Where the Axe Is Buried

by Ray Nayler

He must live in lies so practiced that they were the same as truth to him.

“I think it was because after every death of a leader, they hoped they might change the system. Every death of a leader was an opportunity to build a different world. But to have a chance at that, his companions all had to die with him. Maybe they had the right idea.”

Back when she had been learning English, she had made a frequent mistake, confusing the words “caring” and “carrying.” Later she decided the mistake was a glimpse at a truth: Caring for someone was carrying them with you.

“The dreams are odd, Nikolai. But you are not a psychiatrist. If there is anything more tedious than listening to another person describe their dreams, I do not know what it could be.”

From up there, what happened inside them would be without meaning. You would be able to count them, that was all. They were nothing but data. If you knew how many prisoners each held, you could perform a mathematical problem and attain a sense of the scale of this operation—but not a sense of the horror of it. That was nowhere in the numbers.

“You are a veteran. You were wounded during a police action.” Call it what it was: a war. But no one could call anything what it was. “Yes.”

What difference could it have made? He had chosen to rise with the state because you either rose with it or were crushed by it. He had seen people crushed. It did not happen because they were good.

There were no martyrs. There were only people whose lives were gouged out or ground away. One moment, you were real. You had a job. You had a family, you had a home of your own, you had a future. The next, you had none of that anymore. You were no one.

That was what evil meant to him: doing terrible things and enjoying them. The way they did. Without guilt. Without shame. All Nikolai felt was guilt and shame. Shouldn’t that count for something? He knew it counted for nothing at all.

“I always know. I told you, remember—the world is composed of keyholes. And how do you block a keyhole?” “How?” “You block it with your own eye. To defeat your enemies, you must oppose even yourself. You inhabit your enemies. You take over their organizations and run them, turning them to your purposes. You occupy every space your enemy could have held.”

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.

He was a weak person who knew he was weak. He was a guilty person who knew he was guilty, but did not want to suffer for it. He was the only possible kind of honest person: a coward.

Sometimes, the people who fought against autocracy were simply killed—beaten to death, as Yuri had been. But there were so many other ways to silence them. They were arrested, tortured, stripped of careers, forced to denounce their loved ones, labeled traitors, imprisoned, sent to punishment battalions in one after another colonial war. The state always hit back, and it always hit where it hurt most. If you were personally courageous—if you could not be broken with pain or the destruction of your own life—it went after those you cared about.

How could you continue then? How could you continue when they came for your friends, your family, your children? Only the most ruthless could go on then—and the ruthless were not the ones you wanted.

She had felt she was the last of all of them, and that when she died, no resistance would exist—but that was ego speaking. It would go on. It lived on even in the people who had put her here. It even lived on in people like Nikolai, who resisted the state with an impulse as hidden as an ember under ashes. Who resisted by nothing more than not wanting what the state wanted.

She had forgotten, in despair, the lessons of her own book. It was not for her to decide when resistance ended. Opposition was endless, self-generating—but whether or not it would be enough was the thing luck often decided. All anyone could do was try to clear a space for that luck.

She would be the one to clear that space. She would cut oppression away so that in its place, something new could grow. Once she began, others would join her. She would not have to do it alone.

“No, Nikolai. That story is not true. But I’ll tell you one that is: I whispered into the ear of the world, and it ended.”

It had been fragile to begin with—a flimsy, printed reconnaissance drone, the kind of automated data gatherer used for counting animal herds or monitoring distant rivers. It had died with a shower of fragments that fell on the carpet of larch needles.

The brains were not designed for learning more than a basic knowledge of terrain particularities, local threats, site-specific camouflage, and self-defense. But Lilia remembered stories of what they called “machine-learned trauma”—many walkers used in the military were later repurposed for work in scrapyards, lumber mills, and heavy industry. They could be trained in their new tasks quickly, but occasionally, in a scrapyard, one of them would come across a vehicle of a certain make or color and go mad, attacking it or retreating and hiding from it. It would have to be shut down until a programmer was brought in to dig a chunk of routine out of the algorithm so it could return to normal. The giant flung the crushed remains of the drone into the trees.

The forest was silent—a radius of attentive quiet. It was taking her in, determining whether she was a threat. Then it finished its assessment. In the bog, a frog croaked, and an insect chittered among rotting logs.

For the first time in years she was able to cry where there were no cameras, no one to watch her.

Why else would such perfect hunters exist in the world? A wasp for every larval insect form. For every insect, its nemesis. An enemy so clever it not only keeps its host alive to provide a fresh source of food for its precious children; it even helps fatten its victims up, injects them with antibiotics to keep them healthy, nurtures the flesh that will nurture its flesh.”

“You could hear it coming from a long way off,” Dunia wrote in the margins of a notebook Lilia found. “Its wings sounded exactly like a quadcopter drone. And I could feel my lover’s approach from a long way off as well—I sensed her entrance into the room long before she came, like a humming in the blood.”

“Perhaps. But every species has its wasp. Even the wasp. There are tiny wasps that lay their eggs on the larvae of the wasps that lay their eggs in caterpillars. Hyperparasitoid wasps, they are called. Every nemesis has its nemesis.”

Dunia placed a hand on her shoulder. “I am sorry, child,” Dunia said. “It has to be this way. They found me long ago, and this is the bargain I made with them. My work is of vital importance. I have named every new species I discovered for one of our oppressors—a minister, an oligarch, an informer. The wasp I discovered the day I found you I will name Telenomus krotovus. They will be a permanent record of the government’s crimes. A permanent record!” “Make sure you name a species for yourself.” “Oh, that was the first species I named,” Dunia said.

“I told you, before, that I invented a way to use wasps to detect a chemical used in printing? That was how the government found the people who distributed The Forever Argument. That death sentence you are carrying with you. My method was simple: I trained the wasps to smell the chemical signature of the book’s ink. I put the wasps in a blown-glass ball with a pinhole in it. All the interrogators had to do then was hold the hands of the suspects to the hole. If the chemical was present, the wasps gathered. The stronger the trace of ink, the more that gathered there. My wasps—they were more accurate than dogs. Such brilliant creatures. They killed so many of us…”

cars. I got my license the day I was old enough. I must have driven every day after that, until they made it illegal. I used to drive just to be behind the wheel. People used to do that, you know. They used to drive for no reason at all. It felt wonderful. As if you could go anywhere. I drove across the whole country once, with a couple of friends. It was the best time of my life. They took that from us—that feeling.”

“Terrible news from the West? What’s new about that?”

While I was there, I had an argument with a friend of mine. I say “friend,” but I use it in the North American way, which means nothing.

Everyone waiting for the ferry had the same expression on their face. Nikolai knew it was on his own face as well. All of them wanted the same thing. The only thing that mattered: to get closer to the people they cared for, and who cared for them.

Real evil is nothing more than a curious person inventing new monsters because they can, without a thought for the consequences.”

He was certain of it the way only a parent could be, mistaking hope for knowing. Inventing certainty where there was none.

Some oppressions are easy to see. It is easy to identify the malevolent dictator clinging to power for decades, bleeding his country of its resources, killing and imprisoning anyone who stands in his way, maintaining as much personal power as he can. He always wears a dollar-store mask of religion or patriotism, but nothing about him is really hidden. The question is not who he is—it is how to dislodge him. Other oppressions are more subtle, as countries succumb to increasing limits on personal choices and watch the value of their citizenship eroded by invasive algorithms, decreasing access to basic services, and by a raft of bland technocratic pseudo-efficiencies that habituate the population to massive income disparities, political gridlock, and a bleaker, more precarious, more limited future in which the “gig economy” is just another name for piecework, and economic survival demands monetizing every element of one’s life and identity.

There were a number of books that had a particular influence on Axe. I can provide only a partial list here. I found Jer Thorp’s Living in Data: A Citizen’s Guide to a Better Information Future inspiring, and Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines; The Search for a Planetary Intelligence, by James Bridle, also helped me to think through a number of the ideas behind Axe. For its utility in thinking about the way systems behave, I found Bruce Clarke’s book Neocybernetics and Narrative particularly useful. Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, though I disagreed with it in so many ways, was a fundamental primer to understanding thinking on AI “singularity” problems (this word is in quotes because I have many doubts about the way it is conceived, and the way in which it is manipulated to distract). There are many other books that inspired me, but this is not a bibliography, and I do not have the space to list them here.