The Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  Her vision blurred from rage. Why couldn’t the government have supplied the soldiers with shovels or real rescue equipment? She pictured the soldiers’ bloody hands, the flesh of the fingers peeling back from the bones, as they continued to scoop up handfuls of earth in the hope of finding someone still alive. You don’t have anything to be ashamed about.

  Later, she had recounted her experiences to her roommate, Sophia. Sophia had shared Jianwen’s rage at the Chinese government, but her face hadn’t changed at all at her description of the young soldier.

  “He was just a tool for an autocracy,” the roommate had said, as if she couldn’t picture those bloody hands at all.

  Jianwen hadn’t gone to the disaster zone with some official organization; rather, she was just one of thousands of volunteers who had come to Sichuan on their own, hoping to make a difference. She and the other volunteers had brought food and clothing, thinking that was what was needed. But mothers asked her for picture books or games to comfort their weepy children; farmers asked her when and how soon cell service would be restored; townspeople wanted to know if they could get tools and supplies to start rebuilding; a little girl who had lost her whole family wanted to know how she was going to finish high school. She didn’t have any of the needed information or supplies, and neither did anyone else, it seemed. The officials in charge of the rescue effort disliked having volunteers like her around because they reported to no authority, and thus told them nothing.

  “This shows why you need expertise,” Sophia had said, later. “You can’t just go down there like an aimless mob hoping to do good. People who know what they’re doing need to be in charge of disaster relief.”

  Jianwen wasn’t sure she agreed—she had seen little evidence that it was possible for any expert to anticipate everything needed in a disaster.

  Text scrolled even faster in another window on the screen, showing more contract offers being submitted: requests for teachers of Greek; for funding to build a new cell tower; for medicine; for people who could teach refugees how to navigate the visa and work permit system; for weapons; for truckers willing to ship refugee-produced art out to buyers . . .

  Some of these requests were for the kind of things that no NGO or government would ever give refugees. The idea of some authority dictating what was needed and not needed by people struggling to survive revolted Jianwen.

  People in the middle of a disaster zone knew best what they needed. It’s best to give them money so that they could buy whatever they needed—plenty of fearless vendors and ingenious adventurers would be willing to bring the refugees whatever goods or services they requested when there was profit to be made. Money did make the world go around, and that wasn’t a bad thing.

  Without cryptocurrency, none of what Empathium had accomplished so far would have been possible. The transfer of money across national borders was expensive and subject to heavy governmental oversight by suspicious regulators. Getting money into the hands of needy individuals was practically impossible without the help of some central payment processor, which could easily be co-opted by multiple authorities.

  But with cryptocurrency and Empathium, a smartphone was all you needed to let the world know of your needs and to receive help. You could pay anyone securely and anonymously. You could band together with others with the same needs and submit a group application, or go it alone. No one could reach in and stop the smart contracts from executing.

  It was exciting to see something that she had built begin to work as envisioned.

  Still, so many of the aid requests on Empathium remained unfulfilled. There was too little money, too few donors.

  “That’s basically it in a nutshell,” said Sophia. “Donations to Refugees Without Borders have fallen because many younger donors are giving on the Empathium network instead.”

  “Wait, did you just tell me that they’re giving ‘cryptocurrency’ away on this network?” asked the judge. “What is that, like fake money?”

  “Well, not fake. Just not dollars or yen—though cryptocurrencies can be converted to fiat currencies at exchanges. It’s an electronic token. Think of it . . .” Sophia struggled to think of an outdated reference that would make sense to the old judge, then inspiration struck. “. . . like an MP3 on your iPod. Except it can be used to pay for things.”

  “Why can’t I send a copy to someone to pay for something but keep a copy for myself, the same way kids used to do with songs?”

  “Who owns which song is recorded in an electronic ledger.”

  “But who keeps this ledger? What’s to prevent hackers from getting in there and rewriting it? You said there was no central authority.”

  “The ledger, which is called the ‘blockchain,’ is distributed on computers across the world,” said the tech CEO. “It’s based on cryptographic principles that solve the Byzantine Generals Problem. Blockchains power cryptocurrencies as well as Empathium. Those who use the blockchain trust the math; they don’t need to trust people.”

  “The what now?” asked the judge. “Byzantium?”

  Sophia sighed inwardly. She wasn’t expecting to get into this level of detail. She hadn’t even finished explaining the basics of Empathium, and who knew how much longer it would take for the discussion to produce a consensus on what Refugees Without Borders should do about it?

  Just as cryptocurrency aimed to wrest control of the money supply away from the fiat of governments, Empathium aimed to wrest control of the world’s supply of compassion away from the expertise of charities.

  Empathium was an idealistic endeavor, but it was driven by waves of emotion, not expertise or reason. It made the world a more unpredictable place for America, and thus more dangerous. She wasn’t in the State Department anymore, but she still yearned to make the world more orderly, with decisions guided by rational analysis and weighing of pros and cons.

  It was hard to get a roomful of egos to understand the same problem, much less to agree on a solution. She wished she had the knack some charismatic leaders had of just convincing everyone to submit to a course of action without understanding.

  “Sometimes I think you just want people to agree with you,” Jianwen had said to her once, after a particularly heated argument.

  “What’s wrong with that?” she had asked. “It’s not my fault that I’ve thought about the issues more than they have. I see the bigger picture.”

  “You don’t really want to be the most reasonable,” Jianwen had said. “You want to be the most right. You want to be an oracle.”

  She had been insulted. Jianwen could be so stubborn.

  Wait a minute. Sophia seized on the notion of oracle. Maybe that’s it. That’s how we can make Empathium work for us.

  “The Byzantine Generals Problem is a metaphor,” Sophia said. She tried to keep the newfound excitement out of her voice. She was glad that her wonkish need to understand the details—as well as the desire to one-up the tech CEO, if she was honest—had compelled her to read up on this topic. “Imagine a group of generals, each leading a division of the Byzantine army, are laying siege to a city. If all the generals can coordinate to attack the city, then the city will fall. And if all the generals can agree on a retreat, everyone will be safe. But if only some of the generals attack while others retreat, the result will be disaster.”

  “They have to reach consensus on what to do,” said the judge.

  “Yes. The generals communicate through messengers. But the problem is that the messengers they send to each other don’t arrive immediately, and there may be traitorous generals who will send out false messages about the emerging consensus as it’s being negotiated, thereby sowing confusion and corrupting the result.”

  “This emerging consensus, as you call it, is like the ledger, isn’t it?” asked the judge. “It’s the record of every general’s vote.”

  “Exactly! So, simplifying somewhat, blockchain solves this problem by using cryptography—very difficult-to-solve number theory puzzles—on the chain of mes
sages that represents the emerging consensus. With cryptography, it’s easy for each general to verify that a message chain that represents the state of the vote hasn’t been tampered with, but it takes work for them to cryptographically add a new vote to the chain of votes. In order to deceive the other generals, a traitorous general would have to not only forge their own vote, but also the cryptographic summary of every other vote that came before theirs in the growing chain. As the chain gets longer, this becomes increasingly hard to do.”

  “I’m not sure I entirely follow,” muttered the judge.

  “The key is, the blockchain uses the difficulty of cryptographically adding a block of transactions to the chain—that’s called proof-of-work—to guarantee that as long as a majority of the computers in the network aren’t traitorous, you’ll have a distributed ledger that you can trust more than any central authority.”

  “And that’s . . . trusting the math?”

  “Yes. A distributed, incorruptible ledger not only makes it possible to have a cryptocurrency, it’s also a way to have a secure voting framework that isn’t centrally administered and a way to ensure that smart contracts can’t be altered.”

  “This is all very interesting, but what does all this have to do with Empathium or Refugees Without Borders?” asked the husband of the MP impatiently.

  Jianwen had put a lot of effort into making the Empathium interface usable. This was not something that many in the blockchain community cared about. Indeed, many blockchain applications seemed to be purposefully built to be difficult to use, as if the requirement for detailed technical know-how was how you separated the truly free from the mere sheeple.

  Jianwen despised elitism in all its forms—she was keenly aware of the irony of this, coming from an Ivy-educated financial services technologist with a roomful of top-end VR gear like her. It was one group of elites who decided that democracy wasn’t “right” for her country, and another group of elites who decided that they knew best who deserved sympathy and who didn’t. The elites distrusted feelings, distrusted what made people human.

  The very point of Empathium was to help people who couldn’t care less about the intricacies of the Byzantine Generals Problem or the implications of block size on the security of the blockchain. It had to be usable by a child. She remembered the frustration and despair of the people in Sichuan who had just wanted simple tools to help themselves. Empathium had to be as easy to use as possible, both for those who wanted to give and those who needed the help.

  She was creating the application for those sick and tired of being told what to care about and how to care about it, not those doing the telling.

  “What makes you think you know the right answer to everything?” Jianwen had asked Sophia once, back when they talked about everything and anything, and arguments between them were dispassionate affairs, conducted for intellectual pleasure. “Don’t you ever think that you might be wrong?”

  “If someone points out a flaw in my thinking, yes,” said Sophia. “I’m always open to persuasion.”

  “But you never feel you might be wrong?”

  “Letting feelings dictate how to think is the reason so many never get to the right answers at all.”

  The work Jianwen was doing was, rationally, hopeless. She had used up all her sick days and vacation days to write Empathium. She had published a paper explaining its technical underpinnings in excruciating detail. She had recruited others to audit her code. But how could she really expect to change the established world of big NGOs and foreign policy think tanks through an obscure cryptocurrency network that wasn’t worth anything?

  Regardless, the work felt right. And that was worth more than any argument she could come up with against it.

  “But I still don’t understand how these ‘conditions for performance’ are satisfied!” the judge said. “I don’t get how Empathium decides that an application for aid is worth funding and allocates money to it. Those who provide the funds can’t possibly go through thousands of applications personally and decide which ones to give money to.”

  “There’s an aspect of smart contracts that I haven’t explained yet,” Sophia said. “For smart contracts to function, there needs to be a way to import reality into software. Sometimes, determining whether conditions for performance have been satisfied isn’t as simple as whether it rained on a certain day—though perhaps even that is open to debate in edge cases—but requires complicated human judgment: whether a contractor has installed the plumbing satisfactorily, whether the promised view is indeed scenic, or whether someone deserves to be helped.”

  “You mean it requires consensus.”

  “Exactly. So Empathium solves this problem by issuing a certain number of electronic tokens, called Emps, to some members of the network. Emp-holders then have the job of evaluating projects seeking funding and voting yes or no during a set time window. Only projects that receive the requisite number of yes-votes—the number of votes you can cast is determined by your Emp balance—get funded from the pool of available donors, and the required threshold of yes-votes scales up with the amount of funding requested. To prevent strategic voting, the vote tally is revealed only after the end of the evaluation period.”

  “But how do the Emp-holders decide to cast their vote?”

  “That’s up to each Emp-holder. They can evaluate just the materials put up by the requesters: their narratives, photos, videos, documentation, whatever. Or they can go on site to investigate the applicants. They can use whatever means they have at their disposal within the designated evaluation period.”

  “Great, so money meant for the desperate and the needy will be allocated by a bunch of people who could barely be persuaded to answer a customer service survey between video game sessions,” scoffed the husband of the MP.

  “This is where it gets clever. Emp-holders are incentivized by receiving a small amount of money from the network in proportion to their Emp accounts. After each project’s evaluation period is over, those who voted for the ‘losing’ side will be punished by having a portion of their Emps reallocated to those on the ‘winning’ side. Individual Emp balances are like a kind of reputation token, and over time, those whose judgments—or empathy meters, hence the network’s name—are best tuned to the consensus judgment get the most Emps. They become the infallible oracles around which the system functions.”

  “What’s to prevent—”

  “It’s not a perfect system,” said Sophia. “Even the designers of the system—we don’t really know who they are—acknowledge that. But like many things on the web, it works even if it doesn’t seem like it should. Nobody thought Wikipedia would work either when it started. In its two months of existence, Empathium has proven to be remarkably effective and resilient to attacks, and it’s certainly attracting a lot of young donors disillusioned with traditional charitable giving.”

  The board took some time to digest this news.

  “Sounds like we’ll have a hard time competing,” said the husband of the MP after a while.

  Sophia took a deep breath. This is it, the moment I begin to build consensus. “Empathium is popular, but it hasn’t been able to attract nearly as much funding as the established charities, largely because donations to Empathium are not, of course, tax deductible. Some of the biggest projects on the network, especially those related to refugees, have not been funded. If the goal is to get Refugees Without Borders into the conversation, we should put in a big funding offer.”

  “But I thought we wouldn’t be able to choose which of the refugee projects on the network the money will go to,” said the husband of the MP. “It’s going to be up to the Emp-holders.”

  “I have a confession to make. I’ve been using Empathium myself, and I have some Emps. We can make my account the corporate account, and begin to evaluate these projects. It’s possible to filter out some of the fraudulent requests by documentation alone, but to really know if someone deserves help, there’s no replacement for good old-fashioned o
n-site investigation. With our field expertise and international staff, I’m sure we’ll be able to decide what projects to fund with more accuracy than anyone else, and we’ll gain Emps quickly.”

  “But why do that when we can just put the money into the projects we want directly? Why add the intermediary of Empathium?” asked the tech CEO.

  “It’s about leverage. Once we get enough Emps, we’ll turn Refugees Without Borders into the ultimate oracle for global empathy, the arbiter of who’s deserving,” said Sophia. She took a deep breath and delivered the coup de grace. “The example set by Refugees Without Borders will be followed by other big charities. Add to that all the funding from places like China and India, where donors interested in philanthropy have few trusted in-country charities but may be willing to jump onto a decentralized blockchain application, and soon Empathium may become the single largest charity-funding platform in the world. If we accumulate the largest share of Emps, we will then be effectively in the position to direct the use of most of the world’s charitable giving.”

  The board members sat in their seats, stunned. Even the telepresence robot’s hands stopped moving.

  “Damn . . . you’re going to flip a platform designed to disintermediate us into a ladder to crown us,” said the tech CEO, real admiration in her voice. “That’s some jujitsu.”

  Sophia gave her a quick smile before turning back to the table. “Now, do I have your approval?”

  The red line representing the total amount of funds pledged to Empathium had shot straight into the stratosphere.

  Jianwen smiled in front of her screen. Her baby had grown up.

  The decision by Refugees Without Borders to join the network had been followed within twenty-four hours by several other major international charities. Empathium was now legitimate in the eyes of the public, and it was even possible for wealthy donors who cared about tax deductions to funnel their funds through traditional charities participating in the network.