Beauty is a Weapon

Excerpt from the novel Rising Storm icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12 by S.M. Stirling icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12

S.M. Stirling's "Rising Storm" book cover. [Formatted]

CRAIG KIPFER’S OFFICE, SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

     ALTERNATE USES FOR INTELLIMETAL

Bullets: Intellimetal, once fired, will expand with the heat of the explosion, mushrooming into the most effective shape possible. On striking the target, it will break apart into smaller pieces, each piece seeking the primary electrical source in the body: the brain. Once there, each individual piece of Intellimetal will respond to the brain's electrical patterns by oscillating at a very fast rate as it seeks to rebond with other pieces of Intellimetal. This will effectively liquefy the brain.

Mineworms: These antipersonnel devices will be planted like seeds in rows, while the "farmer" is protected by special gloves and boots, possible special coveralls as well. When stepped on, the rods of Intellimetal will activate and burrow upward through boot, flesh, and bone, again in search of the body's primary electrical source. As an additional advantage, when anyone subsequently touches the body the activated mineworms will try to burrow into this subject as well.

     Craig Kipfer sat back, his lips pursed as though to whistle but emitting no sound. There was some additional stuff in the girl’s notes about possible security uses for her invention, but it was her ideas for weapons that both fascinated and chilled him.
     He’d been around long enough to know that women could outdo men in viciousness; even so, he found it hard to associate these ideas with that young woman’s lovely face. It proved once again the truth of an adage he’d been taught when he first started in this service. Beauty is a weapon. Feel free to use it, never let it use you.
     From the moment he heard about that statue in New York, he’d been interested in Clea Bennet. And when she began throwing out ideas that paralleled the Skynet project during her meeting with Colvin and Warren, he knew that he wanted her to work for him, else he’d never have ordered her picked up. But this! Talk about a bonus, he thought.
     Kipfer sat forward in his chair and pulled out his keyboard. He’d been of two minds about the woman; keep or kill. Pool was waiting for his orders.
     *Send her to Antarctica,* he typed, then sent the message. After this, he’d hear about her in progress reports or not at all. Until, that is, such time as he had to review his decision to let her live.

It Was Very Hard, She Reflected, to Know When to Stop Refining a Plan

Excerpt from the novel Rising Storm icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12 by S.M. Stirling icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12

S.M. Stirling's "Rising Storm" book cover. [Formatted]

LOS ANGELES

     Clea did her best to project untutored country girl at the CEO and president of Cyberdyne. In an effort to aid that effect she’d worn a denim skirt and jacket with a red plaid Western shirt, her tooled leather belt had a big silver buckle, and on her feet were a pair of well-broken-in cowboy boots. The rustic costume, with the glasses and attitude, she hoped, would eliminate any resemblance to Serena’s slick corporate look and, therefore, to Serena.
     As long as he doesn’t focus on my tits, some sardonic corner of her mind thought. They’re just like Serena’s. Clea scowled at the inner voice; it was far too much like the recorded memories of her clone sister/mother.
     Eventually they would notice; it was inevitable. But by that time they would be used to her and might comment on the resemblance, but they wouldn’t be suspicious. Merely curious.
     That’s one of the things I actually like about humans—their willingness to explain away anything strange. From what she’d observed, on her own and through Serena’s memories, they’d perform some unbelievably convoluted feats of logic to return to their everyday frame of reference. At times she found it incredible that these people had conceived and build Skynet.
     The I-950 set her battered briefcase on the conference-room table and extracted a portable computer, smiling nervously at the two men as she set it up. The new corporate HQ was nothing like Serena’s memories of the underground center the Connors had destroyed; it was pure minimalist functionality, the sort of “nothing” that cost a great deal of money, and left you wondering if anything as vulgar as paper ever crossed anyone’s desk. Some of the people in the cubicles outside weren’t even using thin-screen monitors; they were peering into the telltale blackness of vision goggles, miniature lasers painting text and diagrams directly on their retinas.
     “Would you like some coffee?” the president of Cyberdyne offered. Paul Warren hefted a carafe with his own hands, considerable condescension from an executive at his level.
     She shook her head and gave him a shy smile. He smiled back warmly and she knew she’d taken the right tack with him. Serena had considered initiating a romantic affair with him, but she’d miscalculated his affection for his wife. This was one instance in which Serena’s mistake really didn’t matter, though. The woman had had to die, even if it did turn out to be a setback in other areas.
     By now, though, he must be lonely and his distress over his wife’s death should be fading. Perhaps she should co-opt Serena’s plan for herself. Although the very thought of intimate relations with a human revolted her.
     “Welcome to Cyberdyne,” Roger Colvin said. “I think, based on what I saw at the unveiling the other night, that we’ve got a lot to offer each other.”
     Clea squirmed as though pleased and allowed her face to flush as though she was embarrassed. Don’t overdo it, she warned herself. “Thank you,” she said aloud, allowing just a touch of Montana into her voice.
     “I was just wondering,” Warren said, “what have you named your product and have you got a copyright on it.”
     “I, uh, sent in the paperwork, but I hadn’t heard back before I left home.” She shrugged. “It may be that it hasn’t caught up with me yet.”
     “We’ll check on that for you,” Colvin said. “What name have you registered it under?”
     “Intellimetal,” Clea said. She smiled ruefully. “That’s more for what it will be one day than for what it can do now. What Mr. Hill was working with was my earliest successful prototype.”
     “Really,” Colvin said, his voice dripping with interest.
     “Uh-huh,” she said, smiling. “But”—she twisted her fingers together—“I’d rather not go into detail until we’ve come to some sort of agreement.” Clea shrugged prettily. “My uncle was a stickler for getting things in writing. Never agree to anything until you see it written down, he’d say. It always looks different then.”
     Warren and Colvin exchanged a glance that said, “This little lady might be inexperienced, but she’s nobody’s fool.”
     They set to work, and work it was. Clea knew exactly what she wanted, how much she wanted, and what terms she’d accept. As far as she was concerned, almost nothing was negotiable, however hard the two humans tried. Two hours later Clea typed in the last word of her “rough notes,” as she called them, on her portable and handed the CEO a disk.
     “There ya go,” she said cheerfully. “Now I’ll need to see this all written up formally before I can even begin to decide for sure what I want to do.”
     “Thank you,” Colvin said palely.
     “You’re welcome.” She met his eyes and leaned forward confidentially. “I would like to leave you contemplating this one little idea I had. Now, I haven’t done any real special work on it, but I’ve been thinking about it real hard.” Watch the Montana effect, she warned herself. She was in serious danger of enjoying her role too much.
     “We’d love to hear about it,” Warren said, leaning forward himself.
     “Well. You know the F-101, that flying-wing stealth plane?”
     The two men nodded.
     “The only reason something like that can keep from crashing is because it has an onboard computer that makes thousands of adjustments a minute.” Her listeners nodded again. “So I was thinking, what we need is a machine that can do that and know it’s doing it. You know what I mean?”
     Colvin and Warren exchanged nervous glances.
     “A machine like that could control thousands of planes, thousands of miles apart. And not just planes, either, but tanks and gun emplacements and even battle robots.” Clea sat back, having noticed long since the subtly appalled expressions on their faces. “Not detailed control—it would be a distributed system—but a strategic artificial intelligence… Is something wrong?”
     “No, no. It sounds fascinating,” Warren reassured her. “But… well, perhaps at some future date we could look into something like that. But right now you’ve put so much into developing Intellimetal that we’d like to help you with that project.”
     She was silent for a moment, her glance roving from one to the other. “Really?” Clea tapped her fingertips on the arms of her chair. “Because I’ve always thought of Cyberdyne as one of the foremost robotics specialist in the field. I had the impression that artificial intelligence was sort of your bailiwick.”
     “You have to understand, Ms. Bennet”—Colvin spread his hands helplessly—“that in some instances our hands are tied.”
     Her eyes widened. “Oh!” she said, looking from one to the other. “I see.” then she shrugged, and allowed another blush. “And here I thought I was being original.”
     “I’m sure that anything that comes out of that brain of yours is original, Ms. Bennet,” Colvin said.
     “Absolutely,” Warren agreed eagerly.
     Clea smiled at them. “Well then,” she said, rising. “I’m sure you gentlemen have a great deal to do and I’ve already taken up an amazing amount of your time.”
     “Not at all.” Colvin rose with her and extended his hand.
     “She shook it, smiling, and turned to Warren, who had offered his hand as well. “I’ll look forward to hearing from you, then.”
     With a nod the I-950 preceded them out of the room and without another word or backward glance marched down the corridor toward the elevator.
     Warren looked askance at the CEO and gestured toward the young woman. “Is she annoyed, or something?” he asked.
     Colvin shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. She may be a little socially backward. Apparently she was raised by an eccentric uncle in the wilds of Montana and they didn’t get out much. Home schooling, the whole nine yards. She’s never even been to a university.”
     “You’re kidding!” Warren said, appalled.
     Colvin held up his hand. “I know what you’re going to say.”
     “Yeah, and I’m going to say it, too. Why would we want to hire some kid who’s never even graduated from college, especially at the price and on the terms she’s demanding? That’s crazy.”
     “We’re trying to hire her so that we can exploit this metal she’s invented. You have to see this statue to believe it, Paul. It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever laid eyes on.”
     “Why don’t I just hop on a plane to New York, then, and go take a peek?” Warren asked.
     “Why don’t you just trust me, buddy?” Colvin said, putting an arm around the presidents shoulders. “I know what I’m doing here. Believe me, if we don’t snap her up now somebody else will. Look, we’re going to put in an escape clause, right? So we can both walk away if it doesn’t work out and nobody’s a loser. Right?”
     “If she walks she’ll take that Intellimetal with her,” the president warned.
     “You’ve gotta trust our lawyers to write a better contract than that,” Colvin said with a smile.

Clea was pleased. They’d accepted her without question. For the first time in ages she felt that she’d performed well. The only downside was that they hadn’t risen to the bait she’d dangled in the way she’d expected. Could it be that they really weren’t involved in the Skynet project any longer?
     Cyberdyne had provided a limo and driver for her and the car was waiting out front when she exited the building. She didn’t even acknowledge the driver when he opened the door for her, but stepped in and settled herself for the ride back to the hotel, lost in her own thoughts.

Clea woke up lying on a sofa, its firm cushions upholstered in a blue-green tweed. The room she was in appeared to be a cheaply paneled conference room, with, unusually, a large mirror in the wall opposite the couch. No. That is one-way glass. The room is institutional; government, not corporate.
     Her eyes searched the mirror for hints of movement from a possible hidden room as she sharpened her hearing and listened.
     “…took enough hypno to knock out an elephant! I thought she’d never go down,” a male voice was saying.
     “Maybe there’s a flaw in the delivery system,” another man answered, “because she just woke up. If she’d absorbed as much of the drug as you say you gave her, she’d sleep until tomorrow night.”
     Clea detected movement in the mirror, as though one of the speakers had leaned forward for a better look.
     Well, well. I’ve been kidnapped! One of Cyberdyne’s more aggressive competitors, perhaps? Or Cyberdyne itself? She considered the idea. It would be strange if it was them. For one thing, nothing in their dossier indicated that they played such games. For another, it seemed a criminal waste of their president and CEO’s time if they had intended to negotiate by force all along.
     Now who else might have an interest in my little inventions? And who else could or would employ such an extreme technique as drugging and kidnapping her? Organize crime came briefly to mind, but she dismissed the idea. They were hardly into research and development.
     It’s much more likely to be Tricker or one of his friends, she thought. Excellent.
     She’d been wondering where the agent had got himself to; it looked like she might be about to find out.
     Clea sat up, faking a wobbliness that she in no way felt, one hand to her brow as though her head ached. Which it should, but for the computer and nanites that had worked so hard to cleanse her blood. She blinked, and narrowed her eyes as though the fluorescent light bothered her.
     “Hello?” she said, sounding shaky.
     “That’s my cue, said one of the men.
     She heard a door open and close and there was a flash of light in the mirror. Then the door to the room she was in opened and she got up from the couch quickly. The I-950 immediately sat down again, resting her head against the back of the couch, her hand over her eyes as though dizzy.
     “Take it easy, miss,” the man said soothingly. “Are you okay?”
     “Dizzy,” she murmured.
     She dropped her hand as though exhausted, keeping her eyes closed for effect. But her nose and ears told her where he was, even what he’d last eaten—hamburger with some sort of hot sauce. The glimpse she’d had of him when he walked in confirmed her suspicion. He worked for the government. His clothing and appearance were so artfully average that in a crowed he would be effectively invisible. It wasn’t Tricker, but he might have been a close relative.
     “That will pass,” the man said gently.
     She heard water pouring and then felt the touch of his hand. Opening her eyes, she saw that he was offering her a glass of water; when she took it he held out two aspirin.
     “For the headache I’m sure you have, he said with a sympathetic smile.
     Clea accepted the pills and took them with a sip of water, studying him over the rim of the glass. He was tall and slender, with muddy hazel eyes and a narrow face; his silvering blond hair was beginning to recede and there was an element of grayness about him somehow. But his voice was pleasant, as was his manner, both conveying trustworthiness.
     Which was actually quite different than Tricker, who seemed to go out of his way to be abrasive. And yet this man reminded her of no one so much as of Serena’s old nemesis.
     He could be dangerous if he needed to be, she thought. Or if he wanted to be. There was the essential resemblance; like Tricker, this man was competently ruthless. Not unlike myself, she thought. They probably work for the same agency.
     Clea swallowed. “Where am I?” she asked.
     He didn’t answer, but sat looking at her.
     “And who are you?” She pulled herself up until she was sitting straight.
     “Aren’t you going to ask why you’re here?” he prompted.
     “Well, I assume you’re going to tell me,” she snapped. “Or are we just going to sit and stare at each other until we starve to death? But I’ve got to tell you, mister, if you’re looking for a ransom you’ve got the wrong girl! My only relative is dead and all I’ve got in the world is a few thousand dollars in the bank. So what’s going on here?”
     “That’s not entirely true, Ms. Bennet, now is it?” the gray man said. “You have the house and land in Montana, don’t you?”
     The I-950’s eyes widened quite involuntarily as her mind flashed to that empty grave in the modest country cemetery. Should she have replaced the Terminator with a human corpse? Surely they wouldn’t check her background that thoroughly?
     “Oh yes,” the man continued complacently, “we know everything there is to know about you. Certainly everything that is a matter of public record.” He gave her a tight little smile. “And we’ve come to the conclusion that only we can offer you the resources to allow your inventiveness full scope.”
     “Who are you?” she almost shouted. All the time thinking, Ah, so I was right. Tricker’s gang.
     “My name is Pool,” he said.
     “Just Pool?” Clea demanded sarcastically, remembering Tricker’s insistence on being called a simple, unadorned “Tricker.”
     “Yes,” he agreed with a slightly deprecatory smile. “Just Pool.”
     Clea drew in a deep breath. “And who is we, Pool?”
     The smile broadened. “We are your tax dollars at work, Ms. Bennet.”
     Setting her jaw, Clea tilted her head at a defiant angle. Actually she was delighted; the government had to have taken over the Skynet project when Cyberdyne’s second facility was destroyed… by the Connors, again. But a human would object to this sort of treatment…
     “And if I don’t want to work for the government?” she asked.
     Pool shrugged. “Then we would have to tell Vladimir Hill that the wonderful new material you’ve been letting him play with as though it was clay is one of the most carcinogenic materials ever devised.” He paused as if to gauge her reaction.
     Clea gave him one. “Nonsense!” she snapped, sitting forward. Then she looked queasy and leaned back again. “What are you talking about?”
     “He’ll probably be dead by next year,” Pool said. “But that would allow him plenty of time to sue you. And, of course, there would probably be charges of criminal negligence. You’d probably do jail time.” His eyes cooled. “In fact, you can count on that. And afterward, well, Cyberdyne wouldn’t touch you or Intellimetal with a ten-foot pole, and neither would anyone else.” He spread his hands. “Which would leave you with us. But not before we both lost a lot of time and effort and money. So why not just cooperate and we’ll all be happy?”
     Clea allowed herself to look shaken; her computer dropped her circulation slightly so that her face would go pale.
     “Does Vladimir have… cancer?” Her eyes widened. “Do I?” she asked, her voice quavering.
     “We don’t know, actually, your tests aren’t back. But the odds are good. As for Hill, in good conscience, of course, we can’t let him remain at risk. We’ll warn him quite soon, and if it’s caught early enough there’s always a chance that he might survive. You, too, of course. But we think you’d be better off if you suddenly became unavailable. Don’t you?”
     She nodded, looking shell-shocked, or so the mirror told her.
     He smiled, an avuncular smile this time; Pool seemed to have quite a repertoire. “Very wise,” he murmured. “You won’t regret it, I’m sure. Our terms won’t be quite as generous as Cyberdyne’s, but our facilities are the best and our research budget is virtually unlimited.” He stood, smiling down at her. “Why don’t you lie back down and get some rest,” he advised. “That drug can pack quite a punch. Later on someone will come and take you to your room, where you can have something to eat and relax. Then tomorrow we’ll outfit you for your new job and by evening you’ll be on you way.”
     “On my way where?” she asked, trying to sound crushed. Instead, her computer component was suppressing glee; this was turning out exactly as planned. And if it hadn’t [there was a] sixty-seven percent probability of terminating all units here and escaping without irreparable damage, she calculated automatically.
     His lips jerked into a mirthless smile, and he turned to the door. “I’d rather not say,” he told her. Then he walked out the door.
     She heard the click of a lock and then his receding footsteps. Clea covered her mouth as though feeling sick and leaned over, hanging her head. Then she lay down and, turning her back to the mirror, began to sob quietly for the benefit of whoever still lurked in the room behind the mirror.
     It was too late now to do anything about her missing “uncle,” she decided. Agents might still be loitering around asking questions, making it very risky to fill the empty hole.
     I’ll just have to take a chance on it, she thought. But even if they do open the grave to find it empty, that proves nothing. At least, nothing against her. Even so, it bothered her.
     It was very hard, she reflected, to know when to stop refining a plan. I should inform Alissa of the latest developments…

Shadow-World

Excerpt from the novel 1984 icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12 by George Orwell icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12

George Orwell's "1984" book cover. [Formatted]

     Winston examined the four slips of paper which he had unrolled. Each contained a message of only one or two lines, in the abbreviated jargon—not actually Newspeak, but consisting largely of Newspeak words—which was used in the Ministry for internal purposes. They ran:

times 17.3.84 bb speech malreported africa rectify

times 19.12.83 forecasts 3 yp 4th quarter 83 misprints verify current issue

times 14.2.84 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify

times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling

     With a faint feeling of satisfaction Winston laid the fourth message aside. It was an intricate and responsible job and had better be dealt with last. The other three were routine matters, though the second one would probably mean some tedious wading through lists of figures.
     Winston dialled ‘back numbers’ on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of the Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes’ delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify. For example, it appeared from the Times of the seventeenth of March that Big Brother, in his speech of the previous day, had predicted that the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly be launched in North Africa. As it happened the Eurasian Higher Command had launched its offensive in the South India and left North Africa alone. It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother’s speech, in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened. Or again, the Times of the nineteenth of December had published the official forecasts of the output of various classes of consumption goods in the fourth quarter of 1983, which was also the sixth quarter of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. Today’s issue contained a statement of the actual output, from which it appeared that the forecasts were in every instance grossly wrong. Winston’s job was to rectify the original figures by making them agree with the later ones. As for the third message, it referred to a very simple error which could be set right in a couple of minutes. As short a time ago as February, the Ministry of Plenty had issued a promise (a ‘categorical pledge’ were the official words) that there would be no reduction of the chocolate ration during 1984. Actually, as Winston was aware, the chocolate ration was to be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty at the end of the present week. All that was needed was to substitute for the original promise a warning that it would probably be necessary to reduce the ration at some time in April.
     As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of the Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.
     What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the pneumatic tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of the Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs—to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place. The largest section of the Records Department, far larger than the one in which Winston worked, consisted simply of persons whose duty it was to track down and collect all copies of books, newspapers and other documents which had been superseded and were due for destruction. A number of the Times which might, because of changes in political alignment, or mistaken prophecies uttered by Big Brother, have been rewritten a dozen times still stood on the files bearing its original date, and no other copy existed to contradict it. Books, also, were recalled and re-written again and again., and were invariably re-issued without any admission that any alteration had been made. Even the written instructions which Winston received, and which he invariably got rid of as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of forgery was to be committed: always the reference was to slips, errors, misprints or misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the interests of accuracy.
     But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty’s figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connection with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. For example, the Ministry of Plenty’s forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at a hundred and forty-five million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in re-writing the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been over-fulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than a hundred and forty-five millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population in Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain.
     Winston glanced across the hall. In the corresponding cubicle on the other side a small, precise-looking, dark-chinned man named Tillotson was working steadily away, with a folded newspaper on his knee and his mouth very close to the mouthpiece of the speakwrite. He had the air of trying to keep what he was saying a secret between himself and the telescreen. He looked up, and his spectacles darted a hostile flash in Winston’s direction.
     Winston hardly knew Tillotson, and had no idea what work he was employed on. People in the Records Department did not readily talk about their jobs. In the long, windowless hall, with its double row of cubicles and its endless rustle of papers and hum of voices murmuring into speakwrites, there were quite a dozen people whom Winston did not even know by name, though he daily saw them hurrying to and fro in the corridors or gesticulating in the Two Minutes Hate. He knew that in the cubicle next to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in, day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed. There was a certain fitness in this, since her own husband had been vaporized a couple of years earlier. And a few cubicles away a mild, ineffectual, dreamy creature named Ampleforth, with very hairy ears and a surprising talent for juggling rhymes and metres, was engaged in producing garbled versions—definitive texts, they were called—of poems which had become ideologically offensive but which for one reason or another were to be retained in the anthologies. And this hall, with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one sub-section, a single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records Department. Beyond, above, below, were other swarms of workers engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs. There were huge printing shops with their sub-editors, their typography experts and their elaborately-equipped studios for the faking of photographs. There was the tele-programmes section with its engineers, its producers and its teams of actors specially chosen for their skill in imitating voices. There were the armies of reference clerks whose job was simply to draw up lists of books and periodicals which were due for recall. There were the vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored, and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed. And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence.
     And the Records Department, after all, was itself only a single branch of the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job was not to reconstruct the past but to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels—with every conceivable kind of information, instruction or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a bioligical treatise, and from a child’s spelling book to a Newspeak dictionary. And the Ministry had not only to supply the multifarious needs of the Party, but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat. There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. There was even a whole sub-section—Pornosec, it was called in Newspeak—engaged in producing the lowest kind of pornography, which was sent out in sealed packets and which no Party member, other than those who worked on it, was permitted to look at.
     Three messages had slid out of the pneumatic tube while Winston was working; but they were simple matters, and he had disposed of them before the Two Minutes Hate interrupted him. When the Hate was over he returned to his cubicle, took the Newspeak dictionary from the shelf, pushed the speakwrite to one side, cleaned his spectacles and settled down to his main job of the morning.

The Ghost of Rationality

Excerpt from the novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12 by Robert M. Parsig icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12

Robert M. Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" book cover. [Formatted]

     Some things can be said about Phaedrus as an individual:
     He was a knower of logic, the classical system-of-the-system which describes the rules and procedures of systematic thought by which analytic knowledge may be structured and interrelated. He was so swift at this his Stanford-Binet IQ, which is essentially a record of skill at analytic manipulation, was recorded at 170, a figure that occurs in only one person in fifty thousand.
     He was systematic, but to say he thought and acted like a machine would be to misunderstand the nature of his thought. It was not like pistons and wheels and gears all moving at once, massive and coordinated. The image of a laser beam comes to mind instead; a single pencil of light of such terrific energy in such extreme concentration it can be shot at the moon and its reflection seen back on earth. Phaedrus did not try to use his brilliance for general illumination. He sought one specific distant target and aimed for it and hit it. And that was all. General illumination of that target he hit now seems to be left for me.
     In proportion to his intelligence he was extremely isolated. There’s no record of his having had close friends. He traveled alone. Always. Even in the presence of others he was completely alone. People sometimes felt this and felt rejected by it, and so did not like him, but their dislike was not important to him.
     His wife and family seem to have suffered the most. His wife says those who tried to go beyond the barriers of his reserve found themselves facing a blank. My impression is that they were starved for some kind of affection which he never gave.
     No one really knew him. That is evidently the way he wanted it, and that’s the way it was. Perhaps his aloneness was the result of his intelligence. Perhaps it was the cause. But the two were always together. An uncanny solitary intelligence.
     This still doesn’t do it though, because this and the image of a laser beam convey the idea that he was completely cold and unemotional, and that is not so. In his pursuit of what I have called the ghost of rationality he was a fanatic hunter.
     One fragment becomes especially vivid now of a scene in the mountains where the sun was behind the mountain half an hour and an early twilight had changed the trees and even the rocks to almost blackened shades of blue and grey and brown. Phaedrus had been there three days without food. His food had run out but he was thinking deeply and seeing things and was reluctant to leave. He was not far away from where he knew there was a road and was in no hurry.
     In the dusk coming down the trail he saw a movement and then what seemed to be a dog approaching on the trail, a very large sheep dog, or an animal more like a husky, and he wondered what would bring a dog to this obscure place at this time of evening. He disliked dogs, but this animal moved in a way that forestalled these feelings. It seemed to be watching him, judging him. Phaedrus stared into the animal’s eyes for a long time, and for a moment felt some kind of recognition. Then the dog disappeared.
     He realized much later it was a timber wolf, and the memory of this incident stayed with him a long time. I think it stayed with him because he had seen a kind of image of himself.
     A photograph can show a physical image in which time is static, and a mirror can show a physical image in which time is dynamic, but I think what he saw on the mountain was another kind of image altogether which was not physical and did not exist in time at all. It was an image nevertheless and that is why he felt recognition. It comes to me vividly now because I saw it again last night as the visage of Phaedrus himself.
     Like that timber wolf on the mountain he had a kind of animal courage. He went his own way with unconcern for consequences that sometimes stunned people, and stuns me now to hear about it. He did not often swerve to right or to left. I’ve discovered that. But this courage didn’t arise from any idealistic idea of self-sacrifice, only from the intensity of his pursuit, and there was nothing noble about it.
     I think his pursuit of the ghost of rationality occurred because he wanted to wreak revenge on it, because he felt he himself was so shaped by it. He wanted to free himself from his own image. He wanted to destroy it because the ghost was what he was and he wanted to be free from the bondage of his own identity. In a strange way, this freedom was achieved.
     This account of him must sound unworldly, but the most unworldly part of it all is yet to come. This is my own relationship to him. This has been forestalled and obscured until now, but nevertheless must be known.
     I first discovered him by inference from a strange series of events many years ago. One Friday I had gone to work and gotten quite a lot done before the weekend and was happy about that and later that day drove to a party where, after talking to everybody too long and too loudly and drinking way too much, went into a back room to lie down for a while.
     When I awoke I saw that I’d slept the whole night, because now it was daylight, and I thought, “My God, I don’t even know the name of the hosts!” and wondered what kind of embarrassment this was going to lead to. The room didn’t look like the room I had lain down in, but it had been dark when I came in and I must have been blind drunk anyway.
     I got up and saw that my clothes were changed. These were not the clothes I had worn the night before. I walked out the door, but to my surprise the doorway led not to rooms of a house but into a long corridor.
     As I walked down the corridor I got the impression that everyone was looking at me. Three different times a stranger stopped me and asked how I felt. Thinking they were referring to my drunken condition I replied that I didn’t even have a hangover, which caused one of them to start to laugh, but then catch himself.
     At a room at the end of the corridor I saw a table where there was activity of some sort going on. I sat down nearby, hoping to remain unnoticed until I got all this figured out. But a woman dressed in white came up to me and asked if I knew her name. I read the little name clip on her blouse. She didn’t see that I was doing this and seemed amazed, and walked off in a hurry.
     When she came back there was a man with her, and he was looking right at me. He sat down next to me and asked me if I knew his name. I told him what it was, and was as surprised as they were that I knew it.
     “It’s very early for this to be happening,” he said.
     “This looks like a hospital,” I said.
     They agreed.
     “How did I get here?” I asked, thinking about the drunken party. The man said nothing and the woman looked down. Very little was explained.
     It took me more than a week to deduce from the evidence around me that everything before my waking up was a dream and everything afterward was reality. There was no basis for distinguishing the two other than the growing pile of new events that seemed to argue against the drunk experience. Little things appeared, like the locked door, the outside of which I could never remember seeing. And a slip of paper from the probate court telling me that some person was committed as insane. Did they mean me?
     It was explained to me finally that “You have a new personality now.” But this statement was no explanation at all. It puzzled me more than ever since I had no awareness at all of any “old” personality. If they had said, “You are a new personality,” it would have been much clearer. That would have fitted. They had made the mistake of thinking of a personality as some sort of possession, like a suit of clothes, which a person wears. But apart from a personality what is there? Some bones and flesh. A collection of legal statistics, perhaps, but surely no person. The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.
     But who was the old personality whom they had known and presumed I was a continuation of?
     This was my first inkling of the existence of Phaedrus, many years ago. In the days and weeks and years that have followed, I’ve learned much more.
     He was dead. Destroyed by order of the court, enforced by the transmission of high-voltage alternating current through the lobes of his brain. Approximately 800 mills of amperage at duration of 0.5 to 1.5 seconds had been applied on twenty-eight consecutive occasions, in a process known technologically as “Annihilation ECS.” A whole personality had been liquidated without a trace in a technologically faultless act that has defined our relationship ever since. I have never met him. Never will.
     And yet strange wisps of his memory suddenly match and fit this road and desert bluffs and white-hot sand all around us and there is a bizarre concurrence and then I know he has seen all of this. He was here, otherwise I would not know it. He had to be. And in seeing these sudden coalescences of vision and in recall of some strange fragment of thought whose origin I have no idea of, I’m like a clairvoyant, a spirit medium receiving messages from another world. That is how it is. I see things with my own eyes, and I see things with his eyes too. He once owned them.
     These EYES! That is the terror of it. These gloved hands I now look at, steering the motorcycle down the road, were once his! And if you can understand the feeling that comes from that, then you can understand real fear—the fear that comes from knowing there is nowhere you can possibly run.