Distraction - Bruce Sterling [117]
Behind these vibrant, stage-managed scenes of unleashed popular discontent, the transition of actual day-today power had gone remarkably smoothly. Felzian had always run the lab like a high school vice principal; the real power decisions in the Collaboratory had always rested in the distant hands of Dougal and his Senate krewe.
Now Dougal and his cronies were finished. However, the power vacuum was brief. Oscar’s own krewe was a group of political operatives who could easily have become a Senate staff. With a little bending and jamming, they slotted very nicely into place, and quietly usurped the entire operation.
Oscar himself served as Greta’s (very unofficial) chief of staff. Pelicanos oversaw lab finances. Bob Argow and Audrey Avizienis were handling constituency services and counterintelligence. Lana Ramachandran dealt with scheduling, office equipment, and press relations. “Corky” Shoeki, formerly in charge of the Bambakias campaign’s road camps and rallies, was handling the scramble for office space inside the Hot Zone. Kevin Hamilton was doing bravura work on security.
Greta was acting as her own press spokeswoman. That would have to change eventually, but it made excellent sense during the Strike crisis. Greta became the only official source of Strike news, and her solo public role made her seem to be handling matters all by herself. This gave her heroic charisma.
In point of fact, Greta and her zealous idealists had no real idea how to run a modern executive staff. They’d never held power before, so they were anxious to have glamorous jobs with titles and prestige, rather than the gruntwork jobs by which the acts of government were actually accomplished. This charade suited Oscar perfectly. He knew now that if he could simply keep the lab alive, solvent, and out of Huey’s hands, he would have accomplished the greatest feat of his career.
So Oscar took a deeply shadowed backseat, well behind the throne. The new year ground on. Many scientists found the Strike to be an ideal opportunity to quietly resign and leave, but that left the remaining hard-core scientists saturated with revolutionary fervor. Like revolutionaries everywhere, they were discovering that every trifling matter was a moral and intellectual crisis. Every aspect of their former lives and careers seemed to require a radical reformulation. These formerly downtrodden wretches spent most of their free hours raising one another’s consciousnesses.
And it all suited Oscar very well. His political instincts had never been sharper and his krewe, frenetic neurotics to the last man and woman, always shone in a crisis.
At this particular moment—January 8, 2045—Greta and her kitchen cabinet were engaged in particularly intense debate. The scientists were anxiously weighing new candidates for the board: Information Genetics and Biomedicine. Oscar, accompanied by his ever-present bodyguard Kevin, lurked behind a tower of instrumental clutter. He planned to let them talk until they got very tired. Then he would ask a few pointed Socratic questions. After that, they would accept a solution that he had decided a week ago.
While Kevin munched a set of color-coded protein sticks, Oscar was enjoying a catered lunch. Since Oscar’s krewe had taken over the Collaboratory, they’d been forced to hire a new Texan krewe to run their hotel. Given the tepid economy in Buna, finding new staff hadn’t been difficult.
Kevin stopped tinkering with the microchipped innards of a phone, zipped its case shut, and passed the phone to Oscar. Oscar was soon chatting in blissful security to Leon Sosik in Washington.
“I need Russian Constructivist wall posters,” he told Sosik. “Have Alcott’s Boston krewe hit the art museums