Asimov's Science Fiction 10-11/2001 Read online

  Transgression, sex, and networks; these are all on his mind when Mr. Glashwiecz phones.

  “Hello?” Manfred answers distractedly; he's busy pondering the lawsuit ‘bot that's attacking his systems.

  “Macx! The elusive Mister Macx!” Glashwiecz sounds positively overjoyed to have tracked down his target. Manfred winces.

  “Who is this?” he asks.

  “I called you yesterday,” says the lawyer; “you should have listened.” He chortles horribly. “Now I have you!”

  Manfred holds the phone away from his face, like something poisonous. “I'm recording this,” he warns. “Who the hell are you and what do you want?”

  “Your wife has retained my partnership's services to pursue her interests in your divorce case. When I called you yesterday, it was to point out that your options are running out. I have an order, signed in court three days ago, to have all your assets frozen. These ridiculous shell companies notwithstanding, she's going to take you for exactly what you owe her. After tax, of course. She's very insistent on that point.”

  Manfred glances round, puts his phone on hold for a moment: “Where's my suitcase?” he asks Aineko. The cat sidles away, ignoring him. “Shit.” He can't see the new luggage anywhere: it's probably on its way to Morocco by now, complete with its priceless cargo of high-density information. He returns his attention to the phone. Glashwiecz is droning on about equitable settlements, cumulative IRS tax demands—that seem to have materialized out of fantasy with Pam's imprimatur on them—and the need to make a clean breast of things in court and confess to his sins. “Where's the fucking suitcase?” He takes the phone off hold. “Shut the fuck up, please, I'm trying to think.”

  “I'm not going to shut up! You're on the court docket already, Macx. You can't evade your responsibilities forever. You've got a wife and a helpless daughter to care for—”

  “A daughter?” That cuts right through Manfred's preoccupation with the suitcase.

  “Didn't you know?” Glashwiecz sounds pleasantly surprised. “She was decanted on Sunday. Perfectly healthy, I'm told. I thought you knew; you have visiting rights via the clinic webcam. Anyway. I'll just leave you with this thought, the sooner you come to a settlement the sooner I can unfreeze your companies. Goodbye.”

  The suitcase rolls into view, peeping coyly out from behind Annette's dressing table. Manfred beckons to it; right now it's easier to deal with his Plan B than dawn raids by objectivist gangsters, Annette's sulk, his wife's incessant legal spamming, and the news that he is a father against his will. “C'mon over here, you stray baggage. Let's see what I got for my reputation derivatives.”

  * * *

  Anticlimax.

  Annette's communiqué is anodyne; a giggling confession off-camera (shower-curtain rain in the background) that the famous Manfred Macx is in Paris for a weekend of clubbing, drugging, and general hell-raising. Oh, and he's promised to invent three new paradigm shifts before breakfast every day, starting with a way to actualize the arrival of True Communism by building a state central-planning apparatus that interfaces perfectly with external market systems and somehow manages to algorithmically outperform the Monte Carlo free-for-all of market economics. Just because he can, because hacking economics is fun and he wants to hear the screams from the Chicago school.

  Try as he may, Manfred can't see anything in the press release that is at all unusual. It's just the sort of thing he does, and getting it on the net was why he was looking for a CIA stringer in the first place.

  He tries to explain this to her in the bath as he soaps her back. “I don't understand what they're on about,” he complains. “There's nothing that tipped them off—except that I was in Paris, and you filed the news. You did nothing wrong.”

  “Mais oui.” She turns round, slippery as an eel, and slides backward into the water. “I try to tell you this but you are not listening.”

  “I am now.” Water droplets cling to the outside of his glasses, plastering his view of the room with laser speckle highlights. “I'm sorry, Annette. I brought this mess with me. I can take it out of your life.”

  “No!” She rises up in front of him and leans forward, face serious. “I said yesterday. I want to be your manager. Take me in.”

  “I don't need a manager; my whole thing is about being fast and out-of-control!”

  “You think you do not need a manager, but your companies do,” she observes. “You have lawsuits, how many? You cannot the time to oversee them spare. The Soviets, they abolish capitalists, but even they need managers. Please, let me manage for you!”

  Annette is so intense about the idea that she becomes visibly aroused. He leans toward her, cups a hand around one taut nipple. “The company matrix isn't sold yet,” he admits.

  “It is not?” She looks delighted. “Excellent! To who can this be sold, to Moscow? To SLORC? To—”

  “I was thinking of the Italian Communist Party,” he says. “It's a pilot project. I was working on selling it—need the money for my divorce, to close the deal on the luggage—but it's not that simple. Someone has to run the damn thing—someone with a keen understanding of how to interface a central-planning system with a capitalist economy. A system administrator with experience of working for a multinational corporation would be ideal, one with an interest in finding new ways and means of interfacing the centrally planned enterprise to the outside world.” He looks at her with suddenly dawning surmise. “Um. You interested?”

  * * *

  Rome is hotter than downtown Columbia, SC over Thanksgiving weekend; it stinks of methane-burning Skodas with a low undertone of cooked dogshit. The cars are brightly colored subcompact missiles, hurtling in and out of alleyways like angry wasps: hot-wiring their drive-by-wire seems to be the national sport, although Fiat's embedded-systems people have always written notoriously wobbly software.

  Manfred emerges from the Stazione Termini into dusty sunlight, blinking like an owl. His glasses keep up a rolling monologue about who lived where in the days of the late Republic; they're stuck on a tourist channel and won't come unglued from that much history without a struggle. Manfred doesn't feel like a struggle right now. He feels like he's been sucked dry over the weekend: a light, hollow husk that might blow away in a stiff breeze. He hasn't had a patentable idea all day. This is not a good state to be in on a Monday morning when he's due to meet the former Minister for Economic Affairs in an hour and a half, in order to give him a gift that will probably get the minister a shot at higher office, and get Pam's lawyer off his back for good.

  The ex-Minister's private persona isn't what Manfred was expecting. All Manfred has seen up to now is a polished public avatar in a traditionally cut suit, addressing the Chamber of Deputies in cyberspace: which is why when he rings the doorbell set in the whitewashed doorframe of Gianni's front door, he isn't expecting a piece of Tom of Finland beefcake, complete with breechcloth and peaked leather cap, to answer.

  “Hello, I am here to see the minister,” Manfred says carefully. Aineko, perched on his left shoulder, attempts to translate: it trills something that sounds extremely urgent. Everything sounds urgent in Italian.

  “It's okay, I'm from Iowa,” says the guy in the doorway. He tucks a thumb under one leather strap and grins over his mustache: “What's it about?” Over his shoulder: “Gianni! Visitor!”

  “It's about the economy,” Manfred says carefully. “I'm here to make it obsolete.”

  The beefcake backs away from the door cautiously—then the minister appears behind him. “Ah, signore Macx! It's okay, Johnny, I have been expecting him.” Gianni extends a rapid welcome, like a hyperactive gnome buried in a white toweling bathrobe: “Please come in, my friend! I'm sure you must be tired from your journey. A refreshment for the guest if you please, Johnny. Would you prefer coffee or something stronger?”

  Five minutes later Manfred is buried up to his ears in a sofa covered in buttery white cowhide, a cup of virulently strong espresso balanced precariously on his knee, while G
ianni Vittoria himself holds forth on the problems of implementing a postindustrial ecosystem on top of a bureaucratic system with its roots in the bull-headedly modernist era of the 1920s. Gianni is a visionary of the left, a strange attractor within the chaotic phase-space of Italian politics. A former professor of Marxist economics, his ideas are informed by a painfully honest humanism, and everyone—even his enemies—agrees that he is one of the greatest theoreticians of the post-EU era. But his intellectual integrity prevents him from rising to the very top, and his fellow-travelers are much ruder about him than his ideological enemies, accusing him of the ultimate political crime: valuing truth over power.

  Manfred met Gianni a couple of years ago via a hosted politics chatroom; at the beginning of last week, he sent him a paper detailing his embeddable planned economy and a proposal for using it to turbocharge the endless Italian attempt to re-engineer its government systems. This is the thin end of the wedge: if Manfred is right, it could catalyze a whole new wave of communist expansion, driven by humanitarian ideals and demonstrably superior performance, rather than wishful thinking and ideology.

  “It is impossible, I fear. This is Italy, my friend: everybody has to have their say. Not everybody even understands what it is we are talking about, but that won't stop them talking about it. Since 1945, our government requires consensus—a reaction to what came before. Do you know we have five different routes to putting forward a new law, two of them added as emergency measures to break the gridlock? And none of them work on their own unless you can get everybody to agree. Your plan is daring and radical but if it works, we must understand why we work—and that digs right to the root of being human, and not everybody will agree.”

  At this point, Manfred realizes that he's lost. “I don't understand,” he says, genuinely puzzled. “What has the human condition got to do with economics?”

  The minister sighs abruptly. “You are very unusual. You earn no money, do you? But you are rich, because grateful people who have benefited from your work give you everything you need. You are like a mediaeval troubadour who has found favor with the aristocracy. Your labor is not alienated—it is given freely, and your means of production with you always, inside your head.” Manfred blinks; the jargon is weirdly technical-sounding but orthogonal to his experience, offering him a disquieting glimpse into the world of the terminally future-shocked. He is surprised to find that not understanding itches.

  Gianni taps his balding temple with a knuckle like a walnut. “Most people spend little time inside their head. They don't understand how you live. They're like mediaeval peasants looking in puzzlement at the troubadour. This system you invent, for running a planned economy, is delightful and elegant: Lenin's heirs would have been awe-struck. But it is not a system for the new century. It is not human.”

  Manfred scratches his head. “It seems to me that there's nothing human about the economics of scarcity,” He says. “Anyway, humans will be obsolete as economic units within a couple more decades. All I want to do is make everybody rich beyond their wildest dreams before that happens.” A pause for a sip of coffee, and to think one honest statement deserves another: “and to pay off a divorce settlement.”

  “Ye-es? Well, let me show you my library, my friend,” Gianni says, standing up. “This way.”

  The older man ambles out of the predominantly white living room with its carnivorous leather sofas and up a cast-iron spiral staircase that nails some kind of upper level onto the base of the building. “Human beings aren't rational,” he calls over his shoulder. “That was the big mistake of the Chicago school economists, neo-liberals to a man, and of my predecessors, too. If human behavior were logical, there would be no gambling, hmm? The house always wins, after all.” The staircase debouches into another airy whitewashed room, where one wall is occupied by a wooden bench supporting a number of ancient, promiscuously cabled servers and a very new, eye-wateringly expensive solid volume renderer. Opposite the bench is a wall occupied from floor to ceiling by bookcases: Manfred looks at the ancient, low-density medium and sneezes, momentarily bemused by the sight of data density measured in kilograms per megabyte rather than vice versa.

  “What's it fabbing?” Manfred asks, pointing at the renderer, which is whining to itself and slowly sintering together something that resembles a carriage clock maker's fever dream of a clockwork-powered hard disk drive.

  “Oh, one of Johnny's toys: a micromechanical digital phonograph player,” Gianni says dismissively. “He used to design Babbage engines for the Pentagon: stealth computers. (No Van Eck radiation, you know.) Look.” He carefully pulls a fabric-bound document out of the obsolescent data wall and shows the spine to Manfred: “On the Theory of Games, by John Von Neumann. Signed first edition.”

  Aineko meeps and dumps a slew of confusing purple finite state automata into Manfred's left eye: the hardback is dusty and dry beneath his fingertips as he remembers to turn the pages gently. “This copy belonged to the personal library of Oleg Kordiovsky. A lucky man is Oleg: he bought it in 1952, while on a visit to New York, and the MVD let him to keep it.”

  “He must be—” Manfred pauses. More data, historical timelines. “GosPlan?”

  “Correct.” Gianni smiles thinly. “Two years before the central committee denounced computers as bourgeois deviationist pseudo-science intended to dehumanize the proletarian. They recognized the power of robots even then. A shame they do not anticipate the compiler or the net.”

  “I don't understand the significance. Nobody back then could expect that the main obstacle to doing away with the market would be overcome within half a century, surely?”

  “Indeed not. But it's true: since the nineteen-eighties, it has been possible—in principle—to resolve resource allocation problems algorithmically, by computer, instead of needing a market. Markets are wasteful: they allow competition, much of which is thrown on the scrap heap. So why do they persist?”

  Manfred shrugs. “You tell me. Conservatism?”

  Gianni closes the book and puts it back on the shelf. “Markets afford their participants the illusion of free will, my friend. You will find that human beings do not like being forced into doing something, even if it is in their best interests. Of necessity, a command economy must be coercive—it does, after all, command.”

  “But my system doesn't! It mediates where supplies go, not who has to produce what—”

  Gianni is shaking his head. “Backward chaining or forward chaining, it is still an expert system, my friend. Your companies need no human beings, and this is a good thing, but they must not direct the activities of human beings, either. If they do, you have just enslaved people to an abstract machine, as dictators have throughout history.”

  Manfred's eyes scan along the bookshelf. “But the market itself is an abstract machine! A lousy one, too. I'm mostly free of it—but how long is it going to continue oppressing people?”

  “Maybe not as long as you fear.” Gianni sits down next to the renderer, which is currently extruding the inference mill of the analytical engine. “The marginal value of money decreases, after all: the more you have, the less it means to you. We are on the edge of a period of prolonged economic growth, with annual averages in excess of 20 percent if the Council of Europe's predictor metrics are anything to go by. The last of the flaccid industrial economy has withered away, and this era's muscle of economic growth, what used to be the high-technology sector, is now everything. We can afford a little wastage, my friend, if that is the price of keeping people happy until the marginal value of money withers away completely.”

  Realization dawns. “You want to abolish scarcity, not just money!”

  “Indeed.” Gianni grins. “There's more to that than mere economic performance; you have to consider abundance as a factor. Don't plan the economy; take things out of the economy. Do you pay for the air you breathe? No. Now, do you want to know how you can pay for your divorce settlement?”

  * * *

  The shutters are thrown ba
ck, the curtains tied out of the way, and Annette's huge living room windows are drawn open in the morning breeze.

  Manfred sits on a leather-topped piano stool, his suitcase open at his feet. He's running a firewire link from the case to Annette's stereo, an antique standalone SDMI unit with a satellite internet uplink. Someone has chipped it, crudely revoking its copy-protection algorithm: the back of its case bears scars from their soldering iron. Annette is curled up on the huge sofa, wrapped in a caftan and a pair of high bandwidth goggles, taking a break from his scheme to thrash out an Arianespace scheduling problem with some colleagues in Iran and Guyana.

  His suitcase is full of noise, but what's coming out of the stereo is ragtime. Subtract entropy from a data stream—coincidentally uncompressing it—and what's left is information. With a capacity of about a trillion terabytes, the suitcase's holographic storage reservoir has enough capacity to hold every music, film, and video production of the twentieth century with room to spare. This is all stuff that is effectively out of copyright control, work-for-hire owned by bankrupt companies, released before the CCAA could make their media clamp-down stick. Manfred is streaming the music through Annette's stereo—but keeping the noise it was convoluted with. High-grade entropy is valuable....

  Presently, Manfred sighs and pushes his glasses up his forehead, killing the displays. He's thought his way around every permutation of what's going on, and it looks like Gianni was right: there's nothing left to do but wait for everyone to show up.

  For a moment, he feels old and desolate, as slow as an unassisted human mind. Agencies have been swapping in and out of his head for the past day, ever since he got back from Rome; he's developed a butterfly attention span, irritable and unable to focus on anything while the information streams fight it out for control of his cortex, arguing about a solution to his predicament. Annette is putting up with his mood swings surprisingly calmly; he's not sure why, but he glances her way fondly. Her obsessions run surprisingly deep, and she's quite clearly using him for her own purposes. So why does he feel more comfortable around her than he ever did with Pam?