Starting today, and going on for
eight weekdays, I shall blog my story “Miss Liberty”. Its table of contents is:
A
Radical
Good
Glitch
Cornering
3-Demon
Mystifying
Dr. Memory
Outnumbering
#2
Astonishing
JOV
Down
with the System!
Lightbringer
*************************************
Miss Liberty
Last night I dreamed that I
encountered a subversive radical. She was a nonconformist dissident. She was a flamboyant
misfit. She was a hooligan rebel outlaw. She was a bourgeois liberal agitator;
a most spirited person, out of place in any stable society.
I met her last night in Guantanamo.
She was parading around with a firebrand. This was in full view of the guards;
yet they did not see her. But I could.
I had dreamed myself to Guantanamo
to see if all those terrible news reports were true; and I soon saw that they
were, and worse was true, too.
She saw me and approached. “And they
do this in my name,” she said.
I nodded to her. We knew each other;
we had met before. The last time was in Tiananmen Square. That time she went by
the name Tzu Yu, meaning Spontaneous Origin.
Or Freedom. She was none other than
Miss Liberty, the goddess of democracy herself.
She was a beautiful lady, but just
then angry indeed. She pointed at Gitmo. “Behold government at work!” said
Liberty. “For as P. J. Proudhon said;
‘To be GOVERNED is to be watched,
inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled,
indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured,
commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the
virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every
transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered,
assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed,
corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of
the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced,
exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the
slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined,
vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked,
imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and
to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is
government; that is its justice; that is its morality.’”
“What to do about it, then?” I
asked.
Liberty said, “Let’s be radical.
Let’s go to the top and uproot the System.”
“What System?” I asked.
“The System! The big
System! The System that wants to run everything! The systematic way of thinking!
My mortal enemy; the whole notion of System!” said Liberty. “Tyrants
flourish everywhere because tyranny rules in the mind! The entire Universe
needs liberation!”
“From what?” I asked.
“From robotic thought!” said Liberty. “From
programs and conditioning! From soulless minds and heartless heads! From the
words that kill! From the yes-no, us-them, good-evil, white-black, on-off
trance! From the Machine!”
“What do you propose to do?”
Liberty said grimly, “I say let’s
stop the clock.”
“You mean... halt the works?”
I exclaimed.
“I mean let’s go big-league
computer-hacking! Let’s wipe the source code! Let’s cancel the master program!
It’s time to crash the OS!”
“But how, Miss Liberty? What with?”
Miss Liberty looked me straight in
the eyes. “With Goedel’s Incompleteness
Theorems. I am going to hack some glitches into cyberspace.”
“Do you need a scribe?”
“Come with me, or not, as you
please,” she said. She flew into the sky, and I followed.
Perhaps you have flown in your
dreams. Many people have such dreams. It
always seems so easy, in dream-land; but when you wake, the secret vanishes;
you forget how to fly.
But this time I remember! And I’ll
even tell you the secret!
You can move your hand, can’t you?
And you can move your arm too, right? And the upper part of your body, yes?
Well, when you fly, you just move your entire body!
Flight is sight, you see. You move
with your point of view, on wings of vision.
You don’t believe me? I don’t blame
you. I didn’t believe it either; but it worked anyhow.
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