The Artificial Kid

by Bruce Sterling

  “I threw tantrums. I ranted and raved, I threatened suicide. I had a hot temper and a lot of determination. I told her that I was destined for great things and I wouldn’t let such minor, cheap crap destroy my happiness. If the government got in my way I’d crush the government; if society got in my way I’d build my own society. She couldn’t help laughing at that, and her laughter wounded me deeply. I insulted her, maybe I even tried violence. She finished our affair then and there and had me fired from the bureau.

  “The years after that were very hard. Hundreds of doors were closed in my face. I was denied any post in the government. My savings ran out—I had very little, because I spent most of my salary on gifts for Louise. Suddenly I was poor. I lived with the poor, and for the first time I saw their miserable, barren, hampered, dehumanized lives. Sometimes they actually starved, and the damned mechanized police were everywhere. The Confederacy complained about it. Planetary governments aren’t supposed to allow their populations to starve. But what did the Directorate care? They never saw the poor. They literally thought that starvation—which was a fact—was a vile rumor. Of course they never checked for themselves. They never had time, they were too busy holding their posts and plotting against rivals. Life was stratified. And in its way, the life of the very powerful was as narrow and rigid as the life of the very poor.

  “Slowly it dawned on me that our whole society was suffocating. We had locked ourselves into a closet, and we could only escape by breaking down the door.

  “By the time I was thirty I had become completely radicalized.” He paused, meditating. “Thirty—that’s a good age. Imagine growing up to be thirty. Then imagine doing it eleven more times. You see? Now you know what it’s like to be my age. I’m three hundred and seventy years old.” He smiled distantly and went back to his story.

  “By that time I had gotten over my affair with Louise. She was only the catalyst, after all. But I hadn’t forgotten what I told her.

  “I had learned to control my temper and hide my feelings. I realized that I must rigorously discipline myself before I could have even a chance of success. I thought of entering the Academy, but I realized that they gave no courses in revolution. I worked at a succession of odd jobs while I tried to educate myself. I was drawn inexorably to the greatest source of information on the planet—the Consular Library at the Confederate Consulate, which at that time was in the city of Miclo. Do you know that city, Anne?”

  “I’ve never been there,” she said.

  Moses shrugged. “Planets are big places. At Miclo I took a job in industrial design, designing clock faces and digital readouts. Now came my first act of really consummate cunning. I swallowed my obsession, and for five years I applied the full force of my intelligence to my job, which I passionately hated. I lived a life of ruthless discipline. I unhesitatingly trampled and betrayed my fellow workers. I lived in a spartan cell, I had no friends, and no recreations. In my spare time I read textbooks on design. I was promoted by leaps and bounds. Finally only one man stood between myself and control of the enterprise. When my chance came, I unhesitatingly compromised him and ruined his career. Then I bled the company dry by embezzlement and finally sold it for far more than it was worth to a woman I controlled by blackmail. I was then forty-five years old, rich, and insane.

  “I was literally and clinically insane. I heard voices, I felt that my limbs were detached from my body, and I knew that my many enemies were trying to kill me.

  “I invested my wealth, but I had become so intensely paranoid that I couldn’t bear the sight or smell of human beings. I fled to a very remote area in the planet’s polar icecap, the farthest place I could think of. You, Kid, have probably never seen an icecap. They are harsh and terrible places, but not without their own weird beauty. I paid well for a prefabricated, self-sufficient retreat, which I built myself, alone, with my two hands and two primitive construction drones.

  “I lived there for two years and went through a traumatic personality change. I adopted another name, and I returned to the Consular Library with my sanity restored but my resolve undiminished!

  “I was looking for ways to design a whole society from scratch. There were plenty of examples—mostly miserable failures. Part of the problem was that it was impossible to start with brand-new human beings. The converts to the new society always brought along a cultural hangover from their areas of origin.

  “Most of the very worst failures were those based on religions and airy moral convictions. I decided that mine would be based firmly on self-interest. I looked for a sound structural basis and I decided on the corporation. Citizens would be shareholders, so that everyone would profit equally from the collective endeavor.

  “Since work had driven me mad, I decided to abolish it. For that I needed a get-rich-quick scheme, a corporate investment that would supply the revenue to support an entire society. Of course, you know what I eventually found.” He pointed upward. “It was the Reverid Morning Star.”

  He stopped momentarily while Anne and I ducked underwater to blow more air into the flotation bags, which had gone flat.

  “By this time I was fifty, still a youngster. I had reached full maturity, however. By the time I was sixty I had ingratiated myself with the Confederate Consul General and had taken a position as his Chief Archivist. It was then that I discovered the works of Riley. I had them reprinted at my own expense, in translation of course, and they were a planet-wide sensation. I was wealthier than ever and now famous as well. The usual seductions of fame offered themselves, but I refused them. Instead, I adopted a carefully calculated demeanor of modesty and common sense. I knew that I would need such a reputation when I offered my harebrained scheme to the public.

  “During the next forty years I slowly laid the groundwork for my plans, never hinting them to a soul. I was offered a lucrative position with the planetary government, and I refused. This really electrified my contemporaries. When they demanded my reasons, I let it be known that I objected on moral grounds. I never polemicized, I never raised my voice; in fact, I never made my moral grounds exactly clear. I mentioned the plight of the poor of course, but mostly I just fed them with witty platitudes I had scraped up during decades of reading. Frankly, I kept a little notebook full of platitudes on my person at all times. They proved invaluable.” He paused. “Men will give their lives for an idea, if it’s large enough and not exactly clear to them.

  “The real reason for my refusal was the fact that I had already thrown in my lot with the Confederacy. I needed the Confederacy badly, because they were in legal control of the planet I wanted, this very planet in fact. The Academy was investigating the planet for possible colonization at the time, and I knew from my sources that they would clear it. I could get it, for a price.

  “Luckily the Academy was moving very slowly, as it always does, and the planet demanded a lot of investigation. There was quite a bit of concern over the microbial life.

  “At the age of one hundred I married for the first time, and at one hundred and twenty I married again. Both times I married for money. My wives and I were still friends when we separated, and I jumped from moderate wealth to an immense fortune. I started my charitable works: preserving wildlife, endowing libraries, feeding people, housing and clothing them. This was another tactic I had learned from the past. That way I preserved my moral stature and my money. Was it hypocrisy? Was it schizophrenia? I’ve never decided.” He shrugged again.

  “I already knew that I would have to fight the Niwlindid Directorate tooth and nail. Naturally, they had grown to hate me, as they hated any power they couldn’t corrupt or envelop. I knew that there were two sources of power I could turn against them: the Confederacy, and popular support.” Suddenly a thought startled him. “The Confederacy still exists, doesn’t it?”

  “Of course,” I said. “It’s grown weaker since your time, though. Too much decentralization.”

  “Yes,” Moses said. “I could see that coming. At any rate, it dawned on me that the
time had come for popular agitation. I had to make myself such a nuisance to the government that they would be glad to see me go, no matter what the cost to their own resources. When I was one hundred and thirty, I changed my name to Moses Moses and started the Corporation.

  “My plan was to mine the Morning Star. To strip a planet as it had never been stripped before. To blast it. To rip it. To turn it inside out and seize the metal of its core.

  “I envisioned a cloud of oneills. Big, cylindrical orbital cities, the kinds the Confederates live in. I foresaw my people living in these cylinders, building drones, programming them to rip a planet. I knew there was a market for the metal, but the initial investment would be colossal. Ruinous. But Niwlind was ripe for ruin.

  “I hired the best engineers I could find, and I paid to train others. I spent money like water. I was a man possessed. I got the necessary plans from the Confederacy, the documentation for oneills, and I paid them in the coin they liked best. Espionage. Yes, I committed treason—I confess it frankly. They joined me in plundering Niwlind, and many a Confederate official returned from my home planet rich. But I needed information only they could give me.

  “The cost in human suffering was terrible, but it was blamed on the Confederacy and the Directorate, not me. Does that bother you, Kid, to know your life was based on the pain of the helpless?”

  I shook my head. “That was six hundred years ago. They’re all dead now, anyway.”

  Moses Moses smiled blandly. “It didn’t bother me either. Their misery only drew them closer to me. I would have spared them their pain if I could, of course. I loved power, but I wasn’t a sadist. Besides, I was offering them a chance to escape. They could never have had that chance without my genius. I could not afford to be hampered by useless guilt.

  “Decades passed. I was battling the lethargy of the very old, and there’s no lethargy like it. I started small. I endured twenty years of slander and ridicule, preaching, publishing, taping, testifying, pleading, arguing, begging, threatening, pimping, blackmailing. Then the young, the restless, the desperate began to flock around me. I picked good men and women for my apostles. You must have seen their names in your histories: Bowmarshay, Deeder, Quinn, Miniott, and all the others. The first members of the Reverid Board of Directors. They were all good people, the best I could find. They believed in me, and in return I gave them meaning for their lives.

  “They had complete faith in the facade I had built for myself. And I had to stay within the facade, because I would have died rather than disappoint them. I had plenty of followers eager to do my dirty work, so I was able to retreat to a lofty moral eminence. Thanks to my long self-discipline, asceticism was very little effort for me, but it made an immense impression on people who were used to nothing but venality and greed. And this is the part you must believe … my mask became my face. I became Moses Moses, the prophet, the leader. I had started my people moving; now I was swept along by their tide. They had made me their lord and without hesitation I sacrificed everything for their happiness.…

  “I had no private life, no selfishness, no will of my own, no thoughts of my own. In a very real, literal way I ceased to have an identity. I was the people’s will made flesh. This seems bizarre and mystical, I know; it would have seemed so to me, if I had ever given myself time to think about it. But I never did. It absorbed me completely, like a dream, like a womb. I have memories of course: I gave speeches, I organized, I gave orders, I checked plans; I left the planet, I moved into the first oneills with the pioneers, I operated a mining drone like the rest, always like the rest. But it seems so vague to me now, as if I were entranced, as if I were someone else. It was a kind of madness, a kind of possession. I had built myself a role, and it swallowed me. I had burned away like the dross off molten tin; the only thing left of me was a shining tin god.

  “I was like that for almost seventy years, until I was two hundred and twenty. We had already had the oneills operating for twenty-one years, and we had scraped up enough metal to begin to build our own oneills, to establish our independence from Niwlind. We had even begun to supply a trickle of money to the Confederacy; their lust for cash was incredible, and dammit, we were buying a planet, or at least the right to one. My plan was working. The long purgatory on the oneills was changing my Niwlindids into a people of their own, with their own customs, expressions, and ways of thought. Life on the oneills was grindingly hard at first; let no one tell you differently, I was there, and I know. Our supplies from Niwlind were grudging to say the least, and none of us were experts; we blundered time and again, and every time we blundered, people died. A life-support system is merciless; it knows nothing of pain, only the laws of mechanics. But we learned fast. We had to learn to stay alive. We went through the flame, and it tempered us. It made us what we were. It made you what you are.

  “When I was two hundred and twenty-one, an accident occurred in my oneill, which was of course the center of government. It involved a newly constructed mining drone, which had not yet been dropped to the surface of the Morning Star. It was orbiting not far from the edge of the oneill when its laser malfunctioned briefly and sent a small pulse of pure light completely through the oneill outer wall; as it happened, right where I was speaking. This was not an assassination attempt as many people have claimed. It was only a deadly accident. My poor secretary, Madame Deeder, was killed immediately and the screams of the crowd were swallowed up by the roar of decompression. I looked and I saw naked space through the hole, which was no more than ten inches in diameter. Of course it would have taken weeks to empty all the air of the oneill through such a tiny hole, but my only thought was for the safety of my audience, who were trampling one another in panic. Naturally we kept the oneill spinning at Reverid gravity, since Reverie was to be our home; the zero-grav oneills came later. But I digress.

  “To be brief, I saw them panicking; I heard the terrible roar, I saw it ripping up chairs, the podium itself, and I reacted quickly. I flung my body over the hole and blocked it with my chest. Of course I blacked out immediately under the crushing impact. I knew I was dead, because I knew I had given my life. But I wasn’t dead.

  “Things would have been different if I had died a martyr’s death; they would have gone more to my plan. A dead man’s hands can be crushingly strong. But I wasn’t dead, because they healed me. It took them days to rebuild my body, but they succeeded, because they loved me. But when I opened my eyes again, I was no longer Moses Moses.”

  He sighed. We saw the lick of lightning against a distant thunderhead. Moses Moses’ auburn hair had dried and was stiffened with brine. The skin of our hands had begun to wrinkle, as waterlogged as stewed fruit. It was almost noon and the glare off the sea was blinding.

  “Oh, I kept the name,” said Moses Moses. “I always kept the name. But I had lost that inspiration, that possessive zeitgeist. I knew my role, and I played it well, but now I was only the actor, not the man. Somehow they sensed it. I know this is the truth. No one ever spoke of it; maybe they never realized it consciously. Our lives went on, but they lacked luster, as if poisoned by anticlimax. That was it, the turning point. After that, the rot began to steal into my plans.

  “I had lost it. Now that I think back on it, it amazes me to think how long I kept it. But now I was returned to myself, and the schemer had replaced the saint. It sickened me. When I tried to go on with the charade, it choked me; I felt that it was sucking out all of my life. I tried to delegate my authority to those I trusted, to go into retirement. It took me years. God, they were sickeningly coy. Oh, wonderful Moses Moses, they said, the heroic near-martyr, such statesmanlike modesty! As if we could go on without our very heart and soul! It cost me a tremendous effort to put power into the hands of the Board of Directors. When I picked them I had picked loyal followers, not statesmen. They were constantly deferring decisions to me. It lasted throughout the rest of the Mining Century, until I was three hundred miserable years old. God, what didn’t I give for those people?

&n
bsp; “One day I woke up and realized that we were rich. Fantastically rich! Our first concern had been to buy off the Confederacy; that came relatively quickly. Then, with their help and astronomical bribes, we were able to corrupt the Academic survey team and get the planet released to us before their study was complete. We were impatient; they’d already been studying it for two hundred years and they still weren’t satisfied. We promised to take great care concerning the microbial life and I personally assured them that we would stay out of the Mass, which seemed to be the area they thought most dangerous. It’s an ugly area anyway, all that mold and fungus, and who needs that when there are hundreds of thousands of beautiful, rich tropical islands? Then we turned our money back to Niwlind and paid off our investors; once that was done we declared our political independence. They didn’t like it, of course. They called us traitors, but what could they do? The expenses of interstellar war are completely ruinous, and we had the support of the Confederacy who controlled the interstellar pilots. We were beyond their reach.

  “And still the money kept pouring in, exponentially. We spent it on terraforming at first, building the big oneill gardens so that food would no longer be a problem. And I encouraged it, because we’d lived on green scum and yeast for years. Then we bought knowledge, trading metal for technology, so that we had the very best available food synthesis and vast orbital greenhouses tended by computer-run drones. Drone technology was our own, of course, we’d carried it as far as—or farther than—any other human people, so we placed the heaviest reliance on our own expertise. Drones were our slave labor force; we wanted a huge pyramid of drones to support a tiny apex of human aristocrats. So we built them in incredible numbers, until there were more drones than people, then twice as many, four times, six times, ten, twenty. And we built oneills to house them, for manufacturing, for energy, for food, communications, transportation. And as far as possible we kept them simple. We never allowed our computers to mock human sentience, because we’d learned from the lessons of the past.