Cybernation (2001)

by Clancy, Tom - Net Force 06

  “So educate me.”

  Tyrone scooted up a little. Like his mother, he had to use his hands to talk, so the tight body language went away. He said, “All right. Look at CyberNation. They are offering international citizenship. You join up, pay them, and you get connected to the world. You can get a college degree, find any information that’s available, and they’ll even offer you a kind of social security. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing, except that it’s a castle in the sky, son. You can’t live on-line. No matter how many hours of the day you’re plugged in, you still have to have a physical location somewhere. You can roam the planet in virtual reality, but your butt will be in a chair in Washington or Texas or Sierra Leone.”

  “So?”

  “So, as a citizen of a geographic location—a country—you have to obey the rules and regulations of that place.”

  “But CyberNation is going to cover that—”

  “They can’t. They gonna pay your taxes for you? Keep up the roads and schools and national defense? Lookit, what if CyberNation decides to issue driver’s licenses to its ‘citizens.’ That mean you don’t have to get one from the state?”

  “The U.S. recognizes licenses from other countries,” Tyrone countered. “If you come here from France or somewhere, you can drive, as long as you have insurance and your license is valid at home. Jeez, Dad, every state gives out licenses, but you can drive in every other state with it. It’s called reciprocity.”

  “But that’s temporary, son. If you are passing through Arizona and you’re licensed in Mississippi, that’s fine, but if you move to Arizona, you have thirty days to change your paperwork. That’s how it works most places.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “No ‘but’ about it. You live in a place, you have to toe whatever line that place calls for. But skip all the citizenship stuff for a minute. Let’s get into the ‘universal access to knowledge’ business. Let me ask you something. You see anything wrong with recording a movie you like to watch off the cable without buying the commercial DVD of it?”

  “No, I don’t see anything wrong with that. You do it all the time.”

  “Right. But I’m paying for it. I pay the cable bill, and if I set up the HD to record a program I want to watch later, or because I won’t be there when it comes on, there’s nothing wrong with that. But if I take that pay-per-view program, run off a copy, and sell it to somebody else, is that right?”

  “Why not? You buy a book, a knife, a frying pan, it’s yours, you can do anything you want with it. You can sell it to somebody. That’s legal.”

  “One that I paid for, yes. But let’s say I run off fifty copies of a novel, or a DVD movie, and sell them at a discount, then what I’m doing is depriving the cable or satellite company of potential revenue. Fifty people who might have paid for it won’t. Not to mention I’m getting a profit off of something I had no hand in creating.”

  “But what if you give them away? You aren’t making any profit.”

  “Same difference. I’m not earning money, but I’m in essence stealing from the people who paid to produce it, because those fifty copies come out of the company’s profit.”

  “But what if the people you sell them to wouldn’t have bought it at full price?”

  “You’re saying it’s okay to shoplift if you don’t have the cash to buy something?”

  “No, I’m not saying that. But listen. Here’s an example: There’s this piece of music I got from the web. It’s a parody thing. Somebody took the words to a hot rock song, and put them to the music of a TV sitcom. It’s really funny. But the rock stars didn’t think so, so they sued them. You can’t buy the song anywhere. So if I download it, who do I hurt? Nobody makes any money on it, it isn’t available commercially.”

  Howard nodded. “I can see that. Parody is a valid argument and protected under our laws. But the rock stars could argue that the words are their property so it shouldn’t be available without their approval. They own ’em, they can sell the song or let it sit on a shelf until it turns to dust.”

  “That’s not right. What if somebody bought a famous work of art, a Picasso, or the Mona Lisa or something, then they took it out into the yard and slashed it up, set it on fire? Could they do that?”

  “Legally, yes. It would be theirs, they could do that. Morally? I wouldn’t want to be them on Judgment Day standing in front of God trying to explain why they’d destroyed one of the world’s treasures.”

  “That’s my point, Dad. Something can be legal but not moral. Didn’t Jesus say if you had two shirts and your neighbor didn’t have any, you should give him one?”

  “Not exactly, but close enough. The thing is, while we follow Jesus’s teachings, not everybody does. Laws have to be based on moral and ethical principles, but they have to cover all the people. And at the heart of western civilization is the concept of private property. And that includes intellectual property, too. You take a man’s living when you steal his songs or books or secret formulas. Most laws are moral by society’s standards.”

  “Like laws that allowed . . . slavery?”

  Howard stared at him. “You gonna throw that up into my face? You’re not any darker than I am, son.”

  “Sorry. But slavery was legal for a long time. That didn’t make it right.”

  “No, it didn’t. And those laws were changed.”

  “And it took them, what, two hundred and fifty years to get around to it? We’ve got laws now that will be changed, too. This is the information age, Dad. Old concepts will have to make way for the new ones. The cat is out of the bag, and it isn’t gonna go back in.”

  Howard smiled at the memory of his conversation with his son. He was coming along pretty well, Tyrone was. He wasn’t always right, but he did know how to think, and that was important. He had some good points—

  Somebody said, “Penny for your thoughts, General, sir.”

  He looked up, saw Julio standing there.

  “Maybe a nickel, you grinning like that.”

  “Just remembering a conversation with Tyrone.”

  “He’s doing better, I take it?”

  “Not a whole lot since you saw him yesterday, but overall, yes.”

  “Good. You here to work?”

  “I am. Let’s go into the office and you can catch me up.”

  “Well, I can try. I can’t work miracles, sir. Hard to teach an old dog much of anything.”

  “If you learned how to change a diaper, Lieutenant, anything is possible.”

  They grinned.

  Jay Gridley stared at his computer console. He should be working. He should be climbing all over the web like a million baby spiders, running down every lead, trying to find the bad guys who’d been screwing things up. But instead, here he was mired waist-deep in inertia, unable to get moving.

  Thinking about getting married.

  It still seemed like the thing to do, to get married. He loved Saji. He wanted to be with her.

  Well, fool, you are with her, aren’t you?

  Maybe that was part of the problem. Nothing much was really going to change if they had a big wedding, signed documents, and made it legal. Oh, they’d get toasters and teapots, and they’d go on an RW honeymoon—Saji wanted to spend a week on the beach in Bali—and all that, but everything else would be the same, wouldn’t it? The lovemaking, the time they spent laughing, none of that would be any better if they were married, would it?

  Not that he could see.

  Of course, you could twist that both ways. If it didn’t make much difference, then why not get married? They’d belong to each other legally, in the eyes of man and God, and if they had property, or even children, there would be certain protections that came from that. On balance, there was maybe a bit of a plus on the marriage side.

  So why did he feel as if he had just gone over the first drop on a SuperTall roller coaster at Six Flags, with his stomach trying to crawl into his throat?

  What was there to be afraid o
f? Especially since it had been his idea in the first place? He could remember how scared he was that Saji was gonna say no when he asked, and how relieved he’d been when she hadn’t.

  What’s the deal here, Gridley?

  He shook his head. He needed to talk to somebody who was married. Maybe Fernandez, he hadn’t been with Joanna that long, and he’d been a bachelor for a lot more years than Jay had. Maybe he could offer some insight.

  Jay hoped so. It was bugging him that he couldn’t concentrate on the job as much as he needed to, not to mention that it bugged him these guys were screwing with him personally.

  On the Bon Chance

  Chance had in mind to ream ’Berto out, figuratively, anyhow. Yes, he was a perpetual motion machine in bed and that counted for a lot, and yes, he was as good a hammer for smashing enemies as she could want, but he had to understand that she was the boss.

  When she found him, he was in the ship’s gift shop, buying shaving lotion.

  “Roberto,” she said, a little louder and sharper than she had intended.

  The shop’s clerk, a young man in black-rimmed glasses, glanced up at them from where he was stacking candy on a shelf.

  ’Berto turned slowly and gave her a lazy and insolent raised eyebrow. “Ah. Hello, Missy.”

  The clerk turned back to his chore.

  Roberto looked like a big tom cat, sure of himself way past confident.

  Time to crack the whip a little. “You weren’t supposed to leave the ship. Where did you go?”

  “You know where I was, Missy. Did not the helicopter pilot you asked remember where he landed?”

  She felt herself flushing under his gaze. This wouldn’t do, not at all. She had to stay in control of the situation. “He remembered. What I want to know is why you left without telling anybody.”

  “I don’t tell anybody when I’m going to pee, either. Nobody needs to hold my hand for that, nobody needed to know about my business in Fort Lauderdale. Because it was my personal business.”

  “You have responsibilities—” she began.

  “And I do them,” he said, interrupting her. “You have a problem with how I perform, either on the job or in bed?”

  The clerk stopped stacking the candy and apparently realized he had urgent business on the far side of the gift shop. He went there in a hurry.

  She lowered her voice. “No, I didn’t say that.”

  “Or maybe I didn’t worry about telling you because I thought you might not even notice I was gone, that you might be busy.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I hear Jackson fills in for me when I’m not around. As much as he can, anyway.”

  She blinked, caught flatfooted by the statement. Okay, so he knew. But she wasn’t going to give anything away. “I don’t know what you are talking about.” She had learned that in the corporate world a long time ago—when in doubt, deny everything. If somebody had a video of you doing something, if they had ten nuns and a priest as witnesses to . . . whatever, it didn’t matter—you stuck to your story.

  “I mean I don’t think his equipment measures up,” he said, deliberately skipping what she’d meant. “But you would be the one to know that—you the one doing the measuring.”

  “I don’t think is the place to talk about this,” she tried.

  “You came to find me,” he said. “This is where I am.”

  “Maybe we could go to my cabin,” she said.

  “No. I don’t think so. I think maybe we don’t be so . . . personal, if you know what I mean. We can talk business here, in the conference room, someplace, but not your cabin. I don’t like the way it smells there now.”

  Was he dumping her?

  No, she decided. He was miffed. His manhood was insulted. Okay. He could pout for a while if he wanted, but he wasn’t ready to give her up yet. She couldn’t believe that. She had too much power that way, it was her strength. Men never walked away from her until she was ready for them to go. Never.

  “Fine,” she said. “But next time you leave the ship without telling me why and when, you might as well stay gone. I won’t have you compromising our mission. If you had gotten into trouble, been picked up by the police for something, where would that leave us? This is more important than just you, Roberto.”

  He smiled. “So you say.” He went back to selecting his aftershave.

  She felt a flash of anger so hot she wanted to kill him, right there where he stood.

  He was going to pay for this. Dearly.

  18

  Washington, D.C.

  Toni held the training kerambits she’d made, traced from her real ones onto a piece of stiff leather, then cut out and the edges rounded off to make them relatively safe. Relatively safe, because a hard hit with one could still leave scrapes and bruises. The points and inside edges of the leather blades were coated with lipstick, so that any place they touched left a red mark. Both she and Alex wore old white T-shirts and gray sweatpants that would show the marks if they were touched with the red.

  Alex himself had a longer plastic knife, one that came from a G.I. Joe toy set, the rounded point and dull cutting edge also coated with waxy red.

  Toni circled him in the empty garage—the Chevy convertible was finally repaired and sold, and he was without a project car at the moment. Gave them room to work out on rainy days such as this one.

  “You have the longer weapon,” she said. “And in a knife fight, size does matter. But I have two blades to your one, so you have to be extremely careful. Slashing is mostly defensive,” she said. “Slashing can kill you, but it’ll take longer. Your advantage is, you can stab for a faster killing stroke, but these knives are so short that I’ll have to rip out a big blood vessel to do you any damage by slashing.”

  “That’s comforting,” he said.

  He held his right hand, with the knife, in front of his face, kept his left hand under his right elbow. She could almost hear his thoughts: high-line, low-line. High-line, low-line . . .

  “Knowing what you can do with a weapon, or what your opponent can do, is vitally important. Against an opponent with any skill, you will almost certainly get cut in a knife fight. The trick is to limit where, and how bad. You might have to take a nasty cut to end a fight in your favor. But better to be stitched up in the ER than on life support in the ICU.”

  He’d heard her say that often enough. He nodded.

  When she came in, she did it fast, and his slash and poke was right on the edge of desperation. She got in, but she was aware of being touched on the arm and body by his blade. She jumped back as he flailed away at her again, missing.

  “Okay, what do you see? Take a look in the mirror.”

  He moved a couple of steps so he was in front of the mirror they’d picked up at a garage sale. There was a red strip on the side of his neck, and three other less-defined ruby splotches on his chest, belly, and inside his left elbow.

  “Well. Looks like I’m dead, Jim,” he said.

  “Yes, you are. Now, look at me.”

  He did so. Toni had a red long line on the outside of her right arm, and a small spot under her sternum.

  “You see?” she said. “I’m your teacher. I have been training and practicing this art for more than a dozen times as long as you have. With real knives, I would have cut your carotid and probably the radial artery in your antecubital fossa—inside your elbow crook there—plus slashing you in the gut and chest. But even so, you would have opened my arm—which I could have survived—but also stabbed me in the heart.”

  She touched the spot on her chest.

  “Without quick first-aid care, one or both of us would probably have died after that trade, but we’d both have bled. A weapon changes things.”

  “Yeah, so I see.”

  “Against a knife bare-handed, you are in deep trouble. Even with a knife of your own, you can get chopped down.”

  “And the moral of this story?”

  She smiled. “If somebody comes at you with
a knife, run. If you can run, don’t attack unless there are several of them, in which case, you take one out, then run. If you stand your ground, you have to cover your centerline, that’s your advantage.”

  “But maybe we both die? That’s an advantage?”

  “Everybody who carries a knife doesn’t have great skill with it,” she said. “You have to assume they do, of course, and move as if that were the case, but the truth is, most people who might attack you with a blade wouldn’t have gotten any of those hits I did except the arm. They wouldn’t have gotten me, either. And don’t forget, I have two knives, short though they are.”

  “Bad for my wardrobe, though.”

  She smiled. “You can always buy a new sport coat, sport.”

  He smiled.

  “Okay, let’s try it again. This time, block with your free hand, dorsal side, and sector to the outside of my attacking hand when you do. Getting out of the way of an incoming knife is usually a good idea—if you miss the block, at least you don’t get skewered. After that, we’ll switch, you attack and I’ll defend. That’s when the kerambits work the best.”

  Later, when they were in the shower washing off lipstick marks, Toni said, “There’s an exercise I want you to learn.”

  “I’m game,” Alex said. “Come closer.”

  “Not that kind of exercise. A mental one.”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t sound so disappointed. It’ll be a couple of hours yet before Guru and the baby get home. It won’t take long.”

  “What kind of exercise?”

  “Posthypnotic suggestion.”

  He scrubbed her back with the bath sponge. “Uh-huh. Sure.”

  “Look, I know you don’t think a lot of the spiritual and magical sides of silat. You think it’s all mumbo jumbo.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Give me the sponge, I’ll do your back.”

  She soaped the sponge and began scrubbing between his shoulder blades. “You don’t have to say it for me to know it. But hypnosis is a perfectly valid tool, and you can do it yourself. It’s nothing more than autosuggestion with a focus. You visualize things, practice them in your head, and it improves your skill.”