he slid it across the table to him, its cover eye brilliant blue against white.
“1984,” he read, examining it.
“Big Brother is watching you,” she said.
“So?” he said. “I already knew that.”
“This is about how they got into your mind before the Mind. Fascism.”
“Fascism?”
“Just a fancy word. ‘There are those for whom glory and abomination were not dissociated, but coexisted in a reversible figure.’ Foucault said that.”
“Does that sentence even make sense?” he asked.
She rolled her eyes, “Power. Power to control bodies. But pair that with processing power. Omnipotence gives you decimal-point precision for tweaking the person. And if that doesn’t work… well. Operate them. Omnipotent tech need operateds and operators.”
“Maybe that’s how it is now. But why can’t privilege be spread around? Just make do with less?”
“That’s naive. There’s always going to be a knowledge class and a worker class. As long as there’s the Mind.”
“So cut it out of our brains,” he said, miming a chopping scoop with his hand.
“Anyways,” she said, shaking her head. “Back to fighting smart. Why do men never get that? Still recovering from testosterone exposure in the womb. Never quite catch up, do you?”
He laughed. “Come on. Next time you’ve got something to rage against, you’ll be begging for a man.”
A smile played across her mouth, “That’s precisely where I’ll be wanting a brain not hypersensitive to androgens.”
“I don’t think we’re trapped by one set of chemicals. I believe in free will.”
“Do you now? I thought you were all about chemicals as destiny.” She took a sip from her coffee, watching him over the lip.
He leaned into the challenge, “Well, you’re pitting neuron against neuron. It’s no escape from the chemical. But when I’m pitting my upper against my lower brain, I’m glad for my testosterone.”
“I guess that depends which part you want to win,” she said, laughing and glancing toward his midsection.
He blushed, suddenly aware of her beauty. “There is that,” he said, peeling the book open, turning pages like a forget-me-not until he reached the first page. She loves me, he thought.
He began to read on the first page, breaking the tension.
Then Sol read, “The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”
Sol continued, “Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing.”
“Wires in the walls? That’s so lo-fi,” said Isaac.
“Don’t trivialize. You think with your body as much as your mind. You could betray yourself with a word’s emphasis, a misplaced pause, a teeny-tiny microexpression,” she held a compressed thumb and forefinger before her eye.
“It’s still just your body.”
“Yeah, but to perform loyalty you have to go deep. They believe your mind follows your body. But you reserve a slice of mental freedom. And because of this deception you win. Milosz called it Ketman,” she said. “My question is: how free is that slice of you?”
“More free than a slice of brain with Mind-tendrils tapped through it.” He looked at her from beneath a cocked eyebrow.
“Kind of. In Orwell’s world they repress desire. In ours, we train desire, and then give it rein. Nothing matters so long as you stuff your shopping cart full of useless dreams.”
Isaac was shaking his head in annoyance, “But Orwell’s world can’t work. If you have to bottle up your desires and thoughts, they have to explode open, eventually.”
“Why?” she pressed. “People have always bottled emotions. It’s part of being in society. The truly pathetic thing is when you can’t imagine a desire that isn’t answered by the market. And that’s what the metemotional implant is for: to train you to be a good consumer.”
“Well, fuck that,” he struck the table, his eyes blazing. “It can’t retrain the desire to destroy it.”
She smiled. It was fun to get him going. “Like Montag’s flamethrower? Good. But there’s always Mildred, more Mildreds, asleep in a screen cocoon,” she said.
“That’s what makes the economy fucking hum,” he said, looking out the window, losing patience with the book.
“Come on, I’ll read the next page,” she said.