The Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  She could not organize marches or gather signatures for petitions; she could not start or join a nonprofit dedicated to the well-being of the refugees—not that people in China trusted charities, which were all frauds; she could not ask everyone she knew to call their representatives and tell them to do something about Muertien. Having studied abroad in the United States, Jianwen wasn’t so naive as to think that these avenues open to citizens of a democracy were all that effective—often, they served as mere symbolic gestures that did nothing to alter the minds or actions of those who truly determined foreign policy. But at least these acts would have allowed her to feel like she was making a difference.

  And wasn’t feeling the entire point of being human?

  The old men in Beijing, terrified of any challenge to their authority and the possibility of instability, had made all these things impossible. To be a citizen of China was to be constantly reminded of the stark reality of the utter powerlessness of the individual living in a modern, centralized, technocratic state.

  The scalding water was starting to feel uncomfortable. She scrubbed herself hard, as if it was possible to free herself from the haunting memories of the dying by scouring away sweat and skin cells, as if it was possible to be absolved of guilt with soap that smelled of watermelons.

  She got out of the shower, still dazed, raw, but at least functional. The filtered air in the apartment smelled faintly of hot glue, the result of too much electronics packed into a small space. She wrapped a towel around herself, padded into her room, and sat down in front of her computer screen. She tapped on the keyboard, trying to distract herself with updates on her mining progress.

  The screen was enormous and its resolution cutting edge, but by itself, it was an insignificant piece of dumb equipment, only the visible corner of the powerful computing iceberg that she controlled.

  The array of custom-made ASICs in the humming rack along the wall was devoted to one thing: solving cryptographic puzzles. She and other miners around the world used their specialized equipment to discover the nuggets made of special numbers that maintained the integrity of several cryptocurrencies. Although she had a day job as a financial services programmer, this work was where she really felt alive.

  It gave her the feeling of possessing a bit of power, to be part of a global community in rebellion against authority in all its forms: authoritarian governments, democratic-mob statism, central banks that manipulated inflation and value by fiat. It was the closest she could come to being the activist she really yearned to be. Here, only math mattered, and the logic of number theory and elegant programming formed an unbreakable code of trust.

  She tweaked her mining cluster, joined a new pool, checked in on a few channels where like-minded enthusiasts chatted about the future, and felt calmer as she read the scrolling text without joining in the conversation herself.

  NT>: Just set up my Huawei GWX. Anyone have a recommendation for a good VR to try on it?

  1001>: Room-scale or apartment-scale?

  NT>: Apartment-scale. Nothing but the best for me.

  1001>: Wow! You must’ve done well in the mines this year. I’d say try “Titanic.”

  NT>: From Tencent?

  1001>: No! The one from SLG is much better. You’ll need to hook your mining rig up to handle the graphics load if you have a big apartment.

  Anonyt>: Ah, enhanced play or proof-of-work. What’s more important?

  Like many others, Jianwen had plunged headlong into the consumer VR craze. The resolution of the rigs was finally high enough to overcome dizziness, and even a smartphone contained enough processing power to drive a basic headset—though not the kind that provided full immersion.

  She had climbed Mount Everest; she had BASE jumped from the top of the Burj Khalifa; she had “gone out” to VR bars with her friends from across the globe, each of them holed up in their respective apartments drinking shots of real erguotou or vodka; she had kissed her favorite actors and slept with a few she really liked; she had seen VR films (exactly what they sound like and not very good); she had done VR LARP; she had flitted around the room in the form of a tiny fly as twelve angry fictional women argued over the fate of a fictional young woman, subtly directing their arguments by landing on pieces of evidence she wanted them to focus on.

  But she had felt unsatisfied with all of these experiences in some vague, inexpressible way. The emerging medium of VR was like unformed clay, full of potential and possibility, propelled by hope and greed, promising everything and nothing, a technology solution in search of a problem—it was still unclear what sort of pleasures, narratological or ludic, would ultimately predominate.

  This latest VR experience, a short little clip in the life of an unnamed Muertien refugee, however, felt different.

  But for an accident of birth, that little girl could have been me. Her mother even had my mother’s eyes.

  For the first time in years, since her youthful idealism had been ground down by the indifference of the world after college, she felted compelled to do something.

  She stared at her screen. The flickering balances in her cryptocurrency accounts were based on a consensus of cryptographic chains, a trust forged from the trust-less. In a world walled from pain by greed, could such trust also be a way to drill a hole into the barrier, to let hope flood through? Could the world indeed be converted into a virtual village, where empathy bonded each to each?

  She opened a new terminal window on her screen and began to type feverishly.

  I hate D.C., Sophia Ellis decided as she looked out the window.

  Traffic crawled through the rainy streets, punctuated by the occasional blare of an angry driver—a nice metaphor for what passed for political normality in the capital these days. The distant monuments on the Mall, ethereal through the drizzle, seemed to mock her with their permanence and transcendence.

  The board members were making chit-chat, waiting for the quarterly meeting to start. She only paid attention half-heartedly, her mind elsewhere.

  . . . your daughter. . . Congrats to her!

  . . . too many blockchain startups . . .

  . . . passing through London in September. . .

  Sophia would rather be back in the State Department, where she belonged, but the current administration’s distaste for traditional-style diplomacy made her think she might have better prospects shifting into the nonprofit sector as a top administrator. After all, it was an open secret that some of the biggest U.S. nonprofits with international offices served as unofficial arms of U.S. foreign policy, and being the executive director of Refugees Without Borders was not a bad stepping stone back to power when the next administration came in. The key was to do some good for the refugees, to promote American values, and to stabilize the world even as the current administration seemed hell-bent on squandering American power.

  . . . saw a cell phone video and asked me if we were doing anything about it . . . Muertien, I think?

  She pulled herself out of her reverie. “That’s not something we should be involved in. It’s like the situation in Yemen.”

  The board member nodded and changed the subject.

  Sophia’s old college roommate, Jianwen, had emailed her about Muertien a couple months ago. She had written back to express her regrets in a kind and thoughtful message. We’re an organization with limited resources. Not every humanitarian crisis can be addressed adequately. I’m sorry.

  It was the truth. Sort of.

  It was also the consensus of those who understood how things worked that interfering with what was happening in Muertien would not benefit U.S. interests, or the interests of Refugees Without Borders. The desire to make the world a better place, which was what had gotten her into diplomacy and nonprofit work in the first place, had to be tempered and guided by realism. Despite—or perhaps because of—her differences with the current administration, she believed that preserving American power was a worthy and important goal. Drawing attention to the crisis in Muertien would embarras
s a key new American ally in the region, and that had to be avoided. This complicated world demanded that the interests of the United States (and its allies) be prioritized at the expense of some who suffered, so that more of the helpless could be protected.

  America was not perfect, but it was also, after weighing all the alternatives, the best authority we had.

  “. . . the number of small donations from under-thirty donors has fallen by 75 percent in the last month,” said one of the board members. While Sophia had been philosophizing, the board meeting had started.

  The speaker was the husband of an important MP, participating from London through a telepresence robot. Sophia suspected that he was in love with his voice more than his wife. The looming screen at the end of the telescoping neck made his face appear severe and dominating, and the robot’s hands gesticulated for emphasis, presumably in imitation of the speaker’s actual hands. “You are telling me you have no plans for addressing the decline in engagement?”

  Did someone on your wife’s staff write that up for you as a talking point? Sophia thought. She doubted he could have personally paid enough attention to the financial records to notice such a thing.

  “We don’t rely on small direct donations from that demographic for the bulk of our funding—” she began, but she was cut off by another board member.

  “That’s the not the point. It’s about future mindshare, about publicity. Refugees Without Borders is fading from the conversation on social media without large numbers of small donations from that key demographic. This will ultimately affect the big grants.”

  The speaker was the CEO of a mobile devices company. Sophia had had to dissuade her more than once from mandating that donations to Refugees Without Borders be used to purchase the company’s cheap phones for refugees in Europe, which would have boosted the company’s reported market share (and violated conflict-of-interest rules).

  “There have been some recent, unexpected shifts in the donor landscape that everyone is still trying to figure out—” Sophia said, but once again, she couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “You’re talking about Empathium, aren’t you?” asked the husband of the MP. “Well, do you have a plan?”

  Definitely a talking point from your wife’s staff. The Europeans always seemed to her more jittery about the cryptocurrency nuts than Americans. But just as with diplomacy, it’s better to guide the nuts than confront them.

  “What’s Empathium?” asked another board member, a retired federal judge who still thought that the fax machine was the greatest technology invention ever.

  “I am indeed talking about Empathium,” said Sophia, trying to keep her voice soothing. Then she turned to the tech CEO, “Would you like to explain?”

  Had Sophia tried to describe Empathium, the tech CEO would surely have interrupted her. She couldn’t bear to let anyone else show more expertise about a technology issue. Might as well try to preserve some decorum.

  The tech CEO nodded. “It’s simple. Empathium is another new disintermediating blockchain application making heavy use of smart contracts, but this time with the twist of disrupting the jobs traditional charities are hired to do in the philanthropy marketplace.”

  Blank faces stared at the CEO from around the table. Eventually the judge turned to Sophia, “Why don’t you give it a shot?”

  She had gotten control of the meeting back simply by letting others overreach, a classic diplomacy move. “Let me take this piece by piece. I’ll start with smart contracts. Suppose you and I sign a contract where if it rains tomorrow, I have to pay you five dollars, and if it doesn’t rain, you have to pay me a dollar.”

  “Sounds like a bad insurance policy,” said the judge.

  “You wouldn’t do well with that offering in London,” said the husband of the MP.

  Weak chuckles from around the table.

  “With a normal contract,” Sophia went on smoothly, “even if there’s a thunderstorm tomorrow, you may not get your money. I may renege and refuse to pay, or argue with you about what the meaning of ‘rain’ is. And you’ll have to take me to court.”

  “Oh, you won’t do well in my court arguing the meaning of rain.”

  “Sure, but as Your Honor knows, people argue about the most ridiculous things.” She had learned that it was best to let the judge go on these tangents before guiding him back to the trail. “And litigation is expensive.”

  “We can both put our money into the hands of a trusted friend and have him decide who to pay after tomorrow,” the judge proposed. “That’s called escrow, you know?”

  “Absolutely. That’s a great suggestion,” said Sophia. “However, that requires us to agree on a common, trusted third-party authority, and we’ll have to pay her a fee for her troubles. Bottom line: there are a lot of transaction costs associated with a traditional contract.”

  “So what would happen if we had a smart contract?”

  “The funds would be transferred over to you as soon as it rained,” said Sophia. “There’s nothing I can do to stop it because the entire mechanism for performance is coded in software.”

  “So you’re saying a contract and a smart contract are basically the same thing. Except one of them is written in legalese and requires people to read it and interpret it, and the other is written in computer code and just needs a machine to execute it. No judge, no jury, no escrow, no takebacks.”

  Sophia was impressed. The judge wasn’t technologically savvy, but he was sharp. “That’s right. Machines are far more transparent and predictable than the legal system, even a well-functioning legal system.”

  “I’m not sure I like that,” said the judge.

  “But you can see why this is attractive, especially if you don’t trust—”

  “Smart contracts reduce transaction costs by taking out intermediaries,” said the tech CEO impatiently. “You could have just said that instead of this longwinded, ridiculous example.”

  “I could have,” acknowledged Sophia. She had also learned that appearing to agree with the CEO reduced transaction costs.

  “So what does this have to do with charity?” asked the husband of the MP.

  “Some people view charities as unnecessary intermediaries rent-seeking on trust,” said the tech CEO. “Isn’t this obvious?”

  Again, more blank looks from around the table.

  “Some smart contract enthusiasts can be a bit extreme,” acknowledged Sophia. “In their view, charities like Refugees Without Borders spend most of our money on renting office space, paying staffers, holding expensive fundraisers where the wealthy socialize and have fun, and misusing donations to enrich insiders—”

  “Which is an absolutely absurd view held by idiots with loud keyboards and no common sense,” said the tech CEO, her face flushed with anger.

  “Or any political sense,” interrupted the husband of the MP, as if his marriage automatically made him an authority on politics. “We also coordinate field relief efforts, bring international expertise, raise awareness in the West, soothe nervous local officials, and make sure that money goes to deserving recipients.”

  “That’s the trust we bring to the table,” said Sophia. “But for the WikiLeaks generation, claims of authority and expertise are automatically suspicious. In their view, even the way we use our program funds is inefficient: how can we know how to spend the money better than those who actually need the help? How can we rule out the option for refugees to acquire weapons to defend themselves? How can we decide to work with corrupt local government officials who line their own pockets with donations before passing on dribbles to the victims? Better to just send money directly to neighborhood children who can’t afford school lunches. The well-publicized failures of international relief efforts in places like Haiti and the former North Korea strengthen their argument.”

  “So what’s their alternative?” asked the judge.

  Jianwen watched as the notifications scrolled up her screen, each announcing the completion of a smart contra
ct denominated in completely anonymous cryptocurrency. A lot of business was done that way these days, especially in the developing world, what with so many governments trying to extend their control by outlawing cash. She had read somewhere that more than 20 percent of global financial transactions were now through various cryptocurrencies.

  But the transactions she was watching onscreen were different. The offers were requests for aid or promises to provide funds; there was no consideration except the need to do something. The Empathium blockchain network matched and grouped the offers into multiparty smart contracts, and, when the conditions for performance were fulfilled, executed them.

  She saw there were requests for children’s books; for fresh vegetables; for gardening tools; for contraceptives; for another doctor to come and set up shop for the long haul—and not just a volunteer to come for thirty days, parachuting in and jetting right back out, leaving everything unfinished and unfinishable . . .

  She prayed for the offers to be taken up, to be satisfied by the system, even though she didn’t believe in God, or any god. Though she had created Empathium, she was powerless to affect its specific operation. That was the beauty of the system. No one could be in charge.

  When she was a college student in the United States, Jianwen had returned to China for the summer of the year of the massive Sichuan earthquake to help the victims of that disaster. The Chinese government had put a great deal of its resources into the rescue effort, even mobilizing the army.

  Some PLA soldiers, her age or even younger, showed her the ugly scars on their hands from when they had dug through the muddy rubble of collapsed buildings for survivors and bodies.

  “I had to stop because my hands hurt so much,” one of the boys told her, his voice filled with shame. “They said if I kept going I’d lose my fingers.”