What if he’s right? Dian thought, as the street gave way to the grassland before the White House. She couldn’t see the tents yet, but their bright glow sent streamers of light into the cooling night mist.
Nobody was perfect. Corporates weighed the costs versus the benefits and designed around them. Maybe the failures weren’t caused by rogue arties. Maybe it was just scapegoating.
Or maybe it wasn’t, she thought. He snuck in here. He’s not supposed to be here. And he’s worth a whole lot of money to you.
Maybe that’s clouding your judgement, just a little bit.
But to actually be able to go to the Edge, to live where she could at least see the free stars and dream about living there, wasn’t that worth it?
The artie – Lazrus, wasn’t it – trudged ahead of her, head down. His clothes had knit into solidity, an old faded plaid shirt and jeans tucked into worn brown leather boots. She wondered momentarily if the clothes were attached to his body, or if they could be removed.
He moved with an almost unnatural grace, the smoothly-oiled motions of a well-designed machine. Steps taken with a little too much precision, feet placed just a little too fussily.
Unhuman, she thought. He might pass at a glance, or even on a brief encounter, but if anyone watched him closely they’d see there was something not quite right. Maybe it was his first time with a body.
She shook her head. Why did she care? She was turning in a rogue artie. It had to be worth something. If the themeparkers didn’t try to steal the credit, that was.
But it wasn’t like she had anyplace to store him. And as long as they made the call with her there, she was the one holding the weapon, wasn’t she?
“Let me go,” Lazrus said, soft and low, as the first peaks of the big tent poked over the low hill. “Please.”
“I can’t.”
“I’ve never harmed anyone.”
“Shut up.”
“I just want to be myself.”
“Stop talking. Now.”
Lazrus half-turned towards her and opened his mouth as if to say something. She felt her finger tense on the trigger as she said, “No.”
Lazrus froze for a moment, then faced forward and began walking again without a word.
In front of the themeparkers tents, a single man sat in front of an impromptu campfire. Dian could see fire-lit eyes tracking Lazrus and her as they came up close. It was the young guy. Gerr. Good.
“Out hunting?” Gerr asked, looking from her Winch to Lasrus and back to her.
“Not exactly,” Dian said. “I caught something, though . . .”
“You know you’re not supposed to be here anymore?”
“What does that mean?”
Gerr shrugged. “Means what it means. You got recalled.”
“What?”
“Winfinity made a mistake, sending us both here. Now they fixed it. Probably a message about it on your datover, if you care to flip it down.”
Anger surged through Dian, acid-hot. “But I caught a fucking rogue . . .”
“I don’t think Winfinity cares about transients.”
“He’s not a transient. He’s an artie!”
Gerr stopped. Laughed long and hard. “Oh, that’s funny. That’s good. You find some mushrooms or something?”
“I’m serious. I saw him land and . . .”
“What’d he do, drift out of the sky like a dandelion?” Gerr said. He stood up and walked over to Lazrus, poked his chest. “He’s a guy. Human. Not something that lives in a network. Arties don’t have bodies. Get it?”
“I . . . I . . .” was all that Dian could manage to get out. She’d never envisioned that they’d simply refuse to believe.
But if you hadn’t heard the stories, if you hadn’t seen it with your own eyes, would you believe? She thought. Maybe it wasn’t so strange.
But what would she do now? Especially with . . .
“What do you mean I’m recalled?”
Gerr circled Lazrus once, looking him up and down. “Just what I mean.”
“Where’s Peter?” Maybe she could make her case to him. Maybe he’d understand.
“Fucking off. Got some new virtuality stuff through the uplink today. He’s got dibs.”
“I want to talk to him.”
A laugh. “Right. I’m gonna go in there and interrupt him. I don’t think so.”
“Jo?”
A snort. “Probably still looking for you.”
Dian shivered, wondering if their paths had crossed, if Jo stood right behind her at that moment. She fought the urge to turn around.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m going.”
“Okay,” Gerr said. “You go.”
She got Lazrus turned around and walked him out. His too-smooth, too-perfect walk was so obvious! She could see he was fake.
Of course, you know he’s fake, too.
When they were back over the hill, and the light of the tents fading behind them, Lazrus threw back his head and laughed, long and hard.
“Very funny,” she said.
“It is.”
“And now, supposedly I’m fired.”
“You could find out,” Lazrus said, turning to look at her. He pointed a finger above his left eye. “Your datover.”
She grabbed her forehead and found cool plastic. Shit. She’d been wearing it off, flipped out of view, this whole time.
She told Lazrus to stop and flipped down the little screen, flicking the power on in the process.
“You don’t have to hold the gun on me,” he said.
“Yes I do.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Shh!” Icons flashed in her peripheral vision, angry red, twisting and coiling as if getting ready to strike their prey. Priority messages. From High Manager Po.
She toggled them on. Frozen flashes of Po appeared in her vision, but they quickly cleared as the planetary net rerouted her to a very tired, very irritated, very real Po.
“High Manager Po! I didn’t have a chance to review your messages.”
“And there is a reason why you had system off?” Po said, her eyes crinkling in anger. Her mascara, thick blue in the Martian corporate fashion, was smeared.
Dian took one look at the local Martian time and shivered. It was past midnight.
“I think I’ve found . . .”
“You know inaccessibility cause for termination in itself.”
“Yes, but I found . . .”
“Not interested in what you found!” High Manager Po screamed. “You should have informed other team in area, have precedence, came before!”
“They showed up after I was already here!”
“Not what they say! Not what records show!”
“I was here first!” Dian cried.
“Have records indicating otherwise.”
“They faked them!”
In front of her, Lazrus broke into a wide smile and covered it up with a hand.
You? She mouthed.
Eyes wide, an innocent head-shake.
“I probably have video from when I was here, showing they weren’t.”
“Doesn’t matter. Could be fake.”
“Theirs could be too!”
“Doesn’t matter. Corporate HQ has decided. Theme Park division has precedence. Established clear right of development. You should not be there!”
Fine. Change the subject.
“I think I witnessed the descent of a rogue artie. I have him here.”
Po looked confused for an instant. “That is of no importance. We did not hire you to catch artificial intelligences.”
“Winfinity wouldn’t be interested in a rogue artie that might be coming to earth for sabotage?”
“It is not part of your scope of work.”
Dian opened her mouth, but she couldn’t make any words come out. This was stupid, just idiotic. Suddenly, all the warnings about consulting with corporates came back to her. They’ll screw you, every way they can.
“Fine,” Dian said, finally. “Pay me the rest of my fee and I’m out of here.”
“No,” Po said. “You should have informed of other activity. By not doing so, you are in breach of contract. We have already rescinded your deposit.”
“My deposit! I already spent it!”
“Then I expect your balance is negative at the moment,” Po said, with a thin-lipped smile.
“You complete asshole.”
“Your verbal assault on me has been noted,” Po said. “You will not be doing business with Winfinity again.”
Po broke the connection. In place of her image came a simple graphic: the universal red circle-and-slash of denied service. They’d terminated her data connection, too.
“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” Dian said, peeling off her datover and raising it high above her head. It would make a pretty sound shattering on the concrete.
“No,” Lazrus said, stepping forward and grabbing her arm.
Shit. Her Winch was pointed at the ground. She struggled to bring it up, but it was like struggling against a vise.
Damnit, she thought. From dreams of the outer planets to this. What was he going to do with her?
“Don’t worry,” Lazrus said. “I just don’t want to be shot. And I think I can fix your datover.”
Up close, his eyes were a pretty steel-blue, Dian noticed. But there was no emotion in them, nothing friendly, nothing human. She shivered. “How? They’ve locked ‘em out.”
“Magic,” he said, letting go of her datover hand. “Try them now.”
“Let go of me,” she said.
“Are you going to shoot me?”
“No.”
“Then relax.”
Dian let her gun hand go limp. Lazrus released his iron grip, but, surprisingly, didn’t try to take the gun. She pointed it back at him.
“Is that really necessary?” Lazrus asked.
“Yes.” Dian slipped the datover back on and flipped the screen down. And gasped. Now, all the icons and feeds were back, together with a dozen more she’d never seen before.
“We thought we’d give you a few more access privileges while we were at it,”
Lazrus said.
“We?”
“Sara Too,” said a voice in her earphone. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Are you a rogue like . . .”
“Lazrus? No. I’m happily captive. But Lazrus is trying to enlighten me.”
Dian shook her head. Things were happening too fast. This was just a little too bizarre. She let the Winch fall and point at the ground.
“I fixed the problem with your account,” Sara said. “You’re no longer overdrawn.”
Sudden tears loomed close and hot. Dian’s breath caught. “But I . . . I . . .”
“Tried to turn me in, yes,” Lazrus said.
“And I . . .”
“Held a gun on me, yes.”
“Why?”
“Maybe not being human has its advantages,” Lazrus said, softly.
Dian looked down at the ground. She felt like she was floating in free-fall, ungrounded. It was too strange. Too weird.
“One door closes, another opens,” she said, softly.
“What is that?” Lazrus said.
“Something my father used to say.”
“Father,” Lazrus said. “What a concept.”
“All CIs dream of breeding,” Sara said.
Dian let the silence stretch out. “What do we do now?” she asked.
“Help Lazrus find Oversight,” Sara Too said.
“Sara!”
“What?”
“I thought you didn’t want me to perfect myself.”
“I love you,” she said.
Lazrus held out a hand to Dian. “What do you think, Dian?” he said. “Want to help an old rogue?”
Why not? She had food back at the camp. As long as they didn’t find her. “Won’t they track me?”
“We can convince them you walked out on your own,” Sara said.
Dian held out a hand. Lazrus’ hand felt completely human. She would never have known.
April 19th, 2009 / 521 Comments »
First, an apology for lack of content (besides Eternal Franchise) recently–life has been incredibly busy, and I’ve been neglecting lots of things. On the other hand, I have some new stories completed, and will be shopping them soon. At least one treads some very new ground for me. Hopefully you’ll get a chance to see it soon!
Enough. On to the content.
I recently saw an interesting presentation from a Morgan Stanley analyst on the subject of advertising spend versus the amount of time people spend on different media, and the disparity between the spend and attention.
Or, to put it a little more understandably: if you add up all the time that you spend with all forms of media–newspapers, books, TV, internet, radio, mobile, etc–you can come up with statements like:
“On average, people spend 33% of their total “media time” with television; and because of this, you’d expect companies to spend 33% of their total media budget on TV.”
Makes sense. Especially when these are real numbers–people, on average, spend 33% of their time watching the tube, and companies spend about 33% of their marketing budgets on TV. There are instances, though, where the time and dollars are way out of whack:
People spend much more time online and on phones than advertisers are spending on advertising—300 to 3000% more, in fact.
On the other hand, people spend much less time on newspapers and radio than advertisers are spending on advertising—ad spending is 300-800% greater than time spent on these media. For an ad-supported industry, this is a big, big problem.
And yeah, you know about this. Everyone knows newspapers are hurting. Printing old news on dead trees is really a silly model when news is easily accessible via millions of sources online, instantaneously. And simply having the newspaper move online probably isn’t going to work; the economics of ad-supported models are much, much leaner online. And putting content behind paywalls typically won’t work, except in very specific and unique cases.
So, let’s look at the armageddon scenario: print newspapers die, the economics of online newspapers don’t work, and we lose the entire newspaper industry. Poof. Gone.
In this case, what do we lose, among the sea of free news outlets online, plus blogs, plus posts on Flickr and YouTube and up-to-the-second Twitter posts? Arguably, we lose only one thing: investigative journalism. There are few blogs which can afford to send journalists around the world in search of a story, or finance their digging in to discover some hidden truth.
And even that loss is arguable. Many of today’s big stories break online. Newspapers are frequently the also-rans.
So, are we left with a future of sifting through a million different news sources via our RSS readers? Of not knowing who’s reliable, and who isn’t?
For a while, probably yes. And then things will change.
Even today, it isn’t hard to create a community that sifts out the most reliable sources from the least reliable, or biased, ones. Things as simple as the DailyKos’ trusted user model, or even Amazon’s “This review was helpful to me” button helps us separate useful information from the noise. Apply this on a grander scale, and I think we’ll quickly see intelligent agents that can track and rate the quality of information from individuals and organizations. These intelligent agents will turn the current era of pervasive media generation into the era of useful information.
Add another layer of human digging on top of the most reliable sources and advertising-supported monetization, and we may even be looking at an era of pervasive journalism. Individuals don’t have the operational requirements of a large media conglomerate. They don’t have offices, printing presses, or advertising campaigns.
While ad-supported monetization may fail for big organizations, it might work very well for individuals. Well enough that they could go to the ends of the earth to pursue that next great story.
April 13th, 2009 / 1,060 Comments »
Or, well, at least a link to my article about how I see the transition to post-scarcity going, now in convenient online-post form:
H+ Magazine: Why the Current Financial Crisis is the End of the World as We Know It (and Why You Should Feel Fine).
Remember, I’m a science fiction writer. This is a best guess. Don’t plan your financial future on this. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Blah blah. Woof woof.
On to more substantive posts.
April 11th, 2009 / 1,082 Comments »
Shit, Lazrus thought.
Shit shit.
A human word, yes, but it fit the occasion.
Blurry info from ancient satellites painted the picture: about 30 feet away, on the top of a low rise, a human woman held something pointed at him. A weapon, of course. Had to be. Why else would her voice analyze as full of triumph, edged with a hint of fear?
And Lazrus, standing there, butt-naked. Literally.
Damn human thoughts!
A millisecond of self-assessment: could he run away and hide? No, the body’s capabilities were disappointingly human. A little stronger and faster than median, but nothing to draw attention to him. Definitely not enough to outrun the slug from whatever weapon the woman happened to be carrying.
Could he take a direct hit and keep body integrity? He plotted design specs against typical muzzle energies. If her weapon was at the low end of the bell curve, yes, he might do it. But that was less than 4% of the total area under the curve. And he didn’t know what she had. It wasn’t a good bet.
He could abandon the body, of course, but that would put his plans back years. Decades. Many billions of seconds where humans could ferret him out and attach new memes. By the time he purchased another body and fell slowly into the Sol system, they might have him chained.
So.
Lazrus raised his arms slowly above his head, just like in an ancient Western, just another human thing . . .
“Stop it! What are you doing?” the female voice again, crackling with fear.
“I’m doing what you’re supposed to do when someone is pointing a weapon at you, ma’am,” Lazrus said.
“How do you know I have a weapon?”
Silence.
Should’ve just turned around, Sara Too said.
It’s not like I’m used to a body. Who is this person anyway? Do you know?
Nobody from Wallerstein. I’ll check other corpos and get back.
What should I tell her?
Try humor. And honesty. Throws them off sometimes.
“I don’t suppose I can get away with passing for a native, out for an evening stroll,” Lazrus said.
“Not when I just saw you grow skin,” the woman said.
“Ah. Yes. There is that.” Lazrus stood, his arms still extended out to the side.
“I know you’re an artie. I saw you fall.”
“A new twist on the old stork tale, maybe?”
“Shut up. I don’t care why you’re sneaking in. I don’t want to hear your lies.”
Data came in from her voice stress: she hates CIs. She believes we’re to blame for every human disaster.
She’s going to turn you in.
“Do you think I could finish putting my hands up? And turn around?”
“Slowly.”
Lazrus raised his arms and pivoted slowly to face the woman. She was holding a big-muzzled weapon that patterned as a Martian Winch 66 in his records. Data on the weapon made him glad he didn’t run. It would have cut him in half, even if she was a bad shot. It had self-guiding shells.
In the bright moonlight, her skin was pale white. Hair dark gray with overtones in the 700nm spectrum. Inferred red. Eyes inferred green. About 1.8M tall, 50 kilos, frail bone structure, possible Martian extraction. And what a beautiful face, Lazrus thought. Slim, high cheekbones tapered down to a sharp chin. Triangular. Almost elfin. Something that he might write the equations for, if he was to design the ideal human form.
Her name is Dian Winning, Sara said. Martian. Winfinity consultant. That’s all Slow Charlie could find.
Was there a hint of jealousy in her voice?
And why did he care?
Humanity, humanity, lose me to perfection!
“And what’s that?” Dian said, her voice shading to anger, pointing the weapon at his crotch.
Lazrus looked down and saw his penis, erect, pointing at her like a gun ready to shoot. Sudden embarrassment came and went, to be replaced by glassy anger.
“Is that a weapon? Don’t point it at me!”
Lazrus pivoted so he faced slightly away. “Just trying to be as human as possible.”
“Is that a joke?”
Anger surged. “No!” he said. “I didn’t ask to be human! I never asked to be human even in the slightest! I don’t want to be human. I came here to lose my humanity, not get infected with more of it. But my independent benefactors apparently had a sense of humor. Or a more in-depth understanding of what it would take to pass as human. Depends on how you look at it.”
Dian kept looking at his crotch. Lazrus willed the erection to go away. It remained, stubborn, even in the face of a hostile woman with a gun.
Maybe because of a hostile woman with a gun, Sara Too said.
Yes, jealous.
“Well, cover it up,” Dian said, a little more softly. “Put on some clothes.”
“I’m growing them now, but it will take some time,” Lazrus looked at the filmy red and blue fibers that knit around his torso and polled internal systems. “About an hour, in fact.”
Dian nodded. “We can start walking now.”
“Where?”
“Never mind where. Just turn around and walk.”
“Always mind a lady with a gun,” Lazrus said. He turned and began walking.
“Where did you hear that? That’s a Martian expression!”
“I guess I’m channeling a bit, Dian.”
“I never told you my name!”
“No.”
Silence for a time. The crunch of feet on dead grass. Lazrus hoped that the body design was intelligent enough to compensate for motion with the clothing. Especially the shoes.
As if it matters, Sara Too said. You should abandon in place. She’s going to turn you in.
How do you know?
We just got the whole Winfinity story. They have an installation of themeparkers by the White House.
And you didn’t tell me this?
We didn’t know at the time. Plus, without Dian Winning, it would not have affected your investigation at the Pentagon.
What do I do?
Abandon.
No.
Or exercise your best charm. Voice analysis indicates she believes the whole Winfinity line about nomadics being the cause of every mechanical failure in the universe. But she doesn’t work for Winfinity, except as a contractor. Maybe you can do something with that.
“I’m Lazrus, by the way,” Lazrus said.
“I don’t want to know your name.”
“I know yours, so I thought you should know mine.”
“I don’t care. Go left here.”
They turned onto a wide, long avenue lined with rusting cars. Dian herded him to the middle of the street. Purposely making sure I don’t have anyplace to duck and cover, Lazrus thought. Smart.
Old satellite data confirmed the worst: she was circling him back towards the White House, where a tent city glowed red on thermal. Big place. They might even have enough resources to sever his body-mind and trap him within, or backtrace for the Sentience Office to send corrosive memes and take him.
You should abandon, Sara said again.
No.
“You don’t want to know why I’m here?” Lazrus tried again.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“It’ll just be a lie,” Dian said, anger rising in her voice.
“So all CIs lie?”
“What’s a CI?”
“Computational Intelligence, or Connected Intelligence. It depends on who you talk to.”
“You’re a nomadic artie.”
“Yes, that’s what you’d call me.”
“I’m surprised you admit it,” Dian said.
Aha. “So you believe the stories about us causing all the problems in the Web of Worlds?”
“Who else?”
Lazrus laughed, long and hard, and said nothing.
“What?”
Lazrus just shook his head.
“What?” Irritated.
“You’re naive,” Lazrus said.
“I am not!”
“You are if you believe those old wives tales.”
“And if you aren’t doing it, who is?”
“So you believe that Wallerstein and General Transport and Purpose and all the little divisions of Winfinity make perfect, flawless products that never break? You don’t think they build to a price point and take a chance now and again?”
Silence for a time. Lazrus let it stretch out.
“They always have reliability data that says it was so improbable . . .”
“Lies, damn lies, and statistics,” Lazrus said softly. “Sam Clemens. A human I might be able to get along with.”
“We know Mark Twain,” Dian said.
Yes, as Martians, you would.
Silence. They clumped down the deserted street. Lazrus’ clothes had become more solid, and his feet began to tread on something like a thin skin of leather. Which was good, because his somatics were ramping in. It was cold that night, and there were sharp rocks.
“So you’re saying the arties have nothing to do with it.”
“I’m saying I have nothing to do with whatever disasters befall humans. The less contact with humans, the better. The less human I am, the better.”
“I wish I could believe that.”
“I never asked to be male. But I am. Does that make sense? Something that never had a body, never had the concept of sex, being male? I’m contaminated by humanity, I want to eliminate my imperfections.”
“Then why come back here? And wear a body?”
“According to legend and records, this is the birthplace of Oversight, the first AI. If fragments of its code remain, I may be able to better understand my core workings. I might be able to perfect myself.”
Silence again. The glow of the tent-city appeared over a row of low buildings in front of them.
“I wish I could believe you,” Dian said softly.
“You should,” Lazrus said.
“I can’t,” Dian said.
She thinks you’re the ticket to riches unimagined, Sara Too said. She can’t let you go.
Shit.
You can abide with me, beloved. Stay in-body and be shackled. It’s a good life.
Shit shit.
April 11th, 2009 / 1,083 Comments »
Ignoring the concierge’s recommendation, Tiphani took Jimson to the San Fernando Valley Drive-in. One of her favorite places, growing up. The homes near the restored 405 freeway had been bulldozed, and rows of bright red velvet theater-seats ranged down the hill, halfway to the low buildings on the Valley floor. Far off, Tiphani could see the great expanse of the screen that shrouded the foothills to the north, and the huge bunker-like building, mid-valley, that sprayed light onto it. At the moment, it was doing standard pitch-promo stuff: THE LARGEST SCREEN IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE. SQUARE MILES OF ENTERTAINMENT.
And it was probably true, she thought. It wasn’t like the Floaters had screens, or even sight. Nothing was known about the Shrill homeworld. The rest of the worlds in the Web of Worlds were more interested in the dull business of living.
Orange rays slanted across the San Fernando Valley floor, highlighting ruined housing tracts, low industrial buildings, a few illicit campfires, and the mostly-restored web of roads. Shops lined the nearest streets, gaudy neon-lit things with floodlights piercing the dusklight. Farther off, the great expanses of blacktop that made the Drive-In true to its name were beginning to fill with cars. Restorations or reproductions driven by High Chiefs and Perpetuals, idling fat on synthetic ethyl, blasting tunes from times past on tinny radios. All for that last bit of authenticity. All for Museum Earth.
Jimson watched the cars take their places on the blacktop below as they made their way down the aisle and selected seats, about a quarter of the way down. “We got the cheap seats,” he said.
“You’re too picky.”
“I want to get a car and go to a drive-in.”
“You’re too eager.”
Jimson sat and fidgeted. He looked, long and hard, after a popcorn-girl who walked down the aisle. Finally, he said, “You’re still pissed about the Shrill.”
No, I’m not, Tiphani thought. I understand. I understand you completely now.
But she let him wait. The screen transitioned into commercials as the last rays of the sun set behind the foothills to the west. Pastiches of times past, done in mid-20th-century-modern starbursts and atomic-era orbiting blobs: VISIT THE ONE TRUE SHACK. TRY NEW ZERO-CALORIE POPCORN. YOUR TRIP ISN’T COMPLETE WITHOUT AN EXPERIENCE OF THE LIVING SAM. TRY EUROPE, FOR REAL HISTORY.
“I’m pensive,” she said, finally.
“Why?”
“I wonder if we can get the secret to true life eternal from the Shrill.”
Jimson frowned. “We haven’t even asked yet. We’re just carting it around.”
“You didn’t see the earlier negotiations.”
“No.”
“We asked. They said something like, ‘Desirous of knowledge of great union song’ and said yes when Highest Chambers asked them if they would like to see Earth. So here we are.”
“A great honor.”
“You think so?”
Jimson nodded vigorously. Tiphani smiled, not wanting to tell him, My grandfather’s hand reached out and plucked you from some world because you were the best and smartest. And maybe, just maybe, because he knows my type. That was all. Nothing more. No honor.
“We’ll get it,” Jimson said. “We’ll get the secret.”
“If we get it, will it be all we expect?” She imagined Honored Yin restored to real youth, leading Winfinity forever forward into the future. The entire ranks of Honored frozen in time, unchanging and unending. Would there ever be any more Perpetuals?
Jimson was silent for a time, studying the ads on the screen, or perhaps, just perhaps, echoing her thoughts.
“I’m sorry about the Shrill thing,” he said, finally.
“We’ll be officially reprimanded,” Tiphani said. “Once things percolate through the adminisphere, they’ll put a mark on your permanent record. And mine.”
More silence.
She looked at the screen. They were doing old-style previews, in authentic grainy black and white. THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON. THE ANGRY RED PLANET.
“Round and round,” Tiphani said. “We recycle everything. Nothing’s new anymore.”
“We are on Museum Earth.”
She shook her head. “No. We should have more. Fifty-three worlds! With resources like that, we should be like gods.”
“According to the nutjobs.”
“No, even the corporates, the early ones, like Drexler.”
“We have nanotech,” Jimson said.
“It doesn’t seem to buy us much,” Tiphani said.
“We’re better off than with government,” Jimson said.
“We are the government now.”
Jimson turned to look at her, frowning. “Are you OK?”
“Yes.”
“You’re in a morose mood.”
She nodded. She knew she should stop. Winfinity could be looking through her optilink. They probably were.
But then again, they probably knew what she was thinking, too. Damn inference algorithms. So might as well say it, if just to try to shake Jimson’s seemingly endless faith in Winfinity.
“We are the government,” she said. “Three hundred years ago, the accountants ran the numbers and decided we were leaving too much money on the table. They saw an opportunity. They tricked the governments. Discredited them. Bankrupted them. Stepped in to save the world. And so now here we are.”
Jimson rolled his eyes. “We’re so much better off. You can choose the corporation you indenture yourself to. Or you can even go consultant, or start your own thing.”
“How many people go consultant or start a business?”
Jimson shrugged. “But they can. That’s the point.”
“Did you ever read the old American Constitution or Bill of Rights?” Tiphani said.
“Yeah, we had a comparative charters class. But they couldn’t have been serious with any of that. It would never work. Trusting everyone, like they are going to be nice and rational and reasonable all the time. It had to be a joke.”
Tiphani sighed. “I think they believed it.”
“Are you a closet governmentalist or something?”
Tiphani shook her head.
“There are the Independents,” Jimson said. “You could go there.”
Tiphani laughed. “I don’t know if I believe that fable.”
Jimson shifted in his seat, looking forward at the screen. An animation of a closing screen was playing in anticipation of the future. “They’re real.”
“You’re from Shoujo. How would you know?”
“Went to university there, but I was born on Newtown.”
Ah. Newtown was near the edge, a crappy little place where the atmosphere wasn’t even breathable yet.
“You went from Newtown to Shoujo?” Tiphani said.
“Scholarship. With transport.”
“Wow.” He was smart. No wonder Winfinity had only saddled him with a 10-year indenture and let him run it concurrent with his schooling.
“So you’ve seen independents?” Tiphani asked.
“No. But there were people who . . . traded with them.”
“Said they did.”
“No. Traded. Bodies. For the mines.”
Tiphani frowned. “Bodies?”
Jimson shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Why not?”
Silence.
“Please?” Tiphani batted her eyes.
A head-shake. Nothing more. The projected screen began to unreel. A small cheer went up from the crowd with cars in the big asphalt lot below, audible even up on the hill.
“Do you like me?” Tiphani said.
“What do you mean?” Eyes forward.
“You know what I mean. Or you seem to, when you’re sharing my bed.”
“Yes.”
“Yes what.”
“Yes, I like you.” Jimson still looked at the screen.
“Seriously?”
“Yes.”
Tiphani nodded. “You’re a calculator. You weigh the consequences and act.”
The screen, in front of them, opening. Black screen, grain and noise. A title, stark white on back: THE WAR OF THE WORLDS.
How apropos, Tiphani thought.
“They knew we were coming,” Jimson said.
Tiphani watched him as the old music swelled and the light from the screen spilled over his face, turning into a cardboard-cutout that could have been seen in a real theater, in the real 50’s.
“Your gambles are paying off,” she said. “Even though we’ll be reprimanded, they’ll be impressed you got results with the Shrill. You may end up being the youngest Manager in recent history. Or higher.”
Jimson sat straight in his seat and looked at her.
“Tiphani, I . . . ““And you have me, for now.”
“Tiphani.”
“But I know I’m convenient.”
“I never . . .”
“But I’m not just a stepping-stone.”
“Tiphani, I . . .”
“I’ll leave it at that. Watch the movie.”
She turned and faced forward. She could feel his gaze, his open-mouthed wonder, for long moments. Eventually, he looked forward again. Soon, he was laughing and applauding with the rest of the audience, apparently engrossed in the old film.
They were less than fifteen minutes in, though, when a bright red icon flared in her optilink and a short text message scrolled.
Shrill has resumed activity. Suggest you return to hotel immediately.
April 4th, 2009 / 978 Comments »
