Going Viral

We'd had a good run, I thought, looking out the window of the corner office at the violence and chaos below. We'd done our best to keep the reins on that bewildered herd out there, and we'd done a pretty good job for generations. We'd made a pretty decent living while we were at it, too.

But finally the jig was up. The other side had landed a knockout punch and we were going down, down for a very long count.

Memories flickered at the edge of my conscious mind, and I willed them back. It was getting harder. I wondered, looking down at the scene of destruction and rage, whether I'd succumb before the mob of screamers -- raging, grieving, seeking nothing more than animal vengeance -- overwhelmed our small army of private security. After they overran, killed, or subsumed the guards, the screamers would start battering the building itself: Doors, windows, walls. Eventually, they'd get in. There were just too many of them, and they were out of their minds. Then the screamers would pour into the building, overcoming defenses floor by floor and office by office. Then they'd be in here, in the Executive Office, our last refuge. They'd be at our throats. They we'd either die, or...

I fingered the trigger of the vintage Sig Sauer I'd brought from my own office. There was no way I would let things go that far. The screamers could strip away the trappings of my life and rend the flesh right off my bones, but they couldn't have my mind. I would never let my mind... my self... be taken from me. The workers and their union could not only kiss my ass, they could eat my steaming entrails before they'd infest my mind with their craven socialist garbage.

I resorted to deep breathing techniques to focus my mind... to hold on to my mind. I caught sight of a poster on the wall of Chairman Cordoba's executive office suite. It was a quote by the business philosopher Davra Prath, done in fine calligraphy.

"Failing to Succeed is Succeeding at Failure," the poster advised.

I'd always believed this. It was, after all, the Platinum Rule. But those soulless heathens down there didn't have what it took to understand it, to celebrate it, to embrace the guiding principles from which it was distilled.

***

Eighteen years ago, a labor leader named Rafe Esperanza made a pact with a life sciences engineer named Gerard van Paarten. The two men were a married couple... what was once called a "power couple." Their treasonous little arrangement led to the first major victory for workers in nearly two centuries.

The Owners had long since broken the power of the unions, and if that meant wiping out the middle class to keep a grip on the country's wealth, that was an outcome they found more than acceptable.

But the middle class and the working herd didn't surrender quietly. They pushed back. There were court cases, riots. Media offenses. None of it had much practical effect: The momentum was overwhelming and the cause righteous. Every legal finding bolstered the rights of the rich. Every new law constricted and conscripted the poor. Every election and official confirmation threw another bolt to secure doors of opportunity long slammed shut against the undeserving and made secure for the meritorious.

But even as the powerless were crushed harder and harder, the talented among them were finding ways to thrive --�just as we, the Owners, always said they would. That's the way merit works. But the ideals of merit-based capitalism were lost on the surly rabble. By the time Esperanza rose to prominence, the intellectual underclass was already hard at work undermining the Owners' authority. It was a pitched battle, but it was going to have to play out across the long haul: All the courts, both houses of Congress, and the Oval Office were solidly in the grip of the Owners, and the military was right on board with us.

But then van Paarten made a breakthrough. He perverted the fruits of research that belonged to those who had paid for it; he gave Esperanza a weapon that turned the tide of the class war.

van Paarten figured out how to use empathy as a weapon.

***

If you're a worker, you won't have gotten enough education to know this. If you're an intellectual, you might or might not know it, and then only if you work in biosciences or behavioral engineering. But people at my level -- the Overseers -- know this, because we know a lot of things about a lot of things, including economics, surveillance, jurisprudence... and medical science.

It's fascinating, really. If you show a newly hatched chick a cardboard cutout in the shape of a hawk -- nothing more than a silhouette -- the chick will panic and try to flee. There are other examples of this hard-coded, reflexive behavior, but this is my favorite. It points up, in a way anyone can understand, that there are certain ideas -- let's call them memes -- pre-imprinted into the neural networks of living organisms. The idea that you run away from a certain, specific shape is a fairly complex idea; the fact that it can be encoded into a bird's nervous system even before it emerges from the shell is amazing, and powerful, and promising.

What ideas and reflexes might we one day be able to code into our workers -- or our soldiers? Wouldn't it be glorious for our warriors and our workers and even our intellectuals to fall to their knees worshipfully, in fear and adoration, at the sight of an Owner? If a baby chick can fear a bird of prey, why can't one man be stricken with deep, abiding obedience toward his natural superior?

That's what van Paarten was supposed to be developing. What he and his team did... the treachery they engaged in... was to create a retrovirus that re-encoded living human DNA with a simple sentiment, something they blasphemously called the Golden Rule, in plain mockery of the tenets held sacred by every person of true faith.

In short, van Paarten created a gene-splicing virus that carried a meme to those it infected, but it wasn't a meme of obedience; it was a meme, van Paarten said at his trial, of service. The trigger was not an Owner, but any human being. Anyone at all. van Paarten used words like "humility" and "fellow feeling," but his rhetoric didn't disguise the truth that he'd tried to enslave us to the cult of commonality. Us! The chosen, lifted by God Himself from the common herd!

It was easier, biochemically speaking, to engineer this generalized "fellow feeling" sentiment than to create a retrovirus that could re-encode fear, or adulation, or deference based on specific parameters, whether those parameters were a visual shape or some other cue. It was so simple, in fact, that no one knew what van Paarten and his confederates were doing; they accomplished their designer retrovirus a full six years before anyone expected to have a rough working version that would install fear and love for the owners into the common herd. What worked in van Paarten's favor was that the science he was actually doing so closely resembled the science he was supposed to be doing; both derive from a genetically deep-coded Loyalty meme, after all.

It took far less time for van Paarten's handiwork to wreak havoc than it took for him to develop the bug. Suddenly, every fur-clad trophy wife was sobbing over the hard lot of the poor, or the dead babies who had starved, or the shantytown dwellers, or whatever. Any scene of human beings dwelling in filth and misery, or drinking groundwater poisoned by pesticides and fracking chemicals, or swaddling the distorted lumps of flesh that constituted 65% of the live births among maquiladora women, any such thing was enough to get the sighing and chattering started.

For women to be carrying on like that, it wasn't so alarming. It was the weakness of their biology, or so we thought. That was another factor that worked in van Paarten's favor, and delayed the necessary action on our part to save and defend our nation and our way of life. But then the men started in with all the softhearted nonsense, speaking out about the horror of the conditions in which workers plied their trades, raised their families, lived and died.

That's when the watchful knew something was wrong and the Overseers took notice. By then it might easily have been too late, because even Owners were blubbing about it, weeping over "pangs of conscience" and "the moral hazard of neglect." Churches that should have known better and stepped in to keep us on the straight and narrow went astray, too. They resurrected their long-dormant programs to provide food and shelter to the workless, the lazy, the useless, the lame -- all the dead weight that should have lived up to its name and died off.

By the time this new wave of socialism crested, there were clinics and even freshly built free schools for the children of the workers. Can you imagine it? Schools? As if a worker needed schooling; as if the Owners should be responsible for paying for such foolishness.

There truly was a moral hazard in the situation, and it was terrifying, and not just for those whom God and nature had decreed should rule. Priests, social scientists, philogeneticists -- all those graced with intellect agree that workers are of a substandard nature both physically and spiritually. The system may seem cruel, but is the cruel necessity of flesh that purifies spirit. When an extraordinary worker is born, he rises through the ranks; he proves himself meritorious, and he takes his place among the Appointed. Scripture itself says only a certain number shall be saved; without the forge of social Darwinism burning hot every moment of every day, those few worthy of salvation would never waken to their potential, never strive, never rise, and never gain the wealth that is the sure sign of God's love. Men die early under the yoke of their labor, it's true, but by the same means their souls are forever saved.

And this Satanic meme van Paarten inflicted on us rolled the world toward perdition. We quivered on the very edge of a return to the Dark Ages of Democracy, an age decimated by the wasting of funds used to elect temporary rulers to offices for the sheer purpose of doing nothing... at best, preventing the opposition party from getting anything done. Democracy was a trap of incompetence and futility that only made commoners miserable by giving them the impression they had a right to speak or participate in determining the policies that guide their lives. We should have left such foolishness behind forever, but here it was once more, welling up from the dark to drag us down The government was on the verge of imposing taxes -- actual monetary taxes! -- when van Paarten's plot was uncovered. The scandal should have been enough to wipe away any support for such state-sanctioned robbery, but the Golden Rule meme had taken a deep and widespread hold.

The Owners pulled themselves together and set their intellectuals onto the problem right away. Within weeks, the Liberty Meme had been crafted and dispersed. The Liberty Meme was a little more sophisticated, and involved a slightly more complex idea: That those who had the talent, time, family money, and drive to succeed should be free to do so, safe from the predations of generic Sinister Forces. The new virally-propagated idea took some time to work its way into the population bloc, because the Golden Rule Meme had become so firmly entrenched. But finally even the workers in the fields, ocean farms, and maquiladoras were pushing back at the idea of taxes that would be collected from the Owners at the behest of the Sinister Forces and disbursed for the benefit of the undeserving.

The Owners were ready to dust their hands off and retire to their drawing rooms and polo grounds, the battle won. What the Owners didn't count on was the treachery of their own intellectual chattel: A number of life sciences labs covertly initiated research campaigns to define more effective "Communal" Compassion memes and erode the "Competitive" Liberty meme that had spared the Owners from falling victim to wealth confiscation from the state.

Ever since then, it's been an arms race of Owners against terrorists, each side advancing meme virology by tiny degrees. Every new meme that goes viral is just a little more comprehensive, a little more penetrating, a little more durable.

Then Rico Ensarla... or at least that's who the security commission thinks it was... well, somebody, anyway, made a quantum leap in meme virology. I remember the day when the word reached the Overseers: I had tuned in to the morning's teleconference when Security Czar Patterson, looking grim, made his report.

You remember a year or so ago when the whole Paolo Flores thing went down? When the black web was full of stories about the poor, downtrodden forty-year-old single father, a guy who had lost his wife to breast cancer and now the bank was about to take his house pod away? How he wasn't going to be able to feed his four-year-old son, Raphaelito? The socialists were shaking their fingers about it, and saying it was a shame and a scam, people should never have to live like this, and on and on.

Like forty million women don't die every decade? Like this despondent no-name, this Flores nullity, like he was some special case or something? Like sixty thousand children every year don't expire of malnutrition, and good riddance to the little parasites, because why would we want the headache of more workers than we can keep busy?

It's hard enough keeping the current generation productive for seventy hours a week. If you've seen the projections, you know the bad news: Not to cry doomsday (though look at those screamers down in the quad -- that looks like doomsday to me), but if we can't keep the workers fully engaged it's dangerous. We don't allow them time for the same reason we don't allow them money: If we did, they'd just turn on us. They can't reason well enough to be trusted. They'll want a say in how their lives are run, they'll want a say in how our lives are run. They'll drive everything we have built into the ground, and they'll hurt themselves and us in the process, because they have some idea about deserving a share of what we own. It's like they don't even know -- or appreciate --�that we own them. No. Social experiments like that can't happen. It would be legal chaos. More than legal chaos... it would be moral chaos, a riot and a travesty, like what's happening down there in the quad right now.

But you can't explain any of that to these suboptimals. They just kept hammering at the same points again and again: This poor man. His poor wife. His poor four-year-old. Well, yes; I mean, of course he's poor. He's a worker. They're all poor. There's never been enough for everyone to have enough, and that's right in the Bible. Jesus himself said that's the way things are supposed to be. "The poor you will have with you always," he said. And of course! It's the natural order. When people are in their right minds, it's understood. Workers do what they are told by those who know better. Owners act as the caretakers and guardians of material resources, morality, and the masses, and everything works like everything is supposed to.

But then the Paolo meme hit. It was the most sophisticated, concept-rich meme ever, and not just by a little bit. This wasn't some visual cortex / deep emotion connection, or some empathy-building virus. The meme didn't just carry a sentiment, it carried an entire identity: Everyone the Paolo meme infected thought he was goddamn Paolo, and his loss and outrage literally became everyone's loss and outrage. The whole world has walked a mile in Paolo's shoes, and that short mile has brought us to the brink.

The screamers are in the building already. That didn't take as long as I thought. In even less time they will be here in this office, the Chief Overeer's office, in all their screaming mindlessness. So distasteful.

Worse is the taste in my mind, the taste of Paolo -- his point of view, his sadness. It's encroaching on my righteousness and my fury. Clutching my Sig Sauer, slumping toward the floor, I stumble over the words of the Platinum Rule and resort to the even more cherished First Principle, repeating it over and over, focusing on nothing but its holy message, trying to remember the words... the creed that verifies my most deeply held and most cherished beliefs...

Only selfishness succeeds. Only selfishness succeeds. Only...

And the rage surges up! Rage at how hard I worked for... for nothing but corporal punishment and ... my wife screaming in pain, my son sobbing in hunger...

No! I am not that animal Paolo Flores! I am a Man among men, an Owner, empowered and blessed with selfishness... I am enraged and aggrieved... I am selfish, and only selfishness succeeds... Success and Failure, Virtue and Sin... Succeeding at failure is the sinner's wage for his lazy suboptimal nature...

Paolo's outrage wrapping around me, I struggle to bring the gun to my lips. I won't have this godlessness, this compassion. Real compassion, real love for men is to give them a purpose and spare them from doubt and thought. This freedom-stealing dogma, this travesty of reason, insults and degrades me. I won't surrender to it! I'll eat a bullet first.

I'll eat a bullet.

I'll...

I...

"I am Paolo Flores," Jack is saying.

"I am Paolo Flores," Aimee is saying.

Chairman Cordoba himself is walking toward the door to give free access to the liberators. They are crying out with joy, crying out welcome to us. "I am Paolo Flores," Chairman Cordoba is saying. Their laughter sweeps into the room with them, washes away the harm and hurt of a century and more of brutal oppression.

I'm not sure who I am. I thought I was Randall Voorden. But it's strange, because that's not at all who I am. I am a man forced under penalty of law and corporal punishment to work every waking hour for almost nothing in return, sometimes forced to take anti-sleep doses and work multiple days straight through. My meager wages don't cover one third the cost of living. I live and die in debt.

A man should never be treated like this. For all my labor, my reward is to see my family die and my home stolen from me by the same monsters who stole my time, my strength, my life. A man should never be treated like this, and I am a man. Paolo Flores is a man.

Randall Voorden is an Overseer -- the same Overseer who created the Flesh Laws that define living organisms as property of the corporations that employ them. Under Voorden's Laws, only Owners are not owned.

I am not that monster. I am not Randall Voorden. I pretend to own no one, no one but myself.

I am Paolo Flores. I am laughing. I am free.