Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [289]
‘If you find out it’s all been a terrible mistake, just do me one favour,’ she said. ‘Take the money and run. I don’t care who it belongs to, they owe you this much.’
‘Half a day under the state,’ I said, ‘and you’re thinking like a politician.’
‘No,’ she corrected me, standing up and laughing. ‘I’m thinking like a politician’s wife.’
The soldiers stayed, the camps were pacified, people from all wings of the space movement denounced me. I made no reply to the attacks. Snow fell. We kept ourselves warm, and worked on the puzzle as a team. Annette followed the news, and I followed the money. For an advocate of the free market I was embarrassingly ignorant of finance, and a few days went by before I could find my way around the FT’s pink screens without frequent tabs to the Wizards.
Then on to the great databases of Companies House…in VR you could wander through it like a vast mall, its connections and intersections emulating the impossible topologies of an Escher print. I went as myself, and so did some of the other searchers and researchers there, but most were in cryptic fetches, corporate icons or the mirrored samurai armour of the latest discretion software from the Kobe code-shops (‘Zen cryptography – don’t even think about it’, the ads said).
From Companies House you could see the world.
I saw the intricate geometries of Thailand’s Islamic banking system crumble before the assault of the anti-technological Khmer Vertes; Vladivostok’s port economy, liberated by the Vorkuta People’s Front, rise in new and strange shapes; America’s frayed networks of scientific information glow brighter around the coasts, flicker and die in the heartlands as the Scientific Fundamentalists and the White Nationalists shut down the corrupting institutes of what they called ‘rootless naturalism’ in public and ‘Jewish science’ in private.
I saw Kazakhstan’s cosmodromes stretch skyward, and I saw too the tributaries that fed them, the KomLag archipelago of the forced-labour companies. Some in the Former Union – old skills put to a new use – but most in the freer world. A few right here in Norlonto.
Wherever the victorious forces of the Fall Revolution could do it, they were keeping the more useful employees of the defeated US/UN empire – and especially Space Defense – at work for a pittance, in partial restitution for past exploitation. They were supplemented by a new and expanding use for non-political criminals, earning out their payback at high speed, in the high-risk, high-wage space economy.
‘Slavery,’ Annette said. ‘I just don’t believe it’s come to this.’
‘It isn’t really slavery,’ I said uncomfortably. ‘It’s just bonded labour.’
‘Yeah, yeah. Like we don’t have capital punishment, we just let psychopaths pay off their blood-debts by starring in snuff movies?’
‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘Do you still want to take the money and run?’
‘No!’ She looked fiercely at me, then down at the table. ‘On the other hand, there’s no-one to give it back to, it would be counter-productive to sell the shares to someone with even less scruples than you, and it’d be pretty hypocritical just to give the money away.’
‘Not to say wimpish.’
‘Yeah. C of E.’
‘So what’s the answer?’
‘Use it to expose where it’s coming from,’ Annette said firmly. ‘Dig into it some more, then run a campaign to get it all out in the open and discussed. You could do that.’
‘And accomplish what?’
‘Oh, come on! If there are any abuses going on, it might help to stop them.’
We both found ourselves laughing at this statement, but as Annette said after we’d lapsed into a gloomy silence, what else was there to do?
I circled warily in the dataspace around the representations of the Kazakh spaceport hinterland, and noticed the tag-line of the company I’d started so long ago: Space Merchants. It had strong flows of material and information linking it with Myra’s Kazakh workers’ ministate and Reid’s Mutual Protection defence agency. I amplified the resolution, trying to trace what was going on.
They’d all changed, grown beyond anything any of us had initially intended. Space