Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [80]
‘Now you’re the one talking serdar argic,’ Moh said. He punched Jordan lightly. ‘Come on. You’re talking like it’s some kinda electronic antichrist, taking over the world with—’
‘Barcodes containing 666!’ Jordan laughed. ‘No, it’s just a way of looking at it.’ He made an inverting gesture. ‘Mind you, you’ve just said there’s a connection between the Black Plan and the Fourth International…’
‘Well, maybe in the sense that you mean, that Josh wrote it. Beyond that…I don’t know. Not much sign of Trotskyist ideology in the ANR. Or any other, come to that. They’re pragmatic. Post-futurist.’
‘Exactly,’ Jordan said. ‘The political and military techniques work independently of the ideology.’
‘What would you know about that?’
Jordan shrugged. ‘I read books.’
‘What about the Star Fraction?’ Janis interrupted. ‘Bernstein said he thought that was in the Black Plan.’
‘Not the Fraction itself,’ Moh said, frowning. ‘Just instructions for it, for people like Logan.’
‘“Not the Fraction,”’ Jordan mimicked. ‘“Just instructions for it.” Get a clue, Moh. They’re the same thing.’
‘OK, you can look at it that way if you want.’ He felt stubborn about this, that Jordan and Janis between them were concocting a dubious metaphor for something plainly explicable in political terms. ‘What I think is that the Star Fraction was a real organization that Josh was involved in setting up. It was designed to exploit some kind of capability of the Black Plan but it never got activated.’
‘And what,’ Jordan asked triumphantly, ‘were you so damn’ insistent you’d done yesterday? You activated something!’
Moh stared at him, unable to speak as he experienced the mental flip into seeing things the way Jordan did: ideas as discrete entities – memes – leaping from mind to mind like programs indifferent to the hardware they ran on; language itself as a natural Dissembler, turning words into virtual realities in human brains; ideologies as meme machines, using all the parties and factions, armies and movements, faiths and reasons as their disposable bodies to reproduce another generation of gun-toting or Bible-thumping or programme-quoting or party-building meme-propagators.
He thought of Johnny Smith, the Hizbollah fighter who’d died in his arms (Och, Johnny, I hardly knew ye!) and whose heroic death had inspired a dozen others, which in their turn…now there was a Johnny Smith Martyr of the Southall Jihad Memorial Children’s Home.
He thought of Guevara, whose words Bernstein had quoted:
Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome, provided that this, our battle cry, reach some receptive ear; that other hands reach out to wield our weapons and other men intone our funeral dirge with the staccato chant of the machine-guns and new battle cries of war and victory.
The tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living…as Marx said. Yes, there were generations of the dead and they reproduced themselves…just as there were generations of the living and they reproduced themselves.
He thought of Josh and Marcia, how they had joined the generations of the dead. He looked down at his hands on the warm metal of the assault rifle across his knees. Some part of the weapon Josh had wielded was now buried in this gun, in its cryptic, encrypted memories.
And in his.
‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘I activated something. And I did it with a code I remembered from working with Josh on the Black Plan.’
‘Logan was part of the space fraction,’ Janis pointed out. ‘If this idea about the political programme having been sort of built into the computer program is right—’
‘Then it’s reaching into space,’ Moh said. ‘Oh, yeah, I get the point. It could just go on. Building parties, raising armies, raising hell. Forever.’
‘Centuries, anyway,’ Jordan said. ‘The future is a long time.’
Moh looked at the sky. Glades off,