Asimov's SF, September 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “This first lot is particularly prime.” The Auctioneer's voice carries an edge of excitement, but then she is a pro. “Middle class, Shanghai importer family, four successful entrepreneurs in the primary pedigree, talent on both maternal and paternal lines. First child, female. Parents score highly for family stability—but then the Chinese usually do.” Faint appreciative laughter sounds in the room, mostly from the several brokers of Chinese heritage. Numbers flicker in the field as the various players make their initial offers and the bidding starts. The Auctioneer calls the bids, her cadence increasing as the numbers rise. She likes to start with a strong prospect. It puts brokers in the right mood.

  “Buy ... develop.” My guest's voice is barely above a whisper. “Where are you getting these children? It sounds like some kind of ... livestock auction.”

  “Rather like the thoroughbred auctions. Your father is a racing fan so you know what I mean. The yearlings are cheaper than the started horses, but the risk is greater.” The bidding has started and I watch the names and bidding icons flashing through my holo field. I'm not a Futures player this year—my clients are the cream of the crop now, well established and shopping for top Started prospects. I catch the eye of a waiter who replaces our drinks, even though my guest has not touched his, and leaves a plate of shrimp hargau, a small steamed dumpling that I am particularly fond of. I pick up one of the dumplings with the provided chopsticks and poise it in front of my guest. “Have one.” I suspect his blood sugar is low as a result of the corticosteroid spike induced by stress. The blood sugar rise will help him process all this.

  He glares at the dumpling but he's still not sure of the rules and not yet willing to burn any bridges by a clear act of hostility. So he takes the dumpling awkwardly, with his fingers (I do not frown at him) and eats it. “Who buys these children?” He speaks with food still in his mouth, but his parents were working class urbanites in the city of Pittsburgh and he displays the manners he grew up with when under stress. Well, he will learn otherwise if he needs to. And he may not need to. I shrug.

  “Nobody buys anyone. You should know that.” I wait for the slight blush to color his cheeks. “Tell me how you guessed.”

  The carbohydrates in the shrimp dumpling help and he is coming to a decision about how he will deal with all this. He straightens, no longer fixed on the numbers winking in my holo field. The bidding on this first lot is, as I expected, fierce.

  “It was my dad's company, first.” He picks up his cranberry juice, takes a meditative swallow. “I did a study on the economic profile of the Pittsburgh manufacturing industry as my high school senior project. I had some really good teachers and they gave me a lot of help.” He tilts his glass and studies the juice, frowning. “When I ran all the numbers, my dad's company shouldn't have been in business. They were a small department for a manufacturer who had shipped all the rest of the manufacturing overseas. Mostly to northern China.” He shrugged. “When I asked my dad how come they hadn't been outsourced he said it was a skill thing. The company decided that it would cost too much to train unskilled workers and kept the unit in the States. But that didn't work. The numbers didn't work. When I looked at the company history, there's no way they would have kept that department. They outsourced manufacturing the moment the costs reached parity with production stateside. I didn't get it for a while. But then I got to thinking about how many good teachers I had in grade school, and in high school. And funny ... most of my grade school teachers were gone when I went back there. They'd all moved on to more upscale districts. I mean, our neighborhood was a pit back then.” He shrugged. “Although it was starting to change. They shut down a big housing project and a lot of the dealers moved on.” His eyes widen very slightly as he makes a connection but it would be easy to miss his reaction. Yes, I can see that he would enjoy competitive poker.

  “I was really ... lucky.” He finally looks me in the face. “The chips just kept falling my way. I got chosen for a couple of special programs where I met some great teachers, I aced my tests, I got a full ride to Berkeley.” He has clearly made his decision. “So how much of this got made to happen?”

  I check my catalogue. Plenty of Futures to go before the Started lots I want to bid on come up. He has forgotten his poker face and I have to turn away, pretend to study the flickering figures of the bidding in my holo field. I remember those feelings, as if it were yesterday, rather than nearly four decades ago. I clear my throat. “The path was made available to you.” I choose my words carefully, remembering my own anger at the time. “You chose to walk the path. We merely made sure that the gates were open.”

  “The teachers I can guess. Bribes?” Bitterness edges his voice now. “A nice gift to Berkeley so they'd let me in? What about the housing project?”

  “A little pressure on the mayor from people who had supported him in the past. Of course they were business owners and some of them belonged to our organization. The project was an eyesore, a social ulcer. It cost the city money to remove the project, but the subsequent development paid off in the long run. Urban bureaucrats rarely see beyond the horizon of their own term in office, but with a little persuasion, they can take a wider view.” I make my voice quite matter of fact. “You would have been accepted into Berkeley without any interference on our part. We simply ... encouraged you now and again.”

  I wait him out as he looks back over the close friends, the professors, who have been there when he wavered, when he had one of those emotional crises we all suffer from. I guess we all have to go through this, those of us who figure it out. It's easier for some than for others.

  “You are going to ask who we are next.” I give him a patient smile.

  “I was going to ask what you ... whoever the hell you are ... are going to do to me if I don't do whatever it is that you want me to do.”

  “Same question, really.”

  “You manipulated me.” He spits the words and his face is carved with righteous anger now. “Turned me into what I am.”

  “Did you ever really want to do anything else?”

  That stops him for a moment. “Play jazz.” His eyes pierce me. “I walked out of Berkeley, played sax in the clubs for a year. I thought that's what I wanted to really do with my life.”

  “Why did you go back to school?”

  He's honest and he stops to really think about that. He's trying to hold onto his anger, but that honesty prevents him. “I ... it ... I wasn't getting what ... I thought I would. Out of the jazz, I mean. I ... went back to think about it.” He manages to recapture some of the anger. “Then I got into that internship.” Accusation. “That was your doing, wasn't it?”

  I nod.

  “Okay. So now, after all this manipulation, what if I tell you to go to hell and go back to playing jazz?”

  I shrug. “Nothing.”

  “Bullshit.” But he can't quite hide the uncertainty lurking behind that mask of anger he's clinging to. “Nobody makes the kind of investment you're hinting at and walks away.”

  I turn to the Auctioneer.

  “Our next lot is male, Kurdish, living with mother and two sisters in the UN camp for dispossessed persons in northern Turkey. Very high expression of positive assets in the primary pedigree, but a high level of traumatic death precludes a statistically significant extrapolation. Cooperative coefficient is quite high, both sisters have tested out at the preliminary level.”

  The bidding starts off briskly. I look at my guest. “Let me translate for you.” I nod toward the Auctioneer who is calling the bids in her quiet yet penetrating patter. “Mother and three young kids in a refugee camp. Lots of smart and talented people in the family but they have mostly died by violence. What do you think their future will be?”

  “So you're going to buy the kid?”

  “I don't think you mean that.”

  “Okay, yeah, I guess I have figured that much out. I think.” He has abandoned his poker mode so he blushes. “You're going to what ... find a way so that the mom c
an move out of the camp?”

  I nod.

  “And make sure this baby lives in a safe neighborhood, gets into good schools, and so on? What about the parents?” He frowns. “I ... don't think my dad was lying to me.” His eyes plead with me briefly. “When he told me that the company kept their department on because they were good.”

  “He wasn't lying.” I'm running out of time because the Started catalogue is coming up. “The parents matter, of course. A seriously destructive home life is counteractive to the best opportunities in the long run. But outside circumstances are usually the trigger.” I shrug. “We shape events externally whenever possible.”

  “This is huge. You're talking about causing major changes just to make sure some kid has good opportunities. Why are you doing this?”

  “What did you initially believe? That you were lucky?” I sigh, because he could add this two and two equation easily if he was not part of it. Well, I couldn't add it either, at his stage. “Education, internationally, has become an accident of birth ... are your parents wealthy, do you live in a stable society? If the answer is no, you have no real options and not much future. Your potential is wasted. Oh, you may get some education, become a talented member of your community. But your talent is limited by circumstance. This program costs us ... as you can surely determine ... a large amount of money.” I smile, but I'm hurrying now. “In the end, the payoff is greater than the cost. We will never evolve beyond tribes, as a society. Look at wars going on right now in Africa, the Middle East, Indonesia, and Eurasia. When have we not had at least five wars in progress?” He's listening. “What drives change? The price of oil. International trade agreements. Oh, the governments can impose tariffs, the religious leaders can howl for blood for their gods, but in the end, it's all about profit. Profit runs the universe, for all that the democratic populations want to believe otherwise.” I smile because he is processing this more quickly even than I had expected. “And here is your change. A few decades ago, the business world was no different than nations in terms of self-interest. But a lot of us replacing the old boys wanted to see our grandkids grow up. That wasn't going to happen if we kept on squabbling over the pie. Those grandkids are going to have a world to live in now and we'll have a world to make money in.” He's getting it, and I nod. “It doesn't matter which of us you work for. We all win.” He doesn't believe me, but he's not ready to say so yet. The Auctioneer is announcing the Started catalog.

  “These are the twelve-year-olds.” I lean back in my chair and sip my water because the lots I've flagged for my clients won't come up for a bit yet. “You can take a look at the catalogue.” I call it up and send it to his field. “All the stats are there ... how they test in all categories with a talent assessment, genetic expression index for three generations, and a family stability assessment. I'm here to bid on two for clients. I'm a very successful professional broker—a freelancer. That means I pick well more often than I pick badly.”

  “No images?” He's scrolling through the masses of numbers.

  “Nope.” I smile at him, studying his white skin, blond hair. “We're human. You see someone, you make an immediate emotional connection with that appearance and that connection is not logical. So we eliminate it.” I watch the stats of the first lot glow to life in my holo field. “Female. She has tested out in the top percentile since kindergarten age. Her family runs a small produce business in Mogadishu. We have quite a few good prospects in Mogadishu right now. But her talents aren't quite what my clients are looking for.”

  “Are you going to tell me that your organization leveraged the recent democratic movement in Somalia?”

  “Actually, it was the combined pressure of China—who has been Somalia's largest trade partner—and several international companies who have been primary markets for cotton, carbon offsets, and IT products that finally brought about the peace talks. It's a fertile source for us.” I'm watching the bidding numbers flash on the screen. “MS-International is going to take her. I figured they would. She's just what they look for in a prospect. That's why they leaned so hard on Somalia's stubborn president to crack down on the militias. With China threatening to drop their lucrative trade subsidies—yes, they were pressured by some of our members—the president-for-life caved.” Yep. MS-International got her. I sneak a look at my guest but he's staring into space, looking thoughtful.

  “Yes, we do run the world,” I answer him. “Quite an improvement on thirty years ago, eh? Better equity worldwide, less pollution, we've slowed down global warming, and we have fewer wars.”

  “What happens to people who get in your way?” He says it very quietly.

  I shrug. “Nobody alone is big enough to get in our way.” I watch the bidding end and the stats for the next lot shimmer to life on the screen. “No government is big enough to really get in our way. Not any more. I'm buying this one.” Unless my main rival is willing to overspend. She's bidding for a Venezuelan financial firm. I doubt she'll overspend. We've both calculated this lot's value to the last Euro.

  “What happens when you buy her?” He's watching the numbers flash in the field as the Auctioneer patters the bids.

  “Her company makes sure she gets the scholarships she needs and keeps the father's business solvent so that his job as a machinist doesn't go away. Her mother is a ceramic artist and they'll make sure that her popularity is great enough to keep her selling and happy, but not so great that it breaks up the family structure. My client is a carbon-trader and this prospect has the drive and split-second decision making ability—plus a very strong intuition—to make her a powerhouse on the carbon trading floor.”

  “You manipulate the hell out of these families.”

  “You sound horrified.” I smile. “Is it worse for us to do it than let chance manipulate their lives?” I don't take my eyes off the field. My rival is serious about this lot and one of the small ITs is bidding, too. Not a good choice for them, but they're not large and they're new to the Network so they haven't hired the best broker. They queried me, but they were offering about fifty thousand less than I currently earn. They won't get anybody really good for that price.

  “What if the mother is really talented and you keep her from becoming a big hit?”

  “Her husband's job wasn't going to survive outsourcing.” The new IT company is faltering and then bows out. Wisely. I'm going to get her. My rival is not one to lose her head and bid out of competitive spite. The girl will have more value to my client than to hers. “If he'd lost it, he would have been stuck with a service job and she would have had to take another service job to pay the bills. Our assessment is that the marriage would not have survived.”

  “What if the girl doesn't go to work for your client's company?”

  “She probably will. They'll offer her exactly the job that she's perfect for, the one she's worked toward all her life.”

  “Because they made her work toward it.”

  He's starting to get angry again. I make the final bid, take the lot, and text a polite apology to my rival.

  “But what if she doesn't want to work for you? What if she decides she ... oh ... wants to be a potter like her mother?”

  Or a jazz musician like his uncle who died when he was twelve? “Happens. It's like those Thoroughbreds. You buy a nice started two-year-old with a couple of race wins on the local circuit, they may never make it on the big tracks.” I shrug. “Cost of doing business.”

  “What if she's really good and goes to work for someone else?”

  I shrug again. “Her purchaser gets royalties from the company that hires her.”

  “Oh come on.” He snorts and a couple of bidders send a look his way—which he does not miss.

  I suppress a smile. “You want to belong, you play by the rules.” I shrug. “You don't play by the rules—you don't get talented help.” I meet his eyes. “People quit their jobs for lots of reasons. Without threats.” He is thinking now, and nods. “As I said, we all win. The company that might hire
her didn't have to pay to develop her, so they'll pay royalties to the company that did develop her. She's talented enough that she'll earn out and make them money anyway.”

  “Most of these kids come from pretty low income families.” He's studying the catalogue again. “A little social welfare here?”

  “That's just the way the genes show up. Natural selection?” I shrug. “You'd have to ask the geneticists.”

  My other lot has come up. This time, my rival is going to outbid me, I'm afraid. The boy is slightly more suited to her client's use than to mine. I'm right. I reach my limit and send my opponent a virtual bow. She texts me back that she'll buy me a drink, after.

  “What would I be like ... if you people hadn't ... auctioned me off ?”

  “Yourself.” I meet his eyes and his anger and he finally looks away.

  “Who bid on me?”

  He had to ask that, sooner or later. I did, too. I have my eye on a couple of other lots just in case I can grab a bargain as an investment, but the bidding is very keen so I shut down my field and stand. He rises with me, recognizing dismissal. Well, he is sharp. Very high empathic rating. He'll make a top negotiator for one of the major companies.