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But a great deal of effort has been devoted to explaining Babel. Not the
Babel event - which most people consider to be a myth - but the fact that
languages tend to diverge. A number of linguistic theories have been
developed in an effort to tie all languages together."
"Theories Lagos tried to apply to his virus hypothesis."
"Yes. There are two schools: relativists and universalists. As George
Steiner summarizes it, relativists tend to believe that language is not the
vehicle of thought but its determining medium. It is the framework of
cognition. Our perceptions of everything are organized by the flux of
sensations passing over that framework. Hence, the study of the evolution of
language is the study of the evolution of the human mind itself."
"Okay, I can see the significance of that. What about the
universalists?"
"In contrast with the relativists, who believe that languages need not
have anything in common with each other, the universalists believe that if
you can analyze languages enough, you can find that all of them have certain
traits in common. So they analyze languages, looking for such traits."
"Have they found any?"
"No. There seems to be an exception to every rule."
"Which blows universalism out of the water."
"Not necessarily. They explain this problem by saying that the shared
traits are too deeply buried to be analyzable."
"Which is a cop out."
"Their point is that at some level, language has to happen inside the
human brain. Since all human brains are more or less the same - "
"The hardware's the same. Not the software."
"You are using some kind of metaphor that I cannot understand."
Hiro whips past a big Airstream that is rocking from side to side in a
dangerous wind coming down the valley.
"Well, a French-speaker's brain starts out the same as an
English-speaker's brain. As they grow up, they get programmed with different
software-they learn different languages."
"Yes. Therefore, according to the universalists, French and English -
or any other languages - must share certain traits that have their roots in
the 'deep structures' of the human brain. According to Chomskyan theory, the
deep structures are innate components of the brain that enable it to cam out
certain formal kinds of operations on strings of symbols. Or, as Steiner
paraphrases Emmon Bach: These deep structures eventually lead to the actual
patterning of the cortex with its immensely ramified yet, at the same time,
'programmed' network of electrochemical and neurophysiological channels."
"But these deep structures are so deep we can't even see them?"
"The universalists place the active nodes of linguistic life - the deep
structures - so deep as to defy observation and description. Or to use
Steiner's analogy: Try to draw up the creature from the depths of the sea,
and it will disintegrate or change form grotesquely."
"There's that serpent again. So which theory did Lagos believe in? The
relativist or the universalist?"
"He did not seem to think there was much of a difference. In the end,
they are both somewhat mystical. Lagos believed that both schools of thought
had essentially arrived at the same place by different lines of reasoning."
"But it seems to me there is a key difference," Hiro says. "The
universalists think that we are determined by the prepatterned structure of
our brains - the pathways in the cortex. The relativists don't believe that
we have any limits."
"Lagos modified the strict Chomskyan theory by supposing that learning
a language is like blowing code into PROMS -an analogy that I cannot
interpret."
"The analogy is clear. PROMS are Programmable Read-Only Memory chips,"
Hiro says. "When they come from the factory, they have no content. Once and
only once, you can place information into those chips and then freeze it
-the information, the software, becomes frozen into the chip -it transmutes
into hardware. After you have blown the code into the PROMS, you can read it
out, but you can't write to them anymore. So Lagos was trying to say that
the newborn human brain has no structure - as the relativists would have it
- and that as the child learns a language, the developing brain structures
itself accordingly, the language gets 'blown into' the hardware and becomes
a permanent part of the brain's deep structure - as the universalists would
have it."
"Yes. This was his interpretation."
"Okay. So when he talked about Enki being a real person with magical
powers, what he meant was that Enki somehow understood the connection
between language and the brain, knew how to manipulate it. The same way that
a hacker, knowing the secrets of a computer system, can write code to
control it - digital nam-shubs."
"Lagos said that Enki had the ability to ascend into the universe of
language and see it before his eyes. Much as humans go into the Metaverse.
That gave him power to create nam-shubs. And nam-shubs had the power to
alter the functioning of the brain and of the body."
"Why isn't anyone doing this kind of thing nowadays? Why aren't there
any nam-shubs in English?"
"Not all languages are the same, as Steiner points out. Some languages
are better at metaphor than others. Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Chinese lend
themselves to word play and have achieved a lasting grip on reality:
Palestine had Qiryat Sefer, the "City of the Letter," and Syria had Byblos,
the "Town of the Book." By contrast other civilizations seem "speechless" or
at least, as may have been the case in Egypt, not entirely cognizant of the
creative and transformational powers of language. Lagos believed that
Sumerian was an extraordinarily powerful language - at least it was in Sumer
five thousand years ago."
"A language that lent itself to Enki's neurolinguistic hacking."
"Early linguists, as well as the Kabbalists, believed in a fictional
language called the tongue of Eden, the language of Adam. It enabled all men
to understand each other, to communicate without misunderstanding. It was
the language of the Logos, the moment when God created the world by speaking
a word. In the tongue of Eden, naming a thing was the same as creating it.
To quote Steiner again, 'Our speech interposes itself between apprehension
and truth like a dusty pane or warped mirror. The tongue of Eden was like a
flawless glass; a light of total understanding streamed through it. Thus
Babel was a second Fall.' And Isaac the Blind, an early Kabbalist, said
that, to quote Gershom Scholem's translation, 'The speech of men is
connected with divine speech and all language whether heavenly or human
derives from one source: the Divine Name.' The practical kabbalists, the
sorcerers, bore the title Ba'al Shem, meaning 'master of the divine name.'"
"The machine language of the world," Hiro says.
"Is this another analogy?"
"Computers speak machine language," Hiro says. "It's written in ones
and zeroes-binary code. At the lowest level, all computers are programmed
with strings of ones and zeroes. When you program in machine language, you
are controlling the computer at its brainstem, the root of its existence.
It's the tongue of Eden. But it's very difficult to work in machine language
because you go crazy after a while, working at such a minute level. So a
whole Babel of computer languages has been created for programmers: FORTRAN,
BASIC, COBOL, LISP, Pascal, C, PROLOG, FORTH. You talk to the computer in
one of these languages, and a piece of software called a compiler converts
it into machine language. But you never can tell exactly what the compiler
is doing. It doesn't always come out the way you want. Like a dusty pane or
warped mirror. A really advanced hacker comes to understand the true inner
workings of the machine - he sees through the language he's working in and
glimpses the secret functioning of the binary code - becomes a Ba'al Shem of
sorts."
"Lagos believed that the legends about the tongue of Eden were
exaggerated versions of true events," the Librarian says. "These legends
reflected nostalgia for a time when people spoke Sumerian, a tongue that was
superior to anything that came afterward."
"Is Sumerian really that good?"
"Not as far as modern-day linguists can tell," the Librarian says. "As
I mentioned, it is largely impossible for us to grasp. Lagos suspected that
words worked differently in those days. If one's native tongue influences
the physical structure of the developing brain, then it is fair to say that
the Sumerians - who spoke a language radically different from anything in
existence today - had fundamentally different brains from yours. Lagos
believed that for this reason, Sumerian was a language ideally suited to the
creation and propagation of viruses. That a virus, once released into Sumer,
would spread rapidly and virulently, until it had infected everyone."
"Maybe Enki knew that also," Hiro says. "Maybe the nam-shub of Enki
wasn't such a bad thing. Maybe Babel was the best thing that ever happened
to us."
Y.T.'s mom works in Fedland. She has parked her little car in her own
little numbered slot, for which the Feds require her to pay about ten
percent of her salary (if she like it she can take a taxi or walk) and
walked up several levels of a blindingly lit reinforced-concrete helix in
which most of the spaces - the good spaces closer to the surface - are
reserved for people other than her, but empty. She always walks up the
center of the ramp, between the rows of parked cars, so that the EBGOC boys
won't think she's lurking, loitering, skulking, malingering, or smoking.
Reaching the subterranean entrance of her building, she has taken all
metal objects from her pockets and removed what little jewelry she's wearing
and dumped them into a dirty plastic bowl and walked through the detector.
Flashed her badge. Signed her name and noted down the digital time.
Submitted to a frisking from an EBGOC girl. Annoying, but it sure beats a
cavity search. They have a right to do a cavity search if they want. She got
cavity-searched every day for a month once, right after she had spoken up at
a meeting and suggested that her supervisor might be on the wrong track with
a major programming project. It was punitive and vicious, she knew it was,
but she always wanted to give something back to her country, and whenever
you work for the Feds you just accept the fact that there's going to be some
politicking. And that as a low-level person you're going to bear the brunt.
And later on, you climb the GS ladder, don't have to put up with as much
shit. Far be it from her to quarrel with her supervisor. Her supervisor,
Marietta, doesn't have an especially stellar GS level, but she does have
access. She has connections. Marietta knows people who know people. Marietta
has attended cocktail parties that were also attended by some people who,
well, your eyes would bug out.
She has passed the frisking with flying collars. Put the metal stuff
back into her pockets. Climbed up half a dozen flights of stairs to her
floor. The elevators here still work, but some very highly placed people in
Fedland have let it be known - nothing official, but they have ways of
letting this stuff out - that it is a duty to conserve energy. And the Feds
are real serious about duty. Duty, loyalty, responsibility. The collagen
that binds us into the United States of America. So the stairwells are
filled with sweaty wool and clacking leather. If you took the elevator, no
one would actually say anything, but it would be noticed. Noticed and
written down and taken into account. People would look at you, glance you up
and down, like, what happened, sprain your ankle? Taking the stairs is no
problem.
Feds don't smoke. Feds generally don't overeat. The health plan is very
specific, contains major incentives, get too heavy or wheezy and, no one
says anything about it - which would be rude - but you feel a definite
pressure, a sense of not fitting in, as you walk across the sea of desks,
eyes glance up to follow you, estimating the mass of your saddlebags, eyes
darting back and forth between desks as, by consensus, your co-workers say
to themselves, I wonder how much he or she is driving up our health plan
premiums?
So Y.T.'s mom has clacked up the stairs in her black pumps and gone
into her office, actually a large room with computer workstations placed
across it in a grid. Used to be divided up by partitions, but the EBGOC boys
didn't like it, said what would happen if there had to be an evacuation? All
those partitions would impede the free flow of unhinged panic. So no more
partitions. Just workstations and chairs. Not even any desktops. Desktops
encourage the use of paper, which is archaic and reflects inadequate team
spirit. What is so special about your work that you have to write it down on
a piece of paper that only you get to see? That you have to lock it away
inside a desk? When you're working for the Feds, everything you do is the
property of the United States of America. You do your work on the computer.
The computer keeps a copy of everything, so that if you get sick or
something, it's all there where your co-workers and supervisors can get
access to it. If you want to write little notes or make phone doodles,
you're perfectly free to do that at home, in your spare time.
And there's the question of interchangeability. Fed workers, like
military people, are intended to be interchangeable parts. What happens if
your workstation should break down? You're going to sit there and twiddle
your thumbs until it gets fixed? No siree, you're going to move to a spare
workstation and get to work on that. And you don't have that flexibility if
you've got half a ton of personal stuff cached inside of a desk, strewn
around a desktop.
So there is no paper in a Fed office. All the workstations are the
same. You come in in the morning, pick one at random, sit down, and get to
work. You could try to favor a particular station, try to sit there every
day, but it would be noticed. Generally you pick the unoccupied workstation
that's closest to the door. That way, whoever came in earliest sits closest,
whoever came in latest is way in the back, for the rest of the day it's
obvious at a glance who's on the ball in this office and who is - as they
whisper to each other in the bathrooms - having problems.
Not that it's any big secret, who comes in first. When you sign on to a
workstation in the morning, it's not like the central computer doesn't
notice that fact. The central computer notices just about everything. Keeps
track of every key you hit on the keyboard, all day long, what time you hit
it, down to the microsecond, whether it was the right key or the wrong key,
how many mistakes you make and when you make them. You're only required to
be at your workstation from eight to five, with a half-hour lunch break and
two ten-minute coffee breaks, but if you stuck to that schedule it would
definitely be noticed, which is why Y.T.'s mom is sliding into the first
unoccupied workstation and signing on to her machine at quarter to seven.
Half a dozen other people are already here, signed on to workstations closer
to the entrance, but this isn't bad. She can look forward to a reasonably
stable career if she can keep up this sort of performance.
The Feds still operate in Flatland. None of this three-dimensional
stuff, no goggles, no stereo sound. The computers are all basic flat-screen
two-dimensional numbers. Windows appear on the desktop, with little text
documents inside. All part of the austerity program. Soon to reap major
benefits.
She signs on and checks her mail. No personal mail, just a couple of
mass-distributed pronouncements from Marietta.
I've been asked to distribute the new regulations regarding office pool
displays. The enclosed memo is a new subchapter of the EBGOC Procedure
Manual, replacing the old subchapter entitled PHYSICAL PLANT/CALIFORNIA/LOS
ANGELES/BUILDINGS/OFFICE AREAS/PHYSICAL LAYOUT REGULATIONS/EMPLOYEE
INPUT/GROUP ACTIVITIES.
The old subchapter was a flat prohibition on the use of office space or
time for "pool" activities of any kind, whether permanent (e.g., coffee
pool) or one-time (e.g., birthday parties).
This prohibition still applies, but a single, one-time exception has
now been made for any office that wishes to pursue a joint bathroom-tissue
strategy.
By way of introduction, let me just make a few general comments on this
subject. The problem of distributing bathroom tissue to workers presents
inherent challenges for any office management system due to the inherent
unpredictability of usage - not every facility usage transaction
necessitates the use of bathroom tissue, and when it is used, the amount
needed (number of squares) may vary quite widely from person to person and,
for a given person, from one transaction to the next. This does not even
take into account the occasional use of bathroom tissue for
unpredictable/creative purposes such as applying/removing cosmetics,
beverage-spill management, etc. For this reason, rather than trying to
package bathroom tissue in small one-transaction packets (as is done with
premoistened towelettes, for example), which can be wasteful in some cases
and limiting in other cases, it has been traditional to package this product
in bulk distribution units whose size exceeds the maximum amount of squares
that an individual could conceivably use in a single transaction (barring
force majeure). This reduces to a minimum the number of transactions in
which the distribution unit is depleted (the roll runs out during the
transaction, a situation that can lead to emotional stress for the affected
employee. However, it does present the manager with some challenges in that
the distribution unit is rather bulky and must be repeatedly used by a
number of different individuals if it is not to be wasted.
Since the implementation of Phase XVII of the Austerity Program,
employees have been allowed to bring their own bathroom tissue from home.
This approach is somewhat bulky and redundant, as every worker usually
brings their own roll.
Some offices have attempted to meet this challenge by instituting
bathroom-tissue pools.
Without overgeneralizing, it may be stated that an inherent and
irreducible feature of any bathroom-tissue pool implemented at the office
level, in an environment (i.e., building) in which comfort stations are
distributed on a per-floor basis (i.e., in which several offices share a
single facility) is that provision must be made within the confines of the
individual office for temporary stationing of bathroom tissue distribution
units (i.e., rolls). This follows from the fact that if the BTDUs (rolls)
are stationed, while inactive, outside of the purview of the controlling
office (i.e., the office that has collectively purchased the BTDU) - that
is, if the BTDUs are stored, for example, in a lobby area or within the
facility in which they are actually utilized, they will be subject to
pilferage and "shrinkage" as unauthorized persons consume them, either as
part of a conscious effort to pilfer or out of an honest misunderstanding,
i.e., a belief that the BTDUs are being provided free of charge by the
operating agency (in this case the United States Government), or as the
result of necessity, as in the case of a beverage spill that is encroaching
on sensitive electronic equipment and whose management will thus brook no
delay. This fact has led certain offices (which shall go unnamed - you know
who you are, guys) to establish makeshift BTDU depots that also serve as
pool-contribution collection points. Usually, these depots take the form of
a table, near the door closest to the facility, on which the BTDUs are
stacked or otherwise deployed, with a bowl or some other receptacle in which
participants may place their contributions, and typically with a sign or
other attention-getting device (such as a stuffed animal or cartoon)
requesting donations. A quick glance at the current regulations will show
that placement of such a display/depot violates the procedure manual.
However, in the interests of employee hygiene, morale, and group
spiritbudding, my higher-ups have agreed to make a one-time exception in the
regulations for this purpose.
As with any part of the procedure manual, new or old, it is your
responsibility to be thoroughly familiar with this material. Estimated
reading time for this document is 15.62 minutes (and don't think we won't
check). Please make note of the major points made in this document, as
follows:
1) BTDU depot/displays are now allowed, on a trial basis, with the new
policy to be reviewed in six months.
2) These must be operated on a voluntary, pool-type basis, as described
in the subchapter on employee pools. (Note: This means keeping books and
tallying all financial transactions.)
3) BTDUs must be brought in by the employees (not shipped through the
mailroom) and are subject to all the usual search-and-seizure regulations.
4) Scented BTDUs are prohibited as they may cause allergic reactions,
wheezing, etc. in some persons.
5) Cash pool donations, as with all monetary transactions within the
U.S. Government, must use official U.S. currency - no yen or Kongbucks!
Naturally, this will lead to a bulk problem if people try to use the
donation bucket as a dumping ground for bundles of old billion- and
trillion-dollar bills. The Buildings and Grounds people are worried about
waste-disposal problems and the potential fire hazard that may ensue if
large piles of billions and trillions begin to mount up. Therefore, a key
feature of the new regulation is that the donation bucket must be emptied
every day - more often if an excessive build-up situation is seen to
develop.
In this vein, the B & G people would also like me to point out that
many of you who have excess U.S. currency to get rid of have been trying to
kill two birds with one stone by using old billions as bathroom tissue.
While creative, this approach has two drawbacks:
1) It clogs the plumbing, and
2) It constitutes defacement of U.S. currency, which is a federal
crime.
DON'T DO IT.
Join your office bathroom-tissue pool instead. It's easy, it's
hygienic, and it's legal.
Happy pooling!
Marietta.
Y.T.'s mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading
it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does
her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00
P.M., she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of
time spent reading this memo, and her reaction, based on the time spent,
will go something like this:
Less than 10 min. Time for an employee conference and possible attitude
counseling.
10-14 min. Keep an eye on this employee; may be developing
slipshod attitude.
14-15.61 min. Employee is an efficient worker, may sometimes miss
important details.
Exactly 15.62 min. Smartass. Needs attitude counseling.
15.63-16 min. Asswipe. Not to be trusted.
16-18 min. Employee is a methodical worker, may sometimes get hung
up on minor details.
More than 18 min. Check the security videotape, see just what this
employee was up to (e.g., possible unauthorized
restroom break).
Y.T.'s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes
reading the memo. It's better for younger workers to spend too long, to show
that they're careful, not cocky. It's better for older workers to go a
little fast, to show good management potential. She's pushing forty. She'
scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular
intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier
section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading.
It's a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on
your work-habits summary.
Having got that out of the way, she dives into work. She is an
applications programmer for the Feds. In the old days, she would have
written computer programs for a living. Nowadays, she writes fragments of
computer programs. These programs are designed by Marietta and Marietta's
superiors in massive week-long meetings on the top floor. Once they get the
design down, they start breaking up the problem into tinier and tinier
segments, assigning them to group managers, who break them down even more
and feed little bits of work to the individual programmers. In order to keep
the work done by the individual coders from colliding, it all has to be done
according to a set of rules and regulations even bigger and more fluid than
the Government procedure manual.
So the first thing that Y.T.'s mother does, having read the new
subchapter on bathroom tissue pools, is to sign on to a subsystem of the
main computer system that handles the particular programming project she's
working on. She doesn't know what the project is - that's classified - or
what it's called. It's just her project. She shares it with a few hundred
other programmers, she's not sure exactly who. And every day when she signs
on to it, there's a stack of memos waiting for her, containing new
regulations and changes to the rules that they all have to follow when
writing code for the project. These regulations make the business with the
bathroom tissue seem as simple and elegant as the Ten Commandments.
So she spends until about eleven A.M. reading, rereading, and
understanding the new changes in the Project. There are many of these,
because this is a Monday morning and Marietta and her higher-ups spent the
whole weekend closeted on the top floor, having a catfight about this
Project, changing everything.
Then she starts going back over all the code she has previously written
for the Project and making a list of all the stuff that will have to be
rewritten in order to make it compatible with the new specifications.
Basically, she's going to have to rewrite all of her material from the
ground up. For the third time in as many months.
But hey, it's a job.
About eleven-thirty, she looks up, startled, to see that half a dozen
people are standing around her workstation. There's Marietta. And a proctor.
And some male Feds. And Leon the polygraph man.
"I just had mine on Thursday," she says.
"Time for another one," Marietta says. "Come on, let's get this show on
the road."
"Hands out where I can see them," the proctor says.
Y.T.'s mom stands up, hands to her sides, and starts walking. She walks
straight out of the office. None of the other people look up. Not supposed
to. Insensitive to co-workers' needs. Makes the testee feel awkward and
singled out, when in fact the polygraph is just part of the whole Fed way of
life. She can hear the snapping footsteps of the proctor behind her, walking
two paces behind, watching, keeping her eyes on those hands so they can't be
doing anything, like popping a Valium or something else that might throw off
the test.
She stops in front of the bathroom door. The proctor walks in front of
her, holds it open, and she walks in, followed by the proctor.
The last stall on the left is oversized, big enough for two people.
Y.T.'s mom goes in, followed by the proctor, who closes and locks the door.
Y.T.'s mom pulls down her panty hose, pulls up her skirt, squats over a pan,
pees. The proctor watches every drop go into the pan, picks it up, empties
it into a test tube that is already labeled with her name and today's date.
Then it's back out to the lobby, followed again by the proctor. You're
allowed to use the elevators on your way to the polygraph room, so you won't
be out of breath and sweaty when you get there.
It used to be just a plain office with a chair and some instruments on
a table. Then they got the new, fancy polygraph system. Now it's like going
in for some kind of high-tech medical scan. The room is completely rebuilt,
no vestige of its original function, the window covered over, everything
smooth and beige and smelling like a hospital. There's only one chair, in
the middle. Y.T.'s mom goes and sits down in it, puts her arms on the arms
of the chair, nestles her fingertips and palms into the little depressions
that await. The neoprene fist of the blood-pressure cuff gropes blindly,
finds her arm, and seizes it. Meanwhile, the room lights are dimming, the
door is closing, she's all alone. The crown of thorns closes over her head,
she feels the pricks of the electrodes through her scalp, senses the cool
air flowing down over her shoulders from the superconducting
quantum-interference devices that serve as radar into her brain. Somewhere
on the other side of the wall, she knows, half a dozen personnel techs are
sitting in a control room, looking at a big-screen blow-up of her pupils.
Then she feels a burning prick in her forearm and knows she's been
injected with something. Which means it's not a normal polygraph exam. Today
she's in for something special. The burning spreads throughout her body, her
heart thumps, eyes water. She's been shot up with caffeine to make her
hyper, make her talkative.
So much for getting any work done today. Sometimes these things go for
twelve hours.
"What is your name?" a voice says. It's an unnaturally calm and liquid
voice. Computer generated. That way, everything it says to her is impartial,
stripped of emotional content, she has no way to pick up any cues as to how
the interrogation is going.
The caffeine, and the other things that they inject her with, screw up
her sense of time also.
She hates these things, but it happens to everyone from time to time,
and when you go to work for the Feds' you sign on the dotted line and give
permission for it. In a way, it's a mark of pride and honor. Everyone who
works for the Feds has their heart in it. Because if they didn't, it would
come out plain as day when it is their turn to sit in this chair.
The questions go on and on. Mostly nonsense questions. "Have you ever
been to Scotland? Is white bread more expensive than wheat bread?" This is
just to get her settled down, get all systems running smoothly. They throw
out all the stuff they get from the first hour of the interrogation, because
it's lost in the noise.
She can feel herself relaxing into it. They say that after a few
polygraphs, you learn to relax, the whole thing goes quicker. The chair
holds her in place, the caffeine keeps her from getting drowsy, the sensory
deprivation clears out her mind.
"What is your daughter's nickname?"
"How do you refer to your daughter?"
"I call her by her nickname. Y.T. She kind of insists on it."
"Does Y.T. have a job?"
"Yes. She works as Kourier. She works for RadiKS."
"How much money does Y.T. make as a Kourier?"
"I don't know. A few bucks here and there."
"How often does she purchase new equipment for her job?"
"I'm not aware. I don't really keep track of that."
"Has Y.T. done anything unusual lately?"
"That depends on what you mean." She knows she's equivocating. "She's
always doing things that some people might label as unusual." That doesn't
sound too good, sounds like an endorsement of nonconformity. "I guess what
I'm saying is, she's always doing unusual things."
"Has Y.T. broken anything in the house recently?"
"Yes." She gives up. The Feds already know this, her house is bugged
and tapped, it's a wonder it doesn't short out the electrical grid, all the
extra stuff wired into it. "She broke my computer."
"Did she give an explanation for why she broke the computer?"
"Yes. Sort of. I mean, if nonsense counts as an explanation."
"What was her explanation?"
"She was afraid - this is so ridiculous - she was afraid I was going to
catch a virus from it."
"Was Y.T. also afraid of catching this virus?"
"No. She said that only programmers could catch it."
Why are they asking her all of these questions? They have all of this
stuff on tape.
"Did you believe Y.T.'s explanation of why she broke the computer?"
That's it.
That's what they're after.
They want to know the only thing they can't directly tap - what's going
on in her mind. They want to know whether she believes Y.T.'s virus story.
And she knows she's making a mistake just thinking these thoughts.
Because those supercooled SQUIDs around her head are picking it up. They
can't tell what she's thinking. But they can tell that something's going on
in her brain, that she's using parts of her brain right now that she didn't
use when they were asking the nonsense questions.
In other words, they can tell that she is analyzing the situation,
trying to figure them out. And she wouldn't be doing that unless she wanted
to hide something.
"What is it you want to know?" she says. "Why don't you just come out
and ask me directly? Let's talk about this face to face. Just sit down
together in a room like adults and talk about it."
She feels another sharp prick in her arm, feels numbness and coldness
spreading all across her body over an interval of a couple of seconds as the
drug mixes with her bloodstream. It's getting harder to follow the
conversation.
"What is your name?" the voice says.
The Alcan - the Alaska Highway - is the world's longest franchise
ghetto, a one-dimensional city two thousand miles long and a hundred feet
wide, and growing at the rate of a hundred miles a year, or as quickly as
people can drive up to the edge of the wilderness and park their bagos in
the next available slot. It is the only way out for people who want to leave
America but don't have access to an airplane or a ship.
It's all two-lane, paved but not well paved, and choked with mobile
homes, family vans, pickup trucks with camper backs. It starts somewhere in
the middle of British Columbia, at the crossroads of Prince George, where a
number of tributaries feed in together to make a single northbound highway.
South of there, the tributaries split into a delta of feeder roads that
crosses the Canadian/American border at a dozen or more places spread out
over five hundred miles from the fjords of British Columbia to the vast
striped wheatlands of central Montana. Then it ties into the American road
system, which serves as the headwaters of the migration. This
five-hundred-mile swath of territory is filled with would-be arctic
explorers in great wheeled houses, optimistically northbound, and more than
a few rejects who have abandoned their bagos in the north country and
hitched a ride back down south. The lumbering bagos and top-heavy
four-wheelers form a moving slalom course for Hiro on his black motorcycle.
All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together,
looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they
glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units.
With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive
vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal
meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness,
building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and
then moving on because the place ain't what it used to be.
The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect,
spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers. But as long as you have
that four-wheel-drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain
it, keep moving just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste
stream. In twenty years, ten million white people will converge on the north
pole and park their bagos there. The low-grade waste heat of their
thermodynamically intense lifestyle will turn the crystalline ice-scape
pliable and treacherous. It will melt a hole through the polar icecap, and
all that metal will sink to the bottom, sucking the biomass down with it.
For a fee, you can drive into a Snooze 'n' Cruise franchise and
umbilical your bago. The magic words are "We Have Pull-Thrus," which means
you can enter the franchise, hook up, sleep, unhook, and drive out without
ever having to shift your land zeppelin into reverse.
They used to claim it was a campground, tried to design the franchise
with a rustic motif, but the customers kept chopping up those log-and-plank
signs and wooden picnic tables and using them for cooking fires. Nowadays,
the signs are electric polycarbonate bubbles, the corporate identity is all
round and polished and smooth, in the same way that a urinal is, to prevent
stuff from building up in the cracks. Because it's not really camping when
you don't have a house to go back to.
Sixteen hours out of California, Hiro pulls into a Snooze 'n' Cruise on
the eastern slope of the Cascades in northern Oregon. He's several hundred
miles north of where the Raft is, and on the wrong side of the mountains.
But there's a guy here he wants to interview.
There are three parking lots. One out of sight down a pitted dirt road
marked with falling-down signs. One a little bit closer, with scary hairys
hanging around its edges, silvery disks flashing and popping under the full
moon as they aim the bottoms of their beer cans at the sky. And one right in
front of the Towne Hall, with gun-toting attendants. You have to pay to park
in that lot. Hiro, decides to pay. He leaves his bike pointing outward, puts
the bios into warm shutdown so he can hot-boot it later if he has to, throws
some Kongbucks at an attendant. Then he turns his head back and forth like a
hunting dog, sniffing the still air, trying to find the Glade.
There's an area a hundred feet away, under the moonlight, where a few
people have been adventurous enough to pitch a tent; usually, these are the
ones with the most guns, or the least to lose. Hiro goes in that direction,
and pretty soon he can see the spreading canopy over the Glade.
Everyone else calls it the Body Lot. It is, simply, an open patch of
ground, formerly grass covered, now covered with successive truckloads of
sand that have become mingled with litter, broken glass, and human waste. A
canopy is stretched over it to keep out the rain, and big mushroom-shaped
hoods stick out of the ground every few feet, exhaling warm air on cold
nights. It is pretty cheap to sleep in the Glade. It is an innovation that
was created by some of the franchises farther south and has been spreading
northward along with its clientele.
About half a dozen of them are scattered around under the warm-air
vents, bandaged against the chill in their army blankets. A couple of them
have a small fire going, are playing cards by its light. Hiro ignores them,
starts wandering around through the remainder.
"Chuck Wrightson," he says. "Mr. President, are you here?"
The second time he says it, a pile of wool off to his left begins to
writhe and thrash around. A head comes out of it. Hiro turns toward him,
holds up his hands to prove he's unarmed.
"Who is that?" he says. He is abjectly terrified. "Raven?"
"Not Raven," Hiro says. "Don't worry. Are you Chuck Wrightson? Former
President of the Temporary Republic of Kenai and Kodiak?"
"Yeah. What do you want? I don't have any money."
"Just to talk. I work for CIC, and my job is to gather intelligence."
"I need a fucking drink," Chuck Wrightson says.
The Towne Hall is a big inflatable building in the middle of the Snooze
'n' Cruise. It is Derelict Las Vegas: convenience store, video arcade,
laundromat, bar, liquor store, flea market, whorehouse. It always seems to
be ruled by that small percentage of the human population that is capable of
partying until five in the morning every single night, and that has no other
function.
Most Towne Halls have a few franchises-within-franchises. Hiro sees a
Kelley's Tap, which is about the nicest trough you are likely to find at a
Snooze 'n' Cruise, and leads Chuck Wrightson into it. Chuck is wearing many
layers of clothing that used to be different colors. Now they are the same
color as his skin, which is khaki.
All the businesses in a Towne Hall, including this bar, look like
something you'd see on a prison ship - everything nailed down, brightly lit
up twenty-four hours a day, all of the personnel sealed up behind thick
glass barriers that have gone all yellow and murky. Security at this Towne
Hall is provided by The Enforcers, so there are a lot of steroid addicts in
black armorgel outfits, cruising up and down the arcade in twos and threes,
enthusiastically violating people's human rights.
Hiro and Chuck grab the closest thing they can find to a corner table.
Hiro buttonholes a waiter and surreptitiously orders a pitcher of Pub
Special, mixed half and half with nonalcoholic beer. This way, Chuck ought
to remain awake a little longer than he would otherwise.
It doesn't take much to make him open up. He's like one of these old
guys from a disgraced presidential administration, forced out by scandal,
who devotes the rest of his life to finding people who will listen to him.
"Yeah, I was president of TROKK for two years. And I still consider
myself the president of the government in exile."
Hiro tries to keep himself from rolling his eyes. Chuck seems to
notice.
"Okay, okay, so that's not much. But TROKK was a thriving country, for
a while. There's a lot of people who'd like to see something like that rise
again. I mean, the only thing that forced us out - the only way those
maniacs were able to seize power -was just totally, you know - " He doesn't
seem to have words for it. "How could you have expected something like
that?"
"How were you forced out? Was there a civil war?"
"There were some uprisings, early on. And there were remote parts of
Kodiak where we never had a firm grip on power. But there was never a civil
war per se. See, the Americans liked our government. The Americans had all
the weapons, the equipment, the infrastructure. The Orthos were just a bunch
of hairy guys running around in the woods."
"Orthos?"
"Russian Orthodox. At first they were a tiny minority. Mostly Indians -
you know, Tlingits and Aleuts who'd been converted by the Russians hundreds
of years ago. But when things got crazy in Russia, they started to pour
across the Dateline in all kinds of different boats."
"And they didn't want a constitutional democracy."
"No. No way."
"What did they want? A tsar?"
"No. Those tsar guys - the traditionalists - stayed in Russia. The
Orthos who came to TROKK were total rejects. They had been forced out by the
mainline Russian Orthodox church."
"Why?"
"Yeretic. That's how Russians say 'heretic.' The Orthos who came to
TROKK were a new sect - all Pentecostals. They were tied in somehow with the
Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates. We had missionaries from Texas coming up all
the goddamn time to meet with them. They were always speaking in tongues.
The mainline Russian Orthodox church thought it was the work of the devil."
"So how many of these Pentecostal Russian Orthodox people came over to
TROKK?"
"Jeez, a hell of a lot of them. At least fifty thousand."
"How many Americans were in TROKK?"
"Close to a hundred thousand."
"Then how exactly did the Orthos manage to take the place over?"
"Well, one morning we woke up and there was an Airstream parked in the
middle of Government Square in New Washington, right in the middle of all
the bagos where we had set up the government. The Orthos had towed it there
during the night, then took the wheels off so it couldn't be moved. We
figured it was a protest action. We told them to move it out of there. They
refused and issued a proclamation, in Russian. When we got this damn thing
translated, it turned out to be an order for us to pack up and leave and
turn over power to the Orthos.
"Well, this was ridiculous. So we went up to this Airstream to move it
out of there, and Gurov's waiting for us with this nasty grin on his face."
"Gurov?"
"Yeah. One of the Refus who came over the Dateline from the Soviet
Babel event - which most people consider to be a myth - but the fact that
languages tend to diverge. A number of linguistic theories have been
developed in an effort to tie all languages together."
"Theories Lagos tried to apply to his virus hypothesis."
"Yes. There are two schools: relativists and universalists. As George
Steiner summarizes it, relativists tend to believe that language is not the
vehicle of thought but its determining medium. It is the framework of
cognition. Our perceptions of everything are organized by the flux of
sensations passing over that framework. Hence, the study of the evolution of
language is the study of the evolution of the human mind itself."
"Okay, I can see the significance of that. What about the
universalists?"
"In contrast with the relativists, who believe that languages need not
have anything in common with each other, the universalists believe that if
you can analyze languages enough, you can find that all of them have certain
traits in common. So they analyze languages, looking for such traits."
"Have they found any?"
"No. There seems to be an exception to every rule."
"Which blows universalism out of the water."
"Not necessarily. They explain this problem by saying that the shared
traits are too deeply buried to be analyzable."
"Which is a cop out."
"Their point is that at some level, language has to happen inside the
human brain. Since all human brains are more or less the same - "
"The hardware's the same. Not the software."
"You are using some kind of metaphor that I cannot understand."
Hiro whips past a big Airstream that is rocking from side to side in a
dangerous wind coming down the valley.
"Well, a French-speaker's brain starts out the same as an
English-speaker's brain. As they grow up, they get programmed with different
software-they learn different languages."
"Yes. Therefore, according to the universalists, French and English -
or any other languages - must share certain traits that have their roots in
the 'deep structures' of the human brain. According to Chomskyan theory, the
deep structures are innate components of the brain that enable it to cam out
certain formal kinds of operations on strings of symbols. Or, as Steiner
paraphrases Emmon Bach: These deep structures eventually lead to the actual
patterning of the cortex with its immensely ramified yet, at the same time,
'programmed' network of electrochemical and neurophysiological channels."
"But these deep structures are so deep we can't even see them?"
"The universalists place the active nodes of linguistic life - the deep
structures - so deep as to defy observation and description. Or to use
Steiner's analogy: Try to draw up the creature from the depths of the sea,
and it will disintegrate or change form grotesquely."
"There's that serpent again. So which theory did Lagos believe in? The
relativist or the universalist?"
"He did not seem to think there was much of a difference. In the end,
they are both somewhat mystical. Lagos believed that both schools of thought
had essentially arrived at the same place by different lines of reasoning."
"But it seems to me there is a key difference," Hiro says. "The
universalists think that we are determined by the prepatterned structure of
our brains - the pathways in the cortex. The relativists don't believe that
we have any limits."
"Lagos modified the strict Chomskyan theory by supposing that learning
a language is like blowing code into PROMS -an analogy that I cannot
interpret."
"The analogy is clear. PROMS are Programmable Read-Only Memory chips,"
Hiro says. "When they come from the factory, they have no content. Once and
only once, you can place information into those chips and then freeze it
-the information, the software, becomes frozen into the chip -it transmutes
into hardware. After you have blown the code into the PROMS, you can read it
out, but you can't write to them anymore. So Lagos was trying to say that
the newborn human brain has no structure - as the relativists would have it
- and that as the child learns a language, the developing brain structures
itself accordingly, the language gets 'blown into' the hardware and becomes
a permanent part of the brain's deep structure - as the universalists would
have it."
"Yes. This was his interpretation."
"Okay. So when he talked about Enki being a real person with magical
powers, what he meant was that Enki somehow understood the connection
between language and the brain, knew how to manipulate it. The same way that
a hacker, knowing the secrets of a computer system, can write code to
control it - digital nam-shubs."
"Lagos said that Enki had the ability to ascend into the universe of
language and see it before his eyes. Much as humans go into the Metaverse.
That gave him power to create nam-shubs. And nam-shubs had the power to
alter the functioning of the brain and of the body."
"Why isn't anyone doing this kind of thing nowadays? Why aren't there
any nam-shubs in English?"
"Not all languages are the same, as Steiner points out. Some languages
are better at metaphor than others. Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Chinese lend
themselves to word play and have achieved a lasting grip on reality:
Palestine had Qiryat Sefer, the "City of the Letter," and Syria had Byblos,
the "Town of the Book." By contrast other civilizations seem "speechless" or
at least, as may have been the case in Egypt, not entirely cognizant of the
creative and transformational powers of language. Lagos believed that
Sumerian was an extraordinarily powerful language - at least it was in Sumer
five thousand years ago."
"A language that lent itself to Enki's neurolinguistic hacking."
"Early linguists, as well as the Kabbalists, believed in a fictional
language called the tongue of Eden, the language of Adam. It enabled all men
to understand each other, to communicate without misunderstanding. It was
the language of the Logos, the moment when God created the world by speaking
a word. In the tongue of Eden, naming a thing was the same as creating it.
To quote Steiner again, 'Our speech interposes itself between apprehension
and truth like a dusty pane or warped mirror. The tongue of Eden was like a
flawless glass; a light of total understanding streamed through it. Thus
Babel was a second Fall.' And Isaac the Blind, an early Kabbalist, said
that, to quote Gershom Scholem's translation, 'The speech of men is
connected with divine speech and all language whether heavenly or human
derives from one source: the Divine Name.' The practical kabbalists, the
sorcerers, bore the title Ba'al Shem, meaning 'master of the divine name.'"
"The machine language of the world," Hiro says.
"Is this another analogy?"
"Computers speak machine language," Hiro says. "It's written in ones
and zeroes-binary code. At the lowest level, all computers are programmed
with strings of ones and zeroes. When you program in machine language, you
are controlling the computer at its brainstem, the root of its existence.
It's the tongue of Eden. But it's very difficult to work in machine language
because you go crazy after a while, working at such a minute level. So a
whole Babel of computer languages has been created for programmers: FORTRAN,
BASIC, COBOL, LISP, Pascal, C, PROLOG, FORTH. You talk to the computer in
one of these languages, and a piece of software called a compiler converts
it into machine language. But you never can tell exactly what the compiler
is doing. It doesn't always come out the way you want. Like a dusty pane or
warped mirror. A really advanced hacker comes to understand the true inner
workings of the machine - he sees through the language he's working in and
glimpses the secret functioning of the binary code - becomes a Ba'al Shem of
sorts."
"Lagos believed that the legends about the tongue of Eden were
exaggerated versions of true events," the Librarian says. "These legends
reflected nostalgia for a time when people spoke Sumerian, a tongue that was
superior to anything that came afterward."
"Is Sumerian really that good?"
"Not as far as modern-day linguists can tell," the Librarian says. "As
I mentioned, it is largely impossible for us to grasp. Lagos suspected that
words worked differently in those days. If one's native tongue influences
the physical structure of the developing brain, then it is fair to say that
the Sumerians - who spoke a language radically different from anything in
existence today - had fundamentally different brains from yours. Lagos
believed that for this reason, Sumerian was a language ideally suited to the
creation and propagation of viruses. That a virus, once released into Sumer,
would spread rapidly and virulently, until it had infected everyone."
"Maybe Enki knew that also," Hiro says. "Maybe the nam-shub of Enki
wasn't such a bad thing. Maybe Babel was the best thing that ever happened
to us."
Y.T.'s mom works in Fedland. She has parked her little car in her own
little numbered slot, for which the Feds require her to pay about ten
percent of her salary (if she like it she can take a taxi or walk) and
walked up several levels of a blindingly lit reinforced-concrete helix in
which most of the spaces - the good spaces closer to the surface - are
reserved for people other than her, but empty. She always walks up the
center of the ramp, between the rows of parked cars, so that the EBGOC boys
won't think she's lurking, loitering, skulking, malingering, or smoking.
Reaching the subterranean entrance of her building, she has taken all
metal objects from her pockets and removed what little jewelry she's wearing
and dumped them into a dirty plastic bowl and walked through the detector.
Flashed her badge. Signed her name and noted down the digital time.
Submitted to a frisking from an EBGOC girl. Annoying, but it sure beats a
cavity search. They have a right to do a cavity search if they want. She got
cavity-searched every day for a month once, right after she had spoken up at
a meeting and suggested that her supervisor might be on the wrong track with
a major programming project. It was punitive and vicious, she knew it was,
but she always wanted to give something back to her country, and whenever
you work for the Feds you just accept the fact that there's going to be some
politicking. And that as a low-level person you're going to bear the brunt.
And later on, you climb the GS ladder, don't have to put up with as much
shit. Far be it from her to quarrel with her supervisor. Her supervisor,
Marietta, doesn't have an especially stellar GS level, but she does have
access. She has connections. Marietta knows people who know people. Marietta
has attended cocktail parties that were also attended by some people who,
well, your eyes would bug out.
She has passed the frisking with flying collars. Put the metal stuff
back into her pockets. Climbed up half a dozen flights of stairs to her
floor. The elevators here still work, but some very highly placed people in
Fedland have let it be known - nothing official, but they have ways of
letting this stuff out - that it is a duty to conserve energy. And the Feds
are real serious about duty. Duty, loyalty, responsibility. The collagen
that binds us into the United States of America. So the stairwells are
filled with sweaty wool and clacking leather. If you took the elevator, no
one would actually say anything, but it would be noticed. Noticed and
written down and taken into account. People would look at you, glance you up
and down, like, what happened, sprain your ankle? Taking the stairs is no
problem.
Feds don't smoke. Feds generally don't overeat. The health plan is very
specific, contains major incentives, get too heavy or wheezy and, no one
says anything about it - which would be rude - but you feel a definite
pressure, a sense of not fitting in, as you walk across the sea of desks,
eyes glance up to follow you, estimating the mass of your saddlebags, eyes
darting back and forth between desks as, by consensus, your co-workers say
to themselves, I wonder how much he or she is driving up our health plan
premiums?
So Y.T.'s mom has clacked up the stairs in her black pumps and gone
into her office, actually a large room with computer workstations placed
across it in a grid. Used to be divided up by partitions, but the EBGOC boys
didn't like it, said what would happen if there had to be an evacuation? All
those partitions would impede the free flow of unhinged panic. So no more
partitions. Just workstations and chairs. Not even any desktops. Desktops
encourage the use of paper, which is archaic and reflects inadequate team
spirit. What is so special about your work that you have to write it down on
a piece of paper that only you get to see? That you have to lock it away
inside a desk? When you're working for the Feds, everything you do is the
property of the United States of America. You do your work on the computer.
The computer keeps a copy of everything, so that if you get sick or
something, it's all there where your co-workers and supervisors can get
access to it. If you want to write little notes or make phone doodles,
you're perfectly free to do that at home, in your spare time.
And there's the question of interchangeability. Fed workers, like
military people, are intended to be interchangeable parts. What happens if
your workstation should break down? You're going to sit there and twiddle
your thumbs until it gets fixed? No siree, you're going to move to a spare
workstation and get to work on that. And you don't have that flexibility if
you've got half a ton of personal stuff cached inside of a desk, strewn
around a desktop.
So there is no paper in a Fed office. All the workstations are the
same. You come in in the morning, pick one at random, sit down, and get to
work. You could try to favor a particular station, try to sit there every
day, but it would be noticed. Generally you pick the unoccupied workstation
that's closest to the door. That way, whoever came in earliest sits closest,
whoever came in latest is way in the back, for the rest of the day it's
obvious at a glance who's on the ball in this office and who is - as they
whisper to each other in the bathrooms - having problems.
Not that it's any big secret, who comes in first. When you sign on to a
workstation in the morning, it's not like the central computer doesn't
notice that fact. The central computer notices just about everything. Keeps
track of every key you hit on the keyboard, all day long, what time you hit
it, down to the microsecond, whether it was the right key or the wrong key,
how many mistakes you make and when you make them. You're only required to
be at your workstation from eight to five, with a half-hour lunch break and
two ten-minute coffee breaks, but if you stuck to that schedule it would
definitely be noticed, which is why Y.T.'s mom is sliding into the first
unoccupied workstation and signing on to her machine at quarter to seven.
Half a dozen other people are already here, signed on to workstations closer
to the entrance, but this isn't bad. She can look forward to a reasonably
stable career if she can keep up this sort of performance.
The Feds still operate in Flatland. None of this three-dimensional
stuff, no goggles, no stereo sound. The computers are all basic flat-screen
two-dimensional numbers. Windows appear on the desktop, with little text
documents inside. All part of the austerity program. Soon to reap major
benefits.
She signs on and checks her mail. No personal mail, just a couple of
mass-distributed pronouncements from Marietta.
I've been asked to distribute the new regulations regarding office pool
displays. The enclosed memo is a new subchapter of the EBGOC Procedure
Manual, replacing the old subchapter entitled PHYSICAL PLANT/CALIFORNIA/LOS
ANGELES/BUILDINGS/OFFICE AREAS/PHYSICAL LAYOUT REGULATIONS/EMPLOYEE
INPUT/GROUP ACTIVITIES.
The old subchapter was a flat prohibition on the use of office space or
time for "pool" activities of any kind, whether permanent (e.g., coffee
pool) or one-time (e.g., birthday parties).
This prohibition still applies, but a single, one-time exception has
now been made for any office that wishes to pursue a joint bathroom-tissue
strategy.
By way of introduction, let me just make a few general comments on this
subject. The problem of distributing bathroom tissue to workers presents
inherent challenges for any office management system due to the inherent
unpredictability of usage - not every facility usage transaction
necessitates the use of bathroom tissue, and when it is used, the amount
needed (number of squares) may vary quite widely from person to person and,
for a given person, from one transaction to the next. This does not even
take into account the occasional use of bathroom tissue for
unpredictable/creative purposes such as applying/removing cosmetics,
beverage-spill management, etc. For this reason, rather than trying to
package bathroom tissue in small one-transaction packets (as is done with
premoistened towelettes, for example), which can be wasteful in some cases
and limiting in other cases, it has been traditional to package this product
in bulk distribution units whose size exceeds the maximum amount of squares
that an individual could conceivably use in a single transaction (barring
force majeure). This reduces to a minimum the number of transactions in
which the distribution unit is depleted (the roll runs out during the
transaction, a situation that can lead to emotional stress for the affected
employee. However, it does present the manager with some challenges in that
the distribution unit is rather bulky and must be repeatedly used by a
number of different individuals if it is not to be wasted.
Since the implementation of Phase XVII of the Austerity Program,
employees have been allowed to bring their own bathroom tissue from home.
This approach is somewhat bulky and redundant, as every worker usually
brings their own roll.
Some offices have attempted to meet this challenge by instituting
bathroom-tissue pools.
Without overgeneralizing, it may be stated that an inherent and
irreducible feature of any bathroom-tissue pool implemented at the office
level, in an environment (i.e., building) in which comfort stations are
distributed on a per-floor basis (i.e., in which several offices share a
single facility) is that provision must be made within the confines of the
individual office for temporary stationing of bathroom tissue distribution
units (i.e., rolls). This follows from the fact that if the BTDUs (rolls)
are stationed, while inactive, outside of the purview of the controlling
office (i.e., the office that has collectively purchased the BTDU) - that
is, if the BTDUs are stored, for example, in a lobby area or within the
facility in which they are actually utilized, they will be subject to
pilferage and "shrinkage" as unauthorized persons consume them, either as
part of a conscious effort to pilfer or out of an honest misunderstanding,
i.e., a belief that the BTDUs are being provided free of charge by the
operating agency (in this case the United States Government), or as the
result of necessity, as in the case of a beverage spill that is encroaching
on sensitive electronic equipment and whose management will thus brook no
delay. This fact has led certain offices (which shall go unnamed - you know
who you are, guys) to establish makeshift BTDU depots that also serve as
pool-contribution collection points. Usually, these depots take the form of
a table, near the door closest to the facility, on which the BTDUs are
stacked or otherwise deployed, with a bowl or some other receptacle in which
participants may place their contributions, and typically with a sign or
other attention-getting device (such as a stuffed animal or cartoon)
requesting donations. A quick glance at the current regulations will show
that placement of such a display/depot violates the procedure manual.
However, in the interests of employee hygiene, morale, and group
spiritbudding, my higher-ups have agreed to make a one-time exception in the
regulations for this purpose.
As with any part of the procedure manual, new or old, it is your
responsibility to be thoroughly familiar with this material. Estimated
reading time for this document is 15.62 minutes (and don't think we won't
check). Please make note of the major points made in this document, as
follows:
1) BTDU depot/displays are now allowed, on a trial basis, with the new
policy to be reviewed in six months.
2) These must be operated on a voluntary, pool-type basis, as described
in the subchapter on employee pools. (Note: This means keeping books and
tallying all financial transactions.)
3) BTDUs must be brought in by the employees (not shipped through the
mailroom) and are subject to all the usual search-and-seizure regulations.
4) Scented BTDUs are prohibited as they may cause allergic reactions,
wheezing, etc. in some persons.
5) Cash pool donations, as with all monetary transactions within the
U.S. Government, must use official U.S. currency - no yen or Kongbucks!
Naturally, this will lead to a bulk problem if people try to use the
donation bucket as a dumping ground for bundles of old billion- and
trillion-dollar bills. The Buildings and Grounds people are worried about
waste-disposal problems and the potential fire hazard that may ensue if
large piles of billions and trillions begin to mount up. Therefore, a key
feature of the new regulation is that the donation bucket must be emptied
every day - more often if an excessive build-up situation is seen to
develop.
In this vein, the B & G people would also like me to point out that
many of you who have excess U.S. currency to get rid of have been trying to
kill two birds with one stone by using old billions as bathroom tissue.
While creative, this approach has two drawbacks:
1) It clogs the plumbing, and
2) It constitutes defacement of U.S. currency, which is a federal
crime.
DON'T DO IT.
Join your office bathroom-tissue pool instead. It's easy, it's
hygienic, and it's legal.
Happy pooling!
Marietta.
Y.T.'s mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading
it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does
her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00
P.M., she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of
time spent reading this memo, and her reaction, based on the time spent,
will go something like this:
Less than 10 min. Time for an employee conference and possible attitude
counseling.
10-14 min. Keep an eye on this employee; may be developing
slipshod attitude.
14-15.61 min. Employee is an efficient worker, may sometimes miss
important details.
Exactly 15.62 min. Smartass. Needs attitude counseling.
15.63-16 min. Asswipe. Not to be trusted.
16-18 min. Employee is a methodical worker, may sometimes get hung
up on minor details.
More than 18 min. Check the security videotape, see just what this
employee was up to (e.g., possible unauthorized
restroom break).
Y.T.'s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes
reading the memo. It's better for younger workers to spend too long, to show
that they're careful, not cocky. It's better for older workers to go a
little fast, to show good management potential. She's pushing forty. She'
scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular
intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier
section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading.
It's a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on
your work-habits summary.
Having got that out of the way, she dives into work. She is an
applications programmer for the Feds. In the old days, she would have
written computer programs for a living. Nowadays, she writes fragments of
computer programs. These programs are designed by Marietta and Marietta's
superiors in massive week-long meetings on the top floor. Once they get the
design down, they start breaking up the problem into tinier and tinier
segments, assigning them to group managers, who break them down even more
and feed little bits of work to the individual programmers. In order to keep
the work done by the individual coders from colliding, it all has to be done
according to a set of rules and regulations even bigger and more fluid than
the Government procedure manual.
So the first thing that Y.T.'s mother does, having read the new
subchapter on bathroom tissue pools, is to sign on to a subsystem of the
main computer system that handles the particular programming project she's
working on. She doesn't know what the project is - that's classified - or
what it's called. It's just her project. She shares it with a few hundred
other programmers, she's not sure exactly who. And every day when she signs
on to it, there's a stack of memos waiting for her, containing new
regulations and changes to the rules that they all have to follow when
writing code for the project. These regulations make the business with the
bathroom tissue seem as simple and elegant as the Ten Commandments.
So she spends until about eleven A.M. reading, rereading, and
understanding the new changes in the Project. There are many of these,
because this is a Monday morning and Marietta and her higher-ups spent the
whole weekend closeted on the top floor, having a catfight about this
Project, changing everything.
Then she starts going back over all the code she has previously written
for the Project and making a list of all the stuff that will have to be
rewritten in order to make it compatible with the new specifications.
Basically, she's going to have to rewrite all of her material from the
ground up. For the third time in as many months.
But hey, it's a job.
About eleven-thirty, she looks up, startled, to see that half a dozen
people are standing around her workstation. There's Marietta. And a proctor.
And some male Feds. And Leon the polygraph man.
"I just had mine on Thursday," she says.
"Time for another one," Marietta says. "Come on, let's get this show on
the road."
"Hands out where I can see them," the proctor says.
Y.T.'s mom stands up, hands to her sides, and starts walking. She walks
straight out of the office. None of the other people look up. Not supposed
to. Insensitive to co-workers' needs. Makes the testee feel awkward and
singled out, when in fact the polygraph is just part of the whole Fed way of
life. She can hear the snapping footsteps of the proctor behind her, walking
two paces behind, watching, keeping her eyes on those hands so they can't be
doing anything, like popping a Valium or something else that might throw off
the test.
She stops in front of the bathroom door. The proctor walks in front of
her, holds it open, and she walks in, followed by the proctor.
The last stall on the left is oversized, big enough for two people.
Y.T.'s mom goes in, followed by the proctor, who closes and locks the door.
Y.T.'s mom pulls down her panty hose, pulls up her skirt, squats over a pan,
pees. The proctor watches every drop go into the pan, picks it up, empties
it into a test tube that is already labeled with her name and today's date.
Then it's back out to the lobby, followed again by the proctor. You're
allowed to use the elevators on your way to the polygraph room, so you won't
be out of breath and sweaty when you get there.
It used to be just a plain office with a chair and some instruments on
a table. Then they got the new, fancy polygraph system. Now it's like going
in for some kind of high-tech medical scan. The room is completely rebuilt,
no vestige of its original function, the window covered over, everything
smooth and beige and smelling like a hospital. There's only one chair, in
the middle. Y.T.'s mom goes and sits down in it, puts her arms on the arms
of the chair, nestles her fingertips and palms into the little depressions
that await. The neoprene fist of the blood-pressure cuff gropes blindly,
finds her arm, and seizes it. Meanwhile, the room lights are dimming, the
door is closing, she's all alone. The crown of thorns closes over her head,
she feels the pricks of the electrodes through her scalp, senses the cool
air flowing down over her shoulders from the superconducting
quantum-interference devices that serve as radar into her brain. Somewhere
on the other side of the wall, she knows, half a dozen personnel techs are
sitting in a control room, looking at a big-screen blow-up of her pupils.
Then she feels a burning prick in her forearm and knows she's been
injected with something. Which means it's not a normal polygraph exam. Today
she's in for something special. The burning spreads throughout her body, her
heart thumps, eyes water. She's been shot up with caffeine to make her
hyper, make her talkative.
So much for getting any work done today. Sometimes these things go for
twelve hours.
"What is your name?" a voice says. It's an unnaturally calm and liquid
voice. Computer generated. That way, everything it says to her is impartial,
stripped of emotional content, she has no way to pick up any cues as to how
the interrogation is going.
The caffeine, and the other things that they inject her with, screw up
her sense of time also.
She hates these things, but it happens to everyone from time to time,
and when you go to work for the Feds' you sign on the dotted line and give
permission for it. In a way, it's a mark of pride and honor. Everyone who
works for the Feds has their heart in it. Because if they didn't, it would
come out plain as day when it is their turn to sit in this chair.
The questions go on and on. Mostly nonsense questions. "Have you ever
been to Scotland? Is white bread more expensive than wheat bread?" This is
just to get her settled down, get all systems running smoothly. They throw
out all the stuff they get from the first hour of the interrogation, because
it's lost in the noise.
She can feel herself relaxing into it. They say that after a few
polygraphs, you learn to relax, the whole thing goes quicker. The chair
holds her in place, the caffeine keeps her from getting drowsy, the sensory
deprivation clears out her mind.
"What is your daughter's nickname?"
"How do you refer to your daughter?"
"I call her by her nickname. Y.T. She kind of insists on it."
"Does Y.T. have a job?"
"Yes. She works as Kourier. She works for RadiKS."
"How much money does Y.T. make as a Kourier?"
"I don't know. A few bucks here and there."
"How often does she purchase new equipment for her job?"
"I'm not aware. I don't really keep track of that."
"Has Y.T. done anything unusual lately?"
"That depends on what you mean." She knows she's equivocating. "She's
always doing things that some people might label as unusual." That doesn't
sound too good, sounds like an endorsement of nonconformity. "I guess what
I'm saying is, she's always doing unusual things."
"Has Y.T. broken anything in the house recently?"
"Yes." She gives up. The Feds already know this, her house is bugged
and tapped, it's a wonder it doesn't short out the electrical grid, all the
extra stuff wired into it. "She broke my computer."
"Did she give an explanation for why she broke the computer?"
"Yes. Sort of. I mean, if nonsense counts as an explanation."
"What was her explanation?"
"She was afraid - this is so ridiculous - she was afraid I was going to
catch a virus from it."
"Was Y.T. also afraid of catching this virus?"
"No. She said that only programmers could catch it."
Why are they asking her all of these questions? They have all of this
stuff on tape.
"Did you believe Y.T.'s explanation of why she broke the computer?"
That's it.
That's what they're after.
They want to know the only thing they can't directly tap - what's going
on in her mind. They want to know whether she believes Y.T.'s virus story.
And she knows she's making a mistake just thinking these thoughts.
Because those supercooled SQUIDs around her head are picking it up. They
can't tell what she's thinking. But they can tell that something's going on
in her brain, that she's using parts of her brain right now that she didn't
use when they were asking the nonsense questions.
In other words, they can tell that she is analyzing the situation,
trying to figure them out. And she wouldn't be doing that unless she wanted
to hide something.
"What is it you want to know?" she says. "Why don't you just come out
and ask me directly? Let's talk about this face to face. Just sit down
together in a room like adults and talk about it."
She feels another sharp prick in her arm, feels numbness and coldness
spreading all across her body over an interval of a couple of seconds as the
drug mixes with her bloodstream. It's getting harder to follow the
conversation.
"What is your name?" the voice says.
The Alcan - the Alaska Highway - is the world's longest franchise
ghetto, a one-dimensional city two thousand miles long and a hundred feet
wide, and growing at the rate of a hundred miles a year, or as quickly as
people can drive up to the edge of the wilderness and park their bagos in
the next available slot. It is the only way out for people who want to leave
America but don't have access to an airplane or a ship.
It's all two-lane, paved but not well paved, and choked with mobile
homes, family vans, pickup trucks with camper backs. It starts somewhere in
the middle of British Columbia, at the crossroads of Prince George, where a
number of tributaries feed in together to make a single northbound highway.
South of there, the tributaries split into a delta of feeder roads that
crosses the Canadian/American border at a dozen or more places spread out
over five hundred miles from the fjords of British Columbia to the vast
striped wheatlands of central Montana. Then it ties into the American road
system, which serves as the headwaters of the migration. This
five-hundred-mile swath of territory is filled with would-be arctic
explorers in great wheeled houses, optimistically northbound, and more than
a few rejects who have abandoned their bagos in the north country and
hitched a ride back down south. The lumbering bagos and top-heavy
four-wheelers form a moving slalom course for Hiro on his black motorcycle.
All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together,
looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they
glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units.
With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive
vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal
meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness,
building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and
then moving on because the place ain't what it used to be.
The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect,
spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers. But as long as you have
that four-wheel-drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain
it, keep moving just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste
stream. In twenty years, ten million white people will converge on the north
pole and park their bagos there. The low-grade waste heat of their
thermodynamically intense lifestyle will turn the crystalline ice-scape
pliable and treacherous. It will melt a hole through the polar icecap, and
all that metal will sink to the bottom, sucking the biomass down with it.
For a fee, you can drive into a Snooze 'n' Cruise franchise and
umbilical your bago. The magic words are "We Have Pull-Thrus," which means
you can enter the franchise, hook up, sleep, unhook, and drive out without
ever having to shift your land zeppelin into reverse.
They used to claim it was a campground, tried to design the franchise
with a rustic motif, but the customers kept chopping up those log-and-plank
signs and wooden picnic tables and using them for cooking fires. Nowadays,
the signs are electric polycarbonate bubbles, the corporate identity is all
round and polished and smooth, in the same way that a urinal is, to prevent
stuff from building up in the cracks. Because it's not really camping when
you don't have a house to go back to.
Sixteen hours out of California, Hiro pulls into a Snooze 'n' Cruise on
the eastern slope of the Cascades in northern Oregon. He's several hundred
miles north of where the Raft is, and on the wrong side of the mountains.
But there's a guy here he wants to interview.
There are three parking lots. One out of sight down a pitted dirt road
marked with falling-down signs. One a little bit closer, with scary hairys
hanging around its edges, silvery disks flashing and popping under the full
moon as they aim the bottoms of their beer cans at the sky. And one right in
front of the Towne Hall, with gun-toting attendants. You have to pay to park
in that lot. Hiro, decides to pay. He leaves his bike pointing outward, puts
the bios into warm shutdown so he can hot-boot it later if he has to, throws
some Kongbucks at an attendant. Then he turns his head back and forth like a
hunting dog, sniffing the still air, trying to find the Glade.
There's an area a hundred feet away, under the moonlight, where a few
people have been adventurous enough to pitch a tent; usually, these are the
ones with the most guns, or the least to lose. Hiro goes in that direction,
and pretty soon he can see the spreading canopy over the Glade.
Everyone else calls it the Body Lot. It is, simply, an open patch of
ground, formerly grass covered, now covered with successive truckloads of
sand that have become mingled with litter, broken glass, and human waste. A
canopy is stretched over it to keep out the rain, and big mushroom-shaped
hoods stick out of the ground every few feet, exhaling warm air on cold
nights. It is pretty cheap to sleep in the Glade. It is an innovation that
was created by some of the franchises farther south and has been spreading
northward along with its clientele.
About half a dozen of them are scattered around under the warm-air
vents, bandaged against the chill in their army blankets. A couple of them
have a small fire going, are playing cards by its light. Hiro ignores them,
starts wandering around through the remainder.
"Chuck Wrightson," he says. "Mr. President, are you here?"
The second time he says it, a pile of wool off to his left begins to
writhe and thrash around. A head comes out of it. Hiro turns toward him,
holds up his hands to prove he's unarmed.
"Who is that?" he says. He is abjectly terrified. "Raven?"
"Not Raven," Hiro says. "Don't worry. Are you Chuck Wrightson? Former
President of the Temporary Republic of Kenai and Kodiak?"
"Yeah. What do you want? I don't have any money."
"Just to talk. I work for CIC, and my job is to gather intelligence."
"I need a fucking drink," Chuck Wrightson says.
The Towne Hall is a big inflatable building in the middle of the Snooze
'n' Cruise. It is Derelict Las Vegas: convenience store, video arcade,
laundromat, bar, liquor store, flea market, whorehouse. It always seems to
be ruled by that small percentage of the human population that is capable of
partying until five in the morning every single night, and that has no other
function.
Most Towne Halls have a few franchises-within-franchises. Hiro sees a
Kelley's Tap, which is about the nicest trough you are likely to find at a
Snooze 'n' Cruise, and leads Chuck Wrightson into it. Chuck is wearing many
layers of clothing that used to be different colors. Now they are the same
color as his skin, which is khaki.
All the businesses in a Towne Hall, including this bar, look like
something you'd see on a prison ship - everything nailed down, brightly lit
up twenty-four hours a day, all of the personnel sealed up behind thick
glass barriers that have gone all yellow and murky. Security at this Towne
Hall is provided by The Enforcers, so there are a lot of steroid addicts in
black armorgel outfits, cruising up and down the arcade in twos and threes,
enthusiastically violating people's human rights.
Hiro and Chuck grab the closest thing they can find to a corner table.
Hiro buttonholes a waiter and surreptitiously orders a pitcher of Pub
Special, mixed half and half with nonalcoholic beer. This way, Chuck ought
to remain awake a little longer than he would otherwise.
It doesn't take much to make him open up. He's like one of these old
guys from a disgraced presidential administration, forced out by scandal,
who devotes the rest of his life to finding people who will listen to him.
"Yeah, I was president of TROKK for two years. And I still consider
myself the president of the government in exile."
Hiro tries to keep himself from rolling his eyes. Chuck seems to
notice.
"Okay, okay, so that's not much. But TROKK was a thriving country, for
a while. There's a lot of people who'd like to see something like that rise
again. I mean, the only thing that forced us out - the only way those
maniacs were able to seize power -was just totally, you know - " He doesn't
seem to have words for it. "How could you have expected something like
that?"
"How were you forced out? Was there a civil war?"
"There were some uprisings, early on. And there were remote parts of
Kodiak where we never had a firm grip on power. But there was never a civil
war per se. See, the Americans liked our government. The Americans had all
the weapons, the equipment, the infrastructure. The Orthos were just a bunch
of hairy guys running around in the woods."
"Orthos?"
"Russian Orthodox. At first they were a tiny minority. Mostly Indians -
you know, Tlingits and Aleuts who'd been converted by the Russians hundreds
of years ago. But when things got crazy in Russia, they started to pour
across the Dateline in all kinds of different boats."
"And they didn't want a constitutional democracy."
"No. No way."
"What did they want? A tsar?"
"No. Those tsar guys - the traditionalists - stayed in Russia. The
Orthos who came to TROKK were total rejects. They had been forced out by the
mainline Russian Orthodox church."
"Why?"
"Yeretic. That's how Russians say 'heretic.' The Orthos who came to
TROKK were a new sect - all Pentecostals. They were tied in somehow with the
Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates. We had missionaries from Texas coming up all
the goddamn time to meet with them. They were always speaking in tongues.
The mainline Russian Orthodox church thought it was the work of the devil."
"So how many of these Pentecostal Russian Orthodox people came over to
TROKK?"
"Jeez, a hell of a lot of them. At least fifty thousand."
"How many Americans were in TROKK?"
"Close to a hundred thousand."
"Then how exactly did the Orthos manage to take the place over?"
"Well, one morning we woke up and there was an Airstream parked in the
middle of Government Square in New Washington, right in the middle of all
the bagos where we had set up the government. The Orthos had towed it there
during the night, then took the wheels off so it couldn't be moved. We
figured it was a protest action. We told them to move it out of there. They
refused and issued a proclamation, in Russian. When we got this damn thing
translated, it turned out to be an order for us to pack up and leave and
turn over power to the Orthos.
"Well, this was ridiculous. So we went up to this Airstream to move it
out of there, and Gurov's waiting for us with this nasty grin on his face."
"Gurov?"
"Yeah. One of the Refus who came over the Dateline from the Soviet