Chasing Shadows: Visions of Our Coming Transparent World

by David Brin

  Zero-sum games have given way to the positive sum.

  And crime. We understand criminal urges now. We’re learning to soothe and staunch them—both by creating a world of plenty, and by detecting the neural warning signs of coming violence or deception and snipping those crimes in the bud. Those few who do commit crimes are invariably caught. How could it be otherwise in a world where even the poorest infrastructure is suffused with sensors, where intelligence is as ubiquitous a building block of our cities as brick or steel once were? No, the age of crime is ending. Transparency makes transgression impossible. But we do not punish those who commit crimes. That barbarism of the old world is fading behind us into memory, and then history. Instead, we help those who’ve transgressed. We help them become the best selves and the best citizens they can be. We understand the mind, now, and can gently sculpt it, removing those destructive traits, amplifying the constructive ones, consulting and leaving detail-choices to each patient. Those who go through such procedures are far happier, after. They’re more productive. They bring more joy and more value to those around them, and to themselves. And we think—most believe—that we’ve done so without sacrificing diversity, eccentricity, and idiosyncracy. At least, that is how we agreed that things should be.

  We have very few police today, and more doctors.

  This is indeed the Golden Age. Though perhaps we should call it the Crystal Age, an age of transparency, an age where society is crystal clear, where the very substrate of our world is suffused with light, light that carries our signals from one to another, that bridges us, person to person, mind to mind. Connecting when we choose, while politely leaving others space to be themselves.

  And yet …

  There are secrets. Not many. But a few still exist.

  You didn’t even realize how many until you were shown.

  There are places on the map that have not been updated in years. Where no transport goes. Where the satellite imaging services return data that is, if one looks closely, synthetic.

  There are whole hours of the year when you cannot lightly surveil on the thoughts and activities of your democratically elected leaders.

  There are memories you have, from your childhood, passing images and impressions of events that seem so real, and which you cannot find any record of.

  It itches, this knowledge that secrets still exist. They didn’t teach you this in school. Or did they? A hazy memory. You call up your syllabus, the record of every day of your schooling, of the lesson plans, of every word spoken, every drawing shared, every note your human and AI tutors made of your progress.

  There is no mention of such a thing. Of secrets that still exist to this day.

  You’re no “conspiracy theorist.” The mental illness that drives such obsession, that allowed the mind to become confused by outlandish, implausible stories, has long since been cured. You’ve read about the phenomenon, of course. Those afflicted by the conspiracy disease were a pitiful lot, divorced from reality. The opacity of society must have made it hard, when there were so many dark spots in the literal and figurative landscape of the world, when one could legitimately wonder what occupied those spaces. Where curiosity turned to fantasy, or obsession.

  Not like the transparent world of today.

  But there are still secrets today.

  The treatment for conspiracy theorizing is a subtle but pervasive set of neuronal tweaks. The victims remember their past obsessions, and see how ridiculous those thoughts were, see how ill they themselves were. They laugh at their old beliefs, hold compassion for their past selves.

  I’m not sick. I don’t want any neuronal tweak.

  The fear fills you, suddenly. The fear that doctors will insert their software into your brain, will make edits, will take away this newfound awareness. Will turn you into someone else.

  Then comes the fear that someone will sense your fear. You panic. Fear itself is an illness. They’ll use your fear to diagnose you, to make a case to change you.

  You clamp down on your growing terror. You have to stop your spiral of emotion. You have to keep it private. No one can know how you feel.

  Privacy isn’t dead, of course. Only those in positions of great power and responsibility are forced to share nearly everything. “Scrutiny for the powerful; freedom for the masses.” You aren’t one of the powerful. Your responsibilities are medium-sized. You aren’t forced to share … but it is the norm. Deviating too much from that norm is … peculiar. “Accept diversity and eccentricity!” That is a keystone slogan … and yet, too much is attention-getting.

  You have tools that can keep select thoughts and emotions personal—filters, that let you decide what others can sense about you. That is the accepted path, in times of grief or temporary necessity—to continue to share most of what you are, and filter out the bare minimum.

  You activate those filters, now, selectively, blocking out your anxiety, your thoughts about secrets, your questions. No more.

  You feel better once you’ve done that.

  Of course, the filters know what you’re thinking. They have to, to filter it. And the authorities catch violence, before it occurs. They catch crime, and those criminals have filters too.…

  Your eyes widen. You look around, and the world seems new, and more menacing.

  I’m not violent, you think emphatically. I’m not going to hurt anyone. I’m not going to steal. I’m not going to lie.

  Really? You’re not going to lie?

  The doctors don’t come for you that day.

  You repeat the mantra often. Not violent. Not going to hurt anyone. Not going to steal. Not going to lie.

  The doctors don’t come the next day.

  Or the day after that.

  Or the week after that.

  You keep repeating your mantra. But now it has a new ending.

  I’m just curious.

  Weeks pass. Curiosity begins to overcome fear. You start, gently, subtly, obliquely to research.

  You find something almost immediately.

  Global security. There are exemptions from the transparency laws, from the 31st Amendment and Article 23 and all the rest. They’re right there in the open, the provisions for creating secrets.

  So why didn’t you know?

  I’m not violent, you repeat to yourself. I’m not going to hurt anyone. I’m not going to steal. I’m not going to lie.

  I’m just curious.

  You express that curiosity carefully now. You find places online where people talk. About secrets. About privacy. About the disconnected. Disconnected places. Disconnected people.

  The conversations were always there. Always ongoing among … eccentrics. You never noticed. You would have written them off as slightly odd, as not worth your time.

  Perhaps as a bit mentally ill …

  I’m not violent.…

  There are people who disconnect. Who unplug from the world. That’s what the conversations say. There are names given. The names are of people who the official records claim don’t exist, have never existed.

  It’s fiction. It has to be. You consumed a story like this once, of a woman who unplugged. The poor thing. It was a tragedy, a series of mistakes leading to the greatest error of her life. She didn’t die. She lived on, unloved, alone, isolated, ignored by all around her.…

  It’s fiction. Surely no one would disconnect voluntarily?

  And then, the disconnected places. You knew of a few. Now you learn of more. Rumors, really. Stories of “a place where a weapon from the last war was buried and no one can find it again.” “A place where people fought the doctors and lost.”

  There is more speculation. Disconnected events. Disconnected facts. Things you cannot know. Things that perhaps no one can know. A tautology. If no one knows them, how can you even know they exist?

  But it gnaws at you.

  You lie awake at night, your filters on, worrying away at the shape of the world you’ve discovered.

  Always your mantra first, and last, a
nd in-between, just to assuage your filters …

  I’m not violent.…

  And then you try to make sense of it. Of the holes in the world. Of the dark places, the dark hours, the things you do not know.

  Of the disconnected.

  I’m not violent.…

  Have the disconnected been forced into their state? Has it been inflicted on them as punishment? As protection for society from the contents of their thoughts?

  Or did they choose their path?

  Are the disconnected places hiding weapons? Or atrocities? Or … could it be something else? Could there be something beautiful there?

  I’m not violent.…

  And it occurs to you, as you fall asleep that night, that, perhaps, the very idea of disconnection, of not being watched, of being alone … perhaps that is beautiful too.

  It seduces you, this idea of disconnecting. It begins to fill your thoughts. Day, after day. You continue to expand your filters to mask it, until you are far beyond social norms. People begin to notice. They regard you oddly. Friends and family and lovers reach out to you, in curiosity, in barely veiled concern.

  You brush them off. A surprise, you tell them. You have a surprise coming. You smile. You emote mischief and amusement—invoking those enshrined but neglected slogans about diversity. Eccentricity. They ease away, shrugging, one by one. Tolerant, bemused, but increasingly distant. Curious … but not very.

  And you realize …

  … the doctors won’t be coming for you. No agents of the state. No enforcers of conformity. This isn’t about any of that. It never was!

  And you laugh aloud.

  And you wonder: Is this what the other disconnected experienced? Is this what it was like for them, before they made their choice?

  Have you already made yours?

  All of that has led you here, to me, to this wilderness, the canyon entrance behind me, the primitive campfire between us, its flames licking at the sky, for freedom, like you have. Like you always had, but only now realize.

  My face is red in the firelight, as is yours.

  I know everything about you, my friend.

  You know nothing about me.

  Behind me is the unknown.

  Rise from your seat by the fire, rise from your slumber in the world of ease and comfort, rise and step forward. Disconnect, and learn the truth.

  Do you dare?

  LOOKING BACK … AND LOOKING UP

  The Future will see

  Whether you like it or not

  Make the best of it

  Injustice thrives on ignorance.

  But when the disempowered learn to see …

  EMINENCE

  KARL SCHROEDER

  Nathan usually felt his cares lift a little as he turned onto Yuculta Crescent. Today, he had to resist the urge to drive past, even just go home.

  Nathan passed parked RVs and sports cars as he looked for an empty spot. As he walked back to a modest ochre house, he heard voices: teenagers talking about trading items in some online game world. Nathan hesitated again. I could still go back to the car, let Grace find out from somebody else. The temptation was almost overwhelming.

  The image was still with him from this morning, of Alicia stabbing her spoon into her coffee cup as she paced in the kitchen. “It’s all our money, Nathan! You didn’t just put your savings into it; you convinced me to put mine in too. And now you tell me the bottom’s falling out?”

  The day couldn’t get any worse after that, so Nathan started walking again.

  At one time this part of town was full of white working-class families with shared values and expectations. Now, the houses were worth millions and, Grace said, nobody knew their neighbors anymore. The two aboriginal kids sitting on the porch stared at Nathan suspiciously as he walked up.

  “Is Grace here?” he asked.

  “In the kitchen,” said one, jabbing a thumb at the door. Nathan went inside, past a small living room that had been remade as office space. Three more teens wearing AR glasses stood in the middle of the space, poking at the air and arguing over something invisible to Nathan. Dressed normcore, in jeans and T-shirts, each also bore a card-sized sticker, like a nametag. SMILE YOU’RE ON BODYCAM. Little yellow arrows pointing to a black dot above the words: a camera. The kids on the front porch, he realized, wore something like that.

  Grace Cooper was sitting in a pool of sunlight in the kitchen, reading a tablet, her smile easy and genuine as she rose and hugged him. “How’s my favorite coder?”

  Nathan’s stomach tightened. Shall I just blurt it out? The currency is crashing, Grace. We’re about to lose everything. He couldn’t do it, so he sat.

  Nathan had known Grace for almost two years, but it was a long time since he’d had to think of her as the client. In fact, she was just the representative; the real client was an aboriginal nation known as the Musqueam who’d lived on this land for thousands of years. Small matter that they’d invited him into their community, their lives. He should have kept his distance.

  A few years before he immigrated, Grace’s people had won a centuries-old land claim that included a substantial chunk of Vancouver. The University golf course, Pacific Spirit Park and much of the port lands south of that were now band territory. That and other settlements had finally given the indigenous peoples of the west coast a power base, and they were building on it. Until today, everyone had benefited—including Nathan.

  She sat down after him. The sunlight made her lean back to put her face into shade. “Did you see the news?” she said. “Says Gwaiicoin is doing better than the Canadian dollar.”

  It was. He’d checked it fifteen minutes ago, and half an hour before that, and again before that. He’d been up all night watching the numbers, waiting for the change. He shrugged now, glancing away. “Well, it’s a fiat currency,” he said neutrally. “They’re all in trouble since the carbon bubble burst.”

  “And because they’re not smart,” she added triumphantly. “Thanks to you guys, we got the smartest currency on the planet.”

  “Yeah. It’s been … quite a roller coaster.” Nathan was trying to find a way to soften the blow. Maybe if he talked about volatility, about how most cryptocurrencies had failed … Even the first, Bitcoin, had only been able to lumber its clumsy way forward for so long. But all of them weathered the bursting of the carbon bubble better than the dollar, the pound, or the Euro.

  One of those currencies was Gwaiicoin. Nathan had first heard about it while couch-surfing in Seattle with six other guys. He and the guys had struggled to make the rent on a two-bedroom apartment while the housing prices soared, coding web pages for cat lovers to make enough to eat.… Well, it didn’t leave much further for a guy to fall. The smart programmers had left, hearing that living was cheap on Vancouver Island, just west of the Alaskan Panhandle in the archipelago known as Haida Gwaii. As Seattle priced itself out of liveability, the islands where the iconic totem poles stood were suddenly becoming crowded with restless coders.

  One result had been Gwaiicoin—and, when Nathan arrived here, unexpected and welcome employment.

  “Gwaiicoin’s about to be worth a lot more,” Grace was saying. “Once my recruits have added Vancouver to the Gwaii valuation.”

  Nathan looked through the serving window at the half-visible teens in the living room. “Recruits?”

  She leaned forward, her nose stopping just short of the shaft of sunlight. “We’re talking with City Council about measuring the biomass in the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh parts of the city. These kids are my warriors. They’re programming drones to measure the biomass.”

  Nathan gulped, his throat dry, and nodded toward the street. “Good place to start.” His mind was darting about, looking for a way to bring her down gently. Then he realized what she was saying. “Wait—you want to add the local biomass to Gwaiicoin?” Unlike Bitcoin, which had value because of its miners and transaction volume, Gwaiicoin was backed by the value of the ecosystem services of its backers�
� territories.

  She nodded enthusiastically. “Even the Inuit want to get in on it. The more biomass we all commit, the bigger our Fort Knox gets. It’s brilliant.”

  Should have seen this coming, Nathan thought. As the dollar crashed, Gwaiicoin had soared. The government wanted it, but since the Haida were backing the currency with land that the feds had formally ceded through constitutionally binding land-claims settlements, the feds were beggars at the table.

  “You know, you spent a whole day trying to convince me that a potlatch currency was crazy. Remember that?” Grace grinned at him.

  “Yeah.” He looked down. “Who’d have thought self-taxing money would take off?”

  She sighed. “And still you call it a tax. That was the whole idea—you get eminence points for every buck that gets randomly redistributed to the other wallets.”

  “Yeah.” Despite being a lead on the project, Nathan didn’t have much eminence. He wasn’t rich, so his wallet didn’t automatically trim itself—but even some of Grace’s poorer neighbors voluntarily put large chunks of their paychecks into redistribution every month, via the potlatch account everyone shared. Redistributed money was randomly scattered among the currency users’ wallets, and in return the contributors got … nothing, or so he’d argued. What they got was eminence, a kind of social capital, but the idea that it could ever be useful had never made sense to Nathan.

  Ironically, it made sense now. If Gwaiicoin were to vanish overnight, the people who’d given it away would still have their eminence points. These were a permanent record of how much a person had contributed to the community.

  And he had none.

  He took one last deep breath and said, “Grace. We have a problem.”