Rootkit 13
Rootkit 13 states that 'In the good world, everyone is born with the right to keep some things secret.' It is FALSE. It is the thirteenth statement of the Rootkit Test.
Explanation of answer to Rootkit 13
Quoted from Puzzle One.
Babies have no secrets. They can’t have them because they’re helpless: we have to do everything for them, including clean and feed their bodies. So no part of a baby’s video feed is curtained, for their own well-being. Since the beginning of the Nest, one child (out of thousands) has been born with a learning disability. She’s now twelve, but thinks and talks like a child of three. She’s never left the Circle of Love, where she pulls violet karma helping to lift up young children and put them on the airwalks or jungle gyms when they need help, pink karma by feeding herself, purple karma by saying loving things to people, and blue karma by caressing upset kids and calming them down. She pulls indigo karma by showing the new babies all the neat games and puzzles and helping them explore, and orange karma by holding the little ones’ hands as they try out the airwires. She is immensely loved, and she does useful work every day and gets respect for it. Since she’s in the Circle of Love, she’s surrounded by doulas on baby duty who gladly clean up for her (she occasionally soils herself, to her own great surprise) and they pull red karma for it. She’s a great friend to the little ones who are always very amused and enchanted at the sight of a teenager who is exactly like them. She will probably never pull enough of the requisite karmas to have a life outside the Circles, but why should she want to? She is watched all the time like a baby, and that is how we keep her safe and happy.
In the Circle of Love, everyone starts from helpless. Kids work towards privacy in the form of curtain-rights, which are a marker of growing up. People pull curtain-rights by showing they are reliable about their responsibilities so they need not be watched all the time. If you are experienced enough in doing something that you can be left to your own devices while you’re doing it, then you can conceal your feed from casual watchers, or even from your friends. Your feed continues to record, however, it’s just not visible to anyone you’ve curtained it from. If things go wrong, your feed can be called as evidence by a karmatula.
Regarding feeds: yes, we all wear cameras and record our lives. This started in the beginning when we had to crawl down narrow tunnels and drill plasma charges into living rock to make the survivarium: it was a safety measure, but we quickly realised we needed to maintain individual feeds for the system of karma, so that we could keep track of everyone’s transactions and not have to rely on our memories at the end of a hard day. In the survivarium, we have no ownership in the hanyo sense, but if there is anything you can be said to own, it’s your feed. It is entirely yours, but if you wish to hide it completely from others, you have to pull the relevant karma to get curtain rights.
The idea of feeds probably makes you nervous right now because you live in hanyo town where the hanyos use cameras to control and exploit us. But in hanyo town, you don’t get to watch yourself or your bosses on those fancy cameras. Instead you are watched, whether you know it or not, mostly by bored, oppressed Bully Boys who don’t care for you and are duty bound to report anything they see to a boss who will use the information to make your life harder, poorer and more dangerous. In hanyo town, hanyos watch people, but people don’t see what the hanyos do in private, unless we happen to be the day’s chosen victim, in which case we don’t get to tell anyone what was done to us or be believed by them.
In the survivarium, we watch those we love because we want them to be safe and happy. We watch strangers too, because every stranger is a potential friend. In fact the strangers want to be watched so that we can push them karma for what they do. Kids watch each other because they’re always looking for new friends or exciting challenges. Everyone can watch everyone unless a curtain has been drawn, in which case some watchers (with deep karma) may be able to keep watching, but most others will have to leave their curiosity unsatisfied.
The more likely it is that you will be responsible for another’s well-being while you’re curtained, the more you have to show that you understand the responsibility the curtain carries, and the process of pulling the karma will train you to be good when you’re not watched, as I explained about toilet training and the red curtain. The most important curtain that young people usually look to pull, the curtain that is the gateway to adult life, so to speak, is the blue curtain: privacy during physical intimacy.
The blue curtain is tricky to pull, because young people still have so much babyhood left in them that they can be grabby when they’re not thinking. They have to start working towards pulling the blue curtain by going to the baths and showing that they know what good touching is: for instance, they could ask their friends if they want a massage, and then they pull karma by giving one (provided the massaged one feels they did a good enough job without creepiness). We encourage them to do this for strangers too, since the more people they offer their blue tasking to, the less important any one person’s bias becomes. If they do this a lot, and people regularly push them karma for it, other people will feel confident in being intimate with them when no one is watching, and their karma will grow towards the curtain threshold. At this point they may make a mistake, try to rush a blue partner, and get bluestickied.
For small bluestickies there may only be a time limit, after which the sticky peels itself, because the true terror of a bluesticky is that everyone knows you got it; they know you were nasty to someone in a state of intimacy. Ugh, right? More than three stickies and you might have to have a talk with a blue angel, usually someone a bit older with lots of blue karma, who’s volunteered or been appointed by a karmatula to watch over you and teach you how to handle yourself when dancing the blues. Blue angels have good body-consciousness: they can touch people and know what they are thinking. They will slowly train you in how to behave, and this gets them gold blue karma and a downstream bonus as their blue fairy gets better at loving. Most people remember their blue angels with reverence and love.
One of the most unpleasant stickies to contemplate giving involves taking away someone’s blue curtain. This pretty much says the person was unforgivably mean to a lover and is therefore no longer allowed to draw their blue curtain, which means anyone who desires to dance the blues with them has to do it in open feed. You can see now that a hanyo would find it very difficult to chicken-hunt anyone in our world, and they would most certainly not like the outcome of attempting it. If they tried it, everyone would instantly know, and they’d never escape the shame, nor would they be left unwatched with someone ever again. Even more stinging, they wouldn’t be able to whine about it, or at least no one would sympathise.
You see now that secrecy is earned, and furthermore it is never absolute. One rule we have about curtains is that each curtain must have a lifting clause. Mostly, all our curtains lift when we die. In the case of decisions or actions that affect everyone, in nearly every case these are never curtained and stay open to everyone from the beginning. If they are curtained, for instance the access codes to the blast doors that protect us, then there is always a given preset condition under which they will be revealed. In hanyo town, everything your masters do is secret by default, and they get to choose what, if anything, they will reveal to you. We, of course, do it the other way round. In the Nest, if anything is concealed, there must be a very good reason for it, or the curtain will not function.
In hanyo town, however, we fear the gaze of others because we are taught that everyone else is either an exploiter or a competitor: no one is ever your broo. Hanyos use information as weapons, but in order for that to be possible there has to be a general climate of secrecy in which the people who have the information are powerful because they have it. For example, if hanyos or hanyobait use their knowledge of your daily routine to trap you, then their plans to do so must be kept a secret from you, or you will avoid them. Of course, you may be helpless to get away, in which case they won’t bother to keep their intentions a secret from you. This is why, in hanyo town, only the weak know the truth, because they can’t do anything about it.
Secrecy works against the victims, every time. If we could see everything the hanyos do, we would not submit to being their slaves for an instant. And they are deeply unworthy of the secrecy-privileges they abuse. In the old days they would use secrecy to torture their people and children in the individual buildings where they lived. They could do it for years, all their friends would know, and they’d still get away with it. But when one or more of the victims talked to people outside their brood, the shame would be on her for breaking the hanyo privilege of secrecy, and she would be hounded for speaking. Yet speaking out is the first step towards any kind of Antisensical justice, and no one should ever be punished for telling the truth. In the Nest, no one ever is. In fact, properly speaking, we don’t have secrets like they have in hanyo town, we have privacies and curtains, which are personal and earned and help to increase our peace and make us happy.
