As we barrel toward the August 29 premiere of Rayguns Over Texas at LoneStarCon 3 (aka the 71st Annual World Science Fiction Convention) in San Antonio, I am presenting book excerpts, one contributor per day.
Today’s selection comes from Chris N. Brown‘s “Sovereign Wealth.”
In a near future of financial and environmental collapse, businessmen vie for influence in a rapidly changing political arena. Chris N. Brown ventures into the rarely employed economic science fiction subgenre with this disturbing and poignant vision.
That night I got together with my buddies in Austin to watch the vote. They had they’re own idea of the pregame.
“Oh, no, I don’t want to watch another one of your marionette shows,” I said as I plopped myself down on the sofa between Annie and Chaz, in front of the big screen they had flashed on the wall.
Vijay and Clarice were laughing already before I started bitching. I looked at the scene on the screen. Retail surveillance from the Kaufstraße in Munich. People walking on their lunch breaks or whatever, letting their earbuds and tablets and bluerings tell them where to go and what to buy, waylaid, lured and consensually hoodwinked by hundreds of ethereal proximity bots.
“Santa doesn’t like it when you rig the Christmas lists,” I said.
“We’re the ones in charge of the other 364 days,” said Chaz.
Green text, red arrows, and yellow highlights overlaid the scene, revealing the matching algorithms at work.
“Fucking data miners. You’re why I have to clean my chips every
night before I go to bed.”“We’re ambient advertisers, Tony,” said Annie. “We match people with the things they want in life. We don’t need ethics lectures from investment bankers.”
“Look closely,” said Vijay. “This new algorithm Clarice wrote and Chaz tuned is amazing.”
“Right, but I came to watch it dissect the referendum,” I said. “And to have some of Clarice’s chicken masala estilo Jalisco.”
“I forgot,” said Vijay. “It’s Kush-Mex night.”
Chaz went for the mezcal.
“I just think it’s nice to see we still have something on our Teutonic overlords,” he said.
“The Frankfurters are the ones with our bonds,” I said. “Not the Bavarians. And the pendulum always swings back through equilibrium.”
Annie spit out her drink. “Last time I checked, the pendulum came loose from its mooring and knocked over half the remaining banks,” she said.
“But we’re still swinging,” laughed Vijay.
Vijay changed the channel, and the wallscreen quadrupled in size. Vote tallies by precinct and network, detailed issue briefings in video and text on each of the matters up for ballot, four channels of color commentary from different orientations if you wanted it. The votes were monthly, the democracy was direct, more or less, and the exercise of the franchise was still optional.
“Jeez, this is so much work,” said Chaz. “I liked it better when you just showed up every few years and checked the box for Coke or Pepsi.”
“And had your life run by four-hundred and thirty-five self-aggrandizing geezers wearing identical suits?” said Annie. “Tony’s right. We should be doing political work. Help make it easier for people.”
“I guess the idea of a new Constitutional Convention is kind of cool,” said Chaz. “I just find it kind of creepy the way it’s like a combination of a City Council livestream and America’s Hot Talent.”
It was three years now since the Aftershock. The Aftershock was the economic event that followed, by about eighteen months, the event we had considered the greatest crash in American economic history, when the big bubble on which the city on a hill had been built collapsed like an Oklahoma fracking sinkhole. The Crash was bad, but the Aftershock was what broke the political system, exposing the varicose veins and clotted embolisms hiding under the pancake makeup of the animatronic boneheads left as stewards of the republic 250-plus years after we buried the Founding Fathers. Once we pulled the thread on Uncle Sam’s sweater, he got naked in a hurry. Under the new regime that assembled in the following two years of elections, three fourths of the states petitioned for our social contract to be rewritten, in a convention that would be conducted as an experiment in network-based participatory democracy.
Yes, we were kind of figuring it out as we went along.
Excerpts from “Sovereign Wealth” © 2013 by Chris N. Brown.