The Outer Harbour

by Wayde Compton

  Detail from Expropriatus by Suhaima Sylvester Martin

  From “File # OS-25-4-0-0-1; File Title: Jane Doe 39’s blue notepad; Special Committee Access: Pending Review”

  IT WAS LIKE waking up. Then it was a matter of being alone among them.

  No touching, no embracing.

  Merely walking.

  She finds the insurgent sitting on the beach, looking across the green or the blue or the grey or the black water.

  They sit there together for a few days, watching the sun rise and overtake them and set. They watch the lights of the buildings over there blanket the shape of the land at night, and the mist rise off the water in the morning. The wind blows through them.

  They know the language of encounter. The words have been waiting for them in the air.

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  Radio Free Northwest

  Title: “Death in Detention”

  Producer: Ruben Jang

  Host: Lina Bern

  Transcript: Kaz Lovric-Nygaard

  LB: Welcome to Radio Free Northwest. I’m Lina Bern, and for the next hour I’ll be talking to Peter Hammond, a journalist with Unsaid Media, who has been covering the recent death of a young girl earlier this week at the controversial Pauline Johnson Island Special Detention Facility. While hospital officials say she died of complications related to asthma, the girl’s death has prompted renewed criticism of the government’s handling of the ICDP migrants and the policy known as the Burrard Inlet Solution. Stay with us as we discuss the potential repercussions of this tragedy and its implications for the future of the ICDP migrants and for immigration policy in Canada today.

  [Theme music; fade out]

  LB: Welcome, Peter.

  PH: Thanks for having me.

  LB: Before we get into a discussion about the death of this young girl, perhaps you can provide us with some of the background on Pauline Johnson Island and the Special Detention Facility there. Have there been any recent developments that may have led up to this tragedy?

  PH: Well, that’s hard to say. Since the creation of the facility, access to the island has been severely restricted to journalists—basically, limited to only a few officially planned junkets. I’ve been on two of these, most recently at the end of last year. How much we can take these tours at face-value is uncertain, but I’ll tell you what I’ve seen. For starters, the conversion of the residential tower into detention housing is barely perceptible. It’s only really when you enter the front door that you realize that you are in a prison, of sorts. That is, the lobby has been converted into a security centre, with closed-circuit monitoring, a guard posting, and so forth. But inside, they don’t actually lock down the migrants. The circumstances of ICDP render most ordinary security measures pretty much moot.

  LB: Can you talk about that a little bit? When you were there, did you actually witness the phenomenon?

  PH: No, not directly. But on my last visit, while I was there, some of the officers were returning from a patrol across the island having just picked up someone who had gone missing from the building.

  LB: So they had blinked out?

  PH: Yes.

  LB: And the guards were returning them to the facility? Were the migrants resisting at all?

  PH: No, not at all. We still don’t seem to know for sure whether or not the displacement is a deliberate act or something that just happens—or perhaps sometimes one and sometimes the other. But it wasn’t, it seemed to me, treated as an escape attempt or any such thing. As far as I saw, they were simply rounded up and returned to the building and that was that. What I do know is that ICDP is being studied on the island, at the facility. They are working on these exact questions.

  LB: When you say “they”—?

  PH: The presence of teams of researchers on the island is definitely thick. In fact, it seemed to me that there were more scientists than guards, though we were not allowed to talk to them. I was curious myself to know if all of the scientific observers and researchers there were Canadian or if there were teams from other countries as well.

  LB: Americans, you mean?

  PH: Yes, from the States. I suspect so.

  LB: Were the scientific teams running experiments on the migrants?

  PH: I really can’t say what they are doing. If so, I didn’t see anything of that sort. But as I said, we were brought in there very deliberately on a particular day, so I have no way of knowing if anything I saw was business as usual. All I can really tell you about is the condition of the detention centre and how things appeared when we were there.

  LB: And what were your observations in that regard?

  PH: Well, the building itself is in good condition and the migrants that I met seemed to be healthy. As I was saying, there’s no real point locking them in, so the inmates appear to have the free run of the building. There’s a yard they are allowed access to, but in shifts. It’s fenced in, but of course, due to the nature of ICDP, I got the sense it was routine to find migrants outside and on other parts of the island—hence the patrols. I was even told that on more than one occasion the entire group of migrants disappeared and reappeared outside the walls of the facility, and had to be escorted back in.

  LB: Astonishing.

  PH: Indeed. As you know, it’s “Individual and Collective Displacement Phenomenon,” so while these folks mostly seem to blink-out singly, they sometimes do so as a group, just as when they were first found on the Ocean Star.

  LB: Right. Now, during their arrival two years ago, their displacement included, somehow, the ship they were on. The Ocean Star itself, with the migrants on board, blinked, as you say, in and out of place, as was captured on film and witnessed by many. Does it seem possible or likely that they might do the same with the building they are currently housed in? That is to say, might it be possible that they could somehow cause the building itself to move through space?

  PH: I think that’s one of the questions the research teams must be concerned about. The short answer is that I’m pretty sure they just don’t know. This whole experience has been so improbable and baffling that it seems ridiculous to even guess at what the bounds of possibility are anymore. But, no, when they blink collectively, so far at least, it seems only to be in a kind of herding effect, for lack of a better term. They disappear from their various units and appear all together twenty metres or so beyond the walls of the building, standing in a crowd.

  LB: Has there been any protest from the migrants on the island?

  PH: I haven’t heard of any sort of violence or disobedience. The original thinking behind the use of Pauline Johnson Island as a detention site seems to have been basically effective. As you’ll recall, when the migrants were first apprehended, they were detained at the Burnaby Correctional Facility, but the ICDP effect meant that migrants kept disappearing and reappearing outside the prison. Because the migrants had been individually blinking in and out from the moment they landed, at what appeared to be random times and distances, a proper head count was impossible, so it’s never been clear how many migrants initially arrived, and how many may in fact be at large. When the public understood that the migrants were uncontainable at the Burnaby Facility, well, that’s when we got a bit of hysteria. There was a lot of pressure on the government to make sure they were locked down and not disappearing, one by one, into the general population. The logic behind the use of PJI is that the migrants never seemed to blink onto the ocean, even when the ship they were found on was at sea. When they disappear, they always seem to reappear on dry land, and never really at a greater distance than a kilometre or thereabouts. So detention on an island was considered the most viable way of securing them in one spot. And after the Global Acquisitions Crisis, the tower block on PJI had fallen into complete disuse, so the federal government bought the property and repurposed it. The Prime Minister and the coalition pushed the legislation through parliament. That’s the short course on Bill C-77. Then Dave Schoen dubbed
it “the Burrard Inlet Solution,” and that name stuck.

  LB: Right. And you believe it has so far been effective? No migrant has been able to disappear off the island?

  PH: Well, that’s what we’re told. I can’t be sure of it, but it does seem like the number of migrants on both of my own visits has been about the same.

  LB: Do you have any thoughts on how long the migrants are likely to be detained there?

  PH: Your guess is as good as mine. The other problem, of course, is that no one has yet determined the country of origin of the migrants, and it hasn’t been possible to communicate with them in any substantial way. Their language has not been identified. I was told also that some of the researchers working there are in fact linguists trying to break this barrier. The language they speak is nothing anyone else seems to have heard before; nothing they had with them can be used to conclusively place their origins—no identification papers or anything like that was found on anyone in the entire group. Even if there was a plan to deport them, where would that be to? It’s a stalemate.

  LB: Now, the death of this girl—I’m sorry, but do we know her name? Reports say that it is unknown.

  PH: They have given the migrants numbers until names can be ascertained. To be honest, I can’t bring myself to use a number to speak of her.

  LB: Understood. Tell us what you know about the night leading up to her death.

  PH: The official report is that the girl had asthma, which was known previously. She had been treated for it.

  LB: There is a medical staff at the facility?

  PH: Yes.

  LB: Go on.

  PH: Well, at 2:47 a.m. on the morning of May 18th, the girl’s parents brought her to the medical station. She was conscious but having serious trouble breathing. Staff treated her, but quickly decided that she needed to be evacuated. A helicopter was called in to take her to Vancouver. It landed on the roof of St. Paul’s Hospital, which has a purpose-built helipad, at 3:18 a.m., and she was pronounced dead shortly thereafter. They say she was six years old.

  LB: So sad.

  PH: Yes, it is.

  LB: Was she the youngest of the migrants?

  PH: No. There are a few other children at the facility, some younger, some older. Also at least one of the incarcerated women is known to be currently pregnant. When they first apprehended the Ocean Star, the girl we’re talking about was four. And apparently she had picked up some English from the guards and researchers. I don’t know what her proficiency would have been like, and how practical it would be for such a young child to help in any way with translation, but I imagine that she must have been of great interest to all involved, being possibly the only English speaker among the group.

  LB: Now some have been critical of the handling of this incident.

  PH: Certainly. The amount of time it took for the girl to receive attention, the isolation of the facility—it’s brought a degree of alarm and has put some pressure on the government to bring this to some kind of resolution.

  LB: Do you think that’s possible? What would a resolution look like?

  PH: It’s very hard to say. The best thing would be for this process to be as transparent as possible. However, the inaccessibility of the island itself makes that difficult. I don’t feel like we really know what’s going on there, or what the long-term plan is. But I will say that I have been there, I have seen these people up close, and can tell you that they are more ordinary than you might expect, given the strangeness of the circumstances. There is no reason to believe that they are fundamentally any different from the rest of us.

  LB: Thank you, Peter. Would you be willing to answer some questions from the public on these issues?

  PH: Sure. I’ll do my best.

  LB: After this short break, we’ll go to the phones. Your calls next!

  THE GIRL AND the insurgent sit beside each other on the sand. The waves attack the beach. On the horizon, the city burns. A scroll of smoke unfolds skyward out of a geometry of high-rises.

  The insurgent remembers seeing a column of ash similarly rise from the centre of the island he now inhabits, remembers when he and his comrades were reconnoitering it, before his death. He is disoriented by the memory, and wonders for a moment where he really is.

  You and me, she says.

  He looks at her and she looks back. Sorrow and fear in her young eyes.

  He offers his hand to her. The girl hesitates, looks down, looks away. Then she shifts a little closer. She finally reaches out and rests her palm in his.

  She gazes at the city skyline. She knows something. It comes into her mind. She says, There’s someone there we need to help.

  Where?

  She lifts her hand from his and points to the smouldering city across the water.

  We can’t.

  We have to. It’s one of us.

  He looks at her, this dark-haired, dark-eyed child. One of who?

  Us, she says. Like you and me.

  He looks back at the city. Haze and helicopters. Sirens and fire.

  We have to help, she repeats. We have to go there.

  It’s so empty here, the two of them alone. He imagines another.

  Okay.

  A small boat is there in the surf, a vessel made of black volcanic glass, chiselled out of their discourse. It will seat three easily. They board it, and the insurgent shoves off with one of its two gleaming oars. Then he slots them into their locks and rows to the smoke.

  From “Experimental Crowd Control Methods and Advances in Perceptual Manipulation” by P.W. Haarman

  “The concern of this report is the viability of a pacification tool—the Multiple Perception Immobilization Device (MPID)—developed in the private sector by the Canadian company Waking Dream Entertainment Services. Waking Dream has crossed over from primarily marketing multimedia ‘live action role-playing’ supplies to providing security solutions for law enforcement and military purposes after being acquired by Enfortech early last year.

  “The basic concept of the MPID was developed by Waking Dream’s founder and CEO, Jamie Langenderbach, whose team pioneered systems of live gaming involving holographic ‘crowd-seeding’—that is, an effect in which a player in the middle of an open space can be made to perceive a human figure standing or walking near him or her, in all appearances to the eye seeming real and three-dimensional. The original scenarios for the project involved fantasy gaming genres.

  “It was, according to Langenderbach, when an early prototype of the MPID was activated during a late-night session, and he noted a janitor’s response to the sudden ‘crowd’ of holograms in the room, that he first appreciated the system’s possible weaponization. Though the holograms are completely immaterial and can be walked through, Langenderbach noticed that the janitor, who did not realize the room was filled only with projections, froze and attempted to move through the ‘crowd’ without touching the figures around him. Langenderbach says that the inspiration to adapt this effect to crowd control was also directly inspired by his experience of witnessing first-hand the Vancouver hockey riot of 2011.

  “The tactical device works in the following manner: the MPID projects holographic images of people into a crowd, causing a perceived doubling or tripling of the crowd density, in turn causing rioting individuals to perceive themselves as surrounded by a far denser crowd than is the actual case. The device initially scans the suspects, making composite holograms by recombining facial features, clothing, etc. so that its seeded projections closely resemble the demographics of the targeted crowd.

  “The beauty of the MPID for crowd control is that it does not intensify the perception of threat to the crowd, and thereby does not cause further instigation of anti-social behaviour. Rather, the effect causes the instinctive immobilization and/ or slowing of subjects, who believe their movements are restricted. By inflating their numbers artificially, the rioters become distracted, slowed, and ultimately vulnerable to other pacification measures. The MPID comes with hologram-cancelling goggl
es that may be worn by enforcement agents and observers, enabling them to intervene unimpeded into a ‘crowd-seeded’ zone in order to arrest or disable suspects.

  “While the MPID has yet to be used in a domestic situation, it has been previewed overseas, though details on those outcomes are currently unavailable.”

  HE PLUNGES THE blades into the water and leans back, his weight levering the boat through the bay. He leans forward, then leans back, then does it again.

  He faces the island they died on, as he moves the boat away from it.

  She sits at the stern, now and then directing him, watching the shore come slowly closer. The city is veiled in smoke and tear gas. As they approach the shore, she sees the figure on the beach.

  Waiting.

  For them.

  The insurgent brings them as close as he can without grounding the hull, then puts up the oars. He turns around and looks.

  The composite is wearing black, has short dark hair unmoved by the wind.

  Is that—? The insurgent is uncertain of what to say—him or her.

  They need us, the girl says. She stands and the boat rocks. She puts out her hand, gesturing. Come, she says. Come with us.

  The composite hesitates. They watch carefully, thinking. Then the composite looks back at the city, turns away from it, steps finally into the water, takes the girl’s hand, boards.