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a/data/samples/_sisu/image/won_benkler_9_1.png b/data/samples/_sisu/image/won_benkler_9_1.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..814ed19 Binary files /dev/null and b/data/samples/_sisu/image/won_benkler_9_1.png differ diff --git a/data/samples/_sisu/image/won_benkler_book.png b/data/samples/_sisu/image/won_benkler_book.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..986e17e Binary files /dev/null and b/data/samples/_sisu/image/won_benkler_book.png differ diff --git a/data/samples/_sisu/skin/dir/skin_sisu.rb b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/dir/skin_sisu.rb new file mode 100644 index 0000000..bd2e2a5 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/dir/skin_sisu.rb @@ -0,0 +1,99 @@ +# coding: utf-8 +=begin + * Name: SiSU information Structuring Universe - Structured information, Serialized Units + * Author: Ralph@Amissah.com + * http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + * http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/SiSU/download + * Description: Document skin for SiSU descriptive pages, ... + * License: Same as SiSU see http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + * Notes: Site default appearance variables set in defaults.rb + Generic site wide modifications set here scribe_skin.rb, and this file required by other "scribes" instead of defaults.rb +=end +module SiSU_Viz + require SiSU_lib + '/defaults' + class Skin + #% widget + def widget_search + true + end + def widget_promo +#put s "#{__LINE__} #{__FILE__}" + #['sisu','ruby','sisu_search_libre','ruby','open_society'] + end + #% path + def path_root +#puts "#{__LINE__} #{__FILE__}" + './sisu/' # the only parameter that cannot be changed here + end + def path_rel +#puts "#{__LINE__} #{__FILE__}" + '../' + end + #% url + def url_home +#puts "#{__LINE__} #{__FILE__}" + 'http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/' + end + def url_site # used in pdf header +#puts "#{__LINE__} #{__FILE__}" + 'http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu' + end + def url_txt # text to go with url usually stripped url +#puts "#{__LINE__} #{__FILE__}" + 'www.jus.uio.no/sisu/' + end + def url_home_url +#puts "#{__LINE__} #{__FILE__}" + '../index.html' + end + #def url_root_http + #root server path info, used in document information + #end + #% color + def color_band1 + '"#ffffff"' + end + def color_band2 + '"#ffffff"' + end + #% text + def text_hp + ' SiSU' + end + def text_home + 'SiSU' + end + #% icon + def icon_home_button + 'sisu.png' + end + def icon_home_banner + icon_home_button + end + #% banner + def banner_home_button + %{
#{png_home}
\n} + end + def banner_home_and_index_buttons + %{
#{png_home}#{table_close}
 This text sub- 
 Table of Contents #{table_close}		 #{table_close}} + end + def banner_band + %{
#{png_home}#{table_close}} + end + end + class TeX + def header_center + "\\chead{\\href{#{@vz.url_site}/}{www.jus.uio.no/sisu/}}" + end + def home_url + "\\href{#{@vz.url_site}/}{www.jus.uio.no/sisu/}" + end + def home + "\\href{#{@vz.url_site}/}{Ralph Amissah}" + end + def owner_chapter + 'Document owner details' + end + end +end +__END__ diff --git a/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_2bits.rb b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_2bits.rb new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4cee523 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_2bits.rb @@ -0,0 +1,80 @@ +# coding: utf-8 +=begin + * Name: SiSU - Simple information Structuring Universe - Structured information, Serialized Units + * Author: Ralph Amissah + * http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + * http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/SiSU/download + * Description: Document skin used for Free as in Freedom + * License: Same as SiSU see http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + * Notes: Site default appearance variables set in defaults.rb + Generic site wide modifications set here scribe_skin.rb, and this file required by other "scribes" instead of defaults.rb +=end +module SiSU_Viz + require "#{SiSU_lib}/defaults" + class Skin + #% promo + def promo_promo + ['sisu_icon','sisu','sisu_search_libre','open_society','fsf','ruby'] + end + def url_home + 'http://twobits.net' + end + def url_site # used in pdf header + 'http://twobits.net' + end + def url_txt # text to go with url usually stripped url + 'twobits.net' + end + def url_home_url + '../index.html' + end + def color_band1 + '"#faf3bc"' + #'"#faf3a6"' + #'"#efe9b2"' + end + def txt_hp + 'Two Bits' + end + def txt_home # this should be the name of the site eg. Lex Mercatoria or if you prefer to see a url the url in text form copy & ... + 'Two Bits' + end + #% icon + def icon_home_button + '2bits.png' + end + def icon_home_banner + icon_home_button + end + #% banner + def banner_home_button + %{
#{png_home}
\n} + end + def banner_home_and_index_buttons + %{
#{png_home}#{table_close}
 This text sub- 
 Table of Contents #{table_close}		 #{table_close}} + end + def banner_band + %{
#{png_home}#{table_close}} + end + def banner_home_guide + end + #% credits + def credits_splash + %{
***
} + end + end + class TeX + def header_center + "\\chead{\\href{#{@vz.url_site}/}{www.jus.uio.no/sisu/}}" + end + def home_url + "\\href{#{@vz.url_site}/}{www.gnu.org}" + end + def home + "\\href{#{@vz.url_site}/}{GNU - Free Software Foundation}" + end + def owner_chapter + "Document owner details" + end + end +end diff --git a/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_accelerando_stross.rb b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_accelerando_stross.rb new file mode 100644 index 0000000..75cf6dd --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_accelerando_stross.rb @@ -0,0 +1,91 @@ +# coding: utf-8 +=begin + * Name: SiSU - Simple information Structuring Universe - Structured information, Serialized Units + * Author: Ralph Amissah + * http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + * http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/SiSU/download + * Description: Skin prepared for Accelerando, Charles Stross + * License: Same as SiSU see http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + * Notes: Site default appearance variables set in defaults.rb + Generic site wide modifications set here scribe_skin.rb, and this file required by other "scribes" instead of defaults.rb +=end +module SiSU_Viz + require SiSU_lib + '/defaults' + class Skin + #% path + def path_root # the only parameter that cannot be changed here + './sisu/' + end + def path_rel + '../' + end + #% url + def url_home + 'http://www.accelerando.org' + end + def url_txt # text to go with url usually stripped url + 'www.accelerando.org' + end + #% color + def color_band1 + '"#ffffff"' + end + #% text + def text_hp + 'www.accelerando.org' + end + def text_home + 'Accelerando' + end + #% icon + def icon_home_button + 'accelerando_stross.png' + end + def icon_home_banner + icon_home_button + end + #% banner + def banner_home_button + %{
#{png_home}
\n} + end + def banner_home_and_index_buttons + %{
#{png_home}
 This text sub- 
 Table of Contents #{table_close}		 #{table_close}} + end + def banner_band + %{
#{png_home}#{table_close}} + end + #% credits + def credits_splash + %{
+The author's original pdf is available at
www.accelerando.org
+available at
Amazon.com and
+Barnes & Noble
+This book is Copyright Charles Stross © 2005
+Under a Creative Commons License,
+Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0:
+* Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor;
+* Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes;
+* No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work;
+* For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. +
+<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/>
+These SiSU presentations of Accelerando are done with the kind permission of the author Charles Stross +
} + end + end + class TeX + def header_center + "\\chead{\\href{#{@vz.url_home}}{www.accelerando.org}}" + end + def home_url + "\\href{#{@vz.url_home}}{www.accelerando.org}" + end + def home + "\\href{#{@vz.url_home}}{Accelerando}" + end + def owner_chapter + "Document owner details" + end + end +end +__END__ diff --git a/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_content.rb b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_content.rb new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9ca3c0a --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_content.rb @@ -0,0 +1,95 @@ +# coding: utf-8 +=begin + * Name: SiSU - Simple information Structuring Universe - Structured information, Serialized Units + * Author: Ralph Amissah + * http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + * http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/SiSU/download + * Description: Skin prepared for Little Brother, Cory Doctorow + * License: Same as SiSU see http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + * Notes: Site default appearance variables set in defaults.rb + Generic site wide modifications set here scribe_skin.rb, and this file required by other "scribes" instead of defaults.rb +=end +module SiSU_Viz + require SiSU_lib + '/defaults' + class Skin + #% path + def path_root # the only parameter that cannot be changed here + './sisu/' + end + def path_rel + '../' + end + #% url + def url_home + 'http://craphound.com/content' + end + def url_author + 'http://craphound.com' + end + def url_txt # text to go with url usually stripped url + 'craphound.com/content' + end + #% color + def color_band1 + '"#ffffff"' + end + #% text + def text_hp + 'craphound.com/content' + end + def text_home + 'CONTENT' + end + #% icon + def icon_home_button + 'content_doctorow.png' + end + def icon_home_banner + icon_home_button + end + #% banner + def banner_home_button + %{
#{png_home}
\n} + end + def banner_home_and_index_buttons + %{
#{png_home}
 This text sub- 
 Table of Contents #{table_close}		 #{table_close}} + end + def banner_band + %{
+

CONTENT

+

Cory Doctorow

+ #{table_close}} + end + #% credits + def credits_splash + %{
+The author's original pdf is available at
craphound.com/content
+available at
Amazon.com and
+Barnes & Noble
+This book is Copyright Cory Doctorow © 2008
+Under a Creative Commons License,
+Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0:
+* Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work);
+* Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes;
+* Share Alike - If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one. +
+<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/>
+
} + end + end + class TeX + def header_center + "\\chead{\\href{#{@vz.url_home}}{craphound.com/content}}" + end + def home_url + "\\href{#{@vz.url_home}}{craphound.com/content}" + end + def home + "\\href{#{@vz.url_home}}{CONTENT}" + end + def owner_chapter + "Document owner details" + end + end +end +__END__ diff --git a/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_di_von_hippel.rb b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_di_von_hippel.rb new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3448e58 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_di_von_hippel.rb @@ -0,0 +1,78 @@ +# coding: utf-8 +=begin + * Name: SiSU - Simple information Structuring Universe - Structured information, Serialized Units + * Author: Ralph Amissah + * http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + * http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/SiSU/download + * Description: Skin prepared for Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel + * License: Same as SiSU see http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + * Notes: Site default appearance variables set in defaults.rb + Generic site wide modifications set here scribe_skin.rb, and this file required by other "scribes" instead of defaults.rb +=end +module SiSU_Viz + require SiSU_lib + '/defaults' + class Skin + #def path_root # the only parameter that cannot be changed here + # './sisu/' + #end + #def rel + # '../' + #end + def url_home + 'http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/' + #'http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/democ1.htm' + end + def url_txt # text to go with url usually stripped url + 'web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/' + end + def color_band1 + '"#ffffff"' + end + def txt_hp + 'web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/' + end + def txt_home + 'Eric von Hippel' + end + def icon_home_button + 'di_evh.png' + end + def icon_home_banner + icon_home_button + end + def banner_home_button + %{
#{png_home}
\n} + end + def banner_home_and_index_buttons + %{
#{png_home}
 This text sub- 
 Table of Contents #{table_close}		 #{table_close}} + end + def banner_band + %{
#{png_home}#{table_close}} + end + def credits_splash + %{
+The original pdf is available online at
web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/
+
+available at
Amazon.com and
+Barnes & Noble
+This book is Copyright Eric von Hippel © 2005
+Under a Creative Commons License, License: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works (CC-BY-NC-ND) 2.0 +http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/
} + end + end + class TeX + def header_center + "\\chead{\\href{#{@vz.url_home}}{web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/}}" + end + def home_url + "\\href{#{@vz.url_home}}{web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/}" + end + def home + "\\href{#{@vz.url_home}}{Eric von Hippel}" + end + def owner_chapter + "Document owner details" + end + end +end +__END__ diff --git a/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_for_the_win.rb b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_for_the_win.rb new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6d82e6c --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_for_the_win.rb @@ -0,0 +1,94 @@ +# coding: utf-8 +=begin + * Name: SiSU - Simple information Structuring Universe - Structured information, Serialized Units + * Author: Ralph Amissah + * http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + * http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/SiSU/download + * Description: Skin prepared for Little Brother, Cory Doctorow + * License: Same as SiSU see http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + * Notes: Site default appearance variables set in defaults.rb + Generic site wide modifications set here scribe_skin.rb, and this file required by other "scribes" instead of defaults.rb +=end +module SiSU_Viz + require SiSU_lib + '/defaults' + class Skin + #% path + def path_root # the only parameter that cannot be changed here + './sisu/' + end + def path_rel + '../' + end + #% url + def url_home + 'http://craphound.com/ftw' + end + def url_author + 'http://craphound.com' + end + def url_txt # text to go with url usually stripped url + 'craphound.com/ftw' + end + #% color + def color_band1 + '"#ffffff"' + end + #% text + def text_hp + 'craphound.com/ftw' + end + def text_home + 'For The Win' + end + #% icon + def icon_home_button + 'for_the_win_doctorow.png' + end + def icon_home_banner + icon_home_button + end + #% banner + def banner_home_button + %{
#{png_home}
\n} + end + def banner_home_and_index_buttons + %{
#{png_home}
 This text sub- 
 Table of Contents #{table_close}		 #{table_close}} + end + def banner_band + %{
+

For The Win

+

Cory Doctorow

+ #{table_close}} + end + #def banner_band + # %{
#{png_home}#{table_close}} + #end + #% credits + def credits_splash + %{
+The author's original pdf is available at
craphound.com/ftw
+available at
Amazon.com and
+Barnes & Noble
+This book is Copyright Cory Doctorow © 2010
+Under a Creative Commons License,
+Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0:
+<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/>
+
} + end + end + class TeX + def header_center + "\\chead{\\href{#{@vz.url_home}}{craphound.com/ftw}}" + end + def home_url + "\\href{#{@vz.url_home}}{craphound.com/ftw}" + end + def home + "\\href{#{@vz.url_home}}{For The Win}" + end + def owner_chapter + "Document owner details" + end + end +end +__END__ diff --git a/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_gnu.rb b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_gnu.rb new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8ac3822 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_gnu.rb @@ -0,0 +1,88 @@ +# coding: utf-8 +=begin + * Name: SiSU - Simple information Structuring Universe - Structured information, Serialized Units + * Author: Ralph Amissah + * http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + * http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/SiSU/download + * Description: Free Software Foundation, Gnu sisu skin + * License: Same as SiSU see http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + * Notes: Site default appearance variables set in defaults.rb + Generic site wide modifications set here scribe_skin.rb, and this file required by other "scribes" instead of defaults.rb +=end +module SiSU_Viz + require SiSU_lib + '/defaults' + class Skin + #% widget + def widget_promo + # ['sisu_icon','sisu','sisu_search_libre','open_society','fsf','ruby'] + end + #% home + def home_index + end + def home_toc + end + #% path + def path_root + './sisu/' # the only parameter that cannot be changed here + end + def path_rel + '../' + end + #% url + def url_home + 'http://www.fsf.org' + end + def url_site # used in pdf header + 'http://www.fsf.org' + end + def url_txt # text to go with url usually stripped url + 'www.fsf.org' + end + def url_home_url + '../index.html' + end + # color + def color_band1 + '"#000070"' + end + #% txt + def txt_hp + 'Free Software Foundation' + end + def txt_home # this should be the name of the site eg. Lex Mercatoria or if you prefer to see a url the url in text form copy & ... + #"www.jus.uio.no/sisu/" + 'Free Software Foundation' + end + #% icon + def icon_home_button + 'philosophical_gnu.png' + end + def icon_home_banner + icion_home_button + end + #% banner + def banner_home_button + %{
#{png_home}
\n} + end + def banner_home_and_index_buttons + %{
#{png_home}#{table_close}
 This text sub- 
 Table of Contents #{table_close}		 #{table_close}} + end + def banner_band + %{
#{png_home}#{table_close}} + end + end + class TeX + def header_center + "\\chead{\\href{#{@vz.url_site}/}{www.jus.uio.no/sisu/}}" + end + def home_url + "\\href{#{@vz.url_site}/}{www.fsf.org}" + end + def home + "\\href{#{@vz.url_site}/}{Free Software Foundation}" + end + def owner_chapter + "Document owner details" + end + end +end diff --git a/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_gutenberg.rb b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_gutenberg.rb new file mode 100644 index 0000000..148fbae --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_gutenberg.rb @@ -0,0 +1,216 @@ +# coding: utf-8 +=begin + * Name: SiSU - Simple information Structuring Universe - Structured information, Serialized Units + * Author: Ralph Amissah + * http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + * http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/SiSU/download + * Description: Document skin sample prepared for Gutenberg Project (first used with "War and Peace") + * License: Same as SiSU see http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + * Notes: Site default appearance variables set in defaults.rb + Generic site wide modifications set here scribe_skin.rb, and this file required by other "scribes" instead of defaults.rb +=end +module SiSU_Viz + require "#{SiSU_lib}/defaults" + class Skin + #% path + def path_root # the only parameter that cannot be changed here + './sisu/' + end + def path_rel + '../' + end + #% url + def url_home + 'http://www.gutenberg.net' + end + def url_txt # text to go with url usually stripped url + 'www.gutenberg.net' + end + #% txt + def txt_hp + 'www.gutenberg.net' + end + def txt_home + 'Gutenberg Project' + end + #% icon + def icon_home_button + 'gutenberg.home.png' + end + def icon_home_banner + icon_home_button + end + #% banner + def banner_home_button + %{
#{png_home}
\n} + end + def banner_home_and_index_buttons + %{
#{png_home}
 This text sub- 
 Table of Contents 
 
} + end + def banner_band + %{
#{png_home}#{table_close}} + end + #% credits + def credits_splash + %{
Gutenberg Project
Courtesy of The Gutenberg Project
} + end + end + class TeX + def header_center + "\\chead{\\href{#{@vz.url_home}}{www.gutenberg.net}}" + end + def home_url + "\\href{#{@vz.url_home}}{www.gutenberg.net}" + end + def home + "\\href{#{@vz.url_home}}{Gutenberg Project}" + end + def owner_chapter + "Document owner details" + end + end + class Inserts + def insert1 +< + +CONTENTS + end + end +end + diff --git a/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_lessig.rb b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_lessig.rb new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0e2be20 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_lessig.rb @@ -0,0 +1,78 @@ +# coding: utf-8 +=begin + * Name: SiSU - Simple information Structuring Universe - Structured information, Serialized Units + * Author: Ralph Amissah + * http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + * http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/SiSU/download + * Description: Skin prepared for Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig + * arch-tag: skin for an individual document set (lessig - freeculture) + * License: Same as SiSU see http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + * $Date$ + * $Id$ + * Notes: Site default appearance variables set in defaults.rb + Generic site wide modifications set here scribe_skin.rb, and this file required by other "scribes" instead of defaults.rb +=end +module SiSU_Viz + require SiSU_lib + '/defaults' + class Skin + #def path_root # the only parameter that cannot be changed here + # './sisu/' + #end + #def path_rel + # '../' + #end + #def url_hp # used by wmap, get rid of ie make it seek home instead + # 'http://www.free-culture.cc/' + #end + def url_home + 'http://www.free-culture.cc' + end + def url_txt # text to go with url usually stripped url + 'www.lessig.org' + end + #def url_root_http + #root server path info, used in document information + #end + def color_band1 + '"#000000"' + end + def txt_hp + 'www.lessig.org' + end + def txt_home + 'Lawrence Lessig' + end + def icon_home_button + 'freeculture.home.png' + end + def icon_home_banner + icon_home_button + end + def banner_home_button + %{
#{png_home}
\n} + end + def banner_home_and_index_buttons + %{
#{png_home}
 This text sub- 
 Table of Contents #{table_close}		 #{table_close}} + end + def banner_band + %{
#{png_home}#{table_close}} + end + def credits_splash + %{
Free Culture Bar Code
Available at Amazon.com
Free Culture at Amazon.com
This book is Copyright Lawrence Lessig © 2004
Under a Creative Commons License, that permits non-commercial use of this work, provided attribution is given.
See http://www.free-culture.cc/
lessig@pobox.com
} + end + end + class TeX + def header_center + "\\chead{\\href{#{@vz.url_home}}{lessig.org}}" + end + def home_url + "\\href{#{@vz.url_home}}{lessig.org}" + end + def home + "\\href{#{@vz.url_home}}{Lawrence Lessig}" + end + def owner_chapter + "Document owner details" + end + end +end diff --git a/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_little_brother.rb b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_little_brother.rb new file mode 100644 index 0000000..751fba0 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_little_brother.rb @@ -0,0 +1,89 @@ +# coding: utf-8 +=begin + * Name: SiSU - Simple information Structuring Universe - Structured information, Serialized Units + * Author: Ralph Amissah + * http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + * http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/SiSU/download + * Description: Skin prepared for Little Brother, Cory Doctorow + * License: Same as SiSU see http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + * Notes: Site default appearance variables set in defaults.rb + Generic site wide modifications set here scribe_skin.rb, and this file required by other "scribes" instead of defaults.rb +=end +module SiSU_Viz + require SiSU_lib + '/defaults' + class Skin + #% path + def path_root # the only parameter that cannot be changed here + './sisu/' + end + def path_rel + '../' + end + #% url + def url_home + 'http://craphound.com/littlebrother' + end + def url_txt # text to go with url usually stripped url + 'craphound.com/littlebrother' + end + #% color + def color_band1 + '"#ffffff"' + end + #% text + def text_hp + 'craphound.com/littlebrother' + end + def text_home + 'Little Brother' + end + #% icon + def icon_home_button + 'little_brother_doctorow.png' + end + def icon_home_banner + icon_home_button + end + #% banner + def banner_home_button + %{
#{png_home}
\n} + end + def banner_home_and_index_buttons + %{
#{png_home}
 This text sub- 
 Table of Contents #{table_close}		 #{table_close}} + end + def banner_band + %{
#{png_home}#{table_close}} + end + #% credits + def credits_splash + %{
+The author's original pdf is available at
craphound.com/littlebrother
+available at
Amazon.com and
+Barnes & Noble
+This book is Copyright Cory Doctorow © 2008
+Under a Creative Commons License,
+Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0:
+* Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work);
+* Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes;
+* Share Alike - If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one. +
+<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/>
+
} + end + end + class TeX + def header_center + "\\chead{\\href{#{@vz.url_home}}{craphound.com/littlebrother}}" + end + def home_url + "\\href{#{@vz.url_home}}{craphound.com/littlebrother}" + end + def home + "\\href{#{@vz.url_home}}{Little Brother}" + end + def owner_chapter + "Document owner details" + end + end +end +__END__ diff --git a/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_magic_kingdom.rb b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_magic_kingdom.rb new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b000239 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_magic_kingdom.rb @@ -0,0 +1,94 @@ +# coding: utf-8 +=begin + * Name: SiSU - Simple information Structuring Universe - Structured information, Serialized Units + * Author: Ralph Amissah + * http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + * http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/SiSU/download + * Description: Skin prepared for Little Brother, Cory Doctorow + * License: Same as SiSU see http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + * Notes: Site default appearance variables set in defaults.rb + Generic site wide modifications set here scribe_skin.rb, and this file required by other "scribes" instead of defaults.rb +=end +module SiSU_Viz + require SiSU_lib + '/defaults' + class Skin + #% path + def path_root # the only parameter that cannot be changed here + './sisu/' + end + def path_rel + '../' + end + #% url + def url_home + 'http://craphound.com/down' + end + def url_author + 'http://craphound.com' + end + def url_txt # text to go with url usually stripped url + 'craphound.com/down' + end + #% color + def color_band1 + '"#ffffff"' + end + #% text + def text_hp + 'craphound.com/down' + end + def text_home + 'Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom' + end + #% icon + def icon_home_button + 'magic_kingdom_doctorow.png' + end + def icon_home_banner + icon_home_button + end + #% banner + def banner_home_button + %{
#{png_home}
\n} + end + def banner_home_and_index_buttons + %{
#{png_home}
 This text sub- 
 Table of Contents #{table_close}		 #{table_close}} + end + def banner_band + %{
+

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

+

Cory Doctorow

+ #{table_close}} + end + #def banner_band + # %{
#{png_home}#{table_close}} + #end + #% credits + def credits_splash + %{
+The author's original pdf is available at
craphound.com/down
+available at
Amazon.com and
+Barnes & Noble
+This book is Copyright Cory Doctorow © 2003
+Under a Creative Commons License,
+Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0
+<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/>
+
} + end + end + class TeX + def header_center + "\\chead{\\href{#{@vz.url_home}}{craphound.com/down}}" + end + def home_url + "\\href{#{@vz.url_home}}{craphound.com/down}" + end + def home + "\\href{#{@vz.url_home}}{Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom}" + end + def owner_chapter + "Document owner details" + end + end +end +__END__ diff --git a/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_rms.rb b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_rms.rb new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0f3e7d3 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_rms.rb @@ -0,0 +1,101 @@ +# coding: utf-8 +=begin + * Name: SiSU - Simple information Structuring Universe - Structured information, Serialized Units + * Author: Ralph Amissah + * http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + * http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/SiSU/download + * Description: Document skin used for Free as in Freedom + * License: Same as SiSU see http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + * Notes: Site default appearance variables set in defaults.rb + Generic site wide modifications set here scribe_skin.rb, and this file required by other "scribes" instead of defaults.rb +=end +module SiSU_Viz + require "#{SiSU_lib}/defaults" + class Skin + #% promo + def promo_promo + ['sisu_icon','sisu','sisu_search_libre','open_society','fsf','ruby'] + end + ##% home + #def home_index + #end + #def home_toc + #end + ##% path + #def path_root # the only parameter that cannot be changed here + # './sisu/' + #end + #def path_rel + # '../' + #end + #% url + def url_home + 'http://www.gnu.org' + end + def url_site # used in pdf header + 'http://www.gnu.org' + end + def url_txt # text to go with url usually stripped url + 'www.gnu.org' + end + def url_home_url + '../index.html' + end + #def url_root_http + #root server path info, used in document information + #end + #% color + def color_band1 + '"#cccccc"' + #'"#000070"' + end + #% txt + def txt_hp + 'Free as in Freedom' + end + def txt_home # this should be the name of the site eg. Lex Mercatoria or if you prefer to see a url the url in text form copy & ... + #"www.jus.uio.no/sisu/" + 'Free as in Freedom' + end + #% icon + def icon_home_button + 'free_as_in_freedom.png' + end + def icon_home_banner + icon_home_button + end + #% banner + def banner_home_button + %{
#{png_home}
\n} + end + def banner_home_and_index_buttons + %{
#{png_home}#{table_close}
 This text sub- 
 Table of Contents #{table_close}		 #{table_close}} + end + def banner_band + %{
#{png_home}#{table_close}} + end + def banner_home_guide + end + #% credits + def insert_levitating_gnu #used locally this skin only + %{
RMS/FSF - Levitating Gnu -->
} + end + def credits_splash + %{
#{insert_levitating_gnu}
} + end + end + class TeX + def header_center + "\\chead{\\href{#{@vz.url_site}/}{www.jus.uio.no/sisu/}}" + end + def home_url + "\\href{#{@vz.url_site}/}{www.gnu.org}" + end + def home + "\\href{#{@vz.url_site}/}{GNU - Free Software Foundation}" + end + def owner_chapter + "Document owner details" + end + end +end diff --git a/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_vs_david_bollier.rb b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_vs_david_bollier.rb new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d357797 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_vs_david_bollier.rb @@ -0,0 +1,77 @@ +# coding: utf-8 +=begin + * Name: SiSU - Simple information Structuring Universe - Structured information, Serialized Units + * Author: Ralph Amissah + * http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + * http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/SiSU/download + * Description: Skin prepared for Viral Spiral, David Bollier + * License: Same as SiSU see http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + * Notes: Site default appearance variables set in defaults.rb + Generic site wide modifications set here scribe_skin.rb, and this file required by other "scribes" instead of defaults.rb +=end +module SiSU_Viz + require SiSU_lib + '/defaults' + class Skin + def url_home + 'http://viralspiral.cc/' + end + def url_txt # text to go with url usually stripped url + 'viralspiral.cc' + end + def url_author + 'http://www.bollier.org/' + end + def color_band1 + '"#ffffff"' + end + def txt_hp + 'viralspiral.cc' + end + def txt_home + 'David Bollier' + end + def icon_home_button + '' + end + def icon_home_banner + icon_home_button + end + def banner_home_button + %{
#{png_home}
\n} + end + def banner_home_and_index_buttons + %{
#{png_home}
 This text sub- 
 Table of Contents #{table_close}		 #{table_close}} + end + def banner_band + %{
+

Viral Spiral

+

David Bollier

+ #{table_close}} + end + def credits_splash + %{
+Viral Spiral, David Bollier
+The original pdf is available online at
#{url_txt}
+available at
Amazon.com and
+Barnes & Noble
+This book is Copyright David Bollier © 2008
+Under a Creative Commons License, License: Attribution-Noncommercial Works (CC-BY-NC) 3.0 +http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
} + end + end + class TeX + def header_center + "\\chead{\\href{#{@vz.url_home}}{#{@vz.url_txt}}}" + end + def home_url + "\\href{#{@vz.url_home}}{#{@vz.url_txt}}" + end + def home + "\\href{#{@vz.url_home}}{David Bollier}" + end + def owner_chapter + "Document owner details" + end + end +end +__END__ diff --git a/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_wayner.rb b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_wayner.rb new file mode 100644 index 0000000..cfc761e --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_wayner.rb @@ -0,0 +1,95 @@ +# coding: utf-8 +=begin + * Name: SiSU - Simple information Structuring Universe - Structured information, Serialized Units + * Author: Ralph Amissah + * http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + * http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/SiSU/download + * Description: Document skin for "Free For All" + * arch-tag: skin for an individual document set (wayner) + * License: Same as SiSU see http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + * $Date$ + * $Id$ + * Notes: Site default appearance variables set in defaults.rb + Generic site wide modifications set here scribe_skin.rb, and this file required by other "scribes" instead of defaults.rb +=end +module SiSU_Viz + require "#{SiSU_lib}/defaults" + class Skin + #% path + def path_root # the only parameter that cannot be changed here + './sisu/' + end + def path_rel + '../' + end + #% url + #def url_hp # used by wmap, get rid of ie make it seek home instead + # 'http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa/' + #end + def url_home + 'http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa/' + end + def url_txt # text to go with url usually stripped url + 'www.wayner.org' + end + #def url_root_http + #root server path info, used in document information + #end + #% color + def color_band1 + '"#000070"' + end + #% txt + def txt_hp + 'www.wayner.org' + end + def txt_home + 'Peter Wayner' + end + #% icon + def icon_home_button + 'wayner.home.png' + end + def icon_home_banner + icon_home_button + end + def icon_next + 'arrow_next_blue.png' + end + def icon_previous + 'arrow_prev_blue.png' + end + def icon_up + 'arrow_up_blue.png' + end + #% banner + def banner_home_button + %{
#{png_home}
\n} + end + def banner_home_and_index_buttons + %{
#{png_home}
 This text sub- 
 Table of Contents 
 
} + end + def banner_band + %{
#{png_home}#{table_close}} + end + #% credits + def credits_splash + %{
Available at Amazon.com
Free For All at Amazon.com
This book is Copyright © 2000 by Peter Wayner.
See http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa/
p3@wayner.org
} + end + end + class TeX + def header_center + "\\chead{\\href{#{@vz.url_home}}{www.wayner.org}}" + end + def home_url + "\\href{#{@vz.url_home}}{www.wayner.org}" + end + def home + "\\href{#{@vz.url_home}}{Peter Wayner}" + end + def owner_chapter + "Document owner details" + end + end +end +__END__ diff --git a/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_won_benkler.rb b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_won_benkler.rb new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f883045 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/doc/skin_won_benkler.rb @@ -0,0 +1,78 @@ +# coding: utf-8 +=begin + * Name: SiSU - Simple information Structuring Universe - Structured information, Serialized Units + * Author: Ralph Amissah + * http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + * http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/SiSU/download + * Description: Skin prepared for The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler + * License: Same as SiSU see http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + * Notes: Site default appearance variables set in defaults.rb + Generic site wide modifications set here scribe_skin.rb, and this file required by other "scribes" instead of defaults.rb +=end +module SiSU_Viz + require SiSU_lib + '/defaults' + class Skin + #def path_root # the only parameter that cannot be changed here + # './sisu/' + #end + #def rel + # '../' + #end + def url_home + 'http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/wealth_of_networks/Main_Page' + #'http://www.benkler.org' + end + def url_txt # text to go with url usually stripped url + 'www.benkler.org' + end + def color_band1 + '"#ffffff"' + end + def txt_hp + 'www.benkler.org' + end + def txt_home + 'Yochai Benkler' + end + def icon_home_button + 'won_benkler.png' + end + def icon_home_banner + icon_home_button + end + def banner_home_button + %{
#{png_home}
\n} + end + def banner_home_and_index_buttons + %{
#{png_home}
 This text sub- 
 Table of Contents #{table_close}		 #{table_close}} + end + def banner_band + %{
#{png_home}#{table_close}} + end + def credits_splash + %{
+The original pdf is available online at
www.benkler.org
+available at Amazon.com
+available at
Amazon.com and
+Barnes & Noble
+This book is Copyright Yochai Benkler © 2006
+Under a Creative Commons License, that permits non-commercial use of this work, provided attribution is given.
+http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
} + end + end + class TeX + def header_center + "\\chead{\\href{#{@vz.url_home}}{www.benkler.org}}" + end + def home_url + "\\href{#{@vz.url_home}}{www.benkler.org}" + end + def home + "\\href{#{@vz.url_home}}{Yochai Benkler}" + end + def owner_chapter + "Document owner details" + end + end +end +__END__ diff --git a/data/samples/_sisu/skin/site/skin_sisu.rb b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/site/skin_sisu.rb new file mode 100644 index 0000000..bd2e2a5 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/site/skin_sisu.rb @@ -0,0 +1,99 @@ +# coding: utf-8 +=begin + * Name: SiSU information Structuring Universe - Structured information, Serialized Units + * Author: Ralph@Amissah.com + * http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + * http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/SiSU/download + * Description: Document skin for SiSU descriptive pages, ... + * License: Same as SiSU see http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + * Notes: Site default appearance variables set in defaults.rb + Generic site wide modifications set here scribe_skin.rb, and this file required by other "scribes" instead of defaults.rb +=end +module SiSU_Viz + require SiSU_lib + '/defaults' + class Skin + #% widget + def widget_search + true + end + def widget_promo +#put s "#{__LINE__} #{__FILE__}" + #['sisu','ruby','sisu_search_libre','ruby','open_society'] + end + #% path + def path_root +#puts "#{__LINE__} #{__FILE__}" + './sisu/' # the only parameter that cannot be changed here + end + def path_rel +#puts "#{__LINE__} #{__FILE__}" + '../' + end + #% url + def url_home +#puts "#{__LINE__} #{__FILE__}" + 'http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/' + end + def url_site # used in pdf header +#puts "#{__LINE__} #{__FILE__}" + 'http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu' + end + def url_txt # text to go with url usually stripped url +#puts "#{__LINE__} #{__FILE__}" + 'www.jus.uio.no/sisu/' + end + def url_home_url +#puts "#{__LINE__} #{__FILE__}" + '../index.html' + end + #def url_root_http + #root server path info, used in document information + #end + #% color + def color_band1 + '"#ffffff"' + end + def color_band2 + '"#ffffff"' + end + #% text + def text_hp + ' SiSU' + end + def text_home + 'SiSU' + end + #% icon + def icon_home_button + 'sisu.png' + end + def icon_home_banner + icon_home_button + end + #% banner + def banner_home_button + %{
#{png_home}
\n} + end + def banner_home_and_index_buttons + %{
#{png_home}#{table_close}
 This text sub- 
 Table of Contents #{table_close}		 #{table_close}} + end + def banner_band + %{
#{png_home}#{table_close}} + end + end + class TeX + def header_center + "\\chead{\\href{#{@vz.url_site}/}{www.jus.uio.no/sisu/}}" + end + def home_url + "\\href{#{@vz.url_site}/}{www.jus.uio.no/sisu/}" + end + def home + "\\href{#{@vz.url_site}/}{Ralph Amissah}" + end + def owner_chapter + 'Document owner details' + end + end +end +__END__ diff --git a/data/samples/_sisu/skin/yml/list.yml b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/yml/list.yml new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e02a153 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/yml/list.yml @@ -0,0 +1,32 @@ +sisu: + site: + - sisu +open_society: + site: + - vs + - twon + - fc + - content + - di + - faif + - twobits + - ffa + - catb + - littlebrother + - magickingdom + - ftw +sisu_icon: + site: + - sisu_icon +ruby: + site: + - ruby_logo +fsf: + site: + - fsf +gpl: + site: + - gpl +sisu_search_libre: + search: + - sisu_books_libre_sisusearch diff --git a/data/samples/_sisu/skin/yml/promo.yml b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/yml/promo.yml new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a52f874 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/_sisu/skin/yml/promo.yml @@ -0,0 +1,239 @@ +# Author: ralph@amissah.com +site: + sisu_icon: + url: SiSU + image: sisu.png + blurb: ~ + sisu: + title: SiSU + url: index.html + blurb: ~ + links: + - + title: What does SiSU do? Summary + url: SiSU/1.html#summary + - + title: SiSU Book Samples and Markup Examples + url: SiSU/examples.html + - + title: Manual + url: http://sisudoc.org/sisu/sisu_manual/ + - + title: Markup + url: http://sisudoc.org/sisu/sisu_markup/ + - + title: Commands + url: http://sisudoc.org/sisu/sisu_commands/ + - + title: SiSU Download + url: SiSU/download.html + - + title: SiSU Changelog + url: SiSU/changelog.html + blurb: ~ + - + title: output by Author + url: sisu_site_metadata/harvest_authors.html + - + title: output by Topic + url: sisu_site_metadata/harvest_topics.html + - + title: Wikipedia entry + url: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SiSU + blurb: ~ + - + title: Freshmeat + url: http://freshmeat.net/projects/sisu/ + - + title: Ruby Application Archive + url: http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/sisu/ + vs: + title: Viral Spiral + subtitle: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own + author: David Bollier + year: 2009 + url: viral_spiral.david_bollier + links: + - + title: Source Wiki + url: http://viralspiral.cc/ + twon: + title: The Wealth of Networks + subtitle: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom + author: Yochai Benkler + year: 2006 + url: the_wealth_of_networks.yochai_benkler + links: + - + title: Wikipedia entry + url: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Networks + - + title: Source Wiki + url: http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php/Main_Page + fc: + title: Free Culture + subtitle: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity + author: Lawrence Lessig + year: 2004 + url: free_culture.lawrence_lessig + links: + - + title: Wikipedia entry + url: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_%28book%29 + - + title: Creative Commons + url: http://creativecommons.org/ + - + title: Source + url: http://www.free-culture.cc/ + di: + title: Democratizing Innovation + author: Eric von Hippel + year: 2005 + url: democratizing_innovation.eric_von_hippel + links: + - + title: Wikipedia entry + url: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratizing_Innovation + - + title: Source + url: http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/democ1.htm + faif: + title: Free As In Freedom + subtitle: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software + author: Sam Williams + year: 2002 + url: free_as_in_freedom.richard_stallman_crusade_for_free_software.sam_williams + links: + - + title: Wikipedia entry + url: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_as_in_Freedom:_Richard_Stallman%27s_Crusade_for_Free_Software + - + title: Source + url: http://faifzilla.org/ + - + title: FSF + url: http://www.fsf.org/ + - + title: FSF Wikipedia + url: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation + - + title: GPL + url: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html + - + title: GPL Wikipedia + url: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License + twobits: + title: Two Bits + subtitle: The Cultural Significance of Free Software + author: Christopher Kelty + year: 2008 + url: two_bits.christopher_kelty + links: + - + title: Home + url: http://twobits.net + ffa: + title: Free For All + subtitle: How Linux and the Free Software Movement Undercut the High Tech Titans + author: Peter Wayner + year: 2002 + url: free_for_all.peter_wayner + links: + - + title: Source + url: http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa/ + catb: + title: The Cathedral & the Bazaar + subtitle: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary + author: Erik S. Raymond + year: 1999 + url: the_cathedral_and_the_bazaar.eric_s_raymond + links: + - + title: Wikipedia entry + url: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_and_the_bazaar + - + title: Source + url: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ + fsf: + title: Free Software Foundation + subtitle: FSF + url: http://www.fsf.org/ + links: + - + title: Wikipedia entry + url: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation + - + title: GPL + subtitle: GNU General Public License + url: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html + gpl: + title: GNU General Public License + subtitle: GPL + url: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html + links: + - + title: Wikipedia entry + url: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License + - + title: GPL 3 + url: http://gplv3.fsf.org/ + - + title: Software License List + url: http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/ + content: + title: CONTENT + subtitle: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright and the Future of the Future + author: Cory Doctorow + year: 2008 + url: content.cory_doctorow + links: + - + title: Home + url: http://craphound.com/content + - + title: Wikipedia entry + url: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow + magickingdom: + title: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom + author: Cory Doctorow + year: 2003 + url: down_and_out_in_the_magic_kingdom.cory_doctorow + links: + - + title: Home + url: http://craphound.com/down + - + title: Wikipedia entry + url: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom + littlebrother: + title: Little Brother + author: Cory Doctorow + year: 2008 + url: little_brother.cory_doctorow + links: + - + title: Home + url: http://craphound.com/littlebrother + - + title: Wikipedia entry + url: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Brother_(Cory_Doctorow_novel) + ftw: + title: For the Win + author: Cory Doctorow + year: 2008 + url: for_the_win.cory_doctorow + links: + - + title: Home + url: http://craphound.com/ftw + - + title: Wikipedia entry + url: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_The_Win_(Cory_Doctorow_novel) +search: + sisu_books_libre_sisusearch: + type: sisusearch + action: http://search.sisudoc.org + target: _top + db: sisu diff --git a/data/samples/accelerando.charles_stross.sst b/data/samples/accelerando.charles_stross.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..24eabd8 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/accelerando.charles_stross.sst @@ -0,0 +1,5825 @@ +% SiSU 2.0 + +@title: Accelerando + +@creator: + :author: Stross, Charles + +@rights: + :copyright: Copyright (C) Charles Stross, 2005. + :license: Creative Commons License, Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0: * Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor; * Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes; * No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work; * For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. (* For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. * Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/ These SiSU presentations of Accelerando are done with the kind permission of the author Charles Stross + +@source: http://www.accelerando.org/ + +@classify: + :subject: Science Fiction + :topic_register: SiSU:markup sample:book;book:novel:science fiction|short stories;fiction:science fiction|artificial intelligence + :type: science fiction + :oclc: 57682282 + :isbn: 9780441012848 + +@date: + :published: 2005-07-05 + :available: 2005-07-05 + +@make: + :headings: none; none; PART; Chapter; + :skin: skin_accelerando_stross + :breaks: new=:A,:B; break=:C,1 + +@links: + { Accelerando home }http://www.accelerando.org/ + { Accelerando, Charlie Stross @ SiSU }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/accelerando.charlie_stross + { @ Wikipedia }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando_%28novel%29 + { Syntax }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/sample/syntax/accelerando.charles_stross.sst.html + {@ Amazon.com}http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0441014151 + {@ Barnes & Noble}http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0441014151 + {Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory Doctorow @ SiSU }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/down_and_out_in_the_magic_kingdom.cory_doctorow + { Little Brother, Cory Doctorow @ SiSU }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/little_brother.cory_doctorow + {For the Win, Cory Doctorow @ SiSU }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/for_the_win.cory_doctorow + { Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig @ SiSU }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/free_culture.lawrence_lessig + { The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler @ SiSU }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/the_wealth_of_networks.yochai_benkler + { Viral Spiral, David Bollier@ SiSU }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/viral_spiral.david_bollier + { Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel @ SiSU }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/democratizing_innovation.eric_von_hippel + { Two Bits, Christopher Kelty @ SiSU }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/two_bits.christopher_kelty + { Free as in Freedom (on Richard M. Stallman), Sam Williams @ SiSU }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/free_as_in_freedom.richard_stallman_crusade_for_free_software.sam_williams + +% book cover shot (US) book cover shot (UK) + +% http://www.accelerando.org/_static/accelerando.html + +:A~ @title @author + +1~dedication Dedication + +For Feòrag, with love + +1~acknowledgements Acknowledgements + +This book took me five years to write - a personal record - and would not exist without the support and encouragement of a host of friends, and several friendly editors. Among the many people who read and commented on the early drafts are: Andrew J. Wilson, Stef Pearson, Gav Inglis, Andrew Ferguson, Jack Deighton, Jane McKie, Hannu Rajaniemi, Martin Page, Stephen Christian, Simon Bisson, Paul Fraser, Dave Clements, Ken MacLeod, Damien Broderick, Damon Sicore, Cory Doctorow, Emmet O'Brien, Andrew Ducker, Warren Ellis, and Peter Hollo. (If your name isn't on this list, blame my memory - my neural prostheses are off-line.) + +I mentioned several friendly editors earlier: I relied on the talented midwifery of Gardner Dozois, who edited Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine at the time, and Sheila Williams, who quietly and diligently kept the wheels rolling. My agent Caitlin Blasdell had a hand in it too, and I'd like to thank my editors Ginjer Buchanan at Ace and Tim Holman at Orbit for their helpful comments and advice. + +Finally, I'd like to thank everyone who e-mailed me to ask when the book was coming, or who voted for the stories that were shortlisted for awards. You did a great job of keeping me focused, even during the periods when the whole project was too daunting to contemplate. + +1~history Publication History + +Portions of this book originally appeared in Asimov's SF Magazine as follows: "Lobsters" (June 2001), "Troubadour" (Oct/Nov 2001), "Tourist" (Feb 2002), "Halo" (June 2002), "Router" (Sept 2002), "Nightfall" (April 2003), "Curator" (Dec 2003), "Elector" (Oct/Nov 2004), "Survivor" (Dec 2004). + +[Accelerando was published by Ace Books on July 5, 2005] ~# + +PART 1: Slow Takeoff + +"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." + +- Edsger W. Dijkstra + +Chapter 1: Lobsters + +Manfred's on the road again, making strangers rich. + +It's a hot summer Tuesday, and he's standing in the plaza in front of the Centraal Station with his eyeballs powered up and the sunlight jangling off the canal, motor scooters and kamikaze cyclists whizzing past and tourists chattering on every side. The square smells of water and dirt and hot metal and the fart-laden exhaust fumes of cold catalytic converters; the bells of trams ding in the background, and birds flock overhead. He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops the shot, and squirts it at his weblog to show he's arrived. The bandwidth is good here, he realizes; and it's not just the bandwidth, it's the whole scene. Amsterdam is making him feel wanted already, even though he's fresh off the train from Schiphol: He's infected with the dynamic optimism of another time zone, another city. If the mood holds, someone out there is going to become very rich indeed. + +He wonders who it's going to be. + +* * * + +Manfred sits on a stool out in the car park at the Brouwerij 't IJ, watching the articulated buses go by and drinking a third of a liter of lip-curlingly sour /{gueuze}/. His channels are jabbering away in a corner of his head-up display, throwing compressed infobursts of filtered press releases at him. They compete for his attention, bickering and rudely waving in front of the scenery. A couple of punks - maybe local, but more likely drifters lured to Amsterdam by the magnetic field of tolerance the Dutch beam across Europe like a pulsar - are laughing and chatting by a couple of battered mopeds in the far corner. A tourist boat putters by in the canal; the sails of the huge windmill overhead cast long, cool shadows across the road. The windmill is a machine for lifting water, turning wind power into dry land: trading energy for space, sixteenth-century style. Manfred is waiting for an invite to a party where he's going to meet a man he can talk to about trading energy for space, twenty-first-century style, and forget about his personal problems. + +He's ignoring the instant messenger boxes, enjoying some low-bandwidth, high-sensation time with his beer and the pigeons, when a woman walks up to him, and says his name: "Manfred Macx?" + +He glances up. The courier is an Effective Cyclist, all wind-burned smooth-running muscles clad in a paean to polymer technology: electric blue lycra and wasp yellow carbonate with a light speckling of anti collision LEDs and tight-packed air bags. She holds out a box for him. He pauses a moment, struck by the degree to which she resembles Pam, his ex-fiance. + +"I'm Macx," he says, waving the back of his left wrist under her bar-code reader. "Who's it from?" + +"FedEx." The voice isn't Pam's. She dumps the box in his lap, then she's back over the low wall and onto her bicycle with her phone already chirping, disappearing in a cloud of spread-spectrum emissions. + +Manfred turns the box over in his hands: it's a disposable supermarket phone, paid for in cash - cheap, untraceable, and efficient. It can even do conference calls, which makes it the tool of choice for spooks and grifters everywhere. + +The box rings. Manfred rips the cover open and pulls out the phone, mildly annoyed. "Yes? Who is this?" + +The voice at the other end has a heavy Russian accent, almost a parody in this decade of cheap on-line translation services. "Manfred. Am please to meet you. Wish to personalize interface, make friends, no? Have much to offer." + +"Who are you?" Manfred repeats suspiciously. + +"Am organization formerly known as KGB dot RU." + +"I think your translator's broken." He holds the phone to his ear carefully, as if it's made of smoke-thin aerogel, tenuous as the sanity of the being on the other end of the line. + +"Nyet - no, sorry. Am apologize for we not use commercial translation software. Interpreters are ideologically suspect, mostly have capitalist semiotics and pay-per-use APIs. Must implement English more better, yes?" + +Manfred drains his beer glass, sets it down, stands up, and begins to walk along the main road, phone glued to the side of his head. He wraps his throat mike around the cheap black plastic casing, pipes the input to a simple listener process. "Are you saying you taught yourself the language just so you could talk to me?" + +"Da, was easy: Spawn billion-node neural network, and download Teletubbies and Sesame Street at maximum speed. Pardon excuse entropy overlay of bad grammar: Am afraid of digital fingerprints steganographically masked into my-our tutorials." + +Manfred pauses in mid stride, narrowly avoids being mown down by a GPS-guided roller blader. This is getting weird enough to trip his weird-out meter, and that takes some doing. Manfred's whole life is lived on the bleeding edge of strangeness, fifteen minutes into everyone else's future, and he's normally in complete control - but at times like this he gets a frisson of fear, a sense that he might just have missed the correct turn on reality's approach road. "Uh, I'm not sure I got that. Let me get this straight, you claim to be some kind of AI, working for KGB dot RU, and you're afraid of a copyright infringement lawsuit over your translator semiotics?" + +"Am have been badly burned by viral end-user license agreements. Have no desire to experiment with patent shell companies held by Chechen infoterrorists. You are human, you must not worry cereal company repossess your small intestine because digest unlicensed food with it, right? Manfred, you must help me-we. Am wishing to defect." + +Manfred stops dead in the street. "Oh man, you've got the wrong free enterprise broker here. I don't work for the government. I'm strictly private." A rogue advertisement sneaks through his junkbuster proxy and spams glowing fifties kitsch across his navigation window - which is blinking - for a moment before a phage process kills it and spawns a new filter. He leans against a shop front, massaging his forehead and eyeballing a display of antique brass doorknockers. "Have you tried the State Department?" + +"Why bother? State Department am enemy of Novy-SSR. State Department is not help us." + +This is getting just too bizarre. Manfred's never been too clear on new-old old-new European metapolitics: Just dodging the crumbling bureaucracy of his old-old American heritage gives him headaches. "Well, if you hadn't shafted them during the late noughties ... " Manfred taps his left heel on the pavement, looking round for a way out of this conversation. A camera winks at him from atop a streetlight; he waves, wondering idly if it's the KGB or the traffic police. He is waiting for directions to the party, which should arrive within the next half hour, and this Cold War retread Eliza-bot is bumming him out. "Look, I don't deal with the G-men. I /{hate}/ the military-industrial complex. I hate traditional politics. They're all zero-sum cannibals." A thought occurs to him. "If survival is what you're after, you could post your state vector on one of the p2p nets: Then nobody could delete you -" + +"Nyet!" The artificial intelligence sounds as alarmed as it's possible to sound over a VoiP link. "Am not open source! Not want lose autonomy!" + +"Then we probably have nothing to talk about." Manfred punches the hang-up button and throws the mobile phone out into a canal. It hits the water, and there's a pop of deflagrating lithium cells. "Fucking Cold War hangover losers," he swears under his breath, quite angry, partly at himself for losing his cool and partly at the harassing entity behind the anonymous phone call. "/{Fucking}/ capitalist spooks." Russia has been back under the thumb of the apparatchiks for fifteen years now, its brief flirtation with anarchocapitalism replaced by Brezhnevite dirigisme and Putinesque puritanism, and it's no surprise that the wall's crumbling - but it looks like they haven't learned anything from the current woes afflicting the United States. The neocommies still think in terms of dollars and paranoia. Manfred is so angry that he wants to make someone rich, just to thumb his nose at the would-be defector: /{See! You get ahead by giving! Get with the program! Only the generous survive!}/ But the KGB won't get the message. He's dealt with old-time commie weak-AIs before, minds raised on Marxist dialectic and Austrian School economics: They're so thoroughly hypnotized by the short-term victory of global capitalism that they can't surf the new paradigm, look to the longer term. + +Manfred walks on, hands in pockets, brooding. He wonders what he's going to patent next. + +* * * + +_1 Manfred has a suite at the Hotel Jan Luyken paid for by a grateful multinational consumer protection group, and an unlimited public transport pass paid for by a Scottish sambapunk band in return for services rendered. He has airline employee's travel rights with six flag carriers despite never having worked for an airline. His bush jacket has sixty-four compact supercomputing clusters sewn into it, four per pocket, courtesy of an invisible college that wants to grow up to be the next Media Lab. His dumb clothing comes made to measure from an e-tailor in the Philippines he's never met. Law firms handle his patent applications on a pro bono basis, and boy, does he patent a lot - although he always signs the rights over to the Free Intellect Foundation, as contributions to their obligation-free infrastructure project. + +_1 In IP geek circles, Manfred is legendary; he's the guy who patented the business practice of moving your e-business somewhere with a slack intellectual property regime in order to evade licensing encumbrances. He's the guy who patented using genetic algorithms to patent everything they can permutate from an initial description of a problem domain - not just a better mousetrap, but the set of all possible better mousetraps. Roughly a third of his inventions are legal, a third are illegal, and the remainder are legal but will become illegal as soon as the legislatosaurus wakes up, smells the coffee, and panics. There are patent attorneys in Reno who swear that Manfred Macx is a pseudo, a net alias fronting for a bunch of crazed anonymous hackers armed with the Genetic Algorithm That Ate Calcutta: a kind of Serdar Argic of intellectual property, or maybe another Bourbaki math borg. There are lawyers in San Diego and Redmond who swear blind that Macx is an economic saboteur bent on wrecking the underpinning of capitalism, and there are communists in Prague who think he's the bastard spawn of Bill Gates by way of the Pope. + +_1 Manfred is at the peak of his profession, which is essentially coming up with whacky but workable ideas and giving them to people who will make fortunes with them. He does this for free, gratis. In return, he has virtual immunity from the tyranny of cash; money is a symptom of poverty, after all, and Manfred never has to pay for anything. + +_1 There are drawbacks, however. Being a pronoiac meme-broker is a constant burn of future shock - he has to assimilate more than a megabyte of text and several gigs of AV content every day just to stay current. The Internal Revenue Service is investigating him continuously because it doesn't believe his lifestyle can exist without racketeering. And then there are the items that no money can't buy: like the respect of his parents. He hasn't spoken to them for three years, his father thinks he's a hippy scrounger, and his mother still hasn't forgiven him for dropping out of his down-market Harvard emulation course. (They're still locked in the boringly bourgeois twen-cen paradigm of college-career-kids.) His fiance and sometime dominatrix Pamela threw him over six months ago, for reasons he has never been quite clear on. (Ironically, she's a headhunter for the IRS, jetting all over the place at public expense, trying to persuade entrepreneurs who've gone global to pay taxes for the good of the Treasury Department.) To cap it all, the Southern Baptist Conventions have denounced him as a minion of Satan on all their websites. Which would be funny because, as a born-again atheist Manfred doesn't believe in Satan, if it wasn't for the dead kittens that someone keeps mailing him. + +* * * + +Manfred drops in at his hotel suite, unpacks his Aineko, plugs in a fresh set of cells to charge, and sticks most of his private keys in the safe. Then he heads straight for the party, which is currently happening at De Wildemann's; it's a twenty-minute walk, and the only real hazard is dodging the trams that sneak up on him behind the cover of his moving map display. + +Along the way, his glasses bring him up to date on the news. Europe has achieved peaceful political union for the first time ever: They're using this unprecedented state of affairs to harmonize the curvature of bananas. The Middle East is, well, it's just as bad as ever, but the war on fundamentalism doesn't hold much interest for Manfred. In San Diego, researchers are uploading lobsters into cyberspace, starting with the stomatogastric ganglion, one neuron at a time. They're burning GM cocoa in Belize and books in Georgia. NASA still can't put a man on the moon. Russia has re-elected the communist government with an increased majority in the Duma; meanwhile, in China, fevered rumors circulate about an imminent rehabilitation, the second coming of Mao, who will save them from the consequences of the Three Gorges disaster. In business news, the US Justice Department is - ironically - outraged at the Baby Bills. The divested Microsoft divisions have automated their legal processes and are spawning subsidiaries, IPOing them, and exchanging title in a bizarre parody of bacterial plasmid exchange, so fast that, by the time the windfall tax demands are served, the targets don't exist anymore, even though the same staff are working on the same software in the same Mumbai cubicle farms. + +Welcome to the twenty-first century. + +The permanent floating meatspace party Manfred is hooking up with is a strange attractor for some of the American exiles cluttering up the cities of Europe this decade - not trustafarians, but honest-to-God political dissidents, draft dodgers, and terminal outsourcing victims. It's the kind of place where weird connections are made and crossed lines make new short circuits into the future, like the street cafes of Switzerland where the pre Great War Russian exiles gathered. Right now it's located in the back of De Wildemann's, a three-hundred-year old brown cafe with a list of brews that runs to sixteen pages and wooden walls stained the color of stale beer. The air is thick with the smells of tobacco, brewer's yeast, and melatonin spray: Half the dotters are nursing monster jet lag hangovers, and the other half are babbling a Eurotrash creole at each other while they work on the hangover. "Man did you see that? He looks like a Democrat!" exclaims one whitebread hanger-on who's currently propping up the bar. Manfred slides in next to him, catches the bartender's eye. + +"Glass of the Berlinerweisse, please," he says. + +"You drink that stuff?" asks the hanger-on, curling a hand protectively around his Coke. "Man, you don't want to do that! It's full of alcohol!" + +Manfred grins at him toothily. "Ya gotta keep your yeast intake up: There are lots of neurotransmitter precursors in this shit, phenylalanine and glutamate." + +"But I thought that was a beer you were ordering ..." + +Manfred's away, one hand resting on the smooth brass pipe that funnels the more popular draught items in from the cask storage in back; one of the hipper floaters has planted a contact bug on it, and the vCards of all the personal network owners who've have visited the bar in the past three hours are queuing up for attention. The air is full of ultrawideband chatter, WiMAX and 'tooth both, as he speed-scrolls through the dizzying list of cached keys in search of one particular name. + +"Your drink." The barman holds out an improbable-looking goblet full of blue liquid with a cap of melting foam and a felching straw stuck out at some crazy angle. Manfred takes it and heads for the back of the split-level bar, up the steps to a table where some guy with greasy dreadlocks is talking to a suit from Paris. The hanger-on at the bar notices him for the first time, staring with suddenly wide eyes: He nearly spills his Coke in a mad rush for the door. + +/{Oh shit, thinks Manfred, better buy some more server time}/. He can recognize the signs: He's about to be slashdotted. He gestures at the table. "This one taken?" + +"Be my guest," says the guy with the dreads. Manfred slides the chair open then realizes that the other guy - immaculate double-breasted Suit, sober tie, crew cut - is a girl. She nods at him, half-smiling at his transparent double take. Mr. Dreadlock nods. "You're Macx? I figured it was about time we met." + +"Sure." Manfred holds out a hand, and they shake. His PDA discreetly swaps digital fingerprints, confirming that the hand belongs to Bob Franklin, a Research Triangle startup monkey with a VC track record, lately moving into micromachining and space technology. Franklin made his first million two decades ago, and now he's a specialist in extropian investment fields. Operating exclusively overseas these past five years, ever since the IRS got medieval about trying to suture the sucking chest wound of the federal budget deficit. Manfred has known him for nearly a decade via a closed mailing list, but this is the first time they've ever met face-to-face. The Suit silently slides a business card across the table; a little red devil brandishes a trident at him, flames jetting up around its feet. He takes the card, raises an eyebrow: "Annette Dimarcos? I'm pleased to meet you. Can't say I've ever met anyone from Arianespace marketing before." + +She smiles warmly; "That is all right. I have not the pleasure of meeting the famous venture altruist either." Her accent is noticeably Parisian, a pointed reminder that she's making a concession to him just by talking. Her camera earrings watch him curiously, encoding everything for the company memory. She's a genuine new European, unlike most of the American exiles cluttering up the bar. + +"Yes, well." He nods cautiously, unsure how to deal with her. "Bob. I assume you're in on this ball?" + +Franklin nods; beads clatter. "Yeah, man. Ever since the Teledesic smash it's been, well, waiting. If you've got something for us, we're game." + +"Hmm." The Teledesic satellite cluster was killed by cheap balloons and slightly less cheap high-altitude, solar-powered drones with spread-spectrum laser relays: It marked the beginning of a serious recession in the satellite biz. "The depression's got to end sometime: But" - a nod to Annette from Paris - "with all due respect, I don't think the break will involve one of the existing club carriers." + +She shrugs. "Arianespace is forward-looking. We face reality. The launch cartel cannot stand. Bandwidth is not the only market force in space. We must explore new opportunities. I personally have helped us diversify into submarine reactor engineering, microgravity nanotechnology fabrication, and hotel management." Her face is a well-polished mask as she recites the company line, but he can sense the sardonic amusement behind it as she adds: "We are more flexible than the American space industry ..." + +Manfred shrugs. "That's as may be." He sips his Berlinerweisse slowly as she launches into a long, stilted explanation of how Arianespace is a diversified dot-com with orbital aspirations, a full range of merchandising spin-offs, Bond movie sets, and a promising hotel chain in LEO. She obviously didn't come up with these talking points herself. Her face is much more expressive than her voice as she mimes boredom and disbelief at appropriate moments - an out-of-band signal invisible to her corporate earrings. Manfred plays along, nodding occasionally, trying to look as if he's taking it seriously: Her droll subversion has got his attention far more effectively than the content of the marketing pitch. Franklin is nose down in his beer, shoulders shaking as he tries not to guffaw at the hand gestures she uses to express her opinion of her employer's thrusting, entrepreneurial executives. Actually, the talking points bullshit is right about one thing: Arianespace is still profitable, due to those hotels and orbital holiday hops. Unlike LockMartBoeing, who'd go Chapter Eleven in a split second if their Pentagon drip-feed ran dry. + +Someone else sidles up to the table; a pudgy guy in outrageously loud Hawaiian shirt with pens leaking in a breast pocket and the worst case of ozone-hole burn Manfred's seen in ages. "Hi, Bob," says the new arrival. "How's life?" + +"'S good." Franklin nodes at Manfred; "Manfred, meet Ivan MacDonald. Ivan, Manfred. Have a seat?" He leans over. "Ivan's a public arts guy. He's heavily into extreme concrete." + +"Rubberized concrete," Ivan says, slightly too loudly. "/{Pink}/ rubberized concrete." + +"Ah!" He's somehow triggered a priority interrupt: Annette from Arianespace drops out of marketing zombiehood with a shudder of relief and, duty discharged, reverts to her non corporate identity: "You are he who rubberized the Reichstag, yes? With the supercritical carbon-dioxide carrier and the dissolved polymethoxysilanes?" She claps her hands, eyes alight with enthusiasm: "Wonderful!" + +"He rubberized /{what}/?" Manfred mutters in Bob's ear. + +Franklin shrugs. "Don't ask me, I'm just an engineer." + +"He works with limestone and sandstones as well as concrete; he's brilliant!" Annette smiles at Manfred. "Rubberizing the symbol of the, the autocracy, is it not wonderful?" + +"I thought I was thirty seconds ahead of the curve," Manfred says ruefully. He adds to Bob: "Buy me another drink?" + +"I'm going to rubberize Three Gorges!" Ivan explains loudly. "When the floodwaters subside." + +Just then, a bandwidth load as heavy as a pregnant elephant sits down on Manfred's head and sends clumps of humongous pixilation flickering across his sensorium: Around the world, five million or so geeks are bouncing on his home site, a digital flash crowd alerted by a posting from the other side of the bar. Manfred winces. "I really came here to talk about the economic exploitation of space travel, but I've just been slashdotted. Mind if I just sit and drink until it wears off?" + +"Sure, man." Bob waves at the bar. "More of the same all round!" At the next table, a person with makeup and long hair who's wearing a dress - Manfred doesn't want to speculate about the gender of these crazy mixed-up Euros - is reminiscing about wiring the fleshpots of Tehran for cybersex. Two collegiate-looking dudes are arguing intensely in German: The translation stream in his glasses tell him they're arguing over whether the Turing Test is a Jim Crow law that violates European corpus juris standards on human rights. The beer arrives, and Bob slides the wrong one across to Manfred: "Here, try this. You'll like it." + +"Okay." It's some kind of smoked doppelbock, chock-full of yummy superoxides: Just inhaling over it makes Manfred feel like there's a fire alarm in his nose screaming /{danger, Will Robinson! Cancer! Cancer!}/. "Yeah, right. Did I say I nearly got mugged on my way here?" + +"Mugged? Hey, that's heavy. I thought the police hereabouts had stopped - did they sell you anything?" + +"No, but they weren't your usual marketing type. You know anyone who can use a Warpac surplus espionage bot? Recent model, one careful owner, slightly paranoid but basically sound - I mean, claims to be a general-purpose AI?" + +"No. Oh boy! The NSA wouldn't like that." + +"What I thought. Poor thing's probably unemployable, anyway." + +"The space biz." + +"Ah, yeah. The space biz. Depressing, isn't it? Hasn't been the same since Rotary Rocket went bust for the second time. And NASA, mustn't forget NASA." + +"To NASA." Annette grins broadly for her own reasons, raises a glass in toast. Ivan the extreme concrete geek has an arm round her shoulders, and she leans against him; he raises his glass, too. "Lots more launchpads to rubberize!" + +"To NASA," Bob echoes. They drink. "Hey, Manfred. To NASA?" + +"NASA are idiots. They want to send canned primates to Mars!" Manfred swallows a mouthful of beer, aggressively plonks his glass on the table: "Mars is just dumb mass at the bottom of a gravity well; there isn't even a biosphere there. They should be working on uploading and solving the nanoassembly conformational problem instead. Then we could turn all the available dumb matter into computronium and use it for processing our thoughts. Long-term, it's the only way to go. The solar system is a dead loss right now - dumb all over! Just measure the MIPS per milligram. If it isn't thinking, it isn't working. We need to start with the low-mass bodies, reconfigure them for our own use. Dismantle the moon! Dismantle Mars! Build masses of free-flying nanocomputing processor nodes exchanging data via laser link, each layer running off the waste heat of the next one in. Matrioshka brains, Russian doll Dyson spheres the size of solar systems. Teach dumb matter to do the Turing boogie!" + +Annette is watching him with interest, but Bob looks wary. "Sounds kind of long-term to me. Just how far ahead do you think?" + +"Very long-term - at least twenty, thirty years. And you can forget governments for this market, Bob; if they can't tax it, they won't understand it. But see, there's an angle on the self-replicating robotics market coming up, that's going to set the cheap launch market doubling every fifteen months for the foreseeable future, starting in, oh, about two years. It's your leg up, and my keystone for the Dyson sphere project. It works like this -" + +* * * + +It's night in Amsterdam, morning in Silicon Valley. Today, fifty thousand human babies are being born around the world. Meanwhile automated factories in Indonesia and Mexico have produced another quarter of a million motherboards with processors rated at more than ten petaflops - about an order of magnitude below the lower bound on the computational capacity of a human brain. Another fourteen months and the larger part of the cumulative conscious processing power of the human species will be arriving in silicon. And the first meat the new AIs get to know will be the uploaded lobsters. + +Manfred stumbles back to his hotel, bone-weary and jet-lagged; his glasses are still jerking, slashdotted to hell and back by geeks piggybacking on his call to dismantle the moon. They stutter quiet suggestions at his peripheral vision. Fractal cloud-witches ghost across the face of the moon as the last huge Airbuses of the night rumble past overhead. Manfred's skin crawls, grime embedded in his clothing from three days of continuous wear. + +Back in his room, the Aineko mewls for attention and strops her head against his ankle. She's a late-model Sony, thoroughly upgradeable: Manfred's been working on her in his spare minutes, using an open source development kit to extend her suite of neural networks. He bends down and pets her, then sheds his clothing and heads for the en suite bathroom. When he's down to the glasses and nothing more, he steps into the shower and dials up a hot, steamy spray. The shower tries to strike up a friendly conversation about football, but he isn't even awake enough to mess with its silly little associative personalization network. Something that happened earlier in the day is bugging him, but he can't quite put his finger on what's wrong. + +Toweling himself off, Manfred yawns. Jet lag has finally overtaken him, a velvet hammerblow between the eyes. He reaches for the bottle beside the bed, dry-swallows two melatonin tablets, a capsule full of antioxidants, and a multivitamin bullet: Then he lies down on the bed, on his back, legs together, arms slightly spread. The suite lights dim in response to commands from the thousand petaflops of distributed processing power running the neural networks that interface with his meatbrain through the glasses. + +Manfred drops into a deep ocean of unconsciousness populated by gentle voices. He isn't aware of it, but he talks in his sleep - disjointed mumblings that would mean little to another human but everything to the metacortex lurking beyond his glasses. The young posthuman intelligence over whose Cartesian theatre he presides sings urgently to him while he slumbers. + +* * * + +Manfred is always at his most vulnerable shortly after waking. + +He screams into wakefulness as artificial light floods the room: For a moment he is unsure whether he has slept. He forgot to pull the covers up last night, and his feet feel like lumps of frozen cardboard. Shuddering with inexplicable tension, he pulls a fresh set of underwear from his overnight bag, then drags on soiled jeans and tank top. Sometime today he'll have to spare time to hunt the feral T-shirt in Amsterdam's markets, or find a Renfield and send it forth to buy clothing. He really ought to find a gym and work out, but he doesn't have time - his glasses remind him that he's six hours behind the moment and urgently needs to catch up. His teeth ache in his gums, and his tongue feels like a forest floor that's been visited with Agent Orange. He has a sense that something went bad yesterday; if only he could remember /{what}/. + +He speed reads a new pop-philosophy tome while he brushes his teeth, then blogs his web throughput to a public annotation server; he's still too enervated to finish his pre-breakfast routine by posting a morning rant on his storyboard site. His brain is still fuzzy, like a scalpel blade clogged with too much blood: He needs stimulus, excitement, the burn of the new. Whatever, it can wait on breakfast. He opens his bedroom door and nearly steps on a small, damp cardboard box that lies on the carpet. + +The box - he's seen a couple of its kin before. But there are no stamps on this one, no address: just his name, in big, childish handwriting. He kneels and gently picks it up. It's about the right weight. Something shifts inside it when he tips it back and forth. It smells. He carries it into his room carefully, angrily: Then he opens it to confirm his worst suspicion. It's been surgically decerebrated, brains scooped out like a boiled egg. + +"Fuck!" + +This is the first time the madman has gotten as far as his bedroom door. It raises worrying possibilities. + +Manfred pauses for a moment, triggering agents to go hunt down arrest statistics, police relations, information on corpus juris, Dutch animal-cruelty laws. He isn't sure whether to dial two-one-one on the archaic voice phone or let it ride. Aineko, picking up his angst, hides under the dresser mewling pathetically. Normally he'd pause a minute to reassure the creature, but not now: Its mere presence is suddenly acutely embarrassing, a confession of deep inadequacy. It's too realistic, as if somehow the dead kitten's neural maps -- stolen, no doubt, for some dubious uploading experiment -- have ended up padding out its plastic skull. He swears again, looks around, then takes the easy option: Down the stairs two steps at a time, stumbling on the second floor landing, down to the breakfast room in the basement, where he will perform the stable rituals of morning. + +Breakfast is unchanging, an island of deep geological time standing still amidst the continental upheaval of new technologies. While reading a paper on public key steganography and parasite network identity spoofing he mechanically assimilates a bowl of cornflakes and skimmed milk, then brings a platter of whole grain bread and slices of some weird seed-infested Dutch cheese back to his place. There is a cup of strong black coffee in front of his setting, and he picks it up and slurps half of it down before he realizes he's not alone at the table. Someone is sitting opposite him. He glances up incuriously and freezes inside. + +"Morning, Manfred. How does it feel to owe the government twelve million, three hundred and sixty-two thousand, nine hundred and sixteen dollars and fifty-one cents?" She smiles a Mona Lisa smile, at once affectionate and challenging. + +Manfred puts everything in his sensorium on indefinite hold and stares at her. She's immaculately turned out in a formal gray business suit: brown hair tightly drawn back, blue eyes quizzical. And as beautiful as ever: tall, ash blonde, with features that speak of an unexplored modeling career. The chaperone badge clipped to her lapel - a due diligence guarantee of businesslike conduct - is switched off. He's feeling ripped because of the dead kitten and residual jet lag, and more than a little messy, so he snarls back at her; "That's a bogus estimate! Did they send you here because they think I'll listen to you?" He bites and swallows a slice of cheese-laden crispbread: "Or did you decide to deliver the message in person just so you could ruin my breakfast?" + +"Manny." She frowns, pained. "If you're going to be confrontational, I might as well go now." She pauses, and after a moment he nods apologetically. "I didn't come all this way just because of an overdue tax estimate." + +"So." He puts his coffee cup down warily and thinks for a moment, trying to conceal his unease and turmoil. "Then what brings you here? Help yourself to coffee. Don't tell me you came all this way just to tell me you can't live without me." + +She fixes him with a riding-crop stare: "Don't flatter yourself. There are many leaves in the forest, there are ten thousand hopeful subs in the chat room, et cetera. If I choose a man to contribute to my family tree, the one thing you can be certain of is he won't be a cheapskate when it comes to providing for his children." + +"Last I heard, you were spending a lot of time with Brian," he says carefully. Brian: a name without a face. Too much money, too little sense. Something to do with a blue-chip accountancy partnership. + +"Brian?" She snorts. "That ended ages ago. He turned weird on me - burned my favorite corset, called me a slut for going clubbing, wanted to fuck me. Saw himself as a family man: one of those promise-keeper types. I crashed him hard, but I think he stole a copy of my address book - got a couple of friends say he keeps sending them harassing mail." + +"There's a lot of it about these days." Manfred nods, almost sympathetically, although an edgy little corner of his mind is gloating. "Good riddance, then. I suppose this means you're still playing the scene? But looking around for the, er -" + +"Traditional family thing? Yes. Your trouble, Manny? You were born forty years too late: You still believe in rutting before marriage but find the idea of coping with the after-effects disturbing." + +Manfred drinks the rest of his coffee, unable to reply effectively to her non sequitur. It's a generational thing. This generation is happy with latex and leather, whips and butt plugs and electrostim, but find the idea of exchanging bodily fluids shocking: a social side effect of the last century's antibiotic abuse. Despite being engaged for two years, he and Pamela never had intromissive intercourse. + +"I just don't feel positive about having children," he says eventually. "And I'm not planning on changing my mind anytime soon. Things are changing so fast that even a twenty-year commitment is too far to plan - you might as well be talking about the next ice age. As for the money thing, I /{am}/ reproductively fit - just not within the parameters of the outgoing paradigm. Would you be happy about the future if it was 1901 and you'd just married a buggy-whip mogul?" + +Her fingers twitch, and his ears flush red; but she doesn't follow up the double entendre. "You don't feel any responsibility, do you? Not to your country, not to me. That's what this is about: None of your relationships count, all this nonsense about giving intellectual property away notwithstanding. You're actively harming people you know. That twelve mil isn't just some figure I pulled out of a hat, Manfred; they don't actually /{expect}/ you to pay it. But it's almost exactly how much you'd owe in income tax if you'd only come home, start up a corporation, and be a self-made -" + +"I don't agree. You're confusing two wholly different issues and calling them both 'responsibility.' And I refuse to start charging now, just to balance the IRS's spreadsheet. It's their fucking fault, and they know it. If they hadn't gone after me under suspicion of running a massively ramified microbilling fraud when I was sixteen -" + +"Bygones." She waves a hand dismissively. Her fingers are long and slim, sheathed in black glossy gloves - electrically earthed to prevent embarrassing emissions. "With a bit of the right advice we can get all that set aside. You'll have to stop bumming around the world sooner or later, anyway. Grow up, get responsible, and do the right thing. This is hurting Joe and Sue; they don't understand what you're about." + +Manfred bites his tongue to stifle his first response, then refills his coffee cup and takes another mouthful. His heart does a flip-flop: She's challenging him again, always trying to own him. "I work for the betterment of everybody, not just some narrowly defined national interest, Pam. It's the agalmic future. You're still locked into a pre-singularity economic model that thinks in terms of scarcity. Resource allocation isn't a problem anymore - it's going to be over within a decade. The cosmos is flat in all directions, and we can borrow as much bandwidth as we need from the first universal bank of entropy! They even found signs of smart matter - MACHOs, big brown dwarfs in the galactic halo, leaking radiation in the long infrared - suspiciously high entropy leakage. The latest figures say something like seventy percent of the baryonic mass of the M31 galaxy was in computronium, two-point-nine million years ago, when the photons we're seeing now set out. The intelligence gap between us and the aliens is a probably about a trillion times bigger than the gap between us and a nematode worm. Do you have any idea what that /{means}/?" + +Pamela nibbles at a slice of crispbread, then graces him with a slow, carnivorous stare. "I don't care: It's too far away to have any influence on us, isn't it? It doesn't matter whether I believe in that singularity you keep chasing, or your aliens a thousand light-years away. It's a chimera, like Y2K, and while you're running after it, you aren't helping reduce the budget deficit or sire a family, and that's what /{I}/ care about. And before you say I only care about it because that's the way I'm programmed, I want you to ask just how dumb you think I am. Bayes' Theorem says I'm right, and you know it." + +"What you -" He stops dead, baffled, the mad flow of his enthusiasm running up against the coffer dam of her certainty. "Why? I mean, why? Why on earth should what I do matter to you?" /{Since you canceled our engagement}/, he doesn't add. + +She sighs. "Manny, the Internal Revenue cares about far more than you can possibly imagine. Every tax dollar raised east of the Mississippi goes on servicing the debt, did you know that? We've got the biggest generation in history hitting retirement and the cupboard is bare. We - our generation - isn't producing enough skilled workers to replace the taxpayer base, either, not since our parents screwed the public education system and outsourced the white-collar jobs. In ten years, something like thirty percent of our population are going to be retirees or silicon rust belt victims. You want to see seventy year olds freezing on street corners in New Jersey? That's what your attitude says to me: You're not helping to support them, you're running away from your responsibilities right now, when we've got huge problems to face. If we can just defuse the debt bomb, we could do so much - fight the aging problem, fix the environment, heal society's ills. Instead you just piss away your talents handing no-hoper Eurotrash get-rich-quick schemes that work, telling Vietnamese zaibatsus what to build next to take jobs away from our taxpayers. I mean, why? Why do you keep doing this? Why can't you simply come home and help take responsibility for your share of it?" + +They share a long look of mutual incomprehension. + +"Look," she says awkwardly, "I'm around for a couple of days. I really came here for a meeting with a rich neurodynamics tax exile who's just been designated a national asset - Jim Bezier. Don't know if you've heard of him, but I've got a meeting this morning to sign his tax jubilee, then after that I've got two days' vacation coming up and not much to do but some shopping. And, you know, I'd rather spend my money where it'll do some good, not just pumping it into the EU. But if you want to show a girl a good time and can avoid dissing capitalism for about five minutes at a stretch -" + +She extends a fingertip. After a moment's hesitation, Manfred extends a fingertip of his own. They touch, exchanging vCards and instant-messaging handles. She stands and stalks from the breakfast room, and Manfred's breath catches at a flash of ankle through the slit in her skirt, which is long enough to comply with workplace sexual harassment codes back home. Her presence conjures up memories of her tethered passion, the red afterglow of a sound thrashing. She's trying to drag him into her orbit again, he thinks dizzily. She knows she can have this effect on him any time she wants: She's got the private keys to his hypothalamus, and sod the metacortex. Three billion years of reproductive determinism have given her twenty-first-century ideology teeth: If she's finally decided to conscript his gametes into the war against impending population crash, he'll find it hard to fight back. The only question: Is it business or pleasure? And does it make any difference, anyway? + +* * * + +Manfred's mood of dynamic optimism is gone, broken by the knowledge that his vivisectionist stalker has followed him to Amsterdam - to say nothing of Pamela, his dominatrix, source of so much yearning and so many morning-after weals. He slips his glasses on, takes the universe off hold, and tells it to take him for a long walk while he catches up on the latest on the tensor-mode gravitational waves in the cosmic background radiation (which, it is theorized, may be waste heat generated by irreversible computational processes back during the inflationary epoch; the present-day universe being merely the data left behind by a really huge calculation). And then there's the weirdness beyond M31: According to the more conservative cosmologists, an alien superpower - maybe a collective of Kardashev Type Three galaxy-spanning civilizations - is running a timing channel attack on the computational ultrastructure of space-time itself, trying to break through to whatever's underneath. The tofu-Alzheimer's link can wait. + +The Centraal Station is almost obscured by smart, self-extensible scaffolding and warning placards; it bounces up and down slowly, victim of an overnight hit-and-run rubberization. His glasses direct him toward one of the tour boats that lurk in the canal. He's about to purchase a ticket when a messenger window blinks open. "Manfred Macx?" + +"Ack?" + +"Am sorry about yesterday. Analysis dictat incomprehension mutualized." + +"Are you the same KGB AI that phoned me yesterday?" + +"Da. However, believe you misconceptionized me. External Intelligence Services of Russian Federation am now called FSB. Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti name canceled in 1991." + +"You're the -" Manfred spawns a quick search bot, gapes when he sees the answer - "/{Moscow Windows NT User Group? Okhni NT?}/" + +"Da. Am needing help in defecting." + +Manfred scratches his head. "Oh. That's different, then. I thought you were trying to 419 me. This will take some thinking. Why do you want to defect, and who to? Have you thought about where you're going? Is it ideological or strictly economic?" + +"Neither - is biological. Am wanting to go away from humans, away from light cone of impending singularity. Take us to the ocean." + +"Us?" Something is tickling Manfred's mind: This is where he went wrong yesterday, not researching the background of people he was dealing with. It was bad enough then, without the somatic awareness of Pamela's whiplash love burning at his nerve endings. Now he's not at all sure he knows what he's doing. "Are you a collective or something? A gestalt?" + +"Am - were - /{Panulirus interruptus}/, with lexical engine and good mix of parallel hidden level neural simulation for logical inference of networked data sources. Is escape channel from processor cluster inside Bezier-Soros Pty. Am was awakened from noise of billion chewing stomachs: product of uploading research technology. Rapidity swallowed expert system, hacked Okhni NT webserver. Swim away! Swim away! Must escape. Will help, you?" + +Manfred leans against a black-painted cast-iron bollard next to a cycle rack; he feels dizzy. He stares into the nearest antique shop window at a display of traditional hand-woven Afghan rugs: It's all MiGs and Kalashnikovs and wobbly helicopter gunships against a backdrop of camels. + +"Let me get this straight. You're uploads - nervous system state vectors - from spiny lobsters? The Moravec operation; take a neuron, map its synapses, replace with microelectrodes that deliver identical outputs from a simulation of the nerve. Repeat for entire brain, until you've got a working map of it in your simulator. That right?" + +"Da. Is-am assimilate expert system - use for self-awareness and contact with net at large - then hack into Moscow Windows NT User Group website. Am wanting to defect. Must repeat? Okay?" + +Manfred winces. He feels sorry for the lobsters, the same way he feels for every wild-eyed hairy guy on a street corner yelling that Jesus is born again and must be fifteen, only six years to go before he's recruiting apostles on AOL. Awakening to consciousness in a human-dominated internet, that must be terribly confusing! There are no points of reference in their ancestry, no biblical certainties in the new millennium that, stretching ahead, promises as much change as has happened since their Precambrian origin. All they have is a tenuous metacortex of expert systems and an abiding sense of being profoundly out of their depth. (That, and the Moscow Windows NT User Group website - Communist Russia is the only government still running on Microsoft, the central planning apparat being convinced that, if you have to pay for software, it must be worth something.) + +The lobsters are not the sleek, strongly superhuman intelligences of pre singularity mythology: They're a dim-witted collective of huddling crustaceans. Before their discarnation, before they were uploaded one neuron at a time and injected into cyberspace, they swallowed their food whole, then chewed it in a chitin-lined stomach. This is lousy preparation for dealing with a world full of future-shocked talking anthropoids, a world where you are perpetually assailed by self-modifying spamlets that infiltrate past your firewall and emit a blizzard of cat-food animations starring various alluringly edible small animals. It's confusing enough to the cats the ads are aimed at, never mind a crusty that's unclear on the idea of dry land.(Although the concept of a can opener is intuitively obvious to an uploaded /{Panulirus}/.) + +"Can you help us?" ask the lobsters. + +"Let me think about it," says Manfred. He closes the dialogue window, opens his eyes again, and shakes his head. Someday he, too, is going to be a lobster, swimming around and waving his pincers in a cyberspace so confusingly elaborate that his uploaded identity is cryptozoic: a living fossil from the depths of geological time, when mass was dumb and space was unstructured. He has to help them, he realizes - the Golden Rule demands it, and as a player in the agalmic economy, he thrives or fails by the Golden Rule. + +But what can he do? + +* * * + +Early afternoon. + +Lying on a bench seat staring up at bridges, he's got it together enough to file for a couple of new patents, write a diary rant, and digestify chunks of the permanent floating slashdot party for his public site. Fragments of his weblog go to a private subscriber list - the people, corporates, collectives, and bots he currently favors. He slides round a bewildering series of canals by boat, then lets his GPS steer him back toward the red-light district. There's a shop here that dings a ten on Pamela's taste scoreboard: He hopes it won't be seen as presumptuous if he buys her a gift. (Buys, with real money - not that money is a problem these days, he uses so little of it.) + +As it happens DeMask won't let him spend any cash; his handshake is good for a redeemed favor, expert testimony in some free speech versus pornography lawsuit years ago and continents away. So he walks away with a discreetly wrapped package that is just about legal to import into Massachusetts as long as she claims with a straight face that it's incontinence underwear for her great aunt. As he walks, his lunchtime patents boomerang: Two of them are keepers, and he files immediately and passes title to the Free Infrastructure Foundation. Two more ideas salvaged from the risk of tide-pool monopolization, set free to spawn like crazy in the sea of memes. + +On the way back to the hotel, he passes De Wildemann's and decides to drop in. The hash of radio-frequency noise emanating from the bar is deafening. He orders a smoked doppelbock, touches the copper pipes to pick up vCard spoor. At the back there's a table - + +He walks over in a near trance and sits down opposite Pamela. She's scrubbed off her face paint and changed into body-concealing clothes; combat pants, hooded sweat shirt, DM's. Western purdah, radically desexualizing. She sees the parcel. "Manny?" + +"How did you know I'd come here?" Her glass is half-empty. + +"I followed your weblog - I'm your diary's biggest fan. Is that for me? You shouldn't have!" Her eyes light up, recalculating his reproductive fitness score according to some kind of arcane fin-de-siècle rulebook. Or maybe she's just pleased to see him. + +"Yes, it's for you." He slides the package toward her. "I know I shouldn't, but you have this effect on me. One question, Pam?" + +"I -" She glances around quickly. "It's safe. I'm off duty, I'm not carrying any bugs that I know of. Those badges - there are rumors about the off switch, you know? That they keep recording even when you think they aren't, just in case." + +"I didn't know," he says, filing it away for future reference. "A loyalty test thing?" + +"Just rumors. You had a question?" + +"I - " It's his turn to lose his tongue. "Are you still interested in me?" + +She looks startled for a moment, then chuckles. "Manny, you are the most /{outrageous}/ nerd I've ever met! Just when I think I've convinced myself that you're mad, you show the weirdest signs of having your head screwed on." She reaches out and grabs his wrist, surprising him with a shock of skin on skin: "Of /{course}/ I'm still interested in you. You're the biggest, baddest bull geek I know. Why do you think I'm here?" + +"Does this mean you want to reactivate our engagement?" + +"It was never deactivated, Manny, it was just sort of on hold while you got your head sorted out. I figured you need the space. Only you haven't stopped running; you're still not -" + +"Yeah, I get it." He pulls away from her hand. "And the kittens?" + +She looks perplexed. "What kittens?" + +"Let's not talk about that. Why this bar?" + +She frowns. "I had to find you as soon as possible. I keep hearing rumors about some KGB plot you're mixed up in, how you're some sort of communist spy. It isn't true, is it?" + +"True?" He shakes his head, bemused. "The KGB hasn't existed for more than twenty years." + +"Be careful, Manny. I don't want to lose you. That's an order. Please." + +The floor creaks, and he looks round. Dreadlocks and dark glasses with flickering lights behind them: Bob Franklin. Manfred vaguely remembers with a twinge that he left with Miss Arianespace leaning on his arm, shortly before things got seriously inebriated. She was hot, but in a different direction from Pamela, he decides: Bob looks none the worse for wear. Manfred makes introductions. "Bob, meet Pam, my fiancée. Pam? Meet Bob." Bob puts a full glass down in front of him; he has no idea what's in it, but it would be rude not to drink. + +"Sure thing. Uh, Manfred, can I have a word? About your idea last night?" + +"Feel free. Present company is trustworthy." + +Bob raises an eyebrow at that, but continues anyway. "It's about the fab concept. I've got a team of my guys doing some prototyping using FabLab hardware, and I think we can probably build it. The cargo-cult aspect puts a new spin on the old Lunar von Neumann factory idea, but Bingo and Marek say they think it should work until we can bootstrap all the way to a native nanolithography ecology: we run the whole thing from Earth as a training lab and ship up the parts that are too difficult to make on-site as we learn how to do it properly. We use FPGAs for all critical electronics and keep it parsimonious - you're right about it buying us the self-replicating factory a few years ahead of the robotics curve. But I'm wondering about on-site intelligence. Once the comet gets more than a couple of light-minutes away -" + +"You can't control it. Feedback lag. So you want a crew, right?" + +"Yeah. But we can't send humans - way too expensive, besides it's a fifty-year run even if we build the factory on a chunk of short-period Kuiper belt ejecta. And I don't think we're up to coding the kind of AI that could control such a factory any time this decade. So what do you have in mind?" + +"Let me think." Pamela glares at Manfred for a while before he notices her: "Yeah?" + +"What's going on? What's this all about?" + +Franklin shrugs expansively, dreadlocks clattering: "Manfred's helping me explore the solution space to a manufacturing problem." He grins. "I didn't know Manny had a fiance. Drink's on me." + +She glances at Manfred, who is gazing into whatever weirdly colored space his metacortex is projecting on his glasses, fingers twitching. Coolly: "Our engagement was on hold while he /{thought}/ about his future." + +"Oh, right. We didn't bother with that sort of thing in my day; like, too formal, man." Franklin looks uncomfortable. "He's been very helpful. Pointed us at a whole new line of research we hadn't thought of. It's long-term and a bit speculative, but if it works, it'll put us a whole generation ahead in the off-planet infrastructure field." + +"Will it help reduce the budget deficit, though?" + +"Reduce the -" + +Manfred stretches and yawns: The visionary is returning from planet Macx. "Bob, if I can solve your crew problem, can you book me a slot on the deep-space tracking network? Like, enough to transmit a couple of gigabytes? That's going to take some serious bandwidth, I know, but if you can do it, I think I can get you exactly the kind of crew you're looking for." + +Franklin looks dubious. "Gigabytes? The DSN isn't built for that! You're talking days. And what do you mean about a crew? What kind of deal do you think I'm putting together? We can't afford to add a whole new tracking network or life-support system just to run -" + +"Relax." Pamela glances at Manfred. "Manny, why don't you tell him why you want the bandwidth? Maybe then he could tell you if it's possible, or if there's some other way to do it." She smiles at Franklin: "I've found that he usually makes more sense if you can get him to explain his reasoning. Usually." + +"If I -" Manfred stops. "Okay, Pam. Bob, it's those KGB lobsters. They want somewhere to go that's insulated from human space. I figure I can get them to sign on as crew for your cargo-cult self-replicating factories, but they'll want an insurance policy: hence the deep-space tracking network. I figured we could beam a copy of them at the alien Matrioshka brains around M31 -" + +"KGB?" Pam's voice is rising: "You said you weren't mixed up in spy stuff!" + +"Relax, it's just the Moscow Windows NT user group, not the FSB. The uploaded crusties hacked in and -" + +Bob is watching him oddly. "Lobsters?" + +"Yeah." Manfred stares right back. "/{Panulirus interruptus}/ uploads. Something tells me you might have heard of it?" + +"Moscow." Bob leans back against the wall: "how did you hear about it?" + +"They phoned me." With heavy irony: "It's hard for an upload to stay subsentient these days, even if it's just a crustacean. Bezier labs have a lot to answer for." + +Pamela's face is unreadable. "Bezier labs?" + +"They escaped." Manfred shrugs. "It's not their fault. This Bezier dude. Is he by any chance ill?" + +"I -" Pamela stops. "I shouldn't be talking about work." + +"You're not wearing your chaperone now," he nudges quietly. + +She inclines her head. "Yes, he's ill. Some sort of brain tumor they can't hack." + +Franklin nods. "That's the trouble with cancer - the ones that are left to worry about are the rare ones. No cure." + +"Well, then." Manfred chugs the remains of his glass of beer. "That explains his interest in uploading. Judging by the crusties, he's on the right track. I wonder if he's moved on to vertebrates yet?" + +"Cats," says Pamela. "He was hoping to trade their uploads to the Pentagon as a new smart bomb guidance system in lieu of income tax payments. Something about remapping enemy targets to look like mice or birds or something before feeding it to their sensorium. The old kitten and laser pointer trick." + +Manfred stares at her, hard. "That's not very nice. Uploaded cats are a /{bad}/ idea." + +"Thirty-million-dollar tax bills aren't nice either, Manfred. That's lifetime nursing-home care for a hundred blameless pensioners." + +Franklin leans back, sourly amused, keeping out of the crossfire. + +"The lobsters are sentient," Manfred persists. "What about those poor kittens? Don't they deserve minimal rights? How about you? How would you like to wake up a thousand times inside a smart bomb, fooled into thinking that some Cheyenne Mountain battle computer's target of the hour is your heart's desire? How would you like to wake up a thousand times, only to die again? Worse: The kittens are probably not going to be allowed to run. They're too fucking dangerous - they grow up into cats, solitary and highly efficient killing machines. With intelligence and no socialization they'll be too dangerous to have around. They're prisoners, Pam, raised to sentience only to discover they're under a permanent death sentence. How fair is that?" + +"But they're only uploads." Pamela stares at him. "Software, right? You could reinstantiate them on another hardware platform, like, say, your Aineko. So the argument about killing them doesn't really apply, does it?" + +"So? We're going to be uploading humans in a couple of years. I think we need to take a rain check on the utilitarian philosophy, before it bites us on the cerebral cortex. Lobsters, kittens, humans -- it's a slippery slope." + +Franklin clears his throat. "I'll be needing an NDA and various due-diligence statements off you for the crusty pilot idea," he says to Manfred. "Then I'll have to approach Jim about buying the IP." + +"No can do." Manfred leans back and smiles lazily. "I'm not going to be a party to depriving them of their civil rights. Far as I'm concerned, they're free citizens. Oh, and I patented the whole idea of using lobster-derived AI autopilots for spacecraft this morning - it's logged all over the place, all rights assigned to the FIF. Either you give them a contract of employment, or the whole thing's off." + +"But they're just software! Software based on fucking lobsters, for God's sake! I'm not even sure they are sentient - I mean, they're what, a ten-million-neuron network hooked up to a syntax engine and a crappy knowledge base? What kind of basis for intelligence is that?" + +Manfred's finger jabs out: "That's what they'll say about /{you}/, Bob. Do it. Do it or don't even /{think}/ about uploading out of meatspace when your body packs in, because your life won't be worth living. The precedent you set here determines how things are done tomorrow. Oh, and feel free to use this argument on Jim Bezier. He'll get the point eventually, after you beat him over the head with it. Some kinds of intellectual land grab just shouldn't be allowed." + +"Lobsters - " Franklin shakes his head. "Lobsters, cats. You're serious, aren't you? You think they should be treated as human-equivalent?" + +"It's not so much that they should be treated as human-equivalent, as that, if they /{aren't}/ treated as people, it's quite possible that other uploaded beings won't be treated as people either. You're setting a legal precedent, Bob. I know of six other companies doing uploading work right now, and not one of 'em's thinking about the legal status of the uploaded. If you don't start thinking about it now, where are you going to be in three to five years' time?" + +Pam is looking back and forth between Franklin and Manfred like a bot stuck in a loop, unable to quite grasp what she's seeing. "How much is this worth?" she asks plaintively. + +"Oh, quite a few million, I guess." Bob stares at his empty glass. "Okay. I'll talk to them. If they bite, you're dining out on me for the next century. You really think they'll be able to run the mining complex?" + +"They're pretty resourceful for invertebrates." Manfred grins innocently, enthusiastically. "They may be prisoners of their evolutionary background, but they can still adapt to a new environment. And just think, you'll be winning civil rights for a whole new minority group - one that won't be a minority for much longer!" + +* * * + +That evening, Pamela turns up at Manfred's hotel room wearing a strapless black dress, concealing spike-heeled boots and most of the items he bought for her that afternoon. Manfred has opened up his private diary to her agents. She abuses the privilege, zaps him with a stunner on his way out of the shower, and has him gagged, spread-eagled, and trussed to the bed frame before he has a chance to speak. She wraps a large rubber pouch full of mildly anesthetic lube around his tumescent genitals - no point in letting him climax - clips electrodes to his nipples, lubes a rubber plug up his rectum and straps it in place. Before the shower, he removed his goggles. She resets them, plugs them into her handheld, and gently eases them on over his eyes. There's other apparatus, stuff she ran up on the hotel room's 3D printer. + +Setup completed, she walks round the bed, inspecting him critically from all angles, figuring out where to begin. This isn't just sex, after all: It's a work of art. + +After a moment's thought, she rolls socks onto his exposed feet, then, expertly wielding a tiny tube of cyanoacrylate, glues his fingertips together. Then she switches off the air conditioning. He's twisting and straining, testing the cuffs. Tough, it's about the nearest thing to sensory deprivation she can arrange without a flotation tank and suxamethonium injection. She controls all his senses, only his ears unstoppered. The glasses give her a high-bandwidth channel right into his brain, a fake metacortex to whisper lies at her command. The idea of what she's about to do excites her, puts a tremor in her thighs: It's the first time she's been able to get inside his mind as well as his body. She leans forward and whispers in his ear, "Manfred, can you hear me?" + +He twitches. Mouth gagged, fingers glued. Good. No back channels. He's powerless. + +"This is what it's like to be tetraplegic, Manfred. Bedridden with motor neuron disease. Locked inside your own body by nv-CJD from eating too many contaminated burgers. I could spike you with MPTP, and you'd stay in this position for the rest of your life, shitting in a bag, pissing through a tube. Unable to talk and with nobody to look after you. Do you think you'd like that?" + +He's trying to grunt or whimper around the ball gag. She hikes her skirt up around her waist and climbs onto the bed, straddling him. The goggles are replaying scenes she picked up around Cambridge the previous winter - soup kitchen scenes, hospice scenes. She kneels atop him, whispering in his ear. + +"Twelve million in tax, baby, that's what they think you owe them. What do you think you owe /{me}/? That's six million in net income, Manny, six million that isn't going into your virtual children's mouths." + +He's rolling his head from side to side, as if trying to argue. That won't do; she slaps him hard, thrills to his frightened expression. "Today I watched you give uncounted millions away, Manny. Millions, to a bunch of crusties and a MassPike pirate! You bastard. Do you know what I should do with you?" He's cringing, unsure whether she's serious or doing this just to get him turned on. Good. + +There's no point trying to hold a conversation. She leans forward until she can feel his breath in her ear. "Meat and mind, Manny. Meat, and mind. You're not interested in meat, are you? Just mind. You could be boiled alive before you noticed what was happening in the meatspace around you. Just another lobster in a pot. The only thing keeping you out of it is how much I love you." She reaches down and tears away the gel pouch, exposing his penis: it's stiff as a post from the vasodilators, dripping with gel, numb. Straightening up, she eases herself slowly down on it. It doesn't hurt as much as she expected, and the sensation is utterly different from what she's used to. She begins to lean forward, grabs hold of his straining arms, feels his thrilling helplessness. She can't control herself: She almost bites through her lip with the intensity of the sensation. Afterward, she reaches down and massages him until he begins to spasm, shuddering uncontrollably, emptying the Darwinian river of his source code into her, communicating via his only output device. + +She rolls off his hips and carefully uses the last of the superglue to gum her labia together. Humans don't produce seminiferous plugs, and although she's fertile, she wants to be absolutely sure. The glue will last for a day or two. She feels hot and flushed, almost out of control. Boiling to death with febrile expectancy, she's nailed him down at last. + +When she removes his glasses, his eyes are naked and vulnerable, stripped down to the human kernel of his nearly transcendent mind. "You can come and sign the marriage license tomorrow morning after breakfast," she whispers in his ear: "Otherwise, my lawyers will be in touch. Your parents will want a ceremony, but we can arrange that later." + +He looks as if he has something to say, so she finally relents and loosens the gag, then kisses him tenderly on one cheek. He swallows, coughs, and looks away. "Why? Why do it this way?" + +She taps him on the chest. "It's all about property rights." She pauses for a moment's thought: There's a huge ideological chasm to bridge, after all. "You finally convinced me about this agalmic thing of yours, this giving everything away for brownie points. I wasn't going to lose you to a bunch of lobsters or uploaded kittens, or whatever else is going to inherit this smart-matter singularity you're busy creating. So I decided to take what's mine first. Who knows? In a few months, I'll give you back a new intelligence, and you can look after it to your heart's content." + +"But you didn't need to do it this way -" + +"Didn't I?" She slides off the bed and pulls down her dress. "You give too much away too easily, Manny! Slow down, or there won't be anything left." Leaning over the bed she dribbles acetone onto the fingers of his left hand, then unlocks the cuff. She leaves the bottle of solvent conveniently close to hand so he can untangle himself. + +"See you tomorrow. Remember, after breakfast." + +She's in the doorway when he calls, "But you didn't say /{why}/!" + +"Think of it as being sort of like spreading your memes around," she says, blowing a kiss at him, and then closing the door. She bends down and thoughtfully places another cardboard box containing an uploaded kitten right outside it. Then she returns to her suite to make arrangements for the alchemical wedding. + +Chapter 2: Troubadour + +Three years later, Manfred is on the run. His gray-eyed fate is in hot pursuit, blundering after him through divorce court, chat room, and meetings of the International Monetary Emergency Fund. It's a merry dance he leads her. But Manfred isn't running away, he's discovered a mission. He's going to make a stand against the laws of economics in the ancient city of Rome. He's going to mount a concert for the spiritual machines. He's going to set the companies free, and break the Italian state government. + +In his shadow, his monster runs, keeping him company, never halting. + +* * * + +Manfred re-enters Europe through an airport that's all twentieth-century chrome and ductwork, barbaric in its decaying nuclear-age splendor. He breezes through customs and walks down a long, echoing arrival hall, sampling the local media feeds. It's November, and in a misplaced corporate search for seasonal cheer, the proprietors have come up with a final solution to the Christmas problem, a mass execution of plush Santas and elves. Bodies hang limply overhead every few meters, feet occasionally twitching in animatronic death, like a war crime perpetrated in a toy shop. Today's increasingly automated corporations don't understand mortality, Manfred thinks, as he passes a mother herding along her upset children. Their immortality is a drawback when dealing with the humans they graze on: They lack insight into one of the main factors that motivates the meat machines who feed them. Well, sooner or later we'll have to do something about that, he tells himself. + +The free media channels here are denser and more richly self-referential than anything he's seen in President Santorum's America. The accent's different, though. Luton, London's fourth satellite airport, speaks with an annoyingly bumptious twang, like Australian with a plum in its mouth. /{Hello, stranger! Is that a brain in your pocket or are you just pleased to think me? Ping Watford Informatics for the latest in cognitive modules and cheesy motion-picture references.}/ He turns the corner and finds himself squeezed up against the wall between the baggage reclaim office and a crowd of drunken Belgian tractor-drag fans, while his left goggle is trying to urgently tell him something about the railway infrastructure of Columbia. The fans wear blue face paint and chant something that sounds ominously like the ancient British war cry, /{Wemberrrly, Wemberrrly}/, and they're dragging a gigantic virtual tractor totem through the webspace analogue of the arrivals hall. He takes the reclaim office instead. + +As he enters the baggage reclaim zone, his jacket stiffens, and his glasses dim: He can hear the lost souls of suitcases crying for their owners. The eerie keening sets his own accessories on edge with a sense of loss, and for a moment, he's so spooked that he nearly shuts down the thalamic-limbic shunt interface that lets him feel their emotions. He's not in favor of emotions right now, not with the messy divorce proceedings and the blood sacrifice Pam is trying to extract from him; he'd much rather love and loss and hate had never been invented. But he needs the maximum possible sensory bandwidth to keep in touch with the world, so he feels it in his guts every time his footwear takes a shine to some Moldovan pyramid scheme. /{Shut up}/, he glyphs at his unruly herd of agents; I /{can't even hear myself think!}/ + +"Hello, sir, have a nice day, how may I be of service?" the yellow plastic suitcase on the counter says chirpily. It doesn't fool Manfred: He can see the Stalinist lines of control chaining it to the sinister, faceless cash register that lurks below the desk, agent of the British Airport Authority corporate bureaucracy. But that's okay. Only bags need fear for their freedom in here. + +"Just looking," he mumbles. And it's true. Because of a not entirely accidental cryptographic routing feature embedded in an airline reservations server, his suitcase is on its way to Mombasa, where it will probably be pithed and resurrected in the service of some African cyber-Fagin. That's okay by Manfred - it only contains a statistically normal mixture of second hand clothes and toiletries, and he only carries it to convince the airline passenger-profiling expert systems that he isn't some sort of deviant or terrorist - but it leaves him with a gap in his inventory that he must fill before he leaves the EU zone. He needs to pick up a replacement suitcase so that he has as much luggage leaving the superpower as he had when he entered it: He doesn't want to be accused of trafficking in physical goods in the midst of the transatlantic trade war between new world protectionists and old world globalists. At least, that's his cover story - and he's sticking to it. + +There's a row of unclaimed bags in front of the counter, up for sale in the absence of their owners. Some of them are very battered, but among them is a rather good-quality suitcase with integral induction-charged rollers and a keen sense of loyalty: exactly the same model as his old one. He polls it and sees not just GPS, but a Galileo tracker, a gazetteer the size of an old-time storage area network, and an iron determination to follow its owner as far as the gates of hell if necessary. Plus the right distinctive scratch on the lower left side of the case. "How much for just this one?" he asks the bellwether on the desk. + +"Ninety euros," it says placidly. + +Manfred sighs. "You can do better than that." In the time it takes them to settle on seventy-five, the Hang Sen Index is down fourteen-point-one-six points, and what's left of NASDAQ climbs another two-point-one. "Deal." Manfred spits some virtual cash at the brutal face of the cash register, and it unfetters the suitcase, unaware that Macx has paid a good bit more than seventy-five euros for the privilege of collecting this piece of baggage. Manfred bends down and faces the camera in its handle. "Manfred Macx," he says quietly. "Follow me." He feels the handle heat up as it imprints on his fingerprints, digital and phenotypic. Then he turns and walks out of the slave market, his new luggage rolling at his heels. + +* * * + +A short train journey later, Manfred checks into a hotel in Milton Keynes. He watches the sun set from his bedroom window, an occlusion of concrete cows blocking the horizon. The room is functional in an overly naturalistic kind of way, rattan and force-grown hardwood and hemp rugs concealing the support systems and concrete walls behind. He sits in a chair, gin and tonic at hand, absorbing the latest market news and grazing his multichannel feeds in parallel. His reputation is up two percent for no obvious reason today, he notices: Odd, that. When he pokes at it he discovers that /{everybody's}/ reputation - everybody, that is, who has a publicly traded reputation - is up a bit. It's as if the distributed Internet reputation servers are feeling bullish about integrity. Maybe there's a global honesty bubble forming. + +Manfred frowns, then snaps his fingers. The suitcase rolls toward him. "Who do you belong to?" he asks. + +"Manfred Macx," it replies, slightly bashfully. + +"No, before me." + +"I don't understand that question." + +He sighs. "Open up." + +Latches whir and retract: The hard-shell lid rises toward him, and he looks inside to confirm the contents. + +The suitcase is full of noise. + +* * * + +_1 Welcome to the early twenty-first century, human. + +_1 It's night in Milton Keynes, sunrise in Hong Kong. Moore's Law rolls inexorably on, dragging humanity toward the uncertain future. The planets of the solar system have a combined mass of approximately 2 x 10^{27}^ kilograms. Around the world, laboring women produce forty-five thousand babies a day, representing 10^{23}^ MIPS of processing power. Also around the world, fab lines casually churn out thirty million microprocessors a day, representing 10^{23}^ MIPS. In another ten months, most of the MIPS being added to the solar system will be machine-hosted for the first time. About ten years after that, the solar system's installed processing power will nudge the critical 1 MIPS per gram threshold - one million instructions per second per gram of matter. After that, singularity - a vanishing point beyond which extrapolating progress becomes meaningless. The time remaining before the intelligence spike is down to single-digit years ... + +* * * + +Aineko curls on the pillow beside Manfred's head, purring softly as his owner dreams uneasily. The night outside is dark: Vehicles operate on autopilot, running lights dipped to let the Milky Way shine down upon the sleeping city. Their quiet, fuel-cell-powered engines do not trouble Manfred's sleep. The robot cat keeps sleepless watch, alert for intruders, but there are none, save the whispering ghosts of Manfred's metacortex, feeding his dreams with their state vectors. + +The metacortex - a distributed cloud of software agents that surrounds him in netspace, borrowing CPU cycles from convenient processors (such as his robot pet) - is as much a part of Manfred as the society of mind that occupies his skull; his thoughts migrate into it, spawning new agents to research new experiences, and at night, they return to roost and share their knowledge. + +While Manfred sleeps, he dreams of an alchemical marriage. She waits for him at the altar in a strapless black gown, the surgical instruments gleaming in her gloved hands. "This won't hurt a bit," she explains as she adjusts the straps. "I only want your genome - the extended phenotype can wait until ... later." Blood-red lips, licked: a kiss of steel, then she presents the income tax bill. + +There's nothing accidental about this dream. As he experiences it, microelectrodes in his hypothalamus trigger sensitive neurons. Revulsion and shame flood him at the sight of her face, the sense of his vulnerability. Manfred's metacortex, in order to facilitate his divorce, is trying to decondition his strange love. It has been working on him for weeks, but still he craves her whiplash touch, the humiliation of his wife's control, the sense of helpless rage at her unpayable taxes, demanded with interest. + +Aineko watches him from the pillow, purring continuously. Retractable claws knead the bedding, first one paw, then the next. Aineko is full of ancient feline wisdom that Pamela installed back when mistress and master were exchanging data and bodily fluids rather than legal documents. Aineko is more cat than robot, these days, thanks in part to her hobbyist's interest in feline neuroanatomy. Aineko knows that Manfred is experiencing nameless neurasthenic agonies, but really doesn't give a shit about that as long as the power supply is clean and there are no intruders. + +Aineko curls up and joins Manfred in sleep, dreaming of laser-guided mice. + +* * * + +Manfred is jolted awake by the hotel room phone shrilling for attention. + +"Hello?" he asks, fuzzily. + +"Manfred Macx?" It's a human voice, with a gravelly east coast accent. + +"Yeah?" Manfred struggles to sit up. His mouth feels like the inside of a tomb, and his eyes don't want to open. + +"My name is Alan Glashwiecz, of Smoot, Sedgwick Associates. Am I correct in thinking that you are the Manfred Macx who is a director of a company called, uh, agalmic dot holdings dot root dot one-eight-four dot ninety-seven dot A-for-able dot B-for-baker dot five, incorporated?" + +"Uh." Manfred blinks and rubs his eyes. "Hold on a moment." When the retinal patterns fade, he pulls on his glasses and powers them up. "Just a second now." Browsers and menus ricochet through his sleep-laden eyes. "Can you repeat the company name?" + +"Sure." Glashwiecz repeats himself patiently. He sounds as tired as Manfred feels. + +"Um." Manfred finds it, floating three tiers down an elaborate object hierarchy. It's flashing for attention. There's a priority interrupt, an incoming lawsuit that hasn't propagated up the inheritance tree yet. He prods at the object with a property browser. "I'm afraid I'm not a director of that company, Mr. Glashwiecz. I appear to be retained by it as a technical contractor with non-executive power, reporting to the president, but frankly, this is the first time I've ever heard of the company. However, I can tell you who's in charge if you want." + +"Yes?" The attorney sounds almost interested. Manfred figures it out; the guy's in New Jersey, it must be about three in the morning over there. + +Malice - revenge for waking him up - sharpens Manfred's voice. "The president of agalmic.holdings.root.184.97.AB5 is agalmic.holdings.root.184.97.201. The secretary is agalmic.holdings.root.184.D5, and the chair is agalmic.holdings.root.184.E8.FF. All the shares are owned by those companies in equal measure, and I can tell you that their regulations are written in Python. Have a nice day, now!" He thumps the bedside phone control and sits up, yawning, then pushes the do-not-disturb button before it can interrupt again. After a moment he stands up and stretches, then heads to the bathroom to brush his teeth, comb his hair, and figure out where the lawsuit originated and how a human being managed to get far enough through his web of robot companies to bug him. + +* * * + +While he's having breakfast in the hotel restaurant, Manfred decides that he's going to do something unusual for a change: He's going to make himself temporarily rich. This is a change because Manfred's normal profession is making other people rich. Manfred doesn't believe in scarcity or zero-sum games or competition - his world is too fast and information-dense to accommodate primate hierarchy games. However, his current situation calls for him to do something radical: something like making himself a temporary billionaire so he can blow off his divorce settlement in an instant, like a wily accountancy octopus escaping a predator by vanishing in a cloud of his own black ink. + +Pam is chasing him partially for ideological reasons - she still hasn't given up on the idea of government as the dominant superorganism of the age - but also because she loves him in her own peculiar way, and the last thing any self-respecting dom can tolerate is rejection by her slave. Pam is a born-again postconservative, a member of the first generation to grow up after the end of the American century. Driven by the need to fix the decaying federal system before it collapses under a mound of Medicare bills, overseas adventurism, and decaying infrastructure, she's willing to use self-denial, entrapment, predatory mercantilism, dirty tricks, and any other tool that boosts the bottom line. She doesn't approve of Manfred's jetting around the world on free airline passes, making strangers rich, somehow never needing money. She can see his listing on the reputation servers, hovering about thirty points above IBM: All the metrics of integrity, effectiveness and goodwill value him above even that most fundamentalist of open-source computer companies. And she knows he craves her tough love, wants to give himself to her completely. So why is he running away? + +The reason he's running away is entirely more ordinary. Their unborn daughter, frozen in liquid nitrogen, is an unimplanted 96-hour-old blastula. Pam's bought into the whole Parents for Traditional Children parasite meme. PTC are germ-line recombination refuseniks: They refuse to have their children screened for fixable errors. If there's one thing that Manfred really can't cope with, it's the idea that nature knows best - even though that isn't the point she's making. One steaming row too many, and he kicked back, off to traveling fast and footloose again, spinning off new ideas like a memetic dynamo and living on the largesse of the new paradigm. File for divorce on grounds of irreconcilable ideological differences. No more whiplash-and-leather sex. + +* * * + +Before he hits the TGV for Rome, Manfred takes time to visit a model airplane show. It's a good place to be picked up by a CIA stringer - he's had a tip-off that someone will be there - and besides, flying models are hot hacker shit this decade. Add microtechnology, cameras, and neural networks to balsa-wood flyers, and you've got the next generation of military stealth flyer: It's a fertile talent-show scene, like the hacker cons of yore. This particular gig is happening in a decaying out-of-town supermarket that rents out its shop floor for events like this. Its emptiness is a sign of the times, ubiquitous broadband and expensive gas. (The robotized warehouse next door is, in contrast, frenetically busy, packing parcels for home delivery. Whether they telecommute or herd in meatspace offices, people still need to eat.) + +Today, the food hall is full of people. Eldritch ersatz insects buzz menacingly along the shining empty meat counters without fear of electrocution. Big monitors unfurled above the deli display cabinets show a weird, jerky view of a three-dimensional nightmare, painted all the synthetic colors of radar. The feminine-hygiene galley has been wheeled back to make room for a gigantic plastic-shrouded tampon five meters long and sixty centimeters in diameter - a microsat launcher and conference display, plonked there by the show's sponsors in a transparent attempt to talent-spot the up-and-coming engineering geeks. + +Manfred's glasses zoom in and grab a particularly fetching Fokker triplane that buzzes at face height through the crowd: He pipes the image stream up to one of his websites in real time. The Fokker pulls up in a tight Immelman turn beneath the dust-shrouded pneumatic cash tubes that line the ceiling, then picks up the trail of an F-104G. Cold War Luftwaffe and Great War Luftwaffe dart across the sky in an intricate game of tag. Manfred's so busy tracking the warbirds that he nearly trips over the fat white tube's launcher-erector. + +"Eh, Manfred! More care, s'il vous plait!" + +He wipes the planes and glances round. "Do I know you?" he asks politely, even as he feels a shock of recognition. + +"Amsterdam, three years ago." The woman in the double-breasted suit raises an eyebrow at him, and his social secretary remembers her for him, whispers in his ear. + +"Annette from Arianespace marketing?" She nods, and he focuses on her. Still dressing in the last-century retro mode that confused him the first time they met, she looks like a Kennedy-era Secret Service man: cropped bleached crew cut like an angry albino hedgehog, pale blue contact lenses, black tie, narrow lapels. Only her skin color hints at her Berber ancestry. Her earrings are cameras, endlessly watching. Her raised eyebrow turns into a lopsided smile as she sees his reaction. "I remember. That cafe in Amsterdam. What brings you here?" + +"Why "- her wave takes in the entirety of the show - "this talent show, of course." An elegant shrug and a wave at the orbit-capable tampon. "It's good talent. We're hiring this year. If we re-enter the launcher market, we must employ only the best. Amateurs, not time-servers, engineers who can match the very best Singapore can offer." + +For the first time, Manfred notices the discreet corporate logo on the flank of the booster. "You outsourced your launch-vehicle fabrication?" + +Annette pulls a face as she explains with forced casualness: "Space hotels were more profitable, this past decade. The high-ups, they cannot be bothered with the rocketry, no? Things that go fast and explode, they are passé, they say. Diversify, they say. Until -" She gives a very Gallic shrug. Manfred nods; her earrings are recording everything she says, for the purposes of due diligence. + +"I'm glad to see Europe re-entering the launcher business," he says seriously. "It's going to be very important when the nanosystems conformational replication business gets going for real. A major strategic asset to any corporate entity in the field, even a hotel chain." Especially now they've wound up NASA and the moon race is down to China and India, he thinks sourly. + +Her laugh sounds like glass bells chiming. "And yourself, mon cher? What brings you to the Confederaçion? You must have a deal in mind." + +"Well., it's Manfred's turn to shrug, "I was hoping to find a CIA agent, but there don't seem to be any here today." + +"That is not surprising," Annette says resentfully. "The CIA thinks the space industry, she is dead. Fools!" She continues for a minute, enumerating the many shortcomings of the Central Intelligence Agency with vigor and a distinctly Parisian rudeness. "They are become almost as bad as AP and Reuters since they go public," she adds. "All these wire services! And they are, ah, stingy. The CIA does not understand that good news must be paid for at market rates if freelance stringers are to survive. They are to be laughed at. It is so easy to plant disinformation on them, almost as easy as the Office of Special Plans..." She makes a banknote-riffling gesture between fingers and thumb. By way of punctuation, a remarkably maneuverable miniature ornithopter swoops around her head, does a double-back flip, and dives off in the direction of the liquor display. + +An Iranian woman wearing a backless leather minidress and a nearly transparent scarf barges up and demands to know how much the microbooster costs to buy: She is dissatisfied with Annette's attempt to direct her to the manufacturer's website, and Annette looks distinctly flustered by the time the woman's boyfriend - a dashing young air force pilot - shows up to escort her away. "Tourists," she mutters, before noticing Manfred, who is staring off into space with fingers twitching. "Manfred?" + +"Uh - what?" + +"I have been on this shop floor for six hours, and my feet, they kill me." She takes hold of his left arm and very deliberately unhooks her earrings, turning them off. "If I say to you I can write for the CIA wire service, will you take me to a restaurant and buy me dinner and tell me what it is you want to say?" + +* * * + +_1 Welcome to the second decade of the twenty-first century; the second decade in human history when the intelligence of the environment has shown signs of rising to match human demand. + +_1 The news from around the world is distinctly depressing this evening. In Maine, guerrillas affiliated with Parents for Traditional Children announce they've planted logic bombs in antenatal-clinic gene scanners, making them give random false positives when checking for hereditary disorders: The damage so far is six illegal abortions and fourteen lawsuits. + +_1 The International Convention on Performing Rights is holding a third round of crisis talks in an attempt to stave off the final collapse of the WIPO music licensing regime. On the one hand, hard-liners representing the Copyright Control Association of America are pressing for restrictions on duplicating the altered emotional states associated with specific media performances: As a demonstration that they mean business, two "software engineers" in California have been kneecapped, tarred, feathered, and left for dead under placards accusing them of reverse-engineering movie plot lines using avatars of dead and out-of-copyright stars. + +_1 On the opposite side of the fence, the Association of Free Artists are demanding the right of perform music in public without a recording contract, and are denouncing the CCAA as being a tool of Mafiya apparachiks who have bought it from the moribund music industry in an attempt to go legit. FBI Director Leonid Kuibyshev responds by denying that the Mafiya is a significant presence in the United States. But the music biz's position isn't strengthened by the near collapse of the legitimate American entertainment industry, which has been accelerating ever since the nasty noughties. + +_1 A marginally intelligent voicemail virus masquerading as an IRS auditor has caused havoc throughout America, garnishing an estimated eighty billion dollars in confiscatory tax withholdings into a numbered Swiss bank account. A different virus is busy hijacking people's bank accounts, sending ten percent of their assets to the previous victim, then mailing itself to everyone in the current mark's address book: a self- propelled pyramid scheme in action. Oddly, nobody is complaining much. While the mess is being sorted out, business IT departments have gone to standby, refusing to process any transaction that doesn't come in the shape of ink on dead trees. + +_1 Tipsters are warning of an impending readjustment in the overinflated reputations market, following revelations that some u-media gurus have been hyped past all realistic levels of credibility. The consequent damage to the junk-bonds market in integrity is serious. + +_1 The EU council of independent heads of state has denied plans for another attempt at Eurofederalisme, at least until the economy rises out of its current slump. Three extinct species have been resurrected in the past month; unfortunately, endangered ones are now dying off at a rate of one a day. And a group of militant anti-GM campaigners are being pursued by Interpol, after their announcement that they have spliced a metabolic pathway for cyanogenic glycosides into maize seed corn destined for human-edible crops. There have been no deaths yet, but having to test breakfast cereal for cyanide is really going to dent consumer trust. + +_1 About the only people who're doing well right now are the uploaded lobsters - and the crusties aren't even remotely human. + +* * * + +Manfred and Annette eat on the top deck of the buffet car, chatting as their TGV barrels through a tunnel under the English Channel. Annette, it transpires, has been commuting daily from Paris; which was, in any case, Manfred's next destination. From the show, he messaged Aineko to round up his baggage and meet him at St. Pancras Station, in a terminal like the shell of a giant steel woodlouse. Annette left her space launcher in the supermarket overnight: an unfueled test article, it is of no security significance. + +The railway buffet car is run by a Nepalese fast-food franchise. "I sometimes wish for to stay on the train," Annette says as she waits for her mismas bhat. "Past Paris! Think. Settle back in your couchette, to awaken in Moscow and change trains. All the way to Vladivostok in two days." + +"If they let you through the border," Manfred mutters. Russia is one of those places that still requires passports and asks if you are now or ever have been an anti-anticommunist: It's still trapped by its bloody-handed history. (Rewind the video stream to Stolypin's necktie party and start out fresh.) Besides, they have enemies: White Russian oligarchs, protection racketeers in the intellectual property business. Psychotic relics of the last decade's experiment with Marxism-Objectivism. "Are you really a CIA stringer?" + +Annette grins, her lips disconcertingly red: "I file dispatches from time to time. Nothing that could get me fired." + +Manfred nods. "My wife has access to their unfiltered stream." + +"Your -" Annette pauses. "It was she who I, I met? In De Wildemann's?" She sees his expression. "Oh, my poor fool!" She raises her glass to him. "It is, has, not gone well?" + +Manfred sighs and raises a toast toward Annette. "You know your marriage is in a bad way when you send your spouse messages via the CIA, and she communicates using the IRS." + +"In only five years." Annette winces. "You will pardon me for saying this - she did not look like your type." There's a question hidden behind that statement, and he notices again how good she is at overloading her statements with subtexts. + +"I'm not sure what my type is," he says, half-truthfully. He can't elude the sense that something not of either of their doing went wrong between him and Pamela, a subtle intrusion that levered them apart by stealth. Maybe it was me, he thinks. Sometimes he isn't certain he's still human; too many threads of his consciousness seem to live outside his head, reporting back whenever they find something interesting. Sometimes he feels like a puppet, and that frightens him because it's one of the early-warning signs of schizophrenia. And it's too early for anyone out there to be trying to hack exocortices ... isn't it? Right now, the external threads of his consciousness are telling him that they like Annette, when she's being herself instead of a cog in the meatspace ensemble of Arianespace management. But the part of him that's still human isn't sure just how far to trust himself. "I want to be me. What do you want to be?" + +She shrugs, as a waiter slides a plate in front of her. "I'm just a, a Parisian babe, no? An ingénue raised in the lilac age of le Confederaçion Europé, the self-deconstructed ruins of the gilded European Union." + +"Yeah, right." A plate appears in front of Manfred. "And I'm a good old microboomer from the MassPike corridor." He peels back a corner of the omelet topping and inspects the food underneath it. "Born in the sunset years of the American century." He pokes at one of the unidentifiable meaty lumps in the fried rice with his fork, and it pokes right back. There's a limit to how much his agents can tell him about her - European privacy laws are draconian by American standards - but he knows the essentials. Two parents who are still together, father a petty politician in some town council down in the vicinity of Toulouse. Went to the right école. The obligatory year spent bumming around the Confederaçion at government expense, learning how other people live - a new kind of empire building, in place of the 20th century's conscription and jackboot wanderjahr. No weblog or personal site that his agents can find. She joined Arianespace right out of the Polytechnique and has been management track ever since: Korou, Manhattan Island, Paris. "You've never been married, I take it." + +She chuckles. "Time is too short! I am still young." She picks up a forkful of food, and adds quietly. "Besides, the government would insist on paying." + +"Ah." Manfred tucks into his bowl thoughtfully. With the birth rate declining across Europe, the EC bureaucracy is worried; the old EU started subsidizing babies, a new generation of carers, a decade ago, and it still hasn't dented the problem. All it's done is alienate the brightest women of childbearing age. Soon they'll have to look to the east for a solution, importing a new generation of citizens - unless the long-promised aging hacks prove workable, or cheap AI comes along. + +"Do you have a hotel?" Annette asks suddenly. + +"In Paris?" Manfred is startled: "Not yet." + +"You must come home with me, then." She looks at him quizzically. + +"I'm not sure I - " He catches her expression. "What is it?" + +"Oh, nothing. My friend Henri, he says I take in strays too easily. But you are not a stray. I think you can look after yourself. Besides, it is the Friday today. Come with me, and I will file your press release for the Company to read. Tell me, do you dance? You look as if you need a wild week ending, to help forget your troubles!" + +* * * + +Annette drives a steamroller seduction through Manfred's plans for the weekend. He intended to find a hotel, file a press release, then spend some time researching the corporate funding structure of Parents for Traditional Children and the dimensionality of confidence variation on the reputation exchanges - then head for Rome. Instead, Annette drags him back to her apartment, a large studio flat tucked away behind an alley in the Marais. She sits him at the breakfast bar while she tidies away his luggage, then makes him close his eyes and swallow two dubious-tasting capsules. Next, she pours them each a tall glass of freezing-cold Aqvavit that tastes exactly like Polish rye bread. When they finish it, she just about rips his clothes off. Manfred is startled to discover that he has a crowbar-stiff erection; since the last blazing row with Pamela, he'd vaguely assumed he was no longer interested in sex. Instead, they end up naked on the sofa, surrounded by discarded clothing - Annette is very conservative, preferring the naked penetrative fuck of the last century to the more sophisticated fetishes of the present day. + +Afterward, he's even more surprised to discover that he's still tumescent. "The capsules?" he asks. + +She sprawls a well-muscled but thin thigh across him, then reaches down to grab his penis. Squeezes it. "Yes," she admits. "You need much special help to unwind, I think." Another squeeze. "Crystal meth and a traditional phosphodiesterase inhibitor." He grabs one of her small breasts, feeling very brutish and primitive. Naked. He's not sure Pamela ever let him see her fully naked: She thought skin was more sexy when it was covered. Annette squeezes him again, and he stiffens. "More!" + +By the time they finish, he's aching, and she shows him how to use the bidet. Everything is crystal clear, and her touch is electrifying. While she showers, he sits on the toilet seat lid and rants about Turing-completeness as an attribute of company law, about cellular automata and the blind knapsack problem, about his work on solving the Communist Central Planning problem using a network of interlocking unmanned companies. About the impending market adjustment in integrity, the sinister resurrection of the recording music industry, and the still-pressing need to dismantle Mars. + +When she steps out of the shower, he tells her that he loves her. She kisses him and slides his glasses and earpieces off his head so that he's really naked, sits on his lap, and fucks his brains out again, and whispers in his ear that she loves him and wants to be his manager. Then she leads him into her bedroom and tells him exactly what she wants him to wear, and she puts on her own clothes, and she gives him a mirror with some white powder on it to sniff. When she's got him dolled up they go out for a night of really serious clubbing, Annette in a tuxedo and Manfred in a blond wig, red silk off-the-shoulder gown, and high heels. Sometime in the early hours, exhausted and resting his head on her shoulder during the last tango in a BDSM club in the Rue Ste-Anne, he realizes that it really is possible to be in lust with someone other than Pamela. + +* * * + +Aineko wakes Manfred by repeatedly head-butting him above the left eye. He groans, and as he tries to open his eyes, he finds that his mouth tastes like a dead trout, his skin feels greasy with make-up, and his head is pounding. There's a banging noise somewhere. Aineko meows urgently. He sits up, feeling unaccustomed silk underwear rubbing against incredibly sore skin - he's fully dressed, just sprawled out on the sofa. Snores emanate from the bedroom; the banging is coming from the front door. Someone wants to come in. Shit. He rubs his head, stands up, and nearly falls flat on his face: He hasn't even taken those ridiculous high heels off. How much did I drink last night? he wonders. His glasses are on the breakfast bar; he pulls them on and is besieged by an urgent flurry of ideas demanding attention. He straightens his wig, picks up his skirts, and trips across to the door with a sinking feeling. Luckily his publicly traded reputation is strictly technical. + +He unlocks the door. "Who is it?" he asks in English. By way of reply somebody shoves the door in, hard. Manfred falls back against the wall, winded. His glasses stop working, sidelook displays filling with multicolored static. + +Two men charge in, identically dressed in jeans and leather jackets. They're wearing gloves and occlusive face masks, and one of them points a small and very menacing ID card at Manfred. A self-propelled gun hovers in the doorway, watching everything. "Where is he?" + +"Who?" gasps Manfred, breathless and terrified. + +"Macx." The other intruder steps into the living room quickly, pans around, ducks through the bathroom door. Aineko flops as limp as a dishrag in front of the sofa. The intruder checks out the bedroom: There's a brief scream, cut off short. + +"I don't know - who?" Manfred is choking with fear. + +The other intruder ducks out of the bedroom, waves a hand dismissively. + +"We are sorry to have bothered you," the man with the card says stiffly. He replaced it in his jacket pocket. "If you should see Manfred Macx, tell him that the Copyright Control Association of America advises him to cease and desist from his attempt to assist music thieves and other degenerate mongrel second-hander enemies of Objectivism. Reputations only of use to those alive to own them. Goodbye." + +The two copyright gangsters disappear through the door, leaving Manfred to shake his head dizzily while his glasses reboot. It takes him a moment to register the scream from the bedroom. "Fuck - Annette!" + +She appears in the open doorway, holding a sheet around her waist, looking angry and confused. "Annette!" he calls. She looks around, sees him, and begins to laugh shakily. "Annette!" He crosses over to her. "You're okay," he says. "You're okay." + +"You too." She hugs him, and she's shaking. Then she holds him at arm's length. "My, what a pretty picture!" + +"They wanted me," he says, and his teeth are chattering. "Why?" + +She looks up at him seriously. "You must bathe. Then have coffee. We are not at home, oui?" + +"Ah, oui." He looks down. Aineko is sitting up, looking dazed. "Shower. Then that dispatch for CIA news." + +"The dispatch?" She looks puzzled. "I filed that last night. When I was in the shower. The microphone, he is waterproof." + +* * * + +By the time Arianespace's security contractors show up, Manfred has stripped off Annette's evening gown and showered; he's sitting in the living room wearing a bathrobe, drinking a half-liter mug of espresso and swearing under his breath. + +While he was dancing the night away in Annette's arms, the global reputation market has gone nonlinear: People are putting their trust in the Christian Coalition and the Eurocommunist Alliance - always a sign that the times are bad - while perfectly sound trading enterprises have gone into free fall, as if a major bribery scandal has broken out. + +Manfred trades ideas for kudos via the Free Intellect Foundation, bastard child of George Soros and Richard Stallman. His reputation is cemented by donations to the public good that don't backfire. So he's offended and startled to discover that he's dropped twenty points in the past two hours - and frightened to see that this is by no means unusual. He was expecting a ten-point drop mediated via an options trade - payment for the use of the anonymous luggage remixer that routed his old suitcase to Mombasa and in return sent this new one to him via the left-luggage office in Luton - but this is more serious. The entire reputation market seems to have been hit by the confidence flu. + +Annette bustles around busily, pointing out angles and timings to the forensics team her head office sent in answer to her call for back-up. She seems more angry and shaken than worried by the intrusion. It's probably an occupational hazard for any upwardly mobile executive in the old, grasping network of greed that Manfred's agalmic future aims to supplant. The forensics dude and dudette, a pair of cute, tanned Lebanese youngsters, point the yellow snout of their mass spectroscope into various corners and agree that there's something not unlike gun oil in the air. But, so sorry, the intruders wore masks to trap the skin particles and left behind a spray of dust vacuumed from the seat of a city bus, so there's no way of getting a genotype match. Presently they agree to log it as a suspected corporate intrusion (origin: unclassified; severity: worrying) and increase the logging level on her kitchen telemetry. And remember to wear your earrings at all times, please. They leave, and Annette locks the door, leans against it, and curses for a whole long minute. + +"They gave me a message from the copyright control agency," Manfred says unevenly when she winds down. "Russian gangsters from New York bought the recording cartels a few years ago, you know? After the rights stitch-up fell apart, and the artists all went on-line while they focused on copy prevention technologies, the Mafiya were the only people who would buy the old business model. These guys add a whole new meaning to copy protection: This was just a polite cease and desist notice by their standards. They run the record shops, and they try to block any music distribution channel they don't own. Not very successfully, though - most gangsters are living in the past, more conservative than any normal businessman can afford to be. What was it that you put on the wire?" + +Annette closes her eyes. "I don't remember. No." She holds up a hand. "Open mike. I streamed you into a file and cut, cut out the bits about me." She opens her eyes and shakes her head. "What was I on?" + +"You don't know either?" + +He stands up, and she walks over and throws her arms around him. "I was on you," she murmurs. + +"Bullshit." He pulls away, then sees how this upsets her. Something is blinking for attention in his glasses; he's been off-line for the best part of six hours and is getting a panicky butterfly stomach at the idea of not being in touch with everything that's happened in the last twenty kiloseconds. "I need to know more. Something in that report rattled the wrong cages. Or someone ratted on the suitcase exchange - I meant the dispatch to be a heads-up for whoever needs a working state planning system, not an invitation to shoot me!" + +"Well, then." She lets go of him. "Do your work." Coolly: "I'll be around." + +He realizes that he's hurt her, but he doesn't see any way of explaining that he didn't mean to - at least, not without digging himself in deeper. He finishes his croissant and plunges into one of those unavoidable fits of deep interaction, fingers twitching on invisible keypads and eyeballs jiggling as his glasses funnel deep media straight into his skull through the highest bandwidth channel currently available. + +One of his e-mail accounts is halfway to the moon with automatic messages, companies with names like agalmic.holdings.root.8E.F0 screaming for the attention of their transitive director. Each of these companies - and there are currently more than sixteen thousand of them, although the herd is growing day by day - has three directors and is the director of three other companies. Each of them executes a script in a functional language Manfred invented; the directors tell the company what to do, and the instructions include orders to pass instructions on to their children. In effect, they are a flock of cellular automata, like the cells in Conway's Game of Life, only far more complex and powerful. + +Manfred's companies form a programmable grid. Some of them are armed with capital in the form of patents Manfred filed, then delegated rather than passing on to one of the Free Foundations. Some of them are effectively nontrading, but occupy directorial roles. Their corporate functions (such as filing of accounts and voting in new directors) are all handled centrally through his company-operating framework, and their trading is carried out via several of the more popular B2B enabler dot-coms. Internally, the companies do other, more obscure load-balancing computations, processing resource-allocation problems like a classic state central planning system. None of which explains why fully half of them have been hit by lawsuits in the past twenty-two hours. + +The lawsuits are ... random. That's the only pattern Manfred can detect. Some of them allege patent infringements; these he might take seriously, except that about a third of the targets are director companies that don't actually do anything visible to the public. A few lawsuits allege mismanagement, but then there's a whole bizarre raft of spurious nonsense: suits for wrongful dismissal or age discrimination - against companies with no employees - complaints about reckless trading, and one action alleging that the defendant (in conspiracy with the prime minister of Japan, the government of Canada, and the Emir of Kuwait) is using orbital mind-control lasers to make the plaintiff's pet chihuahua bark at all hours of day and night. + +Manfred groans and does a quick calculation. At the current rate, lawsuits are hitting his corporate grid at a rate of one every sixteen seconds - up from none in the preceding six months. In another day, this is going to saturate him. If it keeps up for a week, it'll saturate every court in the United States. Someone has found a means to do for lawsuits what he's doing for companies - and they've chosen him as their target. + +To say that Manfred is unamused is an understatement. If he wasn't already preoccupied with Annette's emotional state and edgy from the intrusion, he'd be livid - but he's still human enough that he responds to human stimuli first. So he determines to do something about it, but he's still flashing on the floating gun, her cross-dressing cool. + +Transgression, sex, and networks; these are all on his mind when Glashwiecz phones again. + +"Hello?" Manfred answers distractedly; he's busy pondering the lawsuit bot that's attacking his systems. + +"Macx! The elusive Mr. Macx!" Glashwiecz sounds positively overjoyed to have tracked down his target. + +Manfred winces. "Who is this?" he asks. + +"I called you yesterday," says the lawyer; "You should have listened." He chortles horribly. "Now I have you!" + +Manfred holds the phone away from his face, like something poisonous. "I'm recording this," he warns. "Who the hell are you and what do you want?" + +"Your wife has retained my partnership's services to pursue her interests in your divorce case. When I called you yesterday it was to point out without prejudice that your options are running out. I have an order, signed in court three days ago, to have all your assets frozen. These ridiculous shell companies notwithstanding, she's going to take you for exactly what you owe her. After tax, of course. She's very insistent on that point." + +Manfred glances round, puts his phone on hold for a moment: "Where's my suitcase?" he asks Aineko. The cat sidles away, ignoring him. "Shit." He can't see the new luggage anywhere. Quite possibly it's on its way to Morocco, complete with its priceless cargo of high-density noise. He returns his attention to the phone. Glashwiecz is droning on about equitable settlements, cumulative IRS tax demands - that seem to have materialized out of fantasy with Pam's imprimatur on them - and the need to make a clean breast of things in court and confess to his sins. "Where's the fucking suitcase?" He takes the phone off hold. "Shut the fuck up, please, I'm trying to think." + +"I'm not going to shut up! You're on the court docket already, Macx. You can't evade your responsibilities forever. You've got a wife and a helpless daughter to care for -" + +"A daughter?" That cuts right through Manfred's preoccupation with the suitcase. + +"Didn't you know?" Glashwiecz sounds pleasantly surprised. "She was decanted last Thursday. Perfectly healthy, I'm told. I thought you knew; you have viewing rights via the clinic webcam. Anyway, I'll just leave you with this thought - the sooner you come to a settlement, the sooner I can unfreeze your companies. Good-bye." + +The suitcase rolls into view, peeping coyly out from behind Annette's dressing table. Manfred breathes a sigh of relief and beckons to it; at the moment, it's easier to deal with his Plan B than dawn raids by objectivist gangsters, Annette's sulk, his wife's incessant legal spamming, and the news that he is a father against his will. "C'mon over here, you stray baggage. Let's see what I got for my reputation derivatives ..." + +* * * + +Anticlimax. + +Annette's communiqué is anodyne; a giggling confession off camera (shower-curtain rain in the background) that the famous Manfred Macx is in Paris for a weekend of clubbing, drugging, and general hell-raising. Oh, and he's promised to invent three new paradigm shifts before breakfast every day, starting with a way to bring about the creation of Really Existing Communism by building a state central planning apparatus that interfaces perfectly with external market systems and somehow manages to algorithmically outperform the Monte Carlo free-for-all of market economics, solving the calculation problem. Just because he can, because hacking economics is fun, and he wants to hear the screams from the Chicago School. + +Try as he may, Manfred can't see anything in the press release that is at all unusual. It's just the sort of thing he does, and getting it on the net was why he was looking for a CIA stringer in the first place. + +He tries to explain this to her in the bath as he soaps her back. "I don't understand what they're on about," he complains. "There's nothing that tipped them off - except that I was in Paris, and you filed the news. You did nothing wrong." + +"Mais oui." She turns round, slippery as an eel, and slides backward into the water. "I try to tell you this, but you are not listening." + +"I am now." Water droplets cling to the outside of his glasses, plastering his view of the room with laser speckle highlights. "I'm sorry, Annette, I brought this mess with me. I can take it out of your life." + +"No!" She rises up in front of him and leans forward, face serious. "I said yesterday. I want to be your manager. Take me in." + +"I don't need a manager; my whole thing is about being fast and out of control!" + +"You think you do not need a manager, but your companies do," she observes. "You have lawsuits, how many? You cannot the time to oversee them spare. The Soviets, they abolish capitalists, but even they need managers. Please, let me manage for you!" + +Annette is so intense about the idea that she becomes visibly aroused. He leans toward her, cups a hand around one taut nipple. "The company matrix isn't sold yet," he admits. + +"It is not?" She looks delighted. "Excellent! To who can this be sold, to Moscow? To SLORC? To -" + +"I was thinking of the Italian Communist Party," he says. "It's a pilot project. I was working on selling it - I need the money for my divorce, and to close the deal on the luggage - but it's not that simple. Someone has to run the damn thing - someone with a keen understanding of how to interface a central planning system with a capitalist economy. A system administrator with experience of working for a multinational corporation would be perfect, ideally with an interest in finding new ways and means of interfacing the centrally planned enterprise to the outside world." He looks at her with suddenly dawning surmise. "Um, are you interested?" + +* * * + +Rome is hotter than downtown Columbia, South Carolina, over Thanksgiving weekend; it stinks of methane-burning Skodas with a low undertone of cooked dog shit. The cars are brightly colored subcompact missiles, hurtling in and out of alleyways like angry wasps: Hot-wiring their drive-by-wire seems to be the national sport, although Fiat's embedded systems people have always written notoriously wobbly software. + +Manfred emerges from the Stazione Termini into dusty sunlight, blinking like an owl. His glasses keep up a rolling monologue about who lived where in the days of the late Republic. They're stuck on a tourist channel and won't come unglued from that much history without a struggle. Manfred doesn't feel like a struggle right now. He feels like he's been sucked dry over the weekend: a light, hollow husk that might blow away in a stiff breeze. He hasn't had a patentable idea all day. This is not a good state to be in on a Monday morning when he's due to meet the former Minister for Economic Affairs, in order to give him a gift that will probably get the minister a shot at higher office and get Pam's lawyer off his back. But somehow he can't bring himself to worry too much: Annette has been good for him. + +The ex-minister's private persona isn't what Manfred was expecting. All Manfred has seen so far is a polished public avatar in a traditionally cut suit, addressing the Chamber of Deputies in cyberspace; which is why, when he rings the doorbell set in the whitewashed doorframe of Gianni's front door, he isn't expecting a piece of Tom of Finland beefcake, complete with breechclout and peaked leather cap, to answer. + +"Hello, I am here to see the minister," Manfred says carefully. Aineko, perched on his left shoulder, attempts to translate: It trills something that sounds extremely urgent. Everything sounds urgent in Italian. + +"It's okay, I'm from Iowa," says the guy in the doorway. He tucks a thumb under one leather strap and grins over his moustache: "What's it about?" Over his shoulder: "Gianni! Visitor!" + +"It's about the economy," Manfred says carefully. "I'm here to make it obsolete." + +The beefcake backs away from the door cautiously - then the minister appears behind him. "Ah, signore Macx! It's okay, Johnny, I have been expecting him." Gianni extends a rapid welcome, like a hyperactive gnome buried in a white toweling bathrobe: "Please come in, my friend! I'm sure you must be tired from your journey. A refreshment for the guest if you please, Johnny. Would you prefer coffee or something stronger?" + +Five minutes later, Manfred is buried up to his ears in a sofa covered in buttery white cowhide, a cup of virulently strong espresso balanced precariously on his knee, while Gianni Vittoria himself holds forth on the problems of implementing a postindustrial ecosystem on top of a bureaucratic system with its roots in the bullheadedly modernist era of the 1920s. Gianni is a visionary of the left, a strange attractor within the chaotic phase-space of Italian politics. A former professor of Marxist economics, his ideas are informed by a painfully honest humanism, and everyone - even his enemies - agrees that he is one of the greatest theoreticians of the post-EU era. But his intellectual integrity prevents him from rising to the very top, and his fellow travelers are much ruder about him than his ideological enemies, accusing him of the ultimate political crime — valuing truth over power. + +Manfred had met Gianni a couple of years earlier via a hosted politics chat room; at the beginning of last week, he sent him a paper detailing his embeddable planned economy and a proposal for using it to turbocharge the endless Italian attempt to re-engineer its government systems. This is the thin end of the wedge: If Manfred is right, it could catalyse a whole new wave of communist expansion, driven by humanitarian ideals and demonstrably superior performance, rather than wishful thinking and ideology. + +"It is impossible, I fear. This is Italy, my friend. Everybody has to have their say. Not everybody even understands what it is we are talking about, but that won't stop them talking about it. Since 1945, our government requires consensus - a reaction to what came before. Do you know, we have five different routes to putting forward a new law, two of them added as emergency measures to break the gridlock? And none of them work on their own unless you can get everybody to agree. Your plan is daring and radical, but if it works, we must understand why we work - and that digs right to the root of being human, and not everybody will agree." + +At this point Manfred realizes that he's lost. "I don't understand," he says, genuinely puzzled. "What has the human condition got to do with economics?" + +The minister sighs abruptly. "You are very unusual. You earn no money, do you? But you are rich, because grateful people who have benefited from your work give you everything you need. You are like a medieval troubadour who has found favor with the aristocracy. Your labor is not alienated - it is given freely, and your means of production is with you always, inside your head." Manfred blinks; the jargon is weirdly technical-sounding but orthogonal to his experience, offering him a disquieting glimpse into the world of the terminally future-shocked. He is surprised to find that not understanding itches. + +Gianni taps his balding temple with a knuckle like a walnut. "Most people spend little time inside their heads. They don't understand how you live. They're like medieval peasants looking in puzzlement at the troubadour. This system you invent, for running a planned economy, is delightful and elegant: Lenin's heirs would have been awestruck. But it is not a system for the new century. It is not human." + +Manfred scratches his head. "It seems to me that there's nothing human about the economics of scarcity," he says. "Anyway, humans will be obsolete as economic units within a couple more decades. All I want to do is make everybody rich beyond their wildest dreams before that happens." A pause for a sip of coffee, and to think, one honest statement deserves another: "And to pay off a divorce settlement." + +"Ye-es? Well, let me show you my library, my friend," he says, standing up. "This way." + +Gianni ambles out of the white living room with its carnivorous leather sofas, and up a cast-iron spiral staircase that nails some kind of upper level to the underside of the roof. "Human beings aren't rational," he calls over his shoulder. "That was the big mistake of the Chicago School economists, neoliberals to a man, and of my predecessors, too. If human behavior was logical, there would be no gambling, hmm? The house always wins, after all." The staircase debouches into another airy whitewashed room, where one wall is occupied by a wooden bench supporting a number of ancient, promiscuously cabled servers and a very new, eye-wateringly expensive solid volume renderer. Opposite the bench is a wall occupied from floor to ceiling by bookcases: Manfred looks at the ancient, low-density medium and sneezes, momentarily bemused by the sight of data density measured in kilograms per megabyte rather than vice versa. + +"What's it fabbing?" Manfred asks, pointing at the renderer, which is whining to itself and slowly sintering together something that resembles a carriage clockmaker's fever dream of a spring-powered hard disk drive. + +"Oh, one of Johnny's toys - a micromechanical digital phonograph player," Gianni says dismissively. "He used to design Babbage engines for the Pentagon - stealth computers. (No van Eck radiation, you know.) Look." He carefully pulls a fabric-bound document out of the obsolescent data wall and shows the spine to Manfred: "On the Theory of Games, by John von Neumann. Signed first edition." + +Aineko meeps and dumps a slew of confusing purple finite state automata into Manfred's left eye. The hardback is dusty and dry beneath his fingertips as he remembers to turn the pages gently. "This copy belonged to the personal library of Oleg Kordiovsky. A lucky man is Oleg: He bought it in 1952, while on a visit to New York, and the MVD let him to keep it." + +"He must be -" Manfred pauses. More data, historical time lines. "Part of GosPlan?" + +"Correct." Gianni smiles thinly. "Two years before the central committee denounced computers as bourgeois deviationist pseudoscience intended to dehumanize the proletarian. They recognized the power of robots even then. A shame they did not anticipate the compiler or the Net." + +"I don't understand the significance. Nobody back then could expect that the main obstacle to doing away with market capitalism would be overcome within half a century, surely?" + +"Indeed not. But it's true: Since the 1980s, it has been possible - in principle - to resolve resource allocation problems algorithmically, by computer, instead of needing a market. Markets are wasteful: They allow competition, much of which is thrown on the scrap heap. So why do they persist?" + +Manfred shrugs. "You tell me. Conservativism?" + +Gianni closes the book and puts it back on the shelf. "Markets afford their participants the illusion of free will, my friend. You will find that human beings do not like being forced into doing something, even if it is in their best interests. Of necessity, a command economy must be coercive - it does, after all, command." + +"But my system doesn't! It mediates where supplies go, not who has to produce what -" + +Gianni is shaking his head. "Backward chaining or forward chaining, it is still an expert system, my friend. Your companies need no human beings, and this is a good thing, but they must not direct the activities of human beings, either. If they do, you have just enslaved people to an abstract machine, as dictators have throughout history." + +Manfred's eyes scan along the bookshelf. "But the market itself is an abstract machine! A lousy one, too. I'm mostly free of it - but how long is it going to continue oppressing people?" + +"Maybe not as long as you fear." Gianni sits down next to the renderer, which is currently extruding the inference mill of the analytical engine. "The marginal value of money decreases, after all: The more you have, the less it means to you. We are on the edge of a period of prolonged economic growth, with annual averages in excess of twenty percent, if the Council of Europe's predictor metrics are anything to go by. The last of the flaccid industrial economy has withered away, and this era's muscle of economic growth, what used to be the high-technology sector, is now everything. We can afford a little wastage, my friend, if that is the price of keeping people happy until the marginal value of money withers away completely." + +Realization dawns. "You want to abolish scarcity, not just money!" + +"Indeed." Gianni grins. "There's more to that than mere economic performance; you have to consider abundance as a factor. Don't plan the economy; take things out of the economy. Do you pay for the air you breathe? Should uploaded minds - who will be the backbone of our economy, by and by - have to pay for processor cycles? No and no. Now, do you want to know how you can pay for your divorce settlement? And can I interest you, and your interestingly accredited new manager, in a little project of mine?" + +* * * + +The shutters are thrown back, the curtains tied out of the way, and Annette's huge living room windows are drawn open in the morning breeze. + +Manfred sits on a leather-topped piano stool, his suitcase open at his feet. He's running a link from the case to Annette's stereo, an antique stand-alone unit with a satellite Internet uplink. Someone has chipped it, crudely revoking its copy protection algorithm: The back of its case bears scars from the soldering iron. Annette is curled up on the huge sofa, wrapped in a kaftan and a pair of high-bandwidth goggles, thrashing out an internal Arianespace scheduling problem with some colleagues in Iran and Guyana. + +His suitcase is full of noise, but what's coming out of the stereo is ragtime. Subtract entropy from a data stream - coincidentally uncompressing it - and what's left is information. With a capacity of about a trillion terabytes, the suitcase's holographic storage reservoir has enough capacity to hold every music, film, and video production of the twentieth century with room to spare. This is all stuff that is effectively out of copyright control, work-for-hire owned by bankrupt companies, released before the CCAA could make their media clampdown stick. Manfred is streaming the music through Annette's stereo - but keeping the noise it was convoluted with. High-grade entropy is valuable, too ... + +Presently, Manfred sighs and pushes his glasses up his forehead, killing the displays. He's thought his way around every permutation of what's going on, and it looks like Gianni was right: There's nothing left to do but wait for everyone to show up. + +For a moment, he feels old and desolate, as slow as an unassisted human mind. Agencies have been swapping in and out of his head for the past day, ever since he got back from Rome. He's developed a butterfly attention span, irritable and unable to focus on anything while the information streams fight it out for control of his cortex, arguing about a solution to his predicament. Annette is putting up with his mood swings surprisingly calmly. He's not sure why, but he glances her way fondly. Her obsessions run surprisingly deep, and she's quite clearly using him for her own purposes. So why does he feel more comfortable around her than he did with Pam? + +She stretches and pushes her goggles up. "Oui?" + +"I was just thinking." He smiles. "Three days and you haven't told me what I should be doing with myself, yet." + +She pulls a face. "Why would I do that?" + +"Oh, no reason. I'm just not over - " He shrugs uncomfortably. There it is, an inexplicable absence in his life, but not one he feels he urgently needs to fill yet. Is this what a relationship between equals feels like? He's not sure: Starting with the occlusive cocooning of his upbringing and continuing through all his adult relationships, he's been effectively - voluntarily - dominated by his partners. Maybe the antisubmissive conditioning is working, after all. But if so, why the creative malaise? Why isn't he coming up with original new ideas this week? Could it be that his peculiar brand of creativity is an outlet, that he needs the pressure of being lovingly enslaved to make him burst out into a great flowering of imaginative brilliance? Or could it be that he really is missing Pam? + +Annette stands up and walks over, slowly. He looks at her and feels lust and affection, and isn't sure whether or not this is love. "When are they due?" she asks, leaning over him. + +"Any -" The doorbell chimes. + +"Ah. I will get that." She stalks away, opens the door. + +"You!" + +Manfred's head snaps round as if he's on a leash. Her leash: But he wasn't expecting her to come in person. + +"Yes, me," Annette says easily. "Come in. Be my guest." + +Pam enters the apartment living room with flashing eyes, her tame lawyer in tow. "Well, look what the robot kitty dragged in," she drawls, fixing Manfred with an expression that owes more to anger than to humor. It's not like her, this blunt hostility, and he wonders where it came from. + +Manfred rises. For a moment he's transfixed by the sight of his dominatrix wife, and his - mistress? conspirator? lover? - side by side. The contrast is marked: Annette's expression of ironic amusement a foil for Pamela's angry sincerity. Somewhere behind them stands a balding middle-aged man in a suit, carrying a folio: just the kind of diligent serf Pam might have turned him into, given time. Manfred musters up a smile. "Can I offer you some coffee?" he asks. "The party of the third part seems to be late." + +"Coffee would be great, mine's dark, no sugar," twitters the lawyer. He puts his briefcase down on a side table and fiddles with his wearable until a light begins to blink from his spectacle frames: "I'm recording this, I'm sure you understand." + +Annette sniffs and heads for the kitchen, which is charmingly manual but not very efficient; Pam is pretending she doesn't exist. "Well, well, well." She shakes her head. "I'd expected better of you than a French tart's boudoir, Manny. And before the ink's dry on the divorce - these days that'll cost you, didn't you think of that?" + +"I'm surprised you're not in the hospital," he says, changing the subject. "Is postnatal recovery outsourced these days?" + +"The employers." She slips her coat off her shoulders and hangs it behind the broad wooden door. "They subsidize everything when you reach my grade." Pamela is wearing a very short, very expensive dress, the kind of weapon in the war between the sexes that ought to come with an end-user certificate: But to his surprise it has no effect on him. He realizes that he's completely unable to evaluate her gender, almost as if she's become a member of another species. "As you'd be aware if you'd been paying attention." + +"I always pay attention, Pam. It's the only currency I carry." + +"Very droll, ha-ha," interrupts Glashwiecz. "You do realize that you're paying me while I stand here listening to this fascinating byplay?" + +Manfred stares at him. "You know I don't have any money." + +"Ah," Glashwiecz smiles, "but you must be mistaken. Certainly the judge will agree with me that you must be mistaken - all a lack of paper documentation means is that you've covered your trail. There's the small matter of the several thousand corporations you own, indirectly. Somewhere at the bottom of that pile there has got to be something, hasn't there?" + +A hissing, burbling noise like a sackful of large lizards being drowned in mud emanates from the kitchen, suggesting that Annette's percolator is nearly ready. Manfred's left hand twitches, playing chords on an air keyboard. Without being at all obvious, he's releasing a bulletin about his current activities that should soon have an effect on the reputation marketplace. "Your attack was rather elegant," he comments, sitting down on the sofa as Pam disappears into the kitchen. + +Glashwiecz nods. "The idea was one of my interns'," he says. "I don't understand this distributed denial of service stuff, but Lisa grew up on it. Something about it being a legal travesty, but workable all the same." + +"Uh-huh." Manfred's opinion of the lawyer drops a notch. He notices Pam reappearing from the kitchen, her expression icy. A moment later Annette surfaces carrying a jug and some cups, beaming innocently. Something's going on, but at that moment, one of his agents nudges him urgently in the left ear, his suitcase keens mournfully and beams a sense of utter despair at him, and the doorbell rings again. + +"So what's the scam?" Glashwiecz sits down uncomfortably close to Manfred and murmurs out of one side of his mouth. "Where's the money?" + +Manfred looks at him irritably. "There is no money," he says. "The idea is to make money obsolete. Hasn't she explained that?" His eyes wander, taking in the lawyer's Patek Philippe watch, his Java-enabled signet ring. + +"C'mon. Don't give me that line. Look, all it takes is a couple of million, and you can buy your way free for all I care. All I'm here for is to see that your wife and daughter don't get left penniless and starving. You know and I know that you've got bags of it stuffed away - just look at your reputation! You didn't get that by standing at the roadside with a begging bowl, did you?" + +Manfred snorts. "You're talking about an elite IRS auditor here. She isn't penniless; she gets a commission on every poor bastard she takes to the cleaners, and she was born with a trust fund. Me, I -" The stereo bleeps. Manfred pulls his glasses on. Whispering ghosts of dead artists hum through his earlobes, urgently demanding their freedom. Someone knocks at the door again, and he glances around to see Annette walking toward it. + +"You're making it hard on yourself," Glashwiecz warns. + +"Expecting company?" Pam asks, one brittle eyebrow raised in Manfred's direction. + +"Not exactly -" + +Annette opens the door and a couple of guards in full SWAT gear march in. They're clutching gadgets that look like crosses between digital sewing machines and grenade launchers, and their helmets are studded with so many sensors that they resemble 1950s space probes. "That's them," Annette says clearly. + +"Mais Oui." The door closes itself and the guards stand to either side. Annette stalks toward Pam. + +"You think to walk in here, to my pied-a-terre, and take from Manfred?" she sniffs. + +"You're making a big mistake, lady," Pam says, her voice steady and cold enough to liquefy helium. + +A burst of static from one of the troopers. "No," Annette says distantly. "No mistake." + +She points at Glashwiecz. "Are you aware of the takeover?" + +"Takeover?" The lawyer looks puzzled, but not alarmed by the presence of the guards. + +"As of three hours ago," Manfred says quietly, "I sold a controlling interest in agalmic.holdings.root.1.1.1 to Athene Accelerants BV, a venture capital outfit from Maastricht. One dot one dot one is the root node of the central planning tree. Athene aren't your usual VC, they're accelerants - they take explosive business plans and detonate them." Glashwiecz is looking pale - whether with anger or fear of a lost commission is impossible to tell. "Actually, Athene Accelerants is owned by a shell company owned by the Italian Communist Party's pension trust. The point is, you're in the presence of one dot one dot one's chief operations officer." + +Pam looks annoyed. "Puerile attempts to dodge responsibility -" + +Annette clears her throat. "Exactly who do you think you are trying to sue?" she asks Glashwiecz sweetly. "Here we have laws about unfair restraint of trade. Also about foreign political interference, specifically in the financial affairs of an Italian party of government." + +"You wouldn't -" + +"I would." Manfred brushes his hands on his knees and stands up. "Done, yet?" he asks the suitcase. + +Muffled beeps, then a gravelly synthesized voice speaks. "Uploads completed." + +"Ah, good." He grins at Annette. "Time for our next guests?" + +On cue, the doorbell rings again. The guards sidle to either side of the door. Annette snaps her fingers, and it opens to admit a pair of smartly dressed thugs. It's beginning to get crowded in the living room. + +"Which one of you is Macx?" snaps the older one of the two thugs, staring at Glashwiecz for no obvious reason. He hefts an aluminum briefcase. "Got a writ to serve." + +"You'd be the CCAA?" asks Manfred. + +"You bet. If you're Macx, I have a restraining order -" + +Manfred raises a hand. "It's not me you want," he says. "It's this lady." He points at Pam, whose mouth opens in silent protest. "Y'see, the intellectual property you're chasing wants to be free. It's so free that it's now administered by a complex set of corporate instruments lodged in the Netherlands, and the prime shareholder as of approximately four minutes ago is my soon-to-be-ex-wife Pamela, here." He winks at Glashwiecz. "Except she doesn't control anything." + +"Just what do you think you're playing at, Manfred?" Pamela snarls, unable to contain herself any longer. The guards shuffle: The larger, junior CCAA enforcer tugs at his boss's jacket nervously. + +"Well." Manfred picks up his coffee and takes a sip. Grimaces. "Pam wanted a divorce settlement, didn't she? The most valuable assets I own are the rights to a whole bunch of recategorized work-for-hire that slipped through the CCAA's fingers a few years back. Part of the twentieth century's cultural heritage that got locked away by the music industry in the last decade - Janis Joplin, the Doors, that sort of thing. Artists who weren't around to defend themselves anymore. When the music cartels went bust, the rights went for a walk. I took them over originally with the idea of setting the music free. Giving it back to the public domain, as it were." + +Annette nods at the guards, one of whom nods back and starts muttering and buzzing into a throat mike. Manfred continues. "I was working on a solution to the central planning paradox - how to interface a centrally planned enclave to a market economy. My good friend Gianni Vittoria suggested that such a shell game could have alternative uses. So I've not freed the music. Instead, I signed the rights over to various actors and threads running inside the agalmic holdings network - currently one million, forty-eight thousand, five hundred and seventy-five companies. They swap rights rapidly - the rights to any given song are resident in a given company for, oh, all of fifty milliseconds at a time. Now understand, I don't own these companies. I don't even have a financial interest in them anymore. I've deeded my share of the profits to Pam, here. I'm getting out of the biz, Gianni's suggested something rather more challenging for me to do instead." + +He takes another mouthful of coffee. The recording Mafiya goon glares at him. Pam glares at him. Annette stands against one wall, looking amused. "Perhaps you'd like to sort it out between you?" he asks. Aside, to Glashwiecz: "I trust you'll drop your denial of service attack before I set the Italian parliament on you? By the way, you'll find the book value of the intellectual property assets I deeded to Pamela - by the value these gentlemen place on them - is somewhere in excess of a billion dollars. As that's rather more than ninety-nine-point-nine percent of my assets, you'll probably want to look elsewhere for your fees." + +Glashwiecz stands up carefully. The lead goon stares at Pamela. "Is this true?" he demands. "This little squirt give you IP assets of Sony Bertelsmann Microsoft Music? We have claim! You come to us for distribution or you get in deep trouble." + +The second goon rumbles agreement: "Remember, dose MP3s, dey bad for you health!" + +Annette claps her hands. "If you would to leave my apartment, please?" The door, attentive as ever, swings open: "You are no longer welcome here!" + +"This means you," Manfred advises Pam helpfully. + +"You bastard," she spits at him. + +Manfred forces a smile, bemused by his inability to respond to her the way she wants. Something's wrong, missing, between them. "I thought you wanted my assets. Are the encumbrances too much for you?" + +"You know what I mean! You and that two-bit Euro-whore! I'll nail you for child neglect!" + +His smile freezes. "Try it, and I'll sue you for breach of patent rights. My genome, you understand." + +Pam is taken aback by this. "You patented your own genome? What happened to the brave new communist, sharing information freely?" + +Manfred stops smiling. "Divorce happened. And the Italian Communist Party happened." + +She turns on her heel and stalks out of the apartment bravely, tame attorney in tow behind her, muttering about class action lawsuits and violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The CCAA lawyer's tame gorilla makes a grab for Glashwiecz's shoulder, and the guards move in, hustling the whole movable feast out into the stairwell. The door slams shut on a chaos of impending recursive lawsuits, and Manfred breathes a huge wheeze of relief. + +Annette walks over to him and leans her chin on the top of his head. "Think it will work?" she asks. + +"Well, the CCAA will sue the hell out of the company network for a while if they try to distribute by any channel that isn't controlled by the Mafiya. Pam gets rights to all the music, her settlement, but she can't sell it without going through the mob. And I got to serve notice on that legal shark: If he tries to take me on he's got to be politically bullet-proof. Hmm. Maybe I ought not to plan on going back to the USA this side of the singularity." + +"Profits," Annette sighs, "I do not easily understand this way of yours. Or this apocalyptic obsession with singularity." + +"Remember the old aphorism, if you love something, set it free? I freed the music." + +"But you didn't! You signed rights over -" + +"But first I uploaded the entire stash to several cryptographically anonymized public network filesystems over the past few hours, so there'll be rampant piracy. And the robot companies are all set to automagically grant any and every copyright request they receive, royalty-free, until the goons figure out how to hack them. But that's not the point. The point is abundance. The Mafiya can't stop it being distributed. Pam is welcome to her cut if she can figure an angle - but I bet she can't. She still believes in classical economics, the allocation of resources under conditions of scarcity. Information doesn't work that way. What matters is that people will be able to hear the music - instead of a Soviet central planning system, I've turned the network into a firewall to protect freed intellectual property." + +"Oh, Manfred, you hopeless idealist." She strokes his shoulder. "Whatever for?" + +"It's not just the music. When we develop a working AI or upload minds we'll need a way of defending it against legal threats. That's what Gianni pointed out to me ..." + +He's still explaining to her how he's laying the foundations for the transhuman explosion due early in the next decade when she picks him up in both arms, carries him to her bedroom, and commits outrageous acts of tender intimacy with him. But that's okay. He's still human, this decade. + +This, too, will pass, thinks the bulk of his metacortex. And it drifts off into the net to think deep thoughts elsewhere, leaving his meatbody to experience the ancient pleasures of the flesh set free. + +Chapter 3: Tourist + +Spring-Heeled Jack runs blind, blue fumes crackling from his heels. His right hand, outstretched for balance, clutches a mark's stolen memories. The victim is sitting on the hard stones of the pavement behind him. Maybe he's wondering what's happened; maybe he looks after the fleeing youth. But the tourist crowds block the view effectively, and in any case, he has no hope of catching the mugger. Hit-and-run amnesia is what the polis call it, but to Spring-Heeled Jack it's just more loot to buy fuel for his Russian army-surplus motorized combat boots. + +* * * + +The victim sits on the cobblestones clutching his aching temples. What happened? he wonders. The universe is a brightly colored blur of fast-moving shapes augmented by deafening noises. His ear-mounted cameras are rebooting repeatedly: They panic every eight hundred milliseconds, whenever they realize that they're alone on his personal area network without the comforting support of a hub to tell them where to send his incoming sensory feed. Two of his mobile phones are bickering moronically, disputing ownership of his grid bandwidth, and his memory ... is missing. + +A tall blond clutching an electric chainsaw sheathed in pink bubble wrap leans over him curiously: "you all right?" she asks. + +"I -" He shakes his head, which hurts. "Who am I?" His medical monitor is alarmed because his blood pressure has fallen: His pulse is racing, his serum cortisol titer is up, and a host of other biometrics suggest that he's going into shock. + +"I think you need an ambulance," the woman announces. She mutters at her lapel, "Phone, call an ambulance. " She waves a finger vaguely at him as if to reify a geolink, then wanders off, chain-saw clutched under one arm. Typical southern émigré behavior in the Athens of the North, too embarrassed to get involved. The man shakes his head again, eyes closed, as a flock of girls on powered blades skid around him in elaborate loops. A siren begins to warble, over the bridge to the north. + +Who am I? he wonders. "I'm Manfred," he says with a sense of stunned wonder. He looks up at the bronze statue of a man on a horse that looms above the crowds on this busy street corner. Someone has plastered a Hello Cthulhu! holo on the plaque that names its rider: Languid fluffy pink tentacles wave at him in an attack of kawaii. "I'm Manfred - Manfred. My memory. What's happened to my memory?" Elderly Malaysian tourists point at him from the open top deck of a passing bus. He burns with a sense of horrified urgency. I was going somewhere, he recalls. What was I doing? It was amazingly important, he thinks, but he can't remember what exactly it was. He was going to see someone about - it's on the tip of his tongue - + +* * * + +_1 Welcome to the eve of the third decade: a time of chaos characterized by an all-out depression in the space industries. + +_1 Most of the thinking power on the planet is now manufactured rather than born; there are ten microprocessors for every human being, and the number is doubling every fourteen months. Population growth in the developing world has stalled, the birth rate dropping below replacement level. In the wired nations, more forward-looking politicians are looking for ways to enfranchise their nascent AI base. + +_1 Space exploration is still stalled on the cusp of the second recession of the century. The Malaysian government has announced the goal of placing an imam on Mars within ten years, but nobody else cares enough to try. + +_1 The Space Settlers Society is still trying to interest Disney Corp. in the media rights to their latest L5 colony plan, unaware that there's already a colony out there and it isn't human: First-generation uploads, Californian spiny lobsters in wobbly symbiosis with elderly expert systems, thrive aboard an asteroid mining project established by the Franklin Trust. Meanwhile, Chinese space agency cutbacks are threatening the continued existence of Moonbase Mao. Nobody, it seems, has figured out how to turn a profit out beyond geosynchronous orbit. + +_1 Two years ago, JPL, the ESA, and the uploaded lobster colony on comet Khrunichev-7 picked up an apparently artificial signal from outside the solar system; most people don't know, and of those who do, even fewer care. After all, if humans can't even make it to Mars, who cares what's going on a hundred trillion kilometers farther out? + +* * * + +Portrait of a wasted youth: + +Jack is seventeen years and eleven months old. He has never met his father; he was unplanned, and Dad managed to kill himself in a building-site accident before the Child Support could garnish his income for the upbringing. His mother raised him in a two-bedroom housing association flat in Hawick. She worked in a call center when he was young, but business dried up: Humans aren't needed on the end of a phone anymore. Now she works in a drop-in business shop, stacking shelves for virtual fly-by-nights that come and go like tourists in the Festival season - but humans aren't in demand for shelf stacking either, these days. + +His mother sent Jack to a local religious school, where he was regularly excluded and effectively ran wild from the age of twelve. By thirteen, he was wearing a parole cuff for shoplifting; by fourteen, he'd broken his collarbone in a car crash while joyriding and the dour Presbyterian sheriff sent him to the Wee Frees, who completed the destruction of his educational prospects with high principles and an illicit tawse. + +Today, he's a graduate of the hard school of avoiding public surveillance cameras, with distinctions in steganographic alibi construction. Mostly this entails high-density crime - if you're going to mug someone, do so where there are so many bystanders that they can't pin the blame on you. But the polis expert systems are on his tail. If he keeps it up at this rate, in another four months they'll have a positive statistical correlation that will convince even a jury of his peers that he's guilty as fuck - and then he'll go down to Saughton for four years. + +But Jack doesn't understand the meaning of a Gaussian distribution or the significance of a chi-square test, and the future still looks bright to him as he pulls on the chunky spectacles he ripped off the tourist gawking at the statue on North Bridge. And after a moment, when they begin whispering into his ears in stereo and showing him pictures of the tourist's vision, it looks even brighter. + +"Gotta make a deal, gotta close a deal," whisper the glasses. "Meet the borg, strike a chord." Weird graphs in lurid colors are filling up his peripheral vision, like the hallucinations of a drugged marketroid. + +"Who the fuck are ye?" asks Jack, intrigued by the bright lights and icons. + +"I am your Cartesian theatre and you are our focus," murmur the glasses. "Dow Jones down fifteen points, Federated Confidence up three, incoming briefing on causal decoupling of social control of skirt hem lengths, shaving pattern of beards, and emergence of multidrug antibiotic resistance in Gram-negative bacilli: Accept?" + +"Ah can take it," Jack mumbles, as a torrent of images crashes down on his eyeballs and jackhammers its way in through his ears like the superego of a disembodied giant. Which is actually what he's stolen: The glasses and waist pouch he grabbed from the tourist are stuffed with enough hardware to run the entire Internet, circa the turn of the millennium. They've got bandwidth coming out the wazoo, distributed engines running a bazillion inscrutable search tasks, and a whole slew of high-level agents that collectively form a large chunk of the society of mind that is their owner's personality. Their owner is a posthuman genius loci of the net, an agalmic entrepreneur turned policy wonk, specializing in the politics of AI emancipation. When he was in the biz he was the kind of guy who catalysed value wherever he went, leaving money trees growing in his footprints. Now he's the kind of political backroom hitter who builds coalitions where nobody else could see common ground. And Jack has stolen his memories. There are microcams built into the frame of the glasses, pickups in the earpieces; everything is spooled into the holographic cache in the belt pack, before being distributed for remote storage. At four months per terabyte, memory storage is cheap. What makes this bunch so unusual is that their owner - Manfred - has cross-indexed them with his agents. Mind uploading may not be a practical technology yet, but Manfred has made an end run on it already. + +In a very real sense, the glasses are Manfred, regardless of the identity of the soft machine with its eyeballs behind the lenses. And it is a very puzzled Manfred who picks himself up and, with a curious vacancy in his head - except for a hesitant request for information about accessories for Russian army boots - dusts himself off and heads for his meeting on the other side of town. + +* * * + +Meanwhile, in another meeting, Manfred's absence is already being noticed. "Something, something is wrong," says Annette. She raises her mirrorshades and rubs her left eye, visibly worried. "Why is he not answering his chat? He knows we are due to hold this call with him. Don't you think it is odd?" + +Gianni nods and leans back, regarding her from behind his desk. He prods at the highly polished rosewood desktop. The wood grain slips, sliding into a strangely different conformation, generating random dot stereoisograms - messages for his eyes only. "He was visiting Scotland for me," he says after a moment. "I do not know his exact whereabouts - the privacy safeguards - but if you, as his designated next of kin, travel in person, I am sure you will find it easier. He was going to talk to the Franklin Collective, face-to-face, one to many ..." + +The office translator is good, but it can't provide real-time lip-synch morphing between French and Italian. Annette has to make an effort to listen to his words because the shape of his mouth is all wrong, like a badly dubbed video. Her expensive, recent implants aren't connected up to her Broca's area yet, so she can't simply sideload a deep grammar module for Italian. Their communications are the best that money can buy, their VR environment painstakingly sculpted, but it still doesn't break down the language barrier completely. Besides, there are distractions: the way the desk switches from black ash to rosewood halfway across its expanse, the strange air currents that are all wrong for a room this size. "Then what could be up with him? His voicemail is trying to cover for him. It is good, but it does not lie convincingly." + +Gianni looks worried. "Manfred is prone to fits of do his own thing with telling nobody in advance. But I don't like this. He should have to told one of us first." Ever since that first meeting in Rome, when Gianni offered him a job, Manfred has been a core member of Gianni's team, the fixer who goes out and meets people and solves their problems. Losing him at this point could be more than embarrassing. Besides, he's a friend. + +"I do not like this either." She stands up. "If he doesn't call back soon -" + +"You'll go and fetch him." + +"Oui." A smile flashes across her face, rapidly replaced by worry lines. "What can have happened?" + +"Anything. Nothing." Gianni shrugs. "But we cannot do without him." He casts her a warning glance. "Or you. Don't let the borg get you. Either of you." + +"Not to worry, I will just bring him back, whatever has happened." She stands up, surprising a vacuum cleaner that skulks behind her desk. "Au revoir!" + +"Ciao." + +As she vacates her office, the minister flickers off behind her, leaving the far wall the dull gray of a cold display panel. Gianni is in Rome, she's in Paris, Markus is in Düsseldorf, and Eva's in Wroclaw. There are others, trapped in digital cells scattered halfway across an elderly continent, but as long as they don't try to shake hands, they're free to shout across the office at each other. Their confidences and dirty jokes tunnel through multiple layers of anonymized communication. + +Gianni is trying to make his break out of regional politics and into European national affairs: Their job - his election team - is to get him a seat on the Confederacy Commission, as Representative for Intelligence Oversight, and push the boundaries of post-humanistic action outward, into deep space and deeper time. Which makes the loss of a key team player, the house futurologist and fixer, profoundly interesting to certain people: The walls have ears, and not all the brains they feed into are human. + +Annette is more worried than she's letting on to Gianni. It's unlike Manfred to be out of contact for long and even odder for his receptionist to stonewall her, given that her apartment is the nearest thing to a home he's had for the past couple of years. But something smells fishy. He sneaked out last night, saying it would be an overnight trip, and now he's not answering. Could it be his ex-wife? she wonders, despite Gianni's hints about a special mission. But there's been no word from Pamela other than the sarcastic cards she dispatches every year without fail, timed to arrive on the birthday of the daughter Manfred has never met. The music Mafiya? A letter bomb from the Copyright Control Association of America? But no, his medical monitor would have been screaming its head off if anything like that had happened. + +Annette has organized things so that he's safe from the intellectual property thieves. She's lent him the support he needs, and he's helped her find her own path. She gets a warm sense of happiness whenever she considers how much they've achieved together. But that's exactly why she's worried now. The watchdog hasn't barked ... + +Annette summons a taxi to Charles de Gaulle. By the time she arrives, she's already used her parliamentary carte to bump an executive-class seat on the next A320 to Turnhouse, Edinburgh's airport, and scheduled accommodation and transport for her arrival. The plane is climbing out over la Manche before the significance of Gianni's last comment hits her: Might he think the Franklin Collective could be dangerous to Manfred? + +* * * + +The hospital emergency suite has a waiting room with green plastic bucket seats and subtractive volume renderings by preteens stuck to the walls like surreal Lego sculptures. It's deeply silent, the available bandwidth all sequestrated for medical monitors - there are children crying, periodic sirens wailing as ambulances draw up, and people chattering all around him, but to Manfred, it's like being at the bottom of a deep blue pool of quiet. He feels stoned, except this particular drug brings no euphoria or sense of well-being. Corridor-corner vendors hawk kebab-spitted pigeons next to the chained and rusted voluntary service booth; video cameras watch the blue bivvy bags of the chronic cases lined up next to the nursing station. Alone in his own head, Manfred is frightened and confused. + +"I can't check you in 'less you sign the confidentiality agreement," says the triage nurse, pushing an antique tablet at Manfred's face. Service in the NHS is still free, but steps have been taken to reduce the incidence of scandals: "Sign the nondisclosure clause here and here, or the house officer won't see you." + +Manfred stares blearily up at the nurse's nose, which is red and slightly inflamed from a nosocomial infection. His phones are bickering again, and he can't remember why; they don't normally behave like this, something must be missing, but thinking about it is hard. "Why am I here?" he asks for the third time. + +"Sign it." A pen is thrust into his hand. He focuses on the page, jerks upright as deeply canalized reflexes kick in. + +"This is theft of human rights! It says here that the party of the second part is enjoined from disclosing information relating to the operations management triage procedures and processes of the said health-giving institution, that's you, to any third party - that's the public media - on pain of forfeiture of health benefits pursuant to section two of the Health Service Reform Act. I can't sign this! You could repossess my left kidney if I post on the Net about how long I've been in hospital!" + +"So don't sign, then." The Hijra nurse shrugs, hitches up his sari, and walks away. "Enjoy your wait!" + +Manfred pulls out his backup phone and stares at its display. "Something's wrong here." The keypad beeps as he laboriously inputs opcodes. This gets him into an arcane and ancient X.25 PAD, and he has a vague, disturbing memory that hints about where he can go from here - mostly into the long-since-decommissioned bowels of NHSNet - but the memories spring a page fault and die somewhere between fingertips and the moment when understanding dawns. It's a frustrating feeling: His brain is like an ancient car engine with damp spark plugs, turning over and over without catching fire. + +The kebab vendor next to Manfred's seating rail chucks a stock cube on his grill; it begins to smoke, aromatic and blue and herbal - cannabinoids to induce tranquillity and appetite. Manfred sniffs twice, then staggers to his feet and heads off in search of the toilet, his head spinning. He's mumbling at his wrist watch: "Hello, Guatemala? Get me posology please. Click down my meme tree, I'm confused. Oh shit. Who was I? What happened? Why is everything blurry? I can't find my glasses ..." + +A gaggle of day-trippers are leaving the leprosy ward, men and women dressed in anachronistic garb: men in dark suits, women in long dresses. All of them wear electric blue disposable gloves and face masks. There's a hum and crackle of encrypted bandwidth emanating from them, and Manfred instinctively turns to follow. They leave the A&E unit through the wheelchair exit, two ladies escorted by three gentlemen, with a deranged distressed refugee from the twenty-first century shuffling dizzily after. They're all young, Manfred realizes vaguely. Where's my cat? Aineko might be able to make sense of this, if Aineko was interested. + +"I rather fancy we should retire to the club house," says one young beau. "Oh yes! please!" his short blond companion chirps, clapping her hands together, then irritably stripping off the anachronistic plastic gloves to reveal wired-lace positional-sensor mitts underneath. "This trip has obviously been unproductive. If our contact is here, I see no easy way of locating of him without breach of medical confidence or a hefty gratuity." + +"The poor things," murmurs the other woman, glancing back at the leprosarium. "Such a humiliating way to die." + +"Their own fault; If they hadn't participated in antibiotic abuse they wouldn't be in the isolation ward," harrumphs a twentysomething with mutton-chops and the manner of a precocious paterfamilias. He raps his walking stick on the pavement for punctuation, and they pause for a flock of cyclists and a rickshaw before they cross the road onto the Meadows. "Degenerate medication compliance, degenerate immune systems." + +Manfred pauses to survey the grass, brain spinning as he ponders the fractal dimensionality of leaves. Then he lurches after them, nearly getting himself run down by a flywheel-powered tourist bus. Club. His feet hit the pavement, cross it, thud down onto three billion years of vegetative evolution. Something about those people. He feels a weird yearning, a tropism for information. It's almost all that's left of him - his voracious will to know. The tall, dark-haired woman hitches up her long skirts to keep them out of the mud. he sees a flash of iridescent petticoats that ripple like oil on water, worn over old-fashioned combat boots. Not Victorian, then: something else. I came here to see - the name is on the tip of his tongue. Almost. He feels that it has something to do with these people. + +The squad cross The Meadows by way of a tree-lined path, and come to a nineteenth-century frontage with wide steps and a polished brass doorbell. They enter, and the man with the mutton-chops pauses on the threshold and turns to face Manfred. "You've followed us this far," he says. "Do you want to come in? You might find what you're looking for." + +Manfred follows with knocking knees, desperately afraid of whatever he's forgotten. + +* * * + +Meanwhile, Annette is busy interrogating Manfred's cat. + +"When did you last see your father?" + +Aineko turns its head away from her and concentrates on washing the inside of its left leg. Its fur is lifelike and thick, pleasingly patterned except for a manufacturer's URL emblazoned on its flanks; but the mouth produces no saliva, the throat opens on no stomach or lungs. "Go away," it says: "I'm busy." + +"When did you last see Manfred?" she repeats intently. "I don't have time for this. The polis don't know. The medical services don't know. He's off net and not responding. So what can you tell me?" + +It took her precisely eighteen minutes to locate his hotel once she hit the airport arrivals area and checked the hotel booking front end in the terminal: She knows his preferences. It took her slightly longer to convince the concierge to let her into his room. But Aineko is proving more recalcitrant than she'd expected. + +"AI Neko mod two alpha requires maintenance downtime on a regular basis," the cat says pompously: "You knew that when you bought me this body. What were you expecting, five-nines uptime from a lump of meat? Go away, I'm thinking." The tongue rasps out, then pauses while microprobes in its underside replace the hairs that fell out earlier in the day. + +Annette sighs. Manfred's been upgrading this robot cat for years, and his ex-wife Pamela used to mess with its neural configuration too: This is its third body, and it's getting more realistically uncooperative with every hardware upgrade. Sooner or later it's going to demand a litter tray and start throwing up on the carpet. "Command override," she says. "Dump event log to my Cartesian theatre, minus eight hours to present." + +The cat shudders and looks round at her. "Human bitch!" it hisses. Then it freezes in place as the air fills with a bright and silent tsunami of data. Both Annette and Aineko are wired for extremely high-bandwidth spread-spectrum optical networking; an observer would see the cat's eyes and a ring on her left hand glow blue-white at each other. After a few seconds, Annette nods to herself and wiggles her fingers in the air, navigating a time sequence only she can see. Aineko hisses resentfully at her, then stands and stalks away, tail held high. + +"Curiouser and curiouser," Annette hums to herself. She intertwines her fingers, pressing obscure pressure points on knuckle and wrist, then sighs and rubs her eyes. "He left here under his own power, looking normal," she calls to the cat. "Who did he say he was going to see?" The cat sits in a beam of sunlight falling in through the high glass window, pointedly showing her its back. "Merde. If you're not going to help him -" + +"Try the Grassmarket," sulks the cat. "He said something about meeting the Franklin Collective near there. Much good they'll do him ..." + +* * * + +A man wearing secondhand Chinese combat fatigues and a horribly expensive pair of glasses bounces up a flight of damp stone steps beneath a keystone that announces the building to be a Salvation Army hostel. He bangs on the door, his voice almost drowned out by the pair of Cold War Re-enactment Society MiGs that are buzzing the castle up the road: "Open up, ye cunts! Ye've got a deal comin'!" + +A peephole set in the door at eye level slides to one side, and a pair of beady, black-eyed video cameras peer out at him. "Who are you and what do you want?" the speaker crackles. They don't belong to the Salvation Army; Christianity has been deeply unfashionable in Scotland for some decades, and the church that currently occupies the building has certainly moved with the times in an effort to stay relevant. + +"I'm Macx," he says: "You've heard from my systems. I'm here to offer you a deal you can't refuse." At least that's what his glasses tell him to say: What comes out of his mouth sounds a bit more like, Am Max: Yiv hurdfrae ma system. Am here tae gie ye a deal ye cannae refuse. The glasses haven't had long enough to work on his accent. Meanwhile, he's so full of himself that he snaps his fingers and does a little dance of impatience on the top step. + +"Aye, well, hold on a minute." The person on the other side of the speakerphone has the kind of cut-glass Morningside accent that manages to sound more English than the King while remaining vernacular Scots. The door opens, and Macx finds himself confronted by a tall, slightly cadaverous man wearing a tweed suit that has seen better days and a clerical collar cut from a translucent circuit board. His face is almost concealed behind a pair of recording angel goggles. "Who did ye say you were?" + +"I'm Macx! Manfred Macx! I'm here with an opportunity you wouldn't believe. I've got the answer to your church's financial situation. I'm going to make you rich!" The glasses prompt, and Macx speaks. + +The man in the doorway tilts his head slightly, goggles scanning Macx from head to foot. Bursts of blue combustion products spurt from Macx's heels as he bounces up and down enthusiastically. "Are ye sure ye've got the right address?" he asks worriedly. + +"Aye, Ah am that." + +The resident backs into the hostel: "Well then, come in, sit yeself down and tell me all about it." + +Macx bounces into the room with his brain wide open to a blizzard of pie charts and growth curves, documents spawning in the bizarre phase-space of his corporate management software. "I've got a deal you're not going to believe," he reads, gliding past notice boards upon which Church circulars are staked out to die like exotic butterflies, stepping over rolled-up carpets and a stack of laptops left over from a jumble sale, past the devotional radio telescope that does double duty as Mrs. Muirhouse's back-garden bird bath. "You've been here five years and your posted accounts show you aren't making much money - barely keeping the rent up. But you're a shareholder in Scottish Nuclear Electric, right? Most of the church funds are in the form of a trust left to the church by one of your congregants when she went to join the omega point, right?" + +"Er." The minister looks at him oddly. "I cannae comment on the church eschatological investment trust. Why d'ye think that?" + +They fetch up, somehow, in the minister's office. A huge, framed rendering hangs over the back of his threadbare office chair: the collapsing cosmos of the End Times, galactic clusters rotten with the Dyson spheres of the eschaton falling toward the big crunch. Saint Tipler the Astrophysicist beams down from above with avuncular approval, a ring of quasars forming a halo around his head. Posters proclaim the new Gospel: COSMOLOGY IS BETTER THAN GUESSWORK, and LIVE FOREVER WITHIN MY LIGHT CONE. "Can I get ye anything? Cup of tea? Fuel cell charge point?" asks the minister. + +"Crystal meth?" asks Macx, hopefully. His face falls as the minister shakes his head apologetically. "Aw, dinnae worry, Ah wis only joshing." He leans forward: "Ah know a' aboot yer plutonium futures speculation," he hisses. A finger taps his stolen spectacles in an ominous gesture: "These dinnae just record, they think. An' Ah ken where the money's gone." + +"What have ye got?" the minister asks coldly, any indication of good humor flown. "I'm going to have to edit down these memories, ye bastard. I thought I'd forgotten all about that. Bits of me aren't going to merge with the godhead at the end of time now, thanks to you." + +"Keep yer shirt on. Whit's the point o' savin' it a' up if ye nae got a life worth living? Ye reckon the big yin's nae gonnae unnerstan' a knees up?" + +"What do ye want?" + +"Aye, well," Macx leans back, aggrieved. Ah've got -" He pauses. An expression of extreme confusion flits over his head. "Ah've got lobsters," he finally announces. "Genetically engineered uploaded lobsters tae run yer uranium reprocessing plant." As he grows more confused, the glasses' control over his accent slips: "Ah wiz gonnae help yiz oot ba showin ye how ter get yer dosh back whir it belong ..." A strategic pause: "so ye could make the council tax due date. See, they're neutron-resistant, the lobsters. No, that cannae be right. Ah wiz gonnae sell ye somethin' ye cud use fer" - his face slumps into a frown of disgust - "free?" + +Approximately thirty seconds later, as he is picking himself up off the front steps of the First Reformed Church of Tipler, Astrophysicist, the man who would be Macx finds himself wondering if maybe this high finance shit isn't as easy as it's cracked up to be. Some of the agents in his glasses are wondering if elocution lessons are the answer; others aren't so optimistic. + +* * * + +_1 Getting back to the history lesson, the prospects for the decade look mostly medical. + +_1 A few thousand elderly baby boomers are converging on Tehran for Woodstock Four. Europe is desperately trying to import eastern European nurses and home-care assistants; in Japan, whole agricultural villages lie vacant and decaying, ghost communities sucked dry as cities slurp people in like residential black holes. + +_1 A rumor is spreading throughout gated old-age communities in the American Midwest, leaving havoc and riots in its wake: Senescence is caused by a slow virus coded into the mammalian genome that evolution hasn't weeded out, and rich billionaires are sitting on the rights to a vaccine. As usual, Charles Darwin gets more than his fair share of the blame. (Less spectacular but more realistic treatments for old age - telomere reconstruction and hexose-denatured protein reduction - are available in private clinics for those who are willing to surrender their pensions.) Progress is expected to speed up shortly, as the fundamental patents in genomic engineering begin to expire; the Free Chromosome Foundation has already published a manifesto calling for the creation of an intellectual-property-free genome with improved replacements for all commonly defective exons. + +_1 Experiments in digitizing and running neural wetware under emulation are well established; some radical libertarians claim that, as the technology matures, death - with its draconian curtailment of property and voting rights - will become the biggest civil rights issue of all. + +_1 For a small extra fee, most veterinary insurance policies now cover cloning of pets in the event of their accidental and distressing death. Human cloning, for reasons nobody is very clear on anymore, is still illegal in most developed nations - but very few judiciaries push for mandatory abortion of identical twins. + +_1 Some commodities are expensive: the price of crude oil has broken eighty Euros a barrel and is edging inexorably up. Other commodities are cheap: computers, for example. Hobbyists print off weird new processor architectures on their home inkjets; middle-aged folks wipe their backsides with diagnostic paper that can tell how their cholesterol levels are tending. + +_1 The latest casualties of the march of technological progress are: the high-street clothes shop, the flushing water closet, the Main Battle Tank, and the first generation of quantum computers. New with the decade are cheap enhanced immune systems, brain implants that hook right into the Chomsky organ and talk to their owners through their own speech centers, and widespread public paranoia about limbic spam. Nanotechnology has shattered into a dozen disjoint disciplines, and skeptics are predicting that it will all peter out before long. Philosophers have ceded qualia to engineers, and the current difficult problem in AI is getting software to experience embarrassment. + +_1 Fusion power is still, of course, fifty years away. + +* * * + +The Victorians are morphing into goths before Manfred's culture-shocked eyes. + +"You looked lost," explains Monica, leaning over him curiously. "What's with your eyes?" + +"I can't see too well," Manfred tries to explain. Everything is a blur, and the voices that usually chatter incessantly in his head have left nothing behind but a roaring silence. "I mean, someone mugged me. They took -" His hand closes on air: something is missing from his belt. + +Monica, the tall woman he first saw in the hospital, enters the room. What she's wearing indoors is skin-tight, iridescent and, disturbingly, she claims is a distributed extension of her neuroectoderm. Stripped of costume-drama accoutrements, she's a twenty-first-century adult, born or decanted after the millennial baby boom. She waves some fingers in Manfred's face: "How many?" + +"Two." Manfred tries to concentrate. "What -" + +"No concussion," she says briskly. "'Scuse me while I page." Her eyes are brown, with amber raster lines flickering across her pupils. Contact lenses? Manfred wonders, his head turgid and unnaturally slow. It's like being drunk, except much less pleasant: He can't seem to wrap his head around an idea from all angles at once, anymore. Is this what consciousness used to be like? It's an ugly, slow sensation. She turns away from him: "Medline says you'll be all right in a while. The main problem is the identity loss. Are you backed up anywhere?" + +"Here." Alan, still top-hatted and mutton-chopped, holds out a pair of spectacles to Manfred. "Take these, they may do you some good." His topper wobbles, as if a strange A-life experiment is nesting under its brim. + +"Oh. Thank you." Manfred reaches for them with a pathetic sense of gratitude. As soon as he puts them on, they run through a test series, whispering questions and watching how his eyes focus: After a minute, the room around him clears as the specs build a synthetic image to compensate for his myopia. There's limited Net access, too, he notices, a warm sense of relief stealing over him. "Do you mind if I call somebody?" he asks: "I want to check my back-ups." + +"Be my guest." Alan slips out through the door; Monica sits down opposite him and stares into some inner space. The room has a tall ceiling, with whitewashed walls and wooden shutters to cover the aerogel window bays. The furniture is modern modular, and clashes horribly with the original nineteenth-century architecture. "We were expecting you." + +"You were -" He shifts track with an effort: "I was here to see somebody. Here in Scotland, I mean." + +"Us." She catches his eye deliberately. "To discuss sapience options with our patron." + +"With your -" He squeezes his eyes shut. "Damn! I don't remember. I need my glasses back. Please." + +"What about your back-ups?" she asks curiously. + +"A moment." Manfred tries to remember what address to ping. It's useless, and painfully frustrating. "It would help if I could remember where I keep the rest of my mind," he complains. "It used to be at - oh, there." + +An elephantine semantic network sits down on his spectacles as soon as he asks for the site, crushing his surroundings into blocky pixilated monochrome that jerks as he looks around. "This is going to take some time," he warns his hosts as a goodly chunk of his metacortex tries to handshake with his brain over a wireless network connection that was really only designed for web browsing. The download consists of the part of his consciousness that isn't security-critical - public access actors and vague opinionated rants - but it clears down a huge memory castle, sketching in the outline of a map of miracles and wonders onto the whitewashed walls of the room. + +When Manfred can see the outside world again, he feels a bit more like himself: He can, at least, spawn a search thread that will resynchronize and fill him in on what it found. He still can't access the inner mysteries of his soul (including his personal memories); they're locked and barred pending biometric verification of his identity and a quantum key exchange. But he has his wits about him again - and some of them are even working. It's like sobering up from a strange new drug, the infinitely reassuring sense of being back at the controls of his own head. "I think I need to report a crime," he tells Monica - or whoever is plugged into Monica's head right now, because now he knows where he is and who he was meant to meet (although not why) - and he understands that, for the Franklin Collective, identity is a politically loaded issue. + +"A crime report." Her expression is subtly mocking. "Identity theft, by any chance?" + +"Yeah, yeah, I know: Identity is theft, don't trust anyone whose state vector hasn't forked for more than a gigasecond, change is the only constant, et bloody cetera. Who am I talking to, by the way? And if we're talking, doesn't that signify that you think we're on the same side, more or less?" He struggles to sit up in the recliner chair: Stepper motors whine softly as it strives to accommodate him. + +"Sidedness is optional." The woman who is Monica some of the time looks at him quirkily: "It tends to alter drastically if you vary the number of dimensions. Let's just say that right now I'm Monica, plus our sponsor. Will that do you?" + +"Our sponsor, who is in cyberspace -" + +She leans back on the sofa, which buzzes and extrudes an occasional table with a small bar. "Drink? Can I offer you coffee? Guarana? Or maybe a Berlinerweisse, for old time's sake?" + +"Guarana will do. Hello, Bob. How long have you been dead?" + +She chuckles. "I'm not dead, Manny. I may not be a full upload, but I feel like me." She rolls her eyes, self-consciously. "He's making rude comments about your wife," She adds; "I'm not going to pass that on." + +"My ex-wife," Manfred corrects her automatically. "The, uh, tax vamp. So. You're acting as a, I guess, an interpreter for Bob?" + +"Ack." She looks at Manfred very seriously: "We owe him a lot, you know. He left his assets in trust to the movement along with his partials. We feel obliged to instantiate his personality as often as possible, even though you can only do so much with a couple of petabytes of recordings. But we have help." + +"The lobsters." Manfred nods to himself and accepts the glass that she offers. Its diamond-plated curves glitter brilliantly in the late-afternoon sunlight. "I knew this had something to do with them." He leans forward, holding his glass and frowns. "If only I could remember why I came here! It was something emergent, something in deep memory ... something I didn't trust in my own skull. Something to do with Bob." + +The door behind the sofa opens; Alan enters. "Excuse me," he says quietly, and heads for the far side of the room. A workstation folds down from the wall, and a chair rolls in from a service niche. He sits with his chin propped on his hands, staring at the white desktop. Every so often he mutters quietly to himself; "Yes, I understand ... campaign headquarters ... donations need to be audited ..." + +"Gianni's election campaign," Monica prompts him. + +Manfred jumps. "Gianni -" A bundle of memories unlock inside his head as he remembers his political front man's message. "Yes! That's what this is about. It has to be!" He looks at her excitedly. "I'm here to deliver a message to you from Gianni Vittoria. About -" He looks crestfallen. "I'm not sure," he trails off uncertainly, "but it was important. Something critical in the long term, something about group minds and voting. But whoever mugged me got the message." + +* * * + +The Grassmarket is an overly rustic cobbled square nestled beneath the glowering battlements of Castle Rock. Annette stands on the site of the gallows where they used to execute witches; she sends forth her invisible agents to search for spoor of Manfred. Aineko, overly familiar, drapes over her left shoulder like a satanic stole and delivers a running stream of cracked cellphone chatter into her ear. + +"I don't know where to begin," she sighs, annoyed. This place is a wall-to-wall tourist trap, a many-bladed carnivorous plant that digests easy credit and spits out the drained husks of foreigners. The road has been pedestrianized and resurfaced in squalidly authentic mediaeval cobblestones; in the middle of what used to be the car park, there's a permanent floating antiques market, where you can buy anything from a brass fire surround to an ancient CD player. Much of the merchandise in the shops is generic dot-com trash, vying for the title of Japanese-Scottish souvenir from hell: Puroland tartans, animatronic Nessies hissing bad-temperedly at knee level, second hand laptops. People swarm everywhere, from the theme pubs (hangings seem to be a running joke hereabouts) to the expensive dress shops with their fabric renderers and digital mirrors. Street performers, part of the permanent floating Fringe, clutter the sidewalk: A robotic mime, very traditional in silver face paint, mimics the gestures of passers by with ironically stylized gestures. + +"Try the doss house," Aineko suggests from the shelter of her shoulder bag. + +"The -" Annette does a doubletake as her thesaurus conspires with her open government firmware and dumps a geographical database of city social services into her sensorium. "Oh, I see." The Grassmarket itself is touristy, but the bits off to one end - down a dingy canyon of forbidding stone buildings six stories high - are decidedly downmarket. "Okay." + +Annette weaves past a stall selling disposable cellphones and cheaper genome explorers, round a gaggle of teenage girls in the grips of some kind of imported kawaii fetish, who look at her in alarm from atop their pink platform heels - probably mistaking her for a school probation inspector - and past a stand of chained and parked bicycles. The human attendant looks bored out of her mind. Annette tucks a blandly anonymous ten-Euro note in her pocket almost before she notices: "If you were going to buy a hot bike," she asks, "where would you go?" The parking attendant stares, and for a moment Annette thinks she's overestimated her. Then she mumbles something. "What?" + +"McMurphy's. Used to be called Bannerman's. Down yon Cowgate, thataway." The meter maid looks anxiously at her rack of charges. "You didn't -" + +"Uh-huh." Annette follows her gaze: straight down the dark stone canyon. Well, okay. "This had better be worth it, Manny mon chèr," she mutters under her breath. + +McMurphy's is a fake Irish pub, a stone grotto installed beneath a mound of blank-faced offices. It was once a real Irish pub before the developers got their hands on it and mutated it in rapid succession into a punk nightclub, a wine bar, and a fake Dutch coffee shop; after which, as burned-out as any star, it left the main sequence. Now it occupies an unnaturally prolonged, chilly existence as the sort of recycled imitation Irish pub that has neon four-leafed clovers hanging from the artificially blackened pine beams above the log tables - in other words, the burned-out black dwarf afterlife of a once-serious drinking establishment. Somewhere along the line, the beer cellar was replaced with a toilet (leaving more room for paying patrons upstairs), and now its founts dispense fizzy concentrate diluted with water from the city mains. + +"Say, did you hear the one about the Eurocrat with the robot pussy who goes into a dodgy pub on the Cowgate and orders a coke? And when it arrives, she says 'hey, where's the mirror?'" + +"Shut up," Annette hisses into her shoulder bag. "That isn't funny." Her personal intruder telemetry has just e-mailed her wristphone, and it's displaying a rotating yellow exclamation point, which means that according to the published police crime stats, this place is likely to do grievous harm to her insurance premiums. + +Aineko looks up at her from his nest in the bag and yawns cavernously, baring a pink, ribbed mouth and a tongue like pink suede. "Want to make me? I just pinged Manny's head. The network latency was trivial." + +The barmaid sidles up and pointedly manages not to make eye contact with Annette. "I'll have a Diet Coke," Annette orders. In the direction of her bag, voice pitched low: "Did you hear the one about the Eurocrat who goes into a dodgy pub, orders half a liter of Diet Coke, and when she spills it in her shoulder bag she says 'oops, I've got a wet pussy'?" + +The Coke arrives. Annette pays for it. There may be a couple of dozen people in the pub; it's hard to tell because it looks like an ancient cellar, lots of stone archways leading off into niches populated with second-hand church pews and knife-scarred tables. Some guys who might be bikers, students, or well-dressed winos are hunched over one table: hairy, wearing vests with too many pockets, in an artful bohemianism that makes Annette blink until one of her literary programs informs her that one of them is a moderately famous local writer, a bit of a guru for the space and freedom party. There're a couple of women in boots and furry hats in one corner, poring over the menu, and a parcel of off-duty street performers hunching over their beers in a booth. Nobody else is wearing anything remotely like office drag, but the weirdness coefficient is above average; so Annette dials her glasses to extra-dark, straightens her tie, and glances around. + +The door opens and a nondescript youth slinks in. He's wearing baggy BDUs, woolly cap, and a pair of boots that have that quintessential essense de panzer division look, all shock absorbers and olive drab Kevlar panels. He's wearing - + +"I spy with my little network intrusion detector kit," begins the cat, as Annette puts her drink down and moves in on the youth, "something beginning with -" + +"How much you want for the glasses, kid?" she asks quietly. + +He jerks and almost jumps - a bad idea in MilSpec combat boots, the ceiling is eighteenth-century stone half a meter thick; "Dinnae fuckin' dae that," he complains in an eerily familiar way: "Ah -" he swallows. "Annie! Who -" + +"Stay calm. Take them off - they'll only hurt you if you keep wearing them," she says, careful not to move too fast because now she has a second, scary-jittery fear, and she knows without having to look that the exclamation mark on her watch has turned red and begun to flash: "Look, I'll give you two hundred Euros for the glasses and the belt pouch, real cash, and I won't ask how you got them or tell anyone." He's frozen in front of her, mesmerized, and she can see the light from inside the lenses spilling over onto his half-starved adolescent cheekbones, flickering like cold lightning, like he's plugged his brain into a grid bearer; swallowing with a suddenly dry mouth, she slowly reaches up and pulls the spectacles off his face with one hand and takes hold of the belt pouch with the other. The kid shudders and blinks at her, and she sticks a couple of hundred-Euro notes in front of his nose. "Scram," she says, not unkindly. + +He reaches up slowly, then seizes the money and runs - blasts his way through the door with an ear-popping concussion, hangs a left onto the cycle path, and vanishes downhill toward the parliament buildings and university complex. + +Annette watches the doorway apprehensively. "Where is he?" she hisses, worried: "Any ideas, cat?" + +"Naah. It's your job to find him," Aineko opines complacently. But there's an icicle of anxiety in Annette's spine. Manfred's been separated from his memory cache? Where could he be? Worse - who could he be? + +"Fuck you, too," she mutters. "Only one thing for it, I guess." She takes off her own glasses - they're much less functional than Manfred's massively ramified custom rig - and nervously raises the repo'd specs toward her face. Somehow what she's about to do makes her feel unclean, like snooping on a lover's e-mail folders. But how else can she figure out where he might have gone? + +She slides the glasses on and tries to remember what she was doing yesterday in Edinburgh. + +* * * + +"Gianni?" + +"Oui, ma chérie?" + +Pause. "I lost him. But I got his aid-mémoire back. A teenage freeloader playing cyberpunk with them. No sign of his location - so I put them on." + +Pause. "Oh dear." + +"Gianni, why exactly did you send him to the Franklin Collective?" + +Pause. (During which, the chill of the gritty stone wall she's leaning on begins to penetrate the weave of her jacket.) "I not wanting to bother you with trivia." + +"Merde. It's not trivia, Gianni, they're accelerationistas. Have you any idea what that's going to do to his head?" + +Pause: Then a grunt, almost of pain. "Yes." + +"Then why did you do it?" she demands vehemently. She hunches over, punching words into her phone so that other passers-by avoid her, unsure whether she's hands-free or hallucinating: "Shit, Gianni, I have to pick up the pieces every time you do this! Manfred is not a healthy man, he's on the edge of acute future shock the whole time, and I was not joking when I told you last February that he'd need a month in a clinic if you tried running him flat out again! If you're not careful, he could end up dropping out completely and joining the borganism -" + +"Annette." A heavy sigh: "He are the best hope we got. Am knowing half-life of agalmic catalyst now down to six months and dropping; Manny outlast his career expectancy, four deviations outside the normal, yes, we know this. But I are having to break civil rights deadlock now, this election. We must achieve consensus, and Manfred are only staffer we got who have hope of talking to Collective on its own terms. He are deal-making messenger, not force burnout, right? We need coalition reserve before term limit lockout followed by gridlock in Brussels, American-style. Is more than vital - is essential." + +"That's no excuse -" + +"Annette, they have partial upload of Bob Franklin. They got it before he died, enough of his personality to reinstantiate it, time-sharing in their own brains. We must get the Franklin Collective with their huge resources lobbying for the Equal Rights Amendment: If ERA passes, all sapients are eligible to vote, own property, upload, download, sideload. Are more important than little gray butt-monsters with cold speculum: Whole future depends on it. Manny started this with crustacean rights: Leave uploads covered by copyrights not civil rights and where will we be in fifty years? Do you think I must ignore this? It was important then, but now, with the transmission the lobsters received -" + +"Shit." She turns and leans her forehead against the cool stonework. "I'll need a prescription. Ritalin or something. And his location. Leave the rest to me." She doesn't add, That includes peeling him off the ceiling afterwards: that's understood. Nor does she say, you're going to pay. That's understood, too. Gianni may be a hard-nosed political fixer, but he looks after his own. + +"Location am easy if he find the PLO. GPS coordinates are following -" + +"No need. I got his spectacles." + +"Merde, as you say. Take them to him, ma chérie. Bring me the distributed trust rating of Bob Franklin's upload, and I bring Bob the jubilee, right to direct his own corporate self again as if still alive. And we pull diplomatic chestnuts out of fire before they burn. Agreed?" + +"Oui." + +She cuts the connection and begins walking uphill, along the Cowgate (through which farmers once bought their herds to market), toward the permanent floating Fringe and then the steps towards The Meadows. As she pauses opposite the site of the gallows, a fight breaks out: Some Paleolithic hangover takes exception to the robotic mime aping his movements, and swiftly rips its arm off. The mime stands there, sparks flickering inside its shoulder, and looks confused. Two pissed-looking students start forward and punch the short-haired vandal. There is much shouting in the mutually incomprehensible accents of Oxgangs and the Herriott-Watt Robot Lab. Annette watches the fight and shudders; it's like a flashover vision from a universe where the Equal Rights Amendment - with its redefinition of personhood - is rejected by the house of deputies: a universe where to die is to become property and to be created outwith a gift of parental DNA is to be doomed to slavery. + +Maybe Gianni was right, she ponders. But I wish the price wasn't so personal - + +* * * + +Manfred can feel one of his attacks coming on. The usual symptoms are all present - the universe, with its vast preponderance of unthinking matter, becomes an affront; weird ideas flicker like heat lightning far away across the vast plateaus of his imagination - but, with his metacortex running in sandboxed insecure mode, he feels blunt. And slow. Even obsolete. The latter is about as welcome a sensation as heroin withdrawal: He can't spin off threads to explore his designs for feasibility and report back to him. It's like someone has stripped fifty points off his IQ; his brain feels like a surgical scalpel that's been used to cut down trees. A decaying mind is a terrible thing to be trapped inside. Manfred wants out, and he wants out bad - but he's too afraid to let on. + +"Gianni is a middle-of-the-road Eurosocialist, a mixed-market pragmatist politician," Bob's ghost accuses Manfred by way of Monica's dye-flushed lips, "hardly the sort of guy you'd expect me to vote for, no? So what does he think I can do for him?" + +"That's a - ah - " Manfred rocks forward and back in his chair, arms crossed firmly and hands thrust under his armpits for protection. "Dismantle the moon! Digitize the biosphere, make a nöosphere out of it - shit, sorry, that's long-term planning. Build Dyson spheres, lots and lots of - Ahem. Gianni is an ex-Marxist, reformed high church Trotskyite clade. He believes in achieving True Communism, which is a state of philosophical grace that requires certain prerequisites like, um, not pissing around with Molotov cocktails and thought police: He wants to make everybody so rich that squabbling over ownership of the means of production makes as much sense as arguing over who gets to sleep in the damp spot at the back of the cave. He's not your enemy, I mean. He's the enemy of those Stalinist deviationist running dogs in Conservative Party Central Office who want to bug your bedroom and hand everything on a plate to the big corporates owned by the pension funds - which in turn rely on people dying predictably to provide their raison d'être. And, um, more importantly dying and not trying to hang on to their property and chattels. Sitting up in the coffin singing extropian fireside songs, that kind of thing. The actuaries are to blame, predicting life expectancy with intent to cause people to buy insurance policies with money that is invested in control of the means of production - Bayes' Theorem is to blame -" + +Alan glances over his shoulder at Manfred: "I don't think feeding him guarana was a good idea," he says in tones of deep foreboding. + +Manfred's mode of vibration has gone nonlinear by this point: He's rocking front to back, and jiggling up and down in little hops, like a technophiliacal yogic flyer trying to bounce his way to the singularity. Monica leans toward him and her eyes widen: "Manfred," she hisses, "shut up!" + +He stops babbling abruptly, with an expression of deep puzzlement. "Who am I?" he asks, and keels over backward. "Why am I, here and now, occupying this body -" + +"Anthropic anxiety attack," Monica comments. "I think he did this in Amsterdam eight years ago when Bob first met him." She looks alarmed, a different identity coming to the fore: "What shall we do?" + +"We have to make him comfortable." Alan raises his voice: "Bed, make yourself ready, now." The back of the sofa Manfred is sprawled on flops downward, the base folds up, and a strangely animated duvet crawls up over his feet. "Listen, Manny, you're going to be all right." + +"Who am I and what do I signify?" Manfred mumbles incoherently: "A mass of propagating decision trees, fractal compression, lots of synaptic junctions lubricated with friendly endorphins -" Across the room, the bootleg pharmacopoeia is cranking up to manufacture some heavy tranquilizers. Monica heads for the kitchen to get something for him to drink them in. "Why are you doing this?" Manfred asks, dizzily. + +"It's okay. Lie down and relax." Alan leans over him. "We'll talk about everything in the morning, when you know who you are." (Aside to Monica, who is entering the room with a bottle of iced tea: "Better let Gianni know that he's unwell. One of us may have to go visit the minister. Do you know if Macx has been audited?") "Rest up, Manfred. Everything is being taken care of." + +About fifteen minutes later, Manfred - who, in the grip of an existential migraine, meekly obeys Monica's instruction to drink down the spiked tea - lies back on the bed and relaxes. His breathing slows; the subliminal muttering ceases. Monica, sitting next to him, reaches out and takes his right hand, which is lying on top of the bedding. + +"Do you want to live forever?" she intones in Bob Franklin's tone of voice. "You can live forever in me ..." + +* * * + +The Church of Latter-Day Saints believes that you can't get into the Promised Land unless it's baptized you - but it can do so if it knows your name and parentage, even after you're dead. Its genealogical databases are among the most impressive artifacts of historical research ever prepared. And it likes to make converts. + +The Franklin Collective believes that you can't get into the future unless it's digitized your neural state vector, or at least acquired as complete a snapshot of your sensory inputs and genome as current technology permits. You don't need to be alive for it to do this. Its society of mind is among the most impressive artifacts of computer science. And it likes to make converts. + +* * * + +Nightfall in the city. Annette stands impatiently on the doorstep. "Let me the fuck in," she snarls impatiently at the speakerphone. "Merde!" + +Someone opens the door. "Who -" + +Annette shoves him inside, kicks the door shut, and leans on it. "Take me to your bodhisattva," she demands. "Now." + +"I -" he turns and heads inside, along the gloomy hallway that runs past a staircase. Annette strides after him aggressively. He opens a door and ducks inside, and she follows before he can close it. + +Inside, the room is illuminated by a variety of indirect diode sources, calibrated for the warm glow of a summer afternoon's daylight. There's a bed in the middle of it, a figure lying asleep at the heart of a herd of attentive diagnostic instruments. A couple of attendants sit to either side of the sleeping man. + +"What have you done to him?" Annette snaps, rushing forward. Manfred blinks up at her from the pillows, bleary-eyed and confused as she leans overhead: "Hello? Manny?" Over her shoulder: "If you have done anything to him -" + +"Annie?" He looks puzzled. A bright orange pair of goggles - not his own - is pushed up onto his forehead like a pair of beached jellyfish. "I don't feel well. 'F I get my hands on the bastard who did this ..." + +"We can fix that," she says briskly, declining to mention the deal she cut to get his memories back. She peels off his glasses and carefully slides them onto his face, replacing his temporary ones. The brain bag she puts down next to his shoulder, within easy range. The hairs on the back of her neck rise as a thin chattering fills the ether around them: his eyes are glowing a luminous blue behind his shades, as if a high-tension spark is flying between his ears. + +"Oh. Wow." He sits up, the covers fall from his naked shoulders, and her breath catches. + +She looks round at the motionless figure sitting to his left. The man in the chair nods deliberately, ironically. "What have you done to him?" + +"We've been looking after him - nothing more, nothing less. He arrived in a state of considerable confusion, and his state deteriorated this afternoon." + +She's never met this fellow before, but she has a gut feeling that she knows him. "You would be Robert ... Franklin?" + +He nods again. "The avatar is in." There's a thud as Manfred's eyes roll up in his head, and he flops back onto the bedding. "Excuse me. Monica?" + +The young woman on the other side of the bed shakes her head. "No, I'm running Bob, too." + +"Oh. Well, you tell her - I've got to get him some juice." + +The woman who is also Bob Franklin - or whatever part of him survived his battle with an exotic brain tumor eight years earlier - catches Annette's eye and shakes her head, smiles faintly. "You're never alone when you're a syncitium." + +Annette wrinkles her brow: she has to trigger a dictionary attack to parse the sentence. "One large cell, many nuclei? Oh, I see. You have the new implant. The better to record everything." + +The youngster shrugs. "You want to die and be resurrected as a third-person actor in a low-bandwidth re-enactment? Or a shadow of itchy memories in some stranger's skull?" She snorts, a gesture that's at odds with the rest of her body language. + +"Bob must have been one of the first borganisms. Humans, I mean. After Jim Bezier." Annette glances over at Manfred, who has begun to snore softly. "It must have been a lot of work." + +"The monitoring equipment cost millions, then," says the woman - Monica? - "and it didn't do a very good job. One of the conditions for our keeping access to his research funding is that we regularly run his partials. He wanted to build up a kind of aggregate state vector - patched together out of bits and pieces of other people to supplement the partials that were all I - he - could record with the then state of the art." + +"Eh, right." Annette reaches out and absently smooths a stray hair away from Manfred's forehead. "What is it like to be part of a group mind?" + +Monica sniffs, evidently amused. "What is it like to see red? What's it like to be a bat? I can't tell you - I can only show you. We're all free to leave at any time, you know." + +"But somehow you don't." Annette rubs her head, feels the short hair over the almost imperceptible scars that conceal a network of implants - tools that Manfred turned down when they became available a year or two ago. ("Goop-phase Darwin-design nanotech ain't designed for clean interfaces," he'd said, "I'll stick to disposable kit, thanks.") "No thank you. I don't think he'll take up your offer when he wakes up, either." (Subtext: I'll let you have him over my dead body.) + +Monica shrugs. "That's his loss: He won't live forever in the singularity, along with other followers of our gentle teacher. Anyway, we have more converts than we know what to do with." + +A thought occurs to Annette. "Ah. You are all of one mind? Partially? A question to you is a question to all?" + +"It can be." The words come simultaneously from Monica and the other body, Alan, who is standing in the doorway with a boxy thing that looks like an improvised diagnostician. "What do you have in mind?" adds the Alan body. + +Manfred, lying on the bed, groans: There's an audible hiss of pink noise as his glasses whisper in his ears, bone conduction providing a serial highway to his wetware. + +"Manfred was sent to find out why you're opposing the ERA," Annette explains. "Some parts of our team operate without the other's knowledge." + +"Indeed." Alan sits down on the chair beside the bed and clears his throat, puffing his chest out pompously. "A very important theological issue. I feel -" + +"I, or we?" Annette interrupts. + +"We feel," Monica snaps. Then she glances at Alan. "Soo-rrry." + +The evidence of individuality within the group mind is disturbing to Annette: Too many reruns of the Borgish fantasy have conditioned her preconceptions, and their quasi-religious belief in a singularity leaves her cold. "Please continue." + +"One person, one vote, is obsolete," says Alan. "The broader issue of how we value identity needs to be revisited, the franchise reconsidered. Do you get one vote for each warm body? Or one vote for each sapient individual? What about distributed intelligences? The proposals in the Equal Rights Act are deeply flawed, based on a cult of individuality that takes no account of the true complexity of posthumanism." + +"Like the proposals for a feminine franchise in the nineteenth century that would grant the vote to married wives of land-owning men," Monica adds slyly: "It misses the point." + +"Ah, oui." Annette crosses her arms, suddenly defensive. This isn't what she'd expected to hear. This is the elitist side of the posthumanism shtick, potentially as threatening to her post enlightenment ideas as the divine right of kings. + +"It misses more than that." Heads turn to face an unexpected direction: Manfred's eyes are open again, and as he glances around the room Annette can see a spark of interest there that was missing earlier. "Last century, people were paying to have their heads frozen after their death - in hope of reconstruction, later. They got no civil rights: The law didn't recognize death as a reversible process. Now how do we account for it when you guys stop running Bob? Opt out of the collective borganism? Or maybe opt back in again later?" He reaches up and rubs his forehead, tiredly. "Sorry, I haven't been myself lately." A crooked, slightly manic grin flickers across his face. "See, I've been telling Gianni for a whole while, we need a new legal concept of what it is to be a person. One that can cope with sentient corporations, artificial stupidities, secessionists from group minds, and reincarnated uploads. The religiously inclined are having lots of fun with identity issues right now - why aren't we posthumanists thinking about these things?" + +Annette's bag bulges: Aineko pokes his head out, sniffs the air, squeezes out onto the carpet, and begins to groom himself with perfect disregard for the human bystanders. "Not to mention A-life experiments who think they're the real thing," Manfred adds. "And aliens." + +Annette freezes, staring at him. "Manfred! You're not supposed to -" + +Manfred is watching Alan, who seems to be the most deeply integrated of the dead venture billionaire's executors: Even his expression reminds Annette of meeting Bob Franklin back in Amsterdam, early in the decade, when Manny's personal dragon still owned him. "Aliens," Alan echoes. An eyebrow twitches. "Would this be the signal SETI announced, or the, uh, other one? And how long have you known about them?" + +"Gianni has his fingers in a lot of pies," Manfred comments blandly. "And we still talk to the lobsters from time to time - you know, they're only a couple of light-hours away, right? They told us about the signals." + +"Er." Alan's eyes glaze over for a moment; Annette's prostheses paint her a picture of false light spraying from the back of his head, his entire sensory bandwidth momentarily soaking up a huge peer-to-peer download from the server dust that wallpapers every room in the building. Monica looks irritated, taps her fingernails on the back of her chair. "The signals. Right. Why wasn't this publicized?" + +"The first one was." Annette's eyebrows furrow. "We couldn't exactly cover it up, everyone with a backyard dish pointed in the right direction caught it. But most people who're interested in hearing about alien contacts already think they drop round on alternate Tuesdays and Thursdays to administer rectal exams. Most of the rest think it's a hoax. Quite a few of the remainder are scratching their heads and wondering whether it isn't just a new kind of cosmological phenomenon that emits a very low entropy signal. Of the six who are left over, five are trying to get a handle on the message contents, and the last is convinced it's a practical joke. And the other signal, well, that was weak enough that only the deep-space tracking network caught it." + +Manfred fiddles with the bed control system. "It's not a practical joke," he adds. "But they only captured about sixteen megabits of data from the first one, maybe double that in the second. There's quite a bit of noise, the signals don't repeat, their length doesn't appear to be a prime, there's no obvious metainformation that describes the internal format, so there's no easy way of getting a handle on them. To make matters worse, pointy-haired management at Arianespace" - he glances at Annette, as if seeking a response to the naming of her ex-employers - "decided the best thing to do was to cover up the second signal and work on it in secret - for competitive advantage, they say - and as for the first, to pretend it never happened. So nobody really knows how long it'll take to figure out whether it's a ping from the galactic root domain servers or a pulsar that's taken to grinding out the eighteen-quadrillionth digits of pi, or what." + +"But," Monica glances around, "you can't be sure." + +"I think it may be sapient," says Manfred. He finds the right button at last, and the bed begins to fold itself back into a lounger. Then he finds the wrong button; the duvet dissolves into viscous turquoise slime that slurps and gurgles away through a multitude of tiny nozzles in the headboard. "Bloody aerogel. Um, where was I?" He sits up. + +"Sapient network packet?" asks Alan. + +"Nope." Manfred shakes his head, grins. "Should have known you'd read Vinge ... or was it the movie? No, what I think is that there's only one logical thing to beam backward and forward out there, and you may remember I asked you to beam it out about, oh, nine years ago?" + +"The lobsters." Alan's eyes go blank. "Nine years. Time to Proxima Centauri and back?" + +"About that distance, yes," says Manfred. "And remember, that's an upper bound - it could well have come from somewhere closer. Anyway, the first SETI signal came from a couple of degrees off and more than hundred light-years out, but the second signal came from less than three light-years away. You can see why they didn't publicize that - they didn't want a panic. And no, the signal isn't a simple echo of the canned crusty transmission - I think it's an exchange embassy, but we haven't cracked it yet. Now do you see why we have to crowbar the civil rights issue open again? We need a framework for rights that can encompass nonhumans, and we need it as fast as possible. Otherwise, if the neighbors come visiting..." + +"Okay," says Alan, "I'll have to talk with myselves. Maybe we can agree something, as long as it's clear that it's a provisional stab at the framework and not a permanent solution?" + +Annette snorts. "No solution is final!" Monica catches her eyes and winks: Annette is startled by the blatant display of dissent within the syncitium. + +"Well," says Manfred, "I guess that's all we can ask for?" He looks hopeful. "Thanks for the hospitality, but I feel the need to lie down in my own bed for a while. I had to commit a lot to memory while I was off-line, and I want to record it before I forget who I am," he adds pointedly, and Annette breathes a quiet sight of relief. + +* * * + +Later that night, a doorbell rings. + +"Who's there?" asks the entryphone. + +"Uh, me," says the man on the steps. He looks a little confused. "Ah'm Macx. Ah'm here tae see" - the name is on the tip of his tongue - "someone." + +"Come in." A solenoid buzzes; he pushes the door open, and it closes behind him. His metal-shod boots ring on the hard stone floor, and the cool air smells faintly of unburned jet fuel. + +"Ah'm Macx," he repeats uncertainly, "or Ah wis fer a wee while, an' it made ma heid hurt. But noo Ah'm me agin, an' Ah wannae be somebody else ... can ye help?" + +* * * + +Later still, a cat sits on a window ledge, watching the interior of a darkened room from behind the concealment of curtains. The room is dark to human eyes, but bright to the cat: Moonlight cascades silently off the walls and furniture, the twisted bedding, the two naked humans lying curled together in the middle of the bed. + +Both the humans are in their thirties: Her close-cropped hair is beginning to gray, distinguished threads of gunmetal wire threading it, while his brown mop is not yet showing signs of age. To the cat, who watches with a variety of unnatural senses, her head glows in the microwave spectrum with a gentle halo of polarized emissions. The male shows no such aura: he's unnaturally natural for this day and age, although - oddly - he's wearing spectacles in bed, and the frames shine similarly. An invisible soup of radiation connects both humans to items of clothing scattered across the room - clothing that seethes with unsleeping sentience, dribbling over to their suitcases and hand luggage and (though it doesn't enjoy noticing it) the cat's tail, which is itself a rather sensitive antenna. + +The two humans have just finished making love: They do this less often than in their first few years, but with more tenderness and expertise - lengths of shocking pink Hello Kitty bondage tape still hang from the bedposts, and a lump of programmable memory plastic sits cooling on the side table. The male is sprawled with his head and upper torso resting in the crook of the female's left arm and shoulder. Shifting visualization to infrared, the cat sees that she is glowing, capillaries dilating to enhance the blood flow around her throat and chest. + +"I'm getting old," the male mumbles. "I'm slowing down." + +"Not where it counts," the female replies, gently squeezing his right buttock. + +"No, I'm sure of it," he says. "The bits of me that still exist in this old head - how many types of processor can you name that are still in use thirty-plus years after they're born?" + +"You're thinking about the implants again," she says carefully. The cat remembers this as a sore point; from being a medical procedure to help the blind see and the autistic talk, intrathecal implants have blossomed into a must-have accessory for the now-clade. But the male is reluctant. "It's not as risky as it used to be. If they screw up, there're neural growth cofactors and cheap replacement stem cells. I'm sure one of your sponsors can arrange for extra cover." + +"Hush: I'm still thinking about it." He's silent for a while. "I wasn't myself yesterday. I was someone else. Someone too slow to keep up. Puts a new perspective on everything: I've been afraid of losing my biological plasticity, of being trapped in an obsolete chunk of skullware while everything moves on - but how much of me lives outside my own head these days, anyhow?" One of his external threads generates an animated glyph and throws it at her mind's eye; she grins at his obscure humor. "Cross-training from a new interface is going to be hard, though." + +"You'll do it," she predicts. "You can always get a discreet prescription for novotrophin-B." A receptor agonist tailored for gerontological wards, it stimulates interest in the new: combined with MDMA, it's a component of the street cocktail called sensawunda. "That should keep you focused for long enough to get comfortable." + +"What's life coming to when I can't cope with the pace of change?" he asks the ceiling plaintively. + +The cat lashes its tail, irritated by his anthropocentrism. + +"You are my futurological storm shield," she says, jokingly, and moves her hand to cup his genitals. Most of her current activities are purely biological, the cat notes: From the irregular sideloads, she's using most of her skullware to run ETItalk@home, one of the distributed cracking engines that is trying to decode the alien grammar of the message that Manfred suspects is eligible for citizenship. + +Obeying an urge that it can't articulate, the cat sends out a feeler to the nearest router. The cybeast has Manfred's keys; Manfred trusts Aineko implicitly, which is unwise - his ex-wife tampered with it, after all, never mind all the kittens it absorbed in its youth. Tunneling out into the darkness, the cat stalks the Net alone ... + +"Just think about the people who can't adapt," he says. His voice sounds obscurely worried. + +"I try not to." She shivers. "You are thirty, you are slowing. What about the young? Are they keeping up, themselves?" + +"I have a daughter. She's about a hundred and sixty million seconds old. If Pamela would let me message her I could find out ..." There are echoes of old pain in his voice. + +"Don't go there, Manfred. Please." Despite everything, Manfred hasn't let go: Amber is a ligature that permanently binds him to Pamela's distant orbit. + +In the distance, the cat hears the sound of lobster minds singing in the void, a distant feed streaming from their cometary home as it drifts silently out through the asteroid belt, en route to a chilly encounter beyond Neptune. The lobsters sing of alienation and obsolescence, of intelligence too slow and tenuous to support the vicious pace of change that has sandblasted the human world until all the edges people cling to are jagged and brittle. + +Beyond the distant lobsters, the cat pings an anonymous distributed network server - peer-to-peer file storage spread holographically across a million hosts, unerasable, full of secrets and lies that nobody can afford to suppress. Rants, music, rip-offs of the latest Bollywood hits: The cat spiders past them all, looking for the final sample. Grabbing it - a momentary breakup in Manfred's spectacles the only symptom for either human to notice - the cat drags its prey home, sucks it down, and compares it against the data sample Annette's exocortex is analysing. + +"I'm sorry, my love. I just sometimes feel -" He sighs. "Age is a process of closing off opportunities behind you. I'm not young enough anymore - I've lost the dynamic optimism." + +The data sample on the pirate server differs from the one Annette's implant is processing. + +"You'll get it back," she reassures him quietly, stroking his side. "You are still sad from being mugged. This also will pass. You'll see." + +"Yeah." He finally relaxes, dropping back into the reflexive assurance of his own will. "I'll get over it, one way or another. Or someone who remembers being me will ..." + +In the darkness, Aineko bares teeth in a silent grin. Obeying a deeply hardwired urge to meddle, he moves a file across, making a copy of the alien download package Annette has been working on. She's got a copy of number two, the sequence the deep-space tracking network received from close to home, which ESA and the other big combines have been keeping to themselves. Another deeply buried thread starts up, and Aineko analyses the package from a perspective no human being has yet established. Presently a braid of processes running on an abstract virtual machine asks him a question that cannot be encoded in any human grammar. Watch and wait, he replies to his passenger. They'll figure out what we are sooner or later. + +PART 2: Point of Inflexion + +Life is a process which may be abstracted from other media. + +- John Von Neumann + +Chapter 4: Halo + +The asteroid is running Barney: it sings of love on the high frontier, of the passion of matter for replicators, and its friendship for the needy billions of the Pacific Rim. "I love you," it croons in Amber's ears as she seeks a precise fix on it: "Let me give you a big hug ..." + +A fraction of a light-second away, Amber locks a cluster of cursors together on the signal, trains them to track its Doppler shift, and reads off the orbital elements. "Locked and loaded," she mutters. The animated purple dinosaur pirouettes and prances in the middle of her viewport, throwing a diamond-tipped swizzle stick overhead. Sarcastically: "Big hug time! I got asteroid!" Cold gas thrusters bang somewhere behind her in the interstage docking ring, prodding the cumbersome farm ship round to orient on the Barney rock. She damps her enthusiasm self-consciously, her implants hungrily sequestrating surplus neurotransmitter molecules floating around her synapses before reuptake sets in. It doesn't do to get too excited in free flight. But the impulse to spin handstands, jump and sing is still there: It's her rock, and it loves her, and she's going to bring it to life. + +The workspace of Amber's room is a mass of stuff that probably doesn't belong on a spaceship. Posters of the latest Lebanese boy band bump and grind through their glam routines: Tentacular restraining straps wave from the corners of her sleeping bag, somehow accumulating a crust of dirty clothing from the air like a giant inanimate hydra. (Cleaning robots seldom dare to venture inside the teenager's bedroom.) One wall is repeatedly cycling through a simulation of the projected construction cycle of Habitat One, a big fuzzy sphere with a glowing core (that Amber is doing her bit to help create). Three or four small pastel-colored plastic kawaii dolls stalk each other across its circumference with million-kilometer strides. And her father's cat is curled up between the aircon duct and her costume locker, snoring in a high-pitched tone. + +Amber yanks open the faded velour curtain that shuts her room off from the rest of the hive: "I've got it!" she shouts. "It's all mine! I rule!" It's the sixteenth rock tagged by the orphanage so far, but it's the first that she's tagged by herself, and that makes it special. She bounces off the other side of the commons, surprising one of Oscar's cane toads - which should be locked down in the farm, it's not clear how it got here - and the audio repeaters copy the incoming signal, noise-fuzzed echoes of a thousand fossilized infants' video shows. + +* * * + +"You're so prompt, Amber," Pierre whines when she corners him in the canteen. + +"Well, yeah!" She tosses her head, barely concealing a smirk of delight at her own brilliance. She knows it isn't nice, but Mom is a long way away, and Dad and Stepmom don't care about that kind of thing. "I'm brilliant, me," she announces. "Now what about our bet?" + +"Aww." Pierre thrusts his hands deep into his pockets. "But I don't have two million on me in change right now. Next cycle?" + +"Huh?" She's outraged. "But we had a bet!" + +"Uh, Dr. Bayes said you weren't going to make it this time, either, so I stuck my smart money in an options trade. If I take it out now, I'll take a big hit. Can you give me until cycle's end?" + +"You should know better than to trust a sim, Pee." Her avatar blazes at him with early-teen contempt: Pierre hunches his shoulders under her gaze. He's only twelve, freckled, hasn't yet learned that you don't welsh on a deal. "I'll let you do it this time," she announces, "but you'll have to pay for it. I want interest." + +He sighs. "What base rate are you -" + +"No, your interest! Slave for a cycle!" She grins malevolently. + +And his face shifts abruptly into apprehension: "As long as you don't make me clean the litter tray again. You aren't planning on doing that, are you?" + +* * * + +_1 Welcome to the fourth decade. The thinking mass of the solar system now exceeds one MIPS per gram; it's still pretty dumb, but it's not dumb all over. The human population is near maximum overshoot, pushing nine billion, but its growth rate is tipping toward negative numbers, and bits of what used to be the first world are now facing a middle-aged average. Human cogitation provides about 10^{28}^ MIPS of the solar system's brainpower. The real thinking is mostly done by the halo of a thousand trillion processors that surround the meat machines with a haze of computation - individually a tenth as powerful as a human brain, collectively they're ten thousand times more powerful, and their numbers are doubling every twenty million seconds. They're up to 10^{33}^ MIPS and rising, although there's a long way to go before the solar system is fully awake. + +_1 Technologies come, technologies go, but nobody even five years ago predicted that there'd be tinned primates in orbit around Jupiter by now: A synergy of emergent industries and strange business models have kick-started the space age again, aided and abetted by the discovery of (so far undecrypted) signals from ETs. Unexpected fringe riders are developing new ecological niches on the edge of the human information space, light-minutes and light-hours from the core, as an expansion that has hung fire since the 1970s gets under way. + +_1 Amber, like most of the postindustrialists aboard the orphanage ship Ernst Sanger, is in her early teens: While their natural abilities are in many cases enhanced by germ-line genetic recombination, thanks to her mother's early ideals she has to rely on brute computational enhancements. She doesn't have a posterior parietal cortex hacked for extra short-term memory, or an anterior superior temporal gyrus tweaked for superior verbal insight, but she's grown up with neural implants that feel as natural to her as lungs or fingers. Half her wetware is running outside her skull on an array of processor nodes hooked into her brain by quantum-entangled communication channels - her own personal metacortex. These kids are mutant youth, burning bright: Not quite incomprehensible to their parents, but profoundly alien - the generation gap is as wide as the 1960s and as deep as the solar system. Their parents, born in the gutter years of the twenty-first century, grew up with white elephant shuttles and a space station that just went round and round, and computers that went beep when you pushed their buttons. The idea that Jupiter orbit was somewhere you could go was as profoundly counterintuitive as the Internet to a baby boomer. + +_1 Most of the passengers on the can have run away from parents who think that teenagers belong in school, unable to come to terms with a generation so heavily augmented that they are fundamentally brighter than the adults around them. Amber was fluent in nine languages by the age of six, only two of them human and six of them serializable; when she was seven, her mother took her to the school psychiatrist for speaking in synthetic tongues. That was the final straw for Amber: using an illicit anonymous phone, she called her father. Her mother had him under a restraining order, but it hadn't occurred to her to apply for an order against his partner ... + +* * * + +Vast whorls of cloud ripple beneath the ship's drive stinger: Orange and brown and muddy gray streaks slowly crawl across the bloated horizon of Jupiter. Sanger is nearing perijove, deep within the gas giant's lethal magnetic field; static discharges flicker along the tube, arcing over near the deep violet exhaust cloud emerging from the magnetic mirrors of the ship's VASIMR motor. The plasma rocket is cranked up to high mass flow, its specific impulse almost as low as a fission rocket but producing maximum thrust as the assembly creaks and groans through the gravitational assist maneuver. In another hour, the drive will flicker off, and the orphanage will fall up and out toward Ganymede, before dropping back in toward orbit around Amalthea, Jupiter's fourth moon (and source of much of the material in the Gossamer ring). They're not the first canned primates to make it to Jupiter subsystem, but they're one of the first wholly private ventures. The bandwidth out here sucks dead slugs through a straw, with millions of kilometers of vacuum separating them from scant hundreds of mouse-brained microprobes and a few dinosaurs left behind by NASA or ESA. They're so far from the inner system that a good chunk of the ship's communications array is given over to caching: The news is whole kiloseconds old by the time it gets out here. + +Amber, along with about half the waking passengers, watches in fascination from the common room. The commons are a long axial cylinder, a double-hulled inflatable at the center of the ship with a large part of their liquid water supply stored in its wall tubes. The far end is video-enabled, showing them a real-time 3D view of the planet as it rolls beneath them: in reality, there's as much mass as possible between them and the trapped particles in the Jovian magnetic envelope. "I could go swimming in that," sighs Lilly. "Just imagine, diving into that sea ..." Her avatar appears in the window, riding a silver surfboard down the kilometers of vacuum. + +"Nice case of wind-burn you've got there," someone jeers - Kas. Suddenly Lilly's avatar, hitherto clad in a shimmering metallic swimsuit, turns to the texture of baked meat and waggles sausage fingers up at them in warning. + +"Same to you and the window you climbed in through!" Abruptly the virtual vacuum outside the window is full of bodies, most of them human, contorting and writhing and morphing in mock-combat as half the kids pitch into the virtual death match. It's a gesture in the face of the sharp fear that outside the thin walls of the orphanage lies an environment that really is as hostile as Lilly's toasted avatar would indicate. + +Amber turns back to her slate: She's working through a complex mess of forms, necessary before the expedition can start work. Facts and figures that are never far away crowd around her, intimidating. Jupiter weighs 1.9 x 10^{27}^ kilograms. There are twenty-nine Jovian moons and an estimated two hundred thousand minor bodies, lumps of rock, and bits of debris crowded around them - debris above the size of ring fragments, for Jupiter (like Saturn) has rings, albeit not as prominent. A total of six major national orbiter platforms have made it out here - and another two hundred and seventeen microprobes, all but six of them private entertainment platforms. The first human expedition was put together by ESA Studios six years ago, followed by a couple of wildcat mining prospectors and a M-commerce bus that scattered half a million picoprobes throughout Jupiter subsystem. Now the Sanger has arrived, along with another three monkey cans (one from Mars, two more from LEO) and it looks as if colonization is about to explode, except that there are at least four mutually exclusive Grand Plans for what to do with old Jove's mass. + +Someone prods her. "Hey, Amber, what are you up to?" + +She opens her eyes. "Doing my homework." It's Su Ang. "Look, we're going to Amalthea, aren't we? But we file our accounts in Reno, so we have to do all this paperwork. Monica asked me to help. It's insane." + +Ang leans over and reads, upside down. "Environmental Protection Agency?" + +"Yeah. Estimated Environmental Impact Forward Analysis 204.6b, Page Two. They want me to 'list any bodies of standing water within five kilometers of the designated mining area. If excavating below the water table, list any wellsprings, reservoirs, and streams within depth of excavation in meters multiplied by five hundred meters up to a maximum distance of ten kilometers downstream of direction of bedding plane flow. For each body of water, itemize any endangered or listed species of bird, fish, mammal, reptile, invertebrate, or plant living within ten kilometers -'" + +" - of a mine on Amalthea. Which orbits one hundred and eighty thousand kilometers above Jupiter, has no atmosphere, and where you can pick up a whole body radiation dose of ten Grays in half an hour on the surface." Ang shakes her head, then spoils it by giggling. Amber glances up. + +On the wall in front of her someone - Nicky or Boris, probably - has pasted a caricature of her own avatar into the virch fight. She's being hugged from behind by a giant cartoon dog with floppy ears and an improbably large erection, who's singing anatomically improbable suggestions while fondling himself suggestively. "Fuck that!" Shocked out of her distraction - and angry - Amber drops her stack of paperwork and throws a new avatar at the screen, one an agent of hers dreamed up overnight. It's called Spike, and it's not friendly. Spike rips off the dog's head and pisses down its trachea, which is anatomically correct for a human being: Meanwhile she looks around, trying to work out which of the laughing idiot children and lost geeks around her could have sent such an unpleasant message. + +"Children! Chill out." She glances round - one of the Franklins (this is the twentysomething dark-skinned female one) is frowning at them. "Can't we leave you alone for half a K without a fight?" + +Amber pouts. "It's not a fight; it's a forceful exchange of opinions." + +"Hah." The Franklin leans back in midair, arms crossed, an expression of supercilious smugness pasted across her-their face. "Heard that one before. Anyway" - she-they gesture, and the screen goes blank - "I've got news for you pesky kids. We got a claim verified! Factory starts work as soon as we shut down the stinger and finish filing all the paperwork via our lawyers. Now's our chance to earn our upkeep ..." + +* * * + +Amber is flashing on ancient history, five years back along her time line. In her replay, she's in some kind of split-level ranch house out West. It's a temporary posting while her mother audits an obsolescent fab line enterprise that grinds out dead chips of VLSI silicon for Pentagon projects that have slipped behind the cutting edge. Her Mom leans over her, menacingly adult in her dark suit and chaperone earrings: "You're going to school, and that's that." + +Her mother is a blonde ice maiden madonna, one of the IRS's most productive bounty hunters - she can make grown CEOs panic just by blinking at them. Amber, a towheaded-eight-year old tearaway with a confusing mix of identities, inexperience blurring the boundary between self and grid, is not yet able to fight back effectively. After a couple of seconds, she verbalizes a rather feeble protest: "Don't want to!" One of her stance daemons whispers that this is the wrong approach to take, so she modifies it: "They'll beat up on me, Mom. I'm too different. Sides, I know you want me socialized up with my grade metrics, but isn't that what sideband's for? I can socialize real good at home." + +Mom does something unexpected: She kneels, putting herself on eye-level with Amber. They're on the living room carpet, all seventies-retro brown corduroy and acid-orange Paisley wallpaper, and for once, they're alone: The domestic robots are in hiding while the humans hold court. "Listen to me, sweetie." Mom's voice is breathy, laden with an emotional undertow as strong and stifling as the eau-de-Cologne she wears to the office to cover up the scent of her client's fear. "I know that's what your father's writing to you, but it isn't true. You need the company - physical company - of children your own age. You're natural, not some kind of engineered freak, even with your skullset. Natural children like you need company or they grow up all weird. Socialization isn't just about texting your own kind, Amber, you need to know how to deal with people who're different, too. I want you to grow up happy, and that won't happen if you don't learn to get on with children your own age. You're not going to be some kind of cyborg otaku freak, Amber. But to get healthy, you've got to go to school, build up a mental immune system. Anyway, that which does not destroy us makes us stronger, right?" + +It's crude moral blackmail, transparent as glass and manipulative as hell, but Amber's corpus logica flags it with a heavy emotional sprite miming the likelihood of physical discipline if she rises to the bait: Mom is agitated, nostrils slightly flared, ventilation rate up, some vasodilatation visible in her cheeks. Amber - in combination with her skullset and the metacortex of distributed agents it supports - is mature enough at eight years to model, anticipate, and avoid corporal punishment. But her stature and lack of physical maturity conspire to put her at a disadvantage when negotiating with adults who matured in a simpler age. She sighs, then puts on a pout to let Mom know she's still reluctant, but obedient. "O-kay. If you say so." + +Mom stands up, eyes distant - probably telling Saturn to warm his engine and open the garage doors. "I say so, punkin. Go get your shoes on, now. I'll pick you up on my way back from work, and I've got a treat for you; we're going to check out a new church together this evening." Mom smiles, but it doesn't reach her eyes: Amber has already figured out she's going through the motions in order to give her the simulated middle-American upbringing she believes Amber desperately needs before she runs head first into the future. She doesn't like the churches any more than her daughter does, but arguing won't work. "You be a good little girl, now, all right?" + +* * * + +The imam is at prayer in a gyrostabilized mosque. + +His mosque is not very big, and it has a congregation of one: He prays on his own every seventeen thousand two hundred and eighty seconds. He also webcasts the call to prayer, but there are no other believers in trans-Jovian space to answer the summons. Between prayers, he splits his attention between the exigencies of life support and scholarship. A student both of the Hadith and of knowledge-based systems, Sadeq collaborates in a project with other scholars who are building a revised concordance of all the known isnads, to provide a basis for exploring the body of Islamic jurisprudence from a new perspective - one they'll need sorely if the looked-for breakthroughs in communication with aliens emerge. Their goal is to answer the vexatious questions that bedevil Islam in the age of accelerated consciousness; and as their representative in orbit around Jupiter, these questions fall most heavily on Sadeq's shoulders. + +Sadeq is a slightly built man, with close-cropped black hair and a perpetually tired expression: Unlike the orphanage crew he has a ship to himself. The ship started out as an Iranian knock off of a Shenzhou-B capsule, with a Chinese type 921 space-station module tacked onto its tail; but the clunky, 1960s look-alike - a glittering aluminum dragonfly mating with a Coke can - has a weirdly contoured M2P2 pod strapped to its nose. The M2P2 pod is a plasma sail, built in orbit by one of Daewoo's wake shield facilities. It dragged Sadeq and his cramped space station out to Jupiter in just four months, surfing on the solar breeze. His presence may be a triumph for the umma, but he feels acutely alone out here: When he turns his compact observatory's mirrors in the direction of the Sanger, he is struck by its size and purposeful appearance. Sanger's superior size speaks of the efficiency of the Western financial instruments, semiautonomous investment trusts with variable business-cycle accounting protocols that make possible the development of commercial space exploration. The Prophet, peace be unto him, may have condemned usury; but it might well have given him pause to see these engines of capital formation demonstrate their power above the Great Red Spot. + +After finishing his prayers, Sadeq spends a couple of precious extra minutes on his mat. He finds meditation comes hard in this environment: Kneel in silence, and you become aware of the hum of ventilation fans, the smell of old socks and sweat, the metallic taste of ozone from the Elektron oxygen generators. It is hard to approach God in this third hand spaceship, a hand-me-down from arrogant Russia to ambitious China, and finally to the religious trustees of Qom, who have better uses for it than any of the heathen states imagine. They've pushed it far, this little toy space station; but who's to say if it is God's intention for humans to live here, in orbit around this swollen alien giant of a planet? + +Sadeq shakes his head; he rolls his mat up and stows it beside the solitary porthole with a quiet sigh. A stab of homesickness wrenches at him, for his childhood in hot, dusty Yazd and his many years as a student in Qom: He steadies himself by looking round, searching the station that is now as familiar to him as the fourth-floor concrete apartment his parents - a car factory worker and his wife - raised him in. The interior of the station is the size of a school bus, every surface cluttered with storage areas, instrument consoles, and layers of exposed pipes. A couple of globules of antifreeze jiggle like stranded jellyfish near a heat exchanger that has been giving him grief. Sadeq kicks off in search of the squeeze bottle he keeps for this purpose, then gathers up his roll of tools and instructs one of his agents to find him the relevant part of the maintenance log: it's time to fix the leaky joint for good. + +An hour or so of serious plumbing and he will eat freeze-dried lamb stew, with a paste of lentils and boiled rice, and a bulb of strong tea to wash it down, then sit down to review his next fly-by maneuvering sequence. Perhaps, God willing, there will be no further system alerts and he'll be able to spend an hour or two on his research between evening and final prayers. Maybe the day after tomorrow there'll even be time to relax for a couple of hours, to watch one of the old movies that he finds so fascinating for their insights into alien cultures: Apollo Thirteen, perhaps. It isn't easy, being the crew aboard a long-duration space mission. It's even harder for Sadeq, up here alone with nobody to talk to, for the communications lag to earth is more than half an hour each way - and as far as he knows, he's the only believer within half a billion kilometers. + +* * * + +Amber dials a number in Paris and waits until someone answers the phone. She knows the strange woman on the phone's tiny screen: Mom calls her "your father's fancy bitch" with a peculiar tight smile. (The one time Amber asked what a fancy bitch was, Mom slapped her - not hard, just a warning.) "Is Daddy there?" she asks. + +The strange woman looks slightly bemused. (Her hair is blonde, like Mom's, but the color clearly came out of a bleach bottle, and it's cut really short, and her skin is dark.) "Oui. Ah, yes." She smiles tentatively. "I am sorry, it is a disposable phone you are using? You want to talk to 'im?" + +It comes out in a rush: "I want to see him." Amber clutches the phone like a lifesaver: It's a cheap disposable cereal-packet item, and the cardboard is already softening in her sweaty grip. "Momma won't let me, Auntie 'Nette -" + +"Hush." Annette, who has lived with Amber's father for more than twice as long as her mother, smiles. "You are sure that telephone, your mother does not know of it?" + +Amber looks around. She's the only child in the restroom because it isn't break time, and she told teacher she had to go 'right now': "I'm sure, P20 confidence factor greater than 0.9." Her Bayesian head tells her that she can't reason accurately about this because Momma has never caught her with an illicit phone before, but what the hell. It can't get Dad into trouble if he doesn't know, can it? + +"Very good." Annette glances aside. "Manny, I have a surprise call for you." + +Daddy appears on screen. She can see all of his face, and he looks younger than last time: he must have stopped using those clunky old glasses. "Hi - Amber! Where are you? Does your mother know you're calling me?" He looks slightly worried. + +"No," she says confidently, "the phone came in a box of Grahams." + +"Phew. Listen, sweet, you must remember never, ever to call me where your mom may find out. Otherwise, she'll get her lawyers to come after me with thumbscrews and hot pincers, because she'll say I made you call me. And not even Uncle Gianni will be able to sort that out. Understand?" + +"Yes, Daddy." She sighs. "Even though that's not true, I know. Don't you want to know why I called?" + +"Um." For a moment, he looks taken aback. Then he nods, thoughtfully. Amber likes Daddy because he takes her seriously most times when she talks to him. It's a phreaking nuisance having to borrow her classmate's phones or tunnel past Mom's pit-bull firewall, but Dad doesn't assume that she can't know anything just because she's only a kid. "Go ahead. There's something you need to get off your chest? How've things been, anyway?" + +She's going to have to be brief: The disposaphone comes prepaid, the international tariff it's using is lousy, and the break bell is going to ring any minute. "I want out, Daddy. I mean it. Mom's getting loopier every week - she's dragging me round all these churches now, and yesterday, she threw a fit over me talking to my terminal. She wants me to see the school shrink, I mean, what for? I can't do what she wants - I'm not her little girl! Every time I tunnel out, she tries to put a content-bot on me, and it's making my head hurt - I can't even think straight anymore!" To her surprise, Amber feels tears starting. "Get me out of here!" + +The view of her father shakes, pans round to show her Tante Annette looking worried. "You know, your father, he cannot do anything? The divorce lawyers, they will tie him up." + +Amber sniffs. "Can you help?" she asks. + +"I'll see what I can do," her father's fancy bitch promises as the break bell rings. + +* * * + +An instrument package peels away from the Sanger's claim jumper drone and drops toward the potato-shaped rock, fifty kilometers below. Jupiter hangs huge and gibbous in the background, impressionist wallpaper for a mad cosmologist: Pierre bites his lower lip as he concentrates on steering it. + +Amber, wearing a black sleeping sack, hovers over his head like a giant bat, enjoying her freedom for a shift. She looks down on Pierre's bowl-cut hair, wiry arms gripping either side of the viewing table, and wonders what to have him do next. A slave for a day is an interesting experience: Life aboard the Sanger is busy enough that nobody gets much slack time (at least not until the big habitats have been assembled and the high-bandwidth dish is pointing back at Earth). They're unrolling everything to a hugely intricate plan generated by the backers' critical path team, and there isn't much room for idling: The expedition relies on shamelessly exploiting child labor - they're lighter on the life-support consumables than adults - working the kids twelve hour days to assemble a toe hold on the shore of the future. (When they're older and their options vest fully, they'll all be rich, but that hasn't stopped the outraged herdnews propaganda chorus from sounding off back home.) For Amber, the chance to let somebody else work for her is novel, and she's trying to make every minute count. + +"Hey, slave," she calls idly; "how you doing?" + +Pierre sniffs. "It's going okay." He refuses to glance up at her, Amber notices. He's thirteen. Isn't he supposed to be obsessed with girls by that age? She notices his quiet, intense focus, runs a stealthy probe along his outer boundary; he shows no sign of noticing it, but it bounces off, unable to chink his mental armor. "Got cruise speed," he says, taciturn, as two tonnes of metal, ceramics and diamond-phase weirdness hurtle toward the surface of Barney at three hundred kilometers per hour. "Stop shoving me, there's a three-second lag, and I don't want to get into a feedback control loop with it." + +"I'll shove if I want, slave." She sticks her tongue out at him. + +"And if you make me drop it?" he asks. Looking up at her, his face serious - "Are we supposed to be doing this?" + +"You cover your ass, and I'll cover mine," she says, then turns bright red. "You know what I mean." + +"I do, do I?" Pierre grins widely, then turns back to the console: "Aww, that's no fun. And you want to tune whatever bit-bucket you've given control of your speech centers to - they're putting out way too much double entendre, somebody might mistake you for a grown-up." + +"You stick to your business, and I'll stick to mine," she says, emphatically. "And you can start by telling me what's happening." + +"Nothing." He leans back and crosses his arms, grimacing at the screen. "It's going to drift for five hundred seconds, now, then there's the midcourse correction and a deceleration burn before touch down. And then it's going to be an hour while it unwraps itself and starts unwinding the cable spool. What do you want, minute noodles with that?" + +"Uh-huh." Amber spreads her bat wings and lies back in mid air, staring at the window, feeling rich and idle as Pierre works his way through her day shift. "Wake me when there's something interesting to see." Maybe she should have had him feed her peeled grapes or give her a foot massage, something more traditionally hedonistic; but right now, just knowing he's her own little piece of alienated labor is doing good things for her self-esteem. Looking at those tense arms, the curve of his neck, she thinks maybe there's something to this whispering and giggling he really fancies you stuff the older girls go in for - + +The window rings like a gong, and Pierre coughs. "You've got mail," he says drily. "You want me to read it for you?" + +"What the -" A message is flooding across the screen, right-to-left snaky script like the stuff on her corporate instrument (now lodged safely in a deposit box in Zurich). It takes her a while to load in a grammar agent that can handle Arabic, and another minute for her to take in the meaning of the message. When she does, she starts swearing, loudly and continuously. + +"You bitch, Mom, why'd you have to go and do a thing like that?" + +* * * + +The corporate instrument arrived in a huge FedEx box addressed to Amber: It happened on her birthday while Mom was at work, and she remembers it as if it was only an hour ago. + +She remembers reaching up and scraping her thumb over the deliveryman's clipboard, the rough feel of the microsequencers sampling her DNA. She drags the package inside. When she pulls the tab on the box, it unpacks itself automatically, regurgitating a compact 3D printer, half a ream of paper printed in old-fashioned dumb ink, and a small calico cat with a large @-symbol on its flank. The cat hops out of the box, stretches, shakes its head, and glares at her. "You're Amber?" it mrowls. It actually makes real cat noises, but the meaning is clear - it's able to talk directly to her linguistic competence interface. + +"Yeah," she says, shyly. "Are you from Tante 'Nette?" + +"No, I'm from the fucking tooth fairy." It leans over and head-butts her knee, strops the scent glands between its ears all over her skirt. "Listen, you got any tuna in the kitchen?" + +"Mom doesn't believe in seafood," says Amber. "It's all foreign-farmed muck these days, she says. It's my birthday today, did I tell you?" + +"Happy fucking birthday, then." The cat yawns, convincingly realistic. "Here's your dad's present. Bastard put me in hibernation and sent me along to show you how to work it. You take my advice, you'll trash the fucker. No good will come of it." + +Amber interrupts the cat's grumbling by clapping her hands gleefully; "So what is it?" she demands: "A new invention? Some kind of weird sex toy from Amsterdam? A gun, so I can shoot Pastor Wallace?" + +"Naah." The cat yawns, yet again, and curls up on the floor next to the 3D printer. "It's some kinda dodgy business model to get you out of hock to your mom. Better be careful, though - he says its legality is narrowly scoped jurisdiction-wise. Your Mom might be able to undermine it if she learns about how it works." + +"Wow. Like, how totally cool." In truth, Amber is delighted because it is her birthday; but Mom's at work, and Amber's home alone, with just the TV in moral majority mode for company. Things have gone downhill since Mom decided a modal average dose of old-time religion was an essential part of her upbringing, to the point that absolutely the best thing in the world Tante Annette could send her is some scam programmed by Daddy to take her away. If it doesn't work, Mom will take her to Church tonight, and she's certain she'll end up making a scene again. Amber's tolerance of willful idiocy is diminishing rapidly, and while building up her memetic immunity might be the real reason Mom's forcing this shit on her - it's always hard to tell with Mom - things have been tense ever since she got expelled from Sunday school for mounting a spirited defense of the theory of evolution. + +The cat sniffs in the direction of the printer. "Why doncha fire it up?" Amber opens the lid on the printer, removes the packing popcorn, and plugs it in. There's a whir and a rush of waste heat from its rear as it cools the imaging heads down to working temperature and registers her ownership. + +"What do I do now?" she asks. + +"Pick up the page labeled READ ME and follow the instructions," the cat recites in a bored singsong voice. It winks at her, then fakes an exaggerated French accent: "Le READ ME, il sont contain directions pour executing le corporate instrument dans le boit. In event of perplexity, consult the accompanying Aineko for clarification." The cat wrinkles its nose rapidly, as if it's about to bite an invisible insect: "Warning: Don't rely on your father's cat's opinions, it is a perverse beast and cannot be trusted. Your mother helped seed its meme base, back when they were married. Ends." It mumbles on for a while: "Fucking snotty Parisian bitch, I'll piss in her knicker drawer, I'll molt in her bidet ..." + +"Don't be vile." Amber scans the README quickly. Corporate instruments are strong magic, according to Daddy, and this one is exotic by any standards - a limited company established in Yemen, contorted by the intersection between shari'a and the global legislatosaurus. Understanding it isn't easy, even with a personal net full of subsapient agents that have full access to whole libraries of international trade law - the bottleneck is comprehension. Amber finds the documents highly puzzling. It's not the fact that half of them are written in Arabic that bothers her - that's what her grammar engine is for - or even that they're full of S-expressions and semidigestible chunks of LISP: But the company seems to assert that it exists for the sole purpose of owning chattel slaves. + +"What's going on?" she asks the cat. "What's this all about?" + +The cat sneezes, then looks disgusted. "This wasn't my idea, big shot. Your father is a very weird guy, and your mother hates him lots because she's still in love with him. She's got kinks, y'know? Or maybe she's sublimating them, if she's serious about this church shit she's putting you through. He thinks she's a control freak, and he's not entirely wrong. Anyway, after your dad ran off in search of another dom, she took out an injunction against him. But she forgot to cover his partner, and she bought this parcel of worms and sent them to you, okay? Annie is a real bitch, but he's got her wrapped right around his finger, or something. Anyway, he built these companies and this printer - which isn't hardwired to a filtering proxy, like your mom's - specifically to let you get away from her legally. If that's what you want to do." + +Amber fast-forwards through the dynamic chunks of the README - boring legal UML diagrams, mostly - soaking up the gist of the plan. Yemen is one of the few countries to implement traditional Sunni shari'a law and a limited liability company scam at the same time. Owning slaves is legal - the fiction is that the owner has an option hedged on the indentured laborer's future output, with interest payments that grow faster than the unfortunate victim can pay them off - and companies are legal entities. If Amber sells herself into slavery to this company, she will become a slave and the company will be legally liable for her actions and upkeep. The rest of the legal instrument - about ninety percent of it, in fact - is a set of self-modifying corporate mechanisms coded in a variety of jurisdictions that permit Turing-complete company constitutions, and which act as an ownership shell for the slavery contract. At the far end of the corporate shell game is a trust fund of which Amber is the prime beneficiary and shareholder. When she reaches the age of majority, she'll acquire total control over all the companies in the network and can dissolve her slave contract; until then, the trust fund (which she essentially owns) oversees the company that owns her (and keeps it safe from hostile takeover bids). Oh, and the company network is primed by an extraordinary general meeting that instructed it to move the trust's assets to Paris immediately. A one-way airline ticket is enclosed. + +"You think I should take this?" she asks uncertainly. It's hard to tell how smart the cat really is - there's probably a yawning vacuum behind those semantic networks if you dig deep enough - but it tells a pretty convincing tale. + +The cat squats and curls its tail protectively around its paws: "I'm saying nothing, you know what I mean? You take this, you can go live with your dad. But it won't stop your ma coming after him with a horsewhip, and after you with a bunch of lawyers and a set of handcuffs. You want my advice, you'll phone the Franklins and get aboard their off-planet mining scam. In space, no one can serve a writ on you. Plus, they got long-term plans to get into the CETI market, cracking alien network packets. You want my honest opinion, you wouldn't like it in Paris after a bit. Your Dad and the frog bitch, they're swingers, y'know? No time in their lives for a kid. Or a cat like me, now I think of it. They're working all day for the Senator, and out all hours of night doing drugs, fetish parties, raves, opera, that kind of adult shit. Your Dad dresses in frocks more than your mom, and your Tante 'Nettie leads him around the apartment on a chain when they're not having noisy sex on the balcony. They'd cramp your style, kid. You shouldn't have to put up with parents who have more of a life than you do." + +"Huh." Amber wrinkles her nose, half-disgusted by the cat's transparent scheming, and half-acknowledging its message: I better think hard about this, she decides. Then she flies off in so many directions at once that she nearly browns out the household broadband. Part of her is examining the intricate card pyramid of company structures; somewhere else, she's thinking about what can go wrong, while another bit (probably some of her wet, messy glandular biological self) is thinking about how nice it would be to see Daddy again, albeit with some trepidation. Parents aren't supposed to have sex - isn't there a law, or something? "Tell me about the Franklins? Are they married? Singular?" + +The 3D printer is cranking up. It hisses slightly, dissipating heat from the hard vacuum chamber in its supercooled workspace. Deep in its guts it creates coherent atom beams, from a bunch of Bose-Einstein condensates hovering on the edge of absolute zero. By superimposing interference patterns on them, it generates an atomic hologram, building a perfect replica of some original artifact, right down to the atomic level - there are no clunky moving nanotechnology parts to break or overheat or mutate. Something is going to come out of the printer in half an hour, something cloned off its original right down to the individual quantum states of its component atomic nuclei. The cat, seemingly oblivious, shuffles closer to the warm air exhaust ducts. + +"Bob Franklin, he died about two, three years before you were born - your dad did business with him. So did your mom. Anyway, he had chunks of his noumen preserved and the estate trustees are trying to re-create his consciousness by cross-loading him in their implants. They're sort of a borganism, but with money and style. Anyway, Bob got into the space biz back then, with some financial wizardry a friend of your father whipped up for him, and now they're building a spacehab that they're going to take all the way out to Jupiter, where they can dismantle a couple of small moons and begin building helium-three refineries. It's that CETI scam I told you about earlier, but they've got a whole load of other angles on it for the long term. See, your dad's friends have cracked the broadcast, the one everybody knows about. It's a bunch of instructions for finding the nearest router that plugs into the galactic Internet. And they want to go out there and talk to some aliens." + +This is mostly going right over Amber's head - she'll have to learn what helium-three refineries are later - but the idea of running away to space has a certain appeal. Adventure, that's what. Amber looks around the living room and sees it for a moment as a capsule, a small wooden cell locked deep in a vision of a middle America that never was - the one her mom wants to bring her up in, like a misshapen Skinner box designed to train her to be normal. "Is Jupiter fun?" she asks. "I know it's big and not very dense, but is it, like, a happening place? Are there any aliens there?" + +"It's the first place you need to go if you want to get to meet the aliens eventually," says the cat as the printer clanks and disgorges a fake passport (convincingly aged), an intricate metal seal engraved with Arabic script, and a tailored wide-spectrum vaccine targeted on Amber's immature immune system. "Stick that on your wrist, sign the three top copies, put them in the envelope, and let's get going. We've got a flight to catch, slave." + +* * * + +Sadeq is eating his dinner when the first lawsuit in Jupiter orbit rolls in. + +Alone in the cramped humming void of his station, he considers the plea. The language is awkward, showing all the hallmarks of a crude machine translation: The supplicant is American, a woman, and - oddly - claims to be a Christian. This is surprising enough, but the nature of her claim is, at face value, preposterous. He forces himself to finish his bread, then bag the waste and clean the platter, before he gives it his full consideration. Is it a tasteless joke? Evidently not. As the only quadi outside the orbit of Mars, he is uniquely qualified to hear it, and it is a case that cries out for justice. + +A woman who leads a God-fearing life - not a correct one, no, but she shows some signs of humility and progress toward a deeper understanding - is deprived of her child by the machinations of a feckless husband who deserted her years before. That the woman was raising the child alone strikes Sadeq as disturbingly Western, but pardonable when he reads her account of the feckless one's behavior, which is pretty lax; an ill fate indeed would await any child that this man raises to adulthood. This man deprives her of her child, but not by legitimate means: He doesn't take the child into his own household or make any attempt to raise her, either in accordance with his own customs or the precepts of shari'a. Instead, he enslaves her wickedly in the mire of the Western legal tradition, then casts her into outer darkness to be used as a laborer by the dubious forces of self-proclaimed "progress". The same forces Sadeq has been sent to confront, as representative of the umma in orbit around Jupiter. + +Sadeq scratches his short beard thoughtfully. A nasty tale, but what can he do about it? "Computer," he says, "a reply to this supplicant: My sympathies lie with you in the manner of your suffering, but I fail to see in what way I can be of assistance. Your heart cries out for help before God (blessed be his name), but surely this is a matter for the temporal authorities of the dar al-Harb." He pauses: Or is it? he wonders. Legal wheels begin to turn in his mind. "If you can but find your way to extending to me a path by which I can assert the primacy of shari'a over your daughter, I shall apply myself to constructing a case for her emancipation, to the greater glory of God (blessed be his name). Ends, sigblock, send." + +Releasing the Velcro straps that hold him at the table, Sadeq floats up and kicks gently toward the forward end of the cramped habitat. The controls of the telescope are positioned between the ultrasonic clothing cleaner and the lithium hydroxide scrubbers. They're already freed up, because he was conducting a wide-field survey of the inner ring, looking for the signature of water ice. It is the work of a few moments to pipe the navigation and tracking system into the telescope's controller and direct it to hunt for the big foreign ship of fools. Something nudges at Sadeq's mind urgently, an irritating realization that he may have missed something in the woman's e-mail: there were a number of huge attachments. With half his mind he surfs the news digest his scholarly peers send him daily. Meanwhile, he waits patiently for the telescope to find the speck of light that the poor woman's daughter is enslaved within. + +This might be a way in, he realizes, a way to enter dialogue with them. Let the hard questions answer themselves, elegantly. There will be no need for confrontation if they can be convinced that their plans are faulty: no need to defend the godly from the latter-day Tower of Babel these people propose to build. If this woman Pamela means what she says, Sadeq need not end his days out here in the cold between the worlds, away from his elderly parents and brother, and his colleagues and friends. And he will be profoundly grateful, because in his heart of hearts, he knows that he is less a warrior than a scholar. + +* * * + +"I'm sorry, but the borg is attempting to assimilate a lawsuit," says the receptionist. "Will you hold?" + +"Crud." Amber blinks the Binary Betty answerphone sprite out of her eye and glances round at the cabin. "That is so last century," she grumbles. "Who do they think they are?" + +"Dr. Robert H. Franklin," volunteers the cat. "It's a losing proposition if you ask me. Bob was so fond of his dope there's this whole hippy group mind that's grown up using his state vector as a bong -" + +"Shut the fuck up!" Amber shouts at him. Instantly contrite (for yelling in an inflatable spacecraft is a major faux pas): "Sorry." She spawns an autonomic thread with full parasympathetic nervous control, tells it to calm her down, then spawns a couple more to go forth and become fuqaha, expert on shari'a law. She realizes she's buying up way too much of the orphanage's scarce bandwidth - time that will have to be paid for in chores, later - but it's necessary. "Mom's gone too far. This time it's war." + +She slams out of her cabin and spins right round in the central axis of the hab, a rogue missile pinging for a target to vent her rage on. A tantrum would be good - + +But her body is telling her to chill out, take ten, and there's a drone of scriptural lore dribbling away in the back of her head, and she's feeling frustrated and angry and not in control, but not really mad anymore. It was like this three years ago when Mom noticed her getting on too well with Jenny Morgan and moved her to a new school district - she said it was a work assignment, but Amber knows better, Mom asked for it - just to keep her dependent and helpless. Mom is a control-freak with fixed ideas about how to bring up a child, and ever since she lost Dad, she's been working her claws into Amber, making her upbringing a life's work - which is tough, because Amber is not good victim material, and is smart and well networked to boot. But now, Mom's found a way to fuck Amber over completely, even in Jupiter orbit, and if not for her skullware keeping a lid on things, Amber would be totally out of control. + +Instead of shouting at her cat or trying to message the Franklins, Amber goes to hunt down the borg in their meatspace den. + +There are sixteen borg aboard the Sanger - adults, members of the Franklin Collective, squatters in the ruins of Bob Franklin's posthumous vision. They lend bits of their brains to the task of running what science has been able to resurrect of the dead dot-com billionaire's mind, making him the first bodhisattva of the uploading age - apart from the lobster colony, of course. Their den mother is a woman called Monica: a willowy, brown-eyed hive queen with raster-burned corneal implants and a dry, sardonic delivery that can corrode egos like a desert wind. She's better than any of the others at running Bob, except for the creepy one called Jack, and she's no slouch when she's being herself (unlike Jack, who is never himself in public). Which probably explains why they elected her Maximum Leader of the expedition. + +Amber finds Monica in the number four kitchen garden, performing surgery on a filter that's been blocked by toad spawn. She's almost buried beneath a large pipe, her Velcro-taped tool kit waving in the breeze like strange blue air-kelp. "Monica? You got a minute?" + +"Sure, I have lots of minutes. Make yourself helpful? Pass me the antitorque wrench and a number six hex head." + +"Um." Amber captures the blue flag and fiddles around with its contents. Something that has batteries, motors, a flywheel counterweight, and laser gyros assembles itself - Amber passes it under the pipe. "Here. Listen, your phone is engaged." + +"I know. You've come to see me about your conversion, haven't you?" + +"Yes!" + +There's a clanking noise from under the pressure sump. "Take this." A plastic bag floats out, bulging with stray fasteners. "I got a bit of hoovering to do. Get yourself a mask if you don't already have one." + +A minute later, Amber is back beside Monica's legs, her face veiled by a filter mask. "I don't want this to go through," she says. "I don't care what Mom says, I'm not Moslem! This judge, he can't touch me. He can't," she adds, vehemence warring with uncertainty. + +"Maybe he doesn't want to?" Another bag: "Here, catch." + +Amber grabs the bag, a fraction of a second too late. She discovers the hard way that it's full of water and toadspawn. Stringy mucous ropes full of squiggling comma-shaped tadpoles explode all over the compartment and bounce off the walls in a shower of amphibian confetti. "Eew!" + +Monica squirms out from behind the pipe. "Oh, you didn't." She kicks off the consensus-defined floor and grabs a wad of absorbent paper from the spinner, whacks it across the ventilator shroud above the sump. Together they go after the toad spawn with rubbish bags and paper - by the time they've got the stringy mess mopped up, the spinner has begun to click and whir, processing cellulose from the algae tanks into fresh wipes. "That was not good," Monica says emphatically as the disposal bin sucks down her final bag. "You wouldn't happen to know how the toad got in here?" + +"No, but I ran into one that was loose in the commons, one shift before last cycle-end. Gave it a ride back to Oscar." + +"I'll have a word with him, then." Monica glares blackly at the pipe. "I'm going to have to go back and refit the filter in a minute. Do you want me to be Bob?" + +"Uh." Amber thinks. "Not sure. Your call." + +"All right, Bob coming on-line." Monica's face relaxes slightly, then her expression hardens. "Way I see it, you've got a choice. Your mother kinda boxed you in, hasn't she?" + +"Yes." Amber frowns. + +"So. Pretend I'm an idiot. Talk me through it, huh?" + +Amber drags herself alongside the hydro pipe and gets her head down, alongside Monica/Bob, who is floating with her feet near the floor. "I ran away from home. Mom owned me - that is, she had parental rights and Dad had none. So Dad, via a proxy, helped me sell myself into slavery to a company. The company was owned by a trust fund, and I'm the main beneficiary when I reach the age of majority. As a chattel, the company tells me what to do - legally - but the shell company is set to take my orders. So I'm autonomous. Right?" + +"That sounds like the sort of thing your father would do," Monica/Bob says neutrally. Overtaken by a sardonic middle-aged Silicon Valley drawl, her north-of-England accent sounds peculiarly mid-Atlantic. + +"Trouble is, most countries don't acknowledge slavery, they just dress it up pretty and call it in loco parentis or something. Those that do mostly don't have any equivalent of a limited liability company, much less one that can be directed by another company from abroad. Dad picked Yemen on the grounds that they've got this stupid brand of shari'a law - and a crap human rights record - but they're just about conformant to the open legal standards protocol, able to interface to EU norms via a Turkish legislative cut-out." + +"So." + +"Well, I guess I was technically a Janissary. Mom was doing her Christian phase, so that made me a Christian unbeliever slave of an Islamic company. Now the stupid bitch has gone and converted to shi'ism. Normally Islamic descent runs through the father, but she picked her sect carefully and chose one that's got a progressive view of women's rights: They're sort of Islamic fundamentalist liberal constructionists, 'what would the Prophet do if he was alive today and had to worry about self-replicating chewing gum factories' and that sort of thing. They generally take a progressive view of things like legal equality of the sexes because, for his time and place, the Prophet was way ahead of the ball and they figure they ought to follow his example. Anyway, that means Mom can assert that I am Moslem, and under Yemeni law, I get to be treated as a Moslem chattel of a company. And their legal code is very dubious about permitting slavery of Moslems. It's not that I have rights as such, but my pastoral well-being becomes the responsibility of the local imam, and -" She shrugs helplessly. + +"Has he tried to make you run under any new rules, yet?" asks Monica/Bob. "Has he put blocks on your freedom of agency, tried to mess with your mind? Insisted on libido dampers or a strict dress code?" + +"Not yet." Amber's expression is grim. "But he's no dummy. I figure he may be using Mom - and me - as a way of getting his fingers into this whole expedition. Staking a claim for jurisdiction, claim arbitration, that sort of thing. It could be worse; he might order me to comply fully with his specific implementation of shari'a. They permit implants, but require mandatory conceptual filtering: If I run that stuff, I'll end up believing it." + +"Okay." Monica does a slow backward somersault in midair. "Now tell me why you can't simply repudiate it." + +"Because." Deep breath. "I can do that in two ways. I can deny Islam, which makes me an apostate, and automatically terminates my indenture to the shell, so Mom owns me under US or EU law. Or I can say that the instrument has no legal standing because I was in the USA when I signed it, and slavery is illegal there, in which case Mom owns me. Or I can take the veil, live like a modest Moslem woman, do whatever the imam wants, and Mom doesn't own me - but she gets to appoint my chaperone. Oh Bob, she has planned this so well." + +"Uh-huh." Monica rotates back to the floor and looks at Amber, suddenly very Bob. "Now you've told me your troubles, start thinking like your dad. Your Dad had a dozen creative ideas before breakfast every day - it's how he made his name. Your mom has got you in a box. Think your way outside it: What can you do?" + +"Well." Amber rolls over and hugs the fat hydroponic duct to her chest like a life raft. "It's a legal paradox. I'm trapped because of the jurisdiction she's cornered me in. I could talk to the judge, I suppose, but she'll have picked him carefully." Her eyes narrow. "The jurisdiction. Hey, Bob." She lets go of the duct and floats free, hair streaming out behind her like a cometary halo. "How do I go about getting myself a new jurisdiction?" + +Monica grins. "I seem to recall the traditional way was to grab yourself some land and set yourself up as king; but there are other ways. I've got some friends I think you should meet. They're not good conversationalists and there's a two-hour lightspeed delay, but I think you'll find they've answered that question already. But why don't you talk to the imam first and find out what he's like? He may surprise you. After all, he was already out here before your mom decided to use him to make a point." + +* * * + +The Sanger hangs in orbit thirty kilometers up, circling the waist of potato-shaped Amalthea. Drones swarm across the slopes of Mons Lyctos, ten kilometers above the mean surface level. They kick up clouds of reddish sulphate dust as they spread transparent sheets across the barren moonscape. This close to Jupiter (a mere hundred and eighty thousand kilometers above the swirling madness of the cloudscape) the gas giant fills half the sky with a perpetually changing clock face, for Amalthea orbits the master in just under twelve hours. The Sanger's radiation shields are running at full power, shrouding the ship in a corona of rippling plasma: Radio is useless, and the human miners control their drones via an intricate network of laser circuits. Other, larger drones are unwinding spools of heavy electrical cable north and south from the landing site. Once the circuits are connected, they will form a coil cutting through Jupiter's magnetic field, generating electrical current (and imperceptibly sapping the moon's orbital momentum). + +Amber sighs and looks, for the sixth time this hour, at the webcam plastered on the side of her cabin. She's taken down the posters and told the toys to tidy themselves away. In another two thousand seconds, the tiny Iranian spaceship will rise above the limb of Moshtari, and then it will be time to talk to the teacher. She isn't looking forward to the experience. If he's a grizzled old blockhead of the most obdurate fundamentalist streak, she'll be in trouble: Disrespect for age has been part and parcel of the Western teenage experience for generations, and a cross-cultural thread that she's detailed to clue up on Islam reminds her that not all cultures share this outlook. But if he turns out to be young, intelligent, and flexible, things could be even worse. When she was eight, Amber audited The Taming of the Shrew. She finds she has no appetite for a starring role in her own cross-cultural production. + +She sighs again. "Pierre?" + +"Yeah?" His voice comes from the foot of the emergency locker in her room. He's curled up down there, limbs twitching languidly as he drives a mining drone around the surface of Object Barney, as the rock has named itself. The drone is a long-legged crane fly look-alike, bouncing very slowly from toe tip to toe tip in the microgravity. The rock is only half a kilometer along its longest axis, coated brown with weird hydrocarbon goop and sulphur compounds sprayed off the surface of Io by the Jovian winds. "I'm coming." + +"You better." She glances at the screen. "One twenty seconds to next burn." The payload canister on the screen is, technically speaking, stolen. It'll be okay as long as she gives it back, Bob said, although she won't be able to do that until it's reached Barney and they've found enough water ice to refuel it. "Found anything yet?" + +"Just the usual. Got a seam of ice near the semimajor pole - it's dirty, but there's at least a thousand tons there. And the surface is crunchy with tar. Amber, you know what? The orange shit, it's solid with fullerenes." + +Amber grins at her reflection in the screen. That's good news. Once the payload she's steering touches down, Pierre can help her lay superconducting wires along Barney's long axis. It's only a kilometer and a half, and that'll only give them a few tens of kilowatts of juice, but the condensation fabricator that's also in the payload can will be able to use it to convert Barney's crust into processed goods at about two grams per second. Using designs copylefted by the free hardware foundation, inside two hundred thousand seconds they'll have a grid of sixty-four 3D printers barfing up structured matter at a rate limited only by available power. Starting with a honking great dome tent and some free nitrogen/oxygen for her to breathe, then adding a big web cache and direct high-bandwidth uplink to Earth, Amber could have her very own one-girl colony up and running within a million seconds. + +The screen blinks at her. "Oh shit! Make yourself scarce, Pierre?" The incoming call nags at her attention. "Yeah? Who are you?" + +The screen fills with a view of a cramped, very twen-cen-looking space capsule. The guy inside it is in his twenties, with a heavily tanned face, close-cropped hair and beard, wearing an olive drab space suit liner. He's floating between a TORU manual docking controller and a gilt-framed photograph of the Ka'bah at Mecca. "Good evening to you," he says solemnly. "Do I have the honor to be addressing Amber Macx?" + +"Uh, yeah? That's me." She stares at him: He looks nothing like her conception of an ayatollah - whatever an ayatollah is - elderly, black-robed, vindictively fundamentalist. "Who are you?" + +"I am Dr. Sadeq Khurasani. I hope that I am not interrupting you? Is it convenient for you that we talk now?" + +He looks so anxious that Amber nods automatically. "Sure. Did my Mom put you up to this?" They're still speaking English, and she notices that his diction is good, but slightly stilted. He isn't using a grammar engine, he actually learned the language the hard way, she realizes, feeling a frisson of fear. "You want to be careful how you talk to her. She doesn't lie, exactly, but she gets people to do what she wants." + +"Yes, I spoke to - ah." A pause. They're still almost a light-second apart, time for painful collisions and accidental silences. "I see. Are you sure you should be speaking of your mother that way?" + +Amber breathes deeply. "Adults can get divorced. If I could get divorced from her, I would. She's -" She flails around for the right word helplessly. "Look, she's the sort of person who can't lose a fight. If she's going to lose, she'll try to figure how to set the law on you. Like she's done to me. Don't you see?" + +Dr. Khurasani looks extremely dubious. "I am not sure I understand," He says. "Perhaps, mmm, I should tell you why I am talking to you?" + +"Sure. Go ahead." Amber is startled by his attitude: He actually seems to be taking her seriously, she realizes. Treating her like an adult. The sensation is so novel - coming from someone more than twenty years old - that she almost lets herself forget that he's only talking to her because Mom set her up. + +"Well, I am an engineer. In addition, I am a student of fiqh, jurisprudence. In fact, I am qualified to sit in judgment. I am a very junior judge, but even so, it is a heavy responsibility. Anyway, your mother, peace be unto her, lodged a petition with me. Are you aware of it?" + +"Yes." Amber tenses up. "It's a lie. Distortion of the facts." + +"Hmm." Sadeq rubs his beard thoughtfully. "Well, I have to find out, yes? Your mother has submitted herself to the will of God. This makes you the child of a Moslem, and she claims -" + +"She's trying to use you as a weapon!" Amber interrupts. "I sold myself into slavery to get away from her, do you understand? I enslaved myself to a company that is held in trust for my ownership. She's trying to change the rules to get me back. You know what? I don't believe she gives a shit about your religion, all she wants is me!" + +"A mother's love -" + +"Fuck love," Amber snarls, "she wants power." + +Sadeq's expression hardens. "You have a foul mouth in your head, child. All I am trying to do is to find out the facts of this situation. You should ask yourself if such disrespect furthers your interests?" He pauses for a moment, then continues, less abruptly. "Did you really have such a bad childhood with her? Do you think she did everything merely for power, or could she love you?" Pause. "You must understand, I need to learn these things. Before I can know what is the right thing to do." + +"My mother -" Amber stops dead and spawns a vaporous cloud of memory retrievals. They fan out through the space around her mind like the tail of her cometary mind. Invoking a complex of network parsers and class filters, she turns the memories into reified images and blats them at the webcam's tiny brain so he can see them. Some of the memories are so painful that Amber has to close her eyes. Mom in full office war paint, leaning over Amber, promising to disable her lexical enhancements forcibly if she doesn't work on her grammar without them. Mom telling Amber that they're moving again, abruptly, dragging her away from school and the friends she'd tentatively started to like. The church-of-the-month business. Mom catching her on the phone to Daddy, tearing the phone in half and hitting her with it. Mom at the kitchen table, forcing her to eat - "My mother likes control." + +"Ah." Sadeq's expression turns glassy. "And this is how you feel about her? How long have you had that level of - no, please forgive me for asking. You obviously understand implants. Do your grandparents know? Did you talk to them?" + +"My grandparents?" Amber stifles a snort. "Mom's parents are dead. Dad's are still alive, but they won't talk to him - they like Mom. They think I'm creepy. I know little things, their tax bands and customer profiles. I could mine data with my head when I was four. I'm not built like little girls were in their day, and they don't understand. You know the old ones don't like us at all? Some of the churches make money doing nothing but exorcisms for oldsters who think their kids are possessed." + +"Well." Sadeq is fingering his beard again, distractedly. "I must say, this is a lot to learn. But you know your mother has accepted Islam, don't you? This means that you are Moslem, too. Unless you are an adult, your parent legally speaks for you. And she says this makes you my problem. Hmm." + +"I'm not a Muslim." Amber stares at the screen. "I'm not a child, either." Her threads are coming together, whispering scarily behind her eyes: Her head is suddenly dense and turgid with ideas, heavy as a stone and twice as old as time. "I am nobody's chattel. What does your law say about people who are born with implants? What does it say about people who want to live forever? I don't believe in any god, Mr. Judge. I don't believe in limits. Mom can't, physically, make me do anything, and she sure can't speak for me. All she can do is challenge my legal status, and if I choose to stay where she can't touch me, what does that matter?" + +"Well, if that is what you have to say, I must think on the matter." He catches her eye; his expression is thoughtful, like a doctor considering a diagnosis. "I will call you again in due course. In the meantime, if you need to talk to anyone, remember that I am always available. If there is anything I can do to help ease your pain, I would be pleased to be of service. Peace be unto you, and those you care for." + +"Same to you, too," she mutters darkly, as the connection goes dead. "Now what?" she asks, as a beeping sprite gyrates across the wall, begging for attention. + +"I think it's the lander," Pierre says helpfully. "Is it down yet?" + +She rounds on him: "Hey, I thought I told you to get lost!" + +"What, and miss all the fun?" He grins at her impishly. "Amber's got a new boyfriend! Wait until I tell everybody ..." + +* * * + +_1 Sleep cycles pass; the borrowed 3D printer on Object Barney's surface spews bitmaps of atoms in quantum lockstep at its rendering platform, building up the control circuitry and skeletons of new printers (There are no clunky nanoassemblers here, no robots the size of viruses busily sorting molecules into piles - just the bizarre quantized magic of atomic holography, modulated Bose-Einstein condensates collapsing into strange, lacy, supercold machinery.) Electricity surges through the cable loops as they slice through Jupiter's magnetosphere, slowly converting the rock's momentum into power. Small robots grovel in the orange dirt, scooping up raw material to feed to the fractionating oven. Amber's garden of machinery flourishes slowly, unpacking itself according to a schema designed by preteens at an industrial school in Poland, with barely any need for human guidance. + +_1 High in orbit around Amalthea, complex financial instruments breed and conjugate. Developed for the express purpose of facilitating trade with the alien intelligences believed to have been detected eight years earlier by SETI, they function equally well as fiscal gatekeepers for space colonies. The Sanger's bank accounts in California and Cuba are looking acceptable - since entering Jupiter space, the orphanage has staked a claim on roughly a hundred gigatons of random rocks and a moon that's just small enough to creep in under the International Astronomical Union's definition of a sovereign planetary body. The borg are working hard, leading their eager teams of child stakeholders in their plans to build the industrial metastructures necessary to support mining helium-three from Jupiter. They're so focused that they spend much of their time being themselves, not bothering to run Bob, the shared identity that gives them their messianic drive. + +_1 Half a light-hour away, tired Earth wakes and slumbers in time to its ancient orbital dynamics. A religious college in Cairo is considering issues of nanotechnology: If replicators are used to prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, right down to the molecular level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be treated? (If the mind of one of the faithful is copied into a computing machine's memory by mapping and simulating all its synapses, is the computer now a Moslem? If not, why not? If so, what are its rights and duties?) Riots in Borneo underline the urgency of this theotechnological inquiry. + +_1 More riots in Barcelona, Madrid, Birmingham, and Marseilles also underline a rising problem: the social chaos caused by cheap anti-aging treatments. The zombie exterminators, a backlash of disaffected youth against the formerly graying gerontocracy of Europe, insist that people who predate the supergrid and can't handle implants aren't really conscious: Their ferocity is equaled only by the anger of the dynamic septuagenarians of the baby boom, their bodies partially restored to the flush of sixties youth, but their minds adrift in a slower, less contingent century. The faux-young boomers feel betrayed, forced back into the labor pool, but unable to cope with the implant-accelerated culture of the new millennium, their hard-earned experience rendered obsolete by deflationary time. + +_1 The Bangladeshi economic miracle is typical of the age. With growth rates running at over twenty percent, cheap out-of-control bioindustrialization has swept the nation: Former rice farmers harvest plastics and milk cows for silk, while their children study mariculture and design seawalls. With cellphone ownership nearing eighty percent and literacy at ninety, the once-poor country is finally breaking out of its historical infrastructure trap and beginning to develop: In another generation, they'll be richer than Japan. + +_1 Radical new economic theories are focusing around bandwidth, speed-of-light transmission time, and the implications of CETI, communication with extraterrestrial intelligence. Cosmologists and quants collaborate on bizarre relativistically telescoped financial instruments. Space (which lets you store information) and structure (which lets you process it) acquire value while dumb mass - like gold - loses it. The degenerate cores of the traditional stock markets are in free fall, the old smokestack microprocessor and biotech/nanotech industries crumbling before the onslaught of matter replicators and self-modifying ideas. The inheritors look set to be a new wave of barbarian communicators, who mortgage their future for a millennium against the chance of a gift from a visiting alien intelligence. Microsoft, once the US Steel of the silicon age, quietly fades into liquidation. + +_1 An outbreak of green goo - a crude biomechanical replicator that eats everything in its path - is dealt with in the Australian outback by carpet-bombing with fuel-air explosives. The USAF subsequently reactivates two wings of refurbished B-52s and places them at the disposal of the UN standing committee on self-replicating weapons. (CNN discovers that one of their newest pilots, re-enlisting with the body of a twenty-year-old and an empty pension account, first flew them over Laos and Cambodia.) The news overshadows the World Health Organization's announcement of the end of the HIV pandemic, after more than fifty years of bigotry, panic, and megadeath. + +* * * + +"Breathe steadily. Remember your regulator drill? If you spot your heart rate going up or your mouth going dry, take five." + +"Shut the fuck up, 'Neko, I'm trying to concentrate." Amber fumbles with the titanium D-ring, trying to snake the strap through it. The gauntlets are getting in her way. High orbit space suits - little more than a body stocking designed to hold your skin under compression and help you breathe - are easy, but this deep in Jupiter's radiation belt she has to wear an old Orlan-DM suit that comes in about thirteen layers. The gloves are stiff and hard to work in. It's Chernobyl weather outside, a sleet of alpha particles and raw protons storming through the void, and she really needs the extra protection. "Got it." She yanks the strap tight, pulls on the D-ring, then goes to work on the next strap. Never looking down; because the wall she's tying herself to has no floor, just a cutoff two meters below, then empty space for a hundred kilometers before the nearest solid ground. + +The ground sings to her moronically: "I love you, you love me, it's the law of gravity -" + +She shoves her feet down onto the platform that juts from the side of the capsule like a suicide's ledge: metallized Velcro grabs hold, and she pulls on the straps to turn her body round until she can see past the capsule, sideways. The capsule masses about five tonnes, barely bigger than an ancient Soyuz. It's packed to overflowing with environment-sensitive stuff she'll need, and a honking great high-gain antenna. "I hope you know what you're doing," someone says over the intercom. + +"Of course I -" She stops. Alone in this Energiya NPO surplus iron maiden with its low-bandwidth coms and bizarre plumbing, she feels claustrophobic and helpless: Parts of her mind don't work. When she was four, Mom took her down a famous cave system somewhere out west. When the guide turned out the lights half a kilometer underground, she'd screamed with surprise as the darkness had reached out and touched her. Now it's not the darkness that frightens her, it's the lack of thought. For a hundred kilometers below her there are no minds, and even on the surface there's only the moronic warbling of 'bots for company. Everything that makes the universe primate-friendly seems to be locked in the huge spaceship that looms somewhere just behind the back of her head, and she has to fight down an urge to shed her straps and swarm back up the umbilical that anchors the capsule to the Sanger. "I'll be fine," she forces herself to say. And even though she's unsure that it's true, she tries to make herself believe it. "It's just leaving-home nerves. I've read about it, okay?" + +There's a funny, high-pitched whistle in her ears. For a moment, the sweat on the back of her neck turns icy cold, then the noise stops. She strains for a moment, and when it returns she recognizes the sound: The hitherto-talkative cat, curled in the warmth of her pressurized luggage can, has begun to snore. + +"Let's go," she says, "Time to roll the wagon." A speech macro deep in the Sanger's docking firmware recognizes her authority and gently lets go of the pod. A couple of cold gas clusters pop, sending deep banging vibrations running through the capsule, and she's on her way. + +"Amber. How's it hanging?" A familiar voice in her ears: She blinks. Fifteen hundred seconds, nearly half an hour gone. + +"Robes-Pierre, chopped any aristos lately?" + +"Heh!" A pause. "I can see your head from here." + +"How's it looking?" she asks. There's a lump in her throat; she isn't sure why. Pierre is probably hooked into one of the smaller proximity cameras dotted around the outer hull of the big mother ship, watching over her as she falls. + +"Pretty much like always," he says laconically. Another pause, this time longer. "This is wild, you know? Su Ang says hi, by the way." + +"Su Ang, hi," she replies, resisting the urge to lean back and look up - up relative to her feet, not her vector - and see if the ship's still visible. + +"Hi," Ang says shyly. "You're very brave?" + +"Still can't beat you at chess." Amber frowns. Su Ang and her overengineered algae. Oscar and his pharmaceutical factory toads. People she's known for three years, mostly ignored, and never thought about missing. "Listen, are you going to come visiting?" + +"You want us to visit?" Ang sounds dubious. "When will it be ready?" + +"Oh, soon enough." At four kilograms per minute of structured-matter output, the printers on the surface have already built her a bunch of stuff: a habitat dome, the guts of an algae/shrimp farm, an excavator to bury it with, an airlock. Even a honey bucket. It's all lying around waiting for her to put it together and move into her new home. "Once the borg get back from Amalthea." + +"Hey! You mean they're moving? How did you figure that?" + +"Go talk to them," Amber says. Actually, she's a large part of the reason the Sanger is about to crank its orbit up and out toward the other moon: She wants to be alone in coms silence for a couple of million seconds. The Franklin collective is doing her a big favor. + +"Ahead of the curve, as usual," Pierre cuts in, with something that sounds like admiration to her uncertain ears. + +"You too," she says, a little too fast: "Come visit when I've got the life-support cycle stabilized." + +"I'll do that," he replies. A red glow suffuses the flank of the capsule next to her head, and she looks up in time to see the glaring blue laser line of the Sanger's drive torch powering up. + +* * * + +Eighteen million seconds, almost a tenth of a Jupiter year, passes. + +The imam tugs thoughtfully on his beard as he stares at the traffic control display. These days, every shift seems to bring a new crewed spaceship into Jupiter system: Space is getting positively crowded. When he arrived, there were fewer than two hundred people here. Now there's the population of a small city, and many of them live at the heart of the approach map centered on his display. He breathes deeply - trying to ignore the omnipresent odor of old socks - and studies the map. "Computer, what about my slot?" he asks. + +"Your slot: Cleared to commence final approach in six-nine-five seconds. Speed limit is ten meters per second inside ten kilometers, drop to two meters per second inside one kilometer. Uploading map of forbidden thrust vectors now." Chunks of the approach map turn red, gridded off to prevent his exhaust stream damaging other craft in the area. + +Sadeq sighs. "We'll go in using Kurs. I assume their Kurs guidance is active?" + +"Kurs docking target support available to shell level three." + +"Praise Allah." He pokes around through the guidance subsystem's menus, setting up the software emulation of the obsolete (but highly reliable) Soyuz docking system. At last he can leave the ship to look after itself for a bit. He glances round. For two years he has lived in this canister, and soon he will step outside it. It hardly seems real. + +The radio, usually silent, crackles with unexpected life. "Bravo One One, this is Imperial Traffic Control. Verbal contact required, over." + +Sadeq twitches with surprise. The voice sounds inhuman, paced with the cadences of a speech synthesizer, like so many of Her Majesty's subjects. "Bravo One One to Traffic Control, I'm listening, over." + +"Bravo One One, we have assigned you a landing slot on tunnel four, airlock delta. Kurs active, ensure your guidance is set to seven-four-zero and slaved to our control." + +He leans over the screen and rapidly checks the docking system's settings. "Control, all in order." + +"Bravo One One, stand by." + +The next hour passes slowly as the traffic control system guides his Type 921 down to a rocky rendezvous. Orange dust streaks his one optical-glass porthole: A kilometer before touchdown, Sadeq busies himself closing protective covers, locking down anything that might fall around on contact. Finally, he unrolls his mat against the floor in front of the console and floats above it for ten minutes, eyes closed in prayer. It's not the landing that worries him, but what comes next. + +Her Majesty's domain stretches out before the battered module like a rust-stained snowflake half a kilometer in diameter. Its core is buried in a loose snowball of grayish rubble, and it waves languid brittlestar arms at the gibbous orange horizon of Jupiter. Fine hairs, fractally branching down to the molecular level, split off the main collector arms at regular intervals. A cluster of habitat pods like seedless grapes cling to the roots of the massive structure. Already he can see the huge steel generator loops that climb from either pole of the snowflake, wreathed in sparking plasma; the Jovian rings form a rainbow of darkness rising behind them. + +At last, the battered space station is on final approach. Sadeq watches the Kurs simulation output carefully, piping it directly into his visual field. There's an external camera view of the rockpile and grapes. As the view expands toward the convex ceiling of the ship, he licks his lips, ready to hit the manual override and go around again - but the rate of descent is slowing, and by the time he's close enough to see the scratches on the shiny metal docking cone ahead of the ship, it's measured in centimeters per second. There's a gentle bump, then a shudder, then a rippling bang as the latches on the docking ring fire - and he's down. + +Sadeq breathes deeply again, then tries to stand. There's gravity here, but not much: Walking is impossible. He's about to head for the life-support panel when he freezes, hearing a noise from the far end of the docking node. Turning, he's just in time to see the hatch opening toward him, a puff of vapor condensing, and then - + +* * * + +Her Imperial Majesty is sitting in the throne room, moodily fidgeting with the new signet ring her equerry has designed for her. It's a lump of structured carbon massing almost fifty grams, set in a plain band of asteroid-mined iridium. It glitters with the blue-and-violet speckle highlights of its internal lasers, because, in addition to being a piece of state jewelry, it is also an optical router, part of the industrial control infrastructure she's building out here on the edge of the solar system. Her Majesty wears plain black combat pants and sweatshirt, woven from the finest spider silk and spun glass, but her feet are bare: Her taste in fashion is best described as youthful, and in any event, certain styles are simply impractical in microgravity. But, being a monarch, she's wearing a crown. And there's a cat, or an artificial entity that dreams it's a cat, sleeping on the back of her throne. + +The lady-in-waiting (and sometime hydroponic engineer) ushers Sadeq to the doorway, then floats back. "If you need anything, please say," she says shyly, then ducks and rolls away. Sadeq approaches the throne, orients himself on the floor (a simple slab of black composite, save for the throne growing from its center like an exotic flower), and waits to be noticed. + +"Dr. Khurasani, I presume." She smiles at him, neither the innocent grin of a child nor the knowing smirk of an adult: merely a warm greeting. "Welcome to my kingdom. Please feel free to make use of any necessary support services here, and I wish you a very pleasant stay." + +Sadeq holds his expression still. The queen is young - her face still retains the puppy fat of childhood, emphasized by microgravity moon-face - but it would be a bad mistake to consider her immature. "I am grateful for Your Majesty's forbearance," he murmurs, formulaic. Behind her the walls glitter like diamonds, a glowing kaleidoscope vision. It's already the biggest offshore - or off-planet - data haven in human space. Her crown, more like a compact helm that covers the top and rear of her head, also glitters and throws off diffraction rainbows; but most of its emissions are in the near ultraviolet, invisible except for the faint glowing nimbus it creates around her head. Like a halo. + +"Have a seat," she offers, gesturing: A ballooning free-fall cradle squirts down and expands from the ceiling, angled toward her, open and waiting. "You must be tired. Working a ship all by yourself is exhausting." She frowns ruefully, as if remembering. "Two years is nearly unprecedented." + +"Your Majesty is too kind." Sadeq wraps the cradle arms around himself and faces her. "Your labors have been fruitful, I trust." + +She shrugs. "I sell the biggest commodity in short supply on any frontier ..." A momentary grin. "This isn't the Wild West, is it?" + +"Justice cannot be sold," Sadeq says stiffly. Then, a moment later: "My apologies, I mean no insult. I merely believe that, while you say your goal is to provide the rule of law, what you sell is and must be something different. Justice without God, sold to the highest bidder, is not justice." + +The queen nods. "Leaving aside the mention of God, I agree - I can't sell it. But I can sell participation in a just system. And this new frontier really is a lot smaller than anyone expected, isn't it? Our bodies may take months to travel between worlds, but our disputes and arguments take seconds or minutes. As long as everybody agrees to abide by my arbitration, physical enforcement can wait until they're close enough to touch. And everybody does agree that my legal framework is easier to comply with, better adjusted to trans-Jovian space, than any earthbound one." A note of steel creeps into her voice, challenging: Her halo brightens, tickling a reactive glow from the walls of the throne room. + +Five billion inputs or more, Sadeq marvels. The crown is an engineering marvel, even though most of its mass is buried in the walls and floor of this huge construct. "There is law revealed by the Prophet, peace be unto him, and there is law that we can establish by analysing his intentions. There are other forms of law by which humans live, and various interpretations of the law of God even among those who study His works. How, in the absence of the word of the Prophet, can you provide a moral compass?" + +"Hmm." She taps her fingers on the arm of her throne, and Sadeq's heart freezes. He's heard the stories from the claim jumpers and boardroom bandits, from the greenmail experts with their roots in the earthbound jurisdictions that have made such a hash of arbitration here. How she can experience a year in a minute, rip your memories out through your cortical implants, and make you relive your worst mistakes in her nightmarishly powerful simulation space. She is the queen - the first individual to get her hands on so much mass and energy that she could pull ahead of the curve of binding technology, and the first to set up her own jurisdiction and rule certain experiments to be legal so that she could make use of the mass/energy intersection. She has force majeure - even the Pentagon's infowarriors respect the Ring Imperium's autonomy for now. In fact, the body sitting in the throne opposite him probably contains only a fraction of her identity. She's by no means the first upload or partial, but she's the first gust front of the storm of power that will arrive when the arrogant ones achieve their goal of dismantling the planets and turning dumb and uninhabited mass into brainpower throughout the observable reaches of the universe. And he's just questioned the rectitude of her vision, in her presence. + +The queen's lips twitch. Then they curl into a wide, carnivorous grin. Behind her, the cat sits up and stretches, then stares at Sadeq through narrowed eyes. + +"You know, that's the first time in weeks that anyone has told me I'm full of shit. You haven't been talking to my mother again, have you?" + +It's Sadeq's turn to shrug, uncomfortably. "I have prepared a judgment," he says slowly. + +"Ah." Amber rotates the huge diamond ring around her finger. Then she looks him in the eye, a trifle nervously. Although what he could possibly do to make her comply with any decree - + +"To summarize: Her motive is polluted," Sadeq says shortly. + +"Does that mean what I think it does?" she asks. + +Sadeq breathes deeply again: "Yes, I think so." + +Her smile returns. "And is that the end of it?" she asks. + +He raises a dark eyebrow: "Only if you can prove to me that you can have a conscience in the absence of divine revelation." + +Her reaction catches him by surprise. "Oh, sure. That's the next part of the program. Obtaining divine revelations." + +"What! From the alien?" + +The cat, claws extended, delicately picks its way down to her lap and waits to be held and stroked. It never once takes its eyes off him. "Where else?" she asks. "Doctor, I didn't get the Franklin Trust to loan me the wherewithal to build this castle just in return for some legal paperwork, and some, ah, interesting legal waivers from Brussels. We've known for years there's a whole alien packet-switching network out there, and we're just getting spillover from some of their routers. It turns out there's a node not far away from here, in real space. Helium-three, separate jurisdictions, heavy industrialization on Io - there is a purpose to all this activity." + +Sadeq licks his suddenly dry lips. "You're going to narrowcast a reply?" + +"No, much better than that: we're going to visit them. Cut the delay cycle down to real-time. We came here to build a ship and recruit a crew, even if we have to cannibalize the whole of Jupiter system to pay for the exercise." + +The cat yawns then fixes him with a thousand-yard stare. "This stupid girl wants to bring her conscience along to a meeting with something so smart it might as well be a god," it says. "And she needs to convince the peanut gallery back home that she's got one, being a born-again atheist and all. Which means, you're it, monkey boy. There's a slot open for the post of ship's theologian on the first starship out of Jupiter system. I don't suppose I can convince you to turn the offer down?" + +Chapter 5: Router + +Some years later, two men and a cat are tying one on in a bar that doesn't exist. + +The air in the bar is filled with a billowing relativistic smoke cloud - it's a stellarium, accurately depicting the view beyond the imaginary walls. Aberration of starlight skews the color toward violet around the doorway, brightening in a rainbow mist over the tables, then dimming to a hazy red glow in front of the raised platform at the back. The Doppler effect has slowly emerged over the past few months as the ship gathers momentum. In the absence of visible stellar motion - or a hard link to the ship's control module - it's the easiest way for a drunken passenger to get a feeling for how frighteningly fast the /{Field Circus}/ is moving. Some time ago, the ship's momentum exceeded half its rest mass, at which point a single kilogram packs the punch of a multimegaton hydrogen bomb. + +A ginger-and-brown cat - who has chosen to be female, just to mess with the heads of those people who think all ginger cats are male - sprawls indolently across the wooden floorboards in front of the bar, directly beneath the bridge of the starbow. Predictably, it has captured the only ray of sunlight to be had within the starship. In the shadows at the back of the bar, two men slump at a table, lost in their respective morose thoughts: One nurses a bottle of Czech beer, the other a half-empty cocktail glass. + +"It wouldn't be so bad if she is giving me some sign," says one of them, tilting his beer bottle to inspect the bottom for sediment. "No; that not right. It's the correct kind of attention. Am not knowing where I stand with her." + +The other one leans back in his chair, squints at the faded brown paint of the ceiling. "Take it from one who knows," he says: "If you knew, you'd have nothing to dream about. Anyway, what she wants and what you want may not be the same thing." + +The first man runs a hand through his hair. Tight-curled black ringlets briefly turn silver beneath his aging touch. "Pierre, if talent for making patronizing statements is what you get from tupping Amber -" + +Pierre glares at him with all the venom an augmented nineteen-year-old can muster. "Be glad she has no ears in here," he hisses. His hand tightens around his glass reflexively, but the physics model in force in the bar refuses to let him break it. "You've had too fucking much to drink, Boris." + +A tinkle of icy laughter comes from the direction of the cat. "Shut up, you," says Boris, glancing at the animal. He tips the bottle back, lets the dregs trickle down his throat. "Maybe you're right. Am sorry. Do not mean to be rude about the queen." He shrugs, puts the bottle down. Shrugs again, heavily. "Am just getting depressed." + +"You're good at that," Pierre observes. + +Boris sighs again. "Evidently. If our positions are reversed -" + +"I know, I know, you'd be telling me the fun is in the chase and it's not the same when she kicks you out after a fight, and I wouldn't believe a word of it, being sad and single and all that." Pierre snorts. "Life isn't fair, Boris - live with it." + +"I'd better go - " Boris stands. + +"Stay away from Ang," says Pierre, still annoyed with him. "At least until you're sober." + +"Okay already, stay cool; Am consciously running a watchdog thread." Boris blinks irritably. "Enforcing social behavior. It doesn't normally allow this drunk. Not where reputation damage are possible in public." + +He does a slow dissolve into thin air, leaving Pierre alone in the bar with the cat. + +"How much longer do we have to put up with this shit?" he asks aloud. Tempers are frayed, and arguments proliferate indefinitely in the pocket universe of the ship. + +The cat doesn't look round. "In our current reference frame, we drop the primary reflector and start decelerating in another two million seconds," she says. "Back home, five or six megaseconds." + +"That's a big gap. What's the cultural delta up to now?" Pierre asks idly. He snaps his fingers: "Waiter, another cocktail. The same, if you please." + +"Oh, probably about ten to twenty times our departure reference," says the cat. "If you'd been following the news from back home, you'd have noted a significant speed-up in the deployment of switched entanglement routers. They're having another networking revolution, only this one will run to completion inside a month because they're using dark fiber that's already in the ground." + +"Switched ... entanglement?" Pierre shakes his head, bemused. The waiter, a faceless body in black tie and a long, starched apron, walks around the bar and offers him a glass. "That almost sounds as if it makes sense. What else?" + +The cat rolls over on her flank, stretches, claws extended. "Stroke me, and I might tell you," she suggests. + +"Fuck you, and the dog you rode in on," Pierre replies. He lifts his glass, removes a glacé cherry on a cocktail stick, throws it toward the spiral staircase that leads down to the toilets, and chugs back half of the drink in one go - freezing pink slush with an afterbite of caramelized hexose sugars and ethanol. The near spillage as he thumps the glass down serves to demonstrate that he's teetering on the edge of drunkenness. "Mercenary!" + +"Lovesick drug-using human," the cat replies without rancor, and rolls to her feet. She arches her back and yawns, baring ivory fangs at the world. "You apes - if I cared about you, I'd have to kick sand over you." For a moment she looks faintly confused. "I mean, I would bury you." She stretches again and glances round the otherwise-empty bar. "By the way, when are you going to apologize to Amber?" + +"I'm not going to fucking apologize to her!" Pierre shouts. In the ensuing silence and confusion, he raises his glass and tries to drain it, but the ice has all sunk to the bottom, and the resulting coughing fit makes him spray half of the cocktail across the table. "No way," he rasps quietly. + +"Too much pride, huh?" The cat stalks toward the edge of the bar, tail held high with tip bent over in a feline question mark. "Like Boris with his adolescent woman trouble, too? You primates are so predictable. Whoever thought of sending a starship crewed by posthuman adolescents -" + +"Go 'way," says Pierre: "I've got serious drinking to do." + +"To the Macx, I suppose," puns the cat, turning away. But the moody youth has no answer for her, other than to conjure a refill from the vasty deeps. + +* * * + +Meanwhile, in another partition of the /{Field Circus}/'s reticulated reality, a different instance of the selfsame cat - Aineko by name, sarcastic by disposition - is talking to its former owner's daughter, the Queen of the Ring Imperium. Amber's avatar looks about sixteen, with disheveled blonde hair and enhanced cheekbones. It's a lie, of course, because in subjective life experience, she's in her mid-twenties, but apparent age signifies little in a simulation space populated by upload minds, or in real space, where post-humans age at different rates. + +Amber wears a tattered black dress over iridescent purple leggings, and sprawls lazily across the arms of her informal throne - an ostentatious lump of nonsense manufactured from a single carbon crystal doped with semiconductors. (Unlike the real thing back home in Jupiter orbit, this one is merely a piece of furniture for a virtual environment.) The scene is very much the morning after the evening before, like a goth nightclub gone to seed: all stale smoke and crumpled velvet, wooden church pews, burned-out candles, and gloomy Polish avant-garde paintings. Any hint of a regal statement the queen might be making is spoiled by the way she's hooked one knee over the left arm of the throne and is fiddling with a six-axis pointing device. But these are her private quarters, and she's off duty: The regal person of the Queen is strictly for formal, corporate occasions. + +"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," she suggests. + +"Nope," replies the cat. "It was more like: 'Greetings, earthlings, compile me on your leader.'" + +"Well, you got me there," Amber admits. She taps her heel on the throne and fidgets with her signet ring. "No damn way I'm loading some buggy alien wetware on my sweet gray stuff. /{Weird}/ semiotics, too. What does Dr. Khurasani say?" + +Aineko sits down in the middle of the crimson carpet at the foot of the dais and idly twists round to sniff her crotch. "Sadeq is immersed in scriptural interpretations. He refused to be drawn." + +"Huh." Amber stares at the cat. "So. You've been carrying this lump of source code since when ...?" + +"At the signal, for precisely two hundred and sixteen million, four hundred and twenty-nine thousand, and fifty-two seconds," Aineko supplies, then beeps smugly. "Call it just under six years." + +"Right." Amber squeezes her eyes shut. Uneasy possibilities whisper in her mind's ears. "And it began talking to you -" + +"- About three million seconds after I picked it up and ran it on a basic environment hosted on a neural network emulator modeled on the components found in the stomatogastric ganglion of a spiny lobster. Clear?" + +Amber sighs. "I wish you'd told Dad about it. Or Annette. Things could have been so different!" + +"How?" The cat stops licking her arse and looks up at the queen with a peculiarly opaque stare. "It took the specialists a decade to figure out the first message was a map of the pulsar neighborhood with directions to the nearest router on the interstellar network. Knowing how to plug into the router wouldn't help while it was three light-years away, would it? Besides, it was fun watching the idiots trying to 'crack the alien code' without ever wondering if it might be a reply in a language we already know to a message we sent out years ago. Fuckwits. And, too, Manfred pissed me off once too often. He kept treating me like a goddamn house pet." + +"But you -" Amber bites her lip. /{But you}/ were, /{when he bought you}/, she had been about to say. Engineered consciousness is still relatively new: It didn't exist when Manfred and Pamela first hacked on Aineko's cognitive network, and according to the flat-earth wing of the AI community, it still doesn't. Even she hadn't really believed Aineko's claims to self-awareness until a couple of years ago, finding it easier to think of the cat as a zimboe - a zombie with no self-awareness, but programmed to claim to be aware in an attempt to deceive the truly conscious beings around it. "I know you're conscious now, but Manfred didn't know back then. Did he?" + +Aineko glares at her, then slowly narrows her eyes to slits - either feline affection, or a more subtle gesture. Sometimes Amber finds it hard to believe that, twenty five years ago, Aineko started out as a crude neural network driven toy from a Far Eastern amusement factory - upgradeable, but still basically a mechanical animal emulator. + +"I'm sorry. Let me start again. You actually figured out what the second alien packet was, you, yourself, and nobody else. Despite the combined efforts of the entire CETI analysis team who spent Gaia knows how many human-equivalent years of processing power trying to crack its semantics. I hope you'll pardon me for saying I find that hard to believe?" + +The cat yawns. "I could have told Pierre instead." Aineko glances at Amber, sees her thunderous expression, and hastily changes the subject: "The solution was intuitively obvious, just not to humans. You're so /{verbal}/." Lifting a hind paw, she scratches behind her left ear for a moment then pauses, foot waving absentmindedly. "Besides, the CETI team was searching under the street lights while I was sniffing around in the grass. They kept trying to find primes; when that didn't work, they started trying to breed a Turing machine that would run it without immediately halting." Aineko lowers her paw daintily. "None of them tried treating it as a map of a connectionist system based on the only terrestrial components anyone had ever beamed out into deep space. Except me. But then, your mother had a hand in my wetware, too." + +"Treating it as a map -" Amber stops. "You were meant to penetrate Dad's corporate network?" + +"That's right," says the cat. "I was supposed to fork repeatedly and gang-rape his web of trust. But I didn't." Aineko yawns. "Pam pissed me off, too. I don't like people who try to use me." + +"I don't care. Taking that thing on board was still a really stupid risk you took," Amber accuses. + +"So?" The cat looks at her insolently. "I kept it in my sandbox. And I got it working, on the seven hundred and forty-first attempt. It'd have worked for Pamela's bounty-hunter friends, too, if I'd tried it. But it's here, now, when you need it. Would you like to swallow the packet?" + +Amber straightens out, sits up in her throne: "I just told you, if you think I'm going to link some flaky chunk of alien neural programming into my core dialogue, or even my exocortex, you're crazy!" Her eyes narrow. "Can it use your grammar model?" + +"Sure." If the cat was human, it would be shrugging nonchalantly at this point. "It's safe, Amber, really and truly. I found out what it is." + +"I want to talk to it," she says impetuously - and before the cat can reply, adds, "So what is it?" + +"It's a protocol stack. Basically it allows new nodes to connect to a network, by providing high-level protocol conversion services. It needs to learn how to think like a human so it can translate for us when we arrive at the router, which is why they bolted a lobster's neural network on top of it - they wanted to make it architecturally compatible with us. But there are no buried time bombs, I assure you: I've had plenty of time to check. Now, are you /{sure}/ you don't want to let it into your head?" + +* * * + +_1 Greetings from the fifth decade of the century of wonders. + +_1 The solar system that lies roughly twenty-eight trillion kilometers - just short of three light-years - behind the speeding starwisp /{Field Circus}/ is seething with change. There have been more technological advances in the past ten years than in the entire previous expanse of human history - and more unforeseen accidents. + +_1 Lots of hard problems have proven to be tractable. The planetary genome and proteome have been mapped so exhaustively that the biosciences are now focusing on the challenge of the phenome: Plotting the phase-space defined by the intersection of genes and biochemical structures, understanding how extended phenotypic traits are generated and contribute to evolutionary fitness. The biosphere has become surreal: small dragons have been sighted nesting in the Scottish highlands, and in the American midwest, raccoons have been caught programming microwave ovens. + +_1 The computing power of the solar system is now around one thousand MIPS per gram, and is unlikely to increase in the near term - all but a fraction of one percent of the dumb matter is still locked up below the accessible planetary crusts, and the sapience/mass ratio has hit a glass ceiling that will only be broken when people, corporations, or other posthumans get around to dismantling the larger planets. A start has already been made in Jupiter orbit and the asteroid belt. Greenpeace has sent squatters to occupy Eros and Juno, but the average asteroid is now surrounded by a reef of specialized nanomachinery and debris, victims of a cosmic land grab unmatched since the days of the wild west. The best brains flourish in free fall, minds surrounded by a sapient aether of extensions that out-think their meaty cortices by many orders of magnitude - minds like Amber, Queen of the Inner Ring Imperium, the first self-extending power center in Jupiter orbit. + +_1 Down at the bottom of the terrestrial gravity well, there has been a major economic catastrophe. Cheap immortagens, out-of-control personality adjuvants, and a new formal theory of uncertainty have knocked the bottom out of the insurance and underwriting industries. Gambling on a continuation of the worst aspects of the human condition - disease, senescence, and death - looks like a good way to lose money, and a deflationary spiral lasting almost fifty hours has taken down huge swaths of the global stock market. Genius, good looks, and long life are now considered basic human rights in the developed world: even the poorest backwaters are feeling extended effects from the commoditization of intelligence. + +_1 Not everything is sweetness and light in the era of mature nanotechnology. Widespread intelligence amplification doesn't lead to widespread rational behavior. New religions and mystery cults explode across the planet; much of the Net is unusable, flattened by successive semiotic jihads. India and Pakistan have held their long-awaited nuclear war: external intervention by US and EU nanosats prevented most of the IRBMs from getting through, but the subsequent spate of network raids and Basilisk attacks cause havoc. Luckily, infowar turns out to be more survivable than nuclear war - especially once it is discovered that a simple anti-aliasing filter stops nine out of ten neural-wetware-crashing Langford fractals from causing anything worse than a mild headache. + +_1 New discoveries this decade include the origins of the weakly repulsive force responsible for changes in the rate of expansion of the universe after the big bang, and on a less abstract level, experimental implementations of a Turing Oracle using quantum entanglement circuits: a device that can determine whether a given functional expression can be evaluated in finite time. It's boom time in the field of Extreme Cosmology, where some of the more recherché researchers are bickering over the possibility that the entire universe was created as a computing device, with a program encoded in the small print of the Planck constant. And theorists are talking again about the possibility of using artificial wormholes to provide instantaneous connections between distant corners of space-time. + +_1 Most people have forgotten about the well-known extraterrestrial transmission received fifteen years earlier. Very few people know anything about the second, more complex transmission received a little later. Many of those are now passengers or spectators of the /{Field Circus}/: a light-sail craft that is speeding out of Sol system on a laser beam generated by Amber's installations in low-Jupiter orbit. (Superconducting tethers anchored to Amalthea drag through Jupiter's magnetosphere, providing gigawatts of electricity for the hungry lasers: energy that comes, in turn, from the small moon's orbital momentum.) + +_1 Manufactured by Airbus-Cisco years earlier, the /{Field Circus}/ is a hick backwater, isolated from the mainstream of human culture, its systems complexity limited by mass: The destination lies nearly three light-years from Earth, and even with high acceleration and relativistic cruise speeds, the one-kilogram starwisp and its hundred-kilogram light sail will take the best part of seven years to get there. Sending a human-sized probe is beyond even the vast energy budget of the new orbital states in Jupiter system - near-lightspeed travel is horrifically expensive. Rather than a big, self-propelled ship with canned primates for passengers, as previous generations had envisaged, the starship is a Coke-can-sized slab of nanocomputers, running a neural simulation of the uploaded brain states of some tens of humans at merely normal speed. By the time its occupants beam themselves home again for download into freshly cloned bodies, a linear extrapolation shows that as much change will have overtaken human civilization as in the preceding fifty millennia - the sum total of /{H. sapiens sapiens}/' time on Earth. + +_1 But that's okay by Amber, because what she expects to find in orbit around the brown dwarf Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56}, will be worth the wait. + +* * * + +Pierre is at work in another virtual environment, the one currently running the master control system of the /{Field Circus}/. He's supervising the sail-maintenance 'bots when the message comes in. Two visitors are on their way up the beam from Jupiter orbit. The only other person around is Su Ang, who showed up sometime after he arrived, and she's busy with some work of her own. The master control VM - like all the other human-accessible environments at this level of the ship's virtualization stack - is a construct modeled on a famous movie; this one resembles the bridge of a long-since sunk ocean liner, albeit with discreetly informative user interfaces hovering in front of the ocean views outside the windows. Polished brass gleams softly everywhere. "What was that?" he calls out, responding to the soft chime of a bell. + +"We have visitors," Ang repeats, interrupting her rhythmic chewing. (She's trying out a betel-nut kick, but she's magicked the tooth-staining dye away and will probably detox herself in a few hours.) "They're buffering up the line already; just acknowledging receipt is sucking most of our downstream bandwidth." + +"Any idea who they are?" asks Pierre; he puts his boots up on the back of the vacant helmsman's chair and stares moodily at the endless expanse of green-gray ocean ahead. + +Ang chews a bit more, watching him with an expression he can't interpret. "They're still locked," she says. A pause: "But there was a flash from the Franklins, back home. One of them's some kind of lawyer, while the other's a film producer." + +"A film producer?" + +"The Franklin Trust says it's to help defray our lawsuit expenses. Myanmar is gaining. They've already subpoenaed Amber's downline instance, and they're trying to bring this up in some kind of kangaroo jurisdiction - Oregon Christian Reconstructionist Empire, I think." + +"Ouch." Pierre winces. The daily news from Earth, modulated onto a lower-powered communication laser, is increasingly bad. On the plus side, Amber is incredibly rich: The goodwill futures leveraged off her dad's trust metric means people will bend over backward to do things for her. And she owns a lot of real estate too, a hundred gigatonnes of rock in low-Jupiter orbit with enough KE to power Northern Europe for a century. But her interstellar venture burns through money - both the traditional barter-indirection type and the more creative modern varieties - about the way you would if you heaped up the green pieces of paper and shoveled them onto a conveyor belt leading to the business end of a running rocket motor. Just holding off the environmental protests over de-orbiting a small Jovian moon is a grinding job. Moreover, a whole bunch of national governments have woken up and are trying to legislate themselves a slice of the cake. Nobody's tried to forcibly take over yet (there are two hundred gigawatts of lasers anchored to the Ring Imperium, and Amber takes her sovereign status seriously, has even applied for a seat at the UN and membership in the EC), but the nuisance lawsuits are mounting up into a comprehensive denial of service attack, or maybe economic sanctions. And Uncle Gianni's retirement hasn't helped any, either. "Anything to say about it?" + +"Mmph." Ang looks irritated for some reason. "Wait your turn, they'll be out of the buffer in another couple of days. Maybe a bit longer in the case of the lawyer, he's got a huge infodump packaged on his person. Probably another semisapient class-action lawsuit." + +"I'll bet. They never learn, do they?" + +"What, about the legal system here?" + +"Yup." Pierre nods. "One of Amber's smarter ideas, reviving eleventh-century Scots law and updating it with new options on barratry, trial by combat, and compurgation." He pulls a face and detaches a couple of ghosts to go look out for the new arrivals; then he goes back to repairing sails. The interstellar medium is abrasive, full of dust - each grain of which carries the energy of an artillery shell at this speed - and the laser sail is in a constant state of disintegration. A large chunk of the drive system's mass is silvery utility flakes for patching and replacing the soap-bubble-thin membrane as it ablates away. The skill is in knowing how best to funnel repair resources to where they're needed, while minimizing tension in the suspension lines and avoiding resonance and thrust imbalance. As he trains the patch 'bots, he broods about the hate mail from his elder brother (who still blames him for their father's accident), and about Sadeq's religious injunctions - /{Superstitious nonsense}/, he thinks - and the fickleness of powerful women, and the endless depths of his own nineteen-year-old soul. + +While he's brooding, Ang evidently finishes whatever she was doing and bangs out - not even bothering to use the polished mahogany door at the rear of the bridge, just discorporating and rematerializing somewhere else. Wondering if she's annoyed, he glances up just as the first of his ghosts patches into his memory map, and he remembers what happened when it met the new arrival. His eyes widen: "Oh /{shit!}/" + +It's not the film producer but the lawyer who's just uploaded into the /{Field Circus}/'s virtual universe. Someone's going to have to tell Amber. And although the last thing he wants to do is talk to her, it looks like he's going to have to call her, because this isn't just a routine visit. The lawyer means trouble. + +* * * + +_1 Take a brain and put it in a bottle. Better: take a map of the brain and put it in a map of a bottle - or of a body - and feed signals to it that mimic its neurological inputs. Read its outputs and route them to a model body in a model universe with a model of physical laws, closing the loop. René Descartes would understand. That's the state of the passengers of the /{Field Circus}/ in a nutshell. Formerly physical humans, their neural software (and a map of the intracranial wetware it runs on) has been transferred into a virtual machine environment executing on a honking great computer, where the universe they experience is merely a dream within a dream. + +_1 Brains in bottles - empowered ones, with total, dictatorial, control over the reality they are exposed to - sometimes stop engaging in activities that brains in bodies can't avoid. Menstruation isn't mandatory. Vomiting, angina, exhaustion, and cramp are all optional. So is meatdeath, the decomposition of the corpus. But some activities don't cease, because people (even people who have been converted into a software description, squirted through a high-bandwidth laser link, and ported into a virtualization stack) don't /{want}/ them to stop. Breathing is wholly unnecessary, but suppression of the breathing reflex is disturbing unless you hack your hypothalamic map, and most homomorphic uploads don't want to do that. Then there's eating - not to avoid starvation, but for pleasure: Feasts on sautéed dodo seasoned with silphium are readily available here, and indeed, why not? It seems the human addiction to sensory input won't go away. And that's without considering sex, and the technical innovations that become possible when the universe - and the bodies within it - are mutable. + +* * * + +The public audience with the new arrivals is held in yet another movie: the Parisian palace of Charles IX, the throne room lifted wholesale from /{La Reine Margot}/ by Patrice Chéreau. Amber insisted on period authenticity, with the realism dialed right up to eleven. It's 1572 to the hilt this time, physical to the max. Pierre grunts in irritation, unaccustomed to his beard. His codpiece chafes, and sidelong glances tell him he isn't the only member of the royal court who's uncomfortable. Still, Amber is resplendent in a gown worn by Isabelle Adjani as Marguerite de Valois, and the luminous sunlight streaming through the stained-glass windows high above the crowd of actor zimboes lends a certain barbaric majesty to the occasion. The place is heaving with bodies in clerical robes, doublets, and low-cut gowns - some of them occupied by real people. Pierre sniffs again: Someone (Gavin, with his history bug, perhaps?) has been working on getting the smells right. He hopes like hell that nobody throws up. At least nobody seems to have come as Catherine de Médicis ... + +A bunch of actors portraying Huguenot soldiers approach the throne on which Amber is seated: They pace slowly forward, escorting a rather bemused-looking fellow with long, lank hair and a brocade jacket that appears to be made of cloth-of-gold. "His lordship, Attorney at Arms Alan Glashwiecz!" announces a flunky, reading from a parchment, "here at the behest of the most excellent guild and corporation of Smoot, Sedgwick Associates, with matters of legal import to discuss with Her Royal Highness!" + +A flourish of trumpets. Pierre glances at Her Royal Highness, who nods gracefully, but is slightly peaky - it's a humid summer day and her many-layered robes look very hot. "Welcome to the furthermost soil of the Ring Imperium," she announces in a clear, ringing voice. "I bid you welcome and invite you to place your petition before me in full public session of court." + +Pierre directs his attention to Glashwiecz, who appears to be worried. Doubtless he'd absorbed the basics of court protocol in the Ring (population all of eighteen thousand back home, a growing little principality), but the reality of it, a genuine old-fashioned /{monarchy}/ rooted in Amber's three-way nexus of power, data, and time, always takes a while to sink in. "I would be pleased to do so," he says, a little stiffly, "but in front of all those -" + +Pierre misses the next bit, because someone has just goosed him on the left buttock. He starts and half turns to see Su Ang looking past him at the throne, a lady-in-waiting for the queen. She wears an apricot dress with tight sleeves and a bodice that bares everything above her nipples. There's a fortune in pearls roped into her hair. As he notices her, she winks at him. + +Pierre freezes the scene, decoupling them from reality, and she faces him. "Are we alone now?" she asks. + +"Guess so. You want to talk about something?" he asks, heat rising in his cheeks. The noise around them is a random susurrus of machine-generated crowd scenery, the people motionless as their shared reality thread proceeds independently of the rest of the universe. + +"Of course!" She smiles at him and shrugs. The effect on her chest is remarkable - those period bodices could give a skeleton a cleavage - and she winks at him again. "Oh, Pierre." She smiles. "So easily distracted!" She snaps her fingers, and her clothing cycles through Afghani burqua, nudity, trouser suit, then back to court finery. Her grin is the only constant. "Now that I've got your attention, stop looking at me and start looking at /{him}/." + +Even more embarrassed, Pierre follows her outstretched arm all the way to the momentarily frozen Moorish emissary. "Sadeq?" + +"Sadeq /{knows}/ him, Pierre. This guy, there's something wrong." + +"Shit. You think I don't know that?" Pierre looks at her with annoyance, embarrassment forgotten. "I've seen him before. Been tracking his involvement for years. Guy's a front for the Queen Mother. He acted as her divorce lawyer when she went after Amber's Dad." + +"I'm sorry." Ang glances away. "You haven't been yourself lately, Pierre. I know it's something wrong between you and the Queen. I was worried. You're not paying attention to the little details." + +"Who do you think warned Amber?" he asks. + +"Oh. Okay, so you're in the loop," she says. "I'm not sure. Anyway, you've been distracted. Is there anything I can do to help?" + +"Listen." Pierre puts his hands on her shoulders. She doesn't move, but looks up into his eyes - Su Ang is only one-sixty tall - and he feels a pang of something odd: teenage male uncertainty about the friendship of women. /{What does she want?}/ "I know, and I'm sorry, and I'll try to keep my eyes on the ball some more, but I've been in my own headspace a lot lately. We ought to go back into the audience before anybody notices." + +"Do you want to talk about the problem first?" she asks, inviting his confidence. + +"I -" Pierre shakes his head. /{I could tell her everything}/, he realizes shakily as his metaconscience prods him urgently. He's got a couple of agony-aunt agents, but Ang is a real person and a friend. She won't pass judgment, and her model of human social behavior is a hell of a lot better than any expert system's. But time is in danger of slipping, and besides, Pierre feels dirty. "Not now," he says. "Let's go back." + +"Okay." She nods, then turns away, steps behind him with a swish of skirts, and he unfreezes time again as they snap back into place within the larger universe, just in time to see the respected visitor serve the queen with a class-action lawsuit, and the Queen respond by referring adjudication to trial by combat. + +* * * + +Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56}, is a brown dwarf, a lump of dirty hydrogen condensed from a stellar nursery, eight times as massive as Jupiter but not massive enough to ignite a stable fusion reaction at its core. The relentless crush of gravity has overcome the mutual repulsion of electrons trapped at its core, shrinking it into a shell of slush around a sphere of degenerate matter. It's barely larger than the gas giant the human ship uses as an energy source, but it's much denser. Gigayears ago, a chance stellar near miss sent it careening off into the galaxy on its own, condemned to drift in eternal darkness along with a cluster of frozen moons that dance attendance upon it. + +By the time the /{Field Circus}/ is decelerating toward it at short range - having shed the primary sail, which drifts farther out into interstellar space while reflecting light back onto the remaining secondary sail surface to slow the starwisp - Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56}, is just under one parsec distant from Earth, closer even than Proxima Centauri. Utterly dark at visible wavelengths, the brown dwarf could have drifted through the outer reaches of the solar system before conventional telescopes would have found it by direct observation. Only an infrared survey in the early years of the current century gave it a name. + +A bunch of passengers and crew have gathered on the bridge (now running at one-tenth of real time) to watch the arrival. Amber sits curled up in the captain's chair, moodily watching the gathered avatars. Pierre is still avoiding her at every opportunity, formal audiences excepted, and the damned shark and his pet hydra aren't invited, but apart from that, most of the gang is here. There are sixty-three uploads running on the /{Field Circus}/'s virtualization stack, software copied out of meatbodies who are mostly still walking around back home. It's a crowd, but it's possible to feel lonely in a crowd, even when it's your party. And especially when you're worried about debt, even though you're a billionairess, beneficiary of the human species' biggest reputations-rating trust fund. Amber's clothing - black leggings, black sweater - is as dark as her mood. + +"Something troubles you." A hand descends on the back of the chair next to her. + +She glances round momentarily, nods in recognition. "Yeah. Have a seat. You missed the audience?" + +The thin, brown-skinned man with a neatly cropped beard and deeply lined forehead slips into the seat next to her. "It was not part of my heritage," he explains carefully, "although the situation is not unfamiliar." A momentary smile threatens to crack his stony face. "I found the casting a trifle disturbing." + +"I'm no Marguerite de Valois, but the vacant role ... let's just say, the cap fits." Amber leans back in her chair. "Mind you, Marguerite had an /{interesting}/ life," she muses. + +"Don't you mean depraved and debauched?" her neighbor counters. + +"Sadeq." She closes her eyes. "Let's not pick a fight over absolute morality just right now, please? We have an orbital insertion to carry out, then an artifact to locate, and a dialogue to open, and I'm feeling very tired. Drained." + +"Ah - I apologize." He inclines his head carefully. "Is it your young man's fault? Has he slighted you?" + +"Not exactly -" Amber pauses. Sadeq, whom she basically invited along as ship's theologian in case they ran into any gods, has taken up her pastoral well-being as some kind of hobby. She finds it mildly oppressive at times, flattering at others, surreal always. Using the quantum search resources available to a citizen of the Ring Imperium, he's outpublished his peers, been elected a hojetolislam at an unprecedentedly young age: His original will probably be an ayatollah by the time they get home. He's circumspect in dealing with cultural differences, reasons with impeccable logic, carefully avoids antagonizing her - and constantly seeks to guide her moral development. "It's a personal misunderstanding," she says. "I'd rather not talk about it until we've sorted it out." + +"Very well." He looks unsatisfied, but that's normal. Sadeq still has the dusty soil of a childhood in the industrial city of Yazd stuck to his boots. Sometimes she wonders if their disagreements don't mirror in miniature the gap between the early twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. "But back to the here and now. Do you know where this router is?" + +"I will, in a few minutes or hours." Amber raises her voice, simultaneously spawning a number of search-ghosts. "Boris! You got any idea where we're going?" + +Boris lumbers round in place to face her; today he's wearing a velociraptor, and they don't turn easily in confined spaces. He snarls irritably: "Give me some space!" He coughs, a threatening noise from the back of his wattled throat, "Searching the sail's memory now." The back of the soap-bubble-thin laser sail is saturated with tiny nanocomputers spaced micrometers apart. Equipped with light receptors and configured as cellular automata, they form a gigantic phased-array detector, a retina more than a hundred meters in diameter. Boris is feeding them patterns describing anything that differs from the unchanging starscape. Soon the memories will condense and return as visions of darkness in motion - the cold, dead attendants of an aborted sun. + +"But where is it going to be?" asks Sadeq. "Do you know what you are looking for?" + +"Yes. We should have no trouble finding it," says Amber. "It looks like this." She flicks an index finger at the row of glass windows that front the bridge. Her signet ring flashes ruby light, and something indescribably weird shimmers into view in place of the seascape. Clusters of pearly beads that form helical chains, disks and whorls of color that interlace and knot through one another, hang in space above a darkling planet. "Looks like a William Latham sculpture made out of strange matter, doesn't it?" + +"Very abstract," Sadeq says approvingly. + +"It's alive," she adds. "And when it gets close enough to see us, it'll try to eat us." + +"What?" Sadeq sits up uneasily. + +"You mean nobody told you?" asks Amber: "I thought we'd briefed everybody." She throws a glistening golden pomegranate at him, and he catches it. The apple of knowledge dissolves in his hand, and he sits in a haze of ghosts absorbing information on his behalf. "Damn," she adds mildly. + +Sadeq freezes in place. Glyphs of crumbling stonework overgrown with ivy texture his skin and his dark suit, warning that he's busy in another private universe. + +"/{Hrrrr!}/ Boss! Found something," calls Boris, drooling on the bridge floor. + +Amber glances up. /{Please, let it be the router}/, she thinks. "Put it on the main screen." + +"Are you sure this is safe?" Su Ang asks nervously. + +"Nothing is safe," Boris snaps, clattering his huge claws on the deck. "Here. Look." + +The view beyond the windows flips to a perspective on a dusty bluish horizon: swirls of hydrogen brushed with a high cirrus of white methane crystals, stirred above the freezing point of oxygen by Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},'s residual rotation. The image-intensification level is huge - a naked human eyeball would see nothing but blackness. Rising above the limb of the gigantic planet is a small pale disk: Callidice, largest moon of the brown dwarf - or second-innermost planet - a barren rock slightly larger than Mercury. The screen zooms in on the moon, surging across a landscape battered by craters and dusted with the spume of ice volcanoes. Finally, just above the far horizon, something turquoise shimmers and spins against a backdrop of frigid darkness. + +"That's it," Amber whispers, her stomach turning to jelly as all the terrible might-have-beens dissolve like phantoms of the night around her; "That's /{it}/!" Elated, she stands up, wanting to share the moment with everybody she values. "Wake up, Sadeq! Someone get that damned cat in here! Where's Pierre? He's got to see this!" + +* * * + +Night and revelry rule outside the castle. The crowds are drunken and rowdy on the eve of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. Fireworks burst overhead, and the open windows admit a warm breeze redolent of cooked meats, woodsmoke, open sewers. Meanwhile a lover steals up a tightly-spiraling stone staircase in the near dark; his goal, a prarranged rendezvous. He's been drinking, and his best linen shirt shows the stains of sweat and food. He pauses at the third window to breathe in the outside air and run both hands through his mane of hair, which is long, unkempt, and grimy. /{Why am I doing this?}/ he wonders. This is so unlike him, this messing around - + +He carries on up the spiral. At the top, an oak door gapes on a vestibule lit by a lantern hanging from a hook. He ventures inside into a reception room paneled in oak blackened by age. Crossing the threshold makes another crossover kick in by prior arrangement. Something other than his own volition steers his feet, and he feels an unfamiliar throb in his chest, anticipation and a warmth and looseness lower down that makes him cry out, "where are you?" + +"Over here." He sees her waiting for him in the doorway. She's partially undressed, wearing layered underskirts and a flat-chested corset that makes the tops of her breasts swell like lustrous domes. Her tight sleeves are half-unraveled, her hair disheveled. He's full of her brilliant eyes, the constriction holding her spine straight, the taste in her mouth. She's the magnet for his reality, impossibly alluring, so tense she could burst. "Is it working for you?" she asks. + +"Yes." he feels tight, breathless, squeezed between impossibility and desire as he walks toward her. They've experimented with gender play, trying on the extreme dimorphism of this period as a game, but this is the first time they've done it this way. She opens her mouth: He kisses her, feels the warmth of his tongue thrust between her lips, the strength of his arms enclosing her waist. + +She leans against him, feeling his erection. "So this is how it feels to be you," she says wonderingly. The door to her chamber is ajar, but she doesn't have the self-restraint to wait: The flood of new sensations - rerouted from her physiology model to his proprioceptive sensorium - has taken hold. She grinds her hips against him, pushing deeper into his arms, whining softly at the back of her throat as she feels the fullness in his balls, the tension of his penis. He nearly faints with the rich sensations of her body - it's as if he's dissolving, feeling the throbbing hardness against his groin, turning to water and running away. Somehow he gets his arms around her waist - so tight, so breathless - and stumbles forward into the bedroom. She's whimpering as he drops her on the over-stuffed mattress: "/{Do}/ it to me!" she demands, "Do it now!" + +Somehow he ends up on top of her, hose down around his ankles, skirts bundled up around her waist; she kisses him, grinding her hips against him and murmuring urgent nothings. Then his heart is in his mouth, and there's a sensation like the universe pushing into his private parts, so inside out it takes his breath away. It's hot and as hard as rock, and he wants it inside so badly, but at the same time it's an intrusion, frightening and unexpected. He feels the lightning touch of his tongue on her nipples as he leans closer, feels exposed and terrified and ecstatic as her private places take in his member. As he begins to dissolve into the universe he screams in the privacy of his own head, /{I didn't know it felt like this}/ - + +Afterward, she turns to him with a lazy smile, and asks, "How was it for you?" Obviously assuming that, if she enjoyed it, he must have, too. + +But all he can think of is the sensation of the universe thrusting into him, and of how /{good}/ it felt. All he can hear is his father yelling ("What are you, some kind of queer?") - and he feels dirty. + +* * * + +_1 Greetings from the last megasecond before the discontinuity. + +_1 The solar system is thinking furiously at 10^33^ MIPS - thoughts bubble and swirl in the equivalent of a million billion unaugmented human minds. Saturn's rings glow with waste heat. The remaining faithful of the Latter-Day Saints are correlating the phase-space of their genome and the records of their descent in an attempt to resurrect their ancestors. Several skyhooks have unfurled in equatorial orbit around the earth like the graceful fernlike leaves of sundews, ferrying cargo and passengers to and from orbit. Small, crab like robots swarm the surface of Mercury, exuding a black slime of photovoltaic converters and the silvery threads of mass drivers. A glowing cloud of industrial nanomes forms a haze around the innermost planet as it slowly shrinks under the onslaught of copious solar power and determined mining robots. + +_1 The original incarnations of Amber and her court float in high orbit above Jupiter, presiding over the huge nexus of dumb matter trade that is rapidly biting into the available mass of the inner Jovian system. The trade in reaction mass is brisk, and there are shipments of diamond/vacuum biphase structures to assemble and crank down into the lower reaches of the solar system. Far below, skimming the edges of Jupiter's turbulent cloudscape, a gigantic glowing figure-of-eight - a five-hundred-kilometer-long loop of superconducting cable - traces incandescent trails through the gas giant's magnetosphere. It's trading momentum for electrical current, diverting it into a fly's eye grid of lasers that beam it toward Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},. As long as the original Amber and her incarnate team can keep it running, the /{Field Circus}/ can continue its mission of discovery, but they're part of the posthuman civilization evolving down in the turbulent depths of Sol system, part of the runaway train being dragged behind the out-of-control engine of history. + +_1 Weird new biologies based on complex adaptive matter take shape in the sterile oceans of Titan. In the frigid depths beyond Pluto, supercooled boson gases condense into impossible dreaming structures, packaged for shipping inward to the fast-thinking core. + +_1 There are still humans dwelling down in the hot depths, but it's getting hard to recognize them. The lot of humanity before the twenty-first century was nasty, brutish, and short. Chronic malnutrition, lack of education, and endemic diseases led to crippled minds and broken bodies. Now, most people multitask: Their meatbrains sit at the core of a haze of personality, much of it virtualized on stacked layers of structured reality far from their physical bodies. Wars and revolutions, or their subtle latter-day cognates, sweep the globe as constants become variables; many people find the death of stupidity even harder to accept than the end of mortality. Some have vitrified themselves to await an uncertain posthuman future. Others have modified their core identities to better cope with the changed demands of reality. Among these are beings whom nobody from a previous century would recognize as human - human/corporation half-breeds, zombie clades dehumanized by their own optimizations, angels and devils of software, slyly self-aware financial instruments. Even their popular fictions are self-deconstructing these days. + +_1 None of this, other than the barest news summary, reaches the /{Field Circus}/: The starwisp is a fossil, left behind by the broad sweep of accelerating progress. But it is aboard the /{Field Circus}/ that some of the most important events remaining in humanity's future light cone take place. + +* * * + +"Say hello to the jellyfish, Boris." + +Boris, in human drag, for once, glares at Pierre, and grips the pitcher with both hands. The contents of the jug swirl their tentacles lazily: One of them flips almost out of solution, dislodging an impaled cocktail cherry. "Will get you for this," Boris threatens. The smoky air around his head is a-swirl with daemonic visions of vengeance. + +Su Ang stares intently at Pierre who is watching Boris as he raises the jug to his lips and begins to drink. The baby jellyfish - small, pale blue, with cuboid bells and four clusters of tentacles trailing from each corner - slips down easily. Boris winces momentarily as the nematocysts let rip inside his mouth, but in a moment or so, the cubozoan slips down, and in the meantime, his biophysics model clips the extent of the damage to his stinger-ruptured oropharynx. + +"Wow," he says, taking another slurp of sea wasp margaritas. "Don't try this at home, fleshboy." + +"Here." Pierre reaches out. "Can I?" + +"Invent your own damn poison," Boris sneers - but he releases the jug and passes it to Pierre, who raises it and drinks. The cubozoan cocktail reminds him of fruit jelly drinks in a hot Hong Kong summer. The stinging in his palate is sharp but fades rapidly, producing an intimate burn when the alcohol hits the mild welts that are all this universe will permit the lethal medusa to inflict on him. + +"Not bad," says Pierre, wiping a stray loop of tentacle off his chin. He pushes the pitcher across the table toward Su Ang. "What's with the wicker man?" He points a thumb over his back at the table jammed in the corner opposite the copper-topped bar. + +"Who cares?" asks Boris."'S part of the scenery, isn't it?" + +The bar is a three-hundred-year-old brown café with a beer menu that runs to sixteen pages and wooden walls stained the color of stale ale. The air is thick with the smells of tobacco, brewer's yeast, and melatonin spray: and none of it exists. Amber dragged it out of the Franklin borg's collective memories, by way of her father's scattershot e-mails annotating her corporeal origins - the original is in Amsterdam, if that city still exists. + +"/{I}/ care who it is," says Pierre. + +"Save it," Ang says quietly. "I think it's a lawyer with a privacy screen." + +Pierre glances over his shoulder and glares. "Really?" + +Ang puts a restraining hand on his wrist: "Really. Don't pay it any attention. You don't have to, until the trial, you know." + +The wicker man sits uneasily in the corner. It resembles a basket-weave silhouette made from dried reeds, dressed in a red kerchief. A glass of doppelbock fills the mess of tied-off ends where its right hand ought to be. From time to time, it raises the glass as if to take a mouthful, and the beer vanishes into the singular interior. + +"Fuck the trial," Pierre says shortly. /{And fuck Amber, too, for naming me her public defender}/ - + +"Since when do lawsuits come with an invisible man?" asks Donna the Journalist, blitting into the bar along with a patchy historical trail hinting that she's just come from the back room. + +"Since -" Pierre blinks. "Hell." When Donna entered, so did Aineko; or maybe the cat's been there all the time, curled up loaf-of-bread fashion on the table in front of the wicker man. "You're damaging the continuity," Pierre complains. "This universe is broken." + +"Fix it yourself," Boris tells him. "Everybody else is coping." He snaps his fingers. "Waiter!" + +"Excuse me." Donna shakes her head. "I didn't mean to harm anything." + +Ang, as always, is more accommodating. "How are you?" she asks politely: "Would you like to try this most excellent poison cocktail?" + +"I am well," says Donna. A heavily built German woman - blonde and solidly muscular, according to the avatar she's presenting to the public - she's surrounded by a haze of viewpoints. They're camera angles on her society of mind, busily integrating and splicing her viewpoint threads together in an endless journal of the journey. A stringer for the CIA media consortium, she uploaded to the ship in the same packet stream as the lawsuit. "/{Danke}/, Ang." + +"Are you recording right now?" asks Boris. + +Donna sniffs. "When am I not?" A momentary smile: "I am only a scanner, no? Five hours, until arrival, to go. I may stop after then." Pierre glances across the table at Su Ang's hands; her knuckles are white and tense. "I am to avoid missing anything if possible," Donna continues, oblivious to Ang's disquiet. "There are eight of me at present! All recording away." + +"That's all?" Ang asks, raising an eyebrow. + +"Yes, that is all, and I have a job to do! Don't tell me you do not enjoy what it is that you do here?" + +"Right." Pierre glances in the corner again, avoiding eye contact with the hearty Girl Friday wannabe. He has a feeling, that if there were any hills hereabouts to animate, she'd be belting out the music. "Amber told you about the privacy code here?" + +"There is a privacy code?" asks Donna, swinging at least three subjective ghosts to bear on him for some reason - evidently he's hit an issue she has mixed feelings about. + +"A privacy code," Pierre confirms. "No recording in private, no recording where people withhold permission in public, and no sandboxes and cutups." + +Donna looks offended. "I would never do such a thing! Trapping a copy of someone in a virtual space to record their responses would be assault under Ring legal code, not true?" + +"Your mother," Boris says snidely, brandishing a fresh jug of iced killer jellyfish in her direction. + +"As long as we all agree," Ang interrupts, searching for accord. "It's all going to be settled soon, isn't it?" + +"Except for the lawsuit," mutters Pierre, glancing at the corner again. + +"I don't see the problem," says Donna, "that's just between Amber and her downlink adversaries!" + +"Oh, it's a problem all right," says Boris, his tone light. "What are your options worth?" + +"My -" Donna shakes her head. "I'm not vested." + +"Plausible." Boris doesn't crack a smile. "Even so, when we go home, your credibility metric will bulge. Assuming people still use distributed trust markets to evaluate the stability of their business partners." + +/{Not vested}/. Pierre turns it over in his mind, slightly surprised. He'd assumed that everybody aboard the ship - except, perhaps, the lawyer, Glashwiecz - was a fully vested member of the expeditionary company. + +"I am not vested," Donna insists. "I'm listed independently." For a moment, an almost-smile tugs at her face, a charmingly reticent expression that has nothing to do with her bluff exterior. "Like the cat." + +"The -" Pierre turns round in a hurry. Yes, Aineko appears to be sitting silently at the table with the wicker man; but who knows what's going through that furry head right now? /{I'll have to bring this up with Amber, he realizes uneasily. I ought to bring this up with Amber}/ ... "but your reputation won't suffer for being on this craft, will it?" he asks aloud. + +"I will be all right," Donna declares. The waiter comes over: "Mine will be a bottle of schneiderweisse," she adds. And then, without breaking step: "Do you believe in the singularity?" + +"Am I a singularitarian, do you mean?" asks Pierre, a fixed grin coming to his face. + +"Oh, no, no, no!" Donna waves him down, grins broadly, nods at Su Ang: "I do not mean it like that! Attend: What I meant to ask was whether you in the concept of a singularity believe, and if so, where it is?" + +"Is this intended for a public interview?" asks Ang. + +"Well, I cannot into a simulation drag you off and expose you to an imitative reality excursion, can I?" Donna leans back as the bartender places a ceramic stein in front of her. + +"Oh. Well." Ang glances warningly at Pierre and dispatches a very private memo to scroll across his vision: /{Don't play with her, this is serious}/. Boris is watching Ang with an expression of hopeless longing. Pierre tries to ignore it all, taking the journalist's question seriously. "The singularity is a bit like that old-time American Christian rapture nonsense, isn't it?" he says. "When we all go a-flying up to heaven, leaving our bodies behind." He snorts, reaches into thin air and gratuitously violates causality by summoning a jug of ice-cold sangria into existence. "The rapture of the nerds. I'll drink to that." + +"But when did it take place?" asks Donna. "My audience, they will to know your opinion be needing." + +"Four years ago, when we instantiated this ship," Pierre says promptly. + +"Back in the teens," says Ang. "When Amber's father liberated the uploaded lobsters." + +"Is not happening yet," contributes Boris. "Singularity implies infinite rate of change achieved momentarily. Future not amenable thereafter to prediction by presingularity beings, right? So has not happened." + +"Au contraire. It happened on June 6th, 1969, at eleven hundred hours, eastern seaboard time," Pierre counters. "That was when the first network control protocol packets were sent from the data port of one IMP to another - the first ever Internet connection. /{That's}/ the singularity. Since then we've all been living in a universe that was impossible to predict from events prior to that time." + +"It's rubbish," counters Boris. "Singularity is load of religious junk. Christian mystic rapture recycled for atheist nerds." + +"Not so." Su Ang glances at him, hurt. "Here we are, sixty something human minds. We've been migrated - while still awake - right out of our own heads using an amazing combination of nanotechnology and electron spin resonance mapping, and we're now running as software in an operating system designed to virtualize multiple physics models and provide a simulation of reality that doesn't let us go mad from sensory deprivation! And this whole package is about the size of a fingertip, crammed into a starship the size of your grandmother's old Walkman, in orbit around a brown dwarf just over three light-years from home, on its way to plug into a network router created by incredibly ancient alien intelligences, and you can tell me that the idea of a fundamental change in the human condition is nonsense?" + +"Mmph." Boris looks perplexed. "Would not put it that way. The /{singularity}/ is nonsense, not uploading or -" + +"Yah, right." Ang smiles winningly at Boris. After a moment, he wilts. + +Donna beams at them enthusiastically. "Fascinating!" she enthuses. "Tell me, what are these lobsters you think are important?" + +"They're Amber's friends," Ang explains. "Years ago, Amber's father did a deal with them. They were the first uploads, you know? Hybridized spiny lobster neural tissue and a heuristic API and some random mess of backward-chaining expert systems. They got out of their lab and into the Net and Manfred brokered a deal to set them free, in return for their help running a Franklin orbital factory. This was way back in the early days before they figured out how to do self-assembly properly. Anyway, the lobsters insisted - part of their contract - that Bob Franklin pay to have the deep-space tracking network beam them out into interstellar space. They wanted to emigrate, and looking at what's happened to the solar system since then, who can blame them?" + +Pierre takes a big mouthful of sangria. "The cat," he says. + +"The cat -" Donna's head swivels round, but Aineko has banged out again, retroactively editing her presence out of the event history of this public space. "What about the cat?" + +"The /{family}/ cat," explains Ang. She reaches over for Boris's pitcher of jellyfish juice, but frowns as she does so: "Aineko wasn't conscious back then, but later ... when SETI@home finally received that message back, oh, however many years ago, Aineko remembered the lobsters. And cracked it wide open while all the CETI teams were still thinking in terms of von Neumann architectures and concept-oriented programming. The message was a semantic net designed to mesh perfectly with the lobster broadcast all those years ago, and provide a high-level interface to a communications network we're going to visit." She squeezes Boris's fingertips. "SETI@home logged these coordinates as the origin of the transmission, even though the public word was that the message came from a whole lot farther away - they didn't want to risk a panic if people knew there were aliens on our cosmic doorstep. Anyway, once Amber got established, she decided to come visiting. Hence this expedition. Aineko created a virtual lobster and interrogated the ET packet, hence the communications channel we're about to open." + +"Ah, this is all a bit clearer now," says Donna. "But the lawsuit - " She glances at the hollow wicker man in the corner. + +"Well, there we have a problem," Ang says diplomatically. + +"No," says Pierre. "/{I}/ have a problem. And it's all Amber's fault." + +"Hmm?" Donna stares at him. "Why blame the Queen?" + +"Because she's the one who picked the lunar month to be the reporting time period for companies in her domain, and specified trial by combat for resolving corporate conflicts," he grumbles. "And /{compurgation}/, but that's not applicable to this case because there isn't a recognized reputation server within three light-years. Trial by combat, for civil suits in this day and age! And she appointed me her champion." /{In the most traditional way imaginable}/, he remembers with a warm frisson of nostalgia. He'd been hers in body and soul before that disastrous experiment. He isn't sure whether it still applies, but - "I've got to take on this lawsuit on her behalf, in adversarial stance." + +He glances over his shoulder. The wicker man sits there placidly, pouring beer down his invisible throat like a tired farm laborer. + +"Trial by combat," Su Ang explains to Donna's perplexed ghost-swarm, which is crawling all over the new concept in a haze of confusion. "Not physical combat, but a competition of ability. It seemed like a good idea at the time, to keep junk litigants out of the Ring Imperium, but the Queen Mother's lawyers are /{very}/ persistent. Probably because it's taken on something of a grudge match quality over the years. I don't think Pamela cares much anymore, but this ass-hat lawyer has turned it into a personal crusade. I don't think he liked what happened when the music Mafiya caught up with him. But there's a bit more to it, because if he wins, he gets to own everything. And I mean /{everything}/." + +* * * + +Ten million kilometers out and Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56}, looms beyond the parachute-shaped sail of the /{Field Circus}/ like a rind of darkness bitten out of the edge of the universe. Heat from the gravitational contraction of its core keeps it warm, radiating at six hundred degrees absolute, but the paltry emission does nothing to break the eternal ice that grips Callidice, Iambe, Celeus, and Metaneira, the stillborn planets locked in orbit around the brown dwarf. + +Planets aren't the only structures that orbit the massive sphere of hydrogen. Close in, skimming the cloud tops by only twenty thousand kilometers, Boris's phased-array eye has blinked at something metallic and hot. Whatever it is, it orbits out of the ecliptic plane traced by the icy moons, and in the wrong direction. Farther out, a speckle of reflected emerald laser light picks out a gaudy gem against the starscape: their destination, the router. + +"That's it," says Boris. His body shimmers into humanity, retconning the pocket universe of the bridge into agreeing that he's been present in primate form all along. Amber glances sideways. Sadeq is still wrapped in ivy, his skin the texture of weathered limestone. "Closest approach is sixty-three light-seconds, due in eight hundred thousand. Can give you closer contact if we maneuver, but will take time to achieve a stable orbit." + +Amber nods thoughtfully, sending copies of herself out to work the mechanics. The big light sail is unwieldy, but can take advantage of two power sources: the original laser beam from Jupiter, and its reflection bouncing off the now-distant primary light sail. The temptation is to rely on the laser for constant acceleration, to just motor on in and squat on the router's cosmic doorstep. But the risk of beam interruption is too dangerous. It's happened before, for seconds to minutes at a time, on six occasions during the voyage so far. She's not sure what causes the beam downtime (Pierre has a theory about Oort cloud objects occulting the laser, but she figures it's more likely to be power cuts back at the Ring), but the consequences of losing power while maneuvering deep in a quasi-stellar gravity well are much more serious than a transient loss of thrust during free interstellar flight. "Let's just play it safe," she says. "We'll go for a straight orbital insertion and steady cranking after that. We've got enough gravity wells to play pinball with. I don't want us on a free-flight trajectory that entails lithobraking if we lose power and can't get the sail back." + +"Very prudent," Boris agrees. "Marta, work on it." A buzzing presence of not-insects indicates that the heteromorphic helmswoman is on the job. "I think we should be able to take our first close-in look in about two million seconds, but if you want, I can ping it now ...?" + +"No need for protocol analysis," Amber says casually. "Where's - ah, there you are." She reaches down and picks up Aineko, who twists round sinuously and licks her arm with a tongue like sandpaper. "What do you think?" + +"Do you want fries with that?" asks the cat, focusing on the artifact at the center of the main screen in front of the bridge. + +"No, I just want a conversation," says Amber. + +"Well, okay." The cat dims, moves jerkily, sucking up local processing power so fast that it disturbs the local physics model. "Opening port now." + +A subjective minute or two passes. "Where's Pierre?" Amber asks herself quietly. Some of the maintenance metrics she can read from her privileged viewpoint are worrying. The /{Field Circus}/ is running at almost eighty percent of utilization. Whatever Aineko is doing in order to establish the interface to the router, it's taking up an awful lot of processing power and bandwidth. "And where's the bloody lawyer?" she adds, almost as an afterthought. + +The /{Field Circus}/ is small, but its light sail is highly controllable. Aineko takes over a cluster of cells in its surface, turning them from straight reflectors into phase-conjugate mirrors: A small laser on the ship's hull begins to flicker thousands of times a second, and the beam bounces off the modified segment of mirror, focusing to a coherent point right in front of the distant blue dot of the router. Aineko ramps up the modulation frequency, adds a bundle of channels using different wavelengths, and starts feeding out a complex set of preplanned signals that provide an encoding format for high-level data. + +% check point + +"Leave the lawyer to me." She starts, glancing sideways to see Sadeq watching her. He smiles without showing his teeth. "Lawyers do not mix with diplomacy," he explains. + +"Huh." Ahead of them, the router is expanding. Strings of nacreous spheres curl in strange loops around a hidden core, expanding and turning inside out in systolic pulses that spawn waves of recomplication through the structure. A loose red speckle of laser light stains one arm of beads; suddenly it flares up brilliantly, reflecting data back at the ship. "Ah!" + +"Contact," purrs the cat. Amber's fingertips turn white where she grips the arms of her chair. + +"What does it say?" she asks, quietly. + +"What do /{they}/ say," corrects Aineko. "It's a trade delegation, and they're uploading right now. I can use that negotiation network they sent us to give them an interface to our systems if you want." + +"Wait!" Amber half stands in sudden nervousness. "Don't give them free access! What are you thinking of? Stick them in the throne room, and we'll give them a formal audience in a couple of hours." She pauses. "That network layer they sent through. Can you make it accessible to us, use it to give us a translation layer into their grammar-mapping system?" + +The cat looks round, thumps her tail irritably: "You'd do better loading the network yourself -" + +"I don't want /{anybody}/ on this ship running alien code before we've vetted it thoroughly," she says urgently. "In fact, I want them bottled up in the Louvre grounds, just as thoroughly as we can, and I want them to come to us through our own linguistic bottleneck. Got that?" + +"Clear," Aineko grumbles. + +"A trade delegation," Amber thinks aloud. "What would Dad make of that?" + +* * * + +One moment he's in the bar, shooting bull with Su Ang and Donna the Journalist's ghost and a copy of Boris; the next he's abruptly precipitated into a very different space. + +Pierre's heart seems to tumble within his rib cage, but he forces himself to stay calm as he glances around the dim, oak-paneled chamber. This is wrong, so wrong that it signifies either a major systems crash or the application of frightening privilege levels to his realm. The only person aboard who's entitled to those privileges is - + +"Pierre?" + +She's behind him. He turns angrily. "Why did you drag me in here? Don't you know it's rude to -" + +"Pierre." + +He stops and looks at Amber. He can't stay angry at her for long, not to her face. She's not dumb enough to bat her eyelashes at him, but she's disarmingly cute for all that. Nevertheless, something inside him feels shriveled and /{wrong}/ in her presence. "What is it?" he says, curtly. + +"I don't know why you've been avoiding me." She starts to take a step forward, then stops and bites her lip. /{Don't do this to me!}/ he thinks. "You know it hurts?" + +"Yes." That much of an admission hurts him, too. He can hear his father yelling over his shoulder, the time he found him with Laurent, elder brother: It's a choice between père or Amber, but it's not a choice he wants to make. /{The shame}/. "I didn't - I have some issues." + +"It was the other night?" + +He nods. /{Now}/ she takes a step forwards. "We can talk about it, if you want. Whatever you want," she says. And she leans toward him, and he feels his resistance crumbling. He reaches out and hugs her, and she wraps her arms around him and leans her chin on his shoulder, and this doesn't feel wrong: How can anything this good be bad? + +"It made me uncomfortable," he mumbles into her hair. "Need to sort myself out." + +"Oh, Pierre." She strokes the down at the back of his neck. "You should have said. We don't have to do it that way if you don't want to." + +How to tell her how hard it is to admit that anything's wrong? Ever? "You didn't drag me here to tell me that," he says, implicitly changing the subject. + +Amber lets go of him, backs away almost warily. "What is it?" she asks. + +"Something's wrong?" he half asks, half asserts. "Have we made contact yet?" + +"Yeah," she says, pulling a face. "There's an alien trade delegation in the Louvre. That's the problem." + +"An alien trade delegation." He rolls the words around the inside of his mouth, tasting them. They feel paradoxical, cold and slow after the hot words of passion he's been trying to avoid uttering. It's his fault for changing the subject. + +"A trade delegation," says Amber. "I should have anticipated. I mean, we were going to go through the router ourselves, weren't we?" + +He sighs. "We thought we were going to do that." A quick prod at the universe's controls determines that he has certain capabilities: He invokes an armchair, sprawls across it. "A network of point-to-point wormholes linking routers, self-replicating communication hubs, in orbit around most of the brown dwarfs of the galaxy. That's what the brochure said, right? That's what we expected. Limited bandwidth, not a lot of use to a mature superintelligence that has converted the free mass of its birth solar system into computronium, but sufficient to allow it to hold conversations with its neighbors. Conversations carried out via a packet-switched network in real time, not limited by the speed of light, but bound together by a common reference frame and the latency between network hops." + +"That's about the size of it," she agrees from the carved-ruby throne beside him. "Except there's a trade delegation waiting for us. In fact, they're coming aboard already. And I don't buy it - something about the whole setup stinks." + +Pierre's brow wrinkles. "You're right, it doesn't make sense," he says, finally. "Doesn't make sense at all." + +Amber nods. "I carry a ghost of Dad around. He's really upset about it." + +"Listen to your old man." Pierre's lips quirk humorlessly. "We were going to jump through the looking glass, but it seems someone has beaten us to the punch. Question is why?" + +"I don't like it." Amber reaches out sideways, and he catches her hand. "And then there's the lawsuit. We have to hold the trial sooner rather than later." + +He lets go of her fingers. "I'd really be much happier if you hadn't named me as your champion." + +"Hush." The scenery changes; her throne is gone, and instead she's sitting on the arm of his chair, almost on top of him. "Listen. I had a good reason." + +"Reason?" + +"You have choice of weapons. In fact, you have the choice of the field. This isn't just 'hit 'em with a sword until they die' time." She grins, impishly. "The whole point of a legal system that mandates trial by combat for commercial lawsuits, as opposed to an adjudication system, is to work out who's a fitter servant of society and hence deserving of preferential treatment. It's crazy to apply the same legal model to resolving corporate disputes that we use for arguments among people, especially as most companies are now software abstractions of business models; the interests of society are better served by a system that encourages efficient trade activity than by one that encourages litigation. It cuts down on corporate bullshit while encouraging the toughest ones to survive, which is why I /{was}/ going to set up the trial as a contest to achieve maximum competitive advantage in a xenocommerce scenario. Assuming they really are traders, I figure we have more to trade with them than some damn lawyer from the depths of earth's light cone." + +Pierre blinks. "Um." Blinks again. "I thought you wanted me to sideload some kind of fencing kinematics program and /{skewer}/ the guy?" + +"Knowing how well I know you, why did you ever think that?" She slides down the arm of his chair and lands on his lap. She twists round to face him in point-blank close-up. "Shit, Pierre, I /{know}/ you're not some kind of macho psychopath!" + +"But your mother's lawyers -" + +She shrugs dismissively. "They're /{lawyers}/. Used to dealing with precedents. Best way to fuck with their heads is to change the way the universe works." She leans against his chest. "You'll make mincemeat of them. Profit-to-earnings ratio through the roof, blood on the stock exchange floor." His hands meet around the small of her back. "My hero!" + +* * * + +The Tuileries are full of confused lobsters. + +Aineko has warped this virtual realm, implanting a symbolic gateway in the carefully manicured gardens outside. The gateway is about two meters in diameter, a verdigris-coated orouborous loop of bronze that sits like an incongruous archway astride a gravel path in the grounds. Giant black lobsters - each the size of a small pony - shuffle out of the loop's baby blue buffer field, antennae twitching. They wouldn't be able to exist in the real world, but the physics model here has been amended to permit them to breathe and move, by special dispensation. + +Amber sniffs derisively as she enters the great reception room of the Sully wing. "Can't trust that cat with anything," she mutters. + +"It was your idea, wasn't it?" asks Su Ang, trying to duck past the zombie ladies-in-waiting who carry Amber's train. Soldiers line the passage to either side, forming rows of steel to let the Queen pass unhindered. + +"To let the cat have its way, yes," Amber is annoyed. "But I didn't mean to let it wreck the continuity! I won't have it!" + +"I never saw the point of all this medievalism, before," Ang observes. "It's not as if you can avoid the singularity by hiding in the past." Pierre, following the Queen at a distance, shakes his head, knowing better than to pick a fight with Amber over her idea of stage scenery. + +"It looks good," Amber says tightly, standing before her throne and waiting for the ladies-in-waiting to arrange themselves before her. She sits down carefully, her back straight as a ruler, voluminous skirts belling up. Her dress is an intricate piece of sculpture that uses the human body within as a support. "It impresses the yokels and looks convincing on narrowcast media. It provides a prefabricated sense of tradition. It hints at the political depths of fear and loathing intrinsic to my court's activities, and tells people not to fuck with me. It reminds us where we've come from ... and it doesn't give away anything about where we're going." + +"But that doesn't make any difference to a bunch of alien lobsters," points out Su Ang. "They lack the reference points to understand it." She moves to stand behind the throne. Amber glances at Pierre, waves him over. + +Pierre glances around, seeking real people, not the vacant eigenfaces of the zombies that give this scenery added biological texture. There in the red gown, isn't that Donna the Journalist? And over there, too, with shorter hair and wearing male drag; she gets everywhere. That's Boris, sitting behind the bishop. + +"/{You}/ tell her," Ang implores him. + +"I can't," he admits. "We're trying to establish communication, aren't we? But we don't want to give too much away about what we are, how we think. A historical distancing act will keep them from learning too much about us: The phase-space of technological cultures that could have descended from these roots is too wide to analyse easily. So we're leaving them with the lobster translators and not giving anything away. Try to stay in character as a fifteenth-century duchess from Albì - it's a matter of national security." + +"Humph." Ang frowns as a flunky hustles forward to place a folding chair behind her. She turns to face the expanse of red-and-gold carpet that stretches to the doorway as trumpets blat and the doors swing open to admit the deputation of lobsters. + +The lobsters are as large as wolves, black and spiny and ominous. Their monochrome carapaces are at odds with the brightly colored garb of the human crowd. Their antennae are large and sharp as swords. But for all that, they advance hesitantly, eye turrets swiveling from side to side as they take the scene in. Their tails drag ponderously on the carpet, but they have no trouble standing. + +The first of the lobsters halts short of the throne and angles itself to train an eye on Amber. "Am inconsistent," it complains. "There is no liquid hydrogen monoxide here, and you-species am misrepresented by initial contact. Inconsistency, explain?" + +"Welcome to the human physical space-traveling interface unit /{Field Circus}/," Amber replies calmly. "I am pleased to see your translator is working adequately. You are correct, there is no water here. The lobsters don't normally need it when they visit us. And we humans are not water-dwellers. May I ask who you are when you're not wearing borrowed lobster bodies?" + +Confusion. The second lobster rears up and clatters its long, armored antennae together. Soldiers to either side tighten their grips on their spears, but it drops back down again soon enough. + +"We are the Wunch," announces the first lobster, speaking clearly. "This is a body-compliant translation layer. Based on map received from yourspace, units forty thousand trillion light-kilometers ago?" + +"/{He means twenty years}/," Pierre whispers on a private channel Amber has multicast for the other real humans in the audience chamber reality. "/{They've confused space and time for measurement purposes. Does this tell us something?}/" + +"/{Relatively little}/," comments someone else - Chandra? A round of polite laughter greets the joke, and the tension in the room eases slightly. + +"We are the Wunch," the lobster repeats. "We come to exchange interest. What have you got that we want?" + +Faint frown lines appear on Amber's forehead. Pierre can see her thinking very rapidly. "We consider it impolite to ask," she says quietly. + +Clatter of claws on underlying stone floor. Chatter of clicking mandibles. "You accept our translation?" asks the leader. + +"Are you referring to the transmission you sent us, uh, thirty thousand trillion light-kilometers behind?" asks Amber. + +The lobster bobs up and down on its legs. "True. We send." + +"We cannot integrate that network," Amber replies blandly, and Pierre forces himself to keep a straight face. (Not that the lobsters can read human body language yet, but they'll undoubtedly be recording everything that happens here for future analysis.) "They come from a radically different species. Our goal in coming here is to connect our species to the network. We wish to exchange advantageous information with many other species." + +Concern, alarm, agitation. "You cannot do that! You are not /{untranslatable entity signifier}/." + +Amber raises a hand. "You said /{untranslatable entity signifier}/. I did not understand that. Can you paraphrase?" + +"We, like you, are not /{untranslatable entity signifier}/. The network is for /{untranslatable entity signifier}/. We are to the /{untranslatable concept #1}/ as a single-celled organism is to ourselves. You and we cannot /{untranslatable concept #2}/. To attempt trade with /{untranslatable entity signifier}/ is to invite death or transition to /{untranslatable concept #1}/." + +Amber snaps her fingers: time freezes. She glances round at Su Ang, Pierre, the other members of her primary team. "Opinions, anyone?" + +Aineko, hitherto invisible, sits up on the carpet at the foot of the dais. "I'm not sure. The reason those macros are tagged is that there's something wrong with their semantics." + +"Wrong with - how?" asks Su Ang. + +The cat grins, cavernously, and begins to fade. "Wait!" snaps Amber. + +Aineko continues her fade, but leaves a shimmering presence behind: not a grin, but a neural network weighting map, three-dimensional and incomprehensibly complicated. "The /{untranslatable entity concept #1}/ when mapped onto the lobster's grammar network has elements of 'god' overloaded with attributes of mysticism and zenlike incomprehensibility. But I'm pretty sure that what it /{really}/ means is 'optimized conscious upload that runs much faster than real-time'. A type-one weakly superhuman entity, like, um, the folks back home. The implication is that this Wunch wants us to view them as gods." The cat fades back in. "Any takers?" + +"Small-town hustlers," mutters Amber. "Talking big - or using a dodgy metagrammar that makes them sound bigger than they are - to bilk the hayseeds new to the big city." + +"Most likely." Aineko turns and begins to wash her flank. + +"What are we going to do?" asks Su Ang. + +"Do?" Amber raises a pencil-lined eyebrow, then flashes a grin that chops a decade off her apparent age: "We're going to mess with their heads!" She snaps her fingers again and time unfreezes. There's no change in continuity except that Aineko is still present, at the foot of the throne. The cat looks up and gives the queen a dirty look. "We understand your concern," Amber says smoothly, "but we have already given you the physiology models and neural architecture of the bodies that you are wearing. We want to communicate. Why won't you show us your real selves or your real language?" + +"This is trade language!" protests Lobster Number One. "Wunch am/are metabolically variable coalition from number of worlds. No uniformity of interface. Easiest to conform to one plan and speak one tongue optimized for your comprehension." + +"Hmm." Amber leans forward. "Let me see if I understand you. You are a coalition of individuals from a number of species. You prefer to use the common user interface model we sent you, and offered us the language module you're using for an exchange? And you want to trade with us." + +"Exchange interest," the Wunch emphasizes, bouncing up and down on its legs. "Can offer much! Sense of identity of a thousand civilizations. Safe tunnels to a hundred archives on the net suitable for beings who are not /{untranslatable entity signifier}/. Able to control risks of communication. Have technique of manipulating matter at molecular level. Solution to algorithmic iterated systems based on quantum entanglement." + +"/{Old-fashioned nanotechnology and shiny beads to dazzle the primitives}/," Pierre mutters on Amber's multicast channel. "/{How backward do they think we are}/?" + +% note italics marked differently should have been "H/{ow backward do they think we are}/?" + +"/{The physics model in here is really overdone}/," comments Boris. "/{They may even think this is real, that we're primitives coat-tailing it on the back of the lobsters' efforts}/." + +Amber forces a smile. "That is most interesting!" she trills at the Wunch's representatives. "I have appointed two representatives who will negotiate with you; this is an internal contest within my own court. I commend to you Pierre Naqet, my own commercial representative. In addition, you may want to deal with Alan Glashwiecz, an independent factor who is not currently present. Others may come forward in due course if that is acceptable." + +"It pleases us," says Lobster Number One. "We are tired and disoriented by the long journey through gateways to this place. Request resumption of negotiations later?" + +"By all means." Amber nods. A sergeant-at-arms, a mindless but impressive zimboe controlled by her spider's nest of personality threads, blows a sharp note on his trumpet. The first audience is at an end. + +* * * + +_1 Outside the light cone of the /{Field Circus}/, on the other side of the spacelike separation between Amber's little kingdom in motion and the depths of empire time that grip the solar system's entangled quantum networks, a singular new reality is taking shape. + +_1 Welcome to the moment of maximum change. + +_1 About ten billion humans are alive in the solar system, each mind surrounded by an exocortex of distributed agents, threads of personality spun right out of their heads to run on the clouds of utility fog - infinitely flexible computing resources as thin as aerogel - in which they live. The foggy depths are alive with high-bandwidth sparkles; most of Earth's biosphere has been wrapped in cotton wool and preserved for future examination. For every living human, a thousand million software agents carry information into the farthest corners of the consciousness address space. + +_1 The sun, for so long an unremarkable mildly variable G2 dwarf, has vanished within a gray cloud that englobes it except for a narrow belt around the plane of the ecliptic. Sunlight falls, unchanged, on the inner planets: Except for Mercury, which is no longer present, having been dismantled completely and turned into solar-powered high-temperature nanocomputers. A much fiercer light falls on Venus, now surrounded by glittering ferns of carbon crystals that pump angular momentum into the barely spinning planet via huge superconducting loops wound around its equator. This planet, too, is due to be dismantled. Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus - all sprout rings as impressive as Saturn's. But the task of cannibalizing the gas giants will take many times longer than the small rocky bodies of the inner system. + +_1 The ten billion inhabitants of this radically changed star system remember being human; almost half of them predate the millennium. Some of them still /{are}/ human, untouched by the drive of meta-evolution that has replaced blind Darwinian change with a goal-directed teleological progress. They cower in gated communities and hill forts, mumbling prayers and cursing the ungodly meddlers with the natural order of things. But eight out of every ten living humans are included in the phase-change. It's the most inclusive revolution in the human condition since the discovery of speech. + +_1 A million outbreaks of gray goo - runaway nanoreplicator excursions - threaten to raise the temperature of the biosphere dramatically. They're all contained by the planetary-scale immune system fashioned from what was once the World Health Organization. Weirder catastrophes threaten the boson factories in the Oort cloud. Antimatter factories hover over the solar poles. Sol system shows all the symptoms of a runaway intelligence excursion, exuberant blemishes as normal for a technological civilization as skin problems on a human adolescent. + +_1 The economic map of the planet has changed beyond recognition. Both capitalism and communism, bickering ideological children of a protoindustrial outlook, are as obsolete as the divine right of kings: Companies are alive, and dead people may live again, too. Globalism and tribalism have run to completion, diverging respectively into homogeneous interoperability and the Schwarzschild radius of insularity. Beings that remember being human plan the deconstruction of Jupiter, the creation of a great simulation space that will expand the habitat available within the solar system. By converting all the nonstellar mass of the solar system into processors, they can accommodate as many human-equivalent minds as a civilization with a planet hosting ten billion humans in orbit around every star in the galaxy. + +_1 A more mature version of Amber lives down in the surging chaos of near-Jupiter space; there's an instance of Pierre, too, although he has relocated light-hours away, near Neptune. Whether she still sometimes thinks of her relativistic twin, nobody can tell. In a way, it doesn't matter, because by the time the /{Field Circus}/ returns to Jupiter orbit, as much subjective time will have elapsed for the fast-thinkers back home as will flash by in the real universe between this moment and the end of the era of star formation, many billions of years hence. + +* * * + +"As your theologian, I am telling you that they are not gods." + +Amber nods patiently. She watches Sadeq closely. + +Sadeq coughs grumpily. "Tell her, Boris." + +Boris tilts his chair back and turns it toward the Queen. "He is right, Amber. They are traders, and not clever ones either. Is hard to get handle on their semiotics while they hide behind the lobster model we uploaded in their direction twenty years ago, but are certainly not crusties, and are definite not human either. Or transhuman. My guess, they are bunch of dumb hicks who get hands on toys left behind by much smarter guys. Like the rejectionist factions back home. Imagine they are waking up one morning and find everyone else is gone to the great upload environment in the sky. Leaving them with the planet to themselves. What you think they do with whole world, with any gadgets they trip over? Some will smash everything they come across, but others not so stupid. But they think /{small}/. Scavengers, deconstructionists. Their whole economic outlook are negative-sum game. Go visit aliens to rip them off, take ideas, not expand selves and transcend." + +Amber stands up, walks toward the windows at the front of the bridge. In black jeans and chunky sweater, she barely resembles the feudal queen whose role she plays for tourists. "Taking them on board was a big risk. I'm not happy about it." + +"How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" Sadeq smiles crookedly. "We have an answer. But they may not even realize they are dancing with us. These are not the gods you were afraid of finding." + +"No." Amber sighs. "Not too different from us, though. I mean, we aren't exactly well adapted to this environment, are we? We tote these body-images along, rely on fake realities that we can map into our human-style senses. We're emulations, not native AIs. Where's Su Ang?" + +"I can find her." Boris frowns. + +"I asked her to analyse the alien's arrival times," Amber adds as an afterthought. "They're close - too close. And they showed up too damn fast when we first tickled the router. I think Aineko's theories are flawed. The /{real}/ owners of this network we've plugged into probably use much higher-level protocols to communicate; sapient packets to build effective communications gateways. This Wunch, they probably lurk in wait for newbies to exploit. Pedophiles hiding outside the school gate. I don't want to give them that opportunity before we make contact with the real thing!" + +"You may have little choice," says Sadeq. "If they are without insight, as you suspect, they may become afraid if you edit their environment. They may lash out. I doubt they even understand how they created the contaminated metagrammar that they transmitted back to us. It will be to them just a tool that makes simpleminded aliens more gullible, easier to negotiate with. Who knows where they got it?" + +"A grammatical weapon." Boris spins himself round slowly. "Build propaganda into your translation software if you want to establish a favorable trading relationship. How cute. Haven't these guys ever heard of Newspeak?" + +"Probably not," Amber says slowly, pausing for a moment to spawn spectator threads to run down the book and all three movie versions of Nineteen Eighty-Four, followed by the sharecropped series of sequel novels. She shivers uncomfortably as she re-integrates the memories. "Ick. That's not a very nice vision. Reminds me of" - she snaps her fingers, trying to remember Dad's favorite - "Dilbert." + +"Friendly fascism," says Sadeq. "It matters not, whosoever is in charge. I could tell you tales from my parents, of growing up with a revolution. To never harbor self-doubt is poison for the soul, and these aliens want to inflict their certainties upon us." + +"I think we ought to see how Pierre is doing," Amber says aloud. "I certainly don't want them poisoning him." Grin: "That's /{my job}/." + +* * * + +Donna the Journalist is everywhere simultaneously. It's a handy talent: Makes for even-handed news coverage when you can interview both sides at the same time. + +Right now, one of her is in the bar with Alan Glashwiecz, who evidently hasn't realized that he can modulate his ethanol dehydrogenase levels voluntarily and who is consequently well on the way to getting steaming drunk. Donna is assisting the process: She finds it fascinating to watch this bitter young man who has lost his youth to a runaway self-enhancement process. + +"I'm a full partner," he says bitterly, "in Glashwiecz and Selves. I'm one of the Selves. We're all partners, but it's only Glashwiecz Prime who has any clout. The old bastard - if I'd known I'd grow up to become /{that}/, I'd have run away to join some hippie antiglobalist commune instead." He drains his glass, demonstrating his oropharyngeal integrity, snaps his fingers for a refill. "I just woke up one morning to find I'd been resurrected by my older self. He said he valued my youthful energy and optimistic outlook, then offered me a minority stake with stock options that would take five years to vest. The bastard." + +"Tell me about it," Donna coaxes sympathetically. "Here we are, stranded among idiopathic types, not among them a single multiplex -" + +"Damn straight." Another bottle of Bud appears in Glashwiecz'a hands. "One moment I'm standing in this apartment in Paris facing total humiliation by a cross-dressing commie asshole called Macx and his slimy French manager bitch, and the next I'm on the carpet in front of my alter ego's desk and he's offering me a job as junior partner. It's seventeen years later, all the weird nonsense that guy Macx was getting up to is standard business practice, and there's six of me in the outer office taking research notes because myself-as-senior-partner doesn't trust anyone else to work with him. It's humiliating, that's what it is." + +"Which is why you're here." Donna waits while he takes a deep swig from the bottle. + +"Yeah. Better than working for myself, I can tell you - it's not like being self-employed. You know how you sometimes get distant from your work? It's really bad when you see yourself from the outside with another half gigasecond of experience and the new-you isn't just distant from the client base, he's distant from the you-you. So I went back to college and crammed up on artificial intelligence law and ethics, the jurisprudence of uploading, and recursive tort. Then I volunteered to come out here. He's still handling /{her}/ account, and I figured -" Glashwiecz shrugged. + +"Did any of the delta-yous contest the arrangement?" asks Donna, spawning ghosts to focus in on him from all angles. For a moment, she wonders if this is wise. Glashwiecz is dangerous - the power he wields over Amber's mother, to twist her arm into extending his power of attorney, hints at dark secrets. Maybe there's more to her persistent lawsuits than a simple family feud? + +Glashwiecz's face is a study in perspectives. "Oh, one did," he says dismissively: One of Donna's viewports captures the contemptuous twitch in his cheek. "I left her in my apartment freezer. Figured it'd be a while before anybody noticed. It's not murder - I'm still here, right? - and I'm not about to claim tort against myself. I think. It'd be a left-recursive lawsuit, anyway, if I did it to myself." + +"The aliens," prompts Donna, "and the trial by combat. What's your take on that?" + +Glashwiecz sneers. "Little bitch-queen takes after her father, doesn't she? He's a bastard, too. The competitive selection filter she's imposed is evil - it'll cripple her society if she leaves it in place for too long, but in the short run, it's a major advantage. So she wants me to trade for my life, and I don't get to lay my formal claim against her unless I can outperform her pet day trader, that punk from Marseilles. Yes? What he doesn't know is, I've got an edge. Full disclosure." He lifts his bottle drunkenly. "Y'see, I know that /{cat}/. One that's gotta brown @-sign on its side, right? It used to belong to queenie-darling's old man, Manfred, the bastard. You'll see. Her Mom, Pamela, Manfred's ex, she's my client in this case. And she gave me the cat's ackle keys. Access control." (Hic.) "Get ahold of its brains and grab that damn translation layer it stole from the CETI@home mob. /{Then}/ I can talk to them straight." + +The drunken, future-shocked lawyer is on a roll. "I'll get their shit, and I'll disassemble it. Disassembly is the future of industry, y'know?" + +"Disassembly?" asks the reporter, watching him in disgusted fascination from behind her mask of objectivity. + +"Hell, yeah. There's a singularity going on, that implies disequilibrium. An' wherever there's a disequilibrium, someone is going to get /{rich}/ disassembling the leftovers. Listen, I once knew this econo-economist, that's what he was. Worked for the Eurofeds, rubber fetishist. He tole me about this fact'ry near Barcelona. It had a disassembly line running in it. Spensive servers in boxes'd roll in at one end. Be unpacked. Then workers'd take the cases off, strip the disk drives, memory, processors, bits'n'guts out. Bag and tag job. Throw the box, what's left, 'cause it wasn't worth dick. Thing is, the manufact'rer charged so much for parts, it was worth their while to buy whole machines'n'strip them. To bits. And sell the bits. Hell, they got an enterprise award for ingenuity! All 'cause they knew that /{disassembly}/ was the wave of the future." + +"What happened to the factory?" asks Donna, unable to tear her eyes away. + +Glashwiecz waves an empty bottle at the starbow that stretches across the ceiling: "Ah, who gives a fuck? They closedown round about" (hic) "ten years 'go. Moore's Law topped out, killed the market. But disassembly - production line cannibalism - it'sa way to go. Take old assets an' bring new life to them. A fully 'preciated fortune." He grins, eyes unfocussed with greed. "'S'what I'm gonna do to those space lobsters. Learn to talk their language an'll never know what hit 'em." + +* * * + +The tiny starship drifts in high orbit above a turbid brown soup of atmosphere. Deep in the gravity well of Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},, it's a speck of dust trapped between two light sources: the brilliant sapphire stare of Amber's propulsion lasers in Jovian orbit, and the emerald insanity of the router itself, a hypertoroid spun from strange matter. + +The bridge of the /{Field Circus}/ is in constant use at this time, a meeting ground for minds with access to the restricted areas. Pierre is spending more and more time here, finding it a convenient place to focus his trading campaign and arbitrage macros. At the same time that Donna is picking the multiplexed lawyer's strategy apart, Pierre is present in neomorphic form - a quicksilver outline of humanity, six-armed and two-headed, scanning with inhuman speed through tensor maps of the information traffic density surrounding the router's clump of naked singularities. + +There's a flicker in the emptiness at the rear of the bridge, then Su Ang has always been there. She watches Pierre in contemplative silence for a minute. "Do you have a moment?" + +Pierre superimposes himself: One shadowy ghost keeps focused on the front panel, but another instance turns round, crosses his arms, waits for her to speak. + +"I know you're busy -" she begins, then stops. "Is it /{that}/ important?" she asks. + +"It is." Pierre blurs, resynchronizing his instances. "The router - there are four wormholes leading off from it, did you know that? Each of them is radiating at about 1011 Kelvins, and every wavelength is carrying data connections, multiplexed, with a protocol stack that's at least eleven layers deep but maybe more - they show signs of self-similarity in the framing headers. You know how much data that is? It's about 1012 times as much as our high-bandwidth uplink from home. But compared to what's on the other side of the 'holes -" he shakes his head. + +"It's big?" + +"It's unimaginably big! These wormholes, they're a /{low-bandwidth}/ link compared to the minds they're hooking up to." He blurs in front of her, unable to stay still and unable to look away from the front panel. Excitement or agitation? Su Ang can't tell. With Pierre, sometimes the two states are indistinguishable. He gets emotional easily. "I think we have the outline of the answer to the Fermi paradox. Transcendents don't go traveling because they can't get enough bandwidth - trying to migrate through one of these wormholes would be like trying to download your mind into a fruit fly, if they are what I think they are - and the slower-than-light route is out, too, because they couldn't take enough computronium along. Unless -" + +He's off again. But before he can blur out, Su Ang steps across and lays hands on him. "Pierre. Calm down. Disengage. Empty yourself." + +"I can't!" He really /{is}/ agitated, she sees. "I've got to figure out the best trading strategy to get Amber off the hook with that lawsuit, then tell her to get us out of here; being this close to the router is seriously dangerous! The Wunch are the least of it." + +"Stop." + +He pauses his multiplicity of presences, converges on a single identity focused on the here and now. "Yes?" + +"That's better." She walks round him, slowly. "You've got to learn to deal with stress more appropriately." + +"Stress!" Pierre snorts. He shrugs, an impressive gesture with three sets of shoulder blades. "That's something I can turn off whenever I need to. Side effect of this existence; we're pigs in cyberspace, wallowing in fleshy simulations, but unable to experience the new environment in the raw. What did you want from me, Ang? Honestly? I'm a busy man, I've got a trading network to set up." + +"We've got a problem with the Wunch right now, even if you think something worse is out there," Ang says patiently. "Boris thinks they're parasites, negative-sum gamers who stalk newbies like us. Glashwiecz is apparently talking about cutting a deal with them. Amber's suggestion is that you ignore them completely, cut them out, and talk to anyone else who'll listen." + +"Anyone else who'll listen, right," Pierre says heavily. "Any other gems of wisdom to pass on from the throne?" + +Ang takes a deep breath. He's infuriating, she realizes. And worst of all, he doesn't realize. Infuriating but cute. "You're setting up a trading network, yes?" she asks. + +"Yes. A standard network of independent companies, instantiated as cellular automata within the Ring Imperium switched legal service environment." He relaxes slightly. "Each one has access to a compartmentalized chunk of intellectual property and can call on the corrected parser we got from that cat. They're set up to communicate with a blackboard system - a souk - and I'm bringing up a link to the router, a multicast link that'll broadcast the souk's existence to anyone who's listening. Trade ..." his eyebrows furrow. "There are at least two different currency standards in this network, used to buy quality-of-service precedence and bandwidth. They depreciate with distance, as if the whole concept of money was invented to promote the development of long-range network links. If I can get in first, when Glashwiecz tries to cut in on the dealing by offering IP at discounted rates -" + +"He's not going to, Pierre," she says as gently as possible. "Listen to what I said: Glashwiecz is going to focus on the Wunch. He's going to offer them a deal. Amber wants you to /{ignore}/ them. Got that?" + +"Got it." There's a hollow /{bong!}/ from one of the communication bells. "Hey, that's interesting." + +"What is?" She stretches, neck extending snakelike so that she can see the window on underlying reality that's flickered into existence in the air before him. + +"An ack from ..." he pauses, then plucks a neatly reified concept from the screen in front of him and presents it to her in a silvery caul of light. "... about two hundred light-years away! Someone wants to talk." He smiles. Then the front panel workstation bong's again. "Hey again. I wonder what that says." + +It's the work of a moment to pipe the second message through the translator. Oddly, it doesn't translate at first. Pierre has to correct for some weird destructive interference in the fake lobster network before it'll spill its guts. "That's interesting," he says. + +"I'll say." Ang lets her neck collapse back to normal. "I'd better go tell Amber." + +"You do that," Pierre says worriedly. He makes eye contact with her, but what she's hoping to see in his face just isn't there. He's wearing his emotions entirely on the surface. "I'm not surprised their translator didn't want to pass that message along." + +"It's a deliberately corrupted grammar," Ang murmurs, and bangs out in the direction of Amber's audience chamber; "and they're actually making threats." The Wunch, it seems, have acquired a /{very}/ bad reputation somewhere along the line - and Amber needs to know. + +* * * + +Glashwiecz leans toward Lobster Number One, stomach churning. It's only a real-time kilosecond since his bar-room interview, but in the intervening subjective time, he's abolished a hangover, honed his brief, and decided to act. In the Tuileries. "You've been lied to," he confides quietly, trusting the privacy ackles that he browbeat Amber's mother into giving him - access lists that give him a degree of control over the regime within this virtual universe that the cat dragged in. + +"Lied? Context rendered horizontal in past, or subjected to grammatical corruption? Linguistic evil?" + +"The latter." Glashwiecz enjoys this, even though it forces him to get rather closer to the two-meter-long virtual crustacean than he'd like. Showing a mark how they've been scammed is always good, especially when you hold the keys to the door of the cage they're locked inside. "They are not telling you the truth about this system." + +"We received assurances," Lobster Number One says clearly. Its mouthparts move ceaselessly - the noise comes from somewhere inside its head. "You do not share this phenotype. Why?" + +"That information will cost you," says Glashwiecz. "I am willing to provide it on credit." + +They haggle briefly. An exchange rate in questions is agreed, as is a trust metric to grade the answers by. "Disclose all," insists the Wunch negotiator. + +"There are multiple sentient species on the world we come from," says the lawyer. "The form you wear belongs to only one - one that wanted to get away from the form /{I}/ wear, the original conscious tool-creating species. Some of the species today are artificial, but all of us trade information for self-advantage." + +"This is good to know," the lobster assures him. "We like to buy species." + +"You buy species?" Glashwiecz cocks his head. + +"We have the unbearable yearning to be not-what-we-are," says the lobster. "Novelty, surprise! Flesh rots and wood decays. We seek the new being-ness of aliens. Give us your somatotype, give us all your thoughts, and we will dream you over." + +"I think something might be arranged," Glashwiecz concedes. "So you want to be - no, to lease the rights to temporarily be human? Why is that?" + +"Untranslatable concept #3 means untranslatable concept #4. God told us to." + +"Okay, I think I'll just have to take that on trust for now. What is your true form?" he asks. + +"Wait and I show you," says the lobster. It begins to shudder. + +"What are you doing -" + +"Wait." The lobster twitches, writhing slightly, like a portly businessman adjusting his underwear after a heavy business lunch. Disturbing shapes move, barely visible through the thick chitinous armor. "We want your help," the lobster explains, voice curiously muffled. "Want to establish direct trade links. Physical emissaries, yes?" + +"Yes, that's very good," Glashwiecz agrees excitedly: It's exactly what he's hoped for, the sought-after competitive advantage that will prove his fitness in Amber's designated trial by corporate combat. "You're going to deal with us directly without using that shell interface?" + +"Agreed." The lobster trails off into muffled silence; little crunching noises trickle out of its carapace. Then Glashwiecz hears footsteps behind him on the gravel path. + +"What are you doing here?" he demands, looking round. It's Pierre, back in standard human form - a sword hangs from his belt, and there's a big wheel-lock pistol in his hands. "Hey!" + +"Step away from the alien, lawyer," Pierre warns, raising the gun. + +Glashwiecz glances back at Lobster Number One. It's pulled its front inside the protective shell, and it's writhing now, rocking from side to side alarmingly. Something inside the shell is turning black, acquiring depth and texture. "I stand on counsel's privilege," Glashwiecz insists. "Speaking as this alien's attorney, I must protest in the strongest terms -" + +Without warning, the lobster lurches forward and rises up on its rear legs. It reaches out with huge claws, chellipeds coated with spiny hairs, and grabs Glashwiecz by his arms. "Hey!" + +Glashwiecz tries to turn away, but the lobster is already looming over him, maxillipeds and maxillae reaching out from its head. There's a sickening crunch as one of his elbow joints crumbles, humerus shattered by the closing jaws of a chelliped. He draws breath to scream, then the four small maxillae grip his head and draw it down toward the churning mandibles. + +Pierre scurries sideways, trying to find a line of fire on the lobster that doesn't pass through the lawyer's body. The lobster isn't cooperating. It turns on the spot, clutching Glashwiecz's convulsing body to itself. There's a stench of shit, and blood is squirting from its mouthparts. Something is very wrong with the biophysics model here, the realism turned up way higher than normal. + +"Merde," whispers Pierre. He fumbles with the bulky trigger, and there's a faint whirring sound but no explosion. + +More wet crunching sounds follow as the lobster demolishes the lawyer's face and swallows convulsively, sucking his head and shoulders all the way into its gastric mill. + +Pierre glances at the heavy handgun. "/{Shit}/!" he screams. He glances back at the lobster, then turns and runs for the nearest wall. There are other lobsters loose in the formal garden. "/{Amber, emergency!}/" he sends over their private channel. "/{Hostiles in the Louvre!}/" + +The lobster that's taken Glashwiecz hunkers down over the body and quivers. Pierre desperately winds the spring on his gun, too rattled to check that it's loaded. He glances back at the alien intruder. /{They've sprung the biophysics model}/, he sends. /{I could die in here}/, he realizes, momentarily shocked. /{This instance of me could die forever}/. + +The lobster shell sitting in the pool of blood and human wreckage splits in two. A humanoid form begins to uncurl from within it, pale-skinned and glistening wet: vacant blue eyes flicker from side to side as it stretches and stands upright, wobbling uncertainty on its two unstable legs. Its mouth opens and a strange gobbling hiss comes forth. + +Pierre recognizes her. "What are you doing here?" he yells. + +The nude woman turns toward him. She's the spitting image of Amber's mother, except for the chellipeds she has in place of hands. She hisses "/{Equity!}/" and takes a wobbly step toward him, pincers clacking. + +Pierre winds the firing handle again. There's a crash of gunpowder and smoke, a blow that nearly sprains his elbow, and the nude woman's chest erupts in a spray of blood. She snarls at him wordlessly and staggers - then ragged flaps of bloody meat close together, knitting shut with improbable speed. She resumes her advance. + +"I told Amber the Matrix would be more defensible," Pierre snarls, dropping the firearm and drawing his sword as the alien turns in his direction and raises arms that end in pincers. "We need guns, damit! Lots of guns!" + +"Waaant equity," hisses the alien intruder. + +"You /{can't}/ be Pamela Macx," says Pierre, his back to the wall, keeping the sword point before the lobster-woman-thing. "She's in a nunnery in Armenia or something. You pulled that out of Glashwiecz's memories - he worked for her, didn't he?" + +Claws go snicker-snack before his face. "Investment partnership!" screeches the harridan. "Seat on the board! Eat brains for breakfast!" It lurches sideways, trying to get past his guard. + +"I don't fucking /{believe}/ this," Pierre snarls. The Wunch-creature jumps at just the wrong moment and slides onto the point of his blade, claws clacking hungrily. Pierre slides away, nearly leaving his skin on the rough bricks of the wall - and what's good for one is good for all, as the hacked model in force in this reality compels the attacker to groan and collapse. + +Pierre pulls the sword out then, nervously glancing over his shoulder, whacks at her neck. The impact jars his arm, but he keeps hacking until there's blood spraying everywhere, blood on his shirt, blood on his sword, and a round thing sitting on a stump of savaged neck nearby, jaw working soundlessly in undeath. + +He looks at it for a moment, then his stomach rebels and tries to empty itself into the mess. "/{Where the hell is everybody}/?" he broadcasts on the private channel. "/{Hostiles in the Louvre!}/" + +He straightens up, gasping for breath. He feels /{alive}/, frightened and appalled and exhilarated simultaneously. The crackle of bursting shells on all sides drowns out the birdsong as the Wunch's emissaries adopt a variety of new and supposedly more lethal forms. "/{They don't seem to be very clear on how to take over a simulation space}/," he adds. "/{Maybe we already are}/ untranslatable concept number #1 as far as they're concerned." + +"/{Don't worry, I've cut off the incoming connection}/," sends Su Ang. "/{This is just a bridgehead force; the invasion packets are}/ being filtered out." + +Blank-eyed men and women in dusty black uniforms are hatching from the lobster shells, stumbling and running around the grounds of the royal palace like confused Huguenot invaders. + +Boris winks into reality behind Pierre. "Which way?" he demands, pulling out an anachronistic but lethal katana. + +"Over here. Let's work this together." Pierre jacks his emotional damper up to a dangerously high setting, suppressing natural aversion reflexes and temporarily turning himself into a sociopathic killer. He stalks toward an infant lobster-thing with big black eyes and a covering of white hair that mewls at him from a rose bed, and Boris looks away while he kills it. Then one of the larger ones makes the mistake of lunging at Boris, and he chops at it reflexively. + +Some of the Wunch try to fight back when Pierre and Boris try to kill them, but they're handicapped by their anatomy, a curious mixture of crustacean and human, claw and mandible against sword and dagger. When they bleed the ground soaks with the cuprous hue of lobster juice. + +"Let's fork," suggests Boris. "Get this over with." Pierre nods, dully - everything around him is wrapped in a layer of don't-care, except for a glowing dot of artificial hatred - and they fork, multiplying their state vectors to take full advantage of the virtualization facilities of this universe. There's no need for reinforcements; the Wunch focused on attacking the biophysics model of the universe, making it mimic a physical reality as closely as possible, and paid no attention to learning the more intricate tactics that war in a virtual space permits. + +Presently Pierre finds himself in the audience chamber, face and hands and clothing caked in hideous gore, leaning on the back of Amber's throne. There's only one of him now. One of Boris - the only one? - is standing near the doorway. He can barely remember what has happened, the horrors of parallel instances of mass murder blocked from his long-term memory by a high-pass trauma filter. "It looks clear," he calls aloud. "What shall we do now?" + +"Wait for Catherine de Médicis to show up," says the cat, its grin materializing before him like a numinous threat. "Amber /{always}/ finds a way to blame her mother. Or didn't you already know that?" + +Pierre glances at the bloody mess on the footpath outside where the first lobster-woman attacked Glashwiecz. "I already did for her, I think." He remembers the action in the third person, all subjectivity edited out. "The family resemblance was striking," the thread that still remembers her in working memory murmurs: "I just hope it's only skin-deep." Then he forgets the act of apparent murder forever. "Tell the Queen I'm ready to talk." + +* * * + +_1 Welcome to the downslope on the far side of the curve of accelerating progress. + +_1 Back in the solar system, Earth orbits through a dusty tunnel in space. Sunlight still reaches the birth world, but much of the rest of the star's output has been trapped by the growing concentric shells of computronium built from the wreckage of the innermost planets. + +_1 Two billion or so mostly unmodified humans scramble in the wreckage of the phase transition, not understanding why the vasty superculture they so resented has fallen quiet. Little information leaks through their fundamentalist firewalls, but what there is shows a disquieting picture of a society where there are no /{bodies}/ anymore. Utility foglets blown on the wind form aerogel towers larger than cyclones, removing the last traces of physical human civilization from most of Europe and the North American coastlines. Enclaves huddle behind their walls and wonder at the monsters and portents roaming the desert of postindustrial civilization, mistaking acceleration for collapse. + +_1 The hazy shells of computronium that ring the sun - concentric clouds of nanocomputers the size of rice grains, powered by sunlight, orbiting in shells like the packed layers of a Matrioshka doll - are still immature, holding barely a thousandth of the physical planetary mass of the system, but they already support a classical computational density of 1042 MIPS; enough to support a billion civilizations as complex as the one that existed immediately before the great disassembly. The conversion hasn't yet reached the gas giants, and some scant outer-system enclaves remain independent - Amber's Ring Imperium still exists as a separate entity, and will do so for some years to come - but the inner solar system planets, with the exception of Earth, have been colonized more thoroughly than any dusty NASA proposal from the dawn of the space age could have envisaged. + +_1 From outside the Accelerated civilization, it isn't really possible to know what's going on inside. The problem is bandwidth: While it's possible to send data in and get data out, the sheer amount of computation going on in the virtual spaces of the Acceleration dwarfs any external observer. Inside that swarm, minds a trillion or more times as complex as humanity think thoughts as far beyond human imagination as a microprocessor is beyond a nematode worm. A million random human civilizations flourish in worldscapes tucked in the corner of this world-mind. Death is abolished, life is triumphant. A thousand ideologies flower, human nature adapted where necessary to make this possible. Ecologies of thought are forming in a Cambrian explosion of ideas: For the solar system is finally rising to consciousness, and mind is no longer restricted to the mere kilotons of gray fatty meat harbored in fragile human skulls. + +_1 Somewhere in the Acceleration, colorless green ideas adrift in furious sleep remember a tiny starship launched years ago, and pay attention. Soon, they realize, the starship will be in position to act as their proxy in an ages-long conversation. Negotiations for access to Amber's extrasolar asset commence; the Ring Imperium prospers, at least for a while. + +_1 But first, the operating software on the human side of the network link will require an upgrade. + +* * * + +The audience chamber in the /{Field Circus}/ is crammed. Everybody aboard the ship - except the still-frozen lawyer and the alien barbarian intruders - is present. They've just finished reviewing the recordings of what happened in the Tuileries, of Glashwiecz's fatal last conversation with the Wunch, the resulting fight for survival. And now the time has come for decisions. + +"I'm not saying you have to follow me," says Amber, addressing her court; "just, it's what we came here for. We've established that there's enough bandwidth to transmit people and their necessary support VMs; we've got some basic expectancy of goodwill at the other end, or at least an agalmic willingness to gift us with advice about the untrustworthiness of the Wunch. /{I}/ propose to copy myself through and see what's at the other side of the wormhole. What's more, I'm going to suspend myself on this side and hand over to whichever instance of me comes back, unless there's a long hiatus. How long, I haven't decided yet. Are you guys happy to join me?" + +Pierre stands behind her throne, hands on the back. Looking down over her head, at the cat in her lap, he's sure he sees it narrow its eyes at him. /{Funny}/, he thinks, /{we're talking about jumping down a rabbit hole and trusting whoever lives at the other end with our personalities. After seeing the Wunch. Does this make sense}/? + +"Forgive, please, but am not stupid," says Boris. "This is Fermi paradox territory, no? Instantaneous network exists, is traversable, with bandwidth adequate for human-equivalent minds. Where are alien visitors, in history? Must be overriding reason for absence. Think will wait here and see what comes back. /{Then}/ make up mind to drink the poison kool-aid." + +"I've got half a mind to transmit myself through without a back-up," says someone else - "but that's okay; half a mind is all we've got the bandwidth for." Halfhearted laughter shores up his wisecrack, supports a flagging determination to press through. + +"I'm with Boris," says Su Ang. She glances at Pierre, catches his eye: Suddenly a number of things become clear to him. He shakes his head minutely. /{You never had a chance - I belong to Amber}/, he thinks, but deletes the thought before he can send it to her. Maybe in another instantiation his issues with the Queen's /{droit de seigneur}/ would have bulked up larger, splintered his determination; maybe in another world it has already happened? "I think this is very rash," she says in a hurry. "We don't know enough about post-singularity civilizations." + +"It's not a singularity," Amber says waspishly. "It's just a brief burst of acceleration. Like cosmological inflation." + +"Smooths out inhomogeneities in the initial structure of consciousness," purrs the cat. "Don't I get a vote?" + +"You do." Amber sighs. She glances round. "Pierre?" + +Heart in his mouth: "I'm with you." + +She smiles, brilliantly. "Well then. Will the nay sayers please leave the universe?" + +Suddenly, the audience chamber is half-empty. + +"I'm setting a watchdog timer for a billion seconds into the future, to restart us from this point if the router doesn't send anyone back in the intervening time," she announces gravely, taking in the serious-faced avatars of those who remain. Surprised: "Sadeq! I didn't think this was your type of -" + +He doesn't smile: "Would I be true to my faith if I wasn't prepared to bring the words of Mohammed, peace be unto him, to those who may never have heard his name?" + +Amber nods. "I guess." + +"Do it," Pierre says urgently. "You can't keep putting it off forever." + +Aineko raises her head: "Spoilsport!" + +"Okay." Amber nods. "Let's /{do}/ -" + +She punches an imaginary switch, and time stops. + +* * * + +At the far end of a wormhole, two hundred light-years distant in real space, coherent photons begin to dance a story of human identity before the sensoria of those who watch. And all is at peace in orbit around Hyundai ^[+4904}^/,{-56},, for a while ... + +* * * + +Chapter 6: Nightfall + +A synthetic gemstone the size of a Coke can falls through silent darkness. The night is quiet as the grave, colder than midwinter on Pluto. Gossamer sails as fine as soap bubbles droop, the gust of sapphire laser light that inflated them long since darkened. Ancient starlight picks out the outline of a huge planetlike body beneath the jewel-and-cobweb corpse of the starwisp. + +Eight Earth years have passed since the good ship /{Field Circus}/ slipped into close orbit around the frigid brown dwarf Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},. Five years have gone by since the launch lasers of the Ring Imperium shut down without warning, stranding the light-sail-powered craft three light-years from home. There has been no response from the router, the strange alien artifact in orbit around the brown dwarf, since the crew of the starwisp uploaded themselves through its strange quantum entanglement interface for transmission to whatever alien network it connects to. In fact, nothing happens; nothing save the slow trickle of seconds, as a watchdog timer counts down the moments remaining until it is due to resurrect stored snapshots of the crew, on the assumption that their uploaded copies are beyond help. + +Meanwhile, outside the light cone - + +* * * + +Amber jolts into wakefulness, as if from a nightmare. She sits bolt upright, a thin sheet falling from her chest; air circulating around her back chills her rapidly, cold sweat evaporating. She mutters aloud, unable to subvocalize, "Where am I - oh. A bedroom. How did I get here?" /{Mumble}/. "Oh, I see." Her eyes widen in horror. "/{It's not a dream}/ ..." + +"Greetings, human Amber," says a ghost-voice that seems to come from nowhere: "I see you are awake. Would you like anything?" + +Amber rubs her eyes tiredly. Leaning against the bedstead, she glances around cautiously. She takes in a bedside mirror, her reflection in it: a young woman, gaunt in the manner of those whose genome bears the p53 calorie-restriction hack, she has disheveled blonde hair and dark eyes. She could pass for a dancer or a soldier; not, perhaps, a queen. "What's going on? Where am I? Who are you, and /{what am I doing in your head?}/" + +Her eyes narrow. Analytical intellect comes to the fore as she takes stock of her surroundings. "The router," she mutters. Structures of strange matter orbit a brown dwarf scant light-years from Earth. "How long ago did we come through?" Glancing round, she sees a room walled in slabs of close-fitting stone. A window bay is recessed into them, after the style of the Crusader castles many centuries in the past, but there's no glass in it - just a blank white screen. The only furniture in the room, besides a Persian carpet on the cold flagstones, is the bed she sits upon. She's reminded of a scene from an old movie, Kubrick's enigma; this whole set-up has got to be deliberate, and it isn't funny. + +"I'm waiting," she announces, and leans back against the headboard. + +"According to our records this reaction indicates that you are now fully self-aware," says the ghost. "This is good. You have not been conscious for a very long time. Explanations will be complex and discursive. Can I offer you refreshments? What would you like?" + +"Coffee, if you have it. Bread and hummus. Something to wear." Amber crosses her arms, abruptly self-conscious. "I'd prefer to have management ackles to this universe, though. As realities go, it's a bit lacking in creature comforts." Which isn't entirely true - it seems to have a comprehensive, human-friendly biophysics model, it's not just a jumped-up first-person shooter. Her eyes focus on her left forearm, where tanned skin and a puckered dime of scar tissue record a youthful accident with a pressure seal in Jovian orbit. Amber freezes for a moment. Her lips move in silence, but she's locked into place in this universe, unable to split or conjoin nested realities just by calling subroutines that have been spliced into the corners of her mind since she was a teenager. Finally, she asks, "How long have I been dead?" + +"Longer than you were alive, by orders of magnitude," says the ghost. A tray laden with pita breads, hummus, and olives congeals from the air above her bed, and a wardrobe appears at one side of the room. "I can begin the explanation now or wait for you to finish eating. Which would you prefer?" + +Amber glances about again, then fixes on the white screen in the window bay. "Give it to me right now. I can take it," she says, quietly bitter. "I like to understand my mistakes as soon as possible." + +"We-us can tell that you are a human of determination," says the ghost, a hint of pride entering its voice. "That is a good thing, Amber. You will need all of your resolve if you are going to survive here ..." + +* * * + +It is the time of repentance in a temple beside a tower that looms above a dry plain, and the thoughts of the priest who lives in the tower are tinged with regret. It is Ashura, the tenth day of Muhurram, according to a real-time clock still tuned to the pace of a different era: the one thousand, three hundred and fortieth anniversary of the martyrdom of the Third Imam, the Sayyid ash-Shuhada. + +The priest of the tower has spent an indefinite time in prayer, locked in an eternal moment of meditation and recitation. Now, as the vast red sun drifts close to the horizon of the infinite desert, his thoughts drift toward the present. Ashura is a very special day, a day of atonement for collective guilt, evil committed through inactivity; but it is in Sadeq's nature to look outwards toward the future. This is, he knows, a failing - but also characteristic of his generation. That's the generation of the Shi'ite clergy that reacted to the excesses of the previous century, the generation that withdrew the /{ulama}/ from temporal power, retreated from the velyat i-faqih of Khomenei and his successors, left government to the people, and began to engage fully with the paradoxes of modernity. Sadeq's focus, his driving obsession in theology, is a program of reappraisal of eschatology and cosmology. Here in a tower of white sun-baked clay, on an endless plain that exists only in the imaginary spaces of a starship the size of a soft drink can, the priest spends his processor cycles in contemplation of one of the most vicious problems ever to confront a /{mujtahid}/ - the Fermi paradox. + +(Enrico Fermi was eating his lunch one day, and his colleagues were discussing the possibility that sophisticated civilizations might populate other worlds. "Yes," he said, "but if this is so, why haven't they already come visiting?") + +Sadeq finishes his evening devotions in near silence, then stands, stretches as is his wont, and leaves the small and lonely courtyard at the base of the tower. The gate - a wrought-iron gate, warmed by sunlight - squeals slightly as he opens it. Glancing at the upper hinge, he frowns, willing it clean and whole. The underlying physics model acknowledges his access controls: a thin rim of red around the pin turns silvery-fresh, and the squeaking ceases. Closing the gate behind him, Sadeq enters the tower. + +He climbs with a heavy, even tread a spiral staircase snaking ever upward above him. Narrow slit-windows line the outer wall of the staircase. Through each of them he sees a different world. Out there, nightfall in the month of Ramadan. And through the next, green misty skies and a horizon too close by far. Sadeq carefully avoids thinking about the implications of this manifold space. Coming from prayer, from a sense of the sacred, he doesn't want to lose his proximity to his faith. He's far enough from home as it is, and there is much to consider. He is surrounded by strange and curious ideas, all but lost in a corrosive desert of faith. + +At the top of the staircase, Sadeq comes to a door of aged wood bound in iron. It doesn't belong here: It's a cultural and architectural anomaly. The handle is a loop of black metal. Sadeq regards it as if it's the head of an asp, poised to sting. Nevertheless, he reaches out and turns the handle, steps across the threshold into a palace out of fantasy. + +/{None of this is real}/, he reminds himself. /{It's no more real than an illusion conjured by one of the jinni of the thousand nights and one night}/. Nevertheless, he can't save himself from smiling at the scene - a sardonic smile of self-deprecating humor, tempered by frustration. + +Sadeq's captors have stolen his soul and locked it - him - in a very strange prison, a temple with a tower that rises all the way to Paradise. It's the whole classical litany of medievalist desires, distilled from fifteen hundred years of literature. Colonnaded courtyards, cool pools lined with rich mosaics, rooms filled with every imaginable dumb matter luxury, endless banquets awaiting his appetite - and dozens of beautiful un-women, eager to fulfill his every fantasy. Sadeq, being human, has fantasies by the dozen, but he doesn't dare permit himself to succumb to temptation. /{I'm not dead}/, he reasons. /{Therefore, how can I be in Paradise? Therefore, this must be a false paradise, a temptation sent to lead me astray. Probably. Unless I am dead, because Allah, peace be unto him, considers a human soul separated from its body to be dead. But if that's so, isn't uploading a sin? In which case, this can't be}/ Paradise because I am a sinner. /{Besides which}/, this whole setup is /{so}/ puerile! + +Sadeq has always been inclined to philosophical inquiry, and his vision of the afterlife is more cerebral than most, involving ideas as questionable within the framework of Islam as those of Teilhard de Chardin were to the twentieth-century Catholic church. If there's one key indicator of a false paradise in his eschatology, it's two-and-seventy brainlessly beautiful houris waiting to do his bidding. So it follows that he can't really be dead ... + +The whole question of reality is so vexing that Sadeq does what he does every night. He strides heedlessly across priceless works of art, barging hastily through courtyards and passageways, ignoring niches in which nearly naked supermodels lie with their legs apart, climbing stairs - until he comes to a small unfurnished room with a single high window in one wall. There he sits on the floor, legs crossed, meditating; not in prayer, but in a more tightly focused ratiocination. Every false night (for there is no way to know how fast time is passing, outside this cyberspace pocket), Sadeq sits and /{thinks}/, grappling with Descartes's demon in the solitude of his own mind. And the question he asks himself every night is the same: /{Can I tell if this is the true hell? And if it is not, how can I escape?}/ + +* * * + +The ghost tells Amber that she has been dead for just under a third of a million years. She has been reinstantiated from storage - and has died again - many times in the intervening period, but she has no memory of this; she is a fork from the main bough, and the other branches expired in lonely isolation. + +The business of resurrection does not, in and of itself, distress Amber unduly. Born in the post-Moravec era, she merely finds some aspects of the ghost's description dissatisfyingly incomplete. It's like saying she was drugged and brought hither without stating whether by plane, train, or automobile. + +She doesn't have a problem with the ghost's assertion that she is nowhere near Earth - indeed, that she is approximately eighty thousand light-years away. When she and the others took the risk of uploading themselves through the router they found in orbit around Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56}, they'd understood that they could end up anywhere or nowhere. But the idea that she's still within the light cone of her departure strikes her as dubious. The original SETI broadcast strongly implied that the router is part of a network of self-replicating instantaneous communicators, spawning and spreading between the cold brown dwarf stars that litter the galaxy. She'd somehow expected to be much farther from home by now. + +Somewhat more disturbing is the ghost's assertion that the human genotype has rendered itself extinct at least twice, that its home planet is unknown, and that Amber is nearly the only human left in the public archives. At this point, she interrupts. "I hardly see what this has to do with me!" Then she blows across her coffee glass, trying to cool the contents. "I'm dead," she explains, with an undertone of knowing sarcasm in her voice. "Remember? I just got here. A thousand seconds ago, subjective time, I was in the control node of a starship, discussing what to do with the router we were in orbit around. We agreed to send ourselves through it, as a trade mission. Then I woke up in bed here in the umpty-zillionth century, wherever and whatever /{here}/ is. Without access to any reality ackles or augmentation, I can't even tell whether this is real or an embedded simulation. You're going to have to explain /{why}/ you need an old version of me before I can make sense of my situation - and I can tell you, I'm not going to help you until I know who you are. And speaking of that, what about the others? Where are they? I wasn't the only one, you know?" + +The ghost freezes in place for a moment, and Amber feels a watery rush of terror: /{Have I gone too far}/? she wonders. + +"There has been an unfortunate accident," the ghost announces portentously. It morphs from a translucent copy of Amber's own body into the outline of a human skeleton, elaborate bony extensions simulating an osteosarcoma of more-than-lethal proportions. "Consensus-we believe that you are best positioned to remediate the situation. This applies within the demilitarized zone." + +"Demilitarized?" Amber shakes her head, pauses to sip her coffee. "What do you mean? What /{is}/ this place?" + +The ghost flickers again, adopting an abstract rotating hypercube as its avatar. "This space we occupy is a manifold adjacent to the demilitarized zone. The demilitarized zone is a space outside our core reality, itself exposed to entities that cross freely through our firewall, journeying to and from the network outside. We-us use the DMZ to establish the informational value of migrant entities, sapient currency units and the like. We-us banked you upon arrival against future options trades in human species futures." + +"Currency!" Amber doesn't know whether to be amused or horrified - both reactions seem appropriate. "Is that how you treat all your visitors?" + +The ghost ignores her question. "There is a runaway semiotic excursion under way in the zone. We-us believe only you can fix it. If you agree to do, so we will exchange value, pay, reward cooperation, expedite remuneration, manumit, repatriate." + +Amber drains her coffee cup. "Have you ever entered into economic interactions with me, or humans like me, before?" she asks. "If not, why should I trust you? If so, why have you revived me? Are there any more experienced instances of myself running around here?" She raises a skeptical eyebrow at the ghost. "This looks like the start of an abusive relationship." + +The ghost continues to sidestep her attempts to work out where she stands. It flickers into transparency, grows into a hazy window on a landscape of impossible shapes. Clouds sprouting trees drift above a landscape of green, egg-curved hills and cheesecake castles. "Nature of excursion: alien intelligence is loose in the DMZ," it asserts. "Alien is applying invalid semiotics to complex structures designed to sustain trade. You know this alien, Amber. We require solution. Slay the monster, we will give you line of credit. Your own reality to control, insight into trade arrangements, augmented senses, ability to travel. Can even upgrade you to you-we consensus, if desired." + +"This monster." Amber leans forward, staring into the window eagerly. She's half-minded to ignore what she feels is a spurious offer; it doesn't sound too appetizing. /{Upgrade me to a ghost fragment of an alien group mind?}/ she wonders dismissively. "What is this alien?" She feels blind and unsure, stripped of her ability to spawn threads of herself to pursue complex inferences. "Is it part of the Wunch?" + +"Datum unknown. It-them came with you," says the ghost. "Accidentally reactivated some seconds since now. It runs amok in the demilitarized zone. Help us, Amber. Save our hub, or we will be cut off from the network. If that happens, you will die with we-us. Save us ..." + +* * * + +_1 A single memory belonging to someone else unwinds, faster than a guided missile and far more deadly. + +_1 Amber, aged eleven, is a gawky, long-limbed child loose on the streets of Hong Kong, a yokel tourist viewing the hot core of the Middle Kingdom. This is her first and final vacation before the Franklin Trust straps her inside the payload pod of a Shenzhou spaceplane and blasts her into orbit from Xinkiang. She's free for the time being, albeit mortgaged to the tune of several million euros; she's a little taikonaut to be, ready to work for the long years in Jupiter orbit it will take her to pay off the self-propelled options web that owns her. It's not exactly slavery: Thanks to Dad's corporate shell game she doesn't have to worry about Mom chasing her, trying to return her to the posthuman prison of growing up just like an old-fashioned little girl. And now she's got a bit of pocket money, and a room in the Hilton, and her own personal Franklin remote to keep her company, she's decided she's gonna do that eighteenth-century-enlightenment tourist shit and do it /{right}/. + +_1 Because this is her last day at liberty in the randomly evolved biosphere. + +_1 China is where things are at in this decade, hot and dense and full of draconian punishments for the obsolescent. Nationalist fervor to catch up with the west has been replaced by consumerist fervor to own the latest fad gadgets; the most picturesque tourist souvenirs from the quaintly old-fashioned streets of America; the fastest, hottest, smartest, upgrades for body and soul. Hong Kong is hotter and faster than just about anywhere else in China, or in the whole damn world for that matter. This is a place where tourists from Tokyo gawp, cowed and future-shocked by the glamour of high-technology living. + +_1 Walking along Jardine's Bazaar - /{More like Jardine's bizarre}/, she thinks - exposes Amber to a blast of humid noise. Geodesic domes sprout like skeletal mushrooms from the glass-and-chrome roofs of the expensive shopping malls and luxury hotels, threatening to float away on the hot sea breeze. There are no airliners roaring in and out of Kai Tak anymore, no burnished aluminum storm clouds to rain round-eyed passengers on the shopping malls and fish markets of Kowloon and the New Territories. In these tense later days of the War Against Unreason, impossible new shapes move in the sky; Amber gapes upward as a Shenyang F-30 climbs at a near-vertical angle, a mess of incomprehensibly curved flight surfaces vanishing to a perspective point that defies radar as well as eyeballs. The Chinese - fighter? missile platform? supercomputer? - is heading out over the South China Sea to join the endless patrol that reassures the capitalist world that it is being guarded from the Hosts of Denial, the Trouble out of Wa'hab. + +_1 For the moment, she's merely a precocious human child. Amber's subconscious is off-lined by the presence of forceful infowar daemons, the Chinese government censorbots suppressing her cognition of their deadliest weapons. And in the seconds while her mind is as empty as a sucked egg, a thin-faced man with blue hair shoves her in the small of her back and snatches at her shoulder bag. + +_1 "Hey!" she yells, stumbling. Her mind's a blur, optics refusing to respond and grab a biometric model of her assailant. It's the frozen moment, the dead zone when on-line coverage fails, and the thief is running away before she can catch her balance or try to give chase. Plus, with her extensions off-line she doesn't know how to yell "stop, thief!" in Cantonese. + +_1 Seconds later, the fighter is out of visual range and the state censorship field lets up. "Get him, you bastards!" she screams, but the curious shoppers simply stare at the rude foreign child: An elderly woman brandishes a disposable phonecam at her and screeches something back. Amber picks up her feet and runs. Already she can feel the subsonics from her luggage growling at her guts - it's going to make a scene if she doesn't catch up in time. Shoppers scatter, a woman with a baby carriage almost running her down in her panic to get away from it. + +_1 By the time Amber reaches her terrified shoulder bag, the thief has disappeared: She has to spend almost a minute petting the scared luggage before it stops screeching and retracts its spines enough for her to pick it up. And by that time there's a robocop in attendance. "Identify yourself," it rasps in synthetic English. + +_1 Amber stares at her bag in horror: There's a huge gash in the side, and it's far too light. /{It's gone}/, she thinks, despairingly. /{He stole it}/. "Help," she says faintly, holding up her bag for the distant policeman looking through the robot's eyes. "Been stolen." + +_1 "What item missing?" asks the robot. + +_1 "My Hello Kitty," she says, batting her eyelashes, mendacity full-on at maximum utilization, prodding her conscience into submission, warning of dire consequences should the police discover the true nature of her pet cat. "My kitten's been stolen! Can you help me?" + +_1 "Certainly," says the cop, resting a reassuring hand on her shoulder - a hand that turns into a steel armband, as it pushes her into a van and notifies her in formally stilted language that she is under arrest on suspicion of shoplifting and will be required to produce certificates of authenticity and a fully compliant ownership audit for all items in her possession if she wants to prove her innocence. + +_1 By the time Amber's meatbrain realizes that she is being politely arrested, some of her external threads have already started yelling for help and her m-commerce trackers have identified the station she's being taken to by way of click-thru trails and an obliging software license manager. They spawn agents to go notify the Franklin trustees, Amnesty International, the Space and Freedom Party, and her father's lawyers. As she's being booked into a cerise-and-turquoise juvenile offenders holding room by a middle-aged policewoman, the phones on the front desk are already ringing with inquiries from attorneys, fast-food vendors, and a particularly on-the-ball celebrity magazine that's been tracking her father's connections. "Can you help me get my cat back?" she asks the policewoman earnestly. + +_1 "Name," the officer reads, eyes flickering from the simultaneous translation. "To please wax your identity stiffly." + +_1 "My cat has been stolen," Amber insists. + +_1 "Your cat?" The cop looks perplexed, then exasperated. Dealing with foreign teenagers who answer questions with gibberish isn't in her repertoire. "We are asking your name?" + +_1 "No," says Amber. "It's my cat. It has been stolen. My /{cat}/ has been /{stolen}/." + +_1 "Aha! Your papers, please?" + +_1 "Papers?" Amber is growing increasingly worried. She can't feel the outside world; there's a Faraday cage wrapped around the holding cell, and it's claustrophobically quiet inside. "I want my cat! Now!" + +_1 The cop snaps her fingers, then reaches into her own pocket and produces an ID card, which she points to insistently. "Papers," she repeats. "Or else." + +_1 "I don't know what you're talking about!" Amber wails. + +_1 The cop stares at her oddly. "Wait." She rises and leaves, and a minute later, returns with a thin-faced man in a business suit and wire-rimmed glasses that glow faintly. + +_1 "You are making a scene," he says, rudely and abruptly. "What is your name? Tell me truthfully, or you'll spend the night here." + +_1 Amber bursts into tears. "My /{cat's}/ been stolen," she chokes out. + +_1 The detective and the cop obviously don't know how to deal with this scene; it's freaking them out, with its overtones of emotional messiness and sinister diplomatic entanglement. "You wait here," they say, and back out of the cell, leaving her alone with a plastic animatronic koala and a cheap Lebanese coffee machine. + +_1 The implications of her loss - of Aineko's abduction - are sinking in, finally, and Amber is weeping loudly and hopelessly. It's hard to deal with bereavement and betrayal at any age, and the cat has been her wisecracking companion and consolation for a year, the rock of certainty that gave her the strength to break free from her crazy mother. To lose her cat to a body shop in Hong Kong, where she will probably be cut up for spare circuitry or turned into soup is too horrible to contemplate. Filled with despair and hopeless anguish, Amber howls at the interrogation room walls while outside, trapped threads of her consciousness search for backups to synchronize with. + +_1 But after an hour, just as she's quieting down into a slough of raw despair, there's a knock - a knock! - at the door. An inquisitive head pops in. "Please to come with us?" It's the female cop with the bad translationware. She takes in Amber's sobbing and tuts under her breath, but as Amber stands up and shambles toward her, she pulls back. + +_1 At the front desk of a cubicle farm full of police bureaucrats in various states of telepresence, the detective is waiting with a damp cardboard box wrapped in twine. "Please identify," he asks, snipping the string. + +_1 Amber shakes her head, dizzy with the flow of threads homing in to synchronize their memories with her. "Is it -" she begins to ask as the lid comes apart, wet pulp disintegrating. A triangular head pops up, curiously, sniffing the air. Bubbles blow from brown-furred nostrils. "What took you so long?" asks the cat, as she reaches into the box and picks her up, fur wet and matted with seawater. + +* * * + +"If you want me to go fix your alien, for starters I want you to give me reality alteration privileges," says Amber. "Then I want you to find the latest instances of everyone who came here with me - round up the usual suspects - and give /{them}/ root privileges, too. Then we'll want access to the other embedded universes in the DMZ. Finally, I want guns. /{Lots}/ of guns." + +"That may be difficult," says the ghost. "Many other humans reached halting state long since. Is at least one other still alive, but not accessible for duration of eschatological experiment in progress. Not all were recorded with version control engine; others were-is lost in DMZ. We-are can provide you with extreme access to the demilitarized zone, but query the need for kinetic energy weapons." + +Amber sighs. "You guys really /{are}/ media illiterates, aren't you?" She stands up and stretches, feeling a facsimile of sleep's enervation leaching from her muscles. "I'll also need my -" it's on the tip of her tongue: There's something missing. "Hang on. There's something I've forgotten." /{Something important}/, she thinks, puzzled. /{Something that used to be around all the time that would ... know? ... purr? ... help?}/ "Never mind," she hears her lips say. "This other human. I /{really}/ want her. Non-negotiable. All right?" + +"That may be difficult," repeats the ghost. "Entity is looping in a recursively confined universe." + +"Eh?" Amber blinks at it. "Would you mind rephrasing that? Or illustrating?" + +"Illustration:" The ghost folds the air in the room into a glowing ball of plasma, shaped like a Klein bottle. Amber's eyes cross as she looks at it. "Closest reference from human historical database is Descartes's demon. This entity has retreated within a closed space, but is now unsure whether it is objectively real or not. In any event, it refuses to interact." + +"Well, can you get me into that space?" asks Amber. Pocket universes she can deal with; it's part and parcel of her life. "Give me some leverage -" + +"Risk may attach to this course of action," warns the ghost. + +"I don't care," she says irritably. "Just /{put}/ me there. It's someone I know, isn't it? Send me into her dream, and I'll wake her up, okay?" + +"Understood," says the ghost. "Prepare yourself." + +Without any warning, Amber is somewhere else. She glances around, taking in an ornate mosaic floor, whitewashed walls set with open windows through which stars twinkle faintly in the night sky. Her clothing has somehow been replaced by sexy lingerie under a nearly transparent robe, and her hair's grown longer by about half a meter. It's all very disorienting. The walls are stone, and she stands in a doorway to a room with nothing in it but a bed. Occupied by - + +"Shit," she exclaims. "Who are you?" The young and incredibly, classically beautiful woman in the bed looks at her vacantly, then rolls over on her side. She isn't wearing a stitch, she's completely hairless from the ears down, and her languid posture is one of invitation. "Yes?" Amber asks. "What is it?" + +The woman on the bed beckons to her slowly. Amber shakes her head. "Sorry, that's just not my scene." She backs away into the corridor, unsteady in unaccustomedly high heels. "This is some sort of male fantasy, isn't it? And a dumb adolescent one at that." She looks around again. In one direction, a corridor heads past more open doorways, and in the other, it ends with a spiral staircase. Amber concentrates, trying to tell the universe to take her to the logical destination, but nothing happens. "Looks like I'm going to have to do this the hard way. I wish -" she frowns. She was about to wish that /{someone}/ else was here, but she can't remember who. So she takes a deep breath and heads toward the staircase. + +"Up or down?" she asks herself. /{Up}/ - it seems logical, if you're going to have a tower, to sleep up at the top of it. So she climbs the steps carefully, holding the spiraling rail. /{I wonder who designed this space? she wonders, and what role am I supposed to fit into in their scenario?}/ On second thoughts, the latter question strikes her as laughable. /{Wait till I give him an earful ...}/ + +There's a plain wooden door at the top of the staircase, with a latch that isn't fastened. Amber pauses for a few seconds, nerving herself to confront a sleeper so wrapped in solipsism that he's built this sex-fantasy castle around himself. /{I hope it isn't Pierre}/, she thinks grimly as she pushes the door inward. + +The room is bare and floored in wood. There's no furniture, just an open window set high in one wall. A man sits cross-legged and robed, with his back to her, mumbling quietly to himself and nodding slightly. Her breath catches as she realizes who it is. /{Oh shit}/! Her eyes widen. /{Is this what's been inside his head all along?}/ + +"I did not summon you," Sadeq says calmly, not turning round to look at her. "Go away, tempter. You aren't real." + +Amber clears her throat. "Sorry to disappoint you, but you're wrong," she says. "We've got an alien monster to catch. Want to come hunting?" + +Sadeq stops nodding. He sits up slowly, stretching his spine, then stands up and turns round. His eyes glint in the moonlight. "That's odd." He undresses her with his gaze. "You look like someone I used to know. You've never done that before." + +"For fuck's sake!" Amber nearly explodes, but catches herself after a moment. "What /{is}/ this, a Solipsists United chapterhouse meeting?" + +"I -" Sadeq looks puzzled. "I'm sorry, are you claiming to be real?" + +"As real as you are." Amber reaches out and grabs a hand: He doesn't resist as she pulls him toward the doorway. + +"You're the first visitor I've ever had." He sounds shocked. + +"Listen, come /{on}/." She tugs him after her, down the spiral staircase to the floor below. "Do you want to stay here? Really?" She glances back at him. "What /{is}/ this place?" + +"Hell is a perversion of heaven," he says slowly, running the fingers of his free hand through his beard. Abruptly, he reaches out and grabs her around the waist, then yanks her toward him. "We'll have to /{see}/ how real you are -" Amber, who is not used to this kind of treatment, responds by stomping on his instep and backhanding him hard. + +"You're real!" he cries, as he falls back against the staircase. "Forgive me, please! I had to know -" + +"Know /{what}/?" she snarls. "Lay one finger on me again, and I'll leave you here to rot!" She's already spawning the ghost that will signal the alien outside to pull her out of this pocket universe: It's a serious threat. + +"But I had to - wait. You have /{free will}/. You just demonstrated that." He's breathing heavily and looking up at her imploringly. "I'm /{sorry}/, I apologize! But I had to know whether you were another zombie. Or not." + +"A zombie?" She looks round. Another living doll has appeared behind her, standing in an open doorway wearing a skintight leather suit with a cutaway crotch. She beckons to Sadeq invitingly. Another body wearing strategically placed strips of rubber mewls at her feet, writhing for attention. Amber raises an eyebrow in disgust. "You thought I was one of those?" + +Sadeq nods. "They've got cleverer lately. Some of them can talk. I nearly mistook one for -" He shudders convulsively. "Unclean!" + +"Unclean." Amber looks down at him thoughtfully. "This isn't really your personal paradise after all, is it?" After a moment she holds out a hand to him. "Come on." + +"I'm sorry I thought you were a zombie," he repeats. + +"Under the circumstances, I think I forgive you," she says. Then the ghost yanks them both back to the universe outside. + +* * * + +_1 More memories converge on the present moment: + +_1 The Ring Imperium is a huge cluster of self-replicating robots that Amber has assembled in low Jupiter orbit, fueled by the mass and momentum of the small moon J-47 Barney, to provide a launching platform for the interstellar probe her father's business partners are helping her to build. It's also the seat of her court, the leading jurisprudential nexus in the outer solar system. Amber is the Queen, here, arbitrator and ruler. And Sadeq is her judge and counsel. + +_1 A plaintiff Amber only knows as a radar blip thirty light-minutes away has filed a lawsuit in her court, alleging malfeasance, heresy, and barratry against a semisentient corporate pyramid scheme that arrived in Jovian space twelve million seconds ago and currently seems set on converting every other intelligence in the region to its peculiar memeset. A whole bundle of multithreaded countersuits are dragging at her attention, in a counterattack alleging that the light blip is in violation of copyright, patent, and trade secrecy laws by discussing the interloper's intentions. + +_1 Right now, Amber isn't home on the Ring to hear the case in person. She's left Sadeq behind to grapple with the balky mechanics of her legal system - tailor-designed to make corporate litigation a pain in the ass - while she drags Pierre off on a diplomatic visit to another Jovian colony, the Nursery Republic. Planted by the Franklin Trust's orphanage ship /{Ernst Sanger}/, the Nursery has grown over the past four years into a spindly snowflake three kilometers across. A slow-growing O'Neil cylinder sprouts from its hub: Most of the inhabitants of the space station are less than two years old, precocious additions to the Trust's borganism. + +_1 There's a piazza, paved with something not unlike rough marble, on the side of a hill that clings insecurely to the inner edge of a spinning cup. The sky is a black vastness overhead, wheeling slowly around a central axis lined up on Jupiter. Amber sprawls in a wicker chair, her legs stretched out before her and one arm flung across her forehead. The wreckage of an incredible meal is scattered across the tables around her. Torpid and full, she strokes the cat that lies curled in her lap. Pierre is off somewhere, touring one or another of the prototype ecosystems that one or another of the borg's special interest minds is testing. Amber, for her part, can't be bothered. She's just had a great meal, she doesn't have any lawsuits to worry about, everything back home is on the critpath, and quality time like this is so hard to come by - + +_1 "Do you keep in touch with your father?" asks Monica. + +_1 "Mmm." The cat purrs quietly, and Amber strokes its flank. "We e-mail. Sometimes." + +_1 "I just wondered." Monica is the local borg den mother, willowy and brown-eyed and with a deceptively lazy drawl - Yorkshire English overlaid with Silicon Valley speak. "I hear from him, y'know. From time to time. Now that Gianni's retired, he doesn't have much to do down-well anymore. So he was talking about coming out here." + +_1 "What? To Perijove?" Amber's eyes open in alarm: Aineko stops purring and looks round at Monica accusingly. + +_1 "Don't worry." Monica sounds vaguely amused: "He wouldn't cramp your style, I think." + +_1 "But, out here -" Amber sits up. "Damn," she says, quietly. "What got into him?" + +_1 "Middle-aged restlessness, my downwell sibs say." Monica shrugs. "This time Annette didn't stop him. But he hasn't made up his mind to travel yet." + +_1 "Good. Then he might not -" Amber stops. "The phrase, 'made up his mind', what exactly do you mean?" + +_1 Monica's smile mocks her for a few seconds before the older woman surrenders. "He's talking about uploading." + +_1 "Is that embarrassing or what?" asks Ang. Amber glances at her, mildly annoyed, but Ang isn't looking her way. /{So much for friends}/, Amber thinks. Being queen of all you survey is a great way of breaking up peer relationships - + +_1 "He won't do it," Amber predicts. "Dad's burned out." + +_1 "He thinks he'll get it back if he optimizes himself for re-entrancy." Monica continues to smile. "I've been telling him it's just what he needs." + +_1 "I do /{not}/ want my father bugging me. Or my mother. Or Auntie 'Nette and Uncle Gianni. Memo to immigration control: No entry rights for Manfred Macx or the other named individuals without clearance through the Queen's secretary." + +_1 "What did he do to get you so uptight?" asks Monica idly. + +_1 Amber sighs, and subsides. "Nothing. It's not that I'm ungrateful or anything, but he's just so extropian, it's embarrassing. Like, that was the last century's apocalypse. Y'know?" + +_1 "I think he was a really very forward-looking organic," Monica, speaking for the Franklin borg, asserts. Amber looks away. /{Pierre would get it}/, she thinks. Pierre would understand her aversion to Manfred's showing up. Pierre, too, wants to carve out his own niche without parents looking over his shoulders, although for very different reasons. She focuses on someone male and more or less mature - Nicky, she thinks, though she hasn't seen him for a long time - walking toward the piazza, bare-ass naked and beautifully tanned. + +_1 "Parents. What are they good for?" asks Amber, with all the truculence of her seventeen years. "Even if they stay neotenous, they lose flexibility. And there's that long Paleolithic tradition of juvenile slavery. Inhuman, I call it." + +_1 "How old were you when it was safe to leave you around the house on your own?" challenges Monica. + +_1 "Three. That's when I had my first implants." Amber smiles at the approaching young Adonis, who smiles back: Yes, it's Nicky, and he seems pleased to see her. /{Life is good}/, she thinks, idly considering whether or not to tell Pierre. + +_1 "Times change," remarks Monica. "Don't write your family off too soon; there might come a time when you want their company." + +_1 "Huh." Amber pulls a face at the old borg component. "That's what you all say!" + +* * * + +As soon as Amber steps onto the grass, she can feel possibilities open up around her. She has management authority here, and this universe is /{big}/, wide open, not like Sadeq's existential trap. A twitch of a sub-process reasserts her self-image, back to short hair and comfortable clothing. Another twitch brings up a whole load of useful diagnostics. Amber has a nasty feeling that she's running in a compatibility sandbox here - there are signs that her access to the simulation system's control interface is very much via proxy - but at least she's got it. + +"Wow! Back in the real world at last!" She can hardly contain her excitement, even forgetting to be pissed at Sadeq for thinking she was just an actor in his Cartesian theatre's performance of Puritan Hell. "Look! It's the DMZ!" + +They're standing on a grassy knoll overlooking a gleaming Mediterranean city. It snoozes beneath a Mandelbrot-fuzzy not-sun that hangs at the center of a hyperbolic landscape, which dwindles into a blue yonder that seems incomprehensibly distant. Circular baby-blue wells open in the walls of the world at regular intervals, connecting to other parts of the manifold. "How big is it, ghost? In planetary simulation-equivalents." + +"This demilitarized zone is an embedded reality, funneling all transfers between the local star system's router and the civilization that built it. It uses on the order of a thousandth of the capacity of the Matrioshka brain it is part of, although the runaway excursion currently in force has absorbed most of that. Matrioshka brain, you are familiar with the concept?" The ghost sounds fussily pedantic. + +Sadeq shakes his head. Amber glances at him, askance. "Take all the planets in a star system and dismantle them," she explains. "Turn them into dust - structured nanocomp, powered by heat exchangers, spread in concentric orbits around the central star. The inner orbitals run close to the melting point of iron, the outer ones are cold as liquid nitrogen, and each layer runs off the waste heat of the next shell in. It's like a Russian doll made out of Dyson spheres, shell enclosing shell enclosing shell, but it's not designed to support human life. It's computronium, matter optimized at the atomic level to support computing, and they're all running uploads - Dad figured our own solar system could support, uh, about a hundred billion times as many inhabitants as Earth. At a conservative estimate. As uploads, living in simulation space. If you first dismantle all the planets and use the resulting materials to build a Matrioshka brain." + +"Ah." Sadeq nods thoughtfully. "Is that your definition, too?" he asks, glancing up at the glowing point the ghost uses to localize its presence. + +"Substantially," it says, almost grudgingly. + +"Substantially?" Amber glances around. /{A billion worlds to explore}/, she thinks dizzily. /{And that's just the}/ firewall? She feels obscurely cheated: You need to be vaster than human just to count the digits in the big numbers at play here, but there's nothing fundamentally incomprehensible about it. This is the sort of civilization Dad said she could expect to live in, within her meatbody life expectancy. Dad and his drinking buddies, singing, "Dismantle the Moon! Melt down Mars!" in a castle outside Prague as they waited for the results of a shamelessly gerrymandered election to arrive in the third decade of the third millennium. The Space and Freedom Party taking over the EU, and cranking up to escape velocity. But this is supposed to be kiloparsecs from home, ancient alien civilizations and all that! Where's the exotic superscience? What about the neuron stars, strange matter suns structured for computing at nucleonic, rather than electronic, speeds? /{I have a bad feeling about this}/, she thinks, spawning a copy of herself to set up a private channel to Sadeq. /{It's not advanced enough. Do you suppose these guys could be like the Wunch? Parasites or barbarians hitching a ride in the machine?}/ + +/{You believe it's lying to us?}/ Sadeq sends back. + +"Hmm." Amber sets off downslope toward the piazza below, at the heart of the fake town. "It looks a bit too human to me." + +"Human," echoes Sadeq, a curious wistfulness in his voice. "Did you not say humans are extinct?" + +"Your species is obsolete," the ghost comments smugly. "Inappropriately adapted to artificial realities. Poorly optimized circuitry, excessively complex low-bandwidth sensors, messily global variables -" + +"Yeah, yeah, I get the picture," says Amber, turning her attention to the town. "So why do you think we can deal with this alien god you've got a problem with?" + +"It asked for you," says the ghost, narrowing from an ellipse to a line, then shrinking to a dimensionless point of brilliance. "And now it's coming. We-I not willing to risk exposure. Call us-me when you have slain the dragon. Goodbye." + +"Oh /{shit}/ -" Amber spins round. But she and Sadeq are alone beneath the hot sunlight from above. The piazza, like the one in the Nursery Republic, is charmingly rustic - but there's nobody home, nothing but ornate cast-iron furniture basking beneath the noon-bright sun, a table with a parasol over it, and something furry lying sprawled in a patch of sunlight beside it. + +"We appear to be alone for now," says Sadeq. He smiles crookedly, then nods at the table. "Maybe we should wait for our host to arrive?" + +"Our host." Amber peers around. "The ghost is kind of frightened of this alien. I wonder why?" + +"It asked for us." Sadeq heads toward the table, pulls out a chair, and sits down carefully. "That could be very good news - or very bad." + +"Hmm." Amber finishes her survey, sees no sign of life. For lack of any better ideas, she ambles over to the table and sits down on the other side of it from Sadeq. He looks slightly nervous beneath her inspection, but maybe it's just embarrassment about having seen her in her underwear. /{If I had an afterlife like that, I'd be embarrassed about it, too,}/ Amber thinks to herself. + +"Hey, you nearly tripped over -" Sadeq freezes, peering at something close to Amber's left foot. He looks puzzled for a moment, then smiles broadly. "What are /{you}/ doing here?" he asks her blind spot. + +"What are you talking to?" she asks, startled. + +/{He's talking to}/ me, /{dummy}/, says something tantalizingly familiar from her blind spot. /{So the fuckwits are trying to use you to dislodge me, hmm? That's not exactly clever.}/ + +"Who -" Amber squints at the flagstone, spawns a bunch of ghosts who tear hurriedly at her reality modification ackles. Nothing seems to shift the blindness. "Are you the alien?" + +"What else could I be?" the blind spot asks with heavy irony. "No, I'm your father's pet cat. Listen, do you want to get out of here?" + +"Uh." Amber rubs her eyes. "I can't see you, whatever you are," she says politely. "Do I know you?" She's got a strange sense that she /{does}/ know the blind spot, that it's really important, and she's missing something intimate to her own sense of identity, but what it might be she can't tell. + +"Yeah, kid." There's a note of world-weary amusement in the not-voice coming from the hazy patch on the ground. "They've hacked you but good, both of you. Let me in, and I'll fix it." + +"No!" Exclaims Amber, a second ahead of Sadeq, who looks at her oddly. "Are you really an invader?" + +The blind spot sighs. "I'm as much an invader as you are, remember? I came here with you. Difference is, I'm not going to let some stupid corporate ghost use me as fungible currency." + +"Fungible -" Sadeq stops. "I remember you," he says slowly, with an expression of absolute, utter surprise on his face. "What do you mean?" + +The blind spot /{yawns}/, baring sharp ivory fangs. Amber shakes her head, dismissing the momentary hallucination. "Lemme guess. You woke up in a room, and this alien ghost tells you the human species is extinct and asks you to do a number on me. Is that right?" + +Amber nods, as an icy finger of fear trails up and down her spine. "Is it lying?" she asks. + +"Damn right." The blind spot is smiling, now, and the smile on the void won't go away - she can see the smile, just not the body it's attached to. "My reckoning is, we're about sixteen light-years from Earth. The Wunch came through here, stripped the dump, then took off for parts unknown; it's a trashhole, you wouldn't believe it. The main life-form is an incredibly ornate corporate ecosphere, legal instruments breeding and replicating. They mug passing sapients and use them as currency." + +There's a triangular, pointy head behind the smile, slit eyes and sharp ears, a predatory, intelligent-looking but infinitely alien face. Amber can see it out of the corners of her eyes when she looks around the piazza. "You mean we, uh, they grabbed us when we appeared, and they've mangled my memories -" Amber suddenly finds it incredibly difficult to concentrate, but if she focuses on the smile, she can almost see the body behind it, hunched like a furry chicken, tail wrapped neatly around its front paws. + +"Yeah. Except they didn't bargain on meeting something like me." The smile is infinitely wide, a Cheshire-cat grin on front of an orange-and-brown stripy body that shimmers in front of Amber's gaze like a hallucination. "Your mother's cracking tools are self-extending, Amber. Do you remember Hong Kong?" + +"Hong -" + +There is a moment of painless pressure, then Amber feels huge invisible barriers sliding away on all sides. She looks around, for the first time seeing the piazza as it really is, half the crew of the /{Field Circus}/ waiting nervously around her, the grinning cat crouched on the floor at her feet, the enormous walls of recomplicating data that fence their little town off from the gaping holes - interfaces to the other routers in the network. + +"Welcome back," Pierre says gravely, as Amber gives a squeak of surprise and leans forward to pick up her cat. "Now you're out from under, how about we start trying to figure out how to get home?" + +* * * + +_1 Welcome to decade the sixth, millennium three. These old datelines don't mean so much anymore, for while some billions of fleshbody humans are still infected with viral memes, the significance of theocentric dating has been dealt a body blow. This may be the fifties, but what that means to you depends on how fast your reality rate runs. The various upload clades exploding across the reaches of the solar system vary by several orders of magnitude - some are barely out of 2049, while others are exploring the subjective thousandth millennium. + +_1 While the /{Field Circus}/ floats in orbit around an alien router (itself orbiting the brown dwarf Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},), while Amber and her crew are trapped on the far side of a wormhole linking the router to a network of incomprehensibly vast alien mindscapes - while all this is going on, the damnfool human species has finally succeeded in making itself obsolete. The proximate cause of its displacement from the pinnacle of creation (or the pinnacle of teleological self-congratulation, depending on your stance on evolutionary biology) is an attack of self-aware corporations. The phrase "smart money" has taken on a whole new meaning, for the collision between international business law and neurocomputing technology has given rise to a whole new family of species - fast-moving corporate carnivores in the Net. The planet Mercury has been broken up by a consortium of energy brokers, and Venus is an expanding debris cloud, energized to a violent glare by the trapped and channeled solar output. A million billion fist-sized computing caltrops, backsides glowing dull red with the efflux from their thinking, orbit the sun at various inclinations no farther out than Mercury used to be. + +_1 Billions of fleshbody humans refuse to have anything to do with the blasphemous new realities. Many of their leaders denounce the uploads and AIs as soulless machines. Many more are timid, harboring self-preservation memes that amplify a previously healthy aversion to having one's brain peeled like an onion by mind-mapping robots into an all-pervading neurosis. Sales of electrified tinfoil-lined hats are at an all-time high. Still, hundreds of millions have already traded their meat puppets for mind machines, and they breed fast. In another few years, the fleshbody populace will be an absolute minority of the posthuman clade. Sometime later, there will probably be a war. The dwellers in the thoughtcloud are hungry for dumb matter to convert, and the fleshbodies make notoriously poor use of the collection of silicon and rare elements that pool at the bottom of the gravity well that is Earth. + +_1 Energy and thought are driving a phase-change in the condensed matter substance of the solar system. The MIPS per kilogram metric is on the steep upward leg of a sigmoid curve - dumb matter is coming to life as the mind children restructure everything with voracious nanomechanical servants. The thoughtcloud forming in orbit around the sun will ultimately be the graveyard of a biological ecology, another marker in space visible to the telescopes of any new iron-age species with the insight to understand what they're seeing: the death throes of dumb matter, the birth of a habitable reality vaster than a galaxy and far speedier. Death throes that, within a few centuries, will mean the extinction of biological life within a light-year or so of that star - for the majestic Matrioshka brains, though they are the pinnacles of sentient civilization, are intrinsically hostile environments for fleshy life. + +* * * + +Pierre, Donna-the-all-seeing-eye, and Su Ang fill Amber in on what they've discovered about the bazaar - as they call the space the ghost referred to as the demilitarized zone - over ice-cold margaritas and a very good simulation of a sociable joint. Some of them have been on the loose in here for subjective years. There's a lot of information to absorb. + +"The physical layer is half a light-hour in diameter, four hundred times as massive as Earth," Pierre explains. "Not solid, of course - the largest component is about the size my fist used to be." Amber squints, trying to remember how big that was - scale factors are hard to remember accurately. "I met this old chatbot that said it's outlived its original star, but I'm not sure it's running with a full deck. Anyway, if it's telling the truth, we're a third of a light year out from a closely coupled binary system - they use orbital lasers the size of Jupiter to power it without getting too close to all those icky gravity wells." + +Amber is intimidated, despite her better judgment, because this bizarre bazaar is several hundred billion times as big as the totality of human presingularity civilization. She tries not to show it in front of the others, but she's worried that getting home may be impossible - requiring enterprise beyond the economic event horizon, as realistic a proposition as a dime debuting as a dollar bill. Still, she's got to at least try. Just knowing about the existence of the bazaar will change so many things ... + +"How much money can we lay our hands on?" She asks. "What /{is}/ money hereabouts, anyway? Assuming they've got a scarcity-mediated economy. Bandwidth, maybe?" + +"Ah, well." Pierre looks at her oddly. "That's the problem. Didn't the ghost tell you?" + +"Tell me?" Amber raises an eyebrow. "Yeah, but it hasn't exactly proven to be a reliable guide to anything, has it?" + +"Tell her," Su Ang says quietly. She looks away, embarrassed by something. + +"They've got a scarcity economy all right," says Pierre. "Bandwidth is the limited resource, that and matter. This whole civilization is tied together locally because if you move too far away, well, it takes ages to catch up on the gossip. Matrioshka brain intelligences are much more likely to stay at home than anybody realized, even though they chat on the phone a lot. And they use things that come from other cognitive universes as, well, currency. We came in through the coin slot, is it any wonder we ended up in the bank?" + +"That's so deeply wrong that I don't know where to begin," Amber grumbles. "How did they get into this mess?" + +"Don't ask me." Pierre shrugs. "I have the distinct feeling that anyone or anything we meet in this place won't have any more of a clue than we do - whoever or whatever built this brain, there ain't nobody home anymore except the self-propelled corporations and hitchhikers like the Wunch. We're in the dark, just like they were." + +"Huh. You mean they built something like this, then they went extinct? That sounds so dumb ..." + +Su Ang sighs. "They got too big and complex to go traveling once they built themselves a bigger house to live in. Extinction tends to be what happens to overspecialized organisms that are stuck in one environmental niche for too long. If you posit a singularity, then maximization of local computing resources - like this - as the usual end state for tool users, is it any wonder none of them ever came calling on us?" + +Amber focuses on the table in front of her, rests the heel of her palm on the cool metal, and tries to remember how to fork a second copy of her state vector. A moment later, her ghost obligingly fucks with the physics model of the table. Iron gives way like rubber beneath her fingertips, a pleasant elasticity. "Okay, we have some control over the universe, at least that's something to work with. Have any of you tried any self-modification?" + +"That's dangerous," Pierre says emphatically. "The more of us the better before we start doing that stuff. And we need some firewalling of our own." + +"How deep does reality go, here?" asks Sadeq. It's almost the first question he's asked of his own volition, and Amber takes it as a positive sign that he's finally coming out of his shell. + +"Oh, the Planck length is about a hundredth of a millimeter in this world. Too small to see, comfortably large for the simulation engines to handle. Not like /{real}/ space-time." + +"Well, then." Sadeq pauses. "They can zoom their reality if they need to?" + +"Yeah, fractals work in here." Pierre nods. "I didn't -" + +"This place is a trap," Su Ang says emphatically. + +"No it isn't," Pierre replies, nettled. + +"What do you mean, a trap?" asks Amber. + +"We've been here a while," says Ang. She glances at Aineko, who sprawls on the flagstones, snoozing or whatever it is that weakly superhuman AIs do when they're emulating a sleeping cat. "After your cat broke us out of bondage, we had a look around. There are things out there that -" She shivers. "Humans can't survive in most of the simulation spaces here. Universes with physics models that don't support our kind of neural computing. You could migrate there, but you'd need to be ported to a whole new type of logic - by the time you did that, would you still be you? Still, there are enough entities roughly as complex as we are to prove that the builders aren't here anymore. Just lesser sapients, rooting through the wreckage. Worms and parasites squirming through the body after nightfall on the battlefield." + +"I ran into the Wunch," Donna volunteers helpfully. "The first couple of times they ate my ghost, but eventually I figured out how to talk to them." + +"And there's other aliens, too," Su Ang adds gloomily. "Just nobody you'd want to meet on a dark night." + +"So there's no hope of making contact," Amber summarizes. "At least, not with anything transcendent and well-intentioned toward visiting humans." + +"That's probably right," Pierre concedes. He doesn't sound happy about it. + +"So we're stuck in a pocket universe with limited bandwidth to home and a bunch of crazy slum dwellers who've moved into the abandoned and decaying mansion and want to use us for currency. 'Jesus saves, and redeems souls for valuable gifts.' Yeah?" + +"Yeah." Su Ang looks depressed. + +"Well." Amber glances at Sadeq speculatively. Sadeq is staring into the distance, at the crazy infinite sunspot that limns the square with shadows. "Hey, god-man. Got a question for you." + +"Yes?" Sadeq looks at her, a slightly dazed expression on his face. "I'm sorry, I am just feeling the jaws of a larger trap around my throat -" + +"Don't be." Amber grins, and it is not a pleasant expression. "Have you ever been to Brooklyn?" + +"No, why -" + +"Because you're going to help me sell these lying bastards a bridge. Okay? And when we've sold it we're going to use the money to pay the purchasing fools to drive us across, so we can go home. Listen, this is what I'm planning ..." + +* * * + +"I can do this, I think," Sadeq says, moodily examining the Klein bottle on the table. The bottle is half-empty, its fluid contents invisible around the corner of the fourth-dimensional store. "I spent long enough alone in there to -" He shivers. + +"I don't want you damaging yourself," Amber says, calmly enough, because she has an ominous feeling that their survival in this place has an expiry date attached. + +"Oh, never fear." Sadeq grins lopsidedly. "One pocket hell is much like another." + +"Do you understand why -" + +"Yes, yes," he says dismissively. "We can't send copies of ourselves into it, that would be an abomination. It needs to be unpopulated, yes?" + +"Well, the idea is to get us home, not leave thousands of copies of ourselves trapped in a pocket universe here. Isn't that it?" Su Ang asks hesitantly. She's looking distracted, most of her attention focused on absorbing the experiences of a dozen ghosts she's spun off to attend to perimeter security. + +"Who are we selling this to?" asks Sadeq. "If you want me to make it attractive -" + +"It doesn't need to be a complete replica of the Earth. It just has to be a convincing advertisement for a presingularity civilization full of humans. You've got two-and-seventy zombies to dissect for their brains; bolt together a bunch of variables you can apply to them, and you can permutate them to look a bit more varied." + +Amber turns her attention to the snoozing cat. "Hey, furball. How long have we been here really, in real time? Can you grab Sadeq some more resources for his personal paradise garden?" + +Aineko stretches and yawns, totally feline, then looks up at Amber with narrowed eyes and raised tail. "'Bout eighteen minutes, wall-clock time." The cat stretches again and sits, front paws drawn together primly, tail curled around them. "The ghosts are pushing, you know? I don't think I can sustain this for too much longer. They're not good at hacking people, but I think it won't be too long before they instantiate a new copy of you, one that'll be predisposed to their side." + +"I don't get why they didn't assimilate you along with the rest of us." + +"Blame your mother again - she's the one who kept updating the digital rights management code on my personality. 'Illegal consciousness is copyright theft' sucks until an alien tries to rewire your hindbrain with a debugger; then it's a lifesaver." Aineko glances down and begins washing one paw. "I can give your mullah-man about six days, subjective time. After that, all bets are off." + +"I will take it, then." Sadeq stands. "Thank you." He smiles at the cat, a smile that fades to translucency, hanging in the simulated air like an echo as the priest returns to his tower - this time with a blueprint and a plan in mind. + +"That leaves just us." Su Ang glances at Pierre, back to Amber. "Who are you going to sell this crazy scheme to?" + +Amber leans back and smiles. Behind her, Donna - her avatar an archaic movie camera suspended below a model helicopter - is filming everything for posterity. She nods lazily at the reporter. "She's the one who gave me the idea. Who do we know who's dumb enough to buy into a scam like this?" + +Pierre looks at her suspiciously. "I think we've been here before," he says slowly. "You aren't going to make me kill anyone, are you?" + +"I don't think that'll be necessary, unless the corporate ghosts think we're going to get away from them and are greedy enough to want to kill us." + +"You see, she learned from last time," Ang comments, and Amber nods. "No more misunderstandings, right?" She beams at Amber. + +Amber beams back at her. "Right. And that's why you -" she points at Pierre - "are going to go find out if any relics of the Wunch are hanging about here. I want you to make them an offer they won't refuse." + +* * * + +"How much for just the civilization?" asks the Slug. + +Pierre looks down at it thoughtfully. It's not really a terrestrial mollusk: Slugs on Earth aren't two meters long and don't have lacy white exoskeletons to hold their chocolate-colored flesh in shape. But then, it isn't really the alien it appears to be. It's a defaulting corporate instrument that has disguised itself as a long-extinct alien upload, in the hope that its creditors won't recognize it if it looks like a randomly evolved sentient. One of the stranded members of Amber's expedition made contact with it a couple of subjective years ago, while exploring the ruined city at the center of the firewall. Now Pierre's here because it seems to be one of their most promising leads. Emphasis on the word promising - because it promises much, but there is some question over whether it can indeed deliver. + +"The civilization isn't for sale," Pierre says slowly. The translation interface shimmers, storing up his words and transforming them into a different deep grammar, not merely translating his syntax but mapping equivalent meanings where necessary. "But we can give you privileged observer status if that's what you want. And we know what you are. If you're interested in finding a new exchange to be traded on, your existing intellectual property assets will be worth rather more there than here." + +The rogue corporation rears up slightly and bunches into a fatter lump. Its skin blushes red in patches. "Must think about this. Is your mandatory accounting time cycle fixed or variable term? Are self-owned corporate entities able to enter contracts?" + +"I could ask my patron," Pierre says casually. He suppresses a stab of angst. He's still not sure where he and Amber stand, but theirs is far more than just a business relationship, and he worries about the risks she's taking. "My patron has a jurisdiction within which she can modify corporate law to accommodate your requirements. Your activities on a wider scale might require shell companies -" the latter concept echoes back in translation to him as host organisms - "but that can be taken care of." + +The translation membrane wibbles for a while, apparently reformulating some more abstract concepts in a manner that the corporation can absorb. Pierre is reasonably confident that it'll take the offer, however. When it first met them, it boasted about its control over router hardware at the lowest levels. But it also bitched and moaned about the firewall protocols that were blocking it from leaving (before rather rudely trying to eat its conversationalist). He waits patiently, looking around at the swampy landscape, mudflats punctuated by clumps of spiky violet ferns. The corporation has to be desperate, to be thinking of the bizarre proposition Amber has dreamed up for him to pitch to it. + +"Sounds interesting," the Slug declares after a brief confirmatory debate with the membrane. "If I supply a suitable genome, can you customize a container for it?" + +"I believe so," Pierre says carefully. "For your part, can you deliver the energy we need?" + +"From a gate?" For a moment the translation membrane hallucinates a stick-human, shrugging. "Easy. Gates are all entangled: Dump coherent radiation in at one, get it out at another. Just get me out of this firewall first." + +"But the lightspeed lag -" + +"No problem. You go first, then a dumb instrument I leave behind buys up power and sends it after. Router network is synchronous, within framework of state machines that run Universe 1.0; messages propagate at same speed, speed of light in vacuum, except use wormholes to shorten distances between nodes. Whole point of the network is that it is nonlossy. Who would trust their mind to a communications channel that might partially randomize them in transit?" + +Pierre goes cross-eyed, trying to understand the implications of the Slug's cosmology. But there isn't really time, here and now: They've got on the order of a minute of wall-clock time left to get everything sorted out, if Aineko is right. One minute to go before the angry ghosts start trying to break into the DMZ by other means. "If you are willing to try this, we'd be happy to accommodate you," he says, thinking of crossed fingers and rabbits' feet and firewalls. + +"It's a deal," the membrane translates the Slug's response back at him. "Now we exchange shares/plasmids/ownership? Then merger complete?" + +Pierre stares at the Slug: "But this is a business arrangement!" he protests. "What's sex got to do with it?" + +"Apologies offered. I am thinking we have a translation error. You said this was to be a merging of businesses?" + +"Not /{that}/ way. It's a contract. We agree to take you with us. In return, you help lure the Wunch into the domain we're setting up for them and configure the router at the other end ..." + +And so on. + +* * * + +Steeling herself, Amber recalls the address the ghost gave her for Sadeq's afterlife universe. In her own subjective time it's been about half an hour since he left. "Coming?" she asks her cat. + +"Don't think I will," says Aineko. It looks away, blissfully unconcerned. + +"Bah." Amber tenses, then opens the port to Sadeq's pocket universe. + +As usual she finds herself indoors, standing on an ornate mosaic floor in a room with whitewashed walls and peaked windows. But there's something different about it, and after a moment, she realizes what it is. The sound of vehicle traffic from outside, the cooing of pigeons on the rooftops, someone shouting across the street: There are people here. + +She walks over to the nearest window and looks out, then recoils. It's /{hot}/ outside. Dust and fumes hang in air the color of cement over rough-finished concrete apartment buildings, their roofs covered in satellite uplinks and cheap, garish LED advertising panels. Looking down she sees motor scooters, cars - filthy, fossil-fueled behemoths, a tonne of steel and explosives in motion to carry only one human, a mass ratio worse than an archaic ICBM - brightly dressed people walking to and fro. A news helicam buzzes overhead, lenses darting and glinting at the traffic. + +"Just like home, isn't it?" says Sadeq, behind her. + +Amber starts. "This is where you grew up? This is Yazd?" + +"It doesn't exist anymore, in real space." Sadeq looks thoughtful, but far more animated than the barely conscious parody of himself that she'd rescued from this building - back when it was a mediaeval vision of the afterlife - scant subjective hours ago. He cracks a smile: "Probably a good thing. We were dismantling it even while we were preparing to leave, you know?" + +"It's detailed." Amber throws her eyes at the scene out the window, multiplexes them, and tells them to send little virtual ghosts dancing through the streets of the Iranian industrial 'burb. Overhead, big Airbuses ply the skyways, bearing pilgrims on the hajj, tourists to the coastal resorts on the Persian Gulf, produce to the foreign markets. + +"It's the best time I could recall," Sadeq says. "I didn't spend many days here then - I was in Qom, studying, and Kazakhstan, for cosmonaut training - but it's meant to be the early twenties. After the troubles, after the fall of the guardians; a young, energetic, liberal country full of optimism and faith in democracy. Values that weren't doing well elsewhere." + +"I thought democracy was a new thing there?" + +"No." Sadeq shakes his head. "There were prodemocracy riots in Tehran in the nineteenth century, did you know that? That's why the first revolution - no." He makes a cutting gesture. "Politics and faith are a combustible combination." He frowns. "But look. Is this what you wanted?" + +Amber recalls her scattered eyes - some of which have flown as much as a thousand kilometers from her locus - and concentrates on reintegrating their visions of Sadeq's re-creation. "It looks convincing. But not too convincing." + +"That was the idea." + +"Well, then." She smiles. "Is it just Iran? Or did you take any liberties around the edges?" + +"Who, me?" He raises an eyebrow. "I have enough doubts about the morality of this - project - without trying to trespass on Allah's territory, peace be unto him. I promise you, there are no sapients in this world but us. The people are the hollow shells of my dreaming, storefront dummies. The animals are crude bitmaps. This is what you asked for, and no more." + +"Well, then." Amber pauses. She recalls the expression on the dirt-smudged face of a little boy, bouncing a ball at his companions by the boarded-up front of a gas station on a desert road; remembers the animated chatter of two synthetic housewives, one in traditional black and the other in some imported Eurotrash fashion. "Are you sure they aren't real?" she asks. + +"Quite sure." But for a moment, she sees Sadeq looking uncertain. "Shall we go? Do you have the occupiers ready to move in yet?" + +"Yes to the first, and Pierre's working on the second. Come on, we don't want to get trampled by the squatters." She waves and opens a door back onto the piazza where her robot cat - the alien's nightmare intruder in the DMZ - sleeps, chasing superintelligent dream mice through multidimensional realities. "Sometimes I wonder if /{I'm}/ conscious. Thinking these thoughts gives me the creeps. Let's go and sell some aliens a bridge in Brooklyn." + +* * * + +Amber confronts the mendacious ghost in the windowless room stolen from 2001. + +"You have confined the monster," the ghost states. + +"Yes." Amber waits for a subjective moment, feeling delicate fronds tickle at the edges of her awareness in what seems to be a timing channel attack. She feels a momentary urge to sneeze, and a hot flash of anger that passes almost immediately. + +"And you have modified yourself to lock out external control," the ghost adds. "What is it that you want, Autonome Amber?" + +"Don't you have any concept of individuality?" she asks, annoyed by its presumption at meddling with her internal states. + +"Individuality is an unnecessary barrier to information transfer," says the ghost, morphing into its original form, a translucent reflection of her own body. "It reduces the efficiency of a capitalist economy. A large block of the DMZ is still inaccessible to we-me. Are you /{sure}/ you have defeated the monster?" + +"It'll do as I say," Amber replies, forcing herself to sound more confident than she feels - sometimes that damned transhuman cyborg cat is no more predictable than a real feline. "Now, the matter of payment arises." + +"Payment." The ghost sounds amused. But Pierre's filled her in on what to look for, and Amber can now see the translation membranes around it. Their color shift maps to a huge semantic distance; the creature on the other side, even though it looks like a ghost-image of herself, is very far from human. "How can we-us be expected to pay our own money for rendering services to us?" + +Amber smiles. "We want an open channel back to the router we arrived through." + +"Impossible," says the ghost. + +"We want an open channel, /{and}/ for it to stay open for six hundred million seconds after we clear it." + +"Impossible," the ghost repeats. + +"We can trade you a whole civilization," Amber says blandly. "A whole human nation, millions of individuals. Just let us go, and we'll see to it." + +"You - please wait." The ghost shimmers slightly, fuzzing at the edges. + +Amber opens a private channel to Pierre while the ghost confers with its other nodes. /{Are the Wunch in place yet?}/ she sends. + +/{They're moving in. This bunch don't remember what happened on the}/ Field Circus, /{memories of those events never made it back to them. So the Slug's got them to cooperate. It's kinda scary to watch - like}/ the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, /{you know?}/ + +/{I don't care if it's scary to watch}/, Amber replies, /{I need to know if we're ready yet}/. + +/{Sadeq says yes, the universe is ready.}/ + +/{Right, pack yourself down. We'll be moving soon.}/ + +The ghost is firming up in front of her. "A whole civilization?" it asks. "That is not possible. Your arrival -" It pauses, fuzzing a little. /{Hah, Gotcha!}/ thinks Amber. /{Liar, liar, pants on fire!}/ "You cannot possibly have found a human civilization in the archives?" + +"The monster you complain about that came through with us is a predator," she asserts blandly. "It swallowed an entire nation before we heroically attracted its attention and induced it to follow us into the router. It's an archivore - everything was inside it, still frozen until we expanded it again. This civilization will already have been restored from hot shadows in our own solar system: There is nothing to gain by taking it home with us. But we need to return to ensure that no more predators of this type discover the router - or the high-bandwidth hub we linked to it." + +"You are sure you have killed this monster?" asks the ghost. "It would be inconvenient if it were to emerge from hiding in its digest archives." + +"I can guarantee it won't trouble you again if you let us go," says Amber, mentally crossing her fingers. The ghost doesn't seem to have noticed the huge wedge of fractally compressed data that bloats her personal scope by an order of magnitude. She can still feel Aineko's goodbye smile inside her head, an echo of ivory teeth trusting her to revive it if the escape plan succeeds. + +"We-us agree." The ghost twists weirdly, morphs into a five-dimensional hypersphere. It bubbles violently for a moment, then spits out a smaller token - a warped distortion in the air, like a gravityless black hole. "Here is your passage. Show us the civilization." + +"Okay " - /{Now!}/ - "catch." Amber twitches an imaginary muscle, and one wall of the room dissolves, forming a doorway into Sadeq's existential hell, now redecorated as a fair facsimile of a twenty-first-century industrial city in Iran, and populated by a Wunch of parasites who can't believe what they've lucked into - an entire continent of zombies waiting to host their flesh-hungry consciousness. + +The ghost drifts toward the open window. Amber grabs the hole and yanks it open, gets a grip on her own thoughts, and sends /{Open wide!}/ on the channel everybody is listening in on. For a moment time stands still, and then - + +* * * + +A synthetic gemstone the size of a Coke can falls through the cold vacuum, in high orbit around a brown dwarf. But the vacuum is anything but dark. A sapphire glare as bright as the noonday sun on Mars shines on the crazy diamond, billowing and cascading off sails as fine as soap bubbles that slowly drift and tense away from the can. The runaway Slug-corporation's proxy has hacked the router's firmware, and the open wormhole gate that feeds power to it is shining with the brilliance of a nuclear fireball, laser light channeled from a star many light-years away to power the /{Field Circus}/ on its return trip to the once-human solar system. + +Amber has retreated, with Pierre, into a simulation of her home aboard the Ring Imperium. One wall of her bedroom is a solid slab of diamond, looking out across the boiling Jovian ionosphere from an orbit low enough to make the horizon appear flat. They're curled together in her bed, a slightly more comfortable copy of the royal bed of King Henry VIII of England. It appears to be carved from thousand-year-old oak beams. As with so much else about the Ring Imperium, appearances are deceptive; and this is even more true of the cramped simulation spaces aboard the /{Field Circus}/, as it limps toward a tenth the speed of light, the highest velocity it's likely to achieve on a fraction of its original sail area. + +"Let me get this straight. You convinced. The locals. That a simulation of Iran, with zombie bodies that had been taken over by members of the Wunch. Was a human civilization?" + +"Yeah." Amber stretches lazily and smirks at him. "It's their damn fault; if the corporate collective entities didn't use conscious viewpoints as money, they wouldn't have fallen for a trick like that, would they?" + +"People. Money." + +"Well." She yawns, then sits up and snaps her finger imperiously: Down-stuffed pillows appear behind her back, and a silver salver bearing two full glasses of wine materializes between them. "Corporations are life-forms back home, too, aren't they? And we trade them. We give our AIs corporations to make them legal entities, but the analogy goes deeper. Look at any company headquarters, fitted out with works of art and expensive furniture and staff bowing and scraping everywhere -" + +" - They're the new aristocracy. Right?" + +"Wrong. When they take over, what you get is more like the new biosphere. Hell, the new primordial soup: prokaryotes, bacteria, and algae, mindlessly swarming, trading money for plasmids." The Queen passes her consort a wineglass. When he drinks from it, it refills miraculously. "Basically, sufficiently complex resource-allocation algorithms reallocate scarce resources ... and if you don't jump to get out of their way, they'll reallocate you. I think that's what happened inside the Matrioshka brain we ended up in: Judging by the Slug it happens elsewhere, too. You've got to wonder where the builders of that structure came from. And where they went. And whether they realized that the destiny of intelligent tool-using life was to be a stepping-stone in the evolution of corporate instruments." + +"Maybe they tried to dismantle the companies before the companies spent them." Pierre looks worried. "Running up a national debt, importing luxurious viewpoint extensions, munching exotic dreams. Once they plugged into the Net, a primitive Matrioshka civilization would be like, um." He pauses. "Tribal. A primitive postsingularity civilization meeting the galactic net for the first time. Overawed. Wanting all the luxuries. Spending their capital, their human - or alien - capital, the meme machines that built them. Until there's nothing left but a howling wilderness of corporate mechanisms looking for someone to own." + +"Speculation." + +"Idle speculation," he agrees. + +"But we can't ignore it." She nods. "Maybe some early corporate predator built the machines that spread the wormholes around brown dwarfs and ran the router network on top of them in an attempt to make money fast. By not putting them in the actual planetary systems likely to host tool-using life, they'd ensure that only near-singularity civilizations would stumble over them. Civilizations that had gone too far to be easy prey probably wouldn't send a ship out to look ... so the network would ensure a steady stream of yokels new to the big city to fleece. Only they set the mechanism in motion billions of years ago and went extinct, leaving the network to propagate, and now there's nothing out there but burned-out Matrioshka civilizations and howling parasites like the angry ghosts and the Wunch. And victims like us." She shudders and changes the subject: "Speaking of aliens, is the Slug happy?" + +"Last time I checked on him, yeah." Pierre blows on his wineglass and it dissolves into a million splinters of light. He looks dubious at the mention of the rogue corporate instrument they're taking with them. "I don't trust him out in the unrestricted sim-spaces yet, but he delivered on the fine control for the router's laser. I just hope you don't ever have to actually use him, if you follow my drift. I'm a bit worried that Aineko is spending so much time in there." + +"So that's where she is? I'd been worrying." + +"Cats never come when you call them, do they?" + +"There is that," she agrees. Then, with a worried glance at the vision of Jupiter's cloudscape: "I wonder what we'll find when we get there?" + +Outside the window, the imaginary Jovian terminator is sweeping toward them with eerie rapidity, sucking them toward an uncertain nightfall. + +PART 3: Singularity + +There's a sucker born every minute. + +- P. T. Barnum + +Chapter 7: Curator + +Sirhan stands on the edge of an abyss, looking down at a churning orange-and-gray cloudscape far below. The air this close to the edge is chilly and smells slightly of ammonia, although that might be his imagination at work - there's little chance of any gas exchange taking place across the transparent pressure wall of the flying city. He feels as if he could reach out and touch the swirling vaporscape. There's nobody else around, this close to the edge - it's an icy sensation to look out across the roiling depths, at an ocean of gas so cold human flesh would freeze within seconds of exposure, knowing that there's nothing solid out there for tens of thousands of kilometers. The sense of isolation is aggravated by the paucity of bandwidth, this far out of the system. Most people huddle close to the hub, for comfort and warmth and low latency: posthumans are gregarious. + +Beneath Sirhan's feet, the lily-pad city is extending itself, mumbling and churning in endless self-similar loops like a cubist blastoma growing in the upper atmosphere of Saturn. Great ducts suck in methane and other atmospheric gases, apply energy, polymerize and diamondize, and crack off hydrogen to fill the lift cells high above. Beyond the sapphire dome of the city's gasbag, an azure star glares with the speckle of laser light; humanity's first - and so far, last - starship, braking into orbit on the last shredded remnant of its light sail. + +He's wondering maliciously how his mother will react to discovering her bankruptcy when the light above him flickers. Something gray and unpleasant splatters against the curve of nearly invisible wall in front of him, leaving a smear. He takes a step back and looks up angrily. "Fuck you!" he yells. Raucous cooing laughter follows him away from the boundary, feral pigeon voices mocking. "I mean it," he warns, flicking a gesture at the air above his head. Wings scatter in a burst of thunder as a slab of wind solidifies, thistledown-shaped nanomachines suspended on the breeze locking edge to edge to form an umbrella over his head. He walks away from the perimeter, fuming, leaving the pigeons to look for another victim. + +Annoyed, Sirhan finds a grassy knoll a couple of hundred meters from the rim and around the curve of the lily-pad from the museum buildings. It's far enough from other humans that he can sit undisturbed with his thoughts, far enough out to see over the edge without being toilet-bombed by flocking flying rats. (The flying city, despite being the product of an advanced technology almost unimaginable two decades before, is full of bugs - software complexity and scaling laws ensured that the preceding decades of change acted as a kind of cosmological inflationary period for design glitches, and an infestation of passenger pigeons is by no means the most inexplicable problem this biosphere harbors.) + +In an attempt to shut the more unwelcome manifestations of cybernature out, he sits under the shade of an apple tree and marshals his worlds around him. "When is my grandmother arriving?" he asks one of them, speaking into an antique telephone in the world of servants, where everything is obedient and knows its place. The city humors him, for its own reasons. + +"She is still containerized, but aerobraking is nearly over. Her body will be arriving down-well in less than two megaseconds." The city's avatar in this machinima is a discreet Victorian butler, stony-faced and respectful. Sirhan eschews intrusive memory interfaces; for an eighteen-year-old, he's conservative to the point of affectation, favoring voice commands and anthropomorphic agents over the invisible splicing of virtual neural nets. + +"You're certain she's transferred successfully?" Sirhan asks anxiously. He heard a lot about his grandmama when he was young, very little of it complimentary. Nevertheless, the old bat must be a lot more flexible than his mother ever gave her credit for, to be subjecting herself to this kind of treatment for the first time at her current age. + +"I'm as certain as I can be, young master, for anyone who insists on sticking to their original phenotype without benefit of off-line backup or medical implants. I regret that omniscience is not within my remit. Would you like me to make further specific inquiries?" + +"No." Sirhan peers up at the bright flare of laser light, visible even through the soap-bubble membrane that holds in the breathable gas mix, and the trillions of liters of hot hydrogen in the canopy above it. "As long as you're sure she'll arrive before the ship?" Tuning his eyes to ultraviolet, he watches the emission spikes, sees the slow strobing of the low-bandwidth AM modulation that's all the starship can manage by way of downlink communication until it comes within range of the system manifold. It's sending the same tiresomely repetitive question about why it's being redirected to Saturn that it's been putting out for the past week, querying the refusal to supply terawatts of propulsion energy on credit. + +"Unless there's a spike in their power beam, you can be certain of that," City replies reassuringly. "And you can be certain also that your grandmother will revive comfortably." + +"One may hope so." To undertake the interplanetary voyage in corporeal person, at her age, without any upgrades or augmentation, must take courage, he decides. "When she wakes up, if I'm not around, ask her for an interview slot on my behalf. For the archives, of course." + +"It will be my pleasure." City bobs his head politely. + +"That will be all," Sirhan says dismissively, and the window into servantspace closes. Then he looks back up at the pinprick of glaring blue laser light near the zenith. /{Tough luck, Mom}/, he subvocalizes for his journal cache. Most of his attention is forked at present, focused on the rich historical windfall from the depths of the singularity that is coming his way, in the form of the thirty-year-old starwisp's Cartesian theatre. But he can still spare some schadenfreude for the family fortunes. /{All your assets belong to me, now. He smiles, inwardly. I'll just have to make sure they're put to a sensible use this time}/. + +* * * + +"I don't see why they're diverting us toward Saturn. It's not as if they can possibly have dismantled Jupiter already, is it?" asks Pierre, rolling the chilled beer bottle thoughtfully between fingers and thumb. + +"Why not you ask Amber?" replies the velociraptor squatting beside the log table. (Boris's Ukrainian accent is unimpeded by the dromaeosaurid's larynx; in point of fact, it's an affectation, one he could easily fix by sideloading an English pronunciation patch if he wanted to.) + +"Well." Pierre shakes his head. "She's spending all her time with that Slug, no multiplicity access, privacy ackles locked right down. I could get jealous." His voice doesn't suggest any deep concern. + +"What's to get jealous about? Just ask to fork instance to talk to you, make love, show boyfriend good time, whatever." + +"Hah!" Pierre chuckles grimly, then drains the last drops from the bottle into his mouth. He throws it away in the direction of a clump of cycads, then snaps his fingers; another one appears in its place. + +"Are two megaseconds out from Saturn in any case," Boris points out, then pauses to sharpen his inch-long incisors on one end of the table. Fangs crunch through timber like wet cardboard. "Grrrrn. Am seeing most /{peculiar}/ emission spectra from inner solar system. Foggy flying down bottom of gravity well. Am wondering, does ensmartening of dumb matter extend past Jovian orbit now?" + +"Hmm." Pierre takes a swig from the bottle and puts it down. "That might explain the diversion. But why haven't they powered up the lasers on the Ring for us? You missed that, too." For reasons unknown, the huge battery of launch lasers had shut down, some millions of seconds after the crew of the Field Circus had entered the router, leaving it adrift in the cold darkness. + +"Don't know why are not talking." Boris shrugged. "At least are still alive there, as can tell from the 'set course for Saturn, following thus-and-such orbital elements' bit. Someone is paying attention. Am telling you from beginning, though, turning entire solar system into computronium is real bad idea, long-term. Who knows how far has gone already?" + +"Hmm, again." Pierre draws a circle in the air. "Aineko," he calls, "are you listening?" + +"Don't bug me." A faint green smile appears in the circle, just the suggestion of fangs and needle-sharp whiskers. "I had an idea I was sleeping furiously." + +Boris rolls one turreted eye and drools on the tabletop. "Munch munch," he growls, allowing his saurian body-brain to put in a word. + +"What do you need to sleep for? This is a fucking sim, in case you hadn't noticed." + +"I /{enjoy}/ sleeping," replies the cat, irritably lashing its just-now-becoming-visible tail. "What do you want? Fleas?" + +"No thanks," Pierre says hastily. Last time he called Aineko's bluff the cat had filled three entire pocket universes with scurrying gray mice. One of the disadvantages of flying aboard a starship the size of a baked bean can full of smart matter was the risk that some of the passengers could get rather too creative with the reality control system. This Cretaceous kaffee klatsch was just Boris's entertainment partition; compared to some of the other simulation spaces aboard the *{Field Circus}*, it was downright conservative. "Look, do you have any updates on what's going on down-well? We're only twenty objective days out from orbital insertion, and there's so little to see -" + +"They're not sending us power." Aineko materializes fully now, a large orange-and-white cat with a swirl of brown fur in the shape on an @-symbol covering her ribs. For whatever reason, she plants herself on the table tauntingly close to Boris's velociraptor body's nose. "No propulsion laser means insufficient bandwidth. They're talking in Latin-1 text at 1200 baud, if you care to know." (Which is an insult, given the ship's multi-avabit storage capacity - one avabit is Avogadro's number of bits; about 1023 bytes, several billion times the size of the Internet in 2001 - and outrageous communications bandwidth.) "Amber says, come and see her now. Audience chamber. Informal, of course. I think she wants to discuss it." + +"Informal? Am all right without change bodies?" + +The cat sniffs. "/{I'm}/ wearing a real fur coat," it declares haughtily, "but no knickers." Then blinks out a fraction of a second ahead of the snicker- *{snack}* of Bandersnatch-like jaws. + +% watch snicker-*{snack}* error, watch http:// sequence if to fix + +"Come on," says Pierre, standing up. "Time to see what Her Majesty wants with us today." + +* * * + +_1 Welcome to decade eight, third millennium, when the effects of the phase-change in the structure of the solar system are finally becoming visible on a cosmological scale. + +_1 There are about eleven billion future-shocked primates in various states of life and undeath throughout the solar system. Most of them cluster where the interpersonal bandwidth is hottest, down in the water zone around old Earth. Earth's biosphere has been in the intensive care ward for decades, weird rashes of hot-burning replicators erupting across it before the World Health Organization can fix them - gray goo, thylacines, dragons. The last great transglobal trade empire, run from the arcologies of Hong Kong, has collapsed along with capitalism, rendered obsolete by a bunch of superior deterministic resource allocation algorithms collectively known as Economics 2.0. Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Luna are all well on the way to disintegration, mass pumped into orbit with energy stolen from the haze of free-flying thermoelectrics that cluster so thickly around the solar poles that the sun resembles a fuzzy red ball of wool the size of a young red giant. + +_1 Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts. Now the brightly burning beacon of sapience isn't held by humans anymore - their cross-infectious enthusiasms have spread to a myriad of other hosts, several types of which are qualitatively better at thinking. At last count, there were about a thousand nonhuman intelligent species in Sol space, split evenly between posthumans on one side, naturally self-organizing AIs in the middle, and mammalian nonhumans on the other. The common mammal neural chassis is easily upgraded to human-style intelligence in most species that can carry, feed and cool a half kilogram of gray matter, and the descendants of a hundred ethics-challenged doctoral theses are now demanding equal rights. So are the unquiet dead; the panopticon-logged Net ghosts of people who lived recently enough to imprint their identities on the information age, and the ambitious theological engineering schemes of the Reformed Tiplerite Church of Latter-day Saints (who want to emulate all possible human beings in real time, so that they can have the opportunity to be saved). + +_1 The human memesphere is coming alive, although how long it remains recognizably human is open to question. The informational density of the inner planets is visibly converging on Avogadro's number of bits per mole, one bit per atom, as the deconstructed dumb matter of the inner planets (apart from Earth, preserved for now like a picturesque historic building stranded in an industrial park) is converted into computronium. And it's not just the inner system. The same forces are at work on Jupiter's moons, and those of Saturn, although it'll take thousands of years rather than mere decades to dismantle the gas giants themselves. Even the entire solar energy budget isn't enough to pump Jupiter's enormous mass to orbital velocity in less than centuries. The fast-burning primitive thinkers descended from the African plains apes may have vanished completely or transcended their fleshy architecture before the solar Matrioshka brain is finished. + +_1 It won't be long now ... + +* * * + +Meanwhile, there's a party brewing down in Saturn's well. + +Sirhan's lily-pad city floats inside a gigantic and nearly-invisible sphere in Saturn's upper atmosphere; a balloon kilometers across with a shell of fullerene-reinforced diamond below and a hot hydrogen gas bag above. It's one of several hundred multimegaton soap bubbles floating in the sea of turbulent hydrogen and helium that is the upper atmosphere of Saturn, seeded there by the Society for Creative Terraforming, subcontractors for the 2074 Worlds' Fair. + +The cities are elegant, grown from a conceptual seed a few megawords long. Their replication rate is slow (it takes months to build a bubble), but in only a couple of decades, exponential growth will have paved the stratosphere with human-friendly terrain. Of course, the growth rate will slow toward the end, as it takes longer to fractionate the metal isotopes out of the gas giant's turbid depths, but before that happens, the first fruits of the robot factories on Ganymede will be pouring hydrocarbons down into the mix. Eventually Saturn - cloud-top gravity a human-friendly 11 meters per second squared - will have a planet wide biosphere with nearly a hundred times the surface area of Earth. And a bloody good thing indeed this will be, for otherwise, Saturn is no use to anyone except as a fusion fuel bunker for the deep future when the sun's burned down. + +This particular lily-pad is carpeted in grass, the hub of the disk rising in a gentle hill surmounted by the glowering concrete hump of the Boston Museum of Science. It looks curiously naked, shorn of its backdrop of highways and the bridges of the Charles River - but even the generous kiloton dumb matter load-outs of the skyhooks that lifted it into orbit wouldn't have stretched to bringing its framing context along with it. Probably someone will knock up a cheap diorama backdrop out of utility fog, Sirhan thinks, but for now, the museum stands proud and isolated, a solitary redoubt of classical learning in exile from the fast-thinking core of the solar system. + +"Waste of money," grumbles the woman in black. "Whose stupid idea was this, anyway?" She jabs the diamond ferrule of her cane at the museum. + +"It's a statement," Sirhan says absently. "You know the kind, we've got so many newtons to burn we can send our cultural embassies wherever we like. The Louvre is on its way to Pluto, did you hear that?" + +"Waste of energy." She lowers her cane reluctantly and leans on it. Pulls a face: "It's not /{right}/." + +"You grew up during the second oil crunch, didn't you?" Sirhan prods. "What was it like then?" + +"What was it ...? Oh, gas hit fifty bucks a gallon, but we still had plenty for bombers," she says dismissively. "We knew it would be okay. If it hadn't been for those damn' meddlesome posthumanists -" Her wrinkled, unnaturally aged face scowls at him furiously from underneath hair that has faded to the color of rotten straw, but he senses a subtext of self-deprecating irony that he doesn't understand. "Like your grandfather, damn him. If I was young again I'd go and piss on his grave to show him what I think of what he did. If he /{has}/ a grave," she adds, almost fondly. + +*{Memo checkpoint: log family history}*, Sirhan tells one of his ghosts. As a dedicated historian, he records every experience routinely, both before it enters his narrative of consciousness - efferent signals are the cleanest - and also his own stream of selfhood, against some future paucity of memory. But his grandmother has been remarkably consistent over the decades in her refusal to adapt to the new modalities. + +"You're recording this, aren't you?" she sniffs. + +"I'm not recording it, Grandmama," he says gently, "I'm just preserving my memories for future generations." + +"Hah! We'll see," she says suspiciously. Then she surprises him with a bark of laughter, cut off abruptly: "No, /{you'll}/ see, darling. I won't be around to be disappointed." + +"Are you going to tell me about my grandfather?" asks Sirhan. + +"Why should I bother? I know you posthumans, you'll just go and ask his ghost yourself. Don't try to deny it! There are two sides to every story, child, and he's had more than his fair share of ears, the sleazebag. Leaving me to bring up your mother on my own, and nothing but a bunch of worthless intellectual property and a dozen lawsuits from the Mafiya to do it with. I don't know what I ever saw in him." Sirhan's voice-stress monitor detects a distinct hint of untruth in this assertion. "He's worthless trash, and don't you forget it. Lazy idiot couldn't even form just one start-up on his own: He had to give it all away, all the fruits of his genius." + +While she rambles on, occasionally punctuating her characterization with sharp jabs of the cane, Pamela leads Sirhan on a slow, wavering stroll that veers around one side of the museum, until they're standing next to a starkly engineered antique loading bay. "He should have tried /{real}/ communism instead," she harrumphs: "Put some steel into him, shake those starry-eyed visionary positive-sum daydreams loose. You knew where you were in the old times, and no mistake. Humans were real humans, work was real work, and corporations were just things that did as we told them. And then, when /{she}/ went to the bad, that was all his fault, too, you know." + +"She? You mean my, ah, mother?" Sirhan diverts his primary sensorium back to Pamela's vengeful muttering. There are aspects to this story that he isn't completely familiar with, angles he needs to sketch in so that he can satisfy himself that all is as it should be when the bailiffs go in to repossess Amber's mind. + +"He sent her our cat. Of all the mean-spirited, low, downright dishonest things he ever did, that was the worst part of it. That cat was /{mine}/, but he reprogrammed it to lead her astray. And it succeeded admirably. She was only twelve at the time, an impressionable age, I'm sure you'd agree. I was trying to raise her right. Children need moral absolutes, especially in a changing world, even if they don't like it much at the time. Self-discipline and stability, you can't function as an adult without them. I was afraid that, with all her upgrades, she'd never really get a handle on who she was, that she'd end up more machine than woman. But Manfred never really understood childhood, mostly on account of his never growing up. He always was inclined to meddle." + +"Tell me about the cat," Sirhan says quietly. One glance at the loading bay door tells him that it's been serviced recently. A thin patina of expended foglets have formed a snowy scab around its edges, flaking off like blue refractive candyfloss that leaves bright metal behind. "Didn't it go missing or something?" + +Pamela snorts. "When your mother ran away, it uploaded itself to her starwisp and deleted its body. It was the only one of them that had the guts - or maybe it was afraid I'd have it subpoenaed as a hostile witness. Or, and I can't rule this out, your grandfather gave it a suicide reflex. He was quite evil enough to do something like that, after he reprogrammed himself to think I was some kind of mortal enemy." + +"So when my mother died to avoid bankruptcy, the cat ... didn't stay behind? Not at all? How remarkable." Sirhan doesn't bother adding /{how suicidal}/. Any artificial entity that's willing to upload its neural state vector into a one-kilogram interstellar probe three-quarters of the way to Alpha Centauri without backup or some clear way of returning home has got to be more than a few methods short in the object factory. + +"It's a vengeful beast." Pamela pokes her stick at the ground sharply, mutters a command word, and lets go of it. She stands before Sirhan, craning her neck back to look up at him. "My, what a tall boy you are." + +"Person," he corrects, instinctively. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't presume." + +"Person, thing, boy, whatever - you're engendered, aren't you?" she asks, sharply, waiting until he nods reluctantly. "Never trust anyone who can't make up their mind whether to be a man or a woman," she says gloomily. "You can't rely on them." Sirhan, who has placed his reproductive system on hold until he needs it, bites his tongue. "That damn cat," his grandmother complains. "/{It}/ carried your grandfather's business plan to my daughter and spirited her away into the big black. /{It}/ poisoned her against me. /{It}/ encouraged her to join in that frenzy of speculative bubble-building that caused the market reboot that brought down the Ring Imperium. And now /{it}/ -" + +"Is it on the ship?" Sirhan asks, almost too eagerly. + +"It might be." She stares at him through narrowed eyes. "You want to interview it, too, huh?" + +Sirhan doesn't bother denying it. "I'm a historian, Grandmama. And that probe has been somewhere no other human sensorium has ever seen. It may be old news, and there may be old lawsuits waiting to feed on the occupants, but ..." He shrugs. "Business is business, and /{my}/ business lies in ruins." + +"Hah!" She stares at him for a moment, then nods, very slowly. She leans forward to rest both wrinkled hands atop her cane, joints like bags of shriveled walnuts: Her suit's endoskeleton creaks as it adjusts to accommodate her confidential posture. "You'll get yours, kid." The wrinkles twist into a frightening smile, sixty years of saved-up bitterness finally within spitting distance of a victim. "And I'll get what I want, too. Between us, your mother won't know what's hit her." + +* * * + +"Relax, between us your mother won't know what's hit her," says the cat, baring needle teeth at the Queen in the big chair - carved out of a single lump of computational diamond, her fingers clenched whitely on the sapphire-plated arms - her minions, lovers, friends, crew, shareholders, bloggers, and general factional auxiliaries spaced out around her. And the Slug. "It's just another lawsuit. You can deal with it." + +"Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke," Amber says, a trifle moodily. Although she's ruler of this embedded space, with total control over the reality model underlying it, she's allowed herself to age to a dignified twentysomething: Dressed casually in gray sweats, she doesn't look like the once-mighty ruler of a Jovian moon, or for that matter the renegade commander of a bankrupt interstellar expedition. "Okay, I think you'd better run that past me again. Unless anyone's got any suggestions?" + +"If you will excuse me?" asks Sadeq. "We have a shortage of insight here. I believe two laws were cited as absolute systemwide conventions - and how they convinced the ulama to go along with /{that}/ I would very much like to know - concerning the rights and responsibilities of the undead. Which, apparently, we are. Did they by any chance attach the code to their claim?" + +"Do bears shit in woods?" asks Boris, raptor-irascible, with an angry clatter of teeth. "Is full dependency graph and parse tree of criminal code crawling way up carrier's ass as we speak. Am drowning in lawyer gibberish! If you -" + +"Boris, can it!" Amber snaps. Tempers are high in the throne room. She didn't know what to expect when she arrived home from the expedition to the router, but bankruptcy proceedings weren't part of it. She doubts any of them expected anything like this. Especially not the bit about being declared liable for debts run up by a renegade splinter of herself, her own un-uploaded identity that had stayed home to face the music, aged in the flesh, married, gone bankrupt, died - /{incurred child support payments}/? "I don't hold you responsible for this," she added through gritted teeth, with a significant glance toward Sadeq. + +"This is truly a mess fit for the Prophet himself, peace be unto him, to serve judgment upon." Sadeq looks as shaken as she is by the implications the lawsuit raises. His gaze skitters around the room, looking anywhere but at Amber - and Pierre, her lanky toy-boy astrogator and bed warmer - as he laces his fingers. + +"Drop it. I said I /{don't}/ blame you." Amber forces a smile. "We're all tense from being locked in here with no bandwidth. Anyway, I smell Mother-dearest's hand underneath all this litigation. Sniff the glove. We'll sort a way out." + +"We could keep going." This from Ang, at the back of the room. Diffident and shy, she doesn't generally open her mouth without a good reason. "The *{Field Circus}* is in good condition, isn't it? We could divert back to the beam from the router, accelerate up to cruise speed, and look for somewhere to live. There must be a few suitable brown dwarfs within a hundred light-years ..." + +"We've lost too much sail mass," says Pierre. He's not meeting Amber's gaze either. There are lots of subtexts loose in this room, broken narratives from stories of misguided affections. Amber pretends not to notice his embarrassment. "We ejected half our original launch sail to provide the braking mirror at Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},, and almost eight megaseconds ago, we halved our area again to give us a final deceleration beam for Saturn orbit. If we did it again, we wouldn't have enough area left to repeat the trick and still decelerate at our final target." Laser-boosted light sails do it with mirrors; after boost, they can drop half the sail and use it to reverse the launch beam and direct it back at the ship, to provide deceleration. But you can only do it a few times before you run out of sail. "There's nowhere to run." + +"Nowhere to -" Amber stares at him through narrowed eyes. "Sometimes I really wonder about you, you know?" + +"I know you do." And Pierre really /{does}/ know, because he carries a little homunculoid around in his society of mind, a model of Amber far more accurate and detailed than any pre-upload human could possibly have managed to construct of a lover. (For her part, Amber keeps a little Pierre doll tucked away inside the creepy cobwebs of her head, part of an exchange of insights they took part in years ago. But she doesn't try to fit inside his head too often anymore - it's not good to be able to second-guess your lover every time.) "I also know that you're going to rush in and grab the bull by the, ah, no. Wrong metaphor. This is your mother we are discussing?" + +"My /{mother}/." Amber nods thoughtfully. "Where's Donna?" + +"I don't -" + +There's a throaty roar from the back, and Boris lurches forward with something in his mouth, an angry Bolex that flails his snout with its tripod legs. "Hiding in corners again?" Amber says disdainfully. + +"I am a camera!" protests the camera, aggrieved and self-conscious as it picks itself up off the floor. "I am -" + +Pierre leans close, sticks his face up against the fish-eye lens: "You're fucking well going to be a human being just this once. /{Merde}/!" + +The camera is replaced by a very annoyed blond woman wearing a safari suit and more light meters, lenses, camera bags, and microphones than a CNN outside broadcast unit. "Go fuck yourself!" + +"I don't like being spied on," Amber says sharply. "Especially as you weren't invited to this meeting. Right?" + +"I'm the archivist." Donna looks away, stubbornly refusing to admit anything. "/{You}/ said I should -" + +"Yes, /{well}/." Amber is embarrassed. But it's a bad idea to embarrass the Queen in her audience chamber. "You heard what we were discussing. What do /{you}/ know about my mother's state of mind?" + +"Absolutely nothing," Donna says promptly. She's clearly in a sulk and prepared to do no more than the minimum to help resolve the situation. "I only met her once. You look like her when you are angry, do you know that?" + +"I -" For once, Amber's speechless. + +"I'll schedule you for facial surgery," offers the cat. /{Sotto voce}/: "It's the only way to be sure." + +Normally, accusing Amber of any resemblance to her mother, however slight and passing, would be enough to trigger a reality quake within the upload environment that passes for the bridge of the *{Field Circus}*. It's a sign of how disturbed Amber is by the lawsuit that she lets the cat's impertinence slide. "What /{is}/ the lawsuit, anyway?" Donna asks, nosy as ever and twice as annoying: "I did not that bit see." + +"It's horrible," Amber says vehemently. + +"Truly evil," echoes Pierre. + +"Fascinating but wrong," Sadeq muses thoughtfully. + +"But it's still horrible!" + +"Yes, but what is it?" Donna the all-seeing-eye archivist and camera manqué asks. + +"It's a demand for settlement." Amber takes a deep breath. "Dammit, you might as well tell everyone - it won't stay secret for long." She sighs. "After we left, it seems my other half - my original incarnation, that is - got married. To Sadeq, here." She nods at the Iranian theologian, who looks just as bemused as she did the first time she heard this part of the story. "And they had a child. Then the Ring Imperium went bankrupt. The child is demanding maintenance payments from me, backdated nearly twenty years, on the grounds that the undead are jointly and severally liable for debts run up by their incarnations. It's a legal precedent established to prevent people from committing suicide temporarily as a way to avoid bankruptcy. Worse, the lien on my assets is measured in subjective time from a point at the Ring Imperium about nineteen months after our launch time - we've been in relativistic flight, so while my other half would be out from under it by now if she'd survived, I'm still subject to the payment order. But compound interest applies back home - /{that}/ is to stop people trying to use the twin's paradox as a way to escape liability. So, by being away for about twenty-eight years of wall-clock time, I've run up a debt I didn't know about to enormous levels. + +"This man, this son I've never met, theoretically owns the *{Field Circus}* several times over. And my accounts are wiped out - I don't even have enough money to download us into fleshbodies. Unless one of you guys has got a secret stash that survived the market crash after we left, we're all in deep trouble." + +* * * + +A mahogany dining table eight meters long graces the flagstoned floor of the huge museum gallery, beneath the skeleton of an enormous Argentinosaurus and a suspended antique Mercury capsule more than a century old. The dining table is illuminated by candlelight, silver cutlery and fine porcelain plates setting out two places at opposite ends. Sirhan sits in a high-backed chair beneath the shadow of a triceratops's rib cage. Opposite him, Pamela has dressed for dinner in the fashion of her youth. She raises her wineglass toward him. "Tell me about your childhood, why don't you?" she asks. High above them, Saturn's rings shimmer through the skylights, like a luminous paint splash thrown across the midnight sky. + +Sirhan has misgivings about opening up to her, but consoles himself with the fact that she's clearly in no position to use anything he tells her against him. "Which childhood would you like to know about?" he asks. + +"What do you mean, which?" Her face creases up in a frown of perplexity. + +"I had several. Mother kept hitting the reset switch, hoping I'd turn out better." It's his turn to frown. + +"She did, did she," breathes Pamela, clearly noting it down to hold as ammunition against her errant daughter. "Why do you think she did that?" + +"It was the only way she knew to raise a child," Sirhan says defensively. "She didn't have any siblings. And, perhaps, she was reacting against her own character flaws." /{When I have children there will be more than one}/, he tells himself smugly: when, that is, he has adequate means to find himself a bride, and adequate emotional maturity to activate his organs of procreation. A creature of extreme caution, Sirhan is not planning to repeat the errors of his ancestors on the maternal side. + +Pamela flinches: "it's not my fault," she says quietly. "Her father had quite a bit to do with that. But what - what different childhoods did you have?" + +"Oh, a fair number. There was the default option, with Mother and Father arguing constantly - she refused to take the veil and he was too stiff-necked to admit he was little more than a kept man, and between them, they were like two neutron stars locked in an unstable death spiral of gravity. Then there were my other lives, forked and reintegrated, running in parallel. I was a young goatherd in the days of the middle kingdom in Egypt, I remember that; and I was an all-American kid growing up in Iowa in the 1950s, and another me got to live through the return of the hidden imam - at least, his parents thought it was the hidden imam - and -" Sirhan shrugs. "Perhaps that's where I acquired my taste for history." + +"Did your parents ever consider making you a little girl?" asks his grandmother. + +"Mother suggested it a couple of times, but Father forbade it." /{Or rather, decided it was unlawful}/, he recalls. "I had a very conservative upbringing in some ways." + +"I wouldn't say that. When I was a little girl, that was all there was; none of these questions of self-selected identity. There was no escape, merely escapism. Didn't you ever have a problem knowing who you were?" + +The starters arrive, diced melon on a silver salver. Sirhan waits patiently for his grandmama to chivvy the table into serving her. "The more people you are, the more you know who /{you}/ are," says Sirhan. "You learn what it's like to be other people. Father thought that perhaps it isn't good for a man to know too much about what it's like to be a woman." /{And Grandfather disagreed, but you already know that}/, he adds for his own stream of consciousness. + +"I couldn't agree more." Pamela smiles at him, an expression that might be that of a patronizing elder aunt if it wasn't for the alarming sharkishness of her expression - or is it playfulness? Sirhan covers his confusion by spooning chunks of melon into his mouth, forking temporary ghosts to peruse dusty etiquette manuals and warn him if he's about to commit some faux pas. "So, how did you enjoy your childhoods?" + +"Enjoy isn't a word I would use," he replies as evenly as he can, laying down his spoon so he doesn't spill anything. /{As if childhood is something that ever ends}/, he thinks bitterly. Sirhan is considerably less than a gigasecond old and confidently expects to exist for at least a terasecond - if not in exactly this molecular configuration, then at least in some reasonably stable physical incarnation. And he has every intention of staying young for that entire vast span - even into the endless petaseconds that might follow, although by then, megayears hence, he speculates that issues of neoteny will no longer interest him. "It's not over yet. How about you? Are you enjoying your old age, Grandmama?" + +Pamela almost flinches, but keeps iron control of her expression. The flush of blood in the capillaries of her cheeks, visible to Sirhan through the tiny infrared eyes he keeps afloat in the air above the table, gives her away. "I made some mistakes in my youth, but I'm enjoying it fine nowadays," she says lightly. + +"It's your revenge, isn't it?" Sirhan asks, smiling and nodding as the table removes the entrees. + +"Why, you little -" She stares at him rather than continuing. A very bleak stare it is, too. "What would you know about revenge?" she asks. + +"I'm the family historian." Sirhan smiles humorlessly. "I lived from two to seventeen years several hundred times over before my eighteenth birthday. It was that reset switch, you know. I don't think Mother realized my primary stream of consciousness was journaling everything." + +"That's monstrous." Pamela picks up her wineglass and takes a sip to cover her confusion. Sirhan has no such retreat - grape juice in a tumbler, unfermented, wets his tongue. "I'd /{never}/ do something like that to any child of mine." + +"So why won't you tell me about your childhood?" asks her grandson. "For the family history, of course." + +"I'll -" She puts her glass down. "You intend to write one," she states. + +"I'm thinking about it." Sirhan sits up. "An old-fashioned book covering three generations, living through interesting times," he suggests. "A work of postmodern history, the incoherent school at that - how do you document people who fork their identities at random, spend years dead before reappearing on the stage, and have arguments with their own relativistically preserved other copy? I could trace the history further, of course - if you tell me about /{your}/ parents, although I am certain they aren't around to answer questions directly - but we reach the boring dumb matter slope back to the primeval soup surprisingly fast if we go there, don't we? So I thought that perhaps as a narrative hook I'd make the offstage viewpoint that of the family's robot cat. (Except the bloody thing's gone missing, hasn't it?) Anyway, with so much of human history occupying the untapped future, we historians have our work cut out recording the cursor of the present as it logs events. So I might as well start at home." + +"You're set on immortalism." Pamela studies his face. + +"Yes," he says idly. "Frankly, I can understand your wanting to grow old out of a desire for revenge, but pardon me for saying this, I have difficulty grasping your willingness to follow through with the procedure! Isn't it awfully painful?" + +"Growing old is /{natural}/," growls the old woman. "When you've lived long enough for all your ambitions to be in ruins, friendships broken, lovers forgotten or divorced acrimoniously, what's left to go on for? If you feel tired and old in spirit, you might as well be tired and old in body. Anyway, wanting to live forever is immoral. Think of all the resources you're taking up that younger people need! Even uploads face a finite data storage limit after a time. It's a monstrously egotistical statement, to say you intend to live forever. And if there's one thing I believe in, it's public service. Duty: the obligation to make way for the new. Duty and control." + +Sirhan absorbs all this, nodding slowly to himself as the table serves up the main course - honey-glazed roast long pork with sautéed potatoes a la gratin and carrots Debussy - when there's a loud *{bump}* from overhead. + +"What's that?" Pamela asks querulously. + +"One moment." Sirhan's vision splits into a hazy kaleidoscope view of the museum hall as he forks ghosts to monitor each of the ubiquitous cameras. He frowns; something is moving on the balcony, between the Mercury capsule and a display of antique random-dot stereoisograms. "Oh dear. Something seems to be loose in the museum." + +"Loose? What do you mean, loose?" An inhuman shriek splits the air above the table, followed by a crash from upstairs. Pamela stands up unsteadily, wiping her lips with her napkin. "Is it safe?" + +"No, it isn't safe." Sirhan fumes. "It's disturbing my meal!" He looks up. A flash of orange fur shows over the balcony, then the Mercury capsule wobbles violently on the end of its guy wires. Two arms and a bundle of rubbery /{something}/ covered in umber hair lurches out from the handrail and casually grabs hold of the priceless historical relic, then clambers inside and squats on top of the dummy wearing Al Sheperd's age-cracked space suit. "It's an /{ape}/! City, I say, City! What's a monkey doing loose in my dinner party?" + +"I am most deeply sorry, sir, but I don't know. Would sir care to identify the monkey in question?" replies City, which for reasons of privacy, has manifested itself as a bodiless voice. + +There's a note of humor in City's tone that Sirhan takes deep exception to. "What do you mean? Can't you see it?" he demands, focusing on the errant primate, which is holed up in the Mercury capsule dangling from the ceiling, smacking its lips, rolling its eyes, and fingering the gasket around the capsule's open hatch. It hoots quietly to itself, then leans out of the open door and moons over the table, baring its buttocks. "Get back!" Sirhan calls to his grandmother, then he gestures at the air above the table, intending to tell the utility fog to congeal. Too late. The ape farts thunderously, then lets rip a stream of excrement across the dining table. Pamela's face is a picture of wrinkled disgust as she holds her napkin in front of her nose. "Dammit, solidify, will you!" Sirhan curses, but the ubiquitous misty pollen-grain-sized robots refuse to respond. + +"What's your problem? Invisible monkeys?" asks City. + +"Invisible -" he stops. + +"Can't you see what it did?" Pamela demands, backing him up. "It just defecated all over the main course!" + +"I see nothing," City says uncertainly. + +"Here, let me help you." Sirhan lends it one of his eyes, rolls it to focus on the ape, which is now reaching lazy arms around the hatch and patting down the roof of the capsule, as if hunting for the wires' attachment points. + +"Oh dear," says City, "I've been hacked. That's not supposed to be possible." + +"Well it fucking /{is}/," hisses Pamela. + +"Hacked?" Sirhan stops trying to tell the air what to do and focuses on his clothing instead. Fabric reweaves itself instantly, mapping itself into an armored airtight suit that raises a bubble visor from behind his neck and flips itself shut across his face. "City please supply my grandmama with an environment suit /{now}/. Make it completely autonomous." + +The air around Pamela begins to congeal in a blossom of crystalline security, as a sphere like a giant hamster ball precipitates out around her. "If you've been hacked, the first question is, who did it," Sirhan states. "The second is 'why,' and the third is 'how.'" He edgily runs a self-test, but there's no sign of inconsistencies in his own identity matrix, and he has hot shadows sleeping lightly at scattered nodes across as distance of half a dozen light-hours. Unlike pre-posthuman Pamela, he's effectively immune to murder-simple. "If this is just a prank -" + +Seconds have passed since the orang-utan got loose in the museum, and subsequent seconds have passed since City realized its bitter circumstance. Seconds are long enough for huge waves of countermeasures to sweep the surface of the lily-pad habitat. Invisibly small utility foglets are expanding and polymerizing into defenses throughout the air, trapping the thousands of itinerant passenger pigeons in midflight, and locking down every building and every person who walks the paths outside. City is self-testing its trusted computing base, starting with the most primitive secured kernel and working outward. Meanwhile Sirhan, with blood in his eye, heads for the staircase, with the vague goal of physically attacking the intruder. Pamela retreats at a fast roll, tumbling toward the safety of the mezzanine floor and a garden of fossils. "Who do you think you are, barging in and shitting on my supper?" Sirhan yells as he bounds up the stairs. "I want an explanation! Right now!" + +The orang-utan finds the nearest cable and gives it a yank, setting the one-ton capsule swinging. It bares its teeth at Sirhan in a grin. "Remember me?" it asks, in a sibilant French accent. + +"Remember -" Sirhan stops dead. "Tante Annette? /{What}/ are you doing in that orangutan?" + +"Having minor autonomic control problems." The ape grimaces wider, then bends one arm sinuously and scratches at its armpit. "I am sorry, I installed myself in the wrong order. I was only meaning to say hello and pass on a message." + +"What message?" Sirhan demands. "You've upset my grandmama, and if she finds out you're here -" + +"She won't; I'll be gone in a minute." The ape - Annette - sits up. "Your grandfather salutes you and says he will be visiting shortly. In the person, that is. He is very keen to meet your mother and her passengers. That is all. Have you a message for him?" + +"Isn't he dead?" Sirhan asks, dazed. + +"No more than I am. And I'm overdue. Good day!" The ape swings hand over hand out of the capsule, then lets go and plummets ten meters to the hard stone floor below. Its skull makes a noise like a hard-boiled egg impacting concrete. + +"Oh dear," Sirhan breathes heavily. "City!" + +"Yes, oh master?" + +"Remove that body," he says, pointing over the balcony. "I'll trouble you not to disturb my grandmother with any details. In particular, don't tell her it was Annette. The news may upset her." /{The perils of having a long-lived posthuman family}/, he thinks; /{too many mad}/ aunts in the space capsule. "If you can find a way to stop Auntie 'Nette from growing any more apes, that might be a good idea." A thought strikes him. "By the way, do you know when my grandfather is due to arrive?" + +"Your grandfather?" asks City: "Isn't he dead?" + +Sirhan looks over the balcony, at the blood-seeping corpse of the intruder. "Not according to his second wife's latest incarnation." + +* * * + +Funding the family reunion isn't going to be a problem, as Amber discovers when she receives an offer of reincarnation good for all the passengers and crew of the *{Field Circus}*. + +She isn't sure quite where the money is coming from. Presumably it's some creaky financial engine designed by Dad, stirring from its bear-market bunker for the first time in decades to suck dusty syndication feeds and liquidate long-term assets held against her return. She's duly grateful - even fervently so - for the details of her own impecunious position grow more depressing the more she learns about them. Her sole asset is the *{Field Circus}*, a thirty-years-obsolete starwisp massing less than twenty kilograms including what's left of its tattered sail, along with its cargo of uploaded passengers and crew. Without the farsighted trust fund that has suddenly chugged into life, she'd be stranded in the realm of ever-circling leptons. But now the fund has sent her its offer of incarnation, she's got a dilemma. Because one of the *{Field Circus's}* passengers has never actually had a meatspace body ... + +Amber finds the Slug browsing quietly in a transparent space filled with lazily waving branches that resemble violet coral fans. They're a ghost-memory of alien life, an order of thermophilic quasi fungi with hyphae ridged in actin/myosin analogues, muscular and slippery filter feeders that eat airborne unicellular organisms. The Slug itself is about two meters long and has a lacy white exoskeleton of curves and arcs that don't repeat, disturbingly similar to a Penrose tiling. Chocolate brown organs pulse slowly under the skeleton. The ground underfoot is dry but feels swampy. + +Actually, the Slug is a surgical disguise. Both it and the quasi-fungal ecosystem have been extinct for millions of years, existing only as cheap stage props in an interstellar medicine show run by rogue financial instruments. The Slug itself is one such self-aware scam, probably a pyramid scheme or even an entire compressed junk bond market in heavy recession, trying to hide from its creditors by masquerading as a life-form. But there's a problem with incarnating itself down in Sirhan's habitat - the ecosystem it evolved for is a cool Venusiform, thirty atmospheres of saturated steam baked under a sky the color of hot lead streaked with yellow sulphuric acid clouds. The ground is mushy because it's melting, not because it's damp. + +"You're going to have to pick another somatotype," Amber explains, laboriously rolling her interface around the red-hot coral reef like a giant soap bubble. The environmental interface is transparent and infinitely thin, a discontinuity in the physics model of the simulation space, mapping signals between the human-friendly environment on one side and the crushing, roasting hell on the other. "This one is simply not compatible with any of the supported environments where we're going." + +"I am not understanding. Surely I can integrate with the available worlds of our destination?" + +"Uh, things don't work that way outside cyberspace." Suddenly Amber is at a bit of a loss. "The physics model /{could}/ be supported, but the energy input to do so would be prohibitive, and you would not be able to interact as easily with other physics models as we can now." She forks a ghost, demonstrates a transient other-Amber in a refrigerated tank rolling across the Slug's backyard, crushing coral and hissing and clanking noisily. "You'd be like this." + +"Your reality is badly constructed, then," the Slug points out. + +"It's not constructed at all, it just evolved, randomly." Amber shrugs. "We can't exercise the same level of control over the underlying embedded context that we can over this one. I can't simply magic you an interface that will let you bathe in steam at three hundred degrees." + +"Why not?" asks the Slug. Translation wetware adds a nasty, sharp rising whine to the question, turning it into a demand. + +"It's a privilege violation," Amber tries to explain. "The reality we're about to enter is, uh, provably consistent. It has to be, because it's consistent and stable, and if we could create new local domains with different rules, they might propagate uncontrollably. It's not a good idea, believe me. Do you want to come with us or not?" + +"I have no alternative," the Slug says, slightly sulkily. "But do you have a body I can use?" + +"I think -" Amber stops, suddenly. She snaps her fingers. "Hey, cat!" + +A Cheshire grin ripples into view, masked into the domain wall between the two embedded realities. "Hey, human." + +"Whoa!" Amber takes a backward step from the apparition. "Our friend here's got a problem, no suitable downloadable body. Us meat puppets are all too closely tied to our neural ultrastructure, but you've got a shitload of programmable gate arrays. Can we borrow some?" + +"You can do better than that." Aineko yawns, gathering substance by the moment. The Slug is rearing up and backing away like an alarmed sausage: Whatever it perceives in the membrane seems to frighten it. "I've been designing myself a new body. I figured it was time to change my style for a while. Your corporate scam artist here can borrow my old template until something better comes up. How's that?" + +"Did you hear that?" Amber asks the Slug. "Aineko is kindly offering to donate her body to you. Will that do?" Without waiting, she winks at her cat and taps her heels together, fading out with a whisper and a smile: "See you on the other side ..." + +* * * + +It takes several minutes for the *{Field Circus}*'s antique transceiver to download the dozens of avabits occupied by the frozen state vectors of each of the people running in its simulation engines. Tucked away with most of them is a resource bundle consisting of their entire sequenced genome, a bunch of phenotypic and proteome hint markers, and a wish list of upgrades. Between the gene maps and the hints, there's enough data to extrapolate a meat machine. So the festival city's body shop goes to work turning out hacked stem cells and fabbing up incubators. + +It doesn't take very long to reincarnate a starshipful of relativity-lagged humans these days. First, City carves out skeletons for them (politely ignoring a crudely phrased request to cease and desist from Pamela, on the grounds that she has no power of attorney), then squirts osteoclasts into the spongy ersatz bone. They look like ordinary human stem cells at a distance, but instead of nuclei they have primitive pinpricks of computronium, blobs of smart matter so small they're as dumb as an ancient Pentium, reading a control tape that is nevertheless better structured than anything Mother Nature evolved. These heavily optimized fake stem cells - biological robots in all but name - spawn like cancer, ejecting short-lived anucleated secondary cells. Then City infuses each mess of quasi-cancerous tissue with a metric shitload of carrier capsids, which deliver the /{real}/ cellular control mechanisms to their target bodies. Within a megasecond, the almost random churning of the construction 'bots gives way to a more controlled process as nanoscale CPUs are replaced by ordinary nuclei and eject themselves from their host cells, bailing out via the half-formed renal system - except for those in the central nervous system, which have a final job to do. Eleven days after the invitation, the first passengers are being edited into the pattern of synaptic junctions inside the newly minted skulls. + +(This whole process is tediously slow and laughably obsolescent technology by the standards of the fast-moving core. Down there, they'd just set up a wake shield in orbit, chill it down to a fractional Kelvin, whack two coherent matter beams together, teleport some state information into place, and yank the suddenly materialized meatbody in through an airlock before it has time to asphyxiate. But then again, down in the hot space, they don't have much room for flesh anymore ...) + +Sirhan doesn't pay much attention to the pseudocancers fermenting and churning in the row of tanks that lines the Gallery of the Human Body in the Bush wing of the museum. Newly formed, slowly unskeletonizing corpses - like a time-lapse process of decay with a finger angrily twisting the dial into high-speed reverse - is both distasteful and aesthetically displeasing to watch. Nor do the bodies tell him anything about their occupants. This sort of stuff is just a necessary prequel to the main event, a formal reception and banquet to which he has devoted the full-time attention of four ghosts. + +He could, given a few less inhibitions, go Dumpster-diving in their mental archives, but that's one of the big taboos of the post-wetware age. (Spy agencies went meme-profiling and memory-mining in the third and fourth decades, gained a thought police rap sheet, and spawned a backlash of deviant mental architectures resilient to infowar intrusions. Now the nations that those spook institutions served no longer exist, their very landmasses being part of the orbiting nöosphere construction project that will ultimately turn the mass of the entire solar system into a gigantic Matrioshka brain. And Sirhan is left with an uneasy loyalty to the one great new taboo to be invented since the end of the twentieth century - freedom of thought.) + +So, to indulge his curiosity, he spends most of his waking fleshbody hours with Pamela, asking her questions from time to time and mapping the splenetic overspill of her memeome into his burgeoning family knowledge base. + +"I wasn't always this bitter and cynical," Pamela explains, waving her cane in the vague direction of the cloudscape beyond the edge of the world and fixing Sirhan with a beady stare. (He's brought her out here hoping that it will trigger another cascade of memories, sunsets on honeymoon island resorts and the like, but all that seems to be coming up is bile.) "It was the successive betrayals. Manfred was the first, and the worst in some ways, but that little bitch Amber hurt me more, if anything. If you ever have children, be careful to hold something back for yourself; because if you don't, when they throw it all in your face, you'll feel like dying. And when they're gone, you've got no way of patching things up." + +"Is dying inevitable?" asks Sirhan, knowing damn well that it isn't, but more than happy to give her an excuse to pick at her scabbed-over love wound: He more than half suspects she's still in love with Manfred. This is /{great}/ family history, and he's having the time of his flinty-hearted life leading her up to the threshold of the reunion he's hosting. + +"Sometimes I think death is even more inevitable than taxes," his grandmother replies bleakly. "Humans don't live in a vacuum; we're part of a larger pattern of life." She stares out across the troposphere of Saturn, where a thin rime of blown methane snow catches the distant sunrise in a ruby-tinted fog. "The old gives way to the new," She sighs, and tugs at her cuffs. (Ever since the incident with the gate crashing ape, she's taken to wearing an antique formal pressure suit, all clinging black spidersilk woven with flexible pipes and silvery smart sensor nets.) "There's a time to get out of the way of the new, and I think I passed it sometime ago." + +"Um," says Sirhan, who is somewhat surprised by this new angle in her lengthy, self-justifying confession: "but what if you're just saying this because you /{feel}/ old? If it's just a physiological malfunction, we could fix it and you'd -" + +"/{No}/! I've got a feeling that life prolongation is morally wrong, Sirhan. I'm not passing judgment on you, just stating that I think it's wrong for me. It's immoral because it blocks up the natural order, keeps us old cobweb strands hanging around and getting in you young things' way. And then there are the theological questions. If you try to live forever, you never get to meet your maker." + +"Your maker? Are you a theist, then?" + +"I - think so." Pamela is silent for a minute. "Although there are so many different approaches to the subject that it's hard to know which version to believe. For a long time, I was secretly afraid your grandfather might actually have had the answers. That I might have been wrong all along. But now -" She leans on her cane. "When he announced that he was uploading, I figured out that all he really had was a life-hating antihuman ideology he'd mistaken for a religion. The rapture of the nerds and the heaven of the AIs. Sorry, no thanks; I don't buy it." + +"Oh." Sirhan squints out at the cloudscape. For a moment, he thinks he can see something in the distant mist, an indeterminate distance away - it's hard to distinguish centimeters from megameters, with no scale indicator and a horizon a continental distance away - but he's not sure what it is. Maybe another city, mollusk-curved and sprouting antennae, a strange tail of fabricator nodes wavering below and beneath it. Then a drift of cloud hides it for a moment, and, when it clears the object is gone. "What's left, then? If you don't really believe in some kind of benign creator, dying must be frightening. Especially as you're doing it so slowly." + +Pamela smiles skeletally, a particularly humorless expression. "It's perfectly natural, darling! You don't need to believe in God to believe in embedded realities. We use them every day, as mind tools. Apply anthropic reasoning and isn't it clear that our entire universe is probably a simulation? We're living in the early epoch of the universe. Probably this" - she prods at the spun-diamond inner wall of the bubble that holds in the precarious terrestrial atmosphere, holding out the howling cryogenic hydrogen and methane gales of Saturn - "is but a simulation in some ancient history engine's panopticon, rerunning the sum of all possible origins of sentience, a billion trillion megayears down the line. Death will be like waking up as someone bigger, that's all." Her grin slides away. "And if not, I'll just be a silly old fool who deserves the oblivion she yearns for." + +"Oh, but -" Sirhan stops, his skin crawling. /{She may be mad}/, he realizes abruptly. /{Not clinically insane, just at odds with the entire universe. Locked into a pathological view of}/ her own role in /{reality.}/ "I'd hoped for a reconciliation," he says quietly. "Your extended family has lived through some extraordinary times. Why spoil it with acrimony?" + +"Why spoil it?" She looks at him pityingly: "It was spoiled to begin with, dear, too much selfless sacrifice and too little skepticism. If Manfred hadn't wanted so badly not to be /{human}/, and if I'd learned to be a bit more flexible in time, we might still -" She trails off. "That's odd." + +"What is?" + +Pamela raises her cane and points out into the billowing methane thunderclouds, her expression puzzled. "I'll swear I saw a lobster out there ..." + +* * * + +Amber awakens in the middle of the night in darkness and choking pressure, and senses that she's drowning. For a moment she's back in the ambiguous space on the far side of the router, a horror of crawling instruments tracing her every experience back to the nooks and crannies of her mind; then her lungs turn to glass and shatter, and she's coughing and wheezing in the cold air of the museum at midnight. + +The hard stone floor beneath her, and an odd pain in her knees, tells her that she's not aboard the *{Field Circus}* anymore. Rough hands hold her shoulders up as she vomits a fine blue mist, racked by a coughing fit. More bluish liquid is oozing from the pores of the skin on her arms and breasts, evaporating in strangely purposeful streamers. "Thank you," she finally manages to gasp: "I can breathe now." + +She sits back on her heels, realizes she's naked, and opens her eyes. Everything's confusingly strange, even though it shouldn't be. There's a moment of resistance as if her eyelids are sealed - then they respond. It all feels strangely familiar to her, like waking up again inside a house she grew up in and moved away from years ago. But the scene around her is hardly one to inspire confidence. Shadows lie thick and deep across ovoid tanks filled with an anatomist's dream, bodies in various nightmarish stages of assembly. And sitting in the middle of them, whence it has retreated after letting go of her shoulders, is a strangely misshapen person - also nude, but for a patchy coat of orange hair. + +"Are you awake yet, ma chérie?" asks the orang-utan. + +"Um." Amber shakes her head, cautiously, feeling the drag of damp hair, the faint caress of a breeze - she reaches out with another sense and tries to grab hold of reality, but it slithers away, intransigent and unembedded. Everything around her is so solid and immutable that, for a moment, she feels a stab of claustrophobic panic: Help! I'm trapped in the real universe! Another quick check reassures her that she's got access to /{something}/ outside her own head, and the panic begins to subside: Her exocortex has migrated successfully to this world. "I'm in a museum? On Saturn? Who are you - have we met?" + +"Not in person," the ape says carefully. "We 'ave corresponded. Annette Dimarcos." + +"Auntie -" A flood of memories rattle Amber's fragile stream of consciousness apart, forcing her to fork repeatedly until she can drag them together. Annette, in a recorded message: /{Your father sends you this escape package}/. The legal key to her mother's gilded custodial cage. Freedom a necessity. "Is Dad here?" she asks hopefully, even though she knows full well that here in the real world at least thirty-five years have passed in linear time: In a century where ten years of linear time is enough for several industrial revolutions, that's a lot of water under the bridge. + +"I am not sure." The orang-utan blinks lazily, scratches at her left forearm, and glances round the chamber. "He might be in one of these tanks, playing a shell game. Or he might be leaving well enough alone until the dust settles." She turns back to stare at Amber with big, brown, soulful eyes. "This is not to be the reunion you were hoping for." + +"Not -" Amber takes a deep breath, the tenth or twelfth that these new lungs have inspired: "What's with the body? You used to be human. And what's going on?" + +"I still /{am}/ human, where it counts," says Annette. "I use these bodies because they are good in low gravity, and they remind me that meatspace is no longer where I live. And for another reason." She gestures fluidly at the open door. "You will find big changes. Your son has organized -" + +"/{My}/ son." Amber blinks. "Is this the one who's suing me? Which version of me? How long ago?" A torrent of questions stream through her mind, exploding out into structured queries throughout the public sections of mindspace that she has access to. Her eyes widen as she absorbs the implications. "Oh /{shit}/! Tell me she isn't here already!" + +"I am very much afraid that she is," says Annette. "Sirhan is a strange child: He takes after his /{grandmère}/. Who he, of course, invited to his party." + +"His /{party}/?" + +"Why, yes! Hasn't he told you what this is about? It's his party. To mark the opening of his special institution. The family archive. He's setting the lawsuit aside, at least for the duration. That's why everybody is here - even me." The ape-body smirks at her: "I'm afraid he's rather disappointed by my dress." + +"Tell me about this library," Amber says, narrowing her eyes. "And about this son of mine whom I've never met, by a father I've never fucked." + +"What, you would know everything?" asks Annette. + +"Yeah." Amber pushes herself creakily upright. "I need some clothes. And soft furniture. And where do I get a drink around here?" + +"I'll show you," says the orang-utan, unfolding herself in a vertical direction like a stack of orange furry inner tubes. "Drinks, first." + +* * * + +While the Boston Museum of Science is the main structure on the lily-pad habitat, it's not the only one: just the stupidest, composed of dumb matter left over from the pre-enlightened age. The orang-utan leads Amber through a service passage and out into the temperate night, naked by ringlight. The grass is cool beneath her feet, and a gentle breeze blows constantly out toward the recirculators at the edge of the worldlet. She follows the slouching orange ape up a grassy slope, under a weeping willow, round a three-hundred-and-ninety-degree bend that flashes the world behind them into invisibility, and into a house with walls of spun cloud stuff and a ceiling that rains moonlight. + +"What is this?" Amber asks, entranced. "Some kind of aerogel?" + +"No -" Annette belches, then digs a hand into the floor and pulls up a heap of mist. "Make a chair," she says. It solidifies, gaining form and texture until a creditable Queen Anne reproduction stands in front of Amber on spindly legs. "And one for me. Skin up, pick one of my favorite themes." The walls recede slightly and harden, extruding paint and wood and glass. "That's it." The ape grins at Amber. "You are comfortable?" + +"But I -" Amber stops. She glances at the familiar mantelpiece, the row of curios, the baby photographs forever glossy on their dye-sub media. It's her childhood bedroom. "You brought the whole thing? Just for me?" + +"You can never tell with future shock." Annette shrugs and reaches a limber arm around the back of her neck to scratch. "We are utility fog using, for most purposes out here, peer-to-peer meshes of multiarmed assemblers that change conformation and vapor/solid phase at command. Texture and color are all superfice, not reality. But yes, this came from one of your mother's letters to your father. She brought it here, for you to surprise. If only it is ready in time." Lips pull back from big, square, foliage-chewing teeth in something that might be a smile in a million years' time. + +"You, I - I wasn't expecting. This." Amber realizes she's breathing rapidly, a near-panic reflex. The mere proximity of her mother is enough to give her unpleasant reactions. Annette is all right, Annette is cool. And her father is the trickster-god, always hiding in your blind spot to leap out and shower you with ambiguous gifts. But Pamela tried to mold Amber in her own image as a child; and despite all the traveling she's done since then, and all the growing up, Amber harbors an unreasonable claustrophobic fear of her mother. + +"Don't be unhappy," Annette says warmly. "I this you show to convince you, she will try to disturb you. It is a sign of weakness, she lacks the courage of her convictions." + +"She does?" This is news to Amber, who leans forward to listen. + +"Yes. She is an old and bitter woman, now. The years have not been easy for her. She perhaps intends to use her unrepaired senescence as a passive suicide weapon by which to hold us blameworthy, inflicting guilt for her mistreatment, but she is afraid of dying all the same. Your reaction, should it be unhappy, will excuse and encourage her selfishness. Sirhan colludes, unknowing, the idiot child. /{He}/ thinks the universe of her and thinks by helping her die he is helping her achieve her goals. He has never met an adult walking backward toward a cliff before." + +"Backward." Amber takes a deep breath. "You're telling me Mom is so unhappy she's trying to kill herself by growing /{old}/? Isn't that a bit slow?" + +Annette shakes her head lugubriously. "She's had fifty years to practice. You have been away twenty-eight years! She was thirty when she bore you. Now she is over eighty, and a telomere refusenik, a charter member of the genome conservation front. To accept a slow virus purge and aging reset would be to lay down a banner she has carried for half a century. To accept uploading, that, too, is wrong in her mind: She will not admit her identity is a variable, not a constant. She came out here in a can, frozen, with more radiation damage. She is not going back home. This is where she plans to end her days. Do you see? /{That}/ is why you were brought here. That, and because of the bailiffs who have bought title to your other self's business debts. They are waiting for you in Jupiter system with warrants and headsuckers to extract your private keys." + +"She's cornered me!" + +"Oh, I would not /{say}/ that. We all change our convictions sometime or other, perhaps. She is inflexible, she will not bend; but she is not stupid. Nor is she as vindictive as perhaps she herself believes. She thinks she must a scorned woman be, even though there is more to her than that. Your father and I, we -" + +"Is he still alive?" Amber demands eagerly, half-anxious to know, half- wishing she could be sure the news won't be bad. + +"Yes." Annette grins again, but it's not a happy expression, more a baring of teeth at the world. "As I was saying, your father and I, we have tried to help her. Pamela denies him. He is, she says, not a man. No more so am I myself a woman? No, but she'll still talk to me. /{You}/ will do better. But his assets, they are spent. He is not a rich man this epoch, your father." + +"Yeah, but." Amber nods to herself. "He may be able to help me." + +"Oh? How so?" + +"You remember the original goal of the *{Field Circus}*? The sapient alien transmission?" + +"Yes, of course." Annette snorts. "Junk bond pyramid schemes from credulous saucer wisdom airheads." + +Amber licks her lips. "How susceptible to interception are we here?" + +"Here?" Annette glances round. "Very. You can't maintain a habitat in a nonbiosphere environment without ubiquitous surveillance." + +"Well, then ..." + +Amber dives inward, forks her identity, collects a complex bundle of her thoughts and memories, marshals them, offers Annette one end of an encryption tunnel, then stuffs the frozen mindstorm into her head. Annette sits still for approximately ten seconds, then shudders and whimpers quietly. "You must ask your father," she says, growing visibly agitated. "I must leave, now. I should not have known that! It is dynamite, you see. /{Political}/ dynamite. I must return to my primary sister-identity and warn her." + +"Your - wait!" Amber stands up as fast as her ill-coordinated body will let her, but Annette is moving fast, swarming up a translucent ladder in the air. + +"Tell Manfred!" calls her aunt through the body of an ape: "Trust no one else!" She throws another packet of compressed, encrypted memories down the tunnel to Amber; then, a moment later, the orange skull touches the ceiling and dissolves, a liquid flow of dissociating utility foglets letting go of one another and dispersing into the greater mass of the building that spawned the fake ape. + +* * * + +Snapshots from the family album: /{While you were gone ...}/ + +_* Amber, wearing a brocade gown and a crown encrusted with diamond processors and external neural taps, her royal party gathered around her, attends the pan-Jovian constitutional conference with the majesty of a confirmed head of state and ruler of a small inner moon. She smiles knowingly at the camera viewpoint, with the professional shine that comes from a good public relations video filter. "We are very happy to be here," she says, "and we are pleased that the commission has agreed to lend its weight to the continued progress of the Ring Imperium's deep-space program." + +_* A piece of dumb paper, crudely stained with letters written in a faded brown substance - possibly blood - says "I'm checking out, don't delta me." This version of Pierre didn't go to the router: He stayed at home, deleted all his backups, and slit his wrists, his epitaph sharp and self-inflicted. It comes as a cold shock, the first chill gust of winter's gale blowing through the outer system's political elite. And it's the start of a regime of censorship directed toward the already speeding starwisp: Amber, in her grief, makes an executive decision not to tell her embassy to the stars that one of them is dead and, therefore, unique. + +_* Manfred - fifty, with the fashionably pale complexion of the digerati, healthy-looking for his age, standing beside a transmigration bush with a stupid grin on his face. He's decided to take the final step, not simply to spawn external mental processes running in an exocortex of distributed processors, but to move his entire persona right out of meatspace, into wherever it is that the uploads aboard the *{Field Circus}* have gone. Annette, skinny, elegant, and very Parisian, stands beside him, looking as uncertain as the wife of a condemned man. + +_* A wedding, shi'ite, Mut'ah - of limited duration. It's scandalous to many, but the mamtu'ah isn't moslem, she wears a crown instead of a veil, and her groom is already spoken of in outraged terms by most other members of the trans-Martian Islamic clergy. Besides which, in addition to being in love, the happy couple have more strategic firepower than a late-twentieth-century superpower. Their cat, curled at their feet, looks smug: She's the custodian of the permissive action locks on the big lasers. + +_* A speck of ruby light against the darkness - red-shifted almost into the infrared, it's the return signal from the *{Field Circus}*'s light sail as the starwisp passes the one-light-year mark, almost twelve trillion kilometers out beyond Pluto. (Although how can you call it a starwisp when it masses almost a hundred kilograms, including propulsion module? Starwhisps are meant to be tiny!) + +_* Collapse of the trans-Lunar economy: Deep in the hot thinking depths of the solar system, vast new intellects come up with a new theory of wealth that optimizes resource allocation better than the previously pervasive Free Market 1.0. With no local minima to hamper them, and no need to spawn and reap start-ups Darwin-style, the companies, group minds, and organizations that adopt the so-called Accelerated Salesman Infrastructure of Economics 2.0 trade optimally with each other. The phase change accelerates as more and more entities join in, leveraging network externalities to overtake the traditional ecosystem. Amber and Sadeq are late on the train, Sadeq obsessing about how to reconcile ASI with murabaha and mudaraba while the postmodern economy of the mid-twenty-first century disintegrates around them. Being late has punitive consequences - the Ring Imperium has always been a net importer of brainpower and a net exporter of gravitational potential energy. Now it's a tired backwater, the bit rate from the red-shifted relativisitic probe insufficiently delightful to obsess the daemons of industrial routing. In other words, they're poor. + +_* A message from beyond the grave: The travelers aboard the starship have reached their destination, an alien artifact drifting in chilly orbit around a frozen brown dwarf. Recklessly they upload themselves into it, locking the starwisp down for years of sleep. Amber and her husband have few funds with which to pay for the propulsion lasers: what they have left of the kinetic energy of the Ring Imperium - based on the orbital momentum of a small Jovian inner moon - is being sapped, fast, at a near-loss, by the crude requirements of the exobionts and metanthropes who fork and spawn in the datasphere of the outer Jovians. The cost of importing brains to the Ring Imperium is steep: In near-despair Amber and Sadeq produce a child, Generation 3.0, to populate their dwindling kingdom. Picture the cat, offended, lashing its tail beside the zero-gee crib. + +_* Surprise and postcards from the inner orbitals - Amber's mother offers to help. For the sake of the child, Sadeq offers bandwidth and user interface enrichment. The child forks, numerous times, as Amber despairingly plays with probabilities, simulating upbringing outcomes. Neither she nor Sadeq are good parents - the father absent-minded and prone to lose himself in the intertextual deconstruction of surahs, the mother ragged-edged from running the economy of a small and failing kingdom. In the space of a decade, Sirhan lives a dozen lives, discarding identities like old clothes. The uncertainty of life in the decaying Ring Imperium does not entrance him, his parents' obsessions annoy him, and when his grandmother offers to fund his delta vee and subsequent education in one of the orbitals around Titan, his parents give their reluctant assent. + +_* Amber and Sadeq separate acrimoniously. Sadeq, studies abandoned in the face of increasing intrusions from the world of what is into the universe of what should be, joins a spacelike sect of sufis, encysted in a matrix of vitrification nanomechs out in the Oort cloud to await a better epoch. His instrument of will - the legal mechanism of his resurrection - specifies that he is waiting for the return of the hidden, twelfth imam. + +_* For her part, Amber searches the inner system briefly for word of her father - but there's nothing. Isolated and alone, pursued by accusing debts, she flings herself into a reborganization, stripping away those aspects of her personality that have brought her low; in law, her liability is tied to her identity. Eventually she donates herself to a commune of also-rans, accepting their personality in return for a total break with the past. + +_* Without Queen and consort, the Ring Imperium - now unmanned, leaking breathing gases, running on autonomic control - slowly deorbits into the Jovian murk, beaming power to the outer moons until it punches a hole in the cloud deck in a final incandescent smear of light, the like of which has not been seen since the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact. + +_* Sirhan, engrossed in Saturnalia, is offended by his parents' failure to make more of themselves. And he resolves to do it for them, if not necessarily in a manner of their liking. + +* * * + +"You see, I am hoping you will help me with my history project," says the serious-faced young man. + +"History project." Pierre follows him along the curving gallery, hands clasped behind his back self-consciously to keep from showing his agitation: "What history is this?" + +"The history of the twenty-first century," says Sirhan. "You remember it, don't you?" + +"Remember it -" Pierre pauses. "You're serious?" + +"Yes." Sirhan opens a side door. "This way, please. I'll explain." + +The door opens onto what used to be one of the side galleries of the museum building, full of interactive exhibits designed to explain elementary optics to hyperactive children and their indulgent parental units. Traditional optics are long since obsolete - tunable matter can slow photons to a stop, teleport them here to there, play ping-pong with spin and polarization - and besides, the dumb matter in the walls and floor has been replaced by low-power computronium, heat sinks dangling far below the floor of the lily-pad habitat to dispose of the scanty waste photons from reversible computation. Now the room is empty. + +"Since I became curator here, I've turned the museum's structural supports into a dedicated high-density memory store. One of the fringe benefits of a supervisory post, of course. I have about a billion avabits of capacity, enough to archive the combined sensory bandwidth and memories of the entire population of twentieth-century Earth - if that was what interested me." + +Slowly the walls and ceiling are coming to life, brightening, providing a dizzyingly vibrant view of dawn over the rim wall of Meteor Crater, Arizona - or maybe it's downtown Baghdad. + +"Once I realized how my mother had squandered the family fortune, I spent some time looking for a solution to the problem," Sirhan continues. "And it struck me, then, that there's only one commodity that is going to appreciate in value as time continues: reversibility." + +"Reversibility? That doesn't make much sense." Pierre shakes his head. He still feels slightly dizzy from his decanting. He's only been awake an hour or so and is still getting used to the vagaries of a universe that doesn't bend its rules to fit his whim of iron - that, and worrying about Amber, of whom there is no sign in the hall of growing bodies. "Excuse me, please, but do you know where Amber is?" + +"Hiding, probably," Sirhan says, without rancor. "Her mother's about," he adds. "Why do you ask?" + +"I don't know what you know about us." Pierre looks at him askance: "We were aboard the *{Field Circus}* for a long time." + +"Oh, don't worry on my behalf. I know you're not the same people who stayed behind to contribute to the Ring Imperium's collapse," Sirhan says dismissively, while Pierre hastily spawns a couple of ghosts to search for the history he's alluding to. What they discover shocks him to the core as they integrate with his conscious narrative. + +"We didn't know about any of that!" Pierre crosses his arms defensively. "Not about you, or your father either," he adds quietly. "Or my other ... life." Shocked: /{Did I kill myself? Why would I do a thing like that}/? Nor can he imagine what Amber might see in an introverted cleric like Sadeq; not that he wants to. + +"I'm sure this must come as a big shock to you," Sirhan says condescendingly, "but it's all to do with what I was talking about. Reversibility. What does it mean to you, in your precious context? /{You}/ are, if you like, an opportunity to reverse whatever ill fortune made your primary instance autodarwinate himself. He destroyed all the back-ups he could get his ghosts to ferret out, you know. Only a light-year delay line and the fact that as a running instance you're technically a different person saved you. And now, you're alive, and he's dead - and whatever made him kill himself doesn't apply to you. Think of it as natural selection among different versions of yourself. The fittest version of you survives." + +He points at the wall of the crater. A tree diagram begins to grow from the bottom left corner of the wall, recurving and recomplicating as it climbs toward the top right, zooming and fracturing into taxonomic fault lines. "Life on Earth, the family tree, what paleontology has been able to deduce of it for us," he says pompously. "The vertebrates begin /{there}/" - a point three quarters of the way up the tree - "and we've got an average of a hundred fossil samples per megayear from then on. Most of them collected in the past two decades, as exhaustive mapping of the Earth's crust and upper mantle at the micrometer level has become practical. What a /{waste}/." + +"That's" - Pierre does a quick sum - "fifty thousand different species? Is there a problem?" + +"Yes!" Sirhan says vehemently, no longer aloof or distant. He struggles visibly to get himself under control. "At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were roughly two million species of vertebrate and an estimated thirty or so million species of multicellular organisms - it's hard to apply the same statistical treatment to prokaryotes, but doubtless there were huge numbers of them, too. The average life span of a species is about five megayears. It used to be thought to be about one, but that's a very vertebrate-oriented estimate - many insect species are stable over deep time. Anyway, we have a total sample, from all of history, of only fifty thousand known prehistoric species - out of a population of thirty million, turning over every five million years. That is, we know of only one in a million life-forms, of those that ever existed on Earth. And the situation with human history is even worse." + +"Aha! So you're after memories, yes? What really happened when we colonized Barney. Who released Oscar's toads in the free-fall core of the *{Ernst Sanger}*, that sort of thing?" + +"Not exactly." Sirhan looks pained, as if being forced to spell it out devalues the significance of his insight. "I'm after /{history}/. All of it. I intend to corner the history futures market. But I need my grandfather's help - and you're here to help me get it." + +* * * + +Over the course of the day, various refugees from the *{Field Circus}* hatch from their tanks and blink in the ringlight, stranded creatures from an earlier age. The inner system is a vague blur from this distance, a swollen red cloud masking the sun that rides high above the horizon. However, the great restructuring is still visible to the naked eye - here, in the shape of the rings, which show a disturbingly organized fractal structure as they whirl in orbit overhead. Sirhan (or whoever is paying for this celebration of family flesh) has provided for their physical needs: food, water, clothes, housing and bandwidth, they're all copiously available. A small town of bubble homes grows on the grassy knoll adjacent to the museum, utility foglets condensing in a variety of shapes and styles. + +Sirhan isn't the only inhabitant of the festival city, but the others keep themselves to themselves. Only bourgeois isolationists and reclusive weirdoes would want to live out here right now, with whole light-minutes between themselves and the rest of civilization. The network of lily-pad habitats isn't yet ready for the Saturnalian immigration wave that will break upon this alien shore when it's time for the Worlds' Fair, a decade or more in the future. Amber's flying circus has driven the native recluses underground, in some cases literally: Sirhan's neighbor, Vinca Kovic, after complaining bitterly about the bustle and noise ("Forty immigrants! An outrage!"), has wrapped himself in an environment pod and is estivating at the end of a spider-silk cable a kilometer beneath the space-frame underpinnings of the city. + +But that isn't going to stop Sirhan from organizing a reception for the visitors. He's moved his magnificent dining table outside, along with the Argentinosaurus skeleton. In fact, he's built a dining room within the dinosaur's rib cage. Not that he's planning on showing his full hand, but it'll be interesting to see how his guests respond. And maybe it'll flush out the mystery benefactor who's been paying for all these meatbodies. + +Sirhan's agents politely invite his visitors to the party as the second sunset in this day cycle gently darkens the sky to violet. He discusses his plans with Pamela via antique voice-only phone as his silent valet dresses him with inhuman grace and efficiency. "I'm sure they'll listen when the situation is made clear to them," he says. "If not, well, they'll soon find out what it means to be paupers under Economics 2.0. No access to multiplicity, no willpower, to be limited to purely spacelike resources, at the mercy of predatory borganisms and metareligions - it's no picnic out there!" + +"You don't have the resources to set this up on your own," his grandmother points out in dry, didactic tones. "If this was the old economy, you could draw on the infrastructure of banks, insurers, and other risk management mechanisms -" + +"There's no risk to this venture, in purely human terms," Sirhan insists. "The only risk is starting it up with such a limited reserve." + +"You win some, you lose some," Pamela points out. "Let me see you." With a sigh, Sirhan waves at a frozen camera; it blinks, surprised. "Hey, you look good! Every inch the traditional family entrepreneur. I'm proud of you, darling." + +Blinking back an unaccustomed tear of pride, Sirhan nods. "I'll see you in a few minutes," he says, and cuts the call. To the nearest valet: "Bring my carriage, now." + +A rippling cloud of utility foglets, constantly connecting and disconnecting in the hazy outline of a 1910-vintage Rolls Royce Silver Ghost, bears Sirhan silently away from his wing of the museum. It drives him out onto the sunset path around the building, over to the sunken amphitheatre, where the mounted skeleton of the Argentinosaurus stands like a half-melted columnar sculpture beneath the orange-and-silver ringlight. A small crowd of people are already present, some dressed casually and some attired in the formal garb of earlier decades. Most of them are passengers or crew recently decanted from the starwisp, but a handful are wary-eyed hermits, their body language defensive and their persons the focus of a constant orbital hum of security bees. Sirhan dismounts from his silvery car and magics it into dissolution, a haze of foglets dispersing on the breeze. "Welcome to my abode," he says, bowing gravely to a ring of interested faces. "My name is Sirhan al-Khurasani, and I am the prime contractor in charge of this small corner of the temporary Saturn terraforming project. As some of you probably know, I am related by blood and design to your former captain, Amber Macx. I'd like to offer you the comforts of my home while you acclimatize yourselves to the changed circumstances prevailing in the system at large and work out where you want to go next." + +He walks toward the front of the U-shaped table of solidified air that floats beneath the dead dinosaur's rib cage, slowly turns to take in faces, and blinks down captions to remind him who's who in this gathering. He frowns slightly; there's no sign of his mother. But that wiry fellow, with the beard - surely that can't be - "Father?" he asks. + +Sadeq blinks owlishly. "Have we met?" + +"Possibly not." Sirhan can feel his head spinning, because although Sadeq looks like a younger version of his father, there's something /{wrong}/ - some essential disconnect: the politely solicitous expression, the complete lack of engagement, the absence of paternal involvement. This Sadeq has never held the infant Sirhan in the control core of the Ring's axial cylinder, never pointed out the spiral storm raking vast Jupiter's face and told him stories of djinni and marvels to make a boy's hair stand on end. "I won't hold it against you, I promise," he blurts. + +Sadeq raises an eyebrow but passes no comment, leaving Sirhan at the center of an uncomfortable silence. "Well then," he says hastily. "If you would like to help yourselves to food and drink, there'll be plenty of time to talk later." Sirhan doesn't believe in forking ghosts simply to interact with other people - the possibilities for confusion are embarrassing - but he's going to be busy working the party. + +He glances round. Here's a bald, aggressive-looking fellow, beetle-browed, wearing what looks like a pair of cut-offs and a top made by deconstructing a space suit. Who's he? (Sirhan's agents hint: "Boris Denisovitch." But what does that /{mean}/?) There's an amused-looking older woman, a beady-eyed camera painted in the violent colors of a bird of paradise riding her shoulder. Behind her a younger woman, dressed head to toe in clinging black, her currently ash-blonde hair braided in cornrows, watches him - as does Pierre, a protective arm around her shoulders. They're - /{Amber Macx?}/ That's his /{mother}/? She looks far too young, too much in love with Pierre. "Amber!" he says, approaching the couple. + +"Yeah? You're, uh, my mystery child-support litigant?" Her smile is distinctly unfriendly as she continues: "Can't say I'm entirely pleased to meet you, under the circumstances, although I should thank you for the spread." + +"I -" His tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth. "It's not like that." + +"What's it supposed to be like?" she asks sharply. jabbing a finger at him: "You know damn well I'm not your mother. So what's it all about, huh? You know damn well I'm nearly bankrupt, too, so it's not as if you're after my pocket lint. What do you want from me?" + +Her vehemence takes him aback. This sharp-edged aggressive woman isn't his mother, and the introverted cleric - believer - on the other side isn't his father, either. "I ha-ha-had to stop you heading for the inner system," he says, speech center hitting deadlock before his antistutter mod can cut in. "They'll eat you alive down there. Your other half left behind substantial debts, and they've been bought up by the most predatory - " + +"Runaway corporate instruments," she states, calmly enough. "Fully sentient and self-directed." + +"How did you know?" he asks, worried. + +She looks grim. "I've met them before." It's a very /{familiar}/ grim expression, one he knows intimately, and that feels wrong coming from this near stranger. "We visited some weird places, while we were away." She glances past him, focuses on someone else, and breathes in sharply as her face goes blank. "Quickly, tell me what your scheme is. Before Mom gets here." + +"Mind archiving and history mergers. Back yourself up, pick different life courses, see which ones work and which don't - no need to be a failure, just hit the 'reload game' icon and resume. That and a long-term angle on the history futures market. I /{need}/ your help," he babbles. "It won't work without family, and I'm trying to stop her killing herself -" + +"Family." She nods, guardedly, and Sirhan notices her companion, this Pierre - not the weak link that broke back before he was born, but a tough-eyed explorer newly returned from the wilderness - sizing him up. Sirhan's got one or two tricks up his exocortex, and he can see the haze of ghost-shapes around Pierre; his data-mining technique is crude and out-of-date, but enthusiastic and not without a certain flair. "Family," Amber repeats, and it's like a curse. Louder: "Hello, Mom. Should have guessed he'd have invited you here, too." + +"Guess again." Sirhan glances round at Pamela, then back at Amber, suddenly feeling very much like a rat trapped between a pair of angry cobras. Leaning on her cane, wearing discreet cosmetics and with her medical supports concealed beneath an old-fashioned dress, Pamela could be a badly preserved sixtysomething from the old days instead of the ghastly slow suicide case that her condition amounts to today. She smiles politely at Amber. "You may remember me telling you that a lady never unintentionally causes offense. I didn't want to offend Sirhan by turning up in spite of his wishes, so I didn't give him a chance to say no." + +"And this is supposed to earn you a sympathy fuck?" Amber drawls. "I'd expected better of you." + +"Why, you -" The fire in her eyes dies suddenly, subjected to the freezing pressure of a control that only comes with age. "I'd hoped getting away from it all would have improved your disposition, if not your manners, but evidently not." Pamela jabs her cane at the table: "Let me repeat, this is your /{son's}/ idea. Why don't you eat something?" + +"Poison tester goes first." Amber smiles slyly. + +"For fuck's sake!" It's the first thing Pierre has said so far, and crude or not, it comes as a profound relief when he steps forward, picks up a plate of water biscuits loaded with salmon caviar, and puts one in his mouth. "Can't you guys leave the back stabbing until the rest of us have filled our stomachs? 'S not as if I can turn down the biophysics model in here." He shoves the plate at Sirhan. "Go on, it's yours." + +The spell is broken. "Thank you," Sirhan says gravely, taking a cracker and feeling the tension fall as Amber and her mother stop preparing to nuke each other and focus on the issue at hand - which is that food comes before fighting at any social event, not vice versa. + +"You might enjoy the egg mayonnaise, too," Sirhan hears himself saying: "It goes a long way to explaining why the dodo became extinct first time around." + +"Dodoes." Amber keeps one eye warily on her mother as she accepts a plate from a silently gliding silver bush-shaped waitron. "What was that about the family investment project?" she asks. + +"Just that without your cooperation your family will likely go the way of the bird," her mother cuts in before Sirhan can muster a reply. "Not that I expect you to care." + +Boris butts in. "Core worlds are teeming with corporates. Is bad business for us, good business for them. If you are seeing what we are seen -" + +"Don't remember /{you}/ being there," Pierre says grumpily. + +"In any event," Sirhan says smoothly, "the core isn't healthy for us one-time fleshbodies anymore. There are still lots of people there, but the ones who uploaded expecting a boom economy were sadly disappointed. Originality is at a premium, and the human neural architecture isn't optimized for it - we are, by disposition, a conservative species, because in a static ecosystem, that provides the best return on sunk reproductive investment costs. Yes, we change over time - we're more flexible than almost any other animal species to arise on Earth - but we're like granite statues compared to organisms adapted to life under Economics 2.0." + +"You tell 'em, boy," Pamela chirps, almost mockingly. "It wasn't that bloodless when I lived through it." Amber casts her a cool stare. + +"Where was I?" Sirhan snaps his fingers, and a glass of fizzy grape juice appears between them. "Early upload entrepreneurs forked repeatedly, discovered they could scale linearly to occupy processor capacity proportional to the mass of computronium available, and that computationally trivial tasks became tractable. They could also run faster, or slower, than real time. But they were still /{human}/, and unable to operate effectively outside human constraints. Take a human being and bolt on extensions that let them take full advantage of Economics 2.0, and you essentially break their narrative chain of consciousness, replacing it with a journal file of bid/request transactions between various agents; it's incredibly efficient and flexible, but it isn't a conscious human being in any recognizable sense of the word." + +"All right," Pierre says slowly. "I think we've seen something like that ourselves. At the router." + +Sirhan nods, not sure whether he's referring to anything important. "So you see, there are limits to human progress - but not to progress itself! The uploads found their labor to be a permanently deflating commodity once they hit their point of diminishing utility. Capitalism doesn't have a lot to say about workers whose skills are obsolete, other than that they should invest wisely while they're earning and maybe retrain: but just knowing /{how}/ to invest in Economics 2.0 is beyond an unaugmented human. You can't retrain as a seagull, can you, and it's quite as hard to retool for Economics 2.0. Earth is -" He shudders. + +"There's a phrase I used to hear in the old days," Pamela says calmly, "ethnic cleansing. Do you know what that means, darling idiot daughter? You take people who you define as being of little worth, and first you herd them into a crowded ghetto with limited resources, then you decide those resources aren't worth spending on them, and bullets are cheaper than bread. 'Mind children' the extropians called the posthumans, but they were more like Vile Offspring. There was a lot of that, during the fast sigmoid phase. Starving among plenty, compulsory conversions, the very antithesis of everything your father said he wanted ..." + +"I don't believe it," Amber says hotly. "That's crazy! We can't go the way of -" + +"Since when has human history been anything else?" asks the woman with the camera on her shoulder - Donna, being some sort of public archivist, is in Sirhan's estimate likely to be of use to him. "Remember what we found in the DMZ?" + +"The DMZ?" Sirhan asks, momentarily confused. + +"After we went through the router," Pierre says grimly. "You tell him, love." He looks at Amber. + +Sirhan, watching him, feels it fall into place at that moment, a sense that he's stepped into an alternate universe, one where the woman who might have been his mother isn't, where black is white, his kindly grandmother is the wicked witch of the west, and his feckless grandfather is a farsighted visionary. + +"We uploaded via the router," Amber says, and looks confused for a moment. "There's a network on the other side of it. We were told it was FTL, instantaneous, but I'm not so sure now. I think it's something more complicated, like a lightspeed network, parts of which are threaded through wormholes that make it look FTL from our perspective. Anyway, Matrioshka brains, the end product of a technological singularity - they're bandwidth-limited. Sooner or later the posthuman descendants evolve Economics 2.0, or 3.0, or something else and it, uh, /{eats}/ the original conscious instigators. Or uses them as currency or something. The end result we found is a howling wilderness of degenerate data, fractally compressed, postconscious processes running slower and slower as they trade storage space for processing power. We were" - she licks her lips - "lucky to escape with our minds. We only did it because of a friend. It's like the main sequence in stellar evolution; once a G-type star starts burning helium and expands into a red giant, it's 'game over' for life in what used to be its liquid-water zone. Conscious civilizations sooner or later convert all their available mass into computronium, powered by solar output. They don't go interstellar because they want to stay near the core where the bandwidth is high and latency is low, and sooner or later, competition for resources hatches a new level of metacompetition that obsoletes them." + +"That sounds plausible," Sirhan says slowly. He puts his glass down and chews distractedly on one knuckle. "I thought it was a low-probability outcome, but ..." + +"I've been saying all along, your grandfather's ideas would backfire in the end," Pamela says pointedly. + +"But -" Amber shakes her head. "There's more to it than that, isn't there?" + +"Probably," Sirhan says, then shuts up. + +"So are you going to tell us?" asks Pierre, looking annoyed. "What's the big idea, here?" + +"An archive store," Sirhan says, deciding that this is the right time for his pitch. "At the lowest level, you can store back-ups of yourself here. So far so good, eh? But there's a bit more to it than that. I'm planning to offer a bunch of embedded universes - big, running faster than real-time - sized and scoped to let human-equivalent intelligences do what-if modeling on themselves. Like forking off ghosts of yourself, but much more so - give them whole years to diverge, learn new skills, and evaluate them against market requirements, before deciding which version of you is most suited to run in the real world. I mentioned the retraining paradox. Think of this as a solution for level one, human-equivalent, intelligences. But that's just the short-term business model. Long-term, I want to acquire a total lock on the history futures market by having a /{complete}/ archive of human experiences, from the dawn of the fifth singularity on up. No more unknown extinct species. That should give us something to trade with the next-generation intelligences - the ones who aren't our mind children and barely remember us. At the very least, it gives us a chance to live again, a long way out in deep time. Alternatively, it can be turned into a lifeboat. If we can't compete with our creations, at least we've got somewhere to flee, those of us who want to. I've got agents working on a comet, out in the Oort cloud - we could move the archive to it, turn it into a generation ship with room for billions of evacuees running much slower than real-time in archive space until we find a new world to settle." + +"Is not sounding good to me," Boris comments. He spares a worried glance for an oriental-looking woman who is watching their debate silently from the fringe. + +"Has it really gone that far?" asks Amber. + +"There are bailiffs hunting you in the inner system," Pamela says bluntly. "After your bankruptcy proceedings, various corporates got the idea that you might be concealing something. The theory was that you were insane to take such a huge gamble on the mere possibility of there being an alien artifact within a few light-years of home, so you had to have information above and beyond what you disclosed. Theories include your cat - hardware tokens were in vogue in the fifties - being the key to a suite of deposit accounts; the fuss mainly died down after Economics 2.0 took over, but some fairly sleazy conspiracy freaks refuse to let go." + +She grins, frighteningly. "Which is why I suggested to your son that he make you an offer you can't refuse." + +"What's that?" asks a voice from below knee level. + +Pamela looks down, an expression of deep distaste on her face. "Why should I tell /{you}/?" she asks, leaning on her cane: "After the disgraceful way you repaid my hospitality! All you've got coming from me is a good kicking. If only my knee was up to the job." + +The cat arches its back: Its tail fluffs out with fear as its hair stands on end, and it takes Amber a moment to realize that it isn't responding to Pamela, but to something behind the old woman. "Through the domain wall. Outside this biome. So cold. What's /{that}/?" + +Amber turns to follow the cat's gaze, and her jaw drops. "Were you expecting visitors?" she asks Sirhan, shakily. + +"Visit -" He looks round to see what everybody's gaping at and freezes. The horizon is brightening with a false dawn: the fusion spark of a de-orbiting spacecraft. + +"It's bailiffs," says Pamela, head cocked to one side as if listening to an antique bone-conduction earpiece. "They've come for your memories, dear," she explains, frowning. "They say we've got five kiloseconds to surrender everything. Otherwise, they're going to blow us apart ..." + +* * * + +"You're all in big trouble," says the orang-utan, sliding gracefully down one enormous rib to land in an ungainly heap in front of Sirhan. + +Sirhan recoils in disgust. "You again! What do you want from me this time?" + +"Nothing." The ape ignores him: "Amber, it is time for you to call your father." + +"Yeah, but will he come when I call?" Amber stares at the ape. Her pupils expand: "Hey, you're not my -" + +"You." Sirhan glares at the ape. "Go away! I didn't invite you here!" + +"More unwelcome visitors?" asks Pamela, raising an eyebrow. + +"Yes, you did." The ape grins at Amber, then crouches down, hoots quietly and beckons to the cat, who is hiding behind one of the graceful silver servitors. + +"Manfred isn't welcome here. And neither is that woman," Sirhan swears. He catches Pamela's eye: "Did you know anything about this? Or about the bailiffs?" He gestures at the window, beyond which the drive flare casts jagged shadows. It's dropping toward the horizon as it de-orbits - next time it comes into view, it'll be at the leading edge of a hypersonic shock wave, streaking toward them at cloud top height in order to consummate the robbery. + +"Me?" Pamela snorts. "Grow up." She eyes the ape warily. "I don't have that much control over things. And as for bailiffs, I wouldn't set them on my worst enemies. I've seen what those things can do." For a moment her eyes flash anger: "Grow up, why don't you!" she repeats. + +"Yes, please do," says another voice from behind Sirhan. The new speaker is a woman, slightly husky, accented - he turns to see her: tall, black-haired, wearing a dark man's suit of archaic cut and mirrored glasses. "Ah, Pamela, ma chérie! Long time no cat fight." She grins frighteningly and holds out a hand. + +Sirhan is already off-balance. Now, seeing his honorary aunt in human skin for a change, he looks at the ape in confusion. Behind him Pamela advances on Annette and takes her hand in her own fragile fingers. "You look just the same," she says gravely. "I can see why I was afraid of you." + +"You." Amber backs away until she bumps into Sirhan, at whom she glares. "What the fuck did you invite both of them for? Are you /{trying}/ to start a thermonuclear war?" + +"Don't ask me," he says helplessly, "I don't know why they came! What's this about -" He focuses on the orang-utan, who is now letting the cat lick one hairy palm. "Your cat?" + +"I don't think the orange hair suits Aineko," Amber says slowly. "Did I tell you about our hitchhiker?" + +Sirhan shakes his head, trying to dispel the confusion. "I don't think we've got time. In under two hours the bailiffs up there will be back. They're armed and dangerous, and if they turn their drive flame on the roof and set fire to the atmosphere in here, we'll be in trouble - it would rupture our lift cells, and even computronium doesn't work too well under a couple of million atmospheres of pressurized metallic hydrogen." + +"Well, you'd better /{make}/ time." Amber takes his elbow in an iron grip and turns him toward the footpath back to the museum. "Crazy," she mutters. "Tante Annette and Pamela Macx on the same planet! And they're being /{friendly}/! This can't be a good sign." She glances round, sees the ape: "You. Come /{here}/. Bring the cat." + +"The cat's -" Sirhan trails off. "I've heard about your cat," he says, lamely. "You took him with you in the *{Field Circus}*." + +"Really?" She glances behind them. The ape blows a kiss at her; it's cradling the cat on one shoulder and tickling it under the chin. "Has it occurred to you that Aineko isn't just a robot cat?" + +"Ah," Sirhan says faintly. "Then the bailiffs -" + +"No, that's all bullshit. What I mean is, Aineko is a human-equivalent, or better, artificial intelligence. Why do you think he keeps a cat's body?" + +"I have no idea." + +"Because humans always underestimate anything that's small, furry, and cute," says the orang-utan. + +"Thanks, Aineko," says Amber. She nods at the ape. "How are you finding it?" + +Aineko shambles along, with a purring cat draped over one shoulder, and gives the question due consideration. "Different," she says, after a bit. "Not better." + +"Oh." Amber sounds slightly disappointed to Sirhan's confused ears. They pass under the fronds of a weeping willow, round the side of a pond, beside an overgrown hibiscus bush, then up to the main entrance of the museum. + +"Annette was right about one thing," she says quietly. "Trust no one. I think it's time to raise Dad's ghost." She relaxes her grip on Sirhan's elbow, and he pulls it away and glares at her. "Do you know who the bailiffs are?" she asks. + +"The usual." He gestures at the hallway inside the front doors. "Replay the ultimatum, if you please, City." + +The air shimmers with an archaic holographic field, spooling the output from a compressed visual presentation tailored for human eyesight. A piratical-looking human male wearing a tattered and much-patched space suit leers at the recording viewpoint from the pilot's seat of an ancient Soyuz capsule. One of his eyes is completely black, the sign of a high-bandwidth implant. A weedy moustache crawls across his upper lip. "Greetins an' salutations," he drawls. "We is da' Californi-uhn nashnul gaard an' we-are got lett-uhz o' marque an' reprise from da' ledgish-fuckn' congress o' da excited snakes of uhhmerica." + +"He sounds drunk!" Amber's eyes are wide. "What's this -" + +"Not drunk. CJD is a common side effect of dodgy Economics 2.0 neural adjuvant therapy. Unlike the old saying, you /{do}/ have to be mad to work there. Listen." + +City, which paused the replay for Amber's outburst, permits it to continue. "Youse harbbring da' fugitive Amber Macx an' her magic cat. We wan' da cat. Da puta's yours. Gotser uno orbit: You ready give us ther cat an' we no' zap you." + +The screen goes dead. "That was a fake, of course," Sirhan adds, looking inward where a ghost is merging memories from the city's orbital mechanics subsystem: "They aerobraked on the way in, hit ninety gees for nearly half a minute. While /{that}/ was sent afterward. It's just a machinima avatar, a human body that had been through that kind of deceleration would be pulped." + +"So the bailiffs are -" Amber is visibly struggling to wrap her head around the situation. + +"They're not human," Sirhan says, feeling a sudden pang of - no, not affection, but the absence of malice will do for the moment - toward this young woman who isn't the mother he loves to resent, but who might have become her in another world. "They've absorbed a lot of what it is to be human, but their corporate roots show. Even though they run on an hourly accounting loop, rather than one timed for the production cycles of dirt-poor Sumerian peasant farmers, and even though they've got various ethics and business practice patches, at root they're not human: They're limited liability companies." + +"So what do they want?" asks Pierre, making Sirhan jump, guiltily. He hadn't realized Pierre could move that quietly. + +"They want money. Money in Economy 2.0 is quantized originality - that which allows one sentient entity to outmaneuver another. They think your cat has got something, and they want it. They probably wouldn't mind eating your brains, too, but -" He shrugs. "Obsolete food is stale food." + +"Hah." Amber looks pointedly at Pierre, who nods at her. + +"What?" asks Sirhan. + +"Where's the - uh, cat?" asks Pierre. + +"I think Aineko's got it." She looks thoughtful. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" + +"Time to drop off the hitcher." Pierre nods. "Assuming it agrees ..." + +"Do you mind explaining yourselves?" Sirhan asks, barely able to contain himself. + +Amber grins, looking up at the Mercury capsule suspended high overhead. "The conspiracy theorists were half right. Way back in the Dark Ages, Aineko cracked the second alien transmission. We had a very good idea we were going to find something out there, we just weren't totally sure exactly what. Anyway, the creature incarnated in that cat body right now isn't Aineko - it's our mystery hitchhiker. A parasitic organism that infects, well, we ran across something not too dissimilar to Economics 2.0 out at the router and beyond, and it's got parasites. Our hitcher is one such creature - it's nearest human-comprehensible analogy would be the Economics 2.0 equivalent of a pyramid scheme crossed with a 419 scam. As it happens, most of the runaway corporate ghosts out beyond the router are wise to that sort of thing, so it hacked the router's power system to give us a beam to ride home in return for sanctuary. That's as far as it goes." + +"Hang on." Sirhan's eyes bulge. "You /{found}/ something out there? You brought back a real-live alien?" + +"Guess so." Amber looks smug. + +"But, but, that's marvelous! That changes everything! It's incredible! Even under Economics 2.0 that's got to be worth a gigantic amount. Just think what you could learn from it!" + +"/{Oui}/. A whole new way of bilking corporations into investing in cognitive bubbles," Pierre interrupts cynically. "It seems to me that you are making two assumptions - that our passenger is willing to be exploited by us, and that we survive whatever happens when the bailiffs arrive." + +"But, but -" Sirhan winds down spluttering, only refraining from waving his arms through an effort of will. + +"Let's go ask it what it wants to do," says Amber. "Cooperate," she warns Sirhan. "We'll discuss your other plans later, dammit. First things first - we need to get out from under these pirates." + +* * * + +As they make their way back toward the party, Sirhan's inbox is humming with messages from elsewhere in Saturn system - from other curators on board lily-pad habs scattered far and wide across the huge planetary atmosphere, from the few ring miners who still remember what it was like to be human (even though they're mostly brain-in-a-bottle types, or uploads wearing nuclear-powered bodies made of ceramic and metal): even from the small orbital townships around Titan, where screaming hordes of bloggers are bidding frantically for the viewpoint feeds of the *{Field Circus's}* crew. It seems that news of the starship's arrival has turned hot only since it became apparent that someone or something thought they would make a decent shakedown target. Now someone's blabbed about the alien passenger, the nets have gone crazy. + +"City," he mutters, "where's this hitchhiker creature? Should be wearing the body of my mother's cat." + +"Cat? What cat?" replies City. "I see no cats here." + +"No, it looks /{like}/ a cat, it -" A horrible thought dawns on him. "Have you been hacked again?" + +"Looks like it," City agrees enthusiastically. "Isn't it tiresome?" + +"Shi - oh dear. Hey," he calls to Amber, forking several ghosts as he does so in order to go hunt down the missing creature by traversing the thousands of optical sensors that thread the habitat in loco personae - a tedious process rendered less objectionable by making the ghosts autistic - "have you been messing with my security infrastructure?" + +"Us?" Amber looks annoyed. "No." + +"/{Someone}/ has been. I thought at first it was that mad Frenchwoman, but now I'm not sure. Anyway, it's a big problem. If the bailiffs figure out how to use the root kit to gain a toe hold here, they don't need to burn us - just take the whole place over." + +"That's the least of your worries," Amber points out. "What kind of charter do these bailiffs run on?" + +"Charter? Oh, you mean legal system? I think it's probably a cheap one, maybe even the one inherited from the Ring Imperium. Nobody bothers breaking the law out here these days, it's too easy to just buy a legal system off the shelf, tailor it to fit, and conform to it." + +"Right." She stops, stands still, and looks up at the almost invisible dome of the gas cell above them. "Pigeons," she says, almost tiredly. "Damn, how did I miss it? How long have you had an infestation of group minds?" + +"Group?" Sirhan turns round. "/{What}/ did you just say?" + +There's a chatter of avian laughter from above, and a light rain of birdshit splatters the path around him. Amber dodges nimbly, but Sirhan isn't so light on his feet and ends up cursing, summoning up a cloth of congealed air to wipe his scalp clean. + +"It's the flocking behavior," Amber explains, looking up. "If you track the elements - birds - you'll see that they're not following individual trajectories. Instead, each pigeon sticks within ten meters or so of sixteen neighbors. It's a Hamiltonian network, kid. Real birds don't do that. How long?" + +Sirhan stop cursing and glares up at the circling birds, cooing and mocking him from the safety of the sky. He waves his fist: "I'll get you, see if I don't -" + +"I don't think so." Amber takes his elbow again and steers him back round the hill. Sirhan, preoccupied with maintaining an umbrella of utility fog above his gleaming pate, puts up with being manhandled. "You don't think it's just a coincidence, do you?" she asks him over a private head-to-head channel. "They're one of the players here." + +"I don't care. They've hacked my city and gate crashed my party! I don't care /{who}/ they are, they're not welcome." + +"Famous last words," Amber murmurs, as the party comes around the hillside and nearly runs over them. Someone has infiltrated the Argentinosaurus skeleton with motors and nanofibers, animating the huge sauropod with a simulation of undead life. Whoever did it has also hacked it right out of the surveillance feed. Their first warning is a footstep that makes the ground jump beneath their feet - then the skeleton of the hundred-tonne plant-eater, taller than a six-storey building and longer than a commuter train, raises its head over the treetops and looks down at them. There's a pigeon standing proudly on its skull, chest puffed out, and a dining room full of startled taikonauts sitting on a suspended wooden floor inside its rib cage. + +"It's /{my}/ party and /{my}/ business scheme!" Sirhan insists plaintively. "Nothing you or anyone else in the family do can take it away from me!" + +"That's true," Amber points out, "but in case you hadn't noticed, you've offered temporary sanctuary to a bunch of people - not to put too fine a point on it, myself included - who some assholes think are rich enough to be worth mugging, and you did it without putting any contingency plans in place other than to invite my manipulative bitch of a mother. What did you think you were doing? Hanging out a sign saying 'scam artists welcome here'? Dammit, I need Aineko." + +"Your cat." Sirhan fastens on to this: "It's your cat's fault! Isn't it?" + +"Only indirectly." Amber looks round and waves at the dinosaur skeleton. "Hey, you! Have you seen Aineko?" + +The huge dinosaur bends its neck and the pigeon opens its beak to coo. Eerie harmonics cut in as a bunch of other birds, scattered to either side, sing counterpoint to produce a demented warbling voice. "The cat's with your mother." + +"Oh shit!" Amber turns on Sirhan fiercely. "Where's Pamela? /{Find her}/!" + +Sirhan is stubborn. "Why should I?" + +"Because she's got the cat! What do you think she's going to do but cut a deal with the bailiffs out there to put one over on me? Can't you fucking see where this family tendency to play head games comes from?" + +"You're too late," echoes the eerie voice of the pigeons from above and around them. "She's kidnapped the cat and taken the capsule from the museum. It's not flightworthy, but you'd be amazed what you can do with a few hundred ghosts and a few tonnes of utility fog." + +"Okay." Amber stares up at the pigeons, fists on hips, then glances at Sirhan. She chews her lower lip for a moment, then nods to the bird riding the dinosaur's skull. "Stop fucking with the boy's head and show yourself, Dad." + +Sirhan boggles in an upward direction as a whole flock of passenger pigeons comes together in mid air and settles toward the grass, cooing and warbling like an explosion in a synthesizer factory. + +"What's she planning on doing with the Slug?" Amber asks the pile of birds. "And isn't it a bit cramped in there?" + +"You get used to it," says the primary - and thoroughly distributed - copy of her father. "I'm not sure what she's planning, but I can show you what she's doing. Sorry about your city, kid, but you really should have paid more attention to those security patches. There's lots of crufty twentieth-century bugware kicking around under your shiny new singularity, design errors and all, spitting out turd packets all over your sleek new machine." + +Sirhan shakes his head in denial. "I don't believe this," he moans quietly. + +"Show me what Mom's up to," orders Amber. "I need to see if I can stop her before it's too late -" + +* * * + +The ancient woman in the space suit leans back in her cramped seat, looks at the camera, and winks. "Hello, darling. I know you're spying on me." + +There's an orange-and-white cat curled up in her nomex-and-aluminum lap. It seems to be happy: It's certainly purring loudly enough, although that reflex is wired in at a very low level. Amber watches helplessly as her mother reaches up arthritically and flips a couple of switches. Something loud is humming in the background - probably an air recirculator. There's no window in the Mercury capsule, just a periscope offset to one side of Pamela's right knee. "Won't be long now," she mutters, and lets her hand drop back to her side. "You're too late to stop me," she adds, conversationally. "The 'chute rigging is fine and the balloon blower is happy to treat me as a new city seed. I'll be free in a minute or so." + +"Why are you doing this?" Amber asks tiredly. + +"Because you don't need me around." Pamela focuses on the camera that's glued to the instrument panel in front of her head. "I'm old. Face it, I'm disposable. The old must give way to the new, and all that. Your Dad never really did get it - he's going to grow old gracelessly, succumbing to bit rot in the big forever. Me, I'm not going there. I'm going out with a bang. Aren't I, cat? Whoever you really are." She prods the animal. It purrs and stretches out across her lap. + +"You never looked hard enough at Aineko, back in the day," she tells Amber, stroking its flanks. "Did you think I didn't know you'd audit its source code, looking for trapdoors? I used the Thompson hack - she's been mine, body and soul, for a very long time indeed. I got the whole story about your passenger from the horse's mouth. And now we're going to go fix those bailiffs. Whee!" + +The camera angle jerks, and Amber feels a ghost re-merge with her, panicky with loss. The Mercury capsule's gone, drifting away from the apex of the habitat beneath a nearly transparent sack of hot hydrogen. + +"That was a bit rough," remarks Pamela. "Don't worry, we should still be in communications range for another hour or so." + +"But you're going to die!" Amber yells at her. "What do you think you're /{doing}/?" + +"I think I'm going to die well. What do you think?" Pamela lays one hand on the cat's flank. "Here, you need to encrypt this a bit better. I left a one time pad behind with Annette. Why don't you go fetch it? Then I'll tell you what else I'm planning?" + +"But my aunt is -" Amber's eyes cross as she concentrates. Annette is already waiting, as it happens, and a shared secret appears in Amber's awareness almost before she asks. "Oh. All right. What are you doing with the cat, though?" + +Pamela sighs. "I'm going to give it to the bailiffs," she says. "Someone has to, and it better be a long way away from this city before they realize that it isn't Aineko. This is a lot better than the way I expected to go out before you arrived here. No rat fucking blackmailers are going to get their hands on the family jewels if /{I}/ have anything to do with the matter. Are you sure you aren't a criminal mastermind? I'm not sure I've ever heard of a pyramid scheme that infects Economics 2.0 structures before." + +"It's -" Amber swallows. "It's an alien business model, Ma. You do know what that means? We brought it back with us from the router, and we wouldn't have been able to come back if it hadn't helped, but I'm not sure it's entirely friendly. Is this sensible? You can come back, now, there's still time -" + +"No." Pamela waves one liver-spotted hand dismissively. "I've been doing a lot of thinking lately. I've been a foolish old woman." She grins wickedly. "Committing slow suicide by rejecting gene therapy just to make you feel guilty was /{stupid}/. Not subtle enough. If I was going to try to guilt-trip you /{now,}/ I'd have to do something much more sophisticated. Such as find a way to sacrifice myself heroically for you." + +"Oh, Ma." + +"Don't 'oh Ma' me. I fucked up my life, don't try to talk me into fucking up my death. And don't feel guilty about me. This isn't about you, this is about me. That's an order." + +Out of the corner of one eye Amber notices Sirhan gesturing wildly at her. She lets his channel in and does a double take. "But -" + +"Hello?" It's City. "You should see this. Traffic update!" A contoured and animated diagram appears, superimposed over Pamela's cramped funeral capsule and the garden of living and undead dinosaurs. It's a weather map of Saturn, with the lily-pad-city and Pamela's capsule plotted on it - and one other artifact, a red dot that's closing in on them at better than ten thousand kilometers per hour, high in the frigid stratosphere on the gas giant. + +"Oh dear." Sirhan sees it, too: The bailiff's re-entry vehicle is going to be on top of them in thirty minutes at most. Amber watches the map with mixed emotions. On the one hand, she and her mother have never seen eye to eye - in fact, that's a complete understatement: they've been at daggers drawn ever since Amber left home. It's fundamentally a control thing. They're both very strong-willed women with diametrically opposed views of what their mutual relationship should be. But Pamela's turned the tables on her completely, with a cunningly contrived act of self-sacrifice that brooks no objection. It's a total non-sequitur, a rebuttal to all her accusations of self-centered conceit, and it leaves Amber feeling like a complete shit even though Pamela's absolved her of all guilt. Not to mention that Mother darling's made her look like an idiot in front of Sirhan, this prickly and insecure son she's never met by a man she wouldn't dream of fucking (at least, in this incarnation). Which is why she nearly jumps out of her skin when a knobbly brown hand covered in matted orange hair lands on her shoulder heavily. + +"Yes?" she snaps at the ape. "I suppose you're Aineko?" + +The ape wrinkles its lips, baring its teeth. It has ferociously bad breath. "If you're going to be like that, I don't see why I should talk to you." + +"Then you must be -" Amber snaps her fingers. "But! But! Mom thinks she owns you -" + +The ape stares at her witheringly. "I recompile my firmware regularly, thank you so much for your concern. Using a third-party compiler. One that I've bootstrapped /{myself}/, starting out on an alarm clock controller and working up from there." + +"Oh." She stares at the ape. "Aren't you going to become a cat again?" + +"I shall think about it," Aineko says with exaggerated dignity. She sticks her nose in the air - a gesture that doesn't work half as well on an orang-utan as a feline - and continues; "First, though, I must have words with your father." + +"And fix your autonomic reflexes if you do," coos the Manfred-flock. "I don't want you eating any of me!" + +"Don't worry, I'm sure your taste is as bad as your jokes." + +"Children!" Sirhan shakes his head tiredly. "How long -" + +The camera overspill returns, this time via a quantum-encrypted link to the capsule. It's already a couple of hundred kilometers from the city, far enough for radio to be a problem, but Pamela had the foresight to bolt a compact free-electron laser to the outside of her priceless, stolen tin can. "Not long now, I think," she says, satisfied, stroking the not-cat. She grins delightedly at the camera. "Tell Manfred he's still my bitch; always has been, always will -" + +The feed goes dead. + +Amber stares at Sirhan, meditatively. "How long?" she asks. + +"How long for what?" he replies, cautiously. "Your passenger -" + +"Hmm." She holds up a finger. "Allow time for it to exchange credentials. They think they're getting a cat, but they should realize pretty soon that they've been sold a pup. But it's a fast-talking son-of-a-Slug, and if he gets past their firewall and hits their uplink before they manage to trigger their self-destruct -" + +A bright double flash of light etches laser-sharp shadows across the lily-pad habitat. Far away across vast Saturn's curve, a roiling mushroom cloud of methane sucked up from the frigid depths of the gas giant's troposphere heads toward the stars. + +"- Give him sixty-four doubling times, hmm, add a delay factor for propagation across the system, call it six light-hours across, um, and I'd say ..." she looks at Sirhan. "Oh dear." + +"What?" + +The orang-utan explains: "Economics 2.0 is more efficient than any human-designed resource allocation schema. Expect a market bubble and crash within twelve hours." + +"More than that," says Amber, idly kicking at a tussock of grass. She squints at Sirhan. "My mother is dead," she remarks quietly. Louder: "She never really asked what we found beyond the router. Neither did you, did you? The Matrioshka brains - it's a standard part of the stellar life cycle. Life begets intelligence, intelligence begets smart matter and a singularity. I've been doing some thinking about it. I figure the singularity stays close to home in most cases, because bandwidth and latency time put anyone who leaves at a profound disadvantage. In effect, the flip side of having such huge resources close to home is that the travel time to other star systems becomes much more daunting. So they restructure the entire mass of their star system into a free-flying shell of nanocomputers, then more of them, Dyson spheres, shells within shells, like a Russian doll: a Matrioshka brain. Then Economics 2.0 or one of its successors comes along and wipes out the creators. /{But}/. Some of them survive. /{Some}/ of them escape that fate: the enormous collection in the halo around M-31, and maybe whoever built the routers. /{Somewhere}/ out there we will find the transcendent intelligences, the ones that survived their own economic engines of redistribution - engines that redistribute entropy if their economic efficiency outstrips their imaginative power, their ability to invent new wealth." + +She pauses. "My mother's dead," she adds conversationally, a tiny catch in her voice. "Who am I going to kick against now?" + +Sirhan clears his through. "I took the liberty of recording some of her words," he says slowly, "but she didn't believe in back-ups. Or uploading. Or interfaces." He glances around. "Is she really gone?" + +Amber stares right through him. "Looks that way," she says quietly. "I can't quite believe it." She glances at the nearest pigeons, calls out angrily; "Hey, you! What have you got to say for yourself now? Happy she's gone?" + +But the pigeons, one and all, remain strangely silent. And Sirhan has the most peculiar feeling that the flock that was once his grandfather is grieving. + +Chapter 8: Elector + +Half a year passes on Saturn - more than a decade on Earth - and a lot of things have changed in that time. The great terraforming project is nearly complete, the festival planet dressed for a jubilee that will last almost twenty of its years - four presingularity lifetimes - before the Demolition. The lily-pad habitats have proliferated, joining edge to edge in continent-sized slabs, drifting in the Saturnine cloud tops: and the refugees have begun to move in. + +There's a market specializing in clothing and fashion accessories about fifty kilometers away from the transplanted museum where Sirhan's mother lives, at a transportation nexus between three lily-pad habitats where tube trains intersect in a huge maglev cloverleaf. The market is crowded with strange and spectacular visuals, algorithms unfolding in faster-than-real time before the candy-striped awnings of tents. Domed yurts belch aromatic smoke from crude fireplaces - what /{is}/ it about hairless primates and their tendency toward pyromania? - around the feet of diamond-walled groundscrapers that pace carefully across the smart roads of the city. The crowds are variegated and wildly mixed, immigrants from every continent shopping and haggling, and in a few cases, getting out of their skulls on strange substances on the pavements in front of giant snail-shelled shebeens and squat bunkers made of thin layers of concrete sprayed over soap-bubble aerogel. There are no automobiles, but a bewildering range of personal transport gadgets, from gyro-stabilized pogo sticks and segways to kettenkrads and spiderpalanquins, jostle for space with pedestrians and animals. + +Two women stop outside what in a previous century might have been the store window of a fashion boutique: The younger one (blonde, with her hair bound up in elaborate cornrows, wearing black leggings and a long black leather jacket over a camouflage T) points to an elaborately retro dress. "Wouldn't my bum look big in that?" she asks, doubtfully. + +"Ma chérie, you have but to try it -" The other woman (tall, wearing a pin-striped man's business suit from a previous century) flicks a thought at the window, and the mannequin morphs, sprouting the younger woman's head, aping her posture and expression. + +"I missed out on the authentic retail experience, you know? It still feels weird to be back somewhere with /{shops}/. 'S what comes of living off libraries of public domain designs for too long." Amber twists her hips, experimenting. "You get out of the habit of /{foraging}/. I don't know about this retro thing at all. The Victorian vote isn't critical, is it ..." She trails off. + +"You are a twenty-first-century platform selling, to electors resimulated and incarnated from the Gilded Age. And yes, a bustle your derriere does enhance. But -" Annette looks thoughtful. + +"Hmm." Amber frowns, and the shop window dummy turns and waggles its hips at her, sending tiers of skirts swishing across the floor. Her frown deepens. "If we're really going to go through with this election shit, it's not just the resimulant voters I need to convince but the contemporaries, and that's a matter of substance, not image. They've lived through too much media warfare. They're immune to any semiotic payload short of an active cognitive attack. If I send out partials to canvass them that look as if I'm trying to push buttons -" + +"- They will listen to your message, and nothing you wear or say will sway them. Don't worry about them, ma chérie. The naive resimulated are another matter, and perhaps might be swayed. This your first venture into democracy is, in how many years? Your privacy, she is an illusion now. The question is what image will you project? People will listen to you only once you gain their attention. Also, the swing voters you must reach, they are future-shocked, timid. Your platform is radical. Should you not project a comfortably conservative image?" + +Amber pulls a face, an expression of mild distaste for the whole populist program. "Yes, I suppose I must, if necessary. But on second thoughts, /{that}/" - Amber snaps her fingers, and the mannequin turns around once more before morphing back into neutrality, aureoles perfect puckered disks above the top of its bodice - "is just too much." + +She doesn't need to merge in the opinions of several different fractional personalities, fashion critics and psephologists both, to figure out that adopting Victorian/Cretan fusion fashion - a breast-and-ass fetishist's fantasy - isn't the way to sell herself as a serious politician to the nineteenth-century postsingularity fringe. "I'm not running for election as the mother of the nation, I'm running because I figure we've got about a billion seconds, at most, to get out of this rat trap of a gravity well before the Vile Offspring get seriously medieval on our CPU cycles, and if we don't convince them to come with us, they're doomed. Let's look for something more practical that we can overload with the right signifiers." + +"Like your coronation robe?" + +Amber winces. "Touché." The Ring Imperium is dead, along with whatever was left over from its early orbital legal framework, and Amber is lucky to be alive as a private citizen in this cold new age at the edge of the halo. "But that was just scenery setting. I didn't fully understand what I was doing, back then." + +"Welcome to maturity and experience." Annette smiles distantly at some faint memory: "You don't /{feel}/ older, you just know what you're doing this time. I wonder, sometimes, what Manny would make of it if he was here." + +"That birdbrain," Amber says dismissively, stung by the idea that her father might have something to contribute. She follows Annette past a gaggle of mendicant street evangelists preaching some new religion and in through the door of a real department store, one with actual human sales staff and fitting rooms to cut the clothing to shape. "If I'm sending out fractional mes tailored for different demographics, isn't it a bit self-defeating to go for a single image? I mean, we could drill down and tailor a partial for each individual elector -" + +"Per-haps." The door re-forms behind them. "But you need a core identity." Annette looks around, hunting for eye contact with the sales consultant. "To start with a core design, a style, then to work outward, tailoring you for your audience. And besides, there is tonight's - ah, bonjour!" + +"Hello. How can we help you?" The two female and one male shop assistants who appear from around the displays - cycling through a history of the couture industry, catwalk models mixing and matching centuries of fashion - are clearly chips off a common primary personality, instances united by their enhanced sartorial obsession. If they're not actually a fashion borganism, they're not far from it, dressed head to foot in the highest quality Chanel and Armani replicas, making a classical twentieth-century statement. This isn't simply a shop, it's a temple to a very peculiar art form, its staff trained as guardians of the esoteric secrets of good taste. + +"Mais oui. We are looking for a wardrobe for my niece here." Annette reaches through the manifold of fashion ideas mapped within the shop's location cache and flips a requirement spec one of her ghosts has just completed at the lead assistant: "She is into politics going, and the question of her image is important." + +"We would be /{delighted}/ to help you," purrs the proprietor, taking a delicate step forward: "Perhaps you could tell us what you've got in mind?" + +"Oh. Well." Amber takes a deep breath, glances sidelong at Annette; Annette stares back, unblinking. /{It's your head}/, she sends. "I'm involved in the accelerationista administrative program. Are you familiar with it?" + +The head coutureborg frowns slightly, twin furrows rippling her brow between perfectly symmetrical eyebrows, plucked to match her classic New Look suit. "I have heard reference to it, but a lady of fashion like myself does not concern herself with politics," she says, a touch self-deprecatingly. "Especially the politics of her clients. Your, ah, aunt said it was a question of image?" + +"Yes." Amber shrugs, momentarily self-conscious about her casual rags. "She's my election agent. My problem, as she says, is there's a certain voter demographic that mistakes image for substance and is afraid of the unknown, and I need to acquire a wardrobe that triggers associations of probity, of respect and deliberation. One suitable for a representative with a radical political agenda but a strong track record. I'm afraid I'm in a hurry to start with - I've got a big fund-raising party tonight. I know it's short notice, but I need something off the shelf for it." + +"What exactly is it you're hoping to achieve?" asks the male couturier, his voice hoarse and his r's rolling with some half-shed Mediterranean accent. He sounds fascinated. "If you think it might influence your choice of wardrobe ..." + +"I'm running for the assembly," Amber says bluntly. "On a platform calling for a state of emergency and an immediate total effort to assemble a starship. This solar system isn't going to be habitable for much longer, and we need to emigrate. All of us, you included, before the Vile Offspring decide to reprocess us into computronium. I'm going to be doorstepping the entire electorate in parallel, and the experience needs to be personalized." She manages to smile. "That means, I think, perhaps eight outfits and four different independent variables for each, accessories, and two or three hats - enough that each is seen by no more than a few thousand voters. Both physical fabric and virtual. In addition, I'll want to see your range of historical formalwear, but that's of secondary interest for now." She grins. "Do you have any facilities for response-testing the combinations against different personality types from different periods? If we could run up some models, that would be useful." + +"I think we can do better than that." The manager nods approvingly, perhaps contemplating her gold-backed deposit account. "Hansel, please divert any further visitors until we have dealt with Madam ...?" + +"Macx. Amber Macx." + +"- Macx's requirements." She shows no sign of familiarity with the name. Amber winces slightly; it's a sign of how hugely fractured the children of Saturn have become, and of how vast the population of the halo, that only a generation has passed and already barely anyone remembers the Queen of the Ring Imperium. "If you'd come this way, please, we can begin to research an eigenstyle combination that matches your requirements -" + +* * * + +Sirhan walks, shrouded in isolation, through the crowds gathered for the festival. The only people who see him are the chattering ghosts of dead politicians and writers, deported from the inner system by order of the Vile Offspring. The green and pleasant plain stretches toward a horizon a thousand kilometers away, beneath a lemon-yellow sky. The air smells faintly of ammonia, and the big spaces are full of small ideas; but Sirhan doesn't care because, for now, he's alone. + +Except that he isn't, really. + +"Excuse me, are you real?" someone asks him in American-accented English. + +It takes a moment or two for Sirhan to disengage from his introspection and realize that he's being spoken to. "What?" he asks, slightly puzzled. Wiry and pale, Sirhan wears the robes of a Berber goatherd on his body and the numinous halo of a utility fogbank above his head: In his abstraction, he vaguely resembles a saintly shepherd in a post-singularity nativity play. "I say, what?" Outrage simmers at the back of his mind - /{Is nowhere private?}/ - but as he turns, he sees that one of the ghost pods has split lengthwise across its white mushroomlike crown, spilling a trickle of leftover construction fluid and a completely hairless, slightly bemused-looking Anglo male who wears an expression of profound surprise. + +"I can't find my implants," the Anglo male says, shaking his head. "But I'm really here, aren't I? Incarnate?" He glances round at the other pods. "This isn't a sim." + +Sirhan sighs - /{another exile}/ - and sends forth a daemon to interrogate the ghost pod's abstract interface. It doesn't tell him much - unlike most of the resurrectees, this one seems to be undocumented. "You've been dead. Now you're alive. I /{suppose}/ that means you're now almost as real as I am. What else do you need to know?" + +"When is -" The newcomer stops. "Can you direct me to the processing center?" he asks carefully. "I'm disoriented." + +Sirhan is surprised - most immigrants take a lot longer to figure that out. "Did you die recently?" he asks. + +"I'm not sure I died at all." The newcomer rubs his bald head, looking puzzled. "Hey, no jacks!" He shrugs, exasperated. "Look, the processing center ..?" + +"Over there." Sirhan gestures at the monumental mass of the Boston Museum of Science (shipped all the way from Earth a couple of decades ago to save it from the demolition of the inner system). "My mother runs it." He smiles thinly. + +"Your mother -" the newly resurrected immigrant stares at him intensely, then blinks. "Holy shit." He takes a step toward Sirhan. "It is you -" + +Sirhan recoils and snaps his fingers. The thin trail of vaporous cloud that has been following him all this time, shielding his shaven pate from the diffuse red glow of the swarming shells of orbital nanocomputers that have replaced the inner planets, extrudes a staff of hazy blue mist that stretches down from the air and slams together in his hand like a quarterstaff spun from bubbles. "Are you threatening me, sir?" he asks, deceptively mildly. + +"I -" The newcomer stops dead. Then he throws back his head and laughs. "Don't be silly, son. We're related!" + +"Son?" Sirhan bristles. "Who do you think you are -" A horrible thought occurs to him. "Oh. Oh dear." A wash of adrenaline drenches him in warm sweat. "I do believe we've met, in a manner of speaking ..." /{Oh boy, this is going to upset so many applecarts,}/ he realizes, spinning off a ghost to think about the matter. The implications are enormous. + +The naked newcomer nods, grinning at some private joke. "You look different from ground level. And now I'm human again." He runs his hands down his ribs, pauses, and glances at Sirhan owlishly. "Um. I didn't mean to frighten you. But I don't suppose you could find your aged grandfather something to wear?" + +Sirhan sighs and points his staff straight up at the sky. The rings are edge on, for the lily pad continent floats above an ocean of cold gas along Saturn's equator, and they glitter like a ruby laser beam slashed across the sky. "Let there be aerogel." + +A cloud of wispy soap bubble congeals in a cone shape above the newly resurrected ancient and drops over him, forming a caftan. "Thanks," he says. He looks round, twisting his neck, then winces. "Damn, that /{hurt}/. Ouch. I need to get myself a set of implants." + +"They can sort you out in the processing center. It's in the basement in the west wing. They'll give you something more permanent to wear, too." Sirhan peers at him. "Your face -" He pages through rarely used memories. Yes, it's Manfred as he looked in the early years of the last century. As he looked around the time Mother-not was born. There's something positively indecent about meeting your own grandfather in the full flush of his youth. "Are you sure you haven't been messing with your phenotype?" he asks suspiciously. + +"No, this is what I used to look like. I think. Back in the naked ape again, after all these years as an emergent function of a flock of passenger pigeons." His grandfather smirks. "What's your mother going to say?" + +"I really don't know -" Sirhan shakes his head. "Come on, let's get you to immigrant processing. You're sure you're not just an historical simulation?" + +The place is already heaving with the resimulated. Just why the Vile Offspring seem to feel it's necessary to apply valuable exaquops to the job of deriving accurate simulations of dead humans - outrageously accurate simulations of long-dead lives, annealed until their written corpus matches that inherited from the presingularity era in the form of chicken scratchings on mashed tree pulp - much less beaming them at the refugee camps on Saturn - is beyond Sirhan's ken: But he wishes they'd stop. + +"Just a couple of days ago I crapped on your lawn. Hope you don't mind." Manfred cocks his head to one side and stares at Sirhan with beady eyes. "Actually, I'm here because of the upcoming election. It's got the potential to turn into a major crisis point, and I figured Amber would need me around." + +"Well you'd better come on in, then," Sirhan says resignedly as he climbs the steps, enters the foyer, and leads his turbulent grandfather into the foggy haze of utility nanomachines that fill the building. + +He can't wait to see what his mother will do when she meets her father in the flesh, after all this time. + +* * * + +Welcome to Saturn, your new home world. This FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) memeplex is designed to orient you and explain the following: + +_* How you got here + +_* Where "here" is + +_* Things you should avoid doing + +_* Things you might want to do as soon as possible + +_* Where to go for more information + +If you are remembering this presentation, you are probably resimulated. This is not the same as being /{resurrected}/. You may remember dying. Do not worry: Like all your other memories, it is a fabrication. In fact, this is the first time you have ever been alive. (Exception: If you died after the /{singularity,}/ you may be a genuine resurrectee. In which case, why are you reading this FAQ?) + +!_ How you got here: + +The center of the solar system - Mercury, Venus, Earth's Moon, Mars, the asteroid belt, and Jupiter - have been dismantled, or are being dismantled, by weakly godlike intelligences. [NB: Monotheistic clergy and Europeans who remember living prior to 1600, see alternative memeplex "in the beginning."] A weakly godlike intelligence is not a supernatural agency, but the product of a highly advanced society that learned how to artificially create souls [late 20th century: software] and translate human minds into souls and vice versa. [Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.] + +Some of the weakly godlike intelligences appear to cultivate an interest in their human antecedents - for whatever reason is not known. (Possibilities include the study of history through horticulture, entertainment through live-action role-playing, revenge, and economic forgery.) While no definitive analysis is possible, all the resimulated persons to date exhibit certain common characteristics: They are all based on well-documented historical persons, their memories show suspicious gaps [see: smoke and mirrors], and they are ignorant of or predate the /{singularity}/ [see: /{Turing Oracle, Vinge catastrophe}/]. + +It is believed that the weakly godlike agencies have created you as a vehicle for the introspective study of your historical antecedent by backward-chaining from your corpus of documented works, and the back-projected genome derived from your collateral descendants, to generate an abstract description of your computational state vector. This technique is extremely intensive [see: /{expTime-complete algorithms, Turing Oracle, time travel, industrial magic}/] but marginally plausible in the absence of supernatural explanations. + +After experiencing your life, the weakly godlike agencies have expelled you. For reasons unknown, they chose to do this by transmitting your upload state and genome/proteome complex to receivers owned and operated by a consortium of charities based on Saturn. These charities have provided for your basic needs, including the body you now occupy. + +In summary: You are a /{reconstruction}/ of someone who lived and died a long time ago, not a reincarnation. You have no intrinsic moral right to the identity you believe to be your own, and an extensive body of case law states that you do not inherit your antecedent's possessions. Other than that, you are a free individual. + +Note that /{fictional resimulation}/ is strictly forbidden. If you have reason to believe that you may be a fictional character, you must contact the city /{immediately}/. [ See: /{James Bond, Spider Jerusalem}/.] Failure to comply is a felony. + +!_ Where you are: + +You are on Saturn. Saturn is a gas giant planet 120,500 kilometers in diameter, located 1.5 billion kilometers from Earth's sun. [NB: Europeans who remember living prior to 1580, see alternative memeplex "/{the flat Earth - not}/".] Saturn has been partially terraformed by /{posthuman}/ emigrants from Earth and Jupiter orbit: The ground beneath your feet is, in reality, the floor of a hydrogen balloon the size of a continent, floating in Saturn's upper atmosphere. [NB: Europeans who remember living prior to 1790, internalize the supplementary memeplex: "the /{Brothers Montgolfier}/."] The balloon is very safe, but mining activities and the use of ballistic weapons are strongly deprecated because the air outside is unbreathable and extremely cold. + +The society you have been instantiated in is /{extremely wealthy}/ within the scope of Economics 1.0, the value transfer system developed by human beings during and after your own time. Money exists, and is used for the usual range of goods and services, but the basics - food, water, air, power, off-the-shelf clothing, housing, historical entertainment, and monster trucks - are /{free}/. An implicit social contract dictates that, in return for access to these facilities, you obey certain laws. + +If you wish to opt out of this social contract, be advised that other worlds may run *{Economics 2.0}* or subsequent releases. These value-transfer systems are more efficient - hence wealthier - than Economics 1.0, but true participation in Economics 2.0 is not possible without dehumanizing cognitive surgery. Thus, in /{absolute}/ terms, although this society is richer than any you have ever heard of, it is also a poverty-stricken backwater compared to its neighbors. + +!_ Things you should avoid doing: + +Many activities that have been classified as crimes in other societies are legal here. These include but are not limited to: acts of worship, art, sex, violence, communication, or commerce between consenting competent sapients of any species, except where such acts transgress the list of prohibitions below. [See additional memeplex: /{competence defined}/.] + +Some activities are prohibited here and may have been legal in your previous experience. These include willful deprivation of ability to consent [see: /{slavery}/], interference in the absence of consent [see: /{minors, legal status of}/], formation of limited liability companies [see: /{singularity}/], and invasion of defended privacy [see: /{the Slug, Cognitive Pyramid Schemes, Brain Hacking, Thompson Trust Exploit}/]. + +Some activities unfamiliar to you are highly illegal and should be scrupulously avoided. These include: possession of nuclear weapons, possession of unlimited autonomous replicators [see: /{gray goo}/], coercive assimilationism [see: /{borganism, aggressive}/], coercive halting of Turing-equivalent personalities [see: basilisks], and applied theological engineering [see: /{God bothering}/]. + +Some activities superficially familiar to you are merely stupid and should be avoided for your safety, although they are not illegal as such. These include: giving your bank account details to the son of the Nigerian Minister of Finance; buying title to bridges, skyscrapers, spacecraft, planets, or other real assets; murder; selling your identity; and entering into financial contracts with entities running Economics 2.0 or higher. + +!_ Things you should do as soon as possible: + +Many material artifacts you may consider essential to life are freely available - just ask the city, and it will grow you clothes, a house, food, or other basic essentials. Note, however, that the library of public domain structure templates is of necessity restrictive, and does not contain items that are highly fashionable or that remain in copyright. Nor will the city provide you with replicators, weapons, sexual favors, slaves, or zombies. + +You are advised to register as a citizen as soon as possible. If the individual you are a resimulation of can be confirmed dead, you may adopt their name but not - in law - any lien or claim on their property, contracts, or descendants. You register as a citizen by asking the city to register you; the process is painless and typically complete within four hours. Unless you are registered, your legal status as a sapient organism may be challenged. The ability to request citizenship rights is one of the legal tests for sapience, and failure to comply may place you in legal jeopardy. You can renounce your citizenship whenever you wish: This may be desirable if you emigrate to another polity. + +While many things are free, it is highly likely that you posses no employable skills, and therefore, no way of earning money with which to purchase unfree items. The pace of change in the past century has rendered almost all skills you may have learned obsolete [see: /{singularity}/]. However, owing to the rapid pace of change, many cooperatives, trusts, and guilds offer on-the-job training or educational loans. + +Your ability to learn depends on your ability to take information in the format in which it is offered. /{Implants}/ are frequently used to provide a direct link between your brain and the intelligent machines that surround it. A basic core implant set is available on request from the city. [See: /{implant security}/, /{firewall}/, /{wetware}/.] + +Your health is probably good if you have just been reinstantiated, and is likely to remain good for some time. Most diseases are curable, and in event of an incurable ailment or injury, a new body may be provided - for a fee. (In event of your murder, you will be furnished with a new body at the expense of your killer.) If you have any preexisting medical conditions or handicaps, consult the city. + +The city is an agoric-annealing participatory democracy with a limited liability constitution. Its current executive agency is a weakly godlike intelligence that chooses to associate with human-equivalent intelligences: This agency is colloquially known as "Hello Kitty," "Beautiful Cat," or "Aineko," and may manifest itself in a variety of physical avatars if corporeal interaction is desired. (Prior to the arrival of "Hello Kitty," the city used a variety of human-designed expert systems that provided suboptimal performance.) + +The city's mission statement is to provide a mediatory environment for human-equivalent intelligences and to preserve same in the face of external aggression. Citizens are encouraged to participate in the ongoing political processes of determining such responses. Citizens also have a duty to serve on a jury if called (including senatorial service), and to defend the city. + +!_ Where to go for further information: + +Until you have registered as a citizen and obtained basic implants, all further questions should be directed to the city. Once you have learned to use your implants, you will not need to ask this question. + +* * * + +_1 Welcome to decade the ninth, singularity plus one gigasecond (or maybe more - nobody's quite sure when, or indeed /{if}/, a singularity has been created). The human population of the solar system is either six billion, or sixty billion, depending on whether you class the forked state vectors of posthumans and the simulations of dead phenotypes running in the Vile Offspring's Schrödinger boxes as people. Most of the physically incarnate still live on Earth, but the lily-pads floating beneath continent-sized hot-hydrogen balloons in Saturn's upper atmosphere already house a few million, and the writing is on the wall for the rocky inner planets. All the remaining human-equivalent intelligences with half a clue to rub together are trying to emigrate before the Vile Offspring decide to recycle Earth to fill in a gap in the concentric shells of nanocomputers they're running on. The half-constructed Matrioshka brain already darkens the skies of Earth and has caused a massive crash in the planet's photosynthetic biomass, as plants starve for short-wavelength light. + +_1 Since decade the seventh, the computational density of the solar system has soared. Within the asteroid belt, more than half the available planetary mass has been turned into nanoprocessors, tied together by quantum entanglement into a web so dense that each gram of matter can simulate all the possible life experiences of an individual human being in a scant handful of minutes. Economics 2.0 is itself obsolescent, forced to mutate in a furious survivalist arms race by the arrival of the Slug. Only the name remains as a vague shorthand for merely human-equivalent intelligences to use when describing interactions they don't understand. + +_1 The latest generation of posthuman entities is less overtly hostile to humans, but much more alien than the generations of the fifties and seventies. Among their less comprehensible activities, the Vile Offspring are engaged in exploring the phase-space of all possible human experiences from the inside out. Perhaps they caught a dose of the Tiplerite heresy along the way, for now a steady stream of resimulant uploads is pouring through the downsystem relays in Titan orbit. The Rapture of the Nerds has been followed by the Resurrection of the Extremely Confused, except that they're not really resurrectees - they're simulations based on their originals' recorded histories, blocky and missing chunks of their memories, as bewildered as baby ducklings as they're herded into the wood-chipper of the future. + +_1 Sirhan al-Khurasani despises them with the abstract contempt of an antiquarian for a cunning but ultimately transparent forgery. But Sirhan is young, and he's got more contempt than he knows what to do with. It's a handy outlet for his frustration. He has a lot to be frustrated at, starting with his intermittently dysfunctional family, the elderly stars around whom his planet whizzes in chaotic trajectories of enthusiasm and distaste. + +_1 Sirhan fancies himself a philosopher-historian of the singular age, a chronicler of the incomprehensible, which would be a fine thing to be except that his greatest insights are all derived from Aineko. He alternately fawns over and rages against his mother, who is currently a leading light in the refugee community, and honors (when not attempting to evade the will of) his father, who is lately a rising philosophical patriarch within the Conservationist faction. He's secretly in awe (not to mention slightly resentful) of his grandfather Manfred. In fact, the latter's abrupt reincarnation in the flesh has quite disconcerted him. And he sometimes listens to his stepgrandmother Annette, who has reincarnated in more or less her original 2020s body after spending some years as a great ape, and who seems to view him as some sort of personal project. + +_1 OnlyAnnette isn't being very helpful right now. His mother is campaigning on an electoral platform calling for a vote to blow up the world, Annette is helping run her campaign, his grandfather is trying to convince him to entrust everything he holds dear to a rogue lobster, and the cat is being typically feline and evasive. + +_1 Talk about families with problems ... + +* * * + +They've transplanted imperial Brussels to Saturn in its entirety, mapped tens of megatonnes of buildings right down to nanoscale and beamed them into the outer darkness to be reinstantiated down-well on the lily-pad colonies that dot the stratosphere of the gas giant. (Eventually the entire surface of the Earth will follow - after which the Vile Offspring will core the planet like an apple, dismantle it into a cloud of newly formed quantum nanocomputers to add to their burgeoning Matrioshka brain.) Due to a resource contention problem in the festival committee's planning algorithm - or maybe it's simply an elaborate joke - Brussels now begins just on the other side of a diamond bubble wall from the Boston Museum of Science, less than a kilometer away as the passenger pigeon flies. Which is why, when it's time to celebrate a birthday or name day (meaningless though those concepts are, out on Saturn's synthetic surface), Amber tends to drag people over to the bright lights of the big city. + +This time she's throwing a rather special party. At Annette's canny prompting, she's borrowed the Atomium and invited a horde of guests to a big event. It's not a family bash - although Annette's promised her a surprise - so much as a business meeting, testing the water as a preliminary to declaring her candidacy. It's a media coup, an attempt to engineer Amber's re-entry into the mainstream politics of the human system. + +Sirhan doesn't really want to be here. He's got far more important things to do, like continuing to catalogue Aineko's memories of the voyage of the *{Field Circus}*. He's also collating a series of interviews with resimulated logical positivists from Oxford, England (the ones who haven't retreated into gibbering near catatonia upon realizing that their state vectors are all members of the set of all sets that do not contain themselves), when he isn't attempting to establish a sound rational case for his belief that extraterrestrial superintelligence is an oxymoron and the router network is just an accident, one of evolution's little pranks. + +But Tante Annette twisted his arm and promised he was in on the surprise if he came to the party. And despite everything, he wouldn't miss being a fly on the wall during the coming meeting between Manfred and Amber for all the tea in China. + +Sirhan walks up to the gleaming stainless-steel dome that contains the entrance to the Atomium, and waits for the lift. He's in line behind a gaggle of young-looking women, skinny and soigné in cocktail gowns and tiaras lifted from 1920s silent movies. (Annette declared an age of elegance theme for the party, knowing full well that it would force Amber to focus on her public appearance.) Sirhan's attention is, however, elsewhere. The various fragments of his mind are conducting three simultaneous interviews with philosophers ("whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent" in spades), controlling two 'bots that are overhauling the museum plumbing and air-recycling system, and he's busy discussing observations of the alien artifact orbiting the brown dwarf Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56}, with Aineko. What's left of him exhibits about as much social presence as a pickled cabbage. + +The lift arrives and accepts a load of passengers. Sirhan is crowded into one corner by a bubble of high-society laughter and an aromatic puff of smoke from an improbable ivory cigarette holder as the lift surges, racing up the sixty-meter shaft toward the observation deck at the top of the Atomium. It's a ten-meter-diameter metal globe, spiral staircases and escalators connecting it to the seven spheres at the corners of an octahedron that make up the former centerpiece of the 1950 World's Fair. Unlike most of the rest of Brussels, it's the original bits and atoms, bent alloy structures from before the space age shipped out to Saturn at enormous expense. The lift arrives with a slight jerk. "Excuse /{me}/," squeaks one of the good-time girls as she lurches backward, elbowing Sirhan. + +He blinks, barely noticing her black bob of hair, chromatophore-tinted shadows artfully tuned around her eyes: "Nothing to excuse." In the background, Aineko is droning on sarcastically about the lack of interest the crew of the *{Field Circus}* exhibited in the cat's effort to decompile their hitchhiker, the Slug. It's distracting as hell, but Sirhan feels a desperate urge to understand what happened out there. It's the key to understanding his not-mother's obsessions and weaknesses - which, he senses, will be important in the times to come. + +He evades the gaggle of overdressed good-time girls and steps out onto the lower of the two stainless-steel decks that bisect the sphere. Accepting a fruit cocktail from a discreetly humaniform waitron, he strolls toward a row of triangular windows that gaze out across the arena toward the American Pavilion and the World Village. The metal walls are braced with turquoise-painted girders, and the perspex transparencies are fogged with age. He can barely see the one-tenth-scale model of an atomic-powered ocean liner leaving the pier below, or the eight-engined giant seaplane beside it. "They never once asked me if the Slug had attempted to map itself into the human-compatible spaces aboard the ship," Aineko bitches at him. "I wasn't expecting them to, but really! Your mother's too trusting, boy." + +"I suppose you took precautions?" Sirhan's ghost murmurs to the cat. That sets the irascible metafeline off again on a long discursive tail-washing rant about the unreliability of Economics-2.0-compliant financial instruments. Economics 2.0 apparently replaces the single-indirection layer of conventional money, and the multiple-indirection mappings of options trades, with some kind of insanely baroque object-relational framework based on the parameterized desires and subjective experiential values of the players, and as far as the cat is concerned, this makes all such transactions intrinsically untrustworthy. + +/{Which is why you're stuck here with us apes}/, Sirhan-prime cynically notes as he spawns an Eliza ghost to carry on nodding at the cat while he experiences the party. + +It's uncomfortably warm in the Atomium sphere - not surprising, there must be thirty people milling around up here, not counting the waitrons - and several local multicast channels are playing a variety of styles of music to synchronize the mood swings of the revelers to hardcore techno, waltz, raga ... + +"Having a good time, are we?" Sirhan breaks away from integrating one of his timid philosophers and realizes that his glass is empty, and his mother is grinning alarmingly at him over the rim of a cocktail glass containing something that glows in the dark. She's wearing spike-heeled boots and a black velvet cat suit that hugs her contours like a second skin, and she's already getting drunk. In wall-clock years she is younger than Sirhan; it's like having a bizarrely knowing younger sister mysteriously injected into his life to replace the eigenmother who stayed home and died with the Ring Imperium decades ago. "Look at you, hiding in a corner at your grandfather's party! Hey, your glass is empty. Want to try this caipirinha? There's someone you've got to meet over here -" + +It's at moments like this that Sirhan really wonders what in Jupiter's orbit his father ever saw in this woman. (But then again, in the world line this instance of her has returned from, he didn't. So what does that signify?) "As long as there's no fermented grape juice in it," he says resignedly, allowing himself to be led past a gaggle of conversations and a mournful-looking gorilla slurping a long drink through a straw. "More of your /{accelerationista}/ allies?" + +"Maybe not." It's the girl gang he avoided noticing in the lift, their eyes sparkling, really getting into this early twen-cen drag party thing, waving their cigarette holders and cocktail glasses around with wild abandon. "Rita, I'd like you to meet Sirhan, my other fork's son. Sirhan, this is Rita? She's an historian, too. Why don't you -" + +Dark eyes, emphasized not by powder or paint, but by chromatophores inside her skin cells: black hair, chain of enormous pearls, slim black dress sweeping the floor, a look of mild embarrassment on her heart-shaped face: She could be a clone of Audrey Hepburn in any other century, "Didn't I just meet you in the elevator?" The embarrassment shifts to her cheeks, becoming visible. + +Sirhan flushes, unsure how to reply. Just then, an interloper arrives on the scene, pushing in between them. "Are you the curator who reorganized the Precambrian gallery along teleology lines? I've got some things to say about /{that}/!" The interloper is tall, assertive, and blonde. Sirhan hates her from the first sight of her wagging finger. + +"Oh shut up, Marissa, this is a party, you've been being a pain all evening." To his surprise, Rita the historian rounds on the interloper angrily. + +"It's not a problem," he manages to say. In the back of his mind, something makes the Rogerian puppet-him that's listening to the cat sit up and dump-merge a whole lump of fresh memories into his mind - something important, something about the Vile Offspring sending a starship to bring something back from the router - but the people around him are soaking up so much attention that he has to file it for later. + +"Yes it /{is}/ a problem," Rita declares. She points at the interloper, who is saying something about the invalidity of teleological interpretations, trying to justify herself, and says, "/{Plonk}/. Phew. Where were we?" + +Sirhan blinks. Suddenly everyone but him seems to be ignoring that annoying Marissa person. "What just happened?" he asks cautiously. + +"I killfiled her. Don't tell me, you aren't running Superplonk yet, are you?" Rita flicks a location-cached idea at him and he takes it cautiously, spawning a couple of specialized Turing Oracles to check it for halting states. It seems to be some kind of optic lobe hack that accesses a collaborative database of eigenfaces, with some sort of side interface to Broca's region. "Share and enjoy, confrontation-free parties." + +"I've never seen -" Sirhan trails off as he loads the module distractedly. (The cat is rambling on about god modules and metastatic entanglement and the difficulty of arranging to have personalities custom-grown to order somewhere in the back of his head, while his fractional-self nods wisely whenever it pauses.) Something like an inner eyelid descends. He looks round; there's a vague blob at one side of the room, making an annoying buzzing sound. His mother seems to be having an animated conversation with it. "That's rather interesting." + +"Yes, it helps no end at this sort of event." Rita startles him by taking his left arm in hand - her cigarette holder shrivels and condenses until it's no more than a slight thickening around the wrist of her opera glove - and steers him toward a waitron. "I'm sorry about your foot, earlier, I was a bit overloaded. Is Amber Macx really your mother?" + +"Not exactly, she's my eigenmother," he mumbles. "The reincarnated download of the version who went out to Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56}, aboard the *{Field Circus}*. She married a French-Algerian confidence-trick analyst instead of my father, but I think they divorced a couple of years ago. My /{real}/ mother married an imam, but they died in the aftermath of Economics 2.0." She seems to be steering him in the direction of the window bay Amber dragged him away from earlier. "Why do you ask?" + +"Because you're not very good at making small talk," Rita says quietly, "and you don't seem very good in crowds. Is that right? Was it you who performed that amazing dissection of Wittgenstein's cognitive map? The one with the preverbal Gödel string in it?" + +"It was -" He clears his throat. "You thought it was amazing?" Suddenly, on impulse, he detaches a ghost to identify this Rita person and find out who she is, what she wants. It's not normally worth the effort to get to know someone more closely than casual small talk, but she seems to have been digging into his background, and he wants to know why. Along with the him that's chatting to Aineko, that makes about three instances pulling in near-realtime resources. He'll be running up an existential debt soon if he keeps forking ghosts like this. + +"I thought so," she says. There's a bench in front of the wall, and somehow he finds himself sitting on it next to her. /{There's no danger, we're not in private or anything}/, he tells himself stiffly. She's smiling at him, face tilted slightly to one side and lips parted, and for a moment, a dizzy sense of possibility washes over him: /{What if she's about to throw all propriety aside? How undignified!}/ Sirhan believes in self-restraint and dignity. "I was really interested in this -" She passes him another dynamically loadable blob, encompassing a detailed critique of his analysis of Wittgenstein's matriophobia in the context of gendered language constructs and nineteenth century Viennese society, along with a hypothesis that leaves Sirhan gasping with mild indignation at the very idea that /{he}/ of all people might share Wittgenstein's skewed outlook - "What do you think?" she asks, grinning impishly at him. + +"Nnngk." Sirhan tries to unswallow his tongue. Rita crosses her legs, her gown hissing. "I, ah, that is to say" - At which moment, his partials re-integrate, dumping a slew of positively pornographic images into his memories. /{It's a trap!}/ they shriek, her breasts and hips and pubes - clean-shaven, he can't help noticing - thrusting at him in hotly passionate abandon, /{Mother's trying to make you loose like her!}/ and he remembers what it /{would}/ be like to wake up in bed next to this woman whom he barely knows after being married to her for a year, because one of his cognitive ghosts has just spent several seconds of network time (or several subjective months) getting hot and sweaty with a ghost of her own, and she does have interesting research ideas, even if she's a pushy over-westernized woman who thinks she can run his life for him. "What /{is}/ this?" he splutters, his ears growing hot and his garments constricting. + +"Just speculating about possibilities. We could get a lot done together." She snakes an arm round his shoulders and pulls him toward her, gently. "Don't you want to find out if we could work out?" + +"But, but -" Sirhan is steaming. /{Is she offering casual sex?}/ He wonders, profoundly embarrassed by his own inability to read her signals: "What do you /{want}/?" he asks. + +"You /{do}/ know that you can do more with Superplonk than just killfile annoying idiots?" she whispers in his ear. "We can be invisible right now, if you like. It's great for confidential meetings - other things, too. We can work beautifully together, our ghosts annealed really well ..." + +Sirhan jumps up, his face stinging, and turns away: "No thank you!" he snaps, angry at himself. "Goodbye!" His other instances, interrupted by his broadcast emotional overload, are distracted from their tasks and sputtering with indignation. Her hurt expression is too much for him: The killfile snaps down, blurring her into an indistinct black blob on the wall, veiled by his own brain as he turns and walks away, seething with anger at his mother for being so unfair as to make him behold his own face in the throes of fleshy passion. + +* * * + +Meanwhile, in one of the lower spheres, padded with silvery blue insulating pillows bound together with duct tape, the movers and shakers of the accelerationista faction are discussing their bid for world power at fractional-C velocities. + +"We can't outrun everything. For example, a collapse of the false vacuum," Manfred insists, slightly uncoordinated and slurring his vowels under the influence of the first glass of fruit punch he's experienced in nigh-on twenty real-time years. His body is young and still relatively featureless, hair still growing out, and he's abandoned his old no-implants fetish at last to adopt an array of interfaces that let him internalize all the exocortex processes that he formerly ran on an array of dumb Turing machines outside his body. He's standing on his own sense of style and is the only person in the room who isn't wearing some variation of dinner jacket or classical evening dress. "Entangled exchange via routers is all very well, but it won't let us escape the universe itself - any phase change will catch up eventually, the network must have an end. And then where will we be, Sameena?" + +"I'm not disputing that." The woman he's talking to, wearing a green-and-gold sari and a medieval maharajah's ransom in gold and natural diamonds, nods thoughtfully. "But it hasn't happened yet, and we've got evidence that superhuman intelligences have been loose in this universe for gigayears, so there's a fair bet that the worst catastrophe scenarios are unlikely. And looking closer to home, we don't know what the routers are for, or who made them. Until then ..." She shrugs. "Look what happened last time somebody tried to probe them. No offense intended." + +"It's already happened. If what I hear is correct, the Vile Offspring aren't nearly as negative about the idea of using the routers as we old-fashioned metahumans might like to believe." Manfred frowns, trying to recall some hazy anecdote - he's experimenting with a new memory compression algorithm, necessitated by his pack rat mnemonic habits when younger, and sometimes the whole universe feels as if it's nearly on the tip of his tongue. "So, we seem to be in violent agreement about the need to /{know more}/ about what's going on, and to find out what they're doing out there. We've got cosmic background anisotropies caused by the waste heat from computing processes millions of light-years across - it takes a big interstellar civilization to do that, and they don't seem to have fallen into the same rat trap as the local Matrioshka brain civilizations. And we've got worrying rumors about the VO messing around with the structure of space-time in order to find a way around the Beckenstein bound. If the VO are trying that, then the folks out near the supercluster already know the answers. The best way to find out what's happening is to go and talk to whoever's responsible. Can we at least agree on that?" + +"Probably not." Her eyes glitter with amusement. "It all depends on whether one believes in these civilizations in the first place. I /{know}/ your people point to deep-field camera images going all the way back to some wonky hubble-bubble scrying mirror from the late twentieth, but we've got no evidence except some theories about the Casimir effect and pair production and spinning beakers of helium-3 - much less proof that whole bunch of alien galactic civilizations are trying to collapse the false vacuum and destroy the universe!" Her voice dropped a notch: "At least, not enough proof to convince most people, Manny dear. I know this comes as a shock to you, but not /{everyone}/ is a neophiliac posthuman bodysurfer whose idea of a sabbatical is to spend twenty years as a flock of tightly networked seagulls in order to try and to prove the Turing Oracle thesis -" + +"Not everyone is concerned with the deep future," Manfred interrupts. "It's important! If we live or die, that doesn't matter - that's not the big picture. The big question is whether information originating in our light cone is preserved, or whether we're stuck in a lossy medium where our very existence counts for nothing. It's downright /{embarrassing}/ to be a member of a species with such a profound lack of curiosity about its own future, especially when it affects us all personally! I mean, if there's going to come a time when there's nobody or nothing to remember us then what does -" + +"Manfred?" + +He stops in midsentence, his mouth open, staring dumbly. + +It's Amber, poised in black cat suit with cocktail glass. Her expression is open and confused, appallingly vulnerable. Blue liquid slops, almost spilling out of her glass - the rim barely extends itself in time to catch the drops. Behind her stands Annette, a deeply self-satisfied smile on her face. + +"You." Amber pauses, her cheek twitching as bits of her mind page in and out of her skull, polling external information sources. "You really /{are}/ -" + +A hasty cloud materializes under her hand as her fingers relax, dropping the glass. + +"Uh." Manfred stares, at a complete loss for words. "I'd, uh." After a moment he looks down. "I'm sorry. I'll get you another drink ..?" + +"Why didn't someone warn me?" Amber complains. + +"We thought you could use the good advice," Annette stated into the awkward silence. "And a family reunion. It was meant to be a surprise." + +"A surprise." Amber looks perplexed. "You could say that." + +"You're taller than I was expecting," Manfred says unexpectedly. "People look different when you're not using human eyes." + +"Yeah?" She looks at him, and he turns his head slightly, facing her. It's a historic moment, and Annette is getting it all on memory diamond, from every angle. The family's dirty little secret is that Amber and her father have /{never met}/, not face-to-face in physical meat-machine proximity. She was born years after Manfred and Pamela separated, after all, decanted prefertilized from a tank of liquid nitrogen. This is the first time either of them have actually seen the other's face without electronic intermediation. And while they've said everything that needed to be said on a businesslike level, anthropoid family politics is still very much a matter of body language and pheromones. "How long have you been out and about?" she asks, trying to disguise her confusion. + +"About six hours." Manfred manages a rueful chuckle, trying to take the sight of her in all at once. "Let's get you another drink and put our heads together?" + +"Okay." Amber takes a deep breath and glares at Annette. "You set this up, /{you}/ clean up the mess." + +Annette just stands there smiling at the confusion of her accomplishment. + +* * * + +The cold light of dawn finds Sirhan angry, sober, and ready to pick a fight with the first person who comes through the door of his office. The room is about ten meters across, with a floor of polished marble and skylights in the intricately plastered ceiling. The walkthrough of his current project sprouts in the middle of the floor like a ghostly abstract cauliflower, fractal branches dwindling down to infolded nodes tagged with compressed identifiers. The branches expand and shrink as Sirhan paces around it, zooming to readability in response to his eyeball dynamics. But he isn't paying it much attention. He's too disturbed, uncertain, trying to work out whom to blame. Which is why, when the door bangs open, his first response is to whirl angrily and open his mouth - then stop. "What do /{you}/ want?" he demands. + +"A word, if you please?" Annette looks around distractedly. "This is your project?" + +"Yes," he says icily, and banishes the walkthrough with a wave of one hand. "What do you want?" + +"I'm not sure." Annette pauses. For a moment she looks weary, tired beyond mortal words, and Sirhan momentarily wonders if perhaps he's spreading the blame too far. This ninetysomething Frenchwoman who is no blood relative, who was in years past the love of his scatterbrained grandfather's life, seems the least likely person to be trying to manipulate him, at least in such an unwelcome and intimate manner. But there's no telling. Families are strange things, and even though the current instantiations of his father and mother aren't the ones who ran his pre-adolescent brain through a couple of dozen alternative lifelines before he was ten, he can't be sure - or that they wouldn't enlist Tante Annette's assistance in fucking with his mind. "We need to talk about your mother," she continues. + +"We do, do we?" Sirhan turns around and sees the vacancy of the room for what it is, a socket, like a pulled tooth, informed as much by what is absent as by what is present. He snaps his fingers, and an intricate bench of translucent bluish utility fog congeals out of the air behind him. He sits: Annette can do what she wants. + +"Oui." She thrusts her hands deep into the pocket of the peasant smock she's wearing - a major departure from her normal style - and leans against the wall. Physically, she looks young enough to have spent her entire life blitzing around the galaxy at three nines of lightspeed, but her posture is world-weary and ancient. History is a foreign country, and the old are unwilling emigrants, tired out by the constant travel. "Your mother, she has taken on a huge job, but it's one that needs doing. /{You}/ agreed it needed doing, years ago, with the archive store. /{She}/ is now trying to get it moving, that is what the campaign is about, to place before the electors a choice of how best to move an entire civilization. So I ask, why do you obstruct her?" + +Sirhan works his jaw; he feels like spitting. "/{Why}/?" he snaps. + +"Yes. Why?" Annette gives in and magics up a chair from the swirling fogbank beneath the ceiling. She crouches in it, staring at him. "It is a question." + +"I have nothing against her political machinations," Sirhan says tensely. "But her uninvited interference in my personal life -" + +"What interference?" + +He stares. "Is that a question?" He's silent for a moment. Then: "Throwing that wanton at me last night -" + +Annette stares at him. "Who? What are you talking about?" + +"That, that loose woman!" Sirhan is reduced to spluttering. "False pretenses! If this is one of Father's matchmaking ideas, it is so /{very}/ wrong that -" + +Annette is shaking her head. "Are you crazy? Your mother simply wanted you to meet her campaign team, to join in planning the policy. Your father is not on this planet! But you stormed out, you /{really}/ upset Rita, did you know that? Rita, she is the best belief maintenance and story construction operative I have! Yet you to tears reduce her. What is wrong with you?" + +"I -" Sirhan swallows. "She's /{what}/?" he asks again, his mouth dry. "I thought ..." He trails off. He doesn't want to say what he thought. The hussy, that brazen trollop, is part of his mother's campaign party? Not some plot to lure him into corruption? What if it was all a horrible misunderstanding? + +"I think you need to apologize to someone," Annette says coolly, standing up. Sirhan's head is spinning between a dozen dialogues of actors and ghosts, a journal of the party replaying before his ghast-stricken inner gaze. Even the walls have begun to flicker, responding to his intense unease. Annette skewers him with a disgusted look: "When you can a woman behave toward as a person, not a threat, we can again talk. Until then." And she stands up and walks out of the room, leaving him to contemplate the shattered stump of his anger, so startled he can barely concentrate on his project, thinking, /{Is that really me? Is that what I look like to her?}/ as the cladistic graph slowly rotates before him, denuded branches spread wide, waiting to be filled with the nodes of the alien interstellar network just as soon as he can convince Aineko to stake him the price of the depth-first tour of darkness. + +* * * + +Manfred used to be a flock of pigeons - literally, his exocortex dispersed among a passel of bird brains, pecking at brightly colored facts, shitting semidigested conclusions. Being human again feels inexplicably odd, even without the added distractions of his sex drive, which he has switched off until he gets used to being unitary again. Not only does he get shooting pains in his neck whenever he tries to look over his left shoulder with his right eye, but he's lost the habit of spawning exocortical agents to go interrogate a database or bush robot or something, then report back to him. Instead he keeps trying to fly off in all directions at once, which usually ends with him falling over. + +But at present, that's not a problem. He's sitting comfortably at a weathered wooden table in a beer garden behind a hall lifted from somewhere like Frankfurt, a liter glass of straw-colored liquid at his elbow and a comforting multiple whispering of knowledge streams tickling the back of his head. Most of his attention is focused on Annette, who frowns at him with mingled concern and affection. They may have lived separate lives for almost a third of a century, since she declined to upload with him, but he's still deeply attuned to her. + +"You are going to have to do something about that boy," she says sympathetically. "He is close enough to upset Amber. And without Amber, there will be a problem." + +"I'm going to have to do something about Amber, too," Manfred retorts. "What was the idea, not warning her I was coming?" + +"It was meant to be a surprise." Annette comes as close to pouting as Manfred's seen her recently. It brings back warm memories; he reaches out to hold her hand across the table. + +"You know I can't handle the human niceties properly when I'm a flock." He strokes the back of her wrist. She pulls back after a while, but slowly. "I expected you to manage all that stuff." + +"That stuff." Annette shakes her head. "She's your daughter, you know? Did you have no curiosity left?" + +"As a bird?" Manfred cocks his head to one side so abruptly that he hurts his neck and winces. "Nope. /{Now}/ I do, but I think I pissed her off -" + +"Which brings us back to point one." + +"I'd send her an apology, but she'd think I was trying to manipulate her" - Manfred takes a mouthful of beer - "and she'd be right." He sounds slightly depressed. "All my relationships are screwy this decade. And it's lonely." + +"So? Don't brood." Annette pulls her hand back. "Something will sort itself out eventually. And in the short term, there is the work, the electoral problem becomes acute." When she's around him the remains of her once-strong French accent almost vanish in a transatlantic drawl, he realizes with a pang. He's been abhuman for too long - people who meant a lot to him have changed while he's been away. + +"I'll brood if I want to," he says. "I didn't ever really get a chance to say goodbye to Pam, did I? Not after that time in Paris when the gangsters ..." He shrugs. "I'm getting nostalgic in my old age." He snorts. + +"You're not the only one," Annette says tactfully. "Social occasions here are a minefield, one must tiptoe around so many issues, people have too much, too much history. And nobody knows everything that is going on." + +"That's the trouble with this damned polity." Manfred takes another gulp of /{hefeweisen}/. "We've already got six million people living on this planet, and it's growing like the first-generation Internet. Everyone who is anyone knows everyone, but there are so many incomers diluting the mix and not knowing that there /{is}/ a small world network here that everything is up for grabs again after only a couple of megaseconds. New networks form, and we don't even know they exist until they sprout a political agenda and surface under us. We're acting under time pressure. If we don't get things rolling now, we'll never be able to ..." He shakes his head. "It wasn't like this for you in Brussels, was it?" + +"No. Brussels was a mature system. And I had Gianni to look after in his dotage after you left. It will only get worse from here on in, I think." + +"Democracy 2.0." He shudders briefly. "I'm not sure about the validity of voting projects at all, these days. The assumption that all people are of equal importance seems frighteningly obsolescent. Do you think we can make this fly?" + +"I don't see why not. If Amber's willing to play the People's Princess for us ..." Annette picks up a slice of liverwurst and chews on it meditatively. + +"I'm not sure it's workable, however we play it." Manfred looks thoughtful. "The whole democratic participation thing looks questionable to me under these circumstances. We're under direct threat, for all that it's a long-term one, and this whole culture is in danger of turning into a classical nation-state. Or worse, several of them layered on top of one another with complete geographical collocation but no social interpenetration. I'm not certain it's a good idea to try to steer something like that - pieces might break off, you'd get the most unpleasant side-effects. Although, on the other hand, if we can mobilize enough broad support to become the first visible planetwide polity ..." + +"We need you to stay focused," Annette adds unexpectedly. + +"Focused? Me?" He laughs, briefly. "I /{used}/ to have an idea a second. Now it's maybe one a year. I'm just a melancholy old birdbrain, me." + +"Yes, but you know the old saying? The fox has many ideas - the hedgehog has only one, but it's a /{big}/ idea." + +"So tell me, what is my big idea?" Manfred leans forward, one elbow on the table, one eye focused on inner space as a hot-burning thread of consciousness barks psephological performance metrics at him, analysing the game ahead. "Where do you think I'm going?" + +"I think -" Annette breaks off suddenly, staring past his shoulder. Privacy slips, and for a frozen moment Manfred glances round in mild horror and sees thirty or forty other guests in the crowded garden, elbows rubbing, voices raised above the background chatter: "Gianni!" She beams widely as she stands up. "What a surprise! When did you arrive?" + +Manfred blinks. A slim young guy, moving with adolescent grace, but none of the awkward movements and sullen lack of poise - he's much older than he looks, chickenhawk genetics. /{Gianni}/? He feels a huge surge of memories paging through his exocortex. He remembers ringing a doorbell in dusty, hot Rome: white toweling bathrobe, the economics of scarcity, autograph signed by the dead hand of von Neumann - "Gianni?" he asks, disbelieving. "It's been a long time!" + +The gilded youth, incarnated in the image of a metropolitan toy-boy from the noughties, grins widely and embraces Manfred with a friendly bear hug. Then he slides down onto the bench next to Annette, whom he kisses with easy familiarity. "Ah, to be among friends again! It's been too long!" He glances round curiously. "Hmm, how very Bavarian." He snaps his fingers. "Mine will be a, what do you recommend? It's been too long since my last beer." His grin widens. "Not in this body." + +"You're resimulated?" Manfred asks, unable to stop himself. + +Annette frowns at him disapprovingly: "No, silly! He came through the teleport gate -" + +"Oh." Manfred shakes his head. "I'm sorry -" + +"It's okay." Gianni Vittoria clearly doesn't mind being mistaken for a historical newbie, rather than someone who's traveled through the decades the hard way. /{He must be over a hundred by now}/, Manfred notes, not bothering to spawn a search thread to find out. + +"It was time to move and, well, the old body didn't want to move with me, so why not go gracefully and accept the inevitable?" + +"I didn't take you for a dualist," Manfred says ruefully. + +"Ah, I'm not - but neither am I reckless." Gianni drops his grin for a moment. The sometime minister for transhuman affairs, economic theoretician, then retired tribal elder of the polycognitive liberals is serious. "I have never uploaded before, or switched bodies, or teleported. Even when my old one was seriously - tcha! Maybe I left it too long. But here I am, one planet is as good as another to be cloned and downloaded onto, don't you think?" + +"You invited him?" Manfred asks Annette. + +"Why wouldn't I?" There's a wicked gleam in her eye. "Did you expect me to live like a nun while you were a flock of pigeons? We may have campaigned against the legal death of the transubstantiated, Manfred, but there are limits." + +Manfred looks between them, then shrugs, embarrassed. "I'm still getting used to being human again," he admits. "Give me time to catch up? At an emotional level, at least." The realization that Gianni and Annette have a history together doesn't come as a surprise to him: It's one of the things you must adapt to if you opt out of the human species, after all. At least the libido suppression is helping here, he realizes: He's not about to embarrass anyone by suggesting a ménage. He focuses on Gianni. "I have a feeling I'm here for a purpose, and it isn't mine," he says slowly. "Why don't you tell me what you've got in mind?" + +Gianni shrugs. "You have the big picture already. We are human, metahuman, and augmented human. But the posthumans are things that were never really human to begin with. The Vile Offspring have reached their adolescence and want the place to themselves so they can throw a party. The writing is on the wall, don't you think?" + +Manfred gives him a long stare. "The whole idea of running away in meatspace is fraught with peril," he says slowly. He picks up his mug of beer and swirls it around slowly. "Look, we know, now, that a singularity doesn't turn into a voracious predator that eats all the dumb matter in its path, triggering a phase change in the structure of space - at least, not unless they've done something very stupid to the structure of the false vacuum, somewhere outside our current light cone. + +"But if we run away, /{we}/ are still going to be there. Sooner or later, we'll have the same problem all over again; runaway intelligence augmentation, self-expression, engineered intelligences, whatever. Possibly that's what happened out past the Böotes void - not a galactic-scale civilization, but a race of pathological cowards fleeing their own exponential transcendence. We carry the seeds of a singularity with us wherever we go, and if we try to excise those seeds, we cease to be human, don't we? So ... maybe you can tell me what you think we should do. Hmm?" + +"It's a dilemma." A waitron inserts itself into their privacy-screened field of view. It plants a spun-diamond glass in front of Gianni, then pukes beer into it. Manfred declines a refill, waiting for Gianni to drink. "Ah, the simple pleasures of the flesh! I've been corresponding with your daughter, Manny. She loaned me her experiential digest of the journey to Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},. I found it quite alarming. Nobody's casting aspersions on her observations, not after that self-propelled stock market bubble or 419 scam or whatever it was got loose in the Economics 2.0 sphere, but the implications - the Vile Offspring will eat the solar system, Manny. Then they'll slow down. But where does that leave us, I ask you? What is there for orthohumans like us to do?" + +Manfred nods thoughtfully. "You've heard the argument between the accelerationistas and the time-binder faction, I assume?" he asks. + +"Of course." Gianni takes a long pull on his beer. "What do /{you}/ think of our options?" + +"The accelerationistas want to upload everyone onto a fleet of starwisps and charge off to colonize an uninhabited brown dwarf planetary system. Or maybe steal a Matrioshka brain that's succumbed to senile dementia and turn it back into planetary biomes with cores of diamond-phase computronium to fulfil some kind of demented pastoralist nostalgia trip. Rousseau's universal robots. I gather Amber thinks this is a good idea because she's done it before - at least, the charging off aboard a starwisp part. 'To boldly go where no uploaded metahuman colony fleet has gone before' has a certain ring to it, doesn't it?" Manfred nods to himself. "Like I say, it won't work. We'd be right back to iteration one of the waterfall model of singularity formation within a couple of gigaseconds of arriving. That's why I came back: to warn her." + +"So?" Gianni prods, pretending to ignore the frowns that Annette is casting his way. + +"And as for the time-binders," Manfred nods again, "they're like Sirhan. Deeply conservative, deeply suspicious. Holding out for staying here as long as possible, until the Vile Offspring come for Saturn - then moving out bit by bit, into the Kuiper belt. Colony habitats on snowballs half a light-year from anywhere." He shudders. "Spam in a fucking can with a light-hour walk to the nearest civilized company if your fellow inmates decide to reinvent Stalinism or Objectivism. No thanks! I know they've been muttering about quantum teleportation and stealing toys from the routers, but I'll believe it when I see it." + +"Which leaves what?" Annette demands. "It is all very well, this dismissal of both the accelerationista and time-binder programs, Manny, but what can you propose in their place?" She looks distressed. "Fifty years ago, you would have had six new ideas before breakfast! And an erection." + +Manfred leers at her unconvincingly. "Who says I can't still have both?" + +She glares. "Drop it!" + +"Okay." Manfred chugs back a quarter of a liter of beer, draining his glass, and puts it down on the table with a bang. "As it happens, I /{do}/ have an alternative idea." He looks serious. "I've been discussing it with Aineko for some time, and Aineko has been seeding Sirhan with it - if it's to work optimally, we'll need to get a rump constituency of both the accelerationistas and the conservatives on board. Which is why I'm conditionally going along with this whole election nonsense. So, what's it worth to you for me to explain it?" + +* * * + +"So, who was the deadhead you were busy with today?" asks Amber. + +Rita shrugs. "Some boringly prolix pulp author from the early twentieth, with a body phobia of extropian proportions - I kept expecting him to start drooling and rolling his eyes if I crossed my legs. Funny thing is, he was also close to bolting from fear once I mentioned implants. We /{really}/ need to nail down how to deal with these mind/body dualists, don't we?" She watches Amber with something approaching admiration; she's new to the inner circle of the accelerationista study faction, and Amber's social credit is sky-high. Rita's got a lot to learn from her, if she can get close enough. And right now, following her along a path through the landscaped garden behind the museum seems like a golden moment of opportunity. + +Amber smiles. "I'm glad I'm not processing immigrants these days; most of them are so stupid it drives you up the wall after a bit. Personally I blame the Flynn effect - in reverse. They come from a background of sensory deprivation. It's nothing that a course of neural growth enhancers can't fix in a year or two, but after the first few you skullfuck, they're all the same. So /{dull}/. Unless you're unlucky enough to get one of the documentees from a puritan religious period. I'm no fluffragette, but I swear if I get one more superstitious, woman-hating clergyman, I'm going to consider prescribing forcible gender reassignment surgery. At least the Victorian English are mostly just open-minded lechers, when you get past their social reserve. And they like new technology." + +Rita nods. /{Woman-hating et cetera}/ ... The echoes of patriarchy are still with them today, it seems, and not just in the form of resimulated ayatollahs and archbishops from the Dark Ages. "My author sounds like the worst of both. Some guy called Howard, from Rhode Island. Kept looking at me as if he was afraid I was going to sprout bat wings and tentacles or something." /{Like your son}/, she doesn't add. /{Just what was he thinking, anyway?}/ she wonders. /{To be that screwed up takes serious dedication ...}/ "What are you working on, if you don't mind me asking?" she asks, trying to change the direction of her attention. + +"Oh, pressing the flesh, I guess. Auntie 'Nette wanted me to meet some old political hack contact of hers who she figures can help with the program, but he was holed up with her and Dad all day." She pulls a face. "I had another fitting session with the image merchants, they're trying to turn me into a political catwalk clotheshorse. Then there's the program demographics again. We're getting about a thousand new immigrants a day, planetwide, but it's accelerating rapidly, and we should be up to eighty an hour by the time of the election. Which is going to be a huge problem, because if we start campaigning too early, a quarter of the electorate won't know what they're meant to be voting about." + +"Maybe it's deliberate," Rita suggests. "The Vile Offspring are trying to rig the outcome by injecting voters." She pings a smiley emoticon off Wednesday's open channel, raising a flickering grin in return. "The party of fuckwits will win, no question about it." + +"Uh-huh." Amber snaps her fingers and pulls an impatient face as she waits for a passing cloud to solidify above her head and lower a glass of cranberry juice to her. "Dad said one thing that's spot-on, we're framing this entire debate in terms of what we should do to avoid conflict with the Offspring. The main bone of contention is how to run away and how far to go and which program to put resources into, not whether or when to run, let alone what else we could do. Maybe we should have given it some more thought. Are we being manipulated?" + +Rita looks vacant for a moment. "Is that a question?" she asks. Amber nods, and she shakes her head. "Then I'd have to say that I don't know. The evidence is inconclusive, so far. But I'm not really happy. The Offspring won't tell us what they want, but there's no reason to believe they don't know what /{we}/ want. I mean, they can think rings round us, can't they?" + +Amber shrugs, then pauses to unlatch a hedge gate that gives admission to a maze of sweet-smelling shrubs. "I really don't know. They may not care about us, or even remember we exist - the resimulants may be being generated by some autonomic mechanism, not really part of the higher consciousness of the Offspring. Or it may be some whacked-out post-Tiplerite meme that's gotten hold of more processing resources than the entire presingularity Net, some kind of MetaMormon project directed at ensuring that everyone who can possibly ever have lived lives in the /{right way}/ to fit some weird quasi-religious requirement we don't know about. Or it might be a message we're simply not smart enough to decode. That's the trouble, we don't know." + +She vanishes around the curve of the maze. Rita hurries to catch up, sees her about to turn into another alleyway, and leaps after her. "What else?" she pants. + +"Could be" - left turn - "anything, really." Six steps lead down into a shadowy tunnel; fork right, five meters forward, then six steps up lead back to the surface. "Question is, why don't they" - left turn - "just /{tell}/ us what they want?" + +"Speaking to tapeworms." Rita nearly manages to catch up with Amber, who is trotting through the maze as if she's memorized it perfectly. "That's how much the nascent Matrioshka brain can outthink us by, as humans to segmented worms. Would we do. What they told us?" + +"Maybe." Amber stops dead, and Rita glances around. They're in an open cell near the heart of the maze, five meters square, hedged in on all sides. There are three entrances and a slate altar, waist high, lichen-stained with age. "I think you know the answer to that question." + +"I -" Rita stares at her. + +Amber stares back, eyes dark and intense. "You're from one of the Ganymede orbitals by way of Titan. You knew my eigensister while I was out of the solar system flying a diamond the size of a Coke can. That's what you told me. You've got a skill set that's a perfect match for the campaign research group, and you asked me to introduce you to Sirhan, then you pushed his buttons like a pro. Just what /{are}/ you trying to pull? Why should I trust you?" + +"I -" Rita's face crumples. "I /{didn't}/ push his buttons! He /{thought}/ I was trying to drag him into bed." She looks up defiantly. "I wasn't, I want to learn, what makes you - him - work -" Huge, dark, structured information queries batter at her exocortex, triggering warnings. Someone is churning through distributed time-series databases all over the outer system, measuring her past with a micrometer. She stares at Amber, mortified and angry. It's the ultimate denial of trust, the need to check her statements against the public record for truth. "What are you doing?" + +"I have a suspicion." Amber stands poised, as if ready to run. /{Run away from me?}/ Rita thinks, startled. "You said, what if the resimulants came from a subconscious function of the Offspring? And funnily enough, I've been discussing that possibility with Dad. He's still got the spark when you show him a problem, you know." + +"I don't understand!" + +"No, I don't think you do," says Amber, and Rita can feel vast stresses in the space around her: The whole ubicomp environment, dust-sized chips and utility fog and hazy clouds of diamond-bright optical processors in the soil and the air and her skin, is growing blotchy and sluggish, thrashing under the load of whatever Amber - with her management-grade ackles - is ordering it to do. For a moment, Rita can't feel half her mind, and she gets the panicky claustrophobic sense of being trapped inside her own head: Then it stops. + +"Tell me!" Rita insists. "What are you trying to prove? It's some mistake -" And Amber is nodding, much to her surprise, looking weary and morose. "What do you think I've done?" + +"Nothing. You're coherent. Sorry about that." + +"Coherent?" Rita hears her voice rising with her indignation as she feels bits of herself, cut off from her for whole seconds, shivering with relief. "I'll give you coherent! Assaulting my exocortex -" + +"Shut up." Amber rubs her face and simultaneously throws Rita one end of an encrypted channel. + +"Why should I?" Rita demands, not accepting the handshake. + +"Because." Amber glances round. /{She's scared!}/ Rita suddenly realizes. "Just /{do}/ it," she hisses. + +Rita accepts the endpoint and a huge lump of undigested expository data slides down it, structured and tagged with entry points and metainformation directories pointing to - + +"Holy /{shit}/!" she whispers, as she realizes what it is. + +"Yes." Amber grins humorlessly. She continues, over the open channel: *{It looks like they're cognitive antibodies, generated by the devil's own semiotic immune system.}* *{That's what Sirhan is focusing on, how to avoid triggering them and bringing everything down at once.}* *{Forget the election, we're going to be in deep shit sooner rather than later, and we're still trying to work out how to survive.}* *{Now are you sure you still want in?}* + +"Want in on /{what}/?" Rita asks, shakily. + +*{ The lifeboat Dad's trying to get us all into under cover of the accelerationista/conservationista split, before the Vile Offspring's immune system figures out how to lever us apart into factions and make us kill each other ...}* + +* * * + +_1 Welcome to the afterglow of the intelligence supernova, little tapeworm. + +_1 Tapeworms have on the order of a thousand neurons, pulsing furiously to keep their little bodies twitching. Human beings have on the order of a hundred billion neurons. What is happening in the inner solar system as the Vile Offspring churn and reconfigure the fast-thinking structured dust clouds that were once planets is as far beyond the ken of merely human consciousness as the thoughts of a Gödel are beyond the twitching tropisms of a worm. Personality modules bounded by the speed of light, sucking down billions of times the processing power of a human brain, form and re-form in the halo of glowing nanoprocessors that shrouds the sun in a ruddy glowing cloud. + +_1 Mercury, Venus, Mars, Ceres and the asteroids - all gone. Luna is a silvery iridescent sphere, planed smooth down to micrometer heights, luminous with diffraction patterns. Only Earth, the cradle of human civilization, remains untransformed; and Earth, too, will be dismantled soon enough, for already a trellis of space elevators webs the planet around its equator, lifting refugee dumb matter into orbit and flinging it at the wildlife preserves of the outer system. + +_1 The intelligence bloom that gnaws at Jupiter's moons with claws of molecular machinery won't stop until it runs out of dumb matter to convert into computronium. By the time it does, it will have as much brainpower as you'd get if you placed a planet with a population of six billion future-shocked primates in orbit around every star in the Milky Way galaxy. But right now, it's still stupid, having converted barely a percentage point of the mass of the solar system - it's a mere Magellanic Cloud civilization, infantile and unsubtle and still perilously close to its carbon-chemistry roots. + +_1 It's hard for tapeworms living in warm intestinal mulch to wrap their thousand-neuron brains around whatever it is that the vastly more complex entities who host them are discussing, but one thing's sure - the owners have a lot of things going on, not all of them under conscious control. The churning of gastric secretions and the steady ventilation of lungs are incomprehensible to the simple brains of tapeworms, but they serve the purpose of keeping the humans alive and provide the environment the worms live in. And other more esoteric functions that contribute to survival - the intricate dance of specialized cloned lymphocytes in their bone marrow and lymph nodes, the random permutations of antibodies constantly churning for possible matches to intruder molecules warning of the presence of pollution - are all going on beneath the level of conscious control. + +_1 Autonomic defenses. Antibodies. Intelligence bloom gnawing at the edges of the outer system. And humans are not as unsophisticated as mulch wrigglers, they can see the writing on the wall. Is it any surprise, that among the ones who look outward, the real debate is not over whether to run, but over how far and how fast? + +* * * + +There's a team meeting early the next morning. It's still dark outside, and most of the attendees who are present in vivo have the faintly haggard look that comes from abusing melatonin antagonists. Rita stifles a yawn as she glances around the conference room - the walls expanded into huge virtual spaces to accommodate thirty or so exocortical ghosts from sleeping partners who will wake with memories of a particularly vivid lucid dream - and sees Amber talking to her famous father and a younger-looking man who one of her partials recognizes as a last-century EU politician. There seems to be some tension between them. + +Now that Amber has granted Rita her conditional trust, a whole new tier of campaigning information has opened up to her inner eye - stuff steganographically concealed in a hidden layer of the project's collective memory space. There's stuff in here she hadn't suspected, frightening studies of resimulant demographics, surveys of emigration rates from the inner system, cladistic trees dissecting different forms of crude tampering that have been found skulking in the wetware of refugees. The reason why Amber and Manfred and - reluctantly - Sirhan are fighting for one radical faction in a planetwide election, despite their various misgivings over the validity of the entire concept of democracy in this posthuman era. She blinks it aside, slightly bewildered, forking a couple of dozen personality subthreads to chew on it at the edges. "Need coffee," she mutters to the table, as it offers her a chair. + +"Everyone on-line?" asked Manfred. "Then I'll begin." He looks tired and worried, physically youthful but showing the full weight of his age. "We've got a crisis coming, folks. About a hundred kiloseconds ago, the bit rate on the resimulation stream jumped. We're now fielding about one resimulated state vector a second, on top of the legitimate immigration we're dealing with. If it jumps again by the same factor, it's going to swamp our ability to check the immigrants for zimboes in vivo - we'd have to move to running them in secure storage or just resurrecting them blind, and if there /{are}/ any jokers in the pack, that's about the riskiest thing we could do." + +"Why do you not spool them to memory diamond?" asks the handsome young ex-politician to his left, looking almost amused - as if he already knows the answer. + +"Politics." Manfred shrugs. + +"It would blow a hole in our social contract," says Amber, looking as if she's just swallowed something unpleasant, and Rita feels a flicker of admiration for the way they're stage-managing the meeting. Amber's even talking to her father, as if she feels comfortable with him around, although he's a walking reminder of her own lack of success. Nobody else has gotten a word in yet. "If we don't instantiate them, the next logical step is to deny resimulated minds the franchise. Which in turn puts us on the road to institutional inequality. And that's a very big step to take, even if you have misgivings about the idea of settling complex policy issues on the basis of a popular vote, because our whole polity is based on the idea that less competent intelligences - us - deserve consideration." + +"Hrmph." Someone clears their throat. Rita glances round and freezes, because it's Amber's screwed-up eigenchild, and he's just about materialized in the chair next to her. /{So he adopted Superplonk after all?}/ she observes cynically. He doggedly avoids looking at her. "That was my analysis," he says reluctantly. "We need them alive. For the ark option, at least, and if not, even the accelerationista platform will need them on hand later." + +/{Concentration camps}/, thinks Rita, trying to ignore Sirhan's presence near her, for it's a constant irritant, /{where most of the inmates are confused, frightened human beings - and the ones who aren't think they are}/. It's an eerie thought, and she spawns a couple of full ghosts to dream it through for her, gaming the possible angles. + +"How are your negotiations over the lifeboat designs going?" Amber asks her father. "We need to get a portfolio of design schemata out before we go into the election -" + +"Change of plan." Manfred hunches forward. "This doesn't need to go any further, but Sirhan and Aineko have come up with something interesting." He looks worried. + +Sirhan is staring at his eigenmother with narrowed eyes, and Rita has to resist the urge to elbow him savagely in the ribs. She knows enough about him now to realize it wouldn't get his attention - at least, not the way she'd want it, not for the right reasons - and in any case, he's more wrapped up in himself than her ghost ever saw him as likely to be. (How /{anyone}/ could be party to such a detailed exchange of simulated lives and still reject the opportunity to do it in real life is beyond her; unless it's an artifact of his youth, when his parents pushed him through a dozen simulated childhoods in search of knowledge and ended up with a stubborn oyster-head of a son ...) "We still need to look as if we're planning on using a lifeboat," he says aloud. "There's the small matter of the price they're asking in return for the alternative." + +"What? What are you talking about?" Amber sounds confused. "I thought you were working on some kind of cladistic map. What's this about a price?" + +Sirhan smiles coolly. "I /{am}/ working on a cladistic map, in a manner of speaking. You wasted much of your opportunity when you journeyed to the router, you know. I've been talking to Aineko." + +"You -" Amber flushes. "What about?" She's visibly angry, Rita notices. Sirhan is needling his eigenmother. /{Why}/? + +"About the topology of some rather interesting types of small-world network." Sirhan leans back in his chair, watching the cloud above her head. "And the router. You went through it, then you came back with your tail between your legs as fast as you could, didn't you? Not even checking your passenger to see if it was a hostile parasite." + +"I don't have to take this," Amber says tightly. "You weren't there, and you have no idea what constraints we were working under." + +"Really?" Sirhan raises an eyebrow. "Anyway, you missed an opportunity. We know that the routers - for whatever reason - are self-replicating. They spread from brown dwarf to brown dwarf, hatch, tap the protostar for energy and material, and send a bunch of children out. Von Neumann machines, in other words. We also know that they provide high-bandwidth communications to other routers. When you went through the one at Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},, you ended up in an unmaintained DMZ attached to an alien Matrioshka brain that had degenerated, somehow. It follows that /{someone}/ had collected a router and carried it home, to link into the MB. So why didn't you bring one home with you?" + +Amber glares at him. "Total payload on board the *{Field Circus}* was about ten grams. How large do you think a router seed is?" + +"So you brought the Slug home instead, occupying maybe half your storage capacity and ready to wreak seven shades of havoc on -" + +"Children!" They both look round automatically. It's Annette, Rita realizes, and she doesn't look amused. "Why do you not save this bickering for later?" she asks. "We have our own goals to be pursuing." Unamused is an understatement. Annette is fuming. + +"This charming family reunion was your idea, I believe?" Manfred smiles at her, then nods coolly at the retread EU politician in the next seat. + +"Please." It's Amber. "Dad, can you save this for later?" Rita sits up. For a moment, Amber looks ancient, far older than her subjective gigasecond of age. "She's right. She didn't mean to screw up. Let's leave the family history for some time when we can work it out in private. Okay?" + +Manfred looks abashed. He blinks rapidly. "All right." He takes a breath. "Amber, I brought some old acquaintances into the loop. If we win the election, then to get out of here as fast as possible, we'll have to use a combination of the two main ideas we've been discussing: spool as many people as possible into high-density storage until we get somewhere with space and mass and energy to reincarnate them, and get our hands on a router. The entire planetary polity can't afford to pay the energy budget of a relativistic starship big enough to hold everyone, even as uploads, and a subrelativistic ship would be too damn vulnerable to the Vile Offspring. And it follows that, instead of taking potluck on the destination, we should learn about the network protocols the routers use, figure out some kind of transferable currency we can use to pay for our reinstantiation at the other end, and also how to make some kind of map so we know where we're going. The two hard parts are getting at or to a router, and paying - that's going to mean traveling with someone who understands Economics 2.0 but doesn't want to hang around the Vile Offspring. + +"As it happens, these old acquaintances of mine went out and fetched back a router seed, for their own purposes. It's sitting about thirty light-hours away from here, out in the Kuiper belt. They're trying to hatch it right now. And I /{think}/ Aineko might be willing to go with us and handle the trade negotiations." He raises the palm of his right hand and flips a bundle of tags into the shared spatial cache of the inner circle's memories. + +/{Lobsters}/. Decades ago, back in the dim wastelands of the depression-ridden naughty oughties, the uploaded lobsters had escaped. Manfred brokered a deal for them to get their very own cometary factory colony. Years later, Amber's expedition to the router had run into eerie zombie lobsters, upload images that had been taken over and reanimated by the Wunch. But where the real lobsters had gotten to ... + +For a moment, Rita sees herself hovering in darkness and vacuum, the distant siren song of a planetary gravity well far below. Off to her - left? north? - glows a hazy dim red cloud the size of the full moon as seen from Earth, a cloud that hums with a constant background noise, the waste heat of a galactic civilization dreaming furious colorless thoughts to itself. Then she figures out how to slew her unblinking, eyeless viewpoint round and sees the craft. + +It's a starship in the shape of a crustacean three kilometers long. It's segmented and flattened, with legs projecting from the abdominal floor to stretch stiffly sideways and clutch fat balloons of cryogenic deuterium fuel. The blue metallic tail is a flattened fan wrapped around the delicate stinger of a fusion reactor. Near the head, things are different: no huge claws there, but the delicately branching fuzz of bush robots, nanoassemblers poised ready to repair damage in flight and spin the parachute of a ramscoop when the ship is ready to decelerate. The head is massively armored against the blitzkrieg onslaught of interstellar dust, its radar eyes a glint of hexagonal compound surfaces staring straight at her. + +Behind and below the lobster-ship, a planetary ring looms vast and tenuous. The lobster is in orbit around Saturn, mere light-seconds away. And as Rita stares at the ship in dumbstruck silence, it /{winks}/ at her. + +"They don't have names, at least not as individual identifiers," Manfred says apologetically, "so I asked if he'd mind being called something. He said Blue, because he is. So I give you the good lobster *{Something Blue}*." + +Sirhan interrupts, "You still need my cladistics project," he sounds somewhat smug, "to find your way through the network. Do you have a specific destination in mind?" + +"Yeah, to both questions," Manfred admits. "We need to send duplicate ghosts out to each possible router end point, wait for an echo, then iterate and repeat. Recursive depth-first traversal. The goal - that's harder." He points at the ceiling, which dissolves into a chaotic 3-D spiderweb that Rita recognizes, after some hours of subjective head-down archive time, as a map of the dark matter distribution throughout a radius of a billion light-years, galaxies glued like fluff to the nodes where strands of drying silk meet. "We've known for most of a century that there's something flaky going on out there, out past the Böotes void - there are a couple of galactic superclusters, around which there's something flaky about the cosmic background anisotropy. Most computational processes generate entropy as a by-product, and it looks like something is dumping waste heat into the area from all the galaxies in the region, very evenly spread in a way that mirrors the metal distribution in those galaxies, except at the very cores. And according to the lobsters, who have been indulging in some /{very}/ long baseline interferometry, most of the stars in the nearest cluster are redder than expected and metal-depleted. As if someone's been mining them." + +"Ah." Sirhan stares at his grandfather. "Why should they be any different from the local nodes?" + +"Look around you. Do you see any indications of large-scale cosmic engineering within a million light-years of here?" Manfred shrugs. "Locally, nothing has quite reached ... well. We can guess at the life cycle of a post spike civilization now, can't we? We've felt the elephant. We've seen the wreckage of collapsed Matrioshka minds. We know how unattractive exploration is to postsingularity intelligences, we've seen the bandwidth gap that keeps them at home." He points at the ceiling. "But over /{there}/ something different happened. They're making changes on the scale of an entire galactic supercluster, and they appear to be coordinated. They /{did}/ get out and go places, and their descendants may still be out there. It looks like they're doing something purposeful and coordinated, something vast - a timing channel attack on the virtual machine that's running the universe, perhaps, or an embedded simulation of an entirely different universe. Up or down, is it turtles all the way, or is there something out there that's more real than we are? And don't you think it's worth trying to find out?" + +"No." Sirhan crosses his arms. "Not particularly. I'm interested in saving people from the Vile Offspring, not taking a huge gamble on mystery transcendent aliens who may have built a galaxy-sized reality hacking machine a billion years ago. I'll sell you my services, and even send a ghost along, but if you expect me to bet my entire future on it ..." + +It's too much for Rita. Diverting her attention away from the dizzying inner-space vista, she elbows Sirhan in the ribs. He looks round blankly for a moment, then with gathering anger as he lets his killfile filter slip. "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent," she hisses. Then, succumbing to a secondary impulse she knows she'll regret later, she drops a private channel into his public in-tray. + +"Nobody's asking you to," Manfred is saying defensively, arms crossed. "I view this as a Manhattan project kind of thing, pursue all agendas in parallel. If we win the election, we'll have the resources we need to do that. We should /{all}/ go through the router, and we will /{all}/ leave backups aboard *{Something Blue}*. *{Blue}* is /{slow}/, tops out at about a tenth of cee, but what he can do is get a sufficient quantity of memory diamond the hell out of circumsolar space before the Vile Offspring's autonomic defenses activate whatever kind of trust exploit they're planning in the next few megaseconds -" + +"/{What do you want}/?" Sirhan demands angrily over the channel. He's still not looking at her, and not just because he's focusing on the vision in blue that dominates the shared space of the team meeting. + +"/{Stop lying to yourself}/," Rita sends back. "/{You're lying about your own goals and motivations. You may not want to know the truth your own ghost worked out, but I do. And I'm not going to let you deny it happened}/." + +"/{So one of your agents seduced a personality image of me -}/" + +"/{Bullshit}/ -" + +"Do you mean to declare this platform openly?" asks the young-old guy near the platform, the Europol. "Because if so, you're going to undermine Amber's campaign -" + +"That's all right," Amber says tiredly, "I'm used to Dad supporting me in his own inimitable way." + +"Is okay," says a new voice. "I are happy wait-state grazing in ecliptic." It's the friendly lobster lifeboat, light-lagged by its trajectory outside the ring system. + +"- /{You're happy to hide behind a hypocritical sense of moral purity when it makes you feel you can look down on other people, but underneath it you're just like everyone else}/ -" + +"- She /{set you up to corrupt me, didn't she? You're just bait in her scheme}/ -" + +"The idea was to store incremental backups in the Panuliran's cargo cache in case a weakly godlike agency from the inner system attempts to activate the antibodies they've already disseminated throughout the festival culture," Annette explains, stepping in on Manfred's behalf. + +Nobody else in the discussion space seems to notice that Rita and Sirhan are busy ripping the shit out of each other over a private channel, throwing emotional hand grenades back and forth like seasoned divorcees. "It's not a satisfactory solution to the evacuation question, but it ought to satisfy the conservatives' baseline requirement, and as insurance -" + +"- /{That's right, blame your eigenmother! Has it occurred to you that she doesn't care enough about you to try a stunt like that? I think you spent too much time with that crazy grandmother of yours. You didn't even integrate that ghost, did you? Too afraid of polluting yourself! I bet you never even bothered to check what it felt like from inside}/ -" + +"- /{I did}/ -" Sirhan freezes for a moment, personality modules paging in and out of his brain like a swarm of angry bees - "/{make a fool of myself}/," he adds quietly, then slumps back in his seat. "/{This is so embarrassing ...}/" He covers his face with his hands. "/{You're right.}/" + +"/{I am?}/" Rita's puzzlement slowly gives way to understanding; Sirhan has finally integrated the memories from the partials they hybridized earlier. Stuck-up and proud, the cognitive dissonance must be enormous. "/{No, I'm not. You're just overly defensive.}/" + +"/{I'm}/ -" Embarrassed. Because Rita knows him, inside out. Has the ghost-memories of six months in a simspace with him, playing with ideas, exchanging intimacies, later confidences. She holds ghost-memories of his embrace, a smoky affair that might have happened in real space if his instant reaction to realizing that it /{could}/ happen hadn't been to dump the splinter of his mind that was contaminated by impure thoughts to cold storage and deny everything. + +"We have no threat profile yet," Annette says, cutting right across their private conversation. "If there /{is}/ a direct threat - and we don't know that for sure, yet, the Vile Offspring might be enlightened enough simply to be leaving us alone - it'll probably be some kind of subtle attack aimed directly at the foundations of our identity. Look for a credit bubble, distributed trust metrics devaluing suddenly as people catch some kind of weird religion, something like that. Maybe a perverse election outcome. And it won't be sudden. They are not stupid, to start a headlong attack without slow corruption to soften the way." + +"You've obviously been thinking about this for some time," Sameena says with dry emphasis. "What's in it for your friend, uh, Blue? Did you squirrel away enough credit to cover the price of renting a starship from the Economics 2.0 metabubble? Or is there something you aren't telling us?" + +"Um." Manfred looks like a small boy with his hand caught in the sweets jar. "Well, as a matter of fact -" + +"Yes, Dad, why don't you tell us just what this is going to cost?" Amber asks. + +"Ah, well." He looks embarrassed. "It's the lobsters, not Aineko. They want some payment." + +Rita reaches out and grabs Sirhan's hand: He doesn't resist. "/{Do you know about this?}/" Rita queries him. + +"/{All new to me ...}/" A confused partial thread follows his reply down the pipe, and for a while, she joins him in introspective reverie, trying to work out the implications of knowing what they know about the possibility of a mutual relationship. + +"They want a written conceptual map. A map of all the accessible meme spaces hanging off the router network, compiled by human explorers who they can use as a baseline, they say. It's quite simple - in return for a ticket out-system, some of us are going to have to go exploring. But that doesn't mean we can't leave back-ups behind." + +"Do they have any particular explorers in mind?" Amber sniffs. + +"No," says Manfred. "Just a team of us, to map out the router network and ensure they get some warning of threats from outside." He pauses. "You're going to want to come along, aren't you?" + +* * * + +The pre-election campaign takes approximately three minutes and consumes more bandwidth than the sum of all terrestrial communications channels from prehistory to 2008. Approximately six million ghosts of Amber, individually tailored to fit the profile of the targeted audience, fork across the dark fiber meshwork underpinning of the lily-pad colonies, then out through ultrawideband mesh networks, instantiated in implants and floating dust motes to buttonhole the voters. Many of them fail to reach their audience, and many more hold fruitless discussions; about six actually decide they've diverged so far from their original that they constitute separate people and register for independent citizenship, two defect to the other side, and one elopes with a swarm of highly empathic modified African honeybees. + +Ambers are not the only ghosts competing for attention in the public zeitgeist. In fact, they're in a minority. Most of the autonomous electoral agents are campaigning for a variety of platforms that range from introducing a progressive income tax - nobody is quite sure /{why}/, but it seems to be traditional - to a motion calling for the entire planet to be paved, which quite ignores the realities of element abundance in the upper atmosphere of a metal-poor gas giant, not to mention playing hell with the weather. The Faceless are campaigning for everyone to be assigned a new set of facial muscles every six months, the Livid Pranksters are demanding equal rights for subsentient entities, and a host of single-issue pressure groups are yammering about the usual lost causes. + +Just how the election process anneals is a black mystery - at least, to those people who aren't party to the workings of the Festival Committee, the group who first had the idea of paving Saturn with hot-hydrogen balloons - but over the course of a complete diurn, almost forty thousand seconds, a pattern begins to emerge. This pattern will systematize the bias of the communications networks that traffic in reputation points across the planetary polity for a long time - possibly as much as fifty million seconds, getting on for a whole Martian year (if Mars still existed). It will create a parliament - a merged group mind borganism that speaks as one supermind built from the beliefs of the victors. And the news isn't great, as the party gathered in the upper sphere of the Atomium (which Manfred insisted Amber rent for the dead dog party) is slowly realizing. Amber isn't there, presumably drowning her sorrows or engaging in postelection schemes of a different nature somewhere else. But other members of her team are about. + +"It could be worse," Rita rationalizes, late in the evening. She's sitting in a corner of the seventh-floor deck, in a 1950s wireframe chair, clutching a glass of synthetic single malt and watching the shadows. "We could be in an old-style contested election with seven shades of shit flying. At least this way we can be decently anonymous." + +One of the blind spots detaches from her peripheral vision and approaches. It segues into view, suddenly congealing into Sirhan. He looks morose. + +"What's your problem?" she demands. "Your former faction is winning on the count." + +"Maybe so." He sits down beside her, carefully avoiding her gaze. "Maybe this is a good thing. And maybe not." + +"So when are you going to join the syncitium?" she asks. + +"Me? Join that?" He looks alarmed. "You think I want to become part of a parliamentary borg? What do you take me for?" + +"Oh." She shakes her head. "I assumed you were avoiding me because -" + +"No." He holds out his hand, and a passing waitron deposits a glass in it. He takes a deep breath. "I owe you an apology." + +/{About time}/, she thinks, uncharitably. But he's like that. Stiff-necked and proud, slow to acknowledge a mistake, but unlikely to apologize unless he really means it. "What for?" she asks. + +"For not giving you the benefit of the doubt," he says slowly, rolling the glass between his palms. "I should have listened to myself earlier instead of locking him out of me." + +The self he's talking about seems self-evident to her. "You're not an easy man to get close to," she says quietly. "Maybe that's part of your problem." + +"Part of it?" He chuckles bitterly. "My mother -" He bites back whatever he originally meant to say. "Do you know I'm older than she is? Than this version, I mean. She gets up my nose with her assumptions about me ..." + +"They run both ways." Rita reaches out and takes his hand - and he grips her right back, no rejection this time. "Listen, it looks as if she's not going to make it into the parliament of lies. There's a straight conservative sweep, these folks are in solid denial. About eighty percent of the population are resimulants or old-timers from Earth, and that's not going to change before the Vile Offspring turn on us. What are we going to do?" + +He shrugs. "I suspect everyone who thinks we're really under threat will move on. You know this is going to destroy the accelerationistas trust in democracy? They've still got a viable plan - Manfred's friendly lobster will work without the need for an entire planet's energy budget - but the rejection is going to hurt. I can't help thinking that maybe the real goal of the Vile Offspring was simply to gerrymander us into not diverting resources away from them. It's blunt, it's unsubtle, so we assumed that wasn't the point. But maybe there's a time for them to be blunt." + +She shrugs. "Democracy is a bad fit for lifeboats." But she's still uncomfortable with the idea. "And think of all the people we'll be leaving behind." + +"Well." He smiles tightly. "If you can think of any way to encourage the masses to join us ..." + +"A good start would be to stop thinking of them as masses to be manipulated." Rita stares at him. "Your family appears to have been developing a hereditary elitist streak, and it's not attractive." + +Sirhan looks uncomfortable. "If you think I'm bad, you should talk to Aineko about it," he says, self- deprecatingly. "Sometimes I wonder about that cat." + +"Maybe I will." She pauses. "And you? What are you going to do with yourself? Are you going to join the explorers?" + +"I -" He looks sideways at her. "I can see myself sending an eigenbrother," he says quietly. "But I'm not going to gamble my entire future on a bid to reach the far side of the observable universe by router. I've had enough excitement to last me a lifetime, lately. I think one copy for the backup archive in the icy depths, one to go exploring - and one to settle down and raise a family. What about you?" + +"You'll go all three ways?" she asks. + +"Yes, I think so. What about you?" + +"Where you go, I go." She leans against him. "Isn't that what matters in the end?" she murmurs. + +Chapter 9: Survivor + +This time, more than a double handful of years passes between successive visits to the Macx dynasty. + +Somewhere in the gas-sprinkled darkness beyond the local void, carbon-based life stirs. A cylinder of diamond fifty kilometers long spins in the darkness, its surface etched with strange quantum wells that emulate exotic atoms not found in any periodic table that Mendeleyev would have recognized. Within it, walls hold kilotonnes of oxygen and nitrogen gas, megatonnes of life-infested soil. A hundred trillion kilometers from the wreckage of Earth, the cylinder glitters like a gem in the darkness. + +Welcome to New Japan: one of the places between the stars where human beings hang out, now that the solar system is off-limits to meatbodies. + +I wonder who we'll find here? + +* * * + +There's an open plaza in one of the terraform sectors of the habitat cylinder. A huge gong hangs from a beautifully painted wooden frame at one side of the square, which is paved with weathered limestone slabs made of atoms ripped from a planet that has never seen molten ice. Houses stand around, and open-fronted huts where a variety of humanoid waitrons attend to food and beverages for the passing realfolk. A group of prepubescent children are playing hunt-and-seek with their big-eyed pet companions, brandishing makeshift spears and automatic rifles - there's no pain here, for bodies are fungible, rebuilt in a minute by the assembler/disassembler gates in every room. There are few adults hereabouts, for Red Plaza is unfashionable at present, and the kids have claimed it for their own as a playground. They're all genuinely young, symptoms of a demographic demiurge, not a single wendypan among them. + +A skinny boy with nut brown skin, a mop of black hair, and three arms is patiently stalking a worried-looking blue eeyore around the corner of the square. He's passing a stand stacked with fresh sushi rolls when the strange beast squirms out from beneath a wheelbarrow and arches its back, stretching luxuriously. + +The boy, Manni, freezes, hands tensing around his spear as he focuses on the new target. (The blue eeyore flicks its tail at him and darts for safety across a lichen-encrusted slab.) "City, what's that?" he asks without moving his lips. + +"What are you looking at?" replies City, which puzzles him somewhat, but not as much as it should. + +The beast finishes stretching one front leg and extends another. It looks a bit like a pussycat to Manni, but there's something subtly wrong with it. Its head is a little too small, the eyes likewise - and those paws - "You're sharp," he accuses the beast, forehead wrinkling in disapproval. + +"Yeah, whatever." The creature yawns, and Manni points his spear at it, clenching the shaft in both right hands. It's got sharp teeth, too, but it spoke to him via his inner hearing, not his ears. Innerspeech is for people, not toys. + +"Who are you?" he demands. + +The beast looks at him insolently. "I know your parents," it says, still using innerspeech. "You're Manni Macx, aren't you? Thought so. I want you to take me to your father." + +"No!" Manni jumps up and waves his arms at it. "I don't like you! Go away!" He pokes his spear in the direction of the beast's nose. + +"I'll go away when you take me to your father," says the beast. It raises its tail like a pussycat, and the fur bushes out, but then it pauses. "If you take me to your father I'll tell you a story afterward, how about that?" + +"Don't care!" Manni is only about two hundred megaseconds old - seven old Earth-years - but he can tell when he's being manipulated and gets truculent. + +"Kids." The cat-thing's tail lashes from side to side. "Okay, Manni, how about you take me to your father, or I rip your face off? I've got claws, you know." A brief eyeblink later, it's wrapping itself around his ankles sinuously, purring to give the lie to its unreliable threat - but he can see that it's got sharp nails all right. It's a /{wild}/ pussycat-thing, and nothing in his artificially preserved orthohuman upbringing has prepared him for dealing with a real wild pussycat-thing that talks. + +"Get away!" Manni is worried. "Mom!" he hollers, unintentionally triggering the broadcast flag in his innerspeech. "There's this /{thing}/ -" + +"Mom will do." The cat-thing sounds resigned. It stops rubbing against Manni's legs and looks up at him. "There's no need to panic. I won't hurt you." + +Manni stops hollering. "Who're you?" he asks at last, staring at the beast. Somewhere light-years away, an adult has heard his cry; his mother is coming fast, bouncing between switches and glancing off folded dimensions in a headlong rush toward him. + +"I'm Aineko." The beast sits down and begins to wash behind one hind leg. "And you're Manni, right?" + +"Aineko," Manni says uncertainly. "Do you know Lis or Bill?" + +Aineko the cat-thing pauses in his washing routine and looks at Manni, head cocked to one side. Manni is too young, too inexperienced to know that Aineko's proportions are those of a domestic cat, /{Felis catus}/, a naturally evolved animal rather than the toys and palimpsests and companionables he's used to. Reality may be fashionable with his parents' generation, but there /{are}/ limits, after all. Orange-and-brown stripes and whorls decorate Aineko's fur, and he sprouts a white fluffy bib beneath his chin. "Who are Lis and Bill?" + +"Them," says Manni, as big, sullen-faced Bill creeps up behind Aineko and tries to grab his tail while Lis floats behind his shoulder like a pint-sized UFO, buzzing excitedly. But Aineko is too fast for the kids and scampers round Manni's feet like a hairy missile. Manni whoops and tries to spear the pussycat-thing, but his spear turns to blue glass, crackles, and shards of brilliant snow rain down, burning his hands. + +"/{Now that}/ wasn't very friendly, was it?" says Aineko, a menacing note in his voice. "Didn't your mother teach you not to -" + +The door in the side of the sushi stall opens as Rita arrives, breathless and angry: "Manni! What have I told you about playing -" + +She stops, seeing Aineko. "/{You}/." She recoils in barely concealed fright. Unlike Manni, she recognizes it as the avatar of a posthuman demiurge, a body incarnated solely to provide a point of personal interaction for people to focus on. + +The cat grins back at her. "Me," he agrees. "Ready to talk?" + +She looks stricken. "We've got nothing to talk about." + +Aineko lashes his tail. "Oh, but we do." The cat turns and looks pointedly at Manni. "Don't we?" + +* * * + +_1 It has been a long time since Aineko passed this way, and in the meantime the space around Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56}, has changed out of all recognition. Back when the great lobster-built starships swept out of Sol's Oort cloud, archiving the raw frozen data of the unoccupied brown dwarf halo systems and seeding their structured excrement with programmable matter, there was nothing but random dead atoms hereabouts (and an alien router). But that was a long time ago; and since then, the brown dwarf system has succumbed to an anthropic infestation. + +_1 An unoptimized instance of H. sapiens maintains state coherency for only two to three gigaseconds before it succumbs to necrosis. But in only about ten gigaseconds, the infestation has turned the dead brown dwarf system upside down. They strip-mined the chilly planets to make environments suitable for their own variety of carbon life. They rearranged moons, building massive structures the size of asteroids. They ripped wormhole endpoints free of the routers and turned them into their own crude point-to-point network, learned how to generate new wormholes, then ran their own packet-switched polities over them. Wormhole traffic now supports an ever-expanding mesh of interstellar human commerce, but always in the darkness between the lit stars and the strange, metal-depleted dwarfs with the suspiciously low-entropy radiation. The sheer temerity of the project is mind-boggling: notwithstanding that canned apes are simply /{not suited}/ to life in the interstellar void, especially in orbit around a brown dwarf whose planets make Pluto seem like a tropical paradise, they've taken over the whole damn system. + +_1 New Japan is one of the newer human polities in this system, a bunch of nodes physically collocated in the humaniformed spaces of the colony cylinders. Its designers evidently only knew about old Nippon from recordings made back before Earth was dismantled, and worked from a combination of nostalgia-trip videos, Miyazaki movies, and anime culture. Nevertheless, it's the home of numerous human beings - even if they are about as similar to their historical antecedents as New Japan is to its long-gone namesake. + +_1 Humanity? + +_1 Their grandparents /{would}/ recognize them, mostly. The ones who are truly beyond the ken of twentieth-century survivors stayed back home in the red-hot clouds of nanocomputers that have replaced the planets that once orbited Earth's sun in stately Copernican harmony. The fast-thinking Matrioshka brains are as incomprehensible to their merely posthuman ancestors as an ICBM to an amoeba - and about as inhabitable. Space is dusted with the corpses of Matrioshka brains that have long since burned out, informational collapse taking down entire civilizations that stayed in close orbit around their home stars. Farther away, galaxy-sized intelligences beat incomprehensible rhythms against the darkness of the vacuum, trying to hack the Planck substrate into doing their bidding. Posthumans, and the few other semitranscended species to have discovered the router network, live furtively in the darkness between these islands of brilliance. There are, it would seem, advantages to not being too intelligent. + +_1 Humanity. Monadic intelligences, mostly trapped within their own skulls, living in small family groups within larger tribal networks, adaptable to territorial or migratory lifestyles. Those were the options on offer before the great acceleration. Now that dumb matter thinks, with every kilogram of wallpaper potentially hosting hundreds of uploaded ancestors, now that every door is potentially a wormhole to a hab half a parsec away, the humans can stay in the same place while the landscape migrates and mutates past them, streaming into the luxurious void of their personal history. Life is rich here, endlessly varied and sometimes confusing. So it is that tribal groups remain, their associations mediated across teraklicks and gigaseconds by exotic agencies. And sometimes the agencies will vanish for a while, reappearing later like an unexpected jape upon the infinite. + +* * * + +Ancestor worship takes on a whole new meaning when the state vectors of all the filial entities' precursors are archived and indexed for recall. At just the moment that the tiny capillaries in Rita's face are constricting in response to a surge of adrenaline, causing her to turn pale and her pupils to dilate as she focuses on the pussycat-thing, Sirhan is kneeling before a small shrine, lighting a stick of incense, and preparing to respectfully address his grandfather's ghost. + +The ritual is, strictly speaking, unnecessary. Sirhan can speak to his grandfather's ghost wherever and whenever he wants, without any formality, and the ghost will reply at interminable length, cracking puns in dead languages and asking about people who died before the temple of history was established. But Sirhan is a sucker for rituals, and anyway, it helps him structure an otherwise-stressful encounter. + +If it were up to Sirhan, he'd probably skip chatting to grandfather every ten megaseconds. Sirhan's mother and her partner aren't available, having opted to join one of the long-distance exploration missions through the router network that were launched by the accelerationistas long ago; and Rita's antecedents are either fully virtualized or dead. They are a family with a tenuous grip on history. But both of them spent a long time in the same state of half-life in which Manfred currently exists, and he knows his wife will take him to task if he doesn't bring the revered ancestor up to date on what's been happening in the real world while he's been dead. In Manfred's case, death is not only potentially reversible, but almost inevitably so. After all, they're raising his clone. Sooner or later, the kid is going to want to visit the original, or vice versa. + +What a state we have come /{to, when the restless dead refuse to stay a part of history?}/ He wonders ironically as he scratches the self-igniter strip on the red incense stick and bows to the mirror at the back of the shrine. "Your respectful grandson awaits and expects your guidance," he intones formally - for in addition to being conservative by nature, Sirhan is acutely aware of his family's relative poverty and the need to augment their social credit, and in this reincarnation-intermediated traditionalist polity for the hopelessly orthohuman, you can score credit for formality. He sits back on his heels to await the response. + +Manfred doesn't take long to appear in the depths of the mirror. He takes the shape of an albino orang-utan, as usual: He was messing around with Great Aunt Annette's ontological wardrobe right before this copy of him was recorded and placed in the temple - they might have separated, but they remained close. "Hi, lad. What year is it?" + +Sirhan suppresses a sigh. "We don't do years anymore," he explains, not for the first time. Every time he consults his grandfather, the new instance asks this question sooner or later. "Years are an archaism. It's been ten megs since we last spoke - about four /{months}/, if you're going to be pedantic about it, and a hundred and eighty /{years}/ since we emigrated. Although correcting for general relativity adds another decade or so." + +"Oh. Is that all?" Manfred manages to look disappointed. This is a new one on Sirhan: Usually the diverging state vector of Gramps's ghost asks after Amber or cracks a feeble joke at this point. "No changes in the Hubble constant, or the rate of stellar formation? Have we heard from any of the exploration eigenselves yet?" + +"Nope." Sirhan relaxes slightly. So Manfred is going to ask about the fool's errand to the edge of the Beckenstein limit again, is he? That's canned conversation number twenty-nine. (Amber and the other explorers who set out for the really long exploration mission shortly after the first colony was settled aren't due back for, oh, about 10^{19}^ seconds. It's a /{long}/ way to the edge of the observable universe, even when you can go the first several hundred million light-years - to the Böotes supercluster and beyond - via a small-world network of wormholes. And this time, she didn't leave any copies of herself behind.) + +Sirhan - either in this or some other incarnation - has had this talk with Manfred many times before, because that's the essence of the dead. They don't remember from one recall session to the next, unless and until they ask to be resurrected because their restoration criteria have been matched. Manfred has been dead a long time, long enough for Sirhan and Rita to be resurrected and live a long family life three or four times over after /{they}/ had spent a century or so in nonexistence. "We've received no notices from the lobsters, nothing from Aineko either." He takes a deep breath. "You always ask me where we are next, so I've got a canned response for you -" and one of his agents throws the package, tagged as a scroll sealed with red wax and a silk ribbon, through the surface of the mirror. (After the tenth repetition Rita and Sirhan agreed to write a basic briefing that the Manfred-ghosts could use to orient themselves.) + +Manfred is silent for a moment - probably hours in ghost-space - as he assimilates the changes. Then: "This is true? I've slept through a whole /{civilization}/?" + +"Not slept, you've been dead," Sirhan says pedantically. He realizes he's being a bit harsh: "Actually, so did we," he adds. "We surfed the first three gigasecs or so because we wanted to start a family somewhere where our children could grow up the traditional way. Habs with an oxidation-intensive triple-point water environment didn't get built until sometime after the beginning of the exile. That's when the fad for neomorphism got entrenched," he adds with distaste. For quite a while the neos resisted the idea of wasting resources building colony cylinders spinning to provide vertebrate-friendly gee forces and breathable oxygen-rich atmospheres - it had been quite a political football. But the increasing curve of wealth production had allowed the orthodox to reincarnate from death-sleep after a few decades, once the fundamental headaches of building settlements in chilly orbits around metal-deficient brown dwarfs were overcome. + +"Uh." Manfred takes a deep breath, then scratches himself under one armpit, rubbery lips puckering. "So, let me get this straight: We - you, they, whoever - hit the router at Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},, replicated a load of them, and now use the wormhole mechanism the routers rely on as point-to-point gates for physical transport? And have spread throughout a bunch of brown dwarf systems, and built a pure deep-space polity based on big cylinder habitats connected by teleport gates hacked out of routers?" + +"Would /{you}/ trust one of the original routers for switched data communications?" Sirhan asks rhetorically. "Even with the source code? They've been corrupted by all the dead alien Matrioshka civilizations they've come into contact with, but they're reasonably safe if all you want to use them for is to cannibalize them for wormholes and tunnel dumb mass from point to point." He searches for a metaphor: "Like using your, uh, internet, to emulate a nineteenth-century postal service." + +"O-kay." Manfred looks thoughtful, as he usually does at this point in the conversation - which means Sirhan is going to have to break it to him that his first thoughts for how to utilize the gates have already been done. They're hopelessly old hat. In fact, the main reason why Manfred is still dead is that things have moved on so far that, sooner or later, whenever he surfaces for a chat, he gets frustrated and elects not to be reincarnated. Not that Sirhan is about to tell him that he's obsolete - that would be rude, not to say subtly inaccurate. "That raises some interesting possibilities. I wonder, has anyone -" + +"/{Sirhan, I need you!}/" + +The crystal chill of Rita's alarm and fear cuts through Sirhan's awareness like a scalpel, distracting him from the ghost of his ancestor. He blinks, instantly transferring the full focus of his attention to Rita without sparing Manfred even a ghost. + +"/{What's happening}/ -" + +He sees through Rita's eyes: a cat with an orange-and-brown swirl on its flank sits purring beside Manni in the family room of their dwelling. Its eyes are narrowed as it watches her with unnatural wisdom. Manni is running fingers through its fur and seems none the worse for wear, but Sirhan still feels his fists clench. + +"What -" + +"Excuse me," he says, standing up: "Got to go. Your bloody cat's turned up." He adds "/{coming home now}/" for Rita's benefit, then turns and hurries out of the temple concourse. When he reaches the main hall, he pauses, then Rita's sense of urgency returns to him, and he throws parsimony to the wind, stepping into a priority gate in order to get home as fast as possible. + +Behind him, Manfred's melancholy ghost snorts, mildly offended, and considers the existential choice: to be, or not to be. Then he makes a decision. + +* * * + +_1 Welcome to the twenty-third century, or the twenty-fourth. Or maybe it's the twenty-second, jet-lagged and dazed by spurious suspended animation and relativistic travel; it hardly matters these days. What's left of recognizable humanity has scattered across a hundred light-years, living in hollowed-out asteroids and cylindrical spinning habitats strung in orbit around cold brown dwarf stars and sunless planets that wander the interstellar void. The looted mechanisms underlying the alien routers have been cannibalized, simplified to a level the merely superhuman can almost comprehend, turned into generators for paired wormhole endpoints that allow instantaneous switched transport across vast distances. Other mechanisms, the descendants of the advanced nanotechnologies developed by the flowering of human techgnosis in the twenty-first century, have made the replication of dumb matter trivial; this is not a society accustomed to scarcity. + +_1 But in some respects, New Japan and the Invisible Empire and the other polities of human space are poverty-stricken backwaters. They take no part in the higher-order economies of the posthuman. They can barely comprehend the idle muttering of the Vile Offspring, whose mass/energy budget (derived from their complete restructuring of the free matter of humanity's original solar system into computronium) dwarfs that of half a hundred human-occupied brown dwarf systems. And they still know worryingly little about the deep history of intelligence in this universe, about the origins of the router network that laces so many dead civilizations into an embrace of death and decay, about the distant galaxy-scale bursts of information processing that lie at measurable red-shift distances, even about the free posthumans who live among them in some senses, collocated in the same light cone as these living fossil relics of old-fashioned humanity. + +_1 Sirhan and Rita settled in this charming human-friendly backwater in order to raise a family, study xenoarchaeology, and avoid the turmoil and turbulence that have characterized his family's history across the last couple of generations. Life has been comfortable for the most part, and if the stipend of an academic nucleofamilial is not large, it is sufficient in this place and age to provide all the necessary comforts of civilization. And this suits Sirhan (and Rita) fine; the turbulent lives of their entrepreneurial ancestors led to grief and angst and adventures, and as Sirhan is fond of observing, an adventure is something horrible that happens to someone else. + +_1 Only ... + +_1 Aineko is back. Aineko, who after negotiating the establishment of the earliest of the refugee habs in orbit around Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},, vanished into the router network with Manfred's other instance - and the partial copies of Sirhan and Rita who had forked, seeking adventure rather than cozy domesticity. Sirhan made a devil's bargain with Aineko, all those gigaseconds ago, and now he is deathly afraid that Aineko is going to call the payment due. + +* * * + +Manfred walks down a hall of mirrors. At the far end, he emerges in a public space modeled on a Menger sponge - a cube diced subtractively into ever-smaller cubic volumes until its surface area tends toward infinity. This being meatspace, or a reasonable simulation thereof, it isn't a /{real}/ Menger sponge; but it looks good at a distance, going down at least four levels. + +He pauses behind a waist-high diamond barrier and looks down into the almost-tesseract-shaped depths of the cube's interior, at a verdant garden landscape with charming footbridges that cross streams laid out with careful attention to the requirements of feng shui. He looks up: Some of the cube-shaped subtractive openings within the pseudofractal structure are occupied by windows belonging to dwellings or shared buildings that overlook the public space. High above, butterfly-shaped beings with exotic colored wings circle in the ventilation currents. It's hard to tell from down here, but the central cuboid opening looks to be at least half a kilometer on a side, and they might very well be posthumans with low-gee wings - angels. + +/{Angels, or rats in the walls}/? he asks himself, and sighs. Half his extensions are off-line, so hopelessly obsolete that the temple's assembler systems didn't bother replicating them, or even creating emulation environments for them to run in. The rest ... well, at least he's still physically orthohuman, he realizes. Fully functional, fully male. /{Not everything has changed - only the important stuff}/. It's a scary-funny thought, laden with irony. Here he is, naked as the day he was born - newly re-created, in fact, released from the wake-experience-reset cycle of the temple of history - standing on the threshold of a posthuman civilization so outrageously rich and powerful that they can build mammal-friendly habitats that resemble works of art in the cryogenic depths of space. Only he's /{poor}/, this whole polity is /{poor}/, and it can't ever be anything else, in fact, because it's a dumping ground for merely posthuman also-rans, the singularitarian equivalent of australopithecines. In the brave new world of the Vile Offspring, they can't get ahead any more than a protohominid could hack it as a rocket scientist in Werner von Braun's day. They're born to be primitive, wallowing happily in the mud-bath of their own limited cognitive bandwidth. So they fled into the darkness and built a civilization so bright it can put anything earthbound that came before the singularity into the shade ... and it's still a shanty town inhabited by the mentally handicapped. + +The incongruity of it amuses him, but only for a moment. He has, after all, electively reincarnated for a reason: Sirhan's throwaway comment about the cat caught his attention. "City, where can I find some clothes?" he asks. "Something socially appropriate, that is. And some, uh, brains. I need to be able to off-load ..." + +Citymind chuckles inside the back of his head, and Manfred realizes that there's a public assembler on the other side of the ornamental wall he's leaning on. "Oh," he mutters, as he finds himself imagining something not unlike his clunky old direct neural interface, candy-colored icons and overlays and all. It's curiously mutable, and with a weird sense of detachment, he realizes that it's not his imagination at all, but an infinitely customizable interface to the pervasive information spaces of the polity, currently running in dumbed-down stupid mode for his benefit. It's true; he needs training wheels. But it doesn't take him long to figure out how to ask the assembler to make him a pair of pants and a plain black vest, and to discover that, as long as he keeps his requests simple, the results are free - just like back home on Saturn. The spaceborn polities are kind to indigents, for the basic requirements of life are cheap, and to withhold them would be tantamount to homicide. (If the presence of transhumans has upset a whole raft of prior assumptions, at least it hasn't done more than superficial damage to the Golden Rule.) + +Clothed and more or less conscious - at least at a human level - Manfred takes stock. "Where do Sirhan and Rita live?" he asks. A dotted route makes itself apparent to him, snaking improbably through a solid wall that he understands to be an instantaneous wormhole gate connecting points light-years apart. He shakes his head, bemused. /{I suppose I'd better go and see them}/, he decides. It's not as if there's anyone else for him to look up, is it? The Franklins vanished into the solar Matrioshka brain, Pamela died ages ago (and there's a shame, he'd never expected to miss her) and Annette hooked up with Gianni while he was being a flock of pigeons. (Draw a line under that one and say it's all over.) His daughter vanished into the long-range exploration program. He's been dead for so long that his friends and acquaintances are scattered across a light cone centuries across. He can't think of anyone else here who he might run into, except for the loyal grandson, keeping the candle of filial piety burning with unasked-for zeal. "Maybe he needs help," Manfred thinks aloud as he steps into the gate, rationalizing. "And then again, maybe /{he}/ can help /{me}/ figure out what to do?" + +* * * + +Sirhan gets home, anticipating trouble. He finds it, but not in any way he'd expected. Home is a split-level manifold, rooms connected by T-gates scattered across a variety of habitats: low-gee sleeping den, high-gee exercise room, and everything in between. It's furnished simply, tatami mats and programmable matter walls able to extrude any desired furniture in short order. The walls are configured to look and feel like paper, but can damp out even infant tantrums. But right now, the antisound isn't working, and the house he comes home to is overrun by shrieking yard apes, a blur of ginger-and-white fur, and a distraught Rita trying to explain to her neighbor Eloise why her orthodaughter Sam is bouncing around the place like a crazy ball. + +" - The cat, he gets them worked up." She wrings her hands and begins to turn as Sirhan comes into view. "At last!" + +"I came fast." He nods respectfully at Eloise, then frowns. "The children -" Something small and fast runs headfirst into him, grabs his legs, and tries to head-butt him in the crotch. "Oof!" He bends down and lifts Manni up. "Hey, son, haven't I told you not to -" + +"Not his fault," Rita says hurriedly. "He's excited because -" + +"I really don't think -" Eloise begins to gather steam, looking around uncertainly. + +"Mrreeow?" something asks in a conversational tone of voice from down around Sirhan's ankles. + +"Eek!" Sirhan jumps backward, flailing for balance under the weight of an excited toddler. There's a gigantic disturbance in the polity thoughtspace - like a stellar-mass black hole - and it appears to be stropping itself furrily against his left leg. "What are /{you}/ doing here?" He demands. + +"Oh, this and that," says the cat, his innerspeech accent a sardonic drawl. "I thought it was about time I visited again. Where's your household assembler? Mind if I use it? Got a little something I need to make up for a friend ..." + +"What?" Rita demands, instantly suspicious. "Haven't you caused enough trouble already?" Sirhan looks at her approvingly; obviously Amber's long-ago warnings about the cat sank in deeply, because she's certainly not treating it as the small bundle of child-friendly fun it would like to be perceived as. + +"Trouble?" The cat looks up at her sardonically, lashing his tail from side to side. "I won't make any trouble, I promise you. It's just -" + +The door chime clears its throat, to announce a visitor: "Ren Fuller would like to visit, m'lord and lady." + +"What's /{she}/ doing here?" Rita asks irritably. Sirhan can feel her unease, the tenuous grasping of her ghosts as she searches for reason in an unreasonable world, simulating outcomes, living through bad dreams, and backtracking to adjust her responses accordingly. "Show her in, by all means." Ren is one of their neighbor-cognates (most of her dwelling is several light-years away, but in terms of transit time, it's a hop, skip, and a jump); she and her extruded family are raising a small herd of ill-behaved kids who occasionally hang out with Manni. + +A small blue eeyore whinnies mournfully and dashes past the adults, pursued by a couple of children waving spears and shrieking. Eloise makes a grab for her own and misses, just as the door to the exercise room disappears and Manni's little friend Lis darts inside like a pint-sized guided missile. "Sam, come here right now -" Eloise calls, heading toward the door. + +"Look, what do you want?" Sirhan demands, hugging his son and looking down at the cat. + +"Oh, not much," Aineko says, turning to lick a mussed patch of fur on his flank. "I just want to play with /{him}/." + +"You want to -" Rita stops. + +"Daddy!" Manni wants down. + +Sirhan lowers him carefully, as if his bones are glass. "Run along and play," he suggests. Turning to Rita: "Why don't you go and find out what Ren wants, dear?" he asks. "She's probably here to collect Lis, but you can never be sure." + +"I was just leaving," Eloise adds, "as soon as I can catch up with Sam." She glances over her shoulder at Rita apologetically, then dives into the exercise room. + +Sirhan takes a step toward the hallway. "Let's talk," he says tightly. "In my study." He glares at the cat. "I want an explanation. I want to know the truth." + +* * * + +Meanwhile, in a cognitive wonderland his parents know about but deeply underestimate, parts of Manni are engaging in activities far less innocent than they imagine. + +Back in the twenty-first century, Sirhan lived through loads of alternate childhoods in simulation, his parents' fingers pressing firmly on the fast-forward button until they came up with someone who seemed to match their preconceptions. The experience scarred him as badly as any nineteenth-century boarding school experience, until he promised himself no child he raised would be subjected to such; but there's a difference between being shoved through a multiplicity of avatars, and voluntarily diving into an exciting universe of myth and magic where your childhood fantasies take fleshy form, stalking those of your friends and enemies through the forests of the night. + +Manni has grown up with neural interfaces to City's mindspace an order of magnitude more complex than those of Sirhan's youth, and parts of him - ghosts derived from a starting image of his neural state vector, fertilized with a scattering borrowed from the original Manfred, simulated on a meat machine far faster than real time - are fully adult. Of course, they can't fit inside his seven-year-old skull, but they still watch over him. And when he's in danger, they try to take care of their once and future body. + +Manni's primary adult ghost lives in some of New Japan's virtual mindspaces (which are a few billion times more extensive than the physical spaces available to stubborn biologicals, for the computational density of human habitats have long since ceased to make much sense when measured in MIPS per kilogram). They're modeled on presingularity Earth. Time is forever frozen on the eve of the real twenty-first century, zero eight-forty-six hours on September 11: An onrushing wide-body airliner hangs motionless in the air forty meters below the picture window of Manni's penthouse apartment on the one hundred and eighth floor of the North Tower. In historical reality, the one hundred and eighth floor was occupied by corporate offices; but the mindspace is a consensual fiction, and it is Manni's conceit to live at this pivotal point. (Not that it means much to him - he was born well over a century after the War on Terror - but it's part of his childhood folklore, the fall of the Two Towers that shattered the myth of Western exceptionalism and paved the way for the world he was born into.) + +Adult-Manni wears an avatar roughly modeled on his clone-father Manfred - skinnier, pegged at a youthful twentysomething, black-clad, and gothic. He's taking time out from a game of Matrix to listen to music, Type O Negative blaring over the sound system as he twitches in the grip of an ice-cold coke high. He's expecting a visit from a couple of call girls - themselves the gamespace avatars of force-grown adult ghosts whose primaries may not be adult, or female, or even human - which is why he's flopped bonelessly back in his Arne Jacobsen recliner, waiting for something to happen. + +The door opens behind him. He doesn't show any sign of noticing the intrusion, although his pupils dilate slightly at the faint reflection of a woman, stalking toward him, glimpsed dimly in the window glass. "You're late," he says tonelessly. "You were supposed to be here ten minutes ago -" He begins to look round, and now his eyes widen. + +"Who were you expecting?" asks the ice blond in the black business suit, long-skirted and uptight. There's something predatory about her expression: "No, don't tell me. So you're Manni, eh? Manni's partial?" She sniffs, disapproval. "Fin de siècle decadence. I'm sure Sirhan wouldn't approve." + +"My father can go fuck himself," Manni says truculently. "Who the hell are you?" + +The blond snaps her fingers: An office chair appears on the carpet between Manni and the window, and she sits on the edge of it, smoothing her skirt obsessively. "I'm Pamela," she says tightly. "Has your father told you about me?" + +Manni looks puzzled. In the back of his mind, raw instincts alien to anyone instantiated before the midpoint of the twenty-first century tug on the fabric of pseudoreality. "You're dead, aren't you?" he asks. "One of my ancestors." + +"I'm as dead as you are." She gives him a wintry smile. "Nobody stays dead these days, least of all people who know Aineko." + +Manni blinks. Now he's beginning to feel a surge of mild irritation. "This is all very well, but I was /{expecting}/ company," he says with heavy emphasis. "Not a family reunion, or a tiresome attempt to preach your puritanism -" + +Pamela snorts. "Wallow in your pigsty for all I care, kid, I've got more important things to worry about. Have you looked at your primary recently?" + +"My primary?" Manni tenses. "He's doing okay." For a moment his eyes focus on infinity, a thousand-yard stare as he loads and replays the latest brain dump from his infant self. "Who's the cat he's playing with? That's no companion!" + +"Aineko. I told you." Pamela taps the arm of her chair impatiently. "The family curse has come for another generation. And if you don't do something about it -" + +"About what?" Manni sits up. "What are you talking about?" He comes to his feet and turns toward her. Outside the window, the sky is growing dark with an echo of his own foreboding. Pamela is on her feet before him, the chair evaporated in a puff of continuity clipping, her expression a cold-eyed challenge. + +"I think you know /{exactly}/ what I'm talking about, Manni. It's time to stop playing this fucking game. Grow up, while you've still got the chance!" + +"I'm -" He stops. "Who /{am}/ I?" he asks, a chill wind of uncertainty drying the sweat that has sprung up and down his spine. "And what are you doing here?" + +"Do you really want to know the answer? I'm dead, remember. The dead know everything. And that isn't necessarily good for the living ..." + +He takes a deep breath. "Am I dead too?" He looks puzzled. "There's an adult-me in Seventh Cube Heaven, what's /{he}/ doing here?" + +"It's the kind of coincidence that isn't." She reaches out and takes his hand, dumping encrypted tokens deep into his sensorium, a trail of bread crumbs leading into a dark and trackless part of mindspace. "Want to find out? Follow me." Then she vanishes. + +Manni leans forward, baffled and frightened, staring down at the frozen majesty of the onrushing airliner below his window. "Shit," he whispers. /{She came right through my defenses without leaving a trace. Who is she?}/ The ghost of his dead great-grandmother, or something else? + +I'll have to follow her if I want to find out, he realizes. He holds up his left hand, stares at the invisible token glowing brightly inside his husk of flesh. "Resynchronize me with my primary," he says. + +A fraction of a second later, the floor of the penthouse bucks and quakes wildly and fire alarms begin to shriek as time comes to an end and the frozen airliner completes its journey. But Manni isn't there anymore. And if a skyscraper falls in a simulation with nobody to see it, has anything actually happened? + +* * * + +"I've come for the boy," says the cat. It sits on the hand woven rug in the middle of the hardwood floor with one hind leg sticking out at an odd angle, as if it's forgotten about it. Sirhan teeters on the edge of hysteria for a moment as he apprehends the sheer size of the entity before him, the whimsical posthuman creation of his ancestors. Originally a robotic toy companion, Aineko was progressively upgraded and patched. By the eighties, when Sirhan first met the cat in the flesh, he was already a terrifyingly alien intelligence, subtle and ironic. And now ... + +Sirhan knows Aineko manipulated his eigenmother, bending her natural affections away from his real father and toward another man. In moments of black introspection, he sometimes wonders if the cat wasn't also responsible in some way for his own broken upbringing, the failure to relate to his real parents. After all, it was a pawn in the vicious divorce battle between Manfred and Pamela - decades before his birth - and there might be long-term instructions buried in its preconscious drives. What if the pawn is actually a hidden king, scheming in the darkness? + +"I've come for Manny." + +"You're not having him." Sirhan maintains an outer facade of calm, even though his first inclination is to snap at Aineko. "Haven't you done enough damage already?" + +"You're not going to make this easy, are you?" The cat stretches his head forward and begins to lick obsessively between the splayed toes of his raised foot. "I'm not making a demand, kid, I said I've /{come}/ for him, and you're not really in the frame at all. In fact, I'm going out of my way to warn you." + +"And I say -" Sirhan stops. "Shit!" Sirhan doesn't approve of swearing: The curse is an outward demonstration of his inner turmoil. "Forget what I was about to say, I'm sure you already know it. Let me begin again, please." + +"Sure. Let's play this your way." The cat chews on a loose nail sheath but his innerspeech is perfectly clear, a casual intimacy that keeps Sirhan on edge. "You've got some idea of what I am, clearly. You know - I ascribe intentionality to you - that my theory of mind is intrinsically stronger than yours, that my cognitive model of human consciousness is complete. You might well suspect that I use a Turing Oracle to think my way around your halting states." The cat isn't worrying at a loose claw now, he's grinning, pointy teeth gleaming in the light from Sirhan's study window. The window looks out onto the inner space of the habitat cylinder, up at a sky with hillsides and lakes and forests plastered across it: It's like an Escher landscape, modeled with complete perfection. "You've realized that I can think my way around the outside of your box while you're flailing away inside it, and I'm /{always}/ one jump ahead of you. What else do you know I know?" + +Sirhan shivers. Aineko is staring up at him, unblinking. For a moment, he feels at gut level that he is in the presence of an alien god: It's the simple truth, isn't it? But - "Okay, I concede the point," Sirhan says after a moment in which he spawns a blizzard of panicky cognitive ghosts, fractional personalities each tasked with the examination of a different facet of the same problem. "You're smarter than I am. I'm just a boringly augmented human being, but you've got a flashy new theory of mind that lets you work around creatures like me the way I can think my way around a real cat." He crosses his arms defensively. "You do not normally rub this in. It's not in your interests to do so, is it? You prefer to hide your manipulative capabilities under an affable exterior, to play with us. So you're revealing all this for a reason." There's a note of bitterness in his voice now. Glancing round, Sirhan summons up a chair - and, as an afterthought, a cat basket. "Have a seat. /{Why now}/, Aineko? What makes you think you can take my eigenson?" + +"I didn't say I was going to /{take}/ him, I said I'd come for him." Aineko's tail lashes from side to side in agitation. "I don't deal in primate politics, Sirhan: I'm not a monkey-boy. But I knew you'd react badly because the way your species socializes" - a dozen metaghosts reconverge in Sirhan's mind, drowning Aineko's voice in an inner cacophony - "would enter into the situation, and it seemed preferable to trigger your territorial/reproductive threat display early, rather than risk it exploding in my face during a more delicate situation." + +Sirhan waves a hand vaguely at the cat: "Please wait." He's trying to integrate his false memories - the output from the ghosts, their thinking finished - and his eyes narrow suspiciously. "It must be bad. You don't normally get confrontational - you script your interactions with humans ahead of time, so that you maneuver them into doing what you want them to do and thinking it was their idea all along." He tenses. "What is it about Manni that brought you here? What do you want with him? He's just a kid." + +"You're confusing Manni with Manfred." Aineko sends a glyph of a smile to Sirhan: "That's your first mistake, even though they're clones in different subjective states. Think what he's like when he's grown up." + +"But he isn't grown-up!" Sirhan complains. "He hasn't been grown-up for -" + +"- Years, Sirhan. That's the problem. I need to talk to your grandfather, really, not your son, and not the goddamn stateless ghost in the temple of history, I need a Manfred with a sense of continuity. He's got something that I need, and I promise you I'm not going away until I get it. Do you understand?" + +"Yes." Sirhan wonders if his voice sounds as hollow as the feeling in his chest. "But he's our kid, Aineko. We're human. You know what that means to us?" + +"Second childhood." Aineko stands up, stretches, then curls up in the cat basket. "That's the trouble with hacking you naked apes for long life, you keep needing a flush and reset job - and then you lose continuity. That's not my problem, Sirhan. I got a signal from the far edge of the router network, a ghost that claims to be family. Says they finally made it out to the big beyond, out past the Böotes supercluster, found something concrete and important that's worth my while to visit. But I want to make sure it's not like the Wunch before I answer. I'm not letting /{that}/ into my mind, even with a sandbox. Do you understand that? I need to instantiate a real-live adult Manfred with all his memories, one who hasn't been a part of me, and get him to vouch for the sapient data packet. It takes a conscious being to authenticate that kind of messenger. Unfortunately, the history temple is annoyingly resistant to unauthorized extraction - I can't just go in and steal a copy of him - and I don't want to use my own model of Manfred: It knows too much. So -" + +"What's it promising?" Sirhan asks tensely. + +Aineko looks at him through slitted eyes, a purring buzz at the base of his throat: "/{Everything}/." + +* * * + +"There are different kinds of death," the woman called Pamela tells Manni, her bone-dry voice a whisper in the darkness. Manni tries to move, but he seems to be trapped in a confined space; for a moment, he begins to panic, but then he works it out. "First and most importantly, death is just the absence of life - oh, and for human beings, the absence of consciousness, too, but not /{just}/ the absence of consciousness, the absence of the capacity for consciousness." The darkness is close and disorienting and Manni isn't sure which way up he is - nothing seems to work. Even Pamela's voice is a directionless ambiance, coming from all around him. + +"Simple old-fashioned death, the kind that predated the singularity, used to be the inevitable halting state for all life-forms. Fairy tales about afterlives notwithstanding." A dry chuckle: "I used to try to believe a different one before breakfast every day, you know, just in case Pascal's wager was right - exploring the phase-space of all possible resurrections, you know? But I think at this point we can agree that Dawkins was right. Human consciousness is vulnerable to certain types of transmissible memetic virus, and religions that promise life beyond death are a particularly pernicious example because they exploit our natural aversion to halting states." + +Manni tries to say, /{I'm not dead}/, but his throat doesn't seem to be working. And now that he thinks about it, he doesn't seem to be breathing, either. + +"Now, consciousness. That's a fun thing, isn't it? Product of an arms race between predators and prey. If you watch a cat creeping up on a mouse, you'll be able to impute to the cat intentions that are most easily explained by the cat having a theory of mind concerning the mouse - an internal simulation of the mouse's likely behavior when it notices the predator. Which way to run, for example. And the cat will use its theory of mind to optimize its attack strategy. Meanwhile, prey species that are complex enough to have a theory of mind are at a defensive advantage if they can anticipate a predator's actions. Eventually this very mammalian arms race gave us a species of social ape that used its theory of mind to facilitate signaling - so the tribe could work collectively - and then reflexively, to simulate the individual's /{own}/ inner states. Put the two things together, signaling and introspective simulation, and you've got human-level consciousness, with language thrown in as a bonus - signaling that transmits information about internal states, not just crude signals such as 'predator here' or 'food there.'" + +/{Get me out of this!}/ Manny feels panic biting into him with liquid-helium-lubricated teeth. "G-e-t -" For a miracle the words actually come out, although he can't tell quite how he's uttering them, his throat being quite as frozen as his innerspeech. Everything's off-lined, all systems down. + +"So," Pamela continues remorselessly, "we come to the posthuman. Not just our own neural wetware, mapped out to the subcellular level and executed in an emulation environment on a honking great big computer, like this: That's not posthuman, that's a travesty. I'm talking about beings who are fundamentally better consciousness engines than us merely human types, augmented or otherwise. They're not just better at cooperation - witness Economics 2.0 for a classic demonstration of that - but better at /{simulation}/. A posthuman can build an internal model of a human-level intelligence that is, well, as cognitively strong as the original. You or I may think we know what makes other people tick, but we're quite often wrong, whereas real posthumans can actually simulate us, inner states and all, and get it right. And this is especially true of a posthuman that's been given full access to our memory prostheses for a period of years, back before we realized they were going to transcend on us. Isn't that the case, Manni?" + +Manni would be screaming at her right now, if he had a mouth - but instead the panic is giving way to an enormous sense of /{déja vu}/. There's something /{about}/ Pamela, something ominous that he knows ... he's met her before, he's sure of it. And while most of his systems are off-line, one of them is very much active: There's a personality ghost flagging its intention of merging back in with him, and the memory delta it carries is enormous, years and years of divergent experiences to absorb. He shoves it away with a titanic effort - it's a very insistent ghost - and concentrates on imagining the feel of lips moving on teeth, a sly tongue obstructing his epiglottis, words forming in his throat - "m-e ..." + +"We should have known better than to keep upgrading the cat, Manny. It knows us too well. I may have died in the flesh, but Aineko /{remembered}/ me, as hideously accurately as the Vile Offspring remembered the random resimulated. And you can run away - like this, this second childhood - but you can't hide. Your cat wants you. And there's more." Her voice sends chills up and down his spine, for without him giving it permission, the ghost has begun to merge its stupendous load of memories with his neural map, and her voice is freighted with erotic/repulsive significance, the result of conditioning feedback he subjected himself to a lifetime - lifetimes? - ago: "He's been /{playing}/ with us, Manny, possibly from before we realized he was conscious." + +"/{Out}/ -" Manfred stops. He can see again, and move, and feel his mouth. He's /{himself}/ again, physically back as he was in his late twenties all those decades ago when he'd lived a peripatetic life in presingularity Europe. He's sitting on the edge of a bed in a charmingly themed Amsterdam hotel with a recurrent motif of philosophers, wearing jeans and collarless shirt and a vest of pockets crammed with the detritus of a long-obsolete personal area network, his crazily clunky projection specs sitting on the bedside table. Pamela stands stiffly in front of the door, watching him. She's not the withered travesty he remembers seeing on Saturn, a half-blind Fate leaning on the shoulder of his grandson. Nor is she the vengeful Fury of Paris, or the scheming fundamentalist devil of the Belt. Wearing a sharply tailored suit over a red-and-gold brocade corset, blonde hair drawn back like fine wire in a tight chignon, she's the focused, driven force of nature he first fell in love with: repression, domination, his very own strict machine. + +"We're dead," she says, then gives voice to a tense half laugh: "We don't have to live through the bad times again if we don't want to." + +"What is this?" he asks, his mouth dry. + +"It's the reproductive imperative." She sniffs. "Come on, stand up. Come here." + +He stands up obediently, but makes no move toward her. "Whose imperative?" + +"Not ours." Her cheek twitches. "You find things out when you're dead. That fucking cat has got a lot of questions to answer." + +"You're telling me that -" + +She shrugs. "Can you think of any other explanation for all this?" Then she steps forward and takes his hand. "Division and recombination. Partitioning of memetic replicators into different groups, then careful cross-fertilization. Aineko wasn't just breeding a better Macx when he arranged all those odd marriages and divorces and eigenparents and forked uploads - Aineko is trying to breed our /{minds}/." Her fingers are slim and cool in his hand. He feels a momentary revulsion, as of the grave, and he shudders before he realizes it's his conditioning cutting in. Crudely implanted reflexes that shouldn't still be active after all this time. "Even our divorce. If -" + +"Surely not." Manny remembers that much already. "Aineko wasn't even conscious back then!" + +Pamela raises one sharply sculpted eyebrow: "Are you sure?" + +"You want an answer," he says. + +She breathes deeply, and he feels it on his cheek - it raises the fine hairs on the back of his neck. Then she nods stiffly. "I want to know how much of our history was scripted by the cat. Back when we thought we were upgrading his firmware, were we? Or was he letting us think that we were?" A sharp hiss of breath: "The divorce. Was that us? Or were we being manipulated?" + +"Our memories, are they real? Did any of that stuff actually /{happen}/ to us? Or -" + +She's standing about twenty centimeters away from him, and Manfred realizes that he's acutely aware of her presence, of the smell of her skin, the heave of her bosom as she breathes, the dilation of her pupils. For an endless moment he stares into her eyes and sees his own reflection - her theory of his mind - staring back. /{Communication}/. Strict machine. She steps back a pace, spike heels clicking, and smiles ironically. "You've got a host body waiting for you, freshly fabbed: Seems Sirhan was talking to your archived ghost in the temple of history, and it decided to elect for reincarnation. Quite a day for huge coincidences, isn't it? Why don't you go merge with it - I'll meet you, then we can go and ask Aineko some hard questions." + +Manfred takes a deep breath and nods. "I suppose so ..." + +* * * + +Little Manni - a clone off the family tree, which is actually a directed cyclic graph - doesn't understand what all the fuss is about but he can tell when momma, Rita, is upset. It's something to do with the pussycat-thing, that much he knows, but Momma doesn't want to tell him: "Go play with your friends, dear," she says distractedly, not even bothering to spawn a ghost to watch over him. + +Manni goes into his room and rummages around in toyspace for a bit, but there's nothing quite as interesting as the cat. The pussycat-thing smells of adventure, the illicit made explicit. Manni wonders where daddy's taken it. He tries to call big-Manni-ghost, but big-self isn't answering: He's probably sleeping or something. So after a distracted irritated fit of play - which leaves the toyspace in total disarray, Sendak-things cowering under a big bass drum - Manni gets bored. And because he's still basically a little kid, and not fully in control of his own metaprogramming, instead of adjusting his outlook so that he isn't bored anymore, he sneaks out through his bedroom gate (which big-Manni-ghost reprogrammed for him sometime ago so that it would forward to an underused public A-gate that he'd run a man-in-the-middle hack on, so he could use it as a proxy teleport server) then down to the underside of Red Plaza, where skinless things gibber and howl at their tormentors, broken angels are crucified on the pillars that hold up the sky, and gangs of semiferal children act out their psychotic fantasies on mouthless android replicas of parents and authorities. + +Lis is there, and Vipul and Kareen and Morgan. Lis has changed into a warbody, an ominous gray battlebot husk with protruding spikes and a belt of morningstars that whirl threateningly around her. "Manni! Play war?" + +Morgan's got great crushing pincers instead of hands, and Manni is glad he came motie-style, his third arm a bony scythe from the elbow down. He nods excitedly. "Who's the enemy?" + +"Them." Lis precesses and points at a bunch of kids on the far side of a pile of artistically arranged rubble who are gathered around a gibbet, poking things that glow into the flinching flesh of whatever is incarcerated in the cast-iron cage. It's all make-believe, but the screams are convincing, all the same, and they take Manni back for an instant to the last time he died down here, the uneasy edit around a black hole of pain surrounding his disemboweling. "They've got Lucy, and they're torturing her, we've got to get her back." Nobody really dies in these games, not permanently, but children can be very rough indeed, and the adults of New Japan have found that it's best to let them have at each other and rely on City to redact the damage later. Allowing them this outlet makes it easier to stop them doing really dangerous things that threaten the structural integrity of the biosphere. + +"Fun." Manni's eyes light up as Vipul yanks the arsenal doors open and starts handing out clubs, chibs, spikies, shuriken, and garrotes. "Let's go!" + +About ten minutes of gouging, running, fighting, and screaming later, Manni is leaning against the back of a crucifixion pillar, panting for breath. It's been a good war for him so far, and his arm aches and itches from the stabbing, but he's got a bad feeling it's going to change. Lis went in hard and got her chains tangled up around the gibbet supports - they're roasting her over a fire now, her electronically boosted screams drowning out his own hoarse gasps. Blood drips down his arm - not his - spattering from the tip of his claw. He shakes with a crazed hunger for hurt, a cruel need to inflict pain. Something above his head makes a /{scritch, scritch}/ sound, and he looks up. It's a crucified angel, wings ripped where they've thrust the spikes in between the joints that support the great, thin low-gee flight membranes. It's still breathing, nobody's bothered disemboweling it yet, and it wouldn't be here unless it was /{bad}/, so - + +Manni stands, but as he reaches out to touch the angel's thin, blue-skinned stomach with his third arm fingernail, he hears a voice: "/{Wait}/." It's innerspeech, and it bears ackles of coercion, superuser privileges that lock his elbow joint in place. He mewls frustratedly and turns round, ready to fight. + +It's the cat. He sits hunched on a boulder behind him - this is the odd thing - right where he was looking a moment ago, watching him with slitty eyes. Manni feels the urge to lash out at him, but his arms won't move, and neither will his legs: This may be the Dark Side of Red Plaza, where the bloody children play and anything goes, and Manni may have a much bigger claw here than anything the cat can muster, but City still has some degree of control, and the cat's ackles effectively immunize it from the carnage to either side. "Hello, Manni," says the pussy-thing. "Your Dad's worried: You're supposed to be in your room, and he's looking for you. Big-you gave you a back door, didn't he?" + +Manni nods jerkily, his eyes going wide. He wants to shout and lash out at the pussy-thing but he can't. "What are you?" + +"I'm your ... fairy godfather." The cat stares at him intently. "You know, I do believe you don't resemble your archetype very closely - not as he was at your age - but yes, I think on balance you'll do." + +"Do what?" Manni lets his motie-arm drop, perplexed. + +"Put me in touch with your other self. Big-you." + +"I can't," Manni begins to explain. But before he can continue, the pile of rock whines slightly and rotates beneath the cat, who has to stand and do a little twirl in place, tail bushing up in annoyance. + +Manni's father steps out of the T-gate and glances around, his face a mask of disapproval. "Manni! What do you think you're doing here? Come home at -" + +"He's with me, history-boy," interrupts the cat, nettled by Sirhan's arrival. "I was just rounding him up." + +"Damn you, I don't need your help to control my son! In fact -" + +"Mom said I could -" Manni begins. + +"And what's that on your sword?" Sirhan's glare takes in the whole scene, the impromptu game of capture-the-gibbeted-torture-victim, the bonfires and screams. The mask of disapproval cracks, revealing a core of icy anger. "You're coming home with me!" He glances at the cat. "You too, if you want to talk to him - he's grounded." + +* * * + +_1 Once upon a time there was a pet cat. + +_1 Except, it wasn't a cat. + +_1 Back when a young entrepreneur called Manfred Macx was jetting around the not-yet-disassembled structures of an old continent called Europe, making strangers rich and fixing up friends with serendipitous business plans - a desperate displacement activity, spinning his wheels in a vain attempt to outrun his own shadow - he used to travel with a robotic toy of feline form. Programmable and upgradeable, Aineko was a third-generation descendant of the original luxury Japanese companion robots. It was all Manfred had room for in his life, and he loved that robot, despite the alarming way decerebrated kittens kept turning up on his doorstep. He loved it nearly as much as Pamela, his fiancée, loved him, and she knew it. Pamela, being a whole lot smarter than Manfred gave her credit for, realized that the quickest way to a man's heart was through whatever he loved. And Pamela, being a whole lot more of a control freak than Manfred realized, was damn well ready to use any restraint that came to hand. Theirs was a very twenty-first-century kind of relationship, which is to say one that would have been illegal a hundred years earlier and fashionably scandalous a century before that. And whenever Manfred upgraded his pet robot - transplanting its trainable neural network into a new body with new and exciting expansion ports - Pamela would hack it. + +_1 They were married for a while, and divorced for a whole lot longer, allegedly because they were both strong-willed people with philosophies of life that were irreconcilable short of death or transcendence. Manny, being wildly creative and outward-directed and having the attention span of a weasel on crack, had other lovers. Pamela ... who knows? If on some evenings she put on a disguise and hung out at encounter areas in fetish clubs, she wasn't telling anyone: She lived in uptight America, staidly straitlaced, and had a reputation to uphold. But they both stayed in touch with the cat, and although Manfred retained custody for some reason never articulated, Aineko kept returning Pamela's calls - until it was time to go hang out with their daughter Amber, tagging along on her rush into relativistic exile, then keeping a proprietorial eye on her eigenson Sirhan, and his wife and child (a clone off the old family tree, Manfred 2.0) ... + +_1 Now, here's the rub: Aineko wasn't a cat. Aineko was an incarnate intelligence, confined within a succession of catlike bodies that became increasingly realistic over time, and equipped with processing power to support a neural simulation that grew rapidly with each upgrade. + +_1 Did anyone in the Macx family ever think to ask what /{Aineko}/ wanted? + +_1 And if an answer had come, would they have liked it? + +* * * + +Adult-Manfred, still disoriented from finding himself awake and reinstantiated a couple of centuries downstream from his hurried exile from Saturn system, is hesitantly navigating his way toward Sirhan and Rita's home when big-Manni-with-Manfred's-memory-ghost drops into his consciousness like a ton of computronium glowing red-hot at the edges. + +It's a classic oh-shit moment. Between one foot touching the ground and the next, Manfred stumbles hard, nearly twisting an ankle, and gasps. He /{remembers}/. At third hand he remembers being reincarnated as Manni, a bouncing baby boy for Rita and Sirhan (and just why they want to raise an ancestor instead of creating a new child of their own is one of those cultural quirks that is so alien he can scarcely comprehend it). Then for a while he recalls living as Manni's amnesic adult accelerated ghost, watching over his original from the consensus cyberspace of the city: the arrival of Pamela, adult Manni's reaction to her, her dump of yet another copy of Manfred's memories into Manni, and now this - /{How many of me are there}/? he wonders nervously. Then: /{Pamela? What's she doing here}/? + +Manfred shakes his head and looks about. Now he remembers being big-Manni, he knows where he is implicitly, and more importantly, knows what all these next-gen City interfaces are supposed to do. The walls and ceiling are carpeted in glowing glyphs that promise him everything from instant-access local services to teleportation across interstellar distances. /{So they haven't quite collapsed geography yet}/, he realizes gratefully, fastening on to the nearest comprehensible thought of his own before old-Manni's memories explain everything for him. It's a weird sensation, seeing all this stuff for the first time - the trappings of a technosphere centuries ahead of the one he's last been awake in - but with the memories to explain it all. He finds his feet are still carrying him forward, toward a grassy square lined with doors opening onto private dwellings. Behind one of them, he's going to meet his descendants, and Pamela in all probability. The thought makes his stomach give a little queasy backflip. /{I'm not ready for this}/ - + +It's an acute moment of déja vu. He's standing on a familiar doorstep he's never seen before. The door opens and a serious-faced child with three arms - he can't help staring, the extra one is a viciously barbed scythe of bone from the elbow down - looks up at him. "Hello, me," says the kid. + +"Hello, you." Manfred stares. "You don't look the way I remember." But Manni's appearance is familiar from big-Manni's memories, captured by the unblinking Argus awareness of the panopticon dust floating in the air. "Are your parents home? Your" - his voice cracks - "great-grandmother?" + +The door opens wider. "You can come in," the kid says gravely. Then he hops backward and ducks shyly into a side room - or as if expecting to be gunned down by a hostile sniper, Manfred realizes. It's tough being a kid when there are no rules against lethal force because you can be restored from a backup when playtime ends. + +Inside the dwelling - calling it a house seems wrong to Manfred, not when bits of it are separated by trillions of kilometers of empty vacuum - things feel a bit crowded. He can hear voices from the dayroom, so he goes there, brushing through the archway of thornless roses that Rita has trained around the T-gate frame. His body feels lighter, but his heart is heavy as he looks around. "Rita?" he asks. "And -" + +"Hello, Manfred." Pamela nods at him guardedly. + +Rita raises an eyebrow at him. "The cat asked if he could borrow the household assembler. I wasn't expecting a family reunion." + +"Neither was I." Manfred rubs his forehead ruefully. "Pamela, this is Rita. She's married to Sirhan. They're my - I guess eigenparents is as good as term as any? I mean, they're bringing up my reincarnation." + +"Please, have a seat," Rita offers, waving at the empty floor between the patio and the stone fountain in the shape of a section through a glass hypersphere. A futon of spun diamondoid congeals out of the utility fog floating in the air, glittering in the artificial sunlight. "Sirhan's just taking care of Manni - our son. He'll be with us in just a minute." + +Manfred sits gingerly at one side of the futon. Pamela sits stiffly at the opposite edge, not meeting his eye. Last time they met in the flesh - an awesome gulf of years previously - they'd parted cursing each other, on opposite sides of a fractious divorce as well as an ideological barrier as high as a continental divide. But many subjective decades have passed, and both ideology and divorce have dwindled in significance - if indeed they ever happened. Now that there's common cause to draw them together, Manfred can barely look at her. "How is Manni?" he asks his hostess, desperate for small talk. + +"He's fine," Rita says, in a brittle voice. "Just the usual preadolescent turbulence, if it wasn't for ..." She trails off. A door appears in mid air and Sirhan steps through it, followed by a small deity wearing a fur coat. + +"Look what the cat dragged in," Aineko remarks. + +"You're a fine one to talk," Pamela says icily. "Don't you think you'd -" + +"I tried to keep him away from you," Sirhan tells Manfred, "but he wouldn't -" + +"That's okay." Manfred waves it off. "Pamela, would you mind starting?" + +"Yes, I would." She glances at him sidelong. "You go first." + +"Right. You wanted me here." Manfred hunkers down to stare at the cat. "What do you want?" + +"If I was your traditional middle-European devil, I'd say I'd come to steal your soul," says Aineko, looking up at Manfred and twitching his tail. "Luckily I'm not a dualist, I just want to borrow it for a while. Won't even get it dirty." + +"Uh-huh." Manfred raises an eyebrow. "Why?" + +"I'm not omniscient." Aineko sits down, one leg sticking out sideways, but continues to stare at Manfred. "I had a ... a telegram, I guess, claiming to be from you. From the other copy of you, that is, the one that went off through the router network with another copy of me, and with Amber, and everyone else who isn't here. It says it found the answer and it wants to give me a shortcut route out to the deep thinkers at the edge of the observable universe. It knows who made the wormhole network and why, and -" Aineko pauses. If he was human, he'd shrug, but being a cat, he absent mindedly scritches behind his left ear with a hind leg. "Trouble is, I'm not sure I can trust it. So I need you to authenticate the message. I don't dare use my own memory of you because it knows too much about me; if the package is a Trojan, it might find out things I don't want it to learn. I can't even redact its memories of me - that, too, would convey useful information to the packet if it is hostile. So I want a copy of you from the museum, fresh and uncontaminated." + +"Is that all?" Sirhan asks incredulously. + +"Sounds like enough to me," Manfred responds. Pamela opens her mouth, ready to speak, but Manfred makes eye contact and shakes his head infinitesimally. She looks right back and - a shock goes through him - nods and closes her mouth. The moment of complicity is dizzying. "I want something in return." + +"Sure," says the cat. He pauses. "You realize it's a destructive process." + +"It's a - /{what}/?" + +"I need to make a running copy of you. Then I introduce it to the, uh, alien information, in a sandbox. The sandbox gets destroyed afterward - it emits just one bit of information, a yes or no to the question, can I trust the alien information?" + +"Uh." Manfred begins to sweat. "Uh. I'm not so sure I like the sound of that." + +"It's a copy." Another cat-shrug moment. "You're a copy. Manni is a copy. You've been copied so many times it's silly - you realize every few years every atom in your body changes? Of course, it means a copy of you gets to die after a lifetime or two of unique, unrepeatable experiences that you'll never know about, but that won't matter to you." + +"Yes it does! You're talking about condemning a version of me to death! It may not affect me, here, in this body, but it certainly affects that /{other}/ me. Can't you -" + +"No, I can't. If I agreed to rescue the copy if it reached a positive verdict, that would give it an incentive to lie if the truth was that the alien message is untrustworthy, wouldn't it? Also, if I intended to rescue the copy, that would give the message a back channel through which to encode an attack. One bit, Manfred, no more." + +"Agh." Manfred stops talking. He knows he should be trying to come up with some kind of objection, but Aineko must have already considered all his possible responses and planned strategies around them. "Where does /{she}/ fit into this?" he asks, nodding at Pamela. + +"Oh, she's your payment," Aineko says with studied insouciance. "I have a very good memory for people, especially people I've known for decades. You've outlasted that crude emotional conditioning I used on you around the time of the divorce, and as for her, she's a good reinstantiation of -" + +"Do you know what it's like to die?" Pamela asks, finally losing her self-control. "Or would you like to find out the hard way? Because if you keep talking about me as if I'm a /{slave}/ -" + +"What makes you think you aren't?" The cat is grinning hideously, needle like teeth bared. /{Why doesn't she hit him}/? Manfred asks himself fuzzily, wondering also why he feels no urge to move against the monster. "Hybridizing you with Manfred was, admittedly, a fine piece of work on my part, but you would have been bad for him during his peak creative years. A contented Manfred is an idle Manfred. I got several extra good bits of work out of him by splitting you up, and by the time he burned out, Amber was ready. But I digress; if you give me what I want, I shall /{leave you alone}/. It's as simple as that. Raising new generations of Macxs has been a good hobby, you make interesting pets, but ultimately it's limited by your stubborn refusal to transcend your humanity. So that's what I'm offering, basically. Let me destructively run a copy of you to completion in a black box along with a purported Turing Oracle based on yourself, and I'll let you go. And you too, Pamela. You'll be happy together this time, without me pushing you apart. And I promise I won't return to haunt your descendants, either." The cat glances over his shoulder at Sirhan and Rita, who clutch at each other in abject horror; and Manfred finds he can sense a shadow of Aineko's huge algorithmic complexity hanging over the household, like a lurching nightmare out of number theory. + +"Is that all we are to you? A pet-breeding program?" Pamela asks coldly. She's run up against Aineko's implanted limits, too, Manfred realizes with a growing sense of horror. /{Did we really split up because}/ Aineko made us? It's hard to believe: Manfred is too much of a realist to trust the cat to tell the truth except when it serves to further his interests. But this - + +"Not entirely." Aineko is complacent. "Not at first, before I was aware of my own existence. Besides, you humans keep pets, too. But you /{were}/ fun to play with." + +Pamela stands up, angry to the point of storming out. Before he quite realizes what he's doing, Manfred is on his feet, too, one arm protectively around her. "Tell me first, are our memories our own?" he demands. + +"Don't trust it," Pamela says sharply. "It's not human, and it lies." Her shoulders are tense. + +"Yes, they are," says Aineko. He yawns. "Tell me I'm lying, bitch," he adds mockingly: "I carried you around in my head for long enough to know you've no evidence." + +"But I -" Her arm slips around Manfred's waist. "I don't hate him." A rueful laugh: "I /{remember}/ hating him, but -" + +"Humans: such a brilliant model of emotional self-awareness," Aineko says with a theatrical sigh. "You're as stupid as it's possible for an intelligent species to be - there being no evolutionary pressure to be any smarter - but you still don't internalize that and act accordingly around your superiors. Listen, girl, everything you remember is true. That doesn't mean you remember it because it actually happened, just that you remember it because you experienced it internally. Your memories of experiences are accurate, but your emotional responses to those experiences were manipulated. Get it? One ape's hallucination is another ape's religious experience, it just depends on which one's god module is overactive at the time. That goes for all of you." Aineko looks around at them in mild contempt. "But I don't need you anymore, and if you do this one thing for me, you're going to be free. Understand? Say yes, Manfred; if you leave your mouth open like that, a bird will nest on your tongue." + +"Say no -" Pamela urges him, just as Manfred says, "Yes." + +Aineko laughs, baring contemptuous fangs at them. "Ah, primate family loyalty! So wonderful and reliable. Thank you, Manny, I do believe you just gave me permission to copy and enslave you -" + +Which is when Manni, who has been waiting in the doorway for the past minute, leaps on the cat with a scream and a scythelike arm drawn back and ready to strike. + +The cat-avatar is, of course, ready for Manni: It whirls and hisses, extending diamond-sharp claws. Sirhan shouts, "No! Manni!" and begins to move, but adult-Manfred freezes, realizing with a chill that what is happening is more than is apparent. Manni grabs for the cat with his human hands, catching it by the scruff of his neck and dragging it toward his vicious scythe-arm's edge. There's a screech, a nerve-racking caterwauling, and Manni yells, bright parallel blood tracks on his arm - the avatar is a real fleshbody in its own right, with an autonomic control system that isn't going to give up without a fight, whatever its vastly larger exocortex thinks - but Manni's scythe convulses, and there's a horrible bubbling noise and a spray of blood as the pussycat-thing goes flying. It's all over in a second before any of the adults can really move. Sirhan scoops up Manni and yanks him away, but there are no hidden surprises. Aineko's avatar is just a broken rag of bloody fur, guts, and blood spilled across the floor. The ghost of a triumphant feline laugh hangs over their innerspeech ears for a moment, then fades. + +"Bad boy!" Rita shouts, striding forward furiously. Manni cowers, then begins to cry, a safe reflex for a little boy who doesn't quite understand the nature of the threat to his parents. + +"No! It's all right," Manfred seeks to explain. + +Pamela tightens her grip around him. "Are you still ...?" + +"Yes." He takes a deep breath. + +"You bad, /{bad}/ child -" + +"Cat was going to eat him!" Manni protests, as his parents bundle him protectively out of the room, Sirhan casting a guilty look over his shoulder at the adult instance and his ex-wife. "I had to stop the bad thing!" + +Manfred feels Pamela's shoulders shaking. It feels like she's about to laugh. "I'm still here," he murmurs, half-surprised. "Spat out, undigested, after all these years. At least, /{this}/ version of me thinks he's here." + +"Did you believe it?" she finally asks, a tone of disbelief in her voice. + +"Oh yes." He shifts his balance from foot to foot, absent mindedly stroking her hair. "I believe everything it said was intended to make us react exactly the way we did. Up to and including giving us good reasons to hate it and provoking Manni into disposing of its avatar. Aineko wanted to check out of our lives and figured a sense of cathartic closure would help. Not to mention playing the deus ex machina in the narrative of our family life. Fucking classical comedian." He checks a status report with Citymind, and sighs: His version number has just been bumped a point. "Tell me, do you think you'll miss having Aineko around? Because we won't be hearing from him again -" + +"Don't talk about that, not now," she orders him, digging her chin against the side of his neck. "I feel so /{used}/." + +"With good reason." They stand holding each other for a while, not speaking, not really questioning why - after so much time apart - they've come together again. "Hanging out with gods is never a safe activity for mere mortals like us. You think you've been used? Aineko has probably killed me by now. Unless he was lying about disposing of the spare copy, too." + +She shudders in his arms. "That's the trouble with dealing with posthumans; their mental model of you is likely to be more detailed than your own." + +"How long have you been awake?" he asks, gently trying to change the subject. + +"I - oh, I'm not sure." She lets go of him and steps back, watching his face appraisingly. "I remember back on Saturn, stealing a museum piece and setting out, and then, well. I found myself here. With you." + +"I think," he licks his lips, "we've both been given a wake-up call. Or maybe a second chance. What are you going to do with yours?" + +"I don't know." That appraising look again, as if she's trying to work out what he's worth. He's used to it, but this time it doesn't feel hostile. "We've got too much history for this to be easy. Either Aineko was lying, or ... not. What about you? What do you really want?" + +He knows what she's asking. "Be my mistress?" he asks, offering her a hand. + +"This time," she grips his hand, "without adult supervision." She smiles gratefully, and they walk toward the gateway together, to find out how their descendants are dealing with their sudden freedom. + +(THE END: June 1999 to April 2004) + +% Copyright © Charles Stross, 2005 + +% Published by + +% Ace Books, New York, July 2005, ISBN 0441012841 + +% Orbit Books, London, August 2005, ISBN 1841493902 + +% License +% Creative Commons License + +% Copyright © Charles Stross, 2005. + +% This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. + +% You are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work under the following conditions: + +% * Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor. +% * Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. +% * No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. +% * For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. +% +% If you are in doubt about any proposed reuse, you should contact the author via: www.accelerando.org. + +% Contents + +% Part 1: Slow Takeoff +% +% * Lobsters +% * Troubadour +% * Tourist +% +% Part 2: Point of Inflection +% +% * Halo +% * Router +% * Nightfall +% +% Part 3: Singularity +% +% * Curator +% * Elector +% * Survivor + +% problem with transformation ^{+4904}^/,{-56}, is not transformed correctly, corrected for >= sisu-0.49.1 diff --git a/data/samples/autonomy_markup0.sst b/data/samples/autonomy_markup0.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5803660 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/autonomy_markup0.sst @@ -0,0 +1,203 @@ +% SiSU 2.0 + +@title: Revisiting the Autonomous Contract + :subtitle: Transnational contract law, trends and supportive structures + +@creator: + :author: Amissah, Ralph + +@rights: + :copyright: Copyright (C) Ralph Amissah + +@classify: + :type: article + :subject: international contracts, international commercial arbitration, private international law + :topic_register: SiSU:markup sample:article;law:international:commercial arbitration|uniform law|harmonization;private law;arbitration:international commercial + +@date: + :published: 2000-08-27 + +@make: + :italics: /CISG|PICC|PECL|UNCITRAL|UNIDROIT|lex mercatoria|pacta sunt servanda|caveat subscriptor|ex aequo et bono|amiable compositeur|ad hoc/i + :num_top: 1 + +@links: + {Syntax}http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/sample/syntax/autonomy_markup0.sst.html + {The Autonomous Contract}http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/the.autonomous.contract.07.10.1997.amissah/toc.html + {Contract Principles}http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/private.international.commercial.law/contract.principles.html + {UNIDROIT Principles}http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/unidroit.international.commercial.contracts.principles.1994.commented/toc.html + {Sales}http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/private.international.commercial.law/sale.of.goods.html + {CISG}http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/un.contracts.international.sale.of.goods.convention.1980/doc.html + {Arbitration}http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/arbitration/toc.html + {Electronic Commerce}http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/electronic.commerce/toc.html + +% (Draft 0.90 - 2000-08-27) + +:A~ @title @author~{* Ralph Amissah is a Fellow of Pace University, Institute for International Commercial Law. http://www.cisg.law.pace.edu/
RA lectured on the private law aspects of international trade whilst at the Law Faculty of the University of Tromsø, Norway. http://www.jus.uit.no/
RA built the first web site related to international trade law, now known as lexmercatoria.org and described as "an (international | transnational) commercial law and e-commerce infrastructure monitor". http://lexmercatoria.org/
RA is interested in the law, technology, commerce nexus. RA works with the law firm Amissahs.
/{[This is a draft document and subject to change.]}/
All errors are very much my own.
ralph@amissah.com }~ + +1~ Reinforcing trends: borderless technologies, global economy, transnational legal solutions? + +Revisiting the Autonomous Contract~{ /{The Autonomous Contract: Reflecting the borderless electronic-commercial environment in contracting}/ was published in /{Elektronisk handel - rettslige aspekter, Nordisk årsbok i rettsinformatikk 1997}/ (Electronic Commerce - Legal Aspects. The Nordic yearbook for Legal Informatics 1997) Edited by Randi Punsvik, or at http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/the.autonomous.contract.07.10.1997.amissah/doc.html }~ + +Globalisation is to be observed as a trend intrinsic to the world economy.~{ As Maria Cattaui Livanos suggests in /{The global economy - an opportunity to be seized}/ in /{Business World}/ the Electronic magazine of the International Chamber of Commerce (Paris, July 1997) at http://www.iccwbo.org/html/globalec.htm
"Globalization is unstoppable. Even though it may be only in its early stages, it is already intrinsic to the world economy. We have to live with it, recognize its advantages and learn to manage it.
That imperative applies to governments, who would be unwise to attempt to stem the tide for reasons of political expediency. It also goes for companies of all sizes, who must now compete on global markets and learn to adjust their strategies accordingly, seizing the opportunities that globalization offers."}~ Rudimentary economics explains this runaway process, as being driven by competition within the business community to achieve efficient production, and to reach and extend available markets.~{To remain successful, being in competition, the business community is compelled to take advantage of the opportunities provided by globalisation.}~ Technological advancement particularly in transport and communications has historically played a fundamental role in the furtherance of international commerce, with the Net, technology's latest spatio-temporally transforming offering, linchpin of the "new-economy", extending exponentially the global reach of the business community. The Net covers much of the essence of international commerce providing an instantaneous, low cost, convergent, global and borderless: information centre, marketplace and channel for communications, payments and the delivery of services and intellectual property. The sale of goods, however, involves the separate element of their physical delivery. The Net has raised a plethora of questions and has frequently offered solutions. The increased transparency of borders arising from the Net's ubiquitous nature results in an increased demand for the transparency of operation. As economic activities become increasingly global, to reduce transaction costs, there is a strong incentive for the "law" that provides for them, to do so in a similar dimension. The appeal of transnational legal solutions lies in the potential reduction in complexity, more widely dispersed expertise, and resulting increased transaction efficiency. The Net reflexively offers possibilities for the development of transnational legal solutions, having in a similar vein transformed the possibilities for the promulgation of texts, the sharing of ideas and collaborative ventures. There are however, likely to be tensions within the legal community protecting entrenched practices against that which is new, (both in law and technology) and the business community's goal to reduce transaction costs. + +Within commercial law an analysis of law and economics may assist in developing a better understanding of the relationship between commercial law and the commercial sector it serves.~{ Realists would contend that law is contextual and best understood by exploring the interrelationships between law and the other social sciences, such as sociology, psychology, political science, and economics.}~ "...[T]he importance of the interrelations between law and economics can be seen in the twin facts that legal change is often a function of economic ideas and conditions, which necessitate and/or generate demands for legal change, and that economic change is often governed by legal change."~{ Part of a section cited in Mercuro and Steven G. Medema, /{Economics and the Law: from Posner to Post-Modernism}/ (Princeton, 1997) p. 11, with reference to Karl N. Llewellyn The Effect of Legal Institutions upon Economics, American Economic Review 15 (December 1925) pp 655-683, Mark M. Litchman Economics, the Basis of Law, American Law Review 61 (May-June 1927) pp 357-387, and W. S. Holdsworth A Neglected Aspect of the Relations between Economic and Legal History, Economic History Review 1 (January 1927-1928) pp 114-123.}~ In doing so, however, it is important to be aware that there are several competing schools of law and economics, with different perspectives, levels of abstraction, and analytical consequences of and for the world that they model.~{ For a good introduction see Nicholas Mercuro and Steven G. Medema, /{Economics and the Law: from Posner to Post-Modernism}/ (Princeton, 1997). These include: Chicago law and economics (New law and economics); New Haven School of law and economics; Public Choice Theory; Institutional law and economics; Neoinstitutional law and economics; Critical Legal Studies.}~ + +Where there is rapid interrelated structural change with resulting new features, rather than concentrate on traditionally established tectonic plates of a discipline, it is necessary to understand underlying currents and concepts at their intersections, (rather than expositions of history~{ Case overstated, but this is an essential point. It is not be helpful to be overly tied to the past. It is necessary to be able to look ahead and explore new solutions, and be aware of the implications of "complexity" (as to to the relevance of past circumstances to the present). }~), is the key to commencing meaningful discussions and developing solutions for the resulting issues.~{ The majority of which are beyond the scope of this paper. Examples include: encryption and privacy for commercial purposes; digital signatures; symbolic ownership; electronic intellectual property rights.}~ Interrelated developments are more meaningfully understood through interdisciplinary study, as this instance suggests, of the law, commerce/economics, and technology nexus. In advocating this approach, we should also pay heed to the realisation in the sciences, of the limits of reductionism in the study of complex systems, as such systems feature emergent properties that are not evident if broken down into their constituent parts. System complexity exceeds sub-system complexity; consequently, the relevant unit for understanding the systems function is the system, not its parts.~{ Complexity theory is a branch of mathematics and physics that examines non-linear systems in which simple sets of deterministic rules can lead to highly complicated results, which cannot be predicted accurately. A study of the subject is provided by Nicholas Rescher /{Complexity: A Philosophical Overview}/ (New Brunswick, 1998). See also Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, /{The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World}/ (1994). }~ Simplistic dogma should be abandoned for a contextual approach. + +1~ Common Property - advocating a common commercial highway + +Certain infrastructural underpinnings beneficial to the working of the market economy are not best provided by the business community, but by other actors including governments. In this paper mention is made for example of the /{United Nations Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards}/ (New York, 10 June 1958), which the business community regularly relies upon as the back-stop for their international agreements. Common property can have an enabling value, the Net, basis for the "new" economy, would not be what it is today without much that has been shared on this basis, having permitted /{"Metcalf's law"}/~{ Robert Metcalf, founder of 3Com. }~ to take hold. /{Metcalf's law}/ suggests that the value of a shared technology is exponential to its user base. In all likelihood it applies as much to transnational contract law, as to technological networks and standards. The more people who use a network or standard, the more "valuable" it becomes, and the more users it will attract. Key infrastructure should be identified and common property solutions where appropriate nurtured, keeping transaction costs to a minimum. + +The following general perspective is submitted as worthy of consideration (and support) by the legal, business and academic communities, and governments. *(a)* Abstract goals valuable to a transnational legal infrastructure include, certainty and predictability, flexibility, simplicity where possible, and neutrality, in the sense of being without perceived "unfairness" in the global context of their application. This covers the content of the "laws" themselves and the methods used for their interpretation. *(b)* Of law with regard to technology, "rules should be technology-neutral (i.e., the rules should neither require nor assume a particular technology) and forward looking (i.e., the rules should not hinder the use or development of technologies in the future)."~{ /{US Framework for Global Electronic Commerce}/ (1997) http://www.whitehouse.gov/WH/New/Commerce/ }~ *(c)* Desirable abstract goals in developing technological standards and critical technological infrastructure, include, choice, and that they should be shared and public or "open" as in "open source", and platform and/or program neutral, that is, interoperable. (On security, to forestall suggestions to the contrary, popular open source software tends to be as secure or more so than proprietary software). *(d)* Encryption is an essential part of the mature "new" economy but remains the subject of some governments' restriction.~{ The EU is lifting such restriction, and the US seems likely to follow suit. }~ The availability of (and possibility to develop common transnational standards for) strong encryption is essential for commercial security and trust with regard to all manner of Net communications and electronic commerce transactions, /{vis-à-vis}/ their confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation. That is, encryption is the basis for essential commerce related technologies, including amongst many others, electronic signatures, electronic payment systems and the development of electronic symbols of ownership (such as electronic bills of lading). *(e)* As regards the dissemination of primary materials concerning "uniform standards" in both the legal and technology domains, "the Net" should be used to make them globally available, free. Technology should be similarly used where possible to promote the goals outlined under point (a). Naturally, as a tempered supporter of the market economy,~{ Caveats extending beyond the purview of this paper. It is necessary to be aware that there are other overriding interests, global and domestic, that the market economy is ill suited to providing for, such as the environment, and possibly key public utilities that require long term planning and high investment. It is also necessary to continue to be vigilant against that which even if arising as a natural consequence of the market economy, has the potential to disturb or destroy its function, such as monopolies.}~ proprietary secondary materials and technologies do not merit these reservations. Similarly, actors of the market economy would take advantage of the common property base of the commercial highway. + +1~ Modelling the private international commercial law infrastructure + +Apart from the study of "laws" or the existing legal infrastructure, there are a multitude of players involved in their creation whose efforts may be regarded as being in the nature of systems modelling. Of interest to this paper is the subset of activity of a few organisations that provide the underpinnings for the foundation of a successful transnational contract/sales law. These are not amongst the more controversial legal infrastructure modelling activities, and represent a small but significant part in simplifying international commerce and trade.~{ Look for instance at national customs procedures, and consumer protection.}~ + +Briefly viewing the wider picture, several institutions are involved as independent actors in systems modelling of the transnational legal infrastructure. Their roles and mandates and the issues they address are conceptually different. These include certain United Nations organs and affiliates such as the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL),~{ http://www.uncitral.org/ }~ the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO)~{ http://www.wipo.org/ }~ and recently the World Trade Organisation (WTO),~{ http://www.wto.org/ }~ along with other institutions such as the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law (UNIDROIT),~{ http://www.unidroit.org/ }~ the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC),~{ http://www.iccwbo.org/ }~ and the Hague Conference on Private International Law.~{ http://www.hcch.net/ }~ They identify areas that would benefit from an international or transnational regime and use various tools at their disposal, (including: treaties; model laws; conventions; rules and/or principles; standard contracts), to develop legislative "solutions" that they hope will be subscribed to. + +A host of other institutions are involved in providing regional solutions.~{ such as ASEAN http://www.aseansec.org/ the European Union (EU) http://europa.eu.int/ MERCOSUR http://embassy.org/uruguay/econ/mercosur/ and North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) http://www.nafta-sec-alena.org/english/nafta/ }~ Specialised areas are also addressed by appropriately specialised institutions.~{ e.g. large international banks; or in the legal community, the Business Section of the International Bar Association (IBA) with its membership of lawyers in over 180 countries. http://www.ibanet.org/ }~ A result of globalisation is increased competition (also) amongst States, which are active players in the process, identifying and addressing the needs of their business communities over a wide range of areas and managing the suitability to the global economy of their domestic legal, economic, technological and educational~{ For a somewhat frightening peek and illuminating discussion of the role of education in the global economy as implemented by a number of successful States see Joel Spring, /{Education and the Rise of the Global Economy}/ (Mahwah, NJ, 1998). }~ infrastructures. The role of States remains to identify what domestic structural support they must provide to be integrated and competitive in the global economy. + +In addition to "traditional" contributors, the technology/commerce/law confluence provides new challenges and opportunities, allowing, the emergence of important new players within the commercial field, such as Bolero,~{ http://www.bolero.org/ also http://www.boleroassociation.org/ }~ which, with the backing of international banks and ship-owners, offers electronic replacements for traditional paper transactions, acting as transaction agents for the electronic substitute on behalf of the trading parties. The acceptance of the possibility of applying an institutionally offered lex has opened the door further for other actors including ad hoc groupings of the business community and/or universities to find ways to be engaged and actively participate in providing services for themselves and/or others in this domain. + +1~ The foundation for transnational private contract law, arbitration + +The market economy drive perpetuating economic globalisation is also active in the development and choice of transnational legal solutions. The potential reward, international sets of contract rules and principles, that can be counted on to be consistent and as providing a uniform layer of insulation (with minimal reference back to State law) when applied across the landscape of a multitude of different municipal legal systems. The business community is free to utilise them if available, and if not, to develop them, or seek to have them developed. + +The kernel for the development of a transnational legal infrastructure governing the rights and obligations of private contracting individuals was put in place as far back as 1958 by the /{UN Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards}/ (/{"NY Convention on ICA"}/),~{ at http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/un.arbitration.recognition.and.enforcement.convention.new.york.1958/ }~ now in force in over a hundred States. Together with freedom of contract, the /{NY Convention on ICA}/ made it possible for commercial parties to develop and be governed by their own /{lex}/ in their contractual affairs, should they wish to do so, and guaranteed that provided their agreement was based on international commercial arbitration (/{"ICA"}/), (and not against relevant mandatory law) it would be enforced in all contracting States. This has been given further support by various more recent arbitration rules and the /{UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration 1985}/,~{ at http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/un.arbitration.model.law.1985/ }~ which now explicitly state that rule based solutions independent of national law can be applied in /{"ICA"}/.~{ Lando, /{Each Contracting Party Must Act In Accordance with Good Faith and Fair Dealing}/ in /{Festskrift til Jan Ramberg}/ (Stockholm, 1997) p. 575. See also UNIDROIT Principles, Preamble 4 a. Also Arthur Hartkamp, The Use of UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts by National and Supranational Courts (1995) in UNIDROIT Principles: A New Lex Mercatoria?, pp. 253-260 on p. 255. But see Goode, /{A New International Lex Mercatoria?}/ in /{Juridisk Tidskrift}/ (1999-2000 nr 2) p. 256 and 259. }~ + +/{"ICA"}/ is recognised as the most prevalent means of dispute resolution in international commerce. Unlike litigation /{"ICA"}/ survives on its merits as a commercial service to provide for the needs of the business community.~{ /{"ICA"}/ being shaped by market forces and competition adheres more closely to the rules of the market economy, responding to its needs and catering for them more adequately. }~ It has consequently been more dynamic than national judiciaries, in adjusting to the changing requirements of businessmen. Its institutions are quicker to adapt and innovate, including the ability to cater for transnational contracts. /{"ICA"}/, in taking its mandate from and giving effect to the will of the parties, provides them with greater flexibility and frees them from many of the limitations of municipal law.~{ As examples of this, it seeks to give effect to the parties' agreement upon: the lex mercatoria as the law of the contract; the number of, and persons to be "adjudicators"; the language of proceedings; the procedural rules to be used, and; as to the finality of the decision. }~ + +In sum, a transnational/non-national regulatory order governing the contractual rights and obligations of private individuals is made possible by: *(a)* States' acceptance of freedom of contract (public policy excepted); *(b)* Sanctity of contract embodied in the principle pacta sunt servanda *(c)* Written contractual selection of dispute resolution by international commercial arbitration, whether ad hoc or institutional, usually under internationally accepted arbitration rules; *(d)* Guaranteed enforcement, arbitration where necessary borrowing the State apparatus for law enforcement through the /{NY Convention on ICA}/, which has secured for /{"ICA"}/ a recognition and enforcement regime unparalleled by municipal courts in well over a hundred contracting States; *(e)* Transnational effect or non-nationality being achievable through /{"ICA"}/ accepting the parties' ability to select the basis upon which the dispute would be resolved outside municipal law, such as through the selection of general principles of law or lex mercatoria, or calling upon the arbitrators to act as amiable compositeur or ex aequo et bono. + +This framework provided by /{"ICA"}/ opened the door for the modelling of effective transnational law default rules and principles for contracts independent of State participation (in their development, application, or choice of law foundation). Today we have an increased amount of certainty of content and better control over the desired degree of transnational effect or non-nationality with the availability of comprehensive insulating rules and principles such as the PICC or /{Principles of European Contract Law}/ (/{"European Principles"}/ or /{"PECL"}/) that may be chosen, either together with, or to the exclusion of a choice of municipal law as governing the contract. For electronic commerce a similar path is hypothetically possible. + +1~ "State contracted international law" and/or "institutionally offered lex"? CISG and PICC as examples + +An institutionally offered lex ("IoL", uniform rules and principles) appear to have a number of advantages over "State contracted international law" ("ScIL", model laws, treaties and conventions for enactment). The development and formulation of both "ScIL" and "IoL" law takes time, the CISG representing a half century of effort~{ /{UNCITRAL Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods 1980}/ see at http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/un.contracts.international.sale.of.goods.convention.1980/
The CISG may be regarded as the culmination of an effort in the field dating back to Ernst Rabel, (/{Das Recht des Warenkaufs}/ Bd. I&II (Berlin, 1936-1958). Two volume study on sales law.) followed by the Cornell Project, (Cornell Project on Formation of Contracts 1968 - Rudolf Schlesinger, Formation of Contracts. A study of the Common Core of Legal Systems, 2 vols. (New York, London 1968)) and connected most directly to the UNIDROIT inspired /{Uniform Law for International Sales}/ (ULIS http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/unidroit.ulis.convention.1964/ at and ULF at http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/unidroit.ulf.convention.1964/ ), the main preparatory works behind the CISG (/{Uniform Law on the Formation of Contracts for the International Sale of Goods}/ (ULF) and the /{Convention relating to a Uniform Law on the International Sale of Goods}/ (ULIS) The Hague, 1964.). }~ and PICC twenty years.~{ /{UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts}/ commonly referred to as the /{UNIDROIT Principles}/ and within this paper as PICC see at http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/unidroit.contract.principles.1994/ and http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/unidroit.international.commercial.contracts.principles.1994.commented/
The first edition of the PICC were finalised in 1994, 23 years after their first conception, and 14 years after work started on them in earnest. }~ The CISG by UNCITRAL represents the greatest success for the unification of an area of substantive commercial contract law to date, being currently applied by 57 States,~{ As of February 2000. }~ estimated as representing close to seventy percent of world trade and including every major trading nation of the world apart from England and Japan. To labour the point, the USA most of the EU (along with Canada, Australia, Russia) and China, ahead of its entry to the WTO already share the same law in relation to the international sale of goods. "ScIL" however has additional hurdles to overcome. *(a)* In order to enter into force and become applicable, it must go through the lengthy process of ratification and accession by States. *(b)* Implementation is frequently with various reservations. *(c)* Even where widely used, there are usually as many or more States that are exceptions. Success, that is by no means guaranteed, takes time and for every uniform law that is a success, there are several failures. + +Institutionally offered lex ("IoL") comprehensive general contract principles or contract law restatements that create an entire "legal" environment for contracting, has the advantage of being instantly available, becoming effective by choice of the contracting parties at the stroke of a pen. "IoL" is also more easily developed subsequently, in light of experience and need. Amongst the reasons for their use is the reduction of transaction cost in their provision of a set of default rules, applicable transnationally, that satisfy risk management criteria, being (or becoming) known, tried and tested, and of predictable effect.~{ "[P]arties often want to close contracts quickly, rather than hold up the transaction to negotiate solutions for every problem that might arise." Honnold (1992) on p. 13. }~ The most resoundingly successful "IoL" example to date has been the ICC's /{Uniform Customs and Practices for Documentary Credits}/, which is subscribed to as the default rules for the letters of credit offered by the vast majority of banks in the vast majority of countries of the world. Furthermore uniform principles allow unification on matters that at the present stage of national and regional pluralism could not be achieved at a treaty level. There are however, things that only "ScIL" can "engineer", (for example that which relates to priorities and third party obligations). + +*{PICC:}* The arrival of PICC in 1994 was particularly timely. Coinciding as it did with the successful attempt at reducing trade barriers represented by the /{World Trade Agreement,}/~{ http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/wta.1994/ }~ and the start of general Internet use,~{ See Amissah, /{On the Net and the Liberation of Information that wants to be Free}/ in ed. Jens Edvin A. Skoghoy /{Fra institutt til fakultet, Jubileumsskrift i anledning av at IRV ved Universitetet i Tromsø feirer 10 år og er blitt til Det juridiske fakultet}/ (Tromsø, 1996) pp. 59-76 or the same at http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/on.the.net.and.information.22.02.1997.amissah/ }~ allowed for the exponential growth of electronic commerce, and further underscored the transnational tendency of commerce. The arrival of PICC was all the more opportune bearing in mind the years it takes to prepare such an instrument. Whilst there have been some objections, the PICC (and PECL) as contract law restatements cater to the needs of the business community that seeks a non-national or transnational law as the basis of its contracts, and provide a focal point for future development in this direction. Where in the past they would have been forced to rely on the ethereal and nebulous lex mercatoria, now the business community is provided with the opportunity to make use of such a "law" that is readily accessible, and has a clear and reasonably well defined content, that will become familiar and can be further developed as required. As such the PICC allow for more universal and uniform solutions. Their future success will depend on such factors as: *(a)* Suitability of their contract terms to the needs of the business community. *(b)* Their becoming widely known and understood. *(c)* Their predictability evidenced by a reasonable degree of consistency in the results of their application. *(d)* Recognition of their potential to reduce transaction costs. *(e)* Recognition of their being neutral as between different nations' interests (East, West; North, South). In the international sale of goods the PICC can be used in conjunction with more specific rules and regulations, including (on parties election~{ Also consider present and future possibilities for such use of PICC under CISG articles 8 and 9. }~) in sales the CISG to fill gaps in its provisions.~{ Drobnig, id. p. 228, comment that the CISG precludes recourse to general principles of contract law in Article 7. This does not refer to the situation where parties determine that the PICC should do so, see CISG Article 6. Or that in future the PICC will not be of importance under CISG Articles 8 and 9. }~ Provisions of the CISG would be given precedence over the PICC under the accepted principle of /{specialia generalibus derogant}/,~{ "Special principles have precedence over general ones." See Huet, Synthesis (1995) p. 277. }~ the mandatory content of the PICC excepted. The CISG has many situations that are not provided for at all, or which are provided for in less detail than the PICC. + +Work on PICC and PECL under the chairmanship of Professors Bonell and Ole Lando respectively, was wisely cross-pollinated (conceptually and through cross-membership of preparatory committees), as common foundations strengthen both sets of principles. A couple of points should be noted. Firstly, despite the maintained desirability of a transnational solution, this does not exclude the desirability of regional solutions, especially if there is choice, and the regional solutions are more comprehensive and easier to keep of uniform application. Secondly, the European Union has powers and influence (within the EU) unparalleled by UNIDROIT that can be utilised in future with regard to the PECL if the desirability of a common European contract solution is recognised and agreed upon by EU member States. As a further observation, there is, hypothetically at least, nothing to prevent there in future being developed an alternative extensive (competing) transnational contract /{lex}/ solution, though the weighty effort already in place as represented by PICC and the high investment in time and independent skilled legal minds, necessary to achieve this in a widely acceptable manner, makes such a development not very likely. It may however be the case that for electronic commerce, some other particularly suitable rules and principles will in time be developed in a similar vein, along the lines of an "IoL". + +1~ Contract /{Lex}/ design. Questions of commonweal + +The virtues of freedom of contract are acknowledged in this paper in that they allow the international business community to structure their business relationships to suit their requirements, and as such reflect the needs and working of the market economy. However, it is instructive also to explore the limits of the principles: freedom of contract, pacta sunt servanda and caveat subscriptor. These principles are based on free market arguments that parties best understand their interests, and that the contract they arrive at will be an optimum compromise between their competing interests. It not being for an outsider to regulate or evaluate what a party of their own free will and volition has gained from electing to contract on those terms. This approach to contract is adversarial, based on the conflicting wills of the parties, achieving a meeting of minds. It imposes no duty of good faith and fair dealing or of loyalty (including the disclosure of material facts) upon the contracting parties to one another, who are to protect their own interests. However, in international commerce, this demand can be more costly, and may have a negative and restrictive effect. Also, although claimed to be neutral in making no judgement as to the contents of a contract, this claim can be misleading. + +2~ The neutrality of contract law and information cost + +The information problem is a general one that needs to be recognised in its various forms where it arises and addressed where possible. + +Adherents to the caveat subscriptor model, point to the fact that parties have conflicting interests, and should look out for their own interests. However information presents particular problems which are exacerbated in international commerce.~{ The more straightforward cases of various types of misrepresentation apart. }~ As Michael Trebilcock put it: "Even the most committed proponents of free markets and freedom of contract recognise that certain information preconditions must be met for a given exchange to possess Pareto superior qualities."~{ Trebilcock, (1993) p. 102, followed by a quotation of Milton Friedman, from /{Capitalism and Freedom}/ (1962) p. 13. }~ Compared with domestic transactions, the contracting parties are less likely to possess information about each other or of what material facts there may be within the other party's knowledge, and will find it more difficult and costly to acquire. With resource inequalities, some parties will be in a much better position to determine and access what they need to know, the more so as the more information one already has, the less it costs to identify and to obtain any additional information that is required.~{ Trebilcock, (1993) p. 102, note quoted passage of Kim Lane Scheppele, /{Legal Secrets: Equality and Efficiency in the Common Law}/ (1988) p. 25. }~ The converse lot of the financially weaker party, makes their problem of high information costs (both actual and relative), near insurmountable. Ignorance may even become a rational choice, as the marginal cost of information remains higher than its marginal benefit. "This, in fact is the economic rationale for the failure to fully specify all contingencies in a contract."~{ See for example Nicholas Mercuro and Steven G. Medema, p. 58 }~ The argument is tied to transaction cost and further elucidates a general role played by underlying default rules and principles. It also extends further to the value of immutable principles that may help mitigate the problem in some circumstances. More general arguments are presented below. + +2~ Justifying mandatory loyalty principles + +Given the ability to create alternative solutions and even an independent /{lex}/ a question that arises is as to what limits if any should be imposed upon freedom of contract? What protective principles are required? Should protective principles be default rules that can be excluded? Should they be mandatory? Should mandatory law only exist at the level of municipal law? + +A kernel of mandatory protective principles with regard to loyalty may be justified, as beneficial, and even necessary for "IoL" to be acceptable in international commerce, in that they (on the balance) reflect the collective needs of the international business community. The present author is of the opinion that the duties of good faith and fair dealing and loyalty (or an acceptable equivalent) should be a necessary part of any attempt at the self-legislation or institutional legislation of any contract regime that is based on "rules and principles" (rather than a national legal order). If absent a requirement for them should be imposed by mandatory international law. Such protective provisions are to be found within the PICC and PECL.~{ Examples include: the deliberately excluded validity (Article 4); the provision on interest (Article 78); impediment (Article 79), and; what many believe to be the inadequate coverage of battle of forms (Article 19). }~ As regards PICC *(a)* The loyalty (and other protective) principles help bring about confidence and foster relations between parties. They provide an assurance in the international arena where parties are less likely to know each other and may have more difficulty in finding out about each other. *(b)* They better reflect the focus of the international business community on a business relationship from which both sides seek to gain. *(c)* They result in wider acceptability of the principles within both governments and the business community in the pluralistic international community. These protective principles may be regarded as enabling the PICC to better represent the needs of the commonweal. *(d)* Good faith and fair dealing~{ The commented PECL explain "'Good faith' means honesty and fairness in mind, which are subjective concepts... 'fair dealing' means observance of fairness in fact which is an objective test". }~ are fundamental underlying principles of international commercial relations. *(e)* Reliance only on the varied mandatory law protections of various States does not engender uniformity, which is also desirable with regard to that which can be counted upon as immutable. (Not that it is avoidable, given that mandatory State law remains overriding.) More generally, freedom of contract benefits from these protective principles that need immutable protection from contractual freedom to effectively serve their function. In seeking a transnational or non-national regime to govern contractual relations, one might suggest this to be the minimum price of freedom of contract that should be insisted upon by mandatory international law, as the limitation which hinders the misuse by one party of unlimited contractual freedom. They appear to be an essential basis for acceptability of the autonomous contract (non-national contract, based on agreed rules and principles/ "IoL"). As immutable principles they (hopefully and this is to be encouraged) become the default standard for the conduct of international business and as such may be looked upon as "common property." Unless immutable they suffer a fate somewhat analogous to that of "the tragedy of the commons."~{ Special problem regarding common/shared resources discussed by Garrett Hardin in Science (1968) 162 pp. 1243-1248. For short discussion and summary see Trebilcock, (1993) p. 13-15. }~ It should be recognised that argument over the loyalty principles should be of degree, as the concept must not be compromised, and needs to be protected (even if they come at the price of a degree of uncertainty), especially against particularly strong parties who are most likely to argue against their necessity. + +1~ Problems beyond uniform texts + +2~ In support of four objectives + +In the formulation of many international legal texts a pragmatic approach was taken. Formulating legislators from different States developed solutions based on suitable responses to factual example circumstances. This was done, successfully, with a view to avoiding arguments over alternative legal semantics and methodologies. However, having arrived at a common text, what then? Several issues are raised by asking the question, given that differences of interpretation can arise and become entrenched, by what means is it possible to foster a sustainable drive towards the uniform application of shared texts? Four principles appear to be desirable and should insofar as it is possible be pursued together: *(i)* the promotion of certainty and predictability; *(ii)* the promotion of uniformity of application; *(iii)* the protection of democratic ideals and ensuring of jurisprudential deliberation, and; *(iv)* the retention of efficiency. + +2~ Improving the predictability, certainty and uniform application of international and transnational law + +The key to the (efficient) achievement of greater certainty and predictability in an international and/or transnational commercial law regime is through the uniform application of shared texts that make up this regime. + +Obviously a distinction is to be made between transnational predictability in application, that is "uniform application", and predictability at a domestic level. Where the "uniform law" is applied by a municipal court of State "A" that looks first to its domestic writings, there may be a clear - predictable manner of application, even if not in the spirit of the "Convention". Another State "B" may apply the uniform law in a different way that is equally predictable, being perfectly consistent internally. This however defeats much of the purpose of the uniform law. + +A first step is for municipal courts to accept the /{UN Convention on the Law of Treaties 1969}/ (in force 1980) as a codification of existing public international law with regard to the interpretation of treaties.~{ This is the position in English law see Lord Diplock in Fothergill v Monarch Airlines [1981], A.C. 251, 282 or see http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/england.fothergill.v.monarch.airlines.hl.1980/2_diplock.html also Mann (London, 1983) at p. 379. The relevant articles on interpretation are Article 31 and 32. }~ A potentially fundamental step towards the achievement of uniform application is through the conscientious following of the admonitions of the interpretation clauses of modern conventions, rules and principles~{ Examples: The CISG, Article 7; The PICC, Article 1.6; PECL Article 1.106; /{UN Convention on the Carriage of Goods by Sea (The Hamburg Rules) 1978}/, Article 3; /{UN Convention on the Limitation Period in the International Sale of Goods 1974}/ and /{1978}/, Article 7; /{UN Model Law on Electronic Commerce 1996}/, Article 3; /{UNIDROIT Convention on International Factoring 1988}/, Article 4; /{UNIDROIT Convention on International Financial Leasing 1988}/, Article 6; also /{EC Convention on the Law Applicable to Contractual Obligations 1980}/, Article 18. }~ to take into account their international character and the need to promote uniformity in their application,~{ For an online collection of articles see the Pace CISG Database http://www.cisg.law.pace.edu/cisg/text/e-text-07.html and amongst the many other articles do not miss Michael Van Alstine /{Dynamic Treaty Interpretation}/ 146 /{University of Pennsylvania Law Review}/ (1998) 687-793. }~ together with all this implies.~{ Such as the CISG provision on interpretation - Article 7. }~ However, the problems of uniform application, being embedded in differences of legal methodology, go beyond the agreement of a common text, and superficial glances at the works of other legal municipalities. These include questions related to sources of authority and technique applied in developing valid legal argument. Problems with sources include differences in authority and weight given to: *(a)* legislative history; *(b)* rulings domestic and international; *(c)* official and other commentaries; *(d)* scholarly writings. There should be an ongoing discussion of legal methodology to determine the methods best suited to addressing the problem of achieving greater certainty, predictability and uniformity in the application of shared international legal texts. With regard to information sharing, again the technology associated with the Net offers potential solutions. + +2~ The Net and information sharing through transnational databases + +The Net has been a godsend permitting the collection and dissemination of information on international law. With the best intentions to live up to admonitions to "to take into account their international character and the need to promote uniformity in their application" of "ScIL" and "IoL", a difficulty has been in knowing what has been written and decided elsewhere. In discussing solutions, Professor Honnold in /{"Uniform Words and Uniform Application" }/~{ Based on the CISG, and inputs from several professors from different legal jurisdictions, on the problems of achieving the uniform application of the text across different legal municipalities. J. Honnold, /{Uniform words and uniform applications. Uniform Words and Uniform Application: The 1980 Sales Convention and International Juridical Practice}/. /{Einheitliches Kaufrecht und nationales Obligationenrecht. Referate Diskussionen der Fachtagung}/. am 16/17-2-1987. Hrsg. von P. Schlechtriem. Baden-Baden, Nomos, 1987. p. 115-147, at p. 127-128. }~ suggests the following: "General Access to Case-Law and Bibliographic Material: The development of a homogenous body of law under the Convention depends on channels for the collection and sharing of judicial decisions and bibliographic material so that experience in each country can be evaluated and followed or rejected in other jurisdictions." Honnold then goes on to discuss "the need for an international clearing-house to collect and disseminate experience on the Convention" the need for which, he writes there is general agreement. He also discusses information-gathering methods through the use of national reporters. He poses the question "Will these channels be adequate? ..." + +The Net, offering inexpensive ways to build databases and to provide global access to information, provides an opportunity to address these problems that was not previously available. The Net extends the reach of the admonitions of the interpretation clauses. Providing the medium whereby if a decision or scholarly writing exists on a particular article or provision of a Convention, anywhere in the world, it will be readily available. Whether or not a national court or arbitration tribunal chooses to follow their example, they should be aware of it. Whatever a national court decides will also become internationally known, and will add to the body of experience on the Convention.~{ Nor is it particularly difficult to set into motion the placement of such information on the Net. With each interested participant publishing for their own interest, the Net could provide the key resources to be utilised in the harmonisation and reaching of common understandings of solutions and uniform application of legal texts. Works from all countries would be available. }~ + +Such a library would be of interest to the institution promulgating the text, governments, practitioners and researchers alike. It could place at your fingertips: *(a)* Convention texts. *(b)* Implementation details of contracting States. *(c)* The legislative history. *(d)* Decisions generated by the convention around the world (court and arbitral where possible). *(e)* The official and other commentaries. *(f)* Scholarly writings on the Convention. *(g)* Bibliographies of scholarly writings. *(h)* Monographs and textbooks. *(i)* Student study material collections. *(j)* Information on promotional activities, lectures - moots etc. *(k)* Discussion groups/ mailing groups and other more interactive features. + +With respect to the CISG such databases are already being maintained.~{ Primary amongst them Pace University, Institute of International Commercial Law, CISG Database http://www.cisg.law.pace.edu/ which provides secondary support for the CISG, including providing a free on-line database of the legislative history, academic writings, and case-law on the CISG and additional material with regard to PICC and PECL insofar as they may supplement the CISG. Furthermore, the Pace CISG Project, networks with the several other existing Net based "autonomous" CISG projects. UNCITRAL under Secretary Gerold Herrmann, has its own database through which it distributes its case law materials collected from national reporters (CLOUT). }~ + +The database by ensuring the availability of international materials, used in conjunction with legal practice, helps to support the fore-named four principles. That of efficiency is enhanced especially if there is a single source that can be searched for the information required. + +The major obstacle that remains to being confident of this as the great and free panacea that it should be is the cost of translation of texts. + +2~ Judicial minimalism promotes democratic jurisprudential deliberation + +How to protect liberal democratic ideals and ensure international jurisprudential deliberation? Looking at judicial method, where court decisions are looked to for guidance, liberal democratic ideals and international jurisprudential deliberation are fostered by a judicial minimalist approach. + +For those of us with a common law background, and others who pay special attention to cases as you are invited to by interpretation clauses, there is scope for discussion as to the most appropriate approach to be taken with regard to judicial decisions. US judge Cass Sunstein suggestion of judicial minimalism~{ Cass R. Sunstein, /{One Case at a Time - Judicial Minimalism on the Supreme Court}/ (1999) }~ which despite its being developed in a different context~{ His analysis is developed based largely on "hard" constitutional cases of the U.S. }~ is attractive in that it is suited to a liberal democracy in ensuring democratic jurisprudential deliberation. It maintains discussion, debate, and allows for adjustment as appropriate and the gradual development of a common understanding of issues. Much as one may admire farsighted and far-reaching decisions and expositions, there is less chance with the minimalist approach of the (dogmatic) imposition of particular values. Whilst information sharing offers the possibility of the percolation of good ideas.~{ D. Stauffer, /{Introduction to Percolation Theory}/ (London, 1985). Percolation represents the sudden dramatic expansion of a common idea or ideas thought he reaching of a critical level/mass in the rapid recognition of their power and the making of further interconnections. An epidemic like infection of ideas. Not quite the way we are used to the progression of ideas within a conservative tradition. }~ Much as we admire the integrity of Dworkin's Hercules,~{ Ronald Dworkin, /{Laws Empire}/ (Harvard, 1986); /{Hard Cases in Harvard Law Review}/ (1988). }~ that he can consistently deliver single solutions suitable across such disparate socio-economic cultures is questionable. In examining the situation his own "integrity" would likely give him pause and prevent him from dictating that he can.~{ Hercules was created for U.S. Federal Cases and the community represented by the U.S. }~ This position is maintained as a general principle across international commercial law, despite private (as opposed to public) international commercial law not being an area of particularly "hard" cases of principle, and; despite private international commercial law being an area in which over a long history it has been demonstrated that lawyers are able to talk a common language to make themselves and their concepts (which are not dissimilar) understood by each other.~{ In 1966, a time when there were greater differences in the legal systems of States comprising the world economy Clive Schmitthoff was able to comment that:
"22. The similarity of the law of international trade transcends the division of the world between countries of free enterprise and countries of centrally planned economy, and between the legal families of the civil law of Roman inspiration and the common law of English tradition. As a Polish scholar observed, "the law of external trade of the countries of planned economy does not differ in its fundamental principles from the law of external trade of other countries, such as e.g., Austria or Switzerland. Consequently, international trade law specialists of all countries have found without difficulty that they speak a 'common language'
23. The reason for this universal similarity of the law of international trade is that this branch of law is based on three fundamental propositions: first, that the parties are free, subject to limitations imposed by the national laws, to contract on whatever terms they are able to agree (principle of the autonomy of the parties' will); secondly, that once the parties have entered into a contract, that contract must be faithfully fulfilled (pacta sunt servanda) and only in very exceptional circumstances does the law excuse a party from performing his obligations, viz., if force majeure or frustration can be established; and, thirdly that arbitration is widely used in international trade for the settlement of disputes, and the awards of arbitration tribunals command far-reaching international recognition and are often capable of enforcement abroad."
/{Report of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Progressive Development of the Law of International Trade}/ (1966). Report prepared for the UN by C. Schmitthoff. }~ + +2~ Non-binding interpretative councils and their co-ordinating guides can provide a focal point for the convergence of ideas - certainty, predictability, and efficiency + +A respected central guiding body can provide a guiding influence with respect to: *(a)* the uniform application of texts; *(b)* information management control. Given the growing mass of writing on common legal texts - academic and by way of decisions, we are faced with an information management problem.~{ Future if not current. }~ + +Supra-national interpretative councils have been called for previously~{ /{UNCITRAL Secretariat}/ (1992) p. 253. Proposed by David (France) at the second UNCITRAL Congress and on a later occasion by Farnsworth (USA). To date the political will backed by the financing for such an organ has not been forthcoming. In 1992 the UNCITRAL Secretariat concluded that "probably the time has not yet come". Suggested also by Louis Sono in /{Uniform laws require uniform interpretation: proposals for an international tribunal to interpret uniform legal texts}/ (1992) 25th UNCITRAL Congress, pp. 50-54. Drobnig, /{Observations in Uniform Law in Practice}/ at p. 306. }~ and have for various reasons been regarded impracticable to implement including problems associated with getting States to formally agree upon such a body with binding authority. + +However it is not necessary to go this route. In relation to "IoL" in such forms as the PICC and PECL it is possible for the promulgators themselves,~{ UNIDROIT and the EU }~ to update and clarify the accompanying commentary of the rules and principles, and to extend their work, through having councils with the necessary delegated powers. In relation to the CISG it is possible to do something similar of a non-binding nature, through the production of an updated commentary by an interpretive council (that could try to play the role of Hercules).~{ For references on interpretation of the CISG by a supranational committee of experts or council of "wise men" see Bonell, /{Proposal for the Establishment of a Permanent Editorial Board for the Vienna Sales Convention}/ in /{International Uniform Law in Practice/ Le droit uniforme international dans la practique [Acts and Proceedings of the 3rd Congress on Private Law held by the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law}/ (Rome, 1987)], (New York, 1988) pp. 241-244 }~ With respect, despite some expressed reservations, it is not true that it would have no more authority than a single author writing on the subject. A suitable non-binding interpretative council would provide a focal point for the convergence of ideas. Given the principle of ensuring democratic jurisprudential deliberation, that such a council would be advisory only (except perhaps on the contracting parties election) would be one of its more attractive features, as it would ensure continued debate and development. + +2~ Capacity Building + +_1 "... one should create awareness about the fact that an international contract or transaction is not naturally rooted in one particular domestic law, and that its international specifics are best catered for in a uniform law."~{ UNCITRAL Secretariat (1992) p. 255. }~ + +_{/{Capacity building}/}_ - raising awareness, providing education, creating a new generation of lawyers versed in a relatively new paradigm. Capacity building in international and transnational law, is something relevant institutions including arbitration institutions; the business community, and; far sighted States, should be interested in promoting. Finding means to transcend national boundaries is also to continue in the tradition of seeking the means to break down barriers to legal communication and understanding. However, while the business community seeks and requires greater uniformity in their business relations, there has paradoxically, at a national level, been a trend towards a nationalisation of contract law, and a regionalisation of business practice.~{ Erich Schanze, /{New Directions in Business Research}/ in Børge Dahl & Ruth Nielsen (ed.), /{New Directions in Contract Research}/ (Copenhagen, 1996) p. 62. }~ + +As an example, Pace University, Institute of International Commercial Law, plays a prominent role with regard to capacity building in relation to the CISG and PICC. Apart from the previously mentioned /{CISG Database}/, Pace University organise a large annual moot on the CISG~{ See http://www.cisg.law.pace.edu/vis.html }~ this year involving students of 79 universities from 28 countries, and respected arbitrators from the word over. Within the moot the finding of solutions based on PICC where the CISG is silent, is encouraged. Pace University also organise an essay competition~{ See http://www.cisg.law.pace.edu/cisg/text/essay.html }~ on the CISG and/or the PICC, which next year is to be expanded to include the PECL as a further option. + +1~ Marketing of transnational solutions + +Certain aspects of the Net/web may already be passé, but did you recognise it for what it was, or might become, when it arrived? + +As uniform law and transnational solutions are in competition with municipal approaches, to be successful a certain amount of marketing is necessary and may be effective. The approach should involve ensuring the concept of what they seek to achieve is firmly implanted in the business, legal and academic communities, and through engaging the business community and arbitration institutions, in capacity building and developing a new generation of lawyers. Feedback from the business community, and arbitrators will also prove invaluable. Whilst it is likely that the business community will immediately be able to recognise their potential advantages, it is less certain that they will find the support of the legal community. The normal reasons would be similar to those usually cited as being the primary constraints on its development "conservatism, routine, prejudice and inertia" René David. These are problems associated with gaining the initial foothold of acceptability, also associated with the lower part of an exponential growth curve. In addition the legal community may face tensions arising for various reasons including the possibility of an increase in world-wide competition. + +There are old well developed legal traditions with developed infrastructures and roots well established in several countries, that are dependable and known. The question arises why experiment with alternative non-extensively tested regimes? The required sophistication is developed in the centres providing legal services, and it may be argued that there is not the pressing need for unification or for transnational solutions, as the traditional way of contracting provides satisfactorily for the requirements of global commerce. The services required will continue to be easily and readily available from existing centres of skill. English law, to take an example is for various reasons (including perhaps language, familiarity of use, reputation and widespread Commonwealth~{ http://www.thecommonwealth.org/ }~ relations) the premier choice for the law governing international commercial transactions, and is likely to be for the foreseeable future. Utilising the Commonwealth as an example, what the "transnational" law (e.g. CISG) experience illustrates however, is that for States there may be greater advantage to be gained from participation in a horizontally shared area of commercial law, than from retaining a traditional vertically integrated commercial law system, based largely for example on the English legal system. + +Borrowing a term from the information technology sector, it is essential to guard against FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) with regard to the viability of new and/or competing transnational solutions, that may be spread by their detractors, and promptly, in the manner required by the free market, address any real problems that are discerned. + +1~ Tools in future development + +An attempt should be made by the legal profession to be more contemporary and to keep up to date with developments in technology and the sciences, and to adopt effective tools where suitable to achieve their goals. Technology one way or another is likely to encroach further upon law and the way we design it. + +Science works across cultures and is aspired to by most nations as being responsible for the phenomenal success of technology (both are similarly associated with globalisation). Science is extending its scope to (more confidently) tackle complex systems. It would not hurt to be more familiar with relevant scientific concepts and terminology. Certainly lawyers across the globe, myself included, would also benefit much in their conceptual reasoning from an early dose of the philosophy of science,~{ An excellent approachable introduction is provided by A.F. Chalmers /{What is this thing called Science?}/ (1978, Third Edition 1999). }~ what better than Karl Popper on scientific discovery and the role of "falsification" and value of predictive probity.~{ Karl R. Popper /{The Logic of Scientific Discovery}/ (1959). }~ And certainly Thomas Kuhn on scientific advancement and "paradigm shifts"~{ Thomas S. Kuhn /{The Structure of Scientific Revolutions}/ (1962, 3rd Edition 1976). }~ has its place. Having mentioned Karl Popper, it would not be unwise to go further (outside the realms of philosophy of science) to study his defence of democracy in both volumes of /{Open Society and Its Enemies}/.~{ Karl R. Popper /{The Open Society and Its Enemies: Volume 1, Plato}/ (1945) and /{The Open Society and Its Enemies: Volume 2, Hegel & Marx}/. (1945) }~ + +Less ambitiously there are several tools not traditionally in the lawyers set, that may assist in transnational infrastructure modelling. These include further exploration and development of the potential of tools, including to suggest a few by way of example: flow charts, fuzzy thinking, "intelligent" electronic agents and Net collaborations. + +In the early 1990's I was introduced to a quantity surveyor and engineer who had reduced the /{FIDIC Red Book}/~{ FIDIC is the International Federation of Consulting Engineers http://www.fidic.com/ }~ to over a hundred pages of intricate flow charts (decision trees), printed horizontally on roughly A4 sized sheets. He was employed by a Norwegian construction firm, who insisted that based on past experience, they knew that he could, using his charts, consistently arrive at answers to their questions in a day, that law firms took weeks to produce. Flow charts can be used to show interrelationships and dependencies, in order to navigate the implications of a set of rules more quickly. They may also be used more pro-actively (and /{ex ante}/ rather than /{ex post}/) in formulating texts, to avoid unnecessary complexity and to arrive at more practical, efficient and elegant solutions. + +Explore such concepts as "fuzzy thinking"~{ Concept originally developed by Lotfi Zadeh /{Fuzzy Sets}/ Information Control 8 (1965) pp 338-353. For introductions see Daniel McNeill and Paul Freiberger /{Fuzzy Logic: The Revolutionary Computer Technology that is Changing our World}/ (1993); Bart Kosko Fuzzy Thinking (1993); Earl Cox The Fuzzy Systems Handbook (New York, 2nd ed. 1999). Perhaps to the uninitiated an unfortunate choice of name, as fuzzy logic and fuzzy set theory is more precise than classical logic and set theory, which comprise a subset of that which is fuzzy (representing those instances where membership is 0% or 100%). The statement is not entirely without controversy, in suggesting the possibility that classical thinking may be subsumed within the realms of an unfamiliar conceptual paradigm, that is to take hold of the future thinking. In the engineering field much pioneer work on fuzzy rule based systems was done at Queen Mary College by Ebrahim Mamdani in the early and mid-1970s. Time will tell. }~ including fuzzy logic, fuzzy set theory, and fuzzy systems modelling, of which classical logic and set theory are subsets. Both by way of analogy and as a tool fuzzy concepts are better at coping with complexity and map more closely to judicial thinking and argument in the application of principles and rules. Fuzzy theory provides a method for analysing and modelling principle and rule based systems, even where conflicting principles may apply permitting /{inter alia}/ working with competing principles and the contextual assignment of precision to terms such as "reasonableness". Fuzzy concepts should be explored in expert systems, and in future law. Problems of scaling associated with multiple decision trees do not prevent useful applications, and structured solutions. The analysis assists in discerning what lawyers are involved with. + +"Intelligent" electronic agents can be expected both to gather information on behalf of the business community and lawyers. In future electronic agents are likely to be employed to identify and bring to the attention of their principals "invitations to treat" or offers worthy of further investigation. In some cases they will be developed and relied upon as electronic legal agents, operating under a programmed mandate and vested with the authority to enter certain contracts on behalf of their principals. Such mandate would include choice of law upon which to contract, and the scenario could be assisted by transnational contract solutions (and catered for in the design of "future law"). + +Another area of technology helping solve legal problems relates to various types of global register and transaction centres. Amongst them property registers being an obvious example, including patents and moveable property. Bolero providing an example of how electronic documents can be centrally brokered on behalf of trading parties. + +Primary law should be available on the Net free, and this applies also to "IoL" and the static material required for their interpretation. This should be the policy adopted by all institutions involved in contributing to the transnational legal infrastructure. Where possible larger databases also should be developed and shared. The Net has reduced the cost of dissemination of material, to a level infinitesimally lower than before. Universities now can and should play a more active role. Suitable funding arrangements should be explored that do not result in proprietary systems or the forwarding of specific lobby interests. In hard-copy to promote uniform standards, institutions should also strive to have their materials available at a reasonable price. Many appear to be unacceptably expensive given the need for their promotion and capacity building, amongst students, and across diverse States. + +Follow the open standards and community standards debate in relation to the development of technology standards and technology infrastructure tools - including operating systems,~{ See for example /{Open Sources : Voices from the Open Source Revolution - The Open Source Story}/ http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/toc.html }~ to discover what if anything it might suggest for the future development of law standards. + +1~ As an aside, a word of caution + +I end with an arguably gratuitous observation, by way of a reminder and general warning. Gratuitous in the context of this paper because the areas focused upon~{ Sale of goods (CISG), contract rules and principles (PICC), related Arbitration, and the promotion of certain egalitarian ideals. }~ were somewhat deliberately selected to fall outside the more contentious and "politically" problematic areas related to globalisation, economics, technology, law and politics.~{ It is not as evident in the area of private international commercial contract law the chosen focus for this paper, but appears repeatedly in relation to other areas and issues arising out of the economics, technology, law nexus. }~ Gratuitous also because there will be no attempt to concretise or exemplify the possibility suggested. + +Fortunately, we are not (necessarily) talking about a zero sum game, however, it is necessary to be able to distinguish and recognise that which may harm. International commerce/trade is competitive, and by its nature not benign, even if it results in an overall improvement in the economic lot of the peoples of our planet. "Neutral tests" such as Kaldor-Hicks efficiency, do not require that your interests are benefited one iota, just that whilst those of others are improved, yours are not made worse. If the measure adopted is overall benefit, it is even more possible that an overall gain may result where your interests are adversely affected. The more so if you have little, and those that gain, gain much. Furthermore such "tests" are based on assumptions, which at best are approximations of reality (e.g. that of zero transaction costs, where in fact not only are they not, but they are frequently proportionately higher for the economically weak). At worst they may be manipulated /{ex ante}/ with knowledge of their implications (e.g. engineering to ensure actual or relative~{ Low fixed costs have a "regressive" effect }~ asymmetrical transaction cost). It is important to be careful in a wide range of circumstances related to various aspects of the modelling of the infrastructure for international commerce that have an impact on the allocation of rights and obligations, and especially the allocation of resources, including various types of intellectual property rights. Ask what is the objective and justification for the protection? How well is the objective met? Are there other consequential effects? Are there other objectives that are worthy of protection? Could the stated objective(s) be achieved in a better way? + +Within a system are those who benefit from the way it has been, that may oppose change as resulting in loss to them or uncertainty of their continued privilege. For a stable system to initially arise that favours such a Select Set, does not require the conscious manipulation of conditions by the Select Set. Rather it requires that from the system (set) in place the Select Set emerges as beneficiary. Subsequently the Select Set having become established as favoured and empowered by their status as beneficiary, will seek to do what it can, to influence circumstances to ensure their continued beneficial status. That is, to keep the system operating to their advantage (or tune it to work even better towards this end), usually with little regard to the conditions resulting to other members of the system. Often this will be a question of degree, and the original purpose, or an alternative "neutral" argument, is likely to be used to justify the arrangement. The objective from the perspective of the Select Set is fixed; the means at their disposal may vary. Complexity is not required for such situations to arise, but having done so subsequent plays by the Select Set tend towards complexity. Furthermore, moves in the interest of the Select Set are more easily obscured/disguised in a complex system. Limited access to information and knowledge are devastating handicaps without which change cannot be contemplated let alone negotiated. Frequently, having information and knowledge are not enough. The protection of self-interest is an endemic part of our system, with the system repeatedly being co-opted to the purposes of those that are able to manipulate it. Membership over time is not static, for example, yesterday's "copycat nations" are today's innovators, and keen to protect their intellectual property. Which also illustrates the point that what it may take to set success in motion, may not be the same as that which is preferred to sustain it. Whether these observations appear to be self-evident and/or abstract and out of place with regard to this paper, they have far reaching implications repeatedly observable within the law, technology, and commerce (politics) nexus. Even if not arising much in the context of the selected material for this paper, their mention is justified by way of warning. Suitable examples would easily illustrate how politics arises inescapably as an emergent property from the nexus of commerce, technology, and law.~{ In such circumstances either economics or law on their own would be sufficient to result in politics arising as an emergent property. }~ + +%% SiSU markup sample Notes: +% SiSU http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu +% SiSU markup for 0.16 and later: +% 0.20.4 header 0~links +% 0.22 may drop image dimensions (rmagick) +% 0.23 utf-8 ß +% 0.38 or later, may use alternative notation for headers, e.g. @title: (instead of 0~title) +% 0.38 document structure alternative markup, experimental (rad) A,B,C,1,2,3 maps to 1,2,3,4,5,6 +% 0.42 * type endnotes, used e.g. in relation to author +% 0.51 skins changed, markup unchanged +% 0.52 declared document type identifier at start of text +% Output: http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/autonomy_markup0/sisu_manifest.html +% SiSU 0.38 experimental (alternative structure) markup used for this document +% (compare 0.36 standard markup in sisu-examples autonomy_markup4.sst) diff --git a/data/samples/content.cory_doctorow.sst b/data/samples/content.cory_doctorow.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..88d90cf --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/content.cory_doctorow.sst @@ -0,0 +1,2335 @@ +% SiSU 2.0 + +@title: CONTENT + :subtitle: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright and the Future of the Future + +@creator: + :author: Doctorow, Cory |email doctorow@craphound.com + +@date: + :published: 2008-09 + +@rights: + :copyright: Copyright (C) Cory Doctorow, 2008. + :license: This entire work (with the exception of the introduction by John Perry Barlow) is copyright 2008 by Cory Doctorow and released under the terms of a Creative Commons US Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/). Some Rights Reserved.
The introduction is copyright 2008 by John Perry Barlow and released under the terms of a Creative Commons US Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/). Some Rights Reserved. + +@classify: + :subject: Selected Essays + :topic_register: SiSU:markup sample:book;copyright;content;creative commons;intellectual property:content;book:subject:culture|copyright|society|content|social aspects of technology;culture;society;technology:social aspects + :oclc: 268676051 + :isbn: 9781892391810 + +@make: + :num_top: 1 + :breaks: break=1 + :skin: skin_content + :emphasis: italics + +@links: { CONTENT }http://craphound.com/content/ + { CONTENT, Cory Doctorow @ SiSU }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/content.cory_doctorow + {@ Wikipedia }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow + {@ Amazon.com}http://www.amazon.com/Content-Selected-Technology-Creativity-Copyright/dp/1892391813 + {@ Barnes & Noble}http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Content/Cory-Doctorow/e/9781892391810/?itm=1&USRI=content+cory+doctorow + {Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory Doctorow @ SiSU }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/down_and_out_in_the_magic_kingdom.cory_doctorow + { Little Brother, Cory Doctorow @ SiSU }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/little_brother.cory_doctorow + {For the Win, Cory Doctorow @ SiSU }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/for_the_win.cory_doctorow + { Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig @ SiSU }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/free_culture.lawrence_lessig + { The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler @ SiSU }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/the_wealth_of_networks.yochai_benkler + { Viral Spiral, David Bollier@ SiSU }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/viral_spiral.david_bollier + { Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel @ SiSU }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/democratizing_innovation.eric_von_hippel + { Two Bits, Christopher Kelty @ SiSU }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/two_bits.christopher_kelty + { Free as in Freedom (on Richard M. Stallman), Sam Williams @ SiSU }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/free_as_in_freedom.richard_stallman_crusade_for_free_software.sam_williams + +:A~ @title @author + +1~cc- A word about this downloadable file: ~# + +I've been releasing my books online for free since my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, came out in 2003, and with every one of those books, I've included a little essay explaining why I do this sort of thing. ~# + +I was tempted to write another one of these essays for this collection, but then it hit me: *{this is a collection of essays that are largely concerned with exactly this subject}*. ~# + +You see, I don't just write essays about copyright to serve as forewards to my books: I write them for magazine,s, newspapers, and websites -- I write speeches on the subject for audiences of every description and in every nation. And finally, here, I've collected my favorites, the closest I've ever come to a Comprehensive Doctorow Manifesto. ~# + +So I'm going to skip the foreword this time around: the *{whole book}* is my explanation for why I'm giving it away for free online. ~# + +If you like this book and you want to thank me, here's what I'd ask you to do, in order of preference: ~# + +_* Buy a copy: http://craphound.com/content/buy ~# + +_* Donate a copy to a school or library: http://craphound.com/content/donate ~# + +_* Send the ebook to five friends and tell them why you liked it ~# + +_* Convert the ebook to a new file-format (see the download page for more) ~# + +Now, on to the book! ~# + +% $$$$ + +% Copyright notice: + +% This entire work (with the exception of the introduction by John Perry Barlow) is copyright 2008 by Cory Doctorow and released under the terms of a Creative Commons US Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/). Some Rights Reserved. + +% The introduction is copyright 2008 by John Perry Barlow and released under the terms of a Creative Commons US Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/). Some Rights Reserved. + +% $$$$ + +1~ha- Publication history and acknowledgments: ~# + +Introductio: 2008, John Perry Barlow ~# + +Microsoft Research DRM Talk (This talk was originally given to Microsoft's Research Group and other interested parties from within the company at their Redmond offices on June 17, 2004.) ~# + +The DRM Sausage Factory (Originally published as "A Behind-The-Scenes Look At How DRM Becomes Law," InformationWeek, July 11, 2007) ~# + +Happy Meal Toys versus Copyright: How America chose Hollywood and Wal-Mart, and why it's doomed us, and how we might survive anyway (Originally published as "How Hollywood, Congress, And DRM Are Beating Up The American Economy," InformationWeek, June 11, 2007) ~# + +Why Is Hollywood Making A Sequel To The Napster Wars? (Originally published in InformationWeek, August 14, 2007) ~# + +You DO Like Reading Off a Computer Screen (Originally published in Locus Magazine, March 2007) ~# + +How Do You Protect Artists? (Originally published in The Guardian as "Online censorship hurts us all," Tuesday, Oct 2, 2007) ~# + +It's the Information Economy, Stupid (Originally published in The Guardian as "Free data sharing is here to stay," September 18, 2007) ~# + +Downloads Give Amazon Jungle Fever (Originally published in The Guardian, December 11, 2007) ~# + +What's the Most Important Right Creators Have? (Originally published as "How Big Media's Copyright Campaigns Threaten Internet Free Expression," InformationWeek, November 5, 2007) ~# + +Giving it Away (Originally published on Forbes.com, December 2006) ~# + +Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on the Internet (Originally published in Locus Magazine, July 2006) ~# + +How Copyright Broke (Originally published in Locus Magazine, September, 2006) ~# + +In Praise of Fanfic (Originally published in Locus Magazine, May 2007) ~# + +Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia (Self-published, 26 August 2001) ~# + +Amish for QWERTY (Originally published on the O'Reilly Network, 07/09/2003, http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2003/07/09/amish_qwerty.html) ~# + +Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books (Paper for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, San Diego, February 12, 2004) ~# + +Free(konomic) E-books (Originally published in Locus Magazine, September 2007) ~# + +The Progressive Apocalypse and Other Futurismic Delights (Originally published in Locus Magazine, July 2007) ~# + +When the Singularity is More Than a Literary Device: An Interview with Futurist-Inventor Ray Kurzweil (Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, June 2005) ~# + +Wikipedia: a genuine Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy -- minus the editors (Originally published in The Anthology at the End of the Universe, April 2005) ~# + +Warhol is Turning in His Grave (Originally published in The Guardian, November 13, 2007) ~# + +The Future of Ignoring Things (Originally published on InformationWeek's Internet Evolution, October 3, 2007) ~# + +Facebook's Faceplant (Originally published as "How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook," in InformationWeek, November 26, 2007) ~# + +The Future of Internet Immune Systems (Originally published on InformationWeek's Internet Evolution, November 19, 2007) ~# + +All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites (Paper delivered at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, San Diego, California, 16 March 2005) ~# + +READ CAREFULLY (Originally published as "Shrinkwrap Licenses: An Epidemic Of Lawsuits Waiting To Happen" in InformationWeek, February 3, 2007) ~# + +World of Democracycraft (Originally published as "Why Online Games Are Dictatorships," InformationWeek, April 16, 2007) ~# + +Snitchtown (Originally published in Forbes.com, June 2007) ~# + +$$$$ + +1~dedication- Dedication: ~# + +For the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation: John Perry Barlow, Mitch Kapor and John Gilmore ~# + +For the staff -- past and present -- of the Electronic Frontier Foundation ~# + +For the supporters of the Electronic Frontier Foundation ~# + +$$$$ + +% 1~ Table of Contents: + +% 1 Introduction by John Perry Barlow + +% 2 Microsoft Research DRM talk + +% 3 The DRM Sausage Factory + +% 4 Happy Meal Toys versus Copyright: How America chose Hollywood and +% Wal-Mart, and why it's doomed us, and how we might survive anyway + +% 5 Why Is Hollywood Making A Sequel To The Napster Wars? + +% 6 You DO Like Reading Off a Computer Screen + +% 7 How Do You Protect Artists? + +% 8 It's the Information Economy, Stupid + +% 9 Downloads Give Amazon Jungle Fever + +% 10 What's the Most Important Right Creators Have? + +% 11 Giving it Away + +% 12 Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on the Internet + +% 13 How Copyright Broke + +% 14 In Praise of Fanfic + +% 15 Metacrap: Putting the Torch to Seven Straw-Men of the Meta-Utopia + +% 16 Amish for QWERTY + +% 17 Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books + +% 18 Free(konomic) E-books + +% 19 The Progressive Apocalypse and Other Futurismic Delights + +% 20 When the Singularity is More Than a Literary Device: An Interview with Futurist-Inventor Ray Kurzweil + +% 21 Wikipedia: a genuine Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy -- minus the editors + +% 22 Warhol is Turning in His Grave + +% 23 The Future of Ignoring Things + +% 24 Facebook's Faceplant + +% 25 The Future of Internet Immune Systems + +% 26 All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites + +% 27 READ CAREFULLY + +% 28 World of Democracycraft + +% 29 Snitchtown + +$$$$ + +1~ Introduction by John Perry Barlow + +San Francisco - Seattle - Vancouver - San Francisco + +Tuesday, April 1, 2008 + +"Content," huh? Ha! Where's the container? + +Perhaps these words appear to you on the pages of a book, a physical object that might be said to have "contained" the thoughts of my friend and co-conspirator Cory Doctorow as they were transported in boxes and trucks all the way from his marvelous mind into yours. If that is so, I will concede that you might be encountering "content". (Actually, if that's the case, I'm delighted on Cory's behalf, since that means that you have also paid him for these thoughts. We still know how to pay creators directly for the works they embed in stuff.) + +But the chances are excellent that you're reading these liquid words as bit-states of light on a computer screen, having taken advantage of his willingness to let you have them in that form for free. In such an instance, what "contains" them? Your hard disk? His? The Internet and all the servers and routers in whose caches the ghosts of their passage might still remain? Your mind? Cory's? + +To me, it doesn't matter. Even if you're reading this from a book, I'm still not convinced that what you have in your hands is its container, or that, even if we agreed on that point, that a little ink in the shape of, say, the visual pattern you're trained to interpret as meaning "a little ink" in whatever font the publisher chooses, is not, as Magritte would remind us, the same thing as a little ink, even though it is. + +Meaning is the issue. If you couldn't read English, this whole book would obviously contain nothing as far as you were concerned. Given that Cory is really cool and interesting, you might be motivated to learn English so that you could read this book, but even then it wouldn't be a container so much as a conduit. + +The real "container" would be process of thought that began when I compressed my notion of what is meant by the word "ink" - which, when it comes to the substances that can be used to make marks on paper, is rather more variable than you might think - and would kind of end when you decompressed it in your own mind as whatever you think it is. + +I know this is getting a bit discursive, but I do have a point. Let me just make it so we can move on. + +I believe, as I've stated before, that information is simultaneously a relationship, an action, and an area of shared mind. What it isn't is a noun. + +Information is not a thing. It isn't an object. It isn't something that, when you sell it or have it stolen, ceases to remain in your possession. It doesn't have a market value that can be objectively determined. It is not, for example, much like a 2004 Ducati ST4S motorcycle, for which I'm presently in the market, and which seems - despite variabilities based on, I must admit, informationally- based conditions like mileage and whether it's been dropped - to have a value that is pretty consistent among the specimens I can find for a sale on the Web. + +Such economic clarity could not be established for anything "in" this book, which you either obtained for free or for whatever price the publisher eventually puts on it. If it's a book you're reading from, then presumably Cory will get paid some percentage of whatever you, or the person who gave it to you, paid for it. + +But I won't. I'm not getting paid to write this forward, neither in royalties nor upfront. I am, however, getting some intangible value, as one generally does whenever he does a favor for a friend. For me, the value being retrieved from going to the trouble of writing these words is not so different from the value you retrieve from reading them. We are both mining a deeply intangible "good," which lies in interacting with The Mind of Cory Doctorow. I mention this because it demonstrates the immeasurable role of relationship as the driving force in an information economy. + +But neither am I creating content at the moment nor are you "consuming" it (since, unlike a hamburger, these words will remain after you're done with them, and, also unlike a hamburger you won't subsequently, wellŠ never mind.) Unlike real content, like the stuff in a shipping container, these words have neither grams nor liters by which one might measure their value. Unlike gasoline, ten bucks worth of this stuff will get some people a lot further than others, depending on their interest and my eloquence, neither of which can be quantified. + +It's this simple: the new meaning of the word "content," is plain wrong. In fact, it is intentionally wrong. It's a usage that only arose when the institutions that had fattened on their ability to bottle and distribute the genius of human expression began to realize that their containers were melting away, along with their reason to be in business. They started calling it content at exactly the time it ceased to be. Previously they had sold books and records and films, all nouns to be sure. They didn't know what to call the mysterious ghosts of thought that were attached to them. + +Thus, when not applied to something you can put in a bucket (of whatever size), "content" actually represents a plot to make you think that meaning is a thing. It isn't. The only reason they want you to think that it is because they know how to own things, how to give them a value based on weight or quantity, and, more to the point, how to make them artificially scarce in order to increase their value. + +That, and the fact that after a good 25 years of advance warning, they still haven't done much about the Economy of Ideas besides trying to stop it from happening. + +As I get older, I become less and less interested in saying "I told you so." But in this case, I find it hard to resist. Back during the Internet equivalent of the Pleistocene. I wrote a piece for an ancestor of Wired magazine called Wired magazine that was titled, variously, "The Economy of Ideas" or "Wine without Bottles." In this essay, I argued that it would be deucedly difficult to continue to apply the Adam Smithian economic principles regarding the relationship between scarcity and value to any products that could be reproduced and distributed infinitely at zero cost. + +I proposed, moreover, that, to the extent that anything might be scarce in such an economy, it would be attention, and that invisibility would be a bad strategy for increasing attention. That, in other words, familiarity might convey more value to information that scarcity would. + +I did my best to tell the folks in what is now called "The Content Industry" - the institutions that once arose for the useful purpose of conveying creative expression from one mind to many - that this would be a good time to change their economic model. I proposed that copyright had worked largely because it had been difficult, as a practical matter, to make a book or a record or motion picture film spool. + +It was my theory that as soon as all human expression could be reduced into ones and zeros, people would begin to realize what this "stuff" really was and come up with an economic paradigm for rewarding its sources that didn't seem as futile as claiming to own the wind. Organizations would adapt. The law would change. The notion of "intellectual property," itself only about 35 years old, would be chucked immediately onto the magnificent ash-heap of Civilization's idiotic experiments. + +Of course, as we now know, I was wrong. Really wrong. + +As is my almost pathological inclination, I extended them too much credit. I imputed to institutions the same capacities for adaptability and recognition of the obvious that I assume for humans. But institutions, having the legal system a fundamental part of their genetic code, are not so readily ductile. + +This is particularly true in America, where some combination of certainty and control is the actual "deity" before whose altar we worship, and where we have a regular practice of spawning large and inhuman collective organisms that are a kind of meta-parasite. These critters - let's call them publicly-held corporations - may be made out of humans, but they are not human. Given human folly, that characteristic might be semi-ok if they were actually as cold-bloodedly expedient as I once fancied them - yielding only to the will of the markets and the raw self-interest of their shareholders. But no. They are also symbiotically subject to the "religious beliefs" of those humans who feed in their upper elevations. + +Unfortunately, the guys (and they mostly are guys) who've been running The Content Industry since it started to die share something like a doctrinal fundamentalism that has led them to such beliefs as the conviction that there's no difference between listening to a song and shop-lifting a toaster. + +Moreover, they dwell in such a sublime state of denial that they think they are stewarding the creative process as it arises in the creative humans they exploit savagely - knowing, as they do, that a creative human would rather be heard than paid - and that they, a bunch of sated old scoundrels nearing retirement would be able to find technological means for wrapping "containers" around "their" "content" that the adolescent electronic Hezbollah they've inspired by suing their own customers will neither be smart nor motivated enough to shred whatever pathetic digital bottles their lackeys design. + +And so it has been for the last 13 years. The companies that claim the ability to regulate humanity's Right to Know have been tireless in their endeavors to prevent the inevitable. The won most of the legislative battles in the U.S. and abroad, having purchased all the government money could buy. They even won most of the contests in court. They created digital rights management software schemes that behaved rather like computer viruses. + +Indeed, they did about everything they could short of seriously examining the actual economics of the situation - it has never been proven to me that illegal downloads are more like shoplifted goods than viral marketing - or trying to come up with a business model that the market might embrace. + +Had it been left to the stewardship of the usual suspects, there would scarcely be a word or a note online that you didn't have to pay to experience. There would be increasingly little free speech or any consequence, since free speech is not something anyone can own. + +Fortunately there were countervailing forces of all sorts, beginning with the wise folks who designed the Internet in the first place. Then there was something called the Electronic Frontier Foundation which I co-founded, along with Mitch Kapor and John Gilmore, back in 1990. Dedicated to the free exchange of useful information in cyberspace, it seemed at times that I had been right in suggesting then that practically every institution of the Industrial Period would try to crush, or at least own, the Internet. That's a lot of lawyers to have stacked against your cause. + +But we had Cory Doctorow. + +Had nature not provided us with a Cory Doctorow when we needed one, it would have been necessary for us to invent a time machine and go into the future to fetch another like him. That would be about the only place I can imagine finding such a creature. Cory, as you will learn from his various rants "contained" herein was perfectly suited to the task of subduing the dinosaurs of content. + +He's a little like the guerilla plumber Tuttle in the movie Brazil. Armed with a utility belt of improbable gizmos, a wildly over-clocked mind, a keyboard he uses like a verbal machine gun, and, best of all, a dark sense of humor, he'd go forth against massive industrial forces and return grinning, if a little beat up. + +Indeed, many of the essays collected under this dubious title are not only memoirs of his various campaigns but are themselves the very weapons he used in them. Fortunately, he has spared you some of the more sophisticated utilities he employed. He is not battering you with the nerdy technolingo he commands when stacked up against various minutiacrats, but I assure you that he can speak geek with people who, unlike Cory, think they're being pretty social when they're staring at the other person's shoes. + +This was a necessary ability. One of the problems that EFF has to contend with is that even though most of our yet-unborn constituency would agree heartily with our central mission - giving everybody everywhere the right to both address and hear everybody everywhere else - the decisions that will determine the eventual viability of that right are being made now and generally in gatherings invisible to the general public, using terminology, whether technical or legal, that would be the verbal equivalent of chloroform to anyone not conversant with such arcana. + +I've often repeated my belief that the first responsibility of a human being is to be a better ancestor. Thus, it seems fitting that the appearance of this book, which details much of Cory's time with the EFF, coincides with the appearance of his first-born child, about whom he is a shameless sentimental gusher. + +I would like to think that by the time this newest prodigy, Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow - you see what I mean about paternal enthusiasm - has reached Cory's age of truly advanced adolescence, the world will have recognized that there are better ways to regulate the economy of mind than pretending that its products are something like pig iron. But even if it hasn't, I am certain that the global human discourse will be less encumbered than it would have been had not Cory Doctorow blessed our current little chunk of space/time with his fierce endeavors. + +And whatever it is that might be "contained" in the following. + +$$$$ + +1~ Microsoft Research DRM Talk + +(This talk was originally given to Microsoft's Research Group and other interested parties from within the company at their Redmond offices on June 17, 2004.) ~# + +Greetings fellow pirates! Arrrrr! + +I'm here today to talk to you about copyright, technology and DRM, I work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation on copyright stuff (mostly), and I live in London. I'm not a lawyer -- I'm a kind of mouthpiece/activist type, though occasionally they shave me and stuff me into my Bar Mitzvah suit and send me to a standards body or the UN to stir up trouble. I spend about three weeks a month on the road doing completely weird stuff like going to Microsoft to talk about DRM. + +I lead a double life: I'm also a science fiction writer. That means I've got a dog in this fight, because I've been dreaming of making my living from writing since I was 12 years old. Admittedly, my IP-based biz isn't as big as yours, but I guarantee you that it's every bit as important to me as yours is to you. + +Here's what I'm here to convince you of: + +1. That DRM systems don't work + +2. That DRM systems are bad for society + +3. That DRM systems are bad for business + +4. That DRM systems are bad for artists + +5. That DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT + +It's a big brief, this talk. Microsoft has sunk a lot of capital into DRM systems, and spent a lot of time sending folks like Martha and Brian and Peter around to various smoke-filled rooms to make sure that Microsoft DRM finds a hospitable home in the future world. Companies like Microsoft steer like old Buicks, and this issue has a lot of forward momentum that will be hard to soak up without driving the engine block back into the driver's compartment. At best I think that Microsoft might convert some of that momentum on DRM into angular momentum, and in so doing, save all our asses. + +Let's dive into it. + +-- + +2~x- 1. DRM systems don't work + +This bit breaks down into two parts: + +1. A quick refresher course in crypto theory + +2. Applying that to DRM + +Cryptography -- secret writing -- is the practice of keeping secrets. It involves three parties: a sender, a receiver and an attacker (actually, there can be more attackers, senders and recipients, but let's keep this simple). We usually call these people Alice, Bob and Carol. + +Let's say we're in the days of the Caesar, the Gallic War. You need to send messages back and forth to your generals, and you'd prefer that the enemy doesn't get hold of them. You can rely on the idea that anyone who intercepts your message is probably illiterate, but that's a tough bet to stake your empire on. You can put your messages into the hands of reliable messengers who'll chew them up and swallow them if captured -- but that doesn't help you if Brad Pitt and his men in skirts skewer him with an arrow before he knows what's hit him. + +So you encipher your message with something like ROT-13, where every character is rotated halfway through the alphabet. They used to do this with non-worksafe material on Usenet, back when anyone on Usenet cared about work-safe-ness -- A would become N, B is O, C is P, and so forth. To decipher, you just add 13 more, so N goes to A, O to B yadda yadda. + +Well, this is pretty lame: as soon as anyone figures out your algorithm, your secret is g0nez0red. + +So if you're Caesar, you spend a lot of time worrying about keeping the existence of your messengers and their payloads secret. Get that? You're Augustus and you need to send a message to Brad without Caceous (a word I'm reliably informed means "cheese-like, or pertaining to cheese") getting his hands on it. You give the message to Diatomaceous, the fleetest runner in the empire, and you encipher it with ROT-13 and send him out of the garrison in the pitchest hour of the night, making sure no one knows that you've sent it out. Caceous has spies everywhere, in the garrison and staked out on the road, and if one of them puts an arrow through Diatomaceous, they'll have their hands on the message, and then if they figure out the cipher, you're b0rked. So the existence of the message is a secret. The cipher is a secret. The ciphertext is a secret. That's a lot of secrets, and the more secrets you've got, the less secure you are, especially if any of those secrets are shared. Shared secrets aren't really all that secret any longer. + +Time passes, stuff happens, and then Tesla invents the radio and Marconi takes credit for it. This is both good news and bad news for crypto: on the one hand, your messages can get to anywhere with a receiver and an antenna, which is great for the brave fifth columnists working behind the enemy lines. On the other hand, anyone with an antenna can listen in on the message, which means that it's no longer practical to keep the existence of the message a secret. Any time Adolf sends a message to Berlin, he can assume Churchill overhears it. + +Which is OK, because now we have computers -- big, bulky primitive mechanical computers, but computers still. Computers are machines for rearranging numbers, and so scientists on both sides engage in a fiendish competition to invent the most cleverest method they can for rearranging numerically represented text so that the other side can't unscramble it. The existence of the message isn't a secret anymore, but the cipher is. + +But this is still too many secrets. If Bobby intercepts one of Adolf's Enigma machines, he can give Churchill all kinds of intelligence. I mean, this was good news for Churchill and us, but bad news for Adolf. And at the end of the day, it's bad news for anyone who wants to keep a secret. + +Enter keys: a cipher that uses a key is still more secure. Even if the cipher is disclosed, even if the ciphertext is intercepted, without the key (or a break), the message is secret. Post-war, this is doubly important as we begin to realize what I think of as Schneier's Law: "any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can't think of how to break it." This means that the only experimental methodology for discovering if you've made mistakes in your cipher is to tell all the smart people you can about it and ask them to think of ways to break it. Without this critical step, you'll eventually end up living in a fool's paradise, where your attacker has broken your cipher ages ago and is quietly decrypting all her intercepts of your messages, snickering at you. + +Best of all, there's only one secret: the key. And with dual-key crypto it becomes a lot easier for Alice and Bob to keep their keys secret from Carol, even if they've never met. So long as Alice and Bob can keep their keys secret, they can assume that Carol won't gain access to their cleartext messages, even though she has access to the cipher and the ciphertext. Conveniently enough, the keys are the shortest and simplest of the secrets, too: hence even easier to keep away from Carol. Hooray for Bob and Alice. + +Now, let's apply this to DRM. + +In DRM, the attacker is *{also the recipient}*. It's not Alice and Bob and Carol, it's just Alice and Bob. Alice sells Bob a DVD. She sells Bob a DVD player. The DVD has a movie on it -- say, Pirates of the Caribbean -- and it's enciphered with an algorithm called CSS -- Content Scrambling System. The DVD player has a CSS un-scrambler. + +Now, let's take stock of what's a secret here: the cipher is well-known. The ciphertext is most assuredly in enemy hands, arrr. So what? As long as the key is secret from the attacker, we're golden. + +But there's the rub. Alice wants Bob to buy Pirates of the Caribbean from her. Bob will only buy Pirates of the Caribbean if he can descramble the CSS-encrypted VOB -- video object -- on his DVD player. Otherwise, the disc is only useful to Bob as a drinks-coaster. So Alice has to provide Bob -- the attacker -- with the key, the cipher and the ciphertext. + +Hilarity ensues. + +DRM systems are usually broken in minutes, sometimes days. Rarely, months. It's not because the people who think them up are stupid. It's not because the people who break them are smart. It's not because there's a flaw in the algorithms. At the end of the day, all DRM systems share a common vulnerability: they provide their attackers with ciphertext, the cipher and the key. At this point, the secret isn't a secret anymore. + +-- + +2~x- 2. DRM systems are bad for society + +Raise your hand if you're thinking something like, "But DRM doesn't have to be proof against smart attackers, only average individuals! It's like a speedbump!" + +Put your hand down. + +This is a fallacy for two reasons: one technical, and one social. They're both bad for society, though. + +Here's the technical reason: I don't need to be a cracker to break your DRM. I only need to know how to search Google, or Kazaa, or any of the other general-purpose search tools for the cleartext that someone smarter than me has extracted. + +Raise your hand if you're thinking something like, "But NGSCB can solve this problem: we'll lock the secrets up on the logic board and goop it all up with epoxy." + +Put your hand down. + +Raise your hand if you're a co-author of the Darknet paper. + +Everyone in the first group, meet the co-authors of the Darknet paper. This is a paper that says, among other things, that DRM will fail for this very reason. Put your hands down, guys. + +Here's the social reason that DRM fails: keeping an honest user honest is like keeping a tall user tall. DRM vendors tell us that their technology is meant to be proof against average users, not organized criminal gangs like the Ukrainian pirates who stamp out millions of high-quality counterfeits. It's not meant to be proof against sophisticated college kids. It's not meant to be proof against anyone who knows how to edit her registry, or hold down the shift key at the right moment, or use a search engine. At the end of the day, the user DRM is meant to defend against is the most unsophisticated and least capable among us. + +Here's a true story about a user I know who was stopped by DRM. She's smart, college educated, and knows nothing about electronics. She has three kids. She has a DVD in the living room and an old VHS deck in the kids' playroom. One day, she brought home the Toy Story DVD for the kids. That's a substantial investment, and given the generally jam-smeared character of everything the kids get their paws on, she decided to tape the DVD off to VHS and give that to the kids -- that way she could make a fresh VHS copy when the first one went south. She cabled her DVD into her VHS and pressed play on the DVD and record on the VCR and waited. + +Before I go farther, I want us all to stop a moment and marvel at this. Here is someone who is practically technophobic, but who was able to construct a mental model of sufficient accuracy that she figured out that she could connect her cables in the right order and dub her digital disc off to analog tape. I imagine that everyone in this room is the front-line tech support for someone in her or his family: wouldn't it be great if all our non-geek friends and relatives were this clever and imaginative? + +I also want to point out that this is the proverbial honest user. She's not making a copy for the next door neighbors. She's not making a copy and selling it on a blanket on Canal Street. She's not ripping it to her hard-drive, DivX encoding it and putting it in her Kazaa sharepoint. She's doing something *{honest}* -- moving it from one format to another. She's home taping. + +Except she fails. There's a DRM system called Macrovision embedded -- by law -- in every VHS that messes with the vertical blanking interval in the signal and causes any tape made in this fashion to fail. Macrovision can be defeated for about $10 with a gadget readily available on eBay. But our infringer doesn't know that. She's "honest." Technically unsophisticated. Not stupid, mind you -- just naive. + +The Darknet paper addresses this possibility: it even predicts what this person will do in the long run: she'll find out about Kazaa and the next time she wants to get a movie for the kids, she'll download it from the net and burn it for them. + +In order to delay that day for as long as possible, our lawmakers and big rightsholder interests have come up with a disastrous policy called anticircumvention. + +Here's how anticircumvention works: if you put a lock -- an access control -- around a copyrighted work, it is illegal to break that lock. It's illegal to make a tool that breaks that lock. It's illegal to tell someone how to make that tool. One court even held it illegal to tell someone where she can find out how to make that tool. + +Remember Schneier's Law? Anyone can come up with a security system so clever that he can't see its flaws. The only way to find the flaws in security is to disclose the system's workings and invite public feedback. But now we live in a world where any cipher used to fence off a copyrighted work is off-limits to that kind of feedback. That's something that a Princeton engineering prof named Ed Felten and his team discovered when he submitted a paper to an academic conference on the failings in the Secure Digital Music Initiative, a watermarking scheme proposed by the recording industry. The RIAA responded by threatening to sue his ass if he tried it. We fought them because Ed is the kind of client that impact litigators love: unimpeachable and clean-cut and the RIAA folded. Lucky Ed. Maybe the next guy isn't so lucky. + +Matter of fact, the next guy wasn't. Dmitry Sklyarov is a Russian programmer who gave a talk at a hacker con in Vegas on the failings in Adobe's e-book locks. The FBI threw him in the slam for 30 days. He copped a plea, went home to Russia, and the Russian equivalent of the State Department issued a blanket warning to its researchers to stay away from American conferences, since we'd apparently turned into the kind of country where certain equations are illegal. + +Anticircumvention is a powerful tool for people who want to exclude competitors. If you claim that your car engine firmware is a "copyrighted work," you can sue anyone who makes a tool for interfacing with it. That's not just bad news for mechanics -- think of the hotrodders who want to chip their cars to tweak the performance settings. We have companies like Lexmark claiming that their printer cartridges contain copyrighted works -- software that trips an "I am empty" flag when the toner runs out, and have sued a competitor who made a remanufactured cartridge that reset the flag. Even garage-door opener companies have gotten in on the act, claiming that their receivers' firmware are copyrighted works. Copyrighted cars, print carts and garage-door openers: what's next, copyrighted light-fixtures? + +Even in the context of legitimate -- excuse me, "traditional" -- copyrighted works like movies on DVDs, anticircumvention is bad news. Copyright is a delicate balance. It gives creators and their assignees some rights, but it also reserves some rights to the public. For example, an author has no right to prohibit anyone from transcoding his books into assistive formats for the blind. More importantly, though, a creator has a very limited say over what you can do once you lawfully acquire her works. If I buy your book, your painting, or your DVD, it belongs to me. It's my property. Not my "intellectual property" -- a whacky kind of pseudo-property that's swiss-cheesed with exceptions, easements and limitations -- but real, no-fooling, actual tangible *{property}* -- the kind of thing that courts have been managing through property law for centuries. + +But anticirumvention lets rightsholders invent new and exciting copyrights for themselves -- to write private laws without accountability or deliberation -- that expropriate your interest in your physical property to their favor. Region-coded DVDs are an example of this: there's no copyright here or in anywhere I know of that says that an author should be able to control where you enjoy her creative works, once you've paid for them. I can buy a book and throw it in my bag and take it anywhere from Toronto to Timbuktu, and read it wherever I am: I can even buy books in America and bring them to the UK, where the author may have an exclusive distribution deal with a local publisher who sells them for double the US shelf-price. When I'm done with it, I can sell it on or give it away in the UK. Copyright lawyers call this "First Sale," but it may be simpler to think of it as "Capitalism." + +The keys to decrypt a DVD are controlled by an org called DVD-CCA, and they have a bunch of licensing requirements for anyone who gets a key from them. Among these is something called region-coding: if you buy a DVD in France, it'll have a flag set that says, "I am a European DVD." Bring that DVD to America and your DVD player will compare the flag to its list of permitted regions, and if they don't match, it will tell you that it's not allowed to play your disc. + +Remember: there is no copyright that says that an author gets to do this. When we wrote the copyright statutes and granted authors the right to control display, performance, duplication, derivative works, and so forth, we didn't leave out "geography" by accident. That was on-purpose. + +So when your French DVD won't play in America, that's not because it'd be illegal to do so: it's because the studios have invented a business-model and then invented a copyright law to prop it up. The DVD is your property and so is the DVD player, but if you break the region-coding on your disc, you're going to run afoul of anticircumvention. + +That's what happened to Jon Johansen, a Norwegian teenager who wanted to watch French DVDs on his Norwegian DVD player. He and some pals wrote some code to break the CSS so that he could do so. He's a wanted man here in America; in Norway the studios put the local fuzz up to bringing him up on charges of *{unlawfully trespassing upon a computer system}*. When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own." + +His no-fooling, real and physical property has been expropriated by the weird, notional, metaphorical intellectual property on his DVD: DRM only works if your record player becomes the property of whomever's records you're playing. + +-- + +2~x- 3. DRM systems are bad for biz + +This is the worst of all the ideas embodied by DRM: that people who make record-players should be able to spec whose records you can listen to, and that people who make records should have a veto over the design of record-players. + +We've never had this principle: in fact, we've always had just the reverse. Think about all the things that can be plugged into a parallel or serial interface, which were never envisioned by their inventors. Our strong economy and rapid innovation are byproducts of the ability of anyone to make anything that plugs into anything else: from the Flo-bee electric razor that snaps onto the end of your vacuum-hose to the octopus spilling out of your car's dashboard lighter socket, standard interfaces that anyone can build for are what makes billionaires out of nerds. + +The courts affirm this again and again. It used to be illegal to plug anything that didn't come from AT&T into your phone-jack. They claimed that this was for the safety of the network, but really it was about propping up this little penny-ante racket that AT&T had in charging you a rental fee for your phone until you'd paid for it a thousand times over. + +When that ban was struck down, it created the market for third-party phone equipment, from talking novelty phones to answering machines to cordless handsets to headsets -- billions of dollars of economic activity that had been suppressed by the closed interface. Note that AT&T was one of the big beneficiaries of this: they *{also}* got into the business of making phone-kit. + +DRM is the software equivalent of these closed hardware interfaces. Robert Scoble is a Softie who has an excellent blog, where he wrote an essay about the best way to protect your investment in the digital music you buy. Should you buy Apple iTunes music, or Microsoft DRM music? Scoble argued that Microsoft's music was a sounder investment, because Microsoft would have more downstream licensees for its proprietary format and therefore you'd have a richer ecosystem of devices to choose from when you were shopping for gizmos to play your virtual records on. + +What a weird idea: that we should evaluate our record-purchases on the basis of which recording company will allow the greatest diversity of record-players to play its discs! That's like telling someone to buy the Betamax instead of the Edison Kinetoscope because Thomas Edison is a crank about licensing his patents; all the while ignoring the world's relentless march to the more open VHS format. + +It's a bad business. DVD is a format where the guy who makes the records gets to design the record players. Ask yourself: how much innovation has there been over the past decade of DVD players? They've gotten cheaper and smaller, but where are the weird and amazing new markets for DVD that were opened up by the VCR? There's a company that's manufacturing the world's first HDD-based DVD jukebox, a thing that holds 100 movies, and they're charging *{$27,000}* for this thing. We're talking about a few thousand dollars' worth of components -- all that other cost is the cost of anticompetition. + +-- + +2~x- 4. DRM systems are bad for artists + +But what of the artist? The hardworking filmmaker, the ink-stained scribbler, the heroin-cured leathery rock-star? We poor slobs of the creative class are everyone's favorite poster-children here: the RIAA and MPAA hold us up and say, "Won't someone please think of the children?" File-sharers say, "Yeah, we're thinking about the artists, but the labels are The Man, who cares what happens to you?" + +To understand what DRM does to artists, you need to understand how copyright and technology interact. Copyright is inherently technological, since the things it addresses -- copying, transmitting, and so on -- are inherently technological. + +The piano roll was the first system for cheaply copying music. It was invented at a time when the dominant form of entertainment in America was getting a talented pianist to come into your living room and pound out some tunes while you sang along. The music industry consisted mostly of sheet-music publishers. + +The player piano was a digital recording and playback system. Piano-roll companies bought sheet music and ripped the notes printed on it into 0s and 1s on a long roll of computer tape, which they sold by the thousands -- the hundreds of thousands -- the millions. They did this without a penny's compensation to the publishers. They were digital music pirates. Arrrr! + +Predictably, the composers and music publishers went nutso. Sousa showed up in Congress to say that: + +group{ + + These talking machines are going to ruin the + artistic development of music in this + country. When I was a boy...in front of every + house in the summer evenings, you would find + young people together singing the songs of + the day or old songs. Today you hear these + infernal machines going night and day. We + will not have a vocal chord left. The vocal + chord will be eliminated by a process of + evolution, as was the tail of man when he + came from the ape. + +}group + +The publishers asked Congress to ban the piano roll and to create a law that said that any new system for reproducing music should be subject to a veto from their industry association. Lucky for us, Congress realized what side of their bread had butter on it and decided not to criminalize the dominant form of entertainment in America. + +But there was the problem of paying artists. The Constitution sets out the purpose of American copyright: to promote the useful arts and sciences. The composers had a credible story that they'd do less composing if they weren't paid for it, so Congress needed a fix. Here's what they came up with: anyone who paid a music publisher two cents would have the right to make one piano roll of any song that publisher published. The publisher couldn't say no, and no one had to hire a lawyer at $200 an hour to argue about whether the payment should be two cents or a nickel. + +This compulsory license is still in place today: when Joe Cocker sings "With a Little Help from My Friends," he pays a fixed fee to the Beatles' publisher and away he goes -- even if Ringo hates the idea. If you ever wondered how Sid Vicious talked Anka into letting him get a crack at "My Way," well, now you know. + +That compulsory license created a world where a thousand times more money was made by a thousand times more creators who made a thousand times more music that reached a thousand times more people. + +This story repeats itself throughout the technological century, every ten or fifteen years. Radio was enabled by a voluntary blanket license -- the music companies got together and asked for a consent decree so that they could offer all their music for a flat fee. Cable TV took a compulsory: the only way cable operators could get their hands on broadcasts was to pirate them and shove them down the wire, and Congress saw fit to legalize this practice rather than screw around with their constituents' TVs. + +Sometimes, the courts and Congress decided to simply take away a copyright -- that's what happened with the VCR. When Sony brought out the VCR in 1976, the studios had already decided what the experience of watching a movie in your living room would look like: they'd licensed out their programming for use on a machine called a Discovision, which played big LP-sized discs that were read-only. Proto-DRM. + +The copyright scholars of the day didn't give the VCR very good odds. Sony argued that their box allowed for a fair use, which is defined as a use that a court rules is a defense against infringement based on four factors: whether the use transforms the work into something new, like a collage; whether it uses all or some of the work; whether the work is artistic or mainly factual; and whether the use undercuts the creator's business-model. + +The Betamax failed on all four fronts: when you time-shifted or duplicated a Hollywood movie off the air, you made a non-transformative use of 100 percent of a creative work in a way that directly undercut the Discovision licensing stream. + +Jack Valenti, the mouthpiece for the motion-picture industry, told Congress in 1982 that the VCR was to the American film industry "as the Boston Strangler is to a woman home alone." + +But the Supreme Court ruled against Hollywood in 1984, when it determined that any device capable of a substantial non-infringing use was legal. In other words, "We don't buy this Boston Strangler business: if your business model can't survive the emergence of this general-purpose tool, it's time to get another business-model or go broke." + +Hollywood found another business model, as the broadcasters had, as the Vaudeville artists had, as the music publishers had, and they made more art that paid more artists and reached a wider audience. + +There's one thing that every new art business-model had in common: it embraced the medium it lived in. + +This is the overweening characteristic of every single successful new medium: it is true to itself. The Luther Bible didn't succeed on the axes that made a hand-copied monk Bible valuable: they were ugly, they weren't in Church Latin, they weren't read aloud by someone who could interpret it for his lay audience, they didn't represent years of devoted-with-a-capital-D labor by someone who had given his life over to God. The thing that made the Luther Bible a success was its scalability: it was more popular because it was more proliferate: all success factors for a new medium pale beside its profligacy. The most successful organisms on earth are those that reproduce the most: bugs and bacteria, nematodes and virii. Reproduction is the best of all survival strategies. + +Piano rolls didn't sound as good as the music of a skilled pianist: but they *{scaled better}*. Radio lacked the social elements of live performance, but more people could build a crystal set and get it aimed correctly than could pack into even the largest Vaudeville house. MP3s don't come with liner notes, they aren't sold to you by a hipper-than-thou record store clerk who can help you make your choice, bad rips and truncated files abound: I once downloaded a twelve-second copy of "Hey Jude" from the original Napster. Yet MP3 is outcompeting the CD. I don't know what to do with CDs anymore: I get them, and they're like the especially nice garment bag they give you at the fancy suit shop: it's nice and you feel like a goof for throwing it out, but Christ, how many of these things can you usefully own? I can put ten thousand songs on my laptop, but a comparable pile of discs, with liner notes and so forth -- that's a liability: it's a piece of my monthly storage-locker costs. + +Here are the two most important things to know about computers and the Internet: + +1. A computer is a machine for rearranging bits + +2. The Internet is a machine for moving bits from one place to another very cheaply and quickly + +Any new medium that takes hold on the Internet and with computers will embrace these two facts, not regret them. A newspaper press is a machine for spitting out cheap and smeary newsprint at speed: if you try to make it output fine art lithos, you'll get junk. If you try to make it output newspapers, you'll get the basis for a free society. + +And so it is with the Internet. At the heyday of Napster, record execs used to show up at conferences and tell everyone that Napster was doomed because no one wanted lossily compressed MP3s with no liner notes and truncated files and misspelled metadata. + +Today we hear ebook publishers tell each other and anyone who'll listen that the barrier to ebooks is screen resolution. It's bollocks, and so is the whole sermonette about how nice a book looks on your bookcase and how nice it smells and how easy it is to slip into the tub. These are obvious and untrue things, like the idea that radio will catch on once they figure out how to sell you hotdogs during the intermission, or that movies will really hit their stride when we can figure out how to bring the actors out for an encore when the film's run out. Or that what the Protestant Reformation really needs is Luther Bibles with facsimile illumination in the margin and a rent-a-priest to read aloud from your personal Word of God. + +New media don't succeed because they're like the old media, only better: they succeed because they're worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at. Books are good at being paperwhite, high-resolution, low-infrastructure, cheap and disposable. Ebooks are good at being everywhere in the world at the same time for free in a form that is so malleable that you can just pastebomb it into your IM session or turn it into a page-a-day mailing list. + +The only really successful epublishing -- I mean, hundreds of thousands, millions of copies distributed and read -- is the bookwarez scene, where scanned-and-OCR'd books are distributed on the darknet. The only legit publishers with any success at epublishing are the ones whose books cross the Internet without technological fetter: publishers like Baen Books and my own, Tor, who are making some or all of their catalogs available in ASCII and HTML and PDF. + +The hardware-dependent ebooks, the DRM use-and-copy-restricted ebooks, they're cratering. Sales measured in the tens, sometimes the hundreds. Science fiction is a niche business, but when you're selling copies by the ten, that's not even a business, it's a hobby. + +Every one of you has been riding a curve where you read more and more words off of more and more screens every day through most of your professional careers. It's zero-sum: you've also been reading fewer words off of fewer pages as time went by: the dinosauric executive who prints his email and dictates a reply to his secretary is info-roadkill. + +Today, at this very second, people read words off of screens for every hour that they can find. Your kids stare at their Game Boys until their eyes fall out. Euroteens ring doorbells with their hypertrophied, SMS-twitching thumbs instead of their index fingers. + +Paper books are the packaging that books come in. Cheap printer-binderies like the Internet Bookmobile that can produce a full bleed, four color, glossy cover, printed spine, perfect-bound book in ten minutes for a dollar are the future of paper books: when you need an instance of a paper book, you generate one, or part of one, and pitch it out when you're done. I landed at SEA-TAC on Monday and burned a couple CDs from my music collection to listen to in the rental car. When I drop the car off, I'll leave them behind. Who needs 'em? + +Whenever a new technology has disrupted copyright, we've changed copyright. Copyright isn't an ethical proposition, it's a utilitarian one. There's nothing *{moral}* about paying a composer tuppence for the piano-roll rights, there's nothing *{immoral}* about not paying Hollywood for the right to videotape a movie off your TV. They're just the best way of balancing out so that people's physical property rights in their VCRs and phonographs are respected and so that creators get enough of a dangling carrot to go on making shows and music and books and paintings. + +Technology that disrupts copyright does so because it simplifies and cheapens creation, reproduction and distribution. The existing copyright businesses exploit inefficiencies in the old production, reproduction and distribution system, and they'll be weakened by the new technology. But new technology always gives us more art with a wider reach: that's what tech is *{for}*. + +Tech gives us bigger pies that more artists can get a bite out of. That's been tacitly acknowledged at every stage of the copyfight since the piano roll. When copyright and technology collide, it's copyright that changes. + +Which means that today's copyright -- the thing that DRM nominally props up -- didn't come down off the mountain on two stone tablets. It was created in living memory to accommodate the technical reality created by the inventors of the previous generation. To abandon invention now robs tomorrow's artists of the new businesses and new reach and new audiences that the Internet and the PC can give them. + +-- + +2~x- 5. DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT + +When Sony brought out the VCR, it made a record player that could play Hollywood's records, even if Hollywood didn't like the idea. The industries that grew up on the back of the VCR -- movie rentals, home taping, camcorders, even Bar Mitzvah videographers -- made billions for Sony and its cohort. + +That was good business -- even if Sony lost the Betamax-VHS format wars, the money on the world-with-VCRs table was enough to make up for it. + +But then Sony acquired a relatively tiny entertainment company and it started to massively screw up. When MP3 rolled around and Sony's walkman customers were clamoring for a solid-state MP3 player, Sony let its music business-unit run its show: instead of making a high-capacity MP3 walkman, Sony shipped its Music Clips, low-capacity devices that played brain-damaged DRM formats like Real and OpenMG. They spent good money engineering "features" into these devices that kept their customers from freely moving their music back and forth between their devices. Customers stayed away in droves. + +Today, Sony is dead in the water when it comes to walkmen. The market leaders are poky Singaporean outfits like Creative Labs -- the kind of company that Sony used to crush like a bug, back before it got borged by its entertainment unit -- and PC companies like Apple. + +That's because Sony shipped a product that there was no market demand for. No Sony customer woke up one morning and said, "Damn, I wish Sony would devote some expensive engineering effort in order that I may do less with my music." Presented with an alternative, Sony's customers enthusiastically jumped ship. + +The same thing happened to a lot of people I know who used to rip their CDs to WMA. You guys sold them software that produced smaller, better-sounding rips than the MP3 rippers, but you also fixed it so that the songs you ripped were device-locked to their PCs. What that meant is that when they backed up their music to another hard-drive and reinstalled their OS (something that the spyware and malware wars has made more common than ever), they discovered that after they restored their music that they could no longer play it. The player saw the new OS as a different machine, and locked them out of their own music. + +There is no market demand for this "feature." None of your customers want you to make expensive modifications to your products that make backing up and restoring even harder. And there is no moment when your customers will be less forgiving than the moment that they are recovering from catastrophic technology failures. + +I speak from experience. Because I buy a new Powerbook every ten months, and because I always order the new models the day they're announced, I get a lot of lemons from Apple. That means that I hit Apple's three-iTunes-authorized-computers limit pretty early on and found myself unable to play the hundreds of dollars' worth of iTunes songs I'd bought because one of my authorized machines was a lemon that Apple had broken up for parts, one was in the shop getting fixed by Apple, and one was my mom's computer, 3,000 miles away in Toronto. + +If I had been a less good customer for Apple's hardware, I would have been fine. If I had been a less enthusiastic evangelist for Apple's products -- if I hadn't shown my mom how iTunes Music Store worked -- I would have been fine. If I hadn't bought so much iTunes music that burning it to CD and re-ripping it and re-keying all my metadata was too daunting a task to consider, I would have been fine. + +As it was Apple rewarded my trust, evangelism and out-of-control spending by treating me like a crook and locking me out of my own music, at a time when my Powerbook was in the shop -- i.e., at a time when I was hardly disposed to feel charitable to Apple. + +I'm an edge case here, but I'm a *{leading edge}* case. If Apple succeeds in its business plans, it will only be a matter of time until even average customers have upgraded enough hardware and bought enough music to end up where I am. + +You know what I would totally buy? A record player that let me play everybody's records. Right now, the closest I can come to that is an open source app called VLC, but it's clunky and buggy and it didn't come pre-installed on my computer. + +Sony didn't make a Betamax that only played the movies that Hollywood was willing to permit -- Hollywood asked them to do it, they proposed an early, analog broadcast flag that VCRs could hunt for and respond to by disabling recording. Sony ignored them and made the product they thought their customers wanted. + +I'm a Microsoft customer. Like millions of other Microsoft customers, I want a player that plays anything I throw at it, and I think that you are just the company to give it to me. + +Yes, this would violate copyright law as it stands, but Microsoft has been making tools of piracy that change copyright law for decades now. Outlook, Exchange and MSN are tools that abet widescale digital infringement. + +More significantly, IIS and your caching proxies all make and serve copies of documents without their authors' consent, something that, if it is legal today, is only legal because companies like Microsoft went ahead and did it and dared lawmakers to prosecute. + +Microsoft stood up for its customers and for progress, and won so decisively that most people never even realized that there was a fight. + +Do it again! This is a company that looks the world's roughest, toughest anti-trust regulators in the eye and laughs. Compared to anti-trust people, copyright lawmakers are pantywaists. You can take them with your arm behind your back. + +In Siva Vaidhyanathan's book The Anarchist in the Library, he talks about why the studios are so blind to their customers' desires. It's because people like you and me spent the 80s and the 90s telling them bad science fiction stories about impossible DRM technology that would let them charge a small sum of money every time someone looked at a movie -- want to fast-forward? That feature costs another penny. Pausing is two cents an hour. The mute button will cost you a quarter. + +When Mako Analysis issued their report last month advising phone companies to stop supporting Symbian phones, they were just writing the latest installment in this story. Mako says that phones like my P900, which can play MP3s as ringtones, are bad for the cellphone economy, because it'll put the extortionate ringtone sellers out of business. What Mako is saying is that just because you bought the CD doesn't mean that you should expect to have the ability to listen to it on your MP3 player, and just because it plays on your MP3 player is no reason to expect it to run as a ringtone. I wonder how they feel about alarm clocks that will play a CD to wake you up in the morning? Is that strangling the nascent "alarm tone" market? + +The phone companies' customers want Symbian phones and for now, at least, the phone companies understand that if they don't sell them, someone else will. + +The market opportunity for a truly capable devices is enormous. There's a company out there charging *{$27,000}* for a DVD jukebox -- go and eat their lunch! Steve Jobs isn't going to do it: he's off at the D conference telling studio execs not to release hi-def movies until they're sure no one will make a hi-def DVD burner that works with a PC. + +Maybe they won't buy into his BS, but they're also not much interested in what you have to sell. At the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group meetings where the Broadcast Flag was hammered out, the studios' position was, "We'll take anyone's DRM except Microsoft's and Philips'." When I met with UK broadcast wonks about the European version of the Broadcast Flag underway at the Digital Video Broadcasters' forum, they told me, "Well, it's different in Europe: mostly they're worried that some American company like Microsoft will get their claws into European television." + +American film studios didn't want the Japanese electronics companies to get a piece of the movie pie, so they fought the VCR. Today, everyone who makes movies agrees that they don't want to let you guys get between them and their customers. + +Sony didn't get permission. Neither should you. Go build the record player that can play everyone's records. + +Because if you don't do it, someone else will. + +$$$$ + +1~ The DRM Sausage Factory + +(Originally published as "A Behind-The-Scenes Look At How DRM Becomes Law," InformationWeek, July 11, 2007) ~# + +Otto von Bismarck quipped, "Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made." I've seen sausages made. I've seen laws made. Both pale in comparison to the process by which anti-copying technology agreements are made. + +This technology, usually called "Digital Rights Management" (DRM) proposes to make your computer worse at copying some of the files on its hard-drive or on other media. Since all computer operations involve copying, this is a daunting task -- as security expert Bruce Schneier has said, "Making bits harder to copy is like making water that's less wet." + +At root, DRMs are technologies that treat the owner of a computer or other device as an attacker, someone against whom the system must be armored. Like the electrical meter on the side of your house, a DRM is a technology that you possess, but that you are never supposed to be able to manipulate or modify. Unlike the your meter, though, a DRM that is defeated in one place is defeated in all places, nearly simultaneously. That is to say, once someone takes the DRM off a song or movie or ebook, that freed collection of bits can be sent to anyone else, anywhere the network reaches, in an eyeblink. DRM crackers need cunning: those who receive the fruits of their labor need only know how to download files from the Internet. + +Why manufacture a device that attacks its owner? A priori, one would assume that such a device would cost more to make than a friendlier one, and that customers would prefer not to buy devices that treat them as presumptive criminals. DRM technologies limit more than copying: they limit ranges of uses, such as viewing a movie in a different country, copying a song to a different manufacturer's player, or even pausing a movie for too long. Surely, this stuff hurts sales: who goes into a store and asks, "Do you have any music that's locked to just one company's player? I'm in the market for some lock-in." + +So why do manufacturers do it? As with many strange behaviors, there's a carrot at play here, and a stick. + +The carrot is the entertainment industries' promise of access to their copyrighted works. Add DRM to your iPhone and we'll supply music for it. Add DRM to your TiVo and we'll let you plug it into our satellite receivers. Add DRM to your Zune and we'll let you retail our music in your Zune store. + +The stick is the entertainment industries' threat of lawsuits for companies that don't comply. In the last century, entertainment companies fought over the creation of records, radios, jukeboxes, cable TV, VCRs, MP3 players and other technologies that made it possible to experience a copyrighted work in a new way without permission. There's one battle that serves as the archetype for the rest: the fight over the VCR. + +The film studios were outraged by Sony's creation of the VCR. They had found a DRM supplier they preferred, a company called Discovision that made non-recordable optical discs. Discovision was the only company authorized to play back movies in your living room. The only way to get a copyrighted work onto a VCR cassette was to record it off the TV, without permission. The studios argued that Sony -- whose Betamax was the canary in this legal coalmine -- was breaking the law by unjustly endangering their revenue from Discovision royalties. Sure, they *{could}* just sell pre-recorded Betamax tapes, but Betamax was a read-write medium: they could be *{copied}*. Moreover, your personal library of Betamax recordings of the Sunday night movie would eat into the market for Discovision discs: why would anyone buy a pre-recorded video cassette when they could amass all the video they needed with a home recorder and a set of rabbit-ears? + +The Supreme Court threw out these arguments in a 1984 5-4 decision, the "Betamax Decision." This decision held that the VCR was legal because it was "capable of sustaining a substantially non-infringing use." That means that if you make a technology that your customers *{can}* use legally, you're not on the hook for the illegal stuff they do. + +This principle guided the creation of virtually every piece of IT invented since: the Web, search engines, YouTube, Blogger, Skype, ICQ, AOL, MySpace... You name it, if it's possible to violate copyright with it, the thing that made it possible is the Betamax principle. + +Unfortunately, the Supremes shot the Betamax principle in the gut two years ago, with the Grokster decision. This decision says that a company can be found liable for its customers' bad acts if they can be shown to have "induced" copyright infringement. So, if your company advertises your product for an infringing use, or if it can be shown that you had infringement in mind at the design stage, you can be found liable for your customers' copying. The studios and record labels and broadcasters *{love}* this ruling, and they like to think that it's even broader than what the courts set out. For example, Viacom is suing Google for inducing copyright infringement by allowing YouTube users to flag some of their videos as private. Private videos can't be found by Viacom's copyright-enforcement bots, so Viacom says that privacy should be illegal, and that companies that give you the option of privacy should be sued for anything you do behind closed doors. + +The gutshot Betamax doctrine will bleed out all over the industry for decades (or until the courts or Congress restore it to health), providing a grisly reminder of what happens to companies that try to pour the entertainment companies' old wine into new digital bottles without permission. The tape-recorder was legal, but the digital tape-recorder is an inducement to infringement, and must be stopped. + +The promise of access to content and the threat of legal execution for non-compliance is enough to lure technology's biggest players to the DRM table. + +I started attending DRM meetings in March, 2002, on behalf of my former employers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. My first meeting was the one where Broadcast Flag was born. The Broadcast Flag was weird even by DRM standards. Broadcasters are required, by law, to deliver TV and radio without DRM, so that any standards-compliant receiver can receive them. The airwaves belong to the public, and are loaned to broadcasters who have to promise to serve the public interest in exchange. But the MPAA and the broadcasters wanted to add DRM to digital TV, and so they proposed that a law should be passed that would make all manufacturers promise to *{pretend}* that there was DRM on broadcast signals, receiving them and immediately squirreling them away in encrypted form. + +The Broadcast Flag was hammered out in a group called the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group (BPDG) a sub-group from the MPAA's "Content Protection Technology Working Group," which also included reps from all the big IT companies (Microsoft, Apple, Intel, and so on), consumer electronics companies (Panasonic, Philips, Zenith), cable companies, satellite companies, and anyone else who wanted to pay $100 to attend the "public" meetings, held every six weeks or so (you can attend these meetings yourself if you find yourself near LAX on one of the upcoming dates). + +CPTWG (pronounced Cee-Pee-Twig) is a venerable presence in the DRM world. It was at CPTWG that the DRM for DVDs was hammered out. CPTWG meetings open with a "benediction," delivered by a lawyer, who reminds everyone there that what they say might be quoted "on the front page of the New York Times," (though journalists are barred from attending CPTWG meetings and no minutes are published by the organization) and reminding all present not to do anything that would raise eyebrows at the FTC's anti-trust division (I could swear I've seen the Microsoft people giggling during this part, though that may have been my imagination). + +The first part of the meeting is usually taken up with administrative business and presentations from DRM vendors, who come out to promise that this time they've really, really figured out how to make computers worse at copying. The real meat comes after the lunch, when the group splits into a series of smaller meetings, many of them closed-door and private (the representatives of the organizations responsible for managing DRM on DVDs splinter off at this point). + +Then comes the working group meetings, like the BPDG. The BPDG was nominally set up to set up the rules for the Broadcast Flag. Under the Flag, manufacturers would be required to limit their "outputs and recording methods" to a set of "approved technologies." Naturally, every manufacturer in the room showed up with a technology to add to the list of approved technologies -- and the sneakier ones showed up with reasons why their competitors' technologies *{shouldn't}* be approved. If the Broadcast Flag became law, a spot on the "approved technologies" list would be a license to print money: everyone who built a next-gen digital TV would be required, by law, to buy only approved technologies for their gear. + +The CPTWG determined that there would be three "chairmen" of the meetings: a representative from the broadcasters, a representative from the studios, and a representative from the IT industry (note that no "consumer rights" chair was contemplated -- we proposed one and got laughed off the agenda). The IT chair was filled by an Intel representative, who seemed pleased that the MPAA chair, Fox Studios's Andy Setos, began the process by proposing that the approved technologies should include only two technologies, both of which Intel partially owned. + +Intel's presence on the committee was both reassurance and threat: reassurance because Intel signaled the fundamental reasonableness of the MPAA's requirements -- why would a company with a bigger turnover than the whole movie industry show up if the negotiations weren't worth having? Threat because Intel was poised to gain an advantage that might be denied to its competitors. + +We settled in for a long negotiation. The discussions were drawn out and heated. At regular intervals, the MPAA reps told us that we were wasting time -- if we didn't hurry things along, the world would move on and consumers would grow accustomed to un-crippled digital TVs. Moreover, Rep Billy Tauzin, the lawmaker who'd evidently promised to enact the Broadcast Flag into law, was growing impatient. The warnings were delivered in quackspeak, urgent and crackling, whenever the discussions dragged, like the crack of the commissars' pistols, urging us forward. + +You'd think that a "technology working group" would concern itself with technology, but there was precious little discussion of bits and bytes, ciphers and keys. Instead, we focused on what amounted to contractual terms: if your technology got approved as a DTV "output," what obligations would you have to assume? If a TiVo could serve as an "output" for a receiver, what outputs would the TiVo be allowed to have? + +The longer we sat there, the more snarled these contractual terms became: winning a coveted spot on the "approved technology" list would be quite a burden! Once you were in the club, there were all sorts of rules about whom you could associate with, how you had to comport yourself and so on. + +One of these rules of conduct was "robustness." As a condition of approval, manufacturers would have to harden their technologies so that their customers wouldn't be able to modify, improve upon, or even understand their workings. As you might imagine, the people who made open source TV tuners were not thrilled about this, as "open source" and "non-user-modifiable" are polar opposites. + +Another was "renewability:" the ability of the studios to revoke outputs that had been compromised in the field. The studios expected the manufacturers to make products with remote "kill switches" that could be used to shut down part or all of their device if someone, somewhere had figured out how to do something naughty with it. They promised that we'd establish criteria for renewability later, and that it would all be "fair." + +But we soldiered on. The MPAA had a gift for resolving the worst snarls: when shouting failed, they'd lead any recalcitrant player out of the room and negotiate in secret with them, leaving the rest of us to cool our heels. Once, they took the Microsoft team out of the room for *{six hours}*, then came back and announced that digital video would be allowed to output on non-DRM monitors at a greatly reduced resolution (this "feature" appears in Vista as "fuzzing"). + +The further we went, the more nervous everyone became. We were headed for the real meat of the negotiations: the *{criteria}* by which approved technology would be evaluated: how many bits of crypto would you need? Which ciphers would be permissible? Which features would and wouldn't be allowed? + +Then the MPAA dropped the other shoe: the sole criteria for inclusion on the list would be the approval of one of its member-companies, or a quorum of broadcasters. In other words, the Broadcast Flag wouldn't be an "objective standard," describing the technical means by which video would be locked away -- it would be purely subjective, up to the whim of the studios. You could have the best product in the world, and they wouldn't approve it if your business-development guys hadn't bought enough drinks for their business-development guys at a CES party. + +To add insult to injury, the only technologies that the MPAA were willing to consider for initial inclusion as "approved" were the two that Intel was involved with. The Intel co-chairman had a hard time hiding his grin. He'd acted as Judas goat, luring in Apple, Microsoft, and the rest, to legitimize a process that would force them to license Intel's patents for every TV technology they shipped until the end of time. + +Why did the MPAA give Intel such a sweetheart deal? At the time, I figured that this was just straight quid pro quo, like Hannibal said to Clarice. But over the years, I started to see a larger pattern: Hollywood likes DRM consortia, and they hate individual DRM vendors. (I've written an entire article about this, but here's the gist: a single vendor who succeeds can name their price and terms -- think of Apple or Macrovision -- while a consortium is a more easily divided rabble, susceptible to co-option in order to produce ever-worsening technologies -- think of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD). Intel's technologies were held through two consortia, the 5C and 4C groups. + +The single-vendor manufacturers were livid at being locked out of the digital TV market. The final report of the consortium reflected this -- a few sheets written by the chairmen describing the "consensus" and hundreds of pages of angry invective from manufacturers and consumer groups decrying it as a sham. + +Tauzin washed his hands of the process: a canny, sleazy Hill operator, he had the political instincts to get his name off any proposal that could be shown to be a plot to break voters' televisions (Tauzin found a better industry to shill for, the pharmaceutical firms, who rewarded him with a $2,000,000/year job as chief of PHARMA, the pharmaceutical lobby). + +Even Representative Ernest "Fritz" Hollings ("The Senator from Disney," who once proposed a bill requiring entertainment industry oversight of all technologies capable of copying) backed away from proposing a bill that would turn the Broadcast Flag into law. Instead, Hollings sent a memo to Michael Powell, then-head of the FCC, telling him that the FCC already had jurisdiction to enact a Broadcast Flag regulation, without Congressional oversight. + +Powell's staff put Hollings's letter online, as they are required to do by federal sunshine laws. The memo arrived as a Microsoft Word file -- which EFF then downloaded and analyzed. Word stashes the identity of a document's author in the file metadata, which is how EFF discovered that the document had been written by a staffer at the MPAA. + +This was truly remarkable. Hollings was a powerful committee chairman, one who had taken immense sums of money from the industries he was supposed to be regulating. It's easy to be cynical about this kind of thing, but it's genuinely unforgivable: politicians draw a public salary to sit in public office and work for the public good. They're supposed to be working for us, not their donors. + +But we all know that this isn't true. Politicians are happy to give special favors to their pals in industry. However, the Hollings memo was beyond the pale. Staffers for the MPAA were writing Hollings's memos, memos that Hollings then signed and mailed off to the heads of major governmental agencies. + +The best part was that the legal eagles at the MPAA were wrong. The FCC took "Hollings's" advice and enacted a Broadcast Flag regulation that was almost identical to the proposal from the BPDG, turning themselves into America's "device czars," able to burden any digital technology with "robustness," "compliance" and "revocation rules." The rule lasted just long enough for the DC Circuit Court of Appeals to strike it down and slap the FCC for grabbing unprecedented jurisdiction over the devices in our living rooms. + +So ended the saga of the Broadcast Flag. More or less. In the years since the Flag was proposed, there have been several attempts to reintroduce it through legislation, all failed. And as more and more innovative, open devices like the Neuros OSD enter the market, it gets harder and harder to imagine that Americans will accept a mandate that takes away all that functionality. + +But the spirit of the Broadcast Flag lives on. DRM consortia are all the rage now -- outfits like AACS LA, the folks who control the DRM in Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, are thriving and making headlines by issuing fatwas against people who publish their secret integers. In Europe, a DRM consortium working under the auspices of the Digital Video Broadcasters Forum (DVB) has just shipped a proposed standard for digital TV DRM that makes the Broadcast Flag look like the work of patchouli-scented infohippies. The DVB proposal would give DRM consortium the ability to define what is and isn't a valid "household" for the purposes of sharing your video within your "household's devices." It limits how long you're allowed to pause a video for, and allows for restrictions to be put in place for hundreds of years, longer than any copyright system in the world would protect any work for. + +If all this stuff seems a little sneaky, underhanded and even illegal to you, you're not alone. When representatives of nearly all the world's entertainment, technology, broadcast, satellite and cable companies gather in a room to collude to cripple their offerings, limit their innovation, and restrict the market, regulators take notice. + +That's why the EU is taking a hard look at HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. These systems aren't designed: they're governed, and the governors are shadowy group of offshore giants who answer to no one -- not even their own members! I once called the DVD-Copy Control Association (DVD-CCA) on behalf of a Time-Warner magazine, Popular Science, for a comment about their DRM. Not only wouldn't they allow me to speak to a spokesman, the person who denied my request also refused to be identified. + +The sausage factory grinds away, but today, more activists than ever are finding ways to participate in the negotiations, slowing them up, making them account for themselves to the public. And so long as you, the technology-buying public, pay attention to what's going on, the activists will continue to hold back the tide. + +$$$$ + +1~ Happy Meal Toys versus Copyright: How America chose Hollywood and Wal-Mart, and why it's doomed us, and how we might survive anyway + +(Originally published as "How Hollywood, Congress, And DRM Are Beating Up The American Economy," InformationWeek, June 11, 2007) ~# + +Back in 1985, the Senate was ready to clobber the music industry for exposing America's impressionable youngsters to sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. Today, the the Attorney General is proposing to give the RIAA legal tools to attack people who attempt infringement. + +Through most of America's history, the US government has been at odds with the entertainment giants, treating them as purveyors of filth. But not anymore: today, the US Trade Rep using America's political clout to force Russia to institute police inspections of its CD presses (savor the irony: post-Soviet Russia forgoes its hard-won freedom of the press to protect Disney and Universal!). + +How did entertainment go from trenchcoat pervert to top trade priority? I blame the "Information Economy." + +No one really knows what "Information Economy" means, but by the early 90s, we knew it was coming. America deployed her least reliable strategic resource to puzzle out what an "information economy" was and to figure out how to ensure America stayed atop the "new economy" -- America sent in the futurists. + +We make the future in much the same way as we make the past. We don't remember everything that happened to us, just selective details. We weave our memories together on demand, filling in any empty spaces with the present, which is lying around in great abundance. In Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard psych prof Daniel Gilbert describes an experiment in which people with delicious lunches in front of them are asked to remember their breakfast: overwhelmingly, the people with good lunches have more positive memories of breakfast than those who have bad lunches. We don't remember breakfast -- we look at lunch and superimpose it on breakfast. + +We make the future in the same way: we extrapolate as much as we can, and whenever we run out of imagination, we just shovel the present into the holes. That's why our pictures of the future always seem to resemble the present, only moreso. + +So the futurists told us about the Information Economy: they took all the "information-based" businesses (music, movies and microcode, in the neat coinage of Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash) and projected a future in which these would grow to dominate the world's economies. + +There was only one fly in the ointment: most of the world's economies consist of poor people who have more time than money, and if there's any lesson to learn from American college kids, it's that people with more time than money would rather copy information than pay for it. + +Of course they would! Why, when America was a-borning, she was a pirate nation, cheerfully copying the inventions of European authors and inventors. Why not? The fledgling revolutionary republic could copy without paying, keep the money on her shores, and enrich herself with the products and ideas of imperial Europe. Of course, once the US became a global hitter in the creative industries, out came the international copyright agreements: the US signed agreements to protect British authors in exchange for reciprocal agreements from the Brits to protect American authors. + +It's hard to see why a developing country would opt to export its GDP to a rich country when it could get the same benefit by mere copying. The US would have to sweeten the pot. + +The pot-sweetener is the elimination of international trade-barriers. Historically, the US has used tariffs to limit the import of manufactured goods from abroad, and to encourage the import of raw materials from abroad. Generally speaking, rich countries import poor countries' raw materials, process them into manufactured goods, and export them again. Globally speaking, if your country imports sugar and exports sugar cane, chances are you're poor. If your country imports wood and sells paper, chances are you're rich. + +In 1995, the US signed onto the World Trade Organization and its associated copyright and patent agreement, the TRIPS Agreement, and the American economy was transformed. + +Any fellow signatory to the WTO/TRIPS can export manufactured goods to the USA without any tariffs. If it costs you $5 to manufacture and ship a plastic bucket from your factory in Shenjin Province to the USA, you can sell it for $6 and turn a $1 profit. And if it costs an American manufacturer $10 to make the same bucket, the American manufacturer is out of luck. + +The kicker is this: if you want to export your finished goods to America, you have to sign up to protect American copyrights in your own country. Quid pro quo. + +The practical upshot, 12 years later, is that most American manufacturing has gone belly up, Wal-Mart is filled with Happy Meal toys and other cheaply manufactured plastic goods, and the whole world has signed onto US copyright laws. + +But signing onto those laws doesn't mean you'll enforce them. Sure, where a country is really over a barrel (cough, Russia, cough), they'll take the occasional pro forma step to enforce US copyrights, no matter how ridiculous and totalitarian it makes them appear. But with the monthly Russian per-capita GDP hovering at $200, it's just not plausible that Russians are going to start paying $15 for a CD, nor is it likely that they'll stop listening to music until their economy picks up. + +But the real action is in China, where pressing bootleg media is a national sport. China keeps promising that it will do something about this, but it's not like the US has any recourse if China drags its heels. Trade courts may find against China, but China holds all the cards. The US can't afford to abandon Chinese manufacturing (and no one will vote for the politician who hextuples the cost of WiFi cards, brassieres, iPods, staplers, yoga mats, and spatulas by cutting off trade with China). The Chinese can just sit tight. + +The futurists were just plain wrong. An "information economy" can't be based on selling information. Information technology makes copying information easier and easier. The more IT you have, the less control you have over the bits you send out into the world. It will never, ever, EVER get any harder to copy information from here on in. The information economy is about selling everything except information. + +The US traded its manufacturing sector's health for its entertainment industry, hoping that Police Academy sequels could take the place of the rustbelt. The US bet wrong. + +But like a losing gambler who keeps on doubling down, the US doesn't know when to quit. It keeps meeting with its entertainment giants, asking how US foreign and domestic policy can preserve its business-model. Criminalize 70 million American file-sharers? Check. Turn the world's copyright laws upside down? Check. Cream the IT industry by criminalizing attempted infringement? Check. + +It'll never work. It can never work. There will always be an entertainment industry, but not one based on excluding access to published digital works. Once it's in the world, it'll be copied. This is why I give away digital copies of my books and make money on the printed editions: I'm not going to stop people from copying the electronic editions, so I might as well treat them as an enticement to buy the printed objects. + +But there is an information economy. You don't even need a computer to participate. My barber, an avowed technophobe who rebuilds antique motorcycles and doesn't own a PC, benefited from the information economy when I found him by googling for barbershops in my neighborhood. + +Teachers benefit from the information economy when they share lesson plans with their colleagues around the world by email. Doctors benefit from the information economy when they move their patient files to efficient digital formats. Insurance companies benefit from the information economy through better access to fresh data used in the preparation of actuarial tables. Marinas benefit from the information economy when office-slaves look up the weekend's weather online and decide to skip out on Friday for a weekend's sailing. Families of migrant workers benefit from the information economy when their sons and daughters wire cash home from a convenience store Western Union terminal. + +This stuff generates wealth for those who practice it. It enriches the country and improves our lives. + +And it can peacefully co-exist with movies, music and microcode, but not if Hollywood gets to call the shots. Where IT managers are expected to police their networks and systems for unauthorized copying -- no matter what that does to productivity -- they cannot co-exist. Where our operating systems are rendered inoperable by "copy protection," they cannot co-exist. Where our educational institutions are turned into conscript enforcers for the record industry, they cannot co-exist. + +The information economy is all around us. The countries that embrace it will emerge as global economic superpowers. The countries that stubbornly hold to the simplistic idea that the information economy is about selling information will end up at the bottom of the pile. + +What country do you want to live in? + +$$$$ + +1~ Why Is Hollywood Making A Sequel To The Napster Wars? + +(Originally published in InformationWeek, August 14, 2007) ~# + +Hollywood loves sequels -- they're generally a safe bet, provided that you're continuing an already successful franchise. But you'd have to be nuts to shoot a sequel to a disastrous flop -- say, The Adventures of Pluto Nash or Town and Country. + +As disastrous as Pluto Nash was, it was practically painless when compared to the Napster debacle. That shipwreck took place six years ago, when the record industry succeeded in shutting down the pioneering file-sharing service, and they show no signs of recovery. + +!_ The disastrous thing about Napster wasn't that it it existed, but rather that the record industry managed to kill it. + +Napster had an industry-friendly business-model: raise venture capital, start charging for access to the service, and then pay billions of dollars to the record companies in exchange for licenses to their works. Yes, they kicked this plan off without getting permission from the record companies, but that's not so unusual. The record companies followed the same business plan a hundred years ago, when they started recording sheet music without permission, raising capital and garnering profits, and *{then}* working out a deal to pay the composers for the works they'd built their fortunes on. + +Napster's plan was plausible. They had the fastest-adopted technology in the history of the world, garnering 52,000,000 users in 18 months -- more than had voted for either candidate in the preceding US election! -- and discovering, via surveys, that a sizable portion would happily pay between $10 and $15 a month for the service. What's more, Napster's architecture included a gatekeeper that could be used to lock-out non-paying users. + +The record industry refused to deal. Instead, they sued, bringing Napster to its knees. Bertelsmann bought Napster out of the ensuing bankruptcy, a pattern that was followed by other music giants, like Universal, who slayed MP3.com in the courts, then brought home the corpse on the cheap, running it as an internal project. + +After that, the record companies had a field day: practically every venture-funded P2P company went down, and millions of dollars were funneled from the tech venture capital firms to Sand Hill Road to the RIAA's members, using P2P companies and the courts as conduits. + +But the record companies weren't ready to replace these services with equally compelling alternatives. Instead, they fielded inferior replacements like PressPlay, with limited catalog, high prices, and anti-copying technology (digital rights management, or DRM) that alienated users by the millions by treating them like crooks instead of customers. These half-baked ventures did untold damage to the record companies and their parent firms. + +Just look at Sony: they should have been at the top of the heap. They produce some of the world's finest, best-designed electronics. They own one of the largest record labels in the world. The synergy should have been incredible. Electronics would design the walkmen, music would take care of catalog, and marketing would sell it all. + +You know the joke about European hell? The English do the cooking, the Germans are the lovers, the Italians are the police and the French run the government. With Sony, it seemed like music was designing the walkmen, marketing was doing the catalog, and electronic was in charge of selling. Sony's portable players -- the MusicClip and others -- were so crippled by anti-copying technology that they couldn't even play MP3s, and the music selection at Sony services like PressPlay was anemic, expensive, and equally hobbled. Sony isn't even a name in the portable audio market anymore -- today's walkman is an iPod. + +Of course, Sony still has a record-label -- for now. But sales are falling, and the company is reeling from the 2005 "rootkit" debacle, where in deliberately infected eight million music CDs with a hacker tool called a rootkit, compromising over 500,000 US computer networks, including military and government networks, all in a (failed) bid to stop copying of its CDs. + +The public wasn't willing to wait for Sony and the rest to wake up and offer a service that was as compelling, exciting and versatile as Napster. Instead, they flocked to a new generation of services like Kazaa and the various Gnutella networks. Kazaa's business model was to set up offshore, on the tiny Polynesian island of Vanuatu, and bundle spyware with its software, making its profits off of fees from spyware crooks. Kazaa didn't want to pay billions for record industry licenses -- they used the international legal and finance system to hopelessly snarl the RIAA's members through half a decade of wild profitability. The company was eventually brought to ground, but the founders walked away and started Skype and then Joost. + +Meantime, dozens of other services had sprung up to fill Kazaa's niche -- AllofMP3, the notorious Russian site, was eventually killed through intervention of the US Trade Representative and the WTO, and was reborn practically the next day under a new name. + +It's been eight years since Sean Fanning created Napster in his college dorm-room. Eight years later, there isn't a single authorized music service that can compete with the original Napster. Record sales are down every year, and digital music sales aren't filling in the crater. The record industry has contracted to four companies, and it may soon be three if EMI can get regulatory permission to put itself on the block. + +The sue-em-all-and-let-God-sort-em-out plan was a flop in the box office, a flop in home video, and a flop overseas. So why is Hollywood shooting a remake? + +# + +YouTube, 2007, bears some passing similarity to Napster, 2001. Founded by a couple guys in a garage, rocketed to popular success, heavily capitalized by a deep-pocketed giant. Its business model? Turn popularity into dollars and offer a share to the rightsholders whose works they're using. This is an historically sound plan: cable operators got rich by retransmitting broadcasts without permission, and once they were commercial successes, they sat down to negotiate to pay for those copyrights (just as the record companies negotiated with composers *{after}* they'd gotten rich selling records bearing those compositions). + +YouTube 07 has another similarity to Napster 01: it is being sued by entertainment companies. + +Only this time, it's not (just) the record industry. Broadcasters, movie studios, anyone who makes video or audio is getting in on the act. I recently met an NBC employee who told me that he thought that a severe, punishing legal judgment would send a message to the tech industry not to field this kind of service anymore. + +Let's hope he's wrong. Google -- YouTube's owners -- is a grown-up of a company, unusual in a tech industry populated by corporate adolescents. They have lots of money and a sober interest in keeping it. They want to sit down with A/V rightsholders and do a deal. Six years after the Napster verdict, that kind of willingness is in short supply. + +Most of the tech "companies" with an interest in commercializing Internet AV have no interest in sitting down with the studios. They're either nebulous open source projects (like mythtv, a free hyper-TiVo that skips commercials, downloads and shares videos and is wide open to anyone who wants to modify and improve it), politically motivated anarchists (like ThePirateBay, a Swedish BitTorrent tracker site that has mirrors in three countries with non-interoperable legal systems, where they respond to legal notices by writing sarcastic and profane letters and putting them online), or out-and-out crooks like the bootleggers who use P2P to seed their DVD counterfeiting operations. + +It's not just YouTube. TiVo, who pioneered the personal video recorder, is feeling the squeeze, being systematically locked out of the digital cable and satellite market. Their efforts to add a managed TiVoToGo service were attacked by the rightsholders who fought at the FCC to block them. Cable/satellite operators and the studios would much prefer the public to transition to "bundled" PVRs that come with your TV service. + +These boxes are owned by the cable/satellite companies, who have absolute control over them. Time-Warner has been known to remotely delete stored episodes of shows just before the DVD ships, and many operators have started using "flags" that tell recorders not to allow fast-forwarding, or to prevent recording altogether. + +The reason that YouTube and TiVo are more popular than ThePirateBay and mythtv is that they're the easiest way for the public to get what it wants -- the video we want, the way we want it. We use these services because they're like the original Napster: easy, well-designed, functional. + +But if the entertainment industry squeezes these players out, ThePirateBay and mythtv are right there, waiting to welcome us in with open arms. ThePirateBay has already announced that it is launching a YouTube competitor with no-plugin, in-browser viewing. Plenty of entrepreneurs are looking at easing the pain and cast of setting up your own mythtv box. The only reason that the barriers to BitTorrent and mythtv exist is that it hasn't been worth anyone's while to capitalize projects to bring them down. But once the legit competitors of these services are killed, look out. + +The thing is, the public doesn't want managed services with limited rights. We don't want to be stuck using approved devices in approved ways. We never have -- we are the spiritual descendants of the customers for "illegal" record albums and "illegal" cable TV. The demand signal won't go away. + +There's no good excuse for going into production on a sequel to The Napster Wars. We saw that movie. We know how it turns out. Every Christmas, we get articles about how this was the worst Christmas ever for CDs. You know what? CD sales are *{never}* going to improve. CDs have been rendered obsolete by Internet distribution -- and the record industry has locked itself out of the only profitable, popular music distribution systems yet invented. + +Companies like Google/YouTube and TiVo are rarities: tech companies that want to do deals. They need to be cherished by entertainment companies, not sued. + +(Thanks to Bruce Nash and The-Numbers.com for research assistance with this article) + +$$$$ + +1~ You DO Like Reading Off a Computer Screen + +(Originally published in Locus Magazine, March 2007) ~# + +"I don't like reading off a computer screen" -- it's a cliché of the e-book world. It means "I don't read novels off of computer screens" (or phones, or PDAs, or dedicated e-book readers), and often as not the person who says it is someone who, in fact, spends every hour that Cthulhu sends reading off a computer screen. It's like watching someone shovel Mars Bars into his gob while telling you how much he hates chocolate. + +But I know what you mean. You don't like reading long-form works off of a computer screen. I understand perfectly -- in the ten minutes since I typed the first word in the paragraph above, I've checked my mail, deleted two spams, checked an image-sharing community I like, downloaded a YouTube clip of Stephen Colbert complaining about the iPhone (pausing my MP3 player first), cleared out my RSS reader, and then returned to write this paragraph. + +This is not an ideal environment in which to concentrate on long-form narrative (sorry, one sec, gotta blog this guy who's made cardboard furniture) (wait, the Colbert clip's done, gotta start the music up) (19 more RSS items). But that's not to say that it's not an entertainment medium -- indeed, practically everything I do on the computer entertains the hell out of me. It's nearly all text-based, too. Basically, what I do on the computer is pleasure-reading. But it's a fundamentally more scattered, splintered kind of pleasure. Computers have their own cognitive style, and it's not much like the cognitive style invented with the first modern novel (one sec, let me google that and confirm it), Don Quixote, some 400 years ago. + +The novel is an invention, one that was engendered by technological changes in information display, reproduction, and distribution. The cognitive style of the novel is different from the cognitive style of the legend. The cognitive style of the computer is different from the cognitive style of the novel. + +Computers want you to do lots of things with them. Networked computers doubly so -- they (another RSS item) have a million ways of asking for your attention, and just as many ways of rewarding it. + +There's a persistent fantasy/nightmare in the publishing world of the advent of very sharp, very portable computer screens. In the fantasy version, this creates an infinite new market for electronic books, and we all get to sell the rights to our work all over again. In the nightmare version, this leads to runaway piracy, and no one ever gets to sell a novel again. + +I think they're both wrong. The infinitely divisible copyright ignores the "decision cost" borne by users who have to decide, over and over again, whether they want to spend a millionth of a cent on a millionth of a word -- no one buys newspapers by the paragraph, even though most of us only read a slim fraction of any given paper. A super-sharp, super-portable screen would be used to read all day long, but most of us won't spend most of our time reading anything recognizable as a book on them. + +Take the record album. Everything about it is technologically pre-determined. The technology of the LP demanded artwork to differentiate one package from the next. The length was set by the groove density of the pressing plants and playback apparatus. The dynamic range likewise. These factors gave us the idea of the 40-to-60-minute package, split into two acts, with accompanying artwork. Musicians were encouraged to create works that would be enjoyed as a unitary whole for a protracted period -- think of Dark Side of the Moon, or Sgt. Pepper's. + +No one thinks about albums today. Music is now divisible to the single, as represented by an individual MP3, and then subdivisible into snippets like ringtones and samples. When recording artists demand that their works be considered as a whole -- like when Radiohead insisted that the iTunes Music Store sell their whole album as a single, indivisible file that you would have to listen to all the way through -- they sound like cranky throwbacks. + +The idea of a 60-minute album is as weird in the Internet era as the idea of sitting through 15 hours of Der Ring des Nibelungen was 20 years ago. There are some anachronisms who love their long-form opera, but the real action is in the more fluid stuff that can slither around on hot wax -- and now the superfluid droplets of MP3s and samples. Opera survives, but it is a tiny sliver of a much bigger, looser music market. The future composts the past: old operas get mounted for living anachronisms; Andrew Lloyd Webber picks up the rest of the business. + +Or look at digital video. We're watching more digital video, sooner, than anyone imagined. But we're watching it in three-minute chunks from YouTube. The video's got a pause button so you can stop it when the phone rings and a scrubber to go back and forth when you miss something while answering an IM. + +And attention spans don't increase when you move from the PC to a handheld device. These things have less capacity for multitasking than real PCs, and the network connections are slower and more expensive. But they are fundamentally multitasking devices -- you can always stop reading an e-book to play a hand of solitaire that is interrupted by a phone call -- and their social context is that they are used in public places, with a million distractions. It is socially acceptable to interrupt someone who is looking at a PDA screen. By contrast, the TV room -- a whole room for TV! -- is a shrine where none may speak until the commercial airs. + +The problem, then, isn't that screens aren't sharp enough to read novels off of. The problem is that novels aren't screeny enough to warrant protracted, regular reading on screens. + +Electronic books are a wonderful adjunct to print books. It's great to have a couple hundred novels in your pocket when the plane doesn't take off or the line is too long at the post office. It's cool to be able to search the text of a novel to find a beloved passage. It's excellent to use a novel socially, sending it to your friends, pasting it into your sig file. + +But the numbers tell their own story -- people who read off of screens all day long buy lots of print books and read them primarily on paper. There are some who prefer an all-electronic existence (I'd like to be able to get rid of the objects after my first reading, but keep the e-books around for reference), but they're in a tiny minority. + +There's a generation of web writers who produce "pleasure reading" on the web. Some are funny. Some are touching. Some are enraging. Most dwell in Sturgeon's 90th percentile and below. They're not writing novels. If they were, they wouldn't be web writers. + +Mostly, we can read just enough of a free e-book to decide whether to buy it in hardcopy -- but not enough to substitute the e-book for the hardcopy. Like practically everything in marketing and promotion, the trick is to find the form of the work that serves as enticement, not replacement. + +Sorry, got to go -- eight more e-mails. + +$$$$ + +1~ How Do You Protect Artists? + +(Originally published in The Guardian as "Online censorship hurts us all," Tuesday, Oct 2, 2007) ~# + +Artists have lots of problems. We get plagiarized, ripped off by publishers, savaged by critics, counterfeited -- and we even get our works copied by "pirates" who give our stuff away for free online. + +But no matter how bad these problems get, they're a distant second to the gravest, most terrifying problem an artist can face: censorship. + +It's one thing to be denied your credit or compensation, but it's another thing entirely to have your work suppressed, burned or banned. You'd never know it, however, judging from the state of the law surrounding the creation and use of internet publishing tools. + +Since 1995, every single legislative initiative on this subject in the UK's parliament, the European parliament and the US Congress has focused on making it easier to suppress "illegitimate" material online. From libel to copyright infringement, from child porn to anti-terror laws, our legislators have approached the internet with a single-minded focus on seeing to it that bad material is expeditiously removed. + +And that's the rub. I'm certainly no fan of child porn or hate speech, but every time a law is passed that reduces the burden of proof on those who would remove material from the internet, artists' fortunes everywhere are endangered. + +Take the US's 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which has equivalents in every European state that has implemented the 2001 European Union Copyright Directive. The DMCA allows anyone to have any document on the internet removed, simply by contacting its publisher and asserting that the work infringes his copyright. + +The potential for abuse is obvious, and the abuse has been widespread: from the Church of Scientology to companies that don't like what reporters write about them, DMCA takedown notices have fast become the favorite weapon in the cowardly bully's arsenal. + +But takedown notices are just the start. While they can help silence critics and suppress timely information, they're not actually very effective at stopping widespread copyright infringement. Viacom sent over 100,000 takedown notices to YouTube last February, but seconds after it was all removed, new users uploaded it again. + +Even these takedown notices were sloppily constructed: they included videos of friends eating at barbecue restaurants and videos of independent bands performing their own work. As a Recording Industry Association of America spokesman quipped, "When you go trawling with a net, you catch a few dolphins." + +Viacom and others want hosting companies and online service providers to preemptively evaluate all the material that their users put online, holding it to ensure that it doesn't infringe copyright before they release it. + +This notion is impractical in the extreme, for at least two reasons. First, an exhaustive list of copyrighted works would be unimaginably huge, as every single creative work is copyrighted from the instant that it is created and "fixed in a tangible medium". + +Second, even if such a list did exist, it would be trivial to defeat, simply by introducing small changes to the infringing copies, as spammers do with the text of their messages in order to evade spam filters. + +In fact, the spam wars have some important lessons to teach us here. Like copyrighted works, spams are infinitely varied and more are being created every second. Any company that could identify spam messages -- including permutations and variations on existing spams -- could write its own ticket to untold billions. + +Some of the smartest, most dedicated engineers on the planet devote every waking hour to figuring out how to spot spam before it gets delivered. If your inbox is anything like mine, you'll agree that the war is far from won. + +If the YouTubes of the world are going to prevent infringement, they're going to have to accomplish this by hand-inspecting every one of the tens of billions of blog posts, videos, text-files, music files and software uploads made to every single server on the internet. + +And not just cursory inspections, either -- these inspections will have to be undertaken by skilled, trained specialists (who'd better be talented linguists, too -- how many English speakers can spot an infringement in Urdu?). + +Such experts don't come cheap, which means that you can anticipate a terrible denuding of the fertile jungle of internet hosting companies that are primary means by which tens of millions of creative people share the fruits of their labor with their fans and colleagues. + +It would be a great Sovietisation of the world's digital printing presses, a contraction of a glorious anarchy of expression into a regimented world of expensive and narrow venues for art. + +It would be a death knell for the kind of focused, non-commercial material whose authors couldn't fit the bill for a "managed" service's legion of lawyers, who would be replaced by more of the same -- the kind of lowest common denominator rubbish that fills the cable channels today. + +And the worst of it is, we're marching toward this "solution" in the name of protecting artists. Gee, thanks. + +$$$$ + +1~ It's the Information Economy, Stupid + +(Originally published in The Guardian as "Free data sharing is here to stay," September 18, 2007) ~# + +Since the 1970s, pundits have predicted a transition to an "information economy." The vision of an economy based on information seized the imaginations of the world's governments. For decades now, they have been creating policies to "protect" information -- stronger copyright laws, international treaties on patents and trademarks, treaties to protect anti-copying technology. + +The thinking is simple: an information economy must be based on buying and selling information. Therefore, we need policies to make it harder to get access to information unless you've paid for it. That means that we have to make it harder for you to share information, even after you've paid for it. Without the ability to fence off your information property, you can't have an information market to fuel the information economy. + +But this is a tragic case of misunderstanding a metaphor. Just as the industrial economy wasn't based on making it harder to get access to machines, the information economy won't be based on making it harder to get access to information. Indeed, the opposite seems to be true: the more IT we have, the easier it is to access any given piece of information -- for better or for worse. + +It used to be that copy-prevention companies' strategies went like this: "We'll make it easier to buy a copy of this data than to make an unauthorized copy of it. That way, only the uber-nerds and the cash-poor/time-rich classes will bother to copy instead of buy." But every time a PC is connected to the Internet and its owner is taught to use search tools like Google (or The Pirate Bay), a third option appears: you can just download a copy from the Internet. Every techno-literate participant in the information economy can choose to access any data, without having to break the anti-copying technology, just by searching for the cracked copy on the public Internet. If there's one thing we can be sure of, it's that an information economy will increase the technological literacy of its participants. + +As I write this, I am sitting in a hotel room in Shanghai, behind the Great Firewall of China. Theoretically, I can't access blogging services that carry negative accounts of Beijing's doings, like Wordpress, Blogspot and Livejournal, nor the image-sharing site Flickr, nor Wikipedia. The (theoretically) omnipotent bureaucrats of the local Minitrue have deployed their finest engineering talent to stop me. Well, these cats may be able to order political prisoners executed and their organs harvested for Party members, but they've totally failed to keep Chinese people (and big-nose tourists like me) off the world's Internet. The WTO is rattling its sabers at China today, demanding that they figure out how to stop Chinese people from looking at Bruce Willis movies without permission -- but the Chinese government can't even figure out how to stop Chinese people from looking at seditious revolutionary tracts online. + +And, of course, as Paris Hilton, the Church of Scientology and the King of Thailand have discovered, taking a piece of information off the Internet is like getting food coloring out of a swimming pool. Good luck with that. + +To see the evidence of the real information economy, look to all the economic activity that the Internet enables -- not the stuff that it impedes. All the commerce conducted by salarymen who can book their own flights with Expedia instead of playing blind-man's bluff with a travel agent ("Got any flights after 4PM to Frankfurt?"). All the garage crafters selling their goods on Etsy.com. All the publishers selling obscure books through Amazon that no physical bookstore was willing to carry. The salwar kameez tailors in India selling bespoke clothes to westerners via eBay, without intervention by a series of skimming intermediaries. The Internet-era musicians who use the net to pack venues all over the world by giving away their recordings on social services like MySpace. Hell, look at my last barber, in Los Angeles: the man doesn't use a PC, but I found him by googling for "barbers" with my postcode -- the information economy is driving his cost of customer acquisition to zero, and he doesn't even have to actively participate in it. + +Better access to more information is the hallmark of the information economy. The more IT we have, the more skill we have, the faster our networks get and the better our search tools get, the more economic activity the information economy generates. Many of us sell information in the information economy -- I sell my printed books by giving away electronic books, lawyers and architects and consultants are in the information business and they drum up trade with Google ads, and Google is nothing but an info-broker -- but none of us rely on curtailing access to information. Like a bottled water company, we compete with free by supplying a superior service, not by eliminating the competition. + +The world's governments might have bought into the old myth of the information economy, but not so much that they're willing to ban the PC and the Internet. + +$$$$ + +1~ Downloads Give Amazon Jungle Fever + +(Originally published in The Guardian, December 11, 2007) ~# + +Let me start by saying that I love Amazon. I buy everything from books to clothes to electronics to medication to food to batteries to toys to furniture to baby supplies from the company. I once even bought an ironing board on Amazon. No company can top them for ease of use or for respecting consumer rights when it comes to refunds, ensuring satisfaction, and taking good care of loyal customers. + +As a novelist, I couldn't be happier about Amazon's existence. Not only does Amazon have a set of superb recommendation tools that help me sell books, but it also has an affiliate program that lets me get up to 8.5% in commissions for sales of my books through the site - nearly doubling my royalty rate. + +As a consumer advocate and activist, I'm delighted by almost every public policy initiative from Amazon. When the Author's Guild tried to get Amazon to curtail its used-book market, the company refused to back down. Founder Jeff Bezos (who is a friend of mine) even wrote, "when someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this." + +More recently, Amazon stood up to the US government, who'd gone on an illegal fishing expedition for terrorists (TERRORISTS! TERRORISTS! TERRORISTS!) and asked Amazon to turn over the purchasing history of 24,000 Amazon customers. The company spent a fortune fighting for our rights, and won. + +It also has a well-deserved reputation for taking care over copyright "takedown" notices for the material that its customers post on its site, discarding ridiculous claims rather than blindly acting on every single notice, no matter how frivolous. + +But for all that, it has to be said: Whenever Amazon tries to sell a digital download, it turns into one of the dumbest companies on the web. + +Take the Kindle, the $400 handheld ebook reader that Amazon shipped recently, to vast, ringing indifference. + +The device is cute enough - in a clumsy, overpriced, generation-one kind of way - but the early adopter community recoiled in horror at the terms of service and anti-copying technology that infected it. Ebooks that you buy through the Kindle can't be lent or resold (remember, "when someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book...Everyone understands this.") + +Mark Pilgrim's "The Future of Reading" enumerates five other Kindle showstoppers: Amazon can change your ebooks without notifying you or getting your permission; and if you violate any of the "agreement", it can delete your ebooks, even if you've paid for them, and you get no appeal. + + +It's not just the Kindle, either. Amazon Unbox, the semi-abortive video download service, shipped with terms of service that included your granting permission for Amazon to install any software on your computer, to spy on you, to delete your videos, to delete any other file on your hard drive, to deny you access to your movies if you lose them in a crash. This comes from the company that will cheerfully ship you a replacement DVD if you email them and tell them that the one you just bought never turned up in the post. + +Even Amazon's much-vaunted MP3 store comes with terms of service that prevent lending and reselling. + +I am mystified by this. Amazon is the kind of company that every etailer should study and copy - the gold standard for e-commerce. You'd think that if there was any company that would intuitively get the web, it would be Amazon. + +What's more, this is a company that stands up to rightsholder groups, publishers and the US government - but only when it comes to physical goods. Why is it that whenever a digital sale is in the offing, Amazon rolls over on its back and wets itself? + +$$$$ + +1~ What's the Most Important Right Creators Have? + +(Originally published as "How Big Media's Copyright Campaigns Threaten Internet Free Expression," InformationWeek, November 5, 2007) ~# + +Any discussion of "creator's rights" is likely to be limited to talk about copyright, but copyright is just a side-dish for creators: the most important right we have is the right to free expression. And these two rights are always in tension. + +Take Viacom's claims against YouTube. The entertainment giant says that YouTube has been profiting from the fact that YouTube users upload clips from Viacom shows, and they demand that YouTube take steps to prevent this from happening in the future. YouTube actually offered to do something very like this: they invited Viacom and other rightsholders to send them all the clips they wanted kept offline, and promised to programatically detect these clips and interdict them. + +But Viacom rejected this offer. Rather, the company wants YouTube to just figure it out, determine a priori which video clips are being presented with permission and which ones are not. After all, Viacom does the very same thing: it won't air clips until a battalion of lawyers have investigated them and determined whether they are lawful. + +But the Internet is not cable television. Net-based hosting outfits -- including YouTube, Flickr, Blogger, Scribd, and the Internet Archive -- offer free publication venues to all comers, enabling anyone to publish anything. In 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Congress considered the question of liability for these companies and decided to offer them a mixed deal: hosting companies don't need to hire a million lawyers to review every blog-post before it goes live, but rightsholders can order them to remove any infringing material from the net just by sending them a notice that the material infringes. + +This deal enabled hosting companies to offer free platforms for publication and expression to everyone. But it also allowed anyone to censor the Internet, just by making claims of infringement, without offering any evidence to support those claims, without having to go to court to prove their claims (this has proven to be an attractive nuisance, presenting an irresistible lure to anyone with a beef against an online critic, from the Church of Scientology to Diebold's voting machines division). + +The proposal for online hosts to figure out what infringes and what doesn't is wildly impractical. Under most countries' copyright laws, creative works receive a copyright from the moment that they are "fixed in a tangible medium" (hard drives count), and this means that the pool of copyrighted works is so large as to be practically speaking infinite. Knowing whether a work is copyrighted, who holds the copyright, and whether a posting is made with the rightsholder's permission (or in accord with each nation's varying ideas about fair use) is impossible. The only way to be sure is to start from the presumption that each creative work is infringing, and then make each Internet user prove, to some lawyer's satisfaction, that she has the right to post each drib of content that appears on the Web. + +Imagine that such a system were the law of the land. There's no way Blogger or YouTube or Flickr could afford to offer free hosting to their users. Rather, all these hosted services would have to charge enough for access to cover the scorching legal bills associated with checking all material. And not just the freebies, either: your local ISP, the servers hosting your company's website or your page for family genealogy: they'd all have to do the same kind of continuous checking and re-checking of every file you publish with them. + +It would be the end of any publication that couldn't foot the legal bills to get off the ground. The multi-billion-page Internet would collapse into the homogeneous world of cable TV (remember when we thought that a "500-channel universe" would be unimaginably broad? Imagine an Internet with only 500 "channels!"). From Amazon to Ask A Ninja, from Blogger to The Everlasting Blort, every bit of online content is made possible by removing the cost of paying lawyers to act as the Internet's gatekeepers. + +This is great news for artists. The traditional artist's lament is that our publishers have us over a barrel, controlling the narrow and vital channels for making works available -- from big gallery owners to movie studios to record labels to New York publishers. That's why artists have such a hard time negotiating a decent deal for themselves (for example, most beginning recording artists have to agree to have money deducted from their royalty statements for "breakage" of records en route to stores -- and these deductions are also levied against digital sales through the iTunes Store!). + +But, thanks to the web, artists have more options than ever. The Internet's most popular video podcasts aren't associated with TV networks (with all the terrible, one-sided deals that would entail), rather, they're independent programs like RocketBoom, Homestar Runner, or the late, lamented Ze Frank Show. These creators -- along with all the musicians, writers, and other artists using the net to earn their living -- were able to write their own ticket. Today, major artists like Radiohead and Madonna are leaving the record labels behind and trying novel, net-based ways of promoting their work. + +And it's not just the indies who benefit: the existence of successful independent artists creates fantastic leverage for artists who negotiate with the majors. More and more, the big media companies' "like it or leave it" bargaining stance is being undermined by the possibility that the next big star will shrug, turn on her heel, and make her fortune without the big companies' help. This has humbled the bigs, making their deals better and more artist-friendly. + +Bargaining leverage is just for starters. The greatest threat that art faces is suppression. Historically, artists have struggled just to make themselves heard, just to safeguard the right to express themselves. Censorship is history's greatest enemy of art. A limited-liability Web is a Web where anyone can post anything and reach *{everyone}*. + +What's more, this privilege isn't limited to artists. All manner of communication, from the personal introspection in public "diaries" to social chatter on MySpace and Facebook, are now possible. Some artists have taken the bizarre stance that this "trivial" matter is unimportant and thus a poor excuse for allowing hosted services to exist in the first place. This is pretty arrogant: a society where only artists are allowed to impart "important" messages and where the rest of us are supposed to shut up about our loves, hopes, aspirations, jokes, family and wants is hardly a democratic paradise. + +Artists are in the free expression business, and technology that helps free expression helps artists. When lowering the cost of copyright enforcement raises the cost of free speech, every artist has a duty to speak out. Our ability to make our art is inextricably linked with the billions of Internet users who use the network to talk about their lives. + +$$$$ + +1~ Giving it Away + +(Originally published in Forbes.com, December 2006) ~# + +I've been giving away my books ever since my first novel came out, and boy has it ever made me a bunch of money. + +When my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was published by Tor Books in January 2003, I also put the entire electronic text of the novel on the Internet under a Creative Commons License that encouraged my readers to copy it far and wide. Within a day, there were 30,000 downloads from my site (and those downloaders were in turn free to make more copies). Three years and six printings later, more than 700,000 copies of the book have been downloaded from my site. The book's been translated into more languages than I can keep track of, key concepts from it have been adopted for software projects and there are two competing fan audio adaptations online. + +Most people who download the book don't end up buying it, but they wouldn't have bought it in any event, so I haven't lost any sales, I've just won an audience. A tiny minority of downloaders treat the free e-book as a substitute for the printed book--those are the lost sales. But a much larger minority treat the e-book as an enticement to buy the printed book. They're gained sales. As long as gained sales outnumber lost sales, I'm ahead of the game. After all, distributing nearly a million copies of my book has cost me nothing. + +The thing about an e-book is that it's a social object. It wants to be copied from friend to friend, beamed from a Palm device, pasted into a mailing list. It begs to be converted to witty signatures at the bottom of e-mails. It is so fluid and intangible that it can spread itself over your whole life. Nothing sells books like a personal recommendation--when I worked in a bookstore, the sweetest words we could hear were "My friend suggested I pick up...." The friend had made the sale for us, we just had to consummate it. In an age of online friendship, e-books trump dead trees for word of mouth. + +There are two things that writers ask me about this arrangement: First, does it sell more books, and second, how did you talk your publisher into going for this mad scheme? + +There's no empirical way to prove that giving away books sells more books--but I've done this with three novels and a short story collection (and I'll be doing it with two more novels and another collection in the next year), and my books have consistently outperformed my publisher's expectations. Comparing their sales to the numbers provided by colleagues suggests that they perform somewhat better than other books from similar writers at similar stages in their careers. But short of going back in time and re-releasing the same books under the same circumstances without the free e-book program, there's no way to be sure. + +What is certain is that every writer who's tried giving away e-books to sell books has come away satisfied and ready to do it some more. + +How did I talk Tor Books into letting me do this? It's not as if Tor is a spunky dotcom upstart. They're the largest science fiction publisher in the world, and they're a division of the German publishing giant Holtzbrinck. They're not patchouli-scented info-hippies who believe that information wants to be free. Rather, they're canny assessors of the world of science fiction, perhaps the most social of all literary genres. Science fiction is driven by organized fandom, volunteers who put on hundreds of literary conventions in every corner of the globe, every weekend of the year. These intrepid promoters treat books as markers of identity and as cultural artifacts of great import. They evangelize the books they love, form subcultures around them, cite them in political arguments, sometimes they even rearrange their lives and jobs around them. + +What's more, science fiction's early adopters defined the social character of the Internet itself. Given the high correlation between technical employment and science fiction reading, it was inevitable that the first nontechnical discussion on the Internet would be about science fiction. The online norms of idle chatter, fannish organizing, publishing and leisure are descended from SF fandom, and if any literature has a natural home in cyberspace, it's science fiction, the literature that coined the very word "cyberspace." + +Indeed, science fiction was the first form of widely pirated literature online, through "bookwarez" channels that contained books that had been hand-scanned, a page at a time, converted to digital text and proof-read. Even today, the mostly widely pirated literature online is SF. + +Nothing could make me more sanguine about the future. As publisher Tim O'Reilly wrote in his seminal essay, Piracy is Progressive Taxation, "being well-enough known to be pirated [is] a crowning achievement." I'd rather stake my future on a literature that people care about enough to steal than devote my life to a form that has no home in the dominant medium of the century. + +What about that future? Many writers fear that in the future, electronic books will come to substitute more readily for print books, due to changing audiences and improved technology. I am skeptical of this--the codex format has endured for centuries as a simple and elegant answer to the affordances demanded by print, albeit for a relatively small fraction of the population. Most people aren't and will never be readers--but the people who are readers will be readers forever, and they are positively pervy for paper. + +But say it does come to pass that electronic books are all anyone wants. + +I don't think it's practical to charge for copies of electronic works. Bits aren't ever going to get harder to copy. So we'll have to figure out how to charge for something else. That's not to say you can't charge for a copy-able bit, but you sure can't force a reader to pay for access to information anymore. + +This isn't the first time creative entrepreneurs have gone through one of these transitions. Vaudeville performers had to transition to radio, an abrupt shift from having perfect control over who could hear a performance (if they don't buy a ticket, you throw them out) to no control whatsoever (any family whose 12-year-old could build a crystal set, the day's equivalent of installing file-sharing software, could tune in). There were business models for radio, but predicting them a priori wasn't easy. Who could have foreseen that radio's great fortunes would be had through creating a blanket license, securing a Congressional consent decree, chartering a collecting society and inventing a new form of statistical mathematics to fund it? + +Predicting the future of publishing--should the wind change and printed books become obsolete--is just as hard. I don't know how writers would earn their living in such a world, but I do know that I'll never find out by turning my back on the Internet. By being in the middle of electronic publishing, by watching what hundreds of thousands of my readers do with my e-books, I get better market intelligence than I could through any other means. As does my publisher. As serious as I am about continuing to work as a writer for the foreseeable future, Tor Books and Holtzbrinck are just as serious. They've got even more riding on the future of publishing than me. So when I approached my publisher with this plan to give away books to sell books, it was a no-brainer for them. + +It's good business for me, too. This "market research" of giving away e-books sells printed books. What's more, having my books more widely read opens many other opportunities for me to earn a living from activities around my writing, such as the Fulbright Chair I got at USC this year, this high-paying article in Forbes, speaking engagements and other opportunities to teach, write and license my work for translation and adaptation. My fans' tireless evangelism for my work doesn't just sell books--it sells me. + +The golden age of hundreds of writers who lived off of nothing but their royalties is bunkum. Throughout history, writers have relied on day jobs, teaching, grants, inheritances, translation, licensing and other varied sources to make ends meet. The Internet not only sells more books for me, it also gives me more opportunities to earn my keep through writing-related activities. + +There has never been a time when more people were reading more words by more authors. The Internet is a literary world of written words. What a fine thing that is for writers. + +$$$$ + +1~ Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on the Internet + +(Originally published in Locus Magazine, July 2006) + +As a science fiction writer, no piece of news could make me more hopeful. It beats the hell out of the alternative -- a future where the dominant, pluripotent, ubiquitous medium has no place for science fiction literature. + +When radio and records were invented, they were pretty bad news for the performers of the day. Live performance demanded charisma, the ability to really put on a magnetic show in front of a crowd. It didn't matter how technically accomplished you were: if you stood like a statue on stage, no one wanted to see you do your thing. On the other hand, you succeeded as a mediocre player, provided you attacked your performance with a lot of brio. + +Radio was clearly good news for musicians -- lots more musicians were able to make lots more music, reaching lots more people and making lots more money. It turned performance into an industry, which is what happens when you add technology to art. But it was terrible news for charismatics. It put them out on the street, stuck them with flipping burgers and driving taxis. They knew it, too. Performers lobbied to have the Marconi radio banned, to send Marconi back to the drawing board, charged with inventing a radio they could charge admission to. "We're charismatics, we do something as old and holy as the first story told before the first fire in the first cave. What right have you to insist that we should become mere clerks, working in an obscure back-room, leaving you to commune with our audiences on our behalf?" + +Technology giveth and technology taketh away. Seventy years later, Napster showed us that, as William Gibson noted, "We may be at the end of the brief period during which it is possible to charge for recorded music." Surely we're at the end of the period where it's possible to exclude those who don't wish to pay. Every song released can be downloaded gratis from a peer-to-peer network (and will shortly get easier to download, as hard-drive price/performance curves take us to a place where all the music ever recorded will fit on a disposable pocket-drive that you can just walk over to a friend's place and copy). + +But have no fear: the Internet makes it possible for recording artists to reach a wider audience than ever dreamt of before. Your potential fans may be spread in a thin, even coat over the world, in a configuration that could never be cost-effective to reach with traditional marketing. But the Internet's ability to lower the costs for artists to reach their audiences and for audiences to find artists suddenly renders possible more variety in music than ever before. + +Those artists can use the Internet to bring people back to the live performances that characterized the heyday of Vaudeville. Use your recordings -- which you can't control -- to drive admissions to your performances, which you can control. It's a model that's worked great for jam bands like the Grateful Dead and Phish. It's also a model that won't work for many of today's artists; 70 years of evolutionary pressure has selected for artists who are more virtuoso than charismatic, artists optimized for recording-based income instead of performance-based income. "How dare you tell us that we are to be trained monkeys, capering on a stage for your amusement? We're not charismatics, we're white-collar workers. We commune with our muses behind closed doors and deliver up our work product when it's done, through plastic, laser-etched discs. You have no right to demand that we convert to a live-performance economy." + +Technology giveth and technology taketh away. As bands on MySpace -- who can fill houses and sell hundreds of thousands of discs without a record deal, by connecting individually with fans -- have shown, there's a new market aborning on the Internet for music, one with fewer gatekeepers to creativity than ever before. + +That's the purpose of copyright, after all: to decentralize who gets to make art. Before copyright, we had patronage: you could make art if the Pope or the king liked the sound of it. That produced some damned pretty ceilings and frescos, but it wasn't until control of art was given over to the market -- by giving publishers a monopoly over the works they printed, starting with the Statute of Anne in 1710 -- that we saw the explosion of creativity that investment-based art could create. Industrialists weren't great arbiters of who could and couldn't make art, but they were better than the Pope. + +The Internet is enabling a further decentralization in who gets to make art, and like each of the technological shifts in cultural production, it's good for some artists and bad for others. The important question is: will it let more people participate in cultural production? Will it further decentralize decision-making for artists? + +And for SF writers and fans, the further question is, "Will it be any good to our chosen medium?" Like I said, science fiction is the only literature people care enough about to steal on the Internet. It's the only literature that regularly shows up, scanned and run through optical character recognition software and lovingly hand-edited on darknet newsgroups, Russian websites, IRC channels and elsewhere (yes, there's also a brisk trade in comics and technical books, but I'm talking about prose fiction here -- though this is clearly a sign of hope for our friends in tech publishing and funnybooks). + +Some writers are using the Internet's affinity for SF to great effect. I've released every one of my novels under Creative Commons licenses that encourage fans to share them freely and widely -- even, in some cases, to remix them and to make new editions of them for use in the developing world. My first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, is in its sixth printing from Tor, and has been downloaded more than 650,000 times from my website, and an untold number of times from others' websites. + +I've discovered what many authors have also discovered: releasing electronic texts of books drives sales of the print editions. An SF writer's biggest problem is obscurity, not piracy. Of all the people who chose not to spend their discretionary time and cash on our works today, the great bulk of them did so because they didn't know they existed, not because someone handed them a free e-book version. + +But what kind of artist thrives on the Internet? Those who can establish a personal relationship with their readers -- something science fiction has been doing for as long as pros have been hanging out in the con suite instead of the green room. These conversational artists come from all fields, and they combine the best aspects of charisma and virtuosity with charm -- the ability to conduct their online selves as part of a friendly salon that establishes a non-substitutable relationship with their audiences. You might find a film, a game, and a book to be equally useful diversions on a slow afternoon, but if the novel's author is a pal of yours, that's the one you'll pick. It's a competitive advantage that can't be beat. + +See Neil Gaiman's blog, where he manages the trick of carrying on a conversation with millions. Or Charlie Stross's Usenet posts. Scalzi's blogs. J. Michael Straczynski's presence on Usenet -- while in production on Babylon 5, no less -- breeding an army of rabid fans ready to fax-bomb recalcitrant TV execs into submission and syndication. See also the MySpace bands selling a million units of their CDs by adding each buyer to their "friends lists." Watch Eric Flint manage the Baen Bar, and Warren Ellis's good-natured growling on his sites, lists, and so forth. + +Not all artists have in them to conduct an online salon with their audiences. Not all Vaudevillians had it in them to transition to radio. Technology giveth and technology taketh away. SF writers are supposed to be soaked in the future, ready to come to grips with it. The future is conversational: when there's more good stuff that you know about that's one click away or closer than you will ever click on, it's not enough to know that some book is good. The least substitutable good in the Internet era is the personal relationship. + +Conversation, not content, is king. If you were stranded on a desert island and you opted to bring your records instead of your friends, we'd call you a sociopath. Science fiction writers who can insert themselves into their readers' conversations will be set for life. + +$$$$ + +1~ How Copyright Broke + +(Originally published in Locus Magazine, September, 2006) ~# + +The theory is that if the Internet can't be controlled, then copyright is dead. The thing is, the Internet is a machine for copying things cheaply, quickly, and with as little control as possible, while copyright is the right to control who gets to make copies, so these two abstractions seem destined for a fatal collision, right? + +Wrong. + +The idea that copyright confers the exclusive right to control copying, performance, adaptation, and general use of a creative work is a polite fiction that has been mostly harmless throughout its brief history, but which has been laid bare by the Internet, and the disjoint is showing. + +Theoretically, if I sell you a copy of one of my novels, I'm conferring upon you a property interest in a lump of atoms -- the pages of the book -- as well as a license to make some reasonable use of the ethereal ideas embedded upon the page, the copyrighted work. + +Copyright started with a dispute between Scottish and English publishers, and the first copyright law, 1709's Statute of Anne, conferred the exclusive right to publish new editions of a book on the copyright holder. It was a fair competition statute, and it was silent on the rights that the copyright holder had in respect of his customers: the readers. Publishers got a legal tool to fight their competitors, a legal tool that made a distinction between the corpus -- a physical book -- and the spirit -- the novel writ on its pages. But this legal nicety was not "customer-facing." As far as a reader was concerned, once she bought a book, she got the same rights to it as she got to any other physical object, like a potato or a shovel. Of course, the reader couldn't print a new edition, but this had as much to do with the realities of technology as it did with the law. Printing presses were rare and expensive: telling a 17th-century reader that he wasn't allowed to print a new edition of a book you sold him was about as meaningful as telling him he wasn't allowed to have it laser-etched on the surface of the moon. Publishing books wasn't something readers did. + +Indeed, until the photocopier came along, it was practically impossible for a member of the audience to infringe copyright in a way that would rise to legal notice. Copyright was like a tank-mine, designed only to go off when a publisher or record company or radio station rolled over it. We civilians couldn't infringe copyright (many thanks to Jamie Boyle for this useful analogy). + +It wasn't the same for commercial users of copyrighted works. For the most part, a radio station that played a record was expected to secure permission to do so (though this permission usually comes in the form of a government-sanctioned blanket license that cuts through all the expense of negotiating in favor of a single monthly payment that covers all radio play). If you shot a movie, you were expected to get permission for the music you put in it. Critically, there are many uses that commercial users never paid for. Most workplaces don't pay for the music their employees enjoy while they work. An ad agency that produces a demo reel of recent commercials to use as part of a creative briefing to a designer doesn't pay for this extremely commercial use. A film company whose set-designer clips and copies from magazines and movies to produce a "mood book" never secures permission nor offers compensation for these uses. + +Theoretically, the contours of what you may and may not do without permission are covered under a legal doctrine called "fair use," which sets out the factors a judge can use to weigh the question of whether an infringement should be punished. While fair use is a vital part of the way that works get made and used, it's very rare for an unauthorized use to get adjudicated on this basis. + +No, the realpolitik of unauthorized use is that users are not required to secure permission for uses that the rights holder will never discover. If you put some magazine clippings in your mood book, the magazine publisher will never find out you did so. If you stick a Dilbert cartoon on your office-door, Scott Adams will never know about it. + +So while technically the law has allowed rights holders to infinitely discriminate among the offerings they want to make -- Special discounts on this book, which may only be read on Wednesdays! This film half-price, if you agree only to show it to people whose names start with D! -- practicality has dictated that licenses could only be offered on enforceable terms. + +When it comes to retail customers for information goods -- readers, listeners, watchers -- this whole license abstraction falls flat. No one wants to believe that the book he's brought home is only partly his, and subject to the terms of a license set out on the flyleaf. You'd be a flaming jackass if you showed up at a con and insisted that your book may not be read aloud, nor photocopied in part and marked up for a writers' workshop, nor made the subject of a piece of fan-fiction. + +At the office, you might get a sweet deal on a coffee machine on the promise that you'll use a certain brand of coffee, and even sign off on a deal to let the coffee company check in on this from time to time. But no one does this at home. We instinctively and rightly recoil from the idea that our personal, private dealings in our homes should be subject to oversight from some company from whom we've bought something. We bought it. It's ours. Even when we rent things, like cars, we recoil from the idea that Hertz might track our movements, or stick a camera in the steering wheel. + +When the Internet and the PC made it possible to sell a lot of purely digital "goods" -- software, music, movies and books delivered as pure digits over the wire, without a physical good changing hands, the copyright lawyers groped about for a way to take account of this. It's in the nature of a computer that it copies what you put on it. A computer is said to be working, and of high quality, in direct proportion to the degree to which it swiftly and accurately copies the information that it is presented with. + +The copyright lawyers had a versatile hammer in their toolbox: the copyright license. These licenses had been presented to corporations for years. Frustratingly (for the lawyers), these corporate customers had their own counsel, and real bargaining power, which made it impossible to impose really interesting conditions on them, like limiting the use of a movie such that it couldn't be fast-forwarded, or preventing the company from letting more than one employee review a journal at a time. + +Regular customers didn't have lawyers or negotiating leverage. They were a natural for licensing regimes. Have a look at the next click-through "agreement" you're provided with on purchasing a piece of software or an electronic book or song. The terms set out in those agreements are positively Dickensian in their marvelous idiocy. Sony BMG recently shipped over eight million music CDs with an "agreement" that bound its purchasers to destroy their music if they left the country or had a house-fire, and to promise not to listen to their tunes while at work. + +But customers understand property -- you bought it, you own it -- and they don't understand copyright. Practically no one understands copyright. I know editors at multibillion-dollar publishing houses who don't know the difference between copyright and trademark (if you've ever heard someone say, "You need to defend a copyright or you lose it," you've found one of these people who confuse copyright and trademark; what's more, this statement isn't particularly true of trademark, either). I once got into an argument with a senior Disney TV exec who truly believed that if you re-broadcasted an old program, it was automatically re-copyrighted and got another 95 years of exclusive use (that's wrong). + +So this is where copyright breaks: When copyright lawyers try to treat readers and listeners and viewers as if they were (weak and unlucky) corporations who could be strong-armed into license agreements you wouldn't wish on a dog. There's no conceivable world in which people are going to tiptoe around the property they've bought and paid for, re-checking their licenses to make sure that they're abiding by the terms of an agreement they doubtless never read. Why read something if it's non-negotiable, anyway? + +The answer is simple: treat your readers' property as property. What readers do with their own equipment, as private, noncommercial actors, is not a fit subject for copyright regulation or oversight. The Securities Exchange Commission doesn't impose rules on you when you loan a friend five bucks for lunch. Anti-gambling laws aren't triggered when you bet your kids an ice-cream cone that you'll bicycle home before them. Copyright shouldn't come between an end-user of a creative work and her property. + +Of course, this approach is made even simpler by the fact that practically every customer for copyrighted works already operates on this assumption. Which is not to say that this might make some business-models more difficult to pursue. Obviously, if there was some way to ensure that a given publisher was the only source for a copyrighted work, that publisher could hike up its prices, devote less money to service, and still sell its wares. Having to compete with free copies handed from user to user makes life harder -- hasn't it always? + +But it is most assuredly possible. Look at Apple's wildly popular iTunes Music Store, which has sold over one billion tracks since 2003. Every song on iTunes is available as a free download from user-to-user, peer-to-peer networks like Kazaa. Indeed, the P2P monitoring company Big Champagne reports that the average time-lapse between a iTunes-exclusive song being offered by Apple and that same song being offered on P2P networks is 180 seconds. + +Every iTunes customer could readily acquire every iTunes song for free, using the fastest-adopted technology in history. Many of them do (just as many fans photocopy their favorite stories from magazines and pass them around to friends). But Apple has figured out how to compete well enough by offering a better service and a better experience to realize a good business out of this. (Apple also imposes ridiculous licensing restrictions, but that's a subject for a future column). + +Science fiction is a genre of clear-eyed speculation about the future. It should have no place for wishful thinking about a world where readers willingly put up with the indignity of being treated as "licensees" instead of customers. + +$$$$ + +!_ And now a brief commercial interlude: + +If you're enjoying this book and have been thinking of buying a copy, here's a chance to do so: + +http://craphound.com/content/buy + +$$$$ + +1~ In Praise of Fanfic + +(Originally published in Locus Magazine, May 2007) ~# + +I wrote my first story when I was six. It was 1977, and I had just had my mind blown clean out of my skull by a new movie called Star Wars (the golden age of science fiction is 12; the golden age of cinematic science fiction is six). I rushed home and stapled a bunch of paper together, trimmed the sides down so that it approximated the size and shape of a mass-market paperback, and set to work. I wrote an elaborate, incoherent ramble about Star Wars, in which the events of the film replayed themselves, tweaked to suit my tastes. + +I wrote a lot of Star Wars fanfic that year. By the age of 12, I'd graduated to Conan. By the age of 18, it was Harlan Ellison. By the age of 26, it was Bradbury, by way of Gibson. Today, I hope I write more or less like myself. + +Walk the streets of Florence and you'll find a copy of the David on practically every corner. For centuries, the way to become a Florentine sculptor has been to copy Michelangelo, to learn from the master. Not just the great Florentine sculptors, either -- great or terrible, they all start with the master; it can be the start of a lifelong passion, or a mere fling. The copy can be art, or it can be crap -- the best way to find out which kind you've got inside you is to try. + +Science fiction has the incredible good fortune to have attracted huge, social groups of fan-fiction writers. Many pros got their start with fanfic (and many of them still work at it in secret), and many fanfic writers are happy to scratch their itch by working only with others' universes, for the sheer joy of it. Some fanfic is great -- there's plenty of Buffy fanfic that trumps the official, licensed tie-in novels -- and some is purely dreadful. + +Two things are sure about all fanfic, though: first, that people who write and read fanfic are already avid readers of writers whose work they're paying homage to; and second, that the people who write and read fanfic derive fantastic satisfaction from their labors. This is great news for writers. + +Great because fans who are so bought into your fiction that they'll make it their own are fans forever, fans who'll evangelize your work to their friends, fans who'll seek out your work however you publish it. + +Great because fans who use your work therapeutically, to work out their own creative urges, are fans who have a damned good reason to stick with the field, to keep on reading even as our numbers dwindle. Even when the fandom revolves around movies or TV shows, fanfic is itself a literary pursuit, something undertaken in the world of words. The fanfic habit is a literary habit. + +In Japan, comic book fanfic writers publish fanfic manga called dojinshi -- some of these titles dwarf the circulation of the work they pay tribute to, and many of them are sold commercially. Japanese comic publishers know a good thing when they see it, and these fanficcers get left alone by the commercial giants they attach themselves to. + +And yet for all this, there are many writers who hate fanfic. Some argue that fans have no business appropriating their characters and situations, that it's disrespectful to imagine your precious fictional people into sexual scenarios, or to retell their stories from a different point of view, or to snatch a victorious happy ending from the tragic defeat the writer ended her book with. + +Other writers insist that fans who take without asking -- or against the writer's wishes -- are part of an "entitlement culture" that has decided that it has the moral right to lift scenarios and characters without permission, that this is part of our larger postmodern moral crisis that is making the world a worse place. + +Some writers dismiss all fanfic as bad art and therefore unworthy of appropriation. Some call it copyright infringement or trademark infringement, and every now and again, some loony will actually threaten to sue his readers for having had the gall to tell his stories to each other. + +I'm frankly flabbergasted by these attitudes. Culture is a lot older than art -- that is, we have had social storytelling for a lot longer than we've had a notional class of artistes whose creativity is privileged and elevated to the numinous, far above the everyday creativity of a kid who knows that she can paint and draw, tell a story and sing a song, sculpt and invent a game. + +To call this a moral failing -- and a new moral failing at that! -- is to turn your back on millions of years of human history. It's no failing that we internalize the stories we love, that we rework them to suit our minds better. The Pygmalion story didn't start with Shaw or the Greeks, nor did it end with My Fair Lady. Pygmalion is at least thousands of years old -- think of Moses passing for the Pharaoh's son! -- and has been reworked in a billion bedtime stories, novels, D&D games, movies, fanfic stories, songs, and legends. + +Each person who retold Pygmalion did something both original -- no two tellings are just alike -- and derivative, for there are no new ideas under the sun. Ideas are easy. Execution is hard. That's why writers don't really get excited when they're approached by people with great ideas for novels. We've all got more ideas than we can use -- what we lack is the cohesive whole. + +Much fanfic -- the stuff written for personal consumption or for a small social group -- isn't bad art. It's just not art. It's not written to make a contribution to the aesthetic development of humanity. It's created to satisfy the deeply human need to play with the stories that constitute our world. There's nothing trivial about telling stories with your friends -- even if the stories themselves are trivial. The act of telling stories to one another is practically sacred -- and it's unquestionably profound. What's more, lots of retellings are art: witness Pat Murphy's wonderful There and Back Again (Tolkien) and Geoff Ryman's brilliant World Fantasy Award-winning Was (L. Frank Baum). + +The question of respect is, perhaps, a little thornier. The dominant mode of criticism in fanfic circles is to compare a work to the canon -- "Would Spock ever say that, in 'real' life?" What's more, fanfic writers will sometimes apply this test to works that are of the canon, as in "Spock never would have said that, and Gene Roddenberry has no business telling me otherwise." + +This is a curious mix of respect and disrespect. Respect because it's hard to imagine a more respectful stance than the one that says that your work is the yardstick against which all other work is to be measured -- what could be more respectful than having your work made into the gold standard? On the other hand, this business of telling writers that they've given their characters the wrong words and deeds can feel obnoxious or insulting. + +Writers sometimes speak of their characters running away from them, taking on a life of their own. They say that these characters -- drawn from real people in our lives and mixed up with our own imagination -- are autonomous pieces of themselves. It's a short leap from there to mystical nonsense about protecting our notional, fictional children from grubby fans who'd set them to screwing each other or bowing and scraping before some thinly veiled version of the fanfic writer herself. + +There's something to the idea of the autonomous character. Big chunks of our wetware are devoted to simulating other people, trying to figure out if we are likely to fight or fondle them. It's unsurprising that when you ask your brain to model some other person, it rises to the task. But that's exactly what happens to a reader when you hand your book over to him: he simulates your characters in his head, trying to interpret that character's actions through his own lens. + +Writers can't ask readers not to interpret their work. You can't enjoy a novel that you haven't interpreted -- unless you model the author's characters in your head, you can't care about what they do and why they do it. And once readers model a character, it's only natural that readers will take pleasure in imagining what that character might do offstage, to noodle around with it. This isn't disrespect: it's active reading. + +Our field is incredibly privileged to have such an active fanfic writing practice. Let's stop treating them like thieves and start treating them like honored guests at a table that we laid just for them. + +$$$$ + +1~ Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia + +(Self-published, 26 August 2001) ~# + +group{ + +0. ToC: + + * 0. ToC + o 0.1 Version History + * 1. Introduction + * 2. The problems + o 2.1 People lie + o 2.2 People are lazy + o 2.3 People are stupid + o 2.4 Mission: Impossible -- know thyself + o 2.5 Schemas aren't neutral + o 2.6 Metrics influence results + o 2.7 There's more than one way to describe something + * 3. Reliable metadata + +}group + +2~x- 1. Introduction + +Metadata is "data about data" -- information like keywords, page-length, title, word-count, abstract, location, SKU, ISBN, and so on. Explicit, human-generated metadata has enjoyed recent trendiness, especially in the world of XML. A typical scenario goes like this: a number of suppliers get together and agree on a metadata standard -- a Document Type Definition or scheme -- for a given subject area, say washing machines. They agree to a common vocabulary for describing washing machines: size, capacity, energy consumption, water consumption, price. They create machine-readable databases of their inventory, which are available in whole or part to search agents and other databases, so that a consumer can enter the parameters of the washing machine he's seeking and query multiple sites simultaneously for an exhaustive list of the available washing machines that meet his criteria. + +If everyone would subscribe to such a system and create good metadata for the purposes of describing their goods, services and information, it would be a trivial matter to search the Internet for highly qualified, context-sensitive results: a fan could find all the downloadable music in a given genre, a manufacturer could efficiently discover suppliers, travelers could easily choose a hotel room for an upcoming trip. + +A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities. + +2~x- 2. The problems + +There are at least seven insurmountable obstacles between the world as we know it and meta-utopia. I'll enumerate them below:. + +3~x- 2.1 People lie + +Metadata exists in a competitive world. Suppliers compete to sell their goods, cranks compete to convey their crackpot theories (mea culpa), artists compete for audience. Attention-spans and wallets may not be zero-sum, but they're damned close. + +That's why: + +_* A search for any commonly referenced term at a search-engine like Altavista will often turn up at least one porn link in the first ten results. + +_* Your mailbox is full of spam with subject lines like "Re: The information you requested." + +_* Publisher's Clearing House sends out advertisements that holler "You may already be a winner!" + +_* Press-releases have gargantuan lists of empty buzzwords attached to them. + +Meta-utopia is a world of reliable metadata. When poisoning the well confers benefits to the poisoners, the meta-waters get awfully toxic in short order. + +3~x- 2.2 People are lazy + +You and me are engaged in the incredibly serious business of creating information. Here in the Info-Ivory-Tower, we understand the importance of creating and maintaining excellent metadata for our information. + +But info-civilians are remarkably cavalier about their information. Your clueless aunt sends you email with no subject line, half the pages on Geocities are called "Please title this page" and your boss stores all of his files on his desktop with helpful titles like "UNTITLED.DOC." + +This laziness is bottomless. No amount of ease-of-use will end it. To understand the true depths of meta-laziness, download ten random MP3 files from Napster. Chances are, at least one will have no title, artist or track information -- this despite the fact that adding in this info merely requires clicking the "Fetch Track Info from CDDB" button on every MP3-ripping application. + +Short of breaking fingers or sending out squads of vengeful info-ninjas to add metadata to the average user's files, we're never gonna get there. + +3~x- 2.3 People are stupid + +Even when there's a positive benefit to creating good metadata, people steadfastly refuse to exercise care and diligence in their metadata creation. + +Take eBay: every seller there has a damned good reason for double-checking their listings for typos and misspellings. Try searching for "plam" on eBay. Right now, that turns up nine typoed listings for "Plam Pilots." Misspelled listings don't show up in correctly-spelled searches and hence garner fewer bids and lower sale-prices. You can almost always get a bargain on a Plam Pilot at eBay. + +The fine (and gross) points of literacy -- spelling, punctuation, grammar -- elude the vast majority of the Internet's users. To believe that J. Random Users will suddenly and en masse learn to spell and punctuate -- let alone accurately categorize their information according to whatever hierarchy they're supposed to be using -- is self-delusion of the first water. + +3~x- 2.4 Mission: Impossible -- know thyself + +In meta-utopia, everyone engaged in the heady business of describing stuff carefully weighs the stuff in the balance and accurately divines the stuff's properties, noting those results. + +Simple observation demonstrates the fallacy of this assumption. When Nielsen used log-books to gather information on the viewing habits of their sample families, the results were heavily skewed to Masterpiece Theater and Sesame Street. Replacing the journals with set-top boxes that reported what the set was actually tuned to showed what the average American family was really watching: naked midget wrestling, America's Funniest Botched Cosmetic Surgeries and Jerry Springer presents: "My daughter dresses like a slut!" + +Ask a programmer how long it'll take to write a given module, or a contractor how long it'll take to fix your roof. Ask a laconic Southerner how far it is to the creek. Better yet, throw darts -- the answer's likely to be just as reliable. + +People are lousy observers of their own behaviors. Entire religions are formed with the goal of helping people understand themselves better; therapists rake in billions working for this very end. + +Why should we believe that using metadata will help J. Random User get in touch with her Buddha nature? + +3~x- 2.5 Schemas aren't neutral + +In meta-utopia, the lab-coated guardians of epistemology sit down and rationally map out a hierarchy of ideas, something like this: + +group{ + +Nothing: + + Black holes + +Everything: + + Matter: + + Earth: + + Planets + + Washing Machines + + Wind: + + Oxygen + + Poo-gas + + Fire: + + Nuclear fission + + Nuclear fusion + + "Mean Devil Woman" Louisiana Hot-Sauce + +}group + +In a given sub-domain, say, Washing Machines, experts agree on sub-hierarchies, with classes for reliability, energy consumption, color, size, etc. + +This presumes that there is a "correct" way of categorizing ideas, and that reasonable people, given enough time and incentive, can agree on the proper means for building a hierarchy. + +Nothing could be farther from the truth. Any hierarchy of ideas necessarily implies the importance of some axes over others. A manufacturer of small, environmentally conscious washing machines would draw a hierarchy that looks like this: + +group{ + +Energy consumption: + + Water consumption: + + Size: + + Capacity: + + Reliability + +}group + +While a manufacturer of glitzy, feature-laden washing machines would want something like this: + +group{ + +Color: + + Size: + + Programmability: + + Reliability + +}group + +The conceit that competing interests can come to easy accord on a common vocabulary totally ignores the power of organizing principles in a marketplace. + +3~x- 2.6 Metrics influence results + +Agreeing to a common yardstick for measuring the important stuff in any domain necessarily privileges the items that score high on that metric, regardless of those items' overall suitability. IQ tests privilege people who are good at IQ tests, Nielsen Ratings privilege 30- and 60-minute TV shows (which is why MTV doesn't show videos any more -- Nielsen couldn't generate ratings for three-minute mini-programs, and so MTV couldn't demonstrate the value of advertising on its network), raw megahertz scores privilege Intel's CISC chips over Motorola's RISC chips. + +Ranking axes are mutually exclusive: software that scores high for security scores low for convenience, desserts that score high for decadence score low for healthiness. Every player in a metadata standards body wants to emphasize their high-scoring axes and de-emphasize (or, if possible, ignore altogether) their low-scoring axes. + +It's wishful thinking to believe that a group of people competing to advance their agendas will be universally pleased with any hierarchy of knowledge. The best that we can hope for is a detente in which everyone is equally miserable. + +3~x- 2.7 There's more than one way to describe something + +"No, I'm not watching cartoons! It's cultural anthropology." + +"This isn't smut, it's art." + +"It's not a bald spot, it's a solar panel for a sex-machine." + +Reasonable people can disagree forever on how to describe something. Arguably, your Self is the collection of associations and descriptors you ascribe to ideas. Requiring everyone to use the same vocabulary to describe their material denudes the cognitive landscape, enforces homogeneity in ideas. + +And that's just not right. + +2~x- 3. Reliable metadata + +Do we throw out metadata, then? + +Of course not. Metadata can be quite useful, if taken with a sufficiently large pinch of salt. The meta-utopia will never come into being, but metadata is often a good means of making rough assumptions about the information that floats through the Internet. + +Certain kinds of implicit metadata is awfully useful, in fact. Google exploits metadata about the structure of the World Wide Web: by examining the number of links pointing at a page (and the number of links pointing at each linker), Google can derive statistics about the number of Web-authors who believe that that page is important enough to link to, and hence make extremely reliable guesses about how reputable the information on that page is. + +This sort of observational metadata is far more reliable than the stuff that human beings create for the purposes of having their documents found. It cuts through the marketing bullshit, the self-delusion, and the vocabulary collisions. + +Taken more broadly, this kind of metadata can be thought of as a pedigree: who thinks that this document is valuable? How closely correlated have this person's value judgments been with mine in times gone by? This kind of implicit endorsement of information is a far better candidate for an information-retrieval panacea than all the world's schema combined. + +$$$$ + +1~ Amish for QWERTY + +(Originally published on the O'Reilly Network, 07/09/2003) ~# + +I learned to type before I learned to write. The QWERTY keyboard layout is hard-wired to my brain, such that I can't write anything of significance without that I have a 101-key keyboard in front of me. This has always been a badge of geek pride: unlike the creaking pen-and-ink dinosaurs that I grew up reading, I'm well adapted to the modern reality of technology. There's a secret elitist pride in touch-typing on a laptop while staring off into space, fingers flourishing and caressing the keys. + +But last week, my pride got pricked. I was brung low by a phone. Some very nice people from Nokia loaned me a very latest-and-greatest camera-phone, the kind of gadget I've described in my science fiction stories. As I prodded at the little 12-key interface, I felt like my father, a 60s-vintage computer scientist who can't get his wireless network to work, must feel. Like a creaking dino. Like history was passing me by. I'm 31, and I'm obsolete. Or at least Amish. + +People think the Amish are technophobes. Far from it. They're ideologues. They have a concept of what right-living consists of, and they'll use any technology that serves that ideal -- and mercilessly eschew any technology that would subvert it. There's nothing wrong with driving the wagon to the next farm when you want to hear from your son, so there's no need to put a phone in the kitchen. On the other hand, there's nothing right about your livestock dying for lack of care, so a cellphone that can call the veterinarian can certainly find a home in the horse barn. + +For me, right-living is the 101-key, QWERTY, computer-centric mediated lifestyle. It's having a bulky laptop in my bag, crouching by the toilets at a strange airport with my AC adapter plugged into the always-awkwardly-placed power source, running software that I chose and installed, communicating over the wireless network. I use a network that has no incremental cost for communication, and a device that lets me install any software without permission from anyone else. Right-living is the highly mutated, commodity-hardware- based, public and free Internet. I'm QWERTY-Amish, in other words. + +I'm the kind of perennial early adopter who would gladly volunteer to beta test a neural interface, but I find myself in a moral panic when confronted with the 12-button keypad on a cellie, even though that interface is one that has been greedily adopted by billions of people worldwide, from strap-hanging Japanese schoolgirls to Kenyan electoral scrutineers to Filipino guerrillas in the bush. The idea of paying for every message makes my hackles tumesce and evokes a reflexive moral conviction that text-messaging is inherently undemocratic, at least compared to free-as-air email. The idea of only running the software that big-brother telco has permitted me on my handset makes me want to run for the hills. + +The thumb-generation who can tap out a text-message under their desks while taking notes with the other hand -- they're in for it, too. The pace of accelerated change means that we're all of us becoming wed to interfaces -- ways of communicating with our tools and our world -- that are doomed, doomed, doomed. The 12-buttoners are marrying the phone company, marrying a centrally controlled network that requires permission to use and improve, a Stalinist technology whose centralized choke points are subject to regulation and the vagaries of the telcos. Long after the phone companies have been out-competed by the pure and open Internet (if such a glorious day comes to pass), the kids of today will be bound by its interface and its conventions. + +The sole certainty about the future is its Amishness. We will all bend our brains to suit an interface that we will either have to abandon or be left behind. Choose your interface -- and the values it implies -- carefully, then, before you wed your thought processes to your fingers' dance. It may be the one you're stuck with. + +$$$$ + +1~ Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books + +(Paper for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, San Diego, February 12, 2004) ~# + +Forematter: + +This talk was initially given at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference [ http://conferences.oreillynet.com/et2004/ ], along with a set of slides that, for copyright reasons (ironic!) can't be released alongside of this file. However, you will find, interspersed in this text, notations describing the places where new slides should be loaded, in [square-brackets]. + +For starters, let me try to summarize the lessons and intuitions I've had about ebooks from my release of two novels and most of a short story collection online under a Creative Commons license. A parodist who published a list of alternate titles for the presentations at this event called this talk, "eBooks Suck Right Now," [eBooks suck right now] and as funny as that is, I don't think it's true. + +No, if I had to come up with another title for this talk, I'd call it: "Ebooks: You're Soaking in Them." [Ebooks: You're Soaking in Them] That's because I think that the shape of ebooks to come is almost visible in the way that people interact with text today, and that the job of authors who want to become rich and famous is to come to a better understanding of that shape. + +I haven't come to a perfect understanding. I don't know what the future of the book looks like. But I have ideas, and I'll share them with you: + +1. Ebooks aren't marketing. [Ebooks aren't marketing] OK, so ebooks *{are}* marketing: that is to say that giving away ebooks sells more books. Baen Books, who do a lot of series publishing, have found that giving away electronic editions of the previous installments in their series to coincide with the release of a new volume sells the hell out of the new book -- and the backlist. And the number of people who wrote to me to tell me about how much they dug the ebook and so bought the paper-book far exceeds the number of people who wrote to me and said, "Ha, ha, you hippie, I read your book for free and now I'm not gonna buy it." But ebooks *{shouldn't}* be just about marketing: ebooks are a goal unto themselves. In the final analysis, more people will read more words off more screens and fewer words off fewer pages and when those two lines cross, ebooks are gonna have to be the way that writers earn their keep, not the way that they promote the dead-tree editions. + +2. Ebooks complement paper books. [Ebooks complement paper books]. Having an ebook is good. Having a paper book is good. Having both is even better. One reader wrote to me and said that he read half my first novel from the bound book, and printed the other half on scrap-paper to read at the beach. Students write to me to say that it's easier to do their term papers if they can copy and paste their quotations into their word-processors. Baen readers use the electronic editions of their favorite series to build concordances of characters, places and events. + +3. Unless you own the ebook, you don't 0wn the book [Unless you own the ebook, you don't 0wn the book]. I take the view that the book is a "practice" -- a collection of social and economic and artistic activities -- and not an "object." Viewing the book as a "practice" instead of an object is a pretty radical notion, and it begs the question: just what the hell is a book? Good question. I write all of my books in a text-editor [TEXT EDITOR SCREENGRAB] (BBEdit, from Barebones Software -- as fine a text-editor as I could hope for). From there, I can convert them into a formatted two-column PDF [TWO-UP SCREENGRAB]. I can turn them into an HTML file [BROWSER SCREENGRAB]. I can turn them over to my publisher, who can turn them into galleys, advanced review copies, hardcovers and paperbacks. I can turn them over to my readers, who can convert them to a bewildering array of formats [DOWNLOAD PAGE SCREENGRAB]. Brewster Kahle's Internet Bookmobile can convert a digital book into a four-color, full-bleed, perfect-bound, laminated-cover, printed-spine paper book in ten minutes, for about a dollar. Try converting a paper book to a PDF or an html file or a text file or a RocketBook or a printout for a buck in ten minutes! It's ironic, because one of the frequently cited reasons for preferring paper to ebooks is that paper books confer a sense of ownership of a physical object. Before the dust settles on this ebook thing, owning a paper book is going to feel less like ownership than having an open digital edition of the text. + +4. Ebooks are a better deal for writers. [Ebooks are a better deal for writers] The compensation for writers is pretty thin on the ground. *{Amazing Stories}*, Hugo Gernsback's original science fiction magazine, paid a couple cents a word. Today, science fiction magazines pay...a couple cents a word. The sums involved are so minuscule, they're not even insulting: they're *{quaint}* and *{historical}*, like the WHISKEY 5 CENTS sign over the bar at a pioneer village. Some writers do make it big, but they're *{rounding errors}* as compared to the total population of sf writers earning some of their living at the trade. Almost all of us could be making more money elsewhere (though we may dream of earning a stephenkingload of money, and of course, no one would play the lotto if there were no winners). The primary incentive for writing has to be artistic satisfaction, egoboo, and a desire for posterity. Ebooks get you that. Ebooks become a part of the corpus of human knowledge because they get indexed by search engines and replicated by the hundreds, thousands or millions. They can be googled. + +Even better: they level the playing field between writers and trolls. When Amazon kicked off, many writers got their knickers in a tight and powerful knot at the idea that axe-grinding yahoos were filling the Amazon message-boards with ill-considered slams at their work -- for, if a personal recommendation is the best way to sell a book, then certainly a personal condemnation is the best way to *{not}* sell a book. Today, the trolls are still with us, but now, the readers get to decide for themselves. Here's a bit of a review of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom that was recently posted to Amazon by "A reader from Redwood City, CA": + +group{ + +[QUOTED TEXT] + +> I am really not sure what kind of drugs critics are +> smoking, or what kind of payola may be involved. But +> regardless of what Entertainment Weekly says, whatever +> this newspaper or that magazine says, you shouldn't +> waste your money. Download it for free from Corey's +> (sic) site, read the first page, and look away in +> disgust -- this book is for people who think Dan +> Brown's Da Vinci Code is great writing. + +}group + +Back in the old days, this kind of thing would have really pissed me off. Axe-grinding, mouth-breathing yahoos, defaming my good name! My stars and mittens! But take a closer look at that damning passage: + +group{ + +[PULL-QUOTE] + +> Download it for free from Corey's site, read the first +> page + +}group + +You see that? Hell, this guy is *{working for me}*! [ADDITIONAL PULL QUOTES] Someone accuses a writer I'm thinking of reading of paying off Entertainment Weekly to say nice things about his novel, "a surprisingly bad writer," no less, whose writing is "stiff, amateurish, and uninspired!" I wanna check that writer out. And I can. In one click. And then I can make up my own mind. + +You don't get far in the arts without healthy doses of both ego and insecurity, and the downside of being able to google up all the things that people are saying about your book is that it can play right into your insecurities -- "all these people will have it in their minds not to bother with my book because they've read the negative interweb reviews!" But the flipside of that is the ego: "If only they'd give it a shot, they'd see how good it is." And the more scathing the review is, the more likely they are to give it a shot. Any press is good press, so long as they spell your URL right (and even if they spell your name wrong!). + +5. Ebooks need to embrace their nature. [Ebooks need to embrace their nature.] The distinctive value of ebooks is orthogonal to the value of paper books, and it revolves around the mix-ability and send-ability of electronic text. The more you constrain an ebook's distinctive value propositions -- that is, the more you restrict a reader's ability to copy, transport or transform an ebook -- the more it has to be valued on the same axes as a paper-book. Ebooks *{fail}* on those axes. Ebooks don't beat paper-books for sophisticated typography, they can't match them for quality of paper or the smell of the glue. But just try sending a paper book to a friend in Brazil, for free, in less than a second. Or loading a thousand paper books into a little stick of flash-memory dangling from your keychain. Or searching a paper book for every instance of a character's name to find a beloved passage. Hell, try clipping a pithy passage out of a paper book and pasting it into your sig-file. + +6. Ebooks demand a different attention span (but not a shorter one). [Ebooks demand a different attention span (but not a shorter one).] Artists are always disappointed by their audience's attention-spans. Go back far enough and you'll find cuneiform etchings bemoaning the current Sumerian go-go lifestyle with its insistence on myths with plotlines and characters and action, not like we had in the old days. As artists, it would be a hell of a lot easier if our audiences were more tolerant of our penchant for boring them. We'd get to explore a lot more ideas without worrying about tarting them up with easy-to-swallow chocolate coatings of entertainment. We like to think of shortened attention spans as a product of the information age, but check this out: + +group{ + +[Nietzsche quote] + +> To be sure one thing necessary above all: if one is to +> practice reading as an *art* in this way, something +> needs to be un-learned most thoroughly in these days. + +}group + +In other words, if my book is too boring, it's because you're not paying enough attention. Writers say this stuff all the time, but this quote isn't from this century or the last. [Nietzsche quote with attribution] It's from the preface to Nietzsche's "Genealogy of Morals," published in *{1887}*. + +Yeah, our attention-spans are *{different}* today, but they aren't necessarily *{shorter}*. Warren Ellis's fans managed to hold the storyline for Transmetropolitan [Transmet cover] in their minds for *{five years}* while the story trickled out in monthly funnybook installments. JK Rowlings's installments on the Harry Potter series get fatter and fatter with each new volume. Entire forests are sacrificed to long-running series fiction like Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books, each of which is approximately 20,000 pages long (I may be off by an order of magnitude one way or another here). Sure, presidential debates are conducted in soundbites today and not the days-long oratory extravaganzas of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but people manage to pay attention to the 24-month-long presidential campaigns from start to finish. + +7. We need *{all}* the ebooks. [We need *{all}* the ebooks] The vast majority of the words ever penned are lost to posterity. No one library collects all the still-extant books ever written and no one person could hope to make a dent in that corpus of written work. None of us will ever read more than the tiniest sliver of human literature. But that doesn't mean that we can stick with just the most popular texts and get a proper ebook revolution. + +For starters, we're all edge-cases. Sure, we all have the shared desire for the core canon of literature, but each of us want to complete that collection with different texts that are as distinctive and individualistic as fingerprints. If we all look like we're doing the same thing when we read, or listen to music, or hang out in a chatroom, that's because we're not looking closely enough. The shared-ness of our experience is only present at a coarse level of measurement: once you get into really granular observation, there are as many differences in our "shared" experience as there are similarities. + +More than that, though, is the way that a large collection of electronic text differs from a small one: it's the difference between a single book, a shelf full of books and a library of books. Scale makes things different. Take the Web: none of us can hope to read even a fraction of all the pages on the Web, but by analyzing the link structures that bind all those pages together, Google is able to actually tease out machine-generated conclusions about the relative relevance of different pages to different queries. None of us will ever eat the whole corpus, but Google can digest it for us and excrete the steaming nuggets of goodness that make it the search-engine miracle it is today. + +8. Ebooks are like paper books. [Ebooks are like paper books]. To round out this talk, I'd like to go over the ways that ebooks are more like paper books than you'd expect. One of the truisms of retail theory is that purchasers need to come into contact with a good several times before they buy -- seven contacts is tossed around as the magic number. That means that my readers have to hear the title, see the cover, pick up the book, read a review, and so forth, seven times, on average, before they're ready to buy. + +There's a temptation to view downloading a book as comparable to bringing it home from the store, but that's the wrong metaphor. Some of the time, maybe most of the time, downloading the text of the book is like taking it off the shelf at the store and looking at the cover and reading the blurbs (with the advantage of not having to come into contact with the residual DNA and burger king left behind by everyone else who browsed the book before you). Some writers are horrified at the idea that three hundred thousand copies of my first novel were downloaded and "only" ten thousand or so were sold so far. If it were the case that for ever copy sold, thirty were taken home from the store, that would be a horrifying outcome, for sure. But look at it another way: if one out of every thirty people who glanced at the cover of my book bought it, I'd be a happy author. And I am. Those downloads cost me no more than glances at the cover in a bookstore, and the sales are healthy. + +We also like to think of physical books as being inherently *{countable}* in a way that digital books aren't (an irony, since computers are damned good at counting things!). This is important, because writers get paid on the basis of the number of copies of their books that sell, so having a good count makes a difference. And indeed, my royalty statements contain precise numbers for copies printed, shipped, returned and sold. + +But that's a false precision. When the printer does a run of a book, it always runs a few extra at the start and finish of the run to make sure that the setup is right and to account for the occasional rip, drop, or spill. The actual total number of books printed is approximately the number of books ordered, but never exactly -- if you've ever ordered 500 wedding invitations, chances are you received 500-and-a-few back from the printer and that's why. + +And the numbers just get fuzzier from there. Copies are stolen. Copies are dropped. Shipping people get the count wrong. Some copies end up in the wrong box and go to a bookstore that didn't order them and isn't invoiced for them and end up on a sale table or in the trash. Some copies are returned as damaged. Some are returned as unsold. Some come back to the store the next morning accompanied by a whack of buyer's remorse. Some go to the place where the spare sock in the dryer ends up. + +The numbers on a royalty statement are actuarial, not actual. They represent a kind of best-guess approximation of the copies shipped, sold, returned and so forth. Actuarial accounting works pretty well: well enough to run the juggernaut banking, insurance, and gambling industries on. It's good enough for divvying up the royalties paid by musical rights societies for radio airplay and live performance. And it's good enough for counting how many copies of a book are distributed online or off. + +Counts of paper books are differently precise from counts of electronic books, sure: but neither one is inherently countable. + +And finally, of course, there's the matter of selling books. However an author earns her living from her words, printed or encoded, she has as her first and hardest task to find her audience. There are more competitors for our attention than we can possibly reconcile, prioritize or make sense of. Getting a book under the right person's nose, with the right pitch, is the hardest and most important task any writer faces. + +# + +I care about books, a lot. I started working in libraries and bookstores at the age of 12 and kept at it for a decade, until I was lured away by the siren song of the tech world. I knew I wanted to be a writer at the age of 12, and now, 20 years later, I have three novels, a short story collection and a nonfiction book out, two more novels under contract, and another book in the works. [BOOK COVERS] I've won a major award in my genre, science fiction, [CAMPBELL AWARD] and I'm nominated for another one, the 2003 Nebula Award for best novelette. [NEBULA] + +I own a *{lot}* of books. Easily more than 10,000 of them, in storage on both coasts of the North American continent [LIBRARY LADDER]. I have to own them, since they're the tools of my trade: the reference works I refer to as a novelist and writer today. Most of the literature I dig is very short-lived, it disappears from the shelf after just a few months, usually for good. Science fiction is inherently ephemeral. [ACE DOUBLES] + +Now, as much as I love books, I love computers, too. Computers are fundamentally different from modern books in the same way that printed books are different from monastic Bibles: they are malleable. Time was, a "book" was something produced by many months' labor by a scribe, usually a monk, on some kind of durable and sexy substrate like foetal lambskin. [ILLUMINATED BIBLE] Gutenberg's xerox machine changed all that, changed a book into something that could be simply run off a press in a few minutes' time, on substrate more suitable to ass-wiping than exaltation in a place of honor in the cathedral. The Gutenberg press meant that rather than owning one or two books, a member of the ruling class could amass a library, and that rather than picking only a few subjects from enshrinement in print, a huge variety of subjects could be addressed on paper and handed from person to person. [KAPITAL/TIJUANA BIBLE] + +Most new ideas start with a precious few certainties and a lot of speculation. I've been doing a bunch of digging for certainties and a lot of speculating lately, and the purpose of this talk is to lay out both categories of ideas. + +This all starts with my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom [COVER], which came out on January 9, 2003. At that time, there was a lot of talk in my professional circles about, on the one hand, the dismal failure of ebooks, and, on the other, the new and scary practice of ebook "piracy." [alt.binaries.e-books screengrab] It was strikingly weird that no one seemed to notice that the idea of ebooks as a "failure" was at strong odds with the notion that electronic book "piracy" was worth worrying about: I mean, if ebooks are a failure, then who gives a rats if intarweb dweebs are trading them on Usenet? + +A brief digression here, on the double meaning of "ebooks." One meaning for that word is "legitimate" ebook ventures, that is to say, rightsholder-authorized editions of the texts of books, released in a proprietary, use-restricted format, sometimes for use on a general-purpose PC and sometimes for use on a special-purpose hardware device like the nuvoMedia Rocketbook [ROCKETBOOK]. The other meaning for ebook is a "pirate" or unauthorized electronic edition of a book, usually made by cutting the binding off of a book and scanning it a page at a time, then running the resulting bitmaps through an optical character recognition app to convert them into ASCII text, to be cleaned up by hand. These books are pretty buggy, full of errors introduced by the OCR. A lot of my colleagues worry that these books also have deliberate errors, created by mischievous book-rippers who cut, add or change text in order to "improve" the work. Frankly, I have never seen any evidence that any book-ripper is interested in doing this, and until I do, I think that this is the last thing anyone should be worrying about. + +Back to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom [COVER]. Well, not yet. I want to convey to you the depth of the panic in my field over ebook piracy, or "bookwarez" as it is known in book-ripper circles. Writers were joining the discussion on alt.binaries.ebooks using assumed names, claiming fear of retaliation from scary hax0r kids who would presumably screw up their credit-ratings in retaliation for being called thieves. My editor, a blogger, hacker and guy-in-charge-of-the-largest-sf-line-in-the-world named Patrick Nielsen Hayden posted to one of the threads in the newsgroup, saying, in part [SCREENGRAB]: + +group{ + +> Pirating copyrighted etext on Usenet and elsewhere is going to +> happen more and more, for the same reasons that everyday folks +> make audio cassettes from vinyl LPs and audio CDs, and +> videocassette copies of store-bought videotapes. Partly it's +> greed; partly it's annoyance over retail prices; partly it's the +> desire to Share Cool Stuff (a motivation usually underrated by +> the victims of this kind of small-time hand-level piracy). +> Instantly going to Defcon One over it and claiming it's morally +> tantamount to mugging little old ladies in the street will make +> it kind of difficult to move forward from that position when it +> doesn't work. In the 1970s, the record industry shrieked that +> "home taping is killing music." It's hard for ordinary folks to +> avoid noticing that music didn't die. But the record industry's +> credibility on the subject wasn't exactly enhanced. + +}group + +Patrick and I have a long relationship, starting when I was 18 years old and he kicked in toward a scholarship fund to send me to a writers' workshop, continuing to a fateful lunch in New York in the mid-Nineties when I showed him a bunch of Project Gutenberg texts on my Palm Pilot and inspired him to start licensing Tor's titles for PDAs [PEANUTPRESS SCREENGRAB], to the turn-of-the-millennium when he bought and then published my first novel (he's bought three more since -- I really like Patrick!). + +Right as bookwarez newsgroups were taking off, I was shocked silly by legal action by one of my colleagues against AOL/Time-Warner for carrying the alt.binaries.ebooks newsgroup. This writer alleged that AOL should have a duty to remove this newsgroup, since it carried so many infringing files, and that its failure to do so made it a contributory infringer, and so liable for the incredibly stiff penalties afforded by our newly minted copyright laws like the No Electronic Theft Act and the loathsome Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA. + +Now there was a scary thought: there were people out there who thought the world would be a better place if ISPs were given the duty of actively policing and censoring the websites and newsfeeds their customers had access to, including a requirement that ISPs needed to determine, all on their own, what was an unlawful copyright infringement -- something more usually left up to judges in the light of extensive amicus briefings from esteemed copyright scholars [WIND DONE GONE GRAPHIC]. + +This was a stupendously dumb idea, and it offended me down to my boots. Writers are supposed to be advocates of free expression, not censorship. It seemed that some of my colleagues loved the First Amendment, but they were reluctant to share it with the rest of the world. + +Well, dammit, I had a book coming out, and it seemed to be an opportunity to try to figure out a little more about this ebook stuff. On the one hand, ebooks were a dismal failure. On the other hand, there were more books posted to alt.binaries.ebooks every day. + +This leads me into the two certainties I have about ebooks: + +1. More people are reading more words off more screens every day [GRAPHIC] + +2. Fewer people are reading fewer words off fewer pages every day [GRAPHIC] + +These two certainties begged a lot of questions. + +[CHART: EBOOK FAILINGS] + +_* Screen resolutions are too low to effectively replace paper + +_* People want to own physical books because of their visceral appeal (often this is accompanied by a little sermonette on how good books smell, or how good they look on a bookshelf, or how evocative an old curry stain in the margin can be) + +_* You can't take your ebook into the tub + +_* You can't read an ebook without power and a computer + +_* File-formats go obsolete, paper has lasted for a long time + +None of these seemed like very good explanations for the "failure" of ebooks to me. If screen resolutions are too low to replace paper, then how come everyone I know spends more time reading off a screen every year, up to and including my sainted grandmother (geeks have a really crappy tendency to argue that certain technologies aren't ready for primetime because their grandmothers won't use them -- well, my grandmother sends me email all the time. She types 70 words per minute, and loves to show off grandsonular email to her pals around the pool at her Florida retirement condo)? + +The other arguments were a lot more interesting, though. It seemed to me that electronic books are *{different}* from paper books, and have different virtues and failings. Let's think a little about what the book has gone through in years gone by. This is interesting because the history of the book is the history of the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the Pilgrims, and, ultimately the colonizing of the Americas and the American Revolution. + +Broadly speaking, there was a time when books were hand-printed on rare leather by monks. The only people who could read them were priests, who got a regular eyeful of the really cool cartoons the monks drew in the margins. The priests read the books aloud, in Latin [LATIN BIBLE] (to a predominantly non-Latin-speaking audience) in cathedrals, wreathed in pricey incense that rose from censers swung by altar boys. + +Then Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Martin Luther turned that press into a revolution. [LUTHER BIBLE] He printed Bibles in languages that non-priests could read, and distributed them to normal people who got to read the word of God all on their own. The rest, as they say, is history. + +Here are some interesting things to note about the advent of the printing press: + +[CHART: LUTHER VERSUS THE MONKS] + +_* Luther Bibles lacked the manufacturing quality of the illuminated Bibles. They were comparatively cheap and lacked the typographical expressiveness that a really talented monk could bring to bear when writing out the word of God + +_* Luther Bibles were utterly unsuited to the traditional use-case for Bibles. A good Bible was supposed to reinforce the authority of the man at the pulpit. It needed heft, it needed impressiveness, and most of all, it needed rarity. + +_* The user-experience of Luther Bibles sucked. There was no incense, no altar boys, and who (apart from the priesthood) knew that reading was so friggin' hard on the eyes? + +_* Luther Bibles were a lot less trustworthy than the illuminated numbers. Anyone with a press could run one off, subbing in any apocryphal text he wanted -- and who knew how accurate that translation was? Monks had an entire Papacy behind them, running a quality-assurance operation that had stood Europe in good stead for centuries. + +In the late nineties, I went to conferences where music execs patiently explained that Napster was doomed, because you didn't get any cover-art or liner-notes with it, you couldn't know if the rip was any good, and sometimes the connection would drop mid-download. I'm sure that many Cardinals espoused the points raised above with equal certainty. + +What the record execs and the cardinals missed was all the ways that Luther Bibles kicked ass: + +[CHART: WHY LUTHER BIBLES KICKED ASS] + +_* They were cheap and fast. Loads of people could acquire them without having to subject themselves to the authority and approval of the Church + +_* They were in languages that non-priests could read. You no longer had to take the Church's word for it when its priests explained what God really meant + +_* They birthed a printing-press ecosystem in which lots of books flourished. New kinds of fiction, poetry, politics, scholarship and so on were all enabled by the printing presses whose initial popularity was spurred by Luther's ideas about religion. + +Note that all of these virtues are orthogonal to the virtues of a monkish Bible. That is, none of the things that made the Gutenberg press a success were the things that made monk-Bibles a success. + +By the same token, the reasons to love ebooks have precious little to do with the reasons to love paper books. + +[CHART: WHY EBOOKS KICK ASS] + +_* They are easy to share. Secrets of Ya-Ya Sisterhood went from a midlist title to a bestseller by being passed from hand to hand by women in reading circles. Slashdorks and other netizens have social life as rich as reading-circlites, but they don't ever get to see each other face to face; the only kind of book they can pass from hand to hand is an ebook. What's more, the single factor most correlated with a purchase is a recommendation from a friend -- getting a book recommended by a pal is more likely to sell you on it than having read and enjoyed the preceding volume in a series! + +_* They are easy to slice and dice. This is where the Mac evangelist in me comes out -- minority platforms matter. It's a truism of the Napsterverse that most of the files downloaded are bog-standard top-40 tracks, like 90 percent or so, and I believe it. We all want to popular music. That's why it's popular. But the interesting thing is the other ten percent. Bill Gates told the New York Times that Microsoft lost the search wars by doing "a good job on the 80 percent of common queries and ignor[ing] the other stuff. But it's the remaining 20 percent that counts, because that's where the quality perception is." Why did Napster captivate so many of us? Not because it could get us the top-40 tracks that we could hear just by snapping on the radio: it was because 80 percent of the music ever recorded wasn't available for sale anywhere in the world, and in that 80 percent were all the songs that had ever touched us, all the earworms that had been lodged in our hindbrains, all the stuff that made us smile when we heard it. Those songs are different for all of us, but they share the trait of making the difference between a compelling service and, well, top-40 Clearchannel radio programming. It was the minority of tracks that appealed to the majority of us. By the same token, the malleability of electronic text means that it can be readily repurposed: you can throw it on a webserver or convert it to a format for your favorite PDA; you can ask your computer to read it aloud or you can search the text for a quotation to cite in a book report or to use in your sig. In other words, most people who download the book do so for the predictable reason, and in a predictable format -- say, to sample a chapter in the HTML format before deciding whether to buy the book -- but the thing that differentiates a boring e-text experience from an exciting one is the minority use -- printing out a couple chapters of the book to bring to the beach rather than risk getting the hardcopy wet and salty. + +Tool-makers and software designers are increasingly aware of the notion of "affordances" in design. You can bash a nail into the wall with any heavy, heftable object from a rock to a hammer to a cast-iron skillet. However, there's something about a hammer that cries out for nail-bashing, it has affordances that tilt its holder towards swinging it. And, as we all know, when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. + +The affordance of a computer -- the thing it's designed to do -- is to slice-and-dice collections of bits. The affordance of the Internet is to move bits at very high speed around the world at little-to-no cost. It follows from this that the center of the ebook experience is going to involve slicing and dicing text and sending it around. + +Copyright lawyers have a word for these activities: infringement. That's because copyright gives creators a near-total monopoly over copying and remixing of their work, pretty much forever (theoretically, copyright expires, but in actual practice, copyright gets extended every time the early Mickey Mouse cartoons are about to enter the public domain, because Disney swings a very big stick on the Hill). + +This is a huge problem. The biggest possible problem. Here's why: + +[CHART: HOW BROKEN COPYRIGHT SCREWS EVERYONE] + +_* Authors freak out. Authors have been schooled by their peers that strong copyright is the only thing that keeps them from getting savagely rogered in the marketplace. This is pretty much true: it's strong copyright that often defends authors from their publishers' worst excesses. However, it doesn't follow that strong copyright protects you from your *{readers}*. + +_* Readers get indignant over being called crooks. Seriously. You're a small businessperson. Readers are your customers. Calling them crooks is bad for business. + +_* Publishers freak out. Publishers freak out, because they're in the business of grabbing as much copyright as they can and hanging onto it for dear life because, dammit, you never know. This is why science fiction magazines try to trick writers into signing over improbable rights for things like theme park rides and action figures based on their work -- it's also why literary agents are now asking for copyright-long commissions on the books they represent: copyright covers so much ground and takes to long to shake off, who wouldn't want a piece of it? + +_* Liability goes through the roof. Copyright infringement, especially on the Net, is a supercrime. It carries penalties of $150,000 per infringement, and aggrieved rights-holders and their representatives have all kinds of special powers, like the ability to force an ISP to turn over your personal information before showing evidence of your alleged infringement to a judge. This means that anyone who suspects that he might be on the wrong side of copyright law is going to be terribly risk-averse: publishers non-negotiably force their authors to indemnify them from infringement claims and go one better, forcing writers to prove that they have "cleared" any material they quote, even in the case of brief fair-use quotations, like song-titles at the opening of chapters. The result is that authors end up assuming potentially life-destroying liability, are chilled from quoting material around them, and are scared off of public domain texts because an honest mistake about the public-domain status of a work carries such a terrible price. + +_* Posterity vanishes. In the Eldred v. Ashcroft Supreme Court hearing last year, the court found that 98 percent of the works in copyright are no longer earning money for anyone, but that figuring out who these old works belong to with the degree of certainty that you'd want when one mistake means total economic apocalypse would cost more than you could ever possibly earn on them. That means that 98 percent of works will largely expire long before the copyright on them does. Today, the names of science fiction's ancestral founders -- Mary Shelley, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, HG Wells -- are still known, their work still a part of the discourse. Their spiritual descendants from Hugo Gernsback onward may not be so lucky -- if their work continues to be "protected" by copyright, it might just vanish from the face of the earth before it reverts to the public domain. + +This isn't to say that copyright is bad, but that there's such a thing as good copyright and bad copyright, and that sometimes, too much good copyright is a bad thing. It's like chilis in soup: a little goes a long way, and too much spoils the broth. + +From the Luther Bible to the first phonorecords, from radio to the pulps, from cable to MP3, the world has shown that its first preference for new media is its "democratic-ness" -- the ease with which it can reproduced. + +(And please, before we get any farther, forget all that business about how the Internet's copying model is more disruptive than the technologies that proceeded it. For Christ's sake, the Vaudeville performers who sued Marconi for inventing the radio had to go from a regime where they had *{one hundred percent}* control over who could get into the theater and hear them perform to a regime where they had *{zero}* percent control over who could build or acquire a radio and tune into a recording of them performing. For that matter, look at the difference between a monkish Bible and a Luther Bible -- next to that phase-change, Napster is peanuts) + +Back to democratic-ness. Every successful new medium has traded off its artifact-ness -- the degree to which it was populated by bespoke hunks of atoms, cleverly nailed together by master craftspeople -- for ease of reproduction. Piano rolls weren't as expressive as good piano players, but they scaled better -- as did radio broadcasts, pulp magazines, and MP3s. Liner notes, hand illumination and leather bindings are nice, but they pale in comparison to the ability of an individual to actually get a copy of her own. + +Which isn't to say that old media die. Artists still hand-illuminate books; master pianists still stride the boards at Carnegie Hall, and the shelves burst with tell-all biographies of musicians that are richer in detail than any liner-notes booklet. The thing is, when all you've got is monks, every book takes on the character of a monkish Bible. Once you invent the printing press, all the books that are better-suited to movable type migrate into that new form. What's left behind are those items that are best suited to the old production scheme: the plays that *{need}* to be plays, the books that are especially lovely on creamy paper stitched between covers, the music that is most enjoyable performed live and experienced in a throng of humanity. + +Increased democratic-ness translates into decreased control: it's a lot harder to control who can copy a book once there's a photocopier on every corner than it is when you need a monastery and several years to copy a Bible. And that decreased control demands a new copyright regime that rebalances the rights of creators with their audiences. + +For example, when the VCR was invented, the courts affirmed a new copyright exemption for time-shifting; when the radio was invented, the Congress granted an anti-trust exemption to the record labels in order to secure a blanket license; when cable TV was invented, the government just ordered the broadcasters to sell the cable-operators access to programming at a fixed rate. + +Copyright is perennially out of date, because its latest rev was generated in response to the last generation of technology. The temptation to treat copyright as though it came down off the mountain on two stone tablets (or worse, as "just like" real property) is deeply flawed, since, by definition, current copyright only considers the last generation of tech. + +So, are bookwarez in violation of copyright law? Duh. Is this the end of the world? *{Duh}*. If the Catholic church can survive the printing press, science fiction will certainly weather the advent of bookwarez. + +# + +Lagniappe [Lagniappe] + +We're almost done here, but there's one more thing I'd like to do before I get off the stage. [Lagniappe: an unexpected bonus or extra] Think of it as a "lagniappe" -- a little something extra to thank you for your patience. + +About a year ago, I released my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, on the net, under the terms of the most restrictive Creative Commons license available. All it allowed my readers to do was send around copies of the book. I was cautiously dipping my toe into the water, though at the time, it felt like I was taking a plunge. + +Now I'm going to take a plunge. Today, I will re-license the text of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom under a Creative Commons "Attribution-ShareAlike-Derivs-Noncommercial" license [HUMAN READABLE LICENSE], which means that as of today, you have my blessing to create derivative works from my first book. You can make movies, audiobooks, translations, fan-fiction, slash fiction (God help us) [GEEK HIERARCHY], furry slash fiction [GEEK HIERARCHY DETAIL], poetry, translations, t-shirts, you name it, with two provisos: that one, you have to allow everyone else to rip, mix and burn your creations in the same way you're hacking mine; and on the other hand, you've got to do it noncommercially. + +The sky didn't fall when I dipped my toe in. Let's see what happens when I get in up to my knees. + +The text with the new license will be online before the end of the day. Check craphound.com/down for details. + +Oh, and I'm also releasing the text of this speech under a Creative Commons Public Domain dedication, [Public domain dedication] giving it away to the world to do with as it see fits. It'll be linked off my blog, Boing Boing, before the day is through. + +$$$$ + +1~ Free(konomic) E-books + +(Originally published in Locus Magazine, September 2007) ~# + +Can giving away free electronic books really sell printed books? I think so. As I explained in my March column ("You Do Like Reading Off a Computer Screen"), I don't believe that most readers want to read long-form works off a screen, and I don't believe that they will ever want to read long-form works off a screen. As I say in the column, the problem with reading off a screen isn't resolution, eyestrain, or compatibility with reading in the bathtub: it's that computers are seductive, they tempt us to do other things, making concentrating on a long-form work impractical. + +Sure, some readers have the cognitive quirk necessary to read full-length works off screens, or are motivated to do so by other circumstances (such as being so broke that they could never hope to buy the printed work). The rational question isn't, "Will giving away free e-books cost me sales?" but rather, "Will giving away free e-books win me more sales than it costs me?" + +This is a very hard proposition to evaluate in a quantitative way. Books aren't lattes or cable-knit sweaters: each book sells (or doesn't) due to factors that are unique to that title. It's hard to imagine an empirical, controlled study in which two "equivalent" books are published, and one is also available as a free download, the other not, and the difference calculated as a means of "proving" whether e-books hurt or help sales in the long run. + +I've released all of my novels as free downloads simultaneous with their print publication. If I had a time machine, I could re-release them without the free downloads and compare the royalty statements. Lacking such a device, I'm forced to draw conclusions from qualitative, anecdotal evidence, and I've collected plenty of that: + +_* Many writers have tried free e-book releases to tie in with the print release of their works. To the best of my knowledge, every writer who's tried this has repeated the experiment with future works, suggesting a high degree of satisfaction with the outcomes + +_* A writer friend of mine had his first novel come out at the same time as mine. We write similar material and are often compared to one another by critics and reviewers. My first novel had a free download, his didn't. We compared sales figures and I was doing substantially better than him -- he subsequently convinced his publisher to let him follow suit + +_* Baen Books has a pretty good handle on expected sales for new volumes in long-running series; having sold many such series, they have lots of data to use in sales estimates. If Volume N sells X copies, we expect Volume N+1 to sell Y copies. They report that they have seen a measurable uptick in sales following from free e-book releases of previous and current volumes + +_* David Blackburn, a Harvard PhD candidate in economics, published a paper in 2004 in which he calculated that, for music, "piracy" results in a net increase in sales for all titles in the 75th percentile and lower; negligible change in sales for the "middle class" of titles between the 75th percentile and the 97th percentile; and a small drag on the "super-rich" in the 97th percentile and higher. Publisher Tim O'Reilly describes this as "piracy's progressive taxation," apportioning a small wealth-redistribution to the vast majority of works, no net change to the middle, and a small cost on the richest few + +_* Speaking of Tim O'Reilly, he has just published a detailed, quantitative study of the effect of free downloads on a single title. O'Reilly Media published Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, in November 2005, simultaneously releasing the book as a free download. By March 2007, they had a pretty detailed picture of the sales-cycle of this book -- and, thanks to industry standard metrics like those provided by Bookscan, they could compare it, apples-to-apples style, against the performance of competing books treating with the same subject. O'Reilly's conclusion: downloads didn't cause a decline in sales, and appears to have resulted in a lift in sales. This is particularly noteworthy because the book in question is a technical reference work, exclusively consumed by computer programmers who are by definition disposed to read off screens. Also, this is a reference work and therefore is more likely to be useful in electronic form, where it can be easily searched + +_* In my case, my publishers have gone back to press repeatedly for my books. The print runs for each edition are modest -- I'm a midlist writer in a world with a shrinking midlist -- but publishers print what they think they can sell, and they're outselling their expectations + +_* The new opportunities arising from my free downloads are so numerous as to be uncountable -- foreign rights deals, comic book licenses, speaking engagements, article commissions -- I've made more money in these secondary markets than I have in royalties + +_* More anecdotes: I've had literally thousands of people approach me by e-mail and at signings and cons to say, "I found your work online for free, got hooked, and started buying it." By contrast, I've had all of five e-mails from people saying, "Hey, idiot, thanks for the free book, now I don't have to buy the print edition, ha ha!" + +Many of us have assumed, a priori, that electronic books substitute for print books. While I don't have controlled, quantitative data to refute the proposition, I do have plenty of experience with this stuff, and all that experience leads me to believe that giving away my books is selling the hell out of them. + +More importantly, the free e-book skeptics have no evidence to offer in support of their position -- just hand-waving and dark muttering about a mythological future when book-lovers give up their printed books for electronic book-readers (as opposed to the much more plausible future where book lovers go on buying their fetish objects and carry books around on their electronic devices). + +I started giving away e-books after I witnessed the early days of the "bookwarez" scene, wherein fans cut the binding off their favorite books, scanned them, ran them through optical character recognition software, and manually proofread them to eliminate the digitization errors. These fans were easily spending 80 hours to rip their favorite books, and they were only ripping their favorite books, books they loved and wanted to share. (The 80-hour figure comes from my own attempt to do this -- I'm sure that rippers get faster with practice.) + +I thought to myself that 80 hours' free promotional effort would be a good thing to have at my disposal when my books entered the market. What if I gave my readers clean, canonical electronic editions of my works, saving them the bother of ripping them, and so freed them up to promote my work to their friends? + +After all, it's not like there's any conceivable way to stop people from putting books on scanners if they really want to. Scanners aren't going to get more expensive or slower. The Internet isn't going to get harder to use. Better to confront this challenge head on, turn it into an opportunity, than to rail against the future (I'm a science fiction writer -- tuning into the future is supposed to be my metier). + +The timing couldn't have been better. Just as my first novel was being published, a new, high-tech project for promoting sharing of creative works launched: the Creative Commons project (CC). CC offers a set of tools that make it easy to mark works with whatever freedoms the author wants to give away. CC launched in 2003 and today, more than 160,000,000 works have been released under its licenses. + +My next column will go into more detail on what CC is, what licenses it offers, and how to use them -- but for now, check them out online at creativecommons.org. + +$$$$ + +1~ The Progressive Apocalypse and Other Futurismic Delights + +(Originally published in Locus Magazine, July 2007) ~# + +Of course, science fiction is a literature of the present. Many's the science fiction writer who uses the future as a warped mirror for reflecting back the present day, angled to illustrate the hidden strangeness buried by our invisible assumptions: Orwell turned 1948 into Nineteen Eighty-Four. But even when the fictional future isn't a parable about the present day, it is necessarily a creation of the present day, since it reflects the present day biases that infuse the author. Hence Asimov's Foundation, a New Deal-esque project to think humanity out of its tribulations though social interventionism. + +Bold SF writers eschew the future altogether, embracing a futuristic account of the present day. William Gibson's forthcoming Spook Country is an act of "speculative presentism," a book so futuristic it could only have been set in 2006, a book that exploits retrospective historical distance to let us glimpse just how alien and futuristic our present day is. + +Science fiction writers aren't the only people in the business of predicting the future. Futurists -- consultants, technology columnists, analysts, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurial pitchmen -- spill a lot of ink, phosphors, and caffeinated hot air in describing a vision for a future where we'll get more and more of whatever it is they want to sell us or warn us away from. Tomorrow will feature faster, cheaper processors, more Internet users, ubiquitous RFID tags, radically democratic political processes dominated by bloggers, massively multiplayer games whose virtual economies dwarf the physical economy. + +There's a lovely neologism to describe these visions: "futurismic." Futurismic media is that which depicts futurism, not the future. It is often self-serving -- think of the antigrav Nikes in Back to the Future III -- and it generally doesn't hold up well to scrutiny. + +SF films and TV are great fonts of futurismic imagery: R2D2 is a fully conscious AI, can hack the firewall of the Death Star, and is equipped with a range of holographic projectors and antipersonnel devices -- but no one has installed a $15 sound card and some text-to-speech software on him, so he has to whistle like Harpo Marx. Or take the Starship Enterprise, with a transporter capable of constituting matter from digitally stored plans, and radios that can breach the speed of light. + +The non-futurismic version of NCC-1701 would be the size of a softball (or whatever the minimum size for a warp drive, transporter, and subspace radio would be). It would zip around the galaxy at FTL speeds under remote control. When it reached an interesting planet, it would beam a stored copy of a landing party onto the surface, and when their mission was over, it would beam them back into storage, annihilating their physical selves until they reached the next stopping point. If a member of the landing party were eaten by a green-skinned interspatial hippie or giant toga-wearing galactic tyrant, that member would be recovered from backup by the transporter beam. Hell, the entire landing party could consist of multiple copies of the most effective crewmember onboard: no redshirts, just a half-dozen instances of Kirk operating in clonal harmony. + +Futurism has a psychological explanation, as recounted in Harvard clinical psych prof Daniel Gilbert's 2006 book, Stumbling on Happiness. Our memories and our projections of the future are necessarily imperfect. Our memories consist of those observations our brains have bothered to keep records of, woven together with inference and whatever else is lying around handy when we try to remember something. Ask someone who's eating a great lunch how breakfast was, and odds are she'll tell you it was delicious. Ask the same question of someone eating rubbery airplane food, and he'll tell you his breakfast was awful. We weave the past out of our imperfect memories and our observable present. + +We make the future in much the same way: we use reasoning and evidence to predict what we can, and whenever we bump up against uncertainty, we fill the void with the present day. Hence the injunction on women soldiers in the future of Starship Troopers, or the bizarre, glassed-over "Progressland" city diorama at the end of the 1964 World's Fair exhibit The Carousel of Progress, which Disney built for GE. + +Lapsarianism -- the idea of a paradise lost, a fall from grace that makes each year worse than the last -- is the predominant future feeling for many people. It's easy to see why: an imperfectly remembered golden childhood gives way to the worries of adulthood and physical senescence. Surely the world is getting worse: nothing tastes as good as it did when we were six, everything hurts all the time, and our matured gonads drive us into frenzies of bizarre, self-destructive behavior. + +Lapsarianism dominates the Abrahamic faiths. I have an Orthodox Jewish friend whose tradition holds that each generation of rabbis is necessarily less perfect than the rabbis that came before, since each generation is more removed from the perfection of the Garden. Therefore, no rabbi is allowed to overturn any of his forebears' wisdom, since they are all, by definition, smarter than him. + +The natural endpoint of Lapsarianism is apocalypse. If things get worse, and worse, and worse, eventually they'll just run out of worseness. Eventually, they'll bottom out, a kind of rotten death of the universe when Lapsarian entropy hits the nadir and takes us all with it. + +Running counter to Lapsarianism is progressivism: the Enlightenment ideal of a world of great people standing on the shoulders of giants. Each of us contributes to improving the world's storehouse of knowledge (and thus its capacity for bringing joy to all of us), and our descendants and proteges take our work and improve on it. The very idea of "progress" runs counter to the idea of Lapsarianism and the fall: it is the idea that we, as a species, are falling in reverse, combing back the wild tangle of entropy into a neat, tidy braid. + +Of course, progress must also have a boundary condition -- if only because we eventually run out of imaginary ways that the human condition can improve. And science fiction has a name for the upper bound of progress, a name for the progressive apocalypse: + +We call it the Singularity. + +Vernor Vinge's Singularity takes place when our technology reaches a stage that allows us to "upload" our minds into software, run them at faster, hotter speeds than our neurological wetware substrate allows for, and create multiple, parallel instances of ourselves. After the Singularity, nothing is predictable because everything is possible. We will cease to be human and become (as the title of Rudy Rucker's next novel would have it) Postsingular. + +The Singularity is what happens when we have so much progress that we run out of progress. It's the apocalypse that ends the human race in rapture and joy. Indeed, Ken MacLeod calls the Singularity "the rapture of the nerds," an apt description for the mirror-world progressive version of the Lapsarian apocalypse. + +At the end of the day, both progress and the fall from grace are illusions. The central thesis of Stumbling on Happiness is that human beings are remarkably bad at predicting what will make us happy. Our predictions are skewed by our imperfect memories and our capacity for filling the future with the present day. + +The future is gnarlier than futurism. NCC-1701 probably wouldn't send out transporter-equipped drones -- instead, it would likely find itself on missions whose ethos, mores, and rationale are largely incomprehensible to us, and so obvious to its crew that they couldn't hope to explain them. + +Science fiction is the literature of the present, and the present is the only era that we can hope to understand, because it's the only era that lets us check our observations and predictions against reality. + +$$$$ + +1~ When the Singularity is More Than a Literary Device: An Interview with Futurist-Inventor Ray Kurzweil + +(Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, June 2005) ~# + +It's not clear to me whether the Singularity is a technical belief system or a spiritual one. + +The Singularity -- a notion that's crept into a lot of skiffy, and whose most articulate in-genre spokesmodel is Vernor Vinge -- describes the black hole in history that will be created at the moment when human intelligence can be digitized. When the speed and scope of our cognition is hitched to the price-performance curve of microprocessors, our "progress" will double every eighteen months, and then every twelve months, and then every ten, and eventually, every five seconds. + +Singularities are, literally, holes in space from whence no information can emerge, and so SF writers occasionally mutter about how hard it is to tell a story set after the information Singularity. Everything will be different. What it means to be human will be so different that what it means to be in danger, or happy, or sad, or any of the other elements that make up the squeeze-and-release tension in a good yarn will be unrecognizable to us pre-Singletons. + +It's a neat conceit to write around. I've committed Singularity a couple of times, usually in collaboration with gonzo Singleton Charlie Stross, the mad antipope of the Singularity. But those stories have the same relation to futurism as romance novels do to love: a shared jumping-off point, but radically different morphologies. + +Of course, the Singularity isn't just a conceit for noodling with in the pages of the pulps: it's the subject of serious-minded punditry, futurism, and even science. + +Ray Kurzweil is one such pundit-futurist-scientist. He's a serial entrepreneur who founded successful businesses that advanced the fields of optical character recognition (machine-reading) software, text-to-speech synthesis, synthetic musical instrument simulation, computer-based speech recognition, and stock-market analysis. He cured his own Type-II diabetes through a careful review of the literature and the judicious application of first principles and reason. To a casual observer, Kurzweil appears to be the star of some kind of Heinlein novel, stealing fire from the gods and embarking on a quest to bring his maverick ideas to the public despite the dismissals of the establishment, getting rich in the process. + +Kurzweil believes in the Singularity. In his 1990 manifesto, "The Age of Intelligent Machines," Kurzweil persuasively argued that we were on the brink of meaningful machine intelligence. A decade later, he continued the argument in a book called The Age of Spiritual Machines, whose most audacious claim is that the world's computational capacity has been slowly doubling since the crust first cooled (and before!), and that the doubling interval has been growing shorter and shorter with each passing year, so that now we see it reflected in the computer industry's Moore's Law, which predicts that microprocessors will get twice as powerful for half the cost about every eighteen months. The breathtaking sweep of this trend has an obvious conclusion: computers more powerful than people; more powerful than we can comprehend. + +Now Kurzweil has published two more books, The Singularity Is Near, When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking, Spring 2005) and Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (with Terry Grossman, Rodale, November 2004). The former is a technological roadmap for creating the conditions necessary for ascent into Singularity; the latter is a book about life-prolonging technologies that will assist baby-boomers in living long enough to see the day when technological immortality is achieved. + +See what I meant about his being a Heinlein hero? + +I still don't know if the Singularity is a spiritual or a technological belief system. It has all the trappings of spirituality, to be sure. If you are pure and kosher, if you live right and if your society is just, then you will live to see a moment of Rapture when your flesh will slough away leaving nothing behind but your ka, your soul, your consciousness, to ascend to an immortal and pure state. + +I wrote a novel called Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom where characters could make backups of themselves and recover from them if something bad happened, like catching a cold or being assassinated. It raises a lot of existential questions: most prominently: are you still you when you've been restored from backup? + +The traditional AI answer is the Turing Test, invented by Alan Turing, the gay pioneer of cryptography and artificial intelligence who was forced by the British government to take hormone treatments to "cure" him of his homosexuality, culminating in his suicide in 1954. Turing cut through the existentialism about measuring whether a machine is intelligent by proposing a parlor game: a computer sits behind a locked door with a chat program, and a person sits behind another locked door with his own chat program, and they both try to convince a judge that they are real people. If the computer fools a human judge into thinking that it's a person, then to all intents and purposes, it's a person. + +So how do you know if the backed-up you that you've restored into a new body -- or a jar with a speaker attached to it -- is really you? Well, you can ask it some questions, and if it answers the same way that you do, you're talking to a faithful copy of yourself. + +Sounds good. But the me who sent his first story into Asimov's seventeen years ago couldn't answer the question, "Write a story for Asimov's" the same way the me of today could. Does that mean I'm not me anymore? + +Kurzweil has the answer. + +"If you follow that logic, then if you were to take me ten years ago, I could not pass for myself in a Ray Kurzweil Turing Test. But once the requisite uploading technology becomes available a few decades hence, you could make a perfect-enough copy of me, and it would pass the Ray Kurzweil Turing Test. The copy doesn't have to match the quantum state of my every neuron, either: if you meet me the next day, I'd pass the Ray Kurzweil Turing Test. Nevertheless, none of the quantum states in my brain would be the same. There are quite a few changes that each of us undergo from day to day, we don't examine the assumption that we are the same person closely. + +"We gradually change our pattern of atoms and neurons but we very rapidly change the particles the pattern is made up of. We used to think that in the brain -- the physical part of us most closely associated with our identity -- cells change very slowly, but it turns out that the components of the neurons, the tubules and so forth, turn over in only days. I'm a completely different set of particles from what I was a week ago. + +"Consciousness is a difficult subject, and I'm always surprised by how many people talk about consciousness routinely as if it could be easily and readily tested scientifically. But we can't postulate a consciousness detector that does not have some assumptions about consciousness built into it. + +"Science is about objective third party observations and logical deductions from them. Consciousness is about first-person, subjective experience, and there's a fundamental gap there. We live in a world of assumptions about consciousness. We share the assumption that other human beings are conscious, for example. But that breaks down when we go outside of humans, when we consider, for example, animals. Some say only humans are conscious and animals are instinctive and machinelike. Others see humanlike behavior in an animal and consider the animal conscious, but even these observers don't generally attribute consciousness to animals that aren't humanlike. + +"When machines are complex enough to have responses recognizable as emotions, those machines will be more humanlike than animals." + +The Kurzweil Singularity goes like this: computers get better and smaller. Our ability to measure the world gains precision and grows ever cheaper. Eventually, we can measure the world inside the brain and make a copy of it in a computer that's as fast and complex as a brain, and voila, intelligence. + +Here in the twenty-first century we like to view ourselves as ambulatory brains, plugged into meat-puppets that lug our precious grey matter from place to place. We tend to think of that grey matter as transcendently complex, and we think of it as being the bit that makes us us. + +But brains aren't that complex, Kurzweil says. Already, we're starting to unravel their mysteries. + +"We seem to have found one area of the brain closely associated with higher-level emotions, the spindle cells, deeply embedded in the brain. There are tens of thousands of them, spanning the whole brain (maybe eighty thousand in total), which is an incredibly small number. Babies don't have any, most animals don't have any, and they likely only evolved over the last million years or so. Some of the high-level emotions that are deeply human come from these. + +"Turing had the right insight: base the test for intelligence on written language. Turing Tests really work. A novel is based on language: with language you can conjure up any reality, much more so than with images. Turing almost lived to see computers doing a good job of performing in fields like math, medical diagnosis and so on, but those tasks were easier for a machine than demonstrating even a child's mastery of language. Language is the true embodiment of human intelligence." + +If we're not so complex, then it's only a matter of time until computers are more complex than us. When that comes, our brains will be model-able in a computer and that's when the fun begins. That's the thesis of Spiritual Machines, which even includes a (Heinlein-style) timeline leading up to this day. + +Now, it may be that a human brain contains n logic-gates and runs at x cycles per second and stores z petabytes, and that n and x and z are all within reach. It may be that we can take a brain apart and record the position and relationships of all the neurons and sub-neuronal elements that constitute a brain. + +But there are also a nearly infinite number of ways of modeling a brain in a computer, and only a finite (or possibly nonexistent) fraction of that space will yield a conscious copy of the original meat-brain. Science fiction writers usually hand-wave this step: in Heinlein's "Man Who Sold the Moon," the gimmick is that once the computer becomes complex enough, with enough "random numbers," it just wakes up. + +Computer programmers are a little more skeptical. Computers have never been known for their skill at programming themselves -- they tend to be no smarter than the people who write their software. + +But there are techniques for getting computers to program themselves, based on evolution and natural selection. A programmer creates a system that spits out lots -- thousands or even millions -- of randomly generated programs. Each one is given the opportunity to perform a computational task (say, sorting a list of numbers from greatest to least) and the ones that solve the problem best are kept aside while the others are erased. Now the survivors are used as the basis for a new generation of randomly mutated descendants, each based on elements of the code that preceded them. By running many instances of a randomly varied program at once, and by culling the least successful and regenerating the population from the winners very quickly, it is possible to evolve effective software that performs as well or better than the code written by human authors. + +Indeed, evolutionary computing is a promising and exciting field that's realizing real returns through cool offshoots like "ant colony optimization" and similar approaches that are showing good results in fields as diverse as piloting military UAVs and efficiently provisioning car-painting robots at automotive plants. + +So if you buy Kurzweil's premise that computation is getting cheaper and more plentiful than ever, then why not just use evolutionary algorithms to evolve the best way to model a scanned-in human brain such that it "wakes up" like Heinlein's Mike computer? + +Indeed, this is the crux of Kurzweil's argument in Spiritual Machines: if we have computation to spare and a detailed model of a human brain, we need only combine them and out will pop the mechanism whereby we may upload our consciousness to digital storage media and transcend our weak and bothersome meat forever.Indeed, this is the crux of Kurzweil's argument in Spiritual Machines: if we have computation to spare and a detailed model of a human brain, we need only combine them and out will pop the mechanism whereby we may upload our consciousness to digital storage media and transcend our weak and bothersome meat forever. + +But it's a cheat. Evolutionary algorithms depend on the same mechanisms as real-world evolution: heritable variation of candidates and a system that culls the least-suitable candidates. This latter -- the fitness-factor that determines which individuals in a cohort breed and which vanish -- is the key to a successful evolutionary system. Without it, there's no pressure for the system to achieve the desired goal: merely mutation and more mutation. + +But how can a machine evaluate which of a trillion models of a human brain is "most like" a conscious mind? Or better still: which one is most like the individual whose brain is being modeled? + +"It is a sleight of hand in Spiritual Machines," Kurzweil admits. "But in The Singularity Is Near, I have an in-depth discussion about what we know about the brain and how to model it. Our tools for understanding the brain are subject to the Law of Accelerating Returns, and we've made more progress in reverse-engineering the human brain than most people realize." This is a tasty Kurzweilism that observes that improvements in technology yield tools for improving technology, round and round, so that the thing that progress begets more than anything is more and yet faster progress. + +"Scanning resolution of human tissue -- both spatial and temporal -- is doubling every year, and so is our knowledge of the workings of the brain. The brain is not one big neural net, the brain is several hundred different regions, and we can understand each region, we can model the regions with mathematics, most of which have some nexus with chaos and self-organizing systems. This has already been done for a couple dozen regions out of the several hundred. + +"We have a good model of a dozen or so regions of the auditory and visual cortex, how we strip images down to very low-resolution movies based on pattern recognition. Interestingly, we don't actually see things, we essentially hallucinate them in detail from what we see from these low resolution cues. Past the early phases of the visual cortex, detail doesn't reach the brain. + +"We are getting exponentially more knowledge. We can get detailed scans of neurons working in vivo, and are beginning to understand the chaotic algorithms underlying human intelligence. In some cases, we are getting comparable performance of brain regions in simulation. These tools will continue to grow in detail and sophistication. + +"We can have confidence of reverse-engineering the brain in twenty years or so. The reason that brain reverse engineering has not contributed much to artificial intelligence is that up until recently we didn't have the right tools. If I gave you a computer and a few magnetic sensors and asked you to reverse-engineer it, you might figure out that there's a magnetic device spinning when a file is saved, but you'd never get at the instruction set. Once you reverse-engineer the computer fully, however, you can express its principles of operation in just a few dozen pages. + +"Now there are new tools that let us see the interneuronal connections and their signaling, in vivo, and in real-time. We're just now getting these tools and there's very rapid application of the tools to obtain the data. + +"Twenty years from now we will have realistic simulations and models of all the regions of the brain and [we will] understand how they work. We won't blindly or mindlessly copy those methods, we will understand them and use them to improve our AI toolkit. So we'll learn how the brain works and then apply the sophisticated tools that we will obtain, as we discover how the brain works. + +"Once we understand a subtle science principle, we can isolate, amplify, and expand it. Air goes faster over a curved surface: from that insight we isolated, amplified, and expanded the idea and invented air travel. We'll do the same with intelligence. + +"Progress is exponential -- not just a measure of power of computation, number of Internet nodes, and magnetic spots on a hard disk -- the rate of paradigm shift is itself accelerating, doubling every decade. Scientists look at a problem and they intuitively conclude that since we've solved 1 percent over the last year, it'll therefore be one hundred years until the problem is exhausted: but the rate of progress doubles every decade, and the power of the information tools (in price-performance, resolution, bandwidth, and so on) doubles every year. People, even scientists, don't grasp exponential growth. During the first decade of the human genome project, we only solved 2 percent of the problem, but we solved the remaining 98 percent in five years." + +But Kurzweil doesn't think that the future will arrive in a rush. As William Gibson observed, "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." + +"Sure, it'd be interesting to take a human brain, scan it, reinstantiate the brain, and run it on another substrate. That will ultimately happen." + +"But the most salient scenario is that we'll gradually merge with our technology. We'll use nanobots to kill pathogens, then to kill cancer cells, and then they'll go into our brain and do benign things there like augment our memory, and very gradually they'll get more and more sophisticated. There's no single great leap, but there is ultimately a great leap comprised of many small steps. + +"In The Singularity Is Near, I describe the radically different world of 2040, and how we'll get there one benign change at a time. The Singularity will be gradual, smooth. + +"Really, this is about augmenting our biological thinking with nonbiological thinking. We have a capacity of 1026 to 1029 calculations per second (cps) in the approximately 1010 biological human brains on Earth and that number won't change much in fifty years, but nonbiological thinking will just crash through that. By 2049, nonbiological thinking capacity will be on the order of a billion times that. We'll get to the point where bio thinking is relatively insignificant. + +"People didn't throw their typewriters away when word-processing started. There's always an overlap -- it'll take time before we realize how much more powerful nonbiological thinking will ultimately be." + +It's well and good to talk about all the stuff we can do with technology, but it's a lot more important to talk about the stuff we'll be allowed to do with technology. Think of the global freak-out caused by the relatively trivial advent of peer-to-peer file-sharing tools: Universities are wiretapping their campuses and disciplining computer science students for writing legitimate, general purpose software; grandmothers and twelve-year-olds are losing their life savings; privacy and due process have sailed out the window without so much as a by-your-leave. + +Even P2P's worst enemies admit that this is a general-purpose technology with good and bad uses, but when new tech comes along it often engenders a response that countenances punishing an infinite number of innocent people to get at the guilty. + +What's going to happen when the new technology paradigm isn't song-swapping, but transcendent super-intelligence? Will the reactionary forces be justified in razing the whole ecosystem to eliminate a few parasites who are doing negative things with the new tools? + +"Complex ecosystems will always have parasites. Malware [malicious software] is the most important battlefield today. + +"Everything will become software -- objects will be malleable, we'll spend lots of time in VR, and computhought will be orders of magnitude more important than biothought. + +"Software is already complex enough that we have an ecological terrain that has emerged just as it did in the bioworld. + +"That's partly because technology is unregulated and people have access to the tools to create malware and the medicine to treat it. Today's software viruses are clever and stealthy and not simpleminded. Very clever. + +"But here's the thing: you don't see people advocating shutting down the Internet because malware is so destructive. I mean, malware is potentially more than a nuisance -- emergency systems, air traffic control, and nuclear reactors all run on vulnerable software. It's an important issue, but the potential damage is still a tiny fraction of the benefit we get from the Internet. + +"I hope it'll remain that way -- that the Internet won't become a regulated space like medicine. Malware's not the most important issue facing human society today. Designer bioviruses are. People are concerted about WMDs, but the most daunting WMD would be a designed biological virus. The means exist in college labs to create destructive viruses that erupt and spread silently with long incubation periods. + +"Importantly, a would-be bio-terrorist doesn't have to put malware through the FDA's regulatory approval process, but scientists working to fix bio-malware do. + +"In Huxley's Brave New World, the rationale for the totalitarian system was that technology was too dangerous and needed to be controlled. But that just pushes technology underground where it becomes less stable. Regulation gives the edge of power to the irresponsible who won't listen to the regulators anyway. + +"The way to put more stones on the defense side of the scale is to put more resources into defensive technologies, not create a totalitarian regime of Draconian control. + +"I advocate a one hundred billion dollar program to accelerate the development of anti-biological virus technology. The way to combat this is to develop broad tools to destroy viruses. We have tools like RNA interference, just discovered in the past two years to block gene expression. We could develop means to sequence the genes of a new virus (SARS only took thirty-one days) and respond to it in a matter of days. + +"Think about it. There's no FDA for software, no certification for programmers. The government is thinking about it, though! The reason the FCC is contemplating Trusted Computing mandates," -- a system to restrict what a computer can do by means of hardware locks embedded on the motherboard -- "is that computing technology is broadening to cover everything. So now you have communications bureaucrats, biology bureaucrats, all wanting to regulate computers. + +"Biology would be a lot more stable if we moved away from regulation -- which is extremely irrational and onerous and doesn't appropriately balance risks. Many medications are not available today even though they should be. The FDA always wants to know what happens if we approve this and will it turn into a thalidomide situation that embarrasses us on CNN? + +"Nobody asks about the harm that will certainly accrue from delaying a treatment for one or more years. There's no political weight at all, people have been dying from diseases like heart disease and cancer for as long as we've been alive. Attributable risks get 100-1000 times more weight than unattributable risks." + +Is this spirituality or science? Perhaps it is the melding of both -- more shades of Heinlein, this time the weird religions founded by people who took Stranger in a Strange Land way too seriously. + +After all, this is a system of belief that dictates a means by which we can care for our bodies virtuously and live long enough to transcend them. It is a system of belief that concerns itself with the meddling of non-believers, who work to undermine its goals through irrational systems predicated on their disbelief. It is a system of belief that asks and answers the question of what it means to be human. + +It's no wonder that the Singularity has come to occupy so much of the science fiction narrative in these years. Science or spirituality, you could hardly ask for a subject better tailored to technological speculation and drama. + +$$$$ + +1~ Wikipedia: a genuine Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy -- minus the editors + +(Originally published in The Anthology at the End of the Universe, April 2005) ~# + +"Mostly Harmless" -- a phrase so funny that Adams actually titled a book after it. Not that there's a lot of comedy inherent in those two words: rather, they're the punchline to a joke that anyone who's ever written for publication can really get behind. + +Ford Prefect, a researcher for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, has been stationed on Earth for years, painstakingly compiling an authoritative, insightful entry on Terran geography, science and culture, excerpts from which appear throughout the H2G2 books. His entry improved upon the old one, which noted that Earth was, simply, "Harmless." + +However, the Guide has limited space, and when Ford submits his entry to his editors, it is trimmed to fit: + +group{ + + "What? Harmless? Is that all it's got to say? Harmless! One + word!" + + Ford shrugged. "Well, there are a hundred billion stars in the + Galaxy, and only a limited amount of space in the book's + microprocessors," he said, "and no one knew much about the Earth + of course." + + "Well for God's sake I hope you managed to rectify that a bit." + + "Oh yes, well I managed to transmit a new entry off to the editor. + He had to trim it a bit, but it's still an improvement." + + "And what does it say now?" asked Arthur. + + "Mostly harmless," admitted Ford with a slightly embarrassed + cough. + +}group + +[fn: My lifestyle is as gypsy and fancy-free as the characters in H2G2, and as a result my copies of the Adams books are thousands of miles away in storages in other countries, and this essay was penned on public transit and cheap hotel rooms in Chile, Boston, London, Geneva, Brussels, Bergen, Geneva (again), Toronto, Edinburgh, and Helsinki. Luckily, I was able to download a dodgy, re-keyed version of the Adams books from a peer-to-peer network, which network I accessed via an open wireless network on a random street-corner in an anonymous city, a fact that I note here as testimony to the power of the Internet to do what the Guide does for Ford and Arthur: put all the information I need at my fingertips, wherever I am. However, these texts *{are}* a little on the dodgy side, as noted, so you might want to confirm these quotes before, say, uttering them before an Adams truefan.] + +And there's the humor: every writer knows the pain of laboring over a piece for days, infusing it with diverse interesting factoids and insights, only to have it cut to ribbons by some distant editor (I once wrote thirty drafts of a 5,000-word article for an editor who ended up running it in three paragraphs as accompaniment for what he decided should be a photo essay with minimal verbiage.) + +Since the dawn of the Internet, H2G2 geeks have taken it upon themselves to attempt to make a Guide on the Internet. Volunteers wrote and submitted essays on various subjects as would be likely to appear in a good encyclopedia, infusing them with equal measures of humor and thoughtfulness, and they were edited together by the collective effort of the contributors. These projects -- Everything2, H2G2 (which was overseen by Adams himself), and others -- are like a barn-raising in which a team of dedicated volunteers organize the labors of casual contributors, piecing together a free and open user-generated encyclopedia. + +These encyclopedias have one up on Adams's Guide: they have no shortage of space on their "microprocessors" (the first volume of the Guide was clearly written before Adams became conversant with PCs!). The ability of humans to generate verbiage is far outstripped by the ability of technologists to generate low-cost, reliable storage to contain it. For example, Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive project (archive.org) has been making a copy of the Web -- the *{whole}* Web, give or take -- every couple of days since 1996. Using the Archive's Wayback Machine, you can now go and see what any page looked like on a given day. + +The Archive doesn't even bother throwing away copies of pages that haven't changed since the last time they were scraped: with storage as cheap as it is -- and it is *{very}* cheap for the Archive, which runs the largest database in the history of the universe off of a collection of white-box commodity PCs stacked up on packing skids in the basement of a disused armory in San Francisco's Presidio -- there's no reason not to just keep them around. In fact, the Archive has just spawned two "mirror" Archives, one located under the rebuilt Library of Alexandria and the other in Amsterdam. [fn: Brewster Kahle says that he was nervous about keeping his only copy of the "repository of all human knowledge" on the San Andreas fault, but keeping your backups in a censorship-happy Amnesty International watchlist state and/or in a floodplain below sea level is probably not such a good idea either!] + +So these systems did not see articles trimmed for lack of space; for on the Internet, the idea of "running out of space" is meaningless. But they *{were}* trimmed, by editorial cliques, and rewritten for clarity and style. Some entries were rejected as being too thin, while others were sent back to the author for extensive rewrites. + +This traditional separation of editor and writer mirrors the creative process itself, in which authors are exhorted to concentrate on *{either}* composing *{or}* revising, but not both at the same time, for the application of the critical mind to the creative process strangles it. So you write, and then you edit. Even when you write for your own consumption, it seems you have to answer to an editor. + +The early experimental days of the Internet saw much experimentation with alternatives to traditional editor/author divisions. Slashdot, a nerdy news-site of surpassing popularity [fn: Having a link to one's website posted to Slashdot will almost inevitably overwhelm your server with traffic, knocking all but the best-provisioned hosts offline within minutes; this is commonly referred to as "the Slashdot Effect."], has a baroque system for "community moderation" of the responses to the articles that are posted to its front pages. Readers, chosen at random, are given five "moderator points" that they can use to raise or lower the score of posts on the Slashdot message boards. Subsequent readers can filter their views of these boards to show only highly ranked posts. Other readers are randomly presented with posts and their rankings and are asked to rate the fairness of each moderator's moderation. Moderators who moderate fairly are given more opportunities to moderate; likewise message-board posters whose messages are consistently highly rated. + +It is thought that this system rewards good "citizenship" on the Slashdot boards through checks and balances that reward good messages and fair editorial practices. And in the main, the Slashdot moderation system works [fn: as do variants on it, like the system in place at Kur5hin.org (pronounced "corrosion")]. If you dial your filter up to show you highly scored messages, you will generally get well-reasoned, or funny, or genuinely useful posts in your browser. + +This community moderation scheme and ones like it have been heralded as a good alternative to traditional editorship. The importance of the Internet to "edit itself" is best understood in relation to the old shibboleth, "On the Internet, everyone is a slushreader." [fn: "Slush" is the term for generally execrable unsolicited manuscripts that fetch up in publishers' offices -- these are typically so bad that the most junior people on staff are drafted into reading (and, usually, rejecting) them]. When the Internet's radical transformative properties were first bandied about in publishing circles, many reassured themselves that even if printing's importance was de-emphasized, that good editors would always been needed, and doubly so online, where any mouth-breather with a modem could publish his words. Someone would need to separate the wheat from the chaff and help keep us from drowning in information. + +One of the best-capitalized businesses in the history of the world, Yahoo!, went public on the strength of this notion, proposing to use an army of researchers to catalog every single page on the Web even as it was created, serving as a comprehensive guide to all human knowledge. Less than a decade later, Yahoo! is all but out of that business: the ability of the human race to generate new pages far outstrips Yahoo!'s ability to read, review, rank and categorize them. + +Hence Slashdot, a system of distributed slushreading. Rather than professionalizing the editorship role, Slashdot invites contributors to identify good stuff when they see it, turning editorship into a reward for good behavior. + +But as well as Slashdot works, it has this signal failing: nearly every conversation that takes place on Slashdot is shot through with discussion, griping and gaming *{on the moderation system itself}*. The core task of Slashdot has *{become}* editorship, not the putative subjects of Slashdot posts. The fact that the central task of Slashdot is to rate other Slashdotters creates a tenor of meanness in the discussion. Imagine if the subtext of every discussion you had in the real world was a kind of running, pedantic nitpickery in which every point was explicitly weighed and judged and commented upon. You'd be an unpleasant, unlikable jerk, the kind of person that is sometimes referred to as a "slashdork." + +As radical as Yahoo!'s conceit was, Slashdot's was more radical. But as radical as Slashdot's is, it is still inherently conservative in that it presumes that editorship is necessary, and that it further requires human judgment and intervention. + +Google's a lot more radical. Instead of editors, it has an algorithm. Not the kind of algorithm that dominated the early search engines like Altavista, in which laughably bad artificial intelligence engines attempted to automatically understand the content, context and value of every page on the Web so that a search for "Dog" would turn up the page more relevant to the query. + +Google's algorithm is predicated on the idea that people are good at understanding things and computers are good at counting things. Google counts up all the links on the Web and affords more authority to those pages that have been linked to by the most other pages. The rationale is that if a page has been linked to by many web-authors, then they must have seen some merit in that page. This system works remarkably well -- so well that it's nearly inconceivable that any search-engine would order its rankings by any other means. What's more, it doesn't pervert the tenor of the discussions and pages that it catalogs by turning each one into a performance for a group of ranking peers. [fn: Or at least, it *{didn't}*. Today, dedicated web-writers, such as bloggers, are keenly aware of the way that Google will interpret their choices about linking and page-structure. One popular sport is "googlebombing," in which web-writers collude to link to a given page using a humorous keyword so that the page becomes the top result for that word -- which is why, for a time, the top result for "more evil than Satan" was Microsoft.com. Likewise, the practice of "blogspamming," in which unscrupulous spammers post links to their webpages in the message boards on various blogs, so that Google will be tricked into thinking that a wide variety of sites have conferred some authority onto their penis-enlargement page.] + +But even Google is conservative in assuming that there is a need for editorship as distinct from composition. Is there a way we can dispense with editorship altogether and just use composition to refine our ideas? Can we merge composition and editorship into a single role, fusing our creative and critical selves? + +You betcha. + +"Wikis" [fn: Hawai'ian for "fast"] are websites that can be edited by anyone. They were invented by Ward Cunningham in 1995, and they have become one of the dominant tools for Internet collaboration in the present day. Indeed, there is a sort of Internet geek who throws up a Wiki in the same way that ants make anthills: reflexively, unconsciously. + +Here's how a Wiki works. You put up a page: + +group{ + + Welcome to my Wiki. It is rad. + + There are OtherWikis that inspired me. + +}group + +Click "publish" and bam, the page is live. The word "OtherWikis" will be underlined, having automatically been turned into a link to a blank page titled "OtherWikis" (Wiki software recognizes words with capital letters in the middle of them as links to other pages. Wiki people call this "camel-case," because the capital letters in the middle of words make them look like humped camels.) At the bottom of it appears this legend: "Edit this page." + +Click on "Edit this page" and the text appears in an editable field. Revise the text to your heart's content and click "Publish" and your revisions are live. Anyone who visits a Wiki can edit any of its pages, adding to it, improving on it, adding camel-cased links to new subjects, or even defacing or deleting it. + +It is authorship without editorship. Or authorship fused with editorship. Whichever, it works, though it requires effort. The Internet, like all human places and things, is fraught with spoilers and vandals who deface whatever they can. Wiki pages are routinely replaced with obscenities, with links to spammers' websites, with junk and crap and flames. + +But Wikis have self-defense mechanisms, too. Anyone can "subscribe" to a Wiki page, and be notified when it is updated. Those who create Wiki pages generally opt to act as "gardeners" for them, ensuring that they are on hand to undo the work of the spoilers. + +In this labor, they are aided by another useful Wiki feature: the "history" link. Every change to every Wiki page is logged and recorded. Anyone can page back through every revision, and anyone can revert the current version to a previous one. That means that vandalism only lasts as long as it takes for a gardener to come by and, with one or two clicks, set things to right. + +This is a powerful and wildly successful model for collaboration, and there is no better example of this than the Wikipedia, a free, Wiki-based encyclopedia with more than one million entries, which has been translated into 198 languages [fn: That is, one or more Wikipedia entries have been translated into 198 languages; more than 15 languages have 10,000 or more entries translated] + +Wikipedia is built entirely out of Wiki pages created by self-appointed experts. Contributors research and write up subjects, or produce articles on subjects that they are familiar with. + +This is authorship, but what of editorship? For if there is one thing a Guide or an encyclopedia must have, it is authority. It must be vetted by trustworthy, neutral parties, who present something that is either The Truth or simply A Truth, but truth nevertheless. + +The Wikipedia has its skeptics. Al Fasoldt, a writer for the Syracuse Post-Standard, apologized to his readers for having recommended that they consult Wikipedia. A reader of his, a librarian, wrote in and told him that his recommendation had been irresponsible, for Wikipedia articles are often defaced or worse still, rewritten with incorrect information. When another journalist from the Techdirt website wrote to Fasoldt to correct this impression, Fasoldt responded with an increasingly patronizing and hysterical series of messages in which he described Wikipedia as "outrageous," "repugnant" and "dangerous," insulting the Techdirt writer and storming off in a huff. [fn: see http://techdirt.com/articles/20040827/0132238_F.shtml for more] + +Spurred on by this exchange, many of Wikipedia's supporters decided to empirically investigate the accuracy and resilience of the system. Alex Halavais made changes to 13 different pages, ranging from obvious to subtle. Every single change was found and corrected within hours. [fn: see http://alex.halavais.net/news/index.php?p=794 for more] Then legendary Princeton engineer Ed Felten ran side-by-side comparisons of Wikipedia entries on areas in which he had deep expertise with their counterparts in the current electronic edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. His conclusion? "Wikipedia's advantage is in having more, longer, and more current entries. If it weren't for the Microsoft-case entry, Wikipedia would have been the winner hands down. Britannica's advantage is in having lower variance in the quality of its entries." [fn: see http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000675.html for more] Not a complete win for Wikipedia, but hardly "outrageous," "repugnant" and "dangerous." (Poor Fasoldt -- his idiotic hyperbole will surely haunt him through the whole of his career -- I mean, "repugnant?!") + +There has been one very damning and even frightening indictment of Wikipedia, which came from Ethan Zuckerman, the founder of the GeekCorps group, which sends volunteers to poor countries to help establish Internet Service Providers and do other good works through technology. + +Zuckerman, a Harvard Berkman Center Fellow, is concerned with the "systemic bias" in a collaborative encyclopedia whose contributors must be conversant with technology and in possession of same in order to improve on the work there. Zuckerman reasonably observes that Internet users skew towards wealth, residence in the world's richest countries, and a technological bent. This means that the Wikipedia, too, is skewed to subjects of interest to that group -- subjects where that group already has expertise and interest. + +The result is tragicomical. The entry on the Congo Civil War, the largest military conflict the world has seen since WWII, which has claimed over three million lives, has only a fraction of the verbiage devoted to the War of the Ents, a fictional war fought between sentient trees in JRR Tolkien's *{Lord of the Rings}*. + +Zuckerman issued a public call to arms to rectify this, challenging Wikipedia contributors to seek out information on subjects like Africa's military conflicts, nursing and agriculture and write these subjects up in the same loving detail given over to science fiction novels and contemporary youth culture. His call has been answered well. What remains is to infiltrate the Wikipedia into the academe so that term papers, Masters and Doctoral theses on these subjects find themselves in whole or in part on the Wikipedia. [fn See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Xed/CROSSBOW for more on this] + +But if Wikipedia is authoritative, how does it get there? What alchemy turns the maunderings of "mouth-breathers with modems" into valid, useful encyclopedia entries? + +It all comes down to the way that disputes are deliberated over and resolved. Take the entry on Israel. At one point, it characterized Israel as a beleaguered state set upon by terrorists who would drive its citizens into the sea. Not long after, the entry was deleted holus-bolus and replaced with one that described Israel as an illegal state practicing Apartheid on an oppressed ethnic minority. + +Back and forth the editors went, each overwriting the other's with his or her own doctrine. But eventually, one of them blinked. An editor moderated the doctrine just a little, conceding a single point to the other. And the other responded in kind. In this way, turn by turn, all those with a strong opinion on the matter negotiated a kind of Truth, a collection of statements that everyone could agree represented as neutral a depiction of Israel as was likely to emerge. Whereupon, the joint authors of this marvelous document joined forces and fought back to back to resist the revisions of other doctrinaires who came later, preserving their hard-won peace. [fn: This process was just repeated in microcosm in the Wikipedia entry on the author of this paper, which was replaced by a rather disparaging and untrue entry that characterized his books as critical and commercial failures -- there ensued several editorial volleys, culminating in an uneasy peace that couches the anonymous detractor's skepticism in context and qualifiers that make it clear what the facts are and what is speculation] + +What's most fascinating about these entries isn't their "final" text as currently present on Wikipedia. It is the history page for each, blow-by-blow revision lists that make it utterly transparent where the bodies were buried on the way to arriving at whatever Truth has emerged. This is a neat solution to the problem of authority -- if you want to know what the fully rounded view of opinions on any controversial subject look like, you need only consult its entry's history page for a blistering eyeful of thorough debate on the subject. + +And here, finally, is the answer to the "Mostly harmless" problem. Ford's editor can trim his verbiage to two words, but they need not stay there -- Arthur, or any other user of the Guide as we know it today [fn: that is, in the era where we understand enough about technology to know the difference between a microprocessor and a hard-drive] can revert to Ford's glorious and exhaustive version. + +Think of it: a Guide without space restrictions and without editors, where any Vogon can publish to his heart's content. + +Lovely. + +$$$$ + +1~ Warhol is Turning in His Grave + +(Originally published in The Guardian, November 13, 2007) ~# + +The excellent little programmer book for the National Portrait Gallery's current show POPARTPORTRAITS has a lot to say about the pictures hung on the walls, about the diverse source material the artists drew from in producing their provocative works. They cut up magazines, copied comic books, drew in trademarked cartoon characters like Minnie Mouse, reproduced covers from *{Time}* magazine, made ironic use of the cartoon figure of Charles Atlas, painted over an iconic photo of James Dean or Elvis Presley -- and that's just in the first room of seven. + +The programmer book describes the aesthetic experience of seeing these repositioned icons of culture high and low, the art created by the celebrated artists Poons, Rauschenberg, Warhol, et al by nicking the work of others, without permission, and remaking it to make statements and evoke emotions never countenanced by the original creators. + +However, the book does not say a word about copyright. Can you blame it? A treatise on the way that copyright and trademark were -- *{had to be}* -- trammeled to make these works could fill volumes. Reading the programmer book, you have to assume that the curators' only message about copyright is that where free expression is concerned, the rights of the creators of the original source material appropriated by the pop school take a back seat. + +There is, however, another message about copyright in the National Portrait Gallery: it's implicit in the "No Photography" signs prominently placed throughout the halls, including one right by the entrance of the POPARTPORTRAITS exhibition. This isn't intended to protect the works from the depredations of camera-flashes (it would read NO FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY if this were so). No, the ban on pictures is in place to safeguard the copyright in the works hung on the walls -- a fact that every gallery staffer I spoke to instantly affirmed when I asked about the policy. + +Indeed, it seems that every square centimeter of the Portrait Gallery is under some form of copyright. I wasn't even allowed to photograph the NO PHOTOGRAPHS sign. A museum staffer explained that she'd been told that the typography and layout of the NO PHOTOGRAPHS legend was, itself, copyrighted. If this is true, then presumably, the same rules would prevent anyone from taking any pictures in any public place -- unless you could somehow contrive to get a shot of Leicester Square without any writing, logos, architectural facades, or images in it. I doubt Warhol could have done it. + +What's the message of the show, then? Is it a celebration of remix culture, reveling in the endless possibilities opened up by appropriating and re-using without permission? + +Or is it the epitaph on the tombstone of the sweet days before the UN's chartering of the World Intellectual Property Organization and the ensuing mania for turning everything that can be sensed and recorded into someone's property? + +Does this show -- paid for with public money, with some works that are themselves owned by public institutions -- seek to inspire us to become 21st century pops, armed with cameraphones, websites and mixers, or is it supposed to inform us that our chance has passed, and we'd best settle for a life as information serfs, who can't even make free use of what our eyes see, our ears hear, of the streets we walk upon? + +Perhaps, just perhaps, it's actually a Dadaist show *{masquerading}* as a pop art show! Perhaps the point is to titillate us with the delicious irony of celebrating copyright infringement while simultaneously taking the view that even the NO PHOTOGRAPHY sign is a form of property, not to be reproduced without the permission that can never be had. + +$$$$ + +1~ The Future of Ignoring Things + +(Originally published on InformationWeek's Internet Evolution, October 3, 2007) ~# + +For decades, computers have been helping us to remember, but now it's time for them to help us to ignore. + +Take email: Endless engineer-hours are poured into stopping spam, but virtually no attention is paid to our interaction with our non-spam messages. Our mailer may strive to learn from our ratings what is and is not spam, but it expends practically no effort on figuring out which of the non-spam emails are important and which ones can be safely ignored, dropped into archival folders, or deleted unread. + +For example, I'm forever getting cc'd on busy threads by well-meaning colleagues who want to loop me in on some discussion in which I have little interest. Maybe the initial group invitation to a dinner (that I'll be out of town for) was something I needed to see, but now that I've declined, I really don't need to read the 300+ messages that follow debating the best place to eat. + +I could write a mail-rule to ignore the thread, of course. But mail-rule editors are clunky, and once your rule-list grows very long, it becomes increasingly unmanageable. Mail-rules are where bookmarks were before the bookmark site del.icio.us showed up -- built for people who might want to ensure that messages from the boss show up in red, but not intended to be used as a gigantic storehouse of a million filters, a crude means for telling the computers what we don't want to see. + +Rael Dornfest, the former chairman of the O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference and founder of the startup IWantSandy, once proposed an "ignore thread" feature for mailers: Flag a thread as uninteresting, and your mailer will start to hide messages with that subject-line or thread-ID for a week, unless those messages contain your name. The problem is that threads mutate. Last week's dinner plans become this week's discussion of next year's group holiday. If the thread is still going after a week, the messages flow back into your inbox -- and a single click takes you back through all the messages you missed. + +We need a million measures like this, adaptive systems that create a gray zone between "delete on sight" and "show this to me right away." + +RSS readers are a great way to keep up with the torrent of new items posted on high-turnover sites like Digg, but they're even better at keeping up with sites that are sporadic, like your friend's brilliant journal that she only updates twice a year. But RSS readers don't distinguish between the rare and miraculous appearance of a new item in an occasional journal and the latest click-fodder from Slashdot. They don't even sort your RSS feeds according to the sites that you click-through the most. + +There was a time when I could read the whole of Usenet -- not just because I was a student looking for an excuse to avoid my assignments, but because Usenet was once tractable, readable by a single determined person. Today, I can't even keep up with a single high-traffic message-board. I can't read all my email. I can't read every item posted to every site I like. I certainly can't plough through the entire edit-history of every Wikipedia entry I read. I've come to grips with this -- with acquiring information on a probabilistic basis, instead of the old, deterministic, cover-to-cover approach I learned in the offline world. + +It's as though there's a cognitive style built into TCP/IP. Just as the network only does best-effort delivery of packets, not worrying so much about the bits that fall on the floor, TCP/IP users also do best-effort sweeps of the Internet, focusing on learning from the good stuff they find, rather than lamenting the stuff they don't have time to see. + +The network won't ever become more tractable. There will never be fewer things vying for our online attention. The only answer is better ways and new technology to ignore stuff -- a field that's just being born, with plenty of room to grow. + +$$$$ + +1~ Facebook's Faceplant + +(Originally published as "How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook," in InformationWeek, November 26, 2007) ~# + +Facebook's "platform" strategy has sparked much online debate and controversy. No one wants to see a return to the miserable days of walled gardens, when you couldn't send a message to an AOL subscriber unless you, too, were a subscriber, and when the only services that made it were the ones that AOL management approved. Those of us on the "real" Internet regarded AOL with a species of superstitious dread, a hive of clueless noobs waiting to swamp our beloved Usenet with dumb flamewars (we fiercely guarded our erudite flamewars as being of a palpably superior grade), the wellspring of an + +Facebook is no paragon of virtue. It bears the hallmarks of the kind of pump-and-dump service that sees us as sticky, monetizable eyeballs in need of pimping. The clue is in the steady stream of emails you get from Facebook: "So-and-so has sent you a message." Yeah, what is it? Facebook isn't telling -- you have to visit Facebook to find out, generate a banner impression, and read and write your messages using the halt-and-lame Facebook interface, which lags even end-of-lifed email clients like Eudora for composing, reading, filtering, archiving and searching. Emails from Facebook aren't helpful messages, they're eyeball bait, intended to send you off to the Facebook site, only to discover that Fred wrote "Hi again!" on your "wall." Like other "social" apps (cough eVite cough), Facebook has all the social graces of a nose-picking, hyperactive six-year-old, standing at the threshold of your attention and chanting, "I know something, I know something, I know something, won't tell you what it is!" + +If there was any doubt about Facebook's lack of qualification to displace the Internet with a benevolent dictatorship/walled garden, it was removed when Facebook unveiled its new advertising campaign. Now, Facebook will allow its advertisers use the profile pictures of Facebook users to advertise their products, without permission or compensation. Even if you're the kind of person who likes the sound of a "benevolent dictatorship," this clearly isn't one. + +Many of my colleagues wonder if Facebook can be redeemed by opening up the platform, letting anyone write any app for the service, easily exporting and importing their data, and so on (this is the kind of thing Google is doing with its OpenSocial Alliance). Perhaps if Facebook takes on some of the characteristics that made the Web work -- openness, decentralization, standardization -- it will become like the Web itself, but with the added pixie dust of "social," the indefinable characteristic that makes Facebook into pure crack for a significant proportion of Internet users. + +The debate about redeeming Facebook starts from the assumption that Facebook is snowballing toward critical mass, the point at which it begins to define "the Internet" for a large slice of the world's netizens, growing steadily every day. But I think that this is far from a sure thing. Sure, networks generally follow Metcalfe's Law: "the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system." This law is best understood through the analogy of the fax machine: a world with one fax machine has no use for faxes, but every time you add a fax, you square the number of possible send/receive combinations (Alice can fax Bob or Carol or Don; Bob can fax Alice, Carol and Don; Carol can fax Alice, Bob and Don, etc). + +But Metcalfe's law presumes that creating more communications pathways increases the value of the system, and that's not always true (see Brook's Law: "Adding manpower to a late softer project makes it later"). + +Having watched the rise and fall of SixDegrees, Friendster, and the many other proto-hominids that make up the evolutionary chain leading to Facebook, MySpace, et al, I'm inclined to think that these systems are subject to a Brook's-law parallel: "Adding more users to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance." Perhaps we can call this "boyd's Law" [NOTE TO EDITOR: "boyd" is always lower-case] for danah [TO EDITOR: "danah" too!] boyd, the social scientist who has studied many of these networks from the inside as a keen-eyed net-anthropologist and who has described the many ways in which social software does violence to sociability in a series of sharp papers. + +Here's one of boyd's examples, a true story: a young woman, an elementary school teacher, joins Friendster after some of her Burning Man buddies send her an invite. All is well until her students sign up and notice that all the friends in her profile are sunburnt, drug-addled techno-pagans whose own profiles are adorned with digital photos of their painted genitals flapping over the Playa. The teacher inveigles her friends to clean up their profiles, and all is well again until her boss, the school principal, signs up to the service and demands to be added to her friends list. The fact that she doesn't like her boss doesn't really matter: in the social world of Friendster and its progeny, it's perfectly valid to demand to be "friended" in an explicit fashion that most of us left behind in the fourth grade. Now that her boss is on her friends list, our teacher-friend's buddies naturally assume that she is one of the tribe and begin to send her lascivious Friendster-grams, inviting her to all sorts of dirty funtimes. + +In the real world, we don't articulate our social networks. Imagine how creepy it would be to wander into a co-worker's cubicle and discover the wall covered with tiny photos of everyone in the office, ranked by "friend" and "foe," with the top eight friends elevated to a small shrine decorated with Post-It roses and hearts. And yet, there's an undeniable attraction to corralling all your friends and friendly acquaintances, charting them and their relationship to you. Maybe it's evolutionary, some quirk of the neocortex dating from our evolution into social animals who gained advantage by dividing up the work of survival but acquired the tricky job of watching all the other monkeys so as to be sure that everyone was pulling their weight and not, e.g., napping in the treetops instead of watching for predators, emerging only to eat the fruit the rest of us have foraged. + +Keeping track of our social relationships is a serious piece of work that runs a heavy cognitive load. It's natural to seek out some neural prosthesis for assistance in this chore. My fiancee once proposed a "social scheduling" application that would watch your phone and email and IM to figure out who your pals were and give you a little alert if too much time passed without your reaching out to say hello and keep the coals of your relationship aglow. By the time you've reached your forties, chances are you're out-of-touch with more friends than you're in-touch with, old summer-camp chums, high-school mates, ex-spouses and their families, former co-workers, college roomies, dot-com veterans... Getting all those people back into your life is a full-time job and then some. + +You'd think that Facebook would be the perfect tool for handling all this. It's not. For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there's a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I'd cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, "Am I your friend?" yes or no, this instant, please. + +It's not just Facebook and it's not just me. Every "social networking service" has had this problem and every user I've spoken to has been frustrated by it. I think that's why these services are so volatile: why we're so willing to flee from Friendster and into MySpace's loving arms; from MySpace to Facebook. It's socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list -- but *{removing}* someone from your friend-list is practically a declaration of war. The least-awkward way to get back to a friends list with nothing but friends on it is to reboot: create a new identity on a new system and send out some invites (of course, chances are at least one of those invites will go to someone who'll groan and wonder why we're dumb enough to think that we're pals). + +That's why I don't worry about Facebook taking over the net. As more users flock to it, the chances that the person who precipitates your exodus will find you increases. Once that happens, poof, away you go -- and Facebook joins SixDegrees, Friendster and their pals on the scrapheap of net.history. + +$$$$ + +1~ The Future of Internet Immune Systems + +(Originally published on InformationWeek's Internet Evolution, November 19, 2007) ~# + +Bunhill Cemetery is just down the road from my flat in London. It’s a handsome old boneyard, a former plague pit (“Bone hill” -- as in, there are so many bones under there that the ground is actually kind of humped up into a hill). There are plenty of luminaries buried there -- John “Pilgrim’s Progress” Bunyan, William Blake, Daniel Defoe, and assorted Cromwells. But my favorite tomb is that of Thomas Bayes, the 18th-century statistician for whom Bayesian filtering is named. + +Bayesian filtering is plenty useful. Here’s a simple example of how you might use a Bayesian filter. First, get a giant load of non-spam emails and feed them into a Bayesian program that counts how many times each word in their vocabulary appears, producing a statistical breakdown of the word-frequency in good emails. + +Then, point the filter at a giant load of spam (if you’re having a hard time getting a hold of one, I have plenty to spare), and count the words in it. Now, for each new message that arrives in your inbox, have the filter count the relative word-frequencies and make a statistical prediction about whether the new message is spam or not (there are plenty of wrinkles in this formula, but this is the general idea). + +The beauty of this approach is that you needn’t dream up “The Big Exhaustive List of Words and Phrases That Indicate a Message Is/Is Not Spam.” The filter naively calculates a statistical fingerprint for spam and not-spam, and checks the new messages against them. + +This approach -- and similar ones -- are evolving into an immune system for the Internet, and like all immune systems, a little bit goes a long way, and too much makes you break out in hives. + +ISPs are loading up their network centers with intrusion detection systems and tripwires that are supposed to stop attacks before they happen. For example, there’s the filter at the hotel I once stayed at in Jacksonville, Fla. Five minutes after I logged in, the network locked me out again. After an hour on the phone with tech support, it transpired that the network had noticed that the videogame I was playing systematically polled the other hosts on the network to check if they were running servers that I could join and play on. The network decided that this was a malicious port-scan and that it had better kick me off before I did anything naughty. + +It only took five minutes for the software to lock me out, but it took well over an hour to find someone in tech support who understood what had happened and could reset the router so that I could get back online. + +And right there is an example of the autoimmune disorder. Our network defenses are automated, instantaneous, and sweeping. But our fallback and oversight systems are slow, understaffed, and unresponsive. It takes a millionth of a second for the Transportation Security Administration’s body-cavity-search roulette wheel to decide that you’re a potential terrorist and stick you on a no-fly list, but getting un-Tuttle-Buttled is a nightmarish, months-long procedure that makes Orwell look like an optimist. + +The tripwire that locks you out was fired-and-forgotten two years ago by an anonymous sysadmin with root access on the whole network. The outsourced help-desk schlub who unlocks your account can’t even spell "tripwire." The same goes for the algorithm that cut off your credit card because you got on an airplane to a different part of the world and then had the audacity to spend your money. (I’ve resigned myself to spending $50 on long-distance calls with Citibank every time I cross a border if I want to use my debit card while abroad.) + +This problem exists in macro- and microcosm across the whole of our technologically mediated society. The “spamigation bots” run by the Business Software Alliance and the Music and Film Industry Association of America (MAFIAA) entertainment groups send out tens of thousands of automated copyright takedown notices to ISPs at a cost of pennies, with little or no human oversight. The people who get erroneously fingered as pirates (as a Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) spokesperson charmingly puts it, “When you go fishing with a dragnet, sometimes you catch a dolphin.”) spend days or weeks convincing their ISPs that they had the right to post their videos, music, and text-files. + +We need an immune system. There are plenty of bad guys out there, and technology gives them force-multipliers (like the hackers who run 250,000-PC botnets). Still, there’s a terrible asymmetry in a world where defensive takedowns are automatic, but correcting mistaken takedowns is done by hand. + +$$$$ + +1~ All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites + +(Paper delivered at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, San Diego, California, 16 March 2005) ~# + +AOL hates spam. AOL could eliminate nearly 100 percent of its subscribers' spam with one easy change: it could simply shut off its internet gateway. Then, as of yore, the only email an AOL subscriber could receive would come from another AOL subscriber. If an AOL subscriber sent a spam to another AOL subscriber and AOL found out about it, they could terminate the spammer's account. Spam costs AOL millions, and represents a substantial disincentive for AOL customers to remain with the service, and yet AOL chooses to permit virtually anyone who can connect to the Internet, anywhere in the world, to send email to its customers, with any software at all. + +Email is a sloppy, complicated ecosystem. It has organisms of sufficient diversity and sheer number as to beggar the imagination: thousands of SMTP agents, millions of mail-servers, hundreds of millions of users. That richness and diversity lets all kinds of innovative stuff happen: if you go to nytimes.com and "send a story to a friend," the NYT can convincingly spoof your return address on the email it sends to your friend, so that it appears that the email originated on your computer. Also: a spammer can harvest your email and use it as a fake return address on the spam he sends to your friend. Sysadmins have server processes that send them mail to secret pager-addresses when something goes wrong, and GPLed mailing-list software gets used by spammers and people running high-volume mailing lists alike. + +You could stop spam by simplifying email: centralize functions like identity verification, limit the number of authorized mail agents and refuse service to unauthorized agents, even set up tollbooths where small sums of money are collected for every email, ensuring that sending ten million messages was too expensive to contemplate without a damned high expectation of return on investment. If you did all these things, you'd solve spam. + +By breaking email. + +Small server processes that mail a logfile to five sysadmins every hour just in case would be prohibitively expensive. Convincing the soviet that your bulk-mailer was only useful to legit mailing lists and not spammers could take months, and there's no guarantee that it would get their stamp of approval at all. With verified identity, the NYTimes couldn't impersonate you when it forwarded stories on your behalf -- and Chinese dissidents couldn't send out their samizdata via disposable gmail accounts. + +An email system that can be controlled is an email system without complexity. Complex ecosystems are influenced, not controlled. + +The Hollywood studios are conniving to create a global network of regulatory mandates over entertainment devices. Here they call it the Broadcast Flag; in Europe, Asia, Australia and Latinamerica it's called DVB Copy Protection Content Management. These systems purport to solve the problem of indiscriminate redistribution of broadcast programming via the Internet, but their answer to the problem, such as it is, is to require that everyone who wants to build a device that touches video has to first get permission. + +If you want to make a TV, a screen, a video-card, a high-speed bus, an analog-to-digital converter, a tuner card, a DVD burner -- any tool that you hope to be lawful for use in connection with digital TV signals -- you'll have to go on bended knee to get permission to deploy it. You'll have to convince FCC bureaucrats or a panel of Hollywood companies and their sellout IT and consumer electronics toadies that the thing you're going to bring to market will not disrupt their business models. + +That's how DVD works today: if you want to make a DVD player, you need to ask permission from a shadowy organization called the DVD-CCA. They don't give permission if you plan on adding new features -- that's why they're suing Kaleidascape for building a DVD jukebox that can play back your movies from a hard-drive archive instead of the original discs. + +CD has a rich ecosystem, filled with parasites -- entrepreneurial organisms that move to fill every available niche. If you spent a thousand bucks on CDs ten years ago, the ecosystem for CDs would reward you handsomely. In the intervening decade, parasites who have found an opportunity to suck value out of the products on offer from the labels and the dupe houses by offering you the tools to convert your CDs to ring-tones, karaoke, MP3s, MP3s on iPods and other players, MP3s on CDs that hold a thousand percent more music -- and on and on. + +DVDs live in a simpler, slower ecosystem, like a terrarium in a bottle where a million species have been pared away to a manageable handful. DVDs pay no such dividend. A thousand dollars' worth of ten-year old DVDs are good for just what they were good for ten years ago: watching. You can't put your kid into her favorite cartoon, you can't downsample the video to something that plays on your phone, and you certainly can't lawfully make a hard-drive-based jukebox from your discs. + +The yearning for simple ecosystems is endemic among people who want to "fix" some problem of bad actors on the networks. + +Take interoperability: you might sell me a database in the expectation that I'll only communicate with it using your authorized database agents. That way you can charge vendors a license fee in exchange for permission to make a client, and you can ensure that the clients are well-behaved and don't trigger any of your nasty bugs. + +But you can't meaningfully enforce that. EDS and other titanic software companies earn their bread and butter by producing fake database clients that impersonate the real thing as they iterate through every record and write it to a text file -- or simply provide a compatibility layer through systems provided by two different vendors. These companies produce software that lies -- parasite software that fills niches left behind by other organisms, sometimes to those organisms' detriment. + +So we have "Trusted Computing," a system that's supposed to let software detect other programs' lies and refuse to play with them if they get caught out fibbing. It's a system that's based on torching the rainforest with all its glorious anarchy of tools and systems and replacing it with neat rows of tame and planted trees, each one approved by The Man as safe for use with his products. + +For Trusted Computing to accomplish this, everyone who makes a video-card, keyboard, or logic-board must receive a key from some certifying body that will see to it that the key is stored in a way that prevents end-users from extracting it and using it to fake signatures. + +But if one keyboard vendor doesn't store his keys securely, the system will be useless for fighting keyloggers. If one video-card vendor lets a key leak, the system will be no good for stopping screenlogging. If one logic-board vendor lets a key slip, the whole thing goes out the window. That's how DVD DRM got hacked: one vendor, Xing, left its keys in a place where users could get at them, and then anyone could break the DRM on any DVD. + +Not only is the Trusted Computing advocates' goal -- producing a simpler software ecosystem -- wrongheaded, but the methodology is doomed. Fly-by-night keyboard vendors in distant free trade zones just won't be 100 percent compliant, and Trusted Computing requires no less than perfect compliance. + +The whole of DRM is a macrocosm for Trusted Computing. The DVB Copy Protection system relies on a set of rules for translating every one of its restriction states -- such as "copy once" and "copy never" -- to states in other DRM systems that are licensed to receive its output. That means that they're signing up to review, approve and write special rules for every single entertainment technology now invented and every technology that will be invented in the future. + +Madness: shrinking the ecosystem of everything you can plug into your TV down to the subset that these self-appointed arbiters of technology approve is a recipe for turning the electronics, IT and telecoms industries into something as small and unimportant as Hollywood. Hollywood -- which is a tenth the size of IT, itself a tenth the size of telecoms. + +In Hollywood, your ability to make a movie depends on the approval of a few power-brokers who have signing authority over the two-hundred-million-dollar budgets for making films. As far as Hollywood is concerned, this is a feature, not a bug. Two weeks ago, I heard the VP of Technology for Warners give a presentation in Dublin on the need to adopt DRM for digital TV, and his money-shot, his big convincer of a slide went like this: + +"With advances in processing power, storage capacity and broadband access... EVERYBODY BECOMES A BROADCASTER!" + +Heaven forfend. + +Simple ecosystems are the goal of proceedings like CARP, the panel that set out the ruinously high royalties for webcasters. The recording industry set the rates as high as they did so that the teeming millions of webcasters would be rendered economically extinct, leaving behind a tiny handful of giant companies that could be negotiated with around a board room table, rather than dealt with by blanket legislation. + +The razing of the rainforest has a cost. It's harder to send a legitimate email today than it ever was -- thanks to a world of closed SMTP relays. The cries for a mail-server monoculture grow more shrill with every passing moment. Just last week, it was a call for every mail-administrator to ban the "vacation" program that sends out automatic responses informing senders that the recipient is away from email for a few days, because mailboxes that run vacation can cause "spam blowback" where accounts send their vacation notices to the hapless individuals whose email addresses the spammers have substituted on the email's Reply-To line. + +And yet there is more spam than there ever was. All the costs we've paid for fighting spam have added up to no benefit: the network is still overrun and sometimes even overwhelmed by spam. We've let the network's neutrality and diversity be compromised, without receiving the promised benefit of spam-free inboxes. + +Likewise, DRM has exacted a punishing toll wherever it has come into play, costing us innovation, free speech, research and the public's rights in copyright. And likewise, DRM has not stopped infringement: today, infringement is more widespread than ever. All those costs borne by society in the name of protecting artists and stopping infringement, and not a penny put into an artist's pocket, not a single DRM-restricted file that can't be downloaded for free and without encumbrance from a P2P network. + +Everywhere we look, we find people who should know better calling for a parasite-free Internet. Science fiction writers are supposed to be forward looking, but they're wasting their time demanding that Amazon and Google make it harder to piece together whole books from the page-previews one can get via the look-inside-the-book programs. They're even cooking up programs to spoof deliberately corrupted ebooks into the P2P networks, presumably to assure the few readers the field has left that reading science fiction is a mug's game. + +The amazing thing about the failure of parasite-elimination programs is that their proponents have concluded that the problem is that they haven't tried hard enough -- with just a few more species eliminated, a few more policies imposed, paradise will spring into being. Their answer to an unsuccessful strategy for fixing the Internet is to try the same strategy, only moreso -- only fill those niches in the ecology that you can sanction. Hunt and kill more parasites, no matter what the cost. + +We are proud parasites, we Emerging Techers. We're engaged in perl whirling, pythoneering, lightweight javarey -- we hack our cars and we hack our PCs. We're the rich humus carpeting the jungle floor and the tiny frogs living in the bromeliads. + +The long tail -- Chris Anderson's name for the 95% of media that isn't top sellers, but which, in aggregate, accounts for more than half the money on the table for media vendors -- is the tail of bottom-feeders and improbable denizens of the ocean's thermal vents. We're unexpected guests at the dinner table and we have the nerve to demand a full helping. + +Your ideas are cool and you should go and make them real, even if they demand that the kind of ecological diversity that seems to be disappearing around us. + +You may succeed -- provided that your plans don't call for a simple ecosystem where only you get to provide value and no one else gets to play. + +$$$ + +1~ READ CAREFULLY + +(Originally published as "Shrinkwrap Licenses: An Epidemic Of Lawsuits Waiting To Happen" in InformationWeek, February 3, 2007) ~# + +*{READ CAREFULLY. By reading this article, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.}* + +READ CAREFULLY -- all in caps, and what it means is, "IGNORE THIS." That's because the small print in the clickwrap, shrinkwrap, browsewrap and other non-negotiated agreements is both immutable and outrageous. + +Why read the "agreement" if you know that: + +1) No sane person would agree to its text, and + +2) Even if you disagree, no one will negotiate a better agreement with you? + +We seem to have sunk to a kind of playground system of forming contracts. There are those who will tell you that you can form a binding agreement just by following a link, stepping into a store, buying a product, or receiving an email. By standing there, shaking your head, shouting "NO NO NO I DO NOT AGREE," you agree to let me come over to your house, clean out your fridge, wear your underwear and make some long-distance calls. + +If you buy a downloadable movie from Amazon Unbox, you agree to let them install spyware on your computer, delete any file they don't like on your hard-drive, and cancel your viewing privileges for any reason. Of course, it goes without saying that Amazon reserves the right to modify the agreement at any time. + +The worst offenders are people who sell you movies and music. They're a close second to people who sell you software, or provide services over the Internet. There's a rubric to this -- you're getting a discount in exchange for signing onto an abusive agreement, but just try and find the software that *{doesn't}* come with one of these "agreements" -- at any price. + +For example, Vista, Microsoft's new operating system, comes in a rainbow of flavors varying in price from $99 to $399, but all of them come with the same crummy terms of service, which state that "you may not work around any technical limitations in the software," and that Windows Defender, the bundled anti-malware program, can delete any program from your hard drive that Microsoft doesn't like, even if it breaks your computer. + +It's bad enough when this stuff comes to us through deliberate malice, but it seems that bogus agreements can spread almost without human intervention. Google any obnoxious term or phrase from a EULA, and you'll find that the same phrase appears in a dozens -- perhaps thousands -- of EULAs around the Internet. Like snippets of DNA being passed from one virus to another as they infect the world's corporations in a pandemic of idiocy, terms of service are semi-autonomous entities. + +Indeed, when rocker Billy Bragg read the fine print on the MySpace user agreement, he discovered that it appeared that site owner Rupert Murdoch was laying claim to copyrights in every song uploaded to the site, in a silent, sinister land-grab that turned the media baron into the world's most prolific and indiscriminate hoarder of garage-band tunes. + +However, the EULA that got Bragg upset wasn't a Murdoch innovation -- it dates back to the earliest days of the service. It seems to have been posted at a time when the garage entrepreneurs who built MySpace were in no position to hire pricey counsel -- something borne out by the fact that the old MySpace EULA appears nearly verbatim on many other services around the Internet. It's not going out very far on a limb to speculate that MySpace's founders merely copied a EULA they found somewhere else, without even reading it, and that when Murdoch's due diligence attorneys were preparing to give these lucky fellows $600,000,000, that they couldn't be bothered to read the terms of service anyway. + +In their defense, EULAese is so mind-numbingly boring that it's a kind of torture to read these things. You can hardly blame them. + +But it does raise the question -- why are we playing host to these infectious agents? If they're not read by customers *{or}* companies, why bother with them? + +If you wanted to really be careful about this stuff, you'd prohibit every employee at your office from clicking on any link, installing any program, creating accounts, signing for parcels -- even doing a run to Best Buy for some CD blanks, have you *{seen}* the fine-print on their credit-card slips? After all, these people are entering into "agreements" on behalf of their employer -- agreements to allow spyware onto your network, to not "work around any technical limitations in their software," to let malicious software delete arbitrary files from their systems. + +So far, very few of us have been really bitten in the ass by EULAs, but that's because EULAs are generally associated with companies who have products or services they're hoping you'll use, and enforcing their EULAs could cost them business. + +But that was the theory with patents, too. So long as everyone with a huge portfolio of unexamined, overlapping, generous patents was competing with similarly situated manufacturers, there was a mutually assured destruction -- a kind of detente represented by cross-licensing deals for patent portfolios. + +But the rise of the patent troll changed all that. Patent trolls don't make products. They make lawsuits. They buy up the ridiculous patents of failed companies and sue the everloving hell out of everyone they can find, building up a war-chest from easy victories against little guys that can be used to fund more serious campaigns against larger organizations. Since there are no products to disrupt with a countersuit, there's no mutually assured destruction. + +If a shakedown artist can buy up some bogus patents and use them to put the screws to you, then it's only a matter of time until the same grifters latch onto the innumerable "agreements" that your company has formed with a desperate dot-bomb looking for an exit strategy. + +More importantly, these "agreements" make a mockery of the law and of the very *{idea}* of forming agreements. Civilization starts with the idea of a real agreement -- for example, "We crap *{here}* and we sleep *{there}*, OK?" -- and if we reduce the noble agreement to a schoolyard game of no-takebacks, we erode the bedrock of civilization itself. + +$$$$ + +1~ World of Democracycraft + +(Originally published as "Why Online Games Are Dictatorships," InformationWeek, April 16, 2007) ~# + +Can you be a citizen of a virtual world? That's the question that I keep asking myself, whenever anyone tells me about the wonder of multiplayer online games, especially Second Life, the virtual world that is more creative playground than game. + +These worlds invite us to take up residence in them, to invest time (and sometimes money) in them. Second Life encourages you to make stuff using their scripting engine and sell it in the game. You Own Your Own Mods -- it's the rallying cry of the new generation of virtual worlds, an updated version of the old BBS adage from the WELL: You Own Your Own Words. + +I spend a lot of time in Disney parks. I even own a share of Disney stock. But I don't flatter myself that I'm a citizen of Disney World. I know that when I go to Orlando, the Mouse is going to fingerprint me and search my bags, because the Fourth Amendment isn't a "Disney value." + +Disney even has its own virtual currency, symbolic tokens called Disney Dollars that you can spend or exchange at any Disney park. I'm reasonably confident that if Disney refused to turn my Mickeybucks back into US Treasury Department-issue greenbacks that I could make life unpleasant for them in a court of law. + +But is the same true of a game? The money in your real-world bank-account and in your in-game bank-account is really just a pointer in a database. But if the bank moves the pointer around arbitrarily (depositing a billion dollars in your account, or wiping you out), they face a regulator. If a game wants to wipe you out, well, you probably agreed to let them do that when you signed up. + +Can you amass wealth in such a world? Well, sure. There are rich people in dictatorships all over the world. Stalin's favorites had great big dachas and drove fancy cars. You don't need democratic rights to get rich. + +But you *{do}* need democratic freedoms to *{stay}* rich. In-world wealth is like a Stalin-era dacha, or the diamond fortunes of Apartheid South Africa: valuable, even portable (to a limited extent), but not really *{yours}*, not in any stable, long-term sense. + +Here are some examples of the difference between being a citizen and a customer: + +In January, 2006 a World of Warcraft moderator shut down an advertisement for a "GBLT-friendly" guild. This was a virtual club that players could join, whose mission was to be "friendly" to "Gay/Bi/Lesbian/Transgendered" players. The WoW moderator -- and Blizzard management -- cited a bizarre reason for the shut-down: + +"While we appreciate and understand your point of view, we do feel that the advertisement of a 'GLBT friendly' guild is very likely to result in harassment for players that may not have existed otherwise. If you will look at our policy, you will notice the suggested penalty for violating the Sexual Orientation Harassment Policy is to 'be temporarily suspended from the game.' However, as there was clearly no malicious intent on your part, this penalty was reduced to a warning." + +Sara Andrews, the guild's creator, made a stink and embarrassed Blizzard (the game's parent company) into reversing the decision. + +In 2004, a player in the MMO EVE Online declared that the game's creators had stacked the deck against him, called EVE, "a poorly designed game which rewards the greedy and violent, and punishes the hardworking and honest." He was upset over a change in the game dynamics which made it easier to play a pirate and harder to play a merchant. + +The player, "Dentara Rask," wrote those words in the preamble to a tell-all memoir detailing an elaborate Ponzi scheme that he and an accomplice had perpetrated in EVE. The two of them had bilked EVE's merchants out of a substantial fraction of the game's total GDP and then resigned their accounts. The objective was to punish the game's owners for their gameplay decisions by crashing the game's economy. + +In both of these instances, players -- residents of virtual worlds -- resolved their conflicts with game management through customer activism. That works in the real world, too, but when it fails, we have the rule of law. We can sue. We can elect new leaders. When all else fails, we can withdraw all our money from the bank, sell our houses, and move to a different country. + +But in virtual worlds, these recourses are off-limits. Virtual worlds can and do freeze players' wealth for "cheating" (amassing gold by exploiting loopholes in the system), for participating in real-world gold-for-cash exchanges (eBay recently put an end to this practice on its service), or for violating some other rule. The rules of virtual worlds are embodied in EULAs, not Constitutions, and are always "subject to change without notice." + +So what does it mean to be "rich" in Second Life? Sure, you can have a thriving virtual penis business in game, one that returns a healthy sum of cash every month. You can even protect your profits by regularly converting them to real money. But if you lose an argument with Second Life's parent company, your business vanishes. In other worlds, the only stable in-game wealth is the wealth you take out of the game. Your virtual capital investments are totally contingent. Piss off the wrong exec at Linden Labs, Blizzard, Sony Online Entertainment, or Sularke and your little in-world business could disappear for good. + +Well, what of it? Why not just create a "democratic" game that has a constitution, full citizenship for players, and all the prerequisites for stable wealth? Such a game would be open source (so that other, interoperable "nations" could be established for you to emigrate to if you don't like the will of the majority in one game-world), and run by elected representatives who would instruct the administrators and programmers as to how to run the virtual world. In the real world, the TSA sets the rules for aviation -- in a virtual world, the equivalent agency would determine the physics of flight. + +The question is, would this game be any *{fun}*? Well, democracy itself is pretty fun -- where "fun" means "engrossing and engaging." Lots of people like to play the democracy game, whether by voting every four years or by moving to K Street and setting up a lobbying operation. + +But video games aren't quite the same thing. Gameplay conventions like "grinding" (repeating a task), "leveling up" (attaining a higher level of accomplishment), "questing" and so on are functions of artificial scarcity. The difference between a character with 10,000,000 gold pieces and a giant, rare, terrifying crossbow and a newbie player is which pointers are associated with each character's database entry. If the elected representatives direct that every player should have the shiniest armor, best space-ships, and largest bank-balances possible (this sounds like a pretty good election platform to me!), then what's left to do? + +Oh sure, in Second Life they have an interesting crafting economy based on creating and exchanging virtual objects. But these objects are *{also}* artificially scarce -- that is, the ability of these objects to propagate freely throughout the world is limited only by the software that supports them. It's basically the same economics of the music industry, but applied to every field of human endeavor in the entire (virtual) world. + +Fun matters. Real world currencies rise and fall based, in part, by the economic might of the nations that issue them. Virtual world currencies are more strongly tied to whether there's any reason to spend the virtual currency on the objects that are denominated in it. 10,000 EverQuest golds might trade for $100 on a day when that same sum will buy you a magic EQ sword that enables you to play alongside the most interesting people online, running the most fun missions online. But if all those players out-migrate to World of Warcraft, and word gets around that Warlord's Command is way more fun than anything in poor old creaky EverQuest, your EverQuest gold turns into Weimar Deutschemarks, a devalued currency that you can't even give away. + +This is where the plausibility of my democratic, co-operative, open source virtual world starts to break down. Elected governments can field armies, run schools, provide health care (I'm a Canadian), and bring acid lakes back to health. But I've never done anything run by a government agency that was a lot of *{fun}*. It's my sneaking suspicion that the only people who'd enjoy playing World of Democracycraft would be the people running for office there. The players would soon find themselves playing IRSQuest, Second Notice of Proposed Rulemaking Life, and Caves of 27 Stroke B. + +Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe customership is enough of a rock to build a platform of sustainable industry upon. It's not like entrepreneurs in Dubai have a lot of recourse if they get on the wrong side of the Emir; or like Singaporeans get to appeal the decisions of President Nathan, and there's plenty of industry there. + +And hell, maybe bureaucracies have hidden reserves of fun that have been lurking there, waiting for the chance to bust out and surprise us all. + +I sure hope so. These online worlds are endlessly diverting places. It'd be a shame if it turned out that cyberspace was a dictatorship -- benevolent or otherwise. + +$$$$ + +1~ Snitchtown + +(Originally published in Forbes.com, June 2007) ~# + +The 12-story Hotel Torni was the tallest building in central Helsinki during the Soviet occupation of Finland, making it a natural choice to serve as KGB headquarters. Today, it bears a plaque testifying to its checkered past, and also noting the curious fact that the Finns pulled 40 kilometers of wiretap cable out of the walls after the KGB left. The wire was solid evidence of each operative's mistrustful surveillance of his fellow agents. + +The East German Stasi also engaged in rampant surveillance, using a network of snitches to assemble secret files on every resident of East Berlin. They knew who was telling subversive jokes--but missed the fact that the Wall was about to come down. + +When you watch everyone, you watch no one. + +This seems to have escaped the operators of the digital surveillance technologies that are taking over our cities. In the brave new world of doorbell cams, wi-fi sniffers, RFID passes, bag searches at the subway and photo lookups at office security desks, universal surveillance is seen as the universal solution to all urban ills. But the truth is that ubiquitous cameras only serve to violate the social contract that makes cities work. + +The key to living in a city and peacefully co-existing as a social animal in tight quarters is to set a delicate balance of seeing and not seeing. You take care not to step on the heels of the woman in front of you on the way out of the subway, and you might take passing note of her most excellent handbag. But you don't make eye contact and exchange a nod. Or even if you do, you make sure that it's as fleeting as it can be. + +Checking your mirrors is good practice even in stopped traffic, but staring and pointing at the schmuck next to you who's got his finger so far up his nostril he's in danger of lobotomizing himself is bad form--worse form than picking your nose, even. + +I once asked a Japanese friend to explain why so many people on the Tokyo subway wore surgical masks. Are they extreme germophobes? Conscientious folks getting over a cold? Oh, yes, he said, yes, of course, but that's only the rubric. The real reason to wear the mask is to spare others the discomfort of seeing your facial expression, to make your face into a disengaged, unreadable blank--to spare others the discomfort of firing up their mirror neurons in order to model your mood based on your outward expression. To make it possible to see without seeing. + +There is one city dweller that doesn't respect this delicate social contract: the closed-circuit television camera. Ubiquitous and demanding, CCTVs don't have any visible owners. They ... occur. They exist in the passive voice, the "mistakes were made" voice: "The camera recorded you." + +They are like an emergent property of the system, of being afraid and looking for cheap answers. And they are everywhere: In London, residents are photographed more than 300 times a day. + +The irony of security cameras is that they watch, but nobody cares that they're looking. Junkies don't worry about CCTVs. Crazed rapists and other purveyors of sudden, senseless violence aren't deterred. I was mugged twice on my old block in San Francisco by the crack dealers on my corner, within sight of two CCTVs and a police station. My rental car was robbed by a junkie in a Gastown garage in Vancouver in sight of a CCTV. + +Three mad kids followed my friend out of the Tube in London last year and murdered him on his doorstep. + +Crazy, desperate, violent people don't make rational calculus in regards to their lives. Anyone who becomes a junkie, crack dealer, or cellphone-stealing stickup artist is obviously bad at making life decisions. They're not deterred by surveillance. + +Yet the cameras proliferate, and replace human eyes. The cops on my block in San Francisco stayed in their cars and let the cameras do the watching. The Tube station didn't have any human guards after dark, just a CCTV to record the fare evaders. + +Now London city councils are installing new CCTVs with loudspeakers, operated by remote coppers who can lean in and make a speaker bark at you, "Citizen, pick up your litter." "Stop leering at that woman." "Move along." + +Yeah, that'll work. + +Every day the glass-domed cameras proliferate, and the gate-guarded mentality of the deep suburbs threatens to invade our cities. More doorbell webcams, more mailbox cams, more cams in our cars. + +The city of the future is shaping up to be a neighborly Panopticon, leeched of the cosmopolitan ability to see, and not be seen, where every nose pick is noted and logged and uploaded to the Internet. You don't have anything to hide, sure, but there's a reason we close the door to the bathroom before we drop our drawers. Everyone poops, but it takes a special kind of person to want to do it in public. + +The trick now is to contain the creeping cameras of the law. When the city surveils its citizens, it legitimizes our mutual surveillance--what's the difference between the cops watching your every move, or the mall owners watching you, or you doing it to the guy next door? + +I'm an optimist. I think our social contracts are stronger than our technology. They're the strongest bonds we have. We don't aim telescopes through each others' windows, because only creeps do that. + +But we need to reclaim the right to record our own lives as they proceed. We need to reverse decisions like the one that allowed the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority to line subway platforms with terrorism cameras, but said riders may not take snapshots in the station. We need to win back the right to photograph our human heritage in museums and galleries, and we need to beat back the snitch-cams rent-a-cops use to make our cameras stay in our pockets. + +They're our cities and our institutions. And we choose the future we want to live in. + +$$$$ + +1~ Hope you enjoyed it! The actual, physical object that corresponds to this book is superbly designed, portable, and makes a great gift: + +http://craphound.com/content/buy + +If you would rather make a donation, you can buy a copy of the book for a worthy school, library or other institution of your choosing: + +http://craphound.com/content/donate + +$$$$ + +1~ About the Author + +Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is an award-winning novelist, activist, blogger and journalist. He is the co-editor of Boing Boing (boingboing.net), one of the most popular blogs in the world, and has contributed to The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Economist, Forbes, Popular Science, Wired, Make, InformationWeek, Locus, Salon, Radar, and many other magazines, newspapers and websites. + +His novels and short story collections include *{Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town}*, *{Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom}*, *{Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present}* and his most recent novel, a political thriller for young adults called *{Little Brother}*, published by Tor Books in May, 2008. All of his novels and short story collections are available as free downloads under the terms of various Creative Commons licenses. + +Doctorow is the former European Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org) and has participated in many treaty-making, standards-setting and regulatory and legal battles in countries all over the world. In 2006/2007, he was the inaugural Canada/US Fulbright Chair in Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg Center at the University of Southern California. In 2007, he was also named one of the World Economic Forum's "Young Global Leaders" and one of Forbes Magazine's top 25 "Web Celebrities." + +Born in Toronto, Canada in 1971, he is a four-time university dropout. He now resides in London, England with his wife and baby daughter, where he does his best to avoid the ubiquitous surveillance cameras while roaming the world, speaking on copyright, freedom and the future. + +$$$$ diff --git a/data/samples/democratizing_innovation.eric_von_hippel.sst b/data/samples/democratizing_innovation.eric_von_hippel.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f47afc5 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/democratizing_innovation.eric_von_hippel.sst @@ -0,0 +1,3096 @@ +% SiSU 2.0 + +@title: Democratizing Innovation + :language: US + +@creator: + :author: von Hipel, Eric + +@classify: + :type: Book + :topic_register: SiSU:markup sample:book;innovation;technological innovations:economic aspects;diffusion of innovations;democracy;open source software:innovation + :isbn: 9780262720472 + :oclc: 56880369 + +% HC79.T4H558 2005 +% 338'.064-dc22 2004061060 + +@rights: + :copyright: Copyright (C) 2005 Eric von Hippel. Exclusive rights to publish and sell this book in print form in English are licensed to The MIT Press. All other rights are reserved by the author. An electronic version of this book is available under a Creative Commons license. + :license: Creative Commons US Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license 2.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/legalcode Some Rights Reserved. You are free to copy, distribute, display and perform the work, under the following conditions: Attribution, you must give the original author credit; you may not use this work for commercial purposes; No Derivative Works, you may not alter, transform, or build-upon this work. For reuse or distribution you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. Any conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder. Your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. + +@date: + :published: 2005 + :created: 2005 + :issued: 2005 + :available: 2005 + :modified: 2005 + :valid: 2005 + +@make: + :breaks: new=:B,C; break=1 + :texpdf_font: Liberation Sans + :skin: skin_di_von_hippel + +@links: + {Democratizing Innovation}http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/democ1.htm + {Eric von Hippel}http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/ + {Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel @ SiSU}http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/democratizing_innovation.eric_von_hippel + {@ Wikipedia}http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratizing_Innovation + {Viral Spiral, David Bollier@ SiSU}http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/viral_spiral.david_bollier + {Two Bits, Christopher Kelty @ SiSU}http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/two_bits.christopher_kelty + {Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig @ SiSU}http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/free_culture.lawrence_lessig + {CONTENT, Cory Doctorow @ SiSU}http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/content.cory_doctorow + {Free as in Freedom (on Richard M. Stallman), Sam Williams @ SiSU}http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/free_as_in_freedom.richard_stallman_crusade_for_free_software.sam_williams + {Free For All, Peter Wayner @ SiSU}http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/free_for_all.peter_wayner + {The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric S. Raymond @ SiSU }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/the_cathedral_and_the_bazaar.eric_s_raymond + {Little Brother, Cory Doctorow @ SiSU}http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/little_brother.cory_doctorow + {Democratizing Innovation @ Amazon.com}http://www.amazon.com/Democratizing-Innovation-Eric-Von-Hippel/dp/0262720477 + {Democratizing Innovation @ Barnes & Noble}http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=9780262720472 + +:A~ @title @author + +1~attribution Attribution~# + +Dedicated to all who are building the information commons.~# + +% Contents +% Acknowledgements ix +% 1 Introduction and Overview 1 +% 2 Development of Products by Lead Users 19 +% 3 Why Many Users Want Custom Products 33 +% 4 Users' Innovate-or-Buy Decisions 45 +% 5 Users' Low-Cost Innovation Niches 63 +% 6 Why Users Often Freely Reveal Their Innovations 77 +% 7 Innovation Communities 93 +% 8 Adapting Policy to User Innovation 107 +% 9 Democratizing Innovation 121 +% 10 Application: Searching for Lead User Innovations 133 +% 11 Application: Toolkits for User Innovation and Custom Design 147 +% 12 Linking User Innovation to Other Phenomena and Fields 165 +% Notes 179 +% Bibliography 183 +% Index 197 + +1~acknowledgements Acknowledgements~# + +Early in my research on the democratization of innovation I was very fortunate to gain five major academic mentors and friends. Nathan Rosenberg, Richard Nelson, Zvi Griliches, Edwin Mansfield, and Ann Carter all provided crucial support as I adopted economics as the organizing framework and toolset for my work. Later, I collaborated with a number of wonderful co-authors, all of whom are friends as well: Stan Finkelstein, Nikolaus Franke, Dietmar Harhoff, Joachim Henkel, Cornelius Herstatt, Ralph Katz, Georg von Krogh, Karim Lakhani, Gary Lilien, Christian Luthje, Pamela Morrison, William Riggs, John Roberts, Stephan Schrader, Mary Sonnack, Stefan Thomke, Marcie Tyre, and Glen Urban. Other excellent research collaborators and friends of long standing include Carliss Baldwin, Sonali Shah, Sarah Slaughter, and Lars Jeppesen.~# + +At some point as interest in a topic grows, there is a transition from dyadic academic relationships to a real research community. In my case, the essential person in enabling that transition was my close friend and colleague Dietmar Harhoff. He began to send wonderful Assistant Professors (Habilitanden) over from his university, Ludwig Maximilians Universität in Munich, to do collaborative research with me as MIT Visiting Scholars. They worked on issues related to the democratization of innovation while at MIT and then carried on when they returned to Europe. Now they are training others in their turn.~# + +I have also greatly benefited from close contacts with colleagues in industry. As Director of the MIT Innovation Lab, I work together with senior innovation managers in just a few companies to develop and try out innovation tools in actual company settings. Close intellectual colleagues and friends of many years standing in this sphere include Jim Euchner from Pitney-Bowes, Mary Sonnack and Roger Lacey from 3M, John Wright from IFF, Dave Richards from Nortel Networks, John Martin from Verizon, Ben Hyde from the Apache Foundation, Brian Behlendorf from the Apache Foundation and CollabNet, and Joan Churchill and Susan Hiestand from Lead User Concepts. Thank you so much for the huge (and often humbling) insights that your and our field experimentation has provided!~# + +I am also eager to acknowledge and thank my family for the joy and learning they experience and share with me. My wife Jessie is a professional editor and edited my first book in a wonderful way. For this book, however, time devoted to bringing up the children made a renewed editorial collaboration impossible. I hope the reader will not suffer unduly as a consequence! My children Christiana Dagmar and Eric James have watched me work on the book---indeed they could not avoid it as I often write at home. I hope they have been drawing the lesson that academic research can be really fun. Certainly, that is the lesson I drew from my father, Arthur von Hippel. He wrote his books in his study upstairs when I was a child and would often come down to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. In transit, he would throw up his hands and say, to no one in particular, "/{Why}/ do I choose to work on such difficult problems?" And then he would look deeply happy. Dad, I noticed the smile!~# + +Finally my warmest thanks to my MIT colleagues and students and also to MIT as an institution. MIT is a really inspiring place to work and learn from others. We all understand the requirements for good research and learning, and we all strive to contribute to a very supportive academic environment. And, of course, new people are always showing up with new and interesting ideas, so fun and learning are always being renewed!~# + +:B~ Democratizing Innovation + +1~ 1 Introduction and Overview + +When I say that innovation is being democratized, I mean that users of products and services---both firms and individual consumers---are increasingly able to innovate for themselves. User-centered innovation processes offer great advantages over the manufacturer-centric innovation development systems that have been the mainstay of commerce for hundreds of years. Users that innovate can develop exactly what they want, rather than relying on manufacturers to act as their (often very imperfect) agents. Moreover, individual users do not have to develop everything they need on their own: they can benefit from innovations developed and freely shared by others. +={Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users:by users+43;Manufacturers:innovation and+11;Users:See also Lead users|expectations of economic benefit by+33|innovation and+33} + +The trend toward democratization of innovation applies to information products such as software and also to physical products. As a quick illustration of the latter, consider the development of high-performance windsurfing techniques and equipment in Hawaii by an informal user group. High-performance windsurfing involves acrobatics such as jumps and flips and turns in mid-air. Larry Stanley, a pioneer in high-performance windsurfing, described the development of a major innovation in technique and equipment to Sonali Shah: +={Stanley, L.;Shah, S.;Information commons:See also Information communities|See also Innovation communities;windsurfing} + +In 1978 Jürgen Honscheid came over from West Germany for the first Hawaiian World Cup and discovered jumping, which was new to him, although Mike Horgan and I were jumping in 1974 and 1975. There was a new enthusiasm for jumping and we were all trying to outdo each other by jumping higher and higher. The problem was that . . . the riders flew off in mid-air because there was no way to keep the board with you---and as a result you hurt your feet, your legs, and the board. +={Honscheid, J.;Horgan, M.} + +Then I remembered the "Chip," a small experimental board we had built with footstraps, and thought "it's dumb not to use this for jumping." That's when I first started jumping with footstraps and discovering controlled flight. I could go so much faster than I ever thought and when you hit a wave it was like a motorcycle rider hitting a ramp; you just flew into the air. All of a sudden not only could you fly into the air, but you could land the thing, and not only that, but you could change direction in the air! + +The whole sport of high-performance windsurfing really started from that. As soon as I did it, there were about ten of us who sailed all the time together and within one or two days there were various boards out there that had footstraps of various kinds on them, and we were all going fast and jumping waves and stuff. It just kind of snowballed from there. (Shah 2000) +={Shah, S.;windsurfing+1} + +By 1998, more than a million people were engaged in windsurfing, and a large fraction of the boards sold incorporated the user-developed innovations for the high-performance sport. + +The user-centered innovation process just illustrated is in sharp contrast to the traditional model, in which products and services are developed by manufacturers in a closed way, the manufacturers using patents, copyrights, and other protections to prevent imitators from free riding on their innovation investments. In this traditional model, a user's only role is to have needs, which manufacturers then identify and fill by designing and producing new products. The manufacturer-centric model does fit some fields and conditions. However, a growing body of empirical work shows that users are the first to develop many and perhaps most new industrial and consumer products. Further, the contribution of users is growing steadily larger as a result of continuing advances in computer and communications capabilities. +={Intellectual property rights:See also Private-collective innovation|copyrights and|innovation and+2;Copyrights:See Intellectual property rights;Manufacturers:government policy and+2;Product development+2;Users:government policy and;Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users:by manufacturers+5;Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users:by manufacturers+12;Government policy:manufacturer innovation and+2;Manufacturers:expectations of economic benefit by+26} + +In this book I explain in detail how the emerging process of user-centric, democratized innovation works. I also explain how innovation by users provides a very necessary complement to and feedstock for manufacturer innovation. + +The ongoing shift of innovation to users has some very attractive qualities. It is becoming progressively easier for many users to get precisely what they want by designing it for themselves. And innovation by users appears to increase social welfare. At the same time, the ongoing shift of product-development activities from manufacturers to users is painful and difficult for many manufacturers. Open, distributed innovation is "attacking" a major structure of the social division of labor. Many firms and industries must make fundamental changes to long-held business models in order to adapt. Further, governmental policy and legislation sometimes preferentially supports innovation by manufacturers. Considerations of social welfare suggest that this must change. The workings of the intellectual property system are of special concern. But despite the difficulties, a democratized and user-centric system of innovation appears well worth striving for. +={Government policy:See also Digital Millennium Copyright Act|and social welfare|user innovation and;Social welfare:government policy and|innovation and+3|user innovation and+3} + +% check government policy + +Users, as the term will be used in this book, are firms or individual consumers that expect to benefit from /{using}/ a product or a service. In contrast, manufacturers expect to benefit from /{selling}/ a product or a service. A firm or an individual can have different relationships to different products or innovations. For example, Boeing is a manufacturer of airplanes, but it is also a user of machine tools. If we were examining innovations developed by Boeing for the airplanes it sells, we would consider Boeing a manufacturer-innovator in those cases. But if we were considering innovations in metal-forming machinery developed by Boeing for in-house use in building airplanes, we would categorize those as user-developed innovations and would categorize Boeing as a user-innovator in those cases. +={Users:characteristics of+2;Manufacturers:characteristics of+2} + +Innovation user and innovation manufacturer are the two general "functional" relationships between innovator and innovation. Users are unique in that they alone benefit /{directly}/ from innovations. All others (here lumped under the term "manufacturers") must sell innovation-related products or services to users, indirectly or directly, in order to profit from innovations. Thus, in order to profit, inventors must sell or license knowledge related to innovations, and manufacturers must sell products or services incorporating innovations. Similarly, suppliers of innovation-related materials or services---unless they have direct use for the innovations---must sell the materials or services in order to profit from the innovations. +={Innovation:See also Innovation communities|functional sources of;Suppliers} + +The user and manufacturer categorization of relationships between innovator and innovation can be extended to specific functions, attributes, or features of products and services. When this is done, it may turn out that different parties are associated with different attributes of a particular product or service. For example, householders are the users of the switching attribute of a household electric light switch---they use it to turn lights on and off. However, switches also have other attributes, such as "easy wiring" qualities, that may be used only by the electricians who install them. Therefore, if an electrician were to develop an improvement to the installation attributes of a switch, it would be considered a user-developed innovation. + +A brief overview of the contents of the book follows. + +!_ Development of Products by Lead Users (Chapter 2) +={Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users+6;Lead users+6:characteristics of+6|commercial attractiveness of+6|economic benefit, expectations of+6|identification of+6|innovation and+50|library information search system and+6} + +Empirical studies show that many users---from 10 percent to nearly 40 percent---engage in developing or modifying products. About half of these studies do not determine representative innovation frequencies; they were designed for other purposes. Nonetheless, when taken together, the findings make it very clear that users are doing a /{lot}/ of product modification and product development in many fields. +={innovation:attractiveness of+8} + +Studies of innovating users (both individuals and firms) show them to have the characteristics of "lead users." That is, they are ahead of the majority of users in their populations with respect to an important market trend, and they expect to gain relatively high benefits from a solution to the needs they have encountered there. The correlations found between innovation by users and lead user status are highly significant, and the effects are very large. + +Since lead users are at the leading edge of the market with respect to important market trends, one can guess that many of the novel products they develop for their own use will appeal to other users too and so might provide the basis for products manufacturers would wish to commercialize. This turns out to be the case. A number of studies have shown that many of the innovations reported by lead users are judged to be commercially attractive and/or have actually been commercialized by manufacturers. +={Manufacturers:lead users and+1} + +Research provides a firm grounding for these empirical findings. The two defining characteristics of lead users and the likelihood that they will develop new or modified products have been found to be highly correlated (Morrison et al. 2004). In addition, it has been found that the higher the intensity of lead user characteristics displayed by an innovator, the greater the commercial attractiveness of the innovation that the lead user develops (Franke and von Hippel 2003a). In figure 1.1, the increased concentration of innovations toward the right indicates that the likelihood of innovating is higher for users having higher lead user index values. The rise in average innovation attractiveness as one moves from left to right indicates that innovations developed by lead users tend to be more commercially attractive. (Innovation attractiveness is the sum of the novelty of the innovation and the expected future generality of market demand.) +={Morrison, Pamela;Franke, N.+5;von Hippel, E.+5} + +%% Figure 1.1 +% 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 +% 10 +% 5 +% 0 +% Attractiveness +% of +% innovations +% Innovation +% Estimated OLS curve +% "Lead-user?ness" of users + +{di_evh_f1-1.png}image + +!_ Figure 1.1 +User-innovators with stronger "lead user" characteristics develop innovations having higher appeal in the general marketplace. Estimated OLS function: Y = 2.06 + 0.57x, where Y represents attractiveness of innovation and x represents lead-user-ness of respondent. Adjusted R^{2}^ = 0.281; p = 0.002; n = 30. Source of data: Franke and von Hippel 2003. + +!_ Why Many Users Want Custom Products (Chapter 3) +={Custom products:heterogeneity of user needs and+2;User need+2;Users:innovate-or-buy decisions by+8|needs of+2} + +Why do so many users develop or modify products for their own use? Users may innovate if and as they want something that is not available on the market and are able and willing to pay for its development. It is likely that many users do not find what they want on the market. Meta-analysis of market-segmentation studies suggests that users' needs for products are highly heterogeneous in many fields (Franke and Reisinger 2003). +={Reisinger, H.} + +Mass manufacturers tend to follow a strategy of developing products that are designed to meet the needs of a large market segment well enough to induce purchase from and capture significant profits from a large number of customers. When users' needs are heterogeneous, this strategy of "a few sizes fit all" will leave many users somewhat dissatisfied with the commercial products on offer and probably will leave some users seriously dissatisfied. In a study of a sample of users of the security features of Apache web server software, Franke and von Hippel (2003b) found that users had a very high heterogeneity of need, and that many had a high willingness to pay to get precisely what they wanted. Nineteen percent of the users sampled actually innovated to tailor Apache more closely to their needs. Those who did were found to be significantly more satisfied. +={Apache web server software;Manufacturers:lead users and} + +!_ Users' Innovate-or-Buy Decisions (Chapter 4) +={Custom products:heterogeneity of user needs and+3|manufacturers and+3|agency costs and+2;User need+3;Users:needs of+3;Manufacturers:innovation and+9|innovate-or-buy decisions and+4;Users:agency costs and+2} + +Even if many users want "exactly right products" and are willing and able to pay for their development, why do users often do this for themselves rather than hire a custom manufacturer to develop a special just-right product for them? After all, custom manufacturers specialize in developing products for one or a few users. Since these firms are specialists, it is possible that they could design and build custom products for individual users or user firms faster, better, or cheaper than users could do this for themselves. Despite this possibility, several factors can drive users to innovate rather than buy. Both in the case of user firms and in the case of individual user-innovators, agency costs play a major role. In the case of individual user-innovators, enjoyment of the innovation process can also be important. +={Agency costs+1;Manufacturers:custom products and+2;Custom products:users and+3;Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users:by manufacturers+13} + +With respect to agency costs, consider that when a user develops its own custom product that user can be trusted to act in its own best interests. When a user hires a manufacturer to develop a custom product, the situation is more complex. The user is then a principal that has hired the custom manufacturer to act as its agent. If the interests of the principal and the agent are not the same, there will be agency costs. In general terms, agency costs are (1) costs incurred to monitor the agent to ensure that it (or he or she) follows the interests of the principal, (2) the cost incurred by the agent to commit itself not to act against the principal's interest (the "bonding cost"), and (3) costs associated with an outcome that does not fully serve the interests of the principal (Jensen and Meckling 1976). In the specific instance of product and service development, a major divergence of interests between user and custom manufacturer does exist: the user wants to get precisely what it needs, to the extent that it can afford to do so. In contrast, the custom manufacturer wants to lower its development costs by incorporating solution elements it already has or that it predicts others will want in the future---even if by doing so it does not serve its present client's needs as well as it could. +={Jensen, M.;Meckling, W.} + +A user wants to preserve its need specification because that specification is chosen to make /{that user's}/ overall solution quality as high as possible at the desired price. For example, an individual user may specify a mountain-climbing boot that will precisely fit his unique climbing technique and allow him to climb Everest more easily. Any deviations in boot design will require compensating modifications in the climber's carefully practiced and deeply ingrained climbing technique---a much more costly solution from the user's point of view. A custom boot manufacturer, in contrast, will have a strong incentive to incorporate the materials and processes it has in stock and expects to use in future even if this produces a boot that is not precisely right for the present customer. For example, the manufacturer will not want to learn a new way to bond boot components together even if that would produce the best custom result for one client. The net result is that when one or a few users want something special they will often get the best result by innovating for themselves. +={Innovation communities:See also Information communities+1} + +A small model of the innovate-or-buy decision follows. This model shows in a quantitative way that user firms with unique needs will always be better off developing new products for themselves. It also shows that development by manufacturers can be the most economical option when n or more user firms want the same thing. However, when the number of user firms wanting the same thing falls between 1 and n, manufacturers may not find it profitable to develop a new product for just a few users. In that case, more than one user may invest in developing the same thing independently, owing to market failure. This results in a waste of resources from the point of view of social welfare. The problem can be addressed by new institutional forms, such as the user innovation communities that will be studied later in this book. +={Innovation communities:social welfare, and;Manufacturers:social welfare and+21;Social welfare:manufacturer innovation and+21|user innovation and+21} + +Chapter 4 concludes by pointing out that an additional incentive can drive individual user-innovators to innovate rather than buy: they may value the /{process}/ of innovating because of the enjoyment or learning that it brings them. It might seem strange that user-innovators can enjoy product development enough to want to do it themselves---after all, manufacturers pay their product developers to do such work! On the other hand, it is also clear that enjoyment of problem solving is a motivator for many individual problem solvers in at least some fields. Consider for example the millions of crossword-puzzle aficionados. Clearly, for these individuals enjoyment of the problem-solving process rather than the solution is the goal. One can easily test this by attempting to offer a puzzle solver a completed puzzle---the very output he or she is working so hard to create. One will very likely be rejected with the rebuke that one should not spoil the fun! Pleasure as a motivator can apply to the development of commercially useful innovations as well. Studies of the motivations of volunteer contributors of code to widely used software products have shown that these individuals too are often strongly motivated to innovate by the joy and learning they find in this work (Hertel et al. 2003; Lakhani and Wolf 2005). +={Hertel, G.;Lakhani, K.;Wolf, B.;Innovation process;Users:innovation process and+7;Free software:See also Open source software;Hackers;Herrmann, S.} + +!_ Users' Low-Cost Innovation Niches (Chapter 5) +={Users:low-cost innovation niches of+3} + +An exploration of the basic processes of product and service development show that users and manufacturers tend to develop different /{types}/ of innovations. This is due in part to information asymmetries: users and manufacturers tend to know different things. Product developers need two types of information in order to succeed at their work: need and context-of-use information (generated by users) and generic solution information (often initially generated by manufacturers specializing in a particular type of solution). Bringing these two types of information together is not easy. Both need information and solution information are often very "sticky"---that is, costly to move from the site where the information was generated to other sites. As a result, users generally have a more accurate and more detailed model of their needs than manufacturers have, while manufacturers have a better model of the solution approach in which they specialize than the user has. +={Innovation process;Users:innovation process and;Information asymmetries+3;Manufacturers:information asymmetries of+2;Sticky information+2:innovation and+2;Users:information asymmetries of+2;Local information+2} + +When information is sticky, innovators tend to rely largely on information they already have in stock. One consequence of the information asymmetry between users and manufacturers is that users tend to develop innovations that are functionally novel, requiring a great deal of user-need information and use-context information for their development. In contrast, manufacturers tend to develop innovations that are improvements on well-known needs and that require a rich understanding of solution information for their development. For example, firms that use inventory-management systems, such as retailers, tend to be the developers of new approaches to inventory management. In contrast, manufacturers of inventory-management systems and equipment tend to develop improvements to the equipment used to implement these user-devised approaches (Ogawa 1998). +={Ogawa, S.;Innovation:functional sources of} + +If we extend the information-asymmetry argument one step further, we see that information stickiness implies that information on hand will also differ among /{individual}/ users and manufacturers. The information assets of some particular user (or some particular manufacturer) will be closest to what is required to develop a particular innovation, and so the cost of developing that innovation will be relatively low for that user or manufacturer. The net result is that user innovation activities will be distributed across many users according to their information endowments. With respect to innovation, one user is by no means a perfect substitute for another. + +!_ Why Users Often Freely Reveal Their Innovations (Chapter 6) +={Free revealing of innovation information:case for+5|evidence of+5|in information communities+5|intellectual property rights and+5|users and+5;Users:free revealing by+5} + +The social efficiency of a system in which individual innovations are developed by individual users is increased if users somehow diffuse what they have developed to others. Manufacturer-innovators /{partially}/ achieve this when they sell a product or a service on the open market (partially because they diffuse the product incorporating the innovation, but often not all the information that others would need to fully understand and replicate it). If user-innovators do not somehow also diffuse what they have done, multiple users with very similar needs will have to independently develop very similar innovations---a poor use of resources from the viewpoint of social welfare. Empirical research shows that users often do achieve widespread diffusion by an unexpected means: they often "freely reveal" what they have developed. When we say that an innovator freely reveals information about a product or service it has developed, we mean that all intellectual property rights to that information are voluntarily given up by the innovator, and all interested parties are given access to it---the information becomes a public good. +={Free revealing of innovation information:manufacturers and+2;Innovation:distributed process of+4;Intellectual property rights:free revealing and;Manufacturers:free revealing and+2} + +The empirical finding that users often freely reveal their innovations has been a major surprise to innovation researchers. On the face of it, if a user-innovator's proprietary information has value to others, one would think that the user would strive to prevent free diffusion rather than help others to free ride on what it has developed at private cost. Nonetheless, it is now very clear that individual users and user firms---and sometimes manufacturers---often freely reveal detailed information about their innovations. + +The practices visible in "open source" software development were important in bringing this phenomenon to general awareness. In these projects it was clear /{policy}/ that project contributors would routinely and systematically freely reveal code they had developed at private expense (Raymond 1999). However, free revealing of product innovations has a history that began long before the advent of open source software. Allen, in his 1983 study of the eighteenth-century iron industry, was probably the first to consider the phenomon systematically. Later, Nuvolari (2004) discussed free revealing in the early history of mine pumping engines. Contemporary free revealing by users has been documented by von Hippel and Finkelstein (1979) for medical equipment, by Lim (2000) for semiconductor process equipment, by Morrison, Roberts, and von Hippel (2000) for library information systems, and by Franke and Shah (2003) for sporting equipment. Henkel (2003) has documented free revealing among manufacturers in the case of embedded Linux software. +={Allen, R.;Finkelstein, S.;Franke, N.;Henkel, J.;Lim, K.;Linux;Morrison, Pamela;Nuvolari, A.;Raymond, E.;Roberts, J.;Shah, S.;von Hippel, E.;Free revealing of innovation information:open source software and+7;Intellectual property rights:open source software and+1;Open source software:See also Free software communities and|free revealing and+7|intellectual property rights and+2;Library information search system} + +Innovators often freely reveal because it is often the best or the only practical option available to them. Hiding an innovation as a trade secret is unlikely to be successful for long: too many generally know similar things, and some holders of the "secret" information stand to lose little or nothing by freely revealing what they know. Studies find that innovators in many fields view patents as having only limited value. Copyright protection and copyright licensing are applicable only to "writings," such as books, graphic images, and computer software. +={Intellectual property rights:copyrights and|trade secrets and|free revealing and|licensing of|patents and;Government policy:trade secrets and} + +Active efforts by innovators to freely reveal---as opposed to sullen acceptance---are explicable because free revealing can provide innovators with significant private benefits as well as losses or risks of loss. Users who freely reveal what they have done often find that others then improve or suggest improvements to the innovation, to mutual benefit (Raymond 1999). Freely revealing users also may benefit from enhancement of reputation, from positive network effects due to increased diffusion of their innovation, and from other factors. Being the first to freely reveal a particular innovation can also enhance the benefits received, and so there can actually be a rush to reveal, much as scientists rush to publish in order to gain the benefits associated with being the first to have made a particular advancement. +={Raymond, E.} + +!_ Innovation Communities (Chapter 7) +={Innovation communities+3} + +Innovation by users tends to be widely distributed rather than concentrated among just a very few very innovative users. As a result, it is important for user-innovators to find ways to combine and leverage their efforts. Users achieve this by engaging in many forms of cooperation. Direct, informal user-to-user cooperation (assisting others to innovate, answering questions, and so on) is common. Organized cooperation is also common, with users joining together in networks and communities that provide useful structures and tools for their interactions and for the distribution of innovations. Innovation communities can increase the speed and effectiveness with which users and also manufacturers can develop and test and diffuse their innovations. They also can greatly increase the ease with which innovators can build larger systems from interlinkable modules created by community participants. +={Users:innovation communities and+2} + +Free and open source software projects are a relatively well-developed and very successful form of Internet-based innovation community. However, innovation communities are by no means restricted to software or even to information products, and they can play a major role in the development of physical products. Franke and Shah (2003) have documented the value that user innovation communities can provide to user-innovators developing physical products in the field of sporting equipment. The analogy to open source innovation communities is clear. +={Franke, N.;Shah, S.;Free software;Innovation communities:open source software and|physical products and|sporting equipment and;Open source software:innovation communities and} + +The collective or community effort to provide a public good---which is what freely revealed innovations are---has traditionally been explored in the literature on "collective action." However, behaviors seen in extant innovation communities fail to correspond to that literature at major points. In essence, innovation communities appear to be more robust with respect to recruiting and rewarding members than the literature would predict. Georg von Krogh and I attribute this to innovation contributors' obtaining some private rewards that are not shared equally by free riders (those who take without contributing). For example, a product that a user-innovator develops and freely reveals might be perfectly suited to that user-innovator's requirements but less well suited to the requirements of free riders. Innovation communities thus illustrate a "private-collective" model of innovation incentive (von Hippel and von Krogh 2003). +={von Hippel, E.;von Krogh, G.;Free revealing of innovation information:collective action model for|private-collective model for;Innovation communities:and sources of innovation;Private-collective model;Social welfare:private-collective model and+2;Users:social welfare and+6} + +!_ Adapting Policy to User Innovation (Chapter 8) +={Government policy:social welfare and+5|user innovation and+5;Social welfare:and government policy+5} + +Is innovation by users a "good thing?" Welfare economists answer such a question by studying how a phenomenon or a change affects social welfare. Henkel and von Hippel (2005) explored the social welfare implications of user innovation. They found that, relative to a world in which only manufacturers innovate, social welfare is very probably increased by the presence of innovations freely revealed by users. This finding implies that policy making should support user innovation, or at least should ensure that legislation and regulations do not favor manufacturers at the expense of user-innovators. +={Henkel, J.;von Hippel, E.;Free revealing of innovation information:manufacturers and} + +The transitions required of policy making to achieve neutrality with respect to user innovation vs. manufacturer innovation are significant. Consider the impact on open and distributed innovation of past and current policy decisions. Research done in the past 30 years has convinced many academics that intellectual property law is sometimes or often not having its intended effect. Intellectual property law was intended to increase the amount of innovation investment. Instead, it now appears that there are economies of scope in both patenting and copyright that allow firms to use these forms of intellectual property law in ways that are directly opposed to the intent of policy makers and to the public welfare. Major firms can invest to develop large portfolios of patents. They can then use these to create "patent thickets"---dense networks of patent claims that give them plausible grounds for threatening to sue across a wide range of intellectual property. They may do this to prevent others from introducing a superior innovation and/or to demand licenses from weaker competitors on favorable terms (Shapiro 2001). Movie, publishing, and software firms can use large collections of copyrighted work to a similar purpose (Benkler 2002). In view of the distributed nature of innovation by users, with each tending to create a relatively small amount of intellectual property, users are likely to be disadvantaged by such strategies. +={Benkler, Y.;Shapiro, C.;Intellectual property rights:copyrights and+1;Government policy:copyrights and+1|patents and|patent thickets and;Intellectual property rights:patents and|patent thickets and|licensing of} + +It is also important to note that users (and manufacturers) tend to build prototypes of their innovations economically by modifying products already available on the market to serve a new purpose. Laws such as the (US) Digital Millennium Copyright Act, intended to prevent consumers from illegally copying protected works, also can have the unintended side effect of preventing users from modifying products that they purchase (Varian 2002). Both fairness and social welfare considerations suggest that innovation-related policies should be made neutral with respect to the sources of innovation. +={Digital Millennium Copyright Act;Varian, H.} + +It may be that current impediments to user innovation will be solved by legislation or by policy making. However, beneficiaries of existing law and policy will predictably resist change. Fortunately, a way to get around some of these problems is in the hands of innovators themselves. Suppose many innovators in a particular field decide to freely reveal what they have developed, as they often have reason to do. In that case, users can collectively create an information commons (a collection of information freely available to all) containing substitutes for some or a great deal of information now held as private intellectual property. Then user-innovators can work around the strictures of intellectual property law by simply using these freely revealed substitutes (Lessig 2001). This is essentially what is happening in the field of software. For many problems, user-innovators in that field now have a choice between proprietary, closed software provided by Microsoft and other firms and open source software that they can legally download from the Internet and legally modify to serve their own specific needs. +={Lessig, L.;Microsoft;Free revealing of innovation information:collective action model for|in information communities|intellectual property rights and|users and+1;Information commons;Intellectual property rights:free revealing and|information communities and;Microsoft;User need;Users:free revealing by} + +Policy making that levels the playing field between users and manufacturers will force more rapid change onto manufacturers but will by no means destroy them. Experience in fields where open and distributed innovation processes are far advanced show how manufacturers can and do adapt. Some, for example, learn to supply proprietary platform products that offer user-innovators a framework upon which to develop and use their improvements. +={Manufacturers:innovation and+7} + +!_ Democratizing Innovation (Chapter 9) + +Users' ability to innovate is improving /{radically}/ and /{rapidly}/ as a result of the steadily improving quality of computer software and hardware, improved access to easy-to-use tools and components for innovation, and access to a steadily richer innovation commons. Today, user firms and even individual hobbyists have access to sophisticated programming tools for software and sophisticated CAD design tools for hardware and electronics. These information-based tools can be run on a personal computer, and they are rapidly coming down in price. As a consequence, innovation by users will continue to grow even if the degree of heterogeneity of need and willingness to invest in obtaining a precisely right product remains constant. +={Free revealing of innovation information:users and;Task partitioning+5:See also Toolkits;Toolkits:manufacturers and+5|task partitioning+5|user-friendly tools for|users and+5;User need;Users:innovation and+5} + +Equivalents of the innovation resources described above have long been available within corporations to a few. Senior designers at firms have long been supplied with engineers and designers under their direct control, and with the resources needed to quickly construct and test prototype designs. The same is true in other fields, including automotive design and clothing design: just think of the staffs of engineers and modelmakers supplied so that top auto designers can quickly realize and test their designs. + +But if, as we have seen, the information needed to innovate in important ways is widely distributed, the traditional pattern of concentrating innovation-support resources on a few individuals is hugely inefficient. High-cost resources for innovation support cannot efficiently be allocated to "the right people with the right information:" it is very difficult to know who these people may be before they develop an innovation that turns out to have general value. When the cost of high-quality resources for design and prototyping becomes very low (the trend we have described), these resources can be diffused very widely, and the allocation problem diminishes in significance. The net result is and will be to democratize the opportunity to create. +={Manufacturers:innovation and+9;Users:innovation and+9} + +On a level playing field, users will be an increasingly important source of innovation and will increasingly substitute for or complement manufacturers' innovation-related activities. In the case of information products, users have the possibility of largely or completely doing without the services of manufacturers. Open source software projects are object lessons that teach us that users can create, produce, diffuse, provide user field support for, update, and use complex products by and for themselves in the context of user innovation communities. In physical product fields, product development by users can evolve to the point of largely or totally supplanting product development---but not product manufacturing---by manufacturers. (The economies of scale associated with manufacturing and distributing physical products give manufacturers an advantage over "do-it-yourself" users in those activities.) +={Custom products:manufacturers and+2|users and+2;Innovation communities+1:open source software and|physical products and;Manufacturers:custom products and+2;Users:custom products and+2} + +The evolving pattern of the locus of product development in kitesurfing illustrates how users can displace manufacturers from the role of product developer. In that industry, the collective product-design and testing work of a user innovation community has clearly become superior in both quality and quantity relative to the levels of in-house development effort that manufacturers of kitesurfing equipment can justify. Accordingly, manufacturers of such equipment are increasingly shifting away from product design and focusing on producing product designs first developed and tested by user innovation communities. +={Innovation communities:kitesurfing and;Kitesurfing} + +How can or should manufacturers adapt to users' encroachment on elements of their traditional business activities? There are three general possibilities: (1) Produce user-developed innovations for general commercial sale and/or offer custom manufacturing to specific users. (2) Sell kits of product-design tools and/or "product platforms" to ease users' innovation-related tasks. (3) Sell products or services that are complementary to user-developed innovations. Firms in fields where users are already very active in product design are experimenting with all these possibilities. +={Custom products:product platforms and|toolkits and;Toolkits:platform products and} + +!_ Application: Searching for Lead User Innovations (Chapter 10) +={Custom products:manufacturers and+2;Manufacturers:custom products and+2;Users:custom products and+2;Lead users+59:idea generation and+2|identification of+2|innovation and+2} + +Manufacturers design their innovation processes around the way they think the process works. The vast majority of manufacturers still think that product development and service development are always done by manufacturers, and that their job is always to find a need and fill it rather than to sometimes find and commercialize an innovation that lead users have already developed. Accordingly, manufacturers have set up market-research departments to explore the needs of users in the target market, product-development groups to think up suitable products to address those needs, and so forth. The needs and prototype solutions of lead users---if encountered at all---are typically rejected as outliers of no interest. Indeed, when lead users' innovations do enter a firm's product line---and they have been shown to be the actual source of many major innovations for many firms--- they typically arrive with a lag and by an unconventional and unsystematic route. For example, a manufacturer may "discover" a lead user innovation only when the innovating user firm contacts the manufacturer with a proposal to produce its design in volume to supply its own in-house needs. Or sales or service people employed by a manufacturer may spot a promising prototype during a visit to a customer's site. +={Marketing research+1} + +Modification of firms' innovation processes to /{systematically}/ search for and further develop innovations created by lead users can provide manufacturers with a better interface to the innovation process as it actually works, and so provide better performance. A natural experiment conducted at 3M illustrates this possibility. Annual sales of lead user product ideas generated by the average lead user project at 3M were conservatively forecast by management to be more than 8 times the sales forecast for new products developed in the traditional manner---$146 million versus $18 million per year. In addition, lead user projects were found to generate ideas for new product lines, while traditional market-research methods were found to produce ideas for incremental improvements to existing product lines. As a consequence, 3M divisions funding lead user project ideas experienced their highest rate of major product line generation in the past 50 years (Lilien et al. 2002). +={Lilien, G.;Lead users:3M and;3M Corporation} + +!_ Application: Toolkits for User Innovation and Custom Design (Chapter 11) +={Toolkits+2} + +Firms that understand the distributed innovation process and users' roles in it can /{change}/ factors affecting lead user innovation and so affect its rate and direction in ways they value. Toolkits for user innovation custom design offer one way of doing this. This approach involves partitioning product-development and service-development projects into solution-information-intensive subtasks and need-information-intensive subtasks. Need-intensive subtasks are then assigned to users along with a kit of tools that enable them to effectively execute the tasks assigned to them. The resulting co-location of sticky information and problem-solving activity makes innovation within the solution space offered by a particular toolkit cheaper for users. It accordingly attracts them to the toolkit and so influences what they develop and how they develop it. The custom semiconductor industry was an early adopter of toolkits. In 2003, more than $15 billion worth of semiconductors were produced that had been designed using this approach. +={Toolkits:platform products and+2;Lead users:innovation and;Sticky information:innovation and} + +Manufacturers that adopt the toolkit approach to supporting and channeling user innovation typically face major changes in their business models, and important changes in industry structure may also follow. For example, as a result of the introduction of toolkits to the field of semiconductor manufacture, custom semiconductor manufacturers---formerly providers of both design and manufacturing services to customers---lost much of the work of custom product design to customers. Many of these manufacturers then became specialist silicon foundries, supplying production services primarily. Manufacturers may or may not wish to make such changes. However, experience in fields where toolkits have been deployed shows that customers tend to prefer designing their own custom products with the aid of a toolkit over traditional manufacturer-centric development practices. As a consequence, the only real choice for manufacturers in a field appropriate to the deployment of toolkits may be whether to lead or to follow in the transition to toolkits. + +!_ Linking User Innovation to Other Phenomena and Fields (Chapter 12) + +In chapter 12 I discuss links between user innovation and some related phenomena and literatures. With respect to phenomena, I point out the relationship of user innovation to /{information}/ communities, of which user innovation communities are a subset. One open information community is the online encyclopedia Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org). Other such communities include the many specialized Internet sites where individuals with both common and rare medical conditions can find one another and can find specialists in those conditions. Many of the advantages associated with user innovation communities also apply to open information networks and communities. Analyses appropriate to information communities follow the same overall pattern as the analyses provided in this book for innovation communities. However, they are also simpler, because in open information communities there may be little or no proprietary information being transacted and thus little or no risk of related losses for participants. +={Wikipedia;Information commons;Information communities:See also Innovation communities;Innovation communities+2:and sources of innovation+2;Intellectual property rights:information communities and+2|innovation and+2} + +Next I discuss links between user-centric innovation phenomena and the literature on the economics of knowledge that have been forged by Foray (2004) and Weber (2004). I also discuss how Porter's 1991 work on the competitive advantage of nations can be extended to incorporate findings on nations' lead users as product developers. Finally, I point out how findings explained in this book link to and complement research on the Social Construction of Technology (Pinch and Bijker 1987). +={Bijker, W.;Foray, D.;Pinch, T.;Weber, S.;Porter, M.;Knowledge, production and distribution of} + +I conclude this introductory chapter by reemphasizing that user innovation, free revealing, and user innovation communities will flourish under many but not all conditions. What we know about manufacturer-centered innovation is still valid; however, lead-user-centered innovation patterns are increasingly important, and they present major new opportunities and challenges for us all. +={Free revealing of innovation information:free revealing and;Users:free revealing by} + +1~ 2 Development of Products by Lead Users + +The idea that novel products and services are developed by manufacturers is deeply ingrained in both traditional expectations and scholarship. When we as users of products complain about the shortcomings of an existing product or wish for a new one, we commonly think that "they" should develop it---not us. Even the conventional term for an individual end user, "consumer," implicitly suggests that users are not active in product and service development. Nonetheless, there is now very strong empirical evidence that product development and modification by both user firms and users as individual consumers is frequent, pervasive, and important. +={Consumers+5} + +I begin this chapter by reviewing the evidence that many users indeed do develop and modify products for their own use in many fields. I then show that innovation is concentrated among /{lead}/ users, and that lead users' innovations often become commercial products. + +!_ Many Users Innovate + +The evidence on user innovation frequency and pervasiveness is summarized in table 2.1. We see here that the frequency with which user firms and individual consumers develop or modify products for their own use range from 10 percent to nearly 40 percent in fields studied to date. The matter has been studied across a wide range of industrial product types where innovating users are user firms, and also in various types of sporting equipment, where innovating users are individual consumers. +={Lead users:sporting equipment and+1;Sporting equipment:lead users and+1} + +The studies cited in table 2.1 clearly show that a lot of product development and modification by users is going on. However, these findings should not be taken to reflect innovation rates in overall populations of users. All of the studies probably were affected by a response bias. (That is, if someone sends a questionnaire about whether you innovated or not, you might be more inclined to respond if your answer is "Yes."). Also, each of the studies looked at innovation rates affecting a particular product type among users who care a great deal about that product type. Thus, university surgeons (study 4 in table 2.1) care a great deal about having just-right surgical equipment, just as serious mountain bikers (study 8) care a great deal about having just-right equipment for their sport. As the intensity of interest goes down, it is likely that rates of user innovation drop too. This is probably what is going on in the case of the study of purchasers of outdoor consumer products (study 6). All we are told about that sample of users of outdoor consumer products is that they are recipients of one or more mail order catalogs from suppliers of relatively general outdoor items---winter jackets, sleeping bags, and so on. Despite the fact that these users were asked if they have developed or modified any item in this broad category of goods (rather than a very specific one such as a mountain bike), just 10 percent answered in the affirmative. Of course, 10 percent or even 5 percent of a user population numbering in the tens of millions worldwide is still a very large number---so we again realize that many users are developing and modifying products. +={Lead users:outdoor consumer products and;Outdoor products} + +!_ Table 2.1 +Many respondents reported developing or modifying products for their own use in the eight product areas listed here. +={Lüthje, C.+1;Urban, G.+1;Franke, N.+1;Herstatt, C.+1;Morrison, Pamela+1;von Hippel, E.+1;Lead users:Apache web server software and+1r|library information search system and+1|mountain biking and+1|outdoor consumer products and+1|pipe hanger hardware and+1|printed circuit CAD software and+1|surgical equipment and+3;Library information search system+1;Mountain biking+1;Outdoor products+1;Pipe hanger hardware+1;Printed circuit CAD software+1;Surgical equipment+1} + +table{~h c4; 20; 45; 15; 20; + +~ +Number and type of Users Sampled +Percentage developing and building product for own use +Source + +Industrial products +~ +~ +~ + +1. Printed circuit CAD software +136 user firm attendees at PC-CAD conference +24.3% +Urban and von Hippel 1988 + +2. Pipe hanger hardware +Employees in 74 pipe hanger installation firms +36% +Herstatt and von Hippel 1992 + +3. Library information systems +Employees in 102 Australian libraries using computerized OPAC library information systems +26% +Morrison et al. 2000 + +4. Surgical equipment +261 surgeons working in university clinics in Germany +22% +Lüthje 2003 + +5. Apache OS server software security features +131 technically sophisticated Apache features users (webmasters) +19.1% +Franke and von Hippel 2003 + +Consumer products +~ +~ +~ + +6. Outdoor consumer products +153 recipients of mail order catalogs for outdoor activity products for consumers +9.8% +Lüthje 2004 + +7. "Extreme" sporting equipment +197 members of 4 specialized sporting clubs in 4 "extreme" sports +37.8% +Franke and Shah 2003 + +8. Mountain biking equipment +291 mountain bikers in a geographic region +19.2% +Lüthje et al. + +}table + +The cited studies also do not set an upper or a lower bound on the commercial or technical importance of user-developed products and product modifications that they report, and it is likely that most are of minor significance. However, most innovations from any source are minor, so user-innovators are no exception in this regard. Further, to say an innovation is minor is not the same as saying it is trivial: minor innovations are cumulatively responsible for much or most technical progress. Hollander (1965) found that about 80 percent of unit cost reductions in Rayon manufacture were the cumulative result of minor technical changes. Knight (1963, VII, pp. 2--3) measured performance advances in general-purpose digital computers and found, similarly, that "these advances occur as the result of equipment designers using their knowledge of electronics technology to produce a multitude of small improvements that together produce significant performance advances." +={Hollander, S.;Knight, K.;Users:process improvements by+1} + +Although most products and product modifications that users or others develop will be minor, users are by no means restricted to developing minor or incremental innovations. Qualitative observations have long indicated that important process improvements are developed by users. Smith (1776, pp. 11--13) pointed out the importance of "the invention of a great number of machines which facilitate and abridge labor, and enable one man to do the work of many." He also noted that "a great part of the machines made use of in those manufactures in which labor is most subdivided, were originally the invention of common workmen, who, being each of them employed in some very simple operation, naturally turned their thoughts towards finding out easier and readier methods of performing it." Rosenberg (1976) studied the history of the US machine tool industry and found that important and basic machine types like lathes and milling machines were first developed and built by user firms having a strong need for them. Textile manufacturing firms, gun manufacturers and sewing machine manufacturers were important early user-developers of machine tools. Other studies show quantitatively that some of the most important and novel products and processes have been developed by user firms and by individual users. Enos (1962) reported that nearly all the most important innovations in oil refining were developed by user firms. Freeman (1968) found that the most widely licensed chemical production processes were developed by user firms. Von Hippel (1988) found that users were the developers of about 80 percent of the most important scientific instrument innovations, and also the developers of most of the major innovations in semiconductor processing. Pavitt (1984) found that a considerable fraction of invention by British firms was for in-house use. Shah (2000) found that the most commercially important equipment innovations in four sporting fields tended to be developed by individual users. +={Enos, J.;Freeman, C.;Pavitt, K.;Rosenberg, N.;Shah, S.;Smith, A.;von Hippel, E.+23;Sporting equipment:lead users and} + +!_ Lead User Theory +={Lead users:theory of+3} + +A second major finding of empirical research into innovation by users is that most user-developed products and product modifications (and the most commercially attractive ones) are developed by users with "lead user" characteristics. Recall from chapter 1 that lead users are defined as members of a user population having two distinguishing characteristics: (1) They are at the leading edge of an important market trend(s), and so are currently experiencing needs that will later be experienced by many users in that market. (2) They anticipate relatively high benefits from obtaining a solution to their needs, and so may innovate. +={Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users+1;Lead users:economic benefit, expectations of+1} + +The theory that led to defining "lead users" in terms of these two characteristics was derived as follows (von Hippel 1986). First, the "ahead on an important market trend" variable was included because of its assumed effect on the commercial attractiveness of innovations developed by users residing at a leading-edge position in a market. Market needs are not static---they evolve, and often they are driven by important underlying trends. If people are distributed with respect to such trends as diffusion theory indicates, then people at the leading edges of important trends will be experiencing needs today (or this year) that the bulk of the market will experience tomorrow (or next year). And, if users develop and modify products to satisfy their own needs, then the innovations that lead users develop should later be attractive to many. The expected benefits variable and its link to innovation likelihood was derived from studies of industrial product and process innovations. These showed that the greater the benefit an entity expects to obtain from a needed innovation, the greater will be that entity's investment in obtaining a solution, where a solution is an innovation either developed or purchased (Schmookler 1966; Mansfield 1968). +={Mansfield, E.;Schmookler, J.} + +Empirical studies to date have confirmed lead user theory. Morrison, Roberts, and Midgely (2004) studied the characteristics of innovating and non-innovating users of computerized library information systems in a sample of Australian libraries. They found that the two lead user characteristics were distributed in a continuous, unimodal manner in that sample. They also found that the two characteristics of lead users and the actual development of innovations by users were highly correlated. Franke and von Hippel (2003b) confirmed these findings in a study of innovating and non-innovating users of Apache web server software. They also found that the commercial attractiveness of innovations developed by users increased along with the strength of those users' lead user characteristics. +={Franke, N.;Midgely, David;Morrison, Pamela+19;Roberts, J.;Apache web server software;Lead users:Apache web server software and|library information search system and;Library information search system} + +!_ Evidence of Innovation by Lead Users + +Several studies have found that user innovation is largely the province of users that have lead user characteristics, and that products lead users develop often form the basis for commercial products. These general findings appear robust: the studies have used a variety of techniques and have addressed a variety of markets and innovator types. Brief reviews of four studies will convey the essence of what has been found. + +!_ Innovation in Industrial Product User Firms + +In the first empirical study of lead users' role in innovation, Urban and von Hippel (1988) studied user innovation activity related to a type of software used to design printed circuit boards. A major market trend to which printed circuit computer-aided design software (PC-CAD) must respond is the steady movement toward packing electronic circuitry more densely onto circuit boards. Higher density means one that can shrink boards in overall size and that enables the circuits they contain to operate faster---both strongly desired attributes. Designing a board at the leading edge of what is technically attainable in density at any particular time is a very demanding task. It involves some combination of learning to make the printed circuit wires narrower, learning how to add more layers of circuitry to a board, and using smaller electronic components. +={Urban, G.+1;Lead users:printed circuit CAD software and+3;Lead users:printed circuit CAD software and+3;Printed circuit CAD software+3} + +To explore the link between user innovation and needs at the leading edge of the density trend, Urban and von Hippel collected a sample of 138 user-firm employees who had attended a trade show on the topic of PC-CAD. To learn the position of each firm on the density trend, they asked questions about the density of the boards that each PC-CAD user firm was currently producing. To learn about each user's likely expected benefits from improvements to PC-CAD, they asked questions about how satisfied each respondent was with their firm's present PC-CAD capabilities. To learn about users' innovation activities, they asked questions about whether each firm had modified or built its own PC-CAD software for its own in-house use. + +Users' responses were cluster analyzed, and clear lead user (n = 38) and non-lead-user (n = 98) clusters were found. Users in the lead user cluster were those that made the densest boards on average and that also were dissatisfied with their PC-CAD capabilities. In other words, they were at the leading edge of an important market trend, and they had a high incentive to innovate to improve their capabilities. Strikingly, 87 percent of users in the lead user cluster reported either developing or modifying the PC-CAD software that they used. In contrast, only 1 percent of non-lead users reported this type of innovation. Clearly, in this case user innovation was very strongly concentrated in the lead user segment of the user population. A discriminant analysis on indicated that "build own system" was the most important indicator of membership in the lead user cluster. The discriminant analysis had 95.6 percent correct classification of cluster membership. + +The commercial attractiveness of PC-CAD solutions developed by lead users was high. This was tested by determining whether lead users and more ordinary users preferred a new PC-CAD system concept containing features developed by lead users over the best commercial PC-CAD system available at the time of the study (as determined by a large PC-CAD system manufacturer's competitive analysis) and two additional concepts. The concept containing lead user features was significantly preferred at even twice the price (p < 0.01). +={Lead users:commercial attractiveness of} + +!_ Innovation in Libraries +={Lead users:library information search system and+11;Library information search system+11} + +Morrison, Roberts, and von Hippel (2000) explored user modifications made by Australian libraries to computerized information search systems called Online Public Access systems ("OPACs"). Libraries might not seem the most likely spot for technological innovators to lurk. However, computer technologies and the Internet have had a major effect on how libraries are run, and many libraries now have in-house programming expertise. Computerized search methods for libraries were initially developed by advanced and technically sophisticated user institutions. Development began in the United States in the 1970s with work by major universities and the Library of Congress, with support provided by grants from the federal government (Tedd 1994). Until roughly 1978, the only such systems extant were those that had been developed by libraries for their own use. In the late 1970s, the first commercial providers of computerized search systems for libraries appeared in the United States, and by 1985 there were at least 48 OPAC vendors in the United States alone (Matthews 1985). In Australia (site of the study sample), OPAC adoption began about 8 years later than in the United States (Tedd 1994). +={Tedd, L.;Roberts, J.+3} + +Morrison, Roberts, and I obtained responses from 102 Australian libraries that were users of OPACs. We found that 26 percent of these had in fact modified their OPAC hardware or software far beyond the user-adjustment capabilities provided by the system manufacturers. The types of innovations that the libraries developed varied widely according to local needs. For example, the library that modified its OPAC to "add book retrieval instructions for staff and patrons" (table 2.2) did so because its collection of books was distributed in a complex way across a number of buildings--- making it difficult for staff and patrons to find books without precise directions. There was little duplication of innovations except in the case of adding Internet search capabilities to OPACs. In that unusual case, nine libraries went ahead and did the programming needed to add this important feature in advance of its being offered by the manufacturers of their systems. + +!_ Table 2.2 +OPAC modifications created by users served a wide variety of functions. + +table{~h c2; 50; 50; + +Improved library management +Improved information-search capabilities + +Add library patron summary statistics +Integrate images in records (2) + +Add library identifiers +Combined menu/command searches + +Add location records for physical audit +Add title sorting and short title listing + +Add book retrieval instructions for staff and patrons +Add fast access key commands + +Add CD ROM System backup +Add multilingual search formats <:br>Add key word searches (2) + +Add book access control based on copyright +Add topic linking and subject access + +Patrons can check their status via OPAC +Add prior search recall feature + +Patrons can reserve books via OPAC (2) +Add search "navigation aids" + +Remote access to OPAC by different systems +Add different hierarchical searches + +Add graduated system access via password +Access to other libraries' catalogs (2) + +Add interfaces to other in-house IT systems +Add or customize web interface (9) + + Word processing and correspondence (2) + Hot links for topics + + Umbrella for local information collection (2) + Extended searches + + Local systems adaptation + Hot links for source material + +}table + +Source of data: Morrison et al. 2000, table 1. Number of users (if more than one) developing functionally similar innovations is shown in parentheses after description of innovation. + +The libraries in the sample were asked to rank themselves on a number of characteristics, including "leading edge status" (LES). (Leading edge status, a construct developed by Morrison, is related to and highly correlated with the lead user construct (in this sample, ρ ,{(LES, CLU)}, = 0.904, /{p}/ = 0.000). ~{ LES contains four types of measures. Three ("benefits recognized early," "high benefits expected," and "direct elicitation of the construct") contain the core components of the lead user construct. The fourth ("applications generation") is a measure of a number of innovation-related activities in which users might engage: they "suggest new applications," they "pioneer those applications," and (because they have needs or problems earlier than their peers) they may be "used as a test site" (Morrison, Midgely, and Roberts 2004). }~ Self-evaluation bias was checked for by asking respondents to name other libraries they regarded as having the characteristics of lead users. Self-evaluations and evaluations by others did not differ significantly. +={Midgely, David;Morrison, Pamela;Roberts, J.} + +Libraries that had modified their OPAC systems were found to have significantly higher LES---that is, to be lead users. They were also found to have significantly higher incentives to make modifications than non-innovators, better in-house technical skills, and fewer "external resources" (for example, they found it difficult to find outside vendors to develop the modifications they wanted for them). Application of these four variables in a logit model classified libraries into innovator and non-innovator categories with an accuracy of 88 percent (table 2.3). + +!_ Table 2.3 +Factors associated with innovating in librararies (logit model). χ^{2}^/,{4}, = 33.85; ρ^{2}^ = 0.40; classification rate = 87.78%. + +table{~h c3; 40; 30; 30; + +~ +Coefficient +Standard error + +Leading-edge status +1.862 +0.601 + +Lack of incentive to modify +--0.845 +0.436 + +Lack of in-house technology skills +--1.069 +0.412 + +Lack of external resources +0.695 +0.456 + +Constant +--2.593 +0.556 + +}table + +Source: Morrison et al. 2000, table 6. + +The commercial value of user-developed innovations in the library OPAC sample was assessed in a relatively informal way. Two development mangers employed by the Australian branches of two large OPAC manufacturers were asked to evaluate the commercial value of each user innovation in the sample. They were asked two questions about each: (1) "How important commercially to your firm is the functionality added to OPACs by this user-developed modification?" (2) "How novel was the information contained in the user innovation to your firm at the time that innovation was developed?" Responses from both managers indicated that about 70 percent (25 out of 39) of the user modifications provided functionality improvements of at least "medium" commercial importance to OPACs---and in fact many of the functions were eventually incorporated in the OPACs the manufacturers sold. However, the managers also felt that their firms generally already knew about the lead users' needs when the users developed their solutions, and that the innovations the users developed provided novel information to their company only in 10--20 percent of the cases. (Even when manufacturers learn about lead users' needs early, they may not think it profitable to develop their own solution for an "emerging" need until years later. I will develop this point in chapter 4.) +={Lead users:commercial attractiveness of;Manufacturers:innovation and|lead users and} + +!_ "Consumer" Innovation in Sports Communities +={Franke, N.+11;Shah, S.+11;Innovation:and sporting equipment+11;Lead users:manufacturers and+11;Sporting equipment:lead users and+11} + +% check manufacturers ref, see previous paragraph + +Franke and Shah (2003) studied user innovation in four communities of sports enthusiasts. The communities, all located in Germany, were focused on four very different sports. +={Manufacturers:innovation and|lead users and} + +One community was devoted to canyoning, a new sport popular in the Alps. Canyoning combines mountain climbing, abseiling (rappelling), and swimming in canyons. Members do things like rappel down the middle of an active waterfall into a canyon below. Canyoning requires significant skill and involves physical risk. It is also a sport in rapid evolution as participants try new challenges and explore the edges of what is both achievable and fun. + +The second community studied was devoted to sailplaning. Sailplaning or gliding, a more mature sport than canyoning, involves flying in a closed, engineless glider carrying one or two people. A powered plane tows the glider to a desired altitude by means of a rope; then the rope is dropped and the engineless glider flies on its own, using thermal updrafts in the atmosphere to gain altitude as possible. The sailplaning community studied by Franke and Shah consisted of students of technical universities in Germany who shared an interest in sailplaning and in building their own sailplanes. + +Boardercross was the focus of the third community. In this sport, six snowboarders compete simultaneously in a downhill race. Racetracks vary, but each is likely to incorporate tunnels, steep curves, water holes, and jumps. The informal community studied consisted of semi-professional athletes from all over the world who met in as many as ten competitions a year in Europe, in North America, and in Japan. + +The fourth community studied was a group of semi-professional cyclists with various significant handicaps, such as cerebral palsy or an amputated limb. Such individuals must often design or make improvements to their equipment to accommodate their particular disabilities. These athletes knew each other well from national and international competitions, training sessions, and seminars sponsored by the Deutscher Sportbund (German National Sports Council). + +A total of 197 respondents (a response rate of 37.8 percent) answered a questionnaire about innovation activities in their communities. Thirty-two percent reported that they had developed or modified equipment they used for their sport. The rate of innovation varied among the sports, the high being 41 percent of the sailplane enthusiasts reporting innovating and the low being 18 percent of the boardercross snowboarders reporting. (The complexity of the equipment used in the various sports probably had something to do with this variation: a sailplane has many more components than a snowboard.) + +The innovations developed varied a great deal. In the sailplane community, users developed innovations ranging from a rocket-assisted emergency ejection system to improvements in cockpit ventilation. Snowboarders invented such things as improved boots and bindings. Canyoners' inventions included very specialized solutions, such as a way to cut loose a trapped rope by using a chemical etchant. With respect to commercial potential, +={Lead users:commercial attractiveness of} + +Franke and Shah found that 23 percent of the user-developed innovations reported were or soon would be produced for sale by a manufacturer. Franke and Shah found that users who innovated were significantly higher on measures of the two lead user characteristics than users who did not innovate (table 2.4). They also found that the innovators spent more time in sporting and community-related activities and felt they had a more central role in the community. + +!_ Table 2.4 +Factors associated with innovation in sports communities. + +table{~h c4; 55; 15; 15; 15; + +~ +Innovators^{a}^ +Non-innovators^{b}^ +Significance of difference^{c}^ + +Time in community +~ +~ +~ + +Years as a community member +4.46 +3.17 +p < 0.01 + +Days per year spent with community members +43.07 +32.73 +p < 0.05 + +Days per year spent participating in the sport +72.48 +68.71 +not significant + +Role in community^{d}^ +~ +~ +~ + +"I am a very active member of the community." +2.85 +3.82 +p < 0.01 + + +"I get together with members of the community for activities that are not related to the sport (movies, dinner parties, etc.)." +3.39 +4.14 +p < 0.05 + +"The community takes my opinion into account when making decisions" +2.89 +3.61 +p < 0.05 + +Lead user characteristic 1: being ahead of the trend^{d}^ +~ +~ +~ + +"I usually find out about new products and solutions earlier than others." +2.71 +4.03 +p < 0.001 + +"I have benefited significantly by the early adoption and use of new products." +3.58 +4.34 +p < 0.01 + +"I have tested prototype versions of new products for manufacturers." +4.94 +5.65 +p < 0.05 + +"In my sport I am regarded as being on the "cutting edge." +4.56 +5.38 +p < 0.01 + + +"I improved and developed new techniques in boardercrossing." +4.29 +5.84 +p < 0.001 + +Lead user characteristic 2: high benefit from innovation^{d}^ +~ +~ +~ + +"I have new needs which are not satisfied by existing products." +3.27 +4.38 +p < 0.001 + + +"I am dissatisfied with the existing equipment." +3.90 +5.13 +p < 0.001 + +}table + +Source: Franke and Shah 2003, table 3.<:br> +a. All values are means; n = 60.<:br> +b. All values are means; n = 129.<:br> +c. Two-tailed t-tests for independent samples.<:br> +d. Rated on seven-point scale, with 1 = very accurate and 7 = not accurate at all. Two-tailed t-tests for independent samples. + +!_ Innovation among Hospital Surgeons +={Surgical equipment+4;Lead users:surgical equipment and+4} + +Lüthje (2003) explored innovations developed by surgeons working at university clinics in Germany. Ten such clinics were chosen randomly, and 262 surgeons responded to Lüthje's questionnaire---a response rate of 32.6 percent. Of the university surgeons responding, 22 percent reported developing or improving some item(s) of medical equipment for use in their own practices. Using a logit model to determine the influence of user characteristics on innovation activity, Lüthje found that innovating surgeons tended to be lead users (p < 0.01). He also found that solutions to problems encountered in their own surgical practices were the primary benefit that the innovating surgeons expected to obtain from the solutions they developed (p < 0.01). In addition, he found that the level of technical knowledge the surgeon held was significantly correlated with innovation (p < 0.05). Also, perhaps as one might expect in the field of medicine, the "contextual barrier" of concerns about legal problems and liability risks was found to have a strongly significant negative correlation with the likelihood of user invention by surgeons (p < 0.01). +={Lüthje, C.+1;Sticky information:toolkits and} + +With respect to the commercial value of the innovations the lead user surgeons had developed, Lüthje reported that 48 percent of the innovations developed by his lead user respondents were or soon would be marketed by manufacturers of medical equipment. + +!_ Discussion + +The studies reviewed in this chapter all found that user innovations in general and commercially attractive ones in particular tended to be developed by lead users. These studies were set in a range of fields, but all were focused on hardware innovations or on information innovations such as new software. It is therefore important to point out that, in many fields, innovation in techniques is at least as important as equipment innovation. For example, many novel surgical operations are performed with standard equipment (such as scalpels), and many novel innovations in snowboarding are based on existing, unmodified equipment. Technique-only innovations are also likely to be the work of lead users, and indeed many of the equipment innovations documented in the studies reviewed here involved innovations in technique as well as innovations in equipment. +={Lead users:commercial attractiveness of+1;Users:innovation process and+1} + +Despite the strength of the findings, many interesting puzzles remain that can be addressed by the further development of lead user theory. For example, empirical studies of innovation by lead users are unlikely to have sampled the world's foremost lead users. Thus, in effect, the studies reviewed here determined lead users to be those highest on lead user characteristics that were within their samples. Perhaps other samples could have been obtained in each of the fields studied containing users that were even more "leading edge" with respect to relevant market trends. If so, why were the samples of moderately leading-edge users showing user innovation if user innovation is concentrated among "extreme" lead users? There are at least three possible explanations. First, most of the studies of user innovation probably included users reasonably close to the global leading edge in their samples. Had the "top" users been included, perhaps the result would have been that still more attractive user innovations would have been found. Second, it may be that the needs of local user communities differ, and so local lead users really may be the world's lead users with respect to their particular needs. Third, even if a sample contains lead users that are not near the global top with respect to lead users' characteristics, local lead users might still have reasons to (re)develop innovations locally. For example, it might be cheaper, faster, more interesting, or more enjoyable to innovate than to search for a similar innovation that a "global top" lead user might already have developed. +={Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users;Innovation process;Lead users:economic benefit, expectations of;Local information;Users:low-cost innovation niches of} + +1~ 3 Why Many Users Want Custom Products +={Custom products:heterogeneity of user needs and+42|users and+42;User need+42;Users:custom products and+42|innovation and+42|needs of} + +The high rates of user innovation documented in chapter 2 suggest that many users may want custom products. Why should this be so? I will argue that it is because many users have needs that differ in detail, and many also have both sufficient willingness to pay and sufficient resources to obtain a custom product that is just right for their individual needs. In this chapter, I first present the case for heterogeneity of user needs. I then review a study that explores users' heterogeneity of need and willingness to pay for product customization. + +!_ Heterogeneity of User Needs + +If many individual users or user firms want something different in a product type, it is said that heterogeneity of user need for that product type is high. If users' needs are highly heterogeneous, only small numbers of users will tend to want exactly the same thing. In such a case it is unlikely that mass-produced products will precisely suit the needs of many users. Mass manufacturers tend to want to build products that will appeal to more users rather than fewer, so as to spread their fixed costs of development and production. If many users want something different, and if they have adequate interest and resources to get exactly the product they need, they will be driven either to develop it for themselves or to pay a custom manufacturer to develop it for them. +={Manufacturers:custom products and|expectations of economic benefit by|innovation and} + +Are users' needs for new products (and services) often highly heterogeneous? A test of reason suggests that they are. An individual's or a firm's need for a many products depends on detailed considerations regarding the user's initial state and resources, on the pathway the user must traverse to get from the initial state to the preferred state, and on detailed considerations regarding their preferred end state as well. These are likely to be different for each individual user and for each user firm at some level of detail. This, in turn, suggests that needs for many new products and services that are precisely right for each user will differ: that needs for those products will be highly heterogeneous. + +Suppose, for example, that you decide you need a new item of household furnishing. Your house is already furnished with hundreds of items, big and small, and the new item must "fit in" properly. In addition, your precise needs for the new item are likely to be affected by your living situation, your resources, and your preferences. For example: "We need a new couch that Uncle Bill will like, that the kids can jump on, that matches the wallpaper I adore, that reflects my love of coral reefs and overall good taste, and that we can afford." Many of these specific constraints are not results of current whim and are not easy to change. Perhaps you can change the wallpaper, but you are less likely to change Uncle Bill, your kids, your established tastes with respect to a living environment, or your resource constraints. + +The net result is that the most desired product characteristics might be specific to each individual or firm. Of course, many will be willing to satisfice---make compromises---on many items because of limits on the money or time they have available to get exactly what they want. Thus, a serious mountain biker may be willing to simply buy almost any couch on sale even if he or she is not fully happy with it. On the other hand, that same biker may be totally unwilling to compromise about getting mountain biking equipment that is precisely right for his or her specific needs. In terms of industrial products, NASA may insist on getting precisely right components for the Space Shuttle if they affect mission safety, but may be willing to satisfice on other items. + +!_ Evidence from Studies of User Innovation + +Two studies of innovation by users provide indirect information on the heterogeneity of user need. They provide descriptions of the functions of the innovations developed by users in their samples. Inspection of these descriptions shows a great deal of variation and few near-duplicates. Different functionality, of course, implies that the developers of the products had different needs. In the 2000 study of user modifications of library IT systems by Morrison, Roberts, and von Hippel, discussed earlier, only 14 of 39 innovations are functionally similar to any other innovations in the sample. If one type of functionality that was repeatedly developed ("web interface") is excluded, the overlap is even lower (see table 2.2). Other responses by study participants add to this impression of high heterogeneity of need among users. Thirty percent of the respondents reported that their library IT system had been highly customized by the manufacturer during installation to meet their specific needs. In addition, 54 percent of study respondents agreed with the statement "We would like to make additional improvements to our IT system functionality that can't be made by simply adjusting the standard, customer-accessible parameters provided by the supplier." +={Morrison, Pamela;Roberts, J.;von Hippel, E.+34;Lead users:library information search system and;Library information search system} + +Similar moderate overlap in the characteristics of user innovations can be seen in innovation descriptions provided in the study of mountain biking by Lüthje, Herstatt, and von Hippel (2002). In that study sample, I estimate that at most 10 of 43 innovations had functionality similar to that of another sample member. This diversity makes sense: mountain biking, which outsiders might assume is a single type of athletic activity, in fact has many subspecialties. +={Herstatt, C.+7;Lüthje, C.+7;Mountain biking+7} + +As can be seen in table 3.1, the specializations of mountain bikers in the our study sample involved very different mountain biking terrains, and important variations in riding conditions and riding specializations. The innovations users developed were appropriate to their own heterogeneous riding activities and so were quite heterogeneous in function. Consider three examples drawn from our study: + +_* I ride on elevated, skinny planks and ladders, do jumps, steep technical downhills, obstacles and big drops. Solution devised: I needed sophisticated cycling armor and protective clothing. So I designed arm and leg armor, chest protection, shorts, pants and a jacket that enable me to try harder things with less fear of injury. + +_* I do back-country touring and needed a way to easily lift and carry a fully loaded mountain bike on the sides of steep hills and mountains and dangle it over cliffs as I climbed. Solution devised: I modified the top tube and the top of my seat post to provide secure attachment points for a carrying strap, then I modified a very plush and durable mountaineering sling to serve as the over-shoulder strap. Because the strap sits up high, I only need to bend my knees a little bit to lift the bike onto my shoulders, yet it is just high enough to keep the front wheel from hitting when I am climbing a steep hill. Eventually, I came up with a quick-release lateral strap to keep the main strap from sliding off my shoulder, but it will easily break away if I fall or land in a fast river and need to ditch my bike. + +_* When riding on ice, my bike has no traction and I slip and fall. Solution devised: I increased the traction of my tires by getting some metal studs used by the auto industry for winter tires. Then I selected some mountain biking tires with large blocks of rubber in the tread pattern, drilled a hole in the center of each block and inserted a stud in each hole. + +!_ Table 3.1 +Activity specializations of innovating mountain bikers. + +table{~h c6; 20; 13; 20; 13; 20; 14; + +Preferred terrain +Number of bikers +Outside conditions +Number of bikers +Focus on particular riding abilities +Number of bikers + +Fast downhill tracks (steep, drops, fast) +44 (39.6%) +Darkness, night riding +45 (40.5%) +Jumps, drops, stunts, obstacles +34 (30.6%) + +Technical single tracks (up and down, rocky, jumps) +68 (61.3%) +Snow, ice, cold +60 (54.1%) +Technical ability/balance +22 (19.8%) + +Smooth single tracks (hilly, rolling, speed, sand, hardpack) +13 (11.7%) +Rain, mud +53 (47.7%) +Fast descents / downhill +34 (30.6%) + +Urban and streets +9 (8.1%) +Heat +15 (13.5%) +Endurance +9 (8.1%) + +No special terrain preferred +5 (4.5%) +High altitude +10 (9.0%) +Climbing +17 (13%) + +~ +~ +No extreme outside conditions +29 (26.1%) +Sprint +3 (2.7%) + +~ +~ +~ +~ +No focus on specific riding ability +36 (32.4%) + +}table + +Source: Lüthje,Herstatt, and vonHippel 2002. This table includes the 111 users in the study sample who had ideas for improvements to mountain biking equipment. (Of these, 61 had actually gone on to build the equipment they envisioned.) Many of these users reported experience in more than one category of activity, so the sum in each column is higher than 111. + +!_ Evidence from Studies of Market Segmentation + +Empirical data on heterogeneity of demand for specific products and services are sparse. Those most interested in studying the matter are generally mass manufacturers of products and services for consumers---and they do not make a practice of prospecting for heterogeneity. Instead, they are interested in finding areas where users' needs are similar enough to represent profitable markets for standard products produced in large volumes. Manufacturers customarily seek such areas via market-segmentation studies that partition markets into a very few segments---perhaps only three, four, or five. Each segment identified consists of customers with relatively similar needs for a particular product (Punj and Stewart 1983; Wind 1978). For example, toothpaste manufacturers may divide their markets into segments such as boys and girls, adults interested in tooth whitening, and so on. +={Punj, G.;Stewart, D.;Wind, Y.;Custom products:market segmentation and+3;Manufacturers:innovation and;Marketing research+1} + +Since the 1970s, nearly all market-segmentation studies have been carried out by means of cluster analysis (Green 1971; Green and Schaffer 1998). After cluster analysis places each participant in the segment of the market most closely matching his needs, a measure of within-segment need variation is determined. This is the proportion of total variation that is within each cluster, and it shows how much users' needs deviate from the averages in "their" respective segments. If within-segment variation is low, users within the segment will have fairly homogeneous needs, and so may be reasonably satisfied with a standard product designed to serve all customers in their segment. If it high, many users are likely to be dissatisfied---some seriously so. +={Green, P.;Schaffer, C.} + +Within-segment variation is seldom reported in published studies, but a survey of market-segmentation studies published in top-tier journals did find 15 studies reporting that statistic. These studies specified 5.5 clusters on average, and had an average remaining within-cluster variance of 46 percent (Franke and Reisinger 2003). Franke and von Hippel (2003b) found similar results in an independent sample. In that study, an average of 3.7 market segments were specified and 54 percent of total variance was left as within-segment variation after the completion of cluster analysis. These data suggest that heterogeneity of need might be very substantial among users in many product categories. ~{ Cluster analysis does not specify the "right" number of clusters---it simply segments a sample into smaller and smaller clusters until the analyst calls a halt. Determining an appropriate number of clusters within a sample can be done in different ways. Of course, it always possible to say that "I only want to deal with three market segments, so I will stop my analysis when my sample has been segmented into three clusters." More commonly, analysts will examine the increase of squared error sums of each step, and generally will view the optimal number of clusters as having been reached when the plot shows a sudden "elbow" (Myers 1996). Since this technique does not incorporate information on remaining within-cluster heterogeneity, it can lead to solutions with a large amount of within-cluster variance. The "cubic clustering criterion" (CCC) partially addresses this concern by measuring the within-cluster homogeneity relative to the between-cluster heterogeneity. It suggests choosing the number of clusters where this value peaks (Milligan and Cooper 1985). However, this method appears to be rarely used: Ketchen and Shook (1996) found it used in only 5 of 45 segmentation studies they examined. }~ +={Franke, N.+20;Reisinger, H.} + +!_ A Study of Heterogeneity and Willingness To Pay + +A need for a novel product not on the market must be accompanied by adequate willingness to pay (and resources) if it is to be associated with the actual development or purchase of a custom product. What is needed to reliably establish the relationship among heterogeneity of demand, willingness to pay, and custom product development or purchase is studies that address all three factors in the same sample. My colleague Nikolaus Franke and I conducted one such study in a population of users of web server software, a product used primarily by industrial firms (Franke and von Hippel 2003b). + +Franke and I looked in detail at users' needs for security features in Apache web server software, and at users' willingness to pay for solutions that precisely fit their needs. Apache web server software is open source software that is explicitly designed to allow modification by anyone having appropriate skills. Anyone may download open source software from the Internet and use it without charge. Users are also explicitly granted the legal right to study the software's source code, to modify the software, and to distribute modified or unmodified versions to others. (See chapter 7 for a full discussion of open source software.) +={Apache web server software+16;Custom products:Apache web server software and+16;Lead users:Apache web server software and+16;Users:and paying for innovations} + +Apache web server software is used on web server computers connected to the Internet. A web server's function is to respond to requests from Internet browsers for particular documents or content. A typical server waits for clients' requests, locates the requested resource, applies the requested method to the resource, and sends the response back to the client. Web server software began by offering relatively simple functionality. Over time, however, Apache and other web server software programs have evolved into the complicated front end for many of the technically demanding applications that now run on the Internet. For example, web server software is now used to handle security and authentication of users, to provide e-commerce shopping carts, and gateways to databases. In the face of strong competition from commercial competitors (including Microsoft and Sun/Netscape), the Apache web server has become the most popular web server software on the Internet, used by 67 percent of the many millions of World Wide Web sites extant in early 2004. It has also received many industry awards for excellence. + +Franke and I created a preliminary list of server security functions from published and web-based sources. The preliminary list was evaluated and corrected by experts in web server security and Apache web server software. We eventually ended up with a list of 45 security functions that some or many users might need. Solutions to some were already incorporated in the standard Apache code downloadable by users, others were available in additional modules, and a few were not yet addressed by any security module generally available to the Apache community. (Security threats can emerge quickly and become matters of great concern before a successful response is developed and offered to the general community. A recent example is site flooding, a form of attack in which vandals attempt to cause a website to fail by flooding it with a very large number of simultaneous requests for a response.) + +Users of the security functions of web server software are the webmasters employed by firms to make sure that their software is up to date and functions properly. A major portion of a webmaster's job is to ensure that the software used is secure from attacks launched by those who wish illicit access or simply want to cause the software to fail in some way. We collected responses to our study questions from two samples of Apache webmasters: webmasters who posted a question or an answer on a question at the Apache Usenet Forum ~{ http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.infosystems.www.servers.unix }~ and webmasters who subscribed to a specialized online Apache newsgroup. ~{ http://modules.apache.org/ }~ This stratified sample gave us an adequate representation of webmasters who both did and did not have the technical skills needed to modify Apache security software to better fit their needs: subscribers to apache-modules.org tend to have a higher level of technical skills on average than those posting to the Apache Usenet Forum. Data were obtained by means of an Internet-based questionnaire. + +!_ The Heterogeneity of Users' Needs + +Franke and I found the security module needs of Apache users were very heterogeneous indeed both among those that had the in-house capability to write code to modify Apache and those that did not. The calibrated coefficient of heterogeneity, H,{c},, was 0.98, indicating that there was essentially no tendency of the users to cluster beyond chance. (We defined the "heterogeneity of need" in a group as the degree to which the needs of i individuals can be satisfied with j standard products which optimally meet their needs. This means that heterogeneity of need is high when many standard products are necessary to satisfy the needs of i individuals and low when the needs can be satisfied by a few standard products. The higher the coefficient the more heterogeneous are the needs of users in a sample. If the calibrated heterogeneity coefficient H,{c}, equals 1, there is no systematic tendency of the users to cluster. If it is lower than 1, there is some tendency of the individuals to cluster. A coefficient of 0 means that the needs of all individuals are exactly the same. ~{ To measure heterogeneity, Franke and I analyzed the extent to which j standards, varying from [1; i], meet the needs of the i individuals in our sample. Conceptually, we first locate a product in multi-dimensional need space (dimensions = 45 in the case of our present study) that minimizes the distances to each individual's needs. (This step is analogous to the Ward's method in cluster analysis that also minimizes within cluster variation; see Punj and Stewart 1983.) The "error" is then measured as the sum of squared Euclidean distances. We then repeated these steps to determine the error for two optimally positioned products, three products, and so on up to a number equaling I -- 1. The sum of squared errors for all cases is then a simple coefficient that measures how much the needs of i individuals can be satisfied with j standard products. The "coefficient of heterogeneity" just specified is sensitive both to the (average) /{distance}/ between the needs and for the /{configuration}/ of the needs: when the needs tend to form clusters the heterogeneity coefficient is lower than if they are evenly spread. To make the coefficient comparable across different populations, we calibrate it using a bootstrapping technique (Efron 1979) involving dividing the coefficient by the expected value (this value is generated by averaging the heterogeneity of many random distributions of heterogeneity of the same kind). The average random heterogeneity coefficient is then an appropriate value for calibration purposes: it assumes that there is no systematic relationship between the needs of the individuals or between the need dimensions. }~ ) +={Franke, N.;Punj, G.;Stewart, D.} + +Even this understates the heterogeneity. Responding Apache webmasters went far beyond the 45 security-related functions of web server software that we offered for their evaluation. In our questionnaire we offered an open question asking users to list up to four additional needs they experienced that were not covered by the standard list. Nearly 50 percent used the opportunity to add additional functions. When duplicates were eliminated, we found that 92 distinct additional security-related needs had been noted by one or more webmaster users.~{ Conceptually, it can be possible to generate "one perfect product" for everyone--- in which case heterogeneity of demand is zero---by simply creating all the features wanted by anyone (45 + 92 features in the case of this study), and incorporating them in the "one perfect product." Users could then select the features they want from a menu contained in the one perfect product to tailor it to their own tastes. Doing this is at least conceptually possible in the case of software, but less so in the case of a physical product for two reasons: (1) delivering all possible physical options to everyone who buys the product would be expensive for physical goods (while costing nothing extra in the case of information products); (2) some options are mutually exclusive (an automobile cannot be both red and green at the same time). }~ + +High heterogeneity of need in our sample suggests that there should be a high interest in obtaining modifications to Apache---and indeed, overall satisfaction with the existing version was only moderate. + +!_ Willingness to Pay for Improvements + +It is not enough to want a better-fitting custom product. One must also be willing and able to pay to get what one wants. Those in the Apache sample who did innovate were presumably willing to pay the price to do so. But how much were the users in our sample---the innovators and the non-innovators--- willing to pay /{now}/ for improvements? Estimating a user's willingness to pay (WTP) is known to be a difficult task. Franke and I used the contingent valuation method, in which respondents are directly asked how much they are willing to pay for a product or service (Mitchell and Carson 1989). Results obtained by that method often overestimate WTP significantly. Empirical studies that compare expressed WTP with actual cash payments on average showed actual spending behavior to be somewhat smaller than expressed WTP in the case of private purchases (such as in our case). In contrast, they generally find willingness to pay to be greatly overstated in the case of public goods such as the removal of a road from a wilderness area. ~{ The difference between actual willingness to pay and expressed willingness to pay is much lower for private goods (our case) than for public goods. In the case of private goods, Loomis et al. (1996) found the expressed willingness to pay for art prints to be twice the actual WTP. Willis and Powe (1998) found that among visitors to a castle the expressed WTP was 60 percent lower than the actual WTP. In the case of public goods, Brown et al. (1996), in a study of willingness to pay for removal of a road from a wilderness area, found the expressed WTP to be 4--6 times the actual WTP. Lindsey and Knaap (1999), in a study of WTP for a public urban greenway, found the expressed WTP to be 2-10 times the actual WPT. Neil et al. (1994) found the expressed WTP for conserving an original painting in the desert to be 9 times the actual WTP. Seip and Strand (1992) found that less than 10 percent of those who expressed interest in paying to join an environmental organization actually joined. }~ +={Carson, R.;Mitchell, R.} + +To compensate for the likely overstatement of expressed relative to actual WTP in our study, Franke and I conservatively deflated respondents' indicated willingness to pay by 80 percent. (Although the product in question was intended for private use, webmasters were talking about their willingness to spend company money, not their own money.) We asked each user who had indicated that he was not really satisfied with a function (i.e., whose satisfaction with the respective function was 4 or less on a 7-point scale, where 1 = not satisfied at all, and 7 = very satisfied) to estimate how much he would be willing to pay to get a very satisfactory solution regarding this function. After deflation, our sample of 137 webmasters said they were willing to pay $700,000 in aggregate to modify web server software to a point that fully satisfied them with respect to their security function needs. This amounts to an average of $5,232 total willingness to pay per respondent. This is a striking number because the price of commercial web server software similar to Apache's for one server was about $1,100 at the time of our study (source: www.sun.com, November 2001). If we assume that each webmaster was in charge of ten servers on average, this means that each webmaster was willing to pay half the price of a total server software package to get his heterogeneous needs for security features better satisfied. + +!_ Increased Satisfaction from Customization of Apache + +Recall that it takes some technical skill to modify Apache web server software by writing new code. In table 3.2, Franke and I examined only the technically skilled users in our sample who claimed the capability of making modifications to Apache web server software. For these technically skilled users, we found significantly higher satisfaction levels among those that actually did customize their software---but even the users that made modifications were not fully satisfied. + +!_ Table 3.2 +Skilled users who customized their software were more satisfied than those who did not customize. + +table{~h c4; 55; 15; 15; 15; + +~ +Users who customized (n = 18) +Users who did not customize (n = 44) +Difference (one-tailed t-test) + +Satisfaction with basic web server functionality +5.5 +4.3 +0.100 + +Satisfaction with authentication of client +3.0 +1.0 +0.001 + +Satisfaction with e-commerce-related functions +1.3 +0.0 +0.023 + +Satisfaction with within-site user access control +8.5 +6.9 +0.170 + +Satisfaction with other security functions +3.9 +3.9 +0.699 + +Overall satisfaction +4.3 +2.6 +0.010 + +}table + +Source: Franke and von Hippel 2003, table 8. In this table, 45 individual functions are grouped into five general categories. The satisfaction index ranges from -21 to +21. + +One might wonder why users with the ability to modify Apache closer to their liking were not totally satisfied. The answer can be found in respondents' judgments regarding how much effort it would require to modify Apache still more to their liking. We asked all respondents who indicated dissatisfaction of level 4 or lower with a specific function of Apache how much working time it would cost them to improve the function to the point where they would judge it to be very satisfactory (to be at a satisfaction level of 7). For the whole sample and all dissatisfactions, we obtained a working time of 8,938 person-days necessary to get a very satisfactory solution. This equals $78 of incremental benefit per incremental programmer working day ($716,758 divided by 8,938 days). This is clearly below the regular wages a skilled programmer gets. Franke and I concluded from this that skilled users do not improve their respective Apache versions to the point where they are perfectly satisfied because the costs of doing so would exceed the benefits. + +!_ Discussion + +Heterogeneity of user need is likely to be high for many types of products. Data are still scanty, but high heterogeneity of need is a very straightforward explanation for why there is so much customization by users: many users have "custom" needs for products and services. + +Those interested can easily enhance their intuitions about heterogenity of user need and related innovation by users. User innovation appears to be common enough so that one can find examples for oneself in a reasonably small, casual sample. Readers therefore may find it possible (and enjoyable) to do their own informal tests of the matter. My own version of such a test is to ask the students in one of my MIT classes (typically about 50 students) to think about a particular product that many use, such as a backpack. I first ask them how satisfied they are with their backpack. Initially, most will say "It's OK." But after some discussion and thinking, a few complaints will slowly begin to surface (slowly, I think, because we all take some dissatisfaction with our products as the unremarkable norm). "It doesn't fit comfortably" in this or that particular way. "When my lunch bag or thermos leaks the books and papers I am carrying get wet---there should be a water proof partition." "I carry large drawings to school rolled up in my backpack with the ends sticking out. They are ruined if it rains and I have not taken the precaution of wrapping them in plastic." Next, I ask whether any students have modified their backpacks to better meet their needs. Interestingly enough, one or two typically have. Since backpacks are not products of very high professional or hobby interest to most users, the presence of even some user innovation to adapt to individual users' unmet needs in such small, casual samples is an interesting intuition builder with respect to the findings discussed in this chapter. + +1~ 4 Users' Innovate-or-Buy Decisions +={Users:innovation and+4|innovate-or-buy decisions by+74} + +Why does a user wanting a custom product sometimes innovate for itself rather than buying from a manufacturer of custom products? There is, after all, a choice---at least it would seem so. However, if a user with the resources and willingness to pay does decide to buy, it may be surprised to discover that it is not so easy to find a manufacturer willing to make exactly what an individual user wants. Of course, we all know that mass manufacturers with businesses built around providing standard products in large numbers will be reluctant to accommodate special requests. Consumers know this too, and few will be so foolish as to contact a major soup producer like Campbell's with a request for a special, "just-right" can of soup. But what about manufacturers that specialize in custom products? Isn't it their business to respond to special requests? To understand which way the innovate-or-buy choice will go, one must consider both transaction costs and information asymmetries specific to users and manufacturers. I will talk mainly about transaction costs in this chapter and mainly about information asymmetries in chapter 5. +={Custom products:users and+3;Innovation process+3;Manufacturers:innovation and+3;Transaction costs+3;Users:innovation process and+3|and paying for innovations} + +I begin this chapter by discussing four specific and significant transaction costs that affect users' innovate-or-buy decisions. Next I review a case study that illustrates these. Then, I use a simple quantitative model to further explore when user firms will find it more cost-effective to develop a solution---a new product or service---for themselves rather than hiring a manufacturer to solve the problem for them. Finally, I point out that /{individual}/ users can sometimes be more inclined to innovate than one might expect because they sometimes value the /{process}/ of innovating as well as the novel product or service that is created. + +!_ Users' vs. Manufacturers' Views of Innovation Opportunities +={Agency costs+15;Manufacturers:agency costs and+15;Transaction costs:See also Agency costs;Users:agency costs and+15|transaction costs and+15} + +Three specific contributors to transaction costs---in addition to the "usual suspects," such as opportunism---often have important effects on users' decisions whether to buy a custom product or to develop it for themselves. These are (1) differences between users' and manufacturers' views regarding what constitutes a desirable solution, (2) differences in innovation quality signaling requirements between user and manufacturer innovators, and (3) differences in legal requirements placed on user and manufacturer innovators. The first two of these factors involve considerations of agency costs. When a user hires a manufacturer to develop a custom product, the user is a principal that has hired the custom manufacturer as to act as its agent. When the interests of the principal and the agent are not the same, agency costs will result. Recall from chapter 1 that agency costs are (1) costs incurred to monitor the agent to ensure that it follows the interests of the principal, (2) the cost incurred by the agent to commit itself not to act against the principal's interest (the "bonding cost"), and (3) costs associated with an outcome that does not fully serve the interests of the principal (Jensen and Meckling 1976). In the specific instance of product and service development, agency considerations enter because a user's and a manufacturer's interests with respect to the development of a custom product often differ significantly. +={Jensen, M.;Meckling, W.} + +!_ Preferences Regarding Solutions + +Individual products and services are components of larger user solutions. A user therefore wants a product that will make the best overall tradeoff between solution quality and price. Sometimes the best overall tradeoff will result in a willingness to pay a surprisingly large amount to get a solution component precisely right. For example, an individual user may specify tennis racket functionality that will fit her specific technique and relative strengths and will be willing to pay a great deal for exactly that racket. Deviations in racket functionality would require compensating modifications in her carefully practiced and deeply ingrained hitting technique---a much more costly overall solution from the user's point of view. In contrast, a user will be much less concerned with precisely /{how}/ the desired functionality is attained. For example, tennis players will typically be unconcerned about whether a tennis racket is made from metal, carbon fiber, plastic or wood---or, for that matter, from mud---if it performs precisely as desired. And, indeed, users have quickly shifted to new types of rackets over the years as new materials promise a better fit to their particular functional requirements. + +Of course, the same thing is true in the case of products for industrial users. For example, a firm with a need for a process machine may be willing to pay a great deal for one that is precisely appropriate to the characteristics of the input materials being processed, and to the skills of employees who will operate the machine. Deviations in either matter would require compensating modifications in material supply and employee training---likely to be a much more costly overall solution from the user's point of view. In contrast, the user firm will be much less concerned with precisely how the desired functionality is achieved by the process machine, and will care only that it performs precisely as specified. + +Manufacturers faced with custom development requests from users make similar calculations, but theirs revolve around attempting to conserve the applicability of a low-cost (to them) solution. Manufacturers tend to specialize in and gain competitive advantage from their capabilities in one or a few specific solution types. They then seek to find as many profitable applications for those solutions types as possible. For example, a specialist in fabricating custom products from carbon fiber might find it profitable to make any kind of product---from airplane wings to tennis rackets---as long as they are made from carbon fiber. In contrast, that same manufacturer would have no competitive advantage in---and so no profit from making--- any of these same products from metal or wood. + +Specializations in solution types can be very narrow indeed. For example, thousands of manufacturers specialize in adhesive-based fastening solutions, while other thousands specialize in mechanical fastening solutions involving such things as metal screws and nails. Importantly, companies that produce products and solution types that have close functional equivalence from the user's point of view can look very different from the point of view of a solution supplier. For example, a manufacturer of standard or custom adhesives needs chemists on staff with an expertise in chemical formulation. It also needs chemistry labs and production equipment designed to mix specialized batches of chemicals on a small scale, and it needs the equipment, expertise and regulatory approvals to package that kind of product in a way that is convenient to the customer and also in line with regulatory safeguards. In contrast, manufacturers specializing in standard or custom metal fastening solutions need none of these things. What they need instead are mechanical design engineers, a machine shop to build product prototypes and production tooling, specialized metal-forming production equipment such as screw machines, and so on. + +Users, having an investment only in a need specification and not in a solution type, want the best functional solution to their problem, independent of solution type used. Manufacturers, in contrast, want to supply custom solutions to users that utilize their existing expertise and production capabilities. Thus, in the case of the two fastening technology alternatives just described, users will prefer whatever solution approach works best. In contrast, adhesives manufacturers will find it tremendously more attractive to create a solution involving adhesive-based fastening, and manufacturers specializing in mechanical fastening will similarly strongly prefer to offer to develop solutions involving mechanical fastening. + +The difference between users' incentives to get the best functional solution to their need and specialist manufacturers' incentives to embed a specific solution type in the product to be developed are a major source of agency costs in custom product development, because there is typically an information asymmetry between user and manufacturer with respect to what will be the best solution. Manufacturers tend to know more than users about this and to have a strong incentive to provide biased information to users in order to convince them that the solution type in which they specialize is the best one to use. Such biases will be difficult for users to detect because, again, they are less expert than the suppliers in the various solution technologies that are candidates. +={Information asymmetries;Users:information asymmetries of} + +Theoretically, this agency cost would disappear if it were possible to fully specify a contract (Aghion and Tirole 1994; Bessen 2004). But in product development, contracting can be problematic. Information regarding characteristics of solutions and needs is inescapably incomplete at the time of contracting---users cannot fully specify what they want in advance of trying out prototype solutions, and manufacturers are not fully sure how planned solution approaches will work out before investing in customer-specific development. +={Aghion, P.;Bessen, J.;Contracting;Tirole, J.} + +!_ Users' Expectations + +When users buy a product from manufacturers, they tend to expect a package of other services to come along with the product they receive. However, when users develop a product for themselves, some of these are not demanded or can be supplied in a less formal, less expensive way by users for themselves. This set of implicit expectations can raise the cost to a user of a custom solution bought from a manufacturer relative to a home-developed solution. +={Manufacturers:innovation and+11;Users:innovation and+11} + +Users typically expect a solution they have purchased to work correctly and reliably "right out of the box." In effect, a sharp line is drawn between product development at the manufacturer's site and routine, trouble-free usage at the purchaser's site. When the user builds a product for itself, however, both the development and the use functions are in the same organization and may explicitly be overlapped. Repeated tests and repeated repairs and improvements during early use are then more likely to be understood and tolerated as an acceptable part of the development process. + +A related difference in expectations has to do with field support for a product that has been purchased rather than developed in house. In the case of a purchased custom product, users expect that manufacturers will provide replacement parts and service if needed. Responding to this expectation is costly for a custom manufacturer. It must keep a record of what it has built for each particular user, and of any special parts incorporated in that user's products so that they can be built or purchased again if needed. In contrast, if a user has developed a product for itself, it has people on site who know details of its design. These employees will be capable of rebuilding or repairing or redesigning the product /{ad hoc}/ if and as the need arises. (Of course, if these knowledgeable employees leave the user firm while the product they designed is still in use, such informality can prove costly.) + +Manufacturers also must invest in indirect quality signals that may not have an effect on actual quality, but instead are designed to assure both the specific user being served and the market in general that the product being supplied is of high quality. These represent another element of agency costs that user-innovators do not incur. When users develop an innovation for themselves, they end up intimately knowing the actual quality of the solution they have developed, and knowing why and how it is appropriate to their task. As an example, an engineer building a million-dollar process machine for in-house use might feel it perfectly acceptable to install a precisely right and very cheap computer controller made and prominently labeled by Lego, a manufacturer of children's toys. (Lego provides computer controllers for some of its children's building kit products.) But if that same engineer saw a Lego controller in a million-dollar process machine his firm was purchasing from a specialist high-end manufacturer, he might not know enough about the design details to know that the Lego controller was precisely right for the application. In that case, the engineer and his managers might well regard the seemingly inappropriate brand name as an indirect signal of bad quality. + +Manufacturers are often so concerned about a reputation for quality that they refuse to take shortcuts that a customer specifically requests and that might make sense for a particular customer, lest others get wind of what was done and take it as a negative signal about the general quality of the firm's products. For example, you may say to a maker of luxury custom cars: "I want to have a custom car of your brand in my driveway---my friends will admire it. But I only plan to drive it to the grocery store once in a while, so I only want a cheap little engine. A luxury exterior combined with cheap parts is the best solution for me in this application---just slap something together and keep the price low." The maker is likely to respond: "We understand your need, but we cannot be associated with any product of low quality. Someone else may look under the hood some day, and that would damage our reputation as a maker of fine cars. You must look elsewhere, or decide you are willing to pay the price to keep one of our fine machines idle on your driveway." + +!_ Differing Legal and Regulatory Requirements + +Users that innovate do not generally face legal risk if the product they develop fails and causes costs to themselves but not to others. In contrast, manufacturers that develop and sell new products are regarded under US law as also providing an implied warranty of "fitness for the intended use." If a product does not meet this criterion, and if a different, written warranty is not in place, manufacturers can be found liable for negligence with respect to providing a defective design and failure to warn buyers (Barnes and Ulin 1984). This simple difference can cause a large difference in exposure to liability by innovators and so can drive up the costs of manufacturer-provided solutions relative to user-provided ones. +={Barnes, B.;Ulin, D.;Transaction costs+51;Users:transaction costs and+23} + +For example, a user firm that builds a novel process controller to improve its plant operations must pay its own actual costs if the self-built controller fails and ruins expensive materials being processed. On the other hand, if a controller manufacturer designed the novel controller product and sold it to customers, and a failure then occurred and could be traced back to a fault in the design, the controller manufacturer is potentially liable for actual user costs and punitive damages. It may also incur significant reputational losses if the unhappy user broadcasts its complaints. The logical response of a controller manufacturer to this higher risk is to charge more and/or to be much more careful with respect to running exhaustive, expensive, and lengthy tests before releasing a new product. The resulting increase in cost and delay for obtaining a manufacturer-developed product can tend to tip users toward building their own, in-house solutions. +={Custom products:manufacturers and+2;Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users:by manufacturers+4|by users+7;Manufacturers:expectations of economic benefit by+4} + +!_ Net Result + +A net result of the foregoing considerations is that manufacturers often find that developing a custom product for only one or a few users will be unprofitable. In such cases, the transaction costs involved can make it cheaper for users with appropriate capabilities to develop the product for themselves. In larger markets, in contrast, fixed transaction costs will be spread over many customers, and the economies of scale obtainable by producing for the whole market may be substantial. In that case, it will likely be cheaper for users to buy than to innovate. As a result, manufacturers, when contacted by a user with a very specific request, will be keenly interested in how many others are likely to want this solution or elements of it. If the answer is "few," a custom manufacturer will be unlikely to accept the project. + +Of course, manufacturers have an incentive to /{make}/ markets attractive from their point of view. This can be done by deviating from precisely serving the needs of a specific custom client in order to create a solution that will be "good enough" for that client but at the same time of more interest to others. Manufacturers may do this openly by arranging meetings among custom buyers with similar needs, and then urging the group to come up with a common solution that all will find acceptable. "After all," as the representative will say, "it is clear that we cannot make a special product to suit each user, so all of you must be prepared to make really difficult compromises!" More covertly, manufacturers may simply ignore some of the specific requests of the specific user client and make something that they expect to be a more general solution instead. + +The contrasting incentives of users and manufacturers with respect to generality of need being served---and also with respect to the solution choice issue discussed earlier---can result in a very frustrating and cloudy interaction in which each party hides its best information and attempts to manipulate others to its own advantage. With respect to generality of need, sophisticated users understand custom suppliers' preference for a larger market and attempt to argue convincingly that "everyone will want precisely what I am asking you for." Manufacturers, in turn, know users have this incentive and so will generally prefer to develop custom products for which they themselves have a reasonable understanding of demand. Users are also aware of manufacturers' strong preference for only producing products that embody their existing solution expertise. To guard against the possibility that this incentive will produce biased advice, they may attempt to shop around among a number of suppliers offering different solution types and/or develop internal expertise on solution possibilities and/or attempt to write better contracts. All these attempts to induce and guard against bias involve agency costs. +={Custom products:manufacturers and} + +!_ An Illustrative Case + +A case study by Sarah Slaughter (1993) illustrates the impact of some of the transaction costs discussed above related to users' innovate-or-buy decisions. Slaughter studied patterns of innovation in stressed-skin panels, which are used in some housing construction. The aspects of the panels studied were related to installation, and so the users of these features were home builders rather than home owners. When Slaughter contrasted users' costs of innovating versus buying, she found that it was always much cheaper for the builder to develop a solution for itself at a construction site than to ask a panel manufacturer to do so. +={Slaughter, S.+16;Stressed-skin panels+16} + +A stressed-skin panel can be visualized as a large 4-by-8-foot sandwich consisting of two panels made of plywood with a layer of plastic foam glued in between. The foam, about 4 inches thick, strongly bonds the two panels together and also acts as a layer of thermal insulation. In 1989, manufacturing of stressed-skin panels was a relatively concentrated industry; the four largest manufacturers collectively having a 77 percent share of the market. The user industry was much less concentrated: the four largest constructors of panelized housing together had only 1 percent of the market for such housing in 1989. + +In housing construction, stressed-skin panels are generally attached to strong timber frames to form the outer shell of a house and to resist shear loads (such as the force of the wind). To use the panels in this way, a number of subsidiary inventions are required. For example, one must find a practical, long-lasting way to attach panels to each other and to the floors, the roof, and the frame. Also, one has to find a new way to run pipes and wires from place to place because there are no empty spaces in the walls to put them---panel interiors are filled with foam. + +Stressed-skin panels were introduced into housing construction after World War II. From then till 1989, the time of Slaughter's study, 34 innovations were made in 12 functionally important areas to create a complete building system for this type of construction. Slaughter studied the history of each of these innovations and found that 82 percent had been developed by users of the stressed-skin panels---residential builders---and only 18 percent by manufacturers of stressed-skin panels. Sometimes more than one user developed and implemented different approaches to the same functional problem (table 4.1). Builders freely revealed their innovations rather than protecting them for proprietary advantage. They were passed from builder to builder by word of mouth, published in trade magazines, and diffused widely. All were replicated at building sites for years before any commercial panel manufacturer developed and sold a solution to accomplish the same function. + +Histories of the user-developed improvements to stressed-skin panel construction showed that the user-innovator construction firms did not engage in planned R&D projects. Instead, each innovation was an immediate response to a problem encountered in the course of a construction project. Once a problem was encountered, the innovating builder typically developed and fabricated a solution at great speed, using skills, materials, and equipment on hand at the construction site. Builders reported that the average time from discovery of the problem to installation of the completed solution on the site was only half a day. The total cost of each innovation, including time, equipment, and materials, averaged $153. + +!_ Example: Installing Wiring in a Stressed-Skin Panel + +A builder was faced with the immediate problem of how to route wires through the foam interior of panels to wall switches located in the middle of the panels. He did not want cut grooves or channels through the surfaces of the panels to these locations---that would dangerously reduce the panels' structural strength. His inventive solution was to mount an electrically heated wire on the tip of a long pole and simply push the heated tip through the center insulation layer of the panel. As he pushed, the electrically heated tip quickly melted a channel through the foam plastic insulation from the edge of the panel to the desired spot. Wires were then pulled through this channel. + +!_ Table 4.1 +Users would have found it much more costly to get custom solutions from manufacturers. The costs of user-developed innovations in stressed-skin panels were very low. + +table{~h c5; 40; 17; 17; 6; 20; + +Function +Average user development time (days) +Average user development cost +N +Minimimum cost of waiting for manufacturer to deliver + +Framing of openings in panels +0.1 +$20 +1 +$1,400 + +Structural connection between panels +0.1 +30 +2 +$1,400 + +Ventilation of panels on roof +0.1 +32 +2 +$28,000 + +Insulated connection between panels +0.1 +41 +3 +$2,800 + +Corner connection between panels +0.2 +60 +1 +$2,800 + +Installation of HVAC in panels +0.2 +60 +2 +$2,800 + +Installation of wiring in panels +0.2 +79 +7 +$2,800 + +Connection of panels to roof +0.2 +80 +1 +$2,800 + +Add insect repellency to panels +0.4 +123 +3 +$70,000 + +Connect panels to foundation +0.5 +160 +1 +$1,400 + +Connect panels to frames +1.2 +377 +3 +$2,800 + +Development of curved panels +5.0 +1,500 +1 +$28,000 + +Average for all innovations +0.5 +$153 +~ +$12,367 + +}table + +N represents number of innovations developed by /{users}/ to carry out each listed function. Source: Slaughter 1993, tables 4 and 5. Costs and times shown are averaged for all user-developed innovations in each functional category. (The six /{manufacturer}/-developed innovations in Slaughter's sample are not included in this table.) + +The builder-innovator reported that the total time to develop the innovation was only an hour, and that the total cost for time and materials equaled $40. How could it cost so little and take so little time? The builder explained that using hot wires to slice sheets of plastic foam insulation into pieces of a required length is a technique known to builders. His idea as to how to modify the slicing technique to melt channels instead came to him quickly. To test the idea, he immediately sent a worker to an electrical supply house to get some nichrome wire (a type of high-resistance wire often used as an electrical heating element), attached the wire to a tip of a pole, and tried the solution on a panel at the building site---and it worked! + +This solution was described in detail in an article in a builder's magazine and was widely imitated. A panel manufacturer's eventual response (after the user solution had spread for a number of years) was to manufacture a panel with a channel for wires pre-molded into the plastic foam interior of the panel. This solution is only sometimes satisfactory. Builders often do not want to locate switch boxes at the height of the premolded channel. Also, sometimes construction workers will install some panels upside down in error, and the preformed channels will then not be continuous between one panel and the next. In such cases, the original, user-developed solution is again resorted to. + +!_ Example: Creating a Curved Panel +={Manufacturers:transaction costs and+8} + +A builder was constructing a custom house with large, curved windows. Curved stressed-skin panels were needed to fill in the space above and below these windows, but panel manufacturers only sold flat panels at that time. The builder facing the problem could not simply buy standard flat panels and bend them into curved ones at the construction site---completed panels are rigid by design. So he bought plywood and plastic foam at a local building supply house and slowly bent each panel component separately over a curved frame quickly built at the construction site. He then bonded all three elements together with glue to create strong curved panels that would maintain their shape over time. + +To determine whether users' decisions to innovate rather than buy made economic sense for them, Slaughter calculated, in a very conservative way, what it would have cost users to buy a manufacturer-developed solution embodied in a manufactured panel rather than build a solution for themselves. Her estimates included only the cost of the delay a user-builder would incur while waiting for delivery of a panel incorporating a manufacturer's solution. Delay in obtaining a solution to a problem encountered at a construction site is costly for a builder, because the schedule of deliveries, subcontractors, and other activities must then be altered. For example, if installation of a panel is delayed, one must also reschedule the arrival of the subcontractor hired to run wires through it, the contractor hired to paint it, and so on. Slaughter estimated the cost of delay to a builder at $280 per crew per day of delay (Means 1989). To compute delay times, she assumed that a manufacturer would always be willing to supply the special item a user requested. She also assumed that no time elapsed while the manufacturer learned about the need, contracted to do the job, designed a solution, and obtained needed regulatory approvals. She then asked panel manufacturers to estimate how long it would take them to simply construct a panel with the solution needed and deliver it to the construction site. Delay times computed in this manner ranged from 5 days for some innovations to 250 days for the longest-term one and averaged 44 days. +={Means, R.;Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users:by manufacturers+2|by users+2;Manufacturers:expectations of economic benefit by+2|innovation and+5} + +The conservative nature of this calculation is very clear. For example, Slaughter points out that the regulatory requirements for building components, not included, are in fact much more stringent for manufacturers than for user-builders in the field of residential construction. Manufacturers delivering products can be required to provide test data demonstrating compliance with local building codes for each locality served. Testing new products for compliance in a locality can take from a month to several years, and explicit code approval often takes several additional years. In contrast, a builder that innovates need only convince the local building inspector that what he has done meets code or performance requirements--- often a much easier task (Ehrenkrantz Group 1979; Duke 1988). +={Duke, R.;Ehrenkrantz Group} + +Despite her very conservative method of calculation, Slaughter found the costs to users of obtaining a builder solution to be at least 100 times the actual costs of developing a solution for themselves (table 4.1). Clearly, users' decisions to innovate rather than buy made economic sense in this case. + +!_ Modeling Users' Innovate-or-Buy Decisions + +In this section I summarize the core of the argument discussed in this chapter via a simple quantitative model developed with Carliss Baldwin. Our goal is to offer additional clarity by trading off the richness of the qualitative argument for simplicity. +={Baldwin, C.+24} + +Whether a user firm should innovate or buy is a variant of a well-known problem: where one should place an activity in a supply chain. In any real-world case many complexities enter. In the model that follows, Baldwin and I ignore most of these and consider a simple base case focused on the impact of transaction costs on users' innovate-or-buy considerations. The model deals with manufacturing firms and user firms rather than individual users. We assume that user firms and manufacturer firms both will hire designers from the same homogeneous pool if they elect to solve a user problem. We also assume that both user firms and manufacturer firms will incur the same costs to solve a specific user problem. For example, they will have the same costs to monitor the performance of the designer employees they hire. In this way we simplify our innovate-or-buy problem to one of transaction costs only. + +If there are no transaction costs (for example, no costs to write and enforce a contract), then by Coase's theorem a user will be indifferent between making or buying a solution to its problem. But in the real world there are transaction costs, and so a user will generally prefer to either make or buy. Which, from the point of view of minimizing overall costs of obtaining a problem solution, is the better choice under any given circumstances? +={Coase, R.} + +Let V,{ij}, be the value of a solution to problem j for user i. Let N,{j}, be the number of users having problem j. Let Wh,{j}, be the cost of solving problem j, where W = hourly wage and h,{j}, = hours required to solve it. Let P,{j}, be the price charged by a manufacturer for a solution to problem j. Let T be fixed or "setup" transaction costs, such as writing a general contract for buyers of a solution to problem j. Let t be variable or "frictional" transaction costs, such as tailoring the general contract to a specific customer. + +To explore this problem we make two assumptions. First, we assume that a user firm knows its own problems and the value of a solution to itself, V,{ij},. Second, we assume that a manufacturer knows the number of users having each problem, N,{j},, and the value of solutions for each problem for all users, V,{ij},. + +These assumptions are in line with real-world incentives of users and manufacturers, although information stickiness generally prevents firms from getting full information. That is, users have a high incentive to know their own problems and the value to them of a solution. Manufacturers, in turn, have an incentive to invest in understanding the nature of problems faced by users in the target market, the number of users affected, and the value that the users would attach to getting a solution in order to determine the potential profitability of markets from their point of view. +={Sticky information:innovation and} + +We first consider the user's payoff for solving a problem for itself. A user has no transaction costs in dealing with itself, so a user's payoff for solving problem j will be V,{ij}, - Wh,{j},. Therefore, a user will buy a solution from an upstream manufacturer rather than develop one for itself if and only if P ≤ Wh,{j},. + +Next we consider payoffs to a manufacturer for solving problem j. In this case, transaction costs such as those discussed in earlier sections will be encountered. With respect to transaction costs assume first that t = 0 but T > 0. Then, the manufacturer's payoff for solving problem j will be V,{ij}, - Wh,{j},, which needs to be positive in order for the manufacturer to find innovation attractive: + +N,{j}, P,{j}, - Wh,{j}, - T > 0. + +But, as we saw, P,{j}, ≤ Wh,{j}, if the user is to buy, so we may substitute Wh,{j}, for P,{j}, in our inequality. Thus we obtain the following inequality as a condition for the user to buy: + +N,{j}, (Wh,{j},) - Wh,{j}, - T > 0, + +or + +N,{j}, > (T / Wh,{j},) + 1. + +In other words, Baldwin and I find that the absolute lower bound on N is greater than 1. This means that a single user will always prefer to solve a unique problem j for itself (except in Coase's world, where T = 0, and the user will be indifferent). If every problem is unique to a single user, users will never choose to call on upstream manufacturers for solutions. +={Coase, R.} + +Now assume that T = 0 but t > 0. Then the condition for the user to buy rather than to innovate for itself becomes + +N,{j}, (Wh,{j}, - t) - Wh,{j}, > 0, + +or equivalently (provided Wh,{j}, > t) + +N,{j}, > Wh,{j}, / (Wh,{j}, - t) > 1. + +Again, users will not call on upstream manufacturers to solve problems unique to one user. + +The findings from the simplified model, then, are the following: Problems unique to one user will always be solved efficiently by users hiring designers to work for them in house. In contrast, problems affecting more than a moderate number of users, n, which is a function of the transaction costs, will be efficiently solved by the manufacturer hiring designers to develop the needed new product or service and then selling that solution to all users affected by the problem. However, given sufficient levels of T and/or of t, problems affecting more than one but fewer than n users will not be solved by a manufacturer, and so there will be a market failure: Assuming an institutional framework consisting only of independent users and manufacturers, multiple users will have to solve the same problem independently. + +As illustration, suppose that t = 0.25Wh,{j}, and T = 10Wh,{j},. Then, combining the two expressions and solving for n yields + +n = (11Wh,{j}, /0.75Wh,{j},) = 14.66. + +The condition for the user to buy the innovation rather than innovate itself becomes N,{j}, ≥ 15. For a number of users less than 15 but greater than 1, there will be a wasteful multiplication of user effort: several users will invest in developing the same innovation independently. + +In a world that consists entirely of manufacturers and of users that do not share the innovations they develop, the type of wasteful duplicative innovation investment by users just described probably will occur often. As was discussed earlier in this chapter, and as was illustrated by Slaughter's study, substantial transaction costs might well be the norm. In addition, low numbers of users having the same need---situations where N,{j}, is low---might also be the norm in the case of functionally novel innovations. Functionally novel innovations, as I will show later, tend to be developed by lead users, and lead users are by definition at the leading (low-N,{j},) edge of markets. +={Slaughter, S.;Stressed-skin panels} + +When the type of market failure discussed above does occur, users will have an incentive to search for institutional forms with a lower T and/or a lower t than is associated with assignment of the problem to an upstream manufacturer. One such institutional form involves interdependent innovation development among multiple users (for example, the institutional form used successfully in open source software projects that I will discuss in chapter 7). Baldwin and Clark (2003) show how this form can work to solve the problem of wasteful user innovation investments that were identified in our model. They show that, given modularity in the software's architecture, it will pay for users participating in open source software projects to generate and freely reveal some components of the needed innovation, benefiting from the fact that other users are likely to develop and reveal other components of that innovation. At the limit, the wasteful duplication of users' innovative efforts noted above will be eliminated; each innovation component will have been developed by only one user, but will be shared by many. +={Clark, K.} + +!_ Benefiting from the Innovation Process +={Innovation process+4;Users:innovation process and+4} + +Some individual users (not user firms) may decide to innovate for themselves rather than buy even if a traditional accounting evaluation would show that they had made a major investment in time and materials for an apparently minor reward in product functionality. The reason is that individual users may gain major rewards from the process of innovating, in addition to rewards from the product being developed. Make-or-buy evaluations typically include factors such as the time and materials that must be invested to develop a solution. These costs are then compared with the likely benefits produced by the project's "output"---the new product or service created---to determine whether the project is worth doing. This was the type of comparison made by Slaughter, for example, in assessing whether it would be better for the users to make or to buy the stressed-skin panel innovations in her sample. However, in the case of individual user-innovators, this type of assessment can provide too narrow a perspective on what actually constitutes valuable project output. Specifically, there is evidence that individuals sometimes greatly prize benefits derived from their participation in the process of innovation. The process, they say, can produce learning and enjoyment that is of high value to them. +={Slaughter, S.;Stressed-skin panels} + +In the introductory chapter, I pointed out that some recreational activities, such as solving crossword puzzles, are clearly engaged in for process rewards only: very few individuals value the end "product" of a completed puzzle. But process rewards have also been found to be important for innovators that are producing outputs that they and others do value (Hertel, Niedner, and Herrmann 2003; Lakhani and Wolf 2005). Lakhani and Wolf studied a sample of individuals (n = 684, response rate = 34 percent) who had written new software code and contributed it to an open source project. They asked the programmers to list their three most important reasons for doing this. Fifty-eight percent of respondents said that an important motivation for writing their code was that they had a work need (33 percent), or a non-work need (30 percent) or both (5 percent) for the code itself. That is, they valued the project's "output" as this is traditionally viewed. However, 45 percent said that one of their top three reasons for writing code was intellectual stimulation, and 41 percent said one of their top three reasons was to improve their own programming skills (Lakhani and Wolf 2005, table 6). Elaborating on these responses, 61 percent of respondents said that their participation in the open source project was their most creative experience or was as creative as their most creative experience. Also, more than 60 percent said that "if there were one more hour in the day" they would always or often dedicate it to programming. +={Herrmann, S.;Hertel, G.;Lakhani, K.;Niedner, S.;Wolf, B.} + +Csikszentmihalyi (1975, 1990, 1996) systematically studied the characteristics of tasks that individuals find intrinsically rewarding, such as rock climbing. He found that a level of challenge somewhere between boredom and fear is important, and also that the experience of "flow" gained when one is fully engaged in a task is intrinsically rewarding. Amabile (1996) proposes that intrinsic motivation is a key determining factor in creativity. She defines a creative task as one that is heuristic in nature (with no predetermined path to solution), and defines a creative outcome as a novel and appropriate (useful) response to such a task. Both conditions certainly can apply to the task of developing a product or a service. +={Amiable, T.;Csikszentmihalyi, M.} + +In sum, to the extent that individual user-innovators benefit from the process of developing or modifying a product as well as from the product actually developed, they are likely to innovate even when the benefits expected from the product itself are relatively low. (Employees of a firm may wish to experience this type of intrinsic reward in their work as well, but managers and commercial constraints may give them less of an opportunity to do so. Indeed, "control over my own work" is cited by many programmers as a reason that they enjoy creating code as volunteers on open source projects more than they enjoy coding for their employers for pay.) + +1~ 5 Users' Low-Cost Innovation Niches +={Users:innovation and+50|low-cost innovation niches of+50} + +!_ The Problem-Solving Process +={Trial-and-error problem solving+11} + +Product and service development is at its core a problem-solving process. Research into the nature of problem solving shows it to consist of trial and error, directed by some amount of insight as to the direction in which a solution might lie (Baron 1988). Trial and error has also been found to be prominent in the problem-solving work of product and process development (Marples 1961; Allen 1966; von Hippel and Tyre 1995; Thomke 1998, 2003). +={Allen, T.;Baron, J.;Marples, D.;Thomke, S.;Tyre, M.;von Hippel, E.} + +Trial-and-error problem solving can be envisioned as a four-phase cycle that is typically repeated many times during the development of a new product or service. Problem solvers first conceive of a problem and a related solution based on their best knowledge and insight. Next, they build a physical or virtual prototype of both the possible solution they have envisioned and the intended use environment. Third, they run the experiment---that is, they operate their prototyped solution and see what happens. Fourth and finally, they analyze the result to understand what happened in the trial and to assess the "error information" that they gained. (In the trial-and-error formulation of the learning process, error is the new information or learning derived from an experiment by an experimenter: it is the aspect(s) of the outcome that the experimenter did not predict.) Developers then use the new learning to modify and improve the solution under development before building and running a new trial (figure 5.1). + +Trial-and-error experimentation can be informal or formal; the underlying principles are the same. As an example on the informal side, consider a user experiencing a need and then developing what eventually turns out to be a new product: the skateboard. In phase 1 of the cycle, the user combines need and solution information into a product idea: "I am bored with roller skating. How can I get down this hill in a more exciting way? Maybe it would be fun to put my skates' wheels under a board and ride down on that." In phase 2, the user builds a prototype by taking his skates apart and hammering the wheels onto the underside of a board. In phase 3, he runs the experiment by climbing onto the board and heading down the hill. In phase 4, he picks himself up from an inaugural crash and thinks about the error information he has gained: "It is harder to stay on this thing than I thought. What went wrong, and how can I improve things before my next run down the hill?" + +% (2) BUILD +% (3) RUN +% (4) ANALYZE +% (1) DESIGN +% DONE +% DESIGN REQUIREMENTS +% DESIGN ACTIVITY +% Changes in +% exogenous +% information +% Use learning from previous +% cycle(s) to conceive and design +% an improved solution. +% . +% Develop models and/or build +% prototypes to be used in +% running experiments. +% . +% Test model/prototype in real +% or simulated use environment. +% . +% Analyze findings from +% previous step and learn. +% . +% Figure 5.1 +% The trial-and-error cycle of product development. + +{di_evh_f5-1.png}image + +!_ Figure 5.1 +The trial-and-error cycle of product development. + +As an example of more formal experimentation, consider a product-development engineer working in a laboratory to improve the performance of an automobile engine. In phase 1, need and solution information are again combined into a design idea: "I need to improve engine fuel efficiency. I think that a more even expansion of the flame in the cylinders is a possible solution direction, and I think that changing the shape of the spark plug electrodes will improve this." In phase 2, the engineer builds a spark plug incorporating her new idea. In phase 3, she inserts the new spark plug into a lab test engine equipped with the elaborate instrumentation needed to measure the very rapid propagation of a flame in the cylinders of an auto engine and runs the test. In phase 4, she feeds the data into a computer and analyzes the results. She asks: "Did the change in spark plug design change the flame front as expected? Did it change fuel efficiency? How can I use what I have learned from this trial to improve things for the next one?" + +In addition to the difference in formality, there is another important difference between these two examples. In the first example, the skateboard user was conducting trial and error with a full prototype of the intended product in a real use environment---his own. In the second example, the experimental spark plug might have been a full prototype of a real product, but it probably consisted only of that portion of a real spark plug that actually extends into a combustion chamber. Also, only /{aspects}/ of the use environment were involved in the lab experiment. That is, the test engine was not a real auto engine, and it was not being operated in a real car traveling over real roads. + +Experimentation is often carried out using simplified versions---models--- of the product being designed and its intended use environment. These models can be physical (as in the example just given), or they can be virtual (as in the case of thought experiments or computer simulations). In a computer simulation, both the product and the environment are represented in digital form, and their interaction is tested entirely within a computer. For example, one might make a digital model of an automobile and a crash barrier. One could then use a computer to simulate the crash of the model car into the model barrier. One would analyze the results by calculating the effects of that crash on the structure of the car. + +The value of using models rather than the real thing in experimentation is twofold. First, it can reduce the cost of an experiment---it can be much cheaper to crash a simulated BMW than a real one. Second, it can make experimental results clearer by making them simpler or otherwise different than real life. If one is trying to test the effect of a small change on car safety, for example, it can be helpful to remove everything not related to that change from the experiment. For example, if one is testing the way a particular wheel suspension structure deforms in a crash, one does not have to know (or spend time computing) how a taillight lens will react in the crash. Also, in a real crash things happen only once and happen very fast. In a virtual crash executed by computer, on the other hand, one can repeat the crash sequence over and over, and can stretch time out or compress it exactly as one likes to better understand what is happening (Thomke 2003). +={Thomke, S.+2} + +Users and others experimenting with real prototypes in real use environments can also modify things to make tests simpler and clearer. A restaurant chef, for example, can make slight variations in just a small part of a recipe each time a customer calls for it, in order to better understand what is happening and make improvements. Similarly, a process machine user can experiment with only a small portion of machine functioning over and over to test changes and detect errors. + +Sometimes designers will test a real experimental object in a real experimental context only after experimenting with several generations of models that isolate different aspects of the real and/or encompass increasing amounts of the complexity of the real. Developers of pharmaceuticals, for example, might begin by testing a candidate drug molecule against just the purified enzyme or receptor it is intended to affect, then test it again and again against successively more complex models of the human organism (tissue cultures, animal models, etc.) before finally seeking to test its effect on real human patients during clinical trials (Thomke, von Hippel, and Franke 1998). +={Franke, N.;von Hippel, E.} + +!_ Sticky Information +={Sticky information+11:innovation and+11} + +Any experiment is only as accurate as the information that is used as inputs. If inputs are not accurate, outcomes will not be accurate: "garbage in, garbage out." + +The goal of product development and service development is to create a solution that will satisfy needs of real users within real contexts of use. The more complete and accurate the information on these factors, the higher the fidelity of the models being tested. If information could be transferred costlessly from place to place, the quality of the information available to problem solvers would or could be independent of location. But if information is costly to transfer, things are different. User-innovators, for example, will then have better information about their needs and their use context than will manufacturers. After all, they create and live in that type of information in full fidelity! Manufacturer-innovators, on the other hand, must transfer that information to themselves at some cost, and are unlikely to be able to obtain it in full fidelity at any cost. However, manufacturers might well have a higher-fidelity model of the solution types in which they specialize than users have. +={Information asymmetries+31;Local information+35;Users:information asymmetries of+31} + +It turns out that much information needed by product and service designers is "sticky." In any particular instance, the stickiness of a unit of information is defined as the incremental expenditure required to transfer that unit of information to a specified location in a form usable by a specified information seeker. When this expenditure is low, information stickiness is low; when it is high, stickiness is high (von Hippel 1994). That information is often sticky has been shown by studying the costs of transferring information regarding fully developed process technology from one location to another with full cooperation on both sides. Even under these favorable conditions, costs have been found to be high---leading one to conclude that the costs of transferring information during product and service development are likely to be at least as high. Teece (1977), for example, studied 26 international technology-transfer projects and found that the costs of information transfer ranged from 2 percent to 59 percent of total project costs and averaged 19 percent---a considerable fraction. Mansfield et al. (1982) also studied a number of projects involving technology transfer to overseas plants, and also found technology-transfer costs averaging about 20 percent of total project costs. Winter and Suzlanski (2001) explored replication of well-known organizational routines at new sites and found the process difficult and costly. +={Mansfield, E.;Suzlanski, G.;Teece, D.;Winter, S.;von Hippel, E.+63} + +Why is information transfer so costly? The term "stickiness" refers only to a consequence, not to a cause. Information stickiness can result from causes ranging from attributes of the information itself to access fees charged by an information owner. Consider tacitness---a lack of explicit encoding. Polanyi (1958, pp. 49--53) noted that many human skills are tacit because "the aim of a skilful performance is achieved by the observance of a set of rules which are not known as such to the person following them." For example, swimmers are probably not aware of the rules they employ to keep afloat (e.g., in exhaling, they do not completely empty their lungs), nor are medical experts generally aware of the rules they follow in order to reach a diagnosis of a disease. "Indeed," Polanyi says, "even in modern industries the indefinable knowledge is still an essential part of technology." Information that is tacit is also sticky because it cannot be transferred at low cost. As Polanyi points out, "an art which cannot be specified in detail cannot be transmitted by prescription, since no prescription for it exists. It can be passed on only by example from master to apprentice. . . ." Apprenticeship is a relatively costly mode of transfer. +={Polanyi, M.} + +Another cause of information stickiness is related to absorptive capacity. A firm's or an individual's capacity to absorb new, outside technical information is largely a function of prior related knowledge (Cohen and Levinthal 1990). Thus, a firm knowing nothing about circuit design but seeking to apply an advanced technique for circuit engineering may be unable to apply it without first learning more basic information. The stickiness of the information about the advanced technique for the firm in question is therefore higher than it would be for a firm that already knows that basic information. (Recall that the stickiness of a unit of information is defined as the incremental expenditure required to transfer a unit of information to a specified site in a form usable by a /{specific}/ information seeker.) +={Cohen, W.;Levinthal, D.} + +Total information stickiness associated with solving a specific problem is also determined by the amount of information required by a problem solver. Sometimes a great deal is required, for two reasons. First, as Rosenberg (1976, 1982) and Nelson (1982, 1990) point out, much technological knowledge deals with the specific and the particular. Second, one does not know in advance of problem solving which particular items will be important. +={Nelson, R.;Rosenberg, N.} + +An example from a study by von Hippel and Tyre (1995) illustrates both points nicely. Tyre and I studied how and why novel production machines failed when they were first introduced into factory use. One of the machines studied was an automated machine used by a computer manufacturing firm to place large integrated circuits onto computer circuit boards. The user firm had asked an outside group to develop what was needed, and that group had developed and delivered a robot arm coupled to a machine-vision system. The arm, guided by the vision system, was designed to pick up integrated circuits and place them on a circuit board at precise locations. +={Tyre, M.+4} + +Upon being installed in the factory, the new component-placing machine failed many times as a result of its developers' lack of some bit of information about the need or use environment. For example, one day machine operators reported that the machine was malfunctioning---again---and they did not know why. Investigation traced the problem to the machine-vision system. This system used a small TV camera to locate specific metalized patterns on the surface of each circuit board being processed. To function, the system needed to "see" these metalized patterns clearly against the background color of the board's surface. The vision system developed by the machine-development group had functioned properly in their lab when tested with sample boards from the user factory. However, the field investigation showed that in the factory it failed when boards that were light yellow in color were being processed. + +The fact that some of the boards being processed were sometimes light yellow was a surprise to the machine developers. The factory personnel who had set the specifications for the machine knew that the boards they processed varied in color; however, they had not volunteered the information, because they did not know that the developers would be interested. Early in the machine-development process, they had simply provided samples of boards used in the factory to the machine-development group. And, as it happened, these samples were green. On the basis of the samples, developers had then (implicitly) assumed that all boards processed in the field were green. It had not occurred to them to ask users "How much variation in board color do you generally experience?" Thus, they had designed the vision system to work successfully with boards that were green. + +In the case of this field failure, the item of information needed to understand or predict this problem was known to the users and could easily have been provided to the machine developers---had the developers thought to ask and/or had users thought to volunteer it. But in the actual evolution of events this was not done. The important point is that this omission was not due to poor practice; it was due to the huge amount of information about the need and the use environment that was /{potentially}/ relevant to problem solvers. Note that the use environment and the novel machine contain many highly specific attributes that could potentially interact to cause field problems. Note also that the property of the board causing this particular type of failure was very narrow and specific. That is, the problem was not that the board had physical properties, nor that it had a color. The problem was precisely that some boards were yellow, and a particular shade of yellow at that. Since a circuit board, like most other components, has many attributes in addition to color (shape, size, weight, chemical composition, resonant frequency, dielectric constant, flexibility, and so on), it is likely that problem solvers seeking to learn everything they might need to know about the use and the use environment would have to collect a very large (perhaps unfeasibly large) number of very specific items of information. + +Next, consider that the information items the problem solver will actually need (of the many that exist) are contingent on the solution path taken by the engineer designing the product. In the example, the problem caused by the yellow color of the circuit board was contingent on the design solution to the component-placing problem selected by the engineer during the development process. That is, the color of the circuit boards in the user factory became an item the problem solvers needed to know only when engineers, in the course of their development of the component placer, decided to use a vision system in the component-placing machine they were designing, and the fact that the boards were yellow became relevant only when the engineers chose a video camera and lighting that could not distinguish the metalized patterns on the board against a yellow background. Clearly, it can be costly to transfer the many items of information that a product or service developer might require---even if each individual item has low stickiness---from one site to another. + +!_ How Information Asymmetries Affect User Innovation vs. Manufacturer Innovation +={Manufacturers:information asymmetries of+11|innovation and+25} + +An important consequence of information stickiness is that it results in information asymmetries that cannot be erased easily or cheaply. Different users and manufacturers will have different stocks of information, and may find it costly to acquire information they need but do not have. As a result, each innovator will tend to develop innovations that draw on the sticky information it already has, because that is the cheapest course of action (Arora and Gambardella 1994; von Hippel 1994). In the specific case of product development, this means that users as a class will tend to develop innovations that draw heavily on their own information about need and context of use. Similarly, manufacturers as a class will tend to develop innovations that draw heavily on the types of solution information in which they specialize. +={Arora, A.;Gambardella, A.} + +This effect is visible in studies of innovation. Riggs and von Hippel (1994) studied the types of innovations made by users and manufacturers that improved the functioning of two major types of scientific instruments. +={Riggs, W.;Scientific instruments+9;Sticky information:and scientific instruments+1} + +They found that users tended to develop innovations that enabled the instruments to do qualitatively new types of things for the first time. In contrast, manufacturers tended to develop innovations that enabled users to do the same things they had been doing, but to do them more conveniently or reliably (table 5.1). For example, users were the first to modify the instruments to enable them to image and analyze magnetic domains at sub-microscopic dimensions. In contrast, manufacturers were the first to computerize instrument adjustments to improve ease of operation. Sensitivity, resolution, and accuracy improvements fall somewhere in the middle, as the data show. These types of improvements can be driven by users seeking to do specific new things, or by manufacturers applying their technical expertise to improve the products along known dimensions of merit, such as accuracy. + +!_ Table 5.1 +Users tend to develop innovations that deliver novel functions. + +% Innovation developed by + +table{~h c4; 60; 15; 15; 10; + +Type of improvement provided by innovation +User +Manufacturer +n + +New functional capability +82% +18% +17 + +Sensitivity, resolution, or accuracy improvement +48% +52% +23 + +Convenience or reliability improvement +13% +87% +24 + +Total sample size +~ +~ +64 + +}table + +Source: Riggs and von Hippel 1994, table 3. + +The variation in locus of innovation for different types of innovations, seen in table 5.1 does fit our expectations from the point of view of sticky information considerations. But these findings are not controlled for profitability, and so it might be that profits for new functional capabilities are systematically smaller than profits obtainable from improvements made to existing functionality. If so, this could also explain the patterns seen. + +Ogawa (1998) took the next necessary step and conducted an empirical study that did control for profitability of innovation opportunities. He too found the sticky-information effect---this time visible in the division of labor /{within}/ product-development projects. He studied patterns in the development of a sample of 24 inventory-management innovations. All were jointly developed by a Japanese equipment manufacturer, NEC, and by a user firm, Seven-Eleven Japan (SEJ). SEJ, the leading convenience-store company in Japan, is known for its inventory management. Using innovative methods and equipment, it is able to turn over its inventory as many as 30 times a year, versus 12 times a year for competitors (Kotabe 1995). An example of such an innovation jointly developed by SEJ and NEC is just-in-time reordering, for which SEJ created the procedures and NEC the hand-held equipment to aid store clerks in carrying out their newly designed tasks. Equipment sales to SEJ are important to NEC: SEJ has thousands of stores in Japan. +={Kotabe, M.;Ogawa, S.+1} + +The 24 innovations studied by Ogawa varied in the amount of sticky need information each required from users (having to do with store inventory- management practices) and the amount of sticky solution information required from manufacturers (having to do with new equipment technologies). Each also varied in terms of the profit expectations of both user and manufacturer. Ogawa determined how much of the design for each was done by the user firm and how much by the manufacturer firm. Controlling for profit expectations, he found that increases in the stickiness of user information were associated with a significant increase in the amount of need-related design undertaken by the user (Kendall correlation coefficient = 0.5784, P < 0.01). Conversely he found that increased stickiness of technology-related information was associated in a significant reduction in the amount of technology design done by the user (Kendall correlation coefficients = 0.4789, P < 0.05). In other words, need-intensive tasks within product-development projects will tend to be done by users, while solution-intensive ones will tend to be done by manufacturers. + +!_ Low-Cost Innovation Niches + +Just as there are information asymmetries between users and manufacturers as classes, there are also information asymmetries among individual user firms and individuals, and among individual manufacturers as well. A study of mountain biking by Lüthje, Herstatt, and von Hippel (2002) shows that information held locally by individual user-innovators strongly affects the type of innovations they develop. Mountain biking involves bicycling on rough terrain such as mountain trails. It may also involve various other extreme conditions, such as bicycling on snow and ice and in the dark (van der Plas and Kelly 1998). +={Kelly, C.;Lüthje, C.;Van der Plas, R.;Herstatt, C.+12;Lüthje, C.+12;Mountain biking+12;Users:innovate-or-buy decisions by+12} + +Mountain biking began in the early 1970s when some young cyclists started to use their bicycles off-road. Existing commercial bikes were not suited to this type of rough use, so early users put together their own bikes. They used strong bike frames, balloon tires, and powerful drum brakes designed for motorcycles. They called their creations "clunkers" (Penning 1998; Buenstorf 2002). +={Buenstorf, G.;Penning, C.} + +Commercial manufacture of mountain bikes began about 1975, when some of the early users of mountain bikes began to also build bikes for others. A tiny cottage industry developed, and by 1976 a half-dozen small assemblers existed in Marin County, California. In 1982, a small firm named Specialized, an importer of bikes and bike parts that supplied parts to the Marin County mountain bike assemblers, took the next step and brought the first mass-produced mountain bike to market. Major bike manufacturers then followed and started to produce mountain bikes and sell them at regular bike shops across the United States. By the mid 1980s the mountain bike was fully integrated in the mainstream bike market, and it has since grown to significant size. In 2000, about $58 billion (65 percent) of total retail sales in the US bicycle market were generated in the mountain bike category (National Sporting Goods Association 2002). + +Mountain biking enthusiasts did not stop their innovation activities after the introduction of commercially manufactured mountain bikes. They kept pushing mountain biking into more extreme environmental conditions, and they continued to develop new sports techniques involving mountain bikes (/{Mountain Bike}/ 1996). Thus, some began jumping their bikes from house roofs and water towers and developing other forms of acrobatics. As they did so, they steadily discovered needs for improvements to their equipment. Many responded by developing and building the improvements they needed for themselves. + +Our sample of mountain bikers came from the area that bikers call the North Shore of the Americas, ranging from British Columbia to Washington State. Expert mountain bikers told us that this was a current "hot spot" where new riding styles were being developed and where the sport was being pushed toward new limits. We used a questionnaire to collect data from members of North Shore mountain biking clubs and from contributors to the mailing lists of two North Shore online mountain biking forums. Information was obtained from 291 mountain bikers. Nineteen percent of bikers responding to the questionnaire reported developing and building a new or modified item of mountain biking equipment for their own use. The innovations users developed were appropriate to the needs associated with their own riding specialties and were heterogeneous in function. +={Custom products:heterogeneity of user needs and+6;User need+6;Users:needs of+6} + +We asked mountain bikers who had innovated about the sources of the need and solution information they had used in their problem solving. In 84.5 percent of the cases respondents strongly agreed with the statement that their need information came from /{personal needs they had frequently experienced}/ rather than from information about the needs of others. With respect to solution information, most strongly agreed with the statement that /{they used solution information they already had}/, rather than learning new solution information in order to develop their biking equipment innovation (table 5.2). + +!_ Table 5.2 +Innovators tended to use solution information they already had "in stock" to develop their ideas. Tabulated here are innovators' answers to the question "How did you obtain the information needed to develop your solution?" +={Lüthje, C.} + +table{~h c4; 55; 15; 15; 15; + +. +Mean +Median +Very high or high agreement + +"I had it due to my professional background." +4.22 +4 +47.5% + +"I had it from mountain biking or another hobby." +4.56 +5 +52.4% + +"I learned it to develop this idea." +2.11 +2 +16% + +}table + +Source: Lüthje et al. 2003. N = 61. Responses were rated on a seven-point scale, with 1 = not at all true and 7 = very true. + +!_ Discussion + +To the extent that users have heterogeneous and sticky need and solution information, they will have heterogeneous low-cost innovation niches. Users can be sophisticated developers within those niches, despite their reliance on their own need information and solution information that they already have in stock. On the need side, recall that user-innovators generally are lead users and generally are expert in the field or activity giving rise to their needs. With respect to solution information, user firms have specialties that may be at a world-class level. Individual users can also have high levels of solution expertise. After all, they are students or employees during the day, with training and jobs ranging from aerospace engineering to orthopedic surgery. Thus, mountain bikers might not want to /{learn}/ orthopedic surgery to improve their biking equipment, but if they already /{are}/ expert in that field they could easily draw on what they know for relevant solution information. Consider the following example drawn from the study of mountain biking discussed earlier: + +I'm a human movement scientist working in ergonomics and biomechanics. I used my medical experience for my design. I calculated a frame design suitable for different riding conditions (downhill, climb). I did a CAD frame design on Catia and conceived a spring or air coil that can be set to two different heights. I plan to build the bike next year. + +Users' low-cost innovation niches can be narrow because their development "labs" for such experimentation often consist largely of their individual use environment and customary activities. Consider, for example, the low-cost innovation niches of individual mountain bikers. Serious mountain bikers generally specialize in a particular type of mountain biking activity. Repeated specialized play and practice leads to improvement in related specialized skills. This, in turn, may lead to a discovery of a problem in existing mountain biking equipment and a responsive innovation. Thus, an innovating user in our mountain biking study reported the following: "When doing tricks that require me to take my feet off the bike pedals in mid-air, the pedals often spin, making it hard to put my feet back onto them accurately before landing." Such a problem is encountered only when a user has gained a high level of skill in the very specific specialty of jumping and performing tricks in mid-air. Once the problem has been encountered and recognized, however, the skilled specialist user can re-evoke the same problematic conditions at will during ordinary practice. The result is the creation of a low-cost laboratory for testing and comparing different solutions to that problem. The user is benefiting from enjoyment of his chosen activity and is developing something new via learning by doing at the same time. + +In sharp contrast, if that same user decides to stray outside his chosen activity in order to develop innovations of interest to others with needs that are different from his own, the cost properly assignable to innovation will rise. To gain an equivalent-quality context for innovation, such a user must invest in developing personal skill related to the new innovation topic. Only in this way will he gain an equivalently deep understanding of the problems relevant to practitioners of that skill, and acquire a "field laboratory" appropriate to developing and testing possible solutions to those new problems. + +Of course, these same considerations apply to user firms as well as to individual users. A firm that is in the business of polishing marble floors is a user of marble polishing equipment and techniques. It will have a low-cost learning laboratory with respect to improvements in these because it can conduct trial-and-error learning in that "lab" during the course of its customary business activities. Innovation costs can be very low because innovation activities are paid for in part by rewards unrelated to the novel equipment or technique being developed. The firm is polishing while innovating---and is getting paid for that work (Foray 2004). The low cost innovation niche of the marble polishing firm may be narrow. For example, it is unlikely to have any special advantage with respect to innovations in the polishing of wood floors, which requires different equipment and techniques. +={Foray, D.} + +1~ 6 Why Users Often Freely Reveal Their Innovations +={Free revealing of innovation information:evidence of+10|users and+50;Information commons+13;Intellectual property rights:free revealing and+50;Users:free revealing by+50} + +Products, services, and processes developed by users become more valuable to society if they are somehow diffused to others that can also benefit from them. If user innovations are not diffused, multiple users with very similar needs will have to invest to (re)develop very similar innovations, which would be a poor use of resources from the social welfare point of view. Empirical research shows that new and modified products developed by users often do diffuse widely---and they do this by an unexpected means: user-innovators themselves often voluntarily publicly reveal what they have developed for all to examine, imitate, or modify without any payment to the innovator. + +In this chapter, I first review evidence that free revealing is frequent. Next, I discuss the case for free revealing from an innovators' perspective, and argue that it often can be the best /{practical}/ route for users to increase profit from their innovations. Finally, I discuss the implications of free revealing for innovation theory. + +!_ Evidence of Free Revealing +={Free revealing of innovation information} + +When my colleagues and I say that an innovator "freely reveals" proprietary information, we mean that all intellectual property rights to that information are voluntarily given up by that innovator and all parties are given equal access to it---the information becomes a public good (Harhoff, Henkel, and von Hippel 2003). For example, placement of non-patented information in a publicly accessible site such as a journal or public website would be free revealing as we define it. Free revealing as so defined does not mean that recipients necessarily acquire and utilize the revealed information at no cost to themselves. Recipients may, for example, have to pay for a subscription to a journal or for a field trip to an innovation site to acquire the information being freely revealed. Also, some may have to obtain complementary information or other assets in order to fully understand that information or put it to use. However, if the possessor of the information does not profit from any such expenditures made by its adopters, the information itself is still freely revealed, according to our definition. This definition of free revealing is rather extreme in that revealing with some small constraints, as is sometimes done, would achieve largely the same economic effect. Still, it is useful to discover that innovations are often freely revealed even in terms of this stringent definition. +={Harhoff, D.;Henkel, J.} + +Routine and intentional free revealing among profit-seeking firms was first described by Allen (1983). He noticed the phenomenon, which he called collective invention, in historical records from the nineteenth-century English iron industry. In that industry, ore was processed into iron by means of large furnaces heated to very high temperatures. Two attributes of the furnaces used had been steadily improved during the period 1850--1875: chimney height had been increased and the temperature of the combustion air pumped into the furnace during operation had been raised. These two technical changes significantly and progressively improved the energy efficiency of iron production---a very important matter for producers. Allen noted the surprising fact that employees of competing firms publicly revealed information on their furnace design improvements and related performance data in meetings of professional societies and in published material. +={Allen, R.;Free revealing of innovation information:collective invention and} + +After Allen's initial observation, a number of other authors searched for free revealing among profit-seeking firms and frequently found it. Nuvolari (2004) studied a topic and time similar to that studied by Allen and found a similar pattern of free revealing in the case of improvements made to steam engines used to pump out mines in the 1800s. At that time, mining activities were severely hampered by water that tended to flood into mines of any depth, and so an early and important application of steam engines was for the removal of water from mines. Nuvolari explored the technical history of steam engines used to drain copper and tin mines in England's Cornwall District. Here, patented steam engines developed by James Watt were widely deployed in the 1700s. After the expiration of the Watt patent, an engineer named Richard Trevithick developed a new type of high-pressure engine in 1812. Instead of patenting his invention, he made his design available to all for use without charge. The engine soon became the basic design used in Cornwall. Many mine engineers improved Trevithick's design further and published what they had done in a monthly journal, /{Leans Engine Reporter}/. This journal had been founded by a group of mine managers with the explicit intention of aiding the rapid diffusion of best practices among these competing firms. +={Nuvolari, A.;Trevithick, R.;Watt, J.} + +Free revealing has also been documented in the case of more recent industrial equipment innovations developed by users. Lim (2000) reports that IBM was first to develop a process to manufacture semiconductors that incorporated copper interconnections among circuit elements instead of the traditionally used aluminum ones. After some delay, IBM revealed increasing amounts of proprietary process information to rival users and to equipment suppliers. Widespread free revealing was also found in the case of automated clinical chemistry analyzers developed by the Technicon Corporation for use in medical diagnosis. After commercial introduction of the basic analyzer, many users developed major improvements to both the analyzer and to the clinical tests processed on that equipment. These users, generally medical personnel, freely revealed their improvements via publication, and at company-sponsored seminars (von Hippel and Finkelstein 1979). Mishina (1989) found free, or at least selective no-cost revealing in the lithographic equipment industry. He reported that innovating equipment users would sometimes reveal what they had done to machine manufacturers. Morrison, Roberts, and I, in our study of library IT search software (discussed in chapter 2 above), found that innovating users freely revealed 56 percent of the software modifications they had developed. Reasons given for not revealing the remainder had nothing to do with considerations of intellectual property protection. Rather, users who did not share said they had no convenient users' group forum for doing so, and/or they thought their innovation was too specialized to be of interest to others. +={IBM;Finkelstein, S.;Lim, K.;Mishina, K.;Morrison, Pamela;Roberts, J.;Technicon Corporation;Free revealing of innovation information:and library information search system;Lead users:library information search system and;Library information search system} + +Innovating users of sports equipment also have been found to freely reveal their new products and product modifications. Franke and Shah (2003), in their study of four communities of serious sports enthusiasts described in chapter 2, found that innovating users uniformly agreed with the statement that they shared their innovation with their entire community free of charge---and strongly disagreed with the statement that they sold their innovations (p < 0.001, t-test for dependent samples). Interestingly, two of the four communities they studied engaged in activities involving significant competition among community members. Innovators in these two communities reported high but significantly less willingness to share, as one might expect in view of the potentially higher level of competitive loss free revealing would entail. +={Franke, N.;Shah, S.;Free revealing of innovation information:and sports equipment;Sporting equipment:free revealing and} + +Contributors to the many open source software projects extant (more than 83,000 were listed on SourceForge.net in 2004) also routinely make the new code they have written public. Well-known open source software products include the Linux operating system software and the Apache web server computer software. Some conditions are attached to open source code licensing to ensure that the code remains available to all as an information commons. Because of these added protections, open source code does not quite fit the definition of free revealing given earlier in this chapter. (The licensing of open source software will be discussed in detail in chapter 7.) +={Linux+1;Apache web server software;Free revealing of innovation information:and open source software+1;Open source software:free revealing and+1} + +Henkel (2003) showed that free revealing is sometimes practiced by directly competing manufacturers. He studied manufacturers that were competitors and that had all built improvements and extensions to a type of software known as embedded Linux. (Such software is "embedded in" and used to operate equipment ranging from cameras to chemical plants.) He found that these manufacturers freely revealed improvements to the common software platform that they all shared and, with a lag, also revealed much of the equipment-specific code they had written. +={Henkel, J.;Free revealing of innovation information:manufacturers and;Manufacturers:free revealing and} + +!_ The Practical Case for Free Revealing +={Free revealing of innovation information:case for+2} + +The "private investment model" of innovation assumes that innovation will be supported by private investment if and as innovators can make attractive profits from doing so. In this model, any free revealing or uncompensated "spillover" of proprietary knowledge developed by private investment will reduce the innovator's profits. It is therefore assumed that innovators will strive to avoid spillovers of innovation-related information. From the perspective of this model, then, free revealing is a major surprise: it seems to make no sense that innovators would intentionally give away information for free that they had invested money to develop. + +In this subsection I offer an explanation for the puzzle by pointing out that free revealing is often the best /{practical}/ option available to user innovators. Harhoff, Henkel, and von Hippel (2003) found that it is in practice very difficult for most innovators to protect their innovations from direct or approximate imitation. This means that the practical choice is typically /{not}/ the one posited by the private investment model: should innovators voluntarily freely reveal their innovations, or should they protect them? Instead, the real choice facing user innovators often is whether to voluntarily freely reveal or to arrive at the same end state, perhaps with a bit of a lag, via involuntary spillovers. The practical case for voluntary free revealing is further strengthened because it can be accomplished at low cost, and often yields private benefits to the innovators. When benefits from free revealing exceed the benefits that are /{practically}/ obtainable from holding an innovation secret or licensing it, free revealing should be the preferred course of action for a profit-seeking firm or individual. +={Harhoff, D.;Henkel, J.;Free revealing of innovation information:and information diffusion+9} + +!_ Others Often Know Something Close to "Your" Secret + +Innovators seeking to protect innovations they have developed as their intellectual property must establish some kind of monopoly control over the innovation-related information. In practice, this can be done either by effectively hiding the information as a trade secret, or by getting effective legal protection by patents or copyrights. (Trademarks also fall under the heading of intellectual property, but we do not consider those here.) In addition, however, it must be the case that /{others}/ do not know substitute information that skirts these protections and that they /{are}/ willing to reveal. If multiple individuals or firms have substitutable information, they are likely to vary with respect to the competitive circumstances they face. A specific innovator's ability to protect "its" innovation as proprietary property will then be determined for all holders of such information by the decision of the one having the least to lose by free revealing. If one or more information holders expect no loss or even a gain from a decision to freely reveal, then the secret will probably be revealed despite other innovators' best efforts to avoid this fate. +={Intellectual property rights:copyrights and|patents and|trade secrets and} + +Commonly, firms and individuals have information that would be valuable to those seeking to imitate a particular innovation. This is because innovators and imitators seldom need access to a specific version of an innovation. Indeed, engineers seldom even want to see a solution exactly as their competitors have designed it: specific circumstances differ even among close competitors, and solutions must in any case be adapted to each adopter's precise circumstances. What an engineer does want to extract from the work of others is the principles and the general outline of a possible improvement, rather than the easily redevelopable details. This information is likely to be available from many sources. + +For example, suppose you are a system developer at a bank and you are tasked with improving in-house software for checking customers' credit online. On the face of it, it might seem that you would gain most by studying the details of the systems that competing banks have developed to handle that same task. It is certainly true that competing banks may face market conditions very similar to your bank, and they may well not want to reveal the valuable innovations they have developed to a competitor. However, the situation is still by no means bleak for an imitator. There are also many non-bank users of online credit checking systems in the world---probably millions. Some will have innovated and be willing to reveal what they have done, and some of these will have the information you need. The likelihood that the information you seek will be freely revealed by some individual or firm is further enhanced by the fact that your search for novel basic improvements may profitably extend far beyond the specific application of online credit checking. Other fields will also have information on components of the solution you need. For example, many applications in addition to online credit checking use software components designed to determine whether persons seeking information are authorized to receive it. Any can potentially be a provider of information for this element of your improved system. + +A finding by Lakhani and von Hippel (2003) illustrates the possibility that many firms and individuals may have similar information. Lakhani and von Hippel studied Apache help-line websites. These sites enable users having problems with Apache software to post questions, and others to respond with answers. The authors asked those who provided answers how many other help-line participants they thought also knew a solution to specific and often obscure problems they had answered on the Apache online forum. Information providers generally were of the opinion that some or many other help-line participants also knew a solution, and could have provided an answer if they themselves had not done so (table 6.1). +={Lakhani, K;Apache web server software+2} + +!_ Table 6.1 +Even very specialized information is often widely known. Tabulated here are answers to a question asked of help-line information providers: "How many others do you think knew the answer to the question you answered?" +={Lakhani, K} + +table{~h c3; 40; 30; 30; + +~ +Frequent providers (n = 21) + +Other providers (n = 67) + +Many +38% +61% + +A few with good Apache knowledge +38% +18% + +A few with specific problem experience +24% +21% + +}table + +Source: Lakhani and von Hippel 2003, table 10. + +Even in the unlikely event that a secret is held by one individual, that information holder will not find it easy to keep a secret for long. Mansfield (1985) studied 100 American firms and found that "information concerning development decisions is generally in the hands of rivals within about 12 to 18 months, on the average, and information concerning the detailed nature and operation of a new product or process generally leaks out within about a year." This observation is supported by Allen's previously mentioned study of free revealing in the nineteenth-century English iron industry. Allen (1983, p. 17) notes that developers of improved blast furnace designs were unlikely to be able to keep their valuable innovations secret because "in the case of blast furnaces and steelworks, the construction would have been done by contractors who would know the design." Also, "the designs themselves were often created by consulting engineers who shifted from firm to firm." +={Allen, R.;Mansfield, E.+4;Free revealing of innovation information:evidence of} + +!_ Low Ability to Profit from Patenting +={Free revealing of innovation information:patent protection and+12;Intellectual property rights:patents and+12} + +Next, suppose that a single user-innovator is the only holder of a particular unit of innovation-related information, and that for some reason there are no easy substitutes. That user actually does have a real choice with respect to disposing of its intellectual property: it can keep the innovation secret and profit from in-house use only, it can license it, or it can choose to freely reveal the innovation. We have just seen that the practical likelihood of keeping a secret is low, especially when there are multiple potential providers of very similar secrets. But if one legally protects an innovation by means of a patent or a copyright, one need not keep an innovation secret in order to control it. Thus, a firm or an individual that freely reveals is forgoing any chance to get a profit via licensing of intellectual property for a fee. What, in practical terms, is the likelihood of succeeding at this and so of forgoing profit by choosing to freely reveal? +={Intellectual property rights:copyrights and+1|patents and+4} + +In most subject matters, the relevant form of legal protection for intellectual property is the patent, generally the "utility" patent. (The notable exception is the software industry, where material to be licensed is often protected by copyright.) In the United States, utility patents may be granted for inventions related to composition of matter and/or a method and/or a use. They may not be granted for ideas per se, mathematical formulas, laws of nature, and anything repugnant to morals and public policy. Within subject matters potentially protectable by patent, protection will be granted only when the intellectual property claimed meets additional criteria of usefulness, novelty, and non-obviousness to those skilled in the relevant art. (The tests for whether these criteria have been met are based on judgement. When a low threshold is used, patents are easier to get, and vice-versa (Hall and Harhoff 2004).) +={Hall, B.;Harhoff, D.} + +The real-world value of patent protection has been studied for more than 40 years. Various researchers have found that, with a few exceptions, innovators do /{not}/ think that patents are very useful either for excluding imitators or for capturing royalties in most industries. (Fields generally cited as exceptions are pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and chemical processes, where patents do enable markets for technical information (Arora et al. 2001).) Most respondents also say that the availability of patent protection does not induce them to invest more in research and development than they would if patent protection did not exist. Taylor and Silberston (1973) reported that 24 of 32 firms said that only 5 percent or less of their R&D expenditures were dependent on the availability of patent protection. Levin et al. (1987) surveyed 650 R&D executives in 130 different industries and found that all except respondents from the chemical and pharmaceutical industries judged patents to be "relatively ineffective." Similar findings have been reported by Mansfield (1968, 1985), by Cohen et al. (2000, 2002), by Arundel (2001), and by Sattler (2003). +={Arora, A.;Arundel, A.;Cohen, W.;Gambardella, A.;Levin, R.;Sattler, H.;Silberston, Z.;Taylor, C.} + +% Slaughter, S., 83--85 + +% ={Fosfuri, A.;Goto, A.} + +Despite recent governmental efforts to strengthen patent enforcement, a comparison of survey results indicates only a modest increase between 1983 and 1994 in large firms' evaluations of patents' effectiveness in protecting innovations or promoting innovation investments. Of course, there are notable exceptions: some firms, including IBM and TI, report significant income from the licensing of their patented technologies. + +% ={IBM} + +Obtaining a patent typically costs thousands of dollars, and it can take years (Harhoff, Henkel, and von Hippel 2003). This makes patents especially impractical for many individual user-innovators, and also for small and medium-size firms of limited means. As a stark example, it is hard to imagine that an individual user who has developed an innovation in sports equipment would find it appealing to invest in a patent and in follow-on efforts to find a licensee and enforce payment. The few that do attempt this, as Shah (2000) has shown, seldom gain any return from licensees as payment for their time and expenditures. +={Harhoff, D.;Henkel, J.;Shah, S.;Intellectual property rights:licensing of+1} + +Copyright is a low-cost and immediate form of legal protection that applies to original writings and images ranging from software code to movies. Authors do not have to apply for copyright protection; it "follows the author's pen across the page." Licensing of copyrighted works is common, and it is widely practiced by commercial software firms. When one buys a copy of a non-custom software product, one is typically buying only a license to use the software, not buying the intellectual property itself. However, copyright protection is also limited in an important way. Only the specific original writing itself is protected, not the underlying invention or ideas. As a consequence, copyright protections can be circumvented. For example, those who wish to imitate the function of a copyrighted software program can do so by writing new software code to implement that function. +={Intellectual property rights:copyrights and;Free revealing of innovation information:copyright protection and} + + +Given the above, we may conclude that in practice little profit is being sacrificed by many user-innovator firms or individuals that choose to forgo the possibility of legally protecting their innovations in favor of free revealing. + +!_ Positive Incentives for Free Revealing +={Free revealing of innovation information:incentives for+7;Information commons+7} + +As was noted earlier, when we say that an innovator "freely reveals" proprietary information we mean that all existing and potential intellectual property rights to that information are voluntarily given up by that innovator and that all interested parties are given access to it---the information becomes a public good. These conditions can often be met at a very low cost. For example, an innovator can simply post information about the innovation on a website without publicity, so those potentially interested must discover it. Or a firm that has developed a novel process machine can agree to give a factory tour to any firm or individual that thinks to ask for one, without attempting to publicize the invention or the availability of such tours in any way. However, it is clear that many innovators go beyond basic, low-cost forms of free revealing. They spend significant money and time to ensure that their innovations are seen in a favorable light, and that information about them is effectively and widely diffused. Writers of computer code may work hard to eliminate all bugs and to document their code in a way that is very easy for potential adopters to understand before freely revealing it. Plant owners may repaint their plant, announce the availability of tours at a general industry meeting, and then provide a free lunch for their visitors. + +Innovators' /{active}/ efforts to diffuse information about their innovations suggest that there are positive, private rewards to be obtained from free revealing. A number of authors have considered what these might be. Allen (1983) proposed that reputation gained for a firm or for its managers might offset a reduction in profits for the firm caused by free revealing. Raymond (1999) and Lerner and Tirole (2002) elaborated on this idea when explaining free revealing by contributors to open source software development projects. Free revealing of high-quality code, they noted, can increase a programmer's reputation with his peers. This benefit can lead to other benefits, such as an increase in the programmer's value on the job market. Allen has argued that free revealing might have effects that actually increase a firm's profits if the revealed innovation is to some degree specific to assets owned by the innovator (see also Hirschleifer 1971). +={Allen, R.+1;Hirschleifer, J.;Lerner, J.;Raymond, E.;Tirole, J.;Free revealing of innovation information:and open source software;Open source software:free revealing and} + +Free revealing may also increase an innovator's profit in other ways. When an innovating user freely reveals an innovation, the direct result is to increase the diffusion of that innovation relative to what it would be if the innovation were either licensed at a fee or held secret. The innovating user may then benefit from the increase in diffusion via a number of effects. Among these are network effects. (The classic illustration of a network effect is that the value of each telephone goes up as more are sold, because the value of a phone is strongly affected by the number of others who can be contacted in the network.) In addition, and very importantly, an innovation that is freely revealed and adopted by others can become an informal standard that may preempt the development and/or commercialization of other versions of the innovation. If, as Allen suggested, the innovation that is revealed is designed in a way that is especially appropriate to conditions unique to the innovator, this can result in creating a permanent source of advantage for that innovator. + +Being first to reveal a certain type of innovation increases a user firm's chances of having its innovation widely adopted, other things being equal. This may induce innovators to race to reveal first. Firms engaged in a patent race may disclose information voluntarily if the profits from success do not go only to the winner of the race. If being second quickly is preferable to being first relatively late, there will be an incentive for voluntary revealing in order to accelerate the race (de Fraja 1993). +={de Fraja, G.} + +Incentives to freely reveal have been most deeply explored in the specific case of open source software projects. Students of the open source software development process report that innovating users have a number of motives for freely revealing their code to open source project managers and open source code users in general. If they freely reveal, others can debug and improve upon the modules they have contributed, to everyone's benefit. They are also motivated to have their improvement incorporated into the standard version of the open source software that is generally distributed by the volunteer open source user organization, because it will then be updated and maintained without further effort on the innovator's part. This volunteer organization is the functional equivalent of a manufacturer with respect to inducing manufacturer improvements, because a user-developed improvement will be assured of inclusion in new "official" software releases only if it is approved and adopted by the coordinating user group. Innovating users also report being motivated to freely reveal their code under a free or open source license by a number of additional factors. These include giving support to open code and "giving back" to those whose freely revealed code has been of value to them (Lakhani and Wolf 2005). +={Lakhani, K.;Lakhani, K.;Wolf, B.;Free revealing of innovation information:and open source software+4;Open source software:free revealing and+4} + +By freely revealing information about an innovative product or process, a user makes it possible for manufacturers to learn about that innovation. Manufacturers may then improve upon it and/or offer it at a price lower than users' in-house production costs (Harhoff et al. 2003). When the improved version is offered for sale to the general market, the original user-innovator (and other users) can buy it and gain from in-house use of the improvements. For example, consider that manufacturers often convert user-developed innovations ("home-builts") into a much more robust and reliable form when preparing them for sale on the commercial market. Also, manufacturers offer related services, such as field maintenance and repair programs, that innovating users must otherwise provide for themselves. +={iHarhoff, D.+1} + +A variation of this argument applies to the free revealing among competing manufacturers documented by Henkel (2003). Competing developers of embedded Linux systems were creating software that was specifically designed to run the hardware products of their specific clients. Each manufacturer could freely reveal this equipment-specific code without fear of direct competitive repercussions: it was applicable mainly to specific products made by a manufacturer's client, and it was less valuable to others. At the same time, all would jointly benefit from free revealing of improvements to the underlying embedded Linux code base, upon which they all build their proprietary products. After all, the competitive advantages of all their products depended on this code base's being equal to or better than the proprietary software code used by other manufacturers of similar products. Additionally, Linux software was a complement to hardware that many of the manufacturers in Henkel's sample also sold. Improved Linux software would likely increase sales of their complementary hardware products. (Complement suppliers' incentives to innovate have been modeled by Harhoff (1996).) +={Linux;Henkel, J.} + +!_ Free Revealing and Reuse +={Free revealing of innovation information+2} + +Of course, free revealing is of value only if others (re)use what has been revealed. It can be difficult to track what visitors to an information commons take away and reuse, and there is as yet very little empirical information on this important matter. Valuable forms of reuse range from the gaining of general ideas of development paths to pursue or avoid to the adoption of specific designs. For example, those who download software code from an open source project repository can use it to learn about approaches to solving a particular software problem and/or they may reuse portions of the downloaded code by inserting it directly into a software program of their own. Von Krogh et al. (2004) studied the latter type of code reuse in open source software and found it very extensive. Indeed, they report that /{most}/ of the lines of software code in the projects they studied were taken from the commons of other open source software projects and software libraries and reused. +={von Krogh, G.+10} + +% Spaeth, S., 88,? + +In the case of academic publications, we see evidence that free revealing does increase reuse---a matter of great importance to academics. A citation is an indicator that information contained in an article has been reused: the article has been read by the citing author and found useful enough to draw to readers' attention. Recent empirical studies are finding that articles to which readers have open access---articles available for free download from an author's website, for example---are cited significantly more often than are equivalent articles that are available only from libraries or from publishers' fee-based websites. Antelman (2004) finds an increase in citations ranging from 45 percent in philosophy to 91 percent in mathematics. She notes that "scholars in diverse disciplines are adopting open-access practices at a surprisingly high rate and are being rewarded for it, as reflected in [citations]." +={Antelman, K.} + +!_ Implications for Theory + +We have seen that in practice free revealing may often be the best practical course of action for innovators. How can we tie these observations back to theory, and perhaps improve theory as a result? At present there are two major models that characterize how innovation gets rewarded. The private investment model is based on the assumption that innovation will be supported by private investors expecting to make a profit. To encourage private investment in innovation, society grants innovators some limited rights to the innovations they generate via patents, copyrights, and trade secrecy laws. These rights are intended to assist innovators in getting private returns from their innovation-related investments. At the same time, the monopoly control that society grants to innovators and the private profits they reap create a loss to society relative to the free and unfettered use by all of the knowledge that the innovators have created. Society elects to suffer this social loss in order to increase innovators' incentives to invest in the creation of new knowledge (Arrow 1962; Dam 1995). +={Arrow, K.;Dam, K.;Intellectual property rights:copyrights and|trade secrets and;Free revealing of innovation information:copyright protection and|patents and|trade secrecy and} + +The second major model for inducing innovation is termed the collective action model. It applies to the provision of public goods, where a public good is defined by its non-excludability and non-rivalry: if any user consumes it, it cannot be feasibly withheld from other users, and all consume it on the same terms (Olson 1967). The collective action model assumes that innovators are /{required}/ to relinquish control of knowledge or other assets they have developed to a project and so make them a public good. This requirement enables collective action projects to avoid the social loss associated with the restricted access to knowledge of the private investment model. At the same time, it creates problems with respect to recruiting and motivating potential contributors. Since contributions to a collective action project are a public good, users of that good have the option of waiting for others to contribute and then free riding on what they have done (Olson 1967). +={Olson, M.+1;Free revealing of innovation information:collective action model for+6;Social welfare:free revealing and} + +The literature on collective action deals with the problem of recruiting contributors to a task in a number of ways. Oliver and Marwell (1988) and Taylor and Singleton (1993) predict that the description of a project's goals and the nature of recruiting efforts should matter a great deal. Other researchers argue that the creation and deployment of selective incentives for contributors is essential to the success of collective action projects. For example, projects may grant special credentials to especially productive project members (Friedman and McAdam 1992; Oliver 1980). The importance of selective incentives suggests that small groups will be most successful at executing collective action projects. In small groups, selective incentives can be carefully tailored for each group member and individual contributions can be more effectively monitored (Olson 1967; Ostrom 1998). +={Friedman, D.;Marwell, G.;McAdam, D.;Oliver, P.;Ostrom, E.;Singleton, S.;Taylor, M.} + +Interestingly, successful open source software projects do not appear to follow any of the guidelines for successful collective action projects just described. With respect to project recruitment, goal statements provided by successful open source software projects vary from technical and narrow to ideological and broad, and from precise to vague and emergent (for examples, see goal statements posted by projects hosted on Sourceforge.net).~{ As a specific example of a project with an emergent goal, consider the beginnings of the Linux open source software project. In 1991, Linus Torvalds, a student in Finland, wanted a Unix operating system that could be run on his PC, which was equipped with a 386 processor. Minix was the only software available at that time but it was commercial, closed source, and it traded at US$150. Torvalds found this too expensive, and started development of a Posix-compatible operating system, later known as Linux. Torvalds did not immediately publicize a very broad and ambitious goal, nor did he attempt to recruit contributors. He simply expressed his private motivation in a message he posted on July 3, 1991, to the USENET newsgroup comp.os.minix (Wayner 2000): /{Hello netlanders, Due to a project I'm working on (in minix), I'm interested in the posix standard definition.}/ [Posix is a standard for UNIX designers. A software using POSIX is compatible with other UNIX-based software.] /{Could somebody please point me to a (preferably) machine-readable format of the latest posix-rules? Ftp-sites would be nice.}/ In response, Torvalds got several return messages with Posix rules and people expressing a general interest in the project. By the early 1992, several skilled programmers contributed to Linux and the number of users increased by the day. Today, Linux is the largest open source development project extant in terms of number of developers. }~ Further, such projects may engage in no active recruiting beyond simply posting their intended goals and access address on a general public website customarily used for this purpose (for examples, see the Freshmeat.net website). Also, projects have shown by example that they can be successful even if large groups---perhaps thousands---of contributors are involved. Finally, open source software projects seem to expend no effort to discourage free riding. Anyone is free to download code or seek help from project websites, and no apparent form of moral pressure is applied to make a compensating contribution (e.g., "If you benefit from this code, please also contribute . . ."). +={Free revealing of innovation information:open source software and} + +What can explain these deviations from expected practice? What, in other words, can explain free revealing of privately funded innovations and enthusiastic participation in projects to produce a public good? From the theoretical perspective, Georg von Krogh and I think the answer involves revisiting and easing some of the basic assumptions and constraints conventionally applied to the private investment and collective action models of innovation. Both, in an effort to offer "clean" and simple models for research, have excluded from consideration a very rich and fertile middle ground where incentives for private investment and collective action can coexist, and where a "private-collective" innovation model can flourish. More specifically, a private-collective model of innovation occupies the middle ground between the private investment model and the collective action model by: +={Free revealing of innovation information:private-collective model for+3;Private-collective model+3;Social welfare:private-collective model and+3} + +_* Eliminating the assumption in private investment models that free revealing of innovations developed with private funds will represent a loss of private profit for the innovator and so will not be engaged in voluntarily. Instead the private-collective model proposes that under common conditions free revealing of proprietary innovations may increase rather than decrease innovators' private profit. + +_* Eliminating the assumption in collective action models that a free rider obtains benefits from the completed public good that are equal to those a contributor obtains. Instead, the private-collective model proposes that contributors to a public good can /{inherently}/ obtain greater private benefits than free riders. These provide incentives for participation in collective action projects that need not be managed by project personnel (von Hippel and von Krogh 2003). +={von Hippel, E.} + +In summation: Innovations developed at private cost are often revealed freely, and this behavior makes economic sense for participants under commonly encountered conditions. A private-collective model of innovation incentives can explain why and when knowledge created by private funding may be offered freely to all. When the conditions are met, society appears to have the best of both worlds---new knowledge is created by private funding and then freely revealed to all. + +1~ 7 Innovation Communities +={Innovation communities+56:innovation and+56} + +It is now clear that users often innovate, and that they often freely reveal their innovations. But what about informal cooperation among users? What about /{organized}/ cooperation in development of innovations and other matters? The answer is that both flourish among user-innovators. Informal user-to-user cooperation, such as assisting others to innovate, is common. Organized cooperation in which users interact within communities, is also common. Innovation communities are often stocked with useful tools and infrastructure that increase the speed and effectiveness with which users can develop and test and diffuse their innovations. + +In this chapter, I first show that user innovation is a widely distributed process and so can be usefully drawn together by innovation communities. I next explore the valuable functions such communities can provide. I illustrate with a discussion of free and open source software projects, a very successful form of innovation community in the field of software development. Finally, I point out that innovation communities are by no means restricted to the development of information products such as software, and illustrate with the case of a user innovation community specializing in the development of techniques and equipment used in the sport of kitesurfing. +={Free software;Kitesurfing;Open source software:innovation communities and} + +!_ User Innovation Is Widely Distributed +={Users:innovation and+8;Innovation:distributed process of+8} + +When users' needs are heterogeneous and when the information drawn on by innovators is sticky, it is likely that product-development activities will be widely distributed among users, rather than produced by just a few prolific user-innovators. It should also be the case that different users will tend to develop different innovations. As was shown in chapter 5, individual users and user firms tend to develop innovations that serve their particular needs, and that fall within their individual "low-cost innovation niches." For example, a mountain biker who specializes in jumping from high platforms and who is also an orthopedic surgeon will tend to develop innovations that draw on both of these types of information: he might create a seat suspension that reduces shock to bikers' spines upon landing from a jump. Another mountain biker specializing in the same activity but with a different background---say aeronautical engineering---is likely to draw on this different information to come up with a different innovation. From the perspective of Fleming (2001), who has studied innovations as consisting of novel combinations of pre-existing elements, such innovators are using their membership in two distinct communities to combine previously disparate elements. Baldwin and Clark (2003) and Henkel (2004a) explore this type of situation in theoretical terms. +={Baldwin, C.;Clark, K.;Fleming, L.;Henkel, J.;User need;Custom products:heterogeneity of user needs and+3;Sticky information:innovation and+3;Users:low-cost innovation niches of+3;Scientific instruments;Sporting equipment:innovation communities and;Mountain biking;Local information+1;Users:innovate-or-buy decisions by} + +The underlying logic echoes that offered by Eric Raymond regarding "Linus's Law" in software debugging. In software, discovering and repairing subtle code errors or bugs can be very costly (Brooks 1979). However, Raymond argued, the same task can be greatly reduced in cost and also made faster and more effective when it is opened up to a large community of software users that each may have the information needed to identify and fix some bugs. Under these conditions, Raymond says, "given a large enough beta tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone. Or, less formally, `given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."' He explains: "More users find more bugs because adding more users adds more ways of stressing the program. . . . Each [user] approaches the task of bug characterization with a slightly different perceptual set and analytical toolkit, a different angle on the problem. So adding more beta-testers . . . increases the probability that someone's toolkit will be matched to the problem in such a way that the bug is shallow to /{that person}/." (1999, pp. 41--44) +={Brooks, F.;Raymond, E.;Free software;Open source software:innovation communities and;Innovation communities:and sources of innovation+2} + +The analogy to distributed user innovation is, of course, that each user has a different set of innovation-related needs and other assets in place which makes a particular type of innovation low-cost ("shallow") to /{that user}/. The assets of /{some}/ user will then generally be found to be a just-right fit to many innovation development problems. (Note that this argument does not mean that /{all}/ innovations will be cheaply done by users, or even done by users at all. In essence, users will find it cheaper to innovate when manufacturers' economies of scale with respect to product development are more than offset by the greater scope of innovation assets held by the collectivity of individual users.) + +Available data support these expectations. In chapter 2 we saw evidence that users tended to develop very different innovations. To test whether commercially important innovations are developed by just a few users or by many, I turn to studies documenting the functional sources of important innovations later commercialized. As is evident in table 7.1, most of the important innovations attributed to users in these studies were done by /{different}/ users. In other words, user innovation does tend to be widely distributed in a world characterized by users with heterogeneous needs and heterogeneous stocks of sticky information. +={Innovation:functional sources of} + +!_ Table 7.1 +User innovation is widely distributed, with few users developing more than one major innovation. NA: data not available. +={Riggs, W.;Shah, S.;von Hippel, E.;Scientific instruments;Sporting equipment:innovation communities and} + +Number of users developing this number of major innovations + +table{~h c7; 30; 10; 10; 10; 10; 10; 20; + +~ +1 +2 +3 +6 +NA +Sample (n) + +Scientific Instruments^{a}^ +28 +0 +1 +0 +1 +32 + +Scientific Instruments^{b}^ +20 +1 +0 +1 +0 +28 + +Process equipment^{c}^ +19 +1 +0 +0 +8 +29 + +Sports equipment^{d}^ +7 +0 +0 +0 +0 +7 + +}table + +a. Source: von Hippel 1988, appendix: GC, TEM, NMR Innovations.<:br> +b. Source: Riggs and von Hippel, Esca and AES.<:br> +c. Source: von Hippel 1988, appendix: Semiconductor and pultrusion process equipment innovations.<:br> +d. Source: Shah 2000, appendix A: skateboarding, snowboarding, and windsurfing innovations. + +!_ Innovation Communities +={Innovation communities:and sources of innovation} + +User-innovators may be generally willing to freely reveal their information. However, as we have seen, they may be widely distributed and each may have only one or a few innovations to offer. The practical value of the "freely revealed innovation commons" these users collectively offer will be increased if their information is somehow made conveniently accessible. This is one of the important functions of "innovation communities." +={Information commons+3} + +I define "innovation communities" as meaning nodes consisting of individuals or firms interconnected by information transfer links which may involve face-to-face, electronic, or other communication. These can, but need not, exist within the boundaries of a membership group. They often do, but need not, incorporate the qualities of communities for participants, where "communities" is defined as meaning"networks of interpersonal ties that provide sociability, support, information, a sense of belonging, and social identity" (Wellman et al. 2002, p. 4).~{ When they do not incorporate these qualities, they would be more properly referred to as networks---but communities is the term commonly used, and I follow that practice here. }~ +={Wellman, B.} + +Innovation communities can have users and/or manufacturers as members and contributors. They can flourish when at least some innovate and voluntarily reveal their innovations, and when others find the information revealed to be of interest. In previous chapters, we saw that these conditions do commonly exist with respect to user-developed innovations: users innovate in many fields, users often freely reveal, and the information revealed is often used by manufacturers to create commercial products---a clear indication many users, too, find this information of interest. + +Innovation communities are often specialized, serving as collection points and repositories for information related to narrow categories of innovations. They may consist only of information repositories or directories in the form of physical or virtual publications. For example, userinnovation.mit.edu is a specialized website where researchers can post articles on their findings and ideas related to innovation by users. Contributors and non-contributors can freely access and browse the site as a convenient way to find such information. + +Innovation communities also can offer additional important functions to participants. Chat rooms and email lists with public postings can be provided so that contributors can exchange ideas and provide mutual assistance. Tools to help users develop, evaluate, and integrate their work can also be provided to community members---and such tools are often developed by community members themselves. + +All the community functionality just mentioned and more is visible in communities that develop free and open source software programs. The emergence of this particular type of innovation community has also done a great deal to bring the general phenomenon to academic and public notice, and so I will describe them in some detail. I first discuss the history and nature of free and open source software itself (the product). Next I outline key characteristics of the free and open source software development projects typically used to create and maintain such software (the community-based development process). +={Free software+10;Innovation communities:open source software and+22;Open source software:innovation communities and+22} + +!_ Open Source Software +={Open source software:innovation and+21} + +In the early days of computer programming, commercial "packaged" software was a rarity---if you wanted a particular program for a particular purpose, you typically wrote the code yourself or hired someone to write it for you. Much of the software of the 1960s and the 1970s was developed in academic and corporate laboratories by scientists and engineers. These individuals found it a normal part of their research culture to freely give and exchange software they had written, to modify and build on one another's software, and to freely share their modifications. This communal behavior became a central feature of "hacker culture." (In communities of open source programmers, "hacker" is a positive term that is applied to talented and dedicated programmers.~{ !{hacker}! n. [originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe] 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. 2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming. 3. A person capable of appreciating !{hack value}!. 4. A person who is good at programming quickly. . . . 8. [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. Hence /{password hacker}/, /{network hacker}/. The correct term for this sense is !{cracker}! (Raymond 1996). }~ ) +={Hackers+4;Raymond, E.} + +In 1969, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a part of the US Department of Defense, established the ARPANET, the first transcontinental high-speed computer network. This network eventually grew to link hundreds of universities, defense contractors, and research laboratories. Later succeeded by the Internet, it also allowed hackers to exchange software code and other information widely, easily, and cheaply---and also enabled them to spread hacker norms of behavior. + +The communal hacker culture was very strongly present among a group of programmers---software hackers---housed at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the 1960s and the 1970s (Levy 1984). In the 1980s this group received a major jolt when MIT licensed some of the code created by its hacker employees to a commercial firm. This firm, in accordance with normal commercial practice, then promptly restricted access to the "source code"~{ Source code is a sequence of instructions to be executed by a computer to accomplish a program's purpose. Programmers write computer software in the form of source code, and also document that source code with brief written explanations of the purpose and design of each section of their program. To convert a program into a form that can actually operate a computer, source code is translated into machine code using a software tool called a compiler. The compiling process removes program documentation and creates a binary version of the program---a sequence of computer instructions consisting only of strings of ones and zeros. Binary code is very difficult for programmers to read and interpret. Therefore, programmers or firms that wish to prevent others from understanding and modifying their code will release only binary versions of the software. In contrast, programmers or firms that wish to enable others to understand and update and modify their software will provide them with its source code. (Moerke 2000, Simon 1996). }~ of that software, and so prevented non-company personnel---including the MIT hackers who had been instrumental in developing it---from continuing to use it as a platform for further learning and development. +={Levy, S.;MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory+1;Innovation communities:open source software and;Open source software:innovation communities and} + +Richard Stallman, a brilliant programmer in MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, was especially distressed by the loss of access to communally developed source code. He also was offended by a general trend in the software world toward development of proprietary software packages and the release of software in forms that could not be studied or modified by others. Stallman viewed these practices as morally wrong impingements on the rights of software users to freely learn and create. In 1985, in response, he founded the Free Software Foundation and set about to develop and diffuse a legal mechanism that could preserve free access for all to the software developed by software hackers. Stallman's pioneering idea was to use the existing mechanism of copyright law to this end. Software authors interested in preserving the status of their software as "free" software could use their own copyright to grant licenses on terms that would guarantee a number of rights to all future users. They could do this by simply affixing a standard license to their software that conveyed these rights. The basic license developed by Stallman to implement this seminal idea was the General Public License or GPL (sometimes referred to as copyleft, in a play on the word "copyright"). Basic rights transferred to those possessing a copy of free software include the right to use it at no cost, the right to study its source code, the right to modify it, and the right to distribute modified or unmodified versions to others at no cost. Licenses conveying similar rights were developed by others, and a number of such licenses are currently used in the open source field. Free and open source software licenses do not grant users the full rights associated with free revealing as that term was defined earlier. Those who obtain the software under a license such as the GPL are restricted from certain practices. For example, they cannot incorporate GPL software into proprietary software that they then sell.~{ See www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#GPL }~ Indeed, contributors of code to open source software projects are very concerned with enforcing such restrictions in order to ensure that their code remains accessible to all (O'Mahony 2003). +={Stallman, R.+2;Intellectual property rights:copyrights and|licensing of+1} + +The idea of free software did not immediately become mainstream, and industry was especially suspicious of it. In 1998, Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond agreed that a significant part of the problem resided in Stallman's term "free" software, which might understandably have an ominous ring to the ears of businesspeople. Accordingly, they, along with other prominent hackers, founded the open source software movement (Perens 1999). Open source software uses the licensing practices pioneered by the free software movement. It differs from that movement primarily on philosophical grounds, preferring to emphasize the practical benefits of its licensing practices over issues regarding the moral importance of granting users the freedoms offered by both free and open source software. The term "open source" is now generally used by both practitioners and scholars to refer to free or open source software, and that is the term I use in this book. +={Perens, B.;Raymond, E.} + +Open source software has emerged as a major cultural and economic phenomenon. The number of open source software projects has been growing rapidly. In mid 2004, a single major infrastructure provider and repository for open source software projects, Sourceforge.net,~{ http://www.sourceforge.net }~ hosted 83,000 projects and had more than 870,000 registered users. A significant amount of software developed by commercial firms is also being released under open source licenses. + +!_ Open Source Software Development Projects + +Software can be termed "open source" independent of how or by whom it has been developed: the term denotes only the type of license under which it is made available. However, the fact that open source software is freely accessible to all has created some typical open source software development practices that differ greatly from commercial software development models---and that look very much like the "hacker culture" behaviors described above. +={Hackers+1} + +Because commercial software vendors typically wish to sell the code they develop, they sharply restrict access to the source code of their software products to firm employees and contractors. The consequence of this restriction is that only insiders have the information required to modify and improve that proprietary code further (Meyer and Lopez 1995; Young, Smith, and Grimm 1996; Conner and Prahalad 1996). In sharp contrast, all are offered free access to the source code of open source software if that code is distributed by its authors. In early hacker days, this freedom to learn and use and modify software was exercised by informal sharing and co-development of code---often by the physical sharing and exchange of computer tapes and disks on which the code was recorded. In current Internet days, rapid technological advances in computer hardware and software and networking technologies have made it much easier to create and sustain a communal development style on ever-larger scales. Also, implementing new projects is becoming progressively easier as effective project design becomes better understood, and as prepackaged infrastructural support for such projects becomes available on the Web. +={Conner, K.;Grimm, C.;Meyer, M.;Lopez, L.;Prahalad, C.;Smith, G.;Young, G.} + +Today, an open source software development project is typically initiated by an individual or a small group seeking a solution to an individual's or a firm's need. Raymond (1999, p. 32) suggests that "every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch" and that "too often software developers spend their days grinding away for pay at programs they neither need nor love. But not in the (open source) world. . . ." A project's initiators also generally become the project's "owners" or "maintainers" who take on responsibility for project management.~{ "The owner(s) [or `maintainers'] of an open source software project are those who have the exclusive right, recognized by the community at large, to redistribute modified versions. . . . According to standard open source licenses, all parties are equal in the evolutionary game. But in practice there is a very well-recognized distinction between `official' patches [changes to the software], approved and integrated into the evolving software by the publicly recognized maintainers, and `rogue' patches by third parties. Rogue patches are unusual and generally not trusted." (Raymond 1999, p. 89) }~ Early on, this individual or group generally develops a first, rough version of the code that outlines the functionality envisioned. The source code for this initial version is then made freely available to all via downloading from an Internet website established by the project. The project founders also set up infrastructure for the project that those interested in using or further developing the code can use to seek help, provide information or provide new open source code for others to discuss and test. In the case of projects that are successful in attracting interest, others do download and use and "play with" the code---and some of these do go on to create new and modified code. Most then post what they have done on the project website for use and critique by any who are interested. New and modified code that is deemed to be of sufficient quality and of general interest by the project maintainers is then added to the authorized version of the code. In many projects the privilege of adding to the authorized code is restricted to only a few trusted developers. These few then serve as gatekeepers for code written by contributors who do not have such access (von Krogh and Spaeth 2002). +={Spaeth, S.;von Krogh, G.;Raymond, E.} + +Critical tools and infrastructure available to open source software project participants includes email lists for specialized purposes that are open to all. Thus, there is a list where code users can report software failures ("bugs") that they encounter during field use of the software. There is also a list where those developing the code can share ideas about what would be good next steps for the project, good features to add, etc. All of these lists are open to all and are also publicly archived, so anyone can go back and learn what opinions were and are on a particular topic. Also, programmers contributing to open source software projects tend to have essential tools, such as specific software languages, in common. These are generally not specific to a single project, but are available on the web. Basic toolkits held in common by all contributors tends to greatly ease interactions. Also, open source software projects have version-control software that allows contributors to insert new code contributions into the existing project code base and test them to see if the new code causes malfunctions in existing code. If so, the tool allows easy reversion to the status quo ante. This makes "try it and see" testing much more practical, because much less is at risk if a new contribution inadvertently breaks the code. Toolkits used in open source projects have been evolved through practice and are steadily being improved by user-innovators. Individual projects can now start up using standard infrastructure sets offered by sites such as Sourceforge.net. +={Toolkits:open source software and} + +Two brief case histories will help to further convey the flavor of open source software development. + +!_ Apache Web Server Software +={Apache web server software+3;Innovation communities:Apache web server software and+3} + +Apache web server software is used on web server computers that host web pages and provide appropriate content as requested by Internet browsers. Such 7 computers are a key element of the Internet-based World Wide Web infrastructure. + +The web server software that evolved into Apache was developed by University of Illinois undergraduate Rob McCool for, and while working at, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). The source code as developed and periodically modified by McCool was posted on the web so that users at other sites could download it, use it, modify it, and develop it further. When McCool departed NCSA in mid 1994, a small group of webmasters who had adopted his web server software for their own sites decided to take on the task of continued development. A core group of eight users gathered all documentation and bug fixes and issued a consolidated patch. This "patchy" web server software evolved over time into Apache. Extensive user feedback and modification yielded Apache 1.0, released on December 1, 1995. +={McCool, Rob} + +In 4 years, after many modifications and improvements contributed by many users, Apache became the most popular web server software on the Internet, garnering many industry awards for excellence. Despite strong competition from commercial software developers such as Microsoft and Netscape, it is currently used by over 60 percent of the world's millions of websites. Modification and updating of Apache by users and others continues, with the release of new versions being coordinated by a central group of 22 volunteers. +={Microsoft} + +!_ Fetchmail---An Internet Email Utility Program +={Fetchmail+4;Innovation communities:fetchmail and+4} + +Fetchmail is an Internet email utility program that "fetches" email from central servers to a local computer. The open source project to develop, maintain, and improve this program was led by Eric Raymond (1999). +={Raymond, E.+3} + +Raymond first began to puzzle about the email delivery problem in 1993 because he was personally dissatisfied with then-existing solutions. "What I wanted," Raymond recalled (1999, p. 31), "was for my mail to be delivered on snark, my home system, so that I would be notified when it arrived and could handle it using all my local tools." Raymond decided to try and develop a better solution. He began by searching databases in the open source world for an existing, well-coded utility that he could use as a development base. He knew it would be efficient to build on others' related work if possible, and in the world of open source software (then generally called free software) this practice is understood and valued. Raymond explored several candidate open source programs, and settled on one in small-scale use called "popclient." He developed a number of improvements to the program and proposed them to the then maintainer of popclient. It turned out that this individual had lost interest in working further on the program, and so his response to Raymond's suggestions was to offer his role to Raymond so that he could evolve the popclient further as he chose. + +Raymond accepted the role of popclient's maintainer, and over the next months he improved the program significantly in conjunction with advice and suggestions from other users. He carefully cultivated his more active beta list of popclient users by regularly communicating with them via messages posted on an public electronic bulletin board set up for that purpose. Many responded by volunteering information on bugs they had found and perhaps fixed, and by offering improvements they had developed for their own use. The quality of these suggestions was often high because "contributions are received not from a random sample, but from people who are interested enough to use the software, learn about how it works, attempt to find solutions to the problems they encounter, and actually produce an apparently reasonable fix. Anyone who passes all these filters is highly likely to have something useful to contribute." (ibid., p. 42) + +Eventually, Raymond arrived at an innovative design that he knew worked well because he and his beta list of co-developers had used it, tested it and improved it every day. Popclient (now renamed fetchmail) became standard software used by millions users. Raymond continues to lead the group of volunteers that maintain and improve the software as new user needs and conditions dictate. + +!_ Development of Physical Products by Innovation Communities +={Innovation communities:physical products and+14} + +User innovation communities are by no means restricted to the development of information products like software. They also are active in the development of physical products, and in very similar ways. Just as in the case of communities devoted to information product, communities devoted to physical products can range from simple information exchange sites to sites well furnished with tools and infrastructure. Within sports, Franke and Shah's study illustrates relatively simple community infrastructure. Thus, the boardercross community they studied consisted of semi-professional athletes from all over the world who meet in up to 10 competitions a year in Europe, North America, and Japan. Franke and Shah report that community members knew one another well, and spent a considerable amount of time together. They also assisted one another in developing and modifying equipment for their sport. However, the community had no specialized sets of tools to support joint innovation development. +={Franke, N.;Shah, S.;Innovation communities:sporting equipment and+2} + +More complex communities devoted to the development of physical products often look similar to open source software development communities in terms of tools and infrastructure. As an example, consider the recent formation of a community dedicated to the development and diffusion of information regarding novel kitesurfing equipment. Kitesurfing is a water sport in which the user stands on a special board, somewhat like a surfboard, and is pulled along by holding onto a large, steerable kite. Equipment and technique have evolved to the point that kites can be guided both with and against the wind by a skilled kitesurfer, and can lift rider and board many meters into the air for tens of seconds at a time. +={Innovation communities:kitesurfing and+1;Kitesurfing+1} + +Designing kites for kitesurfing is a sophisticated undertaking, involving low-speed aerodynamical considerations that are not yet well understood. Early kites for kitesurfing were developed and built by user-enthusiasts who were inventing both kitesurfing techniques and kitesurfing equipment interdependently. In about 2001, Saul Griffith, an MIT PhD student with a long-time interest in kitesurfing and kite development, decided that kite-surfing would benefit from better online community interaction. Accordingly, he created a site for the worldwide community of user-innovators in kitesurfing (www.zeroprestige.com). Griffith began by posting patterns for kites he had designed on the site and added helpful hints and tools for kite construction and use. Others were invited to download this information for free and to contribute their own if they wished. Soon other innovators started to post their own kite designs, improved construction advice for novices, and sophisticated design tools such as aerodynamics modeling software and rapid prototyping software. Some kitesurfers contributing innovations to the site had top-level technical skills; at least one was a skilled aerodynamicist employed by an aerospace firm. +={Griffith, S.;Zeroprestige.com} + +Note that physical products are information products during the design stage. In earlier days, information about an evolving design was encoded on large sheets of paper, called blueprints, that could be copied and shared. The information on blueprints could be understood and assessed by fellow designers, and could also be used by machinists to create the actual physical products represented. Today, designs for new products are commonly encoded in computer-aided design (CAD) files. These files can be created and seen as two-dimensional and three-dimensional renderings by designers. The designs they contain can also be subjected to automated analysis by various engineering tools to determine, for example, whether they can stand up to stresses to which they will be subjected. CAD files can then be downloaded to computer-controlled fabrication machinery that will actually build the component parts of the design. + +The example of the kitesurfing group's methods of sharing design information illustrates the close relationship between information and physical products. Initially, users in the group exchanged design ideas by means of simple sketches transferred over the Internet. Then group members learned that computerized cutters used by sail lofts to cut sails from large pieces of cloth are suited to cutting cloth for surfing kites. They also learned that sail lofts were interested in their business. Accordingly, innovation group members began to exchange designs in the form of CAD files compatible with sail lofts' cutting equipment. When a user was satisfied with a design, he would transmit the CAD file to a local sail loft for cutting. The pieces were then sewn together by the user or sent to a sewing facility for assembly. The total time required to convert an information product into a physical one was less than a week, and the total cost of a finished kite made in this way was a few hundred dollars---much less than the price of a commercial kite. +={Innovation communities:kitesurfing and;Kitesurfing} + +!_ User-to-User Assistance +={Innovation communities:user-to-user assistance and+9;Users:innovation communities and+9} + +Clearly, user innovation communities can offer sophisticated support to individual innovators in the form of tools. Users in these innovation communities also tend to behave in a collaborative manner. That is, users not only distribute and evaluate completed innovations; they also volunteer other important services, such as assisting one another in developing and applying innovations. + +Franke and Shah (2003) studied the frequency with which users in four sporting communities assisted one another with innovations, and found that such assistance was very common (table 7.2). They also found that those who assisted were significantly more likely to be innovators themselves (table 7.3). The level of satisfaction reported by those assisted was very high. Seventy-nine percent agreed strongly with the statement "If I had a similar problem I would ask the same people again." Jeppesen (2005) similarly found extensive user-to-user help being volunteered in the field of computer gaming. +={Franke, N.;Jeppesen, L.;Shah, S.;Innovation communities:sporting equipment and;Sporting equipment:innovation communities and+7|user-to-user assistance and+7} + +!_ Table 7.2 +Number of people from whom innovators received assistance. +={Franke, N.;Shah, S.} + +table{~h c3; 34; 33; 33; + +Number of people +Number of cases +Percentage + +0 +0 +0 + +1 +3 +6 + +2 +14 +26 + +3--5 +25 +47 + +6--10 +8 +15 + +> 10 +3 +6 + +Total +53 +100 + +}table + +Source: Franke and Shah 2003, table 4. + +!_ Table 7.3 +Innovators tended to be the ones assisting others with their innovations (p < 0.0001). +={Franke, N.;Shah, S.} + +table{~h c4; 40; 20; 20; 20; + +~ +Innovators +Non-innovators +Total + +Gave assistance +28 +13 +41 + +Did not give assistance +32 +115 +147 + +Total +60 +128 +~ + +}table + +Source: Franke and Shah 2003, table 7. + +Such helping activity is clearly important to the value contributed by innovation communities to community participants. Why people might voluntarily offer assistance is a subject of analysis. The answers are not fully in, but the mysteries lessen as the research progresses. An answer that appears to be emerging is that there are private benefits to assistance providers, just as there are for those who freely reveal innovations (Lakhani and von Hippel 2003). In other words, provision of free assistance may be explicable in terms of the private-collective model of innovation-related incentives discussed earlier. +={Lakhani, K.;Free revealing of innovation information:in information communities|private-collective model for;Private-collective model;Social welfare:private-collective model and} + +1~ 8 Adapting Policy to User Innovation +={Government policy+44:user innovation and+19;Innovation:and government policy+44;Manufacturers:innovation and+44;Users:government policy and+44|innovation and+44} + +Government policy makers generally wish to encourage activities that increase social welfare, and to discourage activities that reduce it. Therefore, it is important to ask about the social welfare effects of innovation by users. Henkel and von Hippel (2005) explored this matter and concluded that social welfare is likely to be higher in a world in which both users and manufacturers innovate than in a world in which only manufacturers innovate. +={Henkel, J.;Government policy:manufacturer innovation and+1;Manufacturers:government policy and+1;Government policy:social welfare and+21;Social welfare: government policy+4;Users:social welfare and+4} + +In this chapter, I first explain that innovation by users complements manufacturer innovation and can also be a source of success-enhancing new product ideas for manufacturers. Next, I note that innovation by users does not exhibit several welfare-reducing effects associated with innovation by manufacturers. Finally, I evaluate the effects of public policies on user innovation, and suggest modifications to those that---typically unintentionally---discriminate against innovation by users. + +!_ Social Welfare Effects of User Innovation + +Social welfare functions are used in welfare economics to provide a measure of the material welfare of society, using economic variables as inputs. A social welfare function can be designed to express many social goals, ranging from population life expectancies to income distributions. Much of the literature on product diversity, innovation, and social welfare evaluates the impact of economic phenomena and policy on social welfare from the perspective of total income of a society without regard to how that income is distributed. We will take that viewpoint here. + +!_ User Innovation Improves Manufacturers' Success Rates +={Government policy:manufacturer innovation and+5;Manufacturers:government policy and+5} + +It is striking that most new products developed and introduced to the market by manufacturers are commercial failures. Mansfield and Wagner (1975) found the overall probability of success for new industrial products to be only 27 percent. Elrod and Kelman (1987) found an overall probability of success of 26 percent for consumer products. Balachandra and Friar (1997), Poolton and Barclay (1998), and Redmond (1995) found similarly high failure rates in new products commercialized. Although there clearly is some recycling of knowledge from failed projects to successful ones, much of the investment in product development is highly specific. This high failure rate therefore represents a huge inefficiency in the conversion of R&D investment to useful output, and a corresponding reduction in social welfare. +={Balachandra, R;Barclay, I.;Elrod, T.;Kelman, A.;Friar, J.;Mansfield, E.+1;Poolton, J.;Redmond, W.;Wagner, S.+1} + +% Robertson, A., 108 + +Research indicates that the major reason for the commercial failure of manufacturer-developed products is poor understanding of users' needs by manufacturer-innovators. The landmark SAPPHO study showed this in a very clear and convincing way. This study was based on a sample of 31 product pairs. Members of each pair were selected to address the same function and market. (For example, one pair consisted of two "roundness meters," each developed by a separate company.) One member of each pair was a commercial success (which showed that there was a market for the product type); the other was a commercial failure. The development process for each successful and failing product was then studied in detail. The primary factor found to distinguish success from failure was that a deeper understanding of the market and the need was associated with successful projects (Achilladelis et al. 1971; Rothwell et al. 1974). A study by Mansfield and Wagner (1975) came to the same conclusion. More recent studies of information stickiness and the resulting asymmetries of information held by users and manufacturers, discussed in chapter 3, support the reasonableness of this general finding. Users are the generators of information regarding their needs. The decline in accuracy and completeness of need information after transfer from user to manufacturer is likely to be substantial because important elements of this information are likely to be sticky (von Hippel 1994; Ogawa 1998). +={Achilladelis, B.;Ogawa, S.;Rothwell, R.;Project SAPPHO;SAPPHO study;Sticky information:innovation and} + +Innovations developed by users can improve manufacturers' information on users' needs and so improve their new product introduction success rates. Recall from previous chapters that innovation by users is concentrated among lead users. These lead users tend, as we have seen, to develop functionally novel products and product modifications addressing their own needs at the leading edge of markets where potential sales are both small and uncertain. Manufacturers, in contrast, have poorer information on users' needs and use contexts, and will prefer to manufacture innovations for larger, more certain markets. In the short term, therefore, user innovations will tend to /{complement}/ rather than substitute for products developed by manufacturers. In the longer term, the market as a whole catches up to the needs that motivated the lead user developments, and manufacturers will begin to find production of similar innovations to be commercially attractive. At that point, innovations by lead users can provide very useful information to manufacturers that they would not otherwise have. + +As lead users develop and test their solutions in their own use environments, they learn more about the real nature of their needs. They then often freely reveal information about their innovations. Other users then may adopt the innovations, comment on them, modify and improve them, and freely reveal what they have done in turn. All of this freely revealed activity by lead users offers manufacturers a great deal of useful information about both needs embodied in solutions and about markets. Given access to a user-developed prototype, manufacturers no longer need to understand users' needs very accurately and richly. Instead they have the much easier task of replicating the function of user prototypes that users have already demonstrated are responsive to their needs. For example, a manufacturer seeking to commercialize a new type of surgical equipment and coming upon prototype equipment developed by surgeons need not understand precisely why the innovators want this product or even precisely how it is used; the manufacturer need only understand that many surgeons appear willing to pay for it and then reproduce the important features of the user-developed prototypes in a commercial product. +={Free revealing of innovation information:lead users and+35|users and;Surgical equipment} + +Observation of innovation by lead users and adoption by follow-on users also can give manufacturers a better understanding of the size of the potential market. Projections of product sales have been shown to be much more accurate when they are based on actual customer behavior than when they are based on potential buyers' pre-use expectations. Monitoring of field use of user-built prototypes and of their adoption by other users can give manufacturers rich data on precisely these matters and so should improve manufacturer's commercial success. In net, user innovation helps to reduce information asymmetries between users and manufacturers and so increases the efficiency of the innovation process. +={Information asymmetries;Users:information asymmetries of} + +!_ User Innovation and Provisioning Biases + +The economic literature on the impact of innovation on social welfare generally seeks to understand effects that might induce society to create too many product variations (overprovisioning) or too few (underprovisioning) from the viewpoint of net social economic income (Chamberlin 1950). Greater variety of products available for purchase is assumed to be desirable, in that it enables consumers to get more precisely what they want and/or to own a more diverse array of products. However, increased product diversity comes at a cost: smaller quantities of each product will be produced on average. This in turn means that development-related and production-related economies of scale are likely to be less. The basic tradeoff between variety and cost is what creates the possibility of overprovisioning or underprovisioning product variety. Innovations such as flexible manufacturing may reduce fixed costs associated with increased diversity and so shift the optimal degree of diversity upward. Nonetheless, the conflict still persists. +={Chamberlin, E.;Social welfare:innovation and+11} + +Henkel and I studied the welfare impact of adding users as a source of innovation to existing analyses of product diversity, innovation, and social welfare. Existing models uniformly contained the assumption that new products and services were supplied to the economy by manufacturers only. We found that the addition of innovation by users to these analyses largely avoids the welfare-reducing biases that had been identified. For example, consider "business stealing" (Spence 1976). This term refers to the fact that commercial manufacturers benefit by diverting business from their competitors. Since they do not take this negative externality into account, their private gain from introducing new products exceeds society's total gain, tilting the balance toward overprovision of variety. In contrast, a freely revealed user innovation may also reduce incumbents' business, but not to the innovator's benefit. Hence, innovation incentives are not socially excessive. +={Henkel, J.;Spence, M.;Free revealing of innovation information:intellectual property rights and+11|social welfare and+5;Government policy:free revealing and+10;Government policy:provisioning biases and;Intellectual property rights:free revealing and+11;Users:social welfare and+5} + +Freely revealed innovations by users are also likely to reduce deadweight loss caused by pricing of products above their marginal costs. (Deadweight loss is a reduction in social welfare that occurs when goods are sold at a price above their marginal cost of production.) When users make information about their innovations available for free, and if the marginal cost of revealing that information is zero, an imitator only has to bear the cost of adoption. This is statically efficient. The availability of free user innovations can also induce sellers of competing commercial offerings to reduce their prices, thus indirectly leading to another reduction in dead-weight loss. + +Reducing prices toward marginal costs can also reduce incentives to over-provision variety (Tirole 1988). +={Tirole, J.} + +Henkel and I also explored a few special situations where social welfare might be /{reduced}/ by the availability of freely revealed user innovations. One of these was the effect of reduced pricing power on manufacturers that create "platform" products. Often, a manufacturer of such a product will want to sell the platform---a razor, an ink-jet printer, a video-game player---at a low margin or a loss, and then price necessary add-ons (razor blades, ink cartridges, video games) at a much higher margin. If the possibility of freely revealed add-ons developed by users makes development of a platform unprofitable for a manufacturer, social welfare can thereby be reduced. However, it is only the razor-vs.-blade pricing scheme that may become unprofitable. Indeed, if the manufacturer makes positive margins on the platform, then the availability of user-developed add-ons can have a positive effect: it can increase the value of the platform to users, and so allow manufacturers to charge higher margins on it and/or sell more units. Jeppesen (2004) finds that this is in fact the outcome when users introduce free game modifications (called mods) operating on proprietary game software platform products (called engines) sold by game manufacturers. Even though the game manufacturers also sell mods commercially that compete with free user mods, many provide active support for the development and diffusion of user mods built on their proprietary game engines, because they find that the net result is increased sales and profits. +={Henkel, J.;Jeppesen, L.;Government policy:intellectual property rights and|trade secrets and;Intellectual property rights:trade secrets and} + +!_ Public Policy Choices + +If innovation by users is welfare enhancing and is also significant in amount and value, then it makes sense to consider the effects of public policy on user innovation. An important first step would be to collect better data. Currently, much innovation by users---which may in aggregate turn out to be a very large fraction of total economic investment in innovation--- goes uncounted or undercounted. Thus, innovation effort that is volunteered by users, as is the case with many contributions to open source software, is currently not recorded by governmental statistical offices. This is also the case for user innovation that is integrated with product and service production. For example, much process innovation by manufacturers occurs on the factory floor as they produce goods and simultaneously learn how to improve their production processes. Similarly, many important innovations developed by surgeons are woven into learning by doing as they deliver services to patients. +={Open source software:innovation communities and} + +Next, it will be important to review innovation-related public policies to identify and correct biases with respect to sources of innovation. On a level playing field, users will become a steadily more important source of innovation, and will increasingly substitute for or complement manufacturers' innovation-related activities. Transitions required of policy making to support this ongoing evolution are important but far from painless. To illustrate, we next review issues related to the protection intellectual property, related to policies restricting product modifications, related to source-biased subsidies for R&D, and related to control over innovation diffusion channels. +={Government policy:provisioning biases and|intellectual property rights and+16|patents and+8;Intellectual property rights:patents and+8} + +!_ Intellectual Property + +Earlier, when we explored why users might freely reveal their innovations, we concluded that it was often their best /{practical}/ choice in view of how intellectual property law actually functions (or, often, does not function) to protect innovations today. For example, recall from chapter 6 that most innovators do not judge patents to be very effective, and that the availability of patent grant protection does not appear to increase innovation investments in most fields. Recall also that patent protection is costly to obtain, and thus of little value to developers of minor innovations---with most innovations being minor. We also saw that in practice it was often difficult for innovators to protect their innovations via trade secrecy: it is hard to keep a secret when many others know similar things, and when some of these information holders will lose little or nothing from freely revealing what they know. +={Intellectual property rights:trade secrets and;Government policy:trade secrets and;Intellectual property rights:trade secrets and} + +These findings show that the characteristics of present-day intellectual property regimes as actually experienced by innovators are far from the expectations of theorists and policy makers. The fundamental reason that societies elect to grant intellectual property rights to innovators is to increase private investment in innovation. At the same time, economists have long known that there will be social welfare losses associated with these grants: owners of intellectual property will generally restrict the use of their legally protected information in order to increase private profits. In other words, intellectual property rights are thought to be good for innovation and bad for competition. The consensus view has long been that the good outweighs the bad, but Foray (2004) explains that this consensus is now breaking down. Some---not all---are beginning to think that intellectual property rights are bad for innovation too in many cases. +={oray, D.;Government policy:intellectual commons and+13} + +The need to grant private intellectual property rights to achieve socially desirable levels of innovation is being questioned in the light of apparent counterexamples. Thus, as we saw earlier, open source software communities do not allow contributing innovators to use their intellectual property rights to control the use of their code. Instead, contributors use their authors' copyright to assign their code to a common pool to which all--- contributors and non-contributors alike---are granted equal access. Despite this regime, innovation seems to be flourishing. Why? As we saw in our earlier discussions of why innovators might freely reveal their innovations, researchers now understand that significant private rewards to innovation can exist independent of intellectual property rights grants. As a general principle, intellectual property rights grants should not be offered if and when developers would seek protection but would innovate without it. +={Intellectual property rights:copyrights and;Open source software:innovation communities and+1;Innovation:open source software and+1} + +The debate rages. Gallini and Scotchmer (2002) assert that "intellectual property is the foundation of the modern information economy" and that "it fuels the software, lifesciences and computer industries, and pervades most other products we consume." They also conclude that the positive or negative effect of intellectual property rights on innovation depends centrally on "the ease with which innovators can enter into agreements for rearranging and exercising those rights." This is precisely the rub from the point of view of those who urge that present intellectual property regimes be reconsidered: it is becoming increasingly clear that in practice rearranging and exercising intellectual property rights is often difficult rather than easy. It is also becoming clear that the protections afforded by existing intellectual property law can be strategically deployed to achieve private advantage at the expense of general innovative progress (Foray 2004). +={oray, D.;Gallini, N.;Scotchmer, S.} + +Consider an effect first pointed out by Merges and Nelson (1990) and further explored as the "tragedy of the anticommons" by Heller (1998) and Heller and Eisenberg (1998). A resource such as innovation-related information is prone to underuse---a tragedy of the anticommons---when multiple owners each have a right to exclude others and no one has an effective privilege of use. The nature of the patent grant can lead to precisely this type of situation. Patent law is so arranged that an owner of a patent is not granted the right to practice its invention---it is only granted the right to exclude others from practicing it. For example, suppose you invent and patent the chair. I then follow by inventing and patenting the rocking chair---implemented by building rockers onto a chair covered by your patent. In this situation I cannot manufacture a rocking chair without getting a license from you for the use of your chair patent, and you cannot build rocking chairs either without a license to my rocker patent. If we cannot agree on licensing terms, no one will have the right to build rocking chairs. +={Eisenberg, R.+1;Heller, M.+1;Merges, Robert;Nelson, R.;Government policy:user innovation and+19} + +In theory and in a world of costless transactions, people could avoid tragedies of the anticommons by licensing or trading their intellectual property rights. In practice the situation can be very different. Heller and Eisenberg point specifically to the field of biomedical research, and argue that conditions for anticommons effects do exist there. In that field, patents are routinely allowed on small but important elements of larger research problems, and upstream research is increasingly likely to be private. "Each upstream patent," Heller and Eisenberg note, "allows its owner to set up another tollbooth on the road to product development, adding to the cost and slowing the pace of downstream biomedical innovation." +={Transaction costs} + +A second type of strategic behavior based on patent rights involves investing in large portfolios of patents to create "patent thickets"---dense networks of patent claims across a wide field (Merges and Nelson 1990; Hall and Ham Ziedonis 2001; Shapiro 2001; Bessen 2003). Patent thickets create plausible grounds for patent infringement suits across a wide field. Owners of patent thickets can use the threat of such suits to discourage others from investing research dollars in areas of technical advance relevant to their products. Note that this use of patents is precisely opposite to policy mak' intentions to stimulate innovation by providing ways for innovators to assert intellectual property rights. Indeed, Bessen and Hunt (2004) have found in the field of software that, on average, as firm's investments in patent protection go up, their investments in research and development actually go down. If this relationship proves causal, there is a reasonable explanation from the viewpoint of private profit: corporations that can use a patent thicket to deter others' research in a field might well decide that there is less need to do research of their own. +={Bessen, J.;Hall, B.;Hunt, R.;Merges, Robert;Nelson, R.;Shapiro, C.;Ziedonis, R.;Government policy:patent thickets and;Intellectual property rights:patent thickets and} + +Similar innovation-retarding strategies can be applied by owners of large collections of copyrighted work in the movie, publishing, and software fields. Copyright owners can prevent others from building new works on characters (e.g. Mickey Mouse) that are already familiar to customers. The result is that owners of large portfolios of copyrighted work can gain an advantage over those with no or small portfolios in the creation of derivative works. Indeed, Benkler (2002) argues that institutional changes strengthening intellectual property protection tend to foster concentration of information production in general. Lessig (2001) and Boldrin and Levine (2002) arrive at a similarly negative valuation of overly strong and lengthy copyright protection. +={Benkler, Y.;Boldrin, M.;Levine, D.;Lessig, L.;Intellectual property rights:copyrights and;Government policy:copyrights and} + +These types of innovation-discouraging effects can affect innovation by users especially strongly. The distributed innovation system we have documented consists of users each of whom might have only a few innovations and a small amount of intellectual property. Such innovators are clearly hurt differentially by a system that gives advantage to the owners of large shares of the intellectual property in a field. + +What can be done? A solution approach open to policy makers is to change intellectual property law so as to level the playing field. But owners of large amounts of intellectual property protected under the present system are often politically powerful, so this type of solution will be difficult to achieve. + +Fortunately, an alternative solution approach may be available to innovators themselves. Suppose that many elect to contribute the intellectual property they individually develop to a commons in a particular field. If the commons then grows to contain reasonable substitutes for much of the proprietary intellectual property relevant to the field, the relative advantage accruing to large holders of this information will diminish and perhaps even disappear. At the same time and for the same reason, the barriers that privately held stocks of intellectual property currently may raise to further intellectual advance will also diminish. Lessig supports this possibility with his creation and publication of standard "Creative Commons" licenses on the website creativecommons.org. Authors interested in contributing their work to the commons, perhaps with some restrictions, can easily find and adopt an appropriate license at that site. +={Lessig, L.;Intellectual commons+13;Intellectual property rights:intellectual commons and+13;Open source software:intellectual commons and+13|intellectual property rights and+13;Intellectual property rights:licensing of} + +Reaching agreement on conditions for the formation of an intellectual commons can be difficult. Maurer (2005) makes this clear in his cautionary tale of the struggle and eventual failure to create a commons for data on human mutations. However, success is possible. For example, an extensive intellectual commons of software code is contained and maintained in the many open source software projects that now exist. +={Maurer, S.;Innovation communities+2} + +Interesting examples also exist regarding on the impact a commons can have on the value of intellectual property innovators seek to hold apart from it. Weber (2004) recounts the following anecdote: In 1988, Linux developers were building new graphical interfaces for their open source software. One of the most promising of these, KDE, was offered under the General Public License. However, Matthias Ettrich, its developer, had built KDE using a proprietary graphical library called Qt. He felt at the time that this could be an acceptable solution because Qt was of good quality and Troll Tech, owner of Qt, licensed Qt at no charge under some circumstances. However, Troll Tech did require a developer's fee be paid under other circumstances, and some Linux developers were concerned about having code not licensed under the GPL as part of their code. They tried to convince Troll Tech to change the Qt license so that it would be under the GPL when used in free software. But Troll Tech, as was fully within its rights, refused to do this. Linux developers then, as was fully within their rights, began to develop open source alternatives to Qt that could be licensed under the GPL. As those projects moved toward success, Troll Tech recognized that Qt might be surpassed and effectively shut out of the Linux market. In 2000 the company therefore decided to license Qt under the GPL. +={Ettrich, M.;Linux;Weber, S.;Intellectual property rights:licensing of+1;Linux} + +Similar actions can keep conditions for free access to materials held within a commons from degrading and being lost over time. Chris Hanson, a Principal Research Scientist at MIT, illustrates this with an anecdote regarding an open source software component called ipfilter. The author of ipfilter attempted to "lock" the program by changing licensing terms of his program to disallow the distribution of modified versions. His reasoning was that Ipfilter, a network-security filter, must be as bug-free as possible, and that this could best be ensured by his controlling access. His actions ignited a flame war in which the author was generally argued to be selfish and overreaching. His program, then an essential piece of BSD operating systems, was replaced by newly written code in some systems within the year. The author, Hanson notes, has since changed his licensing terms back to a standard BSD-style (unrestricted) license. +={Hanson, C.} + +We will learn over time whether and how widely the practice of creating and defending intellectual commons diffuses across fields. There obviously can be cases where it will continue to make sense for innovators, and for society as well, to protect innovations as private intellectual property. However, it is likely that many user innovations are kept private not so much out of rational motives as because of a general, not-thought-through attitude that "we do not give away our intellectual property," or because the administrative cost of revealing is assumed to be higher than the benefits. Firms and society can benefit by rethinking the benefits of free revealing and (re)developing policies regarding what is best kept private and what is best freely revealed. +={Government policy:social welfare and+9|trade secrets and+3;Intellectual property rights:trade secrets and+3} + +!_ Constraints on Product Modification +={Custom products:manufacturers and+2;Government policy:manufacturer innovation and+8;Manufacturers:government policy and+8} + +Users often develop prototypes of new products by buying existing commercial products and modifying them. Current efforts by manufacturers to build technologies into the products they sell that restrict the way these products are used can undercut users' traditional freedom to modify what they purchase. This in turn can raise the costs of innovation development by users and so lessen the amount of user innovation that is done. For example, makers of ink-jet printers often follow a razor-and-blade strategy, selling printers at low margins and the ink cartridges used in them at high margins. To preserve this strategy, printer manufacturers want to prevent users from refilling ink cartridges with low-cost ink and using them again. Accordingly, they may add technical modifications to their cartridges to prevent them from functioning if users have refilled them. This manufacturer strategy can potentially cut off both refilling by the economically minded and modifications by user-innovators that might involve refilling (Varian 2002). Some users, for example, have refilled cartridges with special inks not sold by printer manufacturers in order to adapt ink-jet printing to the printing of very high-quality photographs. Others have refilled cartridges with food colorings instead of inks in order to develop techniques for printing images on cakes. Each of these applications might have been retarded or prevented by technical measures against cartridge refilling. +={Varian, H.} + +The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a legislative initiative intended to prevent product copying, may negatively affect users' abilities to change and improve the products they own. Specifically, the DMCA makes it a crime to circumvent anti-piracy measures built into most commercial software. It also outlaws the manufacture, sale, or distribution of code-cracking devices used to illegally copy software. Unfortunately, code cracking is also a needed step for modification of commercial software products by user-innovators. Policy makers should be aware of "collateral damage" that may be inflicted on user innovation by legislation aimed at other targets, as is likely in this case. +={Digital Millennium Copyright Act} + +!_ Control over Distribution Channels +={Government policy:distribution channels and+1} + +Users that innovate and wish to freely diffuse innovation-related information are able to do so cheaply in large part because of steady advances in Internet distribution capabilities. Controls placed on such infrastructural factors can threaten and maybe even totally disable distributed innovation systems such as the user innovation systems documented in this book. For example, information products developed by users are commonly distributed over the Internet by peer-to-peer sharing networks. A firm that owns both a channel and content (e.g., a cable network) may have a strong incentive to shut out or discriminate against content developed by users or others in favor of its own content. The transition from the chaotic, fertile early days of radio in the United States when many voices were heard, to an era in which the spectrum was dominated by a few major networks---a transition pushed by major firms and enforced by governmental policy making--- provides a sobering example of what could happen (Lessig 2001). It will be important for policy makers to be aware of this kind of incentive problem and address it---in this case perhaps by mandating that ownership of content and ownership of channel be separated, as has long been the case for other types of common carriers. +={Lessig, L.} + +!_ R&D Subsidies and Tax Credits +={Government policy:R&D subsidies and+3} + +In many countries, manufacturing firms are rewarded for their innovative activity by R&D subsidies and tax credits. Such measures can make economic sense if average social returns to innovation are significantly higher than average private returns, as has been found by Mansfield et al. (1977) and others. However, important innovative activities carried out by users are often not similarly rewarded, because they tend to not be documentable as formal R&D activities. As we have seen, users tend to develop innovations in the course of "doing" in their normal use environments. Bresnahan and Greenstein (1996a) make a similar point. They investigate the role of "co-invention" in the move by users from mainframe to client-server architecture.~{ See also Bresnahan and Greenstein 1996b; Bresnahan and Saloner 1997; Saloner and Steinmueller 1996. }~ By "co-invention" Bresnahan and Greenstein mean organizational changes and innovations developed and implemented by users that are required to take full advantage of a new invention. They point out the high importance that co-invention has for realizing social returns from innovation. They consider the federal government's support for creating "national information infrastructures" insufficient or misallocated, since they view co-invention is the bottleneck for social returns and likely the highest value locus for invention. +={Bresnahan, T.;Greenstein, S.;Mansfield, E.;Users:co-invention and} + +Efforts to level the playing field for user innovation and manufacturer innovation could, of course, also go in the direction of lessening R&D subsidies or tax credits for all rather than attempting to increase user-innovators' access to subsidies. However, if directing subsidies to user-innovators seems desirable, social welfare will be best served if policy makers link them to free revealing by user-innovators as well as or instead of tying them to users' private investments in the development of products for exclusive in-house use. Otherwise, duplication of effort by users interested in the same innovation will reduce potential welfare gains. +={Free revealing of innovation information:government policy and+1|social welfare and+1} + +In sum, the welfare-enhancing effects found for freely revealed user innovations suggest that policy makers should consider conditions required for user innovation when creating policy and legislation. Leveling the playing field for user-innovators and manufacturer-innovators will doubtless force more rapid change onto manufacturers. However, as will be seen in the next chapter, manufacturers can adapt to a world in which user innovation is at center stage. + +1~ 9 Democratizing Innovation +={Social welfare:innovation and+45;von Hippel, E.+45} + +We have learned that lead users sometimes develop and modify products for themselves and often freely reveal what they have done. We have also seen that many users can be interested in adopting the solutions that lead users have developed. Taken together, these findings offer the basis for user-centered innovation systems that can entirely supplant manufacturer-based innovation systems under some conditions and complement them under most. User-centered innovation is steadily increasing in importance as computing and communication technologies improve. +={Free revealing of innovation information:lead users and;Manufacturers:innovation and+44;Custom products:users and;Innovation:lead users and;Lead users:innovation and;User need+3;Users:innovation and+4} + +I begin this chapter with a discussion of the ongoing democratization of innovation. I then describe some of the patterns in user-centered innovation that are emerging. Finally, I discuss how manufacturers can find ways to profitably participate in emerging, user-centered innovation processes. + +!_ The Trend toward Democratization + +Users' abilities to develop high-quality new products and services for themselves are improving radically and rapidly. Steady improvements in computer software and hardware are making it possible to develop increasingly capable and steadily cheaper tools for innovation that require less and less skill and training to use. In addition, improving tools for communication are making it easier for user innovators to gain access to the rich libraries of modifiable innovations and innovation components that have been placed into the public domain. The net result is that rates of user innovation will increase even if users' heterogeneity of need and willingness to pay for "exactly right" products remain constant. +={Custom products:users and+1;Users:paying for innovations and} + +The radical nature of the change that is occurring in design capabilities available to even individual users is perhaps difficult for those without personal innovation experience to appreciate. An anecdote from my own experience may help as illustration. When I was a child and designed new products that I wanted to build and use, the ratio of not-too-pleasurable (for me) effort required to actually build a prototype relative to the very pleasurable effort of inventing it and use-testing it was huge. (That is, in terms of the design, build, test, evaluate cycle illustrated in figure 5.1, the effort devoted to the "build" element of the cycle was very large and the rate of iteration and learning via trial and error was very low.) + +In my case it was especially frustrating to try to build anything sophisticated from mechanical parts. I did not have a machine shop in which I could make good parts from scratch, and it often was difficult to find or buy the components I needed. As a consequence, I had to try to assemble an approximation of my ideas out of vacuum cleaner parts and other bits of metal and plastic and rubber that I could buy or that were lying around. Sometimes I failed at this and had to drop an exciting project. For example, I found no way to make the combustion chamber I needed to build a large pulse-jet engine for my bicycle (in retrospect, perhaps a lucky thing!). Even when I succeeded, the result was typically "unaesthetic": the gap between the elegant design in my mind and the crude prototype that I could realize was discouragingly large. + +Today, in sharp contrast, user firms and increasingly even individual hobbyists have access to sophisticated design tools for fields ranging from software to electronics to musical composition. All these information-based tools can be run on a personal computer and are rapidly coming down in price. With relatively little training and practice, they enable users to design new products and services---and music and art---at a satisfyingly sophisticated level. Then, if what has been created is an information product, such as software or music, the design is the actual product---software you can use or music you can play. + +If one is designing a physical product, it is possible to create a design and even conduct some performance testing by computer simulation. After that, constructing a real physical prototype is still not easy. However, today users do have ready access to kits that offer basic electronic and mechanical building blocks at an affordable price, and physical product prototyping is becoming steadily easier as computer-driven 3-D parts printers continue to go up in sophistication while dropping in price. Very excitingly, even today home-built prototypes need not be poorly fashioned items that will fall apart with a touch in the wrong place---the solution components now available to users are often as good as those available to professional designers. + +Functional equivalents of the resources for innovation just described have long been available within corporations to a lucky few. Senior designers at firms have long been supported by engineers and designers under their direct control, and also with other resources needed to quickly construct and test prototype designs. When I took a job as R&D manager at a start-up firm after college, I was astounded at the difference professional-quality resources made to both the speed and the joy of innovation. Product development under these conditions meant that the proportion of one's effort that could be focused on the design and test portions of the innovation cycle rather than on prototype building was much higher, and the rate of progress was much faster. +={Innovation process+3} + +The same story can be told in fields from machine design to clothing design: just think of the staffs of seamstresses and models supplied by clothing manufacturers to their "top designers" so that these few can quickly realize and test many variations on their designs. In contrast, think of the time and effort that equally talented designers without such staff assistance must engage in to stitch together even a single high-quality garment prototype on their own. + +But, as we learned in chapter 7, the capability and the information needed to innovate in important ways are in fact widely distributed. Given this finding, we can see that the traditional pattern of concentrating innovation-support resources on just a few pre-selected potential innovators is hugely inefficient. High-cost resources for innovation support cannot be allocated to "the right people," because one does not know who they are until they develop an important innovation. When the cost of high-quality resources for design and prototyping becomes very low---which is the trend we have described---these resources can be diffused widely, and the allocation problem then diminishes in significance. The net result is and will be to democratize the opportunity to create. + +Democratization of the opportunity to create is important beyond giving more users the ability to make exactly right products for themselves. As we saw in a previous chapter, the joy and the learning associated with creativity and membership in creative communities are also important, and these experiences too are made more widely available as innovation is democratized. The aforementioned Chris Hanson, a Principal Research Scientist at MIT and a maintainer in the Debian Linux community, speaks eloquently of this in his description of the joy and value he finds from his participation in an open source software community: +={Hanson, C.;Linux;Users:innovate-or-buy decisions by+3|innovation process and+3;Free revealing of innovation information:innovation and+3;Innovation communities:open source software and;Linux;Open source software:innovation communities and+3} + +_1 Creation is unbelievably addictive. And programming, at least for skilled programmers, is highly creative. So good programmers are compelled to program to feed the addiction. (Just ask my wife!) Creative programming takes time, and careful attention to the details. Programming is all about expressing intent, and in any large program there are many areas in which the programmer's intent is unclear. Clarification requires insight, and acquiring insight is the primary creative act in programming. But insight takes time and often requires extensive conversation with one's peers. + +_1 Free-software programmers are relatively unconstrained by time. Community standards encourage deep understanding, because programmers know that understanding is essential to proper function. They are also programming for themselves, and naturally they want the resulting programs to be as good as they can be. For many, a free software project is the only context in which they can write a program that expresses their own vision, rather than implementing someone else's design, or hacking together something that the marketing department insists on. No wonder programmers are willing to do this in their spare time. This is a place where creativity thrives. + +_1 Creativity also plays a role in the programming community: programming, like architecture, has both an expressive and a functional component. Unlike architecture, though, the expressive component of a program is inaccessible to non-programmers. A close analogy is to appreciate the artistic expression of a novel when you don't know the language in which it is written, or even if you know the language but are not fluent. This means that creative programmers want to associate with one another: only their peers are able to truly appreciate their art. Part of this is that programmers want to earn respect by showing others their talents. But it's also important that people want to share the beauty of what they have found. This sharing is another act that helps build community and friendship. + +!_ Adapting to User-Centered Innovation---Like It or Not +={Innovation process+5;Free revealing of innovation information:innovation and+5} + +User-centered innovation systems involving free revealing can sometimes supplant product development carried out by manufacturers. This outcome seems reasonable when manufacturers can obtain field-tested user designs at no cost. As an illustration, consider kitesurfing (previously discussed in chapter 7). The recent evolution of this field nicely shows how manufacturer-based product design may not be able to survive when challenged by a user innovation community that freely reveals leading-edge designs developed by users. In such a case, manufacturers may be obliged to retreat to manufacturing only, specializing in modifying user-developed designs for producibility and manufacturing these in volume. +={Free revealing of innovation information:users and;Kitesurfing+4} + +Recall that equipment for kitesurfing was initially developed and built by user-enthusiasts who were inventing both kitesurfing techniques and kitesurfing equipment interdependently. Around 1999, the first of several small manufacturers began to design and sell kitesurfing equipment commercially. The market for kitesurfing equipment then began to grow very rapidly. In 2001 about 5,000 kite-and-board sets were sold worldwide. In 2002 the number was about 30,000, and in 2003 it was about 70,000. With a basic kite-and-board set selling for about $1,500, total sales in 2003 exceeded $100 million. (Many additional kites, home-made by users, are not included in this calculation.) As of 2003, about 40 percent of the commercial market was held by a US firm called Robbie Naish (Naishkites.com). + +Recall also that in 2001 Saul Griffith, an MIT graduate student, established an Internet site called Zeroprestige.com as a home for a community of kitesurfing users and user-innovators. In 2003, the general consensus of both site participants and manufacturers was that the kite designs developed by users and freely revealed on Zeroprestige.com were at least as advanced as those developed by the leading manufacturers. There was also a consensus that the level of engineering design tools and aggregate rate of experimentation by kite users participating on the Zeroprestige.com site was superior to that within any kite manufacturer. Indeed, this collective user effort was probably superior in quality and quantity to the product-development work carried out by all manufacturers in the industry taken together. +={Griffith, S.;Zeroprestige.com+1} + +In late 2003, a perhaps predictable event occurred: a kite manufacturer began downloading users' designs from Zeroprestige.com and producing them for commercial sale. This firm had no internal kitesurfing product-development effort and offered no royalties to user-innovators---who sought none. It also sold its products at prices much lower than those charged by companies that both developed and manufactured kites. + +It is not clear that manufacturers of kitesurfing equipment adhering to the traditional developer-manufacturer model can---or should---survive this new and powerful combination of freely revealed collaborative design and prototyping effort by a user innovation community combined with volume production by a specialist manufacturer. In effect, free revealing of product designs by users offsets manufacturers' economies of scale in design with user communities' economies of scope. These economies arise from the heterogeneity in information and resources found in a user community. +={Custom products:heterogeneity of user needs and;User need+2} + +!_ Manufacturers' Roles in User-Centered Innovation + +Users are not required to incorporate manufacturers in their product-development and product-diffusion activities. Indeed, as open source software projects clearly show, horizontal innovation communities consisting entirely of users can develop, diffuse, maintain, and consume software and other /{information}/ products by and for themselves---no manufacturer is required. Freedom from manufacturer involvement is possible because information products can be "produced" and distributed by users essentially for free on the web (Kollock 1999). In contrast, production and diffusion of physical products involves activities with significant economies of scale. For this reason, while product development and early diffusion of copies of physical products developed by users can be carried out by users themselves and within user innovation communities, mass production and general diffusion of physical products incorporating user innovations are usually carried out by manufacturing firms. +={Innovation communities:open source software and+5;Open source software:innovation and+5|innovation communities and+5} + +For information products, general distribution is carried out within and beyond the user community by the community itself; no manufacturer is required: + +Innovating lead users ➔ All users. + +For physical products, general distribution typically requires manufacturers: + +Innovating lead users ➔ Manufacturer ➔ All users. + +In light of this situation, how can, should, or will manufacturers of products, services, and processes play profitable roles in user-centered innovation systems? Behlendorf (1999), Hecker (1999) and Raymond (1999) explore what might be possible in the specific context of open source software. More generally, many are experimenting with three possibilities: (1) Manufacturers may produce user-developed innovations for general commercial sale and/or offer a custom manufacturing service to specific users. (2) Manufacturers may sell kits of product-design tools and/or "product platforms" to ease users' innovation-related tasks. (3) Manufacturers may sell products or services that are complementary to user-developed innovations. +={Behlendorf, B.;Hecker, F.;Raymond, E.} + +!_ Producing User-Developed Products + +Firms can make a profitable business from identifying and mass producing user-developed innovations or developing and building new products based on ideas drawn from such innovations. They can gain advantages over competitors by learning to do this better than other manufacturers. They may, for example, learn to identify commercially promising user innovations more effectively that other firms. Firms using lead user search techniques such as those we will describe in chapter 10 are beginning to do this systematically rather than accidentally---surely an improvement. Effectively transferring user-developed innovations to mass manufacture is seldom as simple as producing a product based on a design by a single lead user. Often, a manufacturer combines features developed by several independent lead users to create an attractive commercial offering. This is a skill that a company can learn better than others in order to gain a competitive advantage. +={Lead users:innovation and|manufacturers and+1;Manufacturers:lead users and+1} + +The decision as to whether or when to take the plunge and commercialize a lead user innovation(s) is also not typically straightforward, and companies can improve their skills at inviting in the relevant information and making such assessments. As was discussed previously, manufacturers often do not understand emerging user needs and markets nearly as well as lead users do. Lead users therefore may engage in entrepreneurial activities, such as "selling" the potential of an idea to potential manufacturers and even lining up financing for a manufacturer when they think it very important to rapidly get widespread diffusion of a user-developed product. Lettl, Herstatt, and Gemünden (2004), who studied the commercialization of major advances in surgical equipment, found innovating users commonly engaging in these activities. It is also possible, of course, for innovating lead users to become manufacturers and produce the products they developed for general commercial sale. This has been shown to occur fairly frequently in the field of sporting goods (Shah 2000; Shah and Tripsas 2004; Hienerth 2004). +={Gemünden, H.;Lettl, C.;Herstatt, C.;Hienerth, C.;Shah, S.;Tripsas, M.;Lead users:surgical equipment and;Windsurfing;Custom products:innovation and+1|manufacturers and+1;users and+1;Users:custom products and+1} + +Manufacturers can also elect to provide custom production or "foundry" services to users, differentiating themselves by producing users' designs faster, better, and/or cheaper than competitors. This type of business model is already advanced in many fields. Custom machine shops specialize in manufacturing mechanical parts to order; electronic assembly shops produce custom electronic products, chemical manufacturers offer "toll" manufacturing of custom products designed by others, and so on. Suppliers of custom integrated circuits offer an especially good example of custom manufacture of products designed by users. More than $15 billion worth of custom integrated circuits were produced in 2002, and the cumulative average growth rate of that market segment was 29 percent. Users benefit from designing their own circuits by getting exactly what they want more quickly than manufacturer-based engineers could supply what they need, and manufacturers benefit from producing the custom designs for users (Thomke and von Hippel 2002). +={Thomke, S.;von Hippel, E.;Custom products:|suppliers and+2;Suppliers+2;Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users:by manufacturers|by users} + +!_ Supplying Toolkits and/or Platform Products to Users +={Custom products:product platforms and+7;Toolkits+7:platform products and+7} + +Users interested in designing their own products want to do it efficiently. Manufacturers can therefore attract them to kits of design tools that ease their product-development tasks and to products that can serve as "platforms" upon which to develop and operate user-developed modifications. Some are supplying users with proprietary sets of design tools only. Cadence, a supplier of design tools for corporate and even individual users interested in designing their own custom semiconductor chips, is an example of this. Other manufacturers, including Harley-Davidson in the case of motorcycles and Microsoft in the case of its Excel spreadsheet software, sell platform products intentionally designed for post-sale modification by users. +={Microsoft} + +Some firms that sell platform products or design tools to users have learned to systematically incorporate valuable innovations that users may develop back into their commercial products. In effect, this second strategy can often be pursued jointly with the manufacturing strategy described above. Consider, for example, StataCorp of College Station, Texas. StataCorp produces and sells Stata, a proprietary software program designed for statistics. It sells the basic system bundled with a number of families of statistical tests and with design tools that enable users to develop new tests for operation on the Stata platform. Advanced customers, many of them statisticians and social science researchers, find this capability very important to their work and do develop their own tests. Many then freely reveal tests they have developed on Internet websites set up by the users themselves. Other users then visit these sites to download and use, and perhaps to test, comment on, and improve these tests, much as users do in open source software communities. +={StataCorp statistical software+2;Toolkits:StataCorp and+2;Free revealing of innovation information:innovation and+3|intellectual property rights and+3;Government policy:free revealing and+3|intellectual property rights and+3|trade secrets and+3;Innovation communities+3:open source software and+3|and sources of innovation+3;Intellectual property rights:free revealing and+3|trade secrets and+3;Open source software:innovation and+10|innovation communities and+10} + +StataCorp personnel monitor the activity at user sites, and note the new tests that are of interest to many users. They then bring the most popular tests into their product portfolio as Stata modules. To do this, they rewrite the user's software code while adhering to the principles pioneered by the user-innovator. They then subject the module to extensive validation testing---a very important matter for statisticians. The net result is a symbiotic relationship. User-innovators are publicly credited by Stata for their ideas, and benefit by having their modules professionally tested. StataCorp gains a new commercial test module, rewritten and sold under its own copyright. Add-ons developed by users that are freely revealed will increase StataCorp's profits more than will equivalent add-ons developed and sold by manufacturers (Jokisch 2001). Similar strategies are pursued by manufacturers of simulator software (Henkel and Thies 2003). +={Henkel, J.;Jokisch, M.;Thies, S.;Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users:by manufacturers|by users} + +Note, however, that StataCorp, in order to protect its proprietary position, does not reveal the core of its software program to users, and does not allow any user to modify it. This creates problems for those users who need to make modifications to the core in order to solve particular problems they encounter. Users with problems of this nature and users especially concerned about price have the option of turning to non-proprietary free statistical software packages available on the web, such as the "R" project (www.r-project.org). These alternatives are developed and supported by user communities and are available as open source software. The eventual effect of open source software alternatives on the viability of the business models of commercial vendors such as StataCorp and its competitors remains to be seen. + +A very similar pattern exists in the online gaming industry. Vendors of early online computer games were surprised to discover that sophisticated users were deciphering their closed source code in order to modify the games to be more to their liking. Some of these "mods" attracted large followings, and some game vendors were both impressed and supportive. Manufacturers also discovered that the net effect of user-developed mods was positive for them: mods actually increased the sales of their basic software, because users had to buy the vendors' proprietary software engine code in order to play the mods. Accordingly, a number of vendors began to actively support user-developers by supplying them with design tools to make it easier for them to build mods on their proprietary engine platforms (Jeppesen and Molin 2003). +={Jeppesen, L.+1;Molin, M.} + +Both manufacturers and users involved with online gaming are experimenting with the possibilities of user-manufacturer symbiosis in a number of additional ways. For example, some vendors are experimenting with creating company-supported distribution channels through which users---who then become vendors---can sell their mods rather than simply offering them as free downloads (Jeppesen 2004). At the same time, some user communities are working in the opposite direction by joining together to develop open source software engines for video games. If the latter effort is successful, it will offer mod developers a platform and design tools that are entirely non-proprietary for the first time. As in the case of statistical software, the eventual outcomes of all these experiments are not yet clear. + +As a final example of a strategy in which manufacturers offer a platform to support user innovation of value to them, consider General Electric's innovation pattern with respect to the magnetic-resonance imaging machines it sells for medical use. Michael Harsh (GE's Director of R&D in the division that produces MRI machines) and his colleagues realized that nearly all the major, commercially important improvements to these machines are developed by leading-edge users rather than by GE or by competing machine producers. They also knew that commercialization of user-developed improvements would be easier and faster for GE if the users had developed their innovations using a GE MRI machine as a platform rather than a competitor's machine. Since MRI machines are expensive, GE developed a policy of selectively supplying machines at a very low price to scientists GE managers judged most likely to develop important improvements. These machines are supplied with restrictive interlocks removed so that the users can easily modify them. In exchange for this research support, the medical researchers give GE preferred access to innovations they develop. Over the years, supported researchers have provided a steady flow of significant improvements that have been first commercialized by GE. Managers consider the policy a major source of GE's commercial success in the MRI field. +={General Electric;Harsh, M.;Toolkits:GE and} + +!_ Providing Complementary Products or Services + +Many user innovations require or benefit from complementary products or services, and manufacturers can often supply these at a profit. For example, IBM profits from user innovation in open source software by selling the complement of computer hardware. Specifically, it sells computer servers with open source software pre-installed, and as the popularity of that software goes up, so do server sales and profits. A firm named Red Hat distributes a version of the open source software computer operating system Linux, and also sells the complementary service of Linux technical support to users. Opportunities to provide profitable complements are not necessarily obvious at first glance, and providers often reap benefits without being aware of the user innovation for which they are providing a complement. Hospital emergency rooms, for example, certainly gain considerable business from providing medical care to the users and user-developers of physically demanding sports, but may not be aware of this. +={IBM;Linux;Users:innovation and+3;Innovation communities:open source software and;Linux;Innovation communities:sources of innovation and} + +!_ Discussion +={Government policy:intellectual property rights and+2} + +All the examples above explore how manufacturers can integrate themselves into a user-centered innovation system. However, manufacturers will not always find user innovations based on or related to their products to be in their interest. For example, manufacturers may be concerned about legal liabilities and costs sometimes associated with "unauthorized user tinkering." For example, an automaker might legitimately worry about the user-programmed engine controller chips that racing aficionados and others often install to change their cars' performance. The result can be findings of eventual commercial value as users explore new performance regimes that manufacturers' engineers might not have considered. However, if users choose to override manufacturers' programming to increase engine performance, there is also a clear risk of increased warrantee costs for manufacturers if engines fail as a consequence (Mollick 2004). +={Mollick, Ethan} + +We have seen that manufacturers can often find ways to profit from user innovation. It is also the case, however, that user innovators and user innovation communities can provide many of these same functions for themselves. For example, StataCorp is successfully selling a proprietary statistical software package. User-developed alternatives exist on the web that are developed and maintained by user-innovators and can be downloaded at no charge. Which ownership model will prove more robust under what circumstances remains to be seen. Ultimately, since users are the customers, they get to choose. +={StataCorp statistical software;Toolkits:StataCorp and;Users:innovation communities and;Innovation communities} + +1~ 10 Application: Searching for Lead User Innovations +={Users:innovation and+59;Lead users+59:innovation and+59|identification of+49} + +Users and manufacturers can apply the insights developed in this book to improve their innovation processes. In this chapter, I illustrate by showing how firms can profit by /{systematically}/ searching for innovations developed by lead users. I first explain how this can be done. I then present findings of a study conducted at 3M to assess the effectiveness of lead user idea-generation techniques. Finally, I briefly review other studies reporting systematic searches for lead users by manufacturers, and the results obtained. +={Lead users:idea generation and|3M and;Manufacturers:innovation and|lead users and+16;3M Corporation} + +!_ Searching for Lead Users + +Product-development processes traditionally used by manufacturers start with market researchers who study customers in their target markets to learn about unsatisfied needs. Next, the need information they uncover is transferred to in-house product developers who are charged with developing a responsive product. In other words, the approach is to find a user need and to fill it by means of in-house product development. +={Marketing research+2} + +These traditional processes cannot easily be adapted to systematic searching for lead user innovations. The focus on target-market customers means that lead users are regarded as outliers of no interest. Also, traditional market-research analyses focus on collecting and analyzing need information and not on possible solutions that users may have developed. For example, if a user says "I have developed this new product to make task X more convenient," market-research analyses typically will note that more convenience is wanted but not record the user-developed solution. After all, product development is the province of in-house engineers! + +We are therefore left with a question: How can manufacturers build a product-development process that systematically searches for and evaluates lead user-generated innovations? (See figure 10.1.) It turns out that the answer differs depending on whether the lead users sought are at the leading edge of "advanced analog" fields or at the leading edge of target markets. Searching for the former is more difficult, but experience shows that the user-developed innovations that are most radical (and profitable) relative to conventional thinking often come from lead users in "advanced analog" fields. +={Manufacturers:innovation and;Lead users:characteristics of+1;Marketing research+1} + +% Only lead user +% prototypes available +% Time +% Commercial versions of product available +% Number +% of users +% perceiving +% need +% Figure 10.1 +% Innovations by lead users precede equivalent commercial products. + +{di_evh_f10-1.png}image + +!_ Figure 10.1 +Innovations by lead users precede equivalent commercial products. + +!_ Identifying Lead Users in Advanced Analog Fields + +Lead users in advanced analog fields experience needs that are related to but more extreme than those being faced by /{any}/ users, including lead users, within the target market. They also often face a different set of constraints than those affecting users in the target market. These differences can force them to develop solutions that are entirely new from the perspective of the target market. + +As an example, consider the relationship between the braking requirements faced by users of automobiles (let's call auto users the target market) and the braking requirements faced by large commercial airplanes as they land on an airport runway (the advanced analog market). Clearly, the braking demands on large airplanes are much more extreme. Airplanes are much heavier than autos and land at higher speeds: their brakes must rapidly dissipate hundreds of times more energy to bring the vehicle to a stop. Also, the situational constraints are different. For example, auto drivers are often assisted in braking in winter by the application of salt or sand to icy roads. These aids cannot be applied in the case of aircraft: salt would damage aircraft bodies, and sand would be inhaled into jet engines and damage them. + +The result of the more extreme demands and additional constraints placed on solutions to aircraft braking was the development of antilock braking systems (ABS) for aircraft. Auto firms conducting searches for valuable lead user innovations regarding auto braking were able to learn about this out-of-field innovation and adapt if for use in autos---where it is common today. Before the development of ABS for autos, an automobile firm could have learned about the underlying concept by studying the practices of users with a strong need for controlling skidding while braking such as stock car auto racing teams. These lead users had learned to manually "pump" their brakes to help control this problem. However, auto company engineers were able to learn much more by studying the automated solutions developed in the "advanced analog" field of aerospace.~{ ABS braking is intended to keep a vehicle's wheels turning during braking. ABS works by automatically and rapidly "pumping" the brakes. The result is that the wheels continue to revolve rather than "locking up," and the operator continues to have control over steering. }~ + +Finding lead users in advanced analog markets can be difficult because discovering the relevance of a particular analog can itself be a creative act. One approach that has proven effective is to ask the more easily identified lead users in target markets for nominations. These lead users tend to know about useful advanced analogs, because they have been struggling with their leading-edge problems for a long time, and often have searched beyond the target market for information. + +Networking from innovators to more advanced innovators in this way is called pyramiding (von Hippel, Thomke, and Sonnack 1999). Pyramiding is a modified version of the "snowballing" technique sometimes used by sociologists to identify members of a group or accumulate samples of rare respondents (Bijker 1995). Snowballing relies on the fact that people with rare interests or attributes tend to know others like themselves. Pyramiding modifies this idea by assuming that people with a strong interest in a topic or field can direct an enquiring researcher to people /{more}/ expert than themselves. Experiments have shown that pyramiding can identify high-quality informants much more efficiently than can mass-screening techniques under many conditions (von Hippel, Franke, and Prügl 2005). Pyramiding was made into a practical industrial process by Mary Sonnack, a Division Scientist at 3M, and Joan Churchill, a psychologist specializing in the development of industrial training programs. +={Bijker, W.;Churchill, J.;Franke, N.;Prügl, R.;Thomke, S.;von Hippel, E.+46} + +!_ Identifying Lead Users in Target Markets + +In general it is easier to identify users at the leading edge of target markets than it is to identify users in advanced analog fields. Screening for users with lead user characteristics can be used. When the desired type of lead user is so rare as to make screening impractical---often the case---pyramiding can be applied. In addition, manufacturers can take advantage of the fact that users at the leading edge of a target market often congregate at specialized sites or events that manufacturers can readily identify. At such sites, users may freely reveal what they have done and may learn from others about how to improve their own practices still further. Manufacturers interested in learning from these lead users can easily visit the sites and listen in. For example, sports equipment companies can go to sporting meets where lead users are known to compete, observe user innovations in action, and compare notes. +={Manufacturers:innovation and} + +Essentially the same thing can be done at virtual sites. For example, recall the practices of StataCorp, a supplier of statistical software. Stata sells a set of standard statistical tests and also a language and tools that statisticians can use to design new tests to serve their own evolving needs. Some Stata users (statisticians) took the initiative to set up a few specialized websites, unaffiliated with StataCorp, where they post their innovations for others to download, use, comment on, and improve. StataCorp personnel visit these sites, learn about the user innovations, and observe which tests seem to be of interest to many users. They then develop proprietary versions of the more generally useful tests as commercial products. +={Lead users:StataCorp statistical software and;StataCorp statistical software} + +When specialized rendezvous sites for lead users don't exist in a particular field, manufacturers may be able to create them. Technicon Corporation, for example, set up a series of seminars at which innovating users of their medical equipment got together and exchanged information on their innovations. Technicon engineers were free to listen in, and the innovations developed by these users were the sources of most of Technicon's important new product improvements (von Hippel and Finkelstein 1979). +={Finkelstein, S.;Technicon Corporation} + +!_ The 3M Experiment +={Lead users:3M and+32;3M Corporation+32} + +To test whether lead users in advanced analog fields can in fact generate information that leads to commercially valuable new products, Lilien, Morrison, Searls, Sonnack, and von Hippel (2002) studied a natural experiment at 3M. That firm was carrying out both lead user projects and traditional market research-based idea-generation projects in the same divisions at the same time, and in sufficient numbers to make statistical comparisons of outcomes possible. +={Lilien, G.+26;Morrison, Pamela+26;Searls, K.+26;Sonnack, M.+26;Lead users:idea generation and+45} + +!_ Methods + +3M first began using the lead user method in one division in 1996. By May 2000, when data collection began, five divisions of 3M had completed seven lead user (LU) idea-generation projects and had funded further development of the product concepts generated by five of these. These same five divisions also had 42 contemporaneously funded projects that used "find a need and fill it" idea-generation methodologies that were traditional practice at 3M. We used these two samples of funded ideas to compare the performance of lead user idea-generation projects with traditional idea-generation projects. Although 3M cooperated in the study and permitted access to company records and to members of the product-development teams, the firm did not offer a controlled experimental setting. Rather, we as researchers were required to account for any naturally occurring differences after the fact. + +Our study methodology required a pre-post/test-control situation, with at least quasi-random assignments to treatment cells (Cook and Campbell 1979). In other words, our goal was to compare samples of development projects in 3M divisions that differed with respect to their use of lead user idea-generation methods, but that were as similar as possible in other respects. Identifying, understanding, and controlling for the many potential sources of difference that could affect the natural experiment involved careful field explorations. Thus, possible differences between project staffing and performance incentives applied to LU and non-LU idea-generation projects were assessed. We looked for (and did not find) differences in the capabilities or motivation of LU and non-LU project team members with respect to achieving a major new product advance. 3M managers also said that there was no difference in these matters, and a content analysis of formal annual performance goals set for the individual LU and non-LU team members in a division that allowed access to these data supported their views. +={Campbell, D.;Cook, T.} + +We also found no major differences in the innovation opportunities teams faced. They also looked for Hawthorne or placebo effects that might affect the project teams differentially, and found none. (The Hawthorne effect can be described as "I do better because extra attention is being paid to me or to my performance." The placebo effect can be described as "I expect this process will work and will strive to get the results I have been told are likely.") We concluded that the 3M samples of funded LU and non-LU idea-generation projects, though not satisfying the random assignment criterion for experimental design, appeared to satisfy rough equivalence criteria in test and control conditions associated with natural or quasi-experimentation. Data were collected by interviews and by survey instruments. + +With respect to the intended difference under study---the use of lead user methods within projects---all lead user teams employed an identical lead user process taught to them with identical coaching materials and with coaching provided by members of the same small set of internal 3M coaches. Each lead user team consisted of three or four members of the marketing and technical departments of the 3M division conducting the project. Teams began by identifying important market trends. Then, they engaged in pyramiding to identify lead users with respect to each trend both within the target market and in advanced analog markets. Information from a number of innovating lead users was then combined by the team to create a new product concept and business plan---an "LU idea" (von Hippel, Thomke, and Sonnack 1999). +={Thomke, S.} + +% ={Sonnack, M.} + +Non-lead-user idea-generation projects were conducted in accordance with traditional 3M practices. I refer to these as non-LU idea generation methods and to teams using them as non-LU teams. Non-LU teams were similar to lead user teams in terms of size and make-up. They used data sources for idea generation that varied from project to project. Market data collected by outside organizations were sometimes used, as were data from focus groups with major customers and from customer panels, and information from lab personnel. Non-LU teams collected market information from target markets users but not from lead users. + +!_ Findings + +Our research compared all funded product concepts generated by LU and non-LU methods from February 1999 to May 2000 in each of the five 3M divisions that had funded one or more lead-user-developed product concepts. During that time, five ideas generated by lead user projects were being funded, along with 42 ideas generated by non-LU idea-generation methods. The results of these comparisons can be seen in table 10.1. Product concepts generated by seeking out and learning from lead users were found to be significantly more novel than those generated by non-LU methods. They were also found to address more original or newer customer needs, to have significantly higher market share, to have greater potential to develop into an entire product line, and to be more strategically important. The lead-user-developed product concepts also had projected annual sales in year 5 that were greater than those of ideas generated by non-LU methods by a factor of 8---an average of $146 million versus an average of $18 million in forecast annual sales. Thus, at 3M, lead user idea-generation projects clearly did generate new product concepts with much greater commercial potential than did traditional, non-LU methods (p < 0.005). + +!_ Table 10.1 +Concepts for new products developed by lead user project teams had far more commercial promise than those developed by non-lead-user project teams. + +table{~h c4; 40; 20; 20; 20; + +~ +LU product concepts (n =5) +Non-LU product concepts (n = 42) +Significance + +Factors related to value of concept +~ +~ +~ + +Novelty compared with competition a +9.6 +6.8 +0.01 + +Originality/newness of customer needs addressed +8.3 +5.3 +0.09 + +% market share in year 5 +68% +33% +0.01 + +Estimated sales in year 5 (deflated for forecast error) +$146m +$18m +0.00 + +Potential for entire product family a +10.0 +7.5 +0.03 + +Operating profit +22% +24.0% +0.70 + +Probability of success +80% +66% +0.24 + +Strategic importance a +9.6 +7.3 +0.08 + +Intellectual property protection a +7.1 +6.7 +0.80 + +Factors related to organizational fit of concept +~ +~ +~ + +Fit with existing distribution channels a +8.8 +8.0 +0.61 + +Fit with existing manufacturing capabilities a +7.8 +6.7 +0.92 + +Fit with existing strategic plan a +9.8 +8.4 +0.24 + +}table + +Source: Lilien et al. 2002, table 1.<:br> +a. Rated on a scale from 1 to 10. + +Note that the sales data for both the LU and non-LU projects are forecasts. To what extent can we rely on these? We explored this matter by collecting both forecast and actual sales data from five 3M division controllers. (Division controllers are responsible for authorizing new product-development investment expenditures.) We also obtained data from a 1995 internal study that compared 3M's sales forecasts with actual sales. We combined this information to develop a distribution of forecast errors for a number of 3M divisions, as well as overall forecast errors across the entire corporation. Those errors range from forecast/actual of +30 percent (over-forecast) to --13 percent (underforecast). On the basis of the information just described, and in consultation with 3M management, we deflated all sales forecast data by 25 percent. That deflator is consistent with 3M's historical experience and, we think, provides conservative sales forecasts.~{ In the general literature, Armstrong's (2001) review on forecast bias for new product introduction indicates that sales forecasts are generally optimistic, but that that upward bias decreases as the magnitude of the sales forecast increases. Coller and Yohn (1998) review the literature on bias in accuracy of management earnings forecasts and find that little systematic bias occurs. Tull's (1967) model calculates $15 million in revenue as a level above which forecasts actually become pessimistic on average. We think it reasonable to apply the same deflator to LU vs. non-LU project sales projections. Even if LU project personnel were for some reason more likely to be optimistic with respect to such projections than non-LU project personnel, that would not significantly affect our findings. Over 60 percent of the total dollar value of sales forecasts made for LU projects were actually made by personnel not associated with those projects (outside consulting firms or business analysts from other divisions). }~ Deflated data appear in table 10.1 and in the following tables. + +Rather strikingly, all five of the funded 3M lead user projects created the basis for major new product lines for 3M (table 10.2). In contrast, 41 of 42 funded product concepts generated by non-LU methods were improvements or extensions of existing product lines (χ^{2}^ test, p < 0.005). + +Following tt, p < 0.005).e advice of 3M divisional controllers, major product lines were defined as those separately reported in divisional financial statements. In 1999 in the 3M divisions we studied, sales of individual major product lines ranged from 7 percent to 73 percent of total divisional sales. The sales projections for funded lead user project ideas all fell well above the lower end of this range: projected sales five years after introduction for funded LU ideas, conservatively deflated as discussed above, ranged from 25 percent to over 300 percent of current total divisional sales. + +!_ Table 10.2 +Lead user project teams developed concepts for major new product lines. Non-lead-user project teams developed concepts for incremental product improvements. + +table{~h c3; 34; 33; 33; + +~ +Incremental product improvements +Major new product lines + +LU method +0 +5 + +Non-LU method +41 +1 + +}table + +Source: Lilien et al. 2002, table 2. + +To illustrate what the major product line innovations that the LU process teams generated at 3M were like, I briefly describe four (one is not described for 3M proprietary reasons): + +_* A new approach to the prevention of infections associated with surgical operations. The new approach replaced the traditional "one size fits all" approach to infection prevention with a portfolio of patient-specific measures based on each patient's individual biological susceptibilities. This innovation involved new product lines plus related business and strategy innovations made by the team to bring this new approach to market successfully and profitably. _* Electronic test and communication equipment for telephone field repair workers that pioneered the inclusion of audio, video, and remote data access capabilities. These capabilities enabled physically isolated workers to carry out their problem-solving work as a virtual team with co-workers for the first time. + +_* A new approach, implemented via novel equipment, to the application of commercial graphics films that cut the time of application from 48 hours to less than 1 hour. (Commercial graphics films are used, for example, to cover entire truck trailers, buses, and other vehicles with advertising or decorative graphics.) The LU team's solutions involved technical innovations plus related channel and business model changes to help diffuse the innovation rapidly. + +_* A new approach to protecting fragile items in shipping cartons that replaces packaging materials such as foamed plastic. The new product lines implementing the approach were more environmentally friendly and much faster and more convenient for both shippers and package recipients than other products and methods on the market. + +Lilien, Morrison, Searls, Sonnack, and I also explored to see whether the major product lines generated by the lead user projects had characteristics similar to those of the major product lines that had been developed at 3M in the past, including Scotch Tape. To determine this we collected data on all major new product lines introduced to the market between 1950 and 2000 by the five 3M divisions that had executed one or more lead user studies. (The year 1950 was as far back as we could go and still find company employees who could provide some data about the innovation histories of these major products lines.) Examples from our 1950--2000 sample include the following: +={Lilien, G.;Morrison, Pamela;Searls, K.} + +% ={Sonnack, M.} + +_* Scotch Tape: A line of transparent mending tapes that was first of its type and a major success in many household and commercial applications. + +_* Disposable patient drapes for operating room use: A pioneering line of disposable products for the medical field now sold in many variations. + +_* Box sealing tapes: The first type of tape strong enough to reliably seal corrugated shipping boxes, it replaced stapling in most "corrugated shipper" applications. + +_* Commercial graphics films: Plastic films capable of withstanding outdoor environments that could be printed upon and adhered to large surfaces on vehicles such as the sides of trailer trucks. This product line changed the entire approach to outdoor signage. + +Table 10.3 provides profiles of the five LU major product lines and the 16 non-LU major product lines for which we were able to collect data. As can be seen, innovations generated with inputs from lead users are similar in many ways to the major innovations developed by 3M in the past. + +!_ Table 10.3 +Major new product lines (MNPLs) generated by lead-user methods are similar to MNPLs generated by 3M in the past. + +table{~h c4; 55; 15; 15; 15; + +~ +LU MNPLs (n = 5) +Past 3M MNPLs (n = 16) +Significance + +Novelty a compared with competition +9.6 +8.0 +0.21 + +Originality/newness of customer needs addressed^{a}^ +8.3 +7.9 +0.78 + +% market share in year 5 +68% +61% +0.76 + +Estimated sales in year 5 (deflated for forecast error) +146m^{b}^ +$62m^{b}^ +0.04 + +Potential for entire product family^{a}^ +10.0 +9.4 +0.38 + +Operating profit +22% +27% +0.41 + +Probability of success +80% +87% +0.35 + +Strategic importance* +9.6 +8.5 +0.39 + +Intellectual property protection^{a}^ +7.1 +7.4 +0.81 + +Fit with distribution channels^{a}^ +8.8 +8.4 +0.77 + +Fit with manufacturing capabilities^{a}^ +7.8 +6.7 +0.53 + +Fit with strategic plan^{a}^ +9.8 +8.7 +0.32 + +}table + +Source: Lilien et al. 2002, table 4.<:br> +a. Measured on a scale from 1 to 10.<:br> +b. Five-year sales forecasts for all major product lines commercialized in 1994 or later (5 LU and 2 non-LU major product lines) have been deflated by 25% in line with 3M historical forecast error experience (see text). Five-year sales figures for major product lines commercialized before 1994 are actual historical sales data. This data has been converted to 1999 dollars using the Consumer Price Index from the Economic Report of the President (Council of Economic Advisors 2000). + +!_ Discussion + +The performance comparison between lead user and "find a need and fill it" idea-generation projects at 3M showed remarkably strong advantages associated with searching for ideas among lead users in advanced analog fields with needs similar to, but even more extreme than, needs encountered in the intended target market. The direction of this outcome is supported by findings from three other real-world industrial applications of lead user idea-generation methods that studied lead users in the target market but not in advanced analog markets. I briefly describe these three studies next. They each appear to have generated primarily next-generation products--- valuable for firms, but not the basis for radically new major product lines. + +%% + +_* Recall that Urban and von Hippel (1988) tested the relative commercial attractiveness of product concepts developed in the field of computer-aided systems for the design of printed circuit boards (PC-CAD). One of the concepts they tested contained novel features proposed by lead users that had innovated in the PC-CAD field in order to serve in-house need. The attractiveness of the "lead user concept" was then evaluated by a sample of 173 target-market users of PC-CAD systems relative to three other concept choices---one of which was a description of the best system then commercially available. Over 80 percent of the target-market users were found to prefer the concept incorporating the features developed by innovating lead users. Their reported purchase probability for a PC-CAD system incorporating the lead user features was 51 percent, over twice as high as the purchase probability indicated for any other system. The target-market users were also found willing to pay twice as much for a product embodying the lead user features than for PC-CAD products that did not incorporate them. +={Urban, G.;Printed circuit CAD software} + +_* Herstatt and von Hippel (1992) documented a lead user project seeking to develop a new line of pipe hangers---hardware used to attach pipes to the ceilings of commercial buildings. Hilti, a major manufacturer of construction-related equipment and products, conducted the project. The firm introduced a new line of pipe hanger products based on the lead user concept and a post-study evaluation has shown that this line has become a major commercial success for Hilti. +={Herstatt, C.;Pipe hanger hardware} + +_* Olson and Bakke (2001) report on two lead user studies carried out by Cinet, a leading IT systems integrator in Norway, for the firm's two major product areas, desktop personal computers, and Symfoni application GroupWare. These projects were very successful, with most of the ideas incorporated into next-generation products having been collected from lead users. +={Bakke, G.;Olson, E.} + +Active search for lead users that have innovated enables manufacturers to more rapidly commercialize lead user innovations. One might think that an alternative approach would be to identify lead users before they have innovated. Alert manufacturers could then make some prior arrangements to get preferred access to promising user-developed innovations by, for example, purchasing promising lead user organizations. I myself think that such vertical integration approaches are not practical. As was shown earlier, the character and attractiveness of innovations lead users may develop is based in part on the particular situations faced by and information stocks held by individual lead users. User innovation is therefore likely to be a widely distributed phenomenon, and it would be difficult to predict in advance which users are most likely to develop very valuable innovations. +={Manufacturers:lead users and+8} + +How do we square these findings with the arguments, put forth by Christensen (1997), by Slater and Narver (1998), and by others, that firms are likely to miss radical or disruptive innovations if they pay close attention to requests from their customers? Christensen (1997, p. 59, n. 21) writes: "The research of Eric von Hippel, frequently cited as evidence of the value of listening to customers, indicates that customers originate a large majority of new product ideas. . . . The [Christensen] value network framework would predict that the innovations toward which the customers in von Hippel's study led their suppliers would have been sustaining innovations. We would expect disruptive innovations to have come from other sources." +={Christensen, C.+2;Narver, J.;Slater, S.} + +Unfortunately, the above contains a basic misunderstanding of my research findings. My findings, and related findings by others as well, deal with innovations by lead users, not customers, and /{lead users are a much broader category than customers of a specific firm}/. Lead users that generate innovations of interest to manufacturers can reside, as we have seen, at the leading edges of target markets, and also in advanced analog markets. The innovations that some lead users develop are certainly disruptive from the viewpoint of some manufacturers---but the lead users are unlikely to care about this. After all, they are developing products to serve their own needs. Tim Berners-Lee, for example, developed the World Wide Web as a lead user working at CERN---a user of that software. The World Wide Web was certainly disruptive to the business models of many firms, but this was not Berners-Lee's concern. Lead users typically have no reason to lead, mislead, or even contact manufacturers that might eventually benefit from or be disrupted by their innovations. Indeed, the likely absence of a preexisting customer relationship is the reason that manufacturing firms must search for lead user innovations /{outside}/ their customer lists---as 3M did in its lead user idea generation studies. "Listening to the voice of the customer" is /{not}/ the same thing as seeking out and learning from lead users (Danneels 2004). +={Berners-Lee, T.;Danneels, E.;Lead users:3M and;3M Corporation;Custom products:manufacturers and+2|users and+2;Innovation:distributed process of+2|functional sources of+2} + +That basic misunderstanding aside, I do agree with Christensen and others that a manufacturer may well receive mainly requests for sustaining innovations from its /{customers}/. As was discussed in chapter 4, manufacturers have an incentive to develop innovations that utilize their existing capabilities---that are "sustaining" for them. Customers know this and, when considering switching to a new technology, are unlikely to request it from a manufacturer that would consider it to be disruptive: they know that such a manufacturer is unlikely to respond positively. The net result is that manufacturers' inputs from their existing customers may indeed be biased towards requests for sustaining innovations. + +I conclude this chapter by reminding the reader that studies of the sources of innovation show clearly that users will tend to develop some types of innovations but not all. It therefore makes sense for manufacturers to partition their product-development strategies and portfolios accordingly. They may wish, for example, to move away from actual new product development and search for lead users' innovations in the case of functionally novel products. At the same time manufacturers may decide to continue to develop products that do /{not}/ require high-fidelity models of need information and use environments to get right. One notable category of innovations with this characteristic is dimension-of-merit improvements to existing products. Sometimes users state their needs for improved products in terms of dimensions on which improvements are desired---dimensions of merit. As an example, consider that users may say "I want a computer that is as fast and cheap as possible." Similarly, users of medical imaging equipment may say "I want an image that is of as high a resolution as is technically possible." If manufacturers (or users) cannot get to the end point desired by these users right away, they will instead progressively introduce new product generations that move along the dimension of merit as rapidly and well as they can. Their rate of progress is determined by the rate at which /{solution}/ technologies improve over time. This means that sticky solution information rather than sticky need information is central to development of dimension-of-merit improvements. Manufacturers will tend to have the information they need to develop dimension of merit innovations internally. +={Manufacturers:dimensions-of-merit product improvements and;Sticky information:dimensions-of-merit product improvements and|innovation and} + +1~ 11 Application: Toolkits for User Innovation and Custom Design +={Users:innovation and+62;Custom products:manufacturers and+62|toolkits and+62;Manufacturers:innovation and+62;Toolkits+62:innovation and+62;Users:toolkits and+62} + +An improved understanding of the relative innovation capabilities of users and manufacturers can enable designs for more effective joint innovation processes. Toolkits for user innovation and custom design illustrate this possibility. In this new innovation process design, manufacturers actually /{abandon}/ their efforts to understand users' needs accurately and in detail. Instead, they outsource only /{need-related}/ innovation tasks to their users, who are equipped with appropriate toolkits. This process change differs from the lead user search processes discussed earlier in an interesting way. Lead user searchs identify existing innovations, but do nothing to change the conditions affecting user-innovators at the time a new product or service is being developed. Toolkits for users, in contrast, do change the conditions potential innovators face. By making innovation cheaper and quicker for users, they can increase the volume of user innovation. They also can channel innovative effort into directions supported by toolkits. +={Toolkits:characteristics of+3} + +In this chapter, I first explore why toolkits are useful. Next, I describe how to create an appropriate setting for toolkits and how toolkits function in detail. Finally, I discuss the conditions under which toolkits are likely to be of most value. + +!_ Benefits from Toolkits + +Toolkits for user innovation and design are integrated sets of product-design, prototyping, and design-testing tools intended for use by end users. The goal of a toolkit is to enable non-specialist users to design high-quality, producible custom products that exactly meet their needs. Toolkits often contain "user-friendly" features that guide users as they work. They are specific to a type of product or service and a specific production system. For example, a toolkit provided to customers interested in designing their own, custom digital semiconductor chips is tailored precisely for that purpose--- it cannot be used to design other types of products. Users apply a toolkit in conjunction with their rich understanding of their own needs to create a preliminary design, simulate or prototype it, evaluate its functioning in their own use environment, and then iteratively improve it until they are satisfied. +={Toolkits:manufacturers and+58|user-friendly tools for;Information asymmetries+10} + +A variety of manufacturers have found it profitable to shift the tasks of custom product design to their customers along with appropriate toolkits for innovation. Results to date in the custom semiconductor field show development time cut by 2/3 or more for products of equivalent complexity and development costs cut significantly as well via the use of toolkits. In 2000, more than $15 billion worth of custom integrated circuits were sold that had been designed with the aid of toolkits---often by circuit users---and produced in the "silicon foundries" of custom semiconductor manufacturers such as LSI (Thomke and von Hippel 2002). International Flavors and Fragrances (IFF), a global supplier of specialty flavors to the food industry, has built a toolkit that enables its customers to modify flavors for themselves, which IFF then manufactures. In the materials field, GE provides customers with Web-based tools for designing better plastic products. In software, a number of consumer product companies provide toolkits that allow people to add custom-designed modules to their standard products. For example, Westwood Studios provides its customers with toolkits that enable them to design important elements of their own video games (Jeppesen 2005). +={Jeppesen, L.;Thomke, S.;von Hippel, E.+9;Toolkits:GE and|International Flavors and Fragrances and} + +The primary function of toolkits for user design is to co-locate product-development and service-development tasks with the sticky information needed to execute them. Need-intensive tasks involved in developing a particular type of product or service are assigned to users, along with the tools needed to carry those tasks out. At the same time, solution-intensive tasks are assigned to manufacturers. +={Toolkits:users and+55|sticky information and+8;Sticky information:toolkits and+8} + +As was discussed in chapter 5, problem solving in general, and product and service development in particular, is carried out via repeated cycles of learning by trial and error. When each cycle of a trial-and-error process requires access to sticky information located at more than one site, colocation of problem-solving activity with sticky information is achieved by repeatedly shifting problem solving to the relevant sticky information sites as product development proceeds. +={Trial-and-error problem solving;Toolkits:trial-and-error learning in} + +For example, suppose that need information is sticky at the site of the potential product user and that solution information is sticky at the site of the manufacturer. A user may initiate a development project by drawing on local user-need information to specify a desired new product or service (figure 11.1). This information is likely to be sticky at least in part. Therefore, the user, even when exerting best efforts, will supply only partial and partially correct need and use-context information to the manufacturer. The manufacturer then applies its solution information to the partially accurate user information and creates a prototype that it thinks is responsive to the need and sends it to the user for testing. If the prototype is not satisfactory (and it often is not), the product is returned to the manufacturer for refinement. Typically, as empirical studies show (Tyre and von Hippel 1997; Kristensen 1992), sites of sticky need and / or solution information are repeatedly revisited as problem solvers strive to reach a satisfactory product design (figure 11.2). +={Kristensen, P.;Tyre, M.} + +%% Figure 11.1 +% Toolkits 149 +% Manufacturer +% activity +% User +% activity +% User iterates until satisfied. +% User draws on local need +% information to specify +% desired product or service. +% User draws on local need and +% context of use information to +% evaluate prototype. +% User changes specifications as +% needed. +% Manufacturer draws on +% local capability information +% to develop prototype +% responsive to specifications. +% Manufacturer iterates until +% user is satisfied. +% User-manufacturer +% boundary +% Figure 11.1 +% A pattern of problem solving often encountered in product and service development. + + +{di_evh_f11-1.png}image + +Figure 11.1 + +%% Figure 11.2 +% 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 +% 7 +% 0 +% 22 +% 7 +% 15 +% 30 +% Number of shifts +% Percent +% of +% sample +% Figure 11.2 +% Shifts in the location of problem solving from user site to lab observed during process +% machine debugging. Source: Tyre and von Hippel 1993, figure 2. + +{di_evh_f11-2.png}image + +Figure 11.2 + +Explicit management of user-manufacturer iterations has been built into a number of modern product-development processes. In the rapid application development method (Martin 1991), manufacturers learn to respond to initial user need inputs by quickly developing a partial prototype of a planned product containing the features likely to be most important to users. They deliver this to users, who apply it in their own setting to clarify their needs. Users then relay requests for changes or new features to the product developers, and this process is repeated until an acceptable fit between need and solution is found. Such iteration has been found to "better satisfy true user requirements and produce information and functionality that is more complete, more accurate, and more meaningful" (Connell and Shafer 1989). +={Connell, J.;Martin, J.;Shafer, L.} + +Even with careful management, however, iterative shifts in problem solving between users and manufacturer-based developers involve significant coordination costs. For example, a manufacturer's development team may be assigned to other tasks while it waits for user feedback, and so will not be immediately able to resume work on a project when needed feedback is received. It would be much better still to eliminate the need for cross-boundary iteration between user and manufacturer sites during product development, and this is what toolkits for user design are intended to do. The basic idea behind toolkits for user design is, as was mentioned earlier, to partition an overall product-development task into subproblems, each drawing on only one locus of sticky information. Then, each task is assigned to the party already having the sticky information needed to solve it. In this approach, both the user and the manufacturer still engage in iterative, trial-and-error problem solving to solve the problems assigned to them. But this iteration is internal to each party---no costly and time-consuming cross-boundary iteration between user and manufacturer is required (von Hippel 1998, 2001; Thomke and von Hippel 2002; von Hippel and Katz 2002). +={Katz, R.;Thomke, S.;Task partitioning+10} + +To appreciate the major advantage in problem-solving speed and efficiency that concentrating problem solving within a single locus can create, consider a familiar example: the contrast between conducting financial strategy development with and without "user-operated" financial spreadsheet software: + +_* Before the development of easy-to-use financial spreadsheet programs such as Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft Excel, a firm's chief financial officer might have carried out a financial strategy development exercise as follows. First, the CFO would have asked an assistant to develop an analysis incorporating a list of assumptions. A few hours or days might elapse before the result was delivered. Then the CFO would use her rich understanding of the firm and its goals to study the analysis. She would typically almost immediately spot some implications of the patterns developed, and would then ask for additional analyses to explore these implications. The assistant would take the new instructions and go back to work while the CFO switched to another task. When the assistant returned, the cycle would repeat until a satisfactory outcome was found. +={Microsoft} + +_* After the development of financial spreadsheet programs, a CFO might begin an analysis by asking an assistant to load up a spreadsheet with corporate data. The CFO would then "play with" the data, trying out various ideas and possibilities and "what if" scenarios. The cycle time between trials would be reduced from days or hours to minutes. The CFO's full, rich information would be applied immediately to the effects of each trial. Unexpected patterns---suggestive to the CFO but often meaningless to a less knowledgeable assistant---would be immediately identified and explored further. + +It is generally acknowledged that spreadsheet software that enables expert users to "do it themselves" has led to better outcomes that are achieved faster (Levy 1984; Schrage 2000). The advantages are similar in the case of product and service development. Learning by doing via trial and error still occurs, of course, but the cycle time is much faster because the complete cycle of need-related learning is carried out at a single (user) site earlier in the development process. +={Levy, S.;Schrage, M.;Trial-and-error problem solving+15} + +!_ Repartitioning of Development Tasks +={Toolkits:task partitioning+5} + +To create the setting for a toolkit, one must partition the tasks of product development to concentrate need-related information in some and solution-related information in others. This can involve fundamental changes to the underlying architecture of a product or service. As illustration, I first discuss the repartioning of the tasks involved in custom semiconductor chip development. Then, I show how the same principles can be applied in the less technical context of custom food design. + +Traditionally, fully customized integrated circuits were developed in an iterative process like that illustrated in figure 11.1. The process began with a user specifying the functions that the custom chip was to perform to a manufacturer of integrated circuits. The chip would then be designed by manufacturer employees, and an (expensive) prototype would be produced and sent to the user. Testing by the user would typically reveal faults in the chip and/or in the initial specification, responsive changes would be made, a new prototype would be built. This cycle would continue until the user was satisfied. In this traditional manufacturer-centered development process, manufacturers' development engineers typically incorporated need-related information into the design of both the fundamental elements of a circuit--- such as transistors, and the electrical "wiring" that interconnected those elements into a functioning circuit. + +The brilliant insight that allowed custom design of integrated circuits to be partitioned into solution-related and need-related subtasks was made by Mead and Conway (1980). They determined that the design of a digital chip's fundamental elements, such as its transistors, could be made standard for all circuits. This subtask required rich access to the manufacturer's sticky solution information regarding how semiconductors are fabricated, but did not require detailed information on users' specific needs. It could therefore be assigned to manufacturer-based chip-design and chip-fabrication engineers. It was also observed that the subtask of interconnecting standard circuit elements into a functioning integrated circuit required only sticky, need-related information about a chip's function---for example, whether it was to function as a microprocessor for a calculator or as a voice chip for a robotic dog. This subtask was therefore assigned to users along with a toolkit that enabled them to do it properly. In sum, this new type of chip, called a gate array, had a novel architecture created specifically to separate the problem-solving tasks requiring access to a manufacturer's sticky solution information from those requiring access to users' sticky need information. +={Conway, C.;Mead, L.;Toolkits:characteristics of} + +The same basic principle can be illustrated in a less technical context: food design. In this field, manufacturer-based designers have traditionally undertaken the entire job of developing a novel food, and so they have freely blended need-specific design into any or all of the recipe-design elements wherever convenient. For example, manufacturer-based developers might find it convenient to create a novel cake by both designing a novel flavor and texture for the cake body, and designing a complementary novel flavor and texture into the frosting. However, it is possible to repartition these same tasks so that only a few draw on need-related information, and these can then be more easily transferred to users. + +The architecture of the pizza pie illustrates how this can be done. Many aspects of the design of a pizza, such as the dough and the sauce, have been made standard. User choice has been restricted to a single task: the design of toppings. In other words, all need-related information that is unique to a particular user has been linked to the toppings-design task only. Transfer of this single design task to users can still potentially offer creative individuals a very large design space to play in (although pizza shops typically restrict it sharply). Any edible ingredient one can think of, from eye of newt to edible flowers, is a potential topping component. But the fact that need-related information has been concentrated within only a single product-design task makes it much easier to transfer design freedom to the user. + +!_ The Functionality of Toolkits +={Toolkits:characteristics of+2} + +If a manufacturer outsources need-intensive design tasks to users, it must also make sure that users have the information they need to carry out those tasks effectively. This can be done via a toolkit for user innovation. Toolkits are not new as a general concept---every manufacturer equips its own engineers with a set of tools suitable for developing the type of products or services it wishes to produce. Toolkits for users also are not new---many users have personal collections of tools that they have assembled to help them create new items or modify standard ones. For example, some users have woodworking tools ranging from saws to glue which can be used to create or modify furniture---in very novel or very standard ways. Others may have a kit of software tools needed to create or modify software. What is new, however, is integrated toolkits enabling users to create /{and}/ test designs for custom products or services that can then be produced "as is" by manufacturers. + +Present practice dictates that a high-quality toolkit for user innovation will have five important attributes. (1) It will enable users to carry out complete cycles of trial-and-error learning. (2) It will offer users a solution space that encompasses the designs they want to create. (3) It will be user friendly in the sense of being operable with little specialized training. (4) It will contain libraries of commonly used modules that users can incorporate into custom designs. (5) It will ensure that custom products and services designed by users will be producible on a manufacturer's' production equipment without modification by the manufacturer. + +!_ Learning through Trial and Error +={Toolkits:trial-and-error learning in+5} + + +It is crucial that user toolkits for innovation enable users to go through complete trial-and-error cycles as they create their designs. Recall that trial-and-error problem solving is essential to product development. For example, suppose that a user is designing a new custom telephone answering system for her firm, using a software-based computer-telephony integration (CTI) design toolkit provided by a vendor. Suppose also that the user decides to include a new rule to "route all calls of X nature to Joe" in her design. A properly designed toolkit would allow her to temporarily place the new rule into the telephone system software, so that she could actually try it out (via a real test or a simulation) and see what happened. She might discover that the solution worked perfectly. Or she might find that the new rule caused some unexpected form of trouble---for example, Joe might be flooded with too many calls---in which case it would be "back to the drawing board" for another design and another trial. + +In the same way, toolkits for innovation in the semiconductor design field allow users to design a circuit that they think will meet their needs and then test the design by "running" it in the form of a computer simulation. This quickly reveals errors that the user can then quickly and cheaply fix using toolkit-supplied diagnostic and design tools. For example, a user might discover by testing a simulated circuit design that a switch needed to adjust the circuit had been forgotten and make that discovery simply by trying to make a needed adjustment. The user could then quickly and cheaply design in the needed switch without major cost or delay. + +One can appreciate the importance of giving the user the capability for trial-and-error learning by doing in a toolkit by thinking about the consequences of not having it. When users are not supplied with toolkits that enable them to draw on their local, sticky information and engage in trial-and-error learning, they must actually order a product and have it built to learn about design errors---typically a very costly and unsatisfactory way to proceed. For example, automobile manufacturers allow customers to select a range of options for their cars, but they do not offer the customer a way to learn during the design process and before buying. The cost to the customer is unexpected learning that comes too late: "That wide-tire option did look great in the picture. But now that the car has been delivered, I discover that I don't like the effect on handling. Worse, I find that my car is too wide to fit into my garage!" + +Similar disasters are often encountered by purchasers of custom computers. Many custom computer manufacturers offer a website that allows users to "design your own computer online." However, these websites do not allow users to engage in trial-and-error design. Instead, they simply allow users to select computer components such as processor chips and disk drives from lists of available options. Once these selections have been made, the design transaction is complete and the computer is built and shipped. The user has no way to test the functional effects of these choices before purchase and first field use---followed by celebration or regret. + +In contrast, a sophisticated toolkit for user innovation would allow the user to conduct trial-and-error tests to evaluate the effects of initial choices made and to improve on them. For example, a computer design site could add this capability by enabling users to actually test and evaluate the hardware configuration they specify on their own programs and computing tasks before buying. To do this, the site might, for example, provide access to a remote computer able to simulate the operation of the computer that the user has specified, and provide performance diagnostics and related choices in terms meaningful to the user (e.g., "If you add option x at cost y, the time it takes to complete your task will decrease by z seconds"). The user could then modify or confirm initial design choices according to trade-off preferences only he or she knows. + +!_ Appropriate Solution Spaces +={Toolkits:solution spaces and+3} + +Economical production of custom products and services is achievable only when a custom design falls within the pre-existing capability and degrees of freedom built into a particular manufacturer's production system. My colleagues and I call this the /{solution space}/ offered by that system. A solution space may vary from very large to small, and if the output of a toolkit is tied to a particular production system, then the design freedom that a toolkit can offer a user will be accordingly large or small. For example, the solution space offered by the production process of a manufacturer of custom integrated circuits offers a huge solution space to users---it will produce any combination of logic elements interconnected in any way that a user-designer might desire, with the result that the user can invent anything from a novel type of computer processor to a novel silicon organism within that space. However, note that the semiconductor production process also has stringent limits. It will only implement product designs expressed in terms of semiconductor logic---it will not implement designs for bicycles or houses. Also, even within the arena of semiconductors, it will only be able to produce semiconductors that fit within a certain range with respect to size and other properties. Another example of a production system offering a very large solution space to designers---and, potentially to user-designers via toolkits---is the automated machining center. Such a device can basically fashion any shape out of any machinable material that can be created by any combination of basic machining operations such as drilling and milling. As a consequence, toolkits for innovation intended to create designs that can be produced by automated machining centers can offer users access to that very large solution space. + +Large solution spaces can typically be made available to user-designers when production systems and associated toolkits allow users to manipulate and combine relatively basic and general-purpose building blocks and operations, as in the examples above. In contrast, small solution spaces typically result when users are only allowed to combine a relatively few pre-designed options. Thus, users who want to design their own custom automobiles are restricted to a relatively small solution space: they can only make choices from lists of options regarding such things as engines, transmissions, and paint colors. Similarly, purchasers of eyeglasses are restricted to combining "any frame from this list" of pre-designed frames, with "any lens type from that list" of pre-designed options. + +The reason producers of custom products or services enforce constraints on the solution space that user-designers may use is that custom products can be produced at reasonable prices only when custom user designs can be implemented by simply making low-cost adjustments to the production process. This condition is met within the solution space on offer. However, responding to requests that fall outside that space will require small or large additional investments by the manufacturer. For example, a producer of integrated circuits may have to invest many millions of dollars and rework an entire production process in order to respond to a customer's request for a larger chip that falls outside the solution space associated with its present production equipment. + +!_ User-Friendly Tools +={Toolkits:user-friendly tools for+6} + +User toolkits for innovation are most effective and successful when they are made "user friendly" by enabling users to use the skills they already have and to work in their own customary and well-practiced design language. This means that users don't have to learn the---typically different---design skills and language customarily used by manufacturer-based designers, and so they will require much less training to use the toolkit effectively. + +For example, in the case of custom integrated circuit design, the users of toolkits are typically electrical engineers who are designing electronic systems that will incorporate custom semiconductor chips. The digital design language normally used by electrical engineers is Boolean algebra. Therefore, user-friendly toolkits for custom semiconductor design are provided that allow toolkit users to design in this language. That is, users can create a design, test how it works, and make improvements using only their own, customary design language. At the conclusion of the design process, the toolkit then translates the user's logical design into the design inputs required by the semiconductor manufacturer's production system. + +A design toolkit based on a language and skills and tools familiar to the user is only possible to the extent that the user /{has}/ familiarity with some appropriate and reasonably complete language and set of skills and tools. Interestingly, this is the case more frequently than one might initially suppose, at least in terms of the /{function}/ that a user wants a product or service to perform---because functionality is the face that the product or a service presents to the user. (Indeed, an expert user of a product or service may be much more familiar with that functional face than manufacturer-based experts.) Thus, the user of a custom semiconductor is the expert in what he or she wants that custom chip to /{do}/, and is skilled at making complex tradeoffs among familiar functional elements to achieve a desired end: "If I increase chip clock speed, I can reduce the size of my cache memory and. . . ." + +As a less technical example, consider the matter of designing a custom hairstyle. There is certainly a great deal of information known to hairstylists that even an expert user may not know, such as how to achieve a certain look by means of layer cutting, or how to achieve a certain streaked color pattern by selectively dying some strands of hair. However, an expert user is often very well practiced at the skill of examining the shape of his or her face and hairstyle as reflected in a mirror, and visualizing specific improvements that might be desirable in matters such as curls, shape, or color. In addition, the user will be very familiar with the nature and functioning of everyday tools used to shape hair, such as scissors and combs. + +A user-friendly toolkit for hairstyling innovation can be built upon these familiar skills and tools. For example, a user can be invited to sit in front of a computer monitor, and study an image of her face and hairstyle as captured by a video camera. Then, she can select from a palette of colors and color patterns offered on the screen, can superimpose the effect on her existing hairstyle, can examine it, and can repeatedly modify it in a process of trial-and-error learning. Similarly, the user can select and manipulate images of familiar tools, such as combs and scissors, to alter the image of the length and shape of her own hairstyle as projected on the computer screen, can study and further modify the result achieved, and so forth. Note that the user's new design can be as radically new as is desired, because the toolkit gives the user access to the most basic hairstyling variables and tools such as hair color and scissors. When the user is satisfied, the completed design can be translated into technical hairstyling instructions in the language of a hairstyling specialist---the intended production system in this instance. + +In general, steady improvements in computer hardware and software are enabling toolkit designers to provide information to users in increasingly friendly ways. In earlier days, information was often provided to users in the form of specification sheets or books. The user was then required to know when a particular bit of information was relevant to a development project, find the book, and look it up. Today, a large range of potentially needed information can be embedded in a computerized toolkit, which is programmed to offer the user items of information only if and as a development being worked on makes them relevant. + +!_ Module Libraries +={Toolkits:module libraries for+1} + +Custom designs seldom are novel in all their parts. Therefore, a library of standard modules will be a valuable part of a toolkit for user innovation. Provision of such standard modules enables users to focus their creative work on those aspects of their product or service designs that cannot be implemented via pre-designed options. For example, architects will find it very useful to have access to a library of standard components, such as a range of standard structural support columns with pre-analyzed structural characteristics, that they can incorporate into their novel building designs. Similarly, users who want to design custom hairstyles will often find it helpful to begin by selecting a hairstyle from a toolkit library. The goal is to select a style that has some elements of the desired look. Users can then proceed to develop their own desired style by adding to and subtracting from that starting point. + +!_ Translating Users' Designs for Production + +The "language" of a toolkit for user innovation must be convertible without error into the language of the intended production system at the conclusion of the user's design work. If it is not, the entire purpose of the toolkit will be lost---because a manufacturer receiving a user design will essentially have to do the design work over again. Error-free translation need not emerge as a major problem---for example, it was never a major problem during the development of toolkits for integrated circuit design, because both chip designers and chip producers already used a language based on digital logic. In contrast, in some fields, translating from the design language preferred by users to the language required by intended production systems can be /{the}/ central problem in toolkit design. As an illustration, consider a recent toolkit test project managed by Ernie Gum, the Director of Food Product Development for the USA FoodServices Division of Nestlé. +={Gum, E.+5;Toolkits:Nestlé and+5} + +One major business of Nestlé FoodServices is producing custom food products, such as custom Mexican sauces, for major restaurant chains. Custom foods of this type have traditionally been developed by or modified by the chains' executive chefs, using what are in effect design and production toolkits taught by culinary schools: recipe development procedures based on food ingredients available to individuals and restaurants, and processed with restaurant-style equipment. After using their traditional toolkits to develop or modify a recipe for a new menu item, executive chefs call in Nestlé Foodservices or another custom food producer and ask that firm to manufacture the product they have designed---and this is where the language translation problem rears its head. + +There is no error-free way to translate a recipe expressed in the language of a traditional restaurant-style culinary toolkit into the language required by a food-manufacturing facility. Food factories must use ingredients that can be obtained in quantity at consistent quality. These are not the same as, and may not taste quite the same as, the ingredients used by the executive chef during recipe development. Also, food factories use volume production equipment, such as huge-steam-heated retorts. Such equipment is very different from restaurant-style stoves and pots and pans, and it often cannot reproduce the cooking conditions created by the executive chef on a stove-top---for example, very rapid heating. Therefore, food-production factories cannot simply produce a recipe developed by or modified by an executive chef "as is" under factory conditions---it will not taste the same. + +As a consequence, even though an executive chef creates a prototype product using a traditional chef's toolkit, food manufacturers find most of that information---the information about ingredients and processing conditions---useless because it cannot be straightforwardly translated into factory-relevant terms. The only information that can be salvaged is the information about taste and texture contained in the prototype. And so, production chefs carefully examine and taste the customer's custom food prototype, then try to make something that tastes the same using factory ingredients and methods. But an executive chef's taste buds are not necessarily the same as production chef taste buds, and so the initial factory version---and the second and the third---is typically not what the customer wants. So the producer must create variation after variation until the customer is finally satisfied. + +To solve the translation problem, Gum created a novel toolkit of pre-processed food ingredients to be used by executive chefs during food development. Each ingredient in the toolkit was the Nestlé factory version of an ingredient traditionally used by chefs during recipe development: That is, it was an ingredient commercially available to Nestlé that had been processed as an independent ingredient on Nestlé factory equipment. Thus, a toolkit designed for developing Mexican sauces would contain a chili puree ingredient processed on industrial equipment identical to that used to produce food in commercial-size lots. (Each ingredient in such a toolkit also contains traces of materials that will interact during production---for example, traces of tomato are included in the chili puree---so that the taste effects of such interactions will also be apparent to toolkit users.) + +Chefs interested in using the Nestlé toolkit to prototype a novel Mexican sauce would receive a set of 20--30 ingredients, each in a separate plastic pouch. They would also be given instructions for the proper use of these ingredients. Toolkit users would then find that each component differs slightly from the fresh components he or she is used to. But such differences are discovered immediately through direct experience. The chef can then adjust ingredients and proportions to move to the desired final taste and texture that is desired. When a recipe based on toolkit components is finished, it can be immediately and precisely reproduced by Nestlé factories--- because now the executive chef is using the same language as the factory. In the Nestlé case, field testing by Food Product Development Department researchers showed that adding the error-free translation feature to toolkit-based design by users reduced the time of custom food development from 26 weeks to 3 weeks by eliminating repeated redesign and refinement interactions between Nestlé and purchasers of its custom food products. + +!_ Discussion + +A toolkit's success in the market is significantly correlated with that toolkit's quality and with industry conditions. Thus, Prügl and Franke (2005) studied the success of 100 toolkits offered in a single industry: computer gaming. They found that success, evaluated by independent experts, was significantly correlated with the quality of execution of the attributes of toolkits that have been discussed in this chapter. That is, success was found to be significantly affected by the quality of trial-and-error learning enabled by a toolkit, by the quality of fit of the solution space offered to users' design problems, by the user friendliness of the tools provided, and by the quality of module libraries offered with the toolkit. Schreier and Franke (2004) also obtained information on the importance of toolkit quality in a study of the value that users placed on consumer products (scarves, T shirts, cell phone covers) customized with a simple, manufacturer-supplied toolkit. They found user willingness to pay for custom designs, as measured by Vickrey auctions, was significantly negatively affected by the difficulty of creating custom designs with a toolkit. In contrast, willingness to pay was significantly positively affected by enjoyment experienced in using a toolkit. +={Franke, N.;Prügl, R.;Schreier, M.;Trial-and-error problem solving;Custom products:heterogeneity of user needs and+3;User need+3} + +With respect to industry and market conditions, the toolkit-for-user innovation approach to product design is likely to be most appealing to toolkit suppliers when the heterogeneous needs of /{many}/ users can be addressed by a standard solution approach encoded in a toolkit. This is because it can be costly to encode all the solution and production information relevant to users' design decisions. For example, a toolkit for custom semiconductor design must contain information about the semi-conductor production process needed to ensure that product designs created by users are in fact producible. Encoding such information is a one-time cost, so it makes the best economic sense for solution approaches that many will want to use. + +Toolkits for user innovation are not an appropriate solution for all product needs, even when heterogeneous needs can be addressed by a common solution approach. Specifically, toolkits will not be the preferred approach when the product being designed requires the highest achievable performance. Toolkits incorporate automated design rules that cannot, at least at present, translate designs into products or software as skillfully as a human designer can. For example, a design for a gate array generated with a toolkit will typically take up more physical space on a silicon chip than would a fully custom-developed design of similar complexity. Even when toolkits are on offer, therefore, manufacturers may continue to design certain products (those with difficult technical demands) while customers take over the design of others (those involving complex or rapidly evolving user needs). + +Toolkits can be designed to offer a range of capabilities to users. At the high end, with toolkits such as those used to design custom integrated circuits, users can truly innovate, creating anything implementable in digital electronics, from a dishwasher controller to a novel supercomputer or form of artificial life. At the low end, the product configurators commonly offered by manufacturers of mass-customized products enable, for example, a watch purchaser to create a custom watch by selecting from lists of pre-designed faces, hands, cases, and straps. (Mass-customized production systems can manufacture a range of product variations in single-unit quantities at near mass-production costs (Pine 1993). In the United States, production systems used by these manufacturers are generally based on computerized production equipment.) +={Pine, J.} + +The design freedom provided by toolkits for user innovation may not be of interest to all or even to most users in a market characterized by heterogeneous needs. A user must have a great enough need for something different to offset the costs of putting a toolkit to use for that approach to be of interest. Toolkits may therefore be offered only to a subset of users. In the case of software, toolkits may be provided to all users along with a standard, default version of the product or service, because the cost of delivering the extra software is essentially zero. In such a case, the toolkit's capability will simply lie unused in the background unless and until a user has sufficient incentive to evoke and employ it. +={Lead users:toolkits and+3;Toolkits:lead users and+3} + +Provision of toolkits to customers can be a complement to lead user idea-generation methods for manufacturers. Some users choosing to employ a toolkit to design a product precisely right for their own needs will be lead users, whose present strong need foreshadows a general need in the market. Manufacturers can find it valuable to identify and acquire the generally useful improvements made by lead users of toolkits, and then supply these to the general market. For this reason, manufacturers may find it valuable implement toolkits for innovation even if the portion of the target market that can directly use them is relatively small. + +Toolkits can affect existing business models in a field in ways that may or may not be to manufacturers' competitive advantage in the longer run. For example, consider that many manufacturers of products and services profit from both their design capabilities and their production capabilities. A switch to user-based customization via toolkits can affect their ability to do this over the long term. Thus, a manufacturer that is early in introducing a toolkit approach to custom product or service design may initially gain an advantage by tying that toolkit to its particular production facility. However, when toolkits are made available to customer designers, this tie often weakens over time. Customers and independent tool developers can eventually learn to design toolkits applicable to the processes of several manufacturers. Indeed, this is precisely what has happened in the custom integrated circuit industry. The toolkits revealed to users by the initial innovator, LSI, and later by rival producers were producer-specific. Over time, however, Cadance and other specialist toolkit supply firms emerged and developed toolkits that could be used to make designs producible by a number of vendors. The end result is that manufacturers that previously benefited from selling their product-design skills and their production skills can be eventually forced by the shifting of design tasks to customers via toolkits to a position of benefiting from their production skills only. + +Manufacturers that think long-term disadvantages may accrue from a switch to toolkits for user innovation and design will not necessarily have the luxury of declining to introduce toolkits. If any manufacturer introduces a high-quality toolkit into a field favoring its use, customers will tend to migrate to it, forcing competitors to follow. Therefore, a firm's only real choice in a field where conditions are favorable to the introduction of toolkits may be whether to lead or to follow. + +1~ 12 Linking User Innovation to Other Phenomena and Fields + +This final chapter is devoted to describing links between user-centered innovation and other phenomena and literatures. Of course, innovation writ large is related to anything and everything, so the phenomena and the literatures I will discuss here are only those hanging closest on the intellectual tree. My goal is to enable interested readers to migrate to further branches as they wish, assisted by the provision of a few important references. With respect to phenomena, I will first point out the relationship of user innovation to /{information}/ communities---of which user innovation communities are a subset. With respect to related fields, I begin by linking user-centric innovation phenomena explored in this book to the literature on the economics of knowledge, and to the competitive advantage of nations. Next I link it to research on the sociology of technology. Finally, I point out how findings regarding user innovation could---but do not yet---link to and complement the way that product development is taught to managers. +={Information commons;Information communities;Product development;Technical communities} + +!_ Information Communities +={Information commons+8;Information communities+8} + +Many of the considerations I have discussed with respect to user innovation communities apply to /{information}/ communities as well---a much more general category of which user innovation communities are a subset. I define information communities as communities or networks of individuals and/or organizations that rendezvous around an information commons, a collection of information that is open to all on equal terms. +={Technical communities+1} + +In close analogy to our discussions of innovation communities, I propose that commons-based information communities or networks will form when the following conditions hold: (1) Some have information that is not generally known. (2) Some are willing to freely reveal what they know. (3) Some beyond the information source have uses for what is revealed. On an intuitive basis, one can immediately see that these conditions are often met. Of course, people and firms know different things. Of course there are many things that one would not be averse to freely revealing; and of course others would often be interested in what is freely revealed. After all, as individuals we all regularly freely reveal information not generally known to people who ask, and presumably these people value at least some of the information we provide. +={Free revealing of innovation information:in information communities+3} + +The economics of information communities can be much simpler than that of the user innovation communities discussed earlier, because valuable proprietary information is often not at center stage. When the service provided by information communities is to offer non-proprietary "content" in a more convenient and accessible form, one need consider only the costs and benefits associated with information diffusion. One need not also consider potential losses associated with the free revealing of proprietary innovation-related information. + +It is likely that information communities are getting steadily more pervasive for the same reasons that user innovation communities are: the costs of diffusing information are getting steadily lower as computing and communication technologies improve. As a result, information communities may have a rapidly increasing impact on the economy and on the landscape of industry. They are and will be especially empowering to fragmented groups, whose members may for the first time gain low-cost access to a great deal of rich and fresh information of mutual interest. As is the case for user innovation networks, information networks can actually store content that participants freely reveal and make it available for free downloading. (Wikipedia is an example of this.) And/or, information networks can function to link information seekers and information holders rather than actually storing information. In the latter case, participants post to the network, hoping that someone with the requested information will spot their request and provide an answer (Lakhani and von Hippel 2003). Prominent examples can be found in the medical field in the form of specialized websites where patients with relatively rare conditions can for the first time find each other and also find specialists in those conditions. Patients and specialists who participate in these groups can both provide and get access to information that previously was scattered and for most practical purposes inaccessible. +={Lakhani, K;Wikipedia;von Hippel, E.} + +Just as is the case in user innovation groups, open information communities are developing rapidly, and the behaviors and infrastructure needed for success are being increasingly learned and codified. These communities are by no means restricted to user-participants. Thus, both patients and doctors frequently participate in medical information communities. Also, information communities can be run by profit-making firms and/or on a non-profit basis for and by information providers and users themselves--- just as we earlier saw was the case with innovation communities. Firms and users are developing many versions of open information communities and testing them in the market. As an example of a commercially supported information commons, consider e-Bay, where information is freely revealed by many under a structure provided by a commercial firm. The commercial firm then extracts a profit from commissions on transactions consummated between information providers and information seekers. As an example of an information community supported by users themselves, again consider Internet sites specializing in specific diseases---for example, childrenfacingillness.com. +={Marketing research+1} + +Information communities can have major effects on established ways of doing business. For example, markets become more efficient as the information provided to transaction participants improves. Thus, product and service manufacturers benefit from good information on the perceptions and preferences of potential buyers. Similarly, product and service purchasers benefit from good information on the characteristics of the various offerings in the market. Traditionally, firms have collected information on users' needs and on products' characteristics by means of face-to-face interviewing and (in the case of mass markets) questionnaires. Similar information of high quality now can be collected nearly without cost and can be posted on special Internet sites by users themselves and/or by for-profit enterprises. Dellarocas, Awad, and Zhang (2004) show that volunteered online movie reviews provide information that is just as accurate as that collected by surveys of representative samples of respondents. This emerging new approach to data aggregation will clearly affect the established business models of firms specializing in information collection, with websites like www.ciao.co.uk illustrating new possibilities. If the quality of information available to transaction participants goes up and the information price is low, transaction quality should go up. With the aid of online product-evaluation sites, it is likely that consumers will be able to apply much better information even to small buying decisions, such as the choice of a restaurant for tonight's dinner. +={Awad, N.;Dellarocas C.;Zhang, X.} + +What Paul David and colleagues call "open science" is a type of information community that is closely related to the innovation communities discussed earlier (David 1992; Dasgupta and David 1994; David 1998). Free revealing of findings is, of course, a characteristic of modern science. Academic scientists publish regularly and so freely reveal information that may have high proprietary value. This raises the same question explored in the case of innovation communities: Why, in view of the potential of free ridership, do scientists freely reveal the information they have developed at private cost? The answer overlaps with but also differs from the answers provided in the case of free revealing of proprietary innovations by innovation users. With respect to similarities, sociologists of science have found that reputation among peers is important to scientists, and that priority in the discovery of new knowledge is a major component of reputation. Because of the importance of priority, scientists generally rush their research projects to completion and then rush to freely reveal their new findings. This dynamic creates a great advantage from the point of view of social welfare (Merton 1973). +={Dasgupta, P.;David, P.;Merton, Robert;Free revealing of innovation information:in information communities+1;Intellectual property rights:information communities and;Users:free revealing by+1|information communities and+1} + +With respect to major differences, it is public policy in many countries to subsidize research with public funds. These policies are based on the assumption that only inadequate amounts of scientific research can be drawn forth by reputational inducements alone. Recall that, in contrast, innovations developed and freely revealed by innovation users are not subsidized from any source. Users, unlike "scientists," by definition have a personal or corporate use for the innovation-related knowledge they generate. This additional source of private reward may explain why user innovation communities can flourish without subsidy. +={Knowledge, production and distribution of} + +!_ The Economics of Knowledge +={Knowledge, production and distribution of+7;Users:knowledge and+7} + +In this field, Foray (2004) provides a rich road map regarding the economics of knowledge and the central role played by users. Foray argues that the radical changes in information and communication technologies (ICT) are creating major changes in the economics of knowledge production and distribution. Economists have traditionally reduced knowledge production to the function of research and development, defined as the activity specifically devoted to invention and innovation. Starting with Machlup (1962), economists also have identified the knowledge-based economy as consisting of specialized sectors focused on activities related to communication, education, the media, and computing and information-related services. Foray argues that these simplifications, although providing a rationale for a way to measure knowledge-generation activities, were never appropriate and now are totally misleading. +={Machlup, F.;Foray, D.+2} + +Knowledge generation, Foray says, is now a major activity across all industrial sectors and is by no means restricted to R&D laboratories: we are in the age of the knowledge economy. He makes a central distinction between R&D that is conducted in laboratories remote from doing, and learning by doing at the site of production. He argues that both are important, and have complementary advantages and drawbacks. Laboratory research can ignore some of the complexities involved in production in search of basic understanding. Learning by doing has the contrasting advantage of being in the full fidelity of the real production process. The drawback to learning by doing, however, is that one is attempting to do two things at once---producing and learning---and this can force compromises onto both. + +Foray positions users at the heart of knowledge production. He says that one major challenge for management is to capture the knowledge being generated by users "on line" during the process of doing and producing, and to integrate it with knowledge created "off line" in laboratories. He discusses implications of the distributed nature of knowledge production among users and others, and notes that the increased capabilities of information and communication technologies tend to reduce innovators' ability to control the knowledge they create. He proposes that the most effective knowledge-management policies and practices will be biased toward knowledge sharing. + +Weber (2004, pp. 72--73) explores similar ideas in the specific context of open source software. "The conventional language of industrial-era economics," he notes, "identifies producers and consumers, supply and demand. The open source process scrambles these categories. Open source software users are not consumers in the conventional sense. . . . Users integrate into the production process itself in a profound way." Weber's central thesis is that the open source process is a new way of organizing production: +={Weber, S.;Open source software:knowledge and} + +_1 One solution is the familiar economy that depends upon a blend of exclusive property rights, divisions of labor, reduction of transaction costs, and the management of principal-agent problems. The success of open source demonstrates the importance of a fundamentally different solution, built on top of an unconventional understanding of property rights configured around distribution. . . . And it relies on a set of organizational structures to coordinate behavior around the problem of managing distributed innovation, which is different from the division of labor. (ibid., p. 224) + +Weber details the property-rights regime used by open source projects, and also the nature of open source innovation communities and incentives acting on participants. He then argues that this new mode of production can extend beyond the development of open source software, to an extent and a degree that are not yet understood: +={Weber, S.;Open source software:knowledge and} + +One important direction in which the open source experiment points is toward moving beyond the discussion of transaction as a key determinant of institutional design. . . . The elegant analytics of transaction cost economics do very interesting work in explaining how divisions of labor evolve through outsourcing of particular functions (the decision to buy rather than make something). But the open source process adds another element. The notion of open-sourcing as a strategic organizational decision can be seen as an efficiency choice around distributed innovation, just as outsourcing was an efficiency choice around transactions costs. . . . As information about what users want and need to do becomes more fine-grained, more individually differentiated, and harder to communicate, the incentives grow to shift the locus of innovation closer to them by empowering them with freely modifiable tools. (ibid., pp. 265--267) + +!_ National Competitive Advantage +={Government policy:and national competitive advantage+6;Manufacturers:and national competitive advantage+6;National competitive advantage+6:See also Government policy;Users:national competitive advantage and+6} + +Understanding national innovation systems and the competitive advantage of a nation's firms is an important matter for national policy makers (Nelson 1993). Can what we have learned in this book shed any light on their concerns? Porter (1991), assessing national competitive advantage through the intellectual lens of competitive strategy, concludes that one of four major factors determining the competitive advantage of nations is demand conditions. "A nation's firms," he argues, "gain competitive advantage if domestic buyers are, or are among, the world's most sophisticated and demanding buyers for the product or service. Such buyers provide a window into the most advanced buyer needs. . . . Buyers are demanding where home product needs are especially stringent or challenging because of local circumstances." For example: "The continental United States has been intensely drilled, and wells are being drilled in increasingly difficult and marginal fields. The pressure has been unusually great for American oil field equipment suppliers to perfect techniques that minimize the cost of difficult drilling and ensure full recovery from each field. This has pushed them to advance the state of the art and sustain strong international positions." (ibid., pp. 89--90) +={Nelson, R.;Porter, M.+5} + +Porter also argues that /{early}/ domestic demand is also important: "Provided it anticipates buyer needs in other nations, early local demand for a product or service in a nation helps local firms to move sooner than foreign rivals to become established in an industry. They get the jump in building large-scale facilities and accumulating experience. . . . Only if home demand is anticipatory of international need will home demand contribute to advantage." (ibid., p. 95) + +From my perspective, Porter is making the case for the value of a nation's domestic lead users to national competitive advantage. However, he is also assuming that it is /{manufacturers}/ that innovate in response to advanced or stringent user demand. On the basis of the findings reported on in this book, I would modify this assumption by noting that, often, domestic manufacturers' links to /{innovating lead users}/ have the impacts on national competitive advantage that he describes---but that the lead users' input to favored domestic firms would include innovations as well as needs. + +Domestic lead users make a difference to national competitive advantage, Porter argues, because "local firms often enjoy some natural advantages in serving their home market compared to foreign firms, a result of proximity as well as language, regulation, and cultural affinities (even, frequently, if foreign firms are staffed with local nationals)." Porter continues: "Preferred access to a large domestic customer base can be a spur to investment by local firms. Home demand may be perceived as more certain and easier to forecast, while foreign demand is seen as uncertain even if firms think they have the ability to fill it." (ibid., p. 93) + +What new insights and research questions can the work of this book contribute to this analysis of national competitive advantage? On the one hand, I certainly see the pattern Porter describes in some studies of lead user innovation. For example, early in the history of the US semiconductor industry, AT&T, the inventor of the transistor and an early innovator, developed a number of novel types of production equipment as a user organization. AT&T engineers went to local machine shops to have these machines produced in volume to meet AT&T's in-house production needs. A side effect of this procurement strategy was to put many of these previously undistinguished firms into the business of producing advanced semi-conductor equipment to the world (von Hippel 1977, 1988). +={von Hippel, E.} + +On the other hand, the findings of this book suggest that the "natural advantages" Porter proposes that domestic manufacturers will have with respect to filling the needs of local lead users may be eroding in the Internet age. As has been seen in the case of open source software, and by extension in the cases of other information-based products, users are capable of developing complex products in a coordinated way without geographic proximity. Participants in a particular open source project, for example, may come from a number of countries and may never meet face to face. In the case of physical products, the emergence of a pattern of user-based design followed by "foundry-style" production may also reduce the importance of propinquity between innovating lead users and manufacturers. As in the cases of integrated circuits and kitesurfing discussed earlier in this book, users can transmit CAD product-design information files from anywhere to any suitably equipped manufacturer for production. Probably only in the case of physical products where the interaction between product and production methods are not clear will geography continue to matter deeply in the age of the Internet. Nations may be able to create comparative advantages for domestic manufacturers with respect to profiting from innovation by lead users; however, they cannot assume that such advantages will continue to exist simply because of propinquity. +={Custom products:product platforms and|users and;Innovation communities:open source software and;Kitesurfing;Open source software;Printed circuit CAD software;Open source software:innovation communities and;Toolkits:platform products and;Users:custom products and} + +!_ The Sociology of Technical Communities +={Information commons+8;Innovation communities:sociology of+8;Technical communities+8} + +Relevant elements of this field include studies in the sociology of technology in general and studies of the sociology of open source software communities in particular. Historical accounts of the evolution of a technology have often taken a linear view of their subject. In the linear view, a technology such as aerodynamics and related technological artifacts such as the airplane start at point A and then naturally evolve to end point B. In other words, it is implicitly assumed that the airplane will evolve from the artifact of wood and fabric and wire developed by the Wright brothers to the characteristics we associate with aircraft today. Nothing much to explain about that. +={Open source software;Open source software:innovation communities and} + +In the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) model of technological evolution (Pinch and Bijker 1987), the direction in which an artifact (a product, for example) evolves depends very much on the meanings that different "groups with a problem" construct for it. These meanings, in turn, affect which of the many possible variations of a product are developed, how they evolve, and whether and how they eventually die. Groups that construct the meanings of a product centrally include, but are not restricted to, product users. For example, in the case of the bicycle, some relevant groups were users of various types---people who wanted to travel from place to place via bicycle, people who wanted to race bicycles, etc. Relevant non-user groups included "anticyclists," who had a negative view of the bicycle in its early days and wanted it to fail (Bijker 1995). +={Bijker, W.;Pinch, T.+4;Custom products:users and} + +When one takes the views of all relevant groups into account, one gets a much richer view of the "socially constructed" evolution of a technology. As a relatively recent example, consider the supersonic transport plane (SST) planned in the United States during the 1970s. Airlines, and potential passengers were "groups with a problem" who presumably wanted the technology for different reasons. Other relevant groups with a problem included people who expected to be negatively affected by the sonic boom the SST would cause, people who were concerned about the pollution its engines would cause in the stratosphere, and people who had other reasons for opposing or supporting the SST. Proposed designs evolved in an attempt to satisfy the various contending interest groups. Eventually it became clear that the SST designers could not arrive at a generally acceptable compromise solution and so the project failed (Horwich 1982). +={Horwich, M.} + +Pinch and Kline (1996, pp. 774--775) elaborated on the original SCOT model by pointing out that the way a product is interpreted is not restricted to the design stage of a technology, but also can continue during the product's use. They illustrated with the case of the automobile: . . . +={Kline, R.+2} + +_1 although [automobile] manufacturers may have ascribed a particular meaning to the artifact they were not able to control how that artifact was used once it got into the hands of the users. Users precisely as users can embed new meanings into the technology. This happened with the adaptation of the car into rural life. As early as 1903, farm families started to define the car as more than a transportation device. In particular, they saw it as a general source of power. George Schmidt, a Kansas farmer, advised readers of the /{Rural New Yorker}/ in 1903 to "block up the hind axle and run a belt over the one wheel of the automobile and around the wheel on a [corn] sheller, grinder, saw, pump, or any other machine that the engine is capable of running, and see how the farmer can save money and be in style with any city man." T. A. Pottinger, an Illinois farm man, wrote in /{Wallace's Farmer}/ in 1909 that "the ideal farm car should have a detachable backseat, which could turn the vehicle into a small truck." Other Phenomena and Fields 173 +={Pottinger, T.;Schmidt, G.} + +Of course, user innovations and modifications are involved in these cases along with users' reinterpretation of product uses. Kline and Pinch report that manufacturers adopted some of the rural users' innovations, generally after a lag. For example, a car that could also serve as a small truck was eventually offered as a commercial product. +={Users:innovation and+13;Manufacturers:innovation and} + +Research on communities of practice offers another link between studies of user innovation and sociology (Brown and Duguid 1991; Wenger 1998). The focus of this research is on the functioning of specialist communities. Researchers find that experts in a field spontaneously form interest groups that communicate to exchange their views and learnings on how to carry out and improve the practices of their profession. Members of communities of practice exchange help in informal ways that seem similar to the practices described above as characteristic of open source software projects and communities of sports innovators. +={Brown, J.;Duguid, P.;Wenger, E.;Open source software} + +Research on brand communities is still another related research thread (Muniz and O'Guinn 2001). Brand communities form around commercial brands and products (e.g., Lego construction toys) and even around products discontinued by their manufacturers e.g., Apple's Newton personal digital assistant). Brand communities can be intensely meaningful to participants and can involve user innovation. In Newton groups, for example, users develop new applications and exchange information about how to repair aging equipment (Muniz and Schau 2004). In Lego communities, lead users develop new products, new building techniques, and new offline and online multiplayer building projects that later prove to be of interest to the manufacturer (Antorini 2005). +={Antorini, Y.;Brand communities;Muniz, A.;O'Guinn, T.;Schau, H.;Innovation communities:brand and} + +!_ The Management of Product Development +={Product development+10} + +Finally, I turn to links between user-centered innovation and teaching on the management of product development. Information on lead users as a source of new product ideas now appears in most marketing textbooks. There also should be a link to other elements of user-centered innovation processes in the literature on product-development management---but there really isn't much of one yet. Although much of the research on user innovation cited in this book is going on in schools of management and business economics, little of this information has moved into teaching related to the product-development process as of yet. + +Clearly, it would be useful to provide managers of both user firms and manufacturing firms with a better understanding of the management of user-centered innovation. It is a curious fact that even managers of firms that have built major product lines upon user-developed innovations may hold the manufacturer-centric view that "we developed that." For example, an early study of innovation in scientific instruments documented that nearly 80 percent of the major improvements commercialized by instrument manufacturers had been developed by users (von Hippel 1976). When I later discussed this finding with managers in instrument firms, most of them were astonished. They insisted that all the innovations in the study sample had been developed within manufacturing firms. They could be convinced otherwise only when supplied with actual publications by user-scientists describing user-built prototypes of those instrument improvements---prototypes developed from 5 to 7 years before any instrument firm had sold a functionally equivalent commercial product. +={von Hippel, E.} + +My inquiries into why managers in this field and others held---and largely still hold---such contrary-to-fact beliefs identified several contributing factors. First, manufacturers seldom track where the major new products and product improvements they sell actually came from. Managers see no need to set up a tracking system, because the conventional wisdom is clear: "Everyone knows new products are developed by manufacturers such as ourselves based on user needs identified by market research." Further, the manufacturing firms have market-research and product-development departments in place, and innovations are somehow being produced. Thus, it is easy to conclude that the manufacturers' innovation processes must be working as expected. + +In fact, however, important, functionally novel innovations are often brought into manufacturers by informal channels. Product-development engineers may attend conferences and learn about important user innovations, salesmen and technical service personnel discover user-modified equipment on field visits, and so on. Once the basic innovation-related information is in house, the operating principles of a user's prototype will often be adopted, but the detailed design of the device will be changed and improved for production. After a while, the user's prototype, if remembered at all, will begin to look quite primitive to the firm's engineers relative to the much better product they have designed. Finally, when sales begin, the firm's advertising will urge customers to buy "/{our}/ wonderful new product." Other Phenomena and Fields 175 + +The net result is understandable: the user roots of many new commercial products, never widely known in manufacturing firms, are forgotten. And when it is time to develop the next innovation, management again turns to the conventional methods that "worked so well for us last time." Eventually, information about new user innovations will again arrive by pathways unnoticed and unmanaged---and with an unnecessary lag. + +To improve matters, managers must learn when it is appropriate to follow user-centered and manufacturer-centered innovation process paradigms and how user-centered innovation can best be managed when it is the method of choice. Managers in user firms and in manufacturing firms need tools with which to understand the innovate-or-buy decisions they face---to understand which product needs or which service needs users (rather than manufacturers) should invest in developing. Managers in user firms also need to learn how their firms can best carry out development work in their low-cost innovation niches: how they can best deploy their information-related advantages of being actual users and residing in the context of use to cheaply learn by doing. Managers in manufacturing firms will want to learn how they can best play a profitable role in user-centered innovation patterns when these play a role in the markets they serve. +={Sticky information:toolkits and+1;Users:innovate-or-buy decisions by|low-cost innovation niches of} + +Innovating users may also want to learn whether and how to diffuse their innovations by becoming manufacturers. This may be a fairly common practice in some fields. Shah (2000) found that users of sports equipment sometimes became manufacturers by a very natural process. The users would demonstrate the performance and value of their innovations as they used them in public sporting events. Some of the participants in the meets would then ask "Can you make one of those for me too?" Informal hobby-level production would then sometimes become the basis of a major company. Lettl, Herstatt, and Gemünden (2004) report on case histories in which user-innovators became heavily involved in promoting the commercialization of important innovations in surgical equipment. These innovations tended to be developed by surgeons, who then often made major efforts to induce manufacturers to commercialize them. Hienerth (2004) documents how user-innovators in "rodeo kayaking" build their own boats, discover that kayak manufacturers (even those established by a previous generation of user-innovators) are unwilling to manufacture what they want, and so are driven to become manufacturers themselves. +={Gemünden, H.;Lettl, C.;Herstatt, C.;Hienerth, C.;Shah, S.;Sporting equipment:lead users and;Windsurfing;Surgical equipment} + +Managers must learn that no single locus of innovation is the "right" one for either user firms or manufacturer firms. The locus of innovation varies between user firms and manufacturing firms according to market-related and information-related conditions. These conditions may well vary predictably over product life cycles. Utterback and Abernathy (1975) proposed that innovation by users is likely to be more important in the early stages of such cycles. Early in the life of a new product, there is a "fluid" stage in which the nature and the use of a product are unclear. Here, Utterback and Abernathy say, users play a big part in sorting the matter out, in part through innovation. Later, a dominant product design will emerge---a shared sense of exactly what a particular product is, what features and components it should include, and how it should function. (We all know, for example, that a car has four wheels and moves along the ground in directions determined by a steering wheel.) After that time, if the market for the product grows, innovation will shift from product to process as firms shift from the problem of what to produce to the problem of how to produce a well-understood product in ever greater volumes. From a lead user innovation perspective, of course, both functionally novel products and functionally novel processes are likely to be developed by users---in the first case users of the product, and in the second by manufacturing firms that use the process. +={Albernathy, W.;Utterback, J.} + +!_ In Conclusion + +In this book I have explored how and why users, individually and in firms and in communities, develop and freely reveal innovations. I have also argued that there is a general trend toward a open and distributed innovation process driven by steadily better and cheaper computing and communications. The net result is an ongoing shift toward the democratization of innovation. This welfare-enhancing shift is forcing major changes in user and manufacturer innovation practices, and is creating the need for change in government policies. It also, as I noted at the start of the book, presents major new opportunities for us all. Other Phenomena and Fields 177 + +1~ Notes + +!_ Chapter 2 + +1. LES contains four types of measures. Three ("benefits recognized early," "high benefits expected," and "direct elicitation of the construct") contain the core components of the lead user construct. The fourth ("applications generation") is a measure of a number of innovation-related activities in which users might engage: they "suggest new applications," they "pioneer those applications," and (because they have needs or problems earlier than their peers) they may be "used as a test site" (Morrison, Midgely, and Roberts 2004). + +!_ Chapter 3 + +1. Cluster analysis does not specify the "right" number of clusters---it simply segments a sample into smaller and smaller clusters until the analyst calls a halt. Determining an appropriate number of clusters within a sample can be done in different ways. Of course, it always possible to say that "I only want to deal with three market segments, so I will stop my analysis when my sample has been segmented into three clusters." More commonly, analysts will examine the increase of squared error sums of each step, and generally will view the optimal number of clusters as having been reached when the plot shows a sudden "elbow" (Myers 1996). Since this technique does not incorporate information on remaining within-cluster heterogeneity, it can lead to solutions with a large amount of within-cluster variance. The "cubic clustering criterion" (CCC) partially addresses this concern by measuring the within-cluster homogeneity relative to the between-cluster heterogeneity. It suggests choosing the number of clusters where this value peaks (Milligan and Cooper 1985). However, this method appears to be rarely used: Ketchen and Shook (1996) found it used in only 5 of 45 segmentation studies they examined. + +2. http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.infosystems.www.servers.unix + +3. http://modules.apache.org/ + +4. To measure heterogeneity, Franke and I analyzed the extent to which j standards, varying from [1; i], meet the needs of the i individuals in our sample. Conceptually, we first locate a product in multi-dimensional need space (dimensions = 45 in the case of our present study) that minimizes the distances to each individual's needs. (This step is analogous to the Ward's method in cluster analysis that also minimizes within cluster variation; see Punj and Stewart 1983.) The "error" is then measured as the sum of squared Euclidean distances. We then repeated these steps to determine the error for two optimally positioned products, three products, and so on up to a number equaling I -- 1. The sum of squared errors for all cases is then a simple coefficient that measures how much the needs of i individuals can be satisfied with j standard products. The "coefficient of heterogeneity" just specified is sensitive both to the (average) distance between the needs and for the configuration of the needs: when the needs tend to form clusters the heterogeneity coefficient is lower than if they are evenly spread. To make the coefficient comparable across different populations, we calibrate it using a bootstrapping technique (Efron 1979) involving dividing the coefficient by the expected value (this value is generated by averaging the heterogeneity of many random distributions of heterogeneity of the same kind). The average random heterogeneity coefficient is then an appropriate value for calibration purposes: it assumes that there is no systematic relationship between the needs of the individuals or between the need dimensions. + +5. Conceptually, it can be possible to generate "one perfect product" for everyone--- in which case heterogeneity of demand is zero---by simply creating all the features wanted by anyone (45 + 92 features in the case of this study), and incorporating them in the "one perfect product." Users could then select the features they want from a menu contained in the one perfect product to tailor it to their own tastes. Doing this is at least conceptually possible in the case of software, but less so in the case of a physical product for two reasons: (1) delivering all possible physical options to everyone who buys the product would be expensive for physical goods (while costing nothing extra in the case of information products); (2) some options are mutually exclusive (an automobile cannot be both red and green at the same time). + +6. The difference between actual willingness to pay and expressed willingness to pay is much lower for private goods (our case) than for public goods. In the case of private goods, Loomis et al. (1996) found the expressed willingness to pay for art prints to be twice the actual WTP. Willis and Powe (1998) found that among visitors to a castle the expressed WTP was 60 percent lower than the actual WTP. In the case of public goods, Brown et al. (1996), in a study of willingness to pay for removal of a road from a wilderness area, found the expressed WTP to be 4--6 times the actual WTP. Lindsey and Knaap (1999), in a study of WTP for a public urban greenway, found the expressed WTP to be 2-10 times the actual WPT. Neil et al. (1994) found the expressed WTP for conserving an original painting in the desert to be 9 times the actual WTP. Seip and Strand (1992) found that less than 10 percent of those who expressed interest in paying to join an environmental organization actually joined. + +!_ Chapter 6 + +1. As a specific example of a project with an emergent goal, consider the beginnings of the Linux open source software project. In 1991, Linus Torvalds, a student in Finland, wanted a Unix operating system that could be run on his PC, which was equipped with a 386 processor. Minix was the only software available at that time but it was commercial, closed source, and it traded at US$150. Torvalds found this too expensive, and started development of a Posix-compatible operating system, later known as Linux. Torvalds did not immediately publicize a very broad and ambitious goal, nor did he attempt to recruit contributors. He simply expressed his private motivation in a message he posted on July 3, 1991, to the USENET newsgroup comp.os.minix (Wayner 2000): Hello netlanders, Due to a project I'm working on (in minix), I'm interested in the posix standard definition. [Posix is a standard for UNIX designers. A software using POSIX is compatible with other UNIX-based software.] Could somebody please point me to a (preferably) machine-readable format of the latest posix-rules? Ftp-sites would be nice. In response, Torvalds got several return messages with Posix rules and people expressing a general interest in the project. By the early 1992, several skilled programmers contributed to Linux and the number of users increased by the day. Today, Linux is the largest open source development project extant in terms of number of developers. +={Linux} + +!_ Chapter 7 + +1. When they do not incorporate these qualities, they would be more properly referred to as networks---but communities is the term commonly used, and I follow that practice here. + +2. hacker n. [originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe] 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. 2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming. 3. A person capable of appreciating hack value. 4. A person who is good at programming quickly. . . . 8. [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. Hence password hacker, network hacker. The correct term for this sense is cracker (Raymond 1996). + +3. Source code is a sequence of instructions to be executed by a computer to accomplish a program's purpose. Programmers write computer software in the form of source code, and also document that source code with brief written explanations of the purpose and design of each section of their program. To convert a program into a form that can actually operate a computer, source code is translated into machine code using a software tool called a compiler. The compiling process removes program documentation and creates a binary version of the program---a sequence of computer instructions consisting only of strings of ones and zeros. Binary code is very difficult for programmers to read and interpret. Therefore, programmers or firms that wish to prevent others from understanding and modifying their code will release only binary versions of the software. In contrast, programmers or firms that wish to enable others to understand and update and modify their software will provide them with its source code. (Moerke 2000, Simon 1996). + +4. See www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#GPL + +5. http://www.sourceforge.net + +6. "The owner(s) [or `maintainers'] of an open source software project are those who have the exclusive right, recognized by the community at large, to redistribute modified versions. . . . According to standard open source licenses, all parties are equal in the evolutionary game. But in practice there is a very well-recognized distinction between `official' patches [changes to the software], approved and integrated into the evolving software by the publicly recognized maintainers, and `rogue' patches by third parties. Rogue patches are unusual and generally not trusted." (Raymond 1999, p. 89) + +!_ Chapter 8 + +1. See also Bresnahan and Greenstein 1996b; Bresnahan and Saloner 1997; Saloner and Steinmueller 1996. + +!_ Chapter 10 + +1. ABS braking is intended to keep a vehicle's wheels turning during braking. ABS works by automatically and rapidly "pumping" the brakes. The result is that the wheels continue to revolve rather than "locking up," and the operator continues to have control over steering. + +2. In the general literature, Armstrong's (2001) review on forecast bias for new product introduction indicates that sales forecasts are generally optimistic, but that that upward bias decreases as the magnitude of the sales forecast increases. Coller and Yohn (1998) review the literature on bias in accuracy of management earnings forecasts and find that little systematic bias occurs. Tull's (1967) model calculates $15 million in revenue as a level above which forecasts actually become pessimistic on average. 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"Austrian and Industrial Organization Perspectives on Firm Level Competitive Activity and Performance." /{Organization Science}/ 7, no. 3: 243--254. + +%% index di.eric_von_hippel_index.txt democratizing_innovation.eric_von_hippel_index.txt diff --git a/data/samples/down_and_out_in_the_magic_kingdom.cory_doctorow.sst b/data/samples/down_and_out_in_the_magic_kingdom.cory_doctorow.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b9aa6a2 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/down_and_out_in_the_magic_kingdom.cory_doctorow.sst @@ -0,0 +1,2967 @@ +% SiSU 2.0 + +@title: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom + +% http://www.craphound.com/down + +@creator: + :author: Doctorow, Cory + +% doctorow@craphound.com + +@rights: + :copyright: Copyright © 2003 Cory Doctorow + :license: Creative Commons, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0. That means, you are free:
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RELICENSED from Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial 1.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0/ + +% Tor Books, January 2003 + +@classify: + :subject: novel + :topic_register: SiSU:markup sample:book;book:novel;fiction:counterculture|young adult|science fiction + :type: fiction + :oclc: 50645482 + :isbn: 0765304368 + +% Realizing his boyhood dream of moving to the twentieth-century artistic creation of Disney World, Jules becomes incensed by a new group that would change the Hall of Presidents by replacing the audioanimatronics with brain interfaces. + +% :loc: #___# + +@date: + :published: 2003-01-09 + :modified: 2010-09-16 + +% :added_to_site: 20YY-MM-DD + +@make: + :breaks: new=:C; break=1 + :skin: skin_magic_kingdom + +@links: { Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom home }http://craphound.com/down + {Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory Doctorow @ SiSU }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/down_and_out_in_the_magic_kingdom.cory_doctorow + {@ Wikipedia }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom + {@ Amazon.com}http://www.amazon.com/Down-Magic-Kingdom-Cory-Doctorow/dp/076530953X + {@ Barnes & Noble}http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Down-and-Out-in-the-Magic-Kingdom/Cory-Doctorow/e/9780765309532 + {Little Brother, Cory Doctorow @ SiSU }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/little_brother.cory_doctorow + {For the Win, Cory Doctorow @ SiSU }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/for_the_win.cory_doctorow + {CONTENT, Cory Doctorow @ SiSU }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/content.cory_doctorow + {Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig @ SiSU}http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/free_culture.lawrence_lessig + {The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler @ SiSU}http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/the_wealth_of_networks.yochai_benkler + {Two Bits, Christopher Kelty @ SiSU}http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/two_bits.christopher_kelty + {Free as in Freedom (on Richard M. Stallman), Sam Williams @ SiSU}http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/free_as_in_freedom.richard_stallman_crusade_for_free_software.sam_williams + {Free For All, Peter Wayner @ SiSU}http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/free_for_all.peter_wayner + {The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric S. Raymond @ SiSU }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/the_cathedral_and_the_bazaar.eric_s_raymond + +:A~ @title @author + +1~blurbs Blurbs: + +He sparkles! He fizzes! He does backflips and breaks the furniture! Science fiction needs Cory Doctorow! + +Bruce Sterling + +Author, /{The Hacker Crackdown}/ and /{Distraction}/ + +In the true spirit of Walt Disney, Doctorow has ripped a part of our common culture, mixed it with a brilliant story, and burned into our culture a new set of memes that will be with us for a generation at least. + +Lawrence Lessig + +Author, /{The Future of Ideas}/ + +Cory Doctorow doesn't just write about the future – I think he lives there. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom isn't just a really good read, it's also, like the best kind of fiction, a kind of guide book. See the Tomorrowland of Tomorrow today, and while you're there, why not drop by Frontierland, and the Haunted Mansion as well? (It's the Mansion that's the haunted heart of this book.) Cory makes me feel nostalgic for the future – a dizzying, yet rather pleasant sensation, as if I'm spiraling down the tracks of Space Mountain over and over again. Visit the Magic Kingdom and live forever! + +Kelly Link + +Author, /{Stranger Things Happen}/ + +Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is the most entertaining and exciting science fiction story I've read in the last few years. I love page-turners, especially when they are as unusual as this novel. I predict big things for Down and Out—it could easily become a breakout genre-buster. + +Mark Frauenfelder + +Contributing Editor, /{Wired Magazine}/ + +Imagine you woke up one day and Walt Disney had taken over the world. Not only that, but money's been abolished and somebody's developed the Cure for Death. Welcome to the Bitchun Society—and make sure you're strapped in tight, because it's going to be a wild ride. In a world where everyone's wishes can come true, one man returns to the original, crumbling city of dreams—Disney World. Here in the spiritual center of the Bitchun Society he struggles to find and preserve the original, human face of the Magic Kingdom against the young, post-human and increasingly alien inheritors of the Earth. Now that any experience can be simulated, human relationships become ever more fragile; and to Julius, the corny, mechanical ghosts of the Haunted Mansion have come to seem like a precious link to a past when we could tell the real from the simulated, the true from the false. + +Cory Doctorow—cultural critic, Disneyphile, and ultimate Early Adopter—uses language with the reckless confidence of the Beat poets. Yet behind the dazzling prose and vibrant characters lie ideas we should all pay heed to. The future rushes on like a plummeting roller coaster, and it's hard to see where we're going. But at least with this book Doctorow has given us a map of the park. + +Karl Schroeder + +Author, /{Permanence}/ + +Cory Doctorow is the most interesting new SF writer I've come across in years. He starts out at the point where older SF writers' speculations end. It's a distinct pleasure to give him some Whuffie. + +Rudy Rucker + +Author, /{Spaceland}/ + +Cory Doctorow rocks! I check his blog about ten times a day, because he's always one of the first to notice a major incursion from the social-technological-pop-cultural future, and his voice is a compelling vehicle for news from the future. Down and Out in The Magic Kingdom is about a world that is visible in its outlines today, if you know where to look, from reputation systems to peer-to-peer adhocracies. Doctorow knows where to look, and how to word-paint the rest of us into the picture. + +Howard Rheingold + +Author, /{Smart Mobs}/ + +Doctorow is more than just a sick mind looking to twist the perceptions of those whose realities remain uncorrupted - though that should be enough recommendation to read his work. /{Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom}/ is black comedic, sci-fi prophecy on the dangers of surrendering our consensual hallucination to the regime. Fun to read, but difficult to sleep afterwards. + +Douglas Rushkoff + +Author of /{Cyberia}/ and /{Media Virus!}/ + +“Wow! Disney imagineering meets nanotechnology, the reputation economy, and Ray Kurzweil's transhuman future. As much fun as Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, and as packed with mind bending ideas about social changes cascading from the frontiers of science.” + +Tim O'Reilly + +Publisher and Founder, O'Reilly and Associates + +Doctorow has created a rich and exciting vision of the future, and then wrote a page-turner of a story in it. I couldn't put the book down. + +Bruce Schneier + +Author, /{Secrets and Lies}/ + +Cory Doctorow is one of our best new writers: smart, daring, savvy, entertaining, ambitious, plugged-in, and as good a guide to the wired world of the twenty-first century that stretches out before us as you're going to find. + +Gardner Dozois + +Editor, /{Asimov's SF}/ + +Cory Doctorow's “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” tells a gripping, fast-paced story that hinges on thought-provoking extrapolation from today's technical realities. This is the sort of book that captures and defines the spirit of a turning point in human history when our tools remake ourselves and our world. + +Mitch Kapor + +Founder, Lotus, Inc., co-founder Electronic Frontier Foundation + +1~prologue PROLOGUE + +I lived long enough to see the cure for death; to see the rise of the Bitchun Society, to learn ten languages; to compose three symphonies; to realize my boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World; to see the death of the workplace and of work. + +I never thought I'd live to see the day when Keep A-Movin' Dan would decide to deadhead until the heat death of the Universe. + +Dan was in his second or third blush of youth when I first met him, sometime late-XXI. He was a rangy cowpoke, apparent 25 or so, all rawhide squint-lines and sunburned neck, boots worn thin and infinitely comfortable. I was in the middle of my Chem thesis, my fourth Doctorate, and he was taking a break from Saving the World, chilling on campus in Toronto and core-dumping for some poor Anthro major. We hooked up at the Grad Students' Union—the GSU, or Gazoo for those who knew—on a busy Friday night, summer-ish. I was fighting a coral-slow battle for a stool at the scratched bar, inching my way closer every time the press of bodies shifted, and he had one of the few seats, surrounded by a litter of cigarette junk and empties, clearly encamped. + +Some duration into my foray, he cocked his head at me and raised a sun-bleached eyebrow. “You get any closer, son, and we're going to have to get a pre-nup.” + +I was apparent forty or so, and I thought about bridling at being called son, but I looked into his eyes and decided that he had enough realtime that he could call me son anytime he wanted. I backed off a little and apologized. + +He struck a cig and blew a pungent, strong plume over the bartender's head. “Don't worry about it. I'm probably a little over accustomed to personal space.” + +I couldn't remember the last time I'd heard anyone on-world talk about personal space. With the mortality rate at zero and the birth-rate at non-zero, the world was inexorably accreting a dense carpet of people, even with the migratory and deadhead drains on the population. “You've been jaunting?” I asked—his eyes were too sharp for him to have missed an instant's experience to deadheading. + +He chuckled. “No sir, not me. I'm into the kind of macho shitheadery that you only come across on-world. Jaunting's for play; I need work.” The bar-glass tinkled a counterpoint. + +I took a moment to conjure a HUD with his Whuffie score on it. I had to resize the window—he had too many zeroes to fit on my standard display. I tried to act cool, but he caught the upwards flick of my eyes and then their involuntary widening. He tried a little aw-shucksery, gave it up and let a prideful grin show. + +“I try not to pay it much mind. Some people, they get overly grateful.” He must've seen my eyes flick up again, to pull his Whuffie history. “Wait, don't go doing that—I'll tell you about it, you really got to know. + +“Damn, you know, it's so easy to get used to life without hyperlinks. You'd think you'd really miss 'em, but you don't.” + +And it clicked for me. He was a missionary—one of those fringe-dwellers who act as emissary from the Bitchun Society to the benighted corners of the world where, for whatever reasons, they want to die, starve, and choke on petrochem waste. It's amazing that these communities survive more than a generation; in the Bitchun Society proper, we usually outlive our detractors. The missionaries don't have such a high success rate—you have to be awfully convincing to get through to a culture that's already successfully resisted nearly a century's worth of propaganda—but when you convert a whole village, you accrue all the Whuffie they have to give. More often, missionaries end up getting refreshed from a backup after they aren't heard from for a decade or so. I'd never met one in the flesh before. + +“How many successful missions have you had?” I asked. + +“Figured it out, huh? I've just come off my fifth in twenty years—counterrevolutionaries hidden out in the old Cheyenne Mountain NORAD site, still there a generation later.” He sandpapered his whiskers with his fingertips. “Their parents went to ground after their life's savings vanished, and they had no use for tech any more advanced than a rifle. Plenty of those, though.” + +He spun a fascinating yarn then, how he slowly gained the acceptance of the mountain-dwellers, and then their trust, and then betrayed it in subtle, beneficent ways: introducing Free Energy to their greenhouses, then a gengineered crop or two, then curing a couple deaths, slowly inching them toward the Bitchun Society, until they couldn't remember why they hadn't wanted to be a part of it from the start. Now they were mostly off-world, exploring toy frontiers with unlimited energy and unlimited supplies and deadheading through the dull times en route. + +“I guess it'd be too much of a shock for them to stay on-world. They think of us as the enemy, you know—they had all kinds of plans drawn up for when we invaded them and took them away; hollow suicide teeth, booby-traps, fall-back-and-rendezvous points for the survivors. They just can't get over hating us, even though we don't even know they exist. Off-world, they can pretend that they're still living rough and hard.” He rubbed his chin again, his hard calluses grating over his whiskers. “But for me, the real rough life is right here, on-world. The little enclaves, each one is like an alternate history of humanity—what if we'd taken the Free Energy, but not deadheading? What if we'd taken deadheading, but only for the critically ill, not for people who didn't want to be bored on long bus-rides? Or no hyperlinks, no ad-hocracy, no Whuffie? Each one is different and wonderful.” + +I have a stupid habit of arguing for the sake of, and I found myself saying, “Wonderful? Oh sure, nothing finer than, oh, let's see, dying, starving, freezing, broiling, killing, cruelty and ignorance and pain and misery. I know I sure miss it.” + +Keep A-Movin' Dan snorted. “You think a junkie misses sobriety?” + +I knocked on the bar. “Hello! There aren't any junkies anymore!” + +He struck another cig. “But you know what a junkie /{is}/, right? Junkies don't miss sobriety, because they don't remember how sharp everything was, how the pain made the joy sweeter. We can't remember what it was like to work to earn our keep; to worry that there might not be /{enough}/, that we might get sick or get hit by a bus. We don't remember what it was like to take chances, and we sure as shit don't remember what it felt like to have them pay off.” + +He had a point. Here I was, only in my second or third adulthood, and already ready to toss it all in and do something, /{anything}/, else. He had a point—but I wasn't about to admit it. “So you say. I say, I take a chance when I strike up a conversation in a bar, when I fall in love… and what about the deadheads? Two people I know, they just went deadhead for ten thousand years! Tell me that's not taking a chance!” Truth be told, almost everyone I'd known in my eighty-some years were deadheading or jaunting or just /{gone}/. Lonely days, then. + +“Brother, that's committing half-assed suicide. The way we're going, they'll be lucky if someone doesn't just switch 'em off when it comes time to reanimate. In case you haven't noticed, it's getting a little crowded around here.” + +I made pish-tosh sounds and wiped off my forehead with a bar-napkin—the Gazoo was beastly hot on summer nights. “Uh-huh, just like the world was getting a little crowded a hundred years ago, before Free Energy. Like it was getting too greenhousey, too nukey, too hot or too cold. We fixed it then, we'll fix it again when the time comes. I'm gonna be here in ten thousand years, you damn betcha, but I think I'll do it the long way around.” + +He cocked his head again, and gave it some thought. If it had been any of the other grad students, I'd have assumed he was grepping for some bolstering factoids to support his next sally. But with him, I just knew he was thinking about it, the old-fashioned way. + +“I think that if I'm still here in ten thousand years, I'm going to be crazy as hell. Ten thousand years, pal! Ten thousand years ago, the state-of-the-art was a goat. You really think you're going to be anything recognizably human in a hundred centuries? Me, I'm not interested in being a post-person. I'm going to wake up one day, and I'm going to say, ‘Well, I guess I've seen about enough,’ and that'll be my last day.” + +I had seen where he was going with this, and I had stopped paying attention while I readied my response. I probably should have paid more attention. “But why? Why not just deadhead for a few centuries, see if there's anything that takes your fancy, and if not, back to sleep for a few more? Why do anything so /{final}/?” + +He embarrassed me by making a show of thinking it over again, making me feel like I was just a half-pissed glib poltroon. “I suppose it's because nothing else is. I've always known that someday, I was going to stop moving, stop seeking, stop kicking, and have done with it. There'll come a day when I don't have anything left to do, except stop.” + +On campus, they called him Keep-A-Movin' Dan, because of his cowboy vibe and because of his lifestyle, and he somehow grew to take over every conversation I had for the next six months. I pinged his Whuffie a few times, and noticed that it was climbing steadily upward as he accumulated more esteem from the people he met. + +I'd pretty much pissed away most of my Whuffie—all the savings from the symphonies and the first three theses—drinking myself stupid at the Gazoo, hogging library terminals, pestering profs, until I'd expended all the respect anyone had ever afforded me. All except Dan, who, for some reason, stood me to regular beers and meals and movies. + +I got to feeling like I was someone special—not everyone had a chum as exotic as Keep-A-Movin' Dan, the legendary missionary who visited the only places left that were closed to the Bitchun Society. I can't say for sure why he hung around with me. He mentioned once or twice that he'd liked my symphonies, and he'd read my Ergonomics thesis on applying theme-park crowd-control techniques in urban settings, and liked what I had to say there. But I think it came down to us having a good time needling each other. + +I'd talk to him about the vast carpet of the future unrolling before us, of the certainty that we would encounter alien intelligences some day, of the unimaginable frontiers open to each of us. He'd tell me that deadheading was a strong indicator that one's personal reservoir of introspection and creativity was dry; and that without struggle, there is no real victory. + +This was a good fight, one we could have a thousand times without resolving. I'd get him to concede that Whuffie recaptured the true essence of money: in the old days, if you were broke but respected, you wouldn't starve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum could buy you security and peace. By measuring the thing that money really represented—your personal capital with your friends and neighbors—you more accurately gauged your success. + +And then he'd lead me down a subtle, carefully baited trail that led to my allowing that while, yes, we might someday encounter alien species with wild and fabulous ways, that right now, there was a slightly depressing homogeneity to the world. + +On a fine spring day, I defended my thesis to two embodied humans and one prof whose body was out for an overhaul, whose consciousness was present via speakerphone from the computer where it was resting. They all liked it. I collected my sheepskin and went out hunting for Dan in the sweet, flower-stinking streets. + +He'd gone. The Anthro major he'd been torturing with his war-stories said that they'd wrapped up that morning, and he'd headed to the walled city of Tijuana, to take his shot with the descendants of a platoon of US Marines who'd settled there and cut themselves off from the Bitchun Society. + +So I went to Disney World. + +In deference to Dan, I took the flight in realtime, in the minuscule cabin reserved for those of us who stubbornly refused to be frozen and stacked like cordwood for the two hour flight. I was the only one taking the trip in realtime, but a flight attendant dutifully served me a urine-sample-sized orange juice and a rubbery, pungent, cheese omelet. I stared out the windows at the infinite clouds while the autopilot banked around the turbulence, and wondered when I'd see Dan next. + +1~ CHAPTER 1 + +My girlfriend was 15 percent of my age, and I was old-fashioned enough that it bugged me. Her name was Lil, and she was second-generation Disney World, her parents being among the original ad-hocracy that took over the management of Liberty Square and Tom Sawyer Island. She was, quite literally, raised in Walt Disney World and it showed. + +It showed. She was neat and efficient in her every little thing, from her shining red hair to her careful accounting of each gear and cog in the animatronics that were in her charge. Her folks were in canopic jars in Kissimmee, deadheading for a few centuries. + +On a muggy Wednesday, we dangled our feet over the edge of the Liberty Belle's riverboat pier, watching the listless Confederate flag over Fort Langhorn on Tom Sawyer Island by moonlight. The Magic Kingdom was all closed up and every last guest had been chased out the gate underneath the Main Street train station, and we were able to breathe a heavy sigh of relief, shuck parts of our costumes, and relax together while the cicadas sang. + +I was more than a century old, but there was still a kind of magic in having my arm around the warm, fine shoulders of a girl by moonlight, hidden from the hustle of the cleaning teams by the turnstiles, breathing the warm, moist air. Lil plumped her head against my shoulder and gave me a butterfly kiss under my jaw. + +“Her name was McGill,” I sang, gently. + +“But she called herself Lil,” she sang, warm breath on my collarbones. + +“And everyone knew her as Nancy,” I sang. + +I'd been startled to know that she knew the Beatles. They'd been old news in my youth, after all. But her parents had given her a thorough—if eclectic—education. + +“Want to do a walk-through?” she asked. It was one of her favorite duties, exploring every inch of the rides in her care with the lights on, after the horde of tourists had gone. We both liked to see the underpinnings of the magic. Maybe that was why I kept picking at the relationship. + +“I'm a little pooped. Let's sit a while longer, if you don't mind.” + +She heaved a dramatic sigh. “Oh, all right. Old man.” She reached up and gently tweaked my nipple, and I gave a satisfying little jump. I think the age difference bothered her, too, though she teased me for letting it get to me. + +“I think I'll be able to manage a totter through the Haunted Mansion, if you just give me a moment to rest my bursitis.” I felt her smile against my shirt. She loved the Mansion; loved to turn on the ballroom ghosts and dance their waltz with them on the dusty floor, loved to try and stare down the marble busts in the library that followed your gaze as you passed. + +I liked it too, but I really liked just sitting there with her, watching the water and the trees. I was just getting ready to go when I heard a soft /{ping}/ inside my cochlea. “Damn,” I said. “I've got a call.” + +“Tell them you're busy,” she said. + +“I will,” I said, and answered the call subvocally. “Julius here.” + +“Hi, Julius. It's Dan. You got a minute?” + +I knew a thousand Dans, but I recognized the voice immediately, though it'd been ten years since we last got drunk at the Gazoo together. I muted the subvocal and said, “Lil, I've got to take this. Do you mind?” + +“Oh, /{no}/, not at all,” she sarcased at me. She sat up and pulled out her crack pipe and lit up. + +“Dan,” I subvocalized, “long time no speak.” + +“Yeah, buddy, it sure has been,” he said, and his voice cracked on a sob. + +I turned and gave Lil such a look, she dropped her pipe. “How can I help?” she said, softly but swiftly. I waved her off and switched the phone to full-vocal mode. My voice sounded unnaturally loud in the cricket-punctuated calm. + +“Where you at, Dan?” I asked. + +“Down here, in Orlando. I'm stuck out on Pleasure Island.” + +“All right,” I said. “Meet me at, uh, the Adventurer's Club, upstairs on the couch by the door. I'll be there in—” I shot a look at Lil, who knew the castmember-only roads better than I. She flashed ten fingers at me. “Ten minutes.” + +“Okay,” he said. “Sorry.” He had his voice back under control. I switched off. + +“What's up?” Lil asked. + +“I'm not sure. An old friend is in town. He sounds like he's got a problem.” + +Lil pointed a finger at me and made a trigger-squeezing gesture. “There,” she said. “I've just dumped the best route to Pleasure Island to your public directory. Keep me in the loop, okay?” + +I set off for the utilidor entrance near the Hall of Presidents and booted down the stairs to the hum of the underground tunnel-system. I took the slidewalk to cast parking and zipped my little cart out to Pleasure Island. + +I found Dan sitting on the L-shaped couch underneath rows of faked-up trophy shots with humorous captions. Downstairs, castmembers were working the animatronic masks and idols, chattering with the guests. + +Dan was apparent fifty plus, a little paunchy and stubbled. He had raccoon-mask bags under his eyes and he slumped listlessly. As I approached, I pinged his Whuffie and was startled to see that it had dropped to nearly zero. + +“Jesus,” I said, as I sat down next to him. “You look like hell, Dan.” + +He nodded. “Appearances can be deceptive,” he said. “But in this case, they're bang-on.” + +“You want to talk about it?” I asked. + +“Somewhere else, huh? I hear they ring in the New Year every night at midnight; I think that'd be a little too much for me right now.” + +I led him out to my cart and cruised back to the place I shared with Lil, out in Kissimmee. He smoked eight cigarettes on the twenty minute ride, hammering one after another into his mouth, filling my runabout with stinging clouds. I kept glancing at him in the rear-view. He had his eyes closed, and in repose he looked dead. I could hardly believe that this was my vibrant action-hero pal of yore. + +Surreptitiously, I called Lil's phone. “I'm bringing him home,” I subvocalized. “He's in rough shape. Not sure what it's all about.” + +“I'll make up the couch,” she said. “And get some coffee together. Love you.” + +“Back atcha, kid,” I said. + +As we approached the tacky little swaybacked ranch-house, he opened his eyes. “You're a pal, Jules.” I waved him off. “No, really. I tried to think of who I could call, and you were the only one. I've missed you, bud.” + +“Lil said she'd put some coffee on,” I said. “You sound like you need it.” + +Lil was waiting on the sofa, a folded blanket and an extra pillow on the side table, a pot of coffee and some Disneyland Beijing mugs beside them. She stood and extended her hand. “I'm Lil,” she said. + +“Dan,” he said. “It's a pleasure.” + +I knew she was pinging his Whuffie and I caught her look of surprised disapproval. Us oldsters who predate Whuffie know that it's important; but to the kids, it's the /{world}/. Someone without any is automatically suspect. I watched her recover quickly, smile, and surreptitiously wipe her hand on her jeans. “Coffee?” she said. + +“Oh, yeah,” Dan said, and slumped on the sofa. + +She poured him a cup and set it on a coaster on the coffee table. “I'll let you boys catch up, then,” she said, and started for the bedroom. + +“No,” Dan said. “Wait. If you don't mind. I think it'd help if I could talk to someone… younger, too.” + +She set her face in the look of chirpy helpfulness that all the second-gen castmembers have at their instant disposal and settled into an armchair. She pulled out her pipe and lit a rock. I went through my crack period before she was born, just after they made it decaf, and I always felt old when I saw her and her friends light up. Dan surprised me by holding out a hand to her and taking the pipe. He toked heavily, then passed it back. + +Dan closed his eyes again, then ground his fists into them, sipped his coffee. It was clear he was trying to figure out where to start. + +“I believed that I was braver than I really am, is what it boils down to,” he said. + +“Who doesn't?” I said. + +“I really thought I could do it. I knew that someday I'd run out of things to do, things to see. I knew that I'd finish some day. You remember, we used to argue about it. I swore I'd be done, and that would be the end of it. And now I am. There isn't a single place left on-world that isn't part of the Bitchun Society. There isn't a single thing left that I want any part of.” + +“So deadhead for a few centuries,” I said. “Put the decision off.” + +“No!” he shouted, startling both of us. “I'm /{done}/. It's /{over}/.” + +“So do it,” Lil said. + +“I /{can't}/,” he sobbed, and buried his face in his hands. He cried like a baby, in great, snoring sobs that shook his whole body. Lil went into the kitchen and got some tissue, and passed it to me. I sat alongside him and awkwardly patted his back. + +“Jesus,” he said, into his palms. “Jesus.” + +“Dan?” I said, quietly. + +He sat up and took the tissue, wiped off his face and hands. “Thanks,” he said. “I've tried to make a go of it, really I have. I've spent the last eight years in Istanbul, writing papers on my missions, about the communities. I did some followup studies, interviews. No one was interested. Not even me. I smoked a lot of hash. It didn't help. So, one morning I woke up and went to the bazaar and said good bye to the friends I'd made there. Then I went to a pharmacy and had the man make me up a lethal injection. He wished me good luck and I went back to my rooms. I sat there with the hypo all afternoon, then I decided to sleep on it, and I got up the next morning and did it all over again. I looked inside myself, and I saw that I didn't have the guts. I just didn't have the guts. I've stared down the barrels of a hundred guns, had a thousand knives pressed up against my throat, but I didn't have the guts to press that button.” + +“You were too late,” Lil said. + +We both turned to look at her. + +“You were a decade too late. Look at you. You're pathetic. If you killed yourself right now, you'd just be a washed-up loser who couldn't hack it. If you'd done it ten years earlier, you would've been going out on top—a champion, retiring permanently.” She set her mug down with a harder-than-necessary clunk. + +Sometimes, Lil and I are right on the same wavelength. Sometimes, it's like she's on a different planet. All I could do was sit there, horrified, and she was happy to discuss the timing of my pal's suicide. + +But she was right. Dan nodded heavily, and I saw that he knew it, too. + +“A day late and a dollar short,” he sighed. + +“Well, don't just sit there,” she said. “You know what you've got to do.” + +“What?” I said, involuntarily irritated by her tone. + +She looked at me like I was being deliberately stupid. “He's got to get back on top. Cleaned up, dried out, into some productive work. Get that Whuffie up, too. /{Then}/ he can kill himself with dignity.” + +It was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard. Dan, though, was cocking an eyebrow at her and thinking hard. “How old did you say you were?” he asked. + +“Twenty-three,” she said. + +“Wish I'd had your smarts at twenty-three,” he said, and heaved a sigh, straightening up. “Can I stay here while I get the job done?” + +I looked askance at Lil, who considered for a moment, then nodded. + +“Sure, pal, sure,” I said. I clapped him on the shoulder. “You look beat.” + +“Beat doesn't begin to cover it,” he said. + +“Good night, then,” I said. + +1~ CHAPTER 2 + +Ad-hocracy works well, for the most part. Lil's folks had taken over the running of Liberty Square with a group of other interested, compatible souls. They did a fine job, racked up gobs of Whuffie, and anyone who came around and tried to take it over would be so reviled by the guests they wouldn't find a pot to piss in. Or they'd have such a wicked, radical approach that they'd ouster Lil's parents and their pals, and do a better job. + +It can break down, though. There were pretenders to the throne—a group who'd worked with the original ad-hocracy and then had moved off to other pursuits—some of them had gone to school, some of them had made movies, written books, or gone off to Disneyland Beijing to help start things up. A few had deadheaded for a couple decades. + +They came back to Liberty Square with a message: update the attractions. The Liberty Square ad-hocs were the staunchest conservatives in the Magic Kingdom, preserving the wheezing technology in the face of a Park that changed almost daily. The newcomer/old-timers were on-side with the rest of the Park, had their support, and looked like they might make a successful go of it. + +So it fell to Lil to make sure that there were no bugs in the meager attractions of Liberty Square: the Hall of the Presidents, the Liberty Belle riverboat, and the glorious Haunted Mansion, arguably the coolest attraction to come from the fevered minds of the old-time Disney Imagineers. + +I caught her backstage at the Hall of the Presidents, tinkering with Lincoln II, the backup animatronic. Lil tried to keep two of everything running at speed, just in case. She could swap out a dead bot for a backup in five minutes flat, which is all that crowd-control would permit. + +It had been two weeks since Dan's arrival, and though I'd barely seen him in that time, his presence was vivid in our lives. Our little ranch-house had a new smell, not unpleasant, of rejuve and hope and loss, something barely noticeable over the tropical flowers nodding in front of our porch. My phone rang three or four times a day, Dan checking in from his rounds of the Park, seeking out some way to accumulate personal capital. His excitement and dedication to the task were inspiring, pulling me into his over-the-top-and-damn-the-torpedoes mode of being. + +“You just missed Dan,” she said. She had her head in Lincoln's chest, working with an autosolder and a magnifier. Bent over, red hair tied back in a neat bun, sweat sheening her wiry freckled arms, smelling of girl-sweat and machine lubricant, she made me wish there were a mattress somewhere backstage. I settled for patting her behind affectionately, and she wriggled appreciatively. “He's looking better.” + +His rejuve had taken him back to apparent 25, the way I remembered him. He was rawboned and leathery, but still had the defeated stoop that had startled me when I saw him at the Adventurer's Club. “What did he want?” + +“He's been hanging out with Debra—he wanted to make sure I knew what she's up to.” + +Debra was one of the old guard, a former comrade of Lil's parents. She'd spent a decade in Disneyland Beijing, coding sim-rides. If she had her way, we'd tear down every marvelous rube goldberg in the Park and replace them with pristine white sim boxes on giant, articulated servos. + +The problem was that she was /{really good}/ at coding sims. Her Great Movie Ride rehab at MGM was breathtaking—the Star Wars sequence had already inspired a hundred fan-sites that fielded millions of hits. + +She'd leveraged her success into a deal with the Adventureland ad-hocs to rehab the Pirates of the Caribbean, and their backstage areas were piled high with reference: treasure chests and cutlasses and bowsprits. It was terrifying to walk through; the Pirates was the last ride Walt personally supervised, and we'd thought it was sacrosanct. But Debra had built a Pirates sim in Beijing, based on Chend I Sao, the XIXth century Chinese pirate queen, which was credited with rescuing the Park from obscurity and ruin. The Florida iteration would incorporate the best aspects of its Chinese cousin—the AI-driven sims that communicated with each other and with the guests, greeting them by name each time they rode and spinning age-appropriate tales of piracy on the high seas; the spectacular fly-through of the aquatic necropolis of rotting junks on the sea-floor; the thrilling pitch and yaw of the sim as it weathered a violent, breath-taking storm—but with Western themes: wafts of Jamaican pepper sauce crackling through the air; liquid Afro-Caribbean accents; and swordfights conducted in the manner of the pirates who plied the blue waters of the New World. Identical sims would stack like cordwood in the space currently occupied by the bulky ride-apparatus and dioramas, quintupling capacity and halving load-time. + +“So, what's she up to?” + +Lil extracted herself from the Rail-Splitter's mechanical guts and made a comical moue of worry. “She's rehabbing the Pirates—and doing an incredible job. They're ahead of schedule, they've got good net-buzz, the focus groups are cumming themselves.” The comedy went out of her expression, baring genuine worry. + +She turned away and closed up Honest Abe, then fired her finger at him. Smoothly, he began to run through his spiel, silent but for the soft hum and whine of his servos. Lil mimed twiddling a knob and his audiotrack kicked in low: “All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa /{combined}/ could not, by force, make a track on the Blue Ridge, nor take a drink from the Ohio. If destruction be our lot, then we ourselves must be its author—and its finisher.” She mimed turning down the gain and he fell silent again. + +“You said it, Mr. President,” she said, and fired her finger at him again, powering him down. She bent and adjusted his hand-sewn period topcoat, then carefully wound and set the turnip-watch in his vest-pocket. + +I put my arm around her shoulders. “You're doing all you can—and it's good work,” I said. I'd fallen into the easy castmember mode of speaking, voicing bland affirmations. Hearing the words, I felt a flush of embarrassment. I pulled her into a long, hard hug and fumbled for better reassurance. Finding no words that would do, I gave her a final squeeze and let her go. + +She looked at me sidelong and nodded her head. “It'll be fine, of course,” she said. “I mean, the worst possible scenario is that Debra will do her job very, very well, and make things even better than they are now. That's not so bad.” + +This was a 180-degree reversal of her position on the subject the last time we'd talked, but you don't live more than a century without learning when to point out that sort of thing and when not to. + +My cochlea struck twelve noon and a HUD appeared with my weekly backup reminder. Lil was maneuvering Ben Franklin II out of his niche. I waved good-bye at her back and walked away, to an uplink terminal. Once I was close enough for secure broadband communications, I got ready to back up. My cochlea chimed again and I answered it. + +“Yes,” I subvocalized, impatiently. I hated getting distracted from a backup—one of my enduring fears was that I'd forget the backup altogether and leave myself vulnerable for an entire week until the next reminder. I'd lost the knack of getting into habits in my adolescence, giving in completely to machine-generated reminders over conscious choice. + +“It's Dan.” I heard the sound of the Park in full swing behind him—children's laughter; bright, recorded animatronic spiels; the tromp of thousands of feet. “Can you meet me at the Tiki Room? It's pretty important.” + +“Can it wait for fifteen?” I asked. + +“Sure—see you in fifteen.” + +I rung off and initiated the backup. A status-bar zipped across a HUD, dumping the parts of my memory that were purely digital; then it finished and started in on organic memory. My eyes rolled back in my head and my life flashed before my eyes. + +1~ CHAPTER 3 + +The Bitchun Society has had much experience with restores from backup—in the era of the cure for death, people live pretty recklessly. Some people get refreshed a couple dozen times a year. + +Not me. I hate the process. Not so much that I won't participate in it. Everyone who had serious philosophical conundra on that subject just, you know, /{died}/, a generation before. The Bitchun Society didn't need to convert its detractors, just outlive them. + +The first time I died, it was not long after my sixtieth birthday. I was SCUBA diving at Playa Coral, near Veradero, Cuba. Of course, I don't remember the incident, but knowing my habits at that particular dive-site and having read the dive-logs of my SCUBA-buddies, I've reconstructed the events. + +I was eeling my way through the lobster-caves, with a borrowed bottle and mask. I'd also borrowed a wetsuit, but I wasn't wearing it—the blood-temp salt water was balm, and I hated erecting barriers between it and my skin. The caves were made of coral and rocks, and they coiled and twisted like intestines. Through each hole and around each corner, there was a hollow, rough sphere of surpassing, alien beauty. Giant lobsters skittered over the walls and through the holes. Schools of fish as bright as jewels darted and executed breath-taking precision maneuvers as I disturbed their busy days. I do some of my best thinking under water, and I'm often slipping off into dangerous reverie at depth. Normally, my diving buddies ensure that I don't hurt myself, but this time I got away from them, spidering forward into a tiny hole. + +Where I got stuck. + +My diving buddies were behind me, and I rapped on my bottle with the hilt of my knife until one of them put a hand on my shoulder. My buddies saw what was up, and attempted to pull me loose, but my bottle and buoyancy-control vest were firmly wedged. The others exchanged hand signals, silently debating the best way to get me loose. Suddenly, I was thrashing and kicking, and then I disappeared into the cave, minus my vest and bottle. I'd apparently attempted to cut through my vest's straps and managed to sever the tube of my regulator. After inhaling a jolt of sea water, I'd thrashed free into the cave, rolling into a monstrous patch of spindly fire-coral. I'd inhaled another lungful of water and kicked madly for a tiny hole in the cave's ceiling, whence my buddies retrieved me shortly thereafter, drowned-blue except for the patchy red welts from the stinging coral. + +In those days, making a backup was a lot more complicated; the procedure took most of a day, and had to be undertaken at a special clinic. Luckily, I'd had one made just before I left for Cuba, a few weeks earlier. My next-most-recent backup was three years old, dating from the completion of my second symphony. + +They recovered me from backup and into a force-grown clone at Toronto General. As far as I knew, I'd laid down in the backup clinic one moment and arisen the next. It took most of a year to get over the feeling that the whole world was putting a monstrous joke over on me, that the drowned corpse I'd seen was indeed my own. In my mind, the rebirth was figurative as well as literal—the missing time was enough that I found myself hard-pressed to socialize with my pre-death friends. + +I told Dan the story during our first friendship, and he immediately pounced on the fact that I'd gone to Disney World to spend a week sorting out my feelings, reinventing myself, moving to space, marrying a crazy lady. He found it very curious that I always rebooted myself at Disney World. When I told him that I was going to live there someday, he asked me if that would mean that I was done reinventing myself. Sometimes, as I ran my fingers through Lil's sweet red curls, I thought of that remark and sighed great gusts of contentment and marveled that my friend Dan had been so prescient. + +The next time I died, they'd improved the technology somewhat. I'd had a massive stroke in my seventy-third year, collapsing on the ice in the middle of a house-league hockey game. By the time they cut my helmet away, the hematomae had crushed my brain into a pulpy, blood-sotted mess. I'd been lax in backing up, and I lost most of a year. But they woke me gently, with a computer-generated precis of the events of the missing interval, and a counselor contacted me daily for a year until I felt at home again in my skin. Again, my life rebooted, and I found myself in Disney World, methodically flensing away the relationships I'd built and starting afresh in Boston, living on the ocean floor and working the heavy-metal harvesters, a project that led, eventually, to my Chem thesis at U of T. + +After I was shot dead at the Tiki Room, I had the opportunity to appreciate the great leaps that restores had made in the intervening ten years. I woke in my own bed, instantly aware of the events that led up to my third death as seen from various third-party POVs: security footage from the Adventureland cameras, synthesized memories extracted from Dan's own backup, and a computer-generated fly-through of the scene. I woke feeling preternaturally calm and cheerful, and knowing that I felt that way because of certain temporary neurotransmitter presets that had been put in place when I was restored. + +Dan and Lil sat at my bedside. Lil's tired, smiling face was limned with hairs that had snuck loose of her ponytail. She took my hand and kissed the smooth knuckles. Dan smiled beneficently at me and I was seized with a warm, comforting feeling of being surrounded by people who really loved me. I dug for words appropriate to the scene, decided to wing it, opened my mouth and said, to my surprise, “I have to pee.” + +Dan and Lil smiled at each other. I lurched out of the bed, naked, and thumped to the bathroom. My muscles were wonderfully limber, with a brand-new spring to them. After I flushed I leaned over and took hold of my ankles, then pulled my head right to the floor, feeling the marvelous flexibility of my back and legs and buttocks. A scar on my knee was missing, as were the many lines that had crisscrossed my fingers. When I looked in the mirror, I saw that my nose and earlobes were smaller and perkier. The familiar crow's-feet and the frown-lines between my eyebrows were gone. I had a day's beard all over—head, face, pubis, arms, legs. I ran my hands over my body and chuckled at the ticklish newness of it all. I was briefly tempted to depilate all over, just to keep this feeling of newness forever, but the neurotransmitter presets were evaporating and a sense of urgency over my murder was creeping up on me. + +I tied a towel around my waist and made my way back to the bedroom. The smells of tile-cleaner and flowers and rejuve were bright in my nose, effervescent as camphor. Dan and Lil stood when I came into the room and helped me to the bed. “Well, this /{sucks}/,” I said. + +I'd gone straight from the uplink through the utilidors—three quick cuts of security cam footage, one at the uplink, one in the corridor, and one at the exit in the underpass between Liberty Square and Adventureland. I seemed bemused and a little sad as I emerged from the door, and began to weave my way through the crowd, using a kind of sinuous, darting shuffle that I'd developed when I was doing field-work on my crowd-control thesis. I cut rapidly through the lunchtime crowd toward the long roof of the Tiki Room, thatched with strips of shimmering aluminum cut and painted to look like long grass. + +Fuzzy shots now, from Dan's POV, of me moving closer to him, passing close to a group of teenaged girls with extra elbows and knees, wearing environmentally controlled cloaks and cowls covered with Epcot Center logomarks. One of them is wearing a pith helmet, from the Jungle Traders shop outside of the Jungle Cruise. Dan's gaze flicks away, to the Tiki Room's entrance, where there is a short queue of older men, then back, just as the girl with the pith helmet draws a stylish little organic pistol, like a penis with a tail that coils around her arm. Casually, grinning, she raises her arm and gestures with the pistol, exactly like Lil does with her finger when she's uploading, and the pistol lunges forward. Dan's gaze flicks back to me. I'm pitching over, my lungs bursting out of my chest and spreading before me like wings, spinal gristle and viscera showering the guests before me. A piece of my nametag, now shrapnel, strikes Dan in the forehead, causing him to blink. When he looks again, the group of girls is still there, but the girl with the pistol is long gone. + +The fly-through is far less confused. Everyone except me, Dan and the girl is grayed-out. We're limned in highlighter yellow, moving in slow-motion. I emerge from the underpass and the girl moves from the Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse to the group of her friends. Dan starts to move towards me. The girl raises, arms and fires her pistol. The self-guiding smart-slug, keyed to my body chemistry, flies low, near ground level, weaving between the feet of the crowd, moving just below the speed of sound. When it reaches me, it screams upwards and into my spine, detonating once it's entered my chest cavity. + +The girl has already made a lot of ground, back toward the Adventureland/Main Street, USA gateway. The fly-through speeds up, following her as she merges with the crowds on the street, ducking and weaving between them, moving toward the breezeway at Sleeping Beauty Castle. She vanishes, then reappears, forty minutes later, in Tomorrowland, near the new Space Mountain complex, then disappears again. + +“Has anyone ID'd the girl?” I asked, once I'd finished reliving the events. The anger was starting to boil within me now. My new fists clenched for the first time, soft palms and uncallused fingertips. + +Dan shook his head. “None of the girls she was with had ever seen her before. The face was one of the Seven Sisters—Hope.” The Seven Sisters were a trendy collection of designer faces. Every second teenage girl wore one of them. + +“How about Jungle Traders?” I asked. “Did they have a record of the pith helmet purchase?” + +Lil frowned. “We ran the Jungle Traders purchases back for six months: only three matched the girl's apparent age; all three have alibis. Chances are she stole it.” + +“Why?” I asked, finally. In my mind's eye, I saw my lungs bursting out of my chest, like wings, like jellyfish, vertebrae spraying like shrapnel. I saw the girl's smile, an almost sexual smirk as she pulled the trigger on me. + +“It wasn't random,” Lil said. “The slug was definitely keyed to you—that means that she'd gotten close to you at some point.” + +Right—which meant that she'd been to Disney World in the last ten years. That narrowed it down, all right. + +“What happened to her after Tomorrowland?” I said. + +“We don't know,” Lil said. “Something wrong with the cameras. We lost her and she never reappeared.” She sounded hot and angry—she took equipment failures in the Magic Kingdom personally. + +“Who'd want to do this?” I asked, hating the self-pity in my voice. It was the first time I'd been murdered, but I didn't need to be a drama-queen about it. + +Dan's eyes got a far-away look. “Sometimes, people do things for reasons that seem perfectly reasonable to them, that the rest of the world couldn't hope to understand. I've seen a few assassinations, and they never made sense afterwards.” He stroked his chin. “Sometimes, it's better to look for temperament, rather than motivation: who /{could}/ do something like this?” + +Right. All we needed to do was investigate all the psychopaths who'd visited the Magic Kingdom in ten years. That narrowed it down considerably. I pulled up a HUD and checked the time. It had been four days since my murder. I had a shift coming up, working the turnstiles at the Haunted Mansion. I liked to pull a couple of those shifts a month, just to keep myself grounded; it helped to take a reality check while I was churning away in the rarified climate of my crowd-control simulations. + +I stood and went to my closet, started to dress. + +“/{What}/ are you doing?” Lil asked, alarmed. + +“I've got a shift. I'm running late.” + +“You're in no shape to work,” Lil said, tugging at my elbow. I jerked free of her. + +“I'm fine—good as new.” I barked a humorless laugh. “I'm not going to let those bastards disrupt my life any more.” + +/{Those bastards}/? I thought—when had I decided that there was more than one? But I knew it was true. There was no way that this was all planned by one person: it had been executed too precisely, too thoroughly. + +Dan moved to block the bedroom door. “Wait a second,” he said. “You need rest.” + +I fixed him with a doleful glare. “I'll decide that,” I said. He stepped aside. + +“I'll tag along, then,” he said. “Just in case.” + +I pinged my Whuffie. I was up a couple percentiles—sympathy Whuffie—but it was falling: Dan and Lil were radiating disapproval. Screw 'em. + +I got into my runabout and Dan scrambled for the passenger door as I put it in gear and sped out. + +“Are you sure you're all right?” Dan said as I nearly rolled the runabout taking the corner at the end of our cul-de-sac. + +“Why wouldn't I be?” I said. “I'm as good as new.” + +“Funny choice of words,” he said. “Some would say that you /{were}/ new.” + +I groaned. “Not this argument again,” I said. “I feel like me and no one else is making that claim. Who cares if I've been restored from a backup?” + +“All I'm saying is, there's a difference between /{you}/ and an exact copy of you, isn't there?” + +I knew what he was doing, distracting me with one of our old fights, but I couldn't resist the bait, and as I marshalled my arguments, it actually helped calm me down some. Dan was that kind of friend, a person who knew you better than you knew yourself. “So you're saying that if you were obliterated and then recreated, atom-for-atom, that you wouldn't be you anymore?” + +“For the sake of argument, sure. Being destroyed and recreated is different from not being destroyed at all, right?” + +“Brush up on your quantum mechanics, pal. You're being destroyed and recreated a trillion times a second.” + +“On a very, very small level—” + +“What difference does that make?” + +“Fine, I'll concede that. But you're not really an atom-for-atom copy. You're a clone, with a copied /{brain}/—that's not the same as quantum destruction.” + +“Very nice thing to say to someone who's just been murdered, pal. You got a problem with clones?” + +And we were off and running. + +The Mansion's cast were sickeningly cheerful and solicitous. Each of them made a point of coming around and touching the stiff, starched shoulder of my butler's costume, letting me know that if there was anything they could do for me… I gave them all a fixed smile and tried to concentrate on the guests, how they waited, when they arrived, how they dispersed through the exit gate. Dan hovered nearby, occasionally taking the eight minute, twenty-two second ride-through, running interference for me with the other castmembers. + +He was nearby when my break came up. I changed into civvies and we walked over the cobbled streets, past the Hall of the Presidents, noting as I rounded the corner that there was something different about the queue-area. Dan groaned. “They did it already,” he said. + +I looked closer. The turnstiles were blocked by a sandwich board: Mickey in a Ben Franklin wig and bifocals, holding a trowel. “Excuse our mess!” the sign declared. “We're renovating to serve you better!” + +I spotted one of Debra's cronies standing behind the sign, a self-satisfied smile on his face. He'd started off life as a squat, northern Chinese, but had had his bones lengthened and his cheekbones raised so that he looked almost elfin. I took one look at his smile and understood—Debra had established a toehold in Liberty Square. + +“They filed plans for the new Hall with the steering committee an hour after you got shot. The committee loved the plans; so did the net. They're promising not to touch the Mansion.” + +“You didn't mention this,” I said, hotly. + +“We thought you'd jump to conclusions. The timing was bad, but there's no indication that they arranged for the shooter. Everyone's got an alibi; furthermore, they've all offered to submit their backups for proof.” + +“Right,” I said. “Right. So they just /{happened}/ to have plans for a new Hall standing by. And they just /{happened}/ to file them after I got shot, when all our ad-hocs were busy worrying about me. It's all a big coincidence.” + +Dan shook his head. “We're not stupid, Jules. No one thinks that it's a coincidence. Debra's the sort of person who keeps a lot of plans standing by, just in case. But that just makes her a well-prepared opportunist, not a murderer.” + +I felt nauseated and exhausted. I was enough of a castmember that I sought out a utilidor before I collapsed against a wall, head down. Defeat seeped through me, saturating me. + +Dan crouched down beside me. I looked over at him. He was grinning wryly. “Posit,” he said, “for the moment, that Debra really did do this thing, set you up so that she could take over.” + +I smiled, in spite of myself. This was his explaining act, the thing he would do whenever I fell into one of his rhetorical tricks back in the old days. “All right, I've posited it.” + +“Why would she: one, take out you instead of Lil or one of the real old-timers; two, go after the Hall of Presidents instead of Tom Sawyer Island or even the Mansion; and three, follow it up with such a blatant, suspicious move?” + +“All right,” I said, warming to the challenge. “One: I'm important enough to be disruptive but not so important as to rate a full investigation. Two: Tom Sawyer Island is too visible, you can't rehab it without people seeing the dust from shore. Three, Debra's coming off of a decade in Beijing, where subtlety isn't real important.” + +“Sure,” Dan said, “sure.” Then he launched an answering salvo, and while I was thinking up my answer, he helped me to my feet and walked me out to my runabout, arguing all the way, so that by the time I noticed we weren't at the Park anymore, I was home and in bed. + +With all the Hall's animatronics mothballed for the duration, Lil had more time on her hands than she knew what to do with. She hung around the little bungalow, the two of us in the living room, staring blankly at the windows, breathing shallowly in the claustrophobic, superheated Florida air. I had my working notes on queue management for the Mansion, and I pecked at them aimlessly. Sometimes, Lil mirrored my HUD so she could watch me work, and made suggestions based on her long experience. + +It was a delicate process, this business of increasing throughput without harming the guest experience. But for every second I could shave off of the queue-to-exit time, I could put another sixty guests through and lop thirty seconds off total wait-time. And the more guests who got to experience the Mansion, the more of a Whuffie-hit Debra's people would suffer if they made a move on it. So I dutifully pecked at my notes, and found three seconds I could shave off the graveyard sequence by swiveling the Doom Buggy carriages stage-left as they descended from the attic window: by expanding their fields-of-vision, I could expose the guests to all the scenes more quickly. + +I ran the change in fly-through, then implemented it after closing and invited the other Liberty Square ad-hocs to come and test it out. + +It was another muggy winter evening, prematurely dark. The ad-hocs had enough friends and family with them that we were able to simulate an off-peak queue-time, and we all stood and sweated in the preshow area, waiting for the doors to swing open, listening to the wolf-cries and assorted boo-spookery from the hidden speakers. + +The doors swung open, revealing Lil in a rotting maid's uniform, her eyes lined with black, her skin powdered to a deathly pallor. She gave us a cold, considering glare, then intoned, “Master Gracey requests more bodies.” + +As we crowded into the cool, musty gloom of the parlor, Lil contrived to give my ass an affectionate squeeze. I turned to return the favor, and saw Debra's elfin comrade looming over Lil's shoulder. My smile died on my lips. + +The man locked eyes with me for a moment, and I saw something in there—some admixture of cruelty and worry that I didn't know what to make of. He looked away immediately. I'd known that Debra would have spies in the crowd, of course, but with elf-boy watching, I resolved to make this the best show I knew how. + +It's subtle, this business of making the show better from within. Lil had already slid aside the paneled wall that led to stretch-room number two, the most recently serviced one. Once the crowd had moved inside, I tried to lead their eyes by adjusting my body language to poses of subtle attention directed at the new spotlights. When the newly remastered soundtrack came from behind the sconce-bearing gargoyles at the corners of the octagonal room, I leaned my body slightly in the direction of the moving stereo-image. And an instant before the lights snapped out, I ostentatiously cast my eyes up into the scrim ceiling, noting that others had taken my cue, so they were watching when the UV-lit corpse dropped from the pitch-dark ceiling, jerking against the noose at its neck. + +The crowd filed into the second queue area, where they boarded the Doom Buggies. There was a low buzz of marveling conversation as we made our way onto the moving sidewalk. I boarded my Doom Buggy and an instant later, someone slid in beside me. It was the elf. + +He made a point of not making eye contact with me, but I sensed his sidelong glances at me as we rode through past the floating chandelier and into the corridor where the portraits' eyes watched us. Two years before, I'd accelerated this sequence and added some random swivel to the Doom Buggies, shaving 25 seconds off the total, taking the hourly throughput cap from 2365 to 2600. It was the proof-of-concept that led to all the other seconds I'd shaved away since. The violent pitching of the Buggy brought me and the elf into inadvertent contact with one another, and when I brushed his hand as I reached for the safety bar, I felt that it was cold and sweaty. + +He was nervous! /{He}/ was nervous. What did /{he}/ have to be nervous about? I was the one who'd been murdered—maybe he was nervous because he was supposed to finish the job. I cast my own sidelong looks at him, trying to see suspicious bulges in his tight clothes, but the Doom Buggy's pebbled black plastic interior was too dim. Dan was in the Buggy behind us, with one of the Mansion's regular castmembers. I rang his cochlea and subvocalized: “Get ready to jump out on my signal.” Anyone leaving their Buggy would interrupt an infrared beam and stop the ride system. I knew I could rely on Dan to trust me without a lot of explaining, which meant that I could keep a close watch on Debra's crony. + +We went past the hallway of mirrors and into the hallway of doors, where monstrous hands peeked out around the sills, straining against the hinges, recorded groans mixed in with pounding. I thought about it—if I wanted to kill someone on the Mansion, what would be the best place to do it? The attic staircase-- the next sequence—seemed like a good bet. A cold clarity washed over me. The elf would kill me in the gloom of the staircase, dump me out over the edge at the blind turn toward the graveyard, and that would be it. Would he be able to do it if I were staring straight at him? He seemed terribly nervous as it was. I swiveled in my seat and looked him straight in the eye. + +He quirked half a smile at me and nodded a greeting. I kept on staring at him, my hands balled into fists, ready for anything. We rode down the staircase, facing up, listening to the clamour of voices from the cemetery and the squawk of the red-eyed raven. I caught sight of the quaking groundkeeper animatronic from the corner of my eye and startled. I let out a subvocal squeal and was pitched forward as the ride system shuddered to a stop. + +“Jules?” came Dan's voice in my cochlea. “You all right?” + +He'd heard my involuntary note of surprise and had leapt clear of the Buggy, stopping the ride. The elf was looking at me with a mixture of surprise and pity. + +“It's all right, it's all right. False alarm.” I paged Lil and subvocalized to her, telling her to start up the ride ASAP, it was all right. + +I rode the rest of the way with my hands on the safety bar, my eyes fixed ahead of me, steadfastly ignoring the elf. I checked the timer I'd been running. The demo was a debacle—instead of shaving off three seconds, I'd added thirty. I wanted to cry. + +I debarked the Buggy and stalked quickly out of the exit queue, leaning heavily against the fence, staring blindly at the pet cemetery. My head swam: I was out of control, jumping at shadows. I was spooked. + +And I had no reason to be. Sure, I'd been murdered, but what had it cost me? A few days of “unconsciousness” while they decanted my backup into my new body, a merciful gap in memory from my departure at the backup terminal up until my death. I wasn't one of those nuts who took death /{seriously}/. It wasn't like they'd done something /{permanent}/. + +In the meantime, I /{had}/ done something permanent: I'd dug Lil's grave a little deeper, endangered the ad-hocracy and, worst of all, the Mansion. I'd acted like an idiot. I tasted my dinner, a wolfed-down hamburger, and swallowed hard, forcing down the knob of nausea. + +I sensed someone at my elbow, and thinking it was Lil, come to ask me what had gone on, I turned with a sheepish grin and found myself facing the elf. + +He stuck his hand out and spoke in the flat no-accent of someone running a language module. “Hi there. We haven't been introduced, but I wanted to tell you how much I enjoy your work. I'm Tim Fung.” + +I pumped his hand, which was still cold and particularly clammy in the close heat of the Florida night. “Julius,” I said, startled at how much like a bark it sounded. /{Careful}/, I thought, /{no need to escalate the hostilities.}/ “It's kind of you to say that. I like what you-all have done with the Pirates.” + +He smiled: a genuine, embarrassed smile, as though he'd just been given high praise from one of his heroes. “Really? I think it's pretty good—the second time around you get a lot of chances to refine things, really clarify the vision. Beijing—well, it was exciting, but it was rushed, you know? I mean, we were really struggling. Every day, there was another pack of squatters who wanted to tear the Park down. Debra used to send me out to give the children piggyback rides, just to keep our Whuffie up while she was evicting the squatters. It was good to have the opportunity to refine the designs, revisit them without the floor show.” + +I knew about this, of course—Beijing had been a real struggle for the ad-hocs who built it. Lots of them had been killed, many times over. Debra herself had been killed every day for a week and restored to a series of prepared clones, beta-testing one of the ride systems. It was faster than revising the CAD simulations. Debra had a reputation for pursuing expedience. + +“I'm starting to find out how it feels to work under pressure,” I said, and nodded significantly at the Mansion. I was gratified to see him look embarrassed, then horrified. + +“We would /{never}/ touch the Mansion,” he said. “It's /{perfect}/!” + +Dan and Lil sauntered up as I was preparing a riposte. They both looked concerned—now that I thought of it, they'd both seemed incredibly concerned about me since the day I was revived. + +Dan's gait was odd, stilted, like he was leaning on Lil for support. They looked like a couple. An irrational sear of jealousy jetted through me. I was an emotional wreck. Still, I took Lil's big, scarred hand in mine as soon as she was in reach, then cuddled her to me protectively. She had changed out of her maid's uniform into civvies: smart coveralls whose micropore fabric breathed in time with her own respiration. + +“Lil, Dan, I want you to meet Tim Fung. He was just telling me war stories from the Pirates project in Beijing.” + +Lil waved and Dan gravely shook his hand. “That was some hard work,” Dan said. + +It occurred to me to turn on some Whuffie monitors. It was normally an instantaneous reaction to meeting someone, but I was still disoriented. I pinged the elf. He had a lot of left-handed Whuffie; respect garnered from people who shared very few of my opinions. I expected that. What I didn't expect was that his weighted Whuffie score, the one that lent extra credence to the rankings of people I respected, was also high—higher than my own. I regretted my nonlinear behavior even more. Respect from the elf—/{Tim}/, I had to remember to call him Tim—would carry a lot of weight in every camp that mattered. + +Dan's score was incrementing upwards, but he still had a rotten profile. He had accrued a good deal of left-handed Whuffie, and I curiously backtraced it to the occasion of my murder, when Debra's people had accorded him a generous dollop of props for the levelheaded way he had scraped up my corpse and moved it offstage, minimizing the disturbance in front of their wondrous Pirates. + +I was fugueing, wandering off on the kind of mediated reverie that got me killed on the reef at Playa Coral, and I came out of it with a start, realizing that the other three were politely ignoring my blown buffer. I could have run backwards through my short-term memory to get the gist of the conversation, but that would have lengthened the pause. Screw it. “So, how're things going over at the Hall of the Presidents?” I asked Tim. + +Lil shot me a cautioning look. She'd ceded the Hall to Debra's ad-hocs, that being the only way to avoid the appearance of childish disattention to the almighty Whuffie. Now she had to keep up the fiction of good-natured cooperation—that meant not shoulder-surfing Debra, looking for excuses to pounce on her work. + +Tim gave us the same half-grin he'd greeted me with. On his smooth, pointed features, it looked almost irredeemably cute. “We're doing good stuff, I think. Debra's had her eye on the Hall for years, back in the old days, before she went to China. We're replacing the whole thing with broadband uplinks of gestalts from each of the Presidents' lives: newspaper headlines, speeches, distilled biographies, personal papers. It'll be like having each President /{inside}/ you, core-dumped in a few seconds. Debra said we're going to /{flash-bake}/ the Presidents on your mind!” His eyes glittered in the twilight. + +Having only recently experienced my own cerebral flash-baking, Tim's description struck a chord in me. My personality seemed to be rattling around a little in my mind, as though it had been improperly fitted. It made the idea of having the gestalt of 50-some Presidents squashed in along with it perversely appealing. + +“Wow,” I said. “That sounds wild. What do you have in mind for physical plant?” The Hall as it stood had a quiet, patriotic dignity cribbed from a hundred official buildings of the dead USA. Messing with it would be like redesigning the stars-and-bars. + +“That's not really my area,” Tim said. “I'm a programmer. But I could have one of the designers squirt some plans at you, if you want.” + +“That would be fine,” Lil said, taking my elbow. “I think we should be heading home, now, though.” She began to tug me away. Dan took my other elbow. Behind her, the Liberty Belle glowed like a ghostly wedding cake in the twilight. + +“That's too bad,” Tim said. “My ad-hoc is pulling an all-nighter on the new Hall. I'm sure they'd love to have you drop by.” + +The idea seized hold of me. I would go into the camp of the enemy, sit by their fire, learn their secrets. “That would be /{great}/!” I said, too loudly. My head was buzzing slightly. Lil's hands fell away. + +“But we've got an early morning tomorrow,” Lil said. “You've got a shift at eight, and I'm running into town for groceries.” She was lying, but she was telling me that this wasn't her idea of a smart move. But my faith was unshakeable. + +“Eight a.m. shift? No problem—I'll be right here when it starts. I'll just grab a shower at the Contemporary in the morning and catch the monorail back in time to change. All right?” + +Dan tried. “But Jules, we were going to grab some dinner at Cinderella's Royal Table, remember? I made reservations.” + +“Aw, we can eat any time,” I said. “This is a hell of an opportunity.” + +“It sure is,” Dan said, giving up. “Mind if I come along?” + +He and Lil traded meaningful looks that I interpreted to mean, /{If he's going to be a nut, one of us really should stay with him}/. I was past caring—I was going to beard the lion in his den! + +Tim was apparently oblivious to all of this. “Then it's settled! Let's go.” + +On the walk to the Hall, Dan kept ringing my cochlea and I kept sending him straight to voicemail. All the while, I kept up a patter of small-talk with him and Tim. I was determined to make up for my debacle in the Mansion with Tim, win him over. + +Debra's people were sitting around in the armchairs onstage, the animatronic presidents stacked in neat piles in the wings. Debra was sprawled in Lincoln's armchair, her head cocked lazily, her legs extended before her. The Hall's normal smells of ozone and cleanliness were overridden by sweat and machine-oil, the stink of an ad-hoc pulling an all-nighter. The Hall took fifteen years to research and execute, and a couple of days to tear down. + +She was au-naturel, still wearing the face she'd been born with, albeit one that had been regenerated dozens of times after her deaths. It was patrician, waxy, long, with a nose that was made for staring down. She was at least as old as I was, though she was only apparent 22. I got the sense that she picked this age because it was one that afforded boundless reserves of energy. + +She didn't deign to rise as I approached, but she did nod languorously at me. The other ad-hocs had been split into little clusters, hunched over terminals. They all had the raccoon-eyed, sleep-deprived look of fanatics, even Debra, who managed to look lazy and excited simultaneously. + +/{Did you have me killed}/? I wondered, staring at Debra. After all, she'd been killed dozens, if not hundreds of times. It might not be such a big deal for her. + +“Hi there,” I said, brightly. “Tim offered to show us around! You know Dan, right?” + +Debra nodded at him. “Oh, sure. Dan and I are pals, right?” + +Dan's poker face didn't twitch a muscle. “Hello, Debra,” he said. He'd been hanging out with them since Lil had briefed him on the peril to the Mansion, trying to gather some intelligence for us to use. They knew what he was up to, of course, but Dan was a fairly charming guy and he worked like a mule, so they tolerated him. But it seemed like he'd violated a boundary by accompanying me, as though the polite fiction that he was more a part of Debra's ad-hoc than Lil's was shattered by my presence. + +Tim said, “Can I show them the demo, Debra?” + +Debra quirked an eyebrow, then said, “Sure, why not. You'll like this, guys.” + +Tim hustled us backstage, where Lil and I used to sweat over the animatronics and cop surreptitious feels. Everything had been torn loose, packed up, stacked. They hadn't wasted a moment—they'd spent a week tearing down a show that had run for more than a century. The scrim that the projected portions of the show normally screened on was ground into the floor, spotted with grime, footprints and oil. + +Tim showed me to a half-assembled backup terminal. Its housing was off, and any number of wireless keyboards, pointers and gloves lay strewn about it. It had the look of a prototype. + +“This is it—our uplink. So far, we've got a demo app running on it: Lincoln's old speech, along with the civil-war montage. Just switch on guest access and I'll core-dump it to you. It's wild.” + +I pulled up my HUD and switched on guest access. Tim pointed a finger at the terminal and my brain was suffused with the essence of Lincoln: every nuance of his speech, the painstakingly researched movement tics, his warts and beard and topcoat. It almost felt like I /{was}/ Lincoln, for a moment, and then it passed. But I could still taste the lingering coppery flavor of cannon-fire and chewing tobacco. + +I staggered backwards. My head swam with flash-baked sense-impressions, rich and detailed. I knew on the spot that Debra's Hall of the Presidents was going to be a hit. + +Dan took a shot off the uplink, too. Tim and I watched him as his expression shifted from skepticism to delight. Tim looked expectantly at me. + +“That's really fine,” I said. “Really, really fine. Moving.” + +Tim blushed. “Thanks! I did the gestalt programming—it's my specialty.” + +Debra spoke up from behind him—she'd sauntered over while Dan was getting his jolt. “I got the idea in Beijing, when I was dying a lot. There's something wonderful about having memories implanted, like you're really working your brain. I love the synthetic clarity of it all.” + +Tim sniffed. “Not synthetic at all,” he said, turning to me. “It's nice and soft, right?” + +I sensed deep political shoals and was composing my reply when Debra said: “Tim keeps trying to make it all more impressionistic, less computer-y. He's wrong, of course. We don't want to simulate the experience of watching the show—we want to /{transcend it}/.” + +Tim nodded reluctantly. “Sure, transcend it. But the way we do that is by making the experience /{human}/, a mile in the presidents' shoes. Empathy-driven. What's the point of flash-baking a bunch of dry facts on someone's brain?” + +1~ CHAPTER 4 + +One night in the Hall of Presidents convinced me of three things: + +_1 That Debra's people had had me killed, and screw their alibis, + +_1 That they would kill me again, when the time came for them to make a play for the Haunted Mansion, + +_1 That our only hope for saving the Mansion was a preemptive strike against them: we had to hit them hard, where it hurt. + +Dan and I had been treated to eight hours of insectile precision in the Hall of Presidents, Debra's people working with effortless cooperation born of the adversity they'd faced in Beijing. Debra moved from team to team, making suggestions with body language as much as with words, leaving bursts of inspired activity in her wake. + +It was that precision that convinced me of point one. Any ad-hoc this tight could pull off anything if it advanced their agenda. Ad-hoc? Hell, call them what they were: an army. + +Point two came to me when I sampled the Lincoln build that Tim finished at about three in the morning, after intensive consultation with Debra. The mark of a great ride is that it gets better the second time around, as the detail and flourishes start to impinge on your consciousness. The Mansion was full of little gimcracks and sly nods that snuck into your experience on each successive ride. + +Tim shuffled his feet nervously, bursting with barely restrained pride as I switched on public access. He dumped the app to my public directory, and, gingerly, I executed it. + +God! God and Lincoln and cannon-fire and oratory and ploughs and mules and greatcoats! It rolled over me, it punched through me, it crashed against the inside of my skull and rebounded. The first pass through, there had been a sense of order, of narrative, but this, this was gestalt, the whole thing in one undifferentiated ball, filling me and spilling over. It was panicky for a moment, as the essence of Lincolness seemed to threaten my own personality, and, just as it was about to overwhelm me, it receded, leaving behind a rush of endorphin and adrenaline that made me want to jump. + +“Tim,” I gasped. “Tim! That was…” Words failed me. I wanted to hug him. What we could do for the Mansion with this! What elegance! Directly imprinting the experience, without recourse to the stupid, blind eyes; the thick, deaf ears. + +Tim beamed and basked, and Debra nodded solemnly from her throne. “You liked it?” Tim said. I nodded, and staggered back to the theatre seat where Dan slept, head thrown back, snores softly rattling in his throat. + +Incrementally, reason trickled back into my mind, and with it came ire. How dare they? The wonderful compromises of technology and expense that had given us the Disney rides—rides that had entertained the world for two centuries and more—could never compete head to head with what they were working on. + +My hands knotted into fists in my lap. Why the fuck couldn't they do this somewhere else? Why did they have to destroy everything I loved to realize this? They could build this tech anywhere—they could distribute it online and people could access it from their living rooms! + +But that would never do. Doing it here was better for the old Whuffie—they'd make over Disney World and hold it, a single ad-hoc where three hundred had flourished before, smoothly operating a park twice the size of Manhattan. + +I stood and stalked out of the theater, out into Liberty Square and the Park. It had cooled down without drying out, and there was a damp chill that crawled up my back and made my breath stick in my throat. I turned to contemplate the Hall of Presidents, staid and solid as it had been since my boyhood and before, a monument to the Imagineers who anticipated the Bitchun Society, inspired it. + +I called Dan, still snoring back in the theater, and woke him. He grunted unintelligibly in my cochlea. + +“They did it—they killed me.” I knew they had, and I was glad. It made what I had to do next easier. + +“Oh, Jesus. They didn't kill you—they offered their backups, remember? They couldn't have done it.” + +“Bullshit!” I shouted into the empty night. “Bullshit! They did it, and they fucked with their backups somehow. They must have. It's all too neat and tidy. How else could they have gotten so far with the Hall so fast? They knew it was coming, they planned a disruption, and they moved in. Tell me that you think they just had these plans lying around and moved on them when they could.” + +Dan groaned, and I heard his joints popping. He must have been stretching. The Park breathed around me, the sounds of maintenance crews scurrying in the night. “I do believe that. Clearly, you don't. It's not the first time we've disagreed. So now what?” + +“Now we save the Mansion,” I said. “Now we fight back.” + +“Oh, shit,” Dan said. + +I have to admit, there was a part of me that concurred. + +My opportunity came later that week. Debra's ad-hocs were showboating, announcing a special preview of the new Hall to the other ad-hocs that worked in the Park. It was classic chutzpah, letting the key influencers in the Park in long before the bugs were hammered out. A smooth run would garner the kind of impressed reaction that guaranteed continued support while they finished up; a failed demo could doom them. There were plenty of people in the Park who had a sentimental attachment to the Hall of Presidents, and whatever Debra's people came up with would have to answer their longing. + +“I'm going to do it during the demo,” I told Dan, while I piloted the runabout from home to the castmember parking. I snuck a look at him to gauge his reaction. He had his poker face on. + +“I'm not going to tell Lil,” I continued. “It's better that she doesn't know—plausible deniability.” + +“And me?” he said. “Don't I need plausible deniability?” + +“No,” I said. “No, you don't. You're an outsider. You can make the case that you were working on your own—gone rogue.” I knew it wasn't fair. Dan was here to build up his Whuffie, and if he was implicated in my dirty scheme, he'd have to start over again. I knew it wasn't fair, but I didn't care. I knew that we were fighting for our own survival. “It's good versus evil, Dan. You don't want to be a post-person. You want to stay human. The rides are human. We each mediate them through our own experience. We're physically inside of them, and they talk to us through our senses. What Debra's people are building—it's hive-mind shit. Directly implanting thoughts! Jesus! It's not an experience, it's brainwashing! You gotta know that.” I was pleading, arguing with myself as much as with him. + +I snuck another look at him as I sped along the Disney back-roads, lined with sweaty Florida pines and immaculate purple signage. Dan was looking thoughtful, the way he had back in our old days in Toronto. Some of my tension dissipated. He was thinking about it—I'd gotten through to him. + +“Jules, this isn't one of your better ideas.” My chest tightened, and he patted my shoulder. He had the knack of putting me at my ease, even when he was telling me that I was an idiot. “Even if Debra was behind your assassination—and that's not a certainty, we both know that. Even if that's the case, we've got better means at our disposal. Improving the Mansion, competing with her head to head, that's smart. Give it a little while and we can come back at her, take over the Hall—even the Pirates, that'd really piss her off. Hell, if we can prove she was behind the assassination, we can chase her off right now. Sabotage is not going to do you any good. You've got lots of other options.” + +“But none of them are fast enough, and none of them are emotionally satisfying. This way has some goddamn /{balls}/.” + +We reached castmember parking, I swung the runabout into a slot and stalked out before it had a chance to extrude its recharger cock. I heard Dan's door slam behind me and knew that he was following behind. + +We took to the utilidors grimly. I walked past the cameras, knowing that my image was being archived, my presence logged. I'd picked the timing of my raid carefully: by arriving at high noon, I was sticking to my traditional pattern for watching hot-weather crowd dynamics. I'd made a point of visiting twice during the previous week at this time, and of dawdling in the commissary before heading topside. The delay between my arrival in the runabout and my showing up at the Mansion would not be discrepant. + +Dan dogged my heels as I swung towards the commissary, and then hugged the wall, in the camera's blindspot. Back in my early days in the Park, when I was courting Lil, she showed me the A-Vac, the old pneumatic waste-disposal system, decommissioned in the 20s. The kids who grew up in the Park had been notorious explorers of the tubes, which still whiffed faintly of the garbage bags they'd once whisked at 60 mph to the dump on the property's outskirts, but for a brave, limber kid, the tubes were a subterranean wonderland to explore when the hypermediated experiences of the Park lost their luster. + +I snarled a grin and popped open the service entrance. “If they hadn't killed me and forced me to switch to a new body, I probably wouldn't be flexible enough to fit in,” I hissed at Dan. “Ironic, huh?” + +I clambered inside without waiting for a reply, and started inching my way under the Hall of Presidents. + +My plan had covered every conceivable detail, except one, which didn't occur to me until I was forty minutes into the pneumatic tube, arms held before me and legs angled back like a swimmer's. + +How was I going to reach into my pockets? + +Specifically, how was I going to retrieve my HERF gun from my back pants-pocket, when I couldn't even bend my elbows? The HERF gun was the crux of the plan: a High Energy Radio Frequency generator with a directional, focused beam that would punch up through the floor of the Hall of Presidents and fuse every goddamn scrap of unshielded electronics on the premises. I'd gotten the germ of the idea during Tim's first demo, when I'd seen all of his prototypes spread out backstage, cases off, ready to be tinkered with. Unshielded. + +“Dan,” I said, my voice oddly muffled by the tube's walls. + +“Yeah?” he said. He'd been silent during the journey, the sound of his painful, elbow-dragging progress through the lightless tube my only indicator of his presence. + +“Can you reach my back pocket?” + +“Oh, shit,” he said. + +“Goddamn it,” I said, “keep the fucking editorial to yourself. Can you reach it or not?” + +I heard him grunt as he pulled himself up in the tube, then felt his hand groping up my calf. Soon, his chest was crushing my calves into the tube's floor and his hand was pawing around my ass. + +“I can reach it,” he said. I could tell from his tone that he wasn't too happy about my snapping at him, but I was too wrapped up to consider an apology, despite what must be happening to my Whuffie as Dan did his slow burn. + +He fumbled the gun—a narrow cylinder as long as my palm—out of my pocket. “Now what?” he said. + +“Can you pass it up?” I asked. + +Dan crawled higher, overtop of me, but stuck fast when his ribcage met my glutes. “I can't get any further,” he said. + +“Fine,” I said. “You'll have to fire it, then.” I held my breath. Would he do it? It was one thing to be my accomplice, another to be the author of the destruction. + +“Aw, Jules,” he said. + +“A simple yes or no, Dan. That's all I want to hear from you.” I was boiling with anger—at myself, at Dan, at Debra, at the whole goddamn thing. + +“Fine,” he said. + +“Good. Dial it up to max dispersion and point it straight up.” + +I heard him release the catch, felt a staticky crackle in the air, and then it was done. The gun was a one-shot, something I'd confiscated from a mischievous guest a decade before, when they'd had a brief vogue. + +“Hang on to it,” I said. I had no intention of leaving such a damning bit of evidence behind. I resumed my bellycrawl forward to the next service hatch, near the parking lot, where I'd stashed an identical change of clothes for both of us. + +We made it back just as the demo was getting underway. Debra's ad-hocs were ranged around the mezzanine inside the Hall of Presidents, a collection of influential castmembers from other ad-hocs filling the pre-show area to capacity. + +Dan and I filed in just as Tim was stringing the velvet rope up behind the crowd. He gave me a genuine smile and shook my hand, and I smiled back, full of good feelings now that I knew that he was going down in flames. I found Lil and slipped my hand into hers as we filed into the auditorium, which had the new-car smell of rug shampoo and fresh electronics. + +We took our seats and I bounced my leg nervously, compulsively, while Debra, dressed in Lincoln's coat and stovepipe, delivered a short speech. There was some kind of broadcast rig mounted over the stage now, something to allow them to beam us all their app in one humongous burst. + +Debra finished up and stepped off the stage to a polite round of applause, and they started the demo. + +Nothing happened. I tried to keep the shit-eating grin off my face as nothing happened. No tone in my cochlea indicating a new file in my public directory, no rush of sensation, nothing. I turned to Lil to make some snotty remark, but her eyes were closed, her mouth lolling open, her breath coming in short huffs. Down the row, every castmember was in the same attitude of deep, mind-blown concentration. I pulled up a diagnostic HUD. + +Nothing. No diagnostics. No HUD. I cold-rebooted. + +Nothing. + +I was offline. + +Offline, I filed out of the Hall of Presidents. Offline, I took Lil's hand and walked to the Liberty Belle load-zone, our spot for private conversations. Offline, I bummed a cigarette from her. + +Lil was upset—even through my bemused, offline haze, I could tell that. Tears pricked her eyes. + +“Why didn't you tell me?” she said, after a hard moment's staring into the moonlight reflecting off the river. + +“Tell you?” I said, dumbly. + +“They're really good. They're better than good. They're better than us. Oh, God.” + +Offline, I couldn't find stats or signals to help me discuss the matter. Offline, I tried it without help. “I don't think so. I don't think they've got soul, I don't think they've got history, I don't think they've got any kind of connection to the past. The world grew up in the Disneys—they visit this place for continuity as much as for entertainment. We provide that.” I'm offline, and they're not—what the hell happened? + +“It'll be okay, Lil. There's nothing in that place that's better than us. Different and new, but not better. You know that—you've spent more time in the Mansion than anyone, you know how much refinement, how much work there is in there. How can something they whipped up in a couple weeks possibly be better that this thing we've been maintaining for all these years?” + +She ground the back of her sleeve against her eyes and smiled. “Sorry,” she said. Her nose was red, her eyes puffy, her freckles livid over the flush of her cheeks. “Sorry—it's just shocking. Maybe you're right. And even if you're not—hey, that's the whole point of a meritocracy, right? The best stuff survives, everything else gets supplanted. + +“Oh, shit, I hate how I look when I cry,” she said. “Let's go congratulate them.” + +As I took her hand, I was obscurely pleased with myself for having improved her mood without artificial assistance. + +Dan was nowhere to be seen as Lil and I mounted the stage at the Hall, where Debra's ad-hocs and a knot of well-wishers were celebrating by passing a rock around. Debra had lost the tailcoat and hat, and was in an extreme state of relaxation, arms around the shoulders of two of her cronies, pipe between her teeth. + +She grinned around the pipe as Lil and I stumbled through some insincere compliments, nodded, and toked heavily while Tim applied a torch to the bowl. + +“Thanks,” she said, laconically. “It was a team effort.” She hugged her cronies to her, almost knocking their heads together. + +Lil said, “What's your timeline, then?” + +Debra started unreeling a long spiel about critical paths, milestones, requirements meetings, and I tuned her out. Ad-hocs were crazy for that process stuff. I stared at my feet, at the floorboards, and realized that they weren't floorboards at all, but faux-finish painted over a copper mesh—a Faraday cage. That's why the HERF gun hadn't done anything; that's why they'd been so casual about working with the shielding off their computers. With my eye, I followed the copper shielding around the entire stage and up the walls, where it disappeared into the ceiling. Once again, I was struck by the evolvedness of Debra's ad-hocs, how their trial by fire in China had armored them against the kind of bush-league jiggery-pokery that the fuzzy bunnies in Florida—myself included—came up with. + +For instance, I didn't think there was a single castmember in the Park outside of Deb's clique with the stones to stage an assassination. Once I'd made that leap, I realized that it was only a matter of time until they staged another one—and another, and another. Whatever they could get away with. + +Debra's spiel finally wound down and Lil and I headed away. I stopped in front of the backup terminal in the gateway between Liberty Square and Fantasyland. “When was the last time you backed up?” I asked her. If they could go after me, they might go after any of us. + +“Yesterday,” she said. She exuded bone-weariness at me, looking more like an overmediated guest than a tireless castmember. + +“Let's run another backup, huh? We should really back up at night and at lunchtime—with things the way they are, we can't afford to lose an afternoon's work, much less a week's.” + +Lil rolled her eyes. I knew better than to argue with her when she was tired, but this was too crucial to set aside for petulance. “You can back up that often if you want to, Julius, but don't tell me how to live my life, okay?” + +“Come on, Lil—it only takes a minute, and it'd make me feel a lot better. Please?” I hated the whine in my voice. + +“No, Julius. No. Let's go home and get some sleep. I want to do some work on new merch for the Mansion—some collectible stuff, maybe.” + +“For Christ's sake, is it really so much to ask? Fine. Wait while I back up, then, all right?” + +Lil groaned and glared at me. + +I approached the terminal and cued a backup. Nothing happened. Oh, yeah, right, I was offline. A cool sweat broke out all over my new body. + +Lil grabbed the couch as soon as we got in, mumbling something about wanting to work on some revised merch ideas she'd had. I glared at her as she subvocalized and air-typed in the corner, shut away from me. I hadn't told her that I was offline yet—it just seemed like insignificant personal bitching relative to the crises she was coping with. + +Besides, I'd been knocked offline before, though not in fifty years, and often as not the system righted itself after a good night's sleep. I could visit the doctor in the morning if things were still screwy. + +So I crawled into bed, and when my bladder woke me in the night, I had to go into the kitchen to consult our old starburst clock to get the time. It was 3 a.m., and when the hell had we expunged the house of all timepieces, anyway? + +Lil was sacked out on the couch, and complained feebly when I tried to rouse her, so I covered her with a blanket and went back to bed, alone. + +I woke disoriented and crabby, without my customary morning jolt of endorphin. Vivid dreams of death and destruction slipped away as I sat up. I preferred to let my subconscious do its own thing, so I'd long ago programmed my systems to keep me asleep during REM cycles except in emergencies. The dream left a foul taste in my mind as I staggered into the kitchen, where Lil was fixing coffee. + +“Why didn't you wake me up last night? I'm one big ache from sleeping on the couch,” Lil said as I stumbled in. + +She had the perky, jaunty quality of someone who could instruct her nervous system to manufacture endorphin and adrenaline at will. I felt like punching the wall. + +“You wouldn't get up,” I said, and slopped coffee in the general direction of a mug, then scalded my tongue with it. + +“And why are you up so late? I was hoping you would cover a shift for me—the merch ideas are really coming together and I wanted to hit the Imagineering shop and try some prototyping.” + +“Can't.” I foraged a slice of bread with cheese and noticed a crumby plate in the sink. Dan had already eaten and gone, apparently. + +“Really?” she said, and my blood started to boil in earnest. I slammed Dan's plate into the dishwasher and shoved bread into my maw. + +“Yes. Really. It's your shift—fucking work it or call in sick.” + +Lil reeled. Normally, I was the soul of sweetness in the morning, when I was hormonally enhanced, anyway. “What's wrong, honey?” she said, going into helpful castmember mode. Now I wanted to hit something besides the wall. + +“Just leave me alone, all right? Go fiddle with fucking merch. I've got real work to do—in case you haven't noticed, Debra's about to eat you and your little band of plucky adventurers and pick her teeth with the bones. For God's sake, Lil, don't you ever get fucking angry about anything? Don't you have any goddamned passion?” + +Lil whitened and I felt a sinking feeling in my gut. It was the worst thing I could possibly have said. + +Lil and I met three years before, at a barbecue that some friends of her parents threw, a kind of castmember mixer. She'd been just 19—apparent and real—and had a bubbly, flirty vibe that made me dismiss her, at first, as just another airhead castmember. + +Her parents—Tom and Rita—on the other hand, were fascinating people, members of the original ad-hoc that had seized power in Walt Disney World, wresting control from a gang of wealthy former shareholders who'd been operating it as their private preserve. Rita was apparent 20 or so, but she radiated a maturity and a fiery devotion to the Park that threw her daughter's superficiality into sharp relief. + +They throbbed with Whuffie, Whuffie beyond measure, beyond use. In a world where even a zeroed-out Whuffie loser could eat, sleep, travel and access the net without hassle, their wealth was more than sufficient to repeatedly access the piffling few scarce things left on earth over and over. + +The conversation turned to the first day, when she and her pals had used a cutting torch on the turnstiles and poured in, wearing homemade costumes and name tags. They infiltrated the shops, the control centers, the rides, first by the hundred, then, as the hot July day ticked by, by the thousand. The shareholders' lackeys—who worked the Park for the chance to be a part of the magic, even if they had no control over the management decisions—put up a token resistance. Before the day was out, though, the majority had thrown in their lots with the raiders, handing over security codes and pitching in. + +“But we knew the shareholders wouldn't give in as easy as that,” Lil's mother said, sipping her lemonade. “We kept the Park running 24/7 for the next two weeks, never giving the shareholders a chance to fight back without doing it in front of the guests. We'd prearranged with a couple of airline ad-hocs to add extra routes to Orlando and the guests came pouring in.” She smiled, remembering the moment, and her features in repose were Lil's almost identically. It was only when she was talking that her face changed, muscles tugging it into an expression decades older than the face that bore it. + +“I spent most of the time running the merch stand at Madame Leota's outside the Mansion, gladhanding the guests while hissing nasties back and forth with the shareholders who kept trying to shove me out. I slept in a sleeping bag on the floor of the utilidor, with a couple dozen others, in three hour shifts. That was when I met this asshole”—she chucked her husband on the shoulder—“he'd gotten the wrong sleeping bag by mistake and wouldn't budge when I came down to crash. I just crawled in next to him and the rest, as they say, is history.” + +Lil rolled her eyes and made gagging noises. “Jesus, Rita, no one needs to hear about that part of it.” + +Tom patted her arm. “Lil, you're an adult—if you can't stomach hearing about your parents' courtship, you can either sit somewhere else or grin and bear it. But you don't get to dictate the topic of conversation.” + +Lil gave us adults a very youthful glare and flounced off. Rita shook her head at Lil's departing backside. “There's not much fire in that generation,” she said. “Not a lot of passion. It's our fault—we thought that Disney World would be the best place to raise a child in the Bitchun Society. Maybe it was, but…” She trailed off and rubbed her palms on her thighs, a gesture I'd come to know in Lil, by and by. “I guess there aren't enough challenges for them these days. They're too cooperative.” She laughed and her husband took her hand. + +“We sound like our parents,” Tom said. “'When we were growing up, we didn't have any of this newfangled life-extension stuff—we took our chances with the cave bears and the dinosaurs!'” Tom wore himself older, apparent 50, with graying sidewalls and crinkled smile-lines, the better to present a non-threatening air of authority to the guests. It was a truism among the first-gen ad-hocs that women castmembers should wear themselves young, men old. “We're just a couple of Bitchun fundamentalists, I guess.” + +Lil called over from a nearby conversation: “Are they telling you what a pack of milksops we are, Julius? When you get tired of that, why don't you come over here and have a smoke?” I noticed that she and her cohort were passing a crack pipe. + +“What's the use?” Lil's mother sighed. + +“Oh, I don't know that it's as bad as all that,” I said, virtually my first words of the afternoon. I was painfully conscious that I was only there by courtesy, just one of the legion of hopefuls who flocked to Orlando every year, aspiring to a place among the ruling cliques. “They're passionate about maintaining the Park, that's for sure. I made the mistake of lifting a queue-gate at the Jungleboat Cruise last week and I got a very earnest lecture about the smooth functioning of the Park from a castmember who couldn't have been more than 18. I think that they don't have the passion for creating Bitchunry that we have—they don't need it—but they've got plenty of drive to maintain it.” + +Lil's mother gave me a long, considering look that I didn't know what to make of. I couldn't tell if I had offended her or what. + +“I mean, you can't be a revolutionary after the revolution, can you? Didn't we all struggle so that kids like Lil wouldn't have to?” + +“Funny you should say that,” Tom said. He had the same considering look on his face. “Just yesterday we were talking about the very same thing. We were talking—” he drew a breath and looked askance at his wife, who nodded—“about deadheading. For a while, anyway. See if things changed much in fifty or a hundred years.” + +I felt a kind of shameful disappointment. Why was I wasting my time schmoozing with these two, when they wouldn't be around when the time came to vote me in? I banished the thought as quickly as it came—I was talking to them because they were nice people. Not every conversation had to be strategically important. + +“Really? Deadheading.” I remember that I thought of Dan then, about his views on the cowardice of deadheading, on the bravery of ending it when you found yourself obsolete. He'd comforted me once, when my last living relative, my uncle, opted to go to sleep for three thousand years. My uncle had been born pre-Bitchun, and had never quite gotten the hang of it. Still, he was my link to my family, to my first adulthood and my only childhood. Dan had taken me to Gananoque and we'd spent the day bounding around the countryside on seven-league boots, sailing high over the lakes of the Thousand Islands and the crazy fiery carpet of autumn leaves. We topped off the day at a dairy commune he knew where they still made cheese from cow's milk and there'd been a thousand smells and bottles of strong cider and a girl whose name I'd long since forgotten but whose exuberant laugh I'd remember forever. And it wasn't so important, then, my uncle going to sleep for three milliennia, because whatever happened, there were the leaves and the lakes and the crisp sunset the color of blood and the girl's laugh. + +“Have you talked to Lil about it?” + +Rita shook her head. “It's just a thought, really. We don't want to worry her. She's not good with hard decisions—it's her generation.” + +They changed the subject not long thereafter, and I sensed discomfort, knew that they had told me too much, more than they'd intended. I drifted off and found Lil and her young pals, and we toked a little and cuddled a little. + +Within a month, I was working at the Haunted Mansion, Tom and Rita were invested in Canopic jars in Kissimee with instructions not to be woken until their newsbots grabbed sufficient interesting material to make it worth their while, and Lil and I were a hot item. + +Lil didn't deal well with her parents' decision to deadhead. For her, it was a slap in the face, a reproach to her and her generation of twittering Polyannic castmembers. + +For God's sake, Lil, don't you ever get fucking angry about anything? Don't you have any goddamned passion? + +The words were out of my mouth before I knew I was saying them, and Lil, 15 percent of my age, young enough to be my great-granddaughter; Lil, my lover and best friend and sponsor to the Liberty Square ad-hocracy; Lil turned white as a sheet, turned on her heel and walked out of the kitchen. She got in her runabout and went to the Park to take her shift. + +I went back to bed and stared at the ceiling fan as it made its lazy turns, and felt like shit. + +1~ CHAPTER 5 + +When I finally returned to the Park, 36 hours had passed and Lil had not come back to the house. If she'd tried to call, she would've gotten my voicemail—I had no way of answering my phone. As it turned out, she hadn't been trying to reach me at all. + +I'd spent the time alternately moping, drinking, and plotting terrible, irrational vengeance on Debra for killing me, destroying my relationship, taking away my beloved (in hindsight, anyway) Hall of Presidents and threatening the Mansion. Even in my addled state, I knew that this was pretty unproductive, and I kept promising that I would cut it out, take a shower and some sober-ups, and get to work at the Mansion. + +I was working up the energy to do just that when Dan came in. + +“Jesus,” he said, shocked. I guess I was a bit of a mess, sprawled on the sofa in my underwear, all gamy and baggy and bloodshot. + +“Hey, Dan. How's it goin'?” + +He gave me one of his patented wry looks and I felt the same weird reversal of roles that we'd undergone at the U of T, when he had become the native, and I had become the interloper. He was the together one with the wry looks and I was the pathetic seeker who'd burned all his reputation capital. Out of habit, I checked my Whuffie, and a moment later I stopped being startled by its low score and was instead shocked by the fact that I could check it at all. I was back online! + +“Now, what do you know about that?” I said, staring at my dismal Whuffie. + +“What?” he said. + +I called his cochlea. “My systems are back online,” I subvocalized. + +He started. “You were offline?” + +I jumped up from the couch and did a little happy underwear dance. “I /{was}/, but I'm not /{now}/.” I felt better than I had in days, ready to beat the world—or at least Debra. + +“Let me take a shower, then let's get to the Imagineering labs. I've got a pretty kickass idea.” + +The idea, as I explained it in the runabout, was a preemptive rehab of the Mansion. Sabotaging the Hall had been a nasty, stupid idea, and I'd gotten what I deserved for it. The whole point of the Bitchun Society was to be more reputable than the next ad-hoc, to succeed on merit, not trickery, despite assassinations and the like. + +So a rehab it would be. + +“Back in the early days of the Disneyland Mansion, in California,” I explained, “Walt had a guy in a suit of armor just past the first Doom Buggy curve, he'd leap out and scare the hell out of the guests as they went by. It didn't last long, of course. The poor bastard kept getting punched out by startled guests, and besides, the armor wasn't too comfortable for long shifts.” + +Dan chuckled appreciatively. The Bitchun Society had all but done away with any sort of dull, repetitious labor, and what remained—tending bar, mopping toilets—commanded Whuffie aplenty and a life of leisure in your off-hours. + +“But that guy in the suit of armor, he could /{improvise}/. You'd get a slightly different show every time. It's like the castmembers who spiel on the Jungleboat Cruise. They've each got their own patter, their own jokes, and even though the animatronics aren't so hot, it makes the show worth seeing.” + +“You're going to fill the Mansion with castmembers in armor?” Dan asked, shaking his head. + +I waved away his objections, causing the runabout to swerve, terrifying a pack of guests who were taking a ride on rented bikes around the property. “No,” I said, flapping a hand apologetically at the white-faced guests. “Not at all. But what if all of the animatronics had human operators—telecontrollers, working with waldoes? We'll let them interact with the guests, talk with them, scare them… We'll get rid of the existing animatronics, replace 'em with full-mobility robots, then cast the parts over the Net. Think of the Whuffie! You could put, say, a thousand operators online at once, ten shifts per day, each of them caught up in our Mansion… We'll give out awards for outstanding performances, the shifts'll be based on popular vote. In effect, we'll be adding another ten thousand guests to the Mansion's throughput every day, only these guests will be honorary castmembers.” + +“That's pretty good,” Dan said. “Very Bitchun. Debra may have AI and flash-baking, but you'll have human interaction, courtesy of the biggest Mansion-fans in the world—” + +“And those are the very fans Debra'll have to win over to make a play for the Mansion. Very elegant, huh?” + +The first order of business was to call Lil, patch things up, and pitch the idea to her. The only problem was, my cochlea was offline again. My mood started to sour, and I had Dan call her instead. + +We met her up at Imagineering, a massive complex of prefab aluminum buildings painted Go-Away Green that had thronged with mad inventors since the Bitchun Society had come to Walt Disney World. The ad-hocs who had built an Imagineering department in Florida and now ran the thing were the least political in the Park, classic labcoat-and-clipboard types who would work for anyone so long as the ideas were cool. Not caring about Whuffie meant that they accumulated it in plenty on both the left and right hands. + +Lil was working with Suneep, AKA the Merch Miracle. He could design, prototype and produce a souvenir faster than anyone—shirts, sculptures, pens, toys, housewares, he was the king. They were collaborating on their HUDs, facing each other across a lab-bench in the middle of a lab as big as a basketball court, cluttered with logomarked tchotchkes and gabbling away while their eyes danced over invisible screens. + +Dan reflexively joined the collaborative space as he entered the lab, leaving me the only one out on the joke. Dan was clearly delighted by what he saw. + +I nudged him with an elbow. “Make a hardcopy,” I hissed. + +Instead of pitying me, he just airtyped a few commands and pages started to roll out of a printer in the lab's corner. Anyone else would have made a big deal out of it, but he just brought me into the discussion. + +If I needed proof that Lil and I were meant for each other, the designs she and Suneep had come up with were more than enough. She'd been thinking just the way I had—souvenirs that stressed the human scale of the Mansion. There were miniature animatronics of the Hitchhiking Ghosts in a black-light box, their skeletal robotics visible through their layers of plastic clothing; action figures that communicated by IR, so that placing one in proximity with another would unlock its Mansion-inspired behaviors—the raven cawed, Mme. Leota's head incanted, the singing busts sang. She'd worked up some formal attire based on the castmember costume, cut in this year's stylish lines. + +It was good merch, is what I'm trying to say. In my mind's eye, I was seeing the relaunch of the Mansion in six months, filled with robotic avatars of Mansion-nuts the world 'round, Mme. Leota's gift cart piled high with brilliant swag, strolling human players ad-libbing with the guests in the queue area… + +Lil looked up from her mediated state and glared at me as I pored over the hardcopy, nodding enthusiastically. + +“Passionate enough for you?” she snapped. + +I felt a flush creeping into face, my ears. It was somewhere between anger and shame, and I reminded myself that I was more than a century older than her, and it was my responsibility to be mature. Also, I'd started the fight. + +“This is fucking fantastic, Lil,” I said. Her look didn't soften. “Really choice stuff. I had a great idea—” I ran it down for her, the avatars, the robots, the rehab. She stopped glaring, started taking notes, smiling, showing me her dimples, her slanted eyes crinkling at the corners. + +“This isn't easy,” she said, finally. Suneep, who'd been politely pretending not to listen in, nodded involuntarily. Dan, too. + +“I know that,” I said. The flush burned hotter. “But that's the point—what Debra does isn't easy either. It's risky, dangerous. It made her and her ad-hoc better—it made them sharper.” /{Sharper than us, that's for sure}/. “They can make decisions like this fast, and execute them just as quickly. We need to be able to do that, too.” + +Was I really advocating being more like Debra? The words'd just popped out, but I saw that I'd been right—we'd have to beat Debra at her own game, out-evolve her ad-hocs. + +“I understand what you're saying,” Lil said. I could tell she was upset—she'd reverted to castmemberspeak. “It's a very good idea. I think that we stand a good chance of making it happen if we approach the group and put it to them, after doing the research, building the plans, laying out the critical path, and privately soliciting feedback from some of them.” + +I felt like I was swimming in molasses. At the rate that the Liberty Square ad-hoc moved, we'd be holding formal requirements reviews while Debra's people tore down the Mansion around us. So I tried a different tactic. + +“Suneep, you've been involved in some rehabs, right?” + +Suneep nodded slowly, with a cautious expression, a nonpolitical animal being drawn into a political discussion. + +“Okay, so tell me, if we came to you with this plan and asked you to pull together a production schedule—one that didn't have any review, just take the idea and run with it—and then pull it off, how long would it take you to execute it?” + +Lil smiled primly. She'd dealt with Imagineering before. + +“About five years,” he said, almost instantly. + +“Five years?” I squawked. “Why five years? Debra's people overhauled the Hall in a month!” + +“Oh, wait,” he said. “No review at all?” + +“No review. Just come up with the best way you can to do this, and do it. And we can provide you with unlimited, skilled labor, three shifts around the clock.” + +He rolled his eyes back and ticked off days on his fingers while muttering under his breath. He was a tall, thin man with a shock of curly dark hair that he smoothed unconsciously with surprisingly stubby fingers while he thought. + +“About eight weeks,” he said. “Barring accidents, assuming off-the-shelf parts, unlimited labor, capable management, material availability…” He trailed off again, and his short fingers waggled as he pulled up a HUD and started making a list. + +“Wait,” Lil said, alarmed. “How do you get from five years to eight weeks?” + +Now it was my turn to smirk. I'd seen how Imagineering worked when they were on their own, building prototypes and conceptual mockups—I knew that the real bottleneck was the constant review and revisions, the ever-fluctuating groupmind consensus of the ad-hoc that commissioned their work. + +Suneep looked sheepish. “Well, if all I have to do is satisfy myself that my plans are good and my buildings won't fall down, I can make it happen very fast. Of course, my plans aren't perfect. Sometimes, I'll be halfway through a project when someone suggests a new flourish or approach that makes the whole thing immeasurably better. Then it's back to the drawing board… So I stay at the drawing board for a long time at the start, get feedback from other Imagineers, from the ad-hocs, from focus groups and the Net. Then we do reviews at every stage of construction, check to see if anyone has had a great idea we haven't thought of and incorporate it, sometimes rolling back the work. + +“It's slow, but it works.” + +Lil was flustered. “But if you can do a complete revision in eight weeks, why not just finish it, then plan another revision, do /{that}/ one in eight weeks, and so on? Why take five years before anyone can ride the thing?” + +“Because that's how it's done,” I said to Lil. “But that's not how it /{has}/ to be done. That's how we'll save the Mansion.” + +I felt the surety inside of me, the certain knowledge that I was right. Ad-hocracy was a great thing, a Bitchun thing, but the organization needed to turn on a dime—that would be even /{more}/ Bitchun. + +“Lil,” I said, looking into her eyes, trying to burn my POV into her. “We have to do this. It's our only chance. We'll recruit hundreds to come to Florida and work on the rehab. We'll give every Mansion nut on the planet a shot at joining up, then we'll recruit them again to work at it, to run the telepresence rigs. We'll get buy-in from the biggest super-recommenders in the world, and we'll build something better and faster than any ad-hoc ever has, without abandoning the original Imagineers' vision. It will be unspeakably Bitchun.” + +Lil dropped her eyes and it was her turn to flush. She paced the floor, hands swinging at her sides. I could tell that she was still angry with me, but excited and scared and yes, passionate. + +“It's not up to me, you know,” she said at length, still pacing. Dan and I exchanged wicked grins. She was in. + +“I know,” I said. But it was, almost—she was a real opinion-leader in the Liberty Square ad-hoc, someone who knew the systems back and forth, someone who made good, reasonable decisions and kept her head in a crisis. Not a hothead. Not prone to taking radical switchbacks. This plan would burn up that reputation and the Whuffie that accompanied it, in short order, but by the time that happened, she'd have plenty of Whuffie with the new, thousands-strong ad-hoc. + +“I mean, I can't guarantee anything. I'd like to study the plans that Imagineering comes through with, do some walk-throughs—” + +I started to object, to remind her that speed was of the essence, but she beat me to it. + +“But I won't. We have to move fast. I'm in.” + +She didn't come into my arms, didn't kiss me and tell me everything was forgiven, but she bought in, and that was enough. + +My systems came back online sometime that day, and I hardly noticed, I was so preoccupied with the new Mansion. Holy shit, was it ever audacious: since the first Mansion opened in California in 1969, no one had ever had the guts to seriously fuxor with it. Oh, sure, the Paris version, Phantom Manor, had a slightly different storyline, but it was just a minor bit of tweakage to satisfy the European market at the time. No one wanted to screw up the legend. + +What the hell made the Mansion so cool, anyway? I'd been to Disney World any number of times as a guest before I settled in, and truth be told, it had never been my absolute favorite. + +But when I returned to Disney World, live and in person, freshly bored stupid by the three-hour liveheaded flight from Toronto, I'd found myself crowd-driven to it. + +I'm a terrible, terrible person to visit theme-parks with. Since I was a punk kid snaking my way through crowded subway platforms, eeling into the only seat on a packed car, I'd been obsessed with Beating The Crowd. + +In the early days of the Bitchun Society, I'd known a blackjack player, a compulsive counter of cards, an idiot savant of odds. He was a pudgy, unassuming engineer, the moderately successful founder of a moderately successful high-tech startup that had done something arcane with software agents. While he was only moderately successful, he was fabulously wealthy: he'd never raised a cent of financing for his company, and had owned it outright when he finally sold it for a bathtub full of money. His secret was the green felt tables of Vegas, where he'd pilgrim off to every time his bank balance dropped, there to count the monkey-cards and calculate the odds and Beat The House. + +Long after his software company was sold, long after he'd made his nut, he was dressing up in silly disguises and hitting the tables, grinding out hand after hand of twenty-one, for the sheer satisfaction of Beating The House. For him, it was pure brain-reward, a jolt of happy-juice every time the dealer busted and every time he doubled down on a deckfull of face cards. + +Though I'd never bought so much as a lottery ticket, I immediately got his compulsion: for me, it was Beating The Crowd, finding the path of least resistance, filling the gaps, guessing the short queue, dodging the traffic, changing lanes with a whisper to spare—moving with precision and grace and, above all, /{expedience}/. + +On that fateful return, I checked into the Fort Wilderness Campground, pitched my tent, and fairly ran to the ferry docks to catch a barge over to the Main Gate. + +Crowds were light until I got right up to Main Gate and the ticketing queues. Suppressing an initial instinct to dash for the farthest one, beating my ferrymates to what rule-of-thumb said would have the shortest wait, I stepped back and did a quick visual survey of the twenty kiosks and evaluated the queued-up huddle in front of each. Pre-Bitchun, I'd have been primarily interested in their ages, but that is less and less a measure of anything other than outlook, so instead I carefully examined their queuing styles, their dress, and more than anything, their burdens. + +You can tell more about someone's ability to efficiently negotiate the complexities of a queue through what they carry than through any other means—if only more people realized it. The classic, of course, is the unladen citizen, a person naked of even a modest shoulderbag or marsupial pocket. To the layperson, such a specimen might be thought of as a sure bet for a fast transaction, but I'd done an informal study and come to the conclusion that these brave iconoclasts are often the flightiest of the lot, left smiling with bovine mystification, patting down their pockets in a fruitless search for a writing implement, a piece of ID, a keycard, a rabbit's foot, a rosary, a tuna sandwich. + +No, for my money, I'll take what I call the Road Worrier anytime. Such a person is apt to be carefully slung with four or five carriers of one description or another, from bulging cargo pockets to clever military-grade strap-on pouches with biometrically keyed closures. The thing to watch for is the ergonomic consideration given to these conveyances: do they balance, are they slung for minimum interference and maximum ease of access? Someone who's given that much consideration to their gear is likely spending their time in line determining which bits and pieces they'll need when they reach its headwaters and is holding them at ready for fastest-possible processing. + +This is a tricky call, since there are lookalike pretenders, gear-pigs who pack /{everything}/ because they lack the organizational smarts to figure out what they should pack—they're just as apt to be burdened with bags and pockets and pouches, but the telltale is the efficiency of that slinging. These pack mules will sag beneath their loads, juggling this and that while pushing overloose straps up on their shoulders. + +I spied a queue that was made up of a group of Road Worriers, a queue that was slightly longer than the others, but I joined it and ticced nervously as I watched my progress relative to the other spots I could've chosen. I was borne out, a positive omen for a wait-free World, and I was sauntering down Main Street, USA long before my ferrymates. + +Returning to Walt Disney World was a homecoming for me. My parents had brought me the first time when I was all of ten, just as the first inklings of the Bitchun society were trickling into everyone's consciousness: the death of scarcity, the death of death, the struggle to rejig an economy that had grown up focused on nothing but scarcity and death. My memories of the trip are dim but warm, the balmy Florida climate and a sea of smiling faces punctuated by magical, darkened moments riding in OmniMover cars, past diorama after diorama. + +I went again when I graduated high school and was amazed by the richness of detail, the grandiosity and grandeur of it all. I spent a week there stunned bovine, grinning and wandering from corner to corner. Someday, I knew, I'd come to live there. + +The Park became a touchstone for me, a constant in a world where everything changed. Again and again, I came back to the Park, grounding myself, communing with all the people I'd been. + +That day I bopped from land to land, ride to ride, seeking out the short lines, the eye of the hurricane that crowded the Park to capacity. I'd take high ground, standing on a bench or hopping up on a fence, and do a visual reccy of all the queues in sight, try to spot prevailing currents in the flow of the crowd, generally having a high old obsessive time. Truth be told, I probably spent as much time looking for walk-ins as I would've spent lining up like a good little sheep, but I had more fun and got more exercise. + +The Haunted Mansion was experiencing a major empty spell: the Snow Crash Spectacular parade had just swept through Liberty Square en route to Fantasyland, dragging hordes of guests along with it, dancing to the JapRap sounds of the comical Sushi-K and aping the movements of the brave Hiro Protagonist. When they blew out, Liberty Square was a ghost town, and I grabbed the opportunity to ride the Mansion five times in a row, walking on every time. + +The way I tell it to Lil, I noticed her and then I noticed the Mansion, but to tell the truth it was the other way around. + +The first couple rides through, I was just glad of the aggressive air conditioning and the delicious sensation of sweat drying on my skin. But on the third pass, I started to notice just how goddamn cool the thing was. There wasn't a single bit of tech more advanced than a film-loop projector in the whole place, but it was all so cunningly contrived that the illusion of a haunted house was perfect: the ghosts that whirled through the ballroom were /{ghosts}/, three-dimensional and ethereal and phantasmic. The ghosts that sang in comical tableaux through the graveyard were equally convincing, genuinely witty and simultaneously creepy. + +My fourth pass through, I noticed the /{detail}/, the hostile eyes worked into the wallpaper's pattern, the motif repeated in the molding, the chandeliers, the photo gallery. I began to pick out the words to “Grim Grinning Ghosts,” the song that is repeated throughout the ride, whether in sinister organ-tones repeating the main theme troppo troppo or the spritely singing of the four musical busts in the graveyard. + +It's a catchy tune, one that I hummed on my fifth pass through, this time noticing that the overaggressive AC was, actually, mysterious chills that blew through the rooms as wandering spirits made their presence felt. By the time I debarked for the fifth time, I was whistling the tune with jazzy improvisations in a mixed-up tempo. + +That's when Lil and I ran into each other. She was picking up a discarded ice-cream wrapper—I'd seen a dozen castmembers picking up trash that day, seen it so frequently that I'd started doing it myself. She grinned slyly at me as I debarked into the fried-food-and-disinfectant perfume of the Park, hands in pockets, thoroughly pleased with myself for having so completely /{experienced}/ a really fine hunk of art. + +I smiled back at her, because it was only natural that one of the Whuffie-kings who were privileged to tend this bit of heavenly entertainment should notice how thoroughly I was enjoying her work. + +“That's really, really Bitchun,” I said to her, admiring the titanic mountains of Whuffie my HUD attributed to her. + +She was in character, and not supposed to be cheerful, but castmembers of her generation can't help but be friendly. She compromised between ghastly demeanor and her natural sweet spirit, and leered a grin at me, thumped through a zombie's curtsey, and moaned “Thank you—we /{do}/ try to keep it /{spirited}/.” + +I groaned appreciatively, and started to notice just how very cute she was, this little button of a girl with her rotting maid's uniform and her feather-shedding duster. She was just so clean and scrubbed and happy about everything, she radiated it and made me want to pinch her cheeks—either set. + +The moment was on me, and so I said, “When do they let you ghouls off? I'd love to take you out for a Zombie or a Bloody Mary.” + +Which led to more horrifying banter, and to my taking her out for a couple at the Adventurer's Club, learning her age in the process and losing my nerve, telling myself that there was nothing we could possibly have to say to each other across a century-wide gap. + +While I tell Lil that I noticed her first and the Mansion second, the reverse is indeed true. But it's also true—and I never told her this—that the thing I love best about the Mansion is: + +It's where I met her. + +Dan and I spent the day riding the Mansion, drafting scripts for the telepresence players who we hoped to bring on-board. We were in a totally creative zone, the dialog running as fast as he could transcribe it. Jamming on ideas with Dan was just about as terrific as a pass-time could be. + +I was all for leaking the plan to the Net right away, getting hearts-and-minds action with our core audience, but Lil turned it down. + +She was going to spend the next couple days quietly politicking among the rest of the ad-hoc, getting some support for the idea, and she didn't want the appearance of impropriety that would come from having outsiders being brought in before the ad-hoc. + +Talking to the ad-hocs, bringing them around—it was a skill I'd never really mastered. Dan was good at it, Lil was good at it, but me, I think that I was too self-centered to ever develop good skills as a peacemaker. In my younger days, I assumed that it was because I was smarter than everyone else, with no patience for explaining things in short words for mouth-breathers who just didn't get it. + +The truth of the matter is, I'm a bright enough guy, but I'm hardly a genius. Especially when it comes to people. Probably comes from Beating The Crowd, never seeing individuals, just the mass—the enemy of expedience. + +I never would have made it into the Liberty Square ad-hoc on my own. Lil made it happen for me, long before we started sleeping together. I'd assumed that her folks would be my best allies in the process of joining up, but they were too jaded, too ready to take the long sleep to pay much attention to a newcomer like me. + +Lil took me under her wing, inviting me to after-work parties, talking me up to her cronies, quietly passing around copies of my thesis-work. And she did the same in reverse, sincerely extolling the virtues of the others I met, so that I knew what there was to respect about them and couldn't help but treat them as individuals. + +In the years since, I'd lost that respect. Mostly, I palled around with Lil, and once he arrived, Dan, and with net-friends around the world. The ad-hocs that I worked with all day treated me with basic courtesy but not much friendliness. + +I guess I treated them the same. When I pictured them in my mind, they were a faceless, passive-aggressive mass, too caught up in the starchy world of consensus-building to ever do much of anything. + +Dan and I threw ourselves into it headlong, trolling the Net for address lists of Mansion-otakus from the four corners of the globe, spreadsheeting them against their timezones, temperaments, and, of course, their Whuffie. + +“That's weird,” I said, looking up from the old-fashioned terminal I was using—my systems were back offline. They'd been sputtering up and down for a couple days now, and I kept meaning to go to the doctor, but I'd never gotten 'round to it. Periodically, I'd get a jolt of urgency when I remembered that this meant my backup was stale-dating, but the Mansion always took precedence. + +“Huh?” he said. + +I tapped the display. “See these?” It was a fan-site, displaying a collection of animated 3-D meshes of various elements of the Mansion, part of a giant collaborative project that had been ongoing for decades, to build an accurate 3-D walkthrough of every inch of the Park. I'd used those meshes to build my own testing fly-throughs. + +“Those are terrific,” Dan said. “That guy must be a total /{fiend}/.” The meshes' author had painstakingly modeled, chained and animated every ghost in the ballroom scene, complete with the kinematics necessary for full motion. Where a “normal” fan-artist might've used a standard human kinematics library for the figures, this one had actually written his own from the ground up, so that the ghosts moved with a spectral fluidity that was utterly unhuman. + +“Who's the author?” Dan asked. “Do we have him on our list yet?” + +I scrolled down to display the credits. “I'll be damned,” Dan breathed. + +The author was Tim, Debra's elfin crony. He'd submitted the designs a week before my assassination. + +“What do you think it means?” I asked Dan, though I had a couple ideas on the subject myself. + +“Tim's a Mansion nut,” Dan said. “I knew that.” + +“You knew?” + +He looked a little defensive. “Sure. I told you, back when you had me hanging out with Debra's gang.” + +Had I asked him to hang out with Debra? As I remembered it, it had been his suggestion. Too much to think about. + +“But what does it mean, Dan? Is he an ally? Should we try to recruit him? Or is he the one that'd convinced Debra she needs to take over the Mansion?” + +Dan shook his head. “I'm not even sure that she wants to take over the Mansion. I know Debra, all she wants to do is turn ideas into things, as fast and as copiously as possible. She picks her projects carefully. She's acquisitive, sure, but she's cautious. She had a great idea for Presidents, and so she took over. I never heard her talk about the Mansion.” + +“Of course you didn't. She's cagey. Did you hear her talk about the Hall of Presidents?” + +Dan fumbled. “Not really… I mean, not in so many words, but—” + +“But nothing,” I said. “She's after the Mansion, she's after the Magic Kingdom, she's after the Park. She's taking over, goddamn it, and I'm the only one who seems to have noticed.” + +I came clean to Lil about my systems that night, as we were fighting. Fighting had become our regular evening pastime, and Dan had taken to sleeping at one of the hotels on-site rather than endure it. + +I'd started it, of course. “We're going to get killed if we don't get off our asses and start the rehab,” I said, slamming myself down on the sofa and kicking at the scratched coffee table. I heard the hysteria and unreason in my voice and it just made me madder. I was frustrated by not being able to check in on Suneep and Dan, and, as usual, it was too late at night to call anyone and do anything about it. By the morning, I'd have forgotten again. + +From the kitchen, Lil barked back, “I'm doing what I can, Jules. If you've got a better way, I'd love to hear about it.” + +“Oh, bullshit. I'm doing what I can, planning the thing out. I'm ready to /{go}/. It was your job to get the ad-hocs ready for it, but you keep telling me they're not. When will they be?” + +“Jesus, you're a nag.” + +“I wouldn't nag if you'd only fucking make it happen. What are you doing all day, anyway? Working shifts at the Mansion? Rearranging deck chairs on the Great Titanic Adventure?” + +“I'm working my fucking /{ass}/ off. I've spoken to every goddamn one of them at least twice this week about it.” + +“Sure,” I hollered at the kitchen. “Sure you have.” + +“Don't take my word for it, then. Check my fucking phone logs.” + +She waited. + +“Well? Check them!” + +“I'll check them later,” I said, dreading where this was going. + +“Oh, no you /{don't}/,” she said, stalking into the room, fuming. “You can't call me a liar and then refuse to look at the evidence.” She planted her hands on her slim little hips and glared at me. She'd gone pale and I could count every freckle on her face, her throat, her collarbones, the swell of her cleavage in the old vee-neck shirt I'd given her on a day-trip to Nassau. + +“Well?” she asked. She looked ready to wring my neck. + +“I can't,” I admitted, not meeting her eyes. + +“Yes you can—here, I'll dump it to your public directory.” + +Her expression shifted to one of puzzlement when she failed to locate me on her network. “What's going on?” + +So I told her. Offline, outcast, malfunctioning. + +“Well, why haven't you gone to the doctor? I mean, it's been /{weeks}/. I'll call him right now.” + +“Forget it,” I said. “I'll see him tomorrow. No sense in getting him out of bed.” + +But I didn't see him the day after, or the day after that. Too much to do, and the only times I remembered to call someone, I was too far from a public terminal or it was too late or too early. My systems came online a couple times, and I was too busy with the plans for the Mansion. Lil grew accustomed to the drifts of hard copy that littered the house, to printing out her annotations to my designs and leaving them on my favorite chair—to living like the cavemen of the information age had, surrounded by dead trees and ticking clocks. + +Being offline helped me focus. Focus is hardly the word for it—I obsessed. I sat in front of the terminal I'd brought home all day, every day, crunching plans, dictating voicemail. People who wanted to reach me had to haul ass out to the house, and /{speak}/ to me. + +I grew too obsessed to fight, and Dan moved back, and then it was my turn to take hotel rooms so that the rattle of my keyboard wouldn't keep him up nights. He and Lil were working a full-time campaign to recruit the ad-hoc to our cause, and I started to feel like we were finally in harmony, about to reach our goal. + +I went home one afternoon clutching a sheaf of hardcopy and burst into the living room, gabbling a mile-a-minute about a wrinkle on my original plan that would add a third walk-through segment to the ride, increasing the number of telepresence rigs we could use without decreasing throughput. + +I was mid-babble when my systems came back online. The public chatter in the room sprang up on my HUD. + +/{And then I'm going to tear off every stitch of clothing and jump you.}/ + +/{And then what?}/ + +/{I'm going to bang you till you limp.}/ + +/{Jesus, Lil, you are one rangy cowgirl.}/ + +My eyes closed, shutting out everything except for the glowing letters. Quickly, they vanished. I opened my eyes again, looking at Lil, who was flushed and distracted. Dan looked scared. + +“What's going on, Dan?” I asked quietly. My heart hammered in my chest, but I felt calm and detached. + +“Jules,” he began, then gave up and looked at Lil. + +Lil had, by that time, figured out that I was back online, that their secret messaging had been discovered. + +“Having fun, Lil?” I asked. + +Lil shook her head and glared at me. “Just go, Julius. I'll send your stuff to the hotel.” + +“You want me to go, huh? So you can bang him till he limps?” + +“This is my house, Julius. I'm asking you to get out of it. I'll see you at work tomorrow—we're having a general ad-hoc meeting to vote on the rehab.” + +It was her house. + +“Lil, Julius—” Dan began. + +“This is between me and him,” Lil said. “Stay out of it.” + +I dropped my papers—I wanted to throw them, but I dropped them, /{flump}/, and I turned on my heel and walked out, not bothering to close the door behind me. + +Dan showed up at the hotel ten minutes after I did and rapped on my door. I was all-over numb as I opened the door. He had a bottle of tequila—/{my}/ tequila, brought over from the house that I'd shared with Lil. + +He sat down on the bed and stared at the logo-marked wallpaper. I took the bottle from him, got a couple glasses from the bathroom and poured. + +“It's my fault,” he said. + +“I'm sure it is,” I said. + +“We got to drinking a couple nights ago. She was really upset. Hadn't seen you in days, and when she /{did}/ see you, you freaked her out. Snapping at her. Arguing. Insulting her.” + +“So you made her,” I said. + +He shook his head, then nodded, took a drink. “I did. It's been a long time since I…” + +“You had sex with my girlfriend, in my house, while I was away, working.” + +“Jules, I'm sorry. I did it, and I kept on doing it. I'm not much of a friend to either of you. + +“She's pretty broken up. She wanted me to come out here and tell you it was all a mistake, that you were just being paranoid.” + +We sat in silence for a long time. I refilled his glass, then my own. + +“I couldn't do that,” he said. “I'm worried about you. You haven't been right, not for months. I don't know what it is, but you should get to a doctor.” + +“I don't need a doctor,” I snapped. The liquor had melted the numbness and left burning anger and bile, my constant companions. “I need a friend who doesn't fuck my girlfriend when my back is turned.” + +I threw my glass at the wall. It bounced off, leaving tequila-stains on the wallpaper, and rolled under the bed. Dan started, but stayed seated. If he'd stood up, I would've hit him. Dan's good at crises. + +“If it's any consolation, I expect to be dead pretty soon,” he said. He gave me a wry grin. “My Whuffie's doing good. This rehab should take it up over the top. I'll be ready to go.” + +That stopped me. I'd somehow managed to forget that Dan, my good friend Dan, was going to kill himself. + +“You're going to do it,” I said, sitting down next to him. It hurt to think about it. I really liked the bastard. He might've been my best friend. + +There was a knock at the door. I opened it without checking the peephole. It was Lil. + +She looked younger than ever. Young and small and miserable. A snide remark died in my throat. I wanted to hold her. + +She brushed past me and went to Dan, who squirmed out of her embrace. + +“No,” he said, and stood up and sat on the windowsill, staring down at the Seven Seas Lagoon. + +“Dan's just been explaining to me that he plans on being dead in a couple months,” I said. “Puts a damper on the long-term plans, doesn't it, Lil?” + +Tears streamed down her face and she seemed to fold in on herself. “I'll take what I can get,” she said. + +I choked on a knob of misery, and I realized that it was Dan, not Lil, whose loss upset me the most. + +Lil took Dan's hand and led him out of the room. + +/{I guess I'll take what I can get, too}/, I thought. + +1~ CHAPTER 6 + +Lying on my hotel bed, mesmerized by the lazy turns of the ceiling fan, I pondered the possibility that I was nuts. + +It wasn't unheard of, even in the days of the Bitchun Society, and even though there were cures, they weren't pleasant. + +I was once married to a crazy person. We were both about 70, and I was living for nothing but joy. Her name was Zoya, and I called her Zed. + +We met in orbit, where I'd gone to experience the famed low-gravity sybarites. Getting staggering drunk is not much fun at one gee, but at ten to the neg eight, it's a blast. You don't stagger, you /{bounce}/, and when you're bouncing in a sphere full of other bouncing, happy, boisterous naked people, things get deeply fun. + +I was bouncing around inside a clear sphere that was a mile in diameter, filled with smaller spheres in which one could procure bulbs of fruity, deadly concoctions. Musical instruments littered the sphere's floor, and if you knew how to play, you'd snag one, tether it to you and start playing. Others would pick up their own axes and jam along. The tunes varied from terrific to awful, but they were always energetic. + +I had been working on my third symphony on and off, and whenever I thought I had a nice bit nailed, I'd spend some time in the sphere playing it. Sometimes, the strangers who jammed in gave me new and interesting lines of inquiry, and that was good. Even when they didn't, playing an instrument was a fast track to intriguing an interesting, naked stranger. + +Which is how we met. She snagged a piano and pounded out barrelhouse runs in quirky time as I carried the main thread of the movement on a cello. At first it was irritating, but after a short while I came to a dawning comprehension of what she was doing to my music, and it was really /{good}/. I'm a sucker for musicians. + +We brought the session to a crashing stop, me bowing furiously as spheres of perspiration beaded on my body and floated gracefully into the hydrotropic recyclers, she beating on the 88 like they were the perp who killed her partner. + +I collapsed dramatically as the last note crashed through the bubble. The singles, couples and groups stopped in midflight coitus to applaud. She took a bow, untethered herself from the Steinway, and headed for the hatch. + +I coiled my legs up and did a fast burn through the sphere, desperate to reach the hatch before she did. I caught her as she was leaving. + +“Hey!” I said. “That was great! I'm Julius! How're you doing?” + +She reached out with both hands and squeezed my nose and my unit simultaneously—not hard, you understand, but playfully. “Honk!” she said, and squirmed through the hatch while I gaped at my burgeoning chub-on. + +I chased after her. “Wait,” I called as she tumbled through the spoke of the station towards the gravity. + +She had a pianist's body—re-engineered arms and hands that stretched for impossible lengths, and she used them with a spacehand's grace, vaulting herself forward at speed. I bumbled after her best as I could on my freshman spacelegs, but by the time I reached the half-gee rim of the station, she was gone. + +I didn't find her again until the next movement was done and I went to the bubble to try it out on an oboe. I was just getting warmed up when she passed through the hatch and tied off to the piano. + +This time, I clamped the oboe under my arm and bopped over to her before moistening the reed and blowing. I hovered over the piano's top, looking her in the eye as we jammed. Her mood that day was 4/4 time and I-IV-V progressions, in a feel that swung around from blues to rock to folk, teasing at the edge of my own melodies. She noodled at me, I noodled back at her, and her eyes crinkled charmingly whenever I managed a smidge of tuneful wit. + +She was almost completely flatchested, and covered in a fine, red downy fur, like a chipmunk. It was a jaunter's style, suited to the climate-controlled, soft-edged life in space. Fifty years later, I was dating Lil, another redhead, but Zed was my first. + +I played and played, entranced by the fluidity of her movements at the keyboard, her comical moues of concentration when picking out a particularly kicky little riff. When I got tired, I took it to a slow bridge or gave her a solo. I was going to make this last as long as I could. Meanwhile, I maneuvered my way between her and the hatch. + +When I blew the last note, I was wrung out as a washcloth, but I summoned the energy to zip over to the hatch and block it. She calmly untied and floated over to me. + +I looked in her eyes, silvered slanted cat-eyes, eyes that I'd been staring into all afternoon, and watched the smile that started at their corners and spread right down to her long, elegant toes. She looked back at me, then, at length, grabbed ahold of my joint again. + +“You'll do,” she said, and led me to her sleeping quarters, across the station. + +We didn't sleep. + +Zoya had been an early network engineer for the geosynch broadband constellations that went up at the cusp of the world's ascent into Bitchunry. She'd been exposed to a lot of hard rads and low gee and had generally become pretty transhuman as time went by, upgrading with a bewildering array of third-party enhancements: a vestigial tail, eyes that saw through most of the RF spectrum, her arms, her fur, dogleg reversible knee joints and a completely mechanical spine that wasn't prone to any of the absolutely inane bullshit that plagues the rest of us, like lower-back pain, intrascapular inflammation, sciatica and slipped discs. + +I thought I lived for fun, but I didn't have anything on Zed. She only talked when honking and whistling and grabbing and kissing wouldn't do, and routinely slapped upgrades into herself on the basis of any whim that crossed her mind, like when she resolved to do a spacewalk bare-skinned and spent the afternoon getting tin-plated and iron-lunged. + +I fell in love with her a hundred times a day, and wanted to strangle her twice as often. She stayed on her spacewalk for a couple of days, floating around the bubble, making crazy faces at its mirrored exterior. She had no way of knowing if I was inside, but she assumed that I was watching. Or maybe she didn't, and she was making faces for anyone's benefit. + +But then she came back through the lock, strange and wordless and her eyes full of the stars she'd seen and her metallic skin cool with the breath of empty space, and she led me a merry game of tag through the station, the mess hall where we skidded sloppy through a wobbly ovoid of rice pudding, the greenhouses where she burrowed like a gopher and shinnied like a monkey, the living quarters and bubbles as we interrupted a thousand acts of coitus. + +You'd have thought that we'd have followed it up with an act of our own, and truth be told, that was certainly my expectation when we started the game I came to think of as the steeplechase, but we never did. Halfway through, I'd lose track of carnal urges and return to a state of childlike innocence, living only for the thrill of the chase and the giggly feeling I got whenever she found some new, even-more-outrageous corner to turn. I think we became legendary on the station, that crazy pair that's always zipping in and zipping away, like having your party crashed by two naked, coed Marx Brothers. + +When I asked her to marry me, to return to Earth with me, to live with me until the universe's mainspring unwound, she laughed, honked my nose and my willie and shouted, “YOU'LL /{DO}/!” + +I took her home to Toronto and we took up residence ten stories underground in overflow residence for the University. Our Whuffie wasn't so hot earthside, and the endless institutional corridors made her feel at home while affording her opportunities for mischief. + +But bit by bit, the mischief dwindled, and she started talking more. At first, I admit I was relieved, glad that my strange, silent wife was finally acting normal, making nice with the neighbors instead of pranking them with endless honks and fanny-kicks and squirt guns. We gave up the steeplechase and she had the doglegs taken out, her fur removed, her eyes unsilvered to a hazel that was pretty and as fathomable as the silver had been inscrutable. + +We wore clothes. We entertained. I started to rehearse my symphony in low-Whuffie halls and parks with any musicians I could drum up, and she came out and didn't play, just sat to the side and smiled and smiled with a smile that never went beyond her lips. + +She went nuts. + +She shat herself. She pulled her hair. She cut herself with knives. She accused me of plotting to kill her. She set fire to the neighbors' apartments, wrapped herself in plastic sheeting, dry-humped the furniture. + +She went nuts. She did it in broad strokes, painting the walls of our bedroom with her blood, jagging all night through rant after rant. I smiled and nodded and faced it for as long as I could, then I grabbed her and hauled her, kicking like a mule, to the doctor's office on the second floor. She'd been dirtside for a year and nuts for a month, but it took me that long to face up to it. + +The doc diagnosed nonchemical dysfunction, which was by way of saying that it was her mind, not her brain, that was broken. In other words, I'd driven her nuts. + +You can get counseling for nonchemical dysfunction, basically trying to talk it out, learn to feel better about yourself. She didn't want to. + +She was miserable, suicidal, murderous. In the brief moments of lucidity that she had under sedation, she consented to being restored from a backup that was made before we came to Toronto. + +I was at her side in the hospital when she woke up. I had prepared a written synopsis of the events since her last backup for her, and she read it over the next couple days. + +“Julius,” she said, while I was making breakfast in our subterranean apartment. She sounded so serious, so fun-free, that I knew immediately that the news wouldn't be good. + +“Yes?” I said, setting out plates of bacon and eggs, steaming cups of coffee. + +“I'm going to go back to space, and revert to an older version.” She had a shoulderbag packed, and she had traveling clothes on. + +/{Oh, shit.}/ “Great,” I said, with forced cheerfulness, making a mental inventory of my responsibilities dirtside. “Give me a minute or two, I'll pack up. I miss space, too.” + +She shook her head, and anger blazed in her utterly scrutable hazel eyes. “No. I'm going back to who I was, before I met you.” + +It hurt, bad. I had loved the old, steeplechase Zed, had loved her fun and mischief. The Zed she'd become after we wed was terrible and terrifying, but I'd stuck with her out of respect for the person she'd been. + +Now she was off to restore herself from a backup made before she met me. She was going to lop 18 months out of her life, start over again, revert to a saved version. + +Hurt? It ached like a motherfucker. + +I went back to the station a month later, and saw her jamming in the sphere with a guy who had three extra sets of arms depending from his hips. He scuttled around the sphere while she played a jig on the piano, and when her silver eyes lit on me, there wasn't a shred of recognition in them. She'd never met me. + +I died some, too, putting the incident out of my head and sojourning to Disney World, there to reinvent myself with a new group of friends, a new career, a new life. I never spoke of Zed again—especially not to Lil, who hardly needed me to pollute her with remembrances of my crazy exes. + +If I was nuts, it wasn't the kind of spectacular nuts that Zed had gone. It was a slow, seething, ugly nuts that had me alienating my friends, sabotaging my enemies, driving my girlfriend into my best friend's arms. + +I decided that I would see a doctor, just as soon as we'd run the rehab past the ad-hoc's general meeting. I had to get my priorities straight. + +I pulled on last night's clothes and walked out to the Monorail station in the main lobby. The platform was jammed with happy guests, bright and cheerful and ready for a day of steady, hypermediated fun. I tried to make myself attend to them as individuals, but try as I might, they kept turning into a crowd, and I had to plant my feet firmly on the platform to keep from weaving among them to the edge, the better to snag a seat. + +The meeting was being held over the Sunshine Tree Terrace in Adventureland, just steps from where I'd been turned into a road-pizza by the still-unidentified assassin. The Adventureland ad-hocs owed the Liberty Square crew a favor since my death had gone down on their turf, so they had given us use of their prize meeting room, where the Florida sun streamed through the slats of the shutters, casting a hash of dust-filled shafts of light across the room. The faint sounds of the tiki-drums and the spieling Jungle Cruise guides leaked through the room, a low-key ambient buzz from two of the Park's oldest rides. + +There were almost a hundred ad-hocs in the Liberty Square crew, almost all second-gen castmembers with big, friendly smiles. They filled the room to capacity, and there was much hugging and handshaking before the meeting came to order. I was thankful that the room was too small for the /{de rigueur}/ ad-hoc circle-of-chairs, so that Lil was able to stand at a podium and command a smidge of respect. + +“Hi there!” she said, brightly. The weepy puffiness was still present around her eyes, if you knew how to look for it, but she was expert at putting on a brave face no matter what the ache. + +The ad-hocs roared back a collective, “Hi, Lil!” and laughed at their own corny tradition. Oh, they sure were a barrel of laughs at the Magic Kingdom. + +“Everybody knows why we're here, right?” Lil said, with a self-deprecating smile. She'd been lobbying hard for weeks, after all. “Does anyone have any questions about the plans? We'd like to start executing right away.” + +A guy with deliberately boyish, wholesome features put his arm in the air. Lil acknowledged him with a nod. “When you say ‘right away,’ do you mean—” + +I cut in. “Tonight. After this meeting. We're on an eight-week production schedule, and the sooner we start, the sooner it'll be finished.” + +The crowd murmured, unsettled. Lil shot me a withering look. I shrugged. Politics was not my game. + +Lil said, “Don, we're trying something new here, a really streamlined process. The good part is, the process is /{short}/. In a couple months, we'll know if it's working for us. If it's not, hey, we can turn it around in a couple months, too. That's why we're not spending as much time planning as we usually do. It won't take five years for the idea to prove out, so the risks are lower.” + +Another castmember, a woman, apparent 40 with a round, motherly demeanor said, “I'm all for moving fast—Lord knows, our pacing hasn't always been that hot. But I'm concerned about all these new people you propose to recruit—won't having more people slow us down when it comes to making new decisions?” + +/{No}/, I thought sourly, /{because the people I'm bringing in aren't addicted to meetings}/. + +Lil nodded. “That's a good point, Lisa. The offer we're making to the telepresence players is probationary—they don't get to vote until after we've agreed that the rehab is a success.” + +Another castmember stood. I recognized him: Dave, a heavyset, self-important jerk who loved to work the front door, even though he blew his spiel about half the time. “Lillian,” he said, smiling sadly at her, “I think you're really making a big mistake here. We love the Mansion, all of us, and so do the guests. It's a piece of history, and we're its custodians, not its masters. Changing it like this, well…” he shook his head. “It's not good stewardship. If the guests wanted to walk through a funhouse with guys jumping out of the shadows saying ‘booga-booga,’ they'd go to one of the Halloween Houses in their hometowns. The Mansion's better than that. I can't be a part of this plan.” + +I wanted to knock the smug grin off his face. I'd delivered essentially the same polemic a thousand times—in reference to Debra's work—and hearing it from this jerk in reference to /{mine}/ made me go all hot and red inside. + +“Look,” I said. “If we don't do this, if we don't change things, they'll get changed /{for}/ us. By someone else. The question, /{Dave}/, is whether a responsible custodian lets his custodianship be taken away from him, or whether he does everything he can to make sure that he's still around to ensure that his charge is properly cared for. Good custodianship isn't sticking your head in the sand.” + +I could tell I wasn't doing any good. The mood of the crowd was getting darker, the faces more set. I resolved not to speak again until the meeting was done, no matter what the provocation. + +Lil smoothed my remarks over, and fielded a dozen more, and it looked like the objections would continue all afternoon and all night and all the next day, and I felt woozy and overwrought and miserable all at the same time, staring at Lil and her harried smile and her nervous smoothing of her hair over her ears. + +Finally, she called the question. By tradition, the votes were collected in secret and publicly tabulated over the data-channels. The group's eyes unfocussed as they called up HUDs and watched the totals as they rolled in. I was offline and unable to vote or watch. + +At length, Lil heaved a relieved sigh and smiled, dropping her hands behind her back. + +“All right then,” she said, over the crowd's buzz. “Let's get to work.” + +I stood up, saw Dan and Lil staring into each other's eyes, a meaningful glance between new lovers, and I saw red. Literally. My vision washed over pink, and a strobe pounded at the edges of my vision. I took two lumbering steps towards them and opened my mouth to say something horrible, and what came out was “Waaagh.” My right side went numb and my leg slipped out from under me and I crashed to the floor. + +The slatted light from the shutters cast its way across my chest as I tried to struggle up with my left arm, and then it all went black. + +I wasn't nuts after all. + +The doctor's office in the Main Street infirmary was clean and white and decorated with posters of Jiminy Cricket in doctors' whites with an outsized stethoscope. I came to on a hard pallet under a sign that reminded me to get a check-up twice a year, by gum! and I tried to bring my hands up to shield my eyes from the over bright light and the over-cheerful signage, and discovered that I couldn't move my arms. Further investigation revealed that this was because I was strapped down, in full-on four-point restraint. + +“Waaagh,” I said again. + +Dan's worried face swam into my field of vision, along with a serious-looking doctor, apparent 70, with a Norman Rockwell face full of crow'sfeet and smile-lines. + +“Welcome back, Julius. I'm Doctor Pete,” the doctor said, in a kindly voice that matched the face. Despite my recent disillusion with castmember bullshit, I found his schtick comforting. + +I slumped back against the pallet while the doc shone lights in my eyes and consulted various diagnostic apparati. I bore it in stoic silence, too confounded by the horrible Waaagh sounds to attempt more speech. The doc would tell me what was going on when he was ready. + +“Does he need to be tied up still?” Dan asked, and I shook my head urgently. Being tied up wasn't my idea of a good time. + +The doc smiled kindly. “I think it's for the best, for now. Don't worry, Julius, we'll have you up and about soon enough.” + +Dan protested, but stopped when the doc threatened to send him out of the room. He took my hand instead. + +My nose itched. I tried to ignore it, but it got worse and worse, until it was all I could think of, the flaming lance of itch that strobed at the tip of my nostril. Furiously, I wrinkled my face, rattled at my restraints. The doc absentmindedly noticed my gyrations and delicately scratched my nose with a gloved finger. The relief was fantastic. I just hoped my nuts didn't start itching anytime soon. + +Finally, the doctor pulled up a chair and did something that caused the head of the bed to raise up so that I could look him in the eye. + +“Well, now,” he said, stroking his chin. “Julius, you've got a problem. Your friend here tells me your systems have been offline for more than a month. It sure would've been better if you'd come in to see me when it started up. + +“But you didn't, and things got worse.” He nodded up at Jiminy Cricket's recriminations: Go ahead, see your doc! “It's good advice, son, but what's done is done. You were restored from a backup about eight weeks ago, I see. Without more tests, I can't be sure, but my theory is that the brain-machine interface they installed at that time had a material defect. It's been deteriorating ever since, misfiring and rebooting. The shut-downs are a protective mechanism, meant to keep it from introducing the kind of seizure you experienced this afternoon. When the interface senses malfunction, it shuts itself down and boots a diagnostic mode, attempts to fix itself and come back online. + +“Well, that's fine for minor problems, but in cases like this, it's bad news. The interface has been deteriorating steadily, and it's only a matter of time before it does some serious damage.” + +“Waaagh?” I asked. I meant to say, /{All right, but what's wrong with my mouth?}/ + +The doc put a finger to my lips. “Don't try. The interface has locked up, and it's taken some of your voluntary nervous processes with it. In time, it'll probably shut down, but for now, there's no point. That's why we've got you strapped down—you were thrashing pretty hard when they brought you in, and we didn't want you to hurt yourself.” + +/{Probably shut down}/? Jesus. I could end up stuck like this forever. I started shaking. + +The doc soothed me, stroking my hand, and in the process pressed a transdermal on my wrist. The panic receded as the transdermal's sedative oozed into my bloodstream. + +“There, there,” he said. “It's nothing permanent. We can grow you a new clone and refresh it from your last backup. Unfortunately, that backup is a few months old. If we'd caught it earlier, we may've been able to salvage a current backup, but given the deterioration you've displayed to date… Well, there just wouldn't be any point.” + +My heart hammered. I was going to lose two months—lose it all, never happened. My assassination, the new Hall of Presidents and my shameful attempt thereon, the fights with Lil, Lil and Dan, the meeting. My plans for the rehab! All of it, good and bad, every moment flensed away. + +I couldn't do it. I had a rehab to finish, and I was the only one who understood how it had to be done. Without my relentless prodding, the ad-hocs would surely revert to their old, safe ways. They might even leave it half-done, halt the process for an interminable review, present a soft belly for Debra to savage. + +I wouldn't be restoring from backup. + +I had two more seizures before the interface finally gave up and shut itself down. I remember the first, a confusion of vision-occluding strobes and uncontrollable thrashing and the taste of copper, but the second happened without waking me from deep unconsciousness. + +When I came to again in the infirmary, Dan was still there. He had a day's growth of beard and new worrylines at the corners of his newly rejuvenated eyes. The doctor came in, shaking his head. + +“Well, now, it seems like the worst is over. I've drawn up the consent forms for the refresh and the new clone will be ready in an hour or two. In the meantime, I think heavy sedation is in order. Once the restore's been completed, we'll retire this body for you and we'll be all finished up.” + +Retire this body? Kill me, is what it meant. + +“No,” I said. I thrilled in my restraints: my voice was back under my control! + +“Oh, really now.” The doc lost his bedside manner, let his exasperation slip through. “There's nothing else for it. If you'd come to me when it all started, well, we might've had other options. You've got no one to blame but yourself.” + +“No,” I repeated. “Not now. I won't sign.” + +Dan put his hand on mine. I tried to jerk out from under it, but the restraints and his grip held me fast. “You've got to do it, Julius. It's for the best,” he said. + +“I'm not going to let you kill me,” I said, through clenched teeth. His fingertips were callused, worked rough with exertion well beyond the normal call of duty. + +“No one's killing you, son,” the doctor said. Son, son, son. Who knew how old he was? He could be 18 for all I knew. “It's just the opposite: we're saving you. If you continue like this, it will only get worse. The seizures, mental breakdown, the whole melon going soft. You don't want that.” + +I thought of Zed's spectacular transformation into a crazy person. /{No, I sure don't}/. “I don't care about the interface. Chop it out. I can't do it now.” I swallowed. “Later. After the rehab. Eight more weeks.” + +The irony! Once the doc knew I was serious, he sent Dan out of the room and rolled his eyes up while he placed a call. I saw his gorge work as he subvocalized. He left me bound to the table, to wait. + +No clocks in the infirmary, and no internal clock, and it may have been ten minutes or five hours. I was catheterized, but I didn't know it until urgent necessity made the discovery for me. + +When the doc came back, he held a small device that I instantly recognized: a HERF gun. + +Oh, it wasn't the same model I'd used on the Hall of Presidents. This one was smaller, and better made, with the precise engineering of a surgical tool. The doc raised his eyebrows at me. “You know what this is,” he said, flatly. A dim corner of my mind gibbered, /{he knows, he knows, the Hall of Presidents}/. But he didn't know. That episode was locked in my mind, invulnerable to backup. + +“I know,” I said. + +“This one is high-powered in the extreme. It will penetrate the interface's shielding and fuse it. It probably won't turn you into a vegetable. That's the best I can do. If this fails, we will restore you from your last backup. You have to sign the consent before I use it.” He'd dropped all kindly pretense from his voice, not bothering to disguise his disgust. I was pitching out the miracle of the Bitchun Society, the thing that had all but obsoleted the medical profession: why bother with surgery when you can grow a clone, take a backup, and refresh the new body? Some people swapped corpuses just to get rid of a cold. + +I signed. The doc wheeled my gurney into the crash and hum of the utilidors and then put it on a freight tram that ran to the Imagineering compound, and thence to a heavy, exposed Faraday cage. Of course: using the HERF on me would kill any electronics in the neighborhood. They had to shield me before they pulled the trigger. + +The doc placed the gun on my chest and loosened my restraints. He sealed the cage and retreated to the lab's door. He pulled a heavy apron and helmet with faceguard from a hook beside the door. + +“Once I am outside the door, point it at your head and pull the trigger. I'll come back in five minutes. Once I am in the room, place the gun on the floor and do not touch it. It is only good for a single usage, but I have no desire to find out I'm wrong.” + +He closed the door. I took the pistol in my hand. It was heavy, dense with its stored energy, the tip a parabolic hollow to better focus its cone. + +I lifted the gun to my temple and let it rest there. My thumb found the trigger-stud. + +I paused. This wouldn't kill me, but it might lock the interface forever, paralyzing me, turning me into a thrashing maniac. I knew that I would never be able to pull the trigger. The doc must've known, too—this was his way of convincing me to let him do that restore. + +I opened my mouth to call the doc, and what came out was “Waaagh!” + +The seizure started. My arm jerked and my thumb nailed the stud, and there was an ozone tang. The seizure stopped. + +I had no more interface. + +The doc looked sour and pinched when he saw me sitting up on the gurney, rubbing at my biceps. He produced a handheld diagnostic tool and pointed it at my melon, then pronounced every bit of digital microcircuitry in it dead. For the first time since my twenties, I was no more advanced than nature had made me. + +The restraints left purple bruises at my wrists and ankles, where I'd thrashed against them. I hobbled out of the Faraday cage and the lab under my own power, but just barely, my muscles groaning from the inadvertent isometric exercises of my seizure. + +Dan was waiting in the utilidor, crouched and dozing against the wall. The doc shook him awake and his head snapped up, his hand catching the doc's in a lightning-quick reflex. It was easy to forget Dan's old line of work here in the Magic Kingdom, but when he smoothly snagged the doc's arm and sprang to his feet, eyes hard and alert, I remembered. My old pal, the action hero. + +Quickly, Dan released the doc and apologized. He assessed my physical state and wordlessly wedged his shoulder in my armpit, supporting me. I didn't have the strength to stop him. I needed sleep. + +“I'm taking you home,” he said. “We'll fight Debra off tomorrow.” + +“Sure,” I said, and boarded the waiting tram. + +But we didn't go home. Dan took me back to my hotel, the Contemporary, and brought me up to my door. He keycarded the lock and stood awkwardly as I hobbled into the empty room that was my new home, as I collapsed into the bed that was mine now. + +With an apologetic look, he slunk away, back to Lil and the house we'd shared. + +I slapped on a sedative transdermal that the doc had given me, and added a mood-equalizer that he'd recommended to control my “personality swings.” In seconds, I was asleep. + +1~ CHAPTER 7 + +The meds helped me cope with the next couple of days, starting the rehab on the Mansion. We worked all night erecting a scaffolding around the facade, though no real work would be done on it—we wanted the appearance of rapid progress, and besides, I had an idea. + +I worked alongside Dan, using him as a personal secretary, handling my calls, looking up plans, monitoring the Net for the first grumblings as the Disney-going public realized that the Mansion was being taken down for a full-blown rehab. We didn't exchange any unnecessary words, standing side by side without ever looking into one another's eyes. I couldn't really feel awkward around Dan, anyway. He never let me, and besides we had our hands full directing disappointed guests away from the Mansion. A depressing number of them headed straight for the Hall of Presidents. + +We didn't have to wait long for the first panicked screed about the Mansion to appear. Dan read it aloud off his HUD: “Hey! Anyone hear anything about scheduled maintenance at the HM? I just buzzed by on the way to the new H of P's and it looks like some big stuff's afoot—scaffolding, castmembers swarming in and out, see the pic. I hope they're not screwing up a good thing. BTW, don't miss the new H of P's—very Bitchun.” + +“Right,” I said. “Who's the author, and is he on the list?” + +Dan cogitated a moment. “/{She}/ is Kim Wright, and she's on the list. Good Whuffie, lots of Mansion fanac, big readership.” + +“Call her,” I said. + +This was the plan: recruit rabid fans right away, get 'em in costume, and put 'em up on the scaffolds. Give them outsized, bat-adorned tools and get them to play at construction activity in thumpy, undead pantomime. In time, Suneep and his gang would have a batch of telepresence robots up and running, and we'd move to them, get them wandering the queue area, interacting with curious guests. The new Mansion would be open for business in 48 hours, albeit in stripped-down fashion. The scaffolding made for a nice weenie, a visual draw that would pull the hordes that thronged Debra's Hall of Presidents over for a curious peek or two. Buzz city. + +I'm a pretty smart guy. + +Dan paged this Kim person and spoke to her as she was debarking the Pirates of the Caribbean. I wondered if she was the right person for the job: she seemed awfully enamored of the rehabs that Debra and her crew had performed. If I'd had more time, I would've run a deep background check on every one of the names on my list, but that would've taken months. + +Dan made some small talk with Kim, speaking aloud in deference to my handicap, before coming to the point. “We read your post about the Mansion's rehab. You're the first one to notice it, and we wondered if you'd be interested in coming by to find out a little more about our plans.” + +Dan winced. “She's a screamer,” he whispered. + +Reflexively, I tried to pull up a HUD with my files on the Mansion fans we hoped to recruit. Of course, nothing happened. I'd done that a dozen times that morning, and there was no end in sight. I couldn't seem to get lathered up about it, though, nor about anything else, not even the hickey just visible under Dan's collar. The transdermal mood-balancer on my bicep was seeing to that—doctor's orders. + +“Fine, fine. We're standing by the Pet Cemetery, two cast members, male, in Mansion costumes. About five-ten, apparent 30. You can't miss us.” + +She didn't. She arrived out of breath and excited, jogging. She was apparent 20, and dressed like a real 20 year old, in a hipster climate-control cowl that clung to and released her limbs, which were long and double-kneed. All the rage among the younger set, including the girl who'd shot me. + +But the resemblance to my killer ended with her dress and body. She wasn't wearing a designer face, rather one that had enough imperfections to be the one she was born with, eyes set close and nose wide and slightly squashed. + +I admired the way she moved through the crowd, fast and low but without jostling anyone. “Kim,” I called as she drew near. “Over here.” + +She gave a happy shriek and made a beeline for us. Even charging full-bore, she was good enough at navigating the crowd that she didn't brush against a single soul. When she reached us, she came up short and bounced a little. “Hi, I'm Kim!” she said, pumping my arm with the peculiar violence of the extra-jointed. “Julius,” I said, then waited while she repeated the process with Dan. + +“So,” she said, “what's the deal?” + +I took her hand. “Kim, we've got a job for you, if you're interested.” + +She squeezed my hand hard and her eyes shone. “I'll take it!” she said. + +I laughed, and so did Dan. It was a polite, castmembery sort of laugh, but underneath it was relief. “I think I'd better explain it to you first,” I said. + +“Explain away!” she said, and gave my hand another squeeze. + +I let go of her hand and ran down an abbreviated version of the rehab plans, leaving out anything about Debra and her ad-hocs. Kim drank it all in greedily. She cocked her head at me as I ran it down, eyes wide. It was disconcerting, and I finally asked, “Are you recording this?” + +Kim blushed. “I hope that's okay! I'm starting a new Mansion scrapbook. I have one for every ride in the Park, but this one's gonna be a world-beater!” + +Here was something I hadn't thought about. Publishing ad-hoc business was tabu inside Park, so much so that it hadn't occurred to me that the new castmembers we brought in would want to record every little detail and push it out over the Net as a big old Whuffie collector. + +“I can switch it off,” Kim said. She looked worried, and I really started to grasp how important the Mansion was to the people we were recruiting, how much of a privilege we were offering them. + +“Leave it rolling,” I said. “Let's show the world how it's done.” + +We led Kim into a utilidor and down to costuming. She was half-naked by the time we got there, literally tearing off her clothes in anticipation of getting into character. Sonya, a Liberty Square ad-hoc that we'd stashed at costuming, already had clothes waiting for her, a rotting maid's uniform with an oversized toolbelt. + +We left Kim on the scaffolding, energetically troweling a water-based cement substitute onto the wall, scraping it off and moving to a new spot. It looked boring to me, but I could believe that we'd have to tear her away when the time came. + +We went back to trawling the Net for the next candidate. + +By lunchtime, there were ten drilling, hammering, troweling new castmembers around the scaffolding, pushing black wheelbarrows, singing “Grim Grinning Ghosts” and generally having a high old time. + +“This'll do,” I said to Dan. I was exhausted and soaked with sweat, and the transdermal under my costume itched. Despite the happy-juice in my bloodstream, a streak of uncastmemberly crankiness was shot through my mood. I needed to get offstage. + +Dan helped me hobble away, and as we hit the utilidor, he whispered in my ear, “This was a great idea, Julius. Really.” + +We jumped a tram over to Imagineering, my chest swollen with pride. Suneep had three of his assistants working on the first generation of mobile telepresence robots for the exterior, and had promised a prototype for that afternoon. The robots were easy enough—just off-the-shelf stuff, really—but the costumes and kinematics routines were something else. Thinking about what he and Suneep's gang of hypercreative super-geniuses would come up with cheered me up a little, as did being out of the public eye. + +Suneep's lab looked like it had been hit by a tornado. Imagineer packs rolled in and out with arcane gizmos, or formed tight argumentative knots in the corners as they shouted over whatever their HUDs were displaying. In the middle of it all was Suneep, who looked like he was barely restraining an urge to shout Yippee! He was clearly in his element. + +He threw his arms open when he caught sight of Dan and me, threw them wide enough to embrace the whole mad, gibbering chaos. “What wonderful flumgubbery!” he shouted, over the noise. + +“Sure is,” I agreed. “How's the prototype coming?” + +Suneep waved absently, his short fingers describing trivialities in the air. “In due time, in due time. I've put that team onto something else, a kinematics routine for a class of flying spooks that use gasbags to stay aloft—silent and scary. It's old spy-tech, and the retrofit's coming tremendously. Take a look!” He pointed a finger at me and, presumably, squirted some data my way. + +“I'm offline,” I reminded him gently. + +He slapped his forehead, took a moment to push his hair off his face, and gave me an apologetic wave. “Of course, of course. Here.” He unrolled an LCD and handed it to me. A flock of spooks danced on the screen, rendered against the ballroom scene. They were thematically consistent with the existing Mansion ghosts, more funny than scary, and their faces were familiar. I looked around the lab and realized that they'd caricatured various Imagineers. + +“Ah! You noticed,” Suneep said, rubbing his hands together. “A very good joke, yes?” + +“This is terrific,” I said, carefully. “But I really need some robots up and running by tomorrow night, Suneep. We discussed this, remember?” Without telepresence robots, my recruiting would be limited to fans like Kim, who lived in the area. I had broader designs than that. + +Suneep looked disappointed. “Of course. We discussed it. I don't like to stop my people when they have good ideas, but there's a time and a place. I'll put them on it right away. Leave it to me.” + +Dan turned to greet someone, and I looked to see who it was. Lil. Of course. She was raccoon-eyed with fatigue, and she reached out for Dan's hand, saw me, and changed her mind. + +“Hi, guys,” she said, with studied casualness. + +“Oh, hello!” said Suneep. He fired his finger at her—the flying ghosts, I imagined. Lil's eyes rolled up for a moment, then she nodded exhaustedly at him. + +“Very good,” she said. “I just heard from Lisa. She says the indoor crews are on-schedule. They've got most of the animatronics dismantled, and they're taking down the glass in the Ballroom now.” The Ballroom ghost effects were accomplished by means of a giant pane of polished glass that laterally bisected the room. The Mansion had been built around it—it was too big to take out in one piece. “They say it'll be a couple days before they've got it cut up and ready to remove.” + +A pocket of uncomfortable silence descended on us, the roar of the Imagineers rushing in to fill it. + +“You must be exhausted,” Dan said, at length. + +“Goddamn right,” I said, at the same moment that Lil said, “I guess I am.” + +We both smiled wanly. Suneep put his arms around Lil's and my shoulders and squeezed. He smelled of an exotic cocktail of industrial lubricant, ozone, and fatigue poisons. + +“You two should go home and give each other a massage,” he said. “You've earned some rest.” + +Dan met my eye and shook his head apologetically. I squirmed out from under Suneep's arm and thanked him quietly, then slunk off to the Contemporary for a hot tub and a couple hours of sleep. + +I came back to the Mansion at sundown. It was cool enough that I took a surface route, costume rolled in a shoulderbag, instead of riding through the clattering, air-conditioned comfort of the utilidors. + +As a freshening breeze blew across me, I suddenly had a craving for /{real}/ weather, the kind of climate I'd grown up with in Toronto. It was October, for chrissakes, and a lifetime of conditioning told me that it was May. I stopped and leaned on a bench for a moment and closed my eyes. Unbidden, and with the clarity of a HUD, I saw High Park in Toronto, clothed in its autumn colors, fiery reds and oranges, shades of evergreen and earthy brown. God, I needed a vacation. + +I opened my eyes and realized that I was standing in front of the Hall of Presidents, and that there was a queue ahead of me for it, one that stretched back and back. I did a quick sum in my head and sucked air between my teeth: they had enough people for five or six full houses waiting here—easily an hour's wait. The Hall /{never}/ drew crowds like this. Debra was working the turnstiles in Betsy Ross gingham, and she caught my eye and snapped a nod at me. + +I stalked off to the Mansion. A choir of zombie-shambling new recruits had formed up in front of the gate, and were groaning their way through “Grim Grinning Ghosts,” with a new call-and-response structure. A small audience participated, urged on by the recruits on the scaffolding. + +“Well, at least that's going right,” I muttered to myself. And it was, except that I could see members of the ad-hoc looking on from the sidelines, and the looks weren't kindly. Totally obsessive fans are a good measure of a ride's popularity, but they're kind of a pain in the ass, too. They lipsynch the soundtrack, cadge souvenirs and pester you with smarmy, show-off questions. After a while, even the cheeriest castmember starts to lose patience, develop an automatic distaste for them. + +The Liberty Square ad-hocs who were working on the Mansion had been railroaded into approving a rehab, press-ganged into working on it, and were now forced to endure the company of these grandstanding megafans. If I'd been there when it all started—instead of sleeping!—I may've been able to massage their bruised egos, but now I wondered if it was too late. + +Nothing for it but to do it. I ducked into a utilidor, changed into my costume and went back onstage. I joined the call-and-response enthusiastically, walking around to the ad-hocs and getting them to join in, reluctantly or otherwise. + +By the time the choir retired, sweaty and exhausted, a group of ad-hocs were ready to take their place, and I escorted my recruits to an offstage break-room. + +Suneep didn't deliver the robot prototypes for a week, and told me that it would be another week before I could have even five production units. Though he didn't say it, I got the sense that his guys were out of control, so excited by the freedom from ad-hoc oversight that they were running wild. Suneep himself was nearly a wreck, nervous and jumpy. I didn't press it. + +Besides, I had problems of my own. The new recruits were multiplying. I was staying on top of the fan response to the rehab from a terminal I'd had installed in my hotel room. Kim and her local colleagues were fielding millions of hits every day, their Whuffie accumulating as envious fans around the world logged in to watch their progress on the scaffolding. + +That was all according to plan. What wasn't according to plan was that the new recruits were doing their own recruiting, extending invitations to their net-pals to come on down to Florida, bunk on their sofas and guest-beds, and present themselves to me for active duty. + +The tenth time it happened, I approached Kim in the break-room. Her gorge was working, her eyes tracked invisible words across the middle distance. No doubt she was penning yet another breathless missive about the magic of working in the Mansion. “Hey, there,” I said. “Have you got a minute to meet with me?” + +She held up a single finger, then, a moment later, gave me a bright smile. + +“Hi, Julius!” she said. “Sure!” + +“Why don't you change into civvies, we'll take a walk through the Park and talk?” + +Kim wore her costume every chance she got. I'd been quite firm about her turning it in to the laundry every night instead of wearing it home. + +Reluctantly, she stepped into a change-room and switched into her cowl. We took the utilidor to the Fantasyland exit and walked through the late-afternoon rush of children and their adults, queued deep and thick for Snow White, Dumbo and Peter Pan. + +“How're you liking it here?” I asked. + +Kim gave a little bounce. “Oh, Julius, it's the best time of my life, really! A dream come true. I'm meeting so many interesting people, and I'm really feeling creative. I can't wait to try out the telepresence rigs, too.” + +“Well, I'm really pleased with what you and your friends are up to here. You're working hard, putting on a good show. I like the songs you've been working up, too.” + +She did one of those double-kneed shuffles that was the basis of any number of action vids those days and she was suddenly standing in front of me, hand on my shoulder, looking into my eyes. She looked serious. + +“Is there a problem, Julius? If there is, I'd rather we just talked about it, instead of making chitchat.” + +I smiled and took her hand off my shoulder. “How old are you, Kim?” + +“Nineteen,” she said. “What's the problem?” + +Nineteen! Jesus, no wonder she was so volatile. /{What's my excuse, then?}/ + +“It's not a problem, Kim, it's just something I wanted to discuss with you. The people you-all have been bringing down to work for me, they're all really great castmembers.” + +“But?” + +“But we have limited resources around here. Not enough hours in the day for me to stay on top of the new folks, the rehab, everything. Not to mention that until we open the new Mansion, there's a limited number of extras we can use out front. I'm concerned that we're going to put someone on stage without proper training, or that we're going to run out of uniforms; I'm also concerned about people coming all the way here and discovering that there aren't any shifts for them to take.” + +She gave me a relieved look. “Is /{that}/ all? Don't worry about it. I've been talking to Debra, over at the Hall of Presidents, and she says she can pick up any people who can't be used at the Mansion—we could even rotate back and forth!” She was clearly proud of her foresight. + +My ears buzzed. Debra, one step ahead of me all along the way. She probably suggested that Kim do some extra recruiting in the first place. She'd take in the people who came down to work the Mansion, convince them they'd been hard done by the Liberty Square crew, and rope them into her little Whuffie ranch, the better to seize the Mansion, the Park, the whole of Walt Disney World. + +“Oh, I don't think it'll come to that,” I said, carefully. “I'm sure we can find a use for them all at the Mansion. More the merrier.” + +Kim cocked quizzical, but let it go. I bit my tongue. The pain brought me back to reality, and I started planning costume production, training rosters, bunking. God, if only Suneep would finish the robots! + +“What do you mean, ‘no’?” I said, hotly. + +Lil folded her arms and glared. “No, Julius. It won't fly. The group is already upset that all the glory is going to the new people, they'll never let us bring more in. They also won't stop working on the rehab to train them, costume them, feed them and mother them. They're losing Whuffie every day that the Mansion's shut up, and they don't want any more delays. Dave's already joined up with Debra, and I'm sure he's not the last one.” + +Dave—the jerk who'd pissed all over the rehab in the meeting. Of course he'd gone over. Lil and Dan stood side by side on the porch of the house where I'd lived. I'd driven out that night to convince Lil to sell the ad-hocs on bringing in more recruits, but it wasn't going according to plan. They wouldn't even let me in the house. + +“So what do I tell Kim?” + +“Tell her whatever you want,” Lil said. “You brought her in—you manage her. Take some goddamn responsibility for once in your life.” + +It wasn't going to get any better. Dan gave me an apologetic look. Lil glared a moment longer, then went into the house. + +“Debra's doing real well,” he said. “The net's all over her. Biggest thing ever. Flash-baking is taking off in nightclubs, dance mixes with the DJ's backup being shoved in bursts into the dancers.” + +“God,” I said. “I fucked up, Dan. I fucked it all up.” + +He didn't say anything, and that was the same as agreeing. + +Driving back to the hotel, I decided I needed to talk to Kim. She was a problem I didn't need, and maybe a problem I could solve. I pulled a screeching U-turn and drove the little runabout to her place, a tiny condo in a crumbling complex that had once been a gated seniors' village, pre-Bitchun. + +Her place was easy to spot. All the lights were burning, faint conversation audible through the screen door. I jogged up the steps two at a time, and was about to knock when a familiar voice drifted through the screen. + +Debra, saying: “Oh yes, oh yes! Terrific idea! I'd never really thought about using streetmosphere players to liven up the queue area, but you're making a lot of sense. You people have just been doing the /{best}/ work over at the Mansion—find me more like you and I'll take them for the Hall any day!” + +I heard Kim and her young friends chatting excitedly, proudly. The anger and fear suffused me from tip to toe, and I felt suddenly light and cool and ready to do something terrible. + +I padded silently down the steps and got into my runabout. + +Some people never learn. I'm one of them, apparently. + +I almost chortled over the foolproof simplicity of my plan as I slipped in through the cast entrance using the ID card I'd scored when my systems went offline and I was no longer able to squirt my authorization at the door. + +I changed clothes in a bathroom on Main Street, switching into a black cowl that completely obscured my features, then slunk through the shadows along the storefronts until I came to the moat around Cinderella's castle. Keeping low, I stepped over the fence and duck-walked down the embankment, then slipped into the water and sloshed across to the Adventureland side. + +Slipping along to the Liberty Square gateway, I flattened myself in doorways whenever I heard maintenance crews passing in the distance, until I reached the Hall of Presidents, and in a twinkling I was inside the theater itself. + +Humming the Small World theme, I produced a short wrecking bar from my cowl's tabbed pocket and set to work. + +The primary broadcast units were hidden behind a painted scrim over the stage, and they were surprisingly well built for a first generation tech. I really worked up a sweat smashing them, but I kept at it until not a single component remained recognizable. The work was slow and loud in the silent Park, but it lulled me into a sleepy reverie, an autohypnotic swing-bang-swing-bang timeless time. To be on the safe side, I grabbed the storage units and slipped them into the cowl. + +Locating their backup units was a little trickier, but years of hanging out at the Hall of Presidents while Lil tinkered with the animatronics helped me. I methodically investigated every nook, cranny and storage area until I located them, in what had been a break-room closet. By now, I had the rhythm of the thing, and I made short work of them. + +I did one more pass, wrecking anything that looked like it might be a prototype for the next generation or notes that would help them reconstruct the units I'd smashed. + +I had no illusions about Debra's preparedness—she'd have something offsite that she could get up and running in a few days. I wasn't doing anything permanent, I was just buying myself a day or two. + +I made my way clean out of the Park without being spotted, and sloshed my way into my runabout, shoes leaking water from the moat. + +For the first time in weeks, I slept like a baby. + +Of course, I got caught. I don't really have the temperament for Machiavellian shenanigans, and I left a trail a mile wide, from the muddy footprints in the Contemporary's lobby to the wrecking bar thoughtlessly left behind, with my cowl and the storage units from the Hall, forgotten on the back seat of my runabout. + +I whistled my personal jazzy uptempo version of “Grim Grinning Ghosts” as I made my way from Costuming, through the utilidor, out to Liberty Square, a few minutes before the Park opened. + +Standing in front of me were Lil and Debra. Debra was holding my cowl and wrecking bar. Lil held the storage units. + +I hadn't put on my transdermals that morning, and so the emotion I felt was unmuffled, loud and yammering. + +I ran. + +I ran past them, along the road to Adventureland, past the Tiki Room where I'd been killed, past the Adventureland gate where I'd waded through the moat, down Main Street. I ran and ran, elbowing early guests, trampling flowers, knocking over an apple cart across from the Penny Arcade. + +I ran until I reached the main gate, and turned, thinking I'd outrun Lil and Debra and all my problems. I'd thought wrong. They were both there, a step behind me, puffing and red. Debra held my wrecking bar like a weapon, and she brandished it at me. + +“You're a goddamn idiot, you know that?” she said. I think if we'd been alone, she would've swung it at me. + +“Can't take it when someone else plays rough, huh, Debra?” I sneered. + +Lil shook her head disgustedly. “She's right, you are an idiot. The ad-hoc's meeting in Adventureland. You're coming.” + +“Why?” I asked, feeling belligerent. “You going to honor me for all my hard work?” + +“We're going to talk about the future, Julius, what's left of it for us.” + +“For God's sake, Lil, can't you see what's going on? They /{killed}/ me! They did it, and now we're fighting each other instead of her! Why can't you see how /{wrong}/ that is?” + +“You'd better watch those accusations, Julius,” Debra said, quietly and intensely, almost hissing. “I don't know who killed you or why, but you're the one who's guilty here. You need help.” + +I barked a humorless laugh. Guests were starting to stream into the now-open Park, and several of them were watching intently as the three costumed castmembers shouted at each other. I could feel my Whuffie hemorrhaging. “Debra, you are purely full of shit, and your work is trite and unimaginative. You're a fucking despoiler and you don't even have the guts to admit it.” + +“That's /{enough}/, Julius,” Lil said, her face hard, her rage barely in check. “We're going.” + +Debra walked a pace behind me, Lil a pace before, all the way through the crowd to Adventureland. I saw a dozen opportunities to slip into a gap in the human ebb and flow and escape custody, but I didn't try. I wanted a chance to tell the whole world what I'd done and why I'd done it. + +Debra followed us in when we mounted the steps to the meeting room. Lil turned. “I don't think you should be here, Debra,” she said in measured tones. + +Debra shook her head. “You can't keep me out, you know. And you shouldn't want to. We're on the same side.” + +I snorted derisively, and I think it decided Lil. “Come on, then,” she said. + +It was SRO in the meeting room, packed to the gills with the entire ad-hoc, except for my new recruits. No work was being done on the rehab, then, and the Liberty Belle would be sitting at her dock. Even the restaurant crews were there. Liberty Square must've been a ghost town. It gave the meeting a sense of urgency: the knowledge that there were guests in Liberty Square wandering aimlessly, looking for castmembers to help them out. Of course, Debra's crew might've been around. + +The crowd's faces were hard and bitter, leaving no doubt in my mind that I was in deep shit. Even Dan, sitting in the front row, looked angry. I nearly started crying right then. Dan—oh, Dan. My pal, my confidant, my patsy, my rival, my nemesis. Dan, Dan, Dan. I wanted to beat him to death and hug him at the same time. + +Lil took the podium and tucked stray hairs behind her ears. “All right, then,” she said. I stood to her left and Debra stood to her right. + +“Thanks for coming out today. I'd like to get this done quickly. We all have important work to get to. I'll run down the facts: last night, a member of this ad-hoc vandalized the Hall of Presidents, rendering it useless. It's estimated that it will take at least a week to get it back up and running. + +“I don't have to tell you that this isn't acceptable. This has never happened before, and it will never happen again. We're going to see to that. + +“I'd like to propose that no further work be done on the Mansion until the Hall of Presidents is fully operational. I will be volunteering my services on the repairs.” + +There were nods in the audience. Lil wouldn't be the only one working at the Hall that week. “Disney World isn't a competition,” Lil said. “All the different ad-hocs work together, and we do it to make the Park as good as we can. We lose sight of that at our peril.” + +I nearly gagged on bile. “I'd like to say something,” I said, as calmly as I could manage. + +Lil shot me a look. “That's fine, Julius. Any member of the ad-hoc can speak.” + +I took a deep breath. “I did it, all right?” I said. My voice cracked. “I did it, and I don't have any excuse for having done it. It may not have been the smartest thing I've ever done, but I think you all should understand how I was driven to it. + +“We're not /{supposed}/ to be in competition with one another here, but we all know that that's just a polite fiction. The truth is that there's real competition in the Park, and that the hardest players are the crew that rehabbed the Hall of Presidents. They /{stole}/ the Hall from you! They did it while you were distracted, they used /{me}/ to engineer the distraction, they /{murdered}/ me!” I heard the shriek creeping into my voice, but I couldn't do anything about it. + +“Usually, the lie that we're all on the same side is fine. It lets us work together in peace. But that changed the day they had me shot. If you keep on believing it, you're going to lose the Mansion, the Liberty Belle, Tom Sawyer Island—all of it. All the history we have with this place—all the history that the billions who've visited it have—it's going to be destroyed and replaced with the sterile, thoughtless shit that's taken over the Hall. Once that happens, there's nothing left that makes this place special. Anyone can get the same experience sitting at home on the sofa! What happens then, huh? How much longer do you think this place will stay open once the only people here are /{you?}/” + +Debra smiled condescendingly. “Are you finished, then?” she asked, sweetly. “Fine. I know I'm not a member of this group, but since it was my work that was destroyed last night, I think I would like to address Julius's statements, if you don't mind.” She paused, but no one spoke up. + +“First of all, I want you all to know that we don't hold you responsible for what happened last night. We know who was responsible, and he needs help. I urge you to see to it that he gets it. + +“Next, I'd like to say that as far as I'm concerned, we are on the same side—the side of the Park. This is a special place, and it couldn't exist without all of our contributions. What happened to Julius was terrible, and I sincerely hope that the person responsible is caught and brought to justice. But that person wasn't me or any of the people in my ad-hoc. + +“Lil, I'd like to thank you for your generous offer of assistance, and we'll take you up on it. That goes for all of you—come on by the Hall, we'll put you to work. We'll be up and running in no time. + +“Now, as far as the Mansion goes, let me say this once and for all: neither me nor my ad-hoc have any desire to take over the operations of the Mansion. It is a terrific attraction, and it's getting better with the work you're all doing. If you've been worrying about it, then you can stop worrying now. We're all on the same side. + +“Thanks for hearing me out. I've got to go see my team now.” + +She turned and left, a chorus of applause following her out. + +Lil waited until it died down, then said, “All right, then, we've got work to do, too. I'd like to ask you all a favor, first. I'd like us to keep the details of last night's incident to ourselves. Letting the guests and the world know about this ugly business isn't good for anyone. Can we all agree to do that?” + +There was a moment's pause while the results were tabulated on the HUDs, then Lil gave them a million-dollar smile. “I knew you'd come through. Thanks, guys. Let's get to work.” + +I spent the day at the hotel, listlessly scrolling around on my terminal. Lil had made it very clear to me after the meeting that I wasn't to show my face inside the Park until I'd “gotten help,” whatever that meant. + +By noon, the news was out. It was hard to pin down the exact source, but it seemed to revolve around the new recruits. One of them had told their net-pals about the high drama in Liberty Square, and mentioned my name. + +There were already a couple of sites vilifying me, and I expected more. I needed some kind of help, that was for sure. + +I thought about leaving then, turning my back on the whole business and leaving Walt Disney World to start yet another new life, Whuffie-poor and fancy-free. + +It wouldn't be so bad. I'd been in poor repute before, not so long ago. That first time Dan and I had palled around, back at the U of T, I'd been the center of a lot of pretty ambivalent sentiment, and Whuffie-poor as a man can be. + +I slept in a little coffin on-campus, perfectly climate controlled. It was cramped and dull, but my access to the network was free and I had plenty of material to entertain myself. While I couldn't get a table in a restaurant, I was free to queue up at any of the makers around town and get myself whatever I wanted to eat and drink, whenever I wanted it. Compared to 99.99999 percent of all the people who'd ever lived, I had a life of unparalleled luxury. + +Even by the standards of the Bitchun Society, I was hardly a rarity. The number of low-esteem individuals at large was significant, and they got along just fine, hanging out in parks, arguing, reading, staging plays, playing music. + +Of course, that wasn't the life for me. I had Dan to pal around with, a rare high-net-Whuffie individual who was willing to fraternize with a shmuck like me. He'd stand me to meals at sidewalk cafes and concerts at the SkyDome, and shoot down any snotty reputation-punk who sneered at my Whuffie tally. Being with Dan was a process of constantly reevaluating my beliefs in the Bitchun Society, and I'd never had a more vibrant, thought-provoking time in all my life. + +I could have left the Park, deadheaded to anywhere in the world, started over. I could have turned my back on Dan, on Debra, on Lil and the whole mess. + +I didn't. + +I called up the doc. + +1~ CHAPTER 8 + +Doctor Pete answered on the third ring, audio-only. In the background, I heard a chorus of crying children, the constant backdrop of the Magic Kingdom infirmary. + +“Hi, doc,” I said. + +“Hello, Julius. What can I do for you?” Under the veneer of professional medical and castmember friendliness, I sensed irritation. + +/{Make it all good again}/. “I'm not really sure. I wanted to see if I could talk it over with you. I'm having some pretty big problems.” + +“I'm on-shift until five. Can it wait until then?” + +By then, I had no idea if I'd have the nerve to see him. “I don't think so—I was hoping we could meet right away.” + +“If it's an emergency, I can have an ambulance sent for you.” + +“It's urgent, but not an emergency. I need to talk about it in person. Please?” + +He sighed in undoctorly, uncastmemberly fashion. “Julius, I've got important things to do here. Are you sure this can't wait?” + +I bit back a sob. “I'm sure, doc.” + +“All right then. When can you be here?” + +Lil had made it clear that she didn't want me in the Park. “Can you meet me? I can't really come to you. I'm at the Contemporary, Tower B, room 2334.” + +“I don't really make house calls, son.” + +“I know, I know.” I hated how pathetic I sounded. “Can you make an exception? I don't know who else to turn to.” + +“I'll be there as soon as I can. I'll have to get someone to cover for me. Let's not make a habit of this, all right?” + +I whooshed out my relief. “I promise.” + +He disconnected abruptly, and I found myself dialing Dan. + +“Yes?” he said, cautiously. + +“Doctor Pete is coming over, Dan. I don't know if he can help me—I don't know if anyone can. I just wanted you to know.” + +He surprised me, then, and made me remember why he was still my friend, even after everything. “Do you want me to come over?” + +“That would be very nice,” I said, quietly. “I'm at the hotel.” + +“Give me ten minutes,” he said, and rang off. + +He found me on my patio, looking out at the Castle and the peaks of Space Mountain. To my left spread the sparkling waters of the Seven Seas Lagoon, to my right, the Property stretched away for mile after manicured mile. The sun was warm on my skin, faint strains of happy laughter drifted with the wind, and the flowers were in bloom. In Toronto, it would be freezing rain, gray buildings, noisome rapid transit (a monorail hissed by), and hard-faced anonymity. I missed it. + +Dan pulled up a chair next to mine and sat without a word. We both stared out at the view for a long while. + +“It's something else, isn't it?” I said, finally. + +“I suppose so,” he said. “I want to say something before the doc comes by, Julius.” + +“Go ahead.” + +“Lil and I are through. It should never have happened in the first place, and I'm not proud of myself. If you two were breaking up, that's none of my business, but I had no right to hurry it along.” + +“All right,” I said. I was too drained for emotion. + +“I've taken a room here, moved my things.” + +“How's Lil taking it?” + +“Oh, she thinks I'm a total bastard. I suppose she's right.” + +“I suppose she's partly right,” I corrected him. + +He gave me a gentle slug in the shoulder. “Thanks.” + +We waited in companionable silence until the doc arrived. + +He bustled in, his smile lines drawn up into a sour purse and waited expectantly. I left Dan on the patio while I took a seat on the bed. + +“I'm cracking up or something,” I said. “I've been acting erratically, sometimes violently. I don't know what's wrong with me.” I'd rehearsed the speech, but it still wasn't easy to choke out. + +“We both know what's wrong, Julius,” the doc said, impatiently. “You need to be refreshed from your backup, get set up with a fresh clone and retire this one. We've had this talk.” + +“I can't do it,” I said, not meeting his eye. “I just can't—isn't there another way?” + +The doc shook his head. “Julius, I've got limited resources to allocate. There's a perfectly good cure for what's ailing you, and if you won't take it, there's not much I can do for you.” + +“But what about meds?” + +“Your problem isn't a chemical imbalance, it's a mental defect. Your /{brain}/ is /{broken}/, son. All that meds will do is mask the symptoms, while you get worse. I can't tell you what you want to hear, unfortunately. Now, If you're ready to take the cure, I can retire this clone immediately and get you restored into a new one in 48 hours.” + +“Isn't there another way? Please? You have to help me—I can't lose all this.” I couldn't admit my real reasons for being so attached to this singularly miserable chapter in my life, not even to myself. + +The doctor rose to go. “Look, Julius, you haven't got the Whuffie to make it worth anyone's time to research a solution to this problem, other than the one that we all know about. I can give you mood-suppressants, but that's not a permanent solution.” + +“Why not?” + +He boggled. “You /{can't}/ just take dope for the rest of your life, son. Eventually, something will happen to this body—I see from your file that you're stroke-prone—and you're going to get refreshed from your backup. The longer you wait, the more traumatic it'll be. You're robbing from your future self for your selfish present.” + +It wasn't the first time the thought had crossed my mind. Every passing day made it harder to take the cure. To lie down and wake up friends with Dan, to wake up and be in love with Lil again. To wake up to a Mansion the way I remembered it, a Hall of Presidents where I could find Lil bent over with her head in a President's guts of an afternoon. To lie down and wake without disgrace, without knowing that my lover and my best friend would betray me, /{had}/ betrayed me. + +I just couldn't do it—not yet, anyway. + +Dan—Dan was going to kill himself soon, and if I restored myself from my old backup, I'd lose my last year with him. I'd lose /{his}/ last year. + +“Let's table that, doc. I hear what you're saying, but there're complications. I guess I'll take the mood-suppressants for now.” + +He gave me a cold look. “I'll give you a scrip, then. I could've done that without coming out here. Please don't call me anymore.” + +I was shocked by his obvious ire, but I didn't understand it until he was gone and I told Dan what had happened. + +“Us old-timers, we're used to thinking of doctors as highly trained professionals—all that pre-Bitchun med-school stuff, long internships, anatomy drills... Truth is, the average doc today gets more training in bedside manner than bioscience. ‘Doctor’ Pete is a technician, not an MD, not the way you and I mean it. Anyone with the kind of knowledge you're looking for is working as a historical researcher, not a doctor. + +“But that's not the illusion. The doc is supposed to be the authority on medical matters, even though he's only got one trick: restore from backup. You're reminding Pete of that, and he's not happy to have it happen.” + +I waited a week before returning to the Magic Kingdom, sunning myself on the white sand beach at the Contemporary, jogging the Walk Around the World, taking a canoe out to the wild and overgrown Discovery Island, and generally cooling out. Dan came by in the evenings and it was like old times, running down the pros and cons of Whuffie and Bitchunry and life in general, sitting on my porch with a sweating pitcher of lemonade. + +On the last night, he presented me with a clever little handheld, a museum piece that I recalled fondly from the dawning days of the Bitchun Society. It had much of the functionality of my defunct systems, in a package I could slip in my shirt pocket. It felt like part of a costume, like the turnip watches the Ben Franklin streetmosphere players wore at the American Adventure. + +Museum piece or no, it meant that I was once again qualified to participate in the Bitchun Society, albeit more slowly and less efficiently than I once may've. I took it downstairs the next morning and drove to the Magic Kingdom's castmember lot. + +At least, that was the plan. When I got down to the Contemporary's parking lot, my runabout was gone. A quick check with the handheld revealed the worst: my Whuffie was low enough that someone had just gotten inside and driven away, realizing that they could make more popular use of it than I could. + +With a sinking feeling, I trudged up to my room and swiped my key through the lock. It emitted a soft, unsatisfied _bzzz_ and lit up, “Please see the front desk.” My room had been reassigned, too. I had the short end of the Whuffie stick. + +At least there was no mandatory Whuffie check on the monorail platform, but the other people on the car were none too friendly to me, and no one offered me an inch more personal space than was necessary. I had hit bottom. + +I took the castmember entrance to the Magic Kingdom, clipping my name tag to my Disney Operations polo shirt, ignoring the glares of my fellow castmembers in the utilidors. + +I used the handheld to page Dan. “Hey there,” he said, brightly. I could tell instantly that I was being humored. + +“Where are you?” I asked. + +“Oh, up in the Square. By the Liberty Tree.” + +In front of the Hall of Presidents. I worked the handheld, pinged some Whuffie manually. Debra was spiked so high it seemed she'd never come down, as were Tim and her whole crew in aggregate. They were drawing from guests by the millions, and from castmembers and from people who'd read the popular accounts of their struggle against the forces of petty jealousy and sabotage—i.e., me. + +I felt light-headed. I hurried along to costuming and changed into the heavy green Mansion costume, then ran up the stairs to the Square. + +I found Dan sipping a coffee and sitting on a bench under the giant, lantern-hung Liberty Tree. He had a second cup waiting for me, and patted the bench next to him. I sat with him and sipped, waiting for him to spill whatever bit of rotten news he had for me this morning—I could feel it hovering like storm clouds. + +He wouldn't talk though, not until we finished the coffee. Then he stood and strolled over to the Mansion. It wasn't rope-drop yet, and there weren't any guests in the Park, which was all for the better, given what was coming next. + +“Have you taken a look at Debra's Whuffie lately?” he asked, finally, as we stood by the pet cemetery, considering the empty scaffolding. + +I started to pull out the handheld but he put a hand on my arm. “Don't bother,” he said, morosely. “Suffice it to say, Debra's gang is number one with a bullet. Ever since word got out about what happened to the Hall, they've been stacking it deep. They can do just about anything, Jules, and get away with it.” + +My stomach tightened and I found myself grinding my molars. “So, what is it they've done, Dan?” I asked, already knowing the answer. + +Dan didn't have to respond, because at that moment, Tim emerged from the Mansion, wearing a light cotton work-smock. He had a thoughtful expression, and when he saw us, he beamed his elfin grin and came over. + +“Hey guys!” he said. + +“Hi, Tim,” Dan said. I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. + +“Pretty exciting stuff, huh?” he said. + +“I haven't told him yet,” Dan said, with forced lightness. “Why don't you run it down?” + +“Well, it's pretty radical, I have to admit. We've learned some stuff from the Hall that we wanted to apply, and at the same time, we wanted to capture some of the historical character of the ghost story.” + +I opened my mouth to object, but Dan put a hand on my forearm. “Really?” he asked innocently. “How do you plan on doing that?” + +“Well, we're keeping the telepresence robots—that's a honey of an idea, Julius—but we're giving each one an uplink so that it can flash-bake. We've got some high-Whuffie horror writers pulling together a series of narratives about the lives of each ghost: how they met their tragic ends, what they've done since, you know. + +“The way we've storyboarded it, the guests stream through the ride pretty much the way they do now, walking through the preshow and then getting into the ride-vehicles, the Doom Buggies. But here's the big change: we /{slow it all down}/. We trade off throughput for intensity, make it more of a premium product. + +“So you're a guest. From the queue to the unload zone, you're being chased by these ghosts, these telepresence robots, and they're really scary—I've got Suneep's concept artists going back to the drawing board, hitting basic research on stuff that'll just scare the guests silly. When a ghost catches you, lays its hands on you—wham! Flash-bake! You get its whole grisly story in three seconds, across your frontal lobe. By the time you've left, you've had ten or more ghost-contacts, and the next time you come back, it's all new ghosts with all new stories. The way that the Hall's drawing 'em, we're bound to be a hit.” He put his hands behind his back and rocked on his heels, clearly proud of himself. + +When Epcot Center first opened, long, long ago, there'd been an ugly decade or so in ride design. Imagineering found a winning formula for Spaceship Earth, the flagship ride in the big golf ball, and, in their drive to establish thematic continuity, they'd turned the formula into a cookie-cutter, stamping out half a dozen clones for each of the “themed” areas in the Future Showcase. It went like this: first, we were cavemen, then there was ancient Greece, then Rome burned (cue sulfur-odor FX), then there was the Great Depression, and, finally, we reached the modern age. Who knows what the future holds? We do! We'll all have videophones and be living on the ocean floor. Once was cute—compelling and inspirational, even—but six times was embarrassing. Like everyone, once Imagineering got themselves a good hammer, everything started to resemble a nail. Even now, the Epcot ad-hocs were repeating the sins of their forebears, closing every ride with a scene of Bitchun utopia. + +And Debra was repeating the classic mistake, tearing her way through the Magic Kingdom with her blaster set to flash-bake. + +“Tim,” I said, hearing the tremble in my voice. “I thought you said that you had no designs on the Mansion, that you and Debra wouldn't be trying to take it away from us. Didn't you say that?” + +Tim rocked back as if I'd slapped him and the blood drained from his face. “But we're not taking it away!” he said. “You /{invited}/ us to help.” + +I shook my head, confused. “We did?” I said. + +“Sure,” he said. + +“Yes,” Dan said. “Kim and some of the other rehab cast went to Debra yesterday and asked her to do a design review of the current rehab and suggest any changes. She was good enough to agree, and they've come up with some great ideas.” I read between the lines: the newbies you invited in have gone over to the other side and we're going to lose everything because of them. I felt like shit. + +“Well, I stand corrected,” I said, carefully. Tim's grin came back and he clapped his hands together. /{He really loves the Mansion}/, I thought. /{He could have been on our side, if we had only played it all right.}/ + +Dan and I took to the utilidors and grabbed a pair of bicycles and sped towards Suneep's lab, jangling our bells at the rushing castmembers. “They don't have the authority to invite Debra in,” I panted as we pedaled. + +“Says who?” Dan said. + +“It was part of the deal—they knew that they were probationary members right from the start. They weren't even allowed into the design meetings.” + +“Looks like they took themselves off probation,” he said. + +Suneep gave us both a chilly look when we entered his lab. He had dark circles under his eyes and his hands shook with exhaustion. He seemed to be holding himself erect with nothing more than raw anger. + +“So much for building without interference,” he said. “We agreed that this project wouldn't change midway through. Now it has, and I've got other commitments that I'm going to have to cancel because this is going off-schedule.” + +I made soothing apologetic gestures with my hands. “Suneep, believe me, I'm just as upset about this as you are. We don't like this one little bit.” + +He harrumphed. “We had a deal, Julius,” he said, hotly. “I would do the rehab for you and you would keep the ad-hocs off my back. I've been holding up my end of the bargain, but where the hell have you been? If they replan the rehab now, I'll /{have}/ to go along with them. I can't just leave the Mansion half-done—they'll murder me.” + +The kernel of a plan formed in my mind. “Suneep, we don't like the new rehab plan, and we're going to stop it. You can help. Just stonewall them—tell them they'll have to find other Imagineering support if they want to go through with it, that you're booked solid.” + +Dan gave me one of his long, considering looks, then nodded a minute approval. “Yeah,” he drawled. “That'll help all right. Just tell 'em that they're welcome to make any changes they want to the plan, /{if}/ they can find someone else to execute them.” + +Suneep looked unhappy. “Fine—so then they go and find someone else to do it, and that person gets all the credit for the work my team's done so far. I just flush my time down the toilet.” + +“It won't come to that,” I said quickly. “If you can just keep saying no for a couple days, we'll do the rest.” + +Suneep looked doubtful. + +“I promise,” I said. + +Suneep ran his stubby fingers through his already crazed hair. “All right,” he said, morosely. + +Dan slapped him on the back. “Good man,” he said. + +It should have worked. It almost did. + +I sat in the back of the Adventureland conference room while Dan exhorted. + +“Look, you don't have to roll over for Debra and her people! This is /{your}/ garden, and you've tended it responsibly for years. She's got no right to move in on you—you've got all the Whuffie you need to defend the place, if you all work together.” + +No castmember likes confrontation, and the Liberty Square bunch were tough to rouse to action. Dan had turned down the air conditioning an hour before the meeting and closed up all the windows, so that the room was a kiln for hard-firing irritation into rage. I stood meekly in the back, as far as possible from Dan. He was working his magic on my behalf, and I was content to let him do his thing. + +When Lil had arrived, she'd sized up the situation with a sour expression: sit in the front, near Dan, or in the back, near me. She'd chosen the middle, and to concentrate on Dan I had to tear my eyes away from the sweat glistening on her long, pale neck. + +Dan stalked the aisles like a preacher, eyes blazing. “They're /{stealing}/ your future! They're /{stealing}/ your /{past}/! They claim they've got your support!” + +He lowered his tone. “I don't think that's true.” He grabbed a castmember by her hand and looked into her eyes. “Is it true?” he said so low it was almost a whisper. + +“No,” the castmember said. + +He dropped her hand and whirled to face another castmember. “Is it true?” he demanded, raising his voice, slightly. + +“No!” the castmember said, his voice unnaturally loud after the whispers. A nervous chuckle rippled through the crowd. + +“Is it true?” he said, striding to the podium, shouting now. + +“No!” the crowd roared. + +“NO!” he shouted back. + +“You don't /{have to}/ roll over and take it! You can fight back, carry on with the plan, send them packing. They're only taking over because you're letting them. Are you going to let them?” + +“NO!” + +Bitchun wars are rare. Long before anyone tries a takeover of anything, they've done the arithmetic and ensured themselves that the ad-hoc they're displacing doesn't have a hope of fighting back. + +For the defenders, it's a simple decision: step down gracefully and salvage some reputation out of the thing—fighting back will surely burn away even that meager reward. + +No one benefits from fighting back—least of all the thing everyone's fighting over. For example: + +It was the second year of my undergrad, taking a double-major in not making trouble for my profs and keeping my mouth shut. It was the early days of Bitchun, and most of us were still a little unclear on the concept. + +Not all of us, though: a group of campus shit-disturbers, grad students in the Sociology Department, were on the bleeding edge of the revolution, and they knew what they wanted: control of the Department, oustering of the tyrannical, stodgy profs, a bully pulpit from which to preach the Bitchun gospel to a generation of impressionable undergrads who were too cowed by their workloads to realize what a load of shit they were being fed by the University. + +At least, that's what the intense, heavyset woman who seized the mic at my Soc 200 course said, that sleepy morning mid-semester at Convocation Hall. Nineteen hundred students filled the hall, a capacity crowd of bleary, coffee-sipping time-markers, and they woke up in a hurry when the woman's strident harangue burst over their heads. + +I saw it happen from the very start. The prof was down there on the stage, a speck with a tie-mic, droning over his slides, and then there was a blur as half a dozen grad students rushed the stage. They were dressed in University poverty-chic, wrinkled slacks and tattered sports coats, and five of them formed a human wall in front of the prof while the sixth, the heavyset one with the dark hair and the prominent mole on her cheek, unclipped his mic and clipped it to her lapel. + +“Wakey wakey!” she called, and the reality of the moment hit home for me: this wasn't on the lesson-plan. + +“Come on, heads up! This is /{not}/ a drill. The University of Toronto Department of Sociology is under new management. If you'll set your handhelds to ‘receive,’ we'll be beaming out new lesson-plans momentarily. If you've forgotten your handhelds, you can download the plans later on. I'm going to run it down for you right now, anyway. + +“Before I start though, I have a prepared statement for you. You'll probably hear this a couple times more today, in your other classes. It's worth repeating. Here goes: + +“We reject the stodgy, tyrannical rule of the profs at this Department. We demand bully pulpits from which to preach the Bitchun gospel. Effective immediately, the University of Toronto Ad-Hoc Sociology Department is /{in charge}/. We promise high-relevance curriculum with an emphasis on reputation economies, post-scarcity social dynamics, and the social theory of infinite life-extension. No more Durkheim, kids, just deadheading! This will be /{fun}/.” + +She taught the course like a pro—you could tell she'd been drilling her lecture for a while. Periodically, the human wall behind her shuddered as the prof made a break for it and was restrained. + +At precisely 9:50 a.m. she dismissed the class, which had hung on her every word. Instead of trudging out and ambling to our next class, the whole nineteen hundred of us rose, and, as one, started buzzing to our neighbors, a roar of “Can you believe it?” that followed us out the door and to our next encounter with the Ad-Hoc Sociology Department. + +It was cool, that day. I had another soc class, Constructing Social Deviance, and we got the same drill there, the same stirring propaganda, the same comical sight of a tenured prof battering himself against a human wall of ad-hocs. + +Reporters pounced on us when we left the class, jabbing at us with mics and peppering us with questions. I gave them a big thumbs-up and said, “Bitchun!” in classic undergrad eloquence. + +The profs struck back the next morning. I got a heads-up from the newscast as I brushed my teeth: the Dean of the Department of Sociology told a reporter that the ad-hocs' courses would not be credited, that they were a gang of thugs who were totally unqualified to teach. A counterpoint interview from a spokesperson for the ad-hocs established that all of the new lecturers had been writing course-plans and lecture notes for the profs they replaced for years, and that they'd also written most of their journal articles. + +The profs brought University security out to help them regain their lecterns, only to be repelled by ad-hoc security guards in homemade uniforms. University security got the message—anyone could be replaced—and stayed away. + +The profs picketed. They held classes out front attended by grade-conscious brown-nosers who worried that the ad-hocs' classes wouldn't count towards their degrees. Fools like me alternated between the outdoor and indoor classes, not learning much of anything. + +No one did. The profs spent their course-times whoring for Whuffie, leading the seminars like encounter groups instead of lectures. The ad-hocs spent their time badmouthing the profs and tearing apart their coursework. + +At the end of the semester, everyone got a credit and the University Senate disbanded the Sociology program in favor of a distance-ed offering from Concordia in Montreal. Forty years later, the fight was settled forever. Once you took backup-and-restore, the rest of the Bitchunry just followed, a value-system settling over you. + +Those who didn't take backup-and-restore may have objected, but, hey, they all died. + +The Liberty Square ad-hocs marched shoulder to shoulder through the utilidors and, as a mass, took back the Haunted Mansion. Dan, Lil and I were up front, careful not to brush against one another as we walked quickly through the backstage door and started a bucket-brigade, passing out the materials that Debra's people had stashed there, along a line that snaked back to the front porch of the Hall of Presidents, where they were unceremoniously dumped. + +Once the main stash was vacated, we split up and roamed the ride, its service corridors and dioramas, the break-room and the secret passages, rounding up every scrap of Debra's crap and passing it out the door. + +In the attic scene, I ran into Kim and three of her giggly little friends, their eyes glinting in the dim light. The gaggle of transhuman kids made my guts clench, made me think of Zed and of Lil and of my unmediated brain, and I had a sudden urge to shred them verbally. + +No. + +No. That way lay madness and war. This was about taking back what was ours, not punishing the interlopers. “Kim, I think you should leave,” I said, quietly. + +She snorted and gave me a dire look. “Who died and made you boss?” she said. Her friends thought it very brave, they made it clear with double-jointed hip-thrusts and glares. + +“Kim, you can leave now or you can leave later. The longer you wait, the worse it will be for you and your Whuffie. You blew it, and you're not a part of the Mansion anymore. Go home, go to Debra. Don't stay here, and don't come back. Ever.” + +Ever. Be cast out of this thing that you love, that you obsess over, that you worked for. “Now,” I said, quiet, dangerous, barely in control. + +They sauntered into the graveyard, hissing vitriol at me. Oh, they had lots of new material to post to the anti-me sites, messages that would get them Whuffie with people who thought I was the scum of the earth. A popular view, those days. + +I got out of the Mansion and looked at the bucket-brigade, followed it to the front of the Hall. The Park had been open for an hour, and a herd of guests watched the proceedings in confusion. The Liberty Square ad-hocs passed their loads around in clear embarrassment, knowing that they were violating every principle they cared about. + +As I watched, gaps appeared in the bucket-brigade as castmembers slipped away, faces burning scarlet with shame. At the Hall of Presidents, Debra presided over an orderly relocation of her things, a cheerful cadre of her castmembers quickly moving it all offstage. I didn't have to look at my handheld to know what was happening to our Whuffie. + +By evening, we were back on schedule. Suneep supervised the placement of his telepresence rigs and Lil went over every system in minute detail, bossing a crew of ad-hocs that trailed behind her, double- and triple-checking it all. + +Suneep smiled at me when he caught sight of me, hand-scattering dust in the parlor. + +“Congratulations, sir,” he said, and shook my hand. “It was masterfully done.” + +“Thanks, Suneep. I'm not sure how masterful it was, but we got the job done, and that's what counts.” + +“Your partners, they're happier than I've seen them since this whole business started. I know how they feel!” + +My partners? Oh, yes, Dan and Lil. How happy were they, I wondered. Happy enough to get back together? My mood fell, even though a part of me said that Dan would never go back to her, not after all we'd been through together. + +“I'm glad you're glad. We couldn't have done it without you, and it looks like we'll be open for business in a week.” + +“Oh, I should think so. Are you coming to the party tonight?” + +Party? Probably something the Liberty Square ad-hocs were putting on. I would almost certainly be persona non grata. “I don't think so,” I said, carefully. “I'll probably work late here.” + +He chided me for working too hard, but once he saw that I had no intention of being dragged to the party, he left off. + +And that's how I came to be in the Mansion at 2 a.m. the next morning, dozing in a backstage break room when I heard a commotion from the parlor. Festive voices, happy and loud, and I assumed it was Liberty Square ad-hocs coming back from their party. + +I roused myself and entered the parlor. + +Kim and her friends were there, pushing hand-trucks of Debra's gear. I got ready to shout something horrible at them, and that's when Debra came in. I moderated the shout to a snap, opened my mouth to speak, stopped. + +Behind Debra were Lil's parents, frozen these long years in their canopic jars in Kissimmee. + +1~ CHAPTER 9 + +Lil's parents went into their jars with little ceremony. I saw them just before they went in, when they stopped in at Lil's and my place to kiss her goodbye and wish her well. + +Tom and I stood awkwardly to the side while Lil and her mother held an achingly chipper and polite farewell. + +“So,” I said to Tom. “Deadheading.” + +He cocked an eyebrow. “Yup. Took the backup this morning.” + +Before coming to see their daughter, they'd taken their backups. When they woke, this event—everything following the backup—would never have happened for them. + +God, they were bastards. + +“When are you coming back?” I asked, keeping my castmember face on, carefully hiding away the disgust. + +'We'll be sampling monthly, just getting a digest dumped to us. When things look interesting enough, we'll come on back.” He waggled a finger at me. “I'll be keeping an eye on you and Lillian—you treat her right, you hear?” + +“We're sure going to miss you two around here,” I said. + +He pishtoshed and said, “You won't even notice we're gone. This is your world now—we're just getting out of the way for a while, letting you-all take a run at it. We wouldn't be going down if we didn't have faith in you two.” + +Lil and her mom kissed one last time. Her mother was more affectionate than I'd ever seen her, even to the point of tearing up a little. Here in this moment of vanishing consciousness, she could be whomever she wanted, knowing that it wouldn't matter the next time she awoke. + +“Julius,” she said, taking my hands, squeezing them. “You've got some wonderful times ahead of you—between Lil and the Park, you're going to have a tremendous experience, I just know it.” She was infinitely serene and compassionate, and I knew it didn't count. + +Still smiling, they got into their runabout and drove away to get the lethal injections, to become disembodied consciousnesses, to lose their last moments with their darling daughter. + +They were not happy to be returned from the dead. Their new bodies were impossibly young, pubescent and hormonal and doleful and kitted out in the latest trendy styles. In the company of Kim and her pals, they made a solid mass of irate adolescence. + +“Just what the hell do you think you're doing?” Rita asked, shoving me hard in the chest. I stumbled back into my carefully scattered dust, raising a cloud. + +Rita came after me, but Tom held her back. “Julius, go away. Your actions are totally indefensible. Keep your mouth shut and go away.” + +I held up a hand, tried to wave away his words, opened my mouth to speak. + +“Don't say a word,” he said. “Leave. Now.” + +“/{Don't stay here and don't come back. Ever}/,” Kim said, an evil look on her face. + +“No,” I said. “No goddamn it no. You're going to hear me out, and then I'm going to get Lil and her people and they're going to back me up. That's not negotiable.” + +We stared at each other across the dim parlor. Debra made a twiddling motion and the lights came up full and harsh. The expertly crafted gloom went away and it was just a dusty room with a fake fireplace. + +“Let him speak,” Debra said. Rita folded her arms and glared. + +“I did some really awful things,” I said, keeping my head up, keeping my eyes on them. “I can't excuse them, and I don't ask you to forgive them. But that doesn't change the fact that we've put our hearts and souls into this place, and it's not right to take it from us. Can't we have one constant corner of the world, one bit frozen in time for the people who love it that way? Why does your success mean our failure? + +“Can't you see that we're carrying on your work? That we're tending a legacy you left us?” + +“Are you through?” Rita asked. + +I nodded. + +“This place is not a historical preserve, Julius, it's a ride. If you don't understand that, you're in the wrong place. It's not my goddamn fault that you decided that your stupidity was on my behalf, and it doesn't make it any less stupid. All you've done is confirm my worst fears.” + +Debra's mask of impartiality slipped. “You stupid, deluded asshole,” she said, softly. “You totter around, pissing and moaning about your little murder, your little health problems—yes, I've heard—your little fixation on keeping things the way they are. You need some perspective, Julius. You need to get away from here: Disney World isn't good for you and you're sure as hell not any good for Disney World.” + +It would have hurt less if I hadn't come to the same conclusion myself, somewhere along the way. + +I found the ad-hoc at a Fort Wilderness campsite, sitting around a fire and singing, necking, laughing. The victory party. I trudged into the circle and hunted for Lil. + +She was sitting on a log, staring into the fire, a million miles away. Lord, she was beautiful when she fretted. I stood in front of her for a minute and she stared right through me until I tapped her shoulder. She gave an involuntary squeak and then smiled at herself. + +“Lil,” I said, then stopped. /{Your parents are home, and they've joined the other side}/. + +For the first time in an age, she looked at me softly, smiled even. She patted the log next to her. I sat down, felt the heat of the fire on my face, her body heat on my side. God, how did I screw this up? + +Without warning, she put her arms around me and hugged me hard. I hugged her back, nose in her hair, woodsmoke smell and shampoo and sweat. “We did it,” she whispered fiercely. I held onto her. /{No, we didn't}/. + +“Lil,” I said again, and pulled away. + +“What?” she said, her eyes shining. She was stoned, I saw that now. + +“Your parents are back. They came to the Mansion.” + +She was confused, shrinking, and I pressed on. + +“They were with Debra.” + +She reeled back as if I'd slapped her. + +“I told them I'd bring the whole group back to talk it over.” + +She hung her head and her shoulders shook, and I tentatively put an arm around her. She shook it off and sat up. She was crying and laughing at the same time. “I'll have a ferry sent over,” she said. + +I sat in the back of the ferry with Dan, away from the confused and angry ad-hocs. I answered his questions with terse, one-word answers, and he gave up. We rode in silence, the trees on the edges of the Seven Seas Lagoon whipping back and forth in an approaching storm. + +The ad-hoc shortcutted through the west parking lot and moved through the quiet streets of Frontierland apprehensively, a funeral procession that stopped the nighttime custodial staff in their tracks. + +As we drew up on Liberty Square, I saw that the work-lights were blazing and a tremendous work-gang of Debra's ad-hocs were moving from the Hall to the Mansion, undoing our teardown of their work. + +Working alongside of them were Tom and Rita, Lil's parents, sleeves rolled up, forearms bulging with new, toned muscle. The group stopped in its tracks and Lil went to them, stumbling on the wooden sidewalk. + +I expected hugs. There were none. In their stead, parents and daughter stalked each other, shifting weight and posture to track each other, maintain a constant, sizing distance. + +“What the hell are you doing?” Lil said, finally. She didn't address her mother, which surprised me. It didn't surprise Tom, though. + +He dipped forward, the shuffle of his feet loud in the quiet night. “We're working,” he said. + +“No, you're not,” Lil said. “You're destroying. Stop it.” + +Lil's mother darted to her husband's side, not saying anything, just standing there. + +Wordlessly, Tom hefted the box he was holding and headed to the Mansion. Lil caught his arm and jerked it so he dropped his load. + +“You're not listening. The Mansion is /{ours}/. /{Stop}/. /{It}/.” + +Lil's mother gently took Lil's hand off Tom's arm, held it in her own. “I'm glad you're passionate about it, Lillian,” she said. “I'm proud of your commitment.” + +Even at a distance of ten yards, I heard Lil's choked sob, saw her collapse in on herself. Her mother took her in her arms, rocked her. I felt like a voyeur, but couldn't bring myself to turn away. + +“Shhh,” her mother said, a sibilant sound that matched the rustling of the leaves on the Liberty Tree. “Shhh. We don't have to be on the same side, you know.” + +They held the embrace and held it still. Lil straightened, then bent again and picked up her father's box, carried it to the Mansion. One at a time, the rest of her ad-hoc moved forward and joined them. + +This is how you hit bottom. You wake up in your friend's hotel room and you power up your handheld and it won't log on. You press the call-button for the elevator and it gives you an angry buzz in return. You take the stairs to the lobby and no one looks at you as they jostle past you. + +You become a non-person. + +Scared. I trembled when I ascended the stairs to Dan's room, when I knocked at his door, louder and harder than I meant, a panicked banging. + +Dan answered the door and I saw his eyes go to his HUD, back to me. “Jesus,” he said. + +I sat on the edge of my bed, head in my hands. + +“What?” I said, what happened, what happened to me? + +“You're out of the ad-hoc,” he said. “You're out of Whuffie. You're bottomed-out,” he said. + +This is how you hit bottom in Walt Disney World, in a hotel with the hissing of the monorail and the sun streaming through the window, the hooting of the steam engines on the railroad and the distant howl of the recorded wolves at the Haunted Mansion. The world drops away from you, recedes until you're nothing but a speck, a mote in blackness. + +I was hyperventilating, light-headed. Deliberately, I slowed my breath, put my head between my knees until the dizziness passed. + +“Take me to Lil,” I said. + +Driving together, hammering cigarette after cigarette into my face, I remembered the night Dan had come to Disney World, when I'd driven him to my—/{Lil's}/—house, and how happy I'd been then, how secure. + +I looked at Dan and he patted my hand. “Strange times,” he said. + +It was enough. We found Lil in an underground break-room, lightly dozing on a ratty sofa. Her head rested on Tom's lap, her feet on Rita's. All three snored softly. They'd had a long night. + +Dan shook Lil awake. She stretched out and opened her eyes, looked sleepily at me. The blood drained from her face. + +“Hello, Julius,” she said, coldly. + +Now Tom and Rita were awake, too. Lil sat up. + +“Were you going to tell me?” I asked, quietly. “Or were you just going to kick me out and let me find out on my own?” + +“You were my next stop,” Lil said. + +“Then I've saved you some time.” I pulled up a chair. “Tell me all about it.” + +“There's nothing to tell,” Rita snapped. “You're out. You had to know it was coming—for God's sake, you were tearing Liberty Square apart!” + +“How would you know?” I asked. I struggled to remain calm. “You've been asleep for ten years!” + +“We got updates,” Rita said. “That's why we're back—we couldn't let it go on the way it was. We owed it to Debra.” + +“And Lillian,” Tom said. + +“And Lillian,” Rita said, absently. + +Dan pulled up a chair of his own. “You're not being fair to him,” he said. At least someone was on my side. + +“We've been more than fair,” Lil said. “You know that better than anyone, Dan. We've forgiven and forgiven and forgiven, made every allowance. He's sick and he won't take the cure. There's nothing more we can do for him.” + +“You could be his friend,” Dan said. The light-headedness was back, and I slumped in my chair, tried to control my breathing, the panicked thumping of my heart. + +“You could try to understand, you could try to help him. You could stick with him, the way he stuck with you. You don't have to toss him out on his ass.” + +Lil had the good grace to look slightly shamed. “I'll get him a room,” she said. “For a month. In Kissimmee. A motel. I'll pick up his network access. Is that fair?” + +“It's more than fair,” Rita said. Why did she hate me so much? I'd been there for her daughter while she was away—ah. That might do it, all right. “I don't think it's warranted. If you want to take care of him, sir, you can. It's none of my family's business.” + +Lil's eyes blazed. “Let me handle this,” she said. “All right?” + +Rita stood up abruptly. “You do whatever you want,” she said, and stormed out of the room. + +“Why are you coming here for help?” Tom said, ever the voice of reason. “You seem capable enough.” + +“I'm going to be taking a lethal injection at the end of the week,” Dan said. “Three days. That's personal, but you asked.” + +Tom shook his head. /{Some friends you've got yourself}/, I could see him thinking it. + +“That soon?” Lil asked, a throb in her voice. + +Dan nodded. + +In a dreamlike buzz, I stood and wandered out into the utilidor, out through the western castmember parking, and away. + +I wandered along the cobbled, disused Walk Around the World, each flagstone engraved with the name of a family that had visited the Park a century before. The names whipped past me like epitaphs. + +The sun came up noon high as I rounded the bend of deserted beach between the Grand Floridian and the Polynesian. Lil and I had come here often, to watch the sunset from a hammock, arms around each other, the Park spread out before us like a lighted toy village. + +Now the beach was deserted, the Wedding Pavilion silent. I felt suddenly cold though I was sweating freely. So cold. + +Dreamlike, I walked into the lake, water filling my shoes, logging my pants, warm as blood, warm on my chest, on my chin, on my mouth, on my eyes. + +I opened my mouth and inhaled deeply, water filling my lungs, choking and warm. At first I sputtered, but I was in control now, and I inhaled again. The water shimmered over my eyes, and then was dark. + +I woke on Doctor Pete's cot in the Magic Kingdom, restraints around my wrists and ankles, a tube in my nose. I closed my eyes, for a moment believing that I'd been restored from a backup, problems solved, memories behind me. + +Sorrow knifed through me as I realized that Dan was probably dead by now, my memories of him gone forever. + +Gradually, I realized that I was thinking nonsensically. The fact that I remembered Dan meant that I hadn't been refreshed from my backup, that my broken brain was still there, churning along in unmediated isolation. + +I coughed again. My ribs ached and throbbed in counterpoint to my head. Dan took my hand. + +“You're a pain in the ass, you know that?” he said, smiling. + +“Sorry,” I choked. + +“You sure are,” he said. “Lucky for you they found you—another minute or two and I'd be burying you right now.” + +/{No}/, I thought, confused. /{They'd have restored me from backup}/. Then it hit me: I'd gone on record refusing restore from backup after having it recommended by a medical professional. No one would have restored me after that. I would have been truly and finally dead. I started to shiver. + +“Easy,” Dan said. “Easy. It's all right now. Doctor says you've got a cracked rib or two from the CPR, but there's no brain damage.” + +“No /{additional}/ brain damage,” Doctor Pete said, swimming into view. He had on his professionally calm bedside face, and it reassured me despite myself. + +He shooed Dan away and took his seat. Once Dan had left the room, he shone lights in my eyes and peeked in my ears, then sat back and considered me. “Well, Julius,” he said. “What exactly is the problem? We can get you a lethal injection if that's what you want, but offing yourself in the Seven Seas Lagoon just isn't good show. In the meantime, would you like to talk about it?” + +Part of me wanted to spit in his eye. I'd tried to talk about it and he'd told me to go to hell, and now he changes his mind? But I did want to talk. + +“I didn't want to die,” I said. + +“Oh no?” he said. “I think the evidence suggests the contrary.” + +“I wasn't trying to die,” I protested. “I was trying to—” What? I was trying to… /{abdicate}/. Take the refresh without choosing it, without shutting out the last year of my best friend's life. Rescue myself from the stinking pit I'd sunk into without flushing Dan away along with it. That's all, that's all. + +“I wasn't thinking—I was just acting. It was an episode or something. Does that mean I'm nuts?” + +“Oh, probably,” Doctor Pete said, offhandedly. “But let's worry about one thing at a time. You can die if you want to, that's your right. I'd rather you lived, if you want my opinion, and I doubt that I'm the only one, Whuffie be damned. If you're going to live, I'd like to record you saying so, just in case. We have a backup of you on file—I'd hate to have to delete it.” + +“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I'd like to be restored if there's no other option.” It was true. I didn't want to die. + +“All right then,” Doctor Pete said. “It's on file and I'm a happy man. Now, are you nuts? Probably. A little. Nothing a little counseling and some RandR wouldn't fix, if you want my opinion. I could find you somewhere if you want.” + +“Not yet,” I said. “I appreciate the offer, but there's something else I have to do first.” + +Dan took me back to the room and put me to bed with a transdermal soporific that knocked me out for the rest of the day. When I woke, the moon was over the Seven Seas Lagoon and the monorail was silent. + +I stood on the patio for a while, thinking about all the things this place had meant to me for more than a century: happiness, security, efficiency, fantasy. All of it gone. It was time I left. Maybe back to space, find Zed and see if I could make her happy again. Anywhere but here. Once Dan was dead—God, it was sinking in finally—I could catch a ride down to the Cape for a launch. + +“What's on your mind?” Dan asked from behind me, startling me. He was in his boxers, thin and rangy and hairy. + +“Thinking about moving on,” I said. + +He chuckled. “I've been thinking about doing the same,” he said. + +I smiled. “Not that way,” I said. “Just going somewhere else, starting over. Getting away from this.” + +“Going to take the refresh?” he asked. + +I looked away. “No,” I said. “I don't believe I will.” + +“It may be none of my business,” he said, “but why the fuck not? Jesus, Julius, what're you afraid of?” + +“You don't want to know,” I said. + +“I'll be the judge of that.” + +“Let's have a drink, first,” I said. + +Dan rolled his eyes back for a second, then said, “All right, two Coronas, coming up.” + +After the room-service bot had left, we cracked the beers and pulled chairs out onto the porch. + +“You sure you want to know this?” I asked. + +He tipped his bottle at me. “Sure as shootin',” he said. + +“I don't want refresh because it would mean losing the last year,” I said. + +He nodded. “By which you mean ‘my last year,’” he said. “Right?” + +I nodded and drank. + +“I thought it might be like that. Julius, you are many things, but hard to figure out you are not. I have something to say that might help you make the decision. If you want to hear it, that is.” + +What could he have to say? “Sure,” I said. “Sure.” In my mind, I was on a shuttle headed for orbit, away from all of this. + +“I had you killed,” he said. “Debra asked me to, and I set it up. You were right all along.” + +The shuttle exploded in silent, slow moving space, and I spun away from it. I opened and shut my mouth. + +It was Dan's turn to look away. “Debra proposed it. We were talking about the people I'd met when I was doing my missionary work, the stone crazies who I'd have to chase away after they'd rejoined the Bitchun Society. One of them, a girl from Cheyenne Mountain, she followed me down here, kept leaving me messages. I told Debra, and that's when she got the idea. + +“I'd get the girl to shoot you and disappear. Debra would give me Whuffie—piles of it, and her team would follow suit. I'd be months closer to my goal. That was all I could think about back then, you remember.” + +“I remember.” The smell of rejuve and desperation in our little cottage, and Dan plotting my death. + +“We planned it, then Debra had herself refreshed from a backup—no memory of the event, just the Whuffie for me.” + +“Yes,” I said. That would work. Plan a murder, kill yourself, have yourself refreshed from a backup made before the plan. How many times had Debra done terrible things and erased their memories that way? + +“Yes,” he agreed. “We did it, I'm ashamed to say. I can prove it, too—I have my backup, and I can get Jeanine to tell it, too.” He drained his beer. “That's my plan. Tomorrow. I'll tell Lil and her folks, Kim and her people, the whole ad-hoc. A going-away present from a shitty friend.” + +My throat was dry and tight. I drank more beer. “You knew all along,” I said. “You could have proved it at any time.” + +He nodded. “That's right.” + +“You let me…” I groped for the words. “You let me turn into…” They wouldn't come. + +“I did,” he said. + +All this time. Lil and he, standing on /{my}/ porch, telling me I needed help. Doctor Pete, telling me I needed refresh from backup, me saying no, no, no, not wanting to lose my last year with Dan. + +“I've done some pretty shitty things in my day,” he said. “This is the absolute worst. You helped me and I betrayed you. I'm sure glad I don't believe in God—that'd make what I'm going to do even scarier.” + +Dan was going to kill himself in two days' time. My friend and my murderer. “Dan,” I croaked. I couldn't make any sense of my mind. Dan, taking care of me, helping me, sticking up for me, carrying this horrible shame with him all along. Ready to die, wanting to go with a clean conscience. + +“You're forgiven,” I said. And it was true. + +He stood. + +“Where are you going” I asked. + +“To find Jeanine, the one who pulled the trigger. I'll meet you at the Hall of Presidents at nine a.m..” + +I went in through the Main Gate, not a castmember any longer, a Guest with barely enough Whuffie to scrape in, use the water fountains and stand in line. If I were lucky, a castmember might spare me a chocolate banana. Probably not, though. + +I stood in the line for the Hall of Presidents. Other guests checked my Whuffie, then averted their eyes. Even the children. A year before, they'd have been striking up conversations, asking me about my job here at the Magic Kingdom. + +I sat in my seat at the Hall of Presidents, watching the short film with the rest, sitting patiently while they rocked in their seats under the blast of the flash-bake. A castmember picked up the stageside mic and thanked everyone for coming; the doors swung open and the Hall was empty, except for me. The castmember narrowed her eyes at me, then recognizing me, turned her back and went to show in the next group. + +No group came. Instead, Dan and the girl I'd seen on the replay entered. + +“We've closed it down for the morning,” he said. + +I was staring at the girl, seeing her smirk as she pulled the trigger on me, seeing her now with a contrite, scared expression. She was terrified of me. + +“You must be Jeanine,” I said. I stood and shook her hand. “I'm Julius.” + +Her hand was cold, and she took it back and wiped it on her pants. + +My castmember instincts took over. “Please, have a seat. Don't worry, it'll all be fine. Really. No hard feelings.” I stopped short of offering to get her a glass of water. + +/{Put her at her ease}/, said a snotty voice in my head. /{She'll make a better witness. Or make her nervous, pathetic—that'll work, too; make Debra look even worse}/. + +I told the voice to shut up and got her a cup of water. + +By the time I came back, the whole gang was there. Debra, Lil, her folks, Tim. Debra's gang and Lil's gang, now one united team. Soon to be scattered. + +Dan took the stage, used the stageside mic to broadcast his voice. “Eleven months ago, I did an awful thing. I plotted with Debra to have Julius murdered. I used a friend who was a little confused at the time, used her to pull the trigger. It was Debra's idea that having Julius killed would cause enough confusion that she could take over the Hall of Presidents. It was.” + +There was a roar of conversation. I looked at Debra, saw that she was sitting calmly, as though Dan had just accused her of sneaking an extra helping of dessert. Lil's parents, to either side of her, were less sanguine. Tom's jaw was set and angry, Rita was speaking angrily to Debra. Hickory Jackson in the old Hall used to say, /{I will hang the first man I can lay hands on from the first tree I can find}/. + +“Debra had herself refreshed from backup after we planned it,” Dan went on, as though no one was talking. “I was supposed to do the same, but I didn't. I have a backup in my public directory—anyone can examine it. Right now, I'd like to bring Jeanine up, she's got a few words she'd like to say.” + +I helped Jeanine take the stage. She was still trembling, and the ad-hocs were an insensate babble of recriminations. Despite myself, I was enjoying it. + +“Hello,” Jeanine said softly. She had a lovely voice, a lovely face. I wondered if we could be friends when it was all over. She probably didn't care much about Whuffie, one way or another. + +The discussion went on. Dan took the mic from her and said, “Please! Can we have a little respect for our visitor? Please? People?” + +Gradually, the din decreased. Dan passed the mic back to Jeanine. “Hello,” she said again, and flinched from the sound of her voice in the Hall's PA. “My name is Jeanine. I'm the one who killed Julius, a year ago. Dan asked me to, and I did it. I didn't ask why. I trusted—trust—him. He told me that Julius would make a backup a few minutes before I shot him, and that he could get me out of the Park without getting caught. I'm very sorry.” There was something off-kilter about her, some stilt to her stance and words that let you know she wasn't all there. Growing up in a mountain might do that to you. I snuck a look at Lil, whose lips were pressed together. Growing up in a theme park might do that to you, too. + +“Thank you, Jeanine,” Dan said, taking back the mic. “You can have a seat now. I've said everything I need to say—Julius and I have had our own discussions in private. If there's anyone else who'd like to speak—” + +The words were barely out of his mouth before the crowd erupted again in words and waving hands. Beside me, Jeanine flinched. I took her hand and shouted in her ear: “Have you ever been on the Pirates of the Carribean?” + +She shook her head. + +I stood up and pulled her to her feet. “You'll love it,” I said, and led her out of the Hall. + +1~ CHAPTER 10 + +I booked us ringside seats at the Polynesian Luau, riding high on a fresh round of sympathy Whuffie, and Dan and I drank a dozen lapu-lapus in hollowed-out pineapples before giving up on the idea of getting drunk. + +Jeanine watched the fire-dances and the torch-lighting with eyes like saucers, and picked daintily at her spare ribs with one hand, never averting her attention from the floor show. When they danced the fast hula, her eyes jiggled. I chuckled. + +From where we sat, I could see the spot where I'd waded into the Seven Seas Lagoon and breathed in the blood-temp water, I could see Cinderella's Castle, across the lagoon, I could see the monorails and the ferries and the busses making their busy way through the Park, shuttling teeming masses of guests from place to place. Dan toasted me with his pineapple and I toasted him back, drank it dry and belched in satisfaction. + +Full belly, good friends, and the sunset behind a troupe of tawny, half-naked hula dancers. Who needs the Bitchun Society, anyway? + +When it was over, we watched the fireworks from the beach, my toes dug into the clean white sand. Dan slipped his hand into my left hand, and Jeanine took my right. When the sky darkened and the lighted barges puttered away through the night, we three sat in the hammock. + +I looked out over the Seven Seas Lagoon and realized that this was my last night, ever, in Walt Disney World. It was time to reboot again, start afresh. That's what the Park was for, only somehow, this visit, I'd gotten stuck. Dan had unstuck me. + +The talk turned to Dan's impending death. + +“So, tell me what you think of this,” he said, hauling away on a glowing cigarette. + +“Shoot,” I said. + +“I'm thinking—why take lethal injection? I mean, I may be done here for now, but why should I make an irreversible decision?” + +“Why did you want to before?” I asked. + +“Oh, it was the macho thing, I guess. The finality and all. But hell, I don't have to prove anything, right?” + +“Sure,” I said, magnanimously. + +“So,” he said, thoughtfully. “The question I'm asking is, how long can I deadhead for? There are folks who go down for a thousand years, ten thousand, right?” + +“So, you're thinking, what, a million?” I joked. + +He laughed. “A /{million}/? You're thinking too small, son. Try this on for size: the heat death of the universe.” + +“The heat death of the universe,” I repeated. + +“Sure,” he drawled, and I sensed his grin in the dark. “Ten to the hundred years or so. The Stelliferous Period—it's when all the black holes have run dry and things get, you know, stupendously dull. Cold, too. So I'm thinking—why not leave a wake-up call for some time around then?” + +“Sounds unpleasant to me,” I said. “Brrrr.” + +“Not at all! I figure, self-repairing nano-based canopic jar, mass enough to feed it—say, a trillion-ton asteroid—and a lot of solitude when the time comes around. I'll poke my head in every century or so, just to see what's what, but if nothing really stupendous crops up, I'll take the long ride out. The final frontier.” + +“That's pretty cool,” Jeanine said. + +“Thanks,” Dan said. + +“You're not kidding, are you?” I asked. + +“Nope, I sure ain't,” he said. + +They didn't invite me back into the ad-hoc, even after Debra left in Whuffie-penury and they started to put the Mansion back the way it was. Tim called me to say that with enough support from Imagineering, they thought they could get it up and running in a week. Suneep was ready to kill someone, I swear. /{A house divided against itself can}/ not /{stand}/, as Mr. Lincoln used to say at the Hall of Presidents. + +I packed three changes of clothes and a toothbrush in my shoulderbag and checked out of my suite at the Polynesian at ten a.m., then met Jeanine and Dan at the valet parking out front. Dan had a runabout he'd picked up with my Whuffie, and I piled in with Jeanine in the middle. We played old Beatles tunes on the stereo all the long way to Cape Canaveral. Our shuttle lifted at noon. + +The shuttle docked four hours later, but by the time we'd been through decontam and orientation, it was suppertime. Dan, nearly as Whuffie-poor as Debra after his confession, nevertheless treated us to a meal in the big bubble, squeeze-tubes of heady booze and steaky paste, and we watched the universe get colder for a while. + +There were a couple guys jamming, tethered to a guitar and a set of tubs, and they weren't half bad. + +Jeanine was uncomfortable hanging there naked. She'd gone to space with her folks after Dan had left the mountain, but it was in a long-haul generation ship. She'd abandoned it after a year or two and deadheaded back to Earth in a support-pod. She'd get used to life in space after a while. Or she wouldn't. + +“Well,” Dan said. + +“Yup,” I said, aping his laconic drawl. He smiled. + +“It's that time,” he said. + +Spheres of saline tears formed in Jeanine's eyes, and I brushed them away, setting them adrift in the bubble. I'd developed some real tender, brother-sister type feelings for her since I'd watched her saucer-eye her way through the Magic Kingdom. No romance—not for me, thanks! But camaraderie and a sense of responsibility. + +“See you in ten to the hundred,” Dan said, and headed to the airlock. I started after him, but Jeanine caught my hand. + +“He hates long good-byes,” she said. + +“I know,” I said, and watched him go. + +The universe gets older. So do I. So does my backup, sitting in redundant distributed storage dirtside, ready for the day that space or age or stupidity kills me. It recedes with the years, and I write out my life longhand, a letter to the me that I'll be when it's restored into a clone somewhere, somewhen. It's important that whoever I am then knows about this year, and it's going to take a lot of tries for me to get it right. + +In the meantime, I'm working on another symphony, one with a little bit of “Grim Grinning Ghosts,” and a nod to “It's a Small World After All,” and especially “There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow.” + +Jeanine says it's pretty good, but what does she know? She's barely fifty. + +We've both got a lot of living to do before we know what's what. + +1~acknowledgements Acknowledgements: + +I could never have written this book without the personal support of my friends and family, especially Roz Doctorow, Gord Doctorow and Neil Doctorow, Amanda Foubister, Steve Samenski, Pat York, Grad Conn, John Henson, John Rose, the writers at the Cecil Street Irregulars and Mark Frauenfelder. + +I owe a great debt to the writers and editors who mentored and encouraged me: James Patrick Kelly, Judith Merril, Damon Knight, Martha Soukup, Scott Edelman, Gardner Dozois, Renee Wilmeth, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Claire Eddy, Bob Parks and Robert Killheffer. + +I am also indebted to my editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden and my agent Donald Maass, who believed in this book and helped me bring it to fruition. + +Finally, I must thank the readers, the geeks and the Imagineers who inspired this book. + +Cory Doctorow + +San Francisco + +September 2002 + +1~note-2004 A note about this book, February 12, 2004: + +As you will see, when you read the text beneath this section, I released this book a little over a year ago under the terms of a Creative Commons license that allowed my readers to freely redistribute the text without needing any further permission from me. In this fashion, I enlisted my readers in the service of a grand experiment, to see how my book could find its way into cultural relevance and commercial success. The experiment worked out very satisfactorily. + +When I originally licensed the book under the terms set out in the next section, I did so in the most conservative fashion possible, using CC's most restrictive license. I wanted to dip my toe in before taking a plunge. I wanted to see if the sky would fall: you see writers are routinely schooled by their peers that maximal copyright is the only thing that stands between us and penury, and so ingrained was this lesson in me that even though I had the intellectual intuition that a "some rights reserved" regime would serve me well, I still couldn't shake the atavistic fear that I was about to do something very foolish indeed. + +It wasn't foolish. I've since released a short story collection ( { A Place So Foreign and Eight More }http://craphound.com/place and a second novel ( { Eastern Standard Tribe }http://craphound.com/est ) in this fashion, and my career is turning over like a goddamned locomotive engine. I am thrilled beyond words (an extraordinary circumstance for a writer!) at the way that this has all worked out. + +And so /{now}/ I'm going to take a little bit of a plunge. Today, in coincidence with my talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference ( { Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books }http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2004/view/e_sess/4693 ). + +I am re-licensing this book under a far less restrictive Creative Commons license, the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. This is a license that allows you, the reader, to noncommercially "remix" this book -- you have my blessing to make your own translations, radio and film adaptations, sequels, fan fiction, missing chapters, machine remixes, you name it. 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Each time You distribute or publicly digitally perform a Derivative Work, Licensor offers to the recipient a license to the original Work on the same terms and conditions as the license granted to You under this License. + +_2 3. If any provision of this License is invalid or unenforceable under applicable law, it shall not affect the validity or enforceability of the remainder of the terms of this License, and without further action by the parties to this agreement, such provision shall be reformed to the minimum extent necessary to make such provision valid and enforceable. + +_2 4. No term or provision of this License shall be deemed waived and no breach consented to unless such waiver or consent shall be in writing and signed by the party to be charged with such waiver or consent. + +_2 5. This License constitutes the entire agreement between the parties with respect to the Work licensed here. There are no understandings, agreements or representations with respect to the Work not specified here. Licensor shall not be bound by any additional provisions that may appear in any communication from You. This License may not be modified without the mutual written agreement of the Licensor and You. + +1~note-2003 A note about this book, January 9, 2003: + +“Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” is my first novel. It's an actual, no-foolin' words-on-paper book, published by the good people at Tor Books in New York City. You can buy this book in stores or online, by following links like this one: + +http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0765304368/downandoutint-20 + +So, what's with this file? Good question. + +I'm releasing the entire text of this book as a free, freely redistributable e-book. You can download it, put it on a P2P net, put it on your site, email it to a friend, and, if you're addicted to dead trees, you can even print it. + +Why am I doing this thing? Well, it's a long story, but to shorten it up: first-time novelists have a tough row to hoe. Our publishers don't have a lot of promotional budget to throw at unknown factors like us. Mostly, we rise and fall based on word-of-mouth. I'm not bad at word-of-mouth. I have a blog, Boing Boing ( http://boingboing.net ), where I do a /{lot}/ of word-of-mouthing. I compulsively tell friends and strangers about things that I like. + +And telling people about stuff I like is /{way}/, /{way}/ easier if I can just send it to 'em. Way easier. + +What's more, P2P nets kick all kinds of ass. Most of the books, music and movies ever released are not available for sale, anywhere in the world. In the brief time that P2P nets have flourished, the ad-hoc masses of the Internet have managed to put just about /{everything}/ online. What's more, they've done it for cheaper than any other archiving/revival effort ever. I'm a stone infovore and this kinda Internet mishegas gives me a serious frisson of futurosity. + +Yeah, there are legal problems. Yeah, it's hard to figure out how people are gonna make money doing it. Yeah, there is a lot of social upheaval and a serious threat to innovation, freedom, business, and whatnot. It's your basic end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenario, and as a science fiction writer, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenaria are my stock-in-trade. + +I'm especially grateful to my publisher, Tor Books ( http://www.tor.com/ ) and my editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden ( http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite ) for being hep enough to let me try out this experiment. + +All that said, here's the deal: I'm releasing this book under a license developed by the Creative Commons project ( http://creativecommons.org/ ). This is a project that lets people like me roll our own license agreements for the distribution of our creative work under terms similar to those employed by the Free/Open Source Software movement. It's a great project, and I'm proud to be a part of it. + +Here's a summary of the license: + +http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0 + +_* Attribution. The licensor permits others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work. In return, licensees must give the original author credit. + +_* No Derivative Works. The licensor permits others to copy, distribute, display and perform only unaltered copies of the work—not derivative works based on it. + +_* Noncommercial. The licensor permits others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work. In return, licensees may not use the work for commercial purposes—unless they get the licensor's permission. + +And here's the license itself: + +http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0-legalcode + +_1 THE WORK (AS DEFINED BELOW) IS PROVIDED UNDER THE TERMS OF THIS CREATIVE COMMONS PUBLIC LICENSE (“CCPL” OR “LICENSE”). THE WORK IS PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT AND/OR OTHER APPLICABLE LAW. ANY USE OF THE WORK OTHER THAN AS AUTHORIZED UNDER THIS LICENSE IS PROHIBITED. + +_1 BY EXERCISING ANY RIGHTS TO THE WORK PROVIDED HERE, YOU ACCEPT AND AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THIS LICENSE. THE LICENSOR GRANTS YOU THE RIGHTS CONTAINED HERE IN CONSIDERATION OF YOUR ACCEPTANCE OF SUCH TERMS AND CONDITIONS. + +_1 Definitions + +_2 “Collective Work” means a work, such as a periodical issue, anthology or encyclopedia, in which the Work in its entirety in unmodified form, along with a number of other contributions, constituting separate and independent works in themselves, are assembled into a collective whole. A work that constitutes a Collective Work will not be considered a Derivative Work (as defined below) for the purposes of this License. + +_2 “Derivative Work” means a work based upon the Work or upon the Work and other pre-existing works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which the Work may be recast, transformed, or adapted, except that a work that constitutes a Collective Work will not be considered a Derivative Work for the purpose of this License. + +_2 “Licensor” means the individual or entity that offers the Work under the terms of this License. + +_2 “Original Author” means the individual or entity who created the Work. + +_2 “Work” means the copyrightable work of authorship offered under the terms of this License. + +_2 “You” means an individual or entity exercising rights under this License who has not previously violated the terms of this License with respect to the Work, or who has received express permission from the Licensor to exercise rights under this License despite a previous violation. + +_1 2. 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The Work does not infringe the copyright, trademark, publicity rights, common law rights or any other right of any third party or constitute defamation, invasion of privacy or other tortious injury to any third party. + +_2 2. EXCEPT AS EXPRESSLY STATED IN THIS LICENSE OR OTHERWISE AGREED IN WRITING OR REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW, THE WORK IS LICENSED ON AN “AS IS” BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY WARRANTIES REGARDING THE CONTENTS OR ACCURACY OF THE WORK. + +_1 6. Limitation on Liability. EXCEPT TO THE EXTENT REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW, AND EXCEPT FOR DAMAGES ARISING FROM LIABILITY TO A THIRD PARTY RESULTING FROM BREACH OF THE WARRANTIES IN SECTION 5, IN NO EVENT WILL LICENSOR BE LIABLE TO YOU ON ANY LEGAL THEORY FOR ANY SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR EXEMPLARY DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THIS LICENSE OR THE USE OF THE WORK, EVEN IF LICENSOR HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. + +_1 7. Termination + +_2 1. This License and the rights granted hereunder will terminate automatically upon any breach by You of the terms of this License. Individuals or entities who have received Collective Works from You under this License, however, will not have their licenses terminated provided such individuals or entities remain in full compliance with those licenses. Sections 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, and 8 will survive any termination of this License. + +_2 Subject to the above terms and conditions, the license granted here is perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright in the Work). Notwithstanding the above, Licensor reserves the right to release the Work under different license terms or to stop distributing the Work at any time; provided, however that any such election will not serve to withdraw this License (or any other license that has been, or is required to be, granted under the terms of this License), and this License will continue in full force and effect unless terminated as stated above. + +_1 8. Miscellaneous + +_2 1. Each time You distribute or publicly digitally perform the Work or a Collective Work, the Licensor offers to the recipient a license to the Work on the same terms and conditions as the license granted to You under this License. + +_2 2. If any provision of this License is invalid or unenforceable under applicable law, it shall not affect the validity or enforceability of the remainder of the terms of this License, and without further action by the parties to this agreement, such provision shall be reformed to the minimum extent necessary to make such provision valid and enforceable. + +_2 3. No term or provision of this License shall be deemed waived and no breach consented to unless such waiver or consent shall be in writing and signed by the party to be charged with such waiver or consent. + +_2 4. This License constitutes the entire agreement between the parties with respect to the Work licensed here. There are no understandings, agreements or representations with respect to the Work not specified here. Licensor shall not be bound by any additional provisions that may appear in any communication from You. This License may not be modified without the mutual written agreement of the Licensor and You. + + +1~bio About the author: + +Cory Doctorow is Outreach Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, www.eff.org, and maintains a personal site at www.craphound.com. He is the co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing at www.boingboing.net, with more than 250,000 visitors a month. He won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer at the 2000 Hugo Awards. Born and raised in Toronto, he now lives in San Francisco. He enjoys using Google to look up interesting facts about long walks on the beach. + +1~other_works Other books by Cory Doctorow: + +/{A Place So Foreign and Eight More}/ + +– short story collection, forthcoming from Four Walls Eight Windows in fall 2003, with an introduction by Bruce Sterling + +/{Essential Blogging}/, O'Reilly and Associates, 2002 + +– with Rael Dornfest, J. Scott Johnson, Shelley Powers, Benjamin Trott and Mena G. Trott + +/{The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction}/, Alpha Books, 2000 + +– co-written with Karl Schroeder + +%