FORECAST 42

Forecast is being serialized semiweekly across 42 web sites. For a full list of participants and links to live chapters, please visit www.shyascanlon.com/forecast.

Flatmancrooked has taken the publishing bull by the horns! They recently announced that they will publish Forecast. Release is projected for February 2010. On behalf of Coyotebreath and all FORECAST 42 serialization participants, congratulations Shya!

25

As the eyes of the most highly funded governmental organization in the States, the Citizen Surveillance system doesn’t go down unless someone intentionally pulls the plug. I expect access to any information I want, to have no problem following my watchjob’s every movement anywhere, no deterrent from seamlessly stringing the sequences together into a useful, cohesive whole. A story. With Zara that story was ambitious and quick, as though the character aimed to escape my surveillance. She took advantage of my inexperience and gave me chase with her choices. She parried my gaze. (Still, green as I was, she did not shake me.) With Helen, until she went on her urban errand, it had been quite the opposite. Watching her subdued suburban day-to-day was more like a ponderous, delicate internal drama, something full of close-up shots tracking the soft progress of an ambiguous emotion across an otherwise expressionless face. Though I didn’t have a lot of respect for her decision to remain with Jack, it was here that we grew close. Spend that much time with someone, that quietly, that plainly, and you end up blending strangely together. You learn how to read each tiny movement made, what’s underneath, what makes it significant, what to leave out. They become a part of you. Having established this currency of interpretation, I look back on my time watching Zara and am horrified by how fundamentally abstracted I was from her behavior, how crude my original reading. In fact, if it weren’t for this opportunity to reinterpret the subject’s definitive moments with the aim of uncovering a viable explanation for her ultimate disappearance, early recordings of Zara may have forever been left the unfeeling, impersonal depictions of a wayward child. Truly, I am honored therefore to have this chance, and I hope it will ultimately do better justice to the citizen, and to the craft of surveillance, independent of the outcome of our search.

But I digress.

Before Helen’s disappearance, my surveillance work had only been obstructed twice. Both occasions were during the difficult Zara period, but neither consisted in losing track of Zara herself, rather others closely tied to Zara. Furthermore both surveillance failures were due to abrupt intervention by interested, albeit unnamed, parties. Before describing them, I want to clarify that it is not my intention to draw a correlation between the two previous obstructions and Helen’s disappearance, but only to illustrate the commitment of my team, and the irregularity of such occurrences. Though identities were concealed, there was no attempt made to conceal the fact that someone was indeed pulling the plug.

The first occasion was early on, a couple weeks after Zara and the Professor crossed paths. It was an unusually peaceful afternoon at the Allen-Karuth household, Zara in her bedroom secretly preparing for her debut at Knuckle’s Dirty Doghouse by practicing her pole dance, Marshall and Jennifer in their respective parts of the house, fighting the good fight. The telephone rang, and, following protocol, I began a trace on the line as Marshall answered and had a small exchange before hanging up. My trace failed. Upon notification of this failure I became immediately suspicious, and when, moments later, Marshall was picked up by a car with no plates and shuttled off northward, my suspicion hardened into conviction. Something was awry. An untraceable call or an unmarked car alone, I reasoned at the time, may have been little cause for alarm—technology fails, and I’d been warned about the variety of high-profile visitors I could expect to be visiting Zara’s parents—but together, the two flaws in my (fairly) newly acquired omniscience seemed to merit action, and I called in the troops. I had the car marked for aggressive interception.

Having only been through training exercises that simulated this type of action, I remember being startled by how quickly it all unfolded. Upon my word, the CS cars closed in from all sides, moving speedily but silently: no sirens or squealing tires. They paced along side the target, parallel but blocks apart, hidden, waiting for an inconspicuous intersection or stretch of street. I did not want this to make the papers, or rather, I did not want to go through the hassle of preventing it from doing so (which, in a day where CS interventions are a social spectacle unparalleled even by professional sports, truly dates this anecdote). I remember that as I watched them race along, as I listened to the babble of agents bent on coordination, I had my first experience of the vaguely nauseous sensation mixed with a pleasant light-headedness that I’ve since found quite normally accompanies such moments. I began to feel slightly disembodied, and gripped the back of the chair I stood behind in an effort to ground myself, to remain focused. Adding to my tension, however, was the fact that Zara, it seemed, had finished her “dance routine” and was preparing to head out. It was one thing to leave her in a subordinate’s care while she rubbed herself up and down the oiled post of her bed frame—this was something I had trouble watching anyway—but I couldn’t in good conscience remain away from my post with her wandering around in the world. Marshall’s car continued north on a busy arterial however and there didn’t seem to be any clearing sufficiently clear or intervention-friendly and the light-headedness grew and the nausea grew and it felt like my head was lifting off while my stomach was sinking, my body being slowly pulled apart. Still gripping the seat and now fairly sweating, looking from screen to screen between my ultimate subject and her father, I was on the verge of forgoing my preference for a private intervention when, as if sensing the imminence of my decision, the car turned down a residential street that ran along side an abandoned freeway and led to a park. This was my chance. I made the call. The dark cars leopard-leapt forward, pouncing, and were moments from interception when a hand lightly clasped my shoulder and the unmistakable voice of the Professor said, quiet and close to my ear, “Let it go.” That was all I needed to hear.

The Professor has a singular relationship with the first generation of Citizen Surveillants. I’ve not only felt that to be the case, but have been told this by people who, joining more recently, have noticed what could loosely be termed “preferential treatment” between the Professor and, for instance, myself. While I don’t think this judgment is completely unjustified, neither do I think his treatment of us is groundless. Your first child, like all children, makes mistakes. But what is unique to the first child is that his parents, too, are new to the role of parenting. There must therefore be a certain degree of forgiveness and humility to the act of parenting the first born. Only with later offspring can the parent be more certain about where their own failings end, and where culpability lies with the child. When I felt that hand on my shoulder, those words in my ear, I knew that not only was a great exception being made for me, but that it was followed close behind—if not in fact led—by an acceptance of shared responsibility.

“Thank you, Professor,” I said, after the cars had made their retreat, and the cameras had let Marshall’s car slip from view. But he was already on his way from the room.

Many of my interactions with the Professor are like that; he often haunts the backstage of our production, dipping in and then disappearing once he’s lent his authority to a difficult task, or saved us, as in the episode above, from some imminent misstep. It’s popularly held among Citizen Surveillants that his role in our department is coequal to our role in the general population of our subjects. There does not seem to be any formal or contractual obligation on his part, however, and there have of course been cases where his intervention might easily have prevented hardship or confusion. Nonetheless, his involvement is frequent enough to lend a nearly palpable sense of supervision to our sometimes lonely shifts, and most agree that this is quite a comfort. Since I’d run up against a particularly frustrating dead-end concerning Helen, only to see her on the brink of embarking on an underground trek that I suspected (correctly) would bring with it certain tactical difficulties, I was admittedly in particular need of such comfort just then. I was angry and embarrassed.

It was embarrassing enough to be presented with information as significant as Helen’s warrant by people about whom I should know more than they know about themselves, but to then pursue, as I did, an explanation for that warrant and find myself no better off than Helen’s criminal companions was practically mortifying. I used all the appropriate channels and even wasted a couple favors on fruitless leads, but to no avail. The warrant, it seemed, had simply, impossibly, appeared. The document was not attributed, and, still more mysterious, the file itself had no computer identification code, no fingerprint. Nothing was clear, and no one was talking. Whether they didn’t know, or knew and wouldn’t say, I couldn’t determine, but whatever the reason, I was getting nowhere, and with Helen about to step out into Seattle’s underworld—AS-Mask or not—the entire situation made me not a little uneasy.

The Professor, having set out hours earlier to seek more information about AS-Masks, had still not returned, and I watched, helpless, as Helen put hers back on in preparation for the next leg of her journey. As I would soon learn, of course, the origin and nature of AS-Masks played a critical role in Helen’s story, but I must rather sheepishly admit to having been irritated that the Professor was so caught up in tracking down what, despite the fact that I’d brought the issue to his attention in the first place (I hadn’t forgotten her strange behavior), I arrogantly considered peripheral to the primary concerns of Helen’s case. The AS-Masks were developed, I was thinking, in response to the public’s growing outrage at being constantly monitored. Fine. Of course, to anyone watching closely, a mask isn’t going to hide who’s in it. And as if still not content with how transparent the gesture of concealment was, the masks were quickly deteriorating into stylized fashion accessories, a fetish among so many fetishes. People dressed them up and painted them. Had them signed by stars. And what happens when the mask you wear becomes a unique expression of your individuality? Do the math. Still, the general feeling around the office was, if it makes them feel better, why not? Aside from the Professor’s urgent interest in the details of their origin, AS-Masks certainly weren’t making my job more difficult. And for the record, though it seemed just then to be coming at an inopportune time, I did not generally fault the Professor for his interest in apparently peripheral elements of our ostensibly core responsibilities. He had always been interested in popular culture. It was not uncommon for him to be discovered in his office, listening to the latest pop-chart dandy with the same seriousness and intensity he’d give a tricky watchjob when leaning over one’s shoulder. Many considered this vaguely unnerving, as though in his interest, or “appreciation,” of youth culture, he was somehow debasing both himself and those offices with which he was associated. On the contrary, I always felt that it was in these moments he seemed most human. His was not the calculating interest of a governmental machine, looking for a way to use or exploit the results of his reconnaissance. He was, I believe, actually trying to relate.

It is the fundamental paradox of this post, indeed of the entire department, that our task requires such a great degree of humanity, yet simultaneously demands an extreme form of emotional departure. To string together actions into a cohesive and contingent series of events as though you have access to the mind’s very interior makes impassivity a generous act of will. And skill, of course. And even the best Surveillants get lost, on occasion. Even the best break down. You get so far “inside” that you no longer notice the flap of skin that is your own body, or the screen that separates it from the goings-on you constantly watch, stitch together with explanation. The Professor, having developed this program and being, of course, the greatest practitioner of the art, can only be assumed to experience this paradox most acutely. For the mind, as he himself would remind us in basic training, fights against itself. And in this battle, the stronger its defenses become, the stronger the assault. I’m reminded of Einstein’s famous reminder to those students who, studying math, frustrate themselves with the basics and throw up their hands. Intending, I think, to encourage them, but more likely scaring many away, the genius said, “Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.” How’s that for comfort?

All this is to say that I may have been irked by the Professor’s absence, momentarily, as I ran up against this unexpected obstacle in my intelligence gathering effort regarding Helen’s warrant, but this has to be seen in the context of a profound appreciation for the mechanism of his noble mind, and for that which, though perhaps irritating from an uninformed perspective, may not have been for me, at the time, to understand. Despite my initial rebuke, I had my people persevere—it is never the best option to simply give up—and personally kept watch over Helen.

She hadn’t even made it out into the underground street when the Professor returned with his news about the origin of AS-Masks.