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The Moral Uncanny
in Black Mirror
Edited by
Margaret Gibson
Clarissa Carden
The Moral Uncanny in Black Mirror
 Margaret Gibson · Clarissa Carden
Editors

The Moral Uncanny

in Black Mirror
Editors
Margaret Gibson Clarissa Carden
Griffith University Griffith Centre for Social and
Nathan, QLD, Australia Cultural Research
Griffith University
Nathan, QLD, Australia

ISBN 978-3-030-47494-2 ISBN 978-3-030-47495-9 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47495-9

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
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 Contents

Introduction: The Moral Uncanny in Netflix’s Black Mirror 1

Margaret Gibson and Clarissa Carden

Reflected Anxieties and Projected Dystopias: Black Mirror,

Domestic Media and Dark Fantasy 19
Richard J. Hand

Borges’s “Infinite Finite” in Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror 41

Suzie Gibson and Dean Biron

Lifelogging, Datafication and the Turn to Forgetting:

Thinking Digital Memory Studies Through The Entire
History of You 59
Penelope Papailias

Spectacular Return: Re-performance Inexhausted in ‘White

Bear’s’ Exhibitionary Complex 79
Bryoni Trezise

Facial Obfuscation and Bare Life: Politicizing Dystopia

in Black Mirror 99
Grant Bollmer

v
vi CONTENTS

Invasive Gaming, Bio-Sensing and Digital Labour

in Playtest 121
Gareth Schott and Nick Munn

Living on Beyond the Body: The Digital Soul of Black

Mirror 141
Clarissa Carden and Margaret Gibson

Latent Memory, Responsibility and the Architecture

of Interaction 153
Kristin Veel

God Is an Algorithm: Free Will, Authenticity and Meaning

in Black Mirror 171
Helena Bassil-Morozow

Afterword 191

Index 193
 Notes on Contributors

Helena Bassil-Morozow is a Lecturer in Media and Journalism at

Glasgow Caledonian University. She is a cultural philosopher, media
and film scholar, whose books include: Tim Burton: The Monster and
the Crowd (2010), The Trickster and the System: Identity and Agency
in Contemporary Society (2014), Jungian Film Studies: the Essential
Guide (2016; co-authored with Luke Hockley) and Jungian Theory for
Storytelling: a Toolkit (2018).
Dean Biron teaches in the School of Justice, Queensland University of
Technology and the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Grif-
fith University. He was co-winner of the 2011 Calibre Essay Prize and
his most recent publications have appeared in Meanjin Quarterly, Screen
Education Australia, Australian Book Review, Overland and Rock Music
Studies.
Grant Bollmer is the author of several books, the most recent of which
is Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction. He is an Associate Professor
in the Department of Communication at NC State University, and an
Honorary Associate of the Department of Media and Communications at
the University of Sydney.
Clarissa Carden is a postdoctoral fellow at the Griffith Centre for Social
and Cultural Studies at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia. Her work
explores the intersection of morality and social change and she has written

vii
viii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

on topics as diverse as historical youth justice, secularisation and grief in

virtual worlds.
Margaret Gibson has written extensively on death, mourning, media
and material culture and author of several books including Objects of the
Dead: Mourning and Memory in Everyday Life and the most recent (with
Clarissa Carden) Living and Dying in a Virtual World: Digital Kinship,
Nostalgia, and Mourning in Second Life. She is a Senior Lecturer in
Sociology at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia.
Suzie Gibson is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Charles Sturt
University. She publishes and researches across the fields of Australian,
American and English literature, philosophy, film and television. She has
published in journals and volumes to include Philosophy and Literature,
Philosophy Today, Queensland Review and Screen Education.
Richard J. Hand is Professor of Media Practice at the University of East
Anglia, UK. He is the founding co-editor of the Journal of Adaptation
in Film and Performance, and his interests include interdisciplinarity in
performance media (especially historical forms of popular culture) using
critical and practical research methodologies.
Nick Munn is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Waikato University, New
Zealand. He has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Centre for Applied
Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. His research
examines the value and risks of virtual worlds.
Penelope Papailias is Associate Professor of social anthropology at the
University of Thessaly in Greece. She has written extensively on cultural
memory, historical culture and witnessing, focusing on the intersection of
technology and culture in critical media events, affective networks, spec-
tacles of death, social mourning and performative memorialisation. Her
books include Genres of Recollection: Archival Poetics and Modern and
Digital Ethnography (2015, with Petros Petridis).
Gareth Schott is an Associate Professor in Screen and Media Studies at
the University of Waikato. He has researched interactive digital games
for nearly twenty years, from the inception of the Digital Games Research
Association (DiGRA). His research has been funded by AHRC (UK), UfI
(UK), Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Grants (NZ) and the Office
of Film and Literature Classification (NZ). He is a member of the Film
and Literature Review Board in NZ.
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ix

Bryoni Trezise is a Senior Lecturer at UNSW Sydney. Her research

focuses on performance aesthetics and cultures. She has published two
books Performing Feeling in Cultures of Memory (Palgrave, 2014)
and Visions and Revisions: Performance, Memory, Trauma (Museum
Tusculanum Press, 2013). Her current research examines how young
people use digital media to express changing ideas about childhood.
Kristin Veel is Associate Professor at the Department of Arts and
Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses on the
impact of digital technology on the contemporary cultural imagination.
She has recently co-authored Tower to Tower: Gigantism in Architecture
and Digital Culture with Henriette Steiner.
 List of Figures

Facial Obfuscation and Bare Life: Politicizing Dystopia in

Black Mirror
Fig. 1 In ‘The Entire History of You,’ airport security identifies faces
in recorded memories 110
Fig. 2 Abandonment and obfuscation in ‘White Christmas.’ This
particular image is the POV view of the individual who
has been blocked 113
Fig. 3 Glitches as the MASS visual interface is broken In Men
Against Fire 114

xi
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Introduction: The Moral Uncanny in Netflix’s
Black Mirror

Margaret Gibson and Clarissa Carden

Netflix’s critically acclaimed series Black Mirror (2011–2019) brings

compelling representations of the emerging fourth industrial revolution
in which robotics, data profiling, VR, algorithms and biohacking are
enmeshed in systems of governance, work, pleasure, intimate relation-
ships, memory, death and grief. The inventive title Black Mirror is itself
evocative of countless technological forms—mobile phones, flat-screen
TVs as well as small-screen wearable and hand-held devices that mediate
our relationship to self, others and world. Notably the mirror is not just a
reflecting surface, it is a dark cracked rebound suggesting that the plethora
of our technologies are not neutral in their very design. In fact, it is a
mistake to assume that technology is impartial since it is in essence an
extension of our humanity, and in some cases, inhumanity. Built into the

M. Gibson
School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science, Griffith
University, Nathan, QLD, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]
C. Carden (B)
Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Griffith
University, Nathan, QLD, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2021 1

M. Gibson and C. Carden (eds.), The Moral Uncanny in Black Mirror,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47495-9_1
2 M. GIBSON AND C. CARDEN

endless stream of technologies is an obvious surveillance dimension and

this is rigorously explored in Brooker’s anthology series.
Already a cult series, Black Mirror provokes and disturbs, asking us
to question the morality and ethics of devices that now provide unprece-
dented access to information, real time unfolding events, intimate lives
and bodies. There is a deep sense of moral uncanniness as we grapple with
how to deal with the ethical implications of being able to access people’s
information that poses a threat to privacy. In fact, what Brooker’s series
reveals is the collapsed binary between what is private and what is public,
and this operates as a very incisive critique of what is happening right
now, especially in light of the Russian Facebook hack and the Cambridge
Analytica scandal.
For the most part, Brooker’s series addresses the dark side of tech-
nologies that have the dual power of bringing extraordinary positive
connectivity and intimacies, as well as incredible surveillance and exploita-
tion. It is the latter that the series mainly dramatises, revealing another
paradox: digital forms might enable connection, but they are still, at heart,
devices that cannot provide us with a “pure” relationship to the world.
It is easy to forget that the countless screens we engage with everyday
are highly sophisticated devices that largely mediate what we see, read,
think and believe. The world of flesh—blood, bone, sweat, piss and excre-
ment—is both hidden and exposed by devices whose smooth and clean
contours enable the forgetting of our messy corporeality, but at the same
time our bodies are also captured by the spectacle of the countless black
mirrors we use.
The series is grand in its vision: questioning the very foundations of
our humanity, it undertakes its philosophical inquiry by often drama-
tising situations where sophisticated devices, test, challenge and threaten
the psychological well-being of characters. The fundamental, existential
question “how should we live?” pervades the anthology. There is also
a clever dialectic played out in this series that juxtaposes depth with
surface as technologies enable characters to forge intimate bonds, while,
at the same time, threatening responsibility by the sheer spectacle and
moral distancing of devices. Brooker’s series places us into often devasting
stories that are compelling because of the edgy, satirical humour under-
neath. Throughout the series’ episodes we are confronted by very familiar
human flaws of vanity, egoism, taking pleasure in the suffering of others,
and the overreach of power through technology.
 INTRODUCTION: THE MORAL UNCANNY … 3

The ubiquitous, connective, phone screen is its prevailing

mirror/moral surface upon which the television series projects not-so-
distant dystopian futures where smart technologies are that much more
systematically integrated into bodies, intimate relationships, processes of
surveillance, streetscapes, systems of punishment and revenge, discovery
of crime, torture, sadism, fantasy, desire, love and sex. Indeed, the moral
uncanny in Black Mirror is this strange sense that this future is already
in some sense “here”, close to home, both latent and manifest in our
digitally embedded human lifeworlds where trust is fragile, social media
celebrity ubiquitous, dating apps commonplace, and propaganda daily
manufactured and sold as truth on social media.
Black Mirror’s creator, Charlie Brooker, famously stated “technology
is never the villain in the show” but it is nonetheless utterly central to the
dramatic element of villainy. As a central narrative agent, it can operate as
a false mirror, reflecting back what we want to see and concealing what is
refused acknowledgement. Importantly, some technologies have reached
self-generating levels of algorithmic agency serving to relieve humans of
direct action and therefore a sense of responsibility for the things they
do or might do to others via technologies as social, economic and polit-
ical actors. Technology is not unmoored by human agency although
there is the fear that AI might, like Frankenstein’s monster, gain oper-
ational speed and autonomy to such a degree that it will be difficult
to control and predict problems before they happen. This is particu-
larly prescient when bots are now directly used on social media platforms
to influence elections, profiling voters for targeted information. Further-
more, it is also an ethical concern when big data algorithms are used
by governments to monitor social welfare recipients (some of the most
vulnerable people in any society) to claw back undeclared income when
it has been detected through networked databases. When the algorithm
gets it wrong it is especially difficult because this often happens within a
culture of communication systems actively designed to hide and displace
human responsibility by limiting direct access to human persons. This
makes complaint processes (even knowing what to do) harder and espe-
cially so for people who are vulnerable and have less socio-economic
resources to mobilise for redress. The use of communication technology
to strategically prohibit human contact and delimit channels of responsi-
bility is certainly part of our ordinary experiences of the bureaucracy of
government and corporations.
4 M. GIBSON AND C. CARDEN

Reflecting many existing technological realities in a complex, mobile

world of competing interests, values and ideologies, Black Mirror imag-
inatively heightens anxieties about the depth and reach of technological
expansionism where social control of populations and individuals as well
as economic exploitation are the key drivers. It taps into legitimate
concerns about our technocratic lifeworld of ubiquitous data capture and
surveillance creep by powerful media corporates and governments alike.
Monitoring, regulating and holding to account the actions and interests
of global media corporations (like Google and Facebook) is extremely
difficult at both national and transnational levels of governance. But
importantly there has to be strong leadership in regulation and account-
ability of social media corporations within and between nation-states. At
the same time governments engage in surveillance and secrecy as a matter
of course and holding them to account is also difficult especially in weak
or precarious democracies or, worse still, when there is no democracy at
all. Penelope Papailias’ chapter “lifelogging, dataification and the turn to
forgetting: Thinking digital memory studies through The Entire History
of You” is perhaps the most critical of Black Mirror’s dystopian imaginary,
positioning herself as both admirer and skeptic.1 One of Papailias’s main
criticisms is the way the series tends to position technology as a “foreign
‘thing’” as if it is “antithetical to human subjectivity and relationality”.
She is also unconvinced that the series sufficiently opens up a “politi-
cally useful conversation around platform capitalism, algorithmic culture,
dataification, dataveillance” and so on.
It is also important to place Black Mirror within the representational
history of dystopian fictions in literature and media culture broadly (radio,
film and television including translations of literature into these media)
as Richard Hand does so expansively in his chapter “Reflected Anxi-
eties and Projected Dystopias: Black Mirror, Domestic Media and Dark
Fantasy”. Among other examples, Hand’s chapter develops a comparison
between the narrative originality, impact and atmospherics of distur-
bance of the groundbreaking series The Twilight Zone and that of its
(arguably) contemporary counterpart, Black Mirror. As Hand writes:
“Black Mirror resonates not just with the telefantasy of The Twilight
Zone and others, but also with examples of dark audio fantasy from the
ground-breaking days of radio – such as Lights Out (1934-47) and Quiet,
Please (1947-49) – through to contemporary podcasting with shows such
as The Truth (2011 onwards). Dark telefantasy on 1950-70s television
 INTRODUCTION: THE MORAL UNCANNY … 5

presented metaphorical narratives of social anxiety, ranging from the fear

of Communism to the loss of societal values”.
As with most dystopian fiction, Black Mirror’s disturbing scenarios
warn against the possible, unforeseen directions of the potentially oppres-
sive and abusive uses of a biometric, algorithmic memory lifeworld. This
is particularly palpable in episodes which take audiences into screens
as infinite mirrors where simulations of simulations render futile, obso-
lete or just quaint, notions of a more authentic, trustworthy reality
beyond/outside information systems, data analytics and algorithmic
circuits.
However, the intellectual and psychological impact of the Black Mirror
anthology is its ability to locate the familiar elements of our existing tech-
nological habitus within a larger disturbing version of a social reality. This
is particularly true in the episode Hated by the Nation which Kristin Veel
examines in her chapter “Latent Memory, Responsibility and the Archi-
tecture of Interaction”. This episode explicitly enters into the dark side of
social media in practices of outrage and hate. In this episode a trending
hashtag #deathto literally brings death not just to those who become the
most hated in the nation as they trend to number 1, but those who
use the hashtag, wishing death to others. In a strange twist, the death
wish becomes doubly realised, activating a moral economy of algorithmic
karma. Veel’s chapter explores matters of responsibility and accountability
in social media lives, the kinds of stories we make and share, which extends
to the Black Mirror episode Bandersnatch—the only interactive episode
putting the viewer into a space of decision-making about the narrative
trajectory and outcome of the story (although there are limited options
and thus pre-existing possible endings). Hated by the Nation is about the
automatic, unthinking way people can react to others on social media
(often strangers but also people in media spotlights) directing malevo-
lence towards them. It is about the ease with which this is done as if
social media activities can be set apart or bracketed as actions which do
not make the world in which we live. We know that anonymous online
hate speech and relentless bullying causes enormous social harm leading
to murder and suicide.
The fear of being physically and mentally trapped within technology by
design, by habituation, habitus, and by forces outside individual knowl-
edge and control is one of the most pervasive negative themes within the
anthology. This is something that Clarissa Carden and Margaret Gibson’s
paper explores in relation Black Mirror’s representations of the capacity to
6 M. GIBSON AND C. CARDEN

replicate a human life and sustain its persistence through cookies, traces
of DNA material, and artificial bodies replicating voice, gestures, person-
ality and memories through digital data records. The melancholy that
pervades these deeply human fantasies of capturing the essence of the
self (or soul) for the purposes of overcoming mortality and gaining some
kind of immortality ultimately repeats the Christian disavowal of body as
essential to who we are as relational, inter-corporeal beings. The funda-
mental dependency on our bodies as ourselves is one of the critical themes
explored in their chapter.
Gareth Schott and Nick Munn’s chapter “Invasive Gaming, bio-
sensing and digital labour in Playtest” makes a convincing case for
the way the Black Mirror analogy takes us into the territory of
behavioural psychology and the history of programmes testing the
behavioural responses of humans placed in certain scenarios (which some-
times they thought were real), with certain stimulus–response options.
Linking behavioural psychology to the episode Playtest , they suggest
that the frightening game Playtest (which the central character Cooper
is immersed within through a process of neurological biohacking) is a
contemporary version of the unethical history of behavioural psychology
and the traumas of experiments which tested human fear and human
capacity to do violence to strangers by following orders. They explore
the relation between the idea of a game and the idea of play and how this
episode interrogates this coupling adding that additional layer of a test
and what this comes to mean in an experimental game that pushes the
limits of human endurance in stimulus overload.
The anthology also draws viewers directly, and at times obliquely, into
concerns about losing touch with the natural world, the replacement with
nature with its simulation, the problem of distinction collapse, and the
fragility of trust in the informational drive of consumer capitalism and
governance. However, as Grant Bollmer argues in his chapter “Facial
Obfuscation and Bare Life: Politicizing Dystopia in Black Mirror”, every
era of technology has its potentials for negative, oppressive impacts and
uses, and that what is really at stake in “Black Mirror technology is a
narrative alibi that motivate reflections on the limits (and potentials) of
human desires about interpersonal, social and cultural relations — rela-
tions that exist in the present”. Bollmer also reminds us that dystopian
fiction is often conservative and fatalist with its location aesthetically and
emotionally within the concerns and fears of “bourgeois societies of the
global north”. Black Mirror can be accused of a fatalistic indulgence
 INTRODUCTION: THE MORAL UNCANNY … 7

afforded to privilege. It also develops complex moral themes and scenarios

that do not easily fall into a moral logic of technological determinism or
reductionism. Indeed, Black Mirror puts the human relationship (how
we treat each other, how we relate) at the centre so that technology itself
whether digital or analogue is secondary. Exploring a range of episodes
such as White Christmas , Men Against Fire, The Waldo Moment and The
Entire History of You, Bollmer’s chapter examines facial recognition tech-
nologies and its use/critique in the work of artists such as Zach Blas,
Sterling Crispin, Jemima Wyman and others. Drawing on the work of
Giorgio Agamben’s theorisation of “bare life”, Bollmer’s paper guides
us into various ethical dilemmas and contradictions in regard to facial
recognition technology and resistance to it.
In a world of pervasive and mundane networked dataveillance
(biometric scanning, CCTV, GPS tracking, networked ID systems and
automatic scanning)2 we simply do not know the extensive assemblages,
mobilities, archives and profiling of our dataified lives. How secure is our
information and at what price in the balance between freedom and secu-
rity, moneymaking and rights to privacy? For what reasons other than
economic benefit and security is our information shared and mobilised
by various human actors + algorithms? And what of the inevitable
situatedness of socio-economic, cultural and identity biases shaping the
very human factor of algorithmic programming and facial recognition
technologies? Post 9/11 facial recognition technology was routinely inte-
grated into global airports as part of technologies used by governments to
monitor and capture the mobilities of people around the world whether
they be tourists, labour migrants, refugees, political activists and so on.
Black Mirror takes the dystopian image of the all-seeing, all-knowing
God of the authoritarian modern State translating it as Helena Bassil-
Morozow argues into an Algorithm. Her chapter “God is an Algorithm:
Free Will, Authenticity and Meaning in Black Mirror” engages with the
majority of episodes (from season 1–4) as it unpacks the meaning and
consequences of this idea in the Black Mirror universe. Bassil-Morozow’s
thesis is that algorithms are our new gods (gods and devils) tracking and
tracing our every digital move; knowing us better than we know ourselves.
As all seeing, and all knowing, algorithms (and the economic and political
interests behind them) keep us within the circuits of our digital actions,
patterning the compulsion to repeat, feeding those compulsions while
tempting us, through recommendations, into patterning ever-widening
networks of interest and consumerism. Through the work of Baudrillard
8 M. GIBSON AND C. CARDEN

and a range of literary works and concepts such as the uncanny, the
sublime, the gothic and the soul; Bassil-Morozow discusses the residues
of what is missing and missed (both in the sense of what is not able to be
captured or recognised, and also that which we long for) in striving for
the elimination of error, doubt, risk, pain and death.
Black Mirror is a moral provocation, immersing audiences into bleak
scenarios of ultra-surveillance and perverse scenarios of righteous cruelty,
torture, public and personal humiliation. It provokes audiences into
wondering how close we might be to living some of the scenarios, simula-
tions and mentalities depicted. For example, Fifteen Million Merits (2011)
explores the proliferation of motivational apps and devices for body data
tracking embraced in liberal individualism’s ethos of being personally
responsible for the kinds of lives we live and bodies we have. This episode
draws us into a sinister lifeworld of total screen surveillance and body-
tracking where people’s work is working-out while they watch always on
television screens. In this working-out as work workplace, there is also an
overweight, underclass cleaning-up after the exercise working class who
suffer the indignity of being both “invisible” and thus inconsequential,
and conversely, too visible and vulnerable to cruel treatment as abject. In
Fifteen Million Merits (2011) we see the main character of Bing Marsden
wake up each day in his little prison cell of screens to be greeted by
the smiling face of his annoyingly chirpy avatar (his dopple). Unlike his
avatar, Bing wakes into a mental state of demoralised dread and exhaus-
tion. Once awake he is watched for the watchfulness of his watching.
He lives in a world in which watching pornography is not a choice or
surreptitious pleasure but mandatory daily viewing. Enslaved by screens,
any lapse of attention, any sign of self-will or distracted interiority, sets
off a high-frequency alarm and a voice commands “resume watching”.
With their bodies logged into bike machine circuits for energy transfer
the calorie burn of the gym workers not only earns them individual merits
but powers the screen world that entraps them. There is a golden number
of 15,000,000 merits, which, if reached, can be spent on a chance to
upgrade one’s life by performing on a talent show Hot Shots. Hot Shots
references globally franchised shows like America’s Got Talent, Britain’s
Got Talent or American Idol. One day Bing overhears a new recruit in the
workforce, Abi, singing in the toilets. Her transcendent, exquisite voice
brings a sense of hope and true beauty to an ugly, meaningless life. In a
key dialogue Bing tries to convince Abi, who he has befriended, to take
the gift of his 15,000,000 merit points and go on Hotshots. It is a highly
satirical scene in which their absurdly banal existence is illuminated:
 INTRODUCTION: THE MORAL UNCANNY … 9

Abi: Why don’t you spend it on you then?

Bing: And buy what, some new shoes for my dopple to wear?
Abi: I don’t know, upgrade your MOS?
Bing: Or get a Fat Acts season pass (he says sarcastically)
Abi: Buy one of those wall buddies, the new ones. They talk to you after
shut-in and solve your problems. They guide your dreams like gurus.
It’s amazing actually what they can do.
Bing: Yeah, a mirror plug-in that shows me how I look as a werewolf.
What’s the point?
Abi: No, it can be quite fun. (she says with a look that says, lighten up).
Bing: That’s all just stuff. It’s… its stuff, it’s confetti. It’s… You’ve got
something real.
Abi: You heard me singing in a toilet. Is that real?
Bing: More than anything that’s happened all year.

Fifteen Million Merits (2011) like Hang the DJ (2017) has moments
in which human beings genuinely connect to each other with humour,
pathos and tenderness despite or because of the controlling conditions of
their technological imprisonment. However, it is also about the way in
which dystopias engage in a kind of “soul murder” which crushes the
human spirit, obscuring the opportunity or capacity to recognise true
beauty.
Peter Weir’s film Truman Show is powerfully resonant in many Black
Mirror episodes, including this one, and while it offers an escape from
the television screen of a scripted life of character actors, Black Mirror
tends to represent any portal into freedom as an illusion—as just another
entry point into another simulation. The total “shut-in world” of Fifteen
Million Merits also references reality television shows like Big Brother
(2000–2004) with Orwell’s dystopian vision of total surveillance trans-
lated into light entertainment. As a global television franchise Big Brother
was the apotheosis of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle with people audi-
tioning to live with strangers in a house watched and recorded by 24/7
CCTV cameras with the hope of gaining celebrity traction. It generated
many spin-offs (Celebrity Big Brother, I’m a Celebrity get me out of here)
before its super-succession by other reality television. The idea that privacy
was completely evacuated in Big Brother in the interests of total visibility
was of course a fiction manufactured for shock value—the fantasy that
hooked people in or turned them off. Paradoxically, perhaps, the moral
urgency of the novel 1984 was redoubled by a television programme
where surveillance became part of the cultural logic of the entertainment
10 M. GIBSON AND C. CARDEN

industry raising the question—is this strangely more frightening in its

very normalised banality? And is it disturbing that viewers might have no
idea of the original reference, the gravity it held before its commoditised
superficial appropriation?
Emotional and physical exhaustion are pervasive themes in many
episodes especially The Entire History of You, Shut and Dance, Fifteen
Million Merits , White Bear, Metal Head, Nosedive and Crocodile. In each
of these, exhaustion is linked to the obsessive paranoid micro-analysis of
recorded memory data, excessive screen time demanding excessive atten-
tion, being under constant threat of one’s life, the constant threat of
humiliation and being discovered for one’s criminal act, and the uses
of remembering and forgetting in methods of spectacularised punish-
ment. Byroni’s Trezise’s chapter “Spectacular Return: Re-performance
inexhausted in White Bear’s exhibitionary complex” draws on the theme
of exhaustion in her analysis of the relentless psychological torture of
the young woman Victoria Skillane trapped in a theatre of punishment
(“Victoria’s plight is theatrical itself”) seemingly without end. Drawing
on Crary’s work on “24/7 capitalism and a culture of non-sleep” and
Foucault’s work on technologies of the body, and histories of punish-
ment of the body and the soul, Trezise examines questions of memory,
forgetting, spectacle and medial violence.
Suzie Gibson and Dean Biron in their chapter “Borges ‘Infinite Finite’
in Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror” similarly explore the double-sided
exhaustion of amnesia (in Victoria’s pharmacologically imposed amnesia
in White Bear) producing the exhaustive struggle to-piece-together
clues and remember; and, the concomitant psychological exhaustion of
constant memory capture explored in the episode The Entire History of
You. In this episode, every moment of one’s life is logged as fully realised
video capture projected for playback within the inner eye as screen or onto
external screens for other people to watch, dissect, and interact with.
Drawing on Louis Borges’ “Funes the Memorious” and “The Library
of Babe1”, Gibson and Biron explore the conceit/fantasy of a total
process of memory capture given a particular rendering in The Entire
History of You. Apart from the misery and paranoia that comes from a
prosthetic technology called an “eargrain” which disables forgetting as a
natural part of human brain function, Gibson and Biron raise important
questions about what is sacrificed and paradoxically lost when forgetting,
secrecy and not-knowing is not respected or understood as a necessary
part of an ethical existence: They write: “What is frequently conjured in
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 INTRODUCTION: THE MORAL UNCANNY … 11

The Entire History of You is the human desire to expunge doubt — to

be comforted by certainty and knowledge even if this is at the expense of
an ethical life”. In Papailias’ chapter (which also draws on Borges’s work)
The Entire History of You is ultimately unsatisfactory because it suggests
in its ending (Liam cutting out the memory eargrain from his body)
that we can remove ourselves from the entanglements of technologies
that have been fundamentally constitutive of our very mode existence in
the world. For Papailias, this ending problematically forecloses a deeper,
critical engagement with our cyborg existence.
Black Mirror represents spectacles of cruelty in the blending of
entertainment with technologically sophisticated mechanisms of justice,
punishment and modes of freedom. What might be coined “cruelty spec-
tacle” and “cruelty (in)justice” is a common enough theme in dystopian
fiction with the Hunger Games a highly popular example. But cruelty
spectacle in the form of public exposure to humiliation has been a
mainstay of tabloid talk shows like Jerry Springer and Geraldo. The
media appetite for televised humiliation of vulnerable, socio-economically
deprived people was powerfully critiqued in the film Joker (Todd Phillips,
2019) which has its disturbing, non-fictional counterpart in the American
Presidency of Donald Trump. To the delight of his crowd of supporters
during the 2015 election campaign, Trump publicly mocked the phys-
ical disability of CNN reporter Serge Kovaleski as he ranted against him.
Trump’s presidency for many people feels like a strange topsy turvy world
in which a fictional dystopia has become an unsettling reality and perhaps
resisted as unreal or conversely, too real.
Using Freud’s psychoanalytic idea of the uncanny Black Mirror as a
series elicits the shiver of a blurry, unsure boundary between the real
and the fictional, between what could be reality and what already is
the present world of dataveillance. The uncanny refers to the emergence
of a repressed, dark self or other “often in the midst of the familiar
and the normal”.3 Black Mirror renders the familiarity of social media,
screens, simulations, avatars, celebrity seeking and our reality television life
worlds not just a little strange but fearful in their moral implications. For
example, Nosedive depicts a society of morally commoditised citizenship
as people in everyday forms of exchange control each other’s socio-
economic currency and, in Weberian terms “life chances”, through rating
the experience of services given and received where politeness, bland
sameness, co-operation and friendliness are key measures. Rating is now
such a commonplace activity in service monitoring and quality assurance
12 M. GIBSON AND C. CARDEN

oversight. It is built into payment systems in many shopping experiences

where rating your experience through a set of options is presented on a
screen, even sometimes, as a step before payment processing. All of social
media is a ratings game—a massive popularity game and Nosedive humor-
ously subverts this as it calls to mind our current social reality of social
media competition to become a consumer “influencer”.
Nosedive isn’t an entirely fictional representation of a moral credit and
debit system because a version of this form of social engineering oper-
ates in contemporary China. Tracked for their consumer activities, work,
public behaviour, random acts of kindness to neighbours and strangers,
and social media activities, Chinese citizens are able to monitor their
credit status and effectively improve their rating. How do people in China
interpret this system where they are expected and encouraged to improve
upon their social credit status? There is clearly much to be gained by
conformity as financial credit, jobs opportunities and other benefits are at
stake. What kind of subversive resistance to the passive internalisation of
this self-promoting self-surveillance is operative and what would count as
dissent? Foucault’s image of the panopticon remains an enduring image
of modern systems of power through self-disciplinary mechanisms and
the dystopian imagery of the classic novels such as Zamyatin’s We and
Orwell’s 1984 harbour that desire for people to know in their own most
secret interior self (which they fear and dare to reveal to others), the true
nature of the oppressive regimes in which they live. In its most dystopian
elements, Black Mirror hollows out the interior as the safe place of indi-
vidual freedom and touchstone of truth. Even this most inner sanctum
of interior consciousness and memory is imagined as capture-able and
translatable by technologies as Carden and Gibson’s chapter brings into
question.
While Black Mirror has had a significant conversational imprint in
global journalism cultures (particularly in the market of sophisticated print
and digital forms) let alone everyday conversation amongst viewers and
fans, it is yet to enter academic literature in any significant way via journal
articles and book publications. This book recognises that increasingly
prestige television (driven by Netflix, HBO, AMC, Amazon, APPLE)
has become important not just in television studies but more diverse,
interdisciplinary research that engages with powerful, provocative stories
to demonstrate, anchor and frame contemporary social and academic
debates concerning social media, robotics, AI, ubiquitous computing, big
data, data surveillance and governance through networked information.
 INTRODUCTION: THE MORAL UNCANNY … 13

Recognising the impact of prestige television as forms of culture and crit-

ical enquiry in and of themselves, university courses are now sometimes
framed around forms of impactful popular culture and it is commonplace
for media culture to both feature in and frame the way academics teach
and research. This is something Papailias’ chapter directly engages with as
she discusses her somewhat ambivalent decision to play The Entire History
of You in her memory studies class.
Black Mirror speaks to our deepest concerns about the technolog-
ical present and future. It also speaks to the eternal question of what
it means to be human. As the chapters in this book demonstrate, the
villain in Black Mirror is never simply technology itself. Rather, it is
how human beings use and manipulate technology, that can lead to the
often disturbing and sometimes frightening situations in the show. Some
episodes are covered extensively in this volume while others have less
attention or presence. The show’s first episode, The National Anthem
(2011), and one of its most disturbing, Shut Up and Dance (2016) are
two that stand out as both significant and broadly discussed in the public
sphere but largely downplayed in this collection. It is notable that The
National Anthem (2011) is the first episode in the series but has, over
time, been algorithmically usurped by the episode Nosedive as Netflix’s
first recommendation to viewers because it has been the most watched
and thus ranks the most popular. The irony should not be lost. It is also
the most palatable and personally identifiable in terms of its subject matter
which is about competing to be popular via social media credit. This is
very different to the subject of The National Anthem which is about a
UK Prime Minister forced into an act of publicly televised bestiality with
a pig because the life of kidnapped Princess has been held to ransom
by a disgruntled artist angry about the early closing of an exhibition at
the Tate Gallery in London. Forced out of bed by a phone call from his
cabinet ministers in the middle of the night and sitting in his pyjamas at
No. 10 Downing Street surrounded by his advisers he is shown the video
of Princess Susannah, terrified and ordered to speak to camera about how
she will be executed unless he, the Prime Minister, does what her captive
demands. At this point one of the ministers pauses the video to inform
the Prime Minister that it is indeed the Princess and that this is “real”.
The Prime Minister wants to just get on with watching the rest of the
video and is met with rather awkward looks when he says to one of the
advisors: “What do they want?” The advisor he is looking at says nothing,
so the Prime Minister chimes in and says: “Money?” He looks around at
14 M. GIBSON AND C. CARDEN

another minister and says “Release a Jihadi?” This minister avoids all eye
contact with the Prime Minister then looking at the minister behind him
and says “Scrap Third World debt?… Save the fucking libraries?” There is
a funny wryness that pervades this scene as this cynical list is trotted out.
Another minister steps in and says: “We are convinced both the video and
the demand it contains are genuine”. The Prime Minister shouts “What
demand?”. He is then mentally prepared for what he is going to hear
from Princess Susannah as they play the rest of the ransom video. He
knows that something that directly concerns him is about to be said.
He then hears that he, Prime Minister Michael Callow, must at 4 pm
appear on British Television and commit an act of bestiality with a pig.
The room is silent, the Prime Minister thinks it is an appalling joke. Grad-
ually the Prime Minister is told that the ransom video was uploaded on
YouTube as an encrypted file, and despite the government quickly taking
it down, cloned many times and trending on Twitter. The episode is a
humorous take on politics in the age of social media, the competition to
get a trending story and for journalists to become part of the production
of the story through their own ambition and lack unethical standards.
The Prime Minister’s wife speaks to her husband saying that even the
very idea of the act is itself a public humiliation. He is brought to a
situation where he must carry out this humiliating act in order to save
the Princess’s life (which wasn’t really in danger we learn later) and
it is watched and laughed at in pubs and homes all over the United
Kingdom. The reception of the act, the public appetite for such degra-
dation is revealed as just as horrifying, if not more, than the act itself.
But this episode is also about how the media moves on and concomi-
tantly, people move on in the stories that grip them, and how something
utterly humiliating can earn respect, and get you voted for a second term
in office.
Shut Up and Dance (2016) is one of the most difficult episodes in
the entire anthology as its young protagonist Jerome Flynn is a vulner-
able, isolated young man who seeks sexual gratification in watching child
sex exploitation material online. Jerome discovers, via a message on his
computer, that his sexual proclivities have been recorded. Held in a kind
of moral ransom he is tested for what he is prepared to do to keep his
shameful secret hidden from media broadcast. He has no idea who is
watching him, sending him messages and instructions via his phone and
via drones. Jerome must dance to the tune of an invisible all-seeing, all-
knowing eye who has already planned the tragedy of his downfall into
 INTRODUCTION: THE MORAL UNCANNY … 15

moral destruction and psychological exhaustion as the boundaries of what

he is capable of doing are tested. He is brought into a final horrifying
scenario of kill or be killed in a forest where he meets another paedophile
caught and ransomed in exactly the same way—his alter-ego and enemy
in one.
The absence of the National Anthem (2011) and Shut Up and Dance
(2016) outside of this introductory chapter is perhaps telling. As scholars,
we are drawn to investigate the show’s ability to shed a light on contem-
porary and future concerns. However, both the themes of these episodes
and their confronting subjects limit, perhaps, an appetite for analysis. Shut
Up and Dance (2016) is deeply upsetting as the punishment itself is
criminal, forcing the young man Jerome to commit more crimes than
he perhaps imagined himself capable and yet, he is capable of sexually
gratifying himself through child exploitation material. Does he become a
distortion of himself or a realisation? There is a pathos and ambivalence
of feeling charges the atmosphere of this episode because it is a vulnerable
young man, barely into adulthood, and someone’s son and brother.
Using the narrative device of a flashback we first see Jerome cleaning
the floor at the fast food shop where he works looking sweetly at kids
playing nearby. Once we know more about his relationship to children,
this first impression falls away into something like a misperception, but
the episode also makes us uneasy about making such self-certain judg-
ments without any doubt, equivocation or compassion. Watching him
enter into the last scenario, we do not see Jerome finally kill the other
man. We realise he is the victor as he is the only one who walks out of the
forest alive. In this moment, viewers are potentially put in an ambivalent
space of judgment. We likely feel sorry for Jerome but may be capable
of judging him for not being morally good enough or just redemptive to
let himself be the one killed. The episodes Shut Up and Dance (2016),
White Bear (2013) and others are harsh worlds of excessive, cruel enter-
tainment punishment that kills the soul, crushes hope and displaces moral
rehabilitation.
The fifth season of Black Mirror has received little attention in this
volume as our contributors completed their chapters before this season’s
release. Yet Season Five, described powerfully by The Guardian as “sweet,
sadistic and hugely impressive”,4 in many ways highlights the capacity
of Black Mirror to truly mirror our reality—to act as a conduit through
which to explore moral questions which are immediate and pressing today.
A key example is the episode Striking Vipers (2019). In this episode,
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 “Why didn’t the captain let us know I’d made a mistake when he
heard my complaint?” asked Guy.
“I don’t know. Who did you complain to?”
“The second mate.”
“He told the captain, I suppose. You’ll hear from headquarters all
right. Have you said anything to anybody but the second mate?”
“Only the gentleman here, Mr. Gunseyt.”
“I hope, sir, you don’t attach any credence to this boy’s mistake,”
said Watson, turning to the first visitor.
“I don’t attach any credence to any mistake,” replied the other
smartly. “This is no affair of mine, anyway, and I usually keep my
mouth shut about other people’s business. Don’t let me give you any
uneasiness.”
“You misunderstood me, sir,” replied Watson haughtily. “I’m not in
the least uneasy, rest assured of that.”
“I’ll see the captain in the morning and if he tells me I’ve made a
mistake, I’ll come and apologize to you,” Guy volunteered. “That’s
fair, isn’t it?”
“Quite fair. With that understanding, I’ll bid you goodnight.”
Watson went out and closed the door, and Guy turned to the first
visitor, saying:
“It must have been a mistake. He’s surely all right.”
“You’d ’ave sworn he was the man that entered your room,
wouldn’t you?” asked Gunseyt.
“Almost. I was about as sure of it as I could be, I thought.”
“Then don’t you let him buffalo you. He’s as smooth and clever as
they make ’em. He’s a crook dyed in the wool, and I know it. But
you’re not at liberty to repeat this, because I can’t prove it any more
than you can prove that he entered your stateroom while you were
out. You know now what it means to know something without being
able to back it up with evidence. But it’s nothing to me. I’m only
telling you this to put you on your guard.”
 CHAPTER X
The Voice with the “Squeak and Roar”
Next morning Guy went to Captain Harding and told him of the
visit of Watson and the protest he had made. The master of the ship
looked at the boy with a smile, half of concern, half of amusement,
and replied:
“You surely have made a mistake, young man. I’ve known Mr.
Watson for several years. He’s all right. I’ll give you my word as a
man absolutely that he neither committed nor attempted to commit
a burglary.”
“I’m satisfied now that I did him an injustice,” said Guy. “I’ll go
and apologize to him. But I wonder who the burglar could ’ave
been.”
“If I get further information on the subject, you’ll hear from me,”
assured the captain. “We have a detective on board.”
An hour later Guy found Watson in the smoking room and told
him what the captain had said:
“I’m sorry I made the mistake,” the boy added. “But if you knew
how much that fellow looked like you—”
“So I’ve got a double on board, have I?” interrupted the man of
the large features. “Well, I’d like to meet him for two reasons: one is
because he got me into an unpleasant tangle, and the other is
curiosity. If you meet him, catch onto his coat-tail and hold fast till I
come.”
“I don’t know about that,” laughed Guy. “I got into trouble over
one mistake, and I don’t want to make another. I think I’ll let my
burglar escape.”
“What did my friend, Mr. Gunseyt, have to say after I left your
stateroom last night?”
“Nothing that would do you any good to hear.”
 “I infer from your answer that he didn’t say anything very
complimentary about me.”
“I can’t tell you anything he said. I practically promised not to.”
“But he told you that I was the burglar, didn’t he?” insisted
Watson with a peculiar smile.
“How do you know that?”
“Oh, I know a good deal more than you suspect. He told you to
look out for me and avoid me. He said I was a bad man and not a
safe fellow to associate with. He informed you also that he and I
didn’t meet for the first time on this steamer.”
Guy was astonished. Where had this man gathered his
information? Had he been eavesdropping?
“You’ve got the best of me,” the boy admitted. “How did you find
all that out?”
“I’m a student of psychology, phrenology, physiognomy, telepathy,
and several other oligies and pathies in that category,” replied the
man with a mysterious wink. “You know what that means, I
suppose.”
“Not very clearly, I am afraid,” admitted Guy.
“No? You’re too young. But you’ll learn ’em some day if you’re
going to be a man of affairs. And I never studied them in books
either. I know a little about some other things—criminology, human
nature, and what certain kinds of men will do under certain
circumstances and conditions.”
Guy looked puzzled. Most of this was Greek to him. Watson came
to his rescue.
“I know Mr. Gunseyt,” he said.
“Are you personally acquainted with him?”
“Yes and no. He thinks he knows me, but I know him a lot better.”
“Where did you meet him?”
“Where? Let me see. I’ve almost forgotten, it’s been so long. In
London, I guess.”
“How did he happen to make such an impression on you that you
have to use a dictionary of jawbreakers to explain it?”
 “That’s an anthropocomical question, my boy, and requires an
answer that I do not wish to give at present.”
The man was becoming facetiously mysterious again, and Guy
grew impatient.
“I suppose next you’ll be advising me to avoid him,” suggested
the latter.
“Not at all. On the contrary, I’d be sorry to produce such an
effect. He won’t do you any harm.”
“Then he isn’t a bad man?”
“Is there any reason why you should think so?”
“No, I guess not.”
Guy was more mystified than ever. Half an hour later he told his
mother of the developments of the morning, and she advised him to
give Messrs. Watson and Gunseyt both a wide berth.
“They may both be confidence men working together, while they
appear to be enemies,” she advised him.
This suggestion startled the boy. It had not occurred to him
before. However, a few moments’ thought caused him to reply:
“I can’t believe it. The captain said he knew absolutely that
Watson was all right, and he wouldn’t have said that if he hadn’t
known what he was talking about.”
In spite of his mother’s advice, Guy could not resist the
temptation to seek out Mr. Gunseyt again and inform him what the
captain had said about Mr. Watson. The “radio rogue” looked mildly
surprised, screwed up one eye meditatively, and said:
“Well, of course, there’s always possibility of a mistake, but I can’t
believe there are two men in the world that look and act as much
alike as Watson and Lantry. However, it’s nothing to me, and I hope,
for your friend’s sake, I’m wrong.”
“He’s no friend of mine,” assured the boy. “I never met him before
and I don’t care if I never meet him again. I came near wishing I
hadn’t met him at all.”
The steamer was still plowing through cold northern waters and
correspondingly cold atmosphere. The passengers remained under
cover most of the time after the ship left the Gulf Stream, for the
weather was fitfully inclement and the cabin walls were comfortable
protection from cold and rain. For those who insisted on open-air
exercise, the promenade deck afforded the best convenience.
Guy was fond of open air, summer and winter. So he was seen
frequently walking the promenade. Usually he was not alone, for he
found acquaintances readily. There were a number of boys in the
first class passenger section who got together every day in the
gymnasium, or tennis or ball courts, and Guy was one of that
number. Another, Carl Glennon, son of a Brooklyn lawyer, also was
fond of the promenade, and he and Guy met frequently. He had
finished high school the year before and his father had given him his
choice between going to college and seeing the world. He had
chosen the latter, with a view to taking a business position after
finishing his travels.
On the afternoon of the fifth day out from Liverpool, Guy met Carl
on the promenade, and the latter greeted him thus:
“Hello, Burton. I hear somebody broke into your stateroom. Did
he take anything?”
“No. How did you hear anything about it?”
“The burglar told me.”
“What!”
“I should have said the alleged and exonerated burglar.”
“Mr. Watson?”
“Yes.”
Glennon smiled at Guy’s bewilderment.
“That’s funny,” the latter remarked. “I didn’t think he’d say
anything about it.”
“He seemed to take it as a joke.”
“He did? He didn’t talk that way to me.”
“No. He said he was pretty angry at first, but he got over it when
he found out who put the suspicion into your mind.”
“Nobody put the suspicion into my mind. I saw the man come out
of mother’s stateroom and thought I recognized him. But who did
Mr. Watson mean?”
“A man named Gunseyt. You know him, I suppose.”
“Yes, I know him in a way, about the same as I know you,” Guy
explained. “I met him on the boat.”
“So did I. Odd chap, isn’t he?”
Meanwhile the boys made the course of the promenade once and
doubled back, walking briskly and inhaling deep breaths of the keen
air. Then they sat down on a bench near the open entrance of a
sheltered corner. Neither spoke for several moments, and Guy had
reason soon to be glad of their silence.
Presently they heard voices inside and a familiar name was
uttered in a manner that caused them to be all attention in an
instant.
“I tell you I know the fellow Watson,” said a voice that was
strange to both listeners. “He’s a secret service man as sure as
you’re a foot high.”
“Did you ever meet him before?” inquired another voice, the
sound of which almost caused Guy to leap from his seat. Glennon
caught him by the sleeve and implored silence in a low whisper. The
first speaker was replying:
“No, but I’ve seen him in court; I’ve heard him testify. He’s an
ocean ferret, spends most of his time on ocean liners. He’s hooked
up several old pals of mine.”
“Is his name Watson?” inquired the voice that had startled Guy.
“You can bet it ain’t. He’s got a dozen names and two dozen
disguises.”
“I’ve been suspecting him. I haven’t been asleep. Is he disguised
now?”
“In his dress and manner, yes. That’s one of the best disguises
ever heard of. False whiskers and a wig ain’t in it. A good actor can
change his personality so you’d never know him, even if one eye’s in
his chin and the other’s in his forehead. This fellow’s togged up like
an American merchant and carries himself like the owner of the
world. Very sarcastic and snaps you up with a wise grin every time
he gets a chance.”
 Guy had observed this peculiarity in Watson on some occasions,
while on others it seemed entirely wanting. But if it was assumed
with a purpose this variation was now explained.
The conversation of the two men now dropped to an undertone
and the boys were unable to hear any more. They strained their ears
unsuccessfully several minutes; then Guy arose and whispered to his
companion:
“Come on.”
They stole softly away, and when at a safe distance, the younger
boy said:
“I know one of those men, I’m sure. I want to tell you about him
an’ then go back and see what kind o’ looking fellow he is.”
“If you know him, why don’t you know what kind o’ looking fellow
he is?” inquired Glennon logically.
“Because I never saw him, that is, I never had a good look at his
face. The only time I ever saw him was in a London fog.”
“Then how do you know you know him?”
“I know his voice. He’s a fog pirate. He held up a friend and me a
few weeks ago.”
“You don’t say! Did he get much?”
“Didn’t get anything. Another man happened along as he was
making us empty our pockets and knocked his gun out of his hand.”
“Good! Did the fellow get away?”
“Yes; he bolted. But I remember his voice here. You’d remember
it a hundred years, wouldn’t you? The boy who was held up with me
called it a half-squeak, half-roar.”
“He hit it pretty good, if this is the fellow,” nodded Glennon.
“What’re you going to do about it?”
“Oh, nothing. I’ve just got a curiosity to see what kind of looking
guy he is. Let’s go back now and walk in just as if we were
happening that way.”
The boys turned and retraced their steps to the shelter. On
entering the place, Guy looked eagerly for a view of the man with
the familiar voice but he was unrewarded.
The place was empty.
 CHAPTER XI
“The Ship Is Sinking!”
“Why, they’re gone! Where did they go so sudden!”
Guy gazed helplessly at his companion. Glennon looked sharply
here and there and along the promenade, while the other boy
continued:
“They didn’t have time to get out o’ sight so quick. They must be
hiding near.”
“I guess not,” said the older boy quietly. “No place to hide around
here. They probably dodged into the smoker or cafe.”
“That’s it,” agreed Burton, rushing out.
He led the way into the cafe, whose entrance was near the
shelter. Inside, however, he stopped short with a look of disgust and
said in a low tone to Glennon:
“There’s a dozen men in here and probably as many more in the
smoker. I don’t know how I’m going to pick him out unless I hear
him talk.”
“Yes, you’re probably up against it,” agreed Glennon. “I think your
fog pirate’s escaped you.”
“Well, anyway, I’m going to have a good look at the face of every
one in here.”
The inspection in the cafe was soon finished, and then the boys
passed into the smoker. There were eight men in this room, and one
of them was an acquaintance of the boys, Mr. Gunseyt.
The younger “fog pirate” hunter was a little startled at coming so
unexpectedly upon this man under the circumstances, but after the
first thrill of surprise, he dismissed as ridiculous the vague suspicion
that came to him. Why shouldn’t the “wireless passenger” be here
as well as anywhere else? He was ubiquitous, as well as “all-wise”
and “acquainted with everybody.”
 “Hello, boys,” he called as the two entered the smoker. “Where
you going? You look as if you’re looking for somebody.”
“We are,” answered Guy, approaching the man and speaking in
tones intended only for Gunseyt.
“Who is it?—another burglar?”
“Not exactly. It’s the fog pirate this time.”
“You don’t say! He hasn’t been performing any more deeds of the
mist, has he?”
“If you mean Mr. Watson, no. He surely isn’t the man this time. I
recognized his voice.”
“You did? What does he look like?”
“That’s the trouble—I didn’t see him. I heard him talk, and he had
the same old voice, that squeaky-roar. He was with another man,
and they came in here, we think. You didn’t see them, did you?”
“I don’t know,” replied Gunseyt inconsequentially. “Just came in
myself. I thought I saw one or two men enter the cafe a few
minutes ago, but I guess they passed through. Ask the waiters.”
“I guess it isn’t worth while,” said Guy to his companion as he and
Glennon walked away. “I’ve lost my man, and I may as well give up.
They probably heard or saw us while we were listening and ducked
when we left. If that’s the case, they wouldn’t be likely to stop here.”
Glennon was not sufficiently interested to urge further search, and
Guy proposed that they play a set in the tennis courts. The older boy
agreed and went to his stateroom for his racket. Guy had none and
applied for one belonging to the steamer.
“This is a peach of a racket,” Carl remarked as he returned with
the object thus referred to. “It was given to me by a man in London.
He must have paid a fancy price for it. Your friend Gunseyt nearly
had a fit over it yesterday.”
“It must be a dandy to affect him so,” said Guy, examining the
object of interest. “He seldom reaches the boiling over anything.”
“Oh, it wasn’t as bad as that. I didn’t mean he kicked the deck
overhead. But he said I was mighty lucky to have a friend like
Smithers.”
 “Smithers! Who’s he?”
“The man who gave me the racket.”
“In London?”
“Yes.”
“I met a man of that name there. He’s the one that rescued me
and a friend from the fog pirate. He’s a jeweler.”
“So’s this one,” exclaimed Carl. “They must be the same man. Did
your man have a store in Bond street?”
“Yes.”
“What kind o’ looking fellow was he?—kind o’ stout with sharp,
black eyes?”
“That’s him,” said Guy eagerly. “It’s a wonder I didn’t meet you
with him or hear him speak about you. He told me all about himself
and his friends, I thought. Were you with him much?”
“Quite a good deal. We took several motor rides together.”
“So did we.”
“And he didn’t give you a racket?”
“No.”
“Nor anything else?”
“No.”
“I got the idea that he was fond of giving presents to his friends.”
“I guess he is, but I suppose I wasn’t a good enough friend. He
gave me a present to take to a friend of his in New York.”
“What was it—a tennis racket?”
“No, a pair of wireless shoes.”
“Wireless shoes!” Glennon exclaimed with a laugh of surprise.
“Well that’s a good one. I bet I know what he did that for. The fellow
you’re to turn them over to is a sprinter, and the shoes are intended
to make him sprint faster.”
“No, you’re mistaken. They’re not sprinting shoes; they’re
intended to cure rheumatism.”
“Quite an idea. Let’s see, how do they work? Probably with
induction coil and antennae concealed somewhere—eh?”
 “How in the world do you know that?” Guy demanded in
astonishment.
“Oh, I’m a radio enthusiast,” Glennon replied. “I’ve got a set at
home and what the neighbors call a set of wire clothesline between
our house and the garage. Besides, I’ve had some wireless
experience with this fellow Smithers. This racket he gave me is a
wireless racket.”
“You don’t say!” exclaimed Guy. “How does it work?”
“Very simply. Some of the strings, if you’ll observe closely, are of
wire. They constitute the antennae. In the handle is an induction
coil. The circuit is closed when I grip the handle over two electrodes
on either side.”
“What did Smithers give it to you for—rheumatism?” inquired Guy
with a look of curious amusement.
“No, to put pep into my drives,” answered Glennon.
“And mystery into your curves?”
“I suppose so.”
“Does it do what it is supposed to do?”
“Not that I’ve been able to notice,” said Glennon. “Still it’s a dandy
racket, and I’ll take good care of it. I really can play better with it
than with any other racket I’ve ever had in my hand. Maybe there’s
something of a wireless charm in it after all.”
The boys played two sets and then found it was supper time. So
they went to their staterooms to get ready for the meal. In the
dining room Guy and his mother met Gunseyt, who sat down beside
the boy and inquired:
“Well, did you find your fog pirate?”
“No, but I’ve found out who Mr. Watson is,” replied Guy as he
picked up a menu card and looked at it hungrily.
“You have! Who is he?”
“A detective.”
“You don’t say! Who told you?”
“A friend of the fog pirate.”
“Then you did find him.”
 “No, I overheard their conversation. They were talking about Mr.
Watson.”
“They said he was a detective?”
“One of them did.”
“Where from—England?”
“I don’t think so. The voice I heard called him a secret service
man. I thought he meant an American.”
“What’s he doing here,” inquired Gunseyt, lapsing into a matter-
of-fact manner.
“I don’t know. The man didn’t say.”
“Well,” admitted Gunseyt; “of course, I might have been mistaken
in my recognition of Lantry, or Watson. No man should be cock-sure
about anything. But the man who thought he recognized him as a
detective might be mistaken too. So, you see there you are. But
there’s a bit of evidence on my side that he hasn’t got on his. You
saw Watson come out of your stateroom and found he’d been
ransacking your trunks.”
“Yes—but—”
“But what?”
“If he’s a detective—”
“Yes?”
“—he might ’a’ thought I was a thief and been looking for stolen
property.”
“Ha, ha, ha!” laughed Gunseyt. “What an imagination you’ve got!
But you imagine such impossible things.”
“Perhaps I do,” smiled the boy. “I certainly hope it’s impossible for
me to be a thief.”
“I think you’ve been reading too many detective stories,”
interposed Mrs. Burton, who had been listening to this conversation
with more or less impatience. “I wish you could find something to
talk about that would be more interesting to me.”
“I should think this subject would be exciting enough to interest
anybody,” said Gunseyt with a smile.
 “It might be if there were much evidence of truth in it,” the
woman replied with a mock air of wisdom. “The trouble is you both
know only a little of what you’re talking about, and you supply the
rest with your imagination. You’d make good reporters for yellow
newspapers.”
A waiter now came for their orders, and the conversation was
interrupted. After he had left them, Mr. Gunseyt changed the subject
by saying:
“We’re nearing our journey’s end. We’ll be in New York day after
tomorrow. I suppose you’re glad of it.”
“Yes and no,” replied the boy slowly. “I like the trip; I think it’s
great, but I’m a little homesick.”
“Not many boys will admit they’re homesick until they have to,”
observed Gunseyt. “They’re usually too proud.”
“I’m past that age,” assured Guy.
“How old are you—seventeen?”
“No—sixteen, goin’ on seventeen, you know.”
“Yes,” laughed Gunseyt. “I don’t want to flatter your son to such
an extent as to spoil him, Mrs. Burton,” he continued, addressing
Guy’s mother; “But he’s bright enough to be twenty.”
“He takes after his mother,” she returned smartly.
“I wish I’d taken the southern route,” said Gunseyt, changing the
subject again. “I don’t like being cooped up inside all the time.”
“Same here,” agreed Guy. “The only advantage of this route is the
saving of a little time.”
“They tell me we’re getting in the neighborhood of icebergs,” the
“radio passenger” continued.
“The wireless operator told me we ought to see some icebergs by
tomorrow morning,” the boy said. “He’s been getting messages from
other ships going east all afternoon, and they told him there was lots
of ice west of us.”
“I hope we don’t strike an iceberg as the Titanic did,” Mrs. Burton
remarked.
 “No danger of that,” was Gunseyt’s reassurance. “This boat is well
piloted and supplied with searchlights. One experience like that is
enough to insure the greatest caution in vessels like this for a
hundred years.”
Guy and his mother retired early that night. Both were tired, as
they had been up late every night of the voyage thus far. Moreover,
life on an ocean liner had lost some of its novelty for them, and they
were disposed by this time to look upon the experience almost in a
matter-of-fact manner. And matter-of-fact people usually go to bed
at reasonable hours.
Guy awoke shortly before midnight. The time he learned later, as
there was reason for its being registered in the minds of others. The
awakening was not an ordinary one, for it came with a jar that
shook him heavily, though not with great violence. For a minute or
two he lay awake, wondering what it could mean. He was sure he
had not been dreaming. He had no recollection of a dream.
But he was still sleepy and ceased to wonder as he drifted back
into unconsciousness. How long afterward he was aroused again, he
could not tell, but this time his awakening was decidedly more
startling.
Some one was pounding heavily at the door. Guy listened a few
moments with thrills of dread at the words that came with the
knocking, and then fairly leaped out of his bunk.
“Get up and get out o’ there as quick as you can! The ship’s
sinking!” was the fearful warning that came loudly through the panel
of the stateroom door.
 CHAPTER XII
The Wreck
Mrs. Burton, also awakened by the alarm, was out of bed almost
as soon as her son. The latter threw open the door between their
rooms and called out to his mother, who replied that she was
dressing. Hurriedly the boy drew on a few articles of clothing, and
then turned to the electric button to “push” on the light. The button
“pushed” all right, but the room remained dark.
“Put on the light, Guy,” said Mrs. Burton in strange, hollow tones.
Evidently she was laboring under a dreadful emotion.
Guy tried again. He pushed the “off” button and the “on” again,
but without success.
“It won’t work, mother,” he said. “Something’s wrong with the
current.”
At this moment there was another heavy knocking at the door
and a voice called:
“Hey, Burton! Are you getting out? Hurry up; the ship’s filling with
water. This is Gunseyt.”
Guy flung the door open, and the knocker entered.
“Are you about ready?” inquired the latter. “Hurry up and I’ll help
get your mother in a lifeboat.”
“A lifeboat!” cried Mrs. Burton.
“Oh, there’s no immediate danger,” replied Gunseyt reassuringly.
“The ship’ll probably sink, but not for some time yet. Everybody’ll be
saved. Got any valuables you want to take along?”
“I don’t know,” said Guy in some confusion. “We didn’t bring
anything very valuable with us, did we, mother?”
“Throw open your trunks and look your things over in a hurry,”
suggested Gunseyt. “I’ll help you carry anything you want to the
boat. I’ll strike some matches and hold a light.”
 “You’re very kind,” said Guy appreciatively, as he opened his
mother’s trunk and his own, they being unlocked.
“Turn everything out,” continued Gunseyt, striking a match and
holding it for a torch. “Take only a few of your most valuable things
or keepsakes. There won’t be room for much in the boat. Here,
what’s this?”
“Only those ‘wireless shoes’ I showed you,” replied the boy. “Don’t
bother with them.”
“It’s too bad to let a present like that go to the bottom. If you
haven’t got too much to lug, you might take ’em out of the box and
stick ’em in your pocket. Or I’ll take care of them for you. All I’ve got
is an overcoat. It’ll be cold in the boat.”
“I’ll take my rubber coat,” said Guy. “Mother, you take your
raincoat and muff and a scarf for your head.”
Guy observed in the light of Mr. Gunseyt’s matches that the latter
wore a life jacket under his unbuttoned overcoat, and this
observation enlivened him to the full seriousness of the situation.
But he kept his head, lest he throw his mother into a panic, and
quietly took down two cork jackets hanging from pegs on the wall.
One he fastened around himself and the other he carried in his
hand, intending to slip it on his mother when he found opportunity
to do so without alarming her too much.
Mrs. Burton remained silent most of the time, working
energetically and courageously with her son, while Gunseyt held
lighted matches over them. Presently the vessel began to list
perceptibly, warning them not to waste any more time. Then
something else happened that added a wilder confusion to the
critical conditions.
Hitherto the helper of Guy and his mother appeared to be inspired
not only with great generosity, but with remarkable courage.
Although he had urged the woman and her son to make haste, his
voice and manner had been steady and reassuring. For this the boy
was thankful. He was certain that he would not lose control of
himself under any circumstances, but feared lest his mother become
panic stricken.
 With the lurching of the ship, however, the “brave” Mr. Gunseyt
was the first to show signs of consternation. A cry of alarm escaped
him, and he turned and ran from the stateroom, shouting back to
the others:
“Come on—quick—to the boats! No time to lose!”
Guy and his mother followed, the former carrying his rubber coat
and a life jacket for his mother and the latter wearing her
mackintosh and muff and a scarf around her head. Outside the
stateroom, they found their way lighted with a few lanterns that had
been substituted for electric bulbs, whose current was now dead.
Gunseyt was twenty feet ahead, making with his best speed for the
exit to the outer deck. In one hand he carried the box of “wireless
shoes” and in the other a tennis racket.
“He must be crazy,” Guy said to himself. “That explains his strange
actions. Otherwise he would have waited to help me get mother to a
boat.”
But it was hard for the boy to remain convinced of this
interpretation. Gunseyt had not appeared to be the sort of person at
all likely to lose his mental poise under any circumstances, however
severe. Indeed, he had seemed to possess unusual nerve. What,
then, could be the explanation of his present actions?
The question seemed unanswerable. As he ran, the man put the
racket under one arm, opened the box, took out the shoes, threw
the box away, and pushed the “radio footgear” into his overcoat
pockets. Then he disappeared through the cabin exit.
When Guy and his mother reached the open deck, their late
would-be helper had disappeared. But other matters of more
pressing importance were before them just now, and they dismissed
him from their minds. They started to run aft in the hope of finding
someone who could tell them what to do, when a passenger rushed
past them, crying:
“No boats here, Burton—top deck.”
It was Glennon. He recognized Guy at a glance and tossed him
the information as he would toss a life buoy to a drowning man.
Then, realizing his passenger friend’s predicament, he stopped and
said:
“Hello, is this your mother, Burton? Let me help you.”
Without waiting for uttered consent, Carl Glennon seized Mrs.
Button by one arm, and together the two boys almost lifted her over
the carpeted deck to the stairway and up to the boat deck. There
they found two or three hundred men assembled in the stern and
watching a boat as it was about to be lowered into the water.
Glennon appreciated the situation at a glance. It was the last boat
in this quarter and possibly the only opportunity for saving Guy’s
mother. Several seaman were manning the block and tackle and
were about to lower away, when a voice called out:
“Wait, haven’t you room for one more woman?” It was Carl who
spoke.
“All full,” shouted back a seaman. “Heave away.”
“No, for God’s sake, don’t do that,” insisted Guy’s friend. “You’ve
put all the other women in boats. Don’t leave this one to perish
alone.”
Glennon was mistaken in this regard, but he believed it was true.
The appeal was effective. There was general hesitation. The ropes
were slackened. Then one of the few men whose lot it had been to
enter the boat rose to his feet and stepped out. He said not a word,
but waived the woman to his place. It was Watson, the secret
service operative.
Guy could hardly restrain a sob at the unselfishness of the man, in
view of the criminal charge the woman’s son had made against him.
But Mrs. Burton was not disposed to submit tamely to the
substitution when she saw Guy was not going to follow her into the
boat. She thanked Watson profusely for his kindness and begged
him to return to his place, as she could not think of going without
her son.
But the operative’s generosity was not half-hearted. Instead of
accepting this as final, he approached the woman and said:
“Don’t be foolish, Mrs. Burton. Your son can get along much
better without you. If you stay here, you may be the cause of your
both being drowned. If he’s alone, he will probably be able to save
himself.”
This was an argument that could not be gainsaid, and Mrs. Burton
kissed Guy affectionately and was assisted into the boat, which was
so full of passengers that there was little comfort for any.
“I’ll be all right,” Guy assured his mother. “I’m a good swimmer if
it comes to that, and, besides, I’ve got this cork jacket on. Here’s
one for you. Take it and put it on, though probably won’t need it.
We’ll probably find something to float on before the ship goes down.
There ought to be a lot of rafts here somewhere.”
While the boat was being lowered, the boy’s gaze followed his
mother with an appearance of more courage and confidence than he
felt. As it touched the water Carl laid a hand on his shoulder and
said:
“Come on, Burton. We’ve got to get busy. We don’t want to
depend on our life jackets to save us in that cold water.”
A dozen men were calling down to wife or daughter or other
relative or friend in the boat, and Guy was unable to make his voice
reach his mother intelligibly. So he waved his hand to her and turned
to follow Glennon and Watson.
This was not an occasion for much detailed observation of
surroundings, but there were certain conditions and circumstances
that impressed themselves on Guy’s mind so indelibly that he may
never forget them. It was a clear cold night. There was no moon,
but the stars shone brightly. The ship was listing heavily to starboard
and many of the passengers were moving nervously here and there
in the hope of finding a boat or raft not yet launched. The forward
end of the vessel was sinking rapidly. Fortunately few women and
children were left on the ship, so that there was little individual
helplessness to hamper the most hopeful activities under the
circumstances.
Apparently everybody still on the sinking vessel was now on the
boat deck. The first few boats that were launched had been loaded
from the promenade, but as the ship sunk lower there was a general
migration to the boat deck. There it soon became evident that
although the liner had been equipped with enough lifeboats and
rafts for an emergency of this kind, yet half the boats were useless
because the listing of the vessel rendered it impossible to lower
them.
Naturally, in spite of the imminent danger that confronted all on
board there was a good deal of curiosity as to the cause of the
sinking of the Herculanea. At first it appeared to be another Titanic
disaster, for near the ship loomed a monster iceberg, so immense,
indeed, that it appeared more like a “mainland of ice” than an island
of frozen water. The word was circulated among the passengers that
the liner had struck a submerged projection of this huge berg.
But Guy heard this report positively contradicted by one of the
officers, who declared that an explosion had opened a great gap in
the steamer below the water line. This officer expressed the opinion
that the vessel had struck a floating mine probably laid by a German
submarine after the United States declared war.
Although there was general good order on board, one could not
help seeing that the feeling everywhere was tense, and little more
would be required to create a panic. The captain stood on the
bridge, issuing orders through a megaphone. He exhorted the
passengers to preserve order for their own sake. The throbbing of
the big engines had ceased, but all the mechanical power had not
been killed, for one or more of the dynamos still worked supplying
electric current to some of the lighting wires and to the wireless
apparatus. From an open window of the radio house came the
thrilling sounds of the current leaping the spark gap and eager high
pitched voices. Ever since the fatal blow doomed the steamer to a
watery grave, the operator had been flashing a continuous stream of
distress messages. And this he continued to do as long as the
electric current lasted. Meanwhile assurance was passed among the
remaining passengers that a liner had caught the Herculanea’s “S. O.
S.” and was racing to the rescue. But nobody could dodge the fearful
importance of this question—Would she arrive before the sinking
steamer went down?
 “Are all the boats gone?” inquired Guy, as he and Carl Watson
turned to look about them for some means of escape from the doom
that seemed to be theirs.
“Your mother was the last person to enter the last boat,” replied
Watson solemnly.
“Thanks to your great generosity,” said Guy, scarcely able to
control his emotion of gratefulness.
“Look down there,” interrupted Carl, pointing toward the after end
of the main deck. “Those fellows seem to have found a supply of
rafts. Let’s go down and see what’s doing.”
“That’s a good idea,” said Watson. “This vessel is going to sink
head down, and the farther toward the stern we can get, the safer
we’ll be, even though we’re on the lowest deck.”
“We may be caught in a trap if we go down an inside stairway,”
Guy suggested.
“No danger of that yet,” replied Watson. “The ship isn’t going to
sink for another half hour. Come on. Even if we have to jump into
the sea, that’s the best place to jump from because it’s the lowest.”
They ran through an entrance and down the nearest stairway. The
cabin rooms were deserted. One could almost believe, save for the
listing of the ship, that the vessel was tied up at a dock and resting
after a long cruise. Down on the main deck near the elevator Guy
observed a solitary figure seated on a cushioned bench. An
incandescent bulb was burning a few feet away, and Guy recognized
the man. It was Gunseyt.
The boy almost gasped for breath; then quickly remembered his
recent suspicion that this strangely acting passenger was insane.
Now he was fully convinced of the truth of his suspicion, for the
fellow seemed to have no interest in saving himself. On the bench
beside him, Guy beheld the “wireless shoes” that Gunseyt had taken
from the boy’s room, and in his hands he held the tennis racket that
Guy had seen in his possession as the fellow was deserting him and
his mother. Even as young Burton gazed at him, this remarkable
man strained the handle of the racket across one knee and broke it.
 Attributing this act to nothing more than the giddy working of a
disordered mind, Guy hastened on after his companions. As they
passed out onto the open deck, they were greeted by a heavy
roaring sound, like a mighty clap of thunder, only it came not from
the sky, but from the hold of the ship. Every beam seemed to be
shaken loose, and the great vessel trembled as with a terrible
convulsion.
“We’re going down—the boilers have exploded—we’re going
down!” screamed a terror-stricken passenger, as he rushed to the
side of the ship and leaped overboard.
Panic followed.
 CHAPTER XIII
S. O. S.
Meanwhile the other “wireless twin” was not asleep even though
it was after midnight. Back in Ferncliffe, Walter Burton was a very
busy boy.
He and Tony had been enterprisingly industrious during Guy’s
absence. Tony had made a diligent study of wireless telegraphy and
was already showing promise of early proficiency, as he was
naturally quick. Walter had received several letters from Guy, and
these were all long and full of interesting detail. The boy on the
other side of the Atlantic told all about his doings in London, the
acquaintances he made, and the sights he saw. He devoted pages to
a description of how he and Artie Fletcher “saw London in a fog,”
and this letter was followed by other lengthy ones, telling of his
association with Smithers and the hotel clerk. He described these
two characters so minutely that Walter and Tony received clear
mental pictures of them.
“Save these letters,” Guy requested in his second long writing to
his brother. “I’m telling you everything because I don’t want to
forget anything. I’m going to claim these letters as my own property
when I get back, if you don’t object. You won’t care nearly so much
for them as I do.”
The last letter informed Walter and his father that Guy and his
mother would return on the Herculanea. It contained information
also as to the day they would start and the expected time of
reaching New York.
About a week before Guy and Mrs. Burton started on their return,
the last of the winter snows at Ferncliffe melted and spring weather
arrived. Although the coast was still dangerous, Walter and Tony got
the motor yacht in condition for a trip as soon as the weather
became sufficiently settled for safety. The craft was inspected and
overhauled from stem to stern, and with Mr. Burton’s consent, the
gasoline tanks were filled. Walter also transferred one of the wireless
apparatus to the deck house, extending several wires between the
fore and aft service masts for an aerial.
“We’ll have everything ready for a little cruise when Guy gets
back,” he said to Tony as they worked and discussed their plans.
After all the preparations were completed, Walter suggested to
Det Teller that they make a run out of the harbor, as the sea was
calm and there seemed to be a promise of pleasant weather; but the
sailor-farmer objected.
“This boat doesn’t stir out of this place until your father gets
back,” he said very decidedly. “When he says ‘go’, we go, but not
until.”
That settled it, and Walter realized that he had made a foolish
suggestion. Mr. Burton had been called to New York on business the
day before and would remain there to meet his wife and Guy on
their arrival from Europe. Walter and Tony were therefore left alone
in the house, as Jetta was staying with Mrs. Teller during her
mother’s absence. Sometimes the boys ate at Mrs. Teller’s table and
sometimes at Tony’s home.
Naturally they ran things pretty much their own way when they
found themselves sole occupants of the house. Fortunately they
were even tempered youth, and “their own way” proved to be fairly
sane, so that they did not break the windows or burn the house
down. But they had a good time after boy’s fashion, reading, playing
games, talking wireless, and going to bed when they were too tired
and sleepy to stay up longer.
In this latter respect they violated long established tradition. They
had learned that night is the best time for sending and receiving
radio messages, as the atmospheric conditions are then most
favorable for the transmission of electric waves, and they applied
this information to practice. The first night they were alone they
stayed up until 10:30 o’clock, the second night until after 11, and
the third—well, they were up until after midnight and then
something happened that drove sleep from their minds till the next
succeeding sunset.
After supper on this eventful night, Walter went to the yacht and
Tony went to the attic “den,” and, seated at their respective wireless
tables, they practiced sending and receiving for two or three hours.
Tony, of course, was still very slow, but he managed to spell out his
words with reasonable accuracy, and as Walter sent his messages in
a leisurely manner, they did very well. One of the observations sent
by Walter across the spark gap in the course of their exchange of
wireless witticisms was the following:
“Ben Franklin contradicted himself by discovering a spark-gap in
the sky and giving that ‘early to bed, early to rise,’ advice.”
“Why?” Tony dot-and-dashed back.
“Because you have to stay up late to wireless well,” Walter
replied.
Shortly after ten o’clock he sent the following message to Tony:
“Come here.”
“Repeat,” requested the boy at the shore station, who read the
message but was in doubt as to whether he had read it correctly.
“Come here,” Walter flashed again.
“Why?”
“Some fun here.”
Tony hastened to obey the summons.
He was soon aboard the boat, which was tied up at the wharf,
and eagerly hastened to the deck house to find out what the fun
was. Walter was sitting at the table with the receivers at his ears and
his hand on the key. Observing that he was busy, Tony said nothing,
but waited. The varying expression on the operator’s face indicated
an interesting conversation with someone.
Tony watched and listened attentively and caught enough of his
friend’s messages to understand that the latter was engaged in a
lively repartee with another operator. Presently Walter found an
opportunity to explain.
 “I’ve got an operator on a big yacht, I think,” he said. “He was
casting around for someone to talk to and picked me up. He started
by calling me an undampt landlubber, and I called him a vacuum
amplifier.”
“What’s a vacuum amplifier?” interrupted Tony, who knew little of
the technique of wireless.
“It’s a radio monstrosity,” Walter replied. “When you make a study
of the science of wireless, you’ll learn that the vacuum tube amplifier
is an important instrument for increasing the volume of wave
impulse at the receiving end. I left out the tube and called him a
vacuum amplifier, meaning that he increased the volume of nothing.
He came back weakly by calling me a vacuum detector, playing on
the idea of a vacuum detective. That gave me just my opening for a
good punch and I flashed back that I had detected him as the
emptiest vacuum tube this side of a minus quantity.”
“Wow!” broke in Tony again. “Did that silence him?”
“Not yet,” answered Walter. “He called me an alternating current
of sky juice and I shot back that he was an interrupted gooseberry
—”
“Ha, ha, ha,” laughed Tony, “I’ll bet he quit then.”
“Yes, he did. But here he is again.”
“Hello there, kindergarten,” was the next greeting from the
revived radio banterer. “How far away are you from me?”
“How should I know?” flashed back the young amateur. “But I can
make a better guess than you can.”
“I bet you a spark gap you can’t.”
“That’s just like you—always dealing in nothing,” retorted Walter.
“I bet you a vacuum cleaner I can.”
“It’s a go, Smarty.”
“All right, Empty,” agreed Walter. “How far apart are we?”
“Three miles.”
“I say ten. Where are you?”
“Two miles off Rookery Point.”
 “I win. You’re twelve miles from me. I’m near Ferncliffe. You owe
me an empty glass.”
“I’ll be generous and put something in it. What’ll you have?”
“Make it a gooseberry phosphate.”
“All right but you must furnish the sugar. It costs too much now.”
“You’re a cheap skate. When you die, your folks will go
gooseburying.”
“Good-by, kindergarten,” interrupted the twice defeated wireless
wit. “Your ma wants you to go to bed.”
“There’s a lot doing in the air tonight,” Walter announced
presently, turning to his friend. “I’m going to see what I can pick up.
Most of it is big wave length. I’m going to tune up to it and see
what’s doing. You may listen in some of the time if you want to,
Tony.”
“You go ahead,” said the latter. “You can read faster than I can.
Tell me what’s doing whenever there’s anything interesting.”
Meanwhile Walter’s left hand was pressing the left receiver, while
his right hand was busy with the three-slide tuning coil. Presently he
appeared to be satisfied with the adjustment, for he transferred his
right hand from the instrument to the right ear piece and pressed
both pieces hard against his ears.
And there was good reason for this sudden eagerness of attitude
on his part.
“Oh, Tony,” the radio eavesdropper exclaimed after a few
moments of rapt attention. “It’s two liners talking together, and one
of them’s the Herculanea, the ship mother and Guy are on.”
“What!” shouted the astonished Tony.
“Yes, it’s true. I spelled the name Herculanea as clear as can be.
Keep still now.”
There was silence again for a minute or two while Walter strained
every listening nerve to catch the dots and dashes in the receivers.
Then he said:
“Yes, its the Herculanea. I didn’t catch the name of the other liner,
but it’s warning the Herculanea to look out for icebergs.”
 “They must be way up north,” said Tony.
“Yes, keep still. They’re talking again.”
Walter was an intent listener again for five minutes. Then he took
a pencil from his pocket and wrote several figures on a paper tab
lying on the table. Presently he looked up at his friend and said:
“Tony, get me that chart of the north Atlantic in the chart case.
I’ve got the location of the icebergs, and maybe I’ll get the location
of the Herculanea. I want to follow it if I can. I want to place the
steamer on the chart and follow it as long as I get messages from
it.”
Tony dashed into the pilot house and soon returned with the
desired chart, laying it on the table before Walter.
“There’s where the icebergs are,” said the young operator, eagerly
indicating with his finger; “not far from Sable Island, two hundred
miles or more from Halifax.”
“That’s more’n four hundred miles from here, isn’t it?” said Tony.
“Where’s the Herculanea?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t found that out yet.”
Walter continued to listen in silence for some time, eagerly hoping
to catch the location of the vessel, but he was disappointed. She
might be 100 or 500 miles from the icebergs. He caught many
messages from the Herculanea and other ships speaking with her,
but no more latitude and longitude.
Time passed rapidly, and the interest of Walter did not wane. In
fact, he would not have thought of going to bed at all, so long as he
was able to catch messages from the Herculanea, if Tony had not
called his attention to the lateness of the hour.
“Walter, do you know what time it is?” asked Tony after looking at
his watch. The ship’s clock was not wound and had struck no bells
all evening.
“I guess it’s pretty late,” replied the diligent radio listener
mechanically.
“No, it’s early in the morning—after midnight.”
 “You don’t say. Well, we’ll have to quit soon and go to bed. But I
do hate to stop as long as I can get a message from Guy’s and
mother’s ship. Maybe Guy’s standing beside the operator right now.
It’u’d be just like him to hang around the radio room for hours at a
time if they’d let ’im.”
“He’s more likely in bed.”
“Perhaps you’re right. Well, one more message, and I’ll quit.”
But it was a long time coming, measured by the impatience of the
listener. The operator on the Herculanea was silent for ten minutes
or more, while Walter sat at his table, eager to receive one more
message before turning in.
“Better give it up,” advised Tony, “He’s going to bed.”
“I won’t believe it till I have to,” replied the other. “No, you’re
wrong,” he added suddenly. “Here he is.”
Walter was now all eagerness again. But soon a marked change
came over his face. So startling was the change that Tony sprang
forward to catch his friend, believing him to be ill. The next instant
he saw his mistake.
Pale and trembling, Walter gripped the receivers with both hands,
while he listened with every nerve at high tension. He uttered one or
two gasps; then he snatched up his pencil and wrote several figures
on the tab. A moment later he was shouting orders to his
companion.
“Tony, Tony!” he cried. “Run an’ wake up Det quick. Tell him to
come here right away. The Herculanea—S. O. S.—I got the message.
She’s hit something—wrecked—sinking—mother—Guy!”
Dazed, bewildered, Tony rushed out of the cabin, onto the wharf
and up the path toward the old sailor’s house, while Walter, with
ghost-like face and rigid muscles sat listening to the appeals of
distress as they came from the operator of the doomed liner.