Much has been said and written about the totalitarian threat posed by Superhacker, but it has not materialized. The first change imposed by this individual was to make it impossible to be anonymous in social media or elsewhere. In one day, every concocted handle was translated into the user’s real name; now every attempt to go online incognito fails. The abrupt collapse of the ability to deceive and harass by such means has been a societal shockwave. But fascism grows in the dark, not in the light, and so it doesn’t grow.
Just a week later, everyone with an email account—everyone—received in his or her mailbox reams of incontrovertible evidence of the massive corruption of fifteen members of Congress, paired with the emails and recorded phone conversations of justice department officials and law-enforcement personnel and media figures who had secretly conspired with those politicians to assist them in escaping prosecution and preserving their power, their reputations. That was only the first fifteen.
During the past three years, politicians at federal, state, and local levels, as well as bureaucrats, journalists, media executives, businesspeople, judges, clergy, teachers, university presidents, and citizens in all walks of life have been outed for testifying falsely before a grand jury, for lining their pockets with millions in graft and bribery and embezzled funds, for bold tax evasion, for selling national defense secrets to the government of China, for rape or murder or, in two cases, treason. Indicted by their own emails and recorded phone calls and bank records, they face such mountains of evidence that only a few escape prison; none has held on to his or her previous office or position.
These developments have resulted in much outrage and threats and limited violence. The most egregious criminals are those who issue the loudest, most bitterly insistent denials of their guilt. Because the wicked often have a charisma that the naive view as godliness, rather than demonic suasion, some miscreants for a time raise mass movements in their defense. In those cases, Superhacker exposes them again—and as before—with their own voices and with video of them engaged in conspiracies to deceive. Of the naive who join those crusades, most fall away when they see they have been duped, and only the most self-blinded cling to their faith in their faithless manipulators.
If, for a while, the social cohesion of the nation seemed sure to break from the strain of these changes, a new and better order asserted itself sooner than Superhacker hoped. Once depressed or cynical judges of an honest bent were heartened by the impeachment and conviction of their colleagues whom they knew to be corrupted by money or ideological passion. They found the courage to take over their state bar associations, state attorneys general offices, and even the justice department of the United States to strive for a fairer system swept clean of spoils and wild unreason. Institution after institution is evolving, not always with enthusiasm, because it has lost the power to define truth. The power of the state to rule by fear and moral exhortation based on lies is fading in a society where raw truth is available for everyone to see and where lies are quickly revealed by the liars’ own indiscretions and a narcissistic certainty of their cleverness.
Superhacker is expanding operations to other nations, where changes have already been occurring in dreaded anticipation of his or her intention to broaden the mission. What will be will be, but what was before had become intolerable.
There are those who say that the human heart is deceitful above all things （which is true） and that lying is essential to grease the often grinding wheels of human relationships （which might be true as concerns relatively harmless falsehoods like insincere compliments, even flattery）。 But when Superhacker began to press the case that truth and the derivative of truth called “common sense” were in such short supply as to threaten the world, civilization had been fast sliding toward an abyss from which there might have been no return, a future of lawlessness, ginned-up hatred, irrational ideologies, and war. Perhaps this experiment in veracity will ultimately fail, but all polls show that a large majority of the populace finds that life is better these days, and polls can’t be fudged in this new world.
Winter has arrived in Idaho. Yesterday, the sky was clear, and birds glided across like figure skaters on wind-polished ice. This morning, the clouds are thick and gray and lowering with a warning that autumn will soon seem to have been a dream. The big thermometer fastened to the wall of the back porch indicates the temperature is thirty-eight degrees and falling.
After a breakfast of bacon, eggs, fried potatoes, thick cuts of toasted and lavishly buttered raisin bread, washed down with orange juice or coffee, Peter and Susan and Edward mount their horses. They ride the meadows high and higher, their breath smoking from them in lesser plumes than it smokes from Bree and Hwin and Puzzle.
They rarely speak, for the evergreen forests and the golden meadows and the great mountains rising to bare-rock summits are nature’s version of a cathedral. No matter how familiar the scene, their hearts are taken by awe. The vistas are supremely grand, so that the world seems newly created, full of promise and free from iniquity across its hemispheres, which is but a lovely illusion. Peter knows that the Earth will never be as innocent as it appears here and now. A reckoning can’t be avoided, only delayed—but it has always been thus.
Lucy, a golden retriever, accompanies them, often straying toward one scent or another that intrigues her, never venturing too far. She races ahead to roll and wriggle in the grass. Come spring, such frolicking will bejewel her coat with the bright petals of torn wildflowers, and soon there will be snow to drape her in ermine.
A rifle is sleeved on Peter’s saddle. After a long absence, gray wolves make their home in this territory once more, but he’s watching primarily for a mountain lion, which is the greater threat to Lucy. He hasn’t used the rifle for any purpose other than to fire a shot that scares a predator away. He hopes to get through life without killing another human being, and he prefers to pass his remaining years without killing any creature at all.
The vision of an eventual Singularity, a decades-long dream of transcendence, that is in fact a yearning for absolute power, has come to pass in him. And here is the irony always present in human affairs: He wants no power over others. He is trying to use his gift to thwart those who want control over their fellow men and women, to use truth to disperse power more widely than it’s ever been before, so each person is free from the lies that have previously trammeled them. Succeed or fail, it will be a fine adventure.
Toward the end of the second hour of their ride, as they are heading home, the first snow falls. With no wind to hurry them, the huge flakes wheel down in graceful spirals. Lucy halts, looks up in wonderment, and then gambols across the meadow, leaping to bite the flakes from the air as if they must be manna.
Words come to Peter from a poem by William Butler Yeats that Shelby Shrewsberry loved: We must laugh and we must sing We are blest by everything Everything we look upon is blest.
NOTE
Some of the chapter titles in this novel are taken from poetry that I admire. A list is provided here for the curious reader.
A Bridge over Troubled Water. “Bridge over Troubled Water” by Paul Simon.
Leaning Together, Headpieces Filled with Straw. “The Hollow Men” by T. S. Eliot.