Tom McCarthy - Satin Island

12.1Petr was admitted to hospital in mid-January. The cancer had spread all round his body. It was particularly bad in his lungs. They’d started to fill up with fluid, which meant he couldn’t really breathe. So the doctors had drilled holes in his chest to drain the fluid out through. When I visited him, in a ward full of people who were obviously dying, he was propped up in a bed with these tubes leading from his chest (one from each side) towards a translucent plastic receptacle about the size and shape of a car battery. He had other tubes extending from his arms too: insulin-drips and morphine-feeders, things like that. He looked like Caesar in the famous dream his wife Calpurnia describes: a perforated statue from which streams of bright-red life-blood gush forth, irrigating all of Rome; only the fluid flowing out of Petr’s chest was pink — a lurid and synthetic pink that had an effervescent quality, like Cherryade. We chatted for a while, and as we did, whenever a part of him, a shoulder or a shin or a bit of chest, protruded from under the bedsheets, I would notice various smudgy, dark lumps pushing up beneath the skin. He had one just above his ankle; it was more than dark — it was black. The windows of the hospital were smudged and blackened too; his room was on the twenty-first floor and they obviously didn’t bother to clean them that often, or at all. This upset me, much more than the fact of Petr’s illness did. For crying out loud, I felt like shouting to the nurse, ward manager, whoever: if you can’t save these people, at least clean the windows.

12.2The next week brought a massive disappointment: I discovered that my parachutist theory didn’t work. It was bogus; full of shit. The basic logistics of packing and storage, the security measures put in place to prevent tampering, and so forth — all this rendered it impossible. For example: divers, all divers, use only their own, personal packs, for which they are at all times responsible. They keep these in a special locker, to which they alone hold the key; when the packs are out of this, they never leave them unattended, never let them slip from their sight. I learned this from a piece of correspondence I’d started a month previously with a parachute-club safety officer. I read his email as I sat in the same spot in which I’d first made my “discovery,” my dud one. The shock and disappointment I experienced as I read it were worse than those I would have had had the email told me my house and goods were all being confiscated, or that, as a result of some maternity-ward mix-up, I wasn’t actually who I thought I was. It, too, was visceral; it made me feel first sick, then utterly depleted. After I’d read the email, I sat there for a long time, looking through the window. The sky, now, was grey and murky. It was cold. It was only January, but the year already seemed jaded and old. I felt a deep depression coming on.

12.3Write Everything Down, said Malinowski. But the thing is, now, it is all written down. There’s hardly an instant of our lives that isn’t documented. Walk down any stretch of street and you’re being filmed by three cameras at once — and even if you aren’t, the phone you carry in your pocket pinpoints and logs your location at each given moment. Each website that you visit, every click-through, every keystroke is archived: even if you’ve hit delete, wipe, empty trash , it’s still lodged somewhere, in some fold or enclave, some occluded avenue of circuitry. Nothing ever goes away. And as for the structures of kinship, the networks of exchange within whose web we’re held, cradled, created — networks whose mapping is the task, the very raison d’être , of someone like me: well, those networks are being mapped, that task performed, by the software that tabulates and cross-indexes what we buy with who we know, and what they buy, or like, and with the other objects that are bought or liked by others who we don’t know but with whom we cohabit a shared buying- or liking-pattern. Pondering these facts, a new spectre, an even more grotesque realization, presented itself to me: the truly terrifying thought wasn’t that the Great Report might be un-writable, but — quite the opposite — that it had already been written . Not by a person, nor even by some nefarious cabal, but simply by a neutral and indifferent binary system that had given rise to itself, moved by itself and would perpetuate itself: some auto-alphaing and auto-omegating script — that that’s what it was . And that we, far from being its authors, or its operators, or even its slaves (for slaves are agents who can harbour hopes, however faint, that one day a Moses or a Spartacus will set them free), were no more than actions and commands within its key-chains. This Great Report, once it came into being, would, from that point onwards, have existed always, since time immemorial; and nothing else would really matter. But who could read it? From what angle, vantage-point or platform, accessed through what exit-jetty leading to what study (since all studies and all jetties were already written into it), could it be viewed, surveyed, interpreted? None, of course: none and no one. Only another piece of software could do that.

12.4These ponderings had another consequence: around this time, my attitude not only to the Great Report but also towards Koob-Sassen underwent a sea-change. I started seeing the Project as nefarious. Sinister. Dangerous. In fact, downright evil. Worming its way into each corner of the citizenry’s lives, re-setting (“re-configuring”) the systems lying behind and bearing on virtually their every action and experience, and doing this without their even knowing it … I started picturing it, picturing its very letters (the K a body-outline, the S s folds of cloak, the hyphen a dagger hidden between these), slinking up staircases in the night while people slept, a silent assassin. That’s how I started seeing it. I couldn’t, at first, put my finger on a particular aspect or effect of it, nor on a specific instigator or beneficiary, that was itself inherently and unambiguously bad. But after a while I started telling myself that it was precisely this that made it evil: its very vagueness rendered it nefarious and sinister and dangerous. In not having a face, or even body, the Project garnered for itself enormous and far-reaching capabilities, while at the same time reducing its accountability — and vulnerability — to almost zero. What was to criticize, or to attack? There was no building, no Project Headquarters or Central Co-ordination Bureau. What person, then? The Minister with Shoes? She was no evil mastermind; she had no greater overview of the whole Project than I did. Her immediate boss, a man whose intellectual capacities (like all aristocrats, he was inbred) were held in almost open contempt by even his own cabinet members? The Project was supra-governmental, supra-national, supra-everything — and infra- too: that ’s what made it so effective, and so deadly. I continued to ponder these things even as I laboured on, week-in, week-out, to help usher the Project into being, to help its first phase go live; and as I did, the more I pondered, ruminated, what you will, the more thoughts of this nature festered.

12.5I started to reassess my own part in it all. I won’t, as I’ve already stated, go into particulars; but suffice to say that my own role was tiny — tiny and lowly. I was, quite literally, underground: secreted down among Koob-Sassen’s, as among the Company’s, foundations, its underpinnings. This afforded me no power to shape the Project in a formal or official way — but to un -shape it, sabotage it even … That, I started whispering to myself, was another matter. Given license to burrow, could I not sniff out central axes and supports, and undermine them? Granted access to all areas, could I not lift a spanner from my tool-bag and, when no one else was looking, drop this in the engine rooms, jamming Project-cogs and Project-levers? Koob-Sassen may have been a giant reservoir into which flowed many tributaries — but I, being trusted to dip test-tubes into and take readings from any of these, was primed to slip out of my lab-coat’s inner pocket a small phial, let trickle out of this a poison that, administered in even the minutest, most diluted form, could decimate whole populaces. Something as simple as providing faulty data, an intervention so mouse-like at point-of-entry, might engender, three or so steps down the chain, a sewer-monster of gargantuan proportions that, Godzilla-like, would rise up and smash everything; or issuing erroneous interpretations and assertions, or even insinuations, could lead to key decisions being made later that were catastrophically bad ones, circuits being wired and switches being thrown exactly the wrong way. I could do it, if I wanted: I could torch the fucker …