The two of them stared at him. “You brought us here?” Ace said. “For our ‘smarts and finesse?’”
“Of course I did. You two aren’t here by accident, and neither am I. If we’re not pulling the strings around here, then who is?”
The politician looked at the gangster.
“There’s something to what he says, you know. After all, this is Transition Three.”
“So,” said Borislav, “knock it off with that tough-talk and do some fresh thinking for once! You sound like your own grandfathers!”
Borislav had surprised himself with this outburst. Savic, to his credit, looked embarrassed, while Ace scratched uneasily under his woolly hat. “Well, listen, Boots,” said Ace at last, “even if you, and me, and your posh lawyer pal have us three nice Transition beers together, that’s a River Boy sitting over there. What are we supposed to do about that?”
“I am entirely aware of the criminal North River Syndicate,” Mr. Savic told him airily. “My investigative committee has been analyzing their gang.”
“Oh, so you’re analyzing, are you? They must be scared to death.”
“There are racketeering laws on the books in this country,” said Savic, glowering at Ace. “When we take power and finally have our purge of the criminal elements in this society, we won’t stop at arresting that one little punk in his cheap red shoes. We will liquidate his entire parasite class: I mean him, his nightclub-singer girlfriend, his father, his boss, his brothers, his cousins, his entire football club…As long as there is one honest judge in this country, and there are some honest judges, there are always some…We will never rest! Never!”
“I’ve heard about your honest judges,” Ace sneered. “You can spot ’em by the smoke columns when their cars blow up.”
“Ace, stop talking through your hat. Let me make it crystal clear what’s at stake here.” Borislav reached under the table and brought up a clear plastic shopping bag. He dropped it on the table with a thud.
Ace took immediate interest. “You output a skull?”
“Ace, this is my own skull.” The kiosk scanned him every day. So Borislav had his skull on file.
Ace juggled Borislav’s skull free of the clear plastic bag, then passed it right over to the politician. “That fab is just superb! Look at the crisp detailing on those sutures!”
“I concur. A remarkable technical achievement.” Mr Savic turned the skull upside down, and frowned. “What happened to your teeth?”
“Those are normal.”
“You call these wisdom teeth normal?”
“Hey, let me see those,” Ace pleaded. Mr Savic rolled Borislav’s jet-black skull across the tabletop. Then he cast an over-shoulder look at his fellow politicians, annoyed that they enjoyed themselves so much without him.
“Listen to me, Mr. Savic. When you campaigned, I put your poster up in my kiosk. I even voted for you, and—”
Ace glanced up from the skull’s hollow eye-sockets. “You vote, Boots?”
“Yes. I’m an old guy. Us old guys vote.”
Savic faked some polite attention.
“Mr. Savic, you’re our political leader. You’re a Radical Liberal Democrat. Well, we’ve got ourselves a pretty radical, liberal situation here. What are we supposed to do now?”
“It’s very good that you asked me that,” nodded Savic. “You must be aware that there are considerable intellectual-property difficulties with your machine.”
“What are those?”
“I mean patents and copyrights. Reverse-engineering laws. Trademarks. We don’t observe all of those laws in this country of ours…in point of fact, practically speaking, we scarcely observe any… But the rest of the world fully depends on those regulatory structures. So if you go around publicly pirating wedding china—let’s just say—well, the makers of wedding-china will surely get wind of that some day. I’d be guessing that you see a civil lawsuit. Cease-and-desist, all of that.”
“I see.”
“That’s just how the world works. If you damage their income, they’ll simply have to sue you. Follow the money, follow the lawsuits. A simple principle, really. Although you’ve got a very nice little sideshow here…It’s really brightened up the neighborhood.…”
Professor Damov arrived at the cafe. He had brought his wife, Mrs. Professor-Doctor Damova, an icy sociologist with annoying Marxist and feminist tendencies. The lady professor wore a fur coat as solid as a bank-vault, and a bristling fur hat.
Damov pointed out a black plaque on Borislav’s tabletop. “I’m sorry, gentleman, but this table is reserved for us.”
“Oh,” Borislav blurted. He hadn’t noticed the fabbed reservation, since it was so black.
“We’re having a little party tonight,” said Damov, “it’s our anniversary.”
“Congratulations, sir and madame!” said Mr. Savic. “Why not sit here with us just a moment until your guests arrive?”
A bottle of Mirko’s prosecco restored general good feeling. “I’m an arts-district lawyer, after all,” said Savic, suavely topping-up everyone’s glasses. “So, Borislav, if I were you, I would call this fabrikator an arts installation!”
“Really? Why?”
“Because when those humorless foreigners with their lawsuits try to make a scandal of the arts scene, that never works!” Savic winked at the professor and his wife. “We really enjoyed it, eh? We enjoyed a good show while we had it!”
Ace whipped off his sunglasses. “It’s an ‘arts installation!’ Wow! That is some smart lawyer thinking there!”
Borislav frowned. “Why do you say that?”
Ace leaned in to whisper behind his hand. “Well, because that’s what we tell the River Boys! We tell them it’s just an art show, then we shut it down. They stay in their old industrial district, and we keep our turf in the old arts district. Everything is cool!”
“That’s your big solution?”
“Well, yeah,” said Ace, leaning back with a grin. “Hooray for art!”
Borislav’s temper rose from a deep well to burn the back of his neck. “That’s it, huh? That’s what you two sorry sons of bitches have to offer the people? You just want to get rid of the thing! You want to put it out, like spitting on a candle! Nothing happens with your stupid approach! You call that a Transition? Everything’s just the same as it was before! Nothing changes at all!”
Damov shook his head. “History is always passing. We changed. We’re all a year older.”
Mrs. Damov spoke up. “I can’t believe your fascist, technocratic nonsense! Do you really imagine that you will improve the lives of the people by dropping some weird machine onto their street at random? With no mature consideration of any deeper social issues? I wanted to pick up some milk tonight! Who’s manning your kiosk, you goldbricker? Your store is completely empty! Are we supposed to queue?”
Mr. Savic emptied his glass. “Your fabrikator is great fun, but piracy is illegal and immoral. Fair is fair, let’s face it.”
“Fine,” said Borislav, waving his arms, “if that’s what you believe, then go tell the people. Tell the people in this cafe, right now, that you want to throw the future away! Go on, do it! Say you’re scared of crime! Say they’re not mature enough and they have to think it through. Tell the people that they have to vote for that!”
“Let’s not be hasty,” said Savic.
“Your sordid mechanical invention is useless without a social invention,” said Mrs. Damova primly.
“My wife is exactly correct!” Damov beamed. “Because a social invention is much more than gears and circuits, it’s…well, it’s something like that kiosk. A kiosk was once a way to drink tea in a royal garden. Now it’s a way to buy milk! That is social invention!” He clicked her bubbling glass with his own.
Ace mulled this over. “I never thought of it that way. Where can we steal a social invention? How do you copy one of those?”
These were exciting questions. Borislav felt a piercing ray of mental daylight. “That Europe
an woman, what’s-her-face. She bought-out my kiosk. Who is she? Who does she work for?”
“You mean Dr. Grootjans? She is, uh.… she’s the economic affairs liaison for a European Parliamentary investigative committee.”
“Right,” said Borislav at once, “that’s it. Me, too! I want that. Copy me that! I’m the liaison for the investigation Parliament something stupid-or-other.”
Savic laughed in delight. “This is getting good.”
“You. Mr. Savic. You have a Parliament investigation committee.”
“Well, yes, I certainly do.”
“Then you should investigate this fabrikator. You place it under formal government investigation. You investigate it, all day and all night. Right here on the street, in public. You issue public reports. And of course you make stuff. You make all kinds of stuff. Stuff to investigate.”
“Do I have your proposal clear? You are offering your fabrikator to the government?”
“Sure. Why not? That’s better than losing it. I can’t sell it to you. I’ve got no papers for it. So sure, you can look after it. That’s my gift to the people.”
Savic stroked his chin. “This could become quite an international issue.” Suddenly, Savic had the look of a hungry man about to sit at a bonfire and cook up a whole lot of sausages.
“Man, that’s even better than making it a stupid art project,” Ace enthused. “A stupid government project! Hey, those last forever!”
V.
Savic’s new investigation committee was an immediate success. With the political judo typical of the region, the honest politician wangled a large and generous support-grant from the Europeans—basically, in order to investigate himself.
The fab now reformed its efforts: from consumer knickknacks to the pressing needs of the state’s public sector. Jet-black fire plugs appeared in the arts district. Jet-black hoods for the broken street lights, and jet-black manhole covers for the streets. Governments bought in bulk, so a primary source for the yellow dust was located. The fab churned busily away right in the public square, next to a railroad tanker full of feed-stock.
Borislav returned to his kiosk. He made a play at resuming his normal business. He was frequently called to testify in front of Savic’s busy committee. This resulted in Fleka the Gypsy being briefly arrested, but the man skipped bail. No one made any particular effort to find Fleka. They certainly had never made much effort before.
Investigation soon showed that the fabrikator was stolen property from a hospital in Gdansk. Europeans had long known how to make such fabrikators: fabrikators that used carbon nanotubes. They had simply refrained from doing so.
As a matter of wise precaution, the Europeans had decided not to create devices that could so radically disrupt a well-established political and economic order. The pain of such an act was certain to be great. The benefits were doubtful.
One some grand, abstract level of poetic engineering, it obviously made sense to create super-efficient, widely-distributed, cottage-scale factories that could create as much as possible with as little as possible. If one were inventing industrial civilization from the ground up, then fabbing was a grand idea. But an argument of that kind made no sense to the installed base and the established interests. You couldn’t argue a voter out of his job. So fabs had been subtly restricted to waxes, plastics, plaster, papier-mache, and certain metals.
Except, that is, for fabs with medical applications. Medicine, which dealt in agonies of life and death, was never merely a marketplace. There was always somebody whose child had smashed and shattered bones. Sooner or later this violently-interested party, researching a cure for his beloved, would find the logjam and scream: WON’T ONE OF YOU HEARTLESS, INHUMAN BASTARDS THINK OF THE CHILDREN?
Of course, those who had relinquished this technology had the children’s best interests at heart. They wanted their children to grow up safe within stable, regulated societies. But one could never explain good things for vaporous, potential future children to someone whose heart and soul was twisted by the suffering of an actual, real-life child.
So a better and different kind of fab had come into being. It was watched over with care…but, as time and circumstance passed, it slipped loose.
Eager to spread the fabbing pork through his constituency, Savic commissioned renowned local artists to design a new breed of kiosk. This futuristic Transition Three ultra-kiosk would house the very fab that could make it. Working with surprising eagerness and speed (given that they were on government salary), these artisan-designers created a new, official, state-supported fabbing-kiosk, an alarmingly splendid, well-nigh monumental kiosk, half Ottoman pavilion, half Stalinist gingerbread, and almost one hundred percent black carbon nanotubes, except for a few necessary steel bolts, copper wires and brass staples.
Borislav knew better than to complain about this. He had to abandon his perfectly decent, old-fashioned, customary kiosk, which was swiftly junked and ripped into tiny recyclable shreds. Then he climbed, with pain and resignation, up the shiny black stairsteps into this eerie, oversized, grandiose rock-solid black fort, this black-paneled royal closet whose ornate, computer-calligraphic roof would make meteors bounce off it like graupel hail.
The cheap glass windows fit badly. The new black shelves confused his fingers. The slick black floor sent his chair skidding wildly. The black carbon walls would not take paint, glue or paper. He felt like an utter fool—but this kiosk hadn’t been built for his convenience. This was a kiosk for the new Transition Three generation, crazily radical, liberal guys for whom a “kiosk” was no mere humble conduit, but the fortress of a new culture-war.
A kiosk like this new one could be flung from a passing jet. It could hammer the ground like a plummeting thunderbolt and bounce up completely unharmed. With its ever-brimming bags of gold-dust, a cybernetic tumbling of possessions would boil right out of it: bottles bags knobs latches wheels pumps, molds for making other things, tools for making other things; saws, hammers wrenches levers, drillbits, screws, screwdrivers, awls pliers scissors punches, planes, files, rasps, jacks, carts and shears; pulleys, chains and chain hoists, trolleys, cranes, buckets, bottles, barrels.… All of these items sitting within their digital files as neat as chess pieces, sitting there like the very idea of chess pieces, like a mental chess-set awaiting human desire to leap into being and action.
As Borislav limped back, each night, from his black battleship super-kiosk back to his mother’s apartment, he could see Transition Three insinuating itself into the fabric of his city.
Transition One had once a look all its own: old socialist buildings of bad brick and substandard plaster, peeling like a secret leprosy, then exploding with the plastic branding symbols of the triumphant West: candy bars, franchised fried-food, provocative lingerie.
Transition Two was a tougher business: he remembered it mostly for its lacks and privations. Empty stores, empty roads, crowds of bicycles, the angry hum of newfangled fuel cells, the cheap glitter of solar roofing, insulation stuffed everywhere like the paper in a pauper’s shoes. Crunchy, mulchy-looking new construction. Grass on the rooftops, grass in the trolley-ways. Networking masts and dishes. Those clean, cold, flat-panel lights.
This third Transition had its own native look, too. It was the same song and another verse. It was black. It was jet-black, smooth, anonymous, shiny, stainless, with an occasional rainbow shimmer off the layers and grooves whenever the light was just right, like the ghosts of long-vanished oil slicks.
Revolution was coming. The people wanted more of this game than the regime was allowing them to have. There were five of the fabs running in the city now. Because of growing foreign pressure against “the dangerous proliferation,” the local government wouldn’t make any more fabrikators. So the people were being denied the full scope of their desire to live differently. The people were already feeling different inside, so they were going to take it to the streets. The politicians were feebly trying to split differences between ways of life that just could
not be split.
Did the laws of commerce exist for the people’s sake? Or did the people exist as slaves of the so-called laws of commerce? That was populist demagoguery, but that kind of talk was popular for a reason.
Borislav knew that civilization existed through its laws. Humanity suffered and starved whenever outside the law. But those stark facts didn’t weigh on the souls of the locals for ten seconds. The local people here were not that kind of people. They had never been that kind of people. Turmoil: that was what the people here had to offer the rest of the world.
The people had flown off the handle for far less than this; for a shot fired at some passing prince, for instance. Little street demonstrations were boiling up from left and right. Those demonstrations waxed and waned, but soon the apple-cart would tip hard. The people would take to the city squares, banging their jet-black kitchen pans, shaking their jet-black house keys. Borislav knew from experience that this voice from the people was a nation-shaking racket. The voice of reason from the fragile government sounded like a cartoon mouse.
Borislav looked after certain matters, for there would no time to look after them, later. He talked to a lawyer and made a new will. He made backups of his data and copies of important documents, and stashed things away in numerous caches. He hoarded canned goods, candles, medicines, tools, even boots. He kept his travel bag packed.
He bought his mother her long-promised cemetery plot. He acquired a handsome headstone for her, too. He even found silk sheets.
VI.
It didn’t break in the way he had expected, but then local history could be defined as events that no rational man would expect. It came as a kiosk. It was a brand-new, European kiosk. A civilized, ultimate, decent, well-considered, pre-emptive intervention kiosk. The alien pink-and-white kiosk was beautiful and perfect and clean, and there was no one remotely human inside it.
The automatic kiosk had a kind of silver claw that unerringly picked its goods from its antiseptic shelves, and delivered them to the amazed and trembling customer. These were brilliant goods, they were shiny and gorgeous and tagged with serial numbers and radio-tracking stickers. They glowed all over with reassuring legality: health regulations, total lists of contents, cross-border shipping, tax stamps, associated websites, places to register a complaint.
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