The Facebook Genocide by Andy Ravenscroft
The Facebook Genocide
by Andy Ravenscroft
Copyright 2013 Andy Ravenscroft
1
He awoke in darkness and blood. The taste of salt was in his mouth and there was a sticky crust around his nostrils. His teeth ached and his tongue was sore. On his chest he could feel where the blood had soaked into his clothes, making of them a sodden second skin.
He lay in silence, the bruises on his body defining the boundaries of his world. He had no idea where he was, but he sensed that the space in which he had awoken was not the one in which he had been beaten unconscious. It felt warmer, more closed in.
He rolled onto his side and drew in his breath at the sudden sharp pain in his ribs. The room, as though it had sensed the change in his breathing, was lit gradually by a soft white light. He squinted at it from under swollen eyelids.
The room was small, clean, and everything in it was white. He blinked a few times and his vision became less blurred. He could see a table and chair molded into the walls. There were no sharp edges. He moved his head and looked around. It was just possible to make out on one of the featureless walls the outline of a single door.
It opened. A tall, thin, blond man walked in. He wore a dark grey suit and glasses with thick black rims. “Oh my god!” he said, and he hurried to the bed.
The blond man knelt down and looked into his eyes. “What did they do to you?” He looked the injured man over as though seeking the answer on his body. “Don’t move. I’ll take care of you."
The blond man held up a slim metal tube and put it against the injured man’s neck. “I’m going to put you under so I can work on you. Don’t worry. You’re in good hands. I’m Doctor Jolley. What’s your name?”
The man on the bed closed his eyes. He did not reply.
2
The second time he came out of the darkness, the blood was gone and his body merely ached. He opened his eyes, and once again there was the soft glow of the lights and the white room.
Moments later the door opened and the blond man walked in. “Hello,” he said. He smiled and went over to the chair. He sat down. The two looked at each other for a few seconds, and then the blond man spoke again. “Do you remember me?”
“Jolly.”
“Excellent, excellent. No need to worry about brain damage, then, eh?” He laughed. “It’s Jolley with an ‘e’, by the way. Jolley by name, not jolly by nature.” He laughed again.
“You’re a doctor?”
The blond man twitched and fidgeted. He flashed a smile. “Indeed I am, and at your service.” He gave a brief bow of his head.
“What happened to me?”
“I don’t know,” the doctor replied. “I’m just a simple country doctor. I make house calls wherever I’m asked to go. Judging by your injuries, I’d say you were in some sort of an accident.”
“Why am I here?”
“Why indeed? “ Doctor Jolley put his hands together as if in prayer and raised them so his middle fingers touched his lips. “A question we all ask ourselves at one time or another.” He gave a little laugh. “But you do not mean in the existential sense. You mean, of course, why you are here, in this room?” He raised his eyebrows as he nodded to the corners.
“It's a simple question.”
“Is it? Is it indeed?” Doctor Jolley tilted his head to one side as he considered the thought. “I wonder if there is such a thing as a simple question. In my experience, questions are often far from simple. Perhaps I can illustrate by asking you a question of my own.” He straightened his head. “What is your name?”
There was a pause, then: "Smith".
"Yes, yes, that’s what it says on your ID. The problem is that whoever Mr. Smith is, or was, no one’s very convinced that you're him. Perhaps I should be more specific with my question. What is your real name?"
The man considered this for a moment. “If I tell you, will you let me go?”
“Ah, you see? I asked what I thought was a simple question and you, instead of giving me the simple answer, ask me a question. A question, I might add, that is far less simple than the one I asked you.”
Doctor Jolley leaned forward as he continued. “Your question presupposes a number of things: first, that you are incarcerated in this room and therefore a prisoner; second, that introducing yourself to me is in some way a condition of your release; and, third but not least, that I have the means to secure your release.”
“Am I a prisoner?”
Doctor Jolley scanned the ceiling. “In the literal sense of the word? Yes, yes you are. In the sense that you are in this room and may not leave, you are indeed a prisoner.”
He returned his gaze to the prisoner and looked at him for a long while. “Simplicity is such a virtue, and yet so difficult to come by,” the doctor said at last. “Perhaps if we try again.” He smiled encouragement. “What is your name?”
Again, the prisoner said nothing.
“Let’s start with what I already know about you, yes?” The doctor nodded as if doing so would somehow secure the other man’s agreement.
“Now, let’s see, Mr. Smith.” The doctor raised a knowing eyebrow. ”You don’t have a driver’s license. No passport. No social security number. No birth certificate. No school records. No diplomas, certificates, medals of achievement. No national service record. No medical records. No criminal record.” The doctor paused as though he was expecting to be contradicted.
“You do not appear to have a bank account, credit card, or any financial records for that matter. No personal photographs, no video, no audio recordings. You have never been seen on any security camera anywhere; a virtual impossibility, by the way.” He chuckled. “Have you walked around with a paper bag over your head your entire life?” Doctor Jolley paused for a few long seconds.
“To continue: You have no email account, no website, and no social media presence. In fact you seem to have no online presence of any kind, also a virtual impossibility. You own no house, no car, no phone, or property of any sort other than the clothes you arrived in. Your clothes themselves are a blank canvas: no labels, no logos, no RFID tags.
"There is no record of your fingerprints or of your retinal scan. Your DNA is not on file.” He smiled and looked about the room, and then he whispered: “You know that’s technically a crime.”
The doctor sat back in the chair. “There. I have told you everything I know about you, the sum total of which adds up to,” the doctor fluttered his hands in the air, “precisely nothing. You are a blank canvas. A tabula rasa."
The prisoner sat in silence as the doctor fidgeted in his chair. Doctor Jolley leaned forward and spoke in a lowered voice. “You know, this is really rather a treat for me. I’ve been doing this for so long I can’t remember the last time I was excited about it.“
His eyes brightened and he looked as though he was about to clap his hands together.
“You’re like a little present!”
The prisoner folded his arms.
“You can’t imagine the sheer novelty of your existence. I’m not even sure you’re real. If it wasn’t for the evidence of my own tired eyes, I’d think you didn’t exist, goodness me yes.” He took off his spectacles and polished them with a small cloth from his pocket. He put them back on and stared. “These eyes have seen some things, my boy. They’ve seen people born into the world and they’ve seen people leave it, but I don’t believe they’ve ever seen a man who didn’t exist.”
The prisoner looked at him in silence.
Doctor Jolley twitched in his seat. “This is not getting us very far, is it? Let me cut, as they say in the vernacular, to the chase. You are a veritable conundrum. A riddle wrapped in a mystery, indeed yes. The question before us,” he lea
“Why unwrap it at all?”
“Ah, my dear boy! There you are again complicating my simple question.” He tapped his index finger on the plastic table. “Let me see if I can help.” He glanced at the ceiling for inspiration.
“Nature abhors a vacuum. Every empty space is filled with something. What exactly you are filled with, that is the question before us. What informs your decisions, your behavior?” He tapped his skull with his index finger. “What fills your head?”
"I meant, why do you need to know anything about me?"
"Oh my goodness, that's an obvious one. As you would know if you had had any schooling, which judging by your absence from the national school records you did not, information wants to be free. And it has been free for a very long time now. Information about people, that is.”
The prisoner tipped his head to one side. “Is this some sort of test?”
“My dear boy, these days everything is a sort of test.” An exasperated expression flitted across his face. “Look, this is going to be an awfully boring conversation if it’s just me talking, I can promise you that.”
“I really have nothing to say.”
Doctor Jolley pursed his lips. “Well, if you aren’t ready to chat today, I shall have to contain my disappointment and pop in and see you tomorrow. Think about things and we’ll chat again in the morning.” He stood and went to the door.
He paused and turned. He grinned, winked, and pointed his finger at the prisoner, clicking his thumb like the hammer of a gun. “See you later.” He left the room and the door closed behind him.
3
That night as he slept, three men came to his cell, their faces masked. Hauled from sleep and with his limbs pinned, he could only watch and scream as one of them held his right hand against the wall and another hit it several times, very hard, with a hammer. They dropped him and left without saying a word.
He lay on the bed for an hour before he fell into a patchy sleep riddled with dark veins of pain.
He awoke to the sound of the door opening. The lights were already on. Doctor Jolley walked in, rubbing his palms together.
“Well now, my lad, how did you sleep?”
The prisoner glared at him.
“Not well?”
The prisoner held up his hand, the fingers purple and curled.
“Oh, my dear boy. Whatever happened to you?”
“You don’t know?”
“ Of course not.”
“Last night some men came into the room and grabbed me. They smashed my fingers.”
“How awful. Why did they do that?”
“They didn’t say.”
“Let me have a look.”
The prisoner held out his hand.
Doctor Jolley produced a slim metal tube from his pocket and held it over the swollen hand. A chime sounded and a section of the wall displayed a three dimensional image of his bones. The doctor looked it over, moving the tube around to show different views of the damage.
“Is it bad?”
“Mmm. How does it feel?”
“It hurts. A lot. Something creaks if I try to bend my fingers.”
“Yes. I’m not surprised. You have a pretty set of fractures including a middle phalanx oblique shaft fracture and a fracture of the distal interphalangeal joint of your pinkie. The bones have started to set, but I can fix it, oh yes.”
He took a small spray can out of his pocket and sprayed the prisoner’s hand with it. “Analgesic. Come on, let’s get you to the surgery, eh?” The door opened and the doctor led him through, into a corridor with doors leading off to both sides. He took him through a door on the right that looked no different from any of the others.
There was a large reclining chair and many medical instruments. “Sit down, old fellow, and I’ll get you sorted out.” The prisoner sat in the chair and the doctor fussed over his hand, chatting as he did so.
“Terrible business. Can’t imagine what they were thinking. I’ll have a word, see if I can find out what went on. Might have been some government chaps; they’re a bit heavy handed.” He paused for a moment. “Sorry, about the awful figure of speech.” He resumed his work.
“Might have been something political, you know. Perhaps you said something to someone about the government, that sort of thing. What do you think about the government?”
“I don’t think about the government.”
“Oh, but everyone does, everyone must. Surely you have opinions about one or other of their policies. There must be something that it does that you either like or do not like. Hmm? Immigration? Do you think the new measures draconian, or too laissez faire? No? Taxation policy, then. Too much in favour of the rich?”
“I really don’t have anything to say about any of their policies.”
“Come, come. It’s not possible to live in the world and not have a point of view on something. You might as well not exist, and as I believe I’ve already said, I can see you with my very own eyeballs, yes indeed. Try not to move, I’m going to reset the bones.”
There was silence as Doctor Jolley manipulated the joints to his satisfaction, then started splinting the fingers.
“There, much better. Anyway, I believe it was your turn to say something.”
“I told you. I really have nothing to say.”
The doctor stepped back and looked at him. “You really are an extraordinary creature. In a world in which everyone’s opinions are known, you are singular in that you apparently do not have any.”
The prisoner held up his hand in front of Doctor Jolley’s face. “Some people don’t appear to believe that.”
“Well, then, perhaps another time. Let’s get you back to your room.”
4
They came for him again while he slept, four men this time. They carried him, one limb each, from the cell and down the hallway past the surgery to a room at the end. There was a bright light overhead, like a surgical light in an operating theatre. They strapped him down on a table and put a cloth over his face.
They poured water over the cloth and he felt it invading his lungs, suffocating him as he lay there. Then they stopped and removed the cloth. He shut his eyes against the bright light; then they replaced the cloth. They did it again and again, and he thought he would drown there on that table.
The whole event took place in silence, save for his desperate gasps for breath and his pleas for them to stop whenever they paused and removed the cloth. Occasionally, between episodes, he vomited up the water he had swallowed. After a very long time he passed out, believing as he did so that he would die.
He awoke back in the cell, sick and violated and angry. He had barely gained his bearings when the door opened and Doctor Jolley entered.
“My dear boy, you’re soaking wet. Whatever have you been up to? You know, for a man locked up in a cell you certainly get into some adventures.”
“I know what you’re doing.”
Doctor Jolley looked a little surprised. “Yes, I would hope so. I’m here to check on your hand. Are you all right? You sound a touch disorientated.”
“You and those men. I know what you’re doing. They come in and rough me up, and then you’re here to patch up my wounds and try to get me to say something that they want to know.”
“Really, my dear boy, I’m mortified that you would think I had anything to do with whoever came in and broke your fingers. I’m a doctor. I took an oath.”
“Last night. Last night they took me out of here and tortured me. They almost drowned me. No one said a word. They took me out and damn near drowned me and no one said a word.”
“That sounds dreadful. Are you sure that’s what happened?”
“Yes, I’m fucking sure.”
"Would you like to call someone?"
There was a
“No.”
"Perhaps you should use my phone. This is a dangerous situation. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, you don't exist. If you never returned who would even know you're gone?"
"You would."
“Ah yes, I would. But would I care?"
“You’re a doctor.”
“You say that as though it explains something. Yes, of course, I’m a doctor.” He fluttered his fingers in the air.
“How can you be a part of this?”
The doctor fussed with his jacket, then folded his hands behind his back. “All right, my boy, I’ll explain to you how things look to me. It begins with this: What is the disease? How do we deal with it? Those are the important questions. As a doctor I must ask them. In the end the patient may live or die, but the important thing is the disease. The patient is just the place where the disease manifests itself. The battlefield, if you like.”
Doctor Jolley looked directly into his eyes.
“Now, at this moment, you are the battlefield.”
The prisoner sat down on the bed. He stared at the ground.
“What is it that they want to know?”
“Something. Anything. Everything. You don’t understand why you are so interesting to them, hmm? Well, they wonder about you. They wonder what you think, who you know. They wonder why they don’t know anything about you. They wonder if you will lead them somewhere. Are you the highway, or the country road? You could be a dead-end, a cul de sac, but you could also be the intersection, the crossroads.
“I’m not sure you’ll understand what I’m talking about, but everyone else made it so easy. They gave themselves up without thinking.”
“What do you mean?”
“It began so simply and invisibly. The scanning of the driver’s license at the pharmacy. The frequent shopper reward card. The phone number collected at the checkout. The free app that vacuums up all your information. The cross-referencing of the social media, the photograph of you that someone else posted and tagged. After a while you couldn’t do anything without giving up your information to a corporation. And, well, predictive analytics did the rest.