Chasing Shadows: Visions of Our Coming Transparent World

by David Brin

  Somewhere nearby a phone rang. “Hold that thought,” said Grace as she hopped up and rummaged for a phone among the papers on the counter. “Hello?”

  Nathan watched the flight of emotions cross her face; they settled on anger. “I’ll be there in half an hour,” she said tightly, and put down the phone.

  She avoided Nathan’s gaze for a moment. Then she said, “Well. Jeff’s been arrested.”

  * * *

  “I’m going downtown anyway,” said Nathan. “I’ll drop you at the station.”

  “I could take a driverless,” she said as she hastily gathered up her stuff. “They got those new self-owned ones, too, just cruising around looking for a fare.”

  “They’re creepy,” said Nathan, and she grinned briefly, nodding. As they passed the kids in the living room, Grace said, “Lock up if you go out.”

  Nathan glanced back from the porch. “You know them well?”

  “These ones? No. But to use this hackspace at all you gotta wear a badge.” She patted her own lapel. “And the house knows what’s in it, and what shouldn’t go out the door.”

  Supposedly there was some new privacy protocol for the things, but Nathan had been too immersed in Gwaiicoin protocols lately to explore it. The kids seemed comfortable having eyes on them all the time, but he wasn’t used to it, any more than he was used to passing cars driving down the road without anybody at the wheel.

  He found he was twisting his hands around the steering wheel as if trying to strangle it. Grace didn’t seem to have noticed. “Who’s Jeff?” he made himself ask.

  “One of the kids. He’s Haida, his uncle’s a carver on the Gwaii. Probably should introduce you.”

  “But he’s been arrested…?”

  “It’s just harassment. You know they do that to us all the time.” She glared out the window, but her expression gradually softened. “It’s getting better. Gwaiicoin gives the poorest of us some money every month, and the richer the rest of us get, the more goes to them. No Department of Indian Affairs doling it out. Less harassment. It’s working, Nathan!” She rolled down the window and cool air curled in, teasing her hair.

  When they pulled into the police station’s parking lot, Nathan hesitated. “Why don’t you come in?” said Grace. “This won’t take long. Then you can meet Jeff.”

  “All right.”

  Of course, it took longer than it should have. Service systems hadn’t made it to the Vancouver Police Department yet; any other government service, and Grace could have called in her request or used her glasses and let the computers facilitate it. Here, she had to speak to a desk sergeant, and then they waited in the foyer with a number of other bored or frustrated-looking people. While they stood there (all the plastic chairs were full), Nathan said, “Is Jeff a carver?”

  She shook her head. “That’s his uncle’s thing. No, Jeff’s studying ecology and law, like any decent Haida these days. Today, he was supposed to be adding new sensors to the downtown mesh network.”

  Nathan nodded and they sat there for a while. Finally, Nathan said, “Grace. There’s a problem with Gwaiicoin.”

  She’d been chewing her lip and staring out the window. Now she focused all her attention on him. It was quiet in the waiting room, with no TV, no distractions. Nathan squirmed under her gaze.

  “There’s been a Sybil attack,” he went on, feeling a strange mix of relief and panic that made the words impossible to stop now. “It’s supposed to be a one-person, one-wallet system. Otherwise the rich can just make millions of wallets for themselves and when their full wallets trigger a redistribution, chances are the funds will end up back in an empty wallet they already own.”

  She crossed her arms. “I thought that’s why you made the deal with the government. It’s one wallet per Social Insurance Number.”

  “Yeah,” he hesitated. “Somebody’s hacked the SIN databases. Made, well, about a million bogus citizens. And they’ve built wallets with them.”

  Grace’s eyes went wide and she stood up, fists clenched.

  “Maybe … Maybe it’s fixable,” he said, spreading his hands. “I mean, the Sybil attack … it’s never been solved, every cryptocurrency is vulnerable to it, we’re no worse than Bitcoin was in that sense but of course the potlatch system is critical in your case…” He knew he was babbling but under her accusing gaze he couldn’t stop himself. “I mean, when Microsoft looked at it they decided the only way to prevent Sybils was to have a trusted third party to establish identities, so, so—” He was desperate now. “That’s what we did, Grace! We used the best approach there was. And you know, it’s not just a problem for us, the government’s got to fix it or the whole SIN system is compromised…”

  He could see she wasn’t listening anymore. Instead, she was putting together a reply. But just as she was opening her mouth and starting to point at Nathan, an officer behind the counter called out, “Grace Cooper!”

  She glared at Nathan, snapped her mouth shut, then went behind the security screen with another officer. Nathan could see them through the glass, and debated whether he should just run. But he was a big name on the development team, and the others—well, they were all quiet today. Hiding in their beds, he’d bet. Leaving him to take the heat, too; but maybe that was the way it should be. He waited.

  Grace’s conversation with the cop was surprisingly brief. The officer didn’t look happy, and when they bent over a laptop together and he read something there, he looked positively furious. Grace came out a few minutes later, looking darkly satisfied. “He’ll be right out.”

  “What happened?”

  “He was in one of the ravines in the University Endowment Lands, nailing sensors to trees. Somebody heard him or saw him and called the cops. They found five hundred dollars in his pocket. Figured an aboriginal kid wouldn’t have that kind of money ’cept by stealing it. So they trumped something up and brought him in.”

  Nathan looked past her at the cop, who was now angrily talking to another officer behind the glass. “And what did you just do?”

  “I fixed it.” She crossed her arms again and pinned Nathan with accusing eyes. “What are you going to do, Nathan?”

  “Fix it! Of course, Grace, why do you think I came to you? All my money’s in Gwaiicoin! Mine and … Look, if this goes south I go down with it. I know I gotta fix it.”

  She didn’t reply. A few minutes later a young man with shoulder-length black hair and a wide-cheekboned face came out, lugging a backpack. “Hiya, Grace,” he said, unsmiling. “Hell of a day.” Then he squinted at Nathan. “Hey.”

  “This is Nathan. He was just leaving.”

  “Right. Just leaving. Listen, Grace, I…” Her face was an impenetrable mask. Nathan’s shoulders slumped and he turned away.

  “I’ll talk to you soon.”

  * * *

  Alicia was waiting for him when he walked in the door. “Tell me why I can’t pull my money!”

  While Nathan visited one development team member after another, she had been texting him with this exact question, and he’d been fending her off as best he could.

  “Because the news hasn’t hit yet,” he said as he kicked of his shoes. “Until this goes public, anything you or I do is going to look like insider trading. Hell, it would be insider trading. That’s why nobody else on the team has bought out yet.” He went straight to the kitchen and rooted around in the fridge for a beer. “But trust me, they’re all waiting with hands hovering over mouse, just waiting for the news.”

  “But don’t you know when that’s going to happen? The bottom’s going to fall out of Gwaiicoin. We’ll lose everything if we don’t sell now.”

  He stalked into the living room and sat down. The couch faced out over Blanca Street, and the forested campus of the University of British Columbia. You could see Musqueam lands from here. “We all know that.” He savagely yanked the cap off the bottle and took a deep pull, glaring at her. “It’s up to the government to make an official statement and they’re sitting on it f
or now. And for the rest of us … none of us can be seen to be the first to bail. Who’d want to be known as the guy who kicked off the biggest crash since the Great Depression?”

  “It’s not that big,” she said.

  “It is to us. To the Haida. And the Musqueam and the others.”

  “So you’re all holding your breath. But should I?”

  He blinked at her. “Insider trading. Besides, do you want to be known as the one who brought down Gwaiicoin?”

  She thought about it. “I would if I had to. It’s my money.”

  “And that’s why it’ll go all the way down when it goes. But your reputation—your career—isn’t riding on this. Mine is. Just … just hold off for an hour or two.” He made a patting gesture with both hands, as if to keep the whole issue down. “I’m sure it’ll hit the news tonight.”

  Her lips thinned; she whirled, and went back to the kitchen to bang around in the cupboards.

  A year ago this condo had been Nathan’s safety net. No matter how the Gwaiicoin experiment did, he had wealth sunk in real estate. Now, housing prices were collapsing in the downtown core. There was general flight from one of the priciest markets on the continent. He’d seen little signs of the decay just now that only a local would notice: the paint was peeling on the garage doors, the exhaust fans in the wall weren’t running. Homeless people were living under the neighborhood’s bridges.

  So he’d sold off his investment property and put the money into Gwaiicoin.

  Rather than turn on the TV, he put on his AR glasses, went to stand on the balcony and gazed through the damp air at the park.

  Shadows leaned in from the right as the sun neared the waters of the Strait. He loved to sit out here and watch the sunset proceed, the lights come on in their thousands as night fell. The city’s gone quiet even since I moved here. The incessant hum of distant internal combustion engines had become rare as electrics took over. Some said it was the quieter cars and that they were also responsible for people strolling, not walking, in evening light like this.

  Nathan sighed and called up the Gwaii overlay in his glasses.

  The heads-up display showed a silent aurora above the city, its rippling banners of light made of thousands of thin vertical lines. Each line signified ownership—of houses, cars, shops—inferred by algorithms that constantly rifled through public databases and commercial stats. The lines joined and rejoined overhead, becoming fewer, showing how most of the houses were really owned by this or that bank; how businesses were in debt to other businesses. All those relationships of ownership and debt consolidated and narrowed as the line rose, joining in private and public corporations, and these sprouted lines to names. Compared to the dizzying complexity at street level, there were very, very few names up there at the top.

  Nathan hadn’t built this overlay, and didn’t know who had. Whoever it was, they designed in a subtle gray-white background that you could only see by standing in the dark and looking up. The image was one of the Art Deco cityscapes from the old movie Metropolis.

  He turned on Fountain View, and now the lines pulsed faintly in rising waves. Those ascending glimmers represented money. Some of it rose only to fall again, but some kept on rising, clustering, concentrating, fleeing far over the horizon or ending in the tangle of names above the city. You could change the lights into numbers, and they would show more money going up than was coming down.

  Lately Nathan imagined an invisible line coming out of his own head, gutting him like a hooked fish. It was his debt, tugging on him day and night. Money flowed up that line and never came back. If not for the Gwaii, it would suck up his car and his condo; so he turned on that view. It usually reassured him.

  A different tangle of lines sprouted from the darkening city—gold, not that wan green, and sparser. Value rose up those bright lines, too, and twined and knotted over the city. But it fell, too, in fine thin lines like a mist of rain. If you converted the lines to numbers, you’d see that almost as much fell back as rose. It concentrated, but in the middle rather than at the top. And coins that flew off over the horizon were usually matched by others coming back.

  “Help me with this,” called Alicia. Nathan went back in to chop onions, but he kept the overlay active.

  One of the Gwaiicoin experiments he’d been involved in was a vase on the corner of the counter. He’d bought it entirely with Gwaiicoin, and it had a virtual tag on it that was different from the others sprouting from his furniture, dishes and clothes. The tag said he wasn’t the owner of the vase, but its steward. Such stewardship contracts were the default in any transfer of assets managed entirely through Gwaiicoin. The contract was registered in the Gwaiicoin blockchain, forever beyond the reach of hackers or thieves. It said that the vase was subject to potlatch like his Gwaiicoin, and someday, its virtual tag might change, telling him that the thing had a new steward—somebody picked at random by the algorithm of the coin. He would gain eminence if he gave it to that person. He’d been reluctant to try that out, and Alicia had suspiciously called it “voluntary communism.”

  Communism. Such a quaint old word. A twentieth-century notion, a square peg for the twenty-first century’s round hole. Still, right now the vase was changing its tag—the invisible one in Nathan’s imagination. From being a sign of his triumph, it was rapidly becoming a symbol of his defeat.

  There was nothing on the evening news, but the pressure kept growing inside him. He stood, he paced. Alicia watched, arms folded, from the couch. He monitored the Gwaiicoin developers’ chat room, but nobody was there. They were all waiting. Somebody would have to make the first move.

  Finally, at eight o’clock, social media started lighting up. Sybil Attack. Gwaiicoin compromised. As the tweets and posts began flying fast and furious he turned to Alicia and said, “Do it.”

  As she raced to get her laptop, Nathan sat down and dismissed all his overlays. He called up his financial app and sat for a long time looking at the impressive balance on the Gwaiicoin side, and the nearly empty one in dollars. Below his Gwaiicoin balance was a link for voluntary transfers to the potlatch account.

  I could drop my coins back into dollars, and just walk away. Across the room, the clattering of Alicia’s laptop told him what she was doing.

  He stared at the other link. He was partly responsible for dragging thousands of people—mostly poor to begin with—into this fiasco. If he put his money into potlatch, he would lose it as surely as if he’d burned wads of dollar bills. The coins would instantly appear in others’ wallets, randomly scattered among the emptiest of them. Some would be lost to the Sybil attackers, but most would go to real people. Then, those people could cash out in dollars, and end the Gwaiicoin experiment with just a little more than they’d had this morning.

  And he would have nothing. Except, in the form of eminence, proof that he’d tried to help. Not monetary capital, but social capital.

  Nathan sat there for a long time. Then he slowly reached out, and made a transfer.

  * * *

  At ten, he went for a walk.

  It wasn’t raining, and it was summer; so you walked. He’d always enjoyed strolling along Blanca, with its tall walls of trees and hedges, the suggestion of darkness over the western streets that came from the presence of the UBC forest lands. You passed through that forest on your way to the campus, which dominated the end of the peninsula. Taking University Boulevard, you could peek past the trees lining it to the golf course on either side.

  Except he never went that way. It was all Musqueam territory, and while they were clients and friends, they had also filled the place with cameras and drones. These didn’t bother him so much around Grace’s house, but here, as a solitary walker, he became self-conscious.

  He walked, head down, and didn’t look at the overlays. He imagined it anyway: the slow, ponderous collapse of that pyramid of golden light that he’d seen hovering above the city earlier. The first rats leaping off the ship would alert everybody else, and by now everybody would be se
lling. It would be a classic financial collapse, and he had helped set it off. Who was going to hire him now?

  Somehow his feet had carried him south to Tenth Avenue and University. Off to the right, the golf course gleamed in the evening light. The BC Golf House was also alight and its parking lot full, mostly with pickup trucks and new model electrics, not the pricey sedans you usually saw there.

  He saw a car pull in, stop, and Grace Cooper got out.

  Now he remembered: there was supposed to be a social tonight. The councils were coming together to talk about their successes. Grace had told him about it last week. “It’s called a ‘social,’” she’d said. “They used to have them in the Maritimes and prairies all the time. You just rent a hall, buy a liquor license and find some local band that’s willing to come out and play. Then call all your friends, and they call their friends.…”

  He should be running the other way, but a kind of fatal determination had seized him. Grace had been one of the most enthusiastic supporters of Gwaiicoin. It was brave of her to be here tonight; she risked becoming a lightning rod for the blame.

  The hall’s front doors were wide open and people were standing around laughing and talking on the walk. Nathan ran under the weave of electric bus wires that canopied the street, and came up behind Grace just as she was about to enter. “Grace!”

  She whirled. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  He stopped, hesitated, then squared his shoulders. “I got us into this mess. Are any of the other developers here?”

  She shook her head.

  “Somebody has to take responsibility—” He made to enter the hall, but she stopped him.

  “You’re not going to talk about it, and I’m not going to either because that’s not what tonight’s about. I don’t want you to make it about this. We’re celebrating other things here—things we actually accomplished.” He flinched from her emphasis. It was suddenly obvious why the social was happening at the Golf House. Tiny it might be, but it was on Musqueam land. Land they had taken back.

  “What’s done counts,” she said. “What we tried…” She shrugged. “Not so much.” Then she moved out of his way. “Go on in, I can’t stop you.”