A Good Old-Fashioned Future

by Bruce Sterling

  “All right,” she said at last, panting in exhaustion. “I’ve come from Senator Creighton’s office.”

  “Who?” Lyle said.

  “Creighton! Senator James P. Creighton, the man who’s been your senator from Tennessee for the past thirty years!”

  “Oh,” Lyle said. “I hadn’t noticed.”

  “We’re anarchists,” Pete told her.

  “I’ve sure heard of the nasty old geezer,” Mabel said, “but I’m from British Columbia, where we change senators the way you’d change a pair of socks. If you ever changed your socks, that is. What about him?”

  “Well, Senator Creighton has deep clout and seniority! He was a United States Senator even before the first NAFTA Senate was convened! He has a very large, and powerful, and very well seasoned personal staff of twenty thousand hard-working people, with a lot of pull in the Agriculture, Banking, and Telecommunications Committees!”

  “Yeah? So?”

  “So,” Kitty said miserably, “there are twenty thousand of us on his staff. We’ve been in place for decades now, and naturally we’ve accumulated lots of power and importance. Senator Creighton’s staff is basically running some quite large sections of the NAFTA government, and if the senator loses his office, there will be a great deal of … of unnecessary political turbulence.” She looked up. “You might not think that a senator’s staff is all that important politically. But if people like you bothered to learn anything about the real-life way that your government functions, then you’d know that Senate staffers can be really crucial.”

  Mabel scratched her head. “You’re telling me that even a lousy senator has his own private black-bag unit?”

  Kitty looked insulted. “He’s an excellent senator! You can’t have a working organization of twenty thousand staffers without taking security very seriously! Anyway, the Executive wing has had black-bag units for years! It’s only right that there should be a balance of powers.”

  “Wow,” Mabel said. “The old guy’s a hundred and twelve or something, isn’t he?”

  “A hundred and seventeen.”

  “Even with government health care, there can’t be a lot left of him.”

  “He’s already gone,” Kitty muttered. “His frontal lobes are burned out.… He can still sit up, and if he’s stoked on stimulants he can repeat whatever’s whispered to him. So he’s got two permanent implanted hearing aids, and basically … well … he’s being run by remote control by his mook.”

  “His mook, huh?” Pete repeated thoughtfully.

  “It’s a very good mook,” Kitty said. “The coding’s old, but it’s been very well looked after. It has firm moral values and excellent policies. The mook is really very much like the senator was. It’s just that … well, it’s old. It still prefers a really old-fashioned media environment. It spends almost all its time watching old-fashioned public political coverage, and lately it’s gotten cranky and started broadcasting commentary.”

  “Man, never trust a mook,” Lyle said. “I hate those things.”

  “So do I,” Pete offered, “but even a mook comes off pretty good compared to a politician.”

  “I don’t really see the problem,” Mabel said, puzzled. “Senator Hirschheimer from Arizona has had a direct neural link to his mook for years, and he has an excellent progressive voting record. Same goes for Senator Marmalejo from Tamaulipas; she’s kind of absentminded, and everybody knows she’s on life support, but she’s a real scrapper on women’s issues.”

  Kitty looked up. “You don’t think it’s terrible?”

  Mabel shook her head. “I’m not one to be judgmental about the intimacy of one’s relationship to one’s own digital alter ego. As far as I can see it, that’s a basic privacy issue.”

  “They told me in briefing that it was a very terrible business, and that everyone would panic if they learned that a high government official was basically a front for a rogue artificial intelligence.”

  Mabel, Pete, and Lyle exchanged glances. “Are you guys surprised by that news?” Mabel said.

  “Heck no,” said Pete.

  “Big deal,” Lyle added.

  Something seemed to snap inside Kitty then. Her head sank. “Disaffected émigrés in Europe have been spreading boxes that can decipher the senator’s commentary. I mean, the senator’s mook’s commentary.… The mook speaks just like the senator did, or the way the senator used to speak, when he was in private and off the record. The way he spoke in his diaries. As far as we can tell, the mook was his diary.… It used to be his personal laptop computer. But he just kept transferring the files, and upgrading the software, and teaching it new tricks like voice recognition and speechwriting, and giving it power of attorney and such.… And then, one day the mook made a break for it. We think that the mook sincerely believes that it’s the senator.”

  “Just tell the stupid thing to shut up for a while, then.”

  “We can’t do that. We’re not even sure where the mook is, physically. Or how it’s been encoding those sarcastic comments into the video-feed. The senator had a lot of friends in the telecom industry back in the old days. There are a lot of ways and places to hide a piece of distributed software.”

  “So that’s all?” Lyle said. “That’s it, that’s your big secret? Why didn’t you just come to me and ask me for the box? You didn’t have to dress up in combat gear and kick my door in. That’s a pretty good story, I’d have probably just given you the thing.”

  “I couldn’t do that, Mr. Schweik.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” Pete said, “her people are important government functionaries, and you’re a loser techie wacko who lives in a slum.”

  “I was told this is a very dangerous area,” Kitty muttered.

  “It’s not dangerous,” Mabel told her.

  “No?”

  “No. They’re all too broke to be dangerous. This is just a kind of social breathing space. The whole urban infrastructure’s dreadfully overplanned here in Chattanooga. There’s been too much money here too long. There’s been no room for spontaneity. It was choking the life out of the city. That’s why everyone was secretly overjoyed when the rioters set fire to these three floors.”

  Mabel shrugged. “The insurance took care of the damage. First the looters came in. Then there were a few hideouts for kids and crooks and illegal aliens. Then the permanent squats got set up. Then the artist’s studios, and the semilegal workshops and red-light places. Then the quaint little coffeehouses, then the bakeries. Pretty soon the offices of professionals will be filtering in, and they’ll restore the water and the wiring. Once that happens, the real-estate prices will kick in big-time, and the whole zone will transmute right back into gentryville. It happens all the time.”

  Mabel waved her arm at the door. “If you knew anything about modern urban geography, you’d see this kind of, uh, spontaneous urban renewal happening all over the place. As long as you’ve got naive young people with plenty of energy who can be suckered into living inside rotten, hazardous dumps for nothing, in exchange for imagining that they’re free from oversight, then it all works out just great in the long run.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah, zones like this turn out to be extremely handy for all concerned. For some brief span of time, a few people can think mildly unusual thoughts and behave in mildly unusual ways. All kinds of weird little vermin show up, and if they make any money then they go legal, and if they don’t then they drop dead in a place really quiet where it’s all their own fault. Nothing dangerous about it.” Mabel laughed, then sobered. “Lyle, let this poor dumb cracker out of the bag.”

  “She’s naked under there.”

  “Okay,” she said impatiently, “cut a slit in the bag and throw some clothes in it. Get going, Lyle.”

  Lyle threw in some biking pants and a sweatshirt.

  “What about my gear?” Kitty demanded, wriggling her way into the clothes by feel.

  “I tell you what,” said Mabel thoughtfully. �
��Pete here will give your gear back to you in a week or so, after his friends have photographed all the circuitry. You’ll just have to let him keep all those knickknacks for a while, as his reward for our not immediately telling everybody who you are and what you’re doing here.”

  “Great idea,” Pete announced, “terrific, pragmatic solution!” He began feverishly snatching up gadgets and stuffing them into his shoulder bag. “See, Lyle? One phone call to good ol’ Spider Pete, and your problem is history, zude! Me and Mabel-the-Fed have crisis negotiation skills that are second to none! Another potentially lethal confrontation resolved without any bloodshed or loss of life.” Pete zipped the bag shut. “That’s about it, right, everybody? Problem over! Write if you get work, Lyle buddy. Hang by your thumbs.” Pete leapt out the door and bounded off at top speed on the springy soles of his reactive boots.

  “Thanks a lot for placing my equipment into the hands of sociopathic criminals,” Kitty said. She reached out of the slit in the bag, grabbed a multitool off the corner of the workbench, and began swiftly slashing her way free.

  “This will help the sluggish, corrupt, and underpaid Chattanooga police to take life a little more seriously,” Mabel said, her pale eyes gleaming. “Besides, it’s profoundly undemocratic to restrict specialized technical knowledge to the coercive hands of secret military elites.”

  Kitty thoughtfully thumbed the edge of the multitool’s ceramic blade and stood up to her full height, her eyes slitted. “I’m ashamed to work for the same government as you.”

  Mabel smiled serenely. “Darling, your tradition of deep dark government paranoia is far behind the times! This is the postmodern era! We’re now in the grip of a government with severe schizoid multiple-personality disorder.”

  “You’re truly vile. I despise you more than I can say.” Kitty jerked her thumb at Lyle. “Even this nutcase eunuch anarchist kid looks pretty good, compared to you. At least he’s self-sufficient and market-driven.”

  “I thought he looked good the moment I met him,” Mabel replied sunnily. “He’s cute, he’s got great muscle tone, and he doesn’t make passes. Plus he can fix small appliances and he’s got a spare apartment. I think you ought to move in with him, sweetheart.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? You don’t think I could manage life here in the zone like you do, is that it? You think you have some kind of copyright on living outside the law?”

  “No, I just mean you’d better stay indoors with your boyfriend here until that paint falls off your face. You look like a poisoned raccoon.” Mabel turned on her heel. “Try to get a life, and stay out of my way.” She leapt outside, unlocked her bicycle, and methodically pedaled off.

  Kitty wiped her lips and spat out the door. “Christ, that baton packs a wallop.” She snorted. “Don’t you ever ventilate this place, kid? Those paint fumes are gonna kill you before you’re thirty.”

  “I don’t have time to clean or ventilate it. I’m real busy.”

  “Okay, then I’ll clean it. I’ll ventilate it. I gotta stay here a while, understand? Maybe quite a while.”

  Lyle blinked. “How long, exactly?”

  Kitty stared at him. “You’re not taking me seriously, are you? I don’t much like it when people don’t take me seriously.”

  “No, no,” Lyle assured her hastily. “You’re very serious.”

  “You ever heard of a small-business grant, kid? How about venture capital, did you ever hear of that? Ever heard of federal research-and-development subsidies, Mr. Schweik?” Kitty looked at him sharply, weighing her words. “Yeah, I thought maybe you’d heard of that one, Mr. Techie Wacko. Federal R-and-D backing is the kind of thing that only happens to other people, right? But Lyle, when you make good friends with a senator, you become ‘other people.’ Get my drift, pal?”

  “I guess I do,” Lyle said slowly.

  “We’ll have ourselves some nice talks about that subject, Lyle. You wouldn’t mind that, would you?”

  “No. I don’t mind it now that you’re talking.”

  “There’s some stuff going on down here in the zone that I didn’t understand at first, but it’s important.” Kitty paused, then rubbed dried dye from her hair in a cascade of green dandruff. “How much did you pay those Spider gangsters to string up this place for you?”

  “It was kind of a barter situation,” Lyle told her.

  “Think they’d do it again if I paid ’em real cash? Yeah? I thought so.” She nodded thoughtfully. “They look like a heavy outfit, the City Spiders. I gotta pry ’em loose from that leftist gorgon before she finishes indoctrinating them in socialist revolution.” Kitty wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “This is the senator’s own constituency! It was stupid of us to duck an ideological battle, just because this is a worthless area inhabited by reckless sociopaths who don’t vote. Hell, that’s exactly why it’s important. This could be a vital territory in the culture war. I’m gonna call the office right away, start making arrangements. There’s no way we’re gonna leave this place in the hands of the self-styled Queen of Peace and Justice over there.”

  She snorted, then stretched a kink out of her back. “With a little self-control and discipline, I can save those Spiders from themselves and turn them into an asset to law and order! I’ll get ’em to string up a couple of trailers here in the zone. We could start a dojo.”

  Eddy called, two weeks later. He was in a beachside cabana somewhere in Catalunya, wearing a silk floral-print shirt and a new and very pricey looking set of spex. “How’s life, Lyle?”

  “It’s okay, Eddy.”

  “Making out all right?” Eddy had two new tattoos on his cheekbone.

  “Yeah. I got a new paying roommate. She’s a martial artist.”

  “Girl roommate working out okay this time?”

  “Yeah, she’s good at pumping the flywheel and she lets me get on with my bike work. Bike business has been picking up a lot lately. Looks like I might get a legal electrical feed and some more floorspace, maybe even some genuine mail delivery. My new roomie’s got a lot of useful contacts.”

  “Boy, the ladies sure love you, Lyle! Can’t beat ’em off with a stick, can you, poor guy? That’s a heck of a note.”

  Eddy leaned forward a little, shoving aside a silver tray full of dead gold-tipped zigarettes. “You been getting the packages?”

  “Yeah. Pretty regular.”

  “Good deal,” he said briskly, “but you can wipe ’em all now. I don’t need those backups anymore. Just wipe the data and trash the disks, or sell ’em. I’m into some, well, pretty hairy opportunities right now, and I don’t need all that old clutter. It’s kid stuff anyway.”

  “Okay, man. If that’s the way you want it.”

  Eddy leaned forward. “D’you happen to get a package lately? Some hardware? Kind of a set-top box?”

  “Yeah, I got the thing.”

  “That’s great, Lyle. I want you to open the box up, and break all the chips with pliers.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Then throw all the pieces away. Separately. It’s trouble, Lyle, okay? The kind of trouble I don’t need right now.”

  “Consider it done, man.”

  “Thanks! Anyway, you won’t be bothered by mailouts from now on.” He paused. “Not that I don’t appreciate your former effort and goodwill, and all.”

  Lyle blinked. “How’s your love life, Eddy?”

  Eddy sighed. “Frederika! What a handful! I dunno, Lyle, it was okay for a while, but we couldn’t stick it together. I don’t know why I ever thought that private cops were sexy. I musta been totally out of my mind.… Anyway, I got a new girlfriend now.”

  “Yeah?”

  “She’s a politician, Lyle. She’s a radical member of the Spanish Parliament. Can you believe that? I’m sleeping with an elected official of a European local government.” He laughed. “Politicians are sexy, Lyle. Politicians are hot! They have charisma. They’re glamorous. They’re powerful. They can really make things happen! Politicians get around. T
hey know things on the inside track. I’m having more fun with Violeta than I knew there was in the world.”

  “That’s pleasant to hear, zude.”

  “More pleasant than you know, my man.”

  “Not a problem,” Lyle said indulgently. “We all gotta make our own lives, Eddy.”

  “Ain’t it the truth.”

  Lyle nodded. “I’m in business, zude!”

  “You gonna perfect that inertial whatsit?” Eddy said.

  “Maybe. It could happen. I get to work on it a lot now. I’m getting closer, really getting a grip on the concept. It feels really good. It’s a good hack, man. It makes up for all the rest of it. It really does.”

  Eddy sipped his mimosa. “Lyle.”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t hook up that set-top box and look at it, did you?”

  “You know me, Eddy,” Lyle said. “Just another kid with a wrench.”

  TAKLAMAKAN

  A bone-dry frozen wind tore at the earth outside, its lethal howling cut to a muffled moan. Katrinko and Spider Pete were camped deep in a crevice in the rock, wrapped in furry darkness. Pete could hear Katrinko breathing, with a light rattle of chattering teeth. The neuter’s yeasty armpits smelled like nutmeg.

  Spider Pete strapped his shaven head into his spex.

  Outside their puffy nest, the sticky eyes of a dozen gelcams splayed across the rock, a sky-eating web of perception. Pete touched a stud on his spex, pulled down a glowing menu, and adjusted his visual take on the outside world.

  Flying powder tumbled through the yardangs like an evil fog. The crescent moon and a billion desert stars, glowing like pixelated bruises, wheeled above the eerie wind-sculpted landscape of the Taklamakan. With the exceptions of Antarctica, or maybe the deep Sahara—locales Pete had never been paid to visit—this central Asian desert was the loneliest, most desolate place on Earth.

  Pete adjusted parameters, etching the landscape with a busy array of false colors. He recorded an artful series of panorama shots, and tagged a global positioning fix onto the captured stack. Then he signed the footage with a cryptographic time-stamp from a passing NAFTA spy-sat.