John Brunner - The Squares of the City

“So as far as I can see only the sheer impossibility of gathering a totality of data about all the individuals involved prevents us from developing a system of forecasting and influencing all the actions of a person in his entire daily life.”

“Senor,” said Maria Posador a little faintly, “it is well-known that Alejandro Mayor sought to achieve total control of our people—I myself showed you one method he employed. But are you saying that people can be controlled in this way?”

“People are controlled,” I said in surprise. “Look, the man in the subway going to work of a morning has no more real control over his own activities than—well, than a piece on a chessboard! Because he has to earn a wage, he has to go to work. He can choose his kind of work, within strict limits. Maybe he likes—oh, meeting people and talking to them. So he wants to be a salesman. Unfortunately, that product doesn’t sell very well. His family gets hungry, so he takes a job he loathes, processing company data for computers. It pays more, perhaps, but it pays in practice slightly less than what it would cost to install a machine to read ledger-postings with a scanner system.

“What other choices has he? He could quit work altogether, but if he has a family to support, he won’t. He could cut his throat; sometimes people do. But he’s a Catholic, and suicide is a mortal sin. So there he is, on that subway train at the same time as everyone else.”

“You’re a cynic, senor,” said Senora Posador. Her face was pale under its golden tan; her breath came so quickly that even in those few words I could hear a quaver.

“No, I was lucky,” I said. “I think—I hope—I actually saw this sort of thing coming when I was in college. I read Mayor’s first book, The Administration of the Twentieth-Century State, and as I said, there were pointers in it… So I picked a job where there were openings for only a few specialists, so few their work wouldn’t be worth automation. Result: I have comparative freedom to choose my jobs, I enjoy the work I do because I’m good at it—and am, as you tell me, rootless.”

“So you are master of your fate, and we in Ciudad de Vados are not?” suggested Senora Posador, her violet eyes troubled.

I shook my head. “I said comparative freedom. Ultimately, I’m at the mercy of the same impersonal forces. I have to eat and drink and sleep and wear clothes and all the rest of it, and I have a fair burden of nonessential desires created by advertising and habit—I smoke, I drink alcohol, I like to enjoy myself when I’m off the job. I’m still a chessman. A pawn being shifted hither and yon across the face of the earth by the same processes that have shaped history since man first discovered how to walk on his hind feet.”

“You puzzle me, Senor Hakluyt,” said Senora Posador after a pause. “You must be aware that your work here has laid the foundations for a long and bloody struggle—”

I interrupted her by slamming my fist into my open palm. “Laid the foundations hell !”I snapped. “Don’t accuse me of not understanding the situation, much less being fooled by remarks like that. The current situation was implicit in Vados’s first decision to found his city, and that in its turn may have depended on the fact that his wife was too damned vain to spoil her figure by having children—or maybe he’s impotent or sterile, but whichever way it happened, he needed a surrogate. Whatever the reason, the same forces are driving him that drive the rest of us. I’ve done my best to make things better, not worse. Oh, I’ve been under orders, so all I could do was cushion the blow where I could, but if Vados manages to avoid open revolt within the next few weeks, then he’ll get two years of comparative peace—that’s my guess—and two years from now the situation will be no better, no worse, than it is today. The problems will be different, but they’ll still exist. Maybe then they’ll tackle the root causes—poverty, lack of education, those things. Then, again, maybe they won’t. People don’t do logical things like that.”

“A few moments ago you were saying people were predictable. Does that not imply that they are logical, too?”

“No-o-o… You run out of logic about the time you start taking imponderables like religion into account, or genetic predisposition. In theory, I imagine, there are logical reasons to be got at; one can imagine in some far future society people will say, ‘This man has propinkidinkidol of utterbimollic acid in his genes, so he’ll have cold feet, so he’ll be a good customer for electric blankets’—only even then it’d probably turn out he got shocked as a kid and he’s so scared of electricity he won’t use anything but a plain hot-water bottle.”

Senora Posador was staring into space. “I remember the first time—oh, when I was at school, senor, learning English in a junior class. That was when I first heard the word ‘cussed.’ The teacher said it was slang, and we should not use it. But I like the word. It expresses something so—so human—”

She spread her graceful hands in a helpless gesture, at a loss for a precise definition. “But if what you say is to be believed, if one could—given the time and the necessary information— treat individuals as readily as you forecast the behavior of crowds, hurrying for a train, why, there is nothing left for anyone. Except to be one of the persons who gathers and uses this information, rather than a—a victim.”

I shook my head. “No, no. There is so simple a way of interfering with the process that it could never become reality.”

“How so? You have said just the opposite—”

“Well, you yourself provided me with one example. After you showed me how television was used to force ideas on Vadeanos, I simply stopped watching it. Do you suppose that a chessman possessed of conscious thought would calmly sit on its square and wait to be taken if it knew the rules and the state of the game? Not likely. It would sidle quietly to another square where it was safer, or scuttle across the board when the players weren’t looking, to crown itself a queen.

“No, the sort of absolute system I’ve been talking about couldn’t work unless everyone was ignorant of what was happening. Outwardly there would have to be no change at all in everyday life. You and I and that waiter over there would have to be able to eat and drink and sleep and fall in love and get indigestion as always—so what would be the difference, anyway? Maybe such a system is already in operation—how would we know? We’re like pawns on a chessboard who do know the rules and the state of the game, but we prefer to ignore that knowledge because we have no legs, and we can’t leave our squares unless we’re moved.”

Senora Posador sat without moving, looking at nothing, for a long moment. She said at length, “You paint a bleak picture of the world, Senor Hakluyt.”

“Not very. We’re bound to accept that we’re restricted by forces beyond our control. So long as they remain beyond anyone’s control, we’re all in the same boat, and we don’t care. But to be ruled, and to know one was ruled, by people who were controlling those impersonal forces—-that would be different.”

“Yet we are ruled by people; often there have been absolute regimes, and even you, with your freedom of action—are you not ruled by men controlling economic forces, by those who pay you, in the most immediate case?”

“That’s nothing to disturb me, is it? But what I am afraid of is—let’s say the situation where in a restaurant at noon the cooks prepare exactly so many of each different dish, because they know that, faced with the day’s menu with such-and-such items on it, just that number of their patrons will select just those dishes, and nothing at all will be left over. You see, there is a subtle horror in that. No one, except the cooks, and perhaps not even the cooks, would realize that anything had changed.”