Ken MacLeod - Intrusion

‘Whereas here , it’s a sterile pin, a sticking-plaster, a helpline to prolong your feeling of being a victim, and no hug from me. Contrary to received wisdom that control over there is physical and over here it’s ideological – hegemony, false consciousness and all that Critical Theory 101 guff – it’s almost exactly the other way round. Ordinary, non-political, everyday life is far more regulated here than it is in Russia or India. Why else do you think we maintain the low-carbon regulations, the holiday-flights ban for instance, and all the preventive health measures, when syn bio has cracked the carbon problem and fixed cancer and heart disease?’

‘That sounds kind of… Foucauldian,’ said Geena, trying to keep her mind on an academic track. ‘Like, it’s all about control over bodies? Biopower? But isn’t that already part of the critique?’

Ahmed laughed. ‘Exactly! Bloody Foucault’s where they got the idea from!’

‘There’s just one problem with what you’re saying,’ Geena said, leaning forward. ‘The unicycle thing, yes? It seems to me there are two unicycles on this rope, and they’re heading towards each other.’

‘Yes,’ said Ahmed. ‘Hence the overwhelming importance of delay. They might just slow down and meet in the middle, instead of colliding. And then we have a chance of, maybe, heading in a common direction, off the rope.’

‘But meanwhile, the flames from the abyss are reaching the rope, and the Naxals are busy trying to saw through it.’

‘Yes,’ said Ahmed. ‘Speaking of which.’ He jumped up, looking unexpectedly cheerful. He took his glasses off and slipped them in a shirt pocket, behind the obligatory row of pens. ‘Here, let me show you something. Could you give me your specs for a moment?’

She dug the glasses out of her bag and passed them over. Ahmed synched them with his desk screen, rotated the screen so that they could both see it.

‘Nothing private when you last wore them?’

Geena shook her head. Ahmed began rattling his fingers on the desk.

‘OK,’ he said. Scenes blurred past on the screen as he spoke: Dawley Road, Hillingdon Road, the aircraft… ‘I’ve skipped back to yesterday evening, about teatime, scrolling forward, slow down – ah! Here we are! That little bit of graffiti. The source of all your woe. Now… let’s just open that up, see the projection raw.’

A sudden flourish of the fingertips, fortissimo . The corner-ofthe-eye glimpse of wall and lettering gave way to a screenful of letters and numbers that seemed to Geena pure gibberish. Ahmed scrolled.

‘See that string?’ he said, pointing and highlighting. ‘It’s an IP address, which…’

Another flourish, another screen.

‘… just happens to be the IP address of your glasses. The graffiti could be seen by you and nobody else.’

‘Shit!’ said Geena, heedless of speech codes. ‘The cops planted it! For me!’

Another rapid-fire rattle, and the screen went blank.

‘Uh-huh,’ said Ahmed, handing back the glasses.

‘Why?’

Ahmed shrugged. ‘Fishing.’

‘It’s that specific?’

‘It’s that specific. Let no one say the state is not concerned about the individual.’

Geena smacked a fist in her palm. ‘We’ve got them!’

‘What do you mean?’

Geena stared at him. ‘I mean, we’ve got a legal case. Entrapment, provocation, whatever, it can’t be legal, can it? I was going to ask… a friend about all this, get some advice, but… I couldn’t because… well, I named her and… anyway. So I came here to ask you, and you’ve… This is brilliant! Thanks, Ahmed! I knew you’d help me.’

‘This never happened,’ Ahmed said.

‘What?’

‘I’ve wiped the record of our little investigation. You won’t find a trace of it on your glasses, or on mine, or on my desk.’

‘Why?’ Geena asked, dismayed.

‘It’s better not to talk about these things. Better for you. Just ignore it, say nothing, and, believe me, it’ll be like it never happened.’

‘It won’t be to me!’

‘No, and I’m sorry about that, but it will be to the police and all the rest of them. They’ve made their point. As long as you don’t take it further, they’ll leave it at that. But if you do… well, that’s… I was going to say rocking the boat, but what I should say is, shaking the rope .’

‘In other words,’ said Geena, ‘all that you said, all that sharp criticism, it doesn’t mean anything.’

‘It means everything,’ said Ahmed. ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to explain, dammit! It’s all conscious. Including, you know, this.’

‘This… what?’

‘This conversation. This moment. Everything I’ve said. It’s all understood . It’s understood because I and people like me have explained it to them, in the same terms as I’ve explained it to you. With footnotes, references, bibliography…’

‘Oh,’ said Geena, in a dull, flat voice, feeling that she too had understood, at last. ‘They got to you, too!’

‘They got to me a long time ago,’ said Ahmed, in a tone of mild regret. Half-smiling, he drew his glasses from his pocket and put them back on. He waved into the corner to the right and above, and snapped his fingers. ‘Surveillance on.’

He walked around her to open the door, returned to his desk and sat down, then leaned forward, elbows on the desk, and smiled brightly.

‘Right, that’s the personal matter out of the way. Hope our little chat’s been helpful. Any time, my door’s always open. Now, about your thesis…’

Around mid-morning, Geena walked off campus, up long paths among green meadows, feeling quite cheerful. Spring was definitely in the air. At the edge of the campus she swithered about walking to Hayes, and came down on the side of catching the bus from Kingston Lane. As she waited at the bus stop, she mused over why she felt so much better, despite the anger that seethed inside her. Birdsong and blue sky had a lot to do with it, she decided, but underneath all that was a solid foundation of understanding, of acceptance. The world was what it was. Critique had always left her with a vague sense of obligation to find fault with the world. Now she understood it as part of the world, a spinning flywheel that helped keep it upright and rolling along. It was all right to enjoy the world. She always had, but she’d always had the nagging suspicion that intellectually it was hard to justify uncritical enjoyment. Now that suspicion was gone. Everything was as it had to be. Amor fati and carpe diem , that was the ticket.

And what she was enjoying right now was her rage. She accepted it. She let it flow through her. She observed her hands shaking. She noted with interest their spontaneous self-positioning into strangulation mode: open, mirroring each other, fingers and thumbs curled. She could very easily imagine them around Ahmed Estraguel’s neck. Deliberately she let them relax, and stuck them in her pockets.

It was the betrayal that did it, she thought, the blatant way in which a man she’d have expected to be outraged at what had happened to her had been merely sympathetic. And the way in which all the techniques of critique she had so painstakingly learned had turned out to be an instrument of the very systems of domination they anatomised. It was as if she had been naive. Ahmed had explained it as something that should have been obvious all along. There was no going back from that, she realised. From now on she was inextricably in a different subject position. She understood.

She also understood Hope Morrison, no longer an enigma, and she knew what she could do – the only thing she could do, and the thing only she could do – to help.