Flash

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  "I believe you mentioned that before." The PowerSwift director's voice turned dry. "The creative types don't like hard facts."

  I offered an exaggerated shrug, the kind that the linkcam would catch. A shrug was far better than any words, since no words would address her statement.

  "You do know when silence is golden, Jonat. That's another thing I appreciate about you." Reya paused. "What else?"

  "Your tie-ins with the Infomatic line are low, only in the ten percent range. That's unadjusted..." I went on to explain, without committing more than the facts indicated. In the end, I promised, again, to have the complete analysis to her by Thursday, and to contact Tan Uy-Smythe immediately.

  Once Reya's image vanished, before I linked Uy-Smythe, I spent a moment to call up the ErrorOne results from the analysis program. I ran through the numbers quickly. With my luck, Methroy would link and want a quick read. The PPI product line director was always stuffing bandwidth ... and then forgetting and linking again.

  I retrieved the access codes Reya had sent and made the link for Uy-Smythe. A simple seal appeared on the projected holo, circular, a white rose and a red one crossing over a stylized version of the restored Parthenon.

  Centre for Societal Research

  Jonat deVrai, for Tan Uy-Smythe.

  One moment, sir.

  Without further comment, the seal was replaced by a man seated in an office library, one filled with old-style leatherbound books. At least, the wall behind him showed the books. Tan Uy-Smythe was slender, almost angular, with dark brown hair, and a golden complexion. "Mr. deVrai. How far from the truth?"

  "Not far at all. More like 'of the truth.'"

  "Pardon my witticism. Reya Decostas recommended you as the only link-track analyst able to handle this project. So did a number of others."

  "I've been fortunate to be able to meet most of Reya's expectations."

  "You have to be good to have been able to meet any of them." Uy-Smythe smiled.

  "She didn't offer details about the project you had in mind."

  "She couldn't. I didn't tell her, and whether you accept the job or not, we'll want a confidentiality agreement."

  "I only sign those if they include the standard waiver on illegality," I pointed out.

  "That's more than acceptable. We're more concerned about our research and scholarship being disseminated before it's peer reviewed. I know your reputation is impeccable..."

  "But the confidentiality agreement has to be signed in person with a GIL verification and authentication?"

  "Exactly." Uy-Smythe raised both perfect eyebrows. "You've dealt with nonprofs before?"

  "No. Sensitive data, and I'm aware of the prudence test for confidentiality."

  "Just so. Could you come by our office tomorrow?"

  "Two o'clock?"

  "Ah ... two-thirty might be a bit better. I'll send the address and coordinates."

  "Two-thirty." I flashed a smile, the kind I hoped projected warmth.

  Once the projection blanked and vanished, I reached for the mug of Grey tea—and found it was empty. Too much Grey tea, another of my faults. I flicked to All-News, and instructed the house system to have the projection follow me through the formal front parlor to the kitchen.

  Aliora had said more than once that my house was obscenely large for a single man, but I'd bought it and contracted for the office modifications and repairs when I'd thought matters would work out with Shioban. That meant I'd been paying the single-occupant surtax for nearly five years, but the privacy was worth it, at least so long as I held on to my clients.

  Good news from Ceres ... the fault in the mining complex has been sealed, and there have been no more fatalities ... The total stands at 114 ... Not so good news from Serenium, where the so-called Martian Assembly has threatened secession ... MultiCor is shipping more of its CorPak safos to Mars in full-grav centrifuge ships...

  With NorAm elections less than two months away, Continental Executive Poulas may be faced with another two years of infighting. Polls show the Popular Democrats with 98 seats in the House, while the Laborite Republicans would have 102, with, of course, Palan Druw as an independent. The Senate is likely to remain solidly in LR hands...

  The unidentified cydroid struck and killed by an electrolorry on the Capital Guideway remains a mystery. The cydroid was an unregistered and unknown type carrying sophisticated microtronic gear. Capital safos have not released any additional information, except to say that Investigations are proceeding...

  The Northern African Republic lightened restrictions on all movement north, in the wake of the resurgence of the ebol2 outbreak. NAR's President Hammad reassured the people of all Afrique that the restrictions were temporary ... European Community in-ports have instituted full health screens on travelers from Afrique...

  The PAMD has struck again. An AP missile slammed into the armored limo of Everett Forster, Director General of Unite ... injuring Forster and his driver. Forster had just testified before the Defense Committee of the NorAm Senate on whether Unite had illegally transferred BID technology to SOFIS, a deep-space development multilateral headquartered on Mars ... reputed to be supporting the Martian independence movement. Forster emphatically denied making the sensitive accelerated ion-drive available to an off-Earth entity. A filtered message arrived in most media outlets coincidentally with the attack, stating that Patriots against Multilateral Domination would continue to target greedy and guilty multilateral executives. A second message received later denied responsibility, saying that PAMD still supported peaceful means to outsystem independence, and that the attack represented an attempt to discredit PAMD...

  Unite was certainly no paragon of virtue, but the BID technology was still in prototype designs. Forster would have been cutting his own throat to let go of it before Unite could either sell it to one of the continental governments or obtain an extravagant procurement contract. What all the leftists throughout history failed to understand was that they weren't any different from the rightists. They both wanted to repress something in the name of some other greater good. I didn't even snort. What was the point? I'd have been snorting all the time.

  Once back in the kitchen, I flicked down the lever on the antique electrokettle. Actual boiled water and old-fashioned tea bags made the Grey taste better than anything out of a household reformulator. But then, reformulators were limited to producing dietarily sufficient food, if it could be called that.

  While the water boiled, I had to make an effort to avoid opening any of the cabinets, or walking into the pantry. With exercise and care in eating, I'd maintained my weight, and I didn't like the thought of either dieting or trying the new nanetic-metabolic balancing infusions. The medical literature indicated they still had more than a few problems, even if the linkpops swore by them.

  Once the kettle clicked off, I poured the boiling water into the big mug and swirled the tea bag, thinking about Reya and Uy-Smythe. Reya Decostas did few altruistic favors for anyone, and definitely wasn't a social do-gooder. Mug in hand, with the tea steaming and too hot to sip immediately, I headed back to the office.

  While the Grey tea cooled on the side of the console, I settled into the ergochair and screened in the inquiry—Centre for Societal Research. Within seconds, the holo projection was displaying a summary.

  Centre for Societal Research ... nonprofit foundation, Denv, Colorado District, NorAm. Annual exp. 15Cr[million] Assets 100Cr[million] ... Exec Dir: Tan Uy-Smythe, Admin Dir: Sheren Stolzen...

  Commissions and funds independent research into macro-socio conditions; publishes 15-25 major studies annually; independent review board...

  Aliora, the gatekeeper announced.

  Accept.

  "Jonat!" Aliora was a bundle of energy, not exactly compact at a hundred and eighty centimeters, but despite her height she conveyed the impression of both energy and compactness, from the short curly brown hair to the deep green eyes, and the restlessness that showed itself as she paced back and forth on th
e veranda of her house. Like all deVrais, she had a hard time staying still.

  "Aliora..."

  "You are coming Thursday night? You won't have some urgent project and beg off at the last moment?"

  "I've only done that once, and it was almost two years ago—"

  "You're exaggerating. As usual. One year, seven months, and twenty-one days." Aliora laughed.

  "What can I say?"

  'That you'll be here, on time. Narissa is really looking forward to meeting you."

  "Narissa?" I tried to look clueless.

  "Remember? That's one of the reasons you're coming. You keep complaining that you never meet the right kind of women."

  "And she's looking for an ascendent husband?"

  "No. She's Senator Hareldsen's niece, and she's a junior advocate in the Colorado District's Civil Enforcement Office."

  "Oh..." I offered a grin. "She wants to make sure she stays an ascendent."

  "Jonat!"

  "I'll be there I promised, and I'll be charming, even if she isn't."

  "She's very intelligent. She is also charming."

  "I'll be there," I said again. "How's Dierk?"

  "He's in Bozem today, but he'll be back tonight. Some tailings reclamation project."

  "And you? Are you still working for that health policy place?"

  Aliora offered a syrupy smile. "That's the nicest thing you've said about the Health Policy Centre."

  "I suppose you'll eventually convert me. I just don't think universal state-paid health care will ever work. That was one of the things that brought down the Commonocracy—"

  "Don't call it that. At least, call it the so-called Commonocracy. It was a republic, the United States of America."

  "Whatever you call it," I pointed out, "it was a commonocracy, not a republic or a democracy. At the end, there was no check on the untrammelled mob rule, and the mob refused to understand that when the majority of the populace pays for nothing, that majority will offer no support, because they have no true interest—"

  "Jonat... I think I know where you stand..."

  "I have to remind you sometimes."

  "You've reminded me. Thursday night? At seven?"

  "I'll be there." I made sure I was still smiling until we delinked. Then I went back to the information on the Centre for Societal Research.

  Chapter 4

  With the development and increasing sophistication of personal filters, embedding became both a commercial and financial necessity for the consumer and technical goods producing industries. While individual household nanetic formulators have proved economically infeasible in their present stage of development, a combination of factors in the mid- to late twenty-first century resulted in the radical restructuring of personal/household use goods. The key factors were the industrial use of nanoassembly, the comparatively inexpensive delivery of critical space-mined raw materials, the imperatives of environmental maintenance, and the widespread use of personal pricer systems with full access to the worldlink.

  In practical terms, the result was the effective trifurcation of the marketplace. Consumer commodities essentially became: (1) fungible, where the only differences were in price, shipping costs, and delivery dates; (2) semifungible, where the fungibility was impacted by quantifiable specifications; and (3) discretionary, as determined by prodplacing link-impacted demand.

  High-level commercial pricers, as well as personal pricers, reduced the producers of fungibles to the comparative handful of long-established multilateral resulting in a comparatively stable price structure...

  Discretionary goods, on the other hand, continued to exhibit wide and often unpredictable levels of demand, and rapidly changing prices...

  Overview excerpt, Chapter 3

  World Economics

  Austen Halton, D.Ec.

  Bozem, NorAm, 2215 A.D.

  Chapter 5

  I've always loved mornings, especially early fall mornings, when the air was crisp and cool, and I didn't sweat so much when I ran. On Wednesday, I finished breakfast just before sunrise, so that I could work in my five kay jog along the greenbelt paths to the north of the residential complex that holds the house. Wednesdays, I took the higher route. My shirt was soaked by the time I trotted back up the curving path to the rear of the house thirty-five minutes later. I pushed the middle two kays, and then gradually slowed so that the last thousand meters were almost a cooldown. Aliora kept telling me that I should be keeping the time well under thirty minutes, but she wasn't the one running up and down hills at close to two thousand meters above sea level. She also wasn't following the run with a half hour weight and exercise session.

  I kept blotting sweat from my forehead when I got back upstairs from the weight room, as I automatically checked the gatekeeper. No one had linked while I had been out—exercise and weight work counted as "out," as a matter of principle.

  Once cooled down more and got cleaned up and dressed, I went over all the material the system had pulled up on Tan Uy-Smythe and the Centre for Societal Research before I got to work on finishing the analysis for Reya and PowerSwift.

  Not only did Uy-Smythe hold a doctorate from Southern University, but he had been both a Hoover Fellow and an intern for Prasek Charic, when Charic had been the NorAm Executive. Quite a combination—a conservative thinkjar fellow and an intern for the most liberal PD executive in years.

  The Centre was equally distinguished, founded some thirty years earlier in Denv, with a significant initial endowment from the Pan-Social Trust. I'd never heard of that trust, but I didn't usually deal with foundations or trusts. My clients were interested in maximizing their capitalistic earnings. They probably wouldn't get into doing good for society until they realized that they were still going to die, nanetic medicine and revitalizing therapies notwithstanding.

  The Centre's list of publications and scholarly works was lengthy. The titles were descriptive ... and seemingly well within the Centre's NorAm charter. None exactly jumped out from the projections at me, and I plodded through the titles: Trends in Multigenerational Cultural Transmission; Micro-Economic Impacts of Genetic Improvement; Socio-Economic Implications of User Taxes; Observed Limits to Cultural Assimilation; Cultural Impacts of Macro-Economic Policymaking... From what I could tell, the authors all had equally impeccable academic and professional qualifications, and that bothered me as well. My own credentials, while including a doctorate from Darden, certainly didn't match those of the Centre's listed authors and scholars, and I'd never published anything— unless you counted hundreds of reports to clients over the past eight years. Personal inadequacy wasn't why I was troubled. It might have been why I felt diminished, but there was ... something ... about the publications and their subjects.

  I tried a key subject matter listing search, and followed that with one based on political viewpoints, and another by publication date patterns, and even one by the academic institutions from which the various authors had received degrees. The system couldn't find a single meaningful correlation. That didn't mean there wasn't one, just that I hadn't framed the inquiries well enough to find one.

  More in-depth research on the Centre would have to wait. I'd done enough diligence to cover my ass, and more than enough for not having even signed a retainer or a confidentiality agreement, and I needed to finish the PowerSwift analyses for Reya. I hoped I could do that before Methroy linked and started questioning me about the report I'd sent off on ErrorOne. PPI wasn't going to be happy about my findings, or my recommendations, but then, Methroy had come to me because they were getting trashed. That was because they were handling product placement in the same old comfortable and tired way, and the viewers had caught on and were dismissing the PPI prods. Methroy had just finished the first round of placements based on my analyses, and initial results were promising.

  In what I did, I had to convey bad news at times, and some of the multis preferred to shoot the messenger, rather than face the facts. I'd found that it didn't help to be too soothing in those s
ituations. Diplomatic, yes, but not conciliatory. That sort of client politicking just wasted my time and made them madder in the long run, and I lost credits both ways then.

  Dismissing PPI and Methroy, I called up the raw analyses on the PowerSwift prodplacements. Just for PowerSwift, we—my proprietary system and I—were surveying more than two hundred product positions in six hours of erothrillers. I'd developed my system out of self-defense. The nets spread forth hour after hour of holo-projected, nonstop, rezpop backgrounded, semierotic, mechanical plot action thrillers, or some other variety of sex and violence, or romance and sex, or romance and violence, taking up 95 percent of the available bandwidth. No one, I was convinced, could be surrounded by that and retain any semblance of lucidity and sanity. So, I'd reduced the placements to algorithms based on projection position relative to the central focus, added an additional correlation to the two or three rezchords that hyped the product—effectively a commercial leitmotif. Wagner doubtless would have shuddered at the usage—and the fact that commercial law provided copyright protection to resonance-based proprietary leitmotifs. Then, I'd added another series of algorithms that assessed various cancellation effects. Dierk called it pseudoscience. He was half-fascinated, and half-appalled, that the system worked. I had to tweak it now and again, but it worked, and nothing that anyone else did came nearly so close to my results in measuring product placement effectiveness.

  The PowerSwift line encompassed formulators, cookers, and a range of home conveniences, all emblazoned with the intertwined and stylized P/S logo. I didn't own any, but I'd have bet that Reya Decostas didn't, either.

  I dug into the PowerSwift data and ended up working straight through until one-fifteen, when I set everything aside, tied a black cravat in place, and donned a black jacket. In green and black, I left the house and walked the four hundred meters down to the maglev station that would take me to southeast Denv, where the Centre for Societal Research was located. I could have driven the Altimus, but private transportation for a single individual wasn't considered a deductible business expense, not under the NorAm tax code, and the Revenue Audits would have caught that in a flash. It was stupid, like a lot of government regs. I could also have hired a commercial shuttle, even as the sole passenger, and deducted the entire expense, but I couldn't drive myself and write off the cost, although it would have been cheaper.