Each of the boys he left behind registered an awed, vaguely guilty expression as they stared at their new afto-aspro box. Nigel followed them without a qualm.
It was crazy. They marched into a jeans shop that was chromed, strobed, and shaking with some classic Pulp. A bored girl assistant read a tatty X Libris paperback behind the counter. The boys clustered at the back, sunburst xenon pulses segmenting their movements to robotic jerks as they stuffed jeans into plastic carrier bags. Then they sauntered out casually. The assistant never even glanced up.
Nigel started after them, slackjawed; then he saw the two white pillars on either side of the open door. Why not? he thought. If they can cobble up something that'll scramble a radar trap, then why not something to jam a shop's security tags?
Outside on the pavement a man was struggling past, carrying what looked like a huge painting, an oblong of brown wrapping paper five foot by three foot, barely an inch thick. A furtive look in his eye suggested he'd just snapped up a bargain.
Nigel raised a finger. "Excuse me."
It was a flatscreen television. No need to use up valuable living room space with a bulky black cabinet, just screw it on the wall, neat and out of the way. The screen was edged with a solar collector frame, so it didn't need to be plugged into the mains. Better yet, the man confided, it wouldn't register on TV detector van equipment, no need for a licence. And all for a hundred pounds.
Nigel knew that the corporate giants like Sony, JVC, Goldstar, IBM, and Racal had spent most of the last decade and hundreds of millions of dollars into cracking the concept of flat wide screens.
The blue chips would be haemorrhaging white tonight.
"Mobile phone, mister?" A dreadlocked Asian boy smiled winningly; two missing front teeth turned him into a juvenile vampire. "It's got a floating clone number, you never get a bill. Twenty quid folding, or a sovereign."
"Sod off."
~ * ~
Miranda was waiting for him on the leather settee in his lounge, denim shirt unbuttoned to show off a small black bra.
"How the fuck did you get in here?"
She grinned, and held up a snow-white version of his HiSecure infrared key. "Fair's fair, Nigel. You got the key to my panties."
"You shouldn't be carrying that kind of gadget round with you right now. People are starting to realize what afto-aspro can be made to do."
"Sure they are. They've seen what's coming; they're gonna be carrying themselves pretty soon. Just like Ilkia said. Have you seen the way it's taking off? Stuff's flooding out of the sink estates. There's kids in every city got a breeder chip now. Nobody's going to stop it."
He glanced up from the Twenties glitz-mirror cocktail bar. "A breeder chip? You found out something?"
For once the youthful confidence was missing. She shivered a little as she took the Pimms he'd mixed. "Yeah. I got Ilkia to take me to the Cameroon boys' squat. They showed me. All you need to make afto-aspro is a little chip of breeder and the right chemical junk for it to scoff. Theirs is hooked up to an old PC running a composition program. Do you see? You tell the afto-aspro what you want it to be, and it just fucking does it." She paused. "The function is hardformatted into the molecular structure. It can be anything you want."
Nigel sank deep into the leather settee. "Holy shit." No name. She'd told him there was no name, no single source, no stock to invest in. It was the end of the world.
She laughed, kitten spry again. "Isn't it beautiful? It was crude gear at first, like the gleam and the encryption-buster; but there are composition program upgrades coming in every hour now, downloaded through the Internet. People like the Cameroon boys are matching anything the big companies can build, and then some." Miranda threw her arms round him and tried to kiss him.
"You don't understand what you're doing, do you?"
"Yeah. I'm having a good time. I'm winning. Like you."
"Jesus Christ."
"So is that enough to make our deal? Are we hot now, or what?"
"What deal? You and your friends are screwing the world to death. Do you understand that? To death!"
She looked at him strangely, as if he'd missed some terribly obvious point. "Sure it's gonna be different for you. Your world's gonna be the same as mine, now. Didn't you realize that? That's why you wanted the deal, ain't it, so we could make a stash and clean out first?"
"Stash of what, you stupid bitch? Your bastards from Cameroon are wiping out the economy."
"No we ain't. We're just spreading it around a bit. Stopping things costing so much. Afto-aspro lets people like me have what you've got. No hurt in that. We'll all be better off."
"You understand nothing."
Miranda laughed and climbed onto his lap. "Kiss me Nigel. It's going to be a brand new day. A whole new world! We're gonna change everything! Ilkia says it's democratic electronics. He says that's what it was designed for, to give the world's poor what the rich Westerners enjoy. Afto-aspro don't kill, it helps everyone. Ilkia says it's only the old capitalist structure which is dying. There's still going to be an economy, but we're going to free it from banks and billionaires. Ilkia says-"
"Fuck what Ilkia says." Nigel surged upwards, violently pushing her away. She fell back heavily, cracking her head against the mahogany cocktail bar.
For the first time she seemed to realize his position. She looked confused. "I thought you and me had a thing."
"Don't be ridiculous."
Miranda went from confusion to plain hurt. She stroked strands of hair from her eyes, which were moist. "Here's a tip, Nigel," she said tearfully, going to the door. "Hang on to your gold watch, and your gold pen, and your tie-clip, and your gold neck chain. You'll need them. Credit's gonna get busted too, and that's what your kind live on. Cos we never get given any, do we?" Then she was gone.
He stood there for maybe half a minute. "Hell." He ran out into the landing, but the lift door was already closing. "Good luck, Miranda," he shouted after her. "I want to wish you good luck."
~ * ~
The TV news was overloading on afto-aspro. Half of the nine o'clock news was devoted to the new manufacturing revolution, hot young reporters tackling happy punters. Studio talking heads followed with hyper-cautious interpretations of its possible consequences. The end of large-scale industrialisation, the start of a true global village economy, green, clean, and noncompetitive.
"Bollocks," Nigel snapped. He fired the remote, wiping out the report. De-industrialisation wasn't the outcome, he was sure of it. Instinct was strong here, a lifetime of feeling the patterns spoke to him.
He pulled his laptop over, flipped it open, and after a while, began to type.
~ * ~
"Dump every electronics share we have," Nigel told Austin St. Clair next morning.
"Are you insane?" the supervisor bawled. Outside the glass walls chairs had become as redundant as silicon; everyone stood, shouting and waving at each other like bookies on speed. Gold was still rising. Governments were issuing optimistic forecasts—nobody was paying attention. VDUs were flashing up red starburst symbols as the electronics market crashed. "If we sell now, we'll lose over a quarter of a billion. Totally outside my authority. I won't be working the floor, I'll be fucking sweeping it!"
"We'll lose a lot more if we hang on to them."
"It'll bottom out. It looks bad, but it always bottoms out. Intel and Fujitsu have already announced they're going to start afto-aspro production; the rest will follow."
"It doesn't matter. Those kind of companies are obsolete now. It took an investment of half a billion dollars to build every new chip plant; and two years later the next generation processor would come along, and you'd have to rebuild. That's why only the rich countries ever produced the damn things. The whole point of afto-aspro is that it doesn't need that kind of investment. Right now, the dumbest people in the country are making afto-aspro in rooms full of cockroaches. Don't you get it? There is no more electronics industry. It just went the same way as gas lamps and vinyl reco
rds."
"Christ!" Austin thumped a fist on his desk, then jammed the grazed knuckles into his mouth. "Oh Christ, Nigel."
"It doesn't matter. We can get the company out. Buy engineering, the heavier the better. Firms which make big, solid, bulky metal products: ships, cranes, combine harvesters, bridges, cement lorries, steam rollers, trains, hell even washing machines are mostly mechanical. Afto-aspro can't replace that. And those shares are a good buy right now. Everyone was so keen to get into sunrise technologies and multimedia bollocks we ignored the fundamentals. If we move quick we can recoup our losses on electronics. But it's got to be now, Austin. The market will figure it out; capital is going to flood into that section. If you're smart, we'll be ahead of them."
~ * ~
Five months later his prediction had almost come true. There were no more electronics companies. There weren't any oil companies left either, thanks to the ubiquitous emax.
The afto-aspro spring had edged out the winter of faded technologies right across the UK. Vigorous new growth supplanted the obsolete structures and systems of yesterday. Solar collector panels were spread over roofs, replacing slates and tiles and thatch. Cars were fitted with electrolyte regenerator cells, kits which turned exhaust fumes back into petrol. That was just a stop-gap. Factories were already busy installing new production line facilities for vehicles which would be powered solely from an emax, their bodywork reverting to the Henry Ford bon mot of gleaming solar-collector black.
Afto-aspro was at the heart of it all, but the actual change, the physical adaptations, required manual labour, skilled and semi-skilled. Opportunity for all. People lost jobs, people found new ones. Unemployment only rose a couple of per cent. Nigel was laid off and re-employed on a freelance basis, lower income, inferior terms, poorer conditions. But at least he was still in work.
It was the day the gas network was due to be turned off permanently when Nigel glided his not-so-new Nimbus into the hypermarket park. He turned off the ignition and the perfect tone of the Sonic Energy Authority ebbed away; the afto-aspro MB (memory block) player had replaced CDs and cassettes. MBs had also replaced videos, games cartridges, and floppy disks; each cigarette-sized cylinder stored hours of data.
There were no kids lurking about ready to thrust the latest afto-aspro application into his face. He missed them somehow. But for fitting regenerator cells on cars you went to a garage; to wire your home up to a domestic emax a professional electrician was called in; any household gadget was grown to order in your local electrical store. Blind Simon was hunched in his usual place beside the hypermarket entrance, coat buttoned up against the sweltering September sun, flute trilling gently. Nigel patted his pockets for a coin. There was a wad of notes in his wallet; for a couple of weeks transactions had been all in sovereigns, or jewellery, or even art; but with things settling down again people were accepting the promise of the Chief Cashier once more. Even cashpoints were coming back in use as banks replaced their old electronics with blocks of afto-aspro. "Morning, Simon."
Simon smiled softly. He raised the scuffed old shades and looked straight at Nigel. "I always wondered what you looked like. I always wondered about the face of a man who would pull a shitty stunt like that, week in, week out."
The golden Labrador barked angrily.
Nigel stumbled a pace backwards, shock draining the heat from his blood. Simon's eye sockets were filled with balls of afto-aspro. No irises, no pupils, just blank white spheres. "Clever, isn't it?" the old tramp said. "The latest compositional program upgrade can design organic substitutes. Eyes are easy; all an eye does is convert photons to nerve impulses. Molecular filters like kidneys are a little more complicated, but they'll get there, I'm sure. After all, the only real work left these days is thinking."
"Christ almighty."
"How does your money sound these days, Mr Finchley?" The heat returned to Nigel's blood as fast as it had left, burning his cheeks and ears. He almost sprinted back to the Nimbus.
~ * ~
The trading floor was quiet. Half of the terminals were veiled below dust covers; the level of activity on the market no longer justified a full team of dealers. Those still on the company's payroll were a subdued, sober bunch intent on steering a steady course. The days of screaming out deals while holding three telephone handsets and reading five displays at once were long gone. After the holocaust of corporate casualties afto-aspro had inflicted on the global economy, what remained was rock solid stable. The international financial playing field still wasn't exactly level, but the disparity between the developed nations and what had been the Third World was a lot smaller. In fact, the distinction between the two was now measured in the amount of infrastructure a country had: industrial output per capita was approaching equilibrium. As people suddenly realized, the Third World had a lot of heavy engineering plants, most of them built by the multinationals who wished to exploit the cheap labour costs such countries boasted as their principal asset.
Nigel walked down the row of silent, blank computers knowing how grave-robbers must feel. Dealers just picked over the bones these days; they didn't control or dictate like before. But like everyone else, he'd adjusted. He was good at picking over bones, spotting the scraps of flesh. His position was almost as safe in the new order as it had been in the old.
"Some weird delegation in," one of the dealers muttered uneasily as Nigel sat at his station. "Austin's been talking to them for forty minutes."
Four people were sitting in Austin St. Clair's glass wall office. Not the usual collection of Armani and Yamamoto power suits either. Three black men and a red-headed white woman, all dressed in army surplus fatigues and combat boots.
Austin St. Clair caught sight of Nigel, and met him at the door. "Trouble," he announced bleakly before Nigel could get into the office. "Anarchist freaks from the London-Cameroon software collective. They've made an approach to our board for improving the trading floor's performance. So they say."
As the door closed behind Nigel, he glanced over at the intruders, and froze. It was Miranda. Miranda looking poised, taller, broader, delectable.
"Hi there, Nigel. It's been a while."
"Miranda?" He tried to retain his composure. "What's new?"
"Meet the boys from the collective. We're about to buy you out."
"Buy us out? Well, I see you joined the human race. I always said ex- anarchists make the best capitalists." He tried an uneasy laugh.
"Not quite." She glanced at Austin St. Clair as if to decide his trustworthiness, then shrugged and relaxed. "Actually, we're going to stamp you out, Nigel."
"No way."
"You like the way I look now?"
"What? Yes. Yes, I suppose so."
"It's the latest afto-aspro; our collective specialises in compositional programs for organic substitutes. I had a few implants."
"They suit you. You suit you."
"We don't really give a fuck about cosmetics, of course; but it helps screw up the income for private clinics. What we're concentrating on is providing enhanced automated intellectual services."
"What?"
"Neural networks. We grow afto-aspro brains, Nigel."
"The London-Cameroon collective has persuaded the board that their new afto-aspro development can handle the trading floor by itself," Austin St. Clair said grimly. "They're going to wire neural networks into our finance net, and replace the dealers."
"What?" Nigel yelped.
All four of the collective were smiling at him.
"We're using capitalism's own strength to break it, Nigel," Miranda said. "Capitalism fosters the culture of competition and achievement; so someone told me once. And in order to compete and achieve you've got to have the best product. Once we've installed the system here, the other financial companies will see how good it is, and they'll buy the same system for themselves. They'll be refined and polished and debugged until they can't be improved any further. Then everybody will have identical systems battling for the same business. It'
ll be the final stalemate; nobody will be able to win. You'll be levelled, Nigel. What you are now will cease to exist. It'll allow a social market to grow without interference."
"Banks and billionaires," he whispered.
"You got it, comrade. But before we sound the last crash, the collective would like to offer you a week's contract. You always said you were the best, Nigel, now here's your chance to prove it. Our neural networks need to learn the ropes, so who better than you to teach them their core program? They'll spend a week observing you deal, then take over. Our terms for your thought routines will be generous."
"You want my thought routines?"
New Worlds Page 11
