The Fires of Orc

Men rise from one ambition to another:

First they seek to secure themselves against attack

and then they attack others. Niccolo Machiavelli

This old man’s mind! I forgot about Joyce. I will read today. It’s my right on this fine, ugly day in my appointed hovel.

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed…

“So, Old Timer…”

Oh what now? Must he really make nice on this day, this day of all others? I have a book to read and a story to tell. Now it seems I also have pointless conversation to make.

“What is it?” I ask.

“I was just wondering… So if you’re from the old world, can you still remember what it was like, you know, every day, the routine things?”

“Like it was yesterday.”

“Wow. That must be cool, but kind of sad, I bet.”

I don’t suppose he means to rub it in.

“Yes it is. It is indeed,” I tell him, “both cool and sad at the same time.”

“Did everyone have cars?”

“Nearly everyone. Some people had many cars.”

“Really?! Why would anyone want many cars? You can only drive one.”

The poor dear. “The same reason anyone wants more of anything than they need – to have more than everyone else.”

“You’re telling me that people in the old world just wanted to have things because other people didn’t have them?”

“Well not just, but yes. Having more things than others was important in my time. They used to say ‘He who dies with the most toys wins.’”

“Wow. And I thought the old world was so advanced.”

Should I feel guilty for disillusioning the harmless, simplistic dolts of this new world? Perhaps there’s nothing to gain from crushing their mythology, but it doesn’t seem right to leave them ignorant, blissful or not. On the other hand, if a child believed in a kingdom where dragons and fairies played in the forest, I wouldn’t try to change his mind. I hope I’m not becoming a killjoy in my antiquity.

Anyway, the old world was no fairy tale and San Diego was no Wonderland. But of all the doomed cities of its time, it was the best of them in which to be young and voracious, without hindrance or remorse. The gem of America, where Mexico crept in with color and spice, and what mattered most was to enjoy the day and drink up the night.

Every day a quarter-million people crossed between San Diego and its neighbor to the south for business and whoring. I can’t say for certain which side of the border was the whore and which the pimp. But when it comes to the carnal and the basic, does it matter really who gets screwed and who does the screwing? I guess it would if you were the one getting screwed.

San Diego was made for fun, and flesh, and clean modernity pressed into service for old, dirty purposes. It was too enjoyable a place to stir much passion about any particular cause or concern. Passion and San Diego would never mix. It was a city complicit in satisfaction, content in its own comfort, relaxed in its abstention from significance. It was a place where sailors got drunk and tattooed, where politicians took from the till and retired in disgrace to hidden fortunes, where environmentalists eschewed red meat, biked to work for industrial behemoths and saw no irony in it all.

And then one night the lights went out and all our comforts went with them. It happened everywhere at the same time – San Diego and around the world. Ten thousand planes fell to the hard earth and the watery deep. One billion cars stalled where they were. Eight billion phones blinked out around the globe, all in an instant. In that instant the city that luxury loved most was dark and terrified, three million bawling, stricken toddlers.

The next morning the skies tore open and fire rushed in. But we’re not there yet. Let me back up…

When I was young, before the fires, San Diego was my friend, my brother, my hooker, my playground. I prowled its streets, hunted its bars, dabbled in its business and learned its every curve. In my twenties I had more reputation than money, but reputation could buy things that money alone couldn’t. I walked to the front of lines. I drank twelve-year-old Scotch. I lived in a furnished suite with a south-facing view overlooking Downtown. I notched my belt almost nightly with one conquest or another and my city was my constant companion.

I came by my privilege fairly, but accidentally. Markus was the son of wealth. I was the son of middle-class Methodists. He went to Harvard. I went to City College. At his birth, he was endowed with an everlasting fortune, but I was born with something more precious. I could shape opinions and opinions have always been worth more than gold. I was one of the mystics of my day – a quantum optimizer. I commanded the public mind. I navigated the zeitgeist, ranking what mattered and what did not according to ascribed priorities set, for the most part, by the interests of ogre-headed corporations.

I worked for the highest bidder, whoever that may be. Whether they sold cars, or beauty cream, or video games, or retirement funds, I could make my clients’ products more popular than their competitors. In the first half of the Twenty-First Century, the best of us in my trade were more influential than the New York Times. The men behind the curtain were post-adolescent market watchers, a scattered guild of statisticians, marketing majors and drop-outs with good instincts.

Search engine optimization was decades old by the time I embarked on my career. But I came of age simultaneously with the dawn of quantum information. I was one of the first outputs of the final phase of human evolution that came about with the death of binary computing. The creative minds at Quark Metrics barely glimpsed the full fruition of their genius. Quantum computing was, in a sense, still digital. But in place of the binary states of which all previous computing was made, ones and zeroes, the quantum realm yielded infinite degrees of variation. Once quantum systems were connected, what one system could do expanded exponentially, to the power of the other. Multiple connected quantum systems were practically omniscient. Thousands of such systems were, for all practical purposes, magic. It wasn’t just their ability to occasion new realities that made the systems so awe-inspiring; more than that, it was their ability to interpret the most complex variable sets and render the incalculable meaningful. They could, in other words, make sense of literally everything, everything that had happened, was happening or would happen.

The new quantum units that an eager consumer public brought lovingly into their homes – tablets, wall units, palm processors and more – solved problems most people didn’t know they had until there was an answer. Those same machines worked as nets scouring the human sea, collecting massive inputs from billions of people of all ages, races and religions. The data that built up in the stores of the quantum system was too dense to read and too multi-layered to interpret for all but a select few whose intuitions aligned with the quantum principles at work in the basic operating machinery.

The limitation for most analysts was not knowing what to ask. I knew what to ask but I also knew something much more important; I knew how to tell the system what I wanted it to believe. That was the trick. The quantum brain could not distinguish between what was valuable information and what was just static. So asking for any given piece of information was likely to produce an answer too long to be useful. But if you could tell the system what was useful it could focus only on that, leaving out everything else. Considering the fact that for each set of variables the system could predict trillions of possible outcomes, narrowing the field was essential to making good use of it. I could tell the quantum system how to answer only what I wanted it to answer when anyone asked a question I anticipated. The system did the rest.

Shaping opinion was simple for me. We were all linked in, networked, connected. We were then a species of wasps, our hive brain housed in a cyber-skull, its neurons building thought-bridges to each member of the swarm. The six-billion of us tethered through the ether shared in an instant the sum of all our knowing stretching back to the birth of information. When one of us asked a question, the hive brain answered. Information was free and universal. Answers were given from on-high, their accuracy beyond contestation, but in some cases, I and a few others like me were the real sources of those answers.

“Truth,” as long ago defined, no longer mattered. In place of truth, we had agreement.

As I told The Landlord, even if twelve people say something stupid, it’s still a stupid thing. But if twelve million people say something, stupid or not, it’s a phenomenon. Widespread agreement was the essential ingredient that turned opinion to fact. I could build agreement. Thus I was, in my day, the architect of facts.

Of course there were some two billion people who never joined the hive – the hordes sunken in anonymous poverty, the battered detritus we passed in the streets, averting our gaze, and the serfs of great nations who cleaned our homes, picked our fruit, cleared our tables and watched our children. There were also the billon and more stuck in a mud-walled era, ghosts of the Third World, passed over by progress, tossed by tempest time, marooned on the sand of history. To the hive brain, they did not exist. No one shaped their opinions and no one cared to.

That long ago morning in the San Diego autumn of 2027, the wind licked lightly off the harbor, cooling with ocean breath the sun-swept city. I woke with the light, soft and scattered through thin drapes. There was a girl to be hustled out.

“Can I get you a cab?”

I always hated those awkward moments. There really is no polite way to dismiss an evening’s indulgence in the morning. With practice, impoliteness becomes second nature, but it’s still impolite.

I was fresh off a successful stint with a pharmaceutical start-up. In six months, I helped to make their pill to combat First World depression the most asked-for drug on the market. At the risk of sounding boastful, I’ll tell you it was a masterpiece. I had to unpack the quantum data and filter out the waste, leaving only the meaningful bits to determine and define how a billion people could be made to take a pill they didn’t know they needed. I found the key in the most common queries brought to the quantum mega-system. I found what people were looking for and I crafted a message that promised an answer in a pill bottle.

If a soccer mom with no individuality typed, “How can I feel better?” she found Alexigin. Middle-aged men with diminished libidos, teenagers with bad skin and a case of angst, washed-up artists, mid-level bureaucrats trapped in careers they never chose, the ugly, the sad and the lame all found Alexigin. It cured nothing, masked everything; the perfect remedy for an incurable condition of the soul.

Alexigin was one of my ‘firsts.’ By that I mean it was one of several products that under my watch became the first thing people found when they asked common questions in common terms. It was a notable coup, given the availability of a dozen established feel-good drugs with decades-old name recognition. Alexigin overtook Zoloft, Lexapro, Prozac, Paxil, Cymbalta, Celexa, Wellbutrin, Effexor, Luvox and a hundred other mood candies to claim the top spot. A little white pill became the most lucrative drug in a world filled with whiskey and cocaine. Even I was surprised.

In the privacy of their homes, people asked that one thing most frequently – “How can I feel better?” It was a common affliction for soft people in decadent times – they couldn’t feel good enough. In long ago days they might have gone to a shaman. More recently they went to card readers, palmists, or marriage and family therapists. In my time they went to their computers and there they found my drug. In the received opinion of a plugged-in wasp world, Alexigin could light the darkness inside the heart, a perfect, thought-shaped fact of my creation.

Fresh off the Alexigin contract, with a bonus in the bank, I went to the Markus campaign headquarters on a Monday to offer my assistance. I was not then and still am not a true believer in any political ideology. I believe government by design is a system for the few to inhibit the free will of the many. However, I believed at the time that the will of the many was often misguided. I believed that some power must protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority. In those days I accepted government, although I distrusted it.

Any time I thought about my America and its government, which was not often, I concluded that the core of its dysfunction was the party division that made politics no better than a struggle over which of two rats would guard the people’s cheese. So while I thought little of Tom Markus philosophically and knew nothing of him personally, I was intrigued by a notion.

What if the solution to the two-party problem was as simple as finding the right wealthy candidate with no obligation to either camp? What if my country had an independent billionaire president, immune to the temptation of corporate largesse and beholden to no established political order? What if that president, regardless of his personal qualifications, could assemble a team of experts shielded by their commander’s neutrality from any particular dogma or insider ground rules? What if that team were free to govern in the best interest of real Americans, not the old guard elite? The possibilities were exciting.

More exciting than all, though, was the far-fetched idea that I might be able to help an upstart beat two entrenched, accustomed champions. It was Alexigin-squared, the highest stakes game in my America. If I could win at that game, I would trump even myself, an appealing prospect for a young man yet to learn the wisdom of discretion or the security of low expectations.

Markus headquarters was at the corner of Sixth and Broadway. It occupied a pricey downtown quarter-block with wrap-around glass permitting a hundred-and-eighty-degree view of lawyers, bankers and bureaucrats busy by day with the work of the old world, and club goers, flesh peddlers and pleasure seekers by night, busy with the even older pursuits of time immemorial. Posters with Markus’s beaming face festooned the place. There were no slogans, just a ubiquitous, larger-than-life grin and the words “Markus 2028.”

I asked the blonde at the front desk about volunteer opportunities and she shoved a clipboard my way.

“Actually,” I asked her, “is there someone I could speak with about a higher-level position? I have in mind contributing professional technical support.”

She harumphed, “And who can I say is inquiring?”

“You can say whatever you like. But tell your boss there’s a rich guy in the lobby who wants to donate a million dollars’ worth of time and expertise.”

Great legs on the blonde. I ogled as she went to fetch a higher-up.

Just a week into his announced campaign, Markus’s headquarters was fully staffed. Field offices were slowly forming in other areas of the country, mostly in California, but his base in my beloved city was already a busy place. Ringing phones and frenetic volunteer coordinators filled the air with a din of activity. San Diego would be a curious choice for any other candidate’s headquarters, but for Markus it was obvious. His ties to the city ran through Quark and they ran deep. Within a block of campaign headquarters were the Thomas and Iris Markus Library, the Markus Senior Community Center and the T. L. Markus Symphony Hall.

With fourteen months to go before an election, Markus had a slick office, a cadre of enthusiastic true believers, one supportive city bought and paid for, and very little else.

I took a seat on a red sofa, one of three in the lobby, red, white and blue. The brochures were as cliché as the furniture, also tri-color, a bit heavy on the blue. The entire operation reeked of spontaneity and unsound hunches. It was thrown together, haphazard, terribly grassroots. Grassroots are fine if you’re trying to grow grass. To grow an oak tree you need fertile ground, lots of water and at least one big, fat acorn.

After a few minutes I was rescued, mercifully, from the lobby literature by a round-faced woman in a cheap pantsuit and horn-rimmed glasses. More clichés.

“Good morning,” she said, her hand extended. “I’m Marsha and I’m coordinating volunteers.”

We exchanged pleasantries.

“So I’m told you’re interested in volunteering. May I ask what attracts you to the Markus campaign?”

“I like to win,” I said, leaving it at that.

Marsha was ill at ease. I think she worried I might be a crackpot. I curtailed her usual speech.

“Marsha,” I said, “let me tell you what I do. I take products nobody’s ever heard of – could be pills, could be shampoo, could be a video game, just products, doesn’t matter what – I take those products and make them the top sellers in their industry. In the old days, guys who do what I do worked on Madison Avenue, wrapped commercial campaigns around jingles, and bought air time, billboard placements and positive reviews in Consumer Reports. I do what those guys did from anywhere in the world, with new media and new strategies. I win by being better at my tricks than other guys are at theirs and I really want to help this candidate win.”

“I see,” said Martha. “Did you by chance bring a resume?”

“No I did not,” I replied. “I don’t know how much you could learn about what I do from a resume. However, I did bring a list of references,” whereupon I produced a list of senior executives from some of the world’s leading corporations. “Rather than me telling you about myself and what I do, I really hope you’ll call a few of these men and women and ask them about what I do. I don’t want you to trust me. I want you to know that I am what I say I am.”

“Very well,” she quipped. “I’ll pass this along and one of our senior campaign staff may indeed call your references. But what is it you’d like to do for us?”

“I would like to take this candidate’s message to the public and make it work. Most thinking people in this country already believe in their hearts that electing either of his opponents means more of the same, and that means more of the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer and the rest getting squeezed in between. I don’t want Tom Markus to run just an admirable campaign, I don’t want him to have a respectable showing and I don’t want him to be a footnote to history. I want him to be the next President of the United States. Let me inside your operation and I can help make that happen.”

“Interesting,” said Marsha, “and is there anything else?”

“One thing,” I said, “for now. Did you know you’re one of three candidates in this race with red-white-and-blue literature?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your print materials. They’re red-white-and-blue, just like both of your major party opponents.”

“I don’t know if you know this,” said Marsha, “but those are this country’s colors.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said. “They’re the colors of this country’s flag, but that doesn’t mean much. They’re also the flag colors of France, Australia and Cuba.”

“Yes, well, here in America red-white-and-blue are patriotic. And there are six candidates in this race, not three. The Republicans haven’t selected a nominee yet.”

“Smith is the Republican nominee. Bank on it. And as for whether or not red-white-and-blue are patriotic, what if that’s so? If people want a patriotic president, they have three to choose from. What makes one any better than the others? They’re all red-white-and-blue.”

“Okay,” Marsha droned, “and what would you suggest?”

“Black and green,” I told her.

“And I ’m sure there’s a reason for that.”

“There is,” I said.

“And what might that reason be?”

“Science. The psychology of color is a well trammeled field. It’s been around for a hundred years.”

“And according to the psychology of color, what’s so special about black and green?” she asked.

I said, “It depends on how you look at it. There’s the touchy-feely camp who think of color effects in terms of emotions. To them, black is authority and green is balance, and also peace. But then there are the purely optical thinkers. To them black is bold print and green is the easiest color on the eye. Then too there’s the symbolic school, in which black is structure and green is money. Those are all good things. Red, white and blue, on the other hand, are aggression, tranquility and innocence. Thematically speaking, red-white-and-blue is not just cliché, it’s internally contradictory.”

Marsha had had enough of me. We thanked one another and shook hands. I knew she wanted me gone, but in parting I asked one thing.

“Marsha, I don’t sell myself well. That’s something I’ve never worked very hard at. But aside from myself, I can sell anything. I have sold many, many things I don’t believe in to tens of millions of people who didn’t really need them. I have twenty-four hours a day to give to this campaign and if you would just call a few references, or have someone else do so, I would be truly grateful. I’ll give this candidate everything in my arsenal and I promise he will get further with me than without me. Please just take the time to find out for yourself if I am what I say I am.”

I took a brochure on my way out.

“Say Old timer,” asks The Landlord, “what did you do in the old world anyway?”

The shadows have shortened in the orange light of a creosote day. Where did the morning go? I’ve read scarcely a word and still there’s an entire story to tell.

“I was an astronaut.”

“You mean a spaceman? Oh come on.”

“I’m serious. I walked on Mars. It was a bit like Arizona.”

He laughs, “Nah man, tell me the truth.”

“Would you believe I ran for president?”

“No you didn’t. I bet you were always a teacher,” he says.

“Indeed I was. How did you know?”

“The books,” he says. “Who keeps all those books if they don’t mean to teach out of them?”

“Everyone is how he is because he got that way. Maybe I keep the books from fear of loneliness?”

He shakes his head, “No. I think you like being alone. Good-looking old guy like you, you could get a woman if you were lonely.”

“Perhaps,” I say, “but outside of a woman, a book is a man’s best friend.”

“Yeah, and inside of a woman it’s too dark to read.”

We chuckle. Not so horrible this day is The Landlord. There may be hope for him yet. Perhaps I should make more time for the convivial things in life. I’ve lost a morning. There are so few left and this one is almost gone. I will use them better from here on out. Perhaps I’ll break from my accepted routine. Talking with The Landlord is hardly a conversation but it’s better, I think, than silence. I will do this again, if mood and moment warrant.

But for now, let us resume.