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by Bryan Hurt

  When you get back from lunch, there is another envelope on your desk. You do the whole thing with the thumb, and the breath and the breaking of the seal and all of that, and you slide the picture out. It’s Carol. The note at the bottom explains that you are not to investigate Carol (except to the extent necessary or unavoidable in connection with your investigation of Henry). This communication is merely to inform you that Carol is investigating you. You quickly reassess the division of knowledge. Carol, if she is looking into your file, knows you are investigating Henry. And therefore investigating her, albeit indirectly. And now you know that she knows that. And you also know that she doesn’t know that you know she knows. You need to figure that out, or you might be fired. Or killed. You are thinking of getting a snack from the vending machine. Either the one-hundred-calorie snack package of Wheat Thins or a package of Lorna Doones. Carol pops her head into the cubicle. What’s up, rook? she says. That’s what her mouth says, anyway. Again with the leakage. You look at your desk, but the image of her has already faded to white. Now you’re no longer sure whether she knows you know she knows. This uncertainty about the exact epistemological environment could mean big trouble for you down the road. How you handle this could lead to a major breakthrough in your investigation, or to your downfall at the Division. You choose the Lorna Doones, because why not. Life’s too short to count calories all the time.

  You’re in an elevator with Henry. You think about saying something to him. What would you say, though? I know things about you. That’s not true. You don’t. You know things about what he does and does not know about Carol. What would that accomplish? You just like the fact that you are on one side of a wall, and he is on the other, and he doesn’t know there is a wall there. Everyone in the Division initially enjoys this part of the job, and then eventually comes to feel conflicted about it. On the one hand, the human condition is already so isolating, to celebrate the systematized compartmentalization of knowledge and awareness among a large group of people for the purpose of maximizing control and informational leakage seems, at best, insensitive. On the other hand, Henry kind of deserves it. Carol steps onto the elevator, along with another woman, whom you have not yet met. Henry nods to Carol and the other woman and steps off. You stand there silently, as the elevator goes from the seventeenth floor to the forty-seventh, staring at the back of Carol’s head.

  The new woman’s name is Donna. She has just transferred to the Division. You see Donna in the lobby sometimes, or rather, right outside it, near the ashtray, smoking a cigarette. Previously, she was an operative in the field. You know this because Henry has been assigned to investigate Donna, and what he learns about her makes its way into your file on Henry. You are now a Four, and Henry is now a Six. Carol has progressed above the number clearances and is now into the Greek letters. There are five levels of those clearances, Epsilon, Delta, Gamma, Beta, and Alpha. After Alpha there are more levels but your level of clearance doesn’t allow you to even know the names of clearances above Alpha. Needless to say, Alpha is pretty high. Carol is at Epsilon, which is not as high, but still way higher than you are likely to ever get. You start to feel resentful about your situation. Low on the totem pole, and yet, by virtue of this odd circumstance, functionally much higher than your clearance. You don’t know anything. All you know is what the people above you don’t know. It’s as if everyone who works at the Division is standing in front of a huge viewing window, looking out into some kind of vista. You can imagine what Henry and Carol and Donna are looking at. The grandeur, the absolute incontrovertibility of the brute fact of nature. They can see out the window. And all you can see is the backs of their heads. You are trapped behind them, for some reason, or maybe no reason. And yet despite the wide gulf of disparity between your point of view and theirs, you know something about each of them that none of them can ever experience in the same way that you do. You know what they look like from the back. Donna’s preferred cigarettes are Parliaments, although she’ll accept almost anything if she’s bumming off of someone else. Sometimes, you have noticed, Donna smokes two in a row, especially if she is talking to Henry.

  Terro(tour)istas

  by Juan Pablo Villalobos

  translated by Annie McDermott

  This story begins when João sees a photo of the K2 mountain on Facebook. We’ll call him João instead of using his real name in order to respect, at the very least, that minuscule detail of his privacy. Next to the photo is the phrase: “Mountains are not fair or unfair, they’re just dangerous.” Both the photo and the phrase were posted by Paulo, who, by the looks of things, is a fan of mountains but not of intellectual property: he doesn’t say who the author of the phrase is. Some of his Facebook “friends,” especially the ones who don’t know him in “real life,” could even come to believe that Paulo himself is the author of the phrase, that Paulo himself has scaled the K2 in “real life,” and that, as he stood on the summit, his face lashed by the icy Himalayan winds, the mountain muses whispered that profoundest of thoughts into his ear. A thought of a profundity inversely proportional to the height of the K2. And yet, Paulo is a sedentary character. Paulo has not scaled the K2, and neither has he left his city in the past three years. To tell the truth, he has hardly even left his house. Indeed, the K2 mountain is located more than fifteen thousand kilometers away from where Paulo is currently resting his behind, his eyes on his computer screen. That sets alarm bells going in Some Place in the Empire. That and the fact that João, who really did like the photo and the phrase, has clicked “like.” And take note: João is the only person who has liked the photo. A photo that beautiful and a phrase that profound, of a profundity inversely proportional to the height of the K2, and only one like? Very suspicious. Tremendously suspicious. Or rather: terrifyingly suspicious. For one thing, because João and Pablo live in different cities and, according to the records kept by The System in Some Place in the Empire, they haven’t seen each other for ten years, not since João was nineteen years old and Paulo was eighteen.

  The System sets its algorithms running and detects three terribly serious issues that could result in a Threat to National Security. To the National Security of the Empire, that is, which is the only kind that matters.

  Firstly, that João and Paulo met in Porto Alegre (they’re Brazilian), at the World Social Forum: that hotbed of revolutionaries of various kinds, including communists, eco-warriors, cannabis smokers, landless farmers, defenders-of-Fidel-Castro-and-Hugo-Chávez, greens, pro-Palestinians, vegans, union members, peasants, university students, and so on and so forth.

  Secondly, that the K2 is located on the border of Pakistan, Kashmir, and China. In the so-called Northern Regions of Pakistan, also known as Gilgit-Baltistan, a gunpowder barrel crowned by snowcapped mountains. There are only two things there: terrorists and tourists.

  The third problem is rhetorical: the use of the adjectives “fair” and “unfair,” which refer to the fairness/unfairness dichotomy. Classic anti-imperialist rhetoric.

  Three coinciding factors: alarms sound in Some Place in the Empire. Are João and Paulo potential tourists or actual terrorists?

  Whatever the answer to that might be, something must be done urgently. One of two things: either detaining and torturing them immediately to extract the information about their terrifying terrorist plans, or unleashing a spam attack of all-inclusive travel packages to the Himalayas.

  Who will take responsibility for deciding? An analyst from The System, whom we’ll call Anyone.

  João and Paulo are Latin American, and that puts Anyone on the defensive: he knows only too well the kind of third-world anti-imperialist resentment that can build up in countries like that. Resentment that could easily fill the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans to overflowing. Resentment that so often turns into anger, anger that is then channeled in just the same way as the anger of terrorists.

  Anyone is a specialist in Latin American resentment and anger, which is why the alert was assigned to him and not
to any of the other thousands of Anyones who manage The System. He’s just the man for the job: on September 11, 2001, when he was an exchange student in a Latin American country, he saw on television how the twin towers collapsed amid the applause and cheers of no small number of students and, worse, teachers. The union of Latin American resentment and anger with terrorist resentment and anger seems quite plausible to him. What’s more, he’s been expecting it for years. So Anyone postpones what he’s doing (following the trail of a girl in Guatemala who has been obsessively visiting Nepalese handicraft websites, among them the website of an NGO funded by a shady Qatari emir, and combing the biography of an old man in Venezuela—oh, Venezuela!—who just this morning, moments after waking up, tweeted something that Yasser Arafat said in 1963), and makes a start on the new investigation.

  There are no emails between João and Paulo. João uses Twitter and Paulo does not. Paulo uses Google+ and João does not. Trawling through the other Subsystems (YouTube, Flickr, Instagram, Candy Crush, Match.com, Ashley Madison, Gaydar, etc.) doesn’t reveal anything interesting. For the time being, the only link between the two of them is Facebook. Anyone thinks once again, as he always thinks, that The System could not have invented anything more perfect than the Subsystem Facebook: information that agents of The System would once have had to kill themselves to get hold of, people now distribute quite contentedly of their own accord.

  Anyone builds up a profile of João using the Multi-Platform Method: that is, with the information gleaned from all the Subsystems that João uses. João is twenty-nine years old, mixed-race, heterosexual, married, with a two-year-old son, a degree in communications, and a job in an advertising agency . . . Then comes all his contact information, followed by his favorite brands of chocolate and shampoo. Et cetera.

  Paulo’s profile: twenty-eight years old, white, homosexual (alert!), single, no children, a degree in journalism, a doctorate in social anthropology (alert!), has lived in five different cities on two continents (alert!), works freelance for various magazines and newspapers (alert!), et cetera. The System also informs him that over the past ten years, Paulo has spent an average of fourteen hours a day connected to the Internet. That is to say, he moves between cities and countries only to remain shut up in his bedroom. He belongs to a tribe that postmodernity has named “sedentary nomads” (alert!).

  João and Paulo have been Facebook friends for just eleven months. Why? Why did they get back in touch only now if they’ve known each other for ten years? This is very interesting indeed: if something’s going on, some terrorific and terrifying plan in which both João and Paulo are to play a part, this plan is already in progress. This plan has been in progress for at least eleven months.

  Let’s see. Friends in common . . .

  Bingo!

  A certain “W.H.” appears on the scene, a Tunisian who lives in . . . Mexico!

  In a city on the border!

  Questions shoot into Anyone’s mind: What on earth is a Tunisian doing in Mexico? How many Tunisians can there possibly be in Mexico for conventional reasons?

  Anyone upgrades the alert to the next level. It’s all too much for him, this Tunisian who lives on the border of Mexico with the United States, connected to two left-wing Brazilians who are “interested” in Pakistan. But let’s not forget the really crucial information: Anyone has just won a bonus for finding a case involving sufficient coincidences for it to be analyzed by the next-level analysts. The bonus, of course, is paid in delicious dollars.

  The alert reaches a more highly qualified and terribly perspicacious analyst, let’s say he’s called Somebody. Somebody immediately stops what he is doing (infecting the computer of a Jamaican singer with spyware) and directs his attention to W.H. (last night, at a show in a little bar in Amsterdam, the Jamaican singer performed a cover of a song that is, without question, an apologia for revolutionary violence).

  And oh, oh! The analysis of W.H.’s Facebook wall reveals that he took a contradictory attitude to the Arab Spring. Sometimes he was in favor of it and sometimes he was against; at points he was moderate, at others conservative, at others radical . . . It was as if he were trying to come across as a normal person! Tremendously suspicious. Or rather: terrifyingly suspicious. And what had he gone to Mexico for? How on earth had a Tunisian guy ended up in Mexico? Facebook knows this as well: W.H. wants to live out his sexual preferences in peace. W.H. has a Mexican boyfriend whom he met in Barcelona.

  The big question now is: How do João, Paulo, and W.H. know each other?

  Somebody fires up the Historic Location-Mapping Cross-Referencer Program. It takes a while to display the results, so Somebody has a quick look to see if there are any new selfies from that twenty-one-year-old Swedish girl. The Swedish girl takes photos of herself in the bathroom mirror and sends them to her boyfriend via WhatsApp—so bold! But there’s nothing. Bullshit. And then the alarm sounds.

  Aha!

  Paulo and W.H. took the Memory and Holocaust seminar together in the Autonomous University of Barcelona seven years ago. Somebody is unsure that this is enough to justify calling his contact in the Mossad (it would get him a few pennies more, but shhhh, keep it under your hat). By the looks of things, João and W.H. don’t know each other in person, and are Facebook friends through Paulo, their friend in common.

  Well then, who is W.H.? Somebody reads the profile that Anyone has prepared for him: twenty-nine years old, Maghrebi (alert!), homosexual (alert!) . . . and so on. Then he sees: W.H. was in Pakistan a year ago!

  It’s a Maghrebi-Latin-American-gay-terrorist conspiracy!

  This isn’t a matter for Somebody: more than two oppressed minorities at once, as a source of anger and resentment and a motive for a conspiracy, is high-grade stuff. This must go to the next level, where another analyst, let’s say Someone, will take charge of analyzing it.

  Somebody, by the way, has also just received a bonus. A bonus paid, as you can guess, with money from The Empire’s taxpayers.

  At the moment when Someone receives the dossier, which is headed GAY-TERRORIST-LATIN-AMERICAN-MAGHREBI CONSPIRACY THREATENS NATIONAL SECURITY, things start to snowball. Now it’s João who’s posting a photo of a mountain in Pakistan on Facebook. The photo isn’t accompanied by a phrase this time: João just posts the image of the snowy mountain. Pretty, isn’t it? Someone waits, holding his breath, for a sign that will reveal to him the meaning of this activity, and he doesn’t have to wait long, in fact he has to wait only seven minutes, before Paulo clicks “like” and, two minutes later, so does W.H.!

  Someone puts together a file containing all the information, compresses it, encrypts it, and sends it to the very Director of The System himself, from where it goes zooming to the Agency Director, the Defense Secretary, and, the next day, to the President of the Empire!

  There’s a supernatural agitation, as if they had all seen a ghost—and not the ghost of communism but rather the much-feared alliance of third-world anger with Arab terrorism and a gay revenge plot! The code breakers do not rest for a moment as they work to unravel the nefarious scheme behind that fiendishly complex strategy of photos and likes.

  The Defense Secretary knows exactly what they have to do and the President of the Empire authorizes it: three drones are sent immediately to fly above the heads of the terrorists, three drones that follow the GPS signals from the three iPhones of the three unfortunates.

  Now it all depends on the President of the Empire: if he says the word, João, Paulo, and W.H. will all be liquidated.

  The President of the Empire thinks about the diplomatic consequences. He would rather not use his beloved drones in allied countries. How he loves his drones, by the way; how fond he is of those little flying beasties! But in this case he still isn’t sure: the Brazilian president goes in pretty hard in her UN speeches, and he’d give anything not to have to talk on the phone to the Mexican president, who makes him uneasy with his incomprehensible chattering. And that hair packed full of gel!
The last time the President of the Empire saw him, his palm was left sticky after they shook hands.

  An urgent meeting is called in The System’s Control Room so a decision can be made.

  “Mr. President? We have a five-minute window,” the Defense Secretary says to the President of the Empire, as if they were inside an episode of Homeland rather than reality.

  The President of the Empire opens his mouth and is about to say, “Go.”

  “G—” says the President of the Empire.

  “Stop!” shouts a Whoever. “Stop!” he repeats.

  There is significant activity in the network. Paulo has just entered the website of a travel agency that specializes in expeditions to the Himalayas. Facebook announces that Paulo is visiting that site, and immediately João contacts him via chat: “Are you thinking of going?” he asks. “Me too! I’ve been saving up for years. Let’s do it—I need some fresh air, things at home are unbearable.” W.H. posts a message on Paulo’s wall: “I went last year, totally unmissable.”