Ascendancies

by Bruce Sterling

  “You’ve got a real nerve complaining about that. What about *my* machinery?” Louise held up her fat, eerie-looking American pokkecon. “As soon as I stepped off the airplane at Narita, my PDA was attacked. Thousands and thousands of email messages. All of them pictures of cats. A denial-of-service attack! I can’t even communicate with the home office! My PDA’s useless!”

  “What’s a PDA?”

  “It’s a PDA, my Personal Digital Assistant! Manufactured in Silicon Valley!”

  “Well, with a goofy name like that, no wonder our pokkecons won’t talk to it.”

  Louise frowned grimly. “That’s right, wise guy. Make jokes about it. You’re involved in a malicious software attack on a legal officer of the United States Government. You’ll see.” She paused, looking him over. “You know, Shimizu, you don’t look much like the Italian mafia gangsters I have to deal with, back in Providence.”

  “I’m not a gangster at all. I never do anyone any harm.”

  “Oh no?” Louise glowered at him. “Listen pal, I know a lot more about your set-up, and your kind of people, than you think I do. I’ve been studying your outfit for a long time now. We computer cops have names for your kind of people. Digital panarchies. Segmented, polycephalous, integrated influence networks. What about all these free goods and services you’re getting all this time?”

  She pointed a finger at him. “Ha! Do you ever pay taxes on those? Do you ever declare that income and those benefits? All the free shipments from other countries! The little homemade cookies, and the free pens and pencils and bumper stickers, and the used bicycles, and the helpful news about fire sales.… You’re a tax evader! You’re living through kickbacks! And bribes! And influence peddling! And all kinds of corrupt off-the-books transactions!”

  Tsuyoshi blinked. “Look, I don’t know anything about all that. I’m just living my life.”

  “Well, your network gift economy is undermining the lawful, government approved, regulated economy!”

  “Well,” Tsuyoshi said gently, “maybe my economy is better than your economy.”

  “Says who?” she scoffed. “Why would anyone think that?”

  “It’s better because we’re happier than you are. What’s wrong with acts of kindness? Everyone likes gifts. Midsummer gifts. New Year’s Day gifts. Year-end presents. Wedding presents. Everybody likes those.”

  “Not the way you Japanese like them. You’re totally crazy for gifts.”

  “What kind of society has no gifts? It’s barbaric to have no regard for common human feelings.”

  Louise bristled. “You’re saying I’m barbaric?”

  “I don’t mean to complain,” Tsuyoshi said politely, “but you do have tied me up to your bed.”

  Louise crossed her arms. “You might as well stop complaining. You’ll be in much worse trouble when the local police arrive.”

  “Then we’ll probably be waiting here for quite a while,” Tsuyoshi said. “The police move rather slowly, here in Japan. I’m sorry, but we don’t have as much crime as you Americans, so our police are not very alert.”

  The pasokon rang at the side of the bed. Louise answered it. It was Tsuyoshi’s wife.

  “Could I speak to Tsuyoshi Shimizu please?”

  “I’m over here, dear,” Tsuyoshi called quickly. “She’s kidnapped me! She tied me to the bed!”

  “Tied to her bed?” His wife’s eyes grew wide. “That does it! I’m calling the police!”

  Louise quickly hung up the pasokon. “I haven’t kidnapped you! I’m only detaining you here until the local authorities can come and arrest you.”

  “Arrest me for what, exactly?”

  Louise thought quickly. “Well, for poisoning my bodyguard by pouring bay rum into the ventilator.”

  “But I never did that. Anyway, that’s not illegal, is it?”

  The pasokon rang again. A shining white cat appeared on the screen. It had large, staring, unearthly eyes.

  “Let him go,” the cat commanded in English.

  Louise shrieked and yanked the pasokon’s plug from the wall.

  Suddenly the lights went out. “Infrastructure attack! “Louise squawled. She rolled quickly under the bed.

  The room went gloomy and quiet. The air conditioner had shut off. “I think you can come out,” Tsuyoshi said at last, his voice loud in the still room. “It’s just a power failure.”

  “No it isn’t,” Louise said. She crawled slowly from beneath the bed, and sat on the mattress. Somehow, the darkness had made them more intimate. “I know very well what this is. I’m under attack. I haven’t had a moment’s peace since I broke that network. Stuff just happens to me now. Bad stuff. Swarms of it. It’s never anything you can touch, though. Nothing you can prove in a court of law.”

  She sighed. “I sit in chairs, and somebody’s left a piece of gum there. I get free pizzas, but they’re not the kind of pizzas I like. Little kids spit on my sidewalk. Old women in walkers get in front of me whenever I need to hurry.”

  The shower came on, all by itself. Louise shuddered, but said nothing. Slowly, the darkened, stuffy room began to fill with hot steam.

  “My toilets don’t flush,” Louise said. “My letters get lost in the mail. When I walk by cars, their theft alarms go off. And strangers stare at me. It’s always little things. Lots of little tiny things, but they never, ever stop. I’m up against something that is very very big, and very very patient. And it knows all about me. And its got a million arms and legs. And all those arms and legs are all people.”

  There was the noise of scuffling in the hall. Distant voices, confused shouting.

  Suddenly the chair broke under the doorknob. The door burst open violently. Mitch tumbled through, the sunglasses flying from his head. Two hotel security guards were trying to grab him. Shouting incoherently in English, Mitch fell headlong to the floor, kicking and thrashing. The guards lost their hats in the struggle. One tackled Mitch’s legs with both his arms, and the other whacked and jabbed him with a baton.

  Puffing and grunting with effort, they hauled Mitch out of the room. The darkened room was so full of steam that the harried guards hadn’t even noticed Tsuyoshi and Louise.

  Louise stared at the broken door. “Why did they do that to him?”

  Tsuyoshi scratched his head in embarrassment. “Probably a failure of communication.”

  “Poor Mitch! They took his gun away at the airport. He had all kinds of technical problems with his passport.… Poor guy, he’s never had any luck since he met me.”

  There was a loud tapping at the window. Louise shrank back in fear. Finally she gathered her courage, and opened the curtains. Daylight flooded the room.

  A window-washing rig had been lowered from the roof of the hotel, on cables and pulleys. There were two window-washers in crisp gray uniforms. They waved cheerfully, making little catpaw gestures.

  There was a third man with them. It was Tsuyoshi’s brother.

  One of the washers opened the window with a utility key. Tsuyoshi’s brother squirmed into the room. He stood up and carefully adjusted his coat and tie.

  “This is my brother,” Tsuyoshi explained.

  “What are you doing here?” Louise said.

  “They always bring in the relatives when there’s a hostage situation,” Tsuyoshi’s brother said. “The police just flew me in by helicopter and landed me on the roof.” He looked Louise up and down. “Miss Hashimoto, you just have time to escape.”

  “What?” she said.

  “Look down at the streets,” he told her. “See that? You hear them? Crowds are pouring in from all over the city. All kinds of people, everyone with wheels. Street noodle salesmen. Bicycle messengers. Skateboard kids. Takeout delivery guys.”

  Louise gazed out the window into the streets, and shrieked aloud. “Oh no! A giant swarming mob! They’re surrounding me! I’m doomed!”

  “You are not doomed,” Tsuyoshi’s brother told her intently. “Come out the window. Get onto the platform with us. You
’ve got one chance, Louise. It’s a place I know, a sacred place in the mountains. No computers there, no phones, nothing.” He paused. “It’s a sanctuary for people like us. And I know the way.”

  She gripped his suited arm. “Can I trust you?”

  “Look in my eyes,” he told her. “Don’t you see? Yes, you can trust me. We have everything in common.”

  Louise stepped out the window. She clutched his arm, the wind whipping at her hair. The platform creaked rapidly up and out of sight.

  Tsuyoshi stood up from the chair. When he stretched out, tugging at his handcuffed wrist, he was just able to reach his pokkecon with his fingertips. He drew it in, and clutched it to his chest. Then he sat down again, and waited patiently for someone to come and give him freedom.

  In Paradise

  The machines broke down so much that it was comical, but the security people never laughed about that.

  Felix could endure the delay, for plumbers billed by the hour. He opened his tool kit, extracted a plastic flask and had a solid nip of Scotch.

  The Moslem girl was chattering into her phone. Her dad and another bearded weirdo had passed through the big metal frame just as the scanner broke down so these two somber, suited old men were getting the full third-degree with the hand wands, while daughter was stuck. Daughter wore a long baggy coat and a thick black headscarf and a surprisingly sexy pair of sandals. Between her and her minders stretched the no-man’s land of official insecurity. She waved across the gap.

  The security geeks found something metallic in the black wool jacket of the Wicked Uncle. Of course it was harmless, but they had to run their full ritual, lest they die of boredom at their posts. As the Scotch settled in, Felix felt time stretch like taffy. Little Miss Mujihadeen discovered that her phone was dying. She banged at it with the flat of her hand.

  The line of hopeful shoppers, grimly waiting to stimulate the economy, shifted in their disgruntlement. It was a bad, bleak scene. It crushed Felix’s heart within him. He longed to leap to his feet and harangue the lot of them. Wake up, he wanted to scream at them, cheer up, act more human. He felt the urge keenly, but it scared people when he cut loose like that. They really hated it. And so did he. He knew he couldn’t look them in the eye. It would only make a lot of trouble.

  The Mideastern men shouted at the girl. She waved her dead phone at them, as if another breakdown was going to help their mood. Then Felix noticed that she shared his own make of cellphone. She had a rather ahead-of-the-curve Finnish model that he’d spent a lot of money on. So Felix rose and sidled over.

  “Help you out with that phone, ma’am?”

  She gave him the paralyzed look of a coed stuck with a dripping tap. “No English?” he concluded. “¿Habla espanol, senorita?” No such luck.

  He offered her his own phone. No, she didn’t care to use it. Surprised and even a little hurt by this rejection, Felix took his first good look at her, and realized with a lurch that she was pretty. What eyes! They were whirlpools. The line of her lips was like the tapered edge of a rose leaf.

  “It’s your battery,” he told her. Though she had not a word of English, she obviously got it about phone batteries. After some gestured persuasion, she was willing to trade her dead battery for his. There was a fine and delicate little moment when his fingertips extracted her power supply, and he inserted his own unit into that golden-lined copper cavity. Her display leapt to life with an eager flash of numerals. Felix pressed a button or two, smiled winningly, and handed her phone back.

  She dialed in a hurry, and bearded Evil Dad lifted his phone to answer, and life became much easier on the nerves. Then, with a groaning buzz, the scanner came back on. Dad and Uncle waved a command at her, like lifers turned to trusty prison guards, and she scampered through the metal gate and never looked back.

  She had taken his battery. Well, no problem. He would treasure the one she had given him.

  Felix gallantly let the little crowd through before he himself cleared security. The geeks always went nuts about his plumbing tools, but then again, they had to. He found the assignment: a chi-chi place that sold fake antiques and potpourri. The manager’s office had a clogged drain. As he worked, Felix recharged the phone. Then he socked them for a sum that made them wince.

  On his leisurely way out—whoa, there was Miss Cellphone, that looker, that little goddess, browsing in a jewelry store over Korean gold chains and tiaras. Dad and Uncle were there, with a couple of off-duty cops.

  Felix retired to a bench beside the fountain, in the potted plastic plants. He had another bracing shot of Scotch, then put his feet up on his toolbox and punched her number.

  He saw her straighten at the ring, and open her purse, and place the phone to the kerchiefed side of her head. She didn’t know where he was, or who he was. That was why the words came pouring out of him.

  “My God you’re pretty,” he said. “You are wasting your time with that jewelry. Because your eyes are like two black diamonds.”

  She jumped a little, poked at the phone’s buttons with disbelief, and put it back to her head.

  Felix choked back the urge to laugh and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “A string of pearls around your throat would look like peanuts,” he told the phone. “I am totally smitten with you. What are you like under that big baggy coat? Do I dare to wonder? I would give a million dollars just to see your knees!”

  “Why are you telling me that?” said the phone.

  “Because I’m looking at you right now. And after one look at you, believe me, I was a lost soul.” Felix felt a chill. “Hey, wait a minute. You don’t speak English, do you?”

  “No, I don’t speak English—but my telephone does.”

  “It does?”

  “It’s a very new telephone. It’s from Finland,” the telephone said. “I need it because I’m stuck in a foreign country. Do you really have a million dollars for my knees?”

  “That was a figure of speech,” said Felix, though his back account was, in point of fact, looking considerably healthier since his girlfriend Lola had dumped him. “Never mind the million dollars,” he said. “I’m dying of love out here. I’d sell my blood just to buy you petunias.”

  “You must be a famous poet,” said the phone dreamily, “for you speak such wonderful Farsi.”

  Felix had no idea what Farsi was—but he was way beyond such fretting now. The rusty gates of his soul were shuddering on their hinges. “I’m drunk,” he realized. “I am drunk on your smile.”

  “In my family, the women never smile.”

  Felix had no idea what to say to that, so there was a hissing silence.

  “Are you a spy? How did you get my phone number?”

  “I’m not a spy. I got your phone number from your phone.”

  “Then I know you. You must be that tall foreign man who gave me your battery. Where are you?”

  “Look outside the store. See me on the bench?” She turned where she stood, and he waved his fingertips. “That’s right, it’s me,” he declared to her. “I can’t believe I’m really going through with this. You just stand there, okay? I’m going to run in there and buy you a wedding ring.”

  “Don’t do that.” She glanced cautiously at Dad and Uncle, then stepped closer to the bulletproof glass. “Yes, I do see you. I remember you.”

  She was looking straight at him. Their eyes met. They were connecting. A hot torrent ran up his spine. “You are looking straight at me.”

  “You’re very handsome.”

  It wasn’t hard to elope. Young women had been eloping since the dawn of time. Elopement with eager phone support was a snap. He followed her to the hotel, a posh place that swarmed with limos and videocams. He brought her a bag with a big hat, sunglasses, and a cheap Mexican wedding dress. He sneaked into the women’s restroom—they never put videocams there, due to the complaints—and he left the bag in a stall. She went in, came out in new clothes with her hair loose, and walked straight out of the hotel and into his car.


  They couldn’t speak together without their phones, but that turned out to be surprisingly advantageous, as further discussion was not on their minds. Unlike Lola, who was always complaining that he should open up and relate—“you’re a plumber,” she would tell him, “how deep and mysterious is a plumber supposed to be?”—the new woman in his life had needs that were very straightforward. She liked to walk in parks without a police escort. She liked to thoughtfully peruse the goods in Mideastern ethnic groceries. And she liked to make love to him.

  She was nineteen years old, and the willing sacrifice of her chastity had really burned the bridges for his little refugee. Once she got fully briefed about what went inside where, she was in a mood to tame the demon. She had big, jagged, sobbing, alarming, romantic, brink-of-the-grave things going on, with long, swoony kisses, and heel-drumming, and clutching and clawing.

  When they were too weak, and too raw, and too tingling to make love any more, then she would cook, very badly. She was on her phone constantly, talking to her people. These confidantes of hers were obviously women, because she asked them for Persian cooking tips. She would sink with triumphant delight into a cheery chatter as the Basmati rice burned.

  He longed to take her out to eat; to show her to everyone, to the whole world; really, besides the sex, no act could have made him happier—but she was undocumented, and sooner or later some security geek was sure to check on that. People did things like that to people nowadays. To contemplate such things threw a thorny darkness over their whole affair, so, mostly, he didn’t think. He took time off work, and he spent every moment that he could in her radiant presence, and she did what a pretty girl could do to lift a man’s darkened spirits, which was plenty. More than he had ever had from anyone.

  After ten days of golden, unsullied bliss, ten days of bread and jug wine, ten days when the nightingales sang in chorus and the reddest of roses bloomed outside the boudoir, there came a knock on his door, and it was three cops.

  “Hello, Mr. Hernandez,” said the smallest of the trio. “I would be Agent Portillo from Homeland Security, and these would be two of my distinguished associates. Might we come in?”