by Warren Ellis
Adam paused for a minute, and then said, “That’s when I met the man who wasn’t there.”
Dr. Murgu just waited.
“Do you know that poem?” Adam asked. “‘Antigonish.’ I just remembered that it’s supposed to be about a haunted house in Canada. ‘Yesterday, upon the stair, / I met a man who wasn’t there.’”
“‘He wasn’t there again today,’” Dr. Murgu said, “‘I wish, I wish he’d go away.’”
Adam closed his eyes. He could see it again.
“Talk to me, Adam,” she said. “Tell me what you’re remembering.”
“There was this guy. He was hanging back from the edge of it all, same as me. But I kept seeing him. I realized he wasn’t trying to catch up. He was deliberately keeping pace but keeping his distance. It was foggy. The lights were all smeary—the streetlights, car headlamps, flares people kept setting off. It was hard to see. And this guy, he was heavyset. Couldn’t see his hands. He was always facing the crowd. And I remember thinking, this guy’s trouble. Something about him is just off. I got this whole secret-police vibe off him.”
“Did you confront him?”
“That seemed like a really, really bad idea. If I was right, then he was armed, and in direct communication with a team, because those people don’t wander into the field on their own. But it didn’t matter. I did something even more stupid than that.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“The pack broke. I still don’t know what happened. It sounded like firecrackers going off, but it could have been small-caliber gunfire or any of half a dozen other things. And my position was that the only way out of the surge of people coming toward me was an alley on the other side of the street that that guy had planted himself in front of. I didn’t want to turn around and run the other way because I knew there was a police cordon a block or two back. I had no idea if the entire crowd was running. I went for the best option, which was ducking out of its way. So I ran across the street. Grabbed the guy’s arms to guide myself around him without knocking him flat as I twisted into the mouth of the alley.”
Adam flexed and splayed his fingers in front of him, as if they could still feel it. The memory of fog.
“His arms came apart in my hands. The surge had stopped—whatever it was, it turned out the crowd just wanted to get distance from it and then gawp. So nobody there was looking at us. I lost my balance a bit, because I didn’t have anything to hold on to as I twisted around the guy. I remember my arms flailing. I remember my arm passing almost all the way through him. My wrist bounced off something plastic, and it hurt. I pulled my arm out. And my arm was inside him. There was nothing of him. Just something moving around inside the space of him. And … he was fog.”
“Fog.”
“Yeah. My flailing around dispersed him, sort of. And even in that bad light, I could see what he was. What he really was. You have to understand, this is real. This isn’t me describing a hallucination. I had the mark on my wrist. My clothes smelled of the spray afterward, and I hadn’t been near any other chemicals. I recognized some of what I was looking at. It was as real as this room and this chair.”
“Tell me,” Dr. Murgu said, “what it was.”
“It sounds ridiculous. It was a ridiculous thing to get upset about,” Adam said, his voice cracking.
“Tell me.”
“It was micro-drones. Tiny quadcopters. And they were spraying fog. Well, not fog; it was clouds of atomized chemicals that were draping around them. They were traveling in formation, a vertical stack of them, and spraying a chemical shroud and projecting an image on the spray from the inside. In that weather? In that lighting? It passed for a big guy in a long heavy coat who you didn’t want to go near. The drones had some kind of coating on them that made them hard to look at. I realized later that it would have been a metamaterial cladding. You’ve seen the news stories about making things nearly invisible. It’s done with metamaterials that change the way light works. It was just a cloud of drones tracking a crowd of protesters at street level.”
“A man who wasn’t there,” she said.
“And, oh my God, I want him to go away,” he said.
Dr. Murgu thought for a moment, jotting down a few sentences on her clipboard. She then said, “When you saw Mr. Mansfield—”
“It wasn’t a person.”
“We don’t have a better label for him. It. Whatever. But okay. When you saw it, did you guess what you were looking at? Right at the start?”
“No. It bothered me. But I didn’t know what it was, not until we smashed an insect.”
“Did you suspect?”
“I don’t think I wanted to. When you wish a man who isn’t there would go away, the last idea you want to entertain is that there are more like him. That’s what I couldn’t get out of my head in Windhoek and Rotterdam. Because if you’re going to make flights of micro-drones with fog camouflage so they can blend into urban street-level backgrounds at mid-distance, is Windhoek in Namibia the only place you’re ever going to fly them? There are foggy, rainy, cloudy, smoky cities all over the world. There are cities with narrower streets, more bends and curves, riddled with more alleyways and ratholes. If you’re working with projections and sprays and metamaterials, then it doesn’t even make sense to use human-shaped camouflage in most instances. If the man who wasn’t there was a test article, then I would bet you real money that the only test involved was the shape. No. Those things are going to be everywhere. Half-visible, half-autonomous, and networked.”
“Half-autonomous?”
“The thing reassembled itself in front of me. A swarm of flying robots went back into formation on its own. That’s algorithmic. How deep does that go? The swarm could respond to my action of waving my arm around to disperse them by returning to formation. How does it react when a crowd surges toward it? I don’t know. I might have found out, if the crowd had kept moving. My point is, there are things it can do on its own without being instructed from afar, because the action was too quick to have required a human operator. And, in fact, you don’t put something like that into the field if it needs a human operator.”
“Stop and take a breath, Adam.”
Adam realized his chest was heaving. He rushed on. He needed it out of him. “I came up with a way to strike targets using tiny drones with explosive charges inside. Either what I bumped into was a cloud of spotters for Stoop Model drones above the scene. Or I bumped into a cloud of actual kill vehicles. Think about that. You’re in a protest, or a riot, a mass of people. And then one of the people vanishes, and the next second twelve people are dead.”
Adam took his breath, looking at Dr. Murgu resentfully from under his brow. He said, “The thing about the future is that it keeps happening without you.”
“You thought of something that had evolved under other hands after you left that particular field. Here, you encountered something that sounds like it may have been a further evolution of this idea of drone devices operating under human camouflage. Yes?”
“Yes. I’d never even thought of what they did here. Whoever they are. And that’s the thing, isn’t it? We always say ‘they.’ I had a stepfather for a few years who used ‘they’ all the time because it was a magical buttress to any old shit he came up with. The first time he hit me. One summer. He poured my mother a glass of lemonade with this bullshit flourish, and said, ‘They reckon lemonade cools you down more than anything.’ And I asked who ‘they’ were. Was it the same ‘they’ who let black people live anywhere they liked? Because he’d had a fair amount to say about that ‘they.’ Same ‘they’ who gave away jobs to kids with tattoos and pins in their noses? Or the same ‘they’ who got in the way of everyone having a big war to sort everything out? Because ‘they’ were probably a bunch of morons. He followed me out of the room, put his left hand over my mouth, and punched me in the stomach with his right. There, see? Real therapy stuff. Talking about my childhood.”
“Your point being we never really know who’s doing what
. The nature of government?”
“Government is barely the tip of the iceberg now. Non-state actors, asymmetrical warfighters, skunkworks, security multinationals, who the hell knows. We lost the battle for our streets a long time ago. We gave them up. Worse: we gave up the ideas and data freely to the people who used them to take our streets from us. Do you understand exactly what that thing in Mansfield’s room tells us? It tells us that we quite literally have no idea what is loose in the world and looking at and listening to us, and who it is looking and listening for. Bugs as bugs. It’s fucking comedy. There’s a whole boardroom full of people who were shitting themselves laughing at that. A hundred and eighty pounds of semiautonomous mobile listening devices in human form. No wonder you never got a physical examination or a one-on-one interview out of him. But note, very carefully, how it was otherwise convincing enough to your staff and the people who live here. The future arrived here a couple of weeks ago and nobody noticed. Because that’s how the future always arrives. You don’t realize it’s here until you bump into it.”
“You helped solve it, Adam. You achieved something. Do you understand? Staging tracked the remaining devices that tried to call home and upload their recordings. Everyone else grabbed the fake investigators when they arrived to get an on-site upload and collect the things up. They were from a private intelligence analysis company that doesn’t have access to Normal Head production. There’s a whole investigation now. Other countries are implicated. And, while it was concluding, you tried quite hard to kill yourself. Can you tell me something about what you were thinking as you did that?”
“Oh.” Adam tried to laugh derisively, but the sound strangled in his throat. “That was the easy part. That was the easy decision. It was the confirmation of my nightmare. We’re now in a place, you see, where we will never again have a private conversation. We’re never really going to be alone again. We will never again be in a state where we believe that we’re not being watched. Some futurists talk about a thing called the Singularity, where accelerating progress in technology becomes a runaway effect. Like an ascending graph that suddenly becomes a vertical straight line. Think of a Surveillance Singularity. A condition you cannot go back from, because it’s become a runaway effect, like critical mass in a reactor.”
“Maybe it was just being tested here, Adam. A small, remote place to see if it worked. Just like a fairly peaceful protest in Namibia would be a good place to test a prototype technology.”
“Maybe. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe these are just the tools ‘they’ use now. Maybe this is just the world we live in, and nobody’s noticed yet. But I have. I worked for it. I tried to kill myself because I don’t want to live in a world like that. I don’t want to spend my life wondering who’s copying down everything I say and who it will be used to hurt. I don’t want that. I don’t want to be in that world.”
“Adam. You don’t live in the world anymore. You live in Normal. The only people watching are us now. This is a safe place.”
“You hesitated, there,” Adam said. “You were going to say something else.”
“I was going to say,” Dr. Murgu said, “that this is the last safe place.”
Adam Dearden racked his brains for something to say that would get him out of this room and away so that he could conceive a proper process to do it again and do it right. He was a clever man. He was paid to think about the future all day, every day. He should, he figured, be able to work out a plan to escape it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This little book is for, and because of, my many friends and acquaintances in the business of the future. Their work and lives gave me the idea, and I owe them all a drink, but none of them should carry the blame.
Fiction and Anthropology: Interviewing Warren Ellis About Normal
By Robin Sloan
In a forest in the Pacific Northwest, there is a facility where professional futurists come to renew themselves when the task of staring into the years ahead has taken its toll.
They do not always come willingly.
So begins Normal, the new novel from Warren Ellis that is being published by FSG Originals as a four-part digital serial. The first part was released last week; the second is imminent.
Part One establishes the milieu and sets the scene: We enter the facility called Normal Head riding on the shoulder of Adam Dearden, who has been shipped to the woods after a breakdown and subsequent memory gap at a conference for futurists. We get a sense of the geometry of the place; we learn its rules; we meet its denizens. It’s clear to me that Normal is both fiction and anthropology: here we have one species of imagination considering another. As readers, we get to behold both at once: the future forecasters working out the fate of the world, and the fiction writer working out the forecasters’ own fate, with what seems to be a combination of curiosity, tenderness, and dread.
After finishing the installment, I sent Warren Ellis four questions by e-mail. Fear not: there are no spoilers below.
Robin Sloan: I get the sense that you know people like this: the professional forecasters, the corporate futurists. And you know they’ll read Normal—hungrily. So … is it homage? Satire? Is it … a warning?
Warren Ellis: I think, for some of them, it’s probably just a little uncomfortable? I’ve met a lot of people who work in the business of the future who have eventually had to come to terms with some form of depression. I hope they’ll see it as homage as much as anything else—there are certainly elements of satire in there, but it is in large part an expression of empathy and admiration. I mean, I’ve met people whose actual paid employment is in thinking about ways to avert the end of human civilization. That’s a rough beat.
RS: I realize this is a dangerous question to ask without knowing what comes next, but: Does Warren Ellis himself want or need a stay at Normal Head?
WE: Let’s say that some days I think about it more. Generally speaking, I don’t do well without a phone in my hand and a signal in the air, and my continued ability to earn money to pay for food and shelter kind of depends upon it. I see younger generations talking about needing digital detox and extended unplugging in cabin-porn settings, and usually I make a joke about not really wanting them to extend their obviously enfeebled genetic lines. But, yeah, I think we all have that moment of, right, yes, it’s time to be locked in a compound in the woods …
RS: Let’s take that a step further, then. Like a lot of people, I follow your various digital outputs avidly—e-mail newsletter, Snapchat, Instagram. (“The public-facing services he farmed hourly…”) If you were prescribed a medium-long stay in a micro-home at Normal Head but managed to smuggle in a cheap smartphone with just one digital channel loaded onto it, which would you, at this moment, choose? Which would be your lifeline?
WE: Ideally, a messaging app—I have a daughter at university, after all. At certain times of the year, the main function of Snapchat is to receive photos from her that were taken in underground nightclubs or on the seafront some time past midnight, as well as dubious successes in the field of student cuisine. Failing that, give me a news channel—BBC News, probably.
RS: I just searched my e-mail on a hunch—query: “ellis novella”—and sure enough, I have in my possession archived Bad Signal blasts from 2004 in which you are enumerating the virtues of the novella, almost as a tonic to the kind and length of work you’d been doing just before. Do you still feel that magnetism? Where are we in the era of the Ellis novella, in comics and prose?
WE: I do still feel it, and I’ve been pleased to see writers like China Miéville go to the novella recently. And I’ve been wanting to go back to it in comics for a while—perhaps late next year, once I’ve finished a few bigger projects. I’ve always tended toward the shorter form—things like Transmetropolitan and FreakAngels and Planetary are the outliers. I’ve got this itch in the back of my head that’s telling me I need to think about a big prose book, but so far I’ve been successful in locking that voice in a box, not least because a ninety-thous
and-word book like Gun Machine was at least six uninterrupted months of my life, and I’ve got other things I want to do across the next eighteen months. So maybe another novella next year, and then we’ll see.
Reframing Future Shock: Interviewing Warren Ellis About Normal
By Laurie Penny
When they asked me to talk to Warren Ellis about the second part of his new book, Normal, which is being serially released in four digital installments, I said yes straight away even though I was half-crazed from work burnout and bad politics, because Warren is a mad genius and a very bad man and the chance to give him a gentle grilling was way too good to refuse.
The book is funny and dark and bleak as hell. In Warren’s words, he uses it to “posit cases where people who have to think about the end of the world for a living are eventually broken by that kind of futurological and emotional pressure.” I have a lot of friends who do exactly that sort of work, and, in my own way, I do it too. So I wanted to know, is there something particular about the work, or is it more about the personality type attracted to it?
Laurie Penny: In Normal, these damaged souls have all been isolated in a kind of high-security recovery center—somewhere between an asylum and a luxe nature retreat. And, of course, by the time Part Two begins, all hell has started to break loose. But I want to talk about the nature of the characters themselves. You are talking about people who are “broken” rather than explicitly “mad” in modern terms—are you saying that madness is subjective but damage is real?
Warren Ellis: That’s not unfair. People who are “mad” can continue to function in society without harm to themselves or others, certainly. But when your job means you have to be put to bed with a shitload of Prozac every eighteen months because you stop talking to people or are just crying all the time, then that’s an example of inability to function.
Think of it like another framing of the Tofflers’ old “future shock” saw, perhaps. Future shock was the notion that the future would come on so fast that some people would not be able to adapt, and would live in a continual state of psychological trauma.