Bruce Sterling - Distraction

“There’s way too many hats and rabbits.”

“No there aren’t! Can’t have too many! We’ll just use the ones that we need, as we need them. That’s the beauty of multitasking. It’s that fractal aspect, the self-similarity across multiple political layers …”

Pelicanos snorted. “Stop talking like Bambakias. That highbrow net-jive gets you nowhere with me.”

“But it works! If the feds somehow fail us, we’ve got leaks in at the Texas comptroller’s office. The Buna city council loves us! I know they’re not worth much politically, but hey, we’ve paid more atten-tion to them in the past six weeks than the Collaboratory has paid them in fifteen years.”

“So you’re keeping all your options open.”

“Exactly. ”

“You always say that you hate doing that.”

“What? I never said that. You’re just being morose. I feel very upbeat about this, Yosh — we’ve had a few little setbacks, but taking this assignment was a wise decision. It’s been a broadening professional experience. ”

They paused to let a yak cross the road. “You know what I really like about this campaign?” Oscar said. “It’s so tiny. Two thousand political illiterates, sealed inside a dome. We have complete voter profiles and interest-group dossiers on every single person in the Col-laboratory! It’s so sealed off and detached-politically speaking, there’s something perfect and magical about a setup like this.”

“I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself.”

“I’m determined to enjoy this, Yosh. We might be crushed here, or we might soar to glory, but we’ll never have the chance to do something quite like this again.”

A supply truck lumbered past them, laden with mutant seedlings.

“You know something?” Pelicanos said. “I’ve been so busy playing the angles that I never got the chance to understand what they actually do in here.”

“I think you understand it a lot better than they do.”

“Not their finances, I mean the actual science. I can understand commercial biotech well enough — we were in that business together, in Boston. But the real cutting edge here, those brain people, the cognition people… I know I’m missing something important there.”

“Yeah? Personally, I’ve been trying to get up to speed on ‘amy-loid fibrils.’ Greta really dotes on those things.”

“It’s not just that their field is technically difficult to grasp. It is, but I also have a feeling they’re hiding something.”

“Sure. That’s science in its decadence. They can’t patent or copyright their findings anymore, so sometimes they try for trade secrets.” Oscar laughed. “As if that could really work nowadays.”

“Maybe there’s something going on in this place that could help Sandra.”

Oscar was touched. His friend’s dark mood was clear to him now, it had opened up before him like an origami trick. “Where there’s life, there’s hope, Yosh.”

“If I had more time to figure it out, if there weren’t so many distractions … Everything is hats and rabbits now. Nothing’s pre-dictable, nothing makes sense anymore, it’s all rockets and potholes. There’s no foundation left in our society. There’s no place left for us to take a stand. There’s a very dark momentum going, Oscar. Some-times I really think the country’s going mad.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, just look at us. I mean, look what we’ve been dealing with.” Pelicanos hunched his head and began counting off on his fingers. “My wife is a schizophrenic. Bambakias has major depression. Poor Moira finally cracked in public, and pitched a fit. Dougal is an alcoholic. Green Huey is a megalomaniac. And those sick lunatics trying to kill you — there was an endless supply of those people.”

Oscar walked on silently.

“Am I reading too much into this? Or is there a genuine trend here?”

“I’d call it a groundswell,” Oscar said thoughtfully. “That accounts for those sky-high poll ratings ever since Bambakias’s break-down. He’s a classic political charismatic. So even his personal negatives boost his political positives. People just sense his authenticity, they recognize that he’s truly a man of our time. He represents the American people. He’s a born leader.”

“Does he have it together to take action for us in Washington?”

“Well, he’s still a name for us to conjure with… But practi-cally speaking, no. I’ve got good backchannel from Lorena, and frankly, he’s really delusionary now. He’s got some weird fixation about the President, something about hot-war with Europe… He sees Dutch agents hiding under every bed… They’re trying him out with different flavors of antidepressant.”

“Will that work? Can they stabilize him?”

“Well, the treatments make great media copy. There’s a huge Bambakias medical fandom happening, ever since his hunger strike, really… They’ve got their own sites and feeds… Lots of get-well email, home mental-health remedies, oddsmaking on the death-watch … It’s a classic grass-roots phenomenon. You know, T-shirts, yard signs, coffee mugs, fridge magnets … I dunno, it’s getting kind of out of hand.”

Pelicanos rubbed his chin. “Kind of a tabloid vulture pop-star momentum there.”

“Exactly. Perfect coinage, you’ve hit the nail on the head.”

“How bad should we feel about this, Oscar? I mean, basically, this is all our fault, isn’t it?”

“You really think so?” Oscar said, surprised. “You know, I’m so close to it I can’t really judge anymore.”

A bicycle messenger stopped them. “I’ve got a packet delivery for a Mr. Hamilton.”

“You want that guy in the wheelchair,” Oscar said.

The messenger examined his handheld satellite readout. “Oh yeah. Right. Thanks.” He pedaled off.

“Well, you were never his chief of staff,” Pelicanos said.

“Yeah, that’s true. That’s a comfort.” Oscar watched as the bike messenger engaged in the transaction with his security chief. Kevin signed for two shrink-wrapped bundles. He examined the return ad-dresses and began talking into his head-mounted mouthpiece.

“You know that he eats out of those packages?” Pelicanos said.

“Big white sticks of stuff, like straw and chalk. He chews ’em all the time. He kind of grazes.”

“At least he eats,” Oscar said. His phone rang. He plucked it from his sleeve and answered it. “Hello?”

There was a distant, acid-scratched voice. “It’s me, Kevin, over.” Oscar turned and confronted Kevin, who was rolling along in his chair ten strides behind them. “Yes, Kevin? What’s on your mind?”

“I think we have a situation coming. Somebody just pulled a fire alarm inside the Collaboratory, over.”

“Is that a problem?”

Oscar watched Kevin’s mouth move. Kevin’s voice arrived at his ear a good ten seconds later. “Well, this is a sealed, airtight dome. The locals get pretty serious about fires inside here, over.”

Oscar examined the towering gridwork overhead. It was a blue and lucid winter afternoon. “I don’t see any smoke. Kevin, what’s wrong with your telephone?”

“Traffic analysis countermeasures — I routed this call around the world about eight times, over.”

“But we’re only ten meters apart. Why don’t you just roll up over here and do some face-time with me?”

“We need to cool it, Oscar. Stop looking at me, and just go on walking. Don’t look now, but there are cops tailing us. A cab in front and a cab behind, and I think they have shotgun mikes. Over.”

Oscar turned and threw a companionable arm over Pelicanos’s shoulder, urging him along. There were, in point of fact, some labora-tory cops within sight. Normally the cops employed their “Buna Na-tional Collaboratory Security Authority” trucks, macho vehicles with comic-opera official seals on the doors, but these officers had com-mandeered a pair of the Collaboratory’s little phone-dispatched cabs. The cops were trying to be inconspicuous.