Else and Mia are back, well, they were … right now they’re both verifying a possible entry point I discovered, but in traditional terms — I’m looking at them. It looks like HIV built some sort of backdoor into the May Street facility, though naturally it is heavily encrypted. I’m not sure I understand the thinking on this, but Else insists they are using offsite assistance, and that this port here is the uplink. The assistance is apparently some sort of black-hat set-up, deployed against resistant markets.
Personally, I’m having a hard time buying it, it just doesn’t sound like Grey’s style — I can’t see why they would take such a risk to be honest. If I had to hazard a guess — as much as I hate to admit it, it sounds awfully like bait to me.
I mentioned as much to Mia … she laughed the way she always does, called me wonderfully predictable. Paranoid. I replied that my paranoia is directly related to their survival and that she would do well to remember that.
Her response was typically opaque. She stared at the wall for a minute or so, still as a statue. No blink, no twitch, nothing, just stared as if she had been struck stupid. The next thing I know she’s busying herself in the mainframe, without so much as a word. Maybe she took it on, maybe she didn’t — I’m certain I’ll never know, that’s for sure.
The idea is ludicrous really — how desperate would HIV need to be? They’ve already got Gemini, what the hell else do they need? The ability to intuit/cultivate crucial aspects of trade is as effective now as a priest’s ability to commune with God in the middle ages. And what is that digital monstrosity for, if not to receive confession? Millions of little idiots plugging away, feeding it their questions and fears, refining it, thinking it’s all about them.
Christ … it’s so simple it’s almost hard to believe.
Though I guess that’s why it’s so effective.
I’ve been thinking about Len quite a lot lately, old memories nagging at me, snippets of his transmutation of power theories. Scary thought this, but I suspect his ideas are starting to rub off on me a little, at least the kids have certainly taken it on. As if I don’t have enough problems! Still, I guess now that science isn’t in the gun so much I can see where he’s coming from a little more. Especially after HEROD.
I think of all the miracles that were right there within our grasp and how easily it was taken from us. All because we believed. All because we trusted. As if these traits were cultivated in us all simply for Grey to sweep in and exploit them, as easy as picking ripe fruit. Idealism — Christ what a pathetic trait in a human being — I can’t work out which is worse, idealism or hope. If there is a difference, the results are certainly the same.
Slavery.
Autonomous idiots graduating through the same old tired choices that have been rehearsed ad nauseam in the labs of time. Every last one of them suspecting they are the newest thing to ever grace this tired old earth, and the million goblins of market research clambering over themselves to be the ones to confirm it. And as you sit there and watch it unfold over and over again, you can only think of torture. Medieval torture, with blades and saws and rope.
Torture is about finding secret rooms, about confession, about what pain can force out of the dark. Torture is eating an orange until you’re gnawing at the skin. I’ve been gnawing at my skin for so long now that just waking up is pain. Everything I look at seems connected to a factory of misery that someone built in my sleep. I wish I couldn’t look at all … but my ideas are so complex now I can’t remember which string to pull … I can’t see around the corners …
It’s like I was saying the other day: even when I write at something a hundred miles an hour, like a fired bullet aimed straight at the heart — it’s like I get there and it’s all gone. And somehow my new centre is the periphery of something else and I have to reset my foundation … look …
In precisely the way that the ‘all’ of goods and their various values are, via means of the comprehending: ‘market’, compounded into a single entity and practised via blank sections of that entity: ‘money’. So were the many pantheons, masks, humours, archetypes dissolved into a single entity via the threat of torture.
Monotheism or bust!
The torture is identical, only in dimension does it differ. We don’t burn people at the stake anymore — we burn them on the news. Just as we burn away our potential choices and stamp railway tracks in our heads. The God is the same, the program is the same, the formula is the same, one to replace the many. Do what you’re fucking well told or die!
No, not you the body …
You the soul.
Your meat’s just an echo anyway. All it can offer are the standard needs of an animal. Why do you think your choices in life are all fucking well aimed at it? Arranged like catalogues and executed like convenience, deterrence all around and the sweet gushy centre of sanctioned moderation in the middle.
So they round up the riff raff and display their rot as some weak-willed rape myth, galvanizing the virtues on display … on sale …
One sacrifice — so many to harvest.
Unsurprisingly, a system of virtue by numbers springs up around such a nucleus. This many for that many — there, I’m in the middle now!
What have I achieved?