David Brin - Earth

He looked around quickly, searching for the voyeur. Over to the south citizens of many ages were busy tending high-yield vegetables in narrow strip gardens, leased by the city to those without convenient rooftops. Bean pole detectors watched for poachers, but those devices couldn’t have set off Roland’s alarm.

Nor could the children, running about in visors and sun-goggles, playing tag or beamy. Or the ragged men in their twenties and thirties, over by the reflecting pond, draped in saffron sheets, pretending to be meditating, but fooling no one as they used biofeedback techniques to supply their bottomless, self-stimulated addiction… dazing out on endorphin chemicals released by their own brains.

There were other teens around too… though none wore gang colors. The silent, boring majority then, who neither slip-shaded nor dazed — students dressed for fashion or conformity, with little on their minds — some even carrying pathetic banners for tonight’s B-ball contest between the Fighting Golfers and the Letterman High Hecklers.

Then he saw the geek — a codger this time — leaning against one of the slender stalks of a sunshade-photocell collector, looking directly at the three of them. And sure enough, amid the bushy gray curls spilling under his white sun hat, Remi saw a thin wire, leading from an earpiece to a vest made of some sonomagnetic fabric.

Wheeling almost in step, the boys reacted to this new provocation by striding straight toward the geezer. As they neared, Remi made out the ribbons of a Helvetian War veteran on his chest, with radiation and pathogen clusters. Shit , he thought. Veterans are the worst . It would be hard winning any points over this one.

Then Remi realized the coot wasn’t even wearing goggles! Of course he could still be transmitting, using smaller sensors, but it broke the expected image, especially when the gremper removed even his sunglasses as they approached, and actually smiled!

“Hello, boys,” he said, amiably. “I guess you caught me snooping. Owe you an apology.”

Out of habit, Crat squeezed the fellow’s personal zone, even swaying over a bit as he flashed his scalp tattoo. But the geek didn’t respond in the usual manner, by flourishing his police beeper. Rather, he laughed aloud. “Beautiful! Y’know, I once had a messmate… a Russkie commando he was. Died in the drop on Liechtenstein, I think. He had a tattoo like that one, only it was on his butt! Could make it dance, too.”

Remi grabbed Crat’s arm when the idiot seemed about to spit. “You know using a big ear’s illegal without wearing a sign, tellin’ people you’ve got one. We could cite you, man.”

The oldster nodded. “Fair enough. I violated your privacy, and will accept in situ judgment if you wish.”

Remi and his friends looked at each other. Geriatrics — especially those who had suffered in the war — hardly ever used the word “privacy” except as an epithet, when accusing someone of hiding foul schemes. Certainly Remi had never heard of a codger willing to settle a dispute as gang members would, man to man, away from the all-intrusive eye of the Net.

“Shit no, gremper! We got you—”

“Crat!” Roland snapped. He glanced at Remi, and Remi nodded back. “All right,” he agreed. “Over by that tree. You pitch, we’ll swing.”

That brought another smile. “I used that expression when I was your age. Haven’t heard it since.*Did you know slang phrases often come and go in cycles?”

Still chatting amiably about the vagaries of language fashion since his day, the geep led them toward their designated open-air courtroom, leaving a puzzled Remi trailing behind, suddenly struck by the unasked-for exercise of visualizing this wrinkled, ancient remnant as a youth, once as brimming as they were now with hormones and anger.

Logically, Remi supposed it might be possible. Perhaps a few grempers even remembered what it had been like, with some vague nostalgia. But it couldn’t have been as bad to be young back then, he thought bitterly. There was stuff for guys like me to do. Old farts didn’t control everything .

Hell, at least you had a war to fight!

After the Helvetian holocaust, the frightened international community finally acted to prevent any more big ones, putting muscle into the inspection treaties. But that didn’t seem like much of a solution to Remi. The world was going straight to hell anyway, no detours. So why not do it in a way that was at least honorable and interesting?

Do not go gentle into that good night … Poetry class was just about the only one Remi really liked. Yeah. Back in TwenCen there were some guys who had it right .

From a grassy step they could look out over much of downtown Bloomington, a skyline still dominated by preserved TwenCen towers, though several of the more recent, slablike ’topias canted like ski slopes to the north. From somewhere beyond the park boundaries could be heard the ubiquitous sound of jackhammers as the city waged its endless, unwinnable war against decay, renovating crumbling sidewalks and sewer pipes originally designed to last a hundred years… back more than a century ago, when a hundred years must have sounded like forever. Bloomington looked and felt seedy, like almost any town, anywhere.

“I like listening to people, watching people,” the codger explained as he sat cross-legged before them, displaying a surprising limberness.

“So what?” Roland shrugged. “All you geeks listen and watch. All the time.”

The old man shook his head. “No, they stare and record. That’s different. They were raised in a narcissistic age, thinking they’d live forever. Now they compensate for their failing bodies by waging a war of intimidation against youth.

“Oh, it started as a way to fight street crime — retired people staking out the streets with video cameras and crude beepers. And the seniors’ posse really worked, to the point where perps couldn’t steal anything or hurt anybody in public anymore without getting caught on tape.

“But after the crime rate plummeted, did that stop the paranoia?” He shook his gray head. “You see, it’s all relative . That’s how human psych works. Nowadays seniors — you call us geeks — imagine threats where there aren’t any anymore. It’s become a tradition, see. They’re so busy warning off potential trouble, challenging threats before they materialize, they almost dare young men like you—”

Roland interrupted. “Hey, gremper. We get all this in Tribes. What’s your point?”

The old man shrugged. “Maybe pretending there’s still a need for neighborhood watch makes them feel useful. There’s a saying I heard… geeks find their own uses for technology .”

“I wish nobody ever invented all this tech shit,” Remi muttered.

The war veteran shook his head. “The world would be dead, dead now, my young friend, if it weren’t for tech stuff. Want to go back to the farm? Send ten billion people back to subsistence farming? Feeding the world’s a job for trained experts now, boy. You’d only screw things up worse than they already are.

“Tech eventually solved the worst problems of cities, too: violence and boredom. It helps people have a million zillion low-impact hobbies—”

“Yeah, and helps ’em spy on each other, too! That’s one of the biggest hobbies, isn’t it? Gossip and snooping!”

The old man shrugged. “You might not complain so much if you’d lived through the alternative. Anyway, I wasn’t trying to catch you fellows in some infraction. I was just listening. I like listening to people. I like you guys.”

Crat and Roland laughed out loud at the absurdity of the remark. But Remi felt a queer chill. The geezer really seemed to mean it.