Arms Race

by Nic Low

  But if there’s no war, what the hell are you spending the money on?

  Billions on the computer systems. Billions on enough real drones to make it plausible.

  And the rest?

  Profit.

  There were whistles and claps from the floor.

  Are you fucking serious? Alex said. You must have stolen a trillion dollars.

  Hurtz took off her glasses in a decisive gesture Alex recognised from TV. Don’t be naïve, Hurtz said. War’s a business, same as any other. We deliver it for cheap, the profits are ours to spend. Besides, what’s a few air-freighted lobsters when we’ve saved millions of lives?

  Alex felt a surge of rage. You haven’t saved lives, she said. It’s not real. There are no armies and no fighting. It’s fraud, on the most outrageous scale.

  Hurtz gave a delighted hoot. No armies and no fighting? she said, turning to the crowd. What do we call that?

  Peace! they howled.

  Peace? Alex cried. You—

  We’re not the only ones, Hurtz said. You should watch this year’s Nobel Prize announcements.

  Peace, Alex started again, is not—

  Listen to me, Hurtz said, her voice swelling to fill the room. After the Cold War, Fukuyama said history had ended. He was wrong. The conflicts that drive history forward still happen, and they happen for us, and because of us, but not to us. History hasn’t ended. It’s been outsourced.

  But—

  Think of all the proxy wars. All the tech we’ve built to safely fight war at arm’s length—air strikes, stealth bombers, cruise missiles. And now we have drones. Hallelujah! We can fight full-scale wars without a single soldier getting out of bed. All we’re doing here is taking the next logical step. We’ve outsourced warfare, in its entirety, to computers.

  The assembled staffers, arms dealers and high-ranking officers were quiet now, standing with their faces lifted to Hurtz. Even the cohort of military police had stopped at the foot of the stage to listen.

  Let me ask you a question, Hurtz said. What difference did your famous meltdown make? How many pilots now work from home because of you? How many lives have you saved?

  When my film’s done—

  Your film? What good is a film, against this? Hurtz said, sweeping a hand around the enormous militarised nightclub. Against the fact that war’s in our blood? The reason people like you fail is because you waste your time asking: how do we eliminate war? The real question is: what kind of war is closest to peace?

  Alex turned from the general and crossed to the far side of the stage, trying to clear her head.

  There are many types of war, Hurtz continued. And we have the power to choose. How about if this war was physically real? Drone versus drone: would you prefer that? Thousands of lethally armed robots engaged in the annihilation of this country, its environment and people? Costs far beyond the trillion spent so far. Mongolians dead on the ground, right where we stand. Would that make you happy? Would it bring us closer to peace?

  Or maybe you’d like us to go back to the old, asymmetrical warfare. Drone versus human: massive lethal force deployed on mere suspicion. Signature strikes on weddings and funerals? Wrong time, wrong place, wrong colour? No? Then let’s go further back. We could just have a traditional war. Human versus human: millions sent to the slaughter, millions caught in the crossfire. Cities razed. Unmarked mass graves. How about that?

  No? But why stop there? Let’s all just meet in a paddock and slaughter each other with sharpened sticks. Or our bare hands. You and me. Right now. Let’s scratch and kick and tear each other to bloodied pieces, right here on this stage. Because that’s what war was—before it was privatised. Is that what you want? Is that your idea of peace?

  Alex turned back to face the general. She’d just worked out how her film would end. She removed her steel helmet, felt its weight in her hand. She felt calm; peaceful, even.

  Let me ask you again, Hurtz was saying. In your heart, would you prefer this war was real? Or will you accept our war, and so accept peace? You know this is the better path. Not one person injured. Not one person killed. Say it with me. Us, Them, Civilians—

  Us, Them, Civilians, the crowd chanted. Zero, Zero, Zero.

  Us, Them, Civilians, Alex said. One, Zero, Zero.

  One, Zero, Zero? Hurtz said, frowning.

  Sorry, Alex said, crossing the stage. I never was any good at math.

  FACEBOOK REDUX

  MICHAEL SHOWERS and shaves, then snaps a few self-portraits in the mirror. He lifts his phone high, tilts his head and pouts. Click.

  He’s a substantial man, with ruddy jowls, a small, pleasant mouth and cheerful eyes. At sixty-seven his head is a gleaming dome. Most of his male friends are doing that ridiculous neo-combover thing: a few last pathetic hairs brushed down over one eye, emo-style. He prefers total baldness—chemo-style. Click.

  Michael stands back and takes a coy full-length shot, half turned to hide his cock. He’s in good shape these days. He used to have to watch his weight, with all the dinner parties and long lunches, the breakfasts in bed with Margot. Click.

  His smile is captured mid-collapse. He deletes the shot. These days he mostly steams a few vegetables. He really has lost a lot of weight. He thinks of it as a small, positive side effect of his wife’s death.

  In the kitchen there’s no sign of Sophie. It’s half seven, and she has classes at eight. While Michael waits for coffee, morning images from friends blink up in his retina overlay. He’s intrigued, and mildly annoyed, that the system keeps choosing sequences from women his age. There’s more from Bernadette. Her dyed black hair is glossy and tousled, and she holds one hand across her breasts. She looks wonderful at seventy, though the effect hasn’t been the same since her mastectomy.

  These days, he thinks, we’re all a bit maimed.

  There’s a knock at the front door. Michael blinks. Odd—nothing registers in his overlay. He hears Sophie’s bedroom door open, then the shower. He carries his coffee down the hall and opens the door.

  He can’t see anyone there; just a jogger across the street, kids ambling off to school, two gaunt shanty-dwellers having their morning bucket bath on the footpath. Each of them appears in his overlay as a faint swarm of data, visible, available.

  Morning!

  It’s Sophie’s friend Eloise, standing on the bottom step. He stares. She’s wearing an emerald headscarf that surrounds her face like a cowl. Is Sophie ready? she asks.

  Surprise makes Michael abrupt. No, he says. What’s with the scarf?

  I’ve taken the vow. Sophie didn’t tell you?

  No. Come in.

  He stands aside and sips his coffee to hide his distaste. He sees more kids wearing the scarves every day. To him, their cloistered faces look like they have something to hide. He wonders what her parents think. It was one of the few things he and Margot had argued about. He agreed with the papers: privacy led to political unrest. Nonsense, Margot had said. They’ve got every right to disappear.

  So you’re just—disconnected? Michael asks Eloise at the kitchen table. He finds it unnerving, talking to someone with zero data presence. It’s like sitt
ing across from a small black hole.

  We can still access everything, Eloise says. We’re just not sending anything out.

  And what brought this on? Is it a religious thing?

  No, it was History of Privacy. You should hear the lectures. People used to just give it up, for free. There was this thing called Facebook, where you—

  Facebook. The word comes to him out of a dream.

  You mean the website? he says.

  Yeah. Have you heard of it?

  I used to use it.

  Eloise sits forward with a kind of excited repulsion. Really? You were one of them? So did you just give away your—everything?

  That’s a personal question, he says. He’s joking, but she blushes anyway.

  Sophie bangs into the kitchen, hair damp from the shower. Are you hassling Lou?

  She’s hassling me, Michael says. About my time on Facebook.

  Sophie looks dismayed. You were on Facebook?

  I was. Your mother, too. We—

  Michael trails off. He’s suddenly wide awake. He had completely forgotten: Margot was on Facebook.

  Two years on, his natural memory of Margot is as frayed as old rope. He has a wealth of digital captures, but he’s exhausting them too. There was one he used to loop, of Margo singing in the shower. He went about his day with the hiss of water and her sweet, off-key high notes ghosting down the hall. Over time it had become background noise: a radio left on in another room.

  But Margot was on Facebook. She would have posted videos and photos, decades ago. It’s like he’s discovered a forgotten chamber of his mind. The thought is exquisite.

  Michael realises Sophie has asked him a question. Sorry? he says.

  You do own your data, don’t you?

  Absolutely not, he says. Everything’s out in the open. Why lock yourself away?

  Eloise smiles at Sophie. PP, she murmurs. Sophie looks embarrassed.

  What’s that? Michael says.

  You’re PP, Eloise says. Post Privacy. We call it Publicly Promiscuous.

  He laughs. The wall clock chimes eight.

  Merde, Sophie says. We’re late.

  They’re halfway down the hall when the thought strikes him.

  Hey, girls, he calls. If I’m PP, what are you?

  PPP, Eloise says. She flashes a small gold ring over her shoulder. Post Post Privacy. We’re saving our data for someone special.

  Michael has no appointments in the morning. He calls his secretary. With your permission, he says, I’d like to engage in a little senile leisure time.

  He sits at the desk in his study and thinks about Facebook. His retina and cortex are hardwired, like everyone else on his income, and the results come up in his overlay. There’s a wealth of historical analysis and old news items. Then he finds what he’s looking for. In a grey zone of southern Russia’s deep web, buried in the sediment of an archival server, is a copy of the Facebook data. A fossilised social network.

  He’s not expecting much when his system attempts to connect, but a moment later, there it is: the homepage. It’s surprisingly familiar, right down to the precise shade of blue. At the top is a link: Recover your profile.

  Not bloody likely, he says aloud. It’s been forty-odd years. But he follows the link, skips the privacy statement and fills in a form. His overlay shows ancient code routines waking from sleep on the host server. Obsolete analytics grasp at new filaments of data. There’s another procedure too, shimmering just below the intelligible horizon, that his own system does not recognise.

  While he waits, Michael crosses to the window. Another mainland family is building a tarpaulin shanty on the nature strip. The young father waves; he’s not too badly burned. Michael would have been about that age when social media took over his life. Twenty-three? Twenty-three and full of love, and full of himself. He remembers Margot teasing him about wasting his life self-promoting on Facebook. So much so that he deleted the thing…Shit. They both did. It felt like a spiritual breakthrough at the time. They deleted their profiles, went to Thailand, got married, got on with their lives, and now she’s dead.

  Michael’s in the kitchen, trying to summon enthusiasm for work, when it blinks up in his overlay. Profile reactivated. Welcome back.

  His profile picture stares at him across the decades. His head is shaved, cocked to one side, lit with an insolent grin. It’s eerily similar to the picture he snapped this morning. He runs a hand over the wearied flesh of his face. What skin—what a pup!

  Beneath his photo is a random-seeming list of things he’d claimed to like. Cormac McCarthy. Someone called Seamus Heaney. The Wire. It seems so archaic—that you would tell a system what you liked, rather than trusting it to tell you. There is an invitation to something called a Permablitzkrieg, and one to a Climate Action Rally, back when they thought they stood a chance. He didn’t want to think about it then, and he doesn’t want to think about it now. He scrolls down.

  His heart lurches. There’s something from Margot.

  It’s a photo, too small to properly make out, but she looks to be pulling a face. Below, it says: This content has been removed by the user.

  Michael clicks through to her profile. That same line is repeated, time and again. He clicks through messages, events and comments, drumming his fingers in irritation. The same fuzzy avatar makes the same taunting declaration. It’s as if Margot removed herself to spite him.

  He scrolls through photos, hoping to glimpse her in other people’s shots, and before long he’s distracted. Long-dead friends beam their vitality through the years. They’re in and out of clubs, crammed in the back of cars, camped among valleys of tangled bush. He lingers over a shot of himself diving off the side of a boat at dawn. He is reaching down through the bright and liquid air, an instant before the surface is broken. He can’t find a single person crying, or angry. Everyone seems brand new.

  Halfway down the page, Michael finds a sequence from a woman with an expressive, intelligent mouth and smoky eyes. It only takes a second to remember who she is.

  June-Mee! he says aloud.

  Michael clicks through to her profile. There’s a new entry at the top of the page, exactly the same as his own.

  Profile reactivated. Welcome back.

  Michael gradually becomes conscious of a rattling from the air purifier on the wall. He stretches over and gives it a whack that makes his hand sting. He can’t believe he’s found someone else on the network.

  He loses an hour trawling through old photos. She’s lazing on a beach in Greece, hiking in the Yellow Mountains out past Shanghai. The images stir something in him. Curiosity, and nostalgia.

  They’d met at a party. He’d walked into the crowded bathroom and she was reclined in the bathtub, laughing among the ice and beer, reciting some speech she was studying. Their eyes had met.

  Free at last, she cried. Free at last!

  On a whim, he sends her a message.

  Later, he is propped in bed reading, still carefully on his own side of the bed, when a reply comes through.

  Michael, what a surprise! Are you well?

 
He gives a wriggle of delight and kicks off the sheets. The chatter in his overlay is immediate and positive: eighty-eight per cent of his friends are intrigued. Sophie, studying in her room, sends a WTF. She turns up her music, and it seeps through their shared wall.

  Michael starts each day searching for traces of Margot, and ends up chatting with June-Mee. He finds her quick and funny. It seems she’s the only other living person on Facebook, and he likes the irony: from a billion people down to two. She hints at a simple, affluent life. They both live in the leafy suburbs of Tasmania’s Greater Melbourne, and he gets the feeling she’s recently divorced. He doesn’t ask for details. He mentions Margot’s death and Sophie’s presence, in passing. They talk as if they’re still twenty-one.

  June-Mee recalls a night when they took ecstasy in his bedroom, then cried with laughter through a dinner with scandalised friends. She had a boyfriend who lived interstate. He recalls the sexual tension of their nights out, a gaunt stranger in a club asking if they were lovers. They weren’t—but if he’s honest, he wishes they had been.

  Michael wakes a few days later with a good restlessness in him. He catches Sophie at the breakfast table. Her hair is getting long, and she’s taken to wearing it pulled across her face. She ignores his questions about school. She won’t be drawn on the History of Privacy. He stops trying to sidle up to the conversation.

  I discovered an old friend on Facebook, he says.

  I know, she says. It’s creepy. Don’t you think it’s weird how she just found you?

  I found her. June-Mee is a lovely woman. She makes me feel—

  Just don’t, she says. It’s private.

  It’s not private, he says, amused. I want to share it with you.