Free Orwell's Revenge by Peter Huber Page B

then? At stake was the Party’s second cardinal principle of control: Every citizen worth watching shall be kept fortwenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police.
    O’Brien stared wearily at the enormous map spread out on the table in front of him. For several minutes hisformidable, intelligent face hung motionless and baleful above the desk; then at last he leaned back in his chair again.
    The map had always reminded him of the old underground subway Many of the wires ran through the train tunnels. Years ago, O’Brienhad even climbed down a long access ladder for a quick inspection. He had seen the orange cables suspended like rubber vines from hangers along the walls. Orwell had said a word or two about the enormous capacity of the system, but O’Brien had not cared to linger underground. The tunnels were home to millions of rats.
    The network consisted of several dozen rings and serpentine lines, wandering aimlessly across London, each marked on the map in a different color. There were two or three larger central rings, circling from Kensington to Liverpool Street, and some peripheral ones around Harrow in the west, and Woodford in the east. Across these straggled the other lines, from Morden to HighBarnet, from Hounslow to Cockfosters, from Watford to the East-End, from Waterloo Road across the river to Tower Hill, from the center of the city eastward to Pennyfields, and from Wapping to Whitechapel. Two major rings intersected at the Embankmentnot far from Waterloo Bridge. The network was densely interlinked in the heart of the city; out toward the suburbs it grew progressively thinner.
    O’Brien knew he’d never be down in the tunnels again. He was too old for that now. It didn’t bother him—he had lived well. A Party member from the beginning, he had survived the great purges and then risen to consume the best food, the best wine, the best women. His one pleasure now lay in Party affairs. The decay of his own body was tolerable. What was not tolerable was the decay of the Party itself.
    O’Brien had known—had known instinctively—that the new design of the network was a mistake. The old network had consisted of simple lines connected to simple screens. Dumb terminals, the engineers had called them; idiot boxes. Just as they should be, O’Brien had always thought. The screens had attached directly to the wires, simple copper things, easy to understand, easy to fix, easy to replace. And the wires had led directly to where wires were supposed to lead. O’Brien remembered how he had admired a map of the old system years ago, the million capillaries connected directly to a single, massive brain in the Ministry of Truth, a single, undauntable Heart in the Ministry of Love. Not at all like the tangled mess on the map in front of him now. The old network hadbeen a formal garden of classicism. The new was a wild romantic jungle, full of stupendous beauty, and also ofmorasses and sickly weeds.
    He had been the last to agree to the conversion, O’Brien recalled with bitter satisfaction. The Ministry of Peace had led the charge, terrified that a single well-placed rocket bomb might bring down the whole network. Then the Ministry of Plenty had weighed in: it could no longer ensure supplies of electric power on which the old network had depended. Then the Ministry of Truth: it had demanded a system powerful enough to reach every room, to revise every record, to overwhelm every other form of communication.
    But it had been O’Brien’s own Thought Police who had finally persuaded him. It had been Orwell, in fact, the master architect of it all. Orwell had explained the logic of the new design, explained it patiently, and then explained it again. The old system was overloaded. It hadn’t been designed to handle the cataract of information that would flow from the offices and homes and public squares, and course through the tunnels to the Ministries. Only the new