Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year Volume 5 An anthology of stories

We were supposed to rate these convicts on how well they were sloughing off their selfish ways, and learning to integrate themselves into a spiritualized, share-centric, enlightened society. Pretty much like Alcoholics Anonymous, but without the God or the booze.

Worse yet, this scheme was functioning. Some of our cellmates, especially the meek, dorky, geeky ones, were quickly released. The wretches strung out on dope were pretty likely to manage in the new order, too. They’d given up jailing people for that.

This degeneration had to be stopped somehow. Since I had been a professional troll, I was great at gaming. I kept inventing ways to hack the gaming system and get people to fight. This was the one thing I could do inside the prison that recalled the power I’d once held in my old life.

So, I threw myself into that therapy heart and soul. I worked my way up to fifteenth level Evil Dwarf. I was the envy of the whole prison system, a living legend. I got myself some prison tattoos, made a shiv…. Maybe I had a bleak future, stuck inside the joint, but I still had integrity! I had defied their system! I could vote down the stool-pigeons and boost the stand-up guys who were holding out against the screws!

I was doing great at that, really into it, indomitable—until Claire told me that my success was queering her chances of release. They didn’t care what I did inside the fantasy game. All that time, I was really being judged on my abuse of the ratings system. Because they knew what I was up to. It was all a psychological trap! The whole scheme was their anti-hacker honeypot. I had fallen into it like the veriest newbie schmo!

You see, they were scanning us all the time. Nobody ever gets it about the tremendous power of network surveillance. That’s how they ruled the world, though: by valuing every interaction, by counting every click. Every time one termite touched the feelers of another termite, they were adding that up. In a database.

Everybody was broke: extremely poor, like preindustrial hard-scrabble poor, very modest, very “green.” But still surviving. The one reason we weren’t all chewing each other’s cannibal thigh bones (like the people on certain more disadvantaged continents) was because they’d stapled together this survival regime out of socialist software. It was very social. Ultra-social. No “privatization,” no “private sector,” and no “privacy.”

They pretended that it was all about happiness and kindliness and free-spirited cooperation and gay rainbow banners and all that. It was really a system that was firmly based on “social capital.” Everything social was your only wealth. In a real “gift economy,” you were the gift. You were living by your karma. Instead of a good old hundred-dollar bill, you just had a virtual facebooky thing with your own smiling picture on it, and that picture meant “Please Invest in the Bank of Me!”

That was their New Deal. One big game of socially approved activities. For instance: reading Henry David Thoreau. I did that. I kinda had to. I had this yellow, crumbly, prison edition of a public-domain version of Walden .

Man, I hated that Thoreau guy. I wanted to smack Mr. Nonviolent Moral Resistance right across his chops. I did learn something valuable from him, though. This communard Transcendental thing that had us by the neck? The homemade beans,the funky shacks, the passive-aggressive peacenik dropout thing? That was not something that had invaded America from Mars. That was part of us. It had been there all along. Their New Age spiritual practice was America’s dark freaky undercurrent. It was like witchcraft in the Catholic Church.

Now these organized network freaks had taken over the hurricane wreck of the church. They were sacrificing goats in there, and having group sex under their hammer and sickle while witches read Tarot cards to the beat of techno music.

These Lifestyle of Health and Sustainability geeks were maybe seven percent of America’s population. But the termite people had seized power. They were the Last Best Hope of a society on the skids. They owned all the hope because they had always been the ones who knew our civilization was hopeless.

So, I was in their prison until I got my head around that new reality. Until I realized that this was inevitable. That it was the way forward. That I loved Little Brother. After that, I could go walkies.

That was the secret. All the rest of it: the natural turmoil of the period…the swarms of IEDs, and the little flying bomb drones, and the wiretaps, and the lynch mobs, and the incinerators and the “regrettable excesses,” as they liked to call them—those were not the big story. That was like the exciting sci-fi post-apocalypse part that basically meant nothing that mattered.

Everybody wants the cool post-disaster story—the awesome part where you take over whole abandoned towns, and have sex with cool punk girls in leather rags who have sawed-off shotguns. Boy, I could only wish. In Sustainable-Land, did we have a cool, wild, survivalist lifestyle like that? No way. We had, like, night-soil buckets and vegetarian okra casseroles.

The big story was all about a huge, doomed society that had wrecked itself so thoroughly that its junkyard was inherited by hippies. The epic tale of the Soviet Union, basically. Same thing, different verse. Only more so.

Well, I could survive in that world. I could make it through that. People can survive a Reconstruction: if they keep their noses clean and don’t drink themselves to death. The compost heap had turned over. All the magic mushrooms came out of the dark. So they were on top, for a while. So what?

So I learned to sit still and read a lot. Because that looks like innocent behavior. When all the hippie grannies are watching you over their HAL 9000 monitors, poring over your every activity like Vegas croupiers with their zoom and slo-mo, then quietly reading paper books looks great. That’s the major consolation of philosophy.

So, in prison, I read, like, Jean-Paul Sartre (who was still under copyright, so I reckon they stole his work). I learned some things from him. That changed me. “Hell is other people.” That is the sinister side of a social-software shared society: that people suck, that hell is other people. Sharing with people is hell. When you share, then no matter how much money you have, they just won’t leave you alone.

I quoted Jean-Paul Sartre to the parole board. A very serious left-wing philosopher: lots of girlfriends (even feminists), he ate speed all the time, he hung out with Maoists. Except for the Maoist part, Jean-Paul Sartre is my guru.

My life today is all about my Existential authenticity. Because I’m a dissident in this society. Maybe I’m getting old-fashioned, but I’ll never go away. I’ll never believe what the majority says it believes. And I won’t do you the favor of dying young, either.

Because the inconvenient truth is that, authentically, about fifteen percent of everybody is no good. We are the nogoodniks. That’s the one thing the Right knows, that the Left never understands: that, although fifteen percent of people are saintly and liberal bleeding hearts,and you could play poker with them blindfolded, another fifteen are like me. I’m a troll. I’m a griefer. I’m in it for me, folks. I need to “collaborate” or “share” the way I need to eat a bale of hay and moo.

Well, like I said to the parole board: “So what are you going to do to me? Ideally, you keep me tied up and you preach at me. Then I become your hypocrite. I’m still a dropout. You don’t convince me.”

I can tell you what finally happened to me. I got off. I never expected that, couldn’t predict it, it came out of nowhere. Yet another world was possible, I guess. It’s always like that.