Abyss (Songs of Megiddo)

by Klieve, Daniel

  The night chill subsides.

  Colour enters: free, borne by

  Blossoms effulgent.

  IX – Who is John Galt?

  ~ Kayla ~

  24/11/2023

  I spent a few hours sitting in the sun: smoking; making phone calls; and going over my old files. There were hundreds of pages of briefings, press releases, and documents to sort through before I could actually get to anything real. Though...in the end, it was a lot quicker than I expected. Which was definitely a good thing: the end of November in Pueblo was freezing, after all...but it was an integral part of my process. A part that had been, admittedly, far simpler – not to mention warmer – in Australia.

  Once I was done with that, though, it didn’t take long for my instincts to kick in. And as soon as they did, I was lost to it. When I was working my way to something, I was like an addict chasing a high. I did feel a little embarrassed while I was working, though. I’d really let a lot of things slip.

  Not just to make myself feel better about having been so fucking slack – but yes: partially because of that – I soon decided that I’d re-joined the hunt at just about the perfect moment. My thinking was that...well...because I wasn’t so invested in what had happened up until that point, I wasn’t only seeing new information as a strict, logical progression from older information. It was something that, as I knew from experience, could sometimes lead to insights that, otherwise, simply wouldn’t have been possible.

  Naithe was supportive, as ever. He brought me coffee and snacks, and made sure I didn’t run out of cigarettes. He was used to my way of working by that point. It was like he could feel what I was feeling; my sense of urgency and fascination. I loved him for that. I loved him for everything, really.

  So, to start with: at the core of the story, not much had changed. That was to be expected. There were Disappearances occurring all over the United States, and they were mostly concentrated in big cities. The only real change was that, now, there were quite a few more of them than I remembered. Something that surprised me was that – just in the few days beforehand – there’d been a handful of missing person’s cases from outside the States that fitted the profile, and were beginning to be reported as possibly linked. That part...was unexpected.

  I should probably explain why that was the case. See...my understanding had been, up until that point, that the only real linkage between the various American cases had been that they were...well...American cases. The tendency to group Disappearances according to the wealth and influence of the Disappeared – while it made headlines, sure – was, realistically, a pretty tenuous lowest common denominator. Entirely too selective. I mean, really...it was only half of the story.

  See...of the thousands of people who had gone missing, something like a third of them were, yes, the imposing figures that everyone was obsessing about. These were the kinds of people that you read about and then needed to go and have a drink or three to reconcile their achievements with your relative lack thereof. Or maybe I was just looking for an excuse to drink. That was possible, also.

  But then, of course, there were the others.

  These people contrasted sharply with that first group; largely because they were...people. A couple of thousand people, who were just – I guess – a little too unremarkable to sell papers. While, of course, a hefty proportion of the total group were wading around somewhere in the middle – wandering through a sort of no-mans-land between the definitely important and the clearly not – there were more than enough who were unquestionably in one or the other chunk of the Venn diagram to remind people that The Disappearances were hitting those from all walks of life.

  Only...it really hadn’t. In a sad, but entirely predictable pantomime re-enactment of their lives up until that point, the ones who were classified as ‘un-special’ were almost always discarded...leaving big names for big headlines that brought in big readership...even if the journalists were just talking around the huge pile of ‘nothing’ that they had to actually say. And they were. I knew that better than anyone.

  The unspoken consensus appeared to be that: yes, annual income and social status absolutely, definitely defined personal worth. And, for the little people who couldn’t accept that? Well, they could pretty much fuck off, so far as most of the world seemed to be concerned. For the more cynical among us, it was...yeah: ‘business as usual’.

  The important bit, though: the bit I’d made a point of remembering...was that everyone knew this. The fact that people were ignoring the majority to focus on the privileged minority wasn’t just bullshit...but very obviously bullshit. And yet...whether from fear of what might be coming next, or how it might affect them...the general public’s focus never seemed to touch those who were relatable; the microscope of focus remaining stubbornly, distractingly fixed over the question of the fate of the rich and the powerful.

  I was determined to not fall victim to that. So, discarding virtually all of the information I had on hand, I started again...working off the official statistics and a slowly building hunch that the bigger picture was the way forward. It felt good. It felt like bypassing the congested highways for the empty, winding backstreets. Only, as it turned out, in this case I was far from the only motorist to settle on the low road.

  The first significant – if conjectural; if flimsy – information I happened upon actually came from someone on the exact same path: a fellow Australian working a story out of Sacramento. He brought my attention to the timing of the U.S. Disappearances, explaining that this was how these new, foreign cases were being connected. He explained that the first alleged Disappearances in Canada and Mexico were all in the east, with subsequent cases moving west. At first, I had trouble seeing the connection: it didn’t even seem to be true of the U.S. Disappearances. But then I realised what a lot of other journalists must have already: that the official statistics were indiscriminate.

  Well...maybe ‘indiscriminate’ isn’t the right word. It’s not like the regularly released, Government compiled listing was a completely unedited aggregation of all the Disappearances that had occurred in the United States since the explosion over New York. It was just a completely unedited aggregation of all the Disappearances that had occurred in the United States since the explosion over New York...where there was no forensic or eyewitness evidence to suggest what might have happened. And yes...that was, technically, about right. It was a fairly shallow analysis, sure, but anything deeper required wading into the murky, uncertain waters of speculation and conjecture. I could see why that might have bothered people whose professional reputations were on the line. But I just wanted to satisfy some curiosity. It never occurred to me that I might happen on anything remotely publishable.

  Once I started hacking away at the list of names – removing cases that had clearly been noticed well after the event, or where there had been plausible sightings after the fact – the picture changed dramatically. Suddenly, where there’d been no immediately recognisable pattern...there was...something. A kind of regimented stratification began to show through the seeming chaos. And in that stratification, yes: the very first Disappearances had been on the eastern seaboard, and the most recent had been in California. The Disappearances, I realised, occurred in clusters. These clusters – while they, admittedly, chronologically overlapped in a decent number of places – spread out across a timeline, with definite peaks and troughs evident in the volume of cases that occurred in confined and comparable periods of time.

  The clusters were also somewhat geographically compartmentalised. The part that grabbed for and held my attention, was the way that some of the sharp spikes in reported Disappearances, in this context, stood out as singular peaks, as opposed to being simply the highest among a range of peaks in reported Disappearances.

  Dig. I told myself: Dig until we hit bedrock.

  So I dug. Getting down to brass tacks did, in the end, require more than a small amount of tinkering, and an above average ability to sift and sort through data. The big
gest challenge, though, ended up being almost entirely to do with finding the right baseline. The right definition, that is, for an ‘average’ Human Being. Sadly, it seemed, there was something to the idea that the social importance of the Disappeared was front-and-centre in figuring out what the fuck was going on.

  §§§

  Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever actually tried – I mean really tried – to define ‘average’. If you haven’t? Take my word for it: it’s not as easy as it sounds. For starters, it’s really, really subjective, and inescapably relative, and, just generally? ‘Average’ is kind of a bullshit label that never really ‘fits’ for any three-dimensional Human Being. So, what I had to start with was a vague, politically correct understanding of the word ‘average’ in a general sense. Which, really, only gets you so far.

  Playing with the hazy, often contradictory delineations between ‘average’ and ‘more-than-average’ quickly came to seem a lot like tuning a radio and finding that the frequency you were trying to isolate kept slipping just to one side or the other of the dial. You could twist the dial as slowly and gently as you wanted to...but to find the ‘sweet spot’ you were looking for, what you really needed was a less manual way of zeroing in on that frequency. You needed a way of isolating it. And, unfortunately, there was no way around the need to identify – to isolate, as it were – ‘average’ people. Until I could do that, my working definition for the ‘non-average’ people left the bigger picture obscured by a kind of statistical haze – like interference; like static – that I just couldn’t quite see through.

  This, irritatingly, meant manually finding and working through reams and reams of qualitative data. And when I say ‘qualitative data’, what I’m describing – obviously – is the kind of crap you can turn up on people with a web-search, some tenacity, and an entry-level capacity for privacy violation. From experience, the nebulous off-cuts of a person’s online presence – if you can get a deep enough slice of them – comprise an adequately exhaustive approximation of that person’s social existence to start working with. You distil that kind of information and cross-compare? You can build a bell-curve of social commonalities that – arbitrarily, sure, but meaningfully nonetheless – show you where people sit in relation to one another.

  As you might imagine, though, this strategy tends to net you lifetimes upon lifetimes of raw material to sort through. The best way to deal with this...is to grab as much as you can find for maybe three individuals, and start systematically going through everything you can find for each of them. Simultaneously.

  Unfortunately, this doesn’t work so well unless you do it manually. It also takes a certain amount of instinct. But, if you have the time, and you have the talent, it’s a workable strategy. Then...if you start finding elements that match between individuals, you focus in on those elements and use them to narrow how and what you look for in the others. After the first ten or so – ideally – you’ll wind up with a streamlined process that gets you what you need without wasting too much excess time.

  Ideally.

  Yes. Ideally. There is, admittedly, a decent amount of room for utter and complete failure in this strategy. If any of the people in your sample group are too careful about the information they let out into the world? That’s a problem. If your sample group, just as a matter of idiosyncrasy, differ too radically from one another in terms of how they engage with the world? Then that’s another.

  Of course, you can always try to mitigate the first problem by being smarter than them and finding information on them that they didn’t know was available to find. You can often avoid the second problem entirely by making sure your sample group is...well...more of less homogenous. If you have people of similar ages, of a common ethnicity and nationality, who work in the same basic professional area...then it’s far more likely that this strategy will turn up something useful. As Darren would say: ‘The more they have in common to start with, the more likely they are to have covered the same ground’.

  Once you have your sample sorted out, then you have a baseline. A methodology for how you evaluate the rest. But, like I said, there is always a reasonable chance it’ll all turn to garbled mush, and lead nowhere. If that’s the case, you just have to start twining together any common threads you can find, and hope you eventually have enough rope to pull yourself back to the right track.

  Thankfully, I didn’t have to do that. It didn’t take too long for my system to start gently nudging me in the right direction. Unfortunately...it was a direction I really didn’t want to go in. I felt myself slipping, tripping, stumbling, and eventually, falling – flat-faced and pissed off – into, by necessity, using a simple, all-too-familiar definition of ‘average’ that worked disturbingly well across the board. It went something like: ‘Those who don’t identify themselves as exceptional’.

  I didn’t want it. I didn’t want to touch it with somebody else’s bargepole. But, see...that’s the difference between a journalist and, really, most other kinds of writers: fiction or non. We aren’t meant to choose the reality we write about. So I did what I was meant to do. What my instincts were telling me to do. I tried to look at what was in front of me from the perspective of the kind of person who might have listed ‘Atlas Shrugged’ among their top ten favourite books.

  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 Britain...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...the 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 yes. 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’.