Bruce Sterling - Distraction

“Money isn’t everything.”

“Oh, come on! Look, I’m not smart enough to talk to you, okay?” Jimmy shrugged irritably. “You should be sleeping right now. Everybody else sleeps.” Jimmy checked a readout and gripped the wheel.

Oscar silently waited him out.

“I can drive eighteen hours a day, when I have to,” Jimmy said at last. “I don’t mind it. Hell, I like it. But I get tired out just watching you, man. Just watching you operate, it wears me all out. I just can’t keep up with you. I’m not in your league. I’m just a normal guy, okay? I don’t want to take over federal science bases. I’m just a work-ing guy from Boston, man. I drive buses.”

Jimmy checked the overhead scanner, and took a breath. “I’m gonna drive this bus back to Boston for you, and I’m gonna turn the bus in; and then I’m all done with you. Okay? I’m gonna take some time off after this. I mean, I want some real, no-kidding time off. I mean some leisure, that’s what I want. I’m gonna drink a lot of beer and go bowling, and then maybe if I’m lucky, then maybe I’ll get laid. But I’m not gonna hang out with politicians anymore.”

“You’d really leave my krewe, Jim?” Oscar said. “Just like that?”

“You hired me to drive this bus, man! Can’t you leave it at that? It’s a job! I don’t do crusades.”

“Don’t be hasty. I’m sure we could find another role for you in the organization.”

“No, man. You don’t have any role for me. Or for any guys like me. Why are there millions of nomads now? They don’t have jobs , man! You don’t care about ’em! You don’t have any use for ’em! You can’t make any use for them! They’re just not necessary to you. Not at all. Okay? So, you’re not necessary to them, either. Okay? They got real tired of waiting for you to give them a life. So now, they just make their own life by themselves, out of stuff they find lying around. You think the government cares? The government can’t even pay their own Air Force.”

“A country that was better organized would have a decent role for all its citizens.”

“Man, that’s the creepy part — they’re a lot better organized than the government is. Organization is the only thing they’ve got! They don’t have money or jobs or a place to live, but organization , they sure got plenty of that stuff. See, they’re exactly like you are, man. You and your campaign krewe, you’re a lot more organized than those dinosaur feds that are running the Collaboratory. You can take over that place anytime, right? I mean, that’s exactly what you’re going to do! You’re gonna take that place over. Whether they like it or not. You want it, so you’re just gonna take it.”

Oscar said nothing.

“That’s the part I’m gonna miss most, man. Watching you put your moves on people. Like that weird science chick you’re recruiting. Man, that move was totally brilliant. I just didn’t have the heart to leave, before I saw if you’d score with that science chick. But you nailed her, all right. You can do anything you want.” Jimmy laughed. “You’re a genius! But I’m not a genius, okay? I’m just not up for that. It’s too tiring.”

“I see.”

“So stop worrying so much, man. You wanna worry about something, worry about DC. We’re gonna be in DC by morning, and if this bus makes it out of that town in one piece, I’m gonna be a real happy guy.”

Washington, DC, enjoyed a permanent haze of aerial drones. Helicopters were also extremely common, since the authorities had basically surrendered the streets. Large sections of the nation’s capital were permanently impassable. Dissidents and protesters had occupied all public areas, permanently.

Nonviolent noncooperation had reached unheard-of strategic and tactical heights in the American capital. Its functional districts were privatized and guarded by monitors and swarms of private thugs, but huge sections of the city had surrendered to the squatters. The occupying forces came in a great many ideological flavors, and while they had come to an uneasy understanding with the government per se, they violently despised one another. Dupont Circle, Adams Morgan, and the area east of Capitol Hill boasted murder rates of almost twentieth-century proportions.

In many neighborhoods of Washington the division of streets and housing had simply dissolved. Entire city blocks had been abandoned to the protesters, who had installed their own plumbing, water sys-tems, and power generators. Streets were permanently barricaded, swathed in camou nets and rain-streaked plastic sheeting.

The most remarkable of Washington’s autonomen were the groups known as “martians.” Frustrated by years of studied nonreaction to their crazy grievances, the martians had resolved to act as if the federal government simply didn’t exist. The martians treated the entire structure of Washington, DC, as raw material.

Their construction techniques had originally been invented by a group of overeager would-be Mars colonizers.

These long-vanished space techies, an ingenious and fanatical group, had invented a wide variety of cheap and simple techniques by which small groups of astronauts might colonize the airless and frozen deserts of the Red Planet. Humanity had never yet reached Mars, but with the final collapse of NASA the Martian colonization plans had become public domain.

These plans fell into the eager hands of fanatical street protesters. They had dug down into the squelchy subsoil of the Potomac riverbed, squeezing water from the soil, compacting it to use as bricks, building an endless series of archways, tunnels, and kivas. The radicals found that even the sorriest patch of Earth was a cornucopia, com-pared to the airless deserts of Mars. Anything that might work on Mars would work a hundred times better in a deserted alley or parking lot.

Now NASA’s ingenuity had borne amazing fruit, and the streets of Washington were lavishly bumped and measled with martian settle-ments. Slums of compacted dirt, all glue and mazy airlocks, climbed straight up the walls of buildings, where they clung like the nests of mud-daubing wasps. There were excavation hills three stories high near Union Station, and even Georgetown was subject to repeated subterranean rumblings.

Most of these martians were Anglos. In fact, sixty percent of Washington’s populace were members of the troubled minority. Local DC government, a world-famous model of urban corruption, was dominated by militant Anglos. The ethnic bosses were busily exercis-ing their traditional genius for fraud, hacking, and white-collar crime scams.

Oscar, though a stranger to Washington, knew better than to enter the city unprepared. He abandoned his krewe inside the bus, which retreated at once to the relative safety of Alexandria. Oscar then walked two blocks on foot, through a protesters’ permanent street market of flowers, medals, bracelets, bumper stickers, flags, cassettes, and Christmas toys.

He arrived at his destination, unmolested and in good order. He then discovered, without much surprise, that the federal office build-ing had fallen into the hands of squatters.

Oscar wandered through the entry hall, passing metal detectors and a cyclops set of facial recognition units. The squat’s concierge was an elderly black man with close-cropped hair and a bow tie. He gave Oscar a clip-on ID bracelet.

The system was now logging Oscar’s presence and his move-ments, along with everything else of relevance inside the building: furniture, appliances, tools, kitchenware, clothes, shoes, pets, and of course all the squatters themselves. The locators were as small as or-ange pips and as rugged as tenpenny nails, so they could invisibly infest any device that anyone found of interest.