by Jim Stark
"What's that?” asked Louise, who'd seen her husband fall into verbal gridlock a few times before.
"Well,” said Igor, “as long as this whole thing is kept confidential, and won't end up on the Netnews or something like that, I was thinking that—uh—maybe we could remove the voice-alteration aspect ... and go visual?"
"Jeeze ... sure,” said Rudolph/Annette. “I always prefer things that way. How about you, Louise?"
"Hey, I'm Human Three,” said Louise. “No problem here."
"Okay,” said Rudolph/Annette, “just give me a minute.” She killed the sound output, and called the CQ coordinator, instructing her to reconfigure the connection, to add the visual. “And don't forget to remove that ridiculous voice-alteration stuff too,” she made sure to add.
"Okay,” said the CQ coordinator as she made the required changes. “Just about ... all set ... and here weeee ... go!” She pushed the button.
"Annette!” said the former Igor and Louise in perfect unison from their respective MIUs at the Whitesides’ lodge.
"Michael! Becky!” said Annette, in astonishment.
"Jeeze, you're stark naked, Annette!” said Becky, putting a hand to her mouth and trying not to laugh.
Annette looked down, as if surprised to hear such a disturbing rumor. “Jeeze, you're right,” she observed, poking a breast with her finger. “But then ... so are you,” she said, looking up at her screen, “under your clothes."
Becky laughed. It occurred to her that all people were basically Human Three, if only they could shed the ugly, cumbersome turtle shell of Human Two Consciousness and let themselves be.
Michael stood up and walked out of the lodge. To him, this was a most reprehensible betrayal. His serious contemplations out at the cabin had led him to join the vast majority of world citizens in not caring what the WDA might think of his private life any more—if indeed they were eavesdropping—but he had been assured that the person doing the CQ assistance would be a person that he didn't know and would not be likely to ever meet; a person who didn't know him. Someone at Evolution had screwed up, and he was not in a forgiving mood, let alone a laughing mood. Becky's reaction was alien to the woman he had married, or the woman he thought he had married, in 2014. He wasn't ready for this ... or for anything else, he supposed. So he walked down to the dock at the lodge, got in his hovercraft, and sped back across the half-frozen lake he had traversed a month ago by Ski-doo, when whitened ice clung to the shores and scoffed at the sun.
"Sorry Becky,” said Annette.
"Not your fault,” said Becky. “Michael will get over it. He had to come over here anyway for his LV session, though I suppose we could have sent a Sniffer over there to his cabin. But I definitely think someone at your CQ Center needs their ass kicked."
Ass kicking was a very Human Two remedy, but Annette found herself giving it serious consideration.
Chapter 68
THE QUIET REVOLUTION
Monday, April 25, 2033—7:25 p.m.
Sébastien Roy was sitting on a too-low stool, watching a group of three kids command functions on an MIU, mathematical computations that twenty years ago didn't even crop up until high school. These were grade four students, and they seemed to be enjoying themselves silly—and having little need of any teacher. Sébastien remembered a time just a few years ago when getting nine- or ten-year-olds to even do mathematics was like yanking tree roots out of the ground with your bare hands, and getting kids to find the fun in it, the creativity, wasn't even on the agenda. When he taught here last, back when this was Shawville Public School, his students were there because they had to be there. Now, in one of the same classrooms he'd used a few years before, most of his students were already “at work” when he waltzed in at precisely 8:59 a.m., and many stayed on after he waltzed out at 3:31 p.m. The roll call was already done when he arrived in the mornings, done on the main MIU by the kids themselves, and nobody seemed much concerned about attendance anyway—neither the kids nor the administration. Evolutionary schools were open seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, and truancy wasn't even an issue here, let alone a problem. No one ever “failed,” not that tests or exams were even given—or needed. Motivation wasn't a problem either, which Sébastien still found bizarre. Kids were supposed to have problems that way. Overcoming this difficulty in children was a complicated skill he had been taught in Teachers College, an art he had worked on and developed over his fifteen-year career. Now it was unneeded, whether you called it a skill or an art. He'd been back in the saddle for five days now, and he still found it shocking how much things had changed during his two years of unemployment ... his “supersulk,” as one of his supposedly Human Three colleagues had called it. The insensitive bitch, he thought as his instinct fired a minor thruster-burn in his gut. He felt ... what? Out of it? Obsolete, perhaps?
In his mind he knew it wasn't a two-year revolution that education had undergone. It was that so-called quiet revolution that had been brewing, creeping along largely out of sight, ever since 2015, since the terrible recession that had swept through the world right after the LieDeck Revolution and had eased up only in 2019. The shakeout had been hard on everyone, but it had been completely devastating for hundreds of millions around the world, and of course it was hardest for the poor areas that used to be known as the “Third World"—basically the southern hemisphere. The new global “superclass” of economic losers had hit rock bottom ... and then banded together, becoming each other's insurance against starvation.
And they had ended up not only achieving more job security than the Normal middle class, but figured out how to work for only thirteen or fourteen years and then retire! That was miracle enough for most, but what galled people like Sébastien Roy was the fact that this new “po-folks union,” as it was often called by non-participants, was not content to merely exceed its economic mandate. It became a movement, and had embraced the idea behind the LieDeck in spite of le déluge of 2014. Most Evolutionaries had learned to live without any lying at all, or largely without it, in spite of the WDA's international ban of the device. They behaved “as if” the LieDeck device were available to all. They had their stupidly named “fuss groups,” sort of a hyper-mediation process, and recently they had begun experimenting with “simLV,” or “simulated LieDeck-verification,” in order to root out even the slightest of fibs. And now, of course, they could go to any WDA agent and get to the truth about anything, using an actual LieDeck. Not that they did it very often. It seemed that among Evolutionaries, there was little need for this new WDA service!
But it wasn't even the airs of superiority surrounding this Evolutionary reality that bugged Sébastien the most—it was their recently-renewed dedication to what they called “Human Three Consciousness.” There were always some Evolutionaries on that kick, but now they were almost all into it, full bore, full tilt. The three stages of life had always been childhood, adolescence and adulthood. Now, these “phase 2” Evolutionaries, as they piously called themselves, had a different view of life. Babyhood and early childhood were included in their “Human one” designation, but then later childhood, adolescence, and even adulthood were all bunched together into their “Human Two” classification. Sébastien Roy was a teacher of math. To him it was simple. For anything desirable, from dollars to orgasms, more was better. Three was better than two, and two was better than one. The Evolutionary notion of Human Three Consciousness struck many in the Normal community as some kind of massive ego trip. There was even a small international group of several thousand former Human Threes, men and women who claimed to have been “deprogrammed” from what they said was a “cult.” These people even called themselves Human Fours, and specialized in trash-talking Evolution—not that anyone paid them any mind. Since the partial unbanning of the LieDeck, almost all of them had been exposed as current or former WDA moles.
Bottom line, he thought; it's just insulting for these people to view a mature human being as someone who suffers from arrested development in
the adolescent stage of life.
"Did I do it right?” came a small voice from one of the two girls in his group.
Sébastien snapped out of his toxic reverie. He had no idea what the kid was referring to, and that pissed him off. They were trying to include him, a teacher, in the classroom dynamic! They were also quick as hummingbirds ... the twerps. They knew his head was somewhere far away, and they surely knew he was ... what did they call it? Fussing! In fact, if he didn't grab hold of the situation and assert himself soon, one of his little proto-humans would get up and start massaging his knotted-up shoulders! He really hated it when they did that—absolutely despised the physical liberties these kids took ... with him and with each other ... and took for granted. This kind of condescension was hard enough to deal with from his colleagues or contemporaries, but from a ten-year-old, it was infuriating.
"I was ... fussing,” he admitted sheepishly. There was no future in pretending with these little mind-readers. “I'm ... sorry,” he added, and surprised himself to realize that he really was sorry—for himself more than them, granted, but sorry nonetheless, and not entirely for himself! “If you will excuse me, I'm going to the teachers’ room for a break,” he said. “To get rid of my fuss,” he finally confessed to the six clear young eyes that were watching his slow mutation with fascination and pleasure. They may be kids, he said to himself as he stood up and turned his back to their knowing stares, but they're way ahead of me in this transition thing. I hate them all. No I don't; yes I do; no I don't; yes I do.
Sébastien left the classroom, closed the door, and sighed quietly in the knowledge that more real learning would go on in his absence than in his presence. Fusses got in the way of education (among other things), but it used to be kids that fussed, not teachers, and certainly not him. He walked down the unlit hall, past the low-set water fountains and the endless rows of curiously unlocked lockers. He arrived at the open door of the teachers’ room, and stopped short before those inside could see him. Two other teachers, paid teachers, were kicking around issues of law and politics. I'm eavesdropping! he realized, with a major overdose of chagrin. Neither of them would say a word different if I'd walked right in, he knew. I never felt so fucking old in my life.
He went in—strode in, really, to avoid confessing his venial sin. They both said hi, and he sensed immediately that they knew. They don't know, he thought. It's just guilt telling me that, he said to himself. “You'll never guess ... what I just did,” he said as he poured himself a cup of hot coffee. “I—uh—well ... I stood outside the door listening,” he said through a forced laugh.
Their laughter wasn't forced. It was loud and uninhibited. “We all did that at first,” they both said, along with variations on the theme and a few short anecdotes. Sébastien was coming to actually like these people, these Human Threes, in spite of himself, and there were times—like now—when being in transition didn't piss him off.
"You serious about this ‘new world order’ thing you're always going on about?” he asked them as he stirred his coffee. He knew immediately that his spontaneous choice of the words—"always going on about"—was rather derisive, critical, unwarranted, nasty ... and revealing. “Sorry,” he said, chuckling at his own expense.
The two teachers were in the “consciousness development” program, the curriculum that Evolutionaries had set up to mould their little clumps of obsessive angst into proud, polished, give-a-damn Human Threes ... some of them as early as age twelve! They were both long-time Human Threes themselves, and they were so freaking “nice” that at times Sébastien wanted to just puke.
One was Leo Papadopoulos, a heavily bearded, fiftyish, Greek guy ... man of Greek heritage, Sébastien corrected his vocabulary internally ... with blue tattoos that never let him forget his youthful involvement with organized crime (for which Leo had apparently served eight years of very hard labor). The other was a way-too-pert late-forty-something woman named Beth—maybe early fifties—who had apparently slept with every straight male pal she'd ever made (and any willing females), and just plain loved to talk about it ... courteously, of course. Sébastien found Beth entirely attractive and intriguing, but she scared him to death. He often felt she was trying to befriend him, and while he welcomed her subtle advances, he was just not up for a fling with a Human Three. His bugaboo used to be “performance anxiety.” He knew that was a non-issue for Beth and her ilk, but he was mortified by the impotence that had bedeviled him since his wife had flown the coop with “that rich British fucker,” as Sébastien had often called him from the second beer on. He'd actually stopped drinking when he went back to teaching, but as far as he knew, old Mr. Wiggly still wouldn't stand at attention. Try as I may, he thought ruefully as he took a seat at the round table and remembered his three unfruitful forays into the weird world of Netsex. “Don't let me interrupt,” he said politely, referring to their political debate, now long lost because of the arrival of a ... what am I to them? he asked himself. An adolescent?
"We were just plotting the course of the Quiet Revolution,” said Beth. “Everybody's doing it on the Net now—and it's gotten so big that they're even using capital letters to spell it out now, like we do now for the French Revolution or the American Revolution or the LieDeck Revolution. In fact most people—us Evolutionaries anyway—see this Quiet Revolution as a natural second stage of the continuing or on-going LieDeck Revolution, something that would have happened nineteen years ago had it not been for the WDA and their idiotic decision to ban the LieDeck for civilian use."
"We might not even be here if the WDA hadn't emerged to outlaw war and end all crime and terrorism,” said Sébastien after he swallowed his first sip of coffee. He was right, of course, as any Evolutionary would readily concede, but he'd said his piece in the manner of a point-scorer, an advocate of the Normal side, an opponent of the very thing he was now grudgingly embracing—or at least trying out, experimenting with.
"Bullshit,” said Beth.
Sébastien felt his face go rosy, and his mind raced to phrase his next parry, his deft counterpunch. It went all the way to fire engine florid before he caught the glint in Beth's eye. Cajoling a person was apparently kosher as a means of encouraging Human Three Consciousness, but Sébastien Roy hated being roughed up emotionally ... well, he hated it when it worked this well. He smiled at her zinger, and she burst out laughing.
"Absolutely true,” she corrected her opinion. “The WDA, as we know it now, was ... was historically necessary, but now, so is its reform."
Sébastien leaned back, and wondered at how his intense reaction to her fake jab had faded from his face and found a new home in between his legs. Like when I met Julia Whiteside, he mused, remembering his embarrassing act of gratuitous petulance at the Victor-E SST, the free store, or whatever they called it. “I just don't see why it has to be enshrined in law,” he said to Beth ... and Leo, he added mentally as he looked at “the Greek” momentarily, to indicate his belated inclusion. He didn't think he'd ever adjust to the hypersensitive accommodations that were the way of the Human Three, although he never failed to recognize the need for them when he was the recipient. And I appreciate them as well, he acknowledged in his mind.
"Ever see that old twentieth-century movie Camelot?” asked Leo.
"Yeah,” said Sébastien, bracing himself for yet another Human Three “lecture."
"Human Two got us past the ‘law of the jungle’ a few centuries ago by proscribing—outlawing—Human One behaviors that—"
I know what “proscribing” means, Sébastien muttered inside, realizing too late that his body language had signaled his defensive reaction. Leo had simply stopped talking, and Sébastien ran a hand down his shaven face to indicate that he'd caught the emotional culprit, handcuffed the bugger, incarcerated, tried, convicted and executed the fucker, and didn't need or want to review his internal battle. “You were saying?” he invited.
"Some people really didn't like that, didn't approve of the introduction of laws and courts,�
� continued Leo, “but that was really their tough luck. The era of Human One was over. In time, the great majority of Human Twos simply didn't rape or pillage any more, not precisely because the law proscribed it, but more or less because their consciousness had gotten past the ‘might is right’ assumption, and they saw the wisdom of resolving all conflicts through law. There was still some crime, of course, and ... and—"
"And as little as twenty-five years ago,” interjected Beth, “there were still some South American countries that allowed ‘crimes of passion.’ Your wife cheats on you; you kill her and the guy; you explain to the judge that you pretty well had to do it, considering the shame they had brought upon you and your family, and the judge says he understands, and he lets you go with a couple of weeks in jail and a substantial fine, basically writing off the double homicide as a matter of honor. Nice, eh?"
Sébastien didn't know that, and he saw her point. He was reminded of a fact he did know, and that had been ground into him by his mother—that in Canada, up until 1929, women had been considered non-persons in law, chattels, mere “things” that were meant to be owned ... by men, natch.
"Anyway,” Leo restarted his case, “there's still some crime committed today by the last remaining Human Ones ... or should I say those who think they have the right to act Human One whenever they feel like it, but the WDA pretty much put a stop to all that. Would-be Human Ones are now forced to conform to minimum Human Two standards and live within minimum Human Two expectations. For these people, fear of arrest and punishment is still a deciding factor, but eventually, deterrence will be rendered obsolete and unnecessary by a higher consciousness, by Human Two Consciousness, this in spite of the resistance by these would-be Human Ones to what they see as runaway servitude to a ridiculous and confining ‘political correctness’ fetish."