by John Brunner
But now he had sensed such violence in his own body, he was aware that from outside his behavior must have paralleled that of a member of his Toledo congregation, and his former chief at the Utopia consultancy, and two of his colleagues at the three-vee college, and … Others. Countless others. Trapped in fight-or-flight mode when there was no way to attain either solution.
He sighed, setting aside his cup, and drove himself to utter an honest answer.
“Before, drugs have always straightened me in no time. Today—well, somehow I didn’t want to think of taking anything … if you see what I mean.”
“You never sweated it out before? Not even once? Small wonder this is such a bad attack.”
Nettled, he snapped back. “It happens to you all the time, hm? That’s why you’re so knowledgeable?”
She shook her head, expression neutral. “No, it never did happen to me. But I’ve never taken tranquilizers, either. If I feel like crying myself to sleep,. I do. Or if I feel like cutting classes because it’s such a beautiful day, I do that too. Ina overloaded when I was about five. That was when she and Dad split up. After that she started riding constant herd on my mental state as well as her own. But I got this association fixed in my mind between the pills she took and the way she acted when she broke down—which wasn’t pleasant—so I always used to pretend I’d swallowed what she gave me, then spit it out when I was alone. I got very good at hiding tablets and capsules under my tongue. And I guess it was the sensible thing to do. Most of my friends have folded up at least once, some of them two or three times beginning in grade school. And they all seem to be the ones who had—uh—special care taken of them by their folks. Care they’ll never recover from.”
Somehow a solitary fly had escaped the defenses of the kitchen. Sated, heavy on its wings, it came buzzing in search of a place to rest and digest. As though a saw blade’s teeth were adding an underscore to the words, he felt his next question stressed by the sound.
“Do you mean the sort of thing Anti-Trauma does?”
“The sort of thing parents hire Anti-Trauma to do to their helpless kids!” There was venom in her tone, the first strong feeling he had detected in her. “But they were far from the first. They’re the largest and best-advertised, but they weren’t the pioneers. Ina and I were having a fight last year, and she said she wished she’d given me that type of treatment. Once upon a time I quite liked my mother. Now I’m not so sure.”
He said with weariness born of his recent tormented self-reappraisal, “I guess they think they’re doing the right and proper thing. They want their kids to be able to cope, and it’s claimed to be a way of adjusting people to the modern world.”
“That,” Kate said, “is Sandy Locke talking. Whoever you are, I now know for sure that you’re not him. He’s a role you’ve put on. In your heart you know what Anti-Trauma does is monstrous … don’t you?”
He hesitated only fractionally before nodding. “Yes. Beyond any hope of argument, it’s evil.”
“Thank you for leveling with me at last. I was sure nobody who’s been through what you have could feel otherwise.”
“What am I supposed to have been through?”
“Well, in your sleep you moaned about Tarnover, and since everybody knows what Tarnover is like—”
He jerked as though he had been kicked. “Wait, wait! That can’t be true! Most people don’t know Tarnover exists!”
She shrugged. “Oh, you know what I mean. I’ve met several of their so-called graduates. People who could have been individuals but instead have been standardized—filed down—straitjacketed!”
“But that’s incredible!”
It was her turn to be confused and startled. “What?”
“That you’ve met all these people from Tarnover.”
“No, it’s not. UMKC is crawling with them. Turn any wet stone. Oh, I exaggerate, but there are five or six.”
The sensations he had been victim of when he arrived threatened to return. His mouth dried completely, as though it had been swabbed with cottonwool; his heart pounded; he instantly wanted to find a bathroom. But he fought back with all the resources at his command. Steadying his voice was as exhausting as climbing a mountain.
“So where are they in hiding?”
“Nowhere. Stop by the Behavioral Sciences Lab and—Say, Sandy!” She rose anxiously to her feet. “You’d better he down again and talk about this later. Obviously it hasn’t penetrated that you’re suffering from shock, just as surely as if you’d walked away from a veetol crash.”
“I do know!” he barked. “But there was someone from Tarnover sitting in with the G2S selection board, and if they think to make a physical check of this place … They thought of calling you up, didn’t they?”
She bit her lip, eyes scanning his face in search of clues that were not to be found.
“Why are you so afraid?” she ventured. “What did they do to you?”
“It’s not so much what they did. It’s what they will do if they catch me.”
“Because of something you did to them? What?”
“Quit cold after they’d spent thirty million on trying to turn me into the sort of shivver you were just describing.”
During the next few seconds he was asking himself how he could ever have been so stupid as to say that. And with surprise so terrific it was almost worse than what had gone before he then discovered he hadn’t been stupid after all.
For she turned and walked to the window to peer out at the street between the not-completely-closed curtains. She said, “Nobody in sight who looks suspicious. What’s the first thing they’ll do if they figure out who you are—deevee your code? I mean the one you’ve been using at G2S.”
“I let that out too?” he said in renewed horror.
“You let a lot out. Must have been stacking up in your head for years. Well?”
“Uh—yes, I guess so.”
She checked her watch and compared it with an old-fashioned digital clock that was among the few ornaments she had not disposed of. “There’s a flight to Los Angeles in ninety minutes. I’ve used it now and then; it’s one that you can get on without booking. By tonight we could be at—”
He put his hands to his head, giddy again. “You’re going too fast for me.”
“Fast it’s got to be. What can you do apart from being a systems rash? Everything?”
“I …” He took an enormous grip on himself. “Yes, or damn nearly.”
“Fine. So come on.”
He remained irresolute. “Kate, surely you’re not going to—”
“Forget about school next year, abandon friends and home and mother, and Bagheera?” Her tone was scathing. “Shit, no. But how are you going to make out if you don’t have a usable code to prop you up while you’re building another they don’t know about? I guess that must be how you work the trick, hm?”
“Uh—yes, more or less.”
“So move, will you? My code is in good standing, and the girls downstairs will mind Bagheera for a week as willingly as for an evening, and apart from that all I have to do is leave a note for Ina saying I’ve gone to stay with friends.” She seized the nearest phone and began to compose the code for her mother’s mail-store reel.
“But I can’t possibly ask you to—”
“You’re not asking, I’m offering. You damn well better grab the chance. Because if you don’t you’ll be as good as dead, won’t you?” She waved him silent and spoke the necessary words to mislead Ina.
When she had finished he said, “Not as good as. Worse than.” And followed her out the door.
IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE HERD
At Tarnover they explained it all so reasonably!
Of course everybody had to be given a personal code! How else could the government do right by its citizens, keep track of the desires, tastes, preferences, purchases, commitments and above all location of a continentful of mobile, free individuals?
Granted, there was an alternative approach. B
ut would you want to see it adopted here? Would you like to find your range of choice restricted to the point where the population became predictable in its collective behavior?
So don’t dismiss the computer as a new type of fetters. Think of it rationally, as the most liberating device ever invented, the only tool capable of serving the multifarious needs of modern man.
Think of it, for a change, as him. For example, think of the friendly mailman who makes certain your letters reach you no matter how frequently you move or over what vast distances. Think of the loyal secretary who always pays your bills when they come due, regardless of what distractions may be on your mind. Think of the family doctor who’s on hand at the hospital when you fall sick, with your entire medical history in focus to guide the unknown specialist. Or if you want to be less personal and more social, think of computers as the cure for the monotony of primitive mass-production methods. As long ago as the sixties of last century it became economic to turn out a hundred items in succession from an assembly line, of which each differed subtly from the others. It cost the salary of an extra programer and—naturally—a computer to handle the task … but everybody was using computers anyhow, and their capacity was so colossal the additional data didn’t signify.
(When he pondered the subject, he always found himself flitting back and forth between present and past tense; there was that sensitive a balance between what had been expected, indeed hoped for, and what had eventuated. It seemed that some of the crucial decisions were still being made although generations had elapsed since they were formulated.)
The movement pattern of late twentieth-century America was already the greatest population flow in history. More people moved annually at vacation time than all the armies led by all the world’s great conquerors put together, plus the refugees they drove from home. What a relief, then, to do no more than punch your code into a public terminal—or, since 2005, into the nearest veephone, which likely was in the room where you were sitting—and explain once that because you’d be in Rome the next two weeks, or surfing at Bondi, or whatever, your house should be watched by the police more keenly than usual, and your mail should be held for so many days unless marked “urgent,” in which case it should be redirected to so-and-so, and the garbage truck needn’t come by on its next weekly round, and—and so forth. The muscles of the nation could be felt flexing with joyous new freedom.
Except …
The theory was and always had been: this is the thing the solid citizen has no need to worry about.
Important, later all-important question: what about the hollow citizen?
Because, liberated, the populace took off like so many hot-air balloons.
“Okay, let’s!”—move, take that job in another state, go spend all summer by the lake, operate this winter out of a resort in the Rockies, commute by veetol over a thousand miles, see how island living suits us and forget the idea if it’s a bust …
Subtler yet, more far-reaching: let’s trade wives and children on a monthly rota, good for the kids to get used to multiple parents because after all you’ve been married twice and I’ve been married three times, and let’s quit the city fast before the boss finds out it was me who undercut him on that near-the-knuckle deal, and let’s move out of shouting distance of that twitch you were obsessed with so you can cool down, and let’s go someplace where the word isn’t out on the mouth-to-mouth circuit that you’re skew else you’ll never have the chance to give up men, and let’s see if it’s true about those fine dope connections in Topeka and let’s—let’s—let’s …
Plus, all the time and everywhere, the sneaking suspicion: don’t look now, I think we’re being followed.
Two years after they spliced the home-phone service into the continental net the system was screaming in silent agony like the limbs of a marathon runner who knows he can shatter the world’s best time provided he can make the final mile.
But, they asked at Tarnover in the same oh-so-reasonable tones, what else could we have done?
LET’S ALL BE DIFFERENT SAME AS ME
“That,” Freeman said thoughtfully, “sounds like a question you still have found no answer to.”
“Oh, shut up. Put me back in regressed mode, for God’s sake. I know you don’t call this torture—I know you call it stimulus-response evaluation—but it feels like torture all the same and I’d rather get it over and done with. Since there isn’t an alternative.”
Freeman scanned his dials and screens.
“Unfortunately it’s not safe to regress you again at the moment. It will take a day or so for the revived effects of your overload at KC to flush out of your system. It was the most violent experience you’ve undergone as an adult. Extremely traumatizing.”
“I’m infinitely obliged for the data. I suspected so, but it’s nice to have it confirmed by your machines.”
“Sweedack. Just as it’s good to have what the machines tell us confirmed by your conscious personality.”
“Are you a hockey ’fish?”
“Not in the sense of following one particular team, but the game does offer a microcosm of modern society, doesn’t it? Group commitment, chafing against restrictive rules, enactment of display-type aggression more related to status than hate or fear, plus the use of banishment as a means of enforcing conformity. To which you can add the use of the most primitive weapon, the club, albeit stylized.”
“So that’s how you view society. I’ve been wondering. How trivial! How oversimplified! You mention restrictive rules … but rules only become restrictive when they’re obsolescent. We’ve revised our rules at every stage of our social evolution, ever since we learned to talk, and we’re still making new ones that suit us better. We’ll carry right on unless fools like you contrive to stop us!”
Leaning forward, Freeman cupped his sharp chin in his right palm.
“We’re into an area of fundamental difference of opinion,” he said after a pause. “I put it to you that no rule consciously invented by mankind since we acquired speech has force equivalent to those inherited from perhaps fifty, perhaps a hundred thousand generations of evolution in the wild state. I further suggest that the chief reason why modern society is in turmoil is that for too long we claimed that our special human talents could exempt us from the heritage written in our genes.”
“It’s because you and those like you think in strict binary terms—‘either-or’—as though you’ve decided machines are our superiors and you want to imitate them, that I have to believe you not only don’t have the right answer but can never find it. You treat human beings on the black-box principle. Cue this reflex, that response ensues; cue another and get something different. There’s no room in your cosmos for what you call special talents.”
“Come, now.” Freeman gave a faint, gaunt smile. “You’re talking in terms at least two generations old. Have you deleted from your mind all awareness of how sophisticated our methodology has become since the 1960s?”
“And have you suppressed all perception of how it’s rigidified, like medieval theology, with your collective brilliance concentrated on finding means to abolish any view not in accord with yours? Don’t bother to answer that. I’m experiencing the reality of your black-box approach. You’re testing me to destruction, not as an individual but as a sample that may or may not match your idealized model of a person. If I don’t react as predicted, you’ll revise the model and try again. But you won’t care about me.”
“Sub specie aeternitatis,” Freeman said, smiling anew, “I find no evidence for believing that I matter any more than any other human being who ever existed or who ever will exist. Nor does any of them matter more than I do. We’re elements in a process that began in the dim past and will develop through who knows what kind of future.”
“What you say reinforces my favorite image of Tarnover: a rotting carcass, pullulating with indistinguishable maggots, whose sole purpose in life is to grab more of the dead flesh more quickly than their rivals.”
&nb
sp; “Ah, yes. The conqueror worm. I find it curious that you should have turned out to be of a religious bent, given the cynicism with which you exploited the trappings of your minister’s role at Toledo.”
“But I’m not religious. Chiefly because the end point of religious faith is your type of blind credulity.”
“Excellent. A paradox. Resolve it for me.” Freeman leaned back, crossing his thin legs and setting his thin fingers tip to tip with elbows on the side of his chair.
“You believe that man is comprehensible to himself, or at any rate you act as though you do. Yet you refer constantly to processes that began back then and will continue for ever and ever amen. What you’re trying to do is step out of the flow of process, just as superstitious savages did—do!—by invoking divine forces not confined by human limitations. You give lip service to the process, but you won’t accept it. On the contrary, you strive to dominate it. And that can’t be done unless you stand outside it.”
“Hmm. You’re an atavism, aren’t you? You have the makings of a schoolman! But that doesn’t save you from being wrong. We are trying not to want to step out of the flow, because we’ve recognized the nature of the process and its inevitability. The best that can be hoped for is to direct it into the most tolerable channels. What we’re doing at Tarnover is possibly the most valuable service any small group ever performed for mankind at large. We’re diagnosing our social problems and then deliberately setting out to create the person who can solve them.”
“And how many problems have been solved to date?”
“We haven’t yet exterminated ourselves.”
“You claim credit for that? I knew you had gall, but this is fantastic! You could just as well argue that in the case of human beings it took the invention of nuclear weapons to trigger the life-saving response most species show when faced with the fangs and claws of a tougher rival.”