4 %\setlength{\emergencystretch}{1ex}
8 \textbf{\huge\textsf{The Right Book
}}
18 This story is part of Cory Doctorow’s short story collection
19 “With a Little Help” published by himself. It is licensed under a
20 \href{http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/
}
21 {Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
3.0} license.
25 The whole volume is available at:
26 \texttt{http://craphound.com/walh/
}
30 The volume has been split into individual stories for the purpose of the
31 \href{http://ccbib.org
}{Creative Commons Bibliothek.
}
32 The introduction and similar accompanying texts are available under the
36 With a Little Help -- Extra Stuff
41 \section{Human Readable
}
43 \subsection{1. Nice networks don't go down
}
45 It was unthinkable that the invisible ants that governed all human
46 endeavor should catastrophically fail, but fail they did,
47 catastrophically, on the occasion of Trish's eighth date with Rainer.
48 It took nineteen seconds for the cascade of errors to slow every car on
49 the Interstate to a halt, to light up the dashboard with a grim xmas
50 tree of errors, to still the stereo and freeze the tickers of
51 information and context that they had come to think of as the crawling
52 embodiment of the colony that routed all the traffic that made up their
55 “We are going to be: So. Late,” Rainer said, and Trish swiveled in
56 her seat to look at him. He was Fretting again, his forehead wrinkled
57 and his hands clenched on the steering wheel. When they traded massages
58 (third date) and she'd rubbed at his hands, she'd found them tensed
59 into claws that crackled with knuckle-fluid when she bent each finger
60 back and rubbed sandalwood-scented oil into it. He was mighty cute for
61 a neurotic -- at least he knew it when he was being nuts. Not that he'd
62 stop being nuts, but he'd cheerfully admit it.
64 “We are not going to be late,” she said. “We just need to
65 manually route ourselves out of the dead spot and get back on the grid
66 and we'll be on our way. We've got plenty of time.”
70 “Yes,” she said. His forehead wrinkles were looking more klingon by
71 the second. “Dead spot.” She forced a chuckle. “You didn't think
72 that the whole world was down, did you?”
74 He relaxed his knuckles. “Course not,” he said. “Dead spot.
75 Probably ends up at the turn-off.”
77 “Right,” she said. “We need a map. I'm navigatrix. You're pilot.
78 Tell me where your maps are, then get onto the shoulder and drive
81 “Where my maps are? Jesus, what century do you live in? My maps are
82 with the sextant and sundial, between my leeches and my obsidian
85 She laughed. “OK, pal, I'll find a michelin, you drive. Every car has
86 a couple maps. They self-assemble from happy meal boxes.” She opened
87 the glove-compartment and started rooting through it while he pulled
88 onto the shoulder and gunned the tiny two-seater along it.
90 “This is: So. Illegal,” he said.
92 “Naw,” she said. “I'm pretty sure you're allowed on the shoulder
93 when the routing goes down. It's in the written-test manual. Learned it
94 while I was helping my little cousin Leelee study. Aha!” she said,
97 “You have a cousin named Leelee? That's uniquely horrible.”
99 “Shut up,” she said. “Look at this.” It was an old-fashioned
100 phone, of a certain handsome retro line that made it look like a
101 dolphin fucking a silver dildo, the kind of thing marketed to old
102 people who wanted a device with its affordances constrained to collapse
103 the universe of all possible uses for things that fit into your hand
104 into the much smaller universe of, say, a cellphone.
106 “Yeah, my mom left that behind a couple years ago. I looked
107 everywhere for it but couldn't find it. She must've been snooping in
108 the glove-box. Serves her right. So what?”
110 “These things can unmesh and talk straight to a tower at a long
111 distance, can't they?”
115 “Oh yes, they can. Which means that they work in dead spots. So we
116 can call and get directions.”
118 “You think you're pretty smart, huh, dumpling?”
120 She put her finger to her temple and made an adorable frowny thinky
121 face, and held it until he looked at her and laughed. They'd discovered
122 their ability to make one another laugh when he'd farted while taking
123 off his kilt (second date) and had reflexively swung the hem back to
124 make it appear that his mighty gust was ruffling the pleats.
126 “What's your mom's number?” she said.
128 He recited it and she tapped it in.
130 “Hi there! This is Trish, Rainer's friend? We're on the way, but the,
131 well the, but the -- I mean to say, the grid's down or something. The
132 car doesn't have any nav system, the dolby's out, the Interstate's a
133 parking-lot
\ldots{} Oh, you too? God. Wonder if it's the whole country! So,
134 we need directions from San Luis Obispo, to the cemetery, if
139 “Why yes, it's venti nice to be meeting
\emph{you
},” she said.
140 “I've heard a lot about you, too. Yes, I'm giving directions, he's
141 driving. Oh, that's so sweet of you. Yes, he
\emph{does
} look like he's
142 going to scrunch his forehead into his upper lip. I think it's cute,
143 too. Right. Got it. Left, then right, then left, then a slight left,
144 then up the hill. Got it. Whups! That's the duracell! Better go. Soon!
149 “So, your mom sounds nice.”
151 “You got the directions?”
153 “She gave me directions.”
155 “So you know where we're going?”
157 “I don't have a single, solitary clue. Your mother gives
158 \emph{terrible
} directions, darling. Pull off at the next exit and
161 “We are going to be: So. Late.”
163 “But now
\emph{they know
} we're late. We have an excuse. You: stop
168 Once they were on the secondary roads, the creepiness of the highway
169 full of stopped cars and crane-necked drivers gave way to a wind-washed
170 soughing silence of waves and beach and palms. Trish rolled down the
171 window and let the breeze kiss the sweat off her lip, watching the
172 surfers wiping out in the curl as the car sped toward the boneyard.
174 “Are you
\emph{sure
} this is the kind of thing you're supposed to
177 “Yes,” he said. “Don't Fret. That's my job.”
179 “And you don't think it's even a
\emph{little
} weird to take a girl
180 to a cemetery on a date?”
182 “We're not
\emph{burying
} anyone,” he said. “It's just an
185 “I still don't get that,” she said. “I keep picturing your mom
186 cutting a ribbon with a giant pair of gold scissors.”
188 “Right, let's take it from the top,” he said. “And you'd better
189 not be getting me to talk to stop my Fretting, because appealing to my
190 pedantic nature to distract me is a
\emph{very
} cheap trick.”
192 “I'm fluttering my eyelashes innocently,” she said.
194 He laughed and stole a hand through the vent in her apron-trousers and
195 over her thigh. “Achtung!” she said. “Eyes on road, hands on
196 wheel, mind in gutter,
\emph{this instant!
}” She put her hand over
197 his and he put down the pedal. His hand felt nice there -- too nice,
198 for only eight dates and
20-some phone calls and about
100 emails. She
201 “This is kind of fun,” he said, as they zipped past some surfer
202 dudes staring glumly at their long-boards' displays, their perfect tits
203 buoyant and colored like anodized aluminum with electric-tinted
206 “Ahem,” Trish said, squeezing his hand tight enough to make his
207 knuckles grind together. “You were about to explain
208 tombstone-unveiling to me,” she said. “When you got distracted by
209 the athletic twinkies on the roadside. But I am sweet-natured and good
210 and forgiving and so I will pretend not to have seen it and thus save
211 us both the embarrassment of tearing out your Islets of Langerhans, all
212 right?” She fluttered her eyes innocently in a way that she happened
213 to know made him melt.
215 “Explaining! Yes! OK, remember, I'm not particularly Jewish. I mean,
216 not that my parents are, either: they're just Orthodox. They don't
217 believe in God or anything, they just like Biblical Law as a way of
218 negotiating life. I renounced that when I dropped out of Yeshiva when I
219 was
12, so I am not an authority on this subject.”
221 “Let the record show that the witness declared his utter
222 ignorance,” she said. “But I don't get this atheist-Orthodox thing
225 “Just think of them as Mennonites or something. They find the old
226 ways to be a useful set of rules for navigating the universe's curves.
227 God is irrelevant to the belief.”
229 “So they don't believe in God, but they pray to him?”
231 “Yeah,” he said. The surfers were all coming in now, jiggling their
232 boards and rebooting them and staring ruefully at the radical cutback
233 off the lip, dude, gnarly, as they plodded up the beach. “The ritual
234 is the important part. Thinking good thoughts. Having right mind.
236 “It's good advice, most of it. It doesn't matter where it comes from
237 or how it got there. What matters is that if you follow the Law, you
238 get to where you're going, in good time, with little pain. You don't
239 know why or how, but you do.”
241 “It's like following the ants,” she said, watching the stop-and-go
242 traffic in the other direction. “Don't know why they tell us to go
243 where they do, but they do, and it works.”
245 “Well, I guess,” he said, using the tone of voice that told her
246 that he was avoiding telling her how wrong she was. She smiled.
248 “
\emph{Anyway
}. The thing about Jews -- ethnic Jews, cultural Jews,
249 forget the religion here -- is that we're pretty much on the
250 melodramatic end of the grieving scale. We like to weep and tear at our
251 hair and throw ourselves on top of the coffins, right? So there's like
252 5,
000 years of this, and during that time, a bunch of social scientists
253 -- Rabbinical scholars -- have developed a highly evolved protocol for
254 ensuring that you grieve your dead enough that you don't feel haunted
255 by guilt for having failed to honor them, but not grieving so much that
256 you become a drag on the tribe.
258 “When someone dies, you bury him right away, usually within
24 hours.
259 This means that you spend an entire day running around like your ass
260 was on fire, calling everyone, getting the word out, booking
261 last-minute travel, ordering in from the caterers, picking out a box,
262 fielding consoling phone-calls, getting the rabbi on the phone, booking
263 the limo, so much crap that you can't spare even a second to fall to
264 pieces. And then you bury him, and while you're at it, your family
265 extrudes a volunteer to go over to your house and take all the cushions
266 off of one of the sofas, hang sheets over all the mirrors, and set out
267 enough food to feed the entire state, along with an urn of starbucks
268 the size of an oil-drum.
270 “Before the service starts, the rabbi gives you a razor-blade and you
271 slash a hole in your lapel, so that you've got the rent in your heart
272 hanging out there in plain sight, and once you get back home, you spend
273 \emph{seven days
} grieving. You pray two times a day with a quorum of
274 ten men, facing east and singing the Kaddish, this really, really
275 depressing song-prayer-dirge that's specially engineered to worm its
276 way into the melancholy receptors of the Semitic hindbrain and make you
277 feel really, really, really miserable. Other people come over and cook
278 for you, all three meals. You don't see yourself in the mirrors, you
279 don't sit on cushions, you don't do anything
\emph{except mourn
} for a
282 “Then it's over. You take a walk, leaving by one door and coming back
283 in by the other. You put the mourning behind you and start your new
284 life without your dear departed. You've given over your whole life for
285 a whole week, done nothing but mourn, and you're completely sick of it
286 by then, so you're almost glad to be done.
288 “Then, six months or a year later, usually just before Jewish New
289 Year's, which is in the fall, you have a tombstone erected at the
290 gravesite. The stone-cutters tie a white cloth around it, and everyone
291 gathers there, and there's a sermon, and that dirge again, and more
292 prayer, and everyone has a good hard cry as the scabs you've
293 accumulated are ripped away and all your pain comes back fresh and
294 scalding, and you feel it all again in one hot second, and realize with
295 a guilty start that you
\emph{have
} been neglecting the memory of the
296 loved one, which is to say that you've gotten on with your life even
297 though his is over, which is to say that you've done perfectly healthy,
298 normal stuff, but you feel totally, completely overwhelmed with guilt
299 and love, which are kind of flipsides of the same emotion --”
301 “You don't believe that, do you?” She held her breath.
303 “Well, kind of. Not that they
\emph{should be
}, but hell they
304 \emph{are
}, most of the time, then.”
306 “Good thing we're not in love, then, right?” she said, in reference
307 to their sixth date, when they'd decided that they would hold off on
308 any declarations of love for at least an entire year, since they were
309 most often moved to utter the Three Words of Significance when they
310 were besotted with e.g. post-orgasmic brain-juice or a couple of
315 She shook her head. He
\emph{knew
} she was an academic, not a
316 practicing lawyer, but he loved to tease her about it, ever since she'd
317 revealed (after third date, on the phone) that she'd spent about ten
318 seconds in private practice after she'd worked for her congressman and
319 before she'd joined the faculty at UCLA.
321 “You're out of order,” she said.
323 “This whole damned car is out of order!” he said. “So that's the
324 ritual. You
\emph{said
} you wanted to meet the parents and sisters and
325 aunts and grandmothers and cousins and uncles and nephews and in-laws
326 the next time we all got together. This is it.”
328 “Right,” she said. “I asked for this.” And she had, of course.
329 Hadn't asked for the graveside elements, but she'd been curious to meet
330 this big sprawling enterprise of a family that he was always nattering
331 on about. This seemed as good an occasion as any. “So,” she said.
332 “Is this a traditional date among Your People?”
334 He chuckled. “Yes, this is Yom Shiksa, the ritual bringing of the
335 gentile woman to the family so that she may become the subject of
336 intense, relentless scrutiny and speculation.”
338 She started to laugh, then saw that the tractors were stilled in the
339 fields they were passing, that a train was stopped in its tracks, that
340 the surfers were unable to get their roll-cage dune-buggies to take to
343 “You all right, babe?” he said, after a couple minutes of this.
345 “Just wondering about the dead spot,” she said. “I wish we knew
348 “Nothing too bad, I'm sure,” he said. “It's all self-healing. I'm
349 sure we'll be back online soon enough.”
353 They rolled into the parking lot for his family's
\emph{shul
}'s section
354 of the giant graveyard a few minutes after
1PM, just over an hour late,
355 along with the majority of the other attendees, all of whom had had to
358 “Where are your sisters?” Rainer's mother said, even before he'd
361 Rainer screwed his face up in a scowl and dug in his pocket for a
362 yarmulke. “Do I know? Stuck in traffic, Ma. The grid's down
365 Trish watched this bemusedly, in her cool loose cotton apron-trousers
366 and blouse. She scuffed her toe conspicuously and Rainer turned to her,
367 and it was as though he'd forgotten she was there. She felt a second's
368 irritation, then a wave of sympathy as she saw the spasm of anxiety
369 cross his face. He was nervous about her meeting his fam, and nervous
370 about who would arrive when, and nervous about where his sisters were
371 with their enormous families and meek husbands, trapped somewhere on
372 southern California's squillion-mile freeway network.
374 “Ma,” he said. “This is my friend, Trish.”
376 “Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Feinstein,” Trish said. The old woman
377 was remarkably well-preserved, her soft skin glowing with heat-flush,
378 her thick hair caught in a tight bun and covered with a little scarf
379 that reminded Trish of Rainer's yarmulke. She wondered if she should be
380 wearing one, too. Mrs. Feinstein's eyes flicked quickly to her shoes,
381 up her legs and boobs, to her face and hair, and then back to her face.
382 She opened her arms and drew Trish into a hug that smelled of good,
383 subtle perfume, though Trish knew so little about scent that she
384 couldn't have said which. “Call me Reba, darling,” she said.
385 “It's so good of you to come.”
387 And then she was off, hustling to corral a wayward knot of
388 horseplay-aged cousins, stopping to shake hands with the deceased
389 great-uncle's poker buddies in their old-man pants, golf shirts and
390 knit yarmulkes bobby-pinned to their thinning hair.
392 Trish took stock. Looked like every other graveyard she'd been in,
393 which wasn't that many. At
35, she'd been to half a dozen family
394 funerals, a couple of college buddies who OD'ed or cracked up their
395 cars, and one favorite poli-sci teacher's service, so she was hardly an
396 expert on boneyards, but something was amiss.
398 “What's with the pebbles on the headstones?” she whispered to
399 Rainer, who was scanning the road for signs of his sisters.
401 “Huh? Oh. You drop those on the monument when you visit the grave, as
402 a sign that someone's been there.”
404 “Oh,” she said, and began to cast about for a pebble she could put
405 on his great-uncle's headstone once it was unveiled. There were none to
406 be found. The ground had been picked completely clean. Looking at the
407 thousands and thousands of ranged marble headstones, each topped with a
408 cairn of stones -- and not just stones, either, toys and seashells and
409 small sculptures, she saw now -- and she understood why.
411 “What are you doing?” Rainer asked. He might have been irritated,
412 or just nervous. It was hard to tell when he was Fretting, and he was
413 clearly going coo-coo for coco-puffs.
415 “Looking for pebbles,” she said.
417 He said :fuck: very quietly. “I meant to bring some. Damnit. I've got
418 twenty relatives buried here and we're going to go past every single
419 tombstone before we get to leave and I don't have a single rock.”
421 “Can you leave toys or other stuff, like on those stones?”
423 “Yeah,” he said. “I suppose. If I had other stuff.”
425 She opened her purse and pulled out the dolphin-dildo cellphone. “You
426 still need this?” she said.
428 He smiled and his forehead uncreased. “You're a genius,” he said.
430 She set it down on the pavement and brought her heel down on it hard,
431 breaking it into dozens of fragments. “All the pebbles we'll ever
432 need,” she said, picking them up and handing them to Rainer.
434 He put his arm around her shoulders and squeezed. “I'm awfully fond
435 of you, Counselor,” he said, kissing her earlobe. His breath tickled
436 her ear and made her think of the crazy animal new-relationship-energy
437 sex they'd had the night before -- she was still limping, and so was he
440 “You too, steakypaste,” she said. “Now, introduce me to all of
443 “Introduce you?” He groaned. “You don't think I remember all of
444 their names, do you?”
448 Afterward, they formed a long convoy back to the nearest family
449 member's house -- a great aunt? a second cousin? Rainer was vague --
450 navigating by keeping everyone in sight, snaking along the traffic jam
451 that appeared to have engulfed the entire state, if not the whole coast.
453 “You made that law, yes? We've all heard about you.” This was the
454 sixth time someone had said this to her since they'd arrived and Rainer
455 had made her a plate of blintzes, smoked salmon, fresh bagels, boiled
456 eggs, and baby greens salad with raspberry dressing, then had been
457 spirited away into an endless round of cheek-pinching and intense
458 questioning. She'd been left on her own, and after having a couple of
459 grave conversations with small children about the merits of different
460 toys, she'd been latched upon by one of the Relatives and passed from
463 “I was involved in it, but I didn't write the law,” she said.
465 “Look at you, so modest, you're blushing!” the Relative said. She
466 reached out to steady a cut-glass vase as it wobbled in the wake of two
467 small boys playing keep-away with a third's yarmulke, and Trish
468 realized that this was probably the hostess.
470 “This place is just supercalifragilistic,” she said, with an
471 economical gesture at the tasteful Danish furnishings, the paper books
472 in a handsome oak bookcase, the pretty garden out one side window and
473 the ocean out the back window.
475 “Thank you,” the great-aunt said. “My Benny loved it here.” She
476 misted up. Trish finally added two and two, remembered the BENJAMIN
477 chiseled into the marble headstone, and the blank spot on the other
478 half of the tombstone, realized that this wasn't just the hostess, this
479 was the
\emph{widow
}, and felt about for a thing to say.
481 “It was a beautiful ceremony,” she said. She had a couple napkins
482 tucked in the waistband of her pants, and without thinking, she
483 extracted one and folded an angle into it, reaching for the corner of
484 the great-aunt's eye. “Look up,” she said, and blotted the tear
485 before it could draw a line of mascara down the widow's cheek.
487 The old woman smiled a well-preserved smile that reminded Trish of
488 Rainer's mom. “You're a sweet girl,” she said. “Me, I'm not so
489 good with names, and so I've forgotten yours.”
491 “I'm Trish,” Trish said, bemusedly. Rainer's grammar got
492 yiddishized when he wasn't paying attention, and she adored the
493 contrast between its shtetl credibility and his witty, smooth public
494 banter-persona. It had attuned her to little phrases like, “Me, I'm
497 The widow shook her hand. “I'm Dorothy. It's a pleasure to make your
498 acquaintance. Would you like to come out to the garden with me?”
502 Once they were seated, young male Relatives materialized and set up
503 shade-umbrellas and brought out trays of iced juice.
505 “They're not after the inheritance, you know,” the old woman said
506 with a snort. “Their parents are
\emph{very
} well-off. They don't
507 need from money. They just adore me because I've spoiled them rotten
508 since they were babies and I'd take them swimming and to Disneyland.”
510 “You have a beautiful family,” Trish said.
512 “Do you have a big family, too?” The old woman put on a pair of
513 enormous sunglasses and sipped at her pink grapefruit juice.
515 “Not like this one,” she said. There were a couple hundred people
516 in the house, and Rainer had spent the whole car-ride back from the
517 cemetery Fretting about all the relations who
\emph{hadn't
} made it.
519 “Oh, this one! Well, this is a special case. This family accumulates
520 other families. My Benny had a small family, and when he married me,
521 they just joined us. All the high holidays, we ate here, or at my
522 parents' place, God rest them. Your family is in DC?”
526 “But you're from DC, no?”
528 “Not really. I grew up in Chicago and Seattle.”
530 “But you made that law --”
532 “I really didn't, honestly! I was clerking for a Supreme Court judge
533 when the case was heard, and I wrote his dissenting opinion, and when
534 we lost, I quit and went to work for a PAC that was agitating for
535 copyright reform to accommodate free expression, and then when Senator
536 Sandollar got voted in and they started the Intellectual Property
537 committee and made her chairman, I joined her staff as a policy wonk.
538 So I worked on it, along with a couple thousand other people, not
539 counting the millions who contributed to the campaign and the people
540 who knocked on doors and so on.”
542 “How old are you, darling?”
546 “At
35, I was having babies. You -- listen to you. Listen to what
547 you've
\emph{accomplished
}! I'm proud just to
\emph{listen
} to you.
548 Rainer is lucky to have you. You two will get married?”
550 Trish squirmed and felt her face grow hot. Neither of them really
551 believed in marriage. Whenever anyone brought the subject up around
552 Rainer, he'd grimace and say, “Are you kidding? It'd make my mother
553 \emph{far
} too happy -- she'd keel over from joy.”
555 There was some kind of disturbance down the beach, one that had been
556 growing steadily over the past several minutes, and now the Relatives
557 were all turning their attention that way, to a couple of small boys in
558 miniature suits who were ruining the shine on their shoes running in
559 the sand like lunatics.
561 Something in the way they were running, the distant expressions she
562 couldn't quite make out on their faces. It made her think back to
563 high-school, to working as a beach lifeguard on Lake Michigan in the
564 summers, and before she knew what she was doing, she'd kicked off her
565 shoes and was running for the shore, her legs flashing immodestly
566 through the vents in her apron-trousers.
568 She was still yards away from the hissing surf when she began to assess
569 the situation. There was the small boy, bobbing in the ocean, where the
570 undertow had spit him up after sucking him under. There was the
571 swimmer, unconscious on the beach, face down. Couldn't tell if his
572 chest was moving, but the small boy was in a suit, not swim-trunks like
573 the swimmer, and that meant that he was part of Rainer's Family, which
574 she had begun (on the eighth date, no less!) to think of as her own,
575 and so she had him as her primary target before she reached the sea.
577 She didn't bother finicking with the buttons on her top, just grabbed
578 her collar and yanked, leaving her in a bra that revealed less than
579 some bikinis she owned, but did so through a cunning arrangement of
580 lace, mesh, and structural engineering that was probably illegal in
581 Texas. She undid the bows on each hip holding up her pants and stepped
582 out of them, leaving behind a very small pair of white panties whose
583 primary design consideration had been to avoid showing lines through
584 thin trousers, with modest coverage of all her nethers coming in a
587 She plunged into the water without hesitation, moving swiftly but
588 surely, taking care to keep her feet dug in against the undertow as she
589 waded out toward the young boy. She was a strong swimmer, but the water
590 was shockingly cold after the heat of the garden and the buzzing
591 afternoon and it sucked at her calves and legs like a jacuzzi intake.
592 Her breath roared in her ears as she rode the swells, and then she was
593 soaked by a succession of breakers, and then she had the boy's little
596 She hauled him to her, seeing that he was only five or six, and that
597 his pouting lips were alarmingly blue and that his skin was as pale as
598 cream. She scooped the water out of his mouth, hooked her arm around
599 his neck and tilted his head back and began to slosh back toward shore.
600 When she was waist-deep -- immodestly revealed in a bra that she was
601 quite certain had gone completely transparent -- she pinched his nose
602 and blew into his mouth, not quite getting her mouth out of the way
603 before he vomited up a gush of salt-water, blintzes, diet coke, and
604 bile. She spat and wished that she could duck her head and get a
605 mouthful of ocean to rinse with, but she couldn't without dunking the
606 boy, too, so she hauled him up out of the water and handed him to the
607 Relative who was standing with his arms on the shore, his fine leather
608 shoes soaked with cold seawater.
610 She looked for the swimmer, and saw that he was still face-down in the
611 sand. “You, you and you,” she said, pointing at three young cousins
612 whose wide eyes were flicking from her boobs to her crotch -- white
613 underwear, Christ, why white underwear today? -- to the boy on the
614 sand, who was mobbed now with Relatives whose hubbub had reached
615 deafening proportions, “Go to the house, find an old-fashioned phone
616 and call emergency services. Tell them where we are, and that we have
617 two drowning victims, one a child, neither breathing. What are you
620 The tallest of the three managed to make eye-contact long enough to
621 say, “Find a cell-phone, call emergency, tell them where we are, two
622 drownings, not breathing.”
624 “Right,” she said. “Come back when you're done and tell me that
627 “You, you,” she said, picking out two tall uncles who looked like
628 they'd worked out or played sports before they found whatever careers
629 had paid for the nice suits they were wearing, “Carry him here and
630 lay him down on his side.”
632 She looked for Rainer and found his ass sticking out of the scrum
633 around the boy. She snagged him by the belt and dragged him back.
634 “Rainer,” she shouted. His forehead was scrunched, but he was
635 clear-eyed and grim and looked like he was listening to her, which she
636 found very pleasing. “You need to get everyone back at least five
637 steps from that kid, and make them quiet down,” she said.
639 “Right,” he said, and took off his jacket and handed it to her.
641 “Hold it yourself,” she snapped, “I've got things to do.”
643 “It's to wear,” he said.
645 She surprised herself with a grin. “Thanks,”
647 The Relatives were murmuring, or crying, or bickering, but Rainer
648 \emph{hollered
}. “LISTEN UP,” he said. “All of you get over there
649 by that rock, NOW, or my girlfriend won't be able to save Jory's life.
652 And they went, amazingly, crushing back so quickly they looked like a
653 receding tide. The tall uncles deposited the swimmer in the sand
654 between them, and she checked his breathing and saw that it was good.
656 “Turn him on his side and tell me if he starts to choke,” she said,
657 and turned to the little boy, struggling to remember her rescue
662 She got the boy breathing and ended up with more puke on her face, on
663 Rainer's jacket, in her hair. His pulse was thready but there. She
664 turned to the swimmer and saw that he was a muscular surfer dude in
665 board shorts with a couple of bitchun tatts and a decent body-paint
666 job. He was breathing, too, but his heart was erratic as hell. She
667 pressed two fingers to his throat.
669 “What happened?” she said. “Who saw it happen?”
671 One of the aunts stepped forward and said, “My son says they were
674 She held up her hand. “Where's your son?” she said.
676 “He's back at the house,” the aunt said, startling back.
678 “Send someone for him, then tell me what happened.”
680 The aunt looked like she'd been slapped, but the other Relatives were
681 staring at her and so she had to talk, and then the boy arrived and he
682 told it again and it was pretty much the same story, but she was able
683 to get more details, as she began to examine both the boy and the
684 surfer's bodies for cuts, bruises, breaks and punctures. She gave the
685 boy's clothes the same treatment she'd given her own, gently but
686 forcefully tearing them off, using a seashell to start the tears at
687 first, then a pocket-knife that someone put in her hand.
689 The story was that the kids had been playing when they'd seen the
690 surfer floating in the breakers, and they'd dared each other to fish
691 him out, and the undertow had sucked them out to sea. One had gotten
692 away, the other had ended out beyond the waves, and meanwhile, the
693 surfer had beached himself on his own.
695 “Right,” she said. “Blankets and pillows. Elevate their feet and
696 wrap them up good.” She stood up and staggered a step or two before
697 Rainer caught her, and the crowd made a noise that was at once
698 approving and scandalized.
700 “Get me to the sea,” she said. “I need to soak my head.”
702 So he walked her into the water, he still in his suit-pants and dress
703 shirt and tie, and held onto her while she dunked her head and swirled
704 a mouthful of salt water in her mouth.
706 “Where are the fucking paramedics?” she said, as she sloshed back
709 “There,” he said, and pointed at the horizon, where a Coast Guard
710 clipper was zooming for the shore. “The cell-phone was dead, so I
711 fired up a couple flares. You didn't hear them?”
713 “No,” she said. He could have set off a cannon and she wouldn't
716 She got back to the shore just in time to see the surfer convulse. She
717 was on him in a second, kneeling at his side, doing
718 airway-breathing-circulation checks, finding no pulse, and slamming him
719 onto his back and beginning CPR.
721 Some time later, she was lifted off him and two paramedics went to work
722 on him. Someone put a robe over her shoulders and a cup of juice in her
723 hands. She dropped the juice in the sand and sticky liquid and beach
724 sand covered her legs, which she realized now that she hadn't depilated
725 in a week, and that made her realize that she'd spent a pretty crucial
726 amount of time prancing around naked in front of her date's family, and
727 that that was probably not on the timetable until the fifteenth date at
730 She looked up at Rainer, who was still in his shoes and as she was in
731 bare feet loomed over her. “God,” she said, “Rainer --”
733 He kissed her. “I love you, Patricia,” he said.
735 “Ooh,” she said, with a weak smile. “You're breaking the rules!”
737 “Can you let it go this once?”
739 She made her scrunchy thinky face and then nodded. “Just don't make a
740 habit of it, you lunk.”
744 It would have been perfect if only the surfer hadn't died.
746 They didn't get home until well after midnight. Parts of LA appeared to
747 be on fire as they inched their way along the freeway. It was weird to
748 see LA at this speed. They were used to clipping along at
60 or
70 --
749 over
80 if the traffic was light -- flying over the freeway so fast
750 that the scenery was just a blur. Only the year before, the
\emph{New
751 Yorker
} had run a
40-page paean to LA, a public apology declaring it
752 the most livable city in America, now that it had licked its traffic
753 problems. It balanced lots of personal space with thorough urbanization
754 and urbanity. It was why they both lived there.
756 Now they seemed to have traveled back
50 years in time, to the bad old
757 traffic-jam-and-smog days. Looters danced below, torching stores, and
758 the traffic moved so slowly that some people were apparently abandoning
759 their cars to
\emph{walk
} home -- which made the traffic even worse.
760 The smoke from the fires turned the sunset into a watercolor of reds
761 and mustards and golds, tones that had blown away with the smog when
762 the last gas-sucking Detroitmobile was retired for a plastic
763 Nickel-Metal Hydride jellybean, and all the lanes were repainted to cut
766 It was nightmarish. When they got off the ramp at Studio City, they
767 found homeless guys directing traffic with gas-tubes they'd torn out of
768 the bus-shelters. The tubes glowed in the presence of microwave
769 radio-frequency radiation, and as each of the trillions of invisible
770 ants in the system attempted to connect with its neighbors and get the
771 traffic set to rights again, the RF noise made the tubes glow like
774 They coasted into Trish's driveway and collapsed in her living room.
776 “You were
\emph{wonderful
}, darling,” Rainer said, peeling off the
777 tracksuit that one of his cousins had scrounged from the gym-bag in her
778 trunk and donated to Trish. Her skin was gritted with sand and streaked
779 with stripes of sunburn.
781 “God,” Trish said, lolling back on the sofa, just letting him
782 gently brush away the sand and rub lotion into her skin. “You spoil
785 “You're unspoilable,” he said. “Wonderful girl. You saved their
788 “What a fucking day,” she said. “You think that my lifeguard
789 training made up for my scandalous undergarments in your family's
792 He snorted and she felt his breath tickle the fine hairs on her tummy.
793 “You're kidding. My mom told me that if I didn't marry you, she'd
794 have me killed and then fix you up with someone else from the family --
795 told me it was my duty to see to it that you didn't get away, just in
796 case someone else fell in the ocean.”
798 He looked around at the blank walls. “Creepy not to have any news at
801 “There's a TV in the garage,” she said. “Or maybe the attic. You
802 could find it and plug it in and find out that no one else knows what's
803 going on, if you feel like it.”
805 “Or I could escort you to the bathtub and we could scrub each other
806 clean and then I could give you a massage,” he said.
808 “Yes, or you could do that.”
810 “Where did you say the television was?” he said.
812 “You are going to be: In. So. Much. Trouble.” She twined her
813 fingers in his hair and pulled him up to kiss her.
817 \subsection{2. Progress pilgrims
}
819 It took three days for even the thinnest crawls to return to the walls.
820 In the meantime, people dug out old one-to-many devices like radios and
821 televisions and set them up on their lawns so they could keep track of
822 the aftermath of The Downtime.
824 He slept over those three nights, because no one was going anywhere,
825 anyway, and they had a running argument over how many dates this
826 counted as, but truth be told, they had a wonderful time, making
827 omelets for one-another, washing each other's backs in the shower,
828 stealing moments of sex in the living room at two in the afternoon
829 without worrying about being interrupted by a chime, ringer, bell or
832 When they weren't enjoying each other, they took coolers of fizzy
833 drinks onto the lawn and watched the neighbor's TV set and saw the
834 pundits describing The Downtime. The news-shows were having a drunken
835 ball with this one: as the only game in town, they were free to bring a
836 level of craft to their newsmongering that hadn't been seen since
837 Trish's parents' day, when news-networks turned catastrophes into light
838 operas, complete with soundtracks, brand-identities, logo-marks and
839 intermissions where buffoons worked the audience for laughs.
841 “Oh, she's your favorite, isn't she?” Trish asked, goosing Rainer's
842 bicep and taking a sip of his peach ginger-ade. The pundit had been in
843 heavy rotation since the TV went back on the air. She was a Norwegian
844 academic mathematician who wrote books of popular philosophy. She was a
845 collection of trademark affectations: a jacket with built-up shoulders,
846 a monocle, a string tie, nipple tassles, and tattooed cross-hatching on
847 her face that made her look like a woodcut of a Victorian
848 counting-house clerk. Rainer loathed her -- she'd been on the committee
849 to which he'd defended his Philosophy of Networks thesis, and she'd
850 busted his balls so hard that they still ached a decade later when he
853 The pundit explained the packet-switching, using trains versus
854 automobiles as a metaphor: “In a circuit uniwerse, every
855 communication gets its own dedicated line, like a train on a track. Ven
856 I vant to talk to you, ve build a circuit -- a train track -- betveen
857 our dewices. No one else can use those tracks, even if ve're not
858 talking. But packet-svitching is like a freevay. Ve break the
859 information up into packets and ve give every packet its own little
860 car, and it finds its own vay to the other end. If vun car doesn't
861 arrive, ve make a copy of its information and send it again. The cars
862 have brakes and steering veels, and so they can all share the same road
863 vithout too much trouble.”
865 Rainer grit his teeth and hissed at the set. “She's faking the
866 accent,” he said. “She thinks that Americans believe that anyone
867 with a European accent is smarter than we are. She can pronounce vee
868 and doubleyou perfectly well when she wants to -- she speaks better
869 English than I do! Besides,
\emph{she stole that line from me
},” he
870 said, “from my
\emph{thesis
},” he said, his face scrunching up
873 “Shh, shh,” Trish said, laughing at him. He wasn't really
874 angry-angry, she knew. Just a little stir crazy. He was a networking
875 guy -- he should have been out there trying to make the network go
876 again, but he was on sabbatical and no one at UCLA wanted to hear from
879 And then the pundit was off onto ants -- networks modeled on
880 ant-colonies that use virtual pheromones to explore all possible routes
881 in realtime and emerge a solution to the problem of getting everything,
882 everywhere, in shortest time. Rainer kept barking at the TV, and Trish
883 knew he was doing it to entertain her as much as for any reason, so she
884 laughed more and egged him on.
886 The TV cut back to the news-dude, who was a very cuddly ewok who'd made
887 his name hosting a wheel-of-fortune, jumping up and down and squeaking
888 excitedly and adorably whenever a contestant won the grand prize, his
889 fur-plugs quivering. He cupped his paws to his cheeks and grinned.
891 “But ants aren't perfect, are they?” the ewok said.
893 “He's feeding her!” Rainer said. “She's going to go off on her
894 stupid walking-in-circles bit --”
896 “The thing about using wirtual ants to map out the vorld and make
897 routing recommendations is that ve can't really tell the difference
898 betveen a good solution and a bad vun, without trying it. Sometimes,
899 ants end up valking in circles, reinforcing their scent, until they
900 starve to death. Ve might find that our cars tell us that the best vay
901 from San Francisco to San Jose is via a
1500 mile detour to Las Wegas.
902 It may be true -- if all the traffic eweryvhere else is bad enough,
903 that might be the fastest vay, but it may just be the ants going in
906 “God, talk about taking a metaphor too far,” he said. Trish thought
907 that Rainer was perfectly happy to think about the ants as ants, except
908 when someone raised a point like this, but she didn't see any reason to
909 raise that point just then.
911 The ewok turned to the camera: “One scientist says we
\emph{should
}
912 expect more Downtimes to come. When we come back from this break, we'll
913 talk to a University of Waterloo researcher who claims that this is
914 just the first of many more Downtimes to come.”
916 The screen cut over to a beautiful, operatic advertisement for some
917 Brazilian brand of coca-cola, wittily written, brilliantly shot, with
918 an original score by a woman who'd won three grammies at the
919 Independent Music Awards in Kamchatka the year before. They watched it
920 with mild attention, and Trish absently fished another bottle out of
921 the cooler and chewed the lid off with her side-molars.
923 She looked at Rainer. He was gripping the arm-rests of his inflatable
924 chair tightly, dimpling the hard plastic. She held the bottle to his
925 lips and he took it, then she rubbed at his shoulders while he took a
928 “Let's go back inside and play,” she said. “They won't have
929 anything new to tell us for days.”
933 The crawls were alive the next morning, exuberantly tracking across the
934 walls and over the mirror and down the stairs. They picked out the
935 important ones and trailed them to convenient spots with a fingertip
936 and devoured them, reading interesting bits aloud to one another.
938 Soon the crawls had been tamed and only a few personal messages
939 remained. Trish dragged hers over to the tabletop, next to her cereal
940 bowl, and opened them up while she ate. Outside, she could hear the
941 whisper of cars speeding down the road, and she supposed with a
942 mingling of regret and relief that she should probably go into her
945 She opened her personal mail. It had been three days since she'd read
946 it, but for all that, a surprisingly small amount had accumulated. Of
947 course -- everyone else had been without connectivity, too. This was
948 mostly stuff from the east coast and Europe, people who'd been awake
951 She read, filed and forwarded, tapping out the occasional one-word
952 answer to simple questions or bouncing back messages with a form letter.
954 Then she came to the note from the Coast Guard medic. He didn't mince
955 words. It was in the first sentence: the surfer dude she'd rescued had
956 had a second cardiac arrest on the boat. They'd tried what they could,
957 but he hadn't recovered. He was a freak statistic of The Downtime,
958 another person who'd lost his life when the ants spazzed out. They'd
959 recovered his board and found its black-box. The accelerometer and GPS
960 recorded the spill he'd taken after the loss of climate and
961 wave-condition data from the other surfers strung out on the coast.
962 He'd stayed up for about ten seconds before going under.
964 She stared numbly at the note, the spoon halfway to her mouth, and then
965 she dropped the spoon into the bowl, not noticing that it splashed milk
968 She got up from the table and went into the kitchen. Rainer was there,
969 in a change of clothes they'd bought from a mom-n-pop gap at the mall
970 on the corner that had been taking IOUs from anyone who could show a
971 driver's license with a local address. She grabbed his wrist, making
972 him slosh starbucks down his front, she took the cup out of his hand
973 and set it down on the counter, then put her arms around his chest and
974 hugged him. He didn't protest or ask any questions, he just put his
975 arms around her and hugged back.
977 Eventually, she cried. Then she told him what she was crying about. She
978 let him tell her that she was a hero, that she'd saved Jory's life and
979 almost saved the surfer's life, and she let him tell her that it wasn't
980 her fault for sloshing into the ocean to rinse off the barf, and she
981 let him tell her that he loved her, and she cried until she thought she
982 was cried out, and then she started again.
984 He took her upstairs and he laid her down on the bed. He undressed her,
985 and she let him. He put her in fluffy jammies, and she let him. He
986 wiped away her makeup and her hot tears with a cool face-cloth, and she
987 let him. He took her hand and ran his fingers over her fingernails,
988 squeezing each one a little, the way she liked, and she let him.
990 “You're going to have a nice lie-down for a couple hours, and I'm
991 going to be right beside you. I'll call the department secretary and
992 tell him you're taking a personal day and will be in tomorrow. Then
993 we're going to go see Jory and his family, so that you can see the boy
994 whose life you saved, and then we are going to go for a walk in the
995 hills, and then I'm going to put you to bed. When you get up in the
996 morning, you can make an appointment to see a grief counsellor or not.
997 Today, I'm in charge, all right?”
999 Her heart swelled with love and she felt a tear slip down her cheek.
1000 “Rainer,” she said, “you're a wonder.”
1002 “You inspire me, darling,” he said, and kissed her eyelids shut.
1006 Their thirty-fifth date was their last.
1008 “You're going back to Washington,” he said, when he saw the boxes
1013 He stood in the doorway of her office. Trish was painfully aware of the
1014 other faculty members in the corridor watching him. Their romance was
1015 no secret, of course. Everyone in the law department knew about him,
1016 all the network engineers knew about her, and they both took a
1017 substantial amount of ribbing about “mixed marriages” and
1018 “interfaith dating.”
1020 Trish realized with a pang that it was likely that everyone in the law
1021 department knew that she'd decided to go back to the Hill but that he'd
1022 only suspected it until this instant.
1024 “Well, good for you,” he said, putting on a brave face that was
1025 belied by the Fret wrinkles in his forehead.
1027 “I'm sorry,” she said. “I should have told you once I decided,
1028 but I didn't want to do it over the phone --”
1030 “I'm glad you didn't,” he said, holding up his hand. “Do you want
1031 to come out for dinner with me anyway?”
1033 She gestured at the half-packed office. “The movers are coming in the
1036 “Well then, do you suppose you could use some help? I could get some
1037 burger king or taco bell.”
1039 She looked at him for a long moment, swallowing the knob in her throat.
1040 “That would be lovely. Mexican. I mean, `taco bell,'” she said.
1043 He let her pay for it -- “You're making the big bucks now,” he said
1044 -- and he was a surprisingly conscientious packer, padding her framed
1045 pictures carefully and wrapping her knick-knacks in individual sheets
1048 “Well then,” he said, once he'd finished writing out a description
1049 of his latest box's contents on its outside, “you always told me that
1050 Hill Rats were Hill Rats for life, I suppose.”
1052 “Yeah,” she said. She knew she should explain, but they'd had the
1053 argument about it three times since the new PAC had contacted her and
1054 offered her the executive director position. The explanation wouldn't
1055 get any better now that she'd made up her mind.
1057 The new PAC, The Association for a Human-Readable World, was the
1058 brainchild of some people she'd worked with while she was on the Hill.
1059 They'd asked her to hire a team, to scout an office, and then to camp
1060 out in the offices of various important committee chairmen until they
1061 passed a law limiting the scope of emergent networking meshes. The
1062 Europeans had enacted legislation requiring cops, hydroelectric
1063 agencies, banks, hospitals and aviation authorities to use
1064 “interrogatable” networks within ten days of The Downtime. With
1065 fifteen thousand dead in Western Europe alone, with Florence in flames
1066 and Amsterdam under two meters of water, it was an easy call. The US
1067 had scoffed at them and pointed to the economic efficiencies of a
1068 self-governing network, but the people who were funding Human-Readable
1069 World wanted to know where old concepts like “transparency” and
1070 “accountability” and “consent of the governed” fit in when the
1071 world's essential infrastructure was being managed by nonsentient
1072 ant-colony simulations.
1074 “Be gentle with us, OK?” he said.
1076 “Oh, I wish I had your confidence in my abilities,” she said,
1077 sucking on her big-gulp of coke.
1079 He put down his food and looked hard at her. He stared longer than was
1080 polite, even for (ex-) lovers, and she began to squirm.
1084 “You're not putting me on. Amazing. Patricia Lourdes McCavity, you
1085 have felled an empire and you are setting yourself up to fell another
1086 -- and it's one that I'm pretty heavily invested in, both
1087 professionally and financially.”
1089 `Come on,“ she said. ”I'm good, but I'm not superwoman. I was part
1092 “I've read your briefs. Position papers. Opinions. Speeches. Hell,
1093 your press-releases. They were the most cogent, convincing explanations
1094 for intellectual property reform I'd ever read. You weren't the judge,
1095 but you were his clerk. You weren't the committee chairman, but you
1096 were her head staffer. Taco Bell underestimated you. Coke
1097 underestimated you. Starbucks underestimated you. Disney underestimated
1098 you. Vivendi and Sony underestimated you. Now you're running your own
1099 organization, and it's pointed at me, and I'm scared shitless, you want
1100 to know the truth. I'm not underestimating you.” He'd drawn his dark
1101 eyebrows together while he spoke, and lowered his head, so that he was
1102 looking up at her from under his brow, looking intense as the day
1103 they'd met, when he was delivering a brilliant lecture on ant-colony
1104 optimization to a large lay audience at the law-school, fielding the
1105 Q
{\&
}A with such convulsive humor and scalding lucidity that he'd
1108 She felt herself blushing, then wondered if she was flushing. She still
1109 loved him and still craved the feeling of his skin on hers, wanted
1110 nothing more than another lost weekend with him, taking turns being the
1111 strong one and being the one who surrendered, soothing each other and
1112 spoiling each other. Thinking of that first meeting brought back all
1113 those feelings with keen intensity that made her breasts ache and her
1114 hands flutter on the box she was eating off of.
1116 “Rainer,” she began, then stopped. She took a couple deep breaths.
1117 “I'm not gunning for you, you know. You and I want the same thing: a
1118 world that we can be proud to live in. Your family's company has
1119 contributed more to the public good than any of us can really
1122 He blushed now, too. She never talked about his father's role in the
1123 earliest build-outs of ant-based emergent routing algorithms, about the
1124 family fortune that he'd amassed through the company that bore his name
1125 still,
30 years after he'd stepped down as Chairman of the Board.
1126 Rainer was a genius in his own right, she knew, and his own
1127 contributions to the field were as important as his father's, but he
1128 was haunted by the idea that his esteem in the field was due more to
1129 his surname than his research. He waved his hands at her and she waved
1132 “Shush. I'm trying to explain something to you. Between your father
1133 and you, the world has increased its capacity and improved its quality
1134 of life by an order of magnitude. You've beaten back Malthus for at
1135 least another century. That makes you heroes.
1137 “But your field has been co-opted by corrupt interests. When you
1138 study the distributions, you can see it clearly: the rich and the
1139 powerful get to their destinations more quickly; the poor are routed
1140 through franchise ghettoes and onto toll-roads; the more important you
1141 are, the fewer number of connections you have to make when you fly, the
1142 better the chance that you'll get a kidney when you need it. The
1143 evidence is there for anyone to see, if only you look. We need
1144 standards for this -- we need to be able to interrogate the system and
1145 find out why it does what it does. That's an achievable goal, and a
1146 modest one: we're just asking for the same checks and balances that we
1147 rely on in the real world.”
1149 He looked away and set down his taco. “Trish, I have a lot of respect
1150 for you. Please remember that when I tell you this. You are talking
1151 nonsense. The network is, by definition, above corruption. You simply
1152 can't direct it to give your cronies a better deal than the rest of the
1153 world. The system is too complex to game. Its behavior can't be
1154 \emph{predicted
} -- how could it possibly be
\emph{guided
}? Statistics
1155 can be manipulated to `prove' anything, but everyone who has any clue
1156 about this understands that this is just paranoid raving --”
1158 She narrowed her eyes and sucked in a breath, and he clamped his lips
1159 shut, breathed heavily through his nose, and went on.
1161 “Sorry. It's just wrong, is all. Science isn't like law. You deal
1162 with shades of grey all the time, make compromises, seek out balance.
1163 I'm talking about mathematical truths here, not human-created political
1164 constructs. There's no one to compromise
\emph{with
} -- a
1165 human-readable emergent network just doesn't exist. Can't exist. It
1166 doesn't make sense to say it. It's like asking for me to make Pi equal
1167 three. Pi
\emph{means
} something, and what it means
\emph{isn't
} three.
1168 Emergent networks
\emph{mean
} not-human-readable. ”
1170 She looked at him, and he looked at her, and they looked at each other.
1171 She felt a sad smile in the corners of her lips, and saw one tug at
1172 his, and then they both broke out in grins.
1174 “We're going to be seeing a lot of each other,” she said.
1176 “Oh yes, we are,” he said.
1178 “Across a committee room.”
1188 “No fighting dirty, OK?” he said, raising his eyebrows and showing
1189 her his big brown eyes. She snorted.
1191 “Give me a hug and go home,” she said. “I'll see you at the
1192 hearings when they introduce my bill.”
1194 He hugged her, and she smelled him, thinking,
\emph{this is the last
1195 time I'll smell this smell.
}
1197 “Rainer,” she said, holding him at arm's length.
1201 “I'm going to call you, when I have questions about ant-colony
1202 optimization, all right?”
1206 “I need the best expertise I can get. It's in your interest to see to
1207 it that I'm well-informed.”
1209 Slowly, he nodded. “Yes, you're right. I'd like that. I'll call you
1210 when I have questions about policy, all right?”
1212 “You're on,” she said, and they hugged again, fiercely.
1214 Once he was gone, she permitted herself the briefest of tears. She knew
1215 that she was right and that she was going to make a fool out of him,
1216 but she didn't want to think of that right then. She felt the place
1217 behind her ear where he'd kissed her before going home and looked
1218 around her office, five years of her life in thirty banker's boxes
1219 ready to be shipped across the country tomorrow, according to a route
1220 that would be governed from moment to moment by invisible, notional,
1221 \emph{ridiculous
} insects.
1223 She ate more taco bell. The logo was a pretty one, really, and now that
1224 it had been adopted by every mom-and-pop burrito joint in the world,
1225 they'd really levelled the playing field. She thought about the old
1226 Taco Bell mystery-meat and plastic cheese and took a bite of the ground
1227 beef and sharp Monterey Jack that had come from her favorite little
1228 place on the corner, and permitted herself to believe, for a second,
1229 anyway, that she'd made that possible.
1231 She was going to kick ant ass on the Hill.
1235 \subsection{3. Conflict of Insect
}
1237 Trish gathered her staff in the board room and wrote the following in
1238 glowing letters on the wall with her fingertip, leaving the text in her
1239 expressive schoolmarm's handwriting rather than converting it to some
1240 sterile font: “First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then
1241 they fight you. Then you win.”
1243 Her staff, all five of them, chuckled softly. “Recognize it?” she
1244 asked, looking round at them.
1246 “Pee-Wee Herman?” said the grassroots guy, who was so young it
1247 ached to look at him, but who could fire a cannonload of email into any
1248 congressional office on
12 hours' notice. He never stopped joking.
1250 The lawyer cocked an eyebrow at him and stroked her moustache, a
1251 distinctive gesture that you could see in any number of courtv archives
1252 of famous civil-rights battles, typically just before she unloaded both
1253 barrels at the jury-box and set one or another of her many precedents.
1254 “It's Martin Luther King, right?”
1256 “Close,” Trish said.
1258 “Geronimo,” guessed the paralegal, who probably wasn't going to
1259 work out after all, being something of a giant flake who spent more
1260 time on the phone to her girlfriend than filing papers and looking up
1263 “Nope,” Trish said, looking at the other two staffers -- the office
1264 manager and the media guy -- who shrugged and shook their heads.
1265 “It's Gandhi,” she said.
1267 They all went, “Ohhhh,” except the grassroots guy, who crossed to
1268 the wall and used his fingertip to add, “And then they assassinate
1271 “I'm too tough to die,” the lawyer said. “And you're all too
1272 young. So I think we're safe.”
1274 “OK,” Trish said. “This is an official pep talk. They're playing
1275 dirty now. Last night, my car tried to take me to Arlington via
1276 Detroit. My email is arriving on a
72 hour time-delay. My phone doesn't
1277 ring, or it rings all night long. I've had to switch it off.
1279 “But what all of this means is that I've got more uninterrupted
1280 work-time than ever and I'm getting reacquainted with my bicycle.”
1282 “Every number I call rings at my ex-girlfriend's place,” the
1283 grassroots guy said. “I think we're going to get back together!”
1285 “That's the right attitude, boy-o,” the lawyer said. “When life
1286 gives you SARS, make sarsaparilla. I appear to be unable to access any
1287 of my personal files, and any case-law I query shows up one sentence at
1288 a time. I've discovered that the Georgetown University law-library
1289 makes a very nice latte and serves a terrific high tea, and I've set
1290 Giselle to work on refiling and cross-indexing twenty years' worth of
1291 yellow pads that had previously sat mouldering in a storage locker that
1292 I was paying far too much for.”
1294 “Which has given Giselle a rare opportunity to explore the rich civil
1295 rights history that you embody,” Trish said, looking pointedly at the
1296 paralegal. “But I suspect that she could use a hand, possibly from a
1297 grad student or two who could get some credit for this. Let's ask
1298 around at Georgetown, OK?”
1300 The lawyer nodded. The office manager pointed out that their
1301 bill-payments were going astray after they'd been dispatched to their
1302 suppliers but before they were debited from their -- dwindling --
1303 account, which meant that they were getting a couple days' worth of
1304 free cash-flow. Only the media guy was glum, since he couldn't field,
1305 make or review calls or press-releases, which made him pretty useless
1308 “Right,” she said, and scribbled something on one of the steno pads
1309 she'd bought for everyone when their email started going down three
1310 times a day. “This guy owes me from back in the copyright wars -- I
1311 fed him some good stories that he used to launch his career. He was the
1312 ABNBC Washington bureau chief until last year and now he's teaching
1313 J-School at Columbia. Take the afternoon train to Manhattan and bring
1314 him back with you tonight. Don't take no for an answer. Tell him to
1315 bring his three most promising proteges, and tell him that they'll have
1316 all the access they need to produce an entire series on the campaign.
1317 Sleeping on our sofas. Following us to the toilet. Everything on the
1320 “It's do-able,” the media guy said. “I'm on it.”
1322 Once they'd all cleared out, the lawyer knocked on her door. “You
1323 going to be all right?” she asked.
1325 Trish waved her hands at the piles of briefing books, red-lined
1326 hardcopies, marked-up magazine articles and memos from her Board of
1327 Directors. “Of course!” she said. She shook her head. “Probably.
1328 We never thought we'd get this far, remember? All this psy-ops shit
1329 they're pulling, it's just more proof that we're on the right track. No
1330 one should be able to do this. It's the opposite of democracy. It's the
1331 opposite of civil discourse.”
1333 The lawyer smoothed her moustache. “Right on,” she said. “You
1334 should be proud. This is a hell of a fight, and I'm glad to be part of
1335 it. You know we'd follow you into the sun, right?”
1337 Trish fluttered her hands. “God, don't give me that kind of
1340 “All right then, into the ocean. We're making this happen, is what's
1343 “Thanks, babe,” Trish said. She put on a brave smile until the
1344 lawyer had backed out of the office, then stared down at her calendar
1345 and looked at her morning schedule. Three congressional staffers, a
1346 committee co-chair, an ACLU researcher, and the head of the newly
1347 formed Emergent Network Suppliers' Industry Association -- a man she
1348 had last seen in her office at UCLA, backing away from a long and
1353 When he rang off the phone and joined her, finally, she straightened
1354 out her smart cardigan and said, “Rainer, you're certainly looking
\ldots{}
1357 “
\ldots{}funded,” he finished, with a small smile. The Emergent Network
1358 Suppliers' Industry Association's new offices were in a nice Federal
1359 Revival building off Dupont Circle, with lots of stained glass that
1360 nicely set off the sculptural and understated furniture. “It's not as
1361 grand as appearances suggest, Trish. We got it for a song from the
1362 receivers in the Church of Scientology's bankruptcy, furnishings
1363 included. It
\emph{is
} nice though. Don't you think?”
1365 “It's lovely,” she said. Around her, staffers bustled past in good
1366 suits and good shoes and smart haircuts. “Hard to believe you only
1367 set up shop a week ago,” she said.
1369 “It came furnished, remember,” he said.
1371 “Oh yes, so you said,” she said, watching a kid who looked like
1372 he'd gone tops in his class at the Naval Academy put his ankles up on
1373 the plasticized return beside his desk and tilt his chair, throwing his
1374 head back with wild laughter at whatever it was some other Hill Rat (in
1375 her mind, it was a key Congressman's aide -- some old frat buddy of Mr
1376 Navy
2048) was saying at the phone's other end.
1378 She looked back and Rainer and saw that he was staring where she had.
1380 “Well, it's a far cry from academic research,” he said.
1382 “I know you'll be very good at it. You can explain things without
1383 making it seem like an explanation. The first lesson I ever learned on
1384 the Hill was, `If you're explaining --'”
1386 “'-- you're losing,'” he said. “Yeah, I've heard that. Well,
1387 you're the old hand here, I'm just learning as I go. Trying not to make
1388 too many mistakes and to learn from the ones I do make.”
1390 “Do you want some free advice, Rainer?”
1392 He sat down in one of the chairs, which bulged and sloshed as it
1393 conformed itself to his back and butt. He patted the upholstered jelly
1394 beside him. “You may always assume that I would be immensely grateful
1395 for your advice, Trish,” he said.
1397 She sat down and crossed her legs, letting her sensible shoe hang
1398 loose. “Right. DC is a
\emph{busy
} place. In academic circles, in
1399 tech circles, you might get together to feel out your opponent, or to
1400 make someone's acquaintance, or to see an old friend. You might get
1401 together to enjoy the company of another human being.
1403 “We do that in DC,
\emph{after
} working hours. Strictly evenings and
1404 weekends. When you schedule a meeting during office hours, it has to
1405 have a purpose. Even if it appears to have no purpose, it has a
1406 purpose. There's a protocol to meetings, a secret language, that's
1407 known to every Hill Rat and written nowhere. What time you have the
1408 meeting, who's there, who's invited, who knows it, how long you
1409 schedule, whether you cater: they all say little things about the
1410 purpose of the meeting. Even if you have no reason to call the meeting,
1411 one will be read into it.
1413 “If this was any other city in the world, it would make perfect sense
1414 for you to look me up once you got to DC. We're still friends, I still
1415 think about you from time to time, but here in DC, you calling me over
1416 for a meeting, this kind of meeting, at this time of day, it means
1417 you're looking to parley. You want to strike a deal before my bill goes
1418 to the committee. I don't know how well you know the Hill, so I don't
1419 want to impute any motives to you. But if you took a meeting like this
1420 with anyone else, that's what they'd assume.”
1422 Rainer's forehead crinkled.
1424 “No Fretting,” she said. Then she smiled a sad smile. “Oh, Fret
1425 if you want. You're a big boy.”
1427 He twiddled his thumbs, caught himself at it, and folded his hands in
1428 his lap. “Huh,” he said. “Well. I
\emph{did
} want to talk to you
1429 because it's been a while and because we meant a lot to each other. I
1430 \emph{also
} wanted to talk to you about the bill, because that's what
1431 I'm here to do, at a pretty decent salary. I
\emph{also
} wanted to see
1432 you because I had an idea that you'd be different here in your native
1433 habitat, and well, that's true.”
1435 She refused to let that make her self-conscious. Of
\emph{course
} she
1436 was different, but it wasn't geographic. The last time they'd seen each
1437 other, they were lovers and friends. Now they were ex-lovers who were
1438 being paid to accomplish opposing, mutually exclusive objectives. She
1439 knew that there was a certain power in not saying anything, so she
1440 wrapped herself in silence and waited for him to say something. She
1441 didn't have to wait long.
1443 “Your bill is going to committee?”
1445 “Well, I certainly hope so,” she said. “That's what I'm here for,
1446 after all. The discussion draft has been circulating for a week, and
1447 we're confident we'll see it introduced and assigned to committee by
1448 the end of this week. That's what we're told, anyway. It's got strong
1449 bipartisan support. Selling Congress on the importance of
1450 human-generated governance is pretty easy. Wouldn't want to be in your
1453 He grinned. “You're trying to psych me out.”
1455 “Maybe,” she said, grinning back. “But that's nothing compared to
1456 the psych job that we've been getting down at my office.” She told
1457 him about the phone weirdness, the oddball traffic-management.
1458 “Someone on your side has a funny sense of humor.”
1460 His smile faded. “You're still trying to fake me out,” he said.
1461 “If you're seeing corruption in the net, it's because you're looking
1462 so hard, you can't help but find it. You're reading malice into
1463 accident. Dead spots aren't personal, you know. This is a law of nature
1464 -- the networks emerge solutions, they're the best they can come up
1465 with. If you don't like the results, talk to nature, not me.”
1467 She shrugged. “Whatever, Rainer. I know what's happening. You'll
1468 believe what you want to believe.” She pursed her lips and made an
1469 effort at controlling her irritation. “It's really happening, and
1470 it's not helping your side. If you know who's responsible, you might
1471 let him know that the dirty tricks are what convinced Senator
1472 Beauchamp's staff to green-light the bill. Conspiracy is supposed to be
1473 beneath the surface. It doesn't look so good when it's exposed to fresh
1476 “You've got to be kidding,” he said. “Doesn't matter, I suppose.
1477 All right, message received. If I happen to run into someone whom I
1478 think should hear it, I'll be sure to pass it on, OK?”
1480 “That's all I ask,” she said.
1482 “You want to talk about the bill now?”
1484 “Have you seen the discussion draft?”
1486 He squirmed. “No,” he admitted. “I didn't know it existed until
1489 “I'd offer to send you a copy, but I expect it would take a week to
1490 arrive, if it ever did. Why don't you ask that guy,” she gestured at
1491 the Navy man, “to get you a copy? He looks like he knows his way
1492 around. And then drop by my office if you want to chat about it.”
1494 She stood up and tugged at her cardigan again. “It's been very nice
1495 seeing you,” she said. She picked up her coat and her mitts. “Good
1498 He gave her a hug -- which felt weird, hugging was strictly
1499 west-of-the-Mississippi, and she broke it off firmly -- and showed her
1500 to the door. The first snows were coming in, and the steps were
1501 slightly icy, so she maneuvered them slowly, carefully. When she
1502 reached the road, he was no longer in the doorway. He was standing
1503 right behind her, breath coming out in foggy huffs.
1505 “Trish,” he said, then stopped. His arms dropped to his sides and
1506 his shoulders slumped.
1508 “Rainer,” she said, keeping her voice calm and neutral.
1510 “God,” he said. “God. How'd this happen, Trish? Look, I've never
1511 been happy the way I was with you. I haven't been that happy since.
1514 “Rainer,” she said again, taking one of his hands, firmly,
1515 motherly. “Rainer. Stop it. You're here to do a job, and your job
1516 requires that you and I keep it on a professional level. It doesn't
1517 matter how it happened --” But it did, didn't it? She'd left him to
1518 come east and do something he thought of as wrong-headed and backwards
1519 and superstitious. But she'd left him, not the other way around. And
1520 he'd never recovered, though she'd built herself a new life here. It
1521 wasn't a contest (but she was winning anyway). “It doesn't matter. We
1522 respect each other. That's enough.”
1524 He deflated and she said, “Oh, come here,” and gave him a long and
1525 soulful hug, right there on the street, knowing that she was giving the
1526 hug and he was taking it. Then she let him go, spun him round, and gave
1527 him a little push back toward his office.
1529 By the time she reached the corner and looked back over her shoulder,
1530 he was nowhere to be seen.
1534 That afternoon, her phone started ringing normally, with actual people
1535 on the other end. Her outbound calls were connected. Her email was
1536 delivered. Her car got her home in record time. She sighed as she eased
1537 it into her driveway and carried her briefcase inside and poured
1538 herself a very small glass of Irish whisky so rare that it had been
1539 known to make grown men weep. Normally, she saved it for celebrations,
1540 but if she was celebrating something, she was damned if she knew what
1543 Her phone rang as she was licking the last few drops of liquor from the
1544 little glass. It was the lawyer, with news.
1546 “I just stopped by the office and found a messenger on the doorstep.
1547 He had hard-copy of a press-release from Senator Beauchamp's office.
1548 They're introducing the bill in the morning. Congrats, kid, you did
1551 Trish set the glass down and said :whoopee: very quietly and very
1554 “You're durned tootin',” the lawyer said. “And double for me.”
1556 Of course, it wasn't over by a long shot. Getting a bill introduced was
1557 not the same as getting it through committee. Getting it through
1558 committee was not the same as getting it passed in the Senate, and
1559 getting it passed in the Senate was not the same as getting it passed
1560 in the House, and then who the hell knew what the hereditary
1561 Chimp-in-Chief in the Oval Office would do when it was passed through
1562 the bars of his cage with his morning banana.
1564 But she had ridden back into town less than a year before, and she had
1565 gone from nothing to this. The ACLU was supporting the bill, and EFF,
1566 EPIC, all the old civ-lib mafia had opened their arms to her. She
1567 poured herself one more very small whisky, gave herself a fragrant bath
1568 and put herself to bed, grinning like a fool.
1572 “There are four news-crews, six print reporters, and a couple of
1573 others here to see you,” the office-manager said. The office phones
1574 were out again, but that hadn't stopped a fair number of determined
1575 people from figuring out that they could actually move their physical
1576 being from one part of Washington to another and have a real,
1577 old-fashioned face-to-face. The lawyer and she had each taken a dozen
1578 press “calls” that morning, with their embedded reporters from
1579 Columbia J-School perched obtrusively in the corners of their offices,
1580 taking copious notes and filming constantly.
1584 “A mixed bag. Some Hill people, some I'm not sure about.”
1586 Trish stood and stretched out her back, listening to it pop. She
1587 usually worked in bursts, typing or talking for an hour, then taking a
1588 little walk to gather her thoughts and touch base with her co-workers.
1589 Today, she'd been glued to her seat from
7AM to after lunchtime, and
1590 her back and butt were shrieking at her.
1592 She walked into the front area, trailed by her reporter. She recognized
1593 some of the journos and some of the Congressional staffers, and a local
1594 rep from a European Privacy think-tank in Brussels, and -- Rainer.
1596 He was turned out in a very natty suit and a homburg, a fashion that
1597 had recently come back to DC, and she knew that he'd been put together
1598 by a personal shopper. Her own Board had suggested to her,
1599 matter-of-factly, that she should get one of her own once the bill
1600 cleared committee, since she'd be doing tons of press and as sharp a
1601 dresser as she fancied herself, she was no pro. Her prodigious talents,
1602 they assured her, lay elsewhere.
1604 He took her hand with both of his and gave her a long, intense
1605 hand-shake that drew stares from the journos and the think-tank man.
1607 “Nice to see you again, Ms. McCavity,” he said, somberly.
1609 “A pleasure as always, Mr. Feinstein,” she said.
1611 “I'm sorry to drop in on you unannounced,” he said, “but I hoped
1612 that I could have just a moment of your time.” Belatedly, he
1613 remembered to take off his silly hat and then he fumbled with the right
1614 way to hold it, settling for dropping it to his waist and upending it.
1615 She thought he looked like a panhandler in a Charlie Chaplin movie and
1616 she suppressed a smile. His curly hair had been gelled into a careful
1617 configuration that reminded her of the glossy ringlets of a black
1620 “I suppose we can do that,” she said. She turned to her other
1621 visitors. “Who's got a
3PM deadline?” she said. Two of the
1622 print-reporters held up their hands. “You then you,” she said.
1623 “Who's got a
5PM filing deadline?
6PM?
10PM?” She triaged them all,
1624 promised to meet the think-tank man for dinner at an Ethiopian place in
1625 Adams-Morgan, and led Rainer into her office and closed the door.
1627 He looked at her embedded reporter and cocked his head.
1629 “Sorry, Rainer,” she said. “I have a shadow for the duration.
1630 Just pretend he isn't here. You don't mind, do you dear?” she said to
1631 the reporter, who was very young and very bright and missed nothing. He
1632 shook his head and made some notes.
1634 “The bill's dead,” Rainer said, after he'd sat down.
1636 “Oh really?” she said.
1638 “Just heard from Senator Rittenhouse, personally. He takes the
1639 position that this should be in Commerce, not Judiciary, and is calling
1640 hearings to make that happen.”
1642 Rittenhouse was another powerful committee chairman, and this wasn't
1643 good news. What's more, he was in the pocket of the network operators
1644 and had been for a decade, so much so that editorialists and talk-radio
1645 types called him “The Senator from The Internet.”
1647 Still, it wasn't catastrophic. “That's interesting,” she said,
1648 “but it's a far cry from killing the bill. It's pretty standard, in
1649 fact. Just slows things down.” She smiled at him. He was just a kid
1650 sometimes, so out of his depth here. He reminded her of the Relatives
1651 she'd met that day, the little boys in their miniature suits running on
1654 He shifted in his seat and fondled his hat-brim. “Well, I guess we'll
1655 see. My press-liaison has set up a post-mortem debate on one of the
1656 news-networks tonight, and I thought you might want to represent the
1659 She smiled again. He was twice the rhetorician that she was, but he had
1660 no idea how to play the game. She'd have to be careful to bruise, not
1665 “We, as a society, make trade-offs all the time,” Rainer said. He
1666 was wearing a different suit this evening, something that Trish had to
1667 admit looked damned good on the studio monitors (better than her frumpy
1668 blouse and wool winter-weight trousers). “We trade a little bit of
1669 privacy for a little bit of security when we show identification before
1670 going into a federal building --”
1672 The ewok held up his paw. “But how much should we be willing to
1673 trade, Ms. McCavity?”
1675 She looked into the camera, keeping her eyes still, the way she'd been
1676 told to if she didn't want to appear tourettic. “Wickett, when
1677 Franklin said, `Those willing to give up a little liberty for a little
1678 security deserve neither security nor liberty,' he wasn't spouting
1679 empty rhetoric, he was laying the groundwork for this enduring
1680 democratic experiment that we all love. Look, we're not opposed to the
1681 use of autonomous networks for
\emph{some
} applications, even
1682 \emph{most
} applications, with appropriate safeguards and checks and
1683 balances. No nation on earth has the reliance that we do on these
1684 networks. Are they an appropriate way of advising you on the best way
1685 to get to the mall on a busy Saturday? Absolutely, provided that
1686 everyone gets the best advice the system can give, regardless of
1687 economic status or influence. But should they be used to figure out
1688 whom the FBI should open an investigation into? Absolutely not. We use
1689 judges and grand juries and evidence to establish the sufficiency of a
1690 request to investigate a private citizen who is considered innocent
1691 until proven guilty. We learned that lesson the hard way, during the
1692 War on Terrorism and the Ashcroft witch-hunts. Should we trade grand
1693 juries and judges for ant-colonies? Do you want the warrant for your
1694 wiretap issued by an accountable human being or by a simulated
1697 The ewok turned to the camera. “Both sides make a compelling case.
1698 What do you think? When we come back, we'll take your calls and
1699 questions.” The lights dimmed and it adjusted its collar and cracked
1700 its hairy knuckles on the table before it. Ever since it had made the
1701 move to a pbs, it had been grooming its fur ever-more conservatively
1702 and trying out a series of waistcoats and short pants. It turned to her
1703 and stared at her with its saucer-sized black button eyes. “You know,
1704 I just wanted to say thanks -- I had self-identified as an ewok since I
1705 was five years old, but Lucasfilm just wouldn't license the surgery, so
1706 I went through every day feeling like a stranger in my body. It wasn't
1707 until your law got enacted that I was able to find a doctor who'd do it
1708 without permission.”
1710 She shook its paw. “It wasn't my law, but I helped. I'm glad it
1711 helped you out.” She unconsciously wiped her palm on her thigh as the
1712 ewok turned to his make-up boy and let him comb out its cheeks. She
1713 stared at Rainer, who wasn't looking good. She'd had him on the ropes
1714 since their opening remarks, and the ewok kept interrupting him to let
1715 her rebut -- and now she knew why.
1717 Rainer had his phone clamped to his head, and he was nodding vigorously
1718 and drumming his fingers. He was sweating, and it was making his hair
1719 come un-coiffed. Trish's own phone buzzed and she looked down at in
1720 surprise. It was her voice-mail, coming back to life again. It had
1721 started when she got to the studio -- when she got within a few yards
1722 of Rainer, she realized. Messages coming in. She'd transcribed a dozen
1723 in the green-room before they'd dragged her into makeup.
1725 The studio lights blinked and Rainer popped the phone back into his
1726 pocket and the ewok turned to look back into the camera, examining the
1727 ticker scrolling past his prompter. He introduced them again, then
1730 “Ms. McCavity, Alberto in San Juan writes in wanting to know what
1731 changes we should institute in the networks.”
1733 She said, “It's not my place to say what technical changes the
1734 networks need to have. That's where experts like Mr. Feinstein come in.
1735 We'd ask the administrative branch to solicit comments from people like
1736 him to figure out exactly what technical changes could be made to allow
1737 us to remain competitive without giving up our fundamental liberties in
1738 order to beat the occasional traffic jam.”
1742 He grinned and leaned forward. “It's interesting that Ms. McCavity
1743 should disavow any technical expertise, since that's what we've been
1744 saying all along. If she's getting stuck in traffic, it's because
1745 there's a
\emph{lot
} of traffic. The ant-nets route
\emph{five thousand
1746 percent more traffic
} than our nation's highways ever accommodated
1747 without them, and they've increased the
1748 miles-per-hour-per-capita-per-linear-mile by
\emph{six thousand, four
1749 hundred percent
}. You're stuck in traffic? Fine. I get stuck sometimes
1750 too. But for every hour you spend stuck today, you're saving
1751 \emph{hundreds
} of hours relative to the time your parents spent in
1754 “The other side of this debate are asking for something impossible:
1755 they want us to modify the structure of the network, which is a
1756 technical construct, built out of bits and equations, to accommodate a
1757 philosophical objective. They assert that this is possible, but it's
1758 like listening to someone assert that our democracy would be better
1759 served if we had less gravity, or if two plus two equaled five. Whether
1760 or not that's true, it's not reasonable to ask for it.”
1762 The ewok turned to her.
1764 She said, “Well, we've heard a great deal about the impossibility of
1765 building democratic fundamentals into the network, but nothing about
1766 the possibilities. This hard, no-compromise line is belied by the fact
1767 that we know that the rich and powerful manipulate the network to their
1768 own advantage, something that statistics have proven out --”
1770 “See, this is
\emph{exactly
} how these Human-Readable types do it,
1771 it's how their media training goes. They are here to ask for changes to
1772 \emph{technical
} specifications, but they disavow any technical
1773 knowledge, and when they're called on this, they spout dubious
1774 `statistics' that `prove' that up is down, black is white, and that
1775 millionaires can get to the movies in half the time that paupers can.
1776 The Emergent Network Suppliers' Industry Association represents the
1777 foremost experts in this field, but you don't need to be an expert to
1778 know that these networks
\emph{work
}. The ants take us where we want to
1779 go, in the shortest time, with the highest reliability. Anyone who
1780 doubts that can dig out her map and compass and sextant and try to
1781 navigate the world without their assistance, the way they do in
1784 Her mouth was open.
\emph{Media training
}? Where did he get this
1785 business about
\emph{media training
}? “I'm not sure where Mr.
1786 Feinstein gets his information about my media training from, but
1787 personally, I'd rather talk about networks.” She paused. “Let's
1788 talk about Europe, where they
\emph{have
} found ways of creating
1789 transparency and accountability for these `unregulatable' algorithms,
1790 where the sky
\emph{hasn't
} fallen and the final trump hasn't sounded.
1791 What do they know that we don't?”
1793 “What indeed?” the ewok said, breaking in and giving her the last
1794 word again. “More of your questions after this break.”
1796 They got in their cars together after they'd scrubbed off their makeup
1797 and shaken paws with the ewok, riding down in the elevator shoulder to
1798 shoulder, slumped and sweaty and exhausted. They didn't speak, and the
1799 silence might have been mistaken for companionable by someone who
1800 didn't know any better.
1802 They got off at the same floor in the parking garage and turned in the
1803 same direction, and Trish spied his car, parked next to hers, the last
1804 two on the floor. Quickening her step, she opened her door and turned
1805 the car on, backing up so that she was right behind Rainer.
1807 He backed out slowly, looking at her quizzically in his rearview, but
1808 she refused to meet his eye, and when he pulled out, she rode his
1811 “Sweet fancy Moses,” she breathed, as the traffic parted before
1812 them, allowing them to scythe through the streets, onto the beltway.
1813 She hung grimly onto his bumper, cutting off cars that tried to shift
1814 into her lane. Moving this fast after so much time stuck on the roads
1815 -- it felt like flying. She laughed and then got a devilish idea.
1817 Spotting a gap in the passing lane, she zipped ahead of Rainer and
1818 swerved back into his lane so that she was in the lead. As though a
1819 door had slammed shut, the traffic congealed before them into a clot as
1820 thick as an aneurysm. She hissed out a note of satisfaction, then
1821 waited patiently while Rainer laboriously passed her again, and the
1822 traffic melted away once more.
1824 It was tempting not to get off at her exit, but she had to get some
1825 sleep, and so she reluctantly changed lanes. There wasn't much traffic
1826 on the road, but every traffic light glowed vindictive red all the way
1829 The Chairman of her Board messengered over a hand-written note of
1830 congratulations that was on her doorstep. Beneath it was a note from
1831 Rainer's great-aunt, with the best wishes of his mother in neat pen
1832 beneath it. She read its kind words as she boiled the kettle, and put
1833 it into her pile of correspondence to answer. Rainer's great-aunt
1834 wanted to know if she had met a nice boy in DC yet, but she didn't come
1835 right out and say it -- too subtle for that. The women in Rainer's
1836 family got all the subtlety, and they recognized their own kind. It was
1837 why she and the old lady kept writing to each other; that and so that
1838 the Relatives could reassure themselves that someone in full possession
1839 of lifeguardly skills and a level head was watching out for Rainer's
1842 This business of hand-written, hand-delivered notes and letters was
1843 actually kind of charming, she thought as she put her feet up on her
1844 coffee table and opened up her flask of very special Irish whisky again.
1848 She and Rainer went head to head in half a dozen more skirmishes that
1849 month -- her phone popping back to life every time she got within
1850 shouting distance of him. The on-again/off-again hearings in both
1851 Judiciary and Commerce never quite materialized.
1853 She was better at playing the game, but he was a fast learner, and he
1854 had much deeper pockets and working network infrastructure. Her Board
1855 approved her renting out an empty suite of offices below their office
1856 and converting them to bedrooms for her staff for days when their cars
1857 couldn't get them home. They secretly borrowed elderly network
1858 appliances from relatives or bought them in the dollar-a-pound bin at
1859 the Salvation Army, but always, within a few hours of being in the
1860 possession of someone in the employ of the Association for a
1861 Human-Readable World, the devices would seize up and lose their routes
1862 to the network. Their offices started to fill up with dead soldiers,
1863 abandoned network boxes that no one could get online.
1865 The embedded journalists went home after the second week. Their own
1866 gear was seizing up, too, as though the curse of the Association for a
1867 Human-Readable World was rubbing off on them. They vowed to return when
1868 things got interesting again, but they were of no use to anyone without
1869 working cameras, mics, and notepads.
1871 Christmas came and went, and New Year's, and then February arrived and
1872 the city turned to ice and slush and perpetual twilight. The paralegal
1873 quit -- she needed a job where the phones worked so that she could call
1874 her girlfriend. The media guy took a series of “personal days” and
1875 she wasn't sure if he'd show up again, but it didn't matter, because
1876 the press had stopped calling them.
1878 Then came the second Downtime.
1880 It struck during morning rush-hour on Valentine's Day, a Monday, and it
1881 juddered the whole country to a halt for eight long days. The hospitals
1882 overflowed and doctors used motorized scooters to go from one place to
1883 another, unable to spread their expertise around with telemedicine.
1884 Firemen perished in blazes. Cops arrived too late at crime-scenes.
1885 Grocery stores didn't get their resupplies, and schools dug out old
1886 chalk-boards and taught the few students who lived close enough to
1887 walk. Fed cops of all description went berserk, and could be seen
1888 walking briskly from one federal building to another, their faces grim.
1890 And suddenly, miraculously, every journalist, policy-wonk, staffer,
1891 advisor, clerk and cop in DC wanted to have a chat with the Association
1892 for a Human-Readable World.
1896 She hired three more people that week, and borrowed four more from
1897 fellow-traveler organizations. Paying their salaries for the next four
1898 weeks would bottom out the group's finances, but she knew that this was
1899 now or never, and the Board backed her, after some nail-biting debate.
1901 Rainer showed up on the fourth day of the Downtime, and she found him
1902 standing, bewildered, in the hustle of her office as her staffers
1903 penned notes on steno pads to their contacts on the Hill and handed
1904 them to waiting bicycle couriers in space-program warmgear that swathed
1905 them from fingertips to eyeballs. She plucked him out of the bustle and
1906 brought him back to her office.
1908 “I've got a hell of a nerve,” he said, sitting in her guest-chair.
1910 “Really?” she said. “I hadn't noticed.”
1912 “Well, I haven't been showing it off. But I'm about to. I need
1913 advice. My office is falling apart. You've been living with no
1914 communications and no travel for a year now, you know how to make it
1915 work. We're completely lost. I've come to throw myself on your
1916 mercy.” He looked up at her with his big brown eyes, and then they
1917 crumpled shut as he made his Fretting face.
1919 “You're playing me, Rainer,” she said. “And it won't work.
1920 Whatever I feel for you, I've got a job to do, and if this Downtime
1921 tells us anything, it's that I'm doing the right thing, and you're
1922 doing the wrong thing.”
1924 He hung his head. He wasn't even the slightest bit natty that day. She
1925 supposed that his personal assistant was stuck in Fall's Church or
1926 Baltimore or somewhere, unable to get into the city. Judging from the
1927 slush and road-salt on his shoes, he must have walked the two miles
1928 between their offices.
1930 “What's more, I don't have any advice to give you, in particular.
1931 We're not faring well here because we're doing something differently --
1932 we're faring well because we're doing what we've been at all along,
1933 because of a network outage that you claim is impossible, is a figment
1934 of our imagination. Those bike messengers: we've been their best
1935 customers for months now. Everyone else is begging for service from
1936 them, but they're always here when we need them. We've got beds and
1937 changes of clothes and toilet-kits in the offices downstairs. We've
1938 been living through a Downtime for a couple of quarters now -- we've
1939 hardly noticed the change. If you want to cope as well as we are, well,
1940 you can go back in time, rent out spare offices to house your staff,
1941 establish a good working relationship with a bike-messenger company,
1942 learn to navigate the Metro and the freeways by map, and all the other
1943 things we've done here.”
1945 He looked defeated. He began to stand, to turn, to leave.
1951 “Close the door and sit down,” she said.
1953 He did, looking at her with so much hope that it made her eyes water.
1955 “Here's my offer,” she said. “You and I will lock ourselves in
1956 this office with the last draft of my bill. My staff will run
1957 interference for me with the Judiciary committee, and we will draft a
1958 version of my bill that we can both live with. We will jointly take it
1959 to Senators Beauchamp and Rittenhouse, with our blessings, and ask them
1960 to expedite it through
\emph{both
} committees. Every Congresscritter on
1961 the Hill is sitting around with his thumb up his ass until the lights
1962 come back on. We can get this voted in by Tuesday.”
1964 He stared down at his hands. “I can't do it,” he said. “My
1965 \emph{job
} is
\emph{not to compromise
}. I just can't do it.”
1967 “Come on, Rainer, think outside the box for a minute here.” Her
1968 heart was pounding. This could really be it. This could be the solution
1969 she'd been waiting for. “Even if the bill passes, there's going to be
1970 a long deliberation over the contours of the regulation, probably at
1971 the FCC. You'll be able to work on the bureau staffers and at the
1972 expert agencies, take ex-parte meetings and lobby on behalf of your
1973 employers. It's all we've ever asked for: an expert discussion where
1974 the public interest gets a hearing alongside of private enterprise and
1977 But he was shaking his head, standing up to go. “You're probably
1978 right, Trish,” he said. “I don't know. What I know is, I can't do
1979 what you're asking of me. They'd just fire me.”
1981 “If the Downtime continues, they won't be
\emph{able
} to fire you --
1982 they won't even know what you're up to until it's too late. And then
1983 they'll make the best that they can out of it. No one is better
1984 qualified to represent your side in the administrative agencies.”
1986 He put his ridiculous hat on and wrapped his scarf around his neck, and
1987 they looked each other in the eyes for a long moment. She waited for
1988 the involuntary smile that looking into his eyes inevitably evoked, but
1991 “I don't understand you, Trish. You won this incredible victory for
1992 cooperation, for collective ownership of our intellectual
1993 infrastructure. Ant-networks demand the same cooperation from the
1994 nodes, that my phone pass your car's messages to his desk. Let's just
1995 set aside the professional politics for a second. Just you and me. Tell
1996 me: how can you
\emph{not
} support this?” He looked at her out from
1997 under his brows, staring intensely. He swallowed and said, “It was
1998 the surfer, wasn't it?”
2002 “The one who died. That's why you're doing this. You want to make up
2005 She couldn't believe he'd said it. Taken such a cheap shot. “I'm
2006 surprised you didn't save that one for television, Rainer. Jesus. No,
2007 I'm doing this because it's
\emph{right
}. In case you haven't noticed,
2008 your self-healing, uncorruptible network is
\emph{down
}. People are
2009 suffering. The economy is tanking. The death toll is mounting. You
2010 won't even bend one
\emph{inch
}, one
\emph{tenth of an inch
}, because
2011 you're worried about losing your job.”
2013 “Trish,” he said, “I'm sorry, I didn't mean --”
2015 Her office door opened and there stood her embedded journalist. “I
2016 just got in from Manhattan,” he said. “Can I set up in that corner
2019 “Be my guest,” she said, grateful for the distraction. Rainer
2020 looked at her, forehead scrunched, and then he left.
2024 “It's a good thing you're not over him,” the lawyer said, pouring
2025 her another victory whisky. The bill had passed the House with only one
2026 opposing and two abstentions, and had squeaked through the Senate by
2027 five seats, at five minutes to midnight on the eighth day of the
2028 Downtime. They were halfway to the bar (where the office manager had
2029 been feeding twenties to the bartender to stay open) when the grid came
2030 back up, crawls springing to life on every surface and cars suddenly
2031 zipping forward in the characteristic high-speed ballet of efficiently
2032 routed traffic. They'd laughed themselves stupid all the way to the bar
2033 and after a brief but intense negotiation between the lawyer and the
2034 barman, he'd produced a bottle of Irish that was nearly half as good as
2035 the stuff Trish kept at home.
2037 “I'm going to pretend you didn't say that,” Trish said, sipping
2038 tenderly at the booze.
2040 “Come on, girl,” the lawyer said, twirling her moustache. “Be
2041 serious. You two had so much sexual energy in that room, it's a wonder
2042 you didn't make the bulbs explode. It's how you got inside each other's
2043 heads. You weren't selling the committee, you were selling
\emph{him
},
2044 and that's what made you so effective. We're going to need that again
2045 at the FCC, too -- so no getting over him until after then.”
2047 Trish drank her whisky. She didn't know what to say to that. He'd
2048 looked ten years older tonight, in the corridors, whispering to his
2049 committee members, to his staffers, his face drooping and wilted. She
2050 supposed she didn't look any better. It had been, what, three days?
2051 since she'd had more than an hour's sleep.
2053 “I don't get it,” she said. “How could he be so dumb? I mean,
2054 it's obvious that the system is being gamed. Obvious that we're being
2055 targeted through it. Yet he sits there, insisting that white is black,
2056 that up is down, that the network is autonomous and immune to all
2059 “It's like a religion for them,” the lawyer said. “It doesn't
2060 need explaining. It's just right-living. It's the Law.”
2062 Trish thought back to the ceremony in the graveyard, the dirge and the
2063 prayers to a god no one believed in. Had Rainer really renounced his
2064 faith when he dropped out of Yeshiva?
2066 “Here's to a human-readable world,” Trish said, raising her glass.
2067 Around her, the staffers and borrowed staffers and hangers-on and even
2068 the barman raised their glasses and cheered. It was warm and the
2069 feeling swelled in her tummy and up her chest and through her face and
2070 she burst out in what felt like the biggest smile of her life.
2074 She'd learned a long time ago never to send email while drunk, but it
2075 had been too much last night.
2077 “What if, Rainer, what if -- what if the reason for the Downtimes is
2078 that someone is manipulating the network and that's breaking it. Did
2079 you ever wonder about that? Maybe the network
\emph{is
} as good as you
2080 say it is -- until someone screws it up by trying to get preferential
2081 treatment for his pals.
2083 “Wouldn't that be a kick in the teeth? We get five squillion percent
2084 increases in across-the-board routing efficiency, but in the end, it's
2085 never enough for people who can't be happy unless they're happier than
2088 “The thing that saves the human race, but if we adopt it, it will
2089 destroy us. Irony sucks.”
2091 She'd signed it “Love,” but even drunk, she'd had the sense to take
2092 that out before sending it. Saying “Love” would have been no more
2093 appropriate than saying, “You know, I
\emph{did
} save your cousin's
2094 life.” She'd called in no favors, she'd run no blackmail, and she'd
2097 He rang her doorbell at
5AM. She was barely able to drag herself out of
2100 “I figured you'd be getting up to deal with the press soon,” he
2101 said, and she groaned. He was right. She'd earned some time off, but
2102 it'd be a month before she could take it. Too much press to do. She
2103 appreciated anew how much work it must have taken to be any of her old
2104 bosses from the copyright wars: the judge, the senator, the executive
2105 director of the PAC.
2107 She was in her robe, and he was in jeans and a UCLA sweatshirt. He
2108 didn't have any gel in his hair, which was matted down by the knit cap
2109 he'd been wearing. He looked adorable.
2111 “They fired me this morning,” he said.
2113 “Oh, hon --” she said.
2115 “I would have quit,” he said. “I'm outmatched.”
2117 She felt herself blush. Or was she flushing? She was suddenly aware of
2118 his smell, the boy smell, the smell that she could smell in his chest,
2119 in his scalp, in his tummy, lower
\ldots{} She straightened up and led him
2120 into the living room and started the coffee-maker going.
2122 “When do you fly back, then?” she said.
2124 He looked at her, smiling. “I don't know,” he said. “I haven't
2127 She felt an answering smile at the corners of her mouth and turned into
2128 the fridge to fetch out some gourmet MREs. “Bacon and eggs or
2129 pancakes?” she said, then laughed. “I guess bacon is out,” she
2132 “Oh, I'm willing to bet that that bacon hasn't been anywhere near a
2133 pig,” he said, “but I'll have the pancakes, if you don't mind.”
2135 She set everything to perking and went into the bedroom to pull on
2136 something smart and camera-friendly, but everything was in the hamper,
2137 so she settled for jeans and a decent shirt from last-year's wardrobe.
2139 When she opened the door, he was standing right there, taller than her.
2140 “I think you're right,” he said. “About the network. It's the
2141 best explanation I've heard so far.”
2143 She wrapped herself in silence again, waited for him to say more.
2145 “You see, the
\emph{true
}, neutral network is immune to corrupting
2146 influences and favoritism. So the existence of corruption and
2147 favoritism means that what we've got
\emph{isn't
} a true network. Which
2148 means you're right! We need to have a hearing to get to the bottom of
2149 this, so that we can build the true network.” He smiled bravely. “I
2150 thought maybe you could use an expert in your corner who'd say that in
2153 “Thanks,” she said, and slipped under his arm and back into the
2154 kitchen. Suddenly, she wanted very much to be back at her office, back
2155 with her staff, talking to reporters and overseeing a million details.
2156 “I'll think about it.”
2158 “I'm giving up my apartment at the end of the month -- next Monday. I
2159 won't be able to afford it without the Association's salary,” he said.
2161 Her place was big. A bedroom, a home office, a living room and a dining
2162 room. It was a serious deal for DC, even outside the beltway. It could
2163 easily accommodate a second person, even if they weren't sleeping
2166 Her office -- her staff -- the press -- the bill -- her Board.
2168 “Well,” she said, “I've got to get going. I'll shower at the
2169 office. Got to get there in time to catch the Euro press-calls. Let me
2170 put your breakfast in a bag, OK?”
2172 He looked whipsawed. “Uh, OK. Can I give you a ride?”
2174 “No, I'll need my car this afternoon. Thanks, though.” She kept her
2175 voice light, didn't meet his eyes. Kept thinking: her office -- her
2178 “Well,” he said. He turned for the door. Stopped. She tensed. He
2179 turned back to her. “Trish,” he said.
2181 “It's OK,” she said. “It's OK. We just have religious
2182 differences, is all.”
2184 She slipped past him and into her car, and left him standing in her
2185 driveway. As she asked the car to plot a route for her back to the
2186 Hill, she dug through her purse for a pocket-knife. At the next red
2187 light, she took her lapel and slashed at it, opening a rent in her
2188 shirt that reflected a little of what her heart was feeling. It made
2189 her feel a little better to do it.
2193 \section{Afterword:
}
2195 I wrote this story for Alice, who was then my girlfriend and is now my
2196 wife. Alice is smart as anything and I wanted to show off to her.
2198 So I stole two ideas: Eric Bonabeau's ground-breaking work on
2199 “ant-colony optimisation” (the basis of his consulting firm
2200 Icosystem, built on work he did at the Santa Fe Institute) and Natalie
2201 Jeremijenko's provocative notion of “legible computing” -- that is,
2202 computing whose results can be interpreted by laypeople. Eric's handing
2203 the keys to the kingdom to emergent systems that are spookily good but
2204 can't be interrogated. Natalie wants a Protestant Reformation for
2205 computing in which we can all understand what's being discovered by our
2206 computer systems. These two ideas are both fantastic, but they can't
2207 peacefully coexist, or can they?