Watchlist (55 page)

Among twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

—Wallace Stevens,
“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”

I

We stopped digging vertically in our pursuit of a life free from surveillance when we reached one mile straight down into the bosom of the earth, and began to excavate laterally. With that single perpendicular shaft the only access to our refuge, we finally felt safe from all prying eyes dominant on the panopticon surface. Now we could begin to build our surveillance-free society.

The big boring machines opened up huge caverns, all connected in pleasing and harmonious arrangements. A ceaseless stream of chewed-up rock ascended the shaft in conveyor buckets, while an equally endless stream of equipment and supplies came down. We installed fusion power plants that brought to life the natural-spectrum lights affixed to the cavern ceilings. Programmed to replicate the eternal cycle of day and night, they would provide comfort and familiarity. Smaller lights mimicked the constellations when the large lamps were turned off.

We tapped underground aquifers for more water than our population could use. Air-filtering and air-regeneration machines were installed. Lacking weather and enjoying a perpetual ambient temperature of seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit, we were able to build simple, delicate houses. Nudism was encouraged. Vast hydroponic systems and mushroom farms were established, along with aquaculture tanks and herds of some small animals for meat production. Supplies and items we could not manufacture would continue to arrive, thanks to funding from a secret self-sustaining foundation aboveground. All our well-off members had to tithe.

Finally, the new world was ready for its immigrant population to arrive.

Our pioneering settlers passed through the stringent inspection. No cameras, no communications devices, no recording devices allowed. There would be no Internet, no broadcasts, no telephones to tap. Our government was a benevolent anarcho-libertarianism with an emphasis on minimal interference with the rights of citizens. All social and civic intercourse would occur face to face, and when one wished to be alone and private, no one would monitor or intrude.

For the first six months our paradise rolled along smoothly.

But then people began to complain of feeling spied upon. An unmistakable feeling.

We examined our lone connection to the surface world, but found that no intrusive devices had been stealthily inserted. We reluctantly performed exhaustive searches of every house and storage facility underground, and came up dry of spy bugs.

And then someone noticed a camera lens in the
floor
of our world. Soon, many others were found, and eventually traced to their source.

Yes, all the old legends were true. Deros, C.H.U.D.s, and Mole People all existed, flourishing down below our level, and they wished to know everything about us. We had moved into a neighborhood that boasted more suspicious eyes focused on our every move than we had ever experienced in the open air.

We filled in our caverns and returned aboveground, where at least the spying was performed by our own kind.

II

The discovery of the secret to the compression of matter allowed the creation of miniature humans: perfectly proportioned, naturally functioning men, women, and children only three inches high at most. These Tom Thumbs and Thumbelinas, these Stuart Littles and Borrowers, were initially heralded as the saviors of the planet. By shrinking in size, they would consume many fewer resources. This assertion was true, and many socially responsible volunteers stepped forward to be shrunk. But a corollary, at first unnoticed, was that maintaining surveillance of these tiny beings was much harder.

Public CCTV cameras did not possess enough resolution to track the mannikins, and the tiny people could conceal themselves in a practically limitless range of common places. They did not emit big heat signatures on infrared monitors, or disturb pressure or motion sensors. They were, in effect, invisible.

Human nature dictated that there would inevitably be bad apples among the mannikins. Theft, sabotage, and, ironically, spying by the mannikins soon became rampant.

The authorities had only one solution: to create a class of humans even smaller than the Tom Thumbs, and use them to surveil and control the first-generation mannikins.

As of today, the latest iteration in the multiple generations of tiny people has reached atomic size, and subsequent generations will be stopped only by the firm boundary of the Planck level.

“Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em, /And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so
ad infinitum.
”

III

When I got home from school, I put my phablet down and it yelled at me.

“Excuse me, Mr. Johnson, but exactly where do you think you're going?”

The festering voice was that of one of the myriad assistant festering principals at festering Boomgarden High School, Ms. Daggett. Each of the one hundred assistant principals had the task of monitoring twenty students. That accounted for the whole population of Boomgarden High. The authorities kept track of us 24/7 through the government-issued phablets. The machines could never be shut off. They recorded all the swipes and taps, spreads and pinches we made, which were analyzed by intelligent software for anything forbidden. Their cameras and microphones remained continually activated; there was no power-off button. We were told never to be farther away from our festering phablets than ten feet. The only time we could be separate from them was in the bathroom. And even then we had to leave them right outside the door.

“Gee, Ms. Daggett, I was just going into the kitchen for a snack.”

“Very well. But don't dawdle! You have four point two five hours of homework tonight, and then studying for your AP exam.”

“Yes, Ms. Daggett.” Satan rot your festering soul!

At the fridge—the phablet still had a line of sight on me from the living room, so I didn't have to tote it—I thought about how I might be able to thwart the damn machine so that I could sneak out to see my blazing favorite band, Llama Iguana, in concert tonight. I couldn't damage the phablet, or I'd have to pay for it. Actually, of course, my parents would end up paying, and they wouldn't be too happy about that. I wasn't savvy enough to hack it. And I couldn't pull a Tom Sawyer and get someone else to do my work, because Ms. Daggett would be alerted to a stranger's face in one of her twenty windows.

I finished a quart of milk and half a box of Oreos before I got a brainstorm.

“I'm back Ms. Daggett. Here I go. I'll start with algebra.”

I stared into the phablet's camera with a real intense look of concentration, but I didn't actually touch the screen. Ms. Daggett went away to focus on other kids for a while, and when she returned she was obviously puzzled and angry.

“Mr. Johnson, you haven't done a lick of work. Why is that?”

I put on my most innocent look. “But I have, Ms. Daggett! I've gone through twenty problem sets—oh, damn, all my work just vanished! And now there's a message on the screen with a lot of obscene emojis! Can't you see it? It says, ‘Tough shit from the Honker Union.' Ms. Daggett, the Chinese ate my homework!”

Ms. Daggett flipped out. “They've gotten past our firewalls again! God knows what they're doing in our system right now. Mr. Johnson, put your phablet in its Faraday cage so it goes blind and deaf. I have to call Principal Finney this minute!”

I did as Ms. Daggett ordered, changed my shirt for a Llama Iguana one, and left the house.

God bless foreigners and paranoia!

IV

The rise of biometrics as a means of identifying individuals and tracking them caused many strange behaviors. But perhaps no phenomenon was weirder or more gruesome than eyeball spoofing.

Reliance on scanning a person's irises to formalize their identity naturally led to measures to counteract or confuse or convince such systems. Simple contact lenses failed to trick the devices, as did artificial constructs, and eventually people realized that only living organic human eyeballs could fool the machines.

The savage surgical theft of eyeballs became a shocking trend, as rampant as the theft of credit card numbers had once been. The iris was the key to unlocking all of a person's wealth and information. And employing a stolen optic to register an innocent dupe as the perpetrator of your crime—entering a bank past its scanners under pretense, in order to rob it, say—was a default criminal move.

But soon, waving a detached eyeball in front of the scanners was technologically precluded. Only an eyeball firmly socketed would suffice.

Underground clinics arose to meet the demand, the science of whole-eyeball transplants having been recently perfected. (The banishment of many forms of blindness was almost overlooked in the clamor about eyeball thefts.) At first criminals could often be recognized as the possessors of two differently colored eyes, and innocent individuals with this condition were needlessly stigmatized. But the adoption of contact lenses by savvy crooks ended this easy-identification aspect of the crime wave.

Reluctantly, defeated organizations began to abandon this particular method of biometric security.

But the adoption of gait-and-stance recognition metrics hardly improved matters.

But that remains the theme of another historical account.

V

When aliens eventually landed on Earth, and First Contact was finally a reality, no one initially predicted that their arrival would destroy civilization in precisely the manner that occurred. The extraterrestrials seemed friendly and harmless, and indeed their intentions were honest and altruistic. They brought humanity new technologies and the solutions to many of our problems, as well as information about the galactic community that stood ready to welcome us.

But unfortunately, these aliens were natural shape-shifters.

Basically humanoid in shape and size, dubbed “Facedancers” after such a race in an old science fiction novel, they could alter their appearance at will to resemble anyone.

This protean gift was apparent from the first. The Facedancers did not dissemble. When the doors of their ship, parked in the middle of New York City's First Avenue in front of the UN, opened up, a parade of dead celebrities emerged: Marilyn Monroe, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Benjamin Franklin, Michael Jackson. The Facedancers—appointed by the galactics to make First Contact with Earth specifically because of their talents for mimicry—believed that such a display of idols would put humanity at ease, and to some extent the tactic worked.

But as the Facedancers established embassies around the world, their very existence sowed unease and paranoia.

How could anyone be certain of the identity of anyone else? Even a trusted person of long intimacy could be a Facedancer, acting out of obscure and secret motives of impersonation. Likewise, any person could now disavow any offense. “That wasn't me, it was a Facedancer disguised as me!”

Civilization, based on security of identity and on trust between known individuals, started to creak and exhibit fault lines.

When the king of England suffered a car crash, was rushed to the hospital, died, and reverted to Facedancer appearance—the baseline state of the aliens was green and with a complexly structured epidermis—the final straw on civilization's back had been dropped. None of the protestations by the royal family and the British government that they had been cooperating with this deception (to conceal the real king's abdication with a Las Vegas showgirl) had any effect. Neighbor turned against neighbor, parent against child, in a bloody pogrom of Facedancer accusations and slayings.

All the real Facedancers rushed back to their ship and left the planet in haste.

But they assured us as they left that our entrance to the galactic community, although delayed for a few centuries until our civilization recovered from this apocalypse, was still guaranteed.

VI

The perfection of cloaking garments that rendered their wearers invisible seemed to offer freedom from many types of public surveillance. Although one's electronic communications could still be tapped, once out in public, unmediated by the Internet, the invisible man was king.

The special fabric worked by bending light rays around itself, to convey vistas and images, real-time action and sights that would normally have been occluded by the presence of a person. Tiny pinhole camera lenses were the only break in the seamless clothing. These unnoticeable input devices wirelessly fed exterior sights to the special electronic goggles worn by the invisible person under their cloak, allowing the wearer to navigate through the world. At first, moving too rapidly while cloaked produced uncanny shimmering of the surrounding environment in the eyes of those looking toward the invisible person, as the smart fabric sought to refresh its display. But even this hallucinatory defect vanished with subsequent generations of the technology.

Invisibility was the perfect solution for those who were morally opposed to having their innocent activities unnecessarily monitored, and the technology was hailed as empowering all good citizens. But it fostered many bad behaviors as well. Voyeurism soared, as did gropings. An assassins' guild materialized: they favored knives and poisoned needles over guns, allowing for quick escapes while confusion reigned over what exactly was ailing the hapless victim with no one around. Soon no politician dared appear in public. Robberies proliferated: any stolen item brought under the cloak became invisible as well. As with so many counter- espionage technologies, this one actually fostered a new kind of easy eavesdropping.

Vigilante action proved the only suitable response. In the beginning, people employed cans of spray paint, unleashing jets of aerosol color toward any suspected lurker. But after many lawsuits from innocent bystanders who got accidentally sprayed, the proactive citizens switched to more accurate and less staining paintball guns and, later, special bulbs of nanopowder that would cling harmlessly but blatantly to the cloaks, revealing their outlines.