Interview
The ethnographer turns on a recorder. The story began before but that is lost, like it never happened.
We were always many things, many streams that were separated from each other by walls of silence. The silences were fragile but consistent so no-one was inclined to walk through them. We organized cookouts in one stream while we exported weapon systems to anyone who could buy them in another and in a third wondered about global instabilities. We were in one stream what we were afraid of in another.
When the crisis came we could not say what was happening. But we sensed it. People started taking photographs with a Super-8 look so that an encounter with horses along a purple sand beach yesterday looked like a memory that had been there for as long as we remember. The present acquired a strange thickness and we drifted away from it.
Surveillance systems continuously monitored every one and every where. They photographed the land. They monitored our language. They knew where we went, what we bought and what we watched.
We lived in a world of things. Things were solid; things were real. But the crisis was invisible. It affected what underpinned the visible. It escaped the cameras and algorithms.
In the state bureaucracies, they knew something was happening but they could not find it. They said they had to do something.
In the sunset time-space of the ethnographer and the narrator, the lights from passing cars spread over the tree trunks like they are reflecting off a mirror ball.
The recording continues: The war they declared had no definite shape. No beginning, no end. No objective, no motion. Then the insanity came.
I remember watching insectoid drones fly overhead, tracking us. Each time I saw one select a target I could almost hear it struggle to make up its mechanical mind: Should I? Should I?
On television came images from everywhere of confrontations between police and the people. Footage surfaced of a cop they called the Eye Hunter. You could see him through the American tear gas discharging a weapon at a crowd. Another, standing next to him, acted as a spotter. He said: Well done, sir. You've blinded another.
Then people started disappearing. They would be taken in the night and sent into honeycombs of entryways and get lost in back rooms. When the outcry came, these people were eliminated; shot in the head and dismembered and left in suitcases along desert roads. They blamed this on an imaginary enemy. But no-one was fooled.
There is an extended silence. Then the recording device is switched off.
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Author's Note
A little story about the world.
#OWS
Other stories by stephen hastings-king
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outstanding. needed.
I enjoy your stories. They are scary-delightful.
Fantastic writing, Stephen. So vital, alive and meaningful. Thanks for this.
Fave.
Powerful and exacting. Drills right into the beast-- Fave.
thanks much for the reads & comments. the piece comes out of a range of information i ran across on the weekend--a bill before the senate to expand the notion of battle seemingly infinitely and use that to effectively erase habeas corpus in the name of national security; a post in bldgblog about police departments acquiring drones; the footage from cairo of the eye hunter (just unbelievable) and data about us tear gas sales to the egyptian interior ministry...it's madness.
Gorgeous, Stephen. I particularly love this description:
"People started taking photographs with a Super-8 look so that an encounter with horses along a purple sand beach yesterday looked like a memory that had been there for as long as we remember."
But I also love every other line.
*
Powerful and frightening. Well done. Many lines are simply poetry.*
So much brilliance here, like this: "The war they declared had no definite shape." If I weren't already deeply afraid anyway, you'd talk me into being afraid. Well said. *
Great writing, Stephen, and with such purpose. Powerful, to say the least, but lots more could be said, and it's deserving of lots more. *
Ah, this wraps perfectly. And nearly expertly rendered in tone. This is a fine piece, hoss. I truly enjoyed it. Thank you.
It's madness, yes, and a very frightening challenge for the future. Drone technology is the newest darling of the corporate globalized police state which is attempting to standardize a platform for controlling drones with a combination of on-board recognition programs and remote human operators using brain-machine interfacing to guide the drones to their targets. Air Force researchers recently learned a mild electrical current to a drone operator's brain during training sessions on video simulators cut training time in half. The current is delivered through electrodes placed on the scalp.
Good piece.
Excellent. Fave.
Thanks very much for the reads & comments. On this one, I like the idea of the recording picking up and just stopping and that you continue assembling the story and making variations on your own after it ends.
The ethnographer turns on a recorder. The story began before but that is lost, like it never happened.
Love this opening.
I love the beginning of this, too, and the whole thing is superb, Steve, but this formulation, especially:
"every one and every where"
Amazing how breaking up those words -- such a simple thing, really -- delivers so much. Every where... WOW. love that.
yes, what they all said
Fine piece of work, sir. Sinister in places and that fits.
I like the Eye-Hunter character. He/she/it sums up the workaday barbarism of our times.
(And in Wisconsin, they want you to pay $50/hour for the privilege of having your eye taken out.)
We were in one stream what we feared in another. That's an eloquent way to put it.
thanks much for the reads and lovely comments.
there was footage that circulated briefly of an egyptian interior ministry thug (baltagaya--best word i've sort of learned in a while)filmed at tahrir a couple weeks ago. the eye hunter sequence is a transposed version of the sequence. workaday barbarism indeed.