Those That Wake 02: What We Become (22 page)

“Are you saying that Intellitech tried to control what people think?” Aaron said. “What corporation doesn’t? What
person
doesn’t? Isn’t that what you’re trying to do right now?”

“By controlling what people see and hear, yes. By controlling what’s outside a person’s head, you try to influence what a person thinks. What I’m talking about here is the sacred privacy
within
a person’s head and a living idea, a parasite that’s born in your mind and controls you from within according to its own agenda.”

“Controlled,” Aaron said dubiously, “by Intellitech. That’s what you’re getting at, right?”

“No.” The false voice echoed through the tiles. “That was what they wanted. But even the youngest child knows you can’t control an idea. They engineered the most contagious, powerful idea they could, and it slipped through their fingers and into their heads, into everybody’s heads. It nearly destroyed all of us. It
did
destroy some of us. Your father, to name just one.”

The words hung in the room, heavy and inescapable, like the drowning waters of a black ocean.

“What was the idea?” Laura asked, her voice weak. She was fighting to speak from within some kind of internal brain seizure or something. Her face was contorted with effort; her hand had grown cold on Aaron’s.

“It was the most powerful, contagious idea they could find, one that promoted a craving for relief, a relief that Intellitech fancied it could provide; at a cost, naturally. The idea was hopelessness, and, already such a powerful part of us, when it first awoke—first became self-aware—it had already basically won.”

“So how are we still here?” Aaron demanded. “Why my father? Why haven’t we
all
been incorporated?”

“Hopelessness affects people in different ways, according to their strengths and weaknesses. It got your father where he couldn’t fight it. In truth, I didn’t think anyone could fight it, except by hiding. But I was wrong. A small group of people fought it, and they won.”

“So it’s gone? That’s what you’re saying? This small group of people beat it, and now I can give up my search because the thing that killed my father is gone?”

“Gone?” The Librarian tried the word out. “It enlarged a quality in people that already existed. Just because the cause is destroyed, doesn’t mean the human quality it exploited disappears. Let us say that the disease is gone, but many of the symptoms still remain.”

“How do you know any of this?” Aaron found, as he often did, that when he was defenseless, his best course of action was to challenge, to attack. “Where are you coming up with all this?”

“I don’t function by mere supposition, Aaron. My method is founded on a powerful tool. While still employed by your father, I developed a method of predicting sweeps of human development via seemingly small and unrelated information. An equation made of human interaction. Something you would appreciate, no?”

Aaron offered nothing in return.

“The Global Dynamic is a tool that allows unparalleled insight into human affairs. But like any tool, the hand that wields it determines its use. I tried to prevent this tool from being misused long ago, when I left Intellitech. However, someone eventually got his hands on it.”

The quiet that fell on the room, filled with a sense of the Librarian’s own trepidation, was distinctly uncomfortable.

“And that would be?” Aaron pressed, the ominous pause getting even to him.

“The Old Man.” It echoed off the tiles like a death knell.

“Are you joking?” Aaron spat with dogmatic force. “The Old Man is a bogeyman, a concept used to explain why the world sucks. He’s not real.”

“That’s his power, Aaron,” the voice intoned coolly. “Misdirection, camouflage, invisibility. He manipulates government and corporate powers as though they were chess pieces and the world was his opponent. Imagine how simple it would be to beat an opponent that didn’t even know he was playing. Security is invoked, and it becomes legal to monitor our cell conversations. A law is introduced, and people can’t litigate against corporations anymore. We miss it because a new movie shatters box office records, and we all look the wrong way. When we turn back around, the world has changed.”

Aaron’s hands were balled into fists on the table. His voice was pitched high as he began. “The Old Man is—”

“The Old Man”—the voice took the conversation back smoothly—“has no original name, no date of birth I can find anywhere. It’s impossible to be certain exactly who he is, or was. But I am familiar with references to a young scholar, a disciple of Carl Jung’s teachings, most specifically his theory of the collective unconscious. A very long time ago, this scholar formulated a radical theory of his own about how people’s minds are connected in hidden ways and how, by touching subtle levers, one person can shift the outlook of huge groups. It seems that this scholar made a test run of his theory by creating a movement among the students at a university in Europe. He used it to develop something of a cult and, finally, made his followers into a small political movement. This had a particularly hideous ending. The university folded; the followers were arrested as dissidents. All to test out this theory. The scholar himself was never found. He took his formulation and”—the voice let the statement hang in the electronic hum for an instant—“disappeared. There has never been another trace of him. Unless you believe as I do, that this was the Old Man.”

“You’re suggesting that, what, he weaponized psychoanalysis?” Aaron sneered.

“Aaron, are you familiar with the concept of cake mix?”

“Are you kidding me?” This was simply too much to tolerate. He looked at Laura for support, and, no surprise, she was staring emptily at the blank tiles.

“Cake mix. The flavored powder you buy in the baking aisle. Instant cake. You’ve heard of this?”

“
Yes,
I’ve heard of it.”

“It was invented in the 1950s, a time-saving innovation for housewives. You poured the powder into a bowl, simply added oil, baked it, and you had a delicious cake ready for your family when they got home. The children loved you more; the husband appreciated your kitchen savvy. A complete failure. No one bought it. It was about to be relegated to the trash heap of failed commerce. But then they consulted a team of psychoanalysts. The housewives, it seemed, felt that they had, in effect, been equated with an appliance. The food they prepared for their families was the manifestation of their love, the meals a contribution to family itself. The psychoanalysts came up with a solution. Do you know what the solution was, Aaron?”

“Thrill me.”

“Add an egg.”

Aaron’s expression went dead in the face of this revelation.

“Add an egg,” the voice repeated. “The company removed the powered egg from the mix, leaving that step for the housewives to take care of. It was about perception. The housewives needed to
feel
as though they were doing something for their families. All the company had to do was include the direction to add an egg. They sell a great deal of cake mix these days. Commerce won. Our minds were manipulated by misdirection. Simple psychoanalysis, but if that kind of manipulation isn’t a weapon, I don’t know what is.

“The irony”—the Librarian drew the pause out, his reticence suggesting a sense of regret absent from his electronic voice—“is that I used this scholar’s theory of human interconnection myself, in a way. I stripped it of its original intention, employed it as a means of observation and analysis rather than manipulation. That’s how I developed the Global Dynamic algorithm. Because it is not concerned with guiding people, but rather seeing how people are naturally guided by social currents, the Global Dynamic has much wider application as a predictor. Nevertheless, you could say”—again the Librarian’s voice slowed with old resentment—“that the Global Dynamic is a collaboration between the Old Man and myself. Like his original formulation, it’s just another tool to him, just a means to a larger, more effective tool: the human mind.”

“Stop!”

Aaron jolted in his seat. He had, for all intents and purposes, forgotten Laura was there until her scream tore the room in half.

“This is insane,” she said desperately. “It’s madness.”

“Yes,” the voice returned, unmoved. “It is madness. And it’s going to get worse. The Old Man subscribes to the ultimate corporate philosophy:
total
consolidation under one executive power. Through the Global Dynamic, he’s come to know just how interconnected everything is. He will use that, manipulate it, finesse it with the most effective tool he can find, and he
will
make it happen. These people who stopped the Idea before, Remak in particular, he wants them because he believes they have access to such a tool.”

Aaron wanted,
needed,
his cellpatch back, craved the blanket of the dataflow so much that it made his stomach cramp. He looked at Laura and saw a blank face staring into the middle distance of white.

“Well, then . . .” Aaron fought to order the information properly in his head, to design the proper mathematical proof to solve this. “What you need to do is find the people who beat the Idea before. You need to find them.”

“Yes, Aaron,” the electronic voice agreed. “That’s why I’ve told you all of this. That’s why you were even let down here in the first place. You already have found one of those people. She’s sitting right next to you.”

WHEN ROSE WAS SIX YEARS
old, she was in her cousin’s room and spotted a small statuette of a princess sitting on the windowsill. With the light beaming through it, it seemed cut from pure crystal, though when she took it up in her nervous fingers, it proved to be as light as the cheap plastic it was actually molded from. Chipped and dirty close up, it lost none of its luster or wonder in her young eyes, and she slipped it into her pocket before her cousin came back into the room. Her cousin, however, spotted the missing item immediately and accused Rose of the theft. Hauled out and berated loudly by her uncle while her own parents looked on, Rose handed the toy back and apologized through embarrassed tears. Seeing the object come out of her pocket, her uncle swept her off her feet and threw her down onto his knees so hard, she gasped for her lost breath. He tugged her pants from her bottom violently enough to tear the zipper apart. He spanked her with bitter, stinging strikes that went on and on. Through tear-blurred eyes, she watched her parents standing across the room, staring ineffectually at the door, the window, her uncle—anywhere but back at their daughter. Her act had made her so hideous, they couldn’t even look at her. At home that night, her father sent his wife from the room and grabbed Rose by the wrist, screaming at her for embarrassing them like that. His rage was so great, his grip so tight, Rose went to bed with a fractured wrist.

When Rose was ten, she was awakened one night by voices. She listened at her door as a man her father worked with berated him harshly. She peeked through a crack and watched as the man carried out their HD and several other appliances. Rose’s gangly, shark-faced father did not get the bat she knew he kept in the front closet, did not interpose himself between thief and front door, did not even open his mouth to speak. When the man had gone with their things, Rose’s mother hissed angry accusations at her husband.
That
was when her father leaped into action. Only once before had he beaten her mother so badly that she’d been forced to the hospital. That time she’d had three broken fingers, which, she explained to the doctors, had been caught in a door. This time the diagnosis was a fractured nose and three broken ribs. Three days after her mother was admitted, her father refused to take Rose to the hospital for a visit. Rose cut out of school early and, terrified at navigating so far afield from familiar territory alone, found her way to the hospital. She made her way to her mother’s bed only to find a strange woman occupying it. That night she found her father sitting limp on the sofa, staring at the cracked window in lieu of the missing HD.

“Mommy’s not at the hospital anymore,” she said to him.

“I know,” he said. “I don’t figure she’ll be back.”

Her eyes grew larger. She couldn’t turn away.

Her father’s eyes came away from her, went downward then, edgily wandered back.

“Get out of here,” he snapped. “I can’t look at you.”

When Rose was fifteen, a man in a suit showed up at the door and handed her father a notice. They were being evicted. Not behind on their rent, nowhere near the end of their lease, her father was baffled. One night, while Rose was lying on the sofa, another tenant came to the door. When her father answered, the tenant explained that the corporation was converting the building, but they were supposed to honor the tenants’ contracts, of course. The tenants were going to form a coalition, pool their money, fight this. Her father sent the tenant away.

He walked back into the living room and saw Rose staring at him, and his eyes became hot and manic.

“Stop looking at me,” he hissed at her. She couldn’t.

He grabbed a pillow and put his weight on her chest.

“Stop staring at me. I can’t take the sight of your face anymore.”

He pressed the pillow over her face, over her staring eyes. She reached up and touched his wrists, but let them fall limply away. He pressed down, until all she had left to breathe was darkness.

He tossed the pillow away, leaving her gasping.

Rose found work at a diner, a place her mother had worked at years before, where the owner remembered the child Rose had been, tagging along with her mother on odd days, receiving smiles from the sporadic, tired clientele, free lollipops from the other waitress. He hired Rose, and the other girl who worked there helped Rose find an apartment. Rose’s father came into the diner regularly, expecting to be given his food for free. Rose paid the bill herself, never mentioning it. He never looked up at her face. One day her father didn’t show up and not ever again after that. Without any effort, without having to take any kind of a stand, she was on her own.