Crisis- 2038

by Gerald Huff

  “I can also report that we’ve gotten several hundred people submitting encrypted applications to join LKC,” said Ellul.

  “Oh bullshit,” said Othello. “Those are probably all feds.”

  “Perhaps most of them,” said Ellul. “But there will be some new potential members in there for sure.”

  “More fucking amateurs,” said Othello.

  “We’ve got to grow this movement,” said Artemis. “Let’s use these amateurs for public organizing, not for operations. Let them rally and protest out in the open, recruit more members in omnipresence, create a physical presence that gets media coverage.”

  “I’ve got no problem with that,” said Othello. “Like I said, let’s leave the operations to the damned professionals.”

  “I’d like to canvas the group’s opinion on Artemis’ proposal,” said Ellul. They all tapped on their screens or tablets. “Nineteen to four in favor,” he announced. “I agree. No more core operations from civilians. For now.” Pam was disappointed, but the will of the Collective was clear.

  “Now let’s talk about the maintenance worker,” said Ellul. “We all knew going in that there would be collateral damage. As much as we try to avoid it, the kinds of cyber infrastructure attacks we just discussed are likely to result in even more casualties. Some of them are likely to be sympathetic—sick people in hospitals that lose power or elderly people who don’t get medicine delivered. The media will stop talking about our ideas for a while and focus entirely on the victims. I just want everyone to acknowledge this is going to happen.”

  The faces in Pam and JT’s hologlasses nodded slowly. Othello surprised them all by quoting Thomas Jefferson: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  LONDON - DECEMBER 23

  Roger Driscoll lay down on the comfortable bed in his West End AirBNB and closed his eyes. He was drowsily walking through each of the meetings he’d had that day, replaying the conversations when Allison chimed from his PNA.

  “Roger, I have a call from Frances.”

  “Really? I just left her a half hour ago. Okay, put it through.” He heard a lot of background noise. “Frances?”

  “Yes, hello again Roger. I know you said you were tired, but I was wondering if you’d fancy a bite to eat. I happened to run into an old colleague of mine from Mentapath and I think you’d enjoy meeting her.”

  “I don’t know, Frances, I’m really tired.”

  “Oh, come on, Roger. You’ll need to eat something, right? We’re just a few blocks away, I’ll send you the location. Come whenever, we’ll have some drinks till you arrive. Au revoir!” She disconnected before he could protest. It sounded like she’d already started on those drinks. His PNA buzzed as the location arrived and displayed a street view. It was a trendy-looking restaurant that was indeed just a few minutes away.

  “Allison, wake me up in twenty minutes. I’m going to take a quick nap.”

  “Very well, Roger. Sleep well.”

  The cold winter London air hit him like a slap in the face when he exited the flat. He walked briskly down Coventry Street and took a right on Whitcomb Street, hands thrust deep into his jacket pockets. By the time he got to the restaurant, the weather and exercise had chased his tiredness away. The place was crowded and it took him a minute to find Frances and her friend. They had moved from the noisier bar area to a quieter section in the back.

  “Ah, Roger!” said Frances a little too loudly. “Over here!”

  He waved and joined them at their table.

  “Roger, this is my friend Jill Samborn. She was a principal engineer with me at Mentapath, top notch, really top notch. Jill, this is Roger Driscoll.” He shook her hand awkwardly. Jill was quite attractive, with short brunette hair, striking green eyes, and an enchanting smile.

  “Very nice to meet you Roger. Frances tells me you live in California?”

  “Yes, that’s right. Santa Barbara, about two hours north of Los Angeles.”

  “We’ve had quite a couple of days, haven’t we Roger?” asked Frances. “I was just telling Jill about the companies we visited.”

  “Indeed, a very interesting sampling of the City’s new tech surge,” said Jill. Roger liked her accent.

  “I was wondering about that. These startups seemed to have a lot of expensive office space. Is that typical?”

  “Oh, well, it might seem posh,” said Jill, “but once the financial firms found they could make more profits with algorithms than people, they fired most of their staffs and created a glut of office space. There are dozens of ghost buildings now in the City. Cheap rent for the tech crowd.”

  “Ah, that makes sense.”

  “So, Roger. Which of the companies did you find most interesting?” asked Frances.

  “Well, to be totally honest, some of them are starting to blend together in my mind,” admitted Roger. “There were, what, two of them in the artificial creativity space, another three in computational bioinformatics, and two materials science companies focused on nanoscale battery technology.”

  “Those are quite different areas of R&D,” said Jill. “What’s your background?”

  “AI, mostly,” said Roger, looking up from the menu and turning towards her.

  “Really? That’s mine as well,” said Jill. A waiter appeared to take their dinner order.

  “So then did you find the artificial creativity companies interesting?” Jill asked.

  “Not so much, actually,” answered Roger. “I mean the tech is very cool, but it’s not clear to me that we really need a bunch of artificial artists, poets, and musicians. Seems hard enough for the human ones to make it as it is without needing to compete against the machines. Just look at what happened to actors once they perfected the photo-realistic actor-generation programs.”

  “I agree!” said Jill. “We need to preserve some areas for human endeavor and accomplishment, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, exactly,” said Roger.

  “So,” interjected Frances, “then did the biotech companies interest you more?” Roger reluctantly turned his attention away from Jill.

  “Well, Frances, I think the work you’re doing at Neurgenix and what I saw at the other companies is very interesting. It’s important too. We need to dramatically improve health care and lower its cost. I liked all of them.”

  “Thank you, Roger. Maybe I can convince you to do some consulting for us?”

  “I’ll think about it, Frances.”

  “So, you’re freelance?” asked Jill.

  “I suppose so,” he answered, shifting towards her once again in his seat. “I’ve been running an omnipresence public relations tech company for a while. Sometimes do some consulting on the side.”

  “Ah, so you advise companies on OP strategy?” asked Jill.

  “Something along those lines,” he answered vaguely. “And you,” he said, changing the topic, “where did you end up after Mentapath? Didn’t follow Frances to Neurgenix?”

  “No, I didn’t. I stayed on at RezMat. Just a few months at Mentapath, then I moved over to infosec and special operations.”

  “Really? That’s an interesting transition, from product to operations.”

  “I know, not typical. But they’re doing some very interesting things with AI and I was ready for a change,” said Jill.

  “Wait, hold on—RezMat, infosec and operations. Jesus, you must be in the middle of all this LKC shit, oh, sorry, stuff!”

  “That’s okay, Roger, we’ve been swearing quite a lot ourselves recently. Yes, I am right in the middle of all that ‘stuff’ right now.”

  “Wow! Any hope of tracking them down?”

  “We’re working on it. Mostly by helping the authorities wherever we can.”

  “They caught one of them, right? A woman in Los Angeles?”

  “Yes, apparently. She was involved in a drone attack on one of our
factories.”

  “Did they get enough information to find anyone else?” he asked.

  “I’m not really at liberty to say.”

  “Oh, I get it, secret spy stuff,” he teased.

  “Yes,” Jill said, deepening her voice and feigning a Russian accent. “Eef I told you, I’d have to keell you.”

  “Enough of that,” said Frances, sounding suddenly quite sober. “This isn’t a joking matter. LKC is a serious threat. It’s both building an anti-technology groundswell and provoking an authoritarian backlash.”

  “Yes, of course, Frances” said Jill. “I didn’t mean to downplay the threat. One too many cocktails, that’s all,” she said, swirling her drink. She winked at Roger, however, when Frances turned towards the waiter delivering their food. He blushed. It had been a long time since an attractive woman had flirted with him.

  They kept the conversation light during dinner. As they stood up after he insisted on settling the bill, Roger turned to Frances and said, “Do you actually have some consulting projects I could work on?”

  “Of course we do, I’d be thrilled to have your help.”

  “Good, good. Why don’t I extend my visit a few weeks so I can get up to speed?”

  “Super!” said Frances. “Stop by our office tomorrow and I’ll introduce you to the team I think could most benefit from your expertise.”

  “Great,” said Roger. He turned to Jill. “It was a real pleasure meeting you Jill. I wish you the best of luck with your security issues. Maybe if they let you out for some air we could catch one of those shows you said you wanted to see?”

  “Why thank you, Roger. Yes, that would be lovely. Let’s exchange info.” They tapped their PNAs together and transmitted contact details. Walking back to his flat, though the evening cold had deepened, Roger took no notice at all.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  WASHINGTON - JANUARY 4, 2039

  It had taken a dozen meetings over the course of a month and more than thirty staffers to draft proposed legislation, but Harry Paxton was enormously proud of the result.

  It wasn’t perfect, of course; nothing this big and complicated and the result of so much compromise could be. But he was convinced it was a critical stake in the ground for moving the country, and the world, forward.

  They had attempted to work in secret, but Washington was a city that thrived on leaks and rumors. Details of the proposal, mostly wrong and always controversial and out of context, floated through the back channels and corridors of power. The media picked up on the story, and some wit labeled Harry and his five colleagues the Six Lost Souls of the Senate, “wandering in a desert of delusion.”

  Now that all six of them had signed off on the executive summary and the several hundred page draft, it was up to each of them to pitch their own committee chairperson to bring up the bill for discussion.

  Harry and Rebecca Matheson had an appointment with Walter Scott, Democratic chair of the Budget Committee, at 10 a.m. They met at 8:30 to do a final review over coffee. For eighty minutes they covered their roles and responses to possible objections. Then Rebecca crossed her arms and said, “Okay, we’re ready. But what the hell do you think he’s going to do?”

  “It’s very difficult to say,” Harry replied honestly. “He’s been sending very mixed signals through the grapevine.”

  They gathered their belongings and walked up the stairs from the cafeteria, then down a wide corridor to Walter Scott’s office. His assistant asked them to take a seat. They waited patiently, trying to gauge whether the twenty minutes was a good or bad omen by Washington standards.

  Finally, Walter himself opened the large double doors to his office. “Harry! Rebecca! Please, please come in, so sorry to keep you waiting. Do you need a refreshment? Coffee?”

  Once they were seated in some red leather chairs around a low glass table, Walter looked at them both expectantly. “So, then, what’s this all about? It’s not every day that two senior senators, one with a D and one with an R after their names, come to meet with me together. Is this about all those rumors I keep hearing, about some grand plan?”

  As they’d agreed, Harry led the charge. “Yes, Walter, that’s exactly what this is about. You know that I’ve been working with five other senators on a major piece of legislation designed to get us out of the absolute logjam we find ourselves in. A logjam of our own creation, and one that most of us seem to have no interest in breaking up.”

  Walter nodded encouragingly.

  “What we have here today,” Harry said, tapping his tablet, “is a bill we call ALPHA. The America Leading Progress for Humanity Act. It’s a complex piece of legislation, to be sure, because it’s very ambitious. But it follows directly from the spirit behind the Declaration, the Constitution, and the values that this country was founded on.”

  As they’d planned, Rebecca picked up the thread. “What this document recognizes is that the world has been reshaped by technology so that our old ways of doing business are obsolete. The world has changed, so our approach to it must change as well. As a society, adaptation to a rapidly changing environment has always been one of our great strengths. Until recently, that is. We’ve become stiff and frozen, unable to tackle big issues when big changes are needed.”

  “I see,” said Walter with more than an edge of suspicion in his voice. “So what does the U.S. Congress have to do with leading humanity?”

  “Walter,” said Harry, “we’ve already seen massive increases in the capabilities of AI, robotics, and distributed energy and manufacturing that have eliminated many millions of jobs. It’s inevitable that more of the same is coming. We need to shift toward a new way of thinking about work and the role of human labor in the economy.”

  “So this is some kind of a jobs program?” asked Walter.

  “No,” answered Rebecca. “It’s a new social contract, and a new way to keep money circulating in the economy when jobs get more and more scarce.”

  “You two are going to have to spell this out,” said Walter.

  “The basic outline is this,” began Harry. “We provide every adult citizen with a guaranteed basic income, unconditionally, with no means testing or other requirements. Any money they earn is added on top of the basic income.”

  Walter held up his hand. “Whoa, there, Senator. You know full well we can’t afford any such thing. Is this a serious proposal? Is this what you’ve been spending all this time on?”

  “We had the CBO score it,” replied Rebecca. “While the flows are complicated, it is possible.”

  “Where does the funding come from?” asked Walter.

  “It comes from a variety of sources. Eliminating existing social programs; eliminating many tax expenditures; and raising some financial transaction, corporate and income taxes,” said Harry.

  Walter looked askance at the Republican senator across from him. “And you’re okay with all that?”

  “We don’t have a choice, senator,” she replied. “The economy depends on citizens having money to buy goods and services. If they don’t have jobs, we simply need to circulate the money back to them. And this will actually shrink the size and invasiveness of government in people’s lives, which you know I’m in favor of.”

  “How so?”

  “The basic income is the property of the recipient with no strings attached. They get to spend it however they see fit, not according to some bureaucrat’s plan.”

  “Wait. You mentioned eliminating existing social programs. What does that mean?”

  Harry said, “All of the top-line programs are eliminated in favor of the basic income guarantee.”

  Walter stared at him. “You’re not talking about Medicare-for-All and Social Security, are you?”

  Harry swallowed hard. “I am. There will be supplements for special medical conditions, but, as you know, we’re in the final testing of some astonishing medical technologies that should radically reduce the cost of health care and maintenance.
In fact, we anticipate that the basic income guarantee may be able to be reduced over time as technology makes all of life’s essentials cheaper and cheaper.”

  “That’s the Leading Progress for Humanity part,” explained Rebecca. “We invest in research and development in energy, food science, health care, education, and housing, with the goal of making all of them much less expensive over time.”

  The Budget Committee chairman was silent for the better part of half a minute, looking back and forth at them intently.

  “I’m sitting here wondering,” he said finally, “how the hell two of my most distinguished colleagues could have collaborated together for months and come up with something so fundamentally ridiculous. What you’re proposing doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of appearing on the Budget Committee docket, or of getting a vote in this Congress. And I’m sure the other chairmen will agree.”

  “The other four of us—” Rebecca began

  “As you’re well aware,” the chairman continued, “we’re facing riots in the streets, weekly terrorist attacks, and a faltering economy. This country is in a serious crisis. And the six of you go off in a hotel somewhere and cook up a goddamn blueprint for the destruction of everything we’ve spent the last seventy years building. No wonder they’re calling you the Six Lost Souls.”

  “Walter,” said Harry, “ALPHA isn’t ignoring those problems. It’s the solution to them. We need to give people a new vision of the future that takes into account what they see around them every day.”

  “I have to admit, I’m quite disappointed,” said Walter. “Perhaps if you had tried to approach this one little bite at a time, instead of with some grand plan that overturns everything the people rely on.” The chairman shook his head. “I’m sorry. Harry, Rebecca, you’ve been wasting your time. ALPHA is DOA.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  HOLOCONFERENCE - JANUARY 7

  Preston Jackson, COO of the team Frances had hired to promote Sara, was roused from a deep sleep at one a.m. by the tablet on his bedside table vibrating loudly.