(edited just for xjw.....so the poor old bastard could read the print)
This was just a draft of an idea for a story I knoced up and forgot about...
No one really knows who the first apocracker was. The ?New World Society? had risen from the ashes of the WTBTS after the class-action suits of the mid-noughties had financially gutted the old mother-corporation and printing company. There were many who had grown up as a Jehovah?s Witnesses and already got out by the time the ?New Light? had made most JW?s virtual techno-hermits, but for those who grew up in that environment...
Shaun stared out of the window. The slats of the shutters made a clear view of everything at once quite impossible, but by moving his head to-and-from, he could build up a composite image of the road outside. The tree. The decaying mailbox at the end of the front lawn. The assortment of cars parked outside, changing position from time to time, but, barring visitors to their neighbours, the same selection.
Shaun wondered what it was like in the other houses. Every morning, in the long summer afternoons, the short, sharp snow-bound winter afternoons, and the weekends throughout the year, people roundabout moved and pulsed in a pattern of activity. Flocks of kids running around, shouting, laughing, fighting, a few faces standing out either through being the followed or the harrassed. Kids getting together and getting on the large yellow bus each weekday, bar a few weeks here and there when they seemed to run loose. Adults getting the local transport bus that Shaun rode with his parents on their rare trips into town, every morning, and returning, or jumping into cars or on bikes and disappearing early in the day. Other adults, mostly women, but sometimes (most peculiarly) men, seemingly spending the day round the house, visible occasionally through windows, or on trips laden with either small children or shopping bags. Others, sat as he was, in front of a computer most of the day, working or studying online.
Of course, they were on rather different lines. He knew the story well, how his father had been in a chat room and had his mind opened in a conversation with another Witness when the ?state of the world? had come up as a topic. How his father had studied as a non-subscriber before making the big move and severing his links with the world, joining the Christian Congregation of Jehovah?s Witnesses, and subscribing to
From that point, all the information had come through the New Society?s online service, JWOL. News, entertainment, scriptural information, study material, screened Internet access, online stores, a whole ?cradle-to-grave? service, including specially selected doctors that allowed the faithful Witness to isolate themselves from the wicked modern world. How his father had met his mother, in a secure chatroom, their cautious, text-based courtship, a few heavily chaperoned meetings, their marriage, and the production of seven children, four sons, three daughters. How they gathered together with like minded people online, rather than risk contaminating themselves with the world.
They never got any mail. Not even the colourful envelopes that Shaun could see being posted into the neighbours? mail boxes most days, that were more-or-less always thrown into the trash cans kept in the side passages of the wood-framed, genteelly decaying houses, in the sprawling yet ubiquitous suburbs of a small Pennsylvanian town. As for visitors? well, deliveries of goods bought online from the Organisation, and very occasionally members of the local congregation.
Actually, ?congregation? was pushing it, unless one was willing to concede that one could virtually congregate together. ?Local? also was a rather loose term, even applying to a family of converted Amish two hours drive across the State. But congregate they did.
Shuan, clicked on the ?Next? button, almost instinctively. Experimentation had given him a spooky gut feeling about when one of the ?angaels? would consider the spiritual food he was viewing was taking a little too long to digest. If any screen was viewed for too long, the quasi-intelligent programs monitoring the dataflows running deep within the network of dataflows that flowed to the heart of JWOL would pop-up on screen, and ask if help were needed. Well, that was the better of the two options; the tireless observation through the camera sited above his screen, positioned, as it was in every room, to sweep the length of the room, was the real killer. No matter how hard you tried, if you got into trouble and were monitored, it took superhuman control to avoid inadvertently attracting further attention.
The angaels were the thin end of the edge. If your behaviour was warranted bad enough, you could even come under observation from
.
As with congregation,
was a loose term. The house of god now extended to whomever was judged spiritually mature enough to be appointed to a position of quite literal oversight.
grouped these together in a roughly regional fashion, to shepherd each area?s congregation. These elders, whilst having certain privileges commensurate with their trustworthiness and spiritual maturity, were also subject to the observations of the angaels, and could equally be bought to the attention of Network Overseers if any slackness was detected. Each adult Jehovah?s Witness was expected to spend hours working online, contracted out to do virtually any task that didn?t require leaving the house, the Elders were overseers not just of spiritual life but of individual workgroups.
If you kept the pages turning regularly in the various mandated weekly studies, and were smartly dressed in front of the screen when the online meeting were being webcast, and you could spend a large amount of time in your head, you could actually avoid taking on too much of the relentless tide of material that flowed from the screen. If you did really badly in the monthly tests, you were asking for trouble, but, from Shaun?s experience being averagely bad was best. On the occasions he had actually tried, the tide of bonhomie flowing through the screen from his Congregation Overseer was disturbing. Innocuous phrases like ?strong potential? and ?reaching out for privileges? tended to be bandied around. One of the few kids in the New Society living in his immediate vicinity was a regular little goody-goody, and no was he gpoig to be anything like him.
Shuan also had to complete the educational studies. This was indeed a mixed dish. Some of it, well, it just bothered him. The literature spoke frequently of false scientific theory, often with great sarcasm and in the most scathing of terms. The actual theory that was so terrible was not really outlined in great detail? just passing references to god dishonouring theories of the origins of mankind, and standard arguments to use against worldly people should the opportunity arise. Additional data was hard to come by. Just as goofing around in front of the screen when one should be studying could get you into trouble, the few times Stuart has tried searching for information, the ever present angaels would swoop.
But, sometimes, when he was lurking in a chatroom somewhere on the Net and spotted an opening for one of the feed-lines that he had been trained to use to Witness to people, the ensuing conversation gave him little titbits of information. Some was deeply technical stuff he found it very hard to understand - there were huge gaps in the online learning he got from the New Society - but it gave him a vocabulary of terms that allowed him to access information without triggering the angaels...
