Freedom Club (34 page)

Kamiyoshi shook his head unwillingly. “It was the old Church of Freedom, but they went out of existence. Shiro told me once that he’d been moved, but that was over a decade ago. God knows how many times since then.”

Shinzou scratched his head. “Well, that’s a start. But anyway, you need to pack some essentials and come with us. I need to get you to a safe location.”

“I’m not leaving!” Kamiyoshi snorted.

“Please, Dr. Kamiyoshi,” Shinzou begged. “The men that destroyed the Martin Luther King Junior will stop at nothing. They’ll come for you too!”

Kamiyoshi looked at Shinzou, then at Sumeet. Huffing with disdain, he walked over and picked up his gun. He noted it was switched off, then looked back with cold sober eyes.

“Come back in thirty minutes,” Kamiyoshi ordered. “I’ll be ready by then.”

“Okay, fine,” Shinzou said, while nodding at Sumeet to follow. “We’ll return soon. But please hurry.”

Shinzou and Sumeet went outside and down the lane to their car. They didn’t speak until they were inside and the doors were locked.

“I think you have some explaining to do,” Sumeet said angrily.

Shinzou was ashamed. “You’re right. I haven’t been very forthcoming. I’m so sorry, Sumeet. I never meant to get you involved with all this so soon, but...”

“So soon?” Sumeet barked.

Shinzou grimaced. “Well, you see, what I had planned...”

Before Shinzou could say more, an explosion rocked the car. Not enough to break the glass, but both men felt it to the bone. Shinzou immediately jumped out and looked up the hill.

“What was that!” Sumeet said, with renewed fear.

Shinzou had a worried look. “I don’t know. An explosion. You stay here!”

Shinzou ran back up the hill at full speed. Sumeet defiantly ran behind him to catch up. Within seconds, both were at the front gate. Shocked, they could see that everything that had been neat and tidy was now a complete mess. They could see that the home’s windows were blown out. Glass was everywhere. The door, however, was still intact, and Shinzou walked up cautiously, peeking inside before opening it with deadly care.

Half-broken hinges creaked, revealing a scene that froze them both where they stood. Kamiyoshi’s body, or what was left of it, lay in the foyer on top of a pool of blood. Small fragments of his upper body were disbursed everywhere. The whole room was peppered with flesh and tissue.

Sumeet could barely handle it, and backed away horrified. “What, what happened?”

Shinzou looked all around and thought for a moment. “He set the gun to self destruct. Committed suicide.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. It’s hard to overload it without a bit of work.”

“But...why?”

Shinzou glanced back. “Well, I suppose he was scared, and didn’t want to get caught.”

Reaching into his breast pocket, Shinzou pulled out what looked like a large metal pen. Unscrewing its middle, a small mirror exposed itself. He spat on it, and held it toward Sumeet.

“Here, spit on this!” he ordered.

“What?”

“Spit on it!”

“What, what is it?” Sumeet said dumbly.

“A nano scrubber,” Shinzou said. “We need to make sure this whole area doesn’t have our DNA after we’re gone. It only works with a sample.”

Sumeet’s mouth was a bit dry, but he soon got enough saliva on the mirror. Shinzou activated the scrubber, and dropped it on the doorstep before heading back downhill.

Sumeet followed silently, and neither said anything until they got airborne and rose to a fairly high altitude. Shinzou could see how distressed Sumeet was. The whole situation was clearly beyond anything he had ever experienced. Nothing Shinzou could say would undo things, but he felt obligated to console Sumeet in some way.

“You have every reason to be mad at me,” Shinzou said softly.

Sumeet looked over, but his eyes didn’t make contact. “I lost my job, my fiance wants to kill me, and now I’m a wanted criminal. But for some strange reason, I don’t hold you accountable. I don’t think you planned things to happen this way.”

“You’re not a wanted criminal,” Shinzou said flatly.

“How do you know?”

“Because, as you’ve probably surmised by now, I work for the SWCISA, an ASPAU police unit. And I know you’re not a criminal.”

Sumeet nodded. “Okay, well that’s good...I suppose.”

Shinzou went on. “But what you don’t know is that I work with another group, a group of people concerned with the freedom of mankind. Freedom in many aspects, but primarily freedom lost to the march of technology.”

“Technology?” Sumeet said, unsure what that meant.

“Technology is at the heart of man’s greatest achievements, and is his greatest enslaver,” Shinzou explained. “I think you may have begun to understand that from our recent talks. But we can discuss those things with Henry, when you meet him.”

“Uhm, your adopted Sentient son, was it?”

“Yes, everything I told Kamiyoshi was true. You’ll meet Henry soon.”

Sumeet nodded. “And this cadre of people you spoke of? Who are they, and where are they located?”

Shinzou grinned while pecking at the nav system to adjust course. “We have lots of members. Lord Byron is one.”

“Lord Byron the poet? What’s that supposed to be, some kind of joke?”

“No joke. Then there’s Allen Ginsberg, Karl Marx, and many others.”

Sumeet was entirely perplexed. “Those men lived in completely different ages. They have nothing to do with each other!”

“Oh, but they do,” Shinzou said wryly. “The club doesn’t care about when.”

“What?” Sumeet screwed up his face and shook angrily. “You’re speaking in riddles.”

Shinzou chortled. “It’s not really a cadre. We like to call it a club. The timing is quite poor, but let me be the first to welcome you.”

Shinzou glanced over and saw Sumeet’s look of disbelief. Every iota of information was either confusing, or beyond comprehension. When combined with all their calamitous events, it was too much to bear. Shinzou chalked it all up to bad timing for his well-meant recruitment. Time, he realized, did not align itself to the desires of man. But wasn’t that always the case?

Anyway, better now than never.

With a whimsical smile, Shinzou leaned over and said. “Welcome to the Freedom Club, Sumeet.”

Chapter 16—Freedom Club

“Social Advantages” are for the workers alone, not for the “useless mouths.” The solitary is a useless mouth and will have no ration card - up to the day he is transported to a penal colony.

—Jacques Ellul

Lincoln Montana: 1994

T
ed curiously peered at the monkey cage, its bars dull and weathered. Like any small child, he hoped to get a good glimpse of it. But the creature was not so interested. It just sat on the floor, listless and exhausted. Despair from years of boredom and meaningless toil. And the smell. My God, the cage stank to high heaven. Ted held his nose and began to turn away. But then he realized something was not right. The creature appeared ill. It was hairless in many places, and covered with something. Was it sick? Or perhaps it was a species of monkey he was unfamiliar with. Jesus, what is that thing? Peering closer, he tried to make out its features, until a cold reality crept over him. The creature, whatever it was, turned toward him. My God, it’s not a monkey, or a gorilla, or an orangutan, or any other great ape for that matter. Looking back out through the bars was a simian he knew quite well, void of any freedom or purpose in life.

It was a human being.

Theodore Kaczynski awoke from a deep slumber as the sound of crackling fire consumed the image of his dream, fracturing it into a million small bits. Rising from bed, he rubbed his eyes. It was early morning, his sleep now interrupted by freezing drops that chattered loudly off the asphalt shingles above.

His cabin was on a small plot of land deep in the mountainous woods, south of Lincoln, Montana. It was a harsh area. Throughout the fall months, temperatures dropped heavily in the night. Freezing rain often turned to snow, leaving a rich white blanket to greet him in the morning. It would probably be so again, he figured.

Blinking hard to remove soot and mucus from his eyes, he looked around dimly. Only the light of an oil lamp flickered nearby and illuminated the small living space, his home and workshop for so many years.

The dream had not faded. Like foggy haze, background noise buzzed somewhere inside his skull. With a gaping yawn he rubbed his eyes again, wondering what it all meant. Humans behind bars? Well, that’s not far from the truth, he laughed to himself. Men were so enslaved by meaningless work. Were they not mere caged animals? Domestic creatures of the lowest sort?

He looked over to a small work area, which remained untouched since the night before. Climbing out of bed, he grabbed a wool blanket, which he threw over himself before sitting down at a table covered with various metal and wood parts. There, he carefully examined his most recent project. Laying before him in the amber luminescence was a fully assembled bomb detonator switch, carefully fashioned out of simple scrap materials such as pallet wood and tin boxes found in garbage heaps or nearby junkyards.

The mechanism was simple, but quite reliable. Having learned so much over the years, he was satisfied with the outcome on this occasion. He examined the finished device momentarily with a magnifying glass, and then hunched over his notebook to document the removal of fingerprints. This was followed by a short entry about misinformation to be planted with the device. He noted how to tape arbitrarily sourced hair in a way that seemed natural. This was the important bit. It equaled the removal of any personal traces. Ted prided himself on these meticulous details. It had accrued into a stymieing mix of false leads, befuddling the authorities for years.

An hour passed quietly before he sat back and stretched in his homemade chair. Time for a break. His eye glanced over some books lying nearby. Without thinking, he reached over and grabbed Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society.

He flipped through its worn yellow pages. It was soothing, one of his bibles. Writing which inspired him, fueling his existence over the decades. Here was the answer to modern society as a whole. It was all there. Industrialization, propaganda, enslavement of the proletariat. It spelled out the endemic socioeconomic diseases that industrialization and technology had brought upon mankind.

Damn it! What the hell was wrong with everyone? What blinded them to senseless toil? Were they that stupid?

The image of the caged monkey came back again, then the tables turned. Doubt crept in, and he despaired. Perhaps there was something wrong. In the skull, mental disease. Well, let’s hope not. That might explain it, though. Why he was so incapable of accepting a system that everyone else so easily took for granted. No, it couldn’t be that. It was the system, the machine. Whatever you called it, it was killing them. And, it’s...killing him.

He fumed silently.

Looking again at Ellul’s book, something caught his attention. A section called “The Final Resolution.” He sat back down and read. It described the difficulty one faces when trying to publish. A revolutionary book for instance. Yes, the system doesn’t like that, does it? Criticism of the enslavers is most certainly taboo. Can’t be published unless you meet expectations. Society’s expectations. Screw that!

Then an idea occurred to him. Maybe publication is the way to go? He’d been bombing now for – what, over a decade? Yes, the public took note of the bombs, but then their interest waned. Within days the number of newspaper articles dropped. And before you knew it, no one really cared. Everyone went back to work, watched TV, played sports, whatever surrogate activity turned them on.

Would publication be more effective? Ted mulled the idea over as he leafed slowly through the book’s pages. It wouldn’t be easy. He was no longer an academic, and couldn’t just submit a paper for review. Did it matter? How much effect did one academic paper have anyway? But let’s say you could somehow combine the bombing with it. Yes, yes, that’s it. Attach a manuscript to the next one. Well, it might get torn to shreds. And even if they pieced it back together, the FBI would never release it to the public.

Then he considered another route. He could coerce the press. Yes, publish it, and...and, in exchange, give up bombing forever. Ted closed his eyes and considered how it’d play out. He could get a wide audience, get them to understand what was going on. See how evil technology was. Why, if enough people rallied behind him, a revolution would begin. Gotta be careful though. Keep those oversocialized leftists out. But if the timing were right, it might work. Regress society, get rid of the cities, live in small groups, use small scale technologies.

Jesus! You could dump the whole stinking system and take the consequences!

But the press, would they do it? Would they give in to such demands? Ted grunted disdainfully and snuggled back in his tattered wool blanket. Stroking his beard again, he contemplated the idea while warming himself near the heat of his pot belly stove.

As he looked at the smoking kettle, thoughts of that caged human returned to him. Who was supposed to be watching from outside, anyway? Would it be another human? No, it’d probably be something else, a genetically altered creature. Something that used to be human. Or maybe a thinking machine of some kind. What could be worse. A thinking machine that treats us like a domesticated animal. That’s what’s in store for us. That is, if humans aren’t careful.

Shaking his head clear, he got up and walked over to some shelves in back. Using them as a ladder, he climbed up to access a small loft fashioned to store larger items. He briefly rummaged around before climbing down with a small portable typewriter. Placing it neatly down on his workbench, he took out a stack of typing paper and adjusted his stool to get comfortable. Then he fed one sheet neatly into the manual roller.

For some time he just stared at it. A calming lull filled the room. Glancing briefly at Ellul’s book he placed his hands on the keys and began to make slow rhythmic strokes. Letter by letter, the title began to appear. When the last key was hammered out, Ted returned the carriage several times to view his work.

“Industrial Society and Its Future”, he read out loud.

Yes, he thought to himself. That title will do. It’ll do nicely.

T
he release timers and micro sphincters worked as designed. Now all that was left to do was finalize a housing and mate it with the transport couplings. But those last items were off-the-shelf components and trivial by comparison.

Flip breathed deeply and nodded at his console with self satisfaction. Designing the microbivore delivery system wasn’t that difficult. Having made a similar system years ago, the new design was an extension of his older work. Yes, the microbivore payload was a slightly new twist, but nothing all that complex to incorporate. With Ozwald’s...Shiro’s exact specifications. He found the work straightforward and satisfying.

But the thought of Shiro himself was a different matter. Flip still had trouble getting over the shock of his first day. Feelings bounced back and forth like voltage oscillating through wire. Finding out that he was Sentient. And Catholic too. He could hardly believe it at first. Only after a few days did Shiro’s revelations become manageable.

Flip’s mind wondered back to his life in Arizona, when he so desperately wanted to know Ozwald. His handler. So different than he imagined. Thinking about it now almost made him laugh. Expecting there to be a human on the other side, someone he could go to church with. Or just befriend. How about a fishing partner?

But then a pinch of shame swept over him. Hadn’t Shiro lived up to those expectations? They went to mass together, albeit in virtual space. The Cathedral in Cologne was a perfect replica. With its vaulted ceiling and gargantuan columns – breathtaking! They sat together in the pews, genuflected with hands grasped in prayer. The choir’s angelic voice swept over them, and Flip remembered how poignant it was. How lucky he was to be there. With Shiro.

They even went fishing, though Flip was the one who carried the real gear out on the long pier, which stretched way out onto the sea from the Island’s recreation port. Through his filter, Flip watched Shiro sit joyfully on the handrails that surrounded them. It was early morning, and they were alone before an endless sea of aquamarine currents, intermixing with green hues of seaweed and algae.

They had fun, discussing the best way to cast out into the deep ocean. And Shiro taught flip about the native fish species in the Sea of Japan. He even explained a lot about jellyfish. Flip smiled the whole time. Jellyfish? Unlikely to catch any of those, he laughed. It was an alien creature to him, and Flip realized that he had never even seen a real one, having only fished in small manmade lakes near the Tonto National Forest.

The phone chimed, and Flip came out of his daydream. It was Shiro. With a smile, he picked up the call and joined his invitation for a virtual session.

The room around Flip transformed, and he soon found himself inside an Aquarium. It surrounded him with dimly lit seawater as monster-sized jellyfish floated in different directions behind thick polyurethane walls. Neon lighting of green and red reflected off pinkish-white forms.

“How are things progressing?” Shiro asked while peering curiously into one of the tanks.

Flip looked around, a bit disoriented. “Uhm, pretty good, I think. The primary disbursement mechanism is finished. I’m just mating it with a floater system that will provide initial transportation and release. All the issues we found in the prototype have been resolved.”

Shiro nodded. “Excellent! And when will we have the final system ready for deployment?”

“I suppose in a day or two,” Flip said, scratching his head thoughtfully. “Then all you have to do is have it replicated, and loaded with your payload. Anyone can do that.”

“Not anyone,” Shiro said, smiling. “But I understand what you mean. It’s excellent news Flip. You’ve done a wonderful job.”

“Have I?”

“Why, of course. Don’t you think so?”

“Well, I suppose.”

An uneasy silence lingered. Flip nervously gazed at jellyfish floating by him. He was enthralled by their grace and fluidity, but clearly distracted.

“Have you come to terms with our relationship?” Shiro asked softly. “I know you’ve had a lot to think about since your first day here. I’m sure it wasn’t easy to accept everything.”

“No, not at all,” Flip said, fearful not to portray lingering uncertainty. “It’s all been fine, just fine.”

“Really?” Shiro said, looking for some expression. “You can tell me if you’re still uncomfortable with my existence as a Sentient. I’m sure it must have been quite a shock.”