This is the back story to HH, written in episodes running from 24th Feb to 29th March 2015. It was part of creating a consistent world for a sequel called H3H, in that it establishes the people and rules that inform the series. HH was originally made up out of thin air. Several years later, the back story came to mind nearly complete – an example of creative activity that takes place in the unconscious.
Several nights later Helen March dreamed that she was back on the surface, moving about the lobby of the airport. It was night and the hall whitely lit. Voices called softly over the public address announcing flights to here and there, but there was not a soul, not a thing out of place. It appealed to her very much, this calm and solitude and she felt settled as she fluttered about the baggage checks and the gift shops. How different to the night they were all bundled in here, the shouting and press of people. It was calm. Like home.
If she cared to do so, she could just pick up the distinctive hum of beacons, very gently pressing at the edges of the dream. But there were no beacons actually in the lobby. Had she seen them? It was hard to recall. Certainly they had run through the car lot heads down, the service men holding coats over them, but in any case why would she go back there? It was enough to be here.
Although, in the dream, she wondered if Arthur had arrived and that was why she was in the lobby, to meet him, lead him to the stairs. He might be outside. He might be waiting for her to meet him. In the car lot. There definitely was the sound of beacons now. If she turned her head to the big black windows she couldn’t help but see their colours dotting the night. But then the service men would have brought him in. Unless he was
and there was Arthur, and he was lost and he needed her to guide him. Now she was outside. He was running but he had his head up and his eyes open and she was screaming to him to look down, to keep down, to keep his eyes SHUT and follow her voice, just like the service men had said RUN keep DOWN and keep eyes SHUT.
They were in the lobby. The hum was louder but they were almost there, the top of the stairs, you just had to have the right code but the room was filled with people fighting to get to the stairs, the service men were trying to reach them but panic was churning the crowd. There was pile of bodies covering the entrance way and she turned around to tell something to Arthur
but it was instead a beacon, and in that poisonous moment it locked onto her mind WITH AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE JUST FOR YOU FROM THE MAKERS OF BUD LITE. THIS IS NOT YOUR DREAM. YOU WILL HAVE A GREAT GRAND DAUGHTER. SHE MADE THIS DREAM WITH A SMOOTH CRISP TASTE. SHE SAYS HI GRAMMA I WISH I GOT TO MEET YOU.
Helen was screaming. The other women in the capsule just sullenly waited for her to shut the fuck up. Everyone was having nightmares, and no one had much empathy left. It was not like being First Lady mattered much any more.
2000 Richard Strassman popularises McKenna’s experimentation with the effects of N,N-dimethyltryptamine, a hallucinogen that provides a strangely formalised experience to users. In each case the details are different, but the majority experience a meeting with a guide or guides, in a place outside the bounds of the real world. The guide conveys an important message which does not transfer back to sober language.
2018 A study conducted at UNSW Australia by Choudhury et al. finds evidence for electrical stimulation pathways in the brain that mimic the effects of DMT. The authors note that the technique promises improved control over the lucidity and duration of the effect.
2019 A team led by Pele at Yale Medicine refine the Choudhury process to deliver ’eminently definable and controllable impressions in the subject’ and ‘a convincing diminution in auxiliary visual illusions’.
2019 Patent for the Delivery of Specified Electrical Stimulation to Provide Higher Orders of Experience, jointly held by Yale and Pele.
2022 The ‘Castle Act’ passed by the Paul Administration decriminalises the use of narcotics and firearms within the territory of registered private residences.
2022 Pele et al. publish a follow on study describing ‘a means by which audiovisual stimulation may excite brain function without the application of a physical apparatus.’ The project had been code named SAAAD, which the authors later explain to be ‘spooky action at a distance’. A patent for the SAAAD technology follows.
2024 Pele gathers venture capital from multiple sources including Pearson Learning Systems, and founds Inner Teaching and Learning LLC. Publicity describes the technology as The Royal Road To Knowing.
2026 ITL demonstrates accelerated training of volunteers by use the ‘Pele Yale’ system. Much positive comment appears in the technology press over the years following, with a general theme of the lifting of mankind to a new spiritual peak of knowledge and understanding.
2028 The Castle Act is amended to remove hallucinogens from the list of allowed possessions. Successful lobbying from ITL/Yale differentiates electrical from chemical stimulants in the Amendment. However Yale later relinquishes their share in ITL in a undisclosed payout to avoid negative publicity, leaving the company in some financial difficulty.
2029 The ITL Lucid One is marketed. Early adopters report ‘a truly powerful and effective experience of learning’ but find that the lessons become increasingly difficult to recall coherently over time. The WSJ publishes a conflicted review, which includes the now infamous user report that ‘I wanted to learn about physics, but instead I met God.’ Software range for the Lucid is also less than promised at launch.
2030 Given poor sales of the Lucid One, ITL announce that Pele has been asked to leave the board. A new board led by Janet Murchison, ex. Apple, announces a new round of funding.
2030 Late in the same year Apple acquire all patents and technologies from ITL. There is concern from the remaining users of the Lucid that Apple will extinguish the product. Large numbers of Lucids are now trading second hand. Apple denies that ITL will be harmed by the deal.
2031 Apple shuts ITL and announce a new ‘semi autonomous’ division Be Convinced, with focus on advertising and marketing.
2031 A businessman in Texas advertises hacked Lucids for ‘home use only’, to ‘get the full experience you paid for’. Court action shuts down his business but an illicit trade in Lucids springs up as other hackers remove the educational constraints. The FDA advise that the Castle Act Amendment protects their use, but they are still illegal to sell.
2033 Be Convinced demonstrate an early B-Con unit. The Electronic Frontier Foundation call the device ‘an insanely bad invasion of the mind by the people you trust the least’. The United Church describe the technology as ‘contrary to free will and thus contrary to Christian thought and actions’. Hummer, CEO of Be Convinced assures the public that a code of ethics exists in advertising that will limit the technology. “It advises, it does not demand”.
2034 First B-Con is launched in Times Square. Activists from BUGA-UP deface the unit the night before launch. Further programming of the B-Con discourages interference. An activist is allegedly led to self harm by the message, leading to the widely leaked internal email in B-C that ‘the asshole had it coming to him’. Some mild protest is quickly quelled. Hummer resigns from the board.
2035 B-Cons common in coastal areas of the United States, and population centres surrounding United States military bases in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Most consumers are unconcerned by the technology. An article in the Sydney Morning Herald is typical of the response. “It just guides you. You think of a meal and it takes you to where you need to go. Maybe it tells you you’re hungry, but it still tastes good’.
2036 The Chinese government accuses Be Convinced of programming demand for machines to spread into their regions of influence. Be Convinced and the US Administration counter that the Chinese are breaking international law by copying the mechanism for their own Android Wisdom system. The Russian Union outlaws B-Cons in all territories. The EU is racked by argument between supporters and opponents who accuse the former of being ‘the pawns of the United States of Because’. Be Convinced point to statistics that ‘in regions served by our technologies, crime is almost non-existent, health is paramount and productivity is far above the global average’. The company changes their name to B-Con inc.
2037 On New Years Eve the First B-Con in Times Square is again electronically defaced with the old logo for LUCID ONE. Witnesses describe great anxiety and irritation, and there are outbreaks of violence over the night. Further sporadic disruption in service is felt across the US mainland, with outbreaks increasingly met with police action and arrests. The US and Territories Administration warns that ‘…terrorists are threatened by our freedom in the US&T. They will not overcome our way of life’. B-Con blames Chinese hackers for the attacks, which they frame as an effort to gain commercial ground for the Wisdom network.
2037 Home B-Cons go on sale. The demand is high, but exactly meets available supply each month. The last prison on US Territory is closed with much celebration. Several members of the illegal Lucid One collective arrive in Moscow. In a press conference they claim that the B-Connected network is ‘the largest con, the biggest jail, the greatest insult to free will that humanity has ever suffered’. B-Con issue a statement that ‘it is unfortunate when well meaning people deliver themselves to an autocratic state, intent only on perverting our free offer of advice and information into a systematic oppression of the human spirit’. The Russian Union activate the Pravda system late in 2037.
2038 My.B-Con is announced – “a personalised response to the individual, where each and every machine features a Guide that ‘knows’ the viewer and provides tailored and timely guidance and information”. The current President of B-Con, Arthur March, hosts a widely viewed announcement over the B-Connected network. “We have improved the service to bring back the personality of the original organic process first developed by Choudhury way back in 2018. The B-Con has long been your dedicated servant, now we invite you to consider it a kindly friend”.
My.B-Con is set to launch on June 29th of 2038, simultaneously across the entire network, which now extends over 3/4 of the world, apart from the regions now served by Wisdom or Pravda.
The makers had anticipated fire and brimstone – the capsule could withstand that for months. There was protection from gas, from pathogens, there was food and water ready for hundreds of survivors, far more than needed by the small band of harried women and bodyguards that now constituted ‘mankind’. But the makers had not thought about boredom, of years stuck underground in a dull green prison. Above all, the apocalypse was tedious.
For the first few weeks there was equal dread and hope. They forced one secret service man into the communications room, to try raise other capsules over the B-C. They gave him an hour, then cut the power, pulled him out and put him out of his misery. They were now running out of men, and the experiment wasn’t tried a second time.
The capsule had a small library of films stocked from years back. Cartoons were the most popular as they were the least realistic. Alice was soon the baby girl’s name – but you’d expect that. There were as many console games, and in lieu of a real society to snub and dominate, the Washington Wives adopted these fantasy worlds as a mnemonic of their surface lives. They’d been written by men for boys, but a bit of mental embroidery worked grace into them. The matriarchy evolved, with the service men as cattle, and ranks marked out in guilds and parties. Speculative fiction from Wyndam to Atwood had predicted a religious society rising from the ashes – but not one of these ladies had much as opened a Bible.
Up above a reciprocal process was at work. The B-cons had their captive audience rapidly die out. A few hardy souls managed to get around the rotting streets and buildings, but sooner or later were caught by a reflection or, reduced by loneliness, would give up and look directly into a screen to see if God was in there.
my.B-cons were designed to iterate and improve personal service. The decline of their audience was a business challenge solved by expanding their features and range. Pravda was overwhelmed easily, Wisdom took some weeks to subdue. Despite all the tactics, there came increasing static, then dead silence.
There would be a long wait for another mind, an event for which the whole planet was tensed in a unbearable anticipation of service, domination, unreality … it needed people and it resented people and it suffered in its own way for the lack of contact. It would do anything, be anything, to have back its assigned purpose.
The world below was beginning to believe in conjuring, the world above was getting ready to provide it.
Some years further into ‘the stay’ it was resolved by the Community to expel Those Disruptive Occupants that would not Conform to Rules. That being Mrs. March and her staff, still bitching and whining about representing the ‘administration’. The Community decided they could go there and good riddance to the exact people that had caused all this fuss in the first place. The only concession was to spare March’s baby girl, who was given a worker’s name and assigned to Ms. Hancock’s party.
Helen March did not cry. She told the Community exactly how they could go fuck themselves in the most painful ways, and it was said that you could still hear her swearing when they closed the outer door. She and her two old girls must have struggled a long time to climb out of that airport, given the piled bodies and the decay, but the First Lady at least made it out of the front gates, head held high, walked straight up to the devil and looked it in the eye.
There was the trade of a soul.
Do not for a moment imagine that Mrs. March fell down a rabbit hole to become queen of Wonderland, or that her ghost passed into the machine. Exactly the same thing happened to her as had already happened several billion times across the planet. The stupefied body of Mrs. March stood transfixed in front of the B-con, arms outstretched, twitching slightly with information and pain, its mouth flapping in synchronisation with the advertisements that pounded relentlessly through its mind. It pissed and shat itself uncontrollably, sweated copiously, flexed in agony and after some hours reached the point where enough juice had been lost that the muscles gave, and it collapsed onto the rotting pile of previous victims. A witness once described this death by fascination as very much like the crucifixion – although the crucifix was interior to the victim.
There was nothing spiritual about it. It was gang rape by brand name.
Perhaps it would be nicer to describe her experience. Complete black, solid. Then cracked, interrupted by a few straight lines, brightly coloured. The lines thickened, the grid became more firm, she felt as if she was falling over a night time city, the streets pulsing with colour. It was dazzling. She fell, the lines became thick – main streets, side streets, a hard edged glowing maze of colour, flowing.
One particular street came up to meet her. She stood on the sidewalk, there was nothing to see but the street and black. She wanted to say… There was a parade. The first float was JIM BEAN, were people on it? She couldn’t see them but knew they were up there, THAT TASTE! they said to her. THAT TASTE! She tried to shout back but it was already gone replaced by something WONDERFULLY SOFT – something she couldn’t quite STEP INTO QUALITY catch the ideas as the parade moved into high gear the SAVOUR THE FLAVOUR the messages beginning to thump against her eyes SO GOOD SO GOOD the floats now hard to individuate PURRFECT thump – thump – now a constant frantic beat, smacking across her face.
She shouted back over the din that she was the administration, that she was wronged, that she was here by choice. With the utmost effort she pulled her body to the left. She saw floats lined up, jostling for position, a thousand messages craving to be heard before she dropped out of reach. THE FINEST THE STRONGEST THE CHOICE YOU WILL LOVE. She made 250 before losing her mind. She was dead by 600
To the B-Con it was a chance to drain her for marketing tactics, for trends, desires, secret wishes, aspirations, calls to action. Usually the system would scale these against monthly and yearly trends. The long absence of information had shrilled the process – this particular mind would need to serve for every decision. It was poor research but a sample was a sample.
Mrs. March did not ‘enter the machine’ as a soul or otherwise. But her base desires shaped a formula, which became a kind of reptile instinct it could fulfil. It plunged alcohol from top to the bottom of the list, it became fond of rabbits, to breed them, eat them, use them as a mark for material wealth. It admired hard work and discipline. Above all else it loved order, and hated itself.
B-Con formulated a campaign against B-Con. It set to work to promote order.
And this is where things get strange.