The Arrows of Time

What exactly was he free to do now? He’d had his chance to try to sway the vote, and he’d failed; he couldn’t unpick the tapestry and try again. But the link between his will and his actions still shaped his own history as strongly as ever. All he could do now was keep on fighting not to be told how the fight would end.

‘We should start by withdrawing our labour,’ Pio suggested. ‘We only lost the vote because people succumbed to a fantasy: that this system would deliver exactly what they wanted, with no disruptions or inconvenience at all. But if they can’t imagine the harm the messages themselves will do, they need to be given some more tangible disincentives.’

Ramiro was only half listening as he tinkered with the cameras and checked the network feed. There were barely four dozen people gathered in the cavernous space of the meeting room – all clinging to ropes in the audience section, with the stage left bare – but so far more than a dozen times that number were following the discussion on their consoles, all around the mountain.

‘But what is it that we’d be bargaining with?’ Emilia asked. ‘We don’t have a monopoly on any skill.’

‘No, but we have the numbers,’ Pio replied. ‘We can’t make any one job in the mountain impossible to do, but if five twelfths of the population stop working we’ll be doubling everyone else’s load.’

‘You won’t get every no-voter participating,’ Lena pointed out. As she started speaking, the feed switched automatically to the camera covering her, and Ramiro relaxed a little. The acoustics of the room had been confusing the software, but he seemed to have found the right way to filter out the distracting echoes and make it possible to triangulate each speaker’s location.

‘That’s true,’ Pio conceded. ‘But we could encourage people to join us by focusing the effects of the strike on non-participants. What if we make a public register of everyone who’s taking part? Then instead of sitting at home doing nothing, we could still help each other out.’

Lena buzzed with mirth, unimpressed. ‘And then the Council takes the names and locks us all up?’

Pio said, ‘At most, they could do that to about two gross; after that, they’ll run short of prison space – let alone guards. We won’t make the list public until it’s larger than that.’

‘We could set up a register that only members would have access to,’ Ramiro suggested.

‘And then some spy would join up, just to read it!’ Lena countered.

‘Hmm.’ Ramiro couldn’t see a way around that.

‘They might not lock us up,’ Diego said, ‘but if we’re going to make life hard for people off the list, they’re going to return the favour.’

‘Of course,’ Pio replied. ‘We have to expect to receive far worse than anything we can inflict on the majority. But for most of them, the messaging system is just a novelty that they know they can live without; once the cost becomes high enough, they’ll drop their support.’

Placida said, ‘And what happens when the Council passes a law that makes your entitlement void if you’re not working?’

‘Nobody would accept that,’ Pio said flatly. ‘The right to a share of the crops is in the hands of each family, not the Council. If they tried to change that, everyone would riot.’

‘Not everyone,’ Placida replied. ‘The more we were actually hurting them, the more willing they’d be to go along with the change. If your job really has become twice as hard, why wouldn’t you want the Council doing their best to starve the freeloaders into submission?’

Pio thought it over. ‘It’s not impossible. But if things reach that point we’ll have to move beyond the strike. If they deny us food, we’ll have to be prepared to take it by force.’

At the end of the meeting, everyone in the room agreed to join the strike. There was no public register of names, but anyone curious enough to access the feed – friend or enemy – had already seen their faces. Ramiro tried to tell himself that he’d been taking a greater risk on the day he broke his promise to Greta. But the truth was, many more people would have defended him for exposing her clandestine plan than would back him up now, after the system had been openly debated and approved.

As Ramiro was packing up the equipment, Pio approached him. ‘Thanks for your help tonight.’

‘It was nothing.’ Ramiro unplugged the photonic cable from the wall socket and began winding it back onto its spool.

‘What did the audience come to?’

‘We peaked at a dozen and five gross,’ Ramiro replied. ‘But the whole thing will still be available for anyone who wants to view it later.’

‘Can the Council block access to it?’ Pio asked.

‘Not legally. I suppose they could block access but deny that they’d done it – blame it on a technical glitch.’

‘Then we need to think about ways to get around that.’

‘We?’ Ramiro stopped winding and regarded him quizzically.

Pio buzzed. ‘All right: I have no expertise in these things. I meant you, and anyone else in the group who’s studied automation.’