PART ONE: BEFORE

---

Chapter 1: The Two Minutes

 

The telescreen gave no warning. It never did.

Arthur Holt was at his speakwrite in the Records Department when the
tone began---the rising whine that preceded the Two Minutes Hate. Around
him, clerks pushed back chairs, the legs scraping against the concrete
floor in a ragged chorus. The sound of shuffling feet. The collective
movement toward the Assembly Room, as regular as breathing, as
unthinking.

He stood with the others. He walked with the others. The speakwrite on
his desk continued to hum in his absence, the speed regulator dial
catching the fluorescent light, waiting for corrections that would come
when the two minutes ended.

The Records Department occupied the sixth floor of the Ministry of
Truth. Arthur had worked here for eleven years, or it might have been
twelve---time had a way of becoming uncertain when you spent your days
making the past uncertain. His job was simple: he spoke into the
speakwrite, and the machine transcribed his corrections to history.
Yesterday's production figures became today's fulfilled quotas.
Yesterday's allies became today's enemies. The work was necessary. The
work was endless.

The corridor leading to the Assembly Room smelled of synthetic coffee
and recycled air. Arthur walked with his eyes forward, his pace matching
the pace of those around him. The telescreen on the corridor wall showed
Big Brother's face, the eyes following the procession of blue overalls.
Everyone walked the same speed. Everyone kept their face neutral. The
corridor was long and white and without shadow.

The Assembly Room was already filling when Arthur entered. Rows of
benches faced the telescreen---the large one, twice the size of those in
the flats, bright enough to wash out shadows. He found his usual
position: third row from the back, near the wall. Not so far back as to
suggest reluctance. Not so close to the front as to invite notice.

His blue overalls were identical to every other blue overall in the
room. His face was as gray as every other face. The Ministry had a way
of making people uniform, even in their exhaustion.

The telescreen flickered. Then the face appeared.

Emmanuel Goldstein. The Enemy of the People, as he was called. His thin
face materialized on the screen---the narrow forehead, the small goatee,
the spectacles that magnified his eyes into something not quite human.
He looked like what he was: a man who had betrayed everything. A man who
had chosen to become the enemy.

Arthur's hands tightened on the back of the bench in front of him. The
wood was worn smooth from years of gripping hands. Around him, the first
murmurs began.

Goldstein spoke. His voice was bleating, jeering, full of contempt. He
attacked Big Brother. He attacked the Party. He called for freedom of
speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly---those obscene words,
those relics of the capitalist past that had brought humanity to the
edge of extinction before the Party had saved it. His face twisted as he
spoke, and beneath the words, beneath the screen, music began to rise: a
marching rhythm, militant and terrible, drums that seemed to beat in the
chest rather than the ears.

The murmurs became growls. The growls became shouts. The room began to
pulse with collective fury.

Arthur opened his mouth and screamed.

His throat had been trained over years of Two Minutes Hates to produce
the correct sound---rage, pure and purifying, directed at the bleating
face on the screen. His fists clenched until his fingernails bit into
his palms. His face contorted until his jaw ached. Around him, the room
had become a single organism of hatred, a creature with five hundred
mouths all screaming the same scream.

A woman three rows ahead threw her shoe at the telescreen.

Arthur screamed louder. He screamed because Goldstein was evil. He
screamed because the Party was right. He screamed because if you
screamed loud enough, you didn't have to think, and if you didn't have
to think, you were safe. The sound tore at his throat. His eyes watered.
The woman's shoe tumbled through the air, a black arc against the
blazing screen.

The shoe bounced off the telescreen and landed on the floor with a flat
slap. Someone would collect it afterward. Someone always collected them
afterward.

The music rose to a crescendo. Goldstein's face dissolved into the
image of a Eurasian soldier---massive, blank, inhuman---the enemy's
boot stamping on Oceanian faces forever unless the Party stood firm. The
screaming reached its peak, a sound that seemed to come from the walls
themselves, from the building's foundation, from somewhere beneath
conscious thought.

And then Big Brother.

His face filled the screen: calm, protective, the black-mustachioed
countenance of salvation itself. The music shifted---soft now, almost
tender, a lullaby after a nightmare. The screaming stopped. The room
went silent. Five hundred people exhaled at the same moment.

Arthur's throat hurt. His hands were shaking. His breathing came
slowly, in long exhales that seemed to empty something out of him,
something that had built up during the two minutes and now drained away
like water through sand.

The National Anthem played, and they all stood straighter. Big Brother
gazed down at them, his eyes following each face in the room, seeing
everything, forgiving everything, protecting them from the chaos that
waited outside the Party's embrace.

The telescreen clicked off. The lights returned to their normal
institutional dimness.

People began filing out. Arthur waited a moment, letting his breathing
slow, feeling the ache in his jaw where he had clenched it. The woman
three rows ahead had returned to her bench. She was putting her shoe
back on.

Arthur watched her fingers on the laces. He had seen her throw a shoe
yesterday. And the day before that. The same shoe---he was almost
certain of it. The same scuff mark on the toe, the same worn place at
the heel where the leather had begun to separate from the sole.

He should not notice such things. Noticing was the first step toward
thinking, and thinking was the first step toward doubt, and doubt was
the first step toward the Ministry of Love.

But he had noticed. The scuff mark was distinctive---a pale scrape
across the black synthetic leather, the kind of mark that came from
catching your foot on a pneumatic tube housing in the corridors. He had
noticed yesterday because it was an unusual shoe, better kept than most,
with laces that still matched. He had noticed today because she had
thrown it again. The same motion. The same arc through the air. The same
flat sound when it hit the floor.

Someone collected the shoes. Someone redistributed them.

Arthur walked back to his speakwrite. The dial on the side---the speed
regulator---was loose again. It had been loose for months, wobbling
slightly when he adjusted it, the mechanism beneath worn out from years
of use. He should report it, but reporting required forms, and forms
required explanations, and explanations could lead to questions about
productivity, about why he needed to adjust the speed so often, about
what he was thinking when he adjusted it. Better to work around it.
Better not to be noticed.

The Ministry of Truth hummed around him. Three thousand rooms above
ground level, and who knew how many below. Pneumatic tubes ran along the
ceilings like arteries, carrying documents to destinations Arthur would
never know. The building itself was a pyramid---glittering white
concrete soaring three hundred meters into the sky, too large to be
human, too perfect to be anything but the Party's triumph over history
itself.

WAR IS PEACE.

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

The slogans were picked out on the facade in elegant lettering, visible
from any point in London. Arthur had stopped seeing them years ago. They
were simply true, in the way that the sky was blue and the ground was
solid. To question them would be to question the evidence of his own
senses.

A pneumatic tube sighed, and a cylinder dropped into his tray. He
unscrewed the cap, extracted the slip of paper inside, and began to
read. A correction to a production report from 1982. The Ninth
Three-Year Plan had been revised; the original figures were now
inaccurate. He was to rectify them.

Arthur fed the original document into the memory hole beside his desk.
The brass slot accepted it with a small whoosh of air, carrying the
paper down to the furnaces, where it would be incinerated along with
every other inconvenient truth. The slot was worn smooth around the
edges. Thousands of documents had passed through it. Thousands more
would follow.

He activated his speakwrite.

"Production figures, Oceanic Standard Code 1982-Q3-4451, rectified per
Minitrue directive dated today's date..."

His voice was flat, efficient, the voice of a man who had been speaking
corrections into machines for more than a decade. The speakwrite hummed
and clicked, transcribing his words onto new paper that would replace
the old paper that had never existed. The dial wobbled slightly as the
machine worked.

The woman with the shoe walked past his cubicle on her way back to her
own station. Her footsteps were soft on the concrete floor. Arthur did
not look up. Looking up invited eye contact, and eye contact invited
interaction, and interaction could be observed, analyzed,
misinterpreted.

He adjusted the speed regulator dial on his speakwrite, feeling the worn
edges where his fingers had touched it thousands of times before. The
metal was warm from the machine's operation.

The dial was loose because the mechanism beneath it had worn out. A
small failure in a small machine. The kind of failure that happens
everywhere, all the time, in systems that are never quite as perfect as
they appear.

He spoke another correction into the grille. The machine transcribed.
The Ministry continued its work.

#

Arthur's lunch break was thirty minutes, taken in the canteen on the
ninth floor. He ate quickly and without tasting: a grayish stew that
might have contained meat, bread that crumbled at the touch and left a
gritty film on his teeth, a cup of synthetic coffee that smelled faintly
of burnt grain and tasted of nothing at all. Around him, other clerks
ate the same meal with the same mechanical efficiency. The canteen
smelled of boiled vegetables and Victory Cigarette smoke.

The telescreen in the canteen was reading production statistics in its
fruity voice. Pig iron was up. Boot production was up. The Ninth
Three-Year Plan was ahead of schedule. The voice was warm and
encouraging, the voice of a friend sharing good news.

Arthur had spent the morning rectifying figures from the Ninth
Three-Year Plan. The original targets had been too low; the new targets
were higher and had already been exceeded. Everyone at the Ministry
understood how this worked. No one discussed it. Discussion was
unnecessary. Discussion was dangerous.

A man sat down across from him---Wilkins, from the Historical Archives
section. His tray held the same stew, the same bread, the same synthetic
coffee. They had worked in adjacent departments for eight years. They
had never had a conversation that lasted more than three sentences.

"Hate today was vigorous," Wilkins said.

"Very vigorous," Arthur agreed.

"Goldstein looked particularly treacherous."

"Particularly."

Wilkins nodded and began eating his stew. Arthur finished his coffee and
returned his tray to the collection point. The conversation had been
entirely correct---no opinions expressed, no observations made, no
thoughts revealed. It was the only kind of conversation that was safe.
The only kind that didn't leave traces.

On his way back to the Records Department, Arthur passed a poster of Big
Brother. The eyes followed him down the corridor. They followed
everyone. That was the point. The face was serene, protective, a father
watching over his children.

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.

The words were printed beneath the face, but they were unnecessary.
Everyone knew. The knowledge was as constant as the telescreen's hum,
as regular as the Two Minutes Hate, as reliable as the war with Eurasia.
Or was it Eastasia now? Arthur couldn't remember which enemy they were
at war with today. It didn't matter. It had never mattered.

Arthur returned to his speakwrite. More cylinders had arrived in his
tray. More corrections to be made. More history to be adjusted. The dial
wobbled when he touched it.

He worked until the whistle blew at eighteen hundred hours, and then he
walked to Victory Mansions through streets that smelled of coal smoke
and rotting plaster. The sky was the color of dishwater. A cold wind
whipped dust and torn paper into spirals at the street corners.

#

(Cont.)