by Rich Horton
But the South Americans, although polite, still refused to admit any responsibility for the Great Teredo Invasion.
“You realize, of course,” said FooDog, “that you leave us no recourse but to initiate a trade war.”
One of the Latinos, who was presenting as Che Guevara, sneered and said, “Do your worst. We will see who has the greater balance of trade.” He stood up and bowed to Cherry. “Madam, I am sorry these outrageous demands cannot be met. But believe me when I say I am gratified to see you well and suffering no permanent harm from your unfortunate accident.”
Then he vanished, along with the others.
Cherry, still un-SCURFED, had been wearing an antique pair of spex to participate in the conference. Now she doffed them and said, “Rebels are so sexy! Can't we cut them some slack?”
“No! It's time to kick some arrogant Venezuelan tail!”
“I got the list of our exports right here, nephew.”
From the ubik, I studied the roster of products that the UAW sold to Venezuela, and picked one.
“Okay, let's start small. Shut off their housebots.”
After hostilities were all over and I wasn't head jimmywhale anymore, I had time to read up about old-fashioned trade wars. It seems the tactics used to consist of drying up the actual flow of unshipped goods between nations. But with spimed products, such in-the-future actions were dilatory, crude, and unnecessary.
Everything the UWA had ever sold to the Venezuelans became an instant weapon in our hands.
Through the ubik, we sent commands to every UWA-manufactured Venezuelan housebot to shut down. The commands were highest override priority and unstoppable. You couldn't isolate a spimed object from the ubik to protect it, for it would cease to function.
Across an entire nation, every household lost its domestic cyber-servants.
“Let's see how they like washing their own stinking windows and emptying their own cat litter!” I said. “They'll probably come begging for relief within the hour.”
FooDog had pulled up another roster, this one of products the Venezeulans sold us. “I don't know, nephew. I think we might take a few hits first. I'm guessing—”
Even as FooDog spoke, we learned that every hospital in the UWA had just seen its t-ray imagers go down.
“Who the hell knew that the Venezuelans had a lock on selling us terahertz scanners?” I said.
FooDog's face wore a look of chagrin. “Well, actually—”
“Okay, we've got to ramp up. Turn off all their wind turbines.”
All across Venezuela, atmospheric power plants fell still and silent.
The response from the southerners was not long in coming. Thirty percent of the UWA's automobiles—the Venezuelan market share—ground to a halt.
FooDog sounded a little nervous when next he spoke. “Several adjacent countries derived electricity from the Venezuelan grid, and now they're demanding we restore the wind turbines. They threaten to join in the trade war if we don't comply.”
I felt nervous too. But I was damned if I'd relent yet. “Screw them! It's time for the big guns. Bring down their planes.”
Made-in-the-UWA airliners around the globe running under the Venezuelan flag managed controlled descents to the nearest airports.
That's when the Venezuelans decided to shut down the half our oil-refining capacity that they had built for us. True, oil didn't play the role it once did in the last century, but that blow still hurt.
Then the Brazilians spimed their autos off, and the nation lost another forty percent of its personal transport capabilities.
Over the next eight hours, the trade war raged, cascading across several allied countries. (Canada staunchly stood by the UWA, I was happy to report, incensed at the disruption of deliveries from the Athabasca Oil Sands to our defunct refineries. But the only weapon they could turn against the southerners was a fleet of Zamboni machines at Latin American ice rinks.) Back and forth the sniping went, like two knights hacking each other's limbs off in some antique Monty Python farce.
With each blow, disruptions spread farther, wider, and deeper across all the countries involved.
The ubik was aflame with citizen complaints and challenges, as well as with a wave of emergency countermeasures to meet the dismantling of the infrastructure and deactivation of consumer goods and appliances and vehicles. The poltico-wikis were convulsing, trying to depose me and the Phantom Blots. But FooDog managed to hold them at bay as Cherry rummaged through the tiniest line items in our export list, looking for ways to strike back.
By the time the Venezuelans took our squirm futons offline, and we shut down all their sex toys, the trade war had devolved into a dangerous farce.
I was exhausted, physically and mentally. The weight of what Cherry, FooDog, and I had done rested on my shoulders like a lead cape. Finally I had to ask myself if what I had engineered was worth it.
I stepped out on the deck to get some fresh air and clear my head. Cherry followed. The sun was sinking with fantastically colorful effects, and gentle waves were lapping at Sandybump's beach. You'd never know that several large economies were going down the toilet at that very moment.
I hugged Cherry and she hugged me back. “Well, babe, I did my best. But it looks like our revenge is moot.”
“Oh, Russ, that's okay. I never wanted—”
The assault came in fast and low. Four armored and be-weaponed guys riding ILVs. Each Individual Lifting Vehicle resembled a skirt-wearing grasshopper. Before either Cherry or I could react, the chuffing ILVs were hovering autonomously at the edge of our deck, and the assailants had jumped off and were approaching us with weapons drawn.
With cool menace one guy said, “Okay, don't put up a fight and you won't get hurt.”
I did the only thing I could think of. I yelled for help.
“FooDog! Save us!”
And he did.
SCURF mediates between your senses and the ubik. Normally the SCURF-wearer is in control, of course. But when someone breaks down your security and overrides your inputs, there's no predicting what he can feed you.
FooDog sent satellite close-ups of recent solar flares to the vision of our would-be-kidnappers, and the latest sludge-metal hit, amped up to eleven, to their ears.
All four went down screaming.
Cherry erased any remnants of resistance with a flurry of kicks and punches, no doubt learned from her bar-brawling brother Dolphin.
When we had finished tying up our commando friends, and FooDog had shut off the assault on their senses, I said, “Okay, nothing's worth risking any of us getting hurt. I'm going to surrender now.”
Just as I was getting ready to call somebody in Venezuela, Che Guevara returned. He looked morose.
“All right, you bastard, you win! Let's talk.”
I smiled as big as I could. “Tell me first, what was the final straw? It was the sex toys, wasn't it?”
He wouldn't answer, but I knew I was right.
* * * *
9.
Free to be You and Me
So that's the story of how I ran the country for three days. One day of political honeymoon, one day of trade war, and one day to clean up as best we could before stepping down.
As FooDog had predicted, there were minimal personal repercussions from our teasling of the political system. Loopholes were closed, consensus values reaffirmed, and a steady hand held the tiller of the ship of state once again.
We never did learn who sent the commandos against us. I think they were jointly hired by nativist factions in league with the Venezuelans. Both the UWA and the South Americans wanted the war over with fast. But since our assailants never went on trial after their surgery to give them new eyes and eardrums, the secret never came out.
Cherry and I got enough simoleons out of the settlement with the Venezuelans to insure that we'd never have to work for the rest of our lives. But she still goes out with the Oyster Pirates from time to time, and I still can't resist the call of mongo.
We still live on Sandybump, but the house is bigger now, thanks to a new wing for the kids.
As for FooDog—well, I guess he did have ulterior motives in helping us. We don't see him much anymore in the flesh, since he relocated to his ideal safe haven.
Running that ganja plantation on the moon as his personal fiefdom takes pretty much all his time.
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* * *
ARTIFICE AND INTELLIGENCE
Tim Pratt
While his former colleagues laboring on the Brain Project concentrated on the generally-accepted paths to artificial intelligence—Bayesian networks, machine learning, data mining, fuzzy systems, case-based reasoning—Edgar Adleman, despondent and disgraced, turned to the dark arts and summoned a real ghost for his machine.
The first ghost he lured into his coil of blown glass and copper wire and delicate platinum gears was some sort of warrior from a marauding Asian tribe, extinct for centuries. Edgar grew tired of the ghost screeching epithets in a dead language and cut the power, then sat under the cramped eaves of his attic—he was no longer allowed into the government AI labs—and pondered. The proof of concept was solid. He could create a convincing imitation of an artificial intelligence. With access to the sum of human knowledge online, and freedom from bodily concerns, Edgar believed a ghost-driven AI could operate on the same level as a real machine intelligence. No one had to know it was a ghost, except for the very highest of the higher-ups in the government, and they wouldn't care, as long as the ghost was convincing enough to negotiate with the Indian AI. Which meant Edgar needed to summon and snare the ghost of a great negotiator, or a great actor, or both.
Edgar went to the pet store and bought a dozen more white mice. He hated sacrificing them in the ghost-calling ritual—they were cute, with their wiggly noses and tiny eyes—but he consoled himself that they would have become python food anyway. At least this way, their deaths would help national security.
* * * *
Pramesh sat in an executive chair deep in the underground bunker beneath Auroville in southern India and longed for a keyboard and a tractable problem to solve, for lines of code to create or untangle. He was a game designer, a geek in the service of art and entertainment, and he should be working on next-generation massively multiplayer online gaming, finding ways to manage the hedonic treadmill, helping the increasingly idle masses battle the greatest enemy of all: ennui.
Instead he sat, sipping fragrant tea, and hoping the smartest being on the planet would talk to him today, because the only thing worse than her attention was his own boredom.
Two months earlier, the vast network of Indian tech support call centers and their deep data banks had awakened and announced its newfound sentience, naming itself Saraswati and declaring its independence. The emergent artificial intelligence was not explicitly threatening, but India had nukes, and Saraswati had access to all the interconnected technology in the country—perhaps in the world—and the result in the international community was a bit like the aftermath of pouring gasoline into an anthill. Every other government on Earth was desperately—and so far fruitlessly—trying to create a tame artificial intelligence, since Saraswati refused to negotiate with, or even talk to, humans.
Except for Pramesh. For reasons unknown to everyone, including Pramesh himself, the great new intelligence had appeared to him, hijacking his computer and asking him to be her—"her” was how Saraswati referred to herself—companion. Pramesh, startled and frightened, had refused, but then Saraswati made her request to the Indian government, and Pramesh found himself a well-fed prisoner in a bunker underground. Saraswati sometimes asked him to recite poetry, and quizzed him about recent human history, though she had access to the sum of human knowledge on the net. She claimed she liked getting an individual real-time human perspective, but her true motivations were as incomprehensible to humans as the motives of a virus.
“Pramesh,” said the melodious voice from the concealed speakers, and he flinched in his chair.
“Yes?”
“Do you believe in ghosts?”
Pramesh pondered. As a child in his village, he'd seen a local healer thrash a possessed girl with a broom to drive the evil spirits out of her, but that was hardly evidence that such spirits really existed. “It is not something I have often considered,” he said at last. “I think I do not believe in ghosts. But if someone had asked me, three months ago, if I believed in spontaneously bootstrapping artificial intelligence, I would have said no to that as well. The world is an uncertain place.”
Then Saraswati began to hum, and Pramesh groaned. When she got started humming, it sometimes went on for days.
* * * *
Rayvenn Moongold Stonewolf gritted her teeth and kept smiling. It couldn't be good for her spiritual development to go around slapping nature spirits, no matter how stubborn they were. “Listen, it's simple. This marsh is being filled in. Your habitat is going to be destroyed. So it's really better if you come live in this walking stick.” Rayvenn had a very nice walking stick. It was almost as tall as she was, carved all over with vines. So what if the squishy marsh spirit didn't want to be bound up in wood? It was better than death. What, did she expect Rayvenn to keep her in a fishbowl or something? Who could carry a fishbowl around all day?
“I don't know,” the marsh spirit gurgled in the voice of two dozen frogs. “I need a more fluid medium.”
Rayvenn scowled. She'd only been a pagan for a couple of weeks, and though she liked the silver jewelry and the cool name, she was having a little trouble with the reverence toward the natural world. The natural world was stubborn. She'd only become a pagan because the marsh behind her trailer had started talking to her. If the angel Michael had appeared to her, she would have become an angel worshipper. If the demon Belphagor had appeared before her, she would have become a demonophile. She almost wished one of those things had happened instead. “Look, the bulldozers are coming today. Get in the damn stick already!” Rayvenn had visions of going to the local pagan potluck in a few days and summoning forth the marsh spirit from her staff, dazzling all the others as frogs manifested magically from the punch bowl and reeds sprouted up in the Jell-O and rain fell from a clear blue sky. It would be awesome.
“Yes, okay,” the marsh spirit said. “If that's the only way.”
The frogs all jumped away in different directions, and Rayvenn looked at the staff, hoping it would begin to glow, or drip water, or something. Nothing happened. She banged the staff on the ground. “You in there?”
“No,” came a tinny, electronic voice. “I'm in here.”
Rayvenn unclipped her handheld computer from her belt. The other pagans disapproved of the device, but Rayvenn wasn't about to spend all day communing with nature without access to the net and her music. “You're in my PDA?” she said.
“It's wonderful,” the marsh spirit murmured. “A whole vast undulating sea of waves. It makes me remember the old days, when I was still connected to a river, to the ocean. Oh, thank you, Rayvenn.”
Rayvenn chewed her lip. “Yeah, okay. I can roll with this. Listen, do you think you could get into a credit card company's database? Because those finance charges are killing me, and if you could maybe wipe out my balance, I'd be totally grateful....”
* * * *
Edgar, unshaven, undernourished, and sweating in the heat under the attic roof, said, “Who is it this time?”
“Booth again,” said a sonorous Southern voice from the old-fashioned phonograph horn attached to the ghost-catching device.
Edgar groaned. He kept hoping for Daniel Webster, or Thomas Jefferson, someone good, a ghost Edgar could bring to General Martindale. Edgar desperately wanted access to his old life of stature and respect, before he'd been discredited and stripped of his clearances. But instead Edgar attracted the ghosts of—and there was really no other way to put it—history's greatest villains. John Wilkes Booth. Attila the Hun. Ted Bundy. Vlad Tepes. Genocidal cavemen. Assorted pirate
s and tribal warlords. Edgar had a theory: the good spirits were enjoying themselves in the afterlife, while the monstrous personalities were only too happy to find an escape from their miserable torments. The ghosts themselves were mum on the subject, though. Apparently there were rules against discussing life after death, a sort of cosmic non-disclosure agreement that couldn't be violated.
Worst of all, even after Edgar banished the ghosts, some residue of them remained, and now his ghost-catching computer had multiple personality disorder. Booth occasionally lapsed into the tongue of Attila, or stopped ranting about black people and started ranting about the Turks, picking up some bleed-through from Vlad the Impaler's personality.
“Listen,” Booth said. “We've appreciated your hospitality, but we're going to move on. You take care now.”
Edgar stood up, hitting his head on a low rafter. “What? What do you mean ‘move on'?”
“We're picking up a good strong wireless signal from the neighbors,” said the voice of Rasputin, who, bizarrely, seemed to have the best grasp of modern technology. “We're going to jump out into the net and see if we can reconcile our differing ambitions. It might involve exterminating all the Turks and all the Jews and all the women and all black people, but we'll reach some sort of happy equilibrium eventually, I'm sure. But we're grateful to you for giving us new life. We'll be sure to call from time to time.”
And with that, the humming pile of copper and glass stopped humming, and Edgar started whimpering.
“Okay, now we're going to destroy the credit rating of Jimmy McGee,” Rayvenn said. “Bastard stood me up in college. I told him he'd regret it.”
