by Ed Hurst
Chapter 4
Jesse impatiently waved away the priority message that hogged the display on his office computer.
The message had been addressed to his birth name and his military rank. The nickname he used among the other members of the council was more like a ritual title, but it was the identity he used for the silent internal traffic of his mind. “Jesse, you have more important things to worry about.”
The priority message was an official notice, an invitation to accept a command post and promotion. Other men would die, and had actually killed, for such an opportunity, but Jesse was already exactly where he wanted to be in military service. More important to him and his real mission in life was the document he had been reading when the message intruded. Scanning quickly, Jesse knew the message was a needless distraction.
What riveted his attention was a different kind of proposal. Some student at a private academy had written a research paper in linguistics, and it had taken the academic community by storm. It was precisely the kind of thing that captured the imagination of men who struggled against needless constraints and saw a chance to make the world a better place.
It was also a serious threat to the power of the council.
From as far back as the earliest records of human government, the one thing men of power needed most was control over communications. More than mere secrecy for their own internal messages, rulers needed the fastest dissemination of their own ideas even while they raised barriers to slow communications of those they ruled, especially the opposition.
The Council had vociferously opposed the policy of imposing a single official language on humanity when the global government began to assert itself. Unfortunately, it was one of their few political losses against those with whom they were forced to share the place at the top of the human pyramid of power. The Tower of Babel was a good thing in the council’s eyes and Nimrod was a fool for not seeing the advantages. So it was only just that in the very land of Nimrod another royalty rose to take his place some centuries later. The council had been actively provoking divisive ethnic agitation ever since the current global government had risen to power.
By stirring up sentimental attachment to a multitude of languages, the council had managed to weaken the grip of their opponents among the plutocrat class, the real rulers behind the façade of government bureaucracy. To their credit, the opposition had wisely pushed through the policy that made it sound as if it would elevate everyone to be multilingual. So the mandate was that while the whole human race was required to speak the common global language with fluency, they were also encouraged to master their own regional native tongues and participate in translating everything both ways. The whole mess made things damnably difficult for the Council as they struggled to assert their divine right to rule the world.
Whoever this writer was, he proposed something even worse. It was so wrong on so many levels.
As a good linguist, the author noted the history of human social change was directly tied to the speed and reach of communication. He had the nerve to lavishly praise the democratization of such communication. While global instant messaging had empowered government, it also had brought a much greater prosperity for all, including government revenues. It was this sort of thing that had recently enticed the bureaucrats in their petty greed to ignore the plutocrats and begin rolling back some of the tight controls government had held for at least the past two generations. The Council had been quite willing to live with less material wealth in favor of plans to eventually reduce the swarming mass of mundanes to some more manageable level.
All of that slipped away when this Brotherhood emerged from the shadows and their ideas of universal human access to subspace networking. There had been simply no reasonable excuse to withhold the manufacturing of cheap AI devices in all sizes and so simple to use with just a small set of gestures and vocal commands. The only glimmer of hope in this sea of darkness for the Council was the inevitable talk of embedding electronic devices in humans. It would be the perfect means to gaining total mastery over them, but only if the Council was the first to grab the secret of how The Brotherhood controlled this inscrutable AI.
No, this writer was firmly against welding humans and electronics, in favor of advancing human individuality and creativity. Damn him! Worst of all, he openly revealed some of the Council’s secrets. Not in the sense of identifying who held the secrets, but in the sense of pointing out how they had maintained their control.
He described how the common global language had been subtly hijacked so that people were confused about the wider moral implications. It wasn’t necessary that everyone hold the same worldview, but that they recognize the utter silliness of fighting about which was best. They were allowing forces unseen to stir up needless partisanship over minor differences that loomed large in the common social consciousness because the language as used restricted a wider awareness.
Then he had to gall to describe how this was actually the intended result of people working behind the scenes. If that weren’t enough, he went on to describe how those hidden manipulators themselves used a wide variety of symbolic terms to cloak their agenda. Thus, they were equipped with a much deeper form of communication with far greater subtlety. They could communicate openly and the public would never catch on, missing the hidden meaning of euphemisms and such.
And it got worse. He began citing examples of such hidden communications, using real historical examples that included far too many incidents of Council dissimulation in public pronouncements. And still worse, he suggested this was but a thin, poor example of what mankind had lost over the centuries. Avoiding the alarming language of human rights, he painted a picture of a human heritage stolen, a rich communication in parabolic language. Noting how common people struggled to handle the new quantum computing because the common language was too shallow and weak, he didn’t suggest they simply go back and pull in loan words from traditional ethnic tongues. No, they should take a cue from the deaf community and their sign language by adding an entirely new level of communication.
Rather than reducing communication to a simplistic stream of characters, it should be expanded. The subspace network was more than capable of bearing a much higher bandwidth that permitted transmissions of sound and video like nothing before. Human communication should be more than mere words, with perhaps the addition of vocal intonation, but gestures and facial expressions that conveyed a quantum level of thought. Not merely more traffic in less time, but a far greater communion between minds so there was less mistaking because such communication was much more of the whole person.
Jesse closed his eyes and pressed his fingers to his temples, making small circular strokes. But the ache in his head was nothing compared to the deep agony of his soul. Not enough it was that his people had to tolerate these filthy hordes of subhuman masses pretending to be people, but this writer was trying to elevate them to some level for which they were inherently unfit. That such thoughts came from one of them was all the more shocking. Surely this fellow was one of Jesse’s people, a traitor who had gone to the other side and was now trying to dilute their rich heritage and power by throwing it to the masses?
Who was this “Tim” who dared not use his surname on the paper? It had to be a pen name because Timothy was not a name from his people’s heritage. Nothing in Jesse’s world could take priority over the utter necessity of tracking down this Tim. He knew it had to be connected to The Brotherhood somehow.