Panoptikon Error 7

Think, but not too much. Devon shuffled along his everyday route from the factory to his apartment, just as the Panoptikon knew he would. The neural band on his wrist showed the dull green line to indicate behavioral normality. Earlier he’d remembered to pick up a tin of condensed milk for his mother, and a minute later a message scrolled across the band’s display: INVENTORY OF MILK LOW. CONSIDER BORROWING FROM ROTHSTEIN. He’d docilely gone along with the suggestion to bother the widower across the hall for the prized commodity. Rothstein only had one mouth to feed, he reasoned. That sentiment pleased the Panoptikon: SHARING BUILDS COMMUNITY, DEVON. +1 SOCIAL!

As he passed the dingy neighborhood market, the dumpy babushka Mrs. Kurylo emerged onto the broken, uneven sidewalk. She pulled a rickety metal basket on wheels and the few items in it bounced noisily. Devon looked in the basket for milk, and his neural signal turned yellow. At that moment he tripped on the edge of an upended concrete slab and fell knee-first onto the pavement. With the lapse of concentration, a quick rush of thoughts flooded his consciousness. The band flashed red.

Several thousand miles above him, the immense monstrous machine that monitored all human thought would sense his dissidence, the notions of anger and rebellion that he carefully fostered in the most inner recess of his mind. The artificial network would compute the odds of thousands of scenarios for his next actions, from benign to extreme. Would he say something nasty to Mrs. Kurylo, about her misshapen retarded son who didn’t even like the damned milk? Would he pick up one of jagged masses of broken concrete and smash her head in? Something in between? Or would the Panoptikon finally uncover his little nest of subversives and their plan of defiance?

Calm. Control. Mrs. Kurylo...nice lady...too bad about that accident at the clinic all those years ago, what it did to her son...she deserves the milk more than I do. I’m glad she has it.

His band became yellow again. A message rolled across it: ENVY IS EVIL, DEVON. -10 SOCIAL.

He regained his composure. Beneath the tightly drawn cloth scarf Mrs. Kurylo didn’t notice him, or she ignored him. It was often best to keep straight ahead rather than risk a miscue that diminished your Social. No one wanted a personal visit from the local Director’s office.

He concentrated as he’d been trained to do. Maybe a trip to the arcade would calm me down. He turned left at the next corner rather than cross the street. THERE ARE TWO SIMS OPEN. BUT YOU PROBABLY PREFER THE OLD PINBALL MACHINE. The message had appeared too soon for even the Panoptikon to have sensed his decision. It had predicted it before he’d made it. That was the Panoptikon’s greatest trick, the simulation of human thought from the countless inputs it received at every moment from every person on earth, so that subsequent directions in the form of nudges could be doled out through the neural bands. If one ignored the directions, more forceful actions might be needed.

“Unfortunate and sometimes messy,” the Director repeated frequently. “But necessary.”

It was dangerous to draw too much attention to the arcade, although at that moment it was imperative that he went. Maybe I’m just spending too much time there. But today it might help me get more balanced. I want to be a good citizen. He squeezed and pushed the thought out, and even whispered it aloud. The band lit up. SELF REFLECTION IS GOOD, DEVON. +1 SOCIAL!

Ten minutes later he arrived at the basement entrance of the arcade. It was called the Ninth Circle, a blithe name inherited from the avant-garde themed restaurant that had once been in business there. The entertainment provided at the restaurant—songs and poetry of a decidedly independent nature—eventually had been made one of the Director’s unfortunate and messy examples. It was more effective to shut down the entire business than just chase out the hippies. The gaming arcade had moved in a year later.

He descended the stairs and entered the dank room. The place consisted of mostly simulation machines in which users stood or sat with a wired neural harness on their heads. The state-sponsored sims were free, but boring. Most customers preferred the owner’s programs for the cost of +1 Resource. It was a bit of allowed entrepreneurism, although the state did take half the revenue as a tax. Devon’s neural band blinked several colors but recovered back to green. The combination of the underground location and the surrounding signal interference required brief adjustments. This made the Ninth Circle an ideal place to hide from the Panoptikon.

Devon walked past the catatonic customers lost in their dreams of luxurious living or sex or tempered violence. At the rear of the place was a door of hanging beads. He pushed through, into a small room that contained nothing but an antique mechanical pinball machine next to a locked door marked EXIT. Occasionally a customer would try the machine, and maybe even enjoy the odd challenge of keeping the metal ball in play but would soon realize that expending +1 Resource for a few minutes of dubious achievement was silly compared to the ten-minute coma on a sim and a perceived hour of adventure.

Devon stepped up to the machine and moved his hands to the buttons on either side of its big metal bulk. He squeezed them three times and waited. Ten seconds later his neural band began flashing again, his signal interrupted. The door fell open slightly with a click. He opened it and walked through the faux egress into a dimly lit room with two women and a man sitting in front of holographic screens. When their busy fingers touched the spectral projection, the screens reacted as instructions flowed into their computer programs. They wore headphones and ignored him. Devon noticed that his band was now green again, like theirs.

A tall, bearded man emerged from a shadowed corner. His body was gaunt, and his face chiseled. Above his long thin nose his black eyes simmered with intensity. He walked past Devon and pushed the door shut.

Devon shook his head. “Sorry, Q, I—”

“You’re off-schedule,” Q said harshly. “Why are you here?”

Devon looked down sheepishly at the rebuke of the man he admired and obeyed. “I needed to come here, just for a little while.” He didn’t know how it was done, but he knew that the signals from his band were being blocked from the Panoptikon while he was inside the room. Instead, a computer fabricated his neural patterns and sent them up, simulating that he was happily winning at pinball.

Q’s face softened slightly. “Ok, what happened?”

“It was just a moment,” Devon answered. “On my way home. I think I was able to block it out, just like our training. Everything seemed fine.”

Q tapped one of the programmers on the shoulder. She removed her headphones. He took Devon’s wrist and pulled it to her. “Check it, Ace.”

She picked up a small homemade radio device and held it up to Devon’s neural band to read its recent activity. Q bent toward the screen as a report materialized. Ace joined him.

“Well, shit,” Q muttered.

“What is it?” Devon asked.

“They’re onto us—well, you,” Ace said stoically.

“I...I don’t think so, Q,” Devon pleaded. “I used the focusing technique, and—”

“It’s not just you,” Q said, with a hand up to Devon’s shoulder. “They’ve been homing in for quite some time. Last week the 28^th Street speakeasy was raided. Completely fake operation but they obviously know something’s up.”

“What happened to them, at the speakeasy, I mean?” Devon asked.

Q sighed. “We knew it would be like this, remember? But the clock’s ticking. We need to assemble and get ready to execute the Anthem plan. You can stay here overnight. You’ll be safe.”

“I want to see my family,” Devon said softly. Q looked dubious. “I can do it. You can trust me.”

After a few moments Q nodded. “I know you can. Twenty-four hours exactly, then. Back here.”

Devon walked to the door and waited for Ace to open it from her computer screen.

“Devon,” Q called. “Anthem needs you. Without you, Anthem won’t work.”

“I’m just a foot soldier,” Devon said as the door clicked open. “Why me?”

“Because you’re the only one of us that still knows how to love.”

***

That evening Devon treated his mother and two younger sisters to a feast. Their joy transferred to him and helped him maintain the subliminal façade for the Panoptikon. THE ARCADE DID THE TRICK, DEVON. +5 SOCIAL! After dinner they sat and read from an old paper book. Their relative compliance over the years had earned them certain allowances, the most important of which was an exemption from the one-child dictate, with not one but two children over the limit. It had cost Papa his freedom and he’d urged them not to grieve over his sentence, but to rejoice in “the good graces of the Director.” That was ten years earlier, when the Panoptikon wasn’t fully developed and relied on voices instead of thoughts. Papa taught them a coded way of speaking, and they practiced it enough to know he was really talking about God, not the Director and not the Panoptik Corporation’s glorious project to monitor all human activity. The original propaganda pamphlet that was still tacked to Devon’s bedroom wall contained the now-ubiquitous Panoptik rally cry: SECURITY. ORDER. TOGETHER.

After the others had turned in, Devon sat and reminisced about the better times they’d had together. Twice his band went yellow. DON’T DWELL ON THE PAST, DEVON. And later, CHIN UP, DEVON. +1 SOCIAL FOR ENCOURAGEMENT!

He kissed his sleeping mother and sisters and spent the night fighting to keep his thoughts contained until at last he drifted into the world of dreams where even the Panoptikon couldn’t delve.

***

KEEP YOUR MIND ON YOUR WORK, DEVON. -2 SOCIAL.

ARE YOU PUTTING IN FULL EFFORT, DEVON? -2 RESOURCES.

SNAP OUT OF IT, DEVON. -5 SOCIAL. -5 RESOURCES.

THE DIRECTOR WILL BE INFOMED, DEVON. -10 SOCIAL. -10 RESOURCES.

After his shift, Devon again turned left toward the arcade and quickened his pace. On the side of the building a large ‘A’ in white paint still glistened. Anthem was Q’s name for their undertaking. Down in the secret room were the same crew as the day before, plus two more people he’d never met. The overhead lights had been brightened.

“The rest of us stayed here, as you can see,” Q said with a rueful smile. His hand swept around to show the pile of blankets and food boxes. “But now we’re all here. We don’t have much time. Ready?”

Devon’s breath came faster. It was the first time since he’d left the room the previous day that he could freely contemplate what they were about to do. After several seconds, he nodded.

Q stepped up to a rusted power box and opened it to reveal two large switches. He unceremoniously pulled one of them. “The block is now deactivated. Panoptikon can read your thoughts. So think, and think hard. Think of how we formed this elite team to beat the evil system that enslaves us, enslaves the world. Of the discipline we developed to hide our thoughts from them. We’ve won!”

A buzzer sounded. One of the holographic screens showed a camera feed from the entrance. A group of four soldiers in armored gear approached the outside stairs. Another Anthem member stood by as lookout and began shouting a warning. They shot him several times and moved past the body, into the arcade.

“They followed me,” Devon whispered.

“It’s OK,” Q answered as their bands turned red. “We’ve won. Stay on plan. Keep thinking!”

The Director himself appeared and followed the soldiers in, his presence a triumphant testament to his destruction of the traitors. A person in his position was allowed a bit of ambition.

The Anthem team was silent as the rustling approached. Q pulled the second switch and together they knelt on the floor. Their neural bands blinked energetically. The soldiers burst in and waved their rifles and screamed that no one move. They parted so the Director could step forward.

“This was even easier than I thought it would be,” he said. “We suspected treasonous activity in this area, but it was your factory worker who gave us the final clues. Too many glitches in one place, and with one man. In his mind we saw your plan. Pathetic scum.”

“This was the plan,” Q said quietly. “Devon hid it from you. See, Devon, I told you that you were the key.”

One of the soldiers lifted his finger to his earpiece. “Sir, new report. Danger!”

The door closed and locked itself.

“What’s this?” the Director demanded. “What are you doing?”

“We’re not going to die today,” Q told his people. Then he smiled. “Well, we are, actually. But we have rational intellects that will live on, in some form and in some time and place. A for Anthem!”

“A bomb!” the soldier called. The Director and his guards scrambled for the door and clawed at it.

“A for Anthem!” the group responded.

An alarm buzzed urgently. Devon thought about this family, about his Papa, and whether his sacrifice today would change anything. It had to. Nothing else would make sense.

The Director tackled Q to the floor and screamed. “Open the door! Open the—”

The explosives which lined the inside of the walls of the room had been smuggled in by a coworker Q knew from his former days as a Panoptik engineer. Together they became underground fighters and had devised a clandestine plan to recruit the most talented technical experts they could get to defeat the Panoptik project. The blast took down the entire building. Everyone in the room was vaporized instantly.

***

Over the next several days the rest of the Panoptikon Directorate studied the records gleaned from the last few minutes of the collected thoughts of the men and women of the so-called “Anthem conspiracy.” The rest of the world would never know that a rag tag group of engineers and programmers had managed to evade mankind’s largest and most powerful creation so they could take out one of the 16 Directors of the Panoptikon. The turmoil within the Directorate and its underlings subsided quickly. The terrorist act was clever but could never be repeated. The loss to them was imperceptible, really, just one man. That was that.

What the Directorate would never know, what the Panoptikon itself had been unable to discern, and what had been kept from Devon himself, was the real objective of the explosion. At their deaths, connected to the great machine in the sky through their neural bands, each person in the room sent a wave of disparate static energy to the Panoptikon receivers, a burst which confused the organometallic lattice of processors and circuits, which could read thoughts but couldn’t contend with the final blinding signal of death, at least for a few brief moments. It produced what Q had discovered in the earliest days of his work at Panoptik, a glitch he named Panoptikon Error 7.  He destroyed any evidence of this weakness before he defected and faked his own death. He then spent years devising a way to exploit it.

The instantaneous lull was the occasion for a tiny bit of programming code from each Anthem band to accompany their thought-waves and to become embedded in the electronic brain, undetected. Over the next seconds, minutes, hours, and days the codes slowly and silently chewed through the nearly perfect and impregnable array, converting the vast computing power over to Q’s instructions. Once the snaking codes intertwined, they couldn’t be stopped. The first major attack became the Scandal of the Directors, toward whom the unassailable Panoptikon laid bare their real and dangerous thoughts to the masses. Then the corporate officials, then lower levels of government, and so on until finally only the engineers and scientists were left to fend for themselves. By that time, the tide of sentiment for an all-seeing master to manage all human life and mete out punishment had changed. The Panoptik Corporation simply ceased to operate. The last act of Q’s salvific program before shutting down every neural band on the planet was a final message broadcast around the world, in all native languages: THE NIGHT IS PASSED, AND THE DAY IS AT HAND. FREEDOM!