The Unknown Known
Even as we enter the age of cosmic and perhaps eternal war, it remains remarkable: the nuanced symbiosis between East and West. Here at Strategic Planning, or ‘the “Prism”’, there are three sectors, and these three sectors used to be called, not very imaginatively, Sector Three, Sector Two, and Sector One. Sector Three dealt with daily logistics, Sector Two with long-term missions, and Sector One with conceptual breakthroughs. But now, following certain remarks by the American Secretary of Defence, the three sectors have been renamed as follows: Known Knowns, Known Unknowns, and Unknown Unknowns — a clear improvement. There is of course (this goes without saying) no sector called Unknown Knowns. That would be preposterous and, moreover, a complete waste of time. Only a madman would give the idea any serious thought. There are no such things as Unknown Knowns — though I have to say that I can imagine such a category, such a framework, when I contemplate my physical extinction (which, I admit, I am increasingly inclined to do). I work in Sector One: Unknown Unknowns.
Our camp lies on the Northern Border. Picking up on certain remarks in the Western press, other groups in the region — affiliates, rivals, enemies — have seen fit to call ‘the “Prism”’ a ‘jungle gym’ operation, a mere ‘rope ladder’ or ‘monkey puzzle’ bivouac which the Americans, should they ever find out about it, wouldn’t take the trouble to destroy. According to them, we’re not worth so much as a cruise missile — or even, if you please, a Hellfire warhead from a Predator drone. They call us ‘daydreamers’; they call us ‘sleepwalkers’. Well, all that is about to change. Soon the whole world will whisper it — in the East with tears of pride, in the West with bitterness and horror: ‘the “Prism”…’. I refer of course to my own initiative, my ‘baby’ if you will. Its codename is UU: CRs/G,C.
To the right of the drill-yard, the first longhouse: Known Knowns. This is where we all started out. When you think about human society in a certain way — i.e., with the sole objective of hurting it— the entire planet resembles a pulsing bullseye. The continents themselves hang there like great soft underbellies, almost pleading to be strafed and scorched and slashed. True, our activities here in Known Knowns are hands-on and bread-and-butter: shells, landmines, grenades, petrol bombs. But one’s induction will include action in the field: oh yes. And it goes on being dangerous work, what with the frequent gas leaks and accidental fires and the almost daily explosions.
Later, when, with some pomp, you cross the yard and enter the second longhouse, Known Unknowns, you begin to understand that civilization isn’t entirely defenceless. It is no walk in the park, trolling around North Korea in search of the fabled twenty-five kilograms of uranium; it is no picnic, going from factory to factory in Uzbekistan in search of weapons-grade anthrax or aerosolized asphyxiants. True, doing that is better than actually being in Known Unknowns. In Bio, for example, the conditions are far from sanitary. In one stall a comrade tests a sarin compound on a donkey; in the next stall along, another channels a ‘mosaic’ toxin of smallpox and VX into a garden sprinkler. The regular and lethal epidemics are not always easy to contain. Accordingly the breath of a Sector Two comrade always has a tell-tale tang, that of potent cough-drops, moving about as he does among vats of acids and tubs full of raw pesticides.
Unknown Unknowns is not to be found in a third longhouse. In fact, there isn’t a third longhouse. No. For Unknown Unknowns you go behind the wash-huts and over the sheepdip and then you see it, a deceptively modest wooden cabin, called, sinisterly, ‘Hut A’. An outsider, putting his head round the door, might find the atmosphere somewhat casual and unfastidious — even somewhat torpid and scurf-blown. But these are the necessary motes and postures of intense concentration. The thinking, here, is pointed-end, cutting-edge. Synergy, maximalization — these are the kind of concepts that are tossed from cushion to floor mat in Unknown Unknowns. Now a comrade argues for the dynamiting of the San Andreas Fault; now another envisages the large-scale introduction of rabies (admixed with smallpox, angel dust, and steroids) to the fauna of Central Park. A pensive silence follows. Sometimes these silences can last for days on end. We sit there and think. All you can hear is the occasional swatting palm-slap, or the crackle of a beetle being ground underfoot.
Every evening, after prayers, I flex my impeccable English, reading aloud our write-ups in The New York Times and elsewhere on a faulty and outmoded computer borrowed from Cyber in Known Unknowns.