by Cixin Liu
“Yes. She used to come by and look at my paintings. She was barely literate, but she sure could read my art. She liked it, just like you,” the artist answered glumly.
“You are also part of my contract,” Mr. Smoothbore noted flatly.
The vagrant artist calmly nodded. There was no trace of fear about him. “I thought so,” he said.
“Just out of curiosity, why didn't you take the money?” Mr. Smoothbore asked.
“All my paintings show poverty and death. If I were to become a millionaire overnight, my art would die,” the painter explained.
Mr. Smoothbore nodded. “Your art will live on. I am very fond of your paintings.” His voice glowed with sincere praise as he raised his revolver.
“Just wait a moment. You just said you were doing contract work. Would you take on a contract from me?” the artist asked hastily, but without fear.
Mr. Smoothbore nodded again. “Of course.”
“My death is meaningless, but I want to avenge her.” The painter pointed to where the scavenger had collapsed.
“Let me express your intention in the language of my trade: You want to contract me to process a work batch, the work being those who contracted me to process you two works,” Mr. Smoothbore explained, waiting for confirmation.
It was the artist's turn to nod. “That would be it.”
“No problem,” Mr. Smoothbore agreed. There was no trace of insincerity in his reply.
“But I have no money,” the artist pointed out.
Mr. Smoothbore could only smile. “You sold me your painting for a very low price. It is enough to cover the cost of the business.”
“Then, thank you,” the artist uttered his last words.
“You're most welcome. I am merely fulfilling a contract,” Mr. Smoothbore replied, the deadly flame again bursting from his gun. The bullet tumbled, its strange wail ripping through the air, its body ripping through the artist's heart. Blood burst from his chest and back. Three seconds later he fell, his spurting blood showering the ground in a tepid red rain.
“That was not necessary.”
The voice came from behind him. Again, Mr. Smoothbore abruptly spun on his heel to see a man standing amongst the trash. The leather jacket the man wore closely resembled Mr. Smoothbore's own. The man himself appeared to be somewhat his junior, but otherwise he looked very ordinary, even as the blue light of the star ring gleamed in his eyes.
Mr. Smoothbore let the gun sag. But even as he dropped his aim, he slowly began to squeeze his revolver's trigger, unhurriedly re-cocking the snub-nose's hammer. Without aiming it, he held the gun at a hair's trigger.
“You the police?” he casually asked.
The stranger shook his head.
“Then go; report it to the police.” Mr. Smoothbore was ready to turn away.
The man did not move.
“I won't shoot you in the back. I just process contract work,” Mr. Smoothbore explained.
“We currently do not interfere in humanity's affairs,” the newcomer calmly replied in turn.
His words struck Mr. Smoothbore like a thunderbolt. Involuntarily his hand relaxed, the gun's hammer falling back in place. He studied the stranger as carefully as he could, but in the light of the star ring, he looked no different than anyone else.
“You,” Mr. Smoothbore paused for a second, “have already come?” he finally asked, his words bristling with a rare intensity.
“We came a long time ago,” the alien replied.
A long silence fell between the two from two different worlds standing on that landfill of the Fourth Earth. To Mr. Smoothbore, the air felt thick enough to suffocate him. He needed to say something; that something became a question, bubbling from his subconscious, echoing the events of those past days. “Are there rich and poor people where you come from?”
The First Earther smiled. “Naturally. I am a poor.” He pointed to the star ring in the sky. “As are they.”
“How many people are up there?” Mr. Smoothbore asked.
“If you are referring to the ones currently above us, about half a million. But they are just the vanguard. In a few years another ten-thousand spaceships will arrive, carrying a billion,” the alien answered.
“A billion…” Mr. Smoothbore digested the information. “They can't all be poor, can they?”
“They are all poor,” the stranger replied.
“How many people does the First Earth have?” Mr. Smoothbore continued his questions.
“Two billion,” the alien answered.
“How can so many on one world be poor?” Mr. Smoothbore asked.
“How can so many on one world not be poor?” the stranger asked in return.
“I would think,” Mr. Smoothbore replied, “that too many poor people would destabilize a world. And that would make things tough for the rich and the middle class as well.”
“Given the current level of development on the Fourth Earth, that would certainly be right,” the alien agreed.
“But there will come a time when I would be wrong?” Mr. Smoothbore asked the obvious.
The alien hung his head, then finally replied, “Well, let me tell you the story of rich and poor on the First Earth.”
“I would very much like to hear it.” Mr. Smoothbore returned the snub-nose to his underarm holster.
“Our two human civilizations developed along very similar lines. The roads you have traveled, we took as well, and we, too, passed through an era very much like your current age. Even though society's wealth was not evenly divided, it still maintained a certain balance. There were not too many rich or poor and most believed that with progress the gap between rich and poor would gradually close. They looked forward to an age in which wealth would be distributed fairly. But we soon discovered that things were more complicated than that; the balance that had existed was soon to be broken,” the alien explained.
“Broken by what?” Mr. Smoothbore wondered.
“Education. You well-know that in your world's current era education is the only means by which people can move up the social ladder. If you imagine society and its strata as an ocean with various layers of water separated by temperature and salinity, then education is like an open tube passing from surface to bottom. It is the only thing keeping the layers from becoming completely isolated from one another,” the alien continued.
“So you are saying that fewer and fewer could afford university,” Mr. Smoothbore assumed.
“Yes. The costs of higher education continued to rise, gradually turning it into a privilege reserved solely for the children of the elite. But the costs of traditional means of education faced certain limitations, if only because of the forces of the market. The tube therefore will continue to exist, even if it becomes thin and tight as a straw. However, technology will one day suddenly and fundamentally change all education,” the stranger said, slowly unraveling the mystery.
“Are you talking about injecting information directly into the brain?” Mr. Smoothbore hazarded the guess.
“Exactly,” the alien acknowledged. “But the injection of knowledge is only a part of it. Super-computers with capacities that far exceed the human brain can be implanted straight into the cerebrum. Anyone with such an implant can instantly recall all of the immense quantities of information stored in these computers – but even that is just a part of the picture. These computers also function as intelligence amplifiers, capable of raising human thought to a new, higher level. Knowledge, intellect, depth of thought, even psychological and dispositional perfection and aesthetic ability – they all become just another form of commodity – a form of commodity that can be bought.”
“They must be very expensive.” It was hardly a question.
“Oh, yes, very expensive.” The alien nodded. “Expressed in your current monetary terms, the costs of such a superior 'education' would be comparable to the price of two or three suites of fifteen-hundred-square-foot condos in prime locations of Beijing or Shanghai.”
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bsp; “But at that price, there will still be those who can afford it,” Mr. Smoothbore said.
“Yes,” the alien again agreed, “but it is a very small segment of society. The tube connecting the bottom of society with the top had been severed. The intelligence of a person who received this super-education was an entire level beyond what a normal person can ever hope to achieve. A chasm now gaped between the two, as wide as the canyon between a dog and an ordinary person; and this difference, of course, made itself known in almost all spheres of society, even in such areas as the appreciation of art. And so, this super-intelligentsia formed a new civilization all of its own. It was a civilization completely incomprehensible to the rest of humanity, in much the same way as a symphony is incomprehensible to a dog. For example, the super-intelligentsia mastered hundreds of languages and so, in certain situations and when speaking with certain people, it became a matter of etiquette to use the correct language. In situations like these, ordinary people seemed – at least to the super-intelligentsia – as simple and crude as dogs, barking at humans.” The alien paused. “And so, quite naturally, something fundamental changed. You are smart. I bet that you can imagine what I mean.”
“Rich and poor are no longer the same...” Mr. Smoothbore let the thought churn through his mind. “The same ...” He fell silent.
“Rich and poor were no longer the same species,” the alien agreed. “Just like humans and dogs are not the same, the poor are no longer human.”
“Oh,” Mr. Smoothbore softly exhaled, “that really changes almost everything.”
“It changed many things,” the alien grimly agreed. “First and foremost, the very factors you mentioned as maintaining the balance of wealth and limiting the number of poor ceased to exist. Even if there are far more dogs than humans, they still lack the power to destabilize society. All they can do is cause enough trouble to become a problem worth solving. Frivolously killing dogs is a punishable offense, but it is hardly the same as killing a person, especially when rabid dogs threaten the safety of humans. In fact, that makes killing all the dogs a viable alternative. This in essence was the situation of the poor.” The stranger shook his head. “Without a common basis between two species, real sympathy cannot exist. It was humanity's second evolution. The first was our split from the apes, relying on natural selection; this was the split of the rich from the poor, relying on a principle just as sacred: The inviolable right to private property.”
“That principle is currently sacred to our world as well,” Mr. Smoothbore noted.
“On the First Earth, this rule was maintained by the so-called 'Machine'. That system was a powerful means of enforcing society's rules and its Enforcers could be found in every corner of our world. Some Enforcers were no bigger than bugs, but one and all, they were powerful enough to kill hundreds in the blink of an eye. The rules they obeyed were not the Three Laws of Robotics proposed by your Asimov, but instead the foundational law of the First Earth's constitution: Private property shall be inviolable. They were in no way agents of autocracy. Far from it; they enforced the law with absolute impartiality, irrespective of social status. If the pitiful property of a poor person was threatened, they would protect it like anyone else's, in strict accordance with our constitution.
Under the powerful protections of the Machine, the First Earth's wealth was concentrated among an ever smaller minority. Technological developments lead to another change: The independently wealthy no longer needed anyone else. In your world, the affluent still need the poor; factories still need workers. But on the First Earth, machines no longer required operators and highly efficient robots could fill any and every function. The lower classes had nothing left to offer or sell and so were plunged into abject poverty without recourse, devoid of all hope of betterment. As this situation developed, it completely transformed the essence of the First Earth's economy, accelerating the concentration of wealth at an incredible speed.
“I would not be able to explain the highly complex process of wealth concentration to you,” the alien said, “but in essence it was no different than the operations of capital markets in your world. In the time of my great-grandfather, sixty percent of the wealth of the First Earth was under the control of ten million; in the world of my grandfather, eighty percent of our world's wealth was in the hands of a mere ten thousand. And, when my father was young, ninety percent of the wealth was held by no more than forty-two individuals.
“When I was born, capitalism on the First Earth had reached the peak of peaks, producing an almost unbelievable marvel of wealth: Ninety-nine percent of the wealth of our world was now in the hands of single person! That person was known as the 'Last Entrepreneur'.
“Even though there was still a gap between rich and poor among the other two billion, they were vying for nothing more than the remaining one percent of the world's wealth. And so the First Earth became a world with one rich man and two billion poor. The constitution remained and with it the inviolability of private property. And the Machine continued to faithfully carry out its duty, protecting the private property of that sole individual.
“Do you want to know what the Last Entrepreneur owned?” the alien asked, but gave Mr. Smoothbore no chance to answer. “He owned the entire First Earth! Every last continent and ocean of our planet became his private halls and gardens. Even the very air and atmosphere became his private property. The remaining two billion poor lived in completely sealed homes, separated from the world outside. Inside, these homes were equipped with entirely autonomous miniature eco-cycle systems that used their own pitiful supplies of water, air, and soil to provide for the tiny world sealed within them. The only thing they could take from the outside world was the last resource not the property of the Last Entrepreneur: Sunlight.
“My family's home was next to a river and surrounded by green grass. The grass stretched to the banks of that river and beyond, to the azure feet of the mountains in the distance. We could hear the song of the birds in the air and the splashing of the fish in the water. We saw herds of deer leisurely drink at the river's bank; and, most intoxicating to me, we could see the wind rippling through the great grasslands just outside. But none of it belonged to us. Our family was completely cut-off from the outside world. All we could do was watch it through our hermetically sealed portholes that were never to be opened. To leave our home, we had to go through an airlock, much as one might leave a spaceship for a spacewalk. In fact, there was little separating my family's life from life on a spaceship. The only real difference was that the hostile environment was inside – not out!
“We only breathed the foul air provided to us by our life-support system, only drank water that had been re-filtered a million times over, and only ate barely edible food recycled from our own excrements. And all along, there was nothing more than a single wall separating us from the bountiful, vast world outside. Yet, when we left the house, we had to wear suits like astronauts. We had to bring our own food and water, even our own oxygen. After all, the air did not belong to us. It was the private property of the Last Entrepreneur.
“Of course, we had our luxuries,” the alien continued. “On holidays or weddings, for example, we would leave our sealed homes and venture into the great outdoors of the First Earth. The first breath of fresh air was what always got to us the most. The air was ever so slightly sweet – sweet enough to make you cry. But of course it cost us money. Before leaving our home, we had to swallow a pill-sized air-vendor. This device could monitor and measure how much air we breathed and with every breath, money was deducted from our bank account. For the poor it was a true luxury, something they could only do once or twice a year. When we were outside, we never dared to exert ourselves. In fact, we mostly just sat around to limit the amount we would breathe. Before returning home we needed to carefully scrape and clean our shoes; after all, the soil outside did not belong to us.
“Let me tell you how my mother died. To save money, she had not left the house for three years. She did not even g
o outside on holidays. On the night that it happened, she – entirely by accident – sleepwalked into the airlock and right out! She must have been dreaming about nature. When the Enforcer found her, she was already a good ways from our home. It saw that she was without an air-vendor, so it dragged her back home. As it hauled her along, the Enforcer clasped her neck with its mechanical pincher. It had no intention of killing her; it was just protecting a citizen's inviolable private property – the air. When it arrived at our home, my mother was already dead, strangled. The enforcer dropped her corpse in front of us with the following words: 'She is guilty of larceny. A penalty has been imposed, but your funds are insufficient to cover it. For this reason we will confiscate your mother's remains to collect the debt.' I should also tell you that a corpse was very valuable to poor families. After all – it is made up of seventy percent water and many other useful resources. Even so, the value of her body in the end was not enough to pay the fine, so the Machine also confiscated a good chunk of our family's air.
“The air supply of our family's life-support system was already critically low at the time and we lacked the funds to refill it. After the Enforcer took its share, we were left with so little that our very lives hung in the balance. To replenish used air, the life-support system was now forced to separate oxygen from water via electrolysis. However, doing so rapidly degraded the system in its entirety. Soon the master control issued a warning: If we did not add fifteen liters of water to the system, it would completely collapse within thirty hours. The glow of the red warning lights flooded every room. For a while we planned to steal some water from the river outside, but we soon discarded the idea; the omnipresent Enforcers would kill us before we ever made it home with the water. My father silently mulled over the situation for many long moments, telling me not to worry and go to sleep. I was very afraid, but I still went to bed – more for the lack of oxygen than anything else. I do not know how long I slept before a robot woke me. It had come from a resource conversion vehicle that had docked onto our house. It pointed to a bucket of crystal clear water and told me, 'This is your father.' The resource conversion vehicles were mobile installations that converted human bodies into resources for life-support systems. My father had let it extract all the water from his body, even while a beautiful river gurgled in the moonlight a mere three hundred meters from our home. The resource conversion vehicle had also extracted some other parts of his body for our life-support system: A small box of organic fats, a bottle of calcium, even a bit of iron, about as large as a coin.