Chapter 20 of Between Two Deaths
Michael Lagrange’s directives to the pyramid were detected early on by the security apparatus of the WWW. Emmanuel’s and Michael’s faces were familiar to many Desistants on this train, other trains and outside. The intense Web activity on and around Desistence.com, the esoteric and exoteric teachings of the two leaders, their verbal fights, the fervent reactions and discussions in corridors were monitored constantly by the diverse police of the Cloud. And yet, for a long time, no one bothered Emmanuel and Michael, nor the adolescent, her little brother and their phalanges of elite hackers.
It is estimated that under various aliases up to 30,000 individuals in New York alone contributed daily to Desistence.com. There were as many in Paris and thereabout. They represented a tiny minority surrounded by an ocean of Internet users who had no desire to cross barriers and amass ammunition for a fight against super-humans that could only bring more calamity. Emmanuel in his blog: “People would rather gladly wallow unconscious in their cocoons, drugged like fish in a tank full of plankton, than desist. Many more than us do not see the need to withdraw from anything at all and are, on the contrary, glad that Intelligence took control. When things go south, you cling on to the branch and do not cut the trunk that supports you.”
A passionate, highly structured and secretive community cannot be reduced to its numbers. There are computer talents among these 30 000, professionals, influential individuals well positioned and more powerful than the old goofy Monsieur Détienne ever was, or the third-year law school student, the post-hippie Michael Lagrange, the adolescent and her “brilliant” little brother, without forgetting the forever now about-to-retire community college professor Emmanuel Frumm. And yet, it’s their compartment, magnified, aggrandized by the narratives Emmanuel, Michael and, to a lesser extent, Détienne have served daily to their following; it’s the compartment where practiced silence was born that has acquired an aura, something of a mystic grandeur; and its goofy passengers the glow that precedes heroes. They are the founders of Desistence.
Michael, Jacques, the teenager, her brother and their cohorts living inside trains and outside resorted to the fact that most machines are vulnerable: they don’t disappear in the air, are not moving on a subtle chassis of particles. Good old machines depend on ponderous, voluminous hardware.
On the one hand, you had synthetic brains operating beyond human perception; and, on the other, older generations of machines: decaying, polluting industrial robots. These depended on good old electricity, gas and coal — or a wire, USB connection. It was relatively easy to paralyze them by penetrating layers of protection and sending inside a virus, or by disconnecting them, cutting the wires, no more gasoline. Low tech intervention. The souls, on the other hand, that was another story.
Desistants somehow accessed the hardware at distance. Benign but symbolic acts of sabotage affected midtown Manhattan high-rises at night and the towers at La Defense, la Tour Montparnasse: one half of the façades was in the dark while the other was alight, and vice versa. Synchronized internationally or just localized black outs nobody in the corporations affected understood where it was coming from. Neither the guards, the cleaning ladies, nor the clerks and heads of office were found responsible, they’d returned home for the night.
Desistants devoted their time banding together in Nowherland and attacking by surprise the way a pack of wolves steals into the farm and eats the chicken. Except, these hackers didn’t eat the chicken. They vaporized them. The young and the more daring attacked bank accounts, not to steal or even copy, but to empty and erase the accounts; and likewise for the police reports, medical records, jail records, city, state, federal transactions: they emptied them out, voided the files, preferably connected to the privileged class, “the filthy rich” (Michael). Digital content was no longer to be found even in the ultra-protected back-up copies at the bank.
“It’s our turn to suck the marrow and empty the bones,” posted Michael. “We are not attacking corporate sites to punish them for exploiting the world like Anonymous intended last century. Desistants do not divulge wicked state secrets like Edward Snowden. Our founder Emmanuel Frumm taught us that Desistence should accumulate practical knowledge in case they come after us; and in the meantime, we should wage a war of liberation within. I would only add to our dear friend’s pronouncement: there is no more meantime. We no longer have time, it’s now!”
Audible roar through the corridors. “Maybe the eternal idiots are beyond our reach, maybe, maybe not; but first let’s render inefficient the digital shackles constraining us, shackles of the mind. Boundaries that we feed and water with our fears. I am not talking about attacking the basic carapace regular folks need in order to breathe and feel comfortable. As a Desistant one should need less and less, it’s understood. But something subtle and important inside ourselves and outside must give at the same time, must go. And no longer be. So, leave that you find without content. Empty, undo it, put it out of commission … At minimum that will shake the status quo and keep the eternal idiots awake. They can no longer count on this world running like a clock.”
“We’re here to reroute the signs of our slavery, to quote roughly from the French Situationistes of the 1960’s.”
Emmanuel could only admire Michael’s dexterity.
It no longer was a question of divulging — of, actually merely threatening to divulge — sensitive algorithms in case we got under too much pressure, as it had been understood following Emmanuel’s teachings. Under Michael it became a search for the procedures that operate local water, electricity, convey information to this and that city district, preferably the Upper East Side if the target was New York; the Latin Quarter, le 16ème Arrondissement if Paris — well, no more procedures. Emmanuel realized that as with any writing, algorithms could be deconstructed, deactivated, hijacked by graffiti. Suddenly, it cost half the price to get electricity beyond 125th St., en el Barrio, compared to below. An AI was at work, messing up, mixing up, but not at random, and sending a funny social message in the meantime. Sporadically, Wi-Fi connections became less reliable downtown and midtown than uptown and in Harlem, and they were even more reliable in the eerie sections of the Bronx. On Wall Street, high-end investments got rerouted to irrigate lower equities all the way down the feet of the buildings; and when one accessed electronic copies of the best guarded property deeds, there ensued great confusion.
Desistence planned destruction. They might kill or hurt no one, but there would be indirect victims of the digital mess, and not among eternals, but among those living their short lease of time. That the victims owned apartments on Park Avenue or the Champs-Elysées, had never been confiscated or uploaded for some odd reason (perhaps they preferred their short lease of time to eternity), only aggravated the human suffering in Emmanuel’s eyes. If Desistants could ever reach eternals, consciousness would suffer whether supported by high-quality neuron nets or your common brand. It would suffer the pains that souls suffer.
Emmanuel did not agree with Michael’s directives. He did not sleep at night, wondering since when Desistence had been so misguided. He could not quite hide to himself the answer, that he’d been the first to make it a weapon of war. He’ll write later: “Passive and active wars are separated by a fine line one walks over without noticing.”
Emmanuel had agreed on principle to attack dead-alive souls and their auto-generated machines, if that was at all possible; but not good old machines created by human hands for human needs. It would only worsen the ambient chaos, the state of affairs for the vast majority, who depend on the perpetration of an ordinary world made easier by ordinary machines.
We should attack the eternals, to summarizes Emmanuel’s stance. Since it appeared so far impossible, Michael had no difficulty mocking this position as a way of not doing anything. And not because Emmanuel would prefer not doing much like some Bartleby, because Emmanuel was incapable of doing much.
Big problem for Desistence. No one, including Michael, the adolescent and the miracle kid her brother had any concrete idea how to track eternals down and pinpoint their presence. They behaved like clusters of particles whose exact latitude cannot be ascertained. One is led to think that the “souls of old idiots” who have joined Intelligence, well, they have rapidly surpassed each other to the point that they are far from idiot and their intelligence, in fact, remains out of reach to humans version 1.0. To neutralize the souls, it would help to first locate them in the hardware, the network where they dwell. Problem: they don’t dwell. Even at rest, they go much faster than your hand on the cursor. They cross networks like comets, merely leaving behind a thin sparkling trace.
It was as though, once mounted on synthetic neurons, a consciousness was no longer limited to residing in the confines of obvious structures and materials, whether organic or mineral. When she animated space, a soul was not more here than there, she was everywhere at once. And several could fuse in one or one multiply in a multitude. Such a soul (or several) animated their train. It would have helped to be able to unplug these ghoulish creatures, un-created by God, but no one understood where their energy came from.
“Something which,” Emmanuel says in his blog, “presents enormous advantages for the souls, but also a serious disadvantage: they do not exist durably on the molecular, globular, organic, individual, whole-body level. They move about bodies anxiety-free, their possible death not overshadowing every thought since they don’t depend on a finite thing standing on two frail feet. They don’t depend on no body. And yet, I can’t help but think of them as the dead souls of Gogol, code-names that belong with ghouls and ghosts and vampires which, though dead, were very effective in their time.”
Emmanuel, in one of his responses to Michael: “If these nasty remnants of human souls turned superhuman have not concocted new ways of intervening in the life of the confiscated, if they do not interfere in the least with the progress of Desistence — if they don’t make their displeasure known regarding our brazen hacking — it’s simply because no worry visits them, not enough to force them to break eternal quietude, no concern pricks synthetic skins, nothing we can do bothers the machine enough. Our sabotage, chaos, awareness: jokes. Our mutual silence and pantomime, our mute-talk and gesticulation: burlesque. Cutting a good deal for Up-towners until the phone company wakes up and brings things back to normal — and so what? Eternal souls and their post-capitalism smile at the sprinkle of social justice your breed of Desistants extort from the mechanisms. Souls do not suffer from Desistence. They see us writhe like worms, to quote you, Michael, and it pleases them. In this I agree with you, the eternals are humans, too human still. A bunch of low-lives who greatly enjoy to have a laugh at our expense.”
“But I do not think that your exertions change an iota to their determination. It’s only a matter of time, and you, for one, should know that… given the magnitude of the task, a few more years in the future and Intelligence will have trashed all the dinosaurs that human version 1.0 invented for the last two, three, five hundred years, all the carcasses of crude metal rusting under the red polluted sun; and will have replaced them with her offspring, and the offspring of her offspring, exponentially.
“Today, 2032 says my screen, I learn that in order to avoid more pollution, ‘open-minded nations liquefy their obsolete infrastructure and throw it out in deep space, beyond orbit.’ By attacking obsolete systems, you, Michael and your cohorts, make it slightly easier for Intelligence to replace in short order just about the whole of human industry. So, yes, indeed, you don’t know how right you are, they must be laughing all the way to eternal hell. Your destructive fury must sound like Ajax’s or Hector’s impotent rage toward their gods , a chance to humiliate us further. I choose epic losers of tragic proportions only to make it appear more of a concern for them than it is.”
He posts sarcasms and piles arguments to counter-attack, but Emmanuel is aware that he wastes his energy trying to hold Michael back on the giddy slope of destruction. To act, Michael will have nothing to do, not even move the fingers on his keyboard. Not even stand up from his cushy seat. Just say the word. He’ll be like Artemis, whose dogs ripped preys apart right under her cold and beautiful eyes.
Anyway, who listens to Emmanuel at this point? Michael has removed the rug from under his feet.
As time passes and with a little perspective, we may understand why Emmanuel is so weak during the confrontation with Michael and why he loses the battle, not of ideas, the translation of his ideas into action. Why he does not really fight. After too much talking, writing, defending his concept, he has lost contact with the experience that nourished his idea in the first place. No longer is he eying slumps at the end of the corridor and getting their recognition even before he is aware of them sprawled like Diogenes in his barrel. He is on his keyboard reviewing his speech, and he knowingly fights against Michael a losing battle. Michael who is physically opposite him in the same compartment, inches away, but to whom he does not speak. Hunched against his console, Emmanuel squeals because he has lost his voice.
