In fact Winston thought, his own, entire existence was glaring evidence of the whole, mad organisation and yet no one dared even acknowledge its existence. The thought of having to deny his function within this building was so ludicrous simply because no acquaintance of his would have dared question it for fear of following all those bits of paper into the furnaces.
Winston could not remember when he has last used the memory hole - few things came out on paper these days because paper meant evidence of the past and now it was far easier to just edit the billions and trillions of electrons which constituted almost every piece of news, information and entertainment that existed in the state. The whole mass of this data was continuously changing, a great tide of words and pictures pulsing through various amplitudes depending on how the state wanted to play things at any particular moment. Most of this change was carried out automatically in huge scripts generated by trusted and well-rewarded "Quants" who lived in privileged townships - "working from home" so as not to be contaminated by the low-ranking party members who did the dirtier work. However even the quants, needed to be kept somewhat in the dark. Their job was to define conditions for change - to determine the prevailing ideology for the day or hour or even minute and to use that to crawl through the information in all the machines in all the world to alter them to fit the desired opinion of the man or committee who ran things at any one time.
It was not just words that were changed; whole videos could be re-edited in seconds by these routines. Undesirable plot-lines or even just single characters were expunged and replaced. The resulting work was not perfect - the scripts could not create logical and meaningful entertainment and eventually even the truth-is-lies justification for the edits became strained and the scripts would bail-out to their masters who would invariably just wipe the entire piece, replacing it with some new film of the same title which put across the required idea. And so like so-many individuals working on small bits of some top-secret weapon without understanding the function or even purpose of the complete construction, the quants defined the world for all but the highest party members. They alone knew the truth or at least a good proportion of it.
Winston was lucky. He was skilled at full-scale rewriting where logicality and consistency were still required to keep the few-remaining intellectuals from guessing the truth. Not that they would have questioned the truth anyway. Winston sometimes wondered what the actual point of all this re-writing actually was; the threat of a night-stick in the face was enough to suppress anything. But having survived his aberration of twenty years before and therefore being more aware of the bigger picture (even if he did not actually believe all his memories all the time) he did have some idea of what really was going on. He seemed to me more trusted these days, maybe because of whatever those mysterious electronic machines did to him - was he actually being controlled by the automatic routines? The thought sometimes ran away with him and he began to worry that he was just actually a thought in the humming boxes all those floors below, venting their excess heat into the atmosphere. And so Winston knew where all the bodies were buried - literally in some cases - knew the general stream of how the state had leant over at least forty years. He was a veteran, a survivor, a remnant of the millions who were born before the war and could remember that all that history was just faulty memory. What spark kept him from believing that every thought he had that was at odds with the state was just a false memory? Because no matter what method they used on him - the myriad carrots or just-as-numerous sticks, all too real in his jagged consciousness, somewhere deep in the human mind is a core of reality that enters through the senses, the eyes the ears and seeps into deep places, unreachable by technology, by chemicals, by any kind of outside interference. We are free, Winston thought - in here - he imagined pointing to his temple knowing that not even Big Brother could see that thought, nestled and protected by all the rigorous and repetitive training that his masters, now so much younger than him, put him through.
He was the senior officer in his section, ostensibly respected by all the younger staff. They would come to him for advice and, after the tortuous and extended sentences which had to be used to ask a question without admitting the purpose of the query, he would respond in what they saw to be a dignified way, directing them in the correct use of language, the most elegant way to erase an entire personality, basically how to kill someone with prose. Winston was one of a dwindling band of masters of the art. And it was beginning to be clear that the state could not do without him. He was powerful, more powerful that his masters and obviously this troubled him. At what stage did the men (or more likely machines) who monitored such things become aware of this fact? It might be that they did not yet know and some automatic routine built by the quants but designed to act on real people rather than simple data, would kick in and send him to the furnaces with that day's quota of miscreants, to be vapourised and then to be written out of history.
But how would they do it? He had been party by degrees to so many key points of history that he would himself be in every part of the history, if only as a peripheral figure, a leader writer here, a comment there, a false letter from disgusted of wherever. His own presence in history was so structurally-important to the whole shaky edifice, that the only person able to expunge his existence in any way that left no doubt as to the veracity of ... well everything ... was Winston himself. He imagined at first that he would be forced to write himself out before he had been physically disposed of but what had he to lose by refusing and no gun-toting thought policeman would ever know that his work was correct. In fact Winston realised, he could, under the noses of his tormentors, effectively booby-trap the past, littering history with enough trip-wires, bombs, paradoxes and simple lies so that his own de-existence would immediately render all media false and indefensible.
As he thought more of this, he refined the idea until in his view it could overcome even the physical threats of the all-so-real and consistently-violent thought police. He could stimulate the population, low-ranking party-member and prole alike into just not buying it any more. So passionate was Winston about this, that he became worried that the shivers of excitement the thought of it produced would become visible but he comforted himself that this would only hasten the end and start the collapse he so longed for.
Winston had convinced himself that he was the most powerful person in the entire world, a hidden fulcrum about which everything that had happened, was happening now and would happen, span like a continuously-updated and entirely-accurate narrative, describing the world, not as it was but as he alone wanted it to be. What, he wondered would happen should he simply die of old age or in an accident? The order would unravel but with no structure. Things would fail and some new order would rise from the mess, maybe something far worse. That hidden portion of his brain which contained the last belief in his own memories, jumped into action at the idea that his power would be wasted. He could not just wait for the moment when the state identified him as a weak spot which he now was certain had not yet happened. He needed to act now, make himself known. Raise his expression above the blank one he had carried for years in order not to betray the remaining spark of memory. They should have ended it all those years ago, rather than letting him back into the game. This was their incompetence at its worst. They had missed him as he faded back into the grubby masses and he was now the engineer of the end of the state that he had so wished to be when O'Brien had given him the book.
O'Brien was long gone. There was no indication of his existence anywhere in the apparatus. His removal from history had been the most complex undertaken and Winston had carried it out almost single-handedly and with a skill that in any fair society would have brought rewards unimagined in this state. Indeed, Winston's involvement with O'Brien was one of the pillars on which his grand scheme rested. Remove Winston and great, murky shadows of O'Brien would rise from the electronics like mist above a swamp, seeping into the consciousness of the party and making so many things impossible to either deny or confirm. Perversely, O'Brien would be the right-hand man of the engineer of the end of all this, an unbidden worker for truth. The rats had almost been worth it thought Winston, smiling in a way that betrayed no emotion to the outside of his face. Only he, Winston, could remove himself without resurrecting a-great-many enemies of the state who had been expunged unemotionally and without any apparent malice. He had solved everything. Even if he was vapourised this instant, he would at least leave this state ended. It was up to him to ensure that his end brought about the structured end he so longed for.
What other way could they remove him and yet leave the state intact? Winston thought for many days of this. He foresaw all sorts of artifice to allow him to continue to have existed and slowly and surely he drew his plans to insure himself against any of it. This was another plank of the grand scheme. He alone knew how to do many of the most complex tasks that the department carried out and by adding no more than five percent to his workload, he could set those traps, light those fuses and generally create a sort of structured demolition to the whole thing with himself as the fuse and O'Brien as the detonator, an analogy that he loved.
He had loved Julia and even after his betrayal of her, he seemed still to love her. He knew everything about her for he knew almost everything about almost everyone. That knowledge of her entire life wrapped itself up in that last-remaining kernel of his mind, her physical existence in his head unmatched by her history in the logs and records from her birth, through her school, her work and her death. The core of truth is that she sold him as he sold her and yet who would not? We could not make it simpler than that. The last bastion of truth is oneself and given extreme circumstances one will do anything to live that little bit longer. He apologised in his head every day of his life and yet it was not enough to settle him. This plan would be his apology. He would do it FOR Julia.
Today he would press the button. The plan was set-up like a line of dominoes, the first one toppling the second and so on until the carefully-balanced supports of the state came crashing down. Winston saw the faces of the men and women he had created and those he had destroyed, poised to come back like spectres to haunt those in charge. His net spread wider - he had created quants in the past and now he had created logical impossibilities in the scripts that they produced. The whole media circus of the novel-writing machines and the pulsing illogicality of the automatic editing would bring the proles round, waken them like the sleeping giant he remembered but could not quite place. He stood poised to implement the last piece of the plan, and with the final piece of physical evidence, an ancient newspaper, screwed up in his hand ready to send it to oblivion. He was sure he had no need to destroy this for he was certain that in the chaos he would produce, no person would be bothered to check but he was logical and needed what had come to be called "closure". He would destroy the paper and press the button.
He reached out and opened the grill. Nothing happened. The memory hole was broken. He told himself to be calm; he did not need to destroy the paper, he could eat it, tear it up, make it unreadable and unrecoverable in any number of different ways but none of these ways seemed right. He must send it to the furnaces or his plan was not complete. It had to be that memory hole. He could so-easily have walked casually to another workstation and used that one - things broke all the time - it was common - no one thought anything of it. It would be gone. He tried to get up but the state still had him - had his mind ordered and correct. Without this act he could not finish it all. He might as well stand up and declare himself an enemy of the state. The state would still fall around him but what would be the replacement - might he make things worse? He leant forward and in his normal way tried to cover up the emotion inside but he had come so far that his disappointment spilled out and he shook, sobbing with despair.
He put his head in his hands. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the maintenance panel under the memory hole. It was bashed in, bent in the middle and two of the four screws which held it in place had come away. Probably some apprentice to the engineers had kicked it while replacing a light bulb. Winston thought about fixing it himself. This was almost as much against his programming as his original dilemma but he could just about justify it - sometimes they were allowed to carry out simple repairs if it fell outside the maintenance manuals, not that he'd ever seen them. He leant forward and with outward confidence, he lifted the panel. It came away easily and underneath he could see a wire pulled free from its terminal. It would be a simple job to fix. He hesitated for a tiny moment, though enough for the whole ludicrousness of his plan to march across his mind. Towards the end of that micro second, he braced himself against not fixing it and remembered the only things he could be certain of were his own memories. He fixed his face with the empty confidence that showed on all other faces in the building, indeed every face in the whole city.
Winston pushed the wire back into its terminal. Behind the flap on the memory hole, he heard a hum which he had not previously been aware of but he took it to be the noise of correct operation. Deftly he dropped the piece of paper into his palm, pressed the activate button and the cover of the memory hole slid back with a rush of warm air. In another second, the paper was opened flat and he pushed it into the hole. The cover slid back and he heard another new sound - a gentle and distant puff - normal operation being restored, the nugget of truth in his head had control again.
He typed in the string of commands that he had memorised - a seemingly-innocuous detail about figures, something that would arouse no suspicion. But Winston knew of the next thing in the chain. What was he expecting to happen now? He knew the logical model of the flow he had just started but he suddenly realised that he had no idea how long it would all take. There was no apparent change in anything. Had it all failed he wondered?
Someone moved in his eye line, a figure standing up and visible above the level of their cubicle. This was nothing out of the ordinary -people stood up to ask questions or to get a drink. What should he do now? He actually had work to do and he decided to carry on with it. But now there was another person standing up. Now everyone was on their feet, looking at each other suspiciously and then out of the windows. Winston turned to look as well. What was different? Something had changed but he could not tell what. There seemed to be a hum in the air, different from the normal hum of city traffic. A black helicopter streaked across the view. Someone had gone to the window and was looking down into the street far below. More people took courage from this and joined him. Winston did too. Down in the street, anyone outside was standing or walking in a way that did not chime with the normal, head-down movement of the masses at this time. Winston looked up. Overhead the stars were going out.
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