by Lou Anders
But the building knew to let me in, and I followed a glowing trail of virtual footprints blazoned with my name to a lab on the third floor.
FooDog stood by a table on which rested a dissection tray. Coming up to his side, I looked down at the tray's contents.
I saw a splayed-open rust-colored worm about twenty inches long.
“Eeyeuw! What's that?”
“That and its cousins are what brought down your deck. Shipworms. Teredo navalis. Molluscs, actually. But not native ones, and not unmodified. This particularly nasty critter was created in a Caracas biolab. They were used in the hostilities against Brazil ten years ago. They'll even eat some plastics! Supposedly wiped out in the aftermath—extinct. But obviously not.”
I poked the rubbery worm with a finger. “How'd they get up north and into my deck pilings? Is this some kind of terrorist assault?”
“I don't think so. Now that we know what to look for, I've done a little data-mining. I've found uncoordinated, overlooked reports of these buggers—enough to chart the current geographical dispersion of the worms and backtrack to a single point of origin. I believe that a small number of these worms came accidentally to our region in the bilge water of a fully automated container vessel, the Romulo Gallegos. Looks like purely unintentional contamination. But until I know for sure, I didn't want to broadcast anything over the ubik and alert people to cover their tracks. Or rouse false alarms of an assault.”
“Okay. I can think of at least three entities we can nail for this, and get some damages and satisfaction. The owner of the ship, the traders who employed him, and the jerks who created the worms in the first place.”
“Don't forget our own coastal biosphere guardians, wikis like the Junior Nemos and the Aquamen. They should have caught this outbreak before it spread.”
“Right! Let's go get them!”
“The conference room is down this way.”
Ten empty chairs surrounded a large conference table formed from a single huge vat-grown burl. FooDog and I settled down in two seats, and then we called the offending parties to our meeting.
My SCURF painted onto my visual field the fully dimensional real-time avatars of our interlocutors sitting in the other chairs, so that it looked as if the room had suddenly filled with people in the flesh. Men and women scattered around the planet saw FooDog and me similarly in their native contexts.
Most of the avatars seemed to represent the baseline looks of the participants, but a few were downright disconcerting. I couldn't help staring at a topless mermaid, one of the Aquamen, no doubt.
FooDog smiled in welcoming fashion. “All right, ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce myself….”
Everyone nowadays claims that instant idiomatic translation of any language into any other tongue is one of the things that has ushered in a new era of understanding, empathy, and comity. Maybe so. But not judging from my experiences that day, once FooDog had spread out his evidence and accusations to the mainly South American audience. We were met with stonewalling, denials, patriotic vituperations, countercharges and ad hominem insults. And that was from our English-speaking compatriots in the UWA! The Latinos reacted even more harshly.
Finally, the meeting dissolved in a welter of ill-will and refusal of anyone to take legal or even nominal responsibility for the collapse of my deck and the injuries suffered by poor Cherry.
I turned despondently to FooDog, once we were alone again. “Looks like we're boned, right? All our evidence is circumstantial. There's no way we can redress this through the system. I mean, aside from convincing any wikis I'm personally involved in to boycott these buggers, what else can I do?”
FooDog, good friend that he was, had taken my dilemma to heart.
“Damn! It's just not right that they should be allowed to get away with hurting you and Cherry like this.”
He pondered my fix for another minute or so before speaking.
“Seems to me our problem is this: You got no throw-weight here, nephew. You're only one aggrieved individual. Your affiliate wikis are irrelevant to the cause. But if we could get the whole country behind you, that'd be a different story.”
“And how do we do that?”
“Well, we could mount a big sob campaign. Get all the oprahs and augenblickers talking about you. Make you and Cherry into Victims of the Week.”
“Oh, man, I don't know if I want to go that route. There's no guarantee we wouldn't come out of it looking like jerks anyway.”
“Right, right. Well, I guess that leaves only one option—”
“What's that?”
FooDog grinned with the nearly obscene delight he always expressed when tackling a task deemed impossible by lesser mortals.
“If we want satisfaction, we'll just have to take over the UWA.”
7. Starting at the Top
I had always steered clear of politics. Which is not to say I had neglected any of my civic duties: Voting on thousands of day-to-day decisions about how to run my neighborhood, my city, my state, my bioregion, and the UWA as a whole. Debating and parsing Wikitustional Amendments. Helping to formulate taxes, tariffs, and trade agreements. Drafting criminal penalties. Just like any good citizen, I had done my minute-to-minute share of steering the country down a righteous path.
But I had never once felt any desire to formally join one of the wikis that actually performed the drudgery of implementing the consensus-determined policies and legislation.
The Georgetown Girls. The Slick Willy Wonkettes. The Hamilfranksonians. The Founding Flavors. The Rowdy Rodhamites. The Roosevelvet Underground. The Cabal of Interns. The Technocratic Dreamers. The Loyal Superstition. The Satin Stalins. The Amateur Gods. The Boss Hawgs. The Red Greens. The Rapporteurs. The Harmbudsmen. The Shadow Cabinet. The Gang of Four on the Floor. The Winston Smiths. The Over-the-Churchills.
Maybe, if you're like me, you never realized how many such groups existed, or how they actually coordinated.
By current ubik count, well over five hundred political wikis were tasked with some portion of running the UWA on nonlocal levels, each of them occupying some slice of the political/ideological/intellectual spectrum and performing one or another “governmental” function.
Each political wiki was invested with a certain share of proportional power based on the number of citizens who formally subscribed to its philosophy. The jimmywhales of each wiki formed the next higher level of coordination. From their ranks, after much traditional politicking and alliance building, they elected one jimmywhale to Rule Them All.
This individual came as close to being the president of our country as anyone could nowadays.
Until deposed, he had the power to order certain consequential actions across his sphere of influence by fiat; to countermand bad decisions; to embark on new projects without prior approval: the traditional role of any jimmywhale. But in this case, his sphere of influence included the entire country.
Currently this office was held by Ivo Praed of the Libertinearians.
FooDog set out to put me in Ivo Praed's seat.
“The first thing we have to do,” Foolty Fontal said, “is to register our wiki.”
The three of us—myself, a fully recovered Cherry, and the Dog—were sitting on the restored deck of the Sandybump house, enjoying drinks and snacks under a clear sunny sky. (This time, concrete pilings upheld the porch.)
“What should we call it?” I asked.
Cherry jumped right in. “How about the Phantom Blots?”
FooDog laughed. I pulled up the reference on the ubik, and I laughed too.
“Okay, we're registered,” said FooDog.
“Now what? How do we draw people to our cause? I don't know anything about politics.”
“You don't have to. It would take too long to play by the rules, with no guarantees of success. So we're going to cheat. I'm going to accrue power to the Phantom Blots by stealing microvotes from every citizen. Just like the old scam of grifting a penny apiece from a million bank accoun
ts.”
“And no one's going to notice?”
“Oh, yeah, in about a week, I figure. But by then we'll have gotten our revenge.”
“And what'll happen when everyone finds out how we played them?”
“Oh, nothing, probably. They'll just seal up the back door I took advantage of, and reboot their foolish little parliament.”
“You really think so?”
“I do. Now, let me get busy. I've got to write our platform first—”
FooDog fugued out. Cherry got up, angled an umbrella across the abstracted black man to provide some shade, and then signaled me to step inside the house.
Out of earshot of our pal, she said, “Russ, why is FooDog going to all this trouble for us?”
“Well, let's see. Because we're buddies, and because he can't resist monkey-wrenching the system just for kicks. That about covers it.”
“So you don't think he's looking to get something personal out of all this?”
“No. Well, maybe. FooDog always operates on multiple levels. But so long as he helps us get revenge—”
Cherry's expression darkened. “That's another thing I don't like. All this talk of ‘revenge.’ We shouldn't be focused on the past, holding a grudge. We came out of this accident okay. I'm healthy again, and the house is fixed. No one was even really to blame. It's like when those two species of transgenic flies unpredictably mated in the wild, and the new hybrid wiped out California's wine grapes. Just an act of God….”
In all the years Cherry and I had been together, we had seldom disagreed about anything. But this was one matter I wouldn't relent on. “No! When I think about how you nearly died…Someone's got to pay!”
Shaking her head ruefully, Cherry said, “Okay, I can see it's a point of honor with you, like if one of the Oyster Pirates ratted out another. I'll help all I can. If I'm in, I'm in. I just hope we're not bringing down heavy shit on our heads.”
The door to the deck slid open, admitting a blast of hot air, and FooDog entered, grinning face glistening with sweat.
“Okay, nephew and niece, we're up and running. Even as we speak, thousands and thousands of microvotes are accumulating to the wiki of the Phantom Blots every hour, seemingly from citizens newly entranced by our kickass platform. You should read the plank about turning Moonbase Armstrong into the world's first offworld hydroponic ganja farm! Anyhow, I figure that over the next forty-eight hours, the Blots will rise steadily through the ranks of the politco-wikis, until our leader is ready to challenge Praed for head jimmywhale.”
Suddenly I got butterflies in my stomach. “Uh, FooDog, maybe you'd like to be the one to run the UWA….”
“No way, padre. The Dog's gotta keep a low profile, remember? The farther away I can get from people, the happier I am. Nope, the honor is all yours.”
“Okay. Thanks—I guess.”
FooDog's calculations were a little off. It only took thirty-six hours before the Phantom Blots knocked the Libertinearians out as most influential politco-wiki, pushing Ivo Praed from his role as “president” of the UWA, and elevating me to that honor.
Sandybump, a speck of land off the New England coast, was now the White House. (Not the current museum, but last century's nexus of hyperpower.) I was ruler of the nation—insofar as it consented to be ruled. Cherry was my First Lady. And FooDog was my Cabinet.
Time to get some satisfaction.
8. Wikiwar
The day after my political ascension, we reconvened the meeting we had conducted at Gerontion, this time at Sandybump. All the same participants were there, with the addition of Cherry.
(Lots of other important national matters were continually arising to demand my attention, in my new role as head jimmywhale, but I just ignored them, stuffing them in a queue, preferring not to mess with stuff that I, for one, did not understand. This abdication of my duties would surely cause our charade to be exposed soon, but hopefully not before we had accomplished our goals.)
FooDog and I restated our grievances to the South Americans, but now formulated as a matter of gravest international diplomacy. (Foolty showed me the avatar he was presenting to the South Americans and our coastal management wikis, and of course it looked nothing like the real Dog.) This time, with the weight of the whole UWA behind our complaints, we received less harsh verbal treatment from the foreigners. And our compatriots caved right away, acknowledging that they had been negligent in not protecting our waterways from shipworm incursion. When FooDog and I announced a broad range of penalties against them, the mermaid shimmered and reverted to a weepy young teenaged boy.
But the South Americans, although polite, still refused to admit any responsibility for the Great Teredo Invasion.
“You realize, of course,” said FooDog, “that you leave us no recourse but to initiate a trade war.”
One of the Latinos, who was presenting as Che Guevara, sneered and said, “Do your worst. We will see who has the greater balance of trade.” He stood up and bowed to Cherry. “Madam, I am sorry these outrageous demands cannot be met. But believe me when I say I am gratified to see you well and suffering no permanent harm from your unfortunate accident.”
Then he vanished, along with the others.
Cherry, still un-SCURFED, had been wearing an antique pair of spex to participate in the conference. Now she doffed them and said, “Rebels are so sexy! Can't we cut them some slack?”
“No! It's time to kick some arrogant Venezuelan tail!”
“I got the list of our exports right here, nephew.”
From the ubik, I studied the roster of products that the UAW sold to Venezuela, and picked one.
“Okay, let's start small. Shut off their housebots.”
After hostilities were all over and I wasn't head jimmywhale anymore, I had time to read up about old-fashioned trade wars. It seems the tactics used to consist of drying up the actual flow of unshipped goods between nations. But with spimed products, such in-the-future actions were dilatory, crude, and unnecessary.
Everything the UWA had ever sold to the Venezuelans became an instant weapon in our hands.
Through the ubik, we sent commands to every UWA-manufactured Venezuelan housebot to shut down. The commands were highest override priority and unstoppable. You couldn't isolate a spimed object from the ubik to protect it, for it would cease to function.
Across an entire nation, every household lost its domestic cyber-servants.
“Let's see how they like washing their own stinking windows and emptying their own cat litter!” I said. “They'll probably come begging for relief within the hour.”
FooDog had pulled up another roster, this one of products the Venezeulans sold us. “I don't know, nephew. I think we might take a few hits first. I'm guessing—”
Even as FooDog spoke, we learned that every hospital in the UWA had just seen its t-ray imagers go down.
“Who the hell knew that the Venezuelans had a lock on selling us terahertz scanners?” I said.
FooDog's face wore a look of chagrin. “Well, actually—”
“Okay, we've got to ramp up. Turn off all their wind turbines.”
All across Venezuela, atmospheric power plants fell still and silent.
The response from the southerners was not long in coming. Thirty percent of the UWA's automobiles—the Venezuelan market share—ground to a halt.
FooDog sounded a little nervous when next he spoke. “Several adjacent countries derived electricity from the Venezuelan grid, and now they're demanding we restore the wind turbines. They threaten to join in the trade war if we don't comply.”
I felt nervous too. But I was damned if I'd relent yet. “Screw them! It's time for the big guns. Bring down their planes.”
Made-in-the-UWA airliners around the globe running under the Venezuelan flag managed controlled descents to the nearest airports.
That's when the Venezuelans decided to shut down the half of our oil-refining capacity that they had built for us. True, oil didn't play the role it
once did in the last century, but that blow still hurt.
Then the Brazilians spimed their autos off, and the nation lost another forty percent of its personal transport capabilities.
Over the next eight hours, the trade war raged, cascading across several allied countries. (Canada staunchly stood by the UWA, I was happy to report, incensed at the disruption of deliveries from the Athabasca Oil Sands to our defunct refineries. But the only weapon they could turn against the southerners was a fleet of Zamboni machines at Latin American ice rinks.) Back and forth the sniping went, like two knights hacking each other's limbs off in some antique Monty Python farce.
With each blow, disruptions spread farther, wider, and deeper across all the countries involved.
The ubik was aflame with citizen complaints and challenges, as well as with a wave of emergency countermeasures to meet the dismantling of the infrastructure and deactivation of consumer goods and appliances and vehicles. The poltico-wikis were convulsing, trying to depose me and the Phantom Blots. But FooDog managed to hold them at bay as Cherry rummaged through the tiniest line items in our export list, looking for ways to strike back.
By the time the Venezuelans took our squirm futons offline, and we shut down all their sex toys, the trade war had devolved into a dangerous farce.
I was exhausted, physically and mentally. The weight of what Cherry, FooDog, and I had done rested on my shoulders like a lead cape. Finally I had to ask myself if what I had engineered was worth it.
I stepped out on the deck to get some fresh air and clear my head. Cherry followed. The sun was sinking with fantastically colorful effects, and gentle waves were lapping at Sandybump's beach. You'd never know that several large economies were going down the toilet at that very moment.
I hugged Cherry and she hugged me back. “Well, babe, I did my best. But it looks like our revenge is moot.”
