Those That Wake (20 page)

"Mike," he said when Laura nudged his shoulder. "Just Mike."

"You've come here"—the electronic voice filled the room—"because you approached this cooperative and they turned you away?"

"No, sir, not precisely," Remak said. "I'm a field analyst. Used to be a field analyst. I was ... kidnapped, for lack of a better word, during an inquiry. When I escaped and returned to make my report, no one remembered me. I wasn't even on their files, or so they claimed. I understand that's hard to—"

"No," said the voice. "Not at all, unfortunately. And you, Laura. Who forgot you?

"My parents." Her voice was all but dead.

"I'm very sorry," the voice said. "Jon, you and Laura may come up. You'll forgive me, but I need to limit my exposure."

"No," Mal said, a gentle but heavy hand falling on Laura's shoulder.

"This is our only opportunity, Mal." Remak's voice was low and harsh. "You're going to have to trust me now."

Unconvinced by Remak's demand, Mal allowed his arm to fall to his side only when Laura touched his hand and nodded at him.

Remak and Laura turned toward the stairway.

"Up the stairs and through the door at the left," the voice directed them.

Together, they climbed the stairs, and the door clicked as they came to it. They pushed it open and disappeared into shadow.

Mal watched and, at the last sight of them, scowled.

"This seems like a bad idea," he said up to the shadows. He turned and looked at Mike. "What do you think's going to happen up there?"

Mike looked at him without expression for a moment, then, taking a deep breath and setting his shoulders, he rejoined the world around him all at once.

"They'll be tortured and killed. But don't let it get you down, kid. We're all gonna be dead inside a few days."

Mal's eyes burned into him.

"You've been a zombie since we left the city, and now you come out with that? What the hell's wrong with you?"

"Are you joking?" Mike said, with something of his old acid. "What's wrong? Are you blind and deaf and retarded?"

"Do you see Laura shutting down? Remak?" Mal demanded hotly. "Are they any better off than you?"

"You're goddamned right they are." Mike nearly shouted it back at him, his voice reverberating up the empty walls. "Know why? Because they
care.
Yesterday, Remak puts me in a grocery store and tells me to wait while he checks with his people. When he comes back, he tells me that no one remembers us, that we're somehow disconnected from our entire lives, anyone we ever knew and loved. So I make a few calls from a paycell and guess what? He's right. And I'm thinking, 'Holy shit, this is hell.' But when I'm over the shock and I'm thinking it through, about what it means to me specifically, I realize: it doesn't matter at all. I never met my old man; my mother has nothing but grief for me. My students, I don't miss any of them. I haven't got any friends worth a damn." Mike leaned closer, nearly into Mal's face, though his voice didn't lower. "My whole fucking life, it was so empty that when someone took it away from me, I don't even miss it.

"Remak and Laura had their lives taken away, but they want them back. I had mine taken, and I don't care. My mother was right all along: I don't matter at all."

His eyes burned into Mal from inches away, challenging him to find a solution to that.

And Mal couldn't. Was his own life so different? He had essentially been alone, even before his father left him. So he glared back at Mike, never willing to be the first one to walk away.

Eventually, Mike's eyes cooled and he walked away with a sneer. Mal watched his back as Mike stalked to a window, yanked the curtain away, and turned his gaze on the empty, darkening lawn outside.

Remak and Laura passed into a long hallway of rich, dark wood. There were two doors along one side and a single door on the other, and at the far end, across from them, another door. Laura looked up at Remak and they proceeded forward until, as they came to the single door, it clicked sharply in the murky silence.

Remak pushed it open.

"The doors here are heavy," he whispered to her. "Reinforced with metal inside."

Metal, indeed. They came into a room that was flat gray metal from the floor to the walls, whose corners were vague with shadows and crawled upward into darkness. In the middle of the room was a single gunmetal table, spotlighted with a pale yellow glow.

"There are chairs against the left wall," the electronic voice said from out of the dim reaches. Remak found two, made of a harsh metal that matched the table, and pulled them up. He gestured for Laura to sit and then did so himself.

Unprompted, Remak began speaking to the anonymous space around them, recounting their last few days. It was not particularly cold in here, but Laura felt herself beginning to shiver, a cold sweat pricking the nape of her neck.

When he finished, the room returned only a silence that seemed to vibrate from the shrouded corners. When the disembodied response finally came, it was like being haunted by a phantom.

"There are two kinds of evolution," said the voice from the depths. "There is Darwin's evolution, the mutation and adaptation of genes. This is a physiological process, occurring when an animal, a gene-carrier, interacts with environment. This change, of course, occurs over thousands of years."

The voice was coming from somewhere in front of them, but with the majority of the room cloaked in black, the Librarian might have been in the same room, hidden in the darkness, or somewhere else through the unknown halls of the house.

"And then there is cultural evolution." The voice vibrated out of the black. "The process by which our
minds,
rather than our bodies, adapt as they interact with environment. It is what our minds soak up from the world around us, from other people, from what we see, what we are told. Now, it takes millions of years for a flipper to become a leg. But our minds, our perspective, in a sense the very nature of who we are, can change in an instant, in the amount of time it takes to hear and process a word or interpret an image. Do you understand? Just as the dangers of our environment—persistent attacks by a predator species, eating a poisonous plant—will evolve us over a millennium,
ideas
will evolve us, too, over the course of months or minutes or seconds."

Remak nodded. To Laura, this sounded similar to the rudiments of the Global Dynamic as she understood it.

"Darwinian evolution is genetics," the Librarian's voice went on. "The units of transmission are genes. They move in the physical universe, the strongest ones surviving, passed from generation to generation. What, then, is the transmission unit of cultural evolution?

"In 1976, a biologist named Dawkins at Oxford University gave these units a name. He called them memes. They are conceptually alive, just as genes are. Like genes, memes are born in one person and are capable of implanting themselves in other people. Unlike genes, however, they move over physical space, but not in the physical universe. Memes are living ideas, moving from brain to brain in the space of a glance or a synaptic impulse, the most contagious life form ever to exist. These memes, these living ideas, are the carriers of human culture."

If the Librarian was watching them, there was nothing to see but the faces of two people turned to stone.

"Once upon a time, memes were revelations," the Librarian told them. "The invention of the wheel, or Einstein's theory of relativity. Religion—possibly even God Himself—is a meme. And other, more basic things: an unforgettable quote, a way of playing a game or making a clay pot. When human beings had less access to one another, culture grew more slowly, and the memes were simpler, more significant ideas.

"Not so, anymore. Now memes are catch phrases from movies, tunes you can't get out of your head, a cereal commercial jingle, an empty political slogan, a garish fashion. The birth and transmission of these living ideas is no longer a natural process, an inherent by-product of human life. Now corporations produce them in limitless quantity, flooding the entire world with them, suffocating the meaningful memes, the important ones, the ones that nourish life and thought because they've had generations to grow and flourish organically in our minds. Corporations manufacture hollow ideas, or deformed ones, and they're winning the battle through sheer numbers.

"Of course, the capability to do this is fairly recent. The Internet is the greatest propagator of memes in the history of human thought by a factor of millions. Writing was crucial, radio a vast step forward, television a powerful leap beyond that. But in just a single glance at a standard commercial web page, more than twenty-five distinct meme transmissions occur. Currently, there are on the order of 39.7 billion individual web pages on the World Wide Web. Multiply that and imagine the virulence of the memes, the number of empty ideas slipping into minds that aren't even aware of them. With the improvement of imaging technology and Internet capability in standard cells, people are exposed to this virulence every moment of every day. They now crave the stimulation, to the point that its absence feels undesirable. They are, in effect, addicted to meme transmission, and they don't even know it."

Through the electronic barrier, Laura could hear the Librarian take a deep breath before continuing. Laura, for her part, was holding on to her breath tight. She felt what was coming in the trickle of sweat down her spine. Beside her, Remak was as motionless as death.

"Now, not all memes are undesirable. But consider that most web pages are initially reached via search engines, their complicated algorithms determining which memes we are most likely to be exposed to. And who determines these algorithms? Who, in effect, decides what ideas we are going to have? The corporations, of course. Just as they determine what we see on television, the music we hear, the news that reaches us. And what do you imagine would be their motive in determining what memes we're exposed to?"

"Profit," Remak said, and the word echoed in Laura's ears like a death sentence.

"Rather. My former employer, Intellitech, was the leader in this field of inquiry. They wanted the ultimate competitive edge: an idea that could transmit spontaneously. That is, an idea that moves from mind to mind
without
a standard means of communication, in a sort of inadvertent mental telepathy. Imagine an idea that transmits merely by proximity, or via a cell conversation, through voice tone or facial expression. How long until an entire city had this idea lodged in their brains by doing no more than coming too close to a stranger on the street? How long before the entire world is thinking it, simply because someone spoke to a relative on a cell halfway around the world? True viral marketing.

"For this you would need the ideal meme: an idea that combined maximum latent profit with unprecedented level of transmission potential."

"Hopelessness," Laura said, barely more than a whisper because she couldn't catch her breath. The empty look on her parents' faces, the murderous void in Brath's eyes, the shudder of despair that ran through Mal's body when Stoagie didn't recognize him; what else could give birth to those horrors? Laura could feel the weight of it pressing the air from her body right now.

"Yes, Laura. Hopelessness. And, truly, it was the only way for Intellitech to go. Hopelessness existed already, of course. We have always been so susceptible to it. The media has been trading in it for centuries. It creeps into our heads like a hungry spider and begins feasting.

"But Intellitech wanted it more powerful still. They targeted teens to begin with; they had to. Teens are the largest consumers of media and transmitted culture and are thus the highest meme-transmitting demographic.

"Intellitech already controlled search technology, and they flooded search engine hits with websites that would promote this meme's transmission. Their tentacles slid out. They began aggressively acquiring a cross section of media properties to accommodate their plans. So, HD channels were flooded with images that would carry the hopelessness meme most potently; they began producing music with words and tones that pushed the meme. Finally, there was nowhere left to turn that the meme wasn't present.

"Then came their 'focus groups,' thinly veiled psychic torture chambers. Teenagers were exposed to headlines of disaster and ruin, simulated images of their own families in agonizing pain. They were shown falsified proof that their own reputations, records, lives were being irrevocably ruined. Data-rich smart liquids were injected directly into the amygdalae, the portion of the brain responsible for emotion.

"And then,
then
Intellitech got exactly what it needed: Big Black. The initial destruction was bad enough. But soon after, to have a great black symbol of our own ability to de stroy ourselves rising from the skyline of the world's greatest city ... This broke down the final barrier, let the hopelessness come flooding in like a tidal wave. It was so effective, it seems impossible to me that Intellitech didn't have a hand in it.

"Whatever the case, Intellitech had its success. If that's what you can call it." The Librarian's pauses were filled with a low electronic hum. "In short order, the extraordinary rise in desolated response they had stimulated in their test subjects spread to the doctors administering the experiments, and to the doctors' families and associates. The idea was catching."

"Why?" Laura pleaded, nearly in tears. "Why that? Couldn't they see that it would destroy us?"

"No, Laura, they couldn't. Corporations are vast living systems with one, single evolutionary imperative: profit. Perhaps Jon has familiarized you with the Global Dynamic? Hopelessness promotes certain behavior patterns crucial to marketing. But it is also a by-product of those same behaviors. It promotes the shortest-term thinking and thus increases sales of blatantly harmful substances like tobacco, liquor, and beverages and foods made primarily of sugars and chemicals. It creates violent impulses of resistance at the same time as a yearning to escape into video games, action movies, and fast, no-thought entertainment at the expense of considered, constructive solution-building. It makes parents forget to care what their children do and children forget to care about how they treat one another. It makes us need more and more and more because no amount is ever enough to fix us, to make us happy. Hopelessness creates all of these conditions, but it also
arises
from them. Do you see?"