Distraction - Bruce Sterling [94]
“Why do you say that?” Oscar said.
Bambakias swallowed painfully and raised one bony finger. “There are sixteen political parties in this country. You can’t govern with a political culture that fragmented. And the parties are just the graphic interface for the real chaos underneath. Our education system has collapsed. Our health system is so bad that we have organ-sharing cliques. We’re in a State of Emergency.”
“You’re not telling me anything new here,” Oscar chided. He leaned over and stared enviously into Bambakias’s chowder. “Are you going to finish that?”
Bambakias hunched over his bowl with a wolfish glare.
“Okay, no problem.” Oscar raised his voice to address the hidden microphones. “Vincent, hurry up with those shakes! Bring us more chowder. Bring dinner rolls.”
“I don’t want any damn dinner rolls,” Bambakias muttered. His eyes were watering and his face was flushed. “Our wealth disparities are insane,” he mumbled into his soup. “We have a closed currency and a shattered economy. We have major weather disasters. Toxic pollution. Plunging birth rates. Soaring death rates. It’s bad. It’s really bad. It’s totally hopeless, it’s all over.”
“Vincent, bring us something serious. Quick. Bring us teriyaki. Bring us some dim sum.”
“What are you rambling on about?” Bambakias said.
“Alcott, you’re embarrassing me. I promised Dr. Penninger some good food here, and you’ve gone and eaten her lunch!”
Bambakias stared at the dregs of chowder. “Oh my God …”
“Alcott, let me handle this. The least you can do is sit here with us and see that your guest is properly fed.”
“God, I’m sorry!” Bambakias moaned. “God, I’ve been so wrong about everything. You handle it, Oscar! You handle it.”
Two milk shakes arrived in fluted glasses, their bases caked with frost. The chef himself brought them in, on a cork-lined salver. He gazed at Oscar with a look of dazed gratitude and backed hastily out of the office.
Bambakias’s lean Adam’s apple glugged methodically. “Let me tell you something really awful,” he said, wiping his mouth on his shirtsleeve. “This whole business has been a tragic error from day one. The Emergency committee never meant to drop that air base. Their management and budget software was buggy. Nobody ever double-checked, because everything the stupid bastards do is an official emergency! So when the screwup became obvious, everybody just assumed it had been done deliberately—because it was such a clever, sneaky way to screw with Huey. They’re dying to screw him, because Huey’s the only politician in America who knows what he wants and can stick with it. But when I went looking for the silent genius who was running this brilliant conspiracy, there was nobody there.”
“They gave you that line of guff? I hope you didn’t believe that,” Oscar said, silently switching Bambakias’s empty glass for his own. “These Emergency creeps are geniuses at sleight of hand.”
“Yeah? Then tell me who has been trying to get you shot!” Bambakias belched. “Same issue, same controversy—you could have been killed because of this! But whose fault is it? Nobody’s fault. You hunt for the man responsible, and it’s some nasty piece of software half a light-year out of the chain of command.”
“That’s not political thinking, Alcott.”
“Politics don’t work anymore! We can’t make politics work, because the system’s so complex that its behavior is basically random. Nobody trusts the system anymore, so nobody ever, ever plays it straight. There are sixteen parties, and a hundred bright ideas, and a million ticking bleeping gizmos, but nobody can follow through, execute, and deliver the goods on time and within specs. So our politics has become absurd. The country’s reduced to chaos. We’ve given up on the Republic. We’ve abandoned democracy. I’m not a Senator! I’m a robber baron, a feudal lord. All I can do is build a personality cult.”
Five of Bambakias’s krewepeople arrived in