My brother anticipated an information blackout while in custody. He expected that if and when I read his missive there would be a lot I knew and a lot he didn’t. His instructions were therefore provisional. Christopher delegated considerable authority when he lobbed his message into the future during that panicked week of 2004, an admirably levelheaded call.
There are a number of things he didn’t foresee. For one, Christopher didn’t expect that I would find both of the disks he’d hidden, the second as I cleaned out our father’s university office the month after he died.
—
It’s remarkable that Christopher entrusted his rescue to me. Humbling too. But remarkable not because he and I have a contentious history between us. I know my apparent materialism and self-absorption annoyed him. I cultivated that façade carefully. Did he get that the futures we foresee are similarly dark, that we differed all those years only on questions of what’s to be done, and how? Yes, I did think Christopher was whining from the sidelines for most of his life. But what he was whining about matters. How well did he understand that I know that? Perhaps this manuscript, and the bargain to which it is a preface, will reveal what I failed to show when I could have.
The remarkable thing about appointing me to steward his secrets is that I stood outside the circle of Christopher’s chosen family. He followed a script that played out in Brendan’s imprisonment, a script in which brothers prove steadfast. Yet everything I’ve learned from those who remain at the Triangle points to Christopher’s commitment to his collective, and to his distance from blood family—including yours truly. His housecomrades have been more than steadfast. Vigils, blogs, petitions, interviews, testimonials, legal motions, even a congressional inquiry initiated through the slowest of roundabout channels. So the only sense I see in being appointed his proxy is that Christopher had no idea who at the Triangle would get caught in the government’s net. Though none of them had anything to do with Chagall or Nebraska, he couldn’t predict what police might suspect.
There’s an excruciating irony here. That irony is the second thing Christopher didn’t foresee. It is, of course, the question of Romulus.
—
So to say it straight out: I, Marshall Kalman, am Chagall’s hacker. I am Romulus. It was my suggestion to Chagall, in direct violation of boundaries set by the saboteur, that drew my brother into our conspiracy. When I proposed his name, I imagined I was doing Christopher a favor. I thought I was giving him a shot at acting consequentially for once, and at long last. I thought encryption was enough to protect us all. I proceeded with our plan after wrongly concluding that Chagall chose someone else to write our manifesto.
And now I am staggered by the insidious route treachery took, through a labyrinth of indirection, anonymity, and stupidly arrogant rivalry. My treachery. Humbled, I am called to extraordinary acts of penitence.
As it became clear that the government would hold him indefinitely, I began a secret negotiation with my brother’s captors, in the persona of the hacker who conspired with Chagall. I did not reveal my true identity, but demanded Christopher’s release as a token of the government’s honest dealing. He is, after all, innocent of anything more than expressing ideas. I gave proofs of my role in the Nebraska bombing, and promised more. Negotiations have been inching forward. They are ongoing as I type these words. If you are reading them, however, I have failed to trade my imprisonment for my brother’s freedom.
This manuscript is plan B.
—
It no longer makes sense for Christopher to call the plays. Three years into this debacle, the terrain has shifted. It’s time to use the authority my brother delegated in that excruciating week before the government took him.
Consider that Christopher can no longer point to either of the CDs he hid. I have them both. Christopher can’t give up the data even if the government waterboards him into compliance. Consider that my brother has found no way to strike a deal with the badge-flashing gangsters who hold him captive. He has no position from which to describe information he could produce, and then refuse to give it up. But from deep hiding—which is where I’ll be by the time these pages see the business end of a printing press—I have position to burn. Having possession of both disks, I’m the one withholding evidence now. Not only Christopher’s, but my own. Having told as much as I have, my only choices are to surrender or to disappear. Disappearance gives each of us far greater leverage.
And so, the bargain I propose:
If the government wants to fuel its stalled manhunt with records of Christopher and Chagall’s communication, the first thing they’ll do is permit my brother to read this account in full. Then they’ll permit him to confirm that he has done so by posting a message synthesized from fragments he and only he will recognize as “Easter eggs” scattered through the text. He will know how to reach me.
In response, as a token of seriousness and proof of possession, I will publish the contents of the second CD in a publicly accessible location on the internet. Christopher can prove the data’s authenticity. I won’t say how. The government can then work at deciphering the encrypted fragment. So can anybody else who wants to take a shot, but be warned: it’s only a fragment. Nobody can turn either mass of gibberish into cleartext without its complementary half. I know because I’ve tried.
Next, Christopher must be freed into the care of his housecomrades—his chosen family, the only family he’ll have in the wake of Dad’s death and my own fugitive status.
Only then will I publicly release the other half of the dataset.
Last, with the Nebraska bombing data made public, narrowing the government’s impunity should they try to throw him back in the hole, Christopher may choose to retrieve and publish the encryption key that unscrambles it. Will he do so? Perhaps, if he believes his freedom is secure.
I do not expect Christopher’s records will lead to Chagall’s capture. I’m confident Chagall is smarter than that. He’ll have had a long head start on his trackers. On the other hand, the Feds would be fools to pass on the best evidence they’ve been offered in their dead-end pursuit.
If I learn Christopher has given up the encryption key under duress, before his release, the deal’s off.
—
What no government can guarantee, by taking my offer or spurning it, is an end to struggle of the kinds just recounted. This has nothing to do with Chagall’s ability to elude capture. It’s not bound by the Triangle’s political analysis, or Meg Wyneken’s, or anybody’s tactics. The question of a right path out of the mess humans have made of the world, of how one can make an actual difference, will remain active and open. As Laura Whitehorn put it in The Weather Underground—again, as I had Christopher quote to Suvali the last time he saw her—people never stop struggling to change the things that make life unlivable. This is the core of what my brother got right in his life and work. That the government has paralyzed him these past three years won’t prevent fellow travelers from pushing that work forward.
To what end?
It’s too soon to say.
Allison has come around from the despair that followed Zac’s death, and now clings resolutely to her optimism. She insists no good act is wasted, whether history appears to be moved or not. Leaving Nebraska aside, she maintains the bridge blockade helped frame public understanding of hubris among molecular biologists; hubris that is just as toxic as efforts to install neoliberal “democracy” with tanks and torturers, or wrecking ecosystems to fuel criminally excessive consumption.
Unmoved by her sunny outlook, I remain focused on the defining characteristic of pendulums, history’s included. They swing both ways. Back and forth and back again.
Progressive theories of social evolution are wishful thinking. The truth is that it’s always easier to wreck than to build. To wreck on a planetary scale, never mind using a truck full of processed manure to set back somebody’s construction schedule. In the big picture, Śiva the Destroyer will always have a leg up on the competitio
n. Those who see through a secular lens call this advantage entropy.
Which is not to say that pessimism excuses anyone.
In the manifesto that I, as Romulus, sent careening around the world, Christopher concluded with this:
Living beings, human and nonhuman alike, all lose when our nations and institutions inflame unnatural greed. We have allowed abstractions about property—about stuff, about the right to own and consume—to count more than anything that actually matters. Gluttony clouds our vision and judgment, corrals our morality, tempts us into cowed silence as our only Earth is savaged.
Every day we fail to resist—every day we go along because it doesn’t hurt us personally, not too much, not yet—every day we let ourselves be dazzled by cheap distractions and enthralled by manufactured cravings—every such day that passes we fall deeper into debt. Every such day we creep closer to the hour when it will be too late to turn back and mend what our own apathy and sloth have broken.
That we can’t see how to overcome the power of human weakness doesn’t let us off the hook. That the other fellow isn’t making sacrifices doesn’t give us license to scorch and poison and hoard.
History will be determined by those who act, whether the acts are charitable or self-serving, whether they are loving or hateful, honorably empathetic or twisted with distrust.
The damned in every human theology are those who fail to act righteously, whatever their excuse.
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Consequence has benefitted from the help of many readers, advisers, and editors throughout its gestation; any errors that remain are my own. With apologies for any inadvertent omission of those who lent their attention and expertise, I am grateful to Alice Bell, Dan Berger, Chansonette Buck, Stephanie Carroll, Larry Cohen, Lewis Cohen, Nancy Cooper, Mary DeDanan, Quinn Dombrowski, Andrew Eddy, Kristina Eschmeyer, Stuart Fisk, Susan Giles, Lindy Gligorijevic, Bill Harrison, Rebecca Hemphill, Liana Holmberg, Lisa Jakelski, Steven Long, Leslie Mikkelsen, Kate Raphael, Dorothy Reller, Richard Ruby, Ryan Ruby, Patrick Schmitz, Danielle Seybold, Michael Stack, Matthew Felix Sun, Michelle Wolford, and Steven Yi. Thanks are also due to Bertha Sarmina for gently parrying the least helpful of my suggestions as she translated the words of Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos included in Chapter 11. I hope that friends, former housecomrades, and fellow activists find that Consequence does justice to the community I have been privileged to share with them, over many years and through much unfinished struggle.
Though countless books, articles, film documentaries, lectures, and discussions informed the political and scientific landscape of Consequence, two books merit particular mention as sources. Our Word Is Our Weapon: Selected Writings, edited by Juana Ponce de León, enriched my understanding of Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, and of the nature and aims of the Zapatista movement for which he spoke. A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down by Robert B. Laughlin illuminates relationships between scientific concepts of emergence, complexity, and reductionism that helped me to undergird the worldviews that drive this novel’s characters.
Lines from “No Second Troy” by William Butler Yeats are taken from The Green Helmet and Other Poems. Lines from Giuseppe Verdi’s Il Trovatore are excerpted from Act IV Scene 1. Lines from John Milton are taken from Book IV of Paradise Lost.
About the Author
Steve Masover is a native of Chicago and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. His short fiction has appeared in Five Fingers Review and Christopher Street. He co-wrote the screenplay for Soweto to Berkeley, a documentary film of the mid-1980s anti-apartheid movement. Consequence is his first novel.
www.stevemasover.net
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