I went downstairs and walked through the hall. By the door, I tripped over a bag, some old books fell out – Huxley, Camus, Heinlein, Orwell… I picked up a volume with ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘1984’, opened it and saw an inscription in red ink on the flyleaf: ‘Neo, remember: if an object is no good for one purpose, it can be used for something else.’ And a signature: ‘Dad’.
I took the book and left this weird house. I sat in the car for a while looking at the porch – for some reason I thought that Neolani would jump, run out, wrapped in some ridiculous blanket, would run down the path to the gate…
A police car woke me out of my stupor – stopping next to me. I must’ve had a strange facial expression because the second officer shouted:
‘Sir, is everything alright?’
I nodded.
‘Everything’s great!’
They left. I took Orwell and opened it at a random page. Running my eyes across the page, I read:
‘The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power’.
Having flipped through a few pages, I came across an odd paragraph:
‘The seven commandments:
1. Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
2. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
3. No animal shall wear clothes.
4. No animal shall sleep in a bed.
5. No animal shall drink alcohol.
6. No animal shall kill any other animal.
7. All animals are equal.’
This fragment discouraged me. I wanted some clear conclusion to the morning – and I carried on turning the Orwellian pages.
My attention got drawn to another fragment:
‘He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.’
And suddenly I realised the name of the octopus from my dreams. And many things fell into place – as if some mysterious force, some real life magic, had lifted the broken pieces of the stained glass of my beliefs into the air, whirled them in an enchanting dance and then joined them together into a complete image.
But it was a very different picture from before. Orwell had become the catalyst that had triggered a complex bio-chemical reaction in my brain. I felt I had gained vision and became blind at the same time. And all because I met Neolani. Or in other words, thanks to a chance…
Of course, I took Orwell to Hawaii. And there – in many ways thanks to Orwell – my transformation happened, or to be more precise, reached completion.”
02:53 A.M._
“When I read Orwell’s ‘1984’ for the first time,” the Lawyer noted, “Somewhere in the early 90s, I thought that the totalitarian model he described is a far-gone past and in our time, luckily, not relevant, especially in the West. Especially because it was thanks to the West it was defeated. To understand what’s happening in the USA and in the countries of Western Europe, other types of thinker are needed. Maybe we don’t know them yet.”
“I’ve read many philosophers and politicians,” Kold interrupted him. “The problem is that it was Orwell’s artistic interpretation that turned out to be the most effective in my mind. It’s like fuel for an internal combustion engine. It will work very poorly on kerosene. It’ll work a little bit better on poor quality gasoline. But it’ll achieve full power only if you fill the tank with AKI-97. Does that make sense to you?”
“Sort of,” the Lawyer agreed politely.
“Reading various Orwell texts,” Kold went on, “I understood more sharply and clearly what I had to do. In this sense, Orwell has become for me something like a Scripture and instructions at the same time. He very precisely indicated what I had to do:
‘I know that the English intelligentsia have plenty of reason for their timidity and dishonesty. Indeed, I know by heart the arguments by which they justify themselves. But at least let us have no more nonsense about defending liberty against Fascism. If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. The common people still vaguely subscribe to that doctrine and act on it. In our country – it is not the same in all countries: it was not so in republican France, and it is not so in the USA today – it is the liberals who fear liberty and the intellectuals who want to do the dirt on the intellect.’
‘It is the liberals who fear liberty’ It was a bullseye. The octopus has entangled us all with its tentacle. It has latched on to every head. It is pushing the tiny shoots of its prolegs with their greedy suckers through the soft spot in the crowns of our children.
The octopus is everywhere!
Of course, there are people who resist. There are even those who have managed to fight off the tentacles and live inside their own small worlds. But the octopus is so powerful and omnipresent that such exceptions only prove the old rule, formulated by Orwelclass="underline" ‘Big Brother is watching you’. This thesis has been joined by a new one, given life by the scientific and technological explosion of the new millennium: ‘Big Brother is inside you’.”
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I should really say a few words about how BRISM works. What is the essence of the octopus’ existence?
Boytras and Greyvold have contributed to publications about BRISM, Tembora and other systems, and the world community has a rough idea about these octopus’ organs, but they are still quite far from the nub of it.
Virtual tentacles are sent into all major social nets, communication programs and electronic mail. This is appalling. It’s a complete destruction of concepts such as ‘privacy of correspondence’ and ‘private life’. Hundreds of millions of internet users across the world for years unknowingly provided a nursery, compost in which the octopus grew and matured.
Surveillance programs, especially BRISM, are made in such way that even a child can work with the interface. That’s so that any member of a consulate or embassy – and the data-mining terminals are usually located in places like that – could quickly get all the information he needs. For example, a diplomat, working undercover or a military man from the limited contingent of UN peacekeepers.
The program monitors data for a number of parameters. I don’t want to overload you with specialist terminology, but I’ll just explain what is meant by ‘on fingers’. If you need to track a man’s contacts, let’s call him John Smith, then you need to know the bare minimum.