by Jerry
The other jaw of the trap closes faster than my teeth chomping down on my tongue: “I can take your application online right now!” says Raster.
My sister-in-law is the embodiment of sugary triumph until the next evening, when I have a good news/bad news conversation with her. Good: I’m now a Metaverse customer-service rep. Bad: I don’t have a cubicle in some Edge City office complex. I telecommute from home—from her home, from her sofa. I sit there all day long, munching through my dwindling stash of tax-deductible jelly beans, wearing an operator’s headset, gripping the control unit, using it like a puppeteer’s rig to control other people’s Rasters on other people’s screens, all over the U.S. I can see them—the wide-angle view from their set-top boxes is piped to a window on my screen. But they can’t see me—just Raster, my avatar, my body in the Metaverse.
Ghastly in the mottled, flattening light of the Tube, people ask me inane questions about arithmetic. If they’re asking for help with recipes, airplane schedules, child-rearing or home improvement, they’ve already been turfed to someone else. My expertise is pure math only.
Which is pretty sleepy until the next week, when my brother’s agency announces the big Simoleons Sweepstakes. They’ve hired a knot-kneed fullback as their spokesman. Within minutes, requests for help from contestants start flooding in. Every Bears fan in Greater Chicago is trying to calculate the volume of Soldier Field. They’re all doing it wrong; and even the ones who are doing it right are probably using the faulty chip in their set-top box. I’m in deep conflict-of-interest territory here, wanting to reach out with Raster’s stubby, white-gloved, three-fingered hand and slap some sense into these people.
But I’m sworn to secrecy. Joe has hired me to do the calculations for the Metrodome, Three Rivers Stadium, RFK Stadium and every other N.F.L. venue. There’s going to be a Simoleons winner in every city.
We are allowed to take 15-minute breaks every four hours. So I crank up the Home Theater, just to blow the carbon out of its cylinders, and zip down the main street of the Metaverse to a club that specializes in my kind of tunes. I’m still “wearing” my Raster uniform, but I don’t care—I’m just one of thousands of Rasters running up and down the street on their breaks.
My club has a narrow entrance on a narrow alley off a narrow side street, far from the virtual malls and 3-D video-game amusement parks that serve as the cash cows for the Metaverse’s E-money economy. Inside, there’s a few Rasters on break, but it’s mostly people “wearing” more creative avatars. In the Metaverse, there’s no part of your virtual body you can’t pierce, brand or tattoo in an effort to look weirder than the next guy.
The live band onstage—jacked in from a studio in Prague—isn’t very good, so I duck into the back room where there are virtual racks full of tapes you can sample, listening to a few seconds from each song. If you like it, you can download the whole album, with optional interactive liner notes, videos and sheet music.
I’m pawing through one of these racks when I sense another avatar, something big and shaggy, sidling up next to me. It mumbles something; I ignore it. A magisterial throat-clearing noise rumbles in the subwoofer, crackles in the surround speakers, punches through cleanly on the center channel above the screen. I turn and look: it’s a heavy-set creature wearing a T shirt emblazoned with a logo HACKERS 1111. It has very long scythe-like claws, which it uses to grip a hot-pink cylinder. It’s much better drawn than Raster; almost Disney-quality.
The sloth speaks: “537,824,167,720.”
“Hey!” I shout. “Who the hell are you?” It lifts the pink cylinder to its lips and drinks. It’s a can of Jolt. “Where’d you get that number?” I demand. “It’s supposed to be a secret.”
“The key is under the doormat,” the sloth says, then turns around and walks out of the club.
My 15-minute break is over, so I have to ponder the meaning of this through the rest of my shift. Then, I drag myself up out of the couch, open the front door and peel up the doormat.
Sure enough, someone has stuck an envelope under there. Inside is a sheet of paper with a number on it, written in hexadecimal notation, which is what computer people use: 0A56 7781 6BE2 2004 89FF 9001 C782—and so on for about five lines.
The sloth had told me that “the key is under the doormat,” and I’m willing to bet many Simoleons that this number is an encryption key that will enable me to send and receive coded messages.
So I spend 10 minutes punching it into the set-top box. Raster shows up and starts to bother me: “Can I help you with anything?”
By the time I’ve punched in the 256th digit, I’ve become a little testy with Raster and said some rude things to him. I’m not proud of it. Then I hear something that’s music to my ears: “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand you,” Raster chirps. “Please check your cable connections—I’m getting some noise on the line.”
A second figure materializes on the screen, like a digital genie: it’s the sloth again. “Who the hell are you?” I ask.
The sloth takes another slug of Jolt, stifles a belch and says, “I am Codex, the Crypto-Anarchist Sloth.”
“Your equipment requires maintenance,” Raster says. “Please contact the cable company.”
“Your equipment is fine,” Codex says. “I’m encrypting your back channel. To the cable company, it looks like noise. As you figured out, that number is your personal encryption key. No government or corporation on earth can eavesdrop on us now.”
Gosh, thanks,” I say.
“You’re welcome,” Codex replies. “Now, let’s get down to biz. We have something you want. You have something we want.”
“How did you know the answer to the Soldier Field jelly-bean question?”
“We’ve got all 27,” Codex says. And he rattles off the secret numbers for Candlestick Park, the Kingdome, the Meadowlands . . .
“Unless you’ve broken into the accounting firm’s vault,” I say, “there’s only one way you could have those numbers. You’ve been eavesdropping on my little chats with Raster. You’ve tapped the line coming out of this set-top box, haven’t you?”
“Oh, that’s typical. I suppose you think we’re a bunch of socially inept, acne-ridden, high-IQ teenage hackers who play sophomoric pranks on the Establishment.”
“The thought had crossed my mind,” I say. But the fact that the cartoon sloth can give me such a realistic withering look, as he is doing now, suggests a much higher level of technical sophistication. Raster only has six facial expressions and none of them is very good.
“Your brother runs an ad agency, no?”
“Correct.”
“He recently signed up Simoleons Corp.?”
“Correct.”
“As soon as he did, the government put your house under full-time surveillance.”
Suddenly the glass eyeball in the front of the set-top box is looking very big and beady to me. “They tapped our infotainment cable?”
“Didn’t have to. The cable people are happy to do all the dirty work—after all, they’re beholden to the government for their monopoly. So all those calculations you did using Raster were piped straight to the cable company and from there to the government. We’ve got a mole in the government who cc’d us everything through an anonymous remailer in Jyvaskyla, Finland.”
“Why should the government care?”
“They care big-time,” Codex says. “They’re going to destroy Simoleons. And they’re going to step all over your family in the process.”
“Why?”
“Because if they don’t destroy E-money,” Codex says, “E-money will destroy them.”
The next afternoon I show up at my brother’s office, in a groovily refurbished ex-power plant on the near West Side. He finishes rolling some calls and then waves me into his office, a cavernous space with a giant steam turbine as a conversation piece. I think it’s supposed to be an irony thing.
“Aren’t you supposed to be cruising the I-way for stalled motorists?” he says.
; “Spare me the fraternal heckling,” I say. “We crypto-anarchists don’t have time for such things.”
“Crypto-anarchists?”
“The word panarchist is also frequently used.”
“Cute,” he says, rolling the word around in his head. He’s already working up a mental ad campaign for it.
“You’re looking flushed and satisfied this afternoon,” I say. “Must have been those two imperial pints of Hog City Porter you had with your baby-back ribs at Divane’s Lakeview Grill.”
Suddenly he sits up straight and gets an edgy look about him, as if a practical joke is in progress, and he’s determined not to play the fool.
“So how’d you know what I had for lunch?”
“Same way I know you’ve been cheating on your taxes.”
“What!?”
“Last year you put a new tax-deductible sofa in your home office. But that sofa is a hide-a-bed model, which is a no-no.”
“Hackers,” he says. “Your buddies hacked into my records, didn’t they?”
“You win the Stratolounger.”
“I thought they had safeguards on these things now.”
“The files are harder to break into. But every time information gets sent across the wires—like, when Anne uses Raster to do the taxes—it can be captured and decrypted. Because, my brother, you bought the default data-security agreement with your box, and the default agreement sucks.”
“So what are you getting at?”
“For that,” I say, “we’ll have to go someplace that isn’t under surveillance.”
“Surveillance!? What the . . .” he begins. But then I nod at the TV in the corner of his office, with its beady glass eye staring out at us from the set-top box.
We end up walking along the lakeshore, which, in Chicago in January, is madness. But we hail from North Dakota, and we have all the cold-weather gear it takes to do this. I tell him about Raster and the cable company.
“Oh, Jesus!” he says. “You mean those numbers aren’t secret?”
“Not even close. They’ve been put in the hands of 27 stooges hired by the the government. The stooges have already FedEx’d their entry forms with the correct numbers. So, as of now, all of your Simoleons—$27 million worth—are going straight into the hands of the stooges on Super Bowl Sunday. And they will turn out to be your worst public-relations nightmare. They will cash in their Simoleons for comic books and baseball cards and claim it’s safer. They will intentionally go bankrupt and blame it on you. They will show up in twos and threes on tawdry talk shows to report mysterious disappearances of their Simoleons during Metaverse transactions. They will, in short, destroy the image—and the business—of your client. The result: victory for the government, which hates and fears private currencies. And bankruptcy for you, and for Mom and Dad.”
“How do you figure?”
“Your agency is responsible for screwing up this sweepstakes. Soon as the debacle hits, your stock plummets. Mom and Dad lose millions in paper profits they’ve never had a chance to enjoy. Then your big shareholders will sue your ass, my brother, and you will lose. You gambled the value of the company on the faulty data-security built into your set-top box, and you as a corporate officer are personally responsible for the losses.”
At this point, big brother Joe feels the need to slam himself down on a park bench, which must feel roughly like sitting on a block of dry ice. But he doesn’t care. He’s beyond physical pain. I sort of expected to feel triumphant at this point, but I don’t.
So I let him off the hook. “I just came from your accounting firm,” I say. “I told them I had discovered an error in my calculations—that my set-top box had a faulty chip. I supplied them with 27 new numbers, which I worked out by hand, with pencil and paper, in a conference room in their offices, far from the prying eye of the cable company. I personally sealed them in an envelope and placed them in their vault.”
“So the sweepstakes will come off as planned,” he exhales. “Thank God!”
“Yeah—and while you’re at it, thank me and the panarchists,” I shoot back. “I also called Mom and Dad, and told them that they should sell their stock—just in case the government finds some new way to sabotage your contest.”
“That’s probably wise,” he says sourly, “but they’re going to get hammered on taxes. They’ll lose 40% of their net worth to the government, just like that.”
“No, they won’t,” I say. “They aren’t paying any taxes.”
“Say what?” He lifts his chin off his mittens for the first time in a while, reinvigorated by the chance to tell me how wrong I am. “Their cash basis is only $10,000—you think the IRS won’t notice $20 million in capital gains?”
“We didn’t invite the IRS,” I tell him. “It’s none of the IRS’s damn business.”
“They have ways to make it their business.”
“Not any more. Mom and Dad aren’t selling their stock for dollars, Joe.”
“Simoleons? It’s the same deal with Simoleons—everything gets reported to the government.”
“Forget Simoleons. Think CryptoCredits.”
“CryptoCredits? What the hell is a CryptoCredit?” He stands up and starts pacing back and forth. Now he’s convinced I’ve traded the family cow for a handful of magic beans.
“It’s what Simoleons ought to be: E-money that is totally private from the eyes of government. “How do you know? Isn’t any code crackable?
“Any kind of E-money consists of numbers moving around on wires,” I say. “If you know how to keep your numbers secret, your currency is safe. If you don’t, it’s not. Keeping numbers secret is a problem of cryptography—a branch of mathematics. Well, Joe, the crypto-anarchists showed me their math. And it’s good math. It’s better than the math the government uses. Better than Simoleons’ math too. No one can mess with CryptoCredits.”
He heaves a big sigh. “O.K., O.K.—you want me to say it? I’ll say it. You were right. I was wrong. You studied the right thing in college after all.”
“I’m not worthless scum?”
“Not worthless scum. So. What do these crypto-anarchists want, anyway?”
For some reason I can’t lie to my parents, but Joe’s easy. “Nothing,” I say. “They just wanted to do us a favor, as a way of gaining some goodwill with us.”
“And furthering the righteous cause of World Panarchy?”
“Something like that.”
Which brings us to Super Bowl Sunday. We are sitting in a skybox high up in the Superdome, complete with wet bar, kitchen, waiters and big TV screens to watch the instant replays of what we’ve just seen with our own naked, pitiful, nondigital eyes.
The corporate officers of Simoleons are there. I start sounding them out on their cryptographic protocols, and it becomes clear that these people can’t calculate their gas mileage without consulting Raster, much less navigate the subtle and dangerous currents of cutting-edge cryptography.
A Superdome security man comes in, looking uneasy. “Some, uh, gentlemen here,” he says. “They have tickets that appear to be authentic.”
It’s three guys. The first one is a 300 pounder with hair down to his waist and a beard down to his navel. He must be a Bears fan because he has painted his face and bare torso blue and orange. The second one isn’t quite as introverted as the first, and the third isn’t quite the button-down conformist the other two are. Mr. Big is carrying an old milk crate. What’s inside must be heavy, because it looks like it’s about to pull his arms out of their sockets.
“Mr. and Mrs. De Groot?” he says, as he staggers into the room. Heads turn towards my mom and dad, who, alarmed by the appearance of these three, have declined to identify themselves. The guy makes for them and slams the crate down in front of my dad.
“I’m the guy you’ve known as Codex,” he says. “Thanks for naming us as your broker.”
If Joe wasn’t a rowing-machine abuser, he’d be blowing aneurysms in both hemispheres about now. “Your broker is a half
-naked blue-and-orange crypto-anarchist?”
Dad devotes 30 seconds or so to lighting his pipe. Down on the field, the two-minute warning sounds. Dad puffs out a cloud of smoke and says, “He seemed like an honest sloth.”
“Just in case,” Mom says, “we sold half the stock through our broker in Bismarck. He says we’ll have to pay taxes on that.
“We transferred the other half offshore, to Mr. Codex here,” Dad says, “and he converted it into the local currency—tax free.”
“Offshore? Where? The Bahamas?” Joe asks.
“The First Distributed Republic,” says the big panarchist. “It’s a virtual nation-state. I’m the Minister of Data Security. Our official currency is CryptoCredits.”
“What the hell good is that?” Joe says.
“That was my concern too,” Dad says, “so, just as an experiment, I used my CryptoCredits to buy something a little more tangible.”
Dad reaches into the milk crate and heaves out a rectangular object made of yellow metal. Mom hauls out another one. She and Dad begin lining them up on the counter, like King and Queen Midas unloading a carton of Twinkies.
It takes Joe a few seconds to realize what’s happening. He picks up one of the gold bars and gapes at it. The Simoleons execs crowd around and inspect the booty.
“Now you see why the government wants to stamp us out,” the big guy says. “We can do what they do—cheaper and better.”
For the first time, light dawns on the face of the Simoleons CEO. “Wait a sec,” he says, and puts his hands to his temples. “You can rig it so that people who use E-money don’t have to pay taxes to any government? Ever?”
“You got it,” the big panarchist says. The horn sounds announcing the end of the first half.
“I have to go down and give away some Simoleons,” the CEO says, “but after that, you and I need to have a talk.”
The CEO goes down in the elevator with my brother, carrying a box of 27 smart cards, each of which is loaded up with secret numbers that makes it worth a million Simoleons. I go over and look out the skybox window: 27 Americans are congregated down on the 50-yard line, waiting for their mathematical manna to descend from heaven. They are just the demographic cross section that my brother was hoping for. You’d never guess they were all secretly citizens of the First Distributed Republic.
