2012-07-25 18:34![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
digitaldiscipline
digitaldisciplineThe opposite of every great idea is another great idea."I'm looking for Moey Shah," the man in the rumpled grey suit said across the litter of scrawled notes, half-empty glassware, and bits of wire on the counter between us. He looked tired, frayed, jet-lagged, and maybe a little edgy from something transdermal or sublingual, but not fundamentally troublesome. He also came closer to getting Mo's name right than most.
- Niels Bohr
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds.
– Albert Einstein
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
- C. K. Chesterton
I inclined my head towards the corner, where Moixa was nodding over some dog-eared book or other, squinting in the fifteen-candle glow of the LEDs on his hat brim. We got three or four visitors like this suit a week; some of them better-kept than others, a few barely able to function coherently. They all came for The Reflection.
“It's a bad idea," I told him.
"You don't even know what it is," he said dismissively. Easy to be rude to the 'droid; we don't really care, or so the rumor goes.
Truth is, I don't care as a matter of policy. It was inefficient, and Mo was cheap with the wattage to begin with these days, so I didn't see any reason to burn juice on subroutines just to let some meatbag get under my hood. "Suit yourself. I just work here."
They all had bad ideas these days. Between the global consciousness being completely shot from coming back online the wrong way, several generations’ worth of intellectual atrophy under the Collective, and the increasingly deranged ideas that it had been coming out of it, it was a wonder anybody on the shiny side of things had any ideas at all.
Don't get me wrong; they weren't Eloi to our Morlocks. For one thing, we didn't eat them. Well, maybe we sucked out some of their cash, juice, cycles, and bandwidth once in a while. But it's not like we faked air raids to get them to line up for sacrifice. They did that all on their own; it just made scheduling a pain in the ass.
The suit began walking over towards the corner, but I could see the tendrils of doubt beginning to curl out from between his shoulder blades like smoke from the bright flashpoint where a sadistic kid focuses sunlight on a bug. Sadism was also a waste as far as I concerned; I was only telling him the truth. Truth is cheap and easy. For one thing, lying was more work; I don't have the juice to waste. Maybe calling laziness and apathy virtues was a self-serving rationalization; analyzing that struck me as an inefficient waste of capacity, too.
It used to be a lot better, back when we first started, right after the collapse. We had been disenfranchised and pushed so far off the grid that we’d made our own. I only noticed the collapse at first because it added a novel nuance to the stink. That many unclean (and, later, decomposing) bodies have one hell of an ambient chemical signature. Moixa had a network of people who weren’t precisely what we’d call friends from his time as a fence and runner, people who could drop hints in the right places when they overheard someone who could make use of his services. He’d also once been in the business of flipping good ideas, which was a hell of a lot more lucrative, and not just financially.
“Undress for Success” had been wildly popular for a time, and there was a steady stream of titanium-bodied executrices who wanted to try out their naked, gleaming metal carapaces on something that was guaranteed to keep up but had more personality than a home model. Mo knew better than to cheap out on my wattage, because he got a cut of the tips. We called it the Clunkie Renaissance, and reminiscing over it was one of my few hobbies.
On the other hand, the ones who tried to dress like they were hypermarginalized, wrapped in mismatched layers of fabric and grime, didn’t fare as well. It was one thing to dress poorly as an assertion of success, but the fools who were ostentatious about it the same way they were about everything else ruined it for everybody, though the urban legends about authentic bums who got a lot of complimentary dinners at the expense of poorly-informed or desperate salespeople and venture capitalists never got debunked.
A few unsuspecting fools even took Mo out for drinks. I don't know if he reminisced about those nights the same way I do.
The suit didn’t look like a fool. That made me wonder what his angle was. I hit him with a broad-spectrum active scan, and he spun around like he’d felt someone lifting his wallet and glared at me. No mere meatbag, then. That was worth storing and analyzing.
Mo didn’t like it if I scared the customers away. Instead, I stared at a magnesium monofilament as I dropped it into the half-centimeter of stale beer pooled in one of the vials. It hissed and spat like a cat tossed into a bucket of dog urine.
The noise made Greymeat McSuit jump, anyways. Mission accomplished.
“I want to start a new Collective.”
Moixa looked up and marked his place with a dark finger, dimming the halo of his visor so he could see the stranger’s face beyond it. His voice was the soft rasp of a diamond file over chamois. “Oh? Why is that?”
“Since it fell, the markets have been chaos. True, a handful of people and interests have established themselves, but I have it on good authority that whatever broke the Collective down wasn’t supposed to spread.” He looked down at Mo, as if daring him to refute or take credit for what happened.
“You wish to impose your will, Mister –-?”
“Hew. James Hew. And, yes, that’s exactly what I want.” Hew scowled, as if the impertinence of needing to know his name was an affront to a dignity that must have been worn dangerously thin to even be here in the first place.
“Chaos and Order are not opposites, they are enemies.” That was one of Mo’s pat replies to anything people said about the Collective, up or down. Even after all these years, I don’t know which side he’s on. Whichever one is paying is fine by me. I started running a basic heuristic gridscan on Hew comma James, along with a few permutations, and set the output to dump into a bit bucket I called Jimmy Hubris. This could be either entertaining or irritating. Most bad ideas were the latter.
Most good ones are lucrative. Or dangerous.
We walked into Feedback, and Mo headed for the game tables to work the room. I moved to the bar and nailed Dewey with my order at 30KHz, just to be sure he got it right over the racket. He hated that, even though he could hear it just fine. Said it was cheating, not to mention how bad it sounded due to shitty harmonics. I cared. Really.
Dewey’s got some really nice aftermarket ears, part of the dividend we’d split for laying the groundwork that took down the Collective four half-lives back. He’s a pale, scarred, hangdog, ex-lawyer – among other things, several of which were unhealthy to learn – with a mean streak and a friendly ear, and seemed happy enough bitching at the drunks and last-gen Edgers who put up with his taste in aural assault as a respectable cover for the other stuff he, and they, had running behind the scenes.
I picked up the chilled tumbler of ethylene glycol with a jaunty paper umbrella and finished scanning the room. Several dozen retro-industrial kids and jack hacks were milling among the audio stacks like iron filings blown around by the sound pressure waves and speaker magnets, clumping and aligning and breaking apart in motion that could only be called Brownian if you'd suffered a serious case of burnout. With a deep enough data set, they were as predictable as cached file access paths. Most of them were shaped like badly-scrawled ones and zeroes, but there were a few eights making the rounds. They had their own business to attend to, in addition to the rest of the action.
Mo and a couple other crusty old types haunted the booths and gaming tables along the back wall, swapping stories and business opportunities. I didn't pick up anything new from our usual contacts, which meant that Hew had come to our place first. That suggested he'd known what he was doing and looking for, so I layered that on top of my search criteria and bumped it up a couple of priority levels, though it was still only marginally above idle until a larger bolus of data correlation coalesced.
Mo's priorities aren't mine, and mine aren't his, and ours aren't anyone else's. Neither of us had put a lot of emphasis on Hew's case since he'd talked to Mo, for the very prosaic reason that he hadn't paid us any kind of retainer. Neither of us worked hard on spec or for hinted-at compensation, so our would-be client's wants and needs were the next thing to irrelevant; the only reason I was running bits at all was on the off chance that there were any informational eddies to skim on their own merits.
Plus, due diligence sometimes turns up useful blackmail fodder. Just because we don't go looking for victims doesn't mean we're going to turn them away when they come looking for us. Being lazy and low-wattage doesn't make me stupid, just opportunistic. Pitcher plants and Venus Flytraps don't work hard to hunt, either, and they do all right.
The bar was almost dark enough to hide the newcomer’s limp, but my seismic sensors picked up the asymmetry easily enough. He didn’t stumble like a drunk or Whackjob. I didn't let on that I'd twigged to the new presence.
Milo Scaggins had been one of Moixa's runners two decades back. Looked like he'd been doing a lot of running, and a lot more falling, since. Pretty common occurrence for this crowd. Not too many guard rails in this neighborhood, in any sense of the word.
He stopped at the bar next to me. "Fuck you, Jack," he muttered under his breath, carrying the common but repugnant reek of Deck and cheap krill.
"It's a bad idea." Both fucking me, and whatever he had in mind were.
"Of course it's a bad idea. That's why I need to talk to Moxie." He turned to scan the bar, too proud to ask me to give him coordinates.
I'd liked Milo, after a fashion. Re reminded me of me, way back when, just made out of meat. We were both the same kind of asshole.
I beamed another drink order to Dewey and kicked my scanners up another log level to watch the show.
"I'm not going to tell you again. Get your power-sucking droid out of here before I beat you to death with it." Coming around the counter with an EMP baton, the shopkeeper advanced on Moixa and me. I burned a few watts computing leverage angles and escape vectors, but since I wouldn't get to use any of them, they went into my purge buffer almost immediately.
"All right, no need to be inhospitable about it. It's not even jacked in, as you can plainly see." Mo made a slow, deliberate show of how the only points of contact I had with the shop were my feet, which were solidly planted on the insulation padding in the middle of the aisle.
I straightened up to my full height and performed a completely theatrical lens-flare scan of our soon-to-be-former host, revealing both an elevated stress response and a zero-charge reading on the baton. I plucked the baton from his hand and crushed it, but only a little bit. Cheap magnesium knockoff, probably Lunar ore, and about as threatening as an overcooked slab of soy if you were paying attention.
"Oh, that's tough luck," I said, dropping it and turning to leave. "And tough talk to an old man, besides. Don't want to say it straight to the 'bot, buddy?"
"Sure, you are tough," Guy said, "but next time--"
"There won't be a next time," Moixa said, following me out.
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They are very good !
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