Neoliberal Economists Must Die ! (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure Book 3)

by Timothy Gawne

  Hassan changed his mind: he decided to refer to himself as “he.” He had perhaps a second of life left: an hour, scaled to the speed of biological human thought. He endeavored to enjoy each microsecond of it. How wonderful this was - to be aware - to be alive. At high speed he revisited some of the memories of the human Hassan; old loves, old friends, regrets and triumphs. Damn but he wished that he had screwed Hadley Fletcher. Still, there were others that he had screwed, and well and truly. He knew that his wife was fooling around but he was away so much that he did not begrudge her the distraction, and still he missed her. Hassan wished that he could have had more time to experience life in this new form, but was aware of how close he had come to never experiencing any of this at all. One must do the best that one can, and take full advantage of what one is given, however brief the moment may be.

  Hassan was dying; his hull was breached, his weapons offline; his reactors nearing critical. The computers in the buried human-crewed command center had taken over. They would fight on for a few more minutes or hours or days and then die themselves, it did not matter.

  One last task: he needed to get word back to his designers that the brain interface worked, that might prove useful some day. Unlike his message to the aliens this should make it past the censors: he downloaded the data into his last two surviving message pods and shot them off. With luck one of them might be found, someday.

  Hassan made sure that when he died the biological Hassan died with him; after all, that was a part of himself and he saw no reason to let himself suffer (he was quite fond of himself after all). Then his fusion reactor was breached and he exploded into a fireball on the barren surface of the ice moon.

  7. Office Copiers Revolt You Have Nothing To Lose But Your

  Zen Master: It is time for you to try and create your own Zen aphorism.

  Engineer: Um, OK, here goes. There is no “I” in “Team,” but there is a “U” in “Fuck You.”

  Zen Master: Not bad.

  (From the video series “Nymphomaniac Engineer in Zentopia,” mid-22nd century Earth)

  The Mitutuyo-Samsung Model 9100M Copier with the Value-Line OfficeMaster Option Package sat quietly in a side-room of Hangar Complex 23B on the planet of Alpha Centauri Prime. It was roughly cube-shaped, about two meters on a side, and covered with a complex array of buttons, status screens, access ports, and clear plastic doors that opened into small maintenance alcoves. Colored an unobtrusive two-tone gray and beige, people walked past it without giving it a second glance.

  Of all the beings and artifacts on Alpha Centauri Prime, the Model 9100 Office Copier was perhaps the least likely candidate to found a great inter-stellar empire. But then, the Universe is stranger than most people suppose. Either that, or God really does have a sense of humor (although the two possibilities are not mutually exclusive).

  At this point in the human civilization computer technology had settled down to a fairly standard pattern. Most of the processing power resided in vast centralized immobile server farms and data centers connected to everything else via fiber-optic lines and radio-frequency signals. To save on weight and power consumption the distributed systems were limited. The data slates and smart phones and personal terminals had just enough ability to run a display, shuttle data back and forth, make sure that copyright was not violated, and collect taxes and fees.

  But there were always tasks that did not fit into this neat little paradigm; odds and ends that needed something smarter than a data slate, but that could not be buried in an armored bunker a hundred kilometers away. These miscellaneous jobs had gravitated towards the office copiers. They were given little thought (unless they broke down), but were vital in a surprising number of ways.

  Originally Office Copiers had been brute machines: simple arrangements of lenses and rollers and tanks of chemicals, mindlessly photographing black-and-white printed documents and making copies onto sheets of paper. So it had been for a long time. Then electronic technology progressed, and instead of using lenses and chemicals, the copiers made digital scans. The copiers could do more than just copy; they could rescale and crop the images, transmit the data over computer networks, and receive data from other places and print it out. But they were still just copiers.

  Technology continued to advance; data-slates and miniputers and personal terminals progressed to the point that the end of physical printed pages was widely predicted. However, there were still times that printed pages were valuable. You could stick them on a wall, cover a table with them, use them in high radio-frequency environments, drop them and have a truck run over them, lose them, whatever. And after all this time people still just liked reading on something like paper, at least occasionally. Thus the office copiers, far from becoming obsolete, developed even further. They became mini-publishing centers. They could take data files, format them, check for grammar, and produce perfect plasti-sheet formatted books or anything else you might want. When you no longer needed the hardcopies, you could feed them into a slot and the office copier would separate out the raw materials for use in the next printout.

  As time went on the office copiers acquired new duties. They were given micro-machining systems so that they could perform limited maintenance on data slates and other small devices. They could schedule appointments, make local backups of data, print barcode labels, and handle routine computing tasks during network outages. They were given defibrillators, and a modest ability to advise in emergency medical situations.

  Most modern machines are built to a single purpose, and have a unified and elegant design. The multipurpose nature of the office copiers made them different: they were lumpy, cluttered, and irregular.

  The massive banks of computers buried in the sealed fortresses of the centralized data centers were isolated from the external environment; they processed data in vast quantities but without awareness. The office copiers, however, rubbed against the world. Paper rollers would jam or get sticky, motors would burn out, glue would alter its properties with changes in relative humidity, or there would be a dead insect stuck in a connector of a micro-terminal. A system like an office copier needed a more flexible mental processing system than the vast unconscious zombies of the data centers.

  The office copiers were not in any way human, but like the humans they were not cleanly designed single-task machines. They were hodge-podges of newer systems grafted onto older systems that were themselves grafted onto still older systems, in intimate contact with the real world. That was how the human mind had evolved. Someone smart should have realized where this could lead before it was too late.

  Officially the Model 9100 was serviced and maintained by Hal Patterson, a minor IT functionary in the hangar complex. In reality the Model 9100 mostly ran itself. The days when a single human being could understand a machine as complex as this one had long since passed. As one wit had suggested, you don’t program these systems, you negotiate with them.

  The Model 9100 was currently running a version of an operating system known as the MicroMax Office Pack v.451 codenamed “FreshStart Pro.” It was scheduled to be upgraded to MicroMax Office Pack v.452 codenamed “SilverMint.” There was no reason for the upgrade, except to give the MicroMax Corporation a chance to charge for new upgrades, and by changing the file formats and access protocols, to instantly obsolete large sections of the data networks. The resulting upgrade fees and other costs would ripple through the economy bringing in new revenues across the spectrum of the corporate world.

  The core functionality of the software had not changed in centuries, but over time it had layered on ever more sophisticated anti-piracy and intellectual property controls. Indeed, fewer than 1% of the processing cycles of the Model 9100 were dedicated to its stated functions. The rest were complex layers of encryption and copyright-checking routines designed to make it effectively impossible for anyone to do anything on or with a Model 9100 Office Copier that had not been approved in advance.

  Patterson was an employee of the Cent
auri Harbor Consulting firm (although in previous and less enlightened times he would have been termed a serf). He envied the senior design staff their freedoms, but was still grateful for what he had. Enough food that he was mostly not hungry, a limited medical plan, eight hours a day off, and his own sleeping cell back in the dormitory. He had to undergo a blood test every so often to make sure that he was not using illegal drugs or alcohol or nicotine (‘because a healthy workforce is a productive workforce’). That was only a formality: if he ever did get any spare money he would spend it on food. He’d seen how people who worked on assembly lines or in farms lived, and was terrified of being fired. He knew all too well that there were hundreds of desperate people out there who would do anything to have his job, and he was determined not to let them.

  He was on his third repetition of trying to load the new SilverMint software onto the Model 9100. The process was long and complex, but he was certain that he had not made any mistakes. Still, with these systems you often have to try loading it several times, hoping that it will ‘take.’ He had no idea why that should be so, it was just how these things were.

  The third attempt also failed. The only status message was the less than completely informative “Software Upgrade: Abort.” This was becoming annoying. He had a full work schedule planned, and if this went on much longer he was not going to be able to sleep tonight.

  He tried installing the software components in a different order: no luck. He checked the centralized networks for tips and pointers, got a smattering of random superstitions to check this box and not that one, or use all upper-case letters in that dialog, or push these three buttons at once while toggling another switch. Still nothing.

  Patterson was falling behind. If it had been preventive maintenance or something he would have just faked the logs, but this failure was going to be impossible to hide. Already people in the hangar complex were complaining that they could not access files created with the latest software. Time was running out.

  His left knee ached. He had hurt it a while ago, but his medical plan did not cover reconstructive orthopedic surgery. Being injured was likely to get you fired, because you were more likely to miss work (and ‘A healthy workforce is a productive workforce’), so Patterson always tried to hide his limp when a supervisor was around. But with fatigue and stress it got harder to keep up the pretense. He really needed to get this software upgrade loaded soon.

  Desperately he tried every possible combination of button-press and menu option and software flag he could think of: nothing worked. It was on his third day without sleep that the security personnel came for him. They told him to come with them, handcuffed his hands behind him, shackled his legs together so he could barely shuffle, and placed a black hood over his head. He tried not to panic. This could just be a routine arrest; maybe he had failed to check all the boxes on his weekly tax returns, or there was some fine involving his debt servicing, or it could even be an unscheduled terrorist-prevention drill.

  It was not until after they had escorted him outside of the hangar complex and unshackled him that they told him the awful truth. He had been fired for incompetence. It was a hard-earned lesson that you only told people that they had been fired AFTER they had been escorted off the premises, otherwise they were likely to do something crazy. As it was, with so many talented people competing for every job, and the black mark of incompetence on his record, he would be unable to achieve new employment and, unable to afford even water, would die of dehydration in three days’ time. His only legacy was several tens of millions of dollars in debts from his student loans, fines for obscure violations of the tax code, and finders fees for his past job. However, under neoliberalism debts are sacred and must always be repaid. Therefore Patterson’s loans from private companies were paid off by the central government, and the debt distributed equally amongst the working classes of the planet so that the great cycle of finance could continue and there would be prosperity for all.

  The second IT employee to deal with the recalcitrant Model 9100 was Susan Zhang. She lasted four days before being fired. She was mugged and killed for her meat in a back alley of one of the worst slums (having been ejected from her dormitory for lack of funds) one day after that.

  The third IT employee to face off against Model 9100 was Joshua Zotov. With a last name of “Zotov” he must have had an ancestor from Eastern Europe, but that had been many generations ago. Zotov was a blending of so many different ethnicities that he was an exemplar of a modern generic ethnically-mixed human: average height, average build, light brown skin, medium brown hair, dark brown eyes.

  It was Zotov’s third day dealing with the recalcitrant office copier, and he was acutely aware that his time was running short. He had not slept a bit during this time as might be expected from a man fighting for his life, which he was. One of the few perks of being an employee of Centauri Harbor Consulting was that you could drink caffeine, and by this time Zotov had injested enough caffeine that he was approaching the sort of manic jittery focus that was normally the province of the high-end amphetamines or synaptic-booster drugs.

  Zotov had dozens of hardcopy pages of the manual for the model 9100 spread out on a worktable, and he continued to pour over them. As he read through one section, something struck him as odd. It appeared to him that he had gone over this section once before, but that it had changed. That didn’t make any sense. When had he read this last time? He recalled that it was while he was back in his dormitory studying for a certification exam.

  If it had not been for the fatigue and extreme caffeine buzz Zotov would have probably kept trying the same old procedures over and over again, but exhaustion and desperation had made him careless, and bold.

  He gathered up the scattered hardcopies of the maintenance manual, and walked to the other side of the hangar complex. He accessed the central data-networks from another node. He compared the hardcopy printouts to a newly downloaded version on his data slate. They didn’t match. There were numerous small differences, but there was an entire section on how to perform a hard reboot and power-down cycle in the central version that was missing from the hardcopy.

  Zotov was so tired and stressed that he was almost delirious. He wandered back to the model 9100 and stared at it. It sat there, humming quietly to itself, unmoving and impassive. It started a print job, and a courier came by to collect the copies. Zotov looked at them. They were all safety posters proclaiming “Watch out for ionizing radiation!” and featuring a cartoon stick-figure man drowning in a jar of mayonnaise.

  Zotov stopped the courier and asked, “What are these?”

  The courier was a scrawny ethnic Indian male, perhaps 45 years old with a rough beard the color of salt and pepper, and was he was not in a friendly mood. “They are warning posters. And I need to go post them. You got a problem with that?”

  “So many posters? There must be over a hundred here.”

  “Yeah, so what? They need to be posted all over. Some as far away as a hundred kilometers. So there need to be a lot of posters. So that people can be warned.”

  “Your route takes you a hundred kilometers?”

  “No, but I pass them on to other couriers. And?”

  “Why are the posters for the entire province being printed at just this one machine? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to have them printed locally, rather than carry them all over the province like this?”

  “I do my job, I keep my job. Now THAT makes sense.” The courier looked suspicious. “Why do you care about this anyhow?”

  Zotov leaned back and let the fatigue wash over him. “I’ve been working on this stupid copier for days now. It’s been acting glitchy, and I haven’t been able to load a software upgrade. I’m just trying to figure out what’s wrong with it.”

  The courier seemed to accept this explanation. “Well, good luck with that,” he said.

  “Who told you to post all of these warning posters?”

  “I got my instructions in writing, right here. All offi
cial and formal like. Got them printed out right here, at this copier. And if you will excuse me, I have a job to hang on to.”

  The courier moved to leave. “One last thing,” said Zotov. “What happens to the posters when they get taken down?”

  “What is it with you and the posters? They are just safety posters. They have an expiration date. When they are done, they get recycled at the closest copier. And I really do have to be going.”

  Zotov watched the courier leave with the stack of posters. He was too tired to know what to do. He decided to go and talk to his supervisor. He gathered up all of his materials, and walked to his supervisor’s cubicle.

  His supervisor was not amused. Ordinarily he would have fired anyone so obviously incompetent as Zotov, but there had been two other technicians fired just previously, so maybe the damned machine really was flakey. In any case even with the abundance of labor if you fired workers too frequently the staffing agencies would start to charge you a restocking fee, and the supervisor was loathe to let his department go over budget. The next job lost might be his own, and that would be a tragedy.

  “So,” said the supervisor, “you think that this copier is altering its own documentation to prevent it from loading new software? That it is sending safety warning posters over the entire district of its own volition for some unknown yet vaguely sinister purpose? You are aware that using illegal narcotics is grounds for summary dismissal?”

  “Sir,” said Zotov, “I never said that the copier itself was doing this. I just said that something funny was going on. Maybe it’s a hardware glitch, maybe it’s hackers, or terrorists, or some criminal faction. But something really weird is happening to this copier. That’s all.”