Bruce Sterling - Distraction

“Yes?” Burningboy said skeptically.

“There’s a vital fractal there. It’s all about scaling issues, basically. Here we are, inside these walls. Outside our walls, Green Huey is lurking over us, full of sinister intent. But the President is lurking over Huey — and our new President is, in his own unique way, a rather more sinister person than the Governor of Louisiana. The President runs the USA, a nation that is all wounded and inward-turning now — a little world, surrounded by a bigger world full of people who grew bored with us. They no longer pay America to tell them that we are their future. And then beyond that world… well, I guess it’s Greta’s world. A rational, Einsteinian-Newtonian cosmos. The cos-mos of objective, observable facts. And beyond scientific understand-ing… all those dark phenomena. Metaphysics. Will and idea. History, maybe.”

“Do you really believe any of that junk?”

“No, I don’t believe it in the way that I believe that two and two are four. But it’s doable, it’s my working metaphor. What can politi-cians ever really ‘know’ about anything? History isn’t a laboratory. You never step in the same river twice. But some people have effective political insight, and some just don’t.”

Burningboy nodded slowly. “You really see us from way, way on the outside, don’t you, Oscar?”

“Well, I’ve never been a nomad — at least not yet. And I’ll never be a scientist, either. I can recognize my ignorance, but I can’t be buffaloed by ignorance — I’m in power, I have to act. Knowledge is just knowledge. But the control of knowledge — that’s politics.”

“That wasn’t the kind of ‘outsiderness’ I had in mind.”

“Oh.” Oscar realized the truth. “You mean my personal back-ground problem.”

“Yup. ”

“You mean I have advantages because I’m outside the entire human race.”

Burningboy nodded. “I couldn’t help but notice that. Has it always been that way for you?”

“Yeah. It has. Pretty much.”

“Are you the future, man?”

“No. I wouldn’t count on that. I have too many pieces missing.”

Oscar knew that the situation had stabilized when a roaring sex scan-dal broke out. A teenage soldier accused a middle-aged scientist of indecently fondling her. This incident caused frantic uproar.

Oscar found the scandal a very cheering development. It meant that the conflict between the Collaboratory’s two populations had broken through to a symbolic, psychosexual, politically meaningless level. The public fight was now about deep resentments and psychic starvations that would never, ever be cured, and were therefore basi-cally irrelevant. But the noise was very useful, because it meant that enormous quiet progress could now be made on every other front. The public psychodrama consumed vast amounts of attention, while the Collaboratory’s truly serious problems had become background noise. The real problems were left in the hands of people who cared enough about them to do constructive things.

Oscar took the opportunity to learn how to use a Moderator laptop. He had been given one, and he rightly recognized this gesture as a high tribal honor. The Moderator device had a flexible green shell of plasticized straw. It weighed about as much as a bag of popcorn. And its keyboard, instead of the time-honored QWERTYUIOP, boasted a sleek, sensible, and deeply sinister DHIATENSOR.

Oscar had been assured many times that the venerable QWERTYUIOP keyboard design would never, ever be replaced. Supposedly, this was due to a phenomenon called “technological lock-in.” QWERTYUIOP was a horribly bad design for a key-board — in fact, QWERTYUIOP was deliberately designed to hamper typists — but the effort required to learn it was so crushing that people would never sacrifice it. It was like English spelling, or American standard measurements, or the ludicrous design of toilets; it was very bad, but it was a social fact of nature. QWERTYUIOP’s universality made it impossible for alternatives to arise and spread.

Or so he had always been told. And yet, here was the impossible alternative, sitting on the table before him: DHIATENSOR. It was sensible. It was efficient. It worked much better than QWERTYUIOP.

Pelicanos entered the hotel room. “Still up?”

“Sure. ”

“What are you working on?”

“Greta’s press releases. And I’ve got to talk to Bambakias soon, I’ve been neglecting the Senator. So I’m making some notes, and I’m learning how to type properly, for the very first time in my life.” Oscar paused. He was eager to brief Pelicanos on the fascinating social differences he had discovered between the Regulators and the Moder-ators. To the undiscerning eye, the shabby and truculent proles could not be distinguished with an electron microscope — all their real and genuinely striking differences were inherent in the architecture of their network software.

An epic struggle had been taking place in the invisible fields of the networks. Virtual tribes and communities had been trying literally thousands of different configurations, winnowing them out, giving them their all, watching them die…

“Oscar, we need to talk seriously.”

“Great.” Oscar pushed the laptop aside. “Level with me.”

“Oscar, you’re getting too wrapped up here. All the negotiations with the Emergency Committee, all the time you spend dickering with those NSC people who won’t give you the time of day… we need a reality check.”

“Okay. Fine.”

“Have you been outside the lab lately? The sky is full of ‘delivery aircraft’ that never deliver anything to anyone. There are cops and roadblocks all over East Texas.”

“Yeah, we’re generating a lot of sustained outside interest. We’re a big pop hit. Journalists love the mix here, it’s very provocative.”

“I agree with you that it’s interesting. But that has nothing to do with our agenda. This situation was never in the plans. We were sup-posed to be helping Bambakias with the Senate Science Committee. The campaign krewe are supposed to be here on vacation. You were never supposed to become a spook who works part-time for the Presi-dent, while you take over federal facilities with the help of gangsters.”

“Hmm. You’re absolutely right about that, Yosh. That was not plannable. But it was doable.”

Pelicanos sat down and knotted his hands. “You know what your problem is? Every time you lose sight of your objective, you redouble your efforts.”

“I’ve never lost sight of the objective! The objective is to reform American scientific research.”

“Oscar, I’ve thought this over. I really hate this situation. For one thing, I don’t much like the President. I’m a Federal Democrat. I wasn’t joking when we were doing all that hard work for Bambakias and the Reform Bloc. I don’t want to work for this President. I don’t agree with the man’s policies. He’s a Communist; for heaven’s sake.”

“The President is not a Communist. He’s a billionaire timber baron with a background in the reservation casino business.”

“Well, the Communists are in his Left Tradition Bloc. I just don’t trust him. I don’t like his speeches. I don’t like him picking fights with the Dutch when we ought to be putting our own domestic affairs in order. He’s just not our kind of politician. He’s cruel, and sneaky, and duplicitous, and aggressive.”

Oscar smiled. “At least he doesn’t sleep on the job, like the old guy did.”

“Better King Log than King Stork, pal.”

“Yosh, I know you’re not a leftist, but you have to agree that the Left Tradition Bloc is a lot better than those total lunatics in the Left Progressives.”