The Ministry for the Future

company in that mold, owned by its consumers and only in existence to advance their welfare. So they kept the new YourLock site outside their Great Firewall, as they had so many previous Western internet companies. But the Great Firewall was riddled with holes, and although some argued that most Chinese netizens were completely absorbed and happy in their Chinese space, it did seem to be true that many of them kept links to multiple accounts they had going all over the world. The internal migrants in all the big cities of China, sometimes called the billion, were still an exploited labor force to the point of wanting some outside leverage over the hukou system that had made them illegal for moving to the cities; and the prosperous middle class was always interested to slip some assets offshore. So in some sectors of the Chinese populace, the site was also being taken up in significant numbers.

Days passed, and as far as Mary could tell in Zurich, the impact of all this internet turmoil was minimal on daily life. Possibly it was the global revolution that internet advocates had been calling for since the beginning of the internet, but as no previous manifestation of this poorly defined revolution had ever come to pass, unless one counted the great privatization of the late 1990s, no one could say for sure what it would look like when it happened. Indeed the internet’s earlier rapid colonization and capitalization of the mental life of so many people had occurred in a similarly invisible fashion, so Mary wasn’t sure people even knew what they were wishing for when they postulated an internet revolution.

But her team knew— or they were imagining it. Now everyone who signed up for YourLock and started using it was also helping to sustain it, by hosting their part of a blockchained record of its history from its beginning. A distributed ledger: it was only by way of work given for free (meaning not just the labor but the electricity), by many millions of people, that this new organization could function at the level of the computing required. Even if that worked, Mary wasn’t sure it was going to represent a net gain in terms of a sustainable civilization. Probably it would depend on what this new network was used for, or on what people did in the physical world. As always, the decisive moves were still to come. Possibly it was true that they would happen first in the realm of discourse, then afterward in the realm of material existence.

She tried to focus on that latter part of life. Morning swim in the Zurichsee, its temperature creeping up as spring turned to summer. Tram and trudge to work, trudge home. Take a weekly tram ride down into the city center and the Gefängnis, to visit Frank May. This was some kind of duty.

He seemed to be doing all right. The Swiss prison system was typically Swiss— practical, benign, a kind of community college dorm that you couldn’t opt out of. Frank spent his days out around the city doing public work of various kinds, from street cleaning to nursing assistant, depending on the need and that month’s schedule. He was either calmer and happier than on the night they had met, or else subdued and depressed— Mary didn’t know him well enough to be able to tell. Possibly a bit of both, if that was possible. Other people: if they didn’t want to share with you, you had no way to tell. When she visited, he regarded her curiously, not surprised anymore that she was showing up, just perhaps a bit discomfitted, or mystified. But not enough to ask her why she came. If he had, she wouldn’t have been able to answer him very well. In her head she staged conversations with him that were completely unlike what really happened when they were together. Tramming back up the Zuriberg she would watch the other blue cars of the tram, bending ahead and behind in the switchbacking S turns that the tracks made to get up the slope, saying to the Frank in her mind, If you would just ask me, I would say to you, I visit you because I want to rest easier, because I am helping you to rest easier. My conception of the world going well is a world in which even you look at it and feel it possible to rest easier. A world in which you gave yourself a break, and forgave all the rest of us our sins, and forgave yourself too. And in these mental conversations he would often nod and say, Yes Mary, I feel better about things. Your stupid ministry has put its shoulder to the wheel and helped to shove the cart out of the ditch. Although it’s not out yet, not by a long shot. Because the ditch was eating the road.

Nothing remotely like that ever passed between them in their actual meetings.

She kept track of Badim’s informal work in private meetings away from the office, in the pattern they had established. They didn’t meet often, nor was there any way to communicate in the office that wasn’t subject to surveillance, so pretty often it was a matter of handwritten notes left on her desk, never direct messages but rather lines attributed to Rumi or Kabir or Krishnamurti or Tagore; she didn’t know these poets’ work, and wasn’t sure if the quotes were real or made up. The gods are in disarray. It is the theory which decides what one can observe. A great comet will appear in the sky tomorrow. Look to windward. These phrases, as gnomic as Nostradamus, were only meant to tell her that things were happening, it was time to meet again. Or so she assumed. If there were specific messages encoded in them, she wasn’t getting them.

So she kept reading the news. Two days after a note had appeared on her desk that said