Communications Breakdown, page 12
One of my most jarring examples is when Google let people tag and review places that were named on Maps. And so, former concentration camps are listed on Google Maps. And so Nazis and trolls were reviewing them and giving them five stars. And the people at Google were like, “Well, we didn’t know that would happen.” And I’m like, “Well, how do you work at Google? Do you know what you do? Have you used the internet?”
I’m faced with only a couple of choices. Maybe they’re telling the truth, which means they’re clueless and need to stop doing what they’re doing and just read other people who aren’t them. Or they’re lying. That’s also possible. There are a lot of times when I talk to people, or companies talk about some of this stuff, and they say, “Well, we couldn’t have anticipated X or Y harm.”
Occasionally that is true. But if you have a conversation with the communities that these systems are going to be used on . . . There are experts in all these, so there’s anthropologists and sociologists, right? There’s people who do this stuff who could very easily tell you, “Oh, these are ways that this is going to be weaponized.” And yet somehow, so many of these things get off the ground anyway.
TM: I remember when Trump got in there was a certain part of the science fiction community who were very vocal on Twitter, saying, “Right, no more dystopias, we don’t need you to write any more dystopias. We live in the dystopia now, no need for any more dystopias, we just need positive stories now,” and I was like, “Really? What you’re going to do now—of all times—is to stop listening to people who spent the last forty years telling you this was going to happen?”
CG: Yeah. Whenever I make a joke or talk about how dystopian this tech could get, someone always says, “Well, don’t give them any ideas.” And I think—well, the way I explained it to someone yesterday is like, “I only practice being a terrible person, I’m not actually paid for it.” I can’t give them any ideas that they’re not already sitting in a room cooking up, right? Because there are people who are terrible people, who get paid lots of money to think of this shit and they’re constantly doing it. Whatever fucking horrible thing I think of, it’s probably already in the water.
6
The Excommunicates
Ken MacLeod
We’re past the watershed now, and on the down gradient to the west. Helen slips the van into fourth gear and eases off the accelerator. The needle’s at mid-tank. There’s one pump between here and the coast, but whether it still works or has fuel in it is anyone’s guess. I have the map across my knees, the carbine beneath it, and the binoculars bumping on my chest.
“There’s an old quarry three hundred meters past the next bend,” I say. “Best be ready to stamp on the brake or step on the gas, depending.”
“Got it.”
The windows on both sides are cranked down halfway, and the breeze comes in, heavy with a hot Highland summer day after a week of rain. The glass is retrofitted, supposedly bulletproof, but . . .
As we swing around the curve of the hill, I bring up the binoculars. Hard to keep them steady, and the swoop is disorienting enough to make me nauseous, but as we approach the junction to the rutted works road leading to the great gash in the hillside, nothing seems amiss. I lower the glasses and eyeball a sweep. Heather, moss, sheep, boulders, all the way to the skyline.
“Fast,” I say.
We hurtle past the quarry mouth at 60 km/h, then slow for a long stretch of climb. Down to our left, a burn in spate gushes along the bottom of the glen, amid big wet rocks.
I look down again at the map. A row of houses speckle the roadside, two kilometers farther on, and behind and around them an irregular patch of green checkered with chevrons: coniferous woodland.
“Settlement up ahead over the hill,” I say. “Patch of fir.”
“Ready to stamp or step,” Helen says.
I move my hand to the carbine’s stock. We’ve drilled the move, from both seats: driver ducks, brakes; passenger brings rifle to bear; one shot, warning or otherwise; driver straightens up, hits the gas, and cranks up the window as we speed away. After much practice we have the maneuver down smooth—it’s as awkward as it sounds—but basically we just hope we never have to use it.
My father sat between me and my sister and looked the school secretary in the eye.
“My family and I,” he said, “are members of the Church of the Book.”
The keyboard rattled. A pair of eyebrows and reading glasses loomed above the screen.
“I can’t find any reference to it,” Ms. Eaton said.
“Of course not!” Dad agreed. “That’s the point.” He leaned forward, and added in a helpful tone: “We’ve been called various names: the Sect of the Text, the Paper Presbytery, the Caxton Congregation . . .”
More keyboard rattling. “Nothing on any of them.”
“Our West African mission has been referred to as Boko Halal.”
This was pushing it. Even I could see this was pushing it. The eyebrows lowered, and drew together. Ms. Eaton leaned sideways and looked around the screen. Her lips formed a thin line.
“Mister Rawlins—are you being entirely serious?”
Only policy and politeness were stopping her from saying what I could hear in her voice: Are you taking the piss?
“Serious and sincere,” my father said. “And our religious convictions have a right to respect, under—”
“Thank you, Mr. Rawlins; I’m well aware of the relevant legislation. All right—what are these convictions, and how do they affect your children’s schooling?”
“The Word of God,” my father said, “was given to us in writing: on stone, on leaves, on parchment, on papyrus, on paper. It was not sent by email, or found on a website. We are made in his image, and enjoined to follow his example. Our Church therefore eschews electronic communication.”
“I see.” Ms. Eaton sighed. “So you don’t use computers?”
“Oh, we do use computers! We’re not superstitious, you know. We just don’t use the internet. For anything. No email, no web browsing, no smartphones.”
“No e-books?”
He shook his head. “Paper and print only, I’m afraid.”
“So they’ll need physical copies of all their textbooks?”
“Yes.”
“That’s inconvenient. And expensive.”
“I know. I’m sorry about that, but . . .”
“You’re aware that some homework assignments have to be handed in electronically?”
“Of course,” Dad said. “Liam and Melanie here can write their assignments on their own computers, and bring the files in on USB sticks.”
“What difference does . . . ? Oh, I see.” She leaned around the screen again and gave my father a severe look, which softened as her gaze passed to us. “I understand what this is about.”
“Thank you.”
The keyboard rattled again. “Well, Mr. Rawlins, we’re required to accommodate these requirements. But we’re not obliged to cover all the additional expenses. Your contribution would have to be about . . . four hundred pounds a year.”
To me and to Melanie, this seemed an enormous sum. Looking back, it probably did to our father too. He reached into an inside jacket pocket. “I’ll write you a check.”
Ms. Rawlins looked at the strip of paper.
“Oh!” she said. “It’s like prizes. And fund-raising.”
“Exactly,” Dad said. “Just like on the television.”
She held the check up to the light, and turned it this way and that. “They’re bigger on television.”
On the way home, Melanie looked up and said, “Daddy, what’s the Word of God?”
“Books some people read at weekends,” he replied.
It was the first truthful word he’d spoken on the subject.
Over the crest of the hill, and on to a longer downward slope. Again with the binoculars. No smoke rises. The houses are intact, the windows unbroken, but no washing hangs on the lines and no dogs bark. I lower the glasses, and scan the woodland around the settlement. The scent from the trees blasts in. The sun is high and everything under and between the conifers is in deep shadow.
“Step on it,” I say. As we pass the houses, I catch a glimpse of something bright in the sunlight disappearing around the corner of the last building: the dress of a toddler being snatched back to hiding, I guess. Still people there, but lying low. No doubt they can hear us coming from a kilometer away.
I’m just processing that glimpse when I catch another, down in the glen to our left. There’s a moment of the sheer unreality of seeing a fighter jet from above, and silent as it flashes past. In the side mirror, I see it vanish over the hill as the sonic boom rocks us and the engine scream catches up.
“RAF Typhoon,” Helen says.
“Well spotted,” I say. My heart is thumping but with surprise, not fear. It’s not jets we have to worry about. I look down at the map, and seek the tiny cross that marks our first possible destination.
“Five kilometers to the nearest church,” I say.
“Pray it’s an old one,” Helen says.
“Why?”
“Stone. Not some tin tabernacle.”
My laugh dies around the next bend as we see up ahead on the right a mess on the other side of the ditch, a mess that looks like a dead sheep until we see that what the crows are pecking among is a bloodied white shirt, not wool. We can’t help but slow down and look, sickening though the sight is. There’s nothing we can do for him or her now. In an out-flung hand, or what’s left of it, the black glint of a phone screen.
“Droned,” Helen says. “Shit. Poor bugger.”
Her knuckles are white on the wheel.
I look up at the clear blue sky, and imagine I see dots. You can’t really see them. If I were to lie on the hill for a long time, and the binoculars were more powerful—stargazer standard, maybe—I might just pick out the drone swarm. Solar-powered, tiny, at a few hundred meters up, the infernal machines are known officially as sacrificial munitions platforms: aerial mines, sky mines, murder drones, flying robot suicide bombers, call them what you like. They lurk above us by the million, right across the continent and its islands, from the Atlantic to the Dneiper. Someday, sheer wear and tear will bring them down. But long before then, they’ll have destroyed every active phone and similar device that the cyberattacks and the electromagnetic pulses didn’t get—and with it the phone’s user, whether they’re reckless or simply unaware of what’s happened.
I was Bags, short for Bag Boy. Melanie, slightly luckier, got labeled Satch, for Satchel Girl. It was our first secondary school—we’d moved around a lot, and been in and out of primary schools and what our parents called homeschooling. Melanie was old enough for secondary school, and I was a year older. We’d just arrived in a new town. Dad had landed a steady job at a garden center, and Mum likewise at the local supermarket.
At first, everything went more or less fine. The big boys looked down on me from their great height. My own peers mocked me now and then for lugging books around. Sometimes they asked me about our weird religion, with more curiosity than malice. I made up doctrines and distinctions with the same glib assurance as my father. Cultural references outside my experience—online games, streamed shows—I affected to disdain or faked acquaintance with based on gleanings from review columns in the Guardian and the Daily Mirror. Ironically, in view of our plight, in our house we were assiduous consumers of mainstream newspapers and the relative handful of TV channels we could access without subscriptions. Melanie and I frequented the local public library to an extent that surprised and gratified the librarians, used as they were to the almost exclusive patronage of small children and retired people.
Melanie and I did well in class, partly because we had no online distractions at home. We had books, board games, and playing outdoors. Phones and tablets were banned in the classroom, which suited us fine. Outside was where the problem arose, soon after I went through puberty and a growth spurt and became a big boy myself, 179 centimeters of gangling awkwardness. Cliques and networks, meetups and conflicts carried on over text messaging and apps were invisible to me. I often felt gossiped about behind my back or frozen out of arrangements. My only extracurricular activity was the Orienteering Club, in which our PE teacher led us across hill and dale, using the aggressively offline navigation tools of the Silva compass, the pencil and ruler, and the Ordnance Survey map.
“You can’t rely always on Google Maps,” he would say. “Remember that.”
I remember that all right, and of course it’s all moot now, but you can’t always rely on Ordnance Survey maps either. The church marked by the tiny cross is a ruin, with tall old trees growing out of it.
“Ha!” says Helen. “So much for Highland devotion!”
I could bore her with the observation that it could well have been Highland devotion that emptied that church in the first place, centuries ago. Catholic, Episcopalian, wrong kind of Presbyterian . . . the old Highlanders were ruthless whenever they underwent a great change in their spiritual allegiance, turning their backs on their ancient places of worship and establishing new ones. Hence (eventually) the tin tabernacles, the corrugated iron sheds with nothing to distinguish them from a byre but the black notice board outside with the times of the Sabbath services and the Wednesday prayer meeting spelled out in gilt.
I decide not to bore her with Highland ecclesiastical history. Instead I look again at the map, and spot another church ten kilometers on, this time one with a spire. It’s on the top of a small hill overlooking a freshwater loch, with the nearest houses two hundred meters away.
“I think we’ll have better luck with the next one.”
“Any reason for thinking that?”
“None at all,” I admit. “Just a hunch.”
“An irrational conviction, then.” Helen laughs. “Sounds appropriate.”
Yeah, tell me about irrational convictions.
“Hey, Bags!”
I turned. It was Claudio, a boy a year older, with whom I had not so much a friendship as a nonaggression pact, based on our shared interest in written science fiction. “Hi, Cloudy.”
Claudio fell in with me, in my mooch around the playground. “Got a story for you,” he said, passing me a sheaf of paper printed off from the current issue of a science fiction magazine.
“Thanks,” I said, folding the pages lengthwise and stuffing them into the inside pocket of my school blazer. “Looks exciting.”
“You know the real reason why you can’t read it online like everyone else?”
“Sure,” I said. “The church doesn’t approve—”
“Give over. The real reason.”
“Of course I know,” I said. “I’m not daft. We’re excommunicates. My dad can’t get an email address, he can’t make online payments, and he can’t access anything online. And my mum can’t because using her identity would let him get around that, and me and Melanie can’t because we aren’t old enough to have our own bank accounts. The church thing is—” I shrugged “—just a polite legal fiction so we have some cover at school.”
“But why was your dad excommunicated in the first place?”
I shot him a warning glance. “We don’t talk about it.”
“Why not?”
“You know why, Cloudy.”
“Your dad’s a denier, that’s why.”
A chill went through me. “What’s he supposed to be denying?”
Claudio laughed. “Everything! Climate science. War crimes. Genocides. All kinds of atrocities.”
“And how do you know that?”
He fished out his phone, thumbed it, and showed me the screen. My father’s name, and a youthful photograph of him, headed a brief biography that gave his date and place of birth and the date of his exclusion from the online world for spreading dangerous disinformation. The types of disinformation matched Claudio’s list.
“I don’t believe it,” I said. “He’s not that kind of person.”
“Oh—and how would you know?”
“Know my own dad? Of course I know him. For one thing, he doesn’t talk about any of that at home.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Claudio said. “He wouldn’t, would he?”
I had no answer to that. For a moment, I considered telling Claudio where he could stick his science fiction story if he was going to insult my father like that, but thought better of it. With so few friends, or at least boys willing to be friendly, I couldn’t afford to fall out with him.
“I’ll ask him about it,” I said.
Of course, I did nothing of the sort. On the way home from school I dropped in at the public library. The librarian on the desk was one I had often noticed and eyed covertly. I’d had crushes, obviously, as kids do, but she was my first experience of hopeless, unrequited lust. She was probably ten years older than me and had neat blond hair like some elastic golden helmet framing her face and wore a nylon overall that to my overheated gaze looked like it had nothing underneath but her. I approached her as nervously as if I’d been about to ask her out on a date.
“Um, hello.”
“Yes?”
I nodded toward the row of screens and keyboards off to one side. “Is there any way I can get online?”
“Oh! Of course. You just sign in.”
“Uh, that’s the problem. I don’t have an email address or anything.”
She looked perplexed. “You don’t need one. The long number on your card is your ID, and the short number is your password.”
“And that’s it?” My voice made one of its unpredictable and unwanted pitch shifts.
“That’s it!” she said, with a smile that made my face burn.
“Uh, thank you.” I smiled back for just a little too long, and turned away to the screens. I put down my laden school bag, hung my blazer on the back of the plastic chair, grabbed the chair as it tipped backward, sat, and tapped the two strings of numbers in.
