Islands in the Fog

by Adam Luoranen
Prologue

AMERICA

A FEW GENERATIONS INTO THE FUTURE

On a clear day, it was supposed, a sighted person might see forever. To the blind,
however, it made no difference whether clear or fog.

To Harvey Wallbanger, it seemed that the fog was everywhere, and could not be
dissipated by any amount of warmth or sunshine. It was invisible, or at least hidden from
obvious view, for the air was physically not saturated with moisture; rather, the fog
existed in people’s minds, and prevented them from seeing anything other than what they
chose to see.

The fog was one of American’s greatest sociopolitical reforms, for it was universal and
egalitarian. It was given to all people freely, without charge and without discrimination
based on any attribute that one might choose to distinguish one person from another.
Since it was indoctrinated into people using public money, it was embraced by liberals as
something that truly belonged to the people. More than any other aspect of society, the
fog in people’s minds made them free: Free from the need for independent thought, and
free from uncertainty, the great bugbears that had plagued previous generations since the
dawn of humanity. The fog was easy, convenient, and safe. It was civilization.

Of course, as diverse and unpredictable as human nature is, there were occasional
instances of those who did not like the fog, or who did not believe that it was the best
thing for society. However, part of the beauty of the fog was that it was also self-
perpetuating and self-sustaining: It simultaneously made people resistant to resisting it,
while also working to ensure that those not yet in full acceptance of the fog would
eventually either change their minds or be eliminated. There was scarcely a need for
police, since when people learn to police themselves, such law-enforcement authorities
become obsolete. Truly, Harvey had entered into the golden cradle of the future: A
society which had overcome the age-old problem of strife between people.

For better or for worse, Harvey was destined to change that. Or die trying. Or both.
Chapter 1: Into the fire

Harvey Wallbanger’s journey to America began, as most such journeys do nowadays, at

an airport. A recent graduate of a fairly prestigious university in his country, Harvey had
been encouraged by many friends to go to America, where he could be “Successful.” It
was neither clear what precisely constituted the Success people imagined, nor why such
Success was so readily available in America, but Harvey was assured that if he had a
mind to do so, he could when-in-Rome his way to Success. Like any other word which is
repeated endlessly and used frequently without either context or definition, the word
Success had been reduced to a magic wand that held no deeper meanings than its
connotations, and its connotations were entirely good. Thus, whatever this whole Success
thing was, it seemed assured that something good was waiting in America.

Wisely recognizing that it had lost all hope of competing with other world nations in
terms of industry, technology, or the arts, America had given up the whole idea of
admitting people based on skill sets or educational degrees, and Harvey met America’s
primary immigration requirements: He was white, and he had checked the “No” box on
the application question that asked “Have you ever perpetrated a terrorist attack?”
Harvey’s application to become a resident alien was quickly granted, and lacking any
clear direction in life, he opted to take the advice of his friends and go to America, since
that seemed to be what a lot of other people were doing.

Once upon a time, Americans genuinely believed that their country was entering a new
era of efficiency in transportation. As the airplane grew from its sputtering, wood-and-
fabric origins into gleaming jets that could carry people anywhere in the world within a
matter of hours, an entire society was convinced that a few generations down the line,
people would take to the air as readily and freely as they presently took to the roads in
their cars. This ended up not happening. Indeed, as aviation passed its apex, it
deteriorated significantly as price competition among airlines caused them to scale back
on in-flight luxuries (like meals, pillows, and seating), fears of terrorism made people
wary of going up in the air (since airplanes had been perfectly safe until some evil genius
thought to put a bomb on them), and energy costs went up—for it turned out that keeping
a metal canister filled with hundreds of people airborne required more energy than solar
panels or even regenerative braking could provide. Neither possessing the money to
purchase a first-class plane ticket nor lacking enough in thrift to see the point in splurging
for a more expensive seating option than he needed, Harvey purchased the cheapest plane
ticket he could find, which turned out to not involve seating at all, but rather entailed
being loaded into a space that was part of the plane’s luggage compartment, except
intended for storage of human bodies. Harvey was stacked under five layers of other
people, yet although these upper-layer people became uncomfortably heavy during the
flight, Harvey was fortunate on two counts: One, the people were not particularly
overweight, and so only about 1,000 pounds of weight was distributed across Harvey’s
entire body, and secondly, the body heat of his surrounding passengers worked well at
keeping Harvey warm, since the passenger compartment was sometimes chilly when the
plane reached 30,000 feet.
Of course, problems regarding the compartment being cold were laid to rest when the
plane landed, since the airline Harvey was on was a budget airline, and one of the ways it
kept prices low was to avoid renting the use of airports, which were expensive. Instead,
each flight simply ended in a crash landing near the destination city, since striking the
ground with a plane was a remarkably effective way of ensuring that the plane stopped
moving forward. The planes, like all manufactured goods, were cheaper to mass-produce
than to repair, and so it was no use trying to keep them in working condition for multiple
flights anyway; the airline simply purchased new, disposable planes to replace those lost
after each landing. As the fuselage of the plane cracked open, the passengers began to
slowly get up and file out through the openings that had materalized when the body of the
plane broke up on landing. Harvey, five layers deep, had to wait a while before the
people on top of him got out so that he, too, could escape, but once he was free to do so,
he crawled over to where the luggage was stored, collected his own suitcase, and looked
around for the nearest exist. Naturally, much of the plane was on fire, and so Harvey was
unable to locate an exit that was accessible without passing through some flames. His
suitcase—containing all his earthly possessions in the world—in his hand, Harvey, like
so many visitors to America before him, began his journey by stepping into the fire.

***

Once outside, Harvey located a street and began to walk. It was an imperative part of life
in an American city that you constantly walk around and look busy. There was no
fanfare, no prepatory process to go through—you simply went out there and began
walking among the crowds, and then you, too, knew that you were an American. Being
new to this whole walking-on-the-street thing, Harvey was a little awkward, especially
carrying his suitcase in one hand, but he quickly learned to look straight ahead and never
make eye contact, but rather to keep walking in a straight line as though there was
absolutely no one else on the street, just like his fellow Americans around him.

“No man is an island” was one of those pithy little observations about society which held
some nugget of truth, but required interpretation to fully understand. Of course, all
absolute statements are false if interpreted literally (an ingeniously recursive function),
but like many other non-scientific principles, to say that no man was an island was an
idea that took on a completely different meaning from one society to another. The
statement had originally been used to mean that no person lives in absolute isolation from
any other, and there was certainly truth to this in the sense that the world was now too
crowded for people to get far away from each other. However, definition of terms
becomes important when speaking artistically. True, every person (or nearly every
person) lived their life in relation to someone else, but the connections between those
people were both so artificial and so unrecognized that it would be just as meaningful to
say that every person was an island, that every person sat in their own reality, mentally
isolated to the point of autism, so utterly surrounded by other realities—some real, some
invented—that the other realities seemed to blur into nonexistence, leaving each person
the master of their own domain, an island encased in a fog so thick that it was impossible
to perceive the next island just a few inches away.
This is not to suggest that America did not have modern mechanisms in place to ensure
the proper sort of relations between people. Of course, America was a civilized nation,
and although it was indeed a bastion of capitalism as rightly praised by the rest of the
world, it did have laws to regulate the lives of people. It even had a right; some might
insist that the idea of a human “right” is misguided, since nothing is certain and nothing
can be guaranteed, but American government had seen fit to grant an incontrovertible and
inalienable right to all its people so that they might be free. The human right was the
second most important thing in American society; it was so important that it was posted
in public places on billboards and sign posts as a reminder of the liberating right that had
been freely granted to everyone. The text of the human right was straightforward and
concise:

Every person shall have the right to not be spoken to in a personal or informal manner.

It was a simple right, but how powerful, how liberating its effects! There was no longer
need to endure listening to other people’s ideas, since the moment someone attempted to
talk to another, the spoken-to person could call the full force of the law on the speaker
and have them fined or jailed for violating the human right. It was so very effective that it
was a wonder no other society had implemented such a thing in the modern world.

Some social values are enforced through governmental intervention: Violators of these
principles are breaking actual laws and may be subject to imprisonment or other official
punitive action. The human right belonged to this category; it was not merely a value, it
was the law. Other social values are not technically illegal, but rather enforced socially:
Violators are shunned from the company of others and may be actively derided or
denigrated. Through the latter means, people can be influenced, goaded, or cajoled into
doing things without actually violating their freedom.

Were it the sole guiding principle of human society, the human right might have quickly
become the end of society, since human beings have a basic physiological requirement
for at least some human contact, if nothing else so they can breed for perpetuation of the
species. To accommodate this requirement, the administration had inculcated into society
the one fundamental value that was even more important than the actual human right: The
exchange of money.

The exchange of money was the most important thing in the world. Not actually having
money, for possessing and holding onto money—no matter how large the amount—was
utterly worthless to both the holder and society at large. Rather, the emphasis was
squarely on the exchange of money, since this process was the great oil can that kept
quite literally every aspect of human life running. It did not matter whether people were
receiving or spending money, as long as they were doing one or both at all times. The
most important thing in the world was a social value rather than a law, and so, of course,
no one was legally required to do this, because people were free, but anyone who did not
was a social leper, destined to die quickly since all requirements for human life—food,
shelter, etc.—were only available through the use of money.
The most important thing in the world had important effects upon how the human right
was interpreted and applied. Since money was manufactured and distributed by the
government, it was serious business, a deliberately-instituted pillar of society rather than
something created or traded on a whim, and so the exchange of money fell into the
category of official business: It was neither “personal” nor “informal.” This meant that
anyone could speak to anyone without violating the human right as long as they were on
official business, i.e. speaking with the intent to exchange money. The government
maintained an official list of subjects which were approved for open discussion because
of their great value in the development of money exchange. Anyone could discuss these
subjects and be guaranteed immunity from prosecution for violating the human right. The
list was fairly long—for humans had figured out how to put a price on virtually every real
or imagined thing, from a unicorn on Jupiter to a human life—but perennially popular
subjects on the list revolved around professional sports and entertainment media like
movies and music. Books were specifically excluded from the latter category, because
books were not expensive enough or popular enough to contribute significantly to the
exchange of money, and so the love of books had been relegated to the status of a
religion. Not that religions were frowned upon, for they were also a great way to
exchange money, and any pious pilgrim could readily accost strangers to spread the word
of their faith as long as some money changed hands. Only the old, bad kind of religion—
involving actual spirituality or thoughts of the divine—was discouraged. Of course, such
religion was legal and could be practiced by anyone if they so chose, because people
were free, as long as they did not discuss such faith with anyone else.

The most important thing in the world further ensured that everyone was equal, for to be
rich would be to hoard money. It was vitally important that everyone spend whatever
money they received and resist any urge to save. The result was that even though some
people lived in luxury and others in squalor, everyone was equal, for everyone had the
same net savings: Zero. Indeed, although it was socially acceptable to have no money,
socially-responsible got themselves into debt so that they could exchange even more
money. The nation’s best-remembered American heroes, those who had statues and
plaques erected in their honor, were those who had amassed billions of dollars in
liabilities, ensuring that they would devote the rest of their natural lives to the exchange
of money so they could repay their debts. Once a year, the country had a 60-second
holiday in which the good people of America silently acknowledged these fallen heroes
who had devoted their short lives to the most important thing in the world.

***

Among the first orders of business, once Harvey arrived in America, was to secure a
place to sleep. The vast majority of people lived on shelves in hive buildings (“shelving
units”) that held thousands of such shelves. Wealthy people could afford larger shelves
that afforded them some room to move around on at night, and some even included foot
lockers for storage of personal objects, but most people slept on shelves that simply held
a person and afforded no room to roll over in the middle of the night. The highest-
income-earning 10% of society was sometimes able to afford private rooms with closable
doors, and perhaps the top 0.1% might be able to afford entire houses with their own
private plots of land, but people who lived in cities rarely had any cause to actually see
these detached houses, let alone go into them. Harvey, being a new immigrant with
scarcely any money to spare, quickly rented a shelf that was only about 20 feet off the
ground; it had recently been vacated by someone who had moved out. These low-hanging
shelves were convenient because the inhabitants did not have to climb the housing ladder
very far when they came home. Normally these shelves were all occupied, and so Harvey
was lucky to score such a convenient spot that was close to the ground.

Life inside the shelving units tended to be loud, since people liked to play music, and of
course, the louder the music, the higher the quality of the music. Although not everyone
could afford powerful sound systems, many residents, placing a high emphasis on loud
music in their lives, had expended the money required to purchase large speakers that
rattled the ground for several city blocks in each direction. Fitting such large speakers on
their shelves was no small trick, but people had been taught that music was among their
most powerfully fundamental forms of cultural identity, and where there was a will, there
was a way. This was something of a social norm, since people only had the right to not be
spoken to, not to be free of oppressively loud music; indeed, the use of music was
encouraged throughout society, since the marketing and consumption of stupid, inane,
overpriced music was a great way to promote the exchange of money. Harvey, with what
little money he had left in his pocket after he had paid the first month’s rent on his shelf,
invested in a pair of earplugs to prevent permanent hearing loss. This was difficult, since
a pair of new earplugs cost nearly as much as 100 music albums—after all, the earplugs
could be used over a long period of time while music albums were designed to become
tiresome in a matter of minutes, and so society had to recoup its losses on the earplugs
somehow—but Harvey was fortunate to find someone’s used, frayed, but still functional
earplugs in a pawn shop downtown that was willing to let the plugs go for only
approximately what 10 music albums would cost.

The shelf that Harvey had rented was also a little hard and uncomfortable to lie on, since
the shelves were simply made of easily-mass-produced materials like plastic or steel, so
Harvey invested in a few blankets to pad the shelf and keep himself warm. In Harvey’s
home country, where discarded clothing and blankets were common items, there were
places that people could go to swap these items at little or no cost with a mind to sharing
with their community. Naturally, in America, this idea was anathema, as it would not
have contributed to the most important thing in the world. For people to give away things
without the exchange of money would not have brought them any benefit, and to expect
anyone to do this would have been an unacceptable and inexcusable folly, for people
were free. Rather, Harvey found a store that specialized in cheap blankets. In reality, the
pricing model behind the store was a little like the old joke about the mechanic who
charges someone $100 to fix their car by hitting it with a hammer—$1 to hit the car, and
$99 for knowing where to hit. To keep their costs low, all the blankets in the store were
manufactured by 7-year-old children in a cave in an eighth-world country, and so the
overhead costs that were behind the store prices added up approximately as follows:

Cost of manufacturing items: 0.17% of total cost

Cost of selling items: 99.83% of total cost

It was true that manufacturing clothing and blankets required hours of painstaking labor,
but this effort was easily dwarfed by that expended by the man standing behind the cash
register at the store, who was sufficiently heavy that he was exerting ten times the effort
of the manufacturers in remaining upright rather than collapsing in a heap. Harvey
admired this seller’s resolve in remaining behind the cash register, accepting people’s
money, and making a sound very much like that of a walrus vomiting a sheep, which
Harvey interpreted as the man’s best effort at saying “Thank you, have a nice day!” The
guy didn’t just do this to Harvey—he did it to every one of his customers. Truly, in one of
his first monetary transactions in his new host country, Harvey had met a venerable
American hero.

And so it was that Harvey retired to his new home, blankets under his arm, and curled up
with his earplugs in to drift off to sleep while the rumbling of his neighbors’ sound
systems gently whispered to dreams of Success.
Chapter 2: To work, perchance to dream

Once Harvey had secured housing (which was usually the first step in building an
American life, since almost every aspect of life required someone to have a shelf address
and a phone number—being a resident of the world and a human being was not
sufficient), it was time to address the other key pillar of every good American’s life:
Getting a job.

It pretty much went without saying that in a world where the exchange of money was the
most important thing in the world, the most important role of the human being was to
take part in that exchange. Of course, before they could spend any money, it was
necessary to attain some kind of income, and to this end, the most important thing that
anyone could do with their lives was find a job where they were paid money by an
employer. It did not actually matter what the nature of the job was. It could be washing
windows which were already clean, taking items out of boxes and then putting those
items back into the same boxes, or sitting very quietly in an empty room. As long as you
were getting paid for it, you were a valuable and important member of society, and the
more money you were being paid, the more valuable and important you were. This
explained why the people who were paid the most money were the most useless,
unintelligent, untalented, and unpleasant people of all; their role in society was to make
money, and they were so useless that they had to make a lot of money in order to
compensate for their other lackings. Indeed, they made so much money that it was not
necessary for them to contribute anything else to society. By staying alive long enough to
allow their salaries to be deposited into their bank accounts, they were keeping the gears
of society turning. Indeed, many corporate executives paid the ultimate sacrifice by
continuing to receive their salaries long after they had died, giving back to society even
from beyond the grave.

Work wasn’t all about money, however; it was also where people went to meet. It was
strange—almost unimaginable—to think that at one point in time, American culture had
thought of the workplace as not being sociable. This was sort of like claiming that the
Pacific Ocean was not wet. The workplace was the only sociable place in all the world,
for it was the one place where people could get together and speak about things. In
protecting the dignity of the American worker and ensuring that people remained free, the
law required that all full-time workers receive at least a half-hour lunch break, but
although there were no full-time jobs left in America (as companies had long ago learned
to circumvent any possibility of job benefits or job security by keeping all workers on a
part-time or temporary worker basis), even the part-time and temporary workers got a 15-
minute break every working day, and during those breaks, people could be just as social
as they liked, talking about the company’s new products and services, discussing business
processes, and encouraging each other to work harder, not smarter. Of course, it was
physically possible to talk about non-work-related things, but this was never done, as it
would be inappropriate and taint the workplace atmosphere. This was something no one
wanted to do, for among all the social relations that existed in American society, the most
fundamental and intimate one—indeed, the only fundamental and intimate one—was that
of being co-workers. Little wonder that on those rare occasions when people got married,
the marriages were almost always between co-workers in a business.

Coming from a country that was still debating whether to go post-industrial and which
still had a decent chunk of agricultural activity in its GDP, Harvey was a little
unaccustomed to both the work values and the purpose of work itself in the United States.
Of course, it was already long established that America had gleefully denied the
importance of food in people’s lives by going post-agricultural, fully believing that
people could be made independent from the need to be responsible for their sustenance
by outsourcing food production. Subsequently, America proceeded to deny the
importance of having actual useful skills in life by becoming post-industrial. Now, in the
age of intelligent machines where computers could do all the business thinking, America
was glad to have entered the post-knowledge and post-useful stage of labor. Once all the
people who performed any manner of work had been outsourced, only the corporate
managers, owners, and executives remained, and since the role of those positions was not
actually to do anything, but simply to manage those who did things, the managers,
owners, and executives also became superfluous since they had no one left to manage.
Thus stripped of the need for any employees whatsoever, businesses had settled into a
very simple ideology that informed their staffing decisions. Every business, of course,
had its own products or services that it would sell, but with regard to personnel,
businesses had two primary goals:

1. To employ people.

2. To avoid employing people.

(Not necessarily in the listed order.)

To these ends, businesses diligently searched for ways to make their processes more
efficient and automated so that they could lay off—or avoid hiring in the first place—the
maximal number of employees possible. When this process began to produce a recession
and news media began talking about unemployment, businesses would dutifully fulfill
their role in society by creating jobs. The process for this was simple: People lacking both
logic and sense were tasked with inventing asinine jobs which could be filled by people
who were so worthless that they could be paid a fraction of a living wage and still be
maintained as the world’s most grateful folks because they got a job and couldn’t wait to
tell their friends and families. The asinine, worthless people who invented these asinine,
worthless jobs were among the most important people in their respective companies, and
so they typically received impressive-sounding job titles to make them feel important
such as “Senior Human Resources Analyst” or “Workforce Innovation Specialist” or
something similar.

Getting a job in America was a cutthroat affair, since not only was getting paid money by
some employer the only way for an individual to survive, it was also the very last thing
that any employers wanted to get involved with. No matter how much education or
experience an applicant has, all job interviews essentially boil down to “Tell us why we
should give you money,” and in a society where it was the role of businesses to receive
money and the role of individuals to part with money, this was akin to saying “Tell us
why we should stuff our feces back in after they come out.” The elimination of all forms
of useful labor from the American workplace was an ingenious move on the part of
businesses in terms of preventing employment, since it made it virtually impossible for
any applicant to sell their skills. Anybody can be a great engineer, designer, developer, or
Salesperson, but when confronted with a job title like “Automation Augmentation
Specialist,” job seekers were put in the position of having to develop a sales pitch that
communicated “I’m good at augmenting automation, and you should give me money so
that I can do exactly that for you.” To give the appearance both that they were growing
businesses and that they were contributing to the economic development of society, most
businesses in the area maintained several dozen job postings available on all the major
job-search tools, but the phone numbers there went to voice mailboxes which discarded
all incoming voicemails, and the e-mail addresses went to e-mailboxes which discarded
all incoming e-mails.

Harvey found that he had no problem getting job interviews. He even found that it wasn’t
all that difficult to get job offers; however, he had a hard time getting offers for jobs that
entailed him being paid a positive amount of money. Since getting a job was by far the
most vitally important function in the life of any human being, most businesses expected
Harvey to pay them for the privilege of working for them. Harvey interviewed for
positions that paid from $-50,000 to $-80,000 before finally landing an interview for a
“Business Process Analyst” position that actually seemed willing to pay a positive
amount.

The interviewer for the Business Process Analyst position explained that their previous
Business Process Analyst had recently left the company, and so they needed someone to
replace him. “I didn’t actually read your résumé since we get about 5,000 résumés per
hour and nobody reads any of them,” the interviewer continued, “but I just want to ensure
that you’re qualified. The position that we have open right now has two qualifications:
One, you must be willing to work for less than a living wage. Two, you must spend all of
your time on the job analyzing business processes.”

“I can analyze business processes,” Harvey said—although this was a guess on his part
since he had never done it before—“but how do people live on less than a living wage?”

“It’s very simple: They share their living spaces with other people and split the rent. How
much is the rent for your current shelf?” After Harvey answered this question, the
interviewer asked “How many people are you sharing that shelf with right now?”

“Well, I’m actually just sharing the shelf with myself…” Harvey responded slowly.

“If you imagine a group of normal-sized people and cut off all their arms and legs, how
many of those people could you stack into your shelf space?”

“Um… Probably about five,” Harvey calculated.

“Splendid! You can work for one-fifth of your shelving rental amount. Mr. Wallbanger,
we’d like to bring you on as a Business Process Analyst. I’ll send you a letter of offer
within the week. Congratulations!”

***

After doing the math, Harvey had to admit that the whole money thing wasn’t really the
businesses’ fault; after all, it wasn’t exactly as though they were rolling in money either.
Only the very largest businesses had money to throw around. Most small- and medium-
sized businesses had to be sparing in terms of spending, since the rigors of business
mandated that only the leanest and meanest organizations survive. Indeed, Harvey found
that “Only the leanest and meanest organizations survive” was a fascinating mentality,
since everyone simultaneously 1. Complained about it, and 2. Insisted that it was the only
way things ought to be done. Apparently, in American society, it was standard to
complain about things which were good and proper. “Acceptance” was usually the last
step in the process of dealing with grief, but America had gone the psychologists one
better by making “Wholehearted embracement, to the exclusion of all else” the last word
in the coping process.

Harvey had wondered how his new employers intended to enforce the requirement that
he always think about business processes. He soon found out: On his first day on the job,
Harvey was shown to his desk, which had a computer, some paper and pens, and an EEG
unit on it. The EEG unit was affixed to Harvey’s head, and he was told to think about
business processes for a while. After some readings were taken, he was told that since
they now knew which of his brain centers became active when he thought about business
processes, as long as those same brain centers remained active during the course of his
shift, he would be fine. On the desk were two small lights: One red, one green. Harvey’s
trainer informed him that while the correct brain centers were active, the green light
would come on. If those brain centers went silent, the red light would turn on. If the red
light stayed on for more than three seconds, Harvey was automatically fired.

During his first few days on the job, Harvey worried about his ability to perform. It didn’t
take him long to discover that he could think about and do anything he wanted at his
desk, as long as he kept business processes in the back (or any other part) of his mind. He
found that it was no problem to play video games on his computer, as long as he adopted
the play mentality of “Attack dragon! Business process! Cast fireball! Business process!
Save princess! Business process!” Similarly, with a little practice, he found that he could
nap (“Zzz… Business process…”), masturbate (“Blowjob! Business process! Anal with
dildo! Business process!”), and look at funny pictures and videos of cats on the Internet
(“Hahaha! I kan haz biznezz prosess? lolwut”) without great difficulty. Even with the
green light staying on, however, Harvey had assumed that at some point in time, someone
would ask to see exactly what he had done, and so he took to writing the words
“BUSINESS PROCESS” on a fresh sheet of paper each day that he came in to work, just
so that he would have something tangible to show as a result of his business process
analysis. He was periodically asked to file his results with his manager, but this manager
either never read Harvey’s submissions or considered a ream of papers with the
handwritten words “BUSINESS PROCESS” on them to be acceptable output, as Harvey
never heard back after submitting his work.

Perhaps this outcome was not so surprising. Harvey was a “knowledge worker,” after all,
a member of that class of worker whose output was difficult to gauge objectively. The
performance of physical laborers is easy to interpret, since they work with physical
quantities that can be measured. Since America had only “knowledge worker” jobs left, it
was not difficult for employees like Harvey to give off the appearance of being useful. It
reached the point where Harvey would put a single letter of the phrase on each sheet of
paper. One piece of paper would get a B written on it, then Harvey would take another
sheet and place a U on it. After producing the sheet with the last S in “PROCESS,”
Harvey would start over. After doing this for a while, Harvey realized that there was little
need to keep handwriting these things, so he wrote a small macro within the word
processor on his computer to simply keep printing things out all day. To give the
appearance that he was exercising creativity in his work, Harvey programmed the macro
to randomly vary between printing “BUSINESS PROCESS” all on one page, printing
“BUSINESS” on one page and “PROCESS” on a second, and individually printing out
each letter of the entire phrase on a single page. Pretty soon, Harvey was submitting
hundreds of pages of output to his manager every day.

This went on for several months, until one day, Harvey was summoned into his
manager’s office for an “important meeting.” Harvey’s manager seemed oddly upset, as
though there was something weighing on his mind. After several moments of rubbing his
hands together and frowning into his desk, Harvey’s manager spoke: “Harvey, I’ve been
looking at your performance figures, and I’ve noticed something interesting. Your
productivity is not only the highest of any person in the company, it’s also higher than all
the other employees in the company put together.”

“Is that good?” Harvey wondered.

“It’s good for you, bad for me. I don’t want you taking over my job. To circumvent that
from happening, effective immediately, you are promoted to Senior Vice President of
Business Process Analysis. This is one of the highest-level positions in the company;
technically, the only higher-ranking position—and the person you would report to—
would be the CEO, but this company doesn’t actually have a CEO since we outsourced
that position, so you’ll have to self-manage. Do you think you can handle yourself
effectively?”

“I’ve been doing so very effectively thus far,” Harvey confirmed, recalling the countless
semen stains on the carpet under his desk.

“Good. You’ll begin your new posting immediately. Your job role will be to sit at your
desk and avoid going on a shooting spree in which you massacre every person in the
company. I need your assurance that you’re up to this role.”
“I feel reasonably certain that I can handle this role,” Harvey assured with sincere
confidence.

“Then it’s settled. Congratulations, Harvey.”

Harvey’s new job also entailed a raise, which was good, because Harvey was several
months late paying his rent. In his new position as Senior Vice President of Business
Process Analysis, Harvey found that he made enough money to pay off his outstanding
rent debt and continue his rent payments into the future.

A true-blooded American, of course, would not have been satisfied and would have
continued to fight for more money and higher promotions until they retired or died.
Harvey, being a foreigner and not yet accustomed to American culture, decided that he
was happy making enough money to afford food and rent. (Harvey kept this sentiment to
himself, since being content with what one had was distinctly un-American and could
have gotten him deported.) Now financially independent, Harvey’s mind turned from job
hunting and climbing the corporate ladder to that most precious block of time, the time
spent outside of work.

***

Of course, it was a long-running tradition in America that what a person did for paid
employment was their core focus in life, and society had been structured in such a way
that people were made to feel meaningless and listless when they were outside work. In
conjunction with this tendency was the entertainment industry, which served to distract
people from their lives and ensure that everyday life was never as interesting as either the
things that happened on television or the things that happened at work. Although the
entertainment industry ostensibly existed for the purpose of helping to counter people’s
tendency to feel useless and bored outside of work, it actually served to reinforce that
tendency. For better or for worse, Harvey had not yet learned to inject his life with
meaning by paying an overpriced monthly fee for television content, and so Harvey took
to spending most of his nights reading books.

Reading was a fundamentally lonely activity in America, since it was hard to find
someone else who did it. Of course, people usually perform the actual act of reading
alone, but in societies where people read, a community of literate people may turn
reading into a social activity since people can discuss the ideas they read about. America
wasn’t one of those societies. Harvey had been taught that he should be familiar with
classical works of art so that he could speak with everyday people on their level, but this
hadn’t worked out; in reality, what adults really discussed among themselves was not
anything classic, but rather a melange of topics which changed from week to week
depending on what was happening on whatever television program was popular at the
moment.

It was perhaps telling that in order to get a book in the first place, one had to physically
isolate themselves from society, since bookstores could not afford the high property
prices of cities, but rather operated out in rural areas, where land was cheap and storage
sheds filled with books could be maintained. Lacking a motor vehicle and intending to go
to a place out in the country where public transit did not operate, Harvey found himself
faced with a long walk every time he wanted to go to the bookstore; to walk from his
shelving unit to the bookstore was about a three-hour walk, so to simply pick up
something to read was easily an all-day operation. To compensate for this, Harvey
usually purchased several books at a time.

Despite its socially isolating effect, there were financial advantages to reading. Books, of
course, were such low-demand items that they had to be cheap, and indeed, they were so
very cheap that the only way any bookstore could stay in business was not to be in the
business at all, but rather to have the whole book thing as a side operation of a business
that focused on machines which automatically dispensed sugared water and salted flour.
The bookstore was a vending machine, into which the consumer dropped a coin and then
was allowed to type in the item number for the book of their choice. This system was
convenient, since it was open 24 hours a day, although it obviously made browsing the
books before purchasing them impossible. This was another reason why Harvey
purchased several books at a time, but he had to minimize how many he could buy at
once, since their weight would otherwise burden him down to the point where he would
not be able to make the long journey back to his shelving unit.

Of course, even though the vending machine contained a fair number of books, it would
have been impractical to stock it with millions of them, and so the available selection was
limited to what the sellers thought people would be most likely to buy. The majority of
choices, then, were worthless drivel which, at the very best, might strive to at least be
well-written tripe. Most of the books didn’t even get that far. There was practically no
non-fiction since anything of that nature was considered to be something that only
students enrolled in some school would have any cause to read, and so for the general
audiences which a regular bookstore like this catered to, fiction was the only thing
available. There was a small selection of what the sellers considered “classic” novels, and
Harvey tended to gravitate toward these options, simply because he felt like they were the
least likely to cause his brain to liquefy and drain out through tiny holes in his skull.
Harvey tried to keep himself mentally active and learning new things from books, but he
did so entirely alone.

None of this is meant to imply that Harvey could not have been more involved in the
social activities of his peers if he had so chosen. He was occasionally invited to the
shelves of co-workers where people would watch television or engage in other avenues of
entertainment that were conducive to the most important thing in the world. Harvey went
along and experienced a few of these social gatherings for a while, but he eventually
came to discover that an American “party” consists primarily of a large group of people
gathering together in close physical proximity at some pre-determined location, then
having each person proceed to talk to themselves for several hours about how their lives
were going. Most conversations that Harvey engaged in at parties followed a basic
template:
Harvey: “Hi.”

Socially-active person: “Hi. I drink a lot of coffee. This is very funny. Ha ha ha hee hee
ho ho ha ha ha!”

Harvey: “That’s nice. Do you drink a lot of water as well to counteract the poisonous
effects of the coffee?”

Socially-active person: “I saw a horse last week. It was funny!”

Harvey: “I have no doubt that what you say is true. What do you think of the law of
diminishing returns?”

Socially-active person: “Oh yeah, totally. My friend is so awesome. He says and does the
funniest things! He said something that was really funny, and it was so funny! It cracked
me up! He’s a funny guy.”

Harvey: “May your vocal cords be praised for imparting this timeless pearl of
conversational greatness to me, for I shall live better all my days for the knowledge that
you have given me by telling me about your funny friend. I must beseech you, however,
to educate me on one matter, for your delicately-woven tale regarding your funny friend
has left me ambiguous on one key point. Dare I inquire, then: Is your friend funny?”

Socially-active person: “…and when I pulled it out, there was a huge bug on the end of it!
It was so weird! How did a bug get up there? I still wonder!”

Harvey: “I wonder, too.”

Socially-active person: “Did I tell you about my friend?”

After enduring this several times, Harvey thought it better to simply avoid going to what
people imagined as social gatherings. As a side note, it appeared to Harvey that the way
in which people spoke to each other at these gatherings counted as personal or at least
informal, and so it was quite viable that if the police arrived, all the people at the
gathering could be charged with violating the human right, but since no one ever actually
noticed what anyone else said anyway, it didn’t really seem to matter.

None of this is meant to imply that Harvey wholly lacked any intimate contact with other
human beings—it was merely the case that none of his intimate contact with other human
beings was in any way meaningful, edifying, or satisfying. However, in its relentless
efforts to provide consumers with easy, affordable ways to satisfy any possible urge that
might strike them at any time, it was hardly surprising that everyone had ready and
affordable access to a service that satisfied the longing for the most intimate human
contact of all.
It was almost comically ridiculous to think that at one point in time, prostitution had been
illegal in some parts of America. What a grotesquely Puritan idea! Considering the
human right, it would be almost impossible to find a person of the opposite sex for the
purpose of copulation without somehow treading onto personal territory, which would be
a violation of their right. Occasionally, people still got married, but this was increasingly
rare since the human right made it difficult for people to form intimate relationships, and
people who had gotten married were regarded with suspicion, owing to the vague sense
that at some point in their history, they had probably been willful criminals by violating
their spouse’s right. The only certain way to start a family while remaining within one’s
right was to come (no pun intended) under the basis of official business. Most children
were born of prostitutes, whose official job title was “Family Incubators” and who were
among the most important contributors to society, since not only did they perpetuate the
human species, they did it for the exchange of money, which was the most important
thing in the world. Of course, homosexual prostitution did not propagate the species, but
was quite all right as long as there was still money involved.

Like most American men, Harvey developed the habit of going to “Family Planning
Centers” (which once had been called “brothels”) regularly, since this was the only place
to find any intimate contact with anyone. For only one day’s wages, Harvey could
perform a man’s duty to society while simultaneously easing those disturbing urges that
he sometimes felt to be close to someone. Of course, these urges were barbaric,
completely animal in nature; in Harvey’s home country, people sometimes formed
intimate relationships that involved them spending a lot of time together and sharing
personal thoughts with one another, but this was infantile foolishness, like a young baby
clinging to its mother. Harvey was a grown man, and knew both that a grown man clings
to no woman, and that the exchange of money—not affection or semen—was the only
true expression of love.

Beyond the contact he found in the Family Planning Centers, Harvey found little time or
place where he could actually reach out and touch someone—either literally or
figuratively—or have someone else do the same to him. Any society which takes care of
the needs of its people tends to settle into an impersonal complacence. Something about
mutual need makes people reach out to each other. When those needs are taken care of—
whether it be by the magic of a “socialist” society in which everyone’s needs are taken
care of by a government, or by the magic of a “capitalist” society in which everyone’s
needs are taken care of by for-profit businesses—people become cold and distant. People
from impoverished, developing countries turn out to be the most personable,
unpretentious people in the world, which could be either a good thing or a bad thing,
depending on one’s side of the fence. Then again, was it really a binary fence around
which people were starkly divided on one side or the other? Harvey had come from an
“in-between” country, a country which was hardly prosperous or luxuriant, but which
was still able to provide decent education for its children, and an at least sustainable and
peaceful existence for its citizens. There were no wars or riots there, but then again, there
were scarcely any sprawling mansions or gleaming sports cars either—people were just
poor enough that it was neither unusual nor burdensome for them to take care of each
other.
It had been a bit of a shock—one he had yet to fully recover from—for Harvey to come
from a society like that, into a place with a highly organized system that regulated the
distribution of wealth, education, people, and pretty much everything else. Indeed,
America—the land of the free—was able to afford its residents so many personal
freedoms specifically because life in America was so strictly regimented.

Harvey was not certain that he could be content with merely being content. On second
thought, he was quite certain that over a long period of time, he would not be able to
remain content with it. A strange malaise ate at him, like stomach acid eating away an
ulcer. He could not put his finger on what disturbed him so, for it was not exactly
boredom—society was glad to provide him with infinite ways to amuse and entertain
himself at affordable prices—nor was it loneliness, per se. There was something
fundamentally wrong, something vague but essential missing from the picture, like a
fantastically speedy car that turns out to have no brakes.

The only expression of true art arises from grief. This may be the grief associated with
some afflicting influence—like war or illness—but it is more often the grief of a lack of
something—the loss of a loved one, for example. In Harvey’s case, it was the lack not of
a specific person or object, but of something more intangible, something which could
only be understood philosophically rather than romantically. Harvey felt a lack of
something, but he could not understand it without devoting some concerted analysis to
the situation. This was somewhat challenging, because Harvey was most accustomed to
analyzing only business processes, and even when he was thinking about something other
than business processes, he had learned to adopt the mindset that he was really thinking
about—or supposed to be thinking about—business processes all along, but after
considering why he did not feel quite well, Harvey could only conclude that what he felt
was nothing more than that universal emptiness that everyone else shared, that
hollowness of the human soul that had been freely given to every member of this free
society, an inevitable consequence of a society that championed, as its fundamental
human right, the cultural value that people not speak to each other like human beings.

Driven to distraction by his dissatisfaction with the glorious life afforded to him by both
the human right and the exchange of money, Harvey took to writing his thoughts down
occasionally. It wasn’t exactly like maintaining a diary; it was really more just some faint
scribblings that he resorted to when he felt compelled to let something out, something
which would occasionally stir within him and seemingly would not die. Harvey
“borrowed” some corporate letterhead from his place of employment, which was an
incontrovertibly unethical thing to do since he did not actually intend to use this
letterhead for promoting the exchange of money. He did not want to resort to theft, but
since plain paper was no longer sold anywhere (paper without logos on it was too neutral
and not sufficiently conducive to the exchange of money to be worth selling), the pain of
not having something to write on eventually overcame the pain of stealing a few sheets of
paper from a supply room that held countless reams of paper. Harvey took these little
sheets of letterhead home, and upon his shelf, after staring at the emptiness of the page
below his company’s logo—an emptiness that seemed to match that which he felt within
himself—Harvey put a pen to the paper and allowed the turmoil within to be transferred,
in ink form, to the page.

Everyday life is the emergency, Harvey wrote.

All across the nation, people implement and rely on systems to protect them from fire,
crime, traffic accidents, terrorism, and other incidences of obvious potential for personal
injury or destruction of property. Yet people are so terrified of these bogeymen, so
whipped into a frenzy over the possibility of having their car stolen by some thug, or
being eliminated by a suicide bomber, that they have completely forgotten to think in the
long-term and realize that while these short-term emergencies are being fought, a long-
term disaster is taking place that grips people ever more tightly as time goes by.

The main reason that people struggle every day is for money. Most people will rarely if
ever have a need to call 911. Most people are unlikely to be killed, injured, or even
directly affected by any terrorist attack. The great catastrophe that scourges almost
everyone, almost every day, is the lack of money, that most important thing in the world,
by which people can attain food and all the other stuff of life. As the things which money
buys become more scarce, so does money itself, and people are consumed all day, every
day, with thoughts of how they can get more money. That is the emergency. People are
locked in a struggle to the death, not with the great and terrible monsters that they are
taught to fear, but the one thing that will actually eventually kill us all: A lack of money.

It’s said that money is the most important thing in the world. And why shouldn’t it be?
Look at all the things that money brings us.

Money is truth. People say many things, but if they are willing to back their statements
with money, you know they really mean it. The surest way to gauge whether somebody
believes in something or not is to see whether they put money into it. A Salesperson can
talk about how great a product is, but Sales talk is only believable if the Salesperson
bought the product themselves. If they are not willing to put their money where their
mouth is, you can be assured they are lying. Talk is cheap.

Money is love. You can tell whether a person really cares for others based on whether
that person gives them money or not. If someone gives you money, you know they really
care about you. Once again, it’s easy for someone to say “I love you.” If they are not
willing to lend substantiation to their love, then they don’t really care.

Money is life. Money is the only way to obtain food, clothing, or shelter. With all the
nation’s land consumed and claimed by other people, and no possibility for anyone to
start their own food-growing area, the only way to get food is to buy it from the people
who have the means to produce it. People cannot live without money. The world has been
structured for this to be a necessity.

Money is happiness.
Money is good. Without it, we can do nothing. With it, we can do everything. We must
devote our lives to the exchange of it. Only then can we be meaningful contributors to
society.

Finally finished, Harvey looked again over the words he had written.

Perhaps, he thought, if I can eventually get myself to believe this, I will learn to be happy
here.
Chapter 3: A train ride to nowhere

Time went by.

As every student of the human condition knows, the human being is a creature marked by
its singular ability to get used to anything. After it has been immersed in a certain
environment for long enough, the human being learns to not only tolerate its
environment, but to adapt to that environment, becoming like that environment,
ultimately establishing itself as not merely a resident, but an active participant, in
whatever its environment participates in.

So, too, it was for Harvey, who had gotten over his initial culture shock and was
beginning to not only tolerate, but appreciate the freedoms afforded to him by American
society. He had a job which provided him with sustenance; he had a shelf which provided
him with shelter. And as he walked to the train station where he would board a train that
would take him to work, Harvey was overcome by the natural beauty that had embraced
America since long before it was called America, and was still freely available today. The
sun was shining, the pedestrian-crossing signs were singing, and Harvey was feeling as
though he had found a place where he belonged. His heart and mind fairly sang in unison:
I am a Senior Vice President! I am making important contributions to my society, and I
have found Success!

The platform at the train station was, as always, sparsely populated, since almost
everyone drove their personal car to work, and people who rode public transit were
almost invariably those who had failed to yet completely embrace American society. In
time, Harvey would be able to afford his own car and integrate more completely into
normal society, but for now, accustomed to the use of public transit which had been the
prevailing means of getting around in his home country, he was among the small,
scattered group of folks here at the train station who could not, or would not, lock
themselves into their own personal transporation units.

Harvey was feeling so well, and so attuned to his culture and lifestyle, that he felt
compelled to reach out and touch someone. This was against the law, but Harvey was in
such a good mood that he felt certain the mood would spread and other people around
him might also find their hearts warbling the joys of standing on a train platform waiting
for a public-transit vehicle to arrive.

“Good morning, sir,” Harvey said pleasantly as he passed by a man standing on the train
platform. “How are you today?”

The man’s response was prompt and decisive. Lacking any other blunt-force weapon, the
man swung his briefcase in a broad arc and brought it into contact with Harvey’s head. At
this point, Harvey ceased to be aware of precisely what was going on, but had he
remained conscious throughout the experience, he might have noticed that the man
introduced the briefcase to Harvey’s head several more times, until it was quite apparent
that some red liquid within Harvey’s brain had been enticed to come out and make its
acquaintance with the briefcase as well. Thus thoroughly satisfied of a job well done
regarding his duty as a citizen, the man with the briefcase went back to waiting for his
train, while Harvey continued to remain focused on lying unconscious on the train
platform.

It was not immediately apparent to Harvey, when he awoke, just how long he had been
engaged in bleeding on the train platform, but a quick assessment of the situation
suggested that he had indeed been doing this for some time, though whether it had been a
few seconds or a few hours was something he could not discern. The blood vessels in the
head are remarkably dense, and so a minor laceration in that region can sometimes make
the wound appear considerably worse than it is. Disoriented and driven almost to the
point of concern by realizing that he had lost a fair amount of blood, Harvey entreated the
nearest person—a young woman who, like most other people on the platform, appeared
to be waiting for a train: “Excuse me, ma’am, but I don’t feel well. Could you please call
an ambulance for me?”

The woman regarded Harvey with some trepidation, as though he were a wild animal
who might cause her some loss of money. “I’m sorry, what did you say?” she asked
warily.

“I asked if you could call me an ambulance,” Harvey said patiently.

“No, I caught that part, but what did you say before that?”

“Uh… I just said that I’m not feeling very well right now,” Harvey repeated.

“That’s what I thought,” she said, her face drawing back into a grim expression of
resolve, as if she had just been given a message from Above that she was to slay her only
child. Rustling in her purse as she began walking away, Harvey remained conscious just
long enough to see her draw a telephone from the purse and begin dialing it before he
succumbed to his ever-lowering blood pressure and collapsed into Morpheus’ hands once
more.

***

There is a certain smell that hospitals are infused with, which an awake and alert person
will usually recognize if they have spent any time in a hospital previously. Remarkably
enough, although smell is, of the five senses, the one most especially capable of evoking
memories of people, places, and times in the smeller’s past, victims of medical
emergencies who regain consciousness in the hospital will almost always fail to
recognize the smell at first, the first indication of hospitalization for such people usually
being the visual recognition of a hospital room. So indeed it was for Harvey, who
regained consciousness a few moments before he opened his eyes, but was not aware of
where he was until he saw that he was strapped into a hospital bed, surrounded by several
people who were taking various degrees of interest in him.
It was also remarkable, after spending so much time trying to interpret the exteriors of
everyday people on the street, how readily apparent clothes made the role of a person in
an official position. The guy on Harvey’s left was obviously a doctor, for he was dressed
like a doctor. The guy on Harvey’s right was obviously a policeman, for his uniform
identified him as such. There was no need to ask “Who are you?” One was a doc, one
was a cop, and the other people, who were lying on the floor for some reason, were
entirely irrelevant since their clothing did not mark them as important.

As Harvey’s medical state was the most pressing matter, the doctor was the first to speak.
“Good, you’re awake. Take it easy, you’ve lost a lot of blood, and it took us a while to
stabilize you. You’ll be all right, but you’ll need to stay here for a few days.”

“Okay. Thanks,” Harvey replied.

His duties as a doctor having been thus fulfilled, the doctor took his leave of the room
while the police officer proceeded with his respective role. The policeman introduced
himself, giving his name and specifying the departmental detachment he was associated
with. These kinds of introductions were a formality from a previous age when such
ridiculous ceremonies were typical, but some vestiges of antiquity could still be observed
even in the modern model of efficiency that was contemporary America.

“I need to get your side of exactly what happened on the train platform at Williams
station this morning,” the officer continued, flipping open a notepad and adopting a
position that suggested he was preparing to rub the point of a pen on the notepad for a
while.

“I was struck in the head by a man wielding a briefcase,” Harvey said. “He proceeded to
beat me with his briefcase until I passed out.”

“Uh huh,” the officer said, not writing anything down yet. “The man you speak of claims
that you spoke to him first.”

“Yes, that’s true. I said ‘Good morning’ to him, and asked how he was.”

Now the police officer began to write something on his notepad. “Do you remember the
exact words that you used on him?”

“Um, I think I said something like ‘Good morning, sir. How are you today?’”

“Were you selling anything to him?” the officer asked, his pen poised above the paper.

“Selling anything? Uh, no… I wasn’t selling anything.”

“Then why did you ask the question?”

“I was just… I don’t know, I guess I was trying to be friendly.”

“I see.” More writing on the notepad. “Did you say anything else?”

“No. After I had said those words, the man quickly hit me in the head with his briefcase. I
think I passed out after that.”

“Got it.” The officer wrote some more. “Do you remember anything after that?”

“Um, I remember briefly waking up and asking a woman to call an ambulance.”

“Right. Again, I’ll need to know the exact words you used,” the officer said, his pen
angled up in the air like a rifle about to salute.

“I think I said something like ‘I’m not feeling well, can you please call an ambulance?’
That was all I said.”

The officer wrote down quite a bit of text this time, then: “Did you say anything after
that?”

“Well, the woman asked me to repeat myself, so I repeated the things I’d said to her for
clarity’s sake.”

“Got it.” More notes. “Did you, at any time, physically touch the woman or say anything
else to her?”

“No, that was it. I didn’t touch her. I think after that I passed out again, and the next thing
I knew, I was here.”

“Okay.” The officer concluded with a few more notes before closing his notepad and
putting it into his pocket. “It seems like a pretty straightforward case, but since your
medical condition will take a few days to stabilize, we’ll keep you here until the doctor
says you’re ready to go. Your court appearance will probably be sometime next week.”

“Court appearance? What am I going to court for?” Harvey wondered.

“Criminal trials are normally held in a court of law, presided over by a judge,” the officer
explained.

“Uh, yes, I know that,” Harvey agreed. “But I wasn’t aware that there was a criminal trial
going on that I was to be a part of.”

“There isn’t yet, but there will be soon. The charges against you are fairly serious, but
your honest and forthright confession will probably be helpful, and I expect the judge
will be lenient and let you off with only a few months of jail time.”
“Confession of what? I haven’t confessed to anything. I haven’t done anything illegal.”

“Sir. In the statement you provided to me just a moment ago, you confessed to
premeditated assault upon a man at a rail-transit platform, followed by sexual assault
upon a woman at the same location.”

“Uh… Wait, what? I didn’t assault anyone. I was assaulted by someone. I was hit with a
briefcase; I didn’t hit anyone else.”

“You were struck by a briefcase in self-defense, by the victim of a senseless crime. I’m
sure the judge will be glad to explain the situation to you next week. Just sit tight for
now.”

“Wait a minute. I’m being formally charged with a crime, then? Aren’t I supposed to
have the right to remain silent?”

The hint of a smile played across the police officer’s face, as if something funny had
happened, but he restrained himself from actual laughter. “Not really. At one point in
time, that might have been the case, but today in America, people have the right to not be
spoken to in a personal or informal manner.”

“And I guess this conversation doesn’t count as personal or informal, since you’re
fulfilling your official duties as a law-enforcement officer.”

“That is correct,” the officer affirmed, before leaving Harvey alone with the remaining
random people in the hospital room, who turned out to live there since the rents on the
floors of hospital rooms were sometimes cheaper than getting a shelf.
Chapter 4: A miscreant from a strange land

The courtroom was another planet. It was so far removed from the sphere of everyday life
that it seemed less like going into a building than stepping into a dimensional rift through
which a parallel universe opened up a new and strange way of doing things.

The courts of law were perhaps the last place in the country where decisions were made
mostly on the basis of human intuition and judgment. It was such an anachronism, so
dissonant with the system of everyday American life that there had been talk of
automating courtrooms, removing the human factor to eliminate errors in judgment and
allow every person charged with a crime the impartial, methodical fairness that would
come from having a computer program weigh all factors and decide the fate of the
accused. That system was in the works, but any software program—especially a neural
net like that—required significant amounts of debugging before it was ready for
production use, and so Harvey stepped into a world in which an elderly man wearing a
black cloak would hear Harvey’s story and decide Harvey’s fate.

There had once been a time when the government would supply a lawyer to defend
accused criminals if the accused could not afford their own lawyer. This had been done
away with as an inexcusable and reckless waste of taxpayer money. Of course, the
government still maintained the opposite role: A public prosecutor, since the prison
industry was booming, and the exchange of money was the most important thing in the
world, meaning that it would be for the public benefit if more people went to jail so that
money could be allocated to those people. Harvey was left to tell his own story and
supply his own defense, but he was assured that as long as he told the truth and had not
done anything wrong, this would be no problem.

The first witness was the man Harvey had greeted on the train platform, a man who had
already appeared in several news broadcasts and talk-show interviews in which he had
broken down in tears because of how hurt he was after having his human right violated.
The man told his story of how Harvey, a total stranger, had passed by while asking how
the man was, while apparently without any intent to sell anything. In speaking to him like
a human being, Harvey had reduced the man to a conversation piece, an object of
curiosity like an animal in a zoo, instead of the high-income-earning, important man that
he was: “I want to assure the court that this man, Harvey Wallbanger, spoke to me in a
friendly and personal way, thereby making an abhorrent farce of everything our society
stands for.”

The next witness was, predictably, the young woman whom Harvey had asked to call an
ambulance. If the first witness had been emotional about his experience, the second was
downright hysterical. She had already received several sessions of therapy for rape
survivors, but the moment she took her seat at the witness stand, she broke down in tears
and continued the rest of her testimony sobbing so frantically that several times, the judge
or the prosecuting attorney had to ask her to repeat herself.
“What did the accused say to you on that day? Please try to repeat his words as verbosely
as your recollection will permit,” the prosecutor prompted the woman.

“The first thing he said to me, the very first thing he said to me, was ‘Excuse me, I’m not
feeling well.’” At these words, a gasp rocked the courtroom, as though a most hideous
monster had suddenly appeared in everyone’s midst.

“And what was your reaction? How did the words of the accused make you feel?” the
prosecutor asked.

“You have no idea how it feels to have someone do something like that to you,” the
woman wailed. “To have a complete stranger, and one of the opposite sex of all things,
begin communicating his deeply personal thoughts and feelings to you! It is a thousand
times, a million times worse than being raped. At least a rape is quick and impersonal,
and you can survive through it by just closing your eyes and waiting for it to be over. I
know this because I’ve been raped countless times before, and it’s actually kind of fun,
especially if you get pregnant, because then you get to have an abortion which is really
expensive and contributes to the flow of money.” The woman’s eyes brightened for just a
moment with fond memories, before her face darkened again. “But this man peered into
my psyche and made me feel like a human being! He treated me like a decent, courteous
human being, which is the absolute worst thing that a person could ever do to another.
For just a moment, it seemed like my whole life was meaningless, like the entire world
was meaningless, like our unflagging pursuit of the exchange of money might not be the
most important thing in the world! What a horrible, horrible experience… I can only
hope and pray that no woman ever has to endure what I’ve endured.”

After all that testimony, the spectators in the courtroom fell into an oppressive hush as
Harvey took the witness stand. The silence in the room was so profound that the creak of
the seat as Harvey sat down on it seemed like a nuclear explosion, a faint sound of
nonetheless such monumental force that it caused every attendee in the courtroom to start
backward in their own seats, as if, by creaking his chair, Harvey had just punched every
one of those attendees in the face.

“Mr. Wallbanger,” the judge began after some moments. “The charges against you are
serious. You are charged with attacking an innocent man, who was minding his own
business while waiting for a train, before you came along and violated his serenity.
Moments later, without any apparent regard for the human right, you proceeded to
sexually assault an innocent woman who had done nothing to you. It was only because of
the heroism of your first victim that you were subdued before you could have gone on a
rampage, possibly attacking other people.”

“I’m sorry, your honor, but I still don’t understand,” Harvey interjected. “I didn’t
sexually assault the young woman you speak of. I literally did not even place a finger on
her; I had no physical contact with her whatsoever. Under what grounds are my actions
toward her being judged as sexual?”
“You are a male, and you were speaking to a female. A male speaking to a female is
always sexual, and unless the exchange of money is involved, a male speaking to a
female is always sexual assault,” the judge clarified. “Even now, I am aware that you
have not yet been castrated for your offences, meaning that there is probably a typical
volume of testosterone circulating through your bloodstream at this very moment, and
that today, in this very courtroom, as this innocent young lady gave us testimony of what
happened to her on that fateful day, you may well have been looking at her and thinking
that she was attractive, and possibly having sexual fantasies involving her. For all the
court knows, you may have imagined her bent over the very witness stand you now find
yourself on, thinking of yourself taking her doggystyle, or sliding yourself between her
breasts while your semen comes out in little jets that coat her face and leave shining little
pearls of moisture all over her skin, without any exchange of money taking place
whatsoever. Mr. Wallbanger, the prosecuting attorney would normally be making these
allegations against you, but even now as I look at him, I see that he has turned pale as
death. He is so very disturbed by your presence and your actions that he has gone
catatonic with horror. I believe that he will be incapable of questioning you as a witness,
and so it falls to me to fulfill this duty. I have seen a great many hardened criminals take
the witness stand in my time as a judge, and I believe I may have the stomach to question
you as a witness. Bailiff, please see the prosecutor to a seat so that he may sit down and
compose himself.” The bailiff complied, and after a few moments of ensuring that the
prosecuting attorney did not require further medical attention, the judge resumed his
examination of Harvey.

“Now, Mr. Wallbanger,” the judge said in a tone that suggested he was really starting at
the beginning, and his previous tangent had been just a warm-up. “The testimony against
you overwhelmingly states that on that day when you were standing in a train station, you
initiated contact with a man holding a briefcase. Did you, in fact, without any
provocation on his part, attempt to speak in a personal, friendly manner to this man?”

“I did,” Harvey confirmed.

“Were you attempting to sell the man anything, or conduct any other manner of business
with him?”

“No, your honor.”

“Then why did you take it upon yourself, Mr. Wallbanger, to begin speaking, suddenly
and without any due cause, to this man in a way that was not conducive to the exchange
of money?”

“It just seemed like a nice thing to do.”

The judge’s face contorted into an expression that combined such awesomely
overwhelming degrees of astonishment, puzzlement, and confusion that Harvey the
Business Process Analyst immediately thought of bottling and selling new buzzwords:
Perhaps astuzzlement, or confonishment, or maybe even astonipuzzifusion. He felt certain
that the latter would be a hit product’s name someday.

“You did something because it seemed like a nice thing to do?” the judge asked slowly
and emphatically, as if Harvey had just confirmed that he had placed a shark into a
cardboard box because he enjoyed the sound of wind chimes. “Mr. Wallbanger, I fail to
see your logic.”

“Well, your honor, I was raised to think that if you can do or say something nice for
someone, you should do it, just because it’s a nice thing to do for someone. That
justification is reason enough, and was reason enough for me to do what I did on that
day.”

The judge suddenly broke out into a broad grin. “Ah, I see; you are building a case for the
insanity plea.”

“No, your honor, I truly am not. I just believed that doing random nice things for people
was something appropriate to do.”

A pronounced pause. “You’re not from around here, are you, Harvey?”

“No, your honor. I am an immigrant to this beautiful land, from a foreign country.”

“That explains everything,” the judge affirmed with a nod. “It makes sense now.” The
judge looked down at some papers in front of him before continuing. “All right. And after
you had spoken to the man, he defended himself by striking you in the head with his
briefcase. Is that correct?”

“That is correct, your honor.”

“I see. Some time after that, you regained consciousness, and shortly after doing so, you
spoke to the young lady who testified just before you. Is that correct?”

“That is correct, your honor.”

“What, exactly, did you say to the woman?”

“I asked her to call an ambulance for me.”

“The police officer who took your initial statement at the hospital where you received
treatment for your injuries also attested that you gave this same initial response, while
omitting a key detail. Mr. Wallbanger, did you only ask this woman to call an ambulance
for you, or did you say anything else? Could you recite for us exactly what you said to
her?”
“I can’t remember my precise words, but I believe I said something to the effect of
‘Excuse me, ma’am, but I’m not feeling well. Can you please call an ambulance?”

At these words, which apparently triggered memories that were still fresh in her mind, the
woman Harvey had spoken to burst into fresh peals of sobbing, and after suspending his
questioning for several minutes to allow the woman to compose herself, the judge finally
had her dismissed from the courtroom so that the trial could proceed.

“Now, Mr. Wallbanger, I must commend you for your honesty and forthrightness in
confessing exactly what you said. Please explain, Mr. Wallbanger, why you said exactly
what you said. I can understand why you asked her to call an ambulance, but why did you
tell her that you weren’t feeling very well?”

“Because it was true,” Harvey explained. “I thought she might want to know why I was
asking her to call an ambulance, and so I added that portion to my request so that she
would not wonder why I was asking her to make the call for me.”

“Mr. Wallbanger, no such clarification was necessary. Ambulance drivers are paid money
to do what they do, and so any phone call to request an ambulance is a contribution to the
most important thing in the world. Any person in this country would have been more than
glad to make the phone call for you, without requiring any clarification as to why you had
asked. People sometimes call ambulances just for pleasure, since they know this will cost
someone money and thus contribute to the most important thing in the world. Far from
lending clarity and understanding to her mind, your words confused and disturbed that
young woman, because without any apparent purpose or precedent, you started telling her
how you felt, which is a very personal, very intimate, and very inappropriate thing to do,
even among married couples, let alone complete strangers.”

“I guess it just seemed like the right thing to do at the time,” Harvey concluded.

“I will note that your actions were quite misunderstood in nature, that you did not force
yourself on the woman out of malice, and that you were in fact apparently unaware of the
seriousness of your actions. But ignorance of the law is no excuse. You realize that in the
eyes of the law, you did something wrong; you do realize that, I assume, Mr.
Wallbanger?”

“Yes, your honor. I understand. In the eyes of the law, I violated that woman’s rights.”

A murmur of laughter rippled through the courtroom. Too late, Harvey realized he had
made a fatal mistake: He had spoken of human “rights,” an antiquated concept in
America, a place where society had distilled freedoms down to one single right. To speak
of “rights” was to unequivocally brand oneself either an outsider or a radical, a person at
once unfamiliar with American values or else unwilling to accept them.

“You are indeed a stranger in a strange land,” the judge said, still with the faint trace of
an amused smirk on his face. “You speak of ‘rights,’ Mr. Wallbanger, something
Americans neither have nor want. I am aware that you come from a foreign country, a
place where people have rights, and where this idea of having rights is probably valued
by some, but in America, people are free, and to impose too many rights on them would
restrict what they could do. There is but one right in the United States, Mr. Wallbanger.”

“I’m familiar with the human right,” Harvey said evenly. “Every person shall have the
right to not be spoken to in a personal or informal manner.”

“Very good,” the judge said, nodding slightly. “However, just a moment ago, you seemed
to have quite readily forgotten this right and imagined that people are still subject to the
obsolete concept of rights. Truly, Mr. Wallbanger, you come from a savage, backwards
society, and now you find yourself here, a miscreant from a strange land, still struggling
to adapt to a world in which people live freely.”

“I’m getting better at it,” Harvey said.

“And in time, you will get better still. It seems like a bit of honest disciplinary action will
go a long way toward helping you get there. I do not believe you are a hardened criminal,
Mr. Wallbanger, but you are too calm and intelligent to plead insanity, and the fact that
you openly and wantonly assaulted not one, but two people in a short space of time marks
you as a spree criminal, someone who lives within the bounds of normal society most of
the time before going entirely off the rails and acting without regard for anyone’s well-
being. Perhaps some time spent cooling your heels in the local jail will give you time to
think about our society and your place within it.”
Chapter 5: Solitary refinement

Of course, American penitentiaries of all kinds offered only solitary confinement. Placing
prisoners into cells that were also inhabited by other people created the possibility that
the prisoners would talk to each other in a personal or informal manner, and while
upstanding, normal, law-abiding citizens could be at least partially trusted to respect each
other’s right, it was precisely the people in jail, with their weakened, perverted morals
that were most likely to engage in that kind of self-abuse. In times gone by, when jails
were staffed, prisoners were sometimes jailed together and the guards entrusted to ensure
that the people’s right was respected, but the government, ever seeking to make itself
more efficient, had sought to do more with less resources by automating all jails. Twice
daily, meals were loaded onto trays by robotic arms, then slowly moved through each cell
on a conveyor belt before passing into a dishwasher that would wash and store all the
trays in preparation for the next meal. A spigot on each cell wall was attached to running
water, and each cell had a toilet. Other than these essentials, prisoners needed remarkably
little care, and so guards had been eliminated in all jails and prisons. However, the
elimination of guards made it impossible to police the prisoners’ behavior toward each
other, and so for the good of all prisoners, multi-tenant cells had been eliminated.

Even considering the consequently inherent solitude and boredom of imprisonment,

Harvey’s time in jail might not have been so bad were it not for one detail: The screen.

It was tempting to call it a “television,” but that word seemed to imply some kind of
regular programming, a series of discrete recordings, each dealing with their own subject
matter, such as a sitcom, a news broadcast, or a talk show. What was shown on the
screens in jail was none of these things; it was a series of brief, almost incomprehensible
segments, so schizophrenically disjointed from each other that no sense of flow from one
moment to the next could be perceived, or at least, not by Harvey’s mind. The images
and sounds on the screen focused around two major themes:

1. The most unimaginably, abominably stupid people that could possibly have been
rounded up from the farthest corners of the Earth, repeatedly engaging in saying or doing
the most unimaginably, abominably stupid things that could possibly have been rounded
up from the farthest corners of the human mind.

2. Conspicuous and positive presentation of various brand names, popular celebrities, and
icons of financial consumption, such as mansions, sports cars, and personal entertainment
electronics.

Frequently, these themes were blended together in unlikely ways, or at least, ways that
Harvey would have found unlikely had he never gone to jail. For example, one five-
second segment of the screen’s content might feature a beautiful pop singer placing the
earbuds of some portable music player into her ears while saying “MY CAR HAVE
SUPER CAM” before the image abruptly cut to a man standing in front of a five-level
mansion and speaking on a wireless phone while receiving a handjob from a red sports
car. Simultaneously enthralled and horrified by what he saw on the screen, Harvey was
not sure whether to think of it as brilliantly funny or atrociously dehumanizing.

Compared to the music that was played in residential buildings, the volume of the screen
was quite reasonable; it was not deafeningly loud, but it was just loud enough that two
people in the same room would have had difficulty speaking to each other without raising
their voices. Not that people were ever jailed together, for this created the risk of them
communicating with each other like human beings, which, of course, would be in
violation of the spirit of the human right. The screen was not as loud as a loudspeaker
could be, but it was loud enough to be distracting, and it was on 24 hours a day—there
was no way for the prisoner to turn it off. Harvey had heard that people used to complain
that prisoners in jail had things too good because they were allowed luxuries like
television in jail. Harvey had the opposite perspective: In his estimation, jail would have
been much more comfortable and pleasant without the television, or whatever else you
wanted to call that abomination of a video screen.

Time went by.

Harvey’s cell had no windows and was artificially lit at all hours of the day, so he rapidly
lost track of time and had no idea how many days or weeks he was in jail before a person
suddenly appeared at the door to the cell one day. This was such an unexpected event that
for a moment, Harvey actually recoiled and positioned himself in the far corner of the
cell, like a wild animal cornered in a cage. Harvey’s visitor was a uniformed officer of
the jail system, but even after Harvey recognized him as such, it had been such a length
of time since Harvey had seen a live human being that the officer’s calm, detached
demeanor made him seem inhuman, zombie-like after the frantic style exhibited by the
people who populated the screen. The officer was quite literally like an apparition from a
horror movie, so unexpected and abnormal that his silent gaze upon Harvey made him
seem like a grisly monster who had come to haunt Harvey’s nightmares for all eternity.

Presumably, the officer was used to this kind of reaction from prisoners, since he calmly
waited while Harvey stopped growling and realized that this was no horror movie, but
rather a real-life situation in which Harvey should probably politely ask his visitor what
business brought them around. And so Harvey caught his breath, walked to the door of
his cell, and proceeded to greet the visitor, being certain to do so impersonally: “What
brings you here?”

“You have a letter,” the officer replied, handing Harvey an envelope.

“We’re allowed to receive personal communications in jail?” Harvey asked with surprise.

“Of course not. This isn’t a personal communication. It’s a business communication,
pertaining to the most important thing in the world, which makes it protected speech.”

“I see. Thank you,” Harvey said with a polite nod.

“Yeah. Have a nice day,” the officer said before walking away. At first Harvey thought
that this parting phrase was inappropriately personal in nature, but there wasn’t really
much that he could do to defend his right in jail, so he forgot about this and diverted his
attention to the envelope. The exterior of this envelope had simply been addressed with
Harvey’s cell number, which clarified that the letter was not actually from someone
outside the jail, as anyone outside the jail would have had to address the envelope to the
street address of the penal system’s post office. This was intra-jail mail. The envelope
had a return address, which was the sender’s cell number. Next to this number was a
company logo that Harvey did not recognize.

Upon further examination, it became apparent that the envelope was not made of pulped
wood, nor did it contain a sheet of the same. Rather, it was a sheet of electronic paper that
could be sealed and re-sealed several times, using a mechanism similar to that of a plastic
sandwich bag. The paper could be “written” on by simply pressing the tip of one’s finger
on it, and it could be wiped clear by sweeping the flat of one’s hand over it.

Opening the envelope, Harvey found the paper had a single line of text on it:

What are you in for?

It was hard to tell what to make of this. Presumably another prisoner wanted to offer
Harvey a job while still in jail. What could the nature of the job be? Was Harvey’s
fellow-prisoner expecting aid in breaking out? He hadn’t even said what he wanted; he
was just asking why Harvey had been jailed, which at first seemed like an irrelevant and
too-personal question before Harvey realized that this was probably a reasonable question
to begin a job interview with.

Harvey had no amenities to write with in jail, but it seemed reasonable to re-use the same
piece of e-paper, so he simply wiped off the sender’s question and wrote his own
response:

I was convicted of speaking personally and informally to two people. What about you?

After writing this, Harvey realized that he probably should not have asked this question,
as the job interviewer should be the one asking questions about the candidate and not the
other way around. Harvey wiped off the three-word question at the end, leaving just the
first sentence on the page, then sealed the envelope and addressed it by reversing the
locations of the cell numbers, placing the original sender’s cell number in the recipient
section of the envelope and Harvey’s cell number as the return address.

Having thus prepared his response, Harvey dropped the envelope in his cell’s mail slot.
Every cell had a slot which communications could be dropped into. This slot served as
the prisoner’s only means of contacting the outside world, whether they had a need that
required attention or they just wanted to write a letter to someone they knew. Deposits
into the slot were monitored by machine, and once an item had been detected as having
been put into the slot, a jail-mail officer—like the one who had just delivered this letter to
Harvey—would come to the jail and process the mail within three days of the deposit.
Harvey had been advised, as part of his standard prisoner prep, that if he was to have a
medical emergency while in jail, he should ensure that it was a medical emergency which
he could endure for three days, as that was how long it would take for the mail officer to
pick up the communication and deliver it to the first-responders.

All of this also meant, of course, that Harvey now had a six-day wait before he would get
any response to his response, as it would take three days for his letter to get to the other
prisoner, and another three days for his reply—if indeed he did reply—to get back to
Harvey. However, although Harvey was not sure how long he had been in jail, he was
reasonably certain the he had already been here for longer than six days, and so he waited
patiently.

Sure enough, six days later, the mail officer reappeared at Harvey’s cell with the same
envelope. The same company logo was still printed on it. It was apparent that it would be
necessary to retain this logo for all future communications of this nature, as that was the
way to ensure that the letters were considered business-related, and thus protected against
seizure or perusal by third parties.

Harvey’s communicant had written a somewhat longer letter this time:

Good for you. Defying the idiotic social norms in our society is difficult, but worthwhile.
I have been imprisoned for the same thing, although my crime was much worse: Rather
than simply speak to people in a personal or informal manner, I encouraged people to
think for themselves, which is very nearly the “worst” thing that you can do in any
controlling society.

You must understand that the problem is much larger than some totalitarian, controlling
government or other powerful organization. Such organizations can be easily resisted
because they do not have the resources to monitor everything that people do or say. The
problem in our society is people themselves, who have been so brainwashed as to lose all
sight of what they are living for. In such a society, it becomes necessary to find people
who are willing to be different. May I number you among such people?

Harvey’s hands shook a little as he re-read and re-re-read the letter. Here was a fork in
the road. He had received a communication from someone who was at once different and
important, someone who not only saw and understood the problems in society, but was
willing to openly identify them. The simple, clear, direct language of Harvey’s new
“friend” was effective because it was so piercing and perceptive. It was not clear what
Harvey’s jailmate was planning, but it was pretty certain that he was planning something;
it was almost unthinkable that he had written Harvey this communication just out of
boredom. Whatever this man intended, would Harvey go along with it, or would he
politely decline? Harvey was not so naïve as to imagine that this person was trustworthy;
it could easily be a trick or trap of some kind, but it is a fairly universal property among
desperate people that they will seize on risky opportunities as being preferable to
inaction. In any case, Harvey had nothing to hide, and if indeed this jailmate was sincere,
it could do no good to be anything other than similarly sincere in return. For now,
whoever this guy was, Harvey would be open and honest without being so foolish as to
actually trust.

There was a limited amount of space on the e-paper, especially given the clunky
mechanism of writing using one’s finger instead of with a stylus, and so although he
would have preferred to retain the words of his communicant for later reference, Harvey
resigned himself to the need to wipe off the paper before replying. After clearing the
previous response, Harvey wrote:

I am not happy with this society. Am I willing to be different? I already am, and I think
I’m actually quite comfortable with that. I don’t mind being different. I don’t have to “fit
in.”

How can you be charged with encouraging people to think for themselves? To the best of
my knowledge, that’s not a crime.

Another six days. Another visit from the jail-mail official.

The official title of my crime was “Disturbing The Peace.” You don’t have to actually
break any laws to be charged with a crime or go to jail. As long as you do something that
is socially unacceptable, you can be construed as having “disturbed” someone, and you
can be branded a criminal for it. As I said before, the problem is not the government, for
they will simply reflect the will of the people. The problem is people’s unwillingness to
think for themselves. Indeed, they are so unused to independent thought that the very
concept terrifies them, and if you encourage them toward such, they will turn against you
and brand you a sociopath, an element that must be removed from society for its own
good.

You wonder, no doubt, why I write all this, and why I have contacted you in the first
place. The explanation is simple: In a bad society, it is always valuable to know good
people. Whether simply by their intellectual influence or by more direct and
interventionary action, it never hurts to have a friend, an ally in a struggle. If you are
willing to accept such an idea, then I am pleased to make your acquaintance. My name is
Tom. What may I call you?

Once again, Harvey had to wipe off the sheet of e-paper before his response.

My name is Harvey. I am pleased to meet you as well, Tom. I cannot say for certain
whether I deserve to be called a good person, but I’ll leave that up to your own personal
judgment. Similarly, I’m sure you can appreciate that since I hardly know you, I have
some reservations about accepting that you are who you say you are, or that your
intentions are as benign and high-minded as you present them to be. That doesn’t mean
that I am suspicious of you, but please don’t expect me to just do whatever you expect me
to do without a good reason.
On that note: What do you expect me to do? For that matter, what do you plan to do
yourself? I agree that it is better to make friends than enemies, but is there anything
meaningful that people like us can do other than act friendly toward each other?

Another six days. This time, with a name to address Harvey by, Tom began with a
salutation, which seemed an almost ancient luxury or formality in their era of split-second
communication:

Hello Harvey,

They say that no matter how well you think you know them, you can never truly know
someone else. I believe there’s some truth to that, as well as the old adage that “You
should never trust anyone completely, not even yourself.” I am not expecting you to place
your life in my hands or trust me to any measure other than whatever might be sufficient
for us to be able to communicate honestly with each other. The inverse is true, as well:
People have a way of presenting themselves as other than what they really are, so I will
never assume that you are a particular type of person. I hope to never stop seeing people,
places, and things for what they really are rather than what they seem to be.

Forgive me if at any time I seem too analytical or peculiarly obsessed with the workings
of the human mind. I am a Marketer by trade—that was my job title before I was
imprisoned. In many ways, Marketing is all about psychology, for it is about not only
determining what it is that people want—and thus what products or services a company
should sell—but also how to present those products or services to people, since anything
which is to be offered up to the public must somehow be packaged and presented in a
way that will make the offering most useful to both the giver and the receiver. In many
ways, then, I am a professional psychologist, though I won’t deny a purely personal
fascination with how the mind works as well. Marketers get a bad rap sometimes, but in
their purest form, they are agents, coordinators between people who have something to
offer, and people who receive whatever is offered.

What do I expect you to do? Well, there is appreciably little that you or I can do right
now, from within jail. Perhaps we’ll never be able to do anything grand and meaningful
as long as we live. After all, the enemy we’re up against doesn’t really exist except as
ideas; there is no King Kong or Godzilla or alien invasion to vanquish, just a lot of
misguided ideas floating around, and effecting significant changes in the zeitgeist usually
takes at least an entire generation. You and I may never live to see the changes we hope
to bring about. That said, where should we start? Right now, I don’t think there’s
anything we can do other than learn as much as we can with what we have. The screen
that you have been so graciously provided actually holds some potential as a learning
tool. You know how nutritionists talk about “empty calories” which come from food that
has no nutritional value? People eat such food and become full and fat, yet in reality
they’re starving to death because they are deficient in the actual nutrients that their
bodies really need. I like to make an analogy with our popular media and say that it’s
empty calories for the mind: It makes people’s brains feel full because of the sheer
onslaught of overstimulation, yet since the content is devoid of anything valuable,
people’s minds start to die because they’re actually not being fed anything that will
nourish the brain. However, every coin has two sides, and if you actually analyze the
screen in your cell and consider who designed the programming for the screen and why,
you can come up with some fascinating (though perhaps none too pleasant) conclusions
about human nature. You can learn a lot about how impulsive, sensationalist, and
narrow-minded human nature works by observing it and the social motives and
mechanisms behind it. Know thine enemy. While you’re at it, know yourself too. Being
imprisoned is a good circumstance in which to perform soul-searching. Spend some quiet
time by yourself and, if you’re not already completely certain, see if you can come to a
better understanding of who Harvey really is. I’m doing the same, of course. Think of it
as “solitary refinement,” if you will.

Being in jail is discouraging, but hopefully we won’t be here forever. You’ll be out before
I will be. With a few good people collaborating together, we should be able to effect
something meaningful. The present state of affairs can’t last forever; I sense a change
coming, for both you and I, as well as for American society at large. I don’t know
whether those changes will be for better or worse, but I feel that a change is coming.

Harvey’s next response began with three words:

I feel ready.

The days passed steadily, and Harvey took Tom’s advice, dividing his time between
studying the influences and effects of the screen and examining and refining his own
personal ideology. Oddly enough, as brain-damaging as that screen was, Harvey found
that Tom had a point: The time spent in jail was useful in allowing him time to refine his
thoughts. Absolutely alone, with no responsibilities to anyone or anything, he had plenty
of time to consider his place in the world, and as time went by, Harvey even learned to
learn from the boundless, spewing anus of drivel that was the screen on his cell wall.
There was a certain psychology applied in the programming of the jail screen; whoever
had devised that programming must have had at least some reasonable understanding of
human nature, for it was obvious that no human being could respond to maximum
stimulation 24 hours a day, or they would quickly grow utterly numb to it. Rather, the
screen was like ocean waves, ebbing and flowing back and forth between a slow, sensual
massaging of the senses, involving scenes that were comforting and comparatively
serene, before crescendoing, over the course of several hours, into a chaotic flurry of
images that made people feel as though the only true life was that in which every nerve of
their bodies tingled with as much current as they could carry without losing sensation
altogether. When that had gone on for a while, the screen calmed down again, dissipating
into another multi-hour stretch of abject, but comparatively benign, stupidity. It seemed
that the screen was trying to instill certain values in the residents of the jail cell, although
after a while it just seemed so ridiculous that it was like a parody of itself. Harvey wasn’t
sure whether anyone actually took the screen seriously, but obviously someone must have
believed it served a purpose or they wouldn’t have put it in the cell in the first place.
Every six days or so, another letter from Tom arrived, and Harvey kept up his end of the
communication as well. Harvey found that having someone else to communicate with
made a critical difference in retaining his own sanity, since the human mind, left to its
own devices, tends to eventually drift ever more deeply into madness. Tom was probably
just as grateful to have someone else to write to, and at some point, Harvey realized that
Tom was his only friend in the world. Tom was the first person Harvey had found in
America who had been willing to speak about things that didn’t concern business or
money, and not only that, Tom was both perceptive and insightful, a vital combination
when it comes to distilling new ideas about changing the world. All in all, Harvey found
himself glad that he had gone to jail; the opportunity to rest and reflect, as well as to meet
a sympathetic soul, was beyond priceless.

Harvey had forgotten how long his sentence was for. In light of the fact that this was his
first offense as well as the fact that he had been apparently ignorant about the seriousness
of his crimes, the judge had been lenient and sentenced Harvey to only a few months in
jail, but Harvey had forgotten how many months it was, and even if he’d remembered, he
had little way to keep track of time. The letters from Tom were the only reference point,
as they arrived approximately once every six days, but this was not exact since
sometimes it took Tom or Harvey a day or two to compose their responses. In any case,
Harvey wasn’t really in a hurry; he had gotten used to being here. It was a surprise, then,
when a jail officer showed up at Harvey’s cell one day without a letter and informed
Harvey that his sentence was complete and he was free to go.
Chapter 6: …And the pain came

“There’s someone I need to see,” Harvey said as the jailer escorted him out of his cell.
Harvey gave the jailer Tom’s cell number and said “The man in that cell is my business
partner. Now that I’m leaving, I need to coordinate some Business Processes with him
before I go.”

“There’s a man in that cell?” the jailer asked.

“Isn’t there? I’ve been exchanging business communication with him for months.”

The jailer raised an eyebrow, but said nothing more about Tom. “Visits to prisoners’ cells
are not allowed. For business purposes, the two of you will need to meet in a jail
conference room.”

“That’s fine,” Harvey agreed. “Can we arrange a conference room?”

“Certainly. I just need to search you to ensure that you’re not bringing anything illicit or
anything that might be used to escape from a jail cell.”

“What could people possibly use to escape from here? None of the cells have windows,
so even something like a file would be useless. You’d need a sledgehammer to get out of
here, and you can clearly see that I don’t have anything like that on me.”

“Sure, sure. I’ll need you to take off all your clothes.”

Harvey didn’t see much point in resisting, so he waited while the jailer searched Harvey’s
clothes and performed the sheer awesomeness of a cavity check. Harvey was a bit
regretful that Tom would have to endure the same, but he hoped he would understand.

After getting dressed, Harvey was escorted to a room that was empty except for a large
table with several padded office chairs surrounding it. This furniture seemed surprisingly
fancy for a jail until Harvey remembered that this was a room strictly for businesspeople
to conduct business while they were in jail. Businesspeople went to jail all the time, and
while there, they had to continue discussing Business Processes and all the other utterly
useless things that they discussed when among each other. Harvey was told to sit at the
table and wait; his “business partner” would be searched and escorted in after a few
minutes.

Harvey sat and waited. A few minutes later, the door opened and a young woman walked
in. She smiled faintly. “You must be Harvey.”

“Uh, yes… Is Tom available?”

“I am Tom. My real name is Jane,” the woman said, shaking Harvey’s hand.
Harvey was dumbstruck, for several important reasons. First of all, of course, was the
shock of learning that “Tom” was indeed a woman, and this was compounded by the fact
that Harvey hadn’t even realized that men and women were jailed together in the same
facilities. It made sense, in a way: Since every single prisoner received solitary
confinement, there was no longer any reason to have separate men’s and women’s jails as
there had once been, but Harvey had not even been aware that there were any female
prisoners in the building. Adding still to Harvey’s shock and confusion was the instinct to
not trust strangers; for all Harvey knew, this woman was some kind of agent who had
been reading Harvey’s communications with “Tom” the entire time, and was here to
entrap him in some kind of attempt to keep undesirables like Harvey from getting back
into society where they might corrupt others into thinking for themselves. Last and
probably most stunning of all, “Jane” was incredibly, almost supernaturally beautiful.
After studying her features for a while, Harvey realized that she was not quite as beautiful
as she seemed at first glance, but rather, her demeanor and style made her seem so.
Harvey had just spent months watching an electronic screen in which every woman was
made up to the point of looking like a doll, dressed in ornate, elaborate clothing, and
wearing similarly extravagant jewelry while flashing broad, toothy smiles that were
perfectly white. It was all done to promote the idea of consumption, of course; the
women on the screen were done up in this way to normalize the ideas of being artificially
beautiful through expensive clothing, jewelry, and make-up. “Jane” was such a contrast
to these women that Harvey could not stop staring at her and picking out little details.
Her clothes were plain, neither bearing exquisite designs nor made of exotic material, nor
even particularly colorful. She bore no jewelry of any kind, and her face was obviously
free of make-up. Yet far from making her look ugly or plain, this woman’s adornment-
free face brought out a rich pattern of details, the likes of which were covered up on the
airbrushed, made-up women that Harvey was used to seeing. The few moles on her face,
the little wrinkles and lines that animated her face as she smiled or spoke, and the
unpretentious simplicity that radiated from her would have been sufficient to make her
seem like the most beautiful woman that Harvey had ever seen, but even if not for these
details, the eyes of “Jane” were, above everything else (both literally and figuratively), of
such depth, possessing simultaneously so much calm serenity and yet so much
penetrating alertness, that they were easily the most beautiful things Harvey had ever paid
witness to. The eyes of America were dead. So accustomed to sensory overload and
lacking the light of any spark of intelligence behind their hollow pupils, every eye that
Harvey had seen in America was dull, inattentive, wandering, and unperceiving. Even
when those eyes looked at something, they appeared to not notice things. The eyes of
“Jane” were bright and perceptive. The moment she laid those eyes on Harvey, he had the
impression that she actually saw him; was not merely looking at him, but actually was
making effort to perceive him and his attributes! It was so exhilerating that Harvey
momentarily had another reaction of a wild animal, for his survival instinct told him that
no creature could so thoroughly perceive another creature unless survival was involved:
Either that creature intended to devour the creature it perceived, or, inversely, believed
that the creature it perceived intended to devour the perceiver. And so Harvey was
momentarily terrified—someone so attentive could surely only be a predator. Then he
realized that the eyes were neither threatening nor predatory, but simply attentive for
attentiveness’ own sake, as though paying attention could somehow be its own end.
Jane’s eyes were as polarizedly opposite to the mainstream eyes that Harvey was used to
that for just a moment, she really did seem superhumanly beautiful, as if she were indeed
an angel, or an alien that had developed advanced beauty technology beyond what
humans had ever attained. Yet as Harvey got used to her face, he realized that she was
quite human, and that there was nothing impossible about her. She was, indeed, all the
things that he had perceived Tom to be—intelligent, perceptive, insightful—but with one
quality that Harvey had not expected Tom to possess: Female.

They talked. And they talked some more.

Some people come across in text quite differently than they do in person. Jane was, of
course, every bit as intelligent and perceptive as Tom was—for they were, indeed, the
same person—but she had a wickedly sardonic sense of humor that manifested itself
quickly while Harvey spoke to her, which he had not noticed in her writing. In writing
she was comparatively reserved—still relaxed and personable, but also focused and
mostly humorless. In person, Jane was a relentlessly sarcastic soul, always ready to poke
fun at everyone and everything, including herself. Harvey found himself the subject of
her sarcasm more than once, but he came to find that he did not mind too much, for it was
not mean-spirited, but simply a personal brand of humor—and, perhaps, a reflection of
her own darkened mood while in jail. Harvey came to appreciate her tendency to take
almost any situation and project it in a maximally absurd way that was humorous but also
insightful, reflecting the cloud within every silver lining. She was a pessimist, but a
delightfully playful one who was always ready to turn denigration into a sport.

Even so, talking to her was a little awkward at first. It got less awkward after a while, but
it never quite stopped being awkward. Harvey had a natural disadvantage since he was so
shocked that his head was spinning with ideas. Jane, meanwhile, had apparently been in
jail for quite a while and her social skills had gotten considerably rusty. It didn’t take
long, however, for them to earn each other’s trust. Jane explained that men behave very
differently toward women than toward other men, even when they try not to, even when
they don’t think they actually are, and so she felt that the two of them would have been
able to maintain a more meaningful exchange of communication if she maintained the
persona of being a man. Harvey, for his part, had to agree.

Now that they had made each other’s acquaintance, they promised each other that they
would remain in touch. Harvey gave her his shelf address so that she would know where
to find him when—or if—she was ever released, and he knew her cell number. Since they
could, at any point in time, make use of the conference room under the pretense of
“official business,” he promised that he would visit her regularly so that they could get
together in these comparatively pleasant surroundings and muse on the mysteries of the
universe.

She gave him a parting gift. As they were getting ready to leave, she reached under the
table and drew out a small book. It was not clear where the book materialized from; it
was almost as if she had pulled it out of her pocket, but the motion of her arm had not
seemed to suggest reaching into her pocket. In any case, she handed the book to Harvey,
who took a few moments to page through it. It turned out to be a book of ideas by some
bygone social critic, neither a novel nor precisely a book of non-fiction, but rather a book
of rhetoric relating to the order and structure of society, written in the style of forgotten
similar works by the likes of Marx or Marcuse. It was the kind of book that once had
been widely written, circulated, and read, but had long since been abandoned in favor of
more entertaining fare among the small handful of people who still read books. What
made this particular book all the more meaningful and precious a gift, however, was not
merely its original printed content, but also the fact that Jane was written a great deal in
it; it had become a sort of diary for her while she was in jail, and a great many of the
ideas in the book had her own embellishments and additions scribbled in the margins. It
was the only thing that Jane had to give, and for her to offer it so freely to Harvey, when
it was obviously such an object of vast personal and intellectual worth, that he regretted
his inability to give anything back.

“You don’t owe me anything,” Jane said when Harvey apologized to her. “Just don’t
forget me. When I finally get out of here, you and I are going to make some changes.”

Harvey smiled. “How did you manage to hold on to this, anyway? This seems like
something they would have taken away from you.”

“Oh, I’m sure they would have, if they had found it,” she confirmed.

“Where did you hide it? I wasn’t allowed to take any personal luggage or effects here
with me.”

“I wasn’t either. Tell me, did they do a cavity check on you?”

“Yup,” he said with a nod, not sure whether to regard this event with pleasure or horror.

“The anal cavity check is part of their standard procedure, but for some reason, they don’t
check anywhere else. I simply hid the book in my other option. I’m actually not entirely
certain that the jailers know what a vagina is.”

“You could be right about that,” he agreed. “I was wondering why the cover of the book
is so sticky.”

“Consider it part of the gift,” she said with a warm smile.

“Gladly.” Some faint neurons in the back of his mind gently brushed against the idea that
something here was surreal, but after spending months with the jail screen, having your
best friend pull a book from her vagina and give it to you seemed almost too normal of an
act.

***
After emerging from the jail building, Harvey’s first stop was to return “home” to his
shelf, since that was the only place he belonged. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, it was
the very nature of spacetime that space abhorred a human being unless money was
applied to that space: There was no place that any human being belonged unless they had
secured their right to stay there through the most important thing in the world.

Having been gone for so long, Harvey fairly marvelled at the fact that in a society so
greedy as this, no one had bothered to steal the blankets from his shelf. Truly, they were
not worth much, but given the American mentality that every molecule in existence
should be squeezed as tightly as possible for as much personal profit as the squeezer can
gain, it was still surprising. It seemed that the focus on money really had made people
forget about what that money was all for; they had forgotten that money is actually
inherently worthless and is merely a medium of exchange for “wealth,” which is the
actual substance of goods or services which money is traded for. Indeed, in so
emphatically focusing on money as the only important thing in the world, America had
become a society nearly free of theft, since the means—dollars—rather than the ends—
goods—were most prized. Naturally the goods could be exchanged for dollars, but either
people didn’t think that far ahead, or goods were so worthless that most of them weren’t
worth stealing for resale. The only thing that cost any serious money in America—
besides luxury items like cars, electronics, jewelry, and so on—was real estate, which
was so expensive that any amount of personal space whatsoever was beyond the reach of
all but the upper classes. In the Bible, God once promised the people of a land that they
would be so blessed with goods that they wouldn’t have room to store them all. This was
once something to bless a society with, but in America it had become a curse: The
country was flooded from shore to shore with imported goods, so cheap that they were
nearly free, but on the tiny shelves that people lived on, there was no room to actually
store most of these goods, and so after enjoying them for a day, the buyers of the goods
usually had to throw them away unless the goods were quite small, or the owner’s shelf
quite large.

And so Harvey reclined on his shelf for a while, thinking about what had happened to
him, and what would happen (or what he would like to happen) in the future. It was fair
to say that America was not quite what he had expected. He had found this “Success”
thing that his friends and family had encouraged him to find, but it didn’t feel like
something that had actually been worth pursuing. Harvey knew that going to jail would
not have cost him his job; as a Senior Vice President, he was too important to his
company to be let go because of a little thing like jail time. Executives frequently went to
jail. It was something of a sport among them. No, Harvey’s position in society was
secure, but somehow that security didn’t seem to be worth much. Harvey had nothing that
was of any real value to him but a shelf to live on, the blankets that had been left to him,
and Jane’s book. He clutched the book tightly against himself as though it were a security
blanket. The book was not soft or fuzzy like a teddy bear, but it brought Harvey a strange
comfort. It seemed to be a link to another world, or at least another ideology.

Did Harvey want to go to another world? He wasn’t sure. Although he did not much care
for the American way of life, the problem was that he was embedded in it, had gotten
used to it, and would have difficulty adapting to any other way of doing things. Then
again, he had had trouble adjusting to society here when he first arrived, as well. Would it
not be better to go somewhere where human society was more meaningful, more
balanced, more human?

A human being, perhaps, was a creature marked by its ability to adapt—it could get used
to anything. But whether it would get used to anything was another matter.

Some people are satisfied with a status quo. Some people will accept a stable lifestyle as
long as there are no obvious indications that the lifestyle is either egregiously “bad” in
some subjective way or unsustainable due to external influences. Some people even find
themselves coming to crave that routine, that sense of normalcy in life, even at the cost of
variety, potential for personal growth, or the progression of the human race collectively.

At one point in time, before he went to jail, Harvey had been that person. When Harvey
had come to America, all he had wanted was a normal life. He was not a rebel. He was
not anyone special. He had come looking for “Success,” which had turned out to really
just be a euphemism for “money” after all, because talking about money was crass and
unrefined, but implying that you had found “Success” as a way of attempting to cover the
fact that you were a worthless, bloated sack of garbage who made too much money was
perfectly refined.

Then Harvey changed.

Why did he change? Was it the experience of going to jail? Or was it more specifically
because of her and her influence? In truth, it was probably a potent combination of both
of these things, although upon reflection, he supposed that if he had never met her, he
would have been content to go back to being the Senior Vice President of Business
Process Analysis and nothing would have been different. Now, everything was different.
Everything.

All at once, it came to him as he reached an important personal epiphany: He was not
satisfied. He could have gone back to his job, he could have continued to earn a living,
and he could have lived relatively comfortably. He would not be happy with that kind of
a life. He could force himself to do it. He could even get used to it. But he did not want
to, because he knew that every day of his life, he would have to face his self-
dissatisfaction. He would not like who he was as a person. He would not like his life. He
would see himself as worthless, lazy, and stupid. And why should he not see himself so,
when in truth, such a life would indeed make him those very things?

Harvey perceived, through some strange needling perception that seemed somewhere
between predictive analysis and clairvoyance, that he would probably die young. Perhaps
not “young” as in before he turned 30, but probably before he turned 50. People who
refused to be satisfied tended to die young. Either they ended up doing something
dangerous as a way of remaining true to their ideologies, or they were killed by people
whose self-interests they were hindering, or they simply burned out because of the stress
caused by their dissatisfaction. Perhaps he would have a premature heart attack or stroke,
or just plain wear himself out. It did not matter. Somehow, it did not matter at all. If
Harvey lived a real life and died at 40, those scant years would be infinitely preferable to
the pathetic, fake shadow of a life that waited for him and might see him to age 80 or
beyond. If he continued living as he was now, he was already dead, a dead man walking.

Anaïs Nin was famous for her quote about reaching a point at which it was more painful
to risk being “normal” than it was to risk being true to oneself. Some people were
satisfied with being satisfied. Anaïs Nin was not one of those people. Harvey Wallbanger
was not one of those people.

Harvey opened Jane’s book and pensively looked through it, at her flowing script
interweaving with the words that had originally been printed on the pages. As he looked,
Harvey felt compelled to make his own contributions, to have his own handwriting
interlock with hers, so that their words could sit together on the pages and perhaps
construct something that was the more remarkable, the more powerful for these
individual contributions. Picking up a pen, Harvey began to press it to the paper.

Sometimes, if you sit down on your leg or lie down on your arm, the limb falls asleep. If
this happens, it’s important to allow the blood to flow back into the limb. This is painful
at first; when the limb first wakes up again, it becomes aware of its own condition, and
for a little while, it fairly radiates with agony as it comes to its senses. To the best of my
knowledge, there is no way to do this without some amount of suffering. It can be done
quickly or it can be done more gradually, which may make the adjustment easier, but
some amount of discomfort is always part of the process.

I woke up… And the pain came.

***

Re-integrating into his workplace was not especially difficult for Harvey. It turned out
that most people hadn’t noticed he was gone. For some reason, they were not fully aware
of the vital role he played of not massacring everyone in the company, and so whether
Harvey was behind his desk or not seemed to make no difference to anyone else.

There were some exceptions. A few people welcomed Harvey back. One person in
particular who seemed more cognizant of Harvey’s absence than the rest was Tim, one of
the Sales droids. Harvey barely knew Tim since they worked in different departments and
had never had cause to work together for any reason, but Harvey had assumed Tim to
be—like every other Sales person in the world—contemptible and worthless.
Nonetheless, when they first caught sight of each other after Harvey’s return, Tim
actually seemed glad to have Harvey back.

“Hey Harv!” Tim exclaimed as they came within speaking distance. “How’re you feeling
today, man?” Harvey was momentarily taken aback by this display of personability. Tim
had asked a personal question rather than something relating to official business. If
Harvey had so chosen, he could have had Tim put in jail right now. Harvey could only
assume that this unexpected and completely gratuitous display of personability was Tim’s
way of displaying trust, of communicating to Harvey that they were not merely co-
workers, but personal friends who valued each other’s company for something more than
just the most important thing in the world. Even though Harvey did not much care for
Tim as a person, he was momentarily touched by this irrationally selfless act of passion.

“I am well, thank you, Tim,” Harvey replied with some reserve. Harvey had originally
intended to not return the question, but after thinking about it for a moment, he figured
that he had nothing to lose. Harvey was one of the highest-ranking people in the
company, and Tim was rank-and-file; what was Tim going to do, fire him? With this
mentality, Harvey politely returned the question: “What about you?”

“I’m doing well, thanks,” said Tim. “Hey Harv, where’ve you been? I haven’t seen you
around here for a while.”

“I went to jail,” Harvey said. He felt remarkably little trepidation about admitting this.
More than anything, he felt a sense of morbid amusement at this conversation.

“Wow, that’s far out, man,” Tim said with admiration. “I wish I could go to jail for
something. If you go to jail, you know you’ve done something good.”

Things began to click into place in Harvey’s mind. Tim must have known that Harvey
had gone to jail; it was no secret. There were people in the company who had been made
aware of the fact, and they probably would have readily told Tim—or anyone else who
bothered to ask. Different people would react differently to this information, but the
majority of them would not care, since the event of Harvey going to jail did not involve
the most important thing in the world, and Harvey hadn’t violated the right of any of
them. The only person who would actually care about such an event would be a deviant,
someone who was also not satisfied with their present life and would perceive Harvey as
a sort of folk-hero for doing something inappropriate. This would also explain why Tim
had dared to ask Harvey a personal question: Tim was trying to present himself as the
kind of person that Harvey was looking for.

Harvey was willing to play this whole game with Tim, but even so, a certain amount of
restraint was called for when first starting out. “It’s not too hard to go to jail,” Harvey
hedged. “I’m sure you could arrange it if you really wanted to.”

“Oh, for sure, but it’s not the act of going to jail itself that I’m after. I just would want to
do something important, the kind of thing that might actually get me in jail. What did you
do, anyway?”

“I spoke in a personal and informal manner to two people at a train station.”

“Far out!” Tim exulted. “I wish I could do that kind of thing. Make a difference, you
know?”
“Make a difference in what?”

“The world. Change the world, make it a better place than it was when I first came into it,
that whole deal. I think I’d like to do that.”

Harvey closed his eyes and pressed a hand to his forehead, as though some creature were
within his skull and trying to force its way out. Unlike Tom/Jane, Tim was neither
particularly intelligent nor particularly focused. Tim was young—even younger than
Harvey and Jane, which was pretty darn young—and the whole idea of “doing
something” seemed, to him, more of an adventure or something to be done on a lark than
the more devoted endeavour that Harvey and Jane had probably each envisioned. Then
again, it wasn’t as though Harvey or Jane had actually done anything yet. Like Tim, they
were nothing more than motivated young people who were tired of acting stupid because
that was what they were supposed to do, and possessed by some completely vague yet
utterly pressing need to do something different with their lives. It was true that Tim didn’t
seem as serious or devoted as Harvey and Jane, but that was no reason to push Tim away
as long as he was sincere. After all, as Jane had said: It never hurts to have good people
on your side.

And so they sat down and talked. By way of getting to know each other better, they
exchanged their respective histories: Tim had grown up in the United States and had
gotten his Sales job fresh out of high school. Harvey likewise explained that he had
grown up in a foreign country and graduated from a university there shortly before
moving here. Neither of them, it seemed, had had any real sense of what they were
expected to do with life in America, but they both agreed that something was lacking, and
so Harvey explained that he had met someone important in jail, that he had vague ideas
of “doing something” with his life, that he hadn’t the faintest clue what the something
was, but that he had met someone who seemed to imbue the idea with meaning, and that
Tim should probably meet Harvey’s former jailmate.

“That sounds pretty good,” Tim agreed. “We could be like the Three Musketeers.”

“Did you read that book?” Harvey asked.

“No, but I played the video game.”

Harvey retained some reservations about Tim’s involvement in anything. Tim was not a
bad sort, nor as hopelessly brainwashed as most Americans, but then again, he was young
and hadn’t had time to be. Maybe in another ten years this whole “Let’s be a rebel” act
would seem boring to him and he would buy a huge car and have a bunch of kids with a
Family Incubator in a Family Planning Center just like every other thirtysomething
American guy.

Then again, Harvey wasn’t even ten years older than Tim, and Harvey was already
starting to crack under the pressure. Maybe when Harvey got there, he, too, would find
that the whole idea had been a stupid waste of time and that he was better off contributing
to the most important thing in the world.
Chapter 7: The Influencers

The next time Harvey visited Jane in jail, he told her about Tim. “I know someone I think
you should meet,” he encouraged her. “He’s a Sales guy, but he’s not happy with his life.
He’s like us—looking for something better. I think he’s serious about it.”

Jane gave him a dubious look. “Have you known him for very long?”

“Well, I’ve worked with him for several months now.”

“Worked with him… Have you talked to him about non-work things?”

“Well, I talked to him about non-work things just last week. He said that he wanted to
make a difference with his life, change the world…”

“Was that the first time you talked to him about non-work things?” she asked, arching an
eyebrow.

“Well, yes. Does it matter?”

“Are you serious? Harvey… Don’t get me wrong, maybe the guy is completely
legitimate, but if you talked to him once and he gave the impression that he wanted a
change in his life, it could be as simple as some guy going through a mid-life crisis.”

“He’s younger than we are. He’s something like 22 or 23.”

“Quarter-life crisis, then—even more typical. Look, I don’t want to get paranoid, and I’m
not trying to make you paranoid either, and the last thing I would want to do is make you
automatically distrust people, because if you do that, you’re already dead, but you need to
understand that our thinking is already outside the bounds of what would be considered
socially acceptable. We need to be cautious about letting on who we really are to people
we don’t know well.”

“I can see what you mean, but Jane, this isn’t 1984… Even today, there isn’t any Thought
Police organization that regulates what people can say or think about. We can’t be
charged with a crime for thinking the wrong way.”

“Yes we can! That’s what you need to understand: In our society, people are ‘free’
because there are no official laws regulating what they can say, but that’s even worse than
if certain types of speech were illegal, because that means that there are no clearly-drawn
lines. If some police officer or judge thinks that you’re too far outside the bounds, you
can be arrested or jailed. That’s what happened to me. Remember, I was jailed for
‘Disturbing The Peace’ because I tried to encourage independent thinking in people.
There’s no written law against that, but a court ruled that I was a menace to society and
ordered me locked up. They don’t need any more due process than a so-called ‘fair trial’
and the arbitrary decision of one person who decides your fate. The norms in this society
are social, not legal, which makes them the most dangerous of all, because you could be
tightening the noose around your own neck without even realizing it. You don’t have to
be violating anything written down in a lawbook somewhere; you just have to do
something that will offend the sensibilities of someone, somewhere.”

Harvey’s face had fallen steadily during this tirade, until finally he was looking down at
the table in mute sorrow. He was glad that Jane had said these things—although the
words she had to say were unpleasant, Harvey knew them to be true, and he valued truth
more than blissful ignorance. Indeed, he was a sort of masochist when it came to truth—
no matter how much the truth hurt, it was more painful to endure the lack of truth, or
unawareness of truth. He knew Jane to be of the same ilk, for she would not so furiously
assert this information to him otherwise. He was glad to know someone like her. To have
someone so furiously assert the voice of experience in his life was something that few
people would do—at least, not without expecting money for it. She was the real thing,
determined to tell the truth no matter how much it hurt. Finally, after a prolonged silence,
just to be saying something, he murmured “Is it really as bad as all that?” even though he
already knew the answer.

“I think it is,” Jane replied, almost in a whisper.

“Oh, Jane, why don’t we just go back?” Harvey wondered. “We’re both from foreign
countries, places where a human life is still worth something, places where human beings
haven’t made themselves obsolete. We’re citizens there; we’re only residents here. We
don’t belong here. We don’t even like living in this pathetic, broken society. You’ll be
out of jail soon, and then we’re free to leave. We can still go back.”

She drew her lips back in a grim expression that he initially interpreted as an adverse,
angry reaction to his words before he realized that the expression actually reflected
consideration. She was thinking it over, thinking about a decision that she didn’t want to
make because neither option seemed viable. “I’ve thought about it,” she finally admitted.
“There are problems with going back as well, of course. Things aren’t necessarily that
much better in our home countries.”

“Of course,” he agreed. “No place is perfect. I’m not imagining my home country as
some kind of utopia. But at least the places we’re from are more livable than where we
are now..”

“Perhaps. The real reason, for me at least, has to do with the larger question of our place
in the world. We’re here, in a place that really needs our help. Back home, we’re not
really needed. I could be a cleaning lady or a seamstress in my home country, but there
are already enough of those.”

“Those are actual useful vocations, though,” Harvey pointed out. “Admittedly, they’re
neither glamorous nor high-paying, but at least they’re genuine functions of society. My
father works as a baker and my brother is a roofer. They’re not rich, but they actually do
something useful for people, a hell of a lot more useful than being a Business Process
Analyst. They lead decent, normal lives, and they’re happy. I could be satisfied working
with my brother on his roofing jobs. I don’t really care about money.”

“And you think I do?” she asked pointedly. “It’s not about making money for me. It’s
about making a difference.”

“A difference in what? Around here, all you can be is some stupid wishy-washy
bureaucrat. The jobs that people get here aren’t jobs that make a difference to anyone.”

“Exactly,” she said, as if he’d glossed right over the point. “The paid employment
positions that people get here are useless. Who says that you need to rely on the system of
paid employment to define your worth? Are you already so brainwashed by this culture
that you feel like the only things people can do that could ever mean anything are the
things that businesses will pay them for?”

He paused. “Okay. You have a point. You’re saying that we can’t rely on the system of
jobs that constitute paid employment at the behest of businesses to define who we are or
what we do. That’s fine. But then, what do we do if it’s not the things that get printed on
our business cards?”

“That’s the million-dollar question,” she said with a grin. “Except it’s not, because we’re
not going to do it for a million dollars. We’re not going to do it for any amount of money.
You need to understand that the money culture is a plague. It’s being adopted by other
countries; maybe not to the extreme that it’s been adopted here, but countries don’t exist
in a vacuum. Other countries look to see what people are doing, and if they perceive the
American model of society and economics as a viable model that appears to have worked
well for this country, they’ll adopt it for themselves in the hopes that it will work for
them. If we run, we’ll just keep on running, until eventually there’ll be no place left to
run to. Rammstein said that we’re all living in Amerika, and that only becomes more true
worldwide as time goes by. Do you think that in the Old World, money doesn’t matter
very much? It matters more than ever. Businesses and governments are adopting the
money-before-people paradigm, even in places that have been traditionally socialist and
placed the emphasis on sustainability. It all starts here. America is the epicenter of the
global money movement. If we can’t break this culture of the money habit, we won’t be
able to keep it from spreading to other places around the world, except for countries that
adopt absurdly isolationist policies, but those countries will be too small and weak to
resist our military force and will end up becoming additional states in the union, like the
former North Korea.”

“So we’re stuck here,” Harvey concluded.

“No. You’re free to go. Trust me, I want to go. I just can’t bring myself to do it; it would
be like a rat leaving a sinking ship. I’m not someone who will be content to live a quiet,
simple life in a quiet, simple society, isolated from the things that affect humanity at
large. I’ve reached the point where it hurts more to live what people think is a ‘normal’
life than to face the reality that I’ll probably die young.”

“I recently had a similar experience,” Harvey affirmed.

She smiled. “Besides, we’re from different countries. I’d miss you.”

“We could get married. Then we’d be able to go to the same place.”

She said nothing to that. A good Marketer knows how to retain customers’ curiosity by
withholding information regarding future product offerings. After a significant pause in
which she savored the expectant-but-trying-not-to-appear-hopeful look on his face, she
concluded: “I’ll go ahead and meet with this guy you want me to meet. But don’t assume
that things will work out. Even in our society that places the highest emphasis on
business, less than 10% of all new businesses ever become profitable. The odds of a
small group of dissidents doing anything meaningful in a society that would lock them up
for not being normal are much, much lower. For people like us, the larger a group gets,
its risk—and therefore its chances of success—actually decrease. Teamwork only works
well when the team members are on the same page together. If they aren’t, they’ll end up
getting in each other’s way and nullifying each other’s efforts. It’ll be more like ‘Too
many cooks spoil the broth’ than ‘Many hands make light work.’ We’re in a field of
endeavor where less is more.”

***

He hadn’t asked the others about this, but the sense of directionlessness had been
weighing on Harvey for a long time now, and so when they finally got together as a
group of three friends to discuss plans for the future, Harvey had a mind to setting a goal
before doing anything else. When you want to get something done, you usually need to
set a goal before anything else, since that gives you a clear vision, a reference point to
work toward. This isn’t true 100% of the time—sometimes good things happen
serendipitously through the wanton act of screwing around, but more frequently, such
becomes nothing more than a waste of time and resources: Mildly entertaining at best,
reprehensibly counterproductive at worst.

“Why are we here?” Harvey asked rhetorically, as a way of starting the discussion. “We
are here because we are dissatisfied with our current way of life. When I say our, I do not
mean we three people specifically, but more generally every person in the United States
of America. We are not satisfied with the lifestyle, the culture, or the society that
contemporary American life affords these people. These people are our fellow country-
folk; whether fourth-generation Americans whose ancestors’ ancestors’ ancestors were
born here, or first-generation immigrants like Jane and myself, the American people live
in an insular society that seems to have been specifically calculated to prevent people
from forming meaningful social relationships with each other. This limitation is neither
explicitly encouraged nor actively cultivated by any government, for there is no law
against people congregating together or speaking to one another; this limitation is
thoroughly enforced at the social level, for our social mores inform the ideology that
people should not speak to each other on a personal basis, that money is our sole reason
for doing anything at all, and that there is no greater good that any person could extract
from their lives than the preservation of the current way of life.”

Pausing to observe whether either Jane or Tim had anything to add at this point, Harvey
paused to take a sip of water. Each of them had a water bottle, which made this meeting
feel all the more legitimate and important, since all important meetings between decision-
making people involved each person having a bottle of water and sipping from it
occasionally.

Responded to by silence—and, in that silence, apparent complicit agreement from his

discussion-mates—Harvey continued: “Why are we dissatisfied with the present
American way of life? What makes us different from other people? For Jane and myself,
it may simply be the fact that we are foreigners, immigrants from countries where people
are willing to speak to each other as though they were human beings. As for you, Tim…
You’re not a stranger to this country, right?”

“No, I was born here,” Tim replied. “I think it’s just that I’m mentally ill.”

“Well, that works just as well,” Harvey concluded. “Don’t get me wrong,” he clarified,.
“there are some good things about this country. I love the freedom of speech. Even
though it’s no longer guaranteed as a ‘right’ to people, there are still few places in the
world where you can as freely say whatever is on your mind without fear of
repercussions, unlike countries like Canada, where you can be charged with a crime just
for saying something that isn’t socially acceptable.”

“That is an admirable freedom to allow people,” Jane agreed, “but what good is that
freedom when nobody will listen, and when you can’t actually say things to people? Of
course you can mutter things to yourself, but you can’t say things to people because then
you’ll be charged with speaking to them in a personal or informal manner. And even if
you could get on television or something, in which case you could say whatever you
wanted to say, nobody would actually pay any attention to you unless you had big breasts
or you were talking about money, sex, or something similarly titillating. In a society
where people are so conditioned to ignore meaningful things that they instinctively tune
them out, freedom of speech is about as good as the freedom to talk to a brick wall.”

“It seems like that’s the core of the problem,” Tim interjected. “People are only interested
in what they’re interested in. There’s no desire to look beyond their own little sphere of
interest.”

“In a way, that, too, is a good freedom to have,” Harvey admitted. “People’s minds are
their own, and it would be the most dehumanizing, cruel thing to do to people if anyone
were to attempt to take control of their minds and force them to think about certain
things.”
“But people do that all the time,” Tim pointed out. “In fact, that’s exactly what Marketers
do.”

Tim and Harvey instinctively shot glances at Jane, who smiled sweetly in a way that
communicated she would be pleased to stab them both. “Actually, Marketing is only
partly about influencing people,” she said cooly. “It’s more about becoming aware of
people so that you know what the Market will be ready to accept. I’ve never been a
Salesperson, but I get the impression that Sales is more directly about trying to fool or
force people into buying something.”

Now placed on the defensive, Tim employed his Salesman’s tactic of changing the
subject. “Speaking seriously, though, shouldn’t it be that way? Shouldn’t people have the
freedom to think about their own things and not be forced to think about what society
thinks is ‘good’?”

“You raise a crucial and fundamental question,” Harvey said slowly, for Tim had a point
and Harvey wanted to make sure that the thoughts were clear in his own mind. “If we try
to force people to think and act in a socially responsible way, we’re really going back in
time to a previous era, a time when governments put up posters telling people that they
should conserve water or exercise more. There was a time in history when it was standard
for governments to set standards of normalcy, for the betterment of everyone who lived
within that society. We—and by we, I mean the United States—abandoned that mentality
long ago in favor of personal freedom, because the emphasis on this country really is
squarely on personal freedom, on being able to think, do, and say whatever each
individual person wants. It’s sort of a selfish mentality, but the age of existentialism and
Ayn Rand convinced people that things should be that way, that the only real meaning for
any person was within themselves, that only through attendance to their own personal
values could they extricate any meaning from their lives.”

“You can’t trust people with that, though,” Tim pointed out. “If you give people the
freedom to do whatever they want, they’re basically like little kids set loose in a candy
store. They’ll take advantage of it in a way that abuses that freedom.”

“Which is precisely what we see today,” Harvey agreed. “But I think the understanding
we’re coming to is that there has to be a balance. We can’t—and shouldn’t try to—force
people into doing or thinking a certain way. But something has to change from the
present state. We’re living in a state of… How should I describe it…”

“The idea is not new,” Jane interjected. “What you’re talking about is anomie, a word
that entered English in the early 20th century and simply refers to an absence of norms.
The idea was that if people were utterly left to their own individual desires and ideas,
they would become alienated from each other, and social ties would break down.”

“Which is exactly what we’re seeing today,” Harvey affirmed. “What we’re seeing is the
idea of personal freedom taken to an extreme. An extreme it shouldn’t have gone to. But I
really hate saying that. It sounds like a horrible thing to say, because it almost seems like
we’re here to take freedom away from people, like we’re arguing in favor of placing
restrictions on people and reverting to a fascist society in which people are punished for
not adhering to what some elite group of arbitrators thinks is proper.”

“Is that what we’re here to do?” Tim asked quietly.

After a moment of silence, Jane prodded them: “We haven’t decided that yet. We haven’t
even yet decided what we’re here to do. All this talk is fascinating, but are we here to just
gather around a table and talk about our sociopolitical philosophy? Weren’t we supposed
to effect some kind of change from our mutual association?”

“Okay, yes, you’re right,” Harvey confirmed. “So what are we here to do? We are a
group of contemporary revolutionaries. That’s another word I hate using, because it
sounds so violent and chaotic, like we’re going to go running through the streets with
Molotov cocktails under our arms, throwing them at random people or buildings. That
kind of thing is no good at all; it doesn’t really change anything. All it does is make more
problems for people. We need to approach this methodically and intelligently. So, I guess
that’s a first guiding principle of who or what this little association is: We’re a group of
rebels devoted to peaceful action, a strict code of total non-violence, like what Gandhi
taught back when he… Uh, whenever he did whatever he did.”

Jane rolled her eyes, which Harvey was pretty sure she did just to annoy him, but it was
Tim who spoke next. “That’s not really an answer to the question, though,” Tim pointed
out. “You’ve answered the question by stipulating something we will not do: We will not
use violence or destruction as tools. That’s all well and good, but this little project of ours
will utterly lack any identity until we can explicitly lay out something that we will do.”

“Gandhi brought people together,” Jane said suddenly. She was more cultured and well-
read than either of them, and Harvey was glad to have her for this discussion. “Yet
ironically enough, the purpose of that unity was, in a sense, to divide people. He was one
of the most visible proponents for the liberation of India from Britain. Gandhi insisted
that the Europeans should leave India so that India could be united.”

“Gandhi was an organizer,” Harvey added. “His role was not to physically perform some
great act, but simply to provide mentorship and leadership for his people, so that they
could have a common ideology to unite around. Gandhi didn’t actually ‘do’ anything at
all; his sole significant contribution to the world was his ideas.”

“Speaking of uniting and dividing along political lines, maybe we should just break up
the country,” Tim said. “The real problem is that the United States has become too
diverse. Remember ‘Diversity our strength?’ It’s really the other way around; diversity is
our weakness now. We have too many different factions, too many special-interest
groups, too many divergent lifestyles and too many people leading them in this country
for one system to adequately serve them all. Why don’t we just push for breaking up the
country into two parts? There could be one for the left-wingers and one for the right-
wingers. That way each group would have unity among themselves, and they wouldn’t
have to bother each other or complain that their government was catering to the other
side.”

“What about the no-wingers?” Harvey countered. “There are lots of people who strongly
dislike politics and political solutions, and would prefer a nonpartisan environment.
Would you need a third country to accommodate those people?”

“We could do that,” Tim agreed. “We could do it so that people wouldn’t even need to
move around too much. We could segregate the South into a country with a right-wing
leadership, make the West a place for the left-wing freestyling folks, and make New
England a third option for people who insisted on living in the place with the worst
weather in the world.”

“Okay… Tim, that’s exactly the kind of partisan cheap shot that we want to avoid,”
Harvey said, wincing slightly in frustration. “We need to avoid this becoming political,
because anything political will always degrade into an endless, pointless fight in which
each person simply defends their own selfish interests.”

“It was just a joke,” Tim said evenly. “And it wasn’t even a political joke, at that. It was a
regional joke; I was just commenting on the weather of the region, not the politics.
Anyway, once again you’re defining us by something that we’re not. If this isn’t a
politically-motivated group, fine, but you have yet to actually lay down something that
we are.”

“He’s right,” Jane affirmed with a nod.

“Well, thank you very much,” Harvey replied. “It’s nice that you agree. I thought you
were on my side.”

“Side? This isn’t about sides,” Jane said. “We’re all supposed to be on the same side, all
three of us. If this is about taking sides, then we’re already an ineffective organization,
because we’ll simply be torn apart by infighting.”

“Okay, okay, you’re right,” Harvey conceded. “So what are we about?”

“I thought you were supposed to be defining that,” Jane said with an expectant
expression.

“Me? Why me?” Harvey wondered. “I thought we were all supposed to be doing this
together.”

“We were, before you came up with the idea of us taking sides,” Jane said. But she could
not hold back the smile that betrayed the teasing nature of her words.
“Okay, let’s get back on track,” Harvey said, feeling compelled to steer the conversation
back toward progress. “We’ve agreed that the most powerful contribution people can
make to the world is ideas.”

“Did we agree on that?” Jane interrupted. “You said that ideas are so important, but I
don’t remember you asking us for a consensus about that.”

“Okay, fair enough,” Harvey agreed. “Can we agree that ideas are the things that are most
likely to elicit the kind of changes we’re looking for, as opposed to doing something
more physical or tangible?”

“I guess that depends,” Tim pointed out. “I know you said we wouldn’t use destruction as
a tool, but what about something like the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement? We
could conclude that the best thing for humanity to do is to collectively eliminate itself. If
we could create a giant nuclear explosion that wiped out humanity, that would be a
significant change, wouldn’t it?”

Harvey and Jane glanced at each other significantly. What Tim had said was meant to be
a whimsical remark bordering on a joke, but Tim was a relatively thoughtless person who
wasn’t much in the habit of thinking before he spoke, in stark contrast to Harvey and
Jane, both of whom were dark and serious on the inside—perhaps excessively so. Harvey
and Jane had never actually discussed it between themselves, but they knew that they
were both too intelligent to ever be happy, and both had likely had near brushes with
suicide on multiple occasions. The option to self-obliterate was always there, and it had
taken some considerable effort of will to carry themselves thus far without reaching for
that most simple and certain solution to all their problems. They had resolved to bring
themselves to this point because something inside them refused to accept the idea that
their lives were really that worthless, that they had been put on Earth merely so that they
could extinguish themselves before seeing things through to some kind of meaningful
conclusion. Was that belief noble or naïve? Harvey saw a flicker of sorrow cross Jane’s
eyes, and he felt a strange sense of empathy for her, for he knew the pain she felt, the
pain of being all too conscious of one’s own existence. In that moment, in a flood of
clarity, Harvey realized what he had subconsciously refused to admit to himself: He cared
about her in a way that he could not, or would not, confess.

“I don’t think that’s a change I could advocate,” Harvey said quietly.

“I refuse to associate myself with that kind of ideology,” Jane agreed. It took some
strength to refuse to give up when all you wanted to do was die. But Jane was tough. If
she insisted on being tough, Harvey wasn’t about to let her show him up.

“I wasn’t seriously suggesting it,” Tim said. “It was just idle speculation.”

“No doubt,” Harvey said with a nod. “If there is no further objection, then, can we agree
that ideas are the things that really shape the world? That would be the best way… No,
pardon me, that would be the only way to really effect meaningful change. The problem
here isn’t a physical property. We have a software problem on our hands, or rather, in our
heads. There’s something wrong with people’s brains. How people think is, for lack of a
better word, just plain wrong.” After a pause during which he received no further
objection, Harvey continued: “Then I propose that we become a group of thinkers. I
hesitate to use the word intellectuals, because that word has connotations of elitist,
wealthy people who are out of touch with reality. Do we call ourselves a think-tank?”

“That term has possibly even more sinister connotations,” Jane interjected. “It connotes
shadowy political conspiracies that seek to influence governments for their own power-
hungry ends.”

“Then I guess we’re just a bunch of bohemians who are out to create influence with our
lives. Maybe we could call ourselves The Influencers.”

“Uh, that sounds a little too much like influenza,” Jane protested.

“That’s actually pretty awesome,” Tim suddenly exulted. “It makes us sound shadowy
and mysterious… Dangerous.”

Jane rolled her eyes. Harvey resisted doing the same. He had been hoping to nurture an
informal organization of people that was neither dangerous nor even particularly
secretive, but simply isolated, clustered, tight-knit. That vision was becoming
increasingly unlikely. “We don’t want to appear dangerous,” he insisted. “In fact, quite
the opposite. We’re not here to threaten anyone. We’re here to work together with
people. We need to get away from this us-versus-them mentality. We’re not fighting
against anyone. The people who are contributing to the world’s problems are human
beings, just like us. They just have a different mentality. Once again, we’re here to work
with people, not fight against them, and the best way to do that is with ideas. We want to
come to a mutual understanding of people, so that we can establish common ground
before trying to change anything.”

“That would be my department,” Tim suddenly declared. “I’m the Salesperson among us,
and that’s exactly what I do every time I make a Sale: I try to level with the customer,
creating common ground to work with before fooling them into… Uh, convincing them
to buy.”

“And Jane is a Marketer,” Harvey said thoughtfully. “She’s good at analyzing people and
trends, and crafting thought patterns that will most effectively resonate with people and
drive home a message. Sales and Marketing people are sometimes regarded as evil
because they work for businesses that are after profit. The reality is, though, that almost
anything which is made for public consumption—including any kind of art—needs
publicity people to present things to the public. In truth, there isn’t anything wrong with
Marketing as long as it’s not done selfishly, with a mind to just make money. I haven’t
seen Jane’s work, but I’m convinced she could be an effective publicity or public-
relations person, a spokesperson, a facilitator of awareness. The Sales people are just as
important, since they’re the ones who actually meet with individual consumers and help
them in making decisions. That, too, is a genuinely helpful role as long as the Salesperson
isn’t just after a quick sale and is working with the customer’s best interests, rather than
the maximum profit gain, in mind.”

“Well, well, aren’t we suddenly gracious toward business roles,” Jane said with an ironic
smile. “And since you’re neither a Sales nor a Marketing person, but rather a Business
Process Analyst, what does that make you? The token useless person of the group?”

“Something like that. Actually, analysis is important too, since that’s the process that
does all the logical thinking, kind of like the CPU in a computer.”

“So you’re the brains and we’re the minions?”

Harvey ignored that one. “It seems like we have all the pieces needed to create a full
picture. After all, when a government devises a curriculum to be taught in schools,
there’s a person who decides exactly what information people are supposed to know,
there’s a person who packages all that information and determines how it is to be
delivered to people, and then there are the teachers who actually take that curriculum and
teach it to students. That’s really what we’re after here, isn’t it? An education, or perhaps
a re-education of people.”

“I think that might be part of what makes you two so different from the rest of society,”
Tim added. “You two were raised and educated in other countries. Having grown up here
and gone through school, I can confirm that it was all done with money in mind. Even
when the teachers wanted us to learn about things that had nothing to do with money,
even when the teachers really genuinely cared about history, or sociology, or whatever,
and really wanted to teach it to us, the justification behind it, the reasons that we were
given for studying—by teachers, parents, and peers—the reason that we were told that we
should learn, was because graduating would help us get better jobs. That was the only
goal in mind. From childhood, we were ingrained with this idea that school was a
competition that we had to win, so that we could be Successful in our adult lives.”

“I didn’t grow up in this country, but I went to university here,” Jane added, “and I can
confirm that the mindset behind it all is utterly money-driven. People who are genuinely
curious about learning are rare, and even the few who come into it with that mentality
usually leave school having lost the joy of figuring things out. The role of the so-called
education system in brainwashing people is key, and since everyone is legally required to
go to school, the function of that education becomes to indoctrinate whole societies,
creating that nation’s own army of young, quasi-intelligent, quasi-educated people who
are ready to defend their country’s values because that’s what they were taught to do.”

“People don’t learn well when they’re older,” Tim pointed out. “They say that by the
time a person becomes an adult, their brain has already largely fused into a certain pattern
of thinking, and while that pattern can be partially changed, its fundamental structure will
remain, kind of like how you can cut off limbs from a tree but its grain will still retain the
same alignment when those limbs grow back.”
“We’ll just have to do our best, then,” Harvey concluded. “Older people can still learn.
It’s true that a leopard doesn’t change its spots, and so we can’t expect an adult to just
suddenly turn their life around, but then again, that’s not really what we’re trying to do,
anyway. We’re not trying to take people and shape them into some kind of a mold that
we want everyone to be like. We’re just here to promote good thinking and good ideas.”

“And who decides what’s ‘good,’ given how inherently and supremely subjective that
word is?” Jane asked pointedly.

“We do, I guess,” Harvey said with a shrug. “Ultimately, everyone can only do what they
think is best, and so we can only promote our own ideology because it is what we believe
is best. We’re not perfect, but I feel quite strongly that our way of thinking is objectively
better than the money-obsessed idiocy that the world has gone mad for.”

“And just what is our brand of thinking, Mr. Speaks-For-All-Of-Us?”

“Well, for one thing, an emancipation of people from the money trap. Our society is
structured such that people simply cannot live in any reasonable way without money. We
need to change that. We need to detach ourselves from money, and get rid of it.”

“But if we did that, we’d die very quickly,” Tim pointed out. “You need money just for
basic life functions.”

“That’s the thing: You don’t,” Harvey pointed out. “You really don’t. Money is a man-
made invention. Somehow, before money was invented and manufactured, people still
survived without it. All you really need in this world is food and protection from basic
elements of nature, like carnivorous animals and extremes of temperature. You can
secure both of those things without money.”

“Where would you get food without money?” Tim wondered. “There is no place in our
society where you can get food without money.”

“You know the old saying ‘Money doesn’t grow on trees?’ Well, the same isn’t true of
food. It quite literally does grow on trees.”

“Sure, but we don’t have a tree. We don’t even have any place to plant a tree.”

“Maybe that’s what people need,” Harvey mused, rubbing the side of his face
thoughtfully. “Maybe every person needs to be given a piece of land so that they can be
independent, so that they can grow their own food and fend for themselves.”

“The country is too populous to give much land to each person if you distributed it
evenly,” Jane pointed out. “It might be possible to give each person just barely enough
land to grow some basic crops if you allocated the entire country for that purpose, but
that would leave no room for any other type of land use. To maintain any semblance of
society, we would still need a significant amount of space for housing and other types of
buildings, as well as roads to connect them all. All of this, of course, ignores the basic
impossibility of doing something like this in the first place, because again, you’re talking
about convincing everyone to tear down all the buildings in the entire country and revert
to a nationwide agricultural society in which everyone is a farmer. That’s going to be a
very tough proposition to push to hundreds of millions of people who are addicted to
their cash flows. And even if you could, do you really want to live in a nation of
farmers?”

“What’s wrong with farmers?” Harvey wondered. “There’s nothing wrong with planting
and harvesting crops.”

“Well, no, but shouldn’t a society have educated people as well? Who would maintain the
ideology that we’d worked so hard to instill in people?”

“Farmers can be educated,” Harvey countered. “The idea of an intelligent, sophisticated

agricultural worker isn’t impossible. In my home country, I knew plenty of farmers who
were quite well-read and intellectually vigorous. A farmer doesn’t have to be a backward-
thinking, ignorant country bumpkin, just as not every urban dweller has to be a fast-
talking con who’s out to sell you something. Both of those are American stereotypes.
Granted, most of them are that way in our society today, but there was a time when cities
had people who defied the stereotype, and the same is true of people in rural areas. They
can readily keep fields growing by just tending to them for a few hours a day—if even
that much—and then spend other time developing themselves intellectually.”

“Fair enough, but given that we hardly have anyone who’s interested in learning new
things now, in our information-rich society, do you really think that you could get all
those farmers to start seeking out information and educating themselves?”

“Yes!” Harvey insisted. “It happened in the country I came from! This isn’t some kind of
goofy myth or legend; it still happens today. The reason Americans aren’t intellectually
curious is because they have so much media thrust upon them that they don’t have to go
out and seek anything—thus they learn to stop being curious.”

Jane still seemed unconvinced. “This sounds like something that might be promulgated to
people on some ridiculous talk show or public service announcement: Every citizen
should grow their own food! It’s a sound bite, a simple way for people to improve their
community without actually creating any lasting or effective change, like donating old
clothes to some charity or making sure that you turn down your thermostat in winter.”

“You’re wrong, though,” Harvey said. “This isn’t just a simple, trivial change that will
hardly impact anything; it would change everything. Today, the whole reason why people
submit to the money culture is because they have to. Even if people are humble and
simple enough to not care about mindless pop culture, they still need to eat. That’s how
any culture can force its people to do things without actually literally forcing them to do
anything: By controlling the food supply. Since everyone needs to eat, if you can
completely control the food supply, you can control what people will do, since no matter
how sincere or motivated or austere someone is, they’ll still need to eat. For everyone to
control their own individual food supply would change everything. Everything.”

“We haven’t even begun to discuss how you would actually organize something like
this,” Jane said slowly, trying to put the pieces together in her head. “You need to
remember that allowing people to take a plot of land and make it their own was a lot
more viable in the 19th century when America was still a wild frontier and there was
much more land available than even the greediest people could grab. It’s not like that
today. America is, geographically, a large country, but it’s also a very populous country,
and there just isn’t that much space left. Today, we’d need to face the problems involving
distribution and ownership of land and property—the kinds of social problems that most
other world countries have had to deal with for centuries, and which the United States is
only just barely beginning to address on a national level since it’s finally running out of
available land. How would you ensure that each person got an equal-sized piece of land?
How would you enforce ownership, and ensure that one person didn’t infringe on
another’s land or steal their sheep? These are the kinds of complications that any new
ideas face, and we’ll need to think things through before we can commit to any kind of
ideology.”

Harvey made a wry face. “Perhaps this whole idea of giving everyone their own arable
land is casting the net a bit wide.”

“I think so. Don’t get me wrong, I like that we’re thinking big; it definitely beats starting
some activist group that thinks it’s going to save the world by encouraging people to use
eco-friendly laundry detergent or something like that, but there has to be a middle
ground. Thinking that we’re going to change how the entire nation’s land use is allocated
is an ambitious—perhaps over-ambitious—project for we three people.”

“Um, guys?” Tim interjected, looking a bit nervous. “Are we really serious about this
whole thing? Are we really going to tear down all the buildings and replace everything
with farmers’ fields?”

Harvey and Jane exchanged glances. Harvey noticed that they had been doing this a lot
during the course of the conversation. Apparently it was finally beginning to dawn on
Tim—who had just joked about nuking the entire planet to death—that all this revolution
stuff would require some time and effort.

Jane was the first to respond: “I have a better question: Are you really serious? Are you
actually as stupid as you act, or is this whole conversation just a novelty adventure that
you thought you’d go along with for jollies?” Tim appeared to cower a little, and Harvey
was a little amused, but also somewhat concerned for Tim’s sake. Jane was a forceful
woman with a strong personality, and while Harvey didn’t mind that at all—indeed, it
was one of the things that most endeared her to him—Tim wasn’t quite sure what to do
with a woman who spoke to him in this way. Harvey detected a certain edge of contempt
in the question. Although Jane needled Harvey as well from time to time, she did so in an
I like you enough to make fun of you kind of way, whereas with Tim, she projected more
of a I dislike you enough to belittle you air. Had she spoken to Harvey in this way, he
would have been perceptive enough to have his feelings hurt, but Tim was less hurt than
intimidated.

“Jane, I think that Tim is just trying to clarify our true intent here,” Harvey said gently.
“He doesn’t know what we’re here for, and frankly, I’m trying to figure out the same.
After all, we’ve yet to really lay out a goal for ourselves.”

“And I guess I’m not. I guess I should just go along with whatever you men decide is
best.”

“It’s nothing like that,” Tim said, now visibly leaning back in his chair. Harvey noticed
that Jane was doing the opposite: Her leaning-forward aspect made her look oddly
predatory, particularly in conjunction with her huge, alert eyes that seemed to see
everything. “I just don’t know that I’m ready to get behind something like that. I mean, I
wasn’t prepared for something like this. We’re talking about getting rid of money. All of
it. Are we really going to get rid of money and become a bartering society? I have a
life… I mean, I’m a Salesperson, I Sell things to people every day. I can’t just leave all
that behind.”

“Can’t? Or won’t?” Jane asked.

Tim stared at her helplessly. The intended answer was obvious, and Harvey felt pretty
sure that even in Tim’s own mind he knew the truth, but he could not bring himself to
answer Jane either way. “Guys… I just don’t know if I’m ready for this. I’m sorry.”

“You’re free to leave,” Jane said breezily. “I won’t keep you here if your sports car and
your Sales are that dear to your heart.” This was particularly amusing, because although
Harvey knew for a fact that Tim did indeed drive an expensive sports car, neither of them
had mentioned this to Jane, so either she was using the idea of the sports car
metaphorically, or she had simply guessed.

Tim looked like he wanted to cry, but he knew what priority was more important to him.
“Harvey, I’m sorry… I don’t think I can do this.”

Harvey nodded. “It’s all right. Will you at least think about it for a while?”

“I will, I promise. Thank you. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. We’ll talk again, okay?” Harvey said, trying to sound encouraging.

“Sure,” Tim said with a nod that communicated his mind was already made up.

“Why did you do that?” Harvey asked after Tim had left.
“He was wasting our time,” Jane asserted. “You could tell he wasn’t serious about any of
this. We’re better off without him. Trust me, Harvey, I’m sure you thought he was a nice
guy and blah blah blah, but he would have made more problems for us than solutions.
You’re the real thing. I’m the real thing. We want people who are the real thing.”

“Well, what are we going to do now?”

“I’m going to go home and forget that this conversation happened. You should probably
do the same. We’ll talk later, but right now I just want to go home.” Without further ado,
she stood up and walked away—apparently her “home” of a jail cell was preferable to
remaining here.

Then again, perhaps she’d had a different home in mind. The next time Harvey went to
visit Jane, he found that her sentence was over, and she had been released. He had no idea
where to find her now. They were not destined to work together. But they had each been
an important influence on the other, and their thinking would continue to influence each
other.
Chapter 8: United we fall

The debacle of their three-person team had given Harvey significant cause to reflect upon
the nature of human relationships and how quickly they could be forged or broken. The
underlying idea that lent value to diversity was that different people could complement
each other by filling in each other’s gaps, sort of like in The Lost Vikings or Gobliiins. It
was a simple and effective idea—although everyone was different, if they worked
together, they could build something that was more than the sum of their parts.

Yet for this to happen, people need to have a common goal or ideology that unites them,
and that’s where the hard part comes in. Guiding independent humans is harder than
herding cats; people tend to be notoriously perverse and divergent in where their lives
take them. How could humanity unite toward a common goal when people were so
different? Perhaps they couldn’t… Perhaps they shouldn’t. Maybe it was best for people
to remain in splintered cultures with different goals that reflected their own values.
Efforts at uniting people seemed to do more harm than good, for the only way that the
world had found to effectively unite people around anything was to involve necessity. If
you tell people that something is good, that it will help others, that it will make them
healthier or smarter or nicer or any other pleasant adjective, they will ignore it. However,
it remained true that no one can escape the fundamental physical needs of the human
body. If someone could convince people that they had to do something in order to
survive, people would unite behind that cause and scream its praises to their dying breath.
Not for happiness, nor for wisdom, nor for love did people go, but simply to prolong the
desperate struggle for survival that they might experience a few more years of their
worthless, miserable lives.

Whatever happened to the universality of the human experience? What happened to the
idea that human beings all over the world, no matter what their cultural background, will
inevitably experience shared thoughts, feelings, and situations simply by virtue of the
very nature of existence itself? The idea that all sentient beings draw from a common
pool of knowledge and experiences was not new—it dated at least to Plato, whose belief
in the Forms had caused him to conclude that all beings which learn are learning the same
things. Platonic epistemology, it was called—dubbed “Halikaarnianism” by Neal
Stephenson, who extended the idea into the theory that even if aliens from a distant planet
visited Earth, they would have mutual experiences and ideas with humans simply because
they existed.

Why didn’t it work out that way even among people on Earth? Why couldn’t people of
the same species, from the same planet, find anything in common to share?

It must have something to do with what people do with themselves, Harvey mused.
Somehow, artificially-created barriers were being set up that caused people to reject
universal human principles in favor of invented ones. The divisiveness created by
contemporary civilization must be the result of suppression of universal human principles
in favor of those held valuable by society. It seemed hard to believe in a society as free as
America, where there were no real social values—other than the human right—of any
kind, but Harvey remembered what Jane had said about anomie, and it certainly seemed
true that in a society where there were no shared values or expectations, people would
become increasingly atomized and distant. Perhaps, paradoxically, the lack of social
values was a value in itself…

All at once, it struck him. The epiphany was so obvious, and yet it had taken him so long
to realize it, that Harvey was immediately driven to find a pen, pull out the book that Jane
had given to him, and begin writing:

The lack of social values IS a social value! And so is the separation of people! The
“human right,” which promises people freedom, actually stems from the social value that
people not disturb each other, that people can do “whatever they want, as long as it does
not infringe on someone else’s right to do the same.” This idea is absolute drivel, and has
caused more damage to people and societies in our contemporary age than any other, for
it plays on selfishness from both possible angles—it implies entitlement for people to get
whatever they want, but it also maintains that people can ignore the needs of others,
since to interfere in the lives of others would count as infringing on their own right. Far
from allowing people the freedom to make their own decisions, the overwhelming
emphasis on people not “violating” each other by avoidance of talking personally to
each other strips people of their freedom to associate, communicate, and relate in ways
that make human relationships meaningful. It is an artificial—invented by people, not
nature— limit that society holds people to. People have been taught this way since they
were children, which is remarkably effective, because children are always selfish, and
they don’t like to share. If you always give them what they want, they will grow up
thinking that they are entitled to having their desires fulfilled; meanwhile, children are
simultaneously taught that if they want anything, they have to go out and take it
themselves, since they cannot and should not expect sufficient decency from anyone to
actually facilitate sharing. Reality, of course, is the inverse of what children are taught:
People cannot simply have whatever they want, nor should they feel entitled to the same.
People cannot simply ignore the condition of others, nor, again, should they feel entiteld
to do so.

“Hey Harvey, you got a minute?” Harvey’s thoughts were interrupted by a strangely
familiar voice behind him. When he turned around to look at the speaker, he found
himself face-to-face with Jeff, the shelving unit’s landlord.

A visit from a landlord is never a good thing. They may be understanding and
accommodating or they may be strict and harsh, but either way, like other types of
managers, they never actually make themselves known unless something is wrong, and so
if they come up to you soliciting your attention, you can be assured that bad news is
about to follow. Harvey’s rent was paid on time, which was doubly bad news, because
most landlords are primarily concerned with money, and if they have to solicit a tenant’s
attention for something other than money, the purpose behind their attention must be so
egregiously bad that it is likely to be very bad indeed.
“Sure, I’ve got a minute. What’s up?” Harvey asked, trying to sound pleasant and keep
the edge of dread out of his voice.

“Hey, I hate to bother you with this, but some of the other tenants around have
complained that you might have been seen carrying or reading a book while on your shelf
at some time in the recent past,” Jeff said. Harvey noticed Jeff’s eyes looking past
Harvey’s face at the book which was indeed in Harvey’s hands at that very moment, and
which Jeff was apparently being kind enough to pretend to be blind to. “Now, I don’t
want to make a big deal out of this, because I’m sure it’s just a rumor and you were
probably holding a rented movie or something like that, but you should know that books
make people very uncomfortable. Not many people read… Or rather, not many people
read entire books. Of course people read street signs and price tags and things like that,
but to actually be using a book is the kind of thing that we don’t want to encourage
around here, because when people behave in an unusual manner like that, it makes people
feel like maybe that person is a terrorist, since terrorists tend to behave suspiciously, and
I don’t want this building to be perceived as a haven for terrorists.”

“No problem. I’m not a terrorist,” Harvey assured Jeff.

“Oh, I have no doubt,” Jeff agreed. “I mean, even if you did have a book around, I’m sure
it’s just a romance novel or action thriller, and not something which might express some
kind of relevance to anything social or political, but you know, people talk amongst
themselves, and rumors start spreading, and before long, well, you know, some people
start suggesting that that guy on that shelf over there is someone who might be interested
in thinking for himself.”

“Um, aren’t people free to think for themselves if they want to do so?”

“Oh, absolutely, absolutely,” Jeff said a little too quickly. “Of course, this is America,
and people here are free. But the thing is, even though people are free to think for
themselves, it’s not something that most people actually do, and so if somebody starts
doing it, it just raises the ire of everybody around, you know? And we just really can’t
have that happening. Not at all. I’m sure you understand, right Harvey?”

“Yes, I do. I wouldn’t want to make anyone upset.”

“Of course not, neither of us wants to make anyone upset, and I think we both understand
that. Anyway, Harvey, you might want to check the terms of your renter’s lease
agreement, which stipulates that the housing shelf is for the tenant only, and is not to be
used for the storage or use of personal property, such as toothbrushes or books. Such
items are a fire hazard, which makes them an insurance liability.”

“What about the huge loudspeakers that some other people have on their shelves?”
Harvey asked. “Those speakers have so much current going through them that they could
easily catch fire if they overheat.”
“That’s different,” Jeff explained. “Those cost a lot of money, which makes them
protected property. Books are cheap. Plus, there’s no way to put DRM on books, because
they don’t have any kind of circuitry in them, so they’re seen as tools that can be too
easily abused by people who would like to spread information or ideas around without
charging for that information, which, of course, is exactly what terrorists do.”

“I get the idea,” Harvey said.

“Yeah, just make sure that no one around here sees you carrying, and especially reading
a book. I’m sure people sometimes do that kind of thing back in your home country, but
you have to understand, people here are free, and that means free from the burden of
regret and sorrow that comes from analyzing things too deeply, which is what happens
when you start to read books.”

“Of course. I appreciate your explaining all this to me, Jeff. The world is a clearer place
to me now, because of your assistance.”

“I’m glad to help. Let me know if you have any questions. Later, Harvey.” And Jeff’s
head disappeared below the shelf as he went back down the housing ladder.

***

A few days later, in the late afternoon, Harvey was invited by a group of co-workers to a
“Sport Night” at one of their shelves. Apparently some sports tournament relating to
some sport that involved people handling a large ball was terminating in its culminating
game tonight, and people were excited about this. Harvey had never been to a “Sport
Night” before, but he had some idea of what such an event entailed, and so for
clarification’s sake, he asked what would happen during “Sport Night.” Harvey was
informed that the evening would involve a lot of watching a television broadcast of
uniformed people running around a field while handling a large ball, the consumption of
large amounts of alcohol, and a great deal of boisterous shouting and laughter, all of
which was meant to add up to a lot of “fun.” Harvey’s mind processed this information as
follows: “Sport Night” is a night on which people use their expensive cable television
service to watch programming which fills their minds with empty calories, while
consuming a great deal of poisonous liquid that fills said people’s bodies with empty
calories, and in return drains their wallets of the money that was required for the
purchase of the aforementioned cable TV and toxic liquid, while simultaneously
bombarding the same people with frequent advertising that tells them how important it is
to purchase yet more stultifying goods and services.

It didn’t take Harvey too long to come to a decision. He was polite about it, but he said
no.

He’d been wrong about what people needed. At one point in time, he had simply thought
that people needed to come together. Now he saw that even if this could be accomplished
without the lure of money or hedonism—which was doubtful—it would not be for the
betterment of the people involved. In fact, it might make them more antagonistic against
each other, less willing to understand each other. As Harvey returned to his shelving unit,
walked through the mind-destroying noise that was his neighbors’ music, and slowly
climbed the ladder to his shelf, it occurred to him that he would have remarkably little to
say to any of the people in the building who constantly played their audio systems too
loud, other than “Please turn down your music.” Whatever their backgrounds were, they
would likely be too far apart to find common ground. If they actually tried to talk to each
other, it would only make things worse than they already were; from where he was, on a
separate shelf where he could not see or communicate with the noisy neighbors in any
way, it was possible for Harvey to imagine that those neighbors were actually nice,
decent people, that they had long ago gone deaf and simply lost any sense of how loud
their music was. It was easy to give people the benefit of the doubt if you didn’t know
them. Getting to know them would only confirm in Harvey’s mind that they were nothing
more than worthless bags of meat filled with pus. It was better to keep people separate.

Yet Harvey wouldn’t give up on the idea that human relationships were important. They
still were; it was just a matter of forming the right kind of relationships. And doing that
required finding the right people to bring into one’s life. When you’re all alone without a
friend in the world, it sometimes seems like talking to someone, anyone is better than no
one at all. Once you’ve met a few people, however, you realize how vital it is that you
can actually engage with those people, how key it is to find people that you can click with
instead of just any random people you come across.

That had been his mistake. Harvey had assumed that because Tim seemed interested in
what Harvey talked about, that he would form a good addition to their team. This idea
had been misguided, and led to the dissolution of something that would probably have
been stronger if Tim had never joined it. Harvey clicked with Jane; Tim was a nice guy
but not made of the right stuff. Harvey should have stuck with what he had. Jane had
been a good woman, with a good head on her shoulders. The two of them would be
enough. He felt certain that even having just one trustworthy person to support and
encourage him would be enough, and make all the difference from simply encouraging
himself, which had begun to ring hollow, like the self-unaware ravings of a
schizophrenic. If only he could start over again… If only he and Jane could start over
again.

Right on queue, she appeared at the end of the walkway that led to his shelf. His eyes lit
up; he had another chance! She was determined, unfazed by the misstep they had taken,
and as she slowly walked toward him, he sat up and greeted her: “It’s good to see you.
Thank you for coming here. I was worried that you wouldn’t want to talk to me again.”

“I’m not going to be deterred by some Salesperson who thinks that he can lie to people
on most days of the week, then redeem his life by saying a few lofty-sounding words that
make him feel better about himself for a few hours on weekends. I’m not one to think
highly of myself, but I know I can do better than that. I believe you can, too.”
He nodded. “I feel the same way about you. I was just thinking that not all people are
equal.”

“Perhaps they’re born equal, but by their own decisions, they bring themselves apart from
everyone else.”

“Yes, precisely. I think Confucius said something like that: People are born close
together, but by practice, they learn to be far apart.”

She smiled. “You’re a philosopher. So am I. In fact, I believe that philosophy can

counteract those differences between people by looking beyond the stupid, shallow little
things that people adorn their personas with and looking into the core realities of the
human experience. You know that joke which gun enthusiasts are fond of, how ‘God
made men, but Colt made men equal?’ I’d say the same thing, except I’d replace ‘Colt’
with ‘Plato’ or someone like that. A person of great thoughts, who made huge ripples that
shook history, simply by thinking and speaking things which have the potential to
resonate with people from all cultures and walks of life.”

“But even though Plato is still widely known today, his ideas haven’t seemed to have
been very effective in bringing people together,” Harvey mused.

“Well, that’s probably partly because hardly anyone knows who he really was or what
any of his ideas were. I suspect that at most, people have heard the name, but not read
anything by him. It’s not as though Republic was ever made into a movie; it would be
pretty hard to turn it into a movie, I think.”

“Probably,” he agreed. Then, after a pause: “If we really seek to make the kind of
sweeping changes we’d like to see, though, we really have a lot of work ahead of us,
don’t we? Are we biting off more than we can chew? Is the problem we’re facing much
too large for just a couple of unkown people like us?”

“Maybe, but it’s not just us. We’re not going to create those sweeping changes overnight.
Things took a long time to get where they are; it’s going to take a long time to make
things better, probably even longer than it’s already been, because it’s much easier to
break something than to fix something. Remember, we might not even see the effects of
our efforts in our own lifetimes. Perhaps, at best, we can only hope to plant a small seed
that will not bear fruit until several generations from now.”

“That would require us to be pretty devoted. We’d have to devote our entire lives to
something that we won’t even be certain will lead to anything.”

She smiled suddenly, unexpectedly, and her eyes flashed as though the idea of devoting
your whole life to something were a challenge she relished. “I’m willing to devote myself
to something good. It beats whatever we’ve been devoting ourselves to thus far. I feel
like we’ve already wasted so much of our lives pursuing stupid things that don’t benefit
either us or anyone else.”
He lowered his gaze for a moment and reflexively put a hand over his chest, as though to
assure himself that his vital organs were still intact. He wasn’t old; they were both in their
late twenties. Yet time was moving on, and they weren’t getting any younger. They were
almost thirty. In another ten years, they would already be noticing the first signs of
getting old. And once they began showing up, those marks would only deepen.

“How much time do you think we have, Jane?” Harvey asked somewhat miserably. “I
used to be bright-eyed and enthusiastic, like Tim. I still am, to some degree… At least,
compared to most people I think I am, but I’ve slipped. I’m more burned-out, more
cynical, more hopeless, and I haven’t even finished my third decade of life. How long do
you think we have before we figure we’re just too old to worry about changing the world
and make the core focus of our lives making more money so we can buy better a better
shelf, get a car, and see how many children we can generate?”

Too late, Harvey realized that the latter idea was a bit more suggestive than he had
intended to imply; he had not specifically meant with each other, but there was the
possibility of his words being interpreted that way. Fortunately, Jane appeared to
understand what Harvey had meant. “I think we still have at least a few years,” she said
thoughtfully.

“I don’t want to think that I have five years left to live. That seems like a death sentence.
I don’t want to be some ineffective, worthless person who has decades of life ahead in
which I have nothing to look forward to but tending to my own tiny life and not
contributing anything useful to the world. When you have kids, that’s it, those kids
become your life, and there’s nothing after that.”

“You can be a family person and still contribute things to the world.”

“But it’s so much harder. Children take up almost all of your time and resources.”

“I like children,” she said simply.

“The fact that you like something doesn’t mean it’s something that you can or should
have,” Harvey moaned, trying not to be rude but increasingly working himself into an
emotional state that he didn’t want to be in. “I’m sure that rich people like their cars and
their obnoxiously loud audio electronics, too.”

“I think I want to have children some day,” she said quietly.

Harvey paused and ran a hand over his forehead. He was entirely uncertain how to
interpret this statement. The pointed way that she said it to him could be interpreted in
two completely different ways: It could have simply been a rebuttal to his previous
statement, but the fact that she was targeting this remark directly at him had a possible
subtext of with you. To actually ask her whether this was her intent would be ludicrous,
but it was neither an idea that could be entirely dismissed. Jane was a woman of infinitely
many facets and surprises, consistently defying what Harvey would expect her to do or
say in a given situation, and he had long ago concluded that attempting to interpret or
predict her was a losing battle.

Finally, Harvey simply opted for honesty. “I don’t ever want children.”

“Well then, I hope someday you can find a woman who shares your desire to not have
children. Am I not good enough for you because I’d like to have kids someday? Can you
no longer bear to talk to me because I’m such a disagreeable person, someone who dares
to be so audacious as to have my own preferences?”

“No, no, Jane, I’m not saying anything of the sort. I’m just… I want to meet and get to
know people who share my vision, who are compatible with my view of the world and
our place in it.”

“Oh, I get it,” Jane said, suddenly speaking very quickly and becoming
uncharacteristically angry. “You need me to be perfect. You want me to be exactly what
you dream I am in your imagination, and the moment you find out something about me
that isn’t to your liking, then I’m no good. I’m incompatible, not fit to talk to you or share
ideas with you because we’re not on the same wavelength. That’s nice, Harvey. I’m
really pleased that you have so many people just dying to talk to you that you can pick-
and-choose your friends that way.”

Harvey was stunned. There seemed to be no good way to resolve this discussion. After a
moment of astonished silence, he began speaking very slowly and quietly: “Jane… I
enjoy talking to you. You are my best friend in all the world. There is no one, no one who
I can talk to the way I talk to you. I… I just think that we have some ideas that are
different, and… Maybe we just need some time to think about things.”

“Great idea. I’m happy to give you time to think about exactly what you want. Goodbye,
Harvey.” And without waiting for a response, she turned away and began walking toward
the ladder that would lead her down to the ground and out of the building.

“Jane!” he exclaimed. Then, more loudly, calling after her: “Jane!”

She must have heard, but she did not respond or turn around. He watched her climb down
the ladder until she disappeared beneath the shelf level he was on.

Why were relationships so hard? Not even “relationships” in the romantic sense, as in
people who were amorously attracted to each other, but just relationships as in people
who knew each other and maintained contact with each other. Why was it sometimes so
difficult to have reasonable people come together and get along with each other without
breaking into disagreements and conflict? Were humans really that different from each
other after all? Were they so delicately wound that the slightest upset between them
would ruin a friendship forever?
Harvey sighed. She would be back; he was sure of it. He felt quite certain that she
wouldn’t turn her back on him and never speak to him again over such a brief altercation.
She just needed some time to collect herself. And so, indeed, did he. In any human
relationship, time spent with other people was just as vitally important as time spent apart
so that people could maintain their individuality and reassess their own sense of self.

Or was it? Could people really be so fortunate as to be able to balance these opposites?
What was more important for a human life: Time spent socializing with other people, or
time spent alone in solitude? It was an absurd question, like asking whether the heart or
the lungs were more important; a person could not survive without either. Modern
American society, through concerted effort to get things as wrong as possible, had
succeeded in affording people neither. One could not go anywhere at all without escaping
the ubiquitous, oppressive presence of other people doing things like playing their music
much too loudly, talking about things that amused them, and just generally making their
close presence known, while simultaneously isolating themselves from people who were
just a few footsteps away. Society was fragmented, splintered, divided into such tiny
pieces that every person became isolated from every other even when they were in near
proximity to each other—indeed, often when they were quite literally pressed up against
each other. That people could be surrounded by others and still be so utterly alone was a
paradox that Harvey found both heartbreaking and infuriating.

…What if she didn’t come back? He would have lost everything. Absolutely everything.
It was a question so utterly ruinous that it did not bear thinking about, the kind of
question that one could not even contemplate for fear that just thinking about it would
make it true, like asking a bomb squad technician “What if we cut the wrong wire?” or a
mountain climber “What if there is an avalanche?” The best thing to do, the very best
thing to do, was to not even imagine it.

Feeling mentally and emotionally drained, Harvey opted to escape into sleep. He
normally was irritated when the need for sleep distracted him from thinking some
particularly interesting thoughts, but for once he was glad of the option to escape into a
state where he did not have to face his thoughts for a while. Lying down and pulling his
blankets over himself, Harvey closed his eyes.

While Harvey was spending some last few moments with his thoughts before attempting
to go to sleep, a man’s voice erupted from somewhere in the shelving unit. The sound
bounced around the walls sufficiently that it was basically impossible to pick up on where
the screaming man was, but he was indeed screaming, in such a throaty and unrestrained
way that it immediately recalled in Harvey’s mind the sound effect of Haggar executing
his arm-spinning special move in the arcade version of Final Fight. Yet the screaming
man was not left to scream solo, for a moment after he began his Serenade of the
Superfluous Brain, several other people in the shelving unit began similar cries, as if a
thousand Haggars had all decided to perform their special move in unison. These other
screamers, too, were of quite indeterminate location, but there were enough voices going
off to make it certain that there were a lot of them.
Random screams of this nature were not terribly uncommon in residential units, and
could be caused by any number of things: Perhaps someone had spilled their beer, or
decided to sing along with someone else’s supernaturally loud music. Or perhaps—
probably the most common reason, as far as Harvey could discern—the delicate balance
in someone’s mind between the disordered, primitive part of the brain and the self-
controlled part of the brain had been upset, with the former briefly overtaking the latter,
causing someone to indulge their inner monkey for a moment, allowing themselves the
release of screaming at the top of their lungs, attempting to bring their genitalia into
contact with whatever objects came to hand, and throwing feces in whatever direction the
person could get their arms to arc toward. These bursts of recreational activity usually
lasted only a few seconds; if they lasted longer, they were usually self-limiting by virtue
of the fact that the screaming person would typically lose consciousness within a few
minutes. Harvey had seen such events in his shelving unit many times—indeed, they
were nearly as prevalent as car alarms, and as such, neither particularly alarming nor a
cause for concern.

But this event was a little different, because there were many people doing the screaming
all at once. Indeed, as Harvey peered over the edge of his shelf and attempted to make
some sense of what had inspired his neighbors so, it became apparent that some event of
note had stirred these people into a frenzy, and after a few more moments, Harvey
inferred that the event in question was probably the termination of the sporting event that
was taking place tonight. As with most other sporting matches, the game tonight had
presumably ended in one of the teams beating the other. Harvey wasn’t certain whether
the local team had won or lost, but it didn’t really matter: If the preferred team had won,
the most probable reaction by the fans would be to celebrate by rioting. If the preferred
team had lost, the most probable reaction by the fans would be to protest by rioting.
Harvey had assumed that some reactions to the sporting event could get rather vivacious,
and so he had made a point of coming home to his shelf early to avoid any carnage on the
streets outside, but he had not anticipated that the celebrations in the shelving unit would
reach such a pitch. Within a matter of seconds, the clamor of screaming voices was
competing with the throb of the excessively bass-capable sound systems—which seemed
to have been turned up extra loud in response to the end of the sporting match—and the
streams of unadulterated volume seemed to unite into a uniform vibration, so powerful
that it was no longer sound, but rather some kind of ethereal force that shook the building
like an earthquake. Even with his earplugs in, Harvey’s ears hurt as the force reverberated
within his skull and rattled loose items there, such as Harvey’s teeth and eyeballs.

After a few minutes, Harvey found himself wondering whether the noise outside was
quite as loud, and whether his initial estimation of being relatively safe inside had been a
mistake, lest it be quieter or safer outdoors. In any event, the vibration level indoors
seemed to be sufficient to cause the building to shift, and out of concern that the
structural integrity of the building wouldn’t hold up to this treatment, Harvey unsteadily
pulled himself out of his shelf and onto the ladder that connected his shelf to the ground.
Merely staying on the ladder while holding it with both hands was a struggle, but Harvey
did eventually get himself to ground level, at which point he staggered in two-steps-
forward-one-step-back fashion toward the building’s exit. When he got there, he found
that he’d probably made the right decision, for a police officer was there with a
megaphone in front of his mouth, apparently shouting something to the residents of the
building. By holding his ear close to the broad end of the officer’s megaphone, Harvey
could just make out what the officer was saying: The residents of the building were being
told to evacuate for their own safety.

Fortunately, the particular exit door that Harvey was aiming for opened outward, which
meant that it was being held open by the force of the sound waves that were spewing
from every corner of the building. Had the door opened inward, it would have been
impossible to open, for the waves of force would have held it shut, similar to the way the
pressurized interior of a jetliner prevents people from opening its inward-opening doors
at 30,000 feet in the air. Indeed, like a person in a pressurized vessel suddenly exposed to
a near-vacuum on the exterior of the vessel, Harvey was simply pushed out through the
door like water in a hose, and found himself immediately rewarded with a quieter
environment outside. People outside were also screaming and playing ionizingly loud
music, but at least the sky allowed the sound waves to ripple out into space instead of
being reflected back by walls or a ceiling.

Harvey didn’t really have anywhere in particular to go once he got outside, so he simply
stood around and waited for things to quiet down. A handful of people slowly trickled out
of the shelving unit building, but most of the people could not hear the policeman’s
megaphone over the noise. To counteract this effect, as more police officers arrived on
the scene, they began operating their megaphones in parallel, such that several police
officers were on the ground of the shelving unit screaming into multiple megaphones
lined up in a row, telling people to get out of the building. A handful of people on the
lower levels of the building heard the officers, but ignored them. Why should they leave,
after all? It was not a crime to remain on one’s shelf, and as long as they did not talk to
anyone in a personal or informal manner, the police could not forcibly remove them from
the building.

Nonetheless, the residents did start leaving the building in larger numbers once the
building began to fall apart. The vibrations of all the screaming and audio systems were
slowly causing the building to disassemble itself, rivets popping, screws and bolts
vibrating loose, and cement crumbling. When the first parts of the building broke off, it
was like dumping gasoline on a fire—the noise inside the building, which had already
been intolerably loud, reached levels that were heard from miles away. Siding panels and
other fixtures attached to the exterior of the building began falling off, and through the
open doorway, Harvey perceived that even people’s shelves that they lived on were
beginning to vibrate loose from the walls they were affixed to. As shelves and their
walkways began clattering downward—some causing people to fall dozens of feet, to
presumable injury or death—the people within the building decided that shouting just
wasn’t doing it for them, and proceeded to indulge in open rioting, picking up whatever
objects came to hand and either setting them on fire, throwing them in random directions,
or using them to strike other objects, such as people. From his vantage point on the
sidewalk outside, Harvey perceived that these events were beginning to take place not
only in Harvey’s shelving unit building, but all the buildings in the area. There was
nothing special about Harvey’s shelving unit; it was one of dozens of such buildings that
sat in this residential area, and all of the other buildings were now erupting in riots of
their own.

Were these buildings full of 5-year-old children who had each just been caught stealing a
pack of chewing gum, the streets might soon have been littered with police cars, but
given both the rioting and the fires, the police were too terrified to enter the shelving
units, and the few who had gone in earlier promptly stepped out. Instead, the streets were
soon paved with fire trucks, and the amount of water that began getting projected into the
shelving units made them appear like giant toilets in which all the people were quite
literally being flushed out. The copious use of water was less related to the actual fires—
for the buildings themselves were predominantly built of metal, and thus did not burn—
but rather to the people. The fire hoses were being repurposed as anti-riot water cannons.
This was pretty effective at forcing people out of the buildings—for once the latter began
to fill with water, the former had no choice but to exit the buildings or drown—but once
they had been coaxed out into the street, these people found themselves no less violent
for having been drenched with water, and began enacting acts of random violence on
everyone and everything that came near them. Finally, to subdue the problem once and
for all, the fire trucks moved out to be replaced by SWAT vans, which proceeded to
disgorge teams of body-armored SWAT cops who rapidly cleaned up the streets with
MP5s. As loud as the gunfire was, it was most effective in stopping the screaming that
had been going on, and even though SWAT continued to shoot long after most of the
rioters were dead, the sond of the gunfire was quite soft by comparison, even from the
guns that were not operating with silencers in place.

Although there was little need for any follow-up police work—apparently this kind of
thing was pretty common after any major sporting event, and anyone guilty of a crime
had already been arrested by bullets—there was a team of building inspectors who had to
come around and inspect the interior of the buildings to see which shelves were
sufficiently structurally intact to sleep on tonight and which ones had tenants who would
be sleeping on the streets or in hotels tonight. Harvey waited outside with admitted
impatience for this process to complete, for there were a lot of shelves in each building to
inspect, and Harvey was already quite tired. Even walking around to let off some nervous
energy was laborious, for the blood that had been uncorked by SWAT’s intervention was
rather thick on the sidewalks and had become clotted and sticky under Harvey’s feet.
Finally, he opted to simply stand in one place and marvel at the beautiful patterns made
by the flashing emergency lights of the SWAT vehicles that covered every visible
segment of the street as far as the eye could see, and how even though the lights were red,
when they flickered over the blood on the streets and sidewalks, they made the blood
appear to be black in color.

Presently, the building inspectors began to file out of Harvey’s building, and one of them
spoke for a little while with Jeff, the landlord. Harvey was near enough to hear the
conversation, but before any words were said, an inspector held out a book to Jeff, which
Harvey recognized as the book that Jane had given to him.
“We found this on one of the shelves,” the inspector said. “That person’s shelf was intact,
but I think you might want to take a look at this.”

Jeff accepted the book and began to page through it. “Which shelf did you find this on?”
he asked, although of course he already knew. When the inspector gave Harvey’s shelf
number, Jeff nodded and confirmed: “I know which tenant that shelf is rented to: A man
by the name of Harvey Wallbanger.”

“I know who that is!” exclaimed a familiar voice. All eyes turned to Tim, who, it turned
out, lived in a shelving unit across the street, was also waiting to get back to his shelf, and
had probably wandered over because he recognized Harvey. “It’s that man right there!”
Tim pointed at Harvey, and all eyes subsequently turned to the marked man. “I work with
him! He doesn’t have a personal audio system and has made disparaging remarks relating
to the most important thing in the world!”

A significant number of SWAT officers—more than Harvey could quickly count—

unslung their MP5s and trained them on Harvey while beginning to walk toward him.
“He’s a liar and a sociopath!” Tim continued. “He tried to trick me into living a lifestyle
that would cause me to lose appreciation for my sports car!”

“Sir,” one of the SWAT officers said, addressing Harvey. “Blasphemy against the most
important thing in the world is a most serious charge. If you are found guilty, you may be
sentenced to prison.”

“I think we have all the evidence we need right here,” Jeff said, pointing at the book,
which he had stopped reading since a SWAT officer had seized it and was now
proceeding to flip through it himself. “I told you that books were not permitted, Harvey.
This was made perfectly clear to you. And this isn’t just any book, but something that’s
full of all kinds of nonsense about people working together for mutual good without
trying to maximize their money flow. It’s no wonder that all these people around here
have engaged in rioting; your poisonous ideas have turned their minds away from any
kind of sense, and they’ve been reduced to some kind of wild animals who don’t
appreciate the benefits conferred onto humanity by modern civilization. You’re one of
these deceitful, manipulative rabble-rousers who spread ideas that are inimical to the
peaceful, orderly society that has been created through so much effort. It is doubtless
because of your influence that all these buildings have been destroyed and all these
people have died. I’m ashamed to have had you as a tenant.”

“The prison system would be, too,” a SWAT officer agreed. “I don’t think this guy is
going to get to go to jail; he’ll be sent where the bad people go.”
Chapter 9: Hard at work

“Congratulations, Mr. Wallbanger,” the judge said with dry irony. “You’ve successfully
brought about change in your society.”

There was a pause. Perhaps the judge was simply baiting Harvey, waiting for him to ask
what the change was, or perhaps the judge simply decided to insert a pause here to allow
his words to sink in, not only in Harvey’s mind but the minds of the other courtroom
attendees as well. Either way, after a moment, the judge continued.

“As a result of the events in your shelving building three nights ago, the U.S. Supreme
Court has decided to officially ban books written on printed paper. I have long
maintained that this is the right state of affairs for a society; this was a decision that
should have been made a long time ago. In our modern society, nothing good can come
of having printed books. They can only implant negative ideas in people’s minds and
create both unhappiness and unrest in people, leading to events like the ones we
witnessed a few nights ago. By causing people to question the very fundamental ideas
upon which our society is based, implements which cause people to think can do nothing
except make the world a worse place for everyone. This decision is a landmark in
promoting peace and prosperity among people nationwide.”

Harvey had some opinions he could have offered about the decision at this point, but he
assumed that this was probably not the best place to opine that the decision could only
inspire people to be more ignorant, potentially creating more “peace” in the short-term
but inevitably leading to greater problems for society in the long-term. Instead, Harvey
simply remained silent.

“Yes, you’ve been an important catalyst for change, Mr. Wallbanger, but since I rather
doubt that this was a result that you deliberately intended to create, it hardly seems like
the right thing to do to thank you or honor you for the changes you’ve been responsible
for. And regardless of how we acknowledge your contribution to society, the question
remains of what to do with you. Technically, you haven’t done anything illegal, since
books were not illegal until now, but under the present circumstances, you understand
that the court cannot, in good conscience, simply release you back into society.”

“Am I to be held separate from society for its own good, then?” Harvey asked. He
probably shouldn’t have been planting ideas in the judge’s head, but it was pretty clear
that the judge had already made up his mind about what he was going to do.

“That’s essentially the case, Mr. Wallbanger. The court believes that you are too
unpredictable, too unintegrated an element to be allowed to return to normal social life. I
want to emphasize that we’re not just seeking to punish you. Justice is about more than
just rewarding or punishing people according to what they have sown; it is also about
protecting society from elements that might endanger it, as well as about reforming
people, turning bad elements into good ones, about polishing coarse, drifting grains of
sand until they smooth over into an agreeable quartz stone. Mr. Wallbanger, this country
has given you everything. God made men, but the dollar made men equal. As a resident
of this country, you have had the same opportunities to be happy, to have meaning in
your life, to be Successful, as everyone else. You worked your way into a good job,
whereby you could not only earn a living for yourself, but give back to your community
by fulfilling a useful function that would benefit your fellow people. You had a shelf
where you could find safety and solace every night. I’m told you even had a woman in
your life who gave you affection and companionship; eyewitnesses report that there was
a woman who was at your shelf on the night that your shelving unit was destroyed,
shortly before the riots broke out. Mr. Wallbanger, you have ceaselessly criticized and
fought against the very hands that tirelessly fed you over and over again. You wrote
extensively about the evils of the most important thing in the world, yet it was precisely
because of the country you are in and its dollars that you enjoyed all these comforts and
luxuries in your life. It was you who threw this all away. I want you to reflect on the
decisions you made, so that you can understand that this country gave you everything—
you and you alone are the one who refused to live in peace and harmony with your
neighbors in a community that wanted nothing but to embrace you as one of its
members.”

There was a protracted silence. The judge was allowing Harvey time to speak, but Harvey
sat quietly. What could he say? He could not agree with the judge—everything the judge
said seemed to be completely upside-down, the opposite of reality, but if Harvey said as
much, he would probably just be digging himself into a deeper hole. Trying to talk sense
to sensible people is one thing, but trying to dissuade people who are already thoroughly
brainwashed is a waste of time, effort, and hope that could be better spent on more
worthwhile endeavors.

After a few more moments, the judge held up his hands, palms up, in a kind of Well?
gesture. “Have you nothing to say for yourself, Mr. Wallbanger? You seem to be a man
full of ideas and rhetoric. Now is the time to speak, for soon you will no longer be among
us.”

Harvey took a long breath, then cleared his throat and began to speak slowly. “Your
honor, our society is structured in such a way as to allow people only one choice in life
while still giving the appearance of many choices. People are told that they can be a
doctor, or a lawyer, or a dentist, or a construction worker, or a Salesperson, or a Family
Incubator, and they are taught to be glad for the breadth of choices that they can make
every day. They can choose what kind of food they eat, what kind of car they drive, what
kind of inane television programs they watch, what kind of vapid music they listen to,
and so on. Yet all of these choices are really the same choice: All of these choices are
nothing more than meaningless, utilitarian functions. Even the so-called arts are devoid of
relevance, insight, or anything else that might make art virtuous, and yet it is all called
good because it contributes to the exchange of money and makes people feel ‘happy.’
Every choice that people have been given, every life path they might choose, has been
carefully structured so that in the end, people have no choice but to become part of the
exchange of money, or die. This is really nothing more than a classical trick that has been
exploited by people for as long as people have existed: The trick of giving others only
one viable course of action, then insisting that those people are ‘free’ because they were
not forced into that course of action, and insisting that people are entirely responsible for
choosing that course of action because they chose to take it rather than refusing to do so.”

“I chose a different path. I chose not to accept the one lifestyle that had been given to me,
just as it has been given to every other American. Your hypocritical society would gladly
try to make me feel guilty for driving a motor vehicle that runs on fossil fuels while
simultaneously structuring its population centers so that transit around those areas is
impossible or stunted without the use of such motor vehicles. The same society would tell
me that the foods I eat are unhealthy, too high in calories and too low in nutrients, while
simultaneously placing only such foods in places where food is bought—for indeed, food
must be bought in our society, since there is no room to afford land to people which they
might use to grow their own. The same society would tell me that I am uncultured and
out-of-touch for not keeping up with the latest popular music, while at the same time
manufacturing such music so that its only real metric is how effective it is in taking
people away from their problems and helping them to forget their reality for a little while.
The same society would tell me that I am free to have friends, romantic partners, and
other meaningful relationships in my life, yet simultaneously insists that people not speak
to each other unless money is involved, under threat of going to jail for the paramount
crime against humanity of speaking to others in a personal or informal manner. In short,
ours is a society in which people are given one choice, then relentlessly made to feel
inferior for having made that choice.”

“In light of this, I chose to turn a dream into reality. I took the dream that has been
promised to all these people—freedom—and actually lived according to its spirit rather
than the distorted projection of it that has been taught to people. I thought independently,
avoiding mainstream media and mainstream mentality, which I believe was a reasonable
thing to do as a thinking individual. I actively sought out food that was nutrient-rich
without being calorie-rich, which was more expensive, but which I believe was worth
some extra expense for the sake of maintaining some degree of both physical and mental
health. I did not purchase or operate a motor vehicle, opting to walk or take public transit,
even when this meant that I was only able to reach a small fraction of the city I live in,
since public transit only covers a minimal area of the city, and even when it meant that it
would take me three hours to make a journey that could have been made in half an hour
by car. I read books printed on paper, even when this meant that the ideas in the books
were somber and sad, even if those ideas forced me to think about things that were not
pleasant instead of filling my head with deliciously meaningless mirth or drama. I chose
to regard human beings as infinitely complex, sentient beings that are capable of
independent thought and stimulating conversation, even when everyone around them—
and, more often than not, they themselves—saw them as nothing more than filling a
single role in society, namely whatever job title their employer had affixed to them. In all
these things, I asserted the true meaning of freedom. For you see, your honor, in America,
people are free.”
“I have done nothing wrong. I have never harmed anyone, physically or mentally. I have
never attempted to force anyone into any course of action. I have never sought to hurt
people’s feelings or make them regret things they have done. I have never turned people
away who genuinely wanted something human from me—whether it was polite
conversation, encouragement in times of doubt, advice on matters in which I had some
expertise—in short, anything other than what you ceaselessly refer to as ‘the most
important thing in the world.’ With every day of my life, I have sought to build and
support a safe, supportive, meaningful, sustainable, and personable human community,
rather than something cheap, quick, and efficient. It’s true that I have acted in defiance of
what you believe that a human being should act like, but in every possible metric of
human living—both objective or subjective—I have behaved in such a way that benefits
my fellow humans in both the short term and the long term. I hold these truths to be self-
evident, and so you see, your honor, I am compelled to assert my individuality by
concluding that, at risk of sounding defiant, I deserve neither punishment nor censure,
and beyond this conclusion, I don’t need to justify myself to you.”

Prior to that moment, Harvey would have thought it impossible, but the silence that
stifled the courtroom when he finished speaking was even more pronounced than that
which filled the courtroom during his first trial some time back.

“No hope,” the judge finally murmured, shaking his head sadly. “Truly, there is no hope
for one such as you. I don’t know why I even tried talking sense to you. You are so
brainwashed, so very misguided, that I believe it would take many centuries of un-doing
the damage that has been done to your mind to teach you how the world works, Mr.
Wallbanger. So hopeless a case I cannot justify wasting any more time on, and so I
conclude this trial by simply asking the bailiff to take you away.”

“And am I to be kept in a prison, then?” Harvey asked grimly.

“Not exactly. We’re not sending you back to jail. Mr. Wallbanger, you are going on
vacation.”

Harvey blinked. The full import of these words would come to him later. In that moment,
however, he only wanted to understand. “How is this possible, your honor? How can it be
that a reasonable, intelligent man such as you, can condemn another for doing things
which have caused no harm to anyone?”

With a wan smile, the judge pronounced his final words of the trial: “In the end, it’s
really quite simple, Mr. Wallbanger. You see, I don’t need to justify myself to you.”

***

The prison was officially called a “Social Club for deviants,” and the prisoners were
“members.” This was the place where the truly hopeless were sent. Every now and then, a
particularly socially inept person failed to appreciate either the most important thing in
the world or the fundamental human right of American society, and people who could or
would not conform to either of these very important social mechanisms were not
imprisoned, but “given a vacation” to the facility, which was in the middle of a scorching
desert with no other signs of humanity’s touch for hundreds of miles in any direction.
This was the last place left in America where there was a lot of open land that was not
owned by someone and used for some money-generating purpose. Placing the club in the
middle of such a vast stretch of inhospitable territory was an ingeniously simple and
efficient way of housing members, for there was no need for walls, or any other attempt
to contain people—attempts at escape would simply result in becoming vulture food. The
only way to escape would be to have some kind of vehicle to travel in—a car or an
aircraft or something similar—but nobody here had such a vehicle, and there was no need
to fear that friends or family of the members in the club would come to their rescue, for
that would be an act which required compassion, which did not exist in America.

Of course, to feed the members would have been cruel and unusual punishment. They
were human beings, and ought to be treated humanely. Like any Americans, they were
not to be denied the most important thing in the world, and so rather than being given
meals, they were given nothing save the opportunity to work for money. There was a
labor field in the social club, and many members worked there to earn a living, since it
was the only “legitimate” work around. However, America being the land of the
innovators, there was of course an underground prison economy—oops, social club
economy— that anyone could take part in; after all, people were free. Popular goods and
services for sale included elimination of fellow members whom the purchaser did not like
(since there were no laws against murder in the social club, and so as long as the assassin
did not actually speak to their target, they could carry on their work without violation of
the human right), drugs (where exactly people got drugs from in a remote location with
no contact with the outside world was a mystery, truly illustrating that money create
miracles, for where there is money, there is a way), and reverse-prostitution: People paid
not to have sex with their fellow members.

Naturally, prison entrepreneurship of this nature was only for the clever, the brave, or the
strong. Harvey felt like none of these things in the club, and so like the less motivated of
his clubmates, he spent most of his waking hours toiling in the labor field. Here, too, the
natural selection of capitalism was at work, for members were paid for how much work
they achieved rather than on an hourly rate, and the only source of food around was the
club grocery store, where food was horrifically expensive, meaning that those who could
not work as much (due perhaps to some physical disability, or maybe just simple
weakness of frame) were efficiently weeded out by a process of starvation. Harvey, office
worker as he had been, was unaccustomed to physical labor, but he was still young
enough that he got used to it before death caught up with him, and eventually he found
himself capable of working enough to earn sufficient food to live until tomorrow.

Life in the social club was quite unlike life anywhere else in the United States. Not only
was it the only place in the country where people actually performed some kind of useful
work, it was also the only place in the country where people openly and wantonly
disregarded the social value that had inspired the human right. Here, nobody cared
whether you talked in a personal or informal manner. People did it all the time. This was
a place for the most hardened of hardened criminals, people who had bought their
freedom to speak at the cost of having to be exiled here, because here, you were so
worthless that nobody cared about the right. From his first day in the labor field, Harvey
met an older man named Bob who seemed to take a liking to Harvey and would
frequently talk about colors, shapes, or feelings.

“Why Harvey!” Bob would exclaim, looking up at the sky while shoveling some
substance into a container. “The sky above is blue! It’s sure a blue shade of blue, isn’t it!”

“Yes, Bob,” Harvey agreed, also shoveling some substance into a container. “The sky is
blue.”

“And Harvey! Why, if you look down at the ground, how non-blue it is, isn’t it! It’s sure
not blue at all, not like the sky is, that’s for sure!”

“You’re right, Bob. The ground is not blue here.”

“What a marvel! This makes me wonder! And look! Over there! A cloud! We rarely see
clouds out here in the desert. That cloud is shaped just like a white, amorphous entity!”

“I have to agree with you there, Bob. The cloud you’ve pointed out to me is shaped very
much like a white, amorphous entity.”

“That’s what I like about you, Harvey! You agree with everything I say! Not like my
wife! She would sometimes disgree with things I said. That was why I had to kill her.
That’s how I ended up here; they put me here because I didn’t charge her no money for
killing her. They told me it was the worst thing they had ever heard of. That made me feel
real bad, Harvey. I didn’t like the feeling I got when they told me that I should have
charged her for the killing. I didn’t like feeling like I had done something wrong. But I
like being here, talking to you.”

“Thanks Bob, I like talking to you too.” This was a lie, as bare-faced a lie as any Harvey
had ever told. But Harvey was very alone, in a place utterly removed from every other
place on Earth, and he had come to feel like he needed all the friends he could get around
here.

Indeed, as wearying and diminishing as the work in the labor field was, Harvey preferred
his time there to the rest of his life, for life in the prison was truly an exercise in living
moment-to-moment. Harvey was vulnerable—he had no tattoos that communicated the
protection of any gang affiliation, he lacked large muscles, and it was obvious that he
carried no weapons with him. He was too intelligent for his fellow club members to like
him; they rapidly became jealous of the quiet, simple, unpretentious guy who actually
worked even though he was apparently clever enough to have made a living as a con, and
Harvey spent every waking moment looking over his shoulder constantly, frequently
discovering that someone right behind him was quickly turning away, as if they had been
about to pat Harvey on the shoulder but suddenly decided to change their mind when he
began turning around. Human beings span a far broader spectrum of development than
any other animal in the world—they can raise themselves to heights of intelligence and
awareness that vastly exceed what any other creature could be capable of, but if they
choose to do so, they can go much farther in the opposite direction than any animal ever
would, and in the social club that was now his home, Harvey was a constant witness to
the most superlative exhibitions of violence, hate, greed, deceitfulness, and ignorance that
humanity could possibly devise. It wasn’t even dark or grim in that edgy, film-noir kind
of way; there was nothing cool, exciting, funny, or interesting about it. It was just sick.

At least in the labor field, Harvey found people who, like him, had chosen honest work
over the depravity that was elsewhere, and so Harvey felt relatively safe among them. He
could speak freely with them, but he found that he had almost nothing to say, and it
wasn’t long before he grew utterly weary of Bob’s endless prattle, an endless stream of
friendly words that were spoken for speaking’s sake. Indeed, after a while, Harvey began
to wish that he was back in a place where no one spoke to another in a personal or
informal manner.

Why were the world’s nicest people also the stupidest? Was there some kind of cause-
and-effect there, or was correlation really not the same as causation?

And what did he expect, anyway? For so long now, he had longed for someone, anyone
to speak to him as a friend, and now that he had his wish, he was grousing because the
people talking to him would talk about how beautiful the clouds were or a particularly
tasty meal they had eaten once, instead of the penetrating pearls of wisdom he longed to
share with people. Was he just being too picky? Maybe he should compile a huge list of
everything he wanted in a person:

- Willing to speak like a human being

- Intelligent
- Well-read
- Curious
- Altruistic
- Honest
- Self-confident and independent
- Friendly
- Sympathetic/Empathetic
- Earnest
- Conscientious
- Female

Long before he reached the end of the list, he knew that he had a particular individual in
mind. He struggled with the latter item on the list, for he did not want to think that his
sorrow was so stupidly selfish in nature. It seemed to ruin things just a little, but when he
played the what-if scenario in his mind, he finally had to acknowledge that if she had
only been the first several items on this list, she would merely have been an important
person to him, someone he cherished as a friend and a conversation partner. She was
these things, of course; if “Tom” had turned out to be real, Harvey would have dearly
missed Tom now, but what really cut him to the core, what burned more harshly than the
fury of a thousand blazing suns, was that he loved her, loved her more than he had
thought it could be possible to love someone in this broken, pathetic society, and now she
was gone. Gone forever.

It was insane. He must have been insane. Human beings were not computer programs that
you could simply switch a bunch of check-boxes on or off for; you couldn’t just mix-and-
match whatever you wanted in the people you knew. You had to take them for who they
were. If you didn’t like them, then you could go ahead and be lonely. It was a binary
choice: You enjoy the company of stupid people, or you shut up and remain alone. He
could not demand that people be everything he wanted them to be.

He accepted this idea. It was the truth, and there was no sense in denying that which was
true.

Even so, Harvey could not help but think that at one time—a time not so very long ago,
in fact—he had actually known someone who was all of the things on this list. It seemed
long ago, almost as if it had been a dream nearly forgotten, but Harvey had not forgotten.
Harvey remembered everything, and the memory of what he’d lost was more painful than
the reality of where and what he was now. Harvey had once known a person who was
worth knowing.

He missed her.

***

Time went by.

Quite a lot of time went by, in fact. Time has a way of changing people. Things which
were once greatly appealing to a person may eventually lose their lustre as people realize
that the things they liked aren’t really all that spectacular after all. The inverse may also
happen: A person can get used to something that had initially seemed terrible. Besides all
this, of course, time gives people an opportunity to refine and revise their personal
ideology, which is important for any thinking person, since ideas usually take time to
brew in the back of the mind. However, this time, instead of actually finding himself
developing personally in any way at all, Harvey found that he had hit a wall. As time
went by, Harvey didn’t change; he didn’t develop new ideas in the soul-disintegrating
environment of being out in the labor field under the scorching sun, nor did he find that
he ever quite got used to the experience of being in a place where every human life was
not only devoid of value, but actually possessing such a greatly negative value that the
world would have been instantly rendered a much better place if a nuclear strike wiped
the social club off the face of the planet. Nor did Harvey ever quite forget how much he
missed a certain person—that longing didn’t seem to lessen as time went by.
Occasionally it would leave his mind for a little while, and he would think that he had
moved on, but then memories would come back as strong as ever, and he would find that
the object of his own particular desire had not yet lost her lustre.

“You still haven’t given up, have you Harvey?” Bob asked suddenly, unexpectedly, one
day. This was probably the most intelligent string of words Harvey had ever heard Bob
utter.

“Given up on what?” Harvey wondered.

“On life. I can tell by the way you talk. You still think that life’s worth something. You
still think that there’s some good in people that you can extract from them if you just do
or say the right things.”

Harvey paused. “Maybe.”

Bob nodded. “Yeah. I was like that too, when I first came here, about 23 years ago. I
eventually lost it. Trust me, Harvey, if there’s anything that you can take from me that
will make the rest of your life much more pleasant, it’s this: You need to understand,
above all things, that hope really is the cruelest thing in the world. The moment you give
it up, the rest of your life will be just as pain-free as you like. Just as soft and pleasant as
that cloud that’s forming on the horizon.”

During this impromptu speech by Bob, Harvey dropped his shovel. This was partly from
shock, but partly also because something inside him was beginning to realize the wisdom
in Bob’s advice.

What Bob didn’t know—or perhaps didn’t care about—was that there was one other
thing that separated Harvey from the other people in the social club: He was not willing
to maintain a life that was really and truly meaningless. Everyone else might keep on
living “Just because.” Harvey was not such a person.

The cloud which Bob had used in his analogy seemed purely rhetorical in its importance,
just an object for Bob to compare life to, but when Harvey reflexively glanced at it, he
realized that the cloud was not actually a white cloud caused by evaporation, but rather a
brown cloud of dust being kicked up somewhere off in the distance. As the vehicle that
was stirring the dust got closer, Harvey stepped away from the labor field to walk toward
it. Transport trucks came and went here on a daily basis—after all, something needed to
transport away the minerals that Harvey and the others were mining out of the ground,
and basic supplies also had to be delivered to the businesses that operated here,
particularly the grocery store. Harvey always liked to go and watch the trucks as they
arrived, for they were his sole link to the rest of the world, his sole reminder that
somewhere, on the other side of that gaping desert, there was still human habitation
somewhere beyond this wretched little “club.” Many times, he had been tempted to just
try to grab onto a truck, perhaps hide himself underneath it or hold tightly onto
something, anything that would allow him to ride the truck back to civilization, but this
was impossible, for every other person in the club had had the same thought many times
before, and thus the trucks were always guarded by at least one armed sentry who would
promptly shoot anyone who came near them.

As the vehicle emerged from the dust cloud and came into sight, Harvey perceived that it
was not a truck at all; it was a small car. This was a rare sight indeed here at the club.
Harvey had never seen such a thing here before. Trucks carried items of value to and
from the club, but people had no cause to drive to a forsaken place like this in their
personal cars. As the car pulled up at the edge of the club’s periphery, it stopped, the door
opened, and…

No. Really?

He rubbed his eyes just to ensure that the sand blowing into them wasn’t causing his
vision to blur. It wasn’t—his vision was accurate. It was her.

He wanted to embrace her, to tell her how glad he was to see her, to do something,
anything, to communicate that somehow, against all possibility, a glimmer of meaning
and joy had been spontaneously injected into his life. But somehow, he could not do
these things, could not do anything except stand numbly in place as she slowly walked
over to him. He was tired—so very tired, physically, mentally, and emotionally, that he
had lost the ability to express anything.

“Hi Harvey,” she greeted him as casually as if they saw each other every day, or at least
every week.

“Jane…” he murmured, his voice trailing off. “Jane, my one true love. Is it really you?”

“Who else would it be? Who else would be crazy enough to come out here just to see
you?” She smiled, and somehow, the jolt of her abrupt, assertive style woke him up,
stirred him into being at least expressive enough to smile back.

“There is no one as insane as you,” he assured her gently. “Were I to live another 80
years and write as many books full of prose or poetry, I could not express, in words, how
glad I am to see you again.”

“I’m glad to see you too. But what’s the big deal? I’m not anything special.”

A crooked smile played across his face at the charming absurdity of her self-assessment.
“You’re wrong. You are almost the Platonic ideal of the very Form of specialness. Plus, I
haven’t talked to you in a long time. Talking to you is my favorite thing to do in all the
world.”

She gestured vaguely toward the labor field. “You have all these people to talk to. This is
a place where people will willingly talk about almost anything.”
“But these people are all stupid,” he protested. It was not a nice thing to say, but there
seemed no point in trying to soften the truth in this case.

“So are we,” she replied. “We all are. We’ve all said or done stupid things at some point
in time or another. If you hadn’t, you wouldn’t be here now, and if I hadn’t, then I
wouldn’t have gone to jail.”

“But those were individual mistakes or errors in judgments,” Harvey pointed out. “That’s
not the same thing as persistent, constant, pervasive stupidity. Even that might not be so
bad if people were actually literally stupid—if they were born with mental handicaps. But
most people are not. They are deliberately, knowingly, and willfully stupid because they
have been taught to act that way. Intelligent people acting stupid is a terrible waste. I
cannot stand it.”

“Neither can I, which is why I habitually avoid people,” she said with a sweet, but
perceptibly insane, smile.

“You can’t avoid people forever, though. Or maybe you can, but you shouldn’t. You’ll
lose the perspective that comes from being able to talk to others.”

“But the perspective that I gain from most people is an utter waste of both my time and
theirs. They don’t have anything to say to me that would interest me, and I don’t have
anything to say to them that would interest them. You’re making two contradictory
statements, Harvey—on the one hand, you’re saying that people are worthless and stupid,
but then you’re claiming that the perspective they can give you is invaluable. Which one
is it?”

“It depends on the person,” he finally said.

“Yes, that’s true. And you and I are quite unique people. So unique, in fact, that I’m not
sure we could ever really get along with each other.”

“Actually, it works the other way around,” he explained patiently but somewhat quickly.
“If people are truly unique—really self-made, in the sense that they made their own life’s
decisions, determined their own self-identity, and didn’t pay too much attention to what
culture, society, or their peers expected them to be—then those types of people tend to be
mutually compatible, since they have that element of common humanity uniting them.
That is in stark contrast to artificially-developed people, who can only get along within
that one very specific social framework they’re familiar with—they can only tolerate
people who were indoctrinated into that same social framework.”

“Very good,” she said with a nod. “And you and I are, perhaps, truly unique. But there’s
one thing we both have in common that will ensure that we could never be happy with
each other. It is the same thing that causes us to constantly complain about everything, to
point out the faults in every person, place, or thing that we come into contact with,
including our own selves.”
“We… like to complain a lot?”

“Don’t you see? You and I are both perfectionists,” she said, as if this settled the matter.

“So? What’s wrong with that? If anything, doesn’t that mean that we should stay
together, since that’s something we have in common?” She was right; even in a society
like this, neither of them could stop dreaming. Neither of them was willing to accept the
present state of affairs. Even in their society, so far removed from what they believed a
society should be, they saw the gaping chasm between reality and hope not as an
indication of the impossibility of their ideals, but simply an indication of how far
removed from those ideals the society had drifted.

“Common ground isn’t always a good thing,” she concluded. “In many types of social
relationships, there must be some kind of disparity in order for anything to be possible, in
order for anything to happen, just as you need a difference in pressure for a hydraulic or
pneumatic mechanism to function, or a difference in voltage for any electrical circuit to
create current. For example, it is a necessity in any economy that there be some people
with more money and some people with less money, or the economy could not function
because there would be no cause to create a flow of money.”

“Okay, fair enough, but we’re also different in many ways,” Harvey countered.

“Yes, precisely. And nothing is ever pefect,” she continued. “Nothing will ever exactly
match the vision that you dreamed up in your mind. A perfectionist will always find
something to pick on, some minor detail to quibble over. If they always get their wishes,
they’ll see reality eventually become more like what they want, and the quibbles will
become steadily more trivial, but they’ll always be there.”

“And you don’t think we’ll be more likely to succeed in changing things if we unite our
visions together instead of keeping them separate?”

“That’s just it: We can’t unite our visions, because we’re different. You and I hardly
know each other. You like me because I’m honest and seem to have some of the same
ideals that you do, but in reality, we’re two different people. If we got to know each
other, you would quickly find something in me that you didn’t like, become disappointed
that I’m not exactly what you dreamed I would be, and then you’d get tired of me. Maybe
it’s better that you don’t really know who I am. That way you can pretend I’m whoever
you want me to be.”

She had a point. He had indeed imagined that she was probably several things that he
didn’t know her to be, but simply assumed her to be, because those seemed like good
qualities to have. “And so because of the risk of us getting tired of each other, it’s better
to not even try?”
“I’m saying it’s better to focus on something more important. I like you, Harvey, but
there are more important things in this world than you and I. If we go our separate ways,
we can focus our energies on the world around us, on trying to change the world instead
of trying to change each other.”

“Jane… I don’t want to do this anymore.”

“Do what?”

“I don’t know… I don’t even know. Something has been going on for too long, and I
don’t even know what it is.”

“I think I do, but there’s nothing I can do about it. You need to understand that the
changes you’re looking for can’t come from me, or anyone else. Ultimately, you’re still
responsible for your own life. Yeah, you can change things, but if you’re going to do so,
you need to make those changes, and not wait for someone else to, or even for someone
else to encourage you to make those changes. Sometimes you just have to encourage
yourself. Sometimes you really have absolutely no one other than yourself to lean on.”

“I guess that’s the situation I find myself in, then, is it?” Harvey asked bitterly.

“I’m afraid so. I can’t prop you up for the rest of your life. I wish we could stay
together—believe me, I do. But I think it’s for the best that we don’t.”

There was a long pause.

With one last regretful look at him, she quietly said her last words to him. “Goodbye,
Harvey. I love you.” He could not bring himself to respond. She turned away, walked
back to her car, and drove off.

It was several minutes before he even thought about the fact that he might have at least
asked her to take him back to civilization. He had been so shocked at seeing her, he had
forgotten to ask her for a ride out of the social club. His probable last hope for getting out
of here had departed, and in all likelihood, he was stuck here for the rest of his life.

The dust plume created by her car was still visible in the distance for a long time, but
eventually it dissipated into nothingness, and she was gone. She was an angel, a ghost, an
ethereal spirit. She had briefly emerged from the fog, then dissipated back into it again,
leaving him to wonder whether she had been a hallucination all along.
Chapter 10: Freedom

A human being was a creature who could get used to anything. But Harvey wouldn’t.

Harvey wanted to be free. Not “free” in the way that people had corrupted and perverted
the word, but free as in liberated.

It wasn’t going to stop. Harvey finally understood: It would never end. He wasn’t going
to take Bob’s advice and give up, because he knew that to do so would be to become
already dead. He also wasn’t going to get out of the social club someday. He hadn’t been
sentenced here for some period of time; he had merely been transported here as a way of
getting rid of him. He was free to leave at any time. There was nowhere else he could go,
but if he wanted to, he could just walk away.

Slowly, as if afraid of setting off a land mine, he walked to the edge of the social club
complex, where the development gave way to the sand, and looked out at the endless
expanse of emptiness that lay beyond. As far as the eye could see, there was nothing
there; nothing at all. No people, no flora or fauna, no structures. Empty space. The kind
of place where one could get away from anything and everything.

As Harvey looked, he began to understand something about freedom. Freedom never

comes without risk. Freedom always comes at the cost of security and safety. The two are
inversely proportional to each other; the greater one is, the lesser the other will be.
Winston Smith’s Oceania knew that freedom is slavery, but freedom is other things as
well.

Freedom is death.

It made sense. The cowboys who had been the symbol of the American West around 200
years ago were free, but died easily. They would get injured in accidents, bitten by
rattlesnakes, or shot by outlaws, and even if they survived all the things that might kill
them suddenly, they got old and expired when they had not yet accumulated a great many
years behind them. They were just as free as a human being could be, but it didn’t buy
them a long life.

Harvey was a spiritual descendant of those cowboys, in a way. He had no horse or hat,
but what he did have was a complete absence of anything in his life. Nothing separated
Harvey from infinity.

Harvey began walking. The heat was unbearable, and he knew that he wouldn’t last long
enough to reach anything of note, but as Harvey kept walking, the social club gradually
disappeared behind him, until he found that he could turn around in a 360-degree circle
and find nothing at all around him, nothing but the endless sand, the endless sky, and the
sun, the latter of which was diligently working to kill him even as he beheld it.
Harvey kept walking. It was a beautiful, sunny day for a stroll, a quiet, leisurely walk in a
place where nothing touched him but the ground and the air.

And as Harvey walked slowly away, the fog around him cleared tangibly if not visibly,
and he spent his last hours with clear sight.
Author’s afterword

I broke down and did something I didn’t want to do: I wrote a book that was a reaction to
something rather than a timeless principle.

Some books are based on universal principles. These books tend to endure the test of
time. Almost any book about math, for example, is likely to be relevant to people
thousands of years down the line, since math doesn’t really change—only our
understanding of it does. Similarly, romance novels sometimes end up being ageless
classics since there’s something in most people that reacts to a good love story. Writers
who want to be remembered get themselves into trouble when they write for their current
era and focus on the things that they see instead of the things that future generations will
see. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four got lucky and is still popular today because it was
sprawling enough in its ideology to be applicable to many forms of government, but
some parts of the novel ring hollow to people today who didn’t grow up in the shadow of
Stalin’s Russia. Yes, we all know that Big Brother is supposed to play on the idea of
Stalin, but this idea becomes less meaningful to readers who were born after the Iron
Curtain already fell. Naturally, some trends last longer than others, and some social or
political structures may endure for decades or centuries, giving their cultural offshoots
the appearance of longevity, but I have striven, in most of my writing, to avoid making
my words self-obsoleting. Islands in the Fog is a bit different—it is, first and foremost, a
reaction to contemporary American society. There are my usual circumlocutory
wanderings into tangents that try to extract some deeper truths from whatever’s at hand,
but this book started as an absurdist assault on the absurdity of American society, and
pretty much stayed on that track all the way through.

I’m afraid that I can offer no apologies for either the myopia or the one-sidedness that
pervades the entire book. These are no accident, but quite intentional—literary critics
criticize “one dimensional characters” and are in love with multidimensional characters,
but how realistic are such expectations when human beings are one-dimensional in real
life? Throughout the book, I have sought to portray people simply as they are. The
invented elements of this book are so minor, so much in the spirit of contemporary
America, that they hardly seem like fiction. America, this isn’t your future; this is your
present.

Given that this is a book populated by only semi-fictional people, places, and events, I
wish to extend a sincere thanks to all the real-world elements whose influence upon me
have shaped the writing of this book—some of whom will no doubt recognize a little of
themselves in the text. To anyone who actually reads the book, whether I am acquainted
with them or not, I wish all the strength of hope—not despair—that the human frame can
muster, and that the ideas expressed herein will be as much of a boon to insight in their
reading as they were to me in their writing.

Adam Luoranen
Sunnyvale, California – July 2010
COPYRIGHT NOTICE

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