Crackdown Page 17

  “Impossible,” said Oak.

  “Google it. ProTemp_Beta_2112.”

  Not a trace of ProTemp_Beta_2112 showed up in their online search.

  “Spooky,” said Palm.

  “Someone’s gone to a lot of trouble to help us, but who, and why?” asked Oak.

  The questions made Fah’s head hurt.

  “It’s an omen. Like finding Munny. All the pieces of our karma are a perfect fit.”

  The three of them turned and looked at Munny. No way it could be him. But if it hadn’t been one of them, who else knew about their plans except the Cambodian? Could the tattoo artist have written the code for ProTemp_Beta_2112 and sent it to them? What did they really know about Munny?

  “Have you ever designed software?” asked Palm.

  Munny blinked, picked up a pen.

  “Describe it and I’ll draw it.”

  Fah laughed.

  “Munny, you are special.”

  “Does that mean I can go home?” asked Munny.

  “Munny, come here,” said Fah.

  He crossed over to the table, hands pressed against the edge like a man on a boat steadying himself against a breaker wave.

  “Oak, wai Munny,” she said. “And you too, Palm. We’ve done this together. Munny deserves some respect. He’s not a piece of equipment. He’s a human being.”

  She waied the Cambodian, Palm followed, and that left Oak. Chuckling to himself, he bridged his hands together into a traditional Thai wai and nodded his head slightly.

  “We couldn’t have done this without you, Munny,” said Palm.

  For the first time in Thailand, Munny felt hope.

  EIGHTTEEN

  “When you write, you should put your skin on the table.”—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

  SKY HAD GIVEN a draft of their group paper to her professor. A day later she was called, alone, into his office. He sat behind his desk, the paper in front of him filled with red marks. She saw how he broke out in a cold sweat as he began going through the contents with her.

  “Did you write this?”

  She nodded. The English wasn’t Fah’s, and the professor questioned whether Fah had paid someone to write it. It was a valid question as Fah had a history of outsourcing her work. Hiring Munny was typical of her readiness to get things done by bringing in the right person for the job. The academic papers in her university had a history of being outsourced. In this case her professor wanted to hear that someone not connected with the university had written it. It opened the argument that his students had no idea what had been written and had turned in a paper written by a professional, one they couldn’t fully understand.

  “Is this your work?”

  “Along with Oak and Palm. Is there a problem?”

  She smiled innocently.

  “You always tell us to use critical thinking. So we did.”

  “In theory, yes. Critical thinking is good.”

  “But?” she asked after a long pause.

  “It can make some people unhappy.”

  “Have we made you unhappy, ajarn?”

  He looked miserable, his head slowly moving from side to side, as he stared vacantly into space like a man facing a firing squad.

  “Have you shown it to anyone else?”

  “Should we?”

  “No, please don’t.”

  “Okay. Was there something else?”

  Such innocence, beauty and potential, he thought. Her question echoed through his mind.

  Yes, he thought, there’s a lot of something else. The authorities had been watching him. Waiting for a misstep, seeing if he’d show his true colors as a critic of the coup. As an outspoken professor of political science, he had every reason to be anxious. He had a history of publishing articles on freedom, democracy, human rights and elections—all subjects considered sympathetic to and in support of policies of the overthrown regime and hostile to the junta. Fah and her classmates had unwittingly given him a chance to redeem himself.

  When he’d contacted a military officer about their paper, he’d expected they would embrace him as, not a hero perhaps, but as someone who understood what was required in these times. The officer said that his action would be noted, but he should be aware that turning in his students wasn’t a decisive factor one way or the other. It was one piece of the puzzle in a cloudy picture. One strike against him was his less-than-candid answers to a particular line of questioning. Had his lectures encouraged her and her conspirators? Hadn’t he urged his class to use critical thinking? He had to admit he had. The second strike against him was his timing in disclosing this rogue cell of rebels. Why had he waited? Why hadn’t he acted immediately? Why had they already received information about their term paper from an independent source? Was it possible he had learned that the military already knew of the paper and he was belatedly contacting the authorities to save himself? Was his appearance before them merely a front, a pathetic effort to appear that he was engaged in rooting out the old corrupt regime? His academic history showed his leanings. Had he had a change of heart?

  During the interrogation, inside a military camp, several soldiers circled him in the small room, asking questions about events, timing, personalities, motives and beliefs. His answers from the day before, and an hour before, had been written down, and any variation of the story was noted. A story of what his interrogators called his “involvement” had been twisted, pulled apart and reassembled in a strange and alien narrative. Even the professor agreed that what they’d determined had happened seemed wholly plausible. That was the problem. It didn’t matter that it was nothing but lies. It didn’t have to be true; it had only not to appear absurd.

  At three in the morning, they woke the professor up and asked him again about the substance of his students’ term paper. Had other students written and submitted similar papers? If so, why hadn’t he reported them? Or was he going to lie to them and say this was an isolated incident?

  The professor repeated what he had told them from the beginning. He freely admitted that Fah had written the paper for his class. Once his suspicions had been aroused, he’d made inquiries, gathering information about her daily activities and friends, and he’d placed Fah, Oak and Palm on his personal watch list. The intention of reporting her anti-coup activities had never left his mind. What more could he tell them?

  His interrogators had something more to tell the professor. Their intelligence unit had discovered a working copy of the term paper almost a week before the professor had contacted them. Fah had gone online and hired an Australian expat ghostwriter to write it for the group. She had instructed the scribe, giving him an outline of points drawn from the professor’s own writings. Her hired hand had worked out the details using those core ideas.

  The young woman, in the view of the military interrogators, was more of a dangerous ideas person. They hated her ideas, the professor’s ideas, and they despised the practice of delegating the execution of work to foreigners. Wasn’t it the responsibility of university professors to impart the right knowledge, the right ideas and the values of the good people?

  The professor was told he must share responsibility for what happened. The sooner he confessed, the faster his request to be released would be processed. Of course, it was entirely up to him. His detainment was voluntary. But he understood that leaving detainment required him to agree to their definition of “voluntary.”

  Meanwhile, he had homework to do—to mark the term paper with special attention to the errors and falsehoods of his students. Several officers then read the professor’s critique of the paper. After signing a document that he had voluntarily agreed to meet them and would desist from any further political activity, he was released.

  USER PRIORITY LEVELS

  Political Science 201

  Term Paper

  All over the planet, throughout history, the real power over life and death has resided in the hands of the Users. They had the weapons. They commanded the
armies, navies and air forces. Their power hovered drone-like above the life of the Used, whom they controlled.

  [False premise. True premise: Unity came from the people; the guardians of the people protected them against their common enemies.]

  In the analog world the Users held all the agricultural land, and the Used tilled the land, planting and harvesting the crops, building the temples, halls and cathedrals. Trade and commerce created a new class, as did the industrial revolution, and as the Users became more powerful, the Used sometimes revolted.

  [All of our people benefited from the land and co-operated for mutual harmony. Rewrite accordingly.]

  [Graphic illusions are NOT allowed in university term papers. Offensive graphics such as this one are unacceptable in all cases. Please remove.]

  Security, police, militia repressed the Used, intimidated them into submission. They imprisoned them behind a Great Wall, sheltering them against the contradictions of the outside world. The wall was breached. The evil of the outer world flooded in along with their stories that contradicted what the Users taught. People became agitated and confused and angry. All of their emotions bottled up until they took to the streets. This caused unrest and disturbance as the Used started to openly discuss how the official story had inconsistencies, lies, falsehoods and make-believe leaps. They were stories about ghosts, but the larger world said that ghosts, especially ones without a navel, only existed inside the imagination of people and were not real. Ghost stories infected school textbooks, teaching the students to believe in authority, magic and superstition.

  [False premise. Those who don’t understand our culture diminish our rituals, beliefs and values. To reject heritage is to lose identity. Rewrite accordingly.]

  A grand circle was drawn with the Users at the epicenter and the Used moving out from the center as spokes, connecting the center with the rim; the circle rotated along a stable, slow-changing technology. Once the smart phone combined with Facebook, Twitter, Line and Skype, it was much easier to spot the ghost stories. The Users had invented this wheel. It had been built into every social, political and economic wagon.

  Now the wheels are falling off. Wagons are breaking down. One at a time the roads are clogging with the wreckage. Eyes are being opened. People see clearly what is happening. You become an oracle or you remain blindfolded. You can choose. You stop, think and ask yourself, “Can I stop this from happening? Will everything roll out exactly according to the generals’ orders? Let’s run the movie back to the part we like.”

  [Geometry, technology and vision all mixed up! Nothing is falling except in your minds. They need adjustment for them to see the perfection of what we can build together in Happiness. Rewrite accordingly.]

  Only by the time the Users figured out that they don’t like the future and want to reshuffle the deck and play a new hand, it’s too late. It’s not like the old times, when divide and conquer was easy—the Users had all the schools, textbooks, radio, TV pumping them with their messages. That world is still there, but a new world has cast a very long shadow over it.

  [See above. Rewrite accordingly.]

  Think of sudden climate change, or that the Great Wall of China is now a dike, holding back a huge ocean of water, and on the other side is an alien technology, exploding in all kinds of new directions, algorithms opening thousands of precisely bored holes in the wall, and watch as the water splashes through. How do you shut down thousands and thousands of gaps that allows a tsunami of truth to wash away your statements, evidence or your forecast? How can you control that which is beyond your capacity to control? The uber-Users never had to answer that question before.

  [Delete all text in this paragraph. See above. Rewrite accordingly.]

  Our leaders face a full frontal attack from those outside our borders, who use the new technology to challenge their views and power. What is their response to the modern world? The evidence is clear—they lack understanding of our generation’s age. They’ve seized power in the old way and believe that what worked in the age of the Cold War is the way forward.

  [False, false, false! They assumed power on behalf of the people. Rewrite accordingly.]

  The frog’s life in a coconut shell is a traditional Thai parable. It is our story warning of living in an illusion of reality. We know this parable by heart. So how did our world become filled with frogs that refuse to stick their heads out of the coconut shell? What are they afraid to see in the world outside?

  [Delete all text in this paragraph. This is political science, not biology or a course in fables and mythology.]

  “You, the big world. I am running to embrace you. Wait for me.”

  You don’t hear the junta using that slogan. It doesn’t play to the audience of frogs living inside the coconut shell.

  [False! They embrace all of the people. Rewrite accordingly.]

  Their deepest fear is of being absorbed into the Used class. Technology has undercut the sources of their wealth, power and influence, transferring them to a new group of Users. No one voluntarily joins the Used class, and they will fight to stop it from happening. They will use all available means to stop it. Users understand better than most what it means to be relegated to a lower division of play—where they are just another Used person who struggles to determine levels of access.

  [False premise. Do not use the word “fear” in this context. It is wrong. Our leaders are motivated by love and kindness. They wish nothing but happiness for all of the people. Rewrite accordingly.]

  The model of the future is Wikipedia. The Administrators get all kinds of tools that empower them to delete pages, protect pages, block and unblock, modify pages, remove accounts, roll back, confirm users and limit manager rights to other Users. These sysops appear, in their world, more powerful than military generals in their world, but sysops fall under the authority of Bureaucrats, who can add and remove an Administrator. At the top of the digital power structure are the Stewards.

  [Delete. Irrelevant.]

  Don’t you love that title? Stewards, whose name is an elegant term recalling both the Bible and Star Trek, are appointed from all around the world. Theirs is a truly world-governing body. And what is the power of those who occupy the top realm of Wikipedia? They have limited power over the lesser Users. Stewards grant and revoke permissions to or from any other User. They can shut them out, shut them down and grant access levels. They act as overseers, the final check in the system.

  [Delete. Irrelevant.]

  The Thai generals who acted as the Stewards under the old regime don’t want to lose that job in the new system. They want control at the meta-level, granting and denying access, deciding who gets banned or their access denied. The power to delete is true power.

  [Delete. Irrelevant.]

  That’s me above in the drawing. We are writing down good things I’ve done in my passport of good deeds. You see, we are Stewards, checking the system, and you can see how the doves I’ve released are checked. How can you make people happy if you come to power through force? Can anyone ever force someone else to feel happy? We don’t believe it is possible. We are stuck in the mud of hate and suspicion on a bumpy road, jammed by tank traffic hogging all of the lanes. The signpost reads: OVERTAKE AT YOUR OWN RISK.

  [Delete and rewrite with no less than twelve examples of how happiness has been returned to the people.]

  [Final Mark: F. I don’t believe you wrote these words. You hired some foreigner and paid him money to write this paper. No one can believe you wrote it. I give you a second chance to rewrite it in your own words as indicated in my notes above. Otherwise, you will not graduate. The paper as written is filled with wrong thinking, bad assumptions and dangerously provocative misunderstandings.]

  NINETEEN

  “Don’t talk unless you can improve the silence.”

  —Jorge Luis Borges

  PALM SYNCHRONIZED THEIR cell phone clocks and demonstrated how to use the mysterious graphic projection app. He handed back Oak’s phone and then
returned to Fah her new iPhone 6—a novelty that had burnished her reputation.

  Fah checked her phone and pointed it at a wall. Munny’s graphic of a schoolgirl with her Merit Passport Book appeared.

  “Cool,” she said. “Okay, here’s what we do. Tomorrow at five p.m., meet at BTS Asoke station. I’ll be there with my iPhone.”

  “Why isn’t this a collective decision?” said Oak. “If one person decides, it should be me. I know Bangkok better than anyone here.”

  “Fuck off,” said Palm. “There are only a dozen places in Bangkok on anyone’s protest short list. These are the sensitive spots. These are the locations we need for maximum exposure. The journalists go to these sites and report what they see.”

  “How do you know that?” asked Oak.

  “Because that’s where the police and army have concentrated their forces. They aren’t in the middle of nowhere, guarding abandoned buildings, are they? Otherwise we’ve wasted our time.”

  Having lost that argument, Oak lost no time before moving on to the next obstacle.

  “Okay, what if Fah is detained?” asked Oak. “Then what?”

  “If any of us is arrested, the system has a fail-safe installed,” said Palm.

  “Show me,” said Fah.

  She handed over her phone.

  “I’ve saved your login and password.”

  She leaned forward, her long hair touching the table.

  “Then what?”

  “You see cops coming, press the star key, the dollar key and the question mark key, in that sequence.”

  “What happens then?” asked Oak, moving in closer for a look.

  “It’s programmed to automatically send an email to kwaibaby8@yahoo.com, and when Oak or me log in, we find your ‘goodbye’ message. Once you do that, all of your information and apps are erased. Gone. Can’t be recovered. What the cops find is an empty phone with a high-level encryption. They’ll think you’re hiding stuff, but even if they could break the encryption, which they can’t, they’ll find nothing. Zero.”