Flash crowd

by Larry Niven

  Flash crowd

  Larry Niven

  "Flash Crowd" is a 1973 novella by science fiction author Larry Niven, one of a series about the social consequence of inventing an instantaneous, practically free transfer booth that could take one anywhere on Earth in milliseconds.

  One consequence not foreseen by the builders of the system was that with the almost instantaneous reporting of newsworthy events, tens of thousands of people worldwide — along with criminals — would flock to the scene of anything interesting, hoping to experience or exploit the instant disorder and confusion so created.

  In various other books, for example Ringworld, Niven suggests that easy transportation might be disruptive to traditional behavior and open the way for new forms of parties, spontaneous congregations, or shopping trips around the world. The central character in Ringworld, celebrating his birthday, teleports across time-zones to «lengthen» his birthday multiple times (particularly notable since the hardcover first edition had the error of the character heading the wrong direction, increasing that edition's value).

  from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Crowd

  Flash Crowd

  1

  FROM EDGE to edge and for all of its length, from Central Los Angeles through Beverly Hills and West Los Angeles and Santa Monica to the sea, Wilshire Boulevard was a walkway.

  Once there had been white lines on concrete, and raised curbs to stop the people from interfering with the cars. Now the lines were gone, and much of the concrete was covered with soil and grass. There were even a few trees. Concrete strips had been left for bicycles, and wider places for helicopters carrying cargo too big for the displacement booths.

  Wilshire was wide for a walkway. People seemed to hug the edges, even those on bikes and motor skates. A boulevard built for cars was too big for mere people.

  Outlines of the street still showed through. Ridges in the grass marked where curbs had been, with breaks where there had been driveways. Some stretches in Westwood had a concrete center divider. The freeway ramps were unchanged and unused. Someday the city would do something about them.

  Jerryberry Jansen lived in what had been a seaside motel halfway between Bakersfield and San Francisco. On long-ago summer nights the Shady Rest had been packed with transients at ten dollars a head. Now it made a dandy apartment house, with swimming pool and everything, including a displacement booth outside the manager's office.

  There was a girl in the booth when Jerryberry left his apartment. He glimpsed long, wavy brown hair and the shape of her back in the instant before she disappeared. Janice Wolfe. Too bad she hadn't waited. . but she hadn't even seen him.

  Nobody was ever around the booths long enough to say hello to. You could meet someone by hovering outside the booths, but what would they think?

  Meeting people was for the clubs.

  A displacement booth was a glass cylinder with a rounded top. The machinery that made the magic was invisible, buried beneath the booth. Coin slots and a telephone dial were set into the glass at sternum level.

  Jerryberry inserted his C.B. A. credit card below the coin slots. He dialed by punching numbered buttons. Withdrawing the credit card closed a circuit. An eye blink later he was in an office in the Central Broadcasting Association building in downtown Los Angeles.

  The office was big and empty. Only once in an aeon was all that empty space ever used, though several score of newstapers saw it for a few seconds each day. One wall was lined with displacement booths. A curved desk down at the end was occupied by Jerryberry's boss.

  George Bailey was fat from too much sitting and darkly tanned by the Nevada sun. He commuted to work every morning via the long-distance booths at Los Angeles International. Today he waved at Jerryberry without speaking. Routine, then. Jerryberry chose one of several cameras and slung the padded strap over his shoulder. He studied several lists of numbers posted over the table before picking one.

  He turned and moved to avoid three more newstapers stepping out of booths. They nodded; he nodded; they passed. As he reached for a booth door, a woman flicked in in front of him. Rush hour. He smiled at her and stepped over to the next booth, consulted the list, dialed, and was gone.

  He had not spoken to anyone that morning.

  The east end of Wilshire Boulevard was a most ordinary T-intersection between high, blocky buildings. Jerryberry looked around even as he was dialing. Nothing newsworthy? No. He was two blocks away and dialing.

  He punched the numbered buttons with a ballpoint pen when he remembered. Nonetheless, his index finger was calloused.

  The streets of the inner city were empty, this early. In a minute or so Jerryberry was in sight of the freeway. He stepped out of the booth to watch trucks and bulldozers covering this part of the Pasadena-Harbor Freeway with topsoil. Old machines find new use-but others were covering the event. He moved on.

  The booths were all identical. He might have been in a full-vision theater, watching scenes flick around him. He was used to the way things jerked about. He flicked west on Wilshire, waiting for something to happen.

  It was a cheap, effective way to gather news. At a chocolate dollar per jump per man, C. B. A. could afford to support a score of wandering newstapers in addition to the regular staff. They earned low salaries, plus a bonus for each news item, plus a higher bonus per item used. The turnover was high. It had been higher before C.B.A. learned not to jumble the numbers at random. An orderly progression down a single street was easier on the mind and nerves.

  Jerryberry Jansen knew every foot of Wilshire. At twenty-eight he was old enough to remember cars and trucks and traffic lights. When the city changed, it was the streets that had changed most.

  He watched Wilshire change as he dialed.

  At the old hat-shaped Brown Derby they were converting the parking lot into a miniature golf course. About time they did something with all that wasted space. He queried Bailey, but Bailey wasn't interested.

  The Miracle Mile was a landscaped section. Suddenly there were people:

  throngs of shoppers, so thick that many preferred to walk a block instead of waiting for a booth. They seemed stratified, with the older people hugging the curbs and the teens taking the middle of the street. Jerryberry had noticed it before. As a child he'd been trained to cross only in the crosswalks, with the light. Sometimes his training came back, and he found himself looking both ways before he could step out from the curb.

  He moved on, west, following the list of numbers that was his beat.

  The mall had been a walkway when displacement booths were no more than a theorem in quantum mechanics. Dips in the walk showed where streets had crossed, but the Santa Monica Mall had always been a sanctuary for pedestrians and window-shoppers. Here were several blocks of shops and restaurants and theaters, low buildings that did not block the sky.

  Displacement booths were thick here. People swarmed constantly around and in and out of them. Some travelers carried fold-up bicycles. Many wore change purses. From noon onward there was always the tension of too many people trying to use the same space for the same purpose.

  The argument started outside Penney's Department Store. At the time one could see only that the police officer was being firm and the woman- middle-aged, big, and brawny-was screaming at the top of her lungs. A crowd grew, not because anyone gave a damn but because the two were blocking the walkway. People had to stream around them.

  Some of them stopped to see what was happening. Many later remembered hearing the policeman repeating, "Madam, I place you under arrest on suspicion of shoplifting. Anything you say-" in a voice that simply did not carry. If the officer had used his shockstick then, nothing more would have happened. Maybe. Then again, he might have been mobbed. Already the crowd blocked the entire mall, and to
o many of them were shouting-genial or sarcastic suggestions, random insults, and a thousand variations of "Get out of my way!" and "I can't, you idiot!" — for any to be heard at all.

  At 12:55 Jerryberry Jansen flicked in and looked quickly about him while his hands were reinserting his credit card. His eyes registered the ancient shops at the end of the mall and lingered a moment on the entrance to Romanoff's. Anyone newsworthy? Sometimes they came, the big names, for the cuisine or the publicity. No? — passed on, jumped to the crowd in front of Penney's two blocks down.

  There were booths nearer, but he didn't know the numbers offhand. Jerryberry picked up his card and stepped out of the booth. He signaled the studio but didn't bother to report. Circumstantial details he could give later. But he turned on his camera, and the event was now... real.

  He jogged the two blocks. Whatever was happening might end without him.

  A young, bemused face turned at Jerryberry's hail. "Excuse me, sir. Can you tell me how this started?"

  "Nope. Sony. I just got here," said the young man, and he strolled off. He would be edited from the tape. But other heads were turning, noticing the arrival of- A lean young man with an open, curious, friendly face, topped by red-blond hair curly as cotton. A tiny mike at his lips, a small plug in one ear, a coin purse at his belt. In his hands, a heavy gyrostabilized teevee camera equipped with a directional mike.

  A newstaper. One pair of eyes turned for an instant too long. The woman swung her purse. The policeman's arm came up too late to block the purse, which bounced solidly off his head. Something heavy in that purse.

  The policeman dropped.

  Things happened very fast.

  Jerryberry talked rapidly to himself while he panned the camera. Occasional questions in his earpiece did not interrupt the flow of his report, though they guided it. The gyrostabiized camera felt like a living thing in his hands. It followed the woman with the heavy purse as she pushed her way through the crowd, shot Jerryberry a venomous look, and ran for a displacement booth. It watched someone break a jeweler's window, snatch up a handful of random jewelry, and run. The directional mike picked up the scream of an alarm.

  The police officer was still down.

  Jerryberry went to help him. It occurred to him that of those present, the policeman was most likely to know what had been going on. The voice in his earpiece told him that others were on their way, even as his eye found them leaving the booths: faces he knew on men carrying cameras like his own. He knelt beside the policeman.

  "Officer, can you tell me what happened?"

  The uniformed man looked up with hurt, bewildered eyes. He said something that the directional mike picked up, but Jerryberry's ears lost it in the crowd noise. He heard it later on the news. "Where's my hat?"

  Jerryberry repeated, "What happened here?" while a dozen C.B.A. men around him were interviewing the crowd, and police were pouring out of the displacement booths. The flow of blue uniforms looked like far more than they were. They had to use their shock-sticks to get through the crowd.

  Some of the spectators-shoppers-strollers had decided to leave. A wise decision, but impractical. The nearest booths could not be used at all. They held passengers cased in glass, each trying to get his door open against the press of the mob. Every few seconds one would give up and flick out, and another trapped passenger would be pushing at the door.

  For blocks around, there was no way to get into a displacement booth. As fast as anyone left a booth, someone else would flick in. Most were nondescript citizens who came to gape. A few carried big cardboard rectangles carelessly printed in fluorescent colors, often with the paint still wet. A different few, nondescript otherwise, had rocks in their pockets.

  For Jerryberry, kneeling above the felled policeman and trying to get audible sense out of him, it all seemed to explode. He looked up, and it was a riot.

  "It's a riot," he said, awed. The directional mike picked it up.

  The crowd surged, and he was moving. He looked back, trying to see if the policeman had gained his feet. If he hadn't, he could be hurt.. but the crowd surged away. In this mob there was no conservation of matter; there were sources and sinks in it, and today all the sinks were sources. The flow had to go somewhere.

  A young woman pushed herself close to Jerryberry. Her eyes were wide; her hair was wild. A kind of rage, a kind of joy, made her face a battlefield. "Legalize direct-current stimulus!" she screamed at him. She lunged and caught the snout of Jerryberry's camera and mike and pulled it around to face her. "Legalize wireheading!"

  Jerryberry wrenched the camera free. He turned it toward the big display window in Penney's. The glass was gone. Men crawled in the display window, looting. Jerryberry held the camera high, taking pictures of them over the bobbing heads. He had the scene for a moment-and then three signs shot up in front of the camera. One said ""TANSTAAFL." and one bore a mushroom cloud and the words 'POWER CORRUPTS!" and Jerryberry never read the third because the crowd surged again and he had to scramble to keep his feet. There were men and women and children being trampled here. He could be one of them.

  How had it happened? He'd seen it all, but he didn't understand.

  He tried to keep the camera over his head. He got a big brawny hairy type carrying a stack of teevees under his arm, half a dozen twenty-inch sets almost an inch thick. The thief saw the camera facing him and the solenm face beneath, and he roared and lunged toward Jerryberry.

  Jerryberry abruptly realized that there were people here who would not want to be photographed. The big man had dropped his teevees and was plowing toward him with murder on his face. Jerryberry had to drop his camera to get away. When he looked back, the big man was smashing the camera against a lamp post.

  Idiot. The scene was on tape now, in the C.B.A. buildings in Los Angeles and in Denver.

  The riot splashed outward. Jerryberry perforce went with it. He concentrated on keeping his feet.

  2

  The explosive growth of the mall riot has taken enforcement agencies by surprise. Police have managed to hold the perimeter and are letting people through the lines, but necessarily in small numbers.

  The screen showed people being filtered through a police blockade, one at a time. They looked tired, stunned. One had two pockets full of stolen wristwatches. He did not protest when they confiscated the watches and led him away. A blank-eyed girl maintained a death grip on a rough wooden stick glued to a cardboard rectangle. The cardboard was crumpled and torn, the Day-Glo colors smeared.

  Meanwhile all displacement booths in the area have been shut down from outside. The enclosed area includes fourteen city blocks. Viewers are warned away from the following areas.. . These scenes were taken by C.B.A. helicopter.

  Most of the street lights were out. Those left cast monstrous shadows through the mall. Orange flames flickered in the windows of a furniture store. Diminutive figures, angered by spotlights in the helicopter, pointed and shouted silently into the camera viewpoint. The deep, earnest voice went on: We are getting no transmissions from inside the affected area. A dozen C.B.A. newsmen and an undisclosed number of police in the area have not been heard from….

  Many of the rioters are armed. A C.B.A. helicopter was shot down early today but was able to crash-land beyond the perimeter. Close shot of a helicopter smashed against a brick wall. Two men being carried out on stretchers, in obvious haste. The source of weapons is not known. Police conjecture that they may have been looted from Kerr's Sport Shop, which has a branch in the mall.

  How did it all start?

  The square brown face looking out of the tridee screen was known throughout the English-speaking world. When news was good, that wide mouth would smile enormously, the filter cigarette in the middle of it smoldering delicately between white front teeth. It was not smiling now. That expression was more earnest; it was shaken.

  Jerryberry Jansen looked back with no expression at all.

  He had thrown away his camera and seen it destroyed. He had dropped h
is coin purse and ear mike into a trash can. Not being a newsman was a good idea during the mall riot. Now, an hour after the police had let him through, he was still wandering aimlessly. He had no goal. Almost, he had thrown away his identity.

  He stood in front of an appliance-store window, watching teevee. The deep, precise voice of Wash Evans was audible through the glass-barely.

  How did it all start?

  Evans vanished, and Jerryberry watched scenes taken by his own camera. A milling crowd, mostly trying to get past a disturbance. . a blue uniformed man, a brawny woman with a heavy purse… The officer was trying to arrest a suspected shoplifter, who has not been identified, when this man appeared on the scene.

  Picture of Jerryberry Jansen, camera held high,~ caught in the view of another C.B.A. camera.

  Barry Jerome Jansen, a roving newstaper. It was he who reported the disturbance (The woman swung her purse. The policeman went down, his arms half-raised as if to hide his head.) and reported it as a riot, to this man. Bailey, at his desk in the C.B.A. building. Jerryberry twitched. Sooner or later he would have to report to Bailey. And explain where his camera had gone.

  He'd picked up some good footage, and it was being used. A string of bonuses waiting for him. . unless Bailey docked him for the cost of the camera.

  George Lincoln Bailey sent in a crew to cover the disturbance. He also put the report on teevee, practically live, editing it as it came. At this point anyone with a teevee, anywhere in the United States, could see the violence being filmed by a dozen veteran C.B.A. newstapers.

  The square dark face returned. And then it all blew up. The population of the mall expanded catastrophically, and they all started breaking things. Why? Wash Evans flashed a white grin with a cigarette in it. Well, it seems that there are people who like riots.

  Jerryberry cocked his head. He had never heard it put quite like that.