Distraction - Bruce Sterling [164]
“That wasn’t the kind of ‘outsiderness’ I had in mind.”
“Oh.” Oscar realized the truth. “You mean my personal background problem.”
“Yup.”
“You mean I have advantages because I’m outside the entire human race.”
Burningboy nodded. “I couldn’t help but notice that. Has it always been that way for you?”
“Yeah. It has. Pretty much.”
“Are you the future, man?”
“No. I wouldn’t count on that. I have too many pieces missing.”
Oscar knew that the situation had stabilized when a roaring sex scandal broke out. A teenage soldier accused a middle-aged scientist of indecently fondling her. This incident caused frantic uproar.
Oscar found the scandal a very cheering development. It meant that the conflict between the Collaboratory’s two populations had broken through to a symbolic, psychosexual, politically meaningless level. The public fight was now about deep resentments and psychic starvations that would never, ever be cured, and were therefore basically irrelevant. But the noise was very useful, because it meant that enormous quiet progress could now be made on every other front. The public psychodrama consumed vast amounts of attention, while the Collaboratory’s truly serious problems had become background noise. The real problems were left in the hands of people who cared enough about them to do constructive things.
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 keyboard—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 Moderators. 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