“Listen.” Oscar sat back down and pointed. “You’ve got a laptop there. You want off the hook? Write me some mail. Tell me all about it. Tell me every little thing. Just between the two of us, privately. And if you’re straight with me… well, what the hell. He did break your nose. I apologize for that. That was very wrong.”
Oscar was studying the minutes from the latest Senate Science Com-mittee meeting when Kevin walked into the room.
“Don’t you ever sleep?” Kevin said, yawning.
“No, not particularly.”
“I’m kind of gathering that.” Kevin dropped his cane and sat down in a sling chair. Oscar had a rather spartan room at the hotel. He was forced to move daily for security reasons, and besides, the best suites were all taken by paying customers.
Oscar shut his laptop. It was quite an intriguing report — a federal lab in Davis, California, was sorely infested with hyperintelligent lab mice, provoking a lawsuit-slinging panic from the outraged locals — but he found Kevin very worthwhile.
“So,” Kevin said, “what happens next?”
“What do you think: happens next, Kevin?”
“Well,” Kevin said, “that would be cheating. Because I’ve seen this sort of thing before.”
“You don’t say.”
“Yeah. Here’s the situation. You’ve got a group of people here who are about to all lose their jobs. So you’re gonna organize them and fight back politically. You’ll get a lot of excitement and solidarity for about six weeks, and then they’ll all get fired. They’ll shut the whole place down and lock the gates in your face. Then you’ll all turn into proles.”
“You really think so?”
“Well, maybe not. Maybe basic research scientists are somehow smarter than computer programmers, or stock traders, or assembly-line workers, or traditional farmers… You know, all those other people who lost their professions and got pushed off the edge of the earth. But that’s what everybody always thinks in these situations. ‘Yeah, their jobs are obsolete now, but people will always need us.’ ”
Oscar drummed his fingers on his laptop. “It’s good of you to take such a lively interest, Kevin. I appreciate your input. Believe it or not, what you’re saying isn’t exactly news to me. I’m very aware that huge numbers of people have been forced out of the conventional economy and become organized network mobs. I mean, they don’t vote, so they rarely command my professional attention, but over the years they’re getting better and better at ruining life for the rest of us.”
“Oscar, the proles are ‘the rest of us.’ It’s people like you who aren’t ‘the rest of us.’ ”
“I’ve never been the rest of anybody,” Oscar said. “Even people like me are never people like me. You want a coffee?”
“Okay.”
Oscar poured two cups. Kevin reached companionably into his back pocket and pulled out a square white baton of compressed vege-table protein. “Have a chew?”
“Sure.” Oscar gnawed thoughtfully on a snapped-off chunk. It tasted like carrots and foam.
“You know,” Oscar ruminated, “I have my share of prejudices — who doesn’t, really? — but I’ve never had it in for proles, per se. I’m just tired of living in a society permanently broken into fragments. I’ve always hoped and planned for federal, democratic, national reform. So we can have a system with a decent role for everyone.”
“But the economy’s out of control. Money just doesn’t need human beings anymore. Most of us only get in the way.”
“Well, money isn’t everything, but just try living without it.”
Kevin shrugged. “People lived before money was invented. Money’s not a law of nature. Money’s a medium. You can live without money, if you replace it with the right kind of computation. The proles know that. They’ve tried a million weird stunts to get by, road-blocks, shakedowns, smuggling, scrap metal, road shows… Heaven knows they never had much to work with. But the proles are almost there now. You know how reputation servers work, right?”
“Of course I know about them, but I also know they don’t really work.”
“I used to live off reputation servers. Let’s say you’re in the Reg-ulators — they’re a mob that’s very big around here. You show up at a Regulator camp with a trust rep in the high nineties, people will make it their business to look after you. Because they know for a fact that you’re a good guy to have around. You’re polite, you don’t rob stuff, they can trust you with their kids, their cars, whatever they got. You’re a certifiable good neighbor. You always pitch in. You always do people favors. You never sell out the gang. It’s a network gift econ-omy.”
“It’s gangster socialism. It’s a nutty scheme, it’s unrealistic. And it’s fragile. You can always bribe people to boost your ratings, and then money breaks into your little pie-in-the-sky setup. Then you’re right back where you started.”
“It can work all right. The problem is that the organized-crime feds are on to the proles, so they netwar their systems and deliberately break them down. They prefer the proles chaotic, because they’re a threat to the status quo. Living without money is just not the Ameri-can way. But most of Africa lives outside the money economy now — they’re all eating leaf protein out of Dutch machines. Polynesia is like that now. In Europe they’ve got guaranteed annual incomes, they’ve got zero-work people in their Parliaments. Gift networks have always been big in Japan. Russians still think property is theft — those poor guys could never make a money economy work. So if it’s so impracti-cal, then how come everybody else is doing it? With Green Huey in power, they’ve finally got a whole American state.”
“Green Huey is a pocket Stalin. He’s a personality cultist.”
“I agree he’s a son of a bitch, but he’s a giant son of a bitch. His state government runs Regulator servers now. And they didn’t over-run that air base by any accident. Huey’s nomads really have what it takes now — no more of this penny-ante roadblock and wire-clipper nonsense. Now they’ve got U.S. Air Force equipment that’s knocked over national governments. It’s a silent coup in progress, pal. They’re gonna eat the country right out from under you.”
“Kevin, stop frightening me. I’m way ahead of you here. I know that the proles are a threat. I’ve known it since that May Day riot in Worcester, back in ’42. Maybe you didn’t care to notice that ugly business, but I have tapes of all that — I’ve watched it a hundred times. People in my own home state tore a bank apart with their hands. It was absolute madness. Craziest thing I ever saw.”
Kevin munched his stick and swallowed. “I didn’t have to tape it. I was there.”
“You were?” Oscar leaned forward gently. “Who ordered all that?”
“Nobody. Nobody ever orders it. That was a fed bank, they were running cointelpro out of it. The word bubbled up from below, some heavy activists accreted, they wasp-swarmed the place. And once they’d trashed it, they all ducked and scattered. You’d never find any ‘orders,’ or anyone responsible. You’d never even find the software. That thing is a major-league hit-server. It’s so far underground that it doesn’t need eyes anymore.”
“Why did you do that, Kevin? Why would you risk doing a crazy thing like that?”
“I did it for the trust ratings. And because, well, they stank.” Kevin’s eyes glittered. “Because the people who rule us are spooks, they lie and they cheat and they spy. The sons of bitches are rich, they’re in power. They hold all the cards over us, but they still have to screw people over the sneaky way. They had it coming. I’d do it again, if my feet were a little better.”
Oscar felt himself trembling on the edge of revelation. This was almost making sense. Kevin had just outed himself, and the facts were finally falling into place. The situation was both a lot clearer and rather more dangerous than he had imagined.