Chapter 5
Chan learned that the projected wooden doors next to the bakery were a close copy of the ones actually behind the portal’s electronic curtain. The real doors were kept locked, but anyone breaking in would find himself in a closed, stonewalled chamber not much bigger than Chan’s temporary quarters with The Brotherhood.
As he ascended the stairs to his apartment, one of the other residents with whom he occasionally chatted greeted him and asked where he had been. Chan consciously chose a typical goofy reply about being abducted by space aliens to put him off. It was the same behavior as before, but with a totally different sense of awareness.
He spent his evening sorting through his books and realized none of them were valuable to him any more. On the one hand, the official social orthodoxy enforced by government was the same victimology as before, with a wide range of protected groups, each with its own peculiar set of privileges. What it amounted to was a carefully selected disfavor for traditional manly men who might lack sufficient skin coloration. Chan was just a little too light-skinned for many privileges.
The official orthodoxy said nice nerds were what women wanted, but they never seemed to like such men. While there had been a politically powerful backlash by men in general, the changes were insignificant in part because the Western male model demanded men act tough and uncomplaining. By the time Chan became aware of such things, the backlash amounted to little more than lip service and extra bureaucracy in things like divorce courts and employment.
The resistance of manly men became a sort of background noise, one more thing adding to the tension and confusion in a world where harsh government oppression couldn’t keep up with all the various forms of passive-aggressive resistance from the populace. The current fashion of young men reading and swapping somewhat masculine pulp fiction printed in places where local government couldn’t be bothered with shutting down the production was really not much of a change from decades past. Aside from the quite rare good literature that slipped into this stream of furtively exchanged books, most of it was promoting the fake masculinity of Western Civilization, manifested in all sorts of improbable settings and arbitrary story lines. Chan realized the stories were structurally identical to the mainstream pulp fiction mostly purchased by women.
There had been an old joke that the only reason paperback books made a comeback at all was because the paper companies lobbied government to restrict Net access more tightly to kill off other forms of entertainment. What had once been a thriving television industry was now so completely wedded to government control that no one took it seriously. Videos and private players were simply a more expensive version of the pulp fiction industry, and Chan couldn’t remember a time when folks he knew could afford such things. He had seen some of the movies available through back alley sellers, with their low resolution, gaps in the story line or no story line in the first place. They were actually worse than most pulp fiction.
He understood that the economy had once been much better at one time and that ordinary people could afford much nicer things, but it was a dim memory of the geriatrics. They told tales of how governments and massive industries had merged, how there were no wars, only constant brushfire fighting all over the world as governments came and went and boundaries shifted too often. Crushing taxation raced with a rising cost of living and people all over the world were looking for an excuse to fight back against everything.
Out of the increasingly bold and rapacious plutocrat class arose a group of major public figures willing to confront the insanity. They insisted they had the means to stop the insanity and out of the goodness of their hearts they would selflessly sacrifice for the good of mankind. It all sounded so nice, enforcing an end to war for profits and reining in the trans-national industry groups that made life so miserable. But the price was a bigger and stronger global government.
The world became vanilla, safe and everyone had a job. Then followed the long series of explanations that people would have to sacrifice just a bit here and there because of all the wasted resources not yet recovered. This friendly clique of wise and generous advisers became increasingly less generous, and Chan had heard they gained control mostly by purchasing virtually all human debt. Technically, these folks owned everything and everyone. Chan was born into that world.
The single biggest change was a near shutdown and restructuring of the Internet. This group of self-proclaimed saviors had made heavy use of the Net to agitate on their behalf, and then promptly restricted it. While there had been some geniuses who figured out how to keep hidden networks alive with full access to everything, far fewer people could afford the devices and the access services. The net result was that, for at least his generation, Chan knew that the pendulum on free information had swung the other way. Darvesh had mentioned that The Brotherhood’s technology wasn’t significantly better than what the rest of the world could have, but the government currently had effective control over what ordinary people knew about it, on top of keeping it too expensive. Private access was prohibitively priced, and public access terminals were tightly controlled.
The Brotherhood was partly involved in seeking ways to regain some form of ubiquitous popular access to global networking, but it was not something anyone could rush. Chan resolved to engage that task as soon as he could.
Meanwhile, he took Darvesh’s advice and spent Sunday out in the country. While the soreness was a different kind after a full night’s sleep, it was still a rough start. Chan managed to make a deal with one of his friends, trading his whole book collection for a battered old bicycle. It was better than walking, even if only three of the two dozen speeds worked, and the wheels were the heavy cast plastic type one saw on cheap wheelchairs. The tires were the matching hard plastic core stuff with poor traction, but at least they couldn’t go flat.
Once he had left the city behind, Chan found his legs and back warmed to the task of propelling him along the poorly maintained roads. City streets were generally better, but Chan understood the allocation for funding mostly had to do with how much government officials used any particular routes. In the country it was a matter of roads used by favored businesses. Chan intentionally chose the least traveled lanes, despite it meaning the roughest ride possible. He was in no hurry.
The last kilometer up into the hills required that he dismount and push. Between the unusually heavy weight of the thing and the lack of low gears, Chan worried the old drive chain might break. The breeze was stronger up here and insects fewer. He found a bare rocky ledge, leaned the bike against it and clambered up to the top. He realized it was one of the few times he was pretty sure there were no surveillance cameras recording his movements and precious few aerial drones were visible anywhere.
Out here he could afford to indulge in a full conversation with himself out loud. There was only a thin trickle of walkers on the lane that ran nearest and they were out of earshot. Having never been religious, he decided he would imagine himself talking to God. As Pete had told him, it was hard to ignore the existence of a higher power, but Chan felt encouraged to work with whatever imagination he had of such a thing.
Chan’s experience with organized religion left him thinking that was merely another way to keep people occupied in harmless pursuits. The government controlled religious organizations out of the same office as the various cultural clubs. Church staff was vetted and paid by the government, too. Officially sanctioned religious expression had been Sanforized and defanged in that it was little more than another brand of ethnicity. Particular teachings varied, but few people seemed to take any of it seriously, any more than they might political theories. It was all on the same level as amateur sporting competitions on the local level. There was an underground version of everything, and the unofficial “churches” were all so rabidly obsessed with minutiae that Chan found it confusing. He did his best to dismiss the whole thing.
So instead of praying, it was just a conversation. Chan had no expectation of actually getting any ki
nd of recognizable response; it was just an exercise in objectifying what he thought was his own better nature. The book he had read in the Brotherhood’s library surveyed schools of psychology on the way to explaining the mythology of Western social orthodoxy and Chan was hoping to learn how to embrace self-improvement by reducing internal conflicts. For him, a nebulous image of God was more salutary than a disapproving parental figure or a feel-good grandfather.
The one thing hammered home repeatedly during his stay with The Brotherhood was the fundamental necessity of having a mission. Not a quest; the White Knight was a dastardly lie. The only dragons were ordinary people caught up in something too big for them. Rather, Chan needed a sense of mission and it almost didn’t matter what that mission was or that his perception of it might change over time, so long as it drove him forward through life. The nature of his training there narrowed down the field to a manageable sense of what really mattered. He decided he knew too little to give this thing a name, or even a characterization, but focused more on the thing itself.
It was not so much direct explanation as an implication of what he had learned that the whole concept of accomplishment or measurable success was a major enemy. A mission didn’t have a goal. There was no end point. This much was obvious after being told several times in different ways that simply promoting this different view of reality the Brotherhood held was its own goal. Surely there were good things to come with all this, but the mission of conforming himself to the hidden truth of things was its own reward. Everything he could name or give concrete, objective existence in his mind became a tool, a resource for the mission. Attempts to state this in different ways to God helped vivify his current understanding of things.
It must have taken longer than he realized, because, as before, it was dual signals from his body that broke the reverie: hunger and stiffness from sitting too long. Picking his way back down to the bike, he pulled out the lunch he had packed. It would be an early lunch, his watch told him, but consistent with a newly fired up metabolism. Continuing the gym sessions was his duty to himself, he resolved. Being more selective about food and drink would not be a burden of rules, but a necessity with preferences.
So it was with social encounters. He realized that, even at this stage, membership in The Brotherhood meant for him getting comfortable with emotional distance from most of the world. This was no elitist snobbery against the poor benighted souls of the world, but recognition that he was not yet in much of a position to help them. It was the nature of things that most of them were too far removed from even wanting what The Brotherhood had. Anything like a rescue could only come one at a time. For now, that meant staying alert for openings when anyone manifested unconventional awareness, but otherwise remaining harmlessly aloof.
His clowning nature simply meant that aloofness would be flavored with a quirky sense of humor. Yet he would begin consciously shaping every interaction to maximize exposing receptiveness in others. He promised God he would learn how to stop when the context required it.
The rest of the day was spent aimlessly wandering on the rough lanes around the perimeter of the city as he replayed in his mind various social encounters of the past, but rewriting them with his new commitment. Once more in the square where the portal stood, in his mind he practiced pretending to unlock the door to enter, followed by exiting and pretending to close it. It reminded him how much he wanted to get started on the color algorithms. It was the one part of his mission that had a recognizable shape.