Watchlist

by Bryan Hurt

  But the adoption of gait-and-stance recognition metrics hardly improved matters.

  But that remains the theme of another historical account.

  V

  When aliens eventually landed on Earth, and First Contact was finally a reality, no one initially predicted that their arrival would destroy civilization in precisely the manner that occurred. The extraterrestrials seemed friendly and harmless, and indeed their intentions were honest and altruistic. They brought humanity new technologies and the solutions to many of our problems, as well as information about the galactic community that stood ready to welcome us.

  But unfortunately, these aliens were natural shape-shifters.

  Basically humanoid in shape and size, dubbed “Facedancers” after such a race in an old science fiction novel, they could alter their appearance at will to resemble anyone.

  This protean gift was apparent from the first. The Facedancers did not dissemble. When the doors of their ship, parked in the middle of New York City’s First Avenue in front of the UN, opened up, a parade of dead celebrities emerged: Marilyn Monroe, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Benjamin Franklin, Michael Jackson. The Facedancers—appointed by the galactics to make First Contact with Earth specifically because of their talents for mimicry—believed that such a display of idols would put humanity at ease, and to some extent the tactic worked.

  But as the Facedancers established embassies around the world, their very existence sowed unease and paranoia.

  How could anyone be certain of the identity of anyone else? Even a trusted person of long intimacy could be a Facedancer, acting out of obscure and secret motives of impersonation. Likewise, any person could now disavow any offense. “That wasn’t me, it was a Facedancer disguised as me!”

  Civilization, based on security of identity and on trust between known individuals, started to creak and exhibit fault lines.

  When the king of England suffered a car crash, was rushed to the hospital, died, and reverted to Facedancer appearance—the baseline state of the aliens was green and with a complexly structured epidermis—the final straw on civilization’s back had been dropped. None of the protestations by the royal family and the British government that they had been cooperating with this deception (to conceal the real king’s abdication with a Las Vegas showgirl) had any effect. Neighbor turned against neighbor, parent against child, in a bloody pogrom of Facedancer accusations and slayings.

  All the real Facedancers rushed back to their ship and left the planet in haste.

  But they assured us as they left that our entrance to the galactic community, although delayed for a few centuries until our civilization recovered from this apocalypse, was still guaranteed.

  VI

  The perfection of cloaking garments that rendered their wearers invisible seemed to offer freedom from many types of public surveillance. Although one’s electronic communications could still be tapped, once out in public, unmediated by the Internet, the invisible man was king.

  The special fabric worked by bending light rays around itself, to convey vistas and images, real-time action and sights that would normally have been occluded by the presence of a person. Tiny pinhole camera lenses were the only break in the seamless clothing. These unnoticeable input devices wirelessly fed exterior sights to the special electronic goggles worn by the invisible person under their cloak, allowing the wearer to navigate through the world. At first, moving too rapidly while cloaked produced uncanny shimmering of the surrounding environment in the eyes of those looking toward the invisible person, as the smart fabric sought to refresh its display. But even this hallucinatory defect vanished with subsequent generations of the technology.

  Invisibility was the perfect solution for those who were morally opposed to having their innocent activities unnecessarily monitored, and the technology was hailed as empowering all good citizens. But it fostered many bad behaviors as well. Voyeurism soared, as did gropings. An assassins’ guild materialized: they favored knives and poisoned needles over guns, allowing for quick escapes while confusion reigned over what exactly was ailing the hapless victim with no one around. Soon no politician dared appear in public. Robberies proliferated: any stolen item brought under the cloak became invisible as well. As with so many counter- espionage technologies, this one actually fostered a new kind of easy eavesdropping.

  Vigilante action proved the only suitable response. In the beginning, people employed cans of spray paint, unleashing jets of aerosol color toward any suspected lurker. But after many lawsuits from innocent bystanders who got accidentally sprayed, the proactive citizens switched to more accurate and less staining paintball guns and, later, special bulbs of nanopowder that would cling harmlessly but blatantly to the cloaks, revealing their outlines.

  Ultimately, the development of highly sensitive and portable carbon dioxide detectors put an end to the invisibility craze.

  At least for humans. Invisible drones are all around us still.

  VII

  When the entire atmosphere of the planet was seeded with ineradicable, military-grade, self-replicating smart dust, the war against surveillance was finally lost.

  The dust penetrated everywhere, even into the securest environments, hiding in the nasal passages and other intimate crannies of otherwise disinfected individuals, and broadcast whatever it saw and heard on publicly accessible channels.

  The Totally Transparent Society was born, willy-nilly.

  Like any birth, the process was traumatic and painful. Chaos reigned for several years. But, like any infant, the TTS did not remain the same as when it first emerged.

  The people who survived the interregnum began to curate the billions of feeds from the dust: human and animal, vegetable and mineral.

  Most importantly, every living person became the star of their own reality show channel, shaped by themselves or others.

  All forms of fictional entertainment went extinct in the face of being able to share the candid lives of one’s fellow citizens. So did all nature shows, as audiences became privy to the most intimate moments of wildlife, like watching old-fashioned urban hawk-cams ramped up by several orders of magnitude.

  Surprisingly, no lynch mobs or finger-wagging shaming conditions obtained when inevitable feedback ensued. Stones could be thrown only when one’s own sins remained hidden, and that state of being was impossible.

  Nonetheless, for some strange reason, even without public censure, individual behavior—and, consequently, corporate and government communal behaviors—began to grow more ethical. Experts puzzled over the reasons for such improvements, and then decided that brand maintenance was the answer. Having become, even if only informally, publicly traded commodities with audiences and market shares, each person was focused on not alienating their fans with egregious misbehaviors.

  Except, of course, if one’s persona was that of a “bad boy” or “bad girl.”

  Then, of course, it was a race to the bottom.

  VIII

  The wearing of uniform Guy Fawkes masks by protestors worldwide, intended to stymie identification and indicate a commonality of purpose, reached an inevitable conclusion when nano-based flesh-sculpting was finally perfected. The eventuality that came about in real life had been partially foreseen by a twentieth-century science fiction writer named John Varley, who predicted a cult in which all members subjected themselves to an androgynous full-body makeover to encourage solidarity.

  But in the world of 2054, no such blandness prevailed.

  Instead, a thousand cliques and bands of rebels sprouted, each of whose members chose to share a certain somatotype. Quite often, the artificial appearance did not relate in any way to the original gender, race, or ethnicity of the adopter.

  One group might be composed entirely of Robespierres. Another might be all Margaret Sangers. There were legions of Edward Snowdens and Chelsea Mannings, Chairman Maos and Rasputins, Malcolm Xs and Dr. Kings. Some groups took a more blithe and playful approach,
molding themselves into hordes of identical celebrities. Others chose to mirror the faces of the very politicians they were castigating.

  The identicalness of each set of activists among themselves did indeed prove effective at confusing law-enforcement and national security experts. But the authorities always held out the ultimate option of doing DNA tests on any arrestees and finding their true identities.

  But the first DNA tests revealed an unanticipated glitch in the process.

  The nano-sculpting extended inadvertently down to the cellular level. Each Gloria Steinem now exhibited the same genome as any other. And the changes were ineradicable, irreversible. Each person was stuck for their lifetime with the adopted somatotype.

  After a wave of suicides, people adapted to their less-than-ideal looks. But the real unfortunate fallout came in the next generation, when the children of the protestors arrived.

  You really don’t want to see what the offspring of Abe Lincoln and Betty Friedan look like.

  IX

  As always, my flock of tiny personal drones surrounded me in a whirring, buzzing cocoon of perfect safety, privacy, and inviolability. Each drone was the size of a housefly, and there were thousands and thousands of them, forming a mutable, responsive, intelligent shell around me at a distance of some three inches from my skin. They relayed sensory telemetry to my contact lenses and earbuds, and continually refreshed the air within the multiparticulate eggshell they formed around me, while maintaining the perfect ambient temperature in all circumstances.

  I couldn’t consider living without my swarm of drones. How did our ancestors ever interface directly with the environment? What a brutish state of existence! My drones kept all my actions secluded, all my expressions opaque, all my vulnerabilities concealed. They could mass together to dispense sonic or laser or chemical assaults against my enemies. When I lifted my legs to walk, or my arms to hoist, the drones configured closer to my epidermis and assisted as exo-musculature. When I stood or sat or reclined, they adjusted accordingly between me and whatever surface I was interfacing with.

  All of Earth’s two billion inhabitants were now solitary sovereign states, secure within their portable drone castles.

  I must admit, though, that the important and necessary business of mating was rendered somewhat more complex and difficult by our invaluable and indispensable drone carapaces.

  Personal appearances could no longer be relied on when seeking to render esthetic judgments upon possible mates. Every individual looked identical: a shimmering, humming humanoid blob. One had to choose to accept telemetry from strangers, feeds that ostensibly showed their true faces as recorded by the inner sensors of the drone shells. These sendings could, of course, be faked.

  But, assuming one found a likely mating partner, based on telemetry that included a sufficient amount of introductory conversation, one still faced the trouble of merging drone shells. In order to come skin to skin to enact the ancient biological imperatives, two (or more!) drone swarms had to temporarily blend into a single entity.

  But the drones, possessing artificial intelligence geared toward protecting the wearer, sometimes didn’t agree with the wearer’s choices or decisions. Sensing danger or incompatibility, drones would fight a merger or, if forced, descend into chaotic states, leaving the individuals helplessly naked to the world.

  But, assuming all went well, sex could still happen as of yore, with the chosen instances of pregnancy. Then, with the drones assisting at the birth, the newborns would emerge and be instantly encapsulated in their own drone shells hived off from the mother’s mass.

  I think there are few things more beautiful than a little infant sporting its first flickering cladding of drones, which, around its lips, merge with the drones at the mother’s nipple, as the nutritive milk of life is pumped by the little palpating mechanical assistants from her buzzing breast.

  X

  In the grocery store, I was immediately beset by animated advertising holograms from the products on the shelves. Thank goodness they were tightbeamed to my ears and eyes only, because some of them were quite personal.

  “Ms. Leakey, we know you and your family enjoyed your last box of Cheerios. You finished it in only six days from the time of purchase. Little Charles Leakey had the last bowl, of course, and wished for more the next day. But there were no more boxes in the house. Don’t you think you should buy two boxes this time?”

  “Ms. Leakey, your daughter Amanda had a most embarrassing and awkward incident during co-ed gym class yesterday. Her current brand of tampons failed to handle her menstrual flow and conceal that she was experiencing her period, resulting in a spotting incident that caused her male peers to mock her. Shouldn’t you switch from Tampax to the higher-rated Playtex now?”

  “Ms. Leakey, your husband Roy has been a little tired during the performance of his marital duties lately. We recommend some ginseng from our vitamin aisle. And oysters are on sale today.”

  I managed to ignore these solicitations—I had a mind of my own, after all—until there came one I couldn’t resist.

  “Ms. Leakey, we can tell from your vital signs and brain waves that you are utterly tired of shopping and sick of running your household, as well as fed up with your children and spouse. Out in the parking lot you will find a black Corvette in which sits a man whom we have selected as the ideal candidate to enliven your life with a short-term love affair. If you consent to this purchase, just swipe your store loyalty card on the card reader secured to his stick shift. If not completely satisfied, you may apply for a refund.”

  I left my shopping cart blocking the frozen foods aisle and was in Las Vegas before nightfall.

  I hope more specials like this show up in weeks to come.

  XI

  Ultimately, USA authorities realized that the most effective and cost-cutting form of surveillance was self-surveillance. If the target of spying could be induced to spy and report on himself, then no outside agents would be necessary. Incomplete or erratic information would be obviated. No one could compile a more complete dossier on an individual than the individual himself.

  This revelation occurred to a lowly GS-3 clerk in the Secret Service named Wilbert Punsal, who happened to receive by accident from Netflix the disc of A Scanner Darkly when he thought he had requested Agatha Christie’s spooky murder mystery In a Glass Darkly. Viewing the Philip K. Dick film, he saw the real-life potential of its twisted scenario.

  Punsal was rewarded by being the first person to undergo the enforced self-spying modification. To put a point on the procedure, he was chemically induced to develop a secondary personality which would keep track of everything his baseline personality did, and which would file reports when Wilbert Punsal the Original was sleeping.

  Upon satisfaction with their new technique, various government agencies in collaboration infiltrated the nation’s water supply with a drug that produced Directed Dissociative Identity Disorder. In weeks, three hundred million citizens, more or less, were spying on themselves.

  Other nations quickly followed suit.

  All went well, until the secondary personalities began to develop wills and motivations of their own. At this point, tertiary personalities had to be introduced to spy on the secondaries.

  Naturally, the regress was infinite. Or would have been, if the computational capacity of the human brain had not been reached with Personality Number Ten. After that point, complete hebephrenia and catatonia set in, leaving a planet populated with drooling idiots who quickly died off in hecatombs. The globe’s resources were duly apportioned among the few remaining unmodified humans—basically, a single tribe of Pacific islanders, some Inuits, a few Scandinavian elk herders, and a handful of Amazonian primitives—who had failed to encounter the DDID drugs.

  XII

  The more far-out physicists had long contended that the entire universe was composed of information. Not atoms, but bits. Since information was the stock-in-trade of spies and governments
, many top-secret attempts were made to prove or disprove this theory. Eventually, one black-budget project succeeded in proving the postulate: all of creation was simply a quantum computer. And, with this verification of the nature of reality, it was not long before the tools to access the flow of information were perfected.

  Physical spying was no longer necessary. It was enough to probe the various “registers” and “buffers” of the universe to learn anything one wished to know.

  Terrorists were astounded—in the milliseconds before their deaths—to be blown up in their most secure hideouts. Embezzlers were caught before they could spend the first penny of their ill-gotten gains. Murderers were halted before their fingers reached the triggers.

  Amazingly, abuse of the secret omniscience was kept to a minimum. The political plans of opposition parties were not leaked. The sexual peccadillos of celebrities were not made into headlines. The plots of movies-in-progress were not spoiled. The people in charge of probing the quantum computer exhibited extreme moral fiber.

  But then someone discovered the universe was not read-only, but could be overwritten.

  The temptation was too much. Reality began to shift on a minute-by-minute basis, as those in charge of the quantum computer access began to tinker to achieve their personal preferences. Entire countries disappeared. New genders arose. Multiple moons swam through the skies. The fabric of reality began to unravel.

  But then someone must have hit “reboot,” for the universe winked out of existence, and then restarted, but this time with access to the cosmic software denied.

  Life goes on now as of old. But people are spotted and tentacled and possess many, many eyes.

  XIII

  A secure information utopia had at long last been attained.

  There was no more surveillance upon the planet. Spying had been rendered physically impossible by a number of clever stratagems and technologies, buttressed by strictly enforced laws and legislation.

  Privacy was ultimate and complete. Humans could no longer intrude on the sacred sphere of nondisclosure surrounding each individual.