When Lyman gets to the designated meeting place, there’s no one there until some braves come tromping over the hill. They lead him through a crevasse in a range of bald rocks and then into a cave that’s pitch black. Three new braves emerge with torches and lead Lyman deep into the mountain, all the way to a small chamber with tunnels spiking off in all directions. A fucking underground city, Lyman thinks. Lyman thinks, far fucking out.
Down they go, to some kind of office cave. An Indian chief sits there on a rock, doesn’t look like any Indian Chief Lyman’s seen before. “You look Irish,” Lyman tells the Chief. The Chief motions for Lyman to sit, which he does, on a rock opposite. Another nod from the Chief and a couple of Indians remove a bat skin blanket from a huge pile of gold. Bullion stacked up taller than a man, melted into bars, still has that Off‐Worlder logo on it.
“What’s that?” Lyman asks.
The Chief laughs. “Enough gold to buy all the land west of the Alleghenies.”
Lyman’s shaking his head. “Wait,” he says. “That’s right. You guys don’t go on Newnet.”
The Chief presses a frown. “We have rules here about using the Internet.”
“But The Death is cured.” Lyman looks rather pleased at being the one to break the good news. “And it’s not the Internet anymore, either, by the way. It’s Newnet now.”
A young warrior steps up, knuckles white around the hatchet he’s holding. This guy looks much more like what Lyman expects when he thinks Indian. Not Irish at all. “Maybe we don’t like the Internet, pale face.”
The Chief sidelines his warrior with a gentle hand. “We never thought the Internet caused The Death,” he tells Lyman.
“Then why come all the way down here?” Lyman looks at the cave around them, well‐dug and sort of homey, he has to admit. “Not that it ain’t pretty cool.”
“The Off‐Worlders,” the Chief says. “They’re watching everything you do. Monitoring every link you create.” He indicates the system of caves and tunnels around them. “Here, they see nothing, trace nothing, monitor nothing. Here we are free.” The Chief hits his hatchet on a rock, sending sparks shooting across Lyman’s pants.
“What the fuck?”
“Back to our treaty,” the Chief says.
“Treaty what? This stuff is worthless.” Lyman points at the pile of gold. “If you guys went on Newnet, you’d know.”
Less sure now, the Chief reasserts, “This is enough gold for all the land west of the Alleghenies.”
Lyman’s shaking his head. “Yeah, we’ve got tons of it, too. Everyone does. The whole world. God‐damned Off‐Worlders flooded the market with it. By the time we realized what they were doing, it was too late. They’d devalued gold to pretty much worthless. And then they were gone.”
“Gone? The Off‐Worlders?”
Lyman makes a motion with his hand, like a ship leaving low orbit. “Swoosh,” he says. He presses a friendly smile. “Don’t get angry. They did it to us, too. Used the gold to buy all the oil on Earth. But we got the cure. They cleaned up the bodies.” Lyman shrugs. “A deal’s a deal.” He lets it sit a moment, his eyes wandering the cavern they’ve descended something like a mile into. “We’ve got this market currency thing now, like global. More stable though it’ll inflate a bit. You know, not based on some metal and then some other Off‐Worlders come along with another alloy generator.” Lyman looks at where the Indian Chief is looking, at that big pile of gold. “What did they get you for?” Lyman asks.
“Nothing. They just gave it to us.”
Lyman smiles because it is kind of funny. “Sorry,” he says. “The cure for The Death has already been uploaded. So you guys got that too, sort of, if you decide to start using the Internet again. Newnet, I mean.”
None of this brightens the Chief’s mood.
“Hey,” Lyman says, trying to change the subject. “You guys know anything about this curse thing?”
The Chief stays quiet, but the warrior steps now full into the glow of the fire. It’s day outside, but sure looks like night down here. Feels like night, too, cold despite the hot Georgia fall right then happening topside. “Curse?” the warrior says. He trades a glance with the Chief.
“Yeah,” Lyman says. “Well, we figured maybe you’d know. You guys are into that magic, mystic stuff, too.”
“A witch told you this?”
“Yeah, sorry, I should have said.”
“What did she?”
“What did she what?”
“What did she tell you, the witch?”
Lyman laughs. “No man, not me. She told this other guy. And his kid told the Congress, and the Congress is keeping it this big secret, but they told me to ask you.”
At this, the warrior takes one step forward, plowing the front tip of his hatchet into Lyman’s skull. Lyman doesn’t fall over, just sinks in his seat, hunched forward and still, that hatchet handle poking out of his head like a branch grown there. Blood drops patter onto Lyman’s pants.
The warrior looks down at his latest artful kill, then turns to the Chief. “So they know.”
The Chief nods, sighs. “Witches. They never could keep their mouths shut.”
Benjamin Harrison :: April 24th 1791
Old Internet was full of other people on the Internet,” Ben Harrison is telling his son, W. H. “You knew if you were chatting with someone that it was a someone, and not some group of people, or some thing. Drones were drones and people were people.”
W. H. nods his head like he does every time his dad gets this shtick rolling. Father and son out chopping wood at Berkley Plantation and the weather is fine. Got slaves bringing them tea and a profit crop coming in for the first time since the Revolution. Extra cash is going to let Ben Harrison send W. H. off into the real world with a little scratch in his pocket. Only back from college for a few days before he heads north, off to Philadelphia, to learn the business world as an apprentice to fellow Signer of the Declaration of Independence and financier of the Revolution, Robert Morris.
“We used the Internet, too,” Ben Harrison says. “But it was separate from our bodies at least.”
W. H. smiles, holds up his hand, smartpalm out to show his dad a pixelated video of George Washington meeting with the Creek Indians.
“When did that happen?”
“Not did happen. It is. It’s live, Dad.”
Ben Harrison rolls his eyes. “Why don’t you stop watching the present tense world and start helping me chop this wood?”
But really, Ben Harrison just sits there as W. H. does the chopping. Gout’s been as bad as ever this last week. “Goddamned cure for The Death,” Ben Harrison says. “Why we couldn’t get the cure for the gout, too?” And man, it does look bad, his knuckles like fists, fists like a foot of some kind. W. H.’s pretty used to the gro‐tesqueness of it. Used to his father’s constant complaining, too. This weekend it’s all about the old man’s favorite topic: kids these days.
W. H. is doing a pretty good job of feeding his father’s fire. Puts the wood ax down to update his Brainpage status every time he gets an idea he can make a compound sentence out of. Must be exchanging tickles with someone, too, because he keeps looking at his smartpalm, laughing and looking and then typing and then laughing again.
“This place is fucking awesome,” they hear. And there he is, friend of W. H.’s from UPenn, come down to experience some Virginia countryside firsthand. Keeps wandering in and out of Ben Harrison’s hearing range, gawking, saying, “This place is fucking awesome!”
“Yes,” Ben Harrison tells the kid. “This is Berkley Plantation, young Master Cooper.” And now he mocks the kid’s hard Northeast accent, “And it is fahkin awsim.” His father probably is a cooper, Ben Harrison thinks. Good for them. The American dream, he supposes. Son of a barrel maker graduates ahead of a Virginia Harrison at UPenn.
When W. H.’s friend has ridden off on a family horse for a tour of the James, Ben Harrison says, “Kids these days.” He shifts his gaze to look vaguely in
the direction of Philadelphia, rubs his face with that twisted, bulbous hand. “This Newnet thing is making you more and more paranoid every day and night too. George Washington will hold it together, but then what? Whoever’s not crapping their pants about a President Adams is having a bigger crap about a President Jefferson. No matter who gets elected after Washington, half the country’s going to take the biggest crap ever, rush into a dissolve again and here we go. Reorganizing. Dissolving. Redissolving every time some fan page gets big enough. Isn’t a diaper out there big enough.”
“No one uses fan pages anymore, Dad. Not compatible with the Franklin’s Dream Beta. It’s all Brainpage these days.”
Ben Harrison rolls his eyes. “Doctor Benjamin Franklin’s Dream America.”
W. H. is leveling the ax down just then. The bark of the wood breaking splits the air like a gunshot. He holds the ax up, sharp edge out toward the next thing coming. “Franklin’s Dream,” he says.
“You kids don’t remember when a man had to earn his right to be heard.” He waves at these annoying young Americans. “No matter how much they haven’t studied, how much work they haven’t put in. Isn’t that what we believe now, that all opinions are equal at any moment in time, regardless of the time before?”
“Not exactly, Dad.”
“Kids today,” Ben Harrison says. “When I was your age, we knew how to really represent the people. You had a meetup, a few flexdocs, some fan pages.” Ben Harrison holds his hand up to his face like he’s holding a flip phone. “You have someone in charge of a group, not some group in charge of the people.”
“Dad, have you been on Franklin’s Dream? Do you even know how group avatars work?”
“What do I need a group avatar for? I know what I think and I tell someone and then he knows, too, and he can agree with me or not.”
“Dad, you are so stuck in a pre‐ The Death paradigm.”
Ben Harrison shakes his head, “No shit I am. Ever since The Death, you kids act like living is the hardest thing in the world. Every time the going gets rough, you panic and remake the whole government. Well, I got news for you. Life ain’t no harder now than it was before The Death. And laws need to be laws for a long time to be good laws, plague or no plague, war or no war, no matter who’s President.”
“So the only good laws are the old laws, Dad?”
Ben Harrison rubs one of those gouty knuckles under his chin. Chin looks sort of gouty, too, but that’s just its natural lumpiness. “An old law is a law people have grown to respect, something you can rely on, something that’s true in the morning, true when you’re shaving, and true when you go to sleep. A law gets in there long enough, people don’t dare dissolve it. And that’s when liberty is safe, when you know that the law is safe, safe from a dissolve, or from some panicking kids, or from the whims of some Franklin’s Dream group avatar, whatever the hell that is.”
W. H. comes back from updating something on that smart‐palm. Some slaves drop off a tray with fresh glasses of tea, a few little quarter sandwiches like they know the master likes. “World gone mad,” Ben Harrison says.
Later that night, Ben Harrison has to be taken to his bed and the next day a slave comes to tell W. H., “It’s time to come and say goodbye to your old man.” W. H. tiptoes into the room, dark but for a few candles burning way near their bases. He can smell something sour, the scent of the laudanum they’re giving his dad so he can slip off in comfort. Even with the blankets over his limbs, you can see the knots and deformed joints bulging uneven and jagged.
Ben Harrison asks his youngest son, “Son, do you know how your grandfather died? You grandmother, too?”
W. H. does know, but he shakes his head. He’s found some emotion he didn’t know was in him anywhere and it’s making it sort of hard to talk.
“Hit by lightening,” his father says. “Both of them.” He slips then, a little farther back from the world. “They were holding hands.” Ben Harrison gets one last smile from the grim humor of it, then goes still, a dead relic of a country that’ll probably be dissolved and forgotten not too long from now, the way kids do things these days.
Francis Hopkinson :: April 9th 1791
It’s the day of the launch. Doctor Benjamin Franklin’s Dream America is not in Beta anymore. And Francis Hopkinson’s going to take the afternoon off and just bask. Right now, he’s talking with the twins over allchat. He’s never seen the two of them separated like they are. Can’t even recall one going off to the bathroom by himself. They seem to be always within an arm’s length of each other. Usually closer. But they’re coming through different allchat feeds now, each in his own little viewer. Hopkinson suspects they’re not in different rooms but at different desks in the same room. On opposite sides of the same desk, most likely. Maybe playing footsie.
A few hours ago, Francis Hopkinson portaled the final touches of the Franklin’s Dream programming into Newnet. Right this second, its auto‐register is granting e‐vites to users all over the Cloud. Francis Hopkinson’s latest experiment in the betterment of man could not be off to a more inspiring start. While still in Beta, Franklin’s Dream helped the people swing the tide and make the Bill of Rights inevitable. Ratification went from doubtful to a formality as regular citizens used Franklin’s Dream to get organized, wrestle the public dialogue away from the Federalists and turn all of Newnet into one ringing cry for the Bill of Rights. Even Hopkinson—the man who programmed the actual code—can’t hope to predict the next great thing Franklin’s Dream will do for America. And that’s the point. The possibilities with this thing are endless. Endless new ways democracy can flourish.
Now that it’s public knowledge that Hopkinson coded the whole new platform on his own, professional kudos and requests for interviews are flooding in. The twins have a free app, all ready for release, compatible with any smartdevice, sets a Franklin’s Dream portal right there on your Brainpage. It’s the first in what’s sure to be a long line of open‐source democratic innovations.
Back in the real world, Francis Hopkinson has a drumkit’s worth of touchpads arrayed under his panel of screens. His hands fly over them, a tap here, a drag there, that long pony tail swaying as he sways happily in his desk chair. He’s working on his Franklin’s Dream preferences while he tells the twins, “Even old Lachlan McIntosh chatted me up with congratulations.”
Twin brows furrow. “McIntosh uses allchat now?”
“What did he have to say for himself?”
“Wants me to come see the Old Man,” Hopkinson says. “Apparently, Washington wants some face‐to‐face with the programmer responsible for Franklin’s Dream.”
“Don’t go,” both viewers say at once.
Hopkinson looks at them, leaves his Brainpage still a second to concentrate all attention. “Why?”
“This brings up something…”
“Something we’ve been meaning to bring up.”
Hopkinson doesn’t like the sound of that. “How long have you been meaning to bring it up?”
“A while.”
“Look,” the other says, “lots of people have lost a lot more than memories in this thing.”
“What are you guys talking about?” But Hopkinson has mostly figured out, at least generally, where they’re headed with this.
“We can’t let Franklin’s Dream be shut down.”
“Not before it cements itself.”
“Has a chance to go from novelty to functioning part of the Republic.”
“Stare decisis.”
Hopkinson shakes his head. “There is no way to shut it down. Just like there’s no way to shut down the Constitution. It exists outside its programming now. That’s the whole point of the design. The quincuncial structure of the implementation protocol means five separate branches operating at any one time. The locality of the program changes with each passing moment, depending on which networked CPUs are least active. Franklin’s Dream is everywhere. It’s invulnerable. I couldn’t take it down even if I wanted to. No one could.
What’s the point of a people’s social networking platform if someone up in New York or Philadelphia can just flip it off?”
“Well,” one of the twins finally breaks in, “they’re going to force you to try.”
“Who? McIntosh? Washington? How are they going to force me?”
“They’ll find a way.”
“And let me guess, Jefferson has some means to prevent that. He’s got a plan to save Doctor Benjamin Franklin’s Dream America from the eeeeevil Federalist plot?”
“More or less.”
“Mr. Hopkinson, you’re the only one who could ever possibly do it. The only one who could ever take it down.”
“And so what? I’m supposed to kill myself? The great sacrifice for the eternal Dream?”
The twins laugh, both of them. “No,” they both say. “Nothing like that.” One of them holds up a thumbdrive.
“It’s a program,” one says.
“A pattern of light flashes and colors. Some sounds, too.”
“It will erase the part of your brain you use to code.”
Erase?
“The rest will be left quite alone.”
Hopkinson smiles now despite the fact that what they’re talking about is wiping part of his brain. “Will it work?”
“We think so.”
“We’re pretty sure.”
“Pretty sure? Well, what happens if it doesn’t?”
“There’s always the risk,” one twin says.
“This will be the first time we’ve used it.”
“Though we’ve run a few dozen tests.”
“On mice.”
Hopkinson lets his eyes roll. “Wonderful.” “We are all in agreement, Mr. Hopkinson.” “That Doctor Benjamin Franklin’s Dream America is the best chance to ensure the perpetual political involvement of the people.” “And thus their liberty.”
One twin looks at the thumb drive he’s holding up. “Something could go wrong.”
“We’re not here to lie to you.”
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