The People's Republic of Everything Page 5
“And it?” I asked, glancing at the automaton on my left.
“Go figure,” Wilkins said. “My employers wanted one of their own on the job, in case you somehow bamboozled me with your radical cant into switching sides a second time.”
“They don’t trust you,” I said.
“Aye, but they pay me, half in advance.” And he blew out the match, putting us in darkness again. Without the benefit of sight, my other senses flared to life. I could smell Wilkins stepping forward, hear the tiny grunt as he hefted the sledge. I could nearly taste the brass and aluminium of the steam-worker on my tongue, and I certainly felt its oppressive weight approaching me.
I wish I could say I was brave and through a clever manoeuvre defeated both my foes simultaneously. But a Communist revolutionary must always endeavour to be honest to the working-class—Reader, I fell into a swoon. Through nothing more than a stroke of luck, as my legs gave way beneath me, Wilkins’s sledgehammer flew over my head and hit the steam-worker square on the faceplate. It flew free in a shower of sparks. Facing an attack, the steam-worker staved in Wilkins’s sternum with a single blow, then turned back to me, only to suddenly shudder and collapse atop me. I regained full consciousness for a moment, thanks to the putrid smell of dead flesh and fresh blood. I could see little, but when I reached to touch the exposed face of the steam-worker, I understood. I felt not gears and wirework, but slick sinew and a trace of human bone. Then the floor began to shake. An arclight in the corner flickered to life, illuminating a part of the factory floor. I was pinned under the automaton, but then the tallest of the girls—and I’m ashamed to say I never learned what she was called—with a preternatural strength of her own took up one of the machine’s limbs and dragged him off of me.
I didn’t even catch my breath before exclaiming, “Aha, of course! The new steam-workers aren’t automata, they’re men! Men imprisoned in suits of metal to enslave them utterly to the bourgeoisie!” I coughed and sputtered. “You! Such as you, you see,” I told the girl, who stared at me dumbly. Or perhaps I was the dumb one, and she simply looked upon me as a pitiable old idiot who was the very last to figure out what she considered obvious. “Replace the body of a man with a machine, encase the human brain within a cage, and dead labour lives again! That’s how the steam-workers are able to use their limbs and appendages with a facility otherwise reserved for humans. All the advantages of the proletariat, but the steam-workers neither need to consume nor reproduce!” Sally was at my side now, with my pudding, which she had rescued from my supper table. She was a clever girl, Sally. “The others started all the engines they could find,” she said, and only then I realized that I had been shouting in order to hear myself. All around me, the Dialectical Engine was in full operation.
5. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air
In my office, the styluses scribbled for hours. I spent a night and a day feeding it foolscap. The Dialectical Engine did not work as I’d hoped it would—it took no input from me, answered none of the questions I had prepared, but instead wrote out a single long monograph. I was shocked at what I read from the very first page:
Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, Band V.
The fifth volume of Capital. Marx had died prior to completing the second, which I published myself from his notes. Before turning my energies to the Dialectical Engine, I had edited the third volume for publication. While the prior volumes of the book offered a criticism of bourgeois theories of political economy and a discussion of the laws of the capitalist mode of production, this fifth volume, or extended appendix in truth, was something else. It contained a description of socialism.
The internal contradictions of capitalism had doomed it to destruction. What the bourgeoisie would create would also be used to destroy their reign. The ruling class, in order to stave off extinction, would attempt to use its technological prowess to forestall the day of revolution by radically expanding its control of the proletarian and his labour-power. But in so doing, it would create the material conditions for socialism. The manuscript was speaking of steam-workers, though of course the Dialectical Engine had no sensory organs with which to observe the metal-encased corpse that had expired in its very innards the evening prior. Rather, the Engine predicted the existence of human-steam hybrids from the content of the decade-old correspondence between Marx and myself.
What then, would resolve the challenge of the proletarian brain trapped inside the body of the steam-worker? Dialectical logic pointed to a simple solution: the negation of the negation. Free the proletarian mind from its physical brain by encoding it onto a new mechanical medium. That is to say, the Dialectical Engine itself was the key. Free the working-class by having it exist in the physical world and the needs of capitalism to accumulate, accumulate. Subsequent pages of the manuscript detailed plans for Dialectical Engine Number 2, which would be much smaller and more efficient. A number of human minds could be “stitched-up” into this device and through collective endeavour, these beings-in-one would create Dialectical Engine Number 3, which would be able to hold still more minds and create the notional Dialectical Engine Number 4. Ultimately, the entire working-class of England and Europe could be up-coded into a Dialectical Engine no larger than a hatbox, and fuelled by power drawn from the sun. Without a proletariat to exploit—the class as a whole having taken leave of the realm of flesh and blood to reconstitute itself as information within the singular Dialectical Engine Omega—the bourgeoisie would fall into ruin and helplessness, leaving the working-class whole and unmolested in perpetuity. Even after the disintegration of the planet, the Engine would persist, and move forward to explore the firmament and other worlds that may orbit other stars.
Within the Dialectical Engine Omega, consciousness would be both collective and singular, an instantaneous and perfect industrial democracy. Rather than machines replicating themselves endlessly as in Mister Butler’s novel—the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them—it is us that shall be liberated by the machines, through the machines. We are gaining ground upon them! Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt euch! We have nothing to lose but our chains, as the saying goes!
The Dialectical Engine fell silent after nineteen hours of constant production. I should have been weary, but already I felt myself beyond hunger and fatigue. The schematics for Dialectical Engine Number 2 were incredibly advanced, but for all their cleverness the mechanism itself would be quite simple to synthesize. With a few skilled and trusted workers, we could have it done in a fortnight. Five brains could be stitched-up into it. The girls and myself were obvious candidates, and from within the second engine we would create the third, and fourth, and subsequent numbers via pure unmitigated Arbeitskraft!
Bold? Yes! Audacious? Certainly. And indeed, I shall admit that, for a moment, my mind drifted to the memory of the empty spectacle of Mister Peake’s play, of the rampaging monster made of dead flesh and brought to life via electrical current. But I had made no monster, no brute. That was a bourgeois story featuring a bogeyman that the capitalists had attempted to mass produce from the blood of the working-class. My creation was the opposite number of the steam-worker and the unphilosophical monster of stage and page; the Engine was mens sana sine corpore sano—a sound mind outside a sound body.
What could possibly go wrong. . . ?
____________________
Beginning writers often have too-clever ideas, or perhaps just stupid ones. For many years, starting at the very beginning of my attempts to get published, I entertained writing a story to be called “The Case of the Extracted Surplus Value”—naturally it would feature Marx and Engels as a Holmes and Watson–type pair, being called in to a factory where the harder the employees worked, the more impoverished they become. That’s less an idea for a story than it is for a four-panel gag comic strip, and it wouldn’t be a great one at that.
But the idea stuck with me, and I occasionally took a jab at it by doing a bit of research. I read and
enjoyed Lewis S. Feuer’s novel The Case of the Revolutionist’s Daughter (Holmes and Watson try to find the missing Eleanor Marx) and spent a lot of time with Engels himself via his The Condition of the Working Class in England. While I was doing all that, and writing stories and books and moving back and forth across the country and having relationships and whatnot, steampunk happened. Steampunk happened sufficiently that I was even called upon to explain what it was to a friend of my wife’s cousin as we all hung out in a private sitting room of Edinburgh Castle’s New Barracks after the cousin’s wedding ceremony. (The best man was a military medic; we got to go places not on the typical tourist itinerary.) I basically said, “It’s like cyberpunk, but with steam and difference engines instead of computing.” My new acquaintance was intoxicated enough, and British enough, to politely pretend to understand.
Then, of course, anti-steampunk happened—steampunk was denounced as racist and imperialist. I tend to agree. But I don’t believe that essence precedes existence, so when I was asked to write a steampunk story, I squinted at the email and said, “Yes. Yes, I will write a steampunk story.” “Arbeitskraft” was an attempt to critique steampunk via anti-steampunk without creating an anti-steampunk story.
The story has been very good to me—it’s been multiply reprinted, has been analyzed by scholars, and came within a whisker of a Hugo Award nomination. Had I not previously vowed to eschew promoting my work for awards, it may well have found the extra seven votes it needed. One year later, the Hugos were besieged by the reactionary forces of the Sad and Rabid Puppies, so the chances of some story about Communist sleuths and poor little match girls making the finals ever again are slim indeed. There’s a lesson in all this, but I have no idea what it is.
THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF EVERYWHERE AND EVERYTHING
LILIAN ALWAYS SNORTED when she saw the sign reading nuclear free zone on the border between Berkeley and Oakland, though she learned to suppress it when Jonothan was in the car with her. Everything—nuclear disarmament, overpopulation, alternative hemp-based fuels, animal rights—was serious business with Jonothan. This time, though, as she aimed her car up Telegraph Avenue, she didn’t snort. Not because Jonothan was sitting next to her, his arms crossed and his head tilted out the window as he went on about The Revolution, but because Jonothan was sitting next to her, sure that he was already dead.
“I’ll miss food,” he said. The Smokehouse, a kitschy old burger joint, zipped by. Jonothan was a vegetarian. Maybe I should say had been a vegetarian. But anyways, he liked the French fries at the Smokehouse.
“You’ll be fine, we just have to get to the house, get you into bed, get some rest,” she said.
“You sound very sure of yourself,” Jonothan said. “I don’t have any internal organs. I’m so hollow. Is this hell? Are we touring hell right now?”
Jonothan had been like this for most of the day. He was a street kid who mostly lived in People’s Park, where the long-term homeless sleep under the tree and hold friggin’ committee meetings and write letters to the governor demanding their rights. Jonothan was pretty political; he had a canned speech defending his white-boy dreadlocks he’d rehearsed on Lilian several times since they’d met the month before. Jonothan was still cute under all the dirt and the raggedy clothes, and when he laughed he had a mouth full of straight white teeth that told Lilian one thing—the kid was slumming. Slummers, in the end, always like their creature comforts. So he’d come by and use the co-op’s shower, play with Lilian’s Nintendo DS and update his Facebook on her laptop, and cook up the food he’d liberated from the dumpsters behind the Whole Foods and Andronico’s supermarket. “Beggars can be choosers, after all,” Lilian had said and Jonathan had screwed up his face and started on a rant about locavores and how the Safeway is such an energy sink that even Dumpster diving wouldn’t help, but then he made some delicious vegan stir-fry and Lilian had scrubbed him up in her tub and had taken him to bed. She found out about the herpes only later. And now there was this:
“I’m dead, Lil,” he said. “How will you get me up the stairs? My legs are rotting out from under me. Can you even hear me? It’s like all I can hear is my teeth knocking together. Do I even have skin?” Then he barked and slammed his head against the passenger-side window of Lilian’s Saab. “Look! Devils!”
It was the kids. Lilian had just crossed Dwight, and this part of Telegraph Avenue belonged to the kids. Not the students at Cal, of course. They kept their heads down, their blue and gold sweatshirts clean, and their cell phones on vibrate. The homeless kids gathered in the pools of light in front of the smoke shops and giant CD stores, playing with their dogs, taunting the cops, and now, hooting and throwing stuff into the street. Lilian saw a streak of orange arcing overhead, then the Molotov cocktail opened into a puddle of flame right in front of her car. Suddenly, the police were everywhere, in riot gear, with long batons. Lilian slammed on the brakes.
“Get down!” she said.
“No,” Jonothan said, “this is what I des—” Lilian slammed her forearm into his chest, and the whole bucket seat fell backwards, taking Jonothan with it. She put on her prettiest, most frightened look and tried to catch the eye of one of the police swarming into the street. Fire in front of her, cops all around, some carrying portable barricades that just a few minutes ago were innocent-looking bicycle racks on the campus. Then her phone chimed. A text. From me.
ru there to get the gift??
She looked over at Jonothan, who was still mumbling to himself, and now picking at his skin. Then someone started slamming their hands on the hood of the car. It was a dykey woman cop, helmet up, mouth wide open and screaming. For a second, Lilian found her foot on the accelerator. All she needed to do was give it a little pressure. But she shifted into reverse and moved the car backwards and onto a side street. Barricades went up right after she exited Telegraph, and the mass beat-down began.
Jonothan was pliable enough to get pushed down the street to the co-op house Lilian shared with nine other people, including me, but Lilian still had too many problems. The riot had begun too early, and gotten violent way too quickly. The cop had probably gotten a good look at her. Now the car was probably going to end up either torched or at least well known to the local pigs as well. And Jonothan was insane. There’s an app for that, and with her smartphone Lilian was a regular Wikipedia Brown—Jonothan had Cotard delusion, the belief that he was unreal, a rotting corpse somehow able to still walk and think. It’s a rare disorder, but these were rare and imperfect times, Lilian knew. Sometimes schizophrenics had Cotard’s, and sometimes it was a side effect of anti-herpes medication. A probable double whammy when it came to Jonothan, but he still might be useful to her. Plus, she probably loved him. She did love climbing atop him every night and pinning his wrists down. He had a tattoo across his chest that read, We can carry a new world here, in our hearts. She liked that. I liked to watch them, eavesdrop.
The whole scheme was simple enough to start. Lilian had spent months integrating herself into Berkeley’s anarchic street life—even the Revolution appreciated a pretty girl who shaved her armpits and smelled like patchouli rather than patchouli and landfill. Once she had made all the right friends on-campus and off, she’d be able to snag the Q-chip and sell it. All she needed was a distraction, and the Telegraph Avenue kids were already ready to provide that, especially if it meant mixing it up with the police. But everything was falling apart. For her, not for me. The kids had rioted too soon, and Lilian was woefully out of position. Cal was probably already under lockdown. Jonothan was crazier than usual; there’d be no talking him down.
“Everything is falling apart,” Jonothan said as he stumbled ahead of Lilian. “Can you feel it? No, no, you can’t. Let me tell you about it. I’m seeping out of my body, like steam. That’s what the spirit is. Filling the whole world, swirling around. I’m blocks away already, in every direction at once.”
“Up the steps, John Boy,” Lilian told him. Two palms on his back got him up the staircase
. He turned to face her. “It’s like being everywhere, all at once.” At least he wasn’t talking about being in hell anymore, but then he said, “No walls, no doors.” That was the slogan Lilian had come up with for her plan to steal the Q-chip. The Q-chip, or quantum chip, which promised to break every and any code. While normal computers were stuck with binary operations—everything was either a one or a zero—quantum computing allowed for one, zero, or the superimposition of both. Not just onezero or zeroone, but OzNeEro and ZoEnRoE and any other combination, for cheap and without any more power than a nine-volt. The Q-chip could crack any password, perform any calculation, and derive a question to any answer on Jeopardy, even “This woman is currently living in a forty-room mansion in the Maldives, which lacks an extradition treaty with the US.” Who is Lilian Tanzer? Yes! “No walls, no doors” was just to get the anarchists on her side. They wanted to use the Q-chip—as though they could pop it right into an ordinary laptop—to eliminate Third World debt, bring down the president, and erase their student loan information.
He said it again. “Lily! No walls, no doors! I know it all now; everything.” Then he grabbed her, his fingers tight on her biceps. “We can’t go inside, we have to go to campus now. Do it now! My soul is already there!” Jonothan had been freaking out for three days, but something about him made the back of Lilian’s neck tingle. She glanced around. There was a white van cooling on the corner, and across the street from the co-op house, in one of the apartments she was pretty sure was empty, a light was now on. A McDonald’s wrapper was crumpled up on the curb, which was the biggest clue. There wasn’t a Mickey D’s on this side of town, and almost nobody would be caught dead eating one of those toadburgers on this block. The cops must have been tipped off, not just about the riot, but about the heist.