Invisible Things

by Mat Johnson

As a mere undergraduate, Causwell was profiled nationally for his advocacy of using drone engineering as a force for social activism. While Nalini was still a toddler, Dwayne had been part of a cohort of Caltech phenoms who’d pushed for replacing police bodycams (notoriously unreliable and alterable) with their own drone swarm freeware capable of independent surveillance of the LAPD. When it was adopted, it was considered a landmark in police oversight, providing bounteous new evidence of race-based police brutality. It wasn’t until years later, when it became clear that people were just as capable of shrugging off high-def recordings of things they wanted to ignore as they were with the blurry stuff, that Dwayne decided to take his drone research to the stars.

Bob’s tone was smug, but Bob’s tone was always smug. Like many who had been awarded positions of power

they did not earn, Bob rationalized his good fortune with an unstated belief that somehow he must be as qualified as a person who’d actually earned that position. Nalini knew the type too well: Bob bullied his way through life because that’s what bullies do. But even saying this to herself gave Bob an element of power.

The “Caracas” was built by actual refugees from Venezuela. Three years later, Colombian refugees built “Bogotá”—Harry’s recruiters even hunted down an architect from Medellín to design the place, some political dissident he found now delivering pizzas in Minneapolis. Or was he just a migrant? Migrants, refugees, dissidents—Chase could never remember who liked to be called what. But there were always new ones coming; that Chase knew for a fact. An endless supply. Cameroonians, Saudis, North Koreans: people from whatever place was worth running from. There’d be a war or an invasion in some country, and then the lucky ones would make it into America. And then the even luckier ones would end up out in the New Mexican desert at Theater of Operations, building hyper-realistic life-sized replicas of the cities they’d run from. So that, when they were done, those fake cities could be used to train soldiers and translators and spies to go back and invade the original places. Of those lucky ducks, a handful of fortunates even got to stay on after the construction was done, as actors, given the roles of “locals” to populate the fake versions of the war-torn cities they’d barely escaped. “The Circle of Strife,” Harry would joke to prospective clients, without smiling.

Nalini found that divide fascinating and had no doubt this caste system would be an excellent subject for further investigation. But the problem was that, as a low-caste new arrival, she never actually met any indigenous New Roanokans. They were all over their television station, but rarely mingled with the “nappies,” as the newly collected were slurred (whether its etymological root was a reference to the British slang for “diapers” or a diminutive of “kidnapped” was an ongoing debate).

The vast majority of city dwellers lived as she did, in modest apartments, or in simple row houses, or detached homes in the nearby suburbs. The quality of each differed widely, because “middle-class” was not a single stratum but, rather, all the variants between extreme generational wealth and abject poverty.

Bob offered his service as a token immigrant in a fiercely nativist party, historically a highly lucrative position. Within months, Bob had left the lower-income neighborhood surrounding the New Roanokan Collected Welcome Center altogether. It was less than a year later that Nalini first heard the rumors about Bob’s new McMansion on the other end of town. Perfect for dinner parties, apparently.

“Monumental Muting: the societal habit of avoiding topics so monumentally intractable that discussing them has no positive outcomes and countless negative ones. If there’re no definitive answers, and every time you talk about it you risk offending or alienating others, why bother? Monumental Muting—that’s what I call it in my field research.

“Specifically, you’re wondering, Who created and maintains this place? Of course you are. And you’ve probably heard the official Founders Party position? God? And, I don’t know, maybe that’s right, or not: Again, I don’t know. But I do know this: It ain’t people. Okay? Let that soak in. It’ll take a minute. Trust me. “But, whatever it is, to create all this? It’s basically a god, in comparison to us. So, unless you’re really into theology, I wouldn’t waste my time with that part. Not worth it. There’s no evidence to find. No little green men in town. So you just got to roll with it, enjoy it for what it is and don’t drive yourself crazy.”

And then the final ten percent, the Beneficiaries—the Founders types—they absolutely love New Roanoke. They’ve convinced themselves this actually is some kind of heaven, which is understandable, given that it is for them, as the ones the society is structured to most benefit. Members of all the other groups present themselves as true believers, but it’s often performed as an act of social camouflage. Pretending to be part of the most powerful social segment, a defensive maneuver.

Instead of focusing on building alliances and membership by attracting people from the other roughly 90 percent of the population, the PoP members were more concerned with perpetually criticizing their existing ranks to increase each subgroup’s purity. In fact, Nalini had often heard Dwayne reject possible allies (Ahmed, repeatedly) largely because they only agreed with PoP principles 60 percent of the time.

Nalini, watching at home, was certain the female host was not biologically blond, but fastidiously performing blondness as a loyalty display, to demonstrate allegiance to the power structure, membership in which was dependent on subservience. It required making a concerted effort to bleach her hair weekly to the exact shade of blond that visually signified she accepted both the benefits and limitations of being a Beneficiary woman in the patriarchal Founders Party. To take her adult hair and strip its melanin until it was reduced to an artificial shade that harked back to the transitory pale hair of Northern European children, simultaneously accomplishing both an ethnic alliance and an embracing of prepubescent-level status signaling. Compared with her male counterparts, the woman’s vocal tone was more aggrieved and uncompromising, which Nalini identified as a key indicator of Opportunistic Overcompensation, yet another term she had coined while watching Bob sell his soul for personal gain.

Nalini’s social theory of Opportunistic Overcompensation was rather simple: By overcompensating in displays of fealty to a powerful tribe, it was possible to overcome the fact that this tribe was formed around rejecting people exactly like you.

The Overcompensating Opportunist was presented externally as both proof of a group’s diversity and a symbolic recruitment tool to welcome more of the same. But it was a bad-faith offer: The unspoken social agreement was that the Overcompensating Opportunists were actually there to guard the door, not to keep it open behind them.

“It may seem like one little cultural contradiction, but to accept this would force them to cross what I like to call ‘the Jenga Limit’: the amount of contradictory information a subject can accept before their entire worldview collapses, decimating their initial reality.”

furious. “I doubt they’ll keep us captive long. Too much pressure to let us go. I mean, do you hear them

From the Admiral’s view, she could even discern where the thing was holding them. And she could see how tenuous its repugnant grip was, how it struggled to contain them as she engaged the boosters. The strain as it met its limitations. How it seemed to flinch from the gaze of so many eyes on the ground. In front of the entire population of New Roanoke, the SS Ursula 50 broke free from its grasp. In front of the entire population of New Roanoke, the crew of the SS Ursula 50 flew away. Because whatever it was they finally saw couldn’t stop them. Because it wasn’t endless. It was an abomination, but it was a discernible one. Seeing it clearly, the citizens of New Roanoke could all take the measure of its surface, its finite mess and mass. Where it started, and where it ended. Not unknowable, but something that could be categorized. Something that could be faced. Already, they were looking at it.