Hello Hello. Hello everyone.
I guess I'm supposed to ask you to sit down? So sit down. Or not, for what it makes me. Maybe this room doesn't have a chair and you were persuaded there were? You'll see tomorrow with your aches if you stayed an hour with your ass in the air. But will these be real aches? Who knows.
But I digress.
I am Octavio Gémini. Italian, 62 years old, everything.
Oh, and I'm the Censorship and Disinformation Operations Officer here at the Foundation.
And you, if you're here, it's because you're the best in your field. A political masquerade, a rigged trial, a masterful advertising campaign: you have managed to shape public opinion as you please, to make people forget the unforgettable, to discredit giants.
Not bad.
For a start.
At the Department of Censorship and Disinformation, we practice an art. An art that appeared with civilization, cultivated by the portraits of the Pharaohs, by the speeches of the Romans, by the texts of the Church, by all the powers of all eras on all media.
Do you believe you are an expert in your field? You're only good at selling cat food. What you know as "propaganda" is just the tip of the iceberg. The pretty posters, the flashy speeches, the censorship of the newspapers… It's been more than a century since we got past all that. We have only penetrated further into the mind of the individual and the mind of the masses. Anticipate behavior, make people doubt the reasons for doubting, then make people doubt the reasons for doubting the reasons for doubting the reasons for doubting. Since the Nazis, we've been thinking 5 moves ahead, since the Cold War, 8 moves ahead, and since…ahah, let's say North Korea is far from backward in everything.
You know, North Koreans believe they have unicorns, the inventor of the hamburger and the cure for SARS, Ebola and AIDS. It's absolutely fanta-Does it make you laugh, really?
"Aha, the cure for AIDS, how stupid these Koreans are!" he said before going home to take an aspirin to relieve his headache. And I'm sure you think De Gaulle really existed. You can leave the room if you don't take this post seriously, huh, I'm not stopping you.
Ah, yes, the Agents at the entrance on the other hand, yes.
Sit down.
Anyway, where was I? Ah, yes: we are artists, and we never stop improving.
The epitome of misinformation is called 1984.
The epitome of censorship is called Fahrenheit 451.
It may seem politically incorrect for some of you to take these works as ideals to be achieved. But you know what ? I decide what is politically correct or not. Give our Department a month, and anyone who utters the word "canada" will be stoned in the street, fired from their job, dumped by their wife and kids, and disowned by the rest of their loved ones.
Haha.
Not serious.
But we don't do that stuff. Not when it doesn't serve the interests of the Foundation. Because if we did it for fun, we wouldn't get anything.
And we all have bills to pay, right?
Let's talk about work, by the way. The Department of Censorship and Disinformation is a particularly diverse sector, and in close collaboration with the other departments. Some of you will be tasked with creating stories to fill in the blanks left by the Amnestics Department, or intended to be peddled by the Memetics Division. These guys think they are superior to everyone because they penetrate the human brain at the molecular level. They don't even come close to you, when you're only good at cat food right now, that is to say. Others will be assigned directly to External Affairs. You will be our contacts in publishing houses, the media, that sort of thing. Your job will essentially be to "correct" the newspapers the day before they are published, to "correct" the history books and the astronomy essays and, who knows, to fire two or three news presenters.
For those who will work internally, there is always Censorship. You can't imagine the number of reports that are just waiting for you to display magnificent black squares everywhere, so that some information does not come to the knowledge of just anyone. If you go up a little in rank, you can go to the judiciary and sue in defamation all the scientists, the journalists and the witnesses who have not put their noses where it should be. And if you go up a little more… Did you really think I was going to tell you? Uh. If I told you, I should… no, I wouldn't even have to kill you: I would have had time to have lied to you three times in one sentence., having changed your name along the way and inserted into your subconscious a dazzling desire to swallow the barrel of a revolver.
Short. That's the theory.
In fact, you will have the opportunity to be more versatile, and to give in a little of all that at the same time: the treatment of a file often requires that the same person follow it from start to finish. We don't want to have contradictions in our covers, do we? However, expect sleepless nights.
There. Well, normally that's when I ask you if you have any questions, but I'll save you the trouble of raising your hand. Your questions have very little chance of getting real answers—and even then, you'd have no way of knowing whether what I'm telling you is true or false.
Because yes, last detail but not least, here you will have to lie to everyone. I mean: to everyone. Your friends. Your family. Your colleagues.
Yourself.
The O5s themselves.
Myself.
In the event of a containment breach, if employees are amnesiac, there are internal blankets. If a colleague of yours died falling from an airship, it's because the Department decided that an airship was more believable than a piano dropped from the eighth floor and less messy than a Bengal tiger. You will never know the truth. On nothing. Neither about your own identity, nor your place here, nor the intentions of the Foundation, nor the future of the world. You will now be immersed in a doubt that will never leave you. Who will gnaw at you. Which will slowly drive you crazy.
The only way out is to not give a fuck anymore.
Truth is just a beautiful concept that you have to give up. Invent your version of the facts, invent your own reality… and you may manage to blur this feeling that eats you, this voice that whispers to you that none of this is true.
Nothing is reliable. Neither you, nor the world, nor me. And in the same order of things, you can always do well, cheat, lie, rip off the system, deceive the O5s in person.
I myself have never been hired by the Foundation.
I just came across one of their installations one day. After that I lied to stay alive, then lied to get hired, then lied to get promoted, and here I am.
Eh eh. Intriguing, as a little test.
So, "true or not true?" you ask? This is undoubtedly false. We don't cheat the Foundation, and even if I had managed to rip off the entire system, you'd really have to be stupid to admit it here, in the middle of Site-Aleph, room 49B, facing you all, two agents of security and probably a host of microphones and hidden cameras.
I just allow myself to remind you that my name is Octavio Gémini.
And that the Italians never put accents on the "e".