Oscar took the opportunity to learn how to use a Moderator laptop. He had been given one, and he rightly recognized this gesture as a high tribal honor. The Moderator device had a flexible green shell of plasticized straw. It weighed about as much as a bag of popcorn. And its keyboard, instead of the time-honored QWERTYUIOP, boasted a sleek, sensible, and deeply sinister DHIATENSOR.
Oscar had been assured many times that the venerable QWERTYUIOP keyboard design would never, ever be replaced. Supposedly, this was due to a phenomenon called “technological lock-in.” QWERTYUIOP was a horribly bad design for a key-board — in fact, QWERTYUIOP was deliberately designed to hamper typists — but the effort required to learn it was so crushing that people would never sacrifice it. It was like English spelling, or American standard measurements, or the ludicrous design of toilets; it was very bad, but it was a social fact of nature. QWERTYUIOP’s universality made it impossible for alternatives to arise and spread.
Or so he had always been told. And yet, here was the impossible alternative, sitting on the table before him: DHIATENSOR. It was sensible. It was efficient. It worked much better than QWERTYUIOP.
Pelicanos entered the hotel room. “Still up?”
“Sure. ”
“What are you working on?”
“Greta’s press releases. And I’ve got to talk to Bambakias soon, I’ve been neglecting the Senator. So I’m making some notes, and I’m learning how to type properly, for the very first time in my life.” Oscar paused. He was eager to brief Pelicanos on the fascinating social differences he had discovered between the Regulators and the Moder-ators. To the undiscerning eye, the shabby and truculent proles could not be distinguished with an electron microscope — all their real and genuinely striking differences were inherent in the architecture of their network software.
An epic struggle had been taking place in the invisible fields of the networks. Virtual tribes and communities had been trying literally thousands of different configurations, winnowing them out, giving them their all, watching them die…
“Oscar, we need to talk seriously.”
“Great.” Oscar pushed the laptop aside. “Level with me.”
“Oscar, you’re getting too wrapped up here. All the negotiations with the Emergency Committee, all the time you spend dickering with those NSC people who won’t give you the time of day… we need a reality check.”
“Okay. Fine.”
“Have you been outside the lab lately? The sky is full of ‘delivery aircraft’ that never deliver anything to anyone. There are cops and roadblocks all over East Texas.”
“Yeah, we’re generating a lot of sustained outside interest. We’re a big pop hit. Journalists love the mix here, it’s very provocative.”
“I agree with you that it’s interesting. But that has nothing to do with our agenda. This situation was never in the plans. We were sup-posed to be helping Bambakias with the Senate Science Committee. The campaign krewe are supposed to be here on vacation. You were never supposed to become a spook who works part-time for the Presi-dent, while you take over federal facilities with the help of gangsters.”
“Hmm. You’re absolutely right about that, Yosh. That was not plannable. But it was doable.”
Pelicanos sat down and knotted his hands. “You know what your problem is? Every time you lose sight of your objective, you redouble your efforts.”
“I’ve never lost sight of the objective! The objective is to reform American scientific research.”
“Oscar, I’ve thought this over. I really hate this situation. For one thing, I don’t much like the President. I’m a Federal Democrat. I wasn’t joking when we were doing all that hard work for Bambakias and the Reform Bloc. I don’t want to work for this President. I don’t agree with the man’s policies. He’s a Communist; for heaven’s sake.”
“The President is not a Communist. He’s a billionaire timber baron with a background in the reservation casino business.”
“Well, the Communists are in his Left Tradition Bloc. I just don’t trust him. I don’t like his speeches. I don’t like him picking fights with the Dutch when we ought to be putting our own domestic affairs in order. He’s just not our kind of politician. He’s cruel, and sneaky, and duplicitous, and aggressive.”
Oscar smiled. “At least he doesn’t sleep on the job, like the old guy did.”
“Better King Log than King Stork, pal.”
“Yosh, I know you’re not a leftist, but you have to agree that the Left Tradition Bloc is a lot better than those total lunatics in the Left Progressives.”
“That doesn’t help! Bambakias would have trusted you implic-itly — the President won’t even give you a real post. He’s never sent us anything but empty promises. He’s left you exposed, he’s hanging you out to dry. So, in the meantime, we’re relying on these Moderators. And there’s just no future in a gangster protection racket.”
“Sure there is.”
“No there isn’t. The proles are worse even than the Left Progressives. They have funny slang, and funny clothes, and laptops, and bio-tech, so they’re colorful, but they’re still a mafia. This good old boy, Captain Burningboy … he’s sucking up to you, but he’s not what you think he is. You think he’s a charming old coot who’s a diamond in the rough, the kind of guy you could fit inside your krewe. He’s not. He’s an ultraradical cultist, and he definitely has his own agenda.”
Oscar nodded. “I know that.”
“And then there’s Kevin. You haven’t been paying enough atten-tion to Kevin. You have put a bandit in charge of the police here. The kid is like a pocket Mussolini now. He’s into the phones, he’s in the computers, he’s in the security videos, the place is saturated with his bugs. Now he’s got a pack of tattletale snoop informants, some weird-sister gang of little old nomad ladies on the net in a trailer park, somewhere in the blazing wreckage of Wyoming … The kid is off the rails. It just isn’t healthy.”
“But Kevin’s from Boston, like we are,” Oscar said. “Intense surveillance yields low rates of street violence. Kevin’s getting the job done for us, and he never balks when we bend the rules. He was a really good personnel choice.”
“Oscar, you’re obsessed. Forget the nifty-keen social concepts and all the big-picture blather. Get down to brass tacks, get down to reality. Kevin works here because you’re paying his salary. You’re pay-ing the salaries of all your krewe, and your krewe are the people who are really running this place. Nobody else has any salaries — all they do is eat prole food and work in their labs. I’m your accountant, and I’m telling you: you can’t afford this much longer. You can’t pay people enough to create a revolution.”
“There’s no way to pay people enough to do that.”
“You’re not being fair to your krewe. Your krewe are Massachu-setts campaign workers, not miracle workers. You never explained to them that they had to become a revolutionary junta. This place has no real financial support. You don’t even have a salary yourself. You don’t even have an official post in the government. The Collaboratory is running off your capital.”
“Yosh, there’s always more funding. What’s really interesting is governing without it! Managing on pure prestige. Consider the Mod-erators, for instance. They actually have a functional, prestige-based economy. It’s all been worked out in fantastic detail; for instance, they have a rotating Australian electronic ballot system…”
“Oscar, have you been sleeping at all? Do you eat properly? Do you know what you’re doing here anymore?”
“Yes, I do know. It’s not what we planned to do at first, but it’s what has to be done. I am stealing Huey’s clothes.”
“You’re in a personal feud with the Governor of Louisiana.”
“No. That’s not it. The truth is that I’m conducting a broad-scale struggle with the greatest political visionary in contemporary America. And Huey is years ahead of me. He’s been cultivating his nomads for years now, winning their loyalty, building their infrastruc-ture. He’s set it up so that homeless drifters are the most technically advanced group in his state. He’s made himself the leader of an under-ground mass movement, and he’s promising to share the knowledge and make every man a wizard. And they worship him for that, because the whole structure of their network economy has been regulated that way, surreptitiously and deliberately. It’s corruption on a fantastic scale — it’s an enterprise so far off the books that it isn’t even ‘corruption’ anymore. He has created a new alternative society, with an alter-native power structure, that is all predicated on him: Green Huey, the Swamp King. I’m working here as fast and as hard as I can, because Huey has already proved to me that this works — in fact, it works so well that it’s dangerous. America is on the ropes, and Green Huey is a smiling totalitarian who’s creating a neural dictatorship!”