Ken MacLeod - Intrusion

It was a fine evening, the sun already set and the western sky before her lurid with greens and purples. Post-rush-hour traffic whispered past along Dawley Road, and then Hillingdon Road, leaving a faint waft of ethanol that set her monitor ring a-tingling. Heathland and golf course held up the horizon on her left. Lights came on in crowded suburban semis and went off in office and industrial blocks beyond them to her right. Geena strode along, boot-heels clicking, coat-tails snapping, head up, her glasses subtly enhancing the lower part of the visual field and flagging irregularities in the pavement so she didn’t trip on any of them while she gazed straight ahead and took in the glorious sky and pondered the theoretical problem of Hope.

The problem, as Geena saw it, was this. Inside people’s heads were brains, and these were increasingly well understood, or so Geena was given to understand. Her eyes had always glazed over at the details. But neurology subtends ideology, as Dr Ahmed Estraguel was fond of reminding his students; the object – the celebrated double handful of grey matter – subtends the subject. And the subject itself is no dumb internal essence, no spiritual spark jumping undetected across the synaptic gap. No. The subject speaks itself into being, and it speaks in – what else? – language. And language, from the first babble to the last sigh, articulates ideology. How could it not? Language arises spontaneously out of human interactions, and scientific knowledge of these interactions doesn’t. Language is necessarily freighted with illusion.

So, in the first instance, human subjects constitute themselves out of ideology, even if – especially if – they call that ideology common sense. Common sense, Geena thought, would tell her that the sun had set. Scientific practice, as embodied in her glasses, showed her exactly where the sun was, a few degrees below the horizon.

She paused at the pedestrian crossing at a roundabout, looking in several directions before stepping out, even though the little man was green. Her glasses showed her vehicles outside her line of sight, and reassured her that all was safe. On the other side of the road she paused again, to take in a rare sight revealed by her leftward glance: an airliner on approach to Heathrow. Seen, as now, head-on, with its landing lights and wing lights all in a row, it looked remarkably like a flying saucer. For seconds at a time it seemed to hang still in the air, lights shimmering a little in the haze and relative warmth rising from the ground. And then the angle changed, and the illusion – tenuous enough with the airliner’s flight number tagged beside it by her glasses – was replaced by the unarguable, unmistakable cruciform of the craft.

Geena blinked and walked on. So much, then, for perception and common sense. What you see is not what you get. And what you think is not necessarily what you think. The internal monologue may seem like a pure subjective self, and it is, but that little voice in your head is speaking in a language, and language can only be social, which means it’s ideological from the get-go. Your subjectivity is a subject position , a node in your real relations lived as an origin in your imaginary relations. It’s not just that your thinking is ideological, but that your ideology thinks you. Your flights of fancy come with a flight-number tag.

The theoretical problem with Hope Morrison was that she refused, or was unable, to articulate her subject position. If she were to appeal to her rights, or ascribe her views to some belief or ideology that had inscribed itself on her mind, her subject position would be clear. Instead she persisted in her wordless objection.

An enigma.

Geena had now walked past the wide open space and into one of the streets off Hillingdon Road, part of her zigzag course towards where she lived in Uxbridge. As she passed one corner, she found herself glancing with idle curiosity toward a section of low garden wall that she’d noticed the previous evening. Quite unmarked to the naked eye, through her glasses (and, presumably, through those of anyone who passed with glasses on) it displayed a string of glowing letters, about half a metre high, that looked as if they’d been spray-painted in fluorescent ink.

The string spelled out the word ‘NAXAL’, with a swastika in the place of the ‘X’. Geena smiled faintly to herself at the virtual graffiti. Put there – well, a tiny and almost undetectable transmitter dropped nearby, a speck amid the dirt at the foot of the wall – by some Indian old-line supporter, she guessed, maybe some kid whose family kept up a loyalty to one of the many parties of the Left on the subcontinent who opposed the Naxal insurrection and who often enough were the first in its line of fire.

Geena walked on, vaguely troubled. Something about the slogan rang false. It seemed to be making a simplistic equation: Naxal = Nazi. And that wasn’t right. She half-smiled again, recalling the line from The Big Lebowski . Nazis, whatever else might be said about them, at least weren’t nihilists.

You couldn’t say that about the Naxals. In all she knew of history, Geena could think of only one parallel, and it terrified her. Way back in the thirteenth century BCE there had for many more centuries than thirteen been civilisation right across the Middle East. It had been brought down in the brief span of twenty-seven years, by people who had come out of nowhere and burned down every city in their known world. If, in any heap of ruins, enough survivors were left to begin rebuilding, the City Burners came back after a few years and sacked it again. With equal thoroughness they’d destroyed every record. The City Burners had come from the plains, the deserts, the mountains, the sea. They had completed their task, and then vanished from history. It wasn’t even clear whether they were invaders from without or rebels from below. No history was written about them, because by the time they’d finished, there wasn’t a person alive within a thousand miles who could write.

The Naxals were like that. They’d started out as some kind of Maoists, but their ideology had mutated into what seemed like sheer nihilism, fuelled by a hatred of industrial civilisation itself, with a strategy to bring it down. Her supervisor, Dr Ahmed Estraguel, whom she was vaguely planning to see tomorrow morning, had said that People’s War resembled the Naxal strategy the way a protein resembled a prion. The movement was a pure self-replicator, recruiting new cadre out of the very devastation that their actions and the state’s counteractions brought about. Decades of fighting across an ever-increasing range – far beyond the original ‘Red Corridor’ that they’d vaunted when it had merely extended the length of India, and by now well to the north into central Asia and southern Russia and as far south as Indonesia – had turned them into an engine of destruction that would have made the Khmer Rouge shudder. (Say what you like about the tenets of the Angkar, dude…) They’d merged with and absorbed the defeated remnants of older, lesser movements – the Taliban, al-Qaeda, the rebels in Chechnya and Uzbekistan – and taken over what remained of their tattered, though still far-flung, networks. But the Naxals’ longest reach was in inspiration and ideology, and in the virtual. They’d gone viral, inspiring popups, usually but not always in communities of south Asian origin – including in Southall, a few kilometres away.

Which was why Geena had, in the two years she’d lived in Uxbridge, been stopped in the street five times and questioned by the police. Each time, a simple ID check and a few polite answers had seen her on her way. So when, half an hour after she’d seen the slogan, and just as she was a few streets away from where she lived, she turned a corner to find a police van parked at the wayside and three armoured cops blocking her path, she felt barely more than annoyed.