a rational man

by J S Hollis

  I’m not sorry for killing you. I’m sorry I had to, and I still don’t know what else I should have done. I’m sorry your love for me sucked the life out of you. I’m sorry you were born with humanity but I’m grateful for it too. I’m sorry my answer was to always try to be my idea of a better man. I’m sorry I voted for W. I’m sorry I never made the world a better place. I’m sorry I lied to you when I said I would make it better. I’m sorry I fear death. I’m sorry that the pain of missing you, of feeling constantly starved, is bearable. I’m sorry I had to write this letter to myself.

  Love,

  Cecil

  Pentonville Prison, 2 March 2062

  Samyukta Mullangi died today. Collapsed. Was and then was not. Switched off. The spinning of the earth relevant to irrelevant in the gap of a breath. Not around to see the present, the future or if her name will be taught to children or fade like a shooting star. She could be a Gutenberg or forgotten like the inventor of the internet. Bets are on the latter.

  The media have been speaking about Mullangi’s “significance”. She changed humanity. Properly changed it. She smashed down every conceivable wall except our own skins. I can’t help thinking how little it matters to her lifeless body. Wrenched out of existence when moments before she had been walking around her house in perfect health, or so her medical data suggested. It ended with farce. Her household robodoc jabbing the defibrillator into her chest. “A sudden cardiac arrest,” the doctors said. As a religious woman, she would have appreciated the divine intervention. All the technology on earth couldn’t see her death coming.

  Of course, as soon as she died the comments started. Alongside plans to have a global day of mourning, the Brandeists described her “as worse than Hitler and Putin’s love child”. These activists are blind to the facts. Whatever one’s feelings on privacy, Mullangi was a decent woman. The figures speak for themselves. No wars since the mid thirties and only a smattering of crimes. Not great for policemen or soldiers like Bison but hardly the act of tyrannical dictator offspring. More importantly, on the one occasion I met Mullangi she made me laugh.

  I met Mullangi at a conference on TTT in Bangalore. I was there in my ministerial capacity and she was the keynote speaker. She was an erudite critic of the technology but she became ruffled during the Q&A session. Audience members kept asking her “is your opposition to TTT really an attempt to preserve the relevance of W?” and “isn’t it convenient that your stance against TTT means that W will continue to be the most important technological innovation this century?”

  She denied the accusations again and again but eventually she raised her voice slightly and lost the crowd’s trust. I leant her some support after the Q&A. “Crowds are always like that,” I said, “but if all they have is attacks on your reputation, you must have good arguments.”

  She said, and I remember this well, “Mr Stanhope, I must thank you for your work on textiles. I have literally no idea how I survived before my first Fibrelous trousers.” I assumed she was just being polite and that she was reading off her Eyescreens but when I checked back later, I discovered she wasn’t even wearing them.

  “Thank you,” I replied, “and thank you for coming today. If I were you, I would have invented W and then put my feet up. What spurs you on?”

  She moved very close to me and, as she was fifty centimetres shorter, the angle of our conversation became distorted, secretive. “Justice is my drug,” she whispered. “I love how W reduced many powerful men to shadows.” She watched my face drop into seriousness and then began to laugh, like a child gurgling. “I had you there,” she said, and I laughed along with her, unsure why we were laughing.

  Most of the obituaries haven’t captured her character. They swing between her catastrophic political career and chronologies of her technical successes, such as the selfperpetuating nanocameras and microphones, and the use of trapped light waves to provide almost infinite information storage.

  * * *

  Born in Bangalore in 2001, Sam Mullangi spearheaded the creation and proliferation of W: the democratic surveillance system that by recording every act and making it public to everyone has changed each life on our planet. The launch of W was arguably the most significant invention in the history of humankind. It has since redefined our understanding of what makes a “civilisation”.

  The only relevant points about Mullangi are those that enlighten her single minded pursuit of W. She attributed the idea to one moment: a solitary event at Harvard that triggered an epiphany.

  “I was on a date with a notable Harvard professor of behavioural psychology who shall remain nameless,” she said. “The date was going well and we were back at his apartment for what he undoubtedly imagined would be some fooling around. I went over to the professor’s pad to put on some music. ABBA, I believe. After I pressed play, I saw an image of me. I clicked onto it and there was a video of a conversation I’d had with my friend Amelia earlier that day about Smith’s ‘invisible hand’. We had been in the library. I remember she had drawn a rather crass cartoon of a hand pushing money towards some plutocrats and then creeping up a skirt. My finger was pointed at the hand and you could hear me say ‘that’s a visible hand’.

  “The professor heard the clip playing and ran over. His face was translucent and it muttered unsatisfactorily, ‘It’s not what it looks like.’ I found his comment odd. I had no idea what it looked like. But I felt a surge of power in the presence of this suddenly defenceless professor. I stood up over him and before I began to threaten him, he told me that the Harvard professors had developed a detailed surveillance system to track their students’ behaviour. They had used it for years and not just for academic purposes.

  “My first thought was not: ‘Get the professors fired. Sue them for damages.’ I just thought it was incredibly unfair. If they could look at me, why couldn’t I look at them?

  “We already assumed we were being constantly watched and evaluated. By search engines, governments and friends. I suppose it didn’t surprise me that the professors were in on it too. Or at least, it didn’t surprise me much. I just thought we should all be in on the action and, the more I thought about it, I realised how revolutionary that idea was. My own desire for privacy was driven by a fear of power. Without that fear, I didn’t need it.”

  This reaction, simple as it may have been, was critical. From there, Mullangi began to seek the right for transparency. Perhaps, given her past, her reaction was not surprising. While at high school, Mullangi designed a social network called Esoteris that could only be used by her friends and that encrypted all their messages. After some time, other children in her year began to complain to their parents that she was unfairly controlling access to Esoteris. Eventually the school asked her to make it open to all the children in her year or close it. She closed it.

  That was before she was taken on her way back from school and raped. Three men were later convicted. During the trial, Mullangi heard the lawyers read out the messages the rapists had sent to each other when planning the rape.

  These events shaped Mullangi’s reaction when she heard the professor’s confession. She saw that the true problem of surveillance was unfairness rather than its impact on our freedoms of speech and privacy. She saw that when people complained about CCTV and mass data collection, they were not truly concerned about having their lives open to the public. They disliked the fact that someone could watch them but that they couldn’t watch back. Mullangi saw that allowing people to watch back didn’t undermine the effectiveness of surveillance, rather it enhanced it. She saw that people would accept having their whole lives in public in exchange for justice. She believed actions should always have consequences and managed to sell that idea. She saw that people felt they had nothing to hide and everything to discover. She invented a new freedom: the freedom of vision.

  Determined to give everyone the power to watch each other, Mullangi left Harvard and with her friend Fr
eddie Spitzer set up an NGO called “Eyeden” to develop a democratised surveillance system. Eyeden’s tagline was: “Making the private public.” A decade later they had produced the technology, which they marketed as the “International Democratic Surveillance System” or “W” for short.

  With the technology developed, Mullangi still needed international support for her revolutionary product. All governments were worried about the implications of W for defence and for confidentiality in law and in healthcare. There were also concerns about the access W would give to perverts. Mullangi fought these perceptions. Confidentiality wasn’t needed because discrimination wasn’t possible. Defence was unnecessary because attacks could be snuffed out as soon as they were considered. Paedophiles might be able to watch but they could never act on their desires again. Or so she said. She struggled to gain traction with governments but the public began to listen.

  Context helped. During the twenties, immigration flows accelerated, competition for jobs ramped up, online communities led to the fragmentation of traditional social relations and terrorists attacks occurred almost daily. In most developed countries, there were attacks from a potpourri of groups: the European Defence League, AQ, Israeli Independence International, the Crusaders, and the Reds, to name a few. People lived in perpetual fear.

  The real turning point came with the Bangalore experiment. Mullangi convinced Bangalore, her home city, to be W’s biggest guinea pig. After three months, the community had adjusted to the discomforts of being watched and the community benefits had begun to shine through. Women were particularly rapturous. They didn’t mind the odd peek if the flipside was safety and security. The public pressure for W accelerated.

  Governments remained suspicious though. Then came Mullangi’s second masterstroke. She took a radical and dangerous step. She sanctioned the uncontrolled release of the W nanocameras. They quickly multiplied and covered the world. She threatened to give the information streaming in to one or two governments unless they all came to an agreement. Faced by this ultimate knowledge weapon, the governments conceded to W’s use on two conditions: their populations had to agree and there had to be time for “certain preparatory activities” (i.e. the destruction of incriminating information).

  The populations overwhelmingly agreed to W. It seemed a small price to pay. No privacy meant no crime, no war, no unfairness.

  Would all this have happened if another woman had been dating the behavioural psychology professor? Was W inevitable? I like to think not. I like to think it was anticultural. A sudden zigzag in human development that only occurred due to a specific intersection of person, place and time.

  Mullangi was undoubtedly a technical and philosophical genius. W hasn’t created a perfect world, and for some, it has made life a daily horror. But from the perspective of the twenties, it is a far better place.

  * * *

  I would love to have an idea like W. I want people to say I pushed humanity on a little. That is why I have targeted inequality. The type of inequality that robs the majority of people of a meaningful life. W allows us to see the suffering but the causes of inequality remain hidden and complex. If anything, W reinforces the morality of the wealth gap because no one appears to be doing “wrong”. Corruption has gone. Blatantly exploitative business practices have passed. But the deep structural unfairness of capitalism remains and the pursuit of wealth as an end in itself remains untarnished. The time has come to say “enough is enough”.

  * * *

  but would S know when he knew all there was to know? he had thought his investigation would end after kingsley was interviewed.

  * * *

  “Why do you think your son killed his wife?”

  “Thank you for your question but I am not sure how I am meant to know the answer to it.”

  “Sorry, Mr Stanhope. I was unclear. We are asking for your opinion. Do you have a view on why your son killed his wife?”

  “I’m very sorry. I don’t.”

  “You don’t have any view at all?”

  “No.”

  “How come you don’t have a view?”

  “Because I don’t like thinking about things for which I can’t prove the answer.”

  “About anything?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are a religious man, Mr Stanhope?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you prove there is a God?”

  “No.”

  “Doesn’t that mean you are thinking about something for which you can’t prove the answer?”

  “I don’t think about it.”

  “What don’t you think about?”

  “God.”

  * * *

  but even the finality of nonsense faded as the pictures and sounds beamed into millions of eyes and ears. those eyes and ears turned kingsleys nothing answers into something answers. nothing was another veil. it wasnt transparent, like S expected nothing to be. the audience wondered what kingsley was hiding. he must have an opinion. did he know something about cecil? was cecil raped, touched up, witness to a murder, a child killer or beaten to within an inch of his life? had kingsley seen some tic or pattern he refused to announce? or maybe he really didnt have an opinion. what type of human doesnt have an opinion of his own son? an inhuman. the type of inhuman who brings up a murderer perhaps. a religious scientist. a schizophrenic of sorts. the type of man who can be two different people at once. wasnt that just like cecil? a man who could dedicate much of his life towards the benefit of others and then slit his wifes throat. and like that, kingsley was transformed by the audiences search for meaning.

  a picture steals a soul and a soul steals a picture.

  S had been waiting for the viewing figures to drop but after the kingsley interview they soared. they grew in negative correlation with Ss apathy. the difference was explicable. most of the audience limited themselves to the weekly half hour show and avoided the dull mass of data. and the show developed more methodically than Ss own investigations. but what about those people who spent more time on the quest than S did?

  S had fantasies of screaming at his viewers. “stop watching and do something more important with your lives,” he yelled. “help with the tower bridge investigation. campaign for nuclear disarmament. join the cashkillers.”

  he imagined his ultimate revenge. a show about the people watching. he could see them all already. that wasnt enough. he wanted to pick their lives apart to understand their motivation for watching a reasonable man? but would he discover that they were only interested in watching him lose his mind? were they that cruel? and yet S was guilty too. more guilty than the viewers. he wasnt another person watching the story unfold. he was telling it. nudging it along.

  Ss head screamed out into the darkness like a silent movie actress. maybe he wasnt circling around the truth like a satellite. maybe he was rushing away from it like the edge of the universe from the source of the big bang. he could see now that the evidence was never enough and there was never enough evidence. so the question returned again. why did he keep looking for the answer? why look for answers to questions you know there are no answers to? especially if you regret every second you spend thinking and talking about it. when it gives you headaches and makes you feel so completely alone that you forget you have ever spoken to or touched another person. why hurt oneself for no reason at all?

  S said he would pursue the truth until the programme ended. but he wasnt persisting out of duty alone. he wanted to care about his parents and to be seen to care about his parents. his reflection on the murder was inescapable and regretting it was pointless. and now there were people out there, who he had never met, who hated him, as the child of a murderer, as a failure and for hundreds of other reasons, including his biological birth. and there were people out there who loved him for his persistence, his strength in the face of trauma and for his biological birth. who was right about him? what did
he actually want to do? be normal and irrelevant. be abnormal and famous. be both.

  was he being selfish by raking up cecils past for his own satisfaction? or was he an altruist bending to the will of the audience? he thought he wanted people to like him. but he wanted them to like him for the right reasons. he couldnt be plain old S because his past was his past and he couldnt be a new person because he hated putting on a mask. if he had known what was going to happen he would never have tried to work any of this out.

  but couldnt he choose the truth he wanted? couldnt he choose to believe that cecil killed clara because she wanted out? or was the problem that he didnt like any of the options because they couldnt give him his mother back?

  this confusion led to the headaches and the headaches led to the confusion. they burned the back of his forehead. he saw flashes and screwed up his eyes. he had kept them quiet. his private fire. his health data said there was nothing wrong with him. if he started reporting the headaches, people would ask questions about his mental health. he didnt want that.

  the suspicions would come soon though. the eye screwing and temple massages were giving him away. ariadne had told him to take a break. donatella was calling him more often. S couldnt go on hoping that writing could protect him or that cecils story would end itself. he had to end it.

  RATIONALITY

  entry 16

  thoughts

  S heard the chants before he saw the prison through the car window.