Bruce Sterling - Distraction

Oscar took it upon himself to give the Senator and Mrs. Bambakias a personal tour of the works in Buna. They took an ar-mored limousine. With the Dutch War stalling visibly, it seemed somewhat less likely that Huey would launch any paint bombs.

However, this had not stopped the construction frenzy in Buna. On the contrary, it had liberated them from any pretense that they were sheltering themselves from gas. With thousands of people con-tinuing to pour in, with guaranteed free food, free shelter, and all the network data they could eat, the city was tautly inflated with boom-town atmosphere. One group of zealots was constructing a giant plastic structure roughly the size and shape of the Eiffel Tower, which they had dubbed the “Beacon of Cosmic Truth.” Other hobbyists had taken smart geodesics and airtight skins to a logical extreme, and were building aerostats. These were giant self-expanding airtight bubbles, and if they could get the piezoelectric musculature within the tubing to work properly, the things would engorge themselves to the point where they could literally leave the surface of the earth.

Oscar couldn’t fully contain his enthusiasm for these marvels, and he sensed that Bambakias and Lorena could use some cheering up. Bambakias looked much better — he was clearly lucid now, perhaps even cured — but stress had taken a permanent toll on Lorena. She’d put on weight, she’d sagged, she looked preserved rather than put-together. In her husband’s company she offered Oscar mostly bright monosyllables.

Bambakias was doing all the talking, but it wasn’t his usual bright and tumbling rhetoric.

“The hotel was good,” he said. “You did very well with the hotel. Considering all the local limitations.”

“Oh, we enjoy the hotel. I still sleep there most nights. But it doesn’t begin to compare to the scale of what’s been done to the town.”

“They’re not doing it right,” Bambakias said.

“Well, they’re amateurs.”

“No, they’re worse than amateurs. They’re not following code. They’re not using certified and tested materials. All these tents and pylons, in untested combinations-a lot of them are going to col-lapse. ”

“Yes, surely, Senator — but it only took them a few days to put them up! If they go bust, they’ll just build more.”

“I hope you’re not expecting me to take personal responsibility for this. I sent you those plans, but I never expected them to be executed. Once I abandon my intellectual property to all and sundry, I can’t be expected to be responsible for other people’s exploitation of it. ”

“Of course not, Senator! These were Emergency conditions, War conditions… you know, there is an upside to this. This isn’t permanent structure, and it isn’t in classic form, but it’s remarkably popular.”

Bambakias brightened a little. “Really.”

“The people who are living under these things… they’re not architecture critics. A lot of them are people who haven’t had much shelter of any kind for many years. They’re really impressed to see nomad architecture pushed to these mind-boggling extremes.”

“That isn’t ‘nomad architecture.’ It’s ultrascale emergency re-lief.”

“That’s an interesting distinction, Alcott, but let me just put it this way: it’s nomad architecture now.”

“I think you’d better listen to him, darling,” Lorena put in faintly. “Oscar always has very good instincts about these things.”

“Oh yes, instincts,” Bambakias said. “Instincts are wonderful. You can live off instincts, as long as you don’t plan to live very long. How long do you expect all this to last, Oscar?”

“ ‘This’?” Oscar said delicately.

“Whatever it is that you’ve created here. What is it, exactly? Is it a political movement? Maybe it’s just one big street party. It certainly isn’t a town.”

“Well… it’s a little difficult to say exactly where all this will go…”

“Maybe you should have thought that through a bit more thor-oughly,” Bambakias said. It clearly irked the man to have to discuss the matter, but he was taking it as a painful duty. “You know, I’m a ranking member of the Senate Science Committee. It’s going to be a little difficult explaining these developments to my colleagues back in Washington.”

“Oh, I miss that Science Committee every day,” Oscar lied.

“You know, developments here remind me of the Internet. That old computer network, invented by the American scientific commu-nity. It was all about free communications. Very simple and widely distributed — there was never any central control. It spread worldwide in short order. It turned into the world’s biggest piracy copy machine. The Chinese loved the Internet, they used it and turned it against us. They destroyed our information economy with it. Even then the net didn’t go away — it just started breeding its virtual tribes, all these no-mads and dissidents. Suddenly they could organize in powerful new ways, and now, finally, with the President taking their side… who knows? Do you see my parallel here, Oscar? Does it make sense to you?”

Oscar was increasingly uncomfortable. “Well, I never said what happened here was entirely without precedent. The great secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.”

“You stole these ideas from Huey. You stole Huey’s clothes, didn’t you?”

“Time-honored tactic, Alcott!”

“Oscar, Huey is a dictator. He’s a man on horseback. Do I un-derstand this ‘prestige economy’ business? It seems to run entirely on instinct. They spend all their time doing each other little volunteer community services. And they rank each other for it. Eventually somebody pops out of the mix and becomes a tribal big shot. Then they’re required to do what he says.”

“Well… it’s complicated. But yes, that’s the basics.”

“They really just don’t fit in the rest of American society. Not at all. ”

“It was designed that way.”

“I mean they don’t have any way to properly deal with the rest of society. They don’t even have proper ways to deal with each other. They have no rule of law. There’s no Constitution. There’s no legal redress. There’s no Bill of Rights. They don’t have any way to deal with the rest of us, except through evasion, or intimidation. When one network meets another that’s set up along different lines, they feud. They kill each other.”

“Sometimes. ”

“Now you’ve made these people aware of their mutual interest with the scientific research community. Another group of people who basically live outside the state, outside of economics. One wants free-dom of inquiry, and the other wants freedom from physical want, and neither of them has any sense of responsibility to the rest of us. In fact, the rest of us have given up expecting anything from them. We no longer hope that science will give us utopia, or even a real improve-ment. Science just adds more factor to the mix, and makes everything more unstable. We’ve given up on our dispossessed, too. We have no illusion that we can employ them, or keep them docile with more bio-bread, or more cyber-circuses. And now you’ve brought these two groups together and they’ve become a real coalition.”

“I’m with you, Senator. I’m following the argument.”

“What now, Oscar? What are they going to do now? What be-comes of the rest of us?”

“Hell, I don’t know!” Oscar shouted. “I just saw Huey doing it, that’s all. We were in a feud with Huey — you pushed me into the feud with Huey! The lab was broke, it was halfway in his pocket already, and he was just going to rack them up. They would just… be-come his creatures. I didn’t want them to be his creatures.”