Year Zero
Page 31
“You wouldn’t believe how easy Perfuffinite girls are,” Bill Gates said.
“Oh—I know,” I murmured, realizing an instant later what a truly idiotic thing this was to say in front of my girlfriend.
Manda shot me a withering look. “Wow,” she said to Bill Gates. “Fame, floozies, and money? Any man would love that. Why’d you give it all up?”
“I didn’t give anything up. I’m rich and famous here. And American girls are complete tramps. You should know—you are one.”
Manda wound up to hit him.
“Ha—gotcha! Actually, American girls are total prudes compared to Perfuffinites. But it was worth coming to Earth because I love your music more than anything else. And I knew your musical output would be in terrible jeopardy if I didn’t do something to slow your technical progress to a dead crawl.”
“Because of the Great Acceleration?” I asked.
“Exactly. Great Accelerations are lethal three out of four times. All this technical, biological, and nano know-how is suddenly available to almost anyone. So tiny groups of crazies can take out entire cities, instead of just buildings. Or border skirmishes between fifth-rate powers can kill off whole planets. Or a few hundred individuals behaving recklessly and selfishly can destroy an entire biosphere. And it’s hard to avoid a Great Acceleration—because a fundamental force of nature drives successful societies to ever-increasing levels of technical sophistication once they pass a certain threshold.”
“So how do you prevent one?” I asked.
“The messy way is to lobotomize a society, by killing off every educated person within it.”
“Sounds … unfriendly.”
Bill Gates nodded. “It is, but it works. Just ask anyone who lived under the Khmer Rouge. The gentler approach is to gum up the works, by causing billions of little time-sapping, schedule-wrecking, and train-of-thought derailing problems every year. Target them at the productive ranks of society, and you’ll stomp the brakes on its progress without really hurting anyone.”
As I was considering this odd notion, Manda suddenly said “Whoa.”
We both looked at her.
“You’re talking about … Windows, aren’t you?”
“Exactly. And DOS before that.”
“Wow,” I whispered as I processed this. “That … kind of makes sense.”
“It makes perfect sense,” Bill Gates said. “I mean, seriously. Now that you think about it, could Windows really be anything but an alien conspiracy?”
“No!” I said, chilled to the bone. “So how does it work?”
“This year I’ll knock about a hundred and eighty billion productive hours out of human society. That’s up from maybe a hundred and sixty-three last year. I like to keep the number somewhere between a hundred and twenty to a hundred and fifty hours per machine, per year.”
“You mean through … crashes or something?” That sounded like three or four full working weeks (for a sane nonlawyer), which seemed like a lot of crashes to me.
“Among lots of other things. I hit maybe one percent of you with catastrophic disc failures every several months. Get zapped, and you might be out hundreds of hours. But most people won’t get zapped this year. Other things are more evenly distributed, though. Like needless version compatibility issues. They eat up a couple hours per year, for most of you. Then I get everyone with those momentary screen freezes. They can total up to over twenty hours a year, for heavy users. I also snatch a couple hours from most of you by messing with your printers. Booting and rebooting grumpy systems varies a ton with the OS, but call it ten hours a year, on average. But the real bonanza is in my ingeniously designed user interfaces. Gratuitous complexity and obtuseness can derail almost any creative or productive process, and that sucks up dozens and dozens of hours a year from every one of you. And people are so used to it, they don’t even notice.”
“But how does that stop society from advancing?” Manda asked. “Even a hundred fifty hours is just a fraction of the working year.”
Bill Gates chuckled. “True. But that’s just the raw hours that the software confiscates. I get most of my leverage from timing.”
“Meaning what?” I asked.
“My systems are thirty-eight times more likely to crash when you’re at the tail end of a major project. Haven’t you noticed? They’re also twenty-two times more likely to have a screen freeze juuuuust when you’ve finally come up with the exact right word to put into a document. And they’re almost sixty times more likely to drop off the network when you have a hugely urgent email to send, as opposed to when you’re just browsing porn on the off-hours.”
“That’s … fascinating,” Manda said.
“It is. I can’t really explain how I do it, because it involves higher dimensions, and some concepts that don’t even have words in English. But I call it ‘irony detection’ for short. I’m a big Alanis Morisette fan, see.”
“But how’s a hard drive crashing at the end of a big project ironic?” I asked. “That’s just … bad timing, isn’t it?”
“Like I said, I’m a big Alanis fan. Anyway—my irony detector also takes account of who’s doing the work. And a true genius can crash one of my systems just by looking at it.”
“So that keeps the best and brightest on abacuses,” Manda marveled.
Bill Gates nodded. “And much more important, it keeps you guys from Greatly Accelerating. Which keeps the great music coming for the rest of the universe. Of course, I haven’t ground your progress to a dead halt. I let a few technical goodies trickle into your society every so often, so you’ll think you’re still advancing.”
“Thanks for 4G,” Manda said respectfully.
“No problem.”
“And you had all of this figured out before you took over Microsoft?” I asked.
Bill Gates shook his head. “I had no plan whatsoever at first. I just needed to get to Earth before the Townshend Line went up. My next move was coming up with someone to swap places with, and the original Bill looked more like me than anyone else that I found. It was only then that I started developing a plan to use Microsoft to save the world. Step one was turning it into a juggernaut—which definitely wouldn’t have happened without me running the show.”
“I guess being Refined made it easy for you to outwit all your competitors,” I said.
“I didn’t outwit anybody,” Bill Gates joshed. “I killed all of them.”
“Another joke, right?”
“More of a pun,” he said with an impish smirk.
“Anyway,” I continued, “once Microsoft became a monopoly, I guess you used it … to hijack and pervert our entire tech industry?”
Bill Gates nodded. “I prefer to say ’embrace and extend,’ but you’ve got the gist.”
“But there are other computers,” Manda said. “There’s Macintoshes, and Linux. You may dominate the tech world, but you don’t completely control it. So someone can still build a great machine independently of you, right?”
“You mean someone like Steve Jobs? Sure. And he was brilliant. But like every great talent, he needed great competitors to push him to his full potential. So early on I set the bar so low that it took less than ten percent of his creative capacity to make my stuff look like crap. You’re too young to remember DOS, but trust me on this. I upped the game a bit with Windows. But I was careful to never make him break a sweat.”
“But isn’t your own software starting to … suck less?” I asked. I’d heard a rumor to this effect.
“You mean Windows seven and eight?” Bill Gates chuckled. “I’m just going easy for a few years, because I got a bit carried away with Vista. That one was so bad that the real-life X-Files guys in the government started getting suspicious about me. But I’m gonna pour it on again with the next version of Windows. That one’ll set everything back by at least twenty years.”
“But the PC’s over, and it’s all about the Internet and mobile now, right?” Manda pressed. “Can’t companies like Google push
things forward without you?”
He chuckled again, a little diabolically this time. “Like I said—wait for the next version of Windows. Anyway, I gotta hop. I told Melinda I’d meet her for supper at eight.”
“Hey, don’t let us stop you,” I said, standing up deferentially. Judy was going to kill me for being such a pushover with this guy. But while I seriously needed to think things over, everything he said really seemed to add up.
“And thanks for saving humanity,” Manda added politely.
“Hey, let’s not get carried away. You had a one-in-four shot at making it through the Great Acceleration. So there’s a decent chance that I’m just screwing you over. But in case I am, I’m trying to make it up to you by putting all my money into saving lives these days.”
“That’s right—and thanks for that, too,” I said, opening the door for him. I’d heard many times that Gates’s wealth will save untold millions of lives eventually, given how meticulously and brilliantly he’s investing it to fight poverty and disease.
“Did I really just thank Bill Gates for using Windows to save humankind?” Manda asked, right after he left.
“You did. And it sounds like he actually did just that.”
“Or at least, there’s a seventy-five percent chance that he did.”
“Did you seriously just do that in your head?”
Manda smiled at our running joke. “And you know there’s no way Judy’ll put up with this,” she added. “Not with all her space dollars tied up in escrow.”
I considered this. “So you think she’s going to try to make him back down?”
“As opposed to living out her years stuck on Earth, kissing congressional asses, and suing file sharers? Of course she will.”
I nuzzled Meowhaus’s cheek with my index finger, and nodded. Manda’s right, of course. There are enough loose ends out there that this whole mess is probably just beginning.
* * *
1. When Judy howled about the lenience of this, it was decided that the term would be served without any possibility of parole.
2. Pugwash, meanwhile, ended up buying an awful lot of multigrain Wheat Thins for someone who was hosting a cracker-loathing carnivore.
3. At first I figured he was just sticking around to get into the Willow Smith video that Judy had mentioned. But they taped his part weeks ago, and he’s still here.
4. It would indeed be a lot of work for two million lawyers if we didn’t have access to Refined analytics tools that can handle labyrinthine instructions like, “figure out the precise sums owed to all of the ultimate beneficial shareholders of the Warner Music Group based on its entire catalog of music and territorial rights, and add those amounts to the individual accounts that the shareholders’ respective Cellular Infringements are being charged against.”
5. Judy’s first action back on Earth was to poach Manda from her law firm.
6. Our desk used to be her desk. Although made from a cheap kit, it’s much bigger than my old one, so we kept it when we consolidated our furniture into one apartment.
MANDA’S PLAYLIST
* * *
1 Intelligentactile 101 (Acoustic)
Jesca Hoop
* * *
2 Daddy’s Car
Cardigans
* * *
3 Nightlight
Little Dragon
* * *
4 Voice Yr Choice
The Go! Team
* * *
5 Dance Anthem of the 80’s
Regina Spektor
* * *
6 Hit
Sugarcubes
* * *
7 Silly Fathers
Rubblebucket
* * *
8 Combat Baby
Metric
* * *
9 One Divine Hammer
Breeders
* * *
10 Rill Rill
Sleigh Bells
* * *
11 Same Rain
Sam Phillips
* * *
12 The Real End
Rickie Lee Jones
* * *
13 Elijah
Alela Diane
* * *
14 Stoney End
Laura Nyro
* * *
15 Hurricane Drunk
Florence & The Machine
* * *
16 The Apocalypse Song
St. Vincent
* * *
17 Speak for Me
Cat Power
* * *
18 Holy Holy
Wye Oak
* * *
19 Mushrooms & Roses
Janelle Monáe
* * *
20 Written on the Forehead
PJ Harvey
* * *
21 Don’t Talk to Me About Love
Altered Images
* * *
22 Duel
Propaganda
* * *
23 The Mummers Dance
Loreena McKinnit
* * *
24 Central Reservation (The Then Again Version)
Beth Orton
* * *
25 Undress Me Now
Morcheeba
* * *
26 Evening
Vanessa Daou
* * *
27 Ronco Symphony
Stereolab
* * *
28 5:55
Charlotte Gainsbourg
* * *
29 Occident
Joanna Newsom
* * *
30 Teardrop
Massive Attack
ÖZZŸ’S PLAYLIST
* * *
1 You Shook Me All Night Long
AC/DC
* * *
2 Living After Midnight
Judas Priest
* * *
3 Pour Some Sugar on Me
Def Leppard
* * *
4 Dude Looks Like a Lady
Aerosmith
* * *
5 Too Daze Gone
Billy Squier
* * *
6 Beautiful Girls
Van Halen
* * *
7 Round and Round
Ratt
* * *
8 Rock You Like a Hurricane
Scorpions
* * *
9 Like Never Before
Steelheart
* * *
10 Crazy Train
Ozzy Osbourne
* * *
11 Wild Flower
The Cult
* * *
12 Paradise City
Guns N’ Roses
* * *
13 Not Gonna Take It
Twisted Sister
* * *
14 Cum on Feel the Noize
Quiet Riot
* * *
15 Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight
Spinal Tap
* * *
16 Rock and Roll All Nite
Kiss
* * *
17 There’s Only One Way to Rock
Sammy Hagar
* * *
18 School’s Out
Alice Cooper
* * *
19 Godzilla
Blue Öyster Cult
* * *
20 Turn Up the Radio
Autograph
* * *
21 Looks That Kill
Mötley Crüe
* * *
22 Unskinny Bop
Poison
* * *
23 One Way Ticket
The Darkness
* * *
24 Blue Collar Man (Long Nights)
STYX
* * *
25 Mother
Danzig
* * *
26 Paranoid
Black Sabbath
* * *
27 Run to the Hills
Iron Maiden
* * *
28 Metal on Metal
Anvil
> * * *
29 Enter Sandman
Metallica