"Certainly. If they don't know how I insert theÄ"
"Hush! I don't want to know. And walls have ears. We don't make any fancy announcements; we simply start manufacturing. Wherever power is cheapest today. Where is that?"
The muckraking author fairly frothed at the "cruel, heartless monopoly" held by the Shipstone complex over the prime necessities of "all the little people everywhere." I could not see it that way. What Shipstone and his companies did was to make plentiful and cheap what used to be scarce and dearÄthis is "cruel" and "heartless"?
The Shipstone companies do not have a monopoly over energy. They don't own coal or oil or uranium or water power. They do lease many, many hectares of desert land... but there is far more desert not being cropped for sunshine than the Shipstone trust is using. As for space, it is impossible to intercept even one percent of all the sunshine going to waste inside the orbit of Luna, impossible by a factor of many millions. Do the arithmetic yourself otherwise you'll never believe the answer.
So what is their crime?
Twofold:
a) The Shipstone companies are guilty of supplying energy to the human race at prices below those of their competitors;
b) They meanly and undemocratically decline to share their industrial secret of the final assembly stage of a Shipstone.
This latter is, in the eyes of many people, a capital offense. My
terminal dug out many editorials on "the people's right to know," others on "the insolence of giant monopolies," and other displays of
righteous indignation. -
The Shipstone complex is mammoth, all right, because they supply cheap power to billions of people who want cheap power and want more of it every year. But it is not a monopoly because they don't own any power; they just package it and ship it around to wherever people want it. Those billions of customers could bankrupt the Shipstone complex almost overnight by going back to their old waysÄburn coal, burn wood, burn oil, burn uranium, distribute power through continent-wide stretches of copper and aluminum wires and/or long trains of coal cars and tank cars.
But no one, so far as my terminal could dig out, wants to go back to the bad old days when the landscape was disfigured in endless ways and the very air was loaded with stinks and carcinogens and soot, and the ignorant were scared silly by nuclear power, and all power was scarce and expensive. No, nobody wants the bad old waysÄeven the most radical of the complainers want cheap and convenient power... they just want the Shipstone companies to go away and get lost.
"The people's right to know"Äthe people's right to know what? Daniel Shipstone, having first armed himself with great knowledge of higher mathematics and physics, went down into his basement and patiently suffered seven lean and weary years and thereby learned an applied aspect of natural law that let him construct a Shipstone.
Any and all of "the people" are free to do as he didÄhe did not even take out a patent. Natural laws are freely available to everyone equally, including flea-bitten Neanderthals crouching against the cold.
In this case, the trouble with "the people's right to know" is that it strongly resembles the "right" of someone to be a concert pianistÄ but who does not want to practice.
But I am prejudiced, not being human and never having had any rights.
Whether you prefer the saccharine company version or the vitriolic muckraker's version, the basic facts about Daniel Shipstone and the
Shipstone complex are well known and beyond argument. What surprised me (shocked me, in fact) was what I learned when I started digging into ownership, management, and direction.
My first hint came from that basic printout when I saw what companies were listed as Shipstone complex companies but did not have "Shipstone" in their names. When one pauses for a Coke... the deal is with Shipstone!
Ian had told me that Interworld had ordered the destruction of AcapulcoÄdoes this mean that the trustees of Daniel Shipstone's estate ordered the killing of a quarter of a million innocent people? Can these be the same people who run the best hospital/school for handicapped children in the world? And Sears-MontgomeryÄhell's bells, I own some Sears-Montgomery stock myself. Do I share by concatenation some part of the guilt for the murder of Acapulco?
I programmed the machine to display how the directorates interlocked inside the Shipstone complex, and then what directorships in other companies were held by directors of Shipstone companiesÄand the results were so startling that I asked the computer to list stock ownership of one percent or more of the voting stock in all Shipstone companies.
I spent the next three days fiddling with and rearranging and looking forbetter ways to display the great mass of data that came back in answer to those two questions.
At the end of that time I wrote out my conclusions:
a) The Shipstone complex is all one company. It just looks like twenty-eight separate organizations.
b) The directors and/or stockholders of the Shipstone complex own or control everything of major importance in all the major territorial nations in the solar system.
c) Shipstone is potentially a planetwide (systemwide?) government. I could not tell from the data whether it acted as such or not as control (if indeed it were exerted) would be through corporations not overtly part of the Shipstone empire.
d) It scared me.
Something I had noticed in connection with one Shipstone company (Morgan Associates) caused me to run a search on credit companies and banks. I was unsurprised but depressed to learn that the
very company now extending me credit (MasterCard of California) was in effect the same company as the one guaranteeing payment (Ceres and South Africa Acceptances) and that was duplicated right down the line, whether it was Maple Leaf, Visa, Credit Qu‚bec, or what. That is not news; fiscal theorists have been asserting that as long as I can remember. But it struck home when I saw it spelled out in terms of directorates interlocking and ownership shared.
On impulse I suddenly asked the computer: "Who owns you?"
I got back: "Null Program."
I rephrased it, conforming most carefully to its language. The computer represented by this terminal was a most forgiving machine and very smart; ordinarily it did not mind somewhat informal programming. But there are limits to what one may expect in machine understanding of verbal language; a reflexive question such as this might call for semantic exactness.
Again: "Null Program."
I decided to sneak up on the idea. I asked it the following question, doing it step by step exactly in accordance with this computer's language, computer grammar, computer protococlass="underline" "What is the ownership of the information-processing network that has terminals throughout British Canada?"
The answer was displayed and flashed several times before wipingÄand it wiped without my order: "Requested data are not in my membanks."
That scared me. I knocked off for the day and went swimming and sought out a friend to share a bed with me that night, not waiting to be asked. I wasn't superhorny, I was superlonely and dern well wanted a warm living body close to mine to "protect" me from an intelligent machine that refused to tell me who (what) it really was.
During breakfast next morning Boss sent word to me to see him at ten hundred. I reported, somewhat mystified because in my opinion there had not been nearly enough time for me to complete my two assignments: Shipstone, and the marks of a sick culture.