Somewhere in the Mitumba Mountain Range of central Africa: September 2024

We leave at daylight, so I must write quickly. All reports indicate that my antagonists are close: returning scouts tell of a wide swath of scorched earth moving steadily down from the north, following the same route I used to get to this place. My host, Chief Dugumbe, has at last given up his insistence that I allow his warriors to help me stand and fight, and instead offers an escort of 50 men to cover my escape. Although I'm grateful, I've told him that so large a group would be too conspicuous: I'll take only faithful Mutesa, the man who first dragged my exhausted body out of the deepest part of this jungle, along with two or three others, armed with some of the better French and American automatic weapons. We'll make straight for the coast, where I hope to find passage to a place even more remote than these mountains.

It seems years since fate cast me among Dugumbe's tribe, though in reality it's been only nine months; but then reality has ceased to have much meaning for me. It was a desire to get that meaning back that made me choose this place to hide, this violent, fractious corner of Africa where men kill each other in the name of tribal grievances handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth alone. Once I would have scorned such people; now I see this as a place where I can at least be marginally sure that the human behavior around me is not being manipulated by that same unseen hand that is pursuing me; a hand that, just a year ago, I accepted in friendship, only to subsequently watch it wreak havoc and chaos across the globe.

There are no newspapers here, no televisions and above all no computers, which means no damned Internet. Dugumbe forbids it all. His explanation for this stance is simple, though no less profound for its simplicity: information, he insists, is not knowledge. The lessons passed on from one's elders, taught by the wisest of them but recorded only in the mind, these, Dugumbe has always said, represent true knowledge. The media I've mentioned can only divert a man from such wisdom and enslave him to what Dugumbe calls the worst of all devils: confusion. As I say, there was a time when I--a man of the West, the possessor of not one but two doctorates--would have laughed at and disdained such beliefs. But in a world stuffed full of deliberately warped information, of manufactured "truths" that have ignited conflicts far greater than Dugumbe's tribal struggles, I now find that I cling to the old King's ideas perhaps more tightly than even he does.

There--I've just heard it. Distant, but unmistakable: the rolling thunder that heralds their approach. It'll appear out of the sky, soon, their spectral ship; or perhaps it'll rise up out of the waters of Lake Albert. And then the burning will begin, particularly if the strange yet extraordinary brother and sister who command the vessel detect the arms stockpiles that Dugumbe and his enemies have built up throughout these mountains. Yes, time is running out, and I must write faster--though just what purpose my writing serves is not quite so clear. Is it for the sake of my own sanity, to reassure myself that it all truly happened? Or is it for some larger goal, perhaps the creation of a document that I can feed out over what has become my own devil, the Internet, and thereby fight fire with fire? The latter theory assumes, of course, that someone will believe me. But I can't let such doubts prevent the attempt. Someone must listen, someone must understand--

For it is the greatest truth of our age: information is not knowledge...

In retrospect, the pattern was there to be seen, by anyone attentive enough to trace it. A remarkable series of "discoveries" in history, anthropology and archaeology that had made headlines for several years. But they were all, on their surface, attributable to the great advances made possible in each of those fields by the continued march and intermingling of bio- and computer technology, and so those of us who might have detected a controlling criminal presence at work simply got on with our lives. Our lives; yes, even I had a life, before all this began...

In fact, by the standards of modern capitalism, I had a good life, one graced by both money and professional respect. I taught criminal psychology in New York (the city of my birth and childhood) at John Jay University, once a comparatively small college of criminal justice that had grown, during the movement toward privatized prisons that gained such enormous momentum during the first two decades of this century, to become one of the wealthiest educational institutions in the country. Even the crash of '07 and the resultant worldwide recession had not been enough to stop John Jay's expansion: the school has always produced America's best correctional officers, and by 2023, with mandatory drug and quality-of-life punishments so stringent that fully 2% of the nation's population was behind bars, the nation needed nothing so much as prison guards. All of which allowed those who, like me, taught the headier subjects at John Jay to be paid a more than decent salary. In addition, I'd recently written a best-selling book, The Psychological History of the United States (the second of my degrees being in history), and could therefore live in Manhattan. MORE>>

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This is the first installment of a novella that will be serialized in each of TIME's five Visions 21 issues. (c) 1999 Caleb Carr