by Greg Egan
The van shifted lanes, preparing to turn at the next set of lights. Dan was surprised; anyone who could afford sixty grand a year for designer porn ought to be a little more upmarket when it came to real estate. He smiled grimly; when a few hundred thousand data points couldn’t separate his behavior from that of a welfare cheat, who was he to start profiling aficionados of Graham’s special talent?
The van turned north; Dan followed. The street was mixed residential, with well-maintained but unspectacular houses, retail strips, occasional office blocks.
As it approached a row of fast-food restaurants, the van slowed, then turned into the carpark. Dan was confused; even if it was able to make time for another pick-up along the way, because the ice-cream cake was so well-insulated against the afternoon heat, this was an odd site to do it. Was there a driver on board, after all? Dan hadn’t actually seen into the front of the vehicle. Despite its uniform nationwide livery, the courier company was a franchise; maybe one local owner-operator had decided to buck the trend and sit behind a steering wheel.
Dan followed the van into the carpark. It still hadn’t settled on a bay, despite passing half a dozen empty spots, but maybe the driver wanted to get closer to the Indian take-away at the far end of the strip. He stayed well behind, but decided not to risk parking yet, gesturing to an approaching station wagon to take the bay that he seemed to be coveting.
The van stopped beside a dumpster. The lid was propped up, angled low enough to keep out the elements but still leaving an opening at the side so large that all but the most uncoordinated members of the public who lobbed their trash in as they drove past would stand a good chance of succeeding.
The hatch opened at the side of the van, and Graham’s pristine white box emerged, riding on a gleaming stainless steel plate. When the platform was fully extended the box sat motionless, and Dan clung for a moment to a vision of the rightful recipient, appearing from nowhere in a designer hoodie to snatch up their prized fetish-dessert and dash from the carpark to a limousine waiting on the street. Perhaps a whole convoy of limousines, with decoys to render pursuit impossible.
But then some hidden mechanism gave the box a push and it toppled in to join the chicken bones and greasy napkins.
9
“We’ll move in with my mother,” Janice decided.
“She has one spare room. Which she uses for storage.” Dan could feel his sweat dampening the sheet beneath him. The night wasn’t all that warm, but his body had started drenching his skin at random moments, for no reason he could fathom.
“We can deal with the junk,” Janice said. “She’ll be glad to have it tidied up. I can sleep in the spare bed with Carlie, and you can sleep on the couch. It will only be for a couple of months.”
“How do you know she’ll even agree to have us?”
“Do you think she’d let her granddaughter sleep in a car?”
“Do you think I would?” Dan replied.
Janice pursed her lips reprovingly. “Don’t twist my words around. I know you’ve done everything you can. And I know I have too – which doesn’t make me feel any less guilty, but it makes it easier for me to swallow my pride. If we’d pissed all our savings away on … whatever the government’s brilliant algorithm thinks our vices are … then I’d probably be tearing my hair out in self-loathing while I tried to keep my voice calm on the phone to her, begging for that room. But we’ve done nothing wrong. We need to be clear about that, for the sake of our own sanity, then take whatever the next step is that will keep a roof over our heads.”
#
Dan must have fallen asleep around three, because when he woke at a quarter past four, he felt the special, wretched tiredness that was worse than not having slept at all.
He rose and walked out of the bedroom. In the living room, he switched on his laptop and squinted painfully at the sudden brightness of the screen. He went through the ritual of checking the JobSeekers site, TaskRabbit, and a dozen other places that supposedly offered business and employment opportunities, but – once you weeded out the pyramid schemes and the outright phishing scams – never seemed to carry anything legitimate for which he had the skills or the capital.
His mail program beeped softly. He kept his eyes averted from the alert that came and went on the upper right of the screen; he didn’t want to know about yet another plea from one of the charities he’d stopped supporting. What did he actually bring to the world, now? If he disappeared at this moment, it would be as if the air had closed in on empty space.
He opened the program to delete the unread message, but he didn’t succeed in going through the motions without seeing the sender. The email was from Baker and Saunders, the American law firm. The subject line read: Settlement offer.
Dan opened the message. His eyes were still bleary; he had to enlarge the text to read it. Deepity Systems were prepared to settle out of court. They were offering a payment of thirty thousand dollars per year, for five years, to every single litigant in Dan’s age and skill cohort.
He re-read the message a dozen times, searching for the downside: the toxic fine print that would turn the victory sour. But he couldn’t find it. He opened the attachment, the formal agreement the lawyers had drafted; it was five times longer than the summary, and ten times harder to follow, but there’d been a time when he’d been used to reading financial contracts, and none of the language set alarm bells ringing.
Just before dawn, Janice emerged from the bedroom.
“What are you looking at?” she asked, sitting beside him.
He switched back to the body of the email and slid the laptop across so she could read it. He watched her frowning in disbelief as the scale of the offer sank in.
“Is this real?”
Dan was silent for a while. It was a good question, and he needed to be honest with her.
“If I sign this,” he said, “then I believe we’ll get the money they’re promising. The only thing I’m not sure about is … why.”
“What do you mean? Presumably they’re afraid that the courts might make them pay even more.”
Dan said, “If you were a tech mogul, what would your fantasy of the near-term future be?”
“Colonies on Mars, apparently.”
“Sticking to Earth, for now.”
Janice was losing patience, but she played along. “I don’t know. That business keeps booming? That my stock options keep going through the roof?”
“But what if a large part of your business consists of selling things that put people out of work. Including many of the people who actually pay for the things you’re trying to sell.”
“Then you’ve screwed yourself, haven’t you?”
Dan said, “Unless you can find a way to keep your customers afloat. You could try to talk the wealthier governments into paying everyone a UBI – and sweeten it a bit by offering to pitch in with a bit more tax yourself. You and your machines become the largest sector of the economy; what used to be the labor force is reduced to the role of consumer, but the UBI plugs them into the loop and keeps the money circulating – without bread-lines, without riots in the street.”
“Well, they can dream on,” Janice replied. “Whatever Nina’s got going in Seville, that’s never going to be universal.”
“Of course not,” Dan agreed. “Between the politics, and the different ideas everyone has about personal responsibility, it’s never going to fly. Not as one size fits all. But you know, the computers at Thriftocracy always managed to find a repayment plan that suited every client. Once you’ve gathered enough information about someone, if your goal isn’t actually harmful to them you can usually find a way of repackaging it that they’re willing to swallow.”
Janice was fully awake now. “Are you about to pull some kind of Callum on me?”
Dan shook his head. “I don’t think it’s even a conspiracy, let alone a plan that the computers dreamed up all by themselves. But Thriftocracy didn’t need anyone conspiring in order to start managing people. Th
ey just offered a service that met other companies’ needs. If enough tech firms believe they can benefit from novel ways of limiting the blow-back as they hollow out the middle class, achieving that will become an industry in its own right.”
“So … they organize law suits against themselves?”
“Why not? Especially when they’ll never go to court.” Dan glanced admiringly at the agreement the bots had crafted. There might have been tens of thousands of people in the class action, but it wouldn’t have surprised him if the language of this particular document had been tailored for his eyes alone. “They can’t quite achieve what they really aspire to, but they’re smart enough to understand that the only way to get close is to feed us some version of our own fantasies. They had me pegged, near enough: I would have been happy to win a legal battle against the fuckers who took my job away. But they’re more than willing to customize their approach, and if Chalice’s mother wants to think she’s a fashion icon whose every doodle on her tablet starts clothing factories humming in China, or Graham needs to believe he has a patron hanging out for every word that pops into his head about naughty teenagers, if it gets the job done, so be it. I suppose they must have judged Callum to be too paranoid to accept their hand-outs without becoming suspicious, so they tried to turn that into an advantage and at least give him a sense of purpose and a bit of support from a like-minded community. Then I came blundering in and spoiled it with the horrible, horrible truth.”
Janice rubbed her eyes, still not really sold on his own paranoid vision, but not quite certain, either, that he was wrong.
She said, “So what do you want to do?”
Dan laughed. “Want? We have no choice. If we don’t take this money, your mother will have stabbed me through the arm with a carving knife before the end of the school term.”
10
Once the settlement was finalized and the first tranche was in Dan’s bank account, the ads soon followed. They followed him to every web site, however many times he purged cookies, or rebooted his modem to get a fresh IP address.
“This watch will get your fitness back on track!” an avatar who looked a lot like the old, filtered version of Dan promised. “Come on, you’re not over the hill yet!” alter-Dan goaded him, running up and down steeply sloping streets until his manly stubble glistened and his resting heart rate plummeted.
“Three simultaneous channels of premium streaming entertainment, including Just For Kids, plus unlimited interactive gaming!” This from a woman who resembled Janice, to reassure him that there really was no need to consult her; like her doppelgänger, she was certain to approve.
Dan almost felt ungrateful, each time he declined to click through to a purchase. After all, wasn’t a tithe for his not-so-secret benefactors the new definition of giving something back?
Janice found a volunteer position with a homelessness charity, tending to people who’d had surgery but whose post-operative recovery was adversely affected by a lack of food, showers and beds. Dan offered his own services to the same group, but since he had no relevant skills and their rosters were full, they declined. He looked into an organization that did odd jobs and gardening for pensioners, but then realized they were just undercutting the paid market.
The money, while it lasted, would keep his family out of poverty, but it wasn’t enough to pay for any kind of formal retraining. Dan scoured the web, looking at free online courses, trying to decide if any of them would actually render him employable. Apparently, he could learn to be proficient in all the latest programming languages and data mining methods in as little as twelve months, but everyone else from Bangalore to Zambia had already jumped on that bandwagon. And how many software engineers did it take to skill-clone a million software engineers? No more than it took to clone just one.
#
On his way to pick up Carlie, Dan saw the windshield-wiping Dalmatian waving its squeegee from the side of the road.
He slowed the car, reluctantly, knowing he’d feel bad whatever he did. He still hadn’t restarted his donations to Médecins Sans Frontières; on any sane analysis, the family’s new budget just didn’t stretch that far, however worthy the cause. But the bedraggled mutt pushed some button in him that even footage of a malarial child couldn’t reach.
He waited for the dog to finish its slapdash routine, more a ritual than a service. The stitching was coming apart on the costume, leaving one of the eyes dangling, and there were burrs all over the parts of the material where it hadn’t worn too thin to hold on to them.
Dan fished a five-dollar bill out of his wallet. As the exchange took place, he reached out with his other hand and squeezed the dog’s forearm in what he’d meant as a gesture of solidarity. His fingers came together as they pushed against the dirty fabric, until they encircled a hard, slender rod.
He let go of the bill, and the dog waited, silent and motionless, for Dan to release his grip. Dan peered into the dark maw of its mouth, from which he’d always imagined the occupant was peering out, but as his eyes adapted he could see all the way to the back of the vacant head.
What was inside the costume, below, out of sight? A metal armature, a few motors, a battery, and an old smart phone running it all?
Dan let go of the dog’s arm. “Good for you,” he said, wondering if the thing’s ingenious creator would ever hear his words, but maybe the software extracted a few highlights to replay at the end of each day. He didn’t feel cheated; whoever would be getting his money probably needed it just as much as if they’d been here to collect it in person.
At the school gate, Dan still had trouble looking Graham in the eye. When Carlie ran up the path, he smiled and gave her his full attention, blocking out everything else.
“So how was school today?” he asked, as they walked toward the car.
“All right.”
“Just all right?”
“Ms Snowball’s really boring,” she complained.
“Boring?” Dan gazed down at his daughter, mock-aghast. “You don’t want to hurt her feelings, do you?”
Carlie glared back at him, unamused. “I want Ms Jameson to come back.”
“That’s not going to happen.” The trial was over, but the budgetary savings were locked in. A teaching assistant could watch over three classes at once, for far less than the cost of a human teacher for each.
On the drive home, Dan tried to picture the life Carlie would face. For the last few weeks, all he’d been able to envision was a choice between the family joining a commune in Nimbin to weave their own underwear out of hemp, or resigning themselves to their role laundering money for Silicon Valley.
They approached the Dalmatian, which waved cheerfully.
“Daddy, can we—?”
“Sorry, I already did.” Dan gestured at the streaked suds still drying on the windshield.
Then he said, “How’d you like to learn to make Ms Snowball’s head come off?”
“You’re silly.”
“No, I’m serious! How’d you like to learn to make her do whatever you want?” Either they moved out into the countryside and became subsistence farmers, or they stayed and fought to regain some kind of agency, using the only weapons that worked now. The idea that every person in the world ought to learn to code had always struck Dan as an infuriating piece of proselytizing, as bizarre as being told that everyone just had to shut up and become Rastafarian. But in the zombie apocalypse, no one ever complained that they needed to learn to sharpen sticks and drive them into rotting brains. It wasn’t a matter of cultural homogeneity. It was a question of knowing how to fuck with your enemy.
“Do you really know how to do that?” Carlie asked.
“Not yet,” Dan confessed. “But I think that if we work hard, we’ll be able to figure it out together.”
ZERO FOR CONDUCT
1
Latifa started the web page loading, then went to make tea. The proxy she used convinced her internet provider that every page she accessed belonged to a compendium o
f pious aphorisms from uncontroversial octogenarians in Qom, while to the sites themselves she appeared to be a peripatetic American, logging on from Pittsburgh one day and Kansas City the next. Between the sanctions against her true host country and that host’s paranoia over the most innocent interactions with the West, these precautions were essential. But they slowed down her already sluggish connection so effectively that she might as well have been rehearsing for a flight to Mars.
The sound of boiling water offered a brief respite from the televised football match blaring down from the apartment above. “Two nil in favor of the Black Pearls, with fifteen minutes left to play! It’s looking like victory for the home team here in Samen Stadium!” When the tea had brewed, she served it in a small glass for her grandfather to sip through a piece of hard sugar clenched between his teeth. Latifa sat with him for a while, but he was listening to the shortwave radio, straining to hear Kabul through the hum of interference and the breathless commentary coming through the ceiling, and he barely noticed when she left.
Back in her room after fifteen minutes, she found the scratched screen of the laptop glistening with a dozen shiny ball-and-stick models of organic molecules. Reading the color coding of the atoms was second nature to her by now: white for hydrogen, black for carbon, cherry red for oxygen, azure for nitrogen. Here and there a yellow sulfur atom or a green chlorine stood out, like a chickpea in a barrel of candy.
All the molecules that the ChemFactor page had assigned to her were nameless – unless you counted the formal structural descriptions full of cis-1,3-dimethyl-this and 2,5-di-tert-butyl-that – and Latifa had no idea which, if any of them, had actually been synthesized in a lab somewhere. Perhaps a few of them were impossible beasts, chimeras cranked out by the software’s mindless permutations, destined to be completely unstable in reality. If she made an effort, she could probably weed some of them out. But that could wait until she’d narrowed down the list of candidates, eliminating the molecules with no real chance of binding strongly to the target.