Bruce Sterling - Distraction

“No he’s not, not anymore. He’s actually moving up the slope…” Oscar double-clicked. “See, this huge khaki mountain range represents military affairs … Now I’ll kick the simulation back a week, and run it back up to the Bambakias press conference this morning… See the way he kind of oozes up to the issue, and then suddenly jets across the landscape?”

“Wow!” Audrey said. “I’ve always loved old-fashioned hotshot computer graphics.”

“It’s garbage,” Argow grumbled. “Just because you have a cute simulation doesn’t mean you’re actually connecting to political reality. Or to any kind of reality.”

“Okay, so it’s not real. I know it’s not real, that’s obvious. But what if it works?”

“Well,” Argow mused, “even that doesn’t help much. It’s just like stock-market analysis. Even if you get some technique that does work, that’s strictly temporary. Pretty soon everyone else gets the same analytical tools, and then your advantage disappears. You’re right back where you started. Except for one thing. From then on, every-thing becomes much, much more complicated.”

“Thanks for that technical insight, Bob. I’ll try to keep that in mind.” Oscar paused. “Audrey, why do you suppose Leon Sosik sent me this program?”

“I guess he appreciates the way you airmailed him that bin-turong,” Audrey said.

“Maybe he thought you’d be impressed by this,” Argow said. “Or maybe he’s so old and out-of-it that he really thinks this stuff is new.”

Oscar looked up from his laptop screen. The nine people on the soundstage had suddenly fallen silent. They were looking at him.

The Collaboratory’s Director and his nine functionaries seemed oddly spellbound for a moment. They formed a little Rem-brandtesque tableau under their media lighting. Oscar knew all their names — Oscar never forgot names — but for the moment he had men-tally labeled the nine local functionaries as “Administrative Support,” “Computing Communications,” “Contracts Procurement,” “Fi-nancial Services,” “Human Resources,” “Information Genetics,” “Instrumentation,” “Biomedicine,” and last but not least, the ditzy crew-cut thug from “Safety Security.” They had noticed him and — Oscar realized this suddenly — they were all afraid of him.

They knew that he had the power to do them harm. He had infiltrated their ivory tower and was judging their work. He was very new to them, he owed them nothing at all, and they were all guilty.

The stares of strangers never bothered Oscar. He had grown up in a celebrity childhood. Human attention fed something in Oscar, a deep dark psychic entity that thrived and grew with the feeding. He wasn’t cruel by nature — but he knew that there were moments in the game that required direct and primal acts of intimidation. One of those moments had just arrived. Oscar flicked his gaze upward from his laptop screen and he gave the people on the board his best — his lethal — I Know All look.

The Director flinched. He grappled for his agenda, and moved on to the pressing subject of quality assessment in the technology transfer office.

“Oscar,” Audrey whispered. Oscar leaned over casually. “Yes?”

“What’s going on? Why is Greta Penninger staring at you like that?”

Oscar glanced back up at the soundstage. He hadn’t noticed that “Instrumentation” was staring at him, and yet she clearly was. All of them had been staring at him, but Greta Penninger hadn’t stopped. Her pale and narrow face had an absent, intent cast, like a woman watching a wasp on a windowpane.

Oscar gazed back solemnly at Dr. Greta Penninger. Their eyes met. Dr. Penninger was chewing meditatively at the end of a pencil, gripping the yellow wood with her blue-knuckled, spidery, surgical fingers. She seemed to look right through him and five miles beyond. After a very long moment, she tucked the pencil in the dark pony tailed hair behind her ear, and returned her limpid gaze to her big paper notepad.

“Greta Penninger,” Oscar said thoughtfully.

“She’s really bored,” Argow offered.

“You think so?”

“Yeah. Because she’s a genuine scientist. She’s famous. This ad-ministrative crap is boring her to death. It’s boring me to death, and I don’t even work here.”

Audrey swiftly conjured Greta Penninger’s dossier onto her laptop. “I think she likes you.”

“Why do you say that?” Oscar said.

“She keeps looking your way and twisting her hair on her finger. I think I saw her lick her lips once.”

Oscar laughed quietly.

“Look, I’m not being funny. She’s not married, and you’re the new guy in town. Why shouldn’t she be interested? I know I would be.” Audrey paged a little deeper into her file of oppo data. “She’s only thirty-six, you know. She doesn’t look that bad.”

“She does look bad,” Argow assured her. “Worse than you think.”

“No, she could look okay if she tried. Her face is kind of lop-sided, and she doesn’t do her hair,” Audrey noted clinically. “But she’s tall and she’s thin. She could carry clothes. Donna could make her look good.”

“I don’t think Donna wants to work that hard,” Argow ob-jected.

“I have a girlfriend already, thank you,” Oscar said. “But since you’ve got your screen up: what exactly does Dr. Penninger do?”

“She’s a neurologist. A systemic zoo-neurologist. She won a big award once for something called ‘Radioligand Pharmacokinetics.’ ”

“So she’s still a working researcher?” said Oscar. “How long has she been in administration?”

“I’ll check,” Audrey said readily, tapping keys. “She’s been here in Buna for six years… Six years working inside this place, can you imagine that? No wonder she looks so fidgety … According to this, she’s been the head of the Instrumentation Division for four months.”

“Then she is bored,” Oscar said. “She’s bored by her job. That’s very interesting. Make a note of that, Audrey.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Let’s have her for dinner.”

Oscar had arranged a bus outing, a picnic for part of his krewe. It helped to maintain the thin fiction of “vacation,” and it got them away from the fog of mechanical surveillance, and best of all, it offered some relief from the psychic oppression of the Collaboratory dome.

They took the campaign bus to a roadside stop near a bedraggled state park called Big Thicket. This Thicket was a surprisingly large area of Texas that had somehow escaped farming and settlement. It didn’t seem entirely right to call the place an “unspoiled wilderness,” since climate change had battered it considerably; but for people from Massachusetts the Texas-sized mess was a pleasing novelty.

The day was overcast and damp, even a little raw, but it was pleasant to encounter weather of any sort. The gusting wind through the Thicket park wasn’t “fresh air” exactly — the air of East Texas was considerably less fresh than the manicured air inside the Col-laboratory — but it had a wide-screen smell, the reek of a world that possessed horizons. Besides, the picnickers had Fontenot’s big portable gas stove to keep them warm. Fontenot had just bought the stove, well used, from the proprietor of a Cajun boucherie in Mamou. The stove was made of disassembled oil barrels, heat-scorched tin sheeting, and brass-nozzled propane burners. It looked as if it had been welded into shape by Mardi Gras drunks.

It was good to chat and make a few unsupervised phone calls, well outside of the Collaboratory. Bugs were so cheap these days — when cellphones cost less than a six-pack of beer, covert listening devices were as cheap as confetti. But a cheap bug wouldn’t be able to radiate data sixty miles back to Buna. An expensive bug would be caught by Fontenot’s expensive monitors. This meant that everyone could talk.