Hummingbird Salamander(21)
Most people in New York City had started wearing masks, to keep the pollution out, but also to protect privacy. The keynote was about that, on a technical level, as the trend spread worldwide. What came after facial recognition software? What lay on the horizon for all of us? Wondering idly who here was a spy for a foreign government. Or a local government.
Incoming: >>Dad wants to know if you miss us.
I was sitting in on a panel about biotech surveillance that made my skin crawl. As the panelists ignored anything ethical in their pursuit of a better, less detectable spy.
Me: I miss you especially now, during this boring bit.
>>Dad wants to know if …
All the things Dad wanted to know. Sneaky. She’d never have texted me otherwise. Even as he sent me a message and wasn’t above letting our daughter deliver it. I didn’t blame him.
But what I chased this time didn’t feel like a betrayal.
* * *
Later, as I listened to the last speaker of the day, I wondered if we should give up and let the torrent overwhelm us. That in the roar of rush-hour traffic, the sheer numbers, existed a kind of anonymity. We always made security about privacy, and we stressed the impossibility of being “unhackable.” That we were managing quality of life for patients with a long-term, low-fever virus. Everyone boasted about their bulletproof approach, but it was just a construct in their heads.
I said all of that to someone in the hallway after a panel. They ignored me. I wasn’t on any panels myself because I had registered late. But in this business, it seemed vainglorious anyway. Or unwise.
“Still working for that piece-of-shit company?” a voice said.
I turned, and there was a man from a direct rival. Colorful shirts, broad collars. Former tech bro chastened by a bankruptcy. He’d never be a CEO again.
“Yes, I am still working for that piece-of-shit company,” I said, in a monotone.
“Well, if you ever want to work for a real company—”
“I’ll kill you and eat you and use your bones for soup,” I said. Don’t know why. Just felt reckless.
I gave him my best wrestling snarl and then licked my lips. He looked confused, maybe even frightened, turned away at the same time I turned away.
Only to fall into another unwanted conversation.
“Do you fake it to make it?” an older gentleman said to me, staring up from eyes in a bald head that topped out around five foot three. He, like me, could remember the idea of the Commodore 64. Floppy disks. Dial-up. But, unlike me, he might remember punch cards, too.
“Everything I do is real,” I said, peering down at him.
“I’ll bet, I’ll bet,” he said. “But does it matter?”
“Dark web,” I said, as a joke. “Dark web.” Just because I could. Just because we used the term so much to scare “civilians.” Dank web.
He nodded like he knew what I meant. Like a meaning lay below the “dark” web. Like anything I said would be prophetic.
But he made me feel like an eclipse. I made an excuse to pivot to the refreshments table.
Fake it to make it. Email accounts full of emails we had cre ated. Business correspondence. Personal correspondence. The things so false that they might at least confuse the intruder, force them to engage, that they might never peel back that layer to find the “real stuff,” as the keynote speaker put it. Dramatic recreation and forging. Some even employed movie writers to choreograph the story arc.
All the faces around me felt so gray and featureless. Scentless bodies, rapt, in the falling-apart banquet chairs, lashed together like life rafts, in row after row.
How had I become part of this?
[28]
With distance, I can see that the problem had a larger scope and that, eventually, I’d bought into systems that despised me. We were assholes and opportunists and sociopaths, a lot of us. We thought we were on the right side of things. But what did it mean that our clients resembled ghouls and grave robbers? I knew their families, or photos of their families. Stock sentiments for what looked almost like stock photos. I knew their habits when we took them out on the town. Their fears and doubts, revealed after martinis or boutique whisky. The altruistic pompous speeches about intent meant as much to reassure themselves as impress us. They shared the familiar things, the timeworn things that make up wanting to be comfortable with one another. While before we met, we knew their criminal records and what porn they were into, had to wipe images from our minds to pretend to be like them. And maybe we were like them, because we served them.
I couldn’t always see past the seamless smiles, no matter how fixed, to the crimes. But the system was fixed, and I helped to fix it. What I believed was bulwark or siege defense morphed into the predatory. I allowed systems to flourish without consideration of people. Efficiency, and, especially, the word “proactive,” lived in our heads always. Another was “optimization.”
Most of the rest are fuzzy, or pulled one by one from my mind like hooks from the mouths of a row of fish. Until I’m floating in the dark water, released, but wounded, floating to the bottom, light lost in the murk above.
But I’d rather live here. It’s more secure, for one thing. For another, I can’t hurt anyone here the way I hurt people before, from afar. Pried into their private lives in the name of “monitoring threat” or “better serving need.” What is need but a perversion in the end? I did receive the damage, too, but mostly it streamed out from me.