Less Than The Sum
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| part 2 of 4 |
The professor is also named Paul. When I last saw him, he sank into the billowing cushions of his immense wing chair. His white hair flamed from his face like Einstein’s. He is more massive than Brando, he is huge, but embarrassed by the obsession with obesity. It’s only a fad, he says, dismissing it with a wave. Then reaches for something to nibble on, something to suck.
The professor is a lovable cuss who cannot stop looking. He says he’s retired but doesn’t know how. He can’t help it. He still wants to know. He calls it blessing or curse, depending. What else would I do? he asks in mock exasperation. Play golf?
The idea is funny. I imagine clubs like little sticks in his huge hands, his enormous bulk as solid as a building as he whiffs. I laugh.
The professor is always in the grip of some confounding event. He thrives on irregular shapes, feeling rough edges with his fingers, liking the occasional ouch. He wouldn’t know what to do with a smooth surface or a curve that didn’t challenge him. He prefers to live in hair shirts of perpetual perplexity. Itchiness makes him feel alive.
His eyes often look into the distance. Sometimes people turn to see what he is looking at and can’t see anything at all.
On the other hand, the professor often trips over his own feet.
He obsesses about our owners. He knows they come and go. He has been immersed in the data for decades. He has written hundreds of papers, good ones with careful documentation, reasonable conclusions, and of course, he is ignored. His work is published in periodicals that nobody reads. He lectures to empty rooms but no one outs it on YouTube.
He doesn’t know how long they stay or to what end. Even if we analyzed the metal from a crash or their flesh, it does not tell us anything important. We can do that analysis; it is well within our competence.
But to what end? We want to know the story, and the story is a muddle without a point of reference. Where’s the narrative? That’s what we need: a narrative, not abstractions. They seem to want to make it a muddle, too, and so do we, our own people, guardians of the interface — he winks, meaning our colleagues — who muddle the muddle more.
I know; I am getting to the point. You want a simple story. I understand that. But this is a story, however chock-full of ideas. Ideas can be as alive as people, more alive than some. The people who appointed themselves guardians of the interface, keepers of the secrets, do nothing but dream them up. They invent and alter and manage perceptions and images and ideas in the battle-space of our minds. They create relationships between things, then fill in the blanks.
Most keep the faith and die in silence. But once in a while one will have misgivings. Then there’s a crack and a little light gets in, as the song says. Someone gets an itch that has to be scratched.
* * *
My friend — call him Herb — is a social scientist. Like the professor, Herb is a tenured academic. He has worked on contract for years. People like Herb say they distrust us, but believe me, they’re easier to recruit than hookers. They talk the talk, but they always take the money.
Herb looks like an academic. Can you picture one? Got it? That’s Herb.
Much of his research has been funded in the dark. Of course, a lot of research in social sciences has been done that way for fifty years. Everything is dual-use; there are always plausible reasons, and then there are the ways the “intelligence community” — as we call it with a laugh — can use it, too.
You think I am alluding to something small. You have no idea. We have spun a vast dark web for generations through media, research in and out of industry, entertainment, universities — you cannot imagine how vast it is. Because they turn everything typical into an anomaly. That keeps you from seeing it whole. You never see it all mapped out.
Try. Go ahead. Try to imagine how big it is.
(Pause)
See what I mean? You can’t even come close.
Herb works in the blur between social and psychological, looking for means of manipulation, although he doesn’t call it that, and partners with experts in particle beams, lasers, and electromagnetic energy. There are many interesting effects, like stopping people in their tracks. Making them vomit. Or heat up. Or their brains go fuzzy. Or putting voices in their heads.
Memory, too. Herb works with memory. It’s a passion, not a duty. He works with individual memories, not “memory” in the abstract. He makes memories, and he makes memories go away. Or he keeps them intact but breaks up the index so they can’t be retrieved without a good program. You have to know the code that unlocks the code.
Herb can intensify some memories and reduce the intensity of others. It’s like using a mixer, he says, recording a song. A little more bass, a little less trumpet, and you wouldn’t know it’s the same song.
Of mice and men, he calls his current research.
Herb can make mice forget what they just learned. It looks like magic if you don’t know the science. He distinguishes short-term and long-term encoded proteins and plays games with them. He has a blast.
His playground is small at the moment, just little mice minds, but as Herb said the other night, looking at the street light refracted through his glass of sherry, “Just you wait.” Then he smiled at me and I smiled back.
His wine looked like liquid ruby from across the study. The wind rattled the ornamental shutters on his three-story colonial brick home. His neighbor had raked that afternoon, but the leaves blew from his piles onto Herb’s lawn. We could see the leaves swirling in the wind.
A neighbor was waiting for his dog, scooper in one hand and leash in the other. The dog was a blur. Then the man and the dog moved away, their distorted images flowing along the thick panes of antique glass.
Herb sipped his sherry and smiled again. He and his colleagues had moved a memory from the brain of one mouse to the brain of another. Then they distributed memories randomly in a dozen mice, busting up the culture in a way, the group still knowing everything but not in the same way.
The different juxtaposition in time and space changed the frame. The memories could all be retrieved and resequenced in the proper order, restoring the right tilt to the world. But as I said, you had to know the code.
But that wasn’t why he wanted to talk. That was gossip. He invited me over because he had an itch he needed to scratch. When he turned at last to the subject on his mind, his smile faded.
Herb had been invited somewhere for the weekend. They came through a friend with a channel to the place for the meeting. They wanted to discuss disclosure. That’s all he would say. A tap on the shoulder came like an invitation to Skull and Bones, and off he went. A weekend away, expenses paid. He never says no.
When he flies, sometimes windows are blacked out. Sometimes elevators take a long time to go down. You can’t even see the road into the mountain, that’s how good they are. Google Earth is their toy, too, and all the mapping platforms, so unless you have your own satellites, or code to correct the altered images, you haven’t got a reference, don’t you see, so you can’t really see the earth. All you see is the floor they have given you, seemingly concrete.
A weekend away with men and women from diverse disciplines was a treat. There were several dozen I think he said. Or did I fill in a blank? We make connections without thinking, fill in the blank spaces. Without thinking consciously I ought to say. Narratives complete themselves. No, I think he did say a couple of dozen.
The agenda at any rate was simple: should they tell? They talked over the pros and cons. How long can we sit on this? How long should we? More people know now, despite our work, how well we have hidden it all in plain sight, but they don’t know that they know. That’s the kicker. Some know but don’t know that they know.
But — how long should we keep it up?
Then their facilitator said — now, this is a direct quote, and Herb looked perplexed as he said it, his affect was appropriate to the words — “What will the cattle do? Will they stay inside the fence or will they stampede?”
(Pause.)
Hm. I see that the metaphor cattle might be confusing. I use “cattle” as a metaphor again, but not the way I meant before. The cattle to which I am referring here is the whole herd of humanity, the mass of all humankind, our shared mental space. Not the cattle I meant before, when I said that we humans might look upon our owners as cows do. Then I meant cows. That was a simile. This is a metaphor. That was speculation. This is historical fact.
So let me back up and say it again.
One morning my friend Herb received a call. There is going to be a meeting, he was told. People will come together. Then the meeting will not have happened. There will be no minutes, no memory of the meeting.
We need to discuss disclosure — again. Again we must make a decision.
Your expenses, he was told, will be paid as usual through the Department of International Studies at Oberlin. They will request a paper and you will send one. It won’t be published, so it doesn’t matter which.
Then the caller became serious. Things have been warming up. You understand what I mean? Yes, exactly. We don’t know how hot it will get. It’s not in our control.
The question is, has it percolated long enough through the mind of the herd to bring us to a tipping point? Will people understand and adjust? Or will they go through the barbed wire?
(Pause)
I did it again. That wasn’t much help, was it? Of course you don’t know that point of reference, either. How could you? It’s from another story. So let’s go there, OK? It’s a detour, but the shortest route to all goals is the detours.
* * *
Copyright © 2010 by Richard Thieme
