The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [73]
“We’re victims of our own success,” he said on the day the Eurostar plague leaders were found guilty and sentenced to life. “The prisons are overflowing because we’ve become so bloody good at catching the evildoers. The advancement of your kind of forensics and the rapid spread of invisible eyes and ears has made it extremely difficult to plan any kind of successful premeditated crime and almost impossible to get way with any unpremeditated act of violence. At the moment, the situation seems absurd, because people haven’t yet managed to adjust their behavior to take account of the certainty of getting caught, but that’s temporary. As soon as everybody gets it into his head that he can’t get away with it anymore, the incidence of criminal behavior is bound to fall—and once the trend starts, it’ll go all the way. If we can just hang in there, we can usher in a whole new moral order.”
Lisa had no difficulty in playing devil’s advocate to pessimism and optimism alike. “We’re victims of our own success, all right,” she said. “With the aid of mouse models, oral vaccines, and gene therapy, we’ve wiped out all the premature killers except the ones cooked up in labs to steer around the defenses. We’ve never been healthier, never so long-lived, never so crowded, never so old. But gray power isn’t really wisdom, is it? It’s inertia. The rights of the aged mostly translate into the right to be stuck in one’s ways, to rail against anything and everything new, to see everything as a threat. I could get nostalgic for the days when most of the people we put away were young, because it was at least possible to hope that they might change—but your new moral order will have to be built from the bottom up, and the demographic structure of today’s world is way too top-heavy.”
“It isn’t the old who are committing the crimes,” Mike said. “The average age of offenders may be rising steadily, but that’s because it started out so low.”
“No, it isn’t the old who are committing the crimes,” Lisa agreed, “but it’s the old, by and large, who are provoking them—and, increasingly, striking back. When they begin to figure that it might be a good idea to get their retaliation in first, the shit really will hit the fan, and all the invisible eyes and ears in the world won’t inhibit them. The Eurostar plague merchants weren’t just amateurs, they were idiots. When somebody decides to do the job properly, we’ll certainly see the beginning of a new moral order—but not the kind you have in mind.”
“You still spend too much time with Miller and the other old witches cackling around their cauldrons at the university,” Mike told her, unaware that he was ironically echoing what Lisa had said to Chan. “You should have cut that umbilical cord long ago. We’re in the real world, and we have to tackle practical problems in a practical way. So do the people we’re trying to control—and in the end, they’ll accept that. They have to.”
“Unfortunately,” Lisa said, “they don’t. That’s why we keep picking up the pieces—and why every year that passes delivers more and more pieces to our doorstep.”
“We still have to keep picking them up,” Mike insisted. “What other choice do we have?”
“None,” she admitted. “But having no choice is no guarantee that we’ll win in the end.”
“You’re beginning to sound like Helen,” Mike told her glumly. “Or she’s beginning to sound like you. She used to be so optimistic, so brave, but now … it’s far worse being a social worker, of course, than being in the force. When we send them up, we chalk up another victory, and every year brings more, but that’s just another beginning as far as Helen’s people are concerned. What’s winning, from her perspective? All she can ever do is to try to hold back time, and in the end, she always loses.”
“She could move on,” Lisa pointed out.
“So could we,” Mike countered. “Even if we’ve both hit our limit promotionally, we could move sideways—but we don’t. We keep plugging on, willing prisoners of routine. Helen’s the same.