by John Fast
“I did too,” she replied with her clipped Tibetan-British accent.
I hit a few keys on my keyboard and saved our work. Then we both sat back in our chairs.
“When we were first paired six months ago,” I recalled, “I had no idea you’d be able to help me with my research.”
“It’s brilliant, what you’ve done,” Takla said. “These quantum algarithms are light years ahead of the first drafts you showed me.”
“It took me a long time to figure out how to write them. I filled thousands of pages in my notebooks.”
“And now you’ve got it: a cascading flow of ever richer forms of dynamic integrated complexity.”
“I can’t be sure until I run the algarithms on a quantum computer.”
“How is the development of the quantum computer coming along?”
“It’s incredibly tricky to sustain a programmable quantum matrix, but we’re making progress every day.”
“And so are we!” Takla enthused. “It’s hard to believe we’ll have four children in just a few months.”
“Speaking of quantum complexity!” I said.
“Thank goodness for the surrogate moms,” Takla added. “Have you wondered what our children will be like? My mother says no matter what I expect, I will be surprised.”
“Even with the careful selection process of the Highbrid Protocol,” I replied,”we can’t know how our combined genes will express themselves.”
I smiled at her and couldn’t help notice the way her tight cotton top outlined the curve of her breasts. I thought about Alexa, and felt a pang of loneliness and desire.
“Takla?” I said. “Could I kiss you?”
“We’ve been genetically paired, not sexually paired,” she reminded me.
“Of course. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to presume.”
“I didn’t say you were presuming. I just want our relationship to be clear. I’m going to marry a Tibetan man and have lots of Tibetan children.”
“I didn’t know you were engaged.”
“I haven’t met him yet.”
“Oh?”
“Listen, Fast,” she said with a sudden urgency in her voice. ”The Chinese government has invaded our country, repressed our religion, taken over our politics, undermined our schools. They’ve displaced and dispersed millions of our people and moved millions of Han people onto our land and into our cities. Their military and police have killed and imprisoned countless numbers of our citizens. Their administrators watch and supervise every village and neighborhood. That’s why the independence movement has spread across Tibet, and throughout the exile community. And I want to play my part. So I’m going to teach Math Theory in Tibet, I’m going to work for the independence movement, I’m going to marry a Tibetan man, and I’m going to have lots and lots of Tibetan children.”
“Sounds like an excellent plan,” I said sincerely.
“And what about you?” Takla inquired. “Are you with anyone?”
“Not right now,” I replied.
Takla waited for me to continue as I struggled to give voice to my inarticulate feelings.
“And then there’s Alexa,” I finally said. “She holds me … at a distance.”
“I’m glad we clarified that,” Takla said ironically. “And yes,” she added.
“Yes what?”
“Now it would be all right for you to kiss me.”
“Oh,” I said.
I leaned over and kissed her.
“That’s a very nice collaboration,” Takla whispered.
We kissed for awhile, glorious, luxuriant kisses. Eventually, she unzipped me and I unzipped her and we caressed each other gently, then more insistently, until we each climaxed, one after the other.
“Thanks,” Takla whispered when she recovered her voice.
“Thanks,” I whispered back.
I drove her home in my old Volvo and curled up beside her in bed. We woke each other once more, just before dawn.
CHAPTER 32.
The Invisible Thief
I felt both renewed and sleepy when I returned to my grad student apartment later that morning. I walked in the front door and found Xi Zhu working at his desk, in the far corner of the living room. He was halfway through the joint BS/PhD Program in Plasma Physics at Princeton University.
“Did you use my portal?” He asked, looking up from his screen.
“Good morning to you too,” I replied cheerily.
“My virtual keyboard was off-center.”
Xi Zhu kept his desk in meticulous order and I knew better than to touch anything on it.
“Maybe you bumped the projector,” I suggested, as I flipped through my junk mail. “Maybe a passing truck rattled the floor.”
“Maybe somebody broke in here,” Xi Zhu said darkly.
I stared at him for a second, then hurried to my bedroom. I returned a minute later, my sleepy contentment replaced by raw anger.
“We’ve been robbed,” I announced.
“What did they take?” Xi Zhu asked, glancing around the living room.
“One of my hyperdiscs,” I replied, furious that my personal space had been invaded.
“Your algarithms?”
“A copy of my latest draft,” I said grimly.
“Damn!” Xi Zhu exclaimed, turning back to his virtual keyboard. “I’m contacting the Turing Institute’s Security Office.”
“Not that they can do anything,” I said. “The guy probably used your portal to stream my files to a cyber café in the Ukraine, or some other place. Then he made his only mistake.”
“You mean, besides messing with my keyboard projector?”
“Yeah. Besides that. He decided to keep my hyperdisc, and hoped I wouldn’t notice for a day or two.”
We were quiet for a moment as we contemplated the robbery.
“I wonder who he’s working for?” I said.
*************
A loud knock on the front door ten minutes later made us both jump.
“Who is it?” I asked.
“Jack McHenry, Turing Institute Security,” a gruff voice replied impatiently.
I opened the door. A short, stocky man with a buzz cut stood in the hallway. Two tall, skinny guys stood behind him. I invited them inside and explained about Xi Zhu’s keyboard projector. Then I led them into my bedroom and showed them the loose floorboard in the back of my closet that covered my hiding place. One of the skinny guys put on a pair of latex gloves, retrieved the board and dropped it into a clear plastic bag. Then both of the skinny guys went back to the living room to check out Xi Zhu’s computer, while McHenry and I surveyed the bedroom.
“Thanks for your help,” I said.
“Anything else disturbed?” He asked.
“Not that I can see.”
“It seems as if your thief knew exactly what he was looking for, where to find it, and how to get it out of here.”
“Well I certainly didn’t tell him.”
“Who else knew about your hiding place?”
“Nobody.”
“No one?”
“Well, Xi Zhu knows, and I told my brother, Michael, but you can’t count them.”
McHenry stared at me for a second, then he shrugged. We returned to the living room where the two skinny guys reported that they had lifted some fingerprints from the desk, but they all looked like Xi Zhu’s. They also said they couldn’t trace the address of the second to last e-mail sent from his portal.
McHenry turned to face Xi Zhu and me.
“Don’t you guys ever read the Security Bulletin?” He barked. “Don’t you know you’re not supposed to leave your work lying around, and your portals wide open?”
Xi Zhu looked annoyed.
“I thought …,” I began, then stopped. I knew he was right.
“I’ll be more careful,” I continued. “Xi Zhu had nothing to do with this.”
*************
I drove to my father’s house later that afternoon and talked with him in th
e library.
“Who do you think it was?” I asked.
“A lot of people want to get a look at your quantum algarithms,” André replied. “I met a woman at the Computational Genetics Conference in Iceland last week. She asked me when you were going to publish. You’ve taken care of your other backup discs?”
“I went to the Q-Lab with McHenry and put them all in the safe. He said it was like closing the barn door after the horses had been stolen. His tech guys are upgrading the locks on our doors, and the firewalls on our portals.”
“Good. What did Krishnapur say?”
“He was angry too, but not with me. He’s meeting with McHenry right now to review the Q-Lab’s security system. Do you think someone would actually break into the Lab?”
André nodded.
“We have to take this seriously,” he said. “And you have to do a better job of protecting your work.”
“I will,” I assured him, wondering for the hundredth time that day what the thief would do with my quantum algarithms. And wondering if, and when, he would strike again.
CHAPTER 33.
Specters and Spooks
After Takla and I had shared two weeks of playful intimacy she thought we should go back to being close friends, research collaborators and expectant parents. Since she ultimately wanted to be with a Tibetan man, and I ultimately wanted to be with Alexa, she thought we should end our romance sooner rather than later. It was a perfectly reasonable suggestion, and yet it was too soon and too sudden for me. I was just beginning to understand, for the first time, how it was possible that my father and mother had fallen in love. The Highbrid pairing, the co-parenting of children, the shared intellectual adventure all resulted in a very strong emotional bond. And I continued to feel the relentless confusion of love and desire whenever I thought about Takla and Alexa.
Alexa, by this time, was pursuing her PhD at the London School of Economics, and whenever she returned to the U.S. we got together for dinners and long walks. In those years I wondered if Alexa would ever risk a more intimate relationship with me. And when she came to New York, in November of 2040, for a conference on global trade, I got a partial answer to my question.
*************
Alexa was staying at a friend’s apartment on the Upper West Side. Her friend was in California for the week, so she invited me over for a home-cooked dinner. I brought a bottle of wine and dessert.
“How’s the conference going?” I asked as we took our places at the kitchen table.
“It’s incredibly frustrating,” Alexa replied as she poured the wine.
“Why’s that?”
Alexa served the portobello mushrooms and risotto. Then she reached into the back pocket of her blue jeans, took out a program, unfolded it, and handed it to me.
“Take a look at the theme,” she said.
I glanced at the conference title: “Free Markets/Global Networks.”
“What’s wrong with that?” I wondered.
“Nothing,” Alexa replied. “I mean, how can anyone be against free markets? The American Revolution began, after all, with imperial taxes and ended with a free market.”
“I love that story.”
“So do I.”
“What!” I exclaimed. “I thought you were a Marxist.”
“Marx wasn’t a Marxist,” Alexa replied. “He had many stupid, wrong and terrible ideas about how to form a government. His dark historical determinism blinded him to the possibilities of an enlightened constitutional democracy. And yet he condemned tyrants and despots. And that’s another reason why I don’t like labels. They’re not only reductive, but their meaning always changes. Instead of labels, I like to think of politics in terms of goals. And for me the goals of economic justice are inseparable from the goals of democracy. I don’t think you can have one without the other. Too many utopian dreams have led to dystopian nightmares.”
“Then your critique of Capitalism …,” I began.
“ … is mild compared to my critique of Communism, Fascism and Fundamentalism,” she finished. “You have to get past the labels, John, and study the history of social thought. You should read James Madison. Now there was a great mind.”
“I learn something new about you every day, Alexa,” I said, shaking my head. “So tell me, why is a conference on the free market so frustrating?”
“Because, we never discuss what we really mean by freedom. Everyone agrees the market should be free within the limits of the law. But the question is, What are those limits? For decades upon decades, from the beginning of the nineteenth century right through the first third of the twentieth century, the Supreme Court ruled against any limits. The Court said there could be no minimum wage or maximum hours imposed by the state because that would infringe upon the ‘liberty of contract’, as the lawyers liked to call it. Owners should be free to offer a contract that demands unsustainable work hours for unliveable wages, and laborers should be free to sign such a contract. And that’s exactly what happened throughout the Agricultural Boom and the Industrial Revolution. In other words, the Supreme Court ruled over and again that owners could, in effect, exploit workers and workers could, in effect, be slaves. If racist ideology was the rationale for black slavery, then liberty of contract was the rationale for white slavery. And the economic results were similar: cotton plantations in the south and textile mills in the north generated fantastic profits for the owners. Add the steel, railroad, oil, and banking monopolies to that mix and the free market came to mean something very, very different to the moneyed classes, the working classes and the slaves.”
“But all that collapsed in the Civil War, and then the Great Depression. We abolished slavery, recognized workers’ rights, and learned how to regulate the free market. And that led to the rise of the middle class.”
“And everything we learned in those days has been undone, again and again, by the market extremists, including the right-wing of the Supreme Court. They’ve undermined workers’ rights and de-regulated the market in the name of freedom–without ever saying what they really mean by freedom. And what they really mean is if an oil company makes forty billion dollars in profit in one year, it should be free to make a hundred billion dollars the next year. If the insurance companies make seventy billion dollars in profit in one year, they should be free to make a hundred billion the following year. If the financial services companies make five-hundred billion dollars in profit in one year .... Well, you get the idea. And let’s not talk about the hundreds of billions of dollars in excess profits that the medical, pharmaceutical and military-industrial companies make every year. Drug prices are regulated in every democratic economy in the world, except here. And that’s why every international drug company opens offices in the U.S.: to fatten themselves up. And let’s not forget the teams of lawyers and lobbyists who protect these profiteers from closer scrutiny. Freedom means something very, very different to the market extremists. It means the freedom to claim all the benefits for themselves, while passing along all the costs to others.
“And what’s really funny is that whenever anyone points out this contradiction, the market extremists run around their penthouse offices shrieking. How dare anyone question their right to make ridiculous salaries and bonuses? How dare anyone question their right to charge thirty percent interest, and more, on a credit card? How dare anyone question their right to increase insurance rates and deny claims? How dare anyone question their right to charge exorbitant prices for oil and medicine? They scream that whoever tries to limit their profiteering is trying to start a class war, a war they’ve been successfully waging across three centuries.
“Do you know what the greatest threat to freedom and democracy is? To the American Dream? It’s the Mambas: the MBA consultants, the MBA money men, the MBA corporate men, the MBA oil men–not all of them, but the ones who lack a social conscience. They are the predators, the middle and working classes are the prey. And these predators pay millions of dollars to their media spokesmen and wom
en to delude the people upon whom they prey. They pay to keep the rage of the middle and working classes focused on the government, which is the middle and working classes only protector, and the minorities, who are their natural allies. And any attempt to rein in these predators is automatically equated with socialism. It’s the same old story. The Red Scare of the early 1950’s was both a rabid political reaction to, and a public relations campaign against, Roosevelt’s New Deal. And to this very day, as Derrida once suggested, the Specter of Communism is brought on stage to scare off anyone who dares to talk about economic justice.
“The market extremists have been steadily increasing their power over the last several years. The historical pattern is clear: they took over a few radio and television outlets; they got rid of the Fairness Doctrine which required them to give equal time to opposing viewpoints; they used their broadcasts to promote hate and fear; they leveraged their political power to dismantle decades of economic and consumer safety regulations; they nominated right wing judges to the Supreme Court who not only threw a national election to a puppet president, but also allowed corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns–thereby bringing an end to whatever was left of the democratic election process in this country. And, while we were sleeping, the market extremists, with the help of the Federal Government and the Pentagon, created free-standing mercenary armies on American soil. Imagine that! And the only law and the only loyalty that govern these mercenary armies? Money! And when the market extremists complete the takeover of the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the government, along with the military and the media, then the dark age of Orwell’s 1984 will begin. The monolithic form of a new authoritarian state capitalism will blot out the sun.”
“What can we do?” I asked.
“We can return to the democratic principles of the Constitution! We can recognize that just as we separate Church and State, so too we can separate Corporation and State. We can ban corporate campaign money. We can regulate corporate lobbyists. We can outlaw mercenary armies. We can agree that while the market is very, very good at encouraging certain kinds of capitalist innovation, it stinks at determining public policy. And it stinks at regulating itself. For every honest corporate executive who pays honest wages for the production of quality goods and services, there’s a dishonest corporate executive gaming the system. Just look back at the old Wall Street scandals. Look at the financiers, the bankers, the rating agents who conspired to create one of the greatest investment frauds in history, a fraud which destroyed millions of lives and undermined the entire global economy. And then, with the help of the government bailout money, these Wall Street geniuses paid themselves the fattest bonuses of their careers! And two years later they pocketed 144 billion dollars in salaries! And not a single one of them went to jail! Why not? Because these capitalist autocrats, and others, had already taken over the state. Because the state, as the independent representative of the people, had ceased functioning. No one went to jail because no one was left to prosecute them.