Hideout In the Apocalypse

drafts.

ONE BIG LIE

THE NEWS WAS all bad, there in those fading days of summer.

The darkness came early, settling in over the back fence, making the cluttered, indiscriminate garden instantly cold.

For Old Alex, a retired reporter, every day could seem like a century. This time around he knew there would be no mercy, not for him, and certainly not for the thousands who would die.

His head had begun to swarm weeks before. Frightened of the consequences, of all the things he wished he could not hear, of the fantastical things that swirled through his head, he had done everything he could think of to stop it, smoking too many cigarettes, hiding out deep inside the recesses of his own life, his all too desperately human form. He inserted into random conversations the comment: A dive into the ordinary. He did not want to be found.

In his waking dreams, his species had lived in fright and flight for millennia, and his most overwhelming desire was to be invisible. Unfortunately, the times, destiny, this incarnation had chosen the wrong profession for that, journalism, and there were always whispers in the wind. The world had never been a safe place, not for his kind.

The English had invaded the southern continent on the edge of Western consciousness, killed the indigenous, raped the land for profit, invited the world to trample across the sacred hunting grounds, and sold what was left to the highest bidder. The white ghosts were a cruel race and they brought with them their own gods to pour scorn upon the ancient spirits, to smash the land and its peoples - not just in the physical realm, but in the spiritual. The invaders built their own societies, only, in the end, to destroy themselves. The land would have its revenge.

At the same time as the days began to shorten in the southern hemisphere time, or more precisely events, began to speed up in other parts of an increasingly hyper-connected, image-saturated world. With the advent of internet technologies, the species was busily turning itself into a hive mind. The ancient gods were taking full advantage. As were governments, gifting themselves powers of mass surveillance and control over their populations. Individual privacy was massacred, public interest journalism also.

Every day might seem like a century, but equally the months were collapsing in on themselves. The beginning of summer had barely been a rain-drenched five minutes ago.

Old Alex could make a shopping list sing if he wanted to; but after writing two books in rapid succession he was burnt out, and unusually for him, lacked the emotional coherence or motivation to write. The lyricism which once flowed so readily through his head, the storytelling which had been one of his sole methods of expression, vanished.

Now he sat barely speaking in the backyard while above the heavens were burning, just out of sight. As if the upper atmosphere had caught alight.

He told no one what he was really thinking.

In a flash of recognition an old mentor once said: You’re like me. You think in pictures."

Yes.

Can you imagine what it’s like to be an ordinary person? One thought following another. It must be like walking through a large empty warehouse.

They both laughed, although it was no comfort.

But at that point in time, beyond the incendiary sky, there were no pictures at all, just a terrifying blankness.

Alex had not intended to be back in Australia at his age or stage of life, in this remote place. As he had written before, like the convicts of yore, he had done his time.

An unravelling world was portrayed in short, ideologically filtered bursts on television screens, distant events of which he was not a part and to which most people in the area paid zero attention.

All around Sydney’s inner west the streets remained quiet, the workers’ cottages of days gone by selling now for more than a million dollars each, sanctities of silence, good behaviour, ordered belief, middle class welfare. There were few points of commonality. Students gathered in clots in the park to drink, smoke, gossip and while away the afternoons in the thin winter sun. Middle aged women and gay couples walked their dogs. The only sign of creativity was the graffiti which, being neither political sloganeering nor creative expression, bore little purpose. Sleep in slumber. I anguish, you yearn.

The population had slumped into a zombie-like state, their society deadened by obsessive, overarching regulation.

Ceaseless indoctrination pumped from government-controlled media and the mouths of elected representatives.

I can’t understand anyone who criticises Australia, went the mantra. We’re lucky to live here, why would you want to live anywhere else?

By 2016 Australian culture had become a whimpering desert, redacted, flattened, crushed into a shadow land. The truth was, Australia’s egregious, shameless political castes had failed to act or been complicit in the destruction of the county’s traditional culture, betraying the public at the deepest levels.

Rules, pointless, stupid rules, covered every waking moment. The bars were dead, the nightlife non-existent, the streets swept of protest. Conversations were conducted in whispers, within a narrow band of social justice concerns in a land where there was no justice. Nobody wanted to be caught holding an unacceptable view.

It’s a Police State, Australians frequently said of their own country. The citizens, subdued under excessive levels of bureaucracy in a failing democracy and brainwashed with layers of anodyne, anaemic media, had nothing good to say about their country or their politicians, much less the swathes of government machinery their taxes supported. A defeated population.

Data retention laws and expansion of the Surveillance State, under the threat or excuse of terror, meant the actions of every citizen could now, legally and without warrant, be monitored by a plethora of state agencies. Nowhere to Hide. Bureaucrats without heart or conscience toiled for Big Brother. In a twinkling the society had changed, the only thing to keep the citizens safe a malevolent, suffocating blanket.

The government knew perfectly well when it introduced the panopticon, ubiquitous, universal surveillance into Australia, what the results would be: a frightened, conformist population; a place where dissent and protest was hard to organise under the ever watchful eyes of the county’s oft-hated and increasingly questioned secret police, including the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation.

A population that was not just less inquiring, but sicker.

For Alex, panopticon was a word he had never heard before.

Philosopher Jeremy Bentham conceived of his panopticon in the late 1700s as a way to build cheaper prisons. His idea was a prison where every inmate could be surveilled at any time, unawares. The inmate would have no choice but to assume that he was always being watched, and would therefore conform. This idea has been used as a metaphor for mass personal data collection, both on the Internet and off.

On the Internet, surveillance is ubiquitous. All of us are being watched, all the time, and that data is being stored forever. This is what an information-age surveillance state looks like, and it’s efficient beyond Bentham’s wildest dreams.¹

The Australian Panopticon had been put in place without consulting the population - those whose every move was now a matter of record, every location they travelled to, every website they visited, every term they searched, every phone call they made, every email they sent, every Facebook post they made, every liaison entered into.

The research was already in. The government knew full well universal surveillance would have not just a serious chilling effect on public debate, but broader consequences for the democracy. It also knew universal surveillance would have a serious impact on health and wellbeing.

There’s a strong physiological basis for privacy. Biologist Peter Watts makes the point that a desire for privacy is innate: mammals in particular don’t respond well to surveillance. We consider it a physical threat, because animals in the natural world are surveilled by predators. Surveillance makes us feel like prey, just as it makes the surveillors act like predators.

Psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, novelists, and technologists have all written about the effects of constant surveillance, or even just the perception of constant surveillance. Studies show that we are less healthy, both physically and emotionally. We have feelings of low self-esteem, depression, and anxiety. Surveillance strips us of our dignity. It threatens our very selves as individuals. It’s a dehumanising tactic employed in prisons and detention camps around the world.²

If Modern Day Australia was not a detention camp, what was?

A friend, trying to cheer him up, wrote from the other side of the world:

The nanny/surveillance state may be Orwellian in its effect, but it's always well to remember that this is not the result of a conspiracy, but of a lot of jobsworths trying to make their miserable little jobs bigger, and that at the other end of the lens it's a tiny petty creature that's wasting its precious life watching you.³

The Australian government had enthusiastically adopted its own universal surveillance from the Americans. Ostensibly introduced to prevent terrorism, a glib lie foisted on the Australian people, all it did was intimidate the population and, amongst those disinclined to be intimidated, produced a vociferous reaction of dislike and contempt.

Mass surveillance was the first control instrument reached for by oppressive and totalitarian regimes.

The good legislators of Australia knew what they were doing to a once freedom-loving culture.

As for useful evidence, all it produced was evidence of how people and groups behaved when they knew they were under surveillance. Those with genuine intent got cleverer at avoiding detection; the mass of the population grew more compliant, dissidents grew angrier and more outspoken, those who could not stand the thought of being constantly watched more erratic.

The government had ignored the negative consequences, hoping only for docility.

As journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote in his book on Edward Snowden, No Place To Hide, this model of control had the great advantage of simultaneously creating the illusion of freedom. The compulsion to obedience exists in the individual’s mind. Individuals choose on their own to comply, out of fear that they are being watched. This eliminates the need for all the visible hallmarks of compulsion, and thus enables control over people who falsely believe themselves to be free.

Ubiquitous surveillance not only empowers authorities and compels compliance but also induces Individuals to internalise their watchers. Those who believe they are watched will instinctively choose to do that which is wanted of them without even realising that they are being controlled—the Panopticon induces in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. With the control internalised, the overt evidence of repression disappears because it is no longer necessary: the external power may throw off its physical weight; it tends to be non-corporal; and, the more it approaches this limit, the more constant, profound and permanent are its effects: it is a profound victory that avoids any physical confrontation and which is always decided in advance.⁴

Old Alex might have had an image-flooded head, but the future was even more frightening than he could have ever imagined.

Years of surveillance, and his life became an echo chamber. You have the power to vanquish your pursuers, he tried to tell himself. But it didn’t work, nothing worked.

The aim of the specific programs directed at him, and the broader programs directed at the public, was to silence all dissent. Mindless and extremely cruel, the authorities wanted to create their own Bell Jar, a suffocating place of deadly intent under The Sheltering Sky, a mindless place where they were comfortable:

Well act as if all this were a bad dream.

A bad dream.

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.

A bad dream.

I remembered everything. ⁵

Freedom. As a young man Alex had been a naïve and enthusiastic advocate, without realising it meant more than being able to have a joint out the back of a pub without being busted. Freedom depended on the circulation of ideas, which government censorship, facilitated by universal surveillance, stifled.

Awareness that the Government may be watching chills associational and expressive freedoms. And the Government’s unrestrained power to assemble data that reveal private aspects of identity is susceptible to abuse. The net result is . . . by making available at a relatively low cost such a substantial quantity of intimate information about any person whom the Government, in its unfettered discretion, chooses to track—may ‘alter the relationship between citizen and government in a way that is inimical to democratic society.’⁶

When it came to mass surveillance, the monitoring and collection of every electronic communication of everyone everywhere so heroically exposed by US whistle-blower Edward Snowden, Australia outstripped even its American mentor.

The chilling of the Great Southern Land occurred at a pace, by connivance and confluence of weak governance and the hapless state of both private and public media, which was driven by click rates, fashionable agendas and financial and political self-interest across multiple platforms.

Ever the reporter, Old Alex became intrigued by the psychological impacts of surveillance even as he experienced it, and began to keep an eye out for potential stories.

That was when he came across one of the world’s foremost surveillance experts. Bruce Schneier, who told him: When we are observed at all times we become conformist, and creativity suffers. There’s a reason why surveillance states aren’t the ones that flourish; it’s profoundly inhumane.⁷

The author of Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World, Schneier said most censorship regimes were enforced by surveillance, which in itself led to self-censorship, the so-called chilling effect. For all those who said if you are not doing anything wrong there is nothing to be worried about, just try dancing around the house singing along to a new pop song and see how differently you behave if you know someone is watching.

Surveillance is a tactic of intimidation.

When we know everything is being recorded, we are less likely to speak freely and act individually. When we are constantly under the threat of judgement, criticism, and correction for our actions, we become fearful that—either now or in the uncertain future—data we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has then become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. In response, we do nothing out of the ordinary. We lose our individuality, and society stagnates. We don’t question or challenge power. We become obedient and submissive.

These chilling effects are especially damaging to political discourse. There is value in dissent. Ubiquitous mass surveillance is the enemy of democracy, liberty, freedom, and progress.⁸

When mass surveillance was introduced into Australia, the authorities, senior bureaucrats and the country’s elected representatives, including former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, knew full well their laws would create a docile, fearful population and destroy the country’s traditional anti-authoritarian character.

The mere existence of a surveillance state breeds fear and conformity and stifles free expression. There are also numerous psychological studies demonstrating that people who believe they are being watched engage in behaviour far more compliant, conformist and submissive than those who believe they are acting without monitoring. There is a reason governments, corporations, and multiple other entities of authority crave surveillance. It’s precisely because the possibility of being monitored radically changes individual and collective behaviour. Specifically, that possibility breeds fear and fosters collective conformity. That’s always been intuitively clear. Now, there is mounting empirical evidence proving it.⁹

PEN America, an organisation representing the interests of writers and journalists, reported that most American writers now assumed that their communications were being monitored and significant numbers had curtailed their activities and engaged in self-censorship as a result:

In the human rights and free expression communities, it is a widely shared assumption that the explosive growth and proliferating uses of surveillance technologies must be harmful—to intellectual freedom, to creativity, and to social discourse.

Freedom of expression is under threat and, as a result, freedom of information is imperilled as well.

While it may not be surprising that those who rely on free expression for their craft and livelihood feel greater unease about surveillance than most, the impact on the free flow of information should concern us all. As writers continue to restrict their research, correspondence, and writing on certain topics, the public pool of knowledge shrinks.¹⁰

Key to a new transnational political state and corrosion of power structures kept in place by barriers of secrecy was the internet. But anarchic freedom, like the long theorised Higgs boson, the sub-atomic particle or field which was said to infuse the universe and allow the formation of atoms but which scientists had found almost impossible to detect, the moment of liberation existed for the briefest of times.

Writing on the future of the internet, Julian Assange warned that the state would leech into the veins and arteries of the new societies, gobbling up every relationship expressed or communicated, every web page read, every message sent and every thought Googled, and then store this knowledge, billions of interceptions a day, undreamed-of power, in vast top secret warehouses, forever.

It would go on to mine and mine again this treasure, the collective private intellectual output of humanity, with ever more sophisticated search and pattern finding algorithms, enriching the treasure and maximizing the power imbalance between interceptors and the world of interceptees. And then the state would reflect what it had learned back into the physical world, to start wars, to target drones, to manipulate UN committees and trade deals, and to do favours for its vast connected network of industries, insiders and cronies.

The world is not sliding, but galloping into a new transnational dystopia. This development has not been properly recognised outside of national security circles. It has been hidden by secrecy, complexity and scale. The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilisation.

These transformations have come about silently, because those who know what is going on work in the global surveillance industry and have no incentives to speak out. Left to its own trajectory, within a few years, global civilisation will be a postmodern surveillance dystopia, from which escape for all but the most skilled individuals will be impossible.¹¹

And this was before the most advanced artificial intelligences ever devised were unleashed on to the net.

Just as with the Hindu cycle of destruction and rebirth, out of the ruins of every civilisation came a new order.

It suited the Australian government to have a docile population - and part of that was the hapless state of telecommunications. The buffering symbol, a blue rotating circle, was the most common experience of the internet. Mobile phone coverage was abysmal.

In one of the scattered circuit of cafes Old Alex visited, an acquaintance told him he had phones with all three major providers, Optus, Telstra, Vodafone, and still had to walk around the house with his various devices in the hope of picking up a signal.

The man was not in an isolated location.

The idea that Australia was a wealthy First World Country was a government-peddled myth. Four million Australians had no access to the internet at all. Middle class incomes and standards of living were either static or dropping slowly, year on year. Working class morale was at all time lows, disenchantment with government at all time highs.

Nomadic for years, with every attempt to establish a home of his own ending in disaster, Old Alex found himself stabilising for a time in a large white house in the inner-city Sydney suburb of Newtown.

Twenty years before he had lived two short blocks away, and walked his children up the narrow lane at the back of the house to the Australia Street School each morning, passing by what was then a bed and breakfast run by a retired opera diva, Peter, and his partner Declan.

Back then, he never met them.

The kids had long since grown and flown, Alex had left full-time employment after decades in the salt mines of journalism, and he had been determined to roam the world in a state of constant adventure, to become the person he was always meant to be.

Things hadn’t quite worked out that way, and he was back in the country of his birth.

There was only a passing sense of refuge. It was as if the tides of fortune had dumped him in the one part of Sydney he was yet to say goodbye to.

The ceiling windows in his attic room opened out to a view down to Botany Bay, where Lieutenant (later Captain) Cook made landfall in 1770, encountering the country’s indigenous peoples for the first time. It was an event that lingered now in little more than a tourist information centre, a scattering of old artefacts and the residual oral records of first contact, a story which passed down the ravaged generations ever more diluted. The frightening arrival of the white ghosts in their giant canoes was only the beginning of the destruction of an ancient culture and their ancient land.

Fast forward two centuries and the white ghosts were involved in a different kind of massacre. On the world stage multiple deaths in multiple countries became the new norm, in Ankara, Brussels, Paris, Uganda, Baghdad, Orlando...

Quite how an old journalist like Alex came to be staying in a house with an aging gay man whose obsession with old musicals and old movies was rivalled only by his disinterest in world affairs was the result of one of those quixotic string of events only nomads understand. For beyond the next rise, the next death of an animal, the birth of a child, a coming storm, events and circumstance remain unpredictable. Families huddled in shelters would always be buffeted by uncontrollable events. Safety was only fleeting, at best a dodge, a sidestep on the way of calamity. No hideout lasted forever, no base was permanent.

Those things the West deemed important, the squatting singularity of a suburban house, a place in the world, a place in the hierarchy, a surrounding, terrible silence, none of it he had ever wanted. Let go of all attachment. While Peter was the ultimate materialist, and seemed to know every rich and propertied queen, as gay men had once been known, in the whole of Sydney.

Peter was an ostentatious love-a-chat with upper crust pretensions, and they were an odd couple, as some people thought they were, the man with the big house cluttered with possessions, crystal glasses in cabinets, objects, paintings, useless things. And Alex, with his old car and generally shambolic air, his head torn apart by static.

I don’t know how you clean this place, he said to the cleaner one day as they commiserated over the clutter.

She shook her head. I just do my best.

Peter was the most far-gone anglophile Alex had ever come across. Downton Abbey played on the television, Vaughan Williams on the stereo.

Elegaic, Alex sniffed.

Anglophiliac, he thought, although there were no such words.

Kindness came in many forms, and oddly enough for a time they were kind to each other.

Peter was lonely after the death of his great love Declan the previous year, and in everything that happened in those long months sadness stood at the forefront. Alex had never met Declan, but one of the university students living in the street, who had known them since he was a toddler, told him: You would see them out walking their dog. They were always together, always happy, smiling, laughing. They would always stop and say hello, ask how I was doing, congratulate me on passing an exam, getting into university.

Declan died at home, in the same bed where Peter still slept, and afterwards Peter had refused to let the funeral parlour take the body, lying next to his dead lover sobbing for 12 hours.

That was the kind of grief that lingered, pallid in old light, a fog over drab, aging carpet.

But after a time the grief that was everywhere in that house began to dissipate.

Take care of him, Declan’s spirit ordered him one day, clear as a bell in the half morning light. I know what he’s like.

And so from that day on, rather than despairing over pretentiousness, the dullness of the aspiring middle classes, the brainless self-congratulatory bitchiness and vanity of Sydney’s affluent gay world, Alex settled into a half comfortable home, and became instantly productive.

He had the run of the house, and for once was sleeping like a normal person.

I don’t know why people get up so early and go to work every day when they don’t have to, Peter said one morning, dodging the gardener and the cleaner. It’s ridiculous.

Not everybody’s a trust fund baby, Alex replied.

He began to call him Lord Fauntleroy, only to discover that the deceased Declan had called him the same name.

On the question of the war that was enveloping the globe, a war that was all about God, Peter dismissed believers as fools stupid enough to invest their faith in imaginary friends.

I refuse to listen to it anymore, Peter insisted. The Muslims can all kill themselves for all I care. I don’t want to know about it anymore. Write about something that’s fun. I want to have fun.

Old Alex kept his mouth shut. In any case, it was difficult to get a word in edgeways.

It wasn’t just the old opera diva turning off. Australian politicians liked to boast that they were the second largest international contributor to the war in the Middle East, but the country as a whole had become immured. Australian taxpayers were going to work to pay for the 2,000 pound bombs being dropped on Iraq and Syria, but with very few exceptions they had no idea their country was actively involved in raining down bombs on Muslim families half a world away. Their nation was killing in secret, and as a result of a deliberately manufactured ignorance, there was no anger against the politicians who had involved them in the fiasco.

The issue was only a live one within the Muslim minority, which universally opposed Australia’s involvement in America’s foreign engagements. Screaming children, sobbing parents, broken hearted families, so-called collateral damage, burnt flesh, the shattered bodies of civilians and noble warriors alike, none of it made it into the Australian consciousness.

The world grieved for those massacred in the West, photographs and potted biographies and piles of flower tributes from grieving relatives and strangers alike. They grieved not a drop for the thousands dying on the other side of the ledger, those who had been brave enough to put their lives on the line for something they believed in, those who had no way of dodging the bombs raining down upon them.

Australia had been involved in America’s disastrous military campaigns through the Korean, Vietnam, Gulf and Iraq Wars and the prolonged fiasco of Afghanistan - all at considerable cost in treasure and life - while moral, political and international credibility fled out the window. Soldiers wore their physical, emotional and psychological wounds in smothered dignity; those who put the lives of their own citizens in the firing line and proceeded to lie about the reasons bore their corrosive sins in secret. But like acid eating into concrete, the scars persisted into old age, no matter how fine their houses, how high their status, how Missing In Action their consciences.

Each successive conflict came to be seen by history as a tragic mistake. The country learnt nothing. Australia’s devotion to the American military industrial complex was concealed from the general public. The rich who ran it grew ever richer; while average living standards continued to drop.

In 2016, within the populace there was no sense of urgency or self-sacrifice, no feeling that the nation was at war, no national breast-beating over the killings. And equally no sense of despair at the deadly quagmire enveloping the Middle East which Australia had so actively participated in creating. Anti-war protests were a phenomenon of decades past. Objection to Australia’s military involvements was contained within academic, intelligence and policy circles. Disdain for the military adventurism of politicians and Australia’s abrogation of its sovereignty to American foreign policy may have been rife amongst the cognoscenti, but none of it made it to the streets.

The soporific indifference to the nation’s military misadventures had been deliberately engineered. The government released almost zero information on its operations from Afghanistan to Iraq and elsewhere. Journalists making inquiries were treated as no better than the enemy.

Australians were going to work to pay taxes to kill Muslims, to make a fraught geopolitical situation on the other side of the world worse. And they simply didn’t care. They didn’t even know. Several times Alex raised the issue of the hundreds of bombs Australia was responsible for raining down on Iraq with members of the professional class, people who might have been expected to be fully abreast of current affairs.

They expressed surprise, doubt, bewilderment.

I thought we were just there providing humanitarian help.

A spirit of inquiry was no longer part of the Australian psyche.

There was always a price to pay for ignorance. When it was created by governments, it became, in a very real sense, a crime against the people.

Peter kept up his busy social schedule, a lunch at a fashionable restaurant here, cocktails there, while Alex sat in the garden with the heavens burning above and his stomach churning - from driven to drained, exhausted.

What are you doing? he was sometimes asked.

Practising my thousand-yard stare, he would reply.

You don’t need any practice, would come the response.

Still infected by the idea that he was a plaything of destiny, a flying leaf in a nuclear wind, the last light on a winter’s day, a transmission point with the birth personality only a component part, he rekindled an old desire to understand everything, and began reading that doorstopper, The Great War for Civilisation by Robert Fisk. There in that Sydney backyard:

I have a fascination for the documents that blow through the ruins of war, the pages of letters home and the bureaucracy of armies and the now useless instructions on how to fire ground-to-air missiles that flutter across the desert and cover the floors of roofless factories.

And:

Toyota is good for jihad," my driver said. I could only agree, noting that this was one advertising logo the Toyota company would probably forgo. There was moonlight now and I could see clouds both below us in the ravines and above us, curling round mountaintops, our headlights shining on frozen waterfalls and ice-covered pools.¹²

On a personal level, for Alex it had all begun with threat.

When he was fifteen-years-old and the students in his English class were asked to each write a short story as an exercise, he had chosen to write about a young man who would head into town on various adventures each weekend, based on personal experience. He would come home on Friday, change out of his school uniform and be off, returning in the early hours of Monday; and be savagely belted for his adventurous spirit.

On the occasion of the short story he was hauled before the Deputy Principal and told if he ever wrote anything like that again he would be caned.

Head constantly buried in books, his heart enthused with the creative triumphs of literature, he did not respond well to intimidation.

Even with the current projects, he heard all too clearly, and was meant to hear, the derogatory comments of what came to seem like an army of surveillance teams primed for attack, bully girls and bully boys, kindly or understanding souls pushed aside by thugs.

The harassment followed him everywhere - bedroom, bathroom, work station, the pub, the streets. He became increasingly jumpy. It was a tactic known as pressurisation.

As a journalist Old Alex had come under various sorts of public and private surveillance over the years, most of it minor. Not everyone wanted their story told. He had just shrugged it off, this was meant to be a free society. There was only one reason why he was coming under attention, because he was a journalist. The greater their levels of incompetence, the more he knew.

He was yet to hear the term Psyops, to understand that he had become a Targeted Individual. That the state was perfectly prepared to fund this type of intimidation.

If they were prepared to do this to a retired journalist of several decades standing such as himself; one could only speculate what they were doing to everybody else.

A key logger followed every keystroke. The technology now cost less than $50.

He had experienced it all before, when he was living in Bangkok, Thailand, and writing about a mafia-run strip of bars known as the Twilight Soi, a narrow street running off a main thoroughfare.

Write something on his computer during the day, and his words would be reflected in the bars at night.

Every key stroke followed.

Information, disinformation, it all resolved into threat. It didn’t matter how thoughtful or frivolous, how accurate a documentary style or how fantastical the imagery, it all came straight back.

Mention the word mafia and sure enough, in the evening the touts would taunt him: Mafia, mafia.

The Thais had always been proud of their criminal class, followed their lives with a soap-opera fascination.

The further he got into writing The Twilight Soi, the worse the abuse became, long before it was published.

Without their use of key logging technology, the authorities could have saved themselves an awful lot of trouble. Instead they proceeded to stir hatred against him to ridiculous levels. There were many things rotten in the Kingdom. The full detail of the story defied imagination, but now was not the time to tell it. Suffice to say he would not have believed it if it had not happened to him, those days when he could barely walk five feet without hearing the words mai dee falung, no-good foreigner.

Like many a tourist, he had just wanted to have fun.

As he was to discover, it was amazing how miserable you could become trying to enjoy yourself. The Happiness Trap.

It became a sickly, extremely dangerous game. He had loved Bangkok. There was no other city on Earth like it - as if made for him, the City of Black-eyed Angels.

Once upon a time, in lands far far