Burning Violin

"Vasily Hydane and I had been friends for a good couple of decades before the idea of Da Vinci Law came to mind. My vigor for the artificial had faded and philosophical questions plagued me." He nodded to Crow. "The announcement of your achievement of true sentience, along with the Turing tests all coming back positive, was the last straw really. Vasily and I got horrendously drunk one night and laid it all out on the table. We would form a company to fight the good fight, if no one else would. And believe me, at the time yours was the only band wagon. We were called everything over the years, alarmist, anachronistic, paranoid. But over time, people started to open their eyes, see that the old science fiction stories were not so wrong after all. You see, science fiction is no different in a way than practicing scenarios in your head, except on a societal level. Science fiction is figuring out what to do in situations before they even arise."

 

Osteryoung stopped at a photo hanging on the wall in a simple black frame. The picture itself was a simple black and white photo of three men standing outside a courthouse. "That's Vasily and I, along with Robert Mathers, who you met yesterday of course. That building in the background is the Supreme Court, back fifteen years ago after the Lawrence vs. North Dakota ruling."

 

Crow nodded. "I remember that." He sipped at his coffee. "A lot of us were really mad after that one."

 

A laugh bubbled from Osteryoung. "Well, that was the only success we had at the Supreme Court. Two more cases made it there but we lost both of them. Since then, we have funneled more and more energy into our miscellaneous ventures."

 

"Like the, uh, problems International Robotics has had lately." Crow said.

 

"Yes." Osteryoung said. "Vasily died very unexpectedly four years ago, but his son Yuri has taken over an admirable amount of work. Yuri has harvested a number of valuable contacts in Russia and Eastern Europe, which is a hot bed for both the idealism we want and the technological talent we desire."

 

"Plus their economy is in the shitter, so their work comes at bargain basement prices." Crow said. He flushed for a moment, realizing that frankness had emerged from his diplomatic shell while he admired the architecture.

 

Osteryoung laughed again. "I think you'd get along very well with Hydane's associates."

 

They walked down the hall for a few minutes, as if the momentum of the conversation needed to build-up before Osteryoung could go on. After a long pause, he did, as they looked out from floor to ceiling windows over the edge of the city and the dark blue expanse of the bay.

 

"There is a plan, a horrible plan." Osteryoung said after a while. "The sentis are not stupid, in fact in many ways they are actually smarter than us. This isn't a bad sci-fi movie in which the sentis are our superiors in every way except for the ability to feel and love. They can do all that, what makes them different is not inferiority in some area, but their very artificiality, in fact their very superiority. As humans, as life itself, our primary directive is the propagation of the species not the propagation of something better than our species. It is very possible that the sentis are better than us, that they are more adaptable and in the end are a better choice for the universe. But life, you see, life is selfish. The superiority of the sentis is an irrelevancy to those like us who choose to survive, whatever the costs. There are some among the sentis who take the same attitude. They view themselves as a species, although they are nothing but a twisted mirror, they see humanity as the same threat that I see in them. Their plan is to eliminate mankind from the equation entirely, just as I intend to eliminate them."

He made the drive up 101 into the city, sticking to the slow lane as much as possible to avoid being killed. Truckers took this route, and the fast lanes were choked with trucks pulling five trucks in tow. With the expert driving of sentis, regulations had been relaxed to the point that the fast lane looked like a series of short freight trains. Human drivers still couldn't tow more than two, but it was a non-issue since the trucker's union had lost the battle to cheaper prices of sentis and ceased to exist. Even at twenty grand each, the specialized sentis paid for themselves in three months, and no union in the world could fight those savings.

 

The smell of salt and fish from the sea filtered into the car as he pulled off onto highway 80 and then Fremont Street down into the Financial District. Da Vinci Law leased three floors near the top of the slick skyscraper next to the Transamerica building. He dropped his car off with the parking attendant, who was of course a human in this building. Crow smiled, Da Vinci Law had apparently backed up their philosophy with heavy pressure on the building. I'm sure they have to pay the guy's salary, but it really is the principle of the matter.

 

Crow caught the elevator up to the fortieth floor and straightened his tie in the mirrored walls of the lift, an odd nervousness playing with his stomach. Christ, it's not a date, get over it.

 

The receptionist - a non-robotic blond - showed Crow into a small conference room and fetched him some coffee in a Da Vinci Law vanity mug. Crow stared out over downtown, watching a blue and yellow ferry steam out over the gentle waves to dock at Alcatraz. The door swung open a few minutes later and a wheelchair bound man with a hard face rolled in, his features old but well-aged like a twenty year old scotch. He wore a well-tailored suit but it could not hide legs shriveled beyond the effects of age. Crow walked to him and offered his hand.

 

"I'm Crow Daedalus." He said and shook the man's hand. "Mr. Osteryoung, I presume?"

 

"Doctor, if one wants to split hairs." Osteryoung said with a touch of British accent to his voice, perhaps he had originated there before a long life in the states. "I was quite the robotics protégé in my day, if you can believe it."

 

"Ironic, to say the least." Crow said.

 

"No, not really, that word is misused for the most part." Osteryoung said. "Irony is the fact that I spent twenty years developing artificial intelligence technologies and not a day researching degenerative muscle ailments that could give me back my legs. I helped make machines that think instead of medicines to make me walk."

 

"Touché." Crow said. "I patented the first sentient machine, if you lost your legs, what do you think fate is going to take from me?"

 

Osteryoung laughed. "Come, walk with me, if you don't mind bad jokes."

 

They meandered down a couple of hallways, now and then dodging workers rushing about their daily tasks. Crow listened, interjecting only now and then with questions or comments as Osteryoung rambled about the history of Da Vinci Law.

Crow and Hydane caught the next flight back to California on schedule, and the flight passed with excruciating slowness. Hydane tried to start several conversations, but Crow was preoccupied with his own thoughts and only spared a reluctant brain wave or two for regret that he was being a rather lousy traveling companion.

 

A senti wants to be charged with murder and has professed his love for a human, albeit a human with a penchant for mechanical replacement. Crow thought. And they thought relationships were confusing before the advent of artificial intelligence.

 

The real question in his mind was whether it was possible for a senti and a human to really love each other. Physically, it was a toss up. Certainly some models of sentis designed for sexual imitation at the expense of everything else had been sold by less reputed robotics companies over the last decade, but the result was almost inevitably a one way transaction, even if good acting was included in the artificial intelligence. Love was more than sex of course, but the physical barrier seemed so insurmountable across the board that the question had to be asked. What possible real relationship could the two have? One a fetishist for the artificial, one artificial with an apparent fetish for being human. As if most human relationships aren't based on even more screwed up foundations. Crow noted. Of course, the question he could never quite ask himself lingered at the edge of consciousness. Could she possible return the feeling? Could Rebecca love Green Eyes?

 

Those considerations infected Crow's thoughts all the way through the landing and the return home. Crow played catch with Alexander in the backyard for a long while, even attempting to show him how to throw a curveball, though this only ended in the loss of the ball into the dense foliage behind the back fence. As they walked into the house, the questions put off by the simple and sweet meditation of throwing the ball drove him into a melancholy that lasted the rest of the evening, circling around one central theme, dragging around in circles like a rat in a maze. Can you deny the fundamental humanity of something capable of love?

 

The next morning, Crow dropped Alexander off at school, feeling suddenly more comfortable with driving himself. He knew that he was not the only person who refused to let the robots take over driving as a matter of principle, and he thought idly of seeing if Craigslist had any clubs of the sort, but figured that a driving club was a bit too Victorian for his tastes. Yuri had called him on the way home and asked him to come into Da Vinci Law's San Francisco headquarters for lunch to meet Francis Osteryoung, one of the firm's founders, who had taken a great deal of interest in Crow's status with the company in particular. Crow felt a little awkward about what seemed like a sort of job interview, but accepted the meeting anyway. They were after all paying for the legal costs that were keeping him from being railroaded into state prison for the next twenty years.

Chapter Nine - Revelations

 

Doctor Anderson had run a somewhat hidden clinic for the last decade at St. Theresa's medical center so that he only received the cases of the oddest nature or most resistant diagnosis. The idea originated in technical support call centers. Low level operators (or doctors) were trained to handle the basics in as quick a manner as possible, but problems that resisted solution were passed up the chain level by level until the most impossible cases were tended by the most elite operators (or doctors). Doctor Anderson's unmarked room existed three levels deep in the hospital's hierarchy, specializing in pediatric disorders in particular. An occasional patient like Alexander Daedalus slipped through the lines of defense to talk to Anderson directly, usually by having connections within the hospital itself sufficient to bring pressure down from above. It was harmless for the most part - the Director of Operations liked to send his parents up to the geriatrics experts without going through proper channels, but that really just saved the non-experts time passing people up the ladder for the most part. Alexander Daedalus was the rarer sort of level-jumper, the person who had external connections deemed important by the hospital board. Anderson knew that the patient's father was something of a mildly famous engineer or scientist and that translated into connections.

 

So, Anderson had run Alexander through the usual battery of tests, and a few off the wall ones just for good measure. The symptoms explained by the father were just vague enough that they could be entirely imaginary in the first place. Certainly the patient seemed healthy enough, was a paragon of health really. Blood tests came back normal across the board, as did X-Rays, MRIs and CAT-scans.

 

Anderson paused, the CAT-scan of Alexander's brain was completely fogged over. He zoomed in a bit on the computer, and rotated the three-dimensional image of the child's brain. A cloud of grayish static had replaced the entire brain on the scan, looking like a three-dimensional off-antenna television. Anderson blinked and then grunted. The scan must have been defective for some reason, maybe the machine was going on the fritz. He made a note to send off a message to the technical staff to take a look at the scanner.

 

A flashing window popped up on the screen and informed Anderson that the DNA scan had been completed. Anderson clicked on it, intending to have it filed away and make a note that the DNA did not appear to match the record so the test must have had a glitch, but that it was not needed as a medical necessity and therefore would not be repeated unless the patient returned. Instead, the window informed him that the DNA sample had matched the international missing persons database that was checked by the backend computer systems in every case. Federal authorities had already been notified. Anderson swore and looked over the phone, fully expecting it to ring at that moment with very pissed off government officials on the other end of the line.

 

"Daedalus you son of a bitch, what did you do?" Anderson asked himself. He stared at the screen for a moment and then rehearsed in his mind what his version of reality was going to be. He dialed the phone number offered on the screen. "I don't know what you did, but I'm sure as hell not taking the fall for it." Anderson muttered.

Micro-stories are tiny tid bits of stories that tell a tale in an absurdly small number of words. They're found in occasional contests and postings on writer's message boards in the dim corners of the internet. There are no set definitions: sometimes fifty words, sometimes a hundred. For this posting, I wrote twenty micro stories that lean towards horror. The twist? The last few words of each become the first few words of the next micro story. The final story ends with the first few words of the set to bring it full circle. The parameters are completely arbitrary, but then so are most rules. Enjoy.

I.                     A blood soaked bandage covered his right eye socket. He gave it for a glimpse of wisdom. It now sees the truth behind all things but will never stop bleeding. The blood has mystical properties.

II.                    The blood has mystical properties. It flows from his fingertips as they bash against the keyboard, never resting. If he stops typing, he will die.

III.                  He will die. The judge and jury have had their say and only the executioner remains. A million volts of justice, but when he steps through the final doorway, he is alone on an empty world.

IV.                  He is alone on an empty world, its sky purple and its flowers red. A dull bluish-orange sun beats down through his faceplate. The suit carries enough automated nutrients to keep him alive for a month. The wreckage is the punch line.

V.                   The punch line of any joke is sadistic. If there's no victim, there's no joke. The world itself may be a punch line, but in a cosmic oversight, we were not informed.

VI.                  "We were not informed," the words echo. Handcuffs click closed, police smirk and lead the way. Magic words, those. Knowledge was power and so withholding it deprived the state of power. Silence was treason.

VII.                Silence was treason on the low slung trireme. The ship's listener could read intent with a song. Every sailor, from cabin boy to shift commander, knelt before their captain with offered song. Those that refused were drowned in casks of sea water.

VIII.               Casks of sea water lined the museum walls, a thick-boarded barrel for each of the twelve seas. A thirteenth barrel sat empty at the center of the room, accorded a place adorned with candles and mystic herbs. "The Lost" was carved into the metal supporting bands, runes symbolizing the lost sea of the immortals. Once it had been full, but over the centuries every king stole a little until superstitious monarchs stooped to pricking themselves with the cask's splinters in vain hope of a few extra years.

IX.                  Hope of a few extra years drove Ruby across the Nevada desert to a broken town of retirees and gas station attendants. A place of magic hid there according to an old story on the internet.

X.                   An old story on the internet showed Roger how to raise the dead. The soul moved on though, and the body is just so much meat. That meat is base, a low source of animal instinct. Without the soul to temper it, the body is an animal. Roger saw his mistake its eyes. No zombie this, for intelligence is part of the meat.

XI.                  Part of the meat always clings to the bone, or so his grandmother always said. Towards the end, she lost her mind, but something remained behind to claw at those who cared for her. She cackled that phrase, up until the day she was found dead on her bathroom floor. Some say the day after she was found helpless on her bathroom floor. Her presence nagged him for the rest of his life, half seen glimpses in the mirror, half heard snippets of conversation never muttered by mortal lips.

XII.                Mortal lips whisper for help. She does not. Her check rejected, her ATM card lost, I offer to pay, and must do it over her objections. I carry dense groceries for her daughter's dinners. We step through automatic doors into an unimagined world.

XIII.               An unimagined world stretches around every child. Their imagined worlds are for more beautiful and terrible. One by one, the architecture of dreams falls into the disrepair and chaos of the mundane and knowable. We all keep a nugget of our old dreams.

XIV.              Old dreams drink at their own bar on the far side of Nowhere. They sip stall lagers and bitter scotch not aged quite right. Some dreams you would recognize. "I want to be President" sits in one corner, a bottle of whiskey in hand. Campaign buttons hang on his sleeves from a hundred never entered elections. All their words run, like ink in a tear-splattered notebook. A ballerina with smeared mascara slides in across from him and asks about the wound through his heart. "That," he says, "is the mark of those for whom I am no longer just a dream."

XV.                No longer just a dream, Jack's Coffee Heaven stood tall with a glistening sign, crystal windows, and a spreading aroma of roasted beans. The first customer entered the shop and whispered to Jack. The store closed at noon forever.

XVI.              Forever was her promise, but now I hear her night and day despite her death. Whispers, shouts, sweet tickles in my ear. I know not how she remains, but she haunts me still.

XVII.             She haunts me still, the woman from the store. Slender, tight, luxuriant. Her look draws me on, her brown eyes beckoning. Her knife slides across my neck.

XVIII.           My neck aches from the stiff drive and stiffer company. In the trunk is the most irritating of them. I drive for the docks and stroke the knife in the passenger seat.

XIX.              The passenger seat of his Nissan was filled with a clutter of reference books about space and mechanical engineering. He mutters, "I may have stumbled on the secret."

XX.                The secret door looked like part of the wall. Only Charlie could see the silvering of light through cracks on the edge. Dust motes scattered away from the light as if it was a stiff breeze. Whispers came from the door except when Charlie looked right at it. The knob would not budge until the day he tried it with a wounded hand, wrapped in a blood soaked bandage.

It was a subtle mechanism, so subtle that he had almost missed it even when staring right at it in all its magnificent detail. Crow traced a suspicion out of the areas that controlled aggression and into the neural nets governing relations with other individuals. It took some time to unravel, but once he understood, it clicked into place with the force of a sledge hammer to his chest. This neural net had been altered by a third party. It was subtle, but once identified, undeniably having no source other than malice.

 

Someone had co-opted the ability to control aggression in these sentis. Someone, or something, he growled to himself, had modified the neural net so that only other sentis could control the aggression. In fact, the aggression sub-net was not the only area affected. It was a more general adjustment than that, such that regardless of their source, orders from a human chain of command would be disregarded when contradicted by those from sentis.

 

Crow stared at the screen for a long while before doing anything. The attack was untraceable, so finding the culprit was right out, but it was possible still to fix it. He began work on Hydane's specifications again and found that they left a bad taste in his mouth. Crow took a few mental steps back and began working on a solution that was more elegant and more to his liking.

 

Crow took all of the various threads of decision making that had been co-opted originally for the chain of command and later by the saboteur and instead fed those threads right back into the core neural net. In simple terms, Crow made it so that these sentis would ignore any order if it went against their better judgment. Crow smiled at his work and wrapped up, a rare satisfaction at a job well done. If the measure of a man is whether he makes up his own mind, I think I just made these piles of bolts men instead of sentis. Neither Hydane nor the military nor the saboteur nor Da Vinci Law at large would approve of what he had done. And that's why I'm so happy about it.

 

Crow wrapped up quickly and checked his work into CVS. He shook hands again with Dr. Lawthorn, who had done an admirable job of generally staying out of the way and yet being available when his help was required. Crow did not share his modifications of the plan with Hydane, choosing instead to muse on it himself for a while. When he arrived back at the hotel, Crow ordered room service and slipped into sweatpants to watch the news. Right when he got comfortable, he realized that he needed to call Green Eyes back. Crow sighed, retrieved his phone and jumped through the hoops necessary to get a line into Green Eyes. He wondered what a senti could define as "personal issues", and was not disappointed by the answer.

 

"It is Rebecca." Green Eyes said. "I'm afraid that I have fallen in love with her."

 

Crow shut off the news and rubbed his eyes. He had a feeling that he would have a headache before this phone call was finished.

"Pandora's Box." Hydane muttered.

 

Crow smiled without any warmth. "Oh you have no idea." Crow said and paused, reflecting. "The first ones screamed." He said. "All the computer models would come up clean and good to go, but once we flipped the switch, they would scream in abject horror until we shut them back off."

 

"How did you fix it?" Hydane asked, fascinated in something that morally disgusted him, like a rubber-necker getting an eyeful of blood spattered asphalt.

 

"We didn't." Crow smiled. "We thought that we had hit a brick wall, but really it was a huge mark of progress."

 

"I don't understand." Hydane said.

 

"What does a baby do when it is born?" Crow asked. "What lets you know it's healthy?"

 

Hydane paused. "It cries. No, it screams. Babies always scream."

 

"And there we have it." Crow said. "That was one of the biggest revelations."

 

"But why?" Hydane asked. "Why do they scream?"

 

"Some, those who believe in reincarnation, believe that babies scream because they are being ripped out of heaven." Crow said. He laughed. "Maybe we do have souls. Maybe the sentis do too."

 

Hydane snorted and went off to look for more coffee, leaving Crow to his work. After another hour or so, Crow found the part of the design for which he had been watching out for all these hours. A large section of the neural net, even more than normal given the particular goals of this design, was dedicated towards managing aggression towards detected threats. One of the primary specifications desired by the armed forces, and one of the most difficult concepts to construct in an artificial intelligence was the ability to external modify distinct thresholds of aggression. The ability to with the turn of a dial turn up the aggression or passivity of an entire army of sentis depending on the military situation was tactically indispensable. Crow smiled and began to add his own subtle modifications to the schema, splitting up and reemphasizing certain threads of the neural net to the design specified by Hydane.

 

Da Vinci Law's goal was to make it so that these particular sentis could not in fact be dialed up in aggression, that they would always be set at the most minimum levels of violence. The idea was that if the sentis utterly failed in combat, that was one more arena from which they would be banned, and thus another victory for Da Vinci Law's goals. Crow had his own ideas in mind about that, but found after a moment that something was wrong with the neural net as designed.

Crow lost himself in the work for the next few hours, digging through blueprints and computer diagrams of the internal workings of these most advanced sentis. The military spared no expense on these machines, constructing them of only the finest alloys and materials, whatever the cost might be. Crow was frankly a bit jealous. In his work at International Robotics, they had been so focused on the civilian market and in driving the price down another bit by another bit that he had never had the luxury of just building something the best way possible. He thought of the facsimile of Trinan in his basement and his mood darkened for the better part of an hour.

Hydane lost interest almost immediately and wandered off now and then for forays to retrieve coffee or reading materials. The Russian had been explained on this trip as Crow's liaison. No more explanation had been necessary, and it covered why Hydane was not interested at all in the unintelligible details that were Crow's bread and butter.

"So is that what can make a machine think?" Hydane asked over Crow's shoulder at one point. The tone was devoid of any emotion, lacking even the sardonic edge Crow would have expected, although it would be detrimental to his cover.

Crow nodded, thought better of it, and nodded. "The mind of a senti, or a human for that matter is surprisingly dependent on its body." He gestured at the computer screen, and cursed as he almost spilled his coffee. "Looking at this and saying 'that's how they think' is as gross an understatement as saying the same thing about a picture of a neuron from a human."

"What does the body have to with it?" Hydane asked, sipping at his own coffee.

"Everything, really. That was at the root of figuring out the problem in the first place." Crow said. He sipped his own coffee and marveled at the texture, smoother than silk. The easiest way to tell the quality of a company is by the quality of the free coffee. These guys must have funding bursting at the seams with brew this fine lolling around in the break rooms.

Crow took a logical step backwards. "Did you ever wonder why we never managed to achieve anything more than the crudest of artificial intelligences on computer systems, no matter how big and powerful we made them?" Hydane shook his head and Crow went on. "Well, neither did anyone else until a few years ago. Human intelligence is in some sense inseparable from the body that houses it. Take that away and you may manage raw cunning, but not self awareness. Something cannot become self-aware without a self to become aware of." Crow said, emphasizing the words to make them more clear. "That was the real breakthrough. We stopped work on the computer systems and started work on the bodies. We started to build bodies mimicking the human form, with enough sensation to roughly mimic the human experience. We were putting the self into self-awareness." Crow shrugged. "After that, we adjusted our artificial intelligences appropriately, and we had taken the first step to the sentis."

The elevator opened on the first floor as Crow tucked the phone away and he readjusted the laptop bag on his shoulder and started moving. He only waited a few minutes in the lobby, reading bits of brochures on dining in the area and various city tours and harbor cruises, before Hydane arrived in another perfectly fitted suit, ready to conquer the day's work. "My friend, let's get to work!" Hydane declared expressively and pulled Crow by the arm out onto the street where they could grab another taxi out to the factory site.

What impressed Crow the most about Vancouver was the ineluctable moisture saturating every pore of the city. Everywhere he looked rain-drenched ferns and explosions of leaves made the world look like it was being seen through a damp emerald screen. Every lawn had a just-watered look of lushness and every crack in the pavement disgorged blankets of moss. His clothes clung to his skin like a needy lover, drunk on moisture and humidity. Crow wiped an indefatigable film from his forehead every few minutes with clammy palms.

The cab pulled up outside the factory ten minutes outside the outskirts of Vancouver and Hydane gave him a generous tip. A vine-covered stone wall about fifteen feet tall surrounded a sprawling campus of office buildings and a massive complex that resembled an aircraft hanger. Crow and Hydane trudged up the brick path to a wide steel gate designed to allow eighteen wheelers in when necessary, but with a small person-sized door installed on the left for individual entry. Hydane pulled out his driver's license and Crow did the same, both swiping them in turn at the gate. The complex's database pulled up all relevant information and told the guard to open the door and let them in. It was a senti, Crow saw, and a damned expensive one. Head to toe artificial flesh, designed to look, act, and talk in every way like a real person. All but the best trained eyes could even tell them apart from people. Crow could discern the difference, but he saw Hydane could not, since he nodded and thanked the guard. General etiquette called for ignoring sentis, although people were more and more treating the most advanced as next to human. Hydane would not be one of those, Crow figured.

At the front door, they were met by an eager individual in the uniform of tech workers everywhere, baby blue shirt and khaki pants. He wore them as loose and sloppy as his unkempt beard and unruly hair.

"Dr. Daedalus, I cannot tell you what an honor this is!" The man exclaimed. "I'm Dr. Lawthorn and I'll be walking you through everything you need today."

"Thank you, doctor." Crow said in a slightly weary voice grown accustomed to the long years of being recognized by peers. "Let's get going then."

What you have to understand about laws is that they were never intended to protect anyone. Laws provide order, a structure that organizes how people interact. They are a set of guidelines and instructions intended to program human behavior. The notion that laws protect us, that they exist to outlaw harmful behavior from hurting all of us citizens is a quaint one. But that notion is the article of faith upon which civil society survives. Murder is not outlawed because it is wrong but because those who would murder are not deemed useful citizens.

Any behavior that is useful, regardless of harm, is perfectly legal. Just ask any CEO who has destroyed a thousand lives at a stroke. Ask his victims. The equation of morality with legality is one of the great myths of the modern world.

Victimless crimes are the most obvious hole in the belief that laws are there for protection rather than order. Prostitution, substance abuse, and the entire gamut of crimes not against individuals but against Puritanism cannot exist to protect people since such crimes by definition do not hurt anyone. Why are there victimless crimes at all then?

There are many victimless crimes that are strictly structural in nature. Most civil laws fall into this category: parking laws, traffic laws, noise ordinances. These laws exist in order to grease the wheels of society and keep the entire engine moving. They are not conceptually nefarious, except in so far as every bureaucracy is its own form of malice.

Structural laws are distinct though from criminal laws that punish individuals for actions that do not affect other people. Smoking pot in your home does not just not infringe on the rights of anyone else (the supposed basis of law, the protection of other citizens' rights), but does not affect anyone else in any way whatsoever. The criminalization of private behavior, whether in the realms of sexuality or substance, is in stark contradiction to the assumed basis of laws. If a joint is smoked in a forest and no one smells it, was a crime still committed? How can an action that sends no ripples out to the rest of society be deemed harmful, illegal, wrong?

To understand why certain private behaviors are outlawed, we must approach the problem obliquely. Who are such laws designed to ensnare? Drug use laws primarily trip up young people who disdain following rules for the sake of the rules themselves. The laws that don't make sense exist specifically to catch individuals who are willing to break laws that don't make sense. They are tripwires set up by society to criminalize the individuals unwilling to accept arbitrary government authority.

The individuals most likely to break the laws that really matter to power brokers are the exact same individuals who are likely to break stupid laws when they are young. And in doing so, they are demonized and removed from the political process for the rest of their lives. Stalin's secret police could not have dreamed of creating so perfect a snare for those most likely to resist the government. Society itself condemns the very individuals most likely to be willing to fight the government on behalf of the people.

America has perfected this system, imprisoning over one percent of its adult population. One out of every thirty American adults is in prison, on parole, or on probation. Over half those convicts were convicted of nonviolent victimless crime. If there was no victim, if there was no violence, what exactly could the crime have been?

Marijuana, we are told, is a gateway drug, it leads to criminal behavior. Alcohol though is perfectly kosher. A six pack of Coors never led to anything but good times. The reason alcohol doesn't lead to a criminal future is that being caught with three ounces of it doesn't sacrifice your freedom, your education and your right to vote. Make any arbitrary behavior criminal and it will beget further criminal behavior. Criminalize cracking your knuckles and knuckle cracking will become a gateway behavior, guaranteed to lead to a lifetime of shitty jobs and dead-end opportunities to nowhere. And a significant portion of our potential future leaders will be caught up in the dragnet. Leaders buck authority. They tear down arbitrary rules. If we criminalize the arbitrary, we criminalize the best of who we are. We outlaw the very children upon whom the future depends.

It's a circular logic. Item A is illegal. Illegality's punishment is to destroy your life and brand you as a criminal. Therefore anyone who touches item A is a criminal with a destroyed life. The knot pulls tight for any value of item A. Marijuana, knuckle cracking, cola, burritos, homosexuality. Insert absolutely any behavior or substance for A and you get the same result. That is not a judgment of item A, it is the beautiful design of a mechanism for destroying individuality.

More to the point, it is a system designed to break and discredit at a young age any individual willing to openly challenge authority.