by Jesse Karp
“You’re going to have to sleep your cellpatch.” Her voice was barely more than a whisper, but it resounded like a sonic boom in this cold, dark, still place.
“Over my rotting corpse,” Aaron responded without hesitation.
“This place kills live celltech.”
“Don’t worry—you’ve got nothing that could touch my codes.”
“I assure you, we do,” she said simply.
“I don’t believe you.”
She shrugged.
“I didn’t invite you here,” she said. “You came on your own. You can make your own decisions.”
Again, it was Laura who ended the stalemate.
“I’m going in,” she said, stepping forward.
She’d given no sign that she remembered any of this. She was working as she had up to this point on her instincts, which Aaron would have snorted at had those instincts not been on the mark every single step of the way.
“Wait,” he said. “Just wait a second.” He turned to Ms. Hubert. “Who are you?”
“A custodian.”
“What’s on the other side of that door?”
She looked at it, then back at him.
“Not what you want, probably.”
“But,” Laura said, cutting in, “what we need?”
“Probably.”
Laura stepped up to the door without even sparing Aaron another glance.
Though it had no apparatus on its smooth, blank surface, a last cellock activated and the door opened, accompanied by the popping thrum of fluorescent lights coming to life. Illumination cut from the seams of the slightly open doorway, slicing into the gloom of the cellar. The woman swung the door open, nearly blinding Aaron. Laura stepped up and, silhouetted for an instant like a departing soul stepping into a heavenly blaze, crossed the threshold.
Fighting every instinct he had, his stomach queasy and his muscles twitching from the tension of it, he uncelled himself, shutting his tech down to the very last maintenance routine.
The steady hum of electricity that was a constant stimulation to his brain was gone, leaving him feeling naked and alone, more so than he could ever remember, even at the funeral of his father.
Stifling a desperate sound boiling in the pit of his stomach, he walked forward and passed into the light.
From outside, Ms. Hubert shut the two of them in with a whoosh of airtight seals.
The room was small and stark white from the Hoffman tiles that covered every inch of its surface. The tiles created a perfect null to wireless technology and electricity, provided the tile surface was contiguous. Consequent to the null effect, the tiles had to conduct electricity themselves, since no other power sources could function within. It was the largest Hoffman space Aaron had ever seen, though he had heard that the military was trying to construct a room of nearly this size for the president.
The only objects within were a white table and two chairs, most likely laminated in Hoffman coating, too. Aaron looked at Laura, waiting for a sign, some assurance that this was right, that she knew this place. Instead, she stared blankly at the white corners, also, apparently, waiting for a sign.
“Well?” Aaron demanded of her.
She spared him a glance, then pulled out a seat and sat down.
“Sit,” she said.
“Why?”
“So I can’t kick you in the ’nads, which is what I’m about to do.”
He yanked the chair out angrily and put himself in it.
“Was this supposed to accomplish something?” he said acidly. “Was this supposed to—”
“Aaron,” said a voice that must have been using the tiles themselves as the transmission medium. It would have to, since no external wavelength could penetrate them. The voice was also electronically modulated; a perfect, crystalline simulation of a real man. “I was so sorry to hear about your father.”
The greeting jolted Aaron like a lightning bolt. Calling him by name as though this were not their first meeting and probing such a raw nerve—it was a potent strategy on the Librarian’s part. How could someone who addressed you with such intimacy be your enemy?
“How dare you speak of my father,” Aaron lashed out, leaning forward in his seat, channeling his aggression toward the empty space before him.
“I knew your father very well, a long time ago. Better than anyone, if familiarity with the data that describes a person could be considered knowing him.”
“You’re lying.” Aaron’s voice was growing more shrill. He was falling into this meticulously designed trap. But he knew it, he knew, and so he was still better; better than the trap, better than the man who set it. He felt Laura’s hand cover his, the warmth positively shocking in the midst of this cold white place. He shook it away angrily, without regard to what she might be feeling here.
“I worked for your father.” The cool metallic voice echoed from the tiled walls without urgency, without emotion. “I was Intellitech’s archivist, its librarian, from the moment they incorporated. Every dollar spent on every project, every theory behind every line of research, the details of every life that made up the company, passed before me.”
“Why did you hate him so much, then?” Aaron fired out into space, in hopes of wounding the ghost. “Why did you drive him to his own death?” Aaron’s eyes were burning, but he would not cry in front of Laura. He would not.
“I’ll tell you what drove him to his end, if you like,” the voice said with painful detachment. “But you had better be sure you want to know.”
“You think I don’t understand what you’re doing? Stripping me naked, locking me in here where I can’t even see you. Trying to scare me with your portentous warning. I came here to settle accounts with you, and I’m going to do it.”
“Aaron, you’ve come here with a score to settle, I see that, and you’ve dragged this poor girl into your campaign. You’ve brought your anger in here with you, and it colors everything you hear. This is not a trap. I am not your enemy. I’m warning you because I have no cure for the truth. Once I tell it to you, I can’t ever make you unknow it. And I assure you, it will change a great deal more than your view of me. It is going to break the world apart for you, and you’re going to have to piece it together the best you can.”
“My world is already broken,” Aaron said, feeling the burning lines of tears cut down his face. Laura’s hand returned to his, and this time he let it stay. “Do your worst.”
The chamber filled with the feedback of the speakers, an electronic hum that stood in for silence.
“You answer easily,” the voice returned. “But you’re not answering just for you.”
“Tell us,” Laura said, before the voice could address her specifically. Aaron felt her hand grip tighter as she said it. “The truth is why I’m here, too.”
“In 1976,” the voice offered without further delay, “a biologist named Dawkins at Oxford University—”
“I know what memes are,” Aaron cut in angrily. “What’s this got to do with my father?”
“If you want the truth, you’ll have to take it as I give it.” The electronically smoothed tones didn’t chide, didn’t cajole, and it robbed the figure on the other end of some sense of humanity. “What, then, are memes?”
“They’re ideas, units of idea transmission, really,” Aaron said. “It’s theoretical, but supposedly they’re something like viruses, living organisms that transmit from mind to mind instead of body to body, and that’s how ideas grow, how we learn, anything from mathematics to a commercial jingle.” Aaron glanced up at Laura, for presumably he was being forced through this performance for her benefit. But her face had the strangest expression. Because Aaron faltered when it came to the specifics of social cues, he could only guess, but she looked as though she was searching for something, a notion forgotten, a word on the tip of her tongue.
“Yes,” the Librarian confirmed. “Imagine, if you would, what controlling the transmission of memes would amount to for a company whose primary age
nda is profit. Suppose you could control which memes got to people, how powerfully, how often, when. Suppose you could, in essence, control what people thought. Can you think of a greater engine of commerce?”
“Are you saying that Intellitech tried to control what people think?” Aaron said. “What corporation doesn’t? What person doesn’t? Isn’t that what you’re trying to do right now?”
“By controlling what people see and hear, yes. By controlling what’s outside a person’s head, you try to influence what a person thinks. What I’m talking about here is the sacred privacy within a person’s head and a living idea, a parasite that’s born in your mind and controls you from within according to its own agenda.”
“Controlled,” Aaron said dubiously, “by Intellitech. That’s what you’re getting at, right?”
“No.” The false voice echoed through the tiles. “That was what they wanted. But even the youngest child knows you can’t control an idea. They engineered the most contagious, powerful idea they could, and it slipped through their fingers and into their heads, into everybody’s heads. It nearly destroyed all of us. It did destroy some of us. Your father, to name just one.”
The words hung in the room, heavy and inescapable, like the drowning waters of a black ocean.
“What was the idea?” Laura asked, her voice weak. She was fighting to speak from within some kind of internal brain seizure or something. Her face was contorted with effort; her hand had grown cold on Aaron’s.
“It was the most powerful, contagious idea they could find, one that promoted a craving for relief, a relief that Intellitech fancied it could provide; at a cost, naturally. The idea was hopelessness, and, already such a powerful part of us, when it first awoke—first became self-aware—it had already basically won.”
“So how are we still here?” Aaron demanded. “Why my father? Why haven’t we all been incorporated?”
“Hopelessness affects people in different ways, according to their strengths and weaknesses. It got your father where he couldn’t fight it. In truth, I didn’t think anyone could fight it, except by hiding. But I was wrong. A small group of people fought it, and they won.”
“So it’s gone? That’s what you’re saying? This small group of people beat it, and now I can give up my search because the thing that killed my father is gone?”
“Gone?” The Librarian tried the word out. “It enlarged a quality in people that already existed. Just because the cause is destroyed, doesn’t mean the human quality it exploited disappears. Let us say that the disease is gone, but many of the symptoms still remain.”
“How do you know any of this?” Aaron found, as he often did, that when he was defenseless, his best course of action was to challenge, to attack. “Where are you coming up with all this?”
“I don’t function by mere supposition, Aaron. My method is founded on a powerful tool. While still employed by your father, I developed a method of predicting sweeps of human development via seemingly small and unrelated information. An equation made of human interaction. Something you would appreciate, no?”
Aaron offered nothing in return.
“The Global Dynamic is a tool that allows unparalleled insight into human affairs. But like any tool, the hand that wields it determines its use. I tried to prevent this tool from being misused long ago, when I left Intellitech. However, someone eventually got his hands on it.”
The quiet that fell on the room, filled with a sense of the Librarian’s own trepidation, was distinctly uncomfortable.
“And that would be?” Aaron pressed, the ominous pause getting even to him.
“The Old Man.” It echoed off the tiles like a death knell.
“Are you joking?” Aaron spat with dogmatic force. “The Old Man is a bogeyman, a concept used to explain why the world sucks. He’s not real.”
“That’s his power, Aaron,” the voice intoned coolly. “Misdirection, camouflage, invisibility. He manipulates government and corporate powers as though they were chess pieces and the world was his opponent. Imagine how simple it would be to beat an opponent that didn’t even know he was playing. Security is invoked, and it becomes legal to monitor our cell conversations. A law is introduced, and people can’t litigate against corporations anymore. We miss it because a new movie shatters box office records, and we all look the wrong way. When we turn back around, the world has changed.”
Aaron’s hands were balled into fists on the table. His voice was pitched high as he began. “The Old Man is—”
“The Old Man”—the voice took the conversation back smoothly—“has no original name, no date of birth I can find anywhere. It’s impossible to be certain exactly who he is, or was. But I am familiar with references to a young scholar, a disciple of Carl Jung’s teachings, most specifically his theory of the collective unconscious. A very long time ago, this scholar formulated a radical theory of his own about how people’s minds are connected in hidden ways and how, by touching subtle levers, one person can shift the outlook of huge groups. It seems that this scholar made a test run of his theory by creating a movement among the students at a university in Europe. He used it to develop something of a cult and, finally, made his followers into a small political movement. This had a particularly hideous ending. The university folded; the followers were arrested as dissidents. All to test out this theory. The scholar himself was never found. He took his formulation and”—the voice let the statement hang in the electronic hum for an instant—“disappeared. There has never been another trace of him. Unless you believe as I do, that this was the Old Man.”
“You’re suggesting that, what, he weaponized psychoanalysis?” Aaron sneered.
“Aaron, are you familiar with the concept of cake mix?”
“Are you kidding me?” This was simply too much to tolerate. He looked at Laura for support, and, no surprise, she was staring emptily at the blank tiles.
“Cake mix. The flavored powder you buy in the baking aisle. Instant cake. You’ve heard of this?”
“Yes, I’ve heard of it.”
“It was invented in the 1950s, a time-saving innovation for housewives. You poured the powder into a bowl, simply added oil, baked it, and you had a delicious cake ready for your family when they got home. The children loved you more; the husband appreciated your kitchen savvy. A complete failure. No one bought it. It was about to be relegated to the trash heap of failed commerce. But then they consulted a team of psychoanalysts. The housewives, it seemed, felt that they had, in effect, been equated with an appliance. The food they prepared for their families was the manifestation of their love, the meals a contribution to family itself. The psychoanalysts came up with a solution. Do you know what the solution was, Aaron?”
“Thrill me.”
“Add an egg.”
Aaron’s expression went dead in the face of this revelation.
“Add an egg,” the voice repeated. “The company removed the powered egg from the mix, leaving that step for the housewives to take care of. It was about perception. The housewives needed to feel as though they were doing something for their families. All the company had to do was include the direction to add an egg. They sell a great deal of cake mix these days. Commerce won. Our minds were manipulated by misdirection. Simple psychoanalysis, but if that kind of manipulation isn’t a weapon, I don’t know what is.
“The irony”—the Librarian drew the pause out, his reticence suggesting a sense of regret absent from his electronic voice—“is that I used this scholar’s theory of human interconnection myself, in a way. I stripped it of its original intention, employed it as a means of observation and analysis rather than manipulation. That’s how I developed the Global Dynamic algorithm. Because it is not concerned with guiding people, but rather seeing how people are naturally guided by social currents, the Global Dynamic has much wider application as a predictor. Nevertheless, you could say”—again the Librarian’s voice slowed with old resentment—“that the Global Dynamic is a collaboration between the Old Ma
n and myself. Like his original formulation, it’s just another tool to him, just a means to a larger, more effective tool: the human mind.”
“Stop!”
Aaron jolted in his seat. He had, for all intents and purposes, forgotten Laura was there until her scream tore the room in half.
“This is insane,” she said desperately. “It’s madness.”
“Yes,” the voice returned, unmoved. “It is madness. And it’s going to get worse. The Old Man subscribes to the ultimate corporate philosophy: total consolidation under one executive power. Through the Global Dynamic, he’s come to know just how interconnected everything is. He will use that, manipulate it, finesse it with the most effective tool he can find, and he will make it happen. These people who stopped the Idea before, Remak in particular, he wants them because he believes they have access to such a tool.”
Aaron wanted, needed, his cellpatch back, craved the blanket of the dataflow so much that it made his stomach cramp. He looked at Laura and saw a blank face staring into the middle distance of white.
“Well, then . . .” Aaron fought to order the information properly in his head, to design the proper mathematical proof to solve this. “What you need to do is find the people who beat the Idea before. You need to find them.”
“Yes, Aaron,” the electronic voice agreed. “That’s why I’ve told you all of this. That’s why you were even let down here in the first place. You already have found one of those people. She’s sitting right next to you.”
The Negotiation
WHEN ROSE WAS SIX YEARS old, she was in her cousin’s room and spotted a small statuette of a princess sitting on the windowsill. With the light beaming through it, it seemed cut from pure crystal, though when she took it up in her nervous fingers, it proved to be as light as the cheap plastic it was actually molded from. Chipped and dirty close up, it lost none of its luster or wonder in her young eyes, and she slipped it into her pocket before her cousin came back into the room. Her cousin, however, spotted the missing item immediately and accused Rose of the theft. Hauled out and berated loudly by her uncle while her own parents looked on, Rose handed the toy back and apologized through embarrassed tears. Seeing the object come out of her pocket, her uncle swept her off her feet and threw her down onto his knees so hard, she gasped for her lost breath. He tugged her pants from her bottom violently enough to tear the zipper apart. He spanked her with bitter, stinging strikes that went on and on. Through tear-blurred eyes, she watched her parents standing across the room, staring ineffectually at the door, the window, her uncle—anywhere but back at their daughter. Her act had made her so hideous, they couldn’t even look at her. At home that night, her father sent his wife from the room and grabbed Rose by the wrist, screaming at her for embarrassing them like that. His rage was so great, his grip so tight, Rose went to bed with a fractured wrist.
