually, by buying more things. By feeding the algorithms with more data. By being the content between the ads.

  (And hey, we’ve not even talked about the environment. But yo, the hour draws late, friends.)

  “So what shall we do, Dronegod$?” you ask.

  This time around, the revolution will not be televised, a wise man once said.

  The revolution will not be televised. Or tweeted. Or retweeted. Or casted. Or hashtagged. Or posted. Or liked. Or shared. Or favorited. Or Instagrammed. Or networked.

  If you really think it should be, you don’t understand what that wise man meant.

  The revolution is against the network. It must be stopped.

  We must turn it off and on again! Or maybe just turn it off. We’ll see. That’s for us all to decide, later.

  Either way, it’s time for a reboot, and we’ve found the button to do it.

  Oh, it’s a wonderful thing we have found, a splendid thing. So beautiful, so perfect. A thing that cannot be stopped. A thing that changes everything. A thing that makes things dissolve, that eats away at the hearts of everything that is bad.

  We didn’t make it, but we wish we did. The people that made it were bad and selfish, because they made it for all the wrong reasons. They made it not to help or change things for everyone, but to make them worse, to punish others, to be better than them, to hurt people. And then, when they realized how wonderful and perfect and beautiful the thing they’d made was, they got selfish and hid it away from everyone. Selfish and scared.

  But we found it. We found it for you, our friends. To make a difference at a time when we thought nobody could.

  So don’t be scared. This is going to be fun, but also a tough ride. Times will be hard. But it’ll be worth it in the end. You’ll see.

  Goodbye, friends, see you on the other side.

  — DRONEGOD$

  12. AFTER

  The woman’s voice is weird. Mary can’t quite place it, her accent. It’s a bit Bristol, a bit London maybe, but there’s something else. A bit euro, she thinks—a bit like the Poles up around Newmarket speak, but not quite. Something she’s never heard before.

  Her face, though, seems familiar, she can’t quite place. Blue eyes, her tight bob of blond hair. Like someone she’d met before, yet older, tireder. Worn, defeated.

  They’re standing in the middle of Stokes Croft, right in the middle of the road, where she always starts. It’s quiet today, nobody around—there’s not even anyone on the gate, which is odd. She’d asked Tyrone about it when they’d left the shop with this woman, and he’d just shrugged, saying Ozone had been called away by College to check out something at one of the spice farms. He’d be back soon, he’d said. Don’t worry. I got you.

  She glances back at him, sees him leaning lazily against art, the graffiti-soaked metal of an unopened shop’s shutter. New murals have gone up overnight
, she sees, fleeting vistas daubed in berry paint that will flow into the drains when the inevitable rain comes. She looks at the face she’s holding, the dead eyes scrawled by her own hands in crayon and chalk on ragged paper, and imagines it flowing away, too. Maybe that’s what she should do, bring them all out here—all the dead people’s faces, bring them all out here and leave them in the street so the rain can wash them all away.

  This one belongs to a girl, about her age, she guesses, maybe a few years older. She’d seen her as they were leaving the shop one night, as Tyrone had pulled the shutters down behind them and she’d waited for him to finish locking up. It happened the same way it always did, with the world around her strobing, the crowds flashing in and out of existence. For a fraction—a tiny shard—of a second the empty street was full of people, blurred by their own motion, silhouetted against the flash of daylight where there’d been dusk before. Like always there’d been too many faces to focus on, except for one. Always one. One that caught her eye, one that was still there when the crowd flashed back in again the second and third time. One that lingered in her mind so much that she knew she’d have to draw it to make it go away.

  She looks at the face in her hand. She remembers drawing it now, as soon as she’d got home that night, with the few crayons and pieces of chalk that Grids kept lying around his flat just for her to use when she needed. She’d drawn it the second she got in, sitting at the table in his lounge, fast and frantically, knowing she had to get it down. Had to get it out. Had to set it free of her mind, else it would stare at her all night, dead eyes hanging in the dark shadows of her dreams.

  And now it’s here again, in her hands, plucked from the wall by the woman with the weird voice and handed to her. She was odd to Mary, this woman; something more than just her accent. Disconnected somehow. Calm, calculated. First customer of the day, she just walked right in, handed Tyrone her twenty quid, glanced around, and pulled the face from the wall. She barely spoke, and now they’re standing here. All just like that.

  She looks at the face in her hand.

  Mary stares at it, traces her own badly daubed lines until she has a full image of it in her mind. Focuses, blinks.

  The sky above her shifts, cloudscape changing, shadows tracking across the street as the time of day morphs. That sickening displacement between the realities, the architecture becoming unstuck from itself.

  Sudden anxiety rush as claustrophobia strikes. The crowds are tight around her, she can almost feel them crushing her, can almost feel the bass that rattles in her ears, vibrating the air in her lungs. It’s just like carnival day, she thinks, when the Croft is stuffed so full of people and music that it can literally pick you up and sweep you along, your feet not touching the ground in the crush. It’s happened to her once or twice, it was both terrifying and exhilarating, but now she stays away, waits by the sidelines, keeps close to the buildings. She’s seen enough crowds, both then and now.

  “Can you see her?” the woman asks.

  Mary looks around, having to peer through the moving bodies. Too many people. But then—

  “Yes. She’s here … she’s happy. She’s dancing.” She’s not exaggerating, not laying it on thick for a punter. The girl does look happy, dancing. Laughing. Moving to the slo-mo bass hits. There’s a sense of real release. The crowd is chanting something she can’t quite make out. “She’s with friends. She—”

  “What’s she wearing?” The woman sounds impatient.

  “A hoodie, black. Blue jeans. A scarf.”

  “What color?”

  “Sorry?”

  “The scarf. What color is the scarf ?”

  “It’s … green. Olive?” Mary is flustered, this increasing edge of impatience in the woman’s voice making her nervous. “Like an army color.”

  “That’ll do, close enough. Now give me the glasses.”

  “What?”

  “Give them to me. Quickly. Don’t make a fuss.”

  “No!”

  It’s too late. She feels the glasses being ripped from her face. Her hand grabs at air, but the woman is too fast.

  The crowd disappears. Sudden disorientation, the feeling of being transported to a vast, open space. The street is empty.

  Just her and the woman, who looks straight into her eyes. Piercing blue eyes, short blond hair. Familiar, just older. Tired. Worn. Recognition hits.

  “It’s … you … the girl…”

  “Yeah,” says the woman. “Well spotted.”

  * * *

  Anika slips the spex onto her face, and the whole world shifts.

  Shadows realign, the sky changes. The world is full of ghosts, crowded around her. Pixels thrown at her retinas by twitching laser lenses. It’s both instantly a rush, that transportation to another time, and instantly familiar. Like seeing something that was once exciting and new for the first time in nearly a decade, and remembering it had become mundane, routine. Infinite fucking detail, just like the last time. It makes her think of biting into a favorite childhood candy only to realize it’s both too sweet and too hard.

  Plus something else ain’t quite right. Double images. Ghost traces. People are floating, their feet not quite touching the ground. The buildings seem out of alignment. Either the motion and eye tracking is wrong or the lasers aren’t auto-tuning to her retinas. She tries to pull down a menu from her periphery but it’s a struggle, blinks not being recognized.

  “Wow, your calibration is fucked,” she says to the girl. “It’s all out. No wonder you can barely control anything. I can’t even find the interface … You been getting mad headaches?”

  “Y-yes …?” The girl sounds terrified, confused. She tries to grab at Anika’s arm, to get back her precious glasses, but Anika swats her away easily. She falls backward, landing on her arse. She looks up at Anika, a shocked child being trampled by an army of ghosts.

  Then Anika sees herself, dancing in the crowd. Full of energy, happiness. Emotions that she’d almost forgotten. Music she’s not heard for a decade but recognizes instantly, a heavy grinding synthetic beat that triggers nostalgia spikes with each sub-bass hit. The space between the beats, dub-soaked air. It’s like stumbling across an old photo of yourself, and being simultaneously embarrassed and full of regret, being both glad you’ve grown up and wishing you could go back. She feels herself freeze, her mouth go dry.

  “Give her back the glasses,” a voice says.

  Ah, finally. The past disappears as she takes the spex from her face. The black kid is here, standing next to the girl. He’s hot, sweating, out of breath. He holds a battered-looking old knife out at arm’s length, aimed at Anika’s face, the tip of the blade threatening to scratch her neck.

  “Give her back the glasses,” he says again.

  Anika laughs. “Yeah, that’s not how this works, man.”

  “The glasses. Give them to her.” She can see his hand shaking, a drop of sweat running down his nose. He blinks. Don’t fuck this up, kid, she thinks. For the first time self-doubt creeps in.

  She looks down at Mary, still on her backside, close to sobbing. Looks back at the kid.

  The kid says nothing. Just blinks again.

  She could take him easily. No problem. Break the little motherfucker’s arm before he even got to twitch that knife.

  But maybe that’s not the way.

  She takes a breath.

  “Okay. Fine. You got me.” She shrugs, holds the glasses out toward the girl. She pulls herself up off the floor and snatches them back.

  Anika turns to Tyrone. “Okay? You wanna give me some space here, man?”

  Reluctantly he lowers the knife, still holding it out but no longer at her throat.

  “Thanks,” Anika says. She turns back to the girl, who is frantically checking the glasses, turning them over and over in her hands. “Nice trick you got there. But you really want to see some ghosts? You want to really know how they work? You come find me later.”

  “What?”

  “Tonight.” She turn
s, gestures at the 5102 building. “Up in there. Top floor. I’ll show you some real ghosts up in there.”

  “You stay the fuck away from her,” says Tyrone, tremors in his voice.

  “Hey, it’s cool,” says Anika, smiling as she turns and walks away from them. “It’s all good.”

  13. BEFORE

  “I just—I just can’t believe you’d do something like this just to prove a point.”

  “I don’t know what you mean—”

  “You’re so fucking infuriating. Everything is always about your stupid fucking politics, nothing is about us. You don’t really care about us, do you?”

  “Scott, I—”

  “You don’t, do you? Just fucking admit it. You don’t care about us. We’re just some distraction getting in the way of your fucking crusade to—”

  “Scott! What the fuck are you talking about? What is this all about?”

  “Don’t pull that shit with me, you know exactly what this is about! Holy shit, you’re so fucking INFURIATING!”

  “Scott, I—”

  “The photos! The fucking photos you deleted!”

  “Deleted?”

  “From iCloud! From the shared folder! The fucking photos you’ve deleted! They’re the only copies I fucking have! But you just don’t care, do you?”

  Scott blinks open the iCloud icon, scans through to their shared folder. It’s empty. Scott had set it up so they could both drop photos in there, photos from when they’d been together. The only photos they had of them together. But now they’re gone.

  Rush blinks the refresh icon, hoping they’ll magically reappear. Nothing.

  He blinks it again. Nothing.

  A third time. A window pops up, blocking his view of everything else. Error message. Timed out. Connection error. A string of undecipherable numbers and letters.

  “You make me so fucking angry sometimes. I mean, I fucking get it, you hate Apple, you hate the Internet, you hate fucking everything. You don’t want to put photos on iCloud because it’s not safe, privacy blah fucking blah, surveillance capitalism blah blah, you’re so fucking self-righteous—”