While it was not really an Eden Under Glass, and while those crazy and delightful little bubble cities are definitely not for me, there was something there that turned it into one of those funny, colorful things that sometimes come to me, bubblelike, whenever I am awaiting the outcome of peril or reflecting upon the few lessons that can be learned in the course of a misspent life.
I sighed, took a final drag on my cigarette and crushed it out, knowing that in a moment my bubble would burst.
What is it like to be the only man in the world who does not exist? It is difficult to say. It is not easy to generalize when you are only sure of the particulars in one case, your own. With me, it was a kind of unusual deal, and I doubt there is a parallel one, anywhere. I used to bitch and moan over progressive mechanization. No more.
It was strange, the way that it happened:
Once I wrote programs for computers. That is how the whole thing got started.
One day, I learned an unusual and frightening piece of news ...
I learned that the whole world was going to exist on tape.
How?
Well, it's tricky.
Everybody, nowadays, has a birth certificate, academic record, credit rating, a history of all his travels and places of residence and, ultimately, there is a death certificate somewhere on file. Once, all things of this sort existed in separate places. Then, some people set out to combine them. They called it a Central Data Bank. It resulted in massive changes in the order of human existence. Not all of these changes, I am now certain, were for the better.
I was one of those people, and it was not until things were well along that I began to have second thoughts on the matter. By then, it was too late to do anything about it, I supposed.
What the people in my project were doing was linking every data bank in existence, so that public records, financial records, medical records, specialized technical records all existed and were available from one source, through key stations whose personnel had access to this information at various levels of confidentiality.
I have never considered anything to be wholly good or wholly evil. But this time, I came close to the former feeling. I had thought that it was going to be a very good thing indeed. I had thought that in the wonderful, electrified fin de siecle of McLuhan in which we lived, a thing like this was necessary: every home with closed-circuit access to any book ever written, or any play ever recorded on tape or in a crystal, or any college lecture in the past couple of decades, or any bits of general statistical knowledge desired (you can't lie with statistics, theoretically, if everybody has access to your source, and can question it directly); every commercial and government outfit with access to your assets, your income, and a list of every expenditure you've ever made; every attorney with a court order with access to a list of every place you've ever resided, and with whom, and every commercial vehicle on which you've ever traveled, and with whom. Your whole life, all your actions, laid out like a chart of the nervous system in a neurology class, this impressed me as good.
For one thing, it seemed that it would eliminate crime. Only a crazy man, I thought, would care to err with all that to stand against him; and since medical records were all on file, even the psychopath could be stopped.
... And speaking of medicine, how fine if the computer and medical people diagnosing you for anything had instant access to all your past medical history! Think of all the cures which could be effected! Think of the deaths prevented!
Think of the status of the world economy, when it is known where every dime exists and where it is headed.
Think of the solving of traffic-control problems, land, sea, and air, when everything is regulated.
Think of ... Oh, hell!
I foresaw the coming of a Golden Era.
Crap!
A friend of mine having peripheral connections with the Mafia, it was, laughed at me, all starry in my eyes and just up from the university and into the federal service.
Do you seriously believe that every asset will be registered? Every transaction recorded? he'd asked me.
Eventually.
They haven't pierced Switzerland yet; and if they do, other places will be found.
There will be a certain allowance for residuals.
Then don't forget mattresses, and holes in the backyard. Nobody knows how much money there really is in the world, and no one ever will.
So I stopped and thought and read up on economics. He was right. The things for which we were writing programs in this area were, basically, estimates and approximates, vis-à-vis that which got registered, a reconciliation factor included.
So I thought about travel. How many unregistered vessels? Nobody knew. You can't keep statistics on items for which you have no data. And if there is to be unregistered money, more vessels could be constructed. There is a lot of coastline in the world. So traffic control might not be as perfect as I had envisioned.
Medical? Doctors are as human and lazy as the rest of us. I suddenly realized that all medical reports might not get filed, especially if someone wanted to pocket the cash and not pay taxes on it, and was not asked for a receipt.
When it came to people, I had forgotten the human factor.
There were the shady ones, there were people who just liked their privacy, and there were those who would honestly foul up the reporting of necessary information. All of them people who would prove that the system was not perfect.
Which meant that the thing might not work in precisely the fashion anticipated. There might also be some resentment, some resistance, along with actual evasion. And perhaps these might even be warranted ...
But there was not much overt resistance, so the project proceeded. It occurred over a period of three years. I worked in the central office, starting out as a programmer. After I'd devised a system whereby key weather stations and meteorological observation satellites fed their reports directly into the central system, I was promoted to the position of senior programmer and given some supervisory responsibility.
By then, I had learned sufficient of the project so that my doubts had picked up a few small fears as companions. I found myself beginning to dislike the work, which made me study it all the more intensely. They kidded me about taking work home with me. No one seemed to realize that it was not dedication, but rather a desire, born of my fears, to learn all that I could about the project. Since my superiors misread my actions, they saw that I was promoted once more.
This was fine, because it gave me access to more information, at the policy level. Then, for a variety of reasons, there came a spate of deaths, promotions, resignations, retirements. This left things wide open for fair-haired boys, and I rose higher within the group.
I came to be an adviser to old John Colgate, who was in charge of the entire operation.
One day, when we had just about achieved our mission, I told him of my fears and my doubts. I told the gray-haired, sallow-faced, spaniel-eyed old man that I felt we might be creating a monster and committing the ultimate invasion of human privacy.