Chapter 17 of Between Two Deaths
Until late in his forties, Michael Lagrange had lived in the cozy bedroom of his childhood in Providence, Rhode Island. After his studying at Brown University, where he encountered lots of problems with professors and peers and never pocketed the degree, he’d moved to New York, residing at one girlfriend’s or another, preferably in the West Village. Not able to sustain his lazy lifestyle in the big apple, Michael went back home and traveled. He had a relatively wealthy aunt in Paris and one better off in Miami. And yet, for Emmanuel, he remained the good old Trotskyite who suspected governmental and corporate wrong doing, if not demonic intentions behind everything.
Well, this train, the van, the confiscation altogether were the last incarnation of capitalism; call it post-capitalism since no individual in flesh and bones owned the means of production. And Emmanuel had to admit, there was something demonic to self-owned machines.
If, at the beginning of the confiscation, Emmanuel had envied Michael and would have liked to be the one invited by his aunt, after the success of his corridor, it’s Michael who was endeavoring to take Emmanuel’s place. Emmanuel resented that and didn’t like the warlike tone in Michael’s exhortations. Emmanuel was especially angered by Michael’s calls for black hat action; his trying to convince the adolescent and her brother to form anonymous phalanges of hackers ready to exploit the digital infrastructure, penetrate fire walls and bring back sensitive knowledge so as to accumulate exclusive treasures and know-how in the vaults of Desistence.
Michael had it quickly mapped out. He was no longer the goofy old hippy; no longer the cynical yet deep down idealist Emmanuel mocked at the beginning. Michael was no longer joking, nor even smiling or smirking; he was grimacing and dead serious. Aided by the adolescent and her brother, he created the site Desistence.com, which became popular instantly and swallowed Emmanuel’s blog.
Without a fight, Emmanuel let Michael take over the tenuous movement born out of practiced silence. He let Michael say what Desistence meant — why?
Let’s keep asking this question because there may be more than one answer.
___________________
Michael was intent on keeping the inward, personal, let’s say with Emmanuel, Stoic side of the verb to desist burn like an attractive flame, but on the back burner. We cannot say that he usurped a leadership that was not his. After the revelation of the dead-living souls, Michael proved a better leader for Jacques, the teenager, her brother, George Détienne, the third-year law student and all the Desistants who organized through the train and outside, in closed circles on the Internet, phalanges of hackers and a following of dilettantes hiding their names and taking up handles to fight “the eternal farts.”
Even Jacques, who had two little boys and a wife traveling in another train (he’d communicated with them, finally) — well, he was ready for war, had nothing to lose because: one, the chance was remote that he’d ever be allowed to see them again; and two, he did not envision a future for his two boys, even if by miracle they met again. Not a future he could contemplate proudly.
Emmanuel waited a whole week to confront Michael. Finally, he posted: “But, Michael, ask yourself: what do they intend to do, the old fools? The thing is to understand their strategy, their goal, if they have any. You’re right, Michael, to call them idiots and old farts and worse. They’re immoral. Maybe they don’t have any goal, any that makes any sense–besides crushing us. Look at the random confiscation at the corners of streets and the indefinite duration of the trip … was all this planned? Maybe they went solving issues best they could as the problems landed on their desks, so to speak.”
Michael eructed in a video podcast, “Not quite at random.” He stood tall, leaning against his console, and at the same time his words unfolded on Emmanuel’s screen (and everyone else’s). One could see his face up close, twitching, sweaty, animated. “They probably don’t have a set plan as tight as Leibniz’s pre-established Harmony, but they have a purpose.”
“What purpose?”
“Emasculate, terrorize, confiscate our whole life, harvest it, humiliate us; and then — as you said yourself when you were inspired, Emmanuel — presenting themselves as servants and saviors, have us addicted to them… In the end, we serve them better than slaves obeyed their masters. We are at the service of the men-machine. Though, doing what exactly for them is a matter of debate since they do not need our manual work and even less our intellectual speed. We’re amusing and pathetic semi-intelligent toys. ‘Once bored, they’ll throw us out the window without shedding a tear.’ I do not invent it, Emmanuel, you said it… Shit, we do repeat ourselves, even in the ranks of Desistence!”
“’Nine billion men, women and children, as many pets and domesticated animals, plus three times more robots, on this already saturated planet! That does not make much sense!’ These are your words, ain’t they, Emmanuel?”
Michael was asking Emmanuel the question twice: from his standing position in the compartment, and virtually, on Emmanuel’s screen. “Well, I think your generalities are lame.”
Emmanuel felt doubly stung, and didn’t know how to deflect this aggression, didn’t harbor similar resentment toward Michael.
“What makes sense, you ask?” muttered Michael with an acerbic tone and a grimacing face. “Who tells you that these mock-eternals don’t know what they’re doing? Of course, they know, whether it makes sense to you or not? They knew one thing when they lived, how to exploit us. Now they are dead-alive and even better informed, but that does not mean they will ever know everything about us. I give it to you about practiced silence, it was a brilliant idea in its time. But it was a mistake on your part to believe in the perfection of the machines, no matter how intelligent and coming-from-the-future et tout le toutim…”
Surprising in Michael’s speech this French expression used by kids. And, of course, this surprise in Emmanuel, Michael noticed.
“One of the many French expressions I’ve learned, yes, Emmanuel, after many years going to see my aunt Amélie in France every summer, my aunt Amélie who lives in a very bourgeois neighborhood in Paris… But to go back to the business at hand, you’re for something in our overestimation of the dead souls, you and your daily dithyramb on the superiority of Intelligence!”
Emmanuel felt the blow in his stomach. The critic was particularly unjust: he had been one of the first to notice when the train missed something. The first one to articulate that silence and Desistence could take advantage of blind spots in the omni-vision of the machine. There was this scathing, mordant, malignant accent to the resentment Michael had accumulated against him. Emmanuel had not seen it coming.
Emmanuel had speculated on the provenance from the future of the train; and this, before the adolescent and her brother revealed the embedded soul-machines. In his blog, comparing the train to a Martian in The War of the Worlds, Emmanuel had evoked the colossal tripod controlled at the top by a weak, anemic creature, the Martian. Emmanuel: “These feverish Martians are homunculi, ugly flesh, huge heads, all brains and no body. They represent for H.G. Wells what we, humans, will become when our technology has caught up with us and moved ahead. The Martians are our own future come back to persecute us and suck our blood….”
That’s what Michael was deriding now as too vague, washy-washy, politically or economically blind. Okay, Emmanuel had not given it the hard-edge class-struggle dimension it deserved. How could he? Yet, his meditation had been premonitory.
Finally, Emmanuel endeavored to defend himself: “When I posted my first fragments I could not suspect that human beings had uploaded their brains and fused with an Intelligence coming at us from the future — better said, from no-time-at-all.”
Michael: “We’re dealing with false-humans, not the beings-for-death dear to Heidegger. They have left the realm of the Dasein. The eternal farts persist; they don’t exist — remember your own words: ‘to exist one has to foresee the ultimate line of horizon, the dead-end zone waiting for me beyond all my enterprises — ” And leaving the console aside and looking at Emmanuel, “You’re quite the Heideggerian, in your blog, I was pleasantly surprised.”
Should Emmanuel take this as a compliment? Probably. But since they’re no longer in talking terms, he prefers to answer Michael from the console. Emmanuel: “They were us, so they know us very well, inside out. That’s what makes them hard to beat. We have to measure the power of our enemies.”
“Yes, we know, you think they are infallible. But the Greeks already knew that Zeus himself has flaws, due to his irrationality and the arbitrary use of force. It is our business, facing pretend-gods, to find or create their flaws.”
