Distraction - Bruce Sterling [70]
The most remarkable of Washington’s autonomen were the groups known as “martians.” Frustrated by years of studied nonreaction to their crazy grievances, the martians had resolved to act as if the federal government simply didn’t exist. The martians treated the entire structure of Washington, DC, as raw material.
Their construction techniques had originally been invented by a group of overeager would-be Mars colonizers.
These long-vanished space techies, an ingenious and fanatical group, had invented a wide variety of cheap and simple techniques by which small groups of astronauts might colonize the airless and frozen deserts of the Red Planet. Humanity had never yet reached Mars, but with the final collapse of NASA the Martian colonization plans had become public domain.
These plans fell into the eager hands of fanatical street protesters. They had dug down into the squelchy subsoil of the Potomac riverbed, squeezing water from the soil, compacting it to use as bricks, building an endless series of archways, tunnels, and kivas. The radicals found that even the sorriest patch of Earth was a cornucopia, compared to the airless deserts of Mars. Anything that might work on Mars would work a hundred times better in a deserted alley or parking lot.
Now NASA’s ingenuity had borne amazing fruit, and the streets of Washington were lavishly bumped and measled with martian settlements. Slums of compacted dirt, all glue and mazy airlocks, climbed straight up the walls of buildings, where they clung like the nests of mud-daubing wasps. There were excavation hills three stories high near Union Station, and even Georgetown was subject to repeated subterranean rumblings.
Most of these martians were Anglos. In fact, sixty percent of Washington’s populace were members of the troubled minority. Local DC government, a world-famous model of urban corruption, was dominated by militant Anglos. The ethnic bosses were busily exercising their traditional genius for fraud, hacking, and white-collar crime scams.
Oscar, though a stranger to Washington, knew better than to enter the city unprepared. He abandoned his krewe inside the bus, which retreated at once to the relative safety of Alexandria. Oscar then walked two blocks on foot, through a protesters’ permanent street market of flowers, medals, bracelets, bumper stickers, flags, cassettes, and Christmas toys.
He arrived at his destination, unmolested and in good order. He then discovered, without much surprise, that the federal office building had fallen into the hands of squatters.
Oscar wandered through the entry hall, passing metal detectors and a cyclops set of facial recognition units. The squat’s concierge was an elderly black man with close-cropped hair and a bow tie. He gave Oscar a clip-on ID bracelet.
The system was now logging Oscar’s presence and his movements, along with everything else of relevance inside the building: furniture, appliances, tools, kitchen-ware, clothes, shoes, pets, and of course all the squatters themselves. The locators were as small as orange pips and as rugged as tenpenny nails, so they could invisibly infest any device that anyone found of interest.
This universal tagging made the contents of the building basically theftproof. It also made communal property a rather simple proposition. It was never hard to find a tool when the locale, condition, and history of every tool was logged and displayed in real time. It was also very hard for freeloaders to anonymously steal or abuse the common goods. When it worked, this digital socialism was considerably cheaper and more convenient than private property.
However, in order to function, this technology had a major side effect: it turned people’s lives inside out. There were children playing in the building’s halls