Ascendancies

by Bruce Sterling

  The superpower kiosk was a thing of interlocking directorates, of 100,000-page regulatory codes and vast, clotted databases, a thing of true brilliance, neurosis and fine etiquette, like a glittering Hapsburg court. And it had been dropped with deliberate accuracy on his own part of Europe—that frail and volatile part—the part about to blow up.

  The European kiosk was an almighty vending machine. It replaced its rapidly dwindling stocks in the Black Maria middle of the night, with unmanned cargo vehicles, flat blind anonymous cockroach-like robot things of pink plastic and pink rubber wheels, that snuffled and radared their way across the midnight city and obeyed every traffic law with a crazy punctiliousness.

  There was no one to talk to inside the pink European kiosk, although, when addressed through its dozens of microphones, the kiosk could talk the local language, rather beautifully. There were no human relations to be found there. There was no such thing as society: only a crisp interaction.

  Gangs of kids grafitti-tagged the pink invader right away. Someone—Ace most likely—made a serious effort to burn it down.

  They found Ace dead two days later, in his fancy electric sports car, with three fabbed black bullets through him, and a fabbed black pistol abandoned on the car’s hood.

  VII.

  Ivana caught him before he could leave for the hills.

  “You would go without a word, wouldn’t you? Not one word to me, and again you just go!”

  “It’s the time to go.”

  “You’d take crazy students with you. You’d take football bullies. You’d take tough-guy gangsters. You’d take gypsies and crooks. You’d go there with anybody. And not take me?”

  “We’re not on a picnic. And you’re not the kind of scum who goes to the hills when there’s trouble.”

  “You’re taking guns?”

  “You women never understand! You don’t take carbines with you when you’ve got a black factory that can make carbines!” Borislav rubbed his unshaven jaw. Ammo, yes, some ammo might well be needed. Grenades, mortar rounds. He knew all too well how much of that stuff had been buried out in the hills, since the last time. It was like hunting for truffles.

  And the landmines. Those were what really terrified him, in an unappeasable fear he would take to his grave. Coming back toward the border, once, he and his fellow vigilantes, laden with their loot, marching in step in the deep snow, each man tramping in another’s sunken boot-prints.… Then a flat, lethal thing, with a chip, a wad of explosive and a bellyful of steel bolts, counted their passing footsteps. The virgin snow went blood-red.

  Borislav might have easily built such a thing himself. The shade-tree plans for such guerrilla devices were everywhere on the net. He had never built such a bomb, though the prospect gnawed him in nightmares.

  Crippled for life, back then, he had raved with high fever, freezing, starving, in a hidden village in the hills. His last confidante was his nurse. Not a wife, not a lover, not anyone from any army, or any gang, or any government. His mother. His mother had the only tie to him so profound that she would leave her city, leave everything, and risk starvation to look after a wounded guerrilla. She brought him soup. He watched her cheeks sink in day by day as she starved herself to feed him.

  “You don’t have anyone to cook for you out there,” Ivana begged.

  “You’d be leaving your daughter.”

  “You’re leaving your mother.”

  She had always been able to sting him that way. Once again, despite everything he knew, he surrendered. “All right, then,” he told her. “Fine. Be that way, since you want it so much. If you want to risk everything, then you can be our courier. You go to the camp, and you go to the city. You carry some things for us. You never ask any questions about the things.”

  “I never ask questions,” she lied. They she went to the camp and she just stayed with him. She never left his side, not for a day or a night. Real life started all over for them, once again. Real life was a terrible business.

  VIII.

  It no longer snowed much in the old ski villages; the weather was a real mess nowadays, and it was the summers you had to look out for. They set up their outlaw fab plant inside an abandoned set of horse-stables.

  The zealots talked wildly about copying an “infinite number of fabs,” but that was all talk. That wasn’t needed. It was only necessary to make and distribute enough fabs to shatter the nerves of the authorities. That was propaganda of the deed.

  Certain members of the government were already nodding and winking at their efforts. That was the only reason that they might win. Those hustlers knew that if the weathervanes spun fast enough, the Byzantine cliques that ruled the statehouse would have to break up. There would be chaos. Serious chaos. But then, after some interval, the dust would have to settle on a new arrangement of power-players. Yesterday’s staunch conservative, if he survived, would become the solid backer of the new regime. That was how it worked in these parts.

  In the meantime, however, some dedicated group of damned fools would have to actually carry out the campaign on the ground. Out of any ten people willing to do this, seven were idiots. These seven were dreamers, rebels by nature, unfit to run so much as a lemonade stand.

  One out of the ten would be capable and serious. Another would be genuinely dangerous: a true, amoral fanatic. The last would be the traitor to the group: the police agent, the coward, the informant.

  There were thirty people actively involved in the conspiracy, which naturally meant twenty-one idiots. Knowing what he did, Borislav had gone there to prevent the idiots from quarreling over nothing and blowing the effort apart before it could even start. The three capable men had to be kept focussed on building the fabs. The fanatics were best used to sway and intimidate the potential informants.

  If they held the rebellion together long enough, they would wear down all the sane people. That was the victory.

  The rest was all details, where the devil lived. The idea of self-copying fabs looked great on a sheet of graph paper, but it made little practical sense to make fabs entirely with fabs. Worse yet, there were two vital parts of the fab that simply couldn’t be fabbed at all. One was the nozzle that integrated the yellow dust into the black stuff. The other was the big recycler-comb that chewed up the black stuff back into the yellow dust. These two crucial components obviously couldn’t be made of the yellow dust or the black stuff.

  Instead, they were made of precisely-machined high-voltage European metals that were now being guarded like jewels. These components were way beyond the conspiracy’s ability to create.

  Two dozen of the fabbing nozzles showed up anyway. They came through the courtesy of some foreign intelligence service. Rumor said the Japanese, for whatever inscrutable reason.

  They still had no recycling combs. That was bad. It confounded and betrayed the whole dream of fabs to make them with the nozzles but not the recycling combs. This meant that their outlaw fabs could make things, but never recycle them. A world with fabs like that would be a nightmare: it would slowly but surely fill up with horrible, polluting fabjunk: unusable, indestructible, rock-solid lumps of black slag. Clearly this dark prospect had much affected the counsels of the original inventors.

  There were also many dark claims that carbon nanotubes had dire health effects: because they were indestructible fibers, something like asbestos. And that was true: carbon nanotubes did cause cancer. However, they caused rather less cancer than several thousand other substances already in daily use.

  It took all summer for the competent men to bang together the first outlaw fabs. Then it became necessary to sacrifice the idiots, in order to distribute the hardware. The idiots, shrill and eager as ever, were told to drive the fabs as far as possible from the original factory, then hand them over to sympathizers and scram.

  Four of the five idiots were arrested almost at once. Then the camp was raided by helicopters.

  However, Borislav had fully expected this response. He had moved the camp. In the city
, riots were under way. It didn’t matter who “won” these riots, because rioting melted the status quo. The police were hitting the students with indestructible black batons. The kids were slashing their paddy-wagon tires with indestructible black kitchen knives.

  At this point, one of the fanatics had a major brainwave. He demanded that they send out dozens of fake black boxes that merely looked like fabs. There was no political need for their futuristic promises of plenty to actually work.

  This cynical scheme was much less work than creating real fabs, so it was swiftly adopted. More than that: it was picked up, everywhere, by copycats. People were watching the struggle: in Bucharest, Lublin, Tbilisi; in Bratislava, Warsaw, and Prague. People were dipping ordinary objects in black lacquer to make them look fabbed. People were distributing handbooks for fabs, and files for making fabs. For every active crank who really wanted to make a fab, there were a hundred people who wanted to know how to do it. Just in case.

  Some active cranks were succeeding. Those who failed became martyrs. As resistance spread like spilled ink, there were simply too many people implicated to classify it as criminal activity.

  Once the military contractors realized there were very good reasons to make giant fabs the size of shipyards, the game was basically over. Transition Three was the new realpolitik. The new economy was the stuff of the everyday. The older order was over. It was something no one managed to remember, or even wanted to manage to remember.

  The rest of it was quiet moves toward checkmate. And then the game just stopped. Someone tipped over the White King, in such a sweet, subtle, velvety way that one would have scarcely guessed that there had ever been a White King to fight against at all.

  IX.

  Borislav went to prison. It was necessary that somebody should go. The idiots were only the idiots. The competent guys had quickly found good positions in the new regime. The fanatics had despaired of the new dispensation, and run off to nurse their bitter disillusionment.

  As a working rebel whose primary job had been public figurehead, Borislav was the reasonable party for public punishment.

  Borislav turned himself in to a sympathetic set of cops who would look much better for catching him. They arrested him in a blaze of publicity. He was charged with “conspiracy”: a rather merciful charge, given the host of genuine crimes committed by his group. Those were the necessary, everyday crimes of any revolutionary movement, crimes such as racketeering, theft of services, cross-border smuggling, subversion and sedition, product piracy, copyright infringement, money-laundering, fake identities, squatting inside stolen property, illegal possession of firearms, and so forth.

  Borislav and his various allies weren’t charged with those many crimes. On the contrary; since he himself had been so loudly and publicly apprehended, those crimes of the others were quietly overlooked.

  While sitting inside his prison cell, which was not entirely unlike a kiosk, Borislav discovered the true meaning of the old term “penitentiary.” The original intention of prisons was that people inside them should be penitent people. Penitent people were supposed to meditate and contemplate their way out of their own moral failings. That was the original idea.

  Of course, any real, modern “penitentiary” consisted mostly of frantic business dealings. Nobody “owned” much of anything inside the prison, other than a steel bunk and a chance at a shower, so simple goods such as talcum powder loomed very large in the local imagination. Borislav, who fully understood street-trading, naturally did very well at this. At least, he did much better than the vengeful, mentally limited people who were doomed to inhabit most jails.

  Borislav thought a lot about the people in the jails. They, too, were the people, and many of those people were getting into jail because of him. In any Transition, people lost their jobs. They were broke, they lacked prospects. So they did something desperate.

  Borislav did not much regret the turmoil he had caused the world, but he often thought about what it meant and how it must feel. Somewhere, inside some prison, was some rather nice young guy, with a wife and kids, whose job was gone because the fabs took it away. This guy had a shaven head, an ugly orange jumpsuit, and appalling food, just like Borislav himself. But that young guy was in the jail with less good reason. And with much less hope. And with much more regret.

  That guy was suffering. Nobody gave a damn about him. If there was any justice, someone should mindfully suffer, and be penitent, because of the harsh wrong done that guy.

  Borislav’s mother came to visit him in the jail. She brought printouts from many self-appointed sympathizers. The world seemed to be full of strange foreign people who had nothing better to do with their time than to email tender, supportive screeds to political prisoners. Ivana, something of a mixed comfort to him in their days of real life, did not visit the jail or see him. Ivana knew how to cut her losses when her men deliberately left her to do something stupid, such as volunteering for a prison.

  These strangers and foreigners expressed odd, truncated, malformed ideas of what he had been doing. Because they were the Voice of History.

  He himself had no such voice to give to history. He came from a small place under unique circumstances. People who hadn’t lived there would never understand it. Those who had lived there were too close to understand it. There was just no understanding for it. There were just…the events. Events, transitions, new things. Things like the black kiosks.

  These new kiosks…No matter where they were scattered in the world, they all had the sinister, strange, overly-dignified look of his own original black kiosk. Because the people had seen those kiosks. The people knew well what a black fabbing kiosk was supposed to look like. Those frills, those fringes, that peaked top, that was just how you knew one. That was their proper look. You went there to make your kid’s baby-shoes indestructible. The kiosks did what they did, and they were what they were. They were everywhere, and that was that.

  After twenty-two months, a decent interval, the new regime pardoned him as part of a general amnesty. He was told to keep his nose clean and his mouth shut. Borislav did this. He didn’t have much to say, anyway.

  X.

  Time passed. Borislav went back to the older kind of kiosk. Unlike the fancy new black fabbing kiosk, these older ones sold things that couldn’t be fabbed: foodstuffs, mostly.

  Now that fabs were everywhere and in public, fabbing technology was advancing by leaps and bounds. Surfaces were roughened so they shone with pastel colors. Technicians learned how to make the fibers fluffier, for bendable, flexible parts. The world was in a Transition, but no transition ended the world. A revolution just turned a layer in the compost heap of history, compressing that which now lay buried, bringing air and light to something hidden.

  On a whim, Borislav went into surgery and had his shinbone fabbed. His new right shinbone was the identical, mirror-reversed copy of his left shinbone. After a boring recuperation, for he was an older man now and the flesh didn’t heal as it once had, he found himself able to walk on an even keel for the first time in twenty-five years.

  Now he could walk. So he walked a great deal. He didn’t skip and jump for joy, but he rather enjoyed walking properly. He strolled the boulevards, he saw some sights, he wore much nicer shoes.

  Then his right knee gave out, mostly from all that walking on an indestructible artificial bone. So he had to go back to the cane once again. No cure was a miracle panacea: but thanks to technology, the trouble had crept closer to his heart.

  That made a difference. The shattered leg had oppressed him during most of his lifetime. That wound had squeezed his soul into its own shape. The bad knee would never have a chance to do that, because he simply wouldn’t live that long. So the leg was a tragedy. The knee was an episode.

  It was no great effort to walk the modest distance from his apartment block to his mother’s grave. The city kept threatening to demolish his old apartments. They were ugly and increasingly old fashioned, and they frankly needed to go. But t
he government’s threats of improvement were generally empty, and the rents would see him through. He was a landlord. That was never a popular job, but someone was always going to take it. It might as well be someone who understood the plumbing.

  It gave him great satisfaction that his mother had the last true granite headstone in the local graveyard. All the rest of them were fabbed.

  Dr. Grootjans was no longer working in a government. Dr. Grootjans was remarkably well-preserved. If anything, this female functionary from an alien system looked younger than she had looked, years before. She had two prim Nordic braids. She wore a dainty little off-pink sweater. She had high heels.

  Dr. Grootjans was writing about her experiences in the transition. This was her personal, confessional text, on the net of course, accompanied by photographs, sound recordings, links to other sites, and much supportive reader commentary.

  “Her gravestone has a handsome Cyrillic font,” said Dr. Grootjans.

  Borislav touched a handkerchief to his lips. “Tradition does not mean that the living are dead. Tradition means that the dead are living.”

  Dr. Grootjans happily wrote this down. This customary action of hers had irritated him at first. However, her strange habits were growing on him. Would it kill him that this over-educated foreign woman subjected him to her academic study? Nobody else was bothering. To the neighborhood, to the people, he was a crippled, short-tempered old landlord. To her, the scholar-bureaucrat, he was a mysterious figure of international significance. Her version of events was hopelessly distorted and self-serving. But it was a version of events.

  “Tell me about this grave,” she said. “What are we doing here?”

  “You wanted to see what I do these days. Well, this is what I do.” Borislav set a pretty funeral bouquet against the headstone. Then he lit candles.