The Best of Gregory Benford

by David G. Hartwell

Images played directly upon her retina. The entrance protocol lifted her out of her Huntington Beach apartment and in a second she was zooming over rooftops, skating down the beach. Combers broke in soft white bands and red-suited surfers caught them in passing marriage.

  All piped down from a satellite view, of course, sharp and clear.

  Get to work, Myung, her Foe called. Sightsee later.

  “I’m running a deep search,” she lied.

  Sure.

  “I’ll spot you a hundred creds on the action,” she shot back.

  You’re on. Big new market opening today. A hint of mockery?

  “Where?” Today she was going to nail him, by God.

  Right under our noses, the way I sniff it.

  “In the county?”

  Now, that would be telling.

  Which meant he didn’t know.

  So: a hunt. Better than a day of shaving margins, at least.

  She and her Foe were zoomers, ferrets who made markets more efficient. Evolved far beyond the primitivo commodity traders of the late TwenCen, they moved fast, high-flying for competitive edge.

  They zoomed through spaces wholly insubstantial, but that was irrelevant. Economic pattern-spaces were as tricky as mountain crevasses. And even hard cash just stood for an idea.

  Most people still dug coal and grew crops, ancient style grunt labor—but in Orange County you could easily forget that, gripped by the fever of the new.

  Below her, the county was a sprawl, but a smart one. The wall-to-mall fungus left over from the TwenCen days was gone. High-rises rose from lush parks. Some even had orange grove skirts, a chic nostalgia. Roofs were eco-virtue white. Blacktop streets had long ago added a sandy-colored coating whose mica sprinkles winked up at her. Even cars were in light shades. All this to reflect sunlight, public advertisements that everybody was doing something about global warming.

  The car-rivers thronged streets and freeways (still free—if you could get the license). When parked, cars were tucked underground. Still plenty of scurry-scurry, but most of it mental, not metal.

  She sensed the county’s incessant pulse, the throb of the Pacific Basin’s hub, pivot point of the largest zonal economy on the planet.

  Felt, not saw. Her chest was a map. Laguna Beach over her right nipple, Irvine over the left. Using neural plasticity, the primary sensory areas of her cortex “read” the county’s electronic Mesh through her skin.

  But this was not like antique, serial reading at all. No flat data here. No screens.

  She relaxed. The trick was to merge, not just observe.

  Far better for a chimpanzee-like species to take in the world through its evolved, body-wrapping neural bed.

  More fun, too. She detected economic indicators on her augmented skin. A tiny shooting pain spoke of a leveraged buyout. Was that uneasy sensation natural to her, or a hint from her subsystems about a possible lowering of the prime rate?

  Gotcha! the Foe sent.

  Myung glanced at her running index. She was eleven hundred creds down!

  So fast? How could—?

  Then she felt it: dancing data-spikes in alarm-red, prickly on her left leg. The Foe had captured an early indicator. Which?

  Myung had been coasting toward the Anaheim hills, watching the pulse of business trading quicken as slanting sunshine smartly profiled the fashionable, post-pyramidal corporate buildings. So she had missed the opening salvo of weather data update, the first trading opportunity.

  The Foe already had an edge and was shifting investments. How?

  Ahead of her in the simulated air she could see the Foe skating to the south. All this was visual metaphor, of course, symbology for the directed attention of the data-eating programs.

  A stain came spreading from the east into Mission Viejo. Not real weather, but economic variables.

  Deals flickered beneath the data-thunderheads like sheet lightning. Pixels of packet-information fell as soft rains on her long-term investments.

  The Foe was buying extra electrical power from Oxnard. Selling it to users to offset the low yields seeping up from San Diego.

  Small stuff. A screen for something subtle. Myung close-upped the digital stream and glimpsed the deeper details.

  Every day more water flowed in the air over southern California than streamed down the Mississippi. Rainfall projections changed driving conditions, affected tournament golf scores, altered yields of solar power, fed into agri-prod.

  Down her back slid prickly-fresh commodity info, an itch she should scratch. A hint from her sniffer-programs? She willed a virtual finger to rub the tingling.

  —and snapped back to real-space.

  An ivory mist over Long Beach. Real, purpling water thunderclouds scooting into San Juan Cap from the south.

  Ah—virtual sports. The older the population got, the more leery of weather. They still wanted the zing of adventure, though. Through virtual feedback, creaky bodies could air-surf from twenty kilometers above the Grand Canyon. Or race alongside the few protected Great White sharks in the Catalina Preserve.

  High-resolution Virtuality stimulated lacy filigrees of electro-chem impulses throughout the cerebral cortex. Did it matter whether the induction came from the real thing or from the slippery arts of electronics?

  Time for a bit of business.

  Her prognosticator programs told her that with 0.87 probability, such oldies would cocoon-up across six states. So indoor virtual sports use, with electro-stim to zing the aging muscles, would rise in the next day.

  She swiftly exercised options on five virtual sites, pouring in some of her reserve computational capacity. But the Foe had already harvested the plums there. Not much margin left.

  Myung killed her simulated velocity and saw the layers of deals the Foe was making, counting on the coming storm to shift the odds by fractions. Enough contracts-of-the-moment processed, and profits added up. But you had to call the slant just right.

  Trouble-sniffing subroutines pressed their electronic doubts upon her: a warning chill breeze across her brow. She waved it away.

  Myung dove into the clouds of event-space. Her skin did the deals for her, working with software that verged on mammal-level intelligence itself. She wore her suites of artificial-intelligence…and in a real sense, they wore her.

  She felt her creds—not credits so much as credibilities, the operant currency in data-space—washing like hot air currents over her body.

  Losses were chilling. She got cold feet, quite literally, when the San Onofre nuke piped up with a gush of clean power. A new substation, coming on much earlier than SoCalEd had estimated.

  That endangered her energy portfolio. A quick flick got her out of the electrical futures market altogether, before the world-wide Mesh caught on to the implications.

  Up, away. Let the Foe pick up the last few percentage points. Myung flapped across the digital sky, capital taking wing.

  She lofted to a ten-mile-high perspective. Global warming had already made the county’s south-facing slopes into cactus and tough grasslands. Coastal sage still clung to the north-facing slopes, seeking cooler climes. All the coast was becoming a “fog desert” sustained by vapor from lukewarm ocean currents. Dikes held back the rising warm ocean from Newport to Long Beach.

  Pretty, but no commodity possibilities there any more.

  Time to take the larger view.

  She rose. Her tactile and visual maps expanded. She went to split-skin perception, with the real, matter-based landscape overlaid on the info-scape. Surreal, but heady.

  From below she burst into the data-sphere of Investtainment, where people played upon the world’s weather like a casino. Ever since rising global temperatures pumped more energy in, violent oscillations had grown.

  Weather was now the hidden, wild-card lubricant of the world’s economy. Tornado warnings were sent to street addresses, damage predictions shaded by the city block. Each neighborhood got its own rain forecast.

  A sparrow’s fall in Portugal cou
ld diddle the global fluid system so that, in principle, a thunderhead system would form over Fountain Valley a week later. Today, merging pressures from the south sent forking lightning over mid-California. That shut down the launch site of all local rocket-planes to the Orbital Hiltons. Hundreds of invest-programs had that already covered.

  So she looked on a still larger scale. Up, again.

  This grand world Mesh was N-dimensional. And even the number N changed with time, as parameters shifted in and out of application.

  There was only one way to make sense of this in the narrow human sensorium. Every second, a fresh dimension sheared in over an older dimension. Freeze-framed, each instant looked like a ridiculously complicated abstract sculpture running on drug-driven overdrive. Watch any one moment too hard and you got a lancing headache, motion sickness and zero comprehension.

  Augmented feedback, so useful in keeping on the financial edge, could also be an unforgiving bitch.

  The Foe wasn’t up here, hovering over the whole continent. Good. Time to think. She watched the N-space as if it were an entertainment, and in time came an extended perception, integrated by the long-suffering subconscious.

  She bestrode the world. Total immersion.

  She stamped and marched across the muddy field of chaotic economic interactions. Her boot heels left deep scars. These healed immediately: sub-programs at work, like cellular repair. She would pay a passage price for venturing here.

  A landscape opened like the welcome of a mother’s lap.

  Her fractal tentacles spread through the networks with blinding speed, penetrating the planetary spider web. Orange County was a brooding, swollen orb at the PacBasin’s center.

  Smelled it yet? came the Foe’s taunt from below.

  “I’m following some ticklers,” she lied.

  I’m way ahead of you.

  “Then how come you’re gabbing? And tracking me?”

  Friendly competition—

  “Forget the friendly part.” She was irked. Not by the Foe, but by failure. She needed something hot. Where?

  ’Fess up, you’re smelling nothing.

  “Just the stink of over-done expectations,” she shot back wryly.

  Nothing promising in the swirling weather-space, working with prickly light below her. Seen this way, the planet’s thirteen billion lives were like a field of grass waving beneath fitful gusts they could barely glimpse.

  Wrong blind alley! sent her Foe maliciously.

  Myung shot a glance at her indices. Down nineteen hundred!

  And she had spotted him a hundred. Damn.

  She shifted through parameter-spaces. There—like a carnival, neon-bright on the horizon of a black, cool desert: the colossal market-space of Culture.

  She strode across the tortured seethe of global Mesh data.

  In the archaic economy of manufacturing, middle managers were long gone. No more “just in time” manufacturing in blocky factories. No more one-size-fits-all. That had fallen to “right on time” production out of tiny shops, prefabs, even garages.

  Anybody who could make a gizmo cheaper could send you a bid. They would make your very own custom gizmo, by direct Mesh order.

  Around the globe, robotic prod-lines of canny intelligence stood ready in ill-lit shacks. Savvy software leaped into action at your Meshed demand, reconfiguring for your order like an obliging whore. Friction-free service. The mercantile millennium.

  Seen from up here, friction-free marketism seemed the world’s only workable ideology—unless you counted New Islam, but who did? Under it, middle managers had decades ago vanished down the sucking drain of evolving necessity. “Production” got shortened to prod—and prodded the market.

  Of course the people shed by frictionless prod ended up with dynamic, fulfilling careers in dog-washing: valets, luxury servants, touchy-feely insulators for the harried prod-folk. And their bosses.

  But not all was manufacturing. Even dog-dressers needed Culture Prod. Especially dog-dressers.

  “My sniffers are getting it,” she said.

  The Foe answered, You’re on the scent—but late.

  Something new…

  She walked through the data-vaults of the Culture City. As a glittering representation of unimaginable complexities, it loomed: Global, intricate, impossible to know fully for even a passing instant. And thus, an infinite resource.

  She stamped through streets busy with commerce. Ferrets and deal-making programs scampered like rodents under heel. Towers of the giga-conglomerates raked the skies.

  None of this Big Guy stuff for her. Not today, thanks.

  To beat her Foe, she needed something born of Orange County, something to put on the table.

  And only her own sniffer-programs could find it for her. The web of connections in even a single county was so criss-crossed that no mere human could find her way.

  She snapped back into the real world. Think.

  Lunch eased into her bloodstream, fed by the pod when it sensed her lowering blood sugar. Myung tapped for an extra Kaff to give her some zip. Her medical worrier hovered in air before her, clucked and frowned. She ignored it.

  —And back to Culture City.

  Glassy ramparts led up into the citadels of the mega-Corps. Showers of speculation rained on their flanks. Rivulets gurgled off into gutters. Nothing new here, just the ceaseless hum of a market full of energy and no place to go.

  Index check: sixteen hundred down!

  The deals she had left running from the morning were pumping out the last of their dividends. No more help there.

  Time’s a-wastin’, her Foe sent nastily. She could imagine his sneer and sardonic eyes.

  Save your creds for the crunch, she retorted.

  You’re down thirteen hundred and falling.

  He was right. The trouble with paired competition—the very latest market-stimulating twist—was that the outcome was starkly clear. No comforting self-delusions lasted long.

  Irked, she leaped high and flew above the City. Go local, then. Orange County was the PacBasin’s best fount of fresh ideas.

  She caught vectors from the county drawing her down. Prickly hints sheeted across her belly, over her forearms. To the east—there—a shimmer of possibility.

  Her ferrets were her own, of course—searcher programs tuned to her style, her way of perceiving quality and content. They were her, in a truncated sense.

  Now they led her down a funnel, into—

  A mall.

  In real-space, no less. Tacky.

  Hopelessly antique, of course. Dilapidated buildings leaning against each other, laid out in boring rectangular grids. Faded plastic and rusty chrome.

  People still went there, of course; somewhere, she was sure, people still used wooden plows.

  This must be in Kansas or the Siberian Free State or somewhere equally Out Of It. Why in the world had her sniffers taken her here?

  She checked real-world location, preparing to lift out.

  East Anaheim! Impossible…

  But no—there was something here. Her sniffer popped up an overlay and the soles of her feet itched with anticipation. Programs zoomed her in on a gray shambles that dominated the end of the cracked blacktop parking lot.

  Was this a museum? No, but—

  Art Attack came the signifier.

  That sign… “An old K-Mart,” she murmured. She barely remembered being in one as a girl. Rigid, old-style aisles of plastic prod. Positively cubic, as the teeners said. A cube, after all, was an infinite number of stacked squares.

  But this K-Mart had been reshaped. Stucco-sculpted into an archly ironic lavender mosque, festooned with bright brand name items.

  It hit her. “Of course!”

  She zoomed up, above the Orange County jumble.

  Here it was—pay dirt. And she was on the ground first.

  She popped her pod and sucked in the dry, flavorful air. Back in Huntington Beach. Her throat was dry, the aftermath of tension.

  And just 1
6:47, too. Plenty of time for a swim.

  The team that had done the mock-mosque K-Mart were like all artists: sophisticated along one axis, dunderheads along all economic vectors. They had thought it was a pure lark to fashion ancient relics of paleo-capitalism into bizarre abstract expressionist “statements”. Mere fun effusions, they thought.

  She loved working with people who were, deep in their souls, innocent of markets.

  Within two hours she had locked up the idea and labeled it: “Post-Consumerism Dada from the fabled Age of Appetite”.

  She had marketed it through pre-view around the globe. Thailand and the Siberians (the last true culture virgins) had gobbled up the idea. Every rotting ’burb round the globe had plenty of derelict K-Marts; this gave them a new angle.

  Then she had auctioned the idea in the Mesh. Cut in the artists for their majority interest. Sold shares. Franchised it in the Cutting Concept sub-Mesh. Divided shares twice, declared a dividend.

  All in less time than it took to drive from Garden Grove to San Clemente.

  “How’d you find that?” her Foe asked, climbing out of his pod.

  “My sniffers are good, I told you.”

  He scowled. “And how’d you get there so fast?”

  “You’ve got to take the larger view,” she said mysteriously.

  He grimaced. “You’re up two thousand five creds.”

  “Lucky I didn’t really trounce you.”

  “Culture City sure ate it up, too.”

  “Speaking of which, how about starting a steak? I’m starving.”

  He kissed her. This was perhaps the best part of the Foe-Team method. They spurred each other on, but didn’t cut each other dead in the market place. No matter how appealing that seemed, sometimes.

  Being married helped keep their rivalry on reasonable terms. Theirs was a standard five-year monogamous contract, already nearly half over. How could she not renew, with such a deliciously stimulating opponent?

  Sure, dog-eat-dog markets sometimes worked better, but who wanted to dine on dog?

  “We’ll split the chores,” he said.

  “We need a servant.”

  He laughed. “Think we’re rich? We just grease the gears of the great machine.”

  “Such a poet you are.”