by John Scalzi
Subtle, these young men were always so subtle. She smiles in the shadows and allows her ears to continue to reconnoiter.
Eventually their voices recede, echoing through the ravine, after which farewells are murmured. Cardoza never catches the rhythm of challenge-and-response. New Kid really is a bookmark then, and nothing more. What the hell is going on up there? In her days here she hasn’t yet seen anything remotely this lax. This was city-grade Mickey Mouse, like she’d expect to see on the Edgewater contract-security perimeter at Boeing-Mitsubishi or Microsoft.
She’s been given latitude in her mission parameters for a reason. She’s just found that reason if she wants to take it. Even so, a walkup was dangerous. Had to get within earshot to run a talking play. New Kid might get excited, might get lucky, squeeze off a headshot or something.
But Cardoza isn’t paid to be safe, she’s paid to be smart. This could be a real smart way of getting into Cascadiopolis, escorted every step of the way
She raises herself back up and zooms in on New Kid with the scope. The starlight is almost pulsing this far from any power grid, but still faint as ever. Even so, the scope is smart enough to deal with that, at least as long as there’s some skyshine. New Kid looks nervous to the point of throwing up. He fingers his rifle the way a fourteen year old imagines a woman might want to be touched. Cardoza swallows a silent laugh.
His pimples really are worse than poor Otis. Kid, she thinks. After tonight, you’ll never pull guard duty again.
I promise.
TAKEN from an anonymous retrospective on early-to-mid 21st century business practices, published under a Creative Commons license:
Though corporations as such are by historical nature tied to the sovereign authorities which issued their charters, by the time of the late nineteenth century the multinational or transnational model held sway. While wealthy individuals could and did function in the role of corporations under specific circumstances, the combination of distributed risk and accumulated capital was too seductive to resist over time. Even those parts of the world where socioeconomic structures varied significantly from the Western European model were not able to combat the allure of corporatism. Imperial China, Communist China and the Sunni Islamic societies all surrendered. Even al-Qaeda, that great anti-Western bugaboo of the decades bracketing the turn of the century, owed far more organizationally to transnational corporations than to any historical Islamic tradition.
Then the Westphalian model of sovereignty which had prevailed for over three and a half centuries abruptly collapsed. Though sovereign states by no means ceased to exist, their absolute control over many aspects of the global economic, diplomatic and military systems was fractured beyond repair. Corporations were already tenuously tied to their charters and nominal countries of origin through the continual liberalization which had begun when the United States Supreme Court first opened the door to corporate personhood in the Dartmouth decision of 1819. Now they became de jure sovereign to match their long time de facto sovereignty; not by positive legal assent, but by sheer default on the part of the chartering bodies.
Given the chaos of the times around rising sea levels, worldwide crop failures and energy wars in the Middle East and Africa, few people outside economics faculties even took notice of these changes.
It was the ultimate triumph of libertarian free marketism and Straussian neoconservatism. The disasters foretold by twentieth century economic liberals came to pass, but again, were no more than a candle in the catastrophic winds blowing across the people and lands of the Earth.
What no one predicted was that the corporate actors would soon become foundational to the maintenance of continued peace and public order. The first, immutable law of capital is that it will be preserved.
ALLELULIA
TYGRE might not have arrived on the wings of the storm, but he certainly brought chaos with him. The dungeons of Symmetry are not deep, or extensive, but they are as fearful as the workrooms of the Inquisition. That lava tube was the source of all discipline in the undisciplined community of Cascadiopolis.
Not that the freemen of the city need fear it. Only outsiders go below, more often than not without returning to anyone’s sight.
Except for the birthright Cascadians—children brought to term under the spreading branches of the Douglas firs—everyone here began as an outsider. Everyone here had been interviewed, at the Granite Gate, by one or another committee, around the common tables and in whispered intimacy beneath the ever-dripping rhododendrons.
A few of us have even descended down the moss-damp steps into Symmetry. We especially know what Tygre faced there. Not racks, or arcs of voltage and pain, but the deadly combination of pseudocognitive databases and conscious sedation.
We gather together, as we so rarely do, to see if this new man will emerge. We sense a world borning in the mucky loam beneath our feet.
Still, we do not know what passes within.
TYGRE ignores the dermal patches. For all they seem to be affecting him, they might as well be dewfall. His smile echoes in its affable silence, an expression strange on his mighty and passionate face. The leather straps holding him to the chair seem almost insubstantial, somehow.
Bashar has already begun to understand this man’s secret. His knowledge is nonverbal, or perhaps preverbal, buried deep in the hindbrain where the triggers of reflex flow. The same instincts that make Bashar a deadly marksman have already surrendered to Tygre. It will be some time before the security chief can unwind his reactions sufficiently to contemplate betrayal.
For now he simply mirrors Tygre’s smile and watches two women from the Security Subcommittee attempt to work the man over. In a way, the sight is funny.
Anna Chao is stumpy and angry, with dynamic ink tattoos crawling up and down her arms in a fair representation of the Divine Wind overwhelming the Mongol fleet. Sometimes Bashar thinks he can see aircraft carriers sinking in the storms, their stars-and-stripes flags burning to ash. Anna’s primary work detail is supervising the stonemasons who quarry basalt from the ravines and crevices of the mountain beneath their feet, careful to take their slabs and pillars in such a way as to leave a natural-seeming void behind. This has given her the muscles of a stunted giant, but strangely, no patience at all.
Her interrogation partner in this game of bad cop-bad cop is a little person of African-American descent. Gloria Berry just manages to top three feet in height, and she is built like a bowling pin. Gloria is also the single meanest person Bashar has ever known in a long life filled with evil-minded sadists and good old-fashioned neck breakers. She is also rumored to have more lovers than any other woman or man in Cascadiopolis.
The two of them stacked together would barely be tall enough to stand duty at the Granite Gate, but they’d broken many a testosterone-laced hulk in their time.
Tygre just smiles.
“I don’t freaking care how you got in here,” Gloria says with an incongruent echo of menace in her piping voice. “I don’t freaking care who you know, who you’ve done, or who you’ve bought off to get here.” Her fingers fly through a haptic interface of microwatt lasers and passive motion sensors, teasing data out of piezoelectric Malaysian quantum matrices embedded in stone blocks. The tease is not going well. “What I do freaking care about, my sweet, sweet man…”—Bashar’s spine shuddered at that—“…is how you’ve come not to exist anywhere in western North America.”
Anna checks Tygre’s patches with a worried frown. For all that she swings a hammer on the day shift, her delicacy is a butterfly’s. “He’s taking it up, Glo. It’s just not, well, doing anything.”
Tygre’s smile widens. He clearly has all night to spend here in the delightful company of these women. Bashar’s hindbrain stirs, prompting him to speak out of turn. “I don’t believe you’ll get anywhere with this one, ladies.”
The look Gloria shoots him would have maimed a lesser man. “We don’t tell you your business, soldier-boy, don’t you be telling us ours.”
“Only you,” says Anna.
“Am I in need of some adjustment? If you wish to know something, you have only to ask.”
Here Bashar has to laugh, though he keeps the noise behind his lips. The gruesome twosome have been working Tygre over for an hour, data mining, reading his eye reflexes and the set of his jaw, but they haven’t actually tried direct questioning.
Which admittedly rarely works on people making an involuntary visit to Symmetry, but still represents a deeply amusing problem.
Gloria glares at Bashar again, then with both hands elbow-deep in her data, turns the hard-eyed look on Tygre. “Name?”
“Tygre.”
“That all of it?”
“Tygre Tygre, actually.” There is a benevolent warmth in his tone. “Spelled the old way.”
“Right,” says Anna in a withering tone. In a city which is home to people with names like Starbanner, Undine and Taupe Pantyhose, Bashar finds this hardly fair.
Gloria eyes her display suspiciously. “Where you born?”
“Nowhere.”
Anna clacks the pliers, miming the breaking of a knuckle, but Gloria waves her to silence.
“How’d you get here?”
“Walked.”
“From where?”
“Further downhill.”
Admirably truthful answers, Bashar realizes, and profoundly useless. Still, there is something on Gloria’s face.
“Anna, come here,” she says quietly.
Tygre maintains his mask of amity while the other interrogator slips around to the far side of this segment of the lava tube. They don’t bother to speak aloud, or tell Bashar anything at all, but both heads are quickly focused on the glowing, buzzing universe of information projected above the pile of broken stones.
“You ever own an automobile, Tygre?” Gloria asks after a few minutes.
“Never.”
“Scooter? Registered bike?”
“Never.”
“No bank accounts,” says Anna.
“That’s hardly incriminating,” Bashar offers in spite of himself. “Half the people here have never even touched folding money, let alone held an account.”
“He is not half the people here,” Gloria mutters.
Anna steps over to Tygre with her pair of pliers. “Tell me, man. What happens if I use these?”
Tygre’s smile widens. “You probably would prefer not to find out.”
“Wrong answer, man.” Her eyes cut to her own enormously muscled bicep.
He follows the line of her gaze with a lift of his hand. For a moment they touch, finger to arm, and Bashar realizes how enormous Tygre truly is. Anna is not tall, but her mason’s arms are thicker than Bashar’s thighs. Tygre’s fingers look overlarge even laid upon her tattoo.
The tattoo storm calms beneath his touch, a sunbeam breaking through the clouds—something Bashar has never before seen.
“Right answer, woman.” He stands, shrugging off the restraining straps as if they’d never been buckled. “I believe this interview is over.”
“It’s done when I say it’s done,” Gloria answers hotly.
Anna is fascinated by her own tattoo and does not reply.
“Have you found any data trail on me whatsoever?”
“No…” she admits. Her voice is grudging.
“Then under which security rule are you holding me?”
With Bashar in the interrogation room, Gloria could hardly declare a security emergency. And Bashar himself would be the arbiter of any imminent threats. In this moment her role is confined to the vetting. With or without prejudice, but the moment for Medievalism has already passed.
Tygre turns to Bashar. “I would meet your people.” He then gravely nods at first Gloria, then Anna. “Will you ladies accompany me?”
“I’ll skinny dip in hell first,” Gloria snarls.
Anna smiles and takes the big man’s hand. Just by size alone, she could have been his child, giant daughter to a giant father.
They head back out the deeply shadowed hallways of Symmetry, past salvaged cubicle partitions and homemade concrete dividers. Bashar trails behind them. From the deepest part of the lava tube, Gloria’s steady, monotonous cursing washes over them like waves upon a distant shore.
AN excerpt from the Bacigalupi Lectures:
The concept of “soft path technologies” is at least as old as Aldo Leopold. Twentieth century culture had barely noticed the idea, discarding it unused like so many other potential salvations. Much like water, capital seeks the easiest channel. Infrastructure re-investment requires enormous commitment to long-term planning, or the resources of a stable government.
Wall Street would never spend the money in any given financial quarter, and it never looked into the future past the next quarter.
Cascadiopolis took its inspirations from the same wellsprings as the urban pioneers in Detroit, along with their daughter-colonies in Buffalo, Windsor and elsewhere: the hippies of the 1960s and 1970s, the Green movement of the 1990s and 2000s, the apocalyptic undergrounds of the decades of the twenty-first century. While the individual thinkers and tinkerers who provided the underlying soft paths were scattered throughout history, only in the opening decades of the new millennium was there sufficient social will to implement these on a scale larger than family farming or microcommunities of shared intent.
For the first time since the invention of coinage, social capital was able to trump financial capital. Social capital itself is perhaps the greatest of those soft path technologies.
The root causes of such change are as fantastically varied as the root causes of any cultural movement, but the proximate causes are stunningly clear. The failure of governmental institutions outside of the defense sector was a deliberate strategy of late twentieth century Republican leadership. By the early twenty-first century conservatives had succeeded beyond their wildest imaginings, only to meet with disaster. Instead of a libertarian paradise of unrestrained capital lifting a rising tide of employers, workers and households, an economic apocalypse emerged which made the Great Depression look like a post-Christmas sales slump.
At the same time, two hundred years of aggressive industrialism combined with a deliberately self-censored policy of abusive neglect of climate change trends came home to roost in an overwhelming way. The loss of New Orleans was not a fluke; it was a harbinger. Mobile, then Charleston, then Miami followed within years. The upper speed of hurricane winds increased by forty percent during that period, forcing a revision to the Beaufort scale. Sea levels rose as currents shifted to bring polar meltwater south.
The financial disasters on Wall Street and Main Street were echoed for anyone who lived too close to water.
Suddenly solar-powered hot water heaters and window-box greenhouses didn’t seem so silly, even to dyed-in-the-wool conservatives convinced that the six-meter waves pounding the Gulf Coast were somehow a political conspiracy concocted by the left.
Even then, as always, most people were incrementalists. The balance of power shifted in that the activist minority grew from a noisy fringe to a major movement within American society. In this, they were welcomed by their Green brethren in Europe and the Third World.
And so Cascadiopolis was built, one soft path at a time.
WE don’t know what to make of him, we who stand like owls ranked in the darkness. Mother moon has set early, so the shadows under the trees are nearly as dark as the shadows beneath the stones. Still, we wait out the time of blood and screams and query hacks, watching the tunnel’s entrance as if our own deaths lurk within.
Whe
n Tygre emerges, he stands tall with fists cocked upon his hip and sweeps his gaze across us. More than half of the city’s shifts are present by then, over two thousand souls crowded shoulder to shoulder on branches and along paths. We breathe as one beast, mutter as one many-headed animal, shift our collective weight and stare.
The man himself is almost luminous. His skin shines out of the shadows, and his eyes flash as if target-painted by distant lasers. He looks back and forth, taking us in, then tilts his head, takes a great breath and speaks but one word.
“Hope,” Tygre says in a voice which ripples through us all.
At that we dissolve into two thousand tired, grumpy people looking for sleep, sex, food, explanations. Whatever has bound us together dissolves like cardboard in the rain and we dribble away from the majesty of his presence like cats pretending they’d never seen a dog in the street outside that screen door.
He just stands and smiles until we are almost all gone save a few stragglers. Flanked by Bashar and Anna Chao, the large man looks over the city as if it were his own.
Eventually he speaks again. “They’re coming for you, you know.”
“They been coming for us all our lives,” Anna answers him. Her tone is offhand, but her words are the story of protest in a new American century.
He glances sideways at her, a strangely ordinary movement. “This is different. Not authority. Capital.”
“What does capital care for us?” Bashar asks.
“Don’t be naive,” Anna snaps at him. It is clear she already sees the lines radiating outward from Tygre’s statement. Authority has its own constraints—statutes of limitation, boundaries of time and districting and election cycles. Capital knows no limits, is the beast that shouted “profit” at the heart of the world.
Bashar is not naive. He knows his own world. It is filled with firing solutions and perimeters and ways to stop, break and kill his fellow human beings. Capital is a distant evil he has always resented from the wrong side of a badge, but finance was never a mystery fit to catch his interest.