Take this one: For a long time there was a network of well-entrenched upper-class child molesters in upstate New York. Like a lot of upper-class would-be villains, they dabbled in the occult. We try to discourage that when it’s done by people who hold positions of influence, and some of these folks did. Money supply management is bad enough when people are being rational. A little voodoo bullshit behind the scenes only reinforces the popular belief that economics can’t be rational, and sets our plans for a sensible world back that much more. Just as we were about to take more thorough action, the leaders of the cabal all died violently within a few weeks of each other, in deaths with a lot of occult trappings. Something for us to be concerned about? No, it turns out, just victims and relatives of victims sharing the same regional superstitions and acting accordingly. I handed the rest off to a media management team, who made the perpetrators look both deserving and foolish.
Other patterns are emerging all the time. Unusual quantities of shipping lost in the Mediterranean? That’s piracy, using higher than usual technology, possibly including someone’s old military hardware sold illicitly. The visible authorities won’t get that one; I assign a field team to investigate.
A marked rise in—1 blink for a moment at this one—adherents of Native American shamanism whose devotees claim a bond with the Great Turtle Spirit. That’s odd and, on the evidence of past pan-tribal activism, potentially dangerous. We’ll use the US government to poke on them from one side and try some culture jamming from the other.
Tribalistic ritual violence in the Balkans, going on mostly just beyond the boundaries of UN-patrolled core territories: worth investigating. The last thing we need is another damn bunch of Dracula wannabes out to build their own secret kingdom. And so forth and so on.
Day after day after day goes by like this. I find enough of a concentration of weirdness in the Balkans that I decide I should go investigate there in person. Time to book some flights.
* * *
MING XIAN
I wake after a night of troubled dreams, filled with the war between yin and yang, to the sound of someone outside the empty warehouse I chose to rest in. When I look at my watch, I realize that it’s Wednesday, time for the People’s Armed Police to post the weekly list of people wanted for questioning. I’ll look at it once I’m up.
I’m accustomed to sleeping with very minimal comfort while in the field. This isn’t like that. Buildings are made for furniture, with deliberate lack of concession to comfort in the frames and foundations. I found some burlap bags that weren't too disgusting and made a support for my head and a lining over the floor for the rest of my body, and I found an out-of-the-way niche to do it in. Sometime around midnight, a trio of local drifters staggered in and spent the night in long and often tearful conversation, just inside the front door. It was drunkards’ conversation, full of drifting allusions to bosses who’d done them wrong, women who’d done them wrong, friends who weren’t around anymore, and the endless minutiae of whatever brew it was they were drinking. A floor above and well out of sight, I kept quiet and wasn’t disturbed, but I didn’t rest much.
The trio drifted out right around sunrise. To work? I sincerely hope not, but I have a terrible suspicion that it's so. It’s not like these would be the first exhausted drunkards laboring in the service of some people’s enterprise. My father’s shop had them, and I remember the beatings that his union officers used to administer every Saturday night when they didn’t want to bring the grievance resolution committee into it. In any event, all around me I can hear the neighborhood (and the city beyond) stirring to morning life.
I sit for a while on the floor, out of line of sight with the street, studying the rooftops of the next block over and the cluster of relay towers just past them. I’m accustomed to seeing things in terms of their quiet, darkness, and dissolution. The yin realm receives all substance into itself as form fails, and the shape of a thing’s grave is implicit in its first breaths and steps. Ever since my first awakening into the workings of magic, I’ve seen the latter part of each thing’s Way—not its beginnings or its growth, which remain mysteries to me, but its weakness and passing. Now I see the rest, and it’s tremendously confusing to me. The Way makes sense, when you understand it, but I haven’t been granted wisdom along with this sight.
After I first became a girl, I’d sometimes hear voices from the yin realms whispering in suitable places: in the branches of dead trees, in dark corridors, just before sleep. They explained things to me, over the years. There’s nothing comparable with this new awareness of the yang realms. I hear sounds, very loud ones sometimes, but no voices, no narrative or definition. I am neither accustomed to hearing roofs shout to each other as the sun first strikes them, nor to the peculiarly musical cacophony of engines burning fossil fuels and releasing scraps of nearly pure yang back into the world at large. It’s not unnatural in the way that a great sin is; it’s just new and strange and hard to deal with. I cannot yet speak in terms that yang spirits understand, though they can sense at least some of my emotions.
In the midst of all this, the police go by below, nailing up their signs. I manage to close my inner ears and eyes to at least most of the yang torrent, so that I can walk in the mundane world without too much difficulty. Downstairs, I gather my coat around me and step out to see whom the PAP wants now.
Me.
Right after an entry for two murderers, there’s one with my name and picture. I’m described as a terrorist and dealer in controlled weaponry, associated with the rather brutal independence extremists in the western provinces. They have a picture of me at a conference last year, standing alongside two of those would-be rulers of a free Uygur state, all of us smiling a little. I remember the occasion, but not the photographer. How often does it ever matter?
The Wu Keng can move quickly when they must. I presume that one of their spiritual spies detected some disturbance associated with my reawakening and managed to get to contacts in the police while the drunkards interfered with my sleep. It wouldn’t be that hard—the declaration is fairly typical, there being no shortage of violent separatists and the crime itself being one that doesn’t require anything like extensive justification or explanation. Any typical resident of Beijing who sees the notice and sees me will quite sensibly go to the police, not wanting to run even a small risk of being blown up by someone making a point about homelands. And the penalties for collaboration with accused terrorists are so harsh that the pool of underworld experts who will now be willing to cooperate with me is much smaller than it would have been otherwise.
I already knew I wanted to return to the place where I meet with my ancestors. Now I also want to get as far west as I can as fast as I can, away from the power of the Wu Keng, away from the power of the vast government with its own agendas. This may be hard.
* * *
ROBERT FEW THINGS ARE AS UNPLEASANT TO DEAL WITH AS A GENERAL SENSE OF FATE. THE MILLENNIUM OF THE CHRISTIAN CALENDAR IS WELL PAST US, AND I DON’T HEAR A LOT OF talk about impending doom or anything like that. But I notice extra weariness at work. There’s a sharpening of underlying tensions, but no obvious targets or triggers.
Not long after my rather forcible awakening, I went on a trip to Brazil and Ecuador, following dream messages sent by an older shaman who’d been chosen to be my mentor. In turn, he introduced me to some others, recognizing that his own obsession with fighting the Technocratic Union in a one-man guerilla war made him at least biased, though not altogether unreliable. I remember an old woman in the jungles south of Macondo, Colombia. She wouldn’t discuss anything touching on women’s secrets, and I already knew enough not to push whenever she went silent. We still had plenty to talk about, including monsters and immigrants.
She wanted me to think about how it would feel to lead the life chosen for me. Shamanic life isolates you from the rest of your community, even as duty ties you back to it in new ways. On the individual level, she said, I’d be going through what immigrants do as fami
lies and communities when they arrive in another land. Most of the time, the local authorities take little interest in their wellbeing—assuming such officials aren’t actively malevolent predators in their own right. The newcomers must band together to provide their own justice and peace, such as may be. This is where militias, gangs and political machines all come from. The newcomers create, if they can, a society of their own within the society at large.
If the members of the community succeed in the right ways, they and their descendants become assimilated into their surroundings. The walls of the ghetto weaken thanks to a flow of ideas and personal bonds both in and out. Children take to living in their own ways, and the ghetto changes from a tool of survival to a simple instrument of cultural pride. That’s if it can work, of course; in much of the world, some peoples must continue to live in their ghettos, generation after generation, without any hope of improvement until something changes within the resisting dominant culture.
Europeans and Americans don’t like to think of themselves as subject to anything of the sort. We’re the people that others assimilate to, or so we tell ourselves. But we are also outsiders and victims, the hapless pawns of what this Columbian shaman called the “night society, ” all the monsters and inhuman forces who prey upon us. Our inward-turning paranoia, our reluctance to leave the neighborhoods we grew up in except for very specific tasks elsewhere, our problems with gangs, these are all ways we deal with a threat we do not properly know and can’t even name. What the white North is to the rest of the world, the night society is to us, and more so because it flourishes outside any sort of public, conscious scrutiny.
I remember her comments now because I think something’s stirring the American spirit again. The night society is up to something of its own, and agitating their unwitting mortal subjects in the process. As I drive from New York down to West Virginia, I sense these not-quite-human agitations everywhere, and the ripples from those disturbances make life unpleasant for human souls and the spirits that dwell alongside them. I smell fear in the houses, dread in the streets, doubt along the highways, more so than ever before. Nowhere is it as intense as it was in New York in September, 2001, but unlike then, it’s ubiquitous: every single town and village seems to have something of its own to dread. It’s not the same sort of thing everywhere, either. Here it’s vampires playing their long games of undead politics. There it’s ghosts fleeing some disturbance as urgently as my future-fearing spirits flee theirs. Always changing, but always the same dread.
This puts my immediate problem in a different light. “The city that might be” that the Rubbish speaks of could be the city if it’s more thoroughly under the night society’s rule. Or less so, I guess. But this doesn’t feel like an impending liberation: spirits at last free to be themselves without fear of supernatural slavery wouldn’t be running like that unless they were all quisling allies of the night society, and they weren’t. There’s more dread and less joy coming up.
As I drive, the Rubbishes manifest every few minutes somewhere near the road. I don’t think any of my fellow drivers notice mounds of trash waving cheerfully in our direction. I hope not, at least. They have enough things to deal with already.
* * *
WILLIAM
Flying on commercial airlines when you’re paraplegic is a hassle at the best of times, and of course I don’t fly at the best of times. You have to book a top-of-the-line first class seat, and then usually make additional arrangements, if you rely on anything at all outside the narrow range of mobility aids stewardesses get trained to work with. When they recruited me for Project Ragnarok, one of the promises they made was that I wouldn’t have to put up with that, because if I had to go somewhere beyond driving range, I’d go custom.
Naturally, that was another lie. Custom flights work out just under half the time. That puts me ahead of most of my colleagues, who count themselves lucky to get one custom flight in five, but it’s still a fucking nuisance at a time and in circumstances that absolutely do not need any more nuisances at all.
I spend two and a half hours cooling my heels in Atlanta before deciding to take matters into my own hands. After all, they hired me because I’m a good hacker— Twenty minutes and thirty seconds later, the last three telemarketing firms to try bothering my home number (all duly logged and misdirected until they gave up, thanks to the ELIZA-based counter-interrogative system) are each poorer by six figures. The money cascades through a whole slew of temporary accounts and ends up not in any of my personal accounts but in one of the disposable credit cards they give us for field ops like this. With that I can (and do) book a charter through Brussels to Tuzla, Bosnia, and hire a pilot, a local kid I’ve worked with before. He thinks I’m a drug runner, and I let him keep on thinking that, since a comfortably familiar secret is much better than anything unusual.
Doc Halloway notices it, or rather one of our security systems does and alerts him. We have a frank exchange of views, ending in my expressed wish that he give his life in the cause of fulfilling the sodomite impulses of cougars and bears and his wish in return that my fingers join my legs in uselessness. The crucial thing is that he lets me do it. I don’t comment on that and he doesn’t either. As long as I get results, I can get away with things like this. One day, I suppose, I’ll fall short, and then it’ll be all up, but not yet. Not yet.
Now this is the way to travel, I think for a moment. It would be nice in some ways not to have to do it with quite that kind of funding, but then that’s the occupational hazard of working for a group that doesn’t officially exist. The Technocratic Union is scarcely even anyone’s boogieman. The handful of unfortunately insightful observers who notice us or figure us out analytically are pretty much all by nature also inclined toward errors of judgment in the direction of overall wackiness, and the truth gets lost in assertions about the Bilderbergers, what really happened to John Lennon, how many frames are missing from the Zapruder Film, and when the Commonwealth Bank of Australia began devoting some of its basement to organ farms. So that’s okay, but it’s only part of the problem.
In the past we’ve sometimes operated as bogus offices of real agencies, public and private, but it doesn’t quite work. Any agency large enough to hide us is large enough to have at least one damnably control-resistant nimrod who will stumble onto the irregularities and feel compelled to do something about it. You can find the traces of our wreckage in the history books, if you know how to read between the lines of major scandals. We always ended up having to set up some patsies with boring but exploitable secrets so that we could make our getaway while they held the media spotlight. (And anyone who thinks there wasn’t a media spotlight in the 1890s or 1920s really doesn’t know that much. ) Even when the cover works, there’s administrative overhead, and there are temptations there, too. We can get distracted from our mission just like everyone else, and when we do, it’s not just the Union that suffers, it’s the world.
These are the thoughts that race across the upper reaches of my conscious perception as we fly. I find myself seeing the organizational flaws (and strengths, where there are any) much more clearly than ever before. It’s not just a metaphorical application of the kind of network analysis I do in debugging distributed software, but a much closer identity. We always speak of the machine in the self, the world machine, and so on, but we don’t usually mean anything as vivid and interesting as I understand now. I get out my laptop and start sketching designs based on the multilevel inheritance structures I understand now, and briefly think that there’s something genuinely revolutionary in here.
Alas, the moment fades somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. I become tired, and the patterns of thought become disorganized again. I lapse from the heights back down to something more ordinary. Ordinary for me, admittedly, which is still extraordinary for the masses, who’ll never reach even that far without genetic re-engineering and/or significant computational enhancement of neurology, but after where I’ve just been it's a long way down. I break my g
rowing depression with a little self-critical humor. “I can feel it, Dave. My mind is going. There’s no question. ” Meanwhile, the mission is still waiting.
One of the most important steps the Union ever made in the advancement of science came in the 1880s, when a small group of biologists based in Paris demonstrated that “vampirism” conforms to the standard principles of epidemiology. Before then, my predecessors had certainly felt sure that this was the case because, well, it’s a scientific world, but they hadn’t known. The symptoms of the disease are so varied and so downright strange, involving commensurate relations between an essentially dead human host and a very unusual animating parasite, that it took many researchers over many decades simply to establish that that there are blood-chemistry markers all vampires carry and no one else does (unless they've somehow ingested blood from the infected). The transmission vectors are tricky, too, involving what amounts to a near-death experience most of the time but with a secondary mode that lets the parasite interact more weakly with the host without the fullblown range of symptoms.
The next formal breakthrough (as opposed to the accumulation of specific data and minor insights, which are both important but not the same thing as real paradigm development) didn’t happen until after World War II. That was a bad time for the Union, to put it mildly. Either a majority or a strong plurality of the most senior leadership had committed itself to the Axis powers. Damn fools. They were seduced by the appeal of fascism, and resolutely ignored that already-existing body of theoretical study by people like von Mises and Hayek as well as the practical experience of Prussia and other nations showing that strong central control simply doesn’t work. Period. The knowledge necessary for a flourishing system of self-directed agents, whether they’re people or software or something else, is diffused all through the system, and there is simply no privileged vantage point that allows any one agent to know what all the others do.
World of Darkness - Time of Judgement - Mage Page 8