The Network

One morning, a man awoke, suddenly unprepared to execute a crowd. Thought and emotion writhed within his head as his hands pulled at previously limp fabric until it contorted and settled against his scarred tan skin. At a rational level, he knew what should occur. First, resistors, disbelievers, and other assorted Luddites would make some sort of last stand: valiant in theory, but pathetic in practice. Next, the survivors would be herded into a pen; he would recite a speech he had given dozens of times and would give the Subversives one last chance to be saved and Plug themselves Into the Network. A few would always abandon their principles when faced with death. But the fervency of most Subversives had confused and impressed him: they were so determined to hold on to anachronistic ways of being that they would willingly, even proudly, sacrifice themselves in a futile stand against the March of Progress. Didn’t they know how selfish they were being? Every single Subversive had been amply informed of the mechanics of the Network and every one of them had made a choice to stay on the wrong side of the End War and thus History. Just as economies required new investment to keep people employed, the Network could not sustain itself absent further participation. It was truly humanity’s ethical obligation to keep the Network alive until the world’s top scientists could discover new populations from which to extract more Thought. Without sufficient Thought power, the Network would collapse, ending the lives of everyone linked into it.

The man had heard the counterargument: that giving up control of one’s mind was worse than death. This was what a woman whose frayed blue sweater barely held itself together had once defiantly shouted to him before he opened fire. He knew this to be definitively untrue: no one knew what happened after death. In contrast, Plugging oneself Into the Network meant feeling eternal pleasure, relaxation, and happiness. Was giving up one’s mind really that large a price to pay for guaranteed freedom from everything wrong with the world? The man strapped a firearm with blue lines pulsating through the obsidian-colored steel to his side. He began to pull on his helmet when that Thought wormed its way back into his brain.

The execution of passive Subversives was now unnecessary: this was one of the last Subversive outposts in the entire world. In past years it had still made sense to send a message to other rebels. He remembered the early years of the End War: most of the world’s population, along with nearly everything that made life livable, had been destroyed in the crossfire. North America and Europe came relatively easily, while continents below the equator had taken longer. But the vast unpopulated expanses of Asia provided ample opportunities for Subversives to hide, which was why, the man reflected as he stepped out of his tent and into the darkness and bitter wind, he was standing somewhere in the East Siberian Mountains. The image of dead Subversives began to germinate in his mind as toxic smoke whirled around his reflective blue helm. The gratuity of the violence he was going to inflict felt repulsive. Not wrong per se, but repulsive.

The man lined up with a dozen of identically-uniformed crusaders to await the staccato burst of orders that would emanate from the mouth of his Commander. Amante Pizzaro was a brilliantly violent man and a true ideologue of the Agents of Progress. Rumour had it he was a descendant of the famous Conquistador Fransisco, whose violent methods had won him fame over 500 years ago. Commander Pizzaro had reached the level of repute where he was permitted to add extravagant flair to his uniform, something doubly impressive given the rarity of such trinkets in a world where every resource was devoted to the Network’s preservation and growth. He had chosen a heart-shaped locket which blushed ruby red against his black armor. “It tells you I am full of love for my enemies,” the man remembered Commander Pizzaro had once declared jovially as his squad struggled through a necrotic smog that induced coughing fits in the men who had not sealed their masks tightly enough. As Commander Pizzaro began to go over the day’s battle plan, the man saw the shining ruby locket pushing its way to the front of his field of vision, demanding his attention. He was so drawn in by it, he did not sense the stinging slap until it connected with the back of his neck. “Pay attention, would you please?” “Yes, Commander. Sorry, Commander.” And yet, the man could not withdraw his gaze from the alluring pull of the heart-shaped locket.

The man had only seen Commander Pizzaro’s calm sadistic veneer crack once. This had been back in the very early days, when the messaging campaigns from Facebook, Google, and Apple advertising a chance at everlasting happiness were still dominating every airwave and screen. Commander Pizarro had questioned a scientist as to why they could not force people to join the Network, why it required their free will. After throwing around phrases like “Will coefficient” and “energetic sustainability,” the scientist could see Pizzaro’s anger growing with his confusion. “Look.” The scientist sighed, exasperated. “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” Commander Pizzaro’s amber eyes bored into the scientist’s warm green: “Thank you for explaining that to me,” the words dripped out venomous and viscous. Regardless of the current pain he felt on the back of his neck, the man was still able to render the same pity for his Commander now that he had felt at the time. Behind every attempt to securitize the world with force, there was clearly a fear of inadequacy within Commander Pizzaro. The man was not one for dimestore psychoanalysis, but then again, finding meaning beneath the thump of rotor blades helped to mend the corners of the tapestry the End War had tattered.

Commander Pizzaro finished his description of the battle plan. It was elegantly simple: several squadrons would lead a frontal assault while Pizzaro’s men sealed off the women and children. The Subversives were savage both in terms of their brutality and their refusal to accept Progress, but like the Native American tribes three centuries earlier, they would surrender once their noncombatants were captured. The man had initially been wary of such tactics. Back when ‘tech militias’ were the subject of panic in the halls of Congress, he had justified the violence he committed with the principle of self-preservation. Regardless of his philosophical justifications, the man could not bring himself to personally join the Network. There was something...beautiful about the world; he was unable to leave it. And joining the Agents of Progress was the best way to preserve himself. As time had gone on, the man had become more comfortable with considering Subversives as statistics. And yet, there was that damn Thought again.

The man lay motionless on an icy ridge, weapon laid carefully on a mountaintop divot as the sun tiptoed onto the horizon. He could hear thunderous explosions and flashes of light in the distance, and found himself wondering if the Agents of Progress had underestimated this ragtag outpost. Another flash of light and there was a horrible screech of metal as a helicarrier careened toward the ground, the blue metallic light that had been powering it instantaneously extinguishing. There was no way the Agents would actually lose this battle, was there?

No. The tide quickly shifted as blue lasers poured into the Subversive encampment and soon Commander Pizzaro was beckoning the men slowly down the icy hill, under cover of toxic smog, to cut off the fleeing women and children. By some miraculous stroke of luck, the refugees changed course, now dashing toward a neighboring hill. A Chesire grin spread over Commander Pizzaro’s face and he cocked his rifle, aiming at a large ice boulder at the top of the hill. The bottom of the man’s stomach began to drop and he had to dig his fingers into the frosted, dead ground to keep balance. An electric hum let loose a bolt of cerulean energy that split through the still inky sky and connected directly with the boulder. As massive ice fragments rolled ominously down the hill, many of the weaker and slower were crushed while the most agile were able to get out of the way, screaming in despair and terror.

The man’s initial reaction was the rational one: an intellectual recognition of this as a microcosm of the painful evolution of man: only the strong survived. But the pit in his stomach gnawed away at the cocoon that had been carefully woven around his mind. The joy with which Commander Pizzaro inflicted pain made the End War difficult to enthusiastically support. He knew that the End War was supposed to be the War that ended all Wars and ensured total happiness for all humanity. Any violence inflicted was a necessary evil for the greater good. The man recalled that a politician had once made a speech on television as the sky burned behind him and the crawling text beneath his image announced that the Agents of Progress had seized another state. In the speech, the politician had noted that the Apocalypse in its original Ancient Greek signified a revealing or disclosure of knowledge. This, the politician had stated emphatically, was truly prophetic. Technology corporations had monopolized and militarized themselves in an attempt to bend humanity to the needs of some sort of greater collective known as the Network. He had ended the speech with an optimistic battle cry: that humanity had faced tremendous challenges before and that free will would never be surrendered. Again, the man knew rationally this was false. Regardless of what he did, nothing could halt the March of Progress. Even a thousand men with a similar mindset could not cause anything but an incidental delay to the Network’s expansion. The man returned to remembering the justifications of self-preservation he had used, now with a heavily regretful eye. He followed his Commander down the hill and across the frozen plain encrusted with tendrils of toxic smoke, wishing that at some point in his life, he had stood for something he really believed in. This, he realized, was how the Subversives could maintain their ideology in the face of death: Thought outlived individuals, and without Thought there was no value to life.

These revelations washed over the man, forming a wave of panic. His fingers twitchily tapped out a rhythm on his firearm’s trigger. Commander Pizzaro strode triumphantly around his captives, the ruby red heart locket compelling the man’s attention the same way Commander Pizzaro’s jovially cruel manner compelled the attention of his prisoners. As Commander Pizzaro began to orate on the March of Progress, the Thought that had turned to Panic suddenly reached its apotheosis. The man could not continue to live as an Agent of the Apocalypse. In reality, that ruby red heart locket signified not respect for one’s opponents, but how the Amante Pizzaros of the world wanted to capture the hearts of others for themselves. They were the selfish ones! They wanted to bend the world to their will and the Network had given them a convenient excuse. The man turned toward Commander Pizzaro, suddenly filled with an insatiable urge to discharge his weapon and rid himself of complicity. His finger crawled toward the trigger, as his brain battled his heart for each inch like soldiers at the Marne.

Then, by some stroke of Devil’s luck, Commander Pizzaro whirled back toward the man. “Put that away, you’re going to hurt someone with it,” he said silkily, clearly unaware of the danger he was in. But the words were enough. The man put his firearm away and the March of Progress advanced closer to its inevitable conclusion.