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Nightfall
Place: United States of America Time:
A few years from now
To: CofC’s, All Via: Courier Revere Subject: Courier Dawes, missing presumed dead All Committees of Correspondence: Be aware that courier Dawes—assumed name, of course— is now listed as missing and presumed taken or dead. All references to Dawes should be destroyed immediately. End. Attachment: Transcript of infopacket from Dawes, dictated during last known run. I’m
driving the back roads on a slate-gray rainy day, wondering how long
before they catch up to me. Wondering how it all got started. I’m
getting old, tired, grim-minded. Trying to recreate history . . . no, not
recreate, restore. Trying to restore what is lost is a mind-numbing task.
What if we get it wrong? What if we really don’t remember? What if it
was really the way they tell it and we are a bunch of loonies trying to
get back something that never was? I
live in my van now, since they took down my house. Half house and half
cave, I had hundreds and hundreds of books there, multiple copies of a
great many that have been lost to the people. For the Restoration. My
repository had such documents as the English Magna Carta, John Locke’s
“Second Treatise on Government,” Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense,”
the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, our own Declaration of Independence,
all the documents of freedom. Not to mention commentaries from Twain,
Mencken, O’Rourke, and others. All gone, so now we are searching through
all the nooks and crannies of the country, again, trying to replace them
and keep them safe for the future. They’ve
been on my trail for a while now, even though I change the color on the
van at every safe stop. The I Spy Eyes may be fooled, but there’s a lot
more to the surveillance state than satellites in geo-synchronous orbits.
I’ve had this prickling on the back of my neck, ever since I left the UP
on the way to Idaho via Minnesota, the Dakotas, and Montana. Places they
don’t go into too much. Too many of us in these areas, in certain towns,
and it’s worth more trouble than FedGov wants to take to root us all
out. So they’ll catch me on the road somewhere and that’ll be all she
wrote. I’ve
never hurt anyone, never hit one of them, shot at them, nothing like that
at all. Just tried to live my own life. I’m not a violent person is what
I’m trying to say. I just believe in freedom, that the highest right is
to be left alone to make my own decisions, right or wrong, and take the
consequences, good or bad. And I won’t hurt anyone, not until the point
of death or capture. I have to protect the people behind me. So I have a surprise for them, when they catch me. Every spare space in this old crate is stuffed with dynamite. A bit of old C-4, too. Couple extra gasoline tanks. I have a dead man switch rigged. Press it down, nothing happens. Let go of it, and two seconds later a very big noise and lots of pieces of van. Me pieces, too. I’ll push it when there’s no other choice and I’ll naturally let go of it when I die. Hence the name, “dead man switch.” Kill me they will, if they can’t capture me. They want the intelligence, of course. Routes, safe houses, Committee members. I can’t let them have that. So, I will resist and they will kill me. There probably isn’t too much time left, so I’ll put this out like it’s all new, like I’m talking to aliens who just dropped in from Tau Ceti, someone who doesn’t know recent history, even the reconstituted pap we’re being spoon fed these days. Like
I said, I’m on the back roads, taking it easy. I can’t drive the new
CC highways that have taken over for the old Interstates because this old
van doesn’t have Cruise Control. Once you hit the onramp, all the
driving is turned over to the Federal Transportation Agency, which not
only controls your vehicle, it knows where it is, who’s in it, where
you’re going, where you’ve been. Running courier for the Committees is
dangerous enough without advertising to FedGov where you are. I’m running a caterpillar program on my comp, a prog someone in the C of C wrote for this purpose. I’m talking as I drive and the speech-to-text editor is converting what I’m saying into a doc, compressing segments into packets, and zipsquealing them out on a wireless freq. The first receiver comp they hit, they get scattered onto the wireless net with a little tail dragger program so they don’t leave tracks. Out there, wherever they land, the packets get put together so there’s a complete record. That’s the plan, anyway. Not
many of those old-timers left, though, the big “L” Libertarians. They
moved out west, a lot of them, as part of the Free State Project, and then
got into it with local militia groups. Killed each other off, a lot of
them. FedGov didn’t mind because it was one problem eliminating another,
as they saw it. Most people nowadays figure it was the “USA PATRIOT Act” that started us down the dark road, followed up by the “Homeland Security Act.” Most people that talk about it, anyway, and they’re getting scarcer all the time. Damn few of us left that remember, that want to remember what it was like before FedGov took everything over and made us safe and secure. Even before those acts, private property rights were pretty well shot, with every level of government taking property for any reason: suspicious activity, non-payment of taxes, eminent domain, taking property from residents and businessmen and selling it off or giving it outright to other businesses, all in the name of the “public good.” Well, the PATRIOT Act—now, there’s a name for you, proves you can do anything if you call it patriotic—and the Homeland Act killed off privacy in the name of war on terrorism. The Octagon—or was it still the Pentagon back then? It’s hard to remember since the web only mentions the current eight-sided monument to unintended consequences. The Octagon instituted the Information Awareness Office. Every transaction, personal, public, private, medical, financial, was grist for the mill. The mill ground exceedingly finely. Put a name or a face or a biometric identifier or a driver license or a Social Security number in a comp and your life history popped up. High school grades, books you bought or videos you rented, groceries you bought, restaurants you ate in, where you got gas, what you took for gas after some of those restaurants you ate in—ha, ha. Then came the “Total Information Privacy Act” in 2004, I think. Look, some of this will be mixed up. It depends on my memory because all the books are gone, the histories, too. You can’t look it up on the web any more and trust the data. So some of the dates might be off a little. The way they sold the Information Privacy Act was that if FedGov was in charge of all data, it would be kept private. The trust factor, you know. “I’m from FedGov and I’m here to help you.” The FBI became the big dog agency again after that, renamed as the Federal Bureau of Information, then later, in 2006 or so, it became the Department of Information with all data and information-related functions put under it. Since the FedGov runs on information, that means practically everything. Gathering, storing, collating, disseminating, acting on information. DOI got real strong, real fast under its new mission. It even took the Information Awareness Office logo for its own. The one with the eye in the pyramid looking at the globe. The Latin phrase underneath, “Scientia est Potentia.” “Knowledge is Power.” People called it the “Oh, I See,” a grim foreshadowing, had they known it. New agencies and bureaus and offices were added on or transferred from other departments and renamed. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tax and Firearms became the Bureau of Information Management, but that came later. But
people still didn’t know, or didn’t care, what was happening. Hey,
they were being protected from terrorism. Even though Osama bin Laden
coughed up a lung—it’s funny, everyone thought he had kidney
problems—in ’06, there was still a lot of terrorism to be protected
from, or so they were told. There
was that smallpox outbreak in Atlanta. Interesting how that outbreak got
contained so quick, and I never met anyone who knew anyone that got it.
Then the Sears Tower knockdown. The Mackinac Bridge got blown. The
container port in Savannah, Georgia. Not constant attacks, but every time
the population got settled down and presidential approval ratings started
to drop, well . . . . I always wondered why people kept trusting the
FedGov more every time something bad happened that the FedGov was supposed
to protect them from. In 2007 or so, a guy rewrote the old classic 1984 and renamed it 2024. FedGov didn’t like the update, mostly because it got so particular, naming names and dates and things the FedGov was doing at the time. DOI arrested him, had him held as an enemy combatant, “giving aid and comfort to the enemy” by complaining about “lost phantoms of liberty,” as the DOI head put it. That’s the last anyone ever saw of him. Other authors started disappearing around that time. That guy who wrote the book about the gun culture, “Unintended Consequences,” I think. Joe Russo or something like that. He disappeared. So did his book. I guess I’d better just hit the high points or I’ll never get done with this. Let’s see . . . . The Twenty-Second Amendment, the one term-limiting the President, got rescinded in the first part of 2008. All legal. The Congress adopted it really quick, with hardly any debate. Every politician who had a skeleton of any type in his closet—that would be darn near all of them—got on the bandwagon. Particularly after one well-known anti-administration Senator was found in her bathtub with her wrists cut. There
was a manila envelope on the floor, addressed to her, referencing some
e-mails she had sent and gotten and a bunch of photos scattered around
showing her in compromising positions with compromising people. No return
address except that logo I mentioned. I remember reading about the
incident and the envelope with the logo was mentioned in the first press
releases, then nothing about it. Go back and do a search on it now and you
can’t find it. Three
or four other politicians, two more from Congress and a couple of
governors, also bit the dust about the same time. Either died quickly by
their own hands or just as quickly resigned and disappeared into
obscurity. As I said, the skids were greased and after Congress adopted
it, the states jumped on it, got it ratified. Those states with part-time
legislatures called them in to special session to vote. Knowledge is
Power. The president’s third term got even more active. The “Illegal Alien Transportation Act,” for example. Where they got transported to was Alaska. That was the start of the ANWR Gulag. The Alaska National Wildlife Reserve got a makeover, courtesy of illegal aliens, who not only built the first camps, but started working on the oil rigs that sprang up. We didn’t really need the oil by then since we were getting what we wanted from the Iraqi Protectorate, but Alaska was a good place to keep certain people on ice—ha, ha. The excess—illegal aliens, not oil—well, no one ever explained where all those people went, but that was about the time that Russia announced a massive labor force moving to Siberia to start exploiting the oil fields there. Since Russia was a primary trading partner and needed help to get those fields going, and a few years later we started getting tankers of oil from Russia . . . . Well, you put it together. Then a section of the Alaska pipeline got blown up. It was back in commission in a couple months, but there were gasoline shortages—unexplained because the oil from Alaska was just being put in storage because we didn’t need it. Those shortages sparked the “Alien Repatriation Act.” Everyone not born in the USA, citizen or not, was “repatriated” to their original country. Their kids, too, even if born here. But they never knew who blew the pipeline. The stories came out that a lot of those repatriated never got home. One day, stories. Next day, all quiet on that subject. The “Terrorist Disarmament Act” under which FedGov banned certain weapons, starting with all semi-automatic rifles, shotguns and handguns, then pump shotguns, revolvers, and so on. Each year a new class of firearms came under the ban. A lot of backyard caches for guns and ammo were dug; a lot of backyard caches were later dug up, the owners arrested, and neighbors rewarded under the “Anti-Terrorism Remuneration Act,” an update of the old TIPS program. Of course, there was no registry of firearms, but there were registries of concealed weapons permit holders, records of purchases of guns, ammunition, and so on going back for years. Total Information was total, and FedGov had it all. They didn’t get all the weapons, though. Mostly from people living in the cities and more populated areas. Out in the country, nobody turned in their neighbors. They kept their guns. Still have them. There were still people speaking out, journalists, columnists, editors. Too many for FedGov, I guess. The “Responsibility in Journalism Act” got passed unanimously. (Congress tended to vote unanimously on all issues of national security after DOI started collecting information.) Newspaper editors and columnists were tried, convicted, and sent to the Alaskan Gulag for “education in the proper role of journalists as patriots in a country at war,” as they put it. A few actually came back, went back to work for their papers editing gardening sections and doing movie reviews. Except for Richards and Turner. These two guys went on the extra-net. I have to digress. The old internet by then was absolutely riddled with specialized FedGov progs installed under the “Internet Privacy Act,” another FedGov oxymoron. You’d sign onto a site that was critical of some FedGov program or other, or just a political discussion board or live chat room, and you’d see that logo blinking at you from one corner of the screen. And you knew they were listing you as a visitor to that site. The old sites I used to write for went belly-up pretty quick. No one signing on any more, no advertising revenues. Yeah, I was a writer, a dissident, you might say. Back when being a dissident was kind of quaint. Even patriotic. After text-to-speech technology was perfected, people would just sign on and let their comps look for whatever they had progged in and read it off to them—daily news, recipes, whatever. But the little logo would be there, along with a vocal override that spoke up every once in a while. “This site monitored by Information Awareness Office.” Most people didn’t care. They had the “I have nothing to hide so why should I worry about it” attitude. Sheep, mostly. Reminds me of the old joke about a democracy being three wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. The extra-net was an outlaw net. I like to think of it as one of those underground meeting places like revolutionaries in the early Twentieth hung out in. Cheap booze, smoky air, intense discussions, bearded dissidents. Some people called it the outer-net, the under-net. It used the internet infrastructure, which was rapidly going wireless, but if you had the right progs, you could access the dissident bulletin boards and even catch outlaw netcasts. You needed the right security, too, or FedGov sniffer progs would ride the datastream back to your comp. Next day, there’d be a knock on the door, after it was busted in. There were clandestine e-mail ISP’s set up, often running for a week or so, then shutting down and changing addresses, staying one jump ahead of the new Federal Bureau of Information Management. Then they got mobile, operating out of old trucks and vans. Miniaturization helped a lot. FedBIM’s
job was “to assess the accuracy of public-accessible information, and to
contain unreliable sources of data.” Well, they assessed the hell out of
Richards and Turner, those two un-rehabbed columnists. Caught them, tried
them as enemy combatants, contained them in the Alaskan Gulag again. They
appealed, of course, but no private attorney would take their case since
an attorney for anyone labeled as an enemy combatant got stuck with the
same label, and the same sentence, if they lost the case. (I forget the
name of that act, but a lot of folks figured it was about time the lawyers
got a taste.) So Richards and Turner got a DOI attorney, appointed by DOI,
under DOI’s regulations. This attorney pleaded all the way up to the
Supreme Court. Freedom of the press, freedom of speech, et cetera. I
don’t know how good a job he did. The Supremes listened, nodded wisely, and voted 8-1 that Richards and Turner had no right to free speech if that speech was inaccurate and damaging to the war effort. Remember the war on terrorism? It had gotten to be a kind of forever war. And the judge of what was accurate or inaccurate, damaging or not, was the Department of Information. The lone dissenter, by the way, retired after this decision and went into seclusion. He was replaced by a cousin of the President. The “Information Protection Act” of 2010 changed a lot of things. Basically, the Act provided that FedGov was in charge of protecting all information and data. Protection went a step beyond keeping it private. (Protecting from what, they never said.) In order to protect information, they had to have it all where they could get to it. They banned all newspapers, requiring all news to be posted on the net. No more print news. No more print magazines. No more print textbooks. No more print non-fiction. No more print fiction. No more print at all, after a while. Everything was put on the net. Book stores, printers, all of them, out of business. Libraries were shut down, except for “reading rooms” which offered rows of comp stations. Although most people had comps in their homes by now, the “Internet Access Act” requiring comps in all private dwellings and public gathering places hadn’t yet been passed. They passed that after new technology allowed for easy two-way sight and sound through comp. The Eyes in the Sky became Eyes in the Living Room. People were jailed for “hoarding information” or “maintaining dangerous information” and their books were seized. This took a while, but it went faster than you might think. One guy in a neighborhood or small town gets sent north for having a copy of, say, The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson, and everyone else tends to want to burn their own books, or turn them in and get a pat on the head from the local FedGov office. All books were labeled as “suspect” by definition. The “Information Compliance Act” basically said that if a book was not in compliance with the official FedGov net version, it could be termed as “subversive” and the owner charged with sedition. And the net versions were always a little bit different than the old print versions. Ergo, the print copies were non-compliant. The BIC—Bureau of Information Compliance—goons shot down a few “subversives” fleeing arrest, and everyone got real compliant, real fast. Then came the “Information Correction Act” around 2013, I think. The Office of Information Correction, or OIC—again pronounced “Oh, I See”—went into action. Things got weird. Content on legal net sites started morphing. Stuff started disappearing. “Site under rehabilitation” was a common response if you tried to log in to, say, a history site or a college site. Little changes at first. Hardly noticeable. But the more that books disappeared and the more information was on the net, the more fluid it became. You’d read a straight news piece from a national news site, go back the next day, and there would be subtle alterations. You’d just shake your head, figuring you’d read it wrong to begin with. The next day, more little changes. Current news was shifting sand, quicksand. Nothing solid any more. Then old news and history started changing. I remember the first time I noticed the big changes. When was that, 2016 or so? I was looking up the Bill of Rights because my old print copy was long gone—taken off me during a random pat down some time before—and I wanted to refresh my memory on a particular passage. The First Amendment said: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free approved exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, in time of peace; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble as permitted, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Emphasis in the above supplied by me. I do not remember these words in the original. And believe me, I’d read it enough to know. Either they were changed, or I’m crazy. Or both. I hadn’t mentioned advances in identification technology that were going on all this time. You can’t tie any one thing to any one year, it was just a continuing process. DNA profiling was a great tool for identification, but what really made it workable was instant profiling. The first commercial use was at bank ATMs. Stick your finger in the slot, feel a tiny scrape, then the screen lit up when you were identified. You couldn’t get your money out without it, so DNA codes became the de facto national ID, with the FedGov, of course, protecting everyone’s private information. I do remember a time when finger-jacking was getting common. But some crook sticking someone’s hacked-off finger in an ATM could only get away with it until Facial Recognition Technology was perfected. FRT, when tied to the Total Information databases and DNA profiling made FedGov omniscient. There was an underground trade in facial characteristic change, but that was rare. Money was gone. Even that paper stuff the FedGov issued for years after gold somehow wasn’t money any more. Everything was by card. Look in the camera, stick your finger in the slot, swipe your card. Quick and convenient and all on record. Finally, we started the committees of correspondence. Not a new idea. A loose organization dedicated to keep information flowing about FedGov abuses and to document somewhere, on paper, our history. So much had been lost by that time and we couldn’t trust e-mail or anything on the net, so we moved paper. The original CofC’s were tied in with the Sons of Liberty, back in the 1700’s. That hasn’t happened this time. There’s a real shadowy group calling itself Sons of the Revolution, but the CofC’s don’t know anything about it and the FedGov hasn’t paid much attention to it, yet. I know it’s a very fluid org, with no fixed location, no fixed meetings, and it’s rumored to have been behind a few incidents . . . . An IRS office in Chicago blown. A DOI building in Arlington damaged. All rumors, though. So now I run courier. Upper Peninsula to the western mountain and desert states then east to Georgia and north to New Hampshire to wherever and stopping in whatever safe house is available. I carry paper docs, info and news back and forth. And media. We’ve got a new repository—I won’t say where—of books, some old videos, CDs, whatever media we can save. So we won’t forget. So our children will know. Of course, it’s all run through a DNA scrubber and sterile packed before I take it, just so it can’t be tracked. And as I run, I dictate what I remember so that maybe someone, somewhere will read it and remember for themselves and pass it along. It gets harder all the time. The software gets more and more sophisticated. Just last week, one of my segments bounced back to me with a hound-dog attached to it. I got mobile real fast. From a distance I could see a copter coming in as I got myself lost from there. It’s only a matter of time. Some of the stuff I send out gets eaten up by leeches, progs that key in on certain words and literally destroy the packets before they land anywhere. So what I send can have holes in it when it gets put together. [To Comp: Instruction: Send. Send. Send.] * * * * * I’m pulling into a narrow green valley with a small town in the middle of it. The sun pokes through the clouds, showing typical farm country, scattered houses and barns, a creek running through it all, green fields. It’s my normal gasoline and food stop. No safe houses that I’m aware of, but it’s usually quiet. Watching my back trail, I see a couple of black HumVees behind me, pulling onto the road. Then two more. There’s one road going through this valley, no other way out. This old crate can still run, though. Coming out of the trees, the town’s visible now, down in the valley, and there’s a glint of sunlight off metal, maybe windshields, on the near edge. No tractors out in the fields, no traffic on the road. Getting closer, I see movement, a couple dozen people at least, behind several vehicles blocking the road. HumVees again. Nowhere to go, creek on one side, open fields on the other, HumVees behind me. Two copters lift out of the town, coming up the road. I reach under the dashboard and get the dead man switch out—the cable’s long enough to let me hold it in my left hand so I can drive with my right. I hold off on the gas until I get closer. I start slowing down, like I’m going to come to a stop when I get up to them. The copters are on station overhead. Close enough, now. I just realize I’ve been praying. Well, not praying, just remembering certain things that comfort me, quotations mostly. Nothing you can find on the net any more. I press my foot down on the accelerator, increasing the speed. My finger goes down on the button. Holds it down. [To Comp: Instruction: Send. Send. Send.] [To Comp: Instruction: On condition “Upbutton:” Send. Send. Send.] I’m quoting now. What the Scots wrote in 1320 in the Declaration of Arbroath. “It is not for honor or glory or wealth that we fight, but for freedom alone, which no good man gives up except with his life . . . .” [From
Comp: “Upbutton” condition detected: Send. Send. Send.] |
