by David Brin
You can pay for things in cash instead of using a credit card, or deliberately alter your driving route to avoid traffic cameras. You can refrain from creating Facebook pages for your children and tagging photos of them online. You can refrain from using Google Calendar, or webmail, or cloud backup. You can use DuckDuckGo for Internet searches. You can leave your cell phone at home: an easy, if inconvenient, way to avoid being tracked.
But how many are willing to reduce connection to the technocommons to avoid the all-seeing eye? And always there is the question: will these tricks be easily bypassed by next year’s technology … or the next … or the next?
Perhaps, says cultural critic Slavoj Žižek, “the proper answer to this threat is not retreat into islands of privacy, but an ever stronger socialization of cyberspace.” As Christian Fuchs adds, a “commons-based Internet requires a commons-oriented society.” We can remain private individuals to some extent, but only if we agree to be public citizens at the same time. This brings us full circle to the conclusion David Brin advanced in The Transparent Society: “Again, the cameras are coming. You can rail against them, shaking your fist in futile rage at all the hovering lenses. Or you can join a committee of six billion neighbors to control the pesky things, making each one an extension of your eyes.”
Big Brother is watching? The whole world is watching. But you are part of that brave new world. Take your responsibilities seriously.
Works Cited:
Brin, David. The Transparent Society. Reading MA: Perseus Books, 1998.
Fuchs, Christian, et al. (eds). Internet and Surveillance: The Challenges of Web 2.0 and Social Media. New York and London: Routledge, 2012.
McStay, Andrew. Privacy and Philosophy: New Media and Affective Protocol. New York: Peter Lang, 2014.
O’Hara, Kieron and Nigel Shadbolt. The Spy in the Coffee Machine: The End of Privacy as We Know It. Oxford UK: OneWorld, 2008.
Rushkoff, Douglas, and Frank Koughan. Generation Like. PBS, 2014. Documentary.
Tucker, Patrick. The Naked Future. New York: Penguin/Current, 2014.
NO PLACE TO HIDE
They know what you do
No dark corners to hide in
Know what they do, too
Freedom, safety, empowerment …
… does any of it matter when life hurts?
PREFERENCES
CAT RAMBO
“Everything’s calculated,” Alanna said, scowling down at the cruise-ship breakfast menu. “Look at this, for goddess’s sake. Salmon Benedict, rye toast, cinnamon latte.”
“Those are your favorite things,” her wife Howin pointed out. “Be fair now.”
For a moment, the two women locked glances. The faint frown clouding Alanna’s mouth was echoed upward in Howin’s hesitant smile.
They were alike in age (52) and height (5’6”), but, other than that, were as different as could be. Alanna was thick-fleshed, skin a deep brown, graying hair butch-short to the point where it was a mere shadow on her scalp. Howin was skinny-slim, moon-pale, hair still black and shiny, pinned in an elaborate chignon. Both women wore cruise-casual—shorts and a serviceable navy-blue top for Alanna, a butterfly-printed silky shirt for Howin to match the gilt butterfly clip in her hair. They’d taken a table by themselves near a sunlit window, the water outside an endless carefree turquoise blue, the color of Howin’s blouse.
“Sure they’re my favorites,” Alanna said. “They’ve scraped that from somewhere—maybe some social network, maybe my restaurant orders, who knows?—and linked them to my ship card.”
“Are you really complaining about a customized menu?” Howin said. Exasperation and amusement mingled in her tone. She folded the napkin in her lap, pleating it as she watched Alanna.
“There’re no secrets anymore,” Alanna grumbled. She thumbed the menu, touching items. Red and blue dots bloomed at her touch as she made her choices. She slid it over to join the version Howin had already selected. “What if I wanted to try new things?”
“You never want to try new things,” Howin pointed out. “But if you did, I suspect they’d accommodate that too.”
“And even those would pander to my tastes,” Alanna grumbled. “I’d like it all. No danger of picking something I didn’t like.”
“Again, I’m not sure what you’re complaining about,” Howin said. “Relax and enjoy it. You deserve it.”
Alanna’s gaze flicked up, eyes narrowed. But all she said as one waiter leaned to collect menus while another poured coffee was, “I’ll try.”
The sky outside was unclouded. Howin splashed cream into her coffee and swirled it till there were no clouds there either.
* * *
Later, sitting by the fore pool, Howin stared at flickers of light dancing across rows of deck chairs. She’d brought a reader, but only to pretend to read while drowsing in the sun. She loved the drowsy somnolence of the warmth on her skin, the way it knocked her into unthinking slumber more comforting than alcohol or drugs ever would be.
But she couldn’t relax into the warmth she usually loved. Alanna had stayed down in the cabin. “I want a nap,” she’d said, stretching out on the bed. “Snap the light out as you go.”
She napped so often lately. A sign of depression, Howin had read. It worried her.
Three years since their daughter’s death. Would they ever reach the point where it didn’t weight Alanna’s smile? Where Howin didn’t feel the memory of Bree’s smile sliding like a sudden knife into her heart? She’d thought a Caribbean cruise might banish some of it, fleeing Toronto winter in search of a temporary summer, but all Alanna did was sleep and complain.
Howin flicked through screens, trying to engage herself in the story, but everything was two-dimensional, unappealing.
Two children splashed in the salt-water pool, shrill voices glass-edged. How strange to be here, on this floating city, so isolated from the rest of the world, and yet be reminded of that world daily. No escape.
* * *
When she went down to the cabin, she found Alanna crying. Howin sat down on the side of the bed and stroked her wife’s back, feeling the bumps of her spine, the reverberations of her sobs.
“Shhhh,” she said. “Shhhh, shhhh.” She curled up beside Alanna and held her.
“I can’t get past it,” Alanna said into her shoulder. “I can’t get past it, and I can’t live with it any longer.”
Howin had no answer. She had thought perhaps here they could forget grief, so far from home and its daily reminders: Bree’s school, her favorite restaurant, the park where she had played as a toddler. The other members of the bereavement support group, who Howin loved and hated. Loved for their support; hated for their necessity.
“Come upstairs,” she said gently. “There’s a spa just for adults, a pool in the aft section. It’s quiet, and there’s a hot tub and chairs. Sit in the sun and sleep there.”
She could feel Alanna’s tears, hotter than sunlight on her skin.
“Everyone will see I’ve been crying,” Alanna said.
“Fuck everyone,” Howin said, surprising herself with her simulated firmness.
“I would prefer not to,” Alanna said primly.
Howin stroked the soft fuzz along Alanna’s scalp, letting it tickle her palm. “Did you just make a joke?”
“Yes. Maybe.”
Howin felt herself smiling.
If they could laugh, there was hope. They’d get past it.
But in the end, Alanna declined to come up, staying in the cabin’s darkness. Her head hurt, she said.
Howin stayed, rubbing Alanna’s back. She listened to the sounds of the ship, the clatter of room service outside, the engines’ throb, a couple quarreling, the sounds muted. How long had it been since she and Alanna had fought like that? Since they’d made up afterward?
Alanna’s breath slowed, slipping into sleep as the distant couple stopped their shouting. Were they to the making up part yet?
* * *
A few decks above, she pau
sed by the excursion desk’s bank of interactive screens, each showcasing a different possibility, displays rearranging themselves as she neared. Would it be worthwhile booking something? They’d be in Puerto Rico the next day, but so far Alanna had resisted the idea of going ashore anyplace they’d stopped.
Images flickered in front of her: boating, water-skiing, snorkeling. A tour bus for sightseeing. And simple, easy: walk to the Castillo San Cristobal.
Howin allowed herself to be persuaded.
When she presented the idea to Alanna, she got the protest she expected. But she pushed.
Demurral after demurral. “I need a sun hat,” Alanna said. “I can’t go.”
Howin drew her out of the cabin, fingers firm around Alanna’s wrist. “That’s why they have shops on board.”
She ignored Alanna’s protests, pulled her to Deck Five with its array of stores. The goods were shown on panels on the walls: pick your preferences and they’d be printed out in the colors and textures you wanted, each item marked with the blue and red dot that was the Jubilee cruise line’s logo and the words, “A Jubilee Souvenir.”
Like the excursion screens, the pictures changed whenever someone approached, flickering through choices. Alanna stared at the revolving circle of hats.
“Don’t you like any of them?” Howin coaxed.
“I like them all,” Alanna said. “How could I not? They’re reading my preferences again. Tailoring things just to me.”
“Why is that bad?”
Alanna’s face was unreadable. She refused to speak, just pushed her way out roughly. Howin followed in her wake, bewildered.
She caught up at the railing. For a second she worried that Alanna planned to jump, but the other woman just folded herself over the railing, gathering herself into misery.
“What’s wrong?” Howin said.
“They know me,” Alanna said. “I can’t be anyone but myself. Alanna Yang, wife of Howin Yang. Mother of…” Her voice faltered, then steadied. “Mother of Brianna Yang. Deceased. How can I forget that when it’s part of who I am?”
“It’s not every part of you,” Howin said. She slid her hand along Alanna’s arm, reached down to twine their fingers together, merging their grasp. “A piece of you.”
She went back and bought a hat, using Alanna’s card.
“Come out in the morning with me,” she said. “You don’t want to shop here, well, you can find something there.”
“It’s the same everywhere,” Alanna said. “A world tailored to me, trying to get me to buy. Telling me who I am.”
Howin shook her head. “Just try,” she said. “Please.”
* * *
She was delighted that Alanna accompanied her. But when she turned around in the surge of a cruise ship’s worth of tourists and realized she couldn’t find her, fear and alarm throttled Howin’s throat. Who knew what Alanna would do, here in this place so far from home?
The steward waiting by the gangplank didn’t understand her fear.
“Maybe she went to buy you a present?” the young woman, dressed in blue and red, chirped. “You said she’s only been gone a half hour.”
Howin couldn’t put her forebodings into words. She couldn’t say, “I lost my daughter and I’m afraid I’ll lose my wife.”
Instead she waited near the gangplank for an hour, standing in the shadow of the enormous cruise ship, sorting through faces.
Finally Alanna’s hat approached, bobbing in the crowd.
“Where have you been?” Howin said, torn between anger and joy at the smile on Alanna’s face.
“I found a place where no one knew me,” Alanna said. “I went up the streets and down the streets. There was a stall, a little roadside stall, not a shop with a printer, selling these.”
She held out something in her hand. A tiny wooden puzzle box carved with monarch butterflies.
“An old woman selling them. She was even a little rude to me because I didn’t have the right change. How funny, that I liked that, after all the attentiveness of the ship. Remember these?” The butterflies were painted orange and black. “They were her favorite.”
Howin took the box in her hand, shaky with relief.
“Not tailored to me,” Alanna said. “A coincidence. A happy coincidence. Something made for the sake of making it, not something data-driven, designed to appeal to me.” She smiled.
The box’s wood, so smooth beneath her fingers.
“I’m going to shower,” Alanna said. “Tonight, let’s sit by the pool after dinner. We can get drinks. Remember how we used to sit under the stars, when we were first dating?”
“All right,” Howin said. “You go ahead, I’ll catch up. I want to get a photo of the ship from here.”
She waited till Alanna was gone before sliding the panels aside, unraveling the puzzle. When the final drawer opened, she saw what she had expected there.
A tiny blue and red dot, surrounded by the lettering. “A Jubilee Souvenir.”
She wavered. Grief was real. And if its anodyne was artificial, what happened then?
The box poised on her fingertips, so light.
Tears were so heavy.
Howin tilted her hand and let it fall into the water between pier and ship, down into blue shadows, vague and uncalculated, before she went aboard to join her wife.
Peel back the layers. And guess what?
There will be more.
VECTORS
STEPHEN GASKILL
Chad Legarde, decked in traditional chef’s whites, the top collar of his pristine double-breasted jacket unbuttoned in his trademark style, crashes through dense rainforest. Insects buzz, birds chirrup, while unseen monkeys shriek and large cats growl, but Chad looks cool as ice. Scaling a gnarly tree trunk with the agility of a marmoset he reaches the canopy, plucks off a dew-glistened bunch of bananas. In one swift movement he ties the bananas to his belt, simultaneously ascending through the top of the treeline into bright sunshine. Without pausing, he takes one, two steps over the green quilt, before launching himself into a dive worthy of an Olympic medalist.
He crashes into icy waters, and the splash loops out of the screen.
Zoe and her brother, Luke, both flinch as the spray showers the sofa, then pretend they didn’t.
Emerging from the waters onto a rock-pooled shoreline, Chad strides up the beach, plucks a scarlet-hued lobster out of a shallow pool, the crustacean’s claws snapping ferociously.
Then the camera swings round, head-to-toe Chad dead center. In the background, the icy seas have morphed into a familiar urban skyline: far off thrust the gleaming towers of Canary Wharf, while closer the haphazard tenements of Brixton loom. Dominating the view is GeneLife’s flagship vertical farm, thirty-eight floors of precision-engineered crops and plants shining green and vital, capped by an avant-garde restaurant named The Gastronomique.
“I used to handpick produce for my kitchen,” Chad says confidently. “Now thanks to GeneLife, I no longer have to go to the ends of the Earth. And neither do you.”
As he says the last words he swings the snapping lobster toward the camera. The crustacean whirls, body flexing, claws pincering, its scarlet girth getting larger and larger until it shatters the screen and flies through the living room, chips of glass in its acrobatic wake.
They shriek simultaneously, both ripping off their spex.
Luke dissolves into a pool of laughter.
Zoe doesn’t, too on edge.
Today’s the day.
“Okay, time for work.” She gazes out the window, catching an oblique view of the vertical farm that towers over their neighborhood. She kills the TV, GeneLife’s logo fleeing to a white dot.
Luke’s laughter has morphed into a coughing fit.
Zoe rubs her sick brother’s back. “Hey, take it easy there.”
Luke nods, but his face is red as beets.
Knowing what is a sign of the illness and what is simply an everyday matter anybody might experience is one of the things Zoe finds harde
st about her brother’s condition. Sometimes she drives herself crazy analyzing every cough, every stumble, every trip of his tongue.
Luke is fifteen, suffering from a disorder without a name. MRIs show his shrinking cerebellum, stunting development. Without a cure, eventually, inexorably, he will regress, then die. Medical geneticists at Great Ormond Street Hospital analyzed his DNA. Somewhere in the millions of As, Gs, Cs, and Ts is a misspelling—and maybe a clue to a treatment. But unless they find another patient with the same symptoms, and a similar DNA error, his doctors can’t zero in on which mistake in Luke’s genes is the crucial one.
And that’s the crux.
They can’t.
The words of one of the geneticists echo through her head.
The problem, Zoe, is that the world’s DNA databases are fragmented, ring-fenced.
Out of the nine billion on the planet, there is probably someone who shares Luke’s condition and has been DNA-sequenced, but the segregated nature of the databases makes finding that one patient impossible. Hundreds of corps scattered through dozens of countries own the data, and corps everywhere only care about one thing: profit. Overcoming the ethical, technical and legislative hurdles to share information isn’t high on their priority list.
Luke’s only hope is the black market.
And the black market isn’t cheap.
And so for the love of her brother, it’s come to this: aiding her contacts at Green Dawn in bringing down her employer, GeneLife.
Today GeneLife launches their brand-new genetically engineered superfood—vitan, a modified seaweed. As part of a media blitz, Chad Legarde, celeb chef and critic, will cook up a feast for VIPs in the vertical farm’s penthouse restaurant.
Green Dawn wants to sabotage the launch.
Which is where Zoe comes in.
Conflicted isn’t the half of it. Try torn in two.
After Luke’s coughing fit subsides, she ducks into the tiny spare bedroom, squeezing past the shelf of Pyrex containers and Erlenmeyer flasks. The room smells of chemicals, pure alcohol, agarose sugar, and an earthy mix. Together with the homemade lightbox, the makeshift PCR machine, and all the other clinical-looking equipment, the bedroom looks perfect for cooking crystal meth.