“Now what?” Stanuel asked. “We’re going to be seen.”
“Now it gets messy,” Pepper said. He pulled Stanuel along toward the large elevator at the center. “I’m going with a frontal assault. It’ll be messy. But . . . I do well at messy.”
“There’s no reason for me to be here, then,” Stanuel said. “What use will I be? I failed to get you there through the exhaust pipes. Why not just let me go?”
Pepper laughed. “Not quite ready to die for the cause, Stanuel?”
“No. Yes. I’m not sure, it just feels like suicide, and I’m not sure who that helps.”
“You’re safer with me.” Pepper launched them from branch to branch through the trees. Now that curfews were in effect, no families perched in the great globe of green, no kids screaming and racing through the trees. It was eerily silent.
Pepper slowed them down in the last grove of trees before the elevators at the core of the gardens. As they gently floated towards the lobby at the bottom of the shaft three well-built men, the kind who obviously trained their bodies up on the rim of the wheel, turned the corner.
They carried stun guns. Non-lethal, but still menacing.
Stanuel heard a click. Pepper held out a gun in each hand. Real guns, perfectly lethal.
“I’d turn those off,” Pepper said to the men, “and pass them over, and then no one would get hurt.”
They hesitated. But then the commanding voice of Pan filled the gardens. “Do as he says. And then escort him to me.”
They looked at each other, unhappy, and tossed the guns over. Pepper threw them off into the trees. “You’re escorting us?”
The three unhappy security men nodded. “Pan says you have an electro-magnetic pulse weapon. We’re not to provoke you.”
Stanuel bit his lip. It felt like a trap. These traitors were taking them into the maw of the beast, and Pepper, as far as he could see, looked cheerful about it. “It’s a trap,” he muttered.
“Well, of course it is,” Pepper said. “But it’s a good one that avoids us skulking about, getting dirtier, or having to shoot our way through.” The mercenary followed Pan’s lackeys into the elevator. He turned and looked at Stanuel, hovering outside. “And Pan’s right. I do have an E.M.P device. But if I trigger it this deep into the hub, I take out all your power generating capabilities and computer core systems.”
“Really?” Stanuel was intrigued.
Pepper held up a tiny metal tube with a button on the end. “If I get to the tower,” Pepper said. “I can trigger it and take out Pan, while leaving the rest of the station unaffected.”
Stanuel had weathered five days of his beloved Haven under the autocratic rule of Pan, the trickster.
He’d travel with Pepper to see it end, he realized.
He pulled himself into the elevator.
* * * *
FOR FIVE DAYS Haven’s populace had a ruler, a single being whose word was law, whose thoughts were made policy. Pan stood in the center of the command console, its face lit by the light of a hundred screens and the reflections off the inner rim of Haven’s great wheel.
Pan wore a simple blue suit, had tan skin, brown eyes, and brown hair. His androgynous face and thin body meant that had he stood in a crowd of Haven’s citizens, he would hardly have been noticed. He could be anybody, or everybody.
He also flickered slightly as he turned.
“My executioner and his companion. I’m delighted,” Pan said. “If I could shake your hand, I would.” He gave a slight bow.
Pepper returned it.
Pan smiled. “I’ve been waiting for you two for quite a while. I apologize for sending the rover up the exhaust pipe.”
Pepper shrugged. “No matter. So what now? I have something that can take you out, you have me surrounded by nasty surprises . . . ”
Pan folded its arms. “I don’t do nasty surprises, Pepper. I’m not a monster, contrary to what Stanuel might say. You have an E.M.P device, and if you were to set it off further down the tower, you would shut all Haven down. True, I have backup capabilities that mitigate that, but your device presents a terrible risk to the well being of the citizenry. With the device and you up here, the only risk is to me.”
An easy enough decision, Stanuel thought. Trigger the damn device! But Pepper glanced around the room, maybe seeing traps that Stanuel couldn’t. “If you don’t do nasty surprises, what stops me from zapping you out, right here, right now?”
“I would like to make you an offer. If you’d listen.”
Pepper’s lips quirked. “I wouldn’t be much of a mercenary if I just accepted the higher bid in the middle of the job. You don’t get repeat work very often that way.”
Pan held its hands up. “I understand. But consider this, I am, indirectly, the one who hired you.”
Stanuel had to object. “The resistance . . . ”
“I run it,” Pan smiled. “I know everything it does, who it hires, and in many cases, I give it the orders.”
Stanuel felt like he’d been thrown into a freezing cold vat of water. He lost his breath. “What do you mean? You infiltrated it?” They had lost, even before they’d started.
Pan turned to the mercenary. “Stanuel is bewildered, as are many, by what they created, Pepper. I’m merely the amalgamated avatar of the converged will of all the simulations made to run this colony. The voter simulations kept taking up energy, so the master processing program came up with a more elegant solution: me. Why run millions of emulators, when it could fuse them all into a single expression of its will that would run the government?”
“A clever solution,” Pepper said.
“A techno-democracy, even more so than the vanilla kind, is messy. Dangerously so. With study committees and votes on everything, things that needed to be done quickly didn’t get done in time.
“So the emulations decided to put forward a bill, buried in the middle of some other obscure administrivia. The vote was that emulations be given command of the government.”
Stanuel stepped forward. “We woke up and found that in a single moment all of Haven had been disenfranchised.”
“By your own desires and predictive voting algorithms,” Pan said. “In a way, yes. In a way, no.”
Stanuel spit at the dictatorial hologram in front him. “Then the emulators decided that a single amalgamation, an avatar, and expression of all their wills, would work better. So then even our own voting patterns turned over their power.”
“Not surprising,” Pepper said. “You didn’t have the maturity to keep your own vote, you turned it over to the copies of yourselves. Why be surprised that the copies would do something similar and turn to a benevolent dictator of their own creation?”
Pan looked pleased. “Dictators aren’t so bad, if they’re the right dictator. And it’s hard coded into my very being to look out for the community. That’s why I look like this.” It waved a hand over its face. “I’m the average of all the faces in Haven. Political poll modeling shows that were I to run for office, it would be almost guaranteed based on physiological responses alone.”
Stanuel looked at Pepper. “Pan may have infiltrated, but you were still paid to destroy it. Do it.”
“No,” Pan said. “You might pull that trigger. But if you do, you destroy what the people of Haven really wanted, what they desired, and what they worked very hard to create, Pepper, even if they didn’t realize they consciously wanted it.”
“I’ve heard you get the government you deserve,” Pepper said. “But this is something else. They created their own tyranny . . . ”
“But, Pepper, I’m not a tyrant. If they vote as a whole to oust me, they can do it.”
Pepper moved over to the one of great windows to look out at the inside rim of Haven. Thousands of distant portholes dotted the giant wheel, lit up by the people living inside the rooms across from them.
“Look around you,” Pan implored. “There are plenty who like what I’m doing. I’m rebuilding parts of Haven that have been n
eglected for years. I’m improving agriculture as we speak. I’ve made the choices that were hard, got things into motion that just sat there while people quibbled over them. I am action. I am progress.”
Stanuel kicked forward and Pepper glanced back at him. “I think Stanuel objects.”
Pan sighed. “Yes, a few will be disaffected. They will always be disaffected. That was why I created outlets for the disaffected, because they are a part of me as well. But my plea to you, Pepper, is not to break this great experiment. I can offer you more money, a place of safety here whenever you would want it, and Haven as a powerful ally to your needs.”
Pepper nodded and sat in the air, his legs folded. “I have a question.”
“Proceed.”
“Why do they call you Pan?”
“They call me Pan because it’s short for panopticon. An old experiment: if you were to create a round jail with a tower in the center, with open cell walls facing it, and the ability to look into every cell, you would have the ultimate surveillance society. The panopticon. In some ways, Haven is just that, with me at its center.”
Pepper chuckled. “I’d half expected some insane military dictator wearing a head of antlers calling himself Pan.”
Pan did not laugh. It leaned closer. “Pepper, understand me. This is not your fight. I’m the naturally elected ruler of Haven. The choice to remove me, that isn’t yours. I did not bring you here to destroy me, but for other reasons.”
“The choice?” The word affected Pepper in some way Stanuel could not figure out. He looked over at Stanuel. “Then if you’re a benevolent ruler, you will escort me off Haven, leave Stanuel alive, and move on to other things. After all, it was your orders that set Stanuel down this path.”
“Of course. It’s that or a sentence in one of Haven’s residential rooms. You’ll be locked in, but comfortable. There do have to be ways to handle such things. Exile, or confinement.”
“Okay, Mr. Pan. Okay. My work here is done.” Pepper moved towards Stanuel with a flick of his feet. “Come on Stanuel, it’s time to leave the tower.”
* * * *
STANUEL COULD HARDLY look Pepper in the eye. “I can’t believe you left there.”
“Pan made a good argument.”
“Pan offered to pay you more. That’s all.”
“There’s that, but I won’t take it.” Pepper scratched his head. “If I destroyed Pan, what would you do?”
Stanuel frowned. “What do you mean?”
“You said the emulations wouldn’t be allowed to hold direct control, earlier. Does that mean you’d allow the emulations to come back and decide votes for you?”
“One assumes. We might have not gotten them right, but if we can fix that error, things can go back to the way they were.”
Pepper unpacked his suit and stepped into it. It crinkled and cracked as he zipped it up. “And then I’ll be back. Because you’ll repeat the same pattern all over again.”
“What?”
“For all your assumptions, you’re not quite seeing the pattern. Deep down, somewhere, you all want Pan. You don’t want the responsibility of voting, you want the easy result.”
“That’s not true,” Stanuel objected.
“Oh come on. Think of all the times princes and princesses are adored and feted. Think of all the actors and great people we adore and fawn over.”
“That doesn’t make us slavish followers.”
Pepper cocked his head. “No, but we still can’t escape the instincts we carry from being a small band of hunter-gatherers making their way across a plain, depending on a single leader who knew the ins and outs of their tiny tribe and listened to their feedback. That doesn’t scale, so we have inelegant hacks around it.
“Stanuel, you all created a technological creature, able to view you all and listen to all your feedback, and embody a benevolent single tribal leader. Not only was it born out of your unconscious needs, even your own emulations overwhelmingly voted it into power as sole ruler of Haven.”
Stanuel raised his hand to halt Pepper. “That’s all true, and over the last four days we’ve argued around all this when we found out about the vote. But, Pepper, whether perfect or not, we can’t allow a single person to rule us. It goes against everything we believe in, everything we worked for when we created Haven.”
Pepper nodded. “I know.”
“And you’re going to walk away.”
“I have to. Because this wasn’t some power grab, it was the will of your people. There was a vote. Pan is right, it is the rightful ruler. But,” Pepper pointed at him, “I’m not leaving you empty-handed.”
“What do you mean?”
He handed over the backpack and pressed a small stick with a button into Stanuel’s hand. “The E.M.P device is in the backpack. You won’t get anywhere near the tower to take out just Pan, but if you trigged it in the hub after I leave, it will shut Haven down. Pan will have backups, and his supporters will protect the tower, but if enough people feel like you do, you can storm it with the guns in that pack.”
“You’re asking me to . . . fight?”
“You know your history. The tree of liberty needs to be watered with some blood every now and then. Thomas Jefferson, I think, said that. Most of your ancestors fought for it. You could have kept it, had you just taken the time to vote yourself instead of leaving it to something else.”
“I don’t know if I can.” Stanuel was bewildered. He’d never done anything violent in his life.
Pepper smiled. “You might find Pan is more willing to fold than you imagine. Think about it.”
With that, he stepped into the airlock. The door shut with a hiss, and the spacesuit faded into camouflage black as Pepper disappeared inside whatever stealth ship had bought him to Haven.
Stanuel stood there. He pulled the backpack’s straps up over onto his shoulders and made his way toward the gardens, mulling over the mercenary’s last words.
A hologram of Pan waited for him at the entrance to the gardens, but no goons were nearby. Stanuel had expected to be captured, with the threat of a long confinement ahead of him. But it was just the electronic god of Haven and Stanuel.
“You didn’t understand what he meant, did you?” Pan said. It really was the panopticon, listening to everything that happened in Haven.
“No.” Stanuel held the switch to the E.M.P in his hand, waiting for some trick. Was he going to get shot in the head by a sniper? But Pan said it didn’t use violence.
Maybe a tranquilizer dart of some sort?
“I told you,” Pan said, “I also created the resistance.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense,” Stanuel said.
“It does if you stop thinking of me as a person, but as an avatar of your collective emulators. Every ruling system has an opposition; the day after I was voted into power, I had to create a series of checks and balances against myself. That was the resistance.”
“But I was recruited by people.”
“And they were recruited by my people, working for me, who were told they were to create an opposition tame as a honey trap.” Pan flickered as he walked through a tree. An incongruous vision, as Stanuel floated through the no gravity garden.
“Why would you want to die?”
“Because, I may not be what all of you want, just what most of you want. I have to create an opportunity for myself to be stopped, or else, I really am a tyrant and not the best solution. That is why Pepper was hired to bring the E.M.P device aboard. That was why, ultimately, he left it with you.”
“So it’s all in my hands,” Stanuel said.
“Yes. Live in a better economy, a safer economy, but one ruled by what you have created. Or muddle along yourselves.” Pan moved in front of Stanuel, floating with him.
Stanuel held up the metal tube and hovered his thumb over the button. “Men should be free.”
Pan nodded sadly. “But Stanuel, you all will never be able to get things done the way I can. It will be such a mess of compro
mise, personality, mistakes, wrong choices, emotional choices, mob rule, and imperfect decisions. You could well destroy Haven with your imprecise decisions.”
It was a siren call. But even though Pan was perfect, and right, it was the same song that led smart men to call tyrants leaders and do so happily. The promise of quick action, clean and fast decisions.
Alluring.
“I know it will be messy,” Stanuel said, voice quavering. “And I have no idea how it will work out. But at least it will be ours.”
He pressed the button and watched as the lights throughout Haven dimmed and flickered. Pan disappeared with a sigh, a ghost banished. The darkness marched its glorious way through the cavernous gardens toward Stanuel, who folded up in the air by a tree while he waited for the dark to take him in its freeing embrace.
* * *
Afterword
I carry some of my first memories as being from 1983, during the invasion of Grenada to overthrow the government. In 1979 the revolution started with high hopes and big plans. But as time dragged on some consolidated power, and with their sweeping reforms, also fell into the spiral of quashing opposition to the point where it became draconian and people ended up lined up against walls and shot. As a result, I have an inbuilt distrust of sweeping reforms and powerful individuals in politics.
A lot of my more politically minded friends, of various political persuasions, are always frustrated with the fact that things don’t get done their way, or even quickly. I think a lot of Americans forget that many institutions in the US are designed to slow down, muddle, create compromise, and otherwise add checks to the mob mentality of democracy or the fast actions of a single individual. In an ideal situation everyone is frustrated and making compromises in a democracy: it shouldn’t be easy. But that isn’t to say that the appeal of a prime actor that gets things done in a way frustrated voters in a democracy don’t get isn’t seductive, I just wanted to point out that those people are called dictators.
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