Sunday 10th May

Here is our old friend Janek, remember him.  I am looking back fondly at the year 2066.  This was how it all started; Janek secretly recording his thoughts, committing them to a secret device – poor deluded fool…..

Diary Entry – 20660110

“I have been ultra-careful these last few days.  I have had to be.  I feel that in this ridiculously dangerous enterprise I have embarked upon I cannot actually be too careful.  Am I just paranoid or have I been getting funny looks from people at work?  Maybe it’s just my imagination working overtime, but as it is more than likely that I will be caught at some point, I am almost looking out for it.  Is that what this is all about then, am I just seeking a way out?  Is this whole exercise my escape tunnel from a life I feel more and more imprisoned by?  Am I just waiting for the knock on the door, the i-com asking me to come to hum-res.  Or just as possible, to be quietly sidelined and by degrees and with no explanation at all be down-strata-ed until I join the ranks of the lowly drones, where I am less than nothing in their eyes.  So, problem solved.

Or am I just getting away with it, could it be that no-one is watching me at all, that actually no-one is interested in Janek Smith at all?  That would almost be as sad an outcome in a funny sort of way.  To be ignored, to be of no concern to anyone, is almost worse than to be recognised as some sort of threat.  Anyway, paranoid or not, I am still keeping an extremely low profile, keeping my head well beneath the radar.  (Does anyone use radar nowadays?  Wasn’t that just invented to spot Nazi planes, or did it have other uses? – I’ll have to remember to ask a screen about that.)

Although it is remarkably hard to just act naturally, to pretend that I am the same as I was a few days ago, that I wasn’t writing this secret and subversive little diary.  The more you try to act naturally the more you are aware what an act it is.  Not that I am revealing any great state secret I can assure you, I am only writing down what is common knowledge, what is everywhere, even on Disnews.  If you care to read between the lines, that is.  Nothing is what it seems on the surface, but dig a little deeper and you can see a different picture, a hidden image if you like, a meaning beneath the meaning.  One that most people prefer not to see, of course – it could affect their strata level.

One of my long-held suspicions is that History itself is being manipulated along with everything else. Why shouldn’t it be? What is to stop the news of a few years ago changing as our today’s perception changes?  The great leap forward was when they managed to get everyone to store everything in the ‘ether’ and not on their own devices.  No machine anywhere has any internal memory now, nothing stays on its original device, it is all uploaded automatically, and just as easily it can be read and changed if necessary.

How can we possibly remember or ever be certain that our own memory is more reliable than the official version.  A few times now I have recalled an old com I made, sometimes only a few weeks old, and I don’t quite recognise it.  Something might have subtly changed, and I find myself asking the question, did I really write this?  Or has it been changed, tampered with, re-written in some way?  And I am never quite certain.  The more uncertain I become the more I doubt, both what I am re-reading and what I actually recall of having written in the first place.  Confusing?  You bet it is.  Easier not to even think about it, which is I am sure what they would prefer.

Of course, everyone trusts computers absolutely, far more than they trust their own fallible memories; and actually why bother remembering anything now – computers can do that for us far better than we can ourselves.  In the crammers they only teach you how to access information, not how to remember it.  All exams now are about the best way to collect, combine and précis information rather than finding out what you actually know.  No-one reads anything on paper at all nowadays, except a few antique novels published before the twenty-first century, but they are fast disappearing too.  No-one fills their fairly limited living space with those old objects anymore.  If you want to read something or hear some music you only have to think the thought and before you have finished mouthing the words it is available, but just as quickly it is gone.  Everything just is, everything is of the moment, but nothing is permanent.  Nothing remains, all is transient.

And no-one questions this.  If I want to hear an old recording say of ‘The Stones’ or some other classical music, I can hear it whenever and wherever I want.   I just have to silently whisper the words and there it is in my ears.  Unbelievably, people used to buy music a hundred years ago on black plastic plates.  Huge heavy things, I’ve seen them in museums.  And they needed a special machine to listen to them.  But it was a mechanical reproduction, it couldn’t be externally manipulated, presumably it always sounded the same.  Now when I want to hear something I think I know I simply ask and it plays for me.  But how can I tell it is exactly the same as the last time I asked for it?  Could the words have been altered, the tempo slowed down, the sound subtly enhanced?  It would be so easy to do, and how would we know.  We trust what we see and hear, but cannot even remember if it is the same as last time.  We have forgotten how to remember anything because we don’t need to.

I just used the example of a piece of music, but it could be anything at all, especially the news or our recent history.  Who is to say it isn’t being constantly revised, amended, subtly altered as circumstances change.

We have access to everything and yet possess nothing.  The whole idea of possessions is disappearing fast, people’s living spaces are simply too small, and besides it is easier to just access than to own.  I was reading that people used to own everything, autos, houses, furniture and clothes, and only a few years ago now.  It would be inconceivable and so economically unsustainable to own an auto today; everyone just rents one when you need them, and you have automatic upgrades every year.  The auto is never yours, but is available to you as long as you maintain your strata level.   New autos too, they all seem shiny and new, but I wonder what happens to all the old models.  Are they tidied up, vac-sealed and sold to the Far East where they no longer make such things, or are they scrapped and re-cycled, or are they maybe just slightly rebranded and sold back to us as upgrades?  And it is the same with clothes; you just go to the Apparel store, take your old stuff back and for a small cred adjustment get new things.   People would be amazed to realise that our grandparents actually bought new clothes all the time, and only threw them away when they were wearing out, or if the whim took them to dispose of whole wardrobes full of stuff.  We don’t even need wardrobes now because it is easier to just trade up your clothes than keep them for years and years.

This is because the whole nature of cred, or money as it used to be called, has changed.  Money used to have a steady sort of value, give or take a bit of inflation, which we have managed to get rid of too, thank goodness.  Our predecessors would be amazed at the very concept of our “cred”.  “Cred” isn’t actual money; there are no notes or coins; it is simply the amount you have available at any time to spend.  Like everything else you don’t own it, you never actually see it.  Every month it accrues to you, depending on your strata level, and you have a degree of choice in how to spend it, but you never get anything like a reckoning, a statement they used to call it I believe.  You can’t overspend because you aren’t allowed to.  The very concept of personal debt has been eliminated, as has any responsibility over your own finances.  Cred just is.  Every month you have some, in fact it is seamlessly topped up.  Like some magic wine glass, no matter how much you drink the glass is never quite empty, you just cannot see who is filling it up.

No-one really thinks about their “cred”, they assume that some exterior-accounting is going on somewhere in some hypercom and what is left, your “cred”, is yours to spend on food or whatever.  You see something you would like to use, maybe on a screen-ad, and you know that you wouldn’t be able to see it at all if you couldn’t actually afford it.  If you didn’t have enough cred it wouldn’t be beamed onto your screen in the first place.  We are like children in some magic Alladin’s cave, only each of us, or each strata level anyway is in a slightly different cave, seeing different degrees of treasure.   Simple really, and perfect thought out too.  No debt, no money worries, no misery.

Except that if you stop to think about it, what does any of it matter?  Nothing has any real value; there is no substance to anything.  It can all be taken away as easily as it is given.  We have lost all control of our destiny.  Our whole lives are being controlled by the whim of some Hypercom.  Everything we think we may have achieved is an illusion.  Every day you wake up and your whole world is only there for as long as it pleases them to allow it to continue.   It would all stop tomorrow, this instance even, if this diary – if these most private thoughts were discovered.  I am committing one of the cardinal sins.  I have started to live in my own world and not theirs.  And it suddenly occurs to me, am I a reb after all?  Is that what I have become, simply by this process of writing something down that they don’t know about?  Maybe this is how it always starts.  The realisation that there may be another world somewhere else, even inside your own mind, one that they do not control.  I hadn’t fully understood that at all until now.”