Peter Watts - Beyond the Rift

So if my writing tends toward the dystopic it’s not because I’m in love with dystopias; it’s because reality has forced dystopia upon me. A ravaged environment is no longer optional when writing about the near future. All I can do now is imagine how my characters might react to the hand they’ve been dealt. The fact that they resort to implanting false memories and neurological shackles in their employees, that they may order the immolation of ten thousand innocent refugees—that’s not what makes dystopia. What makes dystopia is an inheritance in which these awful actions are the best ones available , where every other alternative is even worse; a world where people commit mass murder not because they are sadists or sociopaths, but because they are trying to do the least harm. It is not a world my characters built. It is only the world we left them.

There are no real villains in Wattsworld. If you want villains, you know where to look.

Dystopia is not always an unhappy place. There are, as it happens, certain dystopias in which it’s perfectly possible to be happy as a clam. Vast numbers of people go through life never even realizing that they’re in one, might live through the real-time decay from freedom to tyranny and never notice the change.

It basically comes down to wanderlust.

Imagine your life as a path extending through time and society. To either side are fences festooned with signs: No Trespassing , Keep Off the Grass, Thou Shalt Not Kill . These are the constraints on your behavior, the legal limits of acceptable conduct. You are free to wander anywhere between these barriers—but cross one and you risk the weight of the law.

Now imagine that someone starts moving those fences closer together.

How you react—whether you even notice—depends entirely on how much you wandered beforehand. A lot of people never deviate from the center of the path their whole lives, wouldn’t deviate even if there were no fences. They’re the ones who can never understand what all those fringe radicals are whining about; after all, their lives haven’t changed any. It makes no difference to them whether the fences are right on the shoulder or out past the horizon.

For the rest of us, though, it’s only a matter of time before you wander back to a point you’ve always been free to visit in the past, only to find a fence suddenly blocking your way.

When that happens, you might be surprised at how close those things have crept when you weren’t looking. I know I was. I’m not what you’d call a hardened criminal. I’ve found myself in the little white room at US Customs somewhat more often than might be expected from a “random” selection process, but I suspect that’s just because your average customs agent doesn’t quite know what to make of the self-employed (“Biostatistical consultant and writer? What the hell is that supposed to be?”) [4] 3 In more recent years—back before I was banned outright from entering your fine country—I just decided to have fun with it and list “masturbation” as one of my Professional Activities. In such cases it’s generally a good idea to show up at least four hours before departure. I may have once been guilty of associating with tewwowists, back when my dad was still alive—a retired preacher and the General Secretary of the Baptist Convention of Ontario and Quebec, I’m told he earned a CSIS [5] 4 Canada’s equivalent of the CIA, albeit with an annual budget of about $43.26. Known primarily for pulling into traffic after forgetting the briefcase full of national secrets they’d just parked on the roof of their shiny black sedan while unlocking the driver’s door. file for his efforts on behalf of unpatriotic groups like Amnesty International—but none of Obama’s flying terminators were likely to get all twinkly-eyed when they ran me through facial recognition.

Which is not to say that I was intellectually unaware of the ongoing erosion of civil rights on this continent. Only that, as a well-educated white dude with a relatively sheltered life, my awareness was more academic than visceral, more second- than first-hand. So while returning to Toronto with a friend after a trip to Nebraska, I expected to be stopped at the Canadian border, by Canadian Customs. I expected that if they decided to search the vehicle, they’d inform me first, and ask me to pop the trunk. [6] 5 Yes, this is the official protocol. It was confirmed on the record by a spokesperson for US Customs who was being interviewed about this very case.

And when none of this happened—when I was pulled over by US border guards two kilometres from the Canadian border, and looked over my shoulder to find eager guards already going through our luggage like a swarm of army ants—I expected no real trouble when I got out of the car to ask what was going on.

I imagine a number of readers rolling their eyes at this point. Well, of course . You never get out of a vehicle unless ordered. You never make eye contact. You never ask questions; if you do, you deserve what you get . I have nothing to say to these people. To the rest of you I say: see what we’ve come to. We have criminalized the expectation of reasonable communication with those who are supposed to protect us. And people approve .

(One of the things we tend to forget about Ray Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451 is that the banning of books was not imposed against the will of the people by some tyrannical authority. The grass roots in that dystopian novel didn’t want to read.)

I learned more than I wanted to about Michigan’s legal system in the months that followed. I learned of a miraculous little statute—750.81(d) by name—which bundles everything from murder down to “failure to comply with a lawful command” into one felonious little package. It spends almost half a page defining what constitutes a “person”; nowhere does it define what makes a command “lawful.” If you happen to be crossing the border and a “person” tells you to get down on all fours and bark like a dog, you might want to keep that in mind. (Fun fact: according to US law, “the border” is actually a zone extending a hundred miles from the actual line on the map. The rights-free atmosphere one encounters at Customs—warrantless searches, detention without cause, the whole shebang—extends throughout that band. If the Border Patrol decides on a whim to kick in the door of some poor sap living in Potsdam, there’s not a lot anyone can do about it; it’s a “border search,” exempt from the usual checks and balances.)

In the end, of course, I was convicted. Not of assault, despite what you may have heard. The trial established that there was no aggression on my part, not so much as an expletive or a raised voice, despite prosecutorial allegations that I “resisted,” that I “choked an officer.” [7] 6 To this day I remain puzzled as to why they’d even make those allegations in the first place; they must have known that my passenger saw the whole thing, and would call bullshit. Which is exactly what happened. What the prosecution fell back on, ultimately, was that just after I’d been repeatedly punched in the face and just before I got maced, I’d been ordered to get on the ground—and instead of immediately complying, I’d said, “What is the problem ?” It didn’t matter that I had been punched in the face, or that the guards themselves had lied under oath. (The jury threw out their testimony wholesale because—as one of them stated on the record—“they couldn’t keep their stories straight.”) It didn’t matter that DHS itself, called up from Detroit in hopes of boosting the charges (my arrest sheet originally accused me of “Assaulting a Federal Officer”) refused to participate in the case once they’d interviewed those involved. It didn’t even matter that jury members publicly opined that the guards should have been the ones on trial. 750.81(d) forced them to convict regardless.