A Good Old-Fashioned Future

by Bruce Sterling

  The box didn’t offer any glimpse of politics in Europe or the Sphere or the South. There were no hotspots or pips or index tagging. You couldn’t look stuff up or annotate it—you just had to passively watch whatever the channel’s masters chose to show you, whenever they chose to show it. This media setup was so insultingly lame and halt and primitive that it was almost perversely interesting. Kind of like peering through keyholes.

  Lyle left the box on the Executive Channel, because it looked conceivable that something might actually happen there. It had swiftly become clear to him that the intolerably monotonous fodder on the other two channels was about as exciting as those channels ever got. Lyle retreated to his workbench and got back to enamel work.

  At length, the president of NAFTA arrived and decamped from his helicopter on the tarmac in Louisiana. A swarm of presidential bodyguards materialized out of the expectant crowd, looking simultaneously extremely busy and icily unperturbable.

  Suddenly a line of text flickered up at the bottom of the screen. The text was set in a very old-fashioned computer font, chalk-white letters with little visible jagged pixel-edges. “Look at him hunting for that camera mark,” the subtitle read as it scrolled across the screen. “Why wasn’t he briefed properly? He looks like a stray dog!”

  The president meandered amiably across the sun-blistered tarmac, gazing from side to side, and then stopped briefly to shake the eager outstretched hand of a local politician. “That must have hurt,” commented the text. “That Cajun dolt is poison in the polls.” The president chatted amiably with the local politician and an elderly harridan in a purple dress who seemed to be the man’s wife. “Get him away from those losers!” raged the subtitle. “Get the Man up to the podium, for the love of Mike! Where’s the chief of staff? Doped up on so-called smart drugs as usual? Get with your jobs, people!”

  The president looked well. Lyle had noticed that the president of NAFTA always looked well; it seemed to be a professional requirement. The big political cheeses in Europe always looked somber and intellectual, and the Sphere people always looked humble and dedicated, and the South people always looked angry and fanatical, but the NAFTA prez always looked like he’d just done a few laps in a pool and had a brisk rubdown. His large, glossy, bluffly cheerful face was discreetly stenciled with tattoos: both cheeks, a chorus line of tatts on his forehead above both eyebrows, plus a few extra logos on his rocklike chin. A president’s face was the ultimate billboard for major backers and interest groups.

  “Does he think we have all day?” the text demanded. “What’s with this dead air time? Can’t anyone properly arrange a media event these days? You call this public access? You call this informing the electorate? If we’d known the infobahn would come to this, we’d have never built the thing!”

  The president meandered amiably to a podium covered with ceremonial microphones. Lyle had noticed that politicians always used a big healthy cluster of traditional big fat microphones, even though nowadays you could build working microphones the size of a grain of rice.

  “Hey, how y’all?” asked the president, grinning.

  The crowd chorused back at him, with ragged enthusiasm.

  “Let these fine folks up a bit closer,” the president ordered suddenly, waving airily at his phalanx of bodyguards. “Y’all come on up closer, everybody! Sit right on the ground, we’re all just folks here today.” The president smiled benignly as the sweating, straw-hatted summer crowd hustled up to join him, scarcely believing their luck.

  “Marietta and I just had a heck of a fine lunch down in Opelousas,” commented the president, patting his flat, muscular belly. He deserted the fiction of his official podium to energetically press the Louisianan flesh. As he moved from hand to grasping hand, his every word was picked up infallibly by an invisible mike, probably implanted in one of his molars. “We had dirty rice, red beans—were they hot!—and crawdads big enough to body-slam a Maine lobster!” He chuckled. “What a sight them mudbugs were! Can y’all believe that?”

  The president’s guards were unobtrusively but methodically working the crowd with portable detectors and sophisticated spex equipment. They didn’t look very concerned by the president’s supposed change in routine.

  “I see he’s gonna run with the usual genetics malarkey,” commented the subtitle.

  “Y’all have got a perfect right to be mighty proud of the agriculture in this state,” intoned the president.

  “Y’all’s agroscience know-how is second to none! Sure, I know there’s a few pointy-headed Luddites up in the snowbelt, who say they prefer their crawdads dinky.”

  Everyone laughed.

  “Folks, I got nothin’ against that attitude. If some jasper wants to spend his hard-earned money buyin’ and peelin’ and shuckin’ those little dinky ones, that’s all right by me and Marietta. Ain’t that right, honey?”

  The first lady smiled and waved one power-gloved hand.

  “But folks, you and I both know that those whiners who waste our time complaining about ‘natural food’ have never sucked a mudbug head in their lives! ‘Natural,’ my left elbow! Who are they tryin’ to kid? Just ’cause you’re country, don’t mean you can’t hack DNA!”

  “He’s been working really hard on the regional accents,” commented the text. “Not bad for a guy from Minnesota. But look at that sloppy, incompetent camera work! Doesn’t anybody care anymore? What on earth is happening to our standards?”

  By lunchtime, Lyle had the final coat down on the enameling job. He ate a bowl of triticale mush and chewed up a mineral-rich handful of iodized sponge.

  Then he settled down in front of the wallscreen to work on the inertia brake. Lyle knew there was big money in the inertia brake—for somebody, somewhere, sometime. The device smelled like the future.

  Lyle tucked a jeweler’s loupe in one eye and toyed methodically with the brake. He loved the way the piezoplastic clamp and rim transmuted braking energy into electrical-battery storage. At last, a way to capture the energy you lost in braking and put it to solid use. It was almost, but not quite, magical.

  The way Lyle figured it, there was gonna be a big market someday for an inertia brake that captured energy and then fed it back through the chaindrive in a way that just felt like human pedaling energy, in a direct and intuitive and muscular way, not chunky and buzzy like some loser battery-powered moped. If the system worked out right, it would make the rider feel completely natural and yet subtly superhuman at the same time. And it had to be simple, the kind of system a shop guy could fix with hand tools. It wouldn’t work if it was too brittle and fancy, it just wouldn’t feel like an authentic bike.

  Lyle had a lot of ideas about the design. He was pretty sure he could get a real grip on the problem, if only he weren’t being worked to death just keeping the shop going. If he could get enough capital together to assemble the prototypes and do some serious field tests.

  It would have to be chip-driven, of course, but true to the biking spirit at the same time. A lot of bikes had chips in them nowadays, in the shocks or the braking or in reactive hubs, but bicycles simply weren’t like computers. Computers were black boxes inside, no big visible working parts. People, by contrast, got sentimental about their bike gear. People were strangely reticent and traditional about bikes. That’s why the bike market had never really gone for recumbents, even though the recumbent design had a big mechanical advantage. People didn’t like their bikes too complicated. They didn’t want bicycles to bitch and complain and whine for attention and constant upgrading the way that computers did. Bikes were too personal. People wanted their bikes to wear.

  Someone banged at the shop door.

  Lyle opened it. Down on the tiling by the barrels stood a tall brunette woman in stretch shorts, with a short-sleeve blue pullover and a ponytail. She had a bike under one arm, an old lacquer-and-paper-framed Taiwanese job. “Are you Edward Dertouzas?” she said, gazing up at him.

  “No,” Lyle said patiently. “Eddy’s in Europe.�
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  She thought this over. “I’m new in the zone,” she confessed. “Can you fix this bike for me? I just bought it secondhand and I think it kinda needs some work.”

  “Sure,” Lyle said. “You came to the right guy for that job, ma’am, because Eddy Dertouzas couldn’t fix a bike for hell. Eddy just used to live here. I’m the guy who actually owns this shop. Hand the bike up.”

  Lyle crouched down, got a grip on the handlebar stem, and hauled the bike into the shop. The woman gazed up at him respectfully. “What’s your name?”

  “Lyle Schweik.”

  “I’m Kitty Casaday.” She hesitated. “Could I come up inside there?”

  Lyle reached down, gripped her muscular wrist, and hauled her up into the shop. She wasn’t all that good-looking, but she was in really good shape—like a mountain biker or triathlon runner. She looked about thirty-five. It was hard to tell, exactly. Once people got into cosmetic surgery and serious biomaintenance, it got pretty hard to judge their age. Unless you got a good, close medical exam of their eyelids and cuticles and internal membranes and such.

  She looked around the shop with great interest, brown pony tail twitching. “Where you hail from?” Lyle asked her. He had already forgotten her name.

  “Well, I’m originally from Juneau, Alaska.”

  “Canadian, huh? Great. Welcome to Tennessee.”

  “Actually, Alaska used to be part of the United States.”

  “You’re kidding,” Lyle said. “Hey, I’m no historian, but I’ve seen Alaska on a map before.”

  “You’ve got a whole working shop and everything built inside this old place! That’s really something, Mr. Schweik. What’s behind that curtain?”

  “The spare room,” Lyle said. “That’s where my roommate used to stay.”

  She glanced up. “Dertouzas?”

  “Yeah, him.”

  “Who’s in there now?”

  “Nobody,” Lyle said sadly. “I got some storage stuff in there.”

  She nodded slowly, and kept looking around, apparently galvanized with curiosity. “What are you running on that screen?”

  “Hard to say, really,” Lyle said. He crossed the room, bent down, and switched off the set-top box. “Some kind of weird political crap.”

  He began examining her bike. All its serial numbers had been removed. Typical zone bike.

  “The first thing we got to do,” he said briskly, “is fit it to you properly: set the saddle height, pedal stroke, and handlebars. Then I’ll adjust the tension, true the wheels, check the brake pads and suspension valves, tune the shifting, and lubricate the drivetrain. The usual. You’re gonna need a better saddle than this—this saddle’s for a male pelvis.” He looked up. “You got a charge card?”

  She nodded, then frowned. “But I don’t have much credit left.”

  “No problem.” He flipped open a dog-eared catalog. “This is what you need. Any halfway decent gel-saddle. Pick one you like, and we can have it shipped in by tomorrow morning. And then”—he flipped pages—“order me one of these.”

  She stepped closer and examined the page. “The ‘cotterless crank-bolt ceramic wrench set,’ is that it?”

  “That’s right. I fix your bike, you give me those tools, and we’re even.”

  “Okay. Sure. That’s cheap!” She smiled at him. “I like the way you do business, Lyle.”

  “You’ll get used to barter, if you stay in the zone long enough.”

  “I’ve never lived in a squat before,” she said thoughtfully. “I like the attitude here, but people say that squats are pretty dangerous.”

  “I dunno about the squats in other towns, but Chattanooga squats aren’t dangerous, unless you think anarchists are dangerous, and anarchists aren’t dangerous unless they’re really drunk.” Lyle shrugged. “People will steal your stuff all the time, that’s about the worst part. There’s a couple of tough guys around here who claim they have handguns. I never saw anybody actually use a handgun. Old guns aren’t hard to find, but it takes a real chemist to make working ammo nowadays.” He smiled back at her. “Anyway, you look to me like you can take care of yourself.”

  “I take dance classes.”

  Lyle nodded. He opened a drawer and pulled a tape measure.

  “I saw all those cables and pulleys you have on top of this place. You can pull the whole building right up off the ground, huh? Kind of hang it right off the ceiling up there.”

  “That’s right, it saves a lot of trouble with people breaking and entering.” Lyle glanced at his shock-baton, in its mounting at the door. She followed his gaze to the weapon and then looked at him, impressed.

  Lyle measured her arms, torso length, then knelt and measured her inseam from crotch to floor. He took notes. “Okay,” he said. “Come by tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Lyle?”

  “Yeah?” He stood up.

  “Do you rent this place out? I really need a safe place to stay in the zone.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lyle said politely, “but I hate landlords and I’d never be one. What I need is a roommate who can really get behind the whole concept of my shop. Someone who’s qualified, you know, to develop my infrastructure or do bicycle work. Anyway, if I took your cash or charged you for rent, then the tax people would just have another excuse to harass me.”

  “Sure, okay, but …” She paused, then looked at him under lowered eyelids. “I’ve gotta be a lot better than having this place go empty.”

  Lyle stared at her, astonished.

  “I’m a pretty useful woman to have around, Lyle. Nobody’s ever complained before.”

  “Really?”

  “That’s right.” She stared at him boldly.

  “I’ll think about your offer,” Lyle said. “What did you say your name was?”

  “I’m Kitty. Kitty Casaday.”

  “Kitty, I got a whole lot of work to do today, but I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”

  “Okay, Lyle.” She smiled. “You think about me, all right?”

  Lyle helped her down out of the shop. He watched her stride away across the atrium until she vanished through the crowded doorway of the Crowbar, a squat coffee shop. Then he called his mother.

  “Did you forget something?” his mother said, looking up from her workscreen.

  “Mom, I know this is really hard to believe, but a strange woman just banged on my door and offered to have sex with me.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “In exchange for room and board, I think. Anyway, I said you’d be the first to know if it happened.”

  “Lyle—” His mother hesitated. “Lyle, I think you better come right home. Let’s make that dinner date for tonight, okay? We’ll have a little talk about this situation.”

  “Yeah, okay. I got an enameling job I gotta deliver to Floor Forty-one, anyway.”

  “I don’t have a positive feeling about this development, Lyle.”

  “That’s okay, Mom. I’ll see you tonight.”

  Lyle reassembled the newly enameled bike. Then he set the flywheel onto remote, and stepped outside the shop. He mounted the bike, and touched a password into the remote control. The shop faithfully reeled itself far out of reach and hung there in space below the fire-blackened ceiling, swaying gently.

  Lyle pedaled away, back toward the elevators, back toward the neighborhood where he’d grown up.

  He delivered the bike to the delighted young idiot who’d commissioned it, stuffed the cash in his shoes, and then went down to his mother’s. He took a shower, shaved, and shampooed thoroughly. They had pork chops and grits and got drunk together. His mother complained about the breakup with her third husband and wept bitterly, but not as much as usual when this topic came up. Lyle got the strong impression she was thoroughly on the mend and would be angling for number four in pretty short order.

  Around midnight, Lyle refused his mother’s ritual offers of new clothes and fresh leftovers, and headed back down to the zone. He was still a little clubfooted from h
is mother’s sherry, and he stood breathing beside the broken glass of the atrium wall, gazing out at the city-smeared summer stars. The cavernous darkness inside the zone at night was one of his favorite things about the place. The queasy twenty-four-hour security lighting in the rest of the Archiplat had never been rebuilt inside the zone.

  The zone always got livelier at night when all the normal people started sneaking in to cruise the zone’s unlicensed dives and nightspots, but all that activity took place behind discreetly closed doors. Enticing squiggles of red and blue chemglow here and there only enhanced the blessed unnatural gloom.

  Lyle pulled his remote control and ordered the shop back down.

  The door of the shop had been broken open.

  Lyle’s latest bike-repair client lay sprawled on the floor of the shop, unconscious. She was wearing black military fatigues, a knit cap, and rappelling gear.

  She had begun her break-in at Lyle’s establishment by pulling his shock-baton out of its glowing security socket beside the doorframe. The booby-trapped baton had immediately put fifteen thousand volts through her, and sprayed her face with a potent mix of dye and street-legal incapacitants.

  Lyle turned the baton off with the remote control, and then placed it carefully back in its socket. His surprise guest was still breathing, but was clearly in real metabolic distress. He tried clearing her nose and mouth with a tissue. The guys who’d sold him the baton hadn’t been kidding about the “indelible” part. Her face and throat were drenched with green and her chest looked like a spin-painting.

  Her elaborate combat spex had partially shielded her eyes. With the spex off she looked like a viridian-green raccoon.

  Lyle tried stripping her gear off in conventional fashion, realized this wasn’t going to work, and got a pair of metal-shears from the shop. He snipped his way through the eerily writhing power-gloves and the Kevlar laces of the pneumoreactive combat boots. Her black turtleneck had an abrasive surface and a cuirass over chest and back that looked like it could stop small-arms fire.