Hieroglyph (41 page)

They strode through the ancient forest, and as they did Rob felt his sense of where he was, and even who he was, grow out from his chest like an indrawn breath that never stopped expanding. He could
feel
the deer, the ravens and foxes and bears, even if he couldn't see them. His ancestors had lacked this sense, but maybe they'd made up for that with knowledge—reports from hunters and workers of what lived where and in what abundance.

He'd never felt any sense of connection with those people. They were like shadows, as dark and inaccessible as the inward darkness below the pine boughs.

Pensive, he followed his son, speaking less and less as the day went on.

Gradually he became aware that the life of the forest lay behind them. Something was up ahead, and he assumed it was the sea, until they came to the edge of the forest and he saw the churned landscape of stumps and bare earth that stretched away for kilometers. Clear-cutting: the whole forest had been logged here, and with his new sense he could feel how empty it was.

“Raven,” said Terry, pointing. Rob looked, but all he saw was an old logging road, and a pickup truck. Terry was walking out to it, so he followed.

There was a man standing next to the truck. The raven sensation was coming from that spot; did he have a bird with him? No; as Rob came closer he couldn't see the animal, and yet the raven signal kept getting stronger. It was as if the man
were
a raven.

And yes—of course he was.

Robert remembered his grandfather telling him that their family was part of the Eagle clan. It had seemed silly and superstitious to him at the time, just one more piece of the past that he'd have to reject if he was to make some sort of life for himself in the modern world. He still felt that way. And yet . . .

They greeted the man, who was working with Parks Canada to do a census of the local bear population. As they walked back to the trees, Rob said, “He was wearing one of these sensory substi-whatits, wasn't he?” He'd seen a hint of blue under the red plaid lumberjack's shirt the guy had on.

When Terry shrugged, Rob said, “So was everybody at the workshop . . . they could all feel each other's clan, couldn't they? Including ours? Did that guy back there see two Eagles come out of the bush just now?” Terry didn't answer, which told Rob all he needed to know. He stopped, suddenly aware only of his son and not the moss-covered cathedral of trees where they stood. “I know everything, Terry. That you're the one who's backing this. You're a Haida separatist?”

He expected the kind of evasion or argument he used to get when Terry was a kid. Instead Terry laughed.

“Dad, this is the twenty-first century. We're way past separatism here.”

His conversation with Bill echoed in his head. “What, is this some kind of takeover? The First Nations' revenge?” But Terry was still laughing.

“Dad, we can't separate because there's nowhere to separate to. The world's too small now. Nobody can do it. And take over what? Canada's not a well-defined thing anymore, any more than the States or anywhere else is. We're all crammed together. It's the global village, right?”

“So what is going on here?”

Terry crossed his arms, serious now. “The shirts, the Dorians, Wegetit . . . they're just people using cognitive science to improve their interactions. And their decision making. Hell, you use the stuff yourself!”

“I do not—”

“Oh, yeah? What about SimCanada? It's all through Parliament Hill.”

“Those are just brainstorming tools.”

“Tools to think with, right.”

“You're saying the Dorians are just like SimCanada?”

“
Exactly
like SimCanada, Dad.”

“I don't like it, Terry. You're letting a goddamned machine make your decisions for you.”

“Your Dorians don't make your decisions. They're just making visible the invisible: the interplay of all the complicated factors at play in your life. Like which animals are around us, and where all our Eagle brothers and sisters are right now.”

“As well as who owns what?”

Terry grinned. “Ah, you saw that overlay, eh? Wait'll you see the stranded assets overlay for the carbon bubble.”

Rob carefully looked through the dripping green branches at the complex depths of the forest. “If I put on my glasses right now, what
would
I see?”

“Us,” said Terry. “You'd see what you're dealing with.”

Like mountains, the Haida and Tsimshian territorial claims would loom over the trees—not claims entirely of men and women anymore, but of Bear and Raven—and Eagle. And he was sure he would be able to see other things, too, like logging concessions, company names. Who owned what. How much the forest was worth in cold cash. In that moment he got it.

“You're not trying to build a new government. You've already done it.”

Terry nodded slowly. “Not just out of augmented reality apps. We call those the prosthetic—the thing that lets you see power and ownership. Like I said, making the invisible visible. But it doesn't do the deciding.”

“The deciding—that's Wegetit.com?”

“Wegetit and the system around it, which we call Cybersyn. It's built on the block chain, so it's totally decentralized, peer-to-peer. It provides trusted communications, fraud-proof voting, citizenship, and other services for a new governing structure. It's more fraud- and corruption-proof than the one we've got now. Except of course it's not just for Canada. It's worldwide.”

Rob stared at his son. “It's a damned good thing I am who I am, Terry. You've just admitted to treason.”

“Not at all. If I can
see
the carbon bubble and I say, ‘I think the government should divest from fossil fuels,' and you don't, and it turns out that Canada gets burned as the bubble bursts, did I commit treason? No. I
advised,
and you had the option of listening or not.”

“But what you're doing with it here . . . that's not just advising. You're actually
running the island
with it, aren't you?” All these maps of power and wealth—they had visible concentrations, end points, and those corresponded to people. If you could see the whole network of power around yourself, you'd know who to talk to in order to get things done. Even if you were just some anonymous Indian on the street, you'd be able to see what needed to be done, even if you couldn't do it yourself. And using the block chain, it could all be implemented in a completely decentralized manner. No center of power to take down . . .

“We're running the island because nobody else is doing it. If the feds were doing any kind of a good job at it, we wouldn't have to.” Terry said this without heat, but the words stung. Rob almost said, “We do what we can,” but in the face of what he'd seen here, that was no answer at all.

He started walking again, no longer noticing the gorgeous scenery. Terry fell into step beside him. “We use Wegetit and the rest of it to develop public policy that's actually made
by
the public and tested alongside official policy in the national Dorian, which is just an open-source version of SimCanada. They're both Big Data apps. We see which policy works better in the simulations, and then we wait for reality to catch up and see what actually happened in the real world. And either we tweak the national model or we publish the winning policy choice as a
padget
—you know, a policy gadget like they've had in Europe since, oh, at least 2010. The local MLAs have been using the padgets to design policy for a year now; they love it because they actually get good advice for free.

“You see what we're doing here, Dad? We're offering you the chance to do the same thing, only on the national level.”

The implication was clear. If the feds didn't play, the Haida could take it to the next level: they could start voting in the block chain and cut the government out of the loop entirely.

Rob crossed his arms. “I'm representing the whole country.
You're
representing a little group of hackers and malcontents.”

Terry shook his head. “How many people voted in the last federal election?” There was an awkward silence. “We involve more people in decision making than you do,” said Terry. “You do the math.”

Rob thought about it for a while, then said, “Why?” He meant,
why you
.

Terry seemed to understand. “Because you raised me to want to make a difference. The Midwest United States is emptying of people 'cause the water table's gone and the president says he'll invade Canada if we don't agree to reverse the flow of the Hudson Bay watershed. It's the Garrison Diversion project on steroids—and that's in the supposedly most stable, richest, most democratic region in the world. There's water wars and mass migrations everywhere, disease, starvation, religious pogroms. Here's the thing: solving all these problems is easy, from a science and engineering standpoint. The science has been there for decades; so's the technology. We've got biotech, nanotech, access to space, robots, 50 percent efficient solar cells, nuclear fusion, for God's sake! We don't need to solve
those
problems. There's only one issue that's worthy of our time and effort right now, because if we overcome it, we'll solve all the others.

“The only problem worth solving is the problem of
how we govern ourselves
.”

Their feet made no noise as they sank into the moss. For a while father and son just walked together. Rob could feel the web of life radiating out from them, almost like invisible light. The animals, the epic trees, the moss and the inch-long slugs crawling on it; they were almost like a part of himself.

He knew perfectly well how this was supposed to make him feel. Oneness with nature, that was the game here. It made him mad, because it was all so obvious and naive—a tourist's version of the natural world. Try living out here without technology for a week. Try emptying Vancouver into the countryside to hunt the forests bare. The population being what it was, the only reason there were still places like this was because there were places like Vancouver. All this back-to-nature crap wasn't going to cease to be crap just because some new technology made a more compelling argument for it.

There was no point telling Terry this, of course; a sidelong glance showed Rob the quietly happy expression on his son's face. He thought that he and his dad were Having a Moment. It was one of those things he did; Rob could remember times when he'd used this tactic as a boy—used his happiness to try to change his father's mind about something important. Sometimes Rob had let him know he was being an asshole; sometimes, he just stood firm and ignored the ploy.

They'd come to a height that looked down on the shore. He could see their canoe waiting for them. Funny—he hadn't felt it, the way he felt the ravens roosting overhead, or the deer half a kilometer off to the right. The canoe was a hole in the landscape. Damned interface.

“Tomorrow, we can tell this story,” said Terry, as he began picking his way down to the shore. Rob sighed, watching him for a few moments, then followed.

RESOLUTE HE MIGHT BE,
but by noon the next day Rob was grateful for Krishnamurti's call—it saved his ass.

The whole morning had been given over to a festival—of art, song, traditional dances, and storytelling. Rob had known it was coming—he attended such events many times each year. So he'd set his glasses to overlay the briefs on the government's position, so he could be ready when the negotiations started. Except, he kept being distracted by the performances.

Each story, each song, and every work of art had been chosen to reflect the insights they'd collectively discovered on the first day. They'd been told this in the conference recap at breakfast, but what it really meant was only just dawning on Rob.

When Krishnamurti called, Rob had completely forgotten the briefs, was in fact staring through them at an old Tsimshian fisherman from Prince Rupert, who was telling his story. For every one of the government's positions, this man had a real anecdote that showed why it was awful, wrong, or would just be ineffective. The damnedest thing about it was that Rob was sure this wasn't a careful propaganda ploy. Taken by themselves the old geezer's experiences were as random as anybody else's. But hovering in the background, visible through the glasses that everybody was now wearing, was the causal root analysis diagram. Somebody had redrawn it as an actual tree, and as they were done, each story, song, and artwork was being pasted into it as a hotlink. Their argument was already won; that had happened when the people in this room, Rob included, had collectively built that tree the day before yesterday. This morning was all about absorbing the implications. Which weren't good for any of Rob's positions.

It didn't help that Rob had bought the sensory substitution shirt from the outfitter (paying with Gwaiicoin), and with Terry's help had connected to the conference feed he'd suspected was there. Now he could
feel
the complex web of kinship, shared history, and alliances that informed the identities of the people opposite him. Through the glasses, he could see the pyramids of power and money made visible by the rogue overlays. All the complexities of obligation, history, business, and government were there—you could almost reach out and pull the strings, twist them to and fro.

So when Krishnamurti called and told him the news, Rob actually grinned in relief. “Thanks,” he said, moving his lips as little as possible. Then his eyes sought out Terry, who was sitting with the visitors near the door, and the smile vanished. This could get ugly.

There wasn't a dry eye in the place by lunchtime, except maybe for Rob's. He had to admit, the whole performance had been damned convincing. What he'd seen and heard here perfectly described everything that was wrong with the Indian Act and two hundred years of colonialism, and with the causal analysis in play, the reasons were obvious to all. “So,” said Todd as he took the floor again, “we can now move on to our last two stages. First, commitment to change. And second, deciding the actual courses of action that we will all take to address the root cause. This will take up the rest of today, and all of tomorrow.”