Thumbs

                               
"If I wanted to create a surveillance society, I would start by creating dossiers on kindergarten children so that the next generation could not comprehend a world without surveillance."
- Andre Bacard, author of 'The Computer Privacy Handbook'

Prints.  Lots and lots.  Jane and Peter.  Peter and Jane.  I will tell you this if you keep my face in shadow.  Your people will understand when they hear what I have to say.

I knew there would be trouble the day my sister's boy brought the letter home.  

I knew there would be an outcry.  

I came down from my attic to get a cup of water to soak my teeth.  Could hear - what?  Panic in her voice, I thought first - as I dithered on the landing, debated going downstairs.  The excuse of bathroom water not safe for drinking, though it was, came to mind.  I pushed open the kitchen door, my empty glass held out in front of me like a lantern.  

"You!  What do you want?"  she said, then went right back to wailing at him, not waiting for my reply.  I ignored her rudeness, went to the sink as slowly as I could, shuffled my feet on the Spanish tiles because I know it irritates her, but she did not notice this time.  I messed with the cold tap as if it was a creature I had not encountered before, but she did not notice that either.
You know already what the problem was, of course.  That is why you are here talking to me.  It is breaking news, topical.  They should have got the parents' consent before they took what they took: a little piece of each child's soul, like a photograph, but better, because touch was involved, do you see?  

And how it ended up in the wild, so to speak?  Nobody knows, or not precisely, except that it was bound to, in time.  A thing is only unique until it is copied.  Let me tell you about a man, call him Simon, though that is not his real name.  Simon was on the train from Fenchurch Street, though nobody knew that except Simon and one or two disinterested passengers.  He did not have that despicable tendency the teenagers have of announcing to the world by telephone, "I'm on the train".

Simon was looking for something.  His spectacles, probably, down the back of the seat.  There was something down there, but too small, the size of his thumb.  Already he could feel it was a thing filled with sap, far better than any lenses could tell him.  One of those modern gizmos, he had seen them in the Argos catalogue, what were they called?  He found out later it was a USB stick.  Flash or pen drive.  Thumb drive.

Glasses forgotten - though he discovered them later, safe in his pocket - Simon spent the rest of his journey to Dagenham pondering how he could get hold of a computer.   Being frugal, he went the second-hand route; he approached the local recycling group.  The name of the school was not on the USB stick, but that did not matter, because Simon recognised - oh happy day - two of the names.  A boy and a girl.  Their dates of birth.  Most precious of all, like two blooms amongst hundreds of others, their thumbprints.  

One Wednesday, the next week it was, he found himself down at the school without any real recollection of the route between home and here.  Watched from the end of the street as they came gushing out of the gate, a river of thumbs.  Which one are you?  The stick was in his pocket, and so was his hand, stroking it, this phial of life, fizzing gently between his fingers.
                                                                       
It was enough.  For now.

Simon hung on until the knowledge became too much; three weeks, or was it only a fortnight?  Like last time, he did not see his two thumbs; instead he watched the others.   By now he was beginning to ask himself the question:  why the prints?  To identifiy criminals, naturally, but what had whole classrooms of children done wrong?  Nothing, he concluded.  They were angels, innocents.  Delightfully pure, unsullied.  But the question remained, scratched away inside his brain like an imprisoned rodent.

You ask about me?  Yes, I have a job, but it is none of your business.  You digress.  I could tell you I work in a library, that I build computers, but at least one of those is untrue.  It is Simon you want to speak with, truthfully.

Simon is not a scientist.  He knows nothing about the human genome, or DNA, or replication.  But he quickly discovered, by happy accident perhaps, how to copy information from one tiny device to another.  And Simon has
his friends, some might say devotees, waiting around this corner or in that pub, that deserted supermarket car-park.  He did not do it for the money, you understand, though that came in nicely.  He enjoyed playing God, or following in the footsteps of Mendel, if you are irreligious.  The toothsome thing about all of this was that nothing was lost in the copying.  Spread the love, Simon says.  Simon says put your thumbs up to signal agreement.  Simon says "Good, A-OK, go right ahead".

And they did.

But I am getting ahead of myself.  That was later.  First, he found a way to get inside the school building.  He walked right in there, brash as the colour of summer.  Flashed a thumb - somebody's - at the device to the right of the door.  Simon is not a teacher or a teaching assistant or a caretaker.  Once inside, it did not matter what he was.  He belonged because he was inside the hive.

And they followed him as surely as if he had a flute.  They supposed him for a caretaker, or a teaching assistant, or a teacher, maybe.  Simon likes folding things, but he likes unfolding things even better.  Things like boys and girls.  Simon is not Japanese, but he likes to play at origami.  Imagine, small squares of coloured paper between his hands, folding, unfolding, like a film played forwards-backwards-forwards-backwards, losing nothing in the translation.

I knew there would be trouble the day my sister's boy brought the letter home.  But it was too late, already much, much too late, by then.
The day the children disappeared: you cannot say you were not warned.  You signed the warrant with their thumbs, without asking their mothers first.  Nobody knew.  But you cannot say you were not warned.  And you cannot pin it on me.  I do not know where he is.  No matter what Simon says, I am not his keeper.

Simon got rid of the computer, of course; he knew he had to.  He was not wedded to it; it was a tool only.  He paid cash for the newspaper ad, and what if its new owners did collect it from the house he lodged at?  He left home the same day, after telling his so-called landlady certain truths which were bound to make her throw him out.  I expect he followed my advice and folded the hard drive with Norito-prayers made out of zeroes, or kisses dabbed on rice paper, or some real thing for Them to find.

In another part of the city, inside the silent used-to-be-home of another child, the computer: quietly knowing, remembering to itself all of the things it has seen.  His thumbprints, the ones on the outside, quietly glowing, dreaming to themselves, dreaming of their approaching day, their approaching day of dust.


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