Кори Доктороу - Make Shift - Dispatches from the Post-Pandemic Future

“Well… you’d be able to influence the vote, obviously.”

“Influence? Not outright ballot-stuff?”

“It’s pretty obvious when a hundred percent of the voters choose one candidate. Yeah, you can stuff digital ballot boxes, but man you gotta be subtle. Anyway, the whole point is that it is hack-proof. You can’t cheat. Nobody can. I mean—you’ve been using it every day for years,” Reese adds.

“When?” says Sendak. “I don’t vote every day.”

“You don’t use it only for voting. Like I was saying, the first place they used it was for contact tracing, in the middle of the pandemic. So you could be part of the tracing network without ever giving away your personal details. You’re being tracked anonymously every time you spend more than fifteen minutes near someone. So, weirdly enough, a lot of the same tech went into both the ballot system and the contact tracing software.”

“I like quadratic voting,” Remy tries to say, but the world’s receding down a tunnel of sound and light. The glasses are only so good at blocking things out.

He vaguely hears Sendak say, “Um, Remy? Yeah, I think I’d better run you home.”

“Yeah, he’s gettin’ overloaded, isn’t he? Take it easy, Remy! Talk to you soon.”

Remy doesn’t answer as Sendak leads him away.

REMY PUSHES INTO HIS APARTMENT, SENDAK RIGHT BEHIND HIM. HE PAUSES TOlean on the kitchen counter and after a while, notices that she’s stopped in the doorway, staring.

“Yeah, I painted everything black,” he admits. Not just the walls, but the appliances, the chairs, the cutlery. “That way I can skin things however I want, you know, with the glasses.” To him it’s all its usual neutral shades of beige and mauve, with callout labels attached to various things that are out of sight—like in drawers or under other objects. All very convenient to him, but Sendak doesn’t use Mixed Reality. To her his home must look like a vortex of darkness.

“Aw, Remy—”

“Go.” He waves at her weakly. “Go. You have to win our bet. There’s not much time.”

“You’re sure you’ll be okay?”

“Yeah. I just get overwhelmed sometimes.”

“Then why do you live here?”

“This place?”

“No. This city.”

“Oh. I kind of… ended up here. After we sold the farm.”

“We? You’ve got family?”

“My mother. She raised me in the country. Nice little farmhouse, been ours for generations. But she had to sell when the pandemic deepened and they reformed the property laws to try to kickstart the economy.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“It was the right thing to do. Me and Mom argued. She said she had every right to hold onto the place.” Almost the first thing the Liberal Radicals did when they got control of the state legislature was institute a new property regime. Under it you can put any value you want on your place, but you pay the tax at that rate, and you also have to sell to any buyer who makes an offer at the asking price. “Mom set the price higher than she thought anybody would buy at, but then she couldn’t afford the taxes. And somebody bought. I told her it was logical; it got money and assets moving through the economy, which was what we needed right then. She didn’t see it that way. We haven’t spoken in a couple of years.”

“Oh, Remy, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” He straightens up. “Thanks for dropping me off. I’ll review my glasses’ footage from today.”

She nods curtly. “I’ll check in later. If you want me, here’s my number.” She borrows his phone to enter it, then leaves.

He makes himself lunch. Normally he would nap after, but he’s restless. A woman and her two daughters are missing, every second counts, yet here he is sitting in his black cave, helpless to do anything about it. It feels like a billion-fold amplification of all those times he’s disappointed others who expected some normal human response from him. He wants to help, wants to say the right thing, think the right thing. He just doesn’t know how.

Mother had been so angry. “You’re helping them do this!” she’d kept saying, as the sheriffs threw them out of their generational home.

“Mom, it’s just a different property algorithm. You don’t fight the System. You fight the Algorithm.” She didn’t understand it, that algorithms were how you voted, how money got allocated; they weren’t some nebulous Deep State that you could rail against but never change. They were the concrete steps you took to get things done. And they could be improved.

He ends up standing at the window, gazing down at the mass of people in the park. No way he can ever be part of that. He remembers when he first came here, the roar and tumult of the streets where he’d panhandled. There had been no escaping the noise, until the doctors at St. Mary’s, and people like Xander Reese, helped him organize it all.

He needs his algorithms. Still, he touches the glass, marveling at the people bouncing around like atoms in a jar, impervious to being bruised by the Brownian motion of random social life.

They were so irrational. Like, who would expect people to wantonly tear off their contact tracing bracelets? If you were rational about it, if you organized your life properly, you wouldn’t do that.

He thinks of the placement of the chairs where Cawley had been held: in the mathematical and acoustic center of the space. Not where a normal person would place them, but logically…

Remy almost fumbles the phone in his haste to get it out. Can he go to Kraft with this? Sendak? What he’s proposing isn’t exactly legal. He does know Reese, who knows people in the right department. Remy’s done work for the City, for Public Health. But this algorithm is clear: you can bend some rules to save lives.

“Hi, Xander? It’s Remy. No, I’m fine.—Listen, I need a favor, and I need it, like, today .

REMY’S STANDING IN THE DARKNESS NEXT TO A POTTED SPRUCE, ACROSS THE STREETfrom the downtown coronavirus testing center. The center is attached to a hospital, and is almost the last one open in the city. As he expected, traffic has been regular but light since he got here. He’s exhausted from watching the hypochondriacs come and go but he can’t tune down his glasses, because he needs to see their faces or, preferably, their necks.

It’s almost eight o’clock; the place will be closing soon. He’ll have to come back in the morning, and anyway he’s hungry and his whole nervous system is jangling. Coming here was a long shot in several ways; there are other places you can go to get tested, it’s just that they’re on the edge of town. And however logical and methodical the killer may be, there’s no way to know whether he’s taken Remy’s bait.

Just as he’s turning away in disappointment, a large black SUV pulls into the parking lot next to the center. A jolt of adrenaline sends Remy into the street before he thinks to look both ways; luckily traffic is light. He makes it across okay but with his attention divided, he doesn’t see the driver get out. There he is, silhouetted by the center’s automatic doors. He’s going in as another man comes out. The other guy’s suit looks familiar, but not like Kraft’s, because it’s too expensive.

The two exchange a look, then stop in the doorway; the doors try to hiss close and back up, then hesitantly try again. The two men say a few words, probably about how annoying it is to be tested for the millionth time; then they part ways.

Remy waits until the other visitor drives off, then walks around the SUV, trying to find an angle where his phone can catch enough light. When he’s gotten the best shot he can of the license plate, he messages it to Sendak’s phone number. Above the photo attachment, he types “Run this plate. May be our kidnapper.”