Lexicon

by Max Barry

In my city we spent $1.6 billion on a new ticketing system for the trains. We replaced paper tickets with smartcards and now they can tell where people get on and off. So, question: how is that worth $1.6 billion? People say it’s the government being incompetent, and ok. But this is happening all over. All the transit networks are getting smartcards, the grocery stores are taking your name, the airports are getting face recognition cameras. Those cameras, they don’t work when people try to avoid them. Like, they can be fooled by glasses. We KNOW they’re ineffective as anti-terrorism devices, but we still keep installing them. All of this stuff—the smartcards, the ID systems, the “anti-congestion” car-tracking tech—all of it is terrible at what it’s officially supposed to do. It’s only good for tracking the rest of us, the 99.9% who just use the smartcard or whatever and let ourselves be tracked because it’s easier. I’m not a privacy nut, and I don’t care that much if these organizations want to know where I go and what I buy. But what bothers me is how HARD they’re all working for that data, how much money they’re spending, and how they never admit that’s what they want. It means that information must be really valuable for some reason, and I just wonder to who and why.

“Ms. Ruff!” said the attendant on the plane, like he’d been waiting to meet her. “My information tells me this is the first time you’ve graced our airline. That cannot be true.” He beckoned, leading her past banks of leather thrones. “I am going to take extra special care of you.” He leaned close and whispered, stage-loud, “We need more beautiful young customers.” She thought he was making fun. But he wasn’t. First class was strange.

She needed the bathroom. She would have to find some of the other kids, check out the competition. But she stood awhile and watched the trees, because even if this whole deal turned out to be a scam, this moment here was really nice.

His name was Jeremy Lattern. He had wanted to be a zookeeper. His family had a tiny house in Brooklyn but his mother rescued animals: rabbits and mice and ducks and dogs and two chickens. One of the chickens was insane. It ran in circles, making noises like it was drowning. His parents had wanted to get rid of it, but Jeremy pleaded for mercy. He thought he could cure it. He imagined this chicken becoming his friend, and people saying, “Jeremy’s the only one who can go near that chicken.” But this never happened. One day the chicken attacked him, pecking his face, and his father wrung its neck. That was how he got the small scar near his left eye, and decided against zoology.

she pulled down a tome with an alluring title, The Linguistics of Magic, and that was better. It was a history lesson about how people had once believed in literal magic, in wizards and witches and spells. They wouldn’t tell strangers their true name, in case the stranger was a sorcerer, because once a sorcerer knew you, he could put you under his power. You had to guard that information. And if you saw someone who looked like a sorcerer, you would avert your eyes and cover your ears before they could compel you. This was where words like charmed came from, and spellbound and fascinated and bewitched and enraptured and compelled. This all seemed quaint and amusing, but as the book moved through to the modern day, nothing changed. People still fell to the influence of persuasion techniques, especially when they broadcast information about themselves that allowed identification of their personality type—their true name, basically—and the attack vectors for these techniques were primarily aural and visual. But no one thought of this as magic. It was just falling for a good line or being distracted or clever marketing. Even the words were the same. People still got fascinated and charmed, spellbound and amazed, they forgot themselves and were carried away. They just didn’t think there was anything magical about that anymore.

She sat in a red leather armchair and watched a fish. The fish was in a tall hourglass, with water instead of sand. Every few seconds a drop fell from the top to the bottom with a plink she could hear only because the room was a mausoleum. The fish wandered around, ballooning as it approached the curved sides and shrinking away again as it neared the center. It didn’t seem to care that its world was shrinking one drop at a time. Maybe it was used to it.

The thing to remember was that all the power in the world didn’t stop a bullet. She had been taught chess at the school, years ago, and the point was the pieces differed only in terms of their attacking power. They were all equally easy to kill.

“I have a superior brain?” “Uh,” Eliot said, “I wouldn’t go that far.” “I can resist persuasion; sounds like an improvement to me.” “I once had a coffee machine that wouldn’t add milk no matter how I pressed the buttons. It wasn’t better. It was just broken.”

The windows fogged. The car filled with cold. He thought about Cecilia. He’d met her in a pet store. He’d walked past and doubled back and pretended to be interested in puppies. Almost bought one, even. Just because she was selling them. On their second date, he discovered she didn’t like animals much. She only liked organizing them. Deciding what they ate. She liked putting them in cages, basically. When Cecilia had started dropping marriage hints, about three months in, Wil had thought of that.

probably the guy in Grand Forks really did just get pissed off with his girlfriend. But I think it’s worth noting that literally nobody has claimed that’s why he started shooting. If they’d said it was a mystery, then people like us would get curious and ask questions, but apparently all it takes is one unsubstantiated hint and we’re satisfied, because we think we figured it out.

Gone for a ride. Help yourself to brekky. A ride, she thought. He had gone for a ride. He had departed on some mode of transport to an unnamed destination for unknown reasons for an indeterminate length of time. She was glad he had explained that.

He heard footsteps. He lay still until he was sure they were approaching, then began to feel around for a weapon. As Eliot saw it, there were two plausible scenarios. In one, Wil had driven away with the bareword, as Eliot had instructed, and the footsteps belonged to someone from the organization, coming to kill him. In the other, they belonged to Wil, who had been too cowardly to leave, and instead hung around hoping Eliot would wake up and tell him what to do. Either way, Eliot felt the need to shoot someone.

We attempt to conceal ourselves, Emily, but the truth is we do not entirely want to be concealed. We want to be found. Every poet, sooner or later, discovers this: that within perfect walls, there is nothing worth protecting. There is, in fact, nothing. And so we exchange privacy for intimacy. We gamble with it, hoping that by exposing ourselves, someone will find a way in. This is why the human animal will always be vulnerable: because it wants to be.”