Twenty Eighty-Four

The university had long since spread its tentacles. In every borough of the city, there was a faculty. A faculty for Historical Misinformation, a faculty for pre-2060 Art, (in which it was decided who was in and who was out), a faculty for the Scrutiny of Printed Matter, (in which only their tropes were permitted), and a host of other faculties which expounded, praised, extolled, applauded and worshiped all the nations of the earth except the one it called home.

The administrative hub is an imposing Victorian building built by two brothers who made their fortune in tobacco. That is deeply frowned upon now, although the use of other more noxious drugs is widely encouraged. But this building atop an urban hill is not so reviled that the dons, the masters, the administrators and the sponsors won’t make use of their legacy. The wood-panelled walls, the deep carpets, the Art Nouveau tiles, the crystal decanters, lent themselves to the smug bonhomie which any ancestor, from any era, would instantly recognise. These people have won. They are winners. And yet there is a difference of sorts. These people have won by lying, so repeatedly and so loudly that other people have come to believe their lies. The old school ‘classists’ they so despise felt no pressing need to do so.

Katrina had been invited to a collegiate get-to-together by a boyfriend of sorts. A tentative romance with a man called Shiv, which feels like a bad word. They met in a café in which they shared a table. They have barely touched, but have been skirting around each other with side-glances and tiny fingertip strokes of tender flesh in unseen moments. It is not that romance is discouraged, exactly, and of course, a pale-skinned woman is encouraged to mate with a darker-skinned man to achieve the goal of uniformity of the species. There is no specific law which requires her to do so, because this is not a brutalist regime of gulags and stalags, for these are such well-meaning people, such nice (invidious) people, but she will live in poverty if she does not. These societal expectations place a burden on romantic spontaneity. One must always measure the benefits against the suitabilities.

Shiv has told her, with all excited earnestness, (because he wants to fuck her bones), that he might be able to get her a position within this building on the hill. It was, he said, a role in the Interrogation Department, where all aspiring students must go to ensure they have the right quarterings. In order to fulfil their exacting equity requirements, they are only able to employ one Northern European in a single academic year. Anything less, he laughed, would be hypocrisy. And Katrina also laughed. Her sibling and her parents would have recognised it as something other than amusement. It was more akin to a polite expression of rage.

It is not actually called the Interrogation Department. It is called the Welcoming Committee, but the poor people know exactly what it is. It means that they are excluded. They often joke, in the run-down bars, and in the utility blocks they are forced to live in, that there should be a Faculty of Irony in that university on the hill.

Shiv is twinkling with other academics beneath a portrait of Stalin. Other tyrants have come and gone since his time, but this new breed are too modest to be painted in oils. Of course, anyone who dares to disagree is called a Nazi, an old chestnut which yet retains its flavour. There are no pictures of him on the walls, not like there are of Uncle Joe, although their methods and outcomes were hardly dissimilar. The approved artists can’t really paint anyway. Theirs is entirely conceptual and of no merit to anyone except those who believe, (or have been made to believe), that the emperor is wearing clothes. Katrina loiters by the buffet, which displays all the world’s cuisine except that of her own. No sausage rolls, no scotch eggs, no egg and cress sandwiches on white bread. All of that food she has read about in the books you can still buy in backstreet deals.

At present, Katrina is a Category ‘B’ person. There are only three: A (the academics), B (the ones who might be coerced into academe) and C, the Northern Europeans and many, many immigrants who, by some subversive element in their DNA, do not conform to, or appreciate, being patronised. These Category C people are herded into grey, lifeless high rise blocks, where they work all day for nine hours, Sundays off. The children they are allowed to have, (no more than two), are schooled by the lower orders of academe, those uncertain, spotty little people in shapeless clothes who nod, bow and ingratiate themselves when the authorities come to check that their lessons conformed to the latest whimsey. The huddled masses called the system WHIMspeak, because the attitudes changed like the dusty wind, and those things you were taught to believe last week were no longer acceptable or fashionable to believe in today. Bots are very useful in enforcing these opinions, as they can be programmed so efficiently, without wasting days and weeks on human beings and their plausible objections.

Some unvarnished attitudes lingered from the 1960s, and even earlier, to the 1920s, when working-class movements were formed by upper-class people who thought they knew best. People who’d never worked in a cotton mill. People who were academics, once the educators, and now the implacable enemy. Because now, these common people, once held up as objects of charity, were despised. They refused to be indulged, and in this brave new world, that is a mortal sin dressed up as equity. You will be equitable, or you will be made to suffer inequity.

Hardened dissidents, (and they were legion because you will never take the fight out of the dog), were sent to the various islands which dotted the sea-girt nation. They were given weaving tasks, agriculture, certain hi-tech roles (for those so inclined), and schools where the children were evaluated for their suitably to return to the mainland. Whether any were ever returned or not is unclear. The academics don’t speak of their methods. Dirty hands, dirty minds ….

Once people go there, they are largely forgotten. Stalin would most surely have approved.

And Katrina is pondering this world of steaming bullshit when a man touches her exposed shoulder, which gleams in the light from the muted chandeliers. Surveillance is not as widespread as it once was twenty years ago. The academics have simply come to believe that everyone they haven’t evicted now agrees with them, and so complacently feel no need to monitor their own premises. Of course, everyone over eighteen is offered a microchip, which settles in that little soft dent in your clavicle. Category C people don’t often get to find out what this procedure entails unless they show creeping promise, but it insinuates WHIMspeak into your waking moments, and guides you, at all times, towards the path of GoodThink. Of course, if she accepts the offer of the Interrogation Department (Welcoming Committee), she will have to have one as a condition of her employment.

And the stranger, who has touched her shoulder, reminds her how ugly it would become if she gouged it out with a blade.

‘You,’ he said in quiet terms, ‘don’t belong here. I have seen you rolling your eyes, more than once. These are the sort of tells these people pick up on.’

‘Are you one of them?' she asked.

‘Don’t look at me, but just open your bag a little way. I’m going to drop a very old-fashioned piece of paper into it, written with a very old-fashioned pen. Some people in this room are bots, the waiters, generally speaking. You can tell if you look, but these people rely on their guests not looking at the little people. Don’t engage with them, but make your excuses to that creature you came here with, and leave. We are Category C people, and there will always be more of us than there are of them. Remember it, and we’ll be waiting for you.’

‘How can I trust you?’ Her gaze travelled discreetly towards Stalin’s moustache.

‘You can’t,’ he said. ‘But that is the beauty of free will.’

Katrina lives in a Cat C building on the outskirts of the city. Her parents and sister live alongside her, crammed in, bursting with familial love which expanded the four rooms and turned it into something palatial. They had been raised as dissidents, in so far as they were read old story books, tales of adventure and independent children, all of those things academe despises. In those mouldy rooms on the seventeenth floor, their imaginations wrought images of better times, and the longing came unbidden and boundless.

In the shops beneath the high rise blocks, no tobacco was sold - although every grade of marijuana was available, and under the counter, far worse than that. The pubs that remained were monitored for conversation, the drinks dispensed by machines. And yet still people went, and developed their own language which evaded the pre-programmed watchwords, and became its own dialect, the discourse of those who had never seen the inside of a faculty building and were thus immune and resentful. Quietly but powerfully rebellious. They did not give this new language a name, because that too much resembled the methods of the academics. To these people, it was simply discourse. Banter.

Whenever a child from the blocks went to university, the parents mourned and held a wake, in these pubs, with their people. When their children went away, it was an un-straightforward death, where the processes of grief could not truly be observed because they were still alive, but would be taught to scorn the people who gave them life.

Katrina made her excuses to Shiv. He offered to arrange a car to take her home, but she could tell he was affronted: that he had offered her a new life which she seemed so determined to have no part of: that she had merely come as a matter of prurient interest. She told him that she would make her own way back, and he dismissed her with an up-and-down glance. Turned back to stand beneath the portrait of Stalin and his avuncular gloat.

A year or so before, Katrina had acquired a book, through illicit means, called The Shadow of the Wind, a Spanish bestseller some eighty-five years ago. In it, there was a labyrinthine library where lost and forgotten books were kept. In her mind’s eye, as she made her way to the address written on paper, she imagined just such a place. Perhaps owls guarding the door, an elderly man with a long beard dispensing wisdom, granting her leave to borrow a book which would illuminate her world and explain the means to dispense with this one, to conquer it. As she walked, her heels tapping against the broken flagstones, she imagined what it might take to banish the academics whose manicured fingers had poked every institution, the police, the army, the government, the displaced monarchy, the news networks, the man in the street, into such a shameless abandonment of what it means to be human.

It was not a far-reaching, esoteric library, but a green and rotting door at the rear of an old department store, closed eighty years before and never repurposed. She knocked, and on finding no response, nudged it with her shoulder. The door swung open under this slight female pressure. Within the stock rooms, which were lit by lamps, people were talking in earnest, hushed voices. She cleared her throat, and the man who had approached her in the university building rose to greet her, still wearing his suit.

‘You came,’ he said, stooping a little in deference to her smaller frame. ‘I’m so glad.’

‘What is this?’ she asked.

‘Just a place to come,’ said an elderly woman, ‘where we can speak our minds freely. Aaron tells us you were not impressed with your recent brush with those people ..’ (She spoke those last words with hatred).

‘Well, no,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t. But I don’t know how to beat them. It’s all so hopelessly entrenched.’

She looked at the group again, some forty or fifty souls squatting on the concrete floor. They did not look like Cat C people, and she voiced that to them.

‘We are fallen angels,’ said a tall man with an acne-scarred face. ‘We were all once academics.’ He was wearing a simple white T-shirt and he exposed his clavicle to Katrina, where an ugly scar announced the removal of his chip. ‘We have all removed them’ he said, looking around the group. ‘And let me tell you, it hurts.’

‘And then what happened to you?’ she asked.

‘Very kindly fired,’ said another woman. ‘A saccharine farewell, a regret that our faces do not fit, the suggestion of a retraining programme during which are chips could be reinstated. Everyone here chose to walk the plank, as it were. Except for Aaron, who removed his and had it replaced with a burner, which mimics the original. He's been very cleverly playing their game ever since. His job is to stop people like you before it happens.’

‘There is no point in teaching if you cannot teach facts,’ said another middle-aged man with a defeated face, drained of colour. ‘But to actively teach lies; to define your every utterance with confected grievance and division; to mislead, to obfuscate, to brainwash young minds. All of us here feel that we would be more productive as Cat C people.’

They waited, these wearied people, for Katrina to ask the right question, and the question when it came produced a ripple of approval. ‘How do we do this?’

*****

All across the country, these groups began to flourish. They called themselves ‘Contemptibles,’ and wore the name with pride. In every city, town and parish hall, people came in covert numbers to have their chips removed. Agents stood outside army recruitment centres, advising them not to serve until there was again a country worth fighting for. Others removed their chips and continued to serve, infiltrating from within, like Aaron had done. Quietly, efficiently, they played the game of WHIMspeak whilst converting, one by one, until there came a time when there were more Contemptibles than Conformists. (How they would hate to be thought of in that way!)

With supreme skill, police infiltrators reprogrammed the bots, and the human police laid down their batons and refused to work. The army followed, and then the lawyers, who had enriched themselves by prosecuting hate crimes, but came to understand that what they had been practicing in the chambers and the courtrooms was not justice at all, but a subversion of it, like an upside down cross.

The academics? They massed, huddled and strategised. They convinced themselves that they were right, and that in time, when society swiftly became a bloodied melee of bigotry and hatred, the students would return, craving their wisdom and the smug furrows they sowed with their bad, bad seeds.

But they spoke to emptied halls.