by Stanley Bing
“Walk this way, please,” said the appliance.
“The oldest fucking joke in the history of the universe,” said Arthur.
“Thank you, sir,” said Diego, “I pride myself on my database.” It preceded him into another portion of the house, emitting a low humming noise, if only to itself.
12
The Biggest Deal in the History of the Solar System
The art of the telepresence room had changed over the years. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it was a relatively simple facility provided with a two-way hookup capable of supplying video and sound to another location that was similarly equipped. Meetings had all the personality and charm of a transaction recorded on a minicam at a convenience store. Business got done in these rudimentary two-way conference spaces, of course, but everything that took place inside them had a feeling of impermanence, as if something had almost happened—something that had taken place on a lower level than matters conducted face-to-face.
By the end of the first decade of the new millennium, however, the tech had advanced somewhat but was still incompletely baked. Multiple cameras now captured the occupants of each room, which were outfitted with big, juicy screens that made people look at least life-sized and, in some cases, larger—particularly short guys, who appeared taller. The trouble was, there were seams in the displays, and the cameras were incapable of capturing correct line-of-sight angles. Participants would believe they were addressing a counterpart on the other side of the continent, but on the receiving end, it appeared as if the speaker were addressing the plastic ficus plant in the corner. By 2020, those problems of focus had been solved, the screens were now seamless, and eye contact and physical positioning were now assured.
That’s when things started to get too fancy. This was endemic to a late capitalist worldview that celebrated disruption and innovation divorced from any semblance of common sense. Throughout business and industry, as a new product or idea was improved, the service it provided would ramp up exponentially and get demonstrably better until it reached a peak of effectiveness and user satisfaction. It was at this point that the urge to innovate and improve things went on beyond the need to do so. The object or idea would then get “better”—more complex, more impressive to its designers, more expensive and heavier with pretention—while at the same time doing a worse job at what it was originally set out to do. Nothing, for instance, had ever been invented that improved upon a corkscrew when it came to opening a bottle of wine or a church key for popping the top off a bottle of beer. But that didn’t stop inventive, ambitious people from coming up with a wide variety of crazy gizmos that cost a fortune.
The trend was now pandemic. Cars were so complex that even the slightest problem sent them back to the factory for medical diagnosis and expert intervention. Vegetables had become so impressively ungainly that it took a buzz saw to separate a tomato into quarters. And in the case of the telepresence rooms, for twenty or thirty years, “improvements” on the 2020 basic solutions were constantly offered, installed, and then failed spectacularly to do the thing for which they’d been invented any more effectively than prior iterations. People forgot about the fucking issue of function in the rush to whip the form into a mile-high froth, Arthur would tell himself as he tore out the shiny new room and replaced it once again with a newer version of the old. Included in these ostensible upgrades to the basic and perfectly serviceable telepresence rooms were the introduction of 3-D tech, which gave everybody who used it intense migraines and intermittent nausea, as well as, somewhat later, holographic imagery, which reached a level of superbity so impressive—rendering objects and people with such solidity—that participants in meetings were incapable of focusing on anything but the technology, and nothing got done. Worse, when the holographic tech failed for a moment or two, as tech sometimes will, the faint of heart grew alarmed, or in some cases hysterically amused, at the visual disintegration of the individual they were addressing, and it often took an unacceptable amount of time for things to settle down and get back to more two-dimensional matters.
The upshot of this was that Arthur’s current telepresence room was a tasteful, sleek affair sporting blond wood, brushed steel, and forty-year-old tech that did the job but not a bit more than that. No solid objects appeared in the ether before him, nor did any three-dimensional conversant who phased in and out due to a momentary sunspot or photon wave in the space-time continuum. No, as he sat there in his roomy, comfy, high-backed chair, his new, pleasantly muscled torso sheathed in one of his favorite $10,000 bathrobes from Amazon Saks Fifth Avenue, it was a nice two-dimensional video image of Jerry Cee before him, with just enough size and reality to make human conversation the center of the discourse, and not the technology that delivered it.
“Yo, JC,” said Arthur to the small, wizened creature in the corresponding telepresence room some 350 miles away in the gleaming heart of the million-square-mile campus of what had once been known as Silicon Valley. The single most affluent community in the world, with several occupants who boasted net worth calculated in the trillions, with a capital T, the exurban California metropolis now known as Athena stretched from the northern edge of what had once been San Luis Obispo—still known affectionately as Slo-Town, because it had remained so—to the southern rim of Sonoma, with the walled jewel of San Francisco embedded like a diamond bindi in its forehead.
“Ma bruthah,” squeaked Jerry Cee. The tiny, amazingly elderly figure of Jerry Caravarapopulous confronted him. He was sitting, Arthur knew, on his famous, one-of-a-kind steelium-and-graphite suspended stool chair that placed him slightly higher than anybody he spoke with. “My, my,” said Jerry Cee. “Just look the fuck at you.” Then the two just looked at each other, with JC offering far and away the most intense scrutiny. “You are,” he said finally, “an impressive hunk, my frenemy.”
“Thanks, babe,” said Arthur.
It was unfortunate, thought Arthur, what happened to people when they got older than 110 or so. The thing in front of him looked more like a very, very old, intensely wrinkled albino capuchin monkey in a black T-shirt. “We got a deal to propose to you, captain,” said the monkey. “And it’s one I believe you will find interesting.”
“Yeah?” Arthur said in a tone drenched with ennui. This was what he had been waiting for.
“Dude,” said the monkey, “it is nothing more or less than the biggest fucking deal in the history of the solar system.”
“Not the universe?” said Arthur. “I was hoping for the universe.”
Yep. Now was the time, the old man in the young man’s body told himself, to play things cagy and to listen rather than speak; to lean out and not in. So he spoke not. This produced a silence in which each took the other’s mettle.
“How’s the lovely bride?” said the monkey, after a time.
“She is very well. She sends her regards, Jerry. You know you were always one of her favorites.”
“You, my friend, are a lucky man,” said Jerry. He addressed a small pad that sat at his right elbow and then poured himself a tall glass of Diet Coke. Jerry always drank a bunch of Diet Cokes every day. It was part of his brand. He took a swig, and then adopted a serious and businesslike look. But the passion, the greed of acquisition, was pouring out of him like water from a mountain spring. “You look like a fucking Greek god, Artie,” he said at last, the envy in his voice as thick as creosote.
“Well, it’s not my body, you know. It belongs to some poor yutz who was developed for this purpose, but he’s gone now, and I do, you know, inhabit it. And it’s pretty comfortable, Jay. It’s pretty fucking comfortable. It’s nice to take a piss and not think about when the event is going to start and whether it’s finished or not.”
“I can almost imagine it, kiddo.” The shriveled thing on the other side of the electronic setup looked at him for a while, radiating a pure, white lust for whatever it was he had on his mind.
“So what’s the deal, Jay?” Arthur said at last. “I was engage
d when you asked Diego to interrupt me. I’d like to get back to what I was doing.”
“Okay, Artie, well, you know what it is. You just don’t know what incentive I, and the Committee, are prepared to offer for it.”
“Dude. When have I been accused of failure to listen?”
The thing on the other side laughed then, a phlegmy burble that almost rendered him incapable of continuing. But then, his agenda was very, very extreme, so he did not abandon the quest, even though in another situation he might have, just to make a power point.
“So anyway, Artie. You realize that you have the thing we want. The deal will be on your terms. I know what we’re prepared to offer, but I’m curious. What do you want?”
“You’re assuming that I’m willing to deal, Jay,” said Arthur.
“Oh, of course,” said Jerry, very mildly, “we could simply find another, more violent solution to the problem. Like, we could send a task force to invade your facility, during which event you would unfortunately be killed.”
They both shared a good laugh at that.
“That would be an ineffective solution for both of us,” Jerry continued, “but at least we would know that, even though we had lost, you didn’t win, either.”
“Nah,” said Arthur. “You won’t do that, will you, JC? I don’t think so.”
“You’re right, bro. I mean, we’d rather not go adversarial. There’s huge upside here for us all, and there’s no reason to poison the well.”
“Okay, Jer.” Different Arthur now. Softer. Ready to talk. One game over. The other just beginning. “There’s no reason we can’t start off on a better footing. Sorry if I teed this thing up wrong. I guess I didn’t like your assumption that I was in a mandatory position.”
“If I conveyed that impression, that was my bad,” Jerry said, and took a sip of Diet Coke.
“So let’s start over, huh?”
“Fo’ sure, dawg,” said Jerry, who was somewhat notorious for showing his age with hundred-year-old slang never meant to be used by any white people, let alone obscenely wealthy ones.
Arthur didn’t want to show Jerry his before Jerry was forced to show his own, but he knew quite well what Jerry Cee—and the men and women behind him—wanted. Jerry was an effective executive and mouthpiece for the Committee, but he was no actor, and his affect was not subtle. The spittle at the corners of his wrinkled mouth when he beheld the new Arthur’s splendor was evidence of his objective.
“We want to discuss the tech that made you,” Jerry said, and took a slug of his beverage.
“Of course you do,” Arthur replied equably. “But seriously, dude, I’d like to know why it’s even a matter for discussion. Really, it’s not. Nor should it be at this point in time. First, it’s proprietary. It’s been tested on only one subject: me. So far, everything seems to be going okay.”
“Fuckin’ A it’s goin’ okay,” said Jerry. “Let’s look at it, Artie.”
“If you like.”
“This is not the kind of thing that can conceivably be offered to the mass public. The cost is prohibitive. The access to the tech is very limited. The ethical implications we won’t even talk about, although I’m sure there are plenty of people who would like to if they found out about it.”
“I don’t see any,” said Arthur.
“I’m sure you don’t. Let’s table that for a minute and address the issue of monetization. Let’s say it all goes according to plan, and you’re able to scale this to make it available, the way Elon did with the Tesla back in the teens. Started out within reach only to the very well off. Now you can get one for a dollar eighty.”
“Yeah, they’re thoroughly commoditized themselves,” said Arthur disdainfully.
“And they all drive themselves now anyhow. Where, I ask you, is the fucking personal enjoyment in that?”
The mogul in the other virtual space once again took a pull on his Diet Coke. “We hit ninety-seven-percent market share the other day,” he added as an afterthought.
“Of what?” Arthur asked. This was an astounding figure.
“Of, you know, everything, Artie. Everything we do, at any rate. Which is pretty much everything you don’t do.”
“That’s impressive, Jay,” said Arthur, “I mean that. Congratulations.”
In truth, he was a little stunned. This meant that 97 percent of all sales in all market sectors—retail, online, entertainment content, agriculture, whatever people bought or sold—was now controlled by the one huge, interconnected skein of interests whose chief executive was now sitting in the opposing seat.
“The Microsoft Division is looking a little hinky,” Jerry conceded, “but that’s to be expected, right?”
Arthur said nothing. It was well-known that the operation in Redmond had always been a drag on the enterprise portfolio, but it had so many users it was impossible to fold or deconsolidate it, so it went along, essentially flat, producing good cash flow and earnings but none of the growth that the markets looked for in an investment vehicle.
“Beyond that, we’re executing with distinction, as we used to say at Westinghouse about a thousand years ago. Amazon continues to grow, as it always has. We control the profits, if we need any, through our pricing mechanism. Archer Daniels Midland has a hammer lock on its sector. Apple, no problem, although Tim is getting up there in years, too. He says hi.”
“Tell him I send my best.” Once again, Arthur offered no particular comment, although he had to admit to himself that this was getting interesting.
“I don’t have to lay out the collection of assets we now have under one roof,” said Jerry, but Arthur could tell he was going to. “You can see how they would all work together far better than they did apart. Apple. Microsoft. Snapbook and the Alphabet, all the operations of Japan Inc. and the People’s Republic of China, which now includes the former North Korea—which can’t do much of any fucking thing whatsoever except hack and spy, but that has value, too, you know—and then naturally all the banks worth having. All these various operations executing with the fulfillment potential of Amazon, which has pretty much cornered the market on digital, brick-and-mortar, and drone delivery of just about any fucking thing the mind of man or woman can conjure? Peerless, man. Obviously, we still have markets in need of development. Russia, still pretty much a dead zone. All the Stannies, still living in the Stone Age. The Indian subcontinent is growing like a weed but still in need of organization. They still have monkeys in the streets. But except for that? We got it all, Chiquita. Biggest ever. Not since Rome.”
“Jerry. Dude.”
“Okay, okay. I’ll cut to the chase.”
“Diego! Get the fuck in here!” Arthur barked quite suddenly. He needed time to process this. It just might be as big as Jerry said. He was starting to be impressed by the possibility of what he might be offered. It sort of scared him, and that was saying something.
The door to the telepresence room opened with a sigh, and Diego hung in the entryway. “It’s wine o’clock, I think,” he said to the robot.
“Right away, sir.” Diego tipped forward 10 degrees and then backed out. The door to the room hissed shut.
“Sorry, Jay. Please continue. I wish I could offer you something, but . . .” Here Arthur gestured grandly, as if to say that, appearances aside, there were still some physical limitations to this round of discourse.
“We both know, however, that the actual transactions of these various divisions aren’t what matters, Artie. I mean, we do know that, don’t we?”
Here Arthur leaned in, in spite of himself. Yes, this was getting real. Approaching the nub of what he had in mind for quite some time.
“Yeah,” the executive gibbon continued, emitting a small, juicy chuckle. “I thought that might grab your attention.”
“Go on, Jer. Don’t make me come over there.”
“The Committee would like to know if you’re interested in a controlling interest . . . in the Cloud.”
Ah, thought Arthur. After a lifetime of
work—two lifetimes, really: one building power, the other wielding it with a strong arm and a mighty hand—here it was. They were offering him the crown, the laurel wreath, the scepter, because he had discovered the secret of immortal life. Which seemed like a fair trade.
“I won’t lie to you, Jerry,” he said. “I think there’s stuff we can talk about here.”
“Yeah, I thought you might. The consolidated entity that we have here is the bones and flesh and blood of the operation. The Cloud is the brain. Right now it’s spread out among all the divisions of the enterprise, although its physical location has been centralized in a location that is maybe the best-kept secret on the planet. We’re prepared to discuss executing a final consolidation of the underlying businesses, incorporating yours into the mix, and placing the unified Cloud under one ownership: ours. Your role in that structure is yet to be determined, but an exchange of value is what we got under consideration here.”
The door slid open, and Diego came in with a large tumbler of something golden brown on his tiny shelf. Ice tinkled in the glass. Arthur took the drink in silence, and Diego left. He took a gulp while his counterpart drained his Diet Coke to the dregs.
They both thought about things for a bit. Then Arthur spoke. “I’ll be up there tomorrow morning,” he said. It was time to end this phase of the talk. They’d done as much as they could as virtual presences to each other. It was time to sit around a table and find out if something worthwhile was there. The truth was, he felt kind of funny all of a sudden.
“Okay, Artie,” said Jerry. “See you then.”
“Oh, and Jerry”—Arthur leaned in again and impaled Jerry Cee with one of his darkest, meanest glares—“if I ever find another one of your little tennis balls or snooper droids of any kind surveilling me in any fucking way whatsoever, the deal is off. Do you get me on that, Jer? I want to hear that you do.”
