by Karl Beecher
Popular democracy had some uses, after all.
A new engineer would be needed to head up PanJoin now, but that could wait until tomorrow. Lowcuzt's thoughts turned instead to the other great project in his life: Überdigitality. PanJoin would always have a place in his heart as his first big break, but the galaxy would ultimately remember him for Überdigitality. It was a top-secret project, still in its infancy, known only to him and a handful of his best engineers. It was housed in his private basement lab. That was where he wanted to be now, after a day full of dealing with idiocy.
He stood and made his way towards the door with a skip in his step, but as he passed into the corridor, a voice called out to him from behind.
"Sir! Sir!"
Lowcuzt let out a sigh. Ordinarily, he might have ignored it, but the voice didn't belong to an ordinary employee. No-one in the Collective used a term of address like ‘sir,' one that smacked of hierarchy. Even his employees stuck to the more orthodox ‘citizen' when addressing him. However, one in particular did call him ‘sir.' Insisted on it even. Lowcuzt turned.
It was Forn, his personal assistant.
The little man shuffled hurriedly along the corridor, his shoulders hanging forward and his hands clasped together tightly as usual. Aping Lowcuzt's tastes, he also wore black roll-neck sweater and blue trousers, and sported a shiny, bald head. He looked like a clone of Lowcuzt that had failed quality control.
"What is it?" demanded Lowcuzt, as Forn approached.
"So sorry to disturb you, sir," grovelled Forn, "but you're scheduled to meet with Citizen Pohma now."
He pointed at the person following him, a young woman dressed in the yellow jumpsuit customary of the Union of Content Creators.
Lowcuzt eyed her incuriously. "Oh, greetings, Apco Pohma Two-Six-Zero-Zero."
"Greetings, Lowcuzt Null," she replied, sounding pleasant yet uneasy.
Lowcuzt glared at his assistant.
Forn explained, "I informed you yesterday, sir, that Citizen Pohma was still having trouble designing the biography to your requirements. You said you would speak with her today and set her on the right track."
Banish it! Yes, he had said that.
In normal circumstances, he would have brushed off this latest annoyance in favour of going to work on Überdigitality, but the work he'd commissioned Apco Pohma to do was important and strategic. It concerned his image.
Since PanJoin had taken the Collective by storm, Lowcuzt had become something of a media darling. Publications had queued up to interview him. They'd produced flattering, adulatory commentaries praising his acumen and featuring glossy images of him staring penetratingly into the camera looking all tenacious and visionary. He'd been on the front cover of Disruption Magazine, the premier journal of the Collective's technology industry, eight times.
But the praise had waned in recent months. Lowcuzt hadn't been the subject of a slick, laudatory article in any publication for several weeks now and it was beginning to worry him. His tendency to blackball publications that criticised him probably didn't help—he really had to work on that temper of his—but, more importantly, he was beginning to sense something of a backlash as more citizens began to fear him and his power.
The biography was his pre-emptive response. He wanted to put people's fears to rest by portraying himself as just an everyday genius who'd fought the system and won. If this didn't get through to ordinary plebs, what would?
He looked at Forn, who gazed back at Lowcuzt as though he were a prophet about to speak.
"Very well," Lowcuzt sighed. He nodded to the door. "In my office."
He walked back through the doorway and headed to his large, spotless chrome desk. Forn and Pohma trailed behind.
"I can give you fifteen mins," he declared. "No more."
Forn jabbed a finger at her. "And not one min more!" he barked.
"Thank you, Forn," said Lowcuzt, taking a moment to recover from the shock of the little man's shriek. "You may leave."
His assistant's face dropped. "Oh, of course, sir," he mumbled before shuffling back out.
Lowcuzt sank into his huge chair and tekapted a stopwatch. The timer appeared in his vision. "I have already started a countdown," he informed Pohma. "Your time has begun."
The content creator sat opposite and looked nervously at him. "I had hoped for rather more than fifteen mins."
"I'm a plus-plus-busy man," he replied. "You're lucky to get such a sizeable chunk of my valuable time. Now, what problems are you having with this simple task I gave you?"
She reached inside her jumpsuit and produced a slate. "Well, citizen," she began, looking over the text. "It's a silly thing, but I'm having trouble using your description of what PanJoin does."
"Seriously? We went over this." Lowcuzt sighed. "PanJoin provides citizens a unique synergistic framework for engagement, co-creation, and interchange. It disrupts the established norms of cybernetic theory and empowers the essence of interpersonal connections."
"Right," replied Apco Pohma, staring wide-eyed at her slate. "That's, remarkably, word-for-word what you told me last time we met. The problem is, it doesn't really mean anything."
"What?" exclaimed Lowcuzt. "It's a perfectly simple description. Like I always say, keep it simple."
"How about this instead?" she offered. "‘PanJoin lets users exchange messages with each other.'"
Was that all? He ran it through his mind a few times.
"It's a bit simple, isn't it? Doesn't sound impressive."
"I'm trying to keep it simple."
Lowcuzt shook his head. "There's simple, and there's too simple, citizen. You've made it sound so unremarkable. You miss the pure, elegant genius of the idea. And you've forgotten that users can exchange messages anonymously."
"Is that important?" asked Pohma.
"Important? In the Collective, anonymity is close to a revolutionary idea. Think of how little you're allowed to do in the Collective that goes unobserved. By enabling anonymity in PanJoin, it allows users to be who they truly are underneath."
Pohma hummed. "Okay. I think I'll leave out the word ‘revolutionary' if you don't mind. That will hardly be well-received by citizens. We wouldn't want them to think you were trying to overthrow society."
No, Lowcuzt certainly wouldn't want them to think that.
"Very well," he replied. "I'm sure your mind identifies with the Collective's common mediocrity than mine does."
She scrolled the slate further. "Another thing. You've given me very little info on your youth."
"Yes," replied Lowcuzt. "That is irrelevant."
Pohma hummed again. "Would you like my opinion?"
There was little of less interest to Lowcuzt than other people's opinions. He'd never understood why everyone was so insistent on sharing them. As far as he was concerned, other people's opinions on important matters were either the same as Lowcuzt's or they were wrong, so why waste time listening to them? Besides, if he wanted to know what people were actually thinking, he could just listen in on their PanJoin conversations. After all, people were only honest when they thought they had their anonymity.
"I suppose so," he muttered, deciding to humour her. It wasn't beyond the realm of possibility that she had a good idea.
"You should include more about your upbringing," she suggested. "Your early years, your formative experiences. Research shows that such human interest angles can increase reader empathy levels by at least forty percent. Would you perhaps share a little with me now?"
Lowcuzt let out a long breath. "Fine," he began. "At school, I went through the usual conditioning which takes in fresh-minded toddlers, ploughs their fragile young minds with collectivist trash, before finally churning them out as brainwashed worker bees. Then, because the conditioning didn't take owing to my profound intellect—make sure you mention that—I was labelled an egoist and banished to the colonies. Will that be enough?"
Pohma shifted apprehensively in her seat. "I suppose I could take that and expan
d on it a little…highlight the underdog elements and perhaps remove the unorthodox disdain for our entire way of life. Let's explore the formation of PanJoin instead. Did that occur on the colonies?"
"Affirmative," replied Lowcuzt. "At that time, Collective expansion through the galaxy was moving slower than a sloth that had settled into a cosy chair. You see, being part of a community is everything to the conditioning-addled brain of a typical Transhumanist, so uprooting and moving a hundred lights years away seemed far too much like exile to most. Most remained stubbornly rooted to their home planets and left only the banished beatniks to work the frontiers.
"Then, Govcentral did the one thing I've ever given them credit for. They examined other nations and decided to copy their approach to expansion: by allowing private profiteering. But private profiteering is not just unorthodox but positively repugnant, correct? Who in the Collective would sully themselves so? Who among them would be so low and selfish as to give up on their fellows merely to enrich themselves? The unorthodox, of course, the exiles. And so Govcentral—quietly, furtively, and with a hypocrisy so stupendous it threatened to rip a hole in the fabric of spacetime—offered up all manner of prizes, profit-sharing schemes, and incentives to encourage people willing to debase themselves to pioneer new worlds. So, I set up my company on the colony planet Razzle and single-handedly built it up into the most successful enterprise in the Collective."
A smile spread across Lowcuzt's face. Reeling off his story had made him feel good. Perhaps the past wasn't completely irrelevant after all.
"Yes…erm," said Pohma gingerly, "about that ‘single-handedly' aspect. You touched on that several times last during our last meeting. But I'm not sure that rings quite true."
"Of course, it's true." Lowcuzt felt the smile slip away. He gestured around the room. "Using nothing but my own genius, I built all this from nothing."
Pohma looked around the mostly empty room. "Surely, builders constructed your H.Q.?"
"Well, yes…of course," he spluttered, "if you want to be overly-technical about it. Builders built my compound, but my money paid for it. Besides, I wasn't referring literally to this room. I mean, I built this whole organisation myself. I owe a debt to no-one for that."
The content creator coughed. "The problem is, it will take a plus-large amount of spinning to portray your story as one lonely entrepreneur building a company single-handedly. It's just that, I did a little research into the archives…"
"Oh, yes?" Lowcuzt replied pointedly. Where was this going?
"For example," she began, "I found that you started your company with seeding funds from the Collective."
"Erm…what?"
"As part of the investments, the Collective awarded to colonists. Funds to start enterprises in exchange for establishing them specifically in the colonies."
Quite honestly, Lowcuzt had forgotten all about that. It had happened decades ago. Come to think of it, yes, the government had awarded him a grant.
"Ah, yes," he conceded with a dismissive gesture. "A pittance of course. But other than that, I built all this from nothing."
"And the funds for your first office space? Did that come out of the grant?"
"Office space?" Lowcuzt thought back through the mists of time. Again, now he thought about it… "Erm, negative actually, our first building was granted to us for free."
"Equipment included?"
"I don't remember," lied Lowcuzt. "I do remember it was little better than a barn. But apart from those tiny things—"
"—You built all this yourself from nothing, I understand," said Pohma. "I suppose I could find a way to de-emphasise their importance. There are a few other things. As you expanded, you employed new engineers who were brought over to Razzle on Collective ships, at a cost to the Collective naturally."
"Well," he sighed. "Obviously, I could hardly afford my own starships back then!"
"And then there's the rescue funds when PanJoin went into the red."
"Well, I—"
"And the tax credits you accepted in exchange for remaining on Razzle."
"Tax credits? Ah, oh, yes—"
"Although you relocated to Alcentor the following year, anyway…"
"Yes, that's because—"
"…the costs of relocation being covered by the Collective Enterprise Fund."
"All right!" barked Lowcuzt. "I'll grant you, I have received a little help here and there. But apart from the government grants, the donated property, the waived rents, the rescue capital, tax breaks, subsidised relocation and the fact that I need help moving people across trillions of kilometres of empty space…I've built all this myself from nothing!"
His words took several moments to stop echoing around the walls. Pohma had shrunk several centimetres into her chair and was staring back at him apprehensively.
"I see," she whimpered. "I'm sure I can find some way of presenting it like that." She rubbed her forehead drowsily. "Perhaps by changing the definitions of words…"
At that moment, Lowcuzt's office door whooshed open and his assistant, Forn, rushed into the room.
"Sir, sir!" he cried. "Urgent news!"
The panting, excited little man drew up beside the desk.
"News?" said Lowcuzt. "About what?"
Forn eyeballed Pohma before speaking. "Well, sir, it's…it's about…"
He went quiet, and his eye began to twitch.
A moment later, a notification signalled to Lowcuzt a private message arriving via PanJoin. It was from Forn.
"What are you doing, you idiot?" exclaimed Lowcuzt. "I'm right here, why are you sending me—"
"It's rather sensitive, sir," Forn replied, nodding towards the content creator.
Lowcuzt sighed and opened the message. The contents displayed in his vision:
It concerns the artifact.
Now he recognised what the fuss was all about.
"Ah, I see," said Lowcuzt. He turned to Pohma. "Apologises, citizen. Something rather urgent has come up. Forn, please show Apco Pohma out."
She rose uncertainly to her feet. "Oh, erm, fine…but could we arrange another—"
"You heard him," exclaimed Form. "Out!"
With wild, swinging arms, Forn hustled the alarmed-looking content creator towards the door as though he were a yapping little terrier snapping at her heels. When it came to loyalty, no-one could match him.
Once she was out, Forn closed and sealed the door.
"When you say ‘the artifact,'" began Lowcuzt, "you mean…the artifact?"
"Yes." Then his assistant seemed to think again. "Well, actually no. Sort of the artifact, but not the artifact. But also not quite an artifact either. Is there a word that lies between the two, perhaps?"
Lowcuzt rolled his eyes. Forn often got himself into tangles when overexcited. "Just take a breath, Forn. Explain from the beginning. What's the news?"
Forn nodded and exhaled. "We just intercepted a message thread passing through the PanJoin network. It seems to be between a couple of gossiping crewmembers onboard the Collective starship Cruiser Eighty-Nine. Their ship picked up a passenger called Colin Douglass who's talking about some kind of artifact he encountered, a Predecessor artifact which did…well, strange things to his mind, or so he claims."
"And?"
"His description of the artifact was in the message." Forn glimpsed around ominously. "And it matches exactly with the artifact we have in the basement."
21
Colin Douglass was anxious. He rarely tried to count the things making him anxious in life. There were only so many hours in the day. It was far easier keeping a list of the top three instead.
The current number three anxiety stemmed from his constant awareness of being a two-thousand-year-old relic from a long-dead society, now trapped in an overwhelmingly chaotic and unfathomable future. It certainly made a change from his former number three anxiety, worrying about his leaky drainpipes. Coming in at a close second was the fresh diagnosis—some might say catastrophic revelatio
n—of his brain disease. It was not only still present but also encased in some kind of energy so unprecedented that not even the techno-freaks on this spaceship could make head or tail of it.
Oddly, the number one anxiety consuming his attention as Doctor Zeddex and the security officer led him through the passageways was his impending meeting with the ship's captain. That was already enough to make him jittery, but the meeting would take place in the rec room because apparently, the Captain was currently dining. In other words, Colin had been invited to the captain's table. Ever since hearing this, the shrieks of some petite-bourgeois neurosis beast had echoed from a deep recess in his psyche. This middle-class monster dogged him with questions of how to behave and what to say and tutted at his dishevelled appearance.
Colin could do a decent job of faking elegance—small talk, minding your language, eating without food in your mouth and all that. However, elegance didn't appear to be much of a priority to Transhackers. What on Earth would be considered cultured in an environment little more comfortable than a factory? What kind of etiquette would be observed by people who made the Rain Man seem outgoing and conversational?
Finally, he and his escorts arrived at their destination. A pair of large double doors parted to reveal a long, high-ceilinged room with rows of tables and benches. Crewmembers, dozens of them, were sitting in clusters. There must have been a hundred people here, all wearing their tight, shiny black uniforms and various implants, but little could be heard apart from the odd tap of cutlery, the occasional rustle of movement, and a few quiet mumbles of conversation. All in all, it looked like the cafeteria at the world's dullest B.D.S.M. convention.
Doctor Zeddex led the way down an avenue between the tables, while the security officer brought up the rear. Up close, the Transhackers were actually rather fascinating. Most of them, perhaps three quarters, very much resembled the three-member welcoming committee from the hangar bay; black-haired, pale-skinned and androgynous. The remainder dressed the same and had the same implants, but their individual appearances were much more diverse. They had different hair colours, different skin tones, and more pronounced body shapes. How odd. There was no evident separation. The unique-looking Transhackers were scattered randomly among the cookie-cutter ones. There seemed to be no reason behind it, apart from that a handful of them were different.
