Bruce Sterling - Distraction

Oscar and Greta met in a broken car in the dark parking lot behind the Vehicle Repair Facility. This assig-nation spot was Kevin Hamilton’s idea. Kevin was very big on secure meetings inside anonymous cars. Kevin was no Secret Service agent, but he brimmed over with rule-of-thumb street smarts.

“I’m afraid,” Greta confessed.

Oscar adjusted his jacket, tugging for elbow room.

The car was so small that they were almost sitting in each other’s laps. “How could you have stage fright over such a simple thing? You gave a Nobel Prize speech in Stock-holm once.”

“But then I was talking about my own work. I can always do that. This is different. You want me to stand up in front of the board of directors and tell them off to their face. In front of a big crowd of my friends and colleagues. I’m not cut out for that.”

“Actually, you are cut out for it, Greta. You’re abso-lutely perfect for the role. I knew it from the moment I saw you.”

Greta examined her laptop screen. It was the only light inside the dead vehicle, and it underlit their faces with a gentle glow. They were meeting at two in the morning. “If it’s really this bad here — as bad as you claim it is — then it’s really no use fighting, is it? I should just resign.”

“No, you don’t have to resign. The point of this speech is that they have to resign.” Oscar touched her hand. “You don’t have to say anything you don’t know to be true.”

“Well, I know some of these things are true, because I leaked them to you myself. But I would never have said them out loud. And I wouldn’t have said them this way. This speech, or this rant, or what-ever it is — it’s a violent political attack! It’s not scholarly. It’s not objective.”

“Then let’s talk about how you should say it. After all, you’re the speaker — you’re the one who has to reach the audience, not me. Let’s go over your talking points.”

She scrolled up and down fitfully, and sighed. “All right. I guess this is the worst part, right here. This business about scientists being an oppressed class. ‘A group whose exploitation should be recognized and ended.’ Scientists rising up in solidarity to demand justice — good Lord, I can’t say that! It’s too radical, it sounds crazy!”

“But you are an oppressed class. It’s the truth, it’s the central burning truth of your existence. Science took the wrong road some-where, the whole enterprise has been shot to hell. You’ve lost your proper niche in society. You’ve lost prestige, and your self-respect, and the high esteem that scientists once held in the eyes of the public. Demands are being made of you that you’ll never be able to fulfill. You don’t have intellectual freedom anymore. You live in intellectual bondage.”

“That doesn’t make us some kind of ‘oppressed class.’ We’re an elite cadre of highly educated experts.”

“So what? Your situation stinks! You have no power to make your own decisions about your own research. You don’t control the purse strings. You don’t have tenure or job security. You’ve been robbed of your peer review traditions. Your traditional high culture has been crushed underfoot by ignoramuses and fast-buck artists. You’re the technical intelligentsia all right, but you’re being played for suckers and patsies by corrupt pols who line their pockets at your expense.”

“How can you say that? Look at this amazing place we live in!”

“You just think that this is the ivory tower, sweetheart. In reality, you’re slum tenants.”

“But nobody thinks that way!”

“That’s because you’ve been fooling yourselves for years now. You’re smart, Greta. You have eyes and ears. Think about what you’ve been through. Think about how your colleagues really have to live now. Think a little harder.”

She was silent.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Take your time, think it through.”

“It is true. It’s the truth, and it’s awful, and I’m very ashamed of it, and I hate it. But it’s politics. There’s nothing anyone can do about it.”

“We’ll see about that,” he said. “Let’s move on into the speech.” “Okay.” She wiped her eyes. “Well, this is the really sick and painful part. Senator Dougal. I know that man, I’ve met him a lot of times. He drinks too much, but we all do that nowadays. He’s not as bad as all this.”

“People can’t unite against abstractions. You have to put a face on your troubles. That’s how you rally people politically. You have to pick your target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Dougal’s not your only enemy, but you don’t have to worry about that. The rest of them will come running out of the woodwork as soon as you nail him to the wall.”

“But he built everything here, he built this whole laboratory!”

“He’s a crook. We’ve got chapter and verse on him now. No-body dared to cross him while he was in power. But now that he’s shipping water and going down fast, they’ll all rat him out. The kick-backs, the money laundering… You’re in charge of Instrumenta-tion. Dougal and his cronies have been skimming your cream for years. You’ve got a legal and moral obligation to jump on him. And best of all, jumping on Dougal is a free ride politically. He can’t do a thing about it. Dougal is the easy part.” Oscar paused. “It’s Huey that I’m really worried about.”

“I don’t see why I have to be so nasty.”

“You need an issue, and there’s no such thing as a noncontrover-sial issue. And ridicule is the radical’s best weapon. The powers that be can stand anything but being laughed at.”

“It’s just not me.”

“Give it a chance first. Try the experiment. Launch one or two of those zingers, and see how your audience responds.”

She sniffed. “They’re scientists. They’re not going to respond to partisan abuse.”

“Of course they are. Scientists fight like crazed weasels. Look at your own history here at the lab! When Dougal got this place built, he had to cash in a lot of favors. He needed the Christian fundie vote before he could build a giant gene-splicing lab in the East Texas Bible Belt. That’s why the Collaboratory used to have its own Creation Science department. That setup lasted six weeks! There were fistfights, riots, and arson! They had to call in the Texas Rangers to restore order. ”

“Oh, the creation-science problem wasn’t all that bad.”

“Yes it was! Your little society has blocked out that memory because it was so embarrassing. That wasn’t the half of it. Next year they had a major brawl with the Buna residents, regular town-gown riots… And it really hit the fan during the economic war. There were federal witch-hunts for foreign science spies, there was hyperin-flation and lab guys living on bread crusts… See, I’m not a scien-tist like you. I don’t have to take it on faith that science is always a noble endeavor. I actually look these things up.”

“Well, I’m not a politician like you. So I don’t have to spend my life digging up ugly scandals.”

“Darling, we’ll have a little chat sometime about your twentieth-century Golden Age — Lysenkoism, atom spies, Nazi doctors, and ra-diation experiments. In the meantime, though, we need to stick to your speech.”

She gazed at her laptop. “It just gets worse and worse. You want me to cut our budget and get people fired.”

“The budget has to be cut. Cut drastically. People have to be fired. Fired by the truckload. The lab’s sixteen years old, it’s full of bureaucratic deadwood. Get the deadwood out of here. Fire the Spin-offs department, they’re all Dougal’s cronies and they’re all on the take. Fire the lab procurement drones and put the budgets back into the hands of researchers. And, especially, fire the police.”