Where the Axe Is Buried

by Ray Nayler

We all have places where we belong. And places where we do not.

“The public thinks these men are evil. Men who covered up crimes the state should have answered for. The state! Ridiculous. There is no state. There are only people. The ‘state’ is nothing more than people like you and me, trying to make the best of the worst.

Maybe that was the problem. Maybe the problem wasn’t the PMs—maybe it was the material fed into them to begin with. Maybe our lifeways are shit, Palmer thought, and feeding our shitty ideas into some new kind of intelligence was never going to turn them into anything but reprocessed shit.

Again, Lilia imagined the circles paced by social offenders on “conditional release.” Even those circles weren’t the real story: The loops people were contained in were smaller than that. They were contained in their own skulls. It wasn’t a percentage of the population that was imprisoned—it was everyone.

She had not noticed it before, this tree that felt what she could not feel. This sapling in its shade that understood autumn had arrived. It had gotten that information before she had. Before anyone had. It had known it. Where? In its roots? On the surface of its bark? What did it mean for a tree to know a thing?

When a brown hare senses a fox stalking it, it does not run. It stands tall and faces its pursuer. The slower fox then knows it now has no chance of catching the faster hare and breaks off the pursuit. This saves both of them the danger of a pointless chase. In the animal world, cooperation can even exist between predator and prey. Here in our human world, the predator will pursue its prey until both are destroyed in fury.

We cannot wait. We must act immediately, and take the consequences. We must debate their results, and act again. Action cannot be the product of a final conclusion. Action and argument must be bound up together, driving one another forward, each correcting the other’s course. Action and argument together form an experiment, and nothing but constant experimentation will get us where we need to be. The system that contains us is not threatened by what we think of it. It is threatened by what we do about it. And the time for doing is always now.

In the years that followed, they would come to understand the truth—that the days when protests worked, and authoritarian regimes dissolved before the determined voices of freedom or melted away against the inundations of resistance, were gone. Once the regimes had been emptied of ideology—once power became about power alone—there was no breaking them. They had no morality. They did not become disgusted with themselves and turn away from killing. Their will did not break, no matter how many protesters they had to arrest, beat, or kill. They had no conscience, and so they were not stung by guilt. The only thing they feared was the loss of their own power. They understood the simple rule, proven time and again: to hold on to power, never give up power. The regimes had learned, from watching how other autocratic systems were toppled, that compromise was death. They made no reforms. They promised nothing. They simply jailed, beat, harassed, and killed as many people as was necessary.

They ran out of allies. They ran out of recruits to their cause. The population wanted nothing more to do with resistance: they bent their necks forever. They closed the doors to their little worlds and tried to survive.

The idea haunts me. But I also know that if I had, they would have arrested and tortured him sooner or later. And he would have betrayed me. The others all betrayed me in the end. They had to. His death saved me from that sorrow, at least. And in a way, it saved him.” “Yes,” Ella said. “You wrote that in your book—that it is better to die in action. Because no one resists, in the end. Once the state gets hold of us, they take everything. ‘We will betray our friends, and more—we will give up people who were never even there. We will do anything to make the torture stop. We think we won’t, but we will. We will do anything to put a stop to the pain.’

That was how it was. One day you had your own country. The next day you were a refugee. You were in a line, waiting to be someone again. To be legal again. Not to be nothing. You could spend your whole life waiting.

“I waited for years for them to listen to us,” Elmira’s mother said. “And finally I figured out they weren’t interested in listening. They were interested in what they could get from us. Cheap labor on the gray market, for nothing in return.”

It wasn’t the money that was the worst of the problem—it was what you had to do to get it. It was how tired the extra work made you at the end of the week. It was how many times you couldn’t afford to rest, how many Saturdays were spent working, how many Sundays. It was not walking in the park with your child. It was not laughing with them in the evening. It was what all of that took from you. The years it took off the end of your life. And the years it took along the way. Her mother stopped writing her memoirs. She stopped speaking of the past. Nostalgia took energy. Memory came at a cost. She never stopped paying for losing her country. The cost was so high that she could no longer afford to return from exile, even in memory.

“The question is who gets to be a human. That has always been the question.

PMs were supposed to be artificial intellects, and their decisions were supposed to be rational, people accepted reforms from them that they never would have accepted from a human government—in the same way that people accept the mathematical solution of a calculator above the solution of a human being. But it was as fake as hiding a man under the chessboard of the mechanical Turk—because behind all those decisions were our parameters. Our biases. We mystified the public with the idea that the machines were intelligent, maybe even conscious, when they really were nothing more than incredibly advanced statistical calculators, designed to give us the kinds of solutions we needed them to give.

That’s not the same as being apolitical, is it? Apolitical is what people are who think their government can’t hurt them. It’s different here: we know what our government can do.” “And what they will keep doing, if we continue to let them,” said Taisiya. “And we continue to let them,” said Lilia. “Yes. Because of people like you. Because of people who are afraid. It’s a cursed circle, and we are trapped in it. But maybe soon, we won’t be.

Her mother had not been a believer, but she had once said, “I hope they never stop. Long after the last person has stopped believing, I hope they at least play a recording of the muezzin from every minaret.” “What good would that be, without faith?” Elmira had asked. “It isn’t about faith. It’s about place. It’s this place, remembering its particular history. Somewhere else, it’s church bells. In another place, it’s a gong. Without those differences, we could be anywhere at all. And if we are anywhere at all, nothing matters.”

That was the logic of the world. If a technology was invented, it would be used. There was no use in talking about ethics.

“Everything fell apart. But they never built a new world. They just nailed the old one back together, once the fighting was over. Do better this time.”

Imagine what you would be without resistance. Everyone complicit in your plans, or helpless in the face of them. Every desire that flickered in your brain fulfilled. Every person obedient to you. Imagine how, as day followed day and everything was granted to you, your desires would metastasize. There is no cancer like the will, unopposed. What we need most is opposition. It keeps us not only honest, but human. Without it, any one of us is a monster. Where there is complacency, every human power becomes monstrous. Togetherness is not agreement: it is the collective act of resisting one another.

But real evil is something else entirely. It is built right into us. Real evil is nothing more than a curious person inventing new monsters because they can, without a thought for the consequences.”