Lightspeed Magazine Issue 32

by Judith Berman

  I am so over vampires.

  Mom looked surprised, pleased, and finally suspicious when she saw my room. On the grounds that the best defense is a good offense, I said, “See? Boy-toy posters gone. I get that new bookshelf, right?”

  She pulled open a drawer at random. It was full of clean, mostly folded T-shirts—shirts that had been on the floor that very morning.

  “A new bookshelf. Right.”

  Dad jumped to IKEA Funabashi in Japan, since that was the time zone that still had a store open, and purchased a matching shelving unit. I told him that I wanted to put it together so he left the unopened flat pack in my room. But instead of leaving, he leaned against the doorframe.

  “Dad.”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t need, or want, an audience.”

  He looked mildly offended. “Oh. Okay.”

  I felt guilty but I really didn’t want him to discover just how wet the carpet really was.

  Yes, I would tell them eventually. Well, maybe not about the avalanche. But about the jumping, certainly. I finished assembling the shelf and putting the rest of the books up. That lousy generator was still chugging away in the basement so I turned up the living room stereo to drown it out. After an hour of this, Dad, shouting to be heard over the music, said, “Okay! We can go someplace.”

  You’d almost think he preferred the grind of the generator to Electroclash.

  I turned the music down. “Where?”

  Mom stuck her head over the railing of the upstairs landing, a surprised look on her face.

  “Someplace quiet,” Dad said.

  “Someplace with people?” I said.

  “Someplace warm?” Mom suggested, walking down the stairs.

  “Mall of America,” I said.

  Dad said, “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Surveillance cameras. Thousands.”

  “Wear a disguise,” I said. He has disguises. So does Mom.

  Dad got a stubborn look on his face. “No.”

  “Well, where do you want to go?” I said belligerently.

  He frowned at me. “Queensland.”

  “It’s night there,” said Mom. “And you both need to calm down. You don’t mean overnight, do you? One of the islands on the Great Barrier Reef?”

  Dad backtracked. “Uh, not overnight.”

  “That sounds wonderful,” I said. “We could go snorkeling in the morning. And I could do some marine science units.”

  Mom bit her lower lip. I could see she liked the idea.

  Dad got that wild, desperate look in his eyes. He lifted his hand to his collar and I winced. He wasn’t going to pull out the big gun, was he?

  He did.

  “You see these?” Dad pulled his shirt collar to one side, exposing two parallel scars, three-inches long, just below his right collarbone.

  “Yes, Dad. I see them. I’ve seen them. I’ve heard the story.”

  Mom stepped closer. “Davy, your concerns are real but you need to stop doing that.”

  Dad’s voice rose, “She’s got to realize how dangerous it is out there!”

  I didn’t think we’d be going to Queensland.

  Dad was captured once by some nasty supersecret multinational corporate group. They put a device in him to try and condition him, to control him. It was nasty and it went on for months. Eventually Mom got him out, but he’s been super paranoid ever since.

  “I do know, but it’s not dangerous everywhere,” I said. “I was in Pakistan two days ago and Australia the day before that. Do you expect me to live in this house the rest of my life? I need to make friends.”

  “You have friends!” he said.

  “What friends?”

  “What about Awrala and Xareed?”

  “Awrala has two babies and a husband who is afraid of us. Xareed is married with sons. He’s almost twice my age.” I like them both. They live in Somalia and I’ve known them since I was little, but they’re more my parents’ friends. “I need to go to school. I need to know girls my age.” I pulled out my big gun. “I’m an overbright, undersocialized, discipline-challenged teenager who is going to grow up to be a maladjusted sociopath at this rate.”

  Mom’s eyes went wide and her hand went to her mouth. I guess she hadn’t realized I was listening when she’d said that to Dad.

  “You aren’t going to school. It would be like staking you out for the bastards!” Dad’s eyes were wide, the whites showing all around, as bad as I’d ever seen him.

  “You can’t follow me around all my life to protect me!” I said.

  “Wanna bet?” he yelled.

  “Stalker, much?” I yelled back.

  Mom started crying and I flinched.

  I mean, I flinched so good, I was upstairs in my reading cubby.

  That was the second time.

  I heard Mom scream, then Dad—a startled, hoarse yell.

  I almost screamed myself.

  Now they know how it feels.

  They started calling my name. Mom even said the old line, “Where did she go?” but there was nothing playful about it. I almost stayed there, under the bed, but the note of desperation in their voices was too much.

  I walked out onto the landing and said, “Boom. I jumped.”

  Mom’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile, but she remembered. She got it.

  Dad’s knees buckled and he sat down hard on the floor. Relief, I guess.

  Before they said anything, I said, “Unless you’re willing to chain me up or cut me open and put one of those things inside me, I’m going to school.

  “Now, do you want to be a part of that or do I have to do it alone?”

  [End Excerpt]

  From Impulse by Steven Gould.

  Published by arrangement with Tor Books.

  Copyright © Steven Gould, 2013.

  All rights reserved.

  For more information about Impulse, or to buy the book, please visit tinyurl.com/ImpulseBook

  Steven Gould is the author of the frequently banned book Jumper, as well as Wildside, Helm, Blind Waves, Reflex, Jumper: Griffin’s Story, 7th Sigma, and Impulse as well as several short stories published in Analog, Asimov’s, and Amazing, and other magazines and anthologies. He is the recipient of the Hal Clement Young Adult Award for Science Fiction and has been on the Hugo ballot twice and the Nebula ballot once for his short fiction. Jumper was made into the 2008 feature film of the same name with Samuel L. Jackson, Jamie Bell, Rachel Bilson, and Hayden Christensen. Steve lives in New Mexico with his wife, writer Laura J. Mixon (M. J. Locke) and their two daughters, where he keeps chickens and falls down a great deal. He just returned from Doha, Qatar where he discussed writing and science fiction with Qatari college students.

  Interview: Cory Doctorow

  The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

  Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, journalist, and blogger—the co-editor of Boing Boing (boingboing.net) and the author of Tor Teen novels For The Win and the bestselling Little Brother. He is the former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in London.

  This interview first appeared on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the entire interview and the rest of the show, in which the hosts discuss various geeky topics.

  What do you think of Disney acquiring Lucasfilm?

  I’m kind of bummed about it. It just seems to me that we’ve entered this winner-take-all world where things that are a little bit successful become very successful, and then become mega-successes, and then merge with all the other mega-successes. I don’t know. It feels like the finance industry or something to me, and it seems like it’s somehow intimately related to it—this seems like a finance-driven decision rather than an artistic-driven decision or a creative decision.

  One of the things that
freaks me out is that any publicly-traded corporation that acquires an asset for $4 billion is going to be as risk-averse as possible about that asset. Not to say that Lucas was a real risk-taker, but I think that Disney has always been at its best when it took risks, and that one of the downsides to the increasingly high stakes associated with each individual project—you know, the businesses may have always been high-stakes businesses, but now every project is a high-stakes project—is that they’re super risk-averse.

  They always end up acting like dicks. That seems like a universal outcome of having billions of dollars at stake, is that anytime anyone suggests doing anything that might have a bad outcome, your risk-management people and your lawyers come along and say, “No, you’re absolutely obliged to act like a total asshole to these people, just in case it turns out that they might cost you money down the road, because there’s so much at stake here.” It just feels like something that is just going to be about making sequels to sequels to sequels to adaptations to sequels, as opposed to inventing new cool stuff.

  So now one company—Disney—owns Star Wars, Pixar, and Marvel, in addition to all the Disney characters—basically the collective happy childhood memories of several generations.

  Yeah, I’m less worried about that. I’m actually totally non-precious about that. I mean, your memories are your memories, and I’m totally unsympathetic to people who say that having seen the crappy prequels to Star Wars reduced their enjoyment of the first three. To me, the thing that actually reduced my enjoyment of Star Wars and the two sequels was just watching them as an adult instead of a kid, and I realized a lot of the things that I thought of as really interesting and great were either clichés, or that they had a superficial appeal but the more you thought about them the dumber they got.

  I’m more bothered about the fact that if you look at Disney’s pattern of acquisitions, they’re acting like Procter & Gamble, they’re acting like a packaged goods company. In fact, less innovative than a packaged goods company. Basically their whole business plan is about amassing huge amounts of capital, putting it into brands—that is to say, things that have already-understood audiences and understood profiles—and then doing as little as possible to upset the apple cart. In fact, I think they’re more likely to try to keep all of those things intact and to not ever upset or worry the people who grew up on them, because basically their whole approach is to maximize the amount of revenue they can get from you by continuing to spin out infinite variations on the theme of whatever it was you liked last time.

  It seems like going back to Down And Out in the Magic Kingdom, you’ve had sort of a love/hate relationship with Disney. Is any of that love still there?

  Oh yeah, absolutely. I always say with Disney that I love the sin and I hate the sinner. They produce some amazing media that I really love, as you might have gathered if you’ve read the two novels and the novella I wrote that are really about Disney parks—Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Makers, and “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow.” The thing that they do that I love is their dark rides. I actually think immersive automated environments are an art form. I don’t think many people take them very seriously, and I think Disney at its best has taken them more seriously then anyone in the history of the world, and that when they are taking it seriously they do an incredible job with it. I just think that the rest of their media is a lot less interesting. I continue to be totally blown away by their immersive environments—both the rides and the parks that the rides are in—but I also continue to be absolutely distressed by their legislative agenda and by other elements of their corporate culture.

  You recently participated in the Humble eBook Bundle. You want to tell us about that?

  Sure. It comes out of something called the Humble Indie Bundle, which was for videogames. When they started in 2010, there was a group of independent videogame developers who thought, if we get some of our friends together and we put together a bundle of about six videogames without any DRM, and we say to people, “You come and you name your own price, and you can also use a slider to designate some or all of the money that you give to charity,” and then we’ll add some game-like mechanics to the way that the pricing model works. For example, we’ll have a leaderboard of the top spenders. We’ll show you how people are spending by operating system. We’ll break that down in real-time, so you can really see, for example, how Team Mac is performing against Team Linux, and maybe feel some team fellowship there and bid up your team, which I think worked pretty well.

  And we’ll also reserve some of the videogames for people who give more than the average, which of course will continually drive the average up. And the first one of those, in 2010, did $1.25 million in the first week—they were two-week-long promotions—and closed a little over a $1.5 million. By the time they hit Humble Indie Bundle 6 in 2012—the most recent one—they did $4.5 million in the first week and closed at nearly $5 million. And that’s pretty amazing. I mean, that’s just unheard of for games that fundamentally … you know, a decade ago we’d have called them shareware games. And to pull in 5 million bucks for half a dozen shareware games in a couple of weeks? Unheard of and just amazing. And they trade on a bunch of things. One is the bundle’s reputation for excellence. Part of it is the charitable dimension—people do like raising money for charity. And some of it is this game-like mechanic for pricing.

  So they came to me because one of their nominated charities was one that I had been very closely associated with and that I used to, in fact, work for, a group called the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is a civil rights group. They’re kind of like the ACLU of the internet. And EFF had been the beneficiary of a lot of donations from Humble Bundle, so much so that one of EFF’s employees actually left to go work for Humble, and he happened to be one of my former students, Richard Esguerra. He went to Humble, and they started talking about ebooks and he got in touch with me and said, “Would you be interested in helping us do an ebook one?” And I said, “Of course.”

  So I volunteered for them, and I put them together with a bunch of authors and agents, and we filled out a really amazing bundle. And actually, one of the things that I find sad but hopeful is that some of the best works that we had chosen for the bundle and that authors and agents had agreed to, the publishers vetoed. Because of all the big six publishers, only Tor would allow us to put their books in the bundle. Everyone else said without DRM they couldn’t let us do it. And that meant that we had authors who were multiple New York Times #1 Best Sellers whose books we couldn’t use even though they wanted them in there.

  I’ve since heard from some of those writers that they’ve gone back to their publishers and said, “No more book contracts with you until you let me get a piece of the millions of dollars that are sitting out there waiting for me if only I’m willing to sell my books in the way that my audience wants to read them, without DRM.” And since DRM doesn’t stop piracy—because all DRM is easily broken—it doesn’t make any sense to me. It seems like this is a purely ideological decision, and yet this ideology is anything but harmless. It’s costing authors potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars. And so I think that the subsequent bundles are going to be even better. We ended up raising just about $1.25 million, which is a little less but not bad relative to the first of the Humble Indie Bundles. And I really hope that we’ll follow in their trajectory, and that we’ll head up towards those same dizzying $5 million heights within a couple of years. And certainly I’d be happy to continue to curate these bundles for the gang. I had a great time doing it.

  Do you see that model as the future of content distribution?

  There’s an aspect of the Indie Bundle that’s part of the de facto reality of all digital content distribution today, which is that everybody is already naming their own price for digital media, in that it takes the same number of clicks to pirate media as it does to buy it. It’s a recurring motif among people who want to buy things that the buying process is very cumbersome. For example, for
audiobooks you either have to have an account with Audible or you need to download OverDrive. No one will just shut up and take your money. Like, “Give me your credit card number, I’ll give you an MP3.”

  So everybody is already naming their price, except the only two prices they are now allowed to name are “full retail” and “zero.” Nobody’s allowed to name a price in between. And so I think one of the insights of the Humble Bundle is that there actually is a pool of people who would like to name a price somewhere in between. I also think that, in a world where all payments are in some sense voluntary—in the sense that people could get it without paying for it, and the likelihood of them being caught is so small as to be indistinguishable from zero—that the strategy that we use to get money from audiences has to revolve around convincing people instead of coercing them, because we can’t coerce them. They can always choose to just opt out of the system.

  All the strategies we use for convincing are pretty much the opposite of the strategies we use for coercing. Coercing only works—you only get efficiency—if you coerce people in bulk by making examples of a few transgressors. In other words, you coerce people by putting a couple of offenders’ heads on pikes and convincing people that you’re such a big, bad troll that unless they opt into the system that their heads will be up on pikes too. So that’s the opposite way that you convince them that you’re the kind of person who they should voluntarily give money to. You convince them that if they don’t give you money that you’re going to come after them tooth and nail, and that’s not acting like the kind of person that other people want to voluntarily pay.

  And so whatever it is that people do in the future, it won’t necessarily be Humble Bundle or even recognizable as Humble Bundle, but some of the principles that inform the design of Humble Bundle will carry over, and those principles will include performing generosity and performing trust in a way that creates reciprocal arrangements with audiences, that creates a kind of reciprocating social contract with audiences that causes them to treat you in the way that you’ve shown them you’d like to be treated and that you’re prepared to treat them.