The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [10]
“The only way the economy could be planned in the days of the old Old Human Race was by the exercise of political brute force to override and channel individual interest. Then the supercomputer happened along, and the workings of spontaneous individual interest became something not merely measurable on a day-to-day basis but futuristically calculable. Demand could already be influenced, of course, in all kinds of clever ways, but the influences were as separate and spontaneous as the interests themselves until it became possible to weigh them and balance them and build them into patterns. So the twenty-first century’s best and bravest put their wise heads together and said, Hey, let’s buy up the world and usher in the Golden Age of Planned Capitalism. If we’re clever enough, I bet we could organize the stock market crash to end all stock market crashes and come out of it with enough corners in genemod primary produce to obtain effective commercial control of two-thirds of the world’s surface—and then we can reel in the other third at our leisure, as long as we never let anyone mention the unholy word Trust. It won’t be as much fun as conquering the universe, but that plan’s on hold for the time being, and this one’ll be a hell of a lot more convenient. So here we are, in the twenty-sixth century, with the effective ownership of the real world in the hands of half a dozen intricately interlinked megacorps, each one dominated by half a dozen major shareholders. Those dominant shareholders have charged their directors and managers with the duty of keeping the economic lifeblood of humankind pumping in an orderly and healthy fashion while its multitudinous heads dream on in the heady clouds of the Universe Without Limits. So that’s what we do.”
“Oh,” I said, while I was trying desperately to think of a question that would sound sufficiently intelligent. All I could think of, in the end, was “Why here? Why not a nice plush officetree in Moscow or Vienna?”
“They’re nice places to work and play,” Ngomi agreed, “but they’re no place to bring up a child. Too many distractions. Even the UN bureaucrats recognize that serious business requires a certain strategic isolation and manifest austerity. You should be grateful that we take our vocation so seriously. It’s your inheritance, as well as mine, we’re keeping in good order. Think of us as fosterers of your entire generation, of the new New Human Race itself. Even those of us who are only false emortals accept the responsibility of making sure that they hand the world over to the true emortals in the best possible condition. That’s a hell of a lot more than the old Old Human Race did for our grandfathers—a hell of a lot more. Sara and I don’t actually live here, of course. We just serve our tours of duty once or twice a year. It’s a stressful job, and we need our rest—and it’s also the kind of job that can get awkwardly addictive, so it’s best to spread the work around. Megalomania is so unbecoming.”
His tone was never less than pleasant, but he wasn’t really sharing a joke with me, or even pretending to. He wasn’t testing me to see how much of what he said I could follow. He was just amusing himself: taking the edge off his monkish exile. If anything had showed on the flatscreens Sara Saul was watching from the corners of her eyes that required her finger of the Invisible Hand to twitch, they’d have bundled me out—but for the moment, the finger was poised above the pressure pad, waiting without any sense of urgency. So two bored adults were taking time out to play with the kid from next door.
Even the people who run the world sometimes pause for play—although rumor has it that