by David Brin
But this approach has a fundamental limit on its effectiveness. While it may, over the long run, reduce the suffering of marketing targets, it does little to protect one from the excesses of a more authoritarian government than the one we have today. This republic was born in the anonymous broadsides of citizens who published them under Latinate pseudonyms like Publius Civitatus. How would the oppressed citizens of the electronic future protect the source of rebellion?
Furthermore, much of the tolerance which I experience in Pinedale has to do with the fact that we experience one another here. We are not abstracted into information, which, no matter how dense it becomes, is nothing to grow a human being from. And it will be a long time before we exist in cyberspace as anything but information.
* * *
All in all, we are looking at some tough challenges, both technologically and politically. Computer technology has created not just a new medium but a new place. The society we erect there will probably be quite different from the one we now inhabit, given the fact that this one depends heavily on the physical property of things while the next one has no physical properties at all. Certain qualities should survive the transfer, however, and these include tolerance, respect for privacy of others, and a willingness to treat one’s fellows as something besides potential customers.
But until we have developed the Social Contract of Cyberspace, we must create, though encryption and related means, the virtual envelopes and rooms within which we can continue to lead private lives as we enter this new and very public place.
—Pinedale, Wyoming March 30, 1991
BIG BROTHER, LITTLE BROTHER, VILLAGE
Everyone sees you
Does privacy exist now?
Redefine the word
Oh, but then remember that …
… sometimes our only choice is to fight back!
ELDERJOY
GREGORY BENFORD
They had nearly all their clothes off, the fragrant red wine poured, lights dimmed, soft Bach playing—when she said, “Wait, I can’t afford this.”
He shook his head, smiling, and handed her the filmy negligee, kissed her. She had some lines and sags, sure, but the old allure still simmered. One of the unspoken advantages of age was a slow gathering of weight—which, while it gave sags, added too a succulent voluptuous gravitas, a ripe flavor that beckoned him. “That new Mindful Monitoring tax? A hundred bucks a go, I hear.”
She frowned with a quirky, lopsided smile, sighed. Then, in a studied, slow-teasing way she had, she slipped on the negligee with a silky elegance. The sliding grace of it brought a glow of anticipation. “Which I can’t afford. Why’s it higher if we’re over seventy anyway?”
He didn’t want the moment to veer into politics, but she had asked, so … “New ruling. NICE—you know, that National Institute for Care Excellence—changed the QUAL.”
She sat down on the bed, eyes narrowing, and tossed some pillows into a useful position. “God, I hate acronyms.”
He toned down the soothing Bach, moved it to the soft background speakers. “That’s the Quality-Adjusted Life Year, to gauge the cost of extending a patient’s worthwhile life by a year.”
“Worthwhile life? What the hell—”
“That’s us, really. Over the hill but happy, and no disabling conditions. There’s an acronym for it—”
“Don’t tell me.” She gave a low growl and puffed hair from her eyes, her carefully lipsticked mouth in an exasperated twist. “Look, I pay my taxes—”
“This is an extra tax on us old folks, to cover risk of a heart attack. Risk goes up with sex, y’know.” A wink. “Especially when it’s really hot.”
“So this”—she pointed to a small nodule at her inner elbow—“will report us?”
“Yep. Mine, too.” He smoothed the sheets back, lit an orange-aroma candle. “Our neurocardio monitors see our risk go up, and in a microsec or two, tax charges go on our bills.”
“Damn! That’s what that small type in the contract—Emergency services are for taxpayers only—means?”
A shrug. “I think so. Fall way behind, you get no help. It’s an extra service, after all. Kinda like the carpool lane. And the government always needs more money. Congress put this new tax in as part of the deal last year, to reduce student loan rates.” He sat beside her, took her in his arms, managed a chuckle. “So it’s two hundred net for ‘elderjoy,’ as they call it.”
She snorted. “Mindful Monitoring—God, where do they get these names?—has its software listen to my heart go thump-thump. Fine. Right in the middle, our show’s on the road, maybe I get a little tremor or something. So a guy on a motorbike or an octodrone arrives in two minutes, eager to give my heart five thousand volts.”
This was veering away from the right feeling, but she did have a point. “There are upsides. This all started out to insure our safety, remember? Don’t forget, these new sensors can adjust pacemakers. Send back data on cardio, that blood chem-chip stuff, neuro tags. Even trigger your heart, too, if it has to. So that octodrone can be sent back to the neighborhood shed.”
“Right. More service. Everybody stays healthy longer and we all want that. Except ’til they see it means good ol’ Mindful Monitoring needs more cash.”
He lay back, vexed, wondering how to get the conversation back on track. Maybe a little humor? “Makes you wonder. Does masturbation count?”
She lay beside him with a small giggle. “It must. Those hormone and neuro sensors can’t tell the difference, can they?”
“Taxed for jerking off! I don’t recall that in any Tomorrowland futures.”
She ran her hands over his chest, stroking, stroking … then a bit lower. “Save your ammo, sir.”
He stared at the ceiling, eyes intent. “So plain old oral-only, too? Anal? How about when you wear that garter belt and hose? It picks up my pulse rate. Same charge for all?”
“I guess so. Is that what you had in mind?”
His face clouded. “Not until now! Damn, this tax is backward. Shouldn’t seniors like us get a preference? Like we do at the movies and on the bus?”
“Ummm…” She was plainly out of the mood. He was, too. “Not a bad idea. But then every interest group would lobby for a break. Young people have more sex, Mindful Monitoring has the numbers right there, but kids don’t have much income—so they should get a lower rate?”
He laughed ruefully. “The worst off will be the senior bisexual omnivores, right? They probably get more than anybody.”
She snuggled up to him. “But sex is good for you!”
“Good, sure. Government taxes goods, y’know.”
“And…” a flickering, mischievous smile—“services, sir.”
“That’s the right idea! Funny, we thought sex was the one pleasure they couldn’t find a way to tax…” He held her close, catching the scent of her skin, the rich aroma of her hair. Maybe he should use his old lines? He murmured, lowered his voice into the bass notes. “Guess my favorite number…”
But she sat up, face intent. “I wonder if I can hack into the omnifeed, the one that monitors us?”
He sighed, rolled his eyes. “Ah, you tech types. To do what?”
She looked into the distance, the way she did when she explored an idea. “To disable it, while we make love. Save two hundred bucks.”
He laughed. “I dunno. Look at the downside here, though. If you can do that, then it goes both ways. So somebody could hack in, break your code, send an overstim signal to a pacemaker—“
A flash of alarm in her eyes. “Into my heart monitor?—and kill me. Gah!”
“Somebody’s prob’ly thought of that already. We’ll see it in a mystery movie soon.”
She stood, pulling off the negligee, face intent. His gathering desire softened. “I hate this! They’re eavesdropping on us, that’s what this damned Mindful Monitoring really is! We should—that’s it!—we should build a room that’s a Faraday cage.”
“Uh, what’s that?”
�
�A continuous conducting surface, metal, forming a sealed volume. That provides a constant voltage on all sides of the enclosure. Keeps out electromagnetic waves of any kind. Screen rooms, they’re called. An English guy, Michael Faraday, invented those in the 1800s. They shield out phones, radar, you name it. Then we can get it on without the tax!”
He stood too, took her in his thick arms. “Wow, I love you tech types. How?”
She looked around, smiling. “Metal walls, that’s all. I could line this room with sheet aluminum.”
He actually thought about it for maybe a second. “Let’s try it sometime, sure. Meanwhile…”
She pushed him back onto the bed, reached for her negligee. “I’ll pick up the tab today, lover.”
It was better than ever. They forgot about Mindful Monitoring entirely.
But soon she was up, pacing, her musky scent flavoring the air. She popped out ideas, lingo, plans. Their talk later, calculating costs and methods, got them excited again, with predictable results.
Within a week she had the walls sealed tight, windows covered with aluminum shades, doors reframed in metal, even air ducts. And in the spirit of science, they tested the idea. No charges showed up on their HealthFeed accounts. Mindful Monitoring was blind.
It was the beginning. They incorporated the business and advertised, at first slyly, online. It was a nudge-nudge wink-wink overture. SexScreen got orders for service teams by the hundreds per hour, then by the minute. It took all their time to just train their delivery teams.
Dating sites drove the profitability over the break-even line within two weeks. Orders poured in. They hired teams in North America and Europe that could erect a Faraday screen in a few hours, anywhere the customer wanted, on call 24/7. Business lifted off like a Saturn V into a clear sky.
“Screeners” became the new buzz word for the hip, though aging, technorati. When done, just raise the aluminum window shade, and health benefits returned. Also, cell phone service.
As a team, they appeared on talk shows. They worked up some double-entendre jokes that made their way into throw-off online sites, providing free advertising. The New York Times did a profile, for which they dressed in appropriate business attire, then saucy hip; The Times used both. Of course.
The government found no way to detect this electromagnetic deception. The in-body systems did not report continuously to SmartCity systems, so Mindful Monitoring simply registered silence. Fees coming from sex could not be levied on their HealthFeed accounts. This was not tax evasion, since fees are not taxes. Selling Faraday cages was not illegal. Politicians, not fond of laws they could not write—or even better, rewrite—found that electromagnetism allowed no work-arounds, no matter how many hackers they hired.
Market share boomed. The hippest blowoff line was, “go Faraday yourself!”
HealthFeed income fell. Mindful Monitoring was in trouble. Tax collectors worried. Pundits predicted dire straits. Senators held hearings. There seemed no easy way to prevent free sex, beyond the of-course‒benign bureaucratic eyes. Some media mouths were predictably outraged.
After elderjoy became regarded as a civil right—no eyes on me!—moods shifted. The American Association of Retired Persons came out in favor of Faradaying. The entire program of Health Feed tax collection came to resemble the War on Drugs, a dumb idea that had finally failed years before. But this time there were no narcs to inform on old folks getting it on.
The happy couple became rich, too, which seemed to make them ever more horny. (Money does that, research showed.) They spent their final decades in an orbital hotel, where they enjoyed swimming in the zero-g spherical water pools—ideal for making love, rumor had it (soon enough, videos, too). Plus, they needed no Faraday.
The romantic comedy based on their lives won an Oscar. They appeared onstage to accept the plaudits of the crowd, clad in their new specially made all-metal Faraday clothing. A shining moment.
If transparency fosters empathy, can we make that work …
… where it’s needed most?
STREET LIFE IN THE EMERALD CITY
BRENDA COOPER
On the night of 2024’s midsummer homeless count, the street smelled of hot pavement. Me, Ginger, and her eight-year‒old twins sat together on a concrete stoop. A hot July night felt good, even in Seattle. We had just shared a pint of ice cream, and the kids were laughing as they scrubbed leftover stickiness from their fingers with a damp rag.
Of all the things I’d ever wanted, keeping Ginger and those two kids safe was the deepest. In spite of the fact that we slept in different rooms, I spent all my waking hours protecting her. Right now, I was watching for drunks or University-district bullies who hated the homeless and sometimes thought to kill us for it.
A streetlight winked on below, illuminating a woman struggling up the hill. Patricio, an old cop who brought us coffee some crisp mornings, trailed gently behind her. A young blond woman and a Middle-Eastern man followed in silence, looking wary.
Ginger’s boy, Emil, pointed his chubby finger at a drone that sparkled in the light above and behind the first woman. “Is it watching us?”
“I suspect it’s watching them,” Ginger whispered, her slender fingers tugging him close. The pale light from the lantern softened their faces. She looked like a homeless anime character with her shock of red hair over Japanese features. Tight jeans clung to her like paint in spite of the fraying edges and the hole over her right knee. Emil shared her red hair but had pale, freckled skin.
“I dunno.” I tried not to sound like I was contradicting her. “I think it’s a news drone. See the colors?”
Salate looked more Japanese than her mother, a study in black and white with an always-serious face. “Sammy,” she asked me, “what’s she got in her hands?”
“I can’t tell.” I stood up behind the other three as the small crowd drew near. I waved. “Hi, Patricio.”
“Sammy.” The officer’s smile broadened. He turned around to gesture toward the woman, who had round and slightly astonished blue eyes under a shock of unruly black hair. “This is Councilwoman Windy Smith.” He sounded like I should know her, but he must have seen my blank stare. “She’s new. Elected last year. She wants to end the homeless problem.”
Oh. Nevertheless, I nodded at her. “That’s nice, ma’am. We always appreciate assistance.”
She raised an eyebrow, probably at my use of more than one multisyllable word in a single sentence. She knelt down in front of the kids. “Are you in school?”
Ginger looked peeved.
Salate replied in her best formal voice. “Yes, Councilwoman Windy Smith, we are now fourth-graders.”
“Both of you?” she asked, her hands cupped close over something I still couldn’t see.
“We’re twins,” Emil said.
To her credit, Windy Smith appeared willing to take that on face value in spite of the differences in their looks.
“What do you have?” Emil seemed to be trying to peer through the cracks in Windy’s fingers. “Can I see?”
Windy glanced at Ginger and me. “We’re doing a project.” She gestured toward the young people. The man nodded. “Shahid.”
“And I’m Madison.” I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had said Barbie.
Windy sounded enthusiastic. “We’re developing video to show at a symposium on homelessness.”
It sounded like government gabble to me. Nevertheless, I knelt for a closer look as she opened her hands to reveal a tiny bicycle-shirt‒yellow drone with black fins and control surfaces, and four tiny black copter rotors.
The children gasped.
This drone looked smaller and finer than the news drone, which ducked in and took a close-up shot of the yellow machine before retreating to a more polite distance.
Emil reached for it, but Ginger stopped him when Windy flinched away.
“Can we give one to your family?” she asked.
Ginger stiffened. “Sammy is my friend. We’re not family.”
&nbs
p; Windy sat back a little, brow furrowed. “We’ll give you two.”
“Can I have one?” Emil asked, while his sister looked at Ginger, apparently hungry for the same answer.
Ginger said, “The children shouldn’t be watched.”
“They don’t have to be,” Windy replied. “But if you can show people what it’s like to be a homeless mom, it might help. I asked Patricio to find me families.”
I caught an almost-apologetic look on Patricio’s face before he wiped it clean, hiding it from her.
Ginger picked up the little thing and held it in the light of the lantern. “It looks fragile.”
Shahid said, “You can crush it, but it is very fast, and it knows how to keep itself safe.”
I had fallen from the high heady sky of the tech world into the underbelly of city. I knew what to ask. “Is it autonomous or do they drive it?” I glanced at Madison and Shahid.
Windy smiled. “Sometimes they will. It has an auto setting. You also have the ability to turn it off.”
“What are your plans for the recordings? Are you using them?”
“Yes.” She looked at me levelly, as if trying to decide something. “But you can have final say-so over what we use.”
Ginger sounded as doubtful as I felt. “Do you have a paper that says that?”
Madison handed me one. I held it up to the light and read it out loud for Ginger’s sake. “Add a clause,” I said. “I want to make sure no one—not even the city—can use pictures of the kids without Ginger saying okay.”
Windy nodded. “We’ll be back tomorrow. You can have the drone when you sign the paper.”
Emil’s hands were out for the drone. Ginger let him touch it, but passed it back. Patricio looked grateful. “Come on. There’s more to count.”
They left, their footsteps audible longer than we could see them in the dark street.