THE SYSTEM Chapter 4

Fourth Serialized Chapter of The System, Out This Friday, June 6th

Chapter 1 here. Chapter 2 here. Chapter 3 here. Chapter 5 here.

Preorder in digital today; digital, trade paperback, and audiobook (narrated by yours truly) out Friday, June 6th!

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Chapter 4

If we understand the mechanisms and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it?

—Edward Bernays, Propaganda

Montgomery Cranston walked into the Department of the Interior conference room expecting the customary confusion. Instead, he found chaos.

A dozen officials were milling around the room’s long, rectangular table, all talking over one another, the resulting bedlam causing everyone to shout to try to be heard. He caught fragments of multiple conversations twisting together and then unraveling in a cacophony of controlled panic: Emergency disconnect system . . . blowout preventer . . . backup shutdown failure . . .

Some of the faces he recognized—officials from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and of course various bureaus of the Interior Department itself. But he didn’t see who he was looking for.

“Who is OEPC here?” he called out. But no one heard him, it was too loud and they were all too focused on themselves trying to be heard. Even in the best of times, humans liked talking more than listening. More than they wanted to understand, they needed to feel understood.

“Office of Environmental Policy and Compliance,” he called out, louder this time. “Who represents the Office of Environmental Policy and Compliance?”

The cacophony abated a little, as he had hoped. A petite woman with a strained expression walked toward him. “I’m the OEPC representative,” she said. “Julia Hoang.”

The woman’s nervousness agitated him, and he could feel his body wanting to rock back and forth. But he didn’t let it. His parents had taught him that repetitive behaviors like rocking made humans uncomfortable.

“What happened to Menders?” he said.

“He’s with BSEE now.”

“Isn’t BSEE here, too?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

Cranston blew out a breath. If no one had thought to include an official from the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, they were really in disarray. Well, at least someone had thought to call him.

He turned back to the assemblage. “Who here knows that questions have a pitch different from those of assertions?” he called out.

The yammering flickered more. Then, as people realized that others had stopped talking, it guttered entirely.

“That’s why you heard me,” he went on, no longer needing to shout. “It wasn’t my volume so much that reached you as it was the tone of a question. On top of which, questions tend to engage people. Either they know the answer and want to share it, or they wonder if they know, which gets them to pause and think. Regardless, paradoxically a question can be a good way to get someone to stop talking, if only for a moment.”

They were silent now, staring at him as though he had suddenly sprouted antennae. It was okay. People had been looking at him that way for as long as he could remember.

“My name is Montgomery Cranston, and I’m here on behalf of the Secretary of the Interior, who has asked for my assistance in coordinating our response. If you’ve seen with your own eyes what we’re dealing with, please speak up.”

A bearded man in oil-stained coveralls said, “I seen it. And then some.”

Cranston would have made the man as a roughneck even without the coveralls. It was his size, his solidity. And the indentation around his hairline, left by a hard hat he must have worn almost constantly and probably felt half naked without.

“What’s your name?”

“Grove. Mark Grove. Toolpusher on the rig.”

“May I call you Mark?”

“Sure.”

“It’s good that you gave your name, Mark. It’ll make you feel more responsible for the accuracy of what you report. And my calling you by your first name will help make you comfortable talking to me.”

Grove frowned. “What?”

“I’ve been informed there has been an incident at the Yamaloka oil-drilling platform off the coast of Louisiana. What happened?”

Grove stared at him. After a moment, he said, “We don’t know exactly. Right now, it looks worse than the Deepwater Horizon disaster—”

Cranston shook his head. “Not disaster. Everyone knows what the Deepwater Horizon was. No need to embellish or otherwise characterize.”

“Whatever. All the redundancies we put in place following Deepwater Horizon seem to have failed. There was an explosion, we think of a methane bubble, and the rig sank. We lost six men and personally I think we were lucky not to have lost more.”

“Don’t say that. The rig didn’t explode and sink. That’s not helpful.”

“You got mud in your ears? I just told you—”

“It collapsed. You say the rig collapsed. If you say it blew up, you create scary images—bombs, terrorists, Nine-Eleven. By contrast, small things collapse, and when they do, it’s discrete. For example, ‘Grandma passed out and collapsed.’ There isn’t any fire or smoke. Better imagery for us.”

Grove looked left and right as though seeking reassurance. But everyone in the room was as nonplussed as he was.

“Fine,” Grove said after a moment. “The rig collapsed. And somehow this collapse tore a huge fucking gash in the seabed, and—”

“Please don’t swear. Swearing is unprofessional, and public confidence depends to a significant extent on our appearance of professionalism. This is why Transportation Safety Administration personnel wear their distinctive blue uniforms.”

Grove stared. “Are you kidding me?”

“No. People have tried to teach me, but I don’t know how.”

“Doesn’t mean you’re not a joker.”

“I don’t know how to joke, either. Do you see that as I describe how to proceed, I’ve been using the plural pronouns we and us? In other contexts, this could be called forced teaming, which is bad, but here it fosters cooperation and a sense of common purpose.”

Grove scrunched up his face and slowly shook his head. Cranston recognized the meaning: What the fuck? Still, that Grove hadn’t voiced the sentiment was evidence of progress. The man was struggling to keep up overall, but at least the admonition against profanity was sinking in.

“In addition to not swearing,” he went on, “we need to steer clear of words like gash, which has connotations of violence and blood. Also we need to be careful of adjectives like huge. In fact, I don’t want us using adjectives at all. They make it sound like we’re trying too hard. We’ll manage this story with two well-chosen words: leak and spill.Now, Mark, can you tell me how much oil is leaking?”

Grove stared at him for a moment, then said, “Have you seen the underwater imagery? It looks like Mount Vesuvius erupting oil out of the seabed. Our best guess at this point is at least 60,000 barrels a day.”

Cranston wanted to explain to Grove that words like erupt and imagery like Mount Vesuvius would be perfect if they were trying to cause damage rather than perform damage control. But he suppressed the urge. Humans learned in different ways and at different rates, and sometimes correcting a person too much too quickly could be counterproductive.

“That’s not good,” Cranston said. “We can’t say that, at least not right away.”

“Well, it is what it is.”

“We don’t know what it is. You just said yourself that you’re guessing. We’ll start with a low number—let’s make it a thousand barrels a day.”

“Look, you can’t just say it and make it so. There’s—”

“Isn’t it true that the leak includes a thousand barrels a day?”

Grove snorted. “Yeah, and another 59,000 barrels on top of that.”

“We don’t have to mention the second part. Not yet. In fact, doing so would be irresponsible because as you just pointed out, we don’t really know. We’re guessing. So I want us to guess lower.”

“Guess lower?”

“We’ll start with the lower number to ease the incident into the public’s consciousness. Once they realize there’s a spill, we can gradually walk up the number without unduly upsetting people. We’ll be sure to use the word estimate in connection with all numbers. That way, we’ll have the necessary flexibility to increase the numbers as we gain more information.”

“I don’t understand what difference any of this makes,” Hoang said. “We’re not the ones who are going to control the words used to describe this . . . incident. The media will call it whatever they want.”

Cranston looked at her. OEPC would be spearheading media outreach. He wasn’t completely surprised that someone this inept had been put in charge—it was hardly the first time. Well, hopefully she wasn’t ineducable.

“Why do you think that?” he said.

“Well, I mean, it’s not like we can control the media . . .”

“Control isn’t a good word. It sounds totalitarian. Persuade is better.”

Hoang shook her head. “Come on, whatever you call it . . .”

“I called it persuasion when I got the media to refer to the people we were holding at Guantanamo as detainees rather than prisoners. Detainee is much better, wouldn’t you agree? Students get detained for failing to turn in their homework. Nothing to get excited about.”

The room had gone silent, and he went on. “And have you noticed that the media has dropped assassinations and now uses the soothingly dry phrase targeted killings, instead?”

More silence. “The Rules-Based International Order,” he said. “Useful when actual international laws are inconvenient because who could be against order and rules? But really it means the U.S. government makes the rules and gives the orders.”

They were staring at him again, but in a different way now. Their silence no longer felt skeptical, or even quizzical. More like a door that had opened.

“Nor is it a coincidence that America doesn’t do invasions, only interventions. Which don’t inflict casualties but only produce collateral damage. Also not a coincidence that if you’re against interventions, you must be an isolationist. And no one wants to be an isolationist. Because generally humans fear being alone.”

He realized he’d slipped saying humans instead of people. His parents had taught him not to refer to the humans that way because it made them uncomfortable. But this time, no one seemed to notice. A few people chuckled, even though he’d already told them he didn’t know how to joke.

There were so many more fascinating examples he might have shared. But he sensed they already understood about as much as they would be able to.

“All right,” Hoang said. “But how do we stop it?”

They all looked at him expectantly, even Grove.

“I’m sure there’s a way,” Cranston said. “Remember, it’s just a leak.

* * * * *

Chapter 1 here. Chapter 2 here. Chapter 3 here. Chapter 5 here.

Endnotes to each chapter are here.

Preorder in digital today; digital, trade paperback, and audiobook (narrated by yours truly) out Friday, June 6th!

And if you’re in the Bay Area, I’ll be launching the book at Kepler’s this coming Friday, June 6th, at 6:00 pm. Hope to see you there!