29/6 Fragments

Their brakes scream like an aviary. Their sirens' whoop like a whale in your ear.

~

Dodging potholes whose depths are concealed by their aqueous fillings! Riding into the arc of spray whipped up by the wheels of the van in front!

~

"Every Gunpowder Plot needs its Guy Fawkes," she said, then, seeing that I did not understand the reference, added, "He was an explosives expert. If you're going to blow up Parliament, you need an explosives expert. If you're going to obliterate an electronic fortress, you need a hacker. And what do you know? We struck it lucky."

~

Waterboatman's indecision extended to the plot itself. For the most part, he was with us, but his decision on the day we picked him up did not sign and seal the deal. Every now and then he would plunge into doubt, and grab our coat-tails on the way down.

"The success rate of this sort of thing is very low, you realise," he would say. "I'm just going over comparable attempts at overthrow in the past. There's the Gunpowder plot, of course, you all know that."

We did. Blue Damselfly had, of course, already mentioned it. Waterboatman seemed to be trying to puncture our romantic ideals with grisly reality by way of this example. He named the 5th November conspirators, picturing the famous sketch and going left to right). "Bates, Robert Winter, Christopher Wright, John Wright, Thomas Percy, Guido Fawkes, Robert Catesby, Thomas Winter. Is that all? Yes? Catesby dead in a shoot-out at Holbeach House, Fawkes tortured by instruction of the King," (he glanced at Longicorn) "then the remainder hung, drawn and quartered. There are worse fates, I suppose."

Having savaged Blue Damselfly's inspirational event, we imagined he'd stop there. But of course, he didn't.

"Then there's the Cato Street Conspiracy. Any of you heard of that?"

Blue Damselfly said that yes, yes, of course she had, but the rest of us made the mistake of being hesitant, and thus betrayed the truth. Longicorn took a breath.

"I'll try not to bore you with the details. A band of radical conspirators, led by Arthur Thistlewood, planned to murder all of the British cabinet ministers at a dinner party and overthrow the government. An agent provocateur - that is, a spy amidst their ranks - betrayed them. The police and the Bow Street Runners and the Coldstream Guards all turned up at Thistlewood's house and captured most of them in a bloody brawl. Death sentences for half of them, transportation for the other half.

"And conspiracy is only the half the aim here, of course. It's out and out rebellion we're marching for, isn't it? In which case, the success rate doesn't look too good there either. Jack Cade's 1450 rebellion, anyone? No? Twenty thousand rebels - and we'll be lucky if we can raise that number - including MP's, knights and squires, marched on London, beheaded the Lord Treasurer and were swiftly defeated over the next few days. Cade himself killed in a skirmish, then quartered, head put on a pike on London Bridge.

I'm just listing the most notable ones here.

"But Waterboatman, what pessimism!" said Blue Damselfly. "What about the English Civil War? Unprecedented, unexpected and victorious, and the changes it brought still in place today. As I recall, it was the king who went up on the scaffold that time."

"And what about the French revolution?" said Longicorn. "And the Russian?"

I did not say anything. The mention of 'agent provocateur' had rattled me bad. I now suspected everyone around me.
"My apologies, perhaps examples was not the best way to go," said Waterboatman, musing. "Sheer numbers, I suspect, are on my side."
"Are they? I wonder how many successful unrecorded mutinies have been carried out?"
"A mutiny is a much smaller operation." (Waterboatman was relentless!) "There's also the context to consider. We have not taken the lay of the land. We have no idea how many others share our views. Certainly, a good number. But enough for an army? You'll have to excuse my cynicism, but minor factions have been claiming the support of a silent majority for donkey's years and it's been a while since these lions have risen from their slumber in unvanquishable number."

And it went on and on for some time, until Blue Damselfly stealthily led him off the subject. And I was still numbed by this idea of agent provocateurs. I had all the logic in the world on my side. We were randomly selected participants. None of those thus far assembled worked for the government, or had any relations in government. And yet there seemed to be something I was missing, and it unsettled me deeply. Some clue. Some fragment of hair or splash of blood on the thorns in the rosebush.

~

Waterboatman objected:

"That's a very romantic view of the world prior to the Industrial Revolution. I'm rusty on the specifics, but I'm sure people didn't just sit around waiting for the harvest every year, and I seriously doubt we have to work harder today to 'keep up' with machines. If anything, we've got more time for leisure time than ever, not to mention more ways of relaxing. And yes, we have 'captains of industry', but they had landowners. There will always be people in greater positions of power who take the rewards of other people's hard work for themselves. People complain that we're manipulated into obedience today - sure we are, but in the middle ages they cured dissent in even more blunt ways. If the population were restless, you rounded them up and took most of them off to fight a war.
"That's not to say everything is great today, and I don't think anyone would suggest that the current situation is healthy. That's why we're all here, after all. It's also the case that machines don't appear to actually save us work, because expectations of productivity simply increase with technological advancements. But I don't think you can make a case for the idea that we have it harder now than ever. That's just 'grass is greener' logic. I think the raw truth is that a greater percentage of the population are able to relax and feel good about themselves than ever before."

~

To get to the service elevator in the mornings, I had to use the basement. There were other people in the building, you see, who had asked about keeping their bikes in the carpark, but been refused. They were letting me have special priveleges.
Q: Because they were using you.
A: I couldn't say. No explanation was given. But they told me I had to go through the basement anyway, when I brought my bike in. They gave me the keycode for a door in the entranceway. The door made a sound like a guillotine coming down when it was unlocked.
JUDGE: Have you ever seen a guilltone coming down, Mr. Hawley?
A: At the London Dungeons, yes, my Lord, and also on television.
JUDGE: It will do, I suppose. Please continue.
A: Yes, my Lord. On the other side, there was a very narrow staircase, in three segments, leading down. Getting my bike down it was a struggle. I was always jamming the pedal into my ankle or getting the handlebars caught on the railings at the corners. At the bottom, there was a very narrow corridor with poor lighting and lots of metal piping. I had to wheel my bike down that and find the elevator at the end, and that would take me, of course, up to the carpark.
Q: So, let's just get this clear in our heads. The service elevator took you to the carpark, on the ground floor, which was not accessible from the road without a key. You would enter the elevator either from one of the higher floors of the hospital -
A: The fourth floor, usually.
Q: Right. But when arriving with your bicycle, you would instead have to enter the elevator from the basement, via this narrow staircase and corridor.
A: Yes. Only sometimes the lift would get stuck in the basement for no reason. It wouldn't come when I called it up to the fourth floor. So I had to go the basement route in the evenings as well. There was a yellowed map, I remember, on the wall at the top of the staircase.
MR MURDOCH: My Lord, I have to ask: is this relevant?
JUDGE: As I've explained to Mr. Lightoller, Mr. Murdoch, this is not a jury trial, the young man has already confessed his guilt. I'm sure we should all like to be away at a reasonable time, but I am in no hurry to finish the evidence off. I'm sure Mr. Hawley and Mr. Lightoller, between them, are coming to a point, is that right?
MR LIGHTOLLER: Setting the scene as best I can, my Lord, and as thoroughly but efficiently as I can, in the hope that you will understand it as necessary in the er... context of where we are leading towards.
JUDGE: Yes, quite. Go on, Mr. Hawley. The yellowed map at the top of the staircase?
A: Well, I was only going to mention that I recall seeing the Transformer Room and the Ventilation Plant Room and the Lift Motor Room mentioned on that map, and that's just to illustrate the kind of environment it was in the basement. It was dimly lit, it was claustrophobic, and there was this constant orchestra of machinery going on around me, in the walls and the pipes, and seemingly under my feet.

~

"And Honeybee? There is no one else."
I said pardon.
"It's just us seven, I'm afraid."
What.
"Yeah. That's it. This arm enables me to interface with the Vee22 and trace a path all the way back into the Glockenspiele. I can see who is watching who without a network of informants."
What.
"Stop saying what. It was far less risk to tell another white lie than to tell the truth. If I had said it was just me, then maybe you would have come along, maybe Longicorn - but then what about Fire Ant? He threatened to turn us in once. Maybe he would have if he thought it was just three lunatics. You have to give the impression of organisation and efficiency in order to inspire organisation and efficiency."
I said that sounded like a very similar to the idea behind the surveillance grid. If you think someone's watching over you, you try harder.
"Yes, and it's the same with religion, and the same with all attempts to manipulate people," Blue Damselfly said, becoming quite flushed. "And it is a terrible thing to live under. It is, however, very effective."
So you're no better than the government, than the Achievers, I said.