Chasing Shadows: Visions of Our Coming Transparent World

by David Brin

  Through the Demosphere we fly, we men of the Database Maintenance Division, and although the Demosphere belongs to General Communications Inc., it is the schmos of the world who make it—every time a schmo surfs to a different channel, the Demosphere notes that he is bored with program A and more interested, at the moment, in program B. When a schmo’s paycheck is delivered over the I-way, the number on the bottom line is plotted in his Profile, and if that schmo got it by telecommuting we know about that too—the length of his coffee breaks and the size of his bladder are an open book to us. When a schmo buys something on the I-way it goes into his Profile, and if it happens to be something that he recently saw advertised there, we call that interesting, and when he uses the I-way to phone his friends and family, we Profile Auditors can navigate his social web out to a gazillion fractal iterations, the friends of his friends of his friends of his friends, what they buy and what they watch and if there’s a correlation.

  So now it’s a year later. I have logged many a megaparsec across the Demosphere; I can pick out an anomalous Profile at a glance and notify my superiors. I am dimly aware of two things: (1) that my yearly Polysurf test looms, and (2) I’ve a decent chance of being promoted to Profile Auditor 2 and getting a cubicle some twenty-five percent larger and with my choice from among three different color schemes and four pre-approved decor configurations. If I show some stick-to-it-iveness, put out some Second Effort, spread my legs on cue, I may one day be issued a chair with arms.

  But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Have to get through that Polysurf test first. And I am oddly nervous. I am nervous because of Hee Haw.

  Why did my subconscious brain surf away from Hee Haw? That wasn’t like me at all. And yet perhaps it was this that had gotten me the job.

  Disturbing thought: the hangover. I was in a foul mood, short-tempered, reactionary, literal-minded—in short, the temporary brain insult had turned me into an ideal candidate for this job.

  But this time they will come and tap me for the test at a random time, while I am at work. I cannot possibly arrange to be hung over, unless I stay hung over for two weeks straight—tricky to arrange. I am a fraud. Soon they will know; ignominy, poverty will follow.

  I am going to lose my job—my salaried job with medical and dental and even a pension plan. Didn’t even know what a pension was until the employee benefits counselor clued me in, and it nearly blew the top of my skull off. For a couple of weeks I was like that lucky conquistador from the poem—stout what’s-his-name silent upon a peak in Darien—as I dealt this wild surmise: twenty years of rough country ahead of me leading down to an ocean of slack that stretched all the way to the sunlit rim of the world, or to the end of my natural life expectancy, whichever came first.

  So now I am scared shitless about the next Polysurf test. And then, hope.

  My division commander zooms toward me in the Demosphere, an alienated human head wearing a bowler hat as badge of rank. “Follow me, Stark,” he says, launching the command like a bronchial loogie, and before I can even say “yes sir” I’m trying to keep up with him, dodging through DemoTainment Space.

  And ten minutes later we are cruising in a standard orbit around your Profile.

  And from the middle distance it looks pretty normal. I can see at a glance you are a 24-year-old single white female New Derisive with post-Disillusionist leanings, income careening in a death spiral around the poverty line; you spend more on mascara than is really appropriate compared to your other cosmetics outlays, which are Low Modest—I’d wager you’re hooked on some exotic brand—no appendix, O-positive, HIV-negative, don’t call your mother often enough, spend an hour a day talking to your girlfriends, you prefer voice phone to video, like Irish music as well as the usual intelligent yet primal, sludgy yet danceable rock that someone like you would of course listen to. Your use of the Spew follows a bulimic course—you’ll watch for two days at a time and then not switch on for a week.

  But I know it can’t be that simple; the commander wouldn’t have brought me here because he was worried about your mascara imbalance. There’s got to be something else.

  I decide to take a flyer. “Geez, boss, something’s not right here,” I say, “this Profile looks normal—too normal.”

  He buys it. He buys it like a set of snow tires. His disembodied head spins around and he looks at me intently, an oval of two-dimensional video in DemoTainment Space. “You saw that!?” he says.

  Now I’m in deep. “Just a hunch, boss.”

  “Get to the bottom of it, and you’ll be picking out color schemes by the end of the week,” he says, then streaks off like a bottle rocket.

  So that’s it then; if I nab myself a promotion before the next Polysurf, they’ll be a lot more forgiving if, say, the little couch potato in my brain stem chooses to watch Hee Haw for half an hour, or whatever.

  Thenceforward I am in full stalker mode. I stake out your Profile, camp out in the middle of your income-tax returns, dance like an arachnid through your Social Telephony Web, dog you through the virtual mall trying to predict what clothes you’re going to buy. It takes me about ten minutes to figure out you’ve been buying mascara for one of your girlfriends who got fired from her job last year, so that solves that little riddle. Then I get nervous because whatever weirdness it was about you that drew the Commander’s attention doesn’t seem to be there anymore. Almost like you know someone’s watching.

  OK, let’s just get this out of the way: it’s creepy. Being a creep is a role someone has to take for society to remain free and hence prosperous (or is it the other way around?).

  I am pursuing a larger goal that isn’t creepy at all. I am thinking of Adderson. Every one of us, sitting in our cubicles, is always thinking of Adderson, who started out as a Profile Auditor 1 just like us and is now Vice President for Dynamic Programming at Dynastic Communications Inc. and making eight to nine digits a year depending on whether he gets around to exercising his stock options. One day young Adderson was checking out a Profile that didn’t fit in with established norms, and by tracing the subject’s social telephony web, noticed a trend: Post-Graduate Existentialists who started going to church. You heard me: Adderson single-handedly discovered the New Complacency.

  It was an unexploited market niche of cavernous proportions: upwards of one-hundredth of one percent of the population. Within six hours, Adderson had descended upon the subject’s moho with a rapid deployment team of entertainment lawyers and development assistants and launched the fastest-growing new channel ever to wend its way into the thick braid of the Spew.

  I’m figuring that there’s something about you, girl, that’s going to make me into the next Adderson and you into the next Spew Icon—the voice of a generation, the figurehead of a Spew channel, a straight polished shaft leading direct to the heart of a hitherto unknown and unexploited market. I know how awful this sounds, by the way.

  So I stay late in my cubicle and dig a little deeper, rewinding your Profile back into the mists of time. Your credit record is fashionably cratered—but that’s cool, even the God of the New Testament is not as forgiving as the consumer credit system. You’ve blown many scarce dollars at your local BodyMod franchise getting yourself pierced (“topologically enhanced”), and, on one occasion, tattooed: a medium #P879, left breast. Perusal of BodyMod’s graphical database (available, of course, over the Spew) turns up “©1991 by Ray Troll of Ketchikan, Alaska.” BodyMod’s own market research on this little gem indicates that it first became widely popular within the Seattle music scene.

  So the plot thickens. I check out of my cubicle. I decide to go undercover.

  Wouldn’t think a Profile Auditor 1 could pull that off, wouldja? But I’m just like you, or I was a year ago. All I have to do is dig a yard deeper into the sediments of my dirty laundry pile, which have become metamorphic under prolonged heat and pressure.

  As I put the clothes on it occurs to me that I could stand a little prolonged heat and pressure myself.

  Bu
t I can’t be thinking about that, I’m a professional, got a job to do, and frankly I could do without this unwanted insight. That’s just what I need, for the most important assignment of my career to turn into a nookie hunt. I try to drive it from my mind, try to lose myself in the high-definition Spew terminals in the subway car, up there where the roach motel placards used to be. They click from one Feed to another following some irrational pattern and I wonder who has the job of surfing the channels in the subway; maybe it’s what I’ll be doing for a living, a week from now.

  Just before the train pulls into your stop, the terminal in my face surfs into episode #2489 of Hee Haw. It’s a skit. The banjo picker is playing a bit part, sitting on a bale of hay in the back of a pickup truck—chewing on a stalk of grass, surprisingly enough. His job is to laugh along with the cheesy jokes but he’s just a banjo picker, not an actor; he doesn’t know the drill, he can’t keep himself from looking at the camera—looking at me. I notice for the first time that his irises are different colors. I turn up the collar on my jacket as I detrain, feeling those creepy eyes on my neck.

  I have already discovered much about the infrastructure of your life that is probably hidden even from you, including your position in the food chain, which is as follows: the SRVX group is the largest zaibatsu in the services industry. They own five different hotel networks, of which Hospicor is the second largest but only the fourth most profitable. Hospicor hotels are arranged in tiers: at the bottom we have Catchawink, which is human coin lockers in airports, everything covered in a plastic sheet that comes off a huge roll, like sleeping inside a giant, loose-fitting condom. Then we have Mom’s Sleep Inn, a chain of motels catering to truckers and homeless migrants; The Family Room, currently getting its ass kicked by Holiday Inn; Kensington Place, going for that all-important biz traveler; and Imperion Preferred Resorts.

  I see that you work for the Kensington Place Columbus Circle Hotel, which is too far from the park and too viewless to be an Imperion Preferred, even though it’s in a very nice old building. So you are, to be specific, a desk clerk and you work the evening shift there.

  I approach the entrance to the hotel at 8:05 pm, long-jumping across vast reservoirs of gray-brown slush and blowing off the young men who want to change my money into Hong Kong dollars. The doorman is too busy tapping a fresh Camel on his wristbone to open the door for me so I do it myself.

  The lobby looks a little weird because I’ve only seen it on TV, through that security camera up there in the corner, with its distorting wide-angle lens, which feeds directly into the Spew, of course. I’m all turned around for a moment, doing sort of a drunken pirouette in the middle of the lobby, and finally I get my bearings and establish missile lock on you, standing behind the reception desk with Evan, your goatee-sporting colleague, both of you looking dorky (as I’m sure you’d be the first to assert) in your navy blue Kensington Place uniforms, which would border on dignified if not for the maroon piping and pseudobrass name tags.

  For long minutes I stand more or less like an idiot right there under the big chandelier, watching you giving the business to some poor sap of a guest. I am too stunned to move because something big and heavy is going upside my head. Not sure exactly what.

  But it feels like the Big L. And I don’t just mean Lust, though it is present.

  The guest is approaching tears because the fridge in her room is broken and she has some kind of medicine that has to be kept cold or else she won’t wake up tomorrow morning.

  No it’s worse than that; there’s no fridge in her room at all.

  Evan suggests that the woman leave the medicine outside on her windowsill overnight. It is a priceless moment, I feel like holding up a big card with 9.8 written on it. Some of my all-time fave Television Moments have been on surveillance TV, moments like this one, but it takes patience. You have to wait for it. Usually, at a Kensington Place you don’t have to wait for long.

  As I have been watching Evan and you on the Stalker Channel the past couple of days, I have been trying to figure out if the two of you have a thing going. It’s hard because the camera doesn’t give me audio; I have to work it out from body language. And after careful analysis of instant replays, I suspect you of being one of those dangerous types who innocently give good body language to everyone. The type of girl who should have someone walking ten paces in front of her with a red flashing light and a clanging bell. Just my type.

  The woman storms out in tears, wailing something about lawyers. I resist the urge to applaud and stand there for a minute or so, waiting to be greeted. You and Evan ignore me. I approach the desk. I clear my throat. I come right up to the desk and put my bag down on the counter right there and sigh very loudly. Evan is poking randomly at the computer and you are misfiling thousands of tiny little oaktag cards, the color of old bananas, in a small wooden drawer.

  I inhale and open my mouth to say excuse me, but Evan cuts me off: “Customerrrrzz … gotta love ’em.”

  You grin wickedly and give him a nice flirty conspiratorial look. No one has looked at me yet. That’s OK. I recognize your technique from the surveillance camera: good clerk, bad clerk.

  “Reservation for Stark,” I say.

  “Stark,” Evan says, and rolls it around in his head for a minute or so, unwilling to proceed until he has deconstructed my name. “That’s German for ‘strong,’ right?”

  “It’s German for ‘naked,’” I say.

  Evan drops his gaze to the computer screen, defeated and temporarily humble. You laugh and glance up at me for the first time. What do you see? You see a guy who looks pretty much like the guys you hang out with.

  I shove the sleeves of my ratty sweater up to the elbows and rest one forearm across the counter. The tattoo stands out vividly against my spudlike flesh, and in my peripheral I can see your eyes glance up for a moment, taking in the black rectangle, the skull, the crossed fish. Then I pretend to get self-conscious. I step back and pull my sleeve down again—don’t want you to see that the tattoo is only about a day old.

  “No reservation for Stark,” Evan says, right on cue. I’m cool, I’m expecting this; they lose all of the reservations.

  “Dash these computers,” I say. “You have any empty rooms?”

  “Just a suite. And a couple of economy rooms,” he says, issuing a double challenge: do I have the bucks for the former or the moxie for the latter?

  “I’ll take one of the economy rooms,” I say.

  “You sure?”

  “HIV-positive.”

  Evan shrugs, the hotel clerk’s equivalent of issuing a twenty-page legal disclaimer, and prods the computer, which is good enough to spit out a keycard, freshly imprinted with a random code. It’s also spewing bits upstairs to the computer lock on my door, telling it that I’m cool, I’m to be let in.

  “Would you like someone to show you up?” Evan says, glancing in mock surprise around the lobby, which is of course devoid of bellhops. I respond in the only way possible: chuckle darkly—good one, Ev!—and hump my own bag.

  My room’s lone window looks out on a narrow well somewhere between an air shaft and a garbage chute in size and function. Patches of the shag carpet have fused into mysterious crust formations, and in the corners of the bathroom, pubic hairs have formed into gnarled drifts. There is a Robobar in the corner but the door can only be opened halfway because it runs into the radiator, a twelve-ton cast-iron model that, randomly, once or twice an hour, makes a noise like a rock hitting the windshield. The Robobar is mostly empty but I wriggle one arm into it and yank out a canned mai tai, knowing that the selection will show up instantaneously on the computer screens below, where you and Evan will derive fleeting amusement from my offbeat tastes.

  Yes, now we are surveilling each other. I open my suitcase and take my own Spew terminal out of its case, unplug the room’s set and jack my own into the socket. Then I start opening windows: first, in the upper left, you and Evan in wide-angle black and white. Then an episode of Starsky and Hutch t
hat I happened to notice. Starsky’s hair is very big in this one. And then I open a data window too and patch it into the feed coming out of your terminal down there at the desk.

  Profile Auditors can do this because data security on the Spew is a joke. It was deliberately made a joke by the government so that they, and we, and anyone else with a RadioShack charge card and a trade-school diploma, can snoop on anyone.

  I sit back on the bed and sip my execrable mai tai from its heavy, rusty can and watch Starsky and Hutch. Every so often there’s some activity at the desk and I watch you and Evan for a minute. When Evan uses his terminal, lines of ASCII text scroll up my data window. I cannot help noticing that when Evan isn’t actively slacking he can type at a burst speed in excess of two hundred words per minute.

  From Starsky and Hutch I surf to an L.A. Law rerun and then to Larry King Live. There’s local news, then Dave comes on, and about the time he’s doing his Top Ten list, I see activity at the desk.

  It is a young gentleman with hair way down past the epaulets of his tremendously oversized black wool overcoat. Naked hairy legs protrude below the coat and are socketed into large, ratty old basketball shoes. He is carrying, not a garment bag, but a guitar.