The Atrocity Archives (45 page)

So why are spies such fascinating targets of
fiction?

Answer: because they know (or want to know)
what's really going on.

We live in an age of uncertainty, complexity,
and paranoia. Uncertainty because, for the past few centuries, there
has simply been far too much knowledge out there for any one human
being to get their brains around; we are all ignorant, if you dig far
enough. Complexity multiplies because our areas of ignorance and our
blind spots intersect in unpredictable ways—the most benign projects
have unforeseen side effects. And paranoia is the emergent spawn of
those side effects; the world is not as it seems, and indeed we may
never be able to comprehend the world-as-it-is, without the comforting
filter lenses of our preconceptions and our mass media.

It is therefore both an attractive proposition
(and a frightening one) to believe that someone, somewhere, knows the
score. It's attractive when we think they're on our side, defenders of
our values and our lives, fighting in the great and secret wars to
ensure that our cosy creature comforts survive
undisturbed. And it's terrifying when we fear that maybe, just maybe,
someone out there who
doesn't like us
, or even
doesn't
think
like us
, has got their hands on the control yoke of an
airliner and is aiming dead for the twin towers of our
Weltanschauung.

That's not just a tasteless metaphor, by the
way. One comment that surfaced a lot in the second half of September
2001 was, "I thought at first it was like something out of a
Tom Clancy
novel." Tom Clancy is one of the leading exponents of the
mega-scale
techno-thriller, the bigger-is-better offshoot of the spy novel and its
obsession with gadgets and tools of the trade. For an instant, the
fabric of the real world seemed to have been ripped aside and replaced
with a terrible fiction—and indeed, the 9/11 hijackers thought that
they were
sending a message
to the hated West. It was a message
that shocked and horrified (and maimed and murdered); and part of the
reason it was so painful was that it struck at our assumption that we
knew the score, that we knew what was going on and that our defenders
were awake and on the ball.

Sometimes the paranoia can strike too close to
home: writing in the near future is a perilous proposition. I began
writing "The Atrocity Archive" in 1999. For Bob's trip
to California
and his run-in with some frighteningly out-of-their-depth terrorists, I
went digging and came back with an appropriately obscure but fanatical
and unpleasant gang who might, conceivably, be planning an atrocity on
American soil. But by the time the novel first came into print in the
pages of the Scottish magazine
Spectrum SF
, it was late
2001—and editor Paul Fraser quite sensibly suggested I replace Osama
bin Laden and al-Qaida with something slightly more obscure on the
grounds that, with USAF bombers already pounding the hills of
Afghanistan, bin Laden didn't appear to have much of a future. (In
retrospect, I got off lightly. Who can forget the wave of late-eighties
cold war thrillers set in the USSR in the mid-nineties?)

As for the war in Iraq, I make no apologies. The
novel was written in 1999—2000, and should be
taken as set in 2001,
before
the events of 9/11.

On the other side of the narrative fence from
our friend the spy stands our enemy, the destructive Other. The Other
comes in a variety of guises, but always means us ill in one form or
another. It might be that the Other wants to conquer and subjugate us,
enforce our obedience to a religion, ideology, or monarch. Or the Other
might simply want to eat our brains, or crack our bones and suck our
marrow. Whatever the goal, it is defined in terms profoundly
incompatible with our comfort and safety. Sometimes ideology and
alienation overlap in allegory; the 1950s classic
Invasion of the
Body Snatchers
was superficially about invading aliens, but also
served as a close metaphor for Cold War paranoia about Communist
infiltrators. Meanwhile,
The Stepford Wives
tore away the mask
of an outwardly utopian vision of a conformist community with everyone
in their place to reveal a toe-curlingly unpleasant process of
alienation worming its way beneath the skin.

There is this about horror: it allows us to
confront our fears, dragging the bogeyman out of the closet to loom
over us in his most intimidating guise. (The outcome of the
confrontation depends on whether the horror is a classical tragedy—in
which the protagonist suffers their downfall because of a flawed
character and hubris—or a comedy—in which they are redeemed; but the
protagonist is still tainted with the brush of horror.)

And there is this about spy fiction: it allows
us to confront our ignorance, by groping warily around the elephant of
politics until it blows its trumpet, or perhaps stamps one gigantic
foot on the protagonist's head. (Again, the outcome depends on the
tragicomic roots of the narrative—but it still all hinges on ignorance
and revelation.)

And now for something completely different.

The fictional hacker is not a real computer geek
but a four-thousand-year-old archetype.

There have been trickster-gods running around
administering wedgies to authority figures ever since the first
adolescent apprentice took the piss out of his elder shaman. From
Anansi the spider god through to the Norse trickster-god Loki, the
trickster has been the expression of whimsy, curiosity, and occasional
malice. Our first detailed knowledge of polytheistic religions comes
from the first agricultural civilizations to leave written records
behind. Early agricultural societies were conservative to a degree that
seems bizarrely alien to us today: they balanced on a Malthusian
knife-edge between productive plenitude and the starvation of famine.
Change was deeply suspicious because it meant, as often as not, crop
failure and starvation. The trickster-god is the one who makes a
constant out of change; stealing fire, stealing language, stealing just
about anything that isn't nailed down and quite a lot that is, he
brought our ancestors most of their innovations.

Let's fast-forward to the present day, where a
bewildering rate of change is actually a norm that can be counted upon
to continue for decades or centuries. While we don't have
trickster-gods and death-gods and crop-gods anymore, we
do
have
narratives that serve the purpose of accustoming us to the idea of
almost magical social dislocation.

The hot core of recent technological
innovation—"recent" meaning since 1970—has been the
computer industry.
Driven by the inevitable progression of Moore's law, we've seen
enormous breakthroughs, the likes of which haven't been seen since the
rapid development of aviation between 1910 and 1950. Computers are a
pervasive technology, and wherever they go they leave a sluglike trail
of connectedness, information-dense and meaning-rich with the
distillate of our minds. Unlike earlier technologies computers are
general-purpose tools that can be reconfigured to do
different tasks at the press of a button: one moment it's a dessert
topping, the next it's a floor wax (or a spreadsheet, or an immersive
game).

Hackers, in fiction, are the trickster-gods of
the realm of computing. They go where they're not supposed to, steal
anything that isn't nailed down (or rather, written down in ink on
parchment with a quill plucked from a white goose), and boast about it.
There is a refreshing immediacy to their activities because they move
at the speed of light, cropping up anywhere they wish.

In reality, nothing could be further from the
truth. Real hackers—computer programmers in the sense that the word
was
coined at MIT in the 1960s—are meticulous, intelligent, mathematically
and linguistically inclined obsessives. Far from diving in and out of
your bank account details, they're more likely to spend months working
on a mathematical model of an abstraction that only another hacker
would understand, or realise was an elaborate intellectual joke. All
engineering disciplines generate a shared culture and jargon. The
computing field has generated a remarkably rich jargon, and a shared
culture to go with it. In some cases the sense of tradition is
astonishingly strong; there are clubs and mutual support groups, for
instance, for those people who choose to lovingly nurse along the
twenty-year-old minicomputers they rescued from scrapheaps, rather than
abandon them and move what software they can to a new generation of
hardware.

At the other end of the spectrum are the script
kiddies and warez dudes, the orcish adolescent
otaku
who trash
other people's work machines and try to take over chat networks in a
fit of asocial misspelled pique. These are the real and mildly
destructive hackers who generate most of the newspaper headlines and
outrage—tweaking the codebase of moronic email viruses, hanging out
online and moaning endlessly, swallowing the image reflected back at
them by the magic mirror of the tabloid press.

But if we return for a moment to the fictional
hacker, not only do we discover the archetype of
the trickster-god lurking just round the corner, but we also discern
the outline of our spy/horror protagonist hunched over their keyboard,
trying to dig down into the network of dreams and fears to understand
what's really going on.

Every
science-fictional depiction of a
hacker at work seems to be about pulling away the rug to reveal a
squirming mass of icky truths hiding beneath the carpet of reality.
From John M. Ford's
Web of Angels
onward, we've had hackers
exploiting networks to find the truth about what's really going on.
Sometimes the hacker archetype overlaps with the guy-with-a-gun (as in
Ken MacLeod's
The Star Fraction
or William Gibson's
Johnny
Mnemonic
), or the gamer-with-a-virtual-gun (in film, Mamoru Oshii's
Avalon
), or even both (Hiro Protagonist, in Neal Stephenson's
Snow
Crash
). Mao remarked, "power grows from the barrel of a
gun"—both
in real life and in fiction—and if guns are about power, then hacking
is about secret knowledge, and knowledge is also power. In fact, when
you get down to it, what the fictional hacker has come to symbolize is
not that far away from the fictional spy—or the nameless narrator of
one of H. P. Lovecraft's strange tales of exploration and alienation.

There's an iron tripod buried in the basement of
the Laundry, carved with words in an alien language that humans can
only interpret with the aid of a semisentient computer program that
emulates Chomsky's deep grammar. Unfortunately the program is prone to
fits of sulking, and because it obeys a nondeterministic algorithm it
frequently enters a fatal loop when it runs. There is no canonical
translation of the inscription. Government linguists tried to de-cypher
the runes the hard way; all those who tried wound up dead or
incarcerated in the Funny Farm. After a systems analyst suggested that
the carving might really be the
function binding for our reality, and that pronouncing it with
understanding would cause a fatal exception, Mahogany Row decided to
discourage future research along these lines.

The metafictional conceit that magic is a
science has been used in fantasy—or science fiction—several times.
James Gunn's
The Magicians
is explicitly based upon it. Rick
Cook managed to squeeze several books from the idea of a socially
clueless programmer stranded in fantasyland and forced to compete with
the magi by applying his unfair expertise in compiler design. There is
something
about
mathematics that makes it seem to beg for this
sort of misappropriation: an image problem deeply rooted both in the
way that the queen of sciences is taught, and in the way we think about
it—in the philosophy of mathematics.

Plato spoke of a realm of mathematical truth,
and took the view that unearthing a theorem was a matter of discovery:
it revealed its truth to us like a shadow cast upon the wall of a cave
by a light source and a reality invisible to our eyes. Later Descartes
used similar reasoning and a weasely analogical excuse to split the
world into things of the spirit and of the flesh. If the body was
clearly an organic machine,
someone
had to be in a driving seat
controlling it through a switchboard located (he believed) in the
pineal gland.

The history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century
medical research was a disaster for the idea of an immortal soul.
Mind-body dualism sounds good, until you realise that it implies that
the body's sensory nerves must in some way transfer information to the
soul, and the soul must somehow affect the dumb matter with which it is
associated. When the best microscopes could barely resolve nerve
fibres, this was not a problem: but the devil lies in the detail, and
with electron micrographs taking us down to the macromolecular level of
cytology, and with biochemistry finally beginning to explain how
everything works, the brain was revealed for what it is—a mass of
fleshy endocrine cells squirting their neurotransmitter messages at one
another in promiscuous abandon. There is precious
little room left for a soul that can remain hidden but nevertheless
influence the flesh.

But. Let us take Plato's realm of mathematical
abstraction seriously; and with it, let us adopt the Wheeler model of
quantum cosmology—that there exists an infinity of possible worlds,
and
all of them are
real.
Can we, by way of the Platonic realm,
transfer signals between our own sheaf of human-friendly realities and
others, infinitely distant and infinitely close, where other minds
might listen? What if, in other words, the multiverse is leaky? What
sort of people might first discover such information leakage, and to
what use would they put it, and what risks would they encounter in the
process?