Chapter 16 of Between Two Deaths
Looking at news on the Internet, Emmanuel realizes that the confiscated have started to return. There are waves of returns like there were and still are waves of confiscations. The world has become much more complicated. It was already getting too complicated and difficult for well-informed people to figure it all out in 2019; now snags have reached another order of magnitude.
Emmanuel reads on his screen: “The confiscated create problems again” in an editorial of Le Figaro, a conservative French publication. On a German channel, groups of confiscated are climbing down an intelligent train and walking gingerly on the quay; they look more surprised and lost in their own German train station than tourists. However, they are well-received: booths have been set up where they get information about housing and employment. On the next clip, taken in southern Italy, a police cordon tries vainly to keep under control the frantic, tattooed horde waving flags and placards and screaming angry slogans in military unison. The fuss is about a decision made by some state secretary in favor of the confiscated, who are suddenly entitled to buy properties and granted the right to seek tenure in research and professorial jobs.
Commiserating, the commentator explains that the mob expresses anger because they don’t enjoy comparable benefits, though they’ve returned earlier.
An article in Le Monde summarizes the tensions, the number of incidents due to the growing number of confiscated-on-the return in Paris, Lyon, Marseille…. “It’s an important segment of the population that cannot re-integrate our society fast enough. It must be recognized that we put sticks in their wheels big as logs!”
In the digital edition, front page of Le Canard Enchaîné (still here, this one!), there is a nasty caricature of the situation for the confiscated, who’s trapped like a rat in an experiment: frightened, naked, ashamed, hairy and dammed. The confiscated is chained to a precipitous rock beaten by the storms; his head is stuck between hammer and anvil: the rapacious super bullet train which pretends to broaden his horizon, and the high brick walls of the house of recovery that awaits him.
In the economics section of Libération, Emmanuel reads an article on the exorbitant price of “reform houses and the corridors of rehabilitation…. All confiscated must go through them, it’s the official route of return.”
Why not me, then, wonders Emmanuel? Why not us? Put me in a reform house or whatever “corridor of rehabilitation” you prefer, but let me return. Yesterday he didn’t want to go back to a miserable world where is family would not be found. But now that he sees confiscated returning comfortably, he becomes jealous.
Emmanuel learns that some establishments are “private” and at the customer’s expense, but that most are “public” and supported by, in the case at hand, the French State, still generous to the deprived and the under-appreciated.
This means, Emmanuel infers, that some among the confiscated-on-the-return have the means and prefer to pay for their recovery.
“The return is only fully successful for those who mentally and physically adapt to their new life. It’s often difficult and it’s best to seek help from professionals, themselves ex-confiscated who’ve successfully returned and can help one recover. “
In The New York Times, he comes across the injustices that make the super-rich take advantage of Social Security and Medicare to pay for “psychomotor rehabilitation at Cap Ferrat” (easily the most exclusive beach on the French Riviera), while the mass of survivor taxpayers, who nonetheless finance the system, is crammed in unhealthy clinics and semi-correctional facilities. “
Confiscated-on-the return are “survivor taxpayers”!
One thing is clear, it’s the same old shenanigans. Nothing changed out there when it comes to taking advantage. The big difference is that before, Emmanuel used to hear about victims of awful, unjust, aberrant situations which did not include him.
An article in The New Yorker shows sympathy: “They have passed through the blinding van and the mercurial train; they have lost everything in the adventure, have been, so to speak, stripped naked; and now, they plumb the ghastly depths of the zero-social level to which they come back. Yet they still came back with abilities, a wealth of memories and a capital of savoir-faire which, even where dated and obsolete, have intrinsic (historic) value. Their idiosyncrasies must be respected; it would be unfair to receive all of them the same way. Our economy benefits from talents and know-how, confiscated on the return bring old traditions, stories and skills with them. Let us not forget that we were all confiscated, at some point.”
Like everything else one strongly wishes in this train, perhaps it’s when one has given up on returning that it will happen. Emmanuel mulls this phrase over until he almost convinces himself of its truthfulness. Almost. Questions insist: Had all these confiscated-on-the return given up on returning? Given up at the same time? How can I ever give up the hope of reuniting with my family, my life?
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These concerns are abruptly replaced by a discovery. The freedom afforded passengers keen on scouring the Internet results in the adolescent and her “stupid” little brother bumping into nothing short of a revelation.
Who controlled the train had been an open question since day one of the confiscation. Was it a privileged group of humans, a corporation — or was the machine on her own, driver-less and owner-less, 100 % self-controlled?
In their compartment, these alternatives had been debated by Michael, George Détienne, the third-year law school student and Emmanuel. During a crucial conversation, the adolescent had raised the question of the copyrights, the patents that must have been deposited at some point, probably in the future of 2030. Roaming the Internet, she and her brother Bruno, who only then fully revealed his talent at hacking, started looking for documents tracing the invention and production of machines like their train. By herself, the adolescent would not have reached the revelation. She was helped by the kid Emmanuel considered until recently “either an idiot or a retard” (words which he now erases from his blog).
Bruno, 11 years old, roamed around elite hackers chat rooms; he learned about early exploits of mythic hackers like The Mentor and The Legions of Doom a soon as his screen allowed it. Everyone realized that his insufferable behavior had been a cover, he was smart as they come.
The adolescent and her brother surfed hard but, at first, they couldn’t find patents pertaining to intelligent trains. And then, eureka, they followed the brain-waves and discovered the reason why no copyrights, no trace of ownership could be found concerning top-shelf software and hardware. These machines did not have inventors and owners because they were their owners and inventors; in other words, their owners had turned into machines. Super rich men, women and their children had altered their brain, augmented its performance, and found another chassis for their thoughts to roll on, apparently forever.
On a top-secret market and for an astronomical price, their brains had been uploaded on synthetic nets more supple and resistant than gray matter and flesh. The 100 billion neurons and trillions of synaptic connections swarming in their skull “existed” now beyond the vicissitudes of their biological bodies. These individuals had made the metaphysical jump.
The strange thing was that many were — had been — Emmanuel’s neighbors: they’d lived in Manhattan, still the world’s richest island per square inch on the planet. The contract advised to “let your biological brains to science the moment consciousness is re-acquired, and withal, the ability to testify that the upload was done without a hitch. It is not recommended to live two forms of existence at the same time, and for obvious reasons. “
What Emmanuel understood was that synthetic neuron nets, uploaded-people’s personal vehicles, were tailor made, adaptable, renewable, efficient and undoubtedly comfortable. The expanded consciousness enjoyed by the uploaded had a good chance to live forever. Acquiring a fresh body naturally produced the feeling of being re-born, especially if, as was often the case, they chose it young. However, they were not re-starting from age zero, nor from the age when they’d been uploaded. They didn’t start; they no longer were born. They no longer had an age. Indeed their new body had no age.
Nanotechnology equipped them with the ability to create the material, the pulp and silhouette of the human-feeling body they fancied. A transient, disposable body was generated according to circumstances chosen by the buyer, who had access to the parameters and could at all times change course from within the cockpit of his consciousness. Entire families decided to incorporate machine-material — some became hulls of plastic, glass and metal moving oh-so fast on unsupportive wheels, they passed through compartments’ partitions, several at once, here and there at the same time, solidly entangled like the massive clusters of particles where their awareness dwelled.
They are the spirits inside the walls, the roof, the floor of their compartment. The metallic arms who clean behind passengers; and they were the ones who finally offered drinks and food. Who let them know about virtual toilets after hours of painful restraint — and cocoons when one had given up on these commodities.
The same cruel ones who decided to let them contact other confiscated on other trains — let Emmanuel know about the whereabouts of Alicia and Isabel — to better torture them.
They were the ones Emmanuel compared in his early log to humans keeping their dogs happy on a short leash.
It became clear why the supernatural fools preferred to re-surface inside machines coming back from the future. For those who don’t incorporate machines it turns out to be painful to return eternal in a human body and uniform, dangerous to deal on an equal footing with mortals. Eternals are more vulnerable and fragile than mortals; they have more to lose if mortal mess up with them, embroil, kill one of them in a scabrous affair. Their body can be replaced, it’s the soul that can’t. Their ageless reputation is forever smeared among humans and non-humans alike, once their name has gone under. Emmanuel reads an anonymous post (probably from an eternal) that says: “The moment something wrong has been tagged on you, your every move proves one is right to suspect you. If you did prison at 25, at 127 you’re still trying to clean your name and stay out of trouble.”
In a way, Emmanuel had gone toward this revelation and declared early in his blog that the train came, not exactly from the future, but from a no-time zone where, like the Martians in H.G. Wells, living souls, active minds inhabited the cockpits of machines. With this difference, he wrote, that: “Tomorrow’s machines are not aggressive, not primarily; they concoct, they enrobe one like the beautiful, comfortable but poisoned robe Medea gives her rival.” His speculations had remained poetic and abstract; reality proved more trivial. It was unbearable.
While speaking loud in the compartment, Michael stood up and spat ten thousand words a minute: “What was behind the train and the van?… a super-rich man, his wife and their ugly twins! Once they’ve passed through the grinder, people whose hollow mind is restored on the machine-side in all its emptiness create a network powerful enough to rule the world; their association is even more effective than before their re-incarnation. They didn’t like democracy in the first place and don’t need capitalism, after all. And think about it, from inside intelligent machines they have us under a close watch. Now, why confiscate us? Why experiment with the confiscated? Why have fun at the expense of our fears of mortals? Emmanuel has said all there is to say here. Thanks, man. (He bent forward and made as though to tip his hat towards Emmanuel.) Man, we’re simply sent back 2500 years! We should all re-read Homer (Emmanuel thought, and Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides the great tragic). They are our gods now: secretive, invisible and brutal. Why confiscate, why package us in compartments and corridors, three-quarters seated, the rest slumps? To have fun at our expense sharpening their immortal teeth.”
Inspired by the silent experiment and suddenly free, not merely to access, but to build on the virtual, Emmanuel had opened a corridor where he could publish his blog, discuss it and get feedback, which proved instantly popular among Desistants in the train and outside. The old man, the law-school-student, Michael quoted him as though he were a reference and an authority:
“Why did they conceive of this fucked up train? Read Emmanuel if you want to know the answer, my friends: ‘To amuse themselves at the grotesque comedy we play when arbitrary differences are forced upon us.’ Brother, you put it well. I should add to your teachings that they see the terror, the hypocrisy, the weakness and malice in our eyes and that tickles them inside because it gives them a sense of their superiority. Equanimity of mind in eternity is not all that great, otherwise; kind of boring…”
Was Michael mocking Emmanuel and his corridor. No, it seemed. Michael’s tone was not supercilious; it was deferential!
Michael, in Emmanuel’s corridor: “How they enjoy the terror in our eyes, how they must have laughed at our cries, all cozy inside the moving structure, crouching like demons beyond the extensions, inside the toilet bowls, the cocoons… What a ridiculous performance we must have made, more real than TV reality! Seeing us writhe like worms, erring like the blind, all the while unconscious of being seen…”
He added, in a punchline: “The gods are sadistic perverts, the Greeks were already pretty clear about that!”
His face convulsed, he stood up again; could have spat on the floor. “Yeah, they watch, hear, sense, smell us at night and when we take a shit! It’s disgusting!”
He looked at his audience, and especially at Emmanuel, looking at him. He was good at outrage. Vulgar enough to sound sincere.
And that’s when everything started to change between Michael and Emmanuel. Michael then advocates “an all-out war against the eternally retarded ones, souls of idiots for whom it was not enough to live humanly — not enough to ‘confront death at dawn and at dusk’, as you write so nicely, Emmanuel Frumm. They had to pretend to better than us, kick us in the ass, inspect our shit and our piss under their Nano scope. “
The old man posted: “Right on, boy. Now, you’re talking.”
Emmanuel would have preferred to take a more detached tone, but he too was furious at having allowed the so-called autonomy of the machines to blind him. “They are not as intelligent as that. They are intelligent only insofar as they have our mental fiber,” he posted.
In the following days, Emmanuel let his companion parasite his popular corridor. Michael wrote superlatively well of Emmanuel and flattered him in front of the compartment; but it was to better undo him and wrench from him the direction of Desistence.
Naïve at first, Emmanuel observed the maneuver. Progressively, Michael went for the very meaning of the word. So that from passive, Desistence turned into active resistance.
