by Lee Bond
“So, anyways, when he explained what Unfair Advantage was actually all about, my feelings got kind of hurt. Do I look like a mobster? I don't even think Swiztersweden's even got an organized crime thing going, unless you count, uh, aggressive skiers."
“Having Benny Wall on your speed dial isn’t necessarily going to make your life any easier, Mister Nickels. He’s a person of interest himself. And as to your feelings? Don’t care, doesn’t matter. Only thing that does matter in a case of Unfair Advantage is what’s going on and whether or not it applies to the law. And your activities the other day, Mister Nickels, fell squarely in the middle of those laws. You satisfied concerns relating to AI-spawned trading habits, but by no means are you out of the woods yet in terms of ... any affiliations you might have… Now. Why are you calling me?”
“Well, since you are no doubt monitoring my spending habits like an avid housewife eager to catch her husband paying for a secret account with Ashley Madison, you must know I’m down to less than a hundred thousand smackers in play money.”
“Again, Mister Nickels, we’re aware. I’m sure I don’t need to point out that now you’re on our radar, keeping an eye on you is as simple as dropping some software onto your bank accounts, your internet feeds, etcetera. I could be vacationing in Italy and get updates on you.”
“Are you?” Garth asked sincerely. “Because that would be awesome. Sitting at some quaint little roadside coffee shop, sipping your espresso and munching on some delicious pastry when blam! Your smartphone gets an update that your favorite Sweswizerlander is once again boarding his trusty Internet Vessel, The Bad Ship Raidsalot …”
Devlin’s sigh of frustration was a clear warning. “I will ask you one more time, Mister Nickels, what this is about before I lose my temper. When I asked you to call me, it was in the hopes that you’d be less of an idiot and more direct. What do you want?”
Garth felt like pointing out that Angela had, in fact, asked him twice in the same sentence about his intentions, but reluctantly decided that his Special Agent was also not in the best of moods. “All right, okay, fine. Hey, so, if I wanted to do that thing I do again, like, how many companies could I, y’know, make less … functional?”
“The Federal government would prefer it if you never did anything of the sort ever again, Mister Nickels. Putting people out of work and dismantling businesses that may have taken their entire adult lives to build isn’t something that we like to see. You’re from a foreign country, so you may be unfamiliar with the concept of the American Dream, but here, in America, we like to see the underdog succeed from time to time.”
Garth bit back a surge of laughter as one of Armin’s guys took an awkward step and fell face first into a pile of moldy old books. “Yeah, yeah, I get that, but no, seriously. If it’s not against the law and the only thing you’ve got going for you is your preference that I not do it, how many?”
“Two.”
“Like, what?” Garth frowned. “Two an hour? A day?”
“This month.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Garth looked around the room to make sure she wasn’t in the room, pranking the fuck out of him. Nope. Just him, one fully functional computer, one half-assembled one, and six others waiting to be built.
“Mister Nickels, that kind of language falls into the abusive category and will not be tolerated again. Failure to abide by this warning can and will bring financial penalties and, depending on the severity, tone and implications, may involve jail time. And yes. Two. This month. The infrastructure of the American economy can handle only so much messing around before it breaks. We’re in the process of analyzing any potential damage your antics the other day caused to determine whether or not your actions qualify as digital terrorism.”
Garth pressed his lips together and sighed heavily instead of letting loose with a streaming rant of four letter words. He had to hand it to the Emperor, that was for sure; this not-a-simulation was running precisely as if it were real because there was nothing, anywhere else in the entire Unreal Universe as irritating and aggravating as the American bureaucracy. This one … woman … had him hemmed in on all sides.
Digital terrorism?
Doing a simple thing like proving his innocence against those kinds of charges would be time consuming, would throw him into the kind of media spotlight he hated more than anything else and more importantly, would pull him away from the only fucking thing he came ‘here’ to do in the first place.
Against better judgment and instinct, Garth was beginning to believe Emperor Marseilles’ statements concerning the reality of the world he was in.
“Are you still there, Mister Nickels?”
Devlin’s merry tone was a subdued thing, barely audible yet nevertheless still there, still taunting. She was enjoying this.
“Y-yes.” Garth looked away from the window, suddenly feeling incredibly exposed. “I’m here. Still.”
“Now that we’ve got that out of the way, Mister Nickels, is there anything else I can do for you today?”
Garth wanted to suggest the woman wipe that smirk off her face, but that’d probably fall into some hitherto never before imagined realm of threats of a personal nature against a duly registered Federal agent and he really felt he shouldn’t be taking those kinds of risks so early in the game.
“Actually, yeah. Yes I do, now that you mention it. It’s important that Changetech get off the ground and come up swinging, Special Agent Devlin, and I want that to happen with the full blessing of the American government. The last thing I want is for any of it’s finances and/or operating capital to come under scrutiny.”
“Out with it, Mister Nickels.”
“Firstly, what is your official position on gambling?” Garth grinned at the sharp intake of breath that the agent hastily covered up as an aborted sneeze. “Specifically, sports. I’m a keen watcher of sports. All kinds, from handegg to tabletop tennis, and if there’s anything I’ve learned from American films, it’s that people here love to bet their faces off on whatever strikes their interest. If, for example, I were to start betting heavily on handegg…”
“What is handegg, Mister Nickels?”
“I believe you Americans call it ‘football’, but that’s what the rest of the world calls what you all call ‘soccer’.” She got to enjoy being an enthusiastic bitch about ruining a man’s main source of income, he was damn well going to enjoy being an Americanized fish out of water. “Anyways, now that’s explained …”
Special Agent Devlin barged on in to the conversation, cutting Garth off. “The American government has nothing particularly against those men and women who wish to engage in legalized betting on broadcast sports, Mister Nickels. Though it is none of my concern, I would be remiss in my duty if I were to fail to point out that, as in any kind of institutionalized gambling that one might enjoy in a casino, there is no guarantee of winning. In fact, the longer you gamble, the higher the odds you’ll fail. And as much as I disagree thus far with the manner in which you generated your start-up capital, from what little I’ve seen of your purchases, you seem to have high hopes for Changetech.”
“Monitoring my purchases as well, eh?” No surprise there, though it helped sell the fiction that he was ignorant of how agencies like the Federal Bureau worked. “So if I start winning big, you can’t do anything about it?”
“I didn’t say can’t, nor would I say won’t. As with the other night, Mister Nickels, if you prove to be too successful on football bets or any other kind of sport, someone, somewhere might suspect you of fixing the games. It’d be obvious to anyone who looked into your activities that that’d be a stretch of the imagination, but on paper, it’d look suspicious enough for some other agency to peer into your activities.” Garth could hear that smile on her face and he just imagined the wry twinkle in her off-colored eyes. “And I’d say this bed is crowded enough already, wouldn’t you?”
Garth let his head droop for a moment. He couldn’t get over how suspicious the America
n government really was, though he supposed he should’ve known better from the beginning; pound for pound, everything that was happening here in the USA was similar in a lot of ways to how Latelyspace had been run by Chairwoman Doans and her predecessors.
With one twist: most of the time, Chairwoman Doans eagerly let citizens who decided to get themselves up to no good dig themselves a very deep, very impossible to get out of hole before swooping in.
Here, in America, the government jumped at the first sign of bait and they rode you like a donkey until you were exhausted enough to make a critical mistake.
“So does that go for, like, online poker and stuff as well, or what?”
“I think we’ve covered those bases, Mister Nickels, don’t you?” Special Agent Devlin cleared her throat to signal she was about done with all this backing and forthing. “Now, I hope you’re not going to ask me about funds received from the Tooth Fairy next, Mister Nickels, because you aren’t my only person of interest in San Francisco. There are other things I need to be doing. Is that all?”
“Well,” Garth drawled the word out until it was stretched beyond all recognition, “not … really. Does your purview extend beyond American borders?”
This was what he’d really been angling towards the whole conversation, and he could tell by the puzzled silence on the other end of The Line that Special Agent Angela Devlin was scrambling to make sense of the question.
Eventually, the agent got around to speaking, her voice full of suspicion, “How do you mean?”
“Well, all of my trades so far have been for the American stock exchange. I haven’t even started messing around with the currency exchange or any of the other countries. Now, I get you’re all invested in making certain I don’t magically destroy the infrastructure of the American way or anything like that. I mean, that’s admirable. But … do you care about other countries? Because everyone everywhere is inventing all kinds of shit and, uh, yeah. If I can’t do what I do here, maybe I could do it to, like, the Japanese? Or those kids over in Mumbai? Or wherever. Pick a country.”
Disbelief and indignant astonishment burned through the earpiece. Special Agent Angela Devlin’s voice was so rife with earnest emotion Garth felt bad for making the suggestion in the first place, yet his choices were so limited; in order for Changetech –and therefore his efforts to be in the position to save Drake and to break the simulation- to be a viable company in under three months, he need an absolute fuckton of money, and in very short order.
“Did you seriously just ask me to ‘pick a country’ with the full intention of using your particular brand of destructive trading to destroy them?”
“Well, no, not in those exact terms, but like, you’re putting me into a bad situation here. I need money to build my company into the kind of juggernaut that can wrestle with the very particular demons the previous generations dropped into your laps, and you’re not being what I’d call ‘agreeable’. I’ve told you before that I’m here to help, not destroy, and I get that you’re only doing your job as you see it…” Garth yanked the phone from his ear when Special Agent Devlin nearly shrieked the words ‘as you see it’, then continued on before she could get a word in edgewise, “and let’s be honest here, every moment I’m not doing what I came here to do is a moment where one of the other countries, all of whom are vying for superpower status, is doing their level best to come out on top. You guys are on such shaky ground, politically, financially and even militarily that fucking Honduras could beat you. No one likes you. You spent decades running around as Big Brother, a mostly unwanted semi-drunk relative beating your chest at anyone who looked at you funny, offering out Democracy to anyone with oil on their land and a religion or political agenda different than your own. So yeah, basically, Special Agent Angela Devlin, if you won’t let me play in America’s Digital Sandbox, I’ll do it elsewhere. I just wanna know if there’s anything you can do about it. I like this place. I like … no, I love everything about it. From the rock and roll to the bad movies to the unhealthy food. There’s not a thing I don’t dig about America. Can I help get you back to the way you were? Not on your life, because the way you were didn’t play well with others. Can I make you stronger? I really think so. So what’s your answer, Devlin? Can you harass me if I start burning Russian start-ups or Japanese robotics companies to the ground?”
“No. No I can’t.” Special Agent Devlin’s voice was thin, weak. “I don’t advise it, and for precisely the reasons you pointed out. We aren’t well-liked, globally. You cause enough problems overseas and … they might investigate as well. In … different ways. But no, you’re correct in assuming that, so long as the money you earn is done so legitimately, there’s nothing I can do. I will investigate those earnings, and if anything seems shady…”
“Gotcha.” Garth looked at an invisible watch and whistled. “Wow, look at the time. Hey, Special Agent Angela Devlin, it’s been real swell. I’ve got computers to assemble and other stuff to do, so you keep cool and maybe hire a few extra bodies to stare at those monitors. You’re gonna be real busy.”
Garth ended the call and looked around the room at all the stuff he had to do. He rubbed his hands excitedly, then got down to the task of finally getting on the road to destroying the Emperor-for-Life’s increasingly real simulation.
14. An Android’s Quest
The halls of the incongruity felt cramped, strange, almost … inhospitable.
“Have I really been gone so long?” Drake demanded as he walked through that –from the looks of things- hadn’t seen the light of day since well before he’d left. Following his decision to see about rescuing the failing Bishop Genome and the creation of the Spur-suit, he’d had precious little time to check on all the outlying areas of the incongruity; someone like him moving across the skin of the world that Trinity had once guarded with almost possessive tendencies had been a task requiring a great deal of work to pull off because …
Trinity was always watching. Was always trying to sneak people inside, to speak more directly with ‘Etienne’, tried ever and more cunning trips and traps to get what It wanted, but to Drake’s certain knowledge, not one of the men or women crossing the threshold remained loyal to the machine mind once under the influence of the incongruity.
The purpose to which their protomatter was put had a tendency to ignite fires in the mind, blazing beacons that threw all but the most important things into darkness.
It was why they had to be circumspect about how often they allowed people in, because –and with, at least five thousand years ago, ever increasing frequency- the men and women strolling out the other side of their Guilt Trip did so as Shriven.
In the beginning, when the first of the men had left their trial gutted, cored out, hollowed clean of everything save purpose and loyalty to an Empire that wasn’t much more than a man pretending to be Emperor and an AI letting him feel like he was in charge, the both of them had stood there, watching, made awkwardly uncomfortable by …
“Chiang Yang.” The name fell off Drake’s lips before he knew he’d even been looking for it. Side effect of being Spur, he supposed, because under normal circumstances, he would’ve had to dig into the incongruity to find it. “But yes, Chiang Yang. Minister of Finance for Elegant Dance. Guilty of embezzlement, bribery, solicitation, human trafficking … just about every crime a man in his position could get up to save actual murder.”
Yes. Chiang Yang. An odious man, obsequious as he’d been unctuous, a perfect functionary in an imperfect system, parked on the lifeline of Elegant Dance, draining the entire solar system dry of money, happiness, hope.
He’d come to the Emperor with assassins hot on his heels, vat-grown ninjas howling for his blood. Eddie’d let the man in, and his Guilt Trip had kept the both of them occupied for hours on end.
“We even bet on the outcome.” Drake let his feet take him where they wanted; this was nothing more and nothing less than an attempt to become reacquainted with a long lost friend, so to speak. Since Ed
die was the only master in the building, and after five thousand long years, there was an … indefinable … flavor of the power.
To be expected. To be … worried over. With Eddie the sort of man he was, being left alone with nothing but his own thoughts for five millennia …
Not good.
Chiang Yang had not been a good man. Hadn’t been a kind man. Hadn’t even been a decent teenager. Seemed to’ve been born corrupt, if such a thing were possible, and his first dozen attempts at running his Guilt Trip had been met with the kind of epic disaster that’d normally see people rushing in to investigate just what’d gone wrong, but Eddie was nothing if not practical; having no interest in pushing the man to and then past the breaking point on his own, the self-titled Emperor-for-Life had ultimately come up with a workable plan.
Someone would need to go down into the Trip, to carefully massage things here and there, to essentially con the recalcitrant Financier down the right path.
Drake’s feet took a left while his brain continued to burn through the old memory banks. Chiang Yang had finally succeeded, with his help, and when the portly minister had stood before them, stripped right down to the bone and empty as a glass waiting to be filled, head and heart full of nothing but an absurdly pristine allegiance to the Empire and a willingness to be used for whatever purpose he would be put …
“And thus,” Drake said, voice carrying more than a few remnants of Spur, “was born the Shriven Nation. Spies and consorts. Intelligence gatherers and turncoats. Whistleblowers and assassins, when the time calls for it. An idle immortal’s even more idle, fruitless pastime. What’s the point? How many are there, now?”
This last was identified by the incongruity’s operating system as an actual question demanding an answer, so one section of wall nearest Drake blossomed to life, flashing each name and a brief history of each man and woman now Shriven and loose in the Universe for the man’s easy perusal.
