Bruce Sterling - Distraction

Oscar sighed. “Norman, you’re fired.”

Norman nodded sadly. “I am?”

“That’s not acceptable behavior, Norman. The people in my krewe are political operatives. You’re not a vigilante. You can’t beat people up.”

“What was I supposed to do, then?”

“You should have informed the police that you saw Dr. Skope-litis committing a crime.” HE’S FINISHED! GOOD WORK! TOO BAD I HAVE TO FIRE YOU NOW.

“You’re really going to fire me, Oscar?”

“Yes, Norman, you are fired. I’ll go to the clinic, I’ll apologize to Dr. Skopelitis personally. I hope I can persuade him to dismiss the charges against you. Then I’m sending you home to Cambridge.”

Oscar went to visit Skopelitis in the Collaboratory clinic. He brought flowers: a lushly symbolic bouquet of yellow carnations and lettuce. Skopelitis had a private room, and with Oscar’s sudden arrival, he had hastily returned to his bed. He had a black eye and his nose was heavily bandaged.

“I hope you’re not taking this too badly, Dr. Skopelitis. Let me ring the nurse for a vase.”

“I don’t think that will be necessary,” Skopelitis said nasally.

“Oh, but I insist,” Oscar said. He went through the agonizing ritual, shuttling the nurse in, accepting her compliments on the flow-ers, small-talking about water and sunshine, carefully judging the pa-tient’s growing discomfort. This shaded into open horror as Skopelitis glimpsed Kevin in his wheelchair, stationed outside in the hall.

“Is there anything we can do to assist in your convalescence? A little light reading matter, maybe?”

“Stop it,” Skopelitis said. “Stop being so polite, I can’t stand it.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Look, I know exactly why you’re here. Let’s cut to the chase. You want me to get the kid off. Right? He assaulted me. Well, I’ll do that on one condition: he has to stop telling those lies about me.”

“What lies are those?”

“Look, don’t play your games with me. I know the score. You had your dirty tricks team in there. You set up that whole thing from the very beginning, you wrote that speech for her, those slanders against the Senator, you planned it all. You waltzed into my lab with your big campaign machine, muckraking all the tired old stories, try-ing to wreck people’s careers, trying to destroy people’s lives… You make me sick! So I’m giving you one chance, straight across: you shut him up, and I’ll drop the charges. That’s my best offer. So take it or leave it.”

“Oh dear,” Oscar said. “I’m afraid you’ve been misinformed. We don’t want the charges dropped. We intend to contest them in court.”

“What?”

“You’re going to twist in the wind for weeks. We’re going to have a show-trial here. We’re going to squeeze the truth out of you under oath, drop, by drop, by drop. You have no bargaining position with me. You’re sunk. You can’t pull a stunt like that on an impulse! You left DNA traces on the switch. You left your fingerprints on it. There’s an embedded vidcam inside the thing! Didn’t Huey warn you that the lab’s alarms are bugged?”

“Huey has nothing to do with this.”

“I could have guessed that. He wanted you to disrupt the speech, he didn’t want you to fly totally off the handle and send the whole population into the streets. This is a science lab, not a ninja academy. You dropped your pants like a circus clown.”

Skopelitis had gone a light shade of green. “I want a lawyer.”

“Then get one. But you’re not talking to a cop here. You’re just having a friendly bedside chat with a U.S Senate staffer. Of course, once you’re questioned by the U.S. Senate, you’ll surely need a lawyer then. A very expensive lawyer. Conspiracy, obstruction of jus-tice… it’ll be juicy.”

“It was just a false alarm! A false alarm. They happen all the time.”

“You’ve been reading too many sabotage manuals. Proles can get away with urban netwar, because they don’t mind doing jail time. Proles have nothing much to lose — but you do. You came in there to shout her down and cover your own ass, but you lost your temper and destroyed your own career. You just lost twenty years of work in the blink of an eye. And you’ve got the nerve to dictate terms to me? You dumb bastard, I’m gonna crucify you. You just pulled the bonehead move of your life. I’m going to make you a public laughingstock, from sea to shining sea.”

“Look. Don’t do that.”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t do that to me. Don’t ruin me. Please. He broke my nose, okay? He broke my nose! Look, I lost my head.” Skopelitis wiped tears from his blackened eye. “She never acted like that before, she’s turned on us, it was like she’d gone crazy! I had to do something, it was just… it just…” He broke into sobs. “Jesus…”

“Well, I can see I’m distressing you,” Oscar said, rising. “I’ve enjoyed our little confab, but time presses. I’ll be on my way.”

“Look, you just can’t do this to me! I only did one little thing.”

“Listen.” Oscar sat back down and pointed. “You’ve got a laptop there. You want off the hook? Write me some mail. Tell me all about it. Tell me every little thing. Just between the two of us, privately. And if you’re straight with me… well, what the hell. He did break your nose. I apologize for that. That was very wrong.”

Oscar was studying the minutes from the latest Senate Science Com-mittee meeting when Kevin walked into the room.

“Don’t you ever sleep?” Kevin said, yawning.

“No, not particularly.”

“I’m kind of gathering that.” Kevin dropped his cane and sat down in a sling chair. Oscar had a rather spartan room at the hotel. He was forced to move daily for security reasons, and besides, the best suites were all taken by paying customers.

Oscar shut his laptop. It was quite an intriguing report — a federal lab in Davis, California, was sorely infested with hyperintelligent lab mice, provoking a lawsuit-slinging panic from the outraged locals — but he found Kevin very worthwhile.

“So,” Kevin said, “what happens next?”

“What do you think: happens next, Kevin?”

“Well,” Kevin said, “that would be cheating. Because I’ve seen this sort of thing before.”

“You don’t say.”

“Yeah. Here’s the situation. You’ve got a group of people here who are about to all lose their jobs. So you’re gonna organize them and fight back politically. You’ll get a lot of excitement and solidarity for about six weeks, and then they’ll all get fired. They’ll shut the whole place down and lock the gates in your face. Then you’ll all turn into proles.”

“You really think so?”

“Well, maybe not. Maybe basic research scientists are somehow smarter than computer programmers, or stock traders, or assembly-line workers, or traditional farmers… You know, all those other people who lost their professions and got pushed off the edge of the earth. But that’s what everybody always thinks in these situations. ‘Yeah, their jobs are obsolete now, but people will always need us.’ ”

Oscar drummed his fingers on his laptop. “It’s good of you to take such a lively interest, Kevin. I appreciate your input. Believe it or not, what you’re saying isn’t exactly news to me. I’m very aware that huge numbers of people have been forced out of the conventional economy and become organized network mobs. I mean, they don’t vote, so they rarely command my professional attention, but over the years they’re getting better and better at ruining life for the rest of us.”

“Oscar, the proles are ‘the rest of us.’ It’s people like you who aren’t ‘the rest of us.’ ”