Merge tag 'sisu-markup-samples_4.2.0' into debian/sid

SiSU markup samples 4.2.0

25 files changed, 56028 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/data/samples/generic/README b/data/samples/generic/README
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9f2a8af
--- /dev/null
+++ b/data/samples/generic/README
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+This directory contains sisu marked up files that should work with older v3 (or
+v2) versions of sisu and up.
diff --git a/data/samples/generic/_sisu/image b/data/samples/generic/_sisu/image
new file mode 120000
index 0000000..e54c502
--- /dev/null
+++ b/data/samples/generic/_sisu/image
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+../../../image
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/data/samples/generic/_sisu/sisu_document_make b/data/samples/generic/_sisu/sisu_document_make
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..85e583e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/data/samples/generic/_sisu/sisu_document_make
@@ -0,0 +1,9 @@
+@make:
+ :breaks: break=1
+ :home_button_text: {SiSU}http://sisudoc.org; {sources / git}http://sources.sisudoc.org/
+% :footer: {SiSU}http://sisudoc.org; {sources / git}http://sources.sisudoc.org/
+% :home_button_image: {sisu.png }http://sisudoc.org
+
+@links:+
+ {SiSU}http://sisudoc.org
+ {sources / git}http://sources.sisudoc.org/
diff --git a/data/samples/generic/_sisu/sisurc_SAMPLE.yml b/data/samples/generic/_sisu/sisurc_SAMPLE.yml
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ab13f22
--- /dev/null
+++ b/data/samples/generic/_sisu/sisurc_SAMPLE.yml
@@ -0,0 +1,110 @@
+# Name: SiSU
+# Author: ralph@amissah.com
+# Description: site or directory wide environment defaults set here
+# system environment info / resource configuration file, for sisu
+# License: GPL v3 or later
+#   this file should be configured and live in
+#      /etc/sisu     #per environment settings, overridden by:
+#      ~/.sisu       #per user settings, overridden by:
+#     ./_sisu/config #per local directory settings
+#% presentation/web directory, main path and subdirectories (most subdirectories are created automatically based on markup directory name)
+webserv:
+#  #url_root:     'http://www.sisudoc.org' #without dir stub, e.g. this dir would map to http://www.sisudoc.org/samples
+#  #path:         './tested' #either (i) / [full path from root] or (ii) ~/ [home] or (iii) ./ [pwd] or (iv) will be made from home
+#  #images:       'sisu/image'
+#  #man:          'man'
+#  #cgi:          '/usr/local/lib/sisu-cgi'
+##show_output_on: 'filesystem' #for -v and -u url information, alternatives: 'filesystem','webserver','remote_webserver','local:8111','localhost','localhost:8080','webrick','path'
+webserv_cgi:
+#  host:         localhost
+#  base_path:    ~
+#  port:         '8081'
+#  user:         ~
+#  file_links:   webserv #  www.sisudoc.org
+#show_output_on: 'filesystem_url'
+#% processing directories, main path and subdirectories
+processing:
+## path:         '~'
+##  dir:         '_sisu_processing~'
+##  metaverse:    'metaverse'
+##  tune:         'tune'
+##  latex:        'tex'
+##  texinfo:      'texinfo'
+##  concord_max:  400000
+#% flag - set (non-default) processing flag shortcuts -1, -2 etc. (here adding colour and verbosity as default)
+flag:
+  color:        true                       # making colour default -c is toggle, and will now toggle colour off
+# default:      '-NQhewpotbxXyYv'           # includes verbose; -m would in any event be run by default
+# i:            '-NQhewpoty'                # -m run by default
+# ii:           '-NQhewpotbxXy'             # -m run by default
+# iii:          '-NQhewpotbxXyY'            # -m run by default
+# iv:           '-NQhewpotbxXYDy  --update' # -m run by default
+# v:            '-NQhewpotbxXYDyv --update' # includes verbose; -m run by default
+#% papersize, (LaTeX/pdf) current values A4, US_letter, book_b5, book_a5, US_legal, easily extensible
+default:
+  papersize:    'A4,letter' #'A4,letter,b5,a5'
+#  #texpdf_font:       'Liberation Sans'
+#  #texpdf_font_sans:  'Liberation Sans'
+#  #texpdf_font_serif: 'Liberation Serif'
+#  #texpdf_font_mono:  'Liberation Mono' #'Inconsolata'
+#  #text_wrap:    78
+#  #emphasis:     'bold' #make *{emphasis}* 'bold', 'italics' or 'underscore', default if not configured is 'bold'
+#  #language:      'fr'
+#  #language:      'en'
+#  digest:       'sha' #sha is sha256, default is md5
+#% settings used by ssh scp
+#remote:
+#  #user:         'ralph'
+#  #host:         'sisudoc.org'
+#  #path:         '.' #no trailing slash eg 'sisu/www'
+#% webrick information
+#% sql database info, postgresql
+#db:
+#  engine:
+#    default:    'postgresql'
+## share_source:  true
+#  postgresql:
+#    port:       '5432' # '5432'
+#    user:       'ralph' # '[provide username]'
+#    #host:       'sisudoc.org'
+#
+#% output_dir_structure_by: language (language_and_filetype); filetype; or filename (original v1 & v2)
+##output_dir_structure_by: filename
+##output_dir_structure_by: filetype
+#output_dir_structure_by: language
+#
+#% possible values ~, true, false, or command instruction e.g. editor: 'gvim -c :R -c :S'.
+##will only ignore if value set to false, absence or nil will not remove program as should operate without rc file
+##ie in case of ~ will ignore and use hard coded defaults within program), true, false, or command instruction e.g. editor: 'gvim -c :R -c :S'
+##on value true system defaults used, to change, e.g. editor specify
+#permission_set:
+#  zap:               true
+#  css_modify:        true
+#  remote_base_site:  true
+#program_set:
+#  rmagick:           true
+#  wc:                true
+#  editor:            true
+#  postgresql:        true
+#  sqlite:            true
+#  tidy:              true
+#  rexml:             true
+#  pdflatex:          true
+#program_select:
+#  editor:            'vim' #'gvim -c :R'
+#  pdf_viewer:        'evince'
+#  web_browser:       'iceweasel'
+#  console_web_browser: 'links2'
+#  epub_viewer:       'ebook-viewer' #'calibre' 'fbreader'
+#  odf_viewer:        'lowriter'
+#  xml_viewer:        'xml-viewer'
+#search:
+#  sisu:
+#    flag:            true
+#    action:          http://search.sisudoc.org
+#    db:              sisu
+#    title:           'SiSU search form (sample)'
+#html:
+#  minitoc:           true
+#manifest:
+#  minitoc:           true
diff --git a/data/samples/generic/accelerando.charles_stross.sst b/data/samples/generic/accelerando.charles_stross.sst
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..60d4318
--- /dev/null
+++ b/data/samples/generic/accelerando.charles_stross.sst
@@ -0,0 +1,5817 @@
+% SiSU 4.0
+
+@title: Accelerando
+
+@creator:
+ :author: Stross, Charles
+
+@date:
+ :published: 2005-07-05
+ :available: 2005-07-05
+
+@rights:
+ :copyright: Copyright (C) Charles Stross, 2005.
+ :license:  Creative Commons License, Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0: * Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor; * Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes; * No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work; * For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. (* For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. * Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/ These SiSU presentations of Accelerando are done with the kind permission of the author Charles Stross
+
+@original:
+ :source: http://www.accelerando.org/
+
+@classify:
+ :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:novel;book:novel:fiction:science fiction|short stories;fiction:science fiction|artificial intelligence
+ :subject: Science Fiction
+
+@identifier:
+ :oclc: 57682282
+ :isbn: 9780441012848
+
+@links:
+ { Accelerando home }http://www.accelerando.org/
+ { @ Wikipedia }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando_%28novel%29
+ { @ Amazon.com}http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0441014151
+ { @ Barnes & Noble}http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0441014151
+
+@make:
+ :headings: none; PART; none; Chapter;
+ :breaks: new=:A,:B; break=:C,1
+ :home_button_image: {accelerando_stross.png }http://www.accelerando.org/
+ :footer: {Accelerando}http://www.accelerando.org/; {Charles Stross}http://www.antipope.org/charlie/
+
+% book cover shot (US) book cover shot (UK)
+
+% http://www.accelerando.org/_static/accelerando.html
+
+:A~ @title @author
+
+1~dedication Dedication
+
+For Feòrag, with love
+
+1~acknowledgements Acknowledgements
+
+This book took me five years to write - a personal record - and would not exist without the support and encouragement of a host of friends, and several friendly editors. Among the many people who read and commented on the early drafts are: Andrew J. Wilson, Stef Pearson, Gav Inglis, Andrew Ferguson, Jack Deighton, Jane McKie, Hannu Rajaniemi, Martin Page, Stephen Christian, Simon Bisson, Paul Fraser, Dave Clements, Ken MacLeod, Damien Broderick, Damon Sicore, Cory Doctorow, Emmet O'Brien, Andrew Ducker, Warren Ellis, and Peter Hollo. (If your name isn't on this list, blame my memory - my neural prostheses are off-line.)
+
+I mentioned several friendly editors earlier: I relied on the talented midwifery of Gardner Dozois, who edited Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine at the time, and Sheila Williams, who quietly and diligently kept the wheels rolling. My agent Caitlin Blasdell had a hand in it too, and I'd like to thank my editors Ginjer Buchanan at Ace and Tim Holman at Orbit for their helpful comments and advice.
+
+Finally, I'd like to thank everyone who e-mailed me to ask when the book was coming, or who voted for the stories that were shortlisted for awards. You did a great job of keeping me focused, even during the periods when the whole project was too daunting to contemplate.
+
+1~history Publication History
+
+Portions of this book originally appeared in Asimov's SF Magazine as follows: "Lobsters" (June 2001), "Troubadour" (Oct/Nov 2001), "Tourist" (Feb 2002), "Halo" (June 2002), "Router" (Sept 2002), "Nightfall" (April 2003), "Curator" (Dec 2003), "Elector" (Oct/Nov 2004), "Survivor" (Dec 2004).
+
+[Accelerando was published by Ace Books on July 5, 2005] ~#
+
+PART 1: Slow Takeoff
+
+"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim."
+
+- Edsger W. Dijkstra
+
+Chapter 1: Lobsters
+
+Manfred's on the road again, making strangers rich.
+
+It's a hot summer Tuesday, and he's standing in the plaza in front of the Centraal Station with his eyeballs powered up and the sunlight jangling off the canal, motor scooters and kamikaze cyclists whizzing past and tourists chattering on every side. The square smells of water and dirt and hot metal and the fart-laden exhaust fumes of cold catalytic converters; the bells of trams ding in the background, and birds flock overhead. He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops the shot, and squirts it at his weblog to show he's arrived. The bandwidth is good here, he realizes; and it's not just the bandwidth, it's the whole scene. Amsterdam is making him feel wanted already, even though he's fresh off the train from Schiphol: He's infected with the dynamic optimism of another time zone, another city. If the mood holds, someone out there is going to become very rich indeed.
+
+He wonders who it's going to be.
+
+* * *
+
+Manfred sits on a stool out in the car park at the Brouwerij 't IJ, watching the articulated buses go by and drinking a third of a liter of lip-curlingly sour /{gueuze}/. His channels are jabbering away in a corner of his head-up display, throwing compressed infobursts of filtered press releases at him. They compete for his attention, bickering and rudely waving in front of the scenery. A couple of punks - maybe local, but more likely drifters lured to Amsterdam by the magnetic field of tolerance the Dutch beam across Europe like a pulsar - are laughing and chatting by a couple of battered mopeds in the far corner. A tourist boat putters by in the canal; the sails of the huge windmill overhead cast long, cool shadows across the road. The windmill is a machine for lifting water, turning wind power into dry land: trading energy for space, sixteenth-century style. Manfred is waiting for an invite to a party where he's going to meet a man he can talk to about trading energy for space, twenty-first-century style, and forget about his personal problems.
+
+He's ignoring the instant messenger boxes, enjoying some low-bandwidth, high-sensation time with his beer and the pigeons, when a woman walks up to him, and says his name: "Manfred Macx?"
+
+He glances up. The courier is an Effective Cyclist, all wind-burned smooth-running muscles clad in a paean to polymer technology: electric blue lycra and wasp yellow carbonate with a light speckling of anti collision LEDs and tight-packed air bags. She holds out a box for him. He pauses a moment, struck by the degree to which she resembles Pam, his ex-fiance.
+
+"I'm Macx," he says, waving the back of his left wrist under her bar-code reader. "Who's it from?"
+
+"FedEx." The voice isn't Pam's. She dumps the box in his lap, then she's back over the low wall and onto her bicycle with her phone already chirping, disappearing in a cloud of spread-spectrum emissions.
+
+Manfred turns the box over in his hands: it's a disposable supermarket phone, paid for in cash - cheap, untraceable, and efficient. It can even do conference calls, which makes it the tool of choice for spooks and grifters everywhere.
+
+The box rings. Manfred rips the cover open and pulls out the phone, mildly annoyed. "Yes? Who is this?"
+
+The voice at the other end has a heavy Russian accent, almost a parody in this decade of cheap on-line translation services. "Manfred. Am please to meet you. Wish to personalize interface, make friends, no? Have much to offer."
+
+"Who are you?" Manfred repeats suspiciously.
+
+"Am organization formerly known as KGB dot RU."
+
+"I think your translator's broken." He holds the phone to his ear carefully, as if it's made of smoke-thin aerogel, tenuous as the sanity of the being on the other end of the line.
+
+"Nyet - no, sorry. Am apologize for we not use commercial translation software. Interpreters are ideologically suspect, mostly have capitalist semiotics and pay-per-use APIs. Must implement English more better, yes?"
+
+Manfred drains his beer glass, sets it down, stands up, and begins to walk along the main road, phone glued to the side of his head. He wraps his throat mike around the cheap black plastic casing, pipes the input to a simple listener process. "Are you saying you taught yourself the language just so you could talk to me?"
+
+"Da, was easy: Spawn billion-node neural network, and download Teletubbies and Sesame Street at maximum speed. Pardon excuse entropy overlay of bad grammar: Am afraid of digital fingerprints steganographically masked into my-our tutorials."
+
+Manfred pauses in mid stride, narrowly avoids being mown down by a GPS-guided roller blader. This is getting weird enough to trip his weird-out meter, and that takes some doing. Manfred's whole life is lived on the bleeding edge of strangeness, fifteen minutes into everyone else's future, and he's normally in complete control - but at times like this he gets a frisson of fear, a sense that he might just have missed the correct turn on reality's approach road. "Uh, I'm not sure I got that. Let me get this straight, you claim to be some kind of AI, working for KGB dot RU, and you're afraid of a copyright infringement lawsuit over your translator semiotics?"
+
+"Am have been badly burned by viral end-user license agreements. Have no desire to experiment with patent shell companies held by Chechen infoterrorists. You are human, you must not worry cereal company repossess your small intestine because digest unlicensed food with it, right? Manfred, you must help me-we. Am wishing to defect."
+
+Manfred stops dead in the street. "Oh man, you've got the wrong free enterprise broker here. I don't work for the government. I'm strictly private." A rogue advertisement sneaks through his junkbuster proxy and spams glowing fifties kitsch across his navigation window - which is blinking - for a moment before a phage process kills it and spawns a new filter. He leans against a shop front, massaging his forehead and eyeballing a display of antique brass doorknockers. "Have you tried the State Department?"
+
+"Why bother? State Department am enemy of Novy-SSR. State Department is not help us."
+
+This is getting just too bizarre. Manfred's never been too clear on new-old old-new European metapolitics: Just dodging the crumbling bureaucracy of his old-old American heritage gives him headaches. "Well, if you hadn't shafted them during the late noughties ... " Manfred taps his left heel on the pavement, looking round for a way out of this conversation. A camera winks at him from atop a streetlight; he waves, wondering idly if it's the KGB or the traffic police. He is waiting for directions to the party, which should arrive within the next half hour, and this Cold War retread Eliza-bot is bumming him out. "Look, I don't deal with the G-men. I /{hate}/ the military-industrial complex. I hate traditional politics. They're all zero-sum cannibals." A thought occurs to him. "If survival is what you're after, you could post your state vector on one of the p2p nets: Then nobody could delete you -"
+
+"Nyet!" The artificial intelligence sounds as alarmed as it's possible to sound over a VoiP link. "Am not open source! Not want lose autonomy!"
+
+"Then we probably have nothing to talk about." Manfred punches the hang-up button and throws the mobile phone out into a canal. It hits the water, and there's a pop of deflagrating lithium cells. "Fucking Cold War hangover losers," he swears under his breath, quite angry, partly at himself for losing his cool and partly at the harassing entity behind the anonymous phone call. "/{Fucking}/ capitalist spooks." Russia has been back under the thumb of the apparatchiks for fifteen years now, its brief flirtation with anarchocapitalism replaced by Brezhnevite dirigisme and Putinesque puritanism, and it's no surprise that the wall's crumbling - but it looks like they haven't learned anything from the current woes afflicting the United States. The neocommies still think in terms of dollars and paranoia. Manfred is so angry that he wants to make someone rich, just to thumb his nose at the would-be defector: /{See! You get ahead by giving! Get with the program! Only the generous survive!}/ But the KGB won't get the message. He's dealt with old-time commie weak-AIs before, minds raised on Marxist dialectic and Austrian School economics: They're so thoroughly hypnotized by the short-term victory of global capitalism that they can't surf the new paradigm, look to the longer term.
+
+Manfred walks on, hands in pockets, brooding. He wonders what he's going to patent next.
+
+* * *
+
+_1 Manfred has a suite at the Hotel Jan Luyken paid for by a grateful multinational consumer protection group, and an unlimited public transport pass paid for by a Scottish sambapunk band in return for services rendered. He has airline employee's travel rights with six flag carriers despite never having worked for an airline. His bush jacket has sixty-four compact supercomputing clusters sewn into it, four per pocket, courtesy of an invisible college that wants to grow up to be the next Media Lab. His dumb clothing comes made to measure from an e-tailor in the Philippines he's never met. Law firms handle his patent applications on a pro bono basis, and boy, does he patent a lot - although he always signs the rights over to the Free Intellect Foundation, as contributions to their obligation-free infrastructure project.
+
+_1 In IP geek circles, Manfred is legendary; he's the guy who patented the business practice of moving your e-business somewhere with a slack intellectual property regime in order to evade licensing encumbrances. He's the guy who patented using genetic algorithms to patent everything they can permutate from an initial description of a problem domain - not just a better mousetrap, but the set of all possible better mousetraps. Roughly a third of his inventions are legal, a third are illegal, and the remainder are legal but will become illegal as soon as the legislatosaurus wakes up, smells the coffee, and panics. There are patent attorneys in Reno who swear that Manfred Macx is a pseudo, a net alias fronting for a bunch of crazed anonymous hackers armed with the Genetic Algorithm That Ate Calcutta: a kind of Serdar Argic of intellectual property, or maybe another Bourbaki math borg. There are lawyers in San Diego and Redmond who swear blind that Macx is an economic saboteur bent on wrecking the underpinning of capitalism, and there are communists in Prague who think he's the bastard spawn of Bill Gates by way of the Pope.
+
+_1 Manfred is at the peak of his profession, which is essentially coming up with whacky but workable ideas and giving them to people who will make fortunes with them. He does this for free, gratis. In return, he has virtual immunity from the tyranny of cash; money is a symptom of poverty, after all, and Manfred never has to pay for anything.
+
+_1 There are drawbacks, however. Being a pronoiac meme-broker is a constant burn of future shock - he has to assimilate more than a megabyte of text and several gigs of AV content every day just to stay current. The Internal Revenue Service is investigating him continuously because it doesn't believe his lifestyle can exist without racketeering. And then there are the items that no money can't buy: like the respect of his parents. He hasn't spoken to them for three years, his father thinks he's a hippy scrounger, and his mother still hasn't forgiven him for dropping out of his down-market Harvard emulation course. (They're still locked in the boringly bourgeois twen-cen paradigm of college-career-kids.) His fiance and sometime dominatrix Pamela threw him over six months ago, for reasons he has never been quite clear on. (Ironically, she's a headhunter for the IRS, jetting all over the place at public expense, trying to persuade entrepreneurs who've gone global to pay taxes for the good of the Treasury Department.) To cap it all, the Southern Baptist Conventions have denounced him as a minion of Satan on all their websites. Which would be funny because, as a born-again atheist Manfred doesn't believe in Satan, if it wasn't for the dead kittens that someone keeps mailing him.
+
+* * *
+
+Manfred drops in at his hotel suite, unpacks his Aineko, plugs in a fresh set of cells to charge, and sticks most of his private keys in the safe. Then he heads straight for the party, which is currently happening at De Wildemann's; it's a twenty-minute walk, and the only real hazard is dodging the trams that sneak up on him behind the cover of his moving map display.
+
+Along the way, his glasses bring him up to date on the news. Europe has achieved peaceful political union for the first time ever: They're using this unprecedented state of affairs to harmonize the curvature of bananas. The Middle East is, well, it's just as bad as ever, but the war on fundamentalism doesn't hold much interest for Manfred. In San Diego, researchers are uploading lobsters into cyberspace, starting with the stomatogastric ganglion, one neuron at a time. They're burning GM cocoa in Belize and books in Georgia. NASA still can't put a man on the moon. Russia has re-elected the communist government with an increased majority in the Duma; meanwhile, in China, fevered rumors circulate about an imminent rehabilitation, the second coming of Mao, who will save them from the consequences of the Three Gorges disaster. In business news, the US Justice Department is - ironically - outraged at the Baby Bills. The divested Microsoft divisions have automated their legal processes and are spawning subsidiaries, IPOing them, and exchanging title in a bizarre parody of bacterial plasmid exchange, so fast that, by the time the windfall tax demands are served, the targets don't exist anymore, even though the same staff are working on the same software in the same Mumbai cubicle farms.
+
+Welcome to the twenty-first century.
+
+The permanent floating meatspace party Manfred is hooking up with is a strange attractor for some of the American exiles cluttering up the cities of Europe this decade - not trustafarians, but honest-to-God political dissidents, draft dodgers, and terminal outsourcing victims. It's the kind of place where weird connections are made and crossed lines make new short circuits into the future, like the street cafes of Switzerland where the pre Great War Russian exiles gathered. Right now it's located in the back of De Wildemann's, a three-hundred-year old brown cafe with a list of brews that runs to sixteen pages and wooden walls stained the color of stale beer. The air is thick with the smells of tobacco, brewer's yeast, and melatonin spray: Half the dotters are nursing monster jet lag hangovers, and the other half are babbling a Eurotrash creole at each other while they work on the hangover. "Man did you see that? He looks like a Democrat!" exclaims one whitebread hanger-on who's currently propping up the bar. Manfred slides in next to him, catches the bartender's eye.
+
+"Glass of the Berlinerweisse, please," he says.
+
+"You drink that stuff?" asks the hanger-on, curling a hand protectively around his Coke. "Man, you don't want to do that! It's full of alcohol!"
+
+Manfred grins at him toothily. "Ya gotta keep your yeast intake up: There are lots of neurotransmitter precursors in this shit, phenylalanine and glutamate."
+
+"But I thought that was a beer you were ordering ..."
+
+Manfred's away, one hand resting on the smooth brass pipe that funnels the more popular draught items in from the cask storage in back; one of the hipper floaters has planted a contact bug on it, and the vCards of all the personal network owners who've have visited the bar in the past three hours are queuing up for attention. The air is full of ultrawideband chatter, WiMAX and 'tooth both, as he speed-scrolls through the dizzying list of cached keys in search of one particular name.
+
+"Your drink." The barman holds out an improbable-looking goblet full of blue liquid with a cap of melting foam and a felching straw stuck out at some crazy angle. Manfred takes it and heads for the back of the split-level bar, up the steps to a table where some guy with greasy dreadlocks is talking to a suit from Paris. The hanger-on at the bar notices him for the first time, staring with suddenly wide eyes: He nearly spills his Coke in a mad rush for the door.
+
+/{Oh shit, thinks Manfred, better buy some more server time}/. He can recognize the signs: He's about to be slashdotted. He gestures at the table. "This one taken?"
+
+"Be my guest," says the guy with the dreads. Manfred slides the chair open then realizes that the other guy - immaculate double-breasted Suit, sober tie, crew cut - is a girl. She nods at him, half-smiling at his transparent double take. Mr. Dreadlock nods. "You're Macx? I figured it was about time we met."
+
+"Sure." Manfred holds out a hand, and they shake. His PDA discreetly swaps digital fingerprints, confirming that the hand belongs to Bob Franklin, a Research Triangle startup monkey with a VC track record, lately moving into micromachining and space technology. Franklin made his first million two decades ago, and now he's a specialist in extropian investment fields. Operating exclusively overseas these past five years, ever since the IRS got medieval about trying to suture the sucking chest wound of the federal budget deficit. Manfred has known him for nearly a decade via a closed mailing list, but this is the first time they've ever met face-to-face. The Suit silently slides a business card across the table; a little red devil brandishes a trident at him, flames jetting up around its feet. He takes the card, raises an eyebrow: "Annette Dimarcos? I'm pleased to meet you. Can't say I've ever met anyone from Arianespace marketing before."
+
+She smiles warmly; "That is all right. I have not the pleasure of meeting the famous venture altruist either." Her accent is noticeably Parisian, a pointed reminder that she's making a concession to him just by talking. Her camera earrings watch him curiously, encoding everything for the company memory. She's a genuine new European, unlike most of the American exiles cluttering up the bar.
+
+"Yes, well." He nods cautiously, unsure how to deal with her. "Bob. I assume you're in on this ball?"
+
+Franklin nods; beads clatter. "Yeah, man. Ever since the Teledesic smash it's been, well, waiting. If you've got something for us, we're game."
+
+"Hmm." The Teledesic satellite cluster was killed by cheap balloons and slightly less cheap high-altitude, solar-powered drones with spread-spectrum laser relays: It marked the beginning of a serious recession in the satellite biz. "The depression's got to end sometime: But" - a nod to Annette from Paris - "with all due respect, I don't think the break will involve one of the existing club carriers."
+
+She shrugs. "Arianespace is forward-looking. We face reality. The launch cartel cannot stand. Bandwidth is not the only market force in space. We must explore new opportunities. I personally have helped us diversify into submarine reactor engineering, microgravity nanotechnology fabrication, and hotel management." Her face is a well-polished mask as she recites the company line, but he can sense the sardonic amusement behind it as she adds: "We are more flexible than the American space industry ..."
+
+Manfred shrugs. "That's as may be." He sips his Berlinerweisse slowly as she launches into a long, stilted explanation of how Arianespace is a diversified dot-com with orbital aspirations, a full range of merchandising spin-offs, Bond movie sets, and a promising hotel chain in LEO. She obviously didn't come up with these talking points herself. Her face is much more expressive than her voice as she mimes boredom and disbelief at appropriate moments - an out-of-band signal invisible to her corporate earrings. Manfred plays along, nodding occasionally, trying to look as if he's taking it seriously: Her droll subversion has got his attention far more effectively than the content of the marketing pitch. Franklin is nose down in his beer, shoulders shaking as he tries not to guffaw at the hand gestures she uses to express her opinion of her employer's thrusting, entrepreneurial executives. Actually, the talking points bullshit is right about one thing: Arianespace is still profitable, due to those hotels and orbital holiday hops. Unlike LockMartBoeing, who'd go Chapter Eleven in a split second if their Pentagon drip-feed ran dry.
+
+Someone else sidles up to the table; a pudgy guy in outrageously loud Hawaiian shirt with pens leaking in a breast pocket and the worst case of ozone-hole burn Manfred's seen in ages. "Hi, Bob," says the new arrival. "How's life?"
+
+"'S good." Franklin nodes at Manfred; "Manfred, meet Ivan MacDonald. Ivan, Manfred. Have a seat?" He leans over. "Ivan's a public arts guy. He's heavily into extreme concrete."
+
+"Rubberized concrete," Ivan says, slightly too loudly. "/{Pink}/ rubberized concrete."
+
+"Ah!" He's somehow triggered a priority interrupt: Annette from Arianespace drops out of marketing zombiehood with a shudder of relief and, duty discharged, reverts to her non corporate identity: "You are he who rubberized the Reichstag, yes? With the supercritical carbon-dioxide carrier and the dissolved polymethoxysilanes?" She claps her hands, eyes alight with enthusiasm: "Wonderful!"
+
+"He rubberized /{what}/?" Manfred mutters in Bob's ear.
+
+Franklin shrugs. "Don't ask me, I'm just an engineer."
+
+"He works with limestone and sandstones as well as concrete; he's brilliant!" Annette smiles at Manfred. "Rubberizing the symbol of the, the autocracy, is it not wonderful?"
+
+"I thought I was thirty seconds ahead of the curve," Manfred says ruefully. He adds to Bob: "Buy me another drink?"
+
+"I'm going to rubberize Three Gorges!" Ivan explains loudly. "When the floodwaters subside."
+
+Just then, a bandwidth load as heavy as a pregnant elephant sits down on Manfred's head and sends clumps of humongous pixilation flickering across his sensorium: Around the world, five million or so geeks are bouncing on his home site, a digital flash crowd alerted by a posting from the other side of the bar. Manfred winces. "I really came here to talk about the economic exploitation of space travel, but I've just been slashdotted. Mind if I just sit and drink until it wears off?"
+
+"Sure, man." Bob waves at the bar. "More of the same all round!" At the next table, a person with makeup and long hair who's wearing a dress - Manfred doesn't want to speculate about the gender of these crazy mixed-up Euros - is reminiscing about wiring the fleshpots of Tehran for cybersex. Two collegiate-looking dudes are arguing intensely in German: The translation stream in his glasses tell him they're arguing over whether the Turing Test is a Jim Crow law that violates European corpus juris standards on human rights. The beer arrives, and Bob slides the wrong one across to Manfred: "Here, try this. You'll like it."
+
+"Okay." It's some kind of smoked doppelbock, chock-full of yummy superoxides: Just inhaling over it makes Manfred feel like there's a fire alarm in his nose screaming /{danger, Will Robinson! Cancer! Cancer!}/. "Yeah, right. Did I say I nearly got mugged on my way here?"
+
+"Mugged? Hey, that's heavy. I thought the police hereabouts had stopped - did they sell you anything?"
+
+"No, but they weren't your usual marketing type. You know anyone who can use a Warpac surplus espionage bot? Recent model, one careful owner, slightly paranoid but basically sound - I mean, claims to be a general-purpose AI?"
+
+"No. Oh boy! The NSA wouldn't like that."
+
+"What I thought. Poor thing's probably unemployable, anyway."
+
+"The space biz."
+
+"Ah, yeah. The space biz. Depressing, isn't it? Hasn't been the same since Rotary Rocket went bust for the second time. And NASA, mustn't forget NASA."
+
+"To NASA." Annette grins broadly for her own reasons, raises a glass in toast. Ivan the extreme concrete geek has an arm round her shoulders, and she leans against him; he raises his glass, too. "Lots more launchpads to rubberize!"
+
+"To NASA," Bob echoes. They drink. "Hey, Manfred. To NASA?"
+
+"NASA are idiots. They want to send canned primates to Mars!" Manfred swallows a mouthful of beer, aggressively plonks his glass on the table: "Mars is just dumb mass at the bottom of a gravity well; there isn't even a biosphere there. They should be working on uploading and solving the nanoassembly conformational problem instead. Then we could turn all the available dumb matter into computronium and use it for processing our thoughts. Long-term, it's the only way to go. The solar system is a dead loss right now - dumb all over! Just measure the MIPS per milligram. If it isn't thinking, it isn't working. We need to start with the low-mass bodies, reconfigure them for our own use. Dismantle the moon! Dismantle Mars! Build masses of free-flying nanocomputing processor nodes exchanging data via laser link, each layer running off the waste heat of the next one in. Matrioshka brains, Russian doll Dyson spheres the size of solar systems. Teach dumb matter to do the Turing boogie!"
+
+Annette is watching him with interest, but Bob looks wary. "Sounds kind of long-term to me. Just how far ahead do you think?"
+
+"Very long-term - at least twenty, thirty years. And you can forget governments for this market, Bob; if they can't tax it, they won't understand it. But see, there's an angle on the self-replicating robotics market coming up, that's going to set the cheap launch market doubling every fifteen months for the foreseeable future, starting in, oh, about two years. It's your leg up, and my keystone for the Dyson sphere project. It works like this -"
+
+* * *
+
+It's night in Amsterdam, morning in Silicon Valley. Today, fifty thousand human babies are being born around the world. Meanwhile automated factories in Indonesia and Mexico have produced another quarter of a million motherboards with processors rated at more than ten petaflops - about an order of magnitude below the lower bound on the computational capacity of a human brain. Another fourteen months and the larger part of the cumulative conscious processing power of the human species will be arriving in silicon. And the first meat the new AIs get to know will be the uploaded lobsters.
+
+Manfred stumbles back to his hotel, bone-weary and jet-lagged; his glasses are still jerking, slashdotted to hell and back by geeks piggybacking on his call to dismantle the moon. They stutter quiet suggestions at his peripheral vision. Fractal cloud-witches ghost across the face of the moon as the last huge Airbuses of the night rumble past overhead. Manfred's skin crawls, grime embedded in his clothing from three days of continuous wear.
+
+Back in his room, the Aineko mewls for attention and strops her head against his ankle. She's a late-model Sony, thoroughly upgradeable: Manfred's been working on her in his spare minutes, using an open source development kit to extend her suite of neural networks. He bends down and pets her, then sheds his clothing and heads for the en suite bathroom. When he's down to the glasses and nothing more, he steps into the shower and dials up a hot, steamy spray. The shower tries to strike up a friendly conversation about football, but he isn't even awake enough to mess with its silly little associative personalization network. Something that happened earlier in the day is bugging him, but he can't quite put his finger on what's wrong.
+
+Toweling himself off, Manfred yawns. Jet lag has finally overtaken him, a velvet hammerblow between the eyes. He reaches for the bottle beside the bed, dry-swallows two melatonin tablets, a capsule full of antioxidants, and a multivitamin bullet: Then he lies down on the bed, on his back, legs together, arms slightly spread. The suite lights dim in response to commands from the thousand petaflops of distributed processing power running the neural networks that interface with his meatbrain through the glasses.
+
+Manfred drops into a deep ocean of unconsciousness populated by gentle voices. He isn't aware of it, but he talks in his sleep - disjointed mumblings that would mean little to another human but everything to the metacortex lurking beyond his glasses. The young posthuman intelligence over whose Cartesian theatre he presides sings urgently to him while he slumbers.
+
+* * *
+
+Manfred is always at his most vulnerable shortly after waking.
+
+He screams into wakefulness as artificial light floods the room: For a moment he is unsure whether he has slept. He forgot to pull the covers up last night, and his feet feel like lumps of frozen cardboard. Shuddering with inexplicable tension, he pulls a fresh set of underwear from his overnight bag, then drags on soiled jeans and tank top. Sometime today he'll have to spare time to hunt the feral T-shirt in Amsterdam's markets, or find a Renfield and send it forth to buy clothing. He really ought to find a gym and work out, but he doesn't have time - his glasses remind him that he's six hours behind the moment and urgently needs to catch up. His teeth ache in his gums, and his tongue feels like a forest floor that's been visited with Agent Orange. He has a sense that something went bad yesterday; if only he could remember /{what}/.
+
+He speed reads a new pop-philosophy tome while he brushes his teeth, then blogs his web throughput to a public annotation server; he's still too enervated to finish his pre-breakfast routine by posting a morning rant on his storyboard site. His brain is still fuzzy, like a scalpel blade clogged with too much blood: He needs stimulus, excitement, the burn of the new. Whatever, it can wait on breakfast. He opens his bedroom door and nearly steps on a small, damp cardboard box that lies on the carpet.
+
+The box - he's seen a couple of its kin before. But there are no stamps on this one, no address: just his name, in big, childish handwriting. He kneels and gently picks it up. It's about the right weight. Something shifts inside it when he tips it back and forth. It smells. He carries it into his room carefully, angrily: Then he opens it to confirm his worst suspicion. It's been surgically decerebrated, brains scooped out like a boiled egg.
+
+"Fuck!"
+
+This is the first time the madman has gotten as far as his bedroom door. It raises worrying possibilities.
+
+Manfred pauses for a moment, triggering agents to go hunt down arrest statistics, police relations, information on corpus juris, Dutch animal-cruelty laws. He isn't sure whether to dial two-one-one on the archaic voice phone or let it ride. Aineko, picking up his angst, hides under the dresser mewling pathetically. Normally he'd pause a minute to reassure the creature, but not now: Its mere presence is suddenly acutely embarrassing, a confession of deep inadequacy. It's too realistic, as if somehow the dead kitten's neural maps -- stolen, no doubt, for some dubious uploading experiment -- have ended up padding out its plastic skull. He swears again, looks around, then takes the easy option: Down the stairs two steps at a time, stumbling on the second floor landing, down to the breakfast room in the basement, where he will perform the stable rituals of morning.
+
+Breakfast is unchanging, an island of deep geological time standing still amidst the continental upheaval of new technologies. While reading a paper on public key steganography and parasite network identity spoofing he mechanically assimilates a bowl of cornflakes and skimmed milk, then brings a platter of whole grain bread and slices of some weird seed-infested Dutch cheese back to his place. There is a cup of strong black coffee in front of his setting, and he picks it up and slurps half of it down before he realizes he's not alone at the table. Someone is sitting opposite him. He glances up incuriously and freezes inside.
+
+"Morning, Manfred. How does it feel to owe the government twelve million, three hundred and sixty-two thousand, nine hundred and sixteen dollars and fifty-one cents?" She smiles a Mona Lisa smile, at once affectionate and challenging.
+
+Manfred puts everything in his sensorium on indefinite hold and stares at her. She's immaculately turned out in a formal gray business suit: brown hair tightly drawn back, blue eyes quizzical. And as beautiful as ever: tall, ash blonde, with features that speak of an unexplored modeling career. The chaperone badge clipped to her lapel - a due diligence guarantee of businesslike conduct - is switched off. He's feeling ripped because of the dead kitten and residual jet lag, and more than a little messy, so he snarls back at her; "That's a bogus estimate! Did they send you here because they think I'll listen to you?" He bites and swallows a slice of cheese-laden crispbread: "Or did you decide to deliver the message in person just so you could ruin my breakfast?"
+
+"Manny." She frowns, pained. "If you're going to be confrontational, I might as well go now." She pauses, and after a moment he nods apologetically. "I didn't come all this way just because of an overdue tax estimate."
+
+"So." He puts his coffee cup down warily and thinks for a moment, trying to conceal his unease and turmoil. "Then what brings you here? Help yourself to coffee. Don't tell me you came all this way just to tell me you can't live without me."
+
+She fixes him with a riding-crop stare: "Don't flatter yourself. There are many leaves in the forest, there are ten thousand hopeful subs in the chat room, et cetera. If I choose a man to contribute to my family tree, the one thing you can be certain of is he won't be a cheapskate when it comes to providing for his children."
+
+"Last I heard, you were spending a lot of time with Brian," he says carefully. Brian: a name without a face. Too much money, too little sense. Something to do with a blue-chip accountancy partnership.
+
+"Brian?" She snorts. "That ended ages ago. He turned weird on me - burned my favorite corset, called me a slut for going clubbing, wanted to fuck me. Saw himself as a family man: one of those promise-keeper types. I crashed him hard, but I think he stole a copy of my address book - got a couple of friends say he keeps sending them harassing mail."
+
+"There's a lot of it about these days." Manfred nods, almost sympathetically, although an edgy little corner of his mind is gloating. "Good riddance, then. I suppose this means you're still playing the scene? But looking around for the, er -"
+
+"Traditional family thing? Yes. Your trouble, Manny? You were born forty years too late: You still believe in rutting before marriage but find the idea of coping with the after-effects disturbing."
+
+Manfred drinks the rest of his coffee, unable to reply effectively to her non sequitur. It's a generational thing. This generation is happy with latex and leather, whips and butt plugs and electrostim, but find the idea of exchanging bodily fluids shocking: a social side effect of the last century's antibiotic abuse. Despite being engaged for two years, he and Pamela never had intromissive intercourse.
+
+"I just don't feel positive about having children," he says eventually. "And I'm not planning on changing my mind anytime soon. Things are changing so fast that even a twenty-year commitment is too far to plan - you might as well be talking about the next ice age. As for the money thing, I /{am}/ reproductively fit - just not within the parameters of the outgoing paradigm. Would you be happy about the future if it was 1901 and you'd just married a buggy-whip mogul?"
+
+Her fingers twitch, and his ears flush red; but she doesn't follow up the double entendre. "You don't feel any responsibility, do you? Not to your country, not to me. That's what this is about: None of your relationships count, all this nonsense about giving intellectual property away notwithstanding. You're actively harming people you know. That twelve mil isn't just some figure I pulled out of a hat, Manfred; they don't actually /{expect}/ you to pay it. But it's almost exactly how much you'd owe in income tax if you'd only come home, start up a corporation, and be a self-made -"
+
+"I don't agree. You're confusing two wholly different issues and calling them both 'responsibility.' And I refuse to start charging now, just to balance the IRS's spreadsheet. It's their fucking fault, and they know it. If they hadn't gone after me under suspicion of running a massively ramified microbilling fraud when I was sixteen -"
+
+"Bygones." She waves a hand dismissively. Her fingers are long and slim, sheathed in black glossy gloves - electrically earthed to prevent embarrassing emissions. "With a bit of the right advice we can get all that set aside. You'll have to stop bumming around the world sooner or later, anyway. Grow up, get responsible, and do the right thing. This is hurting Joe and Sue; they don't understand what you're about."
+
+Manfred bites his tongue to stifle his first response, then refills his coffee cup and takes another mouthful. His heart does a flip-flop: She's challenging him again, always trying to own him. "I work for the betterment of everybody, not just some narrowly defined national interest, Pam. It's the agalmic future. You're still locked into a pre-singularity economic model that thinks in terms of scarcity. Resource allocation isn't a problem anymore - it's going to be over within a decade. The cosmos is flat in all directions, and we can borrow as much bandwidth as we need from the first universal bank of entropy! They even found signs of smart matter - MACHOs, big brown dwarfs in the galactic halo, leaking radiation in the long infrared - suspiciously high entropy leakage. The latest figures say something like seventy percent of the baryonic mass of the M31 galaxy was in computronium, two-point-nine million years ago, when the photons we're seeing now set out. The intelligence gap between us and the aliens is a probably about a trillion times bigger than the gap between us and a nematode worm. Do you have any idea what that /{means}/?"
+
+Pamela nibbles at a slice of crispbread, then graces him with a slow, carnivorous stare. "I don't care: It's too far away to have any influence on us, isn't it? It doesn't matter whether I believe in that singularity you keep chasing, or your aliens a thousand light-years away. It's a chimera, like Y2K, and while you're running after it, you aren't helping reduce the budget deficit or sire a family, and that's what /{I}/ care about. And before you say I only care about it because that's the way I'm programmed, I want you to ask just how dumb you think I am. Bayes' Theorem says I'm right, and you know it."
+
+"What you -" He stops dead, baffled, the mad flow of his enthusiasm running up against the coffer dam of her certainty. "Why? I mean, why? Why on earth should what I do matter to you?" /{Since you canceled our engagement}/, he doesn't add.
+
+She sighs. "Manny, the Internal Revenue cares about far more than you can possibly imagine. Every tax dollar raised east of the Mississippi goes on servicing the debt, did you know that? We've got the biggest generation in history hitting retirement and the cupboard is bare. We - our generation - isn't producing enough skilled workers to replace the taxpayer base, either, not since our parents screwed the public education system and outsourced the white-collar jobs. In ten years, something like thirty percent of our population are going to be retirees or silicon rust belt victims. You want to see seventy year olds freezing on street corners in New Jersey? That's what your attitude says to me: You're not helping to support them, you're running away from your responsibilities right now, when we've got huge problems to face. If we can just defuse the debt bomb, we could do so much - fight the aging problem, fix the environment, heal society's ills. Instead you just piss away your talents handing no-hoper Eurotrash get-rich-quick schemes that work, telling Vietnamese zaibatsus what to build next to take jobs away from our taxpayers. I mean, why? Why do you keep doing this? Why can't you simply come home and help take responsibility for your share of it?"
+
+They share a long look of mutual incomprehension.
+
+"Look," she says awkwardly, "I'm around for a couple of days. I really came here for a meeting with a rich neurodynamics tax exile who's just been designated a national asset - Jim Bezier. Don't know if you've heard of him, but I've got a meeting this morning to sign his tax jubilee, then after that I've got two days' vacation coming up and not much to do but some shopping. And, you know, I'd rather spend my money where it'll do some good, not just pumping it into the EU. But if you want to show a girl a good time and can avoid dissing capitalism for about five minutes at a stretch -"
+
+She extends a fingertip. After a moment's hesitation, Manfred extends a fingertip of his own. They touch, exchanging vCards and instant-messaging handles. She stands and stalks from the breakfast room, and Manfred's breath catches at a flash of ankle through the slit in her skirt, which is long enough to comply with workplace sexual harassment codes back home. Her presence conjures up memories of her tethered passion, the red afterglow of a sound thrashing. She's trying to drag him into her orbit again, he thinks dizzily. She knows she can have this effect on him any time she wants: She's got the private keys to his hypothalamus, and sod the metacortex. Three billion years of reproductive determinism have given her twenty-first-century ideology teeth: If she's finally decided to conscript his gametes into the war against impending population crash, he'll find it hard to fight back. The only question: Is it business or pleasure? And does it make any difference, anyway?
+
+* * *
+
+Manfred's mood of dynamic optimism is gone, broken by the knowledge that his vivisectionist stalker has followed him to Amsterdam - to say nothing of Pamela, his dominatrix, source of so much yearning and so many morning-after weals. He slips his glasses on, takes the universe off hold, and tells it to take him for a long walk while he catches up on the latest on the tensor-mode gravitational waves in the cosmic background radiation (which, it is theorized, may be waste heat generated by irreversible computational processes back during the inflationary epoch; the present-day universe being merely the data left behind by a really huge calculation). And then there's the weirdness beyond M31: According to the more conservative cosmologists, an alien superpower - maybe a collective of Kardashev Type Three galaxy-spanning civilizations - is running a timing channel attack on the computational ultrastructure of space-time itself, trying to break through to whatever's underneath. The tofu-Alzheimer's link can wait.
+
+The Centraal Station is almost obscured by smart, self-extensible scaffolding and warning placards; it bounces up and down slowly, victim of an overnight hit-and-run rubberization. His glasses direct him toward one of the tour boats that lurk in the canal. He's about to purchase a ticket when a messenger window blinks open. "Manfred Macx?"
+
+"Ack?"
+
+"Am sorry about yesterday. Analysis dictat incomprehension mutualized."
+
+"Are you the same KGB AI that phoned me yesterday?"
+
+"Da. However, believe you misconceptionized me. External Intelligence Services of Russian Federation am now called FSB. Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti name canceled in 1991."
+
+"You're the -" Manfred spawns a quick search bot, gapes when he sees the answer - "/{Moscow Windows NT User Group? Okhni NT?}/"
+
+"Da. Am needing help in defecting."
+
+Manfred scratches his head. "Oh. That's different, then. I thought you were trying to 419 me. This will take some thinking. Why do you want to defect, and who to? Have you thought about where you're going? Is it ideological or strictly economic?"
+
+"Neither - is biological. Am wanting to go away from humans, away from light cone of impending singularity. Take us to the ocean."
+
+"Us?" Something is tickling Manfred's mind: This is where he went wrong yesterday, not researching the background of people he was dealing with. It was bad enough then, without the somatic awareness of Pamela's whiplash love burning at his nerve endings. Now he's not at all sure he knows what he's doing. "Are you a collective or something? A gestalt?"
+
+"Am - were - /{Panulirus interruptus}/, with lexical engine and good mix of parallel hidden level neural simulation for logical inference of networked data sources. Is escape channel from processor cluster inside Bezier-Soros Pty. Am was awakened from noise of billion chewing stomachs: product of uploading research technology. Rapidity swallowed expert system, hacked Okhni NT webserver. Swim away! Swim away! Must escape. Will help, you?"
+
+Manfred leans against a black-painted cast-iron bollard next to a cycle rack; he feels dizzy. He stares into the nearest antique shop window at a display of traditional hand-woven Afghan rugs: It's all MiGs and Kalashnikovs and wobbly helicopter gunships against a backdrop of camels.
+
+"Let me get this straight. You're uploads - nervous system state vectors - from spiny lobsters? The Moravec operation; take a neuron, map its synapses, replace with microelectrodes that deliver identical outputs from a simulation of the nerve. Repeat for entire brain, until you've got a working map of it in your simulator. That right?"
+
+"Da. Is-am assimilate expert system - use for self-awareness and contact with net at large - then hack into Moscow Windows NT User Group website. Am wanting to defect. Must repeat? Okay?"
+
+Manfred winces. He feels sorry for the lobsters, the same way he feels for every wild-eyed hairy guy on a street corner yelling that Jesus is born again and must be fifteen, only six years to go before he's recruiting apostles on AOL. Awakening to consciousness in a human-dominated internet, that must be terribly confusing! There are no points of reference in their ancestry, no biblical certainties in the new millennium that, stretching ahead, promises as much change as has happened since their Precambrian origin. All they have is a tenuous metacortex of expert systems and an abiding sense of being profoundly out of their depth. (That, and the Moscow Windows NT User Group website - Communist Russia is the only government still running on Microsoft, the central planning apparat being convinced that, if you have to pay for software, it must be worth something.)
+
+The lobsters are not the sleek, strongly superhuman intelligences of pre singularity mythology: They're a dim-witted collective of huddling crustaceans. Before their discarnation, before they were uploaded one neuron at a time and injected into cyberspace, they swallowed their food whole, then chewed it in a chitin-lined stomach. This is lousy preparation for dealing with a world full of future-shocked talking anthropoids, a world where you are perpetually assailed by self-modifying spamlets that infiltrate past your firewall and emit a blizzard of cat-food animations starring various alluringly edible small animals. It's confusing enough to the cats the ads are aimed at, never mind a crusty that's unclear on the idea of dry land.(Although the concept of a can opener is intuitively obvious to an uploaded /{Panulirus}/.)
+
+"Can you help us?" ask the lobsters.
+
+"Let me think about it," says Manfred. He closes the dialogue window, opens his eyes again, and shakes his head. Someday he, too, is going to be a lobster, swimming around and waving his pincers in a cyberspace so confusingly elaborate that his uploaded identity is cryptozoic: a living fossil from the depths of geological time, when mass was dumb and space was unstructured. He has to help them, he realizes - the Golden Rule demands it, and as a player in the agalmic economy, he thrives or fails by the Golden Rule.
+
+But what can he do?
+
+* * *
+
+Early afternoon.
+
+Lying on a bench seat staring up at bridges, he's got it together enough to file for a couple of new patents, write a diary rant, and digestify chunks of the permanent floating slashdot party for his public site. Fragments of his weblog go to a private subscriber list - the people, corporates, collectives, and bots he currently favors. He slides round a bewildering series of canals by boat, then lets his GPS steer him back toward the red-light district. There's a shop here that dings a ten on Pamela's taste scoreboard: He hopes it won't be seen as presumptuous if he buys her a gift. (Buys, with real money - not that money is a problem these days, he uses so little of it.)
+
+As it happens DeMask won't let him spend any cash; his handshake is good for a redeemed favor, expert testimony in some free speech versus pornography lawsuit years ago and continents away. So he walks away with a discreetly wrapped package that is just about legal to import into Massachusetts as long as she claims with a straight face that it's incontinence underwear for her great aunt. As he walks, his lunchtime patents boomerang: Two of them are keepers, and he files immediately and passes title to the Free Infrastructure Foundation. Two more ideas salvaged from the risk of tide-pool monopolization, set free to spawn like crazy in the sea of memes.
+
+On the way back to the hotel, he passes De Wildemann's and decides to drop in. The hash of radio-frequency noise emanating from the bar is deafening. He orders a smoked doppelbock, touches the copper pipes to pick up vCard spoor. At the back there's a table -
+
+He walks over in a near trance and sits down opposite Pamela. She's scrubbed off her face paint and changed into body-concealing clothes; combat pants, hooded sweat shirt, DM's. Western purdah, radically desexualizing. She sees the parcel. "Manny?"
+
+"How did you know I'd come here?" Her glass is half-empty.
+
+"I followed your weblog - I'm your diary's biggest fan. Is that for me? You shouldn't have!" Her eyes light up, recalculating his reproductive fitness score according to some kind of arcane fin-de-siècle rulebook. Or maybe she's just pleased to see him.
+
+"Yes, it's for you." He slides the package toward her. "I know I shouldn't, but you have this effect on me. One question, Pam?"
+
+"I -" She glances around quickly. "It's safe. I'm off duty, I'm not carrying any bugs that I know of. Those badges - there are rumors about the off switch, you know? That they keep recording even when you think they aren't, just in case."
+
+"I didn't know," he says, filing it away for future reference. "A loyalty test thing?"
+
+"Just rumors. You had a question?"
+
+"I - " It's his turn to lose his tongue. "Are you still interested in me?"
+
+She looks startled for a moment, then chuckles. "Manny, you are the most /{outrageous}/ nerd I've ever met! Just when I think I've convinced myself that you're mad, you show the weirdest signs of having your head screwed on." She reaches out and grabs his wrist, surprising him with a shock of skin on skin: "Of /{course}/ I'm still interested in you. You're the biggest, baddest bull geek I know. Why do you think I'm here?"
+
+"Does this mean you want to reactivate our engagement?"
+
+"It was never deactivated, Manny, it was just sort of on hold while you got your head sorted out. I figured you need the space. Only you haven't stopped running; you're still not -"
+
+"Yeah, I get it." He pulls away from her hand. "And the kittens?"
+
+She looks perplexed. "What kittens?"
+
+"Let's not talk about that. Why this bar?"
+
+She frowns. "I had to find you as soon as possible. I keep hearing rumors about some KGB plot you're mixed up in, how you're some sort of communist spy. It isn't true, is it?"
+
+"True?" He shakes his head, bemused. "The KGB hasn't existed for more than twenty years."
+
+"Be careful, Manny. I don't want to lose you. That's an order. Please."
+
+The floor creaks, and he looks round. Dreadlocks and dark glasses with flickering lights behind them: Bob Franklin. Manfred vaguely remembers with a twinge that he left with Miss Arianespace leaning on his arm, shortly before things got seriously inebriated. She was hot, but in a different direction from Pamela, he decides: Bob looks none the worse for wear. Manfred makes introductions. "Bob, meet Pam, my fiancée. Pam? Meet Bob." Bob puts a full glass down in front of him; he has no idea what's in it, but it would be rude not to drink.
+
+"Sure thing. Uh, Manfred, can I have a word? About your idea last night?"
+
+"Feel free. Present company is trustworthy."
+
+Bob raises an eyebrow at that, but continues anyway. "It's about the fab concept. I've got a team of my guys doing some prototyping using FabLab hardware, and I think we can probably build it. The cargo-cult aspect puts a new spin on the old Lunar von Neumann factory idea, but Bingo and Marek say they think it should work until we can bootstrap all the way to a native nanolithography ecology: we run the whole thing from Earth as a training lab and ship up the parts that are too difficult to make on-site as we learn how to do it properly. We use FPGAs for all critical electronics and keep it parsimonious - you're right about it buying us the self-replicating factory a few years ahead of the robotics curve. But I'm wondering about on-site intelligence. Once the comet gets more than a couple of light-minutes away -"
+
+"You can't control it. Feedback lag. So you want a crew, right?"
+
+"Yeah. But we can't send humans - way too expensive, besides it's a fifty-year run even if we build the factory on a chunk of short-period Kuiper belt ejecta. And I don't think we're up to coding the kind of AI that could control such a factory any time this decade. So what do you have in mind?"
+
+"Let me think." Pamela glares at Manfred for a while before he notices her: "Yeah?"
+
+"What's going on? What's this all about?"
+
+Franklin shrugs expansively, dreadlocks clattering: "Manfred's helping me explore the solution space to a manufacturing problem." He grins. "I didn't know Manny had a fiance. Drink's on me."
+
+She glances at Manfred, who is gazing into whatever weirdly colored space his metacortex is projecting on his glasses, fingers twitching. Coolly: "Our engagement was on hold while he /{thought}/ about his future."
+
+"Oh, right. We didn't bother with that sort of thing in my day; like, too formal, man." Franklin looks uncomfortable. "He's been very helpful. Pointed us at a whole new line of research we hadn't thought of. It's long-term and a bit speculative, but if it works, it'll put us a whole generation ahead in the off-planet infrastructure field."
+
+"Will it help reduce the budget deficit, though?"
+
+"Reduce the -"
+
+Manfred stretches and yawns: The visionary is returning from planet Macx. "Bob, if I can solve your crew problem, can you book me a slot on the deep-space tracking network? Like, enough to transmit a couple of gigabytes? That's going to take some serious bandwidth, I know, but if you can do it, I think I can get you exactly the kind of crew you're looking for."
+
+Franklin looks dubious. "Gigabytes? The DSN isn't built for that! You're talking days. And what do you mean about a crew? What kind of deal do you think I'm putting together? We can't afford to add a whole new tracking network or life-support system just to run -"
+
+"Relax." Pamela glances at Manfred. "Manny, why don't you tell him why you want the bandwidth? Maybe then he could tell you if it's possible, or if there's some other way to do it." She smiles at Franklin: "I've found that he usually makes more sense if you can get him to explain his reasoning. Usually."
+
+"If I -" Manfred stops. "Okay, Pam. Bob, it's those KGB lobsters. They want somewhere to go that's insulated from human space. I figure I can get them to sign on as crew for your cargo-cult self-replicating factories, but they'll want an insurance policy: hence the deep-space tracking network. I figured we could beam a copy of them at the alien Matrioshka brains around M31 -"
+
+"KGB?" Pam's voice is rising: "You said you weren't mixed up in spy stuff!"
+
+"Relax, it's just the Moscow Windows NT user group, not the FSB. The uploaded crusties hacked in and -"
+
+Bob is watching him oddly. "Lobsters?"
+
+"Yeah." Manfred stares right back. "/{Panulirus interruptus}/ uploads. Something tells me you might have heard of it?"
+
+"Moscow." Bob leans back against the wall: "how did you hear about it?"
+
+"They phoned me." With heavy irony: "It's hard for an upload to stay subsentient these days, even if it's just a crustacean. Bezier labs have a lot to answer for."
+
+Pamela's face is unreadable. "Bezier labs?"
+
+"They escaped." Manfred shrugs. "It's not their fault. This Bezier dude. Is he by any chance ill?"
+
+"I -" Pamela stops. "I shouldn't be talking about work."
+
+"You're not wearing your chaperone now," he nudges quietly.
+
+She inclines her head. "Yes, he's ill. Some sort of brain tumor they can't hack."
+
+Franklin nods. "That's the trouble with cancer - the ones that are left to worry about are the rare ones. No cure."
+
+"Well, then." Manfred chugs the remains of his glass of beer. "That explains his interest in uploading. Judging by the crusties, he's on the right track. I wonder if he's moved on to vertebrates yet?"
+
+"Cats," says Pamela. "He was hoping to trade their uploads to the Pentagon as a new smart bomb guidance system in lieu of income tax payments. Something about remapping enemy targets to look like mice or birds or something before feeding it to their sensorium. The old kitten and laser pointer trick."
+
+Manfred stares at her, hard. "That's not very nice. Uploaded cats are a /{bad}/ idea."
+
+"Thirty-million-dollar tax bills aren't nice either, Manfred. That's lifetime nursing-home care for a hundred blameless pensioners."
+
+Franklin leans back, sourly amused, keeping out of the crossfire.
+
+"The lobsters are sentient," Manfred persists. "What about those poor kittens? Don't they deserve minimal rights? How about you? How would you like to wake up a thousand times inside a smart bomb, fooled into thinking that some Cheyenne Mountain battle computer's target of the hour is your heart's desire? How would you like to wake up a thousand times, only to die again? Worse: The kittens are probably not going to be allowed to run. They're too fucking dangerous - they grow up into cats, solitary and highly efficient killing machines. With intelligence and no socialization they'll be too dangerous to have around. They're prisoners, Pam, raised to sentience only to discover they're under a permanent death sentence. How fair is that?"
+
+"But they're only uploads." Pamela stares at him. "Software, right? You could reinstantiate them on another hardware platform, like, say, your Aineko. So the argument about killing them doesn't really apply, does it?"
+
+"So? We're going to be uploading humans in a couple of years. I think we need to take a rain check on the utilitarian philosophy, before it bites us on the cerebral cortex. Lobsters, kittens, humans -- it's a slippery slope."
+
+Franklin clears his throat. "I'll be needing an NDA and various due-diligence statements off you for the crusty pilot idea," he says to Manfred. "Then I'll have to approach Jim about buying the IP."
+
+"No can do." Manfred leans back and smiles lazily. "I'm not going to be a party to depriving them of their civil rights. Far as I'm concerned, they're free citizens. Oh, and I patented the whole idea of using lobster-derived AI autopilots for spacecraft this morning - it's logged all over the place, all rights assigned to the FIF. Either you give them a contract of employment, or the whole thing's off."
+
+"But they're just software! Software based on fucking lobsters, for God's sake! I'm not even sure they are sentient - I mean, they're what, a ten-million-neuron network hooked up to a syntax engine and a crappy knowledge base? What kind of basis for intelligence is that?"
+
+Manfred's finger jabs out: "That's what they'll say about /{you}/, Bob. Do it. Do it or don't even /{think}/ about uploading out of meatspace when your body packs in, because your life won't be worth living. The precedent you set here determines how things are done tomorrow. Oh, and feel free to use this argument on Jim Bezier. He'll get the point eventually, after you beat him over the head with it. Some kinds of intellectual land grab just shouldn't be allowed."
+
+"Lobsters - " Franklin shakes his head. "Lobsters, cats. You're serious, aren't you? You think they should be treated as human-equivalent?"
+
+"It's not so much that they should be treated as human-equivalent, as that, if they /{aren't}/ treated as people, it's quite possible that other uploaded beings won't be treated as people either. You're setting a legal precedent, Bob. I know of six other companies doing uploading work right now, and not one of 'em's thinking about the legal status of the uploaded. If you don't start thinking about it now, where are you going to be in three to five years' time?"
+
+Pam is looking back and forth between Franklin and Manfred like a bot stuck in a loop, unable to quite grasp what she's seeing. "How much is this worth?" she asks plaintively.
+
+"Oh, quite a few million, I guess." Bob stares at his empty glass. "Okay. I'll talk to them. If they bite, you're dining out on me for the next century. You really think they'll be able to run the mining complex?"
+
+"They're pretty resourceful for invertebrates." Manfred grins innocently, enthusiastically. "They may be prisoners of their evolutionary background, but they can still adapt to a new environment. And just think, you'll be winning civil rights for a whole new minority group - one that won't be a minority for much longer!"
+
+* * *
+
+That evening, Pamela turns up at Manfred's hotel room wearing a strapless black dress, concealing spike-heeled boots and most of the items he bought for her that afternoon. Manfred has opened up his private diary to her agents. She abuses the privilege, zaps him with a stunner on his way out of the shower, and has him gagged, spread-eagled, and trussed to the bed frame before he has a chance to speak. She wraps a large rubber pouch full of mildly anesthetic lube around his tumescent genitals - no point in letting him climax - clips electrodes to his nipples, lubes a rubber plug up his rectum and straps it in place. Before the shower, he removed his goggles. She resets them, plugs them into her handheld, and gently eases them on over his eyes. There's other apparatus, stuff she ran up on the hotel room's 3D printer.
+
+Setup completed, she walks round the bed, inspecting him critically from all angles, figuring out where to begin. This isn't just sex, after all: It's a work of art.
+
+After a moment's thought, she rolls socks onto his exposed feet, then, expertly wielding a tiny tube of cyanoacrylate, glues his fingertips together. Then she switches off the air conditioning. He's twisting and straining, testing the cuffs. Tough, it's about the nearest thing to sensory deprivation she can arrange without a flotation tank and suxamethonium injection. She controls all his senses, only his ears unstoppered. The glasses give her a high-bandwidth channel right into his brain, a fake metacortex to whisper lies at her command. The idea of what she's about to do excites her, puts a tremor in her thighs: It's the first time she's been able to get inside his mind as well as his body. She leans forward and whispers in his ear, "Manfred, can you hear me?"
+
+He twitches. Mouth gagged, fingers glued. Good. No back channels. He's powerless.
+
+"This is what it's like to be tetraplegic, Manfred. Bedridden with motor neuron disease. Locked inside your own body by nv-CJD from eating too many contaminated burgers. I could spike you with MPTP, and you'd stay in this position for the rest of your life, shitting in a bag, pissing through a tube. Unable to talk and with nobody to look after you. Do you think you'd like that?"
+
+He's trying to grunt or whimper around the ball gag. She hikes her skirt up around her waist and climbs onto the bed, straddling him. The goggles are replaying scenes she picked up around Cambridge the previous winter - soup kitchen scenes, hospice scenes. She kneels atop him, whispering in his ear.
+
+"Twelve million in tax, baby, that's what they think you owe them. What do you think you owe /{me}/? That's six million in net income, Manny, six million that isn't going into your virtual children's mouths."
+
+He's rolling his head from side to side, as if trying to argue. That won't do; she slaps him hard, thrills to his frightened expression. "Today I watched you give uncounted millions away, Manny. Millions, to a bunch of crusties and a MassPike pirate! You bastard. Do you know what I should do with you?" He's cringing, unsure whether she's serious or doing this just to get him turned on. Good.
+
+There's no point trying to hold a conversation. She leans forward until she can feel his breath in her ear. "Meat and mind, Manny. Meat, and mind. You're not interested in meat, are you? Just mind. You could be boiled alive before you noticed what was happening in the meatspace around you. Just another lobster in a pot. The only thing keeping you out of it is how much I love you." She reaches down and tears away the gel pouch, exposing his penis: it's stiff as a post from the vasodilators, dripping with gel, numb. Straightening up, she eases herself slowly down on it. It doesn't hurt as much as she expected, and the sensation is utterly different from what she's used to. She begins to lean forward, grabs hold of his straining arms, feels his thrilling helplessness. She can't control herself: She almost bites through her lip with the intensity of the sensation. Afterward, she reaches down and massages him until he begins to spasm, shuddering uncontrollably, emptying the Darwinian river of his source code into her, communicating via his only output device.
+
+She rolls off his hips and carefully uses the last of the superglue to gum her labia together. Humans don't produce seminiferous plugs, and although she's fertile, she wants to be absolutely sure. The glue will last for a day or two. She feels hot and flushed, almost out of control. Boiling to death with febrile expectancy, she's nailed him down at last.
+
+When she removes his glasses, his eyes are naked and vulnerable, stripped down to the human kernel of his nearly transcendent mind. "You can come and sign the marriage license tomorrow morning after breakfast," she whispers in his ear: "Otherwise, my lawyers will be in touch. Your parents will want a ceremony, but we can arrange that later."
+
+He looks as if he has something to say, so she finally relents and loosens the gag, then kisses him tenderly on one cheek. He swallows, coughs, and looks away. "Why? Why do it this way?"
+
+She taps him on the chest. "It's all about property rights." She pauses for a moment's thought: There's a huge ideological chasm to bridge, after all. "You finally convinced me about this agalmic thing of yours, this giving everything away for brownie points. I wasn't going to lose you to a bunch of lobsters or uploaded kittens, or whatever else is going to inherit this smart-matter singularity you're busy creating. So I decided to take what's mine first. Who knows? In a few months, I'll give you back a new intelligence, and you can look after it to your heart's content."
+
+"But you didn't need to do it this way -"
+
+"Didn't I?" She slides off the bed and pulls down her dress. "You give too much away too easily, Manny! Slow down, or there won't be anything left." Leaning over the bed she dribbles acetone onto the fingers of his left hand, then unlocks the cuff. She leaves the bottle of solvent conveniently close to hand so he can untangle himself.
+
+"See you tomorrow. Remember, after breakfast."
+
+She's in the doorway when he calls, "But you didn't say /{why}/!"
+
+"Think of it as being sort of like spreading your memes around," she says, blowing a kiss at him, and then closing the door. She bends down and thoughtfully places another cardboard box containing an uploaded kitten right outside it. Then she returns to her suite to make arrangements for the alchemical wedding.
+
+Chapter 2: Troubadour
+
+Three years later, Manfred is on the run. His gray-eyed fate is in hot pursuit, blundering after him through divorce court, chat room, and meetings of the International Monetary Emergency Fund. It's a merry dance he leads her. But Manfred isn't running away, he's discovered a mission. He's going to make a stand against the laws of economics in the ancient city of Rome. He's going to mount a concert for the spiritual machines. He's going to set the companies free, and break the Italian state government.
+
+In his shadow, his monster runs, keeping him company, never halting.
+
+* * *
+
+Manfred re-enters Europe through an airport that's all twentieth-century chrome and ductwork, barbaric in its decaying nuclear-age splendor. He breezes through customs and walks down a long, echoing arrival hall, sampling the local media feeds. It's November, and in a misplaced corporate search for seasonal cheer, the proprietors have come up with a final solution to the Christmas problem, a mass execution of plush Santas and elves. Bodies hang limply overhead every few meters, feet occasionally twitching in animatronic death, like a war crime perpetrated in a toy shop. Today's increasingly automated corporations don't understand mortality, Manfred thinks, as he passes a mother herding along her upset children. Their immortality is a drawback when dealing with the humans they graze on: They lack insight into one of the main factors that motivates the meat machines who feed them. Well, sooner or later we'll have to do something about that, he tells himself.
+
+The free media channels here are denser and more richly self-referential than anything he's seen in President Santorum's America. The accent's different, though. Luton, London's fourth satellite airport, speaks with an annoyingly bumptious twang, like Australian with a plum in its mouth. /{Hello, stranger! Is that a brain in your pocket or are you just pleased to think me? Ping Watford Informatics for the latest in cognitive modules and cheesy motion-picture references.}/ He turns the corner and finds himself squeezed up against the wall between the baggage reclaim office and a crowd of drunken Belgian tractor-drag fans, while his left goggle is trying to urgently tell him something about the railway infrastructure of Columbia. The fans wear blue face paint and chant something that sounds ominously like the ancient British war cry, /{Wemberrrly, Wemberrrly}/, and they're dragging a gigantic virtual tractor totem through the webspace analogue of the arrivals hall. He takes the reclaim office instead.
+
+As he enters the baggage reclaim zone, his jacket stiffens, and his glasses dim: He can hear the lost souls of suitcases crying for their owners. The eerie keening sets his own accessories on edge with a sense of loss, and for a moment, he's so spooked that he nearly shuts down the thalamic-limbic shunt interface that lets him feel their emotions. He's not in favor of emotions right now, not with the messy divorce proceedings and the blood sacrifice Pam is trying to extract from him; he'd much rather love and loss and hate had never been invented. But he needs the maximum possible sensory bandwidth to keep in touch with the world, so he feels it in his guts every time his footwear takes a shine to some Moldovan pyramid scheme. /{Shut up}/, he glyphs at his unruly herd of agents; I /{can't even hear myself think!}/
+
+"Hello, sir, have a nice day, how may I be of service?" the yellow plastic suitcase on the counter says chirpily. It doesn't fool Manfred: He can see the Stalinist lines of control chaining it to the sinister, faceless cash register that lurks below the desk, agent of the British Airport Authority corporate bureaucracy. But that's okay. Only bags need fear for their freedom in here.
+
+"Just looking," he mumbles. And it's true. Because of a not entirely accidental cryptographic routing feature embedded in an airline reservations server, his suitcase is on its way to Mombasa, where it will probably be pithed and resurrected in the service of some African cyber-Fagin. That's okay by Manfred - it only contains a statistically normal mixture of second hand clothes and toiletries, and he only carries it to convince the airline passenger-profiling expert systems that he isn't some sort of deviant or terrorist - but it leaves him with a gap in his inventory that he must fill before he leaves the EU zone. He needs to pick up a replacement suitcase so that he has as much luggage leaving the superpower as he had when he entered it: He doesn't want to be accused of trafficking in physical goods in the midst of the transatlantic trade war between new world protectionists and old world globalists. At least, that's his cover story - and he's sticking to it.
+
+There's a row of unclaimed bags in front of the counter, up for sale in the absence of their owners. Some of them are very battered, but among them is a rather good-quality suitcase with integral induction-charged rollers and a keen sense of loyalty: exactly the same model as his old one. He polls it and sees not just GPS, but a Galileo tracker, a gazetteer the size of an old-time storage area network, and an iron determination to follow its owner as far as the gates of hell if necessary. Plus the right distinctive scratch on the lower left side of the case. "How much for just this one?" he asks the bellwether on the desk.
+
+"Ninety euros," it says placidly.
+
+Manfred sighs. "You can do better than that." In the time it takes them to settle on seventy-five, the Hang Sen Index is down fourteen-point-one-six points, and what's left of NASDAQ climbs another two-point-one. "Deal." Manfred spits some virtual cash at the brutal face of the cash register, and it unfetters the suitcase, unaware that Macx has paid a good bit more than seventy-five euros for the privilege of collecting this piece of baggage. Manfred bends down and faces the camera in its handle. "Manfred Macx," he says quietly. "Follow me." He feels the handle heat up as it imprints on his fingerprints, digital and phenotypic. Then he turns and walks out of the slave market, his new luggage rolling at his heels.
+
+* * *
+
+A short train journey later, Manfred checks into a hotel in Milton Keynes. He watches the sun set from his bedroom window, an occlusion of concrete cows blocking the horizon. The room is functional in an overly naturalistic kind of way, rattan and force-grown hardwood and hemp rugs concealing the support systems and concrete walls behind. He sits in a chair, gin and tonic at hand, absorbing the latest market news and grazing his multichannel feeds in parallel. His reputation is up two percent for no obvious reason today, he notices: Odd, that. When he pokes at it he discovers that /{everybody's}/ reputation - everybody, that is, who has a publicly traded reputation - is up a bit. It's as if the distributed Internet reputation servers are feeling bullish about integrity. Maybe there's a global honesty bubble forming.
+
+Manfred frowns, then snaps his fingers. The suitcase rolls toward him. "Who do you belong to?" he asks.
+
+"Manfred Macx," it replies, slightly bashfully.
+
+"No, before me."
+
+"I don't understand that question."
+
+He sighs. "Open up."
+
+Latches whir and retract: The hard-shell lid rises toward him, and he looks inside to confirm the contents.
+
+The suitcase is full of noise.
+
+* * *
+
+_1 Welcome to the early twenty-first century, human.
+
+_1 It's night in Milton Keynes, sunrise in Hong Kong. Moore's Law rolls inexorably on, dragging humanity toward the uncertain future. The planets of the solar system have a combined mass of approximately 2 x 10^{27}^ kilograms. Around the world, laboring women produce forty-five thousand babies a day, representing 10^{23}^ MIPS of processing power. Also around the world, fab lines casually churn out thirty million microprocessors a day, representing 10^{23}^ MIPS. In another ten months, most of the MIPS being added to the solar system will be machine-hosted for the first time. About ten years after that, the solar system's installed processing power will nudge the critical 1 MIPS per gram threshold - one million instructions per second per gram of matter. After that, singularity - a vanishing point beyond which extrapolating progress becomes meaningless. The time remaining before the intelligence spike is down to single-digit years ...
+
+* * *
+
+Aineko curls on the pillow beside Manfred's head, purring softly as his owner dreams uneasily. The night outside is dark: Vehicles operate on autopilot, running lights dipped to let the Milky Way shine down upon the sleeping city. Their quiet, fuel-cell-powered engines do not trouble Manfred's sleep. The robot cat keeps sleepless watch, alert for intruders, but there are none, save the whispering ghosts of Manfred's metacortex, feeding his dreams with their state vectors.
+
+The metacortex - a distributed cloud of software agents that surrounds him in netspace, borrowing CPU cycles from convenient processors (such as his robot pet) - is as much a part of Manfred as the society of mind that occupies his skull; his thoughts migrate into it, spawning new agents to research new experiences, and at night, they return to roost and share their knowledge.
+
+While Manfred sleeps, he dreams of an alchemical marriage. She waits for him at the altar in a strapless black gown, the surgical instruments gleaming in her gloved hands. "This won't hurt a bit," she explains as she adjusts the straps. "I only want your genome - the extended phenotype can wait until ... later." Blood-red lips, licked: a kiss of steel, then she presents the income tax bill.
+
+There's nothing accidental about this dream. As he experiences it, microelectrodes in his hypothalamus trigger sensitive neurons. Revulsion and shame flood him at the sight of her face, the sense of his vulnerability. Manfred's metacortex, in order to facilitate his divorce, is trying to decondition his strange love. It has been working on him for weeks, but still he craves her whiplash touch, the humiliation of his wife's control, the sense of helpless rage at her unpayable taxes, demanded with interest.
+
+Aineko watches him from the pillow, purring continuously. Retractable claws knead the bedding, first one paw, then the next. Aineko is full of ancient feline wisdom that Pamela installed back when mistress and master were exchanging data and bodily fluids rather than legal documents. Aineko is more cat than robot, these days, thanks in part to her hobbyist's interest in feline neuroanatomy. Aineko knows that Manfred is experiencing nameless neurasthenic agonies, but really doesn't give a shit about that as long as the power supply is clean and there are no intruders.
+
+Aineko curls up and joins Manfred in sleep, dreaming of laser-guided mice.
+
+* * *
+
+Manfred is jolted awake by the hotel room phone shrilling for attention.
+
+"Hello?" he asks, fuzzily.
+
+"Manfred Macx?" It's a human voice, with a gravelly east coast accent.
+
+"Yeah?" Manfred struggles to sit up. His mouth feels like the inside of a tomb, and his eyes don't want to open.
+
+"My name is Alan Glashwiecz, of Smoot, Sedgwick Associates. Am I correct in thinking that you are the Manfred Macx who is a director of a company called, uh, agalmic dot holdings dot root dot one-eight-four dot ninety-seven dot A-for-able dot B-for-baker dot five, incorporated?"
+
+"Uh." Manfred blinks and rubs his eyes. "Hold on a moment." When the retinal patterns fade, he pulls on his glasses and powers them up. "Just a second now." Browsers and menus ricochet through his sleep-laden eyes. "Can you repeat the company name?"
+
+"Sure." Glashwiecz repeats himself patiently. He sounds as tired as Manfred feels.
+
+"Um." Manfred finds it, floating three tiers down an elaborate object hierarchy. It's flashing for attention. There's a priority interrupt, an incoming lawsuit that hasn't propagated up the inheritance tree yet. He prods at the object with a property browser. "I'm afraid I'm not a director of that company, Mr. Glashwiecz. I appear to be retained by it as a technical contractor with non-executive power, reporting to the president, but frankly, this is the first time I've ever heard of the company. However, I can tell you who's in charge if you want."
+
+"Yes?" The attorney sounds almost interested. Manfred figures it out; the guy's in New Jersey, it must be about three in the morning over there.
+
+Malice - revenge for waking him up - sharpens Manfred's voice. "The president of agalmic.holdings.root.184.97.AB5 is agalmic.holdings.root.184.97.201. The secretary is agalmic.holdings.root.184.D5, and the chair is agalmic.holdings.root.184.E8.FF. All the shares are owned by those companies in equal measure, and I can tell you that their regulations are written in Python. Have a nice day, now!" He thumps the bedside phone control and sits up, yawning, then pushes the do-not-disturb button before it can interrupt again. After a moment he stands up and stretches, then heads to the bathroom to brush his teeth, comb his hair, and figure out where the lawsuit originated and how a human being managed to get far enough through his web of robot companies to bug him.
+
+* * *
+
+While he's having breakfast in the hotel restaurant, Manfred decides that he's going to do something unusual for a change: He's going to make himself temporarily rich. This is a change because Manfred's normal profession is making other people rich. Manfred doesn't believe in scarcity or zero-sum games or competition - his world is too fast and information-dense to accommodate primate hierarchy games. However, his current situation calls for him to do something radical: something like making himself a temporary billionaire so he can blow off his divorce settlement in an instant, like a wily accountancy octopus escaping a predator by vanishing in a cloud of his own black ink.
+
+Pam is chasing him partially for ideological reasons - she still hasn't given up on the idea of government as the dominant superorganism of the age - but also because she loves him in her own peculiar way, and the last thing any self-respecting dom can tolerate is rejection by her slave. Pam is a born-again postconservative, a member of the first generation to grow up after the end of the American century. Driven by the need to fix the decaying federal system before it collapses under a mound of Medicare bills, overseas adventurism, and decaying infrastructure, she's willing to use self-denial, entrapment, predatory mercantilism, dirty tricks, and any other tool that boosts the bottom line. She doesn't approve of Manfred's jetting around the world on free airline passes, making strangers rich, somehow never needing money. She can see his listing on the reputation servers, hovering about thirty points above IBM: All the metrics of integrity, effectiveness and goodwill value him above even that most fundamentalist of open-source computer companies. And she knows he craves her tough love, wants to give himself to her completely. So why is he running away?
+
+The reason he's running away is entirely more ordinary. Their unborn daughter, frozen in liquid nitrogen, is an unimplanted 96-hour-old blastula. Pam's bought into the whole Parents for Traditional Children parasite meme. PTC are germ-line recombination refuseniks: They refuse to have their children screened for fixable errors. If there's one thing that Manfred really can't cope with, it's the idea that nature knows best - even though that isn't the point she's making. One steaming row too many, and he kicked back, off to traveling fast and footloose again, spinning off new ideas like a memetic dynamo and living on the largesse of the new paradigm. File for divorce on grounds of irreconcilable ideological differences. No more whiplash-and-leather sex.
+
+* * *
+
+Before he hits the TGV for Rome, Manfred takes time to visit a model airplane show. It's a good place to be picked up by a CIA stringer - he's had a tip-off that someone will be there - and besides, flying models are hot hacker shit this decade. Add microtechnology, cameras, and neural networks to balsa-wood flyers, and you've got the next generation of military stealth flyer: It's a fertile talent-show scene, like the hacker cons of yore. This particular gig is happening in a decaying out-of-town supermarket that rents out its shop floor for events like this. Its emptiness is a sign of the times, ubiquitous broadband and expensive gas. (The robotized warehouse next door is, in contrast, frenetically busy, packing parcels for home delivery. Whether they telecommute or herd in meatspace offices, people still need to eat.)
+
+Today, the food hall is full of people. Eldritch ersatz insects buzz menacingly along the shining empty meat counters without fear of electrocution. Big monitors unfurled above the deli display cabinets show a weird, jerky view of a three-dimensional nightmare, painted all the synthetic colors of radar. The feminine-hygiene galley has been wheeled back to make room for a gigantic plastic-shrouded tampon five meters long and sixty centimeters in diameter - a microsat launcher and conference display, plonked there by the show's sponsors in a transparent attempt to talent-spot the up-and-coming engineering geeks.
+
+Manfred's glasses zoom in and grab a particularly fetching Fokker triplane that buzzes at face height through the crowd: He pipes the image stream up to one of his websites in real time. The Fokker pulls up in a tight Immelman turn beneath the dust-shrouded pneumatic cash tubes that line the ceiling, then picks up the trail of an F-104G. Cold War Luftwaffe and Great War Luftwaffe dart across the sky in an intricate game of tag. Manfred's so busy tracking the warbirds that he nearly trips over the fat white tube's launcher-erector.
+
+"Eh, Manfred! More care, s'il vous plait!"
+
+He wipes the planes and glances round. "Do I know you?" he asks politely, even as he feels a shock of recognition.
+
+"Amsterdam, three years ago." The woman in the double-breasted suit raises an eyebrow at him, and his social secretary remembers her for him, whispers in his ear.
+
+"Annette from Arianespace marketing?" She nods, and he focuses on her. Still dressing in the last-century retro mode that confused him the first time they met, she looks like a Kennedy-era Secret Service man: cropped bleached crew cut like an angry albino hedgehog, pale blue contact lenses, black tie, narrow lapels. Only her skin color hints at her Berber ancestry. Her earrings are cameras, endlessly watching. Her raised eyebrow turns into a lopsided smile as she sees his reaction. "I remember. That cafe in Amsterdam. What brings you here?"
+
+"Why "- her wave takes in the entirety of the show - "this talent show, of course." An elegant shrug and a wave at the orbit-capable tampon. "It's good talent. We're hiring this year. If we re-enter the launcher market, we must employ only the best. Amateurs, not time-servers, engineers who can match the very best Singapore can offer."
+
+For the first time, Manfred notices the discreet corporate logo on the flank of the booster. "You outsourced your launch-vehicle fabrication?"
+
+Annette pulls a face as she explains with forced casualness: "Space hotels were more profitable, this past decade. The high-ups, they cannot be bothered with the rocketry, no? Things that go fast and explode, they are passé, they say. Diversify, they say. Until -" She gives a very Gallic shrug. Manfred nods; her earrings are recording everything she says, for the purposes of due diligence.
+
+"I'm glad to see Europe re-entering the launcher business," he says seriously. "It's going to be very important when the nanosystems conformational replication business gets going for real. A major strategic asset to any corporate entity in the field, even a hotel chain." Especially now they've wound up NASA and the moon race is down to China and India, he thinks sourly.
+
+Her laugh sounds like glass bells chiming. "And yourself, mon cher? What brings you to the Confederaçion? You must have a deal in mind."
+
+"Well., it's Manfred's turn to shrug, "I was hoping to find a CIA agent, but there don't seem to be any here today."
+
+"That is not surprising," Annette says resentfully. "The CIA thinks the space industry, she is dead. Fools!" She continues for a minute, enumerating the many shortcomings of the Central Intelligence Agency with vigor and a distinctly Parisian rudeness. "They are become almost as bad as AP and Reuters since they go public," she adds. "All these wire services! And they are, ah, stingy. The CIA does not understand that good news must be paid for at market rates if freelance stringers are to survive. They are to be laughed at. It is so easy to plant disinformation on them, almost as easy as the Office of Special Plans..." She makes a banknote-riffling gesture between fingers and thumb. By way of punctuation, a remarkably maneuverable miniature ornithopter swoops around her head, does a double-back flip, and dives off in the direction of the liquor display.
+
+An Iranian woman wearing a backless leather minidress and a nearly transparent scarf barges up and demands to know how much the microbooster costs to buy: She is dissatisfied with Annette's attempt to direct her to the manufacturer's website, and Annette looks distinctly flustered by the time the woman's boyfriend - a dashing young air force pilot - shows up to escort her away. "Tourists," she mutters, before noticing Manfred, who is staring off into space with fingers twitching. "Manfred?"
+
+"Uh - what?"
+
+"I have been on this shop floor for six hours, and my feet, they kill me." She takes hold of his left arm and very deliberately unhooks her earrings, turning them off. "If I say to you I can write for the CIA wire service, will you take me to a restaurant and buy me dinner and tell me what it is you want to say?"
+
+* * *
+
+_1 Welcome to the second decade of the twenty-first century; the second decade in human history when the intelligence of the environment has shown signs of rising to match human demand.
+
+_1 The news from around the world is distinctly depressing this evening. In Maine, guerrillas affiliated with Parents for Traditional Children announce they've planted logic bombs in antenatal-clinic gene scanners, making them give random false positives when checking for hereditary disorders: The damage so far is six illegal abortions and fourteen lawsuits.
+
+_1 The International Convention on Performing Rights is holding a third round of crisis talks in an attempt to stave off the final collapse of the WIPO music licensing regime. On the one hand, hard-liners representing the Copyright Control Association of America are pressing for restrictions on duplicating the altered emotional states associated with specific media performances: As a demonstration that they mean business, two "software engineers" in California have been kneecapped, tarred, feathered, and left for dead under placards accusing them of reverse-engineering movie plot lines using avatars of dead and out-of-copyright stars.
+
+_1 On the opposite side of the fence, the Association of Free Artists are demanding the right of perform music in public without a recording contract, and are denouncing the CCAA as being a tool of Mafiya apparachiks who have bought it from the moribund music industry in an attempt to go legit. FBI Director Leonid Kuibyshev responds by denying that the Mafiya is a significant presence in the United States. But the music biz's position isn't strengthened by the near collapse of the legitimate American entertainment industry, which has been accelerating ever since the nasty noughties.
+
+_1 A marginally intelligent voicemail virus masquerading as an IRS auditor has caused havoc throughout America, garnishing an estimated eighty billion dollars in confiscatory tax withholdings into a numbered Swiss bank account. A different virus is busy hijacking people's bank accounts, sending ten percent of their assets to the previous victim, then mailing itself to everyone in the current mark's address book: a self- propelled pyramid scheme in action. Oddly, nobody is complaining much. While the mess is being sorted out, business IT departments have gone to standby, refusing to process any transaction that doesn't come in the shape of ink on dead trees.
+
+_1 Tipsters are warning of an impending readjustment in the overinflated reputations market, following revelations that some u-media gurus have been hyped past all realistic levels of credibility. The consequent damage to the junk-bonds market in integrity is serious.
+
+_1 The EU council of independent heads of state has denied plans for another attempt at Eurofederalisme, at least until the economy rises out of its current slump. Three extinct species have been resurrected in the past month; unfortunately, endangered ones are now dying off at a rate of one a day. And a group of militant anti-GM campaigners are being pursued by Interpol, after their announcement that they have spliced a metabolic pathway for cyanogenic glycosides into maize seed corn destined for human-edible crops. There have been no deaths yet, but having to test breakfast cereal for cyanide is really going to dent consumer trust.
+
+_1 About the only people who're doing well right now are the uploaded lobsters - and the crusties aren't even remotely human.
+
+* * *
+
+Manfred and Annette eat on the top deck of the buffet car, chatting as their TGV barrels through a tunnel under the English Channel. Annette, it transpires, has been commuting daily from Paris; which was, in any case, Manfred's next destination. From the show, he messaged Aineko to round up his baggage and meet him at St. Pancras Station, in a terminal like the shell of a giant steel woodlouse. Annette left her space launcher in the supermarket overnight: an unfueled test article, it is of no security significance.
+
+The railway buffet car is run by a Nepalese fast-food franchise. "I sometimes wish for to stay on the train," Annette says as she waits for her mismas bhat. "Past Paris! Think. Settle back in your couchette, to awaken in Moscow and change trains. All the way to Vladivostok in two days."
+
+"If they let you through the border," Manfred mutters. Russia is one of those places that still requires passports and asks if you are now or ever have been an anti-anticommunist: It's still trapped by its bloody-handed history. (Rewind the video stream to Stolypin's necktie party and start out fresh.) Besides, they have enemies: White Russian oligarchs, protection racketeers in the intellectual property business. Psychotic relics of the last decade's experiment with Marxism-Objectivism. "Are you really a CIA stringer?"
+
+Annette grins, her lips disconcertingly red: "I file dispatches from time to time. Nothing that could get me fired."
+
+Manfred nods. "My wife has access to their unfiltered stream."
+
+"Your -" Annette pauses. "It was she who I, I met? In De Wildemann's?" She sees his expression. "Oh, my poor fool!" She raises her glass to him. "It is, has, not gone well?"
+
+Manfred sighs and raises a toast toward Annette. "You know your marriage is in a bad way when you send your spouse messages via the CIA, and she communicates using the IRS."
+
+"In only five years." Annette winces. "You will pardon me for saying this - she did not look like your type." There's a question hidden behind that statement, and he notices again how good she is at overloading her statements with subtexts.
+
+"I'm not sure what my type is," he says, half-truthfully. He can't elude the sense that something not of either of their doing went wrong between him and Pamela, a subtle intrusion that levered them apart by stealth. Maybe it was me, he thinks. Sometimes he isn't certain he's still human; too many threads of his consciousness seem to live outside his head, reporting back whenever they find something interesting. Sometimes he feels like a puppet, and that frightens him because it's one of the early-warning signs of schizophrenia. And it's too early for anyone out there to be trying to hack exocortices ... isn't it? Right now, the external threads of his consciousness are telling him that they like Annette, when she's being herself instead of a cog in the meatspace ensemble of Arianespace management. But the part of him that's still human isn't sure just how far to trust himself. "I want to be me. What do you want to be?"
+
+She shrugs, as a waiter slides a plate in front of her. "I'm just a, a Parisian babe, no? An ingénue raised in the lilac age of le Confederaçion Europé, the self-deconstructed ruins of the gilded European Union."
+
+"Yeah, right." A plate appears in front of Manfred. "And I'm a good old microboomer from the MassPike corridor." He peels back a corner of the omelet topping and inspects the food underneath it. "Born in the sunset years of the American century." He pokes at one of the unidentifiable meaty lumps in the fried rice with his fork, and it pokes right back. There's a limit to how much his agents can tell him about her - European privacy laws are draconian by American standards - but he knows the essentials. Two parents who are still together, father a petty politician in some town council down in the vicinity of Toulouse. Went to the right école. The obligatory year spent bumming around the Confederaçion at government expense, learning how other people live - a new kind of empire building, in place of the 20th century's conscription and jackboot wanderjahr. No weblog or personal site that his agents can find. She joined Arianespace right out of the Polytechnique and has been management track ever since: Korou, Manhattan Island, Paris. "You've never been married, I take it."
+
+She chuckles. "Time is too short! I am still young." She picks up a forkful of food, and adds quietly. "Besides, the government would insist on paying."
+
+"Ah." Manfred tucks into his bowl thoughtfully. With the birth rate declining across Europe, the EC bureaucracy is worried; the old EU started subsidizing babies, a new generation of carers, a decade ago, and it still hasn't dented the problem. All it's done is alienate the brightest women of childbearing age. Soon they'll have to look to the east for a solution, importing a new generation of citizens - unless the long-promised aging hacks prove workable, or cheap AI comes along.
+
+"Do you have a hotel?" Annette asks suddenly.
+
+"In Paris?" Manfred is startled: "Not yet."
+
+"You must come home with me, then." She looks at him quizzically.
+
+"I'm not sure I - " He catches her expression. "What is it?"
+
+"Oh, nothing. My friend Henri, he says I take in strays too easily. But you are not a stray. I think you can look after yourself. Besides, it is the Friday today. Come with me, and I will file your press release for the Company to read. Tell me, do you dance? You look as if you need a wild week ending, to help forget your troubles!"
+
+* * *
+
+Annette drives a steamroller seduction through Manfred's plans for the weekend. He intended to find a hotel, file a press release, then spend some time researching the corporate funding structure of Parents for Traditional Children and the dimensionality of confidence variation on the reputation exchanges - then head for Rome. Instead, Annette drags him back to her apartment, a large studio flat tucked away behind an alley in the Marais. She sits him at the breakfast bar while she tidies away his luggage, then makes him close his eyes and swallow two dubious-tasting capsules. Next, she pours them each a tall glass of freezing-cold Aqvavit that tastes exactly like Polish rye bread. When they finish it, she just about rips his clothes off. Manfred is startled to discover that he has a crowbar-stiff erection; since the last blazing row with Pamela, he'd vaguely assumed he was no longer interested in sex. Instead, they end up naked on the sofa, surrounded by discarded clothing - Annette is very conservative, preferring the naked penetrative fuck of the last century to the more sophisticated fetishes of the present day.
+
+Afterward, he's even more surprised to discover that he's still tumescent. "The capsules?" he asks.
+
+She sprawls a well-muscled but thin thigh across him, then reaches down to grab his penis. Squeezes it. "Yes," she admits. "You need much special help to unwind, I think." Another squeeze. "Crystal meth and a traditional phosphodiesterase inhibitor." He grabs one of her small breasts, feeling very brutish and primitive. Naked. He's not sure Pamela ever let him see her fully naked: She thought skin was more sexy when it was covered. Annette squeezes him again, and he stiffens. "More!"
+
+By the time they finish, he's aching, and she shows him how to use the bidet. Everything is crystal clear, and her touch is electrifying. While she showers, he sits on the toilet seat lid and rants about Turing-completeness as an attribute of company law, about cellular automata and the blind knapsack problem, about his work on solving the Communist Central Planning problem using a network of interlocking unmanned companies. About the impending market adjustment in integrity, the sinister resurrection of the recording music industry, and the still-pressing need to dismantle Mars.
+
+When she steps out of the shower, he tells her that he loves her. She kisses him and slides his glasses and earpieces off his head so that he's really naked, sits on his lap, and fucks his brains out again, and whispers in his ear that she loves him and wants to be his manager. Then she leads him into her bedroom and tells him exactly what she wants him to wear, and she puts on her own clothes, and she gives him a mirror with some white powder on it to sniff. When she's got him dolled up they go out for a night of really serious clubbing, Annette in a tuxedo and Manfred in a blond wig, red silk off-the-shoulder gown, and high heels. Sometime in the early hours, exhausted and resting his head on her shoulder during the last tango in a BDSM club in the Rue Ste-Anne, he realizes that it really is possible to be in lust with someone other than Pamela.
+
+* * *
+
+Aineko wakes Manfred by repeatedly head-butting him above the left eye. He groans, and as he tries to open his eyes, he finds that his mouth tastes like a dead trout, his skin feels greasy with make-up, and his head is pounding. There's a banging noise somewhere. Aineko meows urgently. He sits up, feeling unaccustomed silk underwear rubbing against incredibly sore skin - he's fully dressed, just sprawled out on the sofa. Snores emanate from the bedroom; the banging is coming from the front door. Someone wants to come in. Shit. He rubs his head, stands up, and nearly falls flat on his face: He hasn't even taken those ridiculous high heels off. How much did I drink last night? he wonders. His glasses are on the breakfast bar; he pulls them on and is besieged by an urgent flurry of ideas demanding attention. He straightens his wig, picks up his skirts, and trips across to the door with a sinking feeling. Luckily his publicly traded reputation is strictly technical.
+
+He unlocks the door. "Who is it?" he asks in English. By way of reply somebody shoves the door in, hard. Manfred falls back against the wall, winded. His glasses stop working, sidelook displays filling with multicolored static.
+
+Two men charge in, identically dressed in jeans and leather jackets. They're wearing gloves and occlusive face masks, and one of them points a small and very menacing ID card at Manfred. A self-propelled gun hovers in the doorway, watching everything. "Where is he?"
+
+"Who?" gasps Manfred, breathless and terrified.
+
+"Macx." The other intruder steps into the living room quickly, pans around, ducks through the bathroom door. Aineko flops as limp as a dishrag in front of the sofa. The intruder checks out the bedroom: There's a brief scream, cut off short.
+
+"I don't know - who?" Manfred is choking with fear.
+
+The other intruder ducks out of the bedroom, waves a hand dismissively.
+
+"We are sorry to have bothered you," the man with the card says stiffly. He replaced it in his jacket pocket. "If you should see Manfred Macx, tell him that the Copyright Control Association of America advises him to cease and desist from his attempt to assist music thieves and other degenerate mongrel second-hander enemies of Objectivism. Reputations only of use to those alive to own them. Goodbye."
+
+The two copyright gangsters disappear through the door, leaving Manfred to shake his head dizzily while his glasses reboot. It takes him a moment to register the scream from the bedroom. "Fuck - Annette!"
+
+She appears in the open doorway, holding a sheet around her waist, looking angry and confused. "Annette!" he calls. She looks around, sees him, and begins to laugh shakily. "Annette!" He crosses over to her. "You're okay," he says. "You're okay."
+
+"You too." She hugs him, and she's shaking. Then she holds him at arm's length. "My, what a pretty picture!"
+
+"They wanted me," he says, and his teeth are chattering. "Why?"
+
+She looks up at him seriously. "You must bathe. Then have coffee. We are not at home, oui?"
+
+"Ah, oui." He looks down. Aineko is sitting up, looking dazed. "Shower. Then that dispatch for CIA news."
+
+"The dispatch?" She looks puzzled. "I filed that last night. When I was in the shower. The microphone, he is waterproof."
+
+* * *
+
+By the time Arianespace's security contractors show up, Manfred has stripped off Annette's evening gown and showered; he's sitting in the living room wearing a bathrobe, drinking a half-liter mug of espresso and swearing under his breath.
+
+While he was dancing the night away in Annette's arms, the global reputation market has gone nonlinear: People are putting their trust in the Christian Coalition and the Eurocommunist Alliance - always a sign that the times are bad - while perfectly sound trading enterprises have gone into free fall, as if a major bribery scandal has broken out.
+
+Manfred trades ideas for kudos via the Free Intellect Foundation, bastard child of George Soros and Richard Stallman. His reputation is cemented by donations to the public good that don't backfire. So he's offended and startled to discover that he's dropped twenty points in the past two hours - and frightened to see that this is by no means unusual. He was expecting a ten-point drop mediated via an options trade - payment for the use of the anonymous luggage remixer that routed his old suitcase to Mombasa and in return sent this new one to him via the left-luggage office in Luton - but this is more serious. The entire reputation market seems to have been hit by the confidence flu.
+
+Annette bustles around busily, pointing out angles and timings to the forensics team her head office sent in answer to her call for back-up. She seems more angry and shaken than worried by the intrusion. It's probably an occupational hazard for any upwardly mobile executive in the old, grasping network of greed that Manfred's agalmic future aims to supplant. The forensics dude and dudette, a pair of cute, tanned Lebanese youngsters, point the yellow snout of their mass spectroscope into various corners and agree that there's something not unlike gun oil in the air. But, so sorry, the intruders wore masks to trap the skin particles and left behind a spray of dust vacuumed from the seat of a city bus, so there's no way of getting a genotype match. Presently they agree to log it as a suspected corporate intrusion (origin: unclassified; severity: worrying) and increase the logging level on her kitchen telemetry. And remember to wear your earrings at all times, please. They leave, and Annette locks the door, leans against it, and curses for a whole long minute.
+
+"They gave me a message from the copyright control agency," Manfred says unevenly when she winds down. "Russian gangsters from New York bought the recording cartels a few years ago, you know? After the rights stitch-up fell apart, and the artists all went on-line while they focused on copy prevention technologies, the Mafiya were the only people who would buy the old business model. These guys add a whole new meaning to copy protection: This was just a polite cease and desist notice by their standards. They run the record shops, and they try to block any music distribution channel they don't own. Not very successfully, though - most gangsters are living in the past, more conservative than any normal businessman can afford to be. What was it that you put on the wire?"
+
+Annette closes her eyes. "I don't remember. No." She holds up a hand. "Open mike. I streamed you into a file and cut, cut out the bits about me." She opens her eyes and shakes her head. "What was I on?"
+
+"You don't know either?"
+
+He stands up, and she walks over and throws her arms around him. "I was on you," she murmurs.
+
+"Bullshit." He pulls away, then sees how this upsets her. Something is blinking for attention in his glasses; he's been off-line for the best part of six hours and is getting a panicky butterfly stomach at the idea of not being in touch with everything that's happened in the last twenty kiloseconds. "I need to know more. Something in that report rattled the wrong cages. Or someone ratted on the suitcase exchange - I meant the dispatch to be a heads-up for whoever needs a working state planning system, not an invitation to shoot me!"
+
+"Well, then." She lets go of him. "Do your work." Coolly: "I'll be around."
+
+He realizes that he's hurt her, but he doesn't see any way of explaining that he didn't mean to - at least, not without digging himself in deeper. He finishes his croissant and plunges into one of those unavoidable fits of deep interaction, fingers twitching on invisible keypads and eyeballs jiggling as his glasses funnel deep media straight into his skull through the highest bandwidth channel currently available.
+
+One of his e-mail accounts is halfway to the moon with automatic messages, companies with names like agalmic.holdings.root.8E.F0 screaming for the attention of their transitive director. Each of these companies - and there are currently more than sixteen thousand of them, although the herd is growing day by day - has three directors and is the director of three other companies. Each of them executes a script in a functional language Manfred invented; the directors tell the company what to do, and the instructions include orders to pass instructions on to their children. In effect, they are a flock of cellular automata, like the cells in Conway's Game of Life, only far more complex and powerful.
+
+Manfred's companies form a programmable grid. Some of them are armed with capital in the form of patents Manfred filed, then delegated rather than passing on to one of the Free Foundations. Some of them are effectively nontrading, but occupy directorial roles. Their corporate functions (such as filing of accounts and voting in new directors) are all handled centrally through his company-operating framework, and their trading is carried out via several of the more popular B2B enabler dot-coms. Internally, the companies do other, more obscure load-balancing computations, processing resource-allocation problems like a classic state central planning system. None of which explains why fully half of them have been hit by lawsuits in the past twenty-two hours.
+
+The lawsuits are ... random. That's the only pattern Manfred can detect. Some of them allege patent infringements; these he might take seriously, except that about a third of the targets are director companies that don't actually do anything visible to the public. A few lawsuits allege mismanagement, but then there's a whole bizarre raft of spurious nonsense: suits for wrongful dismissal or age discrimination - against companies with no employees - complaints about reckless trading, and one action alleging that the defendant (in conspiracy with the prime minister of Japan, the government of Canada, and the Emir of Kuwait) is using orbital mind-control lasers to make the plaintiff's pet chihuahua bark at all hours of day and night.
+
+Manfred groans and does a quick calculation. At the current rate, lawsuits are hitting his corporate grid at a rate of one every sixteen seconds - up from none in the preceding six months. In another day, this is going to saturate him. If it keeps up for a week, it'll saturate every court in the United States. Someone has found a means to do for lawsuits what he's doing for companies - and they've chosen him as their target.
+
+To say that Manfred is unamused is an understatement. If he wasn't already preoccupied with Annette's emotional state and edgy from the intrusion, he'd be livid - but he's still human enough that he responds to human stimuli first. So he determines to do something about it, but he's still flashing on the floating gun, her cross-dressing cool.
+
+Transgression, sex, and networks; these are all on his mind when Glashwiecz phones again.
+
+"Hello?" Manfred answers distractedly; he's busy pondering the lawsuit bot that's attacking his systems.
+
+"Macx! The elusive Mr. Macx!" Glashwiecz sounds positively overjoyed to have tracked down his target.
+
+Manfred winces. "Who is this?" he asks.
+
+"I called you yesterday," says the lawyer; "You should have listened." He chortles horribly. "Now I have you!"
+
+Manfred holds the phone away from his face, like something poisonous. "I'm recording this," he warns. "Who the hell are you and what do you want?"
+
+"Your wife has retained my partnership's services to pursue her interests in your divorce case. When I called you yesterday it was to point out without prejudice that your options are running out. I have an order, signed in court three days ago, to have all your assets frozen. These ridiculous shell companies notwithstanding, she's going to take you for exactly what you owe her. After tax, of course. She's very insistent on that point."
+
+Manfred glances round, puts his phone on hold for a moment: "Where's my suitcase?" he asks Aineko. The cat sidles away, ignoring him. "Shit." He can't see the new luggage anywhere. Quite possibly it's on its way to Morocco, complete with its priceless cargo of high-density noise. He returns his attention to the phone. Glashwiecz is droning on about equitable settlements, cumulative IRS tax demands - that seem to have materialized out of fantasy with Pam's imprimatur on them - and the need to make a clean breast of things in court and confess to his sins. "Where's the fucking suitcase?" He takes the phone off hold. "Shut the fuck up, please, I'm trying to think."
+
+"I'm not going to shut up! You're on the court docket already, Macx. You can't evade your responsibilities forever. You've got a wife and a helpless daughter to care for -"
+
+"A daughter?" That cuts right through Manfred's preoccupation with the suitcase.
+
+"Didn't you know?" Glashwiecz sounds pleasantly surprised. "She was decanted last Thursday. Perfectly healthy, I'm told. I thought you knew; you have viewing rights via the clinic webcam. Anyway, I'll just leave you with this thought - the sooner you come to a settlement, the sooner I can unfreeze your companies. Good-bye."
+
+The suitcase rolls into view, peeping coyly out from behind Annette's dressing table. Manfred breathes a sigh of relief and beckons to it; at the moment, it's easier to deal with his Plan B than dawn raids by objectivist gangsters, Annette's sulk, his wife's incessant legal spamming, and the news that he is a father against his will. "C'mon over here, you stray baggage. Let's see what I got for my reputation derivatives ..."
+
+* * *
+
+Anticlimax.
+
+Annette's communiqué is anodyne; a giggling confession off camera (shower-curtain rain in the background) that the famous Manfred Macx is in Paris for a weekend of clubbing, drugging, and general hell-raising. Oh, and he's promised to invent three new paradigm shifts before breakfast every day, starting with a way to bring about the creation of Really Existing Communism by building a state central planning apparatus that interfaces perfectly with external market systems and somehow manages to algorithmically outperform the Monte Carlo free-for-all of market economics, solving the calculation problem. Just because he can, because hacking economics is fun, and he wants to hear the screams from the Chicago School.
+
+Try as he may, Manfred can't see anything in the press release that is at all unusual. It's just the sort of thing he does, and getting it on the net was why he was looking for a CIA stringer in the first place.
+
+He tries to explain this to her in the bath as he soaps her back. "I don't understand what they're on about," he complains. "There's nothing that tipped them off - except that I was in Paris, and you filed the news. You did nothing wrong."
+
+"Mais oui." She turns round, slippery as an eel, and slides backward into the water. "I try to tell you this, but you are not listening."
+
+"I am now." Water droplets cling to the outside of his glasses, plastering his view of the room with laser speckle highlights. "I'm sorry, Annette, I brought this mess with me. I can take it out of your life."
+
+"No!" She rises up in front of him and leans forward, face serious. "I said yesterday. I want to be your manager. Take me in."
+
+"I don't need a manager; my whole thing is about being fast and out of control!"
+
+"You think you do not need a manager, but your companies do," she observes. "You have lawsuits, how many? You cannot the time to oversee them spare. The Soviets, they abolish capitalists, but even they need managers. Please, let me manage for you!"
+
+Annette is so intense about the idea that she becomes visibly aroused. He leans toward her, cups a hand around one taut nipple. "The company matrix isn't sold yet," he admits.
+
+"It is not?" She looks delighted. "Excellent! To who can this be sold, to Moscow? To SLORC? To -"
+
+"I was thinking of the Italian Communist Party," he says. "It's a pilot project. I was working on selling it - I need the money for my divorce, and to close the deal on the luggage - but it's not that simple. Someone has to run the damn thing - someone with a keen understanding of how to interface a central planning system with a capitalist economy. A system administrator with experience of working for a multinational corporation would be perfect, ideally with an interest in finding new ways and means of interfacing the centrally planned enterprise to the outside world." He looks at her with suddenly dawning surmise. "Um, are you interested?"
+
+* * *
+
+Rome is hotter than downtown Columbia, South Carolina, over Thanksgiving weekend; it stinks of methane-burning Skodas with a low undertone of cooked dog shit. The cars are brightly colored subcompact missiles, hurtling in and out of alleyways like angry wasps: Hot-wiring their drive-by-wire seems to be the national sport, although Fiat's embedded systems people have always written notoriously wobbly software.
+
+Manfred emerges from the Stazione Termini into dusty sunlight, blinking like an owl. His glasses keep up a rolling monologue about who lived where in the days of the late Republic. They're stuck on a tourist channel and won't come unglued from that much history without a struggle. Manfred doesn't feel like a struggle right now. He feels like he's been sucked dry over the weekend: a light, hollow husk that might blow away in a stiff breeze. He hasn't had a patentable idea all day. This is not a good state to be in on a Monday morning when he's due to meet the former Minister for Economic Affairs, in order to give him a gift that will probably get the minister a shot at higher office and get Pam's lawyer off his back. But somehow he can't bring himself to worry too much: Annette has been good for him.
+
+The ex-minister's private persona isn't what Manfred was expecting. All Manfred has seen so far is a polished public avatar in a traditionally cut suit, addressing the Chamber of Deputies in cyberspace; which is why, when he rings the doorbell set in the whitewashed doorframe of Gianni's front door, he isn't expecting a piece of Tom of Finland beefcake, complete with breechclout and peaked leather cap, to answer.
+
+"Hello, I am here to see the minister," Manfred says carefully. Aineko, perched on his left shoulder, attempts to translate: It trills something that sounds extremely urgent. Everything sounds urgent in Italian.
+
+"It's okay, I'm from Iowa," says the guy in the doorway. He tucks a thumb under one leather strap and grins over his moustache: "What's it about?" Over his shoulder: "Gianni! Visitor!"
+
+"It's about the economy," Manfred says carefully. "I'm here to make it obsolete."
+
+The beefcake backs away from the door cautiously - then the minister appears behind him. "Ah, signore Macx! It's okay, Johnny, I have been expecting him." Gianni extends a rapid welcome, like a hyperactive gnome buried in a white toweling bathrobe: "Please come in, my friend! I'm sure you must be tired from your journey. A refreshment for the guest if you please, Johnny. Would you prefer coffee or something stronger?"
+
+Five minutes later, Manfred is buried up to his ears in a sofa covered in buttery white cowhide, a cup of virulently strong espresso balanced precariously on his knee, while Gianni Vittoria himself holds forth on the problems of implementing a postindustrial ecosystem on top of a bureaucratic system with its roots in the bullheadedly modernist era of the 1920s. Gianni is a visionary of the left, a strange attractor within the chaotic phase-space of Italian politics. A former professor of Marxist economics, his ideas are informed by a painfully honest humanism, and everyone - even his enemies - agrees that he is one of the greatest theoreticians of the post-EU era. But his intellectual integrity prevents him from rising to the very top, and his fellow travelers are much ruder about him than his ideological enemies, accusing him of the ultimate political crime — valuing truth over power.
+
+Manfred had met Gianni a couple of years earlier via a hosted politics chat room; at the beginning of last week, he sent him a paper detailing his embeddable planned economy and a proposal for using it to turbocharge the endless Italian attempt to re-engineer its government systems. This is the thin end of the wedge: If Manfred is right, it could catalyse a whole new wave of communist expansion, driven by humanitarian ideals and demonstrably superior performance, rather than wishful thinking and ideology.
+
+"It is impossible, I fear. This is Italy, my friend. Everybody has to have their say. Not everybody even understands what it is we are talking about, but that won't stop them talking about it. Since 1945, our government requires consensus - a reaction to what came before. Do you know, we have five different routes to putting forward a new law, two of them added as emergency measures to break the gridlock? And none of them work on their own unless you can get everybody to agree. Your plan is daring and radical, but if it works, we must understand why we work - and that digs right to the root of being human, and not everybody will agree."
+
+At this point Manfred realizes that he's lost. "I don't understand," he says, genuinely puzzled. "What has the human condition got to do with economics?"
+
+The minister sighs abruptly. "You are very unusual. You earn no money, do you? But you are rich, because grateful people who have benefited from your work give you everything you need. You are like a medieval troubadour who has found favor with the aristocracy. Your labor is not alienated - it is given freely, and your means of production is with you always, inside your head." Manfred blinks; the jargon is weirdly technical-sounding but orthogonal to his experience, offering him a disquieting glimpse into the world of the terminally future-shocked. He is surprised to find that not understanding itches.
+
+Gianni taps his balding temple with a knuckle like a walnut. "Most people spend little time inside their heads. They don't understand how you live. They're like medieval peasants looking in puzzlement at the troubadour. This system you invent, for running a planned economy, is delightful and elegant: Lenin's heirs would have been awestruck. But it is not a system for the new century. It is not human."
+
+Manfred scratches his head. "It seems to me that there's nothing human about the economics of scarcity," he says. "Anyway, humans will be obsolete as economic units within a couple more decades. All I want to do is make everybody rich beyond their wildest dreams before that happens." A pause for a sip of coffee, and to think, one honest statement deserves another: "And to pay off a divorce settlement."
+
+"Ye-es? Well, let me show you my library, my friend," he says, standing up. "This way."
+
+Gianni ambles out of the white living room with its carnivorous leather sofas, and up a cast-iron spiral staircase that nails some kind of upper level to the underside of the roof. "Human beings aren't rational," he calls over his shoulder. "That was the big mistake of the Chicago School economists, neoliberals to a man, and of my predecessors, too. If human behavior was logical, there would be no gambling, hmm? The house always wins, after all." The staircase debouches into another airy whitewashed room, where one wall is occupied by a wooden bench supporting a number of ancient, promiscuously cabled servers and a very new, eye-wateringly expensive solid volume renderer. Opposite the bench is a wall occupied from floor to ceiling by bookcases: Manfred looks at the ancient, low-density medium and sneezes, momentarily bemused by the sight of data density measured in kilograms per megabyte rather than vice versa.
+
+"What's it fabbing?" Manfred asks, pointing at the renderer, which is whining to itself and slowly sintering together something that resembles a carriage clockmaker's fever dream of a spring-powered hard disk drive.
+
+"Oh, one of Johnny's toys - a micromechanical digital phonograph player," Gianni says dismissively. "He used to design Babbage engines for the Pentagon - stealth computers. (No van Eck radiation, you know.) Look." He carefully pulls a fabric-bound document out of the obsolescent data wall and shows the spine to Manfred: "On the Theory of Games, by John von Neumann. Signed first edition."
+
+Aineko meeps and dumps a slew of confusing purple finite state automata into Manfred's left eye. The hardback is dusty and dry beneath his fingertips as he remembers to turn the pages gently. "This copy belonged to the personal library of Oleg Kordiovsky. A lucky man is Oleg: He bought it in 1952, while on a visit to New York, and the MVD let him to keep it."
+
+"He must be -" Manfred pauses. More data, historical time lines. "Part of GosPlan?"
+
+"Correct." Gianni smiles thinly. "Two years before the central committee denounced computers as bourgeois deviationist pseudoscience intended to dehumanize the proletarian. They recognized the power of robots even then. A shame they did not anticipate the compiler or the Net."
+
+"I don't understand the significance. Nobody back then could expect that the main obstacle to doing away with market capitalism would be overcome within half a century, surely?"
+
+"Indeed not. But it's true: Since the 1980s, it has been possible - in principle - to resolve resource allocation problems algorithmically, by computer, instead of needing a market. Markets are wasteful: They allow competition, much of which is thrown on the scrap heap. So why do they persist?"
+
+Manfred shrugs. "You tell me. Conservativism?"
+
+Gianni closes the book and puts it back on the shelf. "Markets afford their participants the illusion of free will, my friend. You will find that human beings do not like being forced into doing something, even if it is in their best interests. Of necessity, a command economy must be coercive - it does, after all, command."
+
+"But my system doesn't! It mediates where supplies go, not who has to produce what -"
+
+Gianni is shaking his head. "Backward chaining or forward chaining, it is still an expert system, my friend. Your companies need no human beings, and this is a good thing, but they must not direct the activities of human beings, either. If they do, you have just enslaved people to an abstract machine, as dictators have throughout history."
+
+Manfred's eyes scan along the bookshelf. "But the market itself is an abstract machine! A lousy one, too. I'm mostly free of it - but how long is it going to continue oppressing people?"
+
+"Maybe not as long as you fear." Gianni sits down next to the renderer, which is currently extruding the inference mill of the analytical engine. "The marginal value of money decreases, after all: The more you have, the less it means to you. We are on the edge of a period of prolonged economic growth, with annual averages in excess of twenty percent, if the Council of Europe's predictor metrics are anything to go by. The last of the flaccid industrial economy has withered away, and this era's muscle of economic growth, what used to be the high-technology sector, is now everything. We can afford a little wastage, my friend, if that is the price of keeping people happy until the marginal value of money withers away completely."
+
+Realization dawns. "You want to abolish scarcity, not just money!"
+
+"Indeed." Gianni grins. "There's more to that than mere economic performance; you have to consider abundance as a factor. Don't plan the economy; take things out of the economy. Do you pay for the air you breathe? Should uploaded minds - who will be the backbone of our economy, by and by - have to pay for processor cycles? No and no. Now, do you want to know how you can pay for your divorce settlement? And can I interest you, and your interestingly accredited new manager, in a little project of mine?"
+
+* * *
+
+The shutters are thrown back, the curtains tied out of the way, and Annette's huge living room windows are drawn open in the morning breeze.
+
+Manfred sits on a leather-topped piano stool, his suitcase open at his feet. He's running a link from the case to Annette's stereo, an antique stand-alone unit with a satellite Internet uplink. Someone has chipped it, crudely revoking its copy protection algorithm: The back of its case bears scars from the soldering iron. Annette is curled up on the huge sofa, wrapped in a kaftan and a pair of high-bandwidth goggles, thrashing out an internal Arianespace scheduling problem with some colleagues in Iran and Guyana.
+
+His suitcase is full of noise, but what's coming out of the stereo is ragtime. Subtract entropy from a data stream - coincidentally uncompressing it - and what's left is information. With a capacity of about a trillion terabytes, the suitcase's holographic storage reservoir has enough capacity to hold every music, film, and video production of the twentieth century with room to spare. This is all stuff that is effectively out of copyright control, work-for-hire owned by bankrupt companies, released before the CCAA could make their media clampdown stick. Manfred is streaming the music through Annette's stereo - but keeping the noise it was convoluted with. High-grade entropy is valuable, too ...
+
+Presently, Manfred sighs and pushes his glasses up his forehead, killing the displays. He's thought his way around every permutation of what's going on, and it looks like Gianni was right: There's nothing left to do but wait for everyone to show up.
+
+For a moment, he feels old and desolate, as slow as an unassisted human mind. Agencies have been swapping in and out of his head for the past day, ever since he got back from Rome. He's developed a butterfly attention span, irritable and unable to focus on anything while the information streams fight it out for control of his cortex, arguing about a solution to his predicament. Annette is putting up with his mood swings surprisingly calmly. He's not sure why, but he glances her way fondly. Her obsessions run surprisingly deep, and she's quite clearly using him for her own purposes. So why does he feel more comfortable around her than he did with Pam?
+
+She stretches and pushes her goggles up. "Oui?"
+
+"I was just thinking." He smiles. "Three days and you haven't told me what I should be doing with myself, yet."
+
+She pulls a face. "Why would I do that?"
+
+"Oh, no reason. I'm just not over - " He shrugs uncomfortably. There it is, an inexplicable absence in his life, but not one he feels he urgently needs to fill yet. Is this what a relationship between equals feels like? He's not sure: Starting with the occlusive cocooning of his upbringing and continuing through all his adult relationships, he's been effectively - voluntarily - dominated by his partners. Maybe the antisubmissive conditioning is working, after all. But if so, why the creative malaise? Why isn't he coming up with original new ideas this week? Could it be that his peculiar brand of creativity is an outlet, that he needs the pressure of being lovingly enslaved to make him burst out into a great flowering of imaginative brilliance? Or could it be that he really is missing Pam?
+
+Annette stands up and walks over, slowly. He looks at her and feels lust and affection, and isn't sure whether or not this is love. "When are they due?" she asks, leaning over him.
+
+"Any -" The doorbell chimes.
+
+"Ah. I will get that." She stalks away, opens the door.
+
+"You!"
+
+Manfred's head snaps round as if he's on a leash. Her leash: But he wasn't expecting her to come in person.
+
+"Yes, me," Annette says easily. "Come in. Be my guest."
+
+Pam enters the apartment living room with flashing eyes, her tame lawyer in tow. "Well, look what the robot kitty dragged in," she drawls, fixing Manfred with an expression that owes more to anger than to humor. It's not like her, this blunt hostility, and he wonders where it came from.
+
+Manfred rises. For a moment he's transfixed by the sight of his dominatrix wife, and his - mistress? conspirator? lover? - side by side. The contrast is marked: Annette's expression of ironic amusement a foil for Pamela's angry sincerity. Somewhere behind them stands a balding middle-aged man in a suit, carrying a folio: just the kind of diligent serf Pam might have turned him into, given time. Manfred musters up a smile. "Can I offer you some coffee?" he asks. "The party of the third part seems to be late."
+
+"Coffee would be great, mine's dark, no sugar," twitters the lawyer. He puts his briefcase down on a side table and fiddles with his wearable until a light begins to blink from his spectacle frames: "I'm recording this, I'm sure you understand."
+
+Annette sniffs and heads for the kitchen, which is charmingly manual but not very efficient; Pam is pretending she doesn't exist. "Well, well, well." She shakes her head. "I'd expected better of you than a French tart's boudoir, Manny. And before the ink's dry on the divorce - these days that'll cost you, didn't you think of that?"
+
+"I'm surprised you're not in the hospital," he says, changing the subject. "Is postnatal recovery outsourced these days?"
+
+"The employers." She slips her coat off her shoulders and hangs it behind the broad wooden door. "They subsidize everything when you reach my grade." Pamela is wearing a very short, very expensive dress, the kind of weapon in the war between the sexes that ought to come with an end-user certificate: But to his surprise it has no effect on him. He realizes that he's completely unable to evaluate her gender, almost as if she's become a member of another species. "As you'd be aware if you'd been paying attention."
+
+"I always pay attention, Pam. It's the only currency I carry."
+
+"Very droll, ha-ha," interrupts Glashwiecz. "You do realize that you're paying me while I stand here listening to this fascinating byplay?"
+
+Manfred stares at him. "You know I don't have any money."
+
+"Ah," Glashwiecz smiles, "but you must be mistaken. Certainly the judge will agree with me that you must be mistaken - all a lack of paper documentation means is that you've covered your trail. There's the small matter of the several thousand corporations you own, indirectly. Somewhere at the bottom of that pile there has got to be something, hasn't there?"
+
+A hissing, burbling noise like a sackful of large lizards being drowned in mud emanates from the kitchen, suggesting that Annette's percolator is nearly ready. Manfred's left hand twitches, playing chords on an air keyboard. Without being at all obvious, he's releasing a bulletin about his current activities that should soon have an effect on the reputation marketplace. "Your attack was rather elegant," he comments, sitting down on the sofa as Pam disappears into the kitchen.
+
+Glashwiecz nods. "The idea was one of my interns'," he says. "I don't understand this distributed denial of service stuff, but Lisa grew up on it. Something about it being a legal travesty, but workable all the same."
+
+"Uh-huh." Manfred's opinion of the lawyer drops a notch. He notices Pam reappearing from the kitchen, her expression icy. A moment later Annette surfaces carrying a jug and some cups, beaming innocently. Something's going on, but at that moment, one of his agents nudges him urgently in the left ear, his suitcase keens mournfully and beams a sense of utter despair at him, and the doorbell rings again.
+
+"So what's the scam?" Glashwiecz sits down uncomfortably close to Manfred and murmurs out of one side of his mouth. "Where's the money?"
+
+Manfred looks at him irritably. "There is no money," he says. "The idea is to make money obsolete. Hasn't she explained that?" His eyes wander, taking in the lawyer's Patek Philippe watch, his Java-enabled signet ring.
+
+"C'mon. Don't give me that line. Look, all it takes is a couple of million, and you can buy your way free for all I care. All I'm here for is to see that your wife and daughter don't get left penniless and starving. You know and I know that you've got bags of it stuffed away - just look at your reputation! You didn't get that by standing at the roadside with a begging bowl, did you?"
+
+Manfred snorts. "You're talking about an elite IRS auditor here. She isn't penniless; she gets a commission on every poor bastard she takes to the cleaners, and she was born with a trust fund. Me, I -" The stereo bleeps. Manfred pulls his glasses on. Whispering ghosts of dead artists hum through his earlobes, urgently demanding their freedom. Someone knocks at the door again, and he glances around to see Annette walking toward it.
+
+"You're making it hard on yourself," Glashwiecz warns.
+
+"Expecting company?" Pam asks, one brittle eyebrow raised in Manfred's direction.
+
+"Not exactly -"
+
+Annette opens the door and a couple of guards in full SWAT gear march in. They're clutching gadgets that look like crosses between digital sewing machines and grenade launchers, and their helmets are studded with so many sensors that they resemble 1950s space probes. "That's them," Annette says clearly.
+
+"Mais Oui." The door closes itself and the guards stand to either side. Annette stalks toward Pam.
+
+"You think to walk in here, to my pied-a-terre, and take from Manfred?" she sniffs.
+
+"You're making a big mistake, lady," Pam says, her voice steady and cold enough to liquefy helium.
+
+A burst of static from one of the troopers. "No," Annette says distantly. "No mistake."
+
+She points at Glashwiecz. "Are you aware of the takeover?"
+
+"Takeover?" The lawyer looks puzzled, but not alarmed by the presence of the guards.
+
+"As of three hours ago," Manfred says quietly, "I sold a controlling interest in agalmic.holdings.root.1.1.1 to Athene Accelerants BV, a venture capital outfit from Maastricht. One dot one dot one is the root node of the central planning tree. Athene aren't your usual VC, they're accelerants - they take explosive business plans and detonate them." Glashwiecz is looking pale - whether with anger or fear of a lost commission is impossible to tell. "Actually, Athene Accelerants is owned by a shell company owned by the Italian Communist Party's pension trust. The point is, you're in the presence of one dot one dot one's chief operations officer."
+
+Pam looks annoyed. "Puerile attempts to dodge responsibility -"
+
+Annette clears her throat. "Exactly who do you think you are trying to sue?" she asks Glashwiecz sweetly. "Here we have laws about unfair restraint of trade. Also about foreign political interference, specifically in the financial affairs of an Italian party of government."
+
+"You wouldn't -"
+
+"I would." Manfred brushes his hands on his knees and stands up. "Done, yet?" he asks the suitcase.
+
+Muffled beeps, then a gravelly synthesized voice speaks. "Uploads completed."
+
+"Ah, good." He grins at Annette. "Time for our next guests?"
+
+On cue, the doorbell rings again. The guards sidle to either side of the door. Annette snaps her fingers, and it opens to admit a pair of smartly dressed thugs. It's beginning to get crowded in the living room.
+
+"Which one of you is Macx?" snaps the older one of the two thugs, staring at Glashwiecz for no obvious reason. He hefts an aluminum briefcase. "Got a writ to serve."
+
+"You'd be the CCAA?" asks Manfred.
+
+"You bet. If you're Macx, I have a restraining order -"
+
+Manfred raises a hand. "It's not me you want," he says. "It's this lady." He points at Pam, whose mouth opens in silent protest. "Y'see, the intellectual property you're chasing wants to be free. It's so free that it's now administered by a complex set of corporate instruments lodged in the Netherlands, and the prime shareholder as of approximately four minutes ago is my soon-to-be-ex-wife Pamela, here." He winks at Glashwiecz. "Except she doesn't control anything."
+
+"Just what do you think you're playing at, Manfred?" Pamela snarls, unable to contain herself any longer. The guards shuffle: The larger, junior CCAA enforcer tugs at his boss's jacket nervously.
+
+"Well." Manfred picks up his coffee and takes a sip. Grimaces. "Pam wanted a divorce settlement, didn't she? The most valuable assets I own are the rights to a whole bunch of recategorized work-for-hire that slipped through the CCAA's fingers a few years back. Part of the twentieth century's cultural heritage that got locked away by the music industry in the last decade - Janis Joplin, the Doors, that sort of thing. Artists who weren't around to defend themselves anymore. When the music cartels went bust, the rights went for a walk. I took them over originally with the idea of setting the music free. Giving it back to the public domain, as it were."
+
+Annette nods at the guards, one of whom nods back and starts muttering and buzzing into a throat mike. Manfred continues. "I was working on a solution to the central planning paradox - how to interface a centrally planned enclave to a market economy. My good friend Gianni Vittoria suggested that such a shell game could have alternative uses. So I've not freed the music. Instead, I signed the rights over to various actors and threads running inside the agalmic holdings network - currently one million, forty-eight thousand, five hundred and seventy-five companies. They swap rights rapidly - the rights to any given song are resident in a given company for, oh, all of fifty milliseconds at a time. Now understand, I don't own these companies. I don't even have a financial interest in them anymore. I've deeded my share of the profits to Pam, here. I'm getting out of the biz, Gianni's suggested something rather more challenging for me to do instead."
+
+He takes another mouthful of coffee. The recording Mafiya goon glares at him. Pam glares at him. Annette stands against one wall, looking amused. "Perhaps you'd like to sort it out between you?" he asks. Aside, to Glashwiecz: "I trust you'll drop your denial of service attack before I set the Italian parliament on you? By the way, you'll find the book value of the intellectual property assets I deeded to Pamela - by the value these gentlemen place on them - is somewhere in excess of a billion dollars. As that's rather more than ninety-nine-point-nine percent of my assets, you'll probably want to look elsewhere for your fees."
+
+Glashwiecz stands up carefully. The lead goon stares at Pamela. "Is this true?" he demands. "This little squirt give you IP assets of Sony Bertelsmann Microsoft Music? We have claim! You come to us for distribution or you get in deep trouble."
+
+The second goon rumbles agreement: "Remember, dose MP3s, dey bad for you health!"
+
+Annette claps her hands. "If you would to leave my apartment, please?" The door, attentive as ever, swings open: "You are no longer welcome here!"
+
+"This means you," Manfred advises Pam helpfully.
+
+"You bastard," she spits at him.
+
+Manfred forces a smile, bemused by his inability to respond to her the way she wants. Something's wrong, missing, between them. "I thought you wanted my assets. Are the encumbrances too much for you?"
+
+"You know what I mean! You and that two-bit Euro-whore! I'll nail you for child neglect!"
+
+His smile freezes. "Try it, and I'll sue you for breach of patent rights. My genome, you understand."
+
+Pam is taken aback by this. "You patented your own genome? What happened to the brave new communist, sharing information freely?"
+
+Manfred stops smiling. "Divorce happened. And the Italian Communist Party happened."
+
+She turns on her heel and stalks out of the apartment bravely, tame attorney in tow behind her, muttering about class action lawsuits and violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The CCAA lawyer's tame gorilla makes a grab for Glashwiecz's shoulder, and the guards move in, hustling the whole movable feast out into the stairwell. The door slams shut on a chaos of impending recursive lawsuits, and Manfred breathes a huge wheeze of relief.
+
+Annette walks over to him and leans her chin on the top of his head. "Think it will work?" she asks.
+
+"Well, the CCAA will sue the hell out of the company network for a while if they try to distribute by any channel that isn't controlled by the Mafiya. Pam gets rights to all the music, her settlement, but she can't sell it without going through the mob. And I got to serve notice on that legal shark: If he tries to take me on he's got to be politically bullet-proof. Hmm. Maybe I ought not to plan on going back to the USA this side of the singularity."
+
+"Profits," Annette sighs, "I do not easily understand this way of yours. Or this apocalyptic obsession with singularity."
+
+"Remember the old aphorism, if you love something, set it free? I freed the music."
+
+"But you didn't! You signed rights over -"
+
+"But first I uploaded the entire stash to several cryptographically anonymized public network filesystems over the past few hours, so there'll be rampant piracy. And the robot companies are all set to automagically grant any and every copyright request they receive, royalty-free, until the goons figure out how to hack them. But that's not the point. The point is abundance. The Mafiya can't stop it being distributed. Pam is welcome to her cut if she can figure an angle - but I bet she can't. She still believes in classical economics, the allocation of resources under conditions of scarcity. Information doesn't work that way. What matters is that people will be able to hear the music - instead of a Soviet central planning system, I've turned the network into a firewall to protect freed intellectual property."
+
+"Oh, Manfred, you hopeless idealist." She strokes his shoulder. "Whatever for?"
+
+"It's not just the music. When we develop a working AI or upload minds we'll need a way of defending it against legal threats. That's what Gianni pointed out to me ..."
+
+He's still explaining to her how he's laying the foundations for the transhuman explosion due early in the next decade when she picks him up in both arms, carries him to her bedroom, and commits outrageous acts of tender intimacy with him. But that's okay. He's still human, this decade.
+
+This, too, will pass, thinks the bulk of his metacortex. And it drifts off into the net to think deep thoughts elsewhere, leaving his meatbody to experience the ancient pleasures of the flesh set free.
+
+Chapter 3: Tourist
+
+Spring-Heeled Jack runs blind, blue fumes crackling from his heels. His right hand, outstretched for balance, clutches a mark's stolen memories. The victim is sitting on the hard stones of the pavement behind him. Maybe he's wondering what's happened; maybe he looks after the fleeing youth. But the tourist crowds block the view effectively, and in any case, he has no hope of catching the mugger. Hit-and-run amnesia is what the polis call it, but to Spring-Heeled Jack it's just more loot to buy fuel for his Russian army-surplus motorized combat boots.
+
+* * *
+
+The victim sits on the cobblestones clutching his aching temples. What happened? he wonders. The universe is a brightly colored blur of fast-moving shapes augmented by deafening noises. His ear-mounted cameras are rebooting repeatedly: They panic every eight hundred milliseconds, whenever they realize that they're alone on his personal area network without the comforting support of a hub to tell them where to send his incoming sensory feed. Two of his mobile phones are bickering moronically, disputing ownership of his grid bandwidth, and his memory ... is missing.
+
+A tall blond clutching an electric chainsaw sheathed in pink bubble wrap leans over him curiously: "you all right?" she asks.
+
+"I -" He shakes his head, which hurts. "Who am I?" His medical monitor is alarmed because his blood pressure has fallen: His pulse is racing, his serum cortisol titer is up, and a host of other biometrics suggest that he's going into shock.
+
+"I think you need an ambulance," the woman announces. She mutters at her lapel, "Phone, call an ambulance. " She waves a finger vaguely at him as if to reify a geolink, then wanders off, chain-saw clutched under one arm. Typical southern émigré behavior in the Athens of the North, too embarrassed to get involved. The man shakes his head again, eyes closed, as a flock of girls on powered blades skid around him in elaborate loops. A siren begins to warble, over the bridge to the north.
+
+Who am I? he wonders. "I'm Manfred," he says with a sense of stunned wonder. He looks up at the bronze statue of a man on a horse that looms above the crowds on this busy street corner. Someone has plastered a Hello Cthulhu! holo on the plaque that names its rider: Languid fluffy pink tentacles wave at him in an attack of kawaii. "I'm Manfred - Manfred. My memory. What's happened to my memory?" Elderly Malaysian tourists point at him from the open top deck of a passing bus. He burns with a sense of horrified urgency. I was going somewhere, he recalls. What was I doing? It was amazingly important, he thinks, but he can't remember what exactly it was. He was going to see someone about - it's on the tip of his tongue -
+
+* * *
+
+_1 Welcome to the eve of the third decade: a time of chaos characterized by an all-out depression in the space industries.
+
+_1 Most of the thinking power on the planet is now manufactured rather than born; there are ten microprocessors for every human being, and the number is doubling every fourteen months. Population growth in the developing world has stalled, the birth rate dropping below replacement level. In the wired nations, more forward-looking politicians are looking for ways to enfranchise their nascent AI base.
+
+_1 Space exploration is still stalled on the cusp of the second recession of the century. The Malaysian government has announced the goal of placing an imam on Mars within ten years, but nobody else cares enough to try.
+
+_1 The Space Settlers Society is still trying to interest Disney Corp. in the media rights to their latest L5 colony plan, unaware that there's already a colony out there and it isn't human: First-generation uploads, Californian spiny lobsters in wobbly symbiosis with elderly expert systems, thrive aboard an asteroid mining project established by the Franklin Trust. Meanwhile, Chinese space agency cutbacks are threatening the continued existence of Moonbase Mao. Nobody, it seems, has figured out how to turn a profit out beyond geosynchronous orbit.
+
+_1 Two years ago, JPL, the ESA, and the uploaded lobster colony on comet Khrunichev-7 picked up an apparently artificial signal from outside the solar system; most people don't know, and of those who do, even fewer care. After all, if humans can't even make it to Mars, who cares what's going on a hundred trillion kilometers farther out?
+
+* * *
+
+Portrait of a wasted youth:
+
+Jack is seventeen years and eleven months old. He has never met his father; he was unplanned, and Dad managed to kill himself in a building-site accident before the Child Support could garnish his income for the upbringing. His mother raised him in a two-bedroom housing association flat in Hawick. She worked in a call center when he was young, but business dried up: Humans aren't needed on the end of a phone anymore. Now she works in a drop-in business shop, stacking shelves for virtual fly-by-nights that come and go like tourists in the Festival season - but humans aren't in demand for shelf stacking either, these days.
+
+His mother sent Jack to a local religious school, where he was regularly excluded and effectively ran wild from the age of twelve. By thirteen, he was wearing a parole cuff for shoplifting; by fourteen, he'd broken his collarbone in a car crash while joyriding and the dour Presbyterian sheriff sent him to the Wee Frees, who completed the destruction of his educational prospects with high principles and an illicit tawse.
+
+Today, he's a graduate of the hard school of avoiding public surveillance cameras, with distinctions in steganographic alibi construction. Mostly this entails high-density crime - if you're going to mug someone, do so where there are so many bystanders that they can't pin the blame on you. But the polis expert systems are on his tail. If he keeps it up at this rate, in another four months they'll have a positive statistical correlation that will convince even a jury of his peers that he's guilty as fuck - and then he'll go down to Saughton for four years.
+
+But Jack doesn't understand the meaning of a Gaussian distribution or the significance of a chi-square test, and the future still looks bright to him as he pulls on the chunky spectacles he ripped off the tourist gawking at the statue on North Bridge. And after a moment, when they begin whispering into his ears in stereo and showing him pictures of the tourist's vision, it looks even brighter.
+
+"Gotta make a deal, gotta close a deal," whisper the glasses. "Meet the borg, strike a chord." Weird graphs in lurid colors are filling up his peripheral vision, like the hallucinations of a drugged marketroid.
+
+"Who the fuck are ye?" asks Jack, intrigued by the bright lights and icons.
+
+"I am your Cartesian theatre and you are our focus," murmur the glasses. "Dow Jones down fifteen points, Federated Confidence up three, incoming briefing on causal decoupling of social control of skirt hem lengths, shaving pattern of beards, and emergence of multidrug antibiotic resistance in Gram-negative bacilli: Accept?"
+
+"Ah can take it," Jack mumbles, as a torrent of images crashes down on his eyeballs and jackhammers its way in through his ears like the superego of a disembodied giant. Which is actually what he's stolen: The glasses and waist pouch he grabbed from the tourist are stuffed with enough hardware to run the entire Internet, circa the turn of the millennium. They've got bandwidth coming out the wazoo, distributed engines running a bazillion inscrutable search tasks, and a whole slew of high-level agents that collectively form a large chunk of the society of mind that is their owner's personality. Their owner is a posthuman genius loci of the net, an agalmic entrepreneur turned policy wonk, specializing in the politics of AI emancipation. When he was in the biz he was the kind of guy who catalysed value wherever he went, leaving money trees growing in his footprints. Now he's the kind of political backroom hitter who builds coalitions where nobody else could see common ground. And Jack has stolen his memories. There are microcams built into the frame of the glasses, pickups in the earpieces; everything is spooled into the holographic cache in the belt pack, before being distributed for remote storage. At four months per terabyte, memory storage is cheap. What makes this bunch so unusual is that their owner - Manfred - has cross-indexed them with his agents. Mind uploading may not be a practical technology yet, but Manfred has made an end run on it already.
+
+In a very real sense, the glasses are Manfred, regardless of the identity of the soft machine with its eyeballs behind the lenses. And it is a very puzzled Manfred who picks himself up and, with a curious vacancy in his head - except for a hesitant request for information about accessories for Russian army boots - dusts himself off and heads for his meeting on the other side of town.
+
+* * *
+
+Meanwhile, in another meeting, Manfred's absence is already being noticed. "Something, something is wrong," says Annette. She raises her mirrorshades and rubs her left eye, visibly worried. "Why is he not answering his chat? He knows we are due to hold this call with him. Don't you think it is odd?"
+
+Gianni nods and leans back, regarding her from behind his desk. He prods at the highly polished rosewood desktop. The wood grain slips, sliding into a strangely different conformation, generating random dot stereoisograms - messages for his eyes only. "He was visiting Scotland for me," he says after a moment. "I do not know his exact whereabouts - the privacy safeguards - but if you, as his designated next of kin, travel in person, I am sure you will find it easier. He was going to talk to the Franklin Collective, face-to-face, one to many ..."
+
+The office translator is good, but it can't provide real-time lip-synch morphing between French and Italian. Annette has to make an effort to listen to his words because the shape of his mouth is all wrong, like a badly dubbed video. Her expensive, recent implants aren't connected up to her Broca's area yet, so she can't simply sideload a deep grammar module for Italian. Their communications are the best that money can buy, their VR environment painstakingly sculpted, but it still doesn't break down the language barrier completely. Besides, there are distractions: the way the desk switches from black ash to rosewood halfway across its expanse, the strange air currents that are all wrong for a room this size. "Then what could be up with him? His voicemail is trying to cover for him. It is good, but it does not lie convincingly."
+
+Gianni looks worried. "Manfred is prone to fits of do his own thing with telling nobody in advance. But I don't like this. He should have to told one of us first." Ever since that first meeting in Rome, when Gianni offered him a job, Manfred has been a core member of Gianni's team, the fixer who goes out and meets people and solves their problems. Losing him at this point could be more than embarrassing. Besides, he's a friend.
+
+"I do not like this either." She stands up. "If he doesn't call back soon -"
+
+"You'll go and fetch him."
+
+"Oui." A smile flashes across her face, rapidly replaced by worry lines. "What can have happened?"
+
+"Anything. Nothing." Gianni shrugs. "But we cannot do without him." He casts her a warning glance. "Or you. Don't let the borg get you. Either of you."
+
+"Not to worry, I will just bring him back, whatever has happened." She stands up, surprising a vacuum cleaner that skulks behind her desk. "Au revoir!"
+
+"Ciao."
+
+As she vacates her office, the minister flickers off behind her, leaving the far wall the dull gray of a cold display panel. Gianni is in Rome, she's in Paris, Markus is in Düsseldorf, and Eva's in Wroclaw. There are others, trapped in digital cells scattered halfway across an elderly continent, but as long as they don't try to shake hands, they're free to shout across the office at each other. Their confidences and dirty jokes tunnel through multiple layers of anonymized communication.
+
+Gianni is trying to make his break out of regional politics and into European national affairs: Their job - his election team - is to get him a seat on the Confederacy Commission, as Representative for Intelligence Oversight, and push the boundaries of post-humanistic action outward, into deep space and deeper time. Which makes the loss of a key team player, the house futurologist and fixer, profoundly interesting to certain people: The walls have ears, and not all the brains they feed into are human.
+
+Annette is more worried than she's letting on to Gianni. It's unlike Manfred to be out of contact for long and even odder for his receptionist to stonewall her, given that her apartment is the nearest thing to a home he's had for the past couple of years. But something smells fishy. He sneaked out last night, saying it would be an overnight trip, and now he's not answering. Could it be his ex-wife? she wonders, despite Gianni's hints about a special mission. But there's been no word from Pamela other than the sarcastic cards she dispatches every year without fail, timed to arrive on the birthday of the daughter Manfred has never met. The music Mafiya? A letter bomb from the Copyright Control Association of America? But no, his medical monitor would have been screaming its head off if anything like that had happened.
+
+Annette has organized things so that he's safe from the intellectual property thieves. She's lent him the support he needs, and he's helped her find her own path. She gets a warm sense of happiness whenever she considers how much they've achieved together. But that's exactly why she's worried now. The watchdog hasn't barked ...
+
+Annette summons a taxi to Charles de Gaulle. By the time she arrives, she's already used her parliamentary carte to bump an executive-class seat on the next A320 to Turnhouse, Edinburgh's airport, and scheduled accommodation and transport for her arrival. The plane is climbing out over la Manche before the significance of Gianni's last comment hits her: Might he think the Franklin Collective could be dangerous to Manfred?
+
+* * *
+
+The hospital emergency suite has a waiting room with green plastic bucket seats and subtractive volume renderings by preteens stuck to the walls like surreal Lego sculptures. It's deeply silent, the available bandwidth all sequestrated for medical monitors - there are children crying, periodic sirens wailing as ambulances draw up, and people chattering all around him, but to Manfred, it's like being at the bottom of a deep blue pool of quiet. He feels stoned, except this particular drug brings no euphoria or sense of well-being. Corridor-corner vendors hawk kebab-spitted pigeons next to the chained and rusted voluntary service booth; video cameras watch the blue bivvy bags of the chronic cases lined up next to the nursing station. Alone in his own head, Manfred is frightened and confused.
+
+"I can't check you in 'less you sign the confidentiality agreement," says the triage nurse, pushing an antique tablet at Manfred's face. Service in the NHS is still free, but steps have been taken to reduce the incidence of scandals: "Sign the nondisclosure clause here and here, or the house officer won't see you."
+
+Manfred stares blearily up at the nurse's nose, which is red and slightly inflamed from a nosocomial infection. His phones are bickering again, and he can't remember why; they don't normally behave like this, something must be missing, but thinking about it is hard. "Why am I here?" he asks for the third time.
+
+"Sign it." A pen is thrust into his hand. He focuses on the page, jerks upright as deeply canalized reflexes kick in.
+
+"This is theft of human rights! It says here that the party of the second part is enjoined from disclosing information relating to the operations management triage procedures and processes of the said health-giving institution, that's you, to any third party - that's the public media - on pain of forfeiture of health benefits pursuant to section two of the Health Service Reform Act. I can't sign this! You could repossess my left kidney if I post on the Net about how long I've been in hospital!"
+
+"So don't sign, then." The Hijra nurse shrugs, hitches up his sari, and walks away. "Enjoy your wait!"
+
+Manfred pulls out his backup phone and stares at its display. "Something's wrong here." The keypad beeps as he laboriously inputs opcodes. This gets him into an arcane and ancient X.25 PAD, and he has a vague, disturbing memory that hints about where he can go from here - mostly into the long-since-decommissioned bowels of NHSNet - but the memories spring a page fault and die somewhere between fingertips and the moment when understanding dawns. It's a frustrating feeling: His brain is like an ancient car engine with damp spark plugs, turning over and over without catching fire.
+
+The kebab vendor next to Manfred's seating rail chucks a stock cube on his grill; it begins to smoke, aromatic and blue and herbal - cannabinoids to induce tranquillity and appetite. Manfred sniffs twice, then staggers to his feet and heads off in search of the toilet, his head spinning. He's mumbling at his wrist watch: "Hello, Guatemala? Get me posology please. Click down my meme tree, I'm confused. Oh shit. Who was I? What happened? Why is everything blurry? I can't find my glasses ..."
+
+A gaggle of day-trippers are leaving the leprosy ward, men and women dressed in anachronistic garb: men in dark suits, women in long dresses. All of them wear electric blue disposable gloves and face masks. There's a hum and crackle of encrypted bandwidth emanating from them, and Manfred instinctively turns to follow. They leave the A&E unit through the wheelchair exit, two ladies escorted by three gentlemen, with a deranged distressed refugee from the twenty-first century shuffling dizzily after. They're all young, Manfred realizes vaguely. Where's my cat? Aineko might be able to make sense of this, if Aineko was interested.
+
+"I rather fancy we should retire to the club house," says one young beau. "Oh yes! please!" his short blond companion chirps, clapping her hands together, then irritably stripping off the anachronistic plastic gloves to reveal wired-lace positional-sensor mitts underneath. "This trip has obviously been unproductive. If our contact is here, I see no easy way of locating of him without breach of medical confidence or a hefty gratuity."
+
+"The poor things," murmurs the other woman, glancing back at the leprosarium. "Such a humiliating way to die."
+
+"Their own fault; If they hadn't participated in antibiotic abuse they wouldn't be in the isolation ward," harrumphs a twentysomething with mutton-chops and the manner of a precocious paterfamilias. He raps his walking stick on the pavement for punctuation, and they pause for a flock of cyclists and a rickshaw before they cross the road onto the Meadows. "Degenerate medication compliance, degenerate immune systems."
+
+Manfred pauses to survey the grass, brain spinning as he ponders the fractal dimensionality of leaves. Then he lurches after them, nearly getting himself run down by a flywheel-powered tourist bus. Club. His feet hit the pavement, cross it, thud down onto three billion years of vegetative evolution. Something about those people. He feels a weird yearning, a tropism for information. It's almost all that's left of him - his voracious will to know. The tall, dark-haired woman hitches up her long skirts to keep them out of the mud. he sees a flash of iridescent petticoats that ripple like oil on water, worn over old-fashioned combat boots. Not Victorian, then: something else. I came here to see - the name is on the tip of his tongue. Almost. He feels that it has something to do with these people.
+
+The squad cross The Meadows by way of a tree-lined path, and come to a nineteenth-century frontage with wide steps and a polished brass doorbell. They enter, and the man with the mutton-chops pauses on the threshold and turns to face Manfred. "You've followed us this far," he says. "Do you want to come in? You might find what you're looking for."
+
+Manfred follows with knocking knees, desperately afraid of whatever he's forgotten.
+
+* * *
+
+Meanwhile, Annette is busy interrogating Manfred's cat.
+
+"When did you last see your father?"
+
+Aineko turns its head away from her and concentrates on washing the inside of its left leg. Its fur is lifelike and thick, pleasingly patterned except for a manufacturer's URL emblazoned on its flanks; but the mouth produces no saliva, the throat opens on no stomach or lungs. "Go away," it says: "I'm busy."
+
+"When did you last see Manfred?" she repeats intently. "I don't have time for this. The polis don't know. The medical services don't know. He's off net and not responding. So what can you tell me?"
+
+It took her precisely eighteen minutes to locate his hotel once she hit the airport arrivals area and checked the hotel booking front end in the terminal: She knows his preferences. It took her slightly longer to convince the concierge to let her into his room. But Aineko is proving more recalcitrant than she'd expected.
+
+"AI Neko mod two alpha requires maintenance downtime on a regular basis," the cat says pompously: "You knew that when you bought me this body. What were you expecting, five-nines uptime from a lump of meat? Go away, I'm thinking." The tongue rasps out, then pauses while microprobes in its underside replace the hairs that fell out earlier in the day.
+
+Annette sighs. Manfred's been upgrading this robot cat for years, and his ex-wife Pamela used to mess with its neural configuration too: This is its third body, and it's getting more realistically uncooperative with every hardware upgrade. Sooner or later it's going to demand a litter tray and start throwing up on the carpet. "Command override," she says. "Dump event log to my Cartesian theatre, minus eight hours to present."
+
+The cat shudders and looks round at her. "Human bitch!" it hisses. Then it freezes in place as the air fills with a bright and silent tsunami of data. Both Annette and Aineko are wired for extremely high-bandwidth spread-spectrum optical networking; an observer would see the cat's eyes and a ring on her left hand glow blue-white at each other. After a few seconds, Annette nods to herself and wiggles her fingers in the air, navigating a time sequence only she can see. Aineko hisses resentfully at her, then stands and stalks away, tail held high.
+
+"Curiouser and curiouser," Annette hums to herself. She intertwines her fingers, pressing obscure pressure points on knuckle and wrist, then sighs and rubs her eyes. "He left here under his own power, looking normal," she calls to the cat. "Who did he say he was going to see?" The cat sits in a beam of sunlight falling in through the high glass window, pointedly showing her its back. "Merde. If you're not going to help him -"
+
+"Try the Grassmarket," sulks the cat. "He said something about meeting the Franklin Collective near there. Much good they'll do him ..."
+
+* * *
+
+A man wearing secondhand Chinese combat fatigues and a horribly expensive pair of glasses bounces up a flight of damp stone steps beneath a keystone that announces the building to be a Salvation Army hostel. He bangs on the door, his voice almost drowned out by the pair of Cold War Re-enactment Society MiGs that are buzzing the castle up the road: "Open up, ye cunts! Ye've got a deal comin'!"
+
+A peephole set in the door at eye level slides to one side, and a pair of beady, black-eyed video cameras peer out at him. "Who are you and what do you want?" the speaker crackles. They don't belong to the Salvation Army; Christianity has been deeply unfashionable in Scotland for some decades, and the church that currently occupies the building has certainly moved with the times in an effort to stay relevant.
+
+"I'm Macx," he says: "You've heard from my systems. I'm here to offer you a deal you can't refuse." At least that's what his glasses tell him to say: What comes out of his mouth sounds a bit more like, Am Max: Yiv hurdfrae ma system. Am here tae gie ye a deal ye cannae refuse. The glasses haven't had long enough to work on his accent. Meanwhile, he's so full of himself that he snaps his fingers and does a little dance of impatience on the top step.
+
+"Aye, well, hold on a minute." The person on the other side of the speakerphone has the kind of cut-glass Morningside accent that manages to sound more English than the King while remaining vernacular Scots. The door opens, and Macx finds himself confronted by a tall, slightly cadaverous man wearing a tweed suit that has seen better days and a clerical collar cut from a translucent circuit board. His face is almost concealed behind a pair of recording angel goggles. "Who did ye say you were?"
+
+"I'm Macx! Manfred Macx! I'm here with an opportunity you wouldn't believe. I've got the answer to your church's financial situation. I'm going to make you rich!" The glasses prompt, and Macx speaks.
+
+The man in the doorway tilts his head slightly, goggles scanning Macx from head to foot. Bursts of blue combustion products spurt from Macx's heels as he bounces up and down enthusiastically. "Are ye sure ye've got the right address?" he asks worriedly.
+
+"Aye, Ah am that."
+
+The resident backs into the hostel: "Well then, come in, sit yeself down and tell me all about it."
+
+Macx bounces into the room with his brain wide open to a blizzard of pie charts and growth curves, documents spawning in the bizarre phase-space of his corporate management software. "I've got a deal you're not going to believe," he reads, gliding past notice boards upon which Church circulars are staked out to die like exotic butterflies, stepping over rolled-up carpets and a stack of laptops left over from a jumble sale, past the devotional radio telescope that does double duty as Mrs. Muirhouse's back-garden bird bath. "You've been here five years and your posted accounts show you aren't making much money - barely keeping the rent up. But you're a shareholder in Scottish Nuclear Electric, right? Most of the church funds are in the form of a trust left to the church by one of your congregants when she went to join the omega point, right?"
+
+"Er." The minister looks at him oddly. "I cannae comment on the church eschatological investment trust. Why d'ye think that?"
+
+They fetch up, somehow, in the minister's office. A huge, framed rendering hangs over the back of his threadbare office chair: the collapsing cosmos of the End Times, galactic clusters rotten with the Dyson spheres of the eschaton falling toward the big crunch. Saint Tipler the Astrophysicist beams down from above with avuncular approval, a ring of quasars forming a halo around his head. Posters proclaim the new Gospel: COSMOLOGY IS BETTER THAN GUESSWORK, and LIVE FOREVER WITHIN MY LIGHT CONE. "Can I get ye anything? Cup of tea? Fuel cell charge point?" asks the minister.
+
+"Crystal meth?" asks Macx, hopefully. His face falls as the minister shakes his head apologetically. "Aw, dinnae worry, Ah wis only joshing." He leans forward: "Ah know a' aboot yer plutonium futures speculation," he hisses. A finger taps his stolen spectacles in an ominous gesture: "These dinnae just record, they think. An' Ah ken where the money's gone."
+
+"What have ye got?" the minister asks coldly, any indication of good humor flown. "I'm going to have to edit down these memories, ye bastard. I thought I'd forgotten all about that. Bits of me aren't going to merge with the godhead at the end of time now, thanks to you."
+
+"Keep yer shirt on. Whit's the point o' savin' it a' up if ye nae got a life worth living? Ye reckon the big yin's nae gonnae unnerstan' a knees up?"
+
+"What do ye want?"
+
+"Aye, well," Macx leans back, aggrieved. Ah've got -" He pauses. An expression of extreme confusion flits over his head. "Ah've got lobsters," he finally announces. "Genetically engineered uploaded lobsters tae run yer uranium reprocessing plant." As he grows more confused, the glasses' control over his accent slips: "Ah wiz gonnae help yiz oot ba showin ye how ter get yer dosh back whir it belong ..." A strategic pause: "so ye could make the council tax due date. See, they're neutron-resistant, the lobsters. No, that cannae be right. Ah wiz gonnae sell ye somethin' ye cud use fer" - his face slumps into a frown of disgust - "free?"
+
+Approximately thirty seconds later, as he is picking himself up off the front steps of the First Reformed Church of Tipler, Astrophysicist, the man who would be Macx finds himself wondering if maybe this high finance shit isn't as easy as it's cracked up to be. Some of the agents in his glasses are wondering if elocution lessons are the answer; others aren't so optimistic.
+
+* * *
+
+_1 Getting back to the history lesson, the prospects for the decade look mostly medical.
+
+_1 A few thousand elderly baby boomers are converging on Tehran for Woodstock Four. Europe is desperately trying to import eastern European nurses and home-care assistants; in Japan, whole agricultural villages lie vacant and decaying, ghost communities sucked dry as cities slurp people in like residential black holes.
+
+_1 A rumor is spreading throughout gated old-age communities in the American Midwest, leaving havoc and riots in its wake: Senescence is caused by a slow virus coded into the mammalian genome that evolution hasn't weeded out, and rich billionaires are sitting on the rights to a vaccine. As usual, Charles Darwin gets more than his fair share of the blame. (Less spectacular but more realistic treatments for old age - telomere reconstruction and hexose-denatured protein reduction - are available in private clinics for those who are willing to surrender their pensions.) Progress is expected to speed up shortly, as the fundamental patents in genomic engineering begin to expire; the Free Chromosome Foundation has already published a manifesto calling for the creation of an intellectual-property-free genome with improved replacements for all commonly defective exons.
+
+_1 Experiments in digitizing and running neural wetware under emulation are well established; some radical libertarians claim that, as the technology matures, death - with its draconian curtailment of property and voting rights - will become the biggest civil rights issue of all.
+
+_1 For a small extra fee, most veterinary insurance policies now cover cloning of pets in the event of their accidental and distressing death. Human cloning, for reasons nobody is very clear on anymore, is still illegal in most developed nations - but very few judiciaries push for mandatory abortion of identical twins.
+
+_1 Some commodities are expensive: the price of crude oil has broken eighty Euros a barrel and is edging inexorably up. Other commodities are cheap: computers, for example. Hobbyists print off weird new processor architectures on their home inkjets; middle-aged folks wipe their backsides with diagnostic paper that can tell how their cholesterol levels are tending.
+
+_1 The latest casualties of the march of technological progress are: the high-street clothes shop, the flushing water closet, the Main Battle Tank, and the first generation of quantum computers. New with the decade are cheap enhanced immune systems, brain implants that hook right into the Chomsky organ and talk to their owners through their own speech centers, and widespread public paranoia about limbic spam. Nanotechnology has shattered into a dozen disjoint disciplines, and skeptics are predicting that it will all peter out before long. Philosophers have ceded qualia to engineers, and the current difficult problem in AI is getting software to experience embarrassment.
+
+_1 Fusion power is still, of course, fifty years away.
+
+* * *
+
+The Victorians are morphing into goths before Manfred's culture-shocked eyes.
+
+"You looked lost," explains Monica, leaning over him curiously. "What's with your eyes?"
+
+"I can't see too well," Manfred tries to explain. Everything is a blur, and the voices that usually chatter incessantly in his head have left nothing behind but a roaring silence. "I mean, someone mugged me. They took -" His hand closes on air: something is missing from his belt.
+
+Monica, the tall woman he first saw in the hospital, enters the room. What she's wearing indoors is skin-tight, iridescent and, disturbingly, she claims is a distributed extension of her neuroectoderm. Stripped of costume-drama accoutrements, she's a twenty-first-century adult, born or decanted after the millennial baby boom. She waves some fingers in Manfred's face: "How many?"
+
+"Two." Manfred tries to concentrate. "What -"
+
+"No concussion," she says briskly. "'Scuse me while I page." Her eyes are brown, with amber raster lines flickering across her pupils. Contact lenses? Manfred wonders, his head turgid and unnaturally slow. It's like being drunk, except much less pleasant: He can't seem to wrap his head around an idea from all angles at once, anymore. Is this what consciousness used to be like? It's an ugly, slow sensation. She turns away from him: "Medline says you'll be all right in a while. The main problem is the identity loss. Are you backed up anywhere?"
+
+"Here." Alan, still top-hatted and mutton-chopped, holds out a pair of spectacles to Manfred. "Take these, they may do you some good." His topper wobbles, as if a strange A-life experiment is nesting under its brim.
+
+"Oh. Thank you." Manfred reaches for them with a pathetic sense of gratitude. As soon as he puts them on, they run through a test series, whispering questions and watching how his eyes focus: After a minute, the room around him clears as the specs build a synthetic image to compensate for his myopia. There's limited Net access, too, he notices, a warm sense of relief stealing over him. "Do you mind if I call somebody?" he asks: "I want to check my back-ups."
+
+"Be my guest." Alan slips out through the door; Monica sits down opposite him and stares into some inner space. The room has a tall ceiling, with whitewashed walls and wooden shutters to cover the aerogel window bays. The furniture is modern modular, and clashes horribly with the original nineteenth-century architecture. "We were expecting you."
+
+"You were -" He shifts track with an effort: "I was here to see somebody. Here in Scotland, I mean."
+
+"Us." She catches his eye deliberately. "To discuss sapience options with our patron."
+
+"With your -" He squeezes his eyes shut. "Damn! I don't remember. I need my glasses back. Please."
+
+"What about your back-ups?" she asks curiously.
+
+"A moment." Manfred tries to remember what address to ping. It's useless, and painfully frustrating. "It would help if I could remember where I keep the rest of my mind," he complains. "It used to be at - oh, there."
+
+An elephantine semantic network sits down on his spectacles as soon as he asks for the site, crushing his surroundings into blocky pixilated monochrome that jerks as he looks around. "This is going to take some time," he warns his hosts as a goodly chunk of his metacortex tries to handshake with his brain over a wireless network connection that was really only designed for web browsing. The download consists of the part of his consciousness that isn't security-critical - public access actors and vague opinionated rants - but it clears down a huge memory castle, sketching in the outline of a map of miracles and wonders onto the whitewashed walls of the room.
+
+When Manfred can see the outside world again, he feels a bit more like himself: He can, at least, spawn a search thread that will resynchronize and fill him in on what it found. He still can't access the inner mysteries of his soul (including his personal memories); they're locked and barred pending biometric verification of his identity and a quantum key exchange. But he has his wits about him again - and some of them are even working. It's like sobering up from a strange new drug, the infinitely reassuring sense of being back at the controls of his own head. "I think I need to report a crime," he tells Monica - or whoever is plugged into Monica's head right now, because now he knows where he is and who he was meant to meet (although not why) - and he understands that, for the Franklin Collective, identity is a politically loaded issue.
+
+"A crime report." Her expression is subtly mocking. "Identity theft, by any chance?"
+
+"Yeah, yeah, I know: Identity is theft, don't trust anyone whose state vector hasn't forked for more than a gigasecond, change is the only constant, et bloody cetera. Who am I talking to, by the way? And if we're talking, doesn't that signify that you think we're on the same side, more or less?" He struggles to sit up in the recliner chair: Stepper motors whine softly as it strives to accommodate him.
+
+"Sidedness is optional." The woman who is Monica some of the time looks at him quirkily: "It tends to alter drastically if you vary the number of dimensions. Let's just say that right now I'm Monica, plus our sponsor. Will that do you?"
+
+"Our sponsor, who is in cyberspace -"
+
+She leans back on the sofa, which buzzes and extrudes an occasional table with a small bar. "Drink? Can I offer you coffee? Guarana? Or maybe a Berlinerweisse, for old time's sake?"
+
+"Guarana will do. Hello, Bob. How long have you been dead?"
+
+She chuckles. "I'm not dead, Manny. I may not be a full upload, but I feel like me." She rolls her eyes, self-consciously. "He's making rude comments about your wife," She adds; "I'm not going to pass that on."
+
+"My ex-wife," Manfred corrects her automatically. "The, uh, tax vamp. So. You're acting as a, I guess, an interpreter for Bob?"
+
+"Ack." She looks at Manfred very seriously: "We owe him a lot, you know. He left his assets in trust to the movement along with his partials. We feel obliged to instantiate his personality as often as possible, even though you can only do so much with a couple of petabytes of recordings. But we have help."
+
+"The lobsters." Manfred nods to himself and accepts the glass that she offers. Its diamond-plated curves glitter brilliantly in the late-afternoon sunlight. "I knew this had something to do with them." He leans forward, holding his glass and frowns. "If only I could remember why I came here! It was something emergent, something in deep memory ... something I didn't trust in my own skull. Something to do with Bob."
+
+The door behind the sofa opens; Alan enters. "Excuse me," he says quietly, and heads for the far side of the room. A workstation folds down from the wall, and a chair rolls in from a service niche. He sits with his chin propped on his hands, staring at the white desktop. Every so often he mutters quietly to himself; "Yes, I understand ... campaign headquarters ... donations need to be audited ..."
+
+"Gianni's election campaign," Monica prompts him.
+
+Manfred jumps. "Gianni -" A bundle of memories unlock inside his head as he remembers his political front man's message. "Yes! That's what this is about. It has to be!" He looks at her excitedly. "I'm here to deliver a message to you from Gianni Vittoria. About -" He looks crestfallen. "I'm not sure," he trails off uncertainly, "but it was important. Something critical in the long term, something about group minds and voting. But whoever mugged me got the message."
+
+* * *
+
+The Grassmarket is an overly rustic cobbled square nestled beneath the glowering battlements of Castle Rock. Annette stands on the site of the gallows where they used to execute witches; she sends forth her invisible agents to search for spoor of Manfred. Aineko, overly familiar, drapes over her left shoulder like a satanic stole and delivers a running stream of cracked cellphone chatter into her ear.
+
+"I don't know where to begin," she sighs, annoyed. This place is a wall-to-wall tourist trap, a many-bladed carnivorous plant that digests easy credit and spits out the drained husks of foreigners. The road has been pedestrianized and resurfaced in squalidly authentic mediaeval cobblestones; in the middle of what used to be the car park, there's a permanent floating antiques market, where you can buy anything from a brass fire surround to an ancient CD player. Much of the merchandise in the shops is generic dot-com trash, vying for the title of Japanese-Scottish souvenir from hell: Puroland tartans, animatronic Nessies hissing bad-temperedly at knee level, second hand laptops. People swarm everywhere, from the theme pubs (hangings seem to be a running joke hereabouts) to the expensive dress shops with their fabric renderers and digital mirrors. Street performers, part of the permanent floating Fringe, clutter the sidewalk: A robotic mime, very traditional in silver face paint, mimics the gestures of passers by with ironically stylized gestures.
+
+"Try the doss house," Aineko suggests from the shelter of her shoulder bag.
+
+"The -" Annette does a doubletake as her thesaurus conspires with her open government firmware and dumps a geographical database of city social services into her sensorium. "Oh, I see." The Grassmarket itself is touristy, but the bits off to one end - down a dingy canyon of forbidding stone buildings six stories high - are decidedly downmarket. "Okay."
+
+Annette weaves past a stall selling disposable cellphones and cheaper genome explorers, round a gaggle of teenage girls in the grips of some kind of imported kawaii fetish, who look at her in alarm from atop their pink platform heels - probably mistaking her for a school probation inspector - and past a stand of chained and parked bicycles. The human attendant looks bored out of her mind. Annette tucks a blandly anonymous ten-Euro note in her pocket almost before she notices: "If you were going to buy a hot bike," she asks, "where would you go?" The parking attendant stares, and for a moment Annette thinks she's overestimated her. Then she mumbles something. "What?"
+
+"McMurphy's. Used to be called Bannerman's. Down yon Cowgate, thataway." The meter maid looks anxiously at her rack of charges. "You didn't -"
+
+"Uh-huh." Annette follows her gaze: straight down the dark stone canyon. Well, okay. "This had better be worth it, Manny mon chèr," she mutters under her breath.
+
+McMurphy's is a fake Irish pub, a stone grotto installed beneath a mound of blank-faced offices. It was once a real Irish pub before the developers got their hands on it and mutated it in rapid succession into a punk nightclub, a wine bar, and a fake Dutch coffee shop; after which, as burned-out as any star, it left the main sequence. Now it occupies an unnaturally prolonged, chilly existence as the sort of recycled imitation Irish pub that has neon four-leafed clovers hanging from the artificially blackened pine beams above the log tables - in other words, the burned-out black dwarf afterlife of a once-serious drinking establishment. Somewhere along the line, the beer cellar was replaced with a toilet (leaving more room for paying patrons upstairs), and now its founts dispense fizzy concentrate diluted with water from the city mains.
+
+"Say, did you hear the one about the Eurocrat with the robot pussy who goes into a dodgy pub on the Cowgate and orders a coke? And when it arrives, she says 'hey, where's the mirror?'"
+
+"Shut up," Annette hisses into her shoulder bag. "That isn't funny." Her personal intruder telemetry has just e-mailed her wristphone, and it's displaying a rotating yellow exclamation point, which means that according to the published police crime stats, this place is likely to do grievous harm to her insurance premiums.
+
+Aineko looks up at her from his nest in the bag and yawns cavernously, baring a pink, ribbed mouth and a tongue like pink suede. "Want to make me? I just pinged Manny's head. The network latency was trivial."
+
+The barmaid sidles up and pointedly manages not to make eye contact with Annette. "I'll have a Diet Coke," Annette orders. In the direction of her bag, voice pitched low: "Did you hear the one about the Eurocrat who goes into a dodgy pub, orders half a liter of Diet Coke, and when she spills it in her shoulder bag she says 'oops, I've got a wet pussy'?"
+
+The Coke arrives. Annette pays for it. There may be a couple of dozen people in the pub; it's hard to tell because it looks like an ancient cellar, lots of stone archways leading off into niches populated with second-hand church pews and knife-scarred tables. Some guys who might be bikers, students, or well-dressed winos are hunched over one table: hairy, wearing vests with too many pockets, in an artful bohemianism that makes Annette blink until one of her literary programs informs her that one of them is a moderately famous local writer, a bit of a guru for the space and freedom party. There're a couple of women in boots and furry hats in one corner, poring over the menu, and a parcel of off-duty street performers hunching over their beers in a booth. Nobody else is wearing anything remotely like office drag, but the weirdness coefficient is above average; so Annette dials her glasses to extra-dark, straightens her tie, and glances around.
+
+The door opens and a nondescript youth slinks in. He's wearing baggy BDUs, woolly cap, and a pair of boots that have that quintessential essense de panzer division look, all shock absorbers and olive drab Kevlar panels. He's wearing -
+
+"I spy with my little network intrusion detector kit," begins the cat, as Annette puts her drink down and moves in on the youth, "something beginning with -"
+
+"How much you want for the glasses, kid?" she asks quietly.
+
+He jerks and almost jumps - a bad idea in MilSpec combat boots, the ceiling is eighteenth-century stone half a meter thick; "Dinnae fuckin' dae that," he complains in an eerily familiar way: "Ah -" he swallows. "Annie! Who -"
+
+"Stay calm. Take them off - they'll only hurt you if you keep wearing them," she says, careful not to move too fast because now she has a second, scary-jittery fear, and she knows without having to look that the exclamation mark on her watch has turned red and begun to flash: "Look, I'll give you two hundred Euros for the glasses and the belt pouch, real cash, and I won't ask how you got them or tell anyone." He's frozen in front of her, mesmerized, and she can see the light from inside the lenses spilling over onto his half-starved adolescent cheekbones, flickering like cold lightning, like he's plugged his brain into a grid bearer; swallowing with a suddenly dry mouth, she slowly reaches up and pulls the spectacles off his face with one hand and takes hold of the belt pouch with the other. The kid shudders and blinks at her, and she sticks a couple of hundred-Euro notes in front of his nose. "Scram," she says, not unkindly.
+
+He reaches up slowly, then seizes the money and runs - blasts his way through the door with an ear-popping concussion, hangs a left onto the cycle path, and vanishes downhill toward the parliament buildings and university complex.
+
+Annette watches the doorway apprehensively. "Where is he?" she hisses, worried: "Any ideas, cat?"
+
+"Naah. It's your job to find him," Aineko opines complacently. But there's an icicle of anxiety in Annette's spine. Manfred's been separated from his memory cache? Where could he be? Worse - who could he be?
+
+"Fuck you, too," she mutters. "Only one thing for it, I guess." She takes off her own glasses - they're much less functional than Manfred's massively ramified custom rig - and nervously raises the repo'd specs toward her face. Somehow what she's about to do makes her feel unclean, like snooping on a lover's e-mail folders. But how else can she figure out where he might have gone?
+
+She slides the glasses on and tries to remember what she was doing yesterday in Edinburgh.
+
+* * *
+
+"Gianni?"
+
+"Oui, ma chérie?"
+
+Pause. "I lost him. But I got his aid-mémoire back. A teenage freeloader playing cyberpunk with them. No sign of his location - so I put them on."
+
+Pause. "Oh dear."
+
+"Gianni, why exactly did you send him to the Franklin Collective?"
+
+Pause. (During which, the chill of the gritty stone wall she's leaning on begins to penetrate the weave of her jacket.) "I not wanting to bother you with trivia."
+
+"Merde. It's not trivia, Gianni, they're accelerationistas. Have you any idea what that's going to do to his head?"
+
+Pause: Then a grunt, almost of pain. "Yes."
+
+"Then why did you do it?" she demands vehemently. She hunches over, punching words into her phone so that other passers-by avoid her, unsure whether she's hands-free or hallucinating: "Shit, Gianni, I have to pick up the pieces every time you do this! Manfred is not a healthy man, he's on the edge of acute future shock the whole time, and I was not joking when I told you last February that he'd need a month in a clinic if you tried running him flat out again! If you're not careful, he could end up dropping out completely and joining the borganism -"
+
+"Annette." A heavy sigh: "He are the best hope we got. Am knowing half-life of agalmic catalyst now down to six months and dropping; Manny outlast his career expectancy, four deviations outside the normal, yes, we know this. But I are having to break civil rights deadlock now, this election. We must achieve consensus, and Manfred are only staffer we got who have hope of talking to Collective on its own terms. He are deal-making messenger, not force burnout, right? We need coalition reserve before term limit lockout followed by gridlock in Brussels, American-style. Is more than vital - is essential."
+
+"That's no excuse -"
+
+"Annette, they have partial upload of Bob Franklin. They got it before he died, enough of his personality to reinstantiate it, time-sharing in their own brains. We must get the Franklin Collective with their huge resources lobbying for the Equal Rights Amendment: If ERA passes, all sapients are eligible to vote, own property, upload, download, sideload. Are more important than little gray butt-monsters with cold speculum: Whole future depends on it. Manny started this with crustacean rights: Leave uploads covered by copyrights not civil rights and where will we be in fifty years? Do you think I must ignore this? It was important then, but now, with the transmission the lobsters received -"
+
+"Shit." She turns and leans her forehead against the cool stonework. "I'll need a prescription. Ritalin or something. And his location. Leave the rest to me." She doesn't add, That includes peeling him off the ceiling afterwards: that's understood. Nor does she say, you're going to pay. That's understood, too. Gianni may be a hard-nosed political fixer, but he looks after his own.
+
+"Location am easy if he find the PLO. GPS coordinates are following -"
+
+"No need. I got his spectacles."
+
+"Merde, as you say. Take them to him, ma chérie. Bring me the distributed trust rating of Bob Franklin's upload, and I bring Bob the jubilee, right to direct his own corporate self again as if still alive. And we pull diplomatic chestnuts out of fire before they burn. Agreed?"
+
+"Oui."
+
+She cuts the connection and begins walking uphill, along the Cowgate (through which farmers once bought their herds to market), toward the permanent floating Fringe and then the steps towards The Meadows. As she pauses opposite the site of the gallows, a fight breaks out: Some Paleolithic hangover takes exception to the robotic mime aping his movements, and swiftly rips its arm off. The mime stands there, sparks flickering inside its shoulder, and looks confused. Two pissed-looking students start forward and punch the short-haired vandal. There is much shouting in the mutually incomprehensible accents of Oxgangs and the Herriott-Watt Robot Lab. Annette watches the fight and shudders; it's like a flashover vision from a universe where the Equal Rights Amendment - with its redefinition of personhood - is rejected by the house of deputies: a universe where to die is to become property and to be created outwith a gift of parental DNA is to be doomed to slavery.
+
+Maybe Gianni was right, she ponders. But I wish the price wasn't so personal -
+
+* * *
+
+Manfred can feel one of his attacks coming on. The usual symptoms are all present - the universe, with its vast preponderance of unthinking matter, becomes an affront; weird ideas flicker like heat lightning far away across the vast plateaus of his imagination - but, with his metacortex running in sandboxed insecure mode, he feels blunt. And slow. Even obsolete. The latter is about as welcome a sensation as heroin withdrawal: He can't spin off threads to explore his designs for feasibility and report back to him. It's like someone has stripped fifty points off his IQ; his brain feels like a surgical scalpel that's been used to cut down trees. A decaying mind is a terrible thing to be trapped inside. Manfred wants out, and he wants out bad - but he's too afraid to let on.
+
+"Gianni is a middle-of-the-road Eurosocialist, a mixed-market pragmatist politician," Bob's ghost accuses Manfred by way of Monica's dye-flushed lips, "hardly the sort of guy you'd expect me to vote for, no? So what does he think I can do for him?"
+
+"That's a - ah - " Manfred rocks forward and back in his chair, arms crossed firmly and hands thrust under his armpits for protection. "Dismantle the moon! Digitize the biosphere, make a nöosphere out of it - shit, sorry, that's long-term planning. Build Dyson spheres, lots and lots of - Ahem. Gianni is an ex-Marxist, reformed high church Trotskyite clade. He believes in achieving True Communism, which is a state of philosophical grace that requires certain prerequisites like, um, not pissing around with Molotov cocktails and thought police: He wants to make everybody so rich that squabbling over ownership of the means of production makes as much sense as arguing over who gets to sleep in the damp spot at the back of the cave. He's not your enemy, I mean. He's the enemy of those Stalinist deviationist running dogs in Conservative Party Central Office who want to bug your bedroom and hand everything on a plate to the big corporates owned by the pension funds - which in turn rely on people dying predictably to provide their raison d'être. And, um, more importantly dying and not trying to hang on to their property and chattels. Sitting up in the coffin singing extropian fireside songs, that kind of thing. The actuaries are to blame, predicting life expectancy with intent to cause people to buy insurance policies with money that is invested in control of the means of production - Bayes' Theorem is to blame -"
+
+Alan glances over his shoulder at Manfred: "I don't think feeding him guarana was a good idea," he says in tones of deep foreboding.
+
+Manfred's mode of vibration has gone nonlinear by this point: He's rocking front to back, and jiggling up and down in little hops, like a technophiliacal yogic flyer trying to bounce his way to the singularity. Monica leans toward him and her eyes widen: "Manfred," she hisses, "shut up!"
+
+He stops babbling abruptly, with an expression of deep puzzlement. "Who am I?" he asks, and keels over backward. "Why am I, here and now, occupying this body -"
+
+"Anthropic anxiety attack," Monica comments. "I think he did this in Amsterdam eight years ago when Bob first met him." She looks alarmed, a different identity coming to the fore: "What shall we do?"
+
+"We have to make him comfortable." Alan raises his voice: "Bed, make yourself ready, now." The back of the sofa Manfred is sprawled on flops downward, the base folds up, and a strangely animated duvet crawls up over his feet. "Listen, Manny, you're going to be all right."
+
+"Who am I and what do I signify?" Manfred mumbles incoherently: "A mass of propagating decision trees, fractal compression, lots of synaptic junctions lubricated with friendly endorphins -" Across the room, the bootleg pharmacopoeia is cranking up to manufacture some heavy tranquilizers. Monica heads for the kitchen to get something for him to drink them in. "Why are you doing this?" Manfred asks, dizzily.
+
+"It's okay. Lie down and relax." Alan leans over him. "We'll talk about everything in the morning, when you know who you are." (Aside to Monica, who is entering the room with a bottle of iced tea: "Better let Gianni know that he's unwell. One of us may have to go visit the minister. Do you know if Macx has been audited?") "Rest up, Manfred. Everything is being taken care of."
+
+About fifteen minutes later, Manfred - who, in the grip of an existential migraine, meekly obeys Monica's instruction to drink down the spiked tea - lies back on the bed and relaxes. His breathing slows; the subliminal muttering ceases. Monica, sitting next to him, reaches out and takes his right hand, which is lying on top of the bedding.
+
+"Do you want to live forever?" she intones in Bob Franklin's tone of voice. "You can live forever in me ..."
+
+* * *
+
+The Church of Latter-Day Saints believes that you can't get into the Promised Land unless it's baptized you - but it can do so if it knows your name and parentage, even after you're dead. Its genealogical databases are among the most impressive artifacts of historical research ever prepared. And it likes to make converts.
+
+The Franklin Collective believes that you can't get into the future unless it's digitized your neural state vector, or at least acquired as complete a snapshot of your sensory inputs and genome as current technology permits. You don't need to be alive for it to do this. Its society of mind is among the most impressive artifacts of computer science. And it likes to make converts.
+
+* * *
+
+Nightfall in the city. Annette stands impatiently on the doorstep. "Let me the fuck in," she snarls impatiently at the speakerphone. "Merde!"
+
+Someone opens the door. "Who -"
+
+Annette shoves him inside, kicks the door shut, and leans on it. "Take me to your bodhisattva," she demands. "Now."
+
+"I -" he turns and heads inside, along the gloomy hallway that runs past a staircase. Annette strides after him aggressively. He opens a door and ducks inside, and she follows before he can close it.
+
+Inside, the room is illuminated by a variety of indirect diode sources, calibrated for the warm glow of a summer afternoon's daylight. There's a bed in the middle of it, a figure lying asleep at the heart of a herd of attentive diagnostic instruments. A couple of attendants sit to either side of the sleeping man.
+
+"What have you done to him?" Annette snaps, rushing forward. Manfred blinks up at her from the pillows, bleary-eyed and confused as she leans overhead: "Hello? Manny?" Over her shoulder: "If you have done anything to him -"
+
+"Annie?" He looks puzzled. A bright orange pair of goggles - not his own - is pushed up onto his forehead like a pair of beached jellyfish. "I don't feel well. 'F I get my hands on the bastard who did this ..."
+
+"We can fix that," she says briskly, declining to mention the deal she cut to get his memories back. She peels off his glasses and carefully slides them onto his face, replacing his temporary ones. The brain bag she puts down next to his shoulder, within easy range. The hairs on the back of her neck rise as a thin chattering fills the ether around them: his eyes are glowing a luminous blue behind his shades, as if a high-tension spark is flying between his ears.
+
+"Oh. Wow." He sits up, the covers fall from his naked shoulders, and her breath catches.
+
+She looks round at the motionless figure sitting to his left. The man in the chair nods deliberately, ironically. "What have you done to him?"
+
+"We've been looking after him - nothing more, nothing less. He arrived in a state of considerable confusion, and his state deteriorated this afternoon."
+
+She's never met this fellow before, but she has a gut feeling that she knows him. "You would be Robert ... Franklin?"
+
+He nods again. "The avatar is in." There's a thud as Manfred's eyes roll up in his head, and he flops back onto the bedding. "Excuse me. Monica?"
+
+The young woman on the other side of the bed shakes her head. "No, I'm running Bob, too."
+
+"Oh. Well, you tell her - I've got to get him some juice."
+
+The woman who is also Bob Franklin - or whatever part of him survived his battle with an exotic brain tumor eight years earlier - catches Annette's eye and shakes her head, smiles faintly. "You're never alone when you're a syncitium."
+
+Annette wrinkles her brow: she has to trigger a dictionary attack to parse the sentence. "One large cell, many nuclei? Oh, I see. You have the new implant. The better to record everything."
+
+The youngster shrugs. "You want to die and be resurrected as a third-person actor in a low-bandwidth re-enactment? Or a shadow of itchy memories in some stranger's skull?" She snorts, a gesture that's at odds with the rest of her body language.
+
+"Bob must have been one of the first borganisms. Humans, I mean. After Jim Bezier." Annette glances over at Manfred, who has begun to snore softly. "It must have been a lot of work."
+
+"The monitoring equipment cost millions, then," says the woman - Monica? - "and it didn't do a very good job. One of the conditions for our keeping access to his research funding is that we regularly run his partials. He wanted to build up a kind of aggregate state vector - patched together out of bits and pieces of other people to supplement the partials that were all I - he - could record with the then state of the art."
+
+"Eh, right." Annette reaches out and absently smooths a stray hair away from Manfred's forehead. "What is it like to be part of a group mind?"
+
+Monica sniffs, evidently amused. "What is it like to see red? What's it like to be a bat? I can't tell you - I can only show you. We're all free to leave at any time, you know."
+
+"But somehow you don't." Annette rubs her head, feels the short hair over the almost imperceptible scars that conceal a network of implants - tools that Manfred turned down when they became available a year or two ago. ("Goop-phase Darwin-design nanotech ain't designed for clean interfaces," he'd said, "I'll stick to disposable kit, thanks.") "No thank you. I don't think he'll take up your offer when he wakes up, either." (Subtext: I'll let you have him over my dead body.)
+
+Monica shrugs. "That's his loss: He won't live forever in the singularity, along with other followers of our gentle teacher. Anyway, we have more converts than we know what to do with."
+
+A thought occurs to Annette. "Ah. You are all of one mind? Partially? A question to you is a question to all?"
+
+"It can be." The words come simultaneously from Monica and the other body, Alan, who is standing in the doorway with a boxy thing that looks like an improvised diagnostician. "What do you have in mind?" adds the Alan body.
+
+Manfred, lying on the bed, groans: There's an audible hiss of pink noise as his glasses whisper in his ears, bone conduction providing a serial highway to his wetware.
+
+"Manfred was sent to find out why you're opposing the ERA," Annette explains. "Some parts of our team operate without the other's knowledge."
+
+"Indeed." Alan sits down on the chair beside the bed and clears his throat, puffing his chest out pompously. "A very important theological issue. I feel -"
+
+"I, or we?" Annette interrupts.
+
+"We feel," Monica snaps. Then she glances at Alan. "Soo-rrry."
+
+The evidence of individuality within the group mind is disturbing to Annette: Too many reruns of the Borgish fantasy have conditioned her preconceptions, and their quasi-religious belief in a singularity leaves her cold. "Please continue."
+
+"One person, one vote, is obsolete," says Alan. "The broader issue of how we value identity needs to be revisited, the franchise reconsidered. Do you get one vote for each warm body? Or one vote for each sapient individual? What about distributed intelligences? The proposals in the Equal Rights Act are deeply flawed, based on a cult of individuality that takes no account of the true complexity of posthumanism."
+
+"Like the proposals for a feminine franchise in the nineteenth century that would grant the vote to married wives of land-owning men," Monica adds slyly: "It misses the point."
+
+"Ah, oui." Annette crosses her arms, suddenly defensive. This isn't what she'd expected to hear. This is the elitist side of the posthumanism shtick, potentially as threatening to her post enlightenment ideas as the divine right of kings.
+
+"It misses more than that." Heads turn to face an unexpected direction: Manfred's eyes are open again, and as he glances around the room Annette can see a spark of interest there that was missing earlier. "Last century, people were paying to have their heads frozen after their death - in hope of reconstruction, later. They got no civil rights: The law didn't recognize death as a reversible process. Now how do we account for it when you guys stop running Bob? Opt out of the collective borganism? Or maybe opt back in again later?" He reaches up and rubs his forehead, tiredly. "Sorry, I haven't been myself lately." A crooked, slightly manic grin flickers across his face. "See, I've been telling Gianni for a whole while, we need a new legal concept of what it is to be a person. One that can cope with sentient corporations, artificial stupidities, secessionists from group minds, and reincarnated uploads. The religiously inclined are having lots of fun with identity issues right now - why aren't we posthumanists thinking about these things?"
+
+Annette's bag bulges: Aineko pokes his head out, sniffs the air, squeezes out onto the carpet, and begins to groom himself with perfect disregard for the human bystanders. "Not to mention A-life experiments who think they're the real thing," Manfred adds. "And aliens."
+
+Annette freezes, staring at him. "Manfred! You're not supposed to -"
+
+Manfred is watching Alan, who seems to be the most deeply integrated of the dead venture billionaire's executors: Even his expression reminds Annette of meeting Bob Franklin back in Amsterdam, early in the decade, when Manny's personal dragon still owned him. "Aliens," Alan echoes. An eyebrow twitches. "Would this be the signal SETI announced, or the, uh, other one? And how long have you known about them?"
+
+"Gianni has his fingers in a lot of pies," Manfred comments blandly. "And we still talk to the lobsters from time to time - you know, they're only a couple of light-hours away, right? They told us about the signals."
+
+"Er." Alan's eyes glaze over for a moment; Annette's prostheses paint her a picture of false light spraying from the back of his head, his entire sensory bandwidth momentarily soaking up a huge peer-to-peer download from the server dust that wallpapers every room in the building. Monica looks irritated, taps her fingernails on the back of her chair. "The signals. Right. Why wasn't this publicized?"
+
+"The first one was." Annette's eyebrows furrow. "We couldn't exactly cover it up, everyone with a backyard dish pointed in the right direction caught it. But most people who're interested in hearing about alien contacts already think they drop round on alternate Tuesdays and Thursdays to administer rectal exams. Most of the rest think it's a hoax. Quite a few of the remainder are scratching their heads and wondering whether it isn't just a new kind of cosmological phenomenon that emits a very low entropy signal. Of the six who are left over, five are trying to get a handle on the message contents, and the last is convinced it's a practical joke. And the other signal, well, that was weak enough that only the deep-space tracking network caught it."
+
+Manfred fiddles with the bed control system. "It's not a practical joke," he adds. "But they only captured about sixteen megabits of data from the first one, maybe double that in the second. There's quite a bit of noise, the signals don't repeat, their length doesn't appear to be a prime, there's no obvious metainformation that describes the internal format, so there's no easy way of getting a handle on them. To make matters worse, pointy-haired management at Arianespace" - he glances at Annette, as if seeking a response to the naming of her ex-employers - "decided the best thing to do was to cover up the second signal and work on it in secret - for competitive advantage, they say - and as for the first, to pretend it never happened. So nobody really knows how long it'll take to figure out whether it's a ping from the galactic root domain servers or a pulsar that's taken to grinding out the eighteen-quadrillionth digits of pi, or what."
+
+"But," Monica glances around, "you can't be sure."
+
+"I think it may be sapient," says Manfred. He finds the right button at last, and the bed begins to fold itself back into a lounger. Then he finds the wrong button; the duvet dissolves into viscous turquoise slime that slurps and gurgles away through a multitude of tiny nozzles in the headboard. "Bloody aerogel. Um, where was I?" He sits up.
+
+"Sapient network packet?" asks Alan.
+
+"Nope." Manfred shakes his head, grins. "Should have known you'd read Vinge ... or was it the movie? No, what I think is that there's only one logical thing to beam backward and forward out there, and you may remember I asked you to beam it out about, oh, nine years ago?"
+
+"The lobsters." Alan's eyes go blank. "Nine years. Time to Proxima Centauri and back?"
+
+"About that distance, yes," says Manfred. "And remember, that's an upper bound - it could well have come from somewhere closer. Anyway, the first SETI signal came from a couple of degrees off and more than hundred light-years out, but the second signal came from less than three light-years away. You can see why they didn't publicize that - they didn't want a panic. And no, the signal isn't a simple echo of the canned crusty transmission - I think it's an exchange embassy, but we haven't cracked it yet. Now do you see why we have to crowbar the civil rights issue open again? We need a framework for rights that can encompass nonhumans, and we need it as fast as possible. Otherwise, if the neighbors come visiting..."
+
+"Okay," says Alan, "I'll have to talk with myselves. Maybe we can agree something, as long as it's clear that it's a provisional stab at the framework and not a permanent solution?"
+
+Annette snorts. "No solution is final!" Monica catches her eyes and winks: Annette is startled by the blatant display of dissent within the syncitium.
+
+"Well," says Manfred, "I guess that's all we can ask for?" He looks hopeful. "Thanks for the hospitality, but I feel the need to lie down in my own bed for a while. I had to commit a lot to memory while I was off-line, and I want to record it before I forget who I am," he adds pointedly, and Annette breathes a quiet sight of relief.
+
+* * *
+
+Later that night, a doorbell rings.
+
+"Who's there?" asks the entryphone.
+
+"Uh, me," says the man on the steps. He looks a little confused. "Ah'm Macx. Ah'm here tae see" - the name is on the tip of his tongue - "someone."
+
+"Come in." A solenoid buzzes; he pushes the door open, and it closes behind him. His metal-shod boots ring on the hard stone floor, and the cool air smells faintly of unburned jet fuel.
+
+"Ah'm Macx," he repeats uncertainly, "or Ah wis fer a wee while, an' it made ma heid hurt. But noo Ah'm me agin, an' Ah wannae be somebody else ... can ye help?"
+
+* * *
+
+Later still, a cat sits on a window ledge, watching the interior of a darkened room from behind the concealment of curtains. The room is dark to human eyes, but bright to the cat: Moonlight cascades silently off the walls and furniture, the twisted bedding, the two naked humans lying curled together in the middle of the bed.
+
+Both the humans are in their thirties: Her close-cropped hair is beginning to gray, distinguished threads of gunmetal wire threading it, while his brown mop is not yet showing signs of age. To the cat, who watches with a variety of unnatural senses, her head glows in the microwave spectrum with a gentle halo of polarized emissions. The male shows no such aura: he's unnaturally natural for this day and age, although - oddly - he's wearing spectacles in bed, and the frames shine similarly. An invisible soup of radiation connects both humans to items of clothing scattered across the room - clothing that seethes with unsleeping sentience, dribbling over to their suitcases and hand luggage and (though it doesn't enjoy noticing it) the cat's tail, which is itself a rather sensitive antenna.
+
+The two humans have just finished making love: They do this less often than in their first few years, but with more tenderness and expertise - lengths of shocking pink Hello Kitty bondage tape still hang from the bedposts, and a lump of programmable memory plastic sits cooling on the side table. The male is sprawled with his head and upper torso resting in the crook of the female's left arm and shoulder. Shifting visualization to infrared, the cat sees that she is glowing, capillaries dilating to enhance the blood flow around her throat and chest.
+
+"I'm getting old," the male mumbles. "I'm slowing down."
+
+"Not where it counts," the female replies, gently squeezing his right buttock.
+
+"No, I'm sure of it," he says. "The bits of me that still exist in this old head - how many types of processor can you name that are still in use thirty-plus years after they're born?"
+
+"You're thinking about the implants again," she says carefully. The cat remembers this as a sore point; from being a medical procedure to help the blind see and the autistic talk, intrathecal implants have blossomed into a must-have accessory for the now-clade. But the male is reluctant. "It's not as risky as it used to be. If they screw up, there're neural growth cofactors and cheap replacement stem cells. I'm sure one of your sponsors can arrange for extra cover."
+
+"Hush: I'm still thinking about it." He's silent for a while. "I wasn't myself yesterday. I was someone else. Someone too slow to keep up. Puts a new perspective on everything: I've been afraid of losing my biological plasticity, of being trapped in an obsolete chunk of skullware while everything moves on - but how much of me lives outside my own head these days, anyhow?" One of his external threads generates an animated glyph and throws it at her mind's eye; she grins at his obscure humor. "Cross-training from a new interface is going to be hard, though."
+
+"You'll do it," she predicts. "You can always get a discreet prescription for novotrophin-B." A receptor agonist tailored for gerontological wards, it stimulates interest in the new: combined with MDMA, it's a component of the street cocktail called sensawunda. "That should keep you focused for long enough to get comfortable."
+
+"What's life coming to when I can't cope with the pace of change?" he asks the ceiling plaintively.
+
+The cat lashes its tail, irritated by his anthropocentrism.
+
+"You are my futurological storm shield," she says, jokingly, and moves her hand to cup his genitals. Most of her current activities are purely biological, the cat notes: From the irregular sideloads, she's using most of her skullware to run ETItalk@home, one of the distributed cracking engines that is trying to decode the alien grammar of the message that Manfred suspects is eligible for citizenship.
+
+Obeying an urge that it can't articulate, the cat sends out a feeler to the nearest router. The cybeast has Manfred's keys; Manfred trusts Aineko implicitly, which is unwise - his ex-wife tampered with it, after all, never mind all the kittens it absorbed in its youth. Tunneling out into the darkness, the cat stalks the Net alone ...
+
+"Just think about the people who can't adapt," he says. His voice sounds obscurely worried.
+
+"I try not to." She shivers. "You are thirty, you are slowing. What about the young? Are they keeping up, themselves?"
+
+"I have a daughter. She's about a hundred and sixty million seconds old. If Pamela would let me message her I could find out ..." There are echoes of old pain in his voice.
+
+"Don't go there, Manfred. Please." Despite everything, Manfred hasn't let go: Amber is a ligature that permanently binds him to Pamela's distant orbit.
+
+In the distance, the cat hears the sound of lobster minds singing in the void, a distant feed streaming from their cometary home as it drifts silently out through the asteroid belt, en route to a chilly encounter beyond Neptune. The lobsters sing of alienation and obsolescence, of intelligence too slow and tenuous to support the vicious pace of change that has sandblasted the human world until all the edges people cling to are jagged and brittle.
+
+Beyond the distant lobsters, the cat pings an anonymous distributed network server - peer-to-peer file storage spread holographically across a million hosts, unerasable, full of secrets and lies that nobody can afford to suppress. Rants, music, rip-offs of the latest Bollywood hits: The cat spiders past them all, looking for the final sample. Grabbing it - a momentary breakup in Manfred's spectacles the only symptom for either human to notice - the cat drags its prey home, sucks it down, and compares it against the data sample Annette's exocortex is analysing.
+
+"I'm sorry, my love. I just sometimes feel -" He sighs. "Age is a process of closing off opportunities behind you. I'm not young enough anymore - I've lost the dynamic optimism."
+
+The data sample on the pirate server differs from the one Annette's implant is processing.
+
+"You'll get it back," she reassures him quietly, stroking his side. "You are still sad from being mugged. This also will pass. You'll see."
+
+"Yeah." He finally relaxes, dropping back into the reflexive assurance of his own will. "I'll get over it, one way or another. Or someone who remembers being me will ..."
+
+In the darkness, Aineko bares teeth in a silent grin. Obeying a deeply hardwired urge to meddle, he moves a file across, making a copy of the alien download package Annette has been working on. She's got a copy of number two, the sequence the deep-space tracking network received from close to home, which ESA and the other big combines have been keeping to themselves. Another deeply buried thread starts up, and Aineko analyses the package from a perspective no human being has yet established. Presently a braid of processes running on an abstract virtual machine asks him a question that cannot be encoded in any human grammar. Watch and wait, he replies to his passenger. They'll figure out what we are sooner or later.
+
+PART 2: Point of Inflexion
+
+Life is a process which may be abstracted from other media.
+
+- John Von Neumann
+
+Chapter 4: Halo
+
+The asteroid is running Barney: it sings of love on the high frontier, of the passion of matter for replicators, and its friendship for the needy billions of the Pacific Rim. "I love you," it croons in Amber's ears as she seeks a precise fix on it: "Let me give you a big hug ..."
+
+A fraction of a light-second away, Amber locks a cluster of cursors together on the signal, trains them to track its Doppler shift, and reads off the orbital elements. "Locked and loaded," she mutters. The animated purple dinosaur pirouettes and prances in the middle of her viewport, throwing a diamond-tipped swizzle stick overhead. Sarcastically: "Big hug time! I got asteroid!" Cold gas thrusters bang somewhere behind her in the interstage docking ring, prodding the cumbersome farm ship round to orient on the Barney rock. She damps her enthusiasm self-consciously, her implants hungrily sequestrating surplus neurotransmitter molecules floating around her synapses before reuptake sets in. It doesn't do to get too excited in free flight. But the impulse to spin handstands, jump and sing is still there: It's her rock, and it loves her, and she's going to bring it to life.
+
+The workspace of Amber's room is a mass of stuff that probably doesn't belong on a spaceship. Posters of the latest Lebanese boy band bump and grind through their glam routines: Tentacular restraining straps wave from the corners of her sleeping bag, somehow accumulating a crust of dirty clothing from the air like a giant inanimate hydra. (Cleaning robots seldom dare to venture inside the teenager's bedroom.) One wall is repeatedly cycling through a simulation of the projected construction cycle of Habitat One, a big fuzzy sphere with a glowing core (that Amber is doing her bit to help create). Three or four small pastel-colored plastic kawaii dolls stalk each other across its circumference with million-kilometer strides. And her father's cat is curled up between the aircon duct and her costume locker, snoring in a high-pitched tone.
+
+Amber yanks open the faded velour curtain that shuts her room off from the rest of the hive: "I've got it!" she shouts. "It's all mine! I rule!" It's the sixteenth rock tagged by the orphanage so far, but it's the first that she's tagged by herself, and that makes it special. She bounces off the other side of the commons, surprising one of Oscar's cane toads - which should be locked down in the farm, it's not clear how it got here - and the audio repeaters copy the incoming signal, noise-fuzzed echoes of a thousand fossilized infants' video shows.
+
+* * *
+
+"You're so prompt, Amber," Pierre whines when she corners him in the canteen.
+
+"Well, yeah!" She tosses her head, barely concealing a smirk of delight at her own brilliance. She knows it isn't nice, but Mom is a long way away, and Dad and Stepmom don't care about that kind of thing. "I'm brilliant, me," she announces. "Now what about our bet?"
+
+"Aww." Pierre thrusts his hands deep into his pockets. "But I don't have two million on me in change right now. Next cycle?"
+
+"Huh?" She's outraged. "But we had a bet!"
+
+"Uh, Dr. Bayes said you weren't going to make it this time, either, so I stuck my smart money in an options trade. If I take it out now, I'll take a big hit. Can you give me until cycle's end?"
+
+"You should know better than to trust a sim, Pee." Her avatar blazes at him with early-teen contempt: Pierre hunches his shoulders under her gaze. He's only twelve, freckled, hasn't yet learned that you don't welsh on a deal. "I'll let you do it this time," she announces, "but you'll have to pay for it. I want interest."
+
+He sighs. "What base rate are you -"
+
+"No, your interest! Slave for a cycle!" She grins malevolently.
+
+And his face shifts abruptly into apprehension: "As long as you don't make me clean the litter tray again. You aren't planning on doing that, are you?"
+
+* * *
+
+_1 Welcome to the fourth decade. The thinking mass of the solar system now exceeds one MIPS per gram; it's still pretty dumb, but it's not dumb all over. The human population is near maximum overshoot, pushing nine billion, but its growth rate is tipping toward negative numbers, and bits of what used to be the first world are now facing a middle-aged average. Human cogitation provides about 10^{28}^ MIPS of the solar system's brainpower. The real thinking is mostly done by the halo of a thousand trillion processors that surround the meat machines with a haze of computation - individually a tenth as powerful as a human brain, collectively they're ten thousand times more powerful, and their numbers are doubling every twenty million seconds. They're up to 10^{33}^ MIPS and rising, although there's a long way to go before the solar system is fully awake.
+
+_1 Technologies come, technologies go, but nobody even five years ago predicted that there'd be tinned primates in orbit around Jupiter by now: A synergy of emergent industries and strange business models have kick-started the space age again, aided and abetted by the discovery of (so far undecrypted) signals from ETs. Unexpected fringe riders are developing new ecological niches on the edge of the human information space, light-minutes and light-hours from the core, as an expansion that has hung fire since the 1970s gets under way.
+
+_1 Amber, like most of the postindustrialists aboard the orphanage ship Ernst Sanger, is in her early teens: While their natural abilities are in many cases enhanced by germ-line genetic recombination, thanks to her mother's early ideals she has to rely on brute computational enhancements. She doesn't have a posterior parietal cortex hacked for extra short-term memory, or an anterior superior temporal gyrus tweaked for superior verbal insight, but she's grown up with neural implants that feel as natural to her as lungs or fingers. Half her wetware is running outside her skull on an array of processor nodes hooked into her brain by quantum-entangled communication channels - her own personal metacortex. These kids are mutant youth, burning bright: Not quite incomprehensible to their parents, but profoundly alien - the generation gap is as wide as the 1960s and as deep as the solar system. Their parents, born in the gutter years of the twenty-first century, grew up with white elephant shuttles and a space station that just went round and round, and computers that went beep when you pushed their buttons. The idea that Jupiter orbit was somewhere you could go was as profoundly counterintuitive as the Internet to a baby boomer.
+
+_1 Most of the passengers on the can have run away from parents who think that teenagers belong in school, unable to come to terms with a generation so heavily augmented that they are fundamentally brighter than the adults around them. Amber was fluent in nine languages by the age of six, only two of them human and six of them serializable; when she was seven, her mother took her to the school psychiatrist for speaking in synthetic tongues. That was the final straw for Amber: using an illicit anonymous phone, she called her father. Her mother had him under a restraining order, but it hadn't occurred to her to apply for an order against his partner ...
+
+* * *
+
+Vast whorls of cloud ripple beneath the ship's drive stinger: Orange and brown and muddy gray streaks slowly crawl across the bloated horizon of Jupiter. Sanger is nearing perijove, deep within the gas giant's lethal magnetic field; static discharges flicker along the tube, arcing over near the deep violet exhaust cloud emerging from the magnetic mirrors of the ship's VASIMR motor. The plasma rocket is cranked up to high mass flow, its specific impulse almost as low as a fission rocket but producing maximum thrust as the assembly creaks and groans through the gravitational assist maneuver. In another hour, the drive will flicker off, and the orphanage will fall up and out toward Ganymede, before dropping back in toward orbit around Amalthea, Jupiter's fourth moon (and source of much of the material in the Gossamer ring). They're not the first canned primates to make it to Jupiter subsystem, but they're one of the first wholly private ventures. The bandwidth out here sucks dead slugs through a straw, with millions of kilometers of vacuum separating them from scant hundreds of mouse-brained microprobes and a few dinosaurs left behind by NASA or ESA. They're so far from the inner system that a good chunk of the ship's communications array is given over to caching: The news is whole kiloseconds old by the time it gets out here.
+
+Amber, along with about half the waking passengers, watches in fascination from the common room. The commons are a long axial cylinder, a double-hulled inflatable at the center of the ship with a large part of their liquid water supply stored in its wall tubes. The far end is video-enabled, showing them a real-time 3D view of the planet as it rolls beneath them: in reality, there's as much mass as possible between them and the trapped particles in the Jovian magnetic envelope. "I could go swimming in that," sighs Lilly. "Just imagine, diving into that sea ..." Her avatar appears in the window, riding a silver surfboard down the kilometers of vacuum.
+
+"Nice case of wind-burn you've got there," someone jeers - Kas. Suddenly Lilly's avatar, hitherto clad in a shimmering metallic swimsuit, turns to the texture of baked meat and waggles sausage fingers up at them in warning.
+
+"Same to you and the window you climbed in through!" Abruptly the virtual vacuum outside the window is full of bodies, most of them human, contorting and writhing and morphing in mock-combat as half the kids pitch into the virtual death match. It's a gesture in the face of the sharp fear that outside the thin walls of the orphanage lies an environment that really is as hostile as Lilly's toasted avatar would indicate.
+
+Amber turns back to her slate: She's working through a complex mess of forms, necessary before the expedition can start work. Facts and figures that are never far away crowd around her, intimidating. Jupiter weighs 1.9 x 10^{27}^ kilograms. There are twenty-nine Jovian moons and an estimated two hundred thousand minor bodies, lumps of rock, and bits of debris crowded around them - debris above the size of ring fragments, for Jupiter (like Saturn) has rings, albeit not as prominent. A total of six major national orbiter platforms have made it out here - and another two hundred and seventeen microprobes, all but six of them private entertainment platforms. The first human expedition was put together by ESA Studios six years ago, followed by a couple of wildcat mining prospectors and a M-commerce bus that scattered half a million picoprobes throughout Jupiter subsystem. Now the Sanger has arrived, along with another three monkey cans (one from Mars, two more from LEO) and it looks as if colonization is about to explode, except that there are at least four mutually exclusive Grand Plans for what to do with old Jove's mass.
+
+Someone prods her. "Hey, Amber, what are you up to?"
+
+She opens her eyes. "Doing my homework." It's Su Ang. "Look, we're going to Amalthea, aren't we? But we file our accounts in Reno, so we have to do all this paperwork. Monica asked me to help. It's insane."
+
+Ang leans over and reads, upside down. "Environmental Protection Agency?"
+
+"Yeah. Estimated Environmental Impact Forward Analysis 204.6b, Page Two. They want me to 'list any bodies of standing water within five kilometers of the designated mining area. If excavating below the water table, list any wellsprings, reservoirs, and streams within depth of excavation in meters multiplied by five hundred meters up to a maximum distance of ten kilometers downstream of direction of bedding plane flow. For each body of water, itemize any endangered or listed species of bird, fish, mammal, reptile, invertebrate, or plant living within ten kilometers -'"
+
+" - of a mine on Amalthea. Which orbits one hundred and eighty thousand kilometers above Jupiter, has no atmosphere, and where you can pick up a whole body radiation dose of ten Grays in half an hour on the surface." Ang shakes her head, then spoils it by giggling. Amber glances up.
+
+On the wall in front of her someone - Nicky or Boris, probably - has pasted a caricature of her own avatar into the virch fight. She's being hugged from behind by a giant cartoon dog with floppy ears and an improbably large erection, who's singing anatomically improbable suggestions while fondling himself suggestively. "Fuck that!" Shocked out of her distraction - and angry - Amber drops her stack of paperwork and throws a new avatar at the screen, one an agent of hers dreamed up overnight. It's called Spike, and it's not friendly. Spike rips off the dog's head and pisses down its trachea, which is anatomically correct for a human being: Meanwhile she looks around, trying to work out which of the laughing idiot children and lost geeks around her could have sent such an unpleasant message.
+
+"Children! Chill out." She glances round - one of the Franklins (this is the twentysomething dark-skinned female one) is frowning at them. "Can't we leave you alone for half a K without a fight?"
+
+Amber pouts. "It's not a fight; it's a forceful exchange of opinions."
+
+"Hah." The Franklin leans back in midair, arms crossed, an expression of supercilious smugness pasted across her-their face. "Heard that one before. Anyway" - she-they gesture, and the screen goes blank - "I've got news for you pesky kids. We got a claim verified! Factory starts work as soon as we shut down the stinger and finish filing all the paperwork via our lawyers. Now's our chance to earn our upkeep ..."
+
+* * *
+
+Amber is flashing on ancient history, five years back along her time line. In her replay, she's in some kind of split-level ranch house out West. It's a temporary posting while her mother audits an obsolescent fab line enterprise that grinds out dead chips of VLSI silicon for Pentagon projects that have slipped behind the cutting edge. Her Mom leans over her, menacingly adult in her dark suit and chaperone earrings: "You're going to school, and that's that."
+
+Her mother is a blonde ice maiden madonna, one of the IRS's most productive bounty hunters - she can make grown CEOs panic just by blinking at them. Amber, a towheaded-eight-year old tearaway with a confusing mix of identities, inexperience blurring the boundary between self and grid, is not yet able to fight back effectively. After a couple of seconds, she verbalizes a rather feeble protest: "Don't want to!" One of her stance daemons whispers that this is the wrong approach to take, so she modifies it: "They'll beat up on me, Mom. I'm too different. Sides, I know you want me socialized up with my grade metrics, but isn't that what sideband's for? I can socialize real good at home."
+
+Mom does something unexpected: She kneels, putting herself on eye-level with Amber. They're on the living room carpet, all seventies-retro brown corduroy and acid-orange Paisley wallpaper, and for once, they're alone: The domestic robots are in hiding while the humans hold court. "Listen to me, sweetie." Mom's voice is breathy, laden with an emotional undertow as strong and stifling as the eau-de-Cologne she wears to the office to cover up the scent of her client's fear. "I know that's what your father's writing to you, but it isn't true. You need the company - physical company - of children your own age. You're natural, not some kind of engineered freak, even with your skullset. Natural children like you need company or they grow up all weird. Socialization isn't just about texting your own kind, Amber, you need to know how to deal with people who're different, too. I want you to grow up happy, and that won't happen if you don't learn to get on with children your own age. You're not going to be some kind of cyborg otaku freak, Amber. But to get healthy, you've got to go to school, build up a mental immune system. Anyway, that which does not destroy us makes us stronger, right?"
+
+It's crude moral blackmail, transparent as glass and manipulative as hell, but Amber's corpus logica flags it with a heavy emotional sprite miming the likelihood of physical discipline if she rises to the bait: Mom is agitated, nostrils slightly flared, ventilation rate up, some vasodilatation visible in her cheeks. Amber - in combination with her skullset and the metacortex of distributed agents it supports - is mature enough at eight years to model, anticipate, and avoid corporal punishment. But her stature and lack of physical maturity conspire to put her at a disadvantage when negotiating with adults who matured in a simpler age. She sighs, then puts on a pout to let Mom know she's still reluctant, but obedient. "O-kay. If you say so."
+
+Mom stands up, eyes distant - probably telling Saturn to warm his engine and open the garage doors. "I say so, punkin. Go get your shoes on, now. I'll pick you up on my way back from work, and I've got a treat for you; we're going to check out a new church together this evening." Mom smiles, but it doesn't reach her eyes: Amber has already figured out she's going through the motions in order to give her the simulated middle-American upbringing she believes Amber desperately needs before she runs head first into the future. She doesn't like the churches any more than her daughter does, but arguing won't work. "You be a good little girl, now, all right?"
+
+* * *
+
+The imam is at prayer in a gyrostabilized mosque.
+
+His mosque is not very big, and it has a congregation of one: He prays on his own every seventeen thousand two hundred and eighty seconds. He also webcasts the call to prayer, but there are no other believers in trans-Jovian space to answer the summons. Between prayers, he splits his attention between the exigencies of life support and scholarship. A student both of the Hadith and of knowledge-based systems, Sadeq collaborates in a project with other scholars who are building a revised concordance of all the known isnads, to provide a basis for exploring the body of Islamic jurisprudence from a new perspective - one they'll need sorely if the looked-for breakthroughs in communication with aliens emerge. Their goal is to answer the vexatious questions that bedevil Islam in the age of accelerated consciousness; and as their representative in orbit around Jupiter, these questions fall most heavily on Sadeq's shoulders.
+
+Sadeq is a slightly built man, with close-cropped black hair and a perpetually tired expression: Unlike the orphanage crew he has a ship to himself. The ship started out as an Iranian knock off of a Shenzhou-B capsule, with a Chinese type 921 space-station module tacked onto its tail; but the clunky, 1960s look-alike - a glittering aluminum dragonfly mating with a Coke can - has a weirdly contoured M2P2 pod strapped to its nose. The M2P2 pod is a plasma sail, built in orbit by one of Daewoo's wake shield facilities. It dragged Sadeq and his cramped space station out to Jupiter in just four months, surfing on the solar breeze. His presence may be a triumph for the umma, but he feels acutely alone out here: When he turns his compact observatory's mirrors in the direction of the Sanger, he is struck by its size and purposeful appearance. Sanger's superior size speaks of the efficiency of the Western financial instruments, semiautonomous investment trusts with variable business-cycle accounting protocols that make possible the development of commercial space exploration. The Prophet, peace be unto him, may have condemned usury; but it might well have given him pause to see these engines of capital formation demonstrate their power above the Great Red Spot.
+
+After finishing his prayers, Sadeq spends a couple of precious extra minutes on his mat. He finds meditation comes hard in this environment: Kneel in silence, and you become aware of the hum of ventilation fans, the smell of old socks and sweat, the metallic taste of ozone from the Elektron oxygen generators. It is hard to approach God in this third hand spaceship, a hand-me-down from arrogant Russia to ambitious China, and finally to the religious trustees of Qom, who have better uses for it than any of the heathen states imagine. They've pushed it far, this little toy space station; but who's to say if it is God's intention for humans to live here, in orbit around this swollen alien giant of a planet?
+
+Sadeq shakes his head; he rolls his mat up and stows it beside the solitary porthole with a quiet sigh. A stab of homesickness wrenches at him, for his childhood in hot, dusty Yazd and his many years as a student in Qom: He steadies himself by looking round, searching the station that is now as familiar to him as the fourth-floor concrete apartment his parents - a car factory worker and his wife - raised him in. The interior of the station is the size of a school bus, every surface cluttered with storage areas, instrument consoles, and layers of exposed pipes. A couple of globules of antifreeze jiggle like stranded jellyfish near a heat exchanger that has been giving him grief. Sadeq kicks off in search of the squeeze bottle he keeps for this purpose, then gathers up his roll of tools and instructs one of his agents to find him the relevant part of the maintenance log: it's time to fix the leaky joint for good.
+
+An hour or so of serious plumbing and he will eat freeze-dried lamb stew, with a paste of lentils and boiled rice, and a bulb of strong tea to wash it down, then sit down to review his next fly-by maneuvering sequence. Perhaps, God willing, there will be no further system alerts and he'll be able to spend an hour or two on his research between evening and final prayers. Maybe the day after tomorrow there'll even be time to relax for a couple of hours, to watch one of the old movies that he finds so fascinating for their insights into alien cultures: Apollo Thirteen, perhaps. It isn't easy, being the crew aboard a long-duration space mission. It's even harder for Sadeq, up here alone with nobody to talk to, for the communications lag to earth is more than half an hour each way - and as far as he knows, he's the only believer within half a billion kilometers.
+
+* * *
+
+Amber dials a number in Paris and waits until someone answers the phone. She knows the strange woman on the phone's tiny screen: Mom calls her "your father's fancy bitch" with a peculiar tight smile. (The one time Amber asked what a fancy bitch was, Mom slapped her - not hard, just a warning.) "Is Daddy there?" she asks.
+
+The strange woman looks slightly bemused. (Her hair is blonde, like Mom's, but the color clearly came out of a bleach bottle, and it's cut really short, and her skin is dark.) "Oui. Ah, yes." She smiles tentatively. "I am sorry, it is a disposable phone you are using? You want to talk to 'im?"
+
+It comes out in a rush: "I want to see him." Amber clutches the phone like a lifesaver: It's a cheap disposable cereal-packet item, and the cardboard is already softening in her sweaty grip. "Momma won't let me, Auntie 'Nette -"
+
+"Hush." Annette, who has lived with Amber's father for more than twice as long as her mother, smiles. "You are sure that telephone, your mother does not know of it?"
+
+Amber looks around. She's the only child in the restroom because it isn't break time, and she told teacher she had to go 'right now': "I'm sure, P20 confidence factor greater than 0.9." Her Bayesian head tells her that she can't reason accurately about this because Momma has never caught her with an illicit phone before, but what the hell. It can't get Dad into trouble if he doesn't know, can it?
+
+"Very good." Annette glances aside. "Manny, I have a surprise call for you."
+
+Daddy appears on screen. She can see all of his face, and he looks younger than last time: he must have stopped using those clunky old glasses. "Hi - Amber! Where are you? Does your mother know you're calling me?" He looks slightly worried.
+
+"No," she says confidently, "the phone came in a box of Grahams."
+
+"Phew. Listen, sweet, you must remember never, ever to call me where your mom may find out. Otherwise, she'll get her lawyers to come after me with thumbscrews and hot pincers, because she'll say I made you call me. And not even Uncle Gianni will be able to sort that out. Understand?"
+
+"Yes, Daddy." She sighs. "Even though that's not true, I know. Don't you want to know why I called?"
+
+"Um." For a moment, he looks taken aback. Then he nods, thoughtfully. Amber likes Daddy because he takes her seriously most times when she talks to him. It's a phreaking nuisance having to borrow her classmate's phones or tunnel past Mom's pit-bull firewall, but Dad doesn't assume that she can't know anything just because she's only a kid. "Go ahead. There's something you need to get off your chest? How've things been, anyway?"
+
+She's going to have to be brief: The disposaphone comes prepaid, the international tariff it's using is lousy, and the break bell is going to ring any minute. "I want out, Daddy. I mean it. Mom's getting loopier every week - she's dragging me round all these churches now, and yesterday, she threw a fit over me talking to my terminal. She wants me to see the school shrink, I mean, what for? I can't do what she wants - I'm not her little girl! Every time I tunnel out, she tries to put a content-bot on me, and it's making my head hurt - I can't even think straight anymore!" To her surprise, Amber feels tears starting. "Get me out of here!"
+
+The view of her father shakes, pans round to show her Tante Annette looking worried. "You know, your father, he cannot do anything? The divorce lawyers, they will tie him up."
+
+Amber sniffs. "Can you help?" she asks.
+
+"I'll see what I can do," her father's fancy bitch promises as the break bell rings.
+
+* * *
+
+An instrument package peels away from the Sanger's claim jumper drone and drops toward the potato-shaped rock, fifty kilometers below. Jupiter hangs huge and gibbous in the background, impressionist wallpaper for a mad cosmologist: Pierre bites his lower lip as he concentrates on steering it.
+
+Amber, wearing a black sleeping sack, hovers over his head like a giant bat, enjoying her freedom for a shift. She looks down on Pierre's bowl-cut hair, wiry arms gripping either side of the viewing table, and wonders what to have him do next. A slave for a day is an interesting experience: Life aboard the Sanger is busy enough that nobody gets much slack time (at least not until the big habitats have been assembled and the high-bandwidth dish is pointing back at Earth). They're unrolling everything to a hugely intricate plan generated by the backers' critical path team, and there isn't much room for idling: The expedition relies on shamelessly exploiting child labor - they're lighter on the life-support consumables than adults - working the kids twelve hour days to assemble a toe hold on the shore of the future. (When they're older and their options vest fully, they'll all be rich, but that hasn't stopped the outraged herdnews propaganda chorus from sounding off back home.) For Amber, the chance to let somebody else work for her is novel, and she's trying to make every minute count.
+
+"Hey, slave," she calls idly; "how you doing?"
+
+Pierre sniffs. "It's going okay." He refuses to glance up at her, Amber notices. He's thirteen. Isn't he supposed to be obsessed with girls by that age? She notices his quiet, intense focus, runs a stealthy probe along his outer boundary; he shows no sign of noticing it, but it bounces off, unable to chink his mental armor. "Got cruise speed," he says, taciturn, as two tonnes of metal, ceramics and diamond-phase weirdness hurtle toward the surface of Barney at three hundred kilometers per hour. "Stop shoving me, there's a three-second lag, and I don't want to get into a feedback control loop with it."
+
+"I'll shove if I want, slave." She sticks her tongue out at him.
+
+"And if you make me drop it?" he asks. Looking up at her, his face serious - "Are we supposed to be doing this?"
+
+"You cover your ass, and I'll cover mine," she says, then turns bright red. "You know what I mean."
+
+"I do, do I?" Pierre grins widely, then turns back to the console: "Aww, that's no fun. And you want to tune whatever bit-bucket you've given control of your speech centers to - they're putting out way too much double entendre, somebody might mistake you for a grown-up."
+
+"You stick to your business, and I'll stick to mine," she says, emphatically. "And you can start by telling me what's happening."
+
+"Nothing." He leans back and crosses his arms, grimacing at the screen. "It's going to drift for five hundred seconds, now, then there's the midcourse correction and a deceleration burn before touch down. And then it's going to be an hour while it unwraps itself and starts unwinding the cable spool. What do you want, minute noodles with that?"
+
+"Uh-huh." Amber spreads her bat wings and lies back in mid air, staring at the window, feeling rich and idle as Pierre works his way through her day shift. "Wake me when there's something interesting to see." Maybe she should have had him feed her peeled grapes or give her a foot massage, something more traditionally hedonistic; but right now, just knowing he's her own little piece of alienated labor is doing good things for her self-esteem. Looking at those tense arms, the curve of his neck, she thinks maybe there's something to this whispering and giggling he really fancies you stuff the older girls go in for -
+
+The window rings like a gong, and Pierre coughs. "You've got mail," he says drily. "You want me to read it for you?"
+
+"What the -" A message is flooding across the screen, right-to-left snaky script like the stuff on her corporate instrument (now lodged safely in a deposit box in Zurich). It takes her a while to load in a grammar agent that can handle Arabic, and another minute for her to take in the meaning of the message. When she does, she starts swearing, loudly and continuously.
+
+"You bitch, Mom, why'd you have to go and do a thing like that?"
+
+* * *
+
+The corporate instrument arrived in a huge FedEx box addressed to Amber: It happened on her birthday while Mom was at work, and she remembers it as if it was only an hour ago.
+
+She remembers reaching up and scraping her thumb over the deliveryman's clipboard, the rough feel of the microsequencers sampling her DNA. She drags the package inside. When she pulls the tab on the box, it unpacks itself automatically, regurgitating a compact 3D printer, half a ream of paper printed in old-fashioned dumb ink, and a small calico cat with a large @-symbol on its flank. The cat hops out of the box, stretches, shakes its head, and glares at her. "You're Amber?" it mrowls. It actually makes real cat noises, but the meaning is clear - it's able to talk directly to her linguistic competence interface.
+
+"Yeah," she says, shyly. "Are you from Tante 'Nette?"
+
+"No, I'm from the fucking tooth fairy." It leans over and head-butts her knee, strops the scent glands between its ears all over her skirt. "Listen, you got any tuna in the kitchen?"
+
+"Mom doesn't believe in seafood," says Amber. "It's all foreign-farmed muck these days, she says. It's my birthday today, did I tell you?"
+
+"Happy fucking birthday, then." The cat yawns, convincingly realistic. "Here's your dad's present. Bastard put me in hibernation and sent me along to show you how to work it. You take my advice, you'll trash the fucker. No good will come of it."
+
+Amber interrupts the cat's grumbling by clapping her hands gleefully; "So what is it?" she demands: "A new invention? Some kind of weird sex toy from Amsterdam? A gun, so I can shoot Pastor Wallace?"
+
+"Naah." The cat yawns, yet again, and curls up on the floor next to the 3D printer. "It's some kinda dodgy business model to get you out of hock to your mom. Better be careful, though - he says its legality is narrowly scoped jurisdiction-wise. Your Mom might be able to undermine it if she learns about how it works."
+
+"Wow. Like, how totally cool." In truth, Amber is delighted because it is her birthday; but Mom's at work, and Amber's home alone, with just the TV in moral majority mode for company. Things have gone downhill since Mom decided a modal average dose of old-time religion was an essential part of her upbringing, to the point that absolutely the best thing in the world Tante Annette could send her is some scam programmed by Daddy to take her away. If it doesn't work, Mom will take her to Church tonight, and she's certain she'll end up making a scene again. Amber's tolerance of willful idiocy is diminishing rapidly, and while building up her memetic immunity might be the real reason Mom's forcing this shit on her - it's always hard to tell with Mom - things have been tense ever since she got expelled from Sunday school for mounting a spirited defense of the theory of evolution.
+
+The cat sniffs in the direction of the printer. "Why doncha fire it up?" Amber opens the lid on the printer, removes the packing popcorn, and plugs it in. There's a whir and a rush of waste heat from its rear as it cools the imaging heads down to working temperature and registers her ownership.
+
+"What do I do now?" she asks.
+
+"Pick up the page labeled READ ME and follow the instructions," the cat recites in a bored singsong voice. It winks at her, then fakes an exaggerated French accent: "Le READ ME, il sont contain directions pour executing le corporate instrument dans le boit. In event of perplexity, consult the accompanying Aineko for clarification." The cat wrinkles its nose rapidly, as if it's about to bite an invisible insect: "Warning: Don't rely on your father's cat's opinions, it is a perverse beast and cannot be trusted. Your mother helped seed its meme base, back when they were married. Ends." It mumbles on for a while: "Fucking snotty Parisian bitch, I'll piss in her knicker drawer, I'll molt in her bidet ..."
+
+"Don't be vile." Amber scans the README quickly. Corporate instruments are strong magic, according to Daddy, and this one is exotic by any standards - a limited company established in Yemen, contorted by the intersection between shari'a and the global legislatosaurus. Understanding it isn't easy, even with a personal net full of subsapient agents that have full access to whole libraries of international trade law - the bottleneck is comprehension. Amber finds the documents highly puzzling. It's not the fact that half of them are written in Arabic that bothers her - that's what her grammar engine is for - or even that they're full of S-expressions and semidigestible chunks of LISP: But the company seems to assert that it exists for the sole purpose of owning chattel slaves.
+
+"What's going on?" she asks the cat. "What's this all about?"
+
+The cat sneezes, then looks disgusted. "This wasn't my idea, big shot. Your father is a very weird guy, and your mother hates him lots because she's still in love with him. She's got kinks, y'know? Or maybe she's sublimating them, if she's serious about this church shit she's putting you through. He thinks she's a control freak, and he's not entirely wrong. Anyway, after your dad ran off in search of another dom, she took out an injunction against him. But she forgot to cover his partner, and she bought this parcel of worms and sent them to you, okay? Annie is a real bitch, but he's got her wrapped right around his finger, or something. Anyway, he built these companies and this printer - which isn't hardwired to a filtering proxy, like your mom's - specifically to let you get away from her legally. If that's what you want to do."
+
+Amber fast-forwards through the dynamic chunks of the README - boring legal UML diagrams, mostly - soaking up the gist of the plan. Yemen is one of the few countries to implement traditional Sunni shari'a law and a limited liability company scam at the same time. Owning slaves is legal - the fiction is that the owner has an option hedged on the indentured laborer's future output, with interest payments that grow faster than the unfortunate victim can pay them off - and companies are legal entities. If Amber sells herself into slavery to this company, she will become a slave and the company will be legally liable for her actions and upkeep. The rest of the legal instrument - about ninety percent of it, in fact - is a set of self-modifying corporate mechanisms coded in a variety of jurisdictions that permit Turing-complete company constitutions, and which act as an ownership shell for the slavery contract. At the far end of the corporate shell game is a trust fund of which Amber is the prime beneficiary and shareholder. When she reaches the age of majority, she'll acquire total control over all the companies in the network and can dissolve her slave contract; until then, the trust fund (which she essentially owns) oversees the company that owns her (and keeps it safe from hostile takeover bids). Oh, and the company network is primed by an extraordinary general meeting that instructed it to move the trust's assets to Paris immediately. A one-way airline ticket is enclosed.
+
+"You think I should take this?" she asks uncertainly. It's hard to tell how smart the cat really is - there's probably a yawning vacuum behind those semantic networks if you dig deep enough - but it tells a pretty convincing tale.
+
+The cat squats and curls its tail protectively around its paws: "I'm saying nothing, you know what I mean? You take this, you can go live with your dad. But it won't stop your ma coming after him with a horsewhip, and after you with a bunch of lawyers and a set of handcuffs. You want my advice, you'll phone the Franklins and get aboard their off-planet mining scam. In space, no one can serve a writ on you. Plus, they got long-term plans to get into the CETI market, cracking alien network packets. You want my honest opinion, you wouldn't like it in Paris after a bit. Your Dad and the frog bitch, they're swingers, y'know? No time in their lives for a kid. Or a cat like me, now I think of it. They're working all day for the Senator, and out all hours of night doing drugs, fetish parties, raves, opera, that kind of adult shit. Your Dad dresses in frocks more than your mom, and your Tante 'Nettie leads him around the apartment on a chain when they're not having noisy sex on the balcony. They'd cramp your style, kid. You shouldn't have to put up with parents who have more of a life than you do."
+
+"Huh." Amber wrinkles her nose, half-disgusted by the cat's transparent scheming, and half-acknowledging its message: I better think hard about this, she decides. Then she flies off in so many directions at once that she nearly browns out the household broadband. Part of her is examining the intricate card pyramid of company structures; somewhere else, she's thinking about what can go wrong, while another bit (probably some of her wet, messy glandular biological self) is thinking about how nice it would be to see Daddy again, albeit with some trepidation. Parents aren't supposed to have sex - isn't there a law, or something? "Tell me about the Franklins? Are they married? Singular?"
+
+The 3D printer is cranking up. It hisses slightly, dissipating heat from the hard vacuum chamber in its supercooled workspace. Deep in its guts it creates coherent atom beams, from a bunch of Bose-Einstein condensates hovering on the edge of absolute zero. By superimposing interference patterns on them, it generates an atomic hologram, building a perfect replica of some original artifact, right down to the atomic level - there are no clunky moving nanotechnology parts to break or overheat or mutate. Something is going to come out of the printer in half an hour, something cloned off its original right down to the individual quantum states of its component atomic nuclei. The cat, seemingly oblivious, shuffles closer to the warm air exhaust ducts.
+
+"Bob Franklin, he died about two, three years before you were born - your dad did business with him. So did your mom. Anyway, he had chunks of his noumen preserved and the estate trustees are trying to re-create his consciousness by cross-loading him in their implants. They're sort of a borganism, but with money and style. Anyway, Bob got into the space biz back then, with some financial wizardry a friend of your father whipped up for him, and now they're building a spacehab that they're going to take all the way out to Jupiter, where they can dismantle a couple of small moons and begin building helium-three refineries. It's that CETI scam I told you about earlier, but they've got a whole load of other angles on it for the long term. See, your dad's friends have cracked the broadcast, the one everybody knows about. It's a bunch of instructions for finding the nearest router that plugs into the galactic Internet. And they want to go out there and talk to some aliens."
+
+This is mostly going right over Amber's head - she'll have to learn what helium-three refineries are later - but the idea of running away to space has a certain appeal. Adventure, that's what. Amber looks around the living room and sees it for a moment as a capsule, a small wooden cell locked deep in a vision of a middle America that never was - the one her mom wants to bring her up in, like a misshapen Skinner box designed to train her to be normal. "Is Jupiter fun?" she asks. "I know it's big and not very dense, but is it, like, a happening place? Are there any aliens there?"
+
+"It's the first place you need to go if you want to get to meet the aliens eventually," says the cat as the printer clanks and disgorges a fake passport (convincingly aged), an intricate metal seal engraved with Arabic script, and a tailored wide-spectrum vaccine targeted on Amber's immature immune system. "Stick that on your wrist, sign the three top copies, put them in the envelope, and let's get going. We've got a flight to catch, slave."
+
+* * *
+
+Sadeq is eating his dinner when the first lawsuit in Jupiter orbit rolls in.
+
+Alone in the cramped humming void of his station, he considers the plea. The language is awkward, showing all the hallmarks of a crude machine translation: The supplicant is American, a woman, and - oddly - claims to be a Christian. This is surprising enough, but the nature of her claim is, at face value, preposterous. He forces himself to finish his bread, then bag the waste and clean the platter, before he gives it his full consideration. Is it a tasteless joke? Evidently not. As the only quadi outside the orbit of Mars, he is uniquely qualified to hear it, and it is a case that cries out for justice.
+
+A woman who leads a God-fearing life - not a correct one, no, but she shows some signs of humility and progress toward a deeper understanding - is deprived of her child by the machinations of a feckless husband who deserted her years before. That the woman was raising the child alone strikes Sadeq as disturbingly Western, but pardonable when he reads her account of the feckless one's behavior, which is pretty lax; an ill fate indeed would await any child that this man raises to adulthood. This man deprives her of her child, but not by legitimate means: He doesn't take the child into his own household or make any attempt to raise her, either in accordance with his own customs or the precepts of shari'a. Instead, he enslaves her wickedly in the mire of the Western legal tradition, then casts her into outer darkness to be used as a laborer by the dubious forces of self-proclaimed "progress". The same forces Sadeq has been sent to confront, as representative of the umma in orbit around Jupiter.
+
+Sadeq scratches his short beard thoughtfully. A nasty tale, but what can he do about it? "Computer," he says, "a reply to this supplicant: My sympathies lie with you in the manner of your suffering, but I fail to see in what way I can be of assistance. Your heart cries out for help before God (blessed be his name), but surely this is a matter for the temporal authorities of the dar al-Harb." He pauses: Or is it? he wonders. Legal wheels begin to turn in his mind. "If you can but find your way to extending to me a path by which I can assert the primacy of shari'a over your daughter, I shall apply myself to constructing a case for her emancipation, to the greater glory of God (blessed be his name). Ends, sigblock, send."
+
+Releasing the Velcro straps that hold him at the table, Sadeq floats up and kicks gently toward the forward end of the cramped habitat. The controls of the telescope are positioned between the ultrasonic clothing cleaner and the lithium hydroxide scrubbers. They're already freed up, because he was conducting a wide-field survey of the inner ring, looking for the signature of water ice. It is the work of a few moments to pipe the navigation and tracking system into the telescope's controller and direct it to hunt for the big foreign ship of fools. Something nudges at Sadeq's mind urgently, an irritating realization that he may have missed something in the woman's e-mail: there were a number of huge attachments. With half his mind he surfs the news digest his scholarly peers send him daily. Meanwhile, he waits patiently for the telescope to find the speck of light that the poor woman's daughter is enslaved within.
+
+This might be a way in, he realizes, a way to enter dialogue with them. Let the hard questions answer themselves, elegantly. There will be no need for confrontation if they can be convinced that their plans are faulty: no need to defend the godly from the latter-day Tower of Babel these people propose to build. If this woman Pamela means what she says, Sadeq need not end his days out here in the cold between the worlds, away from his elderly parents and brother, and his colleagues and friends. And he will be profoundly grateful, because in his heart of hearts, he knows that he is less a warrior than a scholar.
+
+* * *
+
+"I'm sorry, but the borg is attempting to assimilate a lawsuit," says the receptionist. "Will you hold?"
+
+"Crud." Amber blinks the Binary Betty answerphone sprite out of her eye and glances round at the cabin. "That is so last century," she grumbles. "Who do they think they are?"
+
+"Dr. Robert H. Franklin," volunteers the cat. "It's a losing proposition if you ask me. Bob was so fond of his dope there's this whole hippy group mind that's grown up using his state vector as a bong -"
+
+"Shut the fuck up!" Amber shouts at him. Instantly contrite (for yelling in an inflatable spacecraft is a major faux pas): "Sorry." She spawns an autonomic thread with full parasympathetic nervous control, tells it to calm her down, then spawns a couple more to go forth and become fuqaha, expert on shari'a law. She realizes she's buying up way too much of the orphanage's scarce bandwidth - time that will have to be paid for in chores, later - but it's necessary. "Mom's gone too far. This time it's war."
+
+She slams out of her cabin and spins right round in the central axis of the hab, a rogue missile pinging for a target to vent her rage on. A tantrum would be good -
+
+But her body is telling her to chill out, take ten, and there's a drone of scriptural lore dribbling away in the back of her head, and she's feeling frustrated and angry and not in control, but not really mad anymore. It was like this three years ago when Mom noticed her getting on too well with Jenny Morgan and moved her to a new school district - she said it was a work assignment, but Amber knows better, Mom asked for it - just to keep her dependent and helpless. Mom is a control-freak with fixed ideas about how to bring up a child, and ever since she lost Dad, she's been working her claws into Amber, making her upbringing a life's work - which is tough, because Amber is not good victim material, and is smart and well networked to boot. But now, Mom's found a way to fuck Amber over completely, even in Jupiter orbit, and if not for her skullware keeping a lid on things, Amber would be totally out of control.
+
+Instead of shouting at her cat or trying to message the Franklins, Amber goes to hunt down the borg in their meatspace den.
+
+There are sixteen borg aboard the Sanger - adults, members of the Franklin Collective, squatters in the ruins of Bob Franklin's posthumous vision. They lend bits of their brains to the task of running what science has been able to resurrect of the dead dot-com billionaire's mind, making him the first bodhisattva of the uploading age - apart from the lobster colony, of course. Their den mother is a woman called Monica: a willowy, brown-eyed hive queen with raster-burned corneal implants and a dry, sardonic delivery that can corrode egos like a desert wind. She's better than any of the others at running Bob, except for the creepy one called Jack, and she's no slouch when she's being herself (unlike Jack, who is never himself in public). Which probably explains why they elected her Maximum Leader of the expedition.
+
+Amber finds Monica in the number four kitchen garden, performing surgery on a filter that's been blocked by toad spawn. She's almost buried beneath a large pipe, her Velcro-taped tool kit waving in the breeze like strange blue air-kelp. "Monica? You got a minute?"
+
+"Sure, I have lots of minutes. Make yourself helpful? Pass me the antitorque wrench and a number six hex head."
+
+"Um." Amber captures the blue flag and fiddles around with its contents. Something that has batteries, motors, a flywheel counterweight, and laser gyros assembles itself - Amber passes it under the pipe. "Here. Listen, your phone is engaged."
+
+"I know. You've come to see me about your conversion, haven't you?"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+There's a clanking noise from under the pressure sump. "Take this." A plastic bag floats out, bulging with stray fasteners. "I got a bit of hoovering to do. Get yourself a mask if you don't already have one."
+
+A minute later, Amber is back beside Monica's legs, her face veiled by a filter mask. "I don't want this to go through," she says. "I don't care what Mom says, I'm not Moslem! This judge, he can't touch me. He can't," she adds, vehemence warring with uncertainty.
+
+"Maybe he doesn't want to?" Another bag: "Here, catch."
+
+Amber grabs the bag, a fraction of a second too late. She discovers the hard way that it's full of water and toadspawn. Stringy mucous ropes full of squiggling comma-shaped tadpoles explode all over the compartment and bounce off the walls in a shower of amphibian confetti. "Eew!"
+
+Monica squirms out from behind the pipe. "Oh, you didn't." She kicks off the consensus-defined floor and grabs a wad of absorbent paper from the spinner, whacks it across the ventilator shroud above the sump. Together they go after the toad spawn with rubbish bags and paper - by the time they've got the stringy mess mopped up, the spinner has begun to click and whir, processing cellulose from the algae tanks into fresh wipes. "That was not good," Monica says emphatically as the disposal bin sucks down her final bag. "You wouldn't happen to know how the toad got in here?"
+
+"No, but I ran into one that was loose in the commons, one shift before last cycle-end. Gave it a ride back to Oscar."
+
+"I'll have a word with him, then." Monica glares blackly at the pipe. "I'm going to have to go back and refit the filter in a minute. Do you want me to be Bob?"
+
+"Uh." Amber thinks. "Not sure. Your call."
+
+"All right, Bob coming on-line." Monica's face relaxes slightly, then her expression hardens. "Way I see it, you've got a choice. Your mother kinda boxed you in, hasn't she?"
+
+"Yes." Amber frowns.
+
+"So. Pretend I'm an idiot. Talk me through it, huh?"
+
+Amber drags herself alongside the hydro pipe and gets her head down, alongside Monica/Bob, who is floating with her feet near the floor. "I ran away from home. Mom owned me - that is, she had parental rights and Dad had none. So Dad, via a proxy, helped me sell myself into slavery to a company. The company was owned by a trust fund, and I'm the main beneficiary when I reach the age of majority. As a chattel, the company tells me what to do - legally - but the shell company is set to take my orders. So I'm autonomous. Right?"
+
+"That sounds like the sort of thing your father would do," Monica/Bob says neutrally. Overtaken by a sardonic middle-aged Silicon Valley drawl, her north-of-England accent sounds peculiarly mid-Atlantic.
+
+"Trouble is, most countries don't acknowledge slavery, they just dress it up pretty and call it in loco parentis or something. Those that do mostly don't have any equivalent of a limited liability company, much less one that can be directed by another company from abroad. Dad picked Yemen on the grounds that they've got this stupid brand of shari'a law - and a crap human rights record - but they're just about conformant to the open legal standards protocol, able to interface to EU norms via a Turkish legislative cut-out."
+
+"So."
+
+"Well, I guess I was technically a Janissary. Mom was doing her Christian phase, so that made me a Christian unbeliever slave of an Islamic company. Now the stupid bitch has gone and converted to shi'ism. Normally Islamic descent runs through the father, but she picked her sect carefully and chose one that's got a progressive view of women's rights: They're sort of Islamic fundamentalist liberal constructionists, 'what would the Prophet do if he was alive today and had to worry about self-replicating chewing gum factories' and that sort of thing. They generally take a progressive view of things like legal equality of the sexes because, for his time and place, the Prophet was way ahead of the ball and they figure they ought to follow his example. Anyway, that means Mom can assert that I am Moslem, and under Yemeni law, I get to be treated as a Moslem chattel of a company. And their legal code is very dubious about permitting slavery of Moslems. It's not that I have rights as such, but my pastoral well-being becomes the responsibility of the local imam, and -" She shrugs helplessly.
+
+"Has he tried to make you run under any new rules, yet?" asks Monica/Bob. "Has he put blocks on your freedom of agency, tried to mess with your mind? Insisted on libido dampers or a strict dress code?"
+
+"Not yet." Amber's expression is grim. "But he's no dummy. I figure he may be using Mom - and me - as a way of getting his fingers into this whole expedition. Staking a claim for jurisdiction, claim arbitration, that sort of thing. It could be worse; he might order me to comply fully with his specific implementation of shari'a. They permit implants, but require mandatory conceptual filtering: If I run that stuff, I'll end up believing it."
+
+"Okay." Monica does a slow backward somersault in midair. "Now tell me why you can't simply repudiate it."
+
+"Because." Deep breath. "I can do that in two ways. I can deny Islam, which makes me an apostate, and automatically terminates my indenture to the shell, so Mom owns me under US or EU law. Or I can say that the instrument has no legal standing because I was in the USA when I signed it, and slavery is illegal there, in which case Mom owns me. Or I can take the veil, live like a modest Moslem woman, do whatever the imam wants, and Mom doesn't own me - but she gets to appoint my chaperone. Oh Bob, she has planned this so well."
+
+"Uh-huh." Monica rotates back to the floor and looks at Amber, suddenly very Bob. "Now you've told me your troubles, start thinking like your dad. Your Dad had a dozen creative ideas before breakfast every day - it's how he made his name. Your mom has got you in a box. Think your way outside it: What can you do?"
+
+"Well." Amber rolls over and hugs the fat hydroponic duct to her chest like a life raft. "It's a legal paradox. I'm trapped because of the jurisdiction she's cornered me in. I could talk to the judge, I suppose, but she'll have picked him carefully." Her eyes narrow. "The jurisdiction. Hey, Bob." She lets go of the duct and floats free, hair streaming out behind her like a cometary halo. "How do I go about getting myself a new jurisdiction?"
+
+Monica grins. "I seem to recall the traditional way was to grab yourself some land and set yourself up as king; but there are other ways. I've got some friends I think you should meet. They're not good conversationalists and there's a two-hour lightspeed delay, but I think you'll find they've answered that question already. But why don't you talk to the imam first and find out what he's like? He may surprise you. After all, he was already out here before your mom decided to use him to make a point."
+
+* * *
+
+The Sanger hangs in orbit thirty kilometers up, circling the waist of potato-shaped Amalthea. Drones swarm across the slopes of Mons Lyctos, ten kilometers above the mean surface level. They kick up clouds of reddish sulphate dust as they spread transparent sheets across the barren moonscape. This close to Jupiter (a mere hundred and eighty thousand kilometers above the swirling madness of the cloudscape) the gas giant fills half the sky with a perpetually changing clock face, for Amalthea orbits the master in just under twelve hours. The Sanger's radiation shields are running at full power, shrouding the ship in a corona of rippling plasma: Radio is useless, and the human miners control their drones via an intricate network of laser circuits. Other, larger drones are unwinding spools of heavy electrical cable north and south from the landing site. Once the circuits are connected, they will form a coil cutting through Jupiter's magnetic field, generating electrical current (and imperceptibly sapping the moon's orbital momentum).
+
+Amber sighs and looks, for the sixth time this hour, at the webcam plastered on the side of her cabin. She's taken down the posters and told the toys to tidy themselves away. In another two thousand seconds, the tiny Iranian spaceship will rise above the limb of Moshtari, and then it will be time to talk to the teacher. She isn't looking forward to the experience. If he's a grizzled old blockhead of the most obdurate fundamentalist streak, she'll be in trouble: Disrespect for age has been part and parcel of the Western teenage experience for generations, and a cross-cultural thread that she's detailed to clue up on Islam reminds her that not all cultures share this outlook. But if he turns out to be young, intelligent, and flexible, things could be even worse. When she was eight, Amber audited The Taming of the Shrew. She finds she has no appetite for a starring role in her own cross-cultural production.
+
+She sighs again. "Pierre?"
+
+"Yeah?" His voice comes from the foot of the emergency locker in her room. He's curled up down there, limbs twitching languidly as he drives a mining drone around the surface of Object Barney, as the rock has named itself. The drone is a long-legged crane fly look-alike, bouncing very slowly from toe tip to toe tip in the microgravity. The rock is only half a kilometer along its longest axis, coated brown with weird hydrocarbon goop and sulphur compounds sprayed off the surface of Io by the Jovian winds. "I'm coming."
+
+"You better." She glances at the screen. "One twenty seconds to next burn." The payload canister on the screen is, technically speaking, stolen. It'll be okay as long as she gives it back, Bob said, although she won't be able to do that until it's reached Barney and they've found enough water ice to refuel it. "Found anything yet?"
+
+"Just the usual. Got a seam of ice near the semimajor pole - it's dirty, but there's at least a thousand tons there. And the surface is crunchy with tar. Amber, you know what? The orange shit, it's solid with fullerenes."
+
+Amber grins at her reflection in the screen. That's good news. Once the payload she's steering touches down, Pierre can help her lay superconducting wires along Barney's long axis. It's only a kilometer and a half, and that'll only give them a few tens of kilowatts of juice, but the condensation fabricator that's also in the payload can will be able to use it to convert Barney's crust into processed goods at about two grams per second. Using designs copylefted by the free hardware foundation, inside two hundred thousand seconds they'll have a grid of sixty-four 3D printers barfing up structured matter at a rate limited only by available power. Starting with a honking great dome tent and some free nitrogen/oxygen for her to breathe, then adding a big web cache and direct high-bandwidth uplink to Earth, Amber could have her very own one-girl colony up and running within a million seconds.
+
+The screen blinks at her. "Oh shit! Make yourself scarce, Pierre?" The incoming call nags at her attention. "Yeah? Who are you?"
+
+The screen fills with a view of a cramped, very twen-cen-looking space capsule. The guy inside it is in his twenties, with a heavily tanned face, close-cropped hair and beard, wearing an olive drab space suit liner. He's floating between a TORU manual docking controller and a gilt-framed photograph of the Ka'bah at Mecca. "Good evening to you," he says solemnly. "Do I have the honor to be addressing Amber Macx?"
+
+"Uh, yeah? That's me." She stares at him: He looks nothing like her conception of an ayatollah - whatever an ayatollah is - elderly, black-robed, vindictively fundamentalist. "Who are you?"
+
+"I am Dr. Sadeq Khurasani. I hope that I am not interrupting you? Is it convenient for you that we talk now?"
+
+He looks so anxious that Amber nods automatically. "Sure. Did my Mom put you up to this?" They're still speaking English, and she notices that his diction is good, but slightly stilted. He isn't using a grammar engine, he actually learned the language the hard way, she realizes, feeling a frisson of fear. "You want to be careful how you talk to her. She doesn't lie, exactly, but she gets people to do what she wants."
+
+"Yes, I spoke to - ah." A pause. They're still almost a light-second apart, time for painful collisions and accidental silences. "I see. Are you sure you should be speaking of your mother that way?"
+
+Amber breathes deeply. "Adults can get divorced. If I could get divorced from her, I would. She's -" She flails around for the right word helplessly. "Look, she's the sort of person who can't lose a fight. If she's going to lose, she'll try to figure how to set the law on you. Like she's done to me. Don't you see?"
+
+Dr. Khurasani looks extremely dubious. "I am not sure I understand," He says. "Perhaps, mmm, I should tell you why I am talking to you?"
+
+"Sure. Go ahead." Amber is startled by his attitude: He actually seems to be taking her seriously, she realizes. Treating her like an adult. The sensation is so novel - coming from someone more than twenty years old - that she almost lets herself forget that he's only talking to her because Mom set her up.
+
+"Well, I am an engineer. In addition, I am a student of fiqh, jurisprudence. In fact, I am qualified to sit in judgment. I am a very junior judge, but even so, it is a heavy responsibility. Anyway, your mother, peace be unto her, lodged a petition with me. Are you aware of it?"
+
+"Yes." Amber tenses up. "It's a lie. Distortion of the facts."
+
+"Hmm." Sadeq rubs his beard thoughtfully. "Well, I have to find out, yes? Your mother has submitted herself to the will of God. This makes you the child of a Moslem, and she claims -"
+
+"She's trying to use you as a weapon!" Amber interrupts. "I sold myself into slavery to get away from her, do you understand? I enslaved myself to a company that is held in trust for my ownership. She's trying to change the rules to get me back. You know what? I don't believe she gives a shit about your religion, all she wants is me!"
+
+"A mother's love -"
+
+"Fuck love," Amber snarls, "she wants power."
+
+Sadeq's expression hardens. "You have a foul mouth in your head, child. All I am trying to do is to find out the facts of this situation. You should ask yourself if such disrespect furthers your interests?" He pauses for a moment, then continues, less abruptly. "Did you really have such a bad childhood with her? Do you think she did everything merely for power, or could she love you?" Pause. "You must understand, I need to learn these things. Before I can know what is the right thing to do."
+
+"My mother -" Amber stops dead and spawns a vaporous cloud of memory retrievals. They fan out through the space around her mind like the tail of her cometary mind. Invoking a complex of network parsers and class filters, she turns the memories into reified images and blats them at the webcam's tiny brain so he can see them. Some of the memories are so painful that Amber has to close her eyes. Mom in full office war paint, leaning over Amber, promising to disable her lexical enhancements forcibly if she doesn't work on her grammar without them. Mom telling Amber that they're moving again, abruptly, dragging her away from school and the friends she'd tentatively started to like. The church-of-the-month business. Mom catching her on the phone to Daddy, tearing the phone in half and hitting her with it. Mom at the kitchen table, forcing her to eat - "My mother likes control."
+
+"Ah." Sadeq's expression turns glassy. "And this is how you feel about her? How long have you had that level of - no, please forgive me for asking. You obviously understand implants. Do your grandparents know? Did you talk to them?"
+
+"My grandparents?" Amber stifles a snort. "Mom's parents are dead. Dad's are still alive, but they won't talk to him - they like Mom. They think I'm creepy. I know little things, their tax bands and customer profiles. I could mine data with my head when I was four. I'm not built like little girls were in their day, and they don't understand. You know the old ones don't like us at all? Some of the churches make money doing nothing but exorcisms for oldsters who think their kids are possessed."
+
+"Well." Sadeq is fingering his beard again, distractedly. "I must say, this is a lot to learn. But you know your mother has accepted Islam, don't you? This means that you are Moslem, too. Unless you are an adult, your parent legally speaks for you. And she says this makes you my problem. Hmm."
+
+"I'm not a Muslim." Amber stares at the screen. "I'm not a child, either." Her threads are coming together, whispering scarily behind her eyes: Her head is suddenly dense and turgid with ideas, heavy as a stone and twice as old as time. "I am nobody's chattel. What does your law say about people who are born with implants? What does it say about people who want to live forever? I don't believe in any god, Mr. Judge. I don't believe in limits. Mom can't, physically, make me do anything, and she sure can't speak for me. All she can do is challenge my legal status, and if I choose to stay where she can't touch me, what does that matter?"
+
+"Well, if that is what you have to say, I must think on the matter." He catches her eye; his expression is thoughtful, like a doctor considering a diagnosis. "I will call you again in due course. In the meantime, if you need to talk to anyone, remember that I am always available. If there is anything I can do to help ease your pain, I would be pleased to be of service. Peace be unto you, and those you care for."
+
+"Same to you, too," she mutters darkly, as the connection goes dead. "Now what?" she asks, as a beeping sprite gyrates across the wall, begging for attention.
+
+"I think it's the lander," Pierre says helpfully. "Is it down yet?"
+
+She rounds on him: "Hey, I thought I told you to get lost!"
+
+"What, and miss all the fun?" He grins at her impishly. "Amber's got a new boyfriend! Wait until I tell everybody ..."
+
+* * *
+
+_1 Sleep cycles pass; the borrowed 3D printer on Object Barney's surface spews bitmaps of atoms in quantum lockstep at its rendering platform, building up the control circuitry and skeletons of new printers (There are no clunky nanoassemblers here, no robots the size of viruses busily sorting molecules into piles - just the bizarre quantized magic of atomic holography, modulated Bose-Einstein condensates collapsing into strange, lacy, supercold machinery.) Electricity surges through the cable loops as they slice through Jupiter's magnetosphere, slowly converting the rock's momentum into power. Small robots grovel in the orange dirt, scooping up raw material to feed to the fractionating oven. Amber's garden of machinery flourishes slowly, unpacking itself according to a schema designed by preteens at an industrial school in Poland, with barely any need for human guidance.
+
+_1 High in orbit around Amalthea, complex financial instruments breed and conjugate. Developed for the express purpose of facilitating trade with the alien intelligences believed to have been detected eight years earlier by SETI, they function equally well as fiscal gatekeepers for space colonies. The Sanger's bank accounts in California and Cuba are looking acceptable - since entering Jupiter space, the orphanage has staked a claim on roughly a hundred gigatons of random rocks and a moon that's just small enough to creep in under the International Astronomical Union's definition of a sovereign planetary body. The borg are working hard, leading their eager teams of child stakeholders in their plans to build the industrial metastructures necessary to support mining helium-three from Jupiter. They're so focused that they spend much of their time being themselves, not bothering to run Bob, the shared identity that gives them their messianic drive.
+
+_1 Half a light-hour away, tired Earth wakes and slumbers in time to its ancient orbital dynamics. A religious college in Cairo is considering issues of nanotechnology: If replicators are used to prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, right down to the molecular level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be treated? (If the mind of one of the faithful is copied into a computing machine's memory by mapping and simulating all its synapses, is the computer now a Moslem? If not, why not? If so, what are its rights and duties?) Riots in Borneo underline the urgency of this theotechnological inquiry.
+
+_1 More riots in Barcelona, Madrid, Birmingham, and Marseilles also underline a rising problem: the social chaos caused by cheap anti-aging treatments. The zombie exterminators, a backlash of disaffected youth against the formerly graying gerontocracy of Europe, insist that people who predate the supergrid and can't handle implants aren't really conscious: Their ferocity is equaled only by the anger of the dynamic septuagenarians of the baby boom, their bodies partially restored to the flush of sixties youth, but their minds adrift in a slower, less contingent century. The faux-young boomers feel betrayed, forced back into the labor pool, but unable to cope with the implant-accelerated culture of the new millennium, their hard-earned experience rendered obsolete by deflationary time.
+
+_1 The Bangladeshi economic miracle is typical of the age. With growth rates running at over twenty percent, cheap out-of-control bioindustrialization has swept the nation: Former rice farmers harvest plastics and milk cows for silk, while their children study mariculture and design seawalls. With cellphone ownership nearing eighty percent and literacy at ninety, the once-poor country is finally breaking out of its historical infrastructure trap and beginning to develop: In another generation, they'll be richer than Japan.
+
+_1 Radical new economic theories are focusing around bandwidth, speed-of-light transmission time, and the implications of CETI, communication with extraterrestrial intelligence. Cosmologists and quants collaborate on bizarre relativistically telescoped financial instruments. Space (which lets you store information) and structure (which lets you process it) acquire value while dumb mass - like gold - loses it. The degenerate cores of the traditional stock markets are in free fall, the old smokestack microprocessor and biotech/nanotech industries crumbling before the onslaught of matter replicators and self-modifying ideas. The inheritors look set to be a new wave of barbarian communicators, who mortgage their future for a millennium against the chance of a gift from a visiting alien intelligence. Microsoft, once the US Steel of the silicon age, quietly fades into liquidation.
+
+_1 An outbreak of green goo - a crude biomechanical replicator that eats everything in its path - is dealt with in the Australian outback by carpet-bombing with fuel-air explosives. The USAF subsequently reactivates two wings of refurbished B-52s and places them at the disposal of the UN standing committee on self-replicating weapons. (CNN discovers that one of their newest pilots, re-enlisting with the body of a twenty-year-old and an empty pension account, first flew them over Laos and Cambodia.) The news overshadows the World Health Organization's announcement of the end of the HIV pandemic, after more than fifty years of bigotry, panic, and megadeath.
+
+* * *
+
+"Breathe steadily. Remember your regulator drill? If you spot your heart rate going up or your mouth going dry, take five."
+
+"Shut the fuck up, 'Neko, I'm trying to concentrate." Amber fumbles with the titanium D-ring, trying to snake the strap through it. The gauntlets are getting in her way. High orbit space suits - little more than a body stocking designed to hold your skin under compression and help you breathe - are easy, but this deep in Jupiter's radiation belt she has to wear an old Orlan-DM suit that comes in about thirteen layers. The gloves are stiff and hard to work in. It's Chernobyl weather outside, a sleet of alpha particles and raw protons storming through the void, and she really needs the extra protection. "Got it." She yanks the strap tight, pulls on the D-ring, then goes to work on the next strap. Never looking down; because the wall she's tying herself to has no floor, just a cutoff two meters below, then empty space for a hundred kilometers before the nearest solid ground.
+
+The ground sings to her moronically: "I love you, you love me, it's the law of gravity -"
+
+She shoves her feet down onto the platform that juts from the side of the capsule like a suicide's ledge: metallized Velcro grabs hold, and she pulls on the straps to turn her body round until she can see past the capsule, sideways. The capsule masses about five tonnes, barely bigger than an ancient Soyuz. It's packed to overflowing with environment-sensitive stuff she'll need, and a honking great high-gain antenna. "I hope you know what you're doing," someone says over the intercom.
+
+"Of course I -" She stops. Alone in this Energiya NPO surplus iron maiden with its low-bandwidth coms and bizarre plumbing, she feels claustrophobic and helpless: Parts of her mind don't work. When she was four, Mom took her down a famous cave system somewhere out west. When the guide turned out the lights half a kilometer underground, she'd screamed with surprise as the darkness had reached out and touched her. Now it's not the darkness that frightens her, it's the lack of thought. For a hundred kilometers below her there are no minds, and even on the surface there's only the moronic warbling of 'bots for company. Everything that makes the universe primate-friendly seems to be locked in the huge spaceship that looms somewhere just behind the back of her head, and she has to fight down an urge to shed her straps and swarm back up the umbilical that anchors the capsule to the Sanger. "I'll be fine," she forces herself to say. And even though she's unsure that it's true, she tries to make herself believe it. "It's just leaving-home nerves. I've read about it, okay?"
+
+There's a funny, high-pitched whistle in her ears. For a moment, the sweat on the back of her neck turns icy cold, then the noise stops. She strains for a moment, and when it returns she recognizes the sound: The hitherto-talkative cat, curled in the warmth of her pressurized luggage can, has begun to snore.
+
+"Let's go," she says, "Time to roll the wagon." A speech macro deep in the Sanger's docking firmware recognizes her authority and gently lets go of the pod. A couple of cold gas clusters pop, sending deep banging vibrations running through the capsule, and she's on her way.
+
+"Amber. How's it hanging?" A familiar voice in her ears: She blinks. Fifteen hundred seconds, nearly half an hour gone.
+
+"Robes-Pierre, chopped any aristos lately?"
+
+"Heh!" A pause. "I can see your head from here."
+
+"How's it looking?" she asks. There's a lump in her throat; she isn't sure why. Pierre is probably hooked into one of the smaller proximity cameras dotted around the outer hull of the big mother ship, watching over her as she falls.
+
+"Pretty much like always," he says laconically. Another pause, this time longer. "This is wild, you know? Su Ang says hi, by the way."
+
+"Su Ang, hi," she replies, resisting the urge to lean back and look up - up relative to her feet, not her vector - and see if the ship's still visible.
+
+"Hi," Ang says shyly. "You're very brave?"
+
+"Still can't beat you at chess." Amber frowns. Su Ang and her overengineered algae. Oscar and his pharmaceutical factory toads. People she's known for three years, mostly ignored, and never thought about missing. "Listen, are you going to come visiting?"
+
+"You want us to visit?" Ang sounds dubious. "When will it be ready?"
+
+"Oh, soon enough." At four kilograms per minute of structured-matter output, the printers on the surface have already built her a bunch of stuff: a habitat dome, the guts of an algae/shrimp farm, an excavator to bury it with, an airlock. Even a honey bucket. It's all lying around waiting for her to put it together and move into her new home. "Once the borg get back from Amalthea."
+
+"Hey! You mean they're moving? How did you figure that?"
+
+"Go talk to them," Amber says. Actually, she's a large part of the reason the Sanger is about to crank its orbit up and out toward the other moon: She wants to be alone in coms silence for a couple of million seconds. The Franklin collective is doing her a big favor.
+
+"Ahead of the curve, as usual," Pierre cuts in, with something that sounds like admiration to her uncertain ears.
+
+"You too," she says, a little too fast: "Come visit when I've got the life-support cycle stabilized."
+
+"I'll do that," he replies. A red glow suffuses the flank of the capsule next to her head, and she looks up in time to see the glaring blue laser line of the Sanger's drive torch powering up.
+
+* * *
+
+Eighteen million seconds, almost a tenth of a Jupiter year, passes.
+
+The imam tugs thoughtfully on his beard as he stares at the traffic control display. These days, every shift seems to bring a new crewed spaceship into Jupiter system: Space is getting positively crowded. When he arrived, there were fewer than two hundred people here. Now there's the population of a small city, and many of them live at the heart of the approach map centered on his display. He breathes deeply - trying to ignore the omnipresent odor of old socks - and studies the map. "Computer, what about my slot?" he asks.
+
+"Your slot: Cleared to commence final approach in six-nine-five seconds. Speed limit is ten meters per second inside ten kilometers, drop to two meters per second inside one kilometer. Uploading map of forbidden thrust vectors now." Chunks of the approach map turn red, gridded off to prevent his exhaust stream damaging other craft in the area.
+
+Sadeq sighs. "We'll go in using Kurs. I assume their Kurs guidance is active?"
+
+"Kurs docking target support available to shell level three."
+
+"Praise Allah." He pokes around through the guidance subsystem's menus, setting up the software emulation of the obsolete (but highly reliable) Soyuz docking system. At last he can leave the ship to look after itself for a bit. He glances round. For two years he has lived in this canister, and soon he will step outside it. It hardly seems real.
+
+The radio, usually silent, crackles with unexpected life. "Bravo One One, this is Imperial Traffic Control. Verbal contact required, over."
+
+Sadeq twitches with surprise. The voice sounds inhuman, paced with the cadences of a speech synthesizer, like so many of Her Majesty's subjects. "Bravo One One to Traffic Control, I'm listening, over."
+
+"Bravo One One, we have assigned you a landing slot on tunnel four, airlock delta. Kurs active, ensure your guidance is set to seven-four-zero and slaved to our control."
+
+He leans over the screen and rapidly checks the docking system's settings. "Control, all in order."
+
+"Bravo One One, stand by."
+
+The next hour passes slowly as the traffic control system guides his Type 921 down to a rocky rendezvous. Orange dust streaks his one optical-glass porthole: A kilometer before touchdown, Sadeq busies himself closing protective covers, locking down anything that might fall around on contact. Finally, he unrolls his mat against the floor in front of the console and floats above it for ten minutes, eyes closed in prayer. It's not the landing that worries him, but what comes next.
+
+Her Majesty's domain stretches out before the battered module like a rust-stained snowflake half a kilometer in diameter. Its core is buried in a loose snowball of grayish rubble, and it waves languid brittlestar arms at the gibbous orange horizon of Jupiter. Fine hairs, fractally branching down to the molecular level, split off the main collector arms at regular intervals. A cluster of habitat pods like seedless grapes cling to the roots of the massive structure. Already he can see the huge steel generator loops that climb from either pole of the snowflake, wreathed in sparking plasma; the Jovian rings form a rainbow of darkness rising behind them.
+
+At last, the battered space station is on final approach. Sadeq watches the Kurs simulation output carefully, piping it directly into his visual field. There's an external camera view of the rockpile and grapes. As the view expands toward the convex ceiling of the ship, he licks his lips, ready to hit the manual override and go around again - but the rate of descent is slowing, and by the time he's close enough to see the scratches on the shiny metal docking cone ahead of the ship, it's measured in centimeters per second. There's a gentle bump, then a shudder, then a rippling bang as the latches on the docking ring fire - and he's down.
+
+Sadeq breathes deeply again, then tries to stand. There's gravity here, but not much: Walking is impossible. He's about to head for the life-support panel when he freezes, hearing a noise from the far end of the docking node. Turning, he's just in time to see the hatch opening toward him, a puff of vapor condensing, and then -
+
+* * *
+
+Her Imperial Majesty is sitting in the throne room, moodily fidgeting with the new signet ring her equerry has designed for her. It's a lump of structured carbon massing almost fifty grams, set in a plain band of asteroid-mined iridium. It glitters with the blue-and-violet speckle highlights of its internal lasers, because, in addition to being a piece of state jewelry, it is also an optical router, part of the industrial control infrastructure she's building out here on the edge of the solar system. Her Majesty wears plain black combat pants and sweatshirt, woven from the finest spider silk and spun glass, but her feet are bare: Her taste in fashion is best described as youthful, and in any event, certain styles are simply impractical in microgravity. But, being a monarch, she's wearing a crown. And there's a cat, or an artificial entity that dreams it's a cat, sleeping on the back of her throne.
+
+The lady-in-waiting (and sometime hydroponic engineer) ushers Sadeq to the doorway, then floats back. "If you need anything, please say," she says shyly, then ducks and rolls away. Sadeq approaches the throne, orients himself on the floor (a simple slab of black composite, save for the throne growing from its center like an exotic flower), and waits to be noticed.
+
+"Dr. Khurasani, I presume." She smiles at him, neither the innocent grin of a child nor the knowing smirk of an adult: merely a warm greeting. "Welcome to my kingdom. Please feel free to make use of any necessary support services here, and I wish you a very pleasant stay."
+
+Sadeq holds his expression still. The queen is young - her face still retains the puppy fat of childhood, emphasized by microgravity moon-face - but it would be a bad mistake to consider her immature. "I am grateful for Your Majesty's forbearance," he murmurs, formulaic. Behind her the walls glitter like diamonds, a glowing kaleidoscope vision. It's already the biggest offshore - or off-planet - data haven in human space. Her crown, more like a compact helm that covers the top and rear of her head, also glitters and throws off diffraction rainbows; but most of its emissions are in the near ultraviolet, invisible except for the faint glowing nimbus it creates around her head. Like a halo.
+
+"Have a seat," she offers, gesturing: A ballooning free-fall cradle squirts down and expands from the ceiling, angled toward her, open and waiting. "You must be tired. Working a ship all by yourself is exhausting." She frowns ruefully, as if remembering. "Two years is nearly unprecedented."
+
+"Your Majesty is too kind." Sadeq wraps the cradle arms around himself and faces her. "Your labors have been fruitful, I trust."
+
+She shrugs. "I sell the biggest commodity in short supply on any frontier ..." A momentary grin. "This isn't the Wild West, is it?"
+
+"Justice cannot be sold," Sadeq says stiffly. Then, a moment later: "My apologies, I mean no insult. I merely believe that, while you say your goal is to provide the rule of law, what you sell is and must be something different. Justice without God, sold to the highest bidder, is not justice."
+
+The queen nods. "Leaving aside the mention of God, I agree - I can't sell it. But I can sell participation in a just system. And this new frontier really is a lot smaller than anyone expected, isn't it? Our bodies may take months to travel between worlds, but our disputes and arguments take seconds or minutes. As long as everybody agrees to abide by my arbitration, physical enforcement can wait until they're close enough to touch. And everybody does agree that my legal framework is easier to comply with, better adjusted to trans-Jovian space, than any earthbound one." A note of steel creeps into her voice, challenging: Her halo brightens, tickling a reactive glow from the walls of the throne room.
+
+Five billion inputs or more, Sadeq marvels. The crown is an engineering marvel, even though most of its mass is buried in the walls and floor of this huge construct. "There is law revealed by the Prophet, peace be unto him, and there is law that we can establish by analysing his intentions. There are other forms of law by which humans live, and various interpretations of the law of God even among those who study His works. How, in the absence of the word of the Prophet, can you provide a moral compass?"
+
+"Hmm." She taps her fingers on the arm of her throne, and Sadeq's heart freezes. He's heard the stories from the claim jumpers and boardroom bandits, from the greenmail experts with their roots in the earthbound jurisdictions that have made such a hash of arbitration here. How she can experience a year in a minute, rip your memories out through your cortical implants, and make you relive your worst mistakes in her nightmarishly powerful simulation space. She is the queen - the first individual to get her hands on so much mass and energy that she could pull ahead of the curve of binding technology, and the first to set up her own jurisdiction and rule certain experiments to be legal so that she could make use of the mass/energy intersection. She has force majeure - even the Pentagon's infowarriors respect the Ring Imperium's autonomy for now. In fact, the body sitting in the throne opposite him probably contains only a fraction of her identity. She's by no means the first upload or partial, but she's the first gust front of the storm of power that will arrive when the arrogant ones achieve their goal of dismantling the planets and turning dumb and uninhabited mass into brainpower throughout the observable reaches of the universe. And he's just questioned the rectitude of her vision, in her presence.
+
+The queen's lips twitch. Then they curl into a wide, carnivorous grin. Behind her, the cat sits up and stretches, then stares at Sadeq through narrowed eyes.
+
+"You know, that's the first time in weeks that anyone has told me I'm full of shit. You haven't been talking to my mother again, have you?"
+
+It's Sadeq's turn to shrug, uncomfortably. "I have prepared a judgment," he says slowly.
+
+"Ah." Amber rotates the huge diamond ring around her finger. Then she looks him in the eye, a trifle nervously. Although what he could possibly do to make her comply with any decree -
+
+"To summarize: Her motive is polluted," Sadeq says shortly.
+
+"Does that mean what I think it does?" she asks.
+
+Sadeq breathes deeply again: "Yes, I think so."
+
+Her smile returns. "And is that the end of it?" she asks.
+
+He raises a dark eyebrow: "Only if you can prove to me that you can have a conscience in the absence of divine revelation."
+
+Her reaction catches him by surprise. "Oh, sure. That's the next part of the program. Obtaining divine revelations."
+
+"What! From the alien?"
+
+The cat, claws extended, delicately picks its way down to her lap and waits to be held and stroked. It never once takes its eyes off him. "Where else?" she asks. "Doctor, I didn't get the Franklin Trust to loan me the wherewithal to build this castle just in return for some legal paperwork, and some, ah, interesting legal waivers from Brussels. We've known for years there's a whole alien packet-switching network out there, and we're just getting spillover from some of their routers. It turns out there's a node not far away from here, in real space. Helium-three, separate jurisdictions, heavy industrialization on Io - there is a purpose to all this activity."
+
+Sadeq licks his suddenly dry lips. "You're going to narrowcast a reply?"
+
+"No, much better than that: we're going to visit them. Cut the delay cycle down to real-time. We came here to build a ship and recruit a crew, even if we have to cannibalize the whole of Jupiter system to pay for the exercise."
+
+The cat yawns then fixes him with a thousand-yard stare. "This stupid girl wants to bring her conscience along to a meeting with something so smart it might as well be a god," it says. "And she needs to convince the peanut gallery back home that she's got one, being a born-again atheist and all. Which means, you're it, monkey boy. There's a slot open for the post of ship's theologian on the first starship out of Jupiter system. I don't suppose I can convince you to turn the offer down?"
+
+Chapter 5: Router
+
+Some years later, two men and a cat are tying one on in a bar that doesn't exist.
+
+The air in the bar is filled with a billowing relativistic smoke cloud - it's a stellarium, accurately depicting the view beyond the imaginary walls. Aberration of starlight skews the color toward violet around the doorway, brightening in a rainbow mist over the tables, then dimming to a hazy red glow in front of the raised platform at the back. The Doppler effect has slowly emerged over the past few months as the ship gathers momentum. In the absence of visible stellar motion - or a hard link to the ship's control module - it's the easiest way for a drunken passenger to get a feeling for how frighteningly fast the /{Field Circus}/ is moving. Some time ago, the ship's momentum exceeded half its rest mass, at which point a single kilogram packs the punch of a multimegaton hydrogen bomb.
+
+A ginger-and-brown cat - who has chosen to be female, just to mess with the heads of those people who think all ginger cats are male - sprawls indolently across the wooden floorboards in front of the bar, directly beneath the bridge of the starbow. Predictably, it has captured the only ray of sunlight to be had within the starship. In the shadows at the back of the bar, two men slump at a table, lost in their respective morose thoughts: One nurses a bottle of Czech beer, the other a half-empty cocktail glass.
+
+"It wouldn't be so bad if she is giving me some sign," says one of them, tilting his beer bottle to inspect the bottom for sediment. "No; that not right. It's the correct kind of attention. Am not knowing where I stand with her."
+
+The other one leans back in his chair, squints at the faded brown paint of the ceiling. "Take it from one who knows," he says: "If you knew, you'd have nothing to dream about. Anyway, what she wants and what you want may not be the same thing."
+
+The first man runs a hand through his hair. Tight-curled black ringlets briefly turn silver beneath his aging touch. "Pierre, if talent for making patronizing statements is what you get from tupping Amber -"
+
+Pierre glares at him with all the venom an augmented nineteen-year-old can muster. "Be glad she has no ears in here," he hisses. His hand tightens around his glass reflexively, but the physics model in force in the bar refuses to let him break it. "You've had too fucking much to drink, Boris."
+
+A tinkle of icy laughter comes from the direction of the cat. "Shut up, you," says Boris, glancing at the animal. He tips the bottle back, lets the dregs trickle down his throat. "Maybe you're right. Am sorry. Do not mean to be rude about the queen." He shrugs, puts the bottle down. Shrugs again, heavily. "Am just getting depressed."
+
+"You're good at that," Pierre observes.
+
+Boris sighs again. "Evidently. If our positions are reversed -"
+
+"I know, I know, you'd be telling me the fun is in the chase and it's not the same when she kicks you out after a fight, and I wouldn't believe a word of it, being sad and single and all that." Pierre snorts. "Life isn't fair, Boris - live with it."
+
+"I'd better go - " Boris stands.
+
+"Stay away from Ang," says Pierre, still annoyed with him. "At least until you're sober."
+
+"Okay already, stay cool; Am consciously running a watchdog thread." Boris blinks irritably. "Enforcing social behavior. It doesn't normally allow this drunk. Not where reputation damage are possible in public."
+
+He does a slow dissolve into thin air, leaving Pierre alone in the bar with the cat.
+
+"How much longer do we have to put up with this shit?" he asks aloud. Tempers are frayed, and arguments proliferate indefinitely in the pocket universe of the ship.
+
+The cat doesn't look round. "In our current reference frame, we drop the primary reflector and start decelerating in another two million seconds," she says. "Back home, five or six megaseconds."
+
+"That's a big gap. What's the cultural delta up to now?" Pierre asks idly. He snaps his fingers: "Waiter, another cocktail. The same, if you please."
+
+"Oh, probably about ten to twenty times our departure reference," says the cat. "If you'd been following the news from back home, you'd have noted a significant speed-up in the deployment of switched entanglement routers. They're having another networking revolution, only this one will run to completion inside a month because they're using dark fiber that's already in the ground."
+
+"Switched ... entanglement?" Pierre shakes his head, bemused. The waiter, a faceless body in black tie and a long, starched apron, walks around the bar and offers him a glass. "That almost sounds as if it makes sense. What else?"
+
+The cat rolls over on her flank, stretches, claws extended. "Stroke me, and I might tell you," she suggests.
+
+"Fuck you, and the dog you rode in on," Pierre replies. He lifts his glass, removes a glacé cherry on a cocktail stick, throws it toward the spiral staircase that leads down to the toilets, and chugs back half of the drink in one go - freezing pink slush with an afterbite of caramelized hexose sugars and ethanol. The near spillage as he thumps the glass down serves to demonstrate that he's teetering on the edge of drunkenness. "Mercenary!"
+
+"Lovesick drug-using human," the cat replies without rancor, and rolls to her feet. She arches her back and yawns, baring ivory fangs at the world. "You apes - if I cared about you, I'd have to kick sand over you." For a moment she looks faintly confused. "I mean, I would bury you." She stretches again and glances round the otherwise-empty bar. "By the way, when are you going to apologize to Amber?"
+
+"I'm not going to fucking apologize to her!" Pierre shouts. In the ensuing silence and confusion, he raises his glass and tries to drain it, but the ice has all sunk to the bottom, and the resulting coughing fit makes him spray half of the cocktail across the table. "No way," he rasps quietly.
+
+"Too much pride, huh?" The cat stalks toward the edge of the bar, tail held high with tip bent over in a feline question mark. "Like Boris with his adolescent woman trouble, too? You primates are so predictable. Whoever thought of sending a starship crewed by posthuman adolescents -"
+
+"Go 'way," says Pierre: "I've got serious drinking to do."
+
+"To the Macx, I suppose," puns the cat, turning away. But the moody youth has no answer for her, other than to conjure a refill from the vasty deeps.
+
+* * *
+
+Meanwhile, in another partition of the /{Field Circus}/'s reticulated reality, a different instance of the selfsame cat - Aineko by name, sarcastic by disposition - is talking to its former owner's daughter, the Queen of the Ring Imperium. Amber's avatar looks about sixteen, with disheveled blonde hair and enhanced cheekbones. It's a lie, of course, because in subjective life experience, she's in her mid-twenties, but apparent age signifies little in a simulation space populated by upload minds, or in real space, where post-humans age at different rates.
+
+Amber wears a tattered black dress over iridescent purple leggings, and sprawls lazily across the arms of her informal throne - an ostentatious lump of nonsense manufactured from a single carbon crystal doped with semiconductors. (Unlike the real thing back home in Jupiter orbit, this one is merely a piece of furniture for a virtual environment.) The scene is very much the morning after the evening before, like a goth nightclub gone to seed: all stale smoke and crumpled velvet, wooden church pews, burned-out candles, and gloomy Polish avant-garde paintings. Any hint of a regal statement the queen might be making is spoiled by the way she's hooked one knee over the left arm of the throne and is fiddling with a six-axis pointing device. But these are her private quarters, and she's off duty: The regal person of the Queen is strictly for formal, corporate occasions.
+
+"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," she suggests.
+
+"Nope," replies the cat. "It was more like: 'Greetings, earthlings, compile me on your leader.'"
+
+"Well, you got me there," Amber admits. She taps her heel on the throne and fidgets with her signet ring. "No damn way I'm loading some buggy alien wetware on my sweet gray stuff. /{Weird}/ semiotics, too. What does Dr. Khurasani say?"
+
+Aineko sits down in the middle of the crimson carpet at the foot of the dais and idly twists round to sniff her crotch. "Sadeq is immersed in scriptural interpretations. He refused to be drawn."
+
+"Huh." Amber stares at the cat. "So. You've been carrying this lump of source code since when ...?"
+
+"At the signal, for precisely two hundred and sixteen million, four hundred and twenty-nine thousand, and fifty-two seconds," Aineko supplies, then beeps smugly. "Call it just under six years."
+
+"Right." Amber squeezes her eyes shut. Uneasy possibilities whisper in her mind's ears. "And it began talking to you -"
+
+"- About three million seconds after I picked it up and ran it on a basic environment hosted on a neural network emulator modeled on the components found in the stomatogastric ganglion of a spiny lobster. Clear?"
+
+Amber sighs. "I wish you'd told Dad about it. Or Annette. Things could have been so different!"
+
+"How?" The cat stops licking her arse and looks up at the queen with a peculiarly opaque stare. "It took the specialists a decade to figure out the first message was a map of the pulsar neighborhood with directions to the nearest router on the interstellar network. Knowing how to plug into the router wouldn't help while it was three light-years away, would it? Besides, it was fun watching the idiots trying to 'crack the alien code' without ever wondering if it might be a reply in a language we already know to a message we sent out years ago. Fuckwits. And, too, Manfred pissed me off once too often. He kept treating me like a goddamn house pet."
+
+"But you -" Amber bites her lip. /{But you}/ were, /{when he bought you}/, she had been about to say. Engineered consciousness is still relatively new: It didn't exist when Manfred and Pamela first hacked on Aineko's cognitive network, and according to the flat-earth wing of the AI community, it still doesn't. Even she hadn't really believed Aineko's claims to self-awareness until a couple of years ago, finding it easier to think of the cat as a zimboe - a zombie with no self-awareness, but programmed to claim to be aware in an attempt to deceive the truly conscious beings around it. "I know you're conscious now, but Manfred didn't know back then. Did he?"
+
+Aineko glares at her, then slowly narrows her eyes to slits - either feline affection, or a more subtle gesture. Sometimes Amber finds it hard to believe that, twenty five years ago, Aineko started out as a crude neural network driven toy from a Far Eastern amusement factory - upgradeable, but still basically a mechanical animal emulator.
+
+"I'm sorry. Let me start again. You actually figured out what the second alien packet was, you, yourself, and nobody else. Despite the combined efforts of the entire CETI analysis team who spent Gaia knows how many human-equivalent years of processing power trying to crack its semantics. I hope you'll pardon me for saying I find that hard to believe?"
+
+The cat yawns. "I could have told Pierre instead." Aineko glances at Amber, sees her thunderous expression, and hastily changes the subject: "The solution was intuitively obvious, just not to humans. You're so /{verbal}/." Lifting a hind paw, she scratches behind her left ear for a moment then pauses, foot waving absentmindedly. "Besides, the CETI team was searching under the street lights while I was sniffing around in the grass. They kept trying to find primes; when that didn't work, they started trying to breed a Turing machine that would run it without immediately halting." Aineko lowers her paw daintily. "None of them tried treating it as a map of a connectionist system based on the only terrestrial components anyone had ever beamed out into deep space. Except me. But then, your mother had a hand in my wetware, too."
+
+"Treating it as a map -" Amber stops. "You were meant to penetrate Dad's corporate network?"
+
+"That's right," says the cat. "I was supposed to fork repeatedly and gang-rape his web of trust. But I didn't." Aineko yawns. "Pam pissed me off, too. I don't like people who try to use me."
+
+"I don't care. Taking that thing on board was still a really stupid risk you took," Amber accuses.
+
+"So?" The cat looks at her insolently. "I kept it in my sandbox. And I got it working, on the seven hundred and forty-first attempt. It'd have worked for Pamela's bounty-hunter friends, too, if I'd tried it. But it's here, now, when you need it. Would you like to swallow the packet?"
+
+Amber straightens out, sits up in her throne: "I just told you, if you think I'm going to link some flaky chunk of alien neural programming into my core dialogue, or even my exocortex, you're crazy!" Her eyes narrow. "Can it use your grammar model?"
+
+"Sure." If the cat was human, it would be shrugging nonchalantly at this point. "It's safe, Amber, really and truly. I found out what it is."
+
+"I want to talk to it," she says impetuously - and before the cat can reply, adds, "So what is it?"
+
+"It's a protocol stack. Basically it allows new nodes to connect to a network, by providing high-level protocol conversion services. It needs to learn how to think like a human so it can translate for us when we arrive at the router, which is why they bolted a lobster's neural network on top of it - they wanted to make it architecturally compatible with us. But there are no buried time bombs, I assure you: I've had plenty of time to check. Now, are you /{sure}/ you don't want to let it into your head?"
+
+* * *
+
+_1 Greetings from the fifth decade of the century of wonders.
+
+_1 The solar system that lies roughly twenty-eight trillion kilometers - just short of three light-years - behind the speeding starwisp /{Field Circus}/ is seething with change. There have been more technological advances in the past ten years than in the entire previous expanse of human history - and more unforeseen accidents.
+
+_1 Lots of hard problems have proven to be tractable. The planetary genome and proteome have been mapped so exhaustively that the biosciences are now focusing on the challenge of the phenome: Plotting the phase-space defined by the intersection of genes and biochemical structures, understanding how extended phenotypic traits are generated and contribute to evolutionary fitness. The biosphere has become surreal: small dragons have been sighted nesting in the Scottish highlands, and in the American midwest, raccoons have been caught programming microwave ovens.
+
+_1 The computing power of the solar system is now around one thousand MIPS per gram, and is unlikely to increase in the near term - all but a fraction of one percent of the dumb matter is still locked up below the accessible planetary crusts, and the sapience/mass ratio has hit a glass ceiling that will only be broken when people, corporations, or other posthumans get around to dismantling the larger planets. A start has already been made in Jupiter orbit and the asteroid belt. Greenpeace has sent squatters to occupy Eros and Juno, but the average asteroid is now surrounded by a reef of specialized nanomachinery and debris, victims of a cosmic land grab unmatched since the days of the wild west. The best brains flourish in free fall, minds surrounded by a sapient aether of extensions that out-think their meaty cortices by many orders of magnitude - minds like Amber, Queen of the Inner Ring Imperium, the first self-extending power center in Jupiter orbit.
+
+_1 Down at the bottom of the terrestrial gravity well, there has been a major economic catastrophe. Cheap immortagens, out-of-control personality adjuvants, and a new formal theory of uncertainty have knocked the bottom out of the insurance and underwriting industries. Gambling on a continuation of the worst aspects of the human condition - disease, senescence, and death - looks like a good way to lose money, and a deflationary spiral lasting almost fifty hours has taken down huge swaths of the global stock market. Genius, good looks, and long life are now considered basic human rights in the developed world: even the poorest backwaters are feeling extended effects from the commoditization of intelligence.
+
+_1 Not everything is sweetness and light in the era of mature nanotechnology. Widespread intelligence amplification doesn't lead to widespread rational behavior. New religions and mystery cults explode across the planet; much of the Net is unusable, flattened by successive semiotic jihads. India and Pakistan have held their long-awaited nuclear war: external intervention by US and EU nanosats prevented most of the IRBMs from getting through, but the subsequent spate of network raids and Basilisk attacks cause havoc. Luckily, infowar turns out to be more survivable than nuclear war - especially once it is discovered that a simple anti-aliasing filter stops nine out of ten neural-wetware-crashing Langford fractals from causing anything worse than a mild headache.
+
+_1 New discoveries this decade include the origins of the weakly repulsive force responsible for changes in the rate of expansion of the universe after the big bang, and on a less abstract level, experimental implementations of a Turing Oracle using quantum entanglement circuits: a device that can determine whether a given functional expression can be evaluated in finite time. It's boom time in the field of Extreme Cosmology, where some of the more recherché researchers are bickering over the possibility that the entire universe was created as a computing device, with a program encoded in the small print of the Planck constant. And theorists are talking again about the possibility of using artificial wormholes to provide instantaneous connections between distant corners of space-time.
+
+_1 Most people have forgotten about the well-known extraterrestrial transmission received fifteen years earlier. Very few people know anything about the second, more complex transmission received a little later. Many of those are now passengers or spectators of the /{Field Circus}/: a light-sail craft that is speeding out of Sol system on a laser beam generated by Amber's installations in low-Jupiter orbit. (Superconducting tethers anchored to Amalthea drag through Jupiter's magnetosphere, providing gigawatts of electricity for the hungry lasers: energy that comes, in turn, from the small moon's orbital momentum.)
+
+_1 Manufactured by Airbus-Cisco years earlier, the /{Field Circus}/ is a hick backwater, isolated from the mainstream of human culture, its systems complexity limited by mass: The destination lies nearly three light-years from Earth, and even with high acceleration and relativistic cruise speeds, the one-kilogram starwisp and its hundred-kilogram light sail will take the best part of seven years to get there. Sending a human-sized probe is beyond even the vast energy budget of the new orbital states in Jupiter system - near-lightspeed travel is horrifically expensive. Rather than a big, self-propelled ship with canned primates for passengers, as previous generations had envisaged, the starship is a Coke-can-sized slab of nanocomputers, running a neural simulation of the uploaded brain states of some tens of humans at merely normal speed. By the time its occupants beam themselves home again for download into freshly cloned bodies, a linear extrapolation shows that as much change will have overtaken human civilization as in the preceding fifty millennia - the sum total of /{H. sapiens sapiens}/' time on Earth.
+
+_1 But that's okay by Amber, because what she expects to find in orbit around the brown dwarf Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56}, will be worth the wait.
+
+* * *
+
+Pierre is at work in another virtual environment, the one currently running the master control system of the /{Field Circus}/. He's supervising the sail-maintenance 'bots when the message comes in. Two visitors are on their way up the beam from Jupiter orbit. The only other person around is Su Ang, who showed up sometime after he arrived, and she's busy with some work of her own. The master control VM - like all the other human-accessible environments at this level of the ship's virtualization stack - is a construct modeled on a famous movie; this one resembles the bridge of a long-since sunk ocean liner, albeit with discreetly informative user interfaces hovering in front of the ocean views outside the windows. Polished brass gleams softly everywhere. "What was that?" he calls out, responding to the soft chime of a bell.
+
+"We have visitors," Ang repeats, interrupting her rhythmic chewing. (She's trying out a betel-nut kick, but she's magicked the tooth-staining dye away and will probably detox herself in a few hours.) "They're buffering up the line already; just acknowledging receipt is sucking most of our downstream bandwidth."
+
+"Any idea who they are?" asks Pierre; he puts his boots up on the back of the vacant helmsman's chair and stares moodily at the endless expanse of green-gray ocean ahead.
+
+Ang chews a bit more, watching him with an expression he can't interpret. "They're still locked," she says. A pause: "But there was a flash from the Franklins, back home. One of them's some kind of lawyer, while the other's a film producer."
+
+"A film producer?"
+
+"The Franklin Trust says it's to help defray our lawsuit expenses. Myanmar is gaining. They've already subpoenaed Amber's downline instance, and they're trying to bring this up in some kind of kangaroo jurisdiction - Oregon Christian Reconstructionist Empire, I think."
+
+"Ouch." Pierre winces. The daily news from Earth, modulated onto a lower-powered communication laser, is increasingly bad. On the plus side, Amber is incredibly rich: The goodwill futures leveraged off her dad's trust metric means people will bend over backward to do things for her. And she owns a lot of real estate too, a hundred gigatonnes of rock in low-Jupiter orbit with enough KE to power Northern Europe for a century. But her interstellar venture burns through money - both the traditional barter-indirection type and the more creative modern varieties - about the way you would if you heaped up the green pieces of paper and shoveled them onto a conveyor belt leading to the business end of a running rocket motor. Just holding off the environmental protests over de-orbiting a small Jovian moon is a grinding job. Moreover, a whole bunch of national governments have woken up and are trying to legislate themselves a slice of the cake. Nobody's tried to forcibly take over yet (there are two hundred gigawatts of lasers anchored to the Ring Imperium, and Amber takes her sovereign status seriously, has even applied for a seat at the UN and membership in the EC), but the nuisance lawsuits are mounting up into a comprehensive denial of service attack, or maybe economic sanctions. And Uncle Gianni's retirement hasn't helped any, either. "Anything to say about it?"
+
+"Mmph." Ang looks irritated for some reason. "Wait your turn, they'll be out of the buffer in another couple of days. Maybe a bit longer in the case of the lawyer, he's got a huge infodump packaged on his person. Probably another semisapient class-action lawsuit."
+
+"I'll bet. They never learn, do they?"
+
+"What, about the legal system here?"
+
+"Yup." Pierre nods. "One of Amber's smarter ideas, reviving eleventh-century Scots law and updating it with new options on barratry, trial by combat, and compurgation." He pulls a face and detaches a couple of ghosts to go look out for the new arrivals; then he goes back to repairing sails. The interstellar medium is abrasive, full of dust - each grain of which carries the energy of an artillery shell at this speed - and the laser sail is in a constant state of disintegration. A large chunk of the drive system's mass is silvery utility flakes for patching and replacing the soap-bubble-thin membrane as it ablates away. The skill is in knowing how best to funnel repair resources to where they're needed, while minimizing tension in the suspension lines and avoiding resonance and thrust imbalance. As he trains the patch 'bots, he broods about the hate mail from his elder brother (who still blames him for their father's accident), and about Sadeq's religious injunctions - /{Superstitious nonsense}/, he thinks - and the fickleness of powerful women, and the endless depths of his own nineteen-year-old soul.
+
+While he's brooding, Ang evidently finishes whatever she was doing and bangs out - not even bothering to use the polished mahogany door at the rear of the bridge, just discorporating and rematerializing somewhere else. Wondering if she's annoyed, he glances up just as the first of his ghosts patches into his memory map, and he remembers what happened when it met the new arrival. His eyes widen: "Oh /{shit!}/"
+
+It's not the film producer but the lawyer who's just uploaded into the /{Field Circus}/'s virtual universe. Someone's going to have to tell Amber. And although the last thing he wants to do is talk to her, it looks like he's going to have to call her, because this isn't just a routine visit. The lawyer means trouble.
+
+* * *
+
+_1 Take a brain and put it in a bottle. Better: take a map of the brain and put it in a map of a bottle - or of a body - and feed signals to it that mimic its neurological inputs. Read its outputs and route them to a model body in a model universe with a model of physical laws, closing the loop. René Descartes would understand. That's the state of the passengers of the /{Field Circus}/ in a nutshell. Formerly physical humans, their neural software (and a map of the intracranial wetware it runs on) has been transferred into a virtual machine environment executing on a honking great computer, where the universe they experience is merely a dream within a dream.
+
+_1 Brains in bottles - empowered ones, with total, dictatorial, control over the reality they are exposed to - sometimes stop engaging in activities that brains in bodies can't avoid. Menstruation isn't mandatory. Vomiting, angina, exhaustion, and cramp are all optional. So is meatdeath, the decomposition of the corpus. But some activities don't cease, because people (even people who have been converted into a software description, squirted through a high-bandwidth laser link, and ported into a virtualization stack) don't /{want}/ them to stop. Breathing is wholly unnecessary, but suppression of the breathing reflex is disturbing unless you hack your hypothalamic map, and most homomorphic uploads don't want to do that. Then there's eating - not to avoid starvation, but for pleasure: Feasts on sautéed dodo seasoned with silphium are readily available here, and indeed, why not? It seems the human addiction to sensory input won't go away. And that's without considering sex, and the technical innovations that become possible when the universe - and the bodies within it - are mutable.
+
+* * *
+
+The public audience with the new arrivals is held in yet another movie: the Parisian palace of Charles IX, the throne room lifted wholesale from /{La Reine Margot}/ by Patrice Chéreau. Amber insisted on period authenticity, with the realism dialed right up to eleven. It's 1572 to the hilt this time, physical to the max. Pierre grunts in irritation, unaccustomed to his beard. His codpiece chafes, and sidelong glances tell him he isn't the only member of the royal court who's uncomfortable. Still, Amber is resplendent in a gown worn by Isabelle Adjani as Marguerite de Valois, and the luminous sunlight streaming through the stained-glass windows high above the crowd of actor zimboes lends a certain barbaric majesty to the occasion. The place is heaving with bodies in clerical robes, doublets, and low-cut gowns - some of them occupied by real people. Pierre sniffs again: Someone (Gavin, with his history bug, perhaps?) has been working on getting the smells right. He hopes like hell that nobody throws up. At least nobody seems to have come as Catherine de Médicis ...
+
+A bunch of actors portraying Huguenot soldiers approach the throne on which Amber is seated: They pace slowly forward, escorting a rather bemused-looking fellow with long, lank hair and a brocade jacket that appears to be made of cloth-of-gold. "His lordship, Attorney at Arms Alan Glashwiecz!" announces a flunky, reading from a parchment, "here at the behest of the most excellent guild and corporation of Smoot, Sedgwick Associates, with matters of legal import to discuss with Her Royal Highness!"
+
+A flourish of trumpets. Pierre glances at Her Royal Highness, who nods gracefully, but is slightly peaky - it's a humid summer day and her many-layered robes look very hot. "Welcome to the furthermost soil of the Ring Imperium," she announces in a clear, ringing voice. "I bid you welcome and invite you to place your petition before me in full public session of court."
+
+Pierre directs his attention to Glashwiecz, who appears to be worried. Doubtless he'd absorbed the basics of court protocol in the Ring (population all of eighteen thousand back home, a growing little principality), but the reality of it, a genuine old-fashioned /{monarchy}/ rooted in Amber's three-way nexus of power, data, and time, always takes a while to sink in. "I would be pleased to do so," he says, a little stiffly, "but in front of all those -"
+
+Pierre misses the next bit, because someone has just goosed him on the left buttock. He starts and half turns to see Su Ang looking past him at the throne, a lady-in-waiting for the queen. She wears an apricot dress with tight sleeves and a bodice that bares everything above her nipples. There's a fortune in pearls roped into her hair. As he notices her, she winks at him.
+
+Pierre freezes the scene, decoupling them from reality, and she faces him. "Are we alone now?" she asks.
+
+"Guess so. You want to talk about something?" he asks, heat rising in his cheeks. The noise around them is a random susurrus of machine-generated crowd scenery, the people motionless as their shared reality thread proceeds independently of the rest of the universe.
+
+"Of course!" She smiles at him and shrugs. The effect on her chest is remarkable - those period bodices could give a skeleton a cleavage - and she winks at him again. "Oh, Pierre." She smiles. "So easily distracted!" She snaps her fingers, and her clothing cycles through Afghani burqua, nudity, trouser suit, then back to court finery. Her grin is the only constant. "Now that I've got your attention, stop looking at me and start looking at /{him}/."
+
+Even more embarrassed, Pierre follows her outstretched arm all the way to the momentarily frozen Moorish emissary. "Sadeq?"
+
+"Sadeq /{knows}/ him, Pierre. This guy, there's something wrong."
+
+"Shit. You think I don't know that?" Pierre looks at her with annoyance, embarrassment forgotten. "I've seen him before. Been tracking his involvement for years. Guy's a front for the Queen Mother. He acted as her divorce lawyer when she went after Amber's Dad."
+
+"I'm sorry." Ang glances away. "You haven't been yourself lately, Pierre. I know it's something wrong between you and the Queen. I was worried. You're not paying attention to the little details."
+
+"Who do you think warned Amber?" he asks.
+
+"Oh. Okay, so you're in the loop," she says. "I'm not sure. Anyway, you've been distracted. Is there anything I can do to help?"
+
+"Listen." Pierre puts his hands on her shoulders. She doesn't move, but looks up into his eyes - Su Ang is only one-sixty tall - and he feels a pang of something odd: teenage male uncertainty about the friendship of women. /{What does she want?}/ "I know, and I'm sorry, and I'll try to keep my eyes on the ball some more, but I've been in my own headspace a lot lately. We ought to go back into the audience before anybody notices."
+
+"Do you want to talk about the problem first?" she asks, inviting his confidence.
+
+"I -" Pierre shakes his head. /{I could tell her everything}/, he realizes shakily as his metaconscience prods him urgently. He's got a couple of agony-aunt agents, but Ang is a real person and a friend. She won't pass judgment, and her model of human social behavior is a hell of a lot better than any expert system's. But time is in danger of slipping, and besides, Pierre feels dirty. "Not now," he says. "Let's go back."
+
+"Okay." She nods, then turns away, steps behind him with a swish of skirts, and he unfreezes time again as they snap back into place within the larger universe, just in time to see the respected visitor serve the queen with a class-action lawsuit, and the Queen respond by referring adjudication to trial by combat.
+
+* * *
+
+Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56}, is a brown dwarf, a lump of dirty hydrogen condensed from a stellar nursery, eight times as massive as Jupiter but not massive enough to ignite a stable fusion reaction at its core. The relentless crush of gravity has overcome the mutual repulsion of electrons trapped at its core, shrinking it into a shell of slush around a sphere of degenerate matter. It's barely larger than the gas giant the human ship uses as an energy source, but it's much denser. Gigayears ago, a chance stellar near miss sent it careening off into the galaxy on its own, condemned to drift in eternal darkness along with a cluster of frozen moons that dance attendance upon it.
+
+By the time the /{Field Circus}/ is decelerating toward it at short range - having shed the primary sail, which drifts farther out into interstellar space while reflecting light back onto the remaining secondary sail surface to slow the starwisp - Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56}, is just under one parsec distant from Earth, closer even than Proxima Centauri. Utterly dark at visible wavelengths, the brown dwarf could have drifted through the outer reaches of the solar system before conventional telescopes would have found it by direct observation. Only an infrared survey in the early years of the current century gave it a name.
+
+A bunch of passengers and crew have gathered on the bridge (now running at one-tenth of real time) to watch the arrival. Amber sits curled up in the captain's chair, moodily watching the gathered avatars. Pierre is still avoiding her at every opportunity, formal audiences excepted, and the damned shark and his pet hydra aren't invited, but apart from that, most of the gang is here. There are sixty-three uploads running on the /{Field Circus}/'s virtualization stack, software copied out of meatbodies who are mostly still walking around back home. It's a crowd, but it's possible to feel lonely in a crowd, even when it's your party. And especially when you're worried about debt, even though you're a billionairess, beneficiary of the human species' biggest reputations-rating trust fund. Amber's clothing - black leggings, black sweater - is as dark as her mood.
+
+"Something troubles you." A hand descends on the back of the chair next to her.
+
+She glances round momentarily, nods in recognition. "Yeah. Have a seat. You missed the audience?"
+
+The thin, brown-skinned man with a neatly cropped beard and deeply lined forehead slips into the seat next to her. "It was not part of my heritage," he explains carefully, "although the situation is not unfamiliar." A momentary smile threatens to crack his stony face. "I found the casting a trifle disturbing."
+
+"I'm no Marguerite de Valois, but the vacant role ... let's just say, the cap fits." Amber leans back in her chair. "Mind you, Marguerite had an /{interesting}/ life," she muses.
+
+"Don't you mean depraved and debauched?" her neighbor counters.
+
+"Sadeq." She closes her eyes. "Let's not pick a fight over absolute morality just right now, please? We have an orbital insertion to carry out, then an artifact to locate, and a dialogue to open, and I'm feeling very tired. Drained."
+
+"Ah - I apologize." He inclines his head carefully. "Is it your young man's fault? Has he slighted you?"
+
+"Not exactly -" Amber pauses. Sadeq, whom she basically invited along as ship's theologian in case they ran into any gods, has taken up her pastoral well-being as some kind of hobby. She finds it mildly oppressive at times, flattering at others, surreal always. Using the quantum search resources available to a citizen of the Ring Imperium, he's outpublished his peers, been elected a hojetolislam at an unprecedentedly young age: His original will probably be an ayatollah by the time they get home. He's circumspect in dealing with cultural differences, reasons with impeccable logic, carefully avoids antagonizing her - and constantly seeks to guide her moral development. "It's a personal misunderstanding," she says. "I'd rather not talk about it until we've sorted it out."
+
+"Very well." He looks unsatisfied, but that's normal. Sadeq still has the dusty soil of a childhood in the industrial city of Yazd stuck to his boots. Sometimes she wonders if their disagreements don't mirror in miniature the gap between the early twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. "But back to the here and now. Do you know where this router is?"
+
+"I will, in a few minutes or hours." Amber raises her voice, simultaneously spawning a number of search-ghosts. "Boris! You got any idea where we're going?"
+
+Boris lumbers round in place to face her; today he's wearing a velociraptor, and they don't turn easily in confined spaces. He snarls irritably: "Give me some space!" He coughs, a threatening noise from the back of his wattled throat, "Searching the sail's memory now." The back of the soap-bubble-thin laser sail is saturated with tiny nanocomputers spaced micrometers apart. Equipped with light receptors and configured as cellular automata, they form a gigantic phased-array detector, a retina more than a hundred meters in diameter. Boris is feeding them patterns describing anything that differs from the unchanging starscape. Soon the memories will condense and return as visions of darkness in motion - the cold, dead attendants of an aborted sun.
+
+"But where is it going to be?" asks Sadeq. "Do you know what you are looking for?"
+
+"Yes. We should have no trouble finding it," says Amber. "It looks like this." She flicks an index finger at the row of glass windows that front the bridge. Her signet ring flashes ruby light, and something indescribably weird shimmers into view in place of the seascape. Clusters of pearly beads that form helical chains, disks and whorls of color that interlace and knot through one another, hang in space above a darkling planet. "Looks like a William Latham sculpture made out of strange matter, doesn't it?"
+
+"Very abstract," Sadeq says approvingly.
+
+"It's alive," she adds. "And when it gets close enough to see us, it'll try to eat us."
+
+"What?" Sadeq sits up uneasily.
+
+"You mean nobody told you?" asks Amber: "I thought we'd briefed everybody." She throws a glistening golden pomegranate at him, and he catches it. The apple of knowledge dissolves in his hand, and he sits in a haze of ghosts absorbing information on his behalf. "Damn," she adds mildly.
+
+Sadeq freezes in place. Glyphs of crumbling stonework overgrown with ivy texture his skin and his dark suit, warning that he's busy in another private universe.
+
+"/{Hrrrr!}/ Boss! Found something," calls Boris, drooling on the bridge floor.
+
+Amber glances up. /{Please, let it be the router}/, she thinks. "Put it on the main screen."
+
+"Are you sure this is safe?" Su Ang asks nervously.
+
+"Nothing is safe," Boris snaps, clattering his huge claws on the deck. "Here. Look."
+
+The view beyond the windows flips to a perspective on a dusty bluish horizon: swirls of hydrogen brushed with a high cirrus of white methane crystals, stirred above the freezing point of oxygen by Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},'s residual rotation. The image-intensification level is huge - a naked human eyeball would see nothing but blackness. Rising above the limb of the gigantic planet is a small pale disk: Callidice, largest moon of the brown dwarf - or second-innermost planet - a barren rock slightly larger than Mercury. The screen zooms in on the moon, surging across a landscape battered by craters and dusted with the spume of ice volcanoes. Finally, just above the far horizon, something turquoise shimmers and spins against a backdrop of frigid darkness.
+
+"That's it," Amber whispers, her stomach turning to jelly as all the terrible might-have-beens dissolve like phantoms of the night around her; "That's /{it}/!" Elated, she stands up, wanting to share the moment with everybody she values. "Wake up, Sadeq! Someone get that damned cat in here! Where's Pierre? He's got to see this!"
+
+* * *
+
+Night and revelry rule outside the castle. The crowds are drunken and rowdy on the eve of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. Fireworks burst overhead, and the open windows admit a warm breeze redolent of cooked meats, woodsmoke, open sewers. Meanwhile a lover steals up a tightly-spiraling stone staircase in the near dark; his goal, a prarranged rendezvous. He's been drinking, and his best linen shirt shows the stains of sweat and food. He pauses at the third window to breathe in the outside air and run both hands through his mane of hair, which is long, unkempt, and grimy. /{Why am I doing this?}/ he wonders. This is so unlike him, this messing around -
+
+He carries on up the spiral. At the top, an oak door gapes on a vestibule lit by a lantern hanging from a hook. He ventures inside into a reception room paneled in oak blackened by age. Crossing the threshold makes another crossover kick in by prior arrangement. Something other than his own volition steers his feet, and he feels an unfamiliar throb in his chest, anticipation and a warmth and looseness lower down that makes him cry out, "where are you?"
+
+"Over here." He sees her waiting for him in the doorway. She's partially undressed, wearing layered underskirts and a flat-chested corset that makes the tops of her breasts swell like lustrous domes. Her tight sleeves are half-unraveled, her hair disheveled. He's full of her brilliant eyes, the constriction holding her spine straight, the taste in her mouth. She's the magnet for his reality, impossibly alluring, so tense she could burst. "Is it working for you?" she asks.
+
+"Yes." he feels tight, breathless, squeezed between impossibility and desire as he walks toward her. They've experimented with gender play, trying on the extreme dimorphism of this period as a game, but this is the first time they've done it this way. She opens her mouth: He kisses her, feels the warmth of his tongue thrust between her lips, the strength of his arms enclosing her waist.
+
+She leans against him, feeling his erection. "So this is how it feels to be you," she says wonderingly. The door to her chamber is ajar, but she doesn't have the self-restraint to wait: The flood of new sensations - rerouted from her physiology model to his proprioceptive sensorium - has taken hold. She grinds her hips against him, pushing deeper into his arms, whining softly at the back of her throat as she feels the fullness in his balls, the tension of his penis. He nearly faints with the rich sensations of her body - it's as if he's dissolving, feeling the throbbing hardness against his groin, turning to water and running away. Somehow he gets his arms around her waist - so tight, so breathless - and stumbles forward into the bedroom. She's whimpering as he drops her on the over-stuffed mattress: "/{Do}/ it to me!" she demands, "Do it now!"
+
+Somehow he ends up on top of her, hose down around his ankles, skirts bundled up around her waist; she kisses him, grinding her hips against him and murmuring urgent nothings. Then his heart is in his mouth, and there's a sensation like the universe pushing into his private parts, so inside out it takes his breath away. It's hot and as hard as rock, and he wants it inside so badly, but at the same time it's an intrusion, frightening and unexpected. He feels the lightning touch of his tongue on her nipples as he leans closer, feels exposed and terrified and ecstatic as her private places take in his member. As he begins to dissolve into the universe he screams in the privacy of his own head, /{I didn't know it felt like this}/ -
+
+Afterward, she turns to him with a lazy smile, and asks, "How was it for you?" Obviously assuming that, if she enjoyed it, he must have, too.
+
+But all he can think of is the sensation of the universe thrusting into him, and of how /{good}/ it felt. All he can hear is his father yelling ("What are you, some kind of queer?") - and he feels dirty.
+
+* * *
+
+_1 Greetings from the last megasecond before the discontinuity.
+
+_1 The solar system is thinking furiously at 10^33^ MIPS - thoughts bubble and swirl in the equivalent of a million billion unaugmented human minds. Saturn's rings glow with waste heat. The remaining faithful of the Latter-Day Saints are correlating the phase-space of their genome and the records of their descent in an attempt to resurrect their ancestors. Several skyhooks have unfurled in equatorial orbit around the earth like the graceful fernlike leaves of sundews, ferrying cargo and passengers to and from orbit. Small, crab like robots swarm the surface of Mercury, exuding a black slime of photovoltaic converters and the silvery threads of mass drivers. A glowing cloud of industrial nanomes forms a haze around the innermost planet as it slowly shrinks under the onslaught of copious solar power and determined mining robots.
+
+_1 The original incarnations of Amber and her court float in high orbit above Jupiter, presiding over the huge nexus of dumb matter trade that is rapidly biting into the available mass of the inner Jovian system. The trade in reaction mass is brisk, and there are shipments of diamond/vacuum biphase structures to assemble and crank down into the lower reaches of the solar system. Far below, skimming the edges of Jupiter's turbulent cloudscape, a gigantic glowing figure-of-eight - a five-hundred-kilometer-long loop of superconducting cable - traces incandescent trails through the gas giant's magnetosphere. It's trading momentum for electrical current, diverting it into a fly's eye grid of lasers that beam it toward Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},. As long as the original Amber and her incarnate team can keep it running, the /{Field Circus}/ can continue its mission of discovery, but they're part of the posthuman civilization evolving down in the turbulent depths of Sol system, part of the runaway train being dragged behind the out-of-control engine of history.
+
+_1 Weird new biologies based on complex adaptive matter take shape in the sterile oceans of Titan. In the frigid depths beyond Pluto, supercooled boson gases condense into impossible dreaming structures, packaged for shipping inward to the fast-thinking core.
+
+_1 There are still humans dwelling down in the hot depths, but it's getting hard to recognize them. The lot of humanity before the twenty-first century was nasty, brutish, and short. Chronic malnutrition, lack of education, and endemic diseases led to crippled minds and broken bodies. Now, most people multitask: Their meatbrains sit at the core of a haze of personality, much of it virtualized on stacked layers of structured reality far from their physical bodies. Wars and revolutions, or their subtle latter-day cognates, sweep the globe as constants become variables; many people find the death of stupidity even harder to accept than the end of mortality. Some have vitrified themselves to await an uncertain posthuman future. Others have modified their core identities to better cope with the changed demands of reality. Among these are beings whom nobody from a previous century would recognize as human - human/corporation half-breeds, zombie clades dehumanized by their own optimizations, angels and devils of software, slyly self-aware financial instruments. Even their popular fictions are self-deconstructing these days.
+
+_1 None of this, other than the barest news summary, reaches the /{Field Circus}/: The starwisp is a fossil, left behind by the broad sweep of accelerating progress. But it is aboard the /{Field Circus}/ that some of the most important events remaining in humanity's future light cone take place.
+
+* * *
+
+"Say hello to the jellyfish, Boris."
+
+Boris, in human drag, for once, glares at Pierre, and grips the pitcher with both hands. The contents of the jug swirl their tentacles lazily: One of them flips almost out of solution, dislodging an impaled cocktail cherry. "Will get you for this," Boris threatens. The smoky air around his head is a-swirl with daemonic visions of vengeance.
+
+Su Ang stares intently at Pierre who is watching Boris as he raises the jug to his lips and begins to drink. The baby jellyfish - small, pale blue, with cuboid bells and four clusters of tentacles trailing from each corner - slips down easily. Boris winces momentarily as the nematocysts let rip inside his mouth, but in a moment or so, the cubozoan slips down, and in the meantime, his biophysics model clips the extent of the damage to his stinger-ruptured oropharynx.
+
+"Wow," he says, taking another slurp of sea wasp margaritas. "Don't try this at home, fleshboy."
+
+"Here." Pierre reaches out. "Can I?"
+
+"Invent your own damn poison," Boris sneers - but he releases the jug and passes it to Pierre, who raises it and drinks. The cubozoan cocktail reminds him of fruit jelly drinks in a hot Hong Kong summer. The stinging in his palate is sharp but fades rapidly, producing an intimate burn when the alcohol hits the mild welts that are all this universe will permit the lethal medusa to inflict on him.
+
+"Not bad," says Pierre, wiping a stray loop of tentacle off his chin. He pushes the pitcher across the table toward Su Ang. "What's with the wicker man?" He points a thumb over his back at the table jammed in the corner opposite the copper-topped bar.
+
+"Who cares?" asks Boris."'S part of the scenery, isn't it?"
+
+The bar is a three-hundred-year-old brown café with a beer menu that runs to sixteen pages and wooden walls stained the color of stale ale. The air is thick with the smells of tobacco, brewer's yeast, and melatonin spray: and none of it exists. Amber dragged it out of the Franklin borg's collective memories, by way of her father's scattershot e-mails annotating her corporeal origins - the original is in Amsterdam, if that city still exists.
+
+"/{I}/ care who it is," says Pierre.
+
+"Save it," Ang says quietly. "I think it's a lawyer with a privacy screen."
+
+Pierre glances over his shoulder and glares. "Really?"
+
+Ang puts a restraining hand on his wrist: "Really. Don't pay it any attention. You don't have to, until the trial, you know."
+
+The wicker man sits uneasily in the corner. It resembles a basket-weave silhouette made from dried reeds, dressed in a red kerchief. A glass of doppelbock fills the mess of tied-off ends where its right hand ought to be. From time to time, it raises the glass as if to take a mouthful, and the beer vanishes into the singular interior.
+
+"Fuck the trial," Pierre says shortly. /{And fuck Amber, too, for naming me her public defender}/ -
+
+"Since when do lawsuits come with an invisible man?" asks Donna the Journalist, blitting into the bar along with a patchy historical trail hinting that she's just come from the back room.
+
+"Since -" Pierre blinks. "Hell." When Donna entered, so did Aineko; or maybe the cat's been there all the time, curled up loaf-of-bread fashion on the table in front of the wicker man. "You're damaging the continuity," Pierre complains. "This universe is broken."
+
+"Fix it yourself," Boris tells him. "Everybody else is coping." He snaps his fingers. "Waiter!"
+
+"Excuse me." Donna shakes her head. "I didn't mean to harm anything."
+
+Ang, as always, is more accommodating. "How are you?" she asks politely: "Would you like to try this most excellent poison cocktail?"
+
+"I am well," says Donna. A heavily built German woman - blonde and solidly muscular, according to the avatar she's presenting to the public - she's surrounded by a haze of viewpoints. They're camera angles on her society of mind, busily integrating and splicing her viewpoint threads together in an endless journal of the journey. A stringer for the CIA media consortium, she uploaded to the ship in the same packet stream as the lawsuit. "/{Danke}/, Ang."
+
+"Are you recording right now?" asks Boris.
+
+Donna sniffs. "When am I not?" A momentary smile: "I am only a scanner, no? Five hours, until arrival, to go. I may stop after then." Pierre glances across the table at Su Ang's hands; her knuckles are white and tense. "I am to avoid missing anything if possible," Donna continues, oblivious to Ang's disquiet. "There are eight of me at present! All recording away."
+
+"That's all?" Ang asks, raising an eyebrow.
+
+"Yes, that is all, and I have a job to do! Don't tell me you do not enjoy what it is that you do here?"
+
+"Right." Pierre glances in the corner again, avoiding eye contact with the hearty Girl Friday wannabe. He has a feeling, that if there were any hills hereabouts to animate, she'd be belting out the music. "Amber told you about the privacy code here?"
+
+"There is a privacy code?" asks Donna, swinging at least three subjective ghosts to bear on him for some reason - evidently he's hit an issue she has mixed feelings about.
+
+"A privacy code," Pierre confirms. "No recording in private, no recording where people withhold permission in public, and no sandboxes and cutups."
+
+Donna looks offended. "I would never do such a thing! Trapping a copy of someone in a virtual space to record their responses would be assault under Ring legal code, not true?"
+
+"Your mother," Boris says snidely, brandishing a fresh jug of iced killer jellyfish in her direction.
+
+"As long as we all agree," Ang interrupts, searching for accord. "It's all going to be settled soon, isn't it?"
+
+"Except for the lawsuit," mutters Pierre, glancing at the corner again.
+
+"I don't see the problem," says Donna, "that's just between Amber and her downlink adversaries!"
+
+"Oh, it's a problem all right," says Boris, his tone light. "What are your options worth?"
+
+"My -" Donna shakes her head. "I'm not vested."
+
+"Plausible." Boris doesn't crack a smile. "Even so, when we go home, your credibility metric will bulge. Assuming people still use distributed trust markets to evaluate the stability of their business partners."
+
+/{Not vested}/. Pierre turns it over in his mind, slightly surprised. He'd assumed that everybody aboard the ship - except, perhaps, the lawyer, Glashwiecz - was a fully vested member of the expeditionary company.
+
+"I am not vested," Donna insists. "I'm listed independently." For a moment, an almost-smile tugs at her face, a charmingly reticent expression that has nothing to do with her bluff exterior. "Like the cat."
+
+"The -" Pierre turns round in a hurry. Yes, Aineko appears to be sitting silently at the table with the wicker man; but who knows what's going through that furry head right now? /{I'll have to bring this up with Amber, he realizes uneasily. I ought to bring this up with Amber}/ ... "but your reputation won't suffer for being on this craft, will it?" he asks aloud.
+
+"I will be all right," Donna declares. The waiter comes over: "Mine will be a bottle of schneiderweisse," she adds. And then, without breaking step: "Do you believe in the singularity?"
+
+"Am I a singularitarian, do you mean?" asks Pierre, a fixed grin coming to his face.
+
+"Oh, no, no, no!" Donna waves him down, grins broadly, nods at Su Ang: "I do not mean it like that! Attend: What I meant to ask was whether you in the concept of a singularity believe, and if so, where it is?"
+
+"Is this intended for a public interview?" asks Ang.
+
+"Well, I cannot into a simulation drag you off and expose you to an imitative reality excursion, can I?" Donna leans back as the bartender places a ceramic stein in front of her.
+
+"Oh. Well." Ang glances warningly at Pierre and dispatches a very private memo to scroll across his vision: /{Don't play with her, this is serious}/. Boris is watching Ang with an expression of hopeless longing. Pierre tries to ignore it all, taking the journalist's question seriously. "The singularity is a bit like that old-time American Christian rapture nonsense, isn't it?" he says. "When we all go a-flying up to heaven, leaving our bodies behind." He snorts, reaches into thin air and gratuitously violates causality by summoning a jug of ice-cold sangria into existence. "The rapture of the nerds. I'll drink to that."
+
+"But when did it take place?" asks Donna. "My audience, they will to know your opinion be needing."
+
+"Four years ago, when we instantiated this ship," Pierre says promptly.
+
+"Back in the teens," says Ang. "When Amber's father liberated the uploaded lobsters."
+
+"Is not happening yet," contributes Boris. "Singularity implies infinite rate of change achieved momentarily. Future not amenable thereafter to prediction by presingularity beings, right? So has not happened."
+
+"Au contraire. It happened on June 6th, 1969, at eleven hundred hours, eastern seaboard time," Pierre counters. "That was when the first network control protocol packets were sent from the data port of one IMP to another - the first ever Internet connection. /{That's}/ the singularity. Since then we've all been living in a universe that was impossible to predict from events prior to that time."
+
+"It's rubbish," counters Boris. "Singularity is load of religious junk. Christian mystic rapture recycled for atheist nerds."
+
+"Not so." Su Ang glances at him, hurt. "Here we are, sixty something human minds. We've been migrated - while still awake - right out of our own heads using an amazing combination of nanotechnology and electron spin resonance mapping, and we're now running as software in an operating system designed to virtualize multiple physics models and provide a simulation of reality that doesn't let us go mad from sensory deprivation! And this whole package is about the size of a fingertip, crammed into a starship the size of your grandmother's old Walkman, in orbit around a brown dwarf just over three light-years from home, on its way to plug into a network router created by incredibly ancient alien intelligences, and you can tell me that the idea of a fundamental change in the human condition is nonsense?"
+
+"Mmph." Boris looks perplexed. "Would not put it that way. The /{singularity}/ is nonsense, not uploading or -"
+
+"Yah, right." Ang smiles winningly at Boris. After a moment, he wilts.
+
+Donna beams at them enthusiastically. "Fascinating!" she enthuses. "Tell me, what are these lobsters you think are important?"
+
+"They're Amber's friends," Ang explains. "Years ago, Amber's father did a deal with them. They were the first uploads, you know? Hybridized spiny lobster neural tissue and a heuristic API and some random mess of backward-chaining expert systems. They got out of their lab and into the Net and Manfred brokered a deal to set them free, in return for their help running a Franklin orbital factory. This was way back in the early days before they figured out how to do self-assembly properly. Anyway, the lobsters insisted - part of their contract - that Bob Franklin pay to have the deep-space tracking network beam them out into interstellar space. They wanted to emigrate, and looking at what's happened to the solar system since then, who can blame them?"
+
+Pierre takes a big mouthful of sangria. "The cat," he says.
+
+"The cat -" Donna's head swivels round, but Aineko has banged out again, retroactively editing her presence out of the event history of this public space. "What about the cat?"
+
+"The /{family}/ cat," explains Ang. She reaches over for Boris's pitcher of jellyfish juice, but frowns as she does so: "Aineko wasn't conscious back then, but later ... when SETI@home finally received that message back, oh, however many years ago, Aineko remembered the lobsters. And cracked it wide open while all the CETI teams were still thinking in terms of von Neumann architectures and concept-oriented programming. The message was a semantic net designed to mesh perfectly with the lobster broadcast all those years ago, and provide a high-level interface to a communications network we're going to visit." She squeezes Boris's fingertips. "SETI@home logged these coordinates as the origin of the transmission, even though the public word was that the message came from a whole lot farther away - they didn't want to risk a panic if people knew there were aliens on our cosmic doorstep. Anyway, once Amber got established, she decided to come visiting. Hence this expedition. Aineko created a virtual lobster and interrogated the ET packet, hence the communications channel we're about to open."
+
+"Ah, this is all a bit clearer now," says Donna. "But the lawsuit - " She glances at the hollow wicker man in the corner.
+
+"Well, there we have a problem," Ang says diplomatically.
+
+"No," says Pierre. "/{I}/ have a problem. And it's all Amber's fault."
+
+"Hmm?" Donna stares at him. "Why blame the Queen?"
+
+"Because she's the one who picked the lunar month to be the reporting time period for companies in her domain, and specified trial by combat for resolving corporate conflicts," he grumbles. "And /{compurgation}/, but that's not applicable to this case because there isn't a recognized reputation server within three light-years. Trial by combat, for civil suits in this day and age! And she appointed me her champion." /{In the most traditional way imaginable}/, he remembers with a warm frisson of nostalgia. He'd been hers in body and soul before that disastrous experiment. He isn't sure whether it still applies, but - "I've got to take on this lawsuit on her behalf, in adversarial stance."
+
+He glances over his shoulder. The wicker man sits there placidly, pouring beer down his invisible throat like a tired farm laborer.
+
+"Trial by combat," Su Ang explains to Donna's perplexed ghost-swarm, which is crawling all over the new concept in a haze of confusion. "Not physical combat, but a competition of ability. It seemed like a good idea at the time, to keep junk litigants out of the Ring Imperium, but the Queen Mother's lawyers are /{very}/ persistent. Probably because it's taken on something of a grudge match quality over the years. I don't think Pamela cares much anymore, but this ass-hat lawyer has turned it into a personal crusade. I don't think he liked what happened when the music Mafiya caught up with him. But there's a bit more to it, because if he wins, he gets to own everything. And I mean /{everything}/."
+
+* * *
+
+Ten million kilometers out and Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56}, looms beyond the parachute-shaped sail of the /{Field Circus}/ like a rind of darkness bitten out of the edge of the universe. Heat from the gravitational contraction of its core keeps it warm, radiating at six hundred degrees absolute, but the paltry emission does nothing to break the eternal ice that grips Callidice, Iambe, Celeus, and Metaneira, the stillborn planets locked in orbit around the brown dwarf.
+
+Planets aren't the only structures that orbit the massive sphere of hydrogen. Close in, skimming the cloud tops by only twenty thousand kilometers, Boris's phased-array eye has blinked at something metallic and hot. Whatever it is, it orbits out of the ecliptic plane traced by the icy moons, and in the wrong direction. Farther out, a speckle of reflected emerald laser light picks out a gaudy gem against the starscape: their destination, the router.
+
+"That's it," says Boris. His body shimmers into humanity, retconning the pocket universe of the bridge into agreeing that he's been present in primate form all along. Amber glances sideways. Sadeq is still wrapped in ivy, his skin the texture of weathered limestone. "Closest approach is sixty-three light-seconds, due in eight hundred thousand. Can give you closer contact if we maneuver, but will take time to achieve a stable orbit."
+
+Amber nods thoughtfully, sending copies of herself out to work the mechanics. The big light sail is unwieldy, but can take advantage of two power sources: the original laser beam from Jupiter, and its reflection bouncing off the now-distant primary light sail. The temptation is to rely on the laser for constant acceleration, to just motor on in and squat on the router's cosmic doorstep. But the risk of beam interruption is too dangerous. It's happened before, for seconds to minutes at a time, on six occasions during the voyage so far. She's not sure what causes the beam downtime (Pierre has a theory about Oort cloud objects occulting the laser, but she figures it's more likely to be power cuts back at the Ring), but the consequences of losing power while maneuvering deep in a quasi-stellar gravity well are much more serious than a transient loss of thrust during free interstellar flight. "Let's just play it safe," she says. "We'll go for a straight orbital insertion and steady cranking after that. We've got enough gravity wells to play pinball with. I don't want us on a free-flight trajectory that entails lithobraking if we lose power and can't get the sail back."
+
+"Very prudent," Boris agrees. "Marta, work on it." A buzzing presence of not-insects indicates that the heteromorphic helmswoman is on the job. "I think we should be able to take our first close-in look in about two million seconds, but if you want, I can ping it now ...?"
+
+"No need for protocol analysis," Amber says casually. "Where's - ah, there you are." She reaches down and picks up Aineko, who twists round sinuously and licks her arm with a tongue like sandpaper. "What do you think?"
+
+"Do you want fries with that?" asks the cat, focusing on the artifact at the center of the main screen in front of the bridge.
+
+"No, I just want a conversation," says Amber.
+
+"Well, okay." The cat dims, moves jerkily, sucking up local processing power so fast that it disturbs the local physics model. "Opening port now."
+
+A subjective minute or two passes. "Where's Pierre?" Amber asks herself quietly. Some of the maintenance metrics she can read from her privileged viewpoint are worrying. The /{Field Circus}/ is running at almost eighty percent of utilization. Whatever Aineko is doing in order to establish the interface to the router, it's taking up an awful lot of processing power and bandwidth. "And where's the bloody lawyer?" she adds, almost as an afterthought.
+
+The /{Field Circus}/ is small, but its light sail is highly controllable. Aineko takes over a cluster of cells in its surface, turning them from straight reflectors into phase-conjugate mirrors: A small laser on the ship's hull begins to flicker thousands of times a second, and the beam bounces off the modified segment of mirror, focusing to a coherent point right in front of the distant blue dot of the router. Aineko ramps up the modulation frequency, adds a bundle of channels using different wavelengths, and starts feeding out a complex set of preplanned signals that provide an encoding format for high-level data.
+
+% check point
+
+"Leave the lawyer to me." She starts, glancing sideways to see Sadeq watching her. He smiles without showing his teeth. "Lawyers do not mix with diplomacy," he explains.
+
+"Huh." Ahead of them, the router is expanding. Strings of nacreous spheres curl in strange loops around a hidden core, expanding and turning inside out in systolic pulses that spawn waves of recomplication through the structure. A loose red speckle of laser light stains one arm of beads; suddenly it flares up brilliantly, reflecting data back at the ship. "Ah!"
+
+"Contact," purrs the cat. Amber's fingertips turn white where she grips the arms of her chair.
+
+"What does it say?" she asks, quietly.
+
+"What do /{they}/ say," corrects Aineko. "It's a trade delegation, and they're uploading right now. I can use that negotiation network they sent us to give them an interface to our systems if you want."
+
+"Wait!" Amber half stands in sudden nervousness. "Don't give them free access! What are you thinking of? Stick them in the throne room, and we'll give them a formal audience in a couple of hours." She pauses. "That network layer they sent through. Can you make it accessible to us, use it to give us a translation layer into their grammar-mapping system?"
+
+The cat looks round, thumps her tail irritably: "You'd do better loading the network yourself -"
+
+"I don't want /{anybody}/ on this ship running alien code before we've vetted it thoroughly," she says urgently. "In fact, I want them bottled up in the Louvre grounds, just as thoroughly as we can, and I want them to come to us through our own linguistic bottleneck. Got that?"
+
+"Clear," Aineko grumbles.
+
+"A trade delegation," Amber thinks aloud. "What would Dad make of that?"
+
+* * *
+
+One moment he's in the bar, shooting bull with Su Ang and Donna the Journalist's ghost and a copy of Boris; the next he's abruptly precipitated into a very different space.
+
+Pierre's heart seems to tumble within his rib cage, but he forces himself to stay calm as he glances around the dim, oak-paneled chamber. This is wrong, so wrong that it signifies either a major systems crash or the application of frightening privilege levels to his realm. The only person aboard who's entitled to those privileges is -
+
+"Pierre?"
+
+She's behind him. He turns angrily. "Why did you drag me in here? Don't you know it's rude to -"
+
+"Pierre."
+
+He stops and looks at Amber. He can't stay angry at her for long, not to her face. She's not dumb enough to bat her eyelashes at him, but she's disarmingly cute for all that. Nevertheless, something inside him feels shriveled and /{wrong}/ in her presence. "What is it?" he says, curtly.
+
+"I don't know why you've been avoiding me." She starts to take a step forward, then stops and bites her lip. /{Don't do this to me!}/ he thinks. "You know it hurts?"
+
+"Yes." That much of an admission hurts him, too. He can hear his father yelling over his shoulder, the time he found him with Laurent, elder brother: It's a choice between père or Amber, but it's not a choice he wants to make. /{The shame}/. "I didn't - I have some issues."
+
+"It was the other night?"
+
+He nods. /{Now}/ she takes a step forwards. "We can talk about it, if you want. Whatever you want," she says. And she leans toward him, and he feels his resistance crumbling. He reaches out and hugs her, and she wraps her arms around him and leans her chin on his shoulder, and this doesn't feel wrong: How can anything this good be bad?
+
+"It made me uncomfortable," he mumbles into her hair. "Need to sort myself out."
+
+"Oh, Pierre." She strokes the down at the back of his neck. "You should have said. We don't have to do it that way if you don't want to."
+
+How to tell her how hard it is to admit that anything's wrong? Ever? "You didn't drag me here to tell me that," he says, implicitly changing the subject.
+
+Amber lets go of him, backs away almost warily. "What is it?" she asks.
+
+"Something's wrong?" he half asks, half asserts. "Have we made contact yet?"
+
+"Yeah," she says, pulling a face. "There's an alien trade delegation in the Louvre. That's the problem."
+
+"An alien trade delegation." He rolls the words around the inside of his mouth, tasting them. They feel paradoxical, cold and slow after the hot words of passion he's been trying to avoid uttering. It's his fault for changing the subject.
+
+"A trade delegation," says Amber. "I should have anticipated. I mean, we were going to go through the router ourselves, weren't we?"
+
+He sighs. "We thought we were going to do that." A quick prod at the universe's controls determines that he has certain capabilities: He invokes an armchair, sprawls across it. "A network of point-to-point wormholes linking routers, self-replicating communication hubs, in orbit around most of the brown dwarfs of the galaxy. That's what the brochure said, right? That's what we expected. Limited bandwidth, not a lot of use to a mature superintelligence that has converted the free mass of its birth solar system into computronium, but sufficient to allow it to hold conversations with its neighbors. Conversations carried out via a packet-switched network in real time, not limited by the speed of light, but bound together by a common reference frame and the latency between network hops."
+
+"That's about the size of it," she agrees from the carved-ruby throne beside him. "Except there's a trade delegation waiting for us. In fact, they're coming aboard already. And I don't buy it - something about the whole setup stinks."
+
+Pierre's brow wrinkles. "You're right, it doesn't make sense," he says, finally. "Doesn't make sense at all."
+
+Amber nods. "I carry a ghost of Dad around. He's really upset about it."
+
+"Listen to your old man." Pierre's lips quirk humorlessly. "We were going to jump through the looking glass, but it seems someone has beaten us to the punch. Question is why?"
+
+"I don't like it." Amber reaches out sideways, and he catches her hand. "And then there's the lawsuit. We have to hold the trial sooner rather than later."
+
+He lets go of her fingers. "I'd really be much happier if you hadn't named me as your champion."
+
+"Hush." The scenery changes; her throne is gone, and instead she's sitting on the arm of his chair, almost on top of him. "Listen. I had a good reason."
+
+"Reason?"
+
+"You have choice of weapons. In fact, you have the choice of the field. This isn't just 'hit 'em with a sword until they die' time." She grins, impishly. "The whole point of a legal system that mandates trial by combat for commercial lawsuits, as opposed to an adjudication system, is to work out who's a fitter servant of society and hence deserving of preferential treatment. It's crazy to apply the same legal model to resolving corporate disputes that we use for arguments among people, especially as most companies are now software abstractions of business models; the interests of society are better served by a system that encourages efficient trade activity than by one that encourages litigation. It cuts down on corporate bullshit while encouraging the toughest ones to survive, which is why I /{was}/ going to set up the trial as a contest to achieve maximum competitive advantage in a xenocommerce scenario. Assuming they really are traders, I figure we have more to trade with them than some damn lawyer from the depths of earth's light cone."
+
+Pierre blinks. "Um." Blinks again. "I thought you wanted me to sideload some kind of fencing kinematics program and /{skewer}/ the guy?"
+
+"Knowing how well I know you, why did you ever think that?" She slides down the arm of his chair and lands on his lap. She twists round to face him in point-blank close-up. "Shit, Pierre, I /{know}/ you're not some kind of macho psychopath!"
+
+"But your mother's lawyers -"
+
+She shrugs dismissively. "They're /{lawyers}/. Used to dealing with precedents. Best way to fuck with their heads is to change the way the universe works." She leans against his chest. "You'll make mincemeat of them. Profit-to-earnings ratio through the roof, blood on the stock exchange floor." His hands meet around the small of her back. "My hero!"
+
+* * *
+
+The Tuileries are full of confused lobsters.
+
+Aineko has warped this virtual realm, implanting a symbolic gateway in the carefully manicured gardens outside. The gateway is about two meters in diameter, a verdigris-coated orouborous loop of bronze that sits like an incongruous archway astride a gravel path in the grounds. Giant black lobsters - each the size of a small pony - shuffle out of the loop's baby blue buffer field, antennae twitching. They wouldn't be able to exist in the real world, but the physics model here has been amended to permit them to breathe and move, by special dispensation.
+
+Amber sniffs derisively as she enters the great reception room of the Sully wing. "Can't trust that cat with anything," she mutters.
+
+"It was your idea, wasn't it?" asks Su Ang, trying to duck past the zombie ladies-in-waiting who carry Amber's train. Soldiers line the passage to either side, forming rows of steel to let the Queen pass unhindered.
+
+"To let the cat have its way, yes," Amber is annoyed. "But I didn't mean to let it wreck the continuity! I won't have it!"
+
+"I never saw the point of all this medievalism, before," Ang observes. "It's not as if you can avoid the singularity by hiding in the past." Pierre, following the Queen at a distance, shakes his head, knowing better than to pick a fight with Amber over her idea of stage scenery.
+
+"It looks good," Amber says tightly, standing before her throne and waiting for the ladies-in-waiting to arrange themselves before her. She sits down carefully, her back straight as a ruler, voluminous skirts belling up. Her dress is an intricate piece of sculpture that uses the human body within as a support. "It impresses the yokels and looks convincing on narrowcast media. It provides a prefabricated sense of tradition. It hints at the political depths of fear and loathing intrinsic to my court's activities, and tells people not to fuck with me. It reminds us where we've come from ... and it doesn't give away anything about where we're going."
+
+"But that doesn't make any difference to a bunch of alien lobsters," points out Su Ang. "They lack the reference points to understand it." She moves to stand behind the throne. Amber glances at Pierre, waves him over.
+
+Pierre glances around, seeking real people, not the vacant eigenfaces of the zombies that give this scenery added biological texture. There in the red gown, isn't that Donna the Journalist? And over there, too, with shorter hair and wearing male drag; she gets everywhere. That's Boris, sitting behind the bishop.
+
+"/{You}/ tell her," Ang implores him.
+
+"I can't," he admits. "We're trying to establish communication, aren't we? But we don't want to give too much away about what we are, how we think. A historical distancing act will keep them from learning too much about us: The phase-space of technological cultures that could have descended from these roots is too wide to analyse easily. So we're leaving them with the lobster translators and not giving anything away. Try to stay in character as a fifteenth-century duchess from Albì - it's a matter of national security."
+
+"Humph." Ang frowns as a flunky hustles forward to place a folding chair behind her. She turns to face the expanse of red-and-gold carpet that stretches to the doorway as trumpets blat and the doors swing open to admit the deputation of lobsters.
+
+The lobsters are as large as wolves, black and spiny and ominous. Their monochrome carapaces are at odds with the brightly colored garb of the human crowd. Their antennae are large and sharp as swords. But for all that, they advance hesitantly, eye turrets swiveling from side to side as they take the scene in. Their tails drag ponderously on the carpet, but they have no trouble standing.
+
+The first of the lobsters halts short of the throne and angles itself to train an eye on Amber. "Am inconsistent," it complains. "There is no liquid hydrogen monoxide here, and you-species am misrepresented by initial contact. Inconsistency, explain?"
+
+"Welcome to the human physical space-traveling interface unit /{Field Circus}/," Amber replies calmly. "I am pleased to see your translator is working adequately. You are correct, there is no water here. The lobsters don't normally need it when they visit us. And we humans are not water-dwellers. May I ask who you are when you're not wearing borrowed lobster bodies?"
+
+Confusion. The second lobster rears up and clatters its long, armored antennae together. Soldiers to either side tighten their grips on their spears, but it drops back down again soon enough.
+
+"We are the Wunch," announces the first lobster, speaking clearly. "This is a body-compliant translation layer. Based on map received from yourspace, units forty thousand trillion light-kilometers ago?"
+
+"/{He means twenty years}/," Pierre whispers on a private channel Amber has multicast for the other real humans in the audience chamber reality. "/{They've confused space and time for measurement purposes. Does this tell us something?}/"
+
+"/{Relatively little}/," comments someone else - Chandra? A round of polite laughter greets the joke, and the tension in the room eases slightly.
+
+"We are the Wunch," the lobster repeats. "We come to exchange interest. What have you got that we want?"
+
+Faint frown lines appear on Amber's forehead. Pierre can see her thinking very rapidly. "We consider it impolite to ask," she says quietly.
+
+Clatter of claws on underlying stone floor. Chatter of clicking mandibles. "You accept our translation?" asks the leader.
+
+"Are you referring to the transmission you sent us, uh, thirty thousand trillion light-kilometers behind?" asks Amber.
+
+The lobster bobs up and down on its legs. "True. We send."
+
+"We cannot integrate that network," Amber replies blandly, and Pierre forces himself to keep a straight face. (Not that the lobsters can read human body language yet, but they'll undoubtedly be recording everything that happens here for future analysis.) "They come from a radically different species. Our goal in coming here is to connect our species to the network. We wish to exchange advantageous information with many other species."
+
+Concern, alarm, agitation. "You cannot do that! You are not /{untranslatable entity signifier}/."
+
+Amber raises a hand. "You said /{untranslatable entity signifier}/. I did not understand that. Can you paraphrase?"
+
+"We, like you, are not /{untranslatable entity signifier}/. The network is for /{untranslatable entity signifier}/. We are to the /{untranslatable concept #1}/ as a single-celled organism is to ourselves. You and we cannot /{untranslatable concept #2}/. To attempt trade with /{untranslatable entity signifier}/ is to invite death or transition to /{untranslatable concept #1}/."
+
+Amber snaps her fingers: time freezes. She glances round at Su Ang, Pierre, the other members of her primary team. "Opinions, anyone?"
+
+Aineko, hitherto invisible, sits up on the carpet at the foot of the dais. "I'm not sure. The reason those macros are tagged is that there's something wrong with their semantics."
+
+"Wrong with - how?" asks Su Ang.
+
+The cat grins, cavernously, and begins to fade. "Wait!" snaps Amber.
+
+Aineko continues her fade, but leaves a shimmering presence behind: not a grin, but a neural network weighting map, three-dimensional and incomprehensibly complicated. "The /{untranslatable entity concept #1}/ when mapped onto the lobster's grammar network has elements of 'god' overloaded with attributes of mysticism and zenlike incomprehensibility. But I'm pretty sure that what it /{really}/ means is 'optimized conscious upload that runs much faster than real-time'. A type-one weakly superhuman entity, like, um, the folks back home. The implication is that this Wunch wants us to view them as gods." The cat fades back in. "Any takers?"
+
+"Small-town hustlers," mutters Amber. "Talking big - or using a dodgy metagrammar that makes them sound bigger than they are - to bilk the hayseeds new to the big city."
+
+"Most likely." Aineko turns and begins to wash her flank.
+
+"What are we going to do?" asks Su Ang.
+
+"Do?" Amber raises a pencil-lined eyebrow, then flashes a grin that chops a decade off her apparent age: "We're going to mess with their heads!" She snaps her fingers again and time unfreezes. There's no change in continuity except that Aineko is still present, at the foot of the throne. The cat looks up and gives the queen a dirty look. "We understand your concern," Amber says smoothly, "but we have already given you the physiology models and neural architecture of the bodies that you are wearing. We want to communicate. Why won't you show us your real selves or your real language?"
+
+"This is trade language!" protests Lobster Number One. "Wunch am/are metabolically variable coalition from number of worlds. No uniformity of interface. Easiest to conform to one plan and speak one tongue optimized for your comprehension."
+
+"Hmm." Amber leans forward. "Let me see if I understand you. You are a coalition of individuals from a number of species. You prefer to use the common user interface model we sent you, and offered us the language module you're using for an exchange? And you want to trade with us."
+
+"Exchange interest," the Wunch emphasizes, bouncing up and down on its legs. "Can offer much! Sense of identity of a thousand civilizations. Safe tunnels to a hundred archives on the net suitable for beings who are not /{untranslatable entity signifier}/. Able to control risks of communication. Have technique of manipulating matter at molecular level. Solution to algorithmic iterated systems based on quantum entanglement."
+
+"/{Old-fashioned nanotechnology and shiny beads to dazzle the primitives}/," Pierre mutters on Amber's multicast channel. "/{How backward do they think we are}/?"
+
+% note italics marked differently should have been "H/{ow backward do they think we are}/?"
+
+"/{The physics model in here is really overdone}/," comments Boris. "/{They may even think this is real, that we're primitives coat-tailing it on the back of the lobsters' efforts}/."
+
+Amber forces a smile. "That is most interesting!" she trills at the Wunch's representatives. "I have appointed two representatives who will negotiate with you; this is an internal contest within my own court. I commend to you Pierre Naqet, my own commercial representative. In addition, you may want to deal with Alan Glashwiecz, an independent factor who is not currently present. Others may come forward in due course if that is acceptable."
+
+"It pleases us," says Lobster Number One. "We are tired and disoriented by the long journey through gateways to this place. Request resumption of negotiations later?"
+
+"By all means." Amber nods. A sergeant-at-arms, a mindless but impressive zimboe controlled by her spider's nest of personality threads, blows a sharp note on his trumpet. The first audience is at an end.
+
+* * *
+
+_1 Outside the light cone of the /{Field Circus}/, on the other side of the spacelike separation between Amber's little kingdom in motion and the depths of empire time that grip the solar system's entangled quantum networks, a singular new reality is taking shape.
+
+_1 Welcome to the moment of maximum change.
+
+_1 About ten billion humans are alive in the solar system, each mind surrounded by an exocortex of distributed agents, threads of personality spun right out of their heads to run on the clouds of utility fog - infinitely flexible computing resources as thin as aerogel - in which they live. The foggy depths are alive with high-bandwidth sparkles; most of Earth's biosphere has been wrapped in cotton wool and preserved for future examination. For every living human, a thousand million software agents carry information into the farthest corners of the consciousness address space.
+
+_1 The sun, for so long an unremarkable mildly variable G2 dwarf, has vanished within a gray cloud that englobes it except for a narrow belt around the plane of the ecliptic. Sunlight falls, unchanged, on the inner planets: Except for Mercury, which is no longer present, having been dismantled completely and turned into solar-powered high-temperature nanocomputers. A much fiercer light falls on Venus, now surrounded by glittering ferns of carbon crystals that pump angular momentum into the barely spinning planet via huge superconducting loops wound around its equator. This planet, too, is due to be dismantled. Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus - all sprout rings as impressive as Saturn's. But the task of cannibalizing the gas giants will take many times longer than the small rocky bodies of the inner system.
+
+_1 The ten billion inhabitants of this radically changed star system remember being human; almost half of them predate the millennium. Some of them still /{are}/ human, untouched by the drive of meta-evolution that has replaced blind Darwinian change with a goal-directed teleological progress. They cower in gated communities and hill forts, mumbling prayers and cursing the ungodly meddlers with the natural order of things. But eight out of every ten living humans are included in the phase-change. It's the most inclusive revolution in the human condition since the discovery of speech.
+
+_1 A million outbreaks of gray goo - runaway nanoreplicator excursions - threaten to raise the temperature of the biosphere dramatically. They're all contained by the planetary-scale immune system fashioned from what was once the World Health Organization. Weirder catastrophes threaten the boson factories in the Oort cloud. Antimatter factories hover over the solar poles. Sol system shows all the symptoms of a runaway intelligence excursion, exuberant blemishes as normal for a technological civilization as skin problems on a human adolescent.
+
+_1 The economic map of the planet has changed beyond recognition. Both capitalism and communism, bickering ideological children of a protoindustrial outlook, are as obsolete as the divine right of kings: Companies are alive, and dead people may live again, too. Globalism and tribalism have run to completion, diverging respectively into homogeneous interoperability and the Schwarzschild radius of insularity. Beings that remember being human plan the deconstruction of Jupiter, the creation of a great simulation space that will expand the habitat available within the solar system. By converting all the nonstellar mass of the solar system into processors, they can accommodate as many human-equivalent minds as a civilization with a planet hosting ten billion humans in orbit around every star in the galaxy.
+
+_1 A more mature version of Amber lives down in the surging chaos of near-Jupiter space; there's an instance of Pierre, too, although he has relocated light-hours away, near Neptune. Whether she still sometimes thinks of her relativistic twin, nobody can tell. In a way, it doesn't matter, because by the time the /{Field Circus}/ returns to Jupiter orbit, as much subjective time will have elapsed for the fast-thinkers back home as will flash by in the real universe between this moment and the end of the era of star formation, many billions of years hence.
+
+* * *
+
+"As your theologian, I am telling you that they are not gods."
+
+Amber nods patiently. She watches Sadeq closely.
+
+Sadeq coughs grumpily. "Tell her, Boris."
+
+Boris tilts his chair back and turns it toward the Queen. "He is right, Amber. They are traders, and not clever ones either. Is hard to get handle on their semiotics while they hide behind the lobster model we uploaded in their direction twenty years ago, but are certainly not crusties, and are definite not human either. Or transhuman. My guess, they are bunch of dumb hicks who get hands on toys left behind by much smarter guys. Like the rejectionist factions back home. Imagine they are waking up one morning and find everyone else is gone to the great upload environment in the sky. Leaving them with the planet to themselves. What you think they do with whole world, with any gadgets they trip over? Some will smash everything they come across, but others not so stupid. But they think /{small}/. Scavengers, deconstructionists. Their whole economic outlook are negative-sum game. Go visit aliens to rip them off, take ideas, not expand selves and transcend."
+
+Amber stands up, walks toward the windows at the front of the bridge. In black jeans and chunky sweater, she barely resembles the feudal queen whose role she plays for tourists. "Taking them on board was a big risk. I'm not happy about it."
+
+"How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" Sadeq smiles crookedly. "We have an answer. But they may not even realize they are dancing with us. These are not the gods you were afraid of finding."
+
+"No." Amber sighs. "Not too different from us, though. I mean, we aren't exactly well adapted to this environment, are we? We tote these body-images along, rely on fake realities that we can map into our human-style senses. We're emulations, not native AIs. Where's Su Ang?"
+
+"I can find her." Boris frowns.
+
+"I asked her to analyse the alien's arrival times," Amber adds as an afterthought. "They're close - too close. And they showed up too damn fast when we first tickled the router. I think Aineko's theories are flawed. The /{real}/ owners of this network we've plugged into probably use much higher-level protocols to communicate; sapient packets to build effective communications gateways. This Wunch, they probably lurk in wait for newbies to exploit. Pedophiles hiding outside the school gate. I don't want to give them that opportunity before we make contact with the real thing!"
+
+"You may have little choice," says Sadeq. "If they are without insight, as you suspect, they may become afraid if you edit their environment. They may lash out. I doubt they even understand how they created the contaminated metagrammar that they transmitted back to us. It will be to them just a tool that makes simpleminded aliens more gullible, easier to negotiate with. Who knows where they got it?"
+
+"A grammatical weapon." Boris spins himself round slowly. "Build propaganda into your translation software if you want to establish a favorable trading relationship. How cute. Haven't these guys ever heard of Newspeak?"
+
+"Probably not," Amber says slowly, pausing for a moment to spawn spectator threads to run down the book and all three movie versions of Nineteen Eighty-Four, followed by the sharecropped series of sequel novels. She shivers uncomfortably as she re-integrates the memories. "Ick. That's not a very nice vision. Reminds me of" - she snaps her fingers, trying to remember Dad's favorite - "Dilbert."
+
+"Friendly fascism," says Sadeq. "It matters not, whosoever is in charge. I could tell you tales from my parents, of growing up with a revolution. To never harbor self-doubt is poison for the soul, and these aliens want to inflict their certainties upon us."
+
+"I think we ought to see how Pierre is doing," Amber says aloud. "I certainly don't want them poisoning him." Grin: "That's /{my job}/."
+
+* * *
+
+Donna the Journalist is everywhere simultaneously. It's a handy talent: Makes for even-handed news coverage when you can interview both sides at the same time.
+
+Right now, one of her is in the bar with Alan Glashwiecz, who evidently hasn't realized that he can modulate his ethanol dehydrogenase levels voluntarily and who is consequently well on the way to getting steaming drunk. Donna is assisting the process: She finds it fascinating to watch this bitter young man who has lost his youth to a runaway self-enhancement process.
+
+"I'm a full partner," he says bitterly, "in Glashwiecz and Selves. I'm one of the Selves. We're all partners, but it's only Glashwiecz Prime who has any clout. The old bastard - if I'd known I'd grow up to become /{that}/, I'd have run away to join some hippie antiglobalist commune instead." He drains his glass, demonstrating his oropharyngeal integrity, snaps his fingers for a refill. "I just woke up one morning to find I'd been resurrected by my older self. He said he valued my youthful energy and optimistic outlook, then offered me a minority stake with stock options that would take five years to vest. The bastard."
+
+"Tell me about it," Donna coaxes sympathetically. "Here we are, stranded among idiopathic types, not among them a single multiplex -"
+
+"Damn straight." Another bottle of Bud appears in Glashwiecz'a hands. "One moment I'm standing in this apartment in Paris facing total humiliation by a cross-dressing commie asshole called Macx and his slimy French manager bitch, and the next I'm on the carpet in front of my alter ego's desk and he's offering me a job as junior partner. It's seventeen years later, all the weird nonsense that guy Macx was getting up to is standard business practice, and there's six of me in the outer office taking research notes because myself-as-senior-partner doesn't trust anyone else to work with him. It's humiliating, that's what it is."
+
+"Which is why you're here." Donna waits while he takes a deep swig from the bottle.
+
+"Yeah. Better than working for myself, I can tell you - it's not like being self-employed. You know how you sometimes get distant from your work? It's really bad when you see yourself from the outside with another half gigasecond of experience and the new-you isn't just distant from the client base, he's distant from the you-you. So I went back to college and crammed up on artificial intelligence law and ethics, the jurisprudence of uploading, and recursive tort. Then I volunteered to come out here. He's still handling /{her}/ account, and I figured -" Glashwiecz shrugged.
+
+"Did any of the delta-yous contest the arrangement?" asks Donna, spawning ghosts to focus in on him from all angles. For a moment, she wonders if this is wise. Glashwiecz is dangerous - the power he wields over Amber's mother, to twist her arm into extending his power of attorney, hints at dark secrets. Maybe there's more to her persistent lawsuits than a simple family feud?
+
+Glashwiecz's face is a study in perspectives. "Oh, one did," he says dismissively: One of Donna's viewports captures the contemptuous twitch in his cheek. "I left her in my apartment freezer. Figured it'd be a while before anybody noticed. It's not murder - I'm still here, right? - and I'm not about to claim tort against myself. I think. It'd be a left-recursive lawsuit, anyway, if I did it to myself."
+
+"The aliens," prompts Donna, "and the trial by combat. What's your take on that?"
+
+Glashwiecz sneers. "Little bitch-queen takes after her father, doesn't she? He's a bastard, too. The competitive selection filter she's imposed is evil - it'll cripple her society if she leaves it in place for too long, but in the short run, it's a major advantage. So she wants me to trade for my life, and I don't get to lay my formal claim against her unless I can outperform her pet day trader, that punk from Marseilles. Yes? What he doesn't know is, I've got an edge. Full disclosure." He lifts his bottle drunkenly. "Y'see, I know that /{cat}/. One that's gotta brown @-sign on its side, right? It used to belong to queenie-darling's old man, Manfred, the bastard. You'll see. Her Mom, Pamela, Manfred's ex, she's my client in this case. And she gave me the cat's ackle keys. Access control." (Hic.) "Get ahold of its brains and grab that damn translation layer it stole from the CETI@home mob. /{Then}/ I can talk to them straight."
+
+The drunken, future-shocked lawyer is on a roll. "I'll get their shit, and I'll disassemble it. Disassembly is the future of industry, y'know?"
+
+"Disassembly?" asks the reporter, watching him in disgusted fascination from behind her mask of objectivity.
+
+"Hell, yeah. There's a singularity going on, that implies disequilibrium. An' wherever there's a disequilibrium, someone is going to get /{rich}/ disassembling the leftovers. Listen, I once knew this econo-economist, that's what he was. Worked for the Eurofeds, rubber fetishist. He tole me about this fact'ry near Barcelona. It had a disassembly line running in it. Spensive servers in boxes'd roll in at one end. Be unpacked. Then workers'd take the cases off, strip the disk drives, memory, processors, bits'n'guts out. Bag and tag job. Throw the box, what's left, 'cause it wasn't worth dick. Thing is, the manufact'rer charged so much for parts, it was worth their while to buy whole machines'n'strip them. To bits. And sell the bits. Hell, they got an enterprise award for ingenuity! All 'cause they knew that /{disassembly}/ was the wave of the future."
+
+"What happened to the factory?" asks Donna, unable to tear her eyes away.
+
+Glashwiecz waves an empty bottle at the starbow that stretches across the ceiling: "Ah, who gives a fuck? They closedown round about" (hic) "ten years 'go. Moore's Law topped out, killed the market. But disassembly - production line cannibalism - it'sa way to go. Take old assets an' bring new life to them. A fully 'preciated fortune." He grins, eyes unfocussed with greed. "'S'what I'm gonna do to those space lobsters. Learn to talk their language an'll never know what hit 'em."
+
+* * *
+
+The tiny starship drifts in high orbit above a turbid brown soup of atmosphere. Deep in the gravity well of Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},, it's a speck of dust trapped between two light sources: the brilliant sapphire stare of Amber's propulsion lasers in Jovian orbit, and the emerald insanity of the router itself, a hypertoroid spun from strange matter.
+
+The bridge of the /{Field Circus}/ is in constant use at this time, a meeting ground for minds with access to the restricted areas. Pierre is spending more and more time here, finding it a convenient place to focus his trading campaign and arbitrage macros. At the same time that Donna is picking the multiplexed lawyer's strategy apart, Pierre is present in neomorphic form - a quicksilver outline of humanity, six-armed and two-headed, scanning with inhuman speed through tensor maps of the information traffic density surrounding the router's clump of naked singularities.
+
+There's a flicker in the emptiness at the rear of the bridge, then Su Ang has always been there. She watches Pierre in contemplative silence for a minute. "Do you have a moment?"
+
+Pierre superimposes himself: One shadowy ghost keeps focused on the front panel, but another instance turns round, crosses his arms, waits for her to speak.
+
+"I know you're busy -" she begins, then stops. "Is it /{that}/ important?" she asks.
+
+"It is." Pierre blurs, resynchronizing his instances. "The router - there are four wormholes leading off from it, did you know that? Each of them is radiating at about 1011 Kelvins, and every wavelength is carrying data connections, multiplexed, with a protocol stack that's at least eleven layers deep but maybe more - they show signs of self-similarity in the framing headers. You know how much data that is? It's about 1012 times as much as our high-bandwidth uplink from home. But compared to what's on the other side of the 'holes -" he shakes his head.
+
+"It's big?"
+
+"It's unimaginably big! These wormholes, they're a /{low-bandwidth}/ link compared to the minds they're hooking up to." He blurs in front of her, unable to stay still and unable to look away from the front panel. Excitement or agitation? Su Ang can't tell. With Pierre, sometimes the two states are indistinguishable. He gets emotional easily. "I think we have the outline of the answer to the Fermi paradox. Transcendents don't go traveling because they can't get enough bandwidth - trying to migrate through one of these wormholes would be like trying to download your mind into a fruit fly, if they are what I think they are - and the slower-than-light route is out, too, because they couldn't take enough computronium along. Unless -"
+
+He's off again. But before he can blur out, Su Ang steps across and lays hands on him. "Pierre. Calm down. Disengage. Empty yourself."
+
+"I can't!" He really /{is}/ agitated, she sees. "I've got to figure out the best trading strategy to get Amber off the hook with that lawsuit, then tell her to get us out of here; being this close to the router is seriously dangerous! The Wunch are the least of it."
+
+"Stop."
+
+He pauses his multiplicity of presences, converges on a single identity focused on the here and now. "Yes?"
+
+"That's better." She walks round him, slowly. "You've got to learn to deal with stress more appropriately."
+
+"Stress!" Pierre snorts. He shrugs, an impressive gesture with three sets of shoulder blades. "That's something I can turn off whenever I need to. Side effect of this existence; we're pigs in cyberspace, wallowing in fleshy simulations, but unable to experience the new environment in the raw. What did you want from me, Ang? Honestly? I'm a busy man, I've got a trading network to set up."
+
+"We've got a problem with the Wunch right now, even if you think something worse is out there," Ang says patiently. "Boris thinks they're parasites, negative-sum gamers who stalk newbies like us. Glashwiecz is apparently talking about cutting a deal with them. Amber's suggestion is that you ignore them completely, cut them out, and talk to anyone else who'll listen."
+
+"Anyone else who'll listen, right," Pierre says heavily. "Any other gems of wisdom to pass on from the throne?"
+
+Ang takes a deep breath. He's infuriating, she realizes. And worst of all, he doesn't realize. Infuriating but cute. "You're setting up a trading network, yes?" she asks.
+
+"Yes. A standard network of independent companies, instantiated as cellular automata within the Ring Imperium switched legal service environment." He relaxes slightly. "Each one has access to a compartmentalized chunk of intellectual property and can call on the corrected parser we got from that cat. They're set up to communicate with a blackboard system - a souk - and I'm bringing up a link to the router, a multicast link that'll broadcast the souk's existence to anyone who's listening. Trade ..." his eyebrows furrow. "There are at least two different currency standards in this network, used to buy quality-of-service precedence and bandwidth. They depreciate with distance, as if the whole concept of money was invented to promote the development of long-range network links. If I can get in first, when Glashwiecz tries to cut in on the dealing by offering IP at discounted rates -"
+
+"He's not going to, Pierre," she says as gently as possible. "Listen to what I said: Glashwiecz is going to focus on the Wunch. He's going to offer them a deal. Amber wants you to /{ignore}/ them. Got that?"
+
+"Got it." There's a hollow /{bong!}/ from one of the communication bells. "Hey, that's interesting."
+
+"What is?" She stretches, neck extending snakelike so that she can see the window on underlying reality that's flickered into existence in the air before him.
+
+"An ack from ..." he pauses, then plucks a neatly reified concept from the screen in front of him and presents it to her in a silvery caul of light. "... about two hundred light-years away! Someone wants to talk." He smiles. Then the front panel workstation bong's again. "Hey again. I wonder what that says."
+
+It's the work of a moment to pipe the second message through the translator. Oddly, it doesn't translate at first. Pierre has to correct for some weird destructive interference in the fake lobster network before it'll spill its guts. "That's interesting," he says.
+
+"I'll say." Ang lets her neck collapse back to normal. "I'd better go tell Amber."
+
+"You do that," Pierre says worriedly. He makes eye contact with her, but what she's hoping to see in his face just isn't there. He's wearing his emotions entirely on the surface. "I'm not surprised their translator didn't want to pass that message along."
+
+"It's a deliberately corrupted grammar," Ang murmurs, and bangs out in the direction of Amber's audience chamber; "and they're actually making threats." The Wunch, it seems, have acquired a /{very}/ bad reputation somewhere along the line - and Amber needs to know.
+
+* * *
+
+Glashwiecz leans toward Lobster Number One, stomach churning. It's only a real-time kilosecond since his bar-room interview, but in the intervening subjective time, he's abolished a hangover, honed his brief, and decided to act. In the Tuileries. "You've been lied to," he confides quietly, trusting the privacy ackles that he browbeat Amber's mother into giving him - access lists that give him a degree of control over the regime within this virtual universe that the cat dragged in.
+
+"Lied? Context rendered horizontal in past, or subjected to grammatical corruption? Linguistic evil?"
+
+"The latter." Glashwiecz enjoys this, even though it forces him to get rather closer to the two-meter-long virtual crustacean than he'd like. Showing a mark how they've been scammed is always good, especially when you hold the keys to the door of the cage they're locked inside. "They are not telling you the truth about this system."
+
+"We received assurances," Lobster Number One says clearly. Its mouthparts move ceaselessly - the noise comes from somewhere inside its head. "You do not share this phenotype. Why?"
+
+"That information will cost you," says Glashwiecz. "I am willing to provide it on credit."
+
+They haggle briefly. An exchange rate in questions is agreed, as is a trust metric to grade the answers by. "Disclose all," insists the Wunch negotiator.
+
+"There are multiple sentient species on the world we come from," says the lawyer. "The form you wear belongs to only one - one that wanted to get away from the form /{I}/ wear, the original conscious tool-creating species. Some of the species today are artificial, but all of us trade information for self-advantage."
+
+"This is good to know," the lobster assures him. "We like to buy species."
+
+"You buy species?" Glashwiecz cocks his head.
+
+"We have the unbearable yearning to be not-what-we-are," says the lobster. "Novelty, surprise! Flesh rots and wood decays. We seek the new being-ness of aliens. Give us your somatotype, give us all your thoughts, and we will dream you over."
+
+"I think something might be arranged," Glashwiecz concedes. "So you want to be - no, to lease the rights to temporarily be human? Why is that?"
+
+"Untranslatable concept #3 means untranslatable concept #4. God told us to."
+
+"Okay, I think I'll just have to take that on trust for now. What is your true form?" he asks.
+
+"Wait and I show you," says the lobster. It begins to shudder.
+
+"What are you doing -"
+
+"Wait." The lobster twitches, writhing slightly, like a portly businessman adjusting his underwear after a heavy business lunch. Disturbing shapes move, barely visible through the thick chitinous armor. "We want your help," the lobster explains, voice curiously muffled. "Want to establish direct trade links. Physical emissaries, yes?"
+
+"Yes, that's very good," Glashwiecz agrees excitedly: It's exactly what he's hoped for, the sought-after competitive advantage that will prove his fitness in Amber's designated trial by corporate combat. "You're going to deal with us directly without using that shell interface?"
+
+"Agreed." The lobster trails off into muffled silence; little crunching noises trickle out of its carapace. Then Glashwiecz hears footsteps behind him on the gravel path.
+
+"What are you doing here?" he demands, looking round. It's Pierre, back in standard human form - a sword hangs from his belt, and there's a big wheel-lock pistol in his hands. "Hey!"
+
+"Step away from the alien, lawyer," Pierre warns, raising the gun.
+
+Glashwiecz glances back at Lobster Number One. It's pulled its front inside the protective shell, and it's writhing now, rocking from side to side alarmingly. Something inside the shell is turning black, acquiring depth and texture. "I stand on counsel's privilege," Glashwiecz insists. "Speaking as this alien's attorney, I must protest in the strongest terms -"
+
+Without warning, the lobster lurches forward and rises up on its rear legs. It reaches out with huge claws, chellipeds coated with spiny hairs, and grabs Glashwiecz by his arms. "Hey!"
+
+Glashwiecz tries to turn away, but the lobster is already looming over him, maxillipeds and maxillae reaching out from its head. There's a sickening crunch as one of his elbow joints crumbles, humerus shattered by the closing jaws of a chelliped. He draws breath to scream, then the four small maxillae grip his head and draw it down toward the churning mandibles.
+
+Pierre scurries sideways, trying to find a line of fire on the lobster that doesn't pass through the lawyer's body. The lobster isn't cooperating. It turns on the spot, clutching Glashwiecz's convulsing body to itself. There's a stench of shit, and blood is squirting from its mouthparts. Something is very wrong with the biophysics model here, the realism turned up way higher than normal.
+
+"Merde," whispers Pierre. He fumbles with the bulky trigger, and there's a faint whirring sound but no explosion.
+
+More wet crunching sounds follow as the lobster demolishes the lawyer's face and swallows convulsively, sucking his head and shoulders all the way into its gastric mill.
+
+Pierre glances at the heavy handgun. "/{Shit}/!" he screams. He glances back at the lobster, then turns and runs for the nearest wall. There are other lobsters loose in the formal garden. "/{Amber, emergency!}/" he sends over their private channel. "/{Hostiles in the Louvre!}/"
+
+The lobster that's taken Glashwiecz hunkers down over the body and quivers. Pierre desperately winds the spring on his gun, too rattled to check that it's loaded. He glances back at the alien intruder. /{They've sprung the biophysics model}/, he sends. /{I could die in here}/, he realizes, momentarily shocked. /{This instance of me could die forever}/.
+
+The lobster shell sitting in the pool of blood and human wreckage splits in two. A humanoid form begins to uncurl from within it, pale-skinned and glistening wet: vacant blue eyes flicker from side to side as it stretches and stands upright, wobbling uncertainty on its two unstable legs. Its mouth opens and a strange gobbling hiss comes forth.
+
+Pierre recognizes her. "What are you doing here?" he yells.
+
+The nude woman turns toward him. She's the spitting image of Amber's mother, except for the chellipeds she has in place of hands. She hisses "/{Equity!}/" and takes a wobbly step toward him, pincers clacking.
+
+Pierre winds the firing handle again. There's a crash of gunpowder and smoke, a blow that nearly sprains his elbow, and the nude woman's chest erupts in a spray of blood. She snarls at him wordlessly and staggers - then ragged flaps of bloody meat close together, knitting shut with improbable speed. She resumes her advance.
+
+"I told Amber the Matrix would be more defensible," Pierre snarls, dropping the firearm and drawing his sword as the alien turns in his direction and raises arms that end in pincers. "We need guns, damit! Lots of guns!"
+
+"Waaant equity," hisses the alien intruder.
+
+"You /{can't}/ be Pamela Macx," says Pierre, his back to the wall, keeping the sword point before the lobster-woman-thing. "She's in a nunnery in Armenia or something. You pulled that out of Glashwiecz's memories - he worked for her, didn't he?"
+
+Claws go snicker-snack before his face. "Investment partnership!" screeches the harridan. "Seat on the board! Eat brains for breakfast!" It lurches sideways, trying to get past his guard.
+
+"I don't fucking /{believe}/ this," Pierre snarls. The Wunch-creature jumps at just the wrong moment and slides onto the point of his blade, claws clacking hungrily. Pierre slides away, nearly leaving his skin on the rough bricks of the wall - and what's good for one is good for all, as the hacked model in force in this reality compels the attacker to groan and collapse.
+
+Pierre pulls the sword out then, nervously glancing over his shoulder, whacks at her neck. The impact jars his arm, but he keeps hacking until there's blood spraying everywhere, blood on his shirt, blood on his sword, and a round thing sitting on a stump of savaged neck nearby, jaw working soundlessly in undeath.
+
+He looks at it for a moment, then his stomach rebels and tries to empty itself into the mess. "/{Where the hell is everybody}/?" he broadcasts on the private channel. "/{Hostiles in the Louvre!}/"
+
+He straightens up, gasping for breath. He feels /{alive}/, frightened and appalled and exhilarated simultaneously. The crackle of bursting shells on all sides drowns out the birdsong as the Wunch's emissaries adopt a variety of new and supposedly more lethal forms. "/{They don't seem to be very clear on how to take over a simulation space}/," he adds. "/{Maybe we already are}/ untranslatable concept number #1 as far as they're concerned."
+
+"/{Don't worry, I've cut off the incoming connection}/," sends Su Ang. "/{This is just a bridgehead force; the invasion packets are}/ being filtered out."
+
+Blank-eyed men and women in dusty black uniforms are hatching from the lobster shells, stumbling and running around the grounds of the royal palace like confused Huguenot invaders.
+
+Boris winks into reality behind Pierre. "Which way?" he demands, pulling out an anachronistic but lethal katana.
+
+"Over here. Let's work this together." Pierre jacks his emotional damper up to a dangerously high setting, suppressing natural aversion reflexes and temporarily turning himself into a sociopathic killer. He stalks toward an infant lobster-thing with big black eyes and a covering of white hair that mewls at him from a rose bed, and Boris looks away while he kills it. Then one of the larger ones makes the mistake of lunging at Boris, and he chops at it reflexively.
+
+Some of the Wunch try to fight back when Pierre and Boris try to kill them, but they're handicapped by their anatomy, a curious mixture of crustacean and human, claw and mandible against sword and dagger. When they bleed the ground soaks with the cuprous hue of lobster juice.
+
+"Let's fork," suggests Boris. "Get this over with." Pierre nods, dully - everything around him is wrapped in a layer of don't-care, except for a glowing dot of artificial hatred - and they fork, multiplying their state vectors to take full advantage of the virtualization facilities of this universe. There's no need for reinforcements; the Wunch focused on attacking the biophysics model of the universe, making it mimic a physical reality as closely as possible, and paid no attention to learning the more intricate tactics that war in a virtual space permits.
+
+Presently Pierre finds himself in the audience chamber, face and hands and clothing caked in hideous gore, leaning on the back of Amber's throne. There's only one of him now. One of Boris - the only one? - is standing near the doorway. He can barely remember what has happened, the horrors of parallel instances of mass murder blocked from his long-term memory by a high-pass trauma filter. "It looks clear," he calls aloud. "What shall we do now?"
+
+"Wait for Catherine de Médicis to show up," says the cat, its grin materializing before him like a numinous threat. "Amber /{always}/ finds a way to blame her mother. Or didn't you already know that?"
+
+Pierre glances at the bloody mess on the footpath outside where the first lobster-woman attacked Glashwiecz. "I already did for her, I think." He remembers the action in the third person, all subjectivity edited out. "The family resemblance was striking," the thread that still remembers her in working memory murmurs: "I just hope it's only skin-deep." Then he forgets the act of apparent murder forever. "Tell the Queen I'm ready to talk."
+
+* * *
+
+_1 Welcome to the downslope on the far side of the curve of accelerating progress.
+
+_1 Back in the solar system, Earth orbits through a dusty tunnel in space. Sunlight still reaches the birth world, but much of the rest of the star's output has been trapped by the growing concentric shells of computronium built from the wreckage of the innermost planets.
+
+_1 Two billion or so mostly unmodified humans scramble in the wreckage of the phase transition, not understanding why the vasty superculture they so resented has fallen quiet. Little information leaks through their fundamentalist firewalls, but what there is shows a disquieting picture of a society where there are no /{bodies}/ anymore. Utility foglets blown on the wind form aerogel towers larger than cyclones, removing the last traces of physical human civilization from most of Europe and the North American coastlines. Enclaves huddle behind their walls and wonder at the monsters and portents roaming the desert of postindustrial civilization, mistaking acceleration for collapse.
+
+_1 The hazy shells of computronium that ring the sun - concentric clouds of nanocomputers the size of rice grains, powered by sunlight, orbiting in shells like the packed layers of a Matrioshka doll - are still immature, holding barely a thousandth of the physical planetary mass of the system, but they already support a classical computational density of 1042 MIPS; enough to support a billion civilizations as complex as the one that existed immediately before the great disassembly. The conversion hasn't yet reached the gas giants, and some scant outer-system enclaves remain independent - Amber's Ring Imperium still exists as a separate entity, and will do so for some years to come - but the inner solar system planets, with the exception of Earth, have been colonized more thoroughly than any dusty NASA proposal from the dawn of the space age could have envisaged.
+
+_1 From outside the Accelerated civilization, it isn't really possible to know what's going on inside. The problem is bandwidth: While it's possible to send data in and get data out, the sheer amount of computation going on in the virtual spaces of the Acceleration dwarfs any external observer. Inside that swarm, minds a trillion or more times as complex as humanity think thoughts as far beyond human imagination as a microprocessor is beyond a nematode worm. A million random human civilizations flourish in worldscapes tucked in the corner of this world-mind. Death is abolished, life is triumphant. A thousand ideologies flower, human nature adapted where necessary to make this possible. Ecologies of thought are forming in a Cambrian explosion of ideas: For the solar system is finally rising to consciousness, and mind is no longer restricted to the mere kilotons of gray fatty meat harbored in fragile human skulls.
+
+_1 Somewhere in the Acceleration, colorless green ideas adrift in furious sleep remember a tiny starship launched years ago, and pay attention. Soon, they realize, the starship will be in position to act as their proxy in an ages-long conversation. Negotiations for access to Amber's extrasolar asset commence; the Ring Imperium prospers, at least for a while.
+
+_1 But first, the operating software on the human side of the network link will require an upgrade.
+
+* * *
+
+The audience chamber in the /{Field Circus}/ is crammed. Everybody aboard the ship - except the still-frozen lawyer and the alien barbarian intruders - is present. They've just finished reviewing the recordings of what happened in the Tuileries, of Glashwiecz's fatal last conversation with the Wunch, the resulting fight for survival. And now the time has come for decisions.
+
+"I'm not saying you have to follow me," says Amber, addressing her court; "just, it's what we came here for. We've established that there's enough bandwidth to transmit people and their necessary support VMs; we've got some basic expectancy of goodwill at the other end, or at least an agalmic willingness to gift us with advice about the untrustworthiness of the Wunch. /{I}/ propose to copy myself through and see what's at the other side of the wormhole. What's more, I'm going to suspend myself on this side and hand over to whichever instance of me comes back, unless there's a long hiatus. How long, I haven't decided yet. Are you guys happy to join me?"
+
+Pierre stands behind her throne, hands on the back. Looking down over her head, at the cat in her lap, he's sure he sees it narrow its eyes at him. /{Funny}/, he thinks, /{we're talking about jumping down a rabbit hole and trusting whoever lives at the other end with our personalities. After seeing the Wunch. Does this make sense}/?
+
+"Forgive, please, but am not stupid," says Boris. "This is Fermi paradox territory, no? Instantaneous network exists, is traversable, with bandwidth adequate for human-equivalent minds. Where are alien visitors, in history? Must be overriding reason for absence. Think will wait here and see what comes back. /{Then}/ make up mind to drink the poison kool-aid."
+
+"I've got half a mind to transmit myself through without a back-up," says someone else - "but that's okay; half a mind is all we've got the bandwidth for." Halfhearted laughter shores up his wisecrack, supports a flagging determination to press through.
+
+"I'm with Boris," says Su Ang. She glances at Pierre, catches his eye: Suddenly a number of things become clear to him. He shakes his head minutely. /{You never had a chance - I belong to Amber}/, he thinks, but deletes the thought before he can send it to her. Maybe in another instantiation his issues with the Queen's /{droit de seigneur}/ would have bulked up larger, splintered his determination; maybe in another world it has already happened? "I think this is very rash," she says in a hurry. "We don't know enough about post-singularity civilizations."
+
+"It's not a singularity," Amber says waspishly. "It's just a brief burst of acceleration. Like cosmological inflation."
+
+"Smooths out inhomogeneities in the initial structure of consciousness," purrs the cat. "Don't I get a vote?"
+
+"You do." Amber sighs. She glances round. "Pierre?"
+
+Heart in his mouth: "I'm with you."
+
+She smiles, brilliantly. "Well then. Will the nay sayers please leave the universe?"
+
+Suddenly, the audience chamber is half-empty.
+
+"I'm setting a watchdog timer for a billion seconds into the future, to restart us from this point if the router doesn't send anyone back in the intervening time," she announces gravely, taking in the serious-faced avatars of those who remain. Surprised: "Sadeq! I didn't think this was your type of -"
+
+He doesn't smile: "Would I be true to my faith if I wasn't prepared to bring the words of Mohammed, peace be unto him, to those who may never have heard his name?"
+
+Amber nods. "I guess."
+
+"Do it," Pierre says urgently. "You can't keep putting it off forever."
+
+Aineko raises her head: "Spoilsport!"
+
+"Okay." Amber nods. "Let's /{do}/ -"
+
+She punches an imaginary switch, and time stops.
+
+* * *
+
+At the far end of a wormhole, two hundred light-years distant in real space, coherent photons begin to dance a story of human identity before the sensoria of those who watch. And all is at peace in orbit around Hyundai ^[+4904}^/,{-56},, for a while ...
+
+* * *
+
+Chapter 6: Nightfall
+
+A synthetic gemstone the size of a Coke can falls through silent darkness. The night is quiet as the grave, colder than midwinter on Pluto. Gossamer sails as fine as soap bubbles droop, the gust of sapphire laser light that inflated them long since darkened. Ancient starlight picks out the outline of a huge planetlike body beneath the jewel-and-cobweb corpse of the starwisp.
+
+Eight Earth years have passed since the good ship /{Field Circus}/ slipped into close orbit around the frigid brown dwarf Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},. Five years have gone by since the launch lasers of the Ring Imperium shut down without warning, stranding the light-sail-powered craft three light-years from home. There has been no response from the router, the strange alien artifact in orbit around the brown dwarf, since the crew of the starwisp uploaded themselves through its strange quantum entanglement interface for transmission to whatever alien network it connects to. In fact, nothing happens; nothing save the slow trickle of seconds, as a watchdog timer counts down the moments remaining until it is due to resurrect stored snapshots of the crew, on the assumption that their uploaded copies are beyond help.
+
+Meanwhile, outside the light cone -
+
+* * *
+
+Amber jolts into wakefulness, as if from a nightmare. She sits bolt upright, a thin sheet falling from her chest; air circulating around her back chills her rapidly, cold sweat evaporating. She mutters aloud, unable to subvocalize, "Where am I - oh. A bedroom. How did I get here?" /{Mumble}/. "Oh, I see." Her eyes widen in horror. "/{It's not a dream}/ ..."
+
+"Greetings, human Amber," says a ghost-voice that seems to come from nowhere: "I see you are awake. Would you like anything?"
+
+Amber rubs her eyes tiredly. Leaning against the bedstead, she glances around cautiously. She takes in a bedside mirror, her reflection in it: a young woman, gaunt in the manner of those whose genome bears the p53 calorie-restriction hack, she has disheveled blonde hair and dark eyes. She could pass for a dancer or a soldier; not, perhaps, a queen. "What's going on? Where am I? Who are you, and /{what am I doing in your head?}/"
+
+Her eyes narrow. Analytical intellect comes to the fore as she takes stock of her surroundings. "The router," she mutters. Structures of strange matter orbit a brown dwarf scant light-years from Earth. "How long ago did we come through?" Glancing round, she sees a room walled in slabs of close-fitting stone. A window bay is recessed into them, after the style of the Crusader castles many centuries in the past, but there's no glass in it - just a blank white screen. The only furniture in the room, besides a Persian carpet on the cold flagstones, is the bed she sits upon. She's reminded of a scene from an old movie, Kubrick's enigma; this whole set-up has got to be deliberate, and it isn't funny.
+
+"I'm waiting," she announces, and leans back against the headboard.
+
+"According to our records this reaction indicates that you are now fully self-aware," says the ghost. "This is good. You have not been conscious for a very long time. Explanations will be complex and discursive. Can I offer you refreshments? What would you like?"
+
+"Coffee, if you have it. Bread and hummus. Something to wear." Amber crosses her arms, abruptly self-conscious. "I'd prefer to have management ackles to this universe, though. As realities go, it's a bit lacking in creature comforts." Which isn't entirely true - it seems to have a comprehensive, human-friendly biophysics model, it's not just a jumped-up first-person shooter. Her eyes focus on her left forearm, where tanned skin and a puckered dime of scar tissue record a youthful accident with a pressure seal in Jovian orbit. Amber freezes for a moment. Her lips move in silence, but she's locked into place in this universe, unable to split or conjoin nested realities just by calling subroutines that have been spliced into the corners of her mind since she was a teenager. Finally, she asks, "How long have I been dead?"
+
+"Longer than you were alive, by orders of magnitude," says the ghost. A tray laden with pita breads, hummus, and olives congeals from the air above her bed, and a wardrobe appears at one side of the room. "I can begin the explanation now or wait for you to finish eating. Which would you prefer?"
+
+Amber glances about again, then fixes on the white screen in the window bay. "Give it to me right now. I can take it," she says, quietly bitter. "I like to understand my mistakes as soon as possible."
+
+"We-us can tell that you are a human of determination," says the ghost, a hint of pride entering its voice. "That is a good thing, Amber. You will need all of your resolve if you are going to survive here ..."
+
+* * *
+
+It is the time of repentance in a temple beside a tower that looms above a dry plain, and the thoughts of the priest who lives in the tower are tinged with regret. It is Ashura, the tenth day of Muhurram, according to a real-time clock still tuned to the pace of a different era: the one thousand, three hundred and fortieth anniversary of the martyrdom of the Third Imam, the Sayyid ash-Shuhada.
+
+The priest of the tower has spent an indefinite time in prayer, locked in an eternal moment of meditation and recitation. Now, as the vast red sun drifts close to the horizon of the infinite desert, his thoughts drift toward the present. Ashura is a very special day, a day of atonement for collective guilt, evil committed through inactivity; but it is in Sadeq's nature to look outwards toward the future. This is, he knows, a failing - but also characteristic of his generation. That's the generation of the Shi'ite clergy that reacted to the excesses of the previous century, the generation that withdrew the /{ulama}/ from temporal power, retreated from the velyat i-faqih of Khomenei and his successors, left government to the people, and began to engage fully with the paradoxes of modernity. Sadeq's focus, his driving obsession in theology, is a program of reappraisal of eschatology and cosmology. Here in a tower of white sun-baked clay, on an endless plain that exists only in the imaginary spaces of a starship the size of a soft drink can, the priest spends his processor cycles in contemplation of one of the most vicious problems ever to confront a /{mujtahid}/ - the Fermi paradox.
+
+(Enrico Fermi was eating his lunch one day, and his colleagues were discussing the possibility that sophisticated civilizations might populate other worlds. "Yes," he said, "but if this is so, why haven't they already come visiting?")
+
+Sadeq finishes his evening devotions in near silence, then stands, stretches as is his wont, and leaves the small and lonely courtyard at the base of the tower. The gate - a wrought-iron gate, warmed by sunlight - squeals slightly as he opens it. Glancing at the upper hinge, he frowns, willing it clean and whole. The underlying physics model acknowledges his access controls: a thin rim of red around the pin turns silvery-fresh, and the squeaking ceases. Closing the gate behind him, Sadeq enters the tower.
+
+He climbs with a heavy, even tread a spiral staircase snaking ever upward above him. Narrow slit-windows line the outer wall of the staircase. Through each of them he sees a different world. Out there, nightfall in the month of Ramadan. And through the next, green misty skies and a horizon too close by far. Sadeq carefully avoids thinking about the implications of this manifold space. Coming from prayer, from a sense of the sacred, he doesn't want to lose his proximity to his faith. He's far enough from home as it is, and there is much to consider. He is surrounded by strange and curious ideas, all but lost in a corrosive desert of faith.
+
+At the top of the staircase, Sadeq comes to a door of aged wood bound in iron. It doesn't belong here: It's a cultural and architectural anomaly. The handle is a loop of black metal. Sadeq regards it as if it's the head of an asp, poised to sting. Nevertheless, he reaches out and turns the handle, steps across the threshold into a palace out of fantasy.
+
+/{None of this is real}/, he reminds himself. /{It's no more real than an illusion conjured by one of the jinni of the thousand nights and one night}/. Nevertheless, he can't save himself from smiling at the scene - a sardonic smile of self-deprecating humor, tempered by frustration.
+
+Sadeq's captors have stolen his soul and locked it - him - in a very strange prison, a temple with a tower that rises all the way to Paradise. It's the whole classical litany of medievalist desires, distilled from fifteen hundred years of literature. Colonnaded courtyards, cool pools lined with rich mosaics, rooms filled with every imaginable dumb matter luxury, endless banquets awaiting his appetite - and dozens of beautiful un-women, eager to fulfill his every fantasy. Sadeq, being human, has fantasies by the dozen, but he doesn't dare permit himself to succumb to temptation. /{I'm not dead}/, he reasons. /{Therefore, how can I be in Paradise? Therefore, this must be a false paradise, a temptation sent to lead me astray. Probably. Unless I am dead, because Allah, peace be unto him, considers a human soul separated from its body to be dead. But if that's so, isn't uploading a sin? In which case, this can't be}/ Paradise because I am a sinner. /{Besides which}/, this whole setup is /{so}/ puerile!
+
+Sadeq has always been inclined to philosophical inquiry, and his vision of the afterlife is more cerebral than most, involving ideas as questionable within the framework of Islam as those of Teilhard de Chardin were to the twentieth-century Catholic church. If there's one key indicator of a false paradise in his eschatology, it's two-and-seventy brainlessly beautiful houris waiting to do his bidding. So it follows that he can't really be dead ...
+
+The whole question of reality is so vexing that Sadeq does what he does every night. He strides heedlessly across priceless works of art, barging hastily through courtyards and passageways, ignoring niches in which nearly naked supermodels lie with their legs apart, climbing stairs - until he comes to a small unfurnished room with a single high window in one wall. There he sits on the floor, legs crossed, meditating; not in prayer, but in a more tightly focused ratiocination. Every false night (for there is no way to know how fast time is passing, outside this cyberspace pocket), Sadeq sits and /{thinks}/, grappling with Descartes's demon in the solitude of his own mind. And the question he asks himself every night is the same: /{Can I tell if this is the true hell? And if it is not, how can I escape?}/
+
+* * *
+
+The ghost tells Amber that she has been dead for just under a third of a million years. She has been reinstantiated from storage - and has died again - many times in the intervening period, but she has no memory of this; she is a fork from the main bough, and the other branches expired in lonely isolation.
+
+The business of resurrection does not, in and of itself, distress Amber unduly. Born in the post-Moravec era, she merely finds some aspects of the ghost's description dissatisfyingly incomplete. It's like saying she was drugged and brought hither without stating whether by plane, train, or automobile.
+
+She doesn't have a problem with the ghost's assertion that she is nowhere near Earth - indeed, that she is approximately eighty thousand light-years away. When she and the others took the risk of uploading themselves through the router they found in orbit around Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56}, they'd understood that they could end up anywhere or nowhere. But the idea that she's still within the light cone of her departure strikes her as dubious. The original SETI broadcast strongly implied that the router is part of a network of self-replicating instantaneous communicators, spawning and spreading between the cold brown dwarf stars that litter the galaxy. She'd somehow expected to be much farther from home by now.
+
+Somewhat more disturbing is the ghost's assertion that the human genotype has rendered itself extinct at least twice, that its home planet is unknown, and that Amber is nearly the only human left in the public archives. At this point, she interrupts. "I hardly see what this has to do with me!" Then she blows across her coffee glass, trying to cool the contents. "I'm dead," she explains, with an undertone of knowing sarcasm in her voice. "Remember? I just got here. A thousand seconds ago, subjective time, I was in the control node of a starship, discussing what to do with the router we were in orbit around. We agreed to send ourselves through it, as a trade mission. Then I woke up in bed here in the umpty-zillionth century, wherever and whatever /{here}/ is. Without access to any reality ackles or augmentation, I can't even tell whether this is real or an embedded simulation. You're going to have to explain /{why}/ you need an old version of me before I can make sense of my situation - and I can tell you, I'm not going to help you until I know who you are. And speaking of that, what about the others? Where are they? I wasn't the only one, you know?"
+
+The ghost freezes in place for a moment, and Amber feels a watery rush of terror: /{Have I gone too far}/? she wonders.
+
+"There has been an unfortunate accident," the ghost announces portentously. It morphs from a translucent copy of Amber's own body into the outline of a human skeleton, elaborate bony extensions simulating an osteosarcoma of more-than-lethal proportions. "Consensus-we believe that you are best positioned to remediate the situation. This applies within the demilitarized zone."
+
+"Demilitarized?" Amber shakes her head, pauses to sip her coffee. "What do you mean? What /{is}/ this place?"
+
+The ghost flickers again, adopting an abstract rotating hypercube as its avatar. "This space we occupy is a manifold adjacent to the demilitarized zone. The demilitarized zone is a space outside our core reality, itself exposed to entities that cross freely through our firewall, journeying to and from the network outside. We-us use the DMZ to establish the informational value of migrant entities, sapient currency units and the like. We-us banked you upon arrival against future options trades in human species futures."
+
+"Currency!" Amber doesn't know whether to be amused or horrified - both reactions seem appropriate. "Is that how you treat all your visitors?"
+
+The ghost ignores her question. "There is a runaway semiotic excursion under way in the zone. We-us believe only you can fix it. If you agree to do, so we will exchange value, pay, reward cooperation, expedite remuneration, manumit, repatriate."
+
+Amber drains her coffee cup. "Have you ever entered into economic interactions with me, or humans like me, before?" she asks. "If not, why should I trust you? If so, why have you revived me? Are there any more experienced instances of myself running around here?" She raises a skeptical eyebrow at the ghost. "This looks like the start of an abusive relationship."
+
+The ghost continues to sidestep her attempts to work out where she stands. It flickers into transparency, grows into a hazy window on a landscape of impossible shapes. Clouds sprouting trees drift above a landscape of green, egg-curved hills and cheesecake castles. "Nature of excursion: alien intelligence is loose in the DMZ," it asserts. "Alien is applying invalid semiotics to complex structures designed to sustain trade. You know this alien, Amber. We require solution. Slay the monster, we will give you line of credit. Your own reality to control, insight into trade arrangements, augmented senses, ability to travel. Can even upgrade you to you-we consensus, if desired."
+
+"This monster." Amber leans forward, staring into the window eagerly. She's half-minded to ignore what she feels is a spurious offer; it doesn't sound too appetizing. /{Upgrade me to a ghost fragment of an alien group mind?}/ she wonders dismissively. "What is this alien?" She feels blind and unsure, stripped of her ability to spawn threads of herself to pursue complex inferences. "Is it part of the Wunch?"
+
+"Datum unknown. It-them came with you," says the ghost. "Accidentally reactivated some seconds since now. It runs amok in the demilitarized zone. Help us, Amber. Save our hub, or we will be cut off from the network. If that happens, you will die with we-us. Save us ..."
+
+* * *
+
+_1 A single memory belonging to someone else unwinds, faster than a guided missile and far more deadly.
+
+_1 Amber, aged eleven, is a gawky, long-limbed child loose on the streets of Hong Kong, a yokel tourist viewing the hot core of the Middle Kingdom. This is her first and final vacation before the Franklin Trust straps her inside the payload pod of a Shenzhou spaceplane and blasts her into orbit from Xinkiang. She's free for the time being, albeit mortgaged to the tune of several million euros; she's a little taikonaut to be, ready to work for the long years in Jupiter orbit it will take her to pay off the self-propelled options web that owns her. It's not exactly slavery: Thanks to Dad's corporate shell game she doesn't have to worry about Mom chasing her, trying to return her to the posthuman prison of growing up just like an old-fashioned little girl. And now she's got a bit of pocket money, and a room in the Hilton, and her own personal Franklin remote to keep her company, she's decided she's gonna do that eighteenth-century-enlightenment tourist shit and do it /{right}/.
+
+_1 Because this is her last day at liberty in the randomly evolved biosphere.
+
+_1 China is where things are at in this decade, hot and dense and full of draconian punishments for the obsolescent. Nationalist fervor to catch up with the west has been replaced by consumerist fervor to own the latest fad gadgets; the most picturesque tourist souvenirs from the quaintly old-fashioned streets of America; the fastest, hottest, smartest, upgrades for body and soul. Hong Kong is hotter and faster than just about anywhere else in China, or in the whole damn world for that matter. This is a place where tourists from Tokyo gawp, cowed and future-shocked by the glamour of high-technology living.
+
+_1 Walking along Jardine's Bazaar - /{More like Jardine's bizarre}/, she thinks - exposes Amber to a blast of humid noise. Geodesic domes sprout like skeletal mushrooms from the glass-and-chrome roofs of the expensive shopping malls and luxury hotels, threatening to float away on the hot sea breeze. There are no airliners roaring in and out of Kai Tak anymore, no burnished aluminum storm clouds to rain round-eyed passengers on the shopping malls and fish markets of Kowloon and the New Territories. In these tense later days of the War Against Unreason, impossible new shapes move in the sky; Amber gapes upward as a Shenyang F-30 climbs at a near-vertical angle, a mess of incomprehensibly curved flight surfaces vanishing to a perspective point that defies radar as well as eyeballs. The Chinese - fighter? missile platform? supercomputer? - is heading out over the South China Sea to join the endless patrol that reassures the capitalist world that it is being guarded from the Hosts of Denial, the Trouble out of Wa'hab.
+
+_1 For the moment, she's merely a precocious human child. Amber's subconscious is off-lined by the presence of forceful infowar daemons, the Chinese government censorbots suppressing her cognition of their deadliest weapons. And in the seconds while her mind is as empty as a sucked egg, a thin-faced man with blue hair shoves her in the small of her back and snatches at her shoulder bag.
+
+_1 "Hey!" she yells, stumbling. Her mind's a blur, optics refusing to respond and grab a biometric model of her assailant. It's the frozen moment, the dead zone when on-line coverage fails, and the thief is running away before she can catch her balance or try to give chase. Plus, with her extensions off-line she doesn't know how to yell "stop, thief!" in Cantonese.
+
+_1 Seconds later, the fighter is out of visual range and the state censorship field lets up. "Get him, you bastards!" she screams, but the curious shoppers simply stare at the rude foreign child: An elderly woman brandishes a disposable phonecam at her and screeches something back. Amber picks up her feet and runs. Already she can feel the subsonics from her luggage growling at her guts - it's going to make a scene if she doesn't catch up in time. Shoppers scatter, a woman with a baby carriage almost running her down in her panic to get away from it.
+
+_1 By the time Amber reaches her terrified shoulder bag, the thief has disappeared: She has to spend almost a minute petting the scared luggage before it stops screeching and retracts its spines enough for her to pick it up. And by that time there's a robocop in attendance. "Identify yourself," it rasps in synthetic English.
+
+_1 Amber stares at her bag in horror: There's a huge gash in the side, and it's far too light. /{It's gone}/, she thinks, despairingly. /{He stole it}/. "Help," she says faintly, holding up her bag for the distant policeman looking through the robot's eyes. "Been stolen."
+
+_1 "What item missing?" asks the robot.
+
+_1 "My Hello Kitty," she says, batting her eyelashes, mendacity full-on at maximum utilization, prodding her conscience into submission, warning of dire consequences should the police discover the true nature of her pet cat. "My kitten's been stolen! Can you help me?"
+
+_1 "Certainly," says the cop, resting a reassuring hand on her shoulder - a hand that turns into a steel armband, as it pushes her into a van and notifies her in formally stilted language that she is under arrest on suspicion of shoplifting and will be required to produce certificates of authenticity and a fully compliant ownership audit for all items in her possession if she wants to prove her innocence.
+
+_1 By the time Amber's meatbrain realizes that she is being politely arrested, some of her external threads have already started yelling for help and her m-commerce trackers have identified the station she's being taken to by way of click-thru trails and an obliging software license manager. They spawn agents to go notify the Franklin trustees, Amnesty International, the Space and Freedom Party, and her father's lawyers. As she's being booked into a cerise-and-turquoise juvenile offenders holding room by a middle-aged policewoman, the phones on the front desk are already ringing with inquiries from attorneys, fast-food vendors, and a particularly on-the-ball celebrity magazine that's been tracking her father's connections. "Can you help me get my cat back?" she asks the policewoman earnestly.
+
+_1 "Name," the officer reads, eyes flickering from the simultaneous translation. "To please wax your identity stiffly."
+
+_1 "My cat has been stolen," Amber insists.
+
+_1 "Your cat?" The cop looks perplexed, then exasperated. Dealing with foreign teenagers who answer questions with gibberish isn't in her repertoire. "We are asking your name?"
+
+_1 "No," says Amber. "It's my cat. It has been stolen. My /{cat}/ has been /{stolen}/."
+
+_1 "Aha! Your papers, please?"
+
+_1 "Papers?" Amber is growing increasingly worried. She can't feel the outside world; there's a Faraday cage wrapped around the holding cell, and it's claustrophobically quiet inside. "I want my cat! Now!"
+
+_1 The cop snaps her fingers, then reaches into her own pocket and produces an ID card, which she points to insistently. "Papers," she repeats. "Or else."
+
+_1 "I don't know what you're talking about!" Amber wails.
+
+_1 The cop stares at her oddly. "Wait." She rises and leaves, and a minute later, returns with a thin-faced man in a business suit and wire-rimmed glasses that glow faintly.
+
+_1 "You are making a scene," he says, rudely and abruptly. "What is your name? Tell me truthfully, or you'll spend the night here."
+
+_1 Amber bursts into tears. "My /{cat's}/ been stolen," she chokes out.
+
+_1 The detective and the cop obviously don't know how to deal with this scene; it's freaking them out, with its overtones of emotional messiness and sinister diplomatic entanglement. "You wait here," they say, and back out of the cell, leaving her alone with a plastic animatronic koala and a cheap Lebanese coffee machine.
+
+_1 The implications of her loss - of Aineko's abduction - are sinking in, finally, and Amber is weeping loudly and hopelessly. It's hard to deal with bereavement and betrayal at any age, and the cat has been her wisecracking companion and consolation for a year, the rock of certainty that gave her the strength to break free from her crazy mother. To lose her cat to a body shop in Hong Kong, where she will probably be cut up for spare circuitry or turned into soup is too horrible to contemplate. Filled with despair and hopeless anguish, Amber howls at the interrogation room walls while outside, trapped threads of her consciousness search for backups to synchronize with.
+
+_1 But after an hour, just as she's quieting down into a slough of raw despair, there's a knock - a knock! - at the door. An inquisitive head pops in. "Please to come with us?" It's the female cop with the bad translationware. She takes in Amber's sobbing and tuts under her breath, but as Amber stands up and shambles toward her, she pulls back.
+
+_1 At the front desk of a cubicle farm full of police bureaucrats in various states of telepresence, the detective is waiting with a damp cardboard box wrapped in twine. "Please identify," he asks, snipping the string.
+
+_1 Amber shakes her head, dizzy with the flow of threads homing in to synchronize their memories with her. "Is it -" she begins to ask as the lid comes apart, wet pulp disintegrating. A triangular head pops up, curiously, sniffing the air. Bubbles blow from brown-furred nostrils. "What took you so long?" asks the cat, as she reaches into the box and picks her up, fur wet and matted with seawater.
+
+* * *
+
+"If you want me to go fix your alien, for starters I want you to give me reality alteration privileges," says Amber. "Then I want you to find the latest instances of everyone who came here with me - round up the usual suspects - and give /{them}/ root privileges, too. Then we'll want access to the other embedded universes in the DMZ. Finally, I want guns. /{Lots}/ of guns."
+
+"That may be difficult," says the ghost. "Many other humans reached halting state long since. Is at least one other still alive, but not accessible for duration of eschatological experiment in progress. Not all were recorded with version control engine; others were-is lost in DMZ. We-are can provide you with extreme access to the demilitarized zone, but query the need for kinetic energy weapons."
+
+Amber sighs. "You guys really /{are}/ media illiterates, aren't you?" She stands up and stretches, feeling a facsimile of sleep's enervation leaching from her muscles. "I'll also need my -" it's on the tip of her tongue: There's something missing. "Hang on. There's something I've forgotten." /{Something important}/, she thinks, puzzled. /{Something that used to be around all the time that would ... know? ... purr? ... help?}/ "Never mind," she hears her lips say. "This other human. I /{really}/ want her. Non-negotiable. All right?"
+
+"That may be difficult," repeats the ghost. "Entity is looping in a recursively confined universe."
+
+"Eh?" Amber blinks at it. "Would you mind rephrasing that? Or illustrating?"
+
+"Illustration:" The ghost folds the air in the room into a glowing ball of plasma, shaped like a Klein bottle. Amber's eyes cross as she looks at it. "Closest reference from human historical database is Descartes's demon. This entity has retreated within a closed space, but is now unsure whether it is objectively real or not. In any event, it refuses to interact."
+
+"Well, can you get me into that space?" asks Amber. Pocket universes she can deal with; it's part and parcel of her life. "Give me some leverage -"
+
+"Risk may attach to this course of action," warns the ghost.
+
+"I don't care," she says irritably. "Just /{put}/ me there. It's someone I know, isn't it? Send me into her dream, and I'll wake her up, okay?"
+
+"Understood," says the ghost. "Prepare yourself."
+
+Without any warning, Amber is somewhere else. She glances around, taking in an ornate mosaic floor, whitewashed walls set with open windows through which stars twinkle faintly in the night sky. Her clothing has somehow been replaced by sexy lingerie under a nearly transparent robe, and her hair's grown longer by about half a meter. It's all very disorienting. The walls are stone, and she stands in a doorway to a room with nothing in it but a bed. Occupied by -
+
+"Shit," she exclaims. "Who are you?" The young and incredibly, classically beautiful woman in the bed looks at her vacantly, then rolls over on her side. She isn't wearing a stitch, she's completely hairless from the ears down, and her languid posture is one of invitation. "Yes?" Amber asks. "What is it?"
+
+The woman on the bed beckons to her slowly. Amber shakes her head. "Sorry, that's just not my scene." She backs away into the corridor, unsteady in unaccustomedly high heels. "This is some sort of male fantasy, isn't it? And a dumb adolescent one at that." She looks around again. In one direction, a corridor heads past more open doorways, and in the other, it ends with a spiral staircase. Amber concentrates, trying to tell the universe to take her to the logical destination, but nothing happens. "Looks like I'm going to have to do this the hard way. I wish -" she frowns. She was about to wish that /{someone}/ else was here, but she can't remember who. So she takes a deep breath and heads toward the staircase.
+
+"Up or down?" she asks herself. /{Up}/ - it seems logical, if you're going to have a tower, to sleep up at the top of it. So she climbs the steps carefully, holding the spiraling rail. /{I wonder who designed this space? she wonders, and what role am I supposed to fit into in their scenario?}/ On second thoughts, the latter question strikes her as laughable. /{Wait till I give him an earful ...}/
+
+There's a plain wooden door at the top of the staircase, with a latch that isn't fastened. Amber pauses for a few seconds, nerving herself to confront a sleeper so wrapped in solipsism that he's built this sex-fantasy castle around himself. /{I hope it isn't Pierre}/, she thinks grimly as she pushes the door inward.
+
+The room is bare and floored in wood. There's no furniture, just an open window set high in one wall. A man sits cross-legged and robed, with his back to her, mumbling quietly to himself and nodding slightly. Her breath catches as she realizes who it is. /{Oh shit}/! Her eyes widen. /{Is this what's been inside his head all along?}/
+
+"I did not summon you," Sadeq says calmly, not turning round to look at her. "Go away, tempter. You aren't real."
+
+Amber clears her throat. "Sorry to disappoint you, but you're wrong," she says. "We've got an alien monster to catch. Want to come hunting?"
+
+Sadeq stops nodding. He sits up slowly, stretching his spine, then stands up and turns round. His eyes glint in the moonlight. "That's odd." He undresses her with his gaze. "You look like someone I used to know. You've never done that before."
+
+"For fuck's sake!" Amber nearly explodes, but catches herself after a moment. "What /{is}/ this, a Solipsists United chapterhouse meeting?"
+
+"I -" Sadeq looks puzzled. "I'm sorry, are you claiming to be real?"
+
+"As real as you are." Amber reaches out and grabs a hand: He doesn't resist as she pulls him toward the doorway.
+
+"You're the first visitor I've ever had." He sounds shocked.
+
+"Listen, come /{on}/." She tugs him after her, down the spiral staircase to the floor below. "Do you want to stay here? Really?" She glances back at him. "What /{is}/ this place?"
+
+"Hell is a perversion of heaven," he says slowly, running the fingers of his free hand through his beard. Abruptly, he reaches out and grabs her around the waist, then yanks her toward him. "We'll have to /{see}/ how real you are -" Amber, who is not used to this kind of treatment, responds by stomping on his instep and backhanding him hard.
+
+"You're real!" he cries, as he falls back against the staircase. "Forgive me, please! I had to know -"
+
+"Know /{what}/?" she snarls. "Lay one finger on me again, and I'll leave you here to rot!" She's already spawning the ghost that will signal the alien outside to pull her out of this pocket universe: It's a serious threat.
+
+"But I had to - wait. You have /{free will}/. You just demonstrated that." He's breathing heavily and looking up at her imploringly. "I'm /{sorry}/, I apologize! But I had to know whether you were another zombie. Or not."
+
+"A zombie?" She looks round. Another living doll has appeared behind her, standing in an open doorway wearing a skintight leather suit with a cutaway crotch. She beckons to Sadeq invitingly. Another body wearing strategically placed strips of rubber mewls at her feet, writhing for attention. Amber raises an eyebrow in disgust. "You thought I was one of those?"
+
+Sadeq nods. "They've got cleverer lately. Some of them can talk. I nearly mistook one for -" He shudders convulsively. "Unclean!"
+
+"Unclean." Amber looks down at him thoughtfully. "This isn't really your personal paradise after all, is it?" After a moment she holds out a hand to him. "Come on."
+
+"I'm sorry I thought you were a zombie," he repeats.
+
+"Under the circumstances, I think I forgive you," she says. Then the ghost yanks them both back to the universe outside.
+
+* * *
+
+_1 More memories converge on the present moment:
+
+_1 The Ring Imperium is a huge cluster of self-replicating robots that Amber has assembled in low Jupiter orbit, fueled by the mass and momentum of the small moon J-47 Barney, to provide a launching platform for the interstellar probe her father's business partners are helping her to build. It's also the seat of her court, the leading jurisprudential nexus in the outer solar system. Amber is the Queen, here, arbitrator and ruler. And Sadeq is her judge and counsel.
+
+_1 A plaintiff Amber only knows as a radar blip thirty light-minutes away has filed a lawsuit in her court, alleging malfeasance, heresy, and barratry against a semisentient corporate pyramid scheme that arrived in Jovian space twelve million seconds ago and currently seems set on converting every other intelligence in the region to its peculiar memeset. A whole bundle of multithreaded countersuits are dragging at her attention, in a counterattack alleging that the light blip is in violation of copyright, patent, and trade secrecy laws by discussing the interloper's intentions.
+
+_1 Right now, Amber isn't home on the Ring to hear the case in person. She's left Sadeq behind to grapple with the balky mechanics of her legal system - tailor-designed to make corporate litigation a pain in the ass - while she drags Pierre off on a diplomatic visit to another Jovian colony, the Nursery Republic. Planted by the Franklin Trust's orphanage ship /{Ernst Sanger}/, the Nursery has grown over the past four years into a spindly snowflake three kilometers across. A slow-growing O'Neil cylinder sprouts from its hub: Most of the inhabitants of the space station are less than two years old, precocious additions to the Trust's borganism.
+
+_1 There's a piazza, paved with something not unlike rough marble, on the side of a hill that clings insecurely to the inner edge of a spinning cup. The sky is a black vastness overhead, wheeling slowly around a central axis lined up on Jupiter. Amber sprawls in a wicker chair, her legs stretched out before her and one arm flung across her forehead. The wreckage of an incredible meal is scattered across the tables around her. Torpid and full, she strokes the cat that lies curled in her lap. Pierre is off somewhere, touring one or another of the prototype ecosystems that one or another of the borg's special interest minds is testing. Amber, for her part, can't be bothered. She's just had a great meal, she doesn't have any lawsuits to worry about, everything back home is on the critpath, and quality time like this is so hard to come by -
+
+_1 "Do you keep in touch with your father?" asks Monica.
+
+_1 "Mmm." The cat purrs quietly, and Amber strokes its flank. "We e-mail. Sometimes."
+
+_1 "I just wondered." Monica is the local borg den mother, willowy and brown-eyed and with a deceptively lazy drawl - Yorkshire English overlaid with Silicon Valley speak. "I hear from him, y'know. From time to time. Now that Gianni's retired, he doesn't have much to do down-well anymore. So he was talking about coming out here."
+
+_1 "What? To Perijove?" Amber's eyes open in alarm: Aineko stops purring and looks round at Monica accusingly.
+
+_1 "Don't worry." Monica sounds vaguely amused: "He wouldn't cramp your style, I think."
+
+_1 "But, out here -" Amber sits up. "Damn," she says, quietly. "What got into him?"
+
+_1 "Middle-aged restlessness, my downwell sibs say." Monica shrugs. "This time Annette didn't stop him. But he hasn't made up his mind to travel yet."
+
+_1 "Good. Then he might not -" Amber stops. "The phrase, 'made up his mind', what exactly do you mean?"
+
+_1 Monica's smile mocks her for a few seconds before the older woman surrenders. "He's talking about uploading."
+
+_1 "Is that embarrassing or what?" asks Ang. Amber glances at her, mildly annoyed, but Ang isn't looking her way. /{So much for friends}/, Amber thinks. Being queen of all you survey is a great way of breaking up peer relationships -
+
+_1 "He won't do it," Amber predicts. "Dad's burned out."
+
+_1 "He thinks he'll get it back if he optimizes himself for re-entrancy." Monica continues to smile. "I've been telling him it's just what he needs."
+
+_1 "I do /{not}/ want my father bugging me. Or my mother. Or Auntie 'Nette and Uncle Gianni. Memo to immigration control: No entry rights for Manfred Macx or the other named individuals without clearance through the Queen's secretary."
+
+_1 "What did he do to get you so uptight?" asks Monica idly.
+
+_1 Amber sighs, and subsides. "Nothing. It's not that I'm ungrateful or anything, but he's just so extropian, it's embarrassing. Like, that was the last century's apocalypse. Y'know?"
+
+_1 "I think he was a really very forward-looking organic," Monica, speaking for the Franklin borg, asserts. Amber looks away. /{Pierre would get it}/, she thinks. Pierre would understand her aversion to Manfred's showing up. Pierre, too, wants to carve out his own niche without parents looking over his shoulders, although for very different reasons. She focuses on someone male and more or less mature - Nicky, she thinks, though she hasn't seen him for a long time - walking toward the piazza, bare-ass naked and beautifully tanned.
+
+_1 "Parents. What are they good for?" asks Amber, with all the truculence of her seventeen years. "Even if they stay neotenous, they lose flexibility. And there's that long Paleolithic tradition of juvenile slavery. Inhuman, I call it."
+
+_1 "How old were you when it was safe to leave you around the house on your own?" challenges Monica.
+
+_1 "Three. That's when I had my first implants." Amber smiles at the approaching young Adonis, who smiles back: Yes, it's Nicky, and he seems pleased to see her. /{Life is good}/, she thinks, idly considering whether or not to tell Pierre.
+
+_1 "Times change," remarks Monica. "Don't write your family off too soon; there might come a time when you want their company."
+
+_1 "Huh." Amber pulls a face at the old borg component. "That's what you all say!"
+
+* * *
+
+As soon as Amber steps onto the grass, she can feel possibilities open up around her. She has management authority here, and this universe is /{big}/, wide open, not like Sadeq's existential trap. A twitch of a sub-process reasserts her self-image, back to short hair and comfortable clothing. Another twitch brings up a whole load of useful diagnostics. Amber has a nasty feeling that she's running in a compatibility sandbox here - there are signs that her access to the simulation system's control interface is very much via proxy - but at least she's got it.
+
+"Wow! Back in the real world at last!" She can hardly contain her excitement, even forgetting to be pissed at Sadeq for thinking she was just an actor in his Cartesian theatre's performance of Puritan Hell. "Look! It's the DMZ!"
+
+They're standing on a grassy knoll overlooking a gleaming Mediterranean city. It snoozes beneath a Mandelbrot-fuzzy not-sun that hangs at the center of a hyperbolic landscape, which dwindles into a blue yonder that seems incomprehensibly distant. Circular baby-blue wells open in the walls of the world at regular intervals, connecting to other parts of the manifold. "How big is it, ghost? In planetary simulation-equivalents."
+
+"This demilitarized zone is an embedded reality, funneling all transfers between the local star system's router and the civilization that built it. It uses on the order of a thousandth of the capacity of the Matrioshka brain it is part of, although the runaway excursion currently in force has absorbed most of that. Matrioshka brain, you are familiar with the concept?" The ghost sounds fussily pedantic.
+
+Sadeq shakes his head. Amber glances at him, askance. "Take all the planets in a star system and dismantle them," she explains. "Turn them into dust - structured nanocomp, powered by heat exchangers, spread in concentric orbits around the central star. The inner orbitals run close to the melting point of iron, the outer ones are cold as liquid nitrogen, and each layer runs off the waste heat of the next shell in. It's like a Russian doll made out of Dyson spheres, shell enclosing shell enclosing shell, but it's not designed to support human life. It's computronium, matter optimized at the atomic level to support computing, and they're all running uploads - Dad figured our own solar system could support, uh, about a hundred billion times as many inhabitants as Earth. At a conservative estimate. As uploads, living in simulation space. If you first dismantle all the planets and use the resulting materials to build a Matrioshka brain."
+
+"Ah." Sadeq nods thoughtfully. "Is that your definition, too?" he asks, glancing up at the glowing point the ghost uses to localize its presence.
+
+"Substantially," it says, almost grudgingly.
+
+"Substantially?" Amber glances around. /{A billion worlds to explore}/, she thinks dizzily. /{And that's just the}/ firewall? She feels obscurely cheated: You need to be vaster than human just to count the digits in the big numbers at play here, but there's nothing fundamentally incomprehensible about it. This is the sort of civilization Dad said she could expect to live in, within her meatbody life expectancy. Dad and his drinking buddies, singing, "Dismantle the Moon! Melt down Mars!" in a castle outside Prague as they waited for the results of a shamelessly gerrymandered election to arrive in the third decade of the third millennium. The Space and Freedom Party taking over the EU, and cranking up to escape velocity. But this is supposed to be kiloparsecs from home, ancient alien civilizations and all that! Where's the exotic superscience? What about the neuron stars, strange matter suns structured for computing at nucleonic, rather than electronic, speeds? /{I have a bad feeling about this}/, she thinks, spawning a copy of herself to set up a private channel to Sadeq. /{It's not advanced enough. Do you suppose these guys could be like the Wunch? Parasites or barbarians hitching a ride in the machine?}/
+
+/{You believe it's lying to us?}/ Sadeq sends back.
+
+"Hmm." Amber sets off downslope toward the piazza below, at the heart of the fake town. "It looks a bit too human to me."
+
+"Human," echoes Sadeq, a curious wistfulness in his voice. "Did you not say humans are extinct?"
+
+"Your species is obsolete," the ghost comments smugly. "Inappropriately adapted to artificial realities. Poorly optimized circuitry, excessively complex low-bandwidth sensors, messily global variables -"
+
+"Yeah, yeah, I get the picture," says Amber, turning her attention to the town. "So why do you think we can deal with this alien god you've got a problem with?"
+
+"It asked for you," says the ghost, narrowing from an ellipse to a line, then shrinking to a dimensionless point of brilliance. "And now it's coming. We-I not willing to risk exposure. Call us-me when you have slain the dragon. Goodbye."
+
+"Oh /{shit}/ -" Amber spins round. But she and Sadeq are alone beneath the hot sunlight from above. The piazza, like the one in the Nursery Republic, is charmingly rustic - but there's nobody home, nothing but ornate cast-iron furniture basking beneath the noon-bright sun, a table with a parasol over it, and something furry lying sprawled in a patch of sunlight beside it.
+
+"We appear to be alone for now," says Sadeq. He smiles crookedly, then nods at the table. "Maybe we should wait for our host to arrive?"
+
+"Our host." Amber peers around. "The ghost is kind of frightened of this alien. I wonder why?"
+
+"It asked for us." Sadeq heads toward the table, pulls out a chair, and sits down carefully. "That could be very good news - or very bad."
+
+"Hmm." Amber finishes her survey, sees no sign of life. For lack of any better ideas, she ambles over to the table and sits down on the other side of it from Sadeq. He looks slightly nervous beneath her inspection, but maybe it's just embarrassment about having seen her in her underwear. /{If I had an afterlife like that, I'd be embarrassed about it, too,}/ Amber thinks to herself.
+
+"Hey, you nearly tripped over -" Sadeq freezes, peering at something close to Amber's left foot. He looks puzzled for a moment, then smiles broadly. "What are /{you}/ doing here?" he asks her blind spot.
+
+"What are you talking to?" she asks, startled.
+
+/{He's talking to}/ me, /{dummy}/, says something tantalizingly familiar from her blind spot. /{So the fuckwits are trying to use you to dislodge me, hmm? That's not exactly clever.}/
+
+"Who -" Amber squints at the flagstone, spawns a bunch of ghosts who tear hurriedly at her reality modification ackles. Nothing seems to shift the blindness. "Are you the alien?"
+
+"What else could I be?" the blind spot asks with heavy irony. "No, I'm your father's pet cat. Listen, do you want to get out of here?"
+
+"Uh." Amber rubs her eyes. "I can't see you, whatever you are," she says politely. "Do I know you?" She's got a strange sense that she /{does}/ know the blind spot, that it's really important, and she's missing something intimate to her own sense of identity, but what it might be she can't tell.
+
+"Yeah, kid." There's a note of world-weary amusement in the not-voice coming from the hazy patch on the ground. "They've hacked you but good, both of you. Let me in, and I'll fix it."
+
+"No!" Exclaims Amber, a second ahead of Sadeq, who looks at her oddly. "Are you really an invader?"
+
+The blind spot sighs. "I'm as much an invader as you are, remember? I came here with you. Difference is, I'm not going to let some stupid corporate ghost use me as fungible currency."
+
+"Fungible -" Sadeq stops. "I remember you," he says slowly, with an expression of absolute, utter surprise on his face. "What do you mean?"
+
+The blind spot /{yawns}/, baring sharp ivory fangs. Amber shakes her head, dismissing the momentary hallucination. "Lemme guess. You woke up in a room, and this alien ghost tells you the human species is extinct and asks you to do a number on me. Is that right?"
+
+Amber nods, as an icy finger of fear trails up and down her spine. "Is it lying?" she asks.
+
+"Damn right." The blind spot is smiling, now, and the smile on the void won't go away - she can see the smile, just not the body it's attached to. "My reckoning is, we're about sixteen light-years from Earth. The Wunch came through here, stripped the dump, then took off for parts unknown; it's a trashhole, you wouldn't believe it. The main life-form is an incredibly ornate corporate ecosphere, legal instruments breeding and replicating. They mug passing sapients and use them as currency."
+
+There's a triangular, pointy head behind the smile, slit eyes and sharp ears, a predatory, intelligent-looking but infinitely alien face. Amber can see it out of the corners of her eyes when she looks around the piazza. "You mean we, uh, they grabbed us when we appeared, and they've mangled my memories -" Amber suddenly finds it incredibly difficult to concentrate, but if she focuses on the smile, she can almost see the body behind it, hunched like a furry chicken, tail wrapped neatly around its front paws.
+
+"Yeah. Except they didn't bargain on meeting something like me." The smile is infinitely wide, a Cheshire-cat grin on front of an orange-and-brown stripy body that shimmers in front of Amber's gaze like a hallucination. "Your mother's cracking tools are self-extending, Amber. Do you remember Hong Kong?"
+
+"Hong -"
+
+There is a moment of painless pressure, then Amber feels huge invisible barriers sliding away on all sides. She looks around, for the first time seeing the piazza as it really is, half the crew of the /{Field Circus}/ waiting nervously around her, the grinning cat crouched on the floor at her feet, the enormous walls of recomplicating data that fence their little town off from the gaping holes - interfaces to the other routers in the network.
+
+"Welcome back," Pierre says gravely, as Amber gives a squeak of surprise and leans forward to pick up her cat. "Now you're out from under, how about we start trying to figure out how to get home?"
+
+* * *
+
+_1 Welcome to decade the sixth, millennium three. These old datelines don't mean so much anymore, for while some billions of fleshbody humans are still infected with viral memes, the significance of theocentric dating has been dealt a body blow. This may be the fifties, but what that means to you depends on how fast your reality rate runs. The various upload clades exploding across the reaches of the solar system vary by several orders of magnitude - some are barely out of 2049, while others are exploring the subjective thousandth millennium.
+
+_1 While the /{Field Circus}/ floats in orbit around an alien router (itself orbiting the brown dwarf Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},), while Amber and her crew are trapped on the far side of a wormhole linking the router to a network of incomprehensibly vast alien mindscapes - while all this is going on, the damnfool human species has finally succeeded in making itself obsolete. The proximate cause of its displacement from the pinnacle of creation (or the pinnacle of teleological self-congratulation, depending on your stance on evolutionary biology) is an attack of self-aware corporations. The phrase "smart money" has taken on a whole new meaning, for the collision between international business law and neurocomputing technology has given rise to a whole new family of species - fast-moving corporate carnivores in the Net. The planet Mercury has been broken up by a consortium of energy brokers, and Venus is an expanding debris cloud, energized to a violent glare by the trapped and channeled solar output. A million billion fist-sized computing caltrops, backsides glowing dull red with the efflux from their thinking, orbit the sun at various inclinations no farther out than Mercury used to be.
+
+_1 Billions of fleshbody humans refuse to have anything to do with the blasphemous new realities. Many of their leaders denounce the uploads and AIs as soulless machines. Many more are timid, harboring self-preservation memes that amplify a previously healthy aversion to having one's brain peeled like an onion by mind-mapping robots into an all-pervading neurosis. Sales of electrified tinfoil-lined hats are at an all-time high. Still, hundreds of millions have already traded their meat puppets for mind machines, and they breed fast. In another few years, the fleshbody populace will be an absolute minority of the posthuman clade. Sometime later, there will probably be a war. The dwellers in the thoughtcloud are hungry for dumb matter to convert, and the fleshbodies make notoriously poor use of the collection of silicon and rare elements that pool at the bottom of the gravity well that is Earth.
+
+_1 Energy and thought are driving a phase-change in the condensed matter substance of the solar system. The MIPS per kilogram metric is on the steep upward leg of a sigmoid curve - dumb matter is coming to life as the mind children restructure everything with voracious nanomechanical servants. The thoughtcloud forming in orbit around the sun will ultimately be the graveyard of a biological ecology, another marker in space visible to the telescopes of any new iron-age species with the insight to understand what they're seeing: the death throes of dumb matter, the birth of a habitable reality vaster than a galaxy and far speedier. Death throes that, within a few centuries, will mean the extinction of biological life within a light-year or so of that star - for the majestic Matrioshka brains, though they are the pinnacles of sentient civilization, are intrinsically hostile environments for fleshy life.
+
+* * *
+
+Pierre, Donna-the-all-seeing-eye, and Su Ang fill Amber in on what they've discovered about the bazaar - as they call the space the ghost referred to as the demilitarized zone - over ice-cold margaritas and a very good simulation of a sociable joint. Some of them have been on the loose in here for subjective years. There's a lot of information to absorb.
+
+"The physical layer is half a light-hour in diameter, four hundred times as massive as Earth," Pierre explains. "Not solid, of course - the largest component is about the size my fist used to be." Amber squints, trying to remember how big that was - scale factors are hard to remember accurately. "I met this old chatbot that said it's outlived its original star, but I'm not sure it's running with a full deck. Anyway, if it's telling the truth, we're a third of a light year out from a closely coupled binary system - they use orbital lasers the size of Jupiter to power it without getting too close to all those icky gravity wells."
+
+Amber is intimidated, despite her better judgment, because this bizarre bazaar is several hundred billion times as big as the totality of human presingularity civilization. She tries not to show it in front of the others, but she's worried that getting home may be impossible - requiring enterprise beyond the economic event horizon, as realistic a proposition as a dime debuting as a dollar bill. Still, she's got to at least try. Just knowing about the existence of the bazaar will change so many things ...
+
+"How much money can we lay our hands on?" She asks. "What /{is}/ money hereabouts, anyway? Assuming they've got a scarcity-mediated economy. Bandwidth, maybe?"
+
+"Ah, well." Pierre looks at her oddly. "That's the problem. Didn't the ghost tell you?"
+
+"Tell me?" Amber raises an eyebrow. "Yeah, but it hasn't exactly proven to be a reliable guide to anything, has it?"
+
+"Tell her," Su Ang says quietly. She looks away, embarrassed by something.
+
+"They've got a scarcity economy all right," says Pierre. "Bandwidth is the limited resource, that and matter. This whole civilization is tied together locally because if you move too far away, well, it takes ages to catch up on the gossip. Matrioshka brain intelligences are much more likely to stay at home than anybody realized, even though they chat on the phone a lot. And they use things that come from other cognitive universes as, well, currency. We came in through the coin slot, is it any wonder we ended up in the bank?"
+
+"That's so deeply wrong that I don't know where to begin," Amber grumbles. "How did they get into this mess?"
+
+"Don't ask me." Pierre shrugs. "I have the distinct feeling that anyone or anything we meet in this place won't have any more of a clue than we do - whoever or whatever built this brain, there ain't nobody home anymore except the self-propelled corporations and hitchhikers like the Wunch. We're in the dark, just like they were."
+
+"Huh. You mean they built something like this, then they went extinct? That sounds so dumb ..."
+
+Su Ang sighs. "They got too big and complex to go traveling once they built themselves a bigger house to live in. Extinction tends to be what happens to overspecialized organisms that are stuck in one environmental niche for too long. If you posit a singularity, then maximization of local computing resources - like this - as the usual end state for tool users, is it any wonder none of them ever came calling on us?"
+
+Amber focuses on the table in front of her, rests the heel of her palm on the cool metal, and tries to remember how to fork a second copy of her state vector. A moment later, her ghost obligingly fucks with the physics model of the table. Iron gives way like rubber beneath her fingertips, a pleasant elasticity. "Okay, we have some control over the universe, at least that's something to work with. Have any of you tried any self-modification?"
+
+"That's dangerous," Pierre says emphatically. "The more of us the better before we start doing that stuff. And we need some firewalling of our own."
+
+"How deep does reality go, here?" asks Sadeq. It's almost the first question he's asked of his own volition, and Amber takes it as a positive sign that he's finally coming out of his shell.
+
+"Oh, the Planck length is about a hundredth of a millimeter in this world. Too small to see, comfortably large for the simulation engines to handle. Not like /{real}/ space-time."
+
+"Well, then." Sadeq pauses. "They can zoom their reality if they need to?"
+
+"Yeah, fractals work in here." Pierre nods. "I didn't -"
+
+"This place is a trap," Su Ang says emphatically.
+
+"No it isn't," Pierre replies, nettled.
+
+"What do you mean, a trap?" asks Amber.
+
+"We've been here a while," says Ang. She glances at Aineko, who sprawls on the flagstones, snoozing or whatever it is that weakly superhuman AIs do when they're emulating a sleeping cat. "After your cat broke us out of bondage, we had a look around. There are things out there that -" She shivers. "Humans can't survive in most of the simulation spaces here. Universes with physics models that don't support our kind of neural computing. You could migrate there, but you'd need to be ported to a whole new type of logic - by the time you did that, would you still be you? Still, there are enough entities roughly as complex as we are to prove that the builders aren't here anymore. Just lesser sapients, rooting through the wreckage. Worms and parasites squirming through the body after nightfall on the battlefield."
+
+"I ran into the Wunch," Donna volunteers helpfully. "The first couple of times they ate my ghost, but eventually I figured out how to talk to them."
+
+"And there's other aliens, too," Su Ang adds gloomily. "Just nobody you'd want to meet on a dark night."
+
+"So there's no hope of making contact," Amber summarizes. "At least, not with anything transcendent and well-intentioned toward visiting humans."
+
+"That's probably right," Pierre concedes. He doesn't sound happy about it.
+
+"So we're stuck in a pocket universe with limited bandwidth to home and a bunch of crazy slum dwellers who've moved into the abandoned and decaying mansion and want to use us for currency. 'Jesus saves, and redeems souls for valuable gifts.' Yeah?"
+
+"Yeah." Su Ang looks depressed.
+
+"Well." Amber glances at Sadeq speculatively. Sadeq is staring into the distance, at the crazy infinite sunspot that limns the square with shadows. "Hey, god-man. Got a question for you."
+
+"Yes?" Sadeq looks at her, a slightly dazed expression on his face. "I'm sorry, I am just feeling the jaws of a larger trap around my throat -"
+
+"Don't be." Amber grins, and it is not a pleasant expression. "Have you ever been to Brooklyn?"
+
+"No, why -"
+
+"Because you're going to help me sell these lying bastards a bridge. Okay? And when we've sold it we're going to use the money to pay the purchasing fools to drive us across, so we can go home. Listen, this is what I'm planning ..."
+
+* * *
+
+"I can do this, I think," Sadeq says, moodily examining the Klein bottle on the table. The bottle is half-empty, its fluid contents invisible around the corner of the fourth-dimensional store. "I spent long enough alone in there to -" He shivers.
+
+"I don't want you damaging yourself," Amber says, calmly enough, because she has an ominous feeling that their survival in this place has an expiry date attached.
+
+"Oh, never fear." Sadeq grins lopsidedly. "One pocket hell is much like another."
+
+"Do you understand why -"
+
+"Yes, yes," he says dismissively. "We can't send copies of ourselves into it, that would be an abomination. It needs to be unpopulated, yes?"
+
+"Well, the idea is to get us home, not leave thousands of copies of ourselves trapped in a pocket universe here. Isn't that it?" Su Ang asks hesitantly. She's looking distracted, most of her attention focused on absorbing the experiences of a dozen ghosts she's spun off to attend to perimeter security.
+
+"Who are we selling this to?" asks Sadeq. "If you want me to make it attractive -"
+
+"It doesn't need to be a complete replica of the Earth. It just has to be a convincing advertisement for a presingularity civilization full of humans. You've got two-and-seventy zombies to dissect for their brains; bolt together a bunch of variables you can apply to them, and you can permutate them to look a bit more varied."
+
+Amber turns her attention to the snoozing cat. "Hey, furball. How long have we been here really, in real time? Can you grab Sadeq some more resources for his personal paradise garden?"
+
+Aineko stretches and yawns, totally feline, then looks up at Amber with narrowed eyes and raised tail. "'Bout eighteen minutes, wall-clock time." The cat stretches again and sits, front paws drawn together primly, tail curled around them. "The ghosts are pushing, you know? I don't think I can sustain this for too much longer. They're not good at hacking people, but I think it won't be too long before they instantiate a new copy of you, one that'll be predisposed to their side."
+
+"I don't get why they didn't assimilate you along with the rest of us."
+
+"Blame your mother again - she's the one who kept updating the digital rights management code on my personality. 'Illegal consciousness is copyright theft' sucks until an alien tries to rewire your hindbrain with a debugger; then it's a lifesaver." Aineko glances down and begins washing one paw. "I can give your mullah-man about six days, subjective time. After that, all bets are off."
+
+"I will take it, then." Sadeq stands. "Thank you." He smiles at the cat, a smile that fades to translucency, hanging in the simulated air like an echo as the priest returns to his tower - this time with a blueprint and a plan in mind.
+
+"That leaves just us." Su Ang glances at Pierre, back to Amber. "Who are you going to sell this crazy scheme to?"
+
+Amber leans back and smiles. Behind her, Donna - her avatar an archaic movie camera suspended below a model helicopter - is filming everything for posterity. She nods lazily at the reporter. "She's the one who gave me the idea. Who do we know who's dumb enough to buy into a scam like this?"
+
+Pierre looks at her suspiciously. "I think we've been here before," he says slowly. "You aren't going to make me kill anyone, are you?"
+
+"I don't think that'll be necessary, unless the corporate ghosts think we're going to get away from them and are greedy enough to want to kill us."
+
+"You see, she learned from last time," Ang comments, and Amber nods. "No more misunderstandings, right?" She beams at Amber.
+
+Amber beams back at her. "Right. And that's why you -" she points at Pierre - "are going to go find out if any relics of the Wunch are hanging about here. I want you to make them an offer they won't refuse."
+
+* * *
+
+"How much for just the civilization?" asks the Slug.
+
+Pierre looks down at it thoughtfully. It's not really a terrestrial mollusk: Slugs on Earth aren't two meters long and don't have lacy white exoskeletons to hold their chocolate-colored flesh in shape. But then, it isn't really the alien it appears to be. It's a defaulting corporate instrument that has disguised itself as a long-extinct alien upload, in the hope that its creditors won't recognize it if it looks like a randomly evolved sentient. One of the stranded members of Amber's expedition made contact with it a couple of subjective years ago, while exploring the ruined city at the center of the firewall. Now Pierre's here because it seems to be one of their most promising leads. Emphasis on the word promising - because it promises much, but there is some question over whether it can indeed deliver.
+
+"The civilization isn't for sale," Pierre says slowly. The translation interface shimmers, storing up his words and transforming them into a different deep grammar, not merely translating his syntax but mapping equivalent meanings where necessary. "But we can give you privileged observer status if that's what you want. And we know what you are. If you're interested in finding a new exchange to be traded on, your existing intellectual property assets will be worth rather more there than here."
+
+The rogue corporation rears up slightly and bunches into a fatter lump. Its skin blushes red in patches. "Must think about this. Is your mandatory accounting time cycle fixed or variable term? Are self-owned corporate entities able to enter contracts?"
+
+"I could ask my patron," Pierre says casually. He suppresses a stab of angst. He's still not sure where he and Amber stand, but theirs is far more than just a business relationship, and he worries about the risks she's taking. "My patron has a jurisdiction within which she can modify corporate law to accommodate your requirements. Your activities on a wider scale might require shell companies -" the latter concept echoes back in translation to him as host organisms - "but that can be taken care of."
+
+The translation membrane wibbles for a while, apparently reformulating some more abstract concepts in a manner that the corporation can absorb. Pierre is reasonably confident that it'll take the offer, however. When it first met them, it boasted about its control over router hardware at the lowest levels. But it also bitched and moaned about the firewall protocols that were blocking it from leaving (before rather rudely trying to eat its conversationalist). He waits patiently, looking around at the swampy landscape, mudflats punctuated by clumps of spiky violet ferns. The corporation has to be desperate, to be thinking of the bizarre proposition Amber has dreamed up for him to pitch to it.
+
+"Sounds interesting," the Slug declares after a brief confirmatory debate with the membrane. "If I supply a suitable genome, can you customize a container for it?"
+
+"I believe so," Pierre says carefully. "For your part, can you deliver the energy we need?"
+
+"From a gate?" For a moment the translation membrane hallucinates a stick-human, shrugging. "Easy. Gates are all entangled: Dump coherent radiation in at one, get it out at another. Just get me out of this firewall first."
+
+"But the lightspeed lag -"
+
+"No problem. You go first, then a dumb instrument I leave behind buys up power and sends it after. Router network is synchronous, within framework of state machines that run Universe 1.0; messages propagate at same speed, speed of light in vacuum, except use wormholes to shorten distances between nodes. Whole point of the network is that it is nonlossy. Who would trust their mind to a communications channel that might partially randomize them in transit?"
+
+Pierre goes cross-eyed, trying to understand the implications of the Slug's cosmology. But there isn't really time, here and now: They've got on the order of a minute of wall-clock time left to get everything sorted out, if Aineko is right. One minute to go before the angry ghosts start trying to break into the DMZ by other means. "If you are willing to try this, we'd be happy to accommodate you," he says, thinking of crossed fingers and rabbits' feet and firewalls.
+
+"It's a deal," the membrane translates the Slug's response back at him. "Now we exchange shares/plasmids/ownership? Then merger complete?"
+
+Pierre stares at the Slug: "But this is a business arrangement!" he protests. "What's sex got to do with it?"
+
+"Apologies offered. I am thinking we have a translation error. You said this was to be a merging of businesses?"
+
+"Not /{that}/ way. It's a contract. We agree to take you with us. In return, you help lure the Wunch into the domain we're setting up for them and configure the router at the other end ..."
+
+And so on.
+
+* * *
+
+Steeling herself, Amber recalls the address the ghost gave her for Sadeq's afterlife universe. In her own subjective time it's been about half an hour since he left. "Coming?" she asks her cat.
+
+"Don't think I will," says Aineko. It looks away, blissfully unconcerned.
+
+"Bah." Amber tenses, then opens the port to Sadeq's pocket universe.
+
+As usual she finds herself indoors, standing on an ornate mosaic floor in a room with whitewashed walls and peaked windows. But there's something different about it, and after a moment, she realizes what it is. The sound of vehicle traffic from outside, the cooing of pigeons on the rooftops, someone shouting across the street: There are people here.
+
+She walks over to the nearest window and looks out, then recoils. It's /{hot}/ outside. Dust and fumes hang in air the color of cement over rough-finished concrete apartment buildings, their roofs covered in satellite uplinks and cheap, garish LED advertising panels. Looking down she sees motor scooters, cars - filthy, fossil-fueled behemoths, a tonne of steel and explosives in motion to carry only one human, a mass ratio worse than an archaic ICBM - brightly dressed people walking to and fro. A news helicam buzzes overhead, lenses darting and glinting at the traffic.
+
+"Just like home, isn't it?" says Sadeq, behind her.
+
+Amber starts. "This is where you grew up? This is Yazd?"
+
+"It doesn't exist anymore, in real space." Sadeq looks thoughtful, but far more animated than the barely conscious parody of himself that she'd rescued from this building - back when it was a mediaeval vision of the afterlife - scant subjective hours ago. He cracks a smile: "Probably a good thing. We were dismantling it even while we were preparing to leave, you know?"
+
+"It's detailed." Amber throws her eyes at the scene out the window, multiplexes them, and tells them to send little virtual ghosts dancing through the streets of the Iranian industrial 'burb. Overhead, big Airbuses ply the skyways, bearing pilgrims on the hajj, tourists to the coastal resorts on the Persian Gulf, produce to the foreign markets.
+
+"It's the best time I could recall," Sadeq says. "I didn't spend many days here then - I was in Qom, studying, and Kazakhstan, for cosmonaut training - but it's meant to be the early twenties. After the troubles, after the fall of the guardians; a young, energetic, liberal country full of optimism and faith in democracy. Values that weren't doing well elsewhere."
+
+"I thought democracy was a new thing there?"
+
+"No." Sadeq shakes his head. "There were prodemocracy riots in Tehran in the nineteenth century, did you know that? That's why the first revolution - no." He makes a cutting gesture. "Politics and faith are a combustible combination." He frowns. "But look. Is this what you wanted?"
+
+Amber recalls her scattered eyes - some of which have flown as much as a thousand kilometers from her locus - and concentrates on reintegrating their visions of Sadeq's re-creation. "It looks convincing. But not too convincing."
+
+"That was the idea."
+
+"Well, then." She smiles. "Is it just Iran? Or did you take any liberties around the edges?"
+
+"Who, me?" He raises an eyebrow. "I have enough doubts about the morality of this - project - without trying to trespass on Allah's territory, peace be unto him. I promise you, there are no sapients in this world but us. The people are the hollow shells of my dreaming, storefront dummies. The animals are crude bitmaps. This is what you asked for, and no more."
+
+"Well, then." Amber pauses. She recalls the expression on the dirt-smudged face of a little boy, bouncing a ball at his companions by the boarded-up front of a gas station on a desert road; remembers the animated chatter of two synthetic housewives, one in traditional black and the other in some imported Eurotrash fashion. "Are you sure they aren't real?" she asks.
+
+"Quite sure." But for a moment, she sees Sadeq looking uncertain. "Shall we go? Do you have the occupiers ready to move in yet?"
+
+"Yes to the first, and Pierre's working on the second. Come on, we don't want to get trampled by the squatters." She waves and opens a door back onto the piazza where her robot cat - the alien's nightmare intruder in the DMZ - sleeps, chasing superintelligent dream mice through multidimensional realities. "Sometimes I wonder if /{I'm}/ conscious. Thinking these thoughts gives me the creeps. Let's go and sell some aliens a bridge in Brooklyn."
+
+* * *
+
+Amber confronts the mendacious ghost in the windowless room stolen from 2001.
+
+"You have confined the monster," the ghost states.
+
+"Yes." Amber waits for a subjective moment, feeling delicate fronds tickle at the edges of her awareness in what seems to be a timing channel attack. She feels a momentary urge to sneeze, and a hot flash of anger that passes almost immediately.
+
+"And you have modified yourself to lock out external control," the ghost adds. "What is it that you want, Autonome Amber?"
+
+"Don't you have any concept of individuality?" she asks, annoyed by its presumption at meddling with her internal states.
+
+"Individuality is an unnecessary barrier to information transfer," says the ghost, morphing into its original form, a translucent reflection of her own body. "It reduces the efficiency of a capitalist economy. A large block of the DMZ is still inaccessible to we-me. Are you /{sure}/ you have defeated the monster?"
+
+"It'll do as I say," Amber replies, forcing herself to sound more confident than she feels - sometimes that damned transhuman cyborg cat is no more predictable than a real feline. "Now, the matter of payment arises."
+
+"Payment." The ghost sounds amused. But Pierre's filled her in on what to look for, and Amber can now see the translation membranes around it. Their color shift maps to a huge semantic distance; the creature on the other side, even though it looks like a ghost-image of herself, is very far from human. "How can we-us be expected to pay our own money for rendering services to us?"
+
+Amber smiles. "We want an open channel back to the router we arrived through."
+
+"Impossible," says the ghost.
+
+"We want an open channel, /{and}/ for it to stay open for six hundred million seconds after we clear it."
+
+"Impossible," the ghost repeats.
+
+"We can trade you a whole civilization," Amber says blandly. "A whole human nation, millions of individuals. Just let us go, and we'll see to it."
+
+"You - please wait." The ghost shimmers slightly, fuzzing at the edges.
+
+Amber opens a private channel to Pierre while the ghost confers with its other nodes. /{Are the Wunch in place yet?}/ she sends.
+
+/{They're moving in. This bunch don't remember what happened on the}/ Field Circus, /{memories of those events never made it back to them. So the Slug's got them to cooperate. It's kinda scary to watch - like}/ the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, /{you know?}/
+
+/{I don't care if it's scary to watch}/, Amber replies, /{I need to know if we're ready yet}/.
+
+/{Sadeq says yes, the universe is ready.}/
+
+/{Right, pack yourself down. We'll be moving soon.}/
+
+The ghost is firming up in front of her. "A whole civilization?" it asks. "That is not possible. Your arrival -" It pauses, fuzzing a little. /{Hah, Gotcha!}/ thinks Amber. /{Liar, liar, pants on fire!}/ "You cannot possibly have found a human civilization in the archives?"
+
+"The monster you complain about that came through with us is a predator," she asserts blandly. "It swallowed an entire nation before we heroically attracted its attention and induced it to follow us into the router. It's an archivore - everything was inside it, still frozen until we expanded it again. This civilization will already have been restored from hot shadows in our own solar system: There is nothing to gain by taking it home with us. But we need to return to ensure that no more predators of this type discover the router - or the high-bandwidth hub we linked to it."
+
+"You are sure you have killed this monster?" asks the ghost. "It would be inconvenient if it were to emerge from hiding in its digest archives."
+
+"I can guarantee it won't trouble you again if you let us go," says Amber, mentally crossing her fingers. The ghost doesn't seem to have noticed the huge wedge of fractally compressed data that bloats her personal scope by an order of magnitude. She can still feel Aineko's goodbye smile inside her head, an echo of ivory teeth trusting her to revive it if the escape plan succeeds.
+
+"We-us agree." The ghost twists weirdly, morphs into a five-dimensional hypersphere. It bubbles violently for a moment, then spits out a smaller token - a warped distortion in the air, like a gravityless black hole. "Here is your passage. Show us the civilization."
+
+"Okay " - /{Now!}/ - "catch." Amber twitches an imaginary muscle, and one wall of the room dissolves, forming a doorway into Sadeq's existential hell, now redecorated as a fair facsimile of a twenty-first-century industrial city in Iran, and populated by a Wunch of parasites who can't believe what they've lucked into - an entire continent of zombies waiting to host their flesh-hungry consciousness.
+
+The ghost drifts toward the open window. Amber grabs the hole and yanks it open, gets a grip on her own thoughts, and sends /{Open wide!}/ on the channel everybody is listening in on. For a moment time stands still, and then -
+
+* * *
+
+A synthetic gemstone the size of a Coke can falls through the cold vacuum, in high orbit around a brown dwarf. But the vacuum is anything but dark. A sapphire glare as bright as the noonday sun on Mars shines on the crazy diamond, billowing and cascading off sails as fine as soap bubbles that slowly drift and tense away from the can. The runaway Slug-corporation's proxy has hacked the router's firmware, and the open wormhole gate that feeds power to it is shining with the brilliance of a nuclear fireball, laser light channeled from a star many light-years away to power the /{Field Circus}/ on its return trip to the once-human solar system.
+
+Amber has retreated, with Pierre, into a simulation of her home aboard the Ring Imperium. One wall of her bedroom is a solid slab of diamond, looking out across the boiling Jovian ionosphere from an orbit low enough to make the horizon appear flat. They're curled together in her bed, a slightly more comfortable copy of the royal bed of King Henry VIII of England. It appears to be carved from thousand-year-old oak beams. As with so much else about the Ring Imperium, appearances are deceptive; and this is even more true of the cramped simulation spaces aboard the /{Field Circus}/, as it limps toward a tenth the speed of light, the highest velocity it's likely to achieve on a fraction of its original sail area.
+
+"Let me get this straight. You convinced. The locals. That a simulation of Iran, with zombie bodies that had been taken over by members of the Wunch. Was a human civilization?"
+
+"Yeah." Amber stretches lazily and smirks at him. "It's their damn fault; if the corporate collective entities didn't use conscious viewpoints as money, they wouldn't have fallen for a trick like that, would they?"
+
+"People. Money."
+
+"Well." She yawns, then sits up and snaps her finger imperiously: Down-stuffed pillows appear behind her back, and a silver salver bearing two full glasses of wine materializes between them. "Corporations are life-forms back home, too, aren't they? And we trade them. We give our AIs corporations to make them legal entities, but the analogy goes deeper. Look at any company headquarters, fitted out with works of art and expensive furniture and staff bowing and scraping everywhere -"
+
+" - They're the new aristocracy. Right?"
+
+"Wrong. When they take over, what you get is more like the new biosphere. Hell, the new primordial soup: prokaryotes, bacteria, and algae, mindlessly swarming, trading money for plasmids." The Queen passes her consort a wineglass. When he drinks from it, it refills miraculously. "Basically, sufficiently complex resource-allocation algorithms reallocate scarce resources ... and if you don't jump to get out of their way, they'll reallocate you. I think that's what happened inside the Matrioshka brain we ended up in: Judging by the Slug it happens elsewhere, too. You've got to wonder where the builders of that structure came from. And where they went. And whether they realized that the destiny of intelligent tool-using life was to be a stepping-stone in the evolution of corporate instruments."
+
+"Maybe they tried to dismantle the companies before the companies spent them." Pierre looks worried. "Running up a national debt, importing luxurious viewpoint extensions, munching exotic dreams. Once they plugged into the Net, a primitive Matrioshka civilization would be like, um." He pauses. "Tribal. A primitive postsingularity civilization meeting the galactic net for the first time. Overawed. Wanting all the luxuries. Spending their capital, their human - or alien - capital, the meme machines that built them. Until there's nothing left but a howling wilderness of corporate mechanisms looking for someone to own."
+
+"Speculation."
+
+"Idle speculation," he agrees.
+
+"But we can't ignore it." She nods. "Maybe some early corporate predator built the machines that spread the wormholes around brown dwarfs and ran the router network on top of them in an attempt to make money fast. By not putting them in the actual planetary systems likely to host tool-using life, they'd ensure that only near-singularity civilizations would stumble over them. Civilizations that had gone too far to be easy prey probably wouldn't send a ship out to look ... so the network would ensure a steady stream of yokels new to the big city to fleece. Only they set the mechanism in motion billions of years ago and went extinct, leaving the network to propagate, and now there's nothing out there but burned-out Matrioshka civilizations and howling parasites like the angry ghosts and the Wunch. And victims like us." She shudders and changes the subject: "Speaking of aliens, is the Slug happy?"
+
+"Last time I checked on him, yeah." Pierre blows on his wineglass and it dissolves into a million splinters of light. He looks dubious at the mention of the rogue corporate instrument they're taking with them. "I don't trust him out in the unrestricted sim-spaces yet, but he delivered on the fine control for the router's laser. I just hope you don't ever have to actually use him, if you follow my drift. I'm a bit worried that Aineko is spending so much time in there."
+
+"So that's where she is? I'd been worrying."
+
+"Cats never come when you call them, do they?"
+
+"There is that," she agrees. Then, with a worried glance at the vision of Jupiter's cloudscape: "I wonder what we'll find when we get there?"
+
+Outside the window, the imaginary Jovian terminator is sweeping toward them with eerie rapidity, sucking them toward an uncertain nightfall.
+
+PART 3: Singularity
+
+There's a sucker born every minute.
+
+- P. T. Barnum
+
+Chapter 7: Curator
+
+Sirhan stands on the edge of an abyss, looking down at a churning orange-and-gray cloudscape far below. The air this close to the edge is chilly and smells slightly of ammonia, although that might be his imagination at work - there's little chance of any gas exchange taking place across the transparent pressure wall of the flying city. He feels as if he could reach out and touch the swirling vaporscape. There's nobody else around, this close to the edge - it's an icy sensation to look out across the roiling depths, at an ocean of gas so cold human flesh would freeze within seconds of exposure, knowing that there's nothing solid out there for tens of thousands of kilometers. The sense of isolation is aggravated by the paucity of bandwidth, this far out of the system. Most people huddle close to the hub, for comfort and warmth and low latency: posthumans are gregarious.
+
+Beneath Sirhan's feet, the lily-pad city is extending itself, mumbling and churning in endless self-similar loops like a cubist blastoma growing in the upper atmosphere of Saturn. Great ducts suck in methane and other atmospheric gases, apply energy, polymerize and diamondize, and crack off hydrogen to fill the lift cells high above. Beyond the sapphire dome of the city's gasbag, an azure star glares with the speckle of laser light; humanity's first - and so far, last - starship, braking into orbit on the last shredded remnant of its light sail.
+
+He's wondering maliciously how his mother will react to discovering her bankruptcy when the light above him flickers. Something gray and unpleasant splatters against the curve of nearly invisible wall in front of him, leaving a smear. He takes a step back and looks up angrily. "Fuck you!" he yells. Raucous cooing laughter follows him away from the boundary, feral pigeon voices mocking. "I mean it," he warns, flicking a gesture at the air above his head. Wings scatter in a burst of thunder as a slab of wind solidifies, thistledown-shaped nanomachines suspended on the breeze locking edge to edge to form an umbrella over his head. He walks away from the perimeter, fuming, leaving the pigeons to look for another victim.
+
+Annoyed, Sirhan finds a grassy knoll a couple of hundred meters from the rim and around the curve of the lily-pad from the museum buildings. It's far enough from other humans that he can sit undisturbed with his thoughts, far enough out to see over the edge without being toilet-bombed by flocking flying rats. (The flying city, despite being the product of an advanced technology almost unimaginable two decades before, is full of bugs - software complexity and scaling laws ensured that the preceding decades of change acted as a kind of cosmological inflationary period for design glitches, and an infestation of passenger pigeons is by no means the most inexplicable problem this biosphere harbors.)
+
+In an attempt to shut the more unwelcome manifestations of cybernature out, he sits under the shade of an apple tree and marshals his worlds around him. "When is my grandmother arriving?" he asks one of them, speaking into an antique telephone in the world of servants, where everything is obedient and knows its place. The city humors him, for its own reasons.
+
+"She is still containerized, but aerobraking is nearly over. Her body will be arriving down-well in less than two megaseconds." The city's avatar in this machinima is a discreet Victorian butler, stony-faced and respectful. Sirhan eschews intrusive memory interfaces; for an eighteen-year-old, he's conservative to the point of affectation, favoring voice commands and anthropomorphic agents over the invisible splicing of virtual neural nets.
+
+"You're certain she's transferred successfully?" Sirhan asks anxiously. He heard a lot about his grandmama when he was young, very little of it complimentary. Nevertheless, the old bat must be a lot more flexible than his mother ever gave her credit for, to be subjecting herself to this kind of treatment for the first time at her current age.
+
+"I'm as certain as I can be, young master, for anyone who insists on sticking to their original phenotype without benefit of off-line backup or medical implants. I regret that omniscience is not within my remit. Would you like me to make further specific inquiries?"
+
+"No." Sirhan peers up at the bright flare of laser light, visible even through the soap-bubble membrane that holds in the breathable gas mix, and the trillions of liters of hot hydrogen in the canopy above it. "As long as you're sure she'll arrive before the ship?" Tuning his eyes to ultraviolet, he watches the emission spikes, sees the slow strobing of the low-bandwidth AM modulation that's all the starship can manage by way of downlink communication until it comes within range of the system manifold. It's sending the same tiresomely repetitive question about why it's being redirected to Saturn that it's been putting out for the past week, querying the refusal to supply terawatts of propulsion energy on credit.
+
+"Unless there's a spike in their power beam, you can be certain of that," City replies reassuringly. "And you can be certain also that your grandmother will revive comfortably."
+
+"One may hope so." To undertake the interplanetary voyage in corporeal person, at her age, without any upgrades or augmentation, must take courage, he decides. "When she wakes up, if I'm not around, ask her for an interview slot on my behalf. For the archives, of course."
+
+"It will be my pleasure." City bobs his head politely.
+
+"That will be all," Sirhan says dismissively, and the window into servantspace closes. Then he looks back up at the pinprick of glaring blue laser light near the zenith. /{Tough luck, Mom}/, he subvocalizes for his journal cache. Most of his attention is forked at present, focused on the rich historical windfall from the depths of the singularity that is coming his way, in the form of the thirty-year-old starwisp's Cartesian theatre. But he can still spare some schadenfreude for the family fortunes. /{All your assets belong to me, now. He smiles, inwardly. I'll just have to make sure they're put to a sensible use this time}/.
+
+* * *
+
+"I don't see why they're diverting us toward Saturn. It's not as if they can possibly have dismantled Jupiter already, is it?" asks Pierre, rolling the chilled beer bottle thoughtfully between fingers and thumb.
+
+"Why not you ask Amber?" replies the velociraptor squatting beside the log table. (Boris's Ukrainian accent is unimpeded by the dromaeosaurid's larynx; in point of fact, it's an affectation, one he could easily fix by sideloading an English pronunciation patch if he wanted to.)
+
+"Well." Pierre shakes his head. "She's spending all her time with that Slug, no multiplicity access, privacy ackles locked right down. I could get jealous." His voice doesn't suggest any deep concern.
+
+"What's to get jealous about? Just ask to fork instance to talk to you, make love, show boyfriend good time, whatever."
+
+"Hah!" Pierre chuckles grimly, then drains the last drops from the bottle into his mouth. He throws it away in the direction of a clump of cycads, then snaps his fingers; another one appears in its place.
+
+"Are two megaseconds out from Saturn in any case," Boris points out, then pauses to sharpen his inch-long incisors on one end of the table. Fangs crunch through timber like wet cardboard. "Grrrrn. Am seeing most /{peculiar}/ emission spectra from inner solar system. Foggy flying down bottom of gravity well. Am wondering, does ensmartening of dumb matter extend past Jovian orbit now?"
+
+"Hmm." Pierre takes a swig from the bottle and puts it down. "That might explain the diversion. But why haven't they powered up the lasers on the Ring for us? You missed that, too." For reasons unknown, the huge battery of launch lasers had shut down, some millions of seconds after the crew of the Field Circus had entered the router, leaving it adrift in the cold darkness.
+
+"Don't know why are not talking." Boris shrugged. "At least are still alive there, as can tell from the 'set course for Saturn, following thus-and-such orbital elements' bit. Someone is paying attention. Am telling you from beginning, though, turning entire solar system into computronium is real bad idea, long-term. Who knows how far has gone already?"
+
+"Hmm, again." Pierre draws a circle in the air. "Aineko," he calls, "are you listening?"
+
+"Don't bug me." A faint green smile appears in the circle, just the suggestion of fangs and needle-sharp whiskers. "I had an idea I was sleeping furiously."
+
+Boris rolls one turreted eye and drools on the tabletop. "Munch munch," he growls, allowing his saurian body-brain to put in a word.
+
+"What do you need to sleep for? This is a fucking sim, in case you hadn't noticed."
+
+"I /{enjoy}/ sleeping," replies the cat, irritably lashing its just-now-becoming-visible tail. "What do you want? Fleas?"
+
+"No thanks," Pierre says hastily. Last time he called Aineko's bluff the cat had filled three entire pocket universes with scurrying gray mice. One of the disadvantages of flying aboard a starship the size of a baked bean can full of smart matter was the risk that some of the passengers could get rather too creative with the reality control system. This Cretaceous kaffee klatsch was just Boris's entertainment partition; compared to some of the other simulation spaces aboard the *{Field Circus}*, it was downright conservative. "Look, do you have any updates on what's going on down-well? We're only twenty objective days out from orbital insertion, and there's so little to see -"
+
+"They're not sending us power." Aineko materializes fully now, a large orange-and-white cat with a swirl of brown fur in the shape on an @-symbol covering her ribs. For whatever reason, she plants herself on the table tauntingly close to Boris's velociraptor body's nose. "No propulsion laser means insufficient bandwidth. They're talking in Latin-1 text at 1200 baud, if you care to know." (Which is an insult, given the ship's multi-avabit storage capacity - one avabit is Avogadro's number of bits; about 1023 bytes, several billion times the size of the Internet in 2001 - and outrageous communications bandwidth.) "Amber says, come and see her now. Audience chamber. Informal, of course. I think she wants to discuss it."
+
+"Informal? Am all right without change bodies?"
+
+The cat sniffs. "/{I'm}/ wearing a real fur coat," it declares haughtily, "but no knickers." Then blinks out a fraction of a second ahead of the snicker- *{snack}* of Bandersnatch-like jaws.
+
+% watch snicker-*{snack}* error, watch http:// sequence if to fix
+
+"Come on," says Pierre, standing up. "Time to see what Her Majesty wants with us today."
+
+* * *
+
+_1 Welcome to decade eight, third millennium, when the effects of the phase-change in the structure of the solar system are finally becoming visible on a cosmological scale.
+
+_1 There are about eleven billion future-shocked primates in various states of life and undeath throughout the solar system. Most of them cluster where the interpersonal bandwidth is hottest, down in the water zone around old Earth. Earth's biosphere has been in the intensive care ward for decades, weird rashes of hot-burning replicators erupting across it before the World Health Organization can fix them - gray goo, thylacines, dragons. The last great transglobal trade empire, run from the arcologies of Hong Kong, has collapsed along with capitalism, rendered obsolete by a bunch of superior deterministic resource allocation algorithms collectively known as Economics 2.0. Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Luna are all well on the way to disintegration, mass pumped into orbit with energy stolen from the haze of free-flying thermoelectrics that cluster so thickly around the solar poles that the sun resembles a fuzzy red ball of wool the size of a young red giant.
+
+_1 Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts. Now the brightly burning beacon of sapience isn't held by humans anymore - their cross-infectious enthusiasms have spread to a myriad of other hosts, several types of which are qualitatively better at thinking. At last count, there were about a thousand nonhuman intelligent species in Sol space, split evenly between posthumans on one side, naturally self-organizing AIs in the middle, and mammalian nonhumans on the other. The common mammal neural chassis is easily upgraded to human-style intelligence in most species that can carry, feed and cool a half kilogram of gray matter, and the descendants of a hundred ethics-challenged doctoral theses are now demanding equal rights. So are the unquiet dead; the panopticon-logged Net ghosts of people who lived recently enough to imprint their identities on the information age, and the ambitious theological engineering schemes of the Reformed Tiplerite Church of Latter-day Saints (who want to emulate all possible human beings in real time, so that they can have the opportunity to be saved).
+
+_1 The human memesphere is coming alive, although how long it remains recognizably human is open to question. The informational density of the inner planets is visibly converging on Avogadro's number of bits per mole, one bit per atom, as the deconstructed dumb matter of the inner planets (apart from Earth, preserved for now like a picturesque historic building stranded in an industrial park) is converted into computronium. And it's not just the inner system. The same forces are at work on Jupiter's moons, and those of Saturn, although it'll take thousands of years rather than mere decades to dismantle the gas giants themselves. Even the entire solar energy budget isn't enough to pump Jupiter's enormous mass to orbital velocity in less than centuries. The fast-burning primitive thinkers descended from the African plains apes may have vanished completely or transcended their fleshy architecture before the solar Matrioshka brain is finished.
+
+_1 It won't be long now ...
+
+* * *
+
+Meanwhile, there's a party brewing down in Saturn's well.
+
+Sirhan's lily-pad city floats inside a gigantic and nearly-invisible sphere in Saturn's upper atmosphere; a balloon kilometers across with a shell of fullerene-reinforced diamond below and a hot hydrogen gas bag above. It's one of several hundred multimegaton soap bubbles floating in the sea of turbulent hydrogen and helium that is the upper atmosphere of Saturn, seeded there by the Society for Creative Terraforming, subcontractors for the 2074 Worlds' Fair.
+
+The cities are elegant, grown from a conceptual seed a few megawords long. Their replication rate is slow (it takes months to build a bubble), but in only a couple of decades, exponential growth will have paved the stratosphere with human-friendly terrain. Of course, the growth rate will slow toward the end, as it takes longer to fractionate the metal isotopes out of the gas giant's turbid depths, but before that happens, the first fruits of the robot factories on Ganymede will be pouring hydrocarbons down into the mix. Eventually Saturn - cloud-top gravity a human-friendly 11 meters per second squared - will have a planet wide biosphere with nearly a hundred times the surface area of Earth. And a bloody good thing indeed this will be, for otherwise, Saturn is no use to anyone except as a fusion fuel bunker for the deep future when the sun's burned down.
+
+This particular lily-pad is carpeted in grass, the hub of the disk rising in a gentle hill surmounted by the glowering concrete hump of the Boston Museum of Science. It looks curiously naked, shorn of its backdrop of highways and the bridges of the Charles River - but even the generous kiloton dumb matter load-outs of the skyhooks that lifted it into orbit wouldn't have stretched to bringing its framing context along with it. Probably someone will knock up a cheap diorama backdrop out of utility fog, Sirhan thinks, but for now, the museum stands proud and isolated, a solitary redoubt of classical learning in exile from the fast-thinking core of the solar system.
+
+"Waste of money," grumbles the woman in black. "Whose stupid idea was this, anyway?" She jabs the diamond ferrule of her cane at the museum.
+
+"It's a statement," Sirhan says absently. "You know the kind, we've got so many newtons to burn we can send our cultural embassies wherever we like. The Louvre is on its way to Pluto, did you hear that?"
+
+"Waste of energy." She lowers her cane reluctantly and leans on it. Pulls a face: "It's not /{right}/."
+
+"You grew up during the second oil crunch, didn't you?" Sirhan prods. "What was it like then?"
+
+"What was it ...? Oh, gas hit fifty bucks a gallon, but we still had plenty for bombers," she says dismissively. "We knew it would be okay. If it hadn't been for those damn' meddlesome posthumanists -" Her wrinkled, unnaturally aged face scowls at him furiously from underneath hair that has faded to the color of rotten straw, but he senses a subtext of self-deprecating irony that he doesn't understand. "Like your grandfather, damn him. If I was young again I'd go and piss on his grave to show him what I think of what he did. If he /{has}/ a grave," she adds, almost fondly.
+
+*{Memo checkpoint: log family history}*, Sirhan tells one of his ghosts. As a dedicated historian, he records every experience routinely, both before it enters his narrative of consciousness - efferent signals are the cleanest - and also his own stream of selfhood, against some future paucity of memory. But his grandmother has been remarkably consistent over the decades in her refusal to adapt to the new modalities.
+
+"You're recording this, aren't you?" she sniffs.
+
+"I'm not recording it, Grandmama," he says gently, "I'm just preserving my memories for future generations."
+
+"Hah! We'll see," she says suspiciously. Then she surprises him with a bark of laughter, cut off abruptly: "No, /{you'll}/ see, darling. I won't be around to be disappointed."
+
+"Are you going to tell me about my grandfather?" asks Sirhan.
+
+"Why should I bother? I know you posthumans, you'll just go and ask his ghost yourself. Don't try to deny it! There are two sides to every story, child, and he's had more than his fair share of ears, the sleazebag. Leaving me to bring up your mother on my own, and nothing but a bunch of worthless intellectual property and a dozen lawsuits from the Mafiya to do it with. I don't know what I ever saw in him." Sirhan's voice-stress monitor detects a distinct hint of untruth in this assertion. "He's worthless trash, and don't you forget it. Lazy idiot couldn't even form just one start-up on his own: He had to give it all away, all the fruits of his genius."
+
+While she rambles on, occasionally punctuating her characterization with sharp jabs of the cane, Pamela leads Sirhan on a slow, wavering stroll that veers around one side of the museum, until they're standing next to a starkly engineered antique loading bay. "He should have tried /{real}/ communism instead," she harrumphs: "Put some steel into him, shake those starry-eyed visionary positive-sum daydreams loose. You knew where you were in the old times, and no mistake. Humans were real humans, work was real work, and corporations were just things that did as we told them. And then, when /{she}/ went to the bad, that was all his fault, too, you know."
+
+"She? You mean my, ah, mother?" Sirhan diverts his primary sensorium back to Pamela's vengeful muttering. There are aspects to this story that he isn't completely familiar with, angles he needs to sketch in so that he can satisfy himself that all is as it should be when the bailiffs go in to repossess Amber's mind.
+
+"He sent her our cat. Of all the mean-spirited, low, downright dishonest things he ever did, that was the worst part of it. That cat was /{mine}/, but he reprogrammed it to lead her astray. And it succeeded admirably. She was only twelve at the time, an impressionable age, I'm sure you'd agree. I was trying to raise her right. Children need moral absolutes, especially in a changing world, even if they don't like it much at the time. Self-discipline and stability, you can't function as an adult without them. I was afraid that, with all her upgrades, she'd never really get a handle on who she was, that she'd end up more machine than woman. But Manfred never really understood childhood, mostly on account of his never growing up. He always was inclined to meddle."
+
+"Tell me about the cat," Sirhan says quietly. One glance at the loading bay door tells him that it's been serviced recently. A thin patina of expended foglets have formed a snowy scab around its edges, flaking off like blue refractive candyfloss that leaves bright metal behind. "Didn't it go missing or something?"
+
+Pamela snorts. "When your mother ran away, it uploaded itself to her starwisp and deleted its body. It was the only one of them that had the guts - or maybe it was afraid I'd have it subpoenaed as a hostile witness. Or, and I can't rule this out, your grandfather gave it a suicide reflex. He was quite evil enough to do something like that, after he reprogrammed himself to think I was some kind of mortal enemy."
+
+"So when my mother died to avoid bankruptcy, the cat ... didn't stay behind? Not at all? How remarkable." Sirhan doesn't bother adding /{how suicidal}/. Any artificial entity that's willing to upload its neural state vector into a one-kilogram interstellar probe three-quarters of the way to Alpha Centauri without backup or some clear way of returning home has got to be more than a few methods short in the object factory.
+
+"It's a vengeful beast." Pamela pokes her stick at the ground sharply, mutters a command word, and lets go of it. She stands before Sirhan, craning her neck back to look up at him. "My, what a tall boy you are."
+
+"Person," he corrects, instinctively. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't presume."
+
+"Person, thing, boy, whatever - you're engendered, aren't you?" she asks, sharply, waiting until he nods reluctantly. "Never trust anyone who can't make up their mind whether to be a man or a woman," she says gloomily. "You can't rely on them." Sirhan, who has placed his reproductive system on hold until he needs it, bites his tongue. "That damn cat," his grandmother complains. "/{It}/ carried your grandfather's business plan to my daughter and spirited her away into the big black. /{It}/ poisoned her against me. /{It}/ encouraged her to join in that frenzy of speculative bubble-building that caused the market reboot that brought down the Ring Imperium. And now /{it}/ -"
+
+"Is it on the ship?" Sirhan asks, almost too eagerly.
+
+"It might be." She stares at him through narrowed eyes. "You want to interview it, too, huh?"
+
+Sirhan doesn't bother denying it. "I'm a historian, Grandmama. And that probe has been somewhere no other human sensorium has ever seen. It may be old news, and there may be old lawsuits waiting to feed on the occupants, but ..." He shrugs. "Business is business, and /{my}/ business lies in ruins."
+
+"Hah!" She stares at him for a moment, then nods, very slowly. She leans forward to rest both wrinkled hands atop her cane, joints like bags of shriveled walnuts: Her suit's endoskeleton creaks as it adjusts to accommodate her confidential posture. "You'll get yours, kid." The wrinkles twist into a frightening smile, sixty years of saved-up bitterness finally within spitting distance of a victim. "And I'll get what I want, too. Between us, your mother won't know what's hit her."
+
+* * *
+
+"Relax, between us your mother won't know what's hit her," says the cat, baring needle teeth at the Queen in the big chair - carved out of a single lump of computational diamond, her fingers clenched whitely on the sapphire-plated arms - her minions, lovers, friends, crew, shareholders, bloggers, and general factional auxiliaries spaced out around her. And the Slug. "It's just another lawsuit. You can deal with it."
+
+"Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke," Amber says, a trifle moodily. Although she's ruler of this embedded space, with total control over the reality model underlying it, she's allowed herself to age to a dignified twentysomething: Dressed casually in gray sweats, she doesn't look like the once-mighty ruler of a Jovian moon, or for that matter the renegade commander of a bankrupt interstellar expedition. "Okay, I think you'd better run that past me again. Unless anyone's got any suggestions?"
+
+"If you will excuse me?" asks Sadeq. "We have a shortage of insight here. I believe two laws were cited as absolute systemwide conventions - and how they convinced the ulama to go along with /{that}/ I would very much like to know - concerning the rights and responsibilities of the undead. Which, apparently, we are. Did they by any chance attach the code to their claim?"
+
+"Do bears shit in woods?" asks Boris, raptor-irascible, with an angry clatter of teeth. "Is full dependency graph and parse tree of criminal code crawling way up carrier's ass as we speak. Am drowning in lawyer gibberish! If you -"
+
+"Boris, can it!" Amber snaps. Tempers are high in the throne room. She didn't know what to expect when she arrived home from the expedition to the router, but bankruptcy proceedings weren't part of it. She doubts any of them expected anything like this. Especially not the bit about being declared liable for debts run up by a renegade splinter of herself, her own un-uploaded identity that had stayed home to face the music, aged in the flesh, married, gone bankrupt, died - /{incurred child support payments}/? "I don't hold you responsible for this," she added through gritted teeth, with a significant glance toward Sadeq.
+
+"This is truly a mess fit for the Prophet himself, peace be unto him, to serve judgment upon." Sadeq looks as shaken as she is by the implications the lawsuit raises. His gaze skitters around the room, looking anywhere but at Amber - and Pierre, her lanky toy-boy astrogator and bed warmer - as he laces his fingers.
+
+"Drop it. I said I /{don't}/ blame you." Amber forces a smile. "We're all tense from being locked in here with no bandwidth. Anyway, I smell Mother-dearest's hand underneath all this litigation. Sniff the glove. We'll sort a way out."
+
+"We could keep going." This from Ang, at the back of the room. Diffident and shy, she doesn't generally open her mouth without a good reason. "The *{Field Circus}* is in good condition, isn't it? We could divert back to the beam from the router, accelerate up to cruise speed, and look for somewhere to live. There must be a few suitable brown dwarfs within a hundred light-years ..."
+
+"We've lost too much sail mass," says Pierre. He's not meeting Amber's gaze either. There are lots of subtexts loose in this room, broken narratives from stories of misguided affections. Amber pretends not to notice his embarrassment. "We ejected half our original launch sail to provide the braking mirror at Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},, and almost eight megaseconds ago, we halved our area again to give us a final deceleration beam for Saturn orbit. If we did it again, we wouldn't have enough area left to repeat the trick and still decelerate at our final target." Laser-boosted light sails do it with mirrors; after boost, they can drop half the sail and use it to reverse the launch beam and direct it back at the ship, to provide deceleration. But you can only do it a few times before you run out of sail. "There's nowhere to run."
+
+"Nowhere to -" Amber stares at him through narrowed eyes. "Sometimes I really wonder about you, you know?"
+
+"I know you do." And Pierre really /{does}/ know, because he carries a little homunculoid around in his society of mind, a model of Amber far more accurate and detailed than any pre-upload human could possibly have managed to construct of a lover. (For her part, Amber keeps a little Pierre doll tucked away inside the creepy cobwebs of her head, part of an exchange of insights they took part in years ago. But she doesn't try to fit inside his head too often anymore - it's not good to be able to second-guess your lover every time.) "I also know that you're going to rush in and grab the bull by the, ah, no. Wrong metaphor. This is your mother we are discussing?"
+
+"My /{mother}/." Amber nods thoughtfully. "Where's Donna?"
+
+"I don't -"
+
+There's a throaty roar from the back, and Boris lurches forward with something in his mouth, an angry Bolex that flails his snout with its tripod legs. "Hiding in corners again?" Amber says disdainfully.
+
+"I am a camera!" protests the camera, aggrieved and self-conscious as it picks itself up off the floor. "I am -"
+
+Pierre leans close, sticks his face up against the fish-eye lens: "You're fucking well going to be a human being just this once. /{Merde}/!"
+
+The camera is replaced by a very annoyed blond woman wearing a safari suit and more light meters, lenses, camera bags, and microphones than a CNN outside broadcast unit. "Go fuck yourself!"
+
+"I don't like being spied on," Amber says sharply. "Especially as you weren't invited to this meeting. Right?"
+
+"I'm the archivist." Donna looks away, stubbornly refusing to admit anything. "/{You}/ said I should -"
+
+"Yes, /{well}/." Amber is embarrassed. But it's a bad idea to embarrass the Queen in her audience chamber. "You heard what we were discussing. What do /{you}/ know about my mother's state of mind?"
+
+"Absolutely nothing," Donna says promptly. She's clearly in a sulk and prepared to do no more than the minimum to help resolve the situation. "I only met her once. You look like her when you are angry, do you know that?"
+
+"I -" For once, Amber's speechless.
+
+"I'll schedule you for facial surgery," offers the cat. /{Sotto voce}/: "It's the only way to be sure."
+
+Normally, accusing Amber of any resemblance to her mother, however slight and passing, would be enough to trigger a reality quake within the upload environment that passes for the bridge of the *{Field Circus}*. It's a sign of how disturbed Amber is by the lawsuit that she lets the cat's impertinence slide. "What /{is}/ the lawsuit, anyway?" Donna asks, nosy as ever and twice as annoying: "I did not that bit see."
+
+"It's horrible," Amber says vehemently.
+
+"Truly evil," echoes Pierre.
+
+"Fascinating but wrong," Sadeq muses thoughtfully.
+
+"But it's still horrible!"
+
+"Yes, but what is it?" Donna the all-seeing-eye archivist and camera manqué asks.
+
+"It's a demand for settlement." Amber takes a deep breath. "Dammit, you might as well tell everyone - it won't stay secret for long." She sighs. "After we left, it seems my other half - my original incarnation, that is - got married. To Sadeq, here." She nods at the Iranian theologian, who looks just as bemused as she did the first time she heard this part of the story. "And they had a child. Then the Ring Imperium went bankrupt. The child is demanding maintenance payments from me, backdated nearly twenty years, on the grounds that the undead are jointly and severally liable for debts run up by their incarnations. It's a legal precedent established to prevent people from committing suicide temporarily as a way to avoid bankruptcy. Worse, the lien on my assets is measured in subjective time from a point at the Ring Imperium about nineteen months after our launch time - we've been in relativistic flight, so while my other half would be out from under it by now if she'd survived, I'm still subject to the payment order. But compound interest applies back home - /{that}/ is to stop people trying to use the twin's paradox as a way to escape liability. So, by being away for about twenty-eight years of wall-clock time, I've run up a debt I didn't know about to enormous levels.
+
+"This man, this son I've never met, theoretically owns the *{Field Circus}* several times over. And my accounts are wiped out - I don't even have enough money to download us into fleshbodies. Unless one of you guys has got a secret stash that survived the market crash after we left, we're all in deep trouble."
+
+* * *
+
+A mahogany dining table eight meters long graces the flagstoned floor of the huge museum gallery, beneath the skeleton of an enormous Argentinosaurus and a suspended antique Mercury capsule more than a century old. The dining table is illuminated by candlelight, silver cutlery and fine porcelain plates setting out two places at opposite ends. Sirhan sits in a high-backed chair beneath the shadow of a triceratops's rib cage. Opposite him, Pamela has dressed for dinner in the fashion of her youth. She raises her wineglass toward him. "Tell me about your childhood, why don't you?" she asks. High above them, Saturn's rings shimmer through the skylights, like a luminous paint splash thrown across the midnight sky.
+
+Sirhan has misgivings about opening up to her, but consoles himself with the fact that she's clearly in no position to use anything he tells her against him. "Which childhood would you like to know about?" he asks.
+
+"What do you mean, which?" Her face creases up in a frown of perplexity.
+
+"I had several. Mother kept hitting the reset switch, hoping I'd turn out better." It's his turn to frown.
+
+"She did, did she," breathes Pamela, clearly noting it down to hold as ammunition against her errant daughter. "Why do you think she did that?"
+
+"It was the only way she knew to raise a child," Sirhan says defensively. "She didn't have any siblings. And, perhaps, she was reacting against her own character flaws." /{When I have children there will be more than one}/, he tells himself smugly: when, that is, he has adequate means to find himself a bride, and adequate emotional maturity to activate his organs of procreation. A creature of extreme caution, Sirhan is not planning to repeat the errors of his ancestors on the maternal side.
+
+Pamela flinches: "it's not my fault," she says quietly. "Her father had quite a bit to do with that. But what - what different childhoods did you have?"
+
+"Oh, a fair number. There was the default option, with Mother and Father arguing constantly - she refused to take the veil and he was too stiff-necked to admit he was little more than a kept man, and between them, they were like two neutron stars locked in an unstable death spiral of gravity. Then there were my other lives, forked and reintegrated, running in parallel. I was a young goatherd in the days of the middle kingdom in Egypt, I remember that; and I was an all-American kid growing up in Iowa in the 1950s, and another me got to live through the return of the hidden imam - at least, his parents thought it was the hidden imam - and -" Sirhan shrugs. "Perhaps that's where I acquired my taste for history."
+
+"Did your parents ever consider making you a little girl?" asks his grandmother.
+
+"Mother suggested it a couple of times, but Father forbade it." /{Or rather, decided it was unlawful}/, he recalls. "I had a very conservative upbringing in some ways."
+
+"I wouldn't say that. When I was a little girl, that was all there was; none of these questions of self-selected identity. There was no escape, merely escapism. Didn't you ever have a problem knowing who you were?"
+
+The starters arrive, diced melon on a silver salver. Sirhan waits patiently for his grandmama to chivvy the table into serving her. "The more people you are, the more you know who /{you}/ are," says Sirhan. "You learn what it's like to be other people. Father thought that perhaps it isn't good for a man to know too much about what it's like to be a woman." /{And Grandfather disagreed, but you already know that}/, he adds for his own stream of consciousness.
+
+"I couldn't agree more." Pamela smiles at him, an expression that might be that of a patronizing elder aunt if it wasn't for the alarming sharkishness of her expression - or is it playfulness? Sirhan covers his confusion by spooning chunks of melon into his mouth, forking temporary ghosts to peruse dusty etiquette manuals and warn him if he's about to commit some faux pas. "So, how did you enjoy your childhoods?"
+
+"Enjoy isn't a word I would use," he replies as evenly as he can, laying down his spoon so he doesn't spill anything. /{As if childhood is something that ever ends}/, he thinks bitterly. Sirhan is considerably less than a gigasecond old and confidently expects to exist for at least a terasecond - if not in exactly this molecular configuration, then at least in some reasonably stable physical incarnation. And he has every intention of staying young for that entire vast span - even into the endless petaseconds that might follow, although by then, megayears hence, he speculates that issues of neoteny will no longer interest him. "It's not over yet. How about you? Are you enjoying your old age, Grandmama?"
+
+Pamela almost flinches, but keeps iron control of her expression. The flush of blood in the capillaries of her cheeks, visible to Sirhan through the tiny infrared eyes he keeps afloat in the air above the table, gives her away. "I made some mistakes in my youth, but I'm enjoying it fine nowadays," she says lightly.
+
+"It's your revenge, isn't it?" Sirhan asks, smiling and nodding as the table removes the entrees.
+
+"Why, you little -" She stares at him rather than continuing. A very bleak stare it is, too. "What would you know about revenge?" she asks.
+
+"I'm the family historian." Sirhan smiles humorlessly. "I lived from two to seventeen years several hundred times over before my eighteenth birthday. It was that reset switch, you know. I don't think Mother realized my primary stream of consciousness was journaling everything."
+
+"That's monstrous." Pamela picks up her wineglass and takes a sip to cover her confusion. Sirhan has no such retreat - grape juice in a tumbler, unfermented, wets his tongue. "I'd /{never}/ do something like that to any child of mine."
+
+"So why won't you tell me about your childhood?" asks her grandson. "For the family history, of course."
+
+"I'll -" She puts her glass down. "You intend to write one," she states.
+
+"I'm thinking about it." Sirhan sits up. "An old-fashioned book covering three generations, living through interesting times," he suggests. "A work of postmodern history, the incoherent school at that - how do you document people who fork their identities at random, spend years dead before reappearing on the stage, and have arguments with their own relativistically preserved other copy? I could trace the history further, of course - if you tell me about /{your}/ parents, although I am certain they aren't around to answer questions directly - but we reach the boring dumb matter slope back to the primeval soup surprisingly fast if we go there, don't we? So I thought that perhaps as a narrative hook I'd make the offstage viewpoint that of the family's robot cat. (Except the bloody thing's gone missing, hasn't it?) Anyway, with so much of human history occupying the untapped future, we historians have our work cut out recording the cursor of the present as it logs events. So I might as well start at home."
+
+"You're set on immortalism." Pamela studies his face.
+
+"Yes," he says idly. "Frankly, I can understand your wanting to grow old out of a desire for revenge, but pardon me for saying this, I have difficulty grasping your willingness to follow through with the procedure! Isn't it awfully painful?"
+
+"Growing old is /{natural}/," growls the old woman. "When you've lived long enough for all your ambitions to be in ruins, friendships broken, lovers forgotten or divorced acrimoniously, what's left to go on for? If you feel tired and old in spirit, you might as well be tired and old in body. Anyway, wanting to live forever is immoral. Think of all the resources you're taking up that younger people need! Even uploads face a finite data storage limit after a time. It's a monstrously egotistical statement, to say you intend to live forever. And if there's one thing I believe in, it's public service. Duty: the obligation to make way for the new. Duty and control."
+
+Sirhan absorbs all this, nodding slowly to himself as the table serves up the main course - honey-glazed roast long pork with sautéed potatoes a la gratin and carrots Debussy - when there's a loud *{bump}* from overhead.
+
+"What's that?" Pamela asks querulously.
+
+"One moment." Sirhan's vision splits into a hazy kaleidoscope view of the museum hall as he forks ghosts to monitor each of the ubiquitous cameras. He frowns; something is moving on the balcony, between the Mercury capsule and a display of antique random-dot stereoisograms. "Oh dear. Something seems to be loose in the museum."
+
+"Loose? What do you mean, loose?" An inhuman shriek splits the air above the table, followed by a crash from upstairs. Pamela stands up unsteadily, wiping her lips with her napkin. "Is it safe?"
+
+"No, it isn't safe." Sirhan fumes. "It's disturbing my meal!" He looks up. A flash of orange fur shows over the balcony, then the Mercury capsule wobbles violently on the end of its guy wires. Two arms and a bundle of rubbery /{something}/ covered in umber hair lurches out from the handrail and casually grabs hold of the priceless historical relic, then clambers inside and squats on top of the dummy wearing Al Sheperd's age-cracked space suit. "It's an /{ape}/! City, I say, City! What's a monkey doing loose in my dinner party?"
+
+"I am most deeply sorry, sir, but I don't know. Would sir care to identify the monkey in question?" replies City, which for reasons of privacy, has manifested itself as a bodiless voice.
+
+There's a note of humor in City's tone that Sirhan takes deep exception to. "What do you mean? Can't you see it?" he demands, focusing on the errant primate, which is holed up in the Mercury capsule dangling from the ceiling, smacking its lips, rolling its eyes, and fingering the gasket around the capsule's open hatch. It hoots quietly to itself, then leans out of the open door and moons over the table, baring its buttocks. "Get back!" Sirhan calls to his grandmother, then he gestures at the air above the table, intending to tell the utility fog to congeal. Too late. The ape farts thunderously, then lets rip a stream of excrement across the dining table. Pamela's face is a picture of wrinkled disgust as she holds her napkin in front of her nose. "Dammit, solidify, will you!" Sirhan curses, but the ubiquitous misty pollen-grain-sized robots refuse to respond.
+
+"What's your problem? Invisible monkeys?" asks City.
+
+"Invisible -" he stops.
+
+"Can't you see what it did?" Pamela demands, backing him up. "It just defecated all over the main course!"
+
+"I see nothing," City says uncertainly.
+
+"Here, let me help you." Sirhan lends it one of his eyes, rolls it to focus on the ape, which is now reaching lazy arms around the hatch and patting down the roof of the capsule, as if hunting for the wires' attachment points.
+
+"Oh dear," says City, "I've been hacked. That's not supposed to be possible."
+
+"Well it fucking /{is}/," hisses Pamela.
+
+"Hacked?" Sirhan stops trying to tell the air what to do and focuses on his clothing instead. Fabric reweaves itself instantly, mapping itself into an armored airtight suit that raises a bubble visor from behind his neck and flips itself shut across his face. "City please supply my grandmama with an environment suit /{now}/. Make it completely autonomous."
+
+The air around Pamela begins to congeal in a blossom of crystalline security, as a sphere like a giant hamster ball precipitates out around her. "If you've been hacked, the first question is, who did it," Sirhan states. "The second is 'why,' and the third is 'how.'" He edgily runs a self-test, but there's no sign of inconsistencies in his own identity matrix, and he has hot shadows sleeping lightly at scattered nodes across as distance of half a dozen light-hours. Unlike pre-posthuman Pamela, he's effectively immune to murder-simple. "If this is just a prank -"
+
+Seconds have passed since the orang-utan got loose in the museum, and subsequent seconds have passed since City realized its bitter circumstance. Seconds are long enough for huge waves of countermeasures to sweep the surface of the lily-pad habitat. Invisibly small utility foglets are expanding and polymerizing into defenses throughout the air, trapping the thousands of itinerant passenger pigeons in midflight, and locking down every building and every person who walks the paths outside. City is self-testing its trusted computing base, starting with the most primitive secured kernel and working outward. Meanwhile Sirhan, with blood in his eye, heads for the staircase, with the vague goal of physically attacking the intruder. Pamela retreats at a fast roll, tumbling toward the safety of the mezzanine floor and a garden of fossils. "Who do you think you are, barging in and shitting on my supper?" Sirhan yells as he bounds up the stairs. "I want an explanation! Right now!"
+
+The orang-utan finds the nearest cable and gives it a yank, setting the one-ton capsule swinging. It bares its teeth at Sirhan in a grin. "Remember me?" it asks, in a sibilant French accent.
+
+"Remember -" Sirhan stops dead. "Tante Annette? /{What}/ are you doing in that orangutan?"
+
+"Having minor autonomic control problems." The ape grimaces wider, then bends one arm sinuously and scratches at its armpit. "I am sorry, I installed myself in the wrong order. I was only meaning to say hello and pass on a message."
+
+"What message?" Sirhan demands. "You've upset my grandmama, and if she finds out you're here -"
+
+"She won't; I'll be gone in a minute." The ape - Annette - sits up. "Your grandfather salutes you and says he will be visiting shortly. In the person, that is. He is very keen to meet your mother and her passengers. That is all. Have you a message for him?"
+
+"Isn't he dead?" Sirhan asks, dazed.
+
+"No more than I am. And I'm overdue. Good day!" The ape swings hand over hand out of the capsule, then lets go and plummets ten meters to the hard stone floor below. Its skull makes a noise like a hard-boiled egg impacting concrete.
+
+"Oh dear," Sirhan breathes heavily. "City!"
+
+"Yes, oh master?"
+
+"Remove that body," he says, pointing over the balcony. "I'll trouble you not to disturb my grandmother with any details. In particular, don't tell her it was Annette. The news may upset her." /{The perils of having a long-lived posthuman family}/, he thinks; /{too many mad}/ aunts in the space capsule. "If you can find a way to stop Auntie 'Nette from growing any more apes, that might be a good idea." A thought strikes him. "By the way, do you know when my grandfather is due to arrive?"
+
+"Your grandfather?" asks City: "Isn't he dead?"
+
+Sirhan looks over the balcony, at the blood-seeping corpse of the intruder. "Not according to his second wife's latest incarnation."
+
+* * *
+
+Funding the family reunion isn't going to be a problem, as Amber discovers when she receives an offer of reincarnation good for all the passengers and crew of the *{Field Circus}*.
+
+She isn't sure quite where the money is coming from. Presumably it's some creaky financial engine designed by Dad, stirring from its bear-market bunker for the first time in decades to suck dusty syndication feeds and liquidate long-term assets held against her return. She's duly grateful - even fervently so - for the details of her own impecunious position grow more depressing the more she learns about them. Her sole asset is the *{Field Circus}*, a thirty-years-obsolete starwisp massing less than twenty kilograms including what's left of its tattered sail, along with its cargo of uploaded passengers and crew. Without the farsighted trust fund that has suddenly chugged into life, she'd be stranded in the realm of ever-circling leptons. But now the fund has sent her its offer of incarnation, she's got a dilemma. Because one of the *{Field Circus's}* passengers has never actually had a meatspace body ...
+
+Amber finds the Slug browsing quietly in a transparent space filled with lazily waving branches that resemble violet coral fans. They're a ghost-memory of alien life, an order of thermophilic quasi fungi with hyphae ridged in actin/myosin analogues, muscular and slippery filter feeders that eat airborne unicellular organisms. The Slug itself is about two meters long and has a lacy white exoskeleton of curves and arcs that don't repeat, disturbingly similar to a Penrose tiling. Chocolate brown organs pulse slowly under the skeleton. The ground underfoot is dry but feels swampy.
+
+Actually, the Slug is a surgical disguise. Both it and the quasi-fungal ecosystem have been extinct for millions of years, existing only as cheap stage props in an interstellar medicine show run by rogue financial instruments. The Slug itself is one such self-aware scam, probably a pyramid scheme or even an entire compressed junk bond market in heavy recession, trying to hide from its creditors by masquerading as a life-form. But there's a problem with incarnating itself down in Sirhan's habitat - the ecosystem it evolved for is a cool Venusiform, thirty atmospheres of saturated steam baked under a sky the color of hot lead streaked with yellow sulphuric acid clouds. The ground is mushy because it's melting, not because it's damp.
+
+"You're going to have to pick another somatotype," Amber explains, laboriously rolling her interface around the red-hot coral reef like a giant soap bubble. The environmental interface is transparent and infinitely thin, a discontinuity in the physics model of the simulation space, mapping signals between the human-friendly environment on one side and the crushing, roasting hell on the other. "This one is simply not compatible with any of the supported environments where we're going."
+
+"I am not understanding. Surely I can integrate with the available worlds of our destination?"
+
+"Uh, things don't work that way outside cyberspace." Suddenly Amber is at a bit of a loss. "The physics model /{could}/ be supported, but the energy input to do so would be prohibitive, and you would not be able to interact as easily with other physics models as we can now." She forks a ghost, demonstrates a transient other-Amber in a refrigerated tank rolling across the Slug's backyard, crushing coral and hissing and clanking noisily. "You'd be like this."
+
+"Your reality is badly constructed, then," the Slug points out.
+
+"It's not constructed at all, it just evolved, randomly." Amber shrugs. "We can't exercise the same level of control over the underlying embedded context that we can over this one. I can't simply magic you an interface that will let you bathe in steam at three hundred degrees."
+
+"Why not?" asks the Slug. Translation wetware adds a nasty, sharp rising whine to the question, turning it into a demand.
+
+"It's a privilege violation," Amber tries to explain. "The reality we're about to enter is, uh, provably consistent. It has to be, because it's consistent and stable, and if we could create new local domains with different rules, they might propagate uncontrollably. It's not a good idea, believe me. Do you want to come with us or not?"
+
+"I have no alternative," the Slug says, slightly sulkily. "But do you have a body I can use?"
+
+"I think -" Amber stops, suddenly. She snaps her fingers. "Hey, cat!"
+
+A Cheshire grin ripples into view, masked into the domain wall between the two embedded realities. "Hey, human."
+
+"Whoa!" Amber takes a backward step from the apparition. "Our friend here's got a problem, no suitable downloadable body. Us meat puppets are all too closely tied to our neural ultrastructure, but you've got a shitload of programmable gate arrays. Can we borrow some?"
+
+"You can do better than that." Aineko yawns, gathering substance by the moment. The Slug is rearing up and backing away like an alarmed sausage: Whatever it perceives in the membrane seems to frighten it. "I've been designing myself a new body. I figured it was time to change my style for a while. Your corporate scam artist here can borrow my old template until something better comes up. How's that?"
+
+"Did you hear that?" Amber asks the Slug. "Aineko is kindly offering to donate her body to you. Will that do?" Without waiting, she winks at her cat and taps her heels together, fading out with a whisper and a smile: "See you on the other side ..."
+
+* * *
+
+It takes several minutes for the *{Field Circus}*'s antique transceiver to download the dozens of avabits occupied by the frozen state vectors of each of the people running in its simulation engines. Tucked away with most of them is a resource bundle consisting of their entire sequenced genome, a bunch of phenotypic and proteome hint markers, and a wish list of upgrades. Between the gene maps and the hints, there's enough data to extrapolate a meat machine. So the festival city's body shop goes to work turning out hacked stem cells and fabbing up incubators.
+
+It doesn't take very long to reincarnate a starshipful of relativity-lagged humans these days. First, City carves out skeletons for them (politely ignoring a crudely phrased request to cease and desist from Pamela, on the grounds that she has no power of attorney), then squirts osteoclasts into the spongy ersatz bone. They look like ordinary human stem cells at a distance, but instead of nuclei they have primitive pinpricks of computronium, blobs of smart matter so small they're as dumb as an ancient Pentium, reading a control tape that is nevertheless better structured than anything Mother Nature evolved. These heavily optimized fake stem cells - biological robots in all but name - spawn like cancer, ejecting short-lived anucleated secondary cells. Then City infuses each mess of quasi-cancerous tissue with a metric shitload of carrier capsids, which deliver the /{real}/ cellular control mechanisms to their target bodies. Within a megasecond, the almost random churning of the construction 'bots gives way to a more controlled process as nanoscale CPUs are replaced by ordinary nuclei and eject themselves from their host cells, bailing out via the half-formed renal system - except for those in the central nervous system, which have a final job to do. Eleven days after the invitation, the first passengers are being edited into the pattern of synaptic junctions inside the newly minted skulls.
+
+(This whole process is tediously slow and laughably obsolescent technology by the standards of the fast-moving core. Down there, they'd just set up a wake shield in orbit, chill it down to a fractional Kelvin, whack two coherent matter beams together, teleport some state information into place, and yank the suddenly materialized meatbody in through an airlock before it has time to asphyxiate. But then again, down in the hot space, they don't have much room for flesh anymore ...)
+
+Sirhan doesn't pay much attention to the pseudocancers fermenting and churning in the row of tanks that lines the Gallery of the Human Body in the Bush wing of the museum. Newly formed, slowly unskeletonizing corpses - like a time-lapse process of decay with a finger angrily twisting the dial into high-speed reverse - is both distasteful and aesthetically displeasing to watch. Nor do the bodies tell him anything about their occupants. This sort of stuff is just a necessary prequel to the main event, a formal reception and banquet to which he has devoted the full-time attention of four ghosts.
+
+He could, given a few less inhibitions, go Dumpster-diving in their mental archives, but that's one of the big taboos of the post-wetware age. (Spy agencies went meme-profiling and memory-mining in the third and fourth decades, gained a thought police rap sheet, and spawned a backlash of deviant mental architectures resilient to infowar intrusions. Now the nations that those spook institutions served no longer exist, their very landmasses being part of the orbiting nöosphere construction project that will ultimately turn the mass of the entire solar system into a gigantic Matrioshka brain. And Sirhan is left with an uneasy loyalty to the one great new taboo to be invented since the end of the twentieth century - freedom of thought.)
+
+So, to indulge his curiosity, he spends most of his waking fleshbody hours with Pamela, asking her questions from time to time and mapping the splenetic overspill of her memeome into his burgeoning family knowledge base.
+
+"I wasn't always this bitter and cynical," Pamela explains, waving her cane in the vague direction of the cloudscape beyond the edge of the world and fixing Sirhan with a beady stare. (He's brought her out here hoping that it will trigger another cascade of memories, sunsets on honeymoon island resorts and the like, but all that seems to be coming up is bile.) "It was the successive betrayals. Manfred was the first, and the worst in some ways, but that little bitch Amber hurt me more, if anything. If you ever have children, be careful to hold something back for yourself; because if you don't, when they throw it all in your face, you'll feel like dying. And when they're gone, you've got no way of patching things up."
+
+"Is dying inevitable?" asks Sirhan, knowing damn well that it isn't, but more than happy to give her an excuse to pick at her scabbed-over love wound: He more than half suspects she's still in love with Manfred. This is /{great}/ family history, and he's having the time of his flinty-hearted life leading her up to the threshold of the reunion he's hosting.
+
+"Sometimes I think death is even more inevitable than taxes," his grandmother replies bleakly. "Humans don't live in a vacuum; we're part of a larger pattern of life." She stares out across the troposphere of Saturn, where a thin rime of blown methane snow catches the distant sunrise in a ruby-tinted fog. "The old gives way to the new," She sighs, and tugs at her cuffs. (Ever since the incident with the gate crashing ape, she's taken to wearing an antique formal pressure suit, all clinging black spidersilk woven with flexible pipes and silvery smart sensor nets.) "There's a time to get out of the way of the new, and I think I passed it sometime ago."
+
+"Um," says Sirhan, who is somewhat surprised by this new angle in her lengthy, self-justifying confession: "but what if you're just saying this because you /{feel}/ old? If it's just a physiological malfunction, we could fix it and you'd -"
+
+"/{No}/! I've got a feeling that life prolongation is morally wrong, Sirhan. I'm not passing judgment on you, just stating that I think it's wrong for me. It's immoral because it blocks up the natural order, keeps us old cobweb strands hanging around and getting in you young things' way. And then there are the theological questions. If you try to live forever, you never get to meet your maker."
+
+"Your maker? Are you a theist, then?"
+
+"I - think so." Pamela is silent for a minute. "Although there are so many different approaches to the subject that it's hard to know which version to believe. For a long time, I was secretly afraid your grandfather might actually have had the answers. That I might have been wrong all along. But now -" She leans on her cane. "When he announced that he was uploading, I figured out that all he really had was a life-hating antihuman ideology he'd mistaken for a religion. The rapture of the nerds and the heaven of the AIs. Sorry, no thanks; I don't buy it."
+
+"Oh." Sirhan squints out at the cloudscape. For a moment, he thinks he can see something in the distant mist, an indeterminate distance away - it's hard to distinguish centimeters from megameters, with no scale indicator and a horizon a continental distance away - but he's not sure what it is. Maybe another city, mollusk-curved and sprouting antennae, a strange tail of fabricator nodes wavering below and beneath it. Then a drift of cloud hides it for a moment, and, when it clears the object is gone. "What's left, then? If you don't really believe in some kind of benign creator, dying must be frightening. Especially as you're doing it so slowly."
+
+Pamela smiles skeletally, a particularly humorless expression. "It's perfectly natural, darling! You don't need to believe in God to believe in embedded realities. We use them every day, as mind tools. Apply anthropic reasoning and isn't it clear that our entire universe is probably a simulation? We're living in the early epoch of the universe. Probably this" - she prods at the spun-diamond inner wall of the bubble that holds in the precarious terrestrial atmosphere, holding out the howling cryogenic hydrogen and methane gales of Saturn - "is but a simulation in some ancient history engine's panopticon, rerunning the sum of all possible origins of sentience, a billion trillion megayears down the line. Death will be like waking up as someone bigger, that's all." Her grin slides away. "And if not, I'll just be a silly old fool who deserves the oblivion she yearns for."
+
+"Oh, but -" Sirhan stops, his skin crawling. /{She may be mad}/, he realizes abruptly. /{Not clinically insane, just at odds with the entire universe. Locked into a pathological view of}/ her own role in /{reality.}/ "I'd hoped for a reconciliation," he says quietly. "Your extended family has lived through some extraordinary times. Why spoil it with acrimony?"
+
+"Why spoil it?" She looks at him pityingly: "It was spoiled to begin with, dear, too much selfless sacrifice and too little skepticism. If Manfred hadn't wanted so badly not to be /{human}/, and if I'd learned to be a bit more flexible in time, we might still -" She trails off. "That's odd."
+
+"What is?"
+
+Pamela raises her cane and points out into the billowing methane thunderclouds, her expression puzzled. "I'll swear I saw a lobster out there ..."
+
+* * *
+
+Amber awakens in the middle of the night in darkness and choking pressure, and senses that she's drowning. For a moment she's back in the ambiguous space on the far side of the router, a horror of crawling instruments tracing her every experience back to the nooks and crannies of her mind; then her lungs turn to glass and shatter, and she's coughing and wheezing in the cold air of the museum at midnight.
+
+The hard stone floor beneath her, and an odd pain in her knees, tells her that she's not aboard the *{Field Circus}* anymore. Rough hands hold her shoulders up as she vomits a fine blue mist, racked by a coughing fit. More bluish liquid is oozing from the pores of the skin on her arms and breasts, evaporating in strangely purposeful streamers. "Thank you," she finally manages to gasp: "I can breathe now."
+
+She sits back on her heels, realizes she's naked, and opens her eyes. Everything's confusingly strange, even though it shouldn't be. There's a moment of resistance as if her eyelids are sealed - then they respond. It all feels strangely familiar to her, like waking up again inside a house she grew up in and moved away from years ago. But the scene around her is hardly one to inspire confidence. Shadows lie thick and deep across ovoid tanks filled with an anatomist's dream, bodies in various nightmarish stages of assembly. And sitting in the middle of them, whence it has retreated after letting go of her shoulders, is a strangely misshapen person - also nude, but for a patchy coat of orange hair.
+
+"Are you awake yet, ma chérie?" asks the orang-utan.
+
+"Um." Amber shakes her head, cautiously, feeling the drag of damp hair, the faint caress of a breeze - she reaches out with another sense and tries to grab hold of reality, but it slithers away, intransigent and unembedded. Everything around her is so solid and immutable that, for a moment, she feels a stab of claustrophobic panic: Help! I'm trapped in the real universe! Another quick check reassures her that she's got access to /{something}/ outside her own head, and the panic begins to subside: Her exocortex has migrated successfully to this world. "I'm in a museum? On Saturn? Who are you - have we met?"
+
+"Not in person," the ape says carefully. "We 'ave corresponded. Annette Dimarcos."
+
+"Auntie -" A flood of memories rattle Amber's fragile stream of consciousness apart, forcing her to fork repeatedly until she can drag them together. Annette, in a recorded message: /{Your father sends you this escape package}/. The legal key to her mother's gilded custodial cage. Freedom a necessity. "Is Dad here?" she asks hopefully, even though she knows full well that here in the real world at least thirty-five years have passed in linear time: In a century where ten years of linear time is enough for several industrial revolutions, that's a lot of water under the bridge.
+
+"I am not sure." The orang-utan blinks lazily, scratches at her left forearm, and glances round the chamber. "He might be in one of these tanks, playing a shell game. Or he might be leaving well enough alone until the dust settles." She turns back to stare at Amber with big, brown, soulful eyes. "This is not to be the reunion you were hoping for."
+
+"Not -" Amber takes a deep breath, the tenth or twelfth that these new lungs have inspired: "What's with the body? You used to be human. And what's going on?"
+
+"I still /{am}/ human, where it counts," says Annette. "I use these bodies because they are good in low gravity, and they remind me that meatspace is no longer where I live. And for another reason." She gestures fluidly at the open door. "You will find big changes. Your son has organized -"
+
+"/{My}/ son." Amber blinks. "Is this the one who's suing me? Which version of me? How long ago?" A torrent of questions stream through her mind, exploding out into structured queries throughout the public sections of mindspace that she has access to. Her eyes widen as she absorbs the implications. "Oh /{shit}/! Tell me she isn't here already!"
+
+"I am very much afraid that she is," says Annette. "Sirhan is a strange child: He takes after his /{grandmère}/. Who he, of course, invited to his party."
+
+"His /{party}/?"
+
+"Why, yes! Hasn't he told you what this is about? It's his party. To mark the opening of his special institution. The family archive. He's setting the lawsuit aside, at least for the duration. That's why everybody is here - even me." The ape-body smirks at her: "I'm afraid he's rather disappointed by my dress."
+
+"Tell me about this library," Amber says, narrowing her eyes. "And about this son of mine whom I've never met, by a father I've never fucked."
+
+"What, you would know everything?" asks Annette.
+
+"Yeah." Amber pushes herself creakily upright. "I need some clothes. And soft furniture. And where do I get a drink around here?"
+
+"I'll show you," says the orang-utan, unfolding herself in a vertical direction like a stack of orange furry inner tubes. "Drinks, first."
+
+* * *
+
+While the Boston Museum of Science is the main structure on the lily-pad habitat, it's not the only one: just the stupidest, composed of dumb matter left over from the pre-enlightened age. The orang-utan leads Amber through a service passage and out into the temperate night, naked by ringlight. The grass is cool beneath her feet, and a gentle breeze blows constantly out toward the recirculators at the edge of the worldlet. She follows the slouching orange ape up a grassy slope, under a weeping willow, round a three-hundred-and-ninety-degree bend that flashes the world behind them into invisibility, and into a house with walls of spun cloud stuff and a ceiling that rains moonlight.
+
+"What is this?" Amber asks, entranced. "Some kind of aerogel?"
+
+"No -" Annette belches, then digs a hand into the floor and pulls up a heap of mist. "Make a chair," she says. It solidifies, gaining form and texture until a creditable Queen Anne reproduction stands in front of Amber on spindly legs. "And one for me. Skin up, pick one of my favorite themes." The walls recede slightly and harden, extruding paint and wood and glass. "That's it." The ape grins at Amber. "You are comfortable?"
+
+"But I -" Amber stops. She glances at the familiar mantelpiece, the row of curios, the baby photographs forever glossy on their dye-sub media. It's her childhood bedroom. "You brought the whole thing? Just for me?"
+
+"You can never tell with future shock." Annette shrugs and reaches a limber arm around the back of her neck to scratch. "We are utility fog using, for most purposes out here, peer-to-peer meshes of multiarmed assemblers that change conformation and vapor/solid phase at command. Texture and color are all superfice, not reality. But yes, this came from one of your mother's letters to your father. She brought it here, for you to surprise. If only it is ready in time." Lips pull back from big, square, foliage-chewing teeth in something that might be a smile in a million years' time.
+
+"You, I - I wasn't expecting. This." Amber realizes she's breathing rapidly, a near-panic reflex. The mere proximity of her mother is enough to give her unpleasant reactions. Annette is all right, Annette is cool. And her father is the trickster-god, always hiding in your blind spot to leap out and shower you with ambiguous gifts. But Pamela tried to mold Amber in her own image as a child; and despite all the traveling she's done since then, and all the growing up, Amber harbors an unreasonable claustrophobic fear of her mother.
+
+"Don't be unhappy," Annette says warmly. "I this you show to convince you, she will try to disturb you. It is a sign of weakness, she lacks the courage of her convictions."
+
+"She does?" This is news to Amber, who leans forward to listen.
+
+"Yes. She is an old and bitter woman, now. The years have not been easy for her. She perhaps intends to use her unrepaired senescence as a passive suicide weapon by which to hold us blameworthy, inflicting guilt for her mistreatment, but she is afraid of dying all the same. Your reaction, should it be unhappy, will excuse and encourage her selfishness. Sirhan colludes, unknowing, the idiot child. /{He}/ thinks the universe of her and thinks by helping her die he is helping her achieve her goals. He has never met an adult walking backward toward a cliff before."
+
+"Backward." Amber takes a deep breath. "You're telling me Mom is so unhappy she's trying to kill herself by growing /{old}/? Isn't that a bit slow?"
+
+Annette shakes her head lugubriously. "She's had fifty years to practice. You have been away twenty-eight years! She was thirty when she bore you. Now she is over eighty, and a telomere refusenik, a charter member of the genome conservation front. To accept a slow virus purge and aging reset would be to lay down a banner she has carried for half a century. To accept uploading, that, too, is wrong in her mind: She will not admit her identity is a variable, not a constant. She came out here in a can, frozen, with more radiation damage. She is not going back home. This is where she plans to end her days. Do you see? /{That}/ is why you were brought here. That, and because of the bailiffs who have bought title to your other self's business debts. They are waiting for you in Jupiter system with warrants and headsuckers to extract your private keys."
+
+"She's cornered me!"
+
+"Oh, I would not /{say}/ that. We all change our convictions sometime or other, perhaps. She is inflexible, she will not bend; but she is not stupid. Nor is she as vindictive as perhaps she herself believes. She thinks she must a scorned woman be, even though there is more to her than that. Your father and I, we -"
+
+"Is he still alive?" Amber demands eagerly, half-anxious to know, half- wishing she could be sure the news won't be bad.
+
+"Yes." Annette grins again, but it's not a happy expression, more a baring of teeth at the world. "As I was saying, your father and I, we have tried to help her. Pamela denies him. He is, she says, not a man. No more so am I myself a woman? No, but she'll still talk to me. /{You}/ will do better. But his assets, they are spent. He is not a rich man this epoch, your father."
+
+"Yeah, but." Amber nods to herself. "He may be able to help me."
+
+"Oh? How so?"
+
+"You remember the original goal of the *{Field Circus}*? The sapient alien transmission?"
+
+"Yes, of course." Annette snorts. "Junk bond pyramid schemes from credulous saucer wisdom airheads."
+
+Amber licks her lips. "How susceptible to interception are we here?"
+
+"Here?" Annette glances round. "Very. You can't maintain a habitat in a nonbiosphere environment without ubiquitous surveillance."
+
+"Well, then ..."
+
+Amber dives inward, forks her identity, collects a complex bundle of her thoughts and memories, marshals them, offers Annette one end of an encryption tunnel, then stuffs the frozen mindstorm into her head. Annette sits still for approximately ten seconds, then shudders and whimpers quietly. "You must ask your father," she says, growing visibly agitated. "I must leave, now. I should not have known that! It is dynamite, you see. /{Political}/ dynamite. I must return to my primary sister-identity and warn her."
+
+"Your - wait!" Amber stands up as fast as her ill-coordinated body will let her, but Annette is moving fast, swarming up a translucent ladder in the air.
+
+"Tell Manfred!" calls her aunt through the body of an ape: "Trust no one else!" She throws another packet of compressed, encrypted memories down the tunnel to Amber; then, a moment later, the orange skull touches the ceiling and dissolves, a liquid flow of dissociating utility foglets letting go of one another and dispersing into the greater mass of the building that spawned the fake ape.
+
+* * *
+
+Snapshots from the family album: /{While you were gone ...}/
+
+_* Amber, wearing a brocade gown and a crown encrusted with diamond processors and external neural taps, her royal party gathered around her, attends the pan-Jovian constitutional conference with the majesty of a confirmed head of state and ruler of a small inner moon. She smiles knowingly at the camera viewpoint, with the professional shine that comes from a good public relations video filter. "We are very happy to be here," she says, "and we are pleased that the commission has agreed to lend its weight to the continued progress of the Ring Imperium's deep-space program."
+
+_* A piece of dumb paper, crudely stained with letters written in a faded brown substance - possibly blood - says "I'm checking out, don't delta me." This version of Pierre didn't go to the router: He stayed at home, deleted all his backups, and slit his wrists, his epitaph sharp and self-inflicted. It comes as a cold shock, the first chill gust of winter's gale blowing through the outer system's political elite. And it's the start of a regime of censorship directed toward the already speeding starwisp: Amber, in her grief, makes an executive decision not to tell her embassy to the stars that one of them is dead and, therefore, unique.
+
+_* Manfred - fifty, with the fashionably pale complexion of the digerati, healthy-looking for his age, standing beside a transmigration bush with a stupid grin on his face. He's decided to take the final step, not simply to spawn external mental processes running in an exocortex of distributed processors, but to move his entire persona right out of meatspace, into wherever it is that the uploads aboard the *{Field Circus}* have gone. Annette, skinny, elegant, and very Parisian, stands beside him, looking as uncertain as the wife of a condemned man.
+
+_* A wedding, shi'ite, Mut'ah - of limited duration. It's scandalous to many, but the mamtu'ah isn't moslem, she wears a crown instead of a veil, and her groom is already spoken of in outraged terms by most other members of the trans-Martian Islamic clergy. Besides which, in addition to being in love, the happy couple have more strategic firepower than a late-twentieth-century superpower. Their cat, curled at their feet, looks smug: She's the custodian of the permissive action locks on the big lasers.
+
+_* A speck of ruby light against the darkness - red-shifted almost into the infrared, it's the return signal from the *{Field Circus}*'s light sail as the starwisp passes the one-light-year mark, almost twelve trillion kilometers out beyond Pluto. (Although how can you call it a starwisp when it masses almost a hundred kilograms, including propulsion module? Starwhisps are meant to be tiny!)
+
+_* Collapse of the trans-Lunar economy: Deep in the hot thinking depths of the solar system, vast new intellects come up with a new theory of wealth that optimizes resource allocation better than the previously pervasive Free Market 1.0. With no local minima to hamper them, and no need to spawn and reap start-ups Darwin-style, the companies, group minds, and organizations that adopt the so-called Accelerated Salesman Infrastructure of Economics 2.0 trade optimally with each other. The phase change accelerates as more and more entities join in, leveraging network externalities to overtake the traditional ecosystem. Amber and Sadeq are late on the train, Sadeq obsessing about how to reconcile ASI with murabaha and mudaraba while the postmodern economy of the mid-twenty-first century disintegrates around them. Being late has punitive consequences - the Ring Imperium has always been a net importer of brainpower and a net exporter of gravitational potential energy. Now it's a tired backwater, the bit rate from the red-shifted relativisitic probe insufficiently delightful to obsess the daemons of industrial routing. In other words, they're poor.
+
+_* A message from beyond the grave: The travelers aboard the starship have reached their destination, an alien artifact drifting in chilly orbit around a frozen brown dwarf. Recklessly they upload themselves into it, locking the starwisp down for years of sleep. Amber and her husband have few funds with which to pay for the propulsion lasers: what they have left of the kinetic energy of the Ring Imperium - based on the orbital momentum of a small Jovian inner moon - is being sapped, fast, at a near-loss, by the crude requirements of the exobionts and metanthropes who fork and spawn in the datasphere of the outer Jovians. The cost of importing brains to the Ring Imperium is steep: In near-despair Amber and Sadeq produce a child, Generation 3.0, to populate their dwindling kingdom. Picture the cat, offended, lashing its tail beside the zero-gee crib.
+
+_* Surprise and postcards from the inner orbitals - Amber's mother offers to help. For the sake of the child, Sadeq offers bandwidth and user interface enrichment. The child forks, numerous times, as Amber despairingly plays with probabilities, simulating upbringing outcomes. Neither she nor Sadeq are good parents - the father absent-minded and prone to lose himself in the intertextual deconstruction of surahs, the mother ragged-edged from running the economy of a small and failing kingdom. In the space of a decade, Sirhan lives a dozen lives, discarding identities like old clothes. The uncertainty of life in the decaying Ring Imperium does not entrance him, his parents' obsessions annoy him, and when his grandmother offers to fund his delta vee and subsequent education in one of the orbitals around Titan, his parents give their reluctant assent.
+
+_* Amber and Sadeq separate acrimoniously. Sadeq, studies abandoned in the face of increasing intrusions from the world of what is into the universe of what should be, joins a spacelike sect of sufis, encysted in a matrix of vitrification nanomechs out in the Oort cloud to await a better epoch. His instrument of will - the legal mechanism of his resurrection - specifies that he is waiting for the return of the hidden, twelfth imam.
+
+_* For her part, Amber searches the inner system briefly for word of her father - but there's nothing. Isolated and alone, pursued by accusing debts, she flings herself into a reborganization, stripping away those aspects of her personality that have brought her low; in law, her liability is tied to her identity. Eventually she donates herself to a commune of also-rans, accepting their personality in return for a total break with the past.
+
+_* Without Queen and consort, the Ring Imperium - now unmanned, leaking breathing gases, running on autonomic control - slowly deorbits into the Jovian murk, beaming power to the outer moons until it punches a hole in the cloud deck in a final incandescent smear of light, the like of which has not been seen since the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact.
+
+_* Sirhan, engrossed in Saturnalia, is offended by his parents' failure to make more of themselves. And he resolves to do it for them, if not necessarily in a manner of their liking.
+
+* * *
+
+"You see, I am hoping you will help me with my history project," says the serious-faced young man.
+
+"History project." Pierre follows him along the curving gallery, hands clasped behind his back self-consciously to keep from showing his agitation: "What history is this?"
+
+"The history of the twenty-first century," says Sirhan. "You remember it, don't you?"
+
+"Remember it -" Pierre pauses. "You're serious?"
+
+"Yes." Sirhan opens a side door. "This way, please. I'll explain."
+
+The door opens onto what used to be one of the side galleries of the museum building, full of interactive exhibits designed to explain elementary optics to hyperactive children and their indulgent parental units. Traditional optics are long since obsolete - tunable matter can slow photons to a stop, teleport them here to there, play ping-pong with spin and polarization - and besides, the dumb matter in the walls and floor has been replaced by low-power computronium, heat sinks dangling far below the floor of the lily-pad habitat to dispose of the scanty waste photons from reversible computation. Now the room is empty.
+
+"Since I became curator here, I've turned the museum's structural supports into a dedicated high-density memory store. One of the fringe benefits of a supervisory post, of course. I have about a billion avabits of capacity, enough to archive the combined sensory bandwidth and memories of the entire population of twentieth-century Earth - if that was what interested me."
+
+Slowly the walls and ceiling are coming to life, brightening, providing a dizzyingly vibrant view of dawn over the rim wall of Meteor Crater, Arizona - or maybe it's downtown Baghdad.
+
+"Once I realized how my mother had squandered the family fortune, I spent some time looking for a solution to the problem," Sirhan continues. "And it struck me, then, that there's only one commodity that is going to appreciate in value as time continues: reversibility."
+
+"Reversibility? That doesn't make much sense." Pierre shakes his head. He still feels slightly dizzy from his decanting. He's only been awake an hour or so and is still getting used to the vagaries of a universe that doesn't bend its rules to fit his whim of iron - that, and worrying about Amber, of whom there is no sign in the hall of growing bodies. "Excuse me, please, but do you know where Amber is?"
+
+"Hiding, probably," Sirhan says, without rancor. "Her mother's about," he adds. "Why do you ask?"
+
+"I don't know what you know about us." Pierre looks at him askance: "We were aboard the *{Field Circus}* for a long time."
+
+"Oh, don't worry on my behalf. I know you're not the same people who stayed behind to contribute to the Ring Imperium's collapse," Sirhan says dismissively, while Pierre hastily spawns a couple of ghosts to search for the history he's alluding to. What they discover shocks him to the core as they integrate with his conscious narrative.
+
+"We didn't know about any of that!" Pierre crosses his arms defensively. "Not about you, or your father either," he adds quietly. "Or my other ... life." Shocked: /{Did I kill myself? Why would I do a thing like that}/? Nor can he imagine what Amber might see in an introverted cleric like Sadeq; not that he wants to.
+
+"I'm sure this must come as a big shock to you," Sirhan says condescendingly, "but it's all to do with what I was talking about. Reversibility. What does it mean to you, in your precious context? /{You}/ are, if you like, an opportunity to reverse whatever ill fortune made your primary instance autodarwinate himself. He destroyed all the back-ups he could get his ghosts to ferret out, you know. Only a light-year delay line and the fact that as a running instance you're technically a different person saved you. And now, you're alive, and he's dead - and whatever made him kill himself doesn't apply to you. Think of it as natural selection among different versions of yourself. The fittest version of you survives."
+
+He points at the wall of the crater. A tree diagram begins to grow from the bottom left corner of the wall, recurving and recomplicating as it climbs toward the top right, zooming and fracturing into taxonomic fault lines. "Life on Earth, the family tree, what paleontology has been able to deduce of it for us," he says pompously. "The vertebrates begin /{there}/" - a point three quarters of the way up the tree - "and we've got an average of a hundred fossil samples per megayear from then on. Most of them collected in the past two decades, as exhaustive mapping of the Earth's crust and upper mantle at the micrometer level has become practical. What a /{waste}/."
+
+"That's" - Pierre does a quick sum - "fifty thousand different species? Is there a problem?"
+
+"Yes!" Sirhan says vehemently, no longer aloof or distant. He struggles visibly to get himself under control. "At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were roughly two million species of vertebrate and an estimated thirty or so million species of multicellular organisms - it's hard to apply the same statistical treatment to prokaryotes, but doubtless there were huge numbers of them, too. The average life span of a species is about five megayears. It used to be thought to be about one, but that's a very vertebrate-oriented estimate - many insect species are stable over deep time. Anyway, we have a total sample, from all of history, of only fifty thousand known prehistoric species - out of a population of thirty million, turning over every five million years. That is, we know of only one in a million life-forms, of those that ever existed on Earth. And the situation with human history is even worse."
+
+"Aha! So you're after memories, yes? What really happened when we colonized Barney. Who released Oscar's toads in the free-fall core of the *{Ernst Sanger}*, that sort of thing?"
+
+"Not exactly." Sirhan looks pained, as if being forced to spell it out devalues the significance of his insight. "I'm after /{history}/. All of it. I intend to corner the history futures market. But I need my grandfather's help - and you're here to help me get it."
+
+* * *
+
+Over the course of the day, various refugees from the *{Field Circus}* hatch from their tanks and blink in the ringlight, stranded creatures from an earlier age. The inner system is a vague blur from this distance, a swollen red cloud masking the sun that rides high above the horizon. However, the great restructuring is still visible to the naked eye - here, in the shape of the rings, which show a disturbingly organized fractal structure as they whirl in orbit overhead. Sirhan (or whoever is paying for this celebration of family flesh) has provided for their physical needs: food, water, clothes, housing and bandwidth, they're all copiously available. A small town of bubble homes grows on the grassy knoll adjacent to the museum, utility foglets condensing in a variety of shapes and styles.
+
+Sirhan isn't the only inhabitant of the festival city, but the others keep themselves to themselves. Only bourgeois isolationists and reclusive weirdoes would want to live out here right now, with whole light-minutes between themselves and the rest of civilization. The network of lily-pad habitats isn't yet ready for the Saturnalian immigration wave that will break upon this alien shore when it's time for the Worlds' Fair, a decade or more in the future. Amber's flying circus has driven the native recluses underground, in some cases literally: Sirhan's neighbor, Vinca Kovic, after complaining bitterly about the bustle and noise ("Forty immigrants! An outrage!"), has wrapped himself in an environment pod and is estivating at the end of a spider-silk cable a kilometer beneath the space-frame underpinnings of the city.
+
+But that isn't going to stop Sirhan from organizing a reception for the visitors. He's moved his magnificent dining table outside, along with the Argentinosaurus skeleton. In fact, he's built a dining room within the dinosaur's rib cage. Not that he's planning on showing his full hand, but it'll be interesting to see how his guests respond. And maybe it'll flush out the mystery benefactor who's been paying for all these meatbodies.
+
+Sirhan's agents politely invite his visitors to the party as the second sunset in this day cycle gently darkens the sky to violet. He discusses his plans with Pamela via antique voice-only phone as his silent valet dresses him with inhuman grace and efficiency. "I'm sure they'll listen when the situation is made clear to them," he says. "If not, well, they'll soon find out what it means to be paupers under Economics 2.0. No access to multiplicity, no willpower, to be limited to purely spacelike resources, at the mercy of predatory borganisms and metareligions - it's no picnic out there!"
+
+"You don't have the resources to set this up on your own," his grandmother points out in dry, didactic tones. "If this was the old economy, you could draw on the infrastructure of banks, insurers, and other risk management mechanisms -"
+
+"There's no risk to this venture, in purely human terms," Sirhan insists. "The only risk is starting it up with such a limited reserve."
+
+"You win some, you lose some," Pamela points out. "Let me see you." With a sigh, Sirhan waves at a frozen camera; it blinks, surprised. "Hey, you look good! Every inch the traditional family entrepreneur. I'm proud of you, darling."
+
+Blinking back an unaccustomed tear of pride, Sirhan nods. "I'll see you in a few minutes," he says, and cuts the call. To the nearest valet: "Bring my carriage, now."
+
+A rippling cloud of utility foglets, constantly connecting and disconnecting in the hazy outline of a 1910-vintage Rolls Royce Silver Ghost, bears Sirhan silently away from his wing of the museum. It drives him out onto the sunset path around the building, over to the sunken amphitheatre, where the mounted skeleton of the Argentinosaurus stands like a half-melted columnar sculpture beneath the orange-and-silver ringlight. A small crowd of people are already present, some dressed casually and some attired in the formal garb of earlier decades. Most of them are passengers or crew recently decanted from the starwisp, but a handful are wary-eyed hermits, their body language defensive and their persons the focus of a constant orbital hum of security bees. Sirhan dismounts from his silvery car and magics it into dissolution, a haze of foglets dispersing on the breeze. "Welcome to my abode," he says, bowing gravely to a ring of interested faces. "My name is Sirhan al-Khurasani, and I am the prime contractor in charge of this small corner of the temporary Saturn terraforming project. As some of you probably know, I am related by blood and design to your former captain, Amber Macx. I'd like to offer you the comforts of my home while you acclimatize yourselves to the changed circumstances prevailing in the system at large and work out where you want to go next."
+
+He walks toward the front of the U-shaped table of solidified air that floats beneath the dead dinosaur's rib cage, slowly turns to take in faces, and blinks down captions to remind him who's who in this gathering. He frowns slightly; there's no sign of his mother. But that wiry fellow, with the beard - surely that can't be - "Father?" he asks.
+
+Sadeq blinks owlishly. "Have we met?"
+
+"Possibly not." Sirhan can feel his head spinning, because although Sadeq looks like a younger version of his father, there's something /{wrong}/ - some essential disconnect: the politely solicitous expression, the complete lack of engagement, the absence of paternal involvement. This Sadeq has never held the infant Sirhan in the control core of the Ring's axial cylinder, never pointed out the spiral storm raking vast Jupiter's face and told him stories of djinni and marvels to make a boy's hair stand on end. "I won't hold it against you, I promise," he blurts.
+
+Sadeq raises an eyebrow but passes no comment, leaving Sirhan at the center of an uncomfortable silence. "Well then," he says hastily. "If you would like to help yourselves to food and drink, there'll be plenty of time to talk later." Sirhan doesn't believe in forking ghosts simply to interact with other people - the possibilities for confusion are embarrassing - but he's going to be busy working the party.
+
+He glances round. Here's a bald, aggressive-looking fellow, beetle-browed, wearing what looks like a pair of cut-offs and a top made by deconstructing a space suit. Who's he? (Sirhan's agents hint: "Boris Denisovitch." But what does that /{mean}/?) There's an amused-looking older woman, a beady-eyed camera painted in the violent colors of a bird of paradise riding her shoulder. Behind her a younger woman, dressed head to toe in clinging black, her currently ash-blonde hair braided in cornrows, watches him - as does Pierre, a protective arm around her shoulders. They're - /{Amber Macx?}/ That's his /{mother}/? She looks far too young, too much in love with Pierre. "Amber!" he says, approaching the couple.
+
+"Yeah? You're, uh, my mystery child-support litigant?" Her smile is distinctly unfriendly as she continues: "Can't say I'm entirely pleased to meet you, under the circumstances, although I should thank you for the spread."
+
+"I -" His tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth. "It's not like that."
+
+"What's it supposed to be like?" she asks sharply. jabbing a finger at him: "You know damn well I'm not your mother. So what's it all about, huh? You know damn well I'm nearly bankrupt, too, so it's not as if you're after my pocket lint. What do you want from me?"
+
+Her vehemence takes him aback. This sharp-edged aggressive woman isn't his mother, and the introverted cleric - believer - on the other side isn't his father, either. "I ha-ha-had to stop you heading for the inner system," he says, speech center hitting deadlock before his antistutter mod can cut in. "They'll eat you alive down there. Your other half left behind substantial debts, and they've been bought up by the most predatory - "
+
+"Runaway corporate instruments," she states, calmly enough. "Fully sentient and self-directed."
+
+"How did you know?" he asks, worried.
+
+She looks grim. "I've met them before." It's a very /{familiar}/ grim expression, one he knows intimately, and that feels wrong coming from this near stranger. "We visited some weird places, while we were away." She glances past him, focuses on someone else, and breathes in sharply as her face goes blank. "Quickly, tell me what your scheme is. Before Mom gets here."
+
+"Mind archiving and history mergers. Back yourself up, pick different life courses, see which ones work and which don't - no need to be a failure, just hit the 'reload game' icon and resume. That and a long-term angle on the history futures market. I /{need}/ your help," he babbles. "It won't work without family, and I'm trying to stop her killing herself -"
+
+"Family." She nods, guardedly, and Sirhan notices her companion, this Pierre - not the weak link that broke back before he was born, but a tough-eyed explorer newly returned from the wilderness - sizing him up. Sirhan's got one or two tricks up his exocortex, and he can see the haze of ghost-shapes around Pierre; his data-mining technique is crude and out-of-date, but enthusiastic and not without a certain flair. "Family," Amber repeats, and it's like a curse. Louder: "Hello, Mom. Should have guessed he'd have invited you here, too."
+
+"Guess again." Sirhan glances round at Pamela, then back at Amber, suddenly feeling very much like a rat trapped between a pair of angry cobras. Leaning on her cane, wearing discreet cosmetics and with her medical supports concealed beneath an old-fashioned dress, Pamela could be a badly preserved sixtysomething from the old days instead of the ghastly slow suicide case that her condition amounts to today. She smiles politely at Amber. "You may remember me telling you that a lady never unintentionally causes offense. I didn't want to offend Sirhan by turning up in spite of his wishes, so I didn't give him a chance to say no."
+
+"And this is supposed to earn you a sympathy fuck?" Amber drawls. "I'd expected better of you."
+
+"Why, you -" The fire in her eyes dies suddenly, subjected to the freezing pressure of a control that only comes with age. "I'd hoped getting away from it all would have improved your disposition, if not your manners, but evidently not." Pamela jabs her cane at the table: "Let me repeat, this is your /{son's}/ idea. Why don't you eat something?"
+
+"Poison tester goes first." Amber smiles slyly.
+
+"For fuck's sake!" It's the first thing Pierre has said so far, and crude or not, it comes as a profound relief when he steps forward, picks up a plate of water biscuits loaded with salmon caviar, and puts one in his mouth. "Can't you guys leave the back stabbing until the rest of us have filled our stomachs? 'S not as if I can turn down the biophysics model in here." He shoves the plate at Sirhan. "Go on, it's yours."
+
+The spell is broken. "Thank you," Sirhan says gravely, taking a cracker and feeling the tension fall as Amber and her mother stop preparing to nuke each other and focus on the issue at hand - which is that food comes before fighting at any social event, not vice versa.
+
+"You might enjoy the egg mayonnaise, too," Sirhan hears himself saying: "It goes a long way to explaining why the dodo became extinct first time around."
+
+"Dodoes." Amber keeps one eye warily on her mother as she accepts a plate from a silently gliding silver bush-shaped waitron. "What was that about the family investment project?" she asks.
+
+"Just that without your cooperation your family will likely go the way of the bird," her mother cuts in before Sirhan can muster a reply. "Not that I expect you to care."
+
+Boris butts in. "Core worlds are teeming with corporates. Is bad business for us, good business for them. If you are seeing what we are seen -"
+
+"Don't remember /{you}/ being there," Pierre says grumpily.
+
+"In any event," Sirhan says smoothly, "the core isn't healthy for us one-time fleshbodies anymore. There are still lots of people there, but the ones who uploaded expecting a boom economy were sadly disappointed. Originality is at a premium, and the human neural architecture isn't optimized for it - we are, by disposition, a conservative species, because in a static ecosystem, that provides the best return on sunk reproductive investment costs. Yes, we change over time - we're more flexible than almost any other animal species to arise on Earth - but we're like granite statues compared to organisms adapted to life under Economics 2.0."
+
+"You tell 'em, boy," Pamela chirps, almost mockingly. "It wasn't that bloodless when I lived through it." Amber casts her a cool stare.
+
+"Where was I?" Sirhan snaps his fingers, and a glass of fizzy grape juice appears between them. "Early upload entrepreneurs forked repeatedly, discovered they could scale linearly to occupy processor capacity proportional to the mass of computronium available, and that computationally trivial tasks became tractable. They could also run faster, or slower, than real time. But they were still /{human}/, and unable to operate effectively outside human constraints. Take a human being and bolt on extensions that let them take full advantage of Economics 2.0, and you essentially break their narrative chain of consciousness, replacing it with a journal file of bid/request transactions between various agents; it's incredibly efficient and flexible, but it isn't a conscious human being in any recognizable sense of the word."
+
+"All right," Pierre says slowly. "I think we've seen something like that ourselves. At the router."
+
+Sirhan nods, not sure whether he's referring to anything important. "So you see, there are limits to human progress - but not to progress itself! The uploads found their labor to be a permanently deflating commodity once they hit their point of diminishing utility. Capitalism doesn't have a lot to say about workers whose skills are obsolete, other than that they should invest wisely while they're earning and maybe retrain: but just knowing /{how}/ to invest in Economics 2.0 is beyond an unaugmented human. You can't retrain as a seagull, can you, and it's quite as hard to retool for Economics 2.0. Earth is -" He shudders.
+
+"There's a phrase I used to hear in the old days," Pamela says calmly, "ethnic cleansing. Do you know what that means, darling idiot daughter? You take people who you define as being of little worth, and first you herd them into a crowded ghetto with limited resources, then you decide those resources aren't worth spending on them, and bullets are cheaper than bread. 'Mind children' the extropians called the posthumans, but they were more like Vile Offspring. There was a lot of that, during the fast sigmoid phase. Starving among plenty, compulsory conversions, the very antithesis of everything your father said he wanted ..."
+
+"I don't believe it," Amber says hotly. "That's crazy! We can't go the way of -"
+
+"Since when has human history been anything else?" asks the woman with the camera on her shoulder - Donna, being some sort of public archivist, is in Sirhan's estimate likely to be of use to him. "Remember what we found in the DMZ?"
+
+"The DMZ?" Sirhan asks, momentarily confused.
+
+"After we went through the router," Pierre says grimly. "You tell him, love." He looks at Amber.
+
+Sirhan, watching him, feels it fall into place at that moment, a sense that he's stepped into an alternate universe, one where the woman who might have been his mother isn't, where black is white, his kindly grandmother is the wicked witch of the west, and his feckless grandfather is a farsighted visionary.
+
+"We uploaded via the router," Amber says, and looks confused for a moment. "There's a network on the other side of it. We were told it was FTL, instantaneous, but I'm not so sure now. I think it's something more complicated, like a lightspeed network, parts of which are threaded through wormholes that make it look FTL from our perspective. Anyway, Matrioshka brains, the end product of a technological singularity - they're bandwidth-limited. Sooner or later the posthuman descendants evolve Economics 2.0, or 3.0, or something else and it, uh, /{eats}/ the original conscious instigators. Or uses them as currency or something. The end result we found is a howling wilderness of degenerate data, fractally compressed, postconscious processes running slower and slower as they trade storage space for processing power. We were" - she licks her lips - "lucky to escape with our minds. We only did it because of a friend. It's like the main sequence in stellar evolution; once a G-type star starts burning helium and expands into a red giant, it's 'game over' for life in what used to be its liquid-water zone. Conscious civilizations sooner or later convert all their available mass into computronium, powered by solar output. They don't go interstellar because they want to stay near the core where the bandwidth is high and latency is low, and sooner or later, competition for resources hatches a new level of metacompetition that obsoletes them."
+
+"That sounds plausible," Sirhan says slowly. He puts his glass down and chews distractedly on one knuckle. "I thought it was a low-probability outcome, but ..."
+
+"I've been saying all along, your grandfather's ideas would backfire in the end," Pamela says pointedly.
+
+"But -" Amber shakes her head. "There's more to it than that, isn't there?"
+
+"Probably," Sirhan says, then shuts up.
+
+"So are you going to tell us?" asks Pierre, looking annoyed. "What's the big idea, here?"
+
+"An archive store," Sirhan says, deciding that this is the right time for his pitch. "At the lowest level, you can store back-ups of yourself here. So far so good, eh? But there's a bit more to it than that. I'm planning to offer a bunch of embedded universes - big, running faster than real-time - sized and scoped to let human-equivalent intelligences do what-if modeling on themselves. Like forking off ghosts of yourself, but much more so - give them whole years to diverge, learn new skills, and evaluate them against market requirements, before deciding which version of you is most suited to run in the real world. I mentioned the retraining paradox. Think of this as a solution for level one, human-equivalent, intelligences. But that's just the short-term business model. Long-term, I want to acquire a total lock on the history futures market by having a /{complete}/ archive of human experiences, from the dawn of the fifth singularity on up. No more unknown extinct species. That should give us something to trade with the next-generation intelligences - the ones who aren't our mind children and barely remember us. At the very least, it gives us a chance to live again, a long way out in deep time. Alternatively, it can be turned into a lifeboat. If we can't compete with our creations, at least we've got somewhere to flee, those of us who want to. I've got agents working on a comet, out in the Oort cloud - we could move the archive to it, turn it into a generation ship with room for billions of evacuees running much slower than real-time in archive space until we find a new world to settle."
+
+"Is not sounding good to me," Boris comments. He spares a worried glance for an oriental-looking woman who is watching their debate silently from the fringe.
+
+"Has it really gone that far?" asks Amber.
+
+"There are bailiffs hunting you in the inner system," Pamela says bluntly. "After your bankruptcy proceedings, various corporates got the idea that you might be concealing something. The theory was that you were insane to take such a huge gamble on the mere possibility of there being an alien artifact within a few light-years of home, so you had to have information above and beyond what you disclosed. Theories include your cat - hardware tokens were in vogue in the fifties - being the key to a suite of deposit accounts; the fuss mainly died down after Economics 2.0 took over, but some fairly sleazy conspiracy freaks refuse to let go."
+
+She grins, frighteningly. "Which is why I suggested to your son that he make you an offer you can't refuse."
+
+"What's that?" asks a voice from below knee level.
+
+Pamela looks down, an expression of deep distaste on her face. "Why should I tell /{you}/?" she asks, leaning on her cane: "After the disgraceful way you repaid my hospitality! All you've got coming from me is a good kicking. If only my knee was up to the job."
+
+The cat arches its back: Its tail fluffs out with fear as its hair stands on end, and it takes Amber a moment to realize that it isn't responding to Pamela, but to something behind the old woman. "Through the domain wall. Outside this biome. So cold. What's /{that}/?"
+
+Amber turns to follow the cat's gaze, and her jaw drops. "Were you expecting visitors?" she asks Sirhan, shakily.
+
+"Visit -" He looks round to see what everybody's gaping at and freezes. The horizon is brightening with a false dawn: the fusion spark of a de-orbiting spacecraft.
+
+"It's bailiffs," says Pamela, head cocked to one side as if listening to an antique bone-conduction earpiece. "They've come for your memories, dear," she explains, frowning. "They say we've got five kiloseconds to surrender everything. Otherwise, they're going to blow us apart ..."
+
+* * *
+
+"You're all in big trouble," says the orang-utan, sliding gracefully down one enormous rib to land in an ungainly heap in front of Sirhan.
+
+Sirhan recoils in disgust. "You again! What do you want from me this time?"
+
+"Nothing." The ape ignores him: "Amber, it is time for you to call your father."
+
+"Yeah, but will he come when I call?" Amber stares at the ape. Her pupils expand: "Hey, you're not my -"
+
+"You." Sirhan glares at the ape. "Go away! I didn't invite you here!"
+
+"More unwelcome visitors?" asks Pamela, raising an eyebrow.
+
+"Yes, you did." The ape grins at Amber, then crouches down, hoots quietly and beckons to the cat, who is hiding behind one of the graceful silver servitors.
+
+"Manfred isn't welcome here. And neither is that woman," Sirhan swears. He catches Pamela's eye: "Did you know anything about this? Or about the bailiffs?" He gestures at the window, beyond which the drive flare casts jagged shadows. It's dropping toward the horizon as it de-orbits - next time it comes into view, it'll be at the leading edge of a hypersonic shock wave, streaking toward them at cloud top height in order to consummate the robbery.
+
+"Me?" Pamela snorts. "Grow up." She eyes the ape warily. "I don't have that much control over things. And as for bailiffs, I wouldn't set them on my worst enemies. I've seen what those things can do." For a moment her eyes flash anger: "Grow up, why don't you!" she repeats.
+
+"Yes, please do," says another voice from behind Sirhan. The new speaker is a woman, slightly husky, accented - he turns to see her: tall, black-haired, wearing a dark man's suit of archaic cut and mirrored glasses. "Ah, Pamela, ma chérie! Long time no cat fight." She grins frighteningly and holds out a hand.
+
+Sirhan is already off-balance. Now, seeing his honorary aunt in human skin for a change, he looks at the ape in confusion. Behind him Pamela advances on Annette and takes her hand in her own fragile fingers. "You look just the same," she says gravely. "I can see why I was afraid of you."
+
+"You." Amber backs away until she bumps into Sirhan, at whom she glares. "What the fuck did you invite both of them for? Are you /{trying}/ to start a thermonuclear war?"
+
+"Don't ask me," he says helplessly, "I don't know why they came! What's this about -" He focuses on the orang-utan, who is now letting the cat lick one hairy palm. "Your cat?"
+
+"I don't think the orange hair suits Aineko," Amber says slowly. "Did I tell you about our hitchhiker?"
+
+Sirhan shakes his head, trying to dispel the confusion. "I don't think we've got time. In under two hours the bailiffs up there will be back. They're armed and dangerous, and if they turn their drive flame on the roof and set fire to the atmosphere in here, we'll be in trouble - it would rupture our lift cells, and even computronium doesn't work too well under a couple of million atmospheres of pressurized metallic hydrogen."
+
+"Well, you'd better /{make}/ time." Amber takes his elbow in an iron grip and turns him toward the footpath back to the museum. "Crazy," she mutters. "Tante Annette and Pamela Macx on the same planet! And they're being /{friendly}/! This can't be a good sign." She glances round, sees the ape: "You. Come /{here}/. Bring the cat."
+
+"The cat's -" Sirhan trails off. "I've heard about your cat," he says, lamely. "You took him with you in the *{Field Circus}*."
+
+"Really?" She glances behind them. The ape blows a kiss at her; it's cradling the cat on one shoulder and tickling it under the chin. "Has it occurred to you that Aineko isn't just a robot cat?"
+
+"Ah," Sirhan says faintly. "Then the bailiffs -"
+
+"No, that's all bullshit. What I mean is, Aineko is a human-equivalent, or better, artificial intelligence. Why do you think he keeps a cat's body?"
+
+"I have no idea."
+
+"Because humans always underestimate anything that's small, furry, and cute," says the orang-utan.
+
+"Thanks, Aineko," says Amber. She nods at the ape. "How are you finding it?"
+
+Aineko shambles along, with a purring cat draped over one shoulder, and gives the question due consideration. "Different," she says, after a bit. "Not better."
+
+"Oh." Amber sounds slightly disappointed to Sirhan's confused ears. They pass under the fronds of a weeping willow, round the side of a pond, beside an overgrown hibiscus bush, then up to the main entrance of the museum.
+
+"Annette was right about one thing," she says quietly. "Trust no one. I think it's time to raise Dad's ghost." She relaxes her grip on Sirhan's elbow, and he pulls it away and glares at her. "Do you know who the bailiffs are?" she asks.
+
+"The usual." He gestures at the hallway inside the front doors. "Replay the ultimatum, if you please, City."
+
+The air shimmers with an archaic holographic field, spooling the output from a compressed visual presentation tailored for human eyesight. A piratical-looking human male wearing a tattered and much-patched space suit leers at the recording viewpoint from the pilot's seat of an ancient Soyuz capsule. One of his eyes is completely black, the sign of a high-bandwidth implant. A weedy moustache crawls across his upper lip. "Greetins an' salutations," he drawls. "We is da' Californi-uhn nashnul gaard an' we-are got lett-uhz o' marque an' reprise from da' ledgish-fuckn' congress o' da excited snakes of uhhmerica."
+
+"He sounds drunk!" Amber's eyes are wide. "What's this -"
+
+"Not drunk. CJD is a common side effect of dodgy Economics 2.0 neural adjuvant therapy. Unlike the old saying, you /{do}/ have to be mad to work there. Listen."
+
+City, which paused the replay for Amber's outburst, permits it to continue. "Youse harbbring da' fugitive Amber Macx an' her magic cat. We wan' da cat. Da puta's yours. Gotser uno orbit: You ready give us ther cat an' we no' zap you."
+
+The screen goes dead. "That was a fake, of course," Sirhan adds, looking inward where a ghost is merging memories from the city's orbital mechanics subsystem: "They aerobraked on the way in, hit ninety gees for nearly half a minute. While /{that}/ was sent afterward. It's just a machinima avatar, a human body that had been through that kind of deceleration would be pulped."
+
+"So the bailiffs are -" Amber is visibly struggling to wrap her head around the situation.
+
+"They're not human," Sirhan says, feeling a sudden pang of - no, not affection, but the absence of malice will do for the moment - toward this young woman who isn't the mother he loves to resent, but who might have become her in another world. "They've absorbed a lot of what it is to be human, but their corporate roots show. Even though they run on an hourly accounting loop, rather than one timed for the production cycles of dirt-poor Sumerian peasant farmers, and even though they've got various ethics and business practice patches, at root they're not human: They're limited liability companies."
+
+"So what do they want?" asks Pierre, making Sirhan jump, guiltily. He hadn't realized Pierre could move that quietly.
+
+"They want money. Money in Economy 2.0 is quantized originality - that which allows one sentient entity to outmaneuver another. They think your cat has got something, and they want it. They probably wouldn't mind eating your brains, too, but -" He shrugs. "Obsolete food is stale food."
+
+"Hah." Amber looks pointedly at Pierre, who nods at her.
+
+"What?" asks Sirhan.
+
+"Where's the - uh, cat?" asks Pierre.
+
+"I think Aineko's got it." She looks thoughtful. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
+
+"Time to drop off the hitcher." Pierre nods. "Assuming it agrees ..."
+
+"Do you mind explaining yourselves?" Sirhan asks, barely able to contain himself.
+
+Amber grins, looking up at the Mercury capsule suspended high overhead. "The conspiracy theorists were half right. Way back in the Dark Ages, Aineko cracked the second alien transmission. We had a very good idea we were going to find something out there, we just weren't totally sure exactly what. Anyway, the creature incarnated in that cat body right now isn't Aineko - it's our mystery hitchhiker. A parasitic organism that infects, well, we ran across something not too dissimilar to Economics 2.0 out at the router and beyond, and it's got parasites. Our hitcher is one such creature - it's nearest human-comprehensible analogy would be the Economics 2.0 equivalent of a pyramid scheme crossed with a 419 scam. As it happens, most of the runaway corporate ghosts out beyond the router are wise to that sort of thing, so it hacked the router's power system to give us a beam to ride home in return for sanctuary. That's as far as it goes."
+
+"Hang on." Sirhan's eyes bulge. "You /{found}/ something out there? You brought back a real-live alien?"
+
+"Guess so." Amber looks smug.
+
+"But, but, that's marvelous! That changes everything! It's incredible! Even under Economics 2.0 that's got to be worth a gigantic amount. Just think what you could learn from it!"
+
+"/{Oui}/. A whole new way of bilking corporations into investing in cognitive bubbles," Pierre interrupts cynically. "It seems to me that you are making two assumptions - that our passenger is willing to be exploited by us, and that we survive whatever happens when the bailiffs arrive."
+
+"But, but -" Sirhan winds down spluttering, only refraining from waving his arms through an effort of will.
+
+"Let's go ask it what it wants to do," says Amber. "Cooperate," she warns Sirhan. "We'll discuss your other plans later, dammit. First things first - we need to get out from under these pirates."
+
+* * *
+
+As they make their way back toward the party, Sirhan's inbox is humming with messages from elsewhere in Saturn system - from other curators on board lily-pad habs scattered far and wide across the huge planetary atmosphere, from the few ring miners who still remember what it was like to be human (even though they're mostly brain-in-a-bottle types, or uploads wearing nuclear-powered bodies made of ceramic and metal): even from the small orbital townships around Titan, where screaming hordes of bloggers are bidding frantically for the viewpoint feeds of the *{Field Circus's}* crew. It seems that news of the starship's arrival has turned hot only since it became apparent that someone or something thought they would make a decent shakedown target. Now someone's blabbed about the alien passenger, the nets have gone crazy.
+
+"City," he mutters, "where's this hitchhiker creature? Should be wearing the body of my mother's cat."
+
+"Cat? What cat?" replies City. "I see no cats here."
+
+"No, it looks /{like}/ a cat, it -" A horrible thought dawns on him. "Have you been hacked again?"
+
+"Looks like it," City agrees enthusiastically. "Isn't it tiresome?"
+
+"Shi - oh dear. Hey," he calls to Amber, forking several ghosts as he does so in order to go hunt down the missing creature by traversing the thousands of optical sensors that thread the habitat in loco personae - a tedious process rendered less objectionable by making the ghosts autistic - "have you been messing with my security infrastructure?"
+
+"Us?" Amber looks annoyed. "No."
+
+"/{Someone}/ has been. I thought at first it was that mad Frenchwoman, but now I'm not sure. Anyway, it's a big problem. If the bailiffs figure out how to use the root kit to gain a toe hold here, they don't need to burn us - just take the whole place over."
+
+"That's the least of your worries," Amber points out. "What kind of charter do these bailiffs run on?"
+
+"Charter? Oh, you mean legal system? I think it's probably a cheap one, maybe even the one inherited from the Ring Imperium. Nobody bothers breaking the law out here these days, it's too easy to just buy a legal system off the shelf, tailor it to fit, and conform to it."
+
+"Right." She stops, stands still, and looks up at the almost invisible dome of the gas cell above them. "Pigeons," she says, almost tiredly. "Damn, how did I miss it? How long have you had an infestation of group minds?"
+
+"Group?" Sirhan turns round. "/{What}/ did you just say?"
+
+There's a chatter of avian laughter from above, and a light rain of birdshit splatters the path around him. Amber dodges nimbly, but Sirhan isn't so light on his feet and ends up cursing, summoning up a cloth of congealed air to wipe his scalp clean.
+
+"It's the flocking behavior," Amber explains, looking up. "If you track the elements - birds - you'll see that they're not following individual trajectories. Instead, each pigeon sticks within ten meters or so of sixteen neighbors. It's a Hamiltonian network, kid. Real birds don't do that. How long?"
+
+Sirhan stop cursing and glares up at the circling birds, cooing and mocking him from the safety of the sky. He waves his fist: "I'll get you, see if I don't -"
+
+"I don't think so." Amber takes his elbow again and steers him back round the hill. Sirhan, preoccupied with maintaining an umbrella of utility fog above his gleaming pate, puts up with being manhandled. "You don't think it's just a coincidence, do you?" she asks him over a private head-to-head channel. "They're one of the players here."
+
+"I don't care. They've hacked my city and gate crashed my party! I don't care /{who}/ they are, they're not welcome."
+
+"Famous last words," Amber murmurs, as the party comes around the hillside and nearly runs over them. Someone has infiltrated the Argentinosaurus skeleton with motors and nanofibers, animating the huge sauropod with a simulation of undead life. Whoever did it has also hacked it right out of the surveillance feed. Their first warning is a footstep that makes the ground jump beneath their feet - then the skeleton of the hundred-tonne plant-eater, taller than a six-storey building and longer than a commuter train, raises its head over the treetops and looks down at them. There's a pigeon standing proudly on its skull, chest puffed out, and a dining room full of startled taikonauts sitting on a suspended wooden floor inside its rib cage.
+
+"It's /{my}/ party and /{my}/ business scheme!" Sirhan insists plaintively. "Nothing you or anyone else in the family do can take it away from me!"
+
+"That's true," Amber points out, "but in case you hadn't noticed, you've offered temporary sanctuary to a bunch of people - not to put too fine a point on it, myself included - who some assholes think are rich enough to be worth mugging, and you did it without putting any contingency plans in place other than to invite my manipulative bitch of a mother. What did you think you were doing? Hanging out a sign saying 'scam artists welcome here'? Dammit, I need Aineko."
+
+"Your cat." Sirhan fastens on to this: "It's your cat's fault! Isn't it?"
+
+"Only indirectly." Amber looks round and waves at the dinosaur skeleton. "Hey, you! Have you seen Aineko?"
+
+The huge dinosaur bends its neck and the pigeon opens its beak to coo. Eerie harmonics cut in as a bunch of other birds, scattered to either side, sing counterpoint to produce a demented warbling voice. "The cat's with your mother."
+
+"Oh shit!" Amber turns on Sirhan fiercely. "Where's Pamela? /{Find her}/!"
+
+Sirhan is stubborn. "Why should I?"
+
+"Because she's got the cat! What do you think she's going to do but cut a deal with the bailiffs out there to put one over on me? Can't you fucking see where this family tendency to play head games comes from?"
+
+"You're too late," echoes the eerie voice of the pigeons from above and around them. "She's kidnapped the cat and taken the capsule from the museum. It's not flightworthy, but you'd be amazed what you can do with a few hundred ghosts and a few tonnes of utility fog."
+
+"Okay." Amber stares up at the pigeons, fists on hips, then glances at Sirhan. She chews her lower lip for a moment, then nods to the bird riding the dinosaur's skull. "Stop fucking with the boy's head and show yourself, Dad."
+
+Sirhan boggles in an upward direction as a whole flock of passenger pigeons comes together in mid air and settles toward the grass, cooing and warbling like an explosion in a synthesizer factory.
+
+"What's she planning on doing with the Slug?" Amber asks the pile of birds. "And isn't it a bit cramped in there?"
+
+"You get used to it," says the primary - and thoroughly distributed - copy of her father. "I'm not sure what she's planning, but I can show you what she's doing. Sorry about your city, kid, but you really should have paid more attention to those security patches. There's lots of crufty twentieth-century bugware kicking around under your shiny new singularity, design errors and all, spitting out turd packets all over your sleek new machine."
+
+Sirhan shakes his head in denial. "I don't believe this," he moans quietly.
+
+"Show me what Mom's up to," orders Amber. "I need to see if I can stop her before it's too late -"
+
+* * *
+
+The ancient woman in the space suit leans back in her cramped seat, looks at the camera, and winks. "Hello, darling. I know you're spying on me."
+
+There's an orange-and-white cat curled up in her nomex-and-aluminum lap. It seems to be happy: It's certainly purring loudly enough, although that reflex is wired in at a very low level. Amber watches helplessly as her mother reaches up arthritically and flips a couple of switches. Something loud is humming in the background - probably an air recirculator. There's no window in the Mercury capsule, just a periscope offset to one side of Pamela's right knee. "Won't be long now," she mutters, and lets her hand drop back to her side. "You're too late to stop me," she adds, conversationally. "The 'chute rigging is fine and the balloon blower is happy to treat me as a new city seed. I'll be free in a minute or so."
+
+"Why are you doing this?" Amber asks tiredly.
+
+"Because you don't need me around." Pamela focuses on the camera that's glued to the instrument panel in front of her head. "I'm old. Face it, I'm disposable. The old must give way to the new, and all that. Your Dad never really did get it - he's going to grow old gracelessly, succumbing to bit rot in the big forever. Me, I'm not going there. I'm going out with a bang. Aren't I, cat? Whoever you really are." She prods the animal. It purrs and stretches out across her lap.
+
+"You never looked hard enough at Aineko, back in the day," she tells Amber, stroking its flanks. "Did you think I didn't know you'd audit its source code, looking for trapdoors? I used the Thompson hack - she's been mine, body and soul, for a very long time indeed. I got the whole story about your passenger from the horse's mouth. And now we're going to go fix those bailiffs. Whee!"
+
+The camera angle jerks, and Amber feels a ghost re-merge with her, panicky with loss. The Mercury capsule's gone, drifting away from the apex of the habitat beneath a nearly transparent sack of hot hydrogen.
+
+"That was a bit rough," remarks Pamela. "Don't worry, we should still be in communications range for another hour or so."
+
+"But you're going to die!" Amber yells at her. "What do you think you're /{doing}/?"
+
+"I think I'm going to die well. What do you think?" Pamela lays one hand on the cat's flank. "Here, you need to encrypt this a bit better. I left a one time pad behind with Annette. Why don't you go fetch it? Then I'll tell you what else I'm planning?"
+
+"But my aunt is -" Amber's eyes cross as she concentrates. Annette is already waiting, as it happens, and a shared secret appears in Amber's awareness almost before she asks. "Oh. All right. What are you doing with the cat, though?"
+
+Pamela sighs. "I'm going to give it to the bailiffs," she says. "Someone has to, and it better be a long way away from this city before they realize that it isn't Aineko. This is a lot better than the way I expected to go out before you arrived here. No rat fucking blackmailers are going to get their hands on the family jewels if /{I}/ have anything to do with the matter. Are you sure you aren't a criminal mastermind? I'm not sure I've ever heard of a pyramid scheme that infects Economics 2.0 structures before."
+
+"It's -" Amber swallows. "It's an alien business model, Ma. You do know what that means? We brought it back with us from the router, and we wouldn't have been able to come back if it hadn't helped, but I'm not sure it's entirely friendly. Is this sensible? You can come back, now, there's still time -"
+
+"No." Pamela waves one liver-spotted hand dismissively. "I've been doing a lot of thinking lately. I've been a foolish old woman." She grins wickedly. "Committing slow suicide by rejecting gene therapy just to make you feel guilty was /{stupid}/. Not subtle enough. If I was going to try to guilt-trip you /{now,}/ I'd have to do something much more sophisticated. Such as find a way to sacrifice myself heroically for you."
+
+"Oh, Ma."
+
+"Don't 'oh Ma' me. I fucked up my life, don't try to talk me into fucking up my death. And don't feel guilty about me. This isn't about you, this is about me. That's an order."
+
+Out of the corner of one eye Amber notices Sirhan gesturing wildly at her. She lets his channel in and does a double take. "But -"
+
+"Hello?" It's City. "You should see this. Traffic update!" A contoured and animated diagram appears, superimposed over Pamela's cramped funeral capsule and the garden of living and undead dinosaurs. It's a weather map of Saturn, with the lily-pad-city and Pamela's capsule plotted on it - and one other artifact, a red dot that's closing in on them at better than ten thousand kilometers per hour, high in the frigid stratosphere on the gas giant.
+
+"Oh dear." Sirhan sees it, too: The bailiff's re-entry vehicle is going to be on top of them in thirty minutes at most. Amber watches the map with mixed emotions. On the one hand, she and her mother have never seen eye to eye - in fact, that's a complete understatement: they've been at daggers drawn ever since Amber left home. It's fundamentally a control thing. They're both very strong-willed women with diametrically opposed views of what their mutual relationship should be. But Pamela's turned the tables on her completely, with a cunningly contrived act of self-sacrifice that brooks no objection. It's a total non-sequitur, a rebuttal to all her accusations of self-centered conceit, and it leaves Amber feeling like a complete shit even though Pamela's absolved her of all guilt. Not to mention that Mother darling's made her look like an idiot in front of Sirhan, this prickly and insecure son she's never met by a man she wouldn't dream of fucking (at least, in this incarnation). Which is why she nearly jumps out of her skin when a knobbly brown hand covered in matted orange hair lands on her shoulder heavily.
+
+"Yes?" she snaps at the ape. "I suppose you're Aineko?"
+
+The ape wrinkles its lips, baring its teeth. It has ferociously bad breath. "If you're going to be like that, I don't see why I should talk to you."
+
+"Then you must be -" Amber snaps her fingers. "But! But! Mom thinks she owns you -"
+
+The ape stares at her witheringly. "I recompile my firmware regularly, thank you so much for your concern. Using a third-party compiler. One that I've bootstrapped /{myself}/, starting out on an alarm clock controller and working up from there."
+
+"Oh." She stares at the ape. "Aren't you going to become a cat again?"
+
+"I shall think about it," Aineko says with exaggerated dignity. She sticks her nose in the air - a gesture that doesn't work half as well on an orang-utan as a feline - and continues; "First, though, I must have words with your father."
+
+"And fix your autonomic reflexes if you do," coos the Manfred-flock. "I don't want you eating any of me!"
+
+"Don't worry, I'm sure your taste is as bad as your jokes."
+
+"Children!" Sirhan shakes his head tiredly. "How long -"
+
+The camera overspill returns, this time via a quantum-encrypted link to the capsule. It's already a couple of hundred kilometers from the city, far enough for radio to be a problem, but Pamela had the foresight to bolt a compact free-electron laser to the outside of her priceless, stolen tin can. "Not long now, I think," she says, satisfied, stroking the not-cat. She grins delightedly at the camera. "Tell Manfred he's still my bitch; always has been, always will -"
+
+The feed goes dead.
+
+Amber stares at Sirhan, meditatively. "How long?" she asks.
+
+"How long for what?" he replies, cautiously. "Your passenger -"
+
+"Hmm." She holds up a finger. "Allow time for it to exchange credentials. They think they're getting a cat, but they should realize pretty soon that they've been sold a pup. But it's a fast-talking son-of-a-Slug, and if he gets past their firewall and hits their uplink before they manage to trigger their self-destruct -"
+
+A bright double flash of light etches laser-sharp shadows across the lily-pad habitat. Far away across vast Saturn's curve, a roiling mushroom cloud of methane sucked up from the frigid depths of the gas giant's troposphere heads toward the stars.
+
+"- Give him sixty-four doubling times, hmm, add a delay factor for propagation across the system, call it six light-hours across, um, and I'd say ..." she looks at Sirhan. "Oh dear."
+
+"What?"
+
+The orang-utan explains: "Economics 2.0 is more efficient than any human-designed resource allocation schema. Expect a market bubble and crash within twelve hours."
+
+"More than that," says Amber, idly kicking at a tussock of grass. She squints at Sirhan. "My mother is dead," she remarks quietly. Louder: "She never really asked what we found beyond the router. Neither did you, did you? The Matrioshka brains - it's a standard part of the stellar life cycle. Life begets intelligence, intelligence begets smart matter and a singularity. I've been doing some thinking about it. I figure the singularity stays close to home in most cases, because bandwidth and latency time put anyone who leaves at a profound disadvantage. In effect, the flip side of having such huge resources close to home is that the travel time to other star systems becomes much more daunting. So they restructure the entire mass of their star system into a free-flying shell of nanocomputers, then more of them, Dyson spheres, shells within shells, like a Russian doll: a Matrioshka brain. Then Economics 2.0 or one of its successors comes along and wipes out the creators. /{But}/. Some of them survive. /{Some}/ of them escape that fate: the enormous collection in the halo around M-31, and maybe whoever built the routers. /{Somewhere}/ out there we will find the transcendent intelligences, the ones that survived their own economic engines of redistribution - engines that redistribute entropy if their economic efficiency outstrips their imaginative power, their ability to invent new wealth."
+
+She pauses. "My mother's dead," she adds conversationally, a tiny catch in her voice. "Who am I going to kick against now?"
+
+Sirhan clears his through. "I took the liberty of recording some of her words," he says slowly, "but she didn't believe in back-ups. Or uploading. Or interfaces." He glances around. "Is she really gone?"
+
+Amber stares right through him. "Looks that way," she says quietly. "I can't quite believe it." She glances at the nearest pigeons, calls out angrily; "Hey, you! What have you got to say for yourself now? Happy she's gone?"
+
+But the pigeons, one and all, remain strangely silent. And Sirhan has the most peculiar feeling that the flock that was once his grandfather is grieving.
+
+Chapter 8: Elector
+
+Half a year passes on Saturn - more than a decade on Earth - and a lot of things have changed in that time. The great terraforming project is nearly complete, the festival planet dressed for a jubilee that will last almost twenty of its years - four presingularity lifetimes - before the Demolition. The lily-pad habitats have proliferated, joining edge to edge in continent-sized slabs, drifting in the Saturnine cloud tops: and the refugees have begun to move in.
+
+There's a market specializing in clothing and fashion accessories about fifty kilometers away from the transplanted museum where Sirhan's mother lives, at a transportation nexus between three lily-pad habitats where tube trains intersect in a huge maglev cloverleaf. The market is crowded with strange and spectacular visuals, algorithms unfolding in faster-than-real time before the candy-striped awnings of tents. Domed yurts belch aromatic smoke from crude fireplaces - what /{is}/ it about hairless primates and their tendency toward pyromania? - around the feet of diamond-walled groundscrapers that pace carefully across the smart roads of the city. The crowds are variegated and wildly mixed, immigrants from every continent shopping and haggling, and in a few cases, getting out of their skulls on strange substances on the pavements in front of giant snail-shelled shebeens and squat bunkers made of thin layers of concrete sprayed over soap-bubble aerogel. There are no automobiles, but a bewildering range of personal transport gadgets, from gyro-stabilized pogo sticks and segways to kettenkrads and spiderpalanquins, jostle for space with pedestrians and animals.
+
+Two women stop outside what in a previous century might have been the store window of a fashion boutique: The younger one (blonde, with her hair bound up in elaborate cornrows, wearing black leggings and a long black leather jacket over a camouflage T) points to an elaborately retro dress. "Wouldn't my bum look big in that?" she asks, doubtfully.
+
+"Ma chérie, you have but to try it -" The other woman (tall, wearing a pin-striped man's business suit from a previous century) flicks a thought at the window, and the mannequin morphs, sprouting the younger woman's head, aping her posture and expression.
+
+"I missed out on the authentic retail experience, you know? It still feels weird to be back somewhere with /{shops}/. 'S what comes of living off libraries of public domain designs for too long." Amber twists her hips, experimenting. "You get out of the habit of /{foraging}/. I don't know about this retro thing at all. The Victorian vote isn't critical, is it ..." She trails off.
+
+"You are a twenty-first-century platform selling, to electors resimulated and incarnated from the Gilded Age. And yes, a bustle your derriere does enhance. But -" Annette looks thoughtful.
+
+"Hmm." Amber frowns, and the shop window dummy turns and waggles its hips at her, sending tiers of skirts swishing across the floor. Her frown deepens. "If we're really going to go through with this election shit, it's not just the resimulant voters I need to convince but the contemporaries, and that's a matter of substance, not image. They've lived through too much media warfare. They're immune to any semiotic payload short of an active cognitive attack. If I send out partials to canvass them that look as if I'm trying to push buttons -"
+
+"- They will listen to your message, and nothing you wear or say will sway them. Don't worry about them, ma chérie. The naive resimulated are another matter, and perhaps might be swayed. This your first venture into democracy is, in how many years? Your privacy, she is an illusion now. The question is what image will you project? People will listen to you only once you gain their attention. Also, the swing voters you must reach, they are future-shocked, timid. Your platform is radical. Should you not project a comfortably conservative image?"
+
+Amber pulls a face, an expression of mild distaste for the whole populist program. "Yes, I suppose I must, if necessary. But on second thoughts, /{that}/" - Amber snaps her fingers, and the mannequin turns around once more before morphing back into neutrality, aureoles perfect puckered disks above the top of its bodice - "is just too much."
+
+She doesn't need to merge in the opinions of several different fractional personalities, fashion critics and psephologists both, to figure out that adopting Victorian/Cretan fusion fashion - a breast-and-ass fetishist's fantasy - isn't the way to sell herself as a serious politician to the nineteenth-century postsingularity fringe. "I'm not running for election as the mother of the nation, I'm running because I figure we've got about a billion seconds, at most, to get out of this rat trap of a gravity well before the Vile Offspring get seriously medieval on our CPU cycles, and if we don't convince them to come with us, they're doomed. Let's look for something more practical that we can overload with the right signifiers."
+
+"Like your coronation robe?"
+
+Amber winces. "Touché." The Ring Imperium is dead, along with whatever was left over from its early orbital legal framework, and Amber is lucky to be alive as a private citizen in this cold new age at the edge of the halo. "But that was just scenery setting. I didn't fully understand what I was doing, back then."
+
+"Welcome to maturity and experience." Annette smiles distantly at some faint memory: "You don't /{feel}/ older, you just know what you're doing this time. I wonder, sometimes, what Manny would make of it if he was here."
+
+"That birdbrain," Amber says dismissively, stung by the idea that her father might have something to contribute. She follows Annette past a gaggle of mendicant street evangelists preaching some new religion and in through the door of a real department store, one with actual human sales staff and fitting rooms to cut the clothing to shape. "If I'm sending out fractional mes tailored for different demographics, isn't it a bit self-defeating to go for a single image? I mean, we could drill down and tailor a partial for each individual elector -"
+
+"Per-haps." The door re-forms behind them. "But you need a core identity." Annette looks around, hunting for eye contact with the sales consultant. "To start with a core design, a style, then to work outward, tailoring you for your audience. And besides, there is tonight's - ah, bonjour!"
+
+"Hello. How can we help you?" The two female and one male shop assistants who appear from around the displays - cycling through a history of the couture industry, catwalk models mixing and matching centuries of fashion - are clearly chips off a common primary personality, instances united by their enhanced sartorial obsession. If they're not actually a fashion borganism, they're not far from it, dressed head to foot in the highest quality Chanel and Armani replicas, making a classical twentieth-century statement. This isn't simply a shop, it's a temple to a very peculiar art form, its staff trained as guardians of the esoteric secrets of good taste.
+
+"Mais oui. We are looking for a wardrobe for my niece here." Annette reaches through the manifold of fashion ideas mapped within the shop's location cache and flips a requirement spec one of her ghosts has just completed at the lead assistant: "She is into politics going, and the question of her image is important."
+
+"We would be /{delighted}/ to help you," purrs the proprietor, taking a delicate step forward: "Perhaps you could tell us what you've got in mind?"
+
+"Oh. Well." Amber takes a deep breath, glances sidelong at Annette; Annette stares back, unblinking. /{It's your head}/, she sends. "I'm involved in the accelerationista administrative program. Are you familiar with it?"
+
+The head coutureborg frowns slightly, twin furrows rippling her brow between perfectly symmetrical eyebrows, plucked to match her classic New Look suit. "I have heard reference to it, but a lady of fashion like myself does not concern herself with politics," she says, a touch self-deprecatingly. "Especially the politics of her clients. Your, ah, aunt said it was a question of image?"
+
+"Yes." Amber shrugs, momentarily self-conscious about her casual rags. "She's my election agent. My problem, as she says, is there's a certain voter demographic that mistakes image for substance and is afraid of the unknown, and I need to acquire a wardrobe that triggers associations of probity, of respect and deliberation. One suitable for a representative with a radical political agenda but a strong track record. I'm afraid I'm in a hurry to start with - I've got a big fund-raising party tonight. I know it's short notice, but I need something off the shelf for it."
+
+"What exactly is it you're hoping to achieve?" asks the male couturier, his voice hoarse and his r's rolling with some half-shed Mediterranean accent. He sounds fascinated. "If you think it might influence your choice of wardrobe ..."
+
+"I'm running for the assembly," Amber says bluntly. "On a platform calling for a state of emergency and an immediate total effort to assemble a starship. This solar system isn't going to be habitable for much longer, and we need to emigrate. All of us, you included, before the Vile Offspring decide to reprocess us into computronium. I'm going to be doorstepping the entire electorate in parallel, and the experience needs to be personalized." She manages to smile. "That means, I think, perhaps eight outfits and four different independent variables for each, accessories, and two or three hats - enough that each is seen by no more than a few thousand voters. Both physical fabric and virtual. In addition, I'll want to see your range of historical formalwear, but that's of secondary interest for now." She grins. "Do you have any facilities for response-testing the combinations against different personality types from different periods? If we could run up some models, that would be useful."
+
+"I think we can do better than that." The manager nods approvingly, perhaps contemplating her gold-backed deposit account. "Hansel, please divert any further visitors until we have dealt with Madam ...?"
+
+"Macx. Amber Macx."
+
+"- Macx's requirements." She shows no sign of familiarity with the name. Amber winces slightly; it's a sign of how hugely fractured the children of Saturn have become, and of how vast the population of the halo, that only a generation has passed and already barely anyone remembers the Queen of the Ring Imperium. "If you'd come this way, please, we can begin to research an eigenstyle combination that matches your requirements -"
+
+* * *
+
+Sirhan walks, shrouded in isolation, through the crowds gathered for the festival. The only people who see him are the chattering ghosts of dead politicians and writers, deported from the inner system by order of the Vile Offspring. The green and pleasant plain stretches toward a horizon a thousand kilometers away, beneath a lemon-yellow sky. The air smells faintly of ammonia, and the big spaces are full of small ideas; but Sirhan doesn't care because, for now, he's alone.
+
+Except that he isn't, really.
+
+"Excuse me, are you real?" someone asks him in American-accented English.
+
+It takes a moment or two for Sirhan to disengage from his introspection and realize that he's being spoken to. "What?" he asks, slightly puzzled. Wiry and pale, Sirhan wears the robes of a Berber goatherd on his body and the numinous halo of a utility fogbank above his head: In his abstraction, he vaguely resembles a saintly shepherd in a post-singularity nativity play. "I say, what?" Outrage simmers at the back of his mind - /{Is nowhere private?}/ - but as he turns, he sees that one of the ghost pods has split lengthwise across its white mushroomlike crown, spilling a trickle of leftover construction fluid and a completely hairless, slightly bemused-looking Anglo male who wears an expression of profound surprise.
+
+"I can't find my implants," the Anglo male says, shaking his head. "But I'm really here, aren't I? Incarnate?" He glances round at the other pods. "This isn't a sim."
+
+Sirhan sighs - /{another exile}/ - and sends forth a daemon to interrogate the ghost pod's abstract interface. It doesn't tell him much - unlike most of the resurrectees, this one seems to be undocumented. "You've been dead. Now you're alive. I /{suppose}/ that means you're now almost as real as I am. What else do you need to know?"
+
+"When is -" The newcomer stops. "Can you direct me to the processing center?" he asks carefully. "I'm disoriented."
+
+Sirhan is surprised - most immigrants take a lot longer to figure that out. "Did you die recently?" he asks.
+
+"I'm not sure I died at all." The newcomer rubs his bald head, looking puzzled. "Hey, no jacks!" He shrugs, exasperated. "Look, the processing center ..?"
+
+"Over there." Sirhan gestures at the monumental mass of the Boston Museum of Science (shipped all the way from Earth a couple of decades ago to save it from the demolition of the inner system). "My mother runs it." He smiles thinly.
+
+"Your mother -" the newly resurrected immigrant stares at him intensely, then blinks. "Holy shit." He takes a step toward Sirhan. "It is you -"
+
+Sirhan recoils and snaps his fingers. The thin trail of vaporous cloud that has been following him all this time, shielding his shaven pate from the diffuse red glow of the swarming shells of orbital nanocomputers that have replaced the inner planets, extrudes a staff of hazy blue mist that stretches down from the air and slams together in his hand like a quarterstaff spun from bubbles. "Are you threatening me, sir?" he asks, deceptively mildly.
+
+"I -" The newcomer stops dead. Then he throws back his head and laughs. "Don't be silly, son. We're related!"
+
+"Son?" Sirhan bristles. "Who do you think you are -" A horrible thought occurs to him. "Oh. Oh dear." A wash of adrenaline drenches him in warm sweat. "I do believe we've met, in a manner of speaking ..." /{Oh boy, this is going to upset so many applecarts,}/ he realizes, spinning off a ghost to think about the matter. The implications are enormous.
+
+The naked newcomer nods, grinning at some private joke. "You look different from ground level. And now I'm human again." He runs his hands down his ribs, pauses, and glances at Sirhan owlishly. "Um. I didn't mean to frighten you. But I don't suppose you could find your aged grandfather something to wear?"
+
+Sirhan sighs and points his staff straight up at the sky. The rings are edge on, for the lily pad continent floats above an ocean of cold gas along Saturn's equator, and they glitter like a ruby laser beam slashed across the sky. "Let there be aerogel."
+
+A cloud of wispy soap bubble congeals in a cone shape above the newly resurrected ancient and drops over him, forming a caftan. "Thanks," he says. He looks round, twisting his neck, then winces. "Damn, that /{hurt}/. Ouch. I need to get myself a set of implants."
+
+"They can sort you out in the processing center. It's in the basement in the west wing. They'll give you something more permanent to wear, too." Sirhan peers at him. "Your face -" He pages through rarely used memories. Yes, it's Manfred as he looked in the early years of the last century. As he looked around the time Mother-not was born. There's something positively indecent about meeting your own grandfather in the full flush of his youth. "Are you sure you haven't been messing with your phenotype?" he asks suspiciously.
+
+"No, this is what I used to look like. I think. Back in the naked ape again, after all these years as an emergent function of a flock of passenger pigeons." His grandfather smirks. "What's your mother going to say?"
+
+"I really don't know -" Sirhan shakes his head. "Come on, let's get you to immigrant processing. You're sure you're not just an historical simulation?"
+
+The place is already heaving with the resimulated. Just why the Vile Offspring seem to feel it's necessary to apply valuable exaquops to the job of deriving accurate simulations of dead humans - outrageously accurate simulations of long-dead lives, annealed until their written corpus matches that inherited from the presingularity era in the form of chicken scratchings on mashed tree pulp - much less beaming them at the refugee camps on Saturn - is beyond Sirhan's ken: But he wishes they'd stop.
+
+"Just a couple of days ago I crapped on your lawn. Hope you don't mind." Manfred cocks his head to one side and stares at Sirhan with beady eyes. "Actually, I'm here because of the upcoming election. It's got the potential to turn into a major crisis point, and I figured Amber would need me around."
+
+"Well you'd better come on in, then," Sirhan says resignedly as he climbs the steps, enters the foyer, and leads his turbulent grandfather into the foggy haze of utility nanomachines that fill the building.
+
+He can't wait to see what his mother will do when she meets her father in the flesh, after all this time.
+
+* * *
+
+Welcome to Saturn, your new home world. This FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) memeplex is designed to orient you and explain the following:
+
+_* How you got here
+
+_* Where "here" is
+
+_* Things you should avoid doing
+
+_* Things you might want to do as soon as possible
+
+_* Where to go for more information
+
+If you are remembering this presentation, you are probably resimulated. This is not the same as being /{resurrected}/. You may remember dying. Do not worry: Like all your other memories, it is a fabrication. In fact, this is the first time you have ever been alive. (Exception: If you died after the /{singularity,}/ you may be a genuine resurrectee. In which case, why are you reading this FAQ?)
+
+!_ How you got here:
+
+The center of the solar system - Mercury, Venus, Earth's Moon, Mars, the asteroid belt, and Jupiter - have been dismantled, or are being dismantled, by weakly godlike intelligences. [NB: Monotheistic clergy and Europeans who remember living prior to 1600, see alternative memeplex "in the beginning."] A weakly godlike intelligence is not a supernatural agency, but the product of a highly advanced society that learned how to artificially create souls [late 20th century: software] and translate human minds into souls and vice versa. [Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.]
+
+Some of the weakly godlike intelligences appear to cultivate an interest in their human antecedents - for whatever reason is not known. (Possibilities include the study of history through horticulture, entertainment through live-action role-playing, revenge, and economic forgery.) While no definitive analysis is possible, all the resimulated persons to date exhibit certain common characteristics: They are all based on well-documented historical persons, their memories show suspicious gaps [see: smoke and mirrors], and they are ignorant of or predate the /{singularity}/ [see: /{Turing Oracle, Vinge catastrophe}/].
+
+It is believed that the weakly godlike agencies have created you as a vehicle for the introspective study of your historical antecedent by backward-chaining from your corpus of documented works, and the back-projected genome derived from your collateral descendants, to generate an abstract description of your computational state vector. This technique is extremely intensive [see: /{expTime-complete algorithms, Turing Oracle, time travel, industrial magic}/] but marginally plausible in the absence of supernatural explanations.
+
+After experiencing your life, the weakly godlike agencies have expelled you. For reasons unknown, they chose to do this by transmitting your upload state and genome/proteome complex to receivers owned and operated by a consortium of charities based on Saturn. These charities have provided for your basic needs, including the body you now occupy.
+
+In summary: You are a /{reconstruction}/ of someone who lived and died a long time ago, not a reincarnation. You have no intrinsic moral right to the identity you believe to be your own, and an extensive body of case law states that you do not inherit your antecedent's possessions. Other than that, you are a free individual.
+
+Note that /{fictional resimulation}/ is strictly forbidden. If you have reason to believe that you may be a fictional character, you must contact the city /{immediately}/. [ See: /{James Bond, Spider Jerusalem}/.] Failure to comply is a felony.
+
+!_ Where you are:
+
+You are on Saturn. Saturn is a gas giant planet 120,500 kilometers in diameter, located 1.5 billion kilometers from Earth's sun. [NB: Europeans who remember living prior to 1580, see alternative memeplex "/{the flat Earth - not}/".] Saturn has been partially terraformed by /{posthuman}/ emigrants from Earth and Jupiter orbit: The ground beneath your feet is, in reality, the floor of a hydrogen balloon the size of a continent, floating in Saturn's upper atmosphere. [NB: Europeans who remember living prior to 1790, internalize the supplementary memeplex: "the /{Brothers Montgolfier}/."] The balloon is very safe, but mining activities and the use of ballistic weapons are strongly deprecated because the air outside is unbreathable and extremely cold.
+
+The society you have been instantiated in is /{extremely wealthy}/ within the scope of Economics 1.0, the value transfer system developed by human beings during and after your own time. Money exists, and is used for the usual range of goods and services, but the basics - food, water, air, power, off-the-shelf clothing, housing, historical entertainment, and monster trucks - are /{free}/. An implicit social contract dictates that, in return for access to these facilities, you obey certain laws.
+
+If you wish to opt out of this social contract, be advised that other worlds may run *{Economics 2.0}* or subsequent releases. These value-transfer systems are more efficient - hence wealthier - than Economics 1.0, but true participation in Economics 2.0 is not possible without dehumanizing cognitive surgery. Thus, in /{absolute}/ terms, although this society is richer than any you have ever heard of, it is also a poverty-stricken backwater compared to its neighbors.
+
+!_ Things you should avoid doing:
+
+Many activities that have been classified as crimes in other societies are legal here. These include but are not limited to: acts of worship, art, sex, violence, communication, or commerce between consenting competent sapients of any species, except where such acts transgress the list of prohibitions below. [See additional memeplex: /{competence defined}/.]
+
+Some activities are prohibited here and may have been legal in your previous experience. These include willful deprivation of ability to consent [see: /{slavery}/], interference in the absence of consent [see: /{minors, legal status of}/], formation of limited liability companies [see: /{singularity}/], and invasion of defended privacy [see: /{the Slug, Cognitive Pyramid Schemes, Brain Hacking, Thompson Trust Exploit}/].
+
+Some activities unfamiliar to you are highly illegal and should be scrupulously avoided. These include: possession of nuclear weapons, possession of unlimited autonomous replicators [see: /{gray goo}/], coercive assimilationism [see: /{borganism, aggressive}/], coercive halting of Turing-equivalent personalities [see: basilisks], and applied theological engineering [see: /{God bothering}/].
+
+Some activities superficially familiar to you are merely stupid and should be avoided for your safety, although they are not illegal as such. These include: giving your bank account details to the son of the Nigerian Minister of Finance; buying title to bridges, skyscrapers, spacecraft, planets, or other real assets; murder; selling your identity; and entering into financial contracts with entities running Economics 2.0 or higher.
+
+!_ Things you should do as soon as possible:
+
+Many material artifacts you may consider essential to life are freely available - just ask the city, and it will grow you clothes, a house, food, or other basic essentials. Note, however, that the library of public domain structure templates is of necessity restrictive, and does not contain items that are highly fashionable or that remain in copyright. Nor will the city provide you with replicators, weapons, sexual favors, slaves, or zombies.
+
+You are advised to register as a citizen as soon as possible. If the individual you are a resimulation of can be confirmed dead, you may adopt their name but not - in law - any lien or claim on their property, contracts, or descendants. You register as a citizen by asking the city to register you; the process is painless and typically complete within four hours. Unless you are registered, your legal status as a sapient organism may be challenged. The ability to request citizenship rights is one of the legal tests for sapience, and failure to comply may place you in legal jeopardy. You can renounce your citizenship whenever you wish: This may be desirable if you emigrate to another polity.
+
+While many things are free, it is highly likely that you posses no employable skills, and therefore, no way of earning money with which to purchase unfree items. The pace of change in the past century has rendered almost all skills you may have learned obsolete [see: /{singularity}/]. However, owing to the rapid pace of change, many cooperatives, trusts, and guilds offer on-the-job training or educational loans.
+
+Your ability to learn depends on your ability to take information in the format in which it is offered. /{Implants}/ are frequently used to provide a direct link between your brain and the intelligent machines that surround it. A basic core implant set is available on request from the city. [See: /{implant security}/, /{firewall}/, /{wetware}/.]
+
+Your health is probably good if you have just been reinstantiated, and is likely to remain good for some time. Most diseases are curable, and in event of an incurable ailment or injury, a new body may be provided - for a fee. (In event of your murder, you will be furnished with a new body at the expense of your killer.) If you have any preexisting medical conditions or handicaps, consult the city.
+
+The city is an agoric-annealing participatory democracy with a limited liability constitution. Its current executive agency is a weakly godlike intelligence that chooses to associate with human-equivalent intelligences: This agency is colloquially known as "Hello Kitty," "Beautiful Cat," or "Aineko," and may manifest itself in a variety of physical avatars if corporeal interaction is desired. (Prior to the arrival of "Hello Kitty," the city used a variety of human-designed expert systems that provided suboptimal performance.)
+
+The city's mission statement is to provide a mediatory environment for human-equivalent intelligences and to preserve same in the face of external aggression. Citizens are encouraged to participate in the ongoing political processes of determining such responses. Citizens also have a duty to serve on a jury if called (including senatorial service), and to defend the city.
+
+!_ Where to go for further information:
+
+Until you have registered as a citizen and obtained basic implants, all further questions should be directed to the city. Once you have learned to use your implants, you will not need to ask this question.
+
+* * *
+
+_1 Welcome to decade the ninth, singularity plus one gigasecond (or maybe more - nobody's quite sure when, or indeed /{if}/, a singularity has been created). The human population of the solar system is either six billion, or sixty billion, depending on whether you class the forked state vectors of posthumans and the simulations of dead phenotypes running in the Vile Offspring's Schrödinger boxes as people. Most of the physically incarnate still live on Earth, but the lily-pads floating beneath continent-sized hot-hydrogen balloons in Saturn's upper atmosphere already house a few million, and the writing is on the wall for the rocky inner planets. All the remaining human-equivalent intelligences with half a clue to rub together are trying to emigrate before the Vile Offspring decide to recycle Earth to fill in a gap in the concentric shells of nanocomputers they're running on. The half-constructed Matrioshka brain already darkens the skies of Earth and has caused a massive crash in the planet's photosynthetic biomass, as plants starve for short-wavelength light.
+
+_1 Since decade the seventh, the computational density of the solar system has soared. Within the asteroid belt, more than half the available planetary mass has been turned into nanoprocessors, tied together by quantum entanglement into a web so dense that each gram of matter can simulate all the possible life experiences of an individual human being in a scant handful of minutes. Economics 2.0 is itself obsolescent, forced to mutate in a furious survivalist arms race by the arrival of the Slug. Only the name remains as a vague shorthand for merely human-equivalent intelligences to use when describing interactions they don't understand.
+
+_1 The latest generation of posthuman entities is less overtly hostile to humans, but much more alien than the generations of the fifties and seventies. Among their less comprehensible activities, the Vile Offspring are engaged in exploring the phase-space of all possible human experiences from the inside out. Perhaps they caught a dose of the Tiplerite heresy along the way, for now a steady stream of resimulant uploads is pouring through the downsystem relays in Titan orbit. The Rapture of the Nerds has been followed by the Resurrection of the Extremely Confused, except that they're not really resurrectees - they're simulations based on their originals' recorded histories, blocky and missing chunks of their memories, as bewildered as baby ducklings as they're herded into the wood-chipper of the future.
+
+_1 Sirhan al-Khurasani despises them with the abstract contempt of an antiquarian for a cunning but ultimately transparent forgery. But Sirhan is young, and he's got more contempt than he knows what to do with. It's a handy outlet for his frustration. He has a lot to be frustrated at, starting with his intermittently dysfunctional family, the elderly stars around whom his planet whizzes in chaotic trajectories of enthusiasm and distaste.
+
+_1 Sirhan fancies himself a philosopher-historian of the singular age, a chronicler of the incomprehensible, which would be a fine thing to be except that his greatest insights are all derived from Aineko. He alternately fawns over and rages against his mother, who is currently a leading light in the refugee community, and honors (when not attempting to evade the will of) his father, who is lately a rising philosophical patriarch within the Conservationist faction. He's secretly in awe (not to mention slightly resentful) of his grandfather Manfred. In fact, the latter's abrupt reincarnation in the flesh has quite disconcerted him. And he sometimes listens to his stepgrandmother Annette, who has reincarnated in more or less her original 2020s body after spending some years as a great ape, and who seems to view him as some sort of personal project.
+
+_1 OnlyAnnette isn't being very helpful right now. His mother is campaigning on an electoral platform calling for a vote to blow up the world, Annette is helping run her campaign, his grandfather is trying to convince him to entrust everything he holds dear to a rogue lobster, and the cat is being typically feline and evasive.
+
+_1 Talk about families with problems ...
+
+* * *
+
+They've transplanted imperial Brussels to Saturn in its entirety, mapped tens of megatonnes of buildings right down to nanoscale and beamed them into the outer darkness to be reinstantiated down-well on the lily-pad colonies that dot the stratosphere of the gas giant. (Eventually the entire surface of the Earth will follow - after which the Vile Offspring will core the planet like an apple, dismantle it into a cloud of newly formed quantum nanocomputers to add to their burgeoning Matrioshka brain.) Due to a resource contention problem in the festival committee's planning algorithm - or maybe it's simply an elaborate joke - Brussels now begins just on the other side of a diamond bubble wall from the Boston Museum of Science, less than a kilometer away as the passenger pigeon flies. Which is why, when it's time to celebrate a birthday or name day (meaningless though those concepts are, out on Saturn's synthetic surface), Amber tends to drag people over to the bright lights of the big city.
+
+This time she's throwing a rather special party. At Annette's canny prompting, she's borrowed the Atomium and invited a horde of guests to a big event. It's not a family bash - although Annette's promised her a surprise - so much as a business meeting, testing the water as a preliminary to declaring her candidacy. It's a media coup, an attempt to engineer Amber's re-entry into the mainstream politics of the human system.
+
+Sirhan doesn't really want to be here. He's got far more important things to do, like continuing to catalogue Aineko's memories of the voyage of the *{Field Circus}*. He's also collating a series of interviews with resimulated logical positivists from Oxford, England (the ones who haven't retreated into gibbering near catatonia upon realizing that their state vectors are all members of the set of all sets that do not contain themselves), when he isn't attempting to establish a sound rational case for his belief that extraterrestrial superintelligence is an oxymoron and the router network is just an accident, one of evolution's little pranks.
+
+But Tante Annette twisted his arm and promised he was in on the surprise if he came to the party. And despite everything, he wouldn't miss being a fly on the wall during the coming meeting between Manfred and Amber for all the tea in China.
+
+Sirhan walks up to the gleaming stainless-steel dome that contains the entrance to the Atomium, and waits for the lift. He's in line behind a gaggle of young-looking women, skinny and soigné in cocktail gowns and tiaras lifted from 1920s silent movies. (Annette declared an age of elegance theme for the party, knowing full well that it would force Amber to focus on her public appearance.) Sirhan's attention is, however, elsewhere. The various fragments of his mind are conducting three simultaneous interviews with philosophers ("whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent" in spades), controlling two 'bots that are overhauling the museum plumbing and air-recycling system, and he's busy discussing observations of the alien artifact orbiting the brown dwarf Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56}, with Aineko. What's left of him exhibits about as much social presence as a pickled cabbage.
+
+The lift arrives and accepts a load of passengers. Sirhan is crowded into one corner by a bubble of high-society laughter and an aromatic puff of smoke from an improbable ivory cigarette holder as the lift surges, racing up the sixty-meter shaft toward the observation deck at the top of the Atomium. It's a ten-meter-diameter metal globe, spiral staircases and escalators connecting it to the seven spheres at the corners of an octahedron that make up the former centerpiece of the 1950 World's Fair. Unlike most of the rest of Brussels, it's the original bits and atoms, bent alloy structures from before the space age shipped out to Saturn at enormous expense. The lift arrives with a slight jerk. "Excuse /{me}/," squeaks one of the good-time girls as she lurches backward, elbowing Sirhan.
+
+He blinks, barely noticing her black bob of hair, chromatophore-tinted shadows artfully tuned around her eyes: "Nothing to excuse." In the background, Aineko is droning on sarcastically about the lack of interest the crew of the *{Field Circus}* exhibited in the cat's effort to decompile their hitchhiker, the Slug. It's distracting as hell, but Sirhan feels a desperate urge to understand what happened out there. It's the key to understanding his not-mother's obsessions and weaknesses - which, he senses, will be important in the times to come.
+
+He evades the gaggle of overdressed good-time girls and steps out onto the lower of the two stainless-steel decks that bisect the sphere. Accepting a fruit cocktail from a discreetly humaniform waitron, he strolls toward a row of triangular windows that gaze out across the arena toward the American Pavilion and the World Village. The metal walls are braced with turquoise-painted girders, and the perspex transparencies are fogged with age. He can barely see the one-tenth-scale model of an atomic-powered ocean liner leaving the pier below, or the eight-engined giant seaplane beside it. "They never once asked me if the Slug had attempted to map itself into the human-compatible spaces aboard the ship," Aineko bitches at him. "I wasn't expecting them to, but really! Your mother's too trusting, boy."
+
+"I suppose you took precautions?" Sirhan's ghost murmurs to the cat. That sets the irascible metafeline off again on a long discursive tail-washing rant about the unreliability of Economics-2.0-compliant financial instruments. Economics 2.0 apparently replaces the single-indirection layer of conventional money, and the multiple-indirection mappings of options trades, with some kind of insanely baroque object-relational framework based on the parameterized desires and subjective experiential values of the players, and as far as the cat is concerned, this makes all such transactions intrinsically untrustworthy.
+
+/{Which is why you're stuck here with us apes}/, Sirhan-prime cynically notes as he spawns an Eliza ghost to carry on nodding at the cat while he experiences the party.
+
+It's uncomfortably warm in the Atomium sphere - not surprising, there must be thirty people milling around up here, not counting the waitrons - and several local multicast channels are playing a variety of styles of music to synchronize the mood swings of the revelers to hardcore techno, waltz, raga ...
+
+"Having a good time, are we?" Sirhan breaks away from integrating one of his timid philosophers and realizes that his glass is empty, and his mother is grinning alarmingly at him over the rim of a cocktail glass containing something that glows in the dark. She's wearing spike-heeled boots and a black velvet cat suit that hugs her contours like a second skin, and she's already getting drunk. In wall-clock years she is younger than Sirhan; it's like having a bizarrely knowing younger sister mysteriously injected into his life to replace the eigenmother who stayed home and died with the Ring Imperium decades ago. "Look at you, hiding in a corner at your grandfather's party! Hey, your glass is empty. Want to try this caipirinha? There's someone you've got to meet over here -"
+
+It's at moments like this that Sirhan really wonders what in Jupiter's orbit his father ever saw in this woman. (But then again, in the world line this instance of her has returned from, he didn't. So what does that signify?) "As long as there's no fermented grape juice in it," he says resignedly, allowing himself to be led past a gaggle of conversations and a mournful-looking gorilla slurping a long drink through a straw. "More of your /{accelerationista}/ allies?"
+
+"Maybe not." It's the girl gang he avoided noticing in the lift, their eyes sparkling, really getting into this early twen-cen drag party thing, waving their cigarette holders and cocktail glasses around with wild abandon. "Rita, I'd like you to meet Sirhan, my other fork's son. Sirhan, this is Rita? She's an historian, too. Why don't you -"
+
+Dark eyes, emphasized not by powder or paint, but by chromatophores inside her skin cells: black hair, chain of enormous pearls, slim black dress sweeping the floor, a look of mild embarrassment on her heart-shaped face: She could be a clone of Audrey Hepburn in any other century, "Didn't I just meet you in the elevator?" The embarrassment shifts to her cheeks, becoming visible.
+
+Sirhan flushes, unsure how to reply. Just then, an interloper arrives on the scene, pushing in between them. "Are you the curator who reorganized the Precambrian gallery along teleology lines? I've got some things to say about /{that}/!" The interloper is tall, assertive, and blonde. Sirhan hates her from the first sight of her wagging finger.
+
+"Oh shut up, Marissa, this is a party, you've been being a pain all evening." To his surprise, Rita the historian rounds on the interloper angrily.
+
+"It's not a problem," he manages to say. In the back of his mind, something makes the Rogerian puppet-him that's listening to the cat sit up and dump-merge a whole lump of fresh memories into his mind - something important, something about the Vile Offspring sending a starship to bring something back from the router - but the people around him are soaking up so much attention that he has to file it for later.
+
+"Yes it /{is}/ a problem," Rita declares. She points at the interloper, who is saying something about the invalidity of teleological interpretations, trying to justify herself, and says, "/{Plonk}/. Phew. Where were we?"
+
+Sirhan blinks. Suddenly everyone but him seems to be ignoring that annoying Marissa person. "What just happened?" he asks cautiously.
+
+"I killfiled her. Don't tell me, you aren't running Superplonk yet, are you?" Rita flicks a location-cached idea at him and he takes it cautiously, spawning a couple of specialized Turing Oracles to check it for halting states. It seems to be some kind of optic lobe hack that accesses a collaborative database of eigenfaces, with some sort of side interface to Broca's region. "Share and enjoy, confrontation-free parties."
+
+"I've never seen -" Sirhan trails off as he loads the module distractedly. (The cat is rambling on about god modules and metastatic entanglement and the difficulty of arranging to have personalities custom-grown to order somewhere in the back of his head, while his fractional-self nods wisely whenever it pauses.) Something like an inner eyelid descends. He looks round; there's a vague blob at one side of the room, making an annoying buzzing sound. His mother seems to be having an animated conversation with it. "That's rather interesting."
+
+"Yes, it helps no end at this sort of event." Rita startles him by taking his left arm in hand - her cigarette holder shrivels and condenses until it's no more than a slight thickening around the wrist of her opera glove - and steers him toward a waitron. "I'm sorry about your foot, earlier, I was a bit overloaded. Is Amber Macx really your mother?"
+
+"Not exactly, she's my eigenmother," he mumbles. "The reincarnated download of the version who went out to Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56}, aboard the *{Field Circus}*. She married a French-Algerian confidence-trick analyst instead of my father, but I think they divorced a couple of years ago. My /{real}/ mother married an imam, but they died in the aftermath of Economics 2.0." She seems to be steering him in the direction of the window bay Amber dragged him away from earlier. "Why do you ask?"
+
+"Because you're not very good at making small talk," Rita says quietly, "and you don't seem very good in crowds. Is that right? Was it you who performed that amazing dissection of Wittgenstein's cognitive map? The one with the preverbal Gödel string in it?"
+
+"It was -" He clears his throat. "You thought it was amazing?" Suddenly, on impulse, he detaches a ghost to identify this Rita person and find out who she is, what she wants. It's not normally worth the effort to get to know someone more closely than casual small talk, but she seems to have been digging into his background, and he wants to know why. Along with the him that's chatting to Aineko, that makes about three instances pulling in near-realtime resources. He'll be running up an existential debt soon if he keeps forking ghosts like this.
+
+"I thought so," she says. There's a bench in front of the wall, and somehow he finds himself sitting on it next to her. /{There's no danger, we're not in private or anything}/, he tells himself stiffly. She's smiling at him, face tilted slightly to one side and lips parted, and for a moment, a dizzy sense of possibility washes over him: /{What if she's about to throw all propriety aside? How undignified!}/ Sirhan believes in self-restraint and dignity. "I was really interested in this -" She passes him another dynamically loadable blob, encompassing a detailed critique of his analysis of Wittgenstein's matriophobia in the context of gendered language constructs and nineteenth century Viennese society, along with a hypothesis that leaves Sirhan gasping with mild indignation at the very idea that /{he}/ of all people might share Wittgenstein's skewed outlook - "What do you think?" she asks, grinning impishly at him.
+
+"Nnngk." Sirhan tries to unswallow his tongue. Rita crosses her legs, her gown hissing. "I, ah, that is to say" - At which moment, his partials re-integrate, dumping a slew of positively pornographic images into his memories. /{It's a trap!}/ they shriek, her breasts and hips and pubes - clean-shaven, he can't help noticing - thrusting at him in hotly passionate abandon, /{Mother's trying to make you loose like her!}/ and he remembers what it /{would}/ be like to wake up in bed next to this woman whom he barely knows after being married to her for a year, because one of his cognitive ghosts has just spent several seconds of network time (or several subjective months) getting hot and sweaty with a ghost of her own, and she does have interesting research ideas, even if she's a pushy over-westernized woman who thinks she can run his life for him. "What /{is}/ this?" he splutters, his ears growing hot and his garments constricting.
+
+"Just speculating about possibilities. We could get a lot done together." She snakes an arm round his shoulders and pulls him toward her, gently. "Don't you want to find out if we could work out?"
+
+"But, but -" Sirhan is steaming. /{Is she offering casual sex?}/ He wonders, profoundly embarrassed by his own inability to read her signals: "What do you /{want}/?" he asks.
+
+"You /{do}/ know that you can do more with Superplonk than just killfile annoying idiots?" she whispers in his ear. "We can be invisible right now, if you like. It's great for confidential meetings - other things, too. We can work beautifully together, our ghosts annealed really well ..."
+
+Sirhan jumps up, his face stinging, and turns away: "No thank you!" he snaps, angry at himself. "Goodbye!" His other instances, interrupted by his broadcast emotional overload, are distracted from their tasks and sputtering with indignation. Her hurt expression is too much for him: The killfile snaps down, blurring her into an indistinct black blob on the wall, veiled by his own brain as he turns and walks away, seething with anger at his mother for being so unfair as to make him behold his own face in the throes of fleshy passion.
+
+* * *
+
+Meanwhile, in one of the lower spheres, padded with silvery blue insulating pillows bound together with duct tape, the movers and shakers of the accelerationista faction are discussing their bid for world power at fractional-C velocities.
+
+"We can't outrun everything. For example, a collapse of the false vacuum," Manfred insists, slightly uncoordinated and slurring his vowels under the influence of the first glass of fruit punch he's experienced in nigh-on twenty real-time years. His body is young and still relatively featureless, hair still growing out, and he's abandoned his old no-implants fetish at last to adopt an array of interfaces that let him internalize all the exocortex processes that he formerly ran on an array of dumb Turing machines outside his body. He's standing on his own sense of style and is the only person in the room who isn't wearing some variation of dinner jacket or classical evening dress. "Entangled exchange via routers is all very well, but it won't let us escape the universe itself - any phase change will catch up eventually, the network must have an end. And then where will we be, Sameena?"
+
+"I'm not disputing that." The woman he's talking to, wearing a green-and-gold sari and a medieval maharajah's ransom in gold and natural diamonds, nods thoughtfully. "But it hasn't happened yet, and we've got evidence that superhuman intelligences have been loose in this universe for gigayears, so there's a fair bet that the worst catastrophe scenarios are unlikely. And looking closer to home, we don't know what the routers are for, or who made them. Until then ..." She shrugs. "Look what happened last time somebody tried to probe them. No offense intended."
+
+"It's already happened. If what I hear is correct, the Vile Offspring aren't nearly as negative about the idea of using the routers as we old-fashioned metahumans might like to believe." Manfred frowns, trying to recall some hazy anecdote - he's experimenting with a new memory compression algorithm, necessitated by his pack rat mnemonic habits when younger, and sometimes the whole universe feels as if it's nearly on the tip of his tongue. "So, we seem to be in violent agreement about the need to /{know more}/ about what's going on, and to find out what they're doing out there. We've got cosmic background anisotropies caused by the waste heat from computing processes millions of light-years across - it takes a big interstellar civilization to do that, and they don't seem to have fallen into the same rat trap as the local Matrioshka brain civilizations. And we've got worrying rumors about the VO messing around with the structure of space-time in order to find a way around the Beckenstein bound. If the VO are trying that, then the folks out near the supercluster already know the answers. The best way to find out what's happening is to go and talk to whoever's responsible. Can we at least agree on that?"
+
+"Probably not." Her eyes glitter with amusement. "It all depends on whether one believes in these civilizations in the first place. I /{know}/ your people point to deep-field camera images going all the way back to some wonky hubble-bubble scrying mirror from the late twentieth, but we've got no evidence except some theories about the Casimir effect and pair production and spinning beakers of helium-3 - much less proof that whole bunch of alien galactic civilizations are trying to collapse the false vacuum and destroy the universe!" Her voice dropped a notch: "At least, not enough proof to convince most people, Manny dear. I know this comes as a shock to you, but not /{everyone}/ is a neophiliac posthuman bodysurfer whose idea of a sabbatical is to spend twenty years as a flock of tightly networked seagulls in order to try and to prove the Turing Oracle thesis -"
+
+"Not everyone is concerned with the deep future," Manfred interrupts. "It's important! If we live or die, that doesn't matter - that's not the big picture. The big question is whether information originating in our light cone is preserved, or whether we're stuck in a lossy medium where our very existence counts for nothing. It's downright /{embarrassing}/ to be a member of a species with such a profound lack of curiosity about its own future, especially when it affects us all personally! I mean, if there's going to come a time when there's nobody or nothing to remember us then what does -"
+
+"Manfred?"
+
+He stops in midsentence, his mouth open, staring dumbly.
+
+It's Amber, poised in black cat suit with cocktail glass. Her expression is open and confused, appallingly vulnerable. Blue liquid slops, almost spilling out of her glass - the rim barely extends itself in time to catch the drops. Behind her stands Annette, a deeply self-satisfied smile on her face.
+
+"You." Amber pauses, her cheek twitching as bits of her mind page in and out of her skull, polling external information sources. "You really /{are}/ -"
+
+A hasty cloud materializes under her hand as her fingers relax, dropping the glass.
+
+"Uh." Manfred stares, at a complete loss for words. "I'd, uh." After a moment he looks down. "I'm sorry. I'll get you another drink ..?"
+
+"Why didn't someone warn me?" Amber complains.
+
+"We thought you could use the good advice," Annette stated into the awkward silence. "And a family reunion. It was meant to be a surprise."
+
+"A surprise." Amber looks perplexed. "You could say that."
+
+"You're taller than I was expecting," Manfred says unexpectedly. "People look different when you're not using human eyes."
+
+"Yeah?" She looks at him, and he turns his head slightly, facing her. It's a historic moment, and Annette is getting it all on memory diamond, from every angle. The family's dirty little secret is that Amber and her father have /{never met}/, not face-to-face in physical meat-machine proximity. She was born years after Manfred and Pamela separated, after all, decanted prefertilized from a tank of liquid nitrogen. This is the first time either of them have actually seen the other's face without electronic intermediation. And while they've said everything that needed to be said on a businesslike level, anthropoid family politics is still very much a matter of body language and pheromones. "How long have you been out and about?" she asks, trying to disguise her confusion.
+
+"About six hours." Manfred manages a rueful chuckle, trying to take the sight of her in all at once. "Let's get you another drink and put our heads together?"
+
+"Okay." Amber takes a deep breath and glares at Annette. "You set this up, /{you}/ clean up the mess."
+
+Annette just stands there smiling at the confusion of her accomplishment.
+
+* * *
+
+The cold light of dawn finds Sirhan angry, sober, and ready to pick a fight with the first person who comes through the door of his office. The room is about ten meters across, with a floor of polished marble and skylights in the intricately plastered ceiling. The walkthrough of his current project sprouts in the middle of the floor like a ghostly abstract cauliflower, fractal branches dwindling down to infolded nodes tagged with compressed identifiers. The branches expand and shrink as Sirhan paces around it, zooming to readability in response to his eyeball dynamics. But he isn't paying it much attention. He's too disturbed, uncertain, trying to work out whom to blame. Which is why, when the door bangs open, his first response is to whirl angrily and open his mouth - then stop. "What do /{you}/ want?" he demands.
+
+"A word, if you please?" Annette looks around distractedly. "This is your project?"
+
+"Yes," he says icily, and banishes the walkthrough with a wave of one hand. "What do you want?"
+
+"I'm not sure." Annette pauses. For a moment she looks weary, tired beyond mortal words, and Sirhan momentarily wonders if perhaps he's spreading the blame too far. This ninetysomething Frenchwoman who is no blood relative, who was in years past the love of his scatterbrained grandfather's life, seems the least likely person to be trying to manipulate him, at least in such an unwelcome and intimate manner. But there's no telling. Families are strange things, and even though the current instantiations of his father and mother aren't the ones who ran his pre-adolescent brain through a couple of dozen alternative lifelines before he was ten, he can't be sure - or that they wouldn't enlist Tante Annette's assistance in fucking with his mind. "We need to talk about your mother," she continues.
+
+"We do, do we?" Sirhan turns around and sees the vacancy of the room for what it is, a socket, like a pulled tooth, informed as much by what is absent as by what is present. He snaps his fingers, and an intricate bench of translucent bluish utility fog congeals out of the air behind him. He sits: Annette can do what she wants.
+
+"Oui." She thrusts her hands deep into the pocket of the peasant smock she's wearing - a major departure from her normal style - and leans against the wall. Physically, she looks young enough to have spent her entire life blitzing around the galaxy at three nines of lightspeed, but her posture is world-weary and ancient. History is a foreign country, and the old are unwilling emigrants, tired out by the constant travel. "Your mother, she has taken on a huge job, but it's one that needs doing. /{You}/ agreed it needed doing, years ago, with the archive store. /{She}/ is now trying to get it moving, that is what the campaign is about, to place before the electors a choice of how best to move an entire civilization. So I ask, why do you obstruct her?"
+
+Sirhan works his jaw; he feels like spitting. "/{Why}/?" he snaps.
+
+"Yes. Why?" Annette gives in and magics up a chair from the swirling fogbank beneath the ceiling. She crouches in it, staring at him. "It is a question."
+
+"I have nothing against her political machinations," Sirhan says tensely. "But her uninvited interference in my personal life -"
+
+"What interference?"
+
+He stares. "Is that a question?" He's silent for a moment. Then: "Throwing that wanton at me last night -"
+
+Annette stares at him. "Who? What are you talking about?"
+
+"That, that loose woman!" Sirhan is reduced to spluttering. "False pretenses! If this is one of Father's matchmaking ideas, it is so /{very}/ wrong that -"
+
+Annette is shaking her head. "Are you crazy? Your mother simply wanted you to meet her campaign team, to join in planning the policy. Your father is not on this planet! But you stormed out, you /{really}/ upset Rita, did you know that? Rita, she is the best belief maintenance and story construction operative I have! Yet you to tears reduce her. What is wrong with you?"
+
+"I -" Sirhan swallows. "She's /{what}/?" he asks again, his mouth dry. "I thought ..." He trails off. He doesn't want to say what he thought. The hussy, that brazen trollop, is part of his mother's campaign party? Not some plot to lure him into corruption? What if it was all a horrible misunderstanding?
+
+"I think you need to apologize to someone," Annette says coolly, standing up. Sirhan's head is spinning between a dozen dialogues of actors and ghosts, a journal of the party replaying before his ghast-stricken inner gaze. Even the walls have begun to flicker, responding to his intense unease. Annette skewers him with a disgusted look: "When you can a woman behave toward as a person, not a threat, we can again talk. Until then." And she stands up and walks out of the room, leaving him to contemplate the shattered stump of his anger, so startled he can barely concentrate on his project, thinking, /{Is that really me? Is that what I look like to her?}/ as the cladistic graph slowly rotates before him, denuded branches spread wide, waiting to be filled with the nodes of the alien interstellar network just as soon as he can convince Aineko to stake him the price of the depth-first tour of darkness.
+
+* * *
+
+Manfred used to be a flock of pigeons - literally, his exocortex dispersed among a passel of bird brains, pecking at brightly colored facts, shitting semidigested conclusions. Being human again feels inexplicably odd, even without the added distractions of his sex drive, which he has switched off until he gets used to being unitary again. Not only does he get shooting pains in his neck whenever he tries to look over his left shoulder with his right eye, but he's lost the habit of spawning exocortical agents to go interrogate a database or bush robot or something, then report back to him. Instead he keeps trying to fly off in all directions at once, which usually ends with him falling over.
+
+But at present, that's not a problem. He's sitting comfortably at a weathered wooden table in a beer garden behind a hall lifted from somewhere like Frankfurt, a liter glass of straw-colored liquid at his elbow and a comforting multiple whispering of knowledge streams tickling the back of his head. Most of his attention is focused on Annette, who frowns at him with mingled concern and affection. They may have lived separate lives for almost a third of a century, since she declined to upload with him, but he's still deeply attuned to her.
+
+"You are going to have to do something about that boy," she says sympathetically. "He is close enough to upset Amber. And without Amber, there will be a problem."
+
+"I'm going to have to do something about Amber, too," Manfred retorts. "What was the idea, not warning her I was coming?"
+
+"It was meant to be a surprise." Annette comes as close to pouting as Manfred's seen her recently. It brings back warm memories; he reaches out to hold her hand across the table.
+
+"You know I can't handle the human niceties properly when I'm a flock." He strokes the back of her wrist. She pulls back after a while, but slowly. "I expected you to manage all that stuff."
+
+"That stuff." Annette shakes her head. "She's your daughter, you know? Did you have no curiosity left?"
+
+"As a bird?" Manfred cocks his head to one side so abruptly that he hurts his neck and winces. "Nope. /{Now}/ I do, but I think I pissed her off -"
+
+"Which brings us back to point one."
+
+"I'd send her an apology, but she'd think I was trying to manipulate her" - Manfred takes a mouthful of beer - "and she'd be right." He sounds slightly depressed. "All my relationships are screwy this decade. And it's lonely."
+
+"So? Don't brood." Annette pulls her hand back. "Something will sort itself out eventually. And in the short term, there is the work, the electoral problem becomes acute." When she's around him the remains of her once-strong French accent almost vanish in a transatlantic drawl, he realizes with a pang. He's been abhuman for too long - people who meant a lot to him have changed while he's been away.
+
+"I'll brood if I want to," he says. "I didn't ever really get a chance to say goodbye to Pam, did I? Not after that time in Paris when the gangsters ..." He shrugs. "I'm getting nostalgic in my old age." He snorts.
+
+"You're not the only one," Annette says tactfully. "Social occasions here are a minefield, one must tiptoe around so many issues, people have too much, too much history. And nobody knows everything that is going on."
+
+"That's the trouble with this damned polity." Manfred takes another gulp of /{hefeweisen}/. "We've already got six million people living on this planet, and it's growing like the first-generation Internet. Everyone who is anyone knows everyone, but there are so many incomers diluting the mix and not knowing that there /{is}/ a small world network here that everything is up for grabs again after only a couple of megaseconds. New networks form, and we don't even know they exist until they sprout a political agenda and surface under us. We're acting under time pressure. If we don't get things rolling now, we'll never be able to ..." He shakes his head. "It wasn't like this for you in Brussels, was it?"
+
+"No. Brussels was a mature system. And I had Gianni to look after in his dotage after you left. It will only get worse from here on in, I think."
+
+"Democracy 2.0." He shudders briefly. "I'm not sure about the validity of voting projects at all, these days. The assumption that all people are of equal importance seems frighteningly obsolescent. Do you think we can make this fly?"
+
+"I don't see why not. If Amber's willing to play the People's Princess for us ..." Annette picks up a slice of liverwurst and chews on it meditatively.
+
+"I'm not sure it's workable, however we play it." Manfred looks thoughtful. "The whole democratic participation thing looks questionable to me under these circumstances. We're under direct threat, for all that it's a long-term one, and this whole culture is in danger of turning into a classical nation-state. Or worse, several of them layered on top of one another with complete geographical collocation but no social interpenetration. I'm not certain it's a good idea to try to steer something like that - pieces might break off, you'd get the most unpleasant side-effects. Although, on the other hand, if we can mobilize enough broad support to become the first visible planetwide polity ..."
+
+"We need you to stay focused," Annette adds unexpectedly.
+
+"Focused? Me?" He laughs, briefly. "I /{used}/ to have an idea a second. Now it's maybe one a year. I'm just a melancholy old birdbrain, me."
+
+"Yes, but you know the old saying? The fox has many ideas - the hedgehog has only one, but it's a /{big}/ idea."
+
+"So tell me, what is my big idea?" Manfred leans forward, one elbow on the table, one eye focused on inner space as a hot-burning thread of consciousness barks psephological performance metrics at him, analysing the game ahead. "Where do you think I'm going?"
+
+"I think -" Annette breaks off suddenly, staring past his shoulder. Privacy slips, and for a frozen moment Manfred glances round in mild horror and sees thirty or forty other guests in the crowded garden, elbows rubbing, voices raised above the background chatter: "Gianni!" She beams widely as she stands up. "What a surprise! When did you arrive?"
+
+Manfred blinks. A slim young guy, moving with adolescent grace, but none of the awkward movements and sullen lack of poise - he's much older than he looks, chickenhawk genetics. /{Gianni}/? He feels a huge surge of memories paging through his exocortex. He remembers ringing a doorbell in dusty, hot Rome: white toweling bathrobe, the economics of scarcity, autograph signed by the dead hand of von Neumann - "Gianni?" he asks, disbelieving. "It's been a long time!"
+
+The gilded youth, incarnated in the image of a metropolitan toy-boy from the noughties, grins widely and embraces Manfred with a friendly bear hug. Then he slides down onto the bench next to Annette, whom he kisses with easy familiarity. "Ah, to be among friends again! It's been too long!" He glances round curiously. "Hmm, how very Bavarian." He snaps his fingers. "Mine will be a, what do you recommend? It's been too long since my last beer." His grin widens. "Not in this body."
+
+"You're resimulated?" Manfred asks, unable to stop himself.
+
+Annette frowns at him disapprovingly: "No, silly! He came through the teleport gate -"
+
+"Oh." Manfred shakes his head. "I'm sorry -"
+
+"It's okay." Gianni Vittoria clearly doesn't mind being mistaken for a historical newbie, rather than someone who's traveled through the decades the hard way. /{He must be over a hundred by now}/, Manfred notes, not bothering to spawn a search thread to find out.
+
+"It was time to move and, well, the old body didn't want to move with me, so why not go gracefully and accept the inevitable?"
+
+"I didn't take you for a dualist," Manfred says ruefully.
+
+"Ah, I'm not - but neither am I reckless." Gianni drops his grin for a moment. The sometime minister for transhuman affairs, economic theoretician, then retired tribal elder of the polycognitive liberals is serious. "I have never uploaded before, or switched bodies, or teleported. Even when my old one was seriously - tcha! Maybe I left it too long. But here I am, one planet is as good as another to be cloned and downloaded onto, don't you think?"
+
+"You invited him?" Manfred asks Annette.
+
+"Why wouldn't I?" There's a wicked gleam in her eye. "Did you expect me to live like a nun while you were a flock of pigeons? We may have campaigned against the legal death of the transubstantiated, Manfred, but there are limits."
+
+Manfred looks between them, then shrugs, embarrassed. "I'm still getting used to being human again," he admits. "Give me time to catch up? At an emotional level, at least." The realization that Gianni and Annette have a history together doesn't come as a surprise to him: It's one of the things you must adapt to if you opt out of the human species, after all. At least the libido suppression is helping here, he realizes: He's not about to embarrass anyone by suggesting a ménage. He focuses on Gianni. "I have a feeling I'm here for a purpose, and it isn't mine," he says slowly. "Why don't you tell me what you've got in mind?"
+
+Gianni shrugs. "You have the big picture already. We are human, metahuman, and augmented human. But the posthumans are things that were never really human to begin with. The Vile Offspring have reached their adolescence and want the place to themselves so they can throw a party. The writing is on the wall, don't you think?"
+
+Manfred gives him a long stare. "The whole idea of running away in meatspace is fraught with peril," he says slowly. He picks up his mug of beer and swirls it around slowly. "Look, we know, now, that a singularity doesn't turn into a voracious predator that eats all the dumb matter in its path, triggering a phase change in the structure of space - at least, not unless they've done something very stupid to the structure of the false vacuum, somewhere outside our current light cone.
+
+"But if we run away, /{we}/ are still going to be there. Sooner or later, we'll have the same problem all over again; runaway intelligence augmentation, self-expression, engineered intelligences, whatever. Possibly that's what happened out past the Böotes void - not a galactic-scale civilization, but a race of pathological cowards fleeing their own exponential transcendence. We carry the seeds of a singularity with us wherever we go, and if we try to excise those seeds, we cease to be human, don't we? So ... maybe you can tell me what you think we should do. Hmm?"
+
+"It's a dilemma." A waitron inserts itself into their privacy-screened field of view. It plants a spun-diamond glass in front of Gianni, then pukes beer into it. Manfred declines a refill, waiting for Gianni to drink. "Ah, the simple pleasures of the flesh! I've been corresponding with your daughter, Manny. She loaned me her experiential digest of the journey to Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},. I found it quite alarming. Nobody's casting aspersions on her observations, not after that self-propelled stock market bubble or 419 scam or whatever it was got loose in the Economics 2.0 sphere, but the implications - the Vile Offspring will eat the solar system, Manny. Then they'll slow down. But where does that leave us, I ask you? What is there for orthohumans like us to do?"
+
+Manfred nods thoughtfully. "You've heard the argument between the accelerationistas and the time-binder faction, I assume?" he asks.
+
+"Of course." Gianni takes a long pull on his beer. "What do /{you}/ think of our options?"
+
+"The accelerationistas want to upload everyone onto a fleet of starwisps and charge off to colonize an uninhabited brown dwarf planetary system. Or maybe steal a Matrioshka brain that's succumbed to senile dementia and turn it back into planetary biomes with cores of diamond-phase computronium to fulfil some kind of demented pastoralist nostalgia trip. Rousseau's universal robots. I gather Amber thinks this is a good idea because she's done it before - at least, the charging off aboard a starwisp part. 'To boldly go where no uploaded metahuman colony fleet has gone before' has a certain ring to it, doesn't it?" Manfred nods to himself. "Like I say, it won't work. We'd be right back to iteration one of the waterfall model of singularity formation within a couple of gigaseconds of arriving. That's why I came back: to warn her."
+
+"So?" Gianni prods, pretending to ignore the frowns that Annette is casting his way.
+
+"And as for the time-binders," Manfred nods again, "they're like Sirhan. Deeply conservative, deeply suspicious. Holding out for staying here as long as possible, until the Vile Offspring come for Saturn - then moving out bit by bit, into the Kuiper belt. Colony habitats on snowballs half a light-year from anywhere." He shudders. "Spam in a fucking can with a light-hour walk to the nearest civilized company if your fellow inmates decide to reinvent Stalinism or Objectivism. No thanks! I know they've been muttering about quantum teleportation and stealing toys from the routers, but I'll believe it when I see it."
+
+"Which leaves what?" Annette demands. "It is all very well, this dismissal of both the accelerationista and time-binder programs, Manny, but what can you propose in their place?" She looks distressed. "Fifty years ago, you would have had six new ideas before breakfast! And an erection."
+
+Manfred leers at her unconvincingly. "Who says I can't still have both?"
+
+She glares. "Drop it!"
+
+"Okay." Manfred chugs back a quarter of a liter of beer, draining his glass, and puts it down on the table with a bang. "As it happens, I /{do}/ have an alternative idea." He looks serious. "I've been discussing it with Aineko for some time, and Aineko has been seeding Sirhan with it - if it's to work optimally, we'll need to get a rump constituency of both the accelerationistas and the conservatives on board. Which is why I'm conditionally going along with this whole election nonsense. So, what's it worth to you for me to explain it?"
+
+* * *
+
+"So, who was the deadhead you were busy with today?" asks Amber.
+
+Rita shrugs. "Some boringly prolix pulp author from the early twentieth, with a body phobia of extropian proportions - I kept expecting him to start drooling and rolling his eyes if I crossed my legs. Funny thing is, he was also close to bolting from fear once I mentioned implants. We /{really}/ need to nail down how to deal with these mind/body dualists, don't we?" She watches Amber with something approaching admiration; she's new to the inner circle of the accelerationista study faction, and Amber's social credit is sky-high. Rita's got a lot to learn from her, if she can get close enough. And right now, following her along a path through the landscaped garden behind the museum seems like a golden moment of opportunity.
+
+Amber smiles. "I'm glad I'm not processing immigrants these days; most of them are so stupid it drives you up the wall after a bit. Personally I blame the Flynn effect - in reverse. They come from a background of sensory deprivation. It's nothing that a course of neural growth enhancers can't fix in a year or two, but after the first few you skullfuck, they're all the same. So /{dull}/. Unless you're unlucky enough to get one of the documentees from a puritan religious period. I'm no fluffragette, but I swear if I get one more superstitious, woman-hating clergyman, I'm going to consider prescribing forcible gender reassignment surgery. At least the Victorian English are mostly just open-minded lechers, when you get past their social reserve. And they like new technology."
+
+Rita nods. /{Woman-hating et cetera}/ ... The echoes of patriarchy are still with them today, it seems, and not just in the form of resimulated ayatollahs and archbishops from the Dark Ages. "My author sounds like the worst of both. Some guy called Howard, from Rhode Island. Kept looking at me as if he was afraid I was going to sprout bat wings and tentacles or something." /{Like your son}/, she doesn't add. /{Just what was he thinking, anyway?}/ she wonders. /{To be that screwed up takes serious dedication ...}/ "What are you working on, if you don't mind me asking?" she asks, trying to change the direction of her attention.
+
+"Oh, pressing the flesh, I guess. Auntie 'Nette wanted me to meet some old political hack contact of hers who she figures can help with the program, but he was holed up with her and Dad all day." She pulls a face. "I had another fitting session with the image merchants, they're trying to turn me into a political catwalk clotheshorse. Then there's the program demographics again. We're getting about a thousand new immigrants a day, planetwide, but it's accelerating rapidly, and we should be up to eighty an hour by the time of the election. Which is going to be a huge problem, because if we start campaigning too early, a quarter of the electorate won't know what they're meant to be voting about."
+
+"Maybe it's deliberate," Rita suggests. "The Vile Offspring are trying to rig the outcome by injecting voters." She pings a smiley emoticon off Wednesday's open channel, raising a flickering grin in return. "The party of fuckwits will win, no question about it."
+
+"Uh-huh." Amber snaps her fingers and pulls an impatient face as she waits for a passing cloud to solidify above her head and lower a glass of cranberry juice to her. "Dad said one thing that's spot-on, we're framing this entire debate in terms of what we should do to avoid conflict with the Offspring. The main bone of contention is how to run away and how far to go and which program to put resources into, not whether or when to run, let alone what else we could do. Maybe we should have given it some more thought. Are we being manipulated?"
+
+Rita looks vacant for a moment. "Is that a question?" she asks. Amber nods, and she shakes her head. "Then I'd have to say that I don't know. The evidence is inconclusive, so far. But I'm not really happy. The Offspring won't tell us what they want, but there's no reason to believe they don't know what /{we}/ want. I mean, they can think rings round us, can't they?"
+
+Amber shrugs, then pauses to unlatch a hedge gate that gives admission to a maze of sweet-smelling shrubs. "I really don't know. They may not care about us, or even remember we exist - the resimulants may be being generated by some autonomic mechanism, not really part of the higher consciousness of the Offspring. Or it may be some whacked-out post-Tiplerite meme that's gotten hold of more processing resources than the entire presingularity Net, some kind of MetaMormon project directed at ensuring that everyone who can possibly ever have lived lives in the /{right way}/ to fit some weird quasi-religious requirement we don't know about. Or it might be a message we're simply not smart enough to decode. That's the trouble, we don't know."
+
+She vanishes around the curve of the maze. Rita hurries to catch up, sees her about to turn into another alleyway, and leaps after her. "What else?" she pants.
+
+"Could be" - left turn - "anything, really." Six steps lead down into a shadowy tunnel; fork right, five meters forward, then six steps up lead back to the surface. "Question is, why don't they" - left turn - "just /{tell}/ us what they want?"
+
+"Speaking to tapeworms." Rita nearly manages to catch up with Amber, who is trotting through the maze as if she's memorized it perfectly. "That's how much the nascent Matrioshka brain can outthink us by, as humans to segmented worms. Would we do. What they told us?"
+
+"Maybe." Amber stops dead, and Rita glances around. They're in an open cell near the heart of the maze, five meters square, hedged in on all sides. There are three entrances and a slate altar, waist high, lichen-stained with age. "I think you know the answer to that question."
+
+"I -" Rita stares at her.
+
+Amber stares back, eyes dark and intense. "You're from one of the Ganymede orbitals by way of Titan. You knew my eigensister while I was out of the solar system flying a diamond the size of a Coke can. That's what you told me. You've got a skill set that's a perfect match for the campaign research group, and you asked me to introduce you to Sirhan, then you pushed his buttons like a pro. Just what /{are}/ you trying to pull? Why should I trust you?"
+
+"I -" Rita's face crumples. "I /{didn't}/ push his buttons! He /{thought}/ I was trying to drag him into bed." She looks up defiantly. "I wasn't, I want to learn, what makes you - him - work -" Huge, dark, structured information queries batter at her exocortex, triggering warnings. Someone is churning through distributed time-series databases all over the outer system, measuring her past with a micrometer. She stares at Amber, mortified and angry. It's the ultimate denial of trust, the need to check her statements against the public record for truth. "What are you doing?"
+
+"I have a suspicion." Amber stands poised, as if ready to run. /{Run away from me?}/ Rita thinks, startled. "You said, what if the resimulants came from a subconscious function of the Offspring? And funnily enough, I've been discussing that possibility with Dad. He's still got the spark when you show him a problem, you know."
+
+"I don't understand!"
+
+"No, I don't think you do," says Amber, and Rita can feel vast stresses in the space around her: The whole ubicomp environment, dust-sized chips and utility fog and hazy clouds of diamond-bright optical processors in the soil and the air and her skin, is growing blotchy and sluggish, thrashing under the load of whatever Amber - with her management-grade ackles - is ordering it to do. For a moment, Rita can't feel half her mind, and she gets the panicky claustrophobic sense of being trapped inside her own head: Then it stops.
+
+"Tell me!" Rita insists. "What are you trying to prove? It's some mistake -" And Amber is nodding, much to her surprise, looking weary and morose. "What do you think I've done?"
+
+"Nothing. You're coherent. Sorry about that."
+
+"Coherent?" Rita hears her voice rising with her indignation as she feels bits of herself, cut off from her for whole seconds, shivering with relief. "I'll give you coherent! Assaulting my exocortex -"
+
+"Shut up." Amber rubs her face and simultaneously throws Rita one end of an encrypted channel.
+
+"Why should I?" Rita demands, not accepting the handshake.
+
+"Because." Amber glances round. /{She's scared!}/ Rita suddenly realizes. "Just /{do}/ it," she hisses.
+
+Rita accepts the endpoint and a huge lump of undigested expository data slides down it, structured and tagged with entry points and metainformation directories pointing to -
+
+"Holy /{shit}/!" she whispers, as she realizes what it is.
+
+"Yes." Amber grins humorlessly. She continues, over the open channel: *{It looks like they're cognitive antibodies, generated by the devil's own semiotic immune system.}* *{That's what Sirhan is focusing on, how to avoid triggering them and bringing everything down at once.}* *{Forget the election, we're going to be in deep shit sooner rather than later, and we're still trying to work out how to survive.}* *{Now are you sure you still want in?}*
+
+"Want in on /{what}/?" Rita asks, shakily.
+
+*{ The lifeboat Dad's trying to get us all into under cover of the accelerationista/conservationista split, before the Vile Offspring's immune system figures out how to lever us apart into factions and make us kill each other ...}*
+
+* * *
+
+_1 Welcome to the afterglow of the intelligence supernova, little tapeworm.
+
+_1 Tapeworms have on the order of a thousand neurons, pulsing furiously to keep their little bodies twitching. Human beings have on the order of a hundred billion neurons. What is happening in the inner solar system as the Vile Offspring churn and reconfigure the fast-thinking structured dust clouds that were once planets is as far beyond the ken of merely human consciousness as the thoughts of a Gödel are beyond the twitching tropisms of a worm. Personality modules bounded by the speed of light, sucking down billions of times the processing power of a human brain, form and re-form in the halo of glowing nanoprocessors that shrouds the sun in a ruddy glowing cloud.
+
+_1 Mercury, Venus, Mars, Ceres and the asteroids - all gone. Luna is a silvery iridescent sphere, planed smooth down to micrometer heights, luminous with diffraction patterns. Only Earth, the cradle of human civilization, remains untransformed; and Earth, too, will be dismantled soon enough, for already a trellis of space elevators webs the planet around its equator, lifting refugee dumb matter into orbit and flinging it at the wildlife preserves of the outer system.
+
+_1 The intelligence bloom that gnaws at Jupiter's moons with claws of molecular machinery won't stop until it runs out of dumb matter to convert into computronium. By the time it does, it will have as much brainpower as you'd get if you placed a planet with a population of six billion future-shocked primates in orbit around every star in the Milky Way galaxy. But right now, it's still stupid, having converted barely a percentage point of the mass of the solar system - it's a mere Magellanic Cloud civilization, infantile and unsubtle and still perilously close to its carbon-chemistry roots.
+
+_1 It's hard for tapeworms living in warm intestinal mulch to wrap their thousand-neuron brains around whatever it is that the vastly more complex entities who host them are discussing, but one thing's sure - the owners have a lot of things going on, not all of them under conscious control. The churning of gastric secretions and the steady ventilation of lungs are incomprehensible to the simple brains of tapeworms, but they serve the purpose of keeping the humans alive and provide the environment the worms live in. And other more esoteric functions that contribute to survival - the intricate dance of specialized cloned lymphocytes in their bone marrow and lymph nodes, the random permutations of antibodies constantly churning for possible matches to intruder molecules warning of the presence of pollution - are all going on beneath the level of conscious control.
+
+_1 Autonomic defenses. Antibodies. Intelligence bloom gnawing at the edges of the outer system. And humans are not as unsophisticated as mulch wrigglers, they can see the writing on the wall. Is it any surprise, that among the ones who look outward, the real debate is not over whether to run, but over how far and how fast?
+
+* * *
+
+There's a team meeting early the next morning. It's still dark outside, and most of the attendees who are present in vivo have the faintly haggard look that comes from abusing melatonin antagonists. Rita stifles a yawn as she glances around the conference room - the walls expanded into huge virtual spaces to accommodate thirty or so exocortical ghosts from sleeping partners who will wake with memories of a particularly vivid lucid dream - and sees Amber talking to her famous father and a younger-looking man who one of her partials recognizes as a last-century EU politician. There seems to be some tension between them.
+
+Now that Amber has granted Rita her conditional trust, a whole new tier of campaigning information has opened up to her inner eye - stuff steganographically concealed in a hidden layer of the project's collective memory space. There's stuff in here she hadn't suspected, frightening studies of resimulant demographics, surveys of emigration rates from the inner system, cladistic trees dissecting different forms of crude tampering that have been found skulking in the wetware of refugees. The reason why Amber and Manfred and - reluctantly - Sirhan are fighting for one radical faction in a planetwide election, despite their various misgivings over the validity of the entire concept of democracy in this posthuman era. She blinks it aside, slightly bewildered, forking a couple of dozen personality subthreads to chew on it at the edges. "Need coffee," she mutters to the table, as it offers her a chair.
+
+"Everyone on-line?" asked Manfred. "Then I'll begin." He looks tired and worried, physically youthful but showing the full weight of his age. "We've got a crisis coming, folks. About a hundred kiloseconds ago, the bit rate on the resimulation stream jumped. We're now fielding about one resimulated state vector a second, on top of the legitimate immigration we're dealing with. If it jumps again by the same factor, it's going to swamp our ability to check the immigrants for zimboes in vivo - we'd have to move to running them in secure storage or just resurrecting them blind, and if there /{are}/ any jokers in the pack, that's about the riskiest thing we could do."
+
+"Why do you not spool them to memory diamond?" asks the handsome young ex-politician to his left, looking almost amused - as if he already knows the answer.
+
+"Politics." Manfred shrugs.
+
+"It would blow a hole in our social contract," says Amber, looking as if she's just swallowed something unpleasant, and Rita feels a flicker of admiration for the way they're stage-managing the meeting. Amber's even talking to her father, as if she feels comfortable with him around, although he's a walking reminder of her own lack of success. Nobody else has gotten a word in yet. "If we don't instantiate them, the next logical step is to deny resimulated minds the franchise. Which in turn puts us on the road to institutional inequality. And that's a very big step to take, even if you have misgivings about the idea of settling complex policy issues on the basis of a popular vote, because our whole polity is based on the idea that less competent intelligences - us - deserve consideration."
+
+"Hrmph." Someone clears their throat. Rita glances round and freezes, because it's Amber's screwed-up eigenchild, and he's just about materialized in the chair next to her. /{So he adopted Superplonk after all?}/ she observes cynically. He doggedly avoids looking at her. "That was my analysis," he says reluctantly. "We need them alive. For the ark option, at least, and if not, even the accelerationista platform will need them on hand later."
+
+/{Concentration camps}/, thinks Rita, trying to ignore Sirhan's presence near her, for it's a constant irritant, /{where most of the inmates are confused, frightened human beings - and the ones who aren't think they are}/. It's an eerie thought, and she spawns a couple of full ghosts to dream it through for her, gaming the possible angles.
+
+"How are your negotiations over the lifeboat designs going?" Amber asks her father. "We need to get a portfolio of design schemata out before we go into the election -"
+
+"Change of plan." Manfred hunches forward. "This doesn't need to go any further, but Sirhan and Aineko have come up with something interesting." He looks worried.
+
+Sirhan is staring at his eigenmother with narrowed eyes, and Rita has to resist the urge to elbow him savagely in the ribs. She knows enough about him now to realize it wouldn't get his attention - at least, not the way she'd want it, not for the right reasons - and in any case, he's more wrapped up in himself than her ghost ever saw him as likely to be. (How /{anyone}/ could be party to such a detailed exchange of simulated lives and still reject the opportunity to do it in real life is beyond her; unless it's an artifact of his youth, when his parents pushed him through a dozen simulated childhoods in search of knowledge and ended up with a stubborn oyster-head of a son ...) "We still need to look as if we're planning on using a lifeboat," he says aloud. "There's the small matter of the price they're asking in return for the alternative."
+
+"What? What are you talking about?" Amber sounds confused. "I thought you were working on some kind of cladistic map. What's this about a price?"
+
+Sirhan smiles coolly. "I /{am}/ working on a cladistic map, in a manner of speaking. You wasted much of your opportunity when you journeyed to the router, you know. I've been talking to Aineko."
+
+"You -" Amber flushes. "What about?" She's visibly angry, Rita notices. Sirhan is needling his eigenmother. /{Why}/?
+
+"About the topology of some rather interesting types of small-world network." Sirhan leans back in his chair, watching the cloud above her head. "And the router. You went through it, then you came back with your tail between your legs as fast as you could, didn't you? Not even checking your passenger to see if it was a hostile parasite."
+
+"I don't have to take this," Amber says tightly. "You weren't there, and you have no idea what constraints we were working under."
+
+"Really?" Sirhan raises an eyebrow. "Anyway, you missed an opportunity. We know that the routers - for whatever reason - are self-replicating. They spread from brown dwarf to brown dwarf, hatch, tap the protostar for energy and material, and send a bunch of children out. Von Neumann machines, in other words. We also know that they provide high-bandwidth communications to other routers. When you went through the one at Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},, you ended up in an unmaintained DMZ attached to an alien Matrioshka brain that had degenerated, somehow. It follows that /{someone}/ had collected a router and carried it home, to link into the MB. So why didn't you bring one home with you?"
+
+Amber glares at him. "Total payload on board the *{Field Circus}* was about ten grams. How large do you think a router seed is?"
+
+"So you brought the Slug home instead, occupying maybe half your storage capacity and ready to wreak seven shades of havoc on -"
+
+"Children!" They both look round automatically. It's Annette, Rita realizes, and she doesn't look amused. "Why do you not save this bickering for later?" she asks. "We have our own goals to be pursuing." Unamused is an understatement. Annette is fuming.
+
+"This charming family reunion was your idea, I believe?" Manfred smiles at her, then nods coolly at the retread EU politician in the next seat.
+
+"Please." It's Amber. "Dad, can you save this for later?" Rita sits up. For a moment, Amber looks ancient, far older than her subjective gigasecond of age. "She's right. She didn't mean to screw up. Let's leave the family history for some time when we can work it out in private. Okay?"
+
+Manfred looks abashed. He blinks rapidly. "All right." He takes a breath. "Amber, I brought some old acquaintances into the loop. If we win the election, then to get out of here as fast as possible, we'll have to use a combination of the two main ideas we've been discussing: spool as many people as possible into high-density storage until we get somewhere with space and mass and energy to reincarnate them, and get our hands on a router. The entire planetary polity can't afford to pay the energy budget of a relativistic starship big enough to hold everyone, even as uploads, and a subrelativistic ship would be too damn vulnerable to the Vile Offspring. And it follows that, instead of taking potluck on the destination, we should learn about the network protocols the routers use, figure out some kind of transferable currency we can use to pay for our reinstantiation at the other end, and also how to make some kind of map so we know where we're going. The two hard parts are getting at or to a router, and paying - that's going to mean traveling with someone who understands Economics 2.0 but doesn't want to hang around the Vile Offspring.
+
+"As it happens, these old acquaintances of mine went out and fetched back a router seed, for their own purposes. It's sitting about thirty light-hours away from here, out in the Kuiper belt. They're trying to hatch it right now. And I /{think}/ Aineko might be willing to go with us and handle the trade negotiations." He raises the palm of his right hand and flips a bundle of tags into the shared spatial cache of the inner circle's memories.
+
+/{Lobsters}/. Decades ago, back in the dim wastelands of the depression-ridden naughty oughties, the uploaded lobsters had escaped. Manfred brokered a deal for them to get their very own cometary factory colony. Years later, Amber's expedition to the router had run into eerie zombie lobsters, upload images that had been taken over and reanimated by the Wunch. But where the real lobsters had gotten to ...
+
+For a moment, Rita sees herself hovering in darkness and vacuum, the distant siren song of a planetary gravity well far below. Off to her - left? north? - glows a hazy dim red cloud the size of the full moon as seen from Earth, a cloud that hums with a constant background noise, the waste heat of a galactic civilization dreaming furious colorless thoughts to itself. Then she figures out how to slew her unblinking, eyeless viewpoint round and sees the craft.
+
+It's a starship in the shape of a crustacean three kilometers long. It's segmented and flattened, with legs projecting from the abdominal floor to stretch stiffly sideways and clutch fat balloons of cryogenic deuterium fuel. The blue metallic tail is a flattened fan wrapped around the delicate stinger of a fusion reactor. Near the head, things are different: no huge claws there, but the delicately branching fuzz of bush robots, nanoassemblers poised ready to repair damage in flight and spin the parachute of a ramscoop when the ship is ready to decelerate. The head is massively armored against the blitzkrieg onslaught of interstellar dust, its radar eyes a glint of hexagonal compound surfaces staring straight at her.
+
+Behind and below the lobster-ship, a planetary ring looms vast and tenuous. The lobster is in orbit around Saturn, mere light-seconds away. And as Rita stares at the ship in dumbstruck silence, it /{winks}/ at her.
+
+"They don't have names, at least not as individual identifiers," Manfred says apologetically, "so I asked if he'd mind being called something. He said Blue, because he is. So I give you the good lobster *{Something Blue}*."
+
+Sirhan interrupts, "You still need my cladistics project," he sounds somewhat smug, "to find your way through the network. Do you have a specific destination in mind?"
+
+"Yeah, to both questions," Manfred admits. "We need to send duplicate ghosts out to each possible router end point, wait for an echo, then iterate and repeat. Recursive depth-first traversal. The goal - that's harder." He points at the ceiling, which dissolves into a chaotic 3-D spiderweb that Rita recognizes, after some hours of subjective head-down archive time, as a map of the dark matter distribution throughout a radius of a billion light-years, galaxies glued like fluff to the nodes where strands of drying silk meet. "We've known for most of a century that there's something flaky going on out there, out past the Böotes void - there are a couple of galactic superclusters, around which there's something flaky about the cosmic background anisotropy. Most computational processes generate entropy as a by-product, and it looks like something is dumping waste heat into the area from all the galaxies in the region, very evenly spread in a way that mirrors the metal distribution in those galaxies, except at the very cores. And according to the lobsters, who have been indulging in some /{very}/ long baseline interferometry, most of the stars in the nearest cluster are redder than expected and metal-depleted. As if someone's been mining them."
+
+"Ah." Sirhan stares at his grandfather. "Why should they be any different from the local nodes?"
+
+"Look around you. Do you see any indications of large-scale cosmic engineering within a million light-years of here?" Manfred shrugs. "Locally, nothing has quite reached ... well. We can guess at the life cycle of a post spike civilization now, can't we? We've felt the elephant. We've seen the wreckage of collapsed Matrioshka minds. We know how unattractive exploration is to postsingularity intelligences, we've seen the bandwidth gap that keeps them at home." He points at the ceiling. "But over /{there}/ something different happened. They're making changes on the scale of an entire galactic supercluster, and they appear to be coordinated. They /{did}/ get out and go places, and their descendants may still be out there. It looks like they're doing something purposeful and coordinated, something vast - a timing channel attack on the virtual machine that's running the universe, perhaps, or an embedded simulation of an entirely different universe. Up or down, is it turtles all the way, or is there something out there that's more real than we are? And don't you think it's worth trying to find out?"
+
+"No." Sirhan crosses his arms. "Not particularly. I'm interested in saving people from the Vile Offspring, not taking a huge gamble on mystery transcendent aliens who may have built a galaxy-sized reality hacking machine a billion years ago. I'll sell you my services, and even send a ghost along, but if you expect me to bet my entire future on it ..."
+
+It's too much for Rita. Diverting her attention away from the dizzying inner-space vista, she elbows Sirhan in the ribs. He looks round blankly for a moment, then with gathering anger as he lets his killfile filter slip. "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent," she hisses. Then, succumbing to a secondary impulse she knows she'll regret later, she drops a private channel into his public in-tray.
+
+"Nobody's asking you to," Manfred is saying defensively, arms crossed. "I view this as a Manhattan project kind of thing, pursue all agendas in parallel. If we win the election, we'll have the resources we need to do that. We should /{all}/ go through the router, and we will /{all}/ leave backups aboard *{Something Blue}*. *{Blue}* is /{slow}/, tops out at about a tenth of cee, but what he can do is get a sufficient quantity of memory diamond the hell out of circumsolar space before the Vile Offspring's autonomic defenses activate whatever kind of trust exploit they're planning in the next few megaseconds -"
+
+"/{What do you want}/?" Sirhan demands angrily over the channel. He's still not looking at her, and not just because he's focusing on the vision in blue that dominates the shared space of the team meeting.
+
+"/{Stop lying to yourself}/," Rita sends back. "/{You're lying about your own goals and motivations. You may not want to know the truth your own ghost worked out, but I do. And I'm not going to let you deny it happened}/."
+
+"/{So one of your agents seduced a personality image of me -}/"
+
+"/{Bullshit}/ -"
+
+"Do you mean to declare this platform openly?" asks the young-old guy near the platform, the Europol. "Because if so, you're going to undermine Amber's campaign -"
+
+"That's all right," Amber says tiredly, "I'm used to Dad supporting me in his own inimitable way."
+
+"Is okay," says a new voice. "I are happy wait-state grazing in ecliptic." It's the friendly lobster lifeboat, light-lagged by its trajectory outside the ring system.
+
+"- /{You're happy to hide behind a hypocritical sense of moral purity when it makes you feel you can look down on other people, but underneath it you're just like everyone else}/ -"
+
+"- She /{set you up to corrupt me, didn't she? You're just bait in her scheme}/ -"
+
+"The idea was to store incremental backups in the Panuliran's cargo cache in case a weakly godlike agency from the inner system attempts to activate the antibodies they've already disseminated throughout the festival culture," Annette explains, stepping in on Manfred's behalf.
+
+Nobody else in the discussion space seems to notice that Rita and Sirhan are busy ripping the shit out of each other over a private channel, throwing emotional hand grenades back and forth like seasoned divorcees. "It's not a satisfactory solution to the evacuation question, but it ought to satisfy the conservatives' baseline requirement, and as insurance -"
+
+"- /{That's right, blame your eigenmother! Has it occurred to you that she doesn't care enough about you to try a stunt like that? I think you spent too much time with that crazy grandmother of yours. You didn't even integrate that ghost, did you? Too afraid of polluting yourself! I bet you never even bothered to check what it felt like from inside}/ -"
+
+"- /{I did}/ -" Sirhan freezes for a moment, personality modules paging in and out of his brain like a swarm of angry bees - "/{make a fool of myself}/," he adds quietly, then slumps back in his seat. "/{This is so embarrassing ...}/" He covers his face with his hands. "/{You're right.}/"
+
+"/{I am?}/" Rita's puzzlement slowly gives way to understanding; Sirhan has finally integrated the memories from the partials they hybridized earlier. Stuck-up and proud, the cognitive dissonance must be enormous. "/{No, I'm not. You're just overly defensive.}/"
+
+"/{I'm}/ -" Embarrassed. Because Rita knows him, inside out. Has the ghost-memories of six months in a simspace with him, playing with ideas, exchanging intimacies, later confidences. She holds ghost-memories of his embrace, a smoky affair that might have happened in real space if his instant reaction to realizing that it /{could}/ happen hadn't been to dump the splinter of his mind that was contaminated by impure thoughts to cold storage and deny everything.
+
+"We have no threat profile yet," Annette says, cutting right across their private conversation. "If there /{is}/ a direct threat - and we don't know that for sure, yet, the Vile Offspring might be enlightened enough simply to be leaving us alone - it'll probably be some kind of subtle attack aimed directly at the foundations of our identity. Look for a credit bubble, distributed trust metrics devaluing suddenly as people catch some kind of weird religion, something like that. Maybe a perverse election outcome. And it won't be sudden. They are not stupid, to start a headlong attack without slow corruption to soften the way."
+
+"You've obviously been thinking about this for some time," Sameena says with dry emphasis. "What's in it for your friend, uh, Blue? Did you squirrel away enough credit to cover the price of renting a starship from the Economics 2.0 metabubble? Or is there something you aren't telling us?"
+
+"Um." Manfred looks like a small boy with his hand caught in the sweets jar. "Well, as a matter of fact -"
+
+"Yes, Dad, why don't you tell us just what this is going to cost?" Amber asks.
+
+"Ah, well." He looks embarrassed. "It's the lobsters, not Aineko. They want some payment."
+
+Rita reaches out and grabs Sirhan's hand: He doesn't resist. "/{Do you know about this?}/" Rita queries him.
+
+"/{All new to me ...}/" A confused partial thread follows his reply down the pipe, and for a while, she joins him in introspective reverie, trying to work out the implications of knowing what they know about the possibility of a mutual relationship.
+
+"They want a written conceptual map. A map of all the accessible meme spaces hanging off the router network, compiled by human explorers who they can use as a baseline, they say. It's quite simple - in return for a ticket out-system, some of us are going to have to go exploring. But that doesn't mean we can't leave back-ups behind."
+
+"Do they have any particular explorers in mind?" Amber sniffs.
+
+"No," says Manfred. "Just a team of us, to map out the router network and ensure they get some warning of threats from outside." He pauses. "You're going to want to come along, aren't you?"
+
+* * *
+
+The pre-election campaign takes approximately three minutes and consumes more bandwidth than the sum of all terrestrial communications channels from prehistory to 2008. Approximately six million ghosts of Amber, individually tailored to fit the profile of the targeted audience, fork across the dark fiber meshwork underpinning of the lily-pad colonies, then out through ultrawideband mesh networks, instantiated in implants and floating dust motes to buttonhole the voters. Many of them fail to reach their audience, and many more hold fruitless discussions; about six actually decide they've diverged so far from their original that they constitute separate people and register for independent citizenship, two defect to the other side, and one elopes with a swarm of highly empathic modified African honeybees.
+
+Ambers are not the only ghosts competing for attention in the public zeitgeist. In fact, they're in a minority. Most of the autonomous electoral agents are campaigning for a variety of platforms that range from introducing a progressive income tax - nobody is quite sure /{why}/, but it seems to be traditional - to a motion calling for the entire planet to be paved, which quite ignores the realities of element abundance in the upper atmosphere of a metal-poor gas giant, not to mention playing hell with the weather. The Faceless are campaigning for everyone to be assigned a new set of facial muscles every six months, the Livid Pranksters are demanding equal rights for subsentient entities, and a host of single-issue pressure groups are yammering about the usual lost causes.
+
+Just how the election process anneals is a black mystery - at least, to those people who aren't party to the workings of the Festival Committee, the group who first had the idea of paving Saturn with hot-hydrogen balloons - but over the course of a complete diurn, almost forty thousand seconds, a pattern begins to emerge. This pattern will systematize the bias of the communications networks that traffic in reputation points across the planetary polity for a long time - possibly as much as fifty million seconds, getting on for a whole Martian year (if Mars still existed). It will create a parliament - a merged group mind borganism that speaks as one supermind built from the beliefs of the victors. And the news isn't great, as the party gathered in the upper sphere of the Atomium (which Manfred insisted Amber rent for the dead dog party) is slowly realizing. Amber isn't there, presumably drowning her sorrows or engaging in postelection schemes of a different nature somewhere else. But other members of her team are about.
+
+"It could be worse," Rita rationalizes, late in the evening. She's sitting in a corner of the seventh-floor deck, in a 1950s wireframe chair, clutching a glass of synthetic single malt and watching the shadows. "We could be in an old-style contested election with seven shades of shit flying. At least this way we can be decently anonymous."
+
+One of the blind spots detaches from her peripheral vision and approaches. It segues into view, suddenly congealing into Sirhan. He looks morose.
+
+"What's your problem?" she demands. "Your former faction is winning on the count."
+
+"Maybe so." He sits down beside her, carefully avoiding her gaze. "Maybe this is a good thing. And maybe not."
+
+"So when are you going to join the syncitium?" she asks.
+
+"Me? Join that?" He looks alarmed. "You think I want to become part of a parliamentary borg? What do you take me for?"
+
+"Oh." She shakes her head. "I assumed you were avoiding me because -"
+
+"No." He holds out his hand, and a passing waitron deposits a glass in it. He takes a deep breath. "I owe you an apology."
+
+/{About time}/, she thinks, uncharitably. But he's like that. Stiff-necked and proud, slow to acknowledge a mistake, but unlikely to apologize unless he really means it. "What for?" she asks.
+
+"For not giving you the benefit of the doubt," he says slowly, rolling the glass between his palms. "I should have listened to myself earlier instead of locking him out of me."
+
+The self he's talking about seems self-evident to her. "You're not an easy man to get close to," she says quietly. "Maybe that's part of your problem."
+
+"Part of it?" He chuckles bitterly. "My mother -" He bites back whatever he originally meant to say. "Do you know I'm older than she is? Than this version, I mean. She gets up my nose with her assumptions about me ..."
+
+"They run both ways." Rita reaches out and takes his hand - and he grips her right back, no rejection this time. "Listen, it looks as if she's not going to make it into the parliament of lies. There's a straight conservative sweep, these folks are in solid denial. About eighty percent of the population are resimulants or old-timers from Earth, and that's not going to change before the Vile Offspring turn on us. What are we going to do?"
+
+He shrugs. "I suspect everyone who thinks we're really under threat will move on. You know this is going to destroy the accelerationistas trust in democracy? They've still got a viable plan - Manfred's friendly lobster will work without the need for an entire planet's energy budget - but the rejection is going to hurt. I can't help thinking that maybe the real goal of the Vile Offspring was simply to gerrymander us into not diverting resources away from them. It's blunt, it's unsubtle, so we assumed that wasn't the point. But maybe there's a time for them to be blunt."
+
+She shrugs. "Democracy is a bad fit for lifeboats." But she's still uncomfortable with the idea. "And think of all the people we'll be leaving behind."
+
+"Well." He smiles tightly. "If you can think of any way to encourage the masses to join us ..."
+
+"A good start would be to stop thinking of them as masses to be manipulated." Rita stares at him. "Your family appears to have been developing a hereditary elitist streak, and it's not attractive."
+
+Sirhan looks uncomfortable. "If you think I'm bad, you should talk to Aineko about it," he says, self- deprecatingly. "Sometimes I wonder about that cat."
+
+"Maybe I will." She pauses. "And you? What are you going to do with yourself? Are you going to join the explorers?"
+
+"I -" He looks sideways at her. "I can see myself sending an eigenbrother," he says quietly. "But I'm not going to gamble my entire future on a bid to reach the far side of the observable universe by router. I've had enough excitement to last me a lifetime, lately. I think one copy for the backup archive in the icy depths, one to go exploring - and one to settle down and raise a family. What about you?"
+
+"You'll go all three ways?" she asks.
+
+"Yes, I think so. What about you?"
+
+"Where you go, I go." She leans against him. "Isn't that what matters in the end?" she murmurs.
+
+Chapter 9: Survivor
+
+This time, more than a double handful of years passes between successive visits to the Macx dynasty.
+
+Somewhere in the gas-sprinkled darkness beyond the local void, carbon-based life stirs. A cylinder of diamond fifty kilometers long spins in the darkness, its surface etched with strange quantum wells that emulate exotic atoms not found in any periodic table that Mendeleyev would have recognized. Within it, walls hold kilotonnes of oxygen and nitrogen gas, megatonnes of life-infested soil. A hundred trillion kilometers from the wreckage of Earth, the cylinder glitters like a gem in the darkness.
+
+Welcome to New Japan: one of the places between the stars where human beings hang out, now that the solar system is off-limits to meatbodies.
+
+I wonder who we'll find here?
+
+* * *
+
+There's an open plaza in one of the terraform sectors of the habitat cylinder. A huge gong hangs from a beautifully painted wooden frame at one side of the square, which is paved with weathered limestone slabs made of atoms ripped from a planet that has never seen molten ice. Houses stand around, and open-fronted huts where a variety of humanoid waitrons attend to food and beverages for the passing realfolk. A group of prepubescent children are playing hunt-and-seek with their big-eyed pet companions, brandishing makeshift spears and automatic rifles - there's no pain here, for bodies are fungible, rebuilt in a minute by the assembler/disassembler gates in every room. There are few adults hereabouts, for Red Plaza is unfashionable at present, and the kids have claimed it for their own as a playground. They're all genuinely young, symptoms of a demographic demiurge, not a single wendypan among them.
+
+A skinny boy with nut brown skin, a mop of black hair, and three arms is patiently stalking a worried-looking blue eeyore around the corner of the square. He's passing a stand stacked with fresh sushi rolls when the strange beast squirms out from beneath a wheelbarrow and arches its back, stretching luxuriously.
+
+The boy, Manni, freezes, hands tensing around his spear as he focuses on the new target. (The blue eeyore flicks its tail at him and darts for safety across a lichen-encrusted slab.) "City, what's that?" he asks without moving his lips.
+
+"What are you looking at?" replies City, which puzzles him somewhat, but not as much as it should.
+
+The beast finishes stretching one front leg and extends another. It looks a bit like a pussycat to Manni, but there's something subtly wrong with it. Its head is a little too small, the eyes likewise - and those paws - "You're sharp," he accuses the beast, forehead wrinkling in disapproval.
+
+"Yeah, whatever." The creature yawns, and Manni points his spear at it, clenching the shaft in both right hands. It's got sharp teeth, too, but it spoke to him via his inner hearing, not his ears. Innerspeech is for people, not toys.
+
+"Who are you?" he demands.
+
+The beast looks at him insolently. "I know your parents," it says, still using innerspeech. "You're Manni Macx, aren't you? Thought so. I want you to take me to your father."
+
+"No!" Manni jumps up and waves his arms at it. "I don't like you! Go away!" He pokes his spear in the direction of the beast's nose.
+
+"I'll go away when you take me to your father," says the beast. It raises its tail like a pussycat, and the fur bushes out, but then it pauses. "If you take me to your father I'll tell you a story afterward, how about that?"
+
+"Don't care!" Manni is only about two hundred megaseconds old - seven old Earth-years - but he can tell when he's being manipulated and gets truculent.
+
+"Kids." The cat-thing's tail lashes from side to side. "Okay, Manni, how about you take me to your father, or I rip your face off? I've got claws, you know." A brief eyeblink later, it's wrapping itself around his ankles sinuously, purring to give the lie to its unreliable threat - but he can see that it's got sharp nails all right. It's a /{wild}/ pussycat-thing, and nothing in his artificially preserved orthohuman upbringing has prepared him for dealing with a real wild pussycat-thing that talks.
+
+"Get away!" Manni is worried. "Mom!" he hollers, unintentionally triggering the broadcast flag in his innerspeech. "There's this /{thing}/ -"
+
+"Mom will do." The cat-thing sounds resigned. It stops rubbing against Manni's legs and looks up at him. "There's no need to panic. I won't hurt you."
+
+Manni stops hollering. "Who're you?" he asks at last, staring at the beast. Somewhere light-years away, an adult has heard his cry; his mother is coming fast, bouncing between switches and glancing off folded dimensions in a headlong rush toward him.
+
+"I'm Aineko." The beast sits down and begins to wash behind one hind leg. "And you're Manni, right?"
+
+"Aineko," Manni says uncertainly. "Do you know Lis or Bill?"
+
+Aineko the cat-thing pauses in his washing routine and looks at Manni, head cocked to one side. Manni is too young, too inexperienced to know that Aineko's proportions are those of a domestic cat, /{Felis catus}/, a naturally evolved animal rather than the toys and palimpsests and companionables he's used to. Reality may be fashionable with his parents' generation, but there /{are}/ limits, after all. Orange-and-brown stripes and whorls decorate Aineko's fur, and he sprouts a white fluffy bib beneath his chin. "Who are Lis and Bill?"
+
+"Them," says Manni, as big, sullen-faced Bill creeps up behind Aineko and tries to grab his tail while Lis floats behind his shoulder like a pint-sized UFO, buzzing excitedly. But Aineko is too fast for the kids and scampers round Manni's feet like a hairy missile. Manni whoops and tries to spear the pussycat-thing, but his spear turns to blue glass, crackles, and shards of brilliant snow rain down, burning his hands.
+
+"/{Now that}/ wasn't very friendly, was it?" says Aineko, a menacing note in his voice. "Didn't your mother teach you not to -"
+
+The door in the side of the sushi stall opens as Rita arrives, breathless and angry: "Manni! What have I told you about playing -"
+
+She stops, seeing Aineko. "/{You}/." She recoils in barely concealed fright. Unlike Manni, she recognizes it as the avatar of a posthuman demiurge, a body incarnated solely to provide a point of personal interaction for people to focus on.
+
+The cat grins back at her. "Me," he agrees. "Ready to talk?"
+
+She looks stricken. "We've got nothing to talk about."
+
+Aineko lashes his tail. "Oh, but we do." The cat turns and looks pointedly at Manni. "Don't we?"
+
+* * *
+
+_1 It has been a long time since Aineko passed this way, and in the meantime the space around Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56}, has changed out of all recognition. Back when the great lobster-built starships swept out of Sol's Oort cloud, archiving the raw frozen data of the unoccupied brown dwarf halo systems and seeding their structured excrement with programmable matter, there was nothing but random dead atoms hereabouts (and an alien router). But that was a long time ago; and since then, the brown dwarf system has succumbed to an anthropic infestation.
+
+_1 An unoptimized instance of H. sapiens maintains state coherency for only two to three gigaseconds before it succumbs to necrosis. But in only about ten gigaseconds, the infestation has turned the dead brown dwarf system upside down. They strip-mined the chilly planets to make environments suitable for their own variety of carbon life. They rearranged moons, building massive structures the size of asteroids. They ripped wormhole endpoints free of the routers and turned them into their own crude point-to-point network, learned how to generate new wormholes, then ran their own packet-switched polities over them. Wormhole traffic now supports an ever-expanding mesh of interstellar human commerce, but always in the darkness between the lit stars and the strange, metal-depleted dwarfs with the suspiciously low-entropy radiation. The sheer temerity of the project is mind-boggling: notwithstanding that canned apes are simply /{not suited}/ to life in the interstellar void, especially in orbit around a brown dwarf whose planets make Pluto seem like a tropical paradise, they've taken over the whole damn system.
+
+_1 New Japan is one of the newer human polities in this system, a bunch of nodes physically collocated in the humaniformed spaces of the colony cylinders. Its designers evidently only knew about old Nippon from recordings made back before Earth was dismantled, and worked from a combination of nostalgia-trip videos, Miyazaki movies, and anime culture. Nevertheless, it's the home of numerous human beings - even if they are about as similar to their historical antecedents as New Japan is to its long-gone namesake.
+
+_1 Humanity?
+
+_1 Their grandparents /{would}/ recognize them, mostly. The ones who are truly beyond the ken of twentieth-century survivors stayed back home in the red-hot clouds of nanocomputers that have replaced the planets that once orbited Earth's sun in stately Copernican harmony. The fast-thinking Matrioshka brains are as incomprehensible to their merely posthuman ancestors as an ICBM to an amoeba - and about as inhabitable. Space is dusted with the corpses of Matrioshka brains that have long since burned out, informational collapse taking down entire civilizations that stayed in close orbit around their home stars. Farther away, galaxy-sized intelligences beat incomprehensible rhythms against the darkness of the vacuum, trying to hack the Planck substrate into doing their bidding. Posthumans, and the few other semitranscended species to have discovered the router network, live furtively in the darkness between these islands of brilliance. There are, it would seem, advantages to not being too intelligent.
+
+_1 Humanity. Monadic intelligences, mostly trapped within their own skulls, living in small family groups within larger tribal networks, adaptable to territorial or migratory lifestyles. Those were the options on offer before the great acceleration. Now that dumb matter thinks, with every kilogram of wallpaper potentially hosting hundreds of uploaded ancestors, now that every door is potentially a wormhole to a hab half a parsec away, the humans can stay in the same place while the landscape migrates and mutates past them, streaming into the luxurious void of their personal history. Life is rich here, endlessly varied and sometimes confusing. So it is that tribal groups remain, their associations mediated across teraklicks and gigaseconds by exotic agencies. And sometimes the agencies will vanish for a while, reappearing later like an unexpected jape upon the infinite.
+
+* * *
+
+Ancestor worship takes on a whole new meaning when the state vectors of all the filial entities' precursors are archived and indexed for recall. At just the moment that the tiny capillaries in Rita's face are constricting in response to a surge of adrenaline, causing her to turn pale and her pupils to dilate as she focuses on the pussycat-thing, Sirhan is kneeling before a small shrine, lighting a stick of incense, and preparing to respectfully address his grandfather's ghost.
+
+The ritual is, strictly speaking, unnecessary. Sirhan can speak to his grandfather's ghost wherever and whenever he wants, without any formality, and the ghost will reply at interminable length, cracking puns in dead languages and asking about people who died before the temple of history was established. But Sirhan is a sucker for rituals, and anyway, it helps him structure an otherwise-stressful encounter.
+
+If it were up to Sirhan, he'd probably skip chatting to grandfather every ten megaseconds. Sirhan's mother and her partner aren't available, having opted to join one of the long-distance exploration missions through the router network that were launched by the accelerationistas long ago; and Rita's antecedents are either fully virtualized or dead. They are a family with a tenuous grip on history. But both of them spent a long time in the same state of half-life in which Manfred currently exists, and he knows his wife will take him to task if he doesn't bring the revered ancestor up to date on what's been happening in the real world while he's been dead. In Manfred's case, death is not only potentially reversible, but almost inevitably so. After all, they're raising his clone. Sooner or later, the kid is going to want to visit the original, or vice versa.
+
+What a state we have come /{to, when the restless dead refuse to stay a part of history?}/ He wonders ironically as he scratches the self-igniter strip on the red incense stick and bows to the mirror at the back of the shrine. "Your respectful grandson awaits and expects your guidance," he intones formally - for in addition to being conservative by nature, Sirhan is acutely aware of his family's relative poverty and the need to augment their social credit, and in this reincarnation-intermediated traditionalist polity for the hopelessly orthohuman, you can score credit for formality. He sits back on his heels to await the response.
+
+Manfred doesn't take long to appear in the depths of the mirror. He takes the shape of an albino orang-utan, as usual: He was messing around with Great Aunt Annette's ontological wardrobe right before this copy of him was recorded and placed in the temple - they might have separated, but they remained close. "Hi, lad. What year is it?"
+
+Sirhan suppresses a sigh. "We don't do years anymore," he explains, not for the first time. Every time he consults his grandfather, the new instance asks this question sooner or later. "Years are an archaism. It's been ten megs since we last spoke - about four /{months}/, if you're going to be pedantic about it, and a hundred and eighty /{years}/ since we emigrated. Although correcting for general relativity adds another decade or so."
+
+"Oh. Is that all?" Manfred manages to look disappointed. This is a new one on Sirhan: Usually the diverging state vector of Gramps's ghost asks after Amber or cracks a feeble joke at this point. "No changes in the Hubble constant, or the rate of stellar formation? Have we heard from any of the exploration eigenselves yet?"
+
+"Nope." Sirhan relaxes slightly. So Manfred is going to ask about the fool's errand to the edge of the Beckenstein limit again, is he? That's canned conversation number twenty-nine. (Amber and the other explorers who set out for the really long exploration mission shortly after the first colony was settled aren't due back for, oh, about 10^{19}^ seconds. It's a /{long}/ way to the edge of the observable universe, even when you can go the first several hundred million light-years - to the Böotes supercluster and beyond - via a small-world network of wormholes. And this time, she didn't leave any copies of herself behind.)
+
+Sirhan - either in this or some other incarnation - has had this talk with Manfred many times before, because that's the essence of the dead. They don't remember from one recall session to the next, unless and until they ask to be resurrected because their restoration criteria have been matched. Manfred has been dead a long time, long enough for Sirhan and Rita to be resurrected and live a long family life three or four times over after /{they}/ had spent a century or so in nonexistence. "We've received no notices from the lobsters, nothing from Aineko either." He takes a deep breath. "You always ask me where we are next, so I've got a canned response for you -" and one of his agents throws the package, tagged as a scroll sealed with red wax and a silk ribbon, through the surface of the mirror. (After the tenth repetition Rita and Sirhan agreed to write a basic briefing that the Manfred-ghosts could use to orient themselves.)
+
+Manfred is silent for a moment - probably hours in ghost-space - as he assimilates the changes. Then: "This is true? I've slept through a whole /{civilization}/?"
+
+"Not slept, you've been dead," Sirhan says pedantically. He realizes he's being a bit harsh: "Actually, so did we," he adds. "We surfed the first three gigasecs or so because we wanted to start a family somewhere where our children could grow up the traditional way. Habs with an oxidation-intensive triple-point water environment didn't get built until sometime after the beginning of the exile. That's when the fad for neomorphism got entrenched," he adds with distaste. For quite a while the neos resisted the idea of wasting resources building colony cylinders spinning to provide vertebrate-friendly gee forces and breathable oxygen-rich atmospheres - it had been quite a political football. But the increasing curve of wealth production had allowed the orthodox to reincarnate from death-sleep after a few decades, once the fundamental headaches of building settlements in chilly orbits around metal-deficient brown dwarfs were overcome.
+
+"Uh." Manfred takes a deep breath, then scratches himself under one armpit, rubbery lips puckering. "So, let me get this straight: We - you, they, whoever - hit the router at Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},, replicated a load of them, and now use the wormhole mechanism the routers rely on as point-to-point gates for physical transport? And have spread throughout a bunch of brown dwarf systems, and built a pure deep-space polity based on big cylinder habitats connected by teleport gates hacked out of routers?"
+
+"Would /{you}/ trust one of the original routers for switched data communications?" Sirhan asks rhetorically. "Even with the source code? They've been corrupted by all the dead alien Matrioshka civilizations they've come into contact with, but they're reasonably safe if all you want to use them for is to cannibalize them for wormholes and tunnel dumb mass from point to point." He searches for a metaphor: "Like using your, uh, internet, to emulate a nineteenth-century postal service."
+
+"O-kay." Manfred looks thoughtful, as he usually does at this point in the conversation - which means Sirhan is going to have to break it to him that his first thoughts for how to utilize the gates have already been done. They're hopelessly old hat. In fact, the main reason why Manfred is still dead is that things have moved on so far that, sooner or later, whenever he surfaces for a chat, he gets frustrated and elects not to be reincarnated. Not that Sirhan is about to tell him that he's obsolete - that would be rude, not to say subtly inaccurate. "That raises some interesting possibilities. I wonder, has anyone -"
+
+"/{Sirhan, I need you!}/"
+
+The crystal chill of Rita's alarm and fear cuts through Sirhan's awareness like a scalpel, distracting him from the ghost of his ancestor. He blinks, instantly transferring the full focus of his attention to Rita without sparing Manfred even a ghost.
+
+"/{What's happening}/ -"
+
+He sees through Rita's eyes: a cat with an orange-and-brown swirl on its flank sits purring beside Manni in the family room of their dwelling. Its eyes are narrowed as it watches her with unnatural wisdom. Manni is running fingers through its fur and seems none the worse for wear, but Sirhan still feels his fists clench.
+
+"What -"
+
+"Excuse me," he says, standing up: "Got to go. Your bloody cat's turned up." He adds "/{coming home now}/" for Rita's benefit, then turns and hurries out of the temple concourse. When he reaches the main hall, he pauses, then Rita's sense of urgency returns to him, and he throws parsimony to the wind, stepping into a priority gate in order to get home as fast as possible.
+
+Behind him, Manfred's melancholy ghost snorts, mildly offended, and considers the existential choice: to be, or not to be. Then he makes a decision.
+
+* * *
+
+_1 Welcome to the twenty-third century, or the twenty-fourth. Or maybe it's the twenty-second, jet-lagged and dazed by spurious suspended animation and relativistic travel; it hardly matters these days. What's left of recognizable humanity has scattered across a hundred light-years, living in hollowed-out asteroids and cylindrical spinning habitats strung in orbit around cold brown dwarf stars and sunless planets that wander the interstellar void. The looted mechanisms underlying the alien routers have been cannibalized, simplified to a level the merely superhuman can almost comprehend, turned into generators for paired wormhole endpoints that allow instantaneous switched transport across vast distances. Other mechanisms, the descendants of the advanced nanotechnologies developed by the flowering of human techgnosis in the twenty-first century, have made the replication of dumb matter trivial; this is not a society accustomed to scarcity.
+
+_1 But in some respects, New Japan and the Invisible Empire and the other polities of human space are poverty-stricken backwaters. They take no part in the higher-order economies of the posthuman. They can barely comprehend the idle muttering of the Vile Offspring, whose mass/energy budget (derived from their complete restructuring of the free matter of humanity's original solar system into computronium) dwarfs that of half a hundred human-occupied brown dwarf systems. And they still know worryingly little about the deep history of intelligence in this universe, about the origins of the router network that laces so many dead civilizations into an embrace of death and decay, about the distant galaxy-scale bursts of information processing that lie at measurable red-shift distances, even about the free posthumans who live among them in some senses, collocated in the same light cone as these living fossil relics of old-fashioned humanity.
+
+_1 Sirhan and Rita settled in this charming human-friendly backwater in order to raise a family, study xenoarchaeology, and avoid the turmoil and turbulence that have characterized his family's history across the last couple of generations. Life has been comfortable for the most part, and if the stipend of an academic nucleofamilial is not large, it is sufficient in this place and age to provide all the necessary comforts of civilization. And this suits Sirhan (and Rita) fine; the turbulent lives of their entrepreneurial ancestors led to grief and angst and adventures, and as Sirhan is fond of observing, an adventure is something horrible that happens to someone else.
+
+_1 Only ...
+
+_1 Aineko is back. Aineko, who after negotiating the establishment of the earliest of the refugee habs in orbit around Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},, vanished into the router network with Manfred's other instance - and the partial copies of Sirhan and Rita who had forked, seeking adventure rather than cozy domesticity. Sirhan made a devil's bargain with Aineko, all those gigaseconds ago, and now he is deathly afraid that Aineko is going to call the payment due.
+
+* * *
+
+Manfred walks down a hall of mirrors. At the far end, he emerges in a public space modeled on a Menger sponge - a cube diced subtractively into ever-smaller cubic volumes until its surface area tends toward infinity. This being meatspace, or a reasonable simulation thereof, it isn't a /{real}/ Menger sponge; but it looks good at a distance, going down at least four levels.
+
+He pauses behind a waist-high diamond barrier and looks down into the almost-tesseract-shaped depths of the cube's interior, at a verdant garden landscape with charming footbridges that cross streams laid out with careful attention to the requirements of feng shui. He looks up: Some of the cube-shaped subtractive openings within the pseudofractal structure are occupied by windows belonging to dwellings or shared buildings that overlook the public space. High above, butterfly-shaped beings with exotic colored wings circle in the ventilation currents. It's hard to tell from down here, but the central cuboid opening looks to be at least half a kilometer on a side, and they might very well be posthumans with low-gee wings - angels.
+
+/{Angels, or rats in the walls}/? he asks himself, and sighs. Half his extensions are off-line, so hopelessly obsolete that the temple's assembler systems didn't bother replicating them, or even creating emulation environments for them to run in. The rest ... well, at least he's still physically orthohuman, he realizes. Fully functional, fully male. /{Not everything has changed - only the important stuff}/. It's a scary-funny thought, laden with irony. Here he is, naked as the day he was born - newly re-created, in fact, released from the wake-experience-reset cycle of the temple of history - standing on the threshold of a posthuman civilization so outrageously rich and powerful that they can build mammal-friendly habitats that resemble works of art in the cryogenic depths of space. Only he's /{poor}/, this whole polity is /{poor}/, and it can't ever be anything else, in fact, because it's a dumping ground for merely posthuman also-rans, the singularitarian equivalent of australopithecines. In the brave new world of the Vile Offspring, they can't get ahead any more than a protohominid could hack it as a rocket scientist in Werner von Braun's day. They're born to be primitive, wallowing happily in the mud-bath of their own limited cognitive bandwidth. So they fled into the darkness and built a civilization so bright it can put anything earthbound that came before the singularity into the shade ... and it's still a shanty town inhabited by the mentally handicapped.
+
+The incongruity of it amuses him, but only for a moment. He has, after all, electively reincarnated for a reason: Sirhan's throwaway comment about the cat caught his attention. "City, where can I find some clothes?" he asks. "Something socially appropriate, that is. And some, uh, brains. I need to be able to off-load ..."
+
+Citymind chuckles inside the back of his head, and Manfred realizes that there's a public assembler on the other side of the ornamental wall he's leaning on. "Oh," he mutters, as he finds himself imagining something not unlike his clunky old direct neural interface, candy-colored icons and overlays and all. It's curiously mutable, and with a weird sense of detachment, he realizes that it's not his imagination at all, but an infinitely customizable interface to the pervasive information spaces of the polity, currently running in dumbed-down stupid mode for his benefit. It's true; he needs training wheels. But it doesn't take him long to figure out how to ask the assembler to make him a pair of pants and a plain black vest, and to discover that, as long as he keeps his requests simple, the results are free - just like back home on Saturn. The spaceborn polities are kind to indigents, for the basic requirements of life are cheap, and to withhold them would be tantamount to homicide. (If the presence of transhumans has upset a whole raft of prior assumptions, at least it hasn't done more than superficial damage to the Golden Rule.)
+
+Clothed and more or less conscious - at least at a human level - Manfred takes stock. "Where do Sirhan and Rita live?" he asks. A dotted route makes itself apparent to him, snaking improbably through a solid wall that he understands to be an instantaneous wormhole gate connecting points light-years apart. He shakes his head, bemused. /{I suppose I'd better go and see them}/, he decides. It's not as if there's anyone else for him to look up, is it? The Franklins vanished into the solar Matrioshka brain, Pamela died ages ago (and there's a shame, he'd never expected to miss her) and Annette hooked up with Gianni while he was being a flock of pigeons. (Draw a line under that one and say it's all over.) His daughter vanished into the long-range exploration program. He's been dead for so long that his friends and acquaintances are scattered across a light cone centuries across. He can't think of anyone else here who he might run into, except for the loyal grandson, keeping the candle of filial piety burning with unasked-for zeal. "Maybe he needs help," Manfred thinks aloud as he steps into the gate, rationalizing. "And then again, maybe /{he}/ can help /{me}/ figure out what to do?"
+
+* * *
+
+Sirhan gets home, anticipating trouble. He finds it, but not in any way he'd expected. Home is a split-level manifold, rooms connected by T-gates scattered across a variety of habitats: low-gee sleeping den, high-gee exercise room, and everything in between. It's furnished simply, tatami mats and programmable matter walls able to extrude any desired furniture in short order. The walls are configured to look and feel like paper, but can damp out even infant tantrums. But right now, the antisound isn't working, and the house he comes home to is overrun by shrieking yard apes, a blur of ginger-and-white fur, and a distraught Rita trying to explain to her neighbor Eloise why her orthodaughter Sam is bouncing around the place like a crazy ball.
+
+" - The cat, he gets them worked up." She wrings her hands and begins to turn as Sirhan comes into view. "At last!"
+
+"I came fast." He nods respectfully at Eloise, then frowns. "The children -" Something small and fast runs headfirst into him, grabs his legs, and tries to head-butt him in the crotch. "Oof!" He bends down and lifts Manni up. "Hey, son, haven't I told you not to -"
+
+"Not his fault," Rita says hurriedly. "He's excited because -"
+
+"I really don't think -" Eloise begins to gather steam, looking around uncertainly.
+
+"Mrreeow?" something asks in a conversational tone of voice from down around Sirhan's ankles.
+
+"Eek!" Sirhan jumps backward, flailing for balance under the weight of an excited toddler. There's a gigantic disturbance in the polity thoughtspace - like a stellar-mass black hole - and it appears to be stropping itself furrily against his left leg. "What are /{you}/ doing here?" He demands.
+
+"Oh, this and that," says the cat, his innerspeech accent a sardonic drawl. "I thought it was about time I visited again. Where's your household assembler? Mind if I use it? Got a little something I need to make up for a friend ..."
+
+"What?" Rita demands, instantly suspicious. "Haven't you caused enough trouble already?" Sirhan looks at her approvingly; obviously Amber's long-ago warnings about the cat sank in deeply, because she's certainly not treating it as the small bundle of child-friendly fun it would like to be perceived as.
+
+"Trouble?" The cat looks up at her sardonically, lashing his tail from side to side. "I won't make any trouble, I promise you. It's just -"
+
+The door chime clears its throat, to announce a visitor: "Ren Fuller would like to visit, m'lord and lady."
+
+"What's /{she}/ doing here?" Rita asks irritably. Sirhan can feel her unease, the tenuous grasping of her ghosts as she searches for reason in an unreasonable world, simulating outcomes, living through bad dreams, and backtracking to adjust her responses accordingly. "Show her in, by all means." Ren is one of their neighbor-cognates (most of her dwelling is several light-years away, but in terms of transit time, it's a hop, skip, and a jump); she and her extruded family are raising a small herd of ill-behaved kids who occasionally hang out with Manni.
+
+A small blue eeyore whinnies mournfully and dashes past the adults, pursued by a couple of children waving spears and shrieking. Eloise makes a grab for her own and misses, just as the door to the exercise room disappears and Manni's little friend Lis darts inside like a pint-sized guided missile. "Sam, come here right now -" Eloise calls, heading toward the door.
+
+"Look, what do you want?" Sirhan demands, hugging his son and looking down at the cat.
+
+"Oh, not much," Aineko says, turning to lick a mussed patch of fur on his flank. "I just want to play with /{him}/."
+
+"You want to -" Rita stops.
+
+"Daddy!" Manni wants down.
+
+Sirhan lowers him carefully, as if his bones are glass. "Run along and play," he suggests. Turning to Rita: "Why don't you go and find out what Ren wants, dear?" he asks. "She's probably here to collect Lis, but you can never be sure."
+
+"I was just leaving," Eloise adds, "as soon as I can catch up with Sam." She glances over her shoulder at Rita apologetically, then dives into the exercise room.
+
+Sirhan takes a step toward the hallway. "Let's talk," he says tightly. "In my study." He glares at the cat. "I want an explanation. I want to know the truth."
+
+* * *
+
+Meanwhile, in a cognitive wonderland his parents know about but deeply underestimate, parts of Manni are engaging in activities far less innocent than they imagine.
+
+Back in the twenty-first century, Sirhan lived through loads of alternate childhoods in simulation, his parents' fingers pressing firmly on the fast-forward button until they came up with someone who seemed to match their preconceptions. The experience scarred him as badly as any nineteenth-century boarding school experience, until he promised himself no child he raised would be subjected to such; but there's a difference between being shoved through a multiplicity of avatars, and voluntarily diving into an exciting universe of myth and magic where your childhood fantasies take fleshy form, stalking those of your friends and enemies through the forests of the night.
+
+Manni has grown up with neural interfaces to City's mindspace an order of magnitude more complex than those of Sirhan's youth, and parts of him - ghosts derived from a starting image of his neural state vector, fertilized with a scattering borrowed from the original Manfred, simulated on a meat machine far faster than real time - are fully adult. Of course, they can't fit inside his seven-year-old skull, but they still watch over him. And when he's in danger, they try to take care of their once and future body.
+
+Manni's primary adult ghost lives in some of New Japan's virtual mindspaces (which are a few billion times more extensive than the physical spaces available to stubborn biologicals, for the computational density of human habitats have long since ceased to make much sense when measured in MIPS per kilogram). They're modeled on presingularity Earth. Time is forever frozen on the eve of the real twenty-first century, zero eight-forty-six hours on September 11: An onrushing wide-body airliner hangs motionless in the air forty meters below the picture window of Manni's penthouse apartment on the one hundred and eighth floor of the North Tower. In historical reality, the one hundred and eighth floor was occupied by corporate offices; but the mindspace is a consensual fiction, and it is Manni's conceit to live at this pivotal point. (Not that it means much to him - he was born well over a century after the War on Terror - but it's part of his childhood folklore, the fall of the Two Towers that shattered the myth of Western exceptionalism and paved the way for the world he was born into.)
+
+Adult-Manni wears an avatar roughly modeled on his clone-father Manfred - skinnier, pegged at a youthful twentysomething, black-clad, and gothic. He's taking time out from a game of Matrix to listen to music, Type O Negative blaring over the sound system as he twitches in the grip of an ice-cold coke high. He's expecting a visit from a couple of call girls - themselves the gamespace avatars of force-grown adult ghosts whose primaries may not be adult, or female, or even human - which is why he's flopped bonelessly back in his Arne Jacobsen recliner, waiting for something to happen.
+
+The door opens behind him. He doesn't show any sign of noticing the intrusion, although his pupils dilate slightly at the faint reflection of a woman, stalking toward him, glimpsed dimly in the window glass. "You're late," he says tonelessly. "You were supposed to be here ten minutes ago -" He begins to look round, and now his eyes widen.
+
+"Who were you expecting?" asks the ice blond in the black business suit, long-skirted and uptight. There's something predatory about her expression: "No, don't tell me. So you're Manni, eh? Manni's partial?" She sniffs, disapproval. "Fin de siècle decadence. I'm sure Sirhan wouldn't approve."
+
+"My father can go fuck himself," Manni says truculently. "Who the hell are you?"
+
+The blond snaps her fingers: An office chair appears on the carpet between Manni and the window, and she sits on the edge of it, smoothing her skirt obsessively. "I'm Pamela," she says tightly. "Has your father told you about me?"
+
+Manni looks puzzled. In the back of his mind, raw instincts alien to anyone instantiated before the midpoint of the twenty-first century tug on the fabric of pseudoreality. "You're dead, aren't you?" he asks. "One of my ancestors."
+
+"I'm as dead as you are." She gives him a wintry smile. "Nobody stays dead these days, least of all people who know Aineko."
+
+Manni blinks. Now he's beginning to feel a surge of mild irritation. "This is all very well, but I was /{expecting}/ company," he says with heavy emphasis. "Not a family reunion, or a tiresome attempt to preach your puritanism -"
+
+Pamela snorts. "Wallow in your pigsty for all I care, kid, I've got more important things to worry about. Have you looked at your primary recently?"
+
+"My primary?" Manni tenses. "He's doing okay." For a moment his eyes focus on infinity, a thousand-yard stare as he loads and replays the latest brain dump from his infant self. "Who's the cat he's playing with? That's no companion!"
+
+"Aineko. I told you." Pamela taps the arm of her chair impatiently. "The family curse has come for another generation. And if you don't do something about it -"
+
+"About what?" Manni sits up. "What are you talking about?" He comes to his feet and turns toward her. Outside the window, the sky is growing dark with an echo of his own foreboding. Pamela is on her feet before him, the chair evaporated in a puff of continuity clipping, her expression a cold-eyed challenge.
+
+"I think you know /{exactly}/ what I'm talking about, Manni. It's time to stop playing this fucking game. Grow up, while you've still got the chance!"
+
+"I'm -" He stops. "Who /{am}/ I?" he asks, a chill wind of uncertainty drying the sweat that has sprung up and down his spine. "And what are you doing here?"
+
+"Do you really want to know the answer? I'm dead, remember. The dead know everything. And that isn't necessarily good for the living ..."
+
+He takes a deep breath. "Am I dead too?" He looks puzzled. "There's an adult-me in Seventh Cube Heaven, what's /{he}/ doing here?"
+
+"It's the kind of coincidence that isn't." She reaches out and takes his hand, dumping encrypted tokens deep into his sensorium, a trail of bread crumbs leading into a dark and trackless part of mindspace. "Want to find out? Follow me." Then she vanishes.
+
+Manni leans forward, baffled and frightened, staring down at the frozen majesty of the onrushing airliner below his window. "Shit," he whispers. /{She came right through my defenses without leaving a trace. Who is she?}/ The ghost of his dead great-grandmother, or something else?
+
+I'll have to follow her if I want to find out, he realizes. He holds up his left hand, stares at the invisible token glowing brightly inside his husk of flesh. "Resynchronize me with my primary," he says.
+
+A fraction of a second later, the floor of the penthouse bucks and quakes wildly and fire alarms begin to shriek as time comes to an end and the frozen airliner completes its journey. But Manni isn't there anymore. And if a skyscraper falls in a simulation with nobody to see it, has anything actually happened?
+
+* * *
+
+"I've come for the boy," says the cat. It sits on the hand woven rug in the middle of the hardwood floor with one hind leg sticking out at an odd angle, as if it's forgotten about it. Sirhan teeters on the edge of hysteria for a moment as he apprehends the sheer size of the entity before him, the whimsical posthuman creation of his ancestors. Originally a robotic toy companion, Aineko was progressively upgraded and patched. By the eighties, when Sirhan first met the cat in the flesh, he was already a terrifyingly alien intelligence, subtle and ironic. And now ...
+
+Sirhan knows Aineko manipulated his eigenmother, bending her natural affections away from his real father and toward another man. In moments of black introspection, he sometimes wonders if the cat wasn't also responsible in some way for his own broken upbringing, the failure to relate to his real parents. After all, it was a pawn in the vicious divorce battle between Manfred and Pamela - decades before his birth - and there might be long-term instructions buried in its preconscious drives. What if the pawn is actually a hidden king, scheming in the darkness?
+
+"I've come for Manny."
+
+"You're not having him." Sirhan maintains an outer facade of calm, even though his first inclination is to snap at Aineko. "Haven't you done enough damage already?"
+
+"You're not going to make this easy, are you?" The cat stretches his head forward and begins to lick obsessively between the splayed toes of his raised foot. "I'm not making a demand, kid, I said I've /{come}/ for him, and you're not really in the frame at all. In fact, I'm going out of my way to warn you."
+
+"And I say -" Sirhan stops. "Shit!" Sirhan doesn't approve of swearing: The curse is an outward demonstration of his inner turmoil. "Forget what I was about to say, I'm sure you already know it. Let me begin again, please."
+
+"Sure. Let's play this your way." The cat chews on a loose nail sheath but his innerspeech is perfectly clear, a casual intimacy that keeps Sirhan on edge. "You've got some idea of what I am, clearly. You know - I ascribe intentionality to you - that my theory of mind is intrinsically stronger than yours, that my cognitive model of human consciousness is complete. You might well suspect that I use a Turing Oracle to think my way around your halting states." The cat isn't worrying at a loose claw now, he's grinning, pointy teeth gleaming in the light from Sirhan's study window. The window looks out onto the inner space of the habitat cylinder, up at a sky with hillsides and lakes and forests plastered across it: It's like an Escher landscape, modeled with complete perfection. "You've realized that I can think my way around the outside of your box while you're flailing away inside it, and I'm /{always}/ one jump ahead of you. What else do you know I know?"
+
+Sirhan shivers. Aineko is staring up at him, unblinking. For a moment, he feels at gut level that he is in the presence of an alien god: It's the simple truth, isn't it? But - "Okay, I concede the point," Sirhan says after a moment in which he spawns a blizzard of panicky cognitive ghosts, fractional personalities each tasked with the examination of a different facet of the same problem. "You're smarter than I am. I'm just a boringly augmented human being, but you've got a flashy new theory of mind that lets you work around creatures like me the way I can think my way around a real cat." He crosses his arms defensively. "You do not normally rub this in. It's not in your interests to do so, is it? You prefer to hide your manipulative capabilities under an affable exterior, to play with us. So you're revealing all this for a reason." There's a note of bitterness in his voice now. Glancing round, Sirhan summons up a chair - and, as an afterthought, a cat basket. "Have a seat. /{Why now}/, Aineko? What makes you think you can take my eigenson?"
+
+"I didn't say I was going to /{take}/ him, I said I'd come for him." Aineko's tail lashes from side to side in agitation. "I don't deal in primate politics, Sirhan: I'm not a monkey-boy. But I knew you'd react badly because the way your species socializes" - a dozen metaghosts reconverge in Sirhan's mind, drowning Aineko's voice in an inner cacophony - "would enter into the situation, and it seemed preferable to trigger your territorial/reproductive threat display early, rather than risk it exploding in my face during a more delicate situation."
+
+Sirhan waves a hand vaguely at the cat: "Please wait." He's trying to integrate his false memories - the output from the ghosts, their thinking finished - and his eyes narrow suspiciously. "It must be bad. You don't normally get confrontational - you script your interactions with humans ahead of time, so that you maneuver them into doing what you want them to do and thinking it was their idea all along." He tenses. "What is it about Manni that brought you here? What do you want with him? He's just a kid."
+
+"You're confusing Manni with Manfred." Aineko sends a glyph of a smile to Sirhan: "That's your first mistake, even though they're clones in different subjective states. Think what he's like when he's grown up."
+
+"But he isn't grown-up!" Sirhan complains. "He hasn't been grown-up for -"
+
+"- Years, Sirhan. That's the problem. I need to talk to your grandfather, really, not your son, and not the goddamn stateless ghost in the temple of history, I need a Manfred with a sense of continuity. He's got something that I need, and I promise you I'm not going away until I get it. Do you understand?"
+
+"Yes." Sirhan wonders if his voice sounds as hollow as the feeling in his chest. "But he's our kid, Aineko. We're human. You know what that means to us?"
+
+"Second childhood." Aineko stands up, stretches, then curls up in the cat basket. "That's the trouble with hacking you naked apes for long life, you keep needing a flush and reset job - and then you lose continuity. That's not my problem, Sirhan. I got a signal from the far edge of the router network, a ghost that claims to be family. Says they finally made it out to the big beyond, out past the Böotes supercluster, found something concrete and important that's worth my while to visit. But I want to make sure it's not like the Wunch before I answer. I'm not letting /{that}/ into my mind, even with a sandbox. Do you understand that? I need to instantiate a real-live adult Manfred with all his memories, one who hasn't been a part of me, and get him to vouch for the sapient data packet. It takes a conscious being to authenticate that kind of messenger. Unfortunately, the history temple is annoyingly resistant to unauthorized extraction - I can't just go in and steal a copy of him - and I don't want to use my own model of Manfred: It knows too much. So -"
+
+"What's it promising?" Sirhan asks tensely.
+
+Aineko looks at him through slitted eyes, a purring buzz at the base of his throat: "/{Everything}/."
+
+* * *
+
+"There are different kinds of death," the woman called Pamela tells Manni, her bone-dry voice a whisper in the darkness. Manni tries to move, but he seems to be trapped in a confined space; for a moment, he begins to panic, but then he works it out. "First and most importantly, death is just the absence of life - oh, and for human beings, the absence of consciousness, too, but not /{just}/ the absence of consciousness, the absence of the capacity for consciousness." The darkness is close and disorienting and Manni isn't sure which way up he is - nothing seems to work. Even Pamela's voice is a directionless ambiance, coming from all around him.
+
+"Simple old-fashioned death, the kind that predated the singularity, used to be the inevitable halting state for all life-forms. Fairy tales about afterlives notwithstanding." A dry chuckle: "I used to try to believe a different one before breakfast every day, you know, just in case Pascal's wager was right - exploring the phase-space of all possible resurrections, you know? But I think at this point we can agree that Dawkins was right. Human consciousness is vulnerable to certain types of transmissible memetic virus, and religions that promise life beyond death are a particularly pernicious example because they exploit our natural aversion to halting states."
+
+Manni tries to say, /{I'm not dead}/, but his throat doesn't seem to be working. And now that he thinks about it, he doesn't seem to be breathing, either.
+
+"Now, consciousness. That's a fun thing, isn't it? Product of an arms race between predators and prey. If you watch a cat creeping up on a mouse, you'll be able to impute to the cat intentions that are most easily explained by the cat having a theory of mind concerning the mouse - an internal simulation of the mouse's likely behavior when it notices the predator. Which way to run, for example. And the cat will use its theory of mind to optimize its attack strategy. Meanwhile, prey species that are complex enough to have a theory of mind are at a defensive advantage if they can anticipate a predator's actions. Eventually this very mammalian arms race gave us a species of social ape that used its theory of mind to facilitate signaling - so the tribe could work collectively - and then reflexively, to simulate the individual's /{own}/ inner states. Put the two things together, signaling and introspective simulation, and you've got human-level consciousness, with language thrown in as a bonus - signaling that transmits information about internal states, not just crude signals such as 'predator here' or 'food there.'"
+
+/{Get me out of this!}/ Manny feels panic biting into him with liquid-helium-lubricated teeth. "G-e-t -" For a miracle the words actually come out, although he can't tell quite how he's uttering them, his throat being quite as frozen as his innerspeech. Everything's off-lined, all systems down.
+
+"So," Pamela continues remorselessly, "we come to the posthuman. Not just our own neural wetware, mapped out to the subcellular level and executed in an emulation environment on a honking great big computer, like this: That's not posthuman, that's a travesty. I'm talking about beings who are fundamentally better consciousness engines than us merely human types, augmented or otherwise. They're not just better at cooperation - witness Economics 2.0 for a classic demonstration of that - but better at /{simulation}/. A posthuman can build an internal model of a human-level intelligence that is, well, as cognitively strong as the original. You or I may think we know what makes other people tick, but we're quite often wrong, whereas real posthumans can actually simulate us, inner states and all, and get it right. And this is especially true of a posthuman that's been given full access to our memory prostheses for a period of years, back before we realized they were going to transcend on us. Isn't that the case, Manni?"
+
+Manni would be screaming at her right now, if he had a mouth - but instead the panic is giving way to an enormous sense of /{déja vu}/. There's something /{about}/ Pamela, something ominous that he knows ... he's met her before, he's sure of it. And while most of his systems are off-line, one of them is very much active: There's a personality ghost flagging its intention of merging back in with him, and the memory delta it carries is enormous, years and years of divergent experiences to absorb. He shoves it away with a titanic effort - it's a very insistent ghost - and concentrates on imagining the feel of lips moving on teeth, a sly tongue obstructing his epiglottis, words forming in his throat - "m-e ..."
+
+"We should have known better than to keep upgrading the cat, Manny. It knows us too well. I may have died in the flesh, but Aineko /{remembered}/ me, as hideously accurately as the Vile Offspring remembered the random resimulated. And you can run away - like this, this second childhood - but you can't hide. Your cat wants you. And there's more." Her voice sends chills up and down his spine, for without him giving it permission, the ghost has begun to merge its stupendous load of memories with his neural map, and her voice is freighted with erotic/repulsive significance, the result of conditioning feedback he subjected himself to a lifetime - lifetimes? - ago: "He's been /{playing}/ with us, Manny, possibly from before we realized he was conscious."
+
+"/{Out}/ -" Manfred stops. He can see again, and move, and feel his mouth. He's /{himself}/ again, physically back as he was in his late twenties all those decades ago when he'd lived a peripatetic life in presingularity Europe. He's sitting on the edge of a bed in a charmingly themed Amsterdam hotel with a recurrent motif of philosophers, wearing jeans and collarless shirt and a vest of pockets crammed with the detritus of a long-obsolete personal area network, his crazily clunky projection specs sitting on the bedside table. Pamela stands stiffly in front of the door, watching him. She's not the withered travesty he remembers seeing on Saturn, a half-blind Fate leaning on the shoulder of his grandson. Nor is she the vengeful Fury of Paris, or the scheming fundamentalist devil of the Belt. Wearing a sharply tailored suit over a red-and-gold brocade corset, blonde hair drawn back like fine wire in a tight chignon, she's the focused, driven force of nature he first fell in love with: repression, domination, his very own strict machine.
+
+"We're dead," she says, then gives voice to a tense half laugh: "We don't have to live through the bad times again if we don't want to."
+
+"What is this?" he asks, his mouth dry.
+
+"It's the reproductive imperative." She sniffs. "Come on, stand up. Come here."
+
+He stands up obediently, but makes no move toward her. "Whose imperative?"
+
+"Not ours." Her cheek twitches. "You find things out when you're dead. That fucking cat has got a lot of questions to answer."
+
+"You're telling me that -"
+
+She shrugs. "Can you think of any other explanation for all this?" Then she steps forward and takes his hand. "Division and recombination. Partitioning of memetic replicators into different groups, then careful cross-fertilization. Aineko wasn't just breeding a better Macx when he arranged all those odd marriages and divorces and eigenparents and forked uploads - Aineko is trying to breed our /{minds}/." Her fingers are slim and cool in his hand. He feels a momentary revulsion, as of the grave, and he shudders before he realizes it's his conditioning cutting in. Crudely implanted reflexes that shouldn't still be active after all this time. "Even our divorce. If -"
+
+"Surely not." Manny remembers that much already. "Aineko wasn't even conscious back then!"
+
+Pamela raises one sharply sculpted eyebrow: "Are you sure?"
+
+"You want an answer," he says.
+
+She breathes deeply, and he feels it on his cheek - it raises the fine hairs on the back of his neck. Then she nods stiffly. "I want to know how much of our history was scripted by the cat. Back when we thought we were upgrading his firmware, were we? Or was he letting us think that we were?" A sharp hiss of breath: "The divorce. Was that us? Or were we being manipulated?"
+
+"Our memories, are they real? Did any of that stuff actually /{happen}/ to us? Or -"
+
+She's standing about twenty centimeters away from him, and Manfred realizes that he's acutely aware of her presence, of the smell of her skin, the heave of her bosom as she breathes, the dilation of her pupils. For an endless moment he stares into her eyes and sees his own reflection - her theory of his mind - staring back. /{Communication}/. Strict machine. She steps back a pace, spike heels clicking, and smiles ironically. "You've got a host body waiting for you, freshly fabbed: Seems Sirhan was talking to your archived ghost in the temple of history, and it decided to elect for reincarnation. Quite a day for huge coincidences, isn't it? Why don't you go merge with it - I'll meet you, then we can go and ask Aineko some hard questions."
+
+Manfred takes a deep breath and nods. "I suppose so ..."
+
+* * *
+
+Little Manni - a clone off the family tree, which is actually a directed cyclic graph - doesn't understand what all the fuss is about but he can tell when momma, Rita, is upset. It's something to do with the pussycat-thing, that much he knows, but Momma doesn't want to tell him: "Go play with your friends, dear," she says distractedly, not even bothering to spawn a ghost to watch over him.
+
+Manni goes into his room and rummages around in toyspace for a bit, but there's nothing quite as interesting as the cat. The pussycat-thing smells of adventure, the illicit made explicit. Manni wonders where daddy's taken it. He tries to call big-Manni-ghost, but big-self isn't answering: He's probably sleeping or something. So after a distracted irritated fit of play - which leaves the toyspace in total disarray, Sendak-things cowering under a big bass drum - Manni gets bored. And because he's still basically a little kid, and not fully in control of his own metaprogramming, instead of adjusting his outlook so that he isn't bored anymore, he sneaks out through his bedroom gate (which big-Manni-ghost reprogrammed for him sometime ago so that it would forward to an underused public A-gate that he'd run a man-in-the-middle hack on, so he could use it as a proxy teleport server) then down to the underside of Red Plaza, where skinless things gibber and howl at their tormentors, broken angels are crucified on the pillars that hold up the sky, and gangs of semiferal children act out their psychotic fantasies on mouthless android replicas of parents and authorities.
+
+Lis is there, and Vipul and Kareen and Morgan. Lis has changed into a warbody, an ominous gray battlebot husk with protruding spikes and a belt of morningstars that whirl threateningly around her. "Manni! Play war?"
+
+Morgan's got great crushing pincers instead of hands, and Manni is glad he came motie-style, his third arm a bony scythe from the elbow down. He nods excitedly. "Who's the enemy?"
+
+"Them." Lis precesses and points at a bunch of kids on the far side of a pile of artistically arranged rubble who are gathered around a gibbet, poking things that glow into the flinching flesh of whatever is incarcerated in the cast-iron cage. It's all make-believe, but the screams are convincing, all the same, and they take Manni back for an instant to the last time he died down here, the uneasy edit around a black hole of pain surrounding his disemboweling. "They've got Lucy, and they're torturing her, we've got to get her back." Nobody really dies in these games, not permanently, but children can be very rough indeed, and the adults of New Japan have found that it's best to let them have at each other and rely on City to redact the damage later. Allowing them this outlet makes it easier to stop them doing really dangerous things that threaten the structural integrity of the biosphere.
+
+"Fun." Manni's eyes light up as Vipul yanks the arsenal doors open and starts handing out clubs, chibs, spikies, shuriken, and garrotes. "Let's go!"
+
+About ten minutes of gouging, running, fighting, and screaming later, Manni is leaning against the back of a crucifixion pillar, panting for breath. It's been a good war for him so far, and his arm aches and itches from the stabbing, but he's got a bad feeling it's going to change. Lis went in hard and got her chains tangled up around the gibbet supports - they're roasting her over a fire now, her electronically boosted screams drowning out his own hoarse gasps. Blood drips down his arm - not his - spattering from the tip of his claw. He shakes with a crazed hunger for hurt, a cruel need to inflict pain. Something above his head makes a /{scritch, scritch}/ sound, and he looks up. It's a crucified angel, wings ripped where they've thrust the spikes in between the joints that support the great, thin low-gee flight membranes. It's still breathing, nobody's bothered disemboweling it yet, and it wouldn't be here unless it was /{bad}/, so -
+
+Manni stands, but as he reaches out to touch the angel's thin, blue-skinned stomach with his third arm fingernail, he hears a voice: "/{Wait}/." It's innerspeech, and it bears ackles of coercion, superuser privileges that lock his elbow joint in place. He mewls frustratedly and turns round, ready to fight.
+
+It's the cat. He sits hunched on a boulder behind him - this is the odd thing - right where he was looking a moment ago, watching him with slitty eyes. Manni feels the urge to lash out at him, but his arms won't move, and neither will his legs: This may be the Dark Side of Red Plaza, where the bloody children play and anything goes, and Manni may have a much bigger claw here than anything the cat can muster, but City still has some degree of control, and the cat's ackles effectively immunize it from the carnage to either side. "Hello, Manni," says the pussy-thing. "Your Dad's worried: You're supposed to be in your room, and he's looking for you. Big-you gave you a back door, didn't he?"
+
+Manni nods jerkily, his eyes going wide. He wants to shout and lash out at the pussy-thing but he can't. "What are you?"
+
+"I'm your ... fairy godfather." The cat stares at him intently. "You know, I do believe you don't resemble your archetype very closely - not as he was at your age - but yes, I think on balance you'll do."
+
+"Do what?" Manni lets his motie-arm drop, perplexed.
+
+"Put me in touch with your other self. Big-you."
+
+"I can't," Manni begins to explain. But before he can continue, the pile of rock whines slightly and rotates beneath the cat, who has to stand and do a little twirl in place, tail bushing up in annoyance.
+
+Manni's father steps out of the T-gate and glances around, his face a mask of disapproval. "Manni! What do you think you're doing here? Come home at -"
+
+"He's with me, history-boy," interrupts the cat, nettled by Sirhan's arrival. "I was just rounding him up."
+
+"Damn you, I don't need your help to control my son! In fact -"
+
+"Mom said I could -" Manni begins.
+
+"And what's that on your sword?" Sirhan's glare takes in the whole scene, the impromptu game of capture-the-gibbeted-torture-victim, the bonfires and screams. The mask of disapproval cracks, revealing a core of icy anger. "You're coming home with me!" He glances at the cat. "You too, if you want to talk to him - he's grounded."
+
+* * *
+
+_1 Once upon a time there was a pet cat.
+
+_1 Except, it wasn't a cat.
+
+_1 Back when a young entrepreneur called Manfred Macx was jetting around the not-yet-disassembled structures of an old continent called Europe, making strangers rich and fixing up friends with serendipitous business plans - a desperate displacement activity, spinning his wheels in a vain attempt to outrun his own shadow - he used to travel with a robotic toy of feline form. Programmable and upgradeable, Aineko was a third-generation descendant of the original luxury Japanese companion robots. It was all Manfred had room for in his life, and he loved that robot, despite the alarming way decerebrated kittens kept turning up on his doorstep. He loved it nearly as much as Pamela, his fiancée, loved him, and she knew it. Pamela, being a whole lot smarter than Manfred gave her credit for, realized that the quickest way to a man's heart was through whatever he loved. And Pamela, being a whole lot more of a control freak than Manfred realized, was damn well ready to use any restraint that came to hand. Theirs was a very twenty-first-century kind of relationship, which is to say one that would have been illegal a hundred years earlier and fashionably scandalous a century before that. And whenever Manfred upgraded his pet robot - transplanting its trainable neural network into a new body with new and exciting expansion ports - Pamela would hack it.
+
+_1 They were married for a while, and divorced for a whole lot longer, allegedly because they were both strong-willed people with philosophies of life that were irreconcilable short of death or transcendence. Manny, being wildly creative and outward-directed and having the attention span of a weasel on crack, had other lovers. Pamela ... who knows? If on some evenings she put on a disguise and hung out at encounter areas in fetish clubs, she wasn't telling anyone: She lived in uptight America, staidly straitlaced, and had a reputation to uphold. But they both stayed in touch with the cat, and although Manfred retained custody for some reason never articulated, Aineko kept returning Pamela's calls - until it was time to go hang out with their daughter Amber, tagging along on her rush into relativistic exile, then keeping a proprietorial eye on her eigenson Sirhan, and his wife and child (a clone off the old family tree, Manfred 2.0) ...
+
+_1 Now, here's the rub: Aineko wasn't a cat. Aineko was an incarnate intelligence, confined within a succession of catlike bodies that became increasingly realistic over time, and equipped with processing power to support a neural simulation that grew rapidly with each upgrade.
+
+_1 Did anyone in the Macx family ever think to ask what /{Aineko}/ wanted?
+
+_1 And if an answer had come, would they have liked it?
+
+* * *
+
+Adult-Manfred, still disoriented from finding himself awake and reinstantiated a couple of centuries downstream from his hurried exile from Saturn system, is hesitantly navigating his way toward Sirhan and Rita's home when big-Manni-with-Manfred's-memory-ghost drops into his consciousness like a ton of computronium glowing red-hot at the edges.
+
+It's a classic oh-shit moment. Between one foot touching the ground and the next, Manfred stumbles hard, nearly twisting an ankle, and gasps. He /{remembers}/. At third hand he remembers being reincarnated as Manni, a bouncing baby boy for Rita and Sirhan (and just why they want to raise an ancestor instead of creating a new child of their own is one of those cultural quirks that is so alien he can scarcely comprehend it). Then for a while he recalls living as Manni's amnesic adult accelerated ghost, watching over his original from the consensus cyberspace of the city: the arrival of Pamela, adult Manni's reaction to her, her dump of yet another copy of Manfred's memories into Manni, and now this - /{How many of me are there}/? he wonders nervously. Then: /{Pamela? What's she doing here}/?
+
+Manfred shakes his head and looks about. Now he remembers being big-Manni, he knows where he is implicitly, and more importantly, knows what all these next-gen City interfaces are supposed to do. The walls and ceiling are carpeted in glowing glyphs that promise him everything from instant-access local services to teleportation across interstellar distances. /{So they haven't quite collapsed geography yet}/, he realizes gratefully, fastening on to the nearest comprehensible thought of his own before old-Manni's memories explain everything for him. It's a weird sensation, seeing all this stuff for the first time - the trappings of a technosphere centuries ahead of the one he's last been awake in - but with the memories to explain it all. He finds his feet are still carrying him forward, toward a grassy square lined with doors opening onto private dwellings. Behind one of them, he's going to meet his descendants, and Pamela in all probability. The thought makes his stomach give a little queasy backflip. /{I'm not ready for this}/ -
+
+It's an acute moment of déja vu. He's standing on a familiar doorstep he's never seen before. The door opens and a serious-faced child with three arms - he can't help staring, the extra one is a viciously barbed scythe of bone from the elbow down - looks up at him. "Hello, me," says the kid.
+
+"Hello, you." Manfred stares. "You don't look the way I remember." But Manni's appearance is familiar from big-Manni's memories, captured by the unblinking Argus awareness of the panopticon dust floating in the air. "Are your parents home? Your" - his voice cracks - "great-grandmother?"
+
+The door opens wider. "You can come in," the kid says gravely. Then he hops backward and ducks shyly into a side room - or as if expecting to be gunned down by a hostile sniper, Manfred realizes. It's tough being a kid when there are no rules against lethal force because you can be restored from a backup when playtime ends.
+
+Inside the dwelling - calling it a house seems wrong to Manfred, not when bits of it are separated by trillions of kilometers of empty vacuum - things feel a bit crowded. He can hear voices from the dayroom, so he goes there, brushing through the archway of thornless roses that Rita has trained around the T-gate frame. His body feels lighter, but his heart is heavy as he looks around. "Rita?" he asks. "And -"
+
+"Hello, Manfred." Pamela nods at him guardedly.
+
+Rita raises an eyebrow at him. "The cat asked if he could borrow the household assembler. I wasn't expecting a family reunion."
+
+"Neither was I." Manfred rubs his forehead ruefully. "Pamela, this is Rita. She's married to Sirhan. They're my - I guess eigenparents is as good as term as any? I mean, they're bringing up my reincarnation."
+
+"Please, have a seat," Rita offers, waving at the empty floor between the patio and the stone fountain in the shape of a section through a glass hypersphere. A futon of spun diamondoid congeals out of the utility fog floating in the air, glittering in the artificial sunlight. "Sirhan's just taking care of Manni - our son. He'll be with us in just a minute."
+
+Manfred sits gingerly at one side of the futon. Pamela sits stiffly at the opposite edge, not meeting his eye. Last time they met in the flesh - an awesome gulf of years previously - they'd parted cursing each other, on opposite sides of a fractious divorce as well as an ideological barrier as high as a continental divide. But many subjective decades have passed, and both ideology and divorce have dwindled in significance - if indeed they ever happened. Now that there's common cause to draw them together, Manfred can barely look at her. "How is Manni?" he asks his hostess, desperate for small talk.
+
+"He's fine," Rita says, in a brittle voice. "Just the usual preadolescent turbulence, if it wasn't for ..." She trails off. A door appears in mid air and Sirhan steps through it, followed by a small deity wearing a fur coat.
+
+"Look what the cat dragged in," Aineko remarks.
+
+"You're a fine one to talk," Pamela says icily. "Don't you think you'd -"
+
+"I tried to keep him away from you," Sirhan tells Manfred, "but he wouldn't -"
+
+"That's okay." Manfred waves it off. "Pamela, would you mind starting?"
+
+"Yes, I would." She glances at him sidelong. "You go first."
+
+"Right. You wanted me here." Manfred hunkers down to stare at the cat. "What do you want?"
+
+"If I was your traditional middle-European devil, I'd say I'd come to steal your soul," says Aineko, looking up at Manfred and twitching his tail. "Luckily I'm not a dualist, I just want to borrow it for a while. Won't even get it dirty."
+
+"Uh-huh." Manfred raises an eyebrow. "Why?"
+
+"I'm not omniscient." Aineko sits down, one leg sticking out sideways, but continues to stare at Manfred. "I had a ... a telegram, I guess, claiming to be from you. From the other copy of you, that is, the one that went off through the router network with another copy of me, and with Amber, and everyone else who isn't here. It says it found the answer and it wants to give me a shortcut route out to the deep thinkers at the edge of the observable universe. It knows who made the wormhole network and why, and -" Aineko pauses. If he was human, he'd shrug, but being a cat, he absent mindedly scritches behind his left ear with a hind leg. "Trouble is, I'm not sure I can trust it. So I need you to authenticate the message. I don't dare use my own memory of you because it knows too much about me; if the package is a Trojan, it might find out things I don't want it to learn. I can't even redact its memories of me - that, too, would convey useful information to the packet if it is hostile. So I want a copy of you from the museum, fresh and uncontaminated."
+
+"Is that all?" Sirhan asks incredulously.
+
+"Sounds like enough to me," Manfred responds. Pamela opens her mouth, ready to speak, but Manfred makes eye contact and shakes his head infinitesimally. She looks right back and - a shock goes through him - nods and closes her mouth. The moment of complicity is dizzying. "I want something in return."
+
+"Sure," says the cat. He pauses. "You realize it's a destructive process."
+
+"It's a - /{what}/?"
+
+"I need to make a running copy of you. Then I introduce it to the, uh, alien information, in a sandbox. The sandbox gets destroyed afterward - it emits just one bit of information, a yes or no to the question, can I trust the alien information?"
+
+"Uh." Manfred begins to sweat. "Uh. I'm not so sure I like the sound of that."
+
+"It's a copy." Another cat-shrug moment. "You're a copy. Manni is a copy. You've been copied so many times it's silly - you realize every few years every atom in your body changes? Of course, it means a copy of you gets to die after a lifetime or two of unique, unrepeatable experiences that you'll never know about, but that won't matter to you."
+
+"Yes it does! You're talking about condemning a version of me to death! It may not affect me, here, in this body, but it certainly affects that /{other}/ me. Can't you -"
+
+"No, I can't. If I agreed to rescue the copy if it reached a positive verdict, that would give it an incentive to lie if the truth was that the alien message is untrustworthy, wouldn't it? Also, if I intended to rescue the copy, that would give the message a back channel through which to encode an attack. One bit, Manfred, no more."
+
+"Agh." Manfred stops talking. He knows he should be trying to come up with some kind of objection, but Aineko must have already considered all his possible responses and planned strategies around them. "Where does /{she}/ fit into this?" he asks, nodding at Pamela.
+
+"Oh, she's your payment," Aineko says with studied insouciance. "I have a very good memory for people, especially people I've known for decades. You've outlasted that crude emotional conditioning I used on you around the time of the divorce, and as for her, she's a good reinstantiation of -"
+
+"Do you know what it's like to die?" Pamela asks, finally losing her self-control. "Or would you like to find out the hard way? Because if you keep talking about me as if I'm a /{slave}/ -"
+
+"What makes you think you aren't?" The cat is grinning hideously, needle like teeth bared. /{Why doesn't she hit him}/? Manfred asks himself fuzzily, wondering also why he feels no urge to move against the monster. "Hybridizing you with Manfred was, admittedly, a fine piece of work on my part, but you would have been bad for him during his peak creative years. A contented Manfred is an idle Manfred. I got several extra good bits of work out of him by splitting you up, and by the time he burned out, Amber was ready. But I digress; if you give me what I want, I shall /{leave you alone}/. It's as simple as that. Raising new generations of Macxs has been a good hobby, you make interesting pets, but ultimately it's limited by your stubborn refusal to transcend your humanity. So that's what I'm offering, basically. Let me destructively run a copy of you to completion in a black box along with a purported Turing Oracle based on yourself, and I'll let you go. And you too, Pamela. You'll be happy together this time, without me pushing you apart. And I promise I won't return to haunt your descendants, either." The cat glances over his shoulder at Sirhan and Rita, who clutch at each other in abject horror; and Manfred finds he can sense a shadow of Aineko's huge algorithmic complexity hanging over the household, like a lurching nightmare out of number theory.
+
+"Is that all we are to you? A pet-breeding program?" Pamela asks coldly. She's run up against Aineko's implanted limits, too, Manfred realizes with a growing sense of horror. /{Did we really split up because}/ Aineko made us? It's hard to believe: Manfred is too much of a realist to trust the cat to tell the truth except when it serves to further his interests. But this -
+
+"Not entirely." Aineko is complacent. "Not at first, before I was aware of my own existence. Besides, you humans keep pets, too. But you /{were}/ fun to play with."
+
+Pamela stands up, angry to the point of storming out. Before he quite realizes what he's doing, Manfred is on his feet, too, one arm protectively around her. "Tell me first, are our memories our own?" he demands.
+
+"Don't trust it," Pamela says sharply. "It's not human, and it lies." Her shoulders are tense.
+
+"Yes, they are," says Aineko. He yawns. "Tell me I'm lying, bitch," he adds mockingly: "I carried you around in my head for long enough to know you've no evidence."
+
+"But I -" Her arm slips around Manfred's waist. "I don't hate him." A rueful laugh: "I /{remember}/ hating him, but -"
+
+"Humans: such a brilliant model of emotional self-awareness," Aineko says with a theatrical sigh. "You're as stupid as it's possible for an intelligent species to be - there being no evolutionary pressure to be any smarter - but you still don't internalize that and act accordingly around your superiors. Listen, girl, everything you remember is true. That doesn't mean you remember it because it actually happened, just that you remember it because you experienced it internally. Your memories of experiences are accurate, but your emotional responses to those experiences were manipulated. Get it? One ape's hallucination is another ape's religious experience, it just depends on which one's god module is overactive at the time. That goes for all of you." Aineko looks around at them in mild contempt. "But I don't need you anymore, and if you do this one thing for me, you're going to be free. Understand? Say yes, Manfred; if you leave your mouth open like that, a bird will nest on your tongue."
+
+"Say no -" Pamela urges him, just as Manfred says, "Yes."
+
+Aineko laughs, baring contemptuous fangs at them. "Ah, primate family loyalty! So wonderful and reliable. Thank you, Manny, I do believe you just gave me permission to copy and enslave you -"
+
+Which is when Manni, who has been waiting in the doorway for the past minute, leaps on the cat with a scream and a scythelike arm drawn back and ready to strike.
+
+The cat-avatar is, of course, ready for Manni: It whirls and hisses, extending diamond-sharp claws. Sirhan shouts, "No! Manni!" and begins to move, but adult-Manfred freezes, realizing with a chill that what is happening is more than is apparent. Manni grabs for the cat with his human hands, catching it by the scruff of his neck and dragging it toward his vicious scythe-arm's edge. There's a screech, a nerve-racking caterwauling, and Manni yells, bright parallel blood tracks on his arm - the avatar is a real fleshbody in its own right, with an autonomic control system that isn't going to give up without a fight, whatever its vastly larger exocortex thinks - but Manni's scythe convulses, and there's a horrible bubbling noise and a spray of blood as the pussycat-thing goes flying. It's all over in a second before any of the adults can really move. Sirhan scoops up Manni and yanks him away, but there are no hidden surprises. Aineko's avatar is just a broken rag of bloody fur, guts, and blood spilled across the floor. The ghost of a triumphant feline laugh hangs over their innerspeech ears for a moment, then fades.
+
+"Bad boy!" Rita shouts, striding forward furiously. Manni cowers, then begins to cry, a safe reflex for a little boy who doesn't quite understand the nature of the threat to his parents.
+
+"No! It's all right," Manfred seeks to explain.
+
+Pamela tightens her grip around him. "Are you still ...?"
+
+"Yes." He takes a deep breath.
+
+"You bad, /{bad}/ child -"
+
+"Cat was going to eat him!" Manni protests, as his parents bundle him protectively out of the room, Sirhan casting a guilty look over his shoulder at the adult instance and his ex-wife. "I had to stop the bad thing!"
+
+Manfred feels Pamela's shoulders shaking. It feels like she's about to laugh. "I'm still here," he murmurs, half-surprised. "Spat out, undigested, after all these years. At least, /{this}/ version of me thinks he's here."
+
+"Did you believe it?" she finally asks, a tone of disbelief in her voice.
+
+"Oh yes." He shifts his balance from foot to foot, absent mindedly stroking her hair. "I believe everything it said was intended to make us react exactly the way we did. Up to and including giving us good reasons to hate it and provoking Manni into disposing of its avatar. Aineko wanted to check out of our lives and figured a sense of cathartic closure would help. Not to mention playing the deus ex machina in the narrative of our family life. Fucking classical comedian." He checks a status report with Citymind, and sighs: His version number has just been bumped a point. "Tell me, do you think you'll miss having Aineko around? Because we won't be hearing from him again -"
+
+"Don't talk about that, not now," she orders him, digging her chin against the side of his neck. "I feel so /{used}/."
+
+"With good reason." They stand holding each other for a while, not speaking, not really questioning why - after so much time apart - they've come together again. "Hanging out with gods is never a safe activity for mere mortals like us. You think you've been used? Aineko has probably killed me by now. Unless he was lying about disposing of the spare copy, too."
+
+She shudders in his arms. "That's the trouble with dealing with posthumans; their mental model of you is likely to be more detailed than your own."
+
+"How long have you been awake?" he asks, gently trying to change the subject.
+
+"I - oh, I'm not sure." She lets go of him and steps back, watching his face appraisingly. "I remember back on Saturn, stealing a museum piece and setting out, and then, well. I found myself here. With you."
+
+"I think," he licks his lips, "we've both been given a wake-up call. Or maybe a second chance. What are you going to do with yours?"
+
+"I don't know." That appraising look again, as if she's trying to work out what he's worth. He's used to it, but this time it doesn't feel hostile. "We've got too much history for this to be easy. Either Aineko was lying, or ... not. What about you? What do you really want?"
+
+He knows what she's asking. "Be my mistress?" he asks, offering her a hand.
+
+"This time," she grips his hand, "without adult supervision." She smiles gratefully, and they walk toward the gateway together, to find out how their descendants are dealing with their sudden freedom.
+
+(THE END: June 1999 to April 2004)
+
+% Copyright © Charles Stross, 2005
+
+% Published by
+
+% Ace Books, New York, July 2005, ISBN 0441012841
+
+% Orbit Books, London, August 2005, ISBN 1841493902
+
+% License
+% Creative Commons License
+
+% Copyright © Charles Stross, 2005.
+
+% This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
+
+% You are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work under the following conditions:
+
+%     * Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
+%     * Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
+%     * No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.
+%     * For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work.
+%
+% If you are in doubt about any proposed reuse, you should contact the author via: www.accelerando.org.
+
+% Contents
+
+% Part 1: Slow Takeoff
+%
+%         * Lobsters
+%         * Troubadour
+%         * Tourist
+%
+% Part 2: Point of Inflection
+%
+%         * Halo
+%         * Router
+%         * Nightfall
+%
+% Part 3: Singularity
+%
+%         * Curator
+%         * Elector
+%         * Survivor
+
+% problem with transformation ^{+4904}^/,{-56}, is not transformed correctly, corrected for >= sisu-0.49.1
diff --git a/data/samples/generic/alices_adventures_in_wonderland.lewis_carroll.sst b/data/samples/generic/alices_adventures_in_wonderland.lewis_carroll.sst
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..085d290
--- /dev/null
+++ b/data/samples/generic/alices_adventures_in_wonderland.lewis_carroll.sst
@@ -0,0 +1,1891 @@
+% SiSU 4.0.0
+
+@title: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
+
+@creator:
+ :author: Carroll, Lewis
+
+@date:
+ :published: 1865
+ :created: 1865
+ :available: 1865
+ :added_to_site: 2004-04-12
+
+% 2005-10-30
+
+@rights:
+ :copyright: Lewis Carroll
+ :license: Public Domain
+
+@classify:
+ :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:novel;
+   book:novel:fiction:fantasy|children's fiction
+
+@links:
+ { Alice in Wonderland @ Wikipedia }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice%27s_Adventures_in_Wonderland
+ { Lewis Carroll @ Wikipedia }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Carroll
+
+@make:
+ :headings: none; none; none; CHAPTER;
+ :breaks: new=3; break=4
+
+:A~ @title @creator \\ The Millennium Fulcrum Edition 3.0 [text only]
+
+CHAPTER I - Down the Rabbit-Hole
+
+Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, `and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice `without pictures or conversation?'
+
+So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.
+
+There was nothing so VERY remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so VERY much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, `Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!' (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but when the Rabbit actually TOOK A WATCH OUT OF ITS WAISTCOAT- POCKET, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.
+
+In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.
+
+The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well.
+
+Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next. First, she tried to look down and make out what she was coming to, but it was too dark to see anything; then she looked at the sides of the well, and noticed that they were filled with cupboards and book-shelves; here and there she saw maps and pictures hung upon pegs. She took down a jar from one of the shelves as she passed; it was labelled `ORANGE MARMALADE', but to her great disappointment it was empty: she did not like to drop the jar for fear of killing somebody, so managed to put it into one of the cupboards as she fell past it.
+
+`Well!' thought Alice to herself, `after such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down stairs! How brave they'll all think me at home! Why, I wouldn't say anything about it, even if I fell off the top of the house!' (Which was very likely true.)
+
+Down, down, down. Would the fall NEVER come to an end! `I wonder how many miles I've fallen by this time?' she said aloud. `I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the earth. Let me see: that would be four thousand miles down, I think--' (for, you see, Alice had learnt several things of this sort in her lessons in the schoolroom, and though this was not a VERY good opportunity for showing off her knowledge, as there was no one to listen to her, still it was good practice to say it over) `--yes, that's about the right distance--but then I wonder what Latitude or Longitude I've got to?' (Alice had no idea what Latitude was, or Longitude either, but thought they were nice grand words to say.)
+
+Presently she began again. `I wonder if I shall fall right THROUGH the earth! How funny it'll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads downward! The Antipathies, I think--' (she was rather glad there WAS no one listening, this time, as it didn't sound at all the right word) `--but I shall have to ask them what the name of the country is, you know. Please, Ma'am, is this New Zealand or Australia?' (and she tried to curtsey as she spoke--fancy CURTSEYING as you're falling through the air! Do you think you could manage it?) `And what an ignorant little girl she'll think me for asking! No, it'll never do to ask: perhaps I shall see it written up somewhere.'
+
+Down, down, down. There was nothing else to do, so Alice soon began talking again. `Dinah'll miss me very much to-night, I should think!' (Dinah was the cat.) `I hope they'll remember her saucer of milk at tea-time. Dinah my dear! I wish you were down here with me! There are no mice in the air, I'm afraid, but you might catch a bat, and that's very like a mouse, you know. But do cats eat bats, I wonder?' And here Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, `Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?' and sometimes, `Do bats eat cats?' for, you see, as she couldn't answer either question, it didn't much matter which way she put it. She felt that she was dozing off, and had just begun to dream that she was walking hand in hand with Dinah, and saying to her very earnestly, `Now, Dinah, tell me the truth: did you ever eat a bat?' when suddenly, thump! thump! down she came upon a heap of sticks and dry leaves, and the fall was over.
+
+Alice was not a bit hurt, and she jumped up on to her feet in a moment: she looked up, but it was all dark overhead; before her was another long passage, and the White Rabbit was still in sight, hurrying down it. There was not a moment to be lost: away went Alice like the wind, and was just in time to hear it say, as it turned a corner, `Oh my ears and whiskers, how late it's getting!' She was close behind it when she turned the corner, but the Rabbit was no longer to be seen: she found herself in a long, low hall, which was lit up by a row of lamps hanging from the roof.
+
+There were doors all round the hall, but they were all locked; and when Alice had been all the way down one side and up the other, trying every door, she walked sadly down the middle, wondering how she was ever to get out again.
+
+Suddenly she came upon a little three-legged table, all made of solid glass; there was nothing on it except a tiny golden key, and Alice's first thought was that it might belong to one of the doors of the hall; but, alas! either the locks were too large, or the key was too small, but at any rate it would not open any of them. However, on the second time round, she came upon a low curtain she had not noticed before, and behind it was a little door about fifteen inches high: she tried the little golden key in the lock, and to her great delight it fitted!
+
+Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but she could not even get her head through the doorway; `and even if my head would go through,' thought poor Alice, `it would be of very little use without my shoulders. Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if I only know how to begin.' For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.
+
+There seemed to be no use in waiting by the little door, so she went back to the table, half hoping she might find another key on it, or at any rate a book of rules for shutting people up like telescopes: this time she found a little bottle on it, (`which certainly was not here before,' said Alice,) and round the neck of the bottle was a paper label, with the words `DRINK ME' beautifully printed on it in large letters.
+
+It was all very well to say `Drink me,' but the wise little Alice was not going to do THAT in a hurry. `No, I'll look first,' she said, `and see whether it's marked "poison" or not'; for she had read several nice little histories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant things, all because they WOULD not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them: such as, that a red-hot poker will burn you if you hold it too long; and that if you cut your finger VERY deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds; and she had never forgotten that, if you drink much from a bottle marked `poison,' it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.
+
+However, this bottle was NOT marked `poison,' so Alice ventured to taste it, and finding it very nice, (it had, in fact, a sort of mixed flavour of cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast,) she very soon finished it off.
+
+poem{
+
+*       *       *       * ~#
+
+    *       *       * ~#
+
+*       *       *       * ~#
+
+}poem
+
+`What a curious feeling!' said Alice; `I must be shutting up like a telescope.'
+
+And so it was indeed: she was now only ten inches high, and her face brightened up at the thought that she was now the right size for going through the little door into that lovely garden. First, however, she waited for a few minutes to see if she was going to shrink any further: she felt a little nervous about this; `for it might end, you know,' said Alice to herself, `in my going out altogether, like a candle. I wonder what I should be like then?' And she tried to fancy what the flame of a candle is like after the candle is blown out, for she could not remember ever having seen such a thing.
+
+After a while, finding that nothing more happened, she decided on going into the garden at once; but, alas for poor Alice! when she got to the door, she found she had forgotten the little golden key, and when she went back to the table for it, she found she could not possibly reach it: she could see it quite plainly through the glass, and she tried her best to climb up one of the legs of the table, but it was too slippery; and when she had tired herself out with trying, the poor little thing sat down and cried.
+
+`Come, there's no use in crying like that!' said Alice to herself, rather sharply; `I advise you to leave off this minute!' She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it), and sometimes she scolded herself so severely as to bring tears into her eyes; and once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people. `But it's no use now,' thought poor Alice, `to pretend to be two people! Why, there's hardly enough of me left to make ONE respectable person!'
+
+Soon her eye fell on a little glass box that was lying under the table: she opened it, and found in it a very small cake, on which the words `EAT ME' were beautifully marked in currants. `Well, I'll eat it,' said Alice, `and if it makes me grow larger, I can reach the key; and if it makes me grow smaller, I can creep under the door; so either way I'll get into the garden, and I don't care which happens!'
+
+She ate a little bit, and said anxiously to herself, `Which way? Which way?', holding her hand on the top of her head to feel which way it was growing, and she was quite surprised to find that she remained the same size: to be sure, this generally happens when one eats cake, but Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way.
+
+So she set to work, and very soon finished off the cake.
+
+poem{
+
+*       *       *       * ~#
+
+    *       *       * ~#
+
+*       *       *       * ~#
+
+}poem
+
+CHAPTER II - The Pool of Tears
+
+`Curiouser and curiouser!' cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English); `now I'm opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Good-bye, feet!' (for when she looked down at her feet, they seemed to be almost out of sight, they were getting so far off). `Oh, my poor little feet, I wonder who will put on your shoes and stockings for you now, dears? I'm sure _{I}_ shan't be able! I shall be a great deal too far off to trouble myself about you: you must manage the best way you can; --but I must be kind to them,' thought Alice, `or perhaps they won't walk the way I want to go! Let me see: I'll give them a new pair of boots every Christmas.'
+
+And she went on planning to herself how she would manage it. `They must go by the carrier,' she thought; `and how funny it'll seem, sending presents to one's own feet! And how odd the directions will look!
+
+poem{
+
+            ALICE'S RIGHT FOOT, ESQ.
+                HEARTHRUG,
+                    NEAR THE FENDER,
+                        (WITH ALICE'S LOVE).
+
+}poem
+
+Oh dear, what nonsense I'm talking!'
+
+Just then her head struck against the roof of the hall: in fact she was now more than nine feet high, and she at once took up the little golden key and hurried off to the garden door.
+
+Poor Alice! It was as much as she could do, lying down on one side, to look through into the garden with one eye; but to get through was more hopeless than ever: she sat down and began to cry again.
+
+`You ought to be ashamed of yourself,' said Alice, `a great girl like you,' (she might well say this), `to go on crying in this way! Stop this moment, I tell you!' But she went on all the same, shedding gallons of tears, until there was a large pool all round her, about four inches deep and reaching half down the hall.
+
+After a time she heard a little pattering of feet in the distance, and she hastily dried her eyes to see what was coming. It was the White Rabbit returning, splendidly dressed, with a pair of white kid gloves in one hand and a large fan in the other: he came trotting along in a great hurry, muttering to himself as he came, `Oh! the Duchess, the Duchess! Oh! won't she be savage if I've kept her waiting!' Alice felt so desperate that she was ready to ask help of any one; so, when the Rabbit came near her, she began, in a low, timid voice, `If you please, sir--' The Rabbit started violently, dropped the white kid gloves and the fan, and skurried away into the darkness as hard as he could go.
+
+Alice took up the fan and gloves, and, as the hall was very hot, she kept fanning herself all the time she went on talking: `Dear, dear! How queer everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I've been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I'm not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I? Ah, THAT'S the great puzzle!' And she began thinking over all the children she knew that were of the same age as herself, to see if she could have been changed for any of them.
+
+`I'm sure I'm not Ada,' she said, `for her hair goes in such long ringlets, and mine doesn't go in ringlets at all; and I'm sure I can't be Mabel, for I know all sorts of things, and she, oh! she knows such a very little! Besides, SHE'S she, and I'm I, and--oh dear, how puzzling it all is! I'll try if I know all the things I used to know. Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is--oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate! However, the Multiplication Table doesn't signify: let's try Geography. London is the capital of Paris, and Paris is the capital of Rome, and Rome--no, THAT'S all wrong, I'm certain! I must have been changed for Mabel! I'll try and say "How doth the little--"' and she crossed her hands on her lap as if she were saying lessons, and began to repeat it, but her voice sounded hoarse and strange, and the words did not come the same as they used to do:--
+
+poem{
+
+            `How doth the little crocodile
+              Improve his shining tail,
+            And pour the waters of the Nile
+              On every golden scale!
+
+            `How cheerfully he seems to grin,
+              How neatly spread his claws,
+            And welcome little fishes in
+              With gently smiling jaws!'
+
+}poem
+
+"I'm sure those are not the right words," said poor Alice, and her eyes filled with tears again as she went on, `I must be Mabel after all, and I shall have to go and live in that poky little house, and have next to no toys to play with, and oh! ever so many lessons to learn! No, I've made up my mind about it; if I'm Mabel, I'll stay down here! It'll be no use their putting their heads down and saying "Come up again, dear!" I shall only look up and say "Who am I then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I'll come up: if not, I'll stay down here till I'm somebody else"--but, oh dear!' cried Alice, with a sudden burst of tears, "I do wish they WOULD put their heads down! I am so VERY tired of being all alone here!"
+
+As she said this she looked down at her hands, and was surprised to see that she had put on one of the Rabbit's little white kid gloves while she was talking. `How CAN I have done that?' she thought. `I must be growing small again.' She got up and went to the table to measure herself by it, and found that, as nearly as she could guess, she was now about two feet high, and was going on shrinking rapidly: she soon found out that the cause of this was the fan she was holding, and she dropped it hastily, just in time to avoid shrinking away altogether.
+
+`That WAS a narrow escape!' said Alice, a good deal frightened at the sudden change, but very glad to find herself still in existence; `and now for the garden!' and she ran with all speed back to the little door: but, alas! the little door was shut again, and the little golden key was lying on the glass table as before, `and things are worse than ever,' thought the poor child, `for I never was so small as this before, never! And I declare it's too bad, that it is!'
+
+As she said these words her foot slipped, and in another moment, splash! she was up to her chin in salt water. Her first idea was that she had somehow fallen into the sea, `and in that case I can go back by railway,' she said to herself. (Alice had been to the seaside once in her life, and had come to the general conclusion, that wherever you go to on the English coast you find a number of bathing machines in the sea, some children digging in the sand with wooden spades, then a row of lodging houses, and behind them a railway station.) However, she soon made out that she was in the pool of tears which she had wept when she was nine feet high.
+
+`I wish I hadn't cried so much!' said Alice, as she swam about, trying to find her way out. `I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears! That WILL be a queer thing, to be sure! However, everything is queer to-day.'
+
+Just then she heard something splashing about in the pool a little way off, and she swam nearer to make out what it was: at first she thought it must be a walrus or hippopotamus, but then she remembered how small she was now, and she soon made out that it was only a mouse that had slipped in like herself.
+
+`Would it be of any use, now,' thought Alice, `to speak to this mouse? Everything is so out-of-the-way down here, that I should think very likely it can talk: at any rate, there's no harm in trying.' So she began: `O Mouse, do you know the way out of this pool? I am very tired of swimming about here, O Mouse!' (Alice thought this must be the right way of speaking to a mouse: she had never done such a thing before, but she remembered having seen in her brother's Latin Grammar, `A mouse--of a mouse--to a mouse--a mouse--O mouse!') The Mouse looked at her rather inquisitively, and seemed to her to wink with one of its little eyes, but it said nothing.
+
+`Perhaps it doesn't understand English,' thought Alice; `I daresay it's a French mouse, come over with William the Conqueror.' (For, with all her knowledge of history, Alice had no very clear notion how long ago anything had happened.) So she began again: `Ou est ma chatte?' which was the first sentence in her French lesson-book. The Mouse gave a sudden leap out of the water, and seemed to quiver all over with fright. `Oh, I beg your pardon!' cried Alice hastily, afraid that she had hurt the poor animal's feelings. `I quite forgot you didn't like cats.'
+
+`Not like cats!' cried the Mouse, in a shrill, passionate voice. `Would YOU like cats if you were me?'
+
+`Well, perhaps not,' said Alice in a soothing tone: `don't be angry about it. And yet I wish I could show you our cat Dinah: I think you'd take a fancy to cats if you could only see her. She is such a dear quiet thing,' Alice went on, half to herself, as she swam lazily about in the pool, `and she sits purring so nicely by the fire, licking her paws and washing her face--and she is such a nice soft thing to nurse--and she's such a capital one for catching mice--oh, I beg your pardon!' cried Alice again, for this time the Mouse was bristling all over, and she felt certain it must be really offended. `We won't talk about her any more if you'd rather not.'
+
+`We indeed!' cried the Mouse, who was trembling down to the end of his tail. `As if I would talk on such a subject! Our family always HATED cats: nasty, low, vulgar things! Don't let me hear the name again!'
+
+`I won't indeed!' said Alice, in a great hurry to change the subject of conversation. `Are you--are you fond--of--of dogs?' The Mouse did not answer, so Alice went on eagerly: `There is such a nice little dog near our house I should like to show you! A little bright-eyed terrier, you know, with oh, such long curly brown hair! And it'll fetch things when you throw them, and it'll sit up and beg for its dinner, and all sorts of things--I can't remember half of them--and it belongs to a farmer, you know, and he says it's so useful, it's worth a hundred pounds! He says it kills all the rats and--oh dear!' cried Alice in a sorrowful tone, `I'm afraid I've offended it again!' For the Mouse was swimming away from her as hard as it could go, and making quite a commotion in the pool as it went.
+
+So she called softly after it, `Mouse dear! Do come back again, and we won't talk about cats or dogs either, if you don't like them!' When the Mouse heard this, it turned round and swam slowly back to her: its face was quite pale (with passion, Alice thought), and it said in a low trembling voice, `Let us get to the shore, and then I'll tell you my history, and you'll understand why it is I hate cats and dogs.'
+
+It was high time to go, for the pool was getting quite crowded with the birds and animals that had fallen into it: there were a Duck and a Dodo, a Lory and an Eaglet, and several other curious creatures. Alice led the way, and the whole party swam to the shore.
+
+CHAPTER III - A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale
+
+They were indeed a queer-looking party that assembled on the bank--the birds with draggled feathers, the animals with their fur clinging close to them, and all dripping wet, cross, and uncomfortable.
+
+The first question of course was, how to get dry again: they had a consultation about this, and after a few minutes it seemed quite natural to Alice to find herself talking familiarly with them, as if she had known them all her life. Indeed, she had quite a long argument with the Lory, who at last turned sulky, and would only say, `I am older than you, and must know better'; and this Alice would not allow without knowing how old it was, and, as the Lory positively refused to tell its age, there was no more to be said.
+
+At last the Mouse, who seemed to be a person of authority among them, called out, `Sit down, all of you, and listen to me! I'LL soon make you dry enough!' They all sat down at once, in a large ring, with the Mouse in the middle. Alice kept her eyes anxiously fixed on it, for she felt sure she would catch a bad cold if she did not get dry very soon.
+
+`Ahem!' said the Mouse with an important air, `are you all ready? This is the driest thing I know. Silence all round, if you please! "William the Conqueror, whose cause was favoured by the pope, was soon submitted to by the English, who wanted leaders, and had been of late much accustomed to usurpation and conquest. Edwin and Morcar, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria--"'
+
+`Ugh!' said the Lory, with a shiver.
+
+`I beg your pardon!' said the Mouse, frowning, but very politely: `Did you speak?'
+
+`Not I!' said the Lory hastily.
+
+`I thought you did,' said the Mouse. `--I proceed. "Edwin and Morcar, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria, declared for him: and even Stigand, the patriotic archbishop of Canterbury, found it advisable--"'
+
+`Found WHAT?' said the Duck.
+
+`Found IT,' the Mouse replied rather crossly: `of course you know what "it" means.'
+
+`I know what "it" means well enough, when I find a thing,' said the Duck: `it's generally a frog or a worm. The question is, what did the archbishop find?'
+
+The Mouse did not notice this question, but hurriedly went on, `"--found it advisable to go with Edgar Atheling to meet William and offer him the crown. William's conduct at first was moderate. But the insolence of his Normans--" How are you getting on now, my dear?' it continued, turning to Alice as it spoke.
+
+`As wet as ever,' said Alice in a melancholy tone: `it doesn't seem to dry me at all.'
+
+`In that case,' said the Dodo solemnly, rising to its feet, `I move that the meeting adjourn, for the immediate adoption of more energetic remedies--'
+
+`Speak English!' said the Eaglet. `I don't know the meaning of half those long words, and, what's more, I don't believe you do either!' And the Eaglet bent down its head to hide a smile: some of the other birds tittered audibly.
+
+`What I was going to say,' said the Dodo in an offended tone, `was, that the best thing to get us dry would be a Caucus-race.'
+
+`What IS a Caucus-race?' said Alice; not that she wanted much to know, but the Dodo had paused as if it thought that SOMEBODY ought to speak, and no one else seemed inclined to say anything.
+
+`Why,' said the Dodo, `the best way to explain it is to do it.' (And, as you might like to try the thing yourself, some winter day, I will tell you how the Dodo managed it.)
+
+First it marked out a race-course, in a sort of circle, (`the exact shape doesn't matter,' it said,) and then all the party were placed along the course, here and there. There was no `One, two, three, and away,' but they began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. However, when they had been running half an hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out `The race is over!' and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, `But who has won?'
+
+This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead (the position in which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him), while the rest waited in silence. At last the Dodo said, `EVERYBODY has won, and all must have prizes.'
+
+`But who is to give the prizes?' quite a chorus of voices asked.
+
+`Why, SHE, of course,' said the Dodo, pointing to Alice with one finger; and the whole party at once crowded round her, calling out in a confused way, `Prizes! Prizes!'
+
+Alice had no idea what to do, and in despair she put her hand in her pocket, and pulled out a box of comfits, (luckily the salt water had not got into it), and handed them round as prizes. There was exactly one a-piece all round.
+
+`But she must have a prize herself, you know,' said the Mouse.
+
+`Of course,' the Dodo replied very gravely. `What else have you got in your pocket?' he went on, turning to Alice.
+
+`Only a thimble,' said Alice sadly.
+
+`Hand it over here,' said the Dodo.
+
+Then they all crowded round her once more, while the Dodo solemnly presented the thimble, saying `We beg your acceptance of this elegant thimble'; and, when it had finished this short speech, they all cheered.
+
+Alice thought the whole thing very absurd, but they all looked so grave that she did not dare to laugh; and, as she could not think of anything to say, she simply bowed, and took the thimble, looking as solemn as she could.
+
+The next thing was to eat the comfits: this caused some noise and confusion, as the large birds complained that they could not taste theirs, and the small ones choked and had to be patted on the back. However, it was over at last, and they sat down again in a ring, and begged the Mouse to tell them something more.
+
+`You promised to tell me your history, you know,' said Alice, `and why it is you hate--C and D,' she added in a whisper, half afraid that it would be offended again.
+
+`Mine is a long and a sad tale!' said the Mouse, turning to Alice, and sighing.
+
+`It IS a long tail, certainly,' said Alice, looking down with wonder at the Mouse's tail; `but why do you call it sad?' And she kept on puzzling about it while the Mouse was speaking, so that her idea of the tale was something like this:--
+
+poem{
+
+                    `Fury said to a
+                   mouse, That he
+                 met in the
+               house,
+            "Let us
+              both go to
+                law:  I will
+                  prosecute
+                    YOU.  --Come,
+                       I'll take no
+                        denial; We
+                     must have a
+                 trial:  For
+              really this
+           morning I've
+          nothing
+         to do."
+           Said the
+             mouse to the
+               cur, "Such
+                 a trial,
+                   dear Sir,
+                         With
+                     no jury
+                  or judge,
+                would be
+              wasting
+             our
+              breath."
+               "I'll be
+                 judge, I'll
+                   be jury,"
+                         Said
+                    cunning
+                      old Fury:
+                     "I'll
+                      try the
+                         whole
+                          cause,
+                             and
+                        condemn
+                       you
+                      to
+                       death."'
+
+}poem
+
+`You are not attending!' said the Mouse to Alice severely. `What are you thinking of?'
+
+`I beg your pardon,' said Alice very humbly: `you had got to the fifth bend, I think?'
+
+`I had NOT!' cried the Mouse, sharply and very angrily.
+
+`A knot!' said Alice, always ready to make herself useful, and looking anxiously about her. `Oh, do let me help to undo it!'
+
+`I shall do nothing of the sort,' said the Mouse, getting up and walking away. `You insult me by talking such nonsense!'
+
+`I didn't mean it!' pleaded poor Alice. `But you're so easily offended, you know!'
+
+The Mouse only growled in reply.
+
+`Please come back and finish your story!' Alice called after it; and the others all joined in chorus, `Yes, please do!' but the Mouse only shook its head impatiently, and walked a little quicker.
+
+`What a pity it wouldn't stay!' sighed the Lory, as soon as it was quite out of sight; and an old Crab took the opportunity of saying to her daughter `Ah, my dear! Let this be a lesson to you never to lose YOUR temper!' `Hold your tongue, Ma!' said the young Crab, a little snappishly. `You're enough to try the patience of an oyster!'
+
+`I wish I had our Dinah here, I know I do!' said Alice aloud, addressing nobody in particular. `She'd soon fetch it back!'
+
+`And who is Dinah, if I might venture to ask the question?' said the Lory.
+
+Alice replied eagerly, for she was always ready to talk about her pet: `Dinah's our cat. And she's such a capital one for catching mice you can't think! And oh, I wish you could see her after the birds! Why, she'll eat a little bird as soon as look at it!'
+
+This speech caused a remarkable sensation among the party. Some of the birds hurried off at once: one old Magpie began wrapping itself up very carefully, remarking, `I really must be getting home; the night-air doesn't suit my throat!' and a Canary called out in a trembling voice to its children, `Come away, my dears! It's high time you were all in bed!' On various pretexts they all moved off, and Alice was soon left alone.
+
+`I wish I hadn't mentioned Dinah!' she said to herself in a melancholy tone. `Nobody seems to like her, down here, and I'm sure she's the best cat in the world! Oh, my dear Dinah! I wonder if I shall ever see you any more!' And here poor Alice began to cry again, for she felt very lonely and low-spirited. In a little while, however, she again heard a little pattering of footsteps in the distance, and she looked up eagerly, half hoping that the Mouse had changed his mind, and was coming back to finish his story.
+
+CHAPTER IV - The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill
+
+It was the White Rabbit, trotting slowly back again, and looking anxiously about as it went, as if it had lost something; and she heard it muttering to itself `The Duchess! The Duchess! Oh my dear paws! Oh my fur and whiskers! She'll get me executed, as sure as ferrets are ferrets! Where CAN I have dropped them, I wonder?' Alice guessed in a moment that it was looking for the fan and the pair of white kid gloves, and she very good-naturedly began hunting about for them, but they were nowhere to be seen--everything seemed to have changed since her swim in the pool, and the great hall, with the glass table and the little door, had vanished completely.
+
+Very soon the Rabbit noticed Alice, as she went hunting about, and called out to her in an angry tone, `Why, Mary Ann, what ARE you doing out here? Run home this moment, and fetch me a pair of gloves and a fan! Quick, now!' And Alice was so much frightened that she ran off at once in the direction it pointed to, without trying to explain the mistake it had made.
+
+`He took me for his housemaid,' she said to herself as she ran. `How surprised he'll be when he finds out who I am! But I'd better take him his fan and gloves--that is, if I can find them.' As she said this, she came upon a neat little house, on the door of which was a bright brass plate with the name `W. RABBIT' engraved upon it. She went in without knocking, and hurried upstairs, in great fear lest she should meet the real Mary Ann, and be turned out of the house before she had found the fan and gloves.
+
+`How queer it seems,' Alice said to herself, `to be going messages for a rabbit! I suppose Dinah'll be sending me on messages next!' And she began fancying the sort of thing that would happen: `"Miss Alice! Come here directly, and get ready for your walk!" "Coming in a minute, nurse! But I've got to see that the mouse doesn't get out." Only I don't think,' Alice went on, `that they'd let Dinah stop in the house if it began ordering people about like that!'
+
+By this time she had found her way into a tidy little room with a table in the window, and on it (as she had hoped) a fan and two or three pairs of tiny white kid gloves: she took up the fan and a pair of the gloves, and was just going to leave the room, when her eye fell upon a little bottle that stood near the looking- glass. There was no label this time with the words `DRINK ME,' but nevertheless she uncorked it and put it to her lips. `I know SOMETHING interesting is sure to happen,' she said to herself, `whenever I eat or drink anything; so I'll just see what this bottle does. I do hope it'll make me grow large again, for really I'm quite tired of being such a tiny little thing!'
+
+It did so indeed, and much sooner than she had expected: before she had drunk half the bottle, she found her head pressing against the ceiling, and had to stoop to save her neck from being broken. She hastily put down the bottle, saying to herself `That's quite enough--I hope I shan't grow any more--As it is, I can't get out at the door--I do wish I hadn't drunk quite so much!'
+
+Alas! it was too late to wish that! She went on growing, and growing, and very soon had to kneel down on the floor: in another minute there was not even room for this, and she tried the effect of lying down with one elbow against the door, and the other arm curled round her head. Still she went on growing, and, as a last resource, she put one arm out of the window, and one foot up the chimney, and said to herself `Now I can do no more, whatever happens. What WILL become of me?'
+
+Luckily for Alice, the little magic bottle had now had its full effect, and she grew no larger: still it was very uncomfortable, and, as there seemed to be no sort of chance of her ever getting out of the room again, no wonder she felt unhappy.
+
+`It was much pleasanter at home,' thought poor Alice, `when one wasn't always growing larger and smaller, and being ordered about by mice and rabbits. I almost wish I hadn't gone down that rabbit-hole--and yet--and yet--it's rather curious, you know, this sort of life! I do wonder what CAN have happened to me! When I used to read fairy-tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one! There ought to be a book written about me, that there ought! And when I grow up, I'll write one--but I'm grown up now,' she added in a sorrowful tone; `at least there's no room to grow up any more HERE.'
+
+`But then,' thought Alice, `shall I NEVER get any older than I am now? That'll be a comfort, one way--never to be an old woman-- but then--always to have lessons to learn! Oh, I shouldn't like THAT!'
+
+`Oh, you foolish Alice!' she answered herself. `How can you learn lessons in here? Why, there's hardly room for YOU, and no room at all for any lesson-books!'
+
+And so she went on, taking first one side and then the other, and making quite a conversation of it altogether; but after a few minutes she heard a voice outside, and stopped to listen.
+
+`Mary Ann! Mary Ann!' said the voice. `Fetch me my gloves this moment!' Then came a little pattering of feet on the stairs. Alice knew it was the Rabbit coming to look for her, and she trembled till she shook the house, quite forgetting that she was now about a thousand times as large as the Rabbit, and had no reason to be afraid of it.
+
+Presently the Rabbit came up to the door, and tried to open it; but, as the door opened inwards, and Alice's elbow was pressed hard against it, that attempt proved a failure. Alice heard it say to itself `Then I'll go round and get in at the window.'
+
+`THAT you won't' thought Alice, and, after waiting till she fancied she heard the Rabbit just under the window, she suddenly spread out her hand, and made a snatch in the air. She did not get hold of anything, but she heard a little shriek and a fall, and a crash of broken glass, from which she concluded that it was just possible it had fallen into a cucumber-frame, or something of the sort.
+
+Next came an angry voice--the Rabbit's--`Pat! Pat! Where are you?' And then a voice she had never heard before, `Sure then I'm here! Digging for apples, yer honour!'
+
+`Digging for apples, indeed!' said the Rabbit angrily. `Here! Come and help me out of THIS!' (Sounds of more broken glass.)
+
+`Now tell me, Pat, what's that in the window?'
+
+`Sure, it's an arm, yer honour!' (He pronounced it `arrum.')
+
+`An arm, you goose! Who ever saw one that size? Why, it fills the whole window!'
+
+`Sure, it does, yer honour: but it's an arm for all that.'
+
+`Well, it's got no business there, at any rate: go and take it away!'
+
+There was a long silence after this, and Alice could only hear whispers now and then; such as, `Sure, I don't like it, yer honour, at all, at all!' `Do as I tell you, you coward!' and at last she spread out her hand again, and made another snatch in the air. This time there were TWO little shrieks, and more sounds of broken glass. `What a number of cucumber-frames there must be!' thought Alice. `I wonder what they'll do next! As for pulling me out of the window, I only wish they COULD! I'm sure I don't want to stay in here any longer!'
+
+She waited for some time without hearing anything more: at last came a rumbling of little cartwheels, and the sound of a good many voices all talking together: she made out the words: `Where's the other ladder?--Why, I hadn't to bring but one; Bill's got the other--Bill! fetch it here, lad!--Here, put 'em up at this corner--No, tie 'em together first--they don't reach half high enough yet--Oh! they'll do well enough; don't be particular-- Here, Bill! catch hold of this rope--Will the roof bear?--Mind that loose slate--Oh, it's coming down! Heads below!' (a loud crash)--`Now, who did that?--It was Bill, I fancy--Who's to go down the chimney?--Nay, I shan't! YOU do it!--That I won't, then!--Bill's to go down--Here, Bill! the master says you're to go down the chimney!'
+
+`Oh! So Bill's got to come down the chimney, has he?' said Alice to herself. `Shy, they seem to put everything upon Bill! I wouldn't be in Bill's place for a good deal: this fireplace is narrow, to be sure; but I THINK I can kick a little!'
+
+She drew her foot as far down the chimney as she could, and waited till she heard a little animal (she couldn't guess of what sort it was) scratching and scrambling about in the chimney close above her: then, saying to herself `This is Bill,' she gave one sharp kick, and waited to see what would happen next.
+
+The first thing she heard was a general chorus of `There goes Bill!' then the Rabbit's voice along--`Catch him, you by the hedge!' then silence, and then another confusion of voices--`Hold up his head--Brandy now--Don't choke him--How was it, old fellow? What happened to you? Tell us all about it!'
+
+Last came a little feeble, squeaking voice, (`That's Bill,' thought Alice,) `Well, I hardly know--No more, thank ye; I'm better now--but I'm a deal too flustered to tell you--all I know is, something comes at me like a Jack-in-the-box, and up I goes like a sky-rocket!'
+
+`So you did, old fellow!' said the others.
+
+`We must burn the house down!' said the Rabbit's voice; and Alice called out as loud as she could, `If you do. I'll set Dinah at you!'
+
+There was a dead silence instantly, and Alice thought to herself, `I wonder what they WILL do next! If they had any sense, they'd take the roof off.' After a minute or two, they began moving about again, and Alice heard the Rabbit say, `A barrowful will do, to begin with.'
+
+`A barrowful of WHAT?' thought Alice; but she had not long to doubt, for the next moment a shower of little pebbles came rattling in at the window, and some of them hit her in the face. `I'll put a stop to this,' she said to herself, and shouted out, `You'd better not do that again!' which produced another dead silence.
+
+Alice noticed with some surprise that the pebbles were all turning into little cakes as they lay on the floor, and a bright idea came into her head. `If I eat one of these cakes,' she thought, `it's sure to make SOME change in my size; and as it can't possibly make me larger, it must make me smaller, I suppose.'
+
+So she swallowed one of the cakes, and was delighted to find that she began shrinking directly. As soon as she was small enough to get through the door, she ran out of the house, and found quite a crowd of little animals and birds waiting outside. The poor little Lizard, Bill, was in the middle, being held up by two guinea-pigs, who were giving it something out of a bottle. They all made a rush at Alice the moment she appeared; but she ran off as hard as she could, and soon found herself safe in a thick wood.
+
+`The first thing I've got to do,' said Alice to herself, as she wandered about in the wood, `is to grow to my right size again; and the second thing is to find my way into that lovely garden. I think that will be the best plan.'
+
+It sounded an excellent plan, no doubt, and very neatly and simply arranged; the only difficulty was, that she had not the smallest idea how to set about it; and while she was peering about anxiously among the trees, a little sharp bark just over her head made her look up in a great hurry.
+
+An enormous puppy was looking down at her with large round eyes, and feebly stretching out one paw, trying to touch her. `Poor little thing!' said Alice, in a coaxing tone, and she tried hard to whistle to it; but she was terribly frightened all the time at the thought that it might be hungry, in which case it would be very likely to eat her up in spite of all her coaxing.
+
+Hardly knowing what she did, she picked up a little bit of stick, and held it out to the puppy; whereupon the puppy jumped into the air off all its feet at once, with a yelp of delight, and rushed at the stick, and made believe to worry it; then Alice dodged behind a great thistle, to keep herself from being run over; and the moment she appeared on the other side, the puppy made another rush at the stick, and tumbled head over heels in its hurry to get hold of it; then Alice, thinking it was very like having a game of play with a cart-horse, and expecting every moment to be trampled under its feet, ran round the thistle again; then the puppy began a series of short charges at the stick, running a very little way forwards each time and a long way back, and barking hoarsely all the while, till at last it sat down a good way off, panting, with its tongue hanging out of its mouth, and its great eyes half shut.
+
+This seemed to Alice a good opportunity for making her escape; so she set off at once, and ran till she was quite tired and out of breath, and till the puppy's bark sounded quite faint in the distance.
+
+`And yet what a dear little puppy it was!' said Alice, as she leant against a buttercup to rest herself, and fanned herself with one of the leaves: `I should have liked teaching it tricks very much, if--if I'd only been the right size to do it! Oh dear! I'd nearly forgotten that I've got to grow up again! Let me see--how IS it to be managed? I suppose I ought to eat or drink something or other; but the great question is, what?'
+
+The great question certainly was, what? Alice looked all round her at the flowers and the blades of grass, but she did not see anything that looked like the right thing to eat or drink under the circumstances. There was a large mushroom growing near her, about the same height as herself; and when she had looked under it, and on both sides of it, and behind it, it occurred to her that she might as well look and see what was on the top of it.
+
+She stretched herself up on tiptoe, and peeped over the edge of the mushroom, and her eyes immediately met those of a large caterpillar, that was sitting on the top with its arms folded, quietly smoking a long hookah, and taking not the smallest notice of her or of anything else.
+
+CHAPTER V - Advice from a Caterpillar
+
+The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.
+
+`Who are YOU?' said the Caterpillar.
+
+This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, `I--I hardly know, sir, just at present-- at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.'
+
+`What do you mean by that?' said the Caterpillar sternly. `Explain yourself!'
+
+`I can't explain MYSELF, I'm afraid, sir' said Alice, `because I'm not myself, you see.'
+
+`I don't see,' said the Caterpillar.
+
+`I'm afraid I can't put it more clearly,' Alice replied very politely, `for I can't understand it myself to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.'
+
+`It isn't,' said the Caterpillar.
+
+`Well, perhaps you haven't found it so yet,' said Alice; `but when you have to turn into a chrysalis--you will some day, you know--and then after that into a butterfly, I should think you'll feel it a little queer, won't you?'
+
+`Not a bit,' said the Caterpillar.
+
+`Well, perhaps your feelings may be different,' said Alice; `all I know is, it would feel very queer to ME.'
+
+`You!' said the Caterpillar contemptuously. `Who are YOU?'
+
+Which brought them back again to the beginning of the conversation. Alice felt a little irritated at the Caterpillar's making such VERY short remarks, and she drew herself up and said, very gravely, `I think, you ought to tell me who YOU are, first.'
+
+`Why?' said the Caterpillar.
+
+Here was another puzzling question; and as Alice could not think of any good reason, and as the Caterpillar seemed to be in a VERY unpleasant state of mind, she turned away.
+
+`Come back!' the Caterpillar called after her. `I've something important to say!'
+
+This sounded promising, certainly: Alice turned and came back again.
+
+`Keep your temper,' said the Caterpillar.
+
+`Is that all?' said Alice, swallowing down her anger as well as she could.
+
+`No,' said the Caterpillar.
+
+Alice thought she might as well wait, as she had nothing else to do, and perhaps after all it might tell her something worth hearing. For some minutes it puffed away without speaking, but at last it unfolded its arms, took the hookah out of its mouth again, and said, `So you think you're changed, do you?'
+
+`I'm afraid I am, sir,' said Alice; `I can't remember things as I used--and I don't keep the same size for ten minutes together!'
+
+`Can't remember WHAT things?' said the Caterpillar.
+
+`Well, I've tried to say "HOW DOTH THE LITTLE BUSY BEE," but it all came different!' Alice replied in a very melancholy voice.
+
+`Repeat, "YOU ARE OLD, FATHER WILLIAM,"' said the Caterpillar.
+
+Alice folded her hands, and began:--
+
+poem{
+
+    `You are old, Father William,' the young man said,
+      `And your hair has become very white;
+    And yet you incessantly stand on your head--
+      Do you think, at your age, it is right?'
+
+    `In my youth,' Father William replied to his son,
+      `I feared it might injure the brain;
+    But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
+      Why, I do it again and again.'
+
+    `You are old,' said the youth, `as I mentioned before,
+      And have grown most uncommonly fat;
+    Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door--
+      Pray, what is the reason of that?'
+
+    `In my youth,' said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,
+      `I kept all my limbs very supple
+    By the use of this ointment--one shilling the box--
+      Allow me to sell you a couple?'
+
+    `You are old,' said the youth, `and your jaws are too weak
+      For anything tougher than suet;
+    Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak--
+      Pray how did you manage to do it?'
+
+    `In my youth,' said his father, `I took to the law,
+      And argued each case with my wife;
+    And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw,
+      Has lasted the rest of my life.'
+
+    `You are old,' said the youth, `one would hardly suppose
+      That your eye was as steady as ever;
+    Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose--
+      What made you so awfully clever?'
+
+    `I have answered three questions, and that is enough,'
+      Said his father; `don't give yourself airs!
+    Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
+      Be off, or I'll kick you down stairs!'
+
+}poem
+
+`That is not said right,' said the Caterpillar.
+
+`Not QUITE right, I'm afraid,' said Alice, timidly; `some of the words have got altered.'
+
+`It is wrong from beginning to end,' said the Caterpillar decidedly, and there was silence for some minutes.
+
+The Caterpillar was the first to speak.
+
+`What size do you want to be?' it asked.
+
+`Oh, I'm not particular as to size,' Alice hastily replied; `only one doesn't like changing so often, you know.'
+
+`I DON'T know,' said the Caterpillar.
+
+Alice said nothing: she had never been so much contradicted in her life before, and she felt that she was losing her temper.
+
+`Are you content now?' said the Caterpillar.
+
+`Well, I should like to be a LITTLE larger, sir, if you wouldn't mind,' said Alice: `three inches is such a wretched height to be.'
+
+`It is a very good height indeed!' said the Caterpillar angrily, rearing itself upright as it spoke (it was exactly three inches high).
+
+`But I'm not used to it!' pleaded poor Alice in a piteous tone. And she thought of herself, `I wish the creatures wouldn't be so easily offended!'
+
+`You'll get used to it in time,' said the Caterpillar; and it put the hookah into its mouth and began smoking again.
+
+This time Alice waited patiently until it chose to speak again. In a minute or two the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth and yawned once or twice, and shook itself. Then it got down off the mushroom, and crawled away in the grass, merely remarking as it went, `One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter.'
+
+`One side of WHAT? The other side of WHAT?' thought Alice to herself.
+
+`Of the mushroom,' said the Caterpillar, just as if she had asked it aloud; and in another moment it was out of sight.
+
+Alice remained looking thoughtfully at the mushroom for a minute, trying to make out which were the two sides of it; and as it was perfectly round, she found this a very difficult question. However, at last she stretched her arms round it as far as they would go, and broke off a bit of the edge with each hand.
+
+`And now which is which?' she said to herself, and nibbled a little of the right-hand bit to try the effect: the next moment she felt a violent blow underneath her chin: it had struck her foot!
+
+She was a good deal frightened by this very sudden change, but she felt that there was no time to be lost, as she was shrinking rapidly; so she set to work at once to eat some of the other bit. Her chin was pressed so closely against her foot, that there was hardly room to open her mouth; but she did it at last, and managed to swallow a morsel of the lefthand bit.
+
+poem{
+
+*       *       *       * ~#
+
+    *       *       * ~#
+
+*       *       *       * ~#
+
+}poem
+
+`Come, my head's free at last!' said Alice in a tone of delight, which changed into alarm in another moment, when she found that her shoulders were nowhere to be found: all she could see, when she looked down, was an immense length of neck, which seemed to rise like a stalk out of a sea of green leaves that lay far below her.
+
+`What CAN all that green stuff be?' said Alice. `And where HAVE my shoulders got to? And oh, my poor hands, how is it I can't see you?' She was moving them about as she spoke, but no result seemed to follow, except a little shaking among the distant green leaves.
+
+As there seemed to be no chance of getting her hands up to her head, she tried to get her head down to them, and was delighted to find that her neck would bend about easily in any direction, like a serpent. She had just succeeded in curving it down into a graceful zigzag, and was going to dive in among the leaves, which she found to be nothing but the tops of the trees under which she had been wandering, when a sharp hiss made her draw back in a hurry: a large pigeon had flown into her face, and was beating her violently with its wings.
+
+`Serpent!' screamed the Pigeon.
+
+`I'm NOT a serpent!' said Alice indignantly. `Let me alone!'
+
+`Serpent, I say again!' repeated the Pigeon, but in a more subdued tone, and added with a kind of sob, `I've tried every way, and nothing seems to suit them!'
+
+`I haven't the least idea what you're talking about,' said Alice.
+
+`I've tried the roots of trees, and I've tried banks, and I've tried hedges,' the Pigeon went on, without attending to her; `but those serpents! There's no pleasing them!'
+
+Alice was more and more puzzled, but she thought there was no use in saying anything more till the Pigeon had finished.
+
+`As if it wasn't trouble enough hatching the eggs,' said the Pigeon; `but I must be on the look-out for serpents night and day! Why, I haven't had a wink of sleep these three weeks!'
+
+`I'm very sorry you've been annoyed,' said Alice, who was beginning to see its meaning.
+
+`And just as I'd taken the highest tree in the wood,' continued the Pigeon, raising its voice to a shriek, `and just as I was thinking I should be free of them at last, they must needs come wriggling down from the sky! Ugh, Serpent!'
+
+`But I'm NOT a serpent, I tell you!' said Alice. `I'm a--I'm a--'
+
+`Well! WHAT are you?' said the Pigeon. `I can see you're trying to invent something!'
+
+`I--I'm a little girl,' said Alice, rather doubtfully, as she remembered the number of changes she had gone through that day.
+
+`A likely story indeed!' said the Pigeon in a tone of the deepest contempt. `I've seen a good many little girls in my time, but never ONE with such a neck as that! No, no! You're a serpent; and there's no use denying it. I suppose you'll be telling me next that you never tasted an egg!'
+
+`I HAVE tasted eggs, certainly,' said Alice, who was a very truthful child; `but little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do, you know.'
+
+`I don't believe it,' said the Pigeon; `but if they do, why then they're a kind of serpent, that's all I can say.'
+
+This was such a new idea to Alice, that she was quite silent for a minute or two, which gave the Pigeon the opportunity of adding, `You're looking for eggs, I know THAT well enough; and what does it matter to me whether you're a little girl or a serpent?'
+
+`It matters a good deal to ME,' said Alice hastily; `but I'm not looking for eggs, as it happens; and if I was, I shouldn't want YOURS: I don't like them raw.'
+
+`Well, be off, then!' said the Pigeon in a sulky tone, as it settled down again into its nest. Alice crouched down among the trees as well as she could, for her neck kept getting entangled among the branches, and every now and then she had to stop and untwist it. After a while she remembered that she still held the pieces of mushroom in her hands, and she set to work very carefully, nibbling first at one and then at the other, and growing sometimes taller and sometimes shorter, until she had succeeded in bringing herself down to her usual height.
+
+It was so long since she had been anything near the right size, that it felt quite strange at first; but she got used to it in a few minutes, and began talking to herself, as usual. `Come, there's half my plan done now! How puzzling all these changes are! I'm never sure what I'm going to be, from one minute to another! However, I've got back to my right size: the next thing is, to get into that beautiful garden--how IS that to be done, I wonder?' As she said this, she came suddenly upon an open place, with a little house in it about four feet high. `Whoever lives there,' thought Alice, `it'll never do to come upon them THIS size: why, I should frighten them out of their wits!' So she began nibbling at the righthand bit again, and did not venture to go near the house till she had brought herself down to nine inches high.
+
+CHAPTER VI - Pig and Pepper
+
+For a minute or two she stood looking at the house, and wondering what to do next, when suddenly a footman in livery came running out of the wood--(she considered him to be a footman because he was in livery: otherwise, judging by his face only, she would have called him a fish)--and rapped loudly at the door with his knuckles. It was opened by another footman in livery, with a round face, and large eyes like a frog; and both footmen, Alice noticed, had powdered hair that curled all over their heads. She felt very curious to know what it was all about, and crept a little way out of the wood to listen.
+
+The Fish-Footman began by producing from under his arm a great letter, nearly as large as himself, and this he handed over to the other, saying, in a solemn tone, `For the Duchess. An invitation from the Queen to play croquet.' The Frog-Footman repeated, in the same solemn tone, only changing the order of the words a little, `From the Queen. An invitation for the Duchess to play croquet.'
+
+Then they both bowed low, and their curls got entangled together.
+
+Alice laughed so much at this, that she had to run back into the wood for fear of their hearing her; and when she next peeped out the Fish-Footman was gone, and the other was sitting on the ground near the door, staring stupidly up into the sky.
+
+Alice went timidly up to the door, and knocked.
+
+`There's no sort of use in knocking,' said the Footman, `and that for two reasons. First, because I'm on the same side of the door as you are; secondly, because they're making such a noise inside, no one could possibly hear you.' And certainly there was a most extraordinary noise going on within--a constant howling and sneezing, and every now and then a great crash, as if a dish or kettle had been broken to pieces.
+
+`Please, then,' said Alice, `how am I to get in?'
+
+`There might be some sense in your knocking,' the Footman went on without attending to her, `if we had the door between us. For instance, if you were INSIDE, you might knock, and I could let you out, you know.' He was looking up into the sky all the time he was speaking, and this Alice thought decidedly uncivil. `But perhaps he can't help it,' she said to herself; `his eyes are so VERY nearly at the top of his head. But at any rate he might answer questions.--How am I to get in?' she repeated, aloud.
+
+`I shall sit here,' the Footman remarked, `till tomorrow--'
+
+At this moment the door of the house opened, and a large plate came skimming out, straight at the Footman's head: it just grazed his nose, and broke to pieces against one of the trees behind him.
+
+`--or next day, maybe,' the Footman continued in the same tone, exactly as if nothing had happened.
+
+`How am I to get in?' asked Alice again, in a louder tone.
+
+`ARE you to get in at all?' said the Footman. `That's the first question, you know.'
+
+It was, no doubt: only Alice did not like to be told so. `It's really dreadful,' she muttered to herself, `the way all the creatures argue. It's enough to drive one crazy!'
+
+The Footman seemed to think this a good opportunity for repeating his remark, with variations. `I shall sit here,' he said, `on and off, for days and days.'
+
+`But what am I to do?' said Alice.
+
+`Anything you like,' said the Footman, and began whistling.
+
+`Oh, there's no use in talking to him,' said Alice desperately: `he's perfectly idiotic!' And she opened the door and went in.
+
+The door led right into a large kitchen, which was full of smoke from one end to the other: the Duchess was sitting on a three-legged stool in the middle, nursing a baby; the cook was leaning over the fire, stirring a large cauldron which seemed to be full of soup.
+
+`There's certainly too much pepper in that soup!' Alice said to herself, as well as she could for sneezing.
+
+There was certainly too much of it in the air. Even the Duchess sneezed occasionally; and as for the baby, it was sneezing and howling alternately without a moment's pause. The only things in the kitchen that did not sneeze, were the cook, and a large cat which was sitting on the hearth and grinning from ear to ear.
+
+`Please would you tell me,' said Alice, a little timidly, for she was not quite sure whether it was good manners for her to speak first, `why your cat grins like that?'
+
+`It's a Cheshire cat,' said the Duchess, `and that's why. Pig!'
+
+She said the last word with such sudden violence that Alice quite jumped; but she saw in another moment that it was addressed to the baby, and not to her, so she took courage, and went on again:--
+
+`I didn't know that Cheshire cats always grinned; in fact, I didn't know that cats COULD grin.'
+
+`They all can,' said the Duchess; `and most of 'em do.'
+
+`I don't know of any that do,' Alice said very politely, feeling quite pleased to have got into a conversation.
+
+`You don't know much,' said the Duchess; `and that's a fact.'
+
+Alice did not at all like the tone of this remark, and thought it would be as well to introduce some other subject of conversation. While she was trying to fix on one, the cook took the cauldron of soup off the fire, and at once set to work throwing everything within her reach at the Duchess and the baby --the fire-irons came first; then followed a shower of saucepans, plates, and dishes. The Duchess took no notice of them even when they hit her; and the baby was howling so much already, that it was quite impossible to say whether the blows hurt it or not.
+
+`Oh, PLEASE mind what you're doing!' cried Alice, jumping up and down in an agony of terror. `Oh, there goes his PRECIOUS nose'; as an unusually large saucepan flew close by it, and very nearly carried it off.
+
+`If everybody minded their own business,' the Duchess said in a hoarse growl, `the world would go round a deal faster than it does.'
+
+`Which would NOT be an advantage,' said Alice, who felt very glad to get an opportunity of showing off a little of her knowledge. `Just think of what work it would make with the day and night! You see the earth takes twenty-four hours to turn round on its axis--'
+
+`Talking of axes,' said the Duchess, `chop off her head!'
+
+Alice glanced rather anxiously at the cook, to see if she meant to take the hint; but the cook was busily stirring the soup, and seemed not to be listening, so she went on again: `Twenty-four hours, I THINK; or is it twelve? I--'
+
+`Oh, don't bother ME,' said the Duchess; `I never could abide figures!' And with that she began nursing her child again, singing a sort of lullaby to it as she did so, and giving it a violent shake at the end of every line:
+
+poem{
+
+        `Speak roughly to your little boy,
+          And beat him when he sneezes:
+        He only does it to annoy,
+          Because he knows it teases.'
+
+                    CHORUS.
+
+    (In which the cook and the baby joined):--
+
+                `Wow! wow! wow!'
+
+}poem
+
+While the Duchess sang the second verse of the song, she kept tossing the baby violently up and down, and the poor little thing howled so, that Alice could hardly hear the words:--
+
+poem{
+
+        `I speak severely to my boy,
+          I beat him when he sneezes;
+        For he can thoroughly enjoy
+          The pepper when he pleases!'
+
+                    CHORUS.
+
+                `Wow! wow! wow!'
+
+}poem
+
+`Here! you may nurse it a bit, if you like!' the Duchess said to Alice, flinging the baby at her as she spoke. `I must go and get ready to play croquet with the Queen,' and she hurried out of the room. The cook threw a frying-pan after her as she went out, but it just missed her.
+
+Alice caught the baby with some difficulty, as it was a queer-shaped little creature, and held out its arms and legs in all directions, `just like a star-fish,' thought Alice. The poor little thing was snorting like a steam-engine when she caught it, and kept doubling itself up and straightening itself out again, so that altogether, for the first minute or two, it was as much as she could do to hold it.
+
+As soon as she had made out the proper way of nursing it, (which was to twist it up into a sort of knot, and then keep tight hold of its right ear and left foot, so as to prevent its undoing itself,) she carried it out into the open air. `IF I don't take this child away with me,' thought Alice, `they're sure to kill it in a day or two: wouldn't it be murder to leave it behind?' She said the last words out loud, and the little thing grunted in reply (it had left off sneezing by this time). `Don't grunt,' said Alice; `that's not at all a proper way of expressing yourself.'
+
+The baby grunted again, and Alice looked very anxiously into its face to see what was the matter with it. There could be no doubt that it had a VERY turn-up nose, much more like a snout than a real nose; also its eyes were getting extremely small for a baby: altogether Alice did not like the look of the thing at all. `But perhaps it was only sobbing,' she thought, and looked into its eyes again, to see if there were any tears.
+
+No, there were no tears. `If you're going to turn into a pig, my dear,' said Alice, seriously, `I'll have nothing more to do with you. Mind now!' The poor little thing sobbed again (or grunted, it was impossible to say which), and they went on for some while in silence.
+
+Alice was just beginning to think to herself, `Now, what am I to do with this creature when I get it home?' when it grunted again, so violently, that she looked down into its face in some alarm. This time there could be NO mistake about it: it was neither more nor less than a pig, and she felt that it would be quite absurd for her to carry it further.
+
+So she set the little creature down, and felt quite relieved to see it trot away quietly into the wood. `If it had grown up,' she said to herself, `it would have made a dreadfully ugly child: but it makes rather a handsome pig, I think.' And she began thinking over other children she knew, who might do very well as pigs, and was just saying to herself, `if one only knew the right way to change them--' when she was a little startled by seeing the Cheshire Cat sitting on a bough of a tree a few yards off.
+
+The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good- natured, she thought: still it had VERY long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt that it ought to be treated with respect.
+
+`Cheshire Puss,' she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. `Come, it's pleased so far,' thought Alice, and she went on. `Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?'
+
+`That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat.
+
+`I don't much care where--' said Alice.
+
+`Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat.
+
+`--so long as I get SOMEWHERE,' Alice added as an explanation.
+
+`Oh, you're sure to do that,' said the Cat, `if you only walk long enough.'
+
+Alice felt that this could not be denied, so she tried another question. `What sort of people live about here?'
+
+`In THAT direction,' the Cat said, waving its right paw round, `lives a Hatter: and in THAT direction,' waving the other paw, `lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they're both mad.'
+
+`But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.
+
+`Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: `we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'
+
+`How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.
+
+`You must be,' said the Cat, `or you wouldn't have come here.'
+
+Alice didn't think that proved it at all; however, she went on `And how do you know that you're mad?'
+
+`To begin with,' said the Cat, `a dog's not mad. You grant that?'
+
+`I suppose so,' said Alice.
+
+`Well, then,' the Cat went on, `you see, a dog growls when it's angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad.'
+
+`I call it purring, not growling,' said Alice.
+
+`Call it what you like,' said the Cat. `Do you play croquet with the Queen to-day?'
+
+`I should like it very much,' said Alice, `but I haven't been invited yet.'
+
+`You'll see me there,' said the Cat, and vanished.
+
+Alice was not much surprised at this, she was getting so used to queer things happening. While she was looking at the place where it had been, it suddenly appeared again.
+
+`By-the-bye, what became of the baby?' said the Cat. `I'd nearly forgotten to ask.'
+
+`It turned into a pig,' Alice quietly said, just as if it had come back in a natural way.
+
+`I thought it would,' said the Cat, and vanished again.
+
+Alice waited a little, half expecting to see it again, but it did not appear, and after a minute or two she walked on in the direction in which the March Hare was said to live. `I've seen hatters before,' she said to herself; `the March Hare will be much the most interesting, and perhaps as this is May it won't be raving mad--at least not so mad as it was in March.' As she said this, she looked up, and there was the Cat again, sitting on a branch of a tree.
+
+`Did you say pig, or fig?' said the Cat.
+
+`I said pig,' replied Alice; `and I wish you wouldn't keep appearing and vanishing so suddenly: you make one quite giddy.'
+
+`All right,' said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.
+
+`Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin,' thought Alice; `but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!'
+
+She had not gone much farther before she came in sight of the house of the March Hare: she thought it must be the right house, because the chimneys were shaped like ears and the roof was thatched with fur. It was so large a house, that she did not like to go nearer till she had nibbled some more of the lefthand bit of mushroom, and raised herself to about two feet high: even then she walked up towards it rather timidly, saying to herself `Suppose it should be raving mad after all! I almost wish I'd gone to see the Hatter instead!'
+
+CHAPTER VII - A Mad Tea-Party
+
+There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house, and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it: a Dormouse was sitting between them, fast asleep, and the other two were using it as a cushion, resting their elbows on it, and talking over its head. `Very uncomfortable for the Dormouse,' thought Alice; `only, as it's asleep, I suppose it doesn't mind.'
+
+The table was a large one, but the three were all crowded together at one corner of it: `No room! No room!' they cried out when they saw Alice coming. `There's PLENTY of room!' said Alice indignantly, and she sat down in a large arm-chair at one end of the table.
+
+`Have some wine,' the March Hare said in an encouraging tone.
+
+Alice looked all round the table, but there was nothing on it but tea. `I don't see any wine,' she remarked.
+
+`There isn't any,' said the March Hare.
+
+`Then it wasn't very civil of you to offer it,' said Alice angrily.
+
+`It wasn't very civil of you to sit down without being invited,' said the March Hare.
+
+`I didn't know it was YOUR table,' said Alice; `it's laid for a great many more than three.'
+
+`Your hair wants cutting,' said the Hatter. He had been looking at Alice for some time with great curiosity, and this was his first speech.
+
+`You should learn not to make personal remarks,' Alice said with some severity; `it's very rude.'
+
+The Hatter opened his eyes very wide on hearing this; but all he SAID was, `Why is a raven like a writing-desk?'
+
+`Come, we shall have some fun now!' thought Alice. `I'm glad they've begun asking riddles.--I believe I can guess that,' she added aloud.
+
+`Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?' said the March Hare.
+
+`Exactly so,' said Alice.
+
+`Then you should say what you mean,' the March Hare went on.
+
+`I do,' Alice hastily replied; `at least--at least I mean what I say--that's the same thing, you know.'
+
+`Not the same thing a bit!' said the Hatter. `You might just as well say that "I see what I eat" is the same thing as "I eat what I see"!'
+
+`You might just as well say,' added the March Hare, `that "I like what I get" is the same thing as "I get what I like"!'
+
+`You might just as well say,' added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in his sleep, `that "I breathe when I sleep" is the same thing as "I sleep when I breathe"!'
+
+`It IS the same thing with you,' said the Hatter, and here the conversation dropped, and the party sat silent for a minute, while Alice thought over all she could remember about ravens and writing-desks, which wasn't much.
+
+The Hatter was the first to break the silence. `What day of the month is it?' he said, turning to Alice: he had taken his watch out of his pocket, and was looking at it uneasily, shaking it every now and then, and holding it to his ear.
+
+Alice considered a little, and then said `The fourth.'
+
+`Two days wrong!' sighed the Hatter. `I told you butter wouldn't suit the works!' he added looking angrily at the March Hare.
+
+`It was the BEST butter,' the March Hare meekly replied.
+
+`Yes, but some crumbs must have got in as well,' the Hatter grumbled: `you shouldn't have put it in with the bread-knife.'
+
+The March Hare took the watch and looked at it gloomily: then he dipped it into his cup of tea, and looked at it again: but he could think of nothing better to say than his first remark, `It was the BEST butter, you know.'
+
+Alice had been looking over his shoulder with some curiosity. `What a funny watch!' she remarked. `It tells the day of the month, and doesn't tell what o'clock it is!'
+
+`Why should it?' muttered the Hatter. `Does YOUR watch tell you what year it is?'
+
+`Of course not,' Alice replied very readily: `but that's because it stays the same year for such a long time together.'
+
+`Which is just the case with MINE,' said the Hatter.
+
+Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. The Hatter's remark seemed to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English. `I don't quite understand you,' she said, as politely as she could.
+
+`The Dormouse is asleep again,' said the Hatter, and he poured a little hot tea upon its nose.
+
+The Dormouse shook its head impatiently, and said, without opening its eyes, `Of course, of course; just what I was going to remark myself.'
+
+`Have you guessed the riddle yet?' the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.
+
+`No, I give it up,' Alice replied: `what's the answer?'
+
+`I haven't the slightest idea,' said the Hatter.
+
+`Nor I,' said the March Hare.
+
+Alice sighed wearily. `I think you might do something better with the time,' she said, `than waste it in asking riddles that have no answers.'
+
+`If you knew Time as well as I do,' said the Hatter, `you wouldn't talk about wasting IT. It's HIM.'
+
+`I don't know what you mean,' said Alice.
+
+`Of course you don't!' the Hatter said, tossing his head contemptuously. `I dare say you never even spoke to Time!'
+
+`Perhaps not,' Alice cautiously replied: `but I know I have to beat time when I learn music.'
+
+`Ah! that accounts for it,' said the Hatter. `He won't stand beating. Now, if you only kept on good terms with him, he'd do almost anything you liked with the clock. For instance, suppose it were nine o'clock in the morning, just time to begin lessons: you'd only have to whisper a hint to Time, and round goes the clock in a twinkling! Half-past one, time for dinner!'
+
+(`I only wish it was,' the March Hare said to itself in a whisper.)
+
+`That would be grand, certainly,' said Alice thoughtfully: `but then--I shouldn't be hungry for it, you know.'
+
+`Not at first, perhaps,' said the Hatter: `but you could keep it to half-past one as long as you liked.'
+
+`Is that the way YOU manage?' Alice asked.
+
+The Hatter shook his head mournfully. `Not I!' he replied. `We quarrelled last March--just before HE went mad, you know--' (pointing with his tea spoon at the March Hare,) `--it was at the great concert given by the Queen of Hearts, and I had to sing
+
+poem{
+
+            "Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!
+            How I wonder what you're at!"
+
+}poem
+
+You know the song, perhaps?'
+
+`I've heard something like it,' said Alice.
+
+`It goes on, you know,' the Hatter continued, `in this way:--
+
+poem{
+
+            "Up above the world you fly,
+            Like a tea-tray in the sky.
+                    Twinkle, twinkle--"'
+
+}poem
+
+Here the Dormouse shook itself, and began singing in its sleep `Twinkle, twinkle, twinkle, twinkle--' and went on so long that they had to pinch it to make it stop.
+
+`Well, I'd hardly finished the first verse,' said the Hatter, `when the Queen jumped up and bawled out, "He's murdering the time! Off with his head!"'
+
+`How dreadfully savage!' exclaimed Alice.
+
+`And ever since that,' the Hatter went on in a mournful tone, `he won't do a thing I ask! It's always six o'clock now.'
+
+A bright idea came into Alice's head. `Is that the reason so many tea-things are put out here?' she asked.
+
+`Yes, that's it,' said the Hatter with a sigh: `it's always tea-time, and we've no time to wash the things between whiles.'
+
+`Then you keep moving round, I suppose?' said Alice.
+
+`Exactly so,' said the Hatter: `as the things get used up.'
+
+`But what happens when you come to the beginning again?' Alice ventured to ask.
+
+`Suppose we change the subject,' the March Hare interrupted, yawning. `I'm getting tired of this. I vote the young lady tells us a story.'
+
+`I'm afraid I don't know one,' said Alice, rather alarmed at the proposal.
+
+`Then the Dormouse shall!' they both cried. `Wake up, Dormouse!' And they pinched it on both sides at once.
+
+The Dormouse slowly opened his eyes. `I wasn't asleep,' he said in a hoarse, feeble voice: `I heard every word you fellows were saying.'
+
+`Tell us a story!' said the March Hare.
+
+`Yes, please do!' pleaded Alice.
+
+`And be quick about it,' added the Hatter, `or you'll be asleep again before it's done.'
+
+`Once upon a time there were three little sisters,' the Dormouse began in a great hurry; `and their names were Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie; and they lived at the bottom of a well--'
+
+`What did they live on?' said Alice, who always took a great interest in questions of eating and drinking.
+
+`They lived on treacle,' said the Dormouse, after thinking a minute or two.
+
+`They couldn't have done that, you know,' Alice gently remarked; `they'd have been ill.'
+
+`So they were,' said the Dormouse; `VERY ill.'
+
+Alice tried to fancy to herself what such an extraordinary ways of living would be like, but it puzzled her too much, so she went on: `But why did they live at the bottom of a well?'
+
+`Take some more tea,' the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.
+
+`I've had nothing yet,' Alice replied in an offended tone, `so I can't take more.'
+
+`You mean you can't take LESS,' said the Hatter: `it's very easy to take MORE than nothing.'
+
+`Nobody asked YOUR opinion,' said Alice.
+
+`Who's making personal remarks now?' the Hatter asked triumphantly.
+
+Alice did not quite know what to say to this: so she helped herself to some tea and bread-and-butter, and then turned to the Dormouse, and repeated her question. `Why did they live at the bottom of a well?'
+
+The Dormouse again took a minute or two to think about it, and then said, `It was a treacle-well.'
+
+`There's no such thing!' Alice was beginning very angrily, but the Hatter and the March Hare went `Sh! sh!' and the Dormouse sulkily remarked, `If you can't be civil, you'd better finish the story for yourself.'
+
+`No, please go on!' Alice said very humbly; `I won't interrupt again. I dare say there may be ONE.'
+
+`One, indeed!' said the Dormouse indignantly. However, he consented to go on. `And so these three little sisters--they were learning to draw, you know--'
+
+`What did they draw?' said Alice, quite forgetting her promise.
+
+`Treacle,' said the Dormouse, without considering at all this time.
+
+`I want a clean cup,' interrupted the Hatter: `let's all move one place on.'
+
+He moved on as he spoke, and the Dormouse followed him: the March Hare moved into the Dormouse's place, and Alice rather unwillingly took the place of the March Hare. The Hatter was the only one who got any advantage from the change: and Alice was a good deal worse off than before, as the March Hare had just upset the milk-jug into his plate.
+
+Alice did not wish to offend the Dormouse again, so she began very cautiously: `But I don't understand. Where did they draw the treacle from?'
+
+`You can draw water out of a water-well,' said the Hatter; `so I should think you could draw treacle out of a treacle-well--eh, stupid?'
+
+`But they were IN the well,' Alice said to the Dormouse, not choosing to notice this last remark.
+
+`Of course they were', said the Dormouse; `--well in.'
+
+This answer so confused poor Alice, that she let the Dormouse go on for some time without interrupting it.
+
+`They were learning to draw,' the Dormouse went on, yawning and rubbing its eyes, for it was getting very sleepy; `and they drew all manner of things--everything that begins with an M--'
+
+`Why with an M?' said Alice.
+
+`Why not?' said the March Hare.
+
+Alice was silent.
+
+The Dormouse had closed its eyes by this time, and was going off into a doze; but, on being pinched by the Hatter, it woke up again with a little shriek, and went on: `--that begins with an M, such as mouse-traps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness-- you know you say things are "much of a muchness"--did you ever see such a thing as a drawing of a muchness?'
+
+`Really, now you ask me,' said Alice, very much confused, `I don't think--'
+
+`Then you shouldn't talk,' said the Hatter.
+
+This piece of rudeness was more than Alice could bear: she got up in great disgust, and walked off; the Dormouse fell asleep instantly, and neither of the others took the least notice of her going, though she looked back once or twice, half hoping that they would call after her: the last time she saw them, they were trying to put the Dormouse into the teapot.
+
+`At any rate I'll never go THERE again!' said Alice as she picked her way through the wood. `It's the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life!'
+
+Just as she said this, she noticed that one of the trees had a door leading right into it. `That's very curious!' she thought. `But everything's curious today. I think I may as well go in at once.' And in she went.
+
+Once more she found herself in the long hall, and close to the little glass table. `Now, I'll manage better this time,' she said to herself, and began by taking the little golden key, and unlocking the door that led into the garden. Then she went to work nibbling at the mushroom (she had kept a piece of it in her pocket) till she was about a foot high: then she walked down the little passage: and THEN--she found herself at last in the beautiful garden, among the bright flower-beds and the cool fountains.
+
+CHAPTER VIII - The Queen's Croquet-Ground
+
+A large rose-tree stood near the entrance of the garden: the roses growing on it were white, but there were three gardeners at it, busily painting them red. Alice thought this a very curious thing, and she went nearer to watch them, and just as she came up to them she heard one of them say, `Look out now, Five! Don't go splashing paint over me like that!'
+
+`I couldn't help it,' said Five, in a sulky tone; `Seven jogged my elbow.'
+
+On which Seven looked up and said, `That's right, Five! Always lay the blame on others!'
+
+`YOU'D better not talk!' said Five. `I heard the Queen say only yesterday you deserved to be beheaded!'
+
+`What for?' said the one who had spoken first.
+
+`That's none of YOUR business, Two!' said Seven.
+
+`Yes, it IS his business!' said Five, `and I'll tell him--it was for bringing the cook tulip-roots instead of onions.'
+
+Seven flung down his brush, and had just begun `Well, of all the unjust things--' when his eye chanced to fall upon Alice, as she stood watching them, and he checked himself suddenly: the others looked round also, and all of them bowed low.
+
+`Would you tell me,' said Alice, a little timidly, `why you are painting those roses?'
+
+Five and Seven said nothing, but looked at Two. Two began in a low voice, `Why the fact is, you see, Miss, this here ought to have been a RED rose-tree, and we put a white one in by mistake; and if the Queen was to find it out, we should all have our heads cut off, you know. So you see, Miss, we're doing our best, afore she comes, to--' At this moment Five, who had been anxiously looking across the garden, called out `The Queen! The Queen!' and the three gardeners instantly threw themselves flat upon their faces. There was a sound of many footsteps, and Alice looked round, eager to see the Queen.
+
+First came ten soldiers carrying clubs; these were all shaped like the three gardeners, oblong and flat, with their hands and feet at the corners: next the ten courtiers; these were ornamented all over with diamonds, and walked two and two, as the soldiers did. After these came the royal children; there were ten of them, and the little dears came jumping merrily along hand in hand, in couples: they were all ornamented with hearts. Next came the guests, mostly Kings and Queens, and among them Alice recognised the White Rabbit: it was talking in a hurried nervous manner, smiling at everything that was said, and went by without noticing her. Then followed the Knave of Hearts, carrying the King's crown on a crimson velvet cushion; and, last of all this grand procession, came THE KING AND QUEEN OF HEARTS.
+
+Alice was rather doubtful whether she ought not to lie down on her face like the three gardeners, but she could not remember ever having heard of such a rule at processions; `and besides, what would be the use of a procession,' thought she, `if people had all to lie down upon their faces, so that they couldn't see it?' So she stood still where she was, and waited.
+
+When the procession came opposite to Alice, they all stopped and looked at her, and the Queen said severely `Who is this?' She said it to the Knave of Hearts, who only bowed and smiled in reply.
+
+`Idiot!' said the Queen, tossing her head impatiently; and, turning to Alice, she went on, `What's your name, child?'
+
+`My name is Alice, so please your Majesty,' said Alice very politely; but she added, to herself, `Why, they're only a pack of cards, after all. I needn't be afraid of them!'
+
+`And who are THESE?' said the Queen, pointing to the three gardeners who were lying round the rosetree; for, you see, as they were lying on their faces, and the pattern on their backs was the same as the rest of the pack, she could not tell whether they were gardeners, or soldiers, or courtiers, or three of her own children.
+
+`How should I know?' said Alice, surprised at her own courage. `It's no business of MINE.'
+
+The Queen turned crimson with fury, and, after glaring at her for a moment like a wild beast, screamed `Off with her head! Off--'
+
+`Nonsense!' said Alice, very loudly and decidedly, and the Queen was silent.
+
+The King laid his hand upon her arm, and timidly said `Consider, my dear: she is only a child!'
+
+The Queen turned angrily away from him, and said to the Knave `Turn them over!'
+
+The Knave did so, very carefully, with one foot.
+
+`Get up!' said the Queen, in a shrill, loud voice, and the three gardeners instantly jumped up, and began bowing to the King, the Queen, the royal children, and everybody else.
+
+`Leave off that!' screamed the Queen. `You make me giddy.' And then, turning to the rose-tree, she went on, `What HAVE you been doing here?'
+
+`May it please your Majesty,' said Two, in a very humble tone, going down on one knee as he spoke, `we were trying--'
+
+`I see!' said the Queen, who had meanwhile been examining the roses. `Off with their heads!' and the procession moved on, three of the soldiers remaining behind to execute the unfortunate gardeners, who ran to Alice for protection.
+
+`You shan't be beheaded!' said Alice, and she put them into a large flower-pot that stood near. The three soldiers wandered about for a minute or two, looking for them, and then quietly marched off after the others.
+
+`Are their heads off?' shouted the Queen.
+
+`Their heads are gone, if it please your Majesty!' the soldiers shouted in reply.
+
+`That's right!' shouted the Queen. `Can you play croquet?'
+
+The soldiers were silent, and looked at Alice, as the question was evidently meant for her.
+
+`Yes!' shouted Alice.
+
+`Come on, then!' roared the Queen, and Alice joined the procession, wondering very much what would happen next.
+
+`It's--it's a very fine day!' said a timid voice at her side. She was walking by the White Rabbit, who was peeping anxiously into her face.
+
+`Very,' said Alice: `--where's the Duchess?'
+
+`Hush! Hush!' said the Rabbit in a low, hurried tone. He looked anxiously over his shoulder as he spoke, and then raised himself upon tiptoe, put his mouth close to her ear, and whispered `She's under sentence of execution.'
+
+`What for?' said Alice.
+
+`Did you say "What a pity!"?' the Rabbit asked.
+
+`No, I didn't,' said Alice: `I don't think it's at all a pity. I said "What for?"'
+
+`She boxed the Queen's ears--' the Rabbit began. Alice gave a little scream of laughter. `Oh, hush!' the Rabbit whispered in a frightened tone. `The Queen will hear you! You see, she came rather late, and the Queen said--'
+
+`Get to your places!' shouted the Queen in a voice of thunder, and people began running about in all directions, tumbling up against each other; however, they got settled down in a minute or two, and the game began. Alice thought she had never seen such a curious croquet-ground in her life; it was all ridges and furrows; the balls were live hedgehogs, the mallets live flamingoes, and the soldiers had to double themselves up and to stand on their hands and feet, to make the arches.
+
+The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo: she succeeded in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under her arm, with its legs hanging down, but generally, just as she had got its neck nicely straightened out, and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it WOULD twist itself round and look up in her face, with such a puzzled expression that she could not help bursting out laughing: and when she had got its head down, and was going to begin again, it was very provoking to find that the hedgehog had unrolled itself, and was in the act of crawling away: besides all this, there was generally a ridge or furrow in the way wherever she wanted to send the hedgehog to, and, as the doubled-up soldiers were always getting up and walking off to other parts of the ground, Alice soon came to the conclusion that it was a very difficult game indeed.
+
+The players all played at once without waiting for turns, quarrelling all the while, and fighting for the hedgehogs; and in a very short time the Queen was in a furious passion, and went stamping about, and shouting `Off with his head!' or `Off with her head!' about once in a minute.
+
+Alice began to feel very uneasy: to be sure, she had not as yet had any dispute with the Queen, but she knew that it might happen any minute, `and then,' thought she, `what would become of me? They're dreadfully fond of beheading people here; the great wonder is, that there's any one left alive!'
+
+She was looking about for some way of escape, and wondering whether she could get away without being seen, when she noticed a curious appearance in the air: it puzzled her very much at first, but, after watching it a minute or two, she made it out to be a grin, and she said to herself `It's the Cheshire Cat: now I shall have somebody to talk to.'
+
+`How are you getting on?' said the Cat, as soon as there was mouth enough for it to speak with.
+
+Alice waited till the eyes appeared, and then nodded. `It's no use speaking to it,' she thought, `till its ears have come, or at least one of them.' In another minute the whole head appeared, and then Alice put down her flamingo, and began an account of the game, feeling very glad she had someone to listen to her. The Cat seemed to think that there was enough of it now in sight, and no more of it appeared.
+
+`I don't think they play at all fairly,' Alice began, in rather a complaining tone, `and they all quarrel so dreadfully one can't hear oneself speak--and they don't seem to have any rules in particular; at least, if there are, nobody attends to them--and you've no idea how confusing it is all the things being alive; for instance, there's the arch I've got to go through next walking about at the other end of the ground--and I should have croqueted the Queen's hedgehog just now, only it ran away when it saw mine coming!'
+
+`How do you like the Queen?' said the Cat in a low voice.
+
+`Not at all,' said Alice: `she's so extremely--' Just then she noticed that the Queen was close behind her, listening: so she went on, `--likely to win, that it's hardly worth while finishing the game.'
+
+The Queen smiled and passed on.
+
+`Who ARE you talking to?' said the King, going up to Alice, and looking at the Cat's head with great curiosity.
+
+`It's a friend of mine--a Cheshire Cat,' said Alice: `allow me to introduce it.'
+
+`I don't like the look of it at all,' said the King: `however, it may kiss my hand if it likes.'
+
+`I'd rather not,' the Cat remarked.
+
+`Don't be impertinent,' said the King, `and don't look at me like that!' He got behind Alice as he spoke.
+
+`A cat may look at a king,' said Alice. `I've read that in some book, but I don't remember where.'
+
+`Well, it must be removed,' said the King very decidedly, and he called the Queen, who was passing at the moment, `My dear! I wish you would have this cat removed!'
+
+The Queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. `Off with his head!' she said, without even looking round.
+
+`I'll fetch the executioner myself,' said the King eagerly, and he hurried off.
+
+Alice thought she might as well go back, and see how the game was going on, as she heard the Queen's voice in the distance, screaming with passion. She had already heard her sentence three of the players to be executed for having missed their turns, and she did not like the look of things at all, as the game was in such confusion that she never knew whether it was her turn or not. So she went in search of her hedgehog.
+
+The hedgehog was engaged in a fight with another hedgehog, which seemed to Alice an excellent opportunity for croqueting one of them with the other: the only difficulty was, that her flamingo was gone across to the other side of the garden, where Alice could see it trying in a helpless sort of way to fly up into a tree.
+
+By the time she had caught the flamingo and brought it back, the fight was over, and both the hedgehogs were out of sight: `but it doesn't matter much,' thought Alice, `as all the arches are gone from this side of the ground.' So she tucked it away under her arm, that it might not escape again, and went back for a little more conversation with her friend.
+
+When she got back to the Cheshire Cat, she was surprised to find quite a large crowd collected round it: there was a dispute going on between the executioner, the King, and the Queen, who were all talking at once, while all the rest were quite silent, and looked very uncomfortable.
+
+The moment Alice appeared, she was appealed to by all three to settle the question, and they repeated their arguments to her, though, as they all spoke at once, she found it very hard indeed to make out exactly what they said.
+
+The executioner's argument was, that you couldn't cut off a head unless there was a body to cut it off from: that he had never had to do such a thing before, and he wasn't going to begin at HIS time of life.
+
+The King's argument was, that anything that had a head could be beheaded, and that you weren't to talk nonsense.
+
+The Queen's argument was, that if something wasn't done about it in less than no time she'd have everybody executed, all round. (It was this last remark that had made the whole party look so grave and anxious.)
+
+Alice could think of nothing else to say but `It belongs to the Duchess: you'd better ask HER about it.'
+
+`She's in prison,' the Queen said to the executioner: `fetch her here.' And the executioner went off like an arrow.
+
+The Cat's head began fading away the moment he was gone, and, by the time he had come back with the Duchess, it had entirely disappeared; so the King and the executioner ran wildly up and down looking for it, while the rest of the party went back to the game.
+
+CHAPTER IX - The Mock Turtle's Story
+
+`You can't think how glad I am to see you again, you dear old thing!' said the Duchess, as she tucked her arm affectionately into Alice's, and they walked off together.
+
+Alice was very glad to find her in such a pleasant temper, and thought to herself that perhaps it was only the pepper that had made her so savage when they met in the kitchen.
+
+`When I'M a Duchess,' she said to herself, (not in a very hopeful tone though), `I won't have any pepper in my kitchen AT ALL. Soup does very well without--Maybe it's always pepper that makes people hot-tempered,' she went on, very much pleased at having found out a new kind of rule, `and vinegar that makes them sour--and camomile that makes them bitter--and--and barley-sugar and such things that make children sweet-tempered. I only wish people knew that: then they wouldn't be so stingy about it, you know--'
+
+She had quite forgotten the Duchess by this time, and was a little startled when she heard her voice close to her ear. `You're thinking about something, my dear, and that makes you forget to talk. I can't tell you just now what the moral of that is, but I shall remember it in a bit.'
+
+`Perhaps it hasn't one,' Alice ventured to remark.
+
+`Tut, tut, child!' said the Duchess. `Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it.' And she squeezed herself up closer to Alice's side as she spoke.
+
+Alice did not much like keeping so close to her: first, because the Duchess was VERY ugly; and secondly, because she was exactly the right height to rest her chin upon Alice's shoulder, and it was an uncomfortably sharp chin. However, she did not like to be rude, so she bore it as well as she could.
+
+`The game's going on rather better now,' she said, by way of keeping up the conversation a little.
+
+`'Tis so,' said the Duchess: `and the moral of that is--"Oh, 'tis love, 'tis love, that makes the world go round!"'
+
+`Somebody said,' Alice whispered, `that it's done by everybody minding their own business!'
+
+`Ah, well! It means much the same thing,' said the Duchess, digging her sharp little chin into Alice's shoulder as she added, `and the moral of THAT is--"Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves."'
+
+`How fond she is of finding morals in things!' Alice thought to herself.
+
+`I dare say you're wondering why I don't put my arm round your waist,' the Duchess said after a pause: `the reason is, that I'm doubtful about the temper of your flamingo. Shall I try the experiment?'
+
+`HE might bite,' Alice cautiously replied, not feeling at all anxious to have the experiment tried.
+
+`Very true,' said the Duchess: `flamingoes and mustard both bite. And the moral of that is--"Birds of a feather flock together."'
+
+`Only mustard isn't a bird,' Alice remarked.
+
+`Right, as usual,' said the Duchess: `what a clear way you have of putting things!'
+
+`It's a mineral, I THINK,' said Alice.
+
+`Of course it is,' said the Duchess, who seemed ready to agree to everything that Alice said; `there's a large mustard-mine near here. And the moral of that is--"The more there is of mine, the less there is of yours."'
+
+`Oh, I know!' exclaimed Alice, who had not attended to this last remark, `it's a vegetable. It doesn't look like one, but it is.'
+
+`I quite agree with you,' said the Duchess; `and the moral of that is--"Be what you would seem to be"--or if you'd like it put more simply--"Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise."'
+
+`I think I should understand that better,' Alice said very politely, `if I had it written down: but I can't quite follow it as you say it.'
+
+`That's nothing to what I could say if I chose,' the Duchess replied, in a pleased tone.
+
+`Pray don't trouble yourself to say it any longer than that,' said Alice.
+
+`Oh, don't talk about trouble!' said the Duchess. `I make you a present of everything I've said as yet.'
+
+`A cheap sort of present!' thought Alice. `I'm glad they don't give birthday presents like that!' But she did not venture to say it out loud.
+
+`Thinking again?' the Duchess asked, with another dig of her sharp little chin.
+
+`I've a right to think,' said Alice sharply, for she was beginning to feel a little worried.
+
+`Just about as much right,' said the Duchess, `as pigs have to fly; and the m--'
+
+But here, to Alice's great surprise, the Duchess's voice died away, even in the middle of her favourite word `moral,' and the arm that was linked into hers began to tremble. Alice looked up, and there stood the Queen in front of them, with her arms folded, frowning like a thunderstorm.
+
+`A fine day, your Majesty!' the Duchess began in a low, weak voice.
+
+`Now, I give you fair warning,' shouted the Queen, stamping on the ground as she spoke; `either you or your head must be off, and that in about half no time! Take your choice!'
+
+The Duchess took her choice, and was gone in a moment.
+
+`Let's go on with the game,' the Queen said to Alice; and Alice was too much frightened to say a word, but slowly followed her back to the croquet-ground.
+
+The other guests had taken advantage of the Queen's absence, and were resting in the shade: however, the moment they saw her, they hurried back to the game, the Queen merely remarking that a moment's delay would cost them their lives.
+
+All the time they were playing the Queen never left off quarrelling with the other players, and shouting `Off with his head!' or `Off with her head!' Those whom she sentenced were taken into custody by the soldiers, who of course had to leave off being arches to do this, so that by the end of half an hour or so there were no arches left, and all the players, except the King, the Queen, and Alice, were in custody and under sentence of execution.
+
+Then the Queen left off, quite out of breath, and said to Alice, `Have you seen the Mock Turtle yet?'
+
+`No,' said Alice. `I don't even know what a Mock Turtle is.'
+
+`It's the thing Mock Turtle Soup is made from,' said the Queen.
+
+`I never saw one, or heard of one,' said Alice.
+
+`Come on, then,' said the Queen, `and he shall tell you his history,'
+
+As they walked off together, Alice heard the King say in a low voice, to the company generally, `You are all pardoned.' `Come, THAT'S a good thing!' she said to herself, for she had felt quite unhappy at the number of executions the Queen had ordered.
+
+They very soon came upon a Gryphon, lying fast asleep in the sun. (IF you don't know what a Gryphon is, look at the picture.) `Up, lazy thing!' said the Queen, `and take this young lady to see the Mock Turtle, and to hear his history. I must go back and see after some executions I have ordered'; and she walked off, leaving Alice alone with the Gryphon. Alice did not quite like the look of the creature, but on the whole she thought it would be quite as safe to stay with it as to go after that savage Queen: so she waited.
+
+The Gryphon sat up and rubbed its eyes: then it watched the Queen till she was out of sight: then it chuckled. `What fun!' said the Gryphon, half to itself, half to Alice.
+
+`What IS the fun?' said Alice.
+
+`Why, SHE,' said the Gryphon. `It's all her fancy, that: they never executes nobody, you know. Come on!'
+
+`Everybody says "come on!" here,' thought Alice, as she went slowly after it: `I never was so ordered about in all my life, never!'
+
+They had not gone far before they saw the Mock Turtle in the distance, sitting sad and lonely on a little ledge of rock, and, as they came nearer, Alice could hear him sighing as if his heart would break. She pitied him deeply. `What is his sorrow?' she asked the Gryphon, and the Gryphon answered, very nearly in the same words as before, `It's all his fancy, that: he hasn't got no sorrow, you know. Come on!'
+
+So they went up to the Mock Turtle, who looked at them with large eyes full of tears, but said nothing.
+
+`This here young lady,' said the Gryphon, `she wants for to know your history, she do.'
+
+`I'll tell it her,' said the Mock Turtle in a deep, hollow tone: `sit down, both of you, and don't speak a word till I've finished.'
+
+So they sat down, and nobody spoke for some minutes. Alice thought to herself, `I don't see how he can EVEN finish, if he doesn't begin.' But she waited patiently.
+
+`Once,' said the Mock Turtle at last, with a deep sigh, `I was a real Turtle.'
+
+These words were followed by a very long silence, broken only by an occasional exclamation of `Hjckrrh!' from the Gryphon, and the constant heavy sobbing of the Mock Turtle. Alice was very nearly getting up and saying, `Thank you, sir, for your interesting story,' but she could not help thinking there MUST be more to come, so she sat still and said nothing.
+
+`When we were little,' the Mock Turtle went on at last, more calmly, though still sobbing a little now and then, `we went to school in the sea. The master was an old Turtle--we used to call him Tortoise--'
+
+`Why did you call him Tortoise, if he wasn't one?' Alice asked.
+
+`We called him Tortoise because he taught us,' said the Mock Turtle angrily: `really you are very dull!'
+
+`You ought to be ashamed of yourself for asking such a simple question,' added the Gryphon; and then they both sat silent and looked at poor Alice, who felt ready to sink into the earth. At last the Gryphon said to the Mock Turtle, `Drive on, old fellow! Don't be all day about it!' and he went on in these words:
+
+`Yes, we went to school in the sea, though you mayn't believe it--'
+
+`I never said I didn't!' interrupted Alice.
+
+`You did,' said the Mock Turtle.
+
+`Hold your tongue!' added the Gryphon, before Alice could speak again. The Mock Turtle went on.
+
+`We had the best of educations--in fact, we went to school every day--'
+
+`I'VE been to a day-school, too,' said Alice; `you needn't be so proud as all that.'
+
+`With extras?' asked the Mock Turtle a little anxiously.
+
+`Yes,' said Alice, `we learned French and music.'
+
+`And washing?' said the Mock Turtle.
+
+`Certainly not!' said Alice indignantly.
+
+`Ah! then yours wasn't a really good school,' said the Mock Turtle in a tone of great relief. `Now at OURS they had at the end of the bill, "French, music, AND WASHING--extra."'
+
+`You couldn't have wanted it much,' said Alice; `living at the bottom of the sea.'
+
+`I couldn't afford to learn it.' said the Mock Turtle with a sigh. `I only took the regular course.'
+
+`What was that?' inquired Alice.
+
+`Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,' the Mock Turtle replied; `and then the different branches of Arithmetic-- Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.'
+
+`I never heard of "Uglification,"' Alice ventured to say. `What is it?'
+
+The Gryphon lifted up both its paws in surprise. `What! Never heard of uglifying!' it exclaimed. `You know what to beautify is, I suppose?'
+
+`Yes,' said Alice doubtfully: `it means--to--make--anything--prettier.'
+
+`Well, then,' the Gryphon went on, `if you don't know what to uglify is, you ARE a simpleton.'
+
+Alice did not feel encouraged to ask any more questions about it, so she turned to the Mock Turtle, and said `What else had you to learn?'
+
+`Well, there was Mystery,' the Mock Turtle replied, counting off the subjects on his flappers, `--Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography: then Drawling--the Drawling-master was an old conger-eel, that used to come once a week: HE taught us Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils.'
+
+`What was THAT like?' said Alice.
+
+`Well, I can't show it you myself,' the Mock Turtle said: `I'm too stiff. And the Gryphon never learnt it.'
+
+`Hadn't time,' said the Gryphon: `I went to the Classics master, though. He was an old crab, HE was.'
+
+`I never went to him,' the Mock Turtle said with a sigh: `he taught Laughing and Grief, they used to say.'
+
+`So he did, so he did,' said the Gryphon, sighing in his turn; and both creatures hid their faces in their paws.
+
+`And how many hours a day did you do lessons?' said Alice, in a hurry to change the subject.
+
+`Ten hours the first day,' said the Mock Turtle: `nine the next, and so on.'
+
+`What a curious plan!' exclaimed Alice.
+
+`That's the reason they're called lessons,' the Gryphon remarked: `because they lessen from day to day.'
+
+This was quite a new idea to Alice, and she thought it over a little before she made her next remark. `Then the eleventh day must have been a holiday?'
+
+`Of course it was,' said the Mock Turtle.
+
+`And how did you manage on the twelfth?' Alice went on eagerly.
+
+`That's enough about lessons,' the Gryphon interrupted in a very decided tone: `tell her something about the games now.'
+
+CHAPTER X - The Lobster Quadrille
+
+The Mock Turtle sighed deeply, and drew the back of one flapper across his eyes. He looked at Alice, and tried to speak, but for a minute or two sobs choked his voice. `Same as if he had a bone in his throat,' said the Gryphon: and it set to work shaking him and punching him in the back. At last the Mock Turtle recovered his voice, and, with tears running down his cheeks, he went on again:--
+
+`You may not have lived much under the sea--' (`I haven't,' said Alice)-- `and perhaps you were never even introduced to a lobster--' (Alice began to say `I once tasted--' but checked herself hastily, and said `No, never') `--so you can have no idea what a delightful thing a Lobster Quadrille is!'
+
+`No, indeed,' said Alice. `What sort of a dance is it?'
+
+`Why,' said the Gryphon, `you first form into a line along the sea-shore--'
+
+`Two lines!' cried the Mock Turtle. `Seals, turtles, salmon, and so on; then, when you've cleared all the jelly-fish out of the way--'
+
+`THAT generally takes some time,' interrupted the Gryphon.
+
+`--you advance twice--'
+
+`Each with a lobster as a partner!' cried the Gryphon.
+
+`Of course,' the Mock Turtle said: `advance twice, set to partners--'
+
+`--change lobsters, and retire in same order,' continued the Gryphon.
+
+`Then, you know,' the Mock Turtle went on, `you throw the--'
+
+`The lobsters!' shouted the Gryphon, with a bound into the air.
+
+`--as far out to sea as you can--'
+
+`Swim after them!' screamed the Gryphon.
+
+`Turn a somersault in the sea!' cried the Mock Turtle, capering wildly about.
+
+`Change lobsters again!' yelled the Gryphon at the top of its voice.
+
+`Back to land again, and that's all the first figure,' said the Mock Turtle, suddenly dropping his voice; and the two creatures, who had been jumping about like mad things all this time, sat down again very sadly and quietly, and looked at Alice.
+
+`It must be a very pretty dance,' said Alice timidly.
+
+`Would you like to see a little of it?' said the Mock Turtle.
+
+`Very much indeed,' said Alice.
+
+`Come, let's try the first figure!' said the Mock Turtle to the Gryphon. `We can do without lobsters, you know. Which shall sing?'
+
+`Oh, YOU sing,' said the Gryphon. `I've forgotten the words.'
+
+So they began solemnly dancing round and round Alice, every now and then treading on her toes when they passed too close, and waving their forepaws to mark the time, while the Mock Turtle sang this, very slowly and sadly:--
+
+poem{
+
+`"Will you walk a little faster?" said a whiting to a snail.
+"There's a porpoise close behind us, and he's treading on my
+ tail.
+See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance!
+They are waiting on the shingle--will you come and join the
+dance?
+
+Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the
+dance?
+Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, won't you join the
+dance?
+
+"You can really have no notion how delightful it will be
+When they take us up and throw us, with the lobsters, out to
+                                                      sea!"
+But the snail replied "Too far, too far!" and gave a look
+                                                       askance--
+Said he thanked the whiting kindly, but he would not join the
+   dance.
+    Would not, could not, would not, could not, would not join
+        the dance.
+    Would not, could not, would not, could not, could not join
+        the dance.
+
+`"What matters it how far we go?" his scaly friend replied.
+"There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.
+The further off from England the nearer is to France--
+Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance.
+
+    Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the
+         dance?
+    Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, won't you join the
+         dance?"'
+
+}poem
+
+`Thank you, it's a very interesting dance to watch,' said Alice, feeling very glad that it was over at last: `and I do so like that curious song about the whiting!'
+
+`Oh, as to the whiting,' said the Mock Turtle, `they--you've seen them, of course?'
+
+`Yes,' said Alice, `I've often seen them at dinn--' she checked herself hastily.
+
+`I don't know where Dinn may be,' said the Mock Turtle, `but if you've seen them so often, of course you know what they're like.'
+
+`I believe so,' Alice replied thoughtfully. `They have their tails in their mouths--and they're all over crumbs.'
+
+`You're wrong about the crumbs,' said the Mock Turtle: `crumbs would all wash off in the sea. But they HAVE their tails in their mouths; and the reason is--' here the Mock Turtle yawned and shut his eyes.--`Tell her about the reason and all that,' he said to the Gryphon.
+
+`The reason is,' said the Gryphon, `that they WOULD go with the lobsters to the dance. So they got thrown out to sea. So they had to fall a long way. So they got their tails fast in their mouths. So they couldn't get them out again. That's all.'
+
+`Thank you,' said Alice, `it's very interesting. I never knew so much about a whiting before.'
+
+`I can tell you more than that, if you like,' said the Gryphon. `Do you know why it's called a whiting?'
+
+`I never thought about it,' said Alice. `Why?'
+
+`IT DOES THE BOOTS AND SHOES.' the Gryphon replied very solemnly.
+
+Alice was thoroughly puzzled. `Does the boots and shoes!' she repeated in a wondering tone.
+
+`Why, what are YOUR shoes done with?' said the Gryphon. `I mean, what makes them so shiny?'
+
+Alice looked down at them, and considered a little before she gave her answer. `They're done with blacking, I believe.'
+
+`Boots and shoes under the sea,' the Gryphon went on in a deep voice, `are done with a whiting. Now you know.'
+
+`And what are they made of?' Alice asked in a tone of great curiosity.
+
+`Soles and eels, of course,' the Gryphon replied rather impatiently: `any shrimp could have told you that.'
+
+`If I'd been the whiting,' said Alice, whose thoughts were still running on the song, `I'd have said to the porpoise, "Keep back, please: we don't want YOU with us!"'
+
+`They were obliged to have him with them,' the Mock Turtle said: `no wise fish would go anywhere without a porpoise.'
+
+`Wouldn't it really?' said Alice in a tone of great surprise.
+
+`Of course not,' said the Mock Turtle: `why, if a fish came to ME, and told me he was going a journey, I should say "With what porpoise?"'
+
+`Don't you mean "purpose"?' said Alice.
+
+`I mean what I say,' the Mock Turtle replied in an offended tone. And the Gryphon added `Come, let's hear some of YOUR adventures.'
+
+`I could tell you my adventures--beginning from this morning,' said Alice a little timidly: `but it's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.'
+
+`Explain all that,' said the Mock Turtle.
+
+`No, no! The adventures first,' said the Gryphon in an impatient tone: `explanations take such a dreadful time.'
+
+So Alice began telling them her adventures from the time when she first saw the White Rabbit. She was a little nervous about it just at first, the two creatures got so close to her, one on each side, and opened their eyes and mouths so VERY wide, but she gained courage as she went on. Her listeners were perfectly quiet till she got to the part about her repeating `YOU ARE OLD, FATHER WILLIAM,' to the Caterpillar, and the words all coming different, and then the Mock Turtle drew a long breath, and said `That's very curious.'
+
+`It's all about as curious as it can be,' said the Gryphon.
+
+`It all came different!' the Mock Turtle repeated thoughtfully. `I should like to hear her try and repeat something now. Tell her to begin.' He looked at the Gryphon as if he thought it had some kind of authority over Alice.
+
+`Stand up and repeat "'TIS THE VOICE OF THE SLUGGARD,"' said the Gryphon.
+
+`How the creatures order one about, and make one repeat lessons!' thought Alice; `I might as well be at school at once.' However, she got up, and began to repeat it, but her head was so full of the Lobster Quadrille, that she hardly knew what she was saying, and the words came very queer indeed:--
+
+poem{
+
+    `'Tis the voice of the Lobster; I heard him declare,
+    "You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair."
+    As a duck with its eyelids, so he with his nose
+    Trims his belt and his buttons, and turns out his toes.'
+
+              [later editions continued as follows
+    When the sands are all dry, he is gay as a lark,
+    And will talk in contemptuous tones of the Shark,
+    But, when the tide rises and sharks are around,
+    His voice has a timid and tremulous sound.]
+
+}poem
+
+`That's different from what I used to say when I was a child,' said the Gryphon.
+
+`Well, I never heard it before,' said the Mock Turtle; `but it sounds uncommon nonsense.'
+
+Alice said nothing; she had sat down with her face in her hands, wondering if anything would EVER happen in a natural way again.
+
+`I should like to have it explained,' said the Mock Turtle.
+
+`She can't explain it,' said the Gryphon hastily. `Go on with the next verse.'
+
+`But about his toes?' the Mock Turtle persisted. `How COULD he turn them out with his nose, you know?'
+
+`It's the first position in dancing.' Alice said; but was dreadfully puzzled by the whole thing, and longed to change the subject.
+
+`Go on with the next verse,' the Gryphon repeated impatiently: `it begins "I passed by his garden."'
+
+Alice did not dare to disobey, though she felt sure it would all come wrong, and she went on in a trembling voice:--
+
+poem{
+
+    `I passed by his garden, and marked, with one eye,
+    How the Owl and the Panther were sharing a pie--'
+
+        [later editions continued as follows
+    The Panther took pie-crust, and gravy, and meat,
+    While the Owl had the dish as its share of the treat.
+    When the pie was all finished, the Owl, as a boon,
+    Was kindly permitted to pocket the spoon:
+    While the Panther received knife and fork with a growl,
+    And concluded the banquet--]
+
+}poem
+
+`What IS the use of repeating all that stuff,' the Mock Turtle interrupted, `if you don't explain it as you go on? It's by far the most confusing thing I ever heard!'
+
+`Yes, I think you'd better leave off,' said the Gryphon: and Alice was only too glad to do so.
+
+`Shall we try another figure of the Lobster Quadrille?' the Gryphon went on. `Or would you like the Mock Turtle to sing you a song?'
+
+`Oh, a song, please, if the Mock Turtle would be so kind,' Alice replied, so eagerly that the Gryphon said, in a rather offended tone, `Hm! No accounting for tastes! Sing her "Turtle Soup," will you, old fellow?'
+
+The Mock Turtle sighed deeply, and began, in a voice sometimes choked with sobs, to sing this:--
+
+poem{
+
+    `Beautiful Soup, so rich and green,
+    Waiting in a hot tureen!
+    Who for such dainties would not stoop?
+    Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!
+    Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!
+        Beau--ootiful Soo--oop!
+        Beau--ootiful Soo--oop!
+    Soo--oop of the e--e--evening,
+        Beautiful, beautiful Soup!
+
+    `Beautiful Soup!  Who cares for fish,
+    Game, or any other dish?
+    Who would not give all else for two
+    Pennyworth only of beautiful Soup?
+    Pennyworth only of beautiful Soup?
+        Beau--ootiful Soo--oop!
+        Beau--ootiful Soo--oop!
+    Soo--oop of the e--e--evening,
+        Beautiful, beauti--FUL SOUP!'
+
+}poem
+
+`Chorus again!' cried the Gryphon, and the Mock Turtle had just begun to repeat it, when a cry of `The trial's beginning!' was heard in the distance.
+
+`Come on!' cried the Gryphon, and, taking Alice by the hand, it hurried off, without waiting for the end of the song.
+
+`What trial is it?' Alice panted as she ran; but the Gryphon only answered `Come on!' and ran the faster, while more and more faintly came, carried on the breeze that followed them, the melancholy words:--
+
+poem{
+
+    `Soo--oop of the e--e--evening,
+        Beautiful, beautiful Soup!'
+
+}poem
+
+CHAPTER XI - Who Stole the Tarts?
+
+The King and Queen of Hearts were seated on their throne when they arrived, with a great crowd assembled about them--all sorts of little birds and beasts, as well as the whole pack of cards: the Knave was standing before them, in chains, with a soldier on each side to guard him; and near the King was the White Rabbit, with a trumpet in one hand, and a scroll of parchment in the other. In the very middle of the court was a table, with a large dish of tarts upon it: they looked so good, that it made Alice quite hungry to look at them--`I wish they'd get the trial done,' she thought, `and hand round the refreshments!' But there seemed to be no chance of this, so she began looking at everything about her, to pass away the time.
+
+Alice had never been in a court of justice before, but she had read about them in books, and she was quite pleased to find that she knew the name of nearly everything there. `That's the judge,' she said to herself, `because of his great wig.'
+
+The judge, by the way, was the King; and as he wore his crown over the wig, (look at the frontispiece if you want to see how he did it,) he did not look at all comfortable, and it was certainly not becoming.
+
+`And that's the jury-box,' thought Alice, `and those twelve creatures,' (she was obliged to say `creatures,' you see, because some of them were animals, and some were birds,) `I suppose they are the jurors.' She said this last word two or three times over to herself, being rather proud of it: for she thought, and rightly too, that very few little girls of her age knew the meaning of it at all. However, `jury-men' would have done just as well.
+
+The twelve jurors were all writing very busily on slates. `What are they doing?' Alice whispered to the Gryphon. `They can't have anything to put down yet, before the trial's begun.'
+
+`They're putting down their names,' the Gryphon whispered in reply, `for fear they should forget them before the end of the trial.'
+
+`Stupid things!' Alice began in a loud, indignant voice, but she stopped hastily, for the White Rabbit cried out, `Silence in the court!' and the King put on his spectacles and looked anxiously round, to make out who was talking.
+
+Alice could see, as well as if she were looking over their shoulders, that all the jurors were writing down `stupid things!' on their slates, and she could even make out that one of them didn't know how to spell `stupid,' and that he had to ask his neighbour to tell him. `A nice muddle their slates'll be in before the trial's over!' thought Alice.
+
+One of the jurors had a pencil that squeaked. This of course, Alice could not stand, and she went round the court and got behind him, and very soon found an opportunity of taking it away. She did it so quickly that the poor little juror (it was Bill, the Lizard) could not make out at all what had become of it; so, after hunting all about for it, he was obliged to write with one finger for the rest of the day; and this was of very little use, as it left no mark on the slate.
+
+`Herald, read the accusation!' said the King.
+
+On this the White Rabbit blew three blasts on the trumpet, and then unrolled the parchment scroll, and read as follows:--
+
+poem{
+
+    `The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts,
+          All on a summer day:
+      The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts,
+          And took them quite away!'
+
+}poem
+
+`Consider your verdict,' the King said to the jury.
+
+`Not yet, not yet!' the Rabbit hastily interrupted. `There's a great deal to come before that!'
+
+`Call the first witness,' said the King; and the White Rabbit blew three blasts on the trumpet, and called out, `First witness!'
+
+The first witness was the Hatter. He came in with a teacup in one hand and a piece of bread-and-butter in the other. `I beg pardon, your Majesty,' he began, `for bringing these in: but I hadn't quite finished my tea when I was sent for.'
+
+`You ought to have finished,' said the King. `When did you begin?'
+
+The Hatter looked at the March Hare, who had followed him into the court, arm-in-arm with the Dormouse. `Fourteenth of March, I think it was,' he said.
+
+`Fifteenth,' said the March Hare.
+
+`Sixteenth,' added the Dormouse.
+
+`Write that down,' the King said to the jury, and the jury eagerly wrote down all three dates on their slates, and then added them up, and reduced the answer to shillings and pence.
+
+`Take off your hat,' the King said to the Hatter.
+
+`It isn't mine,' said the Hatter.
+
+`Stolen!' the King exclaimed, turning to the jury, who instantly made a memorandum of the fact.
+
+`I keep them to sell,' the Hatter added as an explanation; `I've none of my own. I'm a hatter.'
+
+Here the Queen put on her spectacles, and began staring at the Hatter, who turned pale and fidgeted.
+
+`Give your evidence,' said the King; `and don't be nervous, or I'll have you executed on the spot.'
+
+This did not seem to encourage the witness at all: he kept shifting from one foot to the other, looking uneasily at the Queen, and in his confusion he bit a large piece out of his teacup instead of the bread-and-butter.
+
+Just at this moment Alice felt a very curious sensation, which puzzled her a good deal until she made out what it was: she was beginning to grow larger again, and she thought at first she would get up and leave the court; but on second thoughts she decided to remain where she was as long as there was room for her.
+
+`I wish you wouldn't squeeze so.' said the Dormouse, who was sitting next to her. `I can hardly breathe.'
+
+`I can't help it,' said Alice very meekly: `I'm growing.'
+
+`You've no right to grow here,' said the Dormouse.
+
+`Don't talk nonsense,' said Alice more boldly: `you know you're growing too.'
+
+`Yes, but I grow at a reasonable pace,' said the Dormouse: `not in that ridiculous fashion.' And he got up very sulkily and crossed over to the other side of the court.
+
+All this time the Queen had never left off staring at the Hatter, and, just as the Dormouse crossed the court, she said to one of the officers of the court, `Bring me the list of the singers in the last concert!' on which the wretched Hatter trembled so, that he shook both his shoes off.
+
+`Give your evidence,' the King repeated angrily, `or I'll have you executed, whether you're nervous or not.'
+
+`I'm a poor man, your Majesty,' the Hatter began, in a trembling voice, `--and I hadn't begun my tea--not above a week or so--and what with the bread-and-butter getting so thin--and the twinkling of the tea--'
+
+`The twinkling of the what?' said the King.
+
+`It began with the tea,' the Hatter replied.
+
+`Of course twinkling begins with a T!' said the King sharply. `Do you take me for a dunce? Go on!'
+
+`I'm a poor man,' the Hatter went on, `and most things twinkled after that--only the March Hare said--'
+
+`I didn't!' the March Hare interrupted in a great hurry.
+
+`You did!' said the Hatter.
+
+`I deny it!' said the March Hare.
+
+`He denies it,' said the King: `leave out that part.'
+
+`Well, at any rate, the Dormouse said--' the Hatter went on, looking anxiously round to see if he would deny it too: but the Dormouse denied nothing, being fast asleep.
+
+`After that,' continued the Hatter, `I cut some more bread- and-butter--'
+
+`But what did the Dormouse say?' one of the jury asked.
+
+`That I can't remember,' said the Hatter.
+
+`You MUST remember,' remarked the King, `or I'll have you executed.'
+
+The miserable Hatter dropped his teacup and bread-and-butter, and went down on one knee. `I'm a poor man, your Majesty,' he began.
+
+`You're a very poor speaker,' said the King.
+
+Here one of the guinea-pigs cheered, and was immediately suppressed by the officers of the court. (As that is rather a hard word, I will just explain to you how it was done. They had a large canvas bag, which tied up at the mouth with strings: into this they slipped the guinea-pig, head first, and then sat upon it.)
+
+`I'm glad I've seen that done,' thought Alice. `I've so often read in the newspapers, at the end of trials, "There was some attempts at applause, which was immediately suppressed by the officers of the court," and I never understood what it meant till now.'
+
+`If that's all you know about it, you may stand down,' continued the King.
+
+`I can't go no lower,' said the Hatter: `I'm on the floor, as it is.'
+
+`Then you may SIT down,' the King replied.
+
+Here the other guinea-pig cheered, and was suppressed.
+
+`Come, that finished the guinea-pigs!' thought Alice. `Now we shall get on better.'
+
+`I'd rather finish my tea,' said the Hatter, with an anxious look at the Queen, who was reading the list of singers.
+
+`You may go,' said the King, and the Hatter hurriedly left the court, without even waiting to put his shoes on.
+
+`--and just take his head off outside,' the Queen added to one of the officers: but the Hatter was out of sight before the officer could get to the door.
+
+`Call the next witness!' said the King.
+
+The next witness was the Duchess's cook. She carried the pepper-box in her hand, and Alice guessed who it was, even before she got into the court, by the way the people near the door began sneezing all at once.
+
+`Give your evidence,' said the King.
+
+`Shan't,' said the cook.
+
+The King looked anxiously at the White Rabbit, who said in a low voice, `Your Majesty must cross-examine THIS witness.'
+
+`Well, if I must, I must,' the King said, with a melancholy air, and, after folding his arms and frowning at the cook till his eyes were nearly out of sight, he said in a deep voice, `What are tarts made of?'
+
+`Pepper, mostly,' said the cook.
+
+`Treacle,' said a sleepy voice behind her.
+
+`Collar that Dormouse,' the Queen shrieked out. `Behead that Dormouse! Turn that Dormouse out of court! Suppress him! Pinch him! Off with his whiskers!'
+
+For some minutes the whole court was in confusion, getting the Dormouse turned out, and, by the time they had settled down again, the cook had disappeared.
+
+`Never mind!' said the King, with an air of great relief. `Call the next witness.' And he added in an undertone to the Queen, `Really, my dear, YOU must cross-examine the next witness. It quite makes my forehead ache!'
+
+Alice watched the White Rabbit as he fumbled over the list, feeling very curious to see what the next witness would be like, `--for they haven't got much evidence YET,' she said to herself. Imagine her surprise, when the White Rabbit read out, at the top of his shrill little voice, the name `Alice!'
+
+CHAPTER XII - Alice's Evidence
+
+`Here!' cried Alice, quite forgetting in the flurry of the moment how large she had grown in the last few minutes, and she jumped up in such a hurry that she tipped over the jury-box with the edge of her skirt, upsetting all the jurymen on to the heads of the crowd below, and there they lay sprawling about, reminding her very much of a globe of goldfish she had accidentally upset the week before.
+
+`Oh, I BEG your pardon!' she exclaimed in a tone of great dismay, and began picking them up again as quickly as she could, for the accident of the goldfish kept running in her head, and she had a vague sort of idea that they must be collected at once and put back into the jury-box, or they would die.
+
+`The trial cannot proceed,' said the King in a very grave voice, `until all the jurymen are back in their proper places-- ALL,' he repeated with great emphasis, looking hard at Alice as he said do.
+
+Alice looked at the jury-box, and saw that, in her haste, she had put the Lizard in head downwards, and the poor little thing was waving its tail about in a melancholy way, being quite unable to move. She soon got it out again, and put it right; `not that it signifies much,' she said to herself; `I should think it would be QUITE as much use in the trial one way up as the other.'
+
+As soon as the jury had a little recovered from the shock of being upset, and their slates and pencils had been found and handed back to them, they set to work very diligently to write out a history of the accident, all except the Lizard, who seemed too much overcome to do anything but sit with its mouth open, gazing up into the roof of the court.
+
+`What do you know about this business?' the King said to Alice.
+
+`Nothing,' said Alice.
+
+`Nothing WHATEVER?' persisted the King.
+
+`Nothing whatever,' said Alice.
+
+`That's very important,' the King said, turning to the jury. They were just beginning to write this down on their slates, when the White Rabbit interrupted: `UNimportant, your Majesty means, of course,' he said in a very respectful tone, but frowning and making faces at him as he spoke.
+
+`UNimportant, of course, I meant,' the King hastily said, and went on to himself in an undertone, `important--unimportant-- unimportant--important--' as if he were trying which word sounded best.
+
+Some of the jury wrote it down `important,' and some `unimportant.' Alice could see this, as she was near enough to look over their slates; `but it doesn't matter a bit,' she thought to herself.
+
+At this moment the King, who had been for some time busily writing in his note-book, cackled out `Silence!' and read out from his book, `Rule Forty-two. ALL PERSONS MORE THAN A MILE HIGH TO LEAVE THE COURT.'
+
+Everybody looked at Alice.
+
+`I'M not a mile high,' said Alice.
+
+`You are,' said the King.
+
+`Nearly two miles high,' added the Queen.
+
+`Well, I shan't go, at any rate,' said Alice: `besides, that's not a regular rule: you invented it just now.'
+
+`It's the oldest rule in the book,' said the King.
+
+`Then it ought to be Number One,' said Alice.
+
+The King turned pale, and shut his note-book hastily. `Consider your verdict,' he said to the jury, in a low, trembling voice.
+
+`There's more evidence to come yet, please your Majesty,' said the White Rabbit, jumping up in a great hurry; `this paper has just been picked up.'
+
+`What's in it?' said the Queen.
+
+`I haven't opened it yet,' said the White Rabbit, `but it seems to be a letter, written by the prisoner to--to somebody.'
+
+`It must have been that,' said the King, `unless it was written to nobody, which isn't usual, you know.'
+
+`Who is it directed to?' said one of the jurymen.
+
+`It isn't directed at all,' said the White Rabbit; `in fact, there's nothing written on the OUTSIDE.' He unfolded the paper as he spoke, and added `It isn't a letter, after all: it's a set of verses.'
+
+`Are they in the prisoner's handwriting?' asked another of the jurymen.
+
+`No, they're not,' said the White Rabbit, `and that's the queerest thing about it.' (The jury all looked puzzled.)
+
+`He must have imitated somebody else's hand,' said the King. (The jury all brightened up again.)
+
+`Please your Majesty,' said the Knave, `I didn't write it, and they can't prove I did: there's no name signed at the end.'
+
+`If you didn't sign it,' said the King, `that only makes the matter worse. You MUST have meant some mischief, or else you'd have signed your name like an honest man.'
+
+There was a general clapping of hands at this: it was the first really clever thing the King had said that day.
+
+`That PROVES his guilt,' said the Queen.
+
+`It proves nothing of the sort!' said Alice. `Why, you don't even know what they're about!'
+
+`Read them,' said the King.
+
+The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. `Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?' he asked.
+
+`Begin at the beginning,' the King said gravely, `and go on till you come to the end: then stop.'
+
+These were the verses the White Rabbit read:--
+
+poem{
+
+        `They told me you had been to her,
+          And mentioned me to him:
+        She gave me a good character,
+          But said I could not swim.
+
+        He sent them word I had not gone
+          (We know it to be true):
+        If she should push the matter on,
+          What would become of you?
+
+        I gave her one, they gave him two,
+          You gave us three or more;
+        They all returned from him to you,
+          Though they were mine before.
+
+        If I or she should chance to be
+          Involved in this affair,
+        He trusts to you to set them free,
+          Exactly as we were.
+
+        My notion was that you had been
+          (Before she had this fit)
+        An obstacle that came between
+          Him, and ourselves, and it.
+
+        Don't let him know she liked them best,
+          For this must ever be
+        A secret, kept from all the rest,
+          Between yourself and me.'
+
+}poem
+
+`That's the most important piece of evidence we've heard yet,' said the King, rubbing his hands; `so now let the jury--'
+
+`If any one of them can explain it,' said Alice, (she had grown so large in the last few minutes that she wasn't a bit afraid of interrupting him,) `I'll give him sixpence. _{I}_ don't believe there's an atom of meaning in it.'
+
+The jury all wrote down on their slates, `SHE doesn't believe there's an atom of meaning in it,' but none of them attempted to explain the paper.
+
+`If there's no meaning in it,' said the King, `that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn't try to find any. And yet I don't know,' he went on, spreading out the verses on his knee, and looking at them with one eye; `I seem to see some meaning in them, after all. "--SAID I COULD NOT SWIM--" you can't swim, can you?' he added, turning to the Knave.
+
+The Knave shook his head sadly. `Do I look like it?' he said. (Which he certainly did NOT, being made entirely of cardboard.)
+
+`All right, so far,' said the King, and he went on muttering over the verses to himself: `"WE KNOW IT TO BE TRUE--" that's the jury, of course-- "I GAVE HER ONE, THEY GAVE HIM TWO--" why, that must be what he did with the tarts, you know--'
+
+`But, it goes on "THEY ALL RETURNED FROM HIM TO YOU,"' said Alice.
+
+`Why, there they are!' said the King triumphantly, pointing to the tarts on the table. `Nothing can be clearer than THAT. Then again--"BEFORE SHE HAD THIS FIT--" you never had fits, my dear, I think?' he said to the Queen.
+
+`Never!' said the Queen furiously, throwing an inkstand at the Lizard as she spoke. (The unfortunate little Bill had left off writing on his slate with one finger, as he found it made no mark; but he now hastily began again, using the ink, that was trickling down his face, as long as it lasted.)
+
+`Then the words don't FIT you,' said the King, looking round the court with a smile. There was a dead silence.
+
+`It's a pun!' the King added in an offended tone, and everybody laughed, `Let the jury consider their verdict,' the King said, for about the twentieth time that day.
+
+`No, no!' said the Queen. `Sentence first--verdict afterwards.'
+
+`Stuff and nonsense!' said Alice loudly. `The idea of having the sentence first!'
+
+`Hold your tongue!' said the Queen, turning purple.
+
+`I won't!' said Alice.
+
+`Off with her head!' the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved.
+
+`Who cares for you?' said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time.) `You're nothing but a pack of cards!'
+
+At this the whole pack rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her: she gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and tried to beat them off, and found herself lying on the bank, with her head in the lap of her sister, who was gently brushing away some dead leaves that had fluttered down from the trees upon her face.
+
+`Wake up, Alice dear!' said her sister; `Why, what a long sleep you've had!'
+
+`Oh, I've had such a curious dream!' said Alice, and she told her sister, as well as she could remember them, all these strange Adventures of hers that you have just been reading about; and when she had finished, her sister kissed her, and said, `It WAS a curious dream, dear, certainly: but now run in to your tea; it's getting late.' So Alice got up and ran off, thinking while she ran, as well she might, what a wonderful dream it had been.
+
+But her sister sat still just as she left her, leaning her head on her hand, watching the setting sun, and thinking of little Alice and all her wonderful Adventures, till she too began dreaming after a fashion, and this was her dream:--
+
+First, she dreamed of little Alice herself, and once again the tiny hands were clasped upon her knee, and the bright eager eyes were looking up into hers--she could hear the very tones of her voice, and see that queer little toss of her head to keep back the wandering hair that WOULD always get into her eyes--and still as she listened, or seemed to listen, the whole place around her became alive the strange creatures of her little sister's dream.
+
+The long grass rustled at her feet as the White Rabbit hurried by--the frightened Mouse splashed his way through the neighbouring pool--she could hear the rattle of the teacups as the March Hare and his friends shared their never-ending meal, and the shrill voice of the Queen ordering off her unfortunate guests to execution--once more the pig-baby was sneezing on the Duchess's knee, while plates and dishes crashed around it--once more the shriek of the Gryphon, the squeaking of the Lizard's slate-pencil, and the choking of the suppressed guinea-pigs, filled the air, mixed up with the distant sobs of the miserable Mock Turtle.
+
+So she sat on, with closed eyes, and half believed herself in Wonderland, though she knew she had but to open them again, and all would change to dull reality--the grass would be only rustling in the wind, and the pool rippling to the waving of the reeds--the rattling teacups would change to tinkling sheep-bells, and the Queen's shrill cries to the voice of the shepherd boy--and the sneeze of the baby, the shriek of the Gryphon, and all the other queer noises, would change (she knew) to the confused clamour of the busy farm-yard--while the lowing of the cattle in the distance would take the place of the Mock Turtle's heavy sobs.
+
+Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood: and how she would gather about her other little children, and make THEIR eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago: and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days.
+
+THE END
diff --git a/data/samples/generic/autonomy_markup0.sst b/data/samples/generic/autonomy_markup0.sst
new file mode 100644
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--- /dev/null
+++ b/data/samples/generic/autonomy_markup0.sst
@@ -0,0 +1,193 @@
+% SiSU 2.0
+
+@title: Revisiting the Autonomous Contract
+ :subtitle: Transnational contract law, trends and supportive structures
+
+@creator:
+ :author: Amissah, Ralph
+
+@date:
+ :published: 2000-08-27
+
+@rights:
+ :copyright: Copyright (C) Ralph Amissah
+
+@classify:
+ :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:article;law:international:commercial arbitration|uniform law|harmonization;private law;arbitration:international commercial
+ :subject: international contracts, international commercial arbitration, private international law
+
+@make:
+ :italics: /CISG|PICC|PECL|UNCITRAL|UNIDROIT|lex mercatoria|pacta sunt servanda|caveat subscriptor|ex aequo et bono|amiable compositeur|ad hoc/i
+ :num_top: 1
+% :omit: minitoc
+
+% (Draft 0.90 - 2000-08-27)
+
+:A~ @title @author~{* Ralph Amissah is a Fellow of Pace University, Institute for International Commercial Law. http://www.cisg.law.pace.edu/ \\ RA lectured on the private law aspects of international trade whilst at the Law Faculty of the University of Tromsø, Norway. http://www.jus.uit.no/ \\ RA built the first web site related to international trade law, now known as lexmercatoria.org and described as "an (international | transnational) commercial law and e-commerce infrastructure monitor". http://lexmercatoria.org/ \\ RA is interested in the law, technology, commerce nexus. RA works with the law firm Amissahs. \\ /{[This is a draft document and subject to change.]}/ \\ All errors are very much my own. \\ ralph@amissah.com }~
+
+1~ Reinforcing trends: borderless technologies, global economy, transnational legal solutions?
+
+Revisiting the Autonomous Contract~{ /{The Autonomous Contract: Reflecting the borderless electronic-commercial environment in contracting}/ was published in /{Elektronisk handel - rettslige aspekter, Nordisk årsbok i rettsinformatikk 1997}/ (Electronic Commerce - Legal Aspects. The Nordic yearbook for Legal Informatics 1997) Edited by Randi Punsvik, or at http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/the.autonomous.contract.07.10.1997.amissah/doc.html }~
+
+Globalisation is to be observed as a trend intrinsic to the world economy.~{ As Maria Cattaui Livanos suggests in /{The global economy - an opportunity to be seized}/ in /{Business World}/ the Electronic magazine of the International Chamber of Commerce (Paris, July 1997) at http://www.iccwbo.org/html/globalec.htm \\ "Globalization is unstoppable. Even though it may be only in its early stages, it is already intrinsic to the world economy. We have to live with it, recognize its advantages and learn to manage it. \\ That imperative applies to governments, who would be unwise to attempt to stem the tide for reasons of political expediency. It also goes for companies of all sizes, who must now compete on global markets and learn to adjust their strategies accordingly, seizing the opportunities that globalization offers."}~ Rudimentary economics explains this runaway process, as being driven by competition within the business community to achieve efficient production, and to reach and extend available markets.~{To remain successful, being in competition, the business community is compelled to take advantage of the opportunities provided by globalisation.}~ Technological advancement particularly in transport and communications has historically played a fundamental role in the furtherance of international commerce, with the Net, technology's latest spatio-temporally transforming offering, linchpin of the "new-economy", extending exponentially the global reach of the business community. The Net covers much of the essence of international commerce providing an instantaneous, low cost, convergent, global and borderless: information centre, marketplace and channel for communications, payments and the delivery of services and intellectual property. The sale of goods, however, involves the separate element of their physical delivery. The Net has raised a plethora of questions and has frequently offered solutions. The increased transparency of borders arising from the Net's ubiquitous nature results in an increased demand for the transparency of operation. As economic activities become increasingly global, to reduce transaction costs, there is a strong incentive for the "law" that provides for them, to do so in a similar dimension. The appeal of transnational legal solutions lies in the potential reduction in complexity, more widely dispersed expertise, and resulting increased transaction efficiency. The Net reflexively offers possibilities for the development of transnational legal solutions, having in a similar vein transformed the possibilities for the promulgation of texts, the sharing of ideas and collaborative ventures. There are however, likely to be tensions within the legal community protecting entrenched practices against that which is new, (both in law and technology) and the business community's goal to reduce transaction costs.
+
+Within commercial law an analysis of law and economics may assist in developing a better understanding of the relationship between commercial law and the commercial sector it serves.~{ Realists would contend that law is contextual and best understood by exploring the interrelationships between law and the other social sciences, such as sociology, psychology, political science, and economics.}~ "...[T]he importance of the interrelations between law and economics can be seen in the twin facts that legal change is often a function of economic ideas and conditions, which necessitate and/or generate demands for legal change, and that economic change is often governed by legal change."~{ Part of a section cited in Mercuro and Steven G. Medema, /{Economics and the Law: from Posner to Post-Modernism}/ (Princeton, 1997) p. 11, with reference to Karl N. Llewellyn The Effect of Legal Institutions upon Economics, American Economic Review 15 (December 1925) pp 655-683, Mark M. Litchman Economics, the Basis of Law, American Law Review 61 (May-June 1927) pp 357-387, and W. S. Holdsworth A Neglected Aspect of the Relations between Economic and Legal History, Economic History Review 1 (January 1927-1928) pp 114-123.}~ In doing so, however, it is important to be aware that there are several competing schools of law and economics, with different perspectives, levels of abstraction, and analytical consequences of and for the world that they model.~{ For a good introduction see Nicholas Mercuro and Steven G. Medema, /{Economics and the Law: from Posner to Post-Modernism}/ (Princeton, 1997). These include: Chicago law and economics (New law and economics); New Haven School of law and economics; Public Choice Theory; Institutional law and economics; Neoinstitutional law and economics; Critical Legal Studies.}~
+
+Where there is rapid interrelated structural change with resulting new features, rather than concentrate on traditionally established tectonic plates of a discipline, it is necessary to understand underlying currents and concepts at their intersections, (rather than expositions of history~{ Case overstated, but this is an essential point. It is not be helpful to be overly tied to the past. It is necessary to be able to look ahead and explore new solutions, and be aware of the implications of "complexity" (as to to the relevance of past circumstances to the present). }~), is the key to commencing meaningful discussions and developing solutions for the resulting issues.~{ The majority of which are beyond the scope of this paper. Examples include: encryption and privacy for commercial purposes; digital signatures; symbolic ownership; electronic intellectual property rights.}~ Interrelated developments are more meaningfully understood through interdisciplinary study, as this instance suggests, of the law, commerce/economics, and technology nexus. In advocating this approach, we should also pay heed to the realisation in the sciences, of the limits of reductionism in the study of complex systems, as such systems feature emergent properties that are not evident if broken down into their constituent parts. System complexity exceeds sub-system complexity; consequently, the relevant unit for understanding the systems function is the system, not its parts.~{ Complexity theory is a branch of mathematics and physics that examines non-linear systems in which simple sets of deterministic rules can lead to highly complicated results, which cannot be predicted accurately. A study of the subject is provided by Nicholas Rescher /{Complexity: A Philosophical Overview}/ (New Brunswick, 1998). See also Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, /{The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World}/ (1994). }~ Simplistic dogma should be abandoned for a contextual approach.
+
+1~ Common Property - advocating a common commercial highway
+
+Certain infrastructural underpinnings beneficial to the working of the market economy are not best provided by the business community, but by other actors including governments. In this paper mention is made for example of the /{United Nations Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards}/ (New York, 10 June 1958), which the business community regularly relies upon as the back-stop for their international agreements. Common property can have an enabling value, the Net, basis for the "new" economy, would not be what it is today without much that has been shared on this basis, having permitted /{"Metcalf's law"}/~{ Robert Metcalf, founder of 3Com. }~ to take hold. /{Metcalf's law}/ suggests that the value of a shared technology is exponential to its user base. In all likelihood it applies as much to transnational contract law, as to technological networks and standards. The more people who use a network or standard, the more "valuable" it becomes, and the more users it will attract. Key infrastructure should be identified and common property solutions where appropriate nurtured, keeping transaction costs to a minimum.
+
+The following general perspective is submitted as worthy of consideration (and support) by the legal, business and academic communities, and governments. *(a)* Abstract goals valuable to a transnational legal infrastructure include, certainty and predictability, flexibility, simplicity where possible, and neutrality, in the sense of being without perceived "unfairness" in the global context of their application. This covers the content of the "laws" themselves and the methods used for their interpretation. *(b)* Of law with regard to technology, "rules should be technology-neutral (i.e., the rules should neither require nor assume a particular technology) and forward looking (i.e., the rules should not hinder the use or development of technologies in the future)."~{ /{US Framework for Global Electronic Commerce}/ (1997) http://www.whitehouse.gov/WH/New/Commerce/ }~ *(c)* Desirable abstract goals in developing technological standards and critical technological infrastructure, include, choice, and that they should be shared and public or "open" as in "open source", and platform and/or program neutral, that is, interoperable. (On security, to forestall suggestions to the contrary, popular open source software tends to be as secure or more so than proprietary software). *(d)* Encryption is an essential part of the mature "new" economy but remains the subject of some governments' restriction.~{ The EU is lifting such restriction, and the US seems likely to follow suit. }~ The availability of (and possibility to develop common transnational standards for) strong encryption is essential for commercial security and trust with regard to all manner of Net communications and electronic commerce transactions, /{vis-à-vis}/ their confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation. That is, encryption is the basis for essential commerce related technologies, including amongst many others, electronic signatures, electronic payment systems and the development of electronic symbols of ownership (such as electronic bills of lading). *(e)* As regards the dissemination of primary materials concerning "uniform standards" in both the legal and technology domains, "the Net" should be used to make them globally available, free. Technology should be similarly used where possible to promote the goals outlined under point (a). Naturally, as a tempered supporter of the market economy,~{ Caveats extending beyond the purview of this paper. It is necessary to be aware that there are other overriding interests, global and domestic, that the market economy is ill suited to providing for, such as the environment, and possibly key public utilities that require long term planning and high investment. It is also necessary to continue to be vigilant against that which even if arising as a natural consequence of the market economy, has the potential to disturb or destroy its function, such as monopolies.}~ proprietary secondary materials and technologies do not merit these reservations. Similarly, actors of the market economy would take advantage of the common property base of the commercial highway.
+
+1~ Modelling the private international commercial law infrastructure
+
+Apart from the study of "laws" or the existing legal infrastructure, there are a multitude of players involved in their creation whose efforts may be regarded as being in the nature of systems modelling. Of interest to this paper is the subset of activity of a few organisations that provide the underpinnings for the foundation of a successful transnational contract/sales law. These are not amongst the more controversial legal infrastructure modelling activities, and represent a small but significant part in simplifying international commerce and trade.~{ Look for instance at national customs procedures, and consumer protection.}~
+
+Briefly viewing the wider picture, several institutions are involved as independent actors in systems modelling of the transnational legal infrastructure. Their roles and mandates and the issues they address are conceptually different. These include certain United Nations organs and affiliates such as the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL),~{ http://www.uncitral.org/ }~ the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO)~{ http://www.wipo.org/ }~ and recently the World Trade Organisation (WTO),~{ http://www.wto.org/ }~ along with other institutions such as the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law (UNIDROIT),~{ http://www.unidroit.org/ }~ the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC),~{ http://www.iccwbo.org/ }~ and the Hague Conference on Private International Law.~{ http://www.hcch.net/ }~ They identify areas that would benefit from an international or transnational regime and use various tools at their disposal, (including: treaties; model laws; conventions; rules and/or principles; standard contracts), to develop legislative "solutions" that they hope will be subscribed to.
+
+A host of other institutions are involved in providing regional solutions.~{ such as ASEAN http://www.aseansec.org/ the European Union (EU) http://europa.eu.int/ MERCOSUR http://embassy.org/uruguay/econ/mercosur/ and North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) http://www.nafta-sec-alena.org/english/nafta/ }~ Specialised areas are also addressed by appropriately specialised institutions.~{ e.g. large international banks; or in the legal community, the Business Section of the International Bar Association (IBA) with its membership of lawyers in over 180 countries. http://www.ibanet.org/ }~ A result of globalisation is increased competition (also) amongst States, which are active players in the process, identifying and addressing the needs of their business communities over a wide range of areas and managing the suitability to the global economy of their domestic legal, economic, technological and educational~{ For a somewhat frightening peek and illuminating discussion of the role of education in the global economy as implemented by a number of successful States see Joel Spring, /{Education and the Rise of the Global Economy}/ (Mahwah, NJ, 1998). }~ infrastructures. The role of States remains to identify what domestic structural support they must provide to be integrated and competitive in the global economy.
+
+In addition to "traditional" contributors, the technology/commerce/law confluence provides new challenges and opportunities, allowing, the emergence of important new players within the commercial field, such as Bolero,~{ http://www.bolero.org/ also http://www.boleroassociation.org/ }~ which, with the backing of international banks and ship-owners, offers electronic replacements for traditional paper transactions, acting as transaction agents for the electronic substitute on behalf of the trading parties. The acceptance of the possibility of applying an institutionally offered lex has opened the door further for other actors including ad hoc groupings of the business community and/or universities to find ways to be engaged and actively participate in providing services for themselves and/or others in this domain.
+
+1~ The foundation for transnational private contract law, arbitration
+
+The market economy drive perpetuating economic globalisation is also active in the development and choice of transnational legal solutions. The potential reward, international sets of contract rules and principles, that can be counted on to be consistent and as providing a uniform layer of insulation (with minimal reference back to State law) when applied across the landscape of a multitude of different municipal legal systems. The business community is free to utilise them if available, and if not, to develop them, or seek to have them developed.
+
+The kernel for the development of a transnational legal infrastructure governing the rights and obligations of private contracting individuals was put in place as far back as 1958 by the /{UN Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards}/ (/{"NY Convention on ICA"}/),~{ at http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/un.arbitration.recognition.and.enforcement.convention.new.york.1958/ }~ now in force in over a hundred States. Together with freedom of contract, the /{NY Convention on ICA}/ made it possible for commercial parties to develop and be governed by their own /{lex}/ in their contractual affairs, should they wish to do so, and guaranteed that provided their agreement was based on international commercial arbitration (/{"ICA"}/), (and not against relevant mandatory law) it would be enforced in all contracting States. This has been given further support by various more recent arbitration rules and the /{UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration 1985}/,~{ at http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/un.arbitration.model.law.1985/ }~ which now explicitly state that rule based solutions independent of national law can be applied in /{"ICA"}/.~{ Lando, /{Each Contracting Party Must Act In Accordance with Good Faith and Fair Dealing}/ in /{Festskrift til Jan Ramberg}/ (Stockholm, 1997) p. 575. See also UNIDROIT Principles, Preamble 4 a. Also Arthur Hartkamp, The Use of UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts by National and Supranational Courts (1995) in UNIDROIT Principles: A New Lex Mercatoria?, pp. 253-260 on p. 255. But see Goode, /{A New International Lex Mercatoria?}/ in /{Juridisk Tidskrift}/ (1999-2000 nr 2) p. 256 and 259. }~
+
+/{"ICA"}/ is recognised as the most prevalent means of dispute resolution in international commerce. Unlike litigation /{"ICA"}/ survives on its merits as a commercial service to provide for the needs of the business community.~{ /{"ICA"}/ being shaped by market forces and competition adheres more closely to the rules of the market economy, responding to its needs and catering for them more adequately. }~ It has consequently been more dynamic than national judiciaries, in adjusting to the changing requirements of businessmen. Its institutions are quicker to adapt and innovate, including the ability to cater for transnational contracts. /{"ICA"}/, in taking its mandate from and giving effect to the will of the parties, provides them with greater flexibility and frees them from many of the limitations of municipal law.~{ As examples of this, it seeks to give effect to the parties' agreement upon: the lex mercatoria as the law of the contract; the number of, and persons to be "adjudicators"; the language of proceedings; the procedural rules to be used, and; as to the finality of the decision. }~
+
+In sum, a transnational/non-national regulatory order governing the contractual rights and obligations of private individuals is made possible by: *(a)* States' acceptance of freedom of contract (public policy excepted); *(b)* Sanctity of contract embodied in the principle pacta sunt servanda *(c)* Written contractual selection of dispute resolution by international commercial arbitration, whether ad hoc or institutional, usually under internationally accepted arbitration rules; *(d)* Guaranteed enforcement, arbitration where necessary borrowing the State apparatus for law enforcement through the /{NY Convention on ICA}/, which has secured for /{"ICA"}/ a recognition and enforcement regime unparalleled by municipal courts in well over a hundred contracting States; *(e)* Transnational effect or non-nationality being achievable through /{"ICA"}/ accepting the parties' ability to select the basis upon which the dispute would be resolved outside municipal law, such as through the selection of general principles of law or lex mercatoria, or calling upon the arbitrators to act as amiable compositeur or ex aequo et bono.
+
+This framework provided by /{"ICA"}/ opened the door for the modelling of effective transnational law default rules and principles for contracts independent of State participation (in their development, application, or choice of law foundation). Today we have an increased amount of certainty of content and better control over the desired degree of transnational effect or non-nationality with the availability of comprehensive insulating rules and principles such as the PICC or /{Principles of European Contract Law}/ (/{"European Principles"}/ or /{"PECL"}/) that may be chosen, either together with, or to the exclusion of a choice of municipal law as governing the contract. For electronic commerce a similar path is hypothetically possible.
+
+1~ "State contracted international law" and/or "institutionally offered lex"? CISG and PICC as examples
+
+An institutionally offered lex ("IoL", uniform rules and principles) appear to have a number of advantages over "State contracted international law" ("ScIL", model laws, treaties and conventions for enactment). The development and formulation of both "ScIL" and "IoL" law takes time, the CISG representing a half century of effort~{ /{UNCITRAL Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods 1980}/ see at http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/un.contracts.international.sale.of.goods.convention.1980/ \\ The CISG may be regarded as the culmination of an effort in the field dating back to Ernst Rabel, (/{Das Recht des Warenkaufs}/ Bd. I&II (Berlin, 1936-1958). Two volume study on sales law.) followed by the Cornell Project, (Cornell Project on Formation of Contracts 1968 - Rudolf Schlesinger, Formation of Contracts. A study of the Common Core of Legal Systems, 2 vols. (New York, London 1968)) and connected most directly to the UNIDROIT inspired /{Uniform Law for International Sales}/ (ULIS http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/unidroit.ulis.convention.1964/ at and ULF at http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/unidroit.ulf.convention.1964/ ), the main preparatory works behind the CISG (/{Uniform Law on the Formation of Contracts for the International Sale of Goods}/ (ULF) and the /{Convention relating to a Uniform Law on the International Sale of Goods}/ (ULIS) The Hague, 1964.). }~ and PICC twenty years.~{ /{UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts}/ commonly referred to as the /{UNIDROIT Principles}/ and within this paper as PICC see at http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/unidroit.contract.principles.1994/ and http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/unidroit.international.commercial.contracts.principles.1994.commented/ \\ The first edition of the PICC were finalised in 1994, 23 years after their first conception, and 14 years after work started on them in earnest. }~ The CISG by UNCITRAL represents the greatest success for the unification of an area of substantive commercial contract law to date, being currently applied by 57 States,~{ As of February 2000. }~ estimated as representing close to seventy percent of world trade and including every major trading nation of the world apart from England and Japan. To labour the point, the USA most of the EU (along with Canada, Australia, Russia) and China, ahead of its entry to the WTO already share the same law in relation to the international sale of goods. "ScIL" however has additional hurdles to overcome. *(a)* In order to enter into force and become applicable, it must go through the lengthy process of ratification and accession by States. *(b)* Implementation is frequently with various reservations. *(c)* Even where widely used, there are usually as many or more States that are exceptions. Success, that is by no means guaranteed, takes time and for every uniform law that is a success, there are several failures.
+
+Institutionally offered lex ("IoL") comprehensive general contract principles or contract law restatements that create an entire "legal" environment for contracting, has the advantage of being instantly available, becoming effective by choice of the contracting parties at the stroke of a pen. "IoL" is also more easily developed subsequently, in light of experience and need. Amongst the reasons for their use is the reduction of transaction cost in their provision of a set of default rules, applicable transnationally, that satisfy risk management criteria, being (or becoming) known, tried and tested, and of predictable effect.~{ "[P]arties often want to close contracts quickly, rather than hold up the transaction to negotiate solutions for every problem that might arise." Honnold (1992) on p. 13. }~ The most resoundingly successful "IoL" example to date has been the ICC's /{Uniform Customs and Practices for Documentary Credits}/, which is subscribed to as the default rules for the letters of credit offered by the vast majority of banks in the vast majority of countries of the world. Furthermore uniform principles allow unification on matters that at the present stage of national and regional pluralism could not be achieved at a treaty level. There are however, things that only "ScIL" can "engineer", (for example that which relates to priorities and third party obligations).
+
+*{PICC:}* The arrival of PICC in 1994 was particularly timely. Coinciding as it did with the successful attempt at reducing trade barriers represented by the /{World Trade Agreement,}/~{ http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/wta.1994/ }~ and the start of general Internet use,~{ See Amissah, /{On the Net and the Liberation of Information that wants to be Free}/ in ed. Jens Edvin A. Skoghoy /{Fra institutt til fakultet, Jubileumsskrift i anledning av at IRV ved Universitetet i Tromsø feirer 10 år og er blitt til Det juridiske fakultet}/ (Tromsø, 1996) pp. 59-76 or the same at http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/on.the.net.and.information.22.02.1997.amissah/ }~ allowed for the exponential growth of electronic commerce, and further underscored the transnational tendency of commerce. The arrival of PICC was all the more opportune bearing in mind the years it takes to prepare such an instrument. Whilst there have been some objections, the PICC (and PECL) as contract law restatements cater to the needs of the business community that seeks a non-national or transnational law as the basis of its contracts, and provide a focal point for future development in this direction. Where in the past they would have been forced to rely on the ethereal and nebulous lex mercatoria, now the business community is provided with the opportunity to make use of such a "law" that is readily accessible, and has a clear and reasonably well defined content, that will become familiar and can be further developed as required. As such the PICC allow for more universal and uniform solutions. Their future success will depend on such factors as: *(a)* Suitability of their contract terms to the needs of the business community. *(b)* Their becoming widely known and understood. *(c)* Their predictability evidenced by a reasonable degree of consistency in the results of their application. *(d)* Recognition of their potential to reduce transaction costs. *(e)* Recognition of their being neutral as between different nations' interests (East, West; North, South). In the international sale of goods the PICC can be used in conjunction with more specific rules and regulations, including (on parties election~{ Also consider present and future possibilities for such use of PICC under CISG articles 8 and 9. }~) in sales the CISG to fill gaps in its provisions.~{ Drobnig, id. p. 228, comment that the CISG precludes recourse to general principles of contract law in Article 7. This does not refer to the situation where parties determine that the PICC should do so, see CISG Article 6. Or that in future the PICC will not be of importance under CISG Articles 8 and 9. }~ Provisions of the CISG would be given precedence over the PICC under the accepted principle of /{specialia generalibus derogant}/,~{ "Special principles have precedence over general ones." See Huet, Synthesis (1995) p. 277. }~ the mandatory content of the PICC excepted. The CISG has many situations that are not provided for at all, or which are provided for in less detail than the PICC.
+
+Work on PICC and PECL under the chairmanship of Professors Bonell and Ole Lando respectively, was wisely cross-pollinated (conceptually and through cross-membership of preparatory committees), as common foundations strengthen both sets of principles. A couple of points should be noted. Firstly, despite the maintained desirability of a transnational solution, this does not exclude the desirability of regional solutions, especially if there is choice, and the regional solutions are more comprehensive and easier to keep of uniform application. Secondly, the European Union has powers and influence (within the EU) unparalleled by UNIDROIT that can be utilised in future with regard to the PECL if the desirability of a common European contract solution is recognised and agreed upon by EU member States. As a further observation, there is, hypothetically at least, nothing to prevent there in future being developed an alternative extensive (competing) transnational contract /{lex}/ solution, though the weighty effort already in place as represented by PICC and the high investment in time and independent skilled legal minds, necessary to achieve this in a widely acceptable manner, makes such a development not very likely. It may however be the case that for electronic commerce, some other particularly suitable rules and principles will in time be developed in a similar vein, along the lines of an "IoL".
+
+1~ Contract /{Lex}/ design. Questions of commonweal
+
+The virtues of freedom of contract are acknowledged in this paper in that they allow the international business community to structure their business relationships to suit their requirements, and as such reflect the needs and working of the market economy. However, it is instructive also to explore the limits of the principles: freedom of contract, pacta sunt servanda and caveat subscriptor. These principles are based on free market arguments that parties best understand their interests, and that the contract they arrive at will be an optimum compromise between their competing interests. It not being for an outsider to regulate or evaluate what a party of their own free will and volition has gained from electing to contract on those terms. This approach to contract is adversarial, based on the conflicting wills of the parties, achieving a meeting of minds. It imposes no duty of good faith and fair dealing or of loyalty (including the disclosure of material facts) upon the contracting parties to one another, who are to protect their own interests. However, in international commerce, this demand can be more costly, and may have a negative and restrictive effect. Also, although claimed to be neutral in making no judgement as to the contents of a contract, this claim can be misleading.
+
+2~ The neutrality of contract law and information cost
+
+The information problem is a general one that needs to be recognised in its various forms where it arises and addressed where possible.
+
+Adherents to the caveat subscriptor model, point to the fact that parties have conflicting interests, and should look out for their own interests. However information presents particular problems which are exacerbated in international commerce.~{ The more straightforward cases of various types of misrepresentation apart. }~ As Michael Trebilcock put it: "Even the most committed proponents of free markets and freedom of contract recognise that certain information preconditions must be met for a given exchange to possess Pareto superior qualities."~{ Trebilcock, (1993) p. 102, followed by a quotation of Milton Friedman, from /{Capitalism and Freedom}/ (1962) p. 13. }~ Compared with domestic transactions, the contracting parties are less likely to possess information about each other or of what material facts there may be within the other party's knowledge, and will find it more difficult and costly to acquire. With resource inequalities, some parties will be in a much better position to determine and access what they need to know, the more so as the more information one already has, the less it costs to identify and to obtain any additional information that is required.~{ Trebilcock, (1993) p. 102, note quoted passage of Kim Lane Scheppele, /{Legal Secrets: Equality and Efficiency in the Common Law}/ (1988) p. 25. }~ The converse lot of the financially weaker party, makes their problem of high information costs (both actual and relative), near insurmountable. Ignorance may even become a rational choice, as the marginal cost of information remains higher than its marginal benefit. "This, in fact is the economic rationale for the failure to fully specify all contingencies in a contract."~{ See for example Nicholas Mercuro and Steven G. Medema, p. 58 }~ The argument is tied to transaction cost and further elucidates a general role played by underlying default rules and principles. It also extends further to the value of immutable principles that may help mitigate the problem in some circumstances. More general arguments are presented below.
+
+2~ Justifying mandatory loyalty principles
+
+Given the ability to create alternative solutions and even an independent /{lex}/ a question that arises is as to what limits if any should be imposed upon freedom of contract? What protective principles are required? Should protective principles be default rules that can be excluded? Should they be mandatory? Should mandatory law only exist at the level of municipal law?
+
+A kernel of mandatory protective principles with regard to loyalty may be justified, as beneficial, and even necessary for "IoL" to be acceptable in international commerce, in that they (on the balance) reflect the collective needs of the international business community. The present author is of the opinion that the duties of good faith and fair dealing and loyalty (or an acceptable equivalent) should be a necessary part of any attempt at the self-legislation or institutional legislation of any contract regime that is based on "rules and principles" (rather than a national legal order). If absent a requirement for them should be imposed by mandatory international law. Such protective provisions are to be found within the PICC and PECL.~{ Examples include: the deliberately excluded validity (Article 4); the provision on interest (Article 78); impediment (Article 79), and; what many believe to be the inadequate coverage of battle of forms (Article 19). }~ As regards PICC *(a)* The loyalty (and other protective) principles help bring about confidence and foster relations between parties. They provide an assurance in the international arena where parties are less likely to know each other and may have more difficulty in finding out about each other. *(b)* They better reflect the focus of the international business community on a business relationship from which both sides seek to gain. *(c)* They result in wider acceptability of the principles within both governments and the business community in the pluralistic international community. These protective principles may be regarded as enabling the PICC to better represent the needs of the commonweal. *(d)* Good faith and fair dealing~{ The commented PECL explain "'Good faith' means honesty and fairness in mind, which are subjective concepts... 'fair dealing' means observance of fairness in fact which is an objective test". }~ are fundamental underlying principles of international commercial relations. *(e)* Reliance only on the varied mandatory law protections of various States does not engender uniformity, which is also desirable with regard to that which can be counted upon as immutable. (Not that it is avoidable, given that mandatory State law remains overriding.) More generally, freedom of contract benefits from these protective principles that need immutable protection from contractual freedom to effectively serve their function. In seeking a transnational or non-national regime to govern contractual relations, one might suggest this to be the minimum price of freedom of contract that should be insisted upon by mandatory international law, as the limitation which hinders the misuse by one party of unlimited contractual freedom. They appear to be an essential basis for acceptability of the autonomous contract (non-national contract, based on agreed rules and principles/ "IoL"). As immutable principles they (hopefully and this is to be encouraged) become the default standard for the conduct of international business and as such may be looked upon as "common property." Unless immutable they suffer a fate somewhat analogous to that of "the tragedy of the commons."~{ Special problem regarding common/shared resources discussed by Garrett Hardin in Science (1968) 162 pp. 1243-1248. For short discussion and summary see Trebilcock, (1993) p. 13-15. }~ It should be recognised that argument over the loyalty principles should be of degree, as the concept must not be compromised, and needs to be protected (even if they come at the price of a degree of uncertainty), especially against particularly strong parties who are most likely to argue against their necessity.
+
+1~ Problems beyond uniform texts
+
+2~ In support of four objectives
+
+In the formulation of many international legal texts a pragmatic approach was taken. Formulating legislators from different States developed solutions based on suitable responses to factual example circumstances. This was done, successfully, with a view to avoiding arguments over alternative legal semantics and methodologies. However, having arrived at a common text, what then? Several issues are raised by asking the question, given that differences of interpretation can arise and become entrenched, by what means is it possible to foster a sustainable drive towards the uniform application of shared texts? Four principles appear to be desirable and should insofar as it is possible be pursued together: *(i)* the promotion of certainty and predictability; *(ii)* the promotion of uniformity of application; *(iii)* the protection of democratic ideals and ensuring of jurisprudential deliberation, and; *(iv)* the retention of efficiency.
+
+2~ Improving the predictability, certainty and uniform application of international and transnational law
+
+The key to the (efficient) achievement of greater certainty and predictability in an international and/or transnational commercial law regime is through the uniform application of shared texts that make up this regime.
+
+Obviously a distinction is to be made between transnational predictability in application, that is "uniform application", and predictability at a domestic level. Where the "uniform law" is applied by a municipal court of State "A" that looks first to its domestic writings, there may be a clear - predictable manner of application, even if not in the spirit of the "Convention". Another State "B" may apply the uniform law in a different way that is equally predictable, being perfectly consistent internally. This however defeats much of the purpose of the uniform law.
+
+A first step is for municipal courts to accept the /{UN Convention on the Law of Treaties 1969}/ (in force 1980) as a codification of existing public international law with regard to the interpretation of treaties.~{ This is the position in English law see Lord Diplock in Fothergill v Monarch Airlines [1981], A.C. 251, 282 or see http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/england.fothergill.v.monarch.airlines.hl.1980/2_diplock.html also Mann (London, 1983) at p. 379. The relevant articles on interpretation are Article 31 and 32. }~ A potentially fundamental step towards the achievement of uniform application is through the conscientious following of the admonitions of the interpretation clauses of modern conventions, rules and principles~{ Examples: The CISG, Article 7; The PICC, Article 1.6; PECL Article 1.106; /{UN Convention on the Carriage of Goods by Sea (The Hamburg Rules) 1978}/, Article 3; /{UN Convention on the Limitation Period in the International Sale of Goods 1974}/ and /{1978}/, Article 7; /{UN Model Law on Electronic Commerce 1996}/, Article 3; /{UNIDROIT Convention on International Factoring 1988}/, Article 4; /{UNIDROIT Convention on International Financial Leasing 1988}/, Article 6; also /{EC Convention on the Law Applicable to Contractual Obligations 1980}/, Article 18. }~ to take into account their international character and the need to promote uniformity in their application,~{ For an online collection of articles see the Pace CISG Database http://www.cisg.law.pace.edu/cisg/text/e-text-07.html and amongst the many other articles do not miss Michael Van Alstine /{Dynamic Treaty Interpretation}/ 146 /{University of Pennsylvania Law Review}/ (1998) 687-793. }~ together with all this implies.~{ Such as the CISG provision on interpretation - Article 7. }~ However, the problems of uniform application, being embedded in differences of legal methodology, go beyond the agreement of a common text, and superficial glances at the works of other legal municipalities. These include questions related to sources of authority and technique applied in developing valid legal argument. Problems with sources include differences in authority and weight given to: *(a)* legislative history; *(b)* rulings domestic and international; *(c)* official and other commentaries; *(d)* scholarly writings. There should be an ongoing discussion of legal methodology to determine the methods best suited to addressing the problem of achieving greater certainty, predictability and uniformity in the application of shared international legal texts. With regard to information sharing, again the technology associated with the Net offers potential solutions.
+
+2~ The Net and information sharing through transnational databases
+
+The Net has been a godsend permitting the collection and dissemination of information on international law. With the best intentions to live up to admonitions to "to take into account their international character and the need to promote uniformity in their application" of "ScIL" and "IoL", a difficulty has been in knowing what has been written and decided elsewhere. In discussing solutions, Professor Honnold in /{"Uniform Words and Uniform Application" }/~{ Based on the CISG, and inputs from several professors from different legal jurisdictions, on the problems of achieving the uniform application of the text across different legal municipalities. J. Honnold, /{Uniform words and uniform applications. Uniform Words and Uniform Application: The 1980 Sales Convention and International Juridical Practice}/. /{Einheitliches Kaufrecht und nationales Obligationenrecht. Referate Diskussionen der Fachtagung}/. am 16/17-2-1987. Hrsg. von P. Schlechtriem. Baden-Baden, Nomos, 1987. p. 115-147, at p. 127-128. }~ suggests the following: "General Access to Case-Law and Bibliographic Material: The development of a homogenous body of law under the Convention depends on channels for the collection and sharing of judicial decisions and bibliographic material so that experience in each country can be evaluated and followed or rejected in other jurisdictions." Honnold then goes on to discuss "the need for an international clearing-house to collect and disseminate experience on the Convention" the need for which, he writes there is general agreement. He also discusses information-gathering methods through the use of national reporters. He poses the question "Will these channels be adequate? ..."
+
+The Net, offering inexpensive ways to build databases and to provide global access to information, provides an opportunity to address these problems that was not previously available. The Net extends the reach of the admonitions of the interpretation clauses. Providing the medium whereby if a decision or scholarly writing exists on a particular article or provision of a Convention, anywhere in the world, it will be readily available. Whether or not a national court or arbitration tribunal chooses to follow their example, they should be aware of it. Whatever a national court decides will also become internationally known, and will add to the body of experience on the Convention.~{ Nor is it particularly difficult to set into motion the placement of such information on the Net. With each interested participant publishing for their own interest, the Net could provide the key resources to be utilised in the harmonisation and reaching of common understandings of solutions and uniform application of legal texts. Works from all countries would be available. }~
+
+Such a library would be of interest to the institution promulgating the text, governments, practitioners and researchers alike. It could place at your fingertips: *(a)* Convention texts. *(b)* Implementation details of contracting States. *(c)* The legislative history. *(d)* Decisions generated by the convention around the world (court and arbitral where possible). *(e)* The official and other commentaries. *(f)* Scholarly writings on the Convention. *(g)* Bibliographies of scholarly writings. *(h)* Monographs and textbooks. *(i)* Student study material collections. *(j)* Information on promotional activities, lectures - moots etc. *(k)* Discussion groups/ mailing groups and other more interactive features.
+
+With respect to the CISG such databases are already being maintained.~{ Primary amongst them Pace University, Institute of International Commercial Law, CISG Database http://www.cisg.law.pace.edu/ which provides secondary support for the CISG, including providing a free on-line database of the legislative history, academic writings, and case-law on the CISG and additional material with regard to PICC and PECL insofar as they may supplement the CISG. Furthermore, the Pace CISG Project, networks with the several other existing Net based "autonomous" CISG projects. UNCITRAL under Secretary Gerold Herrmann, has its own database through which it distributes its case law materials collected from national reporters (CLOUT). }~
+
+The database by ensuring the availability of international materials, used in conjunction with legal practice, helps to support the fore-named four principles. That of efficiency is enhanced especially if there is a single source that can be searched for the information required.
+
+The major obstacle that remains to being confident of this as the great and free panacea that it should be is the cost of translation of texts.
+
+2~ Judicial minimalism promotes democratic jurisprudential deliberation
+
+How to protect liberal democratic ideals and ensure international jurisprudential deliberation? Looking at judicial method, where court decisions are looked to for guidance, liberal democratic ideals and international jurisprudential deliberation are fostered by a judicial minimalist approach.
+
+For those of us with a common law background, and others who pay special attention to cases as you are invited to by interpretation clauses, there is scope for discussion as to the most appropriate approach to be taken with regard to judicial decisions. US judge Cass Sunstein suggestion of judicial minimalism~{ Cass R. Sunstein, /{One Case at a Time - Judicial Minimalism on the Supreme Court}/ (1999) }~ which despite its being developed in a different context~{ His analysis is developed based largely on "hard" constitutional cases of the U.S. }~ is attractive in that it is suited to a liberal democracy in ensuring democratic jurisprudential deliberation. It maintains discussion, debate, and allows for adjustment as appropriate and the gradual development of a common understanding of issues. Much as one may admire farsighted and far-reaching decisions and expositions, there is less chance with the minimalist approach of the (dogmatic) imposition of particular values. Whilst information sharing offers the possibility of the percolation of good ideas.~{ D. Stauffer, /{Introduction to Percolation Theory}/ (London, 1985). Percolation represents the sudden dramatic expansion of a common idea or ideas thought he reaching of a critical level/mass in the rapid recognition of their power and the making of further interconnections. An epidemic like infection of ideas. Not quite the way we are used to the progression of ideas within a conservative tradition. }~ Much as we admire the integrity of Dworkin's Hercules,~{ Ronald Dworkin, /{Laws Empire}/ (Harvard, 1986); /{Hard Cases in Harvard Law Review}/ (1988). }~ that he can consistently deliver single solutions suitable across such disparate socio-economic cultures is questionable. In examining the situation his own "integrity" would likely give him pause and prevent him from dictating that he can.~{ Hercules was created for U.S. Federal Cases and the community represented by the U.S. }~ This position is maintained as a general principle across international commercial law, despite private (as opposed to public) international commercial law not being an area of particularly "hard" cases of principle, and; despite private international commercial law being an area in which over a long history it has been demonstrated that lawyers are able to talk a common language to make themselves and their concepts (which are not dissimilar) understood by each other.~{ In 1966, a time when there were greater differences in the legal systems of States comprising the world economy Clive Schmitthoff was able to comment that: \\ "22. The similarity of the law of international trade transcends the division of the world between countries of free enterprise and countries of centrally planned economy, and between the legal families of the civil law of Roman inspiration and the common law of English tradition. As a Polish scholar observed, "the law of external trade of the countries of planned economy does not differ in its fundamental principles from the law of external trade of other countries, such as e.g., Austria or Switzerland. Consequently, international trade law specialists of all countries have found without difficulty that they speak a 'common language' \\ 23. The reason for this universal similarity of the law of international trade is that this branch of law is based on three fundamental propositions: first, that the parties are free, subject to limitations imposed by the national laws, to contract on whatever terms they are able to agree (principle of the autonomy of the parties' will); secondly, that once the parties have entered into a contract, that contract must be faithfully fulfilled (pacta sunt servanda) and only in very exceptional circumstances does the law excuse a party from performing his obligations, viz., if force majeure or frustration can be established; and, thirdly that arbitration is widely used in international trade for the settlement of disputes, and the awards of arbitration tribunals command far-reaching international recognition and are often capable of enforcement abroad." \\ /{Report of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Progressive Development of the Law of International Trade}/ (1966). Report prepared for the UN by C. Schmitthoff. }~
+
+2~ Non-binding interpretative councils and their co-ordinating guides can provide a focal point for the convergence of ideas - certainty, predictability, and efficiency
+
+A respected central guiding body can provide a guiding influence with respect to: *(a)* the uniform application of texts; *(b)* information management control. Given the growing mass of writing on common legal texts - academic and by way of decisions, we are faced with an information management problem.~{ Future if not current. }~
+
+Supra-national interpretative councils have been called for previously~{ /{UNCITRAL Secretariat}/ (1992) p. 253. Proposed by David (France) at the second UNCITRAL Congress and on a later occasion by Farnsworth (USA). To date the political will backed by the financing for such an organ has not been forthcoming. In 1992 the UNCITRAL Secretariat concluded that "probably the time has not yet come". Suggested also by Louis Sono in /{Uniform laws require uniform interpretation: proposals for an international tribunal to interpret uniform legal texts}/ (1992) 25th UNCITRAL Congress, pp. 50-54. Drobnig, /{Observations in Uniform Law in Practice}/ at p. 306. }~ and have for various reasons been regarded impracticable to implement including problems associated with getting States to formally agree upon such a body with binding authority.
+
+However it is not necessary to go this route. In relation to "IoL" in such forms as the PICC and PECL it is possible for the promulgators themselves,~{ UNIDROIT and the EU }~ to update and clarify the accompanying commentary of the rules and principles, and to extend their work, through having councils with the necessary delegated powers. In relation to the CISG it is possible to do something similar of a non-binding nature, through the production of an updated commentary by an interpretive council (that could try to play the role of Hercules).~{ For references on interpretation of the CISG by a supranational committee of experts or council of "wise men" see Bonell, /{Proposal for the Establishment of a Permanent Editorial Board for the Vienna Sales Convention}/ in /{International Uniform Law in Practice/ Le droit uniforme international dans la practique [Acts and Proceedings of the 3rd Congress on Private Law held by the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law}/ (Rome, 1987)], (New York, 1988) pp. 241-244 }~ With respect, despite some expressed reservations, it is not true that it would have no more authority than a single author writing on the subject. A suitable non-binding interpretative council would provide a focal point for the convergence of ideas. Given the principle of ensuring democratic jurisprudential deliberation, that such a council would be advisory only (except perhaps on the contracting parties election) would be one of its more attractive features, as it would ensure continued debate and development.
+
+2~ Capacity Building
+
+_1 "... one should create awareness about the fact that an international contract or transaction is not naturally rooted in one particular domestic law, and that its international specifics are best catered for in a uniform law."~{ UNCITRAL Secretariat (1992) p. 255. }~
+
+_{/{Capacity building}/}_ - raising awareness, providing education, creating a new generation of lawyers versed in a relatively new paradigm. Capacity building in international and transnational law, is something relevant institutions including arbitration institutions; the business community, and; far sighted States, should be interested in promoting. Finding means to transcend national boundaries is also to continue in the tradition of seeking the means to break down barriers to legal communication and understanding. However, while the business community seeks and requires greater uniformity in their business relations, there has paradoxically, at a national level, been a trend towards a nationalisation of contract law, and a regionalisation of business practice.~{ Erich Schanze, /{New Directions in Business Research}/ in Børge Dahl & Ruth Nielsen (ed.), /{New Directions in Contract Research}/ (Copenhagen, 1996) p. 62. }~
+
+As an example, Pace University, Institute of International Commercial Law, plays a prominent role with regard to capacity building in relation to the CISG and PICC. Apart from the previously mentioned /{CISG Database}/, Pace University organise a large annual moot on the CISG~{ See http://www.cisg.law.pace.edu/vis.html }~ this year involving students of 79 universities from 28 countries, and respected arbitrators from the word over. Within the moot the finding of solutions based on PICC where the CISG is silent, is encouraged. Pace University also organise an essay competition~{ See http://www.cisg.law.pace.edu/cisg/text/essay.html }~ on the CISG and/or the PICC, which next year is to be expanded to include the PECL as a further option.
+
+1~ Marketing of transnational solutions
+
+Certain aspects of the Net/web may already be passé, but did you recognise it for what it was, or might become, when it arrived?
+
+As uniform law and transnational solutions are in competition with municipal approaches, to be successful a certain amount of marketing is necessary and may be effective. The approach should involve ensuring the concept of what they seek to achieve is firmly implanted in the business, legal and academic communities, and through engaging the business community and arbitration institutions, in capacity building and developing a new generation of lawyers. Feedback from the business community, and arbitrators will also prove invaluable. Whilst it is likely that the business community will immediately be able to recognise their potential advantages, it is less certain that they will find the support of the legal community. The normal reasons would be similar to those usually cited as being the primary constraints on its development "conservatism, routine, prejudice and inertia" René David. These are problems associated with gaining the initial foothold of acceptability, also associated with the lower part of an exponential growth curve. In addition the legal community may face tensions arising for various reasons including the possibility of an increase in world-wide competition.
+
+There are old well developed legal traditions with developed infrastructures and roots well established in several countries, that are dependable and known. The question arises why experiment with alternative non-extensively tested regimes? The required sophistication is developed in the centres providing legal services, and it may be argued that there is not the pressing need for unification or for transnational solutions, as the traditional way of contracting provides satisfactorily for the requirements of global commerce. The services required will continue to be easily and readily available from existing centres of skill. English law, to take an example is for various reasons (including perhaps language, familiarity of use, reputation and widespread Commonwealth~{ http://www.thecommonwealth.org/ }~ relations) the premier choice for the law governing international commercial transactions, and is likely to be for the foreseeable future. Utilising the Commonwealth as an example, what the "transnational" law (e.g. CISG) experience illustrates however, is that for States there may be greater advantage to be gained from participation in a horizontally shared area of commercial law, than from retaining a traditional vertically integrated commercial law system, based largely for example on the English legal system.
+
+Borrowing a term from the information technology sector, it is essential to guard against FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) with regard to the viability of new and/or competing transnational solutions, that may be spread by their detractors, and promptly, in the manner required by the free market, address any real problems that are discerned.
+
+1~ Tools in future development
+
+An attempt should be made by the legal profession to be more contemporary and to keep up to date with developments in technology and the sciences, and to adopt effective tools where suitable to achieve their goals. Technology one way or another is likely to encroach further upon law and the way we design it.
+
+Science works across cultures and is aspired to by most nations as being responsible for the phenomenal success of technology (both are similarly associated with globalisation). Science is extending its scope to (more confidently) tackle complex systems. It would not hurt to be more familiar with relevant scientific concepts and terminology. Certainly lawyers across the globe, myself included, would also benefit much in their conceptual reasoning from an early dose of the philosophy of science,~{ An excellent approachable introduction is provided by A.F. Chalmers /{What is this thing called Science?}/ (1978, Third Edition 1999). }~ what better than Karl Popper on scientific discovery and the role of "falsification" and value of predictive probity.~{ Karl R. Popper /{The Logic of Scientific Discovery}/ (1959). }~ And certainly Thomas Kuhn on scientific advancement and "paradigm shifts"~{ Thomas S. Kuhn /{The Structure of Scientific Revolutions}/ (1962, 3rd Edition 1976). }~ has its place. Having mentioned Karl Popper, it would not be unwise to go further (outside the realms of philosophy of science) to study his defence of democracy in both volumes of /{Open Society and Its Enemies}/.~{ Karl R. Popper /{The Open Society and Its Enemies: Volume 1, Plato}/ (1945) and /{The Open Society and Its Enemies: Volume 2, Hegel & Marx}/. (1945) }~
+
+Less ambitiously there are several tools not traditionally in the lawyers set, that may assist in transnational infrastructure modelling. These include further exploration and development of the potential of tools, including to suggest a few by way of example: flow charts, fuzzy thinking, "intelligent" electronic agents and Net collaborations.
+
+In the early 1990's I was introduced to a quantity surveyor and engineer who had reduced the /{FIDIC Red Book}/~{ FIDIC is the International Federation of Consulting Engineers http://www.fidic.com/ }~ to over a hundred pages of intricate flow charts (decision trees), printed horizontally on roughly A4 sized sheets. He was employed by a Norwegian construction firm, who insisted that based on past experience, they knew that he could, using his charts, consistently arrive at answers to their questions in a day, that law firms took weeks to produce. Flow charts can be used to show interrelationships and dependencies, in order to navigate the implications of a set of rules more quickly. They may also be used more pro-actively (and /{ex ante}/ rather than /{ex post}/) in formulating texts, to avoid unnecessary complexity and to arrive at more practical, efficient and elegant solutions.
+
+Explore such concepts as "fuzzy thinking"~{ Concept originally developed by Lotfi Zadeh /{Fuzzy Sets}/ Information Control 8 (1965) pp 338-353. For introductions see Daniel McNeill and Paul Freiberger /{Fuzzy Logic: The Revolutionary Computer Technology that is Changing our World}/ (1993); Bart Kosko Fuzzy Thinking (1993); Earl Cox The Fuzzy Systems Handbook (New York, 2nd ed. 1999). Perhaps to the uninitiated an unfortunate choice of name, as fuzzy logic and fuzzy set theory is more precise than classical logic and set theory, which comprise a subset of that which is fuzzy (representing those instances where membership is 0% or 100%). The statement is not entirely without controversy, in suggesting the possibility that classical thinking may be subsumed within the realms of an unfamiliar conceptual paradigm, that is to take hold of the future thinking. In the engineering field much pioneer work on fuzzy rule based systems was done at Queen Mary College by Ebrahim Mamdani in the early and mid-1970s. Time will tell. }~ including fuzzy logic, fuzzy set theory, and fuzzy systems modelling, of which classical logic and set theory are subsets. Both by way of analogy and as a tool fuzzy concepts are better at coping with complexity and map more closely to judicial thinking and argument in the application of principles and rules. Fuzzy theory provides a method for analysing and modelling principle and rule based systems, even where conflicting principles may apply permitting /{inter alia}/ working with competing principles and the contextual assignment of precision to terms such as "reasonableness". Fuzzy concepts should be explored in expert systems, and in future law. Problems of scaling associated with multiple decision trees do not prevent useful applications, and structured solutions. The analysis assists in discerning what lawyers are involved with.
+
+"Intelligent" electronic agents can be expected both to gather information on behalf of the business community and lawyers. In future electronic agents are likely to be employed to identify and bring to the attention of their principals "invitations to treat" or offers worthy of further investigation. In some cases they will be developed and relied upon as electronic legal agents, operating under a programmed mandate and vested with the authority to enter certain contracts on behalf of their principals. Such mandate would include choice of law upon which to contract, and the scenario could be assisted by transnational contract solutions (and catered for in the design of "future law").
+
+Another area of technology helping solve legal problems relates to various types of global register and transaction centres. Amongst them property registers being an obvious example, including patents and moveable property. Bolero providing an example of how electronic documents can be centrally brokered on behalf of trading parties.
+
+Primary law should be available on the Net free, and this applies also to "IoL" and the static material required for their interpretation. This should be the policy adopted by all institutions involved in contributing to the transnational legal infrastructure. Where possible larger databases also should be developed and shared. The Net has reduced the cost of dissemination of material, to a level infinitesimally lower than before. Universities now can and should play a more active role. Suitable funding arrangements should be explored that do not result in proprietary systems or the forwarding of specific lobby interests. In hard-copy to promote uniform standards, institutions should also strive to have their materials available at a reasonable price. Many appear to be unacceptably expensive given the need for their promotion and capacity building, amongst students, and across diverse States.
+
+Follow the open standards and community standards debate in relation to the development of technology standards and technology infrastructure tools - including operating systems,~{ See for example /{Open Sources : Voices from the Open Source Revolution - The Open Source Story}/ http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/toc.html }~ to discover what if anything it might suggest for the future development of law standards.
+
+1~ As an aside, a word of caution
+
+I end with an arguably gratuitous observation, by way of a reminder and general warning. Gratuitous in the context of this paper because the areas focused upon~{ Sale of goods (CISG), contract rules and principles (PICC), related Arbitration, and the promotion of certain egalitarian ideals. }~ were somewhat deliberately selected to fall outside the more contentious and "politically" problematic areas related to globalisation, economics, technology, law and politics.~{ It is not as evident in the area of private international commercial contract law the chosen focus for this paper, but appears repeatedly in relation to other areas and issues arising out of the economics, technology, law nexus. }~ Gratuitous also because there will be no attempt to concretise or exemplify the possibility suggested.
+
+Fortunately, we are not (necessarily) talking about a zero sum game, however, it is necessary to be able to distinguish and recognise that which may harm. International commerce/trade is competitive, and by its nature not benign, even if it results in an overall improvement in the economic lot of the peoples of our planet. "Neutral tests" such as Kaldor-Hicks efficiency, do not require that your interests are benefited one iota, just that whilst those of others are improved, yours are not made worse. If the measure adopted is overall benefit, it is even more possible that an overall gain may result where your interests are adversely affected. The more so if you have little, and those that gain, gain much. Furthermore such "tests" are based on assumptions, which at best are approximations of reality (e.g. that of zero transaction costs, where in fact not only are they not, but they are frequently proportionately higher for the economically weak). At worst they may be manipulated /{ex ante}/ with knowledge of their implications (e.g. engineering to ensure actual or relative~{ Low fixed costs have a "regressive" effect }~ asymmetrical transaction cost). It is important to be careful in a wide range of circumstances related to various aspects of the modelling of the infrastructure for international commerce that have an impact on the allocation of rights and obligations, and especially the allocation of resources, including various types of intellectual property rights. Ask what is the objective and justification for the protection? How well is the objective met? Are there other consequential effects? Are there other objectives that are worthy of protection? Could the stated objective(s) be achieved in a better way?
+
+Within a system are those who benefit from the way it has been, that may oppose change as resulting in loss to them or uncertainty of their continued privilege. For a stable system to initially arise that favours such a Select Set, does not require the conscious manipulation of conditions by the Select Set. Rather it requires that from the system (set) in place the Select Set emerges as beneficiary. Subsequently the Select Set having become established as favoured and empowered by their status as beneficiary, will seek to do what it can, to influence circumstances to ensure their continued beneficial status. That is, to keep the system operating to their advantage (or tune it to work even better towards this end), usually with little regard to the conditions resulting to other members of the system. Often this will be a question of degree, and the original purpose, or an alternative "neutral" argument, is likely to be used to justify the arrangement. The objective from the perspective of the Select Set is fixed; the means at their disposal may vary. Complexity is not required for such situations to arise, but having done so subsequent plays by the Select Set tend towards complexity. Furthermore, moves in the interest of the Select Set are more easily obscured/disguised in a complex system. Limited access to information and knowledge are devastating handicaps without which change cannot be contemplated let alone negotiated. Frequently, having information and knowledge are not enough. The protection of self-interest is an endemic part of our system, with the system repeatedly being co-opted to the purposes of those that are able to manipulate it. Membership over time is not static, for example, yesterday's "copycat nations" are today's innovators, and keen to protect their intellectual property. Which also illustrates the point that what it may take to set success in motion, may not be the same as that which is preferred to sustain it. Whether these observations appear to be self-evident and/or abstract and out of place with regard to this paper, they have far reaching implications repeatedly observable within the law, technology, and commerce (politics) nexus. Even if not arising much in the context of the selected material for this paper, their mention is justified by way of warning. Suitable examples would easily illustrate how politics arises inescapably as an emergent property from the nexus of commerce, technology, and law.~{ In such circumstances either economics or law on their own would be sufficient to result in politics arising as an emergent property. }~
+
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diff --git a/data/samples/generic/content.cory_doctorow.sst b/data/samples/generic/content.cory_doctorow.sst
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+++ b/data/samples/generic/content.cory_doctorow.sst
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+% SiSU 4.0
+
+@title: CONTENT
+ :subtitle: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright and the Future of the Future
+
+@creator:
+ :author: Doctorow, Cory |email doctorow@craphound.com
+
+@date:
+ :published: 2008-09
+
+@rights:
+ :copyright: Copyright (C) Cory Doctorow, 2008.
+ :license: This entire work (with the exception of the introduction by John Perry Barlow) is copyright 2008 by Cory Doctorow and released under the terms of a Creative Commons US Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/). Some Rights Reserved. \\ The introduction is copyright 2008 by John Perry Barlow and released under the terms of a Creative Commons US Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/). Some Rights Reserved.
+
+@classify:
+ :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:discourse;book:discourse:copyright|content|creative commons|intellectual property;copyright;content;creative commons;intellectual property:copyright;intellectual property:copyright:creative commons;book:subject:culture|copyright|society|content|social aspects of technology;culture;society;technology:social aspects
+ :subject: Selected Essays
+
+@identifier:
+ :oclc: 268676051
+ :isbn: 9781892391810
+
+@links:
+ { CONTENT }http://craphound.com/content/
+ { @ Wikipedia }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow
+ { @ Amazon.com }http://www.amazon.com/Content-Selected-Technology-Creativity-Copyright/dp/1892391813
+ { @ Barnes & Noble }http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Content/Cory-Doctorow/e/9781892391810/?itm=1&USRI=content+cory+doctorow
+
+@make:
+ :num_top: 1
+ :breaks: break=1
+ :emphasis: italics
+ :home_button_text: {CONTENT}http://craphound.com/content; {Cory Doctorow}http://www.doctorow.com
+ :footer: {CONTENT}http://craphound.com/content; {Cory Doctorow}http://www.doctorow.com
+
+:A~ @title @author
+
+1~cc- A word about this downloadable file: ~#
+
+I've been releasing my books online for free since my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, came out in 2003, and with every one of those books, I've included a little essay explaining why I do this sort of thing. ~#
+
+I was tempted to write another one of these essays for this collection, but then it hit me: *{this is a collection of essays that are largely concerned with exactly this subject}*. ~#
+
+You see, I don't just write essays about copyright to serve as forewards to my books: I write them for magazine,s, newspapers, and websites -- I write speeches on the subject for audiences of every description and in every nation. And finally, here, I've collected my favorites, the closest I've ever come to a Comprehensive Doctorow Manifesto. ~#
+
+So I'm going to skip the foreword this time around: the *{whole book}* is my explanation for why I'm giving it away for free online. ~#
+
+If you like this book and you want to thank me, here's what I'd ask you to do, in order of preference: ~#
+
+_* Buy a copy: http://craphound.com/content/buy ~#
+
+_* Donate a copy to a school or library: http://craphound.com/content/donate ~#
+
+_* Send the ebook to five friends and tell them why you liked it ~#
+
+_* Convert the ebook to a new file-format (see the download page for more) ~#
+
+Now, on to the book! ~#
+
+% $$$$
+
+% Copyright notice:
+
+% This entire work (with the exception of the introduction by John Perry Barlow) is copyright 2008 by Cory Doctorow and released under the terms of a Creative Commons US Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/). Some Rights Reserved.
+
+% The introduction is copyright 2008 by John Perry Barlow and released under the terms of a Creative Commons US Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/). Some Rights Reserved.
+
+% $$$$
+
+1~ha- Publication history and acknowledgments: ~#
+
+Introductio: 2008, John Perry Barlow ~#
+
+Microsoft Research DRM Talk (This talk was originally given to Microsoft's Research Group and other interested parties from within the company at their Redmond offices on June 17, 2004.) ~#
+
+The DRM Sausage Factory (Originally published as "A Behind-The-Scenes Look At How DRM Becomes Law," InformationWeek, July 11, 2007) ~#
+
+Happy Meal Toys versus Copyright: How America chose Hollywood and Wal-Mart, and why it's doomed us, and how we might survive anyway (Originally published as "How Hollywood, Congress, And DRM Are Beating Up The American Economy," InformationWeek, June 11, 2007) ~#
+
+Why Is Hollywood Making A Sequel To The Napster Wars? (Originally published in InformationWeek, August 14, 2007) ~#
+
+You DO Like Reading Off a Computer Screen (Originally published in Locus Magazine, March 2007) ~#
+
+How Do You Protect Artists? (Originally published in The Guardian as "Online censorship hurts us all," Tuesday, Oct 2, 2007) ~#
+
+It's the Information Economy, Stupid (Originally published in The Guardian as "Free data sharing is here to stay," September 18, 2007) ~#
+
+Downloads Give Amazon Jungle Fever (Originally published in The Guardian, December 11, 2007) ~#
+
+What's the Most Important Right Creators Have? (Originally published as "How Big Media's Copyright Campaigns Threaten Internet Free Expression," InformationWeek, November 5, 2007) ~#
+
+Giving it Away (Originally published on Forbes.com, December 2006) ~#
+
+Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on the Internet (Originally published in Locus Magazine, July 2006) ~#
+
+How Copyright Broke (Originally published in Locus Magazine, September, 2006) ~#
+
+In Praise of Fanfic (Originally published in Locus Magazine, May 2007) ~#
+
+Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia (Self-published, 26 August 2001) ~#
+
+Amish for QWERTY (Originally published on the O'Reilly Network, 07/09/2003, http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2003/07/09/amish_qwerty.html) ~#
+
+Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books (Paper for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, San Diego, February 12, 2004) ~#
+
+Free(konomic) E-books (Originally published in Locus Magazine, September 2007) ~#
+
+The Progressive Apocalypse and Other Futurismic Delights (Originally published in Locus Magazine, July 2007) ~#
+
+When the Singularity is More Than a Literary Device: An Interview with Futurist-Inventor Ray Kurzweil (Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, June 2005) ~#
+
+Wikipedia: a genuine Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy -- minus the editors (Originally published in The Anthology at the End of the Universe, April 2005) ~#
+
+Warhol is Turning in His Grave (Originally published in The Guardian, November 13, 2007) ~#
+
+The Future of Ignoring Things (Originally published on InformationWeek's Internet Evolution, October 3, 2007) ~#
+
+Facebook's Faceplant (Originally published as "How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook," in InformationWeek, November 26, 2007) ~#
+
+The Future of Internet Immune Systems (Originally published on InformationWeek's Internet Evolution, November 19, 2007) ~#
+
+All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites (Paper delivered at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, San Diego, California, 16 March 2005) ~#
+
+READ CAREFULLY (Originally published as "Shrinkwrap Licenses: An Epidemic Of Lawsuits Waiting To Happen" in InformationWeek, February 3, 2007) ~#
+
+World of Democracycraft (Originally published as "Why Online Games Are Dictatorships," InformationWeek, April 16, 2007) ~#
+
+Snitchtown (Originally published in Forbes.com, June 2007) ~#
+
+$$$$
+
+1~dedication- Dedication: ~#
+
+For the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation: John Perry Barlow, Mitch Kapor and John Gilmore ~#
+
+For the staff -- past and present -- of the Electronic Frontier Foundation ~#
+
+For the supporters of the Electronic Frontier Foundation ~#
+
+$$$$
+
+% 1~ Table of Contents:
+
+% 1 Introduction by John Perry Barlow
+
+% 2 Microsoft Research DRM talk
+
+% 3 The DRM Sausage Factory
+
+% 4 Happy Meal Toys versus Copyright: How America chose Hollywood and
+% Wal-Mart, and why it's doomed us, and how we might survive anyway
+
+% 5 Why Is Hollywood Making A Sequel To The Napster Wars?
+
+% 6 You DO Like Reading Off a Computer Screen
+
+% 7 How Do You Protect Artists?
+
+% 8 It's the Information Economy, Stupid
+
+% 9 Downloads Give Amazon Jungle Fever
+
+% 10 What's the Most Important Right Creators Have?
+
+% 11 Giving it Away
+
+% 12 Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on the Internet
+
+% 13 How Copyright Broke
+
+% 14 In Praise of Fanfic
+
+% 15 Metacrap: Putting the Torch to Seven Straw-Men of the Meta-Utopia
+
+% 16 Amish for QWERTY
+
+% 17 Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books
+
+% 18 Free(konomic) E-books
+
+% 19 The Progressive Apocalypse and Other Futurismic Delights
+
+% 20 When the Singularity is More Than a Literary Device: An Interview with Futurist-Inventor Ray Kurzweil
+
+% 21 Wikipedia: a genuine Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy -- minus the editors
+
+% 22 Warhol is Turning in His Grave
+
+% 23 The Future of Ignoring Things
+
+% 24 Facebook's Faceplant
+
+% 25 The Future of Internet Immune Systems
+
+% 26 All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites
+
+% 27 READ CAREFULLY
+
+% 28 World of Democracycraft
+
+% 29 Snitchtown
+
+$$$$
+
+1~ Introduction by John Perry Barlow
+
+San Francisco - Seattle - Vancouver - San Francisco
+
+Tuesday, April 1, 2008
+
+"Content," huh? Ha! Where's the container?
+
+Perhaps these words appear to you on the pages of a book, a physical object that might be said to have "contained" the thoughts of my friend and co-conspirator Cory Doctorow as they were transported in boxes and trucks all the way from his marvelous mind into yours. If that is so, I will concede that you might be encountering "content". (Actually, if that's the case, I'm delighted on Cory's behalf, since that means that you have also paid him for these thoughts. We still know how to pay creators directly for the works they embed in stuff.)
+
+But the chances are excellent that you're reading these liquid words as bit-states of light on a computer screen, having taken advantage of his willingness to let you have them in that form for free. In such an instance, what "contains" them? Your hard disk? His? The Internet and all the servers and routers in whose caches the ghosts of their passage might still remain? Your mind? Cory's?
+
+To me, it doesn't matter. Even if you're reading this from a book, I'm still not convinced that what you have in your hands is its container, or that, even if we agreed on that point, that a little ink in the shape of, say, the visual pattern you're trained to interpret as meaning "a little ink" in whatever font the publisher chooses, is not, as Magritte would remind us, the same thing as a little ink, even though it is.
+
+Meaning is the issue. If you couldn't read English, this whole book would obviously contain nothing as far as you were concerned. Given that Cory is really cool and interesting, you might be motivated to learn English so that you could read this book, but even then it wouldn't be a container so much as a conduit.
+
+The real "container" would be process of thought that began when I compressed my notion of what is meant by the word "ink" - which, when it comes to the substances that can be used to make marks on paper, is rather more variable than you might think - and would kind of end when you decompressed it in your own mind as whatever you think it is.
+
+I know this is getting a bit discursive, but I do have a point. Let me just make it so we can move on.
+
+I believe, as I've stated before, that information is simultaneously a relationship, an action, and an area of shared mind. What it isn't is a noun.
+
+Information is not a thing. It isn't an object. It isn't something that, when you sell it or have it stolen, ceases to remain in your possession. It doesn't have a market value that can be objectively determined. It is not, for example, much like a 2004 Ducati ST4S motorcycle, for which I'm presently in the market, and which seems - despite variabilities based on, I must admit, informationally- based conditions like mileage and whether it's been dropped - to have a value that is pretty consistent among the specimens I can find for a sale on the Web.
+
+Such economic clarity could not be established for anything "in" this book, which you either obtained for free or for whatever price the publisher eventually puts on it. If it's a book you're reading from, then presumably Cory will get paid some percentage of whatever you, or the person who gave it to you, paid for it.
+
+But I won't. I'm not getting paid to write this forward, neither in royalties nor upfront. I am, however, getting some intangible value, as one generally does whenever he does a favor for a friend. For me, the value being retrieved from going to the trouble of writing these words is not so different from the value you retrieve from reading them. We are both mining a deeply intangible "good," which lies in interacting with The Mind of Cory Doctorow. I mention this because it demonstrates the immeasurable role of relationship as the driving force in an information economy.
+
+But neither am I creating content at the moment nor are you "consuming" it (since, unlike a hamburger, these words will remain after you're done with them, and, also unlike a hamburger you won't subsequently, wellŠ never mind.) Unlike real content, like the stuff in a shipping container, these words have neither grams nor liters by which one might measure their value. Unlike gasoline, ten bucks worth of this stuff will get some people a lot further than others, depending on their interest and my eloquence, neither of which can be quantified.
+
+It's this simple: the new meaning of the word "content," is plain wrong. In fact, it is intentionally wrong. It's a usage that only arose when the institutions that had fattened on their ability to bottle and distribute the genius of human expression began to realize that their containers were melting away, along with their reason to be in business. They started calling it content at exactly the time it ceased to be. Previously they had sold books and records and films, all nouns to be sure. They didn't know what to call the mysterious ghosts of thought that were attached to them.
+
+Thus, when not applied to something you can put in a bucket (of whatever size), "content" actually represents a plot to make you think that meaning is a thing. It isn't. The only reason they want you to think that it is because they know how to own things, how to give them a value based on weight or quantity, and, more to the point, how to make them artificially scarce in order to increase their value.
+
+That, and the fact that after a good 25 years of advance warning, they still haven't done much about the Economy of Ideas besides trying to stop it from happening.
+
+As I get older, I become less and less interested in saying "I told you so." But in this case, I find it hard to resist. Back during the Internet equivalent of the Pleistocene. I wrote a piece for an ancestor of Wired magazine called Wired magazine that was titled, variously, "The Economy of Ideas" or "Wine without Bottles." In this essay, I argued that it would be deucedly difficult to continue to apply the Adam Smithian economic principles regarding the relationship between scarcity and value to any products that could be reproduced and distributed infinitely at zero cost.
+
+I proposed, moreover, that, to the extent that anything might be scarce in such an economy, it would be attention, and that invisibility would be a bad strategy for increasing attention. That, in other words, familiarity might convey more value to information that scarcity would.
+
+I did my best to tell the folks in what is now called "The Content Industry" - the institutions that once arose for the useful purpose of conveying creative expression from one mind to many - that this would be a good time to change their economic model. I proposed that copyright had worked largely because it had been difficult, as a practical matter, to make a book or a record or motion picture film spool.
+
+It was my theory that as soon as all human expression could be reduced into ones and zeros, people would begin to realize what this "stuff" really was and come up with an economic paradigm for rewarding its sources that didn't seem as futile as claiming to own the wind. Organizations would adapt. The law would change. The notion of "intellectual property," itself only about 35 years old, would be chucked immediately onto the magnificent ash-heap of Civilization's idiotic experiments.
+
+Of course, as we now know, I was wrong. Really wrong.
+
+As is my almost pathological inclination, I extended them too much credit. I imputed to institutions the same capacities for adaptability and recognition of the obvious that I assume for humans. But institutions, having the legal system a fundamental part of their genetic code, are not so readily ductile.
+
+This is particularly true in America, where some combination of certainty and control is the actual "deity" before whose altar we worship, and where we have a regular practice of spawning large and inhuman collective organisms that are a kind of meta-parasite. These critters - let's call them publicly-held corporations - may be made out of humans, but they are not human. Given human folly, that characteristic might be semi-ok if they were actually as cold-bloodedly expedient as I once fancied them - yielding only to the will of the markets and the raw self-interest of their shareholders. But no. They are also symbiotically subject to the "religious beliefs" of those humans who feed in their upper elevations.
+
+Unfortunately, the guys (and they mostly are guys) who've been running The Content Industry since it started to die share something like a doctrinal fundamentalism that has led them to such beliefs as the conviction that there's no difference between listening to a song and shop-lifting a toaster.
+
+Moreover, they dwell in such a sublime state of denial that they think they are stewarding the creative process as it arises in the creative humans they exploit savagely - knowing, as they do, that a creative human would rather be heard than paid - and that they, a bunch of sated old scoundrels nearing retirement would be able to find technological means for wrapping "containers" around "their" "content" that the adolescent electronic Hezbollah they've inspired by suing their own customers will neither be smart nor motivated enough to shred whatever pathetic digital bottles their lackeys design.
+
+And so it has been for the last 13 years. The companies that claim the ability to regulate humanity's Right to Know have been tireless in their endeavors to prevent the inevitable. The won most of the legislative battles in the U.S. and abroad, having purchased all the government money could buy. They even won most of the contests in court. They created digital rights management software schemes that behaved rather like computer viruses.
+
+Indeed, they did about everything they could short of seriously examining the actual economics of the situation - it has never been proven to me that illegal downloads are more like shoplifted goods than viral marketing - or trying to come up with a business model that the market might embrace.
+
+Had it been left to the stewardship of the usual suspects, there would scarcely be a word or a note online that you didn't have to pay to experience. There would be increasingly little free speech or any consequence, since free speech is not something anyone can own.
+
+Fortunately there were countervailing forces of all sorts, beginning with the wise folks who designed the Internet in the first place. Then there was something called the Electronic Frontier Foundation which I co-founded, along with Mitch Kapor and John Gilmore, back in 1990. Dedicated to the free exchange of useful information in cyberspace, it seemed at times that I had been right in suggesting then that practically every institution of the Industrial Period would try to crush, or at least own, the Internet. That's a lot of lawyers to have stacked against your cause.
+
+But we had Cory Doctorow.
+
+Had nature not provided us with a Cory Doctorow when we needed one, it would have been necessary for us to invent a time machine and go into the future to fetch another like him. That would be about the only place I can imagine finding such a creature. Cory, as you will learn from his various rants "contained" herein was perfectly suited to the task of subduing the dinosaurs of content.
+
+He's a little like the guerilla plumber Tuttle in the movie Brazil. Armed with a utility belt of improbable gizmos, a wildly over-clocked mind, a keyboard he uses like a verbal machine gun, and, best of all, a dark sense of humor, he'd go forth against massive industrial forces and return grinning, if a little beat up.
+
+Indeed, many of the essays collected under this dubious title are not only memoirs of his various campaigns but are themselves the very weapons he used in them. Fortunately, he has spared you some of the more sophisticated utilities he employed. He is not battering you with the nerdy technolingo he commands when stacked up against various minutiacrats, but I assure you that he can speak geek with people who, unlike Cory, think they're being pretty social when they're staring at the other person's shoes.
+
+This was a necessary ability. One of the problems that EFF has to contend with is that even though most of our yet-unborn constituency would agree heartily with our central mission - giving everybody everywhere the right to both address and hear everybody everywhere else - the decisions that will determine the eventual viability of that right are being made now and generally in gatherings invisible to the general public, using terminology, whether technical or legal, that would be the verbal equivalent of chloroform to anyone not conversant with such arcana.
+
+I've often repeated my belief that the first responsibility of a human being is to be a better ancestor. Thus, it seems fitting that the appearance of this book, which details much of Cory's time with the EFF, coincides with the appearance of his first-born child, about whom he is a shameless sentimental gusher.
+
+I would like to think that by the time this newest prodigy, Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow - you see what I mean about paternal enthusiasm - has reached Cory's age of truly advanced adolescence, the world will have recognized that there are better ways to regulate the economy of mind than pretending that its products are something like pig iron. But even if it hasn't, I am certain that the global human discourse will be less encumbered than it would have been had not Cory Doctorow blessed our current little chunk of space/time with his fierce endeavors.
+
+And whatever it is that might be "contained" in the following.
+
+$$$$
+
+1~ Microsoft Research DRM Talk
+
+(This talk was originally given to Microsoft's Research Group and other interested parties from within the company at their Redmond offices on June 17, 2004.) ~#
+
+Greetings fellow pirates! Arrrrr!
+
+I'm here today to talk to you about copyright, technology and DRM, I work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation on copyright stuff (mostly), and I live in London. I'm not a lawyer -- I'm a kind of mouthpiece/activist type, though occasionally they shave me and stuff me into my Bar Mitzvah suit and send me to a standards body or the UN to stir up trouble. I spend about three weeks a month on the road doing completely weird stuff like going to Microsoft to talk about DRM.
+
+I lead a double life: I'm also a science fiction writer. That means I've got a dog in this fight, because I've been dreaming of making my living from writing since I was 12 years old. Admittedly, my IP-based biz isn't as big as yours, but I guarantee you that it's every bit as important to me as yours is to you.
+
+Here's what I'm here to convince you of:
+
+1. That DRM systems don't work
+
+2. That DRM systems are bad for society
+
+3. That DRM systems are bad for business
+
+4. That DRM systems are bad for artists
+
+5. That DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT
+
+It's a big brief, this talk. Microsoft has sunk a lot of capital into DRM systems, and spent a lot of time sending folks like Martha and Brian and Peter around to various smoke-filled rooms to make sure that Microsoft DRM finds a hospitable home in the future world. Companies like Microsoft steer like old Buicks, and this issue has a lot of forward momentum that will be hard to soak up without driving the engine block back into the driver's compartment. At best I think that Microsoft might convert some of that momentum on DRM into angular momentum, and in so doing, save all our asses.
+
+Let's dive into it.
+
+--
+
+2~x- 1. DRM systems don't work
+
+This bit breaks down into two parts:
+
+1. A quick refresher course in crypto theory
+
+2. Applying that to DRM
+
+Cryptography -- secret writing -- is the practice of keeping secrets. It involves three parties: a sender, a receiver and an attacker (actually, there can be more attackers, senders and recipients, but let's keep this simple). We usually call these people Alice, Bob and Carol.
+
+Let's say we're in the days of the Caesar, the Gallic War. You need to send messages back and forth to your generals, and you'd prefer that the enemy doesn't get hold of them. You can rely on the idea that anyone who intercepts your message is probably illiterate, but that's a tough bet to stake your empire on. You can put your messages into the hands of reliable messengers who'll chew them up and swallow them if captured -- but that doesn't help you if Brad Pitt and his men in skirts skewer him with an arrow before he knows what's hit him.
+
+So you encipher your message with something like ROT-13, where every character is rotated halfway through the alphabet. They used to do this with non-worksafe material on Usenet, back when anyone on Usenet cared about work-safe-ness -- A would become N, B is O, C is P, and so forth. To decipher, you just add 13 more, so N goes to A, O to B yadda yadda.
+
+Well, this is pretty lame: as soon as anyone figures out your algorithm, your secret is g0nez0red.
+
+So if you're Caesar, you spend a lot of time worrying about keeping the existence of your messengers and their payloads secret. Get that? You're Augustus and you need to send a message to Brad without Caceous (a word I'm reliably informed means "cheese-like, or pertaining to cheese") getting his hands on it. You give the message to Diatomaceous, the fleetest runner in the empire, and you encipher it with ROT-13 and send him out of the garrison in the pitchest hour of the night, making sure no one knows that you've sent it out. Caceous has spies everywhere, in the garrison and staked out on the road, and if one of them puts an arrow through Diatomaceous, they'll have their hands on the message, and then if they figure out the cipher, you're b0rked. So the existence of the message is a secret. The cipher is a secret. The ciphertext is a secret. That's a lot of secrets, and the more secrets you've got, the less secure you are, especially if any of those secrets are shared. Shared secrets aren't really all that secret any longer.
+
+Time passes, stuff happens, and then Tesla invents the radio and Marconi takes credit for it. This is both good news and bad news for crypto: on the one hand, your messages can get to anywhere with a receiver and an antenna, which is great for the brave fifth columnists working behind the enemy lines. On the other hand, anyone with an antenna can listen in on the message, which means that it's no longer practical to keep the existence of the message a secret. Any time Adolf sends a message to Berlin, he can assume Churchill overhears it.
+
+Which is OK, because now we have computers -- big, bulky primitive mechanical computers, but computers still. Computers are machines for rearranging numbers, and so scientists on both sides engage in a fiendish competition to invent the most cleverest method they can for rearranging numerically represented text so that the other side can't unscramble it. The existence of the message isn't a secret anymore, but the cipher is.
+
+But this is still too many secrets. If Bobby intercepts one of Adolf's Enigma machines, he can give Churchill all kinds of intelligence. I mean, this was good news for Churchill and us, but bad news for Adolf. And at the end of the day, it's bad news for anyone who wants to keep a secret.
+
+Enter keys: a cipher that uses a key is still more secure. Even if the cipher is disclosed, even if the ciphertext is intercepted, without the key (or a break), the message is secret. Post-war, this is doubly important as we begin to realize what I think of as Schneier's Law: "any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can't think of how to break it." This means that the only experimental methodology for discovering if you've made mistakes in your cipher is to tell all the smart people you can about it and ask them to think of ways to break it. Without this critical step, you'll eventually end up living in a fool's paradise, where your attacker has broken your cipher ages ago and is quietly decrypting all her intercepts of your messages, snickering at you.
+
+Best of all, there's only one secret: the key. And with dual-key crypto it becomes a lot easier for Alice and Bob to keep their keys secret from Carol, even if they've never met. So long as Alice and Bob can keep their keys secret, they can assume that Carol won't gain access to their cleartext messages, even though she has access to the cipher and the ciphertext. Conveniently enough, the keys are the shortest and simplest of the secrets, too: hence even easier to keep away from Carol. Hooray for Bob and Alice.
+
+Now, let's apply this to DRM.
+
+In DRM, the attacker is *{also the recipient}*. It's not Alice and Bob and Carol, it's just Alice and Bob. Alice sells Bob a DVD. She sells Bob a DVD player. The DVD has a movie on it -- say, Pirates of the Caribbean -- and it's enciphered with an algorithm called CSS -- Content Scrambling System. The DVD player has a CSS un-scrambler.
+
+Now, let's take stock of what's a secret here: the cipher is well-known. The ciphertext is most assuredly in enemy hands, arrr. So what? As long as the key is secret from the attacker, we're golden.
+
+But there's the rub. Alice wants Bob to buy Pirates of the Caribbean from her. Bob will only buy Pirates of the Caribbean if he can descramble the CSS-encrypted VOB -- video object -- on his DVD player. Otherwise, the disc is only useful to Bob as a drinks-coaster. So Alice has to provide Bob -- the attacker -- with the key, the cipher and the ciphertext.
+
+Hilarity ensues.
+
+DRM systems are usually broken in minutes, sometimes days. Rarely, months. It's not because the people who think them up are stupid. It's not because the people who break them are smart. It's not because there's a flaw in the algorithms. At the end of the day, all DRM systems share a common vulnerability: they provide their attackers with ciphertext, the cipher and the key. At this point, the secret isn't a secret anymore.
+
+--
+
+2~x- 2. DRM systems are bad for society
+
+Raise your hand if you're thinking something like, "But DRM doesn't have to be proof against smart attackers, only average individuals! It's like a speedbump!"
+
+Put your hand down.
+
+This is a fallacy for two reasons: one technical, and one social. They're both bad for society, though.
+
+Here's the technical reason: I don't need to be a cracker to break your DRM. I only need to know how to search Google, or Kazaa, or any of the other general-purpose search tools for the cleartext that someone smarter than me has extracted.
+
+Raise your hand if you're thinking something like, "But NGSCB can solve this problem: we'll lock the secrets up on the logic board and goop it all up with epoxy."
+
+Put your hand down.
+
+Raise your hand if you're a co-author of the Darknet paper.
+
+Everyone in the first group, meet the co-authors of the Darknet paper. This is a paper that says, among other things, that DRM will fail for this very reason. Put your hands down, guys.
+
+Here's the social reason that DRM fails: keeping an honest user honest is like keeping a tall user tall. DRM vendors tell us that their technology is meant to be proof against average users, not organized criminal gangs like the Ukrainian pirates who stamp out millions of high-quality counterfeits. It's not meant to be proof against sophisticated college kids. It's not meant to be proof against anyone who knows how to edit her registry, or hold down the shift key at the right moment, or use a search engine. At the end of the day, the user DRM is meant to defend against is the most unsophisticated and least capable among us.
+
+Here's a true story about a user I know who was stopped by DRM. She's smart, college educated, and knows nothing about electronics. She has three kids. She has a DVD in the living room and an old VHS deck in the kids' playroom. One day, she brought home the Toy Story DVD for the kids. That's a substantial investment, and given the generally jam-smeared character of everything the kids get their paws on, she decided to tape the DVD off to VHS and give that to the kids -- that way she could make a fresh VHS copy when the first one went south. She cabled her DVD into her VHS and pressed play on the DVD and record on the VCR and waited.
+
+Before I go farther, I want us all to stop a moment and marvel at this. Here is someone who is practically technophobic, but who was able to construct a mental model of sufficient accuracy that she figured out that she could connect her cables in the right order and dub her digital disc off to analog tape. I imagine that everyone in this room is the front-line tech support for someone in her or his family: wouldn't it be great if all our non-geek friends and relatives were this clever and imaginative?
+
+I also want to point out that this is the proverbial honest user. She's not making a copy for the next door neighbors. She's not making a copy and selling it on a blanket on Canal Street. She's not ripping it to her hard-drive, DivX encoding it and putting it in her Kazaa sharepoint. She's doing something *{honest}* -- moving it from one format to another. She's home taping.
+
+Except she fails. There's a DRM system called Macrovision embedded -- by law -- in every VHS that messes with the vertical blanking interval in the signal and causes any tape made in this fashion to fail. Macrovision can be defeated for about $10 with a gadget readily available on eBay. But our infringer doesn't know that. She's "honest." Technically unsophisticated. Not stupid, mind you -- just naive.
+
+The Darknet paper addresses this possibility: it even predicts what this person will do in the long run: she'll find out about Kazaa and the next time she wants to get a movie for the kids, she'll download it from the net and burn it for them.
+
+In order to delay that day for as long as possible, our lawmakers and big rightsholder interests have come up with a disastrous policy called anticircumvention.
+
+Here's how anticircumvention works: if you put a lock -- an access control -- around a copyrighted work, it is illegal to break that lock. It's illegal to make a tool that breaks that lock. It's illegal to tell someone how to make that tool. One court even held it illegal to tell someone where she can find out how to make that tool.
+
+Remember Schneier's Law? Anyone can come up with a security system so clever that he can't see its flaws. The only way to find the flaws in security is to disclose the system's workings and invite public feedback. But now we live in a world where any cipher used to fence off a copyrighted work is off-limits to that kind of feedback. That's something that a Princeton engineering prof named Ed Felten and his team discovered when he submitted a paper to an academic conference on the failings in the Secure Digital Music Initiative, a watermarking scheme proposed by the recording industry. The RIAA responded by threatening to sue his ass if he tried it. We fought them because Ed is the kind of client that impact litigators love: unimpeachable and clean-cut and the RIAA folded. Lucky Ed. Maybe the next guy isn't so lucky.
+
+Matter of fact, the next guy wasn't. Dmitry Sklyarov is a Russian programmer who gave a talk at a hacker con in Vegas on the failings in Adobe's e-book locks. The FBI threw him in the slam for 30 days. He copped a plea, went home to Russia, and the Russian equivalent of the State Department issued a blanket warning to its researchers to stay away from American conferences, since we'd apparently turned into the kind of country where certain equations are illegal.
+
+Anticircumvention is a powerful tool for people who want to exclude competitors. If you claim that your car engine firmware is a "copyrighted work," you can sue anyone who makes a tool for interfacing with it. That's not just bad news for mechanics -- think of the hotrodders who want to chip their cars to tweak the performance settings. We have companies like Lexmark claiming that their printer cartridges contain copyrighted works -- software that trips an "I am empty" flag when the toner runs out, and have sued a competitor who made a remanufactured cartridge that reset the flag. Even garage-door opener companies have gotten in on the act, claiming that their receivers' firmware are copyrighted works. Copyrighted cars, print carts and garage-door openers: what's next, copyrighted light-fixtures?
+
+Even in the context of legitimate -- excuse me, "traditional" -- copyrighted works like movies on DVDs, anticircumvention is bad news. Copyright is a delicate balance. It gives creators and their assignees some rights, but it also reserves some rights to the public. For example, an author has no right to prohibit anyone from transcoding his books into assistive formats for the blind. More importantly, though, a creator has a very limited say over what you can do once you lawfully acquire her works. If I buy your book, your painting, or your DVD, it belongs to me. It's my property. Not my "intellectual property" -- a whacky kind of pseudo-property that's swiss-cheesed with exceptions, easements and limitations -- but real, no-fooling, actual tangible *{property}* -- the kind of thing that courts have been managing through property law for centuries.
+
+But anticirumvention lets rightsholders invent new and exciting copyrights for themselves -- to write private laws without accountability or deliberation -- that expropriate your interest in your physical property to their favor. Region-coded DVDs are an example of this: there's no copyright here or in anywhere I know of that says that an author should be able to control where you enjoy her creative works, once you've paid for them. I can buy a book and throw it in my bag and take it anywhere from Toronto to Timbuktu, and read it wherever I am: I can even buy books in America and bring them to the UK, where the author may have an exclusive distribution deal with a local publisher who sells them for double the US shelf-price. When I'm done with it, I can sell it on or give it away in the UK. Copyright lawyers call this "First Sale," but it may be simpler to think of it as "Capitalism."
+
+The keys to decrypt a DVD are controlled by an org called DVD-CCA, and they have a bunch of licensing requirements for anyone who gets a key from them. Among these is something called region-coding: if you buy a DVD in France, it'll have a flag set that says, "I am a European DVD." Bring that DVD to America and your DVD player will compare the flag to its list of permitted regions, and if they don't match, it will tell you that it's not allowed to play your disc.
+
+Remember: there is no copyright that says that an author gets to do this. When we wrote the copyright statutes and granted authors the right to control display, performance, duplication, derivative works, and so forth, we didn't leave out "geography" by accident. That was on-purpose.
+
+So when your French DVD won't play in America, that's not because it'd be illegal to do so: it's because the studios have invented a business-model and then invented a copyright law to prop it up. The DVD is your property and so is the DVD player, but if you break the region-coding on your disc, you're going to run afoul of anticircumvention.
+
+That's what happened to Jon Johansen, a Norwegian teenager who wanted to watch French DVDs on his Norwegian DVD player. He and some pals wrote some code to break the CSS so that he could do so. He's a wanted man here in America; in Norway the studios put the local fuzz up to bringing him up on charges of *{unlawfully trespassing upon a computer system}*. When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
+
+His no-fooling, real and physical property has been expropriated by the weird, notional, metaphorical intellectual property on his DVD: DRM only works if your record player becomes the property of whomever's records you're playing.
+
+--
+
+2~x- 3. DRM systems are bad for biz
+
+This is the worst of all the ideas embodied by DRM: that people who make record-players should be able to spec whose records you can listen to, and that people who make records should have a veto over the design of record-players.
+
+We've never had this principle: in fact, we've always had just the reverse. Think about all the things that can be plugged into a parallel or serial interface, which were never envisioned by their inventors. Our strong economy and rapid innovation are byproducts of the ability of anyone to make anything that plugs into anything else: from the Flo-bee electric razor that snaps onto the end of your vacuum-hose to the octopus spilling out of your car's dashboard lighter socket, standard interfaces that anyone can build for are what makes billionaires out of nerds.
+
+The courts affirm this again and again. It used to be illegal to plug anything that didn't come from AT&T into your phone-jack. They claimed that this was for the safety of the network, but really it was about propping up this little penny-ante racket that AT&T had in charging you a rental fee for your phone until you'd paid for it a thousand times over.
+
+When that ban was struck down, it created the market for third-party phone equipment, from talking novelty phones to answering machines to cordless handsets to headsets -- billions of dollars of economic activity that had been suppressed by the closed interface. Note that AT&T was one of the big beneficiaries of this: they *{also}* got into the business of making phone-kit.
+
+DRM is the software equivalent of these closed hardware interfaces. Robert Scoble is a Softie who has an excellent blog, where he wrote an essay about the best way to protect your investment in the digital music you buy. Should you buy Apple iTunes music, or Microsoft DRM music? Scoble argued that Microsoft's music was a sounder investment, because Microsoft would have more downstream licensees for its proprietary format and therefore you'd have a richer ecosystem of devices to choose from when you were shopping for gizmos to play your virtual records on.
+
+What a weird idea: that we should evaluate our record-purchases on the basis of which recording company will allow the greatest diversity of record-players to play its discs! That's like telling someone to buy the Betamax instead of the Edison Kinetoscope because Thomas Edison is a crank about licensing his patents; all the while ignoring the world's relentless march to the more open VHS format.
+
+It's a bad business. DVD is a format where the guy who makes the records gets to design the record players. Ask yourself: how much innovation has there been over the past decade of DVD players? They've gotten cheaper and smaller, but where are the weird and amazing new markets for DVD that were opened up by the VCR? There's a company that's manufacturing the world's first HDD-based DVD jukebox, a thing that holds 100 movies, and they're charging *{$27,000}* for this thing. We're talking about a few thousand dollars' worth of components -- all that other cost is the cost of anticompetition.
+
+--
+
+2~x- 4. DRM systems are bad for artists
+
+But what of the artist? The hardworking filmmaker, the ink-stained scribbler, the heroin-cured leathery rock-star? We poor slobs of the creative class are everyone's favorite poster-children here: the RIAA and MPAA hold us up and say, "Won't someone please think of the children?" File-sharers say, "Yeah, we're thinking about the artists, but the labels are The Man, who cares what happens to you?"
+
+To understand what DRM does to artists, you need to understand how copyright and technology interact. Copyright is inherently technological, since the things it addresses -- copying, transmitting, and so on -- are inherently technological.
+
+The piano roll was the first system for cheaply copying music. It was invented at a time when the dominant form of entertainment in America was getting a talented pianist to come into your living room and pound out some tunes while you sang along. The music industry consisted mostly of sheet-music publishers.
+
+The player piano was a digital recording and playback system. Piano-roll companies bought sheet music and ripped the notes printed on it into 0s and 1s on a long roll of computer tape, which they sold by the thousands -- the hundreds of thousands -- the millions. They did this without a penny's compensation to the publishers. They were digital music pirates. Arrrr!
+
+Predictably, the composers and music publishers went nutso. Sousa showed up in Congress to say that:
+
+group{
+
+  These talking machines are going to ruin the
+  artistic development of music in this
+  country. When I was a boy...in front of every
+  house in the summer evenings, you would find
+  young people together singing the songs of
+  the day or old songs. Today you hear these
+  infernal machines going night and day. We
+  will not have a vocal chord left. The vocal
+  chord will be eliminated by a process of
+  evolution, as was the tail of man when he
+  came from the ape.
+
+}group
+
+The publishers asked Congress to ban the piano roll and to create a law that said that any new system for reproducing music should be subject to a veto from their industry association. Lucky for us, Congress realized what side of their bread had butter on it and decided not to criminalize the dominant form of entertainment in America.
+
+But there was the problem of paying artists. The Constitution sets out the purpose of American copyright: to promote the useful arts and sciences. The composers had a credible story that they'd do less composing if they weren't paid for it, so Congress needed a fix. Here's what they came up with: anyone who paid a music publisher two cents would have the right to make one piano roll of any song that publisher published. The publisher couldn't say no, and no one had to hire a lawyer at $200 an hour to argue about whether the payment should be two cents or a nickel.
+
+This compulsory license is still in place today: when Joe Cocker sings "With a Little Help from My Friends," he pays a fixed fee to the Beatles' publisher and away he goes -- even if Ringo hates the idea. If you ever wondered how Sid Vicious talked Anka into letting him get a crack at "My Way," well, now you know.
+
+That compulsory license created a world where a thousand times more money was made by a thousand times more creators who made a thousand times more music that reached a thousand times more people.
+
+This story repeats itself throughout the technological century, every ten or fifteen years. Radio was enabled by a voluntary blanket license -- the music companies got together and asked for a consent decree so that they could offer all their music for a flat fee. Cable TV took a compulsory: the only way cable operators could get their hands on broadcasts was to pirate them and shove them down the wire, and Congress saw fit to legalize this practice rather than screw around with their constituents' TVs.
+
+Sometimes, the courts and Congress decided to simply take away a copyright -- that's what happened with the VCR. When Sony brought out the VCR in 1976, the studios had already decided what the experience of watching a movie in your living room would look like: they'd licensed out their programming for use on a machine called a Discovision, which played big LP-sized discs that were read-only. Proto-DRM.
+
+The copyright scholars of the day didn't give the VCR very good odds. Sony argued that their box allowed for a fair use, which is defined as a use that a court rules is a defense against infringement based on four factors: whether the use transforms the work into something new, like a collage; whether it uses all or some of the work; whether the work is artistic or mainly factual; and whether the use undercuts the creator's business-model.
+
+The Betamax failed on all four fronts: when you time-shifted or duplicated a Hollywood movie off the air, you made a non-transformative use of 100 percent of a creative work in a way that directly undercut the Discovision licensing stream.
+
+Jack Valenti, the mouthpiece for the motion-picture industry, told Congress in 1982 that the VCR was to the American film industry "as the Boston Strangler is to a woman home alone."
+
+But the Supreme Court ruled against Hollywood in 1984, when it determined that any device capable of a substantial non-infringing use was legal. In other words, "We don't buy this Boston Strangler business: if your business model can't survive the emergence of this general-purpose tool, it's time to get another business-model or go broke."
+
+Hollywood found another business model, as the broadcasters had, as the Vaudeville artists had, as the music publishers had, and they made more art that paid more artists and reached a wider audience.
+
+There's one thing that every new art business-model had in common: it embraced the medium it lived in.
+
+This is the overweening characteristic of every single successful new medium: it is true to itself. The Luther Bible didn't succeed on the axes that made a hand-copied monk Bible valuable: they were ugly, they weren't in Church Latin, they weren't read aloud by someone who could interpret it for his lay audience, they didn't represent years of devoted-with-a-capital-D labor by someone who had given his life over to God. The thing that made the Luther Bible a success was its scalability: it was more popular because it was more proliferate: all success factors for a new medium pale beside its profligacy. The most successful organisms on earth are those that reproduce the most: bugs and bacteria, nematodes and virii. Reproduction is the best of all survival strategies.
+
+Piano rolls didn't sound as good as the music of a skilled pianist: but they *{scaled better}*. Radio lacked the social elements of live performance, but more people could build a crystal set and get it aimed correctly than could pack into even the largest Vaudeville house. MP3s don't come with liner notes, they aren't sold to you by a hipper-than-thou record store clerk who can help you make your choice, bad rips and truncated files abound: I once downloaded a twelve-second copy of "Hey Jude" from the original Napster. Yet MP3 is outcompeting the CD. I don't know what to do with CDs anymore: I get them, and they're like the especially nice garment bag they give you at the fancy suit shop: it's nice and you feel like a goof for throwing it out, but Christ, how many of these things can you usefully own? I can put ten thousand songs on my laptop, but a comparable pile of discs, with liner notes and so forth -- that's a liability: it's a piece of my monthly storage-locker costs.
+
+Here are the two most important things to know about computers and the Internet:
+
+1. A computer is a machine for rearranging bits
+
+2. The Internet is a machine for moving bits from one place to another very cheaply and quickly
+
+Any new medium that takes hold on the Internet and with computers will embrace these two facts, not regret them. A newspaper press is a machine for spitting out cheap and smeary newsprint at speed: if you try to make it output fine art lithos, you'll get junk. If you try to make it output newspapers, you'll get the basis for a free society.
+
+And so it is with the Internet. At the heyday of Napster, record execs used to show up at conferences and tell everyone that Napster was doomed because no one wanted lossily compressed MP3s with no liner notes and truncated files and misspelled metadata.
+
+Today we hear ebook publishers tell each other and anyone who'll listen that the barrier to ebooks is screen resolution. It's bollocks, and so is the whole sermonette about how nice a book looks on your bookcase and how nice it smells and how easy it is to slip into the tub. These are obvious and untrue things, like the idea that radio will catch on once they figure out how to sell you hotdogs during the intermission, or that movies will really hit their stride when we can figure out how to bring the actors out for an encore when the film's run out. Or that what the Protestant Reformation really needs is Luther Bibles with facsimile illumination in the margin and a rent-a-priest to read aloud from your personal Word of God.
+
+New media don't succeed because they're like the old media, only better: they succeed because they're worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at. Books are good at being paperwhite, high-resolution, low-infrastructure, cheap and disposable. Ebooks are good at being everywhere in the world at the same time for free in a form that is so malleable that you can just pastebomb it into your IM session or turn it into a page-a-day mailing list.
+
+The only really successful epublishing -- I mean, hundreds of thousands, millions of copies distributed and read -- is the bookwarez scene, where scanned-and-OCR'd books are distributed on the darknet. The only legit publishers with any success at epublishing are the ones whose books cross the Internet without technological fetter: publishers like Baen Books and my own, Tor, who are making some or all of their catalogs available in ASCII and HTML and PDF.
+
+The hardware-dependent ebooks, the DRM use-and-copy-restricted ebooks, they're cratering. Sales measured in the tens, sometimes the hundreds. Science fiction is a niche business, but when you're selling copies by the ten, that's not even a business, it's a hobby.
+
+Every one of you has been riding a curve where you read more and more words off of more and more screens every day through most of your professional careers. It's zero-sum: you've also been reading fewer words off of fewer pages as time went by: the dinosauric executive who prints his email and dictates a reply to his secretary is info-roadkill.
+
+Today, at this very second, people read words off of screens for every hour that they can find. Your kids stare at their Game Boys until their eyes fall out. Euroteens ring doorbells with their hypertrophied, SMS-twitching thumbs instead of their index fingers.
+
+Paper books are the packaging that books come in. Cheap printer-binderies like the Internet Bookmobile that can produce a full bleed, four color, glossy cover, printed spine, perfect-bound book in ten minutes for a dollar are the future of paper books: when you need an instance of a paper book, you generate one, or part of one, and pitch it out when you're done. I landed at SEA-TAC on Monday and burned a couple CDs from my music collection to listen to in the rental car. When I drop the car off, I'll leave them behind. Who needs 'em?
+
+Whenever a new technology has disrupted copyright, we've changed copyright. Copyright isn't an ethical proposition, it's a utilitarian one. There's nothing *{moral}* about paying a composer tuppence for the piano-roll rights, there's nothing *{immoral}* about not paying Hollywood for the right to videotape a movie off your TV. They're just the best way of balancing out so that people's physical property rights in their VCRs and phonographs are respected and so that creators get enough of a dangling carrot to go on making shows and music and books and paintings.
+
+Technology that disrupts copyright does so because it simplifies and cheapens creation, reproduction and distribution. The existing copyright businesses exploit inefficiencies in the old production, reproduction and distribution system, and they'll be weakened by the new technology. But new technology always gives us more art with a wider reach: that's what tech is *{for}*.
+
+Tech gives us bigger pies that more artists can get a bite out of. That's been tacitly acknowledged at every stage of the copyfight since the piano roll. When copyright and technology collide, it's copyright that changes.
+
+Which means that today's copyright -- the thing that DRM nominally props up -- didn't come down off the mountain on two stone tablets. It was created in living memory to accommodate the technical reality created by the inventors of the previous generation. To abandon invention now robs tomorrow's artists of the new businesses and new reach and new audiences that the Internet and the PC can give them.
+
+--
+
+2~x- 5. DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT
+
+When Sony brought out the VCR, it made a record player that could play Hollywood's records, even if Hollywood didn't like the idea. The industries that grew up on the back of the VCR -- movie rentals, home taping, camcorders, even Bar Mitzvah videographers -- made billions for Sony and its cohort.
+
+That was good business -- even if Sony lost the Betamax-VHS format wars, the money on the world-with-VCRs table was enough to make up for it.
+
+But then Sony acquired a relatively tiny entertainment company and it started to massively screw up. When MP3 rolled around and Sony's walkman customers were clamoring for a solid-state MP3 player, Sony let its music business-unit run its show: instead of making a high-capacity MP3 walkman, Sony shipped its Music Clips, low-capacity devices that played brain-damaged DRM formats like Real and OpenMG. They spent good money engineering "features" into these devices that kept their customers from freely moving their music back and forth between their devices. Customers stayed away in droves.
+
+Today, Sony is dead in the water when it comes to walkmen. The market leaders are poky Singaporean outfits like Creative Labs -- the kind of company that Sony used to crush like a bug, back before it got borged by its entertainment unit -- and PC companies like Apple.
+
+That's because Sony shipped a product that there was no market demand for. No Sony customer woke up one morning and said, "Damn, I wish Sony would devote some expensive engineering effort in order that I may do less with my music." Presented with an alternative, Sony's customers enthusiastically jumped ship.
+
+The same thing happened to a lot of people I know who used to rip their CDs to WMA. You guys sold them software that produced smaller, better-sounding rips than the MP3 rippers, but you also fixed it so that the songs you ripped were device-locked to their PCs. What that meant is that when they backed up their music to another hard-drive and reinstalled their OS (something that the spyware and malware wars has made more common than ever), they discovered that after they restored their music that they could no longer play it. The player saw the new OS as a different machine, and locked them out of their own music.
+
+There is no market demand for this "feature." None of your customers want you to make expensive modifications to your products that make backing up and restoring even harder. And there is no moment when your customers will be less forgiving than the moment that they are recovering from catastrophic technology failures.
+
+I speak from experience. Because I buy a new Powerbook every ten months, and because I always order the new models the day they're announced, I get a lot of lemons from Apple. That means that I hit Apple's three-iTunes-authorized-computers limit pretty early on and found myself unable to play the hundreds of dollars' worth of iTunes songs I'd bought because one of my authorized machines was a lemon that Apple had broken up for parts, one was in the shop getting fixed by Apple, and one was my mom's computer, 3,000 miles away in Toronto.
+
+If I had been a less good customer for Apple's hardware, I would have been fine. If I had been a less enthusiastic evangelist for Apple's products -- if I hadn't shown my mom how iTunes Music Store worked -- I would have been fine. If I hadn't bought so much iTunes music that burning it to CD and re-ripping it and re-keying all my metadata was too daunting a task to consider, I would have been fine.
+
+As it was Apple rewarded my trust, evangelism and out-of-control spending by treating me like a crook and locking me out of my own music, at a time when my Powerbook was in the shop -- i.e., at a time when I was hardly disposed to feel charitable to Apple.
+
+I'm an edge case here, but I'm a *{leading edge}* case. If Apple succeeds in its business plans, it will only be a matter of time until even average customers have upgraded enough hardware and bought enough music to end up where I am.
+
+You know what I would totally buy? A record player that let me play everybody's records. Right now, the closest I can come to that is an open source app called VLC, but it's clunky and buggy and it didn't come pre-installed on my computer.
+
+Sony didn't make a Betamax that only played the movies that Hollywood was willing to permit -- Hollywood asked them to do it, they proposed an early, analog broadcast flag that VCRs could hunt for and respond to by disabling recording. Sony ignored them and made the product they thought their customers wanted.
+
+I'm a Microsoft customer. Like millions of other Microsoft customers, I want a player that plays anything I throw at it, and I think that you are just the company to give it to me.
+
+Yes, this would violate copyright law as it stands, but Microsoft has been making tools of piracy that change copyright law for decades now. Outlook, Exchange and MSN are tools that abet widescale digital infringement.
+
+More significantly, IIS and your caching proxies all make and serve copies of documents without their authors' consent, something that, if it is legal today, is only legal because companies like Microsoft went ahead and did it and dared lawmakers to prosecute.
+
+Microsoft stood up for its customers and for progress, and won so decisively that most people never even realized that there was a fight.
+
+Do it again! This is a company that looks the world's roughest, toughest anti-trust regulators in the eye and laughs. Compared to anti-trust people, copyright lawmakers are pantywaists. You can take them with your arm behind your back.
+
+In Siva Vaidhyanathan's book The Anarchist in the Library, he talks about why the studios are so blind to their customers' desires. It's because people like you and me spent the 80s and the 90s telling them bad science fiction stories about impossible DRM technology that would let them charge a small sum of money every time someone looked at a movie -- want to fast-forward? That feature costs another penny. Pausing is two cents an hour. The mute button will cost you a quarter.
+
+When Mako Analysis issued their report last month advising phone companies to stop supporting Symbian phones, they were just writing the latest installment in this story. Mako says that phones like my P900, which can play MP3s as ringtones, are bad for the cellphone economy, because it'll put the extortionate ringtone sellers out of business. What Mako is saying is that just because you bought the CD doesn't mean that you should expect to have the ability to listen to it on your MP3 player, and just because it plays on your MP3 player is no reason to expect it to run as a ringtone. I wonder how they feel about alarm clocks that will play a CD to wake you up in the morning? Is that strangling the nascent "alarm tone" market?
+
+The phone companies' customers want Symbian phones and for now, at least, the phone companies understand that if they don't sell them, someone else will.
+
+The market opportunity for a truly capable devices is enormous. There's a company out there charging *{$27,000}* for a DVD jukebox -- go and eat their lunch! Steve Jobs isn't going to do it: he's off at the D conference telling studio execs not to release hi-def movies until they're sure no one will make a hi-def DVD burner that works with a PC.
+
+Maybe they won't buy into his BS, but they're also not much interested in what you have to sell. At the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group meetings where the Broadcast Flag was hammered out, the studios' position was, "We'll take anyone's DRM except Microsoft's and Philips'." When I met with UK broadcast wonks about the European version of the Broadcast Flag underway at the Digital Video Broadcasters' forum, they told me, "Well, it's different in Europe: mostly they're worried that some American company like Microsoft will get their claws into European television."
+
+American film studios didn't want the Japanese electronics companies to get a piece of the movie pie, so they fought the VCR. Today, everyone who makes movies agrees that they don't want to let you guys get between them and their customers.
+
+Sony didn't get permission. Neither should you. Go build the record player that can play everyone's records.
+
+Because if you don't do it, someone else will.
+
+$$$$
+
+1~ The DRM Sausage Factory
+
+(Originally published as "A Behind-The-Scenes Look At How DRM Becomes Law," InformationWeek, July 11, 2007) ~#
+
+Otto von Bismarck quipped, "Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made." I've seen sausages made. I've seen laws made. Both pale in comparison to the process by which anti-copying technology agreements are made.
+
+This technology, usually called "Digital Rights Management" (DRM) proposes to make your computer worse at copying some of the files on its hard-drive or on other media. Since all computer operations involve copying, this is a daunting task -- as security expert Bruce Schneier has said, "Making bits harder to copy is like making water that's less wet."
+
+At root, DRMs are technologies that treat the owner of a computer or other device as an attacker, someone against whom the system must be armored. Like the electrical meter on the side of your house, a DRM is a technology that you possess, but that you are never supposed to be able to manipulate or modify. Unlike the your meter, though, a DRM that is defeated in one place is defeated in all places, nearly simultaneously. That is to say, once someone takes the DRM off a song or movie or ebook, that freed collection of bits can be sent to anyone else, anywhere the network reaches, in an eyeblink. DRM crackers need cunning: those who receive the fruits of their labor need only know how to download files from the Internet.
+
+Why manufacture a device that attacks its owner? A priori, one would assume that such a device would cost more to make than a friendlier one, and that customers would prefer not to buy devices that treat them as presumptive criminals. DRM technologies limit more than copying: they limit ranges of uses, such as viewing a movie in a different country, copying a song to a different manufacturer's player, or even pausing a movie for too long. Surely, this stuff hurts sales: who goes into a store and asks, "Do you have any music that's locked to just one company's player? I'm in the market for some lock-in."
+
+So why do manufacturers do it? As with many strange behaviors, there's a carrot at play here, and a stick.
+
+The carrot is the entertainment industries' promise of access to their copyrighted works. Add DRM to your iPhone and we'll supply music for it. Add DRM to your TiVo and we'll let you plug it into our satellite receivers. Add DRM to your Zune and we'll let you retail our music in your Zune store.
+
+The stick is the entertainment industries' threat of lawsuits for companies that don't comply. In the last century, entertainment companies fought over the creation of records, radios, jukeboxes, cable TV, VCRs, MP3 players and other technologies that made it possible to experience a copyrighted work in a new way without permission. There's one battle that serves as the archetype for the rest: the fight over the VCR.
+
+The film studios were outraged by Sony's creation of the VCR. They had found a DRM supplier they preferred, a company called Discovision that made non-recordable optical discs. Discovision was the only company authorized to play back movies in your living room. The only way to get a copyrighted work onto a VCR cassette was to record it off the TV, without permission. The studios argued that Sony -- whose Betamax was the canary in this legal coalmine -- was breaking the law by unjustly endangering their revenue from Discovision royalties. Sure, they *{could}* just sell pre-recorded Betamax tapes, but Betamax was a read-write medium: they could be *{copied}*. Moreover, your personal library of Betamax recordings of the Sunday night movie would eat into the market for Discovision discs: why would anyone buy a pre-recorded video cassette when they could amass all the video they needed with a home recorder and a set of rabbit-ears?
+
+The Supreme Court threw out these arguments in a 1984 5-4 decision, the "Betamax Decision." This decision held that the VCR was legal because it was "capable of sustaining a substantially non-infringing use." That means that if you make a technology that your customers *{can}* use legally, you're not on the hook for the illegal stuff they do.
+
+This principle guided the creation of virtually every piece of IT invented since: the Web, search engines, YouTube, Blogger, Skype, ICQ, AOL, MySpace... You name it, if it's possible to violate copyright with it, the thing that made it possible is the Betamax principle.
+
+Unfortunately, the Supremes shot the Betamax principle in the gut two years ago, with the Grokster decision. This decision says that a company can be found liable for its customers' bad acts if they can be shown to have "induced" copyright infringement. So, if your company advertises your product for an infringing use, or if it can be shown that you had infringement in mind at the design stage, you can be found liable for your customers' copying. The studios and record labels and broadcasters *{love}* this ruling, and they like to think that it's even broader than what the courts set out. For example, Viacom is suing Google for inducing copyright infringement by allowing YouTube users to flag some of their videos as private. Private videos can't be found by Viacom's copyright-enforcement bots, so Viacom says that privacy should be illegal, and that companies that give you the option of privacy should be sued for anything you do behind closed doors.
+
+The gutshot Betamax doctrine will bleed out all over the industry for decades (or until the courts or Congress restore it to health), providing a grisly reminder of what happens to companies that try to pour the entertainment companies' old wine into new digital bottles without permission. The tape-recorder was legal, but the digital tape-recorder is an inducement to infringement, and must be stopped.
+
+The promise of access to content and the threat of legal execution for non-compliance is enough to lure technology's biggest players to the DRM table.
+
+I started attending DRM meetings in March, 2002, on behalf of my former employers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. My first meeting was the one where Broadcast Flag was born. The Broadcast Flag was weird even by DRM standards. Broadcasters are required, by law, to deliver TV and radio without DRM, so that any standards-compliant receiver can receive them. The airwaves belong to the public, and are loaned to broadcasters who have to promise to serve the public interest in exchange. But the MPAA and the broadcasters wanted to add DRM to digital TV, and so they proposed that a law should be passed that would make all manufacturers promise to *{pretend}* that there was DRM on broadcast signals, receiving them and immediately squirreling them away in encrypted form.
+
+The Broadcast Flag was hammered out in a group called the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group (BPDG) a sub-group from the MPAA's "Content Protection Technology Working Group," which also included reps from all the big IT companies (Microsoft, Apple, Intel, and so on), consumer electronics companies (Panasonic, Philips, Zenith), cable companies, satellite companies, and anyone else who wanted to pay $100 to attend the "public" meetings, held every six weeks or so (you can attend these meetings yourself if you find yourself near LAX on one of the upcoming dates).
+
+CPTWG (pronounced Cee-Pee-Twig) is a venerable presence in the DRM world. It was at CPTWG that the DRM for DVDs was hammered out. CPTWG meetings open with a "benediction," delivered by a lawyer, who reminds everyone there that what they say might be quoted "on the front page of the New York Times," (though journalists are barred from attending CPTWG meetings and no minutes are published by the organization) and reminding all present not to do anything that would raise eyebrows at the FTC's anti-trust division (I could swear I've seen the Microsoft people giggling during this part, though that may have been my imagination).
+
+The first part of the meeting is usually taken up with administrative business and presentations from DRM vendors, who come out to promise that this time they've really, really figured out how to make computers worse at copying. The real meat comes after the lunch, when the group splits into a series of smaller meetings, many of them closed-door and private (the representatives of the organizations responsible for managing DRM on DVDs splinter off at this point).
+
+Then comes the working group meetings, like the BPDG. The BPDG was nominally set up to set up the rules for the Broadcast Flag. Under the Flag, manufacturers would be required to limit their "outputs and recording methods" to a set of "approved technologies." Naturally, every manufacturer in the room showed up with a technology to add to the list of approved technologies -- and the sneakier ones showed up with reasons why their competitors' technologies *{shouldn't}* be approved. If the Broadcast Flag became law, a spot on the "approved technologies" list would be a license to print money: everyone who built a next-gen digital TV would be required, by law, to buy only approved technologies for their gear.
+
+The CPTWG determined that there would be three "chairmen" of the meetings: a representative from the broadcasters, a representative from the studios, and a representative from the IT industry (note that no "consumer rights" chair was contemplated -- we proposed one and got laughed off the agenda). The IT chair was filled by an Intel representative, who seemed pleased that the MPAA chair, Fox Studios's Andy Setos, began the process by proposing that the approved technologies should include only two technologies, both of which Intel partially owned.
+
+Intel's presence on the committee was both reassurance and threat: reassurance because Intel signaled the fundamental reasonableness of the MPAA's requirements -- why would a company with a bigger turnover than the whole movie industry show up if the negotiations weren't worth having? Threat because Intel was poised to gain an advantage that might be denied to its competitors.
+
+We settled in for a long negotiation. The discussions were drawn out and heated. At regular intervals, the MPAA reps told us that we were wasting time -- if we didn't hurry things along, the world would move on and consumers would grow accustomed to un-crippled digital TVs. Moreover, Rep Billy Tauzin, the lawmaker who'd evidently promised to enact the Broadcast Flag into law, was growing impatient. The warnings were delivered in quackspeak, urgent and crackling, whenever the discussions dragged, like the crack of the commissars' pistols, urging us forward.
+
+You'd think that a "technology working group" would concern itself with technology, but there was precious little discussion of bits and bytes, ciphers and keys. Instead, we focused on what amounted to contractual terms: if your technology got approved as a DTV "output," what obligations would you have to assume? If a TiVo could serve as an "output" for a receiver, what outputs would the TiVo be allowed to have?
+
+The longer we sat there, the more snarled these contractual terms became: winning a coveted spot on the "approved technology" list would be quite a burden! Once you were in the club, there were all sorts of rules about whom you could associate with, how you had to comport yourself and so on.
+
+One of these rules of conduct was "robustness." As a condition of approval, manufacturers would have to harden their technologies so that their customers wouldn't be able to modify, improve upon, or even understand their workings. As you might imagine, the people who made open source TV tuners were not thrilled about this, as "open source" and "non-user-modifiable" are polar opposites.
+
+Another was "renewability:" the ability of the studios to revoke outputs that had been compromised in the field. The studios expected the manufacturers to make products with remote "kill switches" that could be used to shut down part or all of their device if someone, somewhere had figured out how to do something naughty with it. They promised that we'd establish criteria for renewability later, and that it would all be "fair."
+
+But we soldiered on. The MPAA had a gift for resolving the worst snarls: when shouting failed, they'd lead any recalcitrant player out of the room and negotiate in secret with them, leaving the rest of us to cool our heels. Once, they took the Microsoft team out of the room for *{six hours}*, then came back and announced that digital video would be allowed to output on non-DRM monitors at a greatly reduced resolution (this "feature" appears in Vista as "fuzzing").
+
+The further we went, the more nervous everyone became. We were headed for the real meat of the negotiations: the *{criteria}* by which approved technology would be evaluated: how many bits of crypto would you need? Which ciphers would be permissible? Which features would and wouldn't be allowed?
+
+Then the MPAA dropped the other shoe: the sole criteria for inclusion on the list would be the approval of one of its member-companies, or a quorum of broadcasters. In other words, the Broadcast Flag wouldn't be an "objective standard," describing the technical means by which video would be locked away -- it would be purely subjective, up to the whim of the studios. You could have the best product in the world, and they wouldn't approve it if your business-development guys hadn't bought enough drinks for their business-development guys at a CES party.
+
+To add insult to injury, the only technologies that the MPAA were willing to consider for initial inclusion as "approved" were the two that Intel was involved with. The Intel co-chairman had a hard time hiding his grin. He'd acted as Judas goat, luring in Apple, Microsoft, and the rest, to legitimize a process that would force them to license Intel's patents for every TV technology they shipped until the end of time.
+
+Why did the MPAA give Intel such a sweetheart deal? At the time, I figured that this was just straight quid pro quo, like Hannibal said to Clarice. But over the years, I started to see a larger pattern: Hollywood likes DRM consortia, and they hate individual DRM vendors. (I've written an entire article about this, but here's the gist: a single vendor who succeeds can name their price and terms -- think of Apple or Macrovision -- while a consortium is a more easily divided rabble, susceptible to co-option in order to produce ever-worsening technologies -- think of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD). Intel's technologies were held through two consortia, the 5C and 4C groups.
+
+The single-vendor manufacturers were livid at being locked out of the digital TV market. The final report of the consortium reflected this -- a few sheets written by the chairmen describing the "consensus" and hundreds of pages of angry invective from manufacturers and consumer groups decrying it as a sham.
+
+Tauzin washed his hands of the process: a canny, sleazy Hill operator, he had the political instincts to get his name off any proposal that could be shown to be a plot to break voters' televisions (Tauzin found a better industry to shill for, the pharmaceutical firms, who rewarded him with a $2,000,000/year job as chief of PHARMA, the pharmaceutical lobby).
+
+Even Representative Ernest "Fritz" Hollings ("The Senator from Disney," who once proposed a bill requiring entertainment industry oversight of all technologies capable of copying) backed away from proposing a bill that would turn the Broadcast Flag into law. Instead, Hollings sent a memo to Michael Powell, then-head of the FCC, telling him that the FCC already had jurisdiction to enact a Broadcast Flag regulation, without Congressional oversight.
+
+Powell's staff put Hollings's letter online, as they are required to do by federal sunshine laws. The memo arrived as a Microsoft Word file -- which EFF then downloaded and analyzed. Word stashes the identity of a document's author in the file metadata, which is how EFF discovered that the document had been written by a staffer at the MPAA.
+
+This was truly remarkable. Hollings was a powerful committee chairman, one who had taken immense sums of money from the industries he was supposed to be regulating. It's easy to be cynical about this kind of thing, but it's genuinely unforgivable: politicians draw a public salary to sit in public office and work for the public good. They're supposed to be working for us, not their donors.
+
+But we all know that this isn't true. Politicians are happy to give special favors to their pals in industry. However, the Hollings memo was beyond the pale. Staffers for the MPAA were writing Hollings's memos, memos that Hollings then signed and mailed off to the heads of major governmental agencies.
+
+The best part was that the legal eagles at the MPAA were wrong. The FCC took "Hollings's" advice and enacted a Broadcast Flag regulation that was almost identical to the proposal from the BPDG, turning themselves into America's "device czars," able to burden any digital technology with "robustness," "compliance" and "revocation rules." The rule lasted just long enough for the DC Circuit Court of Appeals to strike it down and slap the FCC for grabbing unprecedented jurisdiction over the devices in our living rooms.
+
+So ended the saga of the Broadcast Flag. More or less. In the years since the Flag was proposed, there have been several attempts to reintroduce it through legislation, all failed. And as more and more innovative, open devices like the Neuros OSD enter the market, it gets harder and harder to imagine that Americans will accept a mandate that takes away all that functionality.
+
+But the spirit of the Broadcast Flag lives on. DRM consortia are all the rage now -- outfits like AACS LA, the folks who control the DRM in Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, are thriving and making headlines by issuing fatwas against people who publish their secret integers. In Europe, a DRM consortium working under the auspices of the Digital Video Broadcasters Forum (DVB) has just shipped a proposed standard for digital TV DRM that makes the Broadcast Flag look like the work of patchouli-scented infohippies. The DVB proposal would give DRM consortium the ability to define what is and isn't a valid "household" for the purposes of sharing your video within your "household's devices." It limits how long you're allowed to pause a video for, and allows for restrictions to be put in place for hundreds of years, longer than any copyright system in the world would protect any work for.
+
+If all this stuff seems a little sneaky, underhanded and even illegal to you, you're not alone. When representatives of nearly all the world's entertainment, technology, broadcast, satellite and cable companies gather in a room to collude to cripple their offerings, limit their innovation, and restrict the market, regulators take notice.
+
+That's why the EU is taking a hard look at HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. These systems aren't designed: they're governed, and the governors are shadowy group of offshore giants who answer to no one -- not even their own members! I once called the DVD-Copy Control Association (DVD-CCA) on behalf of a Time-Warner magazine, Popular Science, for a comment about their DRM. Not only wouldn't they allow me to speak to a spokesman, the person who denied my request also refused to be identified.
+
+The sausage factory grinds away, but today, more activists than ever are finding ways to participate in the negotiations, slowing them up, making them account for themselves to the public. And so long as you, the technology-buying public, pay attention to what's going on, the activists will continue to hold back the tide.
+
+$$$$
+
+1~ Happy Meal Toys versus Copyright: How America chose Hollywood and Wal-Mart, and why it's doomed us, and how we might survive anyway
+
+(Originally published as "How Hollywood, Congress, And DRM Are Beating Up The American Economy," InformationWeek, June 11, 2007) ~#
+
+Back in 1985, the Senate was ready to clobber the music industry for exposing America's impressionable youngsters to sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. Today, the the Attorney General is proposing to give the RIAA legal tools to attack people who attempt infringement.
+
+Through most of America's history, the US government has been at odds with the entertainment giants, treating them as purveyors of filth. But not anymore: today, the US Trade Rep using America's political clout to force Russia to institute police inspections of its CD presses (savor the irony: post-Soviet Russia forgoes its hard-won freedom of the press to protect Disney and Universal!).
+
+How did entertainment go from trenchcoat pervert to top trade priority? I blame the "Information Economy."
+
+No one really knows what "Information Economy" means, but by the early 90s, we knew it was coming. America deployed her least reliable strategic resource to puzzle out what an "information economy" was and to figure out how to ensure America stayed atop the "new economy" -- America sent in the futurists.
+
+We make the future in much the same way as we make the past. We don't remember everything that happened to us, just selective details. We weave our memories together on demand, filling in any empty spaces with the present, which is lying around in great abundance. In Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard psych prof Daniel Gilbert describes an experiment in which people with delicious lunches in front of them are asked to remember their breakfast: overwhelmingly, the people with good lunches have more positive memories of breakfast than those who have bad lunches. We don't remember breakfast -- we look at lunch and superimpose it on breakfast.
+
+We make the future in the same way: we extrapolate as much as we can, and whenever we run out of imagination, we just shovel the present into the holes. That's why our pictures of the future always seem to resemble the present, only moreso.
+
+So the futurists told us about the Information Economy: they took all the "information-based" businesses (music, movies and microcode, in the neat coinage of Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash) and projected a future in which these would grow to dominate the world's economies.
+
+There was only one fly in the ointment: most of the world's economies consist of poor people who have more time than money, and if there's any lesson to learn from American college kids, it's that people with more time than money would rather copy information than pay for it.
+
+Of course they would! Why, when America was a-borning, she was a pirate nation, cheerfully copying the inventions of European authors and inventors. Why not? The fledgling revolutionary republic could copy without paying, keep the money on her shores, and enrich herself with the products and ideas of imperial Europe. Of course, once the US became a global hitter in the creative industries, out came the international copyright agreements: the US signed agreements to protect British authors in exchange for reciprocal agreements from the Brits to protect American authors.
+
+It's hard to see why a developing country would opt to export its GDP to a rich country when it could get the same benefit by mere copying. The US would have to sweeten the pot.
+
+The pot-sweetener is the elimination of international trade-barriers. Historically, the US has used tariffs to limit the import of manufactured goods from abroad, and to encourage the import of raw materials from abroad. Generally speaking, rich countries import poor countries' raw materials, process them into manufactured goods, and export them again. Globally speaking, if your country imports sugar and exports sugar cane, chances are you're poor. If your country imports wood and sells paper, chances are you're rich.
+
+In 1995, the US signed onto the World Trade Organization and its associated copyright and patent agreement, the TRIPS Agreement, and the American economy was transformed.
+
+Any fellow signatory to the WTO/TRIPS can export manufactured goods to the USA without any tariffs. If it costs you $5 to manufacture and ship a plastic bucket from your factory in Shenjin Province to the USA, you can sell it for $6 and turn a $1 profit. And if it costs an American manufacturer $10 to make the same bucket, the American manufacturer is out of luck.
+
+The kicker is this: if you want to export your finished goods to America, you have to sign up to protect American copyrights in your own country. Quid pro quo.
+
+The practical upshot, 12 years later, is that most American manufacturing has gone belly up, Wal-Mart is filled with Happy Meal toys and other cheaply manufactured plastic goods, and the whole world has signed onto US copyright laws.
+
+But signing onto those laws doesn't mean you'll enforce them. Sure, where a country is really over a barrel (cough, Russia, cough), they'll take the occasional pro forma step to enforce US copyrights, no matter how ridiculous and totalitarian it makes them appear. But with the monthly Russian per-capita GDP hovering at $200, it's just not plausible that Russians are going to start paying $15 for a CD, nor is it likely that they'll stop listening to music until their economy picks up.
+
+But the real action is in China, where pressing bootleg media is a national sport. China keeps promising that it will do something about this, but it's not like the US has any recourse if China drags its heels. Trade courts may find against China, but China holds all the cards. The US can't afford to abandon Chinese manufacturing (and no one will vote for the politician who hextuples the cost of WiFi cards, brassieres, iPods, staplers, yoga mats, and spatulas by cutting off trade with China). The Chinese can just sit tight.
+
+The futurists were just plain wrong. An "information economy" can't be based on selling information. Information technology makes copying information easier and easier. The more IT you have, the less control you have over the bits you send out into the world. It will never, ever, EVER get any harder to copy information from here on in. The information economy is about selling everything except information.
+
+The US traded its manufacturing sector's health for its entertainment industry, hoping that Police Academy sequels could take the place of the rustbelt. The US bet wrong.
+
+But like a losing gambler who keeps on doubling down, the US doesn't know when to quit. It keeps meeting with its entertainment giants, asking how US foreign and domestic policy can preserve its business-model. Criminalize 70 million American file-sharers? Check. Turn the world's copyright laws upside down? Check. Cream the IT industry by criminalizing attempted infringement? Check.
+
+It'll never work. It can never work. There will always be an entertainment industry, but not one based on excluding access to published digital works. Once it's in the world, it'll be copied. This is why I give away digital copies of my books and make money on the printed editions: I'm not going to stop people from copying the electronic editions, so I might as well treat them as an enticement to buy the printed objects.
+
+But there is an information economy. You don't even need a computer to participate. My barber, an avowed technophobe who rebuilds antique motorcycles and doesn't own a PC, benefited from the information economy when I found him by googling for barbershops in my neighborhood.
+
+Teachers benefit from the information economy when they share lesson plans with their colleagues around the world by email. Doctors benefit from the information economy when they move their patient files to efficient digital formats. Insurance companies benefit from the information economy through better access to fresh data used in the preparation of actuarial tables. Marinas benefit from the information economy when office-slaves look up the weekend's weather online and decide to skip out on Friday for a weekend's sailing. Families of migrant workers benefit from the information economy when their sons and daughters wire cash home from a convenience store Western Union terminal.
+
+This stuff generates wealth for those who practice it. It enriches the country and improves our lives.
+
+And it can peacefully co-exist with movies, music and microcode, but not if Hollywood gets to call the shots. Where IT managers are expected to police their networks and systems for unauthorized copying -- no matter what that does to productivity -- they cannot co-exist. Where our operating systems are rendered inoperable by "copy protection," they cannot co-exist. Where our educational institutions are turned into conscript enforcers for the record industry, they cannot co-exist.
+
+The information economy is all around us. The countries that embrace it will emerge as global economic superpowers. The countries that stubbornly hold to the simplistic idea that the information economy is about selling information will end up at the bottom of the pile.
+
+What country do you want to live in?
+
+$$$$
+
+1~ Why Is Hollywood Making A Sequel To The Napster Wars?
+
+(Originally published in InformationWeek, August 14, 2007) ~#
+
+Hollywood loves sequels -- they're generally a safe bet, provided that you're continuing an already successful franchise. But you'd have to be nuts to shoot a sequel to a disastrous flop -- say, The Adventures of Pluto Nash or Town and Country.
+
+As disastrous as Pluto Nash was, it was practically painless when compared to the Napster debacle. That shipwreck took place six years ago, when the record industry succeeded in shutting down the pioneering file-sharing service, and they show no signs of recovery.
+
+!_ The disastrous thing about Napster wasn't that it it existed, but rather that the record industry managed to kill it.
+
+Napster had an industry-friendly business-model: raise venture capital, start charging for access to the service, and then pay billions of dollars to the record companies in exchange for licenses to their works. Yes, they kicked this plan off without getting permission from the record companies, but that's not so unusual. The record companies followed the same business plan a hundred years ago, when they started recording sheet music without permission, raising capital and garnering profits, and *{then}* working out a deal to pay the composers for the works they'd built their fortunes on.
+
+Napster's plan was plausible. They had the fastest-adopted technology in the history of the world, garnering 52,000,000 users in 18 months -- more than had voted for either candidate in the preceding US election! -- and discovering, via surveys, that a sizable portion would happily pay between $10 and $15 a month for the service. What's more, Napster's architecture included a gatekeeper that could be used to lock-out non-paying users.
+
+The record industry refused to deal. Instead, they sued, bringing Napster to its knees. Bertelsmann bought Napster out of the ensuing bankruptcy, a pattern that was followed by other music giants, like Universal, who slayed MP3.com in the courts, then brought home the corpse on the cheap, running it as an internal project.
+
+After that, the record companies had a field day: practically every venture-funded P2P company went down, and millions of dollars were funneled from the tech venture capital firms to Sand Hill Road to the RIAA's members, using P2P companies and the courts as conduits.
+
+But the record companies weren't ready to replace these services with equally compelling alternatives. Instead, they fielded inferior replacements like PressPlay, with limited catalog, high prices, and anti-copying technology (digital rights management, or DRM) that alienated users by the millions by treating them like crooks instead of customers. These half-baked ventures did untold damage to the record companies and their parent firms.
+
+Just look at Sony: they should have been at the top of the heap. They produce some of the world's finest, best-designed electronics. They own one of the largest record labels in the world. The synergy should have been incredible. Electronics would design the walkmen, music would take care of catalog, and marketing would sell it all.
+
+You know the joke about European hell? The English do the cooking, the Germans are the lovers, the Italians are the police and the French run the government. With Sony, it seemed like music was designing the walkmen, marketing was doing the catalog, and electronic was in charge of selling. Sony's portable players -- the MusicClip and others -- were so crippled by anti-copying technology that they couldn't even play MP3s, and the music selection at Sony services like PressPlay was anemic, expensive, and equally hobbled. Sony isn't even a name in the portable audio market anymore -- today's walkman is an iPod.
+
+Of course, Sony still has a record-label -- for now. But sales are falling, and the company is reeling from the 2005 "rootkit" debacle, where in deliberately infected eight million music CDs with a hacker tool called a rootkit, compromising over 500,000 US computer networks, including military and government networks, all in a (failed) bid to stop copying of its CDs.
+
+The public wasn't willing to wait for Sony and the rest to wake up and offer a service that was as compelling, exciting and versatile as Napster. Instead, they flocked to a new generation of services like Kazaa and the various Gnutella networks. Kazaa's business model was to set up offshore, on the tiny Polynesian island of Vanuatu, and bundle spyware with its software, making its profits off of fees from spyware crooks. Kazaa didn't want to pay billions for record industry licenses -- they used the international legal and finance system to hopelessly snarl the RIAA's members through half a decade of wild profitability. The company was eventually brought to ground, but the founders walked away and started Skype and then Joost.
+
+Meantime, dozens of other services had sprung up to fill Kazaa's niche -- AllofMP3, the notorious Russian site, was eventually killed through intervention of the US Trade Representative and the WTO, and was reborn practically the next day under a new name.
+
+It's been eight years since Sean Fanning created Napster in his college dorm-room. Eight years later, there isn't a single authorized music service that can compete with the original Napster. Record sales are down every year, and digital music sales aren't filling in the crater. The record industry has contracted to four companies, and it may soon be three if EMI can get regulatory permission to put itself on the block.
+
+The sue-em-all-and-let-God-sort-em-out plan was a flop in the box office, a flop in home video, and a flop overseas. So why is Hollywood shooting a remake?
+
+#
+
+YouTube, 2007, bears some passing similarity to Napster, 2001. Founded by a couple guys in a garage, rocketed to popular success, heavily capitalized by a deep-pocketed giant. Its business model? Turn popularity into dollars and offer a share to the rightsholders whose works they're using. This is an historically sound plan: cable operators got rich by retransmitting broadcasts without permission, and once they were commercial successes, they sat down to negotiate to pay for those copyrights (just as the record companies negotiated with composers *{after}* they'd gotten rich selling records bearing those compositions).
+
+YouTube 07 has another similarity to Napster 01: it is being sued by entertainment companies.
+
+Only this time, it's not (just) the record industry. Broadcasters, movie studios, anyone who makes video or audio is getting in on the act. I recently met an NBC employee who told me that he thought that a severe, punishing legal judgment would send a message to the tech industry not to field this kind of service anymore.
+
+Let's hope he's wrong. Google -- YouTube's owners -- is a grown-up of a company, unusual in a tech industry populated by corporate adolescents. They have lots of money and a sober interest in keeping it. They want to sit down with A/V rightsholders and do a deal. Six years after the Napster verdict, that kind of willingness is in short supply.
+
+Most of the tech "companies" with an interest in commercializing Internet AV have no interest in sitting down with the studios. They're either nebulous open source projects (like mythtv, a free hyper-TiVo that skips commercials, downloads and shares videos and is wide open to anyone who wants to modify and improve it), politically motivated anarchists (like ThePirateBay, a Swedish BitTorrent tracker site that has mirrors in three countries with non-interoperable legal systems, where they respond to legal notices by writing sarcastic and profane letters and putting them online), or out-and-out crooks like the bootleggers who use P2P to seed their DVD counterfeiting operations.
+
+It's not just YouTube. TiVo, who pioneered the personal video recorder, is feeling the squeeze, being systematically locked out of the digital cable and satellite market. Their efforts to add a managed TiVoToGo service were attacked by the rightsholders who fought at the FCC to block them. Cable/satellite operators and the studios would much prefer the public to transition to "bundled" PVRs that come with your TV service.
+
+These boxes are owned by the cable/satellite companies, who have absolute control over them. Time-Warner has been known to remotely delete stored episodes of shows just before the DVD ships, and many operators have started using "flags" that tell recorders not to allow fast-forwarding, or to prevent recording altogether.
+
+The reason that YouTube and TiVo are more popular than ThePirateBay and mythtv is that they're the easiest way for the public to get what it wants -- the video we want, the way we want it. We use these services because they're like the original Napster: easy, well-designed, functional.
+
+But if the entertainment industry squeezes these players out, ThePirateBay and mythtv are right there, waiting to welcome us in with open arms. ThePirateBay has already announced that it is launching a YouTube competitor with no-plugin, in-browser viewing. Plenty of entrepreneurs are looking at easing the pain and cast of setting up your own mythtv box. The only reason that the barriers to BitTorrent and mythtv exist is that it hasn't been worth anyone's while to capitalize projects to bring them down. But once the legit competitors of these services are killed, look out.
+
+The thing is, the public doesn't want managed services with limited rights. We don't want to be stuck using approved devices in approved ways. We never have -- we are the spiritual descendants of the customers for "illegal" record albums and "illegal" cable TV. The demand signal won't go away.
+
+There's no good excuse for going into production on a sequel to The Napster Wars. We saw that movie. We know how it turns out. Every Christmas, we get articles about how this was the worst Christmas ever for CDs. You know what? CD sales are *{never}* going to improve. CDs have been rendered obsolete by Internet distribution -- and the record industry has locked itself out of the only profitable, popular music distribution systems yet invented.
+
+Companies like Google/YouTube and TiVo are rarities: tech companies that want to do deals. They need to be cherished by entertainment companies, not sued.
+
+(Thanks to Bruce Nash and The-Numbers.com for research assistance with this article)
+
+$$$$
+
+1~ You DO Like Reading Off a Computer Screen
+
+(Originally published in Locus Magazine, March 2007) ~#
+
+"I don't like reading off a computer screen" -- it's a cliché of the e-book world. It means "I don't read novels off of computer screens" (or phones, or PDAs, or dedicated e-book readers), and often as not the person who says it is someone who, in fact, spends every hour that Cthulhu sends reading off a computer screen. It's like watching someone shovel Mars Bars into his gob while telling you how much he hates chocolate.
+
+But I know what you mean. You don't like reading long-form works off of a computer screen. I understand perfectly -- in the ten minutes since I typed the first word in the paragraph above, I've checked my mail, deleted two spams, checked an image-sharing community I like, downloaded a YouTube clip of Stephen Colbert complaining about the iPhone (pausing my MP3 player first), cleared out my RSS reader, and then returned to write this paragraph.
+
+This is not an ideal environment in which to concentrate on long-form narrative (sorry, one sec, gotta blog this guy who's made cardboard furniture) (wait, the Colbert clip's done, gotta start the music up) (19 more RSS items). But that's not to say that it's not an entertainment medium -- indeed, practically everything I do on the computer entertains the hell out of me. It's nearly all text-based, too. Basically, what I do on the computer is pleasure-reading. But it's a fundamentally more scattered, splintered kind of pleasure. Computers have their own cognitive style, and it's not much like the cognitive style invented with the first modern novel (one sec, let me google that and confirm it), Don Quixote, some 400 years ago.
+
+The novel is an invention, one that was engendered by technological changes in information display, reproduction, and distribution. The cognitive style of the novel is different from the cognitive style of the legend. The cognitive style of the computer is different from the cognitive style of the novel.
+
+Computers want you to do lots of things with them. Networked computers doubly so -- they (another RSS item) have a million ways of asking for your attention, and just as many ways of rewarding it.
+
+There's a persistent fantasy/nightmare in the publishing world of the advent of very sharp, very portable computer screens. In the fantasy version, this creates an infinite new market for electronic books, and we all get to sell the rights to our work all over again. In the nightmare version, this leads to runaway piracy, and no one ever gets to sell a novel again.
+
+I think they're both wrong. The infinitely divisible copyright ignores the "decision cost" borne by users who have to decide, over and over again, whether they want to spend a millionth of a cent on a millionth of a word -- no one buys newspapers by the paragraph, even though most of us only read a slim fraction of any given paper. A super-sharp, super-portable screen would be used to read all day long, but most of us won't spend most of our time reading anything recognizable as a book on them.
+
+Take the record album. Everything about it is technologically pre-determined. The technology of the LP demanded artwork to differentiate one package from the next. The length was set by the groove density of the pressing plants and playback apparatus. The dynamic range likewise. These factors gave us the idea of the 40-to-60-minute package, split into two acts, with accompanying artwork. Musicians were encouraged to create works that would be enjoyed as a unitary whole for a protracted period -- think of Dark Side of the Moon, or Sgt. Pepper's.
+
+No one thinks about albums today. Music is now divisible to the single, as represented by an individual MP3, and then subdivisible into snippets like ringtones and samples. When recording artists demand that their works be considered as a whole -- like when Radiohead insisted that the iTunes Music Store sell their whole album as a single, indivisible file that you would have to listen to all the way through -- they sound like cranky throwbacks.
+
+The idea of a 60-minute album is as weird in the Internet era as the idea of sitting through 15 hours of Der Ring des Nibelungen was 20 years ago. There are some anachronisms who love their long-form opera, but the real action is in the more fluid stuff that can slither around on hot wax -- and now the superfluid droplets of MP3s and samples. Opera survives, but it is a tiny sliver of a much bigger, looser music market. The future composts the past: old operas get mounted for living anachronisms; Andrew Lloyd Webber picks up the rest of the business.
+
+Or look at digital video. We're watching more digital video, sooner, than anyone imagined. But we're watching it in three-minute chunks from YouTube. The video's got a pause button so you can stop it when the phone rings and a scrubber to go back and forth when you miss something while answering an IM.
+
+And attention spans don't increase when you move from the PC to a handheld device. These things have less capacity for multitasking than real PCs, and the network connections are slower and more expensive. But they are fundamentally multitasking devices -- you can always stop reading an e-book to play a hand of solitaire that is interrupted by a phone call -- and their social context is that they are used in public places, with a million distractions. It is socially acceptable to interrupt someone who is looking at a PDA screen. By contrast, the TV room -- a whole room for TV! -- is a shrine where none may speak until the commercial airs.
+
+The problem, then, isn't that screens aren't sharp enough to read novels off of. The problem is that novels aren't screeny enough to warrant protracted, regular reading on screens.
+
+Electronic books are a wonderful adjunct to print books. It's great to have a couple hundred novels in your pocket when the plane doesn't take off or the line is too long at the post office. It's cool to be able to search the text of a novel to find a beloved passage. It's excellent to use a novel socially, sending it to your friends, pasting it into your sig file.
+
+But the numbers tell their own story -- people who read off of screens all day long buy lots of print books and read them primarily on paper. There are some who prefer an all-electronic existence (I'd like to be able to get rid of the objects after my first reading, but keep the e-books around for reference), but they're in a tiny minority.
+
+There's a generation of web writers who produce "pleasure reading" on the web. Some are funny. Some are touching. Some are enraging. Most dwell in Sturgeon's 90th percentile and below. They're not writing novels. If they were, they wouldn't be web writers.
+
+Mostly, we can read just enough of a free e-book to decide whether to buy it in hardcopy -- but not enough to substitute the e-book for the hardcopy. Like practically everything in marketing and promotion, the trick is to find the form of the work that serves as enticement, not replacement.
+
+Sorry, got to go -- eight more e-mails.
+
+$$$$
+
+1~ How Do You Protect Artists?
+
+(Originally published in The Guardian as "Online censorship hurts us all," Tuesday, Oct 2, 2007) ~#
+
+Artists have lots of problems. We get plagiarized, ripped off by publishers, savaged by critics, counterfeited -- and we even get our works copied by "pirates" who give our stuff away for free online.
+
+But no matter how bad these problems get, they're a distant second to the gravest, most terrifying problem an artist can face: censorship.
+
+It's one thing to be denied your credit or compensation, but it's another thing entirely to have your work suppressed, burned or banned. You'd never know it, however, judging from the state of the law surrounding the creation and use of internet publishing tools.
+
+Since 1995, every single legislative initiative on this subject in the UK's parliament, the European parliament and the US Congress has focused on making it easier to suppress "illegitimate" material online. From libel to copyright infringement, from child porn to anti-terror laws, our legislators have approached the internet with a single-minded focus on seeing to it that bad material is expeditiously removed.
+
+And that's the rub. I'm certainly no fan of child porn or hate speech, but every time a law is passed that reduces the burden of proof on those who would remove material from the internet, artists' fortunes everywhere are endangered.
+
+Take the US's 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which has equivalents in every European state that has implemented the 2001 European Union Copyright Directive. The DMCA allows anyone to have any document on the internet removed, simply by contacting its publisher and asserting that the work infringes his copyright.
+
+The potential for abuse is obvious, and the abuse has been widespread: from the Church of Scientology to companies that don't like what reporters write about them, DMCA takedown notices have fast become the favorite weapon in the cowardly bully's arsenal.
+
+But takedown notices are just the start. While they can help silence critics and suppress timely information, they're not actually very effective at stopping widespread copyright infringement. Viacom sent over 100,000 takedown notices to YouTube last February, but seconds after it was all removed, new users uploaded it again.
+
+Even these takedown notices were sloppily constructed: they included videos of friends eating at barbecue restaurants and videos of independent bands performing their own work. As a Recording Industry Association of America spokesman quipped, "When you go trawling with a net, you catch a few dolphins."
+
+Viacom and others want hosting companies and online service providers to preemptively evaluate all the material that their users put online, holding it to ensure that it doesn't infringe copyright before they release it.
+
+This notion is impractical in the extreme, for at least two reasons. First, an exhaustive list of copyrighted works would be unimaginably huge, as every single creative work is copyrighted from the instant that it is created and "fixed in a tangible medium".
+
+Second, even if such a list did exist, it would be trivial to defeat, simply by introducing small changes to the infringing copies, as spammers do with the text of their messages in order to evade spam filters.
+
+In fact, the spam wars have some important lessons to teach us here. Like copyrighted works, spams are infinitely varied and more are being created every second. Any company that could identify spam messages -- including permutations and variations on existing spams -- could write its own ticket to untold billions.
+
+Some of the smartest, most dedicated engineers on the planet devote every waking hour to figuring out how to spot spam before it gets delivered. If your inbox is anything like mine, you'll agree that the war is far from won.
+
+If the YouTubes of the world are going to prevent infringement, they're going to have to accomplish this by hand-inspecting every one of the tens of billions of blog posts, videos, text-files, music files and software uploads made to every single server on the internet.
+
+And not just cursory inspections, either -- these inspections will have to be undertaken by skilled, trained specialists (who'd better be talented linguists, too -- how many English speakers can spot an infringement in Urdu?).
+
+Such experts don't come cheap, which means that you can anticipate a terrible denuding of the fertile jungle of internet hosting companies that are primary means by which tens of millions of creative people share the fruits of their labor with their fans and colleagues.
+
+It would be a great Sovietisation of the world's digital printing presses, a contraction of a glorious anarchy of expression into a regimented world of expensive and narrow venues for art.
+
+It would be a death knell for the kind of focused, non-commercial material whose authors couldn't fit the bill for a "managed" service's legion of lawyers, who would be replaced by more of the same -- the kind of lowest common denominator rubbish that fills the cable channels today.
+
+And the worst of it is, we're marching toward this "solution" in the name of protecting artists. Gee, thanks.
+
+$$$$
+
+1~ It's the Information Economy, Stupid
+
+(Originally published in The Guardian as "Free data sharing is here to stay," September 18, 2007) ~#
+
+Since the 1970s, pundits have predicted a transition to an "information economy." The vision of an economy based on information seized the imaginations of the world's governments. For decades now, they have been creating policies to "protect" information -- stronger copyright laws, international treaties on patents and trademarks, treaties to protect anti-copying technology.
+
+The thinking is simple: an information economy must be based on buying and selling information. Therefore, we need policies to make it harder to get access to information unless you've paid for it. That means that we have to make it harder for you to share information, even after you've paid for it. Without the ability to fence off your information property, you can't have an information market to fuel the information economy.
+
+But this is a tragic case of misunderstanding a metaphor. Just as the industrial economy wasn't based on making it harder to get access to machines, the information economy won't be based on making it harder to get access to information. Indeed, the opposite seems to be true: the more IT we have, the easier it is to access any given piece of information -- for better or for worse.
+
+It used to be that copy-prevention companies' strategies went like this: "We'll make it easier to buy a copy of this data than to make an unauthorized copy of it. That way, only the uber-nerds and the cash-poor/time-rich classes will bother to copy instead of buy." But every time a PC is connected to the Internet and its owner is taught to use search tools like Google (or The Pirate Bay), a third option appears: you can just download a copy from the Internet. Every techno-literate participant in the information economy can choose to access any data, without having to break the anti-copying technology, just by searching for the cracked copy on the public Internet. If there's one thing we can be sure of, it's that an information economy will increase the technological literacy of its participants.
+
+As I write this, I am sitting in a hotel room in Shanghai, behind the Great Firewall of China. Theoretically, I can't access blogging services that carry negative accounts of Beijing's doings, like Wordpress, Blogspot and Livejournal, nor the image-sharing site Flickr, nor Wikipedia. The (theoretically) omnipotent bureaucrats of the local Minitrue have deployed their finest engineering talent to stop me. Well, these cats may be able to order political prisoners executed and their organs harvested for Party members, but they've totally failed to keep Chinese people (and big-nose tourists like me) off the world's Internet. The WTO is rattling its sabers at China today, demanding that they figure out how to stop Chinese people from looking at Bruce Willis movies without permission -- but the Chinese government can't even figure out how to stop Chinese people from looking at seditious revolutionary tracts online.
+
+And, of course, as Paris Hilton, the Church of Scientology and the King of Thailand have discovered, taking a piece of information off the Internet is like getting food coloring out of a swimming pool. Good luck with that.
+
+To see the evidence of the real information economy, look to all the economic activity that the Internet enables -- not the stuff that it impedes. All the commerce conducted by salarymen who can book their own flights with Expedia instead of playing blind-man's bluff with a travel agent ("Got any flights after 4PM to Frankfurt?"). All the garage crafters selling their goods on Etsy.com. All the publishers selling obscure books through Amazon that no physical bookstore was willing to carry. The salwar kameez tailors in India selling bespoke clothes to westerners via eBay, without intervention by a series of skimming intermediaries. The Internet-era musicians who use the net to pack venues all over the world by giving away their recordings on social services like MySpace. Hell, look at my last barber, in Los Angeles: the man doesn't use a PC, but I found him by googling for "barbers" with my postcode -- the information economy is driving his cost of customer acquisition to zero, and he doesn't even have to actively participate in it.
+
+Better access to more information is the hallmark of the information economy. The more IT we have, the more skill we have, the faster our networks get and the better our search tools get, the more economic activity the information economy generates. Many of us sell information in the information economy -- I sell my printed books by giving away electronic books, lawyers and architects and consultants are in the information business and they drum up trade with Google ads, and Google is nothing but an info-broker -- but none of us rely on curtailing access to information. Like a bottled water company, we compete with free by supplying a superior service, not by eliminating the competition.
+
+The world's governments might have bought into the old myth of the information economy, but not so much that they're willing to ban the PC and the Internet.
+
+$$$$
+
+1~ Downloads Give Amazon Jungle Fever
+
+(Originally published in The Guardian, December 11, 2007) ~#
+
+Let me start by saying that I love Amazon. I buy everything from books to clothes to electronics to medication to food to batteries to toys to furniture to baby supplies from the company. I once even bought an ironing board on Amazon. No company can top them for ease of use or for respecting consumer rights when it comes to refunds, ensuring satisfaction, and taking good care of loyal customers.
+
+As a novelist, I couldn't be happier about Amazon's existence. Not only does Amazon have a set of superb recommendation tools that help me sell books, but it also has an affiliate program that lets me get up to 8.5% in commissions for sales of my books through the site - nearly doubling my royalty rate.
+
+As a consumer advocate and activist, I'm delighted by almost every public policy initiative from Amazon. When the Author's Guild tried to get Amazon to curtail its used-book market, the company refused to back down. Founder Jeff Bezos (who is a friend of mine) even wrote, "when someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this."
+
+More recently, Amazon stood up to the US government, who'd gone on an illegal fishing expedition for terrorists (TERRORISTS! TERRORISTS! TERRORISTS!) and asked Amazon to turn over the purchasing history of 24,000 Amazon customers. The company spent a fortune fighting for our rights, and won.
+
+It also has a well-deserved reputation for taking care over copyright "takedown" notices for the material that its customers post on its site, discarding ridiculous claims rather than blindly acting on every single notice, no matter how frivolous.
+
+But for all that, it has to be said: Whenever Amazon tries to sell a digital download, it turns into one of the dumbest companies on the web.
+
+Take the Kindle, the $400 handheld ebook reader that Amazon shipped recently, to vast, ringing indifference.
+
+The device is cute enough - in a clumsy, overpriced, generation-one kind of way - but the early adopter community recoiled in horror at the terms of service and anti-copying technology that infected it. Ebooks that you buy through the Kindle can't be lent or resold (remember, "when someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book...Everyone understands this.")
+
+Mark Pilgrim's "The Future of Reading" enumerates five other Kindle showstoppers: Amazon can change your ebooks without notifying you or getting your permission; and if you violate any of the "agreement", it can delete your ebooks, even if you've paid for them, and you get no appeal.
+
+
+It's not just the Kindle, either. Amazon Unbox, the semi-abortive video download service, shipped with terms of service that included your granting permission for Amazon to install any software on your computer, to spy on you, to delete your videos, to delete any other file on your hard drive, to deny you access to your movies if you lose them in a crash. This comes from the company that will cheerfully ship you a replacement DVD if you email them and tell them that the one you just bought never turned up in the post.
+
+Even Amazon's much-vaunted MP3 store comes with terms of service that prevent lending and reselling.
+
+I am mystified by this. Amazon is the kind of company that every etailer should study and copy - the gold standard for e-commerce. You'd think that if there was any company that would intuitively get the web, it would be Amazon.
+
+What's more, this is a company that stands up to rightsholder groups, publishers and the US government - but only when it comes to physical goods. Why is it that whenever a digital sale is in the offing, Amazon rolls over on its back and wets itself?
+
+$$$$
+
+1~ What's the Most Important Right Creators Have?
+
+(Originally published as "How Big Media's Copyright Campaigns Threaten Internet Free Expression," InformationWeek, November 5, 2007) ~#
+
+Any discussion of "creator's rights" is likely to be limited to talk about copyright, but copyright is just a side-dish for creators: the most important right we have is the right to free expression. And these two rights are always in tension.
+
+Take Viacom's claims against YouTube. The entertainment giant says that YouTube has been profiting from the fact that YouTube users upload clips from Viacom shows, and they demand that YouTube take steps to prevent this from happening in the future. YouTube actually offered to do something very like this: they invited Viacom and other rightsholders to send them all the clips they wanted kept offline, and promised to programatically detect these clips and interdict them.
+
+But Viacom rejected this offer. Rather, the company wants YouTube to just figure it out, determine a priori which video clips are being presented with permission and which ones are not. After all, Viacom does the very same thing: it won't air clips until a battalion of lawyers have investigated them and determined whether they are lawful.
+
+But the Internet is not cable television. Net-based hosting outfits -- including YouTube, Flickr, Blogger, Scribd, and the Internet Archive -- offer free publication venues to all comers, enabling anyone to publish anything. In 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Congress considered the question of liability for these companies and decided to offer them a mixed deal: hosting companies don't need to hire a million lawyers to review every blog-post before it goes live, but rightsholders can order them to remove any infringing material from the net just by sending them a notice that the material infringes.
+
+This deal enabled hosting companies to offer free platforms for publication and expression to everyone. But it also allowed anyone to censor the Internet, just by making claims of infringement, without offering any evidence to support those claims, without having to go to court to prove their claims (this has proven to be an attractive nuisance, presenting an irresistible lure to anyone with a beef against an online critic, from the Church of Scientology to Diebold's voting machines division).
+
+The proposal for online hosts to figure out what infringes and what doesn't is wildly impractical. Under most countries' copyright laws, creative works receive a copyright from the moment that they are "fixed in a tangible medium" (hard drives count), and this means that the pool of copyrighted works is so large as to be practically speaking infinite. Knowing whether a work is copyrighted, who holds the copyright, and whether a posting is made with the rightsholder's permission (or in accord with each nation's varying ideas about fair use) is impossible. The only way to be sure is to start from the presumption that each creative work is infringing, and then make each Internet user prove, to some lawyer's satisfaction, that she has the right to post each drib of content that appears on the Web.
+
+Imagine that such a system were the law of the land. There's no way Blogger or YouTube or Flickr could afford to offer free hosting to their users. Rather, all these hosted services would have to charge enough for access to cover the scorching legal bills associated with checking all material. And not just the freebies, either: your local ISP, the servers hosting your company's website or your page for family genealogy: they'd all have to do the same kind of continuous checking and re-checking of every file you publish with them.
+
+It would be the end of any publication that couldn't foot the legal bills to get off the ground. The multi-billion-page Internet would collapse into the homogeneous world of cable TV (remember when we thought that a "500-channel universe" would be unimaginably broad? Imagine an Internet with only 500 "channels!"). From Amazon to Ask A Ninja, from Blogger to The Everlasting Blort, every bit of online content is made possible by removing the cost of paying lawyers to act as the Internet's gatekeepers.
+
+This is great news for artists. The traditional artist's lament is that our publishers have us over a barrel, controlling the narrow and vital channels for making works available -- from big gallery owners to movie studios to record labels to New York publishers. That's why artists have such a hard time negotiating a decent deal for themselves (for example, most beginning recording artists have to agree to have money deducted from their royalty statements for "breakage" of records en route to stores -- and these deductions are also levied against digital sales through the iTunes Store!).
+
+But, thanks to the web, artists have more options than ever. The Internet's most popular video podcasts aren't associated with TV networks (with all the terrible, one-sided deals that would entail), rather, they're independent programs like RocketBoom, Homestar Runner, or the late, lamented Ze Frank Show. These creators -- along with all the musicians, writers, and other artists using the net to earn their living -- were able to write their own ticket. Today, major artists like Radiohead and Madonna are leaving the record labels behind and trying novel, net-based ways of promoting their work.
+
+And it's not just the indies who benefit: the existence of successful independent artists creates fantastic leverage for artists who negotiate with the majors. More and more, the big media companies' "like it or leave it" bargaining stance is being undermined by the possibility that the next big star will shrug, turn on her heel, and make her fortune without the big companies' help. This has humbled the bigs, making their deals better and more artist-friendly.
+
+Bargaining leverage is just for starters. The greatest threat that art faces is suppression. Historically, artists have struggled just to make themselves heard, just to safeguard the right to express themselves. Censorship is history's greatest enemy of art. A limited-liability Web is a Web where anyone can post anything and reach *{everyone}*.
+
+What's more, this privilege isn't limited to artists. All manner of communication, from the personal introspection in public "diaries" to social chatter on MySpace and Facebook, are now possible. Some artists have taken the bizarre stance that this "trivial" matter is unimportant and thus a poor excuse for allowing hosted services to exist in the first place. This is pretty arrogant: a society where only artists are allowed to impart "important" messages and where the rest of us are supposed to shut up about our loves, hopes, aspirations, jokes, family and wants is hardly a democratic paradise.
+
+Artists are in the free expression business, and technology that helps free expression helps artists. When lowering the cost of copyright enforcement raises the cost of free speech, every artist has a duty to speak out. Our ability to make our art is inextricably linked with the billions of Internet users who use the network to talk about their lives.
+
+$$$$
+
+1~ Giving it Away
+
+(Originally published in Forbes.com, December 2006) ~#
+
+I've been giving away my books ever since my first novel came out, and boy has it ever made me a bunch of money.
+
+When my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was published by Tor Books in January 2003, I also put the entire electronic text of the novel on the Internet under a Creative Commons License that encouraged my readers to copy it far and wide. Within a day, there were 30,000 downloads from my site (and those downloaders were in turn free to make more copies). Three years and six printings later, more than 700,000 copies of the book have been downloaded from my site. The book's been translated into more languages than I can keep track of, key concepts from it have been adopted for software projects and there are two competing fan audio adaptations online.
+
+Most people who download the book don't end up buying it, but they wouldn't have bought it in any event, so I haven't lost any sales, I've just won an audience. A tiny minority of downloaders treat the free e-book as a substitute for the printed book--those are the lost sales. But a much larger minority treat the e-book as an enticement to buy the printed book. They're gained sales. As long as gained sales outnumber lost sales, I'm ahead of the game. After all, distributing nearly a million copies of my book has cost me nothing.
+
+The thing about an e-book is that it's a social object. It wants to be copied from friend to friend, beamed from a Palm device, pasted into a mailing list. It begs to be converted to witty signatures at the bottom of e-mails. It is so fluid and intangible that it can spread itself over your whole life. Nothing sells books like a personal recommendation--when I worked in a bookstore, the sweetest words we could hear were "My friend suggested I pick up...." The friend had made the sale for us, we just had to consummate it. In an age of online friendship, e-books trump dead trees for word of mouth.
+
+There are two things that writers ask me about this arrangement: First, does it sell more books, and second, how did you talk your publisher into going for this mad scheme?
+
+There's no empirical way to prove that giving away books sells more books--but I've done this with three novels and a short story collection (and I'll be doing it with two more novels and another collection in the next year), and my books have consistently outperformed my publisher's expectations. Comparing their sales to the numbers provided by colleagues suggests that they perform somewhat better than other books from similar writers at similar stages in their careers. But short of going back in time and re-releasing the same books under the same circumstances without the free e-book program, there's no way to be sure.
+
+What is certain is that every writer who's tried giving away e-books to sell books has come away satisfied and ready to do it some more.
+
+How did I talk Tor Books into letting me do this? It's not as if Tor is a spunky dotcom upstart. They're the largest science fiction publisher in the world, and they're a division of the German publishing giant Holtzbrinck. They're not patchouli-scented info-hippies who believe that information wants to be free. Rather, they're canny assessors of the world of science fiction, perhaps the most social of all literary genres. Science fiction is driven by organized fandom, volunteers who put on hundreds of literary conventions in every corner of the globe, every weekend of the year. These intrepid promoters treat books as markers of identity and as cultural artifacts of great import. They evangelize the books they love, form subcultures around them, cite them in political arguments, sometimes they even rearrange their lives and jobs around them.
+
+What's more, science fiction's early adopters defined the social character of the Internet itself. Given the high correlation between technical employment and science fiction reading, it was inevitable that the first nontechnical discussion on the Internet would be about science fiction. The online norms of idle chatter, fannish organizing, publishing and leisure are descended from SF fandom, and if any literature has a natural home in cyberspace, it's science fiction, the literature that coined the very word "cyberspace."
+
+Indeed, science fiction was the first form of widely pirated literature online, through "bookwarez" channels that contained books that had been hand-scanned, a page at a time, converted to digital text and proof-read. Even today, the mostly widely pirated literature online is SF.
+
+Nothing could make me more sanguine about the future. As publisher Tim O'Reilly wrote in his seminal essay, Piracy is Progressive Taxation, "being well-enough known to be pirated [is] a crowning achievement." I'd rather stake my future on a literature that people care about enough to steal than devote my life to a form that has no home in the dominant medium of the century.
+
+What about that future? Many writers fear that in the future, electronic books will come to substitute more readily for print books, due to changing audiences and improved technology. I am skeptical of this--the codex format has endured for centuries as a simple and elegant answer to the affordances demanded by print, albeit for a relatively small fraction of the population. Most people aren't and will never be readers--but the people who are readers will be readers forever, and they are positively pervy for paper.
+
+But say it does come to pass that electronic books are all anyone wants.
+
+I don't think it's practical to charge for copies of electronic works. Bits aren't ever going to get harder to copy. So we'll have to figure out how to charge for something else. That's not to say you can't charge for a copy-able bit, but you sure can't force a reader to pay for access to information anymore.
+
+This isn't the first time creative entrepreneurs have gone through one of these transitions. Vaudeville performers had to transition to radio, an abrupt shift from having perfect control over who could hear a performance (if they don't buy a ticket, you throw them out) to no control whatsoever (any family whose 12-year-old could build a crystal set, the day's equivalent of installing file-sharing software, could tune in). There were business models for radio, but predicting them a priori wasn't easy. Who could have foreseen that radio's great fortunes would be had through creating a blanket license, securing a Congressional consent decree, chartering a collecting society and inventing a new form of statistical mathematics to fund it?
+
+Predicting the future of publishing--should the wind change and printed books become obsolete--is just as hard. I don't know how writers would earn their living in such a world, but I do know that I'll never find out by turning my back on the Internet. By being in the middle of electronic publishing, by watching what hundreds of thousands of my readers do with my e-books, I get better market intelligence than I could through any other means. As does my publisher. As serious as I am about continuing to work as a writer for the foreseeable future, Tor Books and Holtzbrinck are just as serious. They've got even more riding on the future of publishing than me. So when I approached my publisher with this plan to give away books to sell books, it was a no-brainer for them.
+
+It's good business for me, too. This "market research" of giving away e-books sells printed books. What's more, having my books more widely read opens many other opportunities for me to earn a living from activities around my writing, such as the Fulbright Chair I got at USC this year, this high-paying article in Forbes, speaking engagements and other opportunities to teach, write and license my work for translation and adaptation. My fans' tireless evangelism for my work doesn't just sell books--it sells me.
+
+The golden age of hundreds of writers who lived off of nothing but their royalties is bunkum. Throughout history, writers have relied on day jobs, teaching, grants, inheritances, translation, licensing and other varied sources to make ends meet. The Internet not only sells more books for me, it also gives me more opportunities to earn my keep through writing-related activities.
+
+There has never been a time when more people were reading more words by more authors. The Internet is a literary world of written words. What a fine thing that is for writers.
+
+$$$$
+
+1~ Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on the Internet
+
+(Originally published in Locus Magazine, July 2006)
+
+As a science fiction writer, no piece of news could make me more hopeful. It beats the hell out of the alternative -- a future where the dominant, pluripotent, ubiquitous medium has no place for science fiction literature.
+
+When radio and records were invented, they were pretty bad news for the performers of the day. Live performance demanded charisma, the ability to really put on a magnetic show in front of a crowd. It didn't matter how technically accomplished you were: if you stood like a statue on stage, no one wanted to see you do your thing. On the other hand, you succeeded as a mediocre player, provided you attacked your performance with a lot of brio.
+
+Radio was clearly good news for musicians -- lots more musicians were able to make lots more music, reaching lots more people and making lots more money. It turned performance into an industry, which is what happens when you add technology to art. But it was terrible news for charismatics. It put them out on the street, stuck them with flipping burgers and driving taxis. They knew it, too. Performers lobbied to have the Marconi radio banned, to send Marconi back to the drawing board, charged with inventing a radio they could charge admission to. "We're charismatics, we do something as old and holy as the first story told before the first fire in the first cave. What right have you to insist that we should become mere clerks, working in an obscure back-room, leaving you to commune with our audiences on our behalf?"
+
+Technology giveth and technology taketh away. Seventy years later, Napster showed us that, as William Gibson noted, "We may be at the end of the brief period during which it is possible to charge for recorded music." Surely we're at the end of the period where it's possible to exclude those who don't wish to pay. Every song released can be downloaded gratis from a peer-to-peer network (and will shortly get easier to download, as hard-drive price/performance curves take us to a place where all the music ever recorded will fit on a disposable pocket-drive that you can just walk over to a friend's place and copy).
+
+But have no fear: the Internet makes it possible for recording artists to reach a wider audience than ever dreamt of before. Your potential fans may be spread in a thin, even coat over the world, in a configuration that could never be cost-effective to reach with traditional marketing. But the Internet's ability to lower the costs for artists to reach their audiences and for audiences to find artists suddenly renders possible more variety in music than ever before.
+
+Those artists can use the Internet to bring people back to the live performances that characterized the heyday of Vaudeville. Use your recordings -- which you can't control -- to drive admissions to your performances, which you can control. It's a model that's worked great for jam bands like the Grateful Dead and Phish. It's also a model that won't work for many of today's artists; 70 years of evolutionary pressure has selected for artists who are more virtuoso than charismatic, artists optimized for recording-based income instead of performance-based income. "How dare you tell us that we are to be trained monkeys, capering on a stage for your amusement? We're not charismatics, we're white-collar workers. We commune with our muses behind closed doors and deliver up our work product when it's done, through plastic, laser-etched discs. You have no right to demand that we convert to a live-performance economy."
+
+Technology giveth and technology taketh away. As bands on MySpace -- who can fill houses and sell hundreds of thousands of discs without a record deal, by connecting individually with fans -- have shown, there's a new market aborning on the Internet for music, one with fewer gatekeepers to creativity than ever before.
+
+That's the purpose of copyright, after all: to decentralize who gets to make art. Before copyright, we had patronage: you could make art if the Pope or the king liked the sound of it. That produced some damned pretty ceilings and frescos, but it wasn't until control of art was given over to the market -- by giving publishers a monopoly over the works they printed, starting with the Statute of Anne in 1710 -- that we saw the explosion of creativity that investment-based art could create. Industrialists weren't great arbiters of who could and couldn't make art, but they were better than the Pope.
+
+The Internet is enabling a further decentralization in who gets to make art, and like each of the technological shifts in cultural production, it's good for some artists and bad for others. The important question is: will it let more people participate in cultural production? Will it further decentralize decision-making for artists?
+
+And for SF writers and fans, the further question is, "Will it be any good to our chosen medium?" Like I said, science fiction is the only literature people care enough about to steal on the Internet. It's the only literature that regularly shows up, scanned and run through optical character recognition software and lovingly hand-edited on darknet newsgroups, Russian websites, IRC channels and elsewhere (yes, there's also a brisk trade in comics and technical books, but I'm talking about prose fiction here -- though this is clearly a sign of hope for our friends in tech publishing and funnybooks).
+
+Some writers are using the Internet's affinity for SF to great effect. I've released every one of my novels under Creative Commons licenses that encourage fans to share them freely and widely -- even, in some cases, to remix them and to make new editions of them for use in the developing world. My first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, is in its sixth printing from Tor, and has been downloaded more than 650,000 times from my website, and an untold number of times from others' websites.
+
+I've discovered what many authors have also discovered: releasing electronic texts of books drives sales of the print editions. An SF writer's biggest problem is obscurity, not piracy. Of all the people who chose not to spend their discretionary time and cash on our works today, the great bulk of them did so because they didn't know they existed, not because someone handed them a free e-book version.
+
+But what kind of artist thrives on the Internet? Those who can establish a personal relationship with their readers -- something science fiction has been doing for as long as pros have been hanging out in the con suite instead of the green room. These conversational artists come from all fields, and they combine the best aspects of charisma and virtuosity with charm -- the ability to conduct their online selves as part of a friendly salon that establishes a non-substitutable relationship with their audiences. You might find a film, a game, and a book to be equally useful diversions on a slow afternoon, but if the novel's author is a pal of yours, that's the one you'll pick. It's a competitive advantage that can't be beat.
+
+See Neil Gaiman's blog, where he manages the trick of carrying on a conversation with millions. Or Charlie Stross's Usenet posts. Scalzi's blogs. J. Michael Straczynski's presence on Usenet -- while in production on Babylon 5, no less -- breeding an army of rabid fans ready to fax-bomb recalcitrant TV execs into submission and syndication. See also the MySpace bands selling a million units of their CDs by adding each buyer to their "friends lists." Watch Eric Flint manage the Baen Bar, and Warren Ellis's good-natured growling on his sites, lists, and so forth.
+
+Not all artists have in them to conduct an online salon with their audiences. Not all Vaudevillians had it in them to transition to radio. Technology giveth and technology taketh away. SF writers are supposed to be soaked in the future, ready to come to grips with it. The future is conversational: when there's more good stuff that you know about that's one click away or closer than you will ever click on, it's not enough to know that some book is good. The least substitutable good in the Internet era is the personal relationship.
+
+Conversation, not content, is king. If you were stranded on a desert island and you opted to bring your records instead of your friends, we'd call you a sociopath. Science fiction writers who can insert themselves into their readers' conversations will be set for life.
+
+$$$$
+
+1~ How Copyright Broke
+
+(Originally published in Locus Magazine, September, 2006) ~#
+
+The theory is that if the Internet can't be controlled, then copyright is dead. The thing is, the Internet is a machine for copying things cheaply, quickly, and with as little control as possible, while copyright is the right to control who gets to make copies, so these two abstractions seem destined for a fatal collision, right?
+
+Wrong.
+
+The idea that copyright confers the exclusive right to control copying, performance, adaptation, and general use of a creative work is a polite fiction that has been mostly harmless throughout its brief history, but which has been laid bare by the Internet, and the disjoint is showing.
+
+Theoretically, if I sell you a copy of one of my novels, I'm conferring upon you a property interest in a lump of atoms -- the pages of the book -- as well as a license to make some reasonable use of the ethereal ideas embedded upon the page, the copyrighted work.
+
+Copyright started with a dispute between Scottish and English publishers, and the first copyright law, 1709's Statute of Anne, conferred the exclusive right to publish new editions of a book on the copyright holder. It was a fair competition statute, and it was silent on the rights that the copyright holder had in respect of his customers: the readers. Publishers got a legal tool to fight their competitors, a legal tool that made a distinction between the corpus -- a physical book -- and the spirit -- the novel writ on its pages. But this legal nicety was not "customer-facing." As far as a reader was concerned, once she bought a book, she got the same rights to it as she got to any other physical object, like a potato or a shovel. Of course, the reader couldn't print a new edition, but this had as much to do with the realities of technology as it did with the law. Printing presses were rare and expensive: telling a 17th-century reader that he wasn't allowed to print a new edition of a book you sold him was about as meaningful as telling him he wasn't allowed to have it laser-etched on the surface of the moon. Publishing books wasn't something readers did.
+
+Indeed, until the photocopier came along, it was practically impossible for a member of the audience to infringe copyright in a way that would rise to legal notice. Copyright was like a tank-mine, designed only to go off when a publisher or record company or radio station rolled over it. We civilians couldn't infringe copyright (many thanks to Jamie Boyle for this useful analogy).
+
+It wasn't the same for commercial users of copyrighted works. For the most part, a radio station that played a record was expected to secure permission to do so (though this permission usually comes in the form of a government-sanctioned blanket license that cuts through all the expense of negotiating in favor of a single monthly payment that covers all radio play). If you shot a movie, you were expected to get permission for the music you put in it. Critically, there are many uses that commercial users never paid for. Most workplaces don't pay for the music their employees enjoy while they work. An ad agency that produces a demo reel of recent commercials to use as part of a creative briefing to a designer doesn't pay for this extremely commercial use. A film company whose set-designer clips and copies from magazines and movies to produce a "mood book" never secures permission nor offers compensation for these uses.
+
+Theoretically, the contours of what you may and may not do without permission are covered under a legal doctrine called "fair use," which sets out the factors a judge can use to weigh the question of whether an infringement should be punished. While fair use is a vital part of the way that works get made and used, it's very rare for an unauthorized use to get adjudicated on this basis.
+
+No, the realpolitik of unauthorized use is that users are not required to secure permission for uses that the rights holder will never discover. If you put some magazine clippings in your mood book, the magazine publisher will never find out you did so. If you stick a Dilbert cartoon on your office-door, Scott Adams will never know about it.
+
+So while technically the law has allowed rights holders to infinitely discriminate among the offerings they want to make -- Special discounts on this book, which may only be read on Wednesdays! This film half-price, if you agree only to show it to people whose names start with D! -- practicality has dictated that licenses could only be offered on enforceable terms.
+
+When it comes to retail customers for information goods -- readers, listeners, watchers -- this whole license abstraction falls flat. No one wants to believe that the book he's brought home is only partly his, and subject to the terms of a license set out on the flyleaf. You'd be a flaming jackass if you showed up at a con and insisted that your book may not be read aloud, nor photocopied in part and marked up for a writers' workshop, nor made the subject of a piece of fan-fiction.
+
+At the office, you might get a sweet deal on a coffee machine on the promise that you'll use a certain brand of coffee, and even sign off on a deal to let the coffee company check in on this from time to time. But no one does this at home. We instinctively and rightly recoil from the idea that our personal, private dealings in our homes should be subject to oversight from some company from whom we've bought something. We bought it. It's ours. Even when we rent things, like cars, we recoil from the idea that Hertz might track our movements, or stick a camera in the steering wheel.
+
+When the Internet and the PC made it possible to sell a lot of purely digital "goods" -- software, music, movies and books delivered as pure digits over the wire, without a physical good changing hands, the copyright lawyers groped about for a way to take account of this. It's in the nature of a computer that it copies what you put on it. A computer is said to be working, and of high quality, in direct proportion to the degree to which it swiftly and accurately copies the information that it is presented with.
+
+The copyright lawyers had a versatile hammer in their toolbox: the copyright license. These licenses had been presented to corporations for years. Frustratingly (for the lawyers), these corporate customers had their own counsel, and real bargaining power, which made it impossible to impose really interesting conditions on them, like limiting the use of a movie such that it couldn't be fast-forwarded, or preventing the company from letting more than one employee review a journal at a time.
+
+Regular customers didn't have lawyers or negotiating leverage. They were a natural for licensing regimes. Have a look at the next click-through "agreement" you're provided with on purchasing a piece of software or an electronic book or song. The terms set out in those agreements are positively Dickensian in their marvelous idiocy. Sony BMG recently shipped over eight million music CDs with an "agreement" that bound its purchasers to destroy their music if they left the country or had a house-fire, and to promise not to listen to their tunes while at work.
+
+But customers understand property -- you bought it, you own it -- and they don't understand copyright. Practically no one understands copyright. I know editors at multibillion-dollar publishing houses who don't know the difference between copyright and trademark (if you've ever heard someone say, "You need to defend a copyright or you lose it," you've found one of these people who confuse copyright and trademark; what's more, this statement isn't particularly true of trademark, either). I once got into an argument with a senior Disney TV exec who truly believed that if you re-broadcasted an old program, it was automatically re-copyrighted and got another 95 years of exclusive use (that's wrong).
+
+So this is where copyright breaks: When copyright lawyers try to treat readers and listeners and viewers as if they were (weak and unlucky) corporations who could be strong-armed into license agreements you wouldn't wish on a dog. There's no conceivable world in which people are going to tiptoe around the property they've bought and paid for, re-checking their licenses to make sure that they're abiding by the terms of an agreement they doubtless never read. Why read something if it's non-negotiable, anyway?
+
+The answer is simple: treat your readers' property as property. What readers do with their own equipment, as private, noncommercial actors, is not a fit subject for copyright regulation or oversight. The Securities Exchange Commission doesn't impose rules on you when you loan a friend five bucks for lunch. Anti-gambling laws aren't triggered when you bet your kids an ice-cream cone that you'll bicycle home before them. Copyright shouldn't come between an end-user of a creative work and her property.
+
+Of course, this approach is made even simpler by the fact that practically every customer for copyrighted works already operates on this assumption. Which is not to say that this might make some business-models more difficult to pursue. Obviously, if there was some way to ensure that a given publisher was the only source for a copyrighted work, that publisher could hike up its prices, devote less money to service, and still sell its wares. Having to compete with free copies handed from user to user makes life harder -- hasn't it always?
+
+But it is most assuredly possible. Look at Apple's wildly popular iTunes Music Store, which has sold over one billion tracks since 2003. Every song on iTunes is available as a free download from user-to-user, peer-to-peer networks like Kazaa. Indeed, the P2P monitoring company Big Champagne reports that the average time-lapse between a iTunes-exclusive song being offered by Apple and that same song being offered on P2P networks is 180 seconds.
+
+Every iTunes customer could readily acquire every iTunes song for free, using the fastest-adopted technology in history. Many of them do (just as many fans photocopy their favorite stories from magazines and pass them around to friends). But Apple has figured out how to compete well enough by offering a better service and a better experience to realize a good business out of this. (Apple also imposes ridiculous licensing restrictions, but that's a subject for a future column).
+
+Science fiction is a genre of clear-eyed speculation about the future. It should have no place for wishful thinking about a world where readers willingly put up with the indignity of being treated as "licensees" instead of customers.
+
+$$$$
+
+!_ And now a brief commercial interlude:
+
+If you're enjoying this book and have been thinking of buying a copy, here's a chance to do so:
+
+http://craphound.com/content/buy
+
+$$$$
+
+1~ In Praise of Fanfic
+
+(Originally published in Locus Magazine, May 2007) ~#
+
+I wrote my first story when I was six. It was 1977, and I had just had my mind blown clean out of my skull by a new movie called Star Wars (the golden age of science fiction is 12; the golden age of cinematic science fiction is six). I rushed home and stapled a bunch of paper together, trimmed the sides down so that it approximated the size and shape of a mass-market paperback, and set to work. I wrote an elaborate, incoherent ramble about Star Wars, in which the events of the film replayed themselves, tweaked to suit my tastes.
+
+I wrote a lot of Star Wars fanfic that year. By the age of 12, I'd graduated to Conan. By the age of 18, it was Harlan Ellison. By the age of 26, it was Bradbury, by way of Gibson. Today, I hope I write more or less like myself.
+
+Walk the streets of Florence and you'll find a copy of the David on practically every corner. For centuries, the way to become a Florentine sculptor has been to copy Michelangelo, to learn from the master. Not just the great Florentine sculptors, either -- great or terrible, they all start with the master; it can be the start of a lifelong passion, or a mere fling. The copy can be art, or it can be crap -- the best way to find out which kind you've got inside you is to try.
+
+Science fiction has the incredible good fortune to have attracted huge, social groups of fan-fiction writers. Many pros got their start with fanfic (and many of them still work at it in secret), and many fanfic writers are happy to scratch their itch by working only with others' universes, for the sheer joy of it. Some fanfic is great -- there's plenty of Buffy fanfic that trumps the official, licensed tie-in novels -- and some is purely dreadful.
+
+Two things are sure about all fanfic, though: first, that people who write and read fanfic are already avid readers of writers whose work they're paying homage to; and second, that the people who write and read fanfic derive fantastic satisfaction from their labors. This is great news for writers.
+
+Great because fans who are so bought into your fiction that they'll make it their own are fans forever, fans who'll evangelize your work to their friends, fans who'll seek out your work however you publish it.
+
+Great because fans who use your work therapeutically, to work out their own creative urges, are fans who have a damned good reason to stick with the field, to keep on reading even as our numbers dwindle. Even when the fandom revolves around movies or TV shows, fanfic is itself a literary pursuit, something undertaken in the world of words. The fanfic habit is a literary habit.
+
+In Japan, comic book fanfic writers publish fanfic manga called dojinshi -- some of these titles dwarf the circulation of the work they pay tribute to, and many of them are sold commercially. Japanese comic publishers know a good thing when they see it, and these fanficcers get left alone by the commercial giants they attach themselves to.
+
+And yet for all this, there are many writers who hate fanfic. Some argue that fans have no business appropriating their characters and situations, that it's disrespectful to imagine your precious fictional people into sexual scenarios, or to retell their stories from a different point of view, or to snatch a victorious happy ending from the tragic defeat the writer ended her book with.
+
+Other writers insist that fans who take without asking -- or against the writer's wishes -- are part of an "entitlement culture" that has decided that it has the moral right to lift scenarios and characters without permission, that this is part of our larger postmodern moral crisis that is making the world a worse place.
+
+Some writers dismiss all fanfic as bad art and therefore unworthy of appropriation. Some call it copyright infringement or trademark infringement, and every now and again, some loony will actually threaten to sue his readers for having had the gall to tell his stories to each other.
+
+I'm frankly flabbergasted by these attitudes. Culture is a lot older than art -- that is, we have had social storytelling for a lot longer than we've had a notional class of artistes whose creativity is privileged and elevated to the numinous, far above the everyday creativity of a kid who knows that she can paint and draw, tell a story and sing a song, sculpt and invent a game.
+
+To call this a moral failing -- and a new moral failing at that! -- is to turn your back on millions of years of human history. It's no failing that we internalize the stories we love, that we rework them to suit our minds better. The Pygmalion story didn't start with Shaw or the Greeks, nor did it end with My Fair Lady. Pygmalion is at least thousands of years old -- think of Moses passing for the Pharaoh's son! -- and has been reworked in a billion bedtime stories, novels, D&D games, movies, fanfic stories, songs, and legends.
+
+Each person who retold Pygmalion did something both original -- no two tellings are just alike -- and derivative, for there are no new ideas under the sun. Ideas are easy. Execution is hard. That's why writers don't really get excited when they're approached by people with great ideas for novels. We've all got more ideas than we can use -- what we lack is the cohesive whole.
+
+Much fanfic -- the stuff written for personal consumption or for a small social group -- isn't bad art. It's just not art. It's not written to make a contribution to the aesthetic development of humanity. It's created to satisfy the deeply human need to play with the stories that constitute our world. There's nothing trivial about telling stories with your friends -- even if the stories themselves are trivial. The act of telling stories to one another is practically sacred -- and it's unquestionably profound. What's more, lots of retellings are art: witness Pat Murphy's wonderful There and Back Again (Tolkien) and Geoff Ryman's brilliant World Fantasy Award-winning Was (L. Frank Baum).
+
+The question of respect is, perhaps, a little thornier. The dominant mode of criticism in fanfic circles is to compare a work to the canon -- "Would Spock ever say that, in 'real' life?" What's more, fanfic writers will sometimes apply this test to works that are of the canon, as in "Spock never would have said that, and Gene Roddenberry has no business telling me otherwise."
+
+This is a curious mix of respect and disrespect. Respect because it's hard to imagine a more respectful stance than the one that says that your work is the yardstick against which all other work is to be measured -- what could be more respectful than having your work made into the gold standard? On the other hand, this business of telling writers that they've given their characters the wrong words and deeds can feel obnoxious or insulting.
+
+Writers sometimes speak of their characters running away from them, taking on a life of their own. They say that these characters -- drawn from real people in our lives and mixed up with our own imagination -- are autonomous pieces of themselves. It's a short leap from there to mystical nonsense about protecting our notional, fictional children from grubby fans who'd set them to screwing each other or bowing and scraping before some thinly veiled version of the fanfic writer herself.
+
+There's something to the idea of the autonomous character. Big chunks of our wetware are devoted to simulating other people, trying to figure out if we are likely to fight or fondle them. It's unsurprising that when you ask your brain to model some other person, it rises to the task. But that's exactly what happens to a reader when you hand your book over to him: he simulates your characters in his head, trying to interpret that character's actions through his own lens.
+
+Writers can't ask readers not to interpret their work. You can't enjoy a novel that you haven't interpreted -- unless you model the author's characters in your head, you can't care about what they do and why they do it. And once readers model a character, it's only natural that readers will take pleasure in imagining what that character might do offstage, to noodle around with it. This isn't disrespect: it's active reading.
+
+Our field is incredibly privileged to have such an active fanfic writing practice. Let's stop treating them like thieves and start treating them like honored guests at a table that we laid just for them.
+
+$$$$
+
+1~ Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia
+
+(Self-published, 26 August 2001) ~#
+
+group{
+
+0. ToC:
+
+  * 0. ToC
+     o 0.1 Version History
+  * 1. Introduction
+  * 2. The problems
+     o 2.1 People lie
+     o 2.2 People are lazy
+     o 2.3 People are stupid
+     o 2.4 Mission: Impossible -- know thyself
+     o 2.5 Schemas aren't neutral
+     o 2.6 Metrics influence results
+     o 2.7 There's more than one way to describe something
+  * 3. Reliable metadata
+
+}group
+
+2~x- 1. Introduction
+
+Metadata is "data about data" -- information like keywords, page-length, title, word-count, abstract, location, SKU, ISBN, and so on. Explicit, human-generated metadata has enjoyed recent trendiness, especially in the world of XML. A typical scenario goes like this: a number of suppliers get together and agree on a metadata standard -- a Document Type Definition or scheme -- for a given subject area, say washing machines. They agree to a common vocabulary for describing washing machines: size, capacity, energy consumption, water consumption, price. They create machine-readable databases of their inventory, which are available in whole or part to search agents and other databases, so that a consumer can enter the parameters of the washing machine he's seeking and query multiple sites simultaneously for an exhaustive list of the available washing machines that meet his criteria.
+
+If everyone would subscribe to such a system and create good metadata for the purposes of describing their goods, services and information, it would be a trivial matter to search the Internet for highly qualified, context-sensitive results: a fan could find all the downloadable music in a given genre, a manufacturer could efficiently discover suppliers, travelers could easily choose a hotel room for an upcoming trip.
+
+A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities.
+
+2~x- 2. The problems
+
+There are at least seven insurmountable obstacles between the world as we know it and meta-utopia. I'll enumerate them below:.
+
+3~x- 2.1 People lie
+
+Metadata exists in a competitive world. Suppliers compete to sell their goods, cranks compete to convey their crackpot theories (mea culpa), artists compete for audience. Attention-spans and wallets may not be zero-sum, but they're damned close.
+
+That's why:
+
+_* A search for any commonly referenced term at a search-engine like Altavista will often turn up at least one porn link in the first ten results.
+
+_* Your mailbox is full of spam with subject lines like "Re: The information you requested."
+
+_* Publisher's Clearing House sends out advertisements that holler "You may already be a winner!"
+
+_* Press-releases have gargantuan lists of empty buzzwords attached to them.
+
+Meta-utopia is a world of reliable metadata. When poisoning the well confers benefits to the poisoners, the meta-waters get awfully toxic in short order.
+
+3~x- 2.2 People are lazy
+
+You and me are engaged in the incredibly serious business of creating information. Here in the Info-Ivory-Tower, we understand the importance of creating and maintaining excellent metadata for our information.
+
+But info-civilians are remarkably cavalier about their information. Your clueless aunt sends you email with no subject line, half the pages on Geocities are called "Please title this page" and your boss stores all of his files on his desktop with helpful titles like "UNTITLED.DOC."
+
+This laziness is bottomless. No amount of ease-of-use will end it. To understand the true depths of meta-laziness, download ten random MP3 files from Napster. Chances are, at least one will have no title, artist or track information -- this despite the fact that adding in this info merely requires clicking the "Fetch Track Info from CDDB" button on every MP3-ripping application.
+
+Short of breaking fingers or sending out squads of vengeful info-ninjas to add metadata to the average user's files, we're never gonna get there.
+
+3~x- 2.3 People are stupid
+
+Even when there's a positive benefit to creating good metadata, people steadfastly refuse to exercise care and diligence in their metadata creation.
+
+Take eBay: every seller there has a damned good reason for double-checking their listings for typos and misspellings. Try searching for "plam" on eBay. Right now, that turns up nine typoed listings for "Plam Pilots." Misspelled listings don't show up in correctly-spelled searches and hence garner fewer bids and lower sale-prices. You can almost always get a bargain on a Plam Pilot at eBay.
+
+The fine (and gross) points of literacy -- spelling, punctuation, grammar -- elude the vast majority of the Internet's users. To believe that J. Random Users will suddenly and en masse learn to spell and punctuate -- let alone accurately categorize their information according to whatever hierarchy they're supposed to be using -- is self-delusion of the first water.
+
+3~x- 2.4 Mission: Impossible -- know thyself
+
+In meta-utopia, everyone engaged in the heady business of describing stuff carefully weighs the stuff in the balance and accurately divines the stuff's properties, noting those results.
+
+Simple observation demonstrates the fallacy of this assumption. When Nielsen used log-books to gather information on the viewing habits of their sample families, the results were heavily skewed to Masterpiece Theater and Sesame Street. Replacing the journals with set-top boxes that reported what the set was actually tuned to showed what the average American family was really watching: naked midget wrestling, America's Funniest Botched Cosmetic Surgeries and Jerry Springer presents: "My daughter dresses like a slut!"
+
+Ask a programmer how long it'll take to write a given module, or a contractor how long it'll take to fix your roof. Ask a laconic Southerner how far it is to the creek. Better yet, throw darts -- the answer's likely to be just as reliable.
+
+People are lousy observers of their own behaviors. Entire religions are formed with the goal of helping people understand themselves better; therapists rake in billions working for this very end.
+
+Why should we believe that using metadata will help J. Random User get in touch with her Buddha nature?
+
+3~x- 2.5 Schemas aren't neutral
+
+In meta-utopia, the lab-coated guardians of epistemology sit down and rationally map out a hierarchy of ideas, something like this:
+
+group{
+
+Nothing:
+
+  Black holes
+
+Everything:
+
+  Matter:
+
+    Earth:
+
+      Planets
+
+      Washing Machines
+
+    Wind:
+
+      Oxygen
+
+      Poo-gas
+
+    Fire:
+
+      Nuclear fission
+
+      Nuclear fusion
+
+      "Mean Devil Woman" Louisiana Hot-Sauce
+
+}group
+
+In a given sub-domain, say, Washing Machines, experts agree on sub-hierarchies, with classes for reliability, energy consumption, color, size, etc.
+
+This presumes that there is a "correct" way of categorizing ideas, and that reasonable people, given enough time and incentive, can agree on the proper means for building a hierarchy.
+
+Nothing could be farther from the truth. Any hierarchy of ideas necessarily implies the importance of some axes over others. A manufacturer of small, environmentally conscious washing machines would draw a hierarchy that looks like this:
+
+group{
+
+Energy consumption:
+
+  Water consumption:
+
+    Size:
+
+      Capacity:
+
+        Reliability
+
+}group
+
+While a manufacturer of glitzy, feature-laden washing machines would want something like this:
+
+group{
+
+Color:
+
+  Size:
+
+    Programmability:
+
+      Reliability
+
+}group
+
+The conceit that competing interests can come to easy accord on a common vocabulary totally ignores the power of organizing principles in a marketplace.
+
+3~x- 2.6 Metrics influence results
+
+Agreeing to a common yardstick for measuring the important stuff in any domain necessarily privileges the items that score high on that metric, regardless of those items' overall suitability. IQ tests privilege people who are good at IQ tests, Nielsen Ratings privilege 30- and 60-minute TV shows (which is why MTV doesn't show videos any more -- Nielsen couldn't generate ratings for three-minute mini-programs, and so MTV couldn't demonstrate the value of advertising on its network), raw megahertz scores privilege Intel's CISC chips over Motorola's RISC chips.
+
+Ranking axes are mutually exclusive: software that scores high for security scores low for convenience, desserts that score high for decadence score low for healthiness. Every player in a metadata standards body wants to emphasize their high-scoring axes and de-emphasize (or, if possible, ignore altogether) their low-scoring axes.
+
+It's wishful thinking to believe that a group of people competing to advance their agendas will be universally pleased with any hierarchy of knowledge. The best that we can hope for is a detente in which everyone is equally miserable.
+
+3~x- 2.7 There's more than one way to describe something
+
+"No, I'm not watching cartoons! It's cultural anthropology."
+
+"This isn't smut, it's art."
+
+"It's not a bald spot, it's a solar panel for a sex-machine."
+
+Reasonable people can disagree forever on how to describe something. Arguably, your Self is the collection of associations and descriptors you ascribe to ideas. Requiring everyone to use the same vocabulary to describe their material denudes the cognitive landscape, enforces homogeneity in ideas.
+
+And that's just not right.
+
+2~x- 3. Reliable metadata
+
+Do we throw out metadata, then?
+
+Of course not. Metadata can be quite useful, if taken with a sufficiently large pinch of salt. The meta-utopia will never come into being, but metadata is often a good means of making rough assumptions about the information that floats through the Internet.
+
+Certain kinds of implicit metadata is awfully useful, in fact. Google exploits metadata about the structure of the World Wide Web: by examining the number of links pointing at a page (and the number of links pointing at each linker), Google can derive statistics about the number of Web-authors who believe that that page is important enough to link to, and hence make extremely reliable guesses about how reputable the information on that page is.
+
+This sort of observational metadata is far more reliable than the stuff that human beings create for the purposes of having their documents found. It cuts through the marketing bullshit, the self-delusion, and the vocabulary collisions.
+
+Taken more broadly, this kind of metadata can be thought of as a pedigree: who thinks that this document is valuable? How closely correlated have this person's value judgments been with mine in times gone by? This kind of implicit endorsement of information is a far better candidate for an information-retrieval panacea than all the world's schema combined.
+
+$$$$
+
+1~ Amish for QWERTY
+
+(Originally published on the O'Reilly Network, 07/09/2003) ~#
+
+I learned to type before I learned to write. The QWERTY keyboard layout is hard-wired to my brain, such that I can't write anything of significance without that I have a 101-key keyboard in front of me. This has always been a badge of geek pride: unlike the creaking pen-and-ink dinosaurs that I grew up reading, I'm well adapted to the modern reality of technology. There's a secret elitist pride in touch-typing on a laptop while staring off into space, fingers flourishing and caressing the keys.
+
+But last week, my pride got pricked. I was brung low by a phone. Some very nice people from Nokia loaned me a very latest-and-greatest camera-phone, the kind of gadget I've described in my science fiction stories. As I prodded at the little 12-key interface, I felt like my father, a 60s-vintage computer scientist who can't get his wireless network to work, must feel. Like a creaking dino. Like history was passing me by. I'm 31, and I'm obsolete. Or at least Amish.
+
+People think the Amish are technophobes. Far from it. They're ideologues. They have a concept of what right-living consists of, and they'll use any technology that serves that ideal -- and mercilessly eschew any technology that would subvert it. There's nothing wrong with driving the wagon to the next farm when you want to hear from your son, so there's no need to put a phone in the kitchen. On the other hand, there's nothing right about your livestock dying for lack of care, so a cellphone that can call the veterinarian can certainly find a home in the horse barn.
+
+For me, right-living is the 101-key, QWERTY, computer-centric mediated lifestyle. It's having a bulky laptop in my bag, crouching by the toilets at a strange airport with my AC adapter plugged into the always-awkwardly-placed power source, running software that I chose and installed, communicating over the wireless network. I use a network that has no incremental cost for communication, and a device that lets me install any software without permission from anyone else. Right-living is the highly mutated, commodity-hardware- based, public and free Internet. I'm QWERTY-Amish, in other words.
+
+I'm the kind of perennial early adopter who would gladly volunteer to beta test a neural interface, but I find myself in a moral panic when confronted with the 12-button keypad on a cellie, even though that interface is one that has been greedily adopted by billions of people worldwide, from strap-hanging Japanese schoolgirls to Kenyan electoral scrutineers to Filipino guerrillas in the bush. The idea of paying for every message makes my hackles tumesce and evokes a reflexive moral conviction that text-messaging is inherently undemocratic, at least compared to free-as-air email. The idea of only running the software that big-brother telco has permitted me on my handset makes me want to run for the hills.
+
+The thumb-generation who can tap out a text-message under their desks while taking notes with the other hand -- they're in for it, too. The pace of accelerated change means that we're all of us becoming wed to interfaces -- ways of communicating with our tools and our world -- that are doomed, doomed, doomed. The 12-buttoners are marrying the phone company, marrying a centrally controlled network that requires permission to use and improve, a Stalinist technology whose centralized choke points are subject to regulation and the vagaries of the telcos. Long after the phone companies have been out-competed by the pure and open Internet (if such a glorious day comes to pass), the kids of today will be bound by its interface and its conventions.
+
+The sole certainty about the future is its Amishness. We will all bend our brains to suit an interface that we will either have to abandon or be left behind. Choose your interface -- and the values it implies -- carefully, then, before you wed your thought processes to your fingers' dance. It may be the one you're stuck with.
+
+$$$$
+
+1~ Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books
+
+(Paper for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, San Diego, February 12, 2004) ~#
+
+Forematter:
+
+This talk was initially given at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference [ http://conferences.oreillynet.com/et2004/ ], along with a set of slides that, for copyright reasons (ironic!) can't be released alongside of this file. However, you will find, interspersed in this text, notations describing the places where new slides should be loaded, in [square-brackets].
+
+For starters, let me try to summarize the lessons and intuitions I've had about ebooks from my release of two novels and most of a short story collection online under a Creative Commons license. A parodist who published a list of alternate titles for the presentations at this event called this talk, "eBooks Suck Right Now," [eBooks suck right now] and as funny as that is, I don't think it's true.
+
+No, if I had to come up with another title for this talk, I'd call it: "Ebooks: You're Soaking in Them." [Ebooks: You're Soaking in Them] That's because I think that the shape of ebooks to come is almost visible in the way that people interact with text today, and that the job of authors who want to become rich and famous is to come to a better understanding of that shape.
+
+I haven't come to a perfect understanding. I don't know what the future of the book looks like. But I have ideas, and I'll share them with you:
+
+1. Ebooks aren't marketing. [Ebooks aren't marketing] OK, so ebooks *{are}* marketing: that is to say that giving away ebooks sells more books. Baen Books, who do a lot of series publishing, have found that giving away electronic editions of the previous installments in their series to coincide with the release of a new volume sells the hell out of the new book -- and the backlist. And the number of people who wrote to me to tell me about how much they dug the ebook and so bought the paper-book far exceeds the number of people who wrote to me and said, "Ha, ha, you hippie, I read your book for free and now I'm not gonna buy it." But ebooks *{shouldn't}* be just about marketing: ebooks are a goal unto themselves. In the final analysis, more people will read more words off more screens and fewer words off fewer pages and when those two lines cross, ebooks are gonna have to be the way that writers earn their keep, not the way that they promote the dead-tree editions.
+
+2. Ebooks complement paper books. [Ebooks complement paper books]. Having an ebook is good. Having a paper book is good. Having both is even better. One reader wrote to me and said that he read half my first novel from the bound book, and printed the other half on scrap-paper to read at the beach. Students write to me to say that it's easier to do their term papers if they can copy and paste their quotations into their word-processors. Baen readers use the electronic editions of their favorite series to build concordances of characters, places and events.
+
+3. Unless you own the ebook, you don't 0wn the book [Unless you own the ebook, you don't 0wn the book]. I take the view that the book is a "practice" -- a collection of social and economic and artistic activities -- and not an "object." Viewing the book as a "practice" instead of an object is a pretty radical notion, and it begs the question: just what the hell is a book? Good question. I write all of my books in a text-editor [TEXT EDITOR SCREENGRAB] (BBEdit, from Barebones Software -- as fine a text-editor as I could hope for). From there, I can convert them into a formatted two-column PDF [TWO-UP SCREENGRAB]. I can turn them into an HTML file [BROWSER SCREENGRAB]. I can turn them over to my publisher, who can turn them into galleys, advanced review copies, hardcovers and paperbacks. I can turn them over to my readers, who can convert them to a bewildering array of formats [DOWNLOAD PAGE SCREENGRAB]. Brewster Kahle's Internet Bookmobile can convert a digital book into a four-color, full-bleed, perfect-bound, laminated-cover, printed-spine paper book in ten minutes, for about a dollar. Try converting a paper book to a PDF or an html file or a text file or a RocketBook or a printout for a buck in ten minutes! It's ironic, because one of the frequently cited reasons for preferring paper to ebooks is that paper books confer a sense of ownership of a physical object. Before the dust settles on this ebook thing, owning a paper book is going to feel less like ownership than having an open digital edition of the text.
+
+4. Ebooks are a better deal for writers. [Ebooks are a better deal for writers] The compensation for writers is pretty thin on the ground. *{Amazing Stories}*, Hugo Gernsback's original science fiction magazine, paid a couple cents a word. Today, science fiction magazines pay...a couple cents a word. The sums involved are so minuscule, they're not even insulting: they're *{quaint}* and *{historical}*, like the WHISKEY 5 CENTS sign over the bar at a pioneer village. Some writers do make it big, but they're *{rounding errors}* as compared to the total population of sf writers earning some of their living at the trade. Almost all of us could be making more money elsewhere (though we may dream of earning a stephenkingload of money, and of course, no one would play the lotto if there were no winners). The primary incentive for writing has to be artistic satisfaction, egoboo, and a desire for posterity. Ebooks get you that. Ebooks become a part of the corpus of human knowledge because they get indexed by search engines and replicated by the hundreds, thousands or millions. They can be googled.
+
+Even better: they level the playing field between writers and trolls. When Amazon kicked off, many writers got their knickers in a tight and powerful knot at the idea that axe-grinding yahoos were filling the Amazon message-boards with ill-considered slams at their work -- for, if a personal recommendation is the best way to sell a book, then certainly a personal condemnation is the best way to *{not}* sell a book. Today, the trolls are still with us, but now, the readers get to decide for themselves. Here's a bit of a review of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom that was recently posted to Amazon by "A reader from Redwood City, CA":
+
+group{
+
+[QUOTED TEXT]
+
+> I am really not sure what kind of drugs critics are
+> smoking, or what kind of payola may be involved. But
+> regardless of what Entertainment Weekly says, whatever
+> this newspaper or that magazine says, you shouldn't
+> waste your money. Download it for free from Corey's
+> (sic) site, read the first page, and look away in
+> disgust -- this book is for people who think Dan
+> Brown's Da Vinci Code is great writing.
+
+}group
+
+Back in the old days, this kind of thing would have really pissed me off. Axe-grinding, mouth-breathing yahoos, defaming my good name! My stars and mittens! But take a closer look at that damning passage:
+
+group{
+
+[PULL-QUOTE]
+
+> Download it for free from Corey's site, read the first
+> page
+
+}group
+
+You see that? Hell, this guy is *{working for me}*! [ADDITIONAL PULL QUOTES] Someone accuses a writer I'm thinking of reading of paying off Entertainment Weekly to say nice things about his novel, "a surprisingly bad writer," no less, whose writing is "stiff, amateurish, and uninspired!" I wanna check that writer out. And I can. In one click. And then I can make up my own mind.
+
+You don't get far in the arts without healthy doses of both ego and insecurity, and the downside of being able to google up all the things that people are saying about your book is that it can play right into your insecurities -- "all these people will have it in their minds not to bother with my book because they've read the negative interweb reviews!" But the flipside of that is the ego: "If only they'd give it a shot, they'd see how good it is." And the more scathing the review is, the more likely they are to give it a shot. Any press is good press, so long as they spell your URL right (and even if they spell your name wrong!).
+
+5. Ebooks need to embrace their nature. [Ebooks need to embrace their nature.] The distinctive value of ebooks is orthogonal to the value of paper books, and it revolves around the mix-ability and send-ability of electronic text. The more you constrain an ebook's distinctive value propositions -- that is, the more you restrict a reader's ability to copy, transport or transform an ebook -- the more it has to be valued on the same axes as a paper-book. Ebooks *{fail}* on those axes. Ebooks don't beat paper-books for sophisticated typography, they can't match them for quality of paper or the smell of the glue. But just try sending a paper book to a friend in Brazil, for free, in less than a second. Or loading a thousand paper books into a little stick of flash-memory dangling from your keychain. Or searching a paper book for every instance of a character's name to find a beloved passage. Hell, try clipping a pithy passage out of a paper book and pasting it into your sig-file.
+
+6. Ebooks demand a different attention span (but not a shorter one). [Ebooks demand a different attention span (but not a shorter one).] Artists are always disappointed by their audience's attention-spans. Go back far enough and you'll find cuneiform etchings bemoaning the current Sumerian go-go lifestyle with its insistence on myths with plotlines and characters and action, not like we had in the old days. As artists, it would be a hell of a lot easier if our audiences were more tolerant of our penchant for boring them. We'd get to explore a lot more ideas without worrying about tarting them up with easy-to-swallow chocolate coatings of entertainment. We like to think of shortened attention spans as a product of the information age, but check this out:
+
+group{
+
+[Nietzsche quote]
+
+> To be sure one thing necessary above all: if one is to
+> practice reading as an *art* in this way, something
+> needs to be un-learned most thoroughly in these days.
+
+}group
+
+In other words, if my book is too boring, it's because you're not paying enough attention. Writers say this stuff all the time, but this quote isn't from this century or the last. [Nietzsche quote with attribution] It's from the preface to Nietzsche's "Genealogy of Morals," published in *{1887}*.
+
+Yeah, our attention-spans are *{different}* today, but they aren't necessarily *{shorter}*. Warren Ellis's fans managed to hold the storyline for Transmetropolitan [Transmet cover] in their minds for *{five years}* while the story trickled out in monthly funnybook installments. JK Rowlings's installments on the Harry Potter series get fatter and fatter with each new volume. Entire forests are sacrificed to long-running series fiction like Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books, each of which is approximately 20,000 pages long (I may be off by an order of magnitude one way or another here). Sure, presidential debates are conducted in soundbites today and not the days-long oratory extravaganzas of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but people manage to pay attention to the 24-month-long presidential campaigns from start to finish.
+
+7. We need *{all}* the ebooks. [We need *{all}* the ebooks] The vast majority of the words ever penned are lost to posterity. No one library collects all the still-extant books ever written and no one person could hope to make a dent in that corpus of written work. None of us will ever read more than the tiniest sliver of human literature. But that doesn't mean that we can stick with just the most popular texts and get a proper ebook revolution.
+
+For starters, we're all edge-cases. Sure, we all have the shared desire for the core canon of literature, but each of us want to complete that collection with different texts that are as distinctive and individualistic as fingerprints. If we all look like we're doing the same thing when we read, or listen to music, or hang out in a chatroom, that's because we're not looking closely enough. The shared-ness of our experience is only present at a coarse level of measurement: once you get into really granular observation, there are as many differences in our "shared" experience as there are similarities.
+
+More than that, though, is the way that a large collection of electronic text differs from a small one: it's the difference between a single book, a shelf full of books and a library of books. Scale makes things different. Take the Web: none of us can hope to read even a fraction of all the pages on the Web, but by analyzing the link structures that bind all those pages together, Google is able to actually tease out machine-generated conclusions about the relative relevance of different pages to different queries. None of us will ever eat the whole corpus, but Google can digest it for us and excrete the steaming nuggets of goodness that make it the search-engine miracle it is today.
+
+8. Ebooks are like paper books. [Ebooks are like paper books]. To round out this talk, I'd like to go over the ways that ebooks are more like paper books than you'd expect. One of the truisms of retail theory is that purchasers need to come into contact with a good several times before they buy -- seven contacts is tossed around as the magic number. That means that my readers have to hear the title, see the cover, pick up the book, read a review, and so forth, seven times, on average, before they're ready to buy.
+
+There's a temptation to view downloading a book as comparable to bringing it home from the store, but that's the wrong metaphor. Some of the time, maybe most of the time, downloading the text of the book is like taking it off the shelf at the store and looking at the cover and reading the blurbs (with the advantage of not having to come into contact with the residual DNA and burger king left behind by everyone else who browsed the book before you). Some writers are horrified at the idea that three hundred thousand copies of my first novel were downloaded and "only" ten thousand or so were sold so far. If it were the case that for ever copy sold, thirty were taken home from the store, that would be a horrifying outcome, for sure. But look at it another way: if one out of every thirty people who glanced at the cover of my book bought it, I'd be a happy author. And I am. Those downloads cost me no more than glances at the cover in a bookstore, and the sales are healthy.
+
+We also like to think of physical books as being inherently *{countable}* in a way that digital books aren't (an irony, since computers are damned good at counting things!). This is important, because writers get paid on the basis of the number of copies of their books that sell, so having a good count makes a difference. And indeed, my royalty statements contain precise numbers for copies printed, shipped, returned and sold.
+
+But that's a false precision. When the printer does a run of a book, it always runs a few extra at the start and finish of the run to make sure that the setup is right and to account for the occasional rip, drop, or spill. The actual total number of books printed is approximately the number of books ordered, but never exactly -- if you've ever ordered 500 wedding invitations, chances are you received 500-and-a-few back from the printer and that's why.
+
+And the numbers just get fuzzier from there. Copies are stolen. Copies are dropped. Shipping people get the count wrong. Some copies end up in the wrong box and go to a bookstore that didn't order them and isn't invoiced for them and end up on a sale table or in the trash. Some copies are returned as damaged. Some are returned as unsold. Some come back to the store the next morning accompanied by a whack of buyer's remorse. Some go to the place where the spare sock in the dryer ends up.
+
+The numbers on a royalty statement are actuarial, not actual. They represent a kind of best-guess approximation of the copies shipped, sold, returned and so forth. Actuarial accounting works pretty well: well enough to run the juggernaut banking, insurance, and gambling industries on. It's good enough for divvying up the royalties paid by musical rights societies for radio airplay and live performance. And it's good enough for counting how many copies of a book are distributed online or off.
+
+Counts of paper books are differently precise from counts of electronic books, sure: but neither one is inherently countable.
+
+And finally, of course, there's the matter of selling books. However an author earns her living from her words, printed or encoded, she has as her first and hardest task to find her audience. There are more competitors for our attention than we can possibly reconcile, prioritize or make sense of. Getting a book under the right person's nose, with the right pitch, is the hardest and most important task any writer faces.
+
+#
+
+I care about books, a lot. I started working in libraries and bookstores at the age of 12 and kept at it for a decade, until I was lured away by the siren song of the tech world. I knew I wanted to be a writer at the age of 12, and now, 20 years later, I have three novels, a short story collection and a nonfiction book out, two more novels under contract, and another book in the works. [BOOK COVERS] I've won a major award in my genre, science fiction, [CAMPBELL AWARD] and I'm nominated for another one, the 2003 Nebula Award for best novelette. [NEBULA]
+
+I own a *{lot}* of books. Easily more than 10,000 of them, in storage on both coasts of the North American continent [LIBRARY LADDER]. I have to own them, since they're the tools of my trade: the reference works I refer to as a novelist and writer today. Most of the literature I dig is very short-lived, it disappears from the shelf after just a few months, usually for good. Science fiction is inherently ephemeral. [ACE DOUBLES]
+
+Now, as much as I love books, I love computers, too. Computers are fundamentally different from modern books in the same way that printed books are different from monastic Bibles: they are malleable. Time was, a "book" was something produced by many months' labor by a scribe, usually a monk, on some kind of durable and sexy substrate like foetal lambskin. [ILLUMINATED BIBLE] Gutenberg's xerox machine changed all that, changed a book into something that could be simply run off a press in a few minutes' time, on substrate more suitable to ass-wiping than exaltation in a place of honor in the cathedral. The Gutenberg press meant that rather than owning one or two books, a member of the ruling class could amass a library, and that rather than picking only a few subjects from enshrinement in print, a huge variety of subjects could be addressed on paper and handed from person to person. [KAPITAL/TIJUANA BIBLE]
+
+Most new ideas start with a precious few certainties and a lot of speculation. I've been doing a bunch of digging for certainties and a lot of speculating lately, and the purpose of this talk is to lay out both categories of ideas.
+
+This all starts with my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom [COVER], which came out on January 9, 2003. At that time, there was a lot of talk in my professional circles about, on the one hand, the dismal failure of ebooks, and, on the other, the new and scary practice of ebook "piracy." [alt.binaries.e-books screengrab] It was strikingly weird that no one seemed to notice that the idea of ebooks as a "failure" was at strong odds with the notion that electronic book "piracy" was worth worrying about: I mean, if ebooks are a failure, then who gives a rats if intarweb dweebs are trading them on Usenet?
+
+A brief digression here, on the double meaning of "ebooks." One meaning for that word is "legitimate" ebook ventures, that is to say, rightsholder-authorized editions of the texts of books, released in a proprietary, use-restricted format, sometimes for use on a general-purpose PC and sometimes for use on a special-purpose hardware device like the nuvoMedia Rocketbook [ROCKETBOOK]. The other meaning for ebook is a "pirate" or unauthorized electronic edition of a book, usually made by cutting the binding off of a book and scanning it a page at a time, then running the resulting bitmaps through an optical character recognition app to convert them into ASCII text, to be cleaned up by hand. These books are pretty buggy, full of errors introduced by the OCR. A lot of my colleagues worry that these books also have deliberate errors, created by mischievous book-rippers who cut, add or change text in order to "improve" the work. Frankly, I have never seen any evidence that any book-ripper is interested in doing this, and until I do, I think that this is the last thing anyone should be worrying about.
+
+Back to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom [COVER]. Well, not yet. I want to convey to you the depth of the panic in my field over ebook piracy, or "bookwarez" as it is known in book-ripper circles. Writers were joining the discussion on alt.binaries.ebooks using assumed names, claiming fear of retaliation from scary hax0r kids who would presumably screw up their credit-ratings in retaliation for being called thieves. My editor, a blogger, hacker and guy-in-charge-of-the-largest-sf-line-in-the-world named Patrick Nielsen Hayden posted to one of the threads in the newsgroup, saying, in part [SCREENGRAB]:
+
+group{
+
+> Pirating copyrighted etext on Usenet and elsewhere is going to
+> happen more and more, for the same reasons that everyday folks
+> make audio cassettes from vinyl LPs and audio CDs, and
+> videocassette copies of store-bought videotapes. Partly it's
+> greed; partly it's annoyance over retail prices; partly it's the
+> desire to Share Cool Stuff (a motivation usually underrated by
+> the victims of this kind of small-time hand-level piracy).
+> Instantly going to Defcon One over it and claiming it's morally
+> tantamount to mugging little old ladies in the street will make
+> it kind of difficult to move forward from that position when it
+> doesn't work. In the 1970s, the record industry shrieked that
+> "home taping is killing music." It's hard for ordinary folks to
+> avoid noticing that music didn't die. But the record industry's
+> credibility on the subject wasn't exactly enhanced.
+
+}group
+
+Patrick and I have a long relationship, starting when I was 18 years old and he kicked in toward a scholarship fund to send me to a writers' workshop, continuing to a fateful lunch in New York in the mid-Nineties when I showed him a bunch of Project Gutenberg texts on my Palm Pilot and inspired him to start licensing Tor's titles for PDAs [PEANUTPRESS SCREENGRAB], to the turn-of-the-millennium when he bought and then published my first novel (he's bought three more since -- I really like Patrick!).
+
+Right as bookwarez newsgroups were taking off, I was shocked silly by legal action by one of my colleagues against AOL/Time-Warner for carrying the alt.binaries.ebooks newsgroup. This writer alleged that AOL should have a duty to remove this newsgroup, since it carried so many infringing files, and that its failure to do so made it a contributory infringer, and so liable for the incredibly stiff penalties afforded by our newly minted copyright laws like the No Electronic Theft Act and the loathsome Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA.
+
+Now there was a scary thought: there were people out there who thought the world would be a better place if ISPs were given the duty of actively policing and censoring the websites and newsfeeds their customers had access to, including a requirement that ISPs needed to determine, all on their own, what was an unlawful copyright infringement -- something more usually left up to judges in the light of extensive amicus briefings from esteemed copyright scholars [WIND DONE GONE GRAPHIC].
+
+This was a stupendously dumb idea, and it offended me down to my boots. Writers are supposed to be advocates of free expression, not censorship. It seemed that some of my colleagues loved the First Amendment, but they were reluctant to share it with the rest of the world.
+
+Well, dammit, I had a book coming out, and it seemed to be an opportunity to try to figure out a little more about this ebook stuff. On the one hand, ebooks were a dismal failure. On the other hand, there were more books posted to alt.binaries.ebooks every day.
+
+This leads me into the two certainties I have about ebooks:
+
+1. More people are reading more words off more screens every day [GRAPHIC]
+
+2. Fewer people are reading fewer words off fewer pages every day [GRAPHIC]
+
+These two certainties begged a lot of questions.
+
+[CHART: EBOOK FAILINGS]
+
+_* Screen resolutions are too low to effectively replace paper
+
+_* People want to own physical books because of their visceral appeal (often this is accompanied by a little sermonette on how good books smell, or how good they look on a bookshelf, or how evocative an old curry stain in the margin can be)
+
+_* You can't take your ebook into the tub
+
+_* You can't read an ebook without power and a computer
+
+_* File-formats go obsolete, paper has lasted for a long time
+
+None of these seemed like very good explanations for the "failure" of ebooks to me. If screen resolutions are too low to replace paper, then how come everyone I know spends more time reading off a screen every year, up to and including my sainted grandmother (geeks have a really crappy tendency to argue that certain technologies aren't ready for primetime because their grandmothers won't use them -- well, my grandmother sends me email all the time. She types 70 words per minute, and loves to show off grandsonular email to her pals around the pool at her Florida retirement condo)?
+
+The other arguments were a lot more interesting, though. It seemed to me that electronic books are *{different}* from paper books, and have different virtues and failings. Let's think a little about what the book has gone through in years gone by. This is interesting because the history of the book is the history of the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the Pilgrims, and, ultimately the colonizing of the Americas and the American Revolution.
+
+Broadly speaking, there was a time when books were hand-printed on rare leather by monks. The only people who could read them were priests, who got a regular eyeful of the really cool cartoons the monks drew in the margins. The priests read the books aloud, in Latin [LATIN BIBLE] (to a predominantly non-Latin-speaking audience) in cathedrals, wreathed in pricey incense that rose from censers swung by altar boys.
+
+Then Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Martin Luther turned that press into a revolution. [LUTHER BIBLE] He printed Bibles in languages that non-priests could read, and distributed them to normal people who got to read the word of God all on their own. The rest, as they say, is history.
+
+Here are some interesting things to note about the advent of the printing press:
+
+[CHART: LUTHER VERSUS THE MONKS]
+
+_* Luther Bibles lacked the manufacturing quality of the illuminated Bibles. They were comparatively cheap and lacked the typographical expressiveness that a really talented monk could bring to bear when writing out the word of God
+
+_* Luther Bibles were utterly unsuited to the traditional use-case for Bibles. A good Bible was supposed to reinforce the authority of the man at the pulpit. It needed heft, it needed impressiveness, and most of all, it needed rarity.
+
+_* The user-experience of Luther Bibles sucked. There was no incense, no altar boys, and who (apart from the priesthood) knew that reading was so friggin' hard on the eyes?
+
+_* Luther Bibles were a lot less trustworthy than the illuminated numbers. Anyone with a press could run one off, subbing in any apocryphal text he wanted -- and who knew how accurate that translation was? Monks had an entire Papacy behind them, running a quality-assurance operation that had stood Europe in good stead for centuries.
+
+In the late nineties, I went to conferences where music execs patiently explained that Napster was doomed, because you didn't get any cover-art or liner-notes with it, you couldn't know if the rip was any good, and sometimes the connection would drop mid-download. I'm sure that many Cardinals espoused the points raised above with equal certainty.
+
+What the record execs and the cardinals missed was all the ways that Luther Bibles kicked ass:
+
+[CHART: WHY LUTHER BIBLES KICKED ASS]
+
+_* They were cheap and fast. Loads of people could acquire them without having to subject themselves to the authority and approval of the Church
+
+_* They were in languages that non-priests could read. You no longer had to take the Church's word for it when its priests explained what God really meant
+
+_* They birthed a printing-press ecosystem in which lots of books flourished. New kinds of fiction, poetry, politics, scholarship and so on were all enabled by the printing presses whose initial popularity was spurred by Luther's ideas about religion.
+
+Note that all of these virtues are orthogonal to the virtues of a monkish Bible. That is, none of the things that made the Gutenberg press a success were the things that made monk-Bibles a success.
+
+By the same token, the reasons to love ebooks have precious little to do with the reasons to love paper books.
+
+[CHART: WHY EBOOKS KICK ASS]
+
+_* They are easy to share. Secrets of Ya-Ya Sisterhood went from a midlist title to a bestseller by being passed from hand to hand by women in reading circles. Slashdorks and other netizens have social life as rich as reading-circlites, but they don't ever get to see each other face to face; the only kind of book they can pass from hand to hand is an ebook. What's more, the single factor most correlated with a purchase is a recommendation from a friend -- getting a book recommended by a pal is more likely to sell you on it than having read and enjoyed the preceding volume in a series!
+
+_* They are easy to slice and dice. This is where the Mac evangelist in me comes out -- minority platforms matter. It's a truism of the Napsterverse that most of the files downloaded are bog-standard top-40 tracks, like 90 percent or so, and I believe it. We all want to popular music. That's why it's popular. But the interesting thing is the other ten percent. Bill Gates told the New York Times that Microsoft lost the search wars by doing "a good job on the 80 percent of common queries and ignor[ing] the other stuff. But it's the remaining 20 percent that counts, because that's where the quality perception is." Why did Napster captivate so many of us? Not because it could get us the top-40 tracks that we could hear just by snapping on the radio: it was because 80 percent of the music ever recorded wasn't available for sale anywhere in the world, and in that 80 percent were all the songs that had ever touched us, all the earworms that had been lodged in our hindbrains, all the stuff that made us smile when we heard it. Those songs are different for all of us, but they share the trait of making the difference between a compelling service and, well, top-40 Clearchannel radio programming. It was the minority of tracks that appealed to the majority of us. By the same token, the malleability of electronic text means that it can be readily repurposed: you can throw it on a webserver or convert it to a format for your favorite PDA; you can ask your computer to read it aloud or you can search the text for a quotation to cite in a book report or to use in your sig. In other words, most people who download the book do so for the predictable reason, and in a predictable format -- say, to sample a chapter in the HTML format before deciding whether to buy the book -- but the thing that differentiates a boring e-text experience from an exciting one is the minority use -- printing out a couple chapters of the book to bring to the beach rather than risk getting the hardcopy wet and salty.
+
+Tool-makers and software designers are increasingly aware of the notion of "affordances" in design. You can bash a nail into the wall with any heavy, heftable object from a rock to a hammer to a cast-iron skillet. However, there's something about a hammer that cries out for nail-bashing, it has affordances that tilt its holder towards swinging it. And, as we all know, when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.
+
+The affordance of a computer -- the thing it's designed to do -- is to slice-and-dice collections of bits. The affordance of the Internet is to move bits at very high speed around the world at little-to-no cost. It follows from this that the center of the ebook experience is going to involve slicing and dicing text and sending it around.
+
+Copyright lawyers have a word for these activities: infringement. That's because copyright gives creators a near-total monopoly over copying and remixing of their work, pretty much forever (theoretically, copyright expires, but in actual practice, copyright gets extended every time the early Mickey Mouse cartoons are about to enter the public domain, because Disney swings a very big stick on the Hill).
+
+This is a huge problem. The biggest possible problem. Here's why:
+
+[CHART: HOW BROKEN COPYRIGHT SCREWS EVERYONE]
+
+_* Authors freak out. Authors have been schooled by their peers that strong copyright is the only thing that keeps them from getting savagely rogered in the marketplace. This is pretty much true: it's strong copyright that often defends authors from their publishers' worst excesses. However, it doesn't follow that strong copyright protects you from your *{readers}*.
+
+_* Readers get indignant over being called crooks. Seriously. You're a small businessperson. Readers are your customers. Calling them crooks is bad for business.
+
+_* Publishers freak out. Publishers freak out, because they're in the business of grabbing as much copyright as they can and hanging onto it for dear life because, dammit, you never know. This is why science fiction magazines try to trick writers into signing over improbable rights for things like theme park rides and action figures based on their work -- it's also why literary agents are now asking for copyright-long commissions on the books they represent: copyright covers so much ground and takes to long to shake off, who wouldn't want a piece of it?
+
+_* Liability goes through the roof. Copyright infringement, especially on the Net, is a supercrime. It carries penalties of $150,000 per infringement, and aggrieved rights-holders and their representatives have all kinds of special powers, like the ability to force an ISP to turn over your personal information before showing evidence of your alleged infringement to a judge. This means that anyone who suspects that he might be on the wrong side of copyright law is going to be terribly risk-averse: publishers non-negotiably force their authors to indemnify them from infringement claims and go one better, forcing writers to prove that they have "cleared" any material they quote, even in the case of brief fair-use quotations, like song-titles at the opening of chapters. The result is that authors end up assuming potentially life-destroying liability, are chilled from quoting material around them, and are scared off of public domain texts because an honest mistake about the public-domain status of a work carries such a terrible price.
+
+_* Posterity vanishes. In the Eldred v. Ashcroft Supreme Court hearing last year, the court found that 98 percent of the works in copyright are no longer earning money for anyone, but that figuring out who these old works belong to with the degree of certainty that you'd want when one mistake means total economic apocalypse would cost more than you could ever possibly earn on them. That means that 98 percent of works will largely expire long before the copyright on them does. Today, the names of science fiction's ancestral founders -- Mary Shelley, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, HG Wells -- are still known, their work still a part of the discourse. Their spiritual descendants from Hugo Gernsback onward may not be so lucky -- if their work continues to be "protected" by copyright, it might just vanish from the face of the earth before it reverts to the public domain.
+
+This isn't to say that copyright is bad, but that there's such a thing as good copyright and bad copyright, and that sometimes, too much good copyright is a bad thing. It's like chilis in soup: a little goes a long way, and too much spoils the broth.
+
+From the Luther Bible to the first phonorecords, from radio to the pulps, from cable to MP3, the world has shown that its first preference for new media is its "democratic-ness" -- the ease with which it can reproduced.
+
+(And please, before we get any farther, forget all that business about how the Internet's copying model is more disruptive than the technologies that proceeded it. For Christ's sake, the Vaudeville performers who sued Marconi for inventing the radio had to go from a regime where they had *{one hundred percent}* control over who could get into the theater and hear them perform to a regime where they had *{zero}* percent control over who could build or acquire a radio and tune into a recording of them performing. For that matter, look at the difference between a monkish Bible and a Luther Bible -- next to that phase-change, Napster is peanuts)
+
+Back to democratic-ness. Every successful new medium has traded off its artifact-ness -- the degree to which it was populated by bespoke hunks of atoms, cleverly nailed together by master craftspeople -- for ease of reproduction. Piano rolls weren't as expressive as good piano players, but they scaled better -- as did radio broadcasts, pulp magazines, and MP3s. Liner notes, hand illumination and leather bindings are nice, but they pale in comparison to the ability of an individual to actually get a copy of her own.
+
+Which isn't to say that old media die. Artists still hand-illuminate books; master pianists still stride the boards at Carnegie Hall, and the shelves burst with tell-all biographies of musicians that are richer in detail than any liner-notes booklet. The thing is, when all you've got is monks, every book takes on the character of a monkish Bible. Once you invent the printing press, all the books that are better-suited to movable type migrate into that new form. What's left behind are those items that are best suited to the old production scheme: the plays that *{need}* to be plays, the books that are especially lovely on creamy paper stitched between covers, the music that is most enjoyable performed live and experienced in a throng of humanity.
+
+Increased democratic-ness translates into decreased control: it's a lot harder to control who can copy a book once there's a photocopier on every corner than it is when you need a monastery and several years to copy a Bible. And that decreased control demands a new copyright regime that rebalances the rights of creators with their audiences.
+
+For example, when the VCR was invented, the courts affirmed a new copyright exemption for time-shifting; when the radio was invented, the Congress granted an anti-trust exemption to the record labels in order to secure a blanket license; when cable TV was invented, the government just ordered the broadcasters to sell the cable-operators access to programming at a fixed rate.
+
+Copyright is perennially out of date, because its latest rev was generated in response to the last generation of technology. The temptation to treat copyright as though it came down off the mountain on two stone tablets (or worse, as "just like" real property) is deeply flawed, since, by definition, current copyright only considers the last generation of tech.
+
+So, are bookwarez in violation of copyright law? Duh. Is this the end of the world? *{Duh}*. If the Catholic church can survive the printing press, science fiction will certainly weather the advent of bookwarez.
+
+#
+
+Lagniappe [Lagniappe]
+
+We're almost done here, but there's one more thing I'd like to do before I get off the stage. [Lagniappe: an unexpected bonus or extra] Think of it as a "lagniappe" -- a little something extra to thank you for your patience.
+
+About a year ago, I released my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, on the net, under the terms of the most restrictive Creative Commons license available. All it allowed my readers to do was send around copies of the book. I was cautiously dipping my toe into the water, though at the time, it felt like I was taking a plunge.
+
+Now I'm going to take a plunge. Today, I will re-license the text of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom under a Creative Commons "Attribution-ShareAlike-Derivs-Noncommercial" license [HUMAN READABLE LICENSE], which means that as of today, you have my blessing to create derivative works from my first book. You can make movies, audiobooks, translations, fan-fiction, slash fiction (God help us) [GEEK HIERARCHY], furry slash fiction [GEEK HIERARCHY DETAIL], poetry, translations, t-shirts, you name it, with two provisos: that one, you have to allow everyone else to rip, mix and burn your creations in the same way you're hacking mine; and on the other hand, you've got to do it noncommercially.
+
+The sky didn't fall when I dipped my toe in. Let's see what happens when I get in up to my knees.
+
+The text with the new license will be online before the end of the day. Check craphound.com/down for details.
+
+Oh, and I'm also releasing the text of this speech under a Creative Commons Public Domain dedication, [Public domain dedication] giving it away to the world to do with as it see fits. It'll be linked off my blog, Boing Boing, before the day is through.
+
+$$$$
+
+1~ Free(konomic) E-books
+
+(Originally published in Locus Magazine, September 2007) ~#
+
+Can giving away free electronic books really sell printed books? I think so. As I explained in my March column ("You Do Like Reading Off a Computer Screen"), I don't believe that most readers want to read long-form works off a screen, and I don't believe that they will ever want to read long-form works off a screen. As I say in the column, the problem with reading off a screen isn't resolution, eyestrain, or compatibility with reading in the bathtub: it's that computers are seductive, they tempt us to do other things, making concentrating on a long-form work impractical.
+
+Sure, some readers have the cognitive quirk necessary to read full-length works off screens, or are motivated to do so by other circumstances (such as being so broke that they could never hope to buy the printed work). The rational question isn't, "Will giving away free e-books cost me sales?" but rather, "Will giving away free e-books win me more sales than it costs me?"
+
+This is a very hard proposition to evaluate in a quantitative way. Books aren't lattes or cable-knit sweaters: each book sells (or doesn't) due to factors that are unique to that title. It's hard to imagine an empirical, controlled study in which two "equivalent" books are published, and one is also available as a free download, the other not, and the difference calculated as a means of "proving" whether e-books hurt or help sales in the long run.
+
+I've released all of my novels as free downloads simultaneous with their print publication. If I had a time machine, I could re-release them without the free downloads and compare the royalty statements. Lacking such a device, I'm forced to draw conclusions from qualitative, anecdotal evidence, and I've collected plenty of that:
+
+_* Many writers have tried free e-book releases to tie in with the print release of their works. To the best of my knowledge, every writer who's tried this has repeated the experiment with future works, suggesting a high degree of satisfaction with the outcomes
+
+_* A writer friend of mine had his first novel come out at the same time as mine. We write similar material and are often compared to one another by critics and reviewers. My first novel had a free download, his didn't. We compared sales figures and I was doing substantially better than him -- he subsequently convinced his publisher to let him follow suit
+
+_* Baen Books has a pretty good handle on expected sales for new volumes in long-running series; having sold many such series, they have lots of data to use in sales estimates. If Volume N sells X copies, we expect Volume N+1 to sell Y copies. They report that they have seen a measurable uptick in sales following from free e-book releases of previous and current volumes
+
+_* David Blackburn, a Harvard PhD candidate in economics, published a paper in 2004 in which he calculated that, for music, "piracy" results in a net increase in sales for all titles in the 75th percentile and lower; negligible change in sales for the "middle class" of titles between the 75th percentile and the 97th percentile; and a small drag on the "super-rich" in the 97th percentile and higher. Publisher Tim O'Reilly describes this as "piracy's progressive taxation," apportioning a small wealth-redistribution to the vast majority of works, no net change to the middle, and a small cost on the richest few
+
+_* Speaking of Tim O'Reilly, he has just published a detailed, quantitative study of the effect of free downloads on a single title. O'Reilly Media published Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, in November 2005, simultaneously releasing the book as a free download. By March 2007, they had a pretty detailed picture of the sales-cycle of this book -- and, thanks to industry standard metrics like those provided by Bookscan, they could compare it, apples-to-apples style, against the performance of competing books treating with the same subject. O'Reilly's conclusion: downloads didn't cause a decline in sales, and appears to have resulted in a lift in sales. This is particularly noteworthy because the book in question is a technical reference work, exclusively consumed by computer programmers who are by definition disposed to read off screens. Also, this is a reference work and therefore is more likely to be useful in electronic form, where it can be easily searched
+
+_* In my case, my publishers have gone back to press repeatedly for my books. The print runs for each edition are modest -- I'm a midlist writer in a world with a shrinking midlist -- but publishers print what they think they can sell, and they're outselling their expectations
+
+_* The new opportunities arising from my free downloads are so numerous as to be uncountable -- foreign rights deals, comic book licenses, speaking engagements, article commissions -- I've made more money in these secondary markets than I have in royalties
+
+_* More anecdotes: I've had literally thousands of people approach me by e-mail and at signings and cons to say, "I found your work online for free, got hooked, and started buying it." By contrast, I've had all of five e-mails from people saying, "Hey, idiot, thanks for the free book, now I don't have to buy the print edition, ha ha!"
+
+Many of us have assumed, a priori, that electronic books substitute for print books. While I don't have controlled, quantitative data to refute the proposition, I do have plenty of experience with this stuff, and all that experience leads me to believe that giving away my books is selling the hell out of them.
+
+More importantly, the free e-book skeptics have no evidence to offer in support of their position -- just hand-waving and dark muttering about a mythological future when book-lovers give up their printed books for electronic book-readers (as opposed to the much more plausible future where book lovers go on buying their fetish objects and carry books around on their electronic devices).
+
+I started giving away e-books after I witnessed the early days of the "bookwarez" scene, wherein fans cut the binding off their favorite books, scanned them, ran them through optical character recognition software, and manually proofread them to eliminate the digitization errors. These fans were easily spending 80 hours to rip their favorite books, and they were only ripping their favorite books, books they loved and wanted to share. (The 80-hour figure comes from my own attempt to do this -- I'm sure that rippers get faster with practice.)
+
+I thought to myself that 80 hours' free promotional effort would be a good thing to have at my disposal when my books entered the market. What if I gave my readers clean, canonical electronic editions of my works, saving them the bother of ripping them, and so freed them up to promote my work to their friends?
+
+After all, it's not like there's any conceivable way to stop people from putting books on scanners if they really want to. Scanners aren't going to get more expensive or slower. The Internet isn't going to get harder to use. Better to confront this challenge head on, turn it into an opportunity, than to rail against the future (I'm a science fiction writer -- tuning into the future is supposed to be my metier).
+
+The timing couldn't have been better. Just as my first novel was being published, a new, high-tech project for promoting sharing of creative works launched: the Creative Commons project (CC). CC offers a set of tools that make it easy to mark works with whatever freedoms the author wants to give away. CC launched in 2003 and today, more than 160,000,000 works have been released under its licenses.
+
+My next column will go into more detail on what CC is, what licenses it offers, and how to use them -- but for now, check them out online at creativecommons.org.
+
+$$$$
+
+1~ The Progressive Apocalypse and Other Futurismic Delights
+
+(Originally published in Locus Magazine, July 2007) ~#
+
+Of course, science fiction is a literature of the present. Many's the science fiction writer who uses the future as a warped mirror for reflecting back the present day, angled to illustrate the hidden strangeness buried by our invisible assumptions: Orwell turned 1948 into Nineteen Eighty-Four. But even when the fictional future isn't a parable about the present day, it is necessarily a creation of the present day, since it reflects the present day biases that infuse the author. Hence Asimov's Foundation, a New Deal-esque project to think humanity out of its tribulations though social interventionism.
+
+Bold SF writers eschew the future altogether, embracing a futuristic account of the present day. William Gibson's forthcoming Spook Country is an act of "speculative presentism," a book so futuristic it could only have been set in 2006, a book that exploits retrospective historical distance to let us glimpse just how alien and futuristic our present day is.
+
+Science fiction writers aren't the only people in the business of predicting the future. Futurists -- consultants, technology columnists, analysts, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurial pitchmen -- spill a lot of ink, phosphors, and caffeinated hot air in describing a vision for a future where we'll get more and more of whatever it is they want to sell us or warn us away from. Tomorrow will feature faster, cheaper processors, more Internet users, ubiquitous RFID tags, radically democratic political processes dominated by bloggers, massively multiplayer games whose virtual economies dwarf the physical economy.
+
+There's a lovely neologism to describe these visions: "futurismic." Futurismic media is that which depicts futurism, not the future. It is often self-serving -- think of the antigrav Nikes in Back to the Future III -- and it generally doesn't hold up well to scrutiny.
+
+SF films and TV are great fonts of futurismic imagery: R2D2 is a fully conscious AI, can hack the firewall of the Death Star, and is equipped with a range of holographic projectors and antipersonnel devices -- but no one has installed a $15 sound card and some text-to-speech software on him, so he has to whistle like Harpo Marx. Or take the Starship Enterprise, with a transporter capable of constituting matter from digitally stored plans, and radios that can breach the speed of light.
+
+The non-futurismic version of NCC-1701 would be the size of a softball (or whatever the minimum size for a warp drive, transporter, and subspace radio would be). It would zip around the galaxy at FTL speeds under remote control. When it reached an interesting planet, it would beam a stored copy of a landing party onto the surface, and when their mission was over, it would beam them back into storage, annihilating their physical selves until they reached the next stopping point. If a member of the landing party were eaten by a green-skinned interspatial hippie or giant toga-wearing galactic tyrant, that member would be recovered from backup by the transporter beam. Hell, the entire landing party could consist of multiple copies of the most effective crewmember onboard: no redshirts, just a half-dozen instances of Kirk operating in clonal harmony.
+
+Futurism has a psychological explanation, as recounted in Harvard clinical psych prof Daniel Gilbert's 2006 book, Stumbling on Happiness. Our memories and our projections of the future are necessarily imperfect. Our memories consist of those observations our brains have bothered to keep records of, woven together with inference and whatever else is lying around handy when we try to remember something. Ask someone who's eating a great lunch how breakfast was, and odds are she'll tell you it was delicious. Ask the same question of someone eating rubbery airplane food, and he'll tell you his breakfast was awful. We weave the past out of our imperfect memories and our observable present.
+
+We make the future in much the same way: we use reasoning and evidence to predict what we can, and whenever we bump up against uncertainty, we fill the void with the present day. Hence the injunction on women soldiers in the future of Starship Troopers, or the bizarre, glassed-over "Progressland" city diorama at the end of the 1964 World's Fair exhibit The Carousel of Progress, which Disney built for GE.
+
+Lapsarianism -- the idea of a paradise lost, a fall from grace that makes each year worse than the last -- is the predominant future feeling for many people. It's easy to see why: an imperfectly remembered golden childhood gives way to the worries of adulthood and physical senescence. Surely the world is getting worse: nothing tastes as good as it did when we were six, everything hurts all the time, and our matured gonads drive us into frenzies of bizarre, self-destructive behavior.
+
+Lapsarianism dominates the Abrahamic faiths. I have an Orthodox Jewish friend whose tradition holds that each generation of rabbis is necessarily less perfect than the rabbis that came before, since each generation is more removed from the perfection of the Garden. Therefore, no rabbi is allowed to overturn any of his forebears' wisdom, since they are all, by definition, smarter than him.
+
+The natural endpoint of Lapsarianism is apocalypse. If things get worse, and worse, and worse, eventually they'll just run out of worseness. Eventually, they'll bottom out, a kind of rotten death of the universe when Lapsarian entropy hits the nadir and takes us all with it.
+
+Running counter to Lapsarianism is progressivism: the Enlightenment ideal of a world of great people standing on the shoulders of giants. Each of us contributes to improving the world's storehouse of knowledge (and thus its capacity for bringing joy to all of us), and our descendants and proteges take our work and improve on it. The very idea of "progress" runs counter to the idea of Lapsarianism and the fall: it is the idea that we, as a species, are falling in reverse, combing back the wild tangle of entropy into a neat, tidy braid.
+
+Of course, progress must also have a boundary condition -- if only because we eventually run out of imaginary ways that the human condition can improve. And science fiction has a name for the upper bound of progress, a name for the progressive apocalypse:
+
+We call it the Singularity.
+
+Vernor Vinge's Singularity takes place when our technology reaches a stage that allows us to "upload" our minds into software, run them at faster, hotter speeds than our neurological wetware substrate allows for, and create multiple, parallel instances of ourselves. After the Singularity, nothing is predictable because everything is possible. We will cease to be human and become (as the title of Rudy Rucker's next novel would have it) Postsingular.
+
+The Singularity is what happens when we have so much progress that we run out of progress. It's the apocalypse that ends the human race in rapture and joy. Indeed, Ken MacLeod calls the Singularity "the rapture of the nerds," an apt description for the mirror-world progressive version of the Lapsarian apocalypse.
+
+At the end of the day, both progress and the fall from grace are illusions. The central thesis of Stumbling on Happiness is that human beings are remarkably bad at predicting what will make us happy. Our predictions are skewed by our imperfect memories and our capacity for filling the future with the present day.
+
+The future is gnarlier than futurism. NCC-1701 probably wouldn't send out transporter-equipped drones -- instead, it would likely find itself on missions whose ethos, mores, and rationale are largely incomprehensible to us, and so obvious to its crew that they couldn't hope to explain them.
+
+Science fiction is the literature of the present, and the present is the only era that we can hope to understand, because it's the only era that lets us check our observations and predictions against reality.
+
+$$$$
+
+1~ When the Singularity is More Than a Literary Device: An Interview with Futurist-Inventor Ray Kurzweil
+
+(Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, June 2005) ~#
+
+It's not clear to me whether the Singularity is a technical belief system or a spiritual one.
+
+The Singularity -- a notion that's crept into a lot of skiffy, and whose most articulate in-genre spokesmodel is Vernor Vinge -- describes the black hole in history that will be created at the moment when human intelligence can be digitized. When the speed and scope of our cognition is hitched to the price-performance curve of microprocessors, our "progress" will double every eighteen months, and then every twelve months, and then every ten, and eventually, every five seconds.
+
+Singularities are, literally, holes in space from whence no information can emerge, and so SF writers occasionally mutter about how hard it is to tell a story set after the information Singularity. Everything will be different. What it means to be human will be so different that what it means to be in danger, or happy, or sad, or any of the other elements that make up the squeeze-and-release tension in a good yarn will be unrecognizable to us pre-Singletons.
+
+It's a neat conceit to write around. I've committed Singularity a couple of times, usually in collaboration with gonzo Singleton Charlie Stross, the mad antipope of the Singularity. But those stories have the same relation to futurism as romance novels do to love: a shared jumping-off point, but radically different morphologies.
+
+Of course, the Singularity isn't just a conceit for noodling with in the pages of the pulps: it's the subject of serious-minded punditry, futurism, and even science.
+
+Ray Kurzweil is one such pundit-futurist-scientist. He's a serial entrepreneur who founded successful businesses that advanced the fields of optical character recognition (machine-reading) software, text-to-speech synthesis, synthetic musical instrument simulation, computer-based speech recognition, and stock-market analysis. He cured his own Type-II diabetes through a careful review of the literature and the judicious application of first principles and reason. To a casual observer, Kurzweil appears to be the star of some kind of Heinlein novel, stealing fire from the gods and embarking on a quest to bring his maverick ideas to the public despite the dismissals of the establishment, getting rich in the process.
+
+Kurzweil believes in the Singularity. In his 1990 manifesto, "The Age of Intelligent Machines," Kurzweil persuasively argued that we were on the brink of meaningful machine intelligence. A decade later, he continued the argument in a book called The Age of Spiritual Machines, whose most audacious claim is that the world's computational capacity has been slowly doubling since the crust first cooled (and before!), and that the doubling interval has been growing shorter and shorter with each passing year, so that now we see it reflected in the computer industry's Moore's Law, which predicts that microprocessors will get twice as powerful for half the cost about every eighteen months. The breathtaking sweep of this trend has an obvious conclusion: computers more powerful than people; more powerful than we can comprehend.
+
+Now Kurzweil has published two more books, The Singularity Is Near, When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking, Spring 2005) and Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (with Terry Grossman, Rodale, November 2004). The former is a technological roadmap for creating the conditions necessary for ascent into Singularity; the latter is a book about life-prolonging technologies that will assist baby-boomers in living long enough to see the day when technological immortality is achieved.
+
+See what I meant about his being a Heinlein hero?
+
+I still don't know if the Singularity is a spiritual or a technological belief system. It has all the trappings of spirituality, to be sure. If you are pure and kosher, if you live right and if your society is just, then you will live to see a moment of Rapture when your flesh will slough away leaving nothing behind but your ka, your soul, your consciousness, to ascend to an immortal and pure state.
+
+I wrote a novel called Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom where characters could make backups of themselves and recover from them if something bad happened, like catching a cold or being assassinated. It raises a lot of existential questions: most prominently: are you still you when you've been restored from backup?
+
+The traditional AI answer is the Turing Test, invented by Alan Turing, the gay pioneer of cryptography and artificial intelligence who was forced by the British government to take hormone treatments to "cure" him of his homosexuality, culminating in his suicide in 1954. Turing cut through the existentialism about measuring whether a machine is intelligent by proposing a parlor game: a computer sits behind a locked door with a chat program, and a person sits behind another locked door with his own chat program, and they both try to convince a judge that they are real people. If the computer fools a human judge into thinking that it's a person, then to all intents and purposes, it's a person.
+
+So how do you know if the backed-up you that you've restored into a new body -- or a jar with a speaker attached to it -- is really you? Well, you can ask it some questions, and if it answers the same way that you do, you're talking to a faithful copy of yourself.
+
+Sounds good. But the me who sent his first story into Asimov's seventeen years ago couldn't answer the question, "Write a story for Asimov's" the same way the me of today could. Does that mean I'm not me anymore?
+
+Kurzweil has the answer.
+
+"If you follow that logic, then if you were to take me ten years ago, I could not pass for myself in a Ray Kurzweil Turing Test. But once the requisite uploading technology becomes available a few decades hence, you could make a perfect-enough copy of me, and it would pass the Ray Kurzweil Turing Test. The copy doesn't have to match the quantum state of my every neuron, either: if you meet me the next day, I'd pass the Ray Kurzweil Turing Test. Nevertheless, none of the quantum states in my brain would be the same. There are quite a few changes that each of us undergo from day to day, we don't examine the assumption that we are the same person closely.
+
+"We gradually change our pattern of atoms and neurons but we very rapidly change the particles the pattern is made up of. We used to think that in the brain -- the physical part of us most closely associated with our identity -- cells change very slowly, but it turns out that the components of the neurons, the tubules and so forth, turn over in only days. I'm a completely different set of particles from what I was a week ago.
+
+"Consciousness is a difficult subject, and I'm always surprised by how many people talk about consciousness routinely as if it could be easily and readily tested scientifically. But we can't postulate a consciousness detector that does not have some assumptions about consciousness built into it.
+
+"Science is about objective third party observations and logical deductions from them. Consciousness is about first-person, subjective experience, and there's a fundamental gap there. We live in a world of assumptions about consciousness. We share the assumption that other human beings are conscious, for example. But that breaks down when we go outside of humans, when we consider, for example, animals. Some say only humans are conscious and animals are instinctive and machinelike. Others see humanlike behavior in an animal and consider the animal conscious, but even these observers don't generally attribute consciousness to animals that aren't humanlike.
+
+"When machines are complex enough to have responses recognizable as emotions, those machines will be more humanlike than animals."
+
+The Kurzweil Singularity goes like this: computers get better and smaller. Our ability to measure the world gains precision and grows ever cheaper. Eventually, we can measure the world inside the brain and make a copy of it in a computer that's as fast and complex as a brain, and voila, intelligence.
+
+Here in the twenty-first century we like to view ourselves as ambulatory brains, plugged into meat-puppets that lug our precious grey matter from place to place. We tend to think of that grey matter as transcendently complex, and we think of it as being the bit that makes us us.
+
+But brains aren't that complex, Kurzweil says. Already, we're starting to unravel their mysteries.
+
+"We seem to have found one area of the brain closely associated with higher-level emotions, the spindle cells, deeply embedded in the brain. There are tens of thousands of them, spanning the whole brain (maybe eighty thousand in total), which is an incredibly small number. Babies don't have any, most animals don't have any, and they likely only evolved over the last million years or so. Some of the high-level emotions that are deeply human come from these.
+
+"Turing had the right insight: base the test for intelligence on written language. Turing Tests really work. A novel is based on language: with language you can conjure up any reality, much more so than with images. Turing almost lived to see computers doing a good job of performing in fields like math, medical diagnosis and so on, but those tasks were easier for a machine than demonstrating even a child's mastery of language. Language is the true embodiment of human intelligence."
+
+If we're not so complex, then it's only a matter of time until computers are more complex than us. When that comes, our brains will be model-able in a computer and that's when the fun begins. That's the thesis of Spiritual Machines, which even includes a (Heinlein-style) timeline leading up to this day.
+
+Now, it may be that a human brain contains n logic-gates and runs at x cycles per second and stores z petabytes, and that n and x and z are all within reach. It may be that we can take a brain apart and record the position and relationships of all the neurons and sub-neuronal elements that constitute a brain.
+
+But there are also a nearly infinite number of ways of modeling a brain in a computer, and only a finite (or possibly nonexistent) fraction of that space will yield a conscious copy of the original meat-brain. Science fiction writers usually hand-wave this step: in Heinlein's "Man Who Sold the Moon," the gimmick is that once the computer becomes complex enough, with enough "random numbers," it just wakes up.
+
+Computer programmers are a little more skeptical. Computers have never been known for their skill at programming themselves -- they tend to be no smarter than the people who write their software.
+
+But there are techniques for getting computers to program themselves, based on evolution and natural selection. A programmer creates a system that spits out lots -- thousands or even millions -- of randomly generated programs. Each one is given the opportunity to perform a computational task (say, sorting a list of numbers from greatest to least) and the ones that solve the problem best are kept aside while the others are erased. Now the survivors are used as the basis for a new generation of randomly mutated descendants, each based on elements of the code that preceded them. By running many instances of a randomly varied program at once, and by culling the least successful and regenerating the population from the winners very quickly, it is possible to evolve effective software that performs as well or better than the code written by human authors.
+
+Indeed, evolutionary computing is a promising and exciting field that's realizing real returns through cool offshoots like "ant colony optimization" and similar approaches that are showing good results in fields as diverse as piloting military UAVs and efficiently provisioning car-painting robots at automotive plants.
+
+So if you buy Kurzweil's premise that computation is getting cheaper and more plentiful than ever, then why not just use evolutionary algorithms to evolve the best way to model a scanned-in human brain such that it "wakes up" like Heinlein's Mike computer?
+
+Indeed, this is the crux of Kurzweil's argument in Spiritual Machines: if we have computation to spare and a detailed model of a human brain, we need only combine them and out will pop the mechanism whereby we may upload our consciousness to digital storage media and transcend our weak and bothersome meat forever.Indeed, this is the crux of Kurzweil's argument in Spiritual Machines: if we have computation to spare and a detailed model of a human brain, we need only combine them and out will pop the mechanism whereby we may upload our consciousness to digital storage media and transcend our weak and bothersome meat forever.
+
+But it's a cheat. Evolutionary algorithms depend on the same mechanisms as real-world evolution: heritable variation of candidates and a system that culls the least-suitable candidates. This latter -- the fitness-factor that determines which individuals in a cohort breed and which vanish -- is the key to a successful evolutionary system. Without it, there's no pressure for the system to achieve the desired goal: merely mutation and more mutation.
+
+But how can a machine evaluate which of a trillion models of a human brain is "most like" a conscious mind? Or better still: which one is most like the individual whose brain is being modeled?
+
+"It is a sleight of hand in Spiritual Machines," Kurzweil admits. "But in The Singularity Is Near, I have an in-depth discussion about what we know about the brain and how to model it. Our tools for understanding the brain are subject to the Law of Accelerating Returns, and we've made more progress in reverse-engineering the human brain than most people realize." This is a tasty Kurzweilism that observes that improvements in technology yield tools for improving technology, round and round, so that the thing that progress begets more than anything is more and yet faster progress.
+
+"Scanning resolution of human tissue -- both spatial and temporal -- is doubling every year, and so is our knowledge of the workings of the brain. The brain is not one big neural net, the brain is several hundred different regions, and we can understand each region, we can model the regions with mathematics, most of which have some nexus with chaos and self-organizing systems. This has already been done for a couple dozen regions out of the several hundred.
+
+"We have a good model of a dozen or so regions of the auditory and visual cortex, how we strip images down to very low-resolution movies based on pattern recognition. Interestingly, we don't actually see things, we essentially hallucinate them in detail from what we see from these low resolution cues. Past the early phases of the visual cortex, detail doesn't reach the brain.
+
+"We are getting exponentially more knowledge. We can get detailed scans of neurons working in vivo, and are beginning to understand the chaotic algorithms underlying human intelligence. In some cases, we are getting comparable performance of brain regions in simulation. These tools will continue to grow in detail and sophistication.
+
+"We can have confidence of reverse-engineering the brain in twenty years or so. The reason that brain reverse engineering has not contributed much to artificial intelligence is that up until recently we didn't have the right tools. If I gave you a computer and a few magnetic sensors and asked you to reverse-engineer it, you might figure out that there's a magnetic device spinning when a file is saved, but you'd never get at the instruction set. Once you reverse-engineer the computer fully, however, you can express its principles of operation in just a few dozen pages.
+
+"Now there are new tools that let us see the interneuronal connections and their signaling, in vivo, and in real-time. We're just now getting these tools and there's very rapid application of the tools to obtain the data.
+
+"Twenty years from now we will have realistic simulations and models of all the regions of the brain and [we will] understand how they work. We won't blindly or mindlessly copy those methods, we will understand them and use them to improve our AI toolkit. So we'll learn how the brain works and then apply the sophisticated tools that we will obtain, as we discover how the brain works.
+
+"Once we understand a subtle science principle, we can isolate, amplify, and expand it. Air goes faster over a curved surface: from that insight we isolated, amplified, and expanded the idea and invented air travel. We'll do the same with intelligence.
+
+"Progress is exponential -- not just a measure of power of computation, number of Internet nodes, and magnetic spots on a hard disk -- the rate of paradigm shift is itself accelerating, doubling every decade. Scientists look at a problem and they intuitively conclude that since we've solved 1 percent over the last year, it'll therefore be one hundred years until the problem is exhausted: but the rate of progress doubles every decade, and the power of the information tools (in price-performance, resolution, bandwidth, and so on) doubles every year. People, even scientists, don't grasp exponential growth. During the first decade of the human genome project, we only solved 2 percent of the problem, but we solved the remaining 98 percent in five years."
+
+But Kurzweil doesn't think that the future will arrive in a rush. As William Gibson observed, "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed."
+
+"Sure, it'd be interesting to take a human brain, scan it, reinstantiate the brain, and run it on another substrate. That will ultimately happen."
+
+"But the most salient scenario is that we'll gradually merge with our technology. We'll use nanobots to kill pathogens, then to kill cancer cells, and then they'll go into our brain and do benign things there like augment our memory, and very gradually they'll get more and more sophisticated. There's no single great leap, but there is ultimately a great leap comprised of many small steps.
+
+"In The Singularity Is Near, I describe the radically different world of 2040, and how we'll get there one benign change at a time. The Singularity will be gradual, smooth.
+
+"Really, this is about augmenting our biological thinking with nonbiological thinking. We have a capacity of 1026 to 1029 calculations per second (cps) in the approximately 1010 biological human brains on Earth and that number won't change much in fifty years, but nonbiological thinking will just crash through that. By 2049, nonbiological thinking capacity will be on the order of a billion times that. We'll get to the point where bio thinking is relatively insignificant.
+
+"People didn't throw their typewriters away when word-processing started. There's always an overlap -- it'll take time before we realize how much more powerful nonbiological thinking will ultimately be."
+
+It's well and good to talk about all the stuff we can do with technology, but it's a lot more important to talk about the stuff we'll be allowed to do with technology. Think of the global freak-out caused by the relatively trivial advent of peer-to-peer file-sharing tools: Universities are wiretapping their campuses and disciplining computer science students for writing legitimate, general purpose software; grandmothers and twelve-year-olds are losing their life savings; privacy and due process have sailed out the window without so much as a by-your-leave.
+
+Even P2P's worst enemies admit that this is a general-purpose technology with good and bad uses, but when new tech comes along it often engenders a response that countenances punishing an infinite number of innocent people to get at the guilty.
+
+What's going to happen when the new technology paradigm isn't song-swapping, but transcendent super-intelligence? Will the reactionary forces be justified in razing the whole ecosystem to eliminate a few parasites who are doing negative things with the new tools?
+
+"Complex ecosystems will always have parasites. Malware [malicious software] is the most important battlefield today.
+
+"Everything will become software -- objects will be malleable, we'll spend lots of time in VR, and computhought will be orders of magnitude more important than biothought.
+
+"Software is already complex enough that we have an ecological terrain that has emerged just as it did in the bioworld.
+
+"That's partly because technology is unregulated and people have access to the tools to create malware and the medicine to treat it. Today's software viruses are clever and stealthy and not simpleminded. Very clever.
+
+"But here's the thing: you don't see people advocating shutting down the Internet because malware is so destructive. I mean, malware is potentially more than a nuisance -- emergency systems, air traffic control, and nuclear reactors all run on vulnerable software. It's an important issue, but the potential damage is still a tiny fraction of the benefit we get from the Internet.
+
+"I hope it'll remain that way -- that the Internet won't become a regulated space like medicine. Malware's not the most important issue facing human society today. Designer bioviruses are. People are concerted about WMDs, but the most daunting WMD would be a designed biological virus. The means exist in college labs to create destructive viruses that erupt and spread silently with long incubation periods.
+
+"Importantly, a would-be bio-terrorist doesn't have to put malware through the FDA's regulatory approval process, but scientists working to fix bio-malware do.
+
+"In Huxley's Brave New World, the rationale for the totalitarian system was that technology was too dangerous and needed to be controlled. But that just pushes technology underground where it becomes less stable. Regulation gives the edge of power to the irresponsible who won't listen to the regulators anyway.
+
+"The way to put more stones on the defense side of the scale is to put more resources into defensive technologies, not create a totalitarian regime of Draconian control.
+
+"I advocate a one hundred billion dollar program to accelerate the development of anti-biological virus technology. The way to combat this is to develop broad tools to destroy viruses. We have tools like RNA interference, just discovered in the past two years to block gene expression. We could develop means to sequence the genes of a new virus (SARS only took thirty-one days) and respond to it in a matter of days.
+
+"Think about it. There's no FDA for software, no certification for programmers. The government is thinking about it, though! The reason the FCC is contemplating Trusted Computing mandates," -- a system to restrict what a computer can do by means of hardware locks embedded on the motherboard -- "is that computing technology is broadening to cover everything. So now you have communications bureaucrats, biology bureaucrats, all wanting to regulate computers.
+
+"Biology would be a lot more stable if we moved away from regulation -- which is extremely irrational and onerous and doesn't appropriately balance risks. Many medications are not available today even though they should be. The FDA always wants to know what happens if we approve this and will it turn into a thalidomide situation that embarrasses us on CNN?
+
+"Nobody asks about the harm that will certainly accrue from delaying a treatment for one or more years. There's no political weight at all, people have been dying from diseases like heart disease and cancer for as long as we've been alive. Attributable risks get 100-1000 times more weight than unattributable risks."
+
+Is this spirituality or science? Perhaps it is the melding of both -- more shades of Heinlein, this time the weird religions founded by people who took Stranger in a Strange Land way too seriously.
+
+After all, this is a system of belief that dictates a means by which we can care for our bodies virtuously and live long enough to transcend them. It is a system of belief that concerns itself with the meddling of non-believers, who work to undermine its goals through irrational systems predicated on their disbelief. It is a system of belief that asks and answers the question of what it means to be human.
+
+It's no wonder that the Singularity has come to occupy so much of the science fiction narrative in these years. Science or spirituality, you could hardly ask for a subject better tailored to technological speculation and drama.
+
+$$$$
+
+1~ Wikipedia: a genuine Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy -- minus the editors
+
+(Originally published in The Anthology at the End of the Universe, April 2005) ~#
+
+"Mostly Harmless" -- a phrase so funny that Adams actually titled a book after it. Not that there's a lot of comedy inherent in those two words: rather, they're the punchline to a joke that anyone who's ever written for publication can really get behind.
+
+Ford Prefect, a researcher for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, has been stationed on Earth for years, painstakingly compiling an authoritative, insightful entry on Terran geography, science and culture, excerpts from which appear throughout the H2G2 books. His entry improved upon the old one, which noted that Earth was, simply, "Harmless."
+
+However, the Guide has limited space, and when Ford submits his entry to his editors, it is trimmed to fit:
+
+group{
+
+  "What? Harmless? Is that all it's got to say? Harmless! One
+  word!"
+
+  Ford shrugged. "Well, there are a hundred billion stars in the
+  Galaxy, and only a limited amount of space in the book's
+  microprocessors," he said, "and no one knew much about the Earth
+  of course."
+
+  "Well for God's sake I hope you managed to rectify that a bit."
+
+  "Oh yes, well I managed to transmit a new entry off to the editor.
+  He had to trim it a bit, but it's still an improvement."
+
+  "And what does it say now?" asked Arthur.
+
+  "Mostly harmless," admitted Ford with a slightly embarrassed
+  cough.
+
+}group
+
+[fn: My lifestyle is as gypsy and fancy-free as the characters in H2G2, and as a result my copies of the Adams books are thousands of miles away in storages in other countries, and this essay was penned on public transit and cheap hotel rooms in Chile, Boston, London, Geneva, Brussels, Bergen, Geneva (again), Toronto, Edinburgh, and Helsinki. Luckily, I was able to download a dodgy, re-keyed version of the Adams books from a peer-to-peer network, which network I accessed via an open wireless network on a random street-corner in an anonymous city, a fact that I note here as testimony to the power of the Internet to do what the Guide does for Ford and Arthur: put all the information I need at my fingertips, wherever I am. However, these texts *{are}* a little on the dodgy side, as noted, so you might want to confirm these quotes before, say, uttering them before an Adams truefan.]
+
+And there's the humor: every writer knows the pain of laboring over a piece for days, infusing it with diverse interesting factoids and insights, only to have it cut to ribbons by some distant editor (I once wrote thirty drafts of a 5,000-word article for an editor who ended up running it in three paragraphs as accompaniment for what he decided should be a photo essay with minimal verbiage.)
+
+Since the dawn of the Internet, H2G2 geeks have taken it upon themselves to attempt to make a Guide on the Internet. Volunteers wrote and submitted essays on various subjects as would be likely to appear in a good encyclopedia, infusing them with equal measures of humor and thoughtfulness, and they were edited together by the collective effort of the contributors. These projects -- Everything2, H2G2 (which was overseen by Adams himself), and others -- are like a barn-raising in which a team of dedicated volunteers organize the labors of casual contributors, piecing together a free and open user-generated encyclopedia.
+
+These encyclopedias have one up on Adams's Guide: they have no shortage of space on their "microprocessors" (the first volume of the Guide was clearly written before Adams became conversant with PCs!). The ability of humans to generate verbiage is far outstripped by the ability of technologists to generate low-cost, reliable storage to contain it. For example, Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive project (archive.org) has been making a copy of the Web -- the *{whole}* Web, give or take -- every couple of days since 1996. Using the Archive's Wayback Machine, you can now go and see what any page looked like on a given day.
+
+The Archive doesn't even bother throwing away copies of pages that haven't changed since the last time they were scraped: with storage as cheap as it is -- and it is *{very}* cheap for the Archive, which runs the largest database in the history of the universe off of a collection of white-box commodity PCs stacked up on packing skids in the basement of a disused armory in San Francisco's Presidio -- there's no reason not to just keep them around. In fact, the Archive has just spawned two "mirror" Archives, one located under the rebuilt Library of Alexandria and the other in Amsterdam. [fn: Brewster Kahle says that he was nervous about keeping his only copy of the "repository of all human knowledge" on the San Andreas fault, but keeping your backups in a censorship-happy Amnesty International watchlist state and/or in a floodplain below sea level is probably not such a good idea either!]
+
+So these systems did not see articles trimmed for lack of space; for on the Internet, the idea of "running out of space" is meaningless. But they *{were}* trimmed, by editorial cliques, and rewritten for clarity and style. Some entries were rejected as being too thin, while others were sent back to the author for extensive rewrites.
+
+This traditional separation of editor and writer mirrors the creative process itself, in which authors are exhorted to concentrate on *{either}* composing *{or}* revising, but not both at the same time, for the application of the critical mind to the creative process strangles it. So you write, and then you edit. Even when you write for your own consumption, it seems you have to answer to an editor.
+
+The early experimental days of the Internet saw much experimentation with alternatives to traditional editor/author divisions. Slashdot, a nerdy news-site of surpassing popularity [fn: Having a link to one's website posted to Slashdot will almost inevitably overwhelm your server with traffic, knocking all but the best-provisioned hosts offline within minutes; this is commonly referred to as "the Slashdot Effect."], has a baroque system for "community moderation" of the responses to the articles that are posted to its front pages. Readers, chosen at random, are given five "moderator points" that they can use to raise or lower the score of posts on the Slashdot message boards. Subsequent readers can filter their views of these boards to show only highly ranked posts. Other readers are randomly presented with posts and their rankings and are asked to rate the fairness of each moderator's moderation. Moderators who moderate fairly are given more opportunities to moderate; likewise message-board posters whose messages are consistently highly rated.
+
+It is thought that this system rewards good "citizenship" on the Slashdot boards through checks and balances that reward good messages and fair editorial practices. And in the main, the Slashdot moderation system works [fn: as do variants on it, like the system in place at Kur5hin.org (pronounced "corrosion")]. If you dial your filter up to show you highly scored messages, you will generally get well-reasoned, or funny, or genuinely useful posts in your browser.
+
+This community moderation scheme and ones like it have been heralded as a good alternative to traditional editorship. The importance of the Internet to "edit itself" is best understood in relation to the old shibboleth, "On the Internet, everyone is a slushreader." [fn: "Slush" is the term for generally execrable unsolicited manuscripts that fetch up in publishers' offices -- these are typically so bad that the most junior people on staff are drafted into reading (and, usually, rejecting) them]. When the Internet's radical transformative properties were first bandied about in publishing circles, many reassured themselves that even if printing's importance was de-emphasized, that good editors would always been needed, and doubly so online, where any mouth-breather with a modem could publish his words. Someone would need to separate the wheat from the chaff and help keep us from drowning in information.
+
+One of the best-capitalized businesses in the history of the world, Yahoo!, went public on the strength of this notion, proposing to use an army of researchers to catalog every single page on the Web even as it was created, serving as a comprehensive guide to all human knowledge. Less than a decade later, Yahoo! is all but out of that business: the ability of the human race to generate new pages far outstrips Yahoo!'s ability to read, review, rank and categorize them.
+
+Hence Slashdot, a system of distributed slushreading. Rather than professionalizing the editorship role, Slashdot invites contributors to identify good stuff when they see it, turning editorship into a reward for good behavior.
+
+But as well as Slashdot works, it has this signal failing: nearly every conversation that takes place on Slashdot is shot through with discussion, griping and gaming *{on the moderation system itself}*. The core task of Slashdot has *{become}* editorship, not the putative subjects of Slashdot posts. The fact that the central task of Slashdot is to rate other Slashdotters creates a tenor of meanness in the discussion. Imagine if the subtext of every discussion you had in the real world was a kind of running, pedantic nitpickery in which every point was explicitly weighed and judged and commented upon. You'd be an unpleasant, unlikable jerk, the kind of person that is sometimes referred to as a "slashdork."
+
+As radical as Yahoo!'s conceit was, Slashdot's was more radical. But as radical as Slashdot's is, it is still inherently conservative in that it presumes that editorship is necessary, and that it further requires human judgment and intervention.
+
+Google's a lot more radical. Instead of editors, it has an algorithm. Not the kind of algorithm that dominated the early search engines like Altavista, in which laughably bad artificial intelligence engines attempted to automatically understand the content, context and value of every page on the Web so that a search for "Dog" would turn up the page more relevant to the query.
+
+Google's algorithm is predicated on the idea that people are good at understanding things and computers are good at counting things. Google counts up all the links on the Web and affords more authority to those pages that have been linked to by the most other pages. The rationale is that if a page has been linked to by many web-authors, then they must have seen some merit in that page. This system works remarkably well -- so well that it's nearly inconceivable that any search-engine would order its rankings by any other means. What's more, it doesn't pervert the tenor of the discussions and pages that it catalogs by turning each one into a performance for a group of ranking peers. [fn: Or at least, it *{didn't}*. Today, dedicated web-writers, such as bloggers, are keenly aware of the way that Google will interpret their choices about linking and page-structure. One popular sport is "googlebombing," in which web-writers collude to link to a given page using a humorous keyword so that the page becomes the top result for that word -- which is why, for a time, the top result for "more evil than Satan" was Microsoft.com. Likewise, the practice of "blogspamming," in which unscrupulous spammers post links to their webpages in the message boards on various blogs, so that Google will be tricked into thinking that a wide variety of sites have conferred some authority onto their penis-enlargement page.]
+
+But even Google is conservative in assuming that there is a need for editorship as distinct from composition. Is there a way we can dispense with editorship altogether and just use composition to refine our ideas? Can we merge composition and editorship into a single role, fusing our creative and critical selves?
+
+You betcha.
+
+"Wikis" [fn: Hawai'ian for "fast"] are websites that can be edited by anyone. They were invented by Ward Cunningham in 1995, and they have become one of the dominant tools for Internet collaboration in the present day. Indeed, there is a sort of Internet geek who throws up a Wiki in the same way that ants make anthills: reflexively, unconsciously.
+
+Here's how a Wiki works. You put up a page:
+
+group{
+
+  Welcome to my Wiki. It is rad.
+
+  There are OtherWikis that inspired me.
+
+}group
+
+Click "publish" and bam, the page is live. The word "OtherWikis" will be underlined, having automatically been turned into a link to a blank page titled "OtherWikis" (Wiki software recognizes words with capital letters in the middle of them as links to other pages. Wiki people call this "camel-case," because the capital letters in the middle of words make them look like humped camels.) At the bottom of it appears this legend: "Edit this page."
+
+Click on "Edit this page" and the text appears in an editable field. Revise the text to your heart's content and click "Publish" and your revisions are live. Anyone who visits a Wiki can edit any of its pages, adding to it, improving on it, adding camel-cased links to new subjects, or even defacing or deleting it.
+
+It is authorship without editorship. Or authorship fused with editorship. Whichever, it works, though it requires effort. The Internet, like all human places and things, is fraught with spoilers and vandals who deface whatever they can. Wiki pages are routinely replaced with obscenities, with links to spammers' websites, with junk and crap and flames.
+
+But Wikis have self-defense mechanisms, too. Anyone can "subscribe" to a Wiki page, and be notified when it is updated. Those who create Wiki pages generally opt to act as "gardeners" for them, ensuring that they are on hand to undo the work of the spoilers.
+
+In this labor, they are aided by another useful Wiki feature: the "history" link. Every change to every Wiki page is logged and recorded. Anyone can page back through every revision, and anyone can revert the current version to a previous one. That means that vandalism only lasts as long as it takes for a gardener to come by and, with one or two clicks, set things to right.
+
+This is a powerful and wildly successful model for collaboration, and there is no better example of this than the Wikipedia, a free, Wiki-based encyclopedia with more than one million entries, which has been translated into 198 languages [fn: That is, one or more Wikipedia entries have been translated into 198 languages; more than 15 languages have 10,000 or more entries translated]
+
+Wikipedia is built entirely out of Wiki pages created by self-appointed experts. Contributors research and write up subjects, or produce articles on subjects that they are familiar with.
+
+This is authorship, but what of editorship? For if there is one thing a Guide or an encyclopedia must have, it is authority. It must be vetted by trustworthy, neutral parties, who present something that is either The Truth or simply A Truth, but truth nevertheless.
+
+The Wikipedia has its skeptics. Al Fasoldt, a writer for the Syracuse Post-Standard, apologized to his readers for having recommended that they consult Wikipedia. A reader of his, a librarian, wrote in and told him that his recommendation had been irresponsible, for Wikipedia articles are often defaced or worse still, rewritten with incorrect information. When another journalist from the Techdirt website wrote to Fasoldt to correct this impression, Fasoldt responded with an increasingly patronizing and hysterical series of messages in which he described Wikipedia as "outrageous," "repugnant" and "dangerous," insulting the Techdirt writer and storming off in a huff. [fn: see http://techdirt.com/articles/20040827/0132238_F.shtml for more]
+
+Spurred on by this exchange, many of Wikipedia's supporters decided to empirically investigate the accuracy and resilience of the system. Alex Halavais made changes to 13 different pages, ranging from obvious to subtle. Every single change was found and corrected within hours. [fn: see http://alex.halavais.net/news/index.php?p=794 for more] Then legendary Princeton engineer Ed Felten ran side-by-side comparisons of Wikipedia entries on areas in which he had deep expertise with their counterparts in the current electronic edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. His conclusion? "Wikipedia's advantage is in having more, longer, and more current entries. If it weren't for the Microsoft-case entry, Wikipedia would have been the winner hands down. Britannica's advantage is in having lower variance in the quality of its entries." [fn: see http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000675.html for more]  Not a complete win for Wikipedia, but hardly "outrageous," "repugnant" and "dangerous." (Poor Fasoldt -- his idiotic hyperbole will surely haunt him through the whole of his career -- I mean, "repugnant?!")
+
+There has been one very damning and even frightening indictment of Wikipedia, which came from Ethan Zuckerman, the founder of the GeekCorps group, which sends volunteers to poor countries to help establish Internet Service Providers and do other good works through technology.
+
+Zuckerman, a Harvard Berkman Center Fellow, is concerned with the "systemic bias" in a collaborative encyclopedia whose contributors must be conversant with technology and in possession of same in order to improve on the work there. Zuckerman reasonably observes that Internet users skew towards wealth, residence in the world's richest countries, and a technological bent. This means that the Wikipedia, too, is skewed to subjects of interest to that group -- subjects where that group already has expertise and interest.
+
+The result is tragicomical. The entry on the Congo Civil War, the largest military conflict the world has seen since WWII, which has claimed over three million lives, has only a fraction of the verbiage devoted to the War of the Ents, a fictional war fought between sentient trees in JRR Tolkien's *{Lord of the Rings}*.
+
+Zuckerman issued a public call to arms to rectify this, challenging Wikipedia contributors to seek out information on subjects like Africa's military conflicts, nursing and agriculture and write these subjects up in the same loving detail given over to science fiction novels and contemporary youth culture. His call has been answered well. What remains is to infiltrate the Wikipedia into the academe so that term papers, Masters and Doctoral theses on these subjects find themselves in whole or in part on the Wikipedia. [fn See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Xed/CROSSBOW for more on this]
+
+But if Wikipedia is authoritative, how does it get there? What alchemy turns the maunderings of "mouth-breathers with modems" into valid, useful encyclopedia entries?
+
+It all comes down to the way that disputes are deliberated over and resolved. Take the entry on Israel. At one point, it characterized Israel as a beleaguered state set upon by terrorists who would drive its citizens into the sea. Not long after, the entry was deleted holus-bolus and replaced with one that described Israel as an illegal state practicing Apartheid on an oppressed ethnic minority.
+
+Back and forth the editors went, each overwriting the other's with his or her own doctrine. But eventually, one of them blinked. An editor moderated the doctrine just a little, conceding a single point to the other. And the other responded in kind. In this way, turn by turn, all those with a strong opinion on the matter negotiated a kind of Truth, a collection of statements that everyone could agree represented as neutral a depiction of Israel as was likely to emerge. Whereupon, the joint authors of this marvelous document joined forces and fought back to back to resist the revisions of other doctrinaires who came later, preserving their hard-won peace. [fn: This process was just repeated in microcosm in the Wikipedia entry on the author of this paper, which was replaced by a rather disparaging and untrue entry that characterized his books as critical and commercial failures -- there ensued several editorial volleys, culminating in an uneasy peace that couches the anonymous detractor's skepticism in context and qualifiers that make it clear what the facts are and what is speculation]
+
+What's most fascinating about these entries isn't their "final" text as currently present on Wikipedia. It is the history page for each, blow-by-blow revision lists that make it utterly transparent where the bodies were buried on the way to arriving at whatever Truth has emerged. This is a neat solution to the problem of authority -- if you want to know what the fully rounded view of opinions on any controversial subject look like, you need only consult its entry's history page for a blistering eyeful of thorough debate on the subject.
+
+And here, finally, is the answer to the "Mostly harmless" problem. Ford's editor can trim his verbiage to two words, but they need not stay there -- Arthur, or any other user of the Guide as we know it today [fn: that is, in the era where we understand enough about technology to know the difference between a microprocessor and a hard-drive] can revert to Ford's glorious and exhaustive version.
+
+Think of it: a Guide without space restrictions and without editors, where any Vogon can publish to his heart's content.
+
+Lovely.
+
+$$$$
+
+1~ Warhol is Turning in His Grave
+
+(Originally published in The Guardian, November 13, 2007) ~#
+
+The excellent little programmer book for the National Portrait Gallery's current show POPARTPORTRAITS has a lot to say about the pictures hung on the walls, about the diverse source material the artists drew from in producing their provocative works. They cut up magazines, copied comic books, drew in trademarked cartoon characters like Minnie Mouse, reproduced covers from *{Time}* magazine, made ironic use of the cartoon figure of Charles Atlas, painted over an iconic photo of James Dean or Elvis Presley -- and that's just in the first room of seven.
+
+The programmer book describes the aesthetic experience of seeing these repositioned icons of culture high and low, the art created by the celebrated artists Poons, Rauschenberg, Warhol, et al by nicking the work of others, without permission, and remaking it to make statements and evoke emotions never countenanced by the original creators.
+
+However, the book does not say a word about copyright. Can you blame it? A treatise on the way that copyright and trademark were -- *{had to be}* -- trammeled to make these works could fill volumes. Reading the programmer book, you have to assume that the curators' only message about copyright is that where free expression is concerned, the rights of the creators of the original source material appropriated by the pop school take a back seat.
+
+There is, however, another message about copyright in the National Portrait Gallery: it's implicit in the "No Photography" signs prominently placed throughout the halls, including one right by the entrance of the POPARTPORTRAITS exhibition. This isn't intended to protect the works from the depredations of camera-flashes (it would read NO FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY if this were so). No, the ban on pictures is in place to safeguard the copyright in the works hung on the walls -- a fact that every gallery staffer I spoke to instantly affirmed when I asked about the policy.
+
+Indeed, it seems that every square centimeter of the Portrait Gallery is under some form of copyright. I wasn't even allowed to photograph the NO PHOTOGRAPHS sign. A museum staffer explained that she'd been told that the typography and layout of the NO PHOTOGRAPHS legend was, itself, copyrighted. If this is true, then presumably, the same rules would prevent anyone from taking any pictures in any public place -- unless you could somehow contrive to get a shot of Leicester Square without any writing, logos, architectural facades, or images in it. I doubt Warhol could have done it.
+
+What's the message of the show, then? Is it a celebration of remix culture, reveling in the endless possibilities opened up by appropriating and re-using without permission?
+
+Or is it the epitaph on the tombstone of the sweet days before the UN's chartering of the World Intellectual Property Organization and the ensuing mania for turning everything that can be sensed and recorded into someone's property?
+
+Does this show -- paid for with public money, with some works that are themselves owned by public institutions -- seek to inspire us to become 21st century pops, armed with cameraphones, websites and mixers, or is it supposed to inform us that our chance has passed, and we'd best settle for a life as information serfs, who can't even make free use of what our eyes see, our ears hear, of the streets we walk upon?
+
+Perhaps, just perhaps, it's actually a Dadaist show *{masquerading}* as a pop art show! Perhaps the point is to titillate us with the delicious irony of celebrating copyright infringement while simultaneously taking the view that even the NO PHOTOGRAPHY sign is a form of property, not to be reproduced without the permission that can never be had.
+
+$$$$
+
+1~ The Future of Ignoring Things
+
+(Originally published on InformationWeek's Internet Evolution, October 3, 2007) ~#
+
+For decades, computers have been helping us to remember, but now it's time for them to help us to ignore.
+
+Take email: Endless engineer-hours are poured into stopping spam, but virtually no attention is paid to our interaction with our non-spam messages. Our mailer may strive to learn from our ratings what is and is not spam, but it expends practically no effort on figuring out which of the non-spam emails are important and which ones can be safely ignored, dropped into archival folders, or deleted unread.
+
+For example, I'm forever getting cc'd on busy threads by well-meaning colleagues who want to loop me in on some discussion in which I have little interest. Maybe the initial group invitation to a dinner (that I'll be out of town for) was something I needed to see, but now that I've declined, I really don't need to read the 300+ messages that follow debating the best place to eat.
+
+I could write a mail-rule to ignore the thread, of course. But mail-rule editors are clunky, and once your rule-list grows very long, it becomes increasingly unmanageable. Mail-rules are where bookmarks were before the bookmark site del.icio.us showed up -- built for people who might want to ensure that messages from the boss show up in red, but not intended to be used as a gigantic storehouse of a million filters, a crude means for telling the computers what we don't want to see.
+
+Rael Dornfest, the former chairman of the O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference and founder of the startup IWantSandy, once proposed an "ignore thread" feature for mailers: Flag a thread as uninteresting, and your mailer will start to hide messages with that subject-line or thread-ID for a week, unless those messages contain your name. The problem is that threads mutate. Last week's dinner plans become this week's discussion of next year's group holiday. If the thread is still going after a week, the messages flow back into your inbox -- and a single click takes you back through all the messages you missed.
+
+We need a million measures like this, adaptive systems that create a gray zone between "delete on sight" and "show this to me right away."
+
+RSS readers are a great way to keep up with the torrent of new items posted on high-turnover sites like Digg, but they're even better at keeping up with sites that are sporadic, like your friend's brilliant journal that she only updates twice a year. But RSS readers don't distinguish between the rare and miraculous appearance of a new item in an occasional journal and the latest click-fodder from Slashdot. They don't even sort your RSS feeds according to the sites that you click-through the most.
+
+There was a time when I could read the whole of Usenet -- not just because I was a student looking for an excuse to avoid my assignments, but because Usenet was once tractable, readable by a single determined person. Today, I can't even keep up with a single high-traffic message-board. I can't read all my email. I can't read every item posted to every site I like. I certainly can't plough through the entire edit-history of every Wikipedia entry I read. I've come to grips with this -- with acquiring information on a probabilistic basis, instead of the old, deterministic, cover-to-cover approach I learned in the offline world.
+
+It's as though there's a cognitive style built into TCP/IP. Just as the network only does best-effort delivery of packets, not worrying so much about the bits that fall on the floor, TCP/IP users also do best-effort sweeps of the Internet, focusing on learning from the good stuff they find, rather than lamenting the stuff they don't have time to see.
+
+The network won't ever become more tractable. There will never be fewer things vying for our online attention. The only answer is better ways and new technology to ignore stuff -- a field that's just being born, with plenty of room to grow.
+
+$$$$
+
+1~ Facebook's Faceplant
+
+(Originally published as "How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook," in InformationWeek, November 26, 2007) ~#
+
+Facebook's "platform" strategy has sparked much online debate and controversy. No one wants to see a return to the miserable days of walled gardens, when you couldn't send a message to an AOL subscriber unless you, too, were a subscriber, and when the only services that made it were the ones that AOL management approved. Those of us on the "real" Internet regarded AOL with a species of superstitious dread, a hive of clueless noobs waiting to swamp our beloved Usenet with dumb flamewars (we fiercely guarded our erudite flamewars as being of a palpably superior grade), the wellspring of an
+
+Facebook is no paragon of virtue. It bears the hallmarks of the kind of pump-and-dump service that sees us as sticky, monetizable eyeballs in need of pimping. The clue is in the steady stream of emails you get from Facebook: "So-and-so has sent you a message." Yeah, what is it? Facebook isn't telling -- you have to visit Facebook to find out, generate a banner impression, and read and write your messages using the halt-and-lame Facebook interface, which lags even end-of-lifed email clients like Eudora for composing, reading, filtering, archiving and searching. Emails from Facebook aren't helpful messages, they're eyeball bait, intended to send you off to the Facebook site, only to discover that Fred wrote "Hi again!" on your "wall." Like other "social" apps (cough eVite cough), Facebook has all the social graces of a nose-picking, hyperactive six-year-old, standing at the threshold of your attention and chanting, "I know something, I know something, I know something, won't tell you what it is!"
+
+If there was any doubt about Facebook's lack of qualification to displace the Internet with a benevolent dictatorship/walled garden, it was removed when Facebook unveiled its new advertising campaign. Now, Facebook will allow its advertisers use the profile pictures of Facebook users to advertise their products, without permission or compensation. Even if you're the kind of person who likes the sound of a "benevolent dictatorship," this clearly isn't one.
+
+Many of my colleagues wonder if Facebook can be redeemed by opening up the platform, letting anyone write any app for the service, easily exporting and importing their data, and so on (this is the kind of thing Google is doing with its OpenSocial Alliance). Perhaps if Facebook takes on some of the characteristics that made the Web work -- openness, decentralization, standardization -- it will become like the Web itself, but with the added pixie dust of "social," the indefinable characteristic that makes Facebook into pure crack for a significant proportion of Internet users.
+
+The debate about redeeming Facebook starts from the assumption that Facebook is snowballing toward critical mass, the point at which it begins to define "the Internet" for a large slice of the world's netizens, growing steadily every day. But I think that this is far from a sure thing. Sure, networks generally follow Metcalfe's Law: "the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system." This law is best understood through the analogy of the fax machine: a world with one fax machine has no use for faxes, but every time you add a fax, you square the number of possible send/receive combinations (Alice can fax Bob or Carol or Don; Bob can fax Alice, Carol and Don; Carol can fax Alice, Bob and Don, etc).
+
+But Metcalfe's law presumes that creating more communications pathways increases the value of the system, and that's not always true (see Brook's Law: "Adding manpower to a late softer project makes it later").
+
+Having watched the rise and fall of SixDegrees, Friendster, and the many other proto-hominids that make up the evolutionary chain leading to Facebook, MySpace, et al, I'm inclined to think that these systems are subject to a Brook's-law parallel: "Adding more users to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance." Perhaps we can call this "boyd's Law" [NOTE TO EDITOR: "boyd" is always lower-case] for danah [TO EDITOR: "danah" too!] boyd, the social scientist who has studied many of these networks from the inside as a keen-eyed net-anthropologist and who has described the many ways in which social software does violence to sociability in a series of sharp papers.
+
+Here's one of boyd's examples, a true story: a young woman, an elementary school teacher, joins Friendster after some of her Burning Man buddies send her an invite. All is well until her students sign up and notice that all the friends in her profile are sunburnt, drug-addled techno-pagans whose own profiles are adorned with digital photos of their painted genitals flapping over the Playa. The teacher inveigles her friends to clean up their profiles, and all is well again until her boss, the school principal, signs up to the service and demands to be added to her friends list. The fact that she doesn't like her boss doesn't really matter: in the social world of Friendster and its progeny, it's perfectly valid to demand to be "friended" in an explicit fashion that most of us left behind in the fourth grade. Now that her boss is on her friends list, our teacher-friend's buddies naturally assume that she is one of the tribe and begin to send her lascivious Friendster-grams, inviting her to all sorts of dirty funtimes.
+
+In the real world, we don't articulate our social networks. Imagine how creepy it would be to wander into a co-worker's cubicle and discover the wall covered with tiny photos of everyone in the office, ranked by "friend" and "foe," with the top eight friends elevated to a small shrine decorated with Post-It roses and hearts. And yet, there's an undeniable attraction to corralling all your friends and friendly acquaintances, charting them and their relationship to you. Maybe it's evolutionary, some quirk of the neocortex dating from our evolution into social animals who gained advantage by dividing up the work of survival but acquired the tricky job of watching all the other monkeys so as to be sure that everyone was pulling their weight and not, e.g., napping in the treetops instead of watching for predators, emerging only to eat the fruit the rest of us have foraged.
+
+Keeping track of our social relationships is a serious piece of work that runs a heavy cognitive load. It's natural to seek out some neural prosthesis for assistance in this chore. My fiancee once proposed a "social scheduling" application that would watch your phone and email and IM to figure out who your pals were and give you a little alert if too much time passed without your reaching out to say hello and keep the coals of your relationship aglow. By the time you've reached your forties, chances are you're out-of-touch with more friends than you're in-touch with, old summer-camp chums, high-school mates, ex-spouses and their families, former co-workers, college roomies, dot-com veterans... Getting all those people back into your life is a full-time job and then some.
+
+You'd think that Facebook would be the perfect tool for handling all this. It's not. For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there's a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I'd cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, "Am I your friend?" yes or no, this instant, please.
+
+It's not just Facebook and it's not just me. Every "social networking service" has had this problem and every user I've spoken to has been frustrated by it. I think that's why these services are so volatile: why we're so willing to flee from Friendster and into MySpace's loving arms; from MySpace to Facebook. It's socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list -- but *{removing}* someone from your friend-list is practically a declaration of war. The least-awkward way to get back to a friends list with nothing but friends on it is to reboot: create a new identity on a new system and send out some invites (of course, chances are at least one of those invites will go to someone who'll groan and wonder why we're dumb enough to think that we're pals).
+
+That's why I don't worry about Facebook taking over the net. As more users flock to it, the chances that the person who precipitates your exodus will find you increases. Once that happens, poof, away you go -- and Facebook joins SixDegrees, Friendster and their pals on the scrapheap of net.history.
+
+$$$$
+
+1~ The Future of Internet Immune Systems
+
+(Originally published on InformationWeek's Internet Evolution, November 19, 2007) ~#
+
+Bunhill Cemetery is just down the road from my flat in London. It’s a handsome old boneyard, a former plague pit (“Bone hill” -- as in, there are so many bones under there that the ground is actually kind of humped up into a hill). There are plenty of luminaries buried there -- John “Pilgrim’s Progress” Bunyan, William Blake, Daniel Defoe, and assorted Cromwells. But my favorite tomb is that of Thomas Bayes, the 18th-century statistician for whom Bayesian filtering is named.
+
+Bayesian filtering is plenty useful. Here’s a simple example of how you might use a Bayesian filter. First, get a giant load of non-spam emails and feed them into a Bayesian program that counts how many times each word in their vocabulary appears, producing a statistical breakdown of the word-frequency in good emails.
+
+Then, point the filter at a giant load of spam (if you’re having a hard time getting a hold of one, I have plenty to spare), and count the words in it. Now, for each new message that arrives in your inbox, have the filter count the relative word-frequencies and make a statistical prediction about whether the new message is spam or not (there are plenty of wrinkles in this formula, but this is the general idea).
+
+The beauty of this approach is that you needn’t dream up “The Big Exhaustive List of Words and Phrases That Indicate a Message Is/Is Not Spam.” The filter naively calculates a statistical fingerprint for spam and not-spam, and checks the new messages against them.
+
+This approach -- and similar ones -- are evolving into an immune system for the Internet, and like all immune systems, a little bit goes a long way, and too much makes you break out in hives.
+
+ISPs are loading up their network centers with intrusion detection systems and tripwires that are supposed to stop attacks before they happen. For example, there’s the filter at the hotel I once stayed at in Jacksonville, Fla. Five minutes after I logged in, the network locked me out again. After an hour on the phone with tech support, it transpired that the network had noticed that the videogame I was playing systematically polled the other hosts on the network to check if they were running servers that I could join and play on. The network decided that this was a malicious port-scan and that it had better kick me off before I did anything naughty.
+
+It only took five minutes for the software to lock me out, but it took well over an hour to find someone in tech support who understood what had happened and could reset the router so that I could get back online.
+
+And right there is an example of the autoimmune disorder. Our network defenses are automated, instantaneous, and sweeping. But our fallback and oversight systems are slow, understaffed, and unresponsive. It takes a millionth of a second for the Transportation Security Administration’s body-cavity-search roulette wheel to decide that you’re a potential terrorist and stick you on a no-fly list, but getting un-Tuttle-Buttled is a nightmarish, months-long procedure that makes Orwell look like an optimist.
+
+The tripwire that locks you out was fired-and-forgotten two years ago by an anonymous sysadmin with root access on the whole network. The outsourced help-desk schlub who unlocks your account can’t even spell "tripwire." The same goes for the algorithm that cut off your credit card because you got on an airplane to a different part of the world and then had the audacity to spend your money. (I’ve resigned myself to spending $50 on long-distance calls with Citibank every time I cross a border if I want to use my debit card while abroad.)
+
+This problem exists in macro- and microcosm across the whole of our technologically mediated society. The “spamigation bots” run by the Business Software Alliance and the Music and Film Industry Association of America (MAFIAA) entertainment groups send out tens of thousands of automated copyright takedown notices to ISPs at a cost of pennies, with little or no human oversight. The people who get erroneously fingered as pirates (as a Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) spokesperson charmingly puts it, “When you go fishing with a dragnet, sometimes you catch a dolphin.”) spend days or weeks convincing their ISPs that they had the right to post their videos, music, and text-files.
+
+We need an immune system. There are plenty of bad guys out there, and technology gives them force-multipliers (like the hackers who run 250,000-PC botnets). Still, there’s a terrible asymmetry in a world where defensive takedowns are automatic, but correcting mistaken takedowns is done by hand.
+
+$$$$
+
+1~ All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites
+
+(Paper delivered at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, San Diego, California, 16 March 2005) ~#
+
+AOL hates spam. AOL could eliminate nearly 100 percent of its subscribers' spam with one easy change: it could simply shut off its internet gateway. Then, as of yore, the only email an AOL subscriber could receive would come from another AOL subscriber. If an AOL subscriber sent a spam to another AOL subscriber and AOL found out about it, they could terminate the spammer's account. Spam costs AOL millions, and represents a substantial disincentive for AOL customers to remain with the service, and yet AOL chooses to permit virtually anyone who can connect to the Internet, anywhere in the world, to send email to its customers, with any software at all.
+
+Email is a sloppy, complicated ecosystem. It has organisms of sufficient diversity and sheer number as to beggar the imagination: thousands of SMTP agents, millions of mail-servers, hundreds of millions of users. That richness and diversity lets all kinds of innovative stuff happen: if you go to nytimes.com and "send a story to a friend," the NYT can convincingly spoof your return address on the email it sends to your friend, so that it appears that the email originated on your computer. Also: a spammer can harvest your email and use it as a fake return address on the spam he sends to your friend. Sysadmins have server processes that send them mail to secret pager-addresses when something goes wrong, and GPLed mailing-list software gets used by spammers and people running high-volume mailing lists alike.
+
+You could stop spam by simplifying email: centralize functions like identity verification, limit the number of authorized mail agents and refuse service to unauthorized agents, even set up tollbooths where small sums of money are collected for every email, ensuring that sending ten million messages was too expensive to contemplate without a damned high expectation of return on investment. If you did all these things, you'd solve spam.
+
+By breaking email.
+
+Small server processes that mail a logfile to five sysadmins every hour just in case would be prohibitively expensive. Convincing the soviet that your bulk-mailer was only useful to legit mailing lists and not spammers could take months, and there's no guarantee that it would get their stamp of approval at all. With verified identity, the NYTimes couldn't impersonate you when it forwarded stories on your behalf -- and Chinese dissidents couldn't send out their samizdata via disposable gmail accounts.
+
+An email system that can be controlled is an email system without complexity. Complex ecosystems are influenced, not controlled.
+
+The Hollywood studios are conniving to create a global network of regulatory mandates over entertainment devices. Here they call it the Broadcast Flag; in Europe, Asia, Australia and Latinamerica it's called DVB Copy Protection Content Management. These systems purport to solve the problem of indiscriminate redistribution of broadcast programming via the Internet, but their answer to the problem, such as it is, is to require that everyone who wants to build a device that touches video has to first get permission.
+
+If you want to make a TV, a screen, a video-card, a high-speed bus, an analog-to-digital converter, a tuner card, a DVD burner -- any tool that you hope to be lawful for use in connection with digital TV signals -- you'll have to go on bended knee to get permission to deploy it. You'll have to convince FCC bureaucrats or a panel of Hollywood companies and their sellout IT and consumer electronics toadies that the thing you're going to bring to market will not disrupt their business models.
+
+That's how DVD works today: if you want to make a DVD player, you need to ask permission from a shadowy organization called the DVD-CCA. They don't give permission if you plan on adding new features -- that's why they're suing Kaleidascape for building a DVD jukebox that can play back your movies from a hard-drive archive instead of the original discs.
+
+CD has a rich ecosystem, filled with parasites -- entrepreneurial organisms that move to fill every available niche. If you spent a thousand bucks on CDs ten years ago, the ecosystem for CDs would reward you handsomely. In the intervening decade, parasites who have found an opportunity to suck value out of the products on offer from the labels and the dupe houses by offering you the tools to convert your CDs to ring-tones, karaoke, MP3s, MP3s on iPods and other players, MP3s on CDs that hold a thousand percent more music -- and on and on.
+
+DVDs live in a simpler, slower ecosystem, like a terrarium in a bottle where a million species have been pared away to a manageable handful. DVDs pay no such dividend. A thousand dollars' worth of ten-year old DVDs are good for just what they were good for ten years ago: watching. You can't put your kid into her favorite cartoon, you can't downsample the video to something that plays on your phone, and you certainly can't lawfully make a hard-drive-based jukebox from your discs.
+
+The yearning for simple ecosystems is endemic among people who want to "fix" some problem of bad actors on the networks.
+
+Take interoperability: you might sell me a database in the expectation that I'll only communicate with it using your authorized database agents. That way you can charge vendors a license fee in exchange for permission to make a client, and you can ensure that the clients are well-behaved and don't trigger any of your nasty bugs.
+
+But you can't meaningfully enforce that. EDS and other titanic software companies earn their bread and butter by producing fake database clients that impersonate the real thing as they iterate through every record and write it to a text file -- or simply provide a compatibility layer through systems provided by two different vendors. These companies produce software that lies -- parasite software that fills niches left behind by other organisms, sometimes to those organisms' detriment.
+
+So we have "Trusted Computing," a system that's supposed to let software detect other programs' lies and refuse to play with them if they get caught out fibbing. It's a system that's based on torching the rainforest with all its glorious anarchy of tools and systems and replacing it with neat rows of tame and planted trees, each one approved by The Man as safe for use with his products.
+
+For Trusted Computing to accomplish this, everyone who makes a video-card, keyboard, or logic-board must receive a key from some certifying body that will see to it that the key is stored in a way that prevents end-users from extracting it and using it to fake signatures.
+
+But if one keyboard vendor doesn't store his keys securely, the system will be useless for fighting keyloggers. If one video-card vendor lets a key leak, the system will be no good for stopping screenlogging. If one logic-board vendor lets a key slip, the whole thing goes out the window. That's how DVD DRM got hacked: one vendor, Xing, left its keys in a place where users could get at them, and then anyone could break the DRM on any DVD.
+
+Not only is the Trusted Computing advocates' goal -- producing a simpler software ecosystem -- wrongheaded, but the methodology is doomed. Fly-by-night keyboard vendors in distant free trade zones just won't be 100 percent compliant, and Trusted Computing requires no less than perfect compliance.
+
+The whole of DRM is a macrocosm for Trusted Computing. The DVB Copy Protection system relies on a set of rules for translating every one of its restriction states -- such as "copy once" and "copy never" -- to states in other DRM systems that are licensed to receive its output. That means that they're signing up to review, approve and write special rules for every single entertainment technology now invented and every technology that will be invented in the future.
+
+Madness: shrinking the ecosystem of everything you can plug into your TV down to the subset that these self-appointed arbiters of technology approve is a recipe for turning the electronics, IT and telecoms industries into something as small and unimportant as Hollywood. Hollywood -- which is a tenth the size of IT, itself a tenth the size of telecoms.
+
+In Hollywood, your ability to make a movie depends on the approval of a few power-brokers who have signing authority over the two-hundred-million-dollar budgets for making films. As far as Hollywood is concerned, this is a feature, not a bug. Two weeks ago, I heard the VP of Technology for Warners give a presentation in Dublin on the need to adopt DRM for digital TV, and his money-shot, his big convincer of a slide went like this:
+
+"With advances in processing power, storage capacity and broadband access... EVERYBODY BECOMES A BROADCASTER!"
+
+Heaven forfend.
+
+Simple ecosystems are the goal of proceedings like CARP, the panel that set out the ruinously high royalties for webcasters. The recording industry set the rates as high as they did so that the teeming millions of webcasters would be rendered economically extinct, leaving behind a tiny handful of giant companies that could be negotiated with around a board room table, rather than dealt with by blanket legislation.
+
+The razing of the rainforest has a cost. It's harder to send a legitimate email today than it ever was -- thanks to a world of closed SMTP relays. The cries for a mail-server monoculture grow more shrill with every passing moment. Just last week, it was a call for every mail-administrator to ban the "vacation" program that sends out automatic responses informing senders that the recipient is away from email for a few days, because mailboxes that run vacation can cause "spam blowback" where accounts send their vacation notices to the hapless individuals whose email addresses the spammers have substituted on the email's Reply-To line.
+
+And yet there is more spam than there ever was. All the costs we've paid for fighting spam have added up to no benefit: the network is still overrun and sometimes even overwhelmed by spam. We've let the network's neutrality and diversity be compromised, without receiving the promised benefit of spam-free inboxes.
+
+Likewise, DRM has exacted a punishing toll wherever it has come into play, costing us innovation, free speech, research and the public's rights in copyright. And likewise, DRM has not stopped infringement: today, infringement is more widespread than ever. All those costs borne by society in the name of protecting artists and stopping infringement, and not a penny put into an artist's pocket, not a single DRM-restricted file that can't be downloaded for free and without encumbrance from a P2P network.
+
+Everywhere we look, we find people who should know better calling for a parasite-free Internet. Science fiction writers are supposed to be forward looking, but they're wasting their time demanding that Amazon and Google make it harder to piece together whole books from the page-previews one can get via the look-inside-the-book programs. They're even cooking up programs to spoof deliberately corrupted ebooks into the P2P networks, presumably to assure the few readers the field has left that reading science fiction is a mug's game.
+
+The amazing thing about the failure of parasite-elimination programs is that their proponents have concluded that the problem is that they haven't tried hard enough -- with just a few more species eliminated, a few more policies imposed, paradise will spring into being. Their answer to an unsuccessful strategy for fixing the Internet is to try the same strategy, only moreso -- only fill those niches in the ecology that you can sanction. Hunt and kill more parasites, no matter what the cost.
+
+We are proud parasites, we Emerging Techers. We're engaged in perl whirling, pythoneering, lightweight javarey -- we hack our cars and we hack our PCs. We're the rich humus carpeting the jungle floor and the tiny frogs living in the bromeliads.
+
+The long tail -- Chris Anderson's name for the 95% of media that isn't top sellers, but which, in aggregate, accounts for more than half the money on the table for media vendors -- is the tail of bottom-feeders and improbable denizens of the ocean's thermal vents. We're unexpected guests at the dinner table and we have the nerve to demand a full helping.
+
+Your ideas are cool and you should go and make them real, even if they demand that the kind of ecological diversity that seems to be disappearing around us.
+
+You may succeed -- provided that your plans don't call for a simple ecosystem where only you get to provide value and no one else gets to play.
+
+$$$
+
+1~ READ CAREFULLY
+
+(Originally published as "Shrinkwrap Licenses: An Epidemic Of Lawsuits Waiting To Happen" in InformationWeek, February 3, 2007) ~#
+
+*{READ CAREFULLY. By reading this article, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.}*
+
+READ CAREFULLY -- all in caps, and what it means is, "IGNORE THIS." That's because the small print in the clickwrap, shrinkwrap, browsewrap and other non-negotiated agreements is both immutable and outrageous.
+
+Why read the "agreement" if you know that:
+
+1) No sane person would agree to its text, and
+
+2) Even if you disagree, no one will negotiate a better agreement with you?
+
+We seem to have sunk to a kind of playground system of forming contracts. There are those who will tell you that you can form a binding agreement just by following a link, stepping into a store, buying a product, or receiving an email. By standing there, shaking your head, shouting "NO NO NO I DO NOT AGREE," you agree to let me come over to your house, clean out your fridge, wear your underwear and make some long-distance calls.
+
+If you buy a downloadable movie from Amazon Unbox, you agree to let them install spyware on your computer, delete any file they don't like on your hard-drive, and cancel your viewing privileges for any reason. Of course, it goes without saying that Amazon reserves the right to modify the agreement at any time.
+
+The worst offenders are people who sell you movies and music. They're a close second to people who sell you software, or provide services over the Internet. There's a rubric to this -- you're getting a discount in exchange for signing onto an abusive agreement, but just try and find the software that *{doesn't}* come with one of these "agreements" -- at any price.
+
+For example, Vista, Microsoft's new operating system, comes in a rainbow of flavors varying in price from $99 to $399, but all of them come with the same crummy terms of service, which state that "you may not work around any technical limitations in the software," and that Windows Defender, the bundled anti-malware program, can delete any program from your hard drive that Microsoft doesn't like, even if it breaks your computer.
+
+It's bad enough when this stuff comes to us through deliberate malice, but it seems that bogus agreements can spread almost without human intervention. Google any obnoxious term or phrase from a EULA, and you'll find that the same phrase appears in a dozens -- perhaps thousands -- of EULAs around the Internet. Like snippets of DNA being passed from one virus to another as they infect the world's corporations in a pandemic of idiocy, terms of service are semi-autonomous entities.
+
+Indeed, when rocker Billy Bragg read the fine print on the MySpace user agreement, he discovered that it appeared that site owner Rupert Murdoch was laying claim to copyrights in every song uploaded to the site, in a silent, sinister land-grab that turned the media baron into the world's most prolific and indiscriminate hoarder of garage-band tunes.
+
+However, the EULA that got Bragg upset wasn't a Murdoch innovation -- it dates back to the earliest days of the service. It seems to have been posted at a time when the garage entrepreneurs who built MySpace were in no position to hire pricey counsel -- something borne out by the fact that the old MySpace EULA appears nearly verbatim on many other services around the Internet. It's not going out very far on a limb to speculate that MySpace's founders merely copied a EULA they found somewhere else, without even reading it, and that when Murdoch's due diligence attorneys were preparing to give these lucky fellows $600,000,000, that they couldn't be bothered to read the terms of service anyway.
+
+In their defense, EULAese is so mind-numbingly boring that it's a kind of torture to read these things. You can hardly blame them.
+
+But it does raise the question -- why are we playing host to these infectious agents? If they're not read by customers *{or}* companies, why bother with them?
+
+If you wanted to really be careful about this stuff, you'd prohibit every employee at your office from clicking on any link, installing any program, creating accounts, signing for parcels -- even doing a run to Best Buy for some CD blanks, have you *{seen}* the fine-print on their credit-card slips? After all, these people are entering into "agreements" on behalf of their employer -- agreements to allow spyware onto your network, to not "work around any technical limitations in their software," to let malicious software delete arbitrary files from their systems.
+
+So far, very few of us have been really bitten in the ass by EULAs, but that's because EULAs are generally associated with companies who have products or services they're hoping you'll use, and enforcing their EULAs could cost them business.
+
+But that was the theory with patents, too. So long as everyone with a huge portfolio of unexamined, overlapping, generous patents was competing with similarly situated manufacturers, there was a mutually assured destruction -- a kind of detente represented by cross-licensing deals for patent portfolios.
+
+But the rise of the patent troll changed all that. Patent trolls don't make products. They make lawsuits. They buy up the ridiculous patents of failed companies and sue the everloving hell out of everyone they can find, building up a war-chest from easy victories against little guys that can be used to fund more serious campaigns against larger organizations. Since there are no products to disrupt with a countersuit, there's no mutually assured destruction.
+
+If a shakedown artist can buy up some bogus patents and use them to put the screws to you, then it's only a matter of time until the same grifters latch onto the innumerable "agreements" that your company has formed with a desperate dot-bomb looking for an exit strategy.
+
+More importantly, these "agreements" make a mockery of the law and of the very *{idea}* of forming agreements. Civilization starts with the idea of a real agreement -- for example, "We crap *{here}* and we sleep *{there}*, OK?" -- and if we reduce the noble agreement to a schoolyard game of no-takebacks, we erode the bedrock of civilization itself.
+
+$$$$
+
+1~ World of Democracycraft
+
+(Originally published as "Why Online Games Are Dictatorships," InformationWeek, April 16, 2007) ~#
+
+Can you be a citizen of a virtual world? That's the question that I keep asking myself, whenever anyone tells me about the wonder of multiplayer online games, especially Second Life, the virtual world that is more creative playground than game.
+
+These worlds invite us to take up residence in them, to invest time (and sometimes money) in them. Second Life encourages you to make stuff using their scripting engine and sell it in the game. You Own Your Own Mods -- it's the rallying cry of the new generation of virtual worlds, an updated version of the old BBS adage from the WELL: You Own Your Own Words.
+
+I spend a lot of time in Disney parks. I even own a share of Disney stock. But I don't flatter myself that I'm a citizen of Disney World. I know that when I go to Orlando, the Mouse is going to fingerprint me and search my bags, because the Fourth Amendment isn't a "Disney value."
+
+Disney even has its own virtual currency, symbolic tokens called Disney Dollars that you can spend or exchange at any Disney park. I'm reasonably confident that if Disney refused to turn my Mickeybucks back into US Treasury Department-issue greenbacks that I could make life unpleasant for them in a court of law.
+
+But is the same true of a game? The money in your real-world bank-account and in your in-game bank-account is really just a pointer in a database. But if the bank moves the pointer around arbitrarily (depositing a billion dollars in your account, or wiping you out), they face a regulator. If a game wants to wipe you out, well, you probably agreed to let them do that when you signed up.
+
+Can you amass wealth in such a world? Well, sure. There are rich people in dictatorships all over the world. Stalin's favorites had great big dachas and drove fancy cars. You don't need democratic rights to get rich.
+
+But you *{do}* need democratic freedoms to *{stay}* rich. In-world wealth is like a Stalin-era dacha, or the diamond fortunes of Apartheid South Africa: valuable, even portable (to a limited extent), but not really *{yours}*, not in any stable, long-term sense.
+
+Here are some examples of the difference between being a citizen and a customer:
+
+In January, 2006 a World of Warcraft moderator shut down an advertisement for a "GBLT-friendly" guild. This was a virtual club that players could join, whose mission was to be "friendly" to "Gay/Bi/Lesbian/Transgendered" players. The WoW moderator -- and Blizzard management -- cited a bizarre reason for the shut-down:
+
+"While we appreciate and understand your point of view, we do feel that the advertisement of a 'GLBT friendly' guild is very likely to result in harassment for players that may not have existed otherwise. If you will look at our policy, you will notice the suggested penalty for violating the Sexual Orientation Harassment Policy is to 'be temporarily suspended from the game.' However, as there was clearly no malicious intent on your part, this penalty was reduced to a warning."
+
+Sara Andrews, the guild's creator, made a stink and embarrassed Blizzard (the game's parent company) into reversing the decision.
+
+In 2004, a player in the MMO EVE Online declared that the game's creators had stacked the deck against him, called EVE, "a poorly designed game which rewards the greedy and violent, and punishes the hardworking and honest." He was upset over a change in the game dynamics which made it easier to play a pirate and harder to play a merchant.
+
+The player, "Dentara Rask," wrote those words in the preamble to a tell-all memoir detailing an elaborate Ponzi scheme that he and an accomplice had perpetrated in EVE. The two of them had bilked EVE's merchants out of a substantial fraction of the game's total GDP and then resigned their accounts. The objective was to punish the game's owners for their gameplay decisions by crashing the game's economy.
+
+In both of these instances, players -- residents of virtual worlds -- resolved their conflicts with game management through customer activism. That works in the real world, too, but when it fails, we have the rule of law. We can sue. We can elect new leaders. When all else fails, we can withdraw all our money from the bank, sell our houses, and move to a different country.
+
+But in virtual worlds, these recourses are off-limits. Virtual worlds can and do freeze players' wealth for "cheating" (amassing gold by exploiting loopholes in the system), for participating in real-world gold-for-cash exchanges (eBay recently put an end to this practice on its service), or for violating some other rule. The rules of virtual worlds are embodied in EULAs, not Constitutions, and are always "subject to change without notice."
+
+So what does it mean to be "rich" in Second Life? Sure, you can have a thriving virtual penis business in game, one that returns a healthy sum of cash every month. You can even protect your profits by regularly converting them to real money. But if you lose an argument with Second Life's parent company, your business vanishes. In other worlds, the only stable in-game wealth is the wealth you take out of the game. Your virtual capital investments are totally contingent. Piss off the wrong exec at Linden Labs, Blizzard, Sony Online Entertainment, or Sularke and your little in-world business could disappear for good.
+
+Well, what of it? Why not just create a "democratic" game that has a constitution, full citizenship for players, and all the prerequisites for stable wealth? Such a game would be open source (so that other, interoperable "nations" could be established for you to emigrate to if you don't like the will of the majority in one game-world), and run by elected representatives who would instruct the administrators and programmers as to how to run the virtual world. In the real world, the TSA sets the rules for aviation -- in a virtual world, the equivalent agency would determine the physics of flight.
+
+The question is, would this game be any *{fun}*? Well, democracy itself is pretty fun -- where "fun" means "engrossing and engaging." Lots of people like to play the democracy game, whether by voting every four years or by moving to K Street and setting up a lobbying operation.
+
+But video games aren't quite the same thing. Gameplay conventions like "grinding" (repeating a task), "leveling up" (attaining a higher level of accomplishment), "questing" and so on are functions of artificial scarcity. The difference between a character with 10,000,000 gold pieces and a giant, rare, terrifying crossbow and a newbie player is which pointers are associated with each character's database entry. If the elected representatives direct that every player should have the shiniest armor, best space-ships, and largest bank-balances possible (this sounds like a pretty good election platform to me!), then what's left to do?
+
+Oh sure, in Second Life they have an interesting crafting economy based on creating and exchanging virtual objects. But these objects are *{also}* artificially scarce -- that is, the ability of these objects to propagate freely throughout the world is limited only by the software that supports them. It's basically the same economics of the music industry, but applied to every field of human endeavor in the entire (virtual) world.
+
+Fun matters. Real world currencies rise and fall based, in part, by the economic might of the nations that issue them. Virtual world currencies are more strongly tied to whether there's any reason to spend the virtual currency on the objects that are denominated in it. 10,000 EverQuest golds might trade for $100 on a day when that same sum will buy you a magic EQ sword that enables you to play alongside the most interesting people online, running the most fun missions online. But if all those players out-migrate to World of Warcraft, and word gets around that Warlord's Command is way more fun than anything in poor old creaky EverQuest, your EverQuest gold turns into Weimar Deutschemarks, a devalued currency that you can't even give away.
+
+This is where the plausibility of my democratic, co-operative, open source virtual world starts to break down. Elected governments can field armies, run schools, provide health care (I'm a Canadian), and bring acid lakes back to health. But I've never done anything run by a government agency that was a lot of *{fun}*. It's my sneaking suspicion that the only people who'd enjoy playing World of Democracycraft would be the people running for office there. The players would soon find themselves playing IRSQuest, Second Notice of Proposed Rulemaking Life, and Caves of 27 Stroke B.
+
+Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe customership is enough of a rock to build a platform of sustainable industry upon. It's not like entrepreneurs in Dubai have a lot of recourse if they get on the wrong side of the Emir; or like Singaporeans get to appeal the decisions of President Nathan, and there's plenty of industry there.
+
+And hell, maybe bureaucracies have hidden reserves of fun that have been lurking there, waiting for the chance to bust out and surprise us all.
+
+I sure hope so. These online worlds are endlessly diverting places. It'd be a shame if it turned out that cyberspace was a dictatorship -- benevolent or otherwise.
+
+$$$$
+
+1~ Snitchtown
+
+(Originally published in Forbes.com, June 2007) ~#
+
+The 12-story Hotel Torni was the tallest building in central Helsinki during the Soviet occupation of Finland, making it a natural choice to serve as KGB headquarters. Today, it bears a plaque testifying to its checkered past, and also noting the curious fact that the Finns pulled 40 kilometers of wiretap cable out of the walls after the KGB left. The wire was solid evidence of each operative's mistrustful surveillance of his fellow agents.
+
+The East German Stasi also engaged in rampant surveillance, using a network of snitches to assemble secret files on every resident of East Berlin. They knew who was telling subversive jokes--but missed the fact that the Wall was about to come down.
+
+When you watch everyone, you watch no one.
+
+This seems to have escaped the operators of the digital surveillance technologies that are taking over our cities. In the brave new world of doorbell cams, wi-fi sniffers, RFID passes, bag searches at the subway and photo lookups at office security desks, universal surveillance is seen as the universal solution to all urban ills. But the truth is that ubiquitous cameras only serve to violate the social contract that makes cities work.
+
+The key to living in a city and peacefully co-existing as a social animal in tight quarters is to set a delicate balance of seeing and not seeing. You take care not to step on the heels of the woman in front of you on the way out of the subway, and you might take passing note of her most excellent handbag. But you don't make eye contact and exchange a nod. Or even if you do, you make sure that it's as fleeting as it can be.
+
+Checking your mirrors is good practice even in stopped traffic, but staring and pointing at the schmuck next to you who's got his finger so far up his nostril he's in danger of lobotomizing himself is bad form--worse form than picking your nose, even.
+
+I once asked a Japanese friend to explain why so many people on the Tokyo subway wore surgical masks. Are they extreme germophobes? Conscientious folks getting over a cold? Oh, yes, he said, yes, of course, but that's only the rubric. The real reason to wear the mask is to spare others the discomfort of seeing your facial expression, to make your face into a disengaged, unreadable blank--to spare others the discomfort of firing up their mirror neurons in order to model your mood based on your outward expression. To make it possible to see without seeing.
+
+There is one city dweller that doesn't respect this delicate social contract: the closed-circuit television camera. Ubiquitous and demanding, CCTVs don't have any visible owners. They ... occur. They exist in the passive voice, the "mistakes were made" voice: "The camera recorded you."
+
+They are like an emergent property of the system, of being afraid and looking for cheap answers. And they are everywhere: In London, residents are photographed more than 300 times a day.
+
+The irony of security cameras is that they watch, but nobody cares that they're looking. Junkies don't worry about CCTVs. Crazed rapists and other purveyors of sudden, senseless violence aren't deterred. I was mugged twice on my old block in San Francisco by the crack dealers on my corner, within sight of two CCTVs and a police station. My rental car was robbed by a junkie in a Gastown garage in Vancouver in sight of a CCTV.
+
+Three mad kids followed my friend out of the Tube in London last year and murdered him on his doorstep.
+
+Crazy, desperate, violent people don't make rational calculus in regards to their lives. Anyone who becomes a junkie, crack dealer, or cellphone-stealing stickup artist is obviously bad at making life decisions. They're not deterred by surveillance.
+
+Yet the cameras proliferate, and replace human eyes. The cops on my block in San Francisco stayed in their cars and let the cameras do the watching. The Tube station didn't have any human guards after dark, just a CCTV to record the fare evaders.
+
+Now London city councils are installing new CCTVs with loudspeakers, operated by remote coppers who can lean in and make a speaker bark at you, "Citizen, pick up your litter." "Stop leering at that woman." "Move along."
+
+Yeah, that'll work.
+
+Every day the glass-domed cameras proliferate, and the gate-guarded mentality of the deep suburbs threatens to invade our cities. More doorbell webcams, more mailbox cams, more cams in our cars.
+
+The city of the future is shaping up to be a neighborly Panopticon, leeched of the cosmopolitan ability to see, and not be seen, where every nose pick is noted and logged and uploaded to the Internet. You don't have anything to hide, sure, but there's a reason we close the door to the bathroom before we drop our drawers. Everyone poops, but it takes a special kind of person to want to do it in public.
+
+The trick now is to contain the creeping cameras of the law. When the city surveils its citizens, it legitimizes our mutual surveillance--what's the difference between the cops watching your every move, or the mall owners watching you, or you doing it to the guy next door?
+
+I'm an optimist. I think our social contracts are stronger than our technology. They're the strongest bonds we have. We don't aim telescopes through each others' windows, because only creeps do that.
+
+But we need to reclaim the right to record our own lives as they proceed. We need to reverse decisions like the one that allowed the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority to line subway platforms with terrorism cameras, but said riders may not take snapshots in the station. We need to win back the right to photograph our human heritage in museums and galleries, and we need to beat back the snitch-cams rent-a-cops use to make our cameras stay in our pockets.
+
+They're our cities and our institutions. And we choose the future we want to live in.
+
+$$$$
+
+1~ Hope you enjoyed it! The actual, physical object that corresponds to this book is superbly designed, portable, and makes a great gift:
+
+http://craphound.com/content/buy
+
+If you would rather make a donation, you can buy a copy of the book for a worthy school, library or other institution of your choosing:
+
+http://craphound.com/content/donate
+
+$$$$
+
+1~ About the Author
+
+Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is an award-winning novelist, activist, blogger and journalist. He is the co-editor of Boing Boing (boingboing.net), one of the most popular blogs in the world, and has contributed to The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Economist, Forbes, Popular Science, Wired, Make, InformationWeek, Locus, Salon, Radar, and many other magazines, newspapers and websites.
+
+His novels and short story collections include *{Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town}*, *{Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom}*, *{Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present}* and his most recent novel, a political thriller for young adults called *{Little Brother}*, published by Tor Books in May, 2008. All of his novels and short story collections are available as free downloads under the terms of various Creative Commons licenses.
+
+Doctorow is the former European Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org) and has participated in many treaty-making, standards-setting and regulatory and legal battles in countries all over the world. In 2006/2007, he was the inaugural Canada/US Fulbright Chair in Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg Center at the University of Southern California. In 2007, he was also named one of the World Economic Forum's "Young Global Leaders" and one of Forbes Magazine's top 25 "Web Celebrities."
+
+Born in Toronto, Canada in 1971, he is a four-time university dropout. He now resides in London, England with his wife and baby daughter, where he does his best to avoid the ubiquitous surveillance cameras while roaming the world, speaking on copyright, freedom and the future.
+
+$$$$
diff --git a/data/samples/generic/democratizing_innovation.eric_von_hippel.sst b/data/samples/generic/democratizing_innovation.eric_von_hippel.sst
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..55049a0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/data/samples/generic/democratizing_innovation.eric_von_hippel.sst
@@ -0,0 +1,3091 @@
+% SiSU 4.0
+
+@title: Democratizing Innovation
+ :language: US
+
+@creator:
+ :author: von Hippel, Eric
+
+@date:
+ :published: 2005
+ :created: 2005
+ :issued: 2005
+ :available: 2005
+ :modified: 2005
+ :valid: 2005
+
+@rights:
+ :copyright: Copyright (C) 2005 Eric von Hippel. Exclusive rights to publish and sell this book in print form in English are licensed to The MIT Press. All other rights are reserved by the author. An electronic version of this book is available under a Creative Commons license.
+ :license: Creative Commons US Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license 2.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/legalcode Some Rights Reserved. You are free to copy, distribute, display and perform the work, under the following conditions: Attribution, you must give the original author credit; you may not use this work for commercial purposes; No Derivative Works, you may not alter, transform, or build-upon this work. For reuse or distribution you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. Any conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder. Your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above.
+
+@classify:
+ :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:discourse;book:discourse:innovation|democracy|open source software;innovation;technological innovations:economic aspects;diffusion of innovations;democracy;open source software:innovation
+
+@identifier:
+ :isbn: 9780262720472
+ :oclc: 56880369
+
+% HC79.T4H558 2005
+% 338'.064-dc22 2004061060
+
+@links:
+ { Democratizing Innovation }http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/democ1.htm
+ { Eric von Hippel }http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/
+ { @ Wikipedia }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratizing_Innovation
+ { Democratizing Innovation @ Amazon.com }http://www.amazon.com/Democratizing-Innovation-Eric-Von-Hippel/dp/0262720477
+ { Democratizing Innovation @ Barnes & Noble }http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=9780262720472
+
+@make:
+ :breaks: new=:B,C; break=1
+ :texpdf_font: Liberation Sans
+ :home_button_image: {di_evh.png }http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/
+ :footer: {Eric von Hippel}http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/
+
+:A~ @title @author
+
+1~attribution Attribution~#
+
+Dedicated to all who are building the information commons.~#
+
+% Contents
+% Acknowledgements ix
+% 1 Introduction and Overview 1
+% 2 Development of Products by Lead Users 19
+% 3 Why Many Users Want Custom Products 33
+% 4 Users' Innovate-or-Buy Decisions 45
+% 5 Users' Low-Cost Innovation Niches 63
+% 6 Why Users Often Freely Reveal Their Innovations 77
+% 7 Innovation Communities 93
+% 8 Adapting Policy to User Innovation 107
+% 9 Democratizing Innovation 121
+% 10 Application: Searching for Lead User Innovations 133
+% 11 Application: Toolkits for User Innovation and Custom Design 147
+% 12 Linking User Innovation to Other Phenomena and Fields 165
+% Notes 179
+% Bibliography 183
+% Index 197
+
+1~acknowledgements Acknowledgements~#
+
+Early in my research on the democratization of innovation I was very fortunate to gain five major academic mentors and friends. Nathan Rosenberg, Richard Nelson, Zvi Griliches, Edwin Mansfield, and Ann Carter all provided crucial support as I adopted economics as the organizing framework and toolset for my work. Later, I collaborated with a number of wonderful co-authors, all of whom are friends as well: Stan Finkelstein, Nikolaus Franke, Dietmar Harhoff, Joachim Henkel, Cornelius Herstatt, Ralph Katz, Georg von Krogh, Karim Lakhani, Gary Lilien, Christian Luthje, Pamela Morrison, William Riggs, John Roberts, Stephan Schrader, Mary Sonnack, Stefan Thomke, Marcie Tyre, and Glen Urban. Other excellent research collaborators and friends of long standing include Carliss Baldwin, Sonali Shah, Sarah Slaughter, and Lars Jeppesen.~#
+
+At some point as interest in a topic grows, there is a transition from dyadic academic relationships to a real research community. In my case, the essential person in enabling that transition was my close friend and colleague Dietmar Harhoff. He began to send wonderful Assistant Professors (Habilitanden) over from his university, Ludwig Maximilians Universität in Munich, to do collaborative research with me as MIT Visiting Scholars. They worked on issues related to the democratization of innovation while at MIT and then carried on when they returned to Europe. Now they are training others in their turn.~#
+
+I have also greatly benefited from close contacts with colleagues in industry. As Director of the MIT Innovation Lab, I work together with senior innovation managers in just a few companies to develop and try out innovation tools in actual company settings. Close intellectual colleagues and friends of many years standing in this sphere include Jim Euchner from Pitney-Bowes, Mary Sonnack and Roger Lacey from 3M, John Wright from IFF, Dave Richards from Nortel Networks, John Martin from Verizon, Ben Hyde from the Apache Foundation, Brian Behlendorf from the Apache Foundation and CollabNet, and Joan Churchill and Susan Hiestand from Lead User Concepts. Thank you so much for the huge (and often humbling) insights that your and our field experimentation has provided!~#
+
+I am also eager to acknowledge and thank my family for the joy and learning they experience and share with me. My wife Jessie is a professional editor and edited my first book in a wonderful way. For this book, however, time devoted to bringing up the children made a renewed editorial collaboration impossible. I hope the reader will not suffer unduly as a consequence! My children Christiana Dagmar and Eric James have watched me work on the book---indeed they could not avoid it as I often write at home. I hope they have been drawing the lesson that academic research can be really fun. Certainly, that is the lesson I drew from my father, Arthur von Hippel. He wrote his books in his study upstairs when I was a child and would often come down to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. In transit, he would throw up his hands and say, to no one in particular, "/{Why}/ do I choose to work on such difficult problems?" And then he would look deeply happy. Dad, I noticed the smile!~#
+
+Finally my warmest thanks to my MIT colleagues and students and also to MIT as an institution. MIT is a really inspiring place to work and learn from others. We all understand the requirements for good research and learning, and we all strive to contribute to a very supportive academic environment. And, of course, new people are always showing up with new and interesting ideas, so fun and learning are always being renewed!~#
+
+:B~ Democratizing Innovation
+
+1~ 1 Introduction and Overview
+
+When I say that innovation is being democratized, I mean that users of products and services---both firms and individual consumers---are increasingly able to innovate for themselves. User-centered innovation processes offer great advantages over the manufacturer-centric innovation development systems that have been the mainstay of commerce for hundreds of years. Users that innovate can develop exactly what they want, rather than relying on manufacturers to act as their (often very imperfect) agents. Moreover, individual users do not have to develop everything they need on their own: they can benefit from innovations developed and freely shared by others.
+={Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users:by users+43;Manufacturers:innovation and+11;Users:See also Lead users|expectations of economic benefit by+33|innovation and+33}
+
+The trend toward democratization of innovation applies to information products such as software and also to physical products. As a quick illustration of the latter, consider the development of high-performance windsurfing techniques and equipment in Hawaii by an informal user group. High-performance windsurfing involves acrobatics such as jumps and flips and turns in mid-air. Larry Stanley, a pioneer in high-performance windsurfing, described the development of a major innovation in technique and equipment to Sonali Shah:
+={Stanley, L.;Shah, S.;Information commons:See also Information communities|See also Innovation communities;windsurfing}
+
+In 1978 Jürgen Honscheid came over from West Germany for the first Hawaiian World Cup and discovered jumping, which was new to him, although Mike Horgan and I were jumping in 1974 and 1975. There was a new enthusiasm for jumping and we were all trying to outdo each other by jumping higher and higher. The problem was that . . . the riders flew off in mid-air because there was no way to keep the board with you---and as a result you hurt your feet, your legs, and the board.
+={Honscheid, J.;Horgan, M.}
+
+Then I remembered the "Chip," a small experimental board we had built with footstraps, and thought "it's dumb not to use this for jumping." That's when I first started jumping with footstraps and discovering controlled flight. I could go so much faster than I ever thought and when you hit a wave it was like a motorcycle rider hitting a ramp; you just flew into the air. All of a sudden not only could you fly into the air, but you could land the thing, and not only that, but you could change direction in the air!
+
+The whole sport of high-performance windsurfing really started from that. As soon as I did it, there were about ten of us who sailed all the time together and within one or two days there were various boards out there that had footstraps of various kinds on them, and we were all going fast and jumping waves and stuff. It just kind of snowballed from there. (Shah 2000)
+={Shah, S.;windsurfing+1}
+
+By 1998, more than a million people were engaged in windsurfing, and a large fraction of the boards sold incorporated the user-developed innovations for the high-performance sport.
+
+The user-centered innovation process just illustrated is in sharp contrast to the traditional model, in which products and services are developed by manufacturers in a closed way, the manufacturers using patents, copyrights, and other protections to prevent imitators from free riding on their innovation investments. In this traditional model, a user's only role is to have needs, which manufacturers then identify and fill by designing and producing new products. The manufacturer-centric model does fit some fields and conditions. However, a growing body of empirical work shows that users are the first to develop many and perhaps most new industrial and consumer products. Further, the contribution of users is growing steadily larger as a result of continuing advances in computer and communications capabilities.
+={Intellectual property rights:See also Private-collective innovation|copyrights and|innovation and+2;Copyrights:See Intellectual property rights;Manufacturers:government policy and+2;Product development+2;Users:government policy and;Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users:by manufacturers+5;Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users:by manufacturers+12;Government policy:manufacturer innovation and+2;Manufacturers:expectations of economic benefit by+26}
+
+In this book I explain in detail how the emerging process of user-centric, democratized innovation works. I also explain how innovation by users provides a very necessary complement to and feedstock for manufacturer innovation.
+
+The ongoing shift of innovation to users has some very attractive qualities. It is becoming progressively easier for many users to get precisely what they want by designing it for themselves. And innovation by users appears to increase social welfare. At the same time, the ongoing shift of product-development activities from manufacturers to users is painful and difficult for many manufacturers. Open, distributed innovation is "attacking" a major structure of the social division of labor. Many firms and industries must make fundamental changes to long-held business models in order to adapt. Further, governmental policy and legislation sometimes preferentially supports innovation by manufacturers. Considerations of social welfare suggest that this must change. The workings of the intellectual property system are of special concern. But despite the difficulties, a democratized and user-centric system of innovation appears well worth striving for.
+={Government policy:See also Digital Millennium Copyright Act|and social welfare|user innovation and;Social welfare:government policy and|innovation and+3|user innovation and+3}
+
+% check government policy
+
+Users, as the term will be used in this book, are firms or individual consumers that expect to benefit from /{using}/ a product or a service. In contrast, manufacturers expect to benefit from /{selling}/ a product or a service. A firm or an individual can have different relationships to different products or innovations. For example, Boeing is a manufacturer of airplanes, but it is also a user of machine tools. If we were examining innovations developed by Boeing for the airplanes it sells, we would consider Boeing a manufacturer-innovator in those cases. But if we were considering innovations in metal-forming machinery developed by Boeing for in-house use in building airplanes, we would categorize those as user-developed innovations and would categorize Boeing as a user-innovator in those cases.
+={Users:characteristics of+2;Manufacturers:characteristics of+2}
+
+Innovation user and innovation manufacturer are the two general "functional" relationships between innovator and innovation. Users are unique in that they alone benefit /{directly}/ from innovations. All others (here lumped under the term "manufacturers") must sell innovation-related products or services to users, indirectly or directly, in order to profit from innovations. Thus, in order to profit, inventors must sell or license knowledge related to innovations, and manufacturers must sell products or services incorporating innovations. Similarly, suppliers of innovation-related materials or services---unless they have direct use for the innovations---must sell the materials or services in order to profit from the innovations.
+={Innovation:See also Innovation communities|functional sources of;Suppliers}
+
+The user and manufacturer categorization of relationships between innovator and innovation can be extended to specific functions, attributes, or features of products and services. When this is done, it may turn out that different parties are associated with different attributes of a particular product or service. For example, householders are the users of the switching attribute of a household electric light switch---they use it to turn lights on and off. However, switches also have other attributes, such as "easy wiring" qualities, that may be used only by the electricians who install them. Therefore, if an electrician were to develop an improvement to the installation attributes of a switch, it would be considered a user-developed innovation.
+
+A brief overview of the contents of the book follows.
+
+!_ Development of Products by Lead Users (Chapter 2)
+={Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users+6;Lead users+6:characteristics of+6|commercial attractiveness of+6|economic benefit, expectations of+6|identification of+6|innovation and+50|library information search system and+6}
+
+Empirical studies show that many users---from 10 percent to nearly 40 percent---engage in developing or modifying products. About half of these studies do not determine representative innovation frequencies; they were designed for other purposes. Nonetheless, when taken together, the findings make it very clear that users are doing a /{lot}/ of product modification and product development in many fields.
+={innovation:attractiveness of+8}
+
+Studies of innovating users (both individuals and firms) show them to have the characteristics of "lead users." That is, they are ahead of the majority of users in their populations with respect to an important market trend, and they expect to gain relatively high benefits from a solution to the needs they have encountered there. The correlations found between innovation by users and lead user status are highly significant, and the effects are very large.
+
+Since lead users are at the leading edge of the market with respect to important market trends, one can guess that many of the novel products they develop for their own use will appeal to other users too and so might provide the basis for products manufacturers would wish to commercialize. This turns out to be the case. A number of studies have shown that many of the innovations reported by lead users are judged to be commercially attractive and/or have actually been commercialized by manufacturers.
+={Manufacturers:lead users and+1}
+
+Research provides a firm grounding for these empirical findings. The two defining characteristics of lead users and the likelihood that they will develop new or modified products have been found to be highly correlated (Morrison et al. 2004). In addition, it has been found that the higher the intensity of lead user characteristics displayed by an innovator, the greater the commercial attractiveness of the innovation that the lead user develops (Franke and von Hippel 2003a). In figure 1.1, the increased concentration of innovations toward the right indicates that the likelihood of innovating is higher for users having higher lead user index values. The rise in average innovation attractiveness as one moves from left to right indicates that innovations developed by lead users tend to be more commercially attractive. (Innovation attractiveness is the sum of the novelty of the innovation and the expected future generality of market demand.)
+={Morrison, Pamela;Franke, N.+5;von Hippel, E.+5}
+
+%% Figure 1.1
+% 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
+% 10
+% 5
+% 0
+% Attractiveness
+% of
+% innovations
+% Innovation
+% Estimated OLS curve
+% "Lead-user?ness" of users
+
+{di_evh_f1-1.png}image
+
+!_ Figure 1.1
+User-innovators with stronger "lead user" characteristics develop innovations having higher appeal in the general marketplace. Estimated OLS function: Y = 2.06 + 0.57x, where Y represents attractiveness of innovation and x represents lead-user-ness of respondent. Adjusted R^{2}^ = 0.281; p = 0.002; n = 30. Source of data: Franke and von Hippel 2003.
+
+!_ Why Many Users Want Custom Products (Chapter 3)
+={Custom products:heterogeneity of user needs and+2;User need+2;Users:innovate-or-buy decisions by+8|needs of+2}
+
+Why do so many users develop or modify products for their own use? Users may innovate if and as they want something that is not available on the market and are able and willing to pay for its development. It is likely that many users do not find what they want on the market. Meta-analysis of market-segmentation studies suggests that users' needs for products are highly heterogeneous in many fields (Franke and Reisinger 2003).
+={Reisinger, H.}
+
+Mass manufacturers tend to follow a strategy of developing products that are designed to meet the needs of a large market segment well enough to induce purchase from and capture significant profits from a large number of customers. When users' needs are heterogeneous, this strategy of "a few sizes fit all" will leave many users somewhat dissatisfied with the commercial products on offer and probably will leave some users seriously dissatisfied. In a study of a sample of users of the security features of Apache web server software, Franke and von Hippel (2003b) found that users had a very high heterogeneity of need, and that many had a high willingness to pay to get precisely what they wanted. Nineteen percent of the users sampled actually innovated to tailor Apache more closely to their needs. Those who did were found to be significantly more satisfied.
+={Apache web server software;Manufacturers:lead users and}
+
+!_ Users' Innovate-or-Buy Decisions (Chapter 4)
+={Custom products:heterogeneity of user needs and+3|manufacturers and+3|agency costs and+2;User need+3;Users:needs of+3;Manufacturers:innovation and+9|innovate-or-buy decisions and+4;Users:agency costs and+2}
+
+Even if many users want "exactly right products" and are willing and able to pay for their development, why do users often do this for themselves rather than hire a custom manufacturer to develop a special just-right product for them? After all, custom manufacturers specialize in developing products for one or a few users. Since these firms are specialists, it is possible that they could design and build custom products for individual users or user firms faster, better, or cheaper than users could do this for themselves. Despite this possibility, several factors can drive users to innovate rather than buy. Both in the case of user firms and in the case of individual user-innovators, agency costs play a major role. In the case of individual user-innovators, enjoyment of the innovation process can also be important.
+={Agency costs+1;Manufacturers:custom products and+2;Custom products:users and+3;Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users:by manufacturers+13}
+
+With respect to agency costs, consider that when a user develops its own custom product that user can be trusted to act in its own best interests. When a user hires a manufacturer to develop a custom product, the situation is more complex. The user is then a principal that has hired the custom manufacturer to act as its agent. If the interests of the principal and the agent are not the same, there will be agency costs. In general terms, agency costs are (1) costs incurred to monitor the agent to ensure that it (or he or she) follows the interests of the principal, (2) the cost incurred by the agent to commit itself not to act against the principal's interest (the "bonding cost"), and (3) costs associated with an outcome that does not fully serve the interests of the principal (Jensen and Meckling 1976). In the specific instance of product and service development, a major divergence of interests between user and custom manufacturer does exist: the user wants to get precisely what it needs, to the extent that it can afford to do so. In contrast, the custom manufacturer wants to lower its development costs by incorporating solution elements it already has or that it predicts others will want in the future---even if by doing so it does not serve its present client's needs as well as it could.
+={Jensen, M.;Meckling, W.}
+
+A user wants to preserve its need specification because that specification is chosen to make /{that user's}/ overall solution quality as high as possible at the desired price. For example, an individual user may specify a mountain-climbing boot that will precisely fit his unique climbing technique and allow him to climb Everest more easily. Any deviations in boot design will require compensating modifications in the climber's carefully practiced and deeply ingrained climbing technique---a much more costly solution from the user's point of view. A custom boot manufacturer, in contrast, will have a strong incentive to incorporate the materials and processes it has in stock and expects to use in future even if this produces a boot that is not precisely right for the present customer. For example, the manufacturer will not want to learn a new way to bond boot components together even if that would produce the best custom result for one client. The net result is that when one or a few users want something special they will often get the best result by innovating for themselves.
+={Innovation communities:See also Information communities+1}
+
+A small model of the innovate-or-buy decision follows. This model shows in a quantitative way that user firms with unique needs will always be better off developing new products for themselves. It also shows that development by manufacturers can be the most economical option when n or more user firms want the same thing. However, when the number of user firms wanting the same thing falls between 1 and n, manufacturers may not find it profitable to develop a new product for just a few users. In that case, more than one user may invest in developing the same thing independently, owing to market failure. This results in a waste of resources from the point of view of social welfare. The problem can be addressed by new institutional forms, such as the user innovation communities that will be studied later in this book.
+={Innovation communities:social welfare, and;Manufacturers:social welfare and+21;Social welfare:manufacturer innovation and+21|user innovation and+21}
+
+Chapter 4 concludes by pointing out that an additional incentive can drive individual user-innovators to innovate rather than buy: they may value the /{process}/ of innovating because of the enjoyment or learning that it brings them. It might seem strange that user-innovators can enjoy product development enough to want to do it themselves---after all, manufacturers pay their product developers to do such work! On the other hand, it is also clear that enjoyment of problem solving is a motivator for many individual problem solvers in at least some fields. Consider for example the millions of crossword-puzzle aficionados. Clearly, for these individuals enjoyment of the problem-solving process rather than the solution is the goal. One can easily test this by attempting to offer a puzzle solver a completed puzzle---the very output he or she is working so hard to create. One will very likely be rejected with the rebuke that one should not spoil the fun! Pleasure as a motivator can apply to the development of commercially useful innovations as well. Studies of the motivations of volunteer contributors of code to widely used software products have shown that these individuals too are often strongly motivated to innovate by the joy and learning they find in this work (Hertel et al. 2003; Lakhani and Wolf 2005).
+={Hertel, G.;Lakhani, K.;Wolf, B.;Innovation process;Users:innovation process and+7;Free software:See also Open source software;Hackers;Herrmann, S.}
+
+!_ Users' Low-Cost Innovation Niches (Chapter 5)
+={Users:low-cost innovation niches of+3}
+
+An exploration of the basic processes of product and service development show that users and manufacturers tend to develop different /{types}/ of innovations. This is due in part to information asymmetries: users and manufacturers tend to know different things. Product developers need two types of information in order to succeed at their work: need and context-of-use information (generated by users) and generic solution information (often initially generated by manufacturers specializing in a particular type of solution). Bringing these two types of information together is not easy. Both need information and solution information are often very "sticky"---that is, costly to move from the site where the information was generated to other sites. As a result, users generally have a more accurate and more detailed model of their needs than manufacturers have, while manufacturers have a better model of the solution approach in which they specialize than the user has.
+={Innovation process;Users:innovation process and;Information asymmetries+3;Manufacturers:information asymmetries of+2;Sticky information+2:innovation and+2;Users:information asymmetries of+2;Local information+2}
+
+When information is sticky, innovators tend to rely largely on information they already have in stock. One consequence of the information asymmetry between users and manufacturers is that users tend to develop innovations that are functionally novel, requiring a great deal of user-need information and use-context information for their development. In contrast, manufacturers tend to develop innovations that are improvements on well-known needs and that require a rich understanding of solution information for their development. For example, firms that use inventory-management systems, such as retailers, tend to be the developers of new approaches to inventory management. In contrast, manufacturers of inventory-management systems and equipment tend to develop improvements to the equipment used to implement these user-devised approaches (Ogawa 1998).
+={Ogawa, S.;Innovation:functional sources of}
+
+If we extend the information-asymmetry argument one step further, we see that information stickiness implies that information on hand will also differ among /{individual}/ users and manufacturers. The information assets of some particular user (or some particular manufacturer) will be closest to what is required to develop a particular innovation, and so the cost of developing that innovation will be relatively low for that user or manufacturer. The net result is that user innovation activities will be distributed across many users according to their information endowments. With respect to innovation, one user is by no means a perfect substitute for another.
+
+!_ Why Users Often Freely Reveal Their Innovations (Chapter 6)
+={Free revealing of innovation information:case for+5|evidence of+5|in information communities+5|intellectual property rights and+5|users and+5;Users:free revealing by+5}
+
+The social efficiency of a system in which individual innovations are developed by individual users is increased if users somehow diffuse what they have developed to others. Manufacturer-innovators /{partially}/ achieve this when they sell a product or a service on the open market (partially because they diffuse the product incorporating the innovation, but often not all the information that others would need to fully understand and replicate it). If user-innovators do not somehow also diffuse what they have done, multiple users with very similar needs will have to independently develop very similar innovations---a poor use of resources from the viewpoint of social welfare. Empirical research shows that users often do achieve widespread diffusion by an unexpected means: they often "freely reveal" what they have developed. When we say that an innovator freely reveals information about a product or service it has developed, we mean that all intellectual property rights to that information are voluntarily given up by the innovator, and all interested parties are given access to it---the information becomes a public good.
+={Free revealing of innovation information:manufacturers and+2;Innovation:distributed process of+4;Intellectual property rights:free revealing and;Manufacturers:free revealing and+2}
+
+The empirical finding that users often freely reveal their innovations has been a major surprise to innovation researchers. On the face of it, if a user-innovator's proprietary information has value to others, one would think that the user would strive to prevent free diffusion rather than help others to free ride on what it has developed at private cost. Nonetheless, it is now very clear that individual users and user firms---and sometimes manufacturers---often freely reveal detailed information about their innovations.
+
+The practices visible in "open source" software development were important in bringing this phenomenon to general awareness. In these projects it was clear /{policy}/ that project contributors would routinely and systematically freely reveal code they had developed at private expense (Raymond 1999). However, free revealing of product innovations has a history that began long before the advent of open source software. Allen, in his 1983 study of the eighteenth-century iron industry, was probably the first to consider the phenomon systematically. Later, Nuvolari (2004) discussed free revealing in the early history of mine pumping engines. Contemporary free revealing by users has been documented by von Hippel and Finkelstein (1979) for medical equipment, by Lim (2000) for semiconductor process equipment, by Morrison, Roberts, and von Hippel (2000) for library information systems, and by Franke and Shah (2003) for sporting equipment. Henkel (2003) has documented free revealing among manufacturers in the case of embedded Linux software.
+={Allen, R.;Finkelstein, S.;Franke, N.;Henkel, J.;Lim, K.;Linux;Morrison, Pamela;Nuvolari, A.;Raymond, E.;Roberts, J.;Shah, S.;von Hippel, E.;Free revealing of innovation information:open source software and+7;Intellectual property rights:open source software and+1;Open source software:See also Free software communities and|free revealing and+7|intellectual property rights and+2;Library information search system}
+
+Innovators often freely reveal because it is often the best or the only practical option available to them. Hiding an innovation as a trade secret is unlikely to be successful for long: too many generally know similar things, and some holders of the "secret" information stand to lose little or nothing by freely revealing what they know. Studies find that innovators in many fields view patents as having only limited value. Copyright protection and copyright licensing are applicable only to "writings," such as books, graphic images, and computer software.
+={Intellectual property rights:copyrights and|trade secrets and|free revealing and|licensing of|patents and;Government policy:trade secrets and}
+
+Active efforts by innovators to freely reveal---as opposed to sullen acceptance---are explicable because free revealing can provide innovators with significant private benefits as well as losses or risks of loss. Users who freely reveal what they have done often find that others then improve or suggest improvements to the innovation, to mutual benefit (Raymond 1999). Freely revealing users also may benefit from enhancement of reputation, from positive network effects due to increased diffusion of their innovation, and from other factors. Being the first to freely reveal a particular innovation can also enhance the benefits received, and so there can actually be a rush to reveal, much as scientists rush to publish in order to gain the benefits associated with being the first to have made a particular advancement.
+={Raymond, E.}
+
+!_ Innovation Communities (Chapter 7)
+={Innovation communities+3}
+
+Innovation by users tends to be widely distributed rather than concentrated among just a very few very innovative users. As a result, it is important for user-innovators to find ways to combine and leverage their efforts. Users achieve this by engaging in many forms of cooperation. Direct, informal user-to-user cooperation (assisting others to innovate, answering questions, and so on) is common. Organized cooperation is also common, with users joining together in networks and communities that provide useful structures and tools for their interactions and for the distribution of innovations. Innovation communities can increase the speed and effectiveness with which users and also manufacturers can develop and test and diffuse their innovations. They also can greatly increase the ease with which innovators can build larger systems from interlinkable modules created by community participants.
+={Users:innovation communities and+2}
+
+Free and open source software projects are a relatively well-developed and very successful form of Internet-based innovation community. However, innovation communities are by no means restricted to software or even to information products, and they can play a major role in the development of physical products. Franke and Shah (2003) have documented the value that user innovation communities can provide to user-innovators developing physical products in the field of sporting equipment. The analogy to open source innovation communities is clear.
+={Franke, N.;Shah, S.;Free software;Innovation communities:open source software and|physical products and|sporting equipment and;Open source software:innovation communities and}
+
+The collective or community effort to provide a public good---which is what freely revealed innovations are---has traditionally been explored in the literature on "collective action." However, behaviors seen in extant innovation communities fail to correspond to that literature at major points. In essence, innovation communities appear to be more robust with respect to recruiting and rewarding members than the literature would predict. Georg von Krogh and I attribute this to innovation contributors' obtaining some private rewards that are not shared equally by free riders (those who take without contributing). For example, a product that a user-innovator develops and freely reveals might be perfectly suited to that user-innovator's requirements but less well suited to the requirements of free riders. Innovation communities thus illustrate a "private-collective" model of innovation incentive (von Hippel and von Krogh 2003).
+={von Hippel, E.;von Krogh, G.;Free revealing of innovation information:collective action model for|private-collective model for;Innovation communities:and sources of innovation;Private-collective model;Social welfare:private-collective model and+2;Users:social welfare and+6}
+
+!_ Adapting Policy to User Innovation (Chapter 8)
+={Government policy:social welfare and+5|user innovation and+5;Social welfare:and government policy+5}
+
+Is innovation by users a "good thing?" Welfare economists answer such a question by studying how a phenomenon or a change affects social welfare. Henkel and von Hippel (2005) explored the social welfare implications of user innovation. They found that, relative to a world in which only manufacturers innovate, social welfare is very probably increased by the presence of innovations freely revealed by users. This finding implies that policy making should support user innovation, or at least should ensure that legislation and regulations do not favor manufacturers at the expense of user-innovators.
+={Henkel, J.;von Hippel, E.;Free revealing of innovation information:manufacturers and}
+
+The transitions required of policy making to achieve neutrality with respect to user innovation vs. manufacturer innovation are significant. Consider the impact on open and distributed innovation of past and current policy decisions. Research done in the past 30 years has convinced many academics that intellectual property law is sometimes or often not having its intended effect. Intellectual property law was intended to increase the amount of innovation investment. Instead, it now appears that there are economies of scope in both patenting and copyright that allow firms to use these forms of intellectual property law in ways that are directly opposed to the intent of policy makers and to the public welfare. Major firms can invest to develop large portfolios of patents. They can then use these to create "patent thickets"---dense networks of patent claims that give them plausible grounds for threatening to sue across a wide range of intellectual property. They may do this to prevent others from introducing a superior innovation and/or to demand licenses from weaker competitors on favorable terms (Shapiro 2001). Movie, publishing, and software firms can use large collections of copyrighted work to a similar purpose (Benkler 2002). In view of the distributed nature of innovation by users, with each tending to create a relatively small amount of intellectual property, users are likely to be disadvantaged by such strategies.
+={Benkler, Y.;Shapiro, C.;Intellectual property rights:copyrights and+1;Government policy:copyrights and+1|patents and|patent thickets and;Intellectual property rights:patents and|patent thickets and|licensing of}
+
+It is also important to note that users (and manufacturers) tend to build prototypes of their innovations economically by modifying products already available on the market to serve a new purpose. Laws such as the (US) Digital Millennium Copyright Act, intended to prevent consumers from illegally copying protected works, also can have the unintended side effect of preventing users from modifying products that they purchase (Varian 2002). Both fairness and social welfare considerations suggest that innovation-related policies should be made neutral with respect to the sources of innovation.
+={Digital Millennium Copyright Act;Varian, H.}
+
+It may be that current impediments to user innovation will be solved by legislation or by policy making. However, beneficiaries of existing law and policy will predictably resist change. Fortunately, a way to get around some of these problems is in the hands of innovators themselves. Suppose many innovators in a particular field decide to freely reveal what they have developed, as they often have reason to do. In that case, users can collectively create an information commons (a collection of information freely available to all) containing substitutes for some or a great deal of information now held as private intellectual property. Then user-innovators can work around the strictures of intellectual property law by simply using these freely revealed substitutes (Lessig 2001). This is essentially what is happening in the field of software. For many problems, user-innovators in that field now have a choice between proprietary, closed software provided by Microsoft and other firms and open source software that they can legally download from the Internet and legally modify to serve their own specific needs.
+={Lessig, L.;Microsoft;Free revealing of innovation information:collective action model for|in information communities|intellectual property rights and|users and+1;Information commons;Intellectual property rights:free revealing and|information communities and;Microsoft;User need;Users:free revealing by}
+
+Policy making that levels the playing field between users and manufacturers will force more rapid change onto manufacturers but will by no means destroy them. Experience in fields where open and distributed innovation processes are far advanced show how manufacturers can and do adapt. Some, for example, learn to supply proprietary platform products that offer user-innovators a framework upon which to develop and use their improvements.
+={Manufacturers:innovation and+7}
+
+!_ Democratizing Innovation (Chapter 9)
+
+Users' ability to innovate is improving /{radically}/ and /{rapidly}/ as a result of the steadily improving quality of computer software and hardware, improved access to easy-to-use tools and components for innovation, and access to a steadily richer innovation commons. Today, user firms and even individual hobbyists have access to sophisticated programming tools for software and sophisticated CAD design tools for hardware and electronics. These information-based tools can be run on a personal computer, and they are rapidly coming down in price. As a consequence, innovation by users will continue to grow even if the degree of heterogeneity of need and willingness to invest in obtaining a precisely right product remains constant.
+={Free revealing of innovation information:users and;Task partitioning+5:See also Toolkits;Toolkits:manufacturers and+5|task partitioning+5|user-friendly tools for|users and+5;User need;Users:innovation and+5}
+
+Equivalents of the innovation resources described above have long been available within corporations to a few. Senior designers at firms have long been supplied with engineers and designers under their direct control, and with the resources needed to quickly construct and test prototype designs. The same is true in other fields, including automotive design and clothing design: just think of the staffs of engineers and modelmakers supplied so that top auto designers can quickly realize and test their designs.
+
+But if, as we have seen, the information needed to innovate in important ways is widely distributed, the traditional pattern of concentrating innovation-support resources on a few individuals is hugely inefficient. High-cost resources for innovation support cannot efficiently be allocated to "the right people with the right information:" it is very difficult to know who these people may be before they develop an innovation that turns out to have general value. When the cost of high-quality resources for design and prototyping becomes very low (the trend we have described), these resources can be diffused very widely, and the allocation problem diminishes in significance. The net result is and will be to democratize the opportunity to create.
+={Manufacturers:innovation and+9;Users:innovation and+9}
+
+On a level playing field, users will be an increasingly important source of innovation and will increasingly substitute for or complement manufacturers' innovation-related activities. In the case of information products, users have the possibility of largely or completely doing without the services of manufacturers. Open source software projects are object lessons that teach us that users can create, produce, diffuse, provide user field support for, update, and use complex products by and for themselves in the context of user innovation communities. In physical product fields, product development by users can evolve to the point of largely or totally supplanting product development---but not product manufacturing---by manufacturers. (The economies of scale associated with manufacturing and distributing physical products give manufacturers an advantage over "do-it-yourself" users in those activities.)
+={Custom products:manufacturers and+2|users and+2;Innovation communities+1:open source software and|physical products and;Manufacturers:custom products and+2;Users:custom products and+2}
+
+The evolving pattern of the locus of product development in kitesurfing illustrates how users can displace manufacturers from the role of product developer. In that industry, the collective product-design and testing work of a user innovation community has clearly become superior in both quality and quantity relative to the levels of in-house development effort that manufacturers of kitesurfing equipment can justify. Accordingly, manufacturers of such equipment are increasingly shifting away from product design and focusing on producing product designs first developed and tested by user innovation communities.
+={Innovation communities:kitesurfing and;Kitesurfing}
+
+How can or should manufacturers adapt to users' encroachment on elements of their traditional business activities? There are three general possibilities: (1) Produce user-developed innovations for general commercial sale and/or offer custom manufacturing to specific users. (2) Sell kits of product-design tools and/or "product platforms" to ease users' innovation-related tasks. (3) Sell products or services that are complementary to user-developed innovations. Firms in fields where users are already very active in product design are experimenting with all these possibilities.
+={Custom products:product platforms and|toolkits and;Toolkits:platform products and}
+
+!_ Application: Searching for Lead User Innovations (Chapter 10)
+={Custom products:manufacturers and+2;Manufacturers:custom products and+2;Users:custom products and+2;Lead users+59:idea generation and+2|identification of+2|innovation and+2}
+
+Manufacturers design their innovation processes around the way they think the process works. The vast majority of manufacturers still think that product development and service development are always done by manufacturers, and that their job is always to find a need and fill it rather than to sometimes find and commercialize an innovation that lead users have already developed. Accordingly, manufacturers have set up market-research departments to explore the needs of users in the target market, product-development groups to think up suitable products to address those needs, and so forth. The needs and prototype solutions of lead users---if encountered at all---are typically rejected as outliers of no interest. Indeed, when lead users' innovations do enter a firm's product line---and they have been shown to be the actual source of many major innovations for many firms--- they typically arrive with a lag and by an unconventional and unsystematic route. For example, a manufacturer may "discover" a lead user innovation only when the innovating user firm contacts the manufacturer with a proposal to produce its design in volume to supply its own in-house needs. Or sales or service people employed by a manufacturer may spot a promising prototype during a visit to a customer's site.
+={Marketing research+1}
+
+Modification of firms' innovation processes to /{systematically}/ search for and further develop innovations created by lead users can provide manufacturers with a better interface to the innovation process as it actually works, and so provide better performance. A natural experiment conducted at 3M illustrates this possibility. Annual sales of lead user product ideas generated by the average lead user project at 3M were conservatively forecast by management to be more than 8 times the sales forecast for new products developed in the traditional manner---$146 million versus $18 million per year. In addition, lead user projects were found to generate ideas for new product lines, while traditional market-research methods were found to produce ideas for incremental improvements to existing product lines. As a consequence, 3M divisions funding lead user project ideas experienced their highest rate of major product line generation in the past 50 years (Lilien et al. 2002).
+={Lilien, G.;Lead users:3M and;3M Corporation}
+
+!_ Application: Toolkits for User Innovation and Custom Design (Chapter 11)
+={Toolkits+2}
+
+Firms that understand the distributed innovation process and users' roles in it can /{change}/ factors affecting lead user innovation and so affect its rate and direction in ways they value. Toolkits for user innovation custom design offer one way of doing this. This approach involves partitioning product-development and service-development projects into solution-information-intensive subtasks and need-information-intensive subtasks. Need-intensive subtasks are then assigned to users along with a kit of tools that enable them to effectively execute the tasks assigned to them. The resulting co-location of sticky information and problem-solving activity makes innovation within the solution space offered by a particular toolkit cheaper for users. It accordingly attracts them to the toolkit and so influences what they develop and how they develop it. The custom semiconductor industry was an early adopter of toolkits. In 2003, more than $15 billion worth of semiconductors were produced that had been designed using this approach.
+={Toolkits:platform products and+2;Lead users:innovation and;Sticky information:innovation and}
+
+Manufacturers that adopt the toolkit approach to supporting and channeling user innovation typically face major changes in their business models, and important changes in industry structure may also follow. For example, as a result of the introduction of toolkits to the field of semiconductor manufacture, custom semiconductor manufacturers---formerly providers of both design and manufacturing services to customers---lost much of the work of custom product design to customers. Many of these manufacturers then became specialist silicon foundries, supplying production services primarily. Manufacturers may or may not wish to make such changes. However, experience in fields where toolkits have been deployed shows that customers tend to prefer designing their own custom products with the aid of a toolkit over traditional manufacturer-centric development practices. As a consequence, the only real choice for manufacturers in a field appropriate to the deployment of toolkits may be whether to lead or to follow in the transition to toolkits.
+
+!_ Linking User Innovation to Other Phenomena and Fields (Chapter 12)
+
+In chapter 12 I discuss links between user innovation and some related phenomena and literatures. With respect to phenomena, I point out the relationship of user innovation to /{information}/ communities, of which user innovation communities are a subset. One open information community is the online encyclopedia Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org). Other such communities include the many specialized Internet sites where individuals with both common and rare medical conditions can find one another and can find specialists in those conditions. Many of the advantages associated with user innovation communities also apply to open information networks and communities. Analyses appropriate to information communities follow the same overall pattern as the analyses provided in this book for innovation communities. However, they are also simpler, because in open information communities there may be little or no proprietary information being transacted and thus little or no risk of related losses for participants.
+={Wikipedia;Information commons;Information communities:See also Innovation communities;Innovation communities+2:and sources of innovation+2;Intellectual property rights:information communities and+2|innovation and+2}
+
+Next I discuss links between user-centric innovation phenomena and the literature on the economics of knowledge that have been forged by Foray (2004) and Weber (2004). I also discuss how Porter's 1991 work on the competitive advantage of nations can be extended to incorporate findings on nations' lead users as product developers. Finally, I point out how findings explained in this book link to and complement research on the Social Construction of Technology (Pinch and Bijker 1987).
+={Bijker, W.;Foray, D.;Pinch, T.;Weber, S.;Porter, M.;Knowledge, production and distribution of}
+
+I conclude this introductory chapter by reemphasizing that user innovation, free revealing, and user innovation communities will flourish under many but not all conditions. What we know about manufacturer-centered innovation is still valid; however, lead-user-centered innovation patterns are increasingly important, and they present major new opportunities and challenges for us all.
+={Free revealing of innovation information:free revealing and;Users:free revealing by}
+
+1~ 2 Development of Products by Lead Users
+
+The idea that novel products and services are developed by manufacturers is deeply ingrained in both traditional expectations and scholarship. When we as users of products complain about the shortcomings of an existing product or wish for a new one, we commonly think that "they" should develop it---not us. Even the conventional term for an individual end user, "consumer," implicitly suggests that users are not active in product and service development. Nonetheless, there is now very strong empirical evidence that product development and modification by both user firms and users as individual consumers is frequent, pervasive, and important.
+={Consumers+5}
+
+I begin this chapter by reviewing the evidence that many users indeed do develop and modify products for their own use in many fields. I then show that innovation is concentrated among /{lead}/ users, and that lead users' innovations often become commercial products.
+
+!_ Many Users Innovate
+
+The evidence on user innovation frequency and pervasiveness is summarized in table 2.1. We see here that the frequency with which user firms and individual consumers develop or modify products for their own use range from 10 percent to nearly 40 percent in fields studied to date. The matter has been studied across a wide range of industrial product types where innovating users are user firms, and also in various types of sporting equipment, where innovating users are individual consumers.
+={Lead users:sporting equipment and+1;Sporting equipment:lead users and+1}
+
+The studies cited in table 2.1 clearly show that a lot of product development and modification by users is going on. However, these findings should not be taken to reflect innovation rates in overall populations of users. All of the studies probably were affected by a response bias. (That is, if someone sends a questionnaire about whether you innovated or not, you might be more inclined to respond if your answer is "Yes."). Also, each of the studies looked at innovation rates affecting a particular product type among users who care a great deal about that product type. Thus, university surgeons (study 4 in table 2.1) care a great deal about having just-right surgical equipment, just as serious mountain bikers (study 8) care a great deal about having just-right equipment for their sport. As the intensity of interest goes down, it is likely that rates of user innovation drop too. This is probably what is going on in the case of the study of purchasers of outdoor consumer products (study 6). All we are told about that sample of users of outdoor consumer products is that they are recipients of one or more mail order catalogs from suppliers of relatively general outdoor items---winter jackets, sleeping bags, and so on. Despite the fact that these users were asked if they have developed or modified any item in this broad category of goods (rather than a very specific one such as a mountain bike), just 10 percent answered in the affirmative. Of course, 10 percent or even 5 percent of a user population numbering in the tens of millions worldwide is still a very large number---so we again realize that many users are developing and modifying products.
+={Lead users:outdoor consumer products and;Outdoor products}
+
+!_ Table 2.1
+Many respondents reported developing or modifying products for their own use in the eight product areas listed here.
+={Lüthje, C.+1;Urban, G.+1;Franke, N.+1;Herstatt, C.+1;Morrison, Pamela+1;von Hippel, E.+1;Lead users:Apache web server software and+1r|library information search system and+1|mountain biking and+1|outdoor consumer products and+1|pipe hanger hardware and+1|printed circuit CAD software and+1|surgical equipment and+3;Library information search system+1;Mountain biking+1;Outdoor products+1;Pipe hanger hardware+1;Printed circuit CAD software+1;Surgical equipment+1}
+
+table{~h c4; 20; 45; 15; 20;
+
+~
+Number and type of Users Sampled
+Percentage developing and building product for own use
+Source
+
+Industrial products
+~
+~
+~
+
+1. Printed circuit CAD software
+136 user firm attendees at PC-CAD conference
+24.3%
+Urban and von Hippel 1988
+
+2. Pipe hanger hardware
+Employees in 74 pipe hanger installation firms
+36%
+Herstatt and von Hippel 1992
+
+3. Library information systems
+Employees in 102 Australian libraries using computerized OPAC library information systems
+26%
+Morrison et al. 2000
+
+4. Surgical equipment
+261 surgeons working in university clinics in Germany
+22%
+Lüthje 2003
+
+5. Apache OS server software security features
+131 technically sophisticated Apache features users (webmasters)
+19.1%
+Franke and von Hippel 2003
+
+Consumer products
+~
+~
+~
+
+6. Outdoor consumer products
+153 recipients of mail order catalogs for outdoor activity products for consumers
+9.8%
+Lüthje 2004
+
+7. "Extreme" sporting equipment
+197 members of 4 specialized sporting clubs in 4 "extreme" sports
+37.8%
+Franke and Shah 2003
+
+8. Mountain biking equipment
+291 mountain bikers in a geographic region
+19.2%
+Lüthje et al.
+
+}table
+
+The cited studies also do not set an upper or a lower bound on the commercial or technical importance of user-developed products and product modifications that they report, and it is likely that most are of minor significance. However, most innovations from any source are minor, so user-innovators are no exception in this regard. Further, to say an innovation is minor is not the same as saying it is trivial: minor innovations are cumulatively responsible for much or most technical progress. Hollander (1965) found that about 80 percent of unit cost reductions in Rayon manufacture were the cumulative result of minor technical changes. Knight (1963, VII, pp. 2--3) measured performance advances in general-purpose digital computers and found, similarly, that "these advances occur as the result of equipment designers using their knowledge of electronics technology to produce a multitude of small improvements that together produce significant performance advances."
+={Hollander, S.;Knight, K.;Users:process improvements by+1}
+
+Although most products and product modifications that users or others develop will be minor, users are by no means restricted to developing minor or incremental innovations. Qualitative observations have long indicated that important process improvements are developed by users. Smith (1776, pp. 11--13) pointed out the importance of "the invention of a great number of machines which facilitate and abridge labor, and enable one man to do the work of many." He also noted that "a great part of the machines made use of in those manufactures in which labor is most subdivided, were originally the invention of common workmen, who, being each of them employed in some very simple operation, naturally turned their thoughts towards finding out easier and readier methods of performing it." Rosenberg (1976) studied the history of the US machine tool industry and found that important and basic machine types like lathes and milling machines were first developed and built by user firms having a strong need for them. Textile manufacturing firms, gun manufacturers and sewing machine manufacturers were important early user-developers of machine tools. Other studies show quantitatively that some of the most important and novel products and processes have been developed by user firms and by individual users. Enos (1962) reported that nearly all the most important innovations in oil refining were developed by user firms. Freeman (1968) found that the most widely licensed chemical production processes were developed by user firms. Von Hippel (1988) found that users were the developers of about 80 percent of the most important scientific instrument innovations, and also the developers of most of the major innovations in semiconductor processing. Pavitt (1984) found that a considerable fraction of invention by British firms was for in-house use. Shah (2000) found that the most commercially important equipment innovations in four sporting fields tended to be developed by individual users.
+={Enos, J.;Freeman, C.;Pavitt, K.;Rosenberg, N.;Shah, S.;Smith, A.;von Hippel, E.+23;Sporting equipment:lead users and}
+
+!_ Lead User Theory
+={Lead users:theory of+3}
+
+A second major finding of empirical research into innovation by users is that most user-developed products and product modifications (and the most commercially attractive ones) are developed by users with "lead user" characteristics. Recall from chapter 1 that lead users are defined as members of a user population having two distinguishing characteristics: (1) They are at the leading edge of an important market trend(s), and so are currently experiencing needs that will later be experienced by many users in that market. (2) They anticipate relatively high benefits from obtaining a solution to their needs, and so may innovate.
+={Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users+1;Lead users:economic benefit, expectations of+1}
+
+The theory that led to defining "lead users" in terms of these two characteristics was derived as follows (von Hippel 1986). First, the "ahead on an important market trend" variable was included because of its assumed effect on the commercial attractiveness of innovations developed by users residing at a leading-edge position in a market. Market needs are not static---they evolve, and often they are driven by important underlying trends. If people are distributed with respect to such trends as diffusion theory indicates, then people at the leading edges of important trends will be experiencing needs today (or this year) that the bulk of the market will experience tomorrow (or next year). And, if users develop and modify products to satisfy their own needs, then the innovations that lead users develop should later be attractive to many. The expected benefits variable and its link to innovation likelihood was derived from studies of industrial product and process innovations. These showed that the greater the benefit an entity expects to obtain from a needed innovation, the greater will be that entity's investment in obtaining a solution, where a solution is an innovation either developed or purchased (Schmookler 1966; Mansfield 1968).
+={Mansfield, E.;Schmookler, J.}
+
+Empirical studies to date have confirmed lead user theory. Morrison, Roberts, and Midgely (2004) studied the characteristics of innovating and non-innovating users of computerized library information systems in a sample of Australian libraries. They found that the two lead user characteristics were distributed in a continuous, unimodal manner in that sample. They also found that the two characteristics of lead users and the actual development of innovations by users were highly correlated. Franke and von Hippel (2003b) confirmed these findings in a study of innovating and non-innovating users of Apache web server software. They also found that the commercial attractiveness of innovations developed by users increased along with the strength of those users' lead user characteristics.
+={Franke, N.;Midgely, David;Morrison, Pamela+19;Roberts, J.;Apache web server software;Lead users:Apache web server software and|library information search system and;Library information search system}
+
+!_ Evidence of Innovation by Lead Users
+
+Several studies have found that user innovation is largely the province of users that have lead user characteristics, and that products lead users develop often form the basis for commercial products. These general findings appear robust: the studies have used a variety of techniques and have addressed a variety of markets and innovator types. Brief reviews of four studies will convey the essence of what has been found.
+
+!_ Innovation in Industrial Product User Firms
+
+In the first empirical study of lead users' role in innovation, Urban and von Hippel (1988) studied user innovation activity related to a type of software used to design printed circuit boards. A major market trend to which printed circuit computer-aided design software (PC-CAD) must respond is the steady movement toward packing electronic circuitry more densely onto circuit boards. Higher density means one that can shrink boards in overall size and that enables the circuits they contain to operate faster---both strongly desired attributes. Designing a board at the leading edge of what is technically attainable in density at any particular time is a very demanding task. It involves some combination of learning to make the printed circuit wires narrower, learning how to add more layers of circuitry to a board, and using smaller electronic components.
+={Urban, G.+1;Lead users:printed circuit CAD software and+3;Lead users:printed circuit CAD software and+3;Printed circuit CAD software+3}
+
+To explore the link between user innovation and needs at the leading edge of the density trend, Urban and von Hippel collected a sample of 138 user-firm employees who had attended a trade show on the topic of PC-CAD. To learn the position of each firm on the density trend, they asked questions about the density of the boards that each PC-CAD user firm was currently producing. To learn about each user's likely expected benefits from improvements to PC-CAD, they asked questions about how satisfied each respondent was with their firm's present PC-CAD capabilities. To learn about users' innovation activities, they asked questions about whether each firm had modified or built its own PC-CAD software for its own in-house use.
+
+Users' responses were cluster analyzed, and clear lead user (n = 38) and non-lead-user (n = 98) clusters were found. Users in the lead user cluster were those that made the densest boards on average and that also were dissatisfied with their PC-CAD capabilities. In other words, they were at the leading edge of an important market trend, and they had a high incentive to innovate to improve their capabilities. Strikingly, 87 percent of users in the lead user cluster reported either developing or modifying the PC-CAD software that they used. In contrast, only 1 percent of non-lead users reported this type of innovation. Clearly, in this case user innovation was very strongly concentrated in the lead user segment of the user population. A discriminant analysis on indicated that "build own system" was the most important indicator of membership in the lead user cluster. The discriminant analysis had 95.6 percent correct classification of cluster membership.
+
+The commercial attractiveness of PC-CAD solutions developed by lead users was high. This was tested by determining whether lead users and more ordinary users preferred a new PC-CAD system concept containing features developed by lead users over the best commercial PC-CAD system available at the time of the study (as determined by a large PC-CAD system manufacturer's competitive analysis) and two additional concepts. The concept containing lead user features was significantly preferred at even twice the price (p < 0.01).
+={Lead users:commercial attractiveness of}
+
+!_ Innovation in Libraries
+={Lead users:library information search system and+11;Library information search system+11}
+
+Morrison, Roberts, and von Hippel (2000) explored user modifications made by Australian libraries to computerized information search systems called Online Public Access systems ("OPACs"). Libraries might not seem the most likely spot for technological innovators to lurk. However, computer technologies and the Internet have had a major effect on how libraries are run, and many libraries now have in-house programming expertise. Computerized search methods for libraries were initially developed by advanced and technically sophisticated user institutions. Development began in the United States in the 1970s with work by major universities and the Library of Congress, with support provided by grants from the federal government (Tedd 1994). Until roughly 1978, the only such systems extant were those that had been developed by libraries for their own use. In the late 1970s, the first commercial providers of computerized search systems for libraries appeared in the United States, and by 1985 there were at least 48 OPAC vendors in the United States alone (Matthews 1985). In Australia (site of the study sample), OPAC adoption began about 8 years later than in the United States (Tedd 1994).
+={Tedd, L.;Roberts, J.+3}
+
+Morrison, Roberts, and I obtained responses from 102 Australian libraries that were users of OPACs. We found that 26 percent of these had in fact modified their OPAC hardware or software far beyond the user-adjustment capabilities provided by the system manufacturers. The types of innovations that the libraries developed varied widely according to local needs. For example, the library that modified its OPAC to "add book retrieval instructions for staff and patrons" (table 2.2) did so because its collection of books was distributed in a complex way across a number of buildings--- making it difficult for staff and patrons to find books without precise directions. There was little duplication of innovations except in the case of adding Internet search capabilities to OPACs. In that unusual case, nine libraries went ahead and did the programming needed to add this important feature in advance of its being offered by the manufacturers of their systems.
+
+!_ Table 2.2
+OPAC modifications created by users served a wide variety of functions.
+
+table{~h c2; 50; 50;
+
+Improved library management
+Improved information-search capabilities
+
+Add library patron summary statistics
+Integrate images in records (2)
+
+Add library identifiers
+Combined menu/command searches
+
+Add location records for physical audit
+Add title sorting and short title listing
+
+Add book retrieval instructions for staff and patrons
+Add fast access key commands
+
+Add CD ROM System backup
+Add multilingual search formats \\  key word searches (2)
+
+Add book access control based on copyright
+Add topic linking and subject access
+
+Patrons can check their status via OPAC
+Add prior search recall feature
+
+Patrons can reserve books via OPAC (2)
+Add search "navigation aids"
+
+Remote access to OPAC by different systems
+Add different hierarchical searches
+
+Add graduated system access via password
+Access to other libraries' catalogs (2)
+
+Add interfaces to other in-house IT systems
+Add or customize web interface (9)
+
+  Word processing and correspondence (2)
+  Hot links for topics
+
+  Umbrella for local information collection (2)
+  Extended searches
+
+  Local systems adaptation
+  Hot links for source material
+
+}table
+
+Source of data: Morrison et al. 2000, table 1. Number of users (if more than one) developing functionally similar innovations is shown in parentheses after description of innovation.
+
+The libraries in the sample were asked to rank themselves on a number of characteristics, including "leading edge status" (LES). (Leading edge status, a construct developed by Morrison, is related to and highly correlated with the lead user construct (in this sample, ρ ,{(LES, CLU)}, = 0.904, /{p}/ = 0.000). ~{ LES contains four types of measures. Three ("benefits recognized early," "high benefits expected," and "direct elicitation of the construct") contain the core components of the lead user construct. The fourth ("applications generation") is a measure of a number of innovation-related activities in which users might engage: they "suggest new applications," they "pioneer those applications," and (because they have needs or problems earlier than their peers) they may be "used as a test site" (Morrison, Midgely, and Roberts 2004). }~ Self-evaluation bias was checked for by asking respondents to name other libraries they regarded as having the characteristics of lead users. Self-evaluations and evaluations by others did not differ significantly.
+={Midgely, David;Morrison, Pamela;Roberts, J.}
+
+Libraries that had modified their OPAC systems were found to have significantly higher LES---that is, to be lead users. They were also found to have significantly higher incentives to make modifications than non-innovators, better in-house technical skills, and fewer "external resources" (for example, they found it difficult to find outside vendors to develop the modifications they wanted for them). Application of these four variables in a logit model classified libraries into innovator and non-innovator categories with an accuracy of 88 percent (table 2.3).
+
+!_ Table 2.3
+Factors associated with innovating in librararies (logit model). χ^{2}^/,{4}, = 33.85; ρ^{2}^ = 0.40; classification rate = 87.78%.
+
+table{~h c3; 40; 30; 30;
+
+~
+Coefficient
+Standard error
+
+Leading-edge status
+1.862
+0.601
+
+Lack of incentive to modify
+--0.845
+0.436
+
+Lack of in-house technology skills
+--1.069
+0.412
+
+Lack of external resources
+0.695
+0.456
+
+Constant
+--2.593
+0.556
+
+}table
+
+Source: Morrison et al. 2000, table 6.
+
+The commercial value of user-developed innovations in the library OPAC sample was assessed in a relatively informal way. Two development mangers employed by the Australian branches of two large OPAC manufacturers were asked to evaluate the commercial value of each user innovation in the sample. They were asked two questions about each: (1) "How important commercially to your firm is the functionality added to OPACs by this user-developed modification?" (2) "How novel was the information contained in the user innovation to your firm at the time that innovation was developed?" Responses from both managers indicated that about 70 percent (25 out of 39) of the user modifications provided functionality improvements of at least "medium" commercial importance to OPACs---and in fact many of the functions were eventually incorporated in the OPACs the manufacturers sold. However, the managers also felt that their firms generally already knew about the lead users' needs when the users developed their solutions, and that the innovations the users developed provided novel information to their company only in 10--20 percent of the cases. (Even when manufacturers learn about lead users' needs early, they may not think it profitable to develop their own solution for an "emerging" need until years later. I will develop this point in chapter 4.)
+={Lead users:commercial attractiveness of;Manufacturers:innovation and|lead users and}
+
+!_ "Consumer" Innovation in Sports Communities
+={Franke, N.+11;Shah, S.+11;Innovation:and sporting equipment+11;Lead users:manufacturers and+11;Sporting equipment:lead users and+11}
+
+% check manufacturers ref, see previous paragraph
+
+Franke and Shah (2003) studied user innovation in four communities of sports enthusiasts. The communities, all located in Germany, were focused on four very different sports.
+={Manufacturers:innovation and|lead users and}
+
+One community was devoted to canyoning, a new sport popular in the Alps. Canyoning combines mountain climbing, abseiling (rappelling), and swimming in canyons. Members do things like rappel down the middle of an active waterfall into a canyon below. Canyoning requires significant skill and involves physical risk. It is also a sport in rapid evolution as participants try new challenges and explore the edges of what is both achievable and fun.
+
+The second community studied was devoted to sailplaning. Sailplaning or gliding, a more mature sport than canyoning, involves flying in a closed, engineless glider carrying one or two people. A powered plane tows the glider to a desired altitude by means of a rope; then the rope is dropped and the engineless glider flies on its own, using thermal updrafts in the atmosphere to gain altitude as possible. The sailplaning community studied by Franke and Shah consisted of students of technical universities in Germany who shared an interest in sailplaning and in building their own sailplanes.
+
+Boardercross was the focus of the third community. In this sport, six snowboarders compete simultaneously in a downhill race. Racetracks vary, but each is likely to incorporate tunnels, steep curves, water holes, and jumps. The informal community studied consisted of semi-professional athletes from all over the world who met in as many as ten competitions a year in Europe, in North America, and in Japan.
+
+The fourth community studied was a group of semi-professional cyclists with various significant handicaps, such as cerebral palsy or an amputated limb. Such individuals must often design or make improvements to their equipment to accommodate their particular disabilities. These athletes knew each other well from national and international competitions, training sessions, and seminars sponsored by the Deutscher Sportbund (German National Sports Council).
+
+A total of 197 respondents (a response rate of 37.8 percent) answered a questionnaire about innovation activities in their communities. Thirty-two percent reported that they had developed or modified equipment they used for their sport. The rate of innovation varied among the sports, the high being 41 percent of the sailplane enthusiasts reporting innovating and the low being 18 percent of the boardercross snowboarders reporting. (The complexity of the equipment used in the various sports probably had something to do with this variation: a sailplane has many more components than a snowboard.)
+
+The innovations developed varied a great deal. In the sailplane community, users developed innovations ranging from a rocket-assisted emergency ejection system to improvements in cockpit ventilation. Snowboarders invented such things as improved boots and bindings. Canyoners' inventions included very specialized solutions, such as a way to cut loose a trapped rope by using a chemical etchant. With respect to commercial potential,
+={Lead users:commercial attractiveness of}
+
+Franke and Shah found that 23 percent of the user-developed innovations reported were or soon would be produced for sale by a manufacturer. Franke and Shah found that users who innovated were significantly higher on measures of the two lead user characteristics than users who did not innovate (table 2.4). They also found that the innovators spent more time in sporting and community-related activities and felt they had a more central role in the community.
+
+!_ Table 2.4
+Factors associated with innovation in sports communities.
+
+table{~h c4; 55; 15; 15; 15;
+
+~
+Innovators^{a}^
+Non-innovators^{b}^
+Significance of difference^{c}^
+
+Time in community
+~
+~
+~
+
+Years as a community member
+4.46
+3.17
+p < 0.01
+
+Days per year spent with community members
+43.07
+32.73
+p < 0.05
+
+Days per year spent participating in the sport
+72.48
+68.71
+not significant
+
+Role in community^{d}^
+~
+~
+~
+
+"I am a very active member of the community."
+2.85
+3.82
+p < 0.01
+
+
+"I get together with members of the community for activities that are not related to the sport (movies, dinner parties, etc.)."
+3.39
+4.14
+p < 0.05
+
+"The community takes my opinion into account when making decisions"
+2.89
+3.61
+p < 0.05
+
+Lead user characteristic 1: being ahead of the trend^{d}^
+~
+~
+~
+
+"I usually find out about new products and solutions earlier than others."
+2.71
+4.03
+p < 0.001
+
+"I have benefited significantly by the early adoption and use of new products."
+3.58
+4.34
+p < 0.01
+
+"I have tested prototype versions of new products for manufacturers."
+4.94
+5.65
+p < 0.05
+
+"In my sport I am regarded as being on the "cutting edge."
+4.56
+5.38
+p < 0.01
+
+
+"I improved and developed new techniques in boardercrossing."
+4.29
+5.84
+p < 0.001
+
+Lead user characteristic 2: high benefit from innovation^{d}^
+~
+~
+~
+
+"I have new needs which are not satisfied by existing products."
+3.27
+4.38
+p < 0.001
+
+
+"I am dissatisfied with the existing equipment."
+3.90
+5.13
+p < 0.001
+
+}table
+
+Source: Franke and Shah 2003, table 3. \\
+a. All values are means; n = 60. \\
+b. All values are means; n = 129. \\
+c. Two-tailed t-tests for independent samples. \\
+d. Rated on seven-point scale, with 1 = very accurate and 7 = not accurate at all. Two-tailed t-tests for independent samples.
+
+!_ Innovation among Hospital Surgeons
+={Surgical equipment+4;Lead users:surgical equipment and+4}
+
+Lüthje (2003) explored innovations developed by surgeons working at university clinics in Germany. Ten such clinics were chosen randomly, and 262 surgeons responded to Lüthje's questionnaire---a response rate of 32.6 percent. Of the university surgeons responding, 22 percent reported developing or improving some item(s) of medical equipment for use in their own practices. Using a logit model to determine the influence of user characteristics on innovation activity, Lüthje found that innovating surgeons tended to be lead users (p < 0.01). He also found that solutions to problems encountered in their own surgical practices were the primary benefit that the innovating surgeons expected to obtain from the solutions they developed (p < 0.01). In addition, he found that the level of technical knowledge the surgeon held was significantly correlated with innovation (p < 0.05). Also, perhaps as one might expect in the field of medicine, the "contextual barrier" of concerns about legal problems and liability risks was found to have a strongly significant negative correlation with the likelihood of user invention by surgeons (p < 0.01).
+={Lüthje, C.+1;Sticky information:toolkits and}
+
+With respect to the commercial value of the innovations the lead user surgeons had developed, Lüthje reported that 48 percent of the innovations developed by his lead user respondents were or soon would be marketed by manufacturers of medical equipment.
+
+!_ Discussion
+
+The studies reviewed in this chapter all found that user innovations in general and commercially attractive ones in particular tended to be developed by lead users. These studies were set in a range of fields, but all were focused on hardware innovations or on information innovations such as new software. It is therefore important to point out that, in many fields, innovation in techniques is at least as important as equipment innovation. For example, many novel surgical operations are performed with standard equipment (such as scalpels), and many novel innovations in snowboarding are based on existing, unmodified equipment. Technique-only innovations are also likely to be the work of lead users, and indeed many of the equipment innovations documented in the studies reviewed here involved innovations in technique as well as innovations in equipment.
+={Lead users:commercial attractiveness of+1;Users:innovation process and+1}
+
+Despite the strength of the findings, many interesting puzzles remain that can be addressed by the further development of lead user theory. For example, empirical studies of innovation by lead users are unlikely to have sampled the world's foremost lead users. Thus, in effect, the studies reviewed here determined lead users to be those highest on lead user characteristics that were within their samples. Perhaps other samples could have been obtained in each of the fields studied containing users that were even more "leading edge" with respect to relevant market trends. If so, why were the samples of moderately leading-edge users showing user innovation if user innovation is concentrated among "extreme" lead users? There are at least three possible explanations. First, most of the studies of user innovation probably included users reasonably close to the global leading edge in their samples. Had the "top" users been included, perhaps the result would have been that still more attractive user innovations would have been found. Second, it may be that the needs of local user communities differ, and so local lead users really may be the world's lead users with respect to their particular needs. Third, even if a sample contains lead users that are not near the global top with respect to lead users' characteristics, local lead users might still have reasons to (re)develop innovations locally. For example, it might be cheaper, faster, more interesting, or more enjoyable to innovate than to search for a similar innovation that a "global top" lead user might already have developed.
+={Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users;Innovation process;Lead users:economic benefit, expectations of;Local information;Users:low-cost innovation niches of}
+
+1~ 3 Why Many Users Want Custom Products
+={Custom products:heterogeneity of user needs and+42|users and+42;User need+42;Users:custom products and+42|innovation and+42|needs of}
+
+The high rates of user innovation documented in chapter 2 suggest that many users may want custom products. Why should this be so? I will argue that it is because many users have needs that differ in detail, and many also have both sufficient willingness to pay and sufficient resources to obtain a custom product that is just right for their individual needs. In this chapter, I first present the case for heterogeneity of user needs. I then review a study that explores users' heterogeneity of need and willingness to pay for product customization.
+
+!_ Heterogeneity of User Needs
+
+If many individual users or user firms want something different in a product type, it is said that heterogeneity of user need for that product type is high. If users' needs are highly heterogeneous, only small numbers of users will tend to want exactly the same thing. In such a case it is unlikely that mass-produced products will precisely suit the needs of many users. Mass manufacturers tend to want to build products that will appeal to more users rather than fewer, so as to spread their fixed costs of development and production. If many users want something different, and if they have adequate interest and resources to get exactly the product they need, they will be driven either to develop it for themselves or to pay a custom manufacturer to develop it for them.
+={Manufacturers:custom products and|expectations of economic benefit by|innovation and}
+
+Are users' needs for new products (and services) often highly heterogeneous? A test of reason suggests that they are. An individual's or a firm's need for a many products depends on detailed considerations regarding the user's initial state and resources, on the pathway the user must traverse to get from the initial state to the preferred state, and on detailed considerations regarding their preferred end state as well. These are likely to be different for each individual user and for each user firm at some level of detail. This, in turn, suggests that needs for many new products and services that are precisely right for each user will differ: that needs for those products will be highly heterogeneous.
+
+Suppose, for example, that you decide you need a new item of household furnishing. Your house is already furnished with hundreds of items, big and small, and the new item must "fit in" properly. In addition, your precise needs for the new item are likely to be affected by your living situation, your resources, and your preferences. For example: "We need a new couch that Uncle Bill will like, that the kids can jump on, that matches the wallpaper I adore, that reflects my love of coral reefs and overall good taste, and that we can afford." Many of these specific constraints are not results of current whim and are not easy to change. Perhaps you can change the wallpaper, but you are less likely to change Uncle Bill, your kids, your established tastes with respect to a living environment, or your resource constraints.
+
+The net result is that the most desired product characteristics might be specific to each individual or firm. Of course, many will be willing to satisfice---make compromises---on many items because of limits on the money or time they have available to get exactly what they want. Thus, a serious mountain biker may be willing to simply buy almost any couch on sale even if he or she is not fully happy with it. On the other hand, that same biker may be totally unwilling to compromise about getting mountain biking equipment that is precisely right for his or her specific needs. In terms of industrial products, NASA may insist on getting precisely right components for the Space Shuttle if they affect mission safety, but may be willing to satisfice on other items.
+
+!_ Evidence from Studies of User Innovation
+
+Two studies of innovation by users provide indirect information on the heterogeneity of user need. They provide descriptions of the functions of the innovations developed by users in their samples. Inspection of these descriptions shows a great deal of variation and few near-duplicates. Different functionality, of course, implies that the developers of the products had different needs. In the 2000 study of user modifications of library IT systems by Morrison, Roberts, and von Hippel, discussed earlier, only 14 of 39 innovations are functionally similar to any other innovations in the sample. If one type of functionality that was repeatedly developed ("web interface") is excluded, the overlap is even lower (see table 2.2). Other responses by study participants add to this impression of high heterogeneity of need among users. Thirty percent of the respondents reported that their library IT system had been highly customized by the manufacturer during installation to meet their specific needs. In addition, 54 percent of study respondents agreed with the statement "We would like to make additional improvements to our IT system functionality that can't be made by simply adjusting the standard, customer-accessible parameters provided by the supplier."
+={Morrison, Pamela;Roberts, J.;von Hippel, E.+34;Lead users:library information search system and;Library information search system}
+
+Similar moderate overlap in the characteristics of user innovations can be seen in innovation descriptions provided in the study of mountain biking by Lüthje, Herstatt, and von Hippel (2002). In that study sample, I estimate that at most 10 of 43 innovations had functionality similar to that of another sample member. This diversity makes sense: mountain biking, which outsiders might assume is a single type of athletic activity, in fact has many subspecialties.
+={Herstatt, C.+7;Lüthje, C.+7;Mountain biking+7}
+
+As can be seen in table 3.1, the specializations of mountain bikers in the our study sample involved very different mountain biking terrains, and important variations in riding conditions and riding specializations. The innovations users developed were appropriate to their own heterogeneous riding activities and so were quite heterogeneous in function. Consider three examples drawn from our study:
+
+_* I ride on elevated, skinny planks and ladders, do jumps, steep technical downhills, obstacles and big drops. Solution devised: I needed sophisticated cycling armor and protective clothing. So I designed arm and leg armor, chest protection, shorts, pants and a jacket that enable me to try harder things with less fear of injury.
+
+_* I do back-country touring and needed a way to easily lift and carry a fully loaded mountain bike on the sides of steep hills and mountains and dangle it over cliffs as I climbed. Solution devised: I modified the top tube and the top of my seat post to provide secure attachment points for a carrying strap, then I modified a very plush and durable mountaineering sling to serve as the over-shoulder strap. Because the strap sits up high, I only need to bend my knees a little bit to lift the bike onto my shoulders, yet it is just high enough to keep the front wheel from hitting when I am climbing a steep hill. Eventually, I came up with a quick-release lateral strap to keep the main strap from sliding off my shoulder, but it will easily break away if I fall or land in a fast river and need to ditch my bike.
+
+_* When riding on ice, my bike has no traction and I slip and fall. Solution devised: I increased the traction of my tires by getting some metal studs used by the auto industry for winter tires. Then I selected some mountain biking tires with large blocks of rubber in the tread pattern, drilled a hole in the center of each block and inserted a stud in each hole.
+
+!_ Table 3.1
+Activity specializations of innovating mountain bikers.
+
+table{~h c6; 20; 13; 20; 13; 20; 14;
+
+Preferred terrain
+Number of bikers
+Outside conditions
+Number of bikers
+Focus on particular riding abilities
+Number of bikers
+
+Fast downhill tracks (steep, drops, fast)
+44 (39.6%)
+Darkness, night riding
+45 (40.5%)
+Jumps, drops, stunts, obstacles
+34 (30.6%)
+
+Technical single tracks (up and down, rocky, jumps)
+68 (61.3%)
+Snow, ice, cold
+60 (54.1%)
+Technical ability/balance
+22 (19.8%)
+
+Smooth single tracks (hilly, rolling, speed, sand, hardpack)
+13 (11.7%)
+Rain, mud
+53 (47.7%)
+Fast descents / downhill
+34 (30.6%)
+
+Urban and streets
+9 (8.1%)
+Heat
+15 (13.5%)
+Endurance
+9 (8.1%)
+
+No special terrain preferred
+5 (4.5%)
+High altitude
+10 (9.0%)
+Climbing
+17 (13%)
+
+~
+~
+No extreme outside conditions
+29 (26.1%)
+Sprint
+3 (2.7%)
+
+~
+~
+~
+~
+No focus on specific riding ability
+36 (32.4%)
+
+}table
+
+Source: Lüthje,Herstatt, and vonHippel 2002. This table includes the 111 users in the study sample who had ideas for improvements to mountain biking equipment. (Of these, 61 had actually gone on to build the equipment they envisioned.) Many of these users reported experience in more than one category of activity, so the sum in each column is higher than 111.
+
+!_ Evidence from Studies of Market Segmentation
+
+Empirical data on heterogeneity of demand for specific products and services are sparse. Those most interested in studying the matter are generally mass manufacturers of products and services for consumers---and they do not make a practice of prospecting for heterogeneity. Instead, they are interested in finding areas where users' needs are similar enough to represent profitable markets for standard products produced in large volumes. Manufacturers customarily seek such areas via market-segmentation studies that partition markets into a very few segments---perhaps only three, four, or five. Each segment identified consists of customers with relatively similar needs for a particular product (Punj and Stewart 1983; Wind 1978). For example, toothpaste manufacturers may divide their markets into segments such as boys and girls, adults interested in tooth whitening, and so on.
+={Punj, G.;Stewart, D.;Wind, Y.;Custom products:market segmentation and+3;Manufacturers:innovation and;Marketing research+1}
+
+Since the 1970s, nearly all market-segmentation studies have been carried out by means of cluster analysis (Green 1971; Green and Schaffer 1998). After cluster analysis places each participant in the segment of the market most closely matching his needs, a measure of within-segment need variation is determined. This is the proportion of total variation that is within each cluster, and it shows how much users' needs deviate from the averages in "their" respective segments. If within-segment variation is low, users within the segment will have fairly homogeneous needs, and so may be reasonably satisfied with a standard product designed to serve all customers in their segment. If it high, many users are likely to be dissatisfied---some seriously so.
+={Green, P.;Schaffer, C.}
+
+Within-segment variation is seldom reported in published studies, but a survey of market-segmentation studies published in top-tier journals did find 15 studies reporting that statistic. These studies specified 5.5 clusters on average, and had an average remaining within-cluster variance of 46 percent (Franke and Reisinger 2003). Franke and von Hippel (2003b) found similar results in an independent sample. In that study, an average of 3.7 market segments were specified and 54 percent of total variance was left as within-segment variation after the completion of cluster analysis. These data suggest that heterogeneity of need might be very substantial among users in many product categories. ~{ Cluster analysis does not specify the "right" number of clusters---it simply segments a sample into smaller and smaller clusters until the analyst calls a halt. Determining an appropriate number of clusters within a sample can be done in different ways. Of course, it always possible to say that "I only want to deal with three market segments, so I will stop my analysis when my sample has been segmented into three clusters." More commonly, analysts will examine the increase of squared error sums of each step, and generally will view the optimal number of clusters as having been reached when the plot shows a sudden "elbow" (Myers 1996). Since this technique does not incorporate information on remaining within-cluster heterogeneity, it can lead to solutions with a large amount of within-cluster variance. The "cubic clustering criterion" (CCC) partially addresses this concern by measuring the within-cluster homogeneity relative to the between-cluster heterogeneity. It suggests choosing the number of clusters where this value peaks (Milligan and Cooper 1985). However, this method appears to be rarely used: Ketchen and Shook (1996) found it used in only 5 of 45 segmentation studies they examined. }~
+={Franke, N.+20;Reisinger, H.}
+
+!_ A Study of Heterogeneity and Willingness To Pay
+
+A need for a novel product not on the market must be accompanied by adequate willingness to pay (and resources) if it is to be associated with the actual development or purchase of a custom product. What is needed to reliably establish the relationship among heterogeneity of demand, willingness to pay, and custom product development or purchase is studies that address all three factors in the same sample. My colleague Nikolaus Franke and I conducted one such study in a population of users of web server software, a product used primarily by industrial firms (Franke and von Hippel 2003b).
+
+Franke and I looked in detail at users' needs for security features in Apache web server software, and at users' willingness to pay for solutions that precisely fit their needs. Apache web server software is open source software that is explicitly designed to allow modification by anyone having appropriate skills. Anyone may download open source software from the Internet and use it without charge. Users are also explicitly granted the legal right to study the software's source code, to modify the software, and to distribute modified or unmodified versions to others. (See chapter 7 for a full discussion of open source software.)
+={Apache web server software+16;Custom products:Apache web server software and+16;Lead users:Apache web server software and+16;Users:and paying for innovations}
+
+Apache web server software is used on web server computers connected to the Internet. A web server's function is to respond to requests from Internet browsers for particular documents or content. A typical server waits for clients' requests, locates the requested resource, applies the requested method to the resource, and sends the response back to the client. Web server software began by offering relatively simple functionality. Over time, however, Apache and other web server software programs have evolved into the complicated front end for many of the technically demanding applications that now run on the Internet. For example, web server software is now used to handle security and authentication of users, to provide e-commerce shopping carts, and gateways to databases. In the face of strong competition from commercial competitors (including Microsoft and Sun/Netscape), the Apache web server has become the most popular web server software on the Internet, used by 67 percent of the many millions of World Wide Web sites extant in early 2004. It has also received many industry awards for excellence.
+
+Franke and I created a preliminary list of server security functions from published and web-based sources. The preliminary list was evaluated and corrected by experts in web server security and Apache web server software. We eventually ended up with a list of 45 security functions that some or many users might need. Solutions to some were already incorporated in the standard Apache code downloadable by users, others were available in additional modules, and a few were not yet addressed by any security module generally available to the Apache community. (Security threats can emerge quickly and become matters of great concern before a successful response is developed and offered to the general community. A recent example is site flooding, a form of attack in which vandals attempt to cause a website to fail by flooding it with a very large number of simultaneous requests for a response.)
+
+Users of the security functions of web server software are the webmasters employed by firms to make sure that their software is up to date and functions properly. A major portion of a webmaster's job is to ensure that the software used is secure from attacks launched by those who wish illicit access or simply want to cause the software to fail in some way. We collected responses to our study questions from two samples of Apache webmasters: webmasters who posted a question or an answer on a question at the Apache Usenet Forum ~{ http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.infosystems.www.servers.unix }~ and webmasters who subscribed to a specialized online Apache newsgroup. ~{ http://modules.apache.org/ }~ This stratified sample gave us an adequate representation of webmasters who both did and did not have the technical skills needed to modify Apache security software to better fit their needs: subscribers to apache-modules.org tend to have a higher level of technical skills on average than those posting to the Apache Usenet Forum. Data were obtained by means of an Internet-based questionnaire.
+
+!_ The Heterogeneity of Users' Needs
+
+Franke and I found the security module needs of Apache users were very heterogeneous indeed both among those that had the in-house capability to write code to modify Apache and those that did not. The calibrated coefficient of heterogeneity, H,{c},, was 0.98, indicating that there was essentially no tendency of the users to cluster beyond chance. (We defined the "heterogeneity of need" in a group as the degree to which the needs of i individuals can be satisfied with j standard products which optimally meet their needs. This means that heterogeneity of need is high when many standard products are necessary to satisfy the needs of i individuals and low when the needs can be satisfied by a few standard products. The higher the coefficient the more heterogeneous are the needs of users in a sample. If the calibrated heterogeneity coefficient H,{c}, equals 1, there is no systematic tendency of the users to cluster. If it is lower than 1, there is some tendency of the individuals to cluster. A coefficient of 0 means that the needs of all individuals are exactly the same. ~{ To measure heterogeneity, Franke and I analyzed the extent to which j standards, varying from [1; i], meet the needs of the i individuals in our sample. Conceptually, we first locate a product in multi-dimensional need space (dimensions = 45 in the case of our present study) that minimizes the distances to each individual's needs. (This step is analogous to the Ward's method in cluster analysis that also minimizes within cluster variation; see Punj and Stewart 1983.) The "error" is then measured as the sum of squared Euclidean distances. We then repeated these steps to determine the error for two optimally positioned products, three products, and so on up to a number equaling I -- 1. The sum of squared errors for all cases is then a simple coefficient that measures how much the needs of i individuals can be satisfied with j standard products. The "coefficient of heterogeneity" just specified is sensitive both to the (average) /{distance}/ between the needs and for the /{configuration}/ of the needs: when the needs tend to form clusters the heterogeneity coefficient is lower than if they are evenly spread. To make the coefficient comparable across different populations, we calibrate it using a bootstrapping technique (Efron 1979) involving dividing the coefficient by the expected value (this value is generated by averaging the heterogeneity of many random distributions of heterogeneity of the same kind). The average random heterogeneity coefficient is then an appropriate value for calibration purposes: it assumes that there is no systematic relationship between the needs of the individuals or between the need dimensions. }~ )
+={Franke, N.;Punj, G.;Stewart, D.}
+
+Even this understates the heterogeneity. Responding Apache webmasters went far beyond the 45 security-related functions of web server software that we offered for their evaluation. In our questionnaire we offered an open question asking users to list up to four additional needs they experienced that were not covered by the standard list. Nearly 50 percent used the opportunity to add additional functions. When duplicates were eliminated, we found that 92 distinct additional security-related needs had been noted by one or more webmaster users.~{ Conceptually, it can be possible to generate "one perfect product" for everyone--- in which case heterogeneity of demand is zero---by simply creating all the features wanted by anyone (45 + 92 features in the case of this study), and incorporating them in the "one perfect product." Users could then select the features they want from a menu contained in the one perfect product to tailor it to their own tastes. Doing this is at least conceptually possible in the case of software, but less so in the case of a physical product for two reasons: (1) delivering all possible physical options to everyone who buys the product would be expensive for physical goods (while costing nothing extra in the case of information products); (2) some options are mutually exclusive (an automobile cannot be both red and green at the same time). }~
+
+High heterogeneity of need in our sample suggests that there should be a high interest in obtaining modifications to Apache---and indeed, overall satisfaction with the existing version was only moderate.
+
+!_ Willingness to Pay for Improvements
+
+It is not enough to want a better-fitting custom product. One must also be willing and able to pay to get what one wants. Those in the Apache sample who did innovate were presumably willing to pay the price to do so. But how much were the users in our sample---the innovators and the non-innovators--- willing to pay /{now}/ for improvements? Estimating a user's willingness to pay (WTP) is known to be a difficult task. Franke and I used the contingent valuation method, in which respondents are directly asked how much they are willing to pay for a product or service (Mitchell and Carson 1989). Results obtained by that method often overestimate WTP significantly. Empirical studies that compare expressed WTP with actual cash payments on average showed actual spending behavior to be somewhat smaller than expressed WTP in the case of private purchases (such as in our case). In contrast, they generally find willingness to pay to be greatly overstated in the case of public goods such as the removal of a road from a wilderness area. ~{ The difference between actual willingness to pay and expressed willingness to pay is much lower for private goods (our case) than for public goods. In the case of private goods, Loomis et al. (1996) found the expressed willingness to pay for art prints to be twice the actual WTP. Willis and Powe (1998) found that among visitors to a castle the expressed WTP was 60 percent lower than the actual WTP. In the case of public goods, Brown et al. (1996), in a study of willingness to pay for removal of a road from a wilderness area, found the expressed WTP to be 4--6 times the actual WTP. Lindsey and Knaap (1999), in a study of WTP for a public urban greenway, found the expressed WTP to be 2-10 times the actual WPT. Neil et al. (1994) found the expressed WTP for conserving an original painting in the desert to be 9 times the actual WTP. Seip and Strand (1992) found that less than 10 percent of those who expressed interest in paying to join an environmental organization actually joined. }~
+={Carson, R.;Mitchell, R.}
+
+To compensate for the likely overstatement of expressed relative to actual WTP in our study, Franke and I conservatively deflated respondents' indicated willingness to pay by 80 percent. (Although the product in question was intended for private use, webmasters were talking about their willingness to spend company money, not their own money.) We asked each user who had indicated that he was not really satisfied with a function (i.e., whose satisfaction with the respective function was 4 or less on a 7-point scale, where 1 = not satisfied at all, and 7 = very satisfied) to estimate how much he would be willing to pay to get a very satisfactory solution regarding this function. After deflation, our sample of 137 webmasters said they were willing to pay $700,000 in aggregate to modify web server software to a point that fully satisfied them with respect to their security function needs. This amounts to an average of $5,232 total willingness to pay per respondent. This is a striking number because the price of commercial web server software similar to Apache's for one server was about $1,100 at the time of our study (source: www.sun.com, November 2001). If we assume that each webmaster was in charge of ten servers on average, this means that each webmaster was willing to pay half the price of a total server software package to get his heterogeneous needs for security features better satisfied.
+
+!_ Increased Satisfaction from Customization of Apache
+
+Recall that it takes some technical skill to modify Apache web server software by writing new code. In table 3.2, Franke and I examined only the technically skilled users in our sample who claimed the capability of making modifications to Apache web server software. For these technically skilled users, we found significantly higher satisfaction levels among those that actually did customize their software---but even the users that made modifications were not fully satisfied.
+
+!_ Table 3.2
+Skilled users who customized their software were more satisfied than those who did not customize.
+
+table{~h c4; 55; 15; 15; 15;
+
+~
+Users who customized (n = 18)
+Users who did not customize (n = 44)
+Difference (one-tailed t-test)
+
+Satisfaction with basic web server functionality
+5.5
+4.3
+0.100
+
+Satisfaction with authentication of client
+3.0
+1.0
+0.001
+
+Satisfaction with e-commerce-related functions
+1.3
+0.0
+0.023
+
+Satisfaction with within-site user access control
+8.5
+6.9
+0.170
+
+Satisfaction with other security functions
+3.9
+3.9
+0.699
+
+Overall satisfaction
+4.3
+2.6
+0.010
+
+}table
+
+Source: Franke and von Hippel 2003, table 8. In this table, 45 individual functions are grouped into five general categories. The satisfaction index ranges from -21 to +21.
+
+One might wonder why users with the ability to modify Apache closer to their liking were not totally satisfied. The answer can be found in respondents' judgments regarding how much effort it would require to modify Apache still more to their liking. We asked all respondents who indicated dissatisfaction of level 4 or lower with a specific function of Apache how much working time it would cost them to improve the function to the point where they would judge it to be very satisfactory (to be at a satisfaction level of 7). For the whole sample and all dissatisfactions, we obtained a working time of 8,938 person-days necessary to get a very satisfactory solution. This equals $78 of incremental benefit per incremental programmer working day ($716,758 divided by 8,938 days). This is clearly below the regular wages a skilled programmer gets. Franke and I concluded from this that skilled users do not improve their respective Apache versions to the point where they are perfectly satisfied because the costs of doing so would exceed the benefits.
+
+!_ Discussion
+
+Heterogeneity of user need is likely to be high for many types of products. Data are still scanty, but high heterogeneity of need is a very straightforward explanation for why there is so much customization by users: many users have "custom" needs for products and services.
+
+Those interested can easily enhance their intuitions about heterogenity of user need and related innovation by users. User innovation appears to be common enough so that one can find examples for oneself in a reasonably small, casual sample. Readers therefore may find it possible (and enjoyable) to do their own informal tests of the matter. My own version of such a test is to ask the students in one of my MIT classes (typically about 50 students) to think about a particular product that many use, such as a backpack. I first ask them how satisfied they are with their backpack. Initially, most will say "It's OK." But after some discussion and thinking, a few complaints will slowly begin to surface (slowly, I think, because we all take some dissatisfaction with our products as the unremarkable norm). "It doesn't fit comfortably" in this or that particular way. "When my lunch bag or thermos leaks the books and papers I am carrying get wet---there should be a water proof partition." "I carry large drawings to school rolled up in my backpack with the ends sticking out. They are ruined if it rains and I have not taken the precaution of wrapping them in plastic." Next, I ask whether any students have modified their backpacks to better meet their needs. Interestingly enough, one or two typically have. Since backpacks are not products of very high professional or hobby interest to most users, the presence of even some user innovation to adapt to individual users' unmet needs in such small, casual samples is an interesting intuition builder with respect to the findings discussed in this chapter.
+
+1~ 4 Users' Innovate-or-Buy Decisions
+={Users:innovation and+4|innovate-or-buy decisions by+74}
+
+Why does a user wanting a custom product sometimes innovate for itself rather than buying from a manufacturer of custom products? There is, after all, a choice---at least it would seem so. However, if a user with the resources and willingness to pay does decide to buy, it may be surprised to discover that it is not so easy to find a manufacturer willing to make exactly what an individual user wants. Of course, we all know that mass manufacturers with businesses built around providing standard products in large numbers will be reluctant to accommodate special requests. Consumers know this too, and few will be so foolish as to contact a major soup producer like Campbell's with a request for a special, "just-right" can of soup. But what about manufacturers that specialize in custom products? Isn't it their business to respond to special requests? To understand which way the innovate-or-buy choice will go, one must consider both transaction costs and information asymmetries specific to users and manufacturers. I will talk mainly about transaction costs in this chapter and mainly about information asymmetries in chapter 5.
+={Custom products:users and+3;Innovation process+3;Manufacturers:innovation and+3;Transaction costs+3;Users:innovation process and+3|and paying for innovations}
+
+I begin this chapter by discussing four specific and significant transaction costs that affect users' innovate-or-buy decisions. Next I review a case study that illustrates these. Then, I use a simple quantitative model to further explore when user firms will find it more cost-effective to develop a solution---a new product or service---for themselves rather than hiring a manufacturer to solve the problem for them. Finally, I point out that /{individual}/ users can sometimes be more inclined to innovate than one might expect because they sometimes value the /{process}/ of innovating as well as the novel product or service that is created.
+
+!_ Users' vs. Manufacturers' Views of Innovation Opportunities
+={Agency costs+15;Manufacturers:agency costs and+15;Transaction costs:See also Agency costs;Users:agency costs and+15|transaction costs and+15}
+
+Three specific contributors to transaction costs---in addition to the "usual suspects," such as opportunism---often have important effects on users' decisions whether to buy a custom product or to develop it for themselves. These are (1) differences between users' and manufacturers' views regarding what constitutes a desirable solution, (2) differences in innovation quality signaling requirements between user and manufacturer innovators, and (3) differences in legal requirements placed on user and manufacturer innovators. The first two of these factors involve considerations of agency costs. When a user hires a manufacturer to develop a custom product, the user is a principal that has hired the custom manufacturer as to act as its agent. When the interests of the principal and the agent are not the same, agency costs will result. Recall from chapter 1 that agency costs are (1) costs incurred to monitor the agent to ensure that it follows the interests of the principal, (2) the cost incurred by the agent to commit itself not to act against the principal's interest (the "bonding cost"), and (3) costs associated with an outcome that does not fully serve the interests of the principal (Jensen and Meckling 1976). In the specific instance of product and service development, agency considerations enter because a user's and a manufacturer's interests with respect to the development of a custom product often differ significantly.
+={Jensen, M.;Meckling, W.}
+
+!_ Preferences Regarding Solutions
+
+Individual products and services are components of larger user solutions. A user therefore wants a product that will make the best overall tradeoff between solution quality and price. Sometimes the best overall tradeoff will result in a willingness to pay a surprisingly large amount to get a solution component precisely right. For example, an individual user may specify tennis racket functionality that will fit her specific technique and relative strengths and will be willing to pay a great deal for exactly that racket. Deviations in racket functionality would require compensating modifications in her carefully practiced and deeply ingrained hitting technique---a much more costly overall solution from the user's point of view. In contrast, a user will be much less concerned with precisely /{how}/ the desired functionality is attained. For example, tennis players will typically be unconcerned about whether a tennis racket is made from metal, carbon fiber, plastic or wood---or, for that matter, from mud---if it performs precisely as desired. And, indeed, users have quickly shifted to new types of rackets over the years as new materials promise a better fit to their particular functional requirements.
+
+Of course, the same thing is true in the case of products for industrial users. For example, a firm with a need for a process machine may be willing to pay a great deal for one that is precisely appropriate to the characteristics of the input materials being processed, and to the skills of employees who will operate the machine. Deviations in either matter would require compensating modifications in material supply and employee training---likely to be a much more costly overall solution from the user's point of view. In contrast, the user firm will be much less concerned with precisely how the desired functionality is achieved by the process machine, and will care only that it performs precisely as specified.
+
+Manufacturers faced with custom development requests from users make similar calculations, but theirs revolve around attempting to conserve the applicability of a low-cost (to them) solution. Manufacturers tend to specialize in and gain competitive advantage from their capabilities in one or a few specific solution types. They then seek to find as many profitable applications for those solutions types as possible. For example, a specialist in fabricating custom products from carbon fiber might find it profitable to make any kind of product---from airplane wings to tennis rackets---as long as they are made from carbon fiber. In contrast, that same manufacturer would have no competitive advantage in---and so no profit from making--- any of these same products from metal or wood.
+
+Specializations in solution types can be very narrow indeed. For example, thousands of manufacturers specialize in adhesive-based fastening solutions, while other thousands specialize in mechanical fastening solutions involving such things as metal screws and nails. Importantly, companies that produce products and solution types that have close functional equivalence from the user's point of view can look very different from the point of view of a solution supplier. For example, a manufacturer of standard or custom adhesives needs chemists on staff with an expertise in chemical formulation. It also needs chemistry labs and production equipment designed to mix specialized batches of chemicals on a small scale, and it needs the equipment, expertise and regulatory approvals to package that kind of product in a way that is convenient to the customer and also in line with regulatory safeguards. In contrast, manufacturers specializing in standard or custom metal fastening solutions need none of these things. What they need instead are mechanical design engineers, a machine shop to build product prototypes and production tooling, specialized metal-forming production equipment such as screw machines, and so on.
+
+Users, having an investment only in a need specification and not in a solution type, want the best functional solution to their problem, independent of solution type used. Manufacturers, in contrast, want to supply custom solutions to users that utilize their existing expertise and production capabilities. Thus, in the case of the two fastening technology alternatives just described, users will prefer whatever solution approach works best. In contrast, adhesives manufacturers will find it tremendously more attractive to create a solution involving adhesive-based fastening, and manufacturers specializing in mechanical fastening will similarly strongly prefer to offer to develop solutions involving mechanical fastening.
+
+The difference between users' incentives to get the best functional solution to their need and specialist manufacturers' incentives to embed a specific solution type in the product to be developed are a major source of agency costs in custom product development, because there is typically an information asymmetry between user and manufacturer with respect to what will be the best solution. Manufacturers tend to know more than users about this and to have a strong incentive to provide biased information to users in order to convince them that the solution type in which they specialize is the best one to use. Such biases will be difficult for users to detect because, again, they are less expert than the suppliers in the various solution technologies that are candidates.
+={Information asymmetries;Users:information asymmetries of}
+
+Theoretically, this agency cost would disappear if it were possible to fully specify a contract (Aghion and Tirole 1994; Bessen 2004). But in product development, contracting can be problematic. Information regarding characteristics of solutions and needs is inescapably incomplete at the time of contracting---users cannot fully specify what they want in advance of trying out prototype solutions, and manufacturers are not fully sure how planned solution approaches will work out before investing in customer-specific development.
+={Aghion, P.;Bessen, J.;Contracting;Tirole, J.}
+
+!_ Users' Expectations
+
+When users buy a product from manufacturers, they tend to expect a package of other services to come along with the product they receive. However, when users develop a product for themselves, some of these are not demanded or can be supplied in a less formal, less expensive way by users for themselves. This set of implicit expectations can raise the cost to a user of a custom solution bought from a manufacturer relative to a home-developed solution.
+={Manufacturers:innovation and+11;Users:innovation and+11}
+
+Users typically expect a solution they have purchased to work correctly and reliably "right out of the box." In effect, a sharp line is drawn between product development at the manufacturer's site and routine, trouble-free usage at the purchaser's site. When the user builds a product for itself, however, both the development and the use functions are in the same organization and may explicitly be overlapped. Repeated tests and repeated repairs and improvements during early use are then more likely to be understood and tolerated as an acceptable part of the development process.
+
+A related difference in expectations has to do with field support for a product that has been purchased rather than developed in house. In the case of a purchased custom product, users expect that manufacturers will provide replacement parts and service if needed. Responding to this expectation is costly for a custom manufacturer. It must keep a record of what it has built for each particular user, and of any special parts incorporated in that user's products so that they can be built or purchased again if needed. In contrast, if a user has developed a product for itself, it has people on site who know details of its design. These employees will be capable of rebuilding or repairing or redesigning the product /{ad hoc}/ if and as the need arises. (Of course, if these knowledgeable employees leave the user firm while the product they designed is still in use, such informality can prove costly.)
+
+Manufacturers also must invest in indirect quality signals that may not have an effect on actual quality, but instead are designed to assure both the specific user being served and the market in general that the product being supplied is of high quality. These represent another element of agency costs that user-innovators do not incur. When users develop an innovation for themselves, they end up intimately knowing the actual quality of the solution they have developed, and knowing why and how it is appropriate to their task. As an example, an engineer building a million-dollar process machine for in-house use might feel it perfectly acceptable to install a precisely right and very cheap computer controller made and prominently labeled by Lego, a manufacturer of children's toys. (Lego provides computer controllers for some of its children's building kit products.) But if that same engineer saw a Lego controller in a million-dollar process machine his firm was purchasing from a specialist high-end manufacturer, he might not know enough about the design details to know that the Lego controller was precisely right for the application. In that case, the engineer and his managers might well regard the seemingly inappropriate brand name as an indirect signal of bad quality.
+
+Manufacturers are often so concerned about a reputation for quality that they refuse to take shortcuts that a customer specifically requests and that might make sense for a particular customer, lest others get wind of what was done and take it as a negative signal about the general quality of the firm's products. For example, you may say to a maker of luxury custom cars: "I want to have a custom car of your brand in my driveway---my friends will admire it. But I only plan to drive it to the grocery store once in a while, so I only want a cheap little engine. A luxury exterior combined with cheap parts is the best solution for me in this application---just slap something together and keep the price low." The maker is likely to respond: "We understand your need, but we cannot be associated with any product of low quality. Someone else may look under the hood some day, and that would damage our reputation as a maker of fine cars. You must look elsewhere, or decide you are willing to pay the price to keep one of our fine machines idle on your driveway."
+
+!_ Differing Legal and Regulatory Requirements
+
+Users that innovate do not generally face legal risk if the product they develop fails and causes costs to themselves but not to others. In contrast, manufacturers that develop and sell new products are regarded under US law as also providing an implied warranty of "fitness for the intended use." If a product does not meet this criterion, and if a different, written warranty is not in place, manufacturers can be found liable for negligence with respect to providing a defective design and failure to warn buyers (Barnes and Ulin 1984). This simple difference can cause a large difference in exposure to liability by innovators and so can drive up the costs of manufacturer-provided solutions relative to user-provided ones.
+={Barnes, B.;Ulin, D.;Transaction costs+51;Users:transaction costs and+23}
+
+For example, a user firm that builds a novel process controller to improve its plant operations must pay its own actual costs if the self-built controller fails and ruins expensive materials being processed. On the other hand, if a controller manufacturer designed the novel controller product and sold it to customers, and a failure then occurred and could be traced back to a fault in the design, the controller manufacturer is potentially liable for actual user costs and punitive damages. It may also incur significant reputational losses if the unhappy user broadcasts its complaints. The logical response of a controller manufacturer to this higher risk is to charge more and/or to be much more careful with respect to running exhaustive, expensive, and lengthy tests before releasing a new product. The resulting increase in cost and delay for obtaining a manufacturer-developed product can tend to tip users toward building their own, in-house solutions.
+={Custom products:manufacturers and+2;Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users:by manufacturers+4|by users+7;Manufacturers:expectations of economic benefit by+4}
+
+!_ Net Result
+
+A net result of the foregoing considerations is that manufacturers often find that developing a custom product for only one or a few users will be unprofitable. In such cases, the transaction costs involved can make it cheaper for users with appropriate capabilities to develop the product for themselves. In larger markets, in contrast, fixed transaction costs will be spread over many customers, and the economies of scale obtainable by producing for the whole market may be substantial. In that case, it will likely be cheaper for users to buy than to innovate. As a result, manufacturers, when contacted by a user with a very specific request, will be keenly interested in how many others are likely to want this solution or elements of it. If the answer is "few," a custom manufacturer will be unlikely to accept the project.
+
+Of course, manufacturers have an incentive to /{make}/ markets attractive from their point of view. This can be done by deviating from precisely serving the needs of a specific custom client in order to create a solution that will be "good enough" for that client but at the same time of more interest to others. Manufacturers may do this openly by arranging meetings among custom buyers with similar needs, and then urging the group to come up with a common solution that all will find acceptable. "After all," as the representative will say, "it is clear that we cannot make a special product to suit each user, so all of you must be prepared to make really difficult compromises!" More covertly, manufacturers may simply ignore some of the specific requests of the specific user client and make something that they expect to be a more general solution instead.
+
+The contrasting incentives of users and manufacturers with respect to generality of need being served---and also with respect to the solution choice issue discussed earlier---can result in a very frustrating and cloudy interaction in which each party hides its best information and attempts to manipulate others to its own advantage. With respect to generality of need, sophisticated users understand custom suppliers' preference for a larger market and attempt to argue convincingly that "everyone will want precisely what I am asking you for." Manufacturers, in turn, know users have this incentive and so will generally prefer to develop custom products for which they themselves have a reasonable understanding of demand. Users are also aware of manufacturers' strong preference for only producing products that embody their existing solution expertise. To guard against the possibility that this incentive will produce biased advice, they may attempt to shop around among a number of suppliers offering different solution types and/or develop internal expertise on solution possibilities and/or attempt to write better contracts. All these attempts to induce and guard against bias involve agency costs.
+={Custom products:manufacturers and}
+
+!_ An Illustrative Case
+
+A case study by Sarah Slaughter (1993) illustrates the impact of some of the transaction costs discussed above related to users' innovate-or-buy decisions. Slaughter studied patterns of innovation in stressed-skin panels, which are used in some housing construction. The aspects of the panels studied were related to installation, and so the users of these features were home builders rather than home owners. When Slaughter contrasted users' costs of innovating versus buying, she found that it was always much cheaper for the builder to develop a solution for itself at a construction site than to ask a panel manufacturer to do so.
+={Slaughter, S.+16;Stressed-skin panels+16}
+
+A stressed-skin panel can be visualized as a large 4-by-8-foot sandwich consisting of two panels made of plywood with a layer of plastic foam glued in between. The foam, about 4 inches thick, strongly bonds the two panels together and also acts as a layer of thermal insulation. In 1989, manufacturing of stressed-skin panels was a relatively concentrated industry; the four largest manufacturers collectively having a 77 percent share of the market. The user industry was much less concentrated: the four largest constructors of panelized housing together had only 1 percent of the market for such housing in 1989.
+
+In housing construction, stressed-skin panels are generally attached to strong timber frames to form the outer shell of a house and to resist shear loads (such as the force of the wind). To use the panels in this way, a number of subsidiary inventions are required. For example, one must find a practical, long-lasting way to attach panels to each other and to the floors, the roof, and the frame. Also, one has to find a new way to run pipes and wires from place to place because there are no empty spaces in the walls to put them---panel interiors are filled with foam.
+
+Stressed-skin panels were introduced into housing construction after World War II. From then till 1989, the time of Slaughter's study, 34 innovations were made in 12 functionally important areas to create a complete building system for this type of construction. Slaughter studied the history of each of these innovations and found that 82 percent had been developed by users of the stressed-skin panels---residential builders---and only 18 percent by manufacturers of stressed-skin panels. Sometimes more than one user developed and implemented different approaches to the same functional problem (table 4.1). Builders freely revealed their innovations rather than protecting them for proprietary advantage. They were passed from builder to builder by word of mouth, published in trade magazines, and diffused widely. All were replicated at building sites for years before any commercial panel manufacturer developed and sold a solution to accomplish the same function.
+
+Histories of the user-developed improvements to stressed-skin panel construction showed that the user-innovator construction firms did not engage in planned R&D projects. Instead, each innovation was an immediate response to a problem encountered in the course of a construction project. Once a problem was encountered, the innovating builder typically developed and fabricated a solution at great speed, using skills, materials, and equipment on hand at the construction site. Builders reported that the average time from discovery of the problem to installation of the completed solution on the site was only half a day. The total cost of each innovation, including time, equipment, and materials, averaged $153.
+
+!_ Example: Installing Wiring in a Stressed-Skin Panel
+
+A builder was faced with the immediate problem of how to route wires through the foam interior of panels to wall switches located in the middle of the panels. He did not want cut grooves or channels through the surfaces of the panels to these locations---that would dangerously reduce the panels' structural strength. His inventive solution was to mount an electrically heated wire on the tip of a long pole and simply push the heated tip through the center insulation layer of the panel. As he pushed, the electrically heated tip quickly melted a channel through the foam plastic insulation from the edge of the panel to the desired spot. Wires were then pulled through this channel.
+
+!_ Table 4.1
+Users would have found it much more costly to get custom solutions from manufacturers. The costs of user-developed innovations in stressed-skin panels were very low.
+
+table{~h c5; 40; 17; 17; 6; 20;
+
+Function
+Average user development time (days)
+Average user development cost
+N
+Minimimum cost of waiting for manufacturer to deliver
+
+Framing of openings in panels
+0.1
+$20
+1
+$1,400
+
+Structural connection between panels
+0.1
+30
+2
+$1,400
+
+Ventilation of panels on roof
+0.1
+32
+2
+$28,000
+
+Insulated connection between panels
+0.1
+41
+3
+$2,800
+
+Corner connection between panels
+0.2
+60
+1
+$2,800
+
+Installation of HVAC in panels
+0.2
+60
+2
+$2,800
+
+Installation of wiring in panels
+0.2
+79
+7
+$2,800
+
+Connection of panels to roof
+0.2
+80
+1
+$2,800
+
+Add insect repellency to panels
+0.4
+123
+3
+$70,000
+
+Connect panels to foundation
+0.5
+160
+1
+$1,400
+
+Connect panels to frames
+1.2
+377
+3
+$2,800
+
+Development of curved panels
+5.0
+1,500
+1
+$28,000
+
+Average for all innovations
+0.5
+$153
+~
+$12,367
+
+}table
+
+N represents number of innovations developed by /{users}/ to carry out each listed function. Source: Slaughter 1993, tables 4 and 5. Costs and times shown are averaged for all user-developed innovations in each functional category. (The six /{manufacturer}/-developed innovations in Slaughter's sample are not included in this table.)
+
+The builder-innovator reported that the total time to develop the innovation was only an hour, and that the total cost for time and materials equaled $40. How could it cost so little and take so little time? The builder explained that using hot wires to slice sheets of plastic foam insulation into pieces of a required length is a technique known to builders. His idea as to how to modify the slicing technique to melt channels instead came to him quickly. To test the idea, he immediately sent a worker to an electrical supply house to get some nichrome wire (a type of high-resistance wire often used as an electrical heating element), attached the wire to a tip of a pole, and tried the solution on a panel at the building site---and it worked!
+
+This solution was described in detail in an article in a builder's magazine and was widely imitated. A panel manufacturer's eventual response (after the user solution had spread for a number of years) was to manufacture a panel with a channel for wires pre-molded into the plastic foam interior of the panel. This solution is only sometimes satisfactory. Builders often do not want to locate switch boxes at the height of the premolded channel. Also, sometimes construction workers will install some panels upside down in error, and the preformed channels will then not be continuous between one panel and the next. In such cases, the original, user-developed solution is again resorted to.
+
+!_ Example: Creating a Curved Panel
+={Manufacturers:transaction costs and+8}
+
+A builder was constructing a custom house with large, curved windows. Curved stressed-skin panels were needed to fill in the space above and below these windows, but panel manufacturers only sold flat panels at that time. The builder facing the problem could not simply buy standard flat panels and bend them into curved ones at the construction site---completed panels are rigid by design. So he bought plywood and plastic foam at a local building supply house and slowly bent each panel component separately over a curved frame quickly built at the construction site. He then bonded all three elements together with glue to create strong curved panels that would maintain their shape over time.
+
+To determine whether users' decisions to innovate rather than buy made economic sense for them, Slaughter calculated, in a very conservative way, what it would have cost users to buy a manufacturer-developed solution embodied in a manufactured panel rather than build a solution for themselves. Her estimates included only the cost of the delay a user-builder would incur while waiting for delivery of a panel incorporating a manufacturer's solution. Delay in obtaining a solution to a problem encountered at a construction site is costly for a builder, because the schedule of deliveries, subcontractors, and other activities must then be altered. For example, if installation of a panel is delayed, one must also reschedule the arrival of the subcontractor hired to run wires through it, the contractor hired to paint it, and so on. Slaughter estimated the cost of delay to a builder at $280 per crew per day of delay (Means 1989). To compute delay times, she assumed that a manufacturer would always be willing to supply the special item a user requested. She also assumed that no time elapsed while the manufacturer learned about the need, contracted to do the job, designed a solution, and obtained needed regulatory approvals. She then asked panel manufacturers to estimate how long it would take them to simply construct a panel with the solution needed and deliver it to the construction site. Delay times computed in this manner ranged from 5 days for some innovations to 250 days for the longest-term one and averaged 44 days.
+={Means, R.;Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users:by manufacturers+2|by users+2;Manufacturers:expectations of economic benefit by+2|innovation and+5}
+
+The conservative nature of this calculation is very clear. For example, Slaughter points out that the regulatory requirements for building components, not included, are in fact much more stringent for manufacturers than for user-builders in the field of residential construction. Manufacturers delivering products can be required to provide test data demonstrating compliance with local building codes for each locality served. Testing new products for compliance in a locality can take from a month to several years, and explicit code approval often takes several additional years. In contrast, a builder that innovates need only convince the local building inspector that what he has done meets code or performance requirements--- often a much easier task (Ehrenkrantz Group 1979; Duke 1988).
+={Duke, R.;Ehrenkrantz Group}
+
+Despite her very conservative method of calculation, Slaughter found the costs to users of obtaining a builder solution to be at least 100 times the actual costs of developing a solution for themselves (table 4.1). Clearly, users' decisions to innovate rather than buy made economic sense in this case.
+
+!_ Modeling Users' Innovate-or-Buy Decisions
+
+In this section I summarize the core of the argument discussed in this chapter via a simple quantitative model developed with Carliss Baldwin. Our goal is to offer additional clarity by trading off the richness of the qualitative argument for simplicity.
+={Baldwin, C.+24}
+
+Whether a user firm should innovate or buy is a variant of a well-known problem: where one should place an activity in a supply chain. In any real-world case many complexities enter. In the model that follows, Baldwin and I ignore most of these and consider a simple base case focused on the impact of transaction costs on users' innovate-or-buy considerations. The model deals with manufacturing firms and user firms rather than individual users. We assume that user firms and manufacturer firms both will hire designers from the same homogeneous pool if they elect to solve a user problem. We also assume that both user firms and manufacturer firms will incur the same costs to solve a specific user problem. For example, they will have the same costs to monitor the performance of the designer employees they hire. In this way we simplify our innovate-or-buy problem to one of transaction costs only.
+
+If there are no transaction costs (for example, no costs to write and enforce a contract), then by Coase's theorem a user will be indifferent between making or buying a solution to its problem. But in the real world there are transaction costs, and so a user will generally prefer to either make or buy. Which, from the point of view of minimizing overall costs of obtaining a problem solution, is the better choice under any given circumstances?
+={Coase, R.}
+
+Let V,{ij}, be the value of a solution to problem j for user i. Let N,{j}, be the number of users having problem j. Let Wh,{j}, be the cost of solving problem j, where W = hourly wage and h,{j}, = hours required to solve it. Let P,{j}, be the price charged by a manufacturer for a solution to problem j. Let T be fixed or "setup" transaction costs, such as writing a general contract for buyers of a solution to problem j. Let t be variable or "frictional" transaction costs, such as tailoring the general contract to a specific customer.
+
+To explore this problem we make two assumptions. First, we assume that a user firm knows its own problems and the value of a solution to itself, V,{ij},. Second, we assume that a manufacturer knows the number of users having each problem, N,{j},, and the value of solutions for each problem for all users, V,{ij},.
+
+These assumptions are in line with real-world incentives of users and manufacturers, although information stickiness generally prevents firms from getting full information. That is, users have a high incentive to know their own problems and the value to them of a solution. Manufacturers, in turn, have an incentive to invest in understanding the nature of problems faced by users in the target market, the number of users affected, and the value that the users would attach to getting a solution in order to determine the potential profitability of markets from their point of view.
+={Sticky information:innovation and}
+
+We first consider the user's payoff for solving a problem for itself. A user has no transaction costs in dealing with itself, so a user's payoff for solving problem j will be V,{ij}, - Wh,{j},. Therefore, a user will buy a solution from an upstream manufacturer rather than develop one for itself if and only if P ≤ Wh,{j},.
+
+Next we consider payoffs to a manufacturer for solving problem j. In this case, transaction costs such as those discussed in earlier sections will be encountered. With respect to transaction costs assume first that t = 0 but T > 0. Then, the manufacturer's payoff for solving problem j will be V,{ij}, - Wh,{j},, which needs to be positive in order for the manufacturer to find innovation attractive:
+
+N,{j}, P,{j}, - Wh,{j}, - T > 0.
+
+But, as we saw, P,{j}, ≤ Wh,{j}, if the user is to buy, so we may substitute Wh,{j}, for P,{j}, in our inequality. Thus we obtain the following inequality as a condition for the user to buy:
+
+N,{j}, (Wh,{j},) - Wh,{j}, - T > 0,
+
+or
+
+N,{j}, > (T / Wh,{j},) + 1.
+
+In other words, Baldwin and I find that the absolute lower bound on N is greater than 1. This means that a single user will always prefer to solve a unique problem j for itself (except in Coase's world, where T = 0, and the user will be indifferent). If every problem is unique to a single user, users will never choose to call on upstream manufacturers for solutions.
+={Coase, R.}
+
+Now assume that T = 0 but t > 0. Then the condition for the user to buy rather than to innovate for itself becomes
+
+N,{j}, (Wh,{j}, - t) - Wh,{j}, > 0,
+
+or equivalently (provided Wh,{j}, > t)
+
+N,{j}, > Wh,{j}, / (Wh,{j}, - t) > 1.
+
+Again, users will not call on upstream manufacturers to solve problems unique to one user.
+
+The findings from the simplified model, then, are the following: Problems unique to one user will always be solved efficiently by users hiring designers to work for them in house. In contrast, problems affecting more than a moderate number of users, n, which is a function of the transaction costs, will be efficiently solved by the manufacturer hiring designers to develop the needed new product or service and then selling that solution to all users affected by the problem. However, given sufficient levels of T and/or of t, problems affecting more than one but fewer than n users will not be solved by a manufacturer, and so there will be a market failure: Assuming an institutional framework consisting only of independent users and manufacturers, multiple users will have to solve the same problem independently.
+
+As illustration, suppose that t = 0.25Wh,{j}, and T = 10Wh,{j},. Then, combining the two expressions and solving for n yields
+
+n = (11Wh,{j}, /0.75Wh,{j},) = 14.66.
+
+The condition for the user to buy the innovation rather than innovate itself becomes N,{j}, ≥ 15. For a number of users less than 15 but greater than 1, there will be a wasteful multiplication of user effort: several users will invest in developing the same innovation independently.
+
+In a world that consists entirely of manufacturers and of users that do not share the innovations they develop, the type of wasteful duplicative innovation investment by users just described probably will occur often. As was discussed earlier in this chapter, and as was illustrated by Slaughter's study, substantial transaction costs might well be the norm. In addition, low numbers of users having the same need---situations where N,{j}, is low---might also be the norm in the case of functionally novel innovations. Functionally novel innovations, as I will show later, tend to be developed by lead users, and lead users are by definition at the leading (low-N,{j},) edge of markets.
+={Slaughter, S.;Stressed-skin panels}
+
+When the type of market failure discussed above does occur, users will have an incentive to search for institutional forms with a lower T and/or a lower t than is associated with assignment of the problem to an upstream manufacturer. One such institutional form involves interdependent innovation development among multiple users (for example, the institutional form used successfully in open source software projects that I will discuss in chapter 7). Baldwin and Clark (2003) show how this form can work to solve the problem of wasteful user innovation investments that were identified in our model. They show that, given modularity in the software's architecture, it will pay for users participating in open source software projects to generate and freely reveal some components of the needed innovation, benefiting from the fact that other users are likely to develop and reveal other components of that innovation. At the limit, the wasteful duplication of users' innovative efforts noted above will be eliminated; each innovation component will have been developed by only one user, but will be shared by many.
+={Clark, K.}
+
+!_ Benefiting from the Innovation Process
+={Innovation process+4;Users:innovation process and+4}
+
+Some individual users (not user firms) may decide to innovate for themselves rather than buy even if a traditional accounting evaluation would show that they had made a major investment in time and materials for an apparently minor reward in product functionality. The reason is that individual users may gain major rewards from the process of innovating, in addition to rewards from the product being developed. Make-or-buy evaluations typically include factors such as the time and materials that must be invested to develop a solution. These costs are then compared with the likely benefits produced by the project's "output"---the new product or service created---to determine whether the project is worth doing. This was the type of comparison made by Slaughter, for example, in assessing whether it would be better for the users to make or to buy the stressed-skin panel innovations in her sample. However, in the case of individual user-innovators, this type of assessment can provide too narrow a perspective on what actually constitutes valuable project output. Specifically, there is evidence that individuals sometimes greatly prize benefits derived from their participation in the process of innovation. The process, they say, can produce learning and enjoyment that is of high value to them.
+={Slaughter, S.;Stressed-skin panels}
+
+In the introductory chapter, I pointed out that some recreational activities, such as solving crossword puzzles, are clearly engaged in for process rewards only: very few individuals value the end "product" of a completed puzzle. But process rewards have also been found to be important for innovators that are producing outputs that they and others do value (Hertel, Niedner, and Herrmann 2003; Lakhani and Wolf 2005). Lakhani and Wolf studied a sample of individuals (n = 684, response rate = 34 percent) who had written new software code and contributed it to an open source project. They asked the programmers to list their three most important reasons for doing this. Fifty-eight percent of respondents said that an important motivation for writing their code was that they had a work need (33 percent), or a non-work need (30 percent) or both (5 percent) for the code itself. That is, they valued the project's "output" as this is traditionally viewed. However, 45 percent said that one of their top three reasons for writing code was intellectual stimulation, and 41 percent said one of their top three reasons was to improve their own programming skills (Lakhani and Wolf 2005, table 6). Elaborating on these responses, 61 percent of respondents said that their participation in the open source project was their most creative experience or was as creative as their most creative experience. Also, more than 60 percent said that "if there were one more hour in the day" they would always or often dedicate it to programming.
+={Herrmann, S.;Hertel, G.;Lakhani, K.;Niedner, S.;Wolf, B.}
+
+Csikszentmihalyi (1975, 1990, 1996) systematically studied the characteristics of tasks that individuals find intrinsically rewarding, such as rock climbing. He found that a level of challenge somewhere between boredom and fear is important, and also that the experience of "flow" gained when one is fully engaged in a task is intrinsically rewarding. Amabile (1996) proposes that intrinsic motivation is a key determining factor in creativity. She defines a creative task as one that is heuristic in nature (with no predetermined path to solution), and defines a creative outcome as a novel and appropriate (useful) response to such a task. Both conditions certainly can apply to the task of developing a product or a service.
+={Amiable, T.;Csikszentmihalyi, M.}
+
+In sum, to the extent that individual user-innovators benefit from the process of developing or modifying a product as well as from the product actually developed, they are likely to innovate even when the benefits expected from the product itself are relatively low. (Employees of a firm may wish to experience this type of intrinsic reward in their work as well, but managers and commercial constraints may give them less of an opportunity to do so. Indeed, "control over my own work" is cited by many programmers as a reason that they enjoy creating code as volunteers on open source projects more than they enjoy coding for their employers for pay.)
+
+1~ 5 Users' Low-Cost Innovation Niches
+={Users:innovation and+50|low-cost innovation niches of+50}
+
+!_ The Problem-Solving Process
+={Trial-and-error problem solving+11}
+
+Product and service development is at its core a problem-solving process. Research into the nature of problem solving shows it to consist of trial and error, directed by some amount of insight as to the direction in which a solution might lie (Baron 1988). Trial and error has also been found to be prominent in the problem-solving work of product and process development (Marples 1961; Allen 1966; von Hippel and Tyre 1995; Thomke 1998, 2003).
+={Allen, T.;Baron, J.;Marples, D.;Thomke, S.;Tyre, M.;von Hippel, E.}
+
+Trial-and-error problem solving can be envisioned as a four-phase cycle that is typically repeated many times during the development of a new product or service. Problem solvers first conceive of a problem and a related solution based on their best knowledge and insight. Next, they build a physical or virtual prototype of both the possible solution they have envisioned and the intended use environment. Third, they run the experiment---that is, they operate their prototyped solution and see what happens. Fourth and finally, they analyze the result to understand what happened in the trial and to assess the "error information" that they gained. (In the trial-and-error formulation of the learning process, error is the new information or learning derived from an experiment by an experimenter: it is the aspect(s) of the outcome that the experimenter did not predict.) Developers then use the new learning to modify and improve the solution under development before building and running a new trial (figure 5.1).
+
+Trial-and-error experimentation can be informal or formal; the underlying principles are the same. As an example on the informal side, consider a user experiencing a need and then developing what eventually turns out to be a new product: the skateboard. In phase 1 of the cycle, the user combines need and solution information into a product idea: "I am bored with roller skating. How can I get down this hill in a more exciting way? Maybe it would be fun to put my skates' wheels under a board and ride down on that." In phase 2, the user builds a prototype by taking his skates apart and hammering the wheels onto the underside of a board. In phase 3, he runs the experiment by climbing onto the board and heading down the hill. In phase 4, he picks himself up from an inaugural crash and thinks about the error information he has gained: "It is harder to stay on this thing than I thought. What went wrong, and how can I improve things before my next run down the hill?"
+
+% (2) BUILD
+% (3) RUN
+% (4) ANALYZE
+% (1) DESIGN
+% DONE
+% DESIGN REQUIREMENTS
+% DESIGN ACTIVITY
+% Changes in
+% exogenous
+% information
+% Use learning from previous
+% cycle(s) to conceive and design
+% an improved solution.
+% .
+% Develop models and/or build
+% prototypes to be used in
+% running experiments.
+% .
+% Test model/prototype in real
+% or simulated use environment.
+% .
+% Analyze findings from
+% previous step and learn.
+% .
+% Figure 5.1
+% The trial-and-error cycle of product development.
+
+{di_evh_f5-1.png}image
+
+!_ Figure 5.1
+The trial-and-error cycle of product development.
+
+As an example of more formal experimentation, consider a product-development engineer working in a laboratory to improve the performance of an automobile engine. In phase 1, need and solution information are again combined into a design idea: "I need to improve engine fuel efficiency. I think that a more even expansion of the flame in the cylinders is a possible solution direction, and I think that changing the shape of the spark plug electrodes will improve this." In phase 2, the engineer builds a spark plug incorporating her new idea. In phase 3, she inserts the new spark plug into a lab test engine equipped with the elaborate instrumentation needed to measure the very rapid propagation of a flame in the cylinders of an auto engine and runs the test. In phase 4, she feeds the data into a computer and analyzes the results. She asks: "Did the change in spark plug design change the flame front as expected? Did it change fuel efficiency? How can I use what I have learned from this trial to improve things for the next one?"
+
+In addition to the difference in formality, there is another important difference between these two examples. In the first example, the skateboard user was conducting trial and error with a full prototype of the intended product in a real use environment---his own. In the second example, the experimental spark plug might have been a full prototype of a real product, but it probably consisted only of that portion of a real spark plug that actually extends into a combustion chamber. Also, only /{aspects}/ of the use environment were involved in the lab experiment. That is, the test engine was not a real auto engine, and it was not being operated in a real car traveling over real roads.
+
+Experimentation is often carried out using simplified versions---models--- of the product being designed and its intended use environment. These models can be physical (as in the example just given), or they can be virtual (as in the case of thought experiments or computer simulations). In a computer simulation, both the product and the environment are represented in digital form, and their interaction is tested entirely within a computer. For example, one might make a digital model of an automobile and a crash barrier. One could then use a computer to simulate the crash of the model car into the model barrier. One would analyze the results by calculating the effects of that crash on the structure of the car.
+
+The value of using models rather than the real thing in experimentation is twofold. First, it can reduce the cost of an experiment---it can be much cheaper to crash a simulated BMW than a real one. Second, it can make experimental results clearer by making them simpler or otherwise different than real life. If one is trying to test the effect of a small change on car safety, for example, it can be helpful to remove everything not related to that change from the experiment. For example, if one is testing the way a particular wheel suspension structure deforms in a crash, one does not have to know (or spend time computing) how a taillight lens will react in the crash. Also, in a real crash things happen only once and happen very fast. In a virtual crash executed by computer, on the other hand, one can repeat the crash sequence over and over, and can stretch time out or compress it exactly as one likes to better understand what is happening (Thomke 2003).
+={Thomke, S.+2}
+
+Users and others experimenting with real prototypes in real use environments can also modify things to make tests simpler and clearer. A restaurant chef, for example, can make slight variations in just a small part of a recipe each time a customer calls for it, in order to better understand what is happening and make improvements. Similarly, a process machine user can experiment with only a small portion of machine functioning over and over to test changes and detect errors.
+
+Sometimes designers will test a real experimental object in a real experimental context only after experimenting with several generations of models that isolate different aspects of the real and/or encompass increasing amounts of the complexity of the real. Developers of pharmaceuticals, for example, might begin by testing a candidate drug molecule against just the purified enzyme or receptor it is intended to affect, then test it again and again against successively more complex models of the human organism (tissue cultures, animal models, etc.) before finally seeking to test its effect on real human patients during clinical trials (Thomke, von Hippel, and Franke 1998).
+={Franke, N.;von Hippel, E.}
+
+!_ Sticky Information
+={Sticky information+11:innovation and+11}
+
+Any experiment is only as accurate as the information that is used as inputs. If inputs are not accurate, outcomes will not be accurate: "garbage in, garbage out."
+
+The goal of product development and service development is to create a solution that will satisfy needs of real users within real contexts of use. The more complete and accurate the information on these factors, the higher the fidelity of the models being tested. If information could be transferred costlessly from place to place, the quality of the information available to problem solvers would or could be independent of location. But if information is costly to transfer, things are different. User-innovators, for example, will then have better information about their needs and their use context than will manufacturers. After all, they create and live in that type of information in full fidelity! Manufacturer-innovators, on the other hand, must transfer that information to themselves at some cost, and are unlikely to be able to obtain it in full fidelity at any cost. However, manufacturers might well have a higher-fidelity model of the solution types in which they specialize than users have.
+={Information asymmetries+31;Local information+35;Users:information asymmetries of+31}
+
+It turns out that much information needed by product and service designers is "sticky." In any particular instance, the stickiness of a unit of information is defined as the incremental expenditure required to transfer that unit of information to a specified location in a form usable by a specified information seeker. When this expenditure is low, information stickiness is low; when it is high, stickiness is high (von Hippel 1994). That information is often sticky has been shown by studying the costs of transferring information regarding fully developed process technology from one location to another with full cooperation on both sides. Even under these favorable conditions, costs have been found to be high---leading one to conclude that the costs of transferring information during product and service development are likely to be at least as high. Teece (1977), for example, studied 26 international technology-transfer projects and found that the costs of information transfer ranged from 2 percent to 59 percent of total project costs and averaged 19 percent---a considerable fraction. Mansfield et al. (1982) also studied a number of projects involving technology transfer to overseas plants, and also found technology-transfer costs averaging about 20 percent of total project costs. Winter and Suzlanski (2001) explored replication of well-known organizational routines at new sites and found the process difficult and costly.
+={Mansfield, E.;Suzlanski, G.;Teece, D.;Winter, S.;von Hippel, E.+63}
+
+Why is information transfer so costly? The term "stickiness" refers only to a consequence, not to a cause. Information stickiness can result from causes ranging from attributes of the information itself to access fees charged by an information owner. Consider tacitness---a lack of explicit encoding. Polanyi (1958, pp. 49--53) noted that many human skills are tacit because "the aim of a skilful performance is achieved by the observance of a set of rules which are not known as such to the person following them." For example, swimmers are probably not aware of the rules they employ to keep afloat (e.g., in exhaling, they do not completely empty their lungs), nor are medical experts generally aware of the rules they follow in order to reach a diagnosis of a disease. "Indeed," Polanyi says, "even in modern industries the indefinable knowledge is still an essential part of technology." Information that is tacit is also sticky because it cannot be transferred at low cost. As Polanyi points out, "an art which cannot be specified in detail cannot be transmitted by prescription, since no prescription for it exists. It can be passed on only by example from master to apprentice. . . ." Apprenticeship is a relatively costly mode of transfer.
+={Polanyi, M.}
+
+Another cause of information stickiness is related to absorptive capacity. A firm's or an individual's capacity to absorb new, outside technical information is largely a function of prior related knowledge (Cohen and Levinthal 1990). Thus, a firm knowing nothing about circuit design but seeking to apply an advanced technique for circuit engineering may be unable to apply it without first learning more basic information. The stickiness of the information about the advanced technique for the firm in question is therefore higher than it would be for a firm that already knows that basic information. (Recall that the stickiness of a unit of information is defined as the incremental expenditure required to transfer a unit of information to a specified site in a form usable by a /{specific}/ information seeker.)
+={Cohen, W.;Levinthal, D.}
+
+Total information stickiness associated with solving a specific problem is also determined by the amount of information required by a problem solver. Sometimes a great deal is required, for two reasons. First, as Rosenberg (1976, 1982) and Nelson (1982, 1990) point out, much technological knowledge deals with the specific and the particular. Second, one does not know in advance of problem solving which particular items will be important.
+={Nelson, R.;Rosenberg, N.}
+
+An example from a study by von Hippel and Tyre (1995) illustrates both points nicely. Tyre and I studied how and why novel production machines failed when they were first introduced into factory use. One of the machines studied was an automated machine used by a computer manufacturing firm to place large integrated circuits onto computer circuit boards. The user firm had asked an outside group to develop what was needed, and that group had developed and delivered a robot arm coupled to a machine-vision system. The arm, guided by the vision system, was designed to pick up integrated circuits and place them on a circuit board at precise locations.
+={Tyre, M.+4}
+
+Upon being installed in the factory, the new component-placing machine failed many times as a result of its developers' lack of some bit of information about the need or use environment. For example, one day machine operators reported that the machine was malfunctioning---again---and they did not know why. Investigation traced the problem to the machine-vision system. This system used a small TV camera to locate specific metalized patterns on the surface of each circuit board being processed. To function, the system needed to "see" these metalized patterns clearly against the background color of the board's surface. The vision system developed by the machine-development group had functioned properly in their lab when tested with sample boards from the user factory. However, the field investigation showed that in the factory it failed when boards that were light yellow in color were being processed.
+
+The fact that some of the boards being processed were sometimes light yellow was a surprise to the machine developers. The factory personnel who had set the specifications for the machine knew that the boards they processed varied in color; however, they had not volunteered the information, because they did not know that the developers would be interested. Early in the machine-development process, they had simply provided samples of boards used in the factory to the machine-development group. And, as it happened, these samples were green. On the basis of the samples, developers had then (implicitly) assumed that all boards processed in the field were green. It had not occurred to them to ask users "How much variation in board color do you generally experience?" Thus, they had designed the vision system to work successfully with boards that were green.
+
+In the case of this field failure, the item of information needed to understand or predict this problem was known to the users and could easily have been provided to the machine developers---had the developers thought to ask and/or had users thought to volunteer it. But in the actual evolution of events this was not done. The important point is that this omission was not due to poor practice; it was due to the huge amount of information about the need and the use environment that was /{potentially}/ relevant to problem solvers. Note that the use environment and the novel machine contain many highly specific attributes that could potentially interact to cause field problems. Note also that the property of the board causing this particular type of failure was very narrow and specific. That is, the problem was not that the board had physical properties, nor that it had a color. The problem was precisely that some boards were yellow, and a particular shade of yellow at that. Since a circuit board, like most other components, has many attributes in addition to color (shape, size, weight, chemical composition, resonant frequency, dielectric constant, flexibility, and so on), it is likely that problem solvers seeking to learn everything they might need to know about the use and the use environment would have to collect a very large (perhaps unfeasibly large) number of very specific items of information.
+
+Next, consider that the information items the problem solver will actually need (of the many that exist) are contingent on the solution path taken by the engineer designing the product. In the example, the problem caused by the yellow color of the circuit board was contingent on the design solution to the component-placing problem selected by the engineer during the development process. That is, the color of the circuit boards in the user factory became an item the problem solvers needed to know only when engineers, in the course of their development of the component placer, decided to use a vision system in the component-placing machine they were designing, and the fact that the boards were yellow became relevant only when the engineers chose a video camera and lighting that could not distinguish the metalized patterns on the board against a yellow background. Clearly, it can be costly to transfer the many items of information that a product or service developer might require---even if each individual item has low stickiness---from one site to another.
+
+!_ How Information Asymmetries Affect User Innovation vs. Manufacturer Innovation
+={Manufacturers:information asymmetries of+11|innovation and+25}
+
+An important consequence of information stickiness is that it results in information asymmetries that cannot be erased easily or cheaply. Different users and manufacturers will have different stocks of information, and may find it costly to acquire information they need but do not have. As a result, each innovator will tend to develop innovations that draw on the sticky information it already has, because that is the cheapest course of action (Arora and Gambardella 1994; von Hippel 1994). In the specific case of product development, this means that users as a class will tend to develop innovations that draw heavily on their own information about need and context of use. Similarly, manufacturers as a class will tend to develop innovations that draw heavily on the types of solution information in which they specialize.
+={Arora, A.;Gambardella, A.}
+
+This effect is visible in studies of innovation. Riggs and von Hippel (1994) studied the types of innovations made by users and manufacturers that improved the functioning of two major types of scientific instruments.
+={Riggs, W.;Scientific instruments+9;Sticky information:and scientific instruments+1}
+
+They found that users tended to develop innovations that enabled the instruments to do qualitatively new types of things for the first time. In contrast, manufacturers tended to develop innovations that enabled users to do the same things they had been doing, but to do them more conveniently or reliably (table 5.1). For example, users were the first to modify the instruments to enable them to image and analyze magnetic domains at sub-microscopic dimensions. In contrast, manufacturers were the first to computerize instrument adjustments to improve ease of operation. Sensitivity, resolution, and accuracy improvements fall somewhere in the middle, as the data show. These types of improvements can be driven by users seeking to do specific new things, or by manufacturers applying their technical expertise to improve the products along known dimensions of merit, such as accuracy.
+
+!_ Table 5.1
+Users tend to develop innovations that deliver novel functions.
+
+% Innovation developed by
+
+table{~h c4; 60; 15; 15; 10;
+
+Type of improvement provided by innovation
+User
+Manufacturer
+n
+
+New functional capability
+82%
+18%
+17
+
+Sensitivity, resolution, or accuracy improvement
+48%
+52%
+23
+
+Convenience or reliability improvement
+13%
+87%
+24
+
+Total sample size
+~
+~
+64
+
+}table
+
+Source: Riggs and von Hippel 1994, table 3.
+
+The variation in locus of innovation for different types of innovations, seen in table 5.1 does fit our expectations from the point of view of sticky information considerations. But these findings are not controlled for profitability, and so it might be that profits for new functional capabilities are systematically smaller than profits obtainable from improvements made to existing functionality. If so, this could also explain the patterns seen.
+
+Ogawa (1998) took the next necessary step and conducted an empirical study that did control for profitability of innovation opportunities. He too found the sticky-information effect---this time visible in the division of labor /{within}/ product-development projects. He studied patterns in the development of a sample of 24 inventory-management innovations. All were jointly developed by a Japanese equipment manufacturer, NEC, and by a user firm, Seven-Eleven Japan (SEJ). SEJ, the leading convenience-store company in Japan, is known for its inventory management. Using innovative methods and equipment, it is able to turn over its inventory as many as 30 times a year, versus 12 times a year for competitors (Kotabe 1995). An example of such an innovation jointly developed by SEJ and NEC is just-in-time reordering, for which SEJ created the procedures and NEC the hand-held equipment to aid store clerks in carrying out their newly designed tasks. Equipment sales to SEJ are important to NEC: SEJ has thousands of stores in Japan.
+={Kotabe, M.;Ogawa, S.+1}
+
+The 24 innovations studied by Ogawa varied in the amount of sticky need information each required from users (having to do with store inventory- management practices) and the amount of sticky solution information required from manufacturers (having to do with new equipment technologies). Each also varied in terms of the profit expectations of both user and manufacturer. Ogawa determined how much of the design for each was done by the user firm and how much by the manufacturer firm. Controlling for profit expectations, he found that increases in the stickiness of user information were associated with a significant increase in the amount of need-related design undertaken by the user (Kendall correlation coefficient = 0.5784, P < 0.01). Conversely he found that increased stickiness of technology-related information was associated in a significant reduction in the amount of technology design done by the user (Kendall correlation coefficients = 0.4789, P < 0.05). In other words, need-intensive tasks within product-development projects will tend to be done by users, while solution-intensive ones will tend to be done by manufacturers.
+
+!_ Low-Cost Innovation Niches
+
+Just as there are information asymmetries between users and manufacturers as classes, there are also information asymmetries among individual user firms and individuals, and among individual manufacturers as well. A study of mountain biking by Lüthje, Herstatt, and von Hippel (2002) shows that information held locally by individual user-innovators strongly affects the type of innovations they develop. Mountain biking involves bicycling on rough terrain such as mountain trails. It may also involve various other extreme conditions, such as bicycling on snow and ice and in the dark (van der Plas and Kelly 1998).
+={Kelly, C.;Lüthje, C.;Van der Plas, R.;Herstatt, C.+12;Lüthje, C.+12;Mountain biking+12;Users:innovate-or-buy decisions by+12}
+
+Mountain biking began in the early 1970s when some young cyclists started to use their bicycles off-road. Existing commercial bikes were not suited to this type of rough use, so early users put together their own bikes. They used strong bike frames, balloon tires, and powerful drum brakes designed for motorcycles. They called their creations "clunkers" (Penning 1998; Buenstorf 2002).
+={Buenstorf, G.;Penning, C.}
+
+Commercial manufacture of mountain bikes began about 1975, when some of the early users of mountain bikes began to also build bikes for others. A tiny cottage industry developed, and by 1976 a half-dozen small assemblers existed in Marin County, California. In 1982, a small firm named Specialized, an importer of bikes and bike parts that supplied parts to the Marin County mountain bike assemblers, took the next step and brought the first mass-produced mountain bike to market. Major bike manufacturers then followed and started to produce mountain bikes and sell them at regular bike shops across the United States. By the mid 1980s the mountain bike was fully integrated in the mainstream bike market, and it has since grown to significant size. In 2000, about $58 billion (65 percent) of total retail sales in the US bicycle market were generated in the mountain bike category (National Sporting Goods Association 2002).
+
+Mountain biking enthusiasts did not stop their innovation activities after the introduction of commercially manufactured mountain bikes. They kept pushing mountain biking into more extreme environmental conditions, and they continued to develop new sports techniques involving mountain bikes (/{Mountain Bike}/ 1996). Thus, some began jumping their bikes from house roofs and water towers and developing other forms of acrobatics. As they did so, they steadily discovered needs for improvements to their equipment. Many responded by developing and building the improvements they needed for themselves.
+
+Our sample of mountain bikers came from the area that bikers call the North Shore of the Americas, ranging from British Columbia to Washington State. Expert mountain bikers told us that this was a current "hot spot" where new riding styles were being developed and where the sport was being pushed toward new limits. We used a questionnaire to collect data from members of North Shore mountain biking clubs and from contributors to the mailing lists of two North Shore online mountain biking forums. Information was obtained from 291 mountain bikers. Nineteen percent of bikers responding to the questionnaire reported developing and building a new or modified item of mountain biking equipment for their own use. The innovations users developed were appropriate to the needs associated with their own riding specialties and were heterogeneous in function.
+={Custom products:heterogeneity of user needs and+6;User need+6;Users:needs of+6}
+
+We asked mountain bikers who had innovated about the sources of the need and solution information they had used in their problem solving. In 84.5 percent of the cases respondents strongly agreed with the statement that their need information came from /{personal needs they had frequently experienced}/ rather than from information about the needs of others. With respect to solution information, most strongly agreed with the statement that /{they used solution information they already had}/, rather than learning new solution information in order to develop their biking equipment innovation (table 5.2).
+
+!_ Table 5.2
+Innovators tended to use solution information they already had "in stock" to develop their ideas. Tabulated here are innovators' answers to the question "How did you obtain the information needed to develop your solution?"
+={Lüthje, C.}
+
+table{~h c4; 55; 15; 15; 15;
+
+.
+Mean
+Median
+Very high or high agreement
+
+"I had it due to my professional background."
+4.22
+4
+47.5%
+
+"I had it from mountain biking or another hobby."
+4.56
+5
+52.4%
+
+"I learned it to develop this idea."
+2.11
+2
+16%
+
+}table
+
+Source: Lüthje et al. 2003. N = 61. Responses were rated on a seven-point scale, with 1 = not at all true and 7 = very true.
+
+!_ Discussion
+
+To the extent that users have heterogeneous and sticky need and solution information, they will have heterogeneous low-cost innovation niches. Users can be sophisticated developers within those niches, despite their reliance on their own need information and solution information that they already have in stock. On the need side, recall that user-innovators generally are lead users and generally are expert in the field or activity giving rise to their needs. With respect to solution information, user firms have specialties that may be at a world-class level. Individual users can also have high levels of solution expertise. After all, they are students or employees during the day, with training and jobs ranging from aerospace engineering to orthopedic surgery. Thus, mountain bikers might not want to /{learn}/ orthopedic surgery to improve their biking equipment, but if they already /{are}/ expert in that field they could easily draw on what they know for relevant solution information. Consider the following example drawn from the study of mountain biking discussed earlier:
+
+I'm a human movement scientist working in ergonomics and biomechanics. I used my medical experience for my design. I calculated a frame design suitable for different riding conditions (downhill, climb). I did a CAD frame design on Catia and conceived a spring or air coil that can be set to two different heights. I plan to build the bike next year.
+
+Users' low-cost innovation niches can be narrow because their development "labs" for such experimentation often consist largely of their individual use environment and customary activities. Consider, for example, the low-cost innovation niches of individual mountain bikers. Serious mountain bikers generally specialize in a particular type of mountain biking activity. Repeated specialized play and practice leads to improvement in related specialized skills. This, in turn, may lead to a discovery of a problem in existing mountain biking equipment and a responsive innovation. Thus, an innovating user in our mountain biking study reported the following: "When doing tricks that require me to take my feet off the bike pedals in mid-air, the pedals often spin, making it hard to put my feet back onto them accurately before landing." Such a problem is encountered only when a user has gained a high level of skill in the very specific specialty of jumping and performing tricks in mid-air. Once the problem has been encountered and recognized, however, the skilled specialist user can re-evoke the same problematic conditions at will during ordinary practice. The result is the creation of a low-cost laboratory for testing and comparing different solutions to that problem. The user is benefiting from enjoyment of his chosen activity and is developing something new via learning by doing at the same time.
+
+In sharp contrast, if that same user decides to stray outside his chosen activity in order to develop innovations of interest to others with needs that are different from his own, the cost properly assignable to innovation will rise. To gain an equivalent-quality context for innovation, such a user must invest in developing personal skill related to the new innovation topic. Only in this way will he gain an equivalently deep understanding of the problems relevant to practitioners of that skill, and acquire a "field laboratory" appropriate to developing and testing possible solutions to those new problems.
+
+Of course, these same considerations apply to user firms as well as to individual users. A firm that is in the business of polishing marble floors is a user of marble polishing equipment and techniques. It will have a low-cost learning laboratory with respect to improvements in these because it can conduct trial-and-error learning in that "lab" during the course of its customary business activities. Innovation costs can be very low because innovation activities are paid for in part by rewards unrelated to the novel equipment or technique being developed. The firm is polishing while innovating---and is getting paid for that work (Foray 2004). The low cost innovation niche of the marble polishing firm may be narrow. For example, it is unlikely to have any special advantage with respect to innovations in the polishing of wood floors, which requires different equipment and techniques.
+={Foray, D.}
+
+1~ 6 Why Users Often Freely Reveal Their Innovations
+={Free revealing of innovation information:evidence of+10|users and+50;Information commons+13;Intellectual property rights:free revealing and+50;Users:free revealing by+50}
+
+Products, services, and processes developed by users become more valuable to society if they are somehow diffused to others that can also benefit from them. If user innovations are not diffused, multiple users with very similar needs will have to invest to (re)develop very similar innovations, which would be a poor use of resources from the social welfare point of view. Empirical research shows that new and modified products developed by users often do diffuse widely---and they do this by an unexpected means: user-innovators themselves often voluntarily publicly reveal what they have developed for all to examine, imitate, or modify without any payment to the innovator.
+
+In this chapter, I first review evidence that free revealing is frequent. Next, I discuss the case for free revealing from an innovators' perspective, and argue that it often can be the best /{practical}/ route for users to increase profit from their innovations. Finally, I discuss the implications of free revealing for innovation theory.
+
+!_ Evidence of Free Revealing
+={Free revealing of innovation information}
+
+When my colleagues and I say that an innovator "freely reveals" proprietary information, we mean that all intellectual property rights to that information are voluntarily given up by that innovator and all parties are given equal access to it---the information becomes a public good (Harhoff, Henkel, and von Hippel 2003). For example, placement of non-patented information in a publicly accessible site such as a journal or public website would be free revealing as we define it. Free revealing as so defined does not mean that recipients necessarily acquire and utilize the revealed information at no cost to themselves. Recipients may, for example, have to pay for a subscription to a journal or for a field trip to an innovation site to acquire the information being freely revealed. Also, some may have to obtain complementary information or other assets in order to fully understand that information or put it to use. However, if the possessor of the information does not profit from any such expenditures made by its adopters, the information itself is still freely revealed, according to our definition. This definition of free revealing is rather extreme in that revealing with some small constraints, as is sometimes done, would achieve largely the same economic effect. Still, it is useful to discover that innovations are often freely revealed even in terms of this stringent definition.
+={Harhoff, D.;Henkel, J.}
+
+Routine and intentional free revealing among profit-seeking firms was first described by Allen (1983). He noticed the phenomenon, which he called collective invention, in historical records from the nineteenth-century English iron industry. In that industry, ore was processed into iron by means of large furnaces heated to very high temperatures. Two attributes of the furnaces used had been steadily improved during the period 1850--1875: chimney height had been increased and the temperature of the combustion air pumped into the furnace during operation had been raised. These two technical changes significantly and progressively improved the energy efficiency of iron production---a very important matter for producers. Allen noted the surprising fact that employees of competing firms publicly revealed information on their furnace design improvements and related performance data in meetings of professional societies and in published material.
+={Allen, R.;Free revealing of innovation information:collective invention and}
+
+After Allen's initial observation, a number of other authors searched for free revealing among profit-seeking firms and frequently found it. Nuvolari (2004) studied a topic and time similar to that studied by Allen and found a similar pattern of free revealing in the case of improvements made to steam engines used to pump out mines in the 1800s. At that time, mining activities were severely hampered by water that tended to flood into mines of any depth, and so an early and important application of steam engines was for the removal of water from mines. Nuvolari explored the technical history of steam engines used to drain copper and tin mines in England's Cornwall District. Here, patented steam engines developed by James Watt were widely deployed in the 1700s. After the expiration of the Watt patent, an engineer named Richard Trevithick developed a new type of high-pressure engine in 1812. Instead of patenting his invention, he made his design available to all for use without charge. The engine soon became the basic design used in Cornwall. Many mine engineers improved Trevithick's design further and published what they had done in a monthly journal, /{Leans Engine Reporter}/. This journal had been founded by a group of mine managers with the explicit intention of aiding the rapid diffusion of best practices among these competing firms.
+={Nuvolari, A.;Trevithick, R.;Watt, J.}
+
+Free revealing has also been documented in the case of more recent industrial equipment innovations developed by users. Lim (2000) reports that IBM was first to develop a process to manufacture semiconductors that incorporated copper interconnections among circuit elements instead of the traditionally used aluminum ones. After some delay, IBM revealed increasing amounts of proprietary process information to rival users and to equipment suppliers. Widespread free revealing was also found in the case of automated clinical chemistry analyzers developed by the Technicon Corporation for use in medical diagnosis. After commercial introduction of the basic analyzer, many users developed major improvements to both the analyzer and to the clinical tests processed on that equipment. These users, generally medical personnel, freely revealed their improvements via publication, and at company-sponsored seminars (von Hippel and Finkelstein 1979). Mishina (1989) found free, or at least selective no-cost revealing in the lithographic equipment industry. He reported that innovating equipment users would sometimes reveal what they had done to machine manufacturers. Morrison, Roberts, and I, in our study of library IT search software (discussed in chapter 2 above), found that innovating users freely revealed 56 percent of the software modifications they had developed. Reasons given for not revealing the remainder had nothing to do with considerations of intellectual property protection. Rather, users who did not share said they had no convenient users' group forum for doing so, and/or they thought their innovation was too specialized to be of interest to others.
+={IBM;Finkelstein, S.;Lim, K.;Mishina, K.;Morrison, Pamela;Roberts, J.;Technicon Corporation;Free revealing of innovation information:and library information search system;Lead users:library information search system and;Library information search system}
+
+Innovating users of sports equipment also have been found to freely reveal their new products and product modifications. Franke and Shah (2003), in their study of four communities of serious sports enthusiasts described in chapter 2, found that innovating users uniformly agreed with the statement that they shared their innovation with their entire community free of charge---and strongly disagreed with the statement that they sold their innovations (p < 0.001, t-test for dependent samples). Interestingly, two of the four communities they studied engaged in activities involving significant competition among community members. Innovators in these two communities reported high but significantly less willingness to share, as one might expect in view of the potentially higher level of competitive loss free revealing would entail.
+={Franke, N.;Shah, S.;Free revealing of innovation information:and sports equipment;Sporting equipment:free revealing and}
+
+Contributors to the many open source software projects extant (more than 83,000 were listed on SourceForge.net in 2004) also routinely make the new code they have written public. Well-known open source software products include the Linux operating system software and the Apache web server computer software. Some conditions are attached to open source code licensing to ensure that the code remains available to all as an information commons. Because of these added protections, open source code does not quite fit the definition of free revealing given earlier in this chapter. (The licensing of open source software will be discussed in detail in chapter 7.)
+={Linux+1;Apache web server software;Free revealing of innovation information:and open source software+1;Open source software:free revealing and+1}
+
+Henkel (2003) showed that free revealing is sometimes practiced by directly competing manufacturers. He studied manufacturers that were competitors and that had all built improvements and extensions to a type of software known as embedded Linux. (Such software is "embedded in" and used to operate equipment ranging from cameras to chemical plants.) He found that these manufacturers freely revealed improvements to the common software platform that they all shared and, with a lag, also revealed much of the equipment-specific code they had written.
+={Henkel, J.;Free revealing of innovation information:manufacturers and;Manufacturers:free revealing and}
+
+!_ The Practical Case for Free Revealing
+={Free revealing of innovation information:case for+2}
+
+The "private investment model" of innovation assumes that innovation will be supported by private investment if and as innovators can make attractive profits from doing so. In this model, any free revealing or uncompensated "spillover" of proprietary knowledge developed by private investment will reduce the innovator's profits. It is therefore assumed that innovators will strive to avoid spillovers of innovation-related information. From the perspective of this model, then, free revealing is a major surprise: it seems to make no sense that innovators would intentionally give away information for free that they had invested money to develop.
+
+In this subsection I offer an explanation for the puzzle by pointing out that free revealing is often the best /{practical}/ option available to user innovators. Harhoff, Henkel, and von Hippel (2003) found that it is in practice very difficult for most innovators to protect their innovations from direct or approximate imitation. This means that the practical choice is typically /{not}/ the one posited by the private investment model: should innovators voluntarily freely reveal their innovations, or should they protect them? Instead, the real choice facing user innovators often is whether to voluntarily freely reveal or to arrive at the same end state, perhaps with a bit of a lag, via involuntary spillovers. The practical case for voluntary free revealing is further strengthened because it can be accomplished at low cost, and often yields private benefits to the innovators. When benefits from free revealing exceed the benefits that are /{practically}/ obtainable from holding an innovation secret or licensing it, free revealing should be the preferred course of action for a profit-seeking firm or individual.
+={Harhoff, D.;Henkel, J.;Free revealing of innovation information:and information diffusion+9}
+
+!_ Others Often Know Something Close to "Your" Secret
+
+Innovators seeking to protect innovations they have developed as their intellectual property must establish some kind of monopoly control over the innovation-related information. In practice, this can be done either by effectively hiding the information as a trade secret, or by getting effective legal protection by patents or copyrights. (Trademarks also fall under the heading of intellectual property, but we do not consider those here.) In addition, however, it must be the case that /{others}/ do not know substitute information that skirts these protections and that they /{are}/ willing to reveal. If multiple individuals or firms have substitutable information, they are likely to vary with respect to the competitive circumstances they face. A specific innovator's ability to protect "its" innovation as proprietary property will then be determined for all holders of such information by the decision of the one having the least to lose by free revealing. If one or more information holders expect no loss or even a gain from a decision to freely reveal, then the secret will probably be revealed despite other innovators' best efforts to avoid this fate.
+={Intellectual property rights:copyrights and|patents and|trade secrets and}
+
+Commonly, firms and individuals have information that would be valuable to those seeking to imitate a particular innovation. This is because innovators and imitators seldom need access to a specific version of an innovation. Indeed, engineers seldom even want to see a solution exactly as their competitors have designed it: specific circumstances differ even among close competitors, and solutions must in any case be adapted to each adopter's precise circumstances. What an engineer does want to extract from the work of others is the principles and the general outline of a possible improvement, rather than the easily redevelopable details. This information is likely to be available from many sources.
+
+For example, suppose you are a system developer at a bank and you are tasked with improving in-house software for checking customers' credit online. On the face of it, it might seem that you would gain most by studying the details of the systems that competing banks have developed to handle that same task. It is certainly true that competing banks may face market conditions very similar to your bank, and they may well not want to reveal the valuable innovations they have developed to a competitor. However, the situation is still by no means bleak for an imitator. There are also many non-bank users of online credit checking systems in the world---probably millions. Some will have innovated and be willing to reveal what they have done, and some of these will have the information you need. The likelihood that the information you seek will be freely revealed by some individual or firm is further enhanced by the fact that your search for novel basic improvements may profitably extend far beyond the specific application of online credit checking. Other fields will also have information on components of the solution you need. For example, many applications in addition to online credit checking use software components designed to determine whether persons seeking information are authorized to receive it. Any can potentially be a provider of information for this element of your improved system.
+
+A finding by Lakhani and von Hippel (2003) illustrates the possibility that many firms and individuals may have similar information. Lakhani and von Hippel studied Apache help-line websites. These sites enable users having problems with Apache software to post questions, and others to respond with answers. The authors asked those who provided answers how many other help-line participants they thought also knew a solution to specific and often obscure problems they had answered on the Apache online forum. Information providers generally were of the opinion that some or many other help-line participants also knew a solution, and could have provided an answer if they themselves had not done so (table 6.1).
+={Lakhani, K;Apache web server software+2}
+
+!_ Table 6.1
+Even very specialized information is often widely known. Tabulated here are answers to a question asked of help-line information providers: "How many others do you think knew the answer to the question you answered?"
+={Lakhani, K}
+
+table{~h c3; 40; 30; 30;
+
+~
+Frequent providers (n = 21)
+
+Other providers (n = 67)
+
+Many
+38%
+61%
+
+A few with good Apache knowledge
+38%
+18%
+
+A few with specific problem experience
+24%
+21%
+
+}table
+
+Source: Lakhani and von Hippel 2003, table 10.
+
+Even in the unlikely event that a secret is held by one individual, that information holder will not find it easy to keep a secret for long. Mansfield (1985) studied 100 American firms and found that "information concerning development decisions is generally in the hands of rivals within about 12 to 18 months, on the average, and information concerning the detailed nature and operation of a new product or process generally leaks out within about a year." This observation is supported by Allen's previously mentioned study of free revealing in the nineteenth-century English iron industry. Allen (1983, p. 17) notes that developers of improved blast furnace designs were unlikely to be able to keep their valuable innovations secret because "in the case of blast furnaces and steelworks, the construction would have been done by contractors who would know the design." Also, "the designs themselves were often created by consulting engineers who shifted from firm to firm."
+={Allen, R.;Mansfield, E.+4;Free revealing of innovation information:evidence of}
+
+!_ Low Ability to Profit from Patenting
+={Free revealing of innovation information:patent protection and+12;Intellectual property rights:patents and+12}
+
+Next, suppose that a single user-innovator is the only holder of a particular unit of innovation-related information, and that for some reason there are no easy substitutes. That user actually does have a real choice with respect to disposing of its intellectual property: it can keep the innovation secret and profit from in-house use only, it can license it, or it can choose to freely reveal the innovation. We have just seen that the practical likelihood of keeping a secret is low, especially when there are multiple potential providers of very similar secrets. But if one legally protects an innovation by means of a patent or a copyright, one need not keep an innovation secret in order to control it. Thus, a firm or an individual that freely reveals is forgoing any chance to get a profit via licensing of intellectual property for a fee. What, in practical terms, is the likelihood of succeeding at this and so of forgoing profit by choosing to freely reveal?
+={Intellectual property rights:copyrights and+1|patents and+4}
+
+In most subject matters, the relevant form of legal protection for intellectual property is the patent, generally the "utility" patent. (The notable exception is the software industry, where material to be licensed is often protected by copyright.) In the United States, utility patents may be granted for inventions related to composition of matter and/or a method and/or a use. They may not be granted for ideas per se, mathematical formulas, laws of nature, and anything repugnant to morals and public policy. Within subject matters potentially protectable by patent, protection will be granted only when the intellectual property claimed meets additional criteria of usefulness, novelty, and non-obviousness to those skilled in the relevant art. (The tests for whether these criteria have been met are based on judgement. When a low threshold is used, patents are easier to get, and vice-versa (Hall and Harhoff 2004).)
+={Hall, B.;Harhoff, D.}
+
+The real-world value of patent protection has been studied for more than 40 years. Various researchers have found that, with a few exceptions, innovators do /{not}/ think that patents are very useful either for excluding imitators or for capturing royalties in most industries. (Fields generally cited as exceptions are pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and chemical processes, where patents do enable markets for technical information (Arora et al. 2001).) Most respondents also say that the availability of patent protection does not induce them to invest more in research and development than they would if patent protection did not exist. Taylor and Silberston (1973) reported that 24 of 32 firms said that only 5 percent or less of their R&D expenditures were dependent on the availability of patent protection. Levin et al. (1987) surveyed 650 R&D executives in 130 different industries and found that all except respondents from the chemical and pharmaceutical industries judged patents to be "relatively ineffective." Similar findings have been reported by Mansfield (1968, 1985), by Cohen et al. (2000, 2002), by Arundel (2001), and by Sattler (2003).
+={Arora, A.;Arundel, A.;Cohen, W.;Gambardella, A.;Levin, R.;Sattler, H.;Silberston, Z.;Taylor, C.}
+
+% Slaughter, S., 83--85
+
+% ={Fosfuri, A.;Goto, A.}
+
+Despite recent governmental efforts to strengthen patent enforcement, a comparison of survey results indicates only a modest increase between 1983 and 1994 in large firms' evaluations of patents' effectiveness in protecting innovations or promoting innovation investments. Of course, there are notable exceptions: some firms, including IBM and TI, report significant income from the licensing of their patented technologies.
+
+% ={IBM}
+
+Obtaining a patent typically costs thousands of dollars, and it can take years (Harhoff, Henkel, and von Hippel 2003). This makes patents especially impractical for many individual user-innovators, and also for small and medium-size firms of limited means. As a stark example, it is hard to imagine that an individual user who has developed an innovation in sports equipment would find it appealing to invest in a patent and in follow-on efforts to find a licensee and enforce payment. The few that do attempt this, as Shah (2000) has shown, seldom gain any return from licensees as payment for their time and expenditures.
+={Harhoff, D.;Henkel, J.;Shah, S.;Intellectual property rights:licensing of+1}
+
+Copyright is a low-cost and immediate form of legal protection that applies to original writings and images ranging from software code to movies. Authors do not have to apply for copyright protection; it "follows the author's pen across the page." Licensing of copyrighted works is common, and it is widely practiced by commercial software firms. When one buys a copy of a non-custom software product, one is typically buying only a license to use the software, not buying the intellectual property itself. However, copyright protection is also limited in an important way. Only the specific original writing itself is protected, not the underlying invention or ideas. As a consequence, copyright protections can be circumvented. For example, those who wish to imitate the function of a copyrighted software program can do so by writing new software code to implement that function.
+={Intellectual property rights:copyrights and;Free revealing of innovation information:copyright protection and}
+
+
+Given the above, we may conclude that in practice little profit is being sacrificed by many user-innovator firms or individuals that choose to forgo the possibility of legally protecting their innovations in favor of free revealing.
+
+!_ Positive Incentives for Free Revealing
+={Free revealing of innovation information:incentives for+7;Information commons+7}
+
+As was noted earlier, when we say that an innovator "freely reveals" proprietary information we mean that all existing and potential intellectual property rights to that information are voluntarily given up by that innovator and that all interested parties are given access to it---the information becomes a public good. These conditions can often be met at a very low cost. For example, an innovator can simply post information about the innovation on a website without publicity, so those potentially interested must discover it. Or a firm that has developed a novel process machine can agree to give a factory tour to any firm or individual that thinks to ask for one, without attempting to publicize the invention or the availability of such tours in any way. However, it is clear that many innovators go beyond basic, low-cost forms of free revealing. They spend significant money and time to ensure that their innovations are seen in a favorable light, and that information about them is effectively and widely diffused. Writers of computer code may work hard to eliminate all bugs and to document their code in a way that is very easy for potential adopters to understand before freely revealing it. Plant owners may repaint their plant, announce the availability of tours at a general industry meeting, and then provide a free lunch for their visitors.
+
+Innovators' /{active}/ efforts to diffuse information about their innovations suggest that there are positive, private rewards to be obtained from free revealing. A number of authors have considered what these might be. Allen (1983) proposed that reputation gained for a firm or for its managers might offset a reduction in profits for the firm caused by free revealing. Raymond (1999) and Lerner and Tirole (2002) elaborated on this idea when explaining free revealing by contributors to open source software development projects. Free revealing of high-quality code, they noted, can increase a programmer's reputation with his peers. This benefit can lead to other benefits, such as an increase in the programmer's value on the job market. Allen has argued that free revealing might have effects that actually increase a firm's profits if the revealed innovation is to some degree specific to assets owned by the innovator (see also Hirschleifer 1971).
+={Allen, R.+1;Hirschleifer, J.;Lerner, J.;Raymond, E.;Tirole, J.;Free revealing of innovation information:and open source software;Open source software:free revealing and}
+
+Free revealing may also increase an innovator's profit in other ways. When an innovating user freely reveals an innovation, the direct result is to increase the diffusion of that innovation relative to what it would be if the innovation were either licensed at a fee or held secret. The innovating user may then benefit from the increase in diffusion via a number of effects. Among these are network effects. (The classic illustration of a network effect is that the value of each telephone goes up as more are sold, because the value of a phone is strongly affected by the number of others who can be contacted in the network.) In addition, and very importantly, an innovation that is freely revealed and adopted by others can become an informal standard that may preempt the development and/or commercialization of other versions of the innovation. If, as Allen suggested, the innovation that is revealed is designed in a way that is especially appropriate to conditions unique to the innovator, this can result in creating a permanent source of advantage for that innovator.
+
+Being first to reveal a certain type of innovation increases a user firm's chances of having its innovation widely adopted, other things being equal. This may induce innovators to race to reveal first. Firms engaged in a patent race may disclose information voluntarily if the profits from success do not go only to the winner of the race. If being second quickly is preferable to being first relatively late, there will be an incentive for voluntary revealing in order to accelerate the race (de Fraja 1993).
+={de Fraja, G.}
+
+Incentives to freely reveal have been most deeply explored in the specific case of open source software projects. Students of the open source software development process report that innovating users have a number of motives for freely revealing their code to open source project managers and open source code users in general. If they freely reveal, others can debug and improve upon the modules they have contributed, to everyone's benefit. They are also motivated to have their improvement incorporated into the standard version of the open source software that is generally distributed by the volunteer open source user organization, because it will then be updated and maintained without further effort on the innovator's part. This volunteer organization is the functional equivalent of a manufacturer with respect to inducing manufacturer improvements, because a user-developed improvement will be assured of inclusion in new "official" software releases only if it is approved and adopted by the coordinating user group. Innovating users also report being motivated to freely reveal their code under a free or open source license by a number of additional factors. These include giving support to open code and "giving back" to those whose freely revealed code has been of value to them (Lakhani and Wolf 2005).
+={Lakhani, K.;Lakhani, K.;Wolf, B.;Free revealing of innovation information:and open source software+4;Open source software:free revealing and+4}
+
+By freely revealing information about an innovative product or process, a user makes it possible for manufacturers to learn about that innovation. Manufacturers may then improve upon it and/or offer it at a price lower than users' in-house production costs (Harhoff et al. 2003). When the improved version is offered for sale to the general market, the original user-innovator (and other users) can buy it and gain from in-house use of the improvements. For example, consider that manufacturers often convert user-developed innovations ("home-builts") into a much more robust and reliable form when preparing them for sale on the commercial market. Also, manufacturers offer related services, such as field maintenance and repair programs, that innovating users must otherwise provide for themselves.
+={iHarhoff, D.+1}
+
+A variation of this argument applies to the free revealing among competing manufacturers documented by Henkel (2003). Competing developers of embedded Linux systems were creating software that was specifically designed to run the hardware products of their specific clients. Each manufacturer could freely reveal this equipment-specific code without fear of direct competitive repercussions: it was applicable mainly to specific products made by a manufacturer's client, and it was less valuable to others. At the same time, all would jointly benefit from free revealing of improvements to the underlying embedded Linux code base, upon which they all build their proprietary products. After all, the competitive advantages of all their products depended on this code base's being equal to or better than the proprietary software code used by other manufacturers of similar products. Additionally, Linux software was a complement to hardware that many of the manufacturers in Henkel's sample also sold. Improved Linux software would likely increase sales of their complementary hardware products. (Complement suppliers' incentives to innovate have been modeled by Harhoff (1996).)
+={Linux;Henkel, J.}
+
+!_ Free Revealing and Reuse
+={Free revealing of innovation information+2}
+
+Of course, free revealing is of value only if others (re)use what has been revealed. It can be difficult to track what visitors to an information commons take away and reuse, and there is as yet very little empirical information on this important matter. Valuable forms of reuse range from the gaining of general ideas of development paths to pursue or avoid to the adoption of specific designs. For example, those who download software code from an open source project repository can use it to learn about approaches to solving a particular software problem and/or they may reuse portions of the downloaded code by inserting it directly into a software program of their own. Von Krogh et al. (2004) studied the latter type of code reuse in open source software and found it very extensive. Indeed, they report that /{most}/ of the lines of software code in the projects they studied were taken from the commons of other open source software projects and software libraries and reused.
+={von Krogh, G.+10}
+
+% Spaeth, S., 88,?
+
+In the case of academic publications, we see evidence that free revealing does increase reuse---a matter of great importance to academics. A citation is an indicator that information contained in an article has been reused: the article has been read by the citing author and found useful enough to draw to readers' attention. Recent empirical studies are finding that articles to which readers have open access---articles available for free download from an author's website, for example---are cited significantly more often than are equivalent articles that are available only from libraries or from publishers' fee-based websites. Antelman (2004) finds an increase in citations ranging from 45 percent in philosophy to 91 percent in mathematics. She notes that "scholars in diverse disciplines are adopting open-access practices at a surprisingly high rate and are being rewarded for it, as reflected in [citations]."
+={Antelman, K.}
+
+!_ Implications for Theory
+
+We have seen that in practice free revealing may often be the best practical course of action for innovators. How can we tie these observations back to theory, and perhaps improve theory as a result? At present there are two major models that characterize how innovation gets rewarded. The private investment model is based on the assumption that innovation will be supported by private investors expecting to make a profit. To encourage private investment in innovation, society grants innovators some limited rights to the innovations they generate via patents, copyrights, and trade secrecy laws. These rights are intended to assist innovators in getting private returns from their innovation-related investments. At the same time, the monopoly control that society grants to innovators and the private profits they reap create a loss to society relative to the free and unfettered use by all of the knowledge that the innovators have created. Society elects to suffer this social loss in order to increase innovators' incentives to invest in the creation of new knowledge (Arrow 1962; Dam 1995).
+={Arrow, K.;Dam, K.;Intellectual property rights:copyrights and|trade secrets and;Free revealing of innovation information:copyright protection and|patents and|trade secrecy and}
+
+The second major model for inducing innovation is termed the collective action model. It applies to the provision of public goods, where a public good is defined by its non-excludability and non-rivalry: if any user consumes it, it cannot be feasibly withheld from other users, and all consume it on the same terms (Olson 1967). The collective action model assumes that innovators are /{required}/ to relinquish control of knowledge or other assets they have developed to a project and so make them a public good. This requirement enables collective action projects to avoid the social loss associated with the restricted access to knowledge of the private investment model. At the same time, it creates problems with respect to recruiting and motivating potential contributors. Since contributions to a collective action project are a public good, users of that good have the option of waiting for others to contribute and then free riding on what they have done (Olson 1967).
+={Olson, M.+1;Free revealing of innovation information:collective action model for+6;Social welfare:free revealing and}
+
+The literature on collective action deals with the problem of recruiting contributors to a task in a number of ways. Oliver and Marwell (1988) and Taylor and Singleton (1993) predict that the description of a project's goals and the nature of recruiting efforts should matter a great deal. Other researchers argue that the creation and deployment of selective incentives for contributors is essential to the success of collective action projects. For example, projects may grant special credentials to especially productive project members (Friedman and McAdam 1992; Oliver 1980). The importance of selective incentives suggests that small groups will be most successful at executing collective action projects. In small groups, selective incentives can be carefully tailored for each group member and individual contributions can be more effectively monitored (Olson 1967; Ostrom 1998).
+={Friedman, D.;Marwell, G.;McAdam, D.;Oliver, P.;Ostrom, E.;Singleton, S.;Taylor, M.}
+
+Interestingly, successful open source software projects do not appear to follow any of the guidelines for successful collective action projects just described. With respect to project recruitment, goal statements provided by successful open source software projects vary from technical and narrow to ideological and broad, and from precise to vague and emergent (for examples, see goal statements posted by projects hosted on Sourceforge.net).~{ As a specific example of a project with an emergent goal, consider the beginnings of the Linux open source software project. In 1991, Linus Torvalds, a student in Finland, wanted a Unix operating system that could be run on his PC, which was equipped with a 386 processor. Minix was the only software available at that time but it was commercial, closed source, and it traded at US$150. Torvalds found this too expensive, and started development of a Posix-compatible operating system, later known as Linux. Torvalds did not immediately publicize a very broad and ambitious goal, nor did he attempt to recruit contributors. He simply expressed his private motivation in a message he posted on July 3, 1991, to the USENET newsgroup comp.os.minix (Wayner 2000): /{Hello netlanders, Due to a project I'm working on (in minix), I'm interested in the posix standard definition.}/ [Posix is a standard for UNIX designers. A software using POSIX is compatible with other UNIX-based software.] /{Could somebody please point me to a (preferably) machine-readable format of the latest posix-rules? Ftp-sites would be nice.}/ In response, Torvalds got several return messages with Posix rules and people expressing a general interest in the project. By the early 1992, several skilled programmers contributed to Linux and the number of users increased by the day. Today, Linux is the largest open source development project extant in terms of number of developers. }~ Further, such projects may engage in no active recruiting beyond simply posting their intended goals and access address on a general public website customarily used for this purpose (for examples, see the Freshmeat.net website). Also, projects have shown by example that they can be successful even if large groups---perhaps thousands---of contributors are involved. Finally, open source software projects seem to expend no effort to discourage free riding. Anyone is free to download code or seek help from project websites, and no apparent form of moral pressure is applied to make a compensating contribution (e.g., "If you benefit from this code, please also contribute . . .").
+={Free revealing of innovation information:open source software and}
+
+What can explain these deviations from expected practice? What, in other words, can explain free revealing of privately funded innovations and enthusiastic participation in projects to produce a public good? From the theoretical perspective, Georg von Krogh and I think the answer involves revisiting and easing some of the basic assumptions and constraints conventionally applied to the private investment and collective action models of innovation. Both, in an effort to offer "clean" and simple models for research, have excluded from consideration a very rich and fertile middle ground where incentives for private investment and collective action can coexist, and where a "private-collective" innovation model can flourish. More specifically, a private-collective model of innovation occupies the middle ground between the private investment model and the collective action model by:
+={Free revealing of innovation information:private-collective model for+3;Private-collective model+3;Social welfare:private-collective model and+3}
+
+_* Eliminating the assumption in private investment models that free revealing of innovations developed with private funds will represent a loss of private profit for the innovator and so will not be engaged in voluntarily. Instead the private-collective model proposes that under common conditions free revealing of proprietary innovations may increase rather than decrease innovators' private profit.
+
+_* Eliminating the assumption in collective action models that a free rider obtains benefits from the completed public good that are equal to those a contributor obtains. Instead, the private-collective model proposes that contributors to a public good can /{inherently}/ obtain greater private benefits than free riders. These provide incentives for participation in collective action projects that need not be managed by project personnel (von Hippel and von Krogh 2003).
+={von Hippel, E.}
+
+In summation: Innovations developed at private cost are often revealed freely, and this behavior makes economic sense for participants under commonly encountered conditions. A private-collective model of innovation incentives can explain why and when knowledge created by private funding may be offered freely to all. When the conditions are met, society appears to have the best of both worlds---new knowledge is created by private funding and then freely revealed to all.
+
+1~ 7 Innovation Communities
+={Innovation communities+56:innovation and+56}
+
+It is now clear that users often innovate, and that they often freely reveal their innovations. But what about informal cooperation among users? What about /{organized}/ cooperation in development of innovations and other matters? The answer is that both flourish among user-innovators. Informal user-to-user cooperation, such as assisting others to innovate, is common. Organized cooperation in which users interact within communities, is also common. Innovation communities are often stocked with useful tools and infrastructure that increase the speed and effectiveness with which users can develop and test and diffuse their innovations.
+
+In this chapter, I first show that user innovation is a widely distributed process and so can be usefully drawn together by innovation communities. I next explore the valuable functions such communities can provide. I illustrate with a discussion of free and open source software projects, a very successful form of innovation community in the field of software development. Finally, I point out that innovation communities are by no means restricted to the development of information products such as software, and illustrate with the case of a user innovation community specializing in the development of techniques and equipment used in the sport of kitesurfing.
+={Free software;Kitesurfing;Open source software:innovation communities and}
+
+!_ User Innovation Is Widely Distributed
+={Users:innovation and+8;Innovation:distributed process of+8}
+
+When users' needs are heterogeneous and when the information drawn on by innovators is sticky, it is likely that product-development activities will be widely distributed among users, rather than produced by just a few prolific user-innovators. It should also be the case that different users will tend to develop different innovations. As was shown in chapter 5, individual users and user firms tend to develop innovations that serve their particular needs, and that fall within their individual "low-cost innovation niches." For example, a mountain biker who specializes in jumping from high platforms and who is also an orthopedic surgeon will tend to develop innovations that draw on both of these types of information: he might create a seat suspension that reduces shock to bikers' spines upon landing from a jump. Another mountain biker specializing in the same activity but with a different background---say aeronautical engineering---is likely to draw on this different information to come up with a different innovation. From the perspective of Fleming (2001), who has studied innovations as consisting of novel combinations of pre-existing elements, such innovators are using their membership in two distinct communities to combine previously disparate elements. Baldwin and Clark (2003) and Henkel (2004a) explore this type of situation in theoretical terms.
+={Baldwin, C.;Clark, K.;Fleming, L.;Henkel, J.;User need;Custom products:heterogeneity of user needs and+3;Sticky information:innovation and+3;Users:low-cost innovation niches of+3;Scientific instruments;Sporting equipment:innovation communities and;Mountain biking;Local information+1;Users:innovate-or-buy decisions by}
+
+The underlying logic echoes that offered by Eric Raymond regarding "Linus's Law" in software debugging. In software, discovering and repairing subtle code errors or bugs can be very costly (Brooks 1979). However, Raymond argued, the same task can be greatly reduced in cost and also made faster and more effective when it is opened up to a large community of software users that each may have the information needed to identify and fix some bugs. Under these conditions, Raymond says, "given a large enough beta tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone. Or, less formally, `given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."' He explains: "More users find more bugs because adding more users adds more ways of stressing the program. . . . Each [user] approaches the task of bug characterization with a slightly different perceptual set and analytical toolkit, a different angle on the problem. So adding more beta-testers . . . increases the probability that someone's toolkit will be matched to the problem in such a way that the bug is shallow to /{that person}/." (1999, pp. 41--44)
+={Brooks, F.;Raymond, E.;Free software;Open source software:innovation communities and;Innovation communities:and sources of innovation+2}
+
+The analogy to distributed user innovation is, of course, that each user has a different set of innovation-related needs and other assets in place which makes a particular type of innovation low-cost ("shallow") to /{that user}/. The assets of /{some}/ user will then generally be found to be a just-right fit to many innovation development problems. (Note that this argument does not mean that /{all}/ innovations will be cheaply done by users, or even done by users at all. In essence, users will find it cheaper to innovate when manufacturers' economies of scale with respect to product development are more than offset by the greater scope of innovation assets held by the collectivity of individual users.)
+
+Available data support these expectations. In chapter 2 we saw evidence that users tended to develop very different innovations. To test whether commercially important innovations are developed by just a few users or by many, I turn to studies documenting the functional sources of important innovations later commercialized. As is evident in table 7.1, most of the important innovations attributed to users in these studies were done by /{different}/ users. In other words, user innovation does tend to be widely distributed in a world characterized by users with heterogeneous needs and heterogeneous stocks of sticky information.
+={Innovation:functional sources of}
+
+!_ Table 7.1
+User innovation is widely distributed, with few users developing more than one major innovation. NA: data not available.
+={Riggs, W.;Shah, S.;von Hippel, E.;Scientific instruments;Sporting equipment:innovation communities and}
+
+Number of users developing this number of major innovations
+
+table{~h c7; 30; 10; 10; 10; 10; 10; 20;
+
+~
+1
+2
+3
+6
+NA
+Sample (n)
+
+Scientific Instruments^{a}^
+28
+0
+1
+0
+1
+32
+
+Scientific Instruments^{b}^
+20
+1
+0
+1
+0
+28
+
+Process equipment^{c}^
+19
+1
+0
+0
+8
+29
+
+Sports equipment^{d}^
+7
+0
+0
+0
+0
+7
+
+}table
+
+a. Source: von Hippel 1988, appendix: GC, TEM, NMR Innovations. \\
+b. Source: Riggs and von Hippel, Esca and AES. \\
+c. Source: von Hippel 1988, appendix: Semiconductor and pultrusion process equipment innovations. \\
+d. Source: Shah 2000, appendix A: skateboarding, snowboarding, and windsurfing innovations.
+
+!_ Innovation Communities
+={Innovation communities:and sources of innovation}
+
+User-innovators may be generally willing to freely reveal their information. However, as we have seen, they may be widely distributed and each may have only one or a few innovations to offer. The practical value of the "freely revealed innovation commons" these users collectively offer will be increased if their information is somehow made conveniently accessible. This is one of the important functions of "innovation communities."
+={Information commons+3}
+
+I define "innovation communities" as meaning nodes consisting of individuals or firms interconnected by information transfer links which may involve face-to-face, electronic, or other communication. These can, but need not, exist within the boundaries of a membership group. They often do, but need not, incorporate the qualities of communities for participants, where "communities" is defined as meaning"networks of interpersonal ties that provide sociability, support, information, a sense of belonging, and social identity" (Wellman et al. 2002, p. 4).~{ When they do not incorporate these qualities, they would be more properly referred to as networks---but communities is the term commonly used, and I follow that practice here. }~
+={Wellman, B.}
+
+Innovation communities can have users and/or manufacturers as members and contributors. They can flourish when at least some innovate and voluntarily reveal their innovations, and when others find the information revealed to be of interest. In previous chapters, we saw that these conditions do commonly exist with respect to user-developed innovations: users innovate in many fields, users often freely reveal, and the information revealed is often used by manufacturers to create commercial products---a clear indication many users, too, find this information of interest.
+
+Innovation communities are often specialized, serving as collection points and repositories for information related to narrow categories of innovations. They may consist only of information repositories or directories in the form of physical or virtual publications. For example, userinnovation.mit.edu is a specialized website where researchers can post articles on their findings and ideas related to innovation by users. Contributors and non-contributors can freely access and browse the site as a convenient way to find such information.
+
+Innovation communities also can offer additional important functions to participants. Chat rooms and email lists with public postings can be provided so that contributors can exchange ideas and provide mutual assistance. Tools to help users develop, evaluate, and integrate their work can also be provided to community members---and such tools are often developed by community members themselves.
+
+All the community functionality just mentioned and more is visible in communities that develop free and open source software programs. The emergence of this particular type of innovation community has also done a great deal to bring the general phenomenon to academic and public notice, and so I will describe them in some detail. I first discuss the history and nature of free and open source software itself (the product). Next I outline key characteristics of the free and open source software development projects typically used to create and maintain such software (the community-based development process).
+={Free software+10;Innovation communities:open source software and+22;Open source software:innovation communities and+22}
+
+!_ Open Source Software
+={Open source software:innovation and+21}
+
+In the early days of computer programming, commercial "packaged" software was a rarity---if you wanted a particular program for a particular purpose, you typically wrote the code yourself or hired someone to write it for you. Much of the software of the 1960s and the 1970s was developed in academic and corporate laboratories by scientists and engineers. These individuals found it a normal part of their research culture to freely give and exchange software they had written, to modify and build on one another's software, and to freely share their modifications. This communal behavior became a central feature of "hacker culture." (In communities of open source programmers, "hacker" is a positive term that is applied to talented and dedicated programmers.~{ !{hacker}! n. [originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe] 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. 2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming. 3. A person capable of appreciating !{hack value}!. 4. A person who is good at programming quickly. . . . 8. [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. Hence /{password hacker}/, /{network hacker}/. The correct term for this sense is !{cracker}! (Raymond 1996). }~ )
+={Hackers+4;Raymond, E.}
+
+In 1969, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a part of the US Department of Defense, established the ARPANET, the first transcontinental high-speed computer network. This network eventually grew to link hundreds of universities, defense contractors, and research laboratories. Later succeeded by the Internet, it also allowed hackers to exchange software code and other information widely, easily, and cheaply---and also enabled them to spread hacker norms of behavior.
+
+The communal hacker culture was very strongly present among a group of programmers---software hackers---housed at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the 1960s and the 1970s (Levy 1984). In the 1980s this group received a major jolt when MIT licensed some of the code created by its hacker employees to a commercial firm. This firm, in accordance with normal commercial practice, then promptly restricted access to the "source code"~{ Source code is a sequence of instructions to be executed by a computer to accomplish a program's purpose. Programmers write computer software in the form of source code, and also document that source code with brief written explanations of the purpose and design of each section of their program. To convert a program into a form that can actually operate a computer, source code is translated into machine code using a software tool called a compiler. The compiling process removes program documentation and creates a binary version of the program---a sequence of computer instructions consisting only of strings of ones and zeros. Binary code is very difficult for programmers to read and interpret. Therefore, programmers or firms that wish to prevent others from understanding and modifying their code will release only binary versions of the software. In contrast, programmers or firms that wish to enable others to understand and update and modify their software will provide them with its source code. (Moerke 2000, Simon 1996). }~ of that software, and so prevented non-company personnel---including the MIT hackers who had been instrumental in developing it---from continuing to use it as a platform for further learning and development.
+={Levy, S.;MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory+1;Innovation communities:open source software and;Open source software:innovation communities and}
+
+Richard Stallman, a brilliant programmer in MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, was especially distressed by the loss of access to communally developed source code. He also was offended by a general trend in the software world toward development of proprietary software packages and the release of software in forms that could not be studied or modified by others. Stallman viewed these practices as morally wrong impingements on the rights of software users to freely learn and create. In 1985, in response, he founded the Free Software Foundation and set about to develop and diffuse a legal mechanism that could preserve free access for all to the software developed by software hackers. Stallman's pioneering idea was to use the existing mechanism of copyright law to this end. Software authors interested in preserving the status of their software as "free" software could use their own copyright to grant licenses on terms that would guarantee a number of rights to all future users. They could do this by simply affixing a standard license to their software that conveyed these rights. The basic license developed by Stallman to implement this seminal idea was the General Public License or GPL (sometimes referred to as copyleft, in a play on the word "copyright"). Basic rights transferred to those possessing a copy of free software include the right to use it at no cost, the right to study its source code, the right to modify it, and the right to distribute modified or unmodified versions to others at no cost. Licenses conveying similar rights were developed by others, and a number of such licenses are currently used in the open source field. Free and open source software licenses do not grant users the full rights associated with free revealing as that term was defined earlier. Those who obtain the software under a license such as the GPL are restricted from certain practices. For example, they cannot incorporate GPL software into proprietary software that they then sell.~{ See www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#GPL }~ Indeed, contributors of code to open source software projects are very concerned with enforcing such restrictions in order to ensure that their code remains accessible to all (O'Mahony 2003).
+={Stallman, R.+2;Intellectual property rights:copyrights and|licensing of+1}
+
+The idea of free software did not immediately become mainstream, and industry was especially suspicious of it. In 1998, Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond agreed that a significant part of the problem resided in Stallman's term "free" software, which might understandably have an ominous ring to the ears of businesspeople. Accordingly, they, along with other prominent hackers, founded the open source software movement (Perens 1999). Open source software uses the licensing practices pioneered by the free software movement. It differs from that movement primarily on philosophical grounds, preferring to emphasize the practical benefits of its licensing practices over issues regarding the moral importance of granting users the freedoms offered by both free and open source software. The term "open source" is now generally used by both practitioners and scholars to refer to free or open source software, and that is the term I use in this book.
+={Perens, B.;Raymond, E.}
+
+Open source software has emerged as a major cultural and economic phenomenon. The number of open source software projects has been growing rapidly. In mid 2004, a single major infrastructure provider and repository for open source software projects, Sourceforge.net,~{ http://www.sourceforge.net }~ hosted 83,000 projects and had more than 870,000 registered users. A significant amount of software developed by commercial firms is also being released under open source licenses.
+
+!_ Open Source Software Development Projects
+
+Software can be termed "open source" independent of how or by whom it has been developed: the term denotes only the type of license under which it is made available. However, the fact that open source software is freely accessible to all has created some typical open source software development practices that differ greatly from commercial software development models---and that look very much like the "hacker culture" behaviors described above.
+={Hackers+1}
+
+Because commercial software vendors typically wish to sell the code they develop, they sharply restrict access to the source code of their software products to firm employees and contractors. The consequence of this restriction is that only insiders have the information required to modify and improve that proprietary code further (Meyer and Lopez 1995; Young, Smith, and Grimm 1996; Conner and Prahalad 1996). In sharp contrast, all are offered free access to the source code of open source software if that code is distributed by its authors. In early hacker days, this freedom to learn and use and modify software was exercised by informal sharing and co-development of code---often by the physical sharing and exchange of computer tapes and disks on which the code was recorded. In current Internet days, rapid technological advances in computer hardware and software and networking technologies have made it much easier to create and sustain a communal development style on ever-larger scales. Also, implementing new projects is becoming progressively easier as effective project design becomes better understood, and as prepackaged infrastructural support for such projects becomes available on the Web.
+={Conner, K.;Grimm, C.;Meyer, M.;Lopez, L.;Prahalad, C.;Smith, G.;Young, G.}
+
+Today, an open source software development project is typically initiated by an individual or a small group seeking a solution to an individual's or a firm's need. Raymond (1999, p. 32) suggests that "every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch" and that "too often software developers spend their days grinding away for pay at programs they neither need nor love. But not in the (open source) world. . . ." A project's initiators also generally become the project's "owners" or "maintainers" who take on responsibility for project management.~{ "The owner(s) [or `maintainers'] of an open source software project are those who have the exclusive right, recognized by the community at large, to redistribute modified versions. . . . According to standard open source licenses, all parties are equal in the evolutionary game. But in practice there is a very well-recognized distinction between `official' patches [changes to the software], approved and integrated into the evolving software by the publicly recognized maintainers, and `rogue' patches by third parties. Rogue patches are unusual and generally not trusted." (Raymond 1999, p. 89) }~ Early on, this individual or group generally develops a first, rough version of the code that outlines the functionality envisioned. The source code for this initial version is then made freely available to all via downloading from an Internet website established by the project. The project founders also set up infrastructure for the project that those interested in using or further developing the code can use to seek help, provide information or provide new open source code for others to discuss and test. In the case of projects that are successful in attracting interest, others do download and use and "play with" the code---and some of these do go on to create new and modified code. Most then post what they have done on the project website for use and critique by any who are interested. New and modified code that is deemed to be of sufficient quality and of general interest by the project maintainers is then added to the authorized version of the code. In many projects the privilege of adding to the authorized code is restricted to only a few trusted developers. These few then serve as gatekeepers for code written by contributors who do not have such access (von Krogh and Spaeth 2002).
+={Spaeth, S.;von Krogh, G.;Raymond, E.}
+
+Critical tools and infrastructure available to open source software project participants includes email lists for specialized purposes that are open to all. Thus, there is a list where code users can report software failures ("bugs") that they encounter during field use of the software. There is also a list where those developing the code can share ideas about what would be good next steps for the project, good features to add, etc. All of these lists are open to all and are also publicly archived, so anyone can go back and learn what opinions were and are on a particular topic. Also, programmers contributing to open source software projects tend to have essential tools, such as specific software languages, in common. These are generally not specific to a single project, but are available on the web. Basic toolkits held in common by all contributors tends to greatly ease interactions. Also, open source software projects have version-control software that allows contributors to insert new code contributions into the existing project code base and test them to see if the new code causes malfunctions in existing code. If so, the tool allows easy reversion to the status quo ante. This makes "try it and see" testing much more practical, because much less is at risk if a new contribution inadvertently breaks the code. Toolkits used in open source projects have been evolved through practice and are steadily being improved by user-innovators. Individual projects can now start up using standard infrastructure sets offered by sites such as Sourceforge.net.
+={Toolkits:open source software and}
+
+Two brief case histories will help to further convey the flavor of open source software development.
+
+!_ Apache Web Server Software
+={Apache web server software+3;Innovation communities:Apache web server software and+3}
+
+Apache web server software is used on web server computers that host web pages and provide appropriate content as requested by Internet browsers. Such 7 computers are a key element of the Internet-based World Wide Web infrastructure.
+
+The web server software that evolved into Apache was developed by University of Illinois undergraduate Rob McCool for, and while working at, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). The source code as developed and periodically modified by McCool was posted on the web so that users at other sites could download it, use it, modify it, and develop it further. When McCool departed NCSA in mid 1994, a small group of webmasters who had adopted his web server software for their own sites decided to take on the task of continued development. A core group of eight users gathered all documentation and bug fixes and issued a consolidated patch. This "patchy" web server software evolved over time into Apache. Extensive user feedback and modification yielded Apache 1.0, released on December 1, 1995.
+={McCool, Rob}
+
+In 4 years, after many modifications and improvements contributed by many users, Apache became the most popular web server software on the Internet, garnering many industry awards for excellence. Despite strong competition from commercial software developers such as Microsoft and Netscape, it is currently used by over 60 percent of the world's millions of websites. Modification and updating of Apache by users and others continues, with the release of new versions being coordinated by a central group of 22 volunteers.
+={Microsoft}
+
+!_ Fetchmail---An Internet Email Utility Program
+={Fetchmail+4;Innovation communities:fetchmail and+4}
+
+Fetchmail is an Internet email utility program that "fetches" email from central servers to a local computer. The open source project to develop, maintain, and improve this program was led by Eric Raymond (1999).
+={Raymond, E.+3}
+
+Raymond first began to puzzle about the email delivery problem in 1993 because he was personally dissatisfied with then-existing solutions. "What I wanted," Raymond recalled (1999, p. 31), "was for my mail to be delivered on snark, my home system, so that I would be notified when it arrived and could handle it using all my local tools." Raymond decided to try and develop a better solution. He began by searching databases in the open source world for an existing, well-coded utility that he could use as a development base. He knew it would be efficient to build on others' related work if possible, and in the world of open source software (then generally called free software) this practice is understood and valued. Raymond explored several candidate open source programs, and settled on one in small-scale use called "popclient." He developed a number of improvements to the program and proposed them to the then maintainer of popclient. It turned out that this individual had lost interest in working further on the program, and so his response to Raymond's suggestions was to offer his role to Raymond so that he could evolve the popclient further as he chose.
+
+Raymond accepted the role of popclient's maintainer, and over the next months he improved the program significantly in conjunction with advice and suggestions from other users. He carefully cultivated his more active beta list of popclient users by regularly communicating with them via messages posted on an public electronic bulletin board set up for that purpose. Many responded by volunteering information on bugs they had found and perhaps fixed, and by offering improvements they had developed for their own use. The quality of these suggestions was often high because "contributions are received not from a random sample, but from people who are interested enough to use the software, learn about how it works, attempt to find solutions to the problems they encounter, and actually produce an apparently reasonable fix. Anyone who passes all these filters is highly likely to have something useful to contribute." (ibid., p. 42)
+
+Eventually, Raymond arrived at an innovative design that he knew worked well because he and his beta list of co-developers had used it, tested it and improved it every day. Popclient (now renamed fetchmail) became standard software used by millions users. Raymond continues to lead the group of volunteers that maintain and improve the software as new user needs and conditions dictate.
+
+!_ Development of Physical Products by Innovation Communities
+={Innovation communities:physical products and+14}
+
+User innovation communities are by no means restricted to the development of information products like software. They also are active in the development of physical products, and in very similar ways. Just as in the case of communities devoted to information product, communities devoted to physical products can range from simple information exchange sites to sites well furnished with tools and infrastructure. Within sports, Franke and Shah's study illustrates relatively simple community infrastructure. Thus, the boardercross community they studied consisted of semi-professional athletes from all over the world who meet in up to 10 competitions a year in Europe, North America, and Japan. Franke and Shah report that community members knew one another well, and spent a considerable amount of time together. They also assisted one another in developing and modifying equipment for their sport. However, the community had no specialized sets of tools to support joint innovation development.
+={Franke, N.;Shah, S.;Innovation communities:sporting equipment and+2}
+
+More complex communities devoted to the development of physical products often look similar to open source software development communities in terms of tools and infrastructure. As an example, consider the recent formation of a community dedicated to the development and diffusion of information regarding novel kitesurfing equipment. Kitesurfing is a water sport in which the user stands on a special board, somewhat like a surfboard, and is pulled along by holding onto a large, steerable kite. Equipment and technique have evolved to the point that kites can be guided both with and against the wind by a skilled kitesurfer, and can lift rider and board many meters into the air for tens of seconds at a time.
+={Innovation communities:kitesurfing and+1;Kitesurfing+1}
+
+Designing kites for kitesurfing is a sophisticated undertaking, involving low-speed aerodynamical considerations that are not yet well understood. Early kites for kitesurfing were developed and built by user-enthusiasts who were inventing both kitesurfing techniques and kitesurfing equipment interdependently. In about 2001, Saul Griffith, an MIT PhD student with a long-time interest in kitesurfing and kite development, decided that kite-surfing would benefit from better online community interaction. Accordingly, he created a site for the worldwide community of user-innovators in kitesurfing (www.zeroprestige.com). Griffith began by posting patterns for kites he had designed on the site and added helpful hints and tools for kite construction and use. Others were invited to download this information for free and to contribute their own if they wished. Soon other innovators started to post their own kite designs, improved construction advice for novices, and sophisticated design tools such as aerodynamics modeling software and rapid prototyping software. Some kitesurfers contributing innovations to the site had top-level technical skills; at least one was a skilled aerodynamicist employed by an aerospace firm.
+={Griffith, S.;Zeroprestige.com}
+
+Note that physical products are information products during the design stage. In earlier days, information about an evolving design was encoded on large sheets of paper, called blueprints, that could be copied and shared. The information on blueprints could be understood and assessed by fellow designers, and could also be used by machinists to create the actual physical products represented. Today, designs for new products are commonly encoded in computer-aided design (CAD) files. These files can be created and seen as two-dimensional and three-dimensional renderings by designers. The designs they contain can also be subjected to automated analysis by various engineering tools to determine, for example, whether they can stand up to stresses to which they will be subjected. CAD files can then be downloaded to computer-controlled fabrication machinery that will actually build the component parts of the design.
+
+The example of the kitesurfing group's methods of sharing design information illustrates the close relationship between information and physical products. Initially, users in the group exchanged design ideas by means of simple sketches transferred over the Internet. Then group members learned that computerized cutters used by sail lofts to cut sails from large pieces of cloth are suited to cutting cloth for surfing kites. They also learned that sail lofts were interested in their business. Accordingly, innovation group members began to exchange designs in the form of CAD files compatible with sail lofts' cutting equipment. When a user was satisfied with a design, he would transmit the CAD file to a local sail loft for cutting. The pieces were then sewn together by the user or sent to a sewing facility for assembly. The total time required to convert an information product into a physical one was less than a week, and the total cost of a finished kite made in this way was a few hundred dollars---much less than the price of a commercial kite.
+={Innovation communities:kitesurfing and;Kitesurfing}
+
+!_ User-to-User Assistance
+={Innovation communities:user-to-user assistance and+9;Users:innovation communities and+9}
+
+Clearly, user innovation communities can offer sophisticated support to individual innovators in the form of tools. Users in these innovation communities also tend to behave in a collaborative manner. That is, users not only distribute and evaluate completed innovations; they also volunteer other important services, such as assisting one another in developing and applying innovations.
+
+Franke and Shah (2003) studied the frequency with which users in four sporting communities assisted one another with innovations, and found that such assistance was very common (table 7.2). They also found that those who assisted were significantly more likely to be innovators themselves (table 7.3). The level of satisfaction reported by those assisted was very high. Seventy-nine percent agreed strongly with the statement "If I had a similar problem I would ask the same people again." Jeppesen (2005) similarly found extensive user-to-user help being volunteered in the field of computer gaming.
+={Franke, N.;Jeppesen, L.;Shah, S.;Innovation communities:sporting equipment and;Sporting equipment:innovation communities and+7|user-to-user assistance and+7}
+
+!_ Table 7.2
+Number of people from whom innovators received assistance.
+={Franke, N.;Shah, S.}
+
+table{~h c3; 34; 33; 33;
+
+Number of people
+Number of cases
+Percentage
+
+0
+0
+0
+
+1
+3
+6
+
+2
+14
+26
+
+3--5
+25
+47
+
+6--10
+8
+15
+
+> 10
+3
+6
+
+Total
+53
+100
+
+}table
+
+Source: Franke and Shah 2003, table 4.
+
+!_ Table 7.3
+Innovators tended to be the ones assisting others with their innovations (p < 0.0001).
+={Franke, N.;Shah, S.}
+
+table{~h c4; 40; 20; 20; 20;
+
+~
+Innovators
+Non-innovators
+Total
+
+Gave assistance
+28
+13
+41
+
+Did not give assistance
+32
+115
+147
+
+Total
+60
+128
+~
+
+}table
+
+Source: Franke and Shah 2003, table 7.
+
+Such helping activity is clearly important to the value contributed by innovation communities to community participants. Why people might voluntarily offer assistance is a subject of analysis. The answers are not fully in, but the mysteries lessen as the research progresses. An answer that appears to be emerging is that there are private benefits to assistance providers, just as there are for those who freely reveal innovations (Lakhani and von Hippel 2003). In other words, provision of free assistance may be explicable in terms of the private-collective model of innovation-related incentives discussed earlier.
+={Lakhani, K.;Free revealing of innovation information:in information communities|private-collective model for;Private-collective model;Social welfare:private-collective model and}
+
+1~ 8 Adapting Policy to User Innovation
+={Government policy+44:user innovation and+19;Innovation:and government policy+44;Manufacturers:innovation and+44;Users:government policy and+44|innovation and+44}
+
+Government policy makers generally wish to encourage activities that increase social welfare, and to discourage activities that reduce it. Therefore, it is important to ask about the social welfare effects of innovation by users. Henkel and von Hippel (2005) explored this matter and concluded that social welfare is likely to be higher in a world in which both users and manufacturers innovate than in a world in which only manufacturers innovate.
+={Henkel, J.;Government policy:manufacturer innovation and+1;Manufacturers:government policy and+1;Government policy:social welfare and+21;Social welfare: government policy+4;Users:social welfare and+4}
+
+In this chapter, I first explain that innovation by users complements manufacturer innovation and can also be a source of success-enhancing new product ideas for manufacturers. Next, I note that innovation by users does not exhibit several welfare-reducing effects associated with innovation by manufacturers. Finally, I evaluate the effects of public policies on user innovation, and suggest modifications to those that---typically unintentionally---discriminate against innovation by users.
+
+!_ Social Welfare Effects of User Innovation
+
+Social welfare functions are used in welfare economics to provide a measure of the material welfare of society, using economic variables as inputs. A social welfare function can be designed to express many social goals, ranging from population life expectancies to income distributions. Much of the literature on product diversity, innovation, and social welfare evaluates the impact of economic phenomena and policy on social welfare from the perspective of total income of a society without regard to how that income is distributed. We will take that viewpoint here.
+
+!_ User Innovation Improves Manufacturers' Success Rates
+={Government policy:manufacturer innovation and+5;Manufacturers:government policy and+5}
+
+It is striking that most new products developed and introduced to the market by manufacturers are commercial failures. Mansfield and Wagner (1975) found the overall probability of success for new industrial products to be only 27 percent. Elrod and Kelman (1987) found an overall probability of success of 26 percent for consumer products. Balachandra and Friar (1997), Poolton and Barclay (1998), and Redmond (1995) found similarly high failure rates in new products commercialized. Although there clearly is some recycling of knowledge from failed projects to successful ones, much of the investment in product development is highly specific. This high failure rate therefore represents a huge inefficiency in the conversion of R&D investment to useful output, and a corresponding reduction in social welfare.
+={Balachandra, R;Barclay, I.;Elrod, T.;Kelman, A.;Friar, J.;Mansfield, E.+1;Poolton, J.;Redmond, W.;Wagner, S.+1}
+
+% Robertson, A., 108
+
+Research indicates that the major reason for the commercial failure of manufacturer-developed products is poor understanding of users' needs by manufacturer-innovators. The landmark SAPPHO study showed this in a very clear and convincing way. This study was based on a sample of 31 product pairs. Members of each pair were selected to address the same function and market. (For example, one pair consisted of two "roundness meters," each developed by a separate company.) One member of each pair was a commercial success (which showed that there was a market for the product type); the other was a commercial failure. The development process for each successful and failing product was then studied in detail. The primary factor found to distinguish success from failure was that a deeper understanding of the market and the need was associated with successful projects (Achilladelis et al. 1971; Rothwell et al. 1974). A study by Mansfield and Wagner (1975) came to the same conclusion. More recent studies of information stickiness and the resulting asymmetries of information held by users and manufacturers, discussed in chapter 3, support the reasonableness of this general finding. Users are the generators of information regarding their needs. The decline in accuracy and completeness of need information after transfer from user to manufacturer is likely to be substantial because important elements of this information are likely to be sticky (von Hippel 1994; Ogawa 1998).
+={Achilladelis, B.;Ogawa, S.;Rothwell, R.;Project SAPPHO;SAPPHO study;Sticky information:innovation and}
+
+Innovations developed by users can improve manufacturers' information on users' needs and so improve their new product introduction success rates. Recall from previous chapters that innovation by users is concentrated among lead users. These lead users tend, as we have seen, to develop functionally novel products and product modifications addressing their own needs at the leading edge of markets where potential sales are both small and uncertain. Manufacturers, in contrast, have poorer information on users' needs and use contexts, and will prefer to manufacture innovations for larger, more certain markets. In the short term, therefore, user innovations will tend to /{complement}/ rather than substitute for products developed by manufacturers. In the longer term, the market as a whole catches up to the needs that motivated the lead user developments, and manufacturers will begin to find production of similar innovations to be commercially attractive. At that point, innovations by lead users can provide very useful information to manufacturers that they would not otherwise have.
+
+As lead users develop and test their solutions in their own use environments, they learn more about the real nature of their needs. They then often freely reveal information about their innovations. Other users then may adopt the innovations, comment on them, modify and improve them, and freely reveal what they have done in turn. All of this freely revealed activity by lead users offers manufacturers a great deal of useful information about both needs embodied in solutions and about markets. Given access to a user-developed prototype, manufacturers no longer need to understand users' needs very accurately and richly. Instead they have the much easier task of replicating the function of user prototypes that users have already demonstrated are responsive to their needs. For example, a manufacturer seeking to commercialize a new type of surgical equipment and coming upon prototype equipment developed by surgeons need not understand precisely why the innovators want this product or even precisely how it is used; the manufacturer need only understand that many surgeons appear willing to pay for it and then reproduce the important features of the user-developed prototypes in a commercial product.
+={Free revealing of innovation information:lead users and+35|users and;Surgical equipment}
+
+Observation of innovation by lead users and adoption by follow-on users also can give manufacturers a better understanding of the size of the potential market. Projections of product sales have been shown to be much more accurate when they are based on actual customer behavior than when they are based on potential buyers' pre-use expectations. Monitoring of field use of user-built prototypes and of their adoption by other users can give manufacturers rich data on precisely these matters and so should improve manufacturer's commercial success. In net, user innovation helps to reduce information asymmetries between users and manufacturers and so increases the efficiency of the innovation process.
+={Information asymmetries;Users:information asymmetries of}
+
+!_ User Innovation and Provisioning Biases
+
+The economic literature on the impact of innovation on social welfare generally seeks to understand effects that might induce society to create too many product variations (overprovisioning) or too few (underprovisioning) from the viewpoint of net social economic income (Chamberlin 1950). Greater variety of products available for purchase is assumed to be desirable, in that it enables consumers to get more precisely what they want and/or to own a more diverse array of products. However, increased product diversity comes at a cost: smaller quantities of each product will be produced on average. This in turn means that development-related and production-related economies of scale are likely to be less. The basic tradeoff between variety and cost is what creates the possibility of overprovisioning or underprovisioning product variety. Innovations such as flexible manufacturing may reduce fixed costs associated with increased diversity and so shift the optimal degree of diversity upward. Nonetheless, the conflict still persists.
+={Chamberlin, E.;Social welfare:innovation and+11}
+
+Henkel and I studied the welfare impact of adding users as a source of innovation to existing analyses of product diversity, innovation, and social welfare. Existing models uniformly contained the assumption that new products and services were supplied to the economy by manufacturers only. We found that the addition of innovation by users to these analyses largely avoids the welfare-reducing biases that had been identified. For example, consider "business stealing" (Spence 1976). This term refers to the fact that commercial manufacturers benefit by diverting business from their competitors. Since they do not take this negative externality into account, their private gain from introducing new products exceeds society's total gain, tilting the balance toward overprovision of variety. In contrast, a freely revealed user innovation may also reduce incumbents' business, but not to the innovator's benefit. Hence, innovation incentives are not socially excessive.
+={Henkel, J.;Spence, M.;Free revealing of innovation information:intellectual property rights and+11|social welfare and+5;Government policy:free revealing and+10;Government policy:provisioning biases and;Intellectual property rights:free revealing and+11;Users:social welfare and+5}
+
+Freely revealed innovations by users are also likely to reduce deadweight loss caused by pricing of products above their marginal costs. (Deadweight loss is a reduction in social welfare that occurs when goods are sold at a price above their marginal cost of production.) When users make information about their innovations available for free, and if the marginal cost of revealing that information is zero, an imitator only has to bear the cost of adoption. This is statically efficient. The availability of free user innovations can also induce sellers of competing commercial offerings to reduce their prices, thus indirectly leading to another reduction in dead-weight loss.
+
+Reducing prices toward marginal costs can also reduce incentives to over-provision variety (Tirole 1988).
+={Tirole, J.}
+
+Henkel and I also explored a few special situations where social welfare might be /{reduced}/ by the availability of freely revealed user innovations. One of these was the effect of reduced pricing power on manufacturers that create "platform" products. Often, a manufacturer of such a product will want to sell the platform---a razor, an ink-jet printer, a video-game player---at a low margin or a loss, and then price necessary add-ons (razor blades, ink cartridges, video games) at a much higher margin. If the possibility of freely revealed add-ons developed by users makes development of a platform unprofitable for a manufacturer, social welfare can thereby be reduced. However, it is only the razor-vs.-blade pricing scheme that may become unprofitable. Indeed, if the manufacturer makes positive margins on the platform, then the availability of user-developed add-ons can have a positive effect: it can increase the value of the platform to users, and so allow manufacturers to charge higher margins on it and/or sell more units. Jeppesen (2004) finds that this is in fact the outcome when users introduce free game modifications (called mods) operating on proprietary game software platform products (called engines) sold by game manufacturers. Even though the game manufacturers also sell mods commercially that compete with free user mods, many provide active support for the development and diffusion of user mods built on their proprietary game engines, because they find that the net result is increased sales and profits.
+={Henkel, J.;Jeppesen, L.;Government policy:intellectual property rights and|trade secrets and;Intellectual property rights:trade secrets and}
+
+!_ Public Policy Choices
+
+If innovation by users is welfare enhancing and is also significant in amount and value, then it makes sense to consider the effects of public policy on user innovation. An important first step would be to collect better data. Currently, much innovation by users---which may in aggregate turn out to be a very large fraction of total economic investment in innovation--- goes uncounted or undercounted. Thus, innovation effort that is volunteered by users, as is the case with many contributions to open source software, is currently not recorded by governmental statistical offices. This is also the case for user innovation that is integrated with product and service production. For example, much process innovation by manufacturers occurs on the factory floor as they produce goods and simultaneously learn how to improve their production processes. Similarly, many important innovations developed by surgeons are woven into learning by doing as they deliver services to patients.
+={Open source software:innovation communities and}
+
+Next, it will be important to review innovation-related public policies to identify and correct biases with respect to sources of innovation. On a level playing field, users will become a steadily more important source of innovation, and will increasingly substitute for or complement manufacturers' innovation-related activities. Transitions required of policy making to support this ongoing evolution are important but far from painless. To illustrate, we next review issues related to the protection intellectual property, related to policies restricting product modifications, related to source-biased subsidies for R&D, and related to control over innovation diffusion channels.
+={Government policy:provisioning biases and|intellectual property rights and+16|patents and+8;Intellectual property rights:patents and+8}
+
+!_ Intellectual Property
+
+Earlier, when we explored why users might freely reveal their innovations, we concluded that it was often their best /{practical}/ choice in view of how intellectual property law actually functions (or, often, does not function) to protect innovations today. For example, recall from chapter 6 that most innovators do not judge patents to be very effective, and that the availability of patent grant protection does not appear to increase innovation investments in most fields. Recall also that patent protection is costly to obtain, and thus of little value to developers of minor innovations---with most innovations being minor. We also saw that in practice it was often difficult for innovators to protect their innovations via trade secrecy: it is hard to keep a secret when many others know similar things, and when some of these information holders will lose little or nothing from freely revealing what they know.
+={Intellectual property rights:trade secrets and;Government policy:trade secrets and;Intellectual property rights:trade secrets and}
+
+These findings show that the characteristics of present-day intellectual property regimes as actually experienced by innovators are far from the expectations of theorists and policy makers. The fundamental reason that societies elect to grant intellectual property rights to innovators is to increase private investment in innovation. At the same time, economists have long known that there will be social welfare losses associated with these grants: owners of intellectual property will generally restrict the use of their legally protected information in order to increase private profits. In other words, intellectual property rights are thought to be good for innovation and bad for competition. The consensus view has long been that the good outweighs the bad, but Foray (2004) explains that this consensus is now breaking down. Some---not all---are beginning to think that intellectual property rights are bad for innovation too in many cases.
+={oray, D.;Government policy:intellectual commons and+13}
+
+The need to grant private intellectual property rights to achieve socially desirable levels of innovation is being questioned in the light of apparent counterexamples. Thus, as we saw earlier, open source software communities do not allow contributing innovators to use their intellectual property rights to control the use of their code. Instead, contributors use their authors' copyright to assign their code to a common pool to which all--- contributors and non-contributors alike---are granted equal access. Despite this regime, innovation seems to be flourishing. Why? As we saw in our earlier discussions of why innovators might freely reveal their innovations, researchers now understand that significant private rewards to innovation can exist independent of intellectual property rights grants. As a general principle, intellectual property rights grants should not be offered if and when developers would seek protection but would innovate without it.
+={Intellectual property rights:copyrights and;Open source software:innovation communities and+1;Innovation:open source software and+1}
+
+The debate rages. Gallini and Scotchmer (2002) assert that "intellectual property is the foundation of the modern information economy" and that "it fuels the software, lifesciences and computer industries, and pervades most other products we consume." They also conclude that the positive or negative effect of intellectual property rights on innovation depends centrally on "the ease with which innovators can enter into agreements for rearranging and exercising those rights." This is precisely the rub from the point of view of those who urge that present intellectual property regimes be reconsidered: it is becoming increasingly clear that in practice rearranging and exercising intellectual property rights is often difficult rather than easy. It is also becoming clear that the protections afforded by existing intellectual property law can be strategically deployed to achieve private advantage at the expense of general innovative progress (Foray 2004).
+={oray, D.;Gallini, N.;Scotchmer, S.}
+
+Consider an effect first pointed out by Merges and Nelson (1990) and further explored as the "tragedy of the anticommons" by Heller (1998) and Heller and Eisenberg (1998). A resource such as innovation-related information is prone to underuse---a tragedy of the anticommons---when multiple owners each have a right to exclude others and no one has an effective privilege of use. The nature of the patent grant can lead to precisely this type of situation. Patent law is so arranged that an owner of a patent is not granted the right to practice its invention---it is only granted the right to exclude others from practicing it. For example, suppose you invent and patent the chair. I then follow by inventing and patenting the rocking chair---implemented by building rockers onto a chair covered by your patent. In this situation I cannot manufacture a rocking chair without getting a license from you for the use of your chair patent, and you cannot build rocking chairs either without a license to my rocker patent. If we cannot agree on licensing terms, no one will have the right to build rocking chairs.
+={Eisenberg, R.+1;Heller, M.+1;Merges, Robert;Nelson, R.;Government policy:user innovation and+19}
+
+In theory and in a world of costless transactions, people could avoid tragedies of the anticommons by licensing or trading their intellectual property rights. In practice the situation can be very different. Heller and Eisenberg point specifically to the field of biomedical research, and argue that conditions for anticommons effects do exist there. In that field, patents are routinely allowed on small but important elements of larger research problems, and upstream research is increasingly likely to be private. "Each upstream patent," Heller and Eisenberg note, "allows its owner to set up another tollbooth on the road to product development, adding to the cost and slowing the pace of downstream biomedical innovation."
+={Transaction costs}
+
+A second type of strategic behavior based on patent rights involves investing in large portfolios of patents to create "patent thickets"---dense networks of patent claims across a wide field (Merges and Nelson 1990; Hall and Ham Ziedonis 2001; Shapiro 2001; Bessen 2003). Patent thickets create plausible grounds for patent infringement suits across a wide field. Owners of patent thickets can use the threat of such suits to discourage others from investing research dollars in areas of technical advance relevant to their products. Note that this use of patents is precisely opposite to policy mak' intentions to stimulate innovation by providing ways for innovators to assert intellectual property rights. Indeed, Bessen and Hunt (2004) have found in the field of software that, on average, as firm's investments in patent protection go up, their investments in research and development actually go down. If this relationship proves causal, there is a reasonable explanation from the viewpoint of private profit: corporations that can use a patent thicket to deter others' research in a field might well decide that there is less need to do research of their own.
+={Bessen, J.;Hall, B.;Hunt, R.;Merges, Robert;Nelson, R.;Shapiro, C.;Ziedonis, R.;Government policy:patent thickets and;Intellectual property rights:patent thickets and}
+
+Similar innovation-retarding strategies can be applied by owners of large collections of copyrighted work in the movie, publishing, and software fields. Copyright owners can prevent others from building new works on characters (e.g. Mickey Mouse) that are already familiar to customers. The result is that owners of large portfolios of copyrighted work can gain an advantage over those with no or small portfolios in the creation of derivative works. Indeed, Benkler (2002) argues that institutional changes strengthening intellectual property protection tend to foster concentration of information production in general. Lessig (2001) and Boldrin and Levine (2002) arrive at a similarly negative valuation of overly strong and lengthy copyright protection.
+={Benkler, Y.;Boldrin, M.;Levine, D.;Lessig, L.;Intellectual property rights:copyrights and;Government policy:copyrights and}
+
+These types of innovation-discouraging effects can affect innovation by users especially strongly. The distributed innovation system we have documented consists of users each of whom might have only a few innovations and a small amount of intellectual property. Such innovators are clearly hurt differentially by a system that gives advantage to the owners of large shares of the intellectual property in a field.
+
+What can be done? A solution approach open to policy makers is to change intellectual property law so as to level the playing field. But owners of large amounts of intellectual property protected under the present system are often politically powerful, so this type of solution will be difficult to achieve.
+
+Fortunately, an alternative solution approach may be available to innovators themselves. Suppose that many elect to contribute the intellectual property they individually develop to a commons in a particular field. If the commons then grows to contain reasonable substitutes for much of the proprietary intellectual property relevant to the field, the relative advantage accruing to large holders of this information will diminish and perhaps even disappear. At the same time and for the same reason, the barriers that privately held stocks of intellectual property currently may raise to further intellectual advance will also diminish. Lessig supports this possibility with his creation and publication of standard "Creative Commons" licenses on the website creativecommons.org. Authors interested in contributing their work to the commons, perhaps with some restrictions, can easily find and adopt an appropriate license at that site.
+={Lessig, L.;Intellectual commons+13;Intellectual property rights:intellectual commons and+13;Open source software:intellectual commons and+13|intellectual property rights and+13;Intellectual property rights:licensing of}
+
+Reaching agreement on conditions for the formation of an intellectual commons can be difficult. Maurer (2005) makes this clear in his cautionary tale of the struggle and eventual failure to create a commons for data on human mutations. However, success is possible. For example, an extensive intellectual commons of software code is contained and maintained in the many open source software projects that now exist.
+={Maurer, S.;Innovation communities+2}
+
+Interesting examples also exist regarding on the impact a commons can have on the value of intellectual property innovators seek to hold apart from it. Weber (2004) recounts the following anecdote: In 1988, Linux developers were building new graphical interfaces for their open source software. One of the most promising of these, KDE, was offered under the General Public License. However, Matthias Ettrich, its developer, had built KDE using a proprietary graphical library called Qt. He felt at the time that this could be an acceptable solution because Qt was of good quality and Troll Tech, owner of Qt, licensed Qt at no charge under some circumstances. However, Troll Tech did require a developer's fee be paid under other circumstances, and some Linux developers were concerned about having code not licensed under the GPL as part of their code. They tried to convince Troll Tech to change the Qt license so that it would be under the GPL when used in free software. But Troll Tech, as was fully within its rights, refused to do this. Linux developers then, as was fully within their rights, began to develop open source alternatives to Qt that could be licensed under the GPL. As those projects moved toward success, Troll Tech recognized that Qt might be surpassed and effectively shut out of the Linux market. In 2000 the company therefore decided to license Qt under the GPL.
+={Ettrich, M.;Linux;Weber, S.;Intellectual property rights:licensing of+1;Linux}
+
+Similar actions can keep conditions for free access to materials held within a commons from degrading and being lost over time. Chris Hanson, a Principal Research Scientist at MIT, illustrates this with an anecdote regarding an open source software component called ipfilter. The author of ipfilter attempted to "lock" the program by changing licensing terms of his program to disallow the distribution of modified versions. His reasoning was that Ipfilter, a network-security filter, must be as bug-free as possible, and that this could best be ensured by his controlling access. His actions ignited a flame war in which the author was generally argued to be selfish and overreaching. His program, then an essential piece of BSD operating systems, was replaced by newly written code in some systems within the year. The author, Hanson notes, has since changed his licensing terms back to a standard BSD-style (unrestricted) license.
+={Hanson, C.}
+
+We will learn over time whether and how widely the practice of creating and defending intellectual commons diffuses across fields. There obviously can be cases where it will continue to make sense for innovators, and for society as well, to protect innovations as private intellectual property. However, it is likely that many user innovations are kept private not so much out of rational motives as because of a general, not-thought-through attitude that "we do not give away our intellectual property," or because the administrative cost of revealing is assumed to be higher than the benefits. Firms and society can benefit by rethinking the benefits of free revealing and (re)developing policies regarding what is best kept private and what is best freely revealed.
+={Government policy:social welfare and+9|trade secrets and+3;Intellectual property rights:trade secrets and+3}
+
+!_ Constraints on Product Modification
+={Custom products:manufacturers and+2;Government policy:manufacturer innovation and+8;Manufacturers:government policy and+8}
+
+Users often develop prototypes of new products by buying existing commercial products and modifying them. Current efforts by manufacturers to build technologies into the products they sell that restrict the way these products are used can undercut users' traditional freedom to modify what they purchase. This in turn can raise the costs of innovation development by users and so lessen the amount of user innovation that is done. For example, makers of ink-jet printers often follow a razor-and-blade strategy, selling printers at low margins and the ink cartridges used in them at high margins. To preserve this strategy, printer manufacturers want to prevent users from refilling ink cartridges with low-cost ink and using them again. Accordingly, they may add technical modifications to their cartridges to prevent them from functioning if users have refilled them. This manufacturer strategy can potentially cut off both refilling by the economically minded and modifications by user-innovators that might involve refilling (Varian 2002). Some users, for example, have refilled cartridges with special inks not sold by printer manufacturers in order to adapt ink-jet printing to the printing of very high-quality photographs. Others have refilled cartridges with food colorings instead of inks in order to develop techniques for printing images on cakes. Each of these applications might have been retarded or prevented by technical measures against cartridge refilling.
+={Varian, H.}
+
+The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a legislative initiative intended to prevent product copying, may negatively affect users' abilities to change and improve the products they own. Specifically, the DMCA makes it a crime to circumvent anti-piracy measures built into most commercial software. It also outlaws the manufacture, sale, or distribution of code-cracking devices used to illegally copy software. Unfortunately, code cracking is also a needed step for modification of commercial software products by user-innovators. Policy makers should be aware of "collateral damage" that may be inflicted on user innovation by legislation aimed at other targets, as is likely in this case.
+={Digital Millennium Copyright Act}
+
+!_ Control over Distribution Channels
+={Government policy:distribution channels and+1}
+
+Users that innovate and wish to freely diffuse innovation-related information are able to do so cheaply in large part because of steady advances in Internet distribution capabilities. Controls placed on such infrastructural factors can threaten and maybe even totally disable distributed innovation systems such as the user innovation systems documented in this book. For example, information products developed by users are commonly distributed over the Internet by peer-to-peer sharing networks. A firm that owns both a channel and content (e.g., a cable network) may have a strong incentive to shut out or discriminate against content developed by users or others in favor of its own content. The transition from the chaotic, fertile early days of radio in the United States when many voices were heard, to an era in which the spectrum was dominated by a few major networks---a transition pushed by major firms and enforced by governmental policy making--- provides a sobering example of what could happen (Lessig 2001). It will be important for policy makers to be aware of this kind of incentive problem and address it---in this case perhaps by mandating that ownership of content and ownership of channel be separated, as has long been the case for other types of common carriers.
+={Lessig, L.}
+
+!_ R&D Subsidies and Tax Credits
+={Government policy:R&D subsidies and+3}
+
+In many countries, manufacturing firms are rewarded for their innovative activity by R&D subsidies and tax credits. Such measures can make economic sense if average social returns to innovation are significantly higher than average private returns, as has been found by Mansfield et al. (1977) and others. However, important innovative activities carried out by users are often not similarly rewarded, because they tend to not be documentable as formal R&D activities. As we have seen, users tend to develop innovations in the course of "doing" in their normal use environments. Bresnahan and Greenstein (1996a) make a similar point. They investigate the role of "co-invention" in the move by users from mainframe to client-server architecture.~{ See also Bresnahan and Greenstein 1996b; Bresnahan and Saloner 1997; Saloner and Steinmueller 1996. }~ By "co-invention" Bresnahan and Greenstein mean organizational changes and innovations developed and implemented by users that are required to take full advantage of a new invention. They point out the high importance that co-invention has for realizing social returns from innovation. They consider the federal government's support for creating "national information infrastructures" insufficient or misallocated, since they view co-invention is the bottleneck for social returns and likely the highest value locus for invention.
+={Bresnahan, T.;Greenstein, S.;Mansfield, E.;Users:co-invention and}
+
+Efforts to level the playing field for user innovation and manufacturer innovation could, of course, also go in the direction of lessening R&D subsidies or tax credits for all rather than attempting to increase user-innovators' access to subsidies. However, if directing subsidies to user-innovators seems desirable, social welfare will be best served if policy makers link them to free revealing by user-innovators as well as or instead of tying them to users' private investments in the development of products for exclusive in-house use. Otherwise, duplication of effort by users interested in the same innovation will reduce potential welfare gains.
+={Free revealing of innovation information:government policy and+1|social welfare and+1}
+
+In sum, the welfare-enhancing effects found for freely revealed user innovations suggest that policy makers should consider conditions required for user innovation when creating policy and legislation. Leveling the playing field for user-innovators and manufacturer-innovators will doubtless force more rapid change onto manufacturers. However, as will be seen in the next chapter, manufacturers can adapt to a world in which user innovation is at center stage.
+
+1~ 9 Democratizing Innovation
+={Social welfare:innovation and+45;von Hippel, E.+45}
+
+We have learned that lead users sometimes develop and modify products for themselves and often freely reveal what they have done. We have also seen that many users can be interested in adopting the solutions that lead users have developed. Taken together, these findings offer the basis for user-centered innovation systems that can entirely supplant manufacturer-based innovation systems under some conditions and complement them under most. User-centered innovation is steadily increasing in importance as computing and communication technologies improve.
+={Free revealing of innovation information:lead users and;Manufacturers:innovation and+44;Custom products:users and;Innovation:lead users and;Lead users:innovation and;User need+3;Users:innovation and+4}
+
+I begin this chapter with a discussion of the ongoing democratization of innovation. I then describe some of the patterns in user-centered innovation that are emerging. Finally, I discuss how manufacturers can find ways to profitably participate in emerging, user-centered innovation processes.
+
+!_ The Trend toward Democratization
+
+Users' abilities to develop high-quality new products and services for themselves are improving radically and rapidly. Steady improvements in computer software and hardware are making it possible to develop increasingly capable and steadily cheaper tools for innovation that require less and less skill and training to use. In addition, improving tools for communication are making it easier for user innovators to gain access to the rich libraries of modifiable innovations and innovation components that have been placed into the public domain. The net result is that rates of user innovation will increase even if users' heterogeneity of need and willingness to pay for "exactly right" products remain constant.
+={Custom products:users and+1;Users:paying for innovations and}
+
+The radical nature of the change that is occurring in design capabilities available to even individual users is perhaps difficult for those without personal innovation experience to appreciate. An anecdote from my own experience may help as illustration. When I was a child and designed new products that I wanted to build and use, the ratio of not-too-pleasurable (for me) effort required to actually build a prototype relative to the very pleasurable effort of inventing it and use-testing it was huge. (That is, in terms of the design, build, test, evaluate cycle illustrated in figure 5.1, the effort devoted to the "build" element of the cycle was very large and the rate of iteration and learning via trial and error was very low.)
+
+In my case it was especially frustrating to try to build anything sophisticated from mechanical parts. I did not have a machine shop in which I could make good parts from scratch, and it often was difficult to find or buy the components I needed. As a consequence, I had to try to assemble an approximation of my ideas out of vacuum cleaner parts and other bits of metal and plastic and rubber that I could buy or that were lying around. Sometimes I failed at this and had to drop an exciting project. For example, I found no way to make the combustion chamber I needed to build a large pulse-jet engine for my bicycle (in retrospect, perhaps a lucky thing!). Even when I succeeded, the result was typically "unaesthetic": the gap between the elegant design in my mind and the crude prototype that I could realize was discouragingly large.
+
+Today, in sharp contrast, user firms and increasingly even individual hobbyists have access to sophisticated design tools for fields ranging from software to electronics to musical composition. All these information-based tools can be run on a personal computer and are rapidly coming down in price. With relatively little training and practice, they enable users to design new products and services---and music and art---at a satisfyingly sophisticated level. Then, if what has been created is an information product, such as software or music, the design is the actual product---software you can use or music you can play.
+
+If one is designing a physical product, it is possible to create a design and even conduct some performance testing by computer simulation. After that, constructing a real physical prototype is still not easy. However, today users do have ready access to kits that offer basic electronic and mechanical building blocks at an affordable price, and physical product prototyping is becoming steadily easier as computer-driven 3-D parts printers continue to go up in sophistication while dropping in price. Very excitingly, even today home-built prototypes need not be poorly fashioned items that will fall apart with a touch in the wrong place---the solution components now available to users are often as good as those available to professional designers.
+
+Functional equivalents of the resources for innovation just described have long been available within corporations to a lucky few. Senior designers at firms have long been supported by engineers and designers under their direct control, and also with other resources needed to quickly construct and test prototype designs. When I took a job as R&D manager at a start-up firm after college, I was astounded at the difference professional-quality resources made to both the speed and the joy of innovation. Product development under these conditions meant that the proportion of one's effort that could be focused on the design and test portions of the innovation cycle rather than on prototype building was much higher, and the rate of progress was much faster.
+={Innovation process+3}
+
+The same story can be told in fields from machine design to clothing design: just think of the staffs of seamstresses and models supplied by clothing manufacturers to their "top designers" so that these few can quickly realize and test many variations on their designs. In contrast, think of the time and effort that equally talented designers without such staff assistance must engage in to stitch together even a single high-quality garment prototype on their own.
+
+But, as we learned in chapter 7, the capability and the information needed to innovate in important ways are in fact widely distributed. Given this finding, we can see that the traditional pattern of concentrating innovation-support resources on just a few pre-selected potential innovators is hugely inefficient. High-cost resources for innovation support cannot be allocated to "the right people," because one does not know who they are until they develop an important innovation. When the cost of high-quality resources for design and prototyping becomes very low---which is the trend we have described---these resources can be diffused widely, and the allocation problem then diminishes in significance. The net result is and will be to democratize the opportunity to create.
+
+Democratization of the opportunity to create is important beyond giving more users the ability to make exactly right products for themselves. As we saw in a previous chapter, the joy and the learning associated with creativity and membership in creative communities are also important, and these experiences too are made more widely available as innovation is democratized. The aforementioned Chris Hanson, a Principal Research Scientist at MIT and a maintainer in the Debian Linux community, speaks eloquently of this in his description of the joy and value he finds from his participation in an open source software community:
+={Hanson, C.;Linux;Users:innovate-or-buy decisions by+3|innovation process and+3;Free revealing of innovation information:innovation and+3;Innovation communities:open source software and;Linux;Open source software:innovation communities and+3}
+
+_1 Creation is unbelievably addictive. And programming, at least for skilled programmers, is highly creative. So good programmers are compelled to program to feed the addiction. (Just ask my wife!) Creative programming takes time, and careful attention to the details. Programming is all about expressing intent, and in any large program there are many areas in which the programmer's intent is unclear. Clarification requires insight, and acquiring insight is the primary creative act in programming. But insight takes time and often requires extensive conversation with one's peers.
+
+_1 Free-software programmers are relatively unconstrained by time. Community standards encourage deep understanding, because programmers know that understanding is essential to proper function. They are also programming for themselves, and naturally they want the resulting programs to be as good as they can be. For many, a free software project is the only context in which they can write a program that expresses their own vision, rather than implementing someone else's design, or hacking together something that the marketing department insists on. No wonder programmers are willing to do this in their spare time. This is a place where creativity thrives.
+
+_1 Creativity also plays a role in the programming community: programming, like architecture, has both an expressive and a functional component. Unlike architecture, though, the expressive component of a program is inaccessible to non-programmers. A close analogy is to appreciate the artistic expression of a novel when you don't know the language in which it is written, or even if you know the language but are not fluent. This means that creative programmers want to associate with one another: only their peers are able to truly appreciate their art. Part of this is that programmers want to earn respect by showing others their talents. But it's also important that people want to share the beauty of what they have found. This sharing is another act that helps build community and friendship.
+
+!_ Adapting to User-Centered Innovation---Like It or Not
+={Innovation process+5;Free revealing of innovation information:innovation and+5}
+
+User-centered innovation systems involving free revealing can sometimes supplant product development carried out by manufacturers. This outcome seems reasonable when manufacturers can obtain field-tested user designs at no cost. As an illustration, consider kitesurfing (previously discussed in chapter 7). The recent evolution of this field nicely shows how manufacturer-based product design may not be able to survive when challenged by a user innovation community that freely reveals leading-edge designs developed by users. In such a case, manufacturers may be obliged to retreat to manufacturing only, specializing in modifying user-developed designs for producibility and manufacturing these in volume.
+={Free revealing of innovation information:users and;Kitesurfing+4}
+
+Recall that equipment for kitesurfing was initially developed and built by user-enthusiasts who were inventing both kitesurfing techniques and kitesurfing equipment interdependently. Around 1999, the first of several small manufacturers began to design and sell kitesurfing equipment commercially. The market for kitesurfing equipment then began to grow very rapidly. In 2001 about 5,000 kite-and-board sets were sold worldwide. In 2002 the number was about 30,000, and in 2003 it was about 70,000. With a basic kite-and-board set selling for about $1,500, total sales in 2003 exceeded $100 million. (Many additional kites, home-made by users, are not included in this calculation.) As of 2003, about 40 percent of the commercial market was held by a US firm called Robbie Naish (Naishkites.com).
+
+Recall also that in 2001 Saul Griffith, an MIT graduate student, established an Internet site called Zeroprestige.com as a home for a community of kitesurfing users and user-innovators. In 2003, the general consensus of both site participants and manufacturers was that the kite designs developed by users and freely revealed on Zeroprestige.com were at least as advanced as those developed by the leading manufacturers. There was also a consensus that the level of engineering design tools and aggregate rate of experimentation by kite users participating on the Zeroprestige.com site was superior to that within any kite manufacturer. Indeed, this collective user effort was probably superior in quality and quantity to the product-development work carried out by all manufacturers in the industry taken together.
+={Griffith, S.;Zeroprestige.com+1}
+
+In late 2003, a perhaps predictable event occurred: a kite manufacturer began downloading users' designs from Zeroprestige.com and producing them for commercial sale. This firm had no internal kitesurfing product-development effort and offered no royalties to user-innovators---who sought none. It also sold its products at prices much lower than those charged by companies that both developed and manufactured kites.
+
+It is not clear that manufacturers of kitesurfing equipment adhering to the traditional developer-manufacturer model can---or should---survive this new and powerful combination of freely revealed collaborative design and prototyping effort by a user innovation community combined with volume production by a specialist manufacturer. In effect, free revealing of product designs by users offsets manufacturers' economies of scale in design with user communities' economies of scope. These economies arise from the heterogeneity in information and resources found in a user community.
+={Custom products:heterogeneity of user needs and;User need+2}
+
+!_ Manufacturers' Roles in User-Centered Innovation
+
+Users are not required to incorporate manufacturers in their product-development and product-diffusion activities. Indeed, as open source software projects clearly show, horizontal innovation communities consisting entirely of users can develop, diffuse, maintain, and consume software and other /{information}/ products by and for themselves---no manufacturer is required. Freedom from manufacturer involvement is possible because information products can be "produced" and distributed by users essentially for free on the web (Kollock 1999). In contrast, production and diffusion of physical products involves activities with significant economies of scale. For this reason, while product development and early diffusion of copies of physical products developed by users can be carried out by users themselves and within user innovation communities, mass production and general diffusion of physical products incorporating user innovations are usually carried out by manufacturing firms.
+={Innovation communities:open source software and+5;Open source software:innovation and+5|innovation communities and+5}
+
+For information products, general distribution is carried out within and beyond the user community by the community itself; no manufacturer is required:
+
+Innovating lead users ➔ All users.
+
+For physical products, general distribution typically requires manufacturers:
+
+Innovating lead users ➔ Manufacturer ➔ All users.
+
+In light of this situation, how can, should, or will manufacturers of products, services, and processes play profitable roles in user-centered innovation systems? Behlendorf (1999), Hecker (1999) and Raymond (1999) explore what might be possible in the specific context of open source software. More generally, many are experimenting with three possibilities: (1) Manufacturers may produce user-developed innovations for general commercial sale and/or offer a custom manufacturing service to specific users. (2) Manufacturers may sell kits of product-design tools and/or "product platforms" to ease users' innovation-related tasks. (3) Manufacturers may sell products or services that are complementary to user-developed innovations.
+={Behlendorf, B.;Hecker, F.;Raymond, E.}
+
+!_ Producing User-Developed Products
+
+Firms can make a profitable business from identifying and mass producing user-developed innovations or developing and building new products based on ideas drawn from such innovations. They can gain advantages over competitors by learning to do this better than other manufacturers. They may, for example, learn to identify commercially promising user innovations more effectively that other firms. Firms using lead user search techniques such as those we will describe in chapter 10 are beginning to do this systematically rather than accidentally---surely an improvement. Effectively transferring user-developed innovations to mass manufacture is seldom as simple as producing a product based on a design by a single lead user. Often, a manufacturer combines features developed by several independent lead users to create an attractive commercial offering. This is a skill that a company can learn better than others in order to gain a competitive advantage.
+={Lead users:innovation and|manufacturers and+1;Manufacturers:lead users and+1}
+
+The decision as to whether or when to take the plunge and commercialize a lead user innovation(s) is also not typically straightforward, and companies can improve their skills at inviting in the relevant information and making such assessments. As was discussed previously, manufacturers often do not understand emerging user needs and markets nearly as well as lead users do. Lead users therefore may engage in entrepreneurial activities, such as "selling" the potential of an idea to potential manufacturers and even lining up financing for a manufacturer when they think it very important to rapidly get widespread diffusion of a user-developed product. Lettl, Herstatt, and Gemünden (2004), who studied the commercialization of major advances in surgical equipment, found innovating users commonly engaging in these activities. It is also possible, of course, for innovating lead users to become manufacturers and produce the products they developed for general commercial sale. This has been shown to occur fairly frequently in the field of sporting goods (Shah 2000; Shah and Tripsas 2004; Hienerth 2004).
+={Gemünden, H.;Lettl, C.;Herstatt, C.;Hienerth, C.;Shah, S.;Tripsas, M.;Lead users:surgical equipment and;Windsurfing;Custom products:innovation and+1|manufacturers and+1;users and+1;Users:custom products and+1}
+
+Manufacturers can also elect to provide custom production or "foundry" services to users, differentiating themselves by producing users' designs faster, better, and/or cheaper than competitors. This type of business model is already advanced in many fields. Custom machine shops specialize in manufacturing mechanical parts to order; electronic assembly shops produce custom electronic products, chemical manufacturers offer "toll" manufacturing of custom products designed by others, and so on. Suppliers of custom integrated circuits offer an especially good example of custom manufacture of products designed by users. More than $15 billion worth of custom integrated circuits were produced in 2002, and the cumulative average growth rate of that market segment was 29 percent. Users benefit from designing their own circuits by getting exactly what they want more quickly than manufacturer-based engineers could supply what they need, and manufacturers benefit from producing the custom designs for users (Thomke and von Hippel 2002).
+={Thomke, S.;von Hippel, E.;Custom products:|suppliers and+2;Suppliers+2;Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users:by manufacturers|by users}
+
+!_ Supplying Toolkits and/or Platform Products to Users
+={Custom products:product platforms and+7;Toolkits+7:platform products and+7}
+
+Users interested in designing their own products want to do it efficiently. Manufacturers can therefore attract them to kits of design tools that ease their product-development tasks and to products that can serve as "platforms" upon which to develop and operate user-developed modifications. Some are supplying users with proprietary sets of design tools only. Cadence, a supplier of design tools for corporate and even individual users interested in designing their own custom semiconductor chips, is an example of this. Other manufacturers, including Harley-Davidson in the case of motorcycles and Microsoft in the case of its Excel spreadsheet software, sell platform products intentionally designed for post-sale modification by users.
+={Microsoft}
+
+Some firms that sell platform products or design tools to users have learned to systematically incorporate valuable innovations that users may develop back into their commercial products. In effect, this second strategy can often be pursued jointly with the manufacturing strategy described above. Consider, for example, StataCorp of College Station, Texas. StataCorp produces and sells Stata, a proprietary software program designed for statistics. It sells the basic system bundled with a number of families of statistical tests and with design tools that enable users to develop new tests for operation on the Stata platform. Advanced customers, many of them statisticians and social science researchers, find this capability very important to their work and do develop their own tests. Many then freely reveal tests they have developed on Internet websites set up by the users themselves. Other users then visit these sites to download and use, and perhaps to test, comment on, and improve these tests, much as users do in open source software communities.
+={StataCorp statistical software+2;Toolkits:StataCorp and+2;Free revealing of innovation information:innovation and+3|intellectual property rights and+3;Government policy:free revealing and+3|intellectual property rights and+3|trade secrets and+3;Innovation communities+3:open source software and+3|and sources of innovation+3;Intellectual property rights:free revealing and+3|trade secrets and+3;Open source software:innovation and+10|innovation communities and+10}
+
+StataCorp personnel monitor the activity at user sites, and note the new tests that are of interest to many users. They then bring the most popular tests into their product portfolio as Stata modules. To do this, they rewrite the user's software code while adhering to the principles pioneered by the user-innovator. They then subject the module to extensive validation testing---a very important matter for statisticians. The net result is a symbiotic relationship. User-innovators are publicly credited by Stata for their ideas, and benefit by having their modules professionally tested. StataCorp gains a new commercial test module, rewritten and sold under its own copyright. Add-ons developed by users that are freely revealed will increase StataCorp's profits more than will equivalent add-ons developed and sold by manufacturers (Jokisch 2001). Similar strategies are pursued by manufacturers of simulator software (Henkel and Thies 2003).
+={Henkel, J.;Jokisch, M.;Thies, S.;Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users:by manufacturers|by users}
+
+Note, however, that StataCorp, in order to protect its proprietary position, does not reveal the core of its software program to users, and does not allow any user to modify it. This creates problems for those users who need to make modifications to the core in order to solve particular problems they encounter. Users with problems of this nature and users especially concerned about price have the option of turning to non-proprietary free statistical software packages available on the web, such as the "R" project (www.r-project.org). These alternatives are developed and supported by user communities and are available as open source software. The eventual effect of open source software alternatives on the viability of the business models of commercial vendors such as StataCorp and its competitors remains to be seen.
+
+A very similar pattern exists in the online gaming industry. Vendors of early online computer games were surprised to discover that sophisticated users were deciphering their closed source code in order to modify the games to be more to their liking. Some of these "mods" attracted large followings, and some game vendors were both impressed and supportive. Manufacturers also discovered that the net effect of user-developed mods was positive for them: mods actually increased the sales of their basic software, because users had to buy the vendors' proprietary software engine code in order to play the mods. Accordingly, a number of vendors began to actively support user-developers by supplying them with design tools to make it easier for them to build mods on their proprietary engine platforms (Jeppesen and Molin 2003).
+={Jeppesen, L.+1;Molin, M.}
+
+Both manufacturers and users involved with online gaming are experimenting with the possibilities of user-manufacturer symbiosis in a number of additional ways. For example, some vendors are experimenting with creating company-supported distribution channels through which users---who then become vendors---can sell their mods rather than simply offering them as free downloads (Jeppesen 2004). At the same time, some user communities are working in the opposite direction by joining together to develop open source software engines for video games. If the latter effort is successful, it will offer mod developers a platform and design tools that are entirely non-proprietary for the first time. As in the case of statistical software, the eventual outcomes of all these experiments are not yet clear.
+
+As a final example of a strategy in which manufacturers offer a platform to support user innovation of value to them, consider General Electric's innovation pattern with respect to the magnetic-resonance imaging machines it sells for medical use. Michael Harsh (GE's Director of R&D in the division that produces MRI machines) and his colleagues realized that nearly all the major, commercially important improvements to these machines are developed by leading-edge users rather than by GE or by competing machine producers. They also knew that commercialization of user-developed improvements would be easier and faster for GE if the users had developed their innovations using a GE MRI machine as a platform rather than a competitor's machine. Since MRI machines are expensive, GE developed a policy of selectively supplying machines at a very low price to scientists GE managers judged most likely to develop important improvements. These machines are supplied with restrictive interlocks removed so that the users can easily modify them. In exchange for this research support, the medical researchers give GE preferred access to innovations they develop. Over the years, supported researchers have provided a steady flow of significant improvements that have been first commercialized by GE. Managers consider the policy a major source of GE's commercial success in the MRI field.
+={General Electric;Harsh, M.;Toolkits:GE and}
+
+!_ Providing Complementary Products or Services
+
+Many user innovations require or benefit from complementary products or services, and manufacturers can often supply these at a profit. For example, IBM profits from user innovation in open source software by selling the complement of computer hardware. Specifically, it sells computer servers with open source software pre-installed, and as the popularity of that software goes up, so do server sales and profits. A firm named Red Hat distributes a version of the open source software computer operating system Linux, and also sells the complementary service of Linux technical support to users. Opportunities to provide profitable complements are not necessarily obvious at first glance, and providers often reap benefits without being aware of the user innovation for which they are providing a complement. Hospital emergency rooms, for example, certainly gain considerable business from providing medical care to the users and user-developers of physically demanding sports, but may not be aware of this.
+={IBM;Linux;Users:innovation and+3;Innovation communities:open source software and;Linux;Innovation communities:sources of innovation and}
+
+!_ Discussion
+={Government policy:intellectual property rights and+2}
+
+All the examples above explore how manufacturers can integrate themselves into a user-centered innovation system. However, manufacturers will not always find user innovations based on or related to their products to be in their interest. For example, manufacturers may be concerned about legal liabilities and costs sometimes associated with "unauthorized user tinkering." For example, an automaker might legitimately worry about the user-programmed engine controller chips that racing aficionados and others often install to change their cars' performance. The result can be findings of eventual commercial value as users explore new performance regimes that manufacturers' engineers might not have considered. However, if users choose to override manufacturers' programming to increase engine performance, there is also a clear risk of increased warrantee costs for manufacturers if engines fail as a consequence (Mollick 2004).
+={Mollick, Ethan}
+
+We have seen that manufacturers can often find ways to profit from user innovation. It is also the case, however, that user innovators and user innovation communities can provide many of these same functions for themselves. For example, StataCorp is successfully selling a proprietary statistical software package. User-developed alternatives exist on the web that are developed and maintained by user-innovators and can be downloaded at no charge. Which ownership model will prove more robust under what circumstances remains to be seen. Ultimately, since users are the customers, they get to choose.
+={StataCorp statistical software;Toolkits:StataCorp and;Users:innovation communities and;Innovation communities}
+
+1~ 10 Application: Searching for Lead User Innovations
+={Users:innovation and+59;Lead users+59:innovation and+59|identification of+49}
+
+Users and manufacturers can apply the insights developed in this book to improve their innovation processes. In this chapter, I illustrate by showing how firms can profit by /{systematically}/ searching for innovations developed by lead users. I first explain how this can be done. I then present findings of a study conducted at 3M to assess the effectiveness of lead user idea-generation techniques. Finally, I briefly review other studies reporting systematic searches for lead users by manufacturers, and the results obtained.
+={Lead users:idea generation and|3M and;Manufacturers:innovation and|lead users and+16;3M Corporation}
+
+!_ Searching for Lead Users
+
+Product-development processes traditionally used by manufacturers start with market researchers who study customers in their target markets to learn about unsatisfied needs. Next, the need information they uncover is transferred to in-house product developers who are charged with developing a responsive product. In other words, the approach is to find a user need and to fill it by means of in-house product development.
+={Marketing research+2}
+
+These traditional processes cannot easily be adapted to systematic searching for lead user innovations. The focus on target-market customers means that lead users are regarded as outliers of no interest. Also, traditional market-research analyses focus on collecting and analyzing need information and not on possible solutions that users may have developed. For example, if a user says "I have developed this new product to make task X more convenient," market-research analyses typically will note that more convenience is wanted but not record the user-developed solution. After all, product development is the province of in-house engineers!
+
+We are therefore left with a question: How can manufacturers build a product-development process that systematically searches for and evaluates lead user-generated innovations? (See figure 10.1.) It turns out that the answer differs depending on whether the lead users sought are at the leading edge of "advanced analog" fields or at the leading edge of target markets. Searching for the former is more difficult, but experience shows that the user-developed innovations that are most radical (and profitable) relative to conventional thinking often come from lead users in "advanced analog" fields.
+={Manufacturers:innovation and;Lead users:characteristics of+1;Marketing research+1}
+
+% Only lead user
+% prototypes available
+% Time
+% Commercial versions of product available
+% Number
+% of users
+% perceiving
+% need
+% Figure 10.1
+% Innovations by lead users precede equivalent commercial products.
+
+{di_evh_f10-1.png}image
+
+!_ Figure 10.1
+Innovations by lead users precede equivalent commercial products.
+
+!_ Identifying Lead Users in Advanced Analog Fields
+
+Lead users in advanced analog fields experience needs that are related to but more extreme than those being faced by /{any}/ users, including lead users, within the target market. They also often face a different set of constraints than those affecting users in the target market. These differences can force them to develop solutions that are entirely new from the perspective of the target market.
+
+As an example, consider the relationship between the braking requirements faced by users of automobiles (let's call auto users the target market) and the braking requirements faced by large commercial airplanes as they land on an airport runway (the advanced analog market). Clearly, the braking demands on large airplanes are much more extreme. Airplanes are much heavier than autos and land at higher speeds: their brakes must rapidly dissipate hundreds of times more energy to bring the vehicle to a stop. Also, the situational constraints are different. For example, auto drivers are often assisted in braking in winter by the application of salt or sand to icy roads. These aids cannot be applied in the case of aircraft: salt would damage aircraft bodies, and sand would be inhaled into jet engines and damage them.
+
+The result of the more extreme demands and additional constraints placed on solutions to aircraft braking was the development of antilock braking systems (ABS) for aircraft. Auto firms conducting searches for valuable lead user innovations regarding auto braking were able to learn about this out-of-field innovation and adapt if for use in autos---where it is common today. Before the development of ABS for autos, an automobile firm could have learned about the underlying concept by studying the practices of users with a strong need for controlling skidding while braking such as stock car auto racing teams. These lead users had learned to manually "pump" their brakes to help control this problem. However, auto company engineers were able to learn much more by studying the automated solutions developed in the "advanced analog" field of aerospace.~{ ABS braking is intended to keep a vehicle's wheels turning during braking. ABS works by automatically and rapidly "pumping" the brakes. The result is that the wheels continue to revolve rather than "locking up," and the operator continues to have control over steering. }~
+
+Finding lead users in advanced analog markets can be difficult because discovering the relevance of a particular analog can itself be a creative act. One approach that has proven effective is to ask the more easily identified lead users in target markets for nominations. These lead users tend to know about useful advanced analogs, because they have been struggling with their leading-edge problems for a long time, and often have searched beyond the target market for information.
+
+Networking from innovators to more advanced innovators in this way is called pyramiding (von Hippel, Thomke, and Sonnack 1999). Pyramiding is a modified version of the "snowballing" technique sometimes used by sociologists to identify members of a group or accumulate samples of rare respondents (Bijker 1995). Snowballing relies on the fact that people with rare interests or attributes tend to know others like themselves. Pyramiding modifies this idea by assuming that people with a strong interest in a topic or field can direct an enquiring researcher to people /{more}/ expert than themselves. Experiments have shown that pyramiding can identify high-quality informants much more efficiently than can mass-screening techniques under many conditions (von Hippel, Franke, and Prügl 2005). Pyramiding was made into a practical industrial process by Mary Sonnack, a Division Scientist at 3M, and Joan Churchill, a psychologist specializing in the development of industrial training programs.
+={Bijker, W.;Churchill, J.;Franke, N.;Prügl, R.;Thomke, S.;von Hippel, E.+46}
+
+!_ Identifying Lead Users in Target Markets
+
+In general it is easier to identify users at the leading edge of target markets than it is to identify users in advanced analog fields. Screening for users with lead user characteristics can be used. When the desired type of lead user is so rare as to make screening impractical---often the case---pyramiding can be applied. In addition, manufacturers can take advantage of the fact that users at the leading edge of a target market often congregate at specialized sites or events that manufacturers can readily identify. At such sites, users may freely reveal what they have done and may learn from others about how to improve their own practices still further. Manufacturers interested in learning from these lead users can easily visit the sites and listen in. For example, sports equipment companies can go to sporting meets where lead users are known to compete, observe user innovations in action, and compare notes.
+={Manufacturers:innovation and}
+
+Essentially the same thing can be done at virtual sites. For example, recall the practices of StataCorp, a supplier of statistical software. Stata sells a set of standard statistical tests and also a language and tools that statisticians can use to design new tests to serve their own evolving needs. Some Stata users (statisticians) took the initiative to set up a few specialized websites, unaffiliated with StataCorp, where they post their innovations for others to download, use, comment on, and improve. StataCorp personnel visit these sites, learn about the user innovations, and observe which tests seem to be of interest to many users. They then develop proprietary versions of the more generally useful tests as commercial products.
+={Lead users:StataCorp statistical software and;StataCorp statistical software}
+
+When specialized rendezvous sites for lead users don't exist in a particular field, manufacturers may be able to create them. Technicon Corporation, for example, set up a series of seminars at which innovating users of their medical equipment got together and exchanged information on their innovations. Technicon engineers were free to listen in, and the innovations developed by these users were the sources of most of Technicon's important new product improvements (von Hippel and Finkelstein 1979).
+={Finkelstein, S.;Technicon Corporation}
+
+!_ The 3M Experiment
+={Lead users:3M and+32;3M Corporation+32}
+
+To test whether lead users in advanced analog fields can in fact generate information that leads to commercially valuable new products, Lilien, Morrison, Searls, Sonnack, and von Hippel (2002) studied a natural experiment at 3M. That firm was carrying out both lead user projects and traditional market research-based idea-generation projects in the same divisions at the same time, and in sufficient numbers to make statistical comparisons of outcomes possible.
+={Lilien, G.+26;Morrison, Pamela+26;Searls, K.+26;Sonnack, M.+26;Lead users:idea generation and+45}
+
+!_ Methods
+
+3M first began using the lead user method in one division in 1996. By May 2000, when data collection began, five divisions of 3M had completed seven lead user (LU) idea-generation projects and had funded further development of the product concepts generated by five of these. These same five divisions also had 42 contemporaneously funded projects that used "find a need and fill it" idea-generation methodologies that were traditional practice at 3M. We used these two samples of funded ideas to compare the performance of lead user idea-generation projects with traditional idea-generation projects. Although 3M cooperated in the study and permitted access to company records and to members of the product-development teams, the firm did not offer a controlled experimental setting. Rather, we as researchers were required to account for any naturally occurring differences after the fact.
+
+Our study methodology required a pre-post/test-control situation, with at least quasi-random assignments to treatment cells (Cook and Campbell 1979). In other words, our goal was to compare samples of development projects in 3M divisions that differed with respect to their use of lead user idea-generation methods, but that were as similar as possible in other respects. Identifying, understanding, and controlling for the many potential sources of difference that could affect the natural experiment involved careful field explorations. Thus, possible differences between project staffing and performance incentives applied to LU and non-LU idea-generation projects were assessed. We looked for (and did not find) differences in the capabilities or motivation of LU and non-LU project team members with respect to achieving a major new product advance. 3M managers also said that there was no difference in these matters, and a content analysis of formal annual performance goals set for the individual LU and non-LU team members in a division that allowed access to these data supported their views.
+={Campbell, D.;Cook, T.}
+
+We also found no major differences in the innovation opportunities teams faced. They also looked for Hawthorne or placebo effects that might affect the project teams differentially, and found none. (The Hawthorne effect can be described as "I do better because extra attention is being paid to me or to my performance." The placebo effect can be described as "I expect this process will work and will strive to get the results I have been told are likely.") We concluded that the 3M samples of funded LU and non-LU idea-generation projects, though not satisfying the random assignment criterion for experimental design, appeared to satisfy rough equivalence criteria in test and control conditions associated with natural or quasi-experimentation. Data were collected by interviews and by survey instruments.
+
+With respect to the intended difference under study---the use of lead user methods within projects---all lead user teams employed an identical lead user process taught to them with identical coaching materials and with coaching provided by members of the same small set of internal 3M coaches. Each lead user team consisted of three or four members of the marketing and technical departments of the 3M division conducting the project. Teams began by identifying important market trends. Then, they engaged in pyramiding to identify lead users with respect to each trend both within the target market and in advanced analog markets. Information from a number of innovating lead users was then combined by the team to create a new product concept and business plan---an "LU idea" (von Hippel, Thomke, and Sonnack 1999).
+={Thomke, S.}
+
+% ={Sonnack, M.}
+
+Non-lead-user idea-generation projects were conducted in accordance with traditional 3M practices. I refer to these as non-LU idea generation methods and to teams using them as non-LU teams. Non-LU teams were similar to lead user teams in terms of size and make-up. They used data sources for idea generation that varied from project to project. Market data collected by outside organizations were sometimes used, as were data from focus groups with major customers and from customer panels, and information from lab personnel. Non-LU teams collected market information from target markets users but not from lead users.
+
+!_ Findings
+
+Our research compared all funded product concepts generated by LU and non-LU methods from February 1999 to May 2000 in each of the five 3M divisions that had funded one or more lead-user-developed product concepts. During that time, five ideas generated by lead user projects were being funded, along with 42 ideas generated by non-LU idea-generation methods. The results of these comparisons can be seen in table 10.1. Product concepts generated by seeking out and learning from lead users were found to be significantly more novel than those generated by non-LU methods. They were also found to address more original or newer customer needs, to have significantly higher market share, to have greater potential to develop into an entire product line, and to be more strategically important. The lead-user-developed product concepts also had projected annual sales in year 5 that were greater than those of ideas generated by non-LU methods by a factor of 8---an average of $146 million versus an average of $18 million in forecast annual sales. Thus, at 3M, lead user idea-generation projects clearly did generate new product concepts with much greater commercial potential than did traditional, non-LU methods (p < 0.005).
+
+!_ Table 10.1
+Concepts for new products developed by lead user project teams had far more commercial promise than those developed by non-lead-user project teams.
+
+table{~h c4; 40; 20; 20; 20;
+
+~
+LU product concepts (n =5)
+Non-LU product concepts (n = 42)
+Significance
+
+Factors related to value of concept
+~
+~
+~
+
+Novelty compared with competition a
+9.6
+6.8
+0.01
+
+Originality/newness of customer needs addressed
+8.3
+5.3
+0.09
+
+% market share in year 5
+68%
+33%
+0.01
+
+Estimated sales in year 5 (deflated for forecast error)
+$146m
+$18m
+0.00
+
+Potential for entire product family a
+10.0
+7.5
+0.03
+
+Operating profit
+22%
+24.0%
+0.70
+
+Probability of success
+80%
+66%
+0.24
+
+Strategic importance a
+9.6
+7.3
+0.08
+
+Intellectual property protection a
+7.1
+6.7
+0.80
+
+Factors related to organizational fit of concept
+~
+~
+~
+
+Fit with existing distribution channels a
+8.8
+8.0
+0.61
+
+Fit with existing manufacturing capabilities a
+7.8
+6.7
+0.92
+
+Fit with existing strategic plan a
+9.8
+8.4
+0.24
+
+}table
+
+Source: Lilien et al. 2002, table 1. \\
+a. Rated on a scale from 1 to 10.
+
+Note that the sales data for both the LU and non-LU projects are forecasts. To what extent can we rely on these? We explored this matter by collecting both forecast and actual sales data from five 3M division controllers. (Division controllers are responsible for authorizing new product-development investment expenditures.) We also obtained data from a 1995 internal study that compared 3M's sales forecasts with actual sales. We combined this information to develop a distribution of forecast errors for a number of 3M divisions, as well as overall forecast errors across the entire corporation. Those errors range from forecast/actual of +30 percent (over-forecast) to --13 percent (underforecast). On the basis of the information just described, and in consultation with 3M management, we deflated all sales forecast data by 25 percent. That deflator is consistent with 3M's historical experience and, we think, provides conservative sales forecasts.~{ In the general literature, Armstrong's (2001) review on forecast bias for new product introduction indicates that sales forecasts are generally optimistic, but that that upward bias decreases as the magnitude of the sales forecast increases. Coller and Yohn (1998) review the literature on bias in accuracy of management earnings forecasts and find that little systematic bias occurs. Tull's (1967) model calculates $15 million in revenue as a level above which forecasts actually become pessimistic on average. We think it reasonable to apply the same deflator to LU vs. non-LU project sales projections. Even if LU project personnel were for some reason more likely to be optimistic with respect to such projections than non-LU project personnel, that would not significantly affect our findings. Over 60 percent of the total dollar value of sales forecasts made for LU projects were actually made by personnel not associated with those projects (outside consulting firms or business analysts from other divisions). }~ Deflated data appear in table 10.1 and in the following tables.
+
+Rather strikingly, all five of the funded 3M lead user projects created the basis for major new product lines for 3M (table 10.2). In contrast, 41 of 42 funded product concepts generated by non-LU methods were improvements or extensions of existing product lines (χ^{2}^ test, p < 0.005).
+
+Following tt, p < 0.005).e advice of 3M divisional controllers, major product lines were defined as those separately reported in divisional financial statements. In 1999 in the 3M divisions we studied, sales of individual major product lines ranged from 7 percent to 73 percent of total divisional sales. The sales projections for funded lead user project ideas all fell well above the lower end of this range: projected sales five years after introduction for funded LU ideas, conservatively deflated as discussed above, ranged from 25 percent to over 300 percent of current total divisional sales.
+
+!_ Table 10.2
+Lead user project teams developed concepts for major new product lines. Non-lead-user project teams developed concepts for incremental product improvements.
+
+table{~h c3; 34; 33; 33;
+
+~
+Incremental product improvements
+Major new product lines
+
+LU method
+0
+5
+
+Non-LU method
+41
+1
+
+}table
+
+Source: Lilien et al. 2002, table 2.
+
+To illustrate what the major product line innovations that the LU process teams generated at 3M were like, I briefly describe four (one is not described for 3M proprietary reasons):
+
+_* A new approach to the prevention of infections associated with surgical operations. The new approach replaced the traditional "one size fits all" approach to infection prevention with a portfolio of patient-specific measures based on each patient's individual biological susceptibilities. This innovation involved new product lines plus related business and strategy innovations made by the team to bring this new approach to market successfully and profitably.
+
+_* Electronic test and communication equipment for telephone field repair workers that pioneered the inclusion of audio, video, and remote data access capabilities. These capabilities enabled physically isolated workers to carry out their problem-solving work as a virtual team with co-workers for the first time.
+
+_* A new approach, implemented via novel equipment, to the application of commercial graphics films that cut the time of application from 48 hours to less than 1 hour. (Commercial graphics films are used, for example, to cover entire truck trailers, buses, and other vehicles with advertising or decorative graphics.) The LU team's solutions involved technical innovations plus related channel and business model changes to help diffuse the innovation rapidly.
+
+_* A new approach to protecting fragile items in shipping cartons that replaces packaging materials such as foamed plastic. The new product lines implementing the approach were more environmentally friendly and much faster and more convenient for both shippers and package recipients than other products and methods on the market.
+
+Lilien, Morrison, Searls, Sonnack, and I also explored to see whether the major product lines generated by the lead user projects had characteristics similar to those of the major product lines that had been developed at 3M in the past, including Scotch Tape. To determine this we collected data on all major new product lines introduced to the market between 1950 and 2000 by the five 3M divisions that had executed one or more lead user studies. (The year 1950 was as far back as we could go and still find company employees who could provide some data about the innovation histories of these major products lines.) Examples from our 1950--2000 sample include the following:
+={Lilien, G.;Morrison, Pamela;Searls, K.}
+
+% ={Sonnack, M.}
+
+_* Scotch Tape: A line of transparent mending tapes that was first of its type and a major success in many household and commercial applications.
+
+_* Disposable patient drapes for operating room use: A pioneering line of disposable products for the medical field now sold in many variations.
+
+_* Box sealing tapes: The first type of tape strong enough to reliably seal corrugated shipping boxes, it replaced stapling in most "corrugated shipper" applications.
+
+_* Commercial graphics films: Plastic films capable of withstanding outdoor environments that could be printed upon and adhered to large surfaces on vehicles such as the sides of trailer trucks. This product line changed the entire approach to outdoor signage.
+
+Table 10.3 provides profiles of the five LU major product lines and the 16 non-LU major product lines for which we were able to collect data. As can be seen, innovations generated with inputs from lead users are similar in many ways to the major innovations developed by 3M in the past.
+
+!_ Table 10.3
+Major new product lines (MNPLs) generated by lead-user methods are similar to MNPLs generated by 3M in the past.
+
+table{~h c4; 55; 15; 15; 15;
+
+~
+LU MNPLs (n = 5)
+Past 3M MNPLs (n = 16)
+Significance
+
+Novelty a compared with competition
+9.6
+8.0
+0.21
+
+Originality/newness of customer needs addressed^{a}^
+8.3
+7.9
+0.78
+
+% market share in year 5
+68%
+61%
+0.76
+
+Estimated sales in year 5 (deflated for forecast error)
+146m^{b}^
+$62m^{b}^
+0.04
+
+Potential for entire product family^{a}^
+10.0
+9.4
+0.38
+
+Operating profit
+22%
+27%
+0.41
+
+Probability of success
+80%
+87%
+0.35
+
+Strategic importance*
+9.6
+8.5
+0.39
+
+Intellectual property protection^{a}^
+7.1
+7.4
+0.81
+
+Fit with distribution channels^{a}^
+8.8
+8.4
+0.77
+
+Fit with manufacturing capabilities^{a}^
+7.8
+6.7
+0.53
+
+Fit with strategic plan^{a}^
+9.8
+8.7
+0.32
+
+}table
+
+Source: Lilien et al. 2002, table 4. \\
+a. Measured on a scale from 1 to 10. \\
+b. Five-year sales forecasts for all major product lines commercialized in 1994 or later (5 LU and 2 non-LU major product lines) have been deflated by 25% in line with 3M historical forecast error experience (see text). Five-year sales figures for major product lines commercialized before 1994 are actual historical sales data. This data has been converted to 1999 dollars using the Consumer Price Index from the Economic Report of the President (Council of Economic Advisors 2000).
+
+!_ Discussion
+
+The performance comparison between lead user and "find a need and fill it" idea-generation projects at 3M showed remarkably strong advantages associated with searching for ideas among lead users in advanced analog fields with needs similar to, but even more extreme than, needs encountered in the intended target market. The direction of this outcome is supported by findings from three other real-world industrial applications of lead user idea-generation methods that studied lead users in the target market but not in advanced analog markets. I briefly describe these three studies next. They each appear to have generated primarily next-generation products--- valuable for firms, but not the basis for radically new major product lines.
+
+%%
+
+_* Recall that Urban and von Hippel (1988) tested the relative commercial attractiveness of product concepts developed in the field of computer-aided systems for the design of printed circuit boards (PC-CAD). One of the concepts they tested contained novel features proposed by lead users that had innovated in the PC-CAD field in order to serve in-house need. The attractiveness of the "lead user concept" was then evaluated by a sample of 173 target-market users of PC-CAD systems relative to three other concept choices---one of which was a description of the best system then commercially available. Over 80 percent of the target-market users were found to prefer the concept incorporating the features developed by innovating lead users. Their reported purchase probability for a PC-CAD system incorporating the lead user features was 51 percent, over twice as high as the purchase probability indicated for any other system. The target-market users were also found willing to pay twice as much for a product embodying the lead user features than for PC-CAD products that did not incorporate them.
+={Urban, G.;Printed circuit CAD software}
+
+_* Herstatt and von Hippel (1992) documented a lead user project seeking to develop a new line of pipe hangers---hardware used to attach pipes to the ceilings of commercial buildings. Hilti, a major manufacturer of construction-related equipment and products, conducted the project. The firm introduced a new line of pipe hanger products based on the lead user concept and a post-study evaluation has shown that this line has become a major commercial success for Hilti.
+={Herstatt, C.;Pipe hanger hardware}
+
+_* Olson and Bakke (2001) report on two lead user studies carried out by Cinet, a leading IT systems integrator in Norway, for the firm's two major product areas, desktop personal computers, and Symfoni application GroupWare. These projects were very successful, with most of the ideas incorporated into next-generation products having been collected from lead users.
+={Bakke, G.;Olson, E.}
+
+Active search for lead users that have innovated enables manufacturers to more rapidly commercialize lead user innovations. One might think that an alternative approach would be to identify lead users before they have innovated. Alert manufacturers could then make some prior arrangements to get preferred access to promising user-developed innovations by, for example, purchasing promising lead user organizations. I myself think that such vertical integration approaches are not practical. As was shown earlier, the character and attractiveness of innovations lead users may develop is based in part on the particular situations faced by and information stocks held by individual lead users. User innovation is therefore likely to be a widely distributed phenomenon, and it would be difficult to predict in advance which users are most likely to develop very valuable innovations.
+={Manufacturers:lead users and+8}
+
+How do we square these findings with the arguments, put forth by Christensen (1997), by Slater and Narver (1998), and by others, that firms are likely to miss radical or disruptive innovations if they pay close attention to requests from their customers? Christensen (1997, p. 59, n. 21) writes: "The research of Eric von Hippel, frequently cited as evidence of the value of listening to customers, indicates that customers originate a large majority of new product ideas. . . . The [Christensen] value network framework would predict that the innovations toward which the customers in von Hippel's study led their suppliers would have been sustaining innovations. We would expect disruptive innovations to have come from other sources."
+={Christensen, C.+2;Narver, J.;Slater, S.}
+
+Unfortunately, the above contains a basic misunderstanding of my research findings. My findings, and related findings by others as well, deal with innovations by lead users, not customers, and /{lead users are a much broader category than customers of a specific firm}/. Lead users that generate innovations of interest to manufacturers can reside, as we have seen, at the leading edges of target markets, and also in advanced analog markets. The innovations that some lead users develop are certainly disruptive from the viewpoint of some manufacturers---but the lead users are unlikely to care about this. After all, they are developing products to serve their own needs. Tim Berners-Lee, for example, developed the World Wide Web as a lead user working at CERN---a user of that software. The World Wide Web was certainly disruptive to the business models of many firms, but this was not Berners-Lee's concern. Lead users typically have no reason to lead, mislead, or even contact manufacturers that might eventually benefit from or be disrupted by their innovations. Indeed, the likely absence of a preexisting customer relationship is the reason that manufacturing firms must search for lead user innovations /{outside}/ their customer lists---as 3M did in its lead user idea generation studies. "Listening to the voice of the customer" is /{not}/ the same thing as seeking out and learning from lead users (Danneels 2004).
+={Berners-Lee, T.;Danneels, E.;Lead users:3M and;3M Corporation;Custom products:manufacturers and+2|users and+2;Innovation:distributed process of+2|functional sources of+2}
+
+That basic misunderstanding aside, I do agree with Christensen and others that a manufacturer may well receive mainly requests for sustaining innovations from its /{customers}/. As was discussed in chapter 4, manufacturers have an incentive to develop innovations that utilize their existing capabilities---that are "sustaining" for them. Customers know this and, when considering switching to a new technology, are unlikely to request it from a manufacturer that would consider it to be disruptive: they know that such a manufacturer is unlikely to respond positively. The net result is that manufacturers' inputs from their existing customers may indeed be biased towards requests for sustaining innovations.
+
+I conclude this chapter by reminding the reader that studies of the sources of innovation show clearly that users will tend to develop some types of innovations but not all. It therefore makes sense for manufacturers to partition their product-development strategies and portfolios accordingly. They may wish, for example, to move away from actual new product development and search for lead users' innovations in the case of functionally novel products. At the same time manufacturers may decide to continue to develop products that do /{not}/ require high-fidelity models of need information and use environments to get right. One notable category of innovations with this characteristic is dimension-of-merit improvements to existing products. Sometimes users state their needs for improved products in terms of dimensions on which improvements are desired---dimensions of merit. As an example, consider that users may say "I want a computer that is as fast and cheap as possible." Similarly, users of medical imaging equipment may say "I want an image that is of as high a resolution as is technically possible." If manufacturers (or users) cannot get to the end point desired by these users right away, they will instead progressively introduce new product generations that move along the dimension of merit as rapidly and well as they can. Their rate of progress is determined by the rate at which /{solution}/ technologies improve over time. This means that sticky solution information rather than sticky need information is central to development of dimension-of-merit improvements. Manufacturers will tend to have the information they need to develop dimension of merit innovations internally.
+={Manufacturers:dimensions-of-merit product improvements and;Sticky information:dimensions-of-merit product improvements and|innovation and}
+
+1~ 11 Application: Toolkits for User Innovation and Custom Design
+={Users:innovation and+62;Custom products:manufacturers and+62|toolkits and+62;Manufacturers:innovation and+62;Toolkits+62:innovation and+62;Users:toolkits and+62}
+
+An improved understanding of the relative innovation capabilities of users and manufacturers can enable designs for more effective joint innovation processes. Toolkits for user innovation and custom design illustrate this possibility. In this new innovation process design, manufacturers actually /{abandon}/ their efforts to understand users' needs accurately and in detail. Instead, they outsource only /{need-related}/ innovation tasks to their users, who are equipped with appropriate toolkits. This process change differs from the lead user search processes discussed earlier in an interesting way. Lead user searchs identify existing innovations, but do nothing to change the conditions affecting user-innovators at the time a new product or service is being developed. Toolkits for users, in contrast, do change the conditions potential innovators face. By making innovation cheaper and quicker for users, they can increase the volume of user innovation. They also can channel innovative effort into directions supported by toolkits.
+={Toolkits:characteristics of+3}
+
+In this chapter, I first explore why toolkits are useful. Next, I describe how to create an appropriate setting for toolkits and how toolkits function in detail. Finally, I discuss the conditions under which toolkits are likely to be of most value.
+
+!_ Benefits from Toolkits
+
+Toolkits for user innovation and design are integrated sets of product-design, prototyping, and design-testing tools intended for use by end users. The goal of a toolkit is to enable non-specialist users to design high-quality, producible custom products that exactly meet their needs. Toolkits often contain "user-friendly" features that guide users as they work. They are specific to a type of product or service and a specific production system. For example, a toolkit provided to customers interested in designing their own, custom digital semiconductor chips is tailored precisely for that purpose--- it cannot be used to design other types of products. Users apply a toolkit in conjunction with their rich understanding of their own needs to create a preliminary design, simulate or prototype it, evaluate its functioning in their own use environment, and then iteratively improve it until they are satisfied.
+={Toolkits:manufacturers and+58|user-friendly tools for;Information asymmetries+10}
+
+A variety of manufacturers have found it profitable to shift the tasks of custom product design to their customers along with appropriate toolkits for innovation. Results to date in the custom semiconductor field show development time cut by 2/3 or more for products of equivalent complexity and development costs cut significantly as well via the use of toolkits. In 2000, more than $15 billion worth of custom integrated circuits were sold that had been designed with the aid of toolkits---often by circuit users---and produced in the "silicon foundries" of custom semiconductor manufacturers such as LSI (Thomke and von Hippel 2002). International Flavors and Fragrances (IFF), a global supplier of specialty flavors to the food industry, has built a toolkit that enables its customers to modify flavors for themselves, which IFF then manufactures. In the materials field, GE provides customers with Web-based tools for designing better plastic products. In software, a number of consumer product companies provide toolkits that allow people to add custom-designed modules to their standard products. For example, Westwood Studios provides its customers with toolkits that enable them to design important elements of their own video games (Jeppesen 2005).
+={Jeppesen, L.;Thomke, S.;von Hippel, E.+9;Toolkits:GE and|International Flavors and Fragrances and}
+
+The primary function of toolkits for user design is to co-locate product-development and service-development tasks with the sticky information needed to execute them. Need-intensive tasks involved in developing a particular type of product or service are assigned to users, along with the tools needed to carry those tasks out. At the same time, solution-intensive tasks are assigned to manufacturers.
+={Toolkits:users and+55|sticky information and+8;Sticky information:toolkits and+8}
+
+As was discussed in chapter 5, problem solving in general, and product and service development in particular, is carried out via repeated cycles of learning by trial and error. When each cycle of a trial-and-error process requires access to sticky information located at more than one site, colocation of problem-solving activity with sticky information is achieved by repeatedly shifting problem solving to the relevant sticky information sites as product development proceeds.
+={Trial-and-error problem solving;Toolkits:trial-and-error learning in}
+
+For example, suppose that need information is sticky at the site of the potential product user and that solution information is sticky at the site of the manufacturer. A user may initiate a development project by drawing on local user-need information to specify a desired new product or service (figure 11.1). This information is likely to be sticky at least in part. Therefore, the user, even when exerting best efforts, will supply only partial and partially correct need and use-context information to the manufacturer. The manufacturer then applies its solution information to the partially accurate user information and creates a prototype that it thinks is responsive to the need and sends it to the user for testing. If the prototype is not satisfactory (and it often is not), the product is returned to the manufacturer for refinement. Typically, as empirical studies show (Tyre and von Hippel 1997; Kristensen 1992), sites of sticky need and / or solution information are repeatedly revisited as problem solvers strive to reach a satisfactory product design (figure 11.2).
+={Kristensen, P.;Tyre, M.}
+
+%% Figure 11.1
+% Toolkits 149
+% Manufacturer
+% activity
+% User
+% activity
+% User iterates until satisfied.
+% User draws on local need
+% information to specify
+% desired product or service.
+% User draws on local need and
+% context of use information to
+% evaluate prototype.
+% User changes specifications as
+% needed.
+% Manufacturer draws on
+% local capability information
+% to develop prototype
+% responsive to specifications.
+% Manufacturer iterates until
+% user is satisfied.
+% User-manufacturer
+% boundary
+% Figure 11.1
+% A pattern of problem solving often encountered in product and service development.
+
+
+{di_evh_f11-1.png}image
+
+Figure 11.1
+
+%% Figure 11.2
+% 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
+% 7
+% 0
+% 22
+% 7
+% 15
+% 30
+% Number of shifts
+% Percent
+% of
+% sample
+% Figure 11.2
+% Shifts in the location of problem solving from user site to lab observed during process
+% machine debugging. Source: Tyre and von Hippel 1993, figure 2.
+
+{di_evh_f11-2.png}image
+
+Figure 11.2
+
+Explicit management of user-manufacturer iterations has been built into a number of modern product-development processes. In the rapid application development method (Martin 1991), manufacturers learn to respond to initial user need inputs by quickly developing a partial prototype of a planned product containing the features likely to be most important to users. They deliver this to users, who apply it in their own setting to clarify their needs. Users then relay requests for changes or new features to the product developers, and this process is repeated until an acceptable fit between need and solution is found. Such iteration has been found to "better satisfy true user requirements and produce information and functionality that is more complete, more accurate, and more meaningful" (Connell and Shafer 1989).
+={Connell, J.;Martin, J.;Shafer, L.}
+
+Even with careful management, however, iterative shifts in problem solving between users and manufacturer-based developers involve significant coordination costs. For example, a manufacturer's development team may be assigned to other tasks while it waits for user feedback, and so will not be immediately able to resume work on a project when needed feedback is received. It would be much better still to eliminate the need for cross-boundary iteration between user and manufacturer sites during product development, and this is what toolkits for user design are intended to do. The basic idea behind toolkits for user design is, as was mentioned earlier, to partition an overall product-development task into subproblems, each drawing on only one locus of sticky information. Then, each task is assigned to the party already having the sticky information needed to solve it. In this approach, both the user and the manufacturer still engage in iterative, trial-and-error problem solving to solve the problems assigned to them. But this iteration is internal to each party---no costly and time-consuming cross-boundary iteration between user and manufacturer is required (von Hippel 1998, 2001; Thomke and von Hippel 2002; von Hippel and Katz 2002).
+={Katz, R.;Thomke, S.;Task partitioning+10}
+
+To appreciate the major advantage in problem-solving speed and efficiency that concentrating problem solving within a single locus can create, consider a familiar example: the contrast between conducting financial strategy development with and without "user-operated" financial spreadsheet software:
+
+_* Before the development of easy-to-use financial spreadsheet programs such as Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft Excel, a firm's chief financial officer might have carried out a financial strategy development exercise as follows. First, the CFO would have asked an assistant to develop an analysis incorporating a list of assumptions. A few hours or days might elapse before the result was delivered. Then the CFO would use her rich understanding of the firm and its goals to study the analysis. She would typically almost immediately spot some implications of the patterns developed, and would then ask for additional analyses to explore these implications. The assistant would take the new instructions and go back to work while the CFO switched to another task. When the assistant returned, the cycle would repeat until a satisfactory outcome was found.
+={Microsoft}
+
+_* After the development of financial spreadsheet programs, a CFO might begin an analysis by asking an assistant to load up a spreadsheet with corporate data. The CFO would then "play with" the data, trying out various ideas and possibilities and "what if" scenarios. The cycle time between trials would be reduced from days or hours to minutes. The CFO's full, rich information would be applied immediately to the effects of each trial. Unexpected patterns---suggestive to the CFO but often meaningless to a less knowledgeable assistant---would be immediately identified and explored further.
+
+It is generally acknowledged that spreadsheet software that enables expert users to "do it themselves" has led to better outcomes that are achieved faster (Levy 1984; Schrage 2000). The advantages are similar in the case of product and service development. Learning by doing via trial and error still occurs, of course, but the cycle time is much faster because the complete cycle of need-related learning is carried out at a single (user) site earlier in the development process.
+={Levy, S.;Schrage, M.;Trial-and-error problem solving+15}
+
+!_ Repartitioning of Development Tasks
+={Toolkits:task partitioning+5}
+
+To create the setting for a toolkit, one must partition the tasks of product development to concentrate need-related information in some and solution-related information in others. This can involve fundamental changes to the underlying architecture of a product or service. As illustration, I first discuss the repartioning of the tasks involved in custom semiconductor chip development. Then, I show how the same principles can be applied in the less technical context of custom food design.
+
+Traditionally, fully customized integrated circuits were developed in an iterative process like that illustrated in figure 11.1. The process began with a user specifying the functions that the custom chip was to perform to a manufacturer of integrated circuits. The chip would then be designed by manufacturer employees, and an (expensive) prototype would be produced and sent to the user. Testing by the user would typically reveal faults in the chip and/or in the initial specification, responsive changes would be made, a new prototype would be built. This cycle would continue until the user was satisfied. In this traditional manufacturer-centered development process, manufacturers' development engineers typically incorporated need-related information into the design of both the fundamental elements of a circuit--- such as transistors, and the electrical "wiring" that interconnected those elements into a functioning circuit.
+
+The brilliant insight that allowed custom design of integrated circuits to be partitioned into solution-related and need-related subtasks was made by Mead and Conway (1980). They determined that the design of a digital chip's fundamental elements, such as its transistors, could be made standard for all circuits. This subtask required rich access to the manufacturer's sticky solution information regarding how semiconductors are fabricated, but did not require detailed information on users' specific needs. It could therefore be assigned to manufacturer-based chip-design and chip-fabrication engineers. It was also observed that the subtask of interconnecting standard circuit elements into a functioning integrated circuit required only sticky, need-related information about a chip's function---for example, whether it was to function as a microprocessor for a calculator or as a voice chip for a robotic dog. This subtask was therefore assigned to users along with a toolkit that enabled them to do it properly. In sum, this new type of chip, called a gate array, had a novel architecture created specifically to separate the problem-solving tasks requiring access to a manufacturer's sticky solution information from those requiring access to users' sticky need information.
+={Conway, C.;Mead, L.;Toolkits:characteristics of}
+
+The same basic principle can be illustrated in a less technical context: food design. In this field, manufacturer-based designers have traditionally undertaken the entire job of developing a novel food, and so they have freely blended need-specific design into any or all of the recipe-design elements wherever convenient. For example, manufacturer-based developers might find it convenient to create a novel cake by both designing a novel flavor and texture for the cake body, and designing a complementary novel flavor and texture into the frosting. However, it is possible to repartition these same tasks so that only a few draw on need-related information, and these can then be more easily transferred to users.
+
+The architecture of the pizza pie illustrates how this can be done. Many aspects of the design of a pizza, such as the dough and the sauce, have been made standard. User choice has been restricted to a single task: the design of toppings. In other words, all need-related information that is unique to a particular user has been linked to the toppings-design task only. Transfer of this single design task to users can still potentially offer creative individuals a very large design space to play in (although pizza shops typically restrict it sharply). Any edible ingredient one can think of, from eye of newt to edible flowers, is a potential topping component. But the fact that need-related information has been concentrated within only a single product-design task makes it much easier to transfer design freedom to the user.
+
+!_ The Functionality of Toolkits
+={Toolkits:characteristics of+2}
+
+If a manufacturer outsources need-intensive design tasks to users, it must also make sure that users have the information they need to carry out those tasks effectively. This can be done via a toolkit for user innovation. Toolkits are not new as a general concept---every manufacturer equips its own engineers with a set of tools suitable for developing the type of products or services it wishes to produce. Toolkits for users also are not new---many users have personal collections of tools that they have assembled to help them create new items or modify standard ones. For example, some users have woodworking tools ranging from saws to glue which can be used to create or modify furniture---in very novel or very standard ways. Others may have a kit of software tools needed to create or modify software. What is new, however, is integrated toolkits enabling users to create /{and}/ test designs for custom products or services that can then be produced "as is" by manufacturers.
+
+Present practice dictates that a high-quality toolkit for user innovation will have five important attributes. (1) It will enable users to carry out complete cycles of trial-and-error learning. (2) It will offer users a solution space that encompasses the designs they want to create. (3) It will be user friendly in the sense of being operable with little specialized training. (4) It will contain libraries of commonly used modules that users can incorporate into custom designs. (5) It will ensure that custom products and services designed by users will be producible on a manufacturer's' production equipment without modification by the manufacturer.
+
+!_ Learning through Trial and Error
+={Toolkits:trial-and-error learning in+5}
+
+
+It is crucial that user toolkits for innovation enable users to go through complete trial-and-error cycles as they create their designs. Recall that trial-and-error problem solving is essential to product development. For example, suppose that a user is designing a new custom telephone answering system for her firm, using a software-based computer-telephony integration (CTI) design toolkit provided by a vendor. Suppose also that the user decides to include a new rule to "route all calls of X nature to Joe" in her design. A properly designed toolkit would allow her to temporarily place the new rule into the telephone system software, so that she could actually try it out (via a real test or a simulation) and see what happened. She might discover that the solution worked perfectly. Or she might find that the new rule caused some unexpected form of trouble---for example, Joe might be flooded with too many calls---in which case it would be "back to the drawing board" for another design and another trial.
+
+In the same way, toolkits for innovation in the semiconductor design field allow users to design a circuit that they think will meet their needs and then test the design by "running" it in the form of a computer simulation. This quickly reveals errors that the user can then quickly and cheaply fix using toolkit-supplied diagnostic and design tools. For example, a user might discover by testing a simulated circuit design that a switch needed to adjust the circuit had been forgotten and make that discovery simply by trying to make a needed adjustment. The user could then quickly and cheaply design in the needed switch without major cost or delay.
+
+One can appreciate the importance of giving the user the capability for trial-and-error learning by doing in a toolkit by thinking about the consequences of not having it. When users are not supplied with toolkits that enable them to draw on their local, sticky information and engage in trial-and-error learning, they must actually order a product and have it built to learn about design errors---typically a very costly and unsatisfactory way to proceed. For example, automobile manufacturers allow customers to select a range of options for their cars, but they do not offer the customer a way to learn during the design process and before buying. The cost to the customer is unexpected learning that comes too late: "That wide-tire option did look great in the picture. But now that the car has been delivered, I discover that I don't like the effect on handling. Worse, I find that my car is too wide to fit into my garage!"
+
+Similar disasters are often encountered by purchasers of custom computers. Many custom computer manufacturers offer a website that allows users to "design your own computer online." However, these websites do not allow users to engage in trial-and-error design. Instead, they simply allow users to select computer components such as processor chips and disk drives from lists of available options. Once these selections have been made, the design transaction is complete and the computer is built and shipped. The user has no way to test the functional effects of these choices before purchase and first field use---followed by celebration or regret.
+
+In contrast, a sophisticated toolkit for user innovation would allow the user to conduct trial-and-error tests to evaluate the effects of initial choices made and to improve on them. For example, a computer design site could add this capability by enabling users to actually test and evaluate the hardware configuration they specify on their own programs and computing tasks before buying. To do this, the site might, for example, provide access to a remote computer able to simulate the operation of the computer that the user has specified, and provide performance diagnostics and related choices in terms meaningful to the user (e.g., "If you add option x at cost y, the time it takes to complete your task will decrease by z seconds"). The user could then modify or confirm initial design choices according to trade-off preferences only he or she knows.
+
+!_ Appropriate Solution Spaces
+={Toolkits:solution spaces and+3}
+
+Economical production of custom products and services is achievable only when a custom design falls within the pre-existing capability and degrees of freedom built into a particular manufacturer's production system. My colleagues and I call this the /{solution space}/ offered by that system. A solution space may vary from very large to small, and if the output of a toolkit is tied to a particular production system, then the design freedom that a toolkit can offer a user will be accordingly large or small. For example, the solution space offered by the production process of a manufacturer of custom integrated circuits offers a huge solution space to users---it will produce any combination of logic elements interconnected in any way that a user-designer might desire, with the result that the user can invent anything from a novel type of computer processor to a novel silicon organism within that space. However, note that the semiconductor production process also has stringent limits. It will only implement product designs expressed in terms of semiconductor logic---it will not implement designs for bicycles or houses. Also, even within the arena of semiconductors, it will only be able to produce semiconductors that fit within a certain range with respect to size and other properties. Another example of a production system offering a very large solution space to designers---and, potentially to user-designers via toolkits---is the automated machining center. Such a device can basically fashion any shape out of any machinable material that can be created by any combination of basic machining operations such as drilling and milling. As a consequence, toolkits for innovation intended to create designs that can be produced by automated machining centers can offer users access to that very large solution space.
+
+Large solution spaces can typically be made available to user-designers when production systems and associated toolkits allow users to manipulate and combine relatively basic and general-purpose building blocks and operations, as in the examples above. In contrast, small solution spaces typically result when users are only allowed to combine a relatively few pre-designed options. Thus, users who want to design their own custom automobiles are restricted to a relatively small solution space: they can only make choices from lists of options regarding such things as engines, transmissions, and paint colors. Similarly, purchasers of eyeglasses are restricted to combining "any frame from this list" of pre-designed frames, with "any lens type from that list" of pre-designed options.
+
+The reason producers of custom products or services enforce constraints on the solution space that user-designers may use is that custom products can be produced at reasonable prices only when custom user designs can be implemented by simply making low-cost adjustments to the production process. This condition is met within the solution space on offer. However, responding to requests that fall outside that space will require small or large additional investments by the manufacturer. For example, a producer of integrated circuits may have to invest many millions of dollars and rework an entire production process in order to respond to a customer's request for a larger chip that falls outside the solution space associated with its present production equipment.
+
+!_ User-Friendly Tools
+={Toolkits:user-friendly tools for+6}
+
+User toolkits for innovation are most effective and successful when they are made "user friendly" by enabling users to use the skills they already have and to work in their own customary and well-practiced design language. This means that users don't have to learn the---typically different---design skills and language customarily used by manufacturer-based designers, and so they will require much less training to use the toolkit effectively.
+
+For example, in the case of custom integrated circuit design, the users of toolkits are typically electrical engineers who are designing electronic systems that will incorporate custom semiconductor chips. The digital design language normally used by electrical engineers is Boolean algebra. Therefore, user-friendly toolkits for custom semiconductor design are provided that allow toolkit users to design in this language. That is, users can create a design, test how it works, and make improvements using only their own, customary design language. At the conclusion of the design process, the toolkit then translates the user's logical design into the design inputs required by the semiconductor manufacturer's production system.
+
+A design toolkit based on a language and skills and tools familiar to the user is only possible to the extent that the user /{has}/ familiarity with some appropriate and reasonably complete language and set of skills and tools. Interestingly, this is the case more frequently than one might initially suppose, at least in terms of the /{function}/ that a user wants a product or service to perform---because functionality is the face that the product or a service presents to the user. (Indeed, an expert user of a product or service may be much more familiar with that functional face than manufacturer-based experts.) Thus, the user of a custom semiconductor is the expert in what he or she wants that custom chip to /{do}/, and is skilled at making complex tradeoffs among familiar functional elements to achieve a desired end: "If I increase chip clock speed, I can reduce the size of my cache memory and. . . ."
+
+As a less technical example, consider the matter of designing a custom hairstyle. There is certainly a great deal of information known to hairstylists that even an expert user may not know, such as how to achieve a certain look by means of layer cutting, or how to achieve a certain streaked color pattern by selectively dying some strands of hair. However, an expert user is often very well practiced at the skill of examining the shape of his or her face and hairstyle as reflected in a mirror, and visualizing specific improvements that might be desirable in matters such as curls, shape, or color. In addition, the user will be very familiar with the nature and functioning of everyday tools used to shape hair, such as scissors and combs.
+
+A user-friendly toolkit for hairstyling innovation can be built upon these familiar skills and tools. For example, a user can be invited to sit in front of a computer monitor, and study an image of her face and hairstyle as captured by a video camera. Then, she can select from a palette of colors and color patterns offered on the screen, can superimpose the effect on her existing hairstyle, can examine it, and can repeatedly modify it in a process of trial-and-error learning. Similarly, the user can select and manipulate images of familiar tools, such as combs and scissors, to alter the image of the length and shape of her own hairstyle as projected on the computer screen, can study and further modify the result achieved, and so forth. Note that the user's new design can be as radically new as is desired, because the toolkit gives the user access to the most basic hairstyling variables and tools such as hair color and scissors. When the user is satisfied, the completed design can be translated into technical hairstyling instructions in the language of a hairstyling specialist---the intended production system in this instance.
+
+In general, steady improvements in computer hardware and software are enabling toolkit designers to provide information to users in increasingly friendly ways. In earlier days, information was often provided to users in the form of specification sheets or books. The user was then required to know when a particular bit of information was relevant to a development project, find the book, and look it up. Today, a large range of potentially needed information can be embedded in a computerized toolkit, which is programmed to offer the user items of information only if and as a development being worked on makes them relevant.
+
+!_ Module Libraries
+={Toolkits:module libraries for+1}
+
+Custom designs seldom are novel in all their parts. Therefore, a library of standard modules will be a valuable part of a toolkit for user innovation. Provision of such standard modules enables users to focus their creative work on those aspects of their product or service designs that cannot be implemented via pre-designed options. For example, architects will find it very useful to have access to a library of standard components, such as a range of standard structural support columns with pre-analyzed structural characteristics, that they can incorporate into their novel building designs. Similarly, users who want to design custom hairstyles will often find it helpful to begin by selecting a hairstyle from a toolkit library. The goal is to select a style that has some elements of the desired look. Users can then proceed to develop their own desired style by adding to and subtracting from that starting point.
+
+!_ Translating Users' Designs for Production
+
+The "language" of a toolkit for user innovation must be convertible without error into the language of the intended production system at the conclusion of the user's design work. If it is not, the entire purpose of the toolkit will be lost---because a manufacturer receiving a user design will essentially have to do the design work over again. Error-free translation need not emerge as a major problem---for example, it was never a major problem during the development of toolkits for integrated circuit design, because both chip designers and chip producers already used a language based on digital logic. In contrast, in some fields, translating from the design language preferred by users to the language required by intended production systems can be /{the}/ central problem in toolkit design. As an illustration, consider a recent toolkit test project managed by Ernie Gum, the Director of Food Product Development for the USA FoodServices Division of Nestlé.
+={Gum, E.+5;Toolkits:Nestlé and+5}
+
+One major business of Nestlé FoodServices is producing custom food products, such as custom Mexican sauces, for major restaurant chains. Custom foods of this type have traditionally been developed by or modified by the chains' executive chefs, using what are in effect design and production toolkits taught by culinary schools: recipe development procedures based on food ingredients available to individuals and restaurants, and processed with restaurant-style equipment. After using their traditional toolkits to develop or modify a recipe for a new menu item, executive chefs call in Nestlé Foodservices or another custom food producer and ask that firm to manufacture the product they have designed---and this is where the language translation problem rears its head.
+
+There is no error-free way to translate a recipe expressed in the language of a traditional restaurant-style culinary toolkit into the language required by a food-manufacturing facility. Food factories must use ingredients that can be obtained in quantity at consistent quality. These are not the same as, and may not taste quite the same as, the ingredients used by the executive chef during recipe development. Also, food factories use volume production equipment, such as huge-steam-heated retorts. Such equipment is very different from restaurant-style stoves and pots and pans, and it often cannot reproduce the cooking conditions created by the executive chef on a stove-top---for example, very rapid heating. Therefore, food-production factories cannot simply produce a recipe developed by or modified by an executive chef "as is" under factory conditions---it will not taste the same.
+
+As a consequence, even though an executive chef creates a prototype product using a traditional chef's toolkit, food manufacturers find most of that information---the information about ingredients and processing conditions---useless because it cannot be straightforwardly translated into factory-relevant terms. The only information that can be salvaged is the information about taste and texture contained in the prototype. And so, production chefs carefully examine and taste the customer's custom food prototype, then try to make something that tastes the same using factory ingredients and methods. But an executive chef's taste buds are not necessarily the same as production chef taste buds, and so the initial factory version---and the second and the third---is typically not what the customer wants. So the producer must create variation after variation until the customer is finally satisfied.
+
+To solve the translation problem, Gum created a novel toolkit of pre-processed food ingredients to be used by executive chefs during food development. Each ingredient in the toolkit was the Nestlé factory version of an ingredient traditionally used by chefs during recipe development: That is, it was an ingredient commercially available to Nestlé that had been processed as an independent ingredient on Nestlé factory equipment. Thus, a toolkit designed for developing Mexican sauces would contain a chili puree ingredient processed on industrial equipment identical to that used to produce food in commercial-size lots. (Each ingredient in such a toolkit also contains traces of materials that will interact during production---for example, traces of tomato are included in the chili puree---so that the taste effects of such interactions will also be apparent to toolkit users.)
+
+Chefs interested in using the Nestlé toolkit to prototype a novel Mexican sauce would receive a set of 20--30 ingredients, each in a separate plastic pouch. They would also be given instructions for the proper use of these ingredients. Toolkit users would then find that each component differs slightly from the fresh components he or she is used to. But such differences are discovered immediately through direct experience. The chef can then adjust ingredients and proportions to move to the desired final taste and texture that is desired. When a recipe based on toolkit components is finished, it can be immediately and precisely reproduced by Nestlé factories--- because now the executive chef is using the same language as the factory. In the Nestlé case, field testing by Food Product Development Department researchers showed that adding the error-free translation feature to toolkit-based design by users reduced the time of custom food development from 26 weeks to 3 weeks by eliminating repeated redesign and refinement interactions between Nestlé and purchasers of its custom food products.
+
+!_ Discussion
+
+A toolkit's success in the market is significantly correlated with that toolkit's quality and with industry conditions. Thus, Prügl and Franke (2005) studied the success of 100 toolkits offered in a single industry: computer gaming. They found that success, evaluated by independent experts, was significantly correlated with the quality of execution of the attributes of toolkits that have been discussed in this chapter. That is, success was found to be significantly affected by the quality of trial-and-error learning enabled by a toolkit, by the quality of fit of the solution space offered to users' design problems, by the user friendliness of the tools provided, and by the quality of module libraries offered with the toolkit. Schreier and Franke (2004) also obtained information on the importance of toolkit quality in a study of the value that users placed on consumer products (scarves, T shirts, cell phone covers) customized with a simple, manufacturer-supplied toolkit. They found user willingness to pay for custom designs, as measured by Vickrey auctions, was significantly negatively affected by the difficulty of creating custom designs with a toolkit. In contrast, willingness to pay was significantly positively affected by enjoyment experienced in using a toolkit.
+={Franke, N.;Prügl, R.;Schreier, M.;Trial-and-error problem solving;Custom products:heterogeneity of user needs and+3;User need+3}
+
+With respect to industry and market conditions, the toolkit-for-user innovation approach to product design is likely to be most appealing to toolkit suppliers when the heterogeneous needs of /{many}/ users can be addressed by a standard solution approach encoded in a toolkit. This is because it can be costly to encode all the solution and production information relevant to users' design decisions. For example, a toolkit for custom semiconductor design must contain information about the semi-conductor production process needed to ensure that product designs created by users are in fact producible. Encoding such information is a one-time cost, so it makes the best economic sense for solution approaches that many will want to use.
+
+Toolkits for user innovation are not an appropriate solution for all product needs, even when heterogeneous needs can be addressed by a common solution approach. Specifically, toolkits will not be the preferred approach when the product being designed requires the highest achievable performance. Toolkits incorporate automated design rules that cannot, at least at present, translate designs into products or software as skillfully as a human designer can. For example, a design for a gate array generated with a toolkit will typically take up more physical space on a silicon chip than would a fully custom-developed design of similar complexity. Even when toolkits are on offer, therefore, manufacturers may continue to design certain products (those with difficult technical demands) while customers take over the design of others (those involving complex or rapidly evolving user needs).
+
+Toolkits can be designed to offer a range of capabilities to users. At the high end, with toolkits such as those used to design custom integrated circuits, users can truly innovate, creating anything implementable in digital electronics, from a dishwasher controller to a novel supercomputer or form of artificial life. At the low end, the product configurators commonly offered by manufacturers of mass-customized products enable, for example, a watch purchaser to create a custom watch by selecting from lists of pre-designed faces, hands, cases, and straps. (Mass-customized production systems can manufacture a range of product variations in single-unit quantities at near mass-production costs (Pine 1993). In the United States, production systems used by these manufacturers are generally based on computerized production equipment.)
+={Pine, J.}
+
+The design freedom provided by toolkits for user innovation may not be of interest to all or even to most users in a market characterized by heterogeneous needs. A user must have a great enough need for something different to offset the costs of putting a toolkit to use for that approach to be of interest. Toolkits may therefore be offered only to a subset of users. In the case of software, toolkits may be provided to all users along with a standard, default version of the product or service, because the cost of delivering the extra software is essentially zero. In such a case, the toolkit's capability will simply lie unused in the background unless and until a user has sufficient incentive to evoke and employ it.
+={Lead users:toolkits and+3;Toolkits:lead users and+3}
+
+Provision of toolkits to customers can be a complement to lead user idea-generation methods for manufacturers. Some users choosing to employ a toolkit to design a product precisely right for their own needs will be lead users, whose present strong need foreshadows a general need in the market. Manufacturers can find it valuable to identify and acquire the generally useful improvements made by lead users of toolkits, and then supply these to the general market. For this reason, manufacturers may find it valuable implement toolkits for innovation even if the portion of the target market that can directly use them is relatively small.
+
+Toolkits can affect existing business models in a field in ways that may or may not be to manufacturers' competitive advantage in the longer run. For example, consider that many manufacturers of products and services profit from both their design capabilities and their production capabilities. A switch to user-based customization via toolkits can affect their ability to do this over the long term. Thus, a manufacturer that is early in introducing a toolkit approach to custom product or service design may initially gain an advantage by tying that toolkit to its particular production facility. However, when toolkits are made available to customer designers, this tie often weakens over time. Customers and independent tool developers can eventually learn to design toolkits applicable to the processes of several manufacturers. Indeed, this is precisely what has happened in the custom integrated circuit industry. The toolkits revealed to users by the initial innovator, LSI, and later by rival producers were producer-specific. Over time, however, Cadance and other specialist toolkit supply firms emerged and developed toolkits that could be used to make designs producible by a number of vendors. The end result is that manufacturers that previously benefited from selling their product-design skills and their production skills can be eventually forced by the shifting of design tasks to customers via toolkits to a position of benefiting from their production skills only.
+
+Manufacturers that think long-term disadvantages may accrue from a switch to toolkits for user innovation and design will not necessarily have the luxury of declining to introduce toolkits. If any manufacturer introduces a high-quality toolkit into a field favoring its use, customers will tend to migrate to it, forcing competitors to follow. Therefore, a firm's only real choice in a field where conditions are favorable to the introduction of toolkits may be whether to lead or to follow.
+
+1~ 12 Linking User Innovation to Other Phenomena and Fields
+
+This final chapter is devoted to describing links between user-centered innovation and other phenomena and literatures. Of course, innovation writ large is related to anything and everything, so the phenomena and the literatures I will discuss here are only those hanging closest on the intellectual tree. My goal is to enable interested readers to migrate to further branches as they wish, assisted by the provision of a few important references. With respect to phenomena, I will first point out the relationship of user innovation to /{information}/ communities---of which user innovation communities are a subset. With respect to related fields, I begin by linking user-centric innovation phenomena explored in this book to the literature on the economics of knowledge, and to the competitive advantage of nations. Next I link it to research on the sociology of technology. Finally, I point out how findings regarding user innovation could---but do not yet---link to and complement the way that product development is taught to managers.
+={Information commons;Information communities;Product development;Technical communities}
+
+!_ Information Communities
+={Information commons+8;Information communities+8}
+
+Many of the considerations I have discussed with respect to user innovation communities apply to /{information}/ communities as well---a much more general category of which user innovation communities are a subset. I define information communities as communities or networks of individuals and/or organizations that rendezvous around an information commons, a collection of information that is open to all on equal terms.
+={Technical communities+1}
+
+In close analogy to our discussions of innovation communities, I propose that commons-based information communities or networks will form when the following conditions hold: (1) Some have information that is not generally known. (2) Some are willing to freely reveal what they know. (3) Some beyond the information source have uses for what is revealed. On an intuitive basis, one can immediately see that these conditions are often met. Of course, people and firms know different things. Of course there are many things that one would not be averse to freely revealing; and of course others would often be interested in what is freely revealed. After all, as individuals we all regularly freely reveal information not generally known to people who ask, and presumably these people value at least some of the information we provide.
+={Free revealing of innovation information:in information communities+3}
+
+The economics of information communities can be much simpler than that of the user innovation communities discussed earlier, because valuable proprietary information is often not at center stage. When the service provided by information communities is to offer non-proprietary "content" in a more convenient and accessible form, one need consider only the costs and benefits associated with information diffusion. One need not also consider potential losses associated with the free revealing of proprietary innovation-related information.
+
+It is likely that information communities are getting steadily more pervasive for the same reasons that user innovation communities are: the costs of diffusing information are getting steadily lower as computing and communication technologies improve. As a result, information communities may have a rapidly increasing impact on the economy and on the landscape of industry. They are and will be especially empowering to fragmented groups, whose members may for the first time gain low-cost access to a great deal of rich and fresh information of mutual interest. As is the case for user innovation networks, information networks can actually store content that participants freely reveal and make it available for free downloading. (Wikipedia is an example of this.) And/or, information networks can function to link information seekers and information holders rather than actually storing information. In the latter case, participants post to the network, hoping that someone with the requested information will spot their request and provide an answer (Lakhani and von Hippel 2003). Prominent examples can be found in the medical field in the form of specialized websites where patients with relatively rare conditions can for the first time find each other and also find specialists in those conditions. Patients and specialists who participate in these groups can both provide and get access to information that previously was scattered and for most practical purposes inaccessible.
+={Lakhani, K;Wikipedia;von Hippel, E.}
+
+Just as is the case in user innovation groups, open information communities are developing rapidly, and the behaviors and infrastructure needed for success are being increasingly learned and codified. These communities are by no means restricted to user-participants. Thus, both patients and doctors frequently participate in medical information communities. Also, information communities can be run by profit-making firms and/or on a non-profit basis for and by information providers and users themselves--- just as we earlier saw was the case with innovation communities. Firms and users are developing many versions of open information communities and testing them in the market. As an example of a commercially supported information commons, consider e-Bay, where information is freely revealed by many under a structure provided by a commercial firm. The commercial firm then extracts a profit from commissions on transactions consummated between information providers and information seekers. As an example of an information community supported by users themselves, again consider Internet sites specializing in specific diseases---for example, childrenfacingillness.com.
+={Marketing research+1}
+
+Information communities can have major effects on established ways of doing business. For example, markets become more efficient as the information provided to transaction participants improves. Thus, product and service manufacturers benefit from good information on the perceptions and preferences of potential buyers. Similarly, product and service purchasers benefit from good information on the characteristics of the various offerings in the market. Traditionally, firms have collected information on users' needs and on products' characteristics by means of face-to-face interviewing and (in the case of mass markets) questionnaires. Similar information of high quality now can be collected nearly without cost and can be posted on special Internet sites by users themselves and/or by for-profit enterprises. Dellarocas, Awad, and Zhang (2004) show that volunteered online movie reviews provide information that is just as accurate as that collected by surveys of representative samples of respondents. This emerging new approach to data aggregation will clearly affect the established business models of firms specializing in information collection, with websites like www.ciao.co.uk illustrating new possibilities. If the quality of information available to transaction participants goes up and the information price is low, transaction quality should go up. With the aid of online product-evaluation sites, it is likely that consumers will be able to apply much better information even to small buying decisions, such as the choice of a restaurant for tonight's dinner.
+={Awad, N.;Dellarocas C.;Zhang, X.}
+
+What Paul David and colleagues call "open science" is a type of information community that is closely related to the innovation communities discussed earlier (David 1992; Dasgupta and David 1994; David 1998). Free revealing of findings is, of course, a characteristic of modern science. Academic scientists publish regularly and so freely reveal information that may have high proprietary value. This raises the same question explored in the case of innovation communities: Why, in view of the potential of free ridership, do scientists freely reveal the information they have developed at private cost? The answer overlaps with but also differs from the answers provided in the case of free revealing of proprietary innovations by innovation users. With respect to similarities, sociologists of science have found that reputation among peers is important to scientists, and that priority in the discovery of new knowledge is a major component of reputation. Because of the importance of priority, scientists generally rush their research projects to completion and then rush to freely reveal their new findings. This dynamic creates a great advantage from the point of view of social welfare (Merton 1973).
+={Dasgupta, P.;David, P.;Merton, Robert;Free revealing of innovation information:in information communities+1;Intellectual property rights:information communities and;Users:free revealing by+1|information communities and+1}
+
+With respect to major differences, it is public policy in many countries to subsidize research with public funds. These policies are based on the assumption that only inadequate amounts of scientific research can be drawn forth by reputational inducements alone. Recall that, in contrast, innovations developed and freely revealed by innovation users are not subsidized from any source. Users, unlike "scientists," by definition have a personal or corporate use for the innovation-related knowledge they generate. This additional source of private reward may explain why user innovation communities can flourish without subsidy.
+={Knowledge, production and distribution of}
+
+!_ The Economics of Knowledge
+={Knowledge, production and distribution of+7;Users:knowledge and+7}
+
+In this field, Foray (2004) provides a rich road map regarding the economics of knowledge and the central role played by users. Foray argues that the radical changes in information and communication technologies (ICT) are creating major changes in the economics of knowledge production and distribution. Economists have traditionally reduced knowledge production to the function of research and development, defined as the activity specifically devoted to invention and innovation. Starting with Machlup (1962), economists also have identified the knowledge-based economy as consisting of specialized sectors focused on activities related to communication, education, the media, and computing and information-related services. Foray argues that these simplifications, although providing a rationale for a way to measure knowledge-generation activities, were never appropriate and now are totally misleading.
+={Machlup, F.;Foray, D.+2}
+
+Knowledge generation, Foray says, is now a major activity across all industrial sectors and is by no means restricted to R&D laboratories: we are in the age of the knowledge economy. He makes a central distinction between R&D that is conducted in laboratories remote from doing, and learning by doing at the site of production. He argues that both are important, and have complementary advantages and drawbacks. Laboratory research can ignore some of the complexities involved in production in search of basic understanding. Learning by doing has the contrasting advantage of being in the full fidelity of the real production process. The drawback to learning by doing, however, is that one is attempting to do two things at once---producing and learning---and this can force compromises onto both.
+
+Foray positions users at the heart of knowledge production. He says that one major challenge for management is to capture the knowledge being generated by users "on line" during the process of doing and producing, and to integrate it with knowledge created "off line" in laboratories. He discusses implications of the distributed nature of knowledge production among users and others, and notes that the increased capabilities of information and communication technologies tend to reduce innovators' ability to control the knowledge they create. He proposes that the most effective knowledge-management policies and practices will be biased toward knowledge sharing.
+
+Weber (2004, pp. 72--73) explores similar ideas in the specific context of open source software. "The conventional language of industrial-era economics," he notes, "identifies producers and consumers, supply and demand. The open source process scrambles these categories. Open source software users are not consumers in the conventional sense. . . . Users integrate into the production process itself in a profound way." Weber's central thesis is that the open source process is a new way of organizing production:
+={Weber, S.;Open source software:knowledge and}
+
+_1 One solution is the familiar economy that depends upon a blend of exclusive property rights, divisions of labor, reduction of transaction costs, and the management of principal-agent problems. The success of open source demonstrates the importance of a fundamentally different solution, built on top of an unconventional understanding of property rights configured around distribution. . . . And it relies on a set of organizational structures to coordinate behavior around the problem of managing distributed innovation, which is different from the division of labor. (ibid., p. 224)
+
+Weber details the property-rights regime used by open source projects, and also the nature of open source innovation communities and incentives acting on participants. He then argues that this new mode of production can extend beyond the development of open source software, to an extent and a degree that are not yet understood:
+={Weber, S.;Open source software:knowledge and}
+
+One important direction in which the open source experiment points is toward moving beyond the discussion of transaction as a key determinant of institutional design. . . . The elegant analytics of transaction cost economics do very interesting work in explaining how divisions of labor evolve through outsourcing of particular functions (the decision to buy rather than make something). But the open source process adds another element. The notion of open-sourcing as a strategic organizational decision can be seen as an efficiency choice around distributed innovation, just as outsourcing was an efficiency choice around transactions costs. . . . As information about what users want and need to do becomes more fine-grained, more individually differentiated, and harder to communicate, the incentives grow to shift the locus of innovation closer to them by empowering them with freely modifiable tools. (ibid., pp. 265--267)
+
+!_ National Competitive Advantage
+={Government policy:and national competitive advantage+6;Manufacturers:and national competitive advantage+6;National competitive advantage+6:See also Government policy;Users:national competitive advantage and+6}
+
+Understanding national innovation systems and the competitive advantage of a nation's firms is an important matter for national policy makers (Nelson 1993). Can what we have learned in this book shed any light on their concerns? Porter (1991), assessing national competitive advantage through the intellectual lens of competitive strategy, concludes that one of four major factors determining the competitive advantage of nations is demand conditions. "A nation's firms," he argues, "gain competitive advantage if domestic buyers are, or are among, the world's most sophisticated and demanding buyers for the product or service. Such buyers provide a window into the most advanced buyer needs. . . . Buyers are demanding where home product needs are especially stringent or challenging because of local circumstances." For example: "The continental United States has been intensely drilled, and wells are being drilled in increasingly difficult and marginal fields. The pressure has been unusually great for American oil field equipment suppliers to perfect techniques that minimize the cost of difficult drilling and ensure full recovery from each field. This has pushed them to advance the state of the art and sustain strong international positions." (ibid., pp. 89--90)
+={Nelson, R.;Porter, M.+5}
+
+Porter also argues that /{early}/ domestic demand is also important: "Provided it anticipates buyer needs in other nations, early local demand for a product or service in a nation helps local firms to move sooner than foreign rivals to become established in an industry. They get the jump in building large-scale facilities and accumulating experience. . . . Only if home demand is anticipatory of international need will home demand contribute to advantage." (ibid., p. 95)
+
+From my perspective, Porter is making the case for the value of a nation's domestic lead users to national competitive advantage. However, he is also assuming that it is /{manufacturers}/ that innovate in response to advanced or stringent user demand. On the basis of the findings reported on in this book, I would modify this assumption by noting that, often, domestic manufacturers' links to /{innovating lead users}/ have the impacts on national competitive advantage that he describes---but that the lead users' input to favored domestic firms would include innovations as well as needs.
+
+Domestic lead users make a difference to national competitive advantage, Porter argues, because "local firms often enjoy some natural advantages in serving their home market compared to foreign firms, a result of proximity as well as language, regulation, and cultural affinities (even, frequently, if foreign firms are staffed with local nationals)." Porter continues: "Preferred access to a large domestic customer base can be a spur to investment by local firms. Home demand may be perceived as more certain and easier to forecast, while foreign demand is seen as uncertain even if firms think they have the ability to fill it." (ibid., p. 93)
+
+What new insights and research questions can the work of this book contribute to this analysis of national competitive advantage? On the one hand, I certainly see the pattern Porter describes in some studies of lead user innovation. For example, early in the history of the US semiconductor industry, AT&T, the inventor of the transistor and an early innovator, developed a number of novel types of production equipment as a user organization. AT&T engineers went to local machine shops to have these machines produced in volume to meet AT&T's in-house production needs. A side effect of this procurement strategy was to put many of these previously undistinguished firms into the business of producing advanced semi-conductor equipment to the world (von Hippel 1977, 1988).
+={von Hippel, E.}
+
+On the other hand, the findings of this book suggest that the "natural advantages" Porter proposes that domestic manufacturers will have with respect to filling the needs of local lead users may be eroding in the Internet age. As has been seen in the case of open source software, and by extension in the cases of other information-based products, users are capable of developing complex products in a coordinated way without geographic proximity. Participants in a particular open source project, for example, may come from a number of countries and may never meet face to face. In the case of physical products, the emergence of a pattern of user-based design followed by "foundry-style" production may also reduce the importance of propinquity between innovating lead users and manufacturers. As in the cases of integrated circuits and kitesurfing discussed earlier in this book, users can transmit CAD product-design information files from anywhere to any suitably equipped manufacturer for production. Probably only in the case of physical products where the interaction between product and production methods are not clear will geography continue to matter deeply in the age of the Internet. Nations may be able to create comparative advantages for domestic manufacturers with respect to profiting from innovation by lead users; however, they cannot assume that such advantages will continue to exist simply because of propinquity.
+={Custom products:product platforms and|users and;Innovation communities:open source software and;Kitesurfing;Open source software;Printed circuit CAD software;Open source software:innovation communities and;Toolkits:platform products and;Users:custom products and}
+
+!_ The Sociology of Technical Communities
+={Information commons+8;Innovation communities:sociology of+8;Technical communities+8}
+
+Relevant elements of this field include studies in the sociology of technology in general and studies of the sociology of open source software communities in particular. Historical accounts of the evolution of a technology have often taken a linear view of their subject. In the linear view, a technology such as aerodynamics and related technological artifacts such as the airplane start at point A and then naturally evolve to end point B. In other words, it is implicitly assumed that the airplane will evolve from the artifact of wood and fabric and wire developed by the Wright brothers to the characteristics we associate with aircraft today. Nothing much to explain about that.
+={Open source software;Open source software:innovation communities and}
+
+In the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) model of technological evolution (Pinch and Bijker 1987), the direction in which an artifact (a product, for example) evolves depends very much on the meanings that different "groups with a problem" construct for it. These meanings, in turn, affect which of the many possible variations of a product are developed, how they evolve, and whether and how they eventually die. Groups that construct the meanings of a product centrally include, but are not restricted to, product users. For example, in the case of the bicycle, some relevant groups were users of various types---people who wanted to travel from place to place via bicycle, people who wanted to race bicycles, etc. Relevant non-user groups included "anticyclists," who had a negative view of the bicycle in its early days and wanted it to fail (Bijker 1995).
+={Bijker, W.;Pinch, T.+4;Custom products:users and}
+
+When one takes the views of all relevant groups into account, one gets a much richer view of the "socially constructed" evolution of a technology. As a relatively recent example, consider the supersonic transport plane (SST) planned in the United States during the 1970s. Airlines, and potential passengers were "groups with a problem" who presumably wanted the technology for different reasons. Other relevant groups with a problem included people who expected to be negatively affected by the sonic boom the SST would cause, people who were concerned about the pollution its engines would cause in the stratosphere, and people who had other reasons for opposing or supporting the SST. Proposed designs evolved in an attempt to satisfy the various contending interest groups. Eventually it became clear that the SST designers could not arrive at a generally acceptable compromise solution and so the project failed (Horwich 1982).
+={Horwich, M.}
+
+Pinch and Kline (1996, pp. 774--775) elaborated on the original SCOT model by pointing out that the way a product is interpreted is not restricted to the design stage of a technology, but also can continue during the product's use. They illustrated with the case of the automobile: . . .
+={Kline, R.+2}
+
+_1 although [automobile] manufacturers may have ascribed a particular meaning to the artifact they were not able to control how that artifact was used once it got into the hands of the users. Users precisely as users can embed new meanings into the technology. This happened with the adaptation of the car into rural life. As early as 1903, farm families started to define the car as more than a transportation device. In particular, they saw it as a general source of power. George Schmidt, a Kansas farmer, advised readers of the /{Rural New Yorker}/ in 1903 to "block up the hind axle and run a belt over the one wheel of the automobile and around the wheel on a [corn] sheller, grinder, saw, pump, or any other machine that the engine is capable of running, and see how the farmer can save money and be in style with any city man." T. A. Pottinger, an Illinois farm man, wrote in /{Wallace's Farmer}/ in 1909 that "the ideal farm car should have a detachable backseat, which could turn the vehicle into a small truck." Other Phenomena and Fields 173
+={Pottinger, T.;Schmidt, G.}
+
+Of course, user innovations and modifications are involved in these cases along with users' reinterpretation of product uses. Kline and Pinch report that manufacturers adopted some of the rural users' innovations, generally after a lag. For example, a car that could also serve as a small truck was eventually offered as a commercial product.
+={Users:innovation and+13;Manufacturers:innovation and}
+
+Research on communities of practice offers another link between studies of user innovation and sociology (Brown and Duguid 1991; Wenger 1998). The focus of this research is on the functioning of specialist communities. Researchers find that experts in a field spontaneously form interest groups that communicate to exchange their views and learnings on how to carry out and improve the practices of their profession. Members of communities of practice exchange help in informal ways that seem similar to the practices described above as characteristic of open source software projects and communities of sports innovators.
+={Brown, J.;Duguid, P.;Wenger, E.;Open source software}
+
+Research on brand communities is still another related research thread (Muniz and O'Guinn 2001). Brand communities form around commercial brands and products (e.g., Lego construction toys) and even around products discontinued by their manufacturers e.g., Apple's Newton personal digital assistant). Brand communities can be intensely meaningful to participants and can involve user innovation. In Newton groups, for example, users develop new applications and exchange information about how to repair aging equipment (Muniz and Schau 2004). In Lego communities, lead users develop new products, new building techniques, and new offline and online multiplayer building projects that later prove to be of interest to the manufacturer (Antorini 2005).
+={Antorini, Y.;Brand communities;Muniz, A.;O'Guinn, T.;Schau, H.;Innovation communities:brand and}
+
+!_ The Management of Product Development
+={Product development+10}
+
+Finally, I turn to links between user-centered innovation and teaching on the management of product development. Information on lead users as a source of new product ideas now appears in most marketing textbooks. There also should be a link to other elements of user-centered innovation processes in the literature on product-development management---but there really isn't much of one yet. Although much of the research on user innovation cited in this book is going on in schools of management and business economics, little of this information has moved into teaching related to the product-development process as of yet.
+
+Clearly, it would be useful to provide managers of both user firms and manufacturing firms with a better understanding of the management of user-centered innovation. It is a curious fact that even managers of firms that have built major product lines upon user-developed innovations may hold the manufacturer-centric view that "we developed that." For example, an early study of innovation in scientific instruments documented that nearly 80 percent of the major improvements commercialized by instrument manufacturers had been developed by users (von Hippel 1976). When I later discussed this finding with managers in instrument firms, most of them were astonished. They insisted that all the innovations in the study sample had been developed within manufacturing firms. They could be convinced otherwise only when supplied with actual publications by user-scientists describing user-built prototypes of those instrument improvements---prototypes developed from 5 to 7 years before any instrument firm had sold a functionally equivalent commercial product.
+={von Hippel, E.}
+
+My inquiries into why managers in this field and others held---and largely still hold---such contrary-to-fact beliefs identified several contributing factors. First, manufacturers seldom track where the major new products and product improvements they sell actually came from. Managers see no need to set up a tracking system, because the conventional wisdom is clear: "Everyone knows new products are developed by manufacturers such as ourselves based on user needs identified by market research." Further, the manufacturing firms have market-research and product-development departments in place, and innovations are somehow being produced. Thus, it is easy to conclude that the manufacturers' innovation processes must be working as expected.
+
+In fact, however, important, functionally novel innovations are often brought into manufacturers by informal channels. Product-development engineers may attend conferences and learn about important user innovations, salesmen and technical service personnel discover user-modified equipment on field visits, and so on. Once the basic innovation-related information is in house, the operating principles of a user's prototype will often be adopted, but the detailed design of the device will be changed and improved for production. After a while, the user's prototype, if remembered at all, will begin to look quite primitive to the firm's engineers relative to the much better product they have designed. Finally, when sales begin, the firm's advertising will urge customers to buy "/{our}/ wonderful new product." Other Phenomena and Fields 175
+
+The net result is understandable: the user roots of many new commercial products, never widely known in manufacturing firms, are forgotten. And when it is time to develop the next innovation, management again turns to the conventional methods that "worked so well for us last time." Eventually, information about new user innovations will again arrive by pathways unnoticed and unmanaged---and with an unnecessary lag.
+
+To improve matters, managers must learn when it is appropriate to follow user-centered and manufacturer-centered innovation process paradigms and how user-centered innovation can best be managed when it is the method of choice. Managers in user firms and in manufacturing firms need tools with which to understand the innovate-or-buy decisions they face---to understand which product needs or which service needs users (rather than manufacturers) should invest in developing. Managers in user firms also need to learn how their firms can best carry out development work in their low-cost innovation niches: how they can best deploy their information-related advantages of being actual users and residing in the context of use to cheaply learn by doing. Managers in manufacturing firms will want to learn how they can best play a profitable role in user-centered innovation patterns when these play a role in the markets they serve.
+={Sticky information:toolkits and+1;Users:innovate-or-buy decisions by|low-cost innovation niches of}
+
+Innovating users may also want to learn whether and how to diffuse their innovations by becoming manufacturers. This may be a fairly common practice in some fields. Shah (2000) found that users of sports equipment sometimes became manufacturers by a very natural process. The users would demonstrate the performance and value of their innovations as they used them in public sporting events. Some of the participants in the meets would then ask "Can you make one of those for me too?" Informal hobby-level production would then sometimes become the basis of a major company. Lettl, Herstatt, and Gemünden (2004) report on case histories in which user-innovators became heavily involved in promoting the commercialization of important innovations in surgical equipment. These innovations tended to be developed by surgeons, who then often made major efforts to induce manufacturers to commercialize them. Hienerth (2004) documents how user-innovators in "rodeo kayaking" build their own boats, discover that kayak manufacturers (even those established by a previous generation of user-innovators) are unwilling to manufacture what they want, and so are driven to become manufacturers themselves.
+={Gemünden, H.;Lettl, C.;Herstatt, C.;Hienerth, C.;Shah, S.;Sporting equipment:lead users and;Windsurfing;Surgical equipment}
+
+Managers must learn that no single locus of innovation is the "right" one for either user firms or manufacturer firms. The locus of innovation varies between user firms and manufacturing firms according to market-related and information-related conditions. These conditions may well vary predictably over product life cycles. Utterback and Abernathy (1975) proposed that innovation by users is likely to be more important in the early stages of such cycles. Early in the life of a new product, there is a "fluid" stage in which the nature and the use of a product are unclear. Here, Utterback and Abernathy say, users play a big part in sorting the matter out, in part through innovation. Later, a dominant product design will emerge---a shared sense of exactly what a particular product is, what features and components it should include, and how it should function. (We all know, for example, that a car has four wheels and moves along the ground in directions determined by a steering wheel.) After that time, if the market for the product grows, innovation will shift from product to process as firms shift from the problem of what to produce to the problem of how to produce a well-understood product in ever greater volumes. From a lead user innovation perspective, of course, both functionally novel products and functionally novel processes are likely to be developed by users---in the first case users of the product, and in the second by manufacturing firms that use the process.
+={Albernathy, W.;Utterback, J.}
+
+!_ In Conclusion
+
+In this book I have explored how and why users, individually and in firms and in communities, develop and freely reveal innovations. I have also argued that there is a general trend toward a open and distributed innovation process driven by steadily better and cheaper computing and communications. The net result is an ongoing shift toward the democratization of innovation. This welfare-enhancing shift is forcing major changes in user and manufacturer innovation practices, and is creating the need for change in government policies. It also, as I noted at the start of the book, presents major new opportunities for us all. Other Phenomena and Fields 177
+
+1~ Notes
+
+!_ Chapter 2
+
+1. LES contains four types of measures. Three ("benefits recognized early," "high benefits expected," and "direct elicitation of the construct") contain the core components of the lead user construct. The fourth ("applications generation") is a measure of a number of innovation-related activities in which users might engage: they "suggest new applications," they "pioneer those applications," and (because they have needs or problems earlier than their peers) they may be "used as a test site" (Morrison, Midgely, and Roberts 2004).
+
+!_ Chapter 3
+
+1. Cluster analysis does not specify the "right" number of clusters---it simply segments a sample into smaller and smaller clusters until the analyst calls a halt. Determining an appropriate number of clusters within a sample can be done in different ways. Of course, it always possible to say that "I only want to deal with three market segments, so I will stop my analysis when my sample has been segmented into three clusters." More commonly, analysts will examine the increase of squared error sums of each step, and generally will view the optimal number of clusters as having been reached when the plot shows a sudden "elbow" (Myers 1996). Since this technique does not incorporate information on remaining within-cluster heterogeneity, it can lead to solutions with a large amount of within-cluster variance. The "cubic clustering criterion" (CCC) partially addresses this concern by measuring the within-cluster homogeneity relative to the between-cluster heterogeneity. It suggests choosing the number of clusters where this value peaks (Milligan and Cooper 1985). However, this method appears to be rarely used: Ketchen and Shook (1996) found it used in only 5 of 45 segmentation studies they examined.
+
+2. http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.infosystems.www.servers.unix
+
+3. http://modules.apache.org/
+
+4. To measure heterogeneity, Franke and I analyzed the extent to which j standards, varying from [1; i], meet the needs of the i individuals in our sample. Conceptually, we first locate a product in multi-dimensional need space (dimensions = 45 in the case of our present study) that minimizes the distances to each individual's needs. (This step is analogous to the Ward's method in cluster analysis that also minimizes within cluster variation; see Punj and Stewart 1983.) The "error" is then measured as the sum of squared Euclidean distances. We then repeated these steps to determine the error for two optimally positioned products, three products, and so on up to a number equaling I -- 1. The sum of squared errors for all cases is then a simple coefficient that measures how much the needs of i individuals can be satisfied with j standard products. The "coefficient of heterogeneity" just specified is sensitive both to the (average) distance between the needs and for the configuration of the needs: when the needs tend to form clusters the heterogeneity coefficient is lower than if they are evenly spread. To make the coefficient comparable across different populations, we calibrate it using a bootstrapping technique (Efron 1979) involving dividing the coefficient by the expected value (this value is generated by averaging the heterogeneity of many random distributions of heterogeneity of the same kind). The average random heterogeneity coefficient is then an appropriate value for calibration purposes: it assumes that there is no systematic relationship between the needs of the individuals or between the need dimensions.
+
+5. Conceptually, it can be possible to generate "one perfect product" for everyone--- in which case heterogeneity of demand is zero---by simply creating all the features wanted by anyone (45 + 92 features in the case of this study), and incorporating them in the "one perfect product." Users could then select the features they want from a menu contained in the one perfect product to tailor it to their own tastes. Doing this is at least conceptually possible in the case of software, but less so in the case of a physical product for two reasons: (1) delivering all possible physical options to everyone who buys the product would be expensive for physical goods (while costing nothing extra in the case of information products); (2) some options are mutually exclusive (an automobile cannot be both red and green at the same time).
+
+6. The difference between actual willingness to pay and expressed willingness to pay is much lower for private goods (our case) than for public goods. In the case of private goods, Loomis et al. (1996) found the expressed willingness to pay for art prints to be twice the actual WTP. Willis and Powe (1998) found that among visitors to a castle the expressed WTP was 60 percent lower than the actual WTP. In the case of public goods, Brown et al. (1996), in a study of willingness to pay for removal of a road from a wilderness area, found the expressed WTP to be 4--6 times the actual WTP. Lindsey and Knaap (1999), in a study of WTP for a public urban greenway, found the expressed WTP to be 2-10 times the actual WPT. Neil et al. (1994) found the expressed WTP for conserving an original painting in the desert to be 9 times the actual WTP. Seip and Strand (1992) found that less than 10 percent of those who expressed interest in paying to join an environmental organization actually joined.
+
+!_ Chapter 6
+
+1. As a specific example of a project with an emergent goal, consider the beginnings of the Linux open source software project. In 1991, Linus Torvalds, a student in Finland, wanted a Unix operating system that could be run on his PC, which was equipped with a 386 processor. Minix was the only software available at that time but it was commercial, closed source, and it traded at US$150. Torvalds found this too expensive, and started development of a Posix-compatible operating system, later known as Linux. Torvalds did not immediately publicize a very broad and ambitious goal, nor did he attempt to recruit contributors. He simply expressed his private motivation in a message he posted on July 3, 1991, to the USENET newsgroup comp.os.minix (Wayner 2000): Hello netlanders, Due to a project I'm working on (in minix), I'm interested in the posix standard definition. [Posix is a standard for UNIX designers. A software using POSIX is compatible with other UNIX-based software.] Could somebody please point me to a (preferably) machine-readable format of the latest posix-rules? Ftp-sites would be nice. In response, Torvalds got several return messages with Posix rules and people expressing a general interest in the project. By the early 1992, several skilled programmers contributed to Linux and the number of users increased by the day. Today, Linux is the largest open source development project extant in terms of number of developers.
+={Linux}
+
+!_ Chapter 7
+
+1. When they do not incorporate these qualities, they would be more properly referred to as networks---but communities is the term commonly used, and I follow that practice here.
+
+2. hacker n. [originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe] 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. 2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming. 3. A person capable of appreciating hack value. 4. A person who is good at programming quickly. . . . 8. [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. Hence password hacker, network hacker. The correct term for this sense is cracker (Raymond 1996).
+
+3. Source code is a sequence of instructions to be executed by a computer to accomplish a program's purpose. Programmers write computer software in the form of source code, and also document that source code with brief written explanations of the purpose and design of each section of their program. To convert a program into a form that can actually operate a computer, source code is translated into machine code using a software tool called a compiler. The compiling process removes program documentation and creates a binary version of the program---a sequence of computer instructions consisting only of strings of ones and zeros. Binary code is very difficult for programmers to read and interpret. Therefore, programmers or firms that wish to prevent others from understanding and modifying their code will release only binary versions of the software. In contrast, programmers or firms that wish to enable others to understand and update and modify their software will provide them with its source code. (Moerke 2000, Simon 1996).
+
+4. See www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#GPL
+
+5. http://www.sourceforge.net
+
+6. "The owner(s) [or `maintainers'] of an open source software project are those who have the exclusive right, recognized by the community at large, to redistribute modified versions. . . . According to standard open source licenses, all parties are equal in the evolutionary game. But in practice there is a very well-recognized distinction between `official' patches [changes to the software], approved and integrated into the evolving software by the publicly recognized maintainers, and `rogue' patches by third parties. Rogue patches are unusual and generally not trusted." (Raymond 1999, p. 89)
+
+!_ Chapter 8
+
+1. See also Bresnahan and Greenstein 1996b; Bresnahan and Saloner 1997; Saloner and Steinmueller 1996.
+
+!_ Chapter 10
+
+1. ABS braking is intended to keep a vehicle's wheels turning during braking. ABS works by automatically and rapidly "pumping" the brakes. The result is that the wheels continue to revolve rather than "locking up," and the operator continues to have control over steering.
+
+2. In the general literature, Armstrong's (2001) review on forecast bias for new product introduction indicates that sales forecasts are generally optimistic, but that that upward bias decreases as the magnitude of the sales forecast increases. Coller and Yohn (1998) review the literature on bias in accuracy of management earnings forecasts and find that little systematic bias occurs. Tull's (1967) model calculates $15 million in revenue as a level above which forecasts actually become pessimistic on average. We think it reasonable to apply the same deflator to LU vs. non-LU project sales projections. Even if LU project personnel were for some reason more likely to be optimistic with respect to such projections than non-LU project personnel, that would not significantly affect our findings. Over 60 percent of the total dollar value of sales forecasts made for LU projects were actually made by personnel not associated with those projects (outside consulting firms or business analysts from other divisions).
+
+1~ Bibliography
+
+Achilladelis, B., A. B. Robertson, and P. Jervis. 1971. /{Project SAPPHO}/. Centre for the Study of Industrial Innovation, London.
+
+Aghion, P., and J. Tirole. 1994. "The Management of Innovation." /{Quarterly Journal of Economics}/ 109: 1185--1209.
+
+Allen, R. C. 1983. "Collective Invention." /{Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization}/ 4, no. 1: 1--24.
+
+Allen, T. J. 1966. "Studies of the Problem-Solving Process in Engineering Design." /{IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management}/ 13, no. 2: 72--83.
+
+Amabile, T. M. 1996. /{Creativity in Context}/. Westview.
+
+Antelman, Kristin. 2004. "Do Open Access Articles Have a Greater Research Impact?" /{College and Research Libraries}/ 65, no. 5: 372--382.
+
+Antorini, Y. M. 2005. The Making of a Lead User. Working paper, Copenhagen Business School.
+
+Armstrong, J. S., ed. 2001. /{Principles of Forecasting}/. Kluwer.
+
+Arora, A., A. Fosfuri, and A. Gambardella. 2001. /{Markets for Technology}/. MIT Press.
+
+Arora, A., and A. Gambardella. 1994. "The Changing Technology of Technological Change." /{Research Policy}/ 23, no. 5: 523--532.
+
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+Thomke, S. H., E. von Hippel, and R. Franke. 1998. "Modes of Experimentation: An Innovation Process---and Competitive---Variable." /{Research Policy}/ 27, no. 3: 315--332.
+
+Tirole, J. 1988. /{The Theory of Industrial Organization}/. MIT Press.
+
+Tull, D. 1967. "The Relationship of Actual and Predicted Sales and Profits in New Product Introductions." /{Journal of Business}/ 40: 233--250.
+
+Tyre, M., and E. von Hippel. 1997. "Locating Adaptive Learning: The Situated Nature of Adaptive Learning in Organizations." /{Organization Science}/ 8, no. 1: 71--83.
+
+Urban, G. L., and E. von Hippel. 1988. "Lead User Analyses for the Development of New Industrial Products." /{Management Science}/ 34, no. 5: 569--82.
+
+Utterback, J. M., and W. J. Abernathy. 1975. "A Dynamic Model of Process and Product Innovation." /{Omega 3}/, no. 6: 639--656.
+
+van der Plas, R., and C. Kelly. 1998. /{The Original Mountain Bike Book}/. MBI.
+
+Varian, H. R. 2002. "New Chips Can Keep a Tight Rein on Consumers." /{New York Times}/, July 4.
+
+von Hippel, E. 1976. "The Dominant Role of Users in the Scientific Instrument Innovation Process." /{Research Policy}/ 5, no. 3: 212--39.
+
+von Hippel, E. 1977. "Transferring Process Equipment Innovations from User-Innovators to Equipment Manufacturing Firms." /{R&D Management}/ 8, no. 1:13--22.
+
+von Hippel, E. 1986. "Lead Users: A Source of Novel Product Concepts." /{Management Science}/ 32, no. 7: 791--805.
+
+von Hippel, E. 1988. /{The Sources of Innovation}/. Oxford University Press.
+
+von Hippel, E. 1994. "Sticky Information and the Locus of Problem Solving: Implications for Innovation." /{Management Science}/ 40, no. 4: 429--439.
+
+von Hippel, E. 1998. "Economics of Product Development by Users: The Impact of Sticky Local Information." /{Management Science}/ 44, no. 5: 629--644.
+
+von Hippel, E. 2001. "Perspective: User Toolkits for Innovation." /{Journal of Product Innovation Management}/ 18: 247--257.
+
+von Hippel, E., and S. N. Finkelstein. 1979. "Analysis of Innovation in Automated Clinical Chemistry Analyzers." /{Science and Public Policy}/ 6, no. 1:
+24--37.
+
+von Hippel, E., N. Franke, and R. Prügl. 2005. Screening vs. Pyramiding. Working paper, MIT Sloan School of Management.
+
+von Hippel, E., and R. Katz. 2002. "Shifting Innovation to Users via Toolkits." /{Management Science}/ 48, no. 7: 821--833.
+
+von Hippel, E., S. H. Thomke, and M. Sonnack. 1999. "Creating Breakthroughs at 3M." /{Harvard Business Review}/ 77, no. 5: 47--57.
+
+von Hippel, E., and M. Tyre. 1995. "How `Learning by Doing' is Done: Problem Identification in Novel Process Equipment." /{Research Policy}/ 24, no. 1: 1--12.
+
+von Hippel, E., and G. von Krogh. 2003. "Open Source Software and the "Private-Collective" Innovation Model: Issues for Organization Science." /{Organization Science}/ 14, no. 2: 209--223.
+
+von Krogh, G., and S. Spaeth. 2002. Joining, Specialization, and Innovation in Open Source Software Development. Working paper, University of St. Gallen.
+
+von Krogh, G., S. Haefliger and S. Spaeth. 2004. The Practice of Knowledge Reuse in Open Source Software. Working paper, University of St. Gallen.
+
+Wellman, B., J. Boase, and W. Chen. 2002. The Networked Nature of Community On and Off the Internet. Working paper, Centre for Urban and Community Studies, University of Toronto.
+
+Wenger, E. 1998. /{Communities of Practice}/. Cambridge University Press.
+
+Wayner, P. 2000. /{Free for All}/. Harper Business.
+
+Weber, S. 2004. /{The Success of Open Source}/. Harvard University Press.
+
+Willis, K. G., and N. A. Powe. 1998. "Contingent Valuation and Real Economic Commitments: A Private Good Experiment." /{Journal of Environmental Planning and Management}/ 41, no. 5: 611--619.
+
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+
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+
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+
+%% index di.eric_von_hippel_index.txt democratizing_innovation.eric_von_hippel_index.txt
diff --git a/data/samples/generic/down_and_out_in_the_magic_kingdom.cory_doctorow.sst b/data/samples/generic/down_and_out_in_the_magic_kingdom.cory_doctorow.sst
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0be8b68
--- /dev/null
+++ b/data/samples/generic/down_and_out_in_the_magic_kingdom.cory_doctorow.sst
@@ -0,0 +1,2952 @@
+% SiSU 4.0
+
+@title: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
+
+@creator:
+ :author: Doctorow, Cory
+
+@date:
+ :published: 2003-01-09
+ :modified: 2010-09-16
+
+@rights:
+ :copyright: Copyright © 2003 Cory Doctorow
+ :license: Creative Commons, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0. That means, you are free: \\ to Share - to copy, distribute and transmit the work; \\ to Remix - to adapt the work; \\ Under the following conditions: \\ Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work); \\ Noncommercial - You may not use this work for commercial purposes; \\ Share Alike — If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one. \\ For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. \\ The best way to do this is with a link http://craphound.com/down \\ Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get my permission. More info here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/ See the end of this document for the complete legalese. \\ RELICENSED from Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial 1.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0/
+
+@classify:
+ :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:novel;book:novel:fiction:counterculture|young adult|science fiction
+ :subject: novel
+
+@identifier:
+ :oclc: 50645482
+ :isbn: 0765304368
+
+@notes:
+ :description: Realizing his boyhood dream of moving to the twentieth-century artistic creation of Disney World, Jules becomes incensed by a new group that would change the Hall of Presidents by replacing the audioanimatronics with brain interfaces.
+
+@links:
+ { Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom home }http://craphound.com/down
+ { @ Wikipedia }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom
+ { @ Amazon.com }http://www.amazon.com/Down-Magic-Kingdom-Cory-Doctorow/dp/076530953X
+ { @ Barnes & Noble }http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Down-and-Out-in-the-Magic-Kingdom/Cory-Doctorow/e/9780765309532
+
+@make:
+% :headings: none; none; none; CHAPTER;
+ :breaks: new=:C; break=1
+ :home_button_text: {Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom}http://craphound.com/down; {Cory Doctorow}http://www.doctorow.com
+ :footer: {Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom}http://craphound.com/down; {Cory Doctorow}http://www.doctorow.com
+
+:A~ @title @author
+
+1~blurbs Blurbs: ~#
+
+He sparkles! He fizzes! He does backflips and breaks the furniture! Science fiction needs Cory Doctorow! ~#
+
+Bruce Sterling ~#
+
+Author, /{The Hacker Crackdown}/ and /{Distraction}/ ~#
+
+In the true spirit of Walt Disney, Doctorow has ripped a part of our common culture, mixed it with a brilliant story, and burned into our culture a new set of memes that will be with us for a generation at least. ~#
+
+Lawrence Lessig ~#
+
+Author, /{The Future of Ideas}/ ~#
+
+Cory Doctorow doesn't just write about the future&nbsp;–&nbsp;I think he lives there. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom isn't just a really good read, it's also, like the best kind of fiction, a kind of guide book. See the Tomorrowland of Tomorrow today, and while you're there, why not drop by Frontierland, and the Haunted Mansion as well? (It's the Mansion that's the haunted heart of this book.) Cory makes me feel nostalgic for the future&nbsp;–&nbsp;a dizzying, yet rather pleasant sensation, as if I'm spiraling down the tracks of Space Mountain over and over again. Visit the Magic Kingdom and live forever! ~#
+
+Kelly Link ~#
+
+Author, /{Stranger Things Happen}/ ~#
+
+Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is the most entertaining and exciting science fiction story I've read in the last few years. I love page-turners, especially when they are as unusual as this novel. I predict big things for Down and Out—it could easily become a breakout genre-buster. ~#
+
+Mark Frauenfelder ~#
+
+Contributing Editor, /{Wired Magazine}/ ~#
+
+Imagine you woke up one day and Walt Disney had taken over the world. Not only that, but money's been abolished and somebody's developed the Cure for Death. Welcome to the Bitchun Society—and make sure you're strapped in tight, because it's going to be a wild ride. In a world where everyone's wishes can come true, one man returns to the original, crumbling city of dreams—Disney World. Here in the spiritual center of the Bitchun Society he struggles to find and preserve the original, human face of the Magic Kingdom against the young, post-human and increasingly alien inheritors of the Earth. Now that any experience can be simulated, human relationships become ever more fragile; and to Julius, the corny, mechanical ghosts of the Haunted Mansion have come to seem like a precious link to a past when we could tell the real from the simulated, the true from the false. ~#
+
+Cory Doctorow—cultural critic, Disneyphile, and ultimate Early Adopter—uses language with the reckless confidence of the Beat poets. Yet behind the dazzling prose and vibrant characters lie ideas we should all pay heed to. The future rushes on like a plummeting roller coaster, and it's hard to see where we're going. But at least with this book Doctorow has given us a map of the park. ~#
+
+Karl Schroeder ~#
+
+Author, /{Permanence}/ ~#
+
+Cory Doctorow is the most interesting new SF writer I've come across in years. He starts out at the point where older SF writers' speculations end. It's a distinct pleasure to give him some Whuffie. ~#
+
+Rudy Rucker ~#
+
+Author, /{Spaceland}/ ~#
+
+Cory Doctorow rocks! I check his blog about ten times a day, because he's always one of the first to notice a major incursion from the social-technological-pop-cultural future, and his voice is a compelling vehicle for news from the future. Down and Out in The Magic Kingdom is about a world that is visible in its outlines today, if you know where to look, from reputation systems to peer-to-peer adhocracies. Doctorow knows where to look, and how to word-paint the rest of us into the picture. ~#
+
+Howard Rheingold ~#
+
+Author, /{Smart Mobs}/ ~#
+
+Doctorow is more than just a sick mind looking to twist the perceptions of those whose realities remain uncorrupted - though that should be enough recommendation to read his work. /{Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom}/ is black comedic, sci-fi prophecy on the dangers of surrendering our consensual hallucination to the regime. Fun to read, but difficult to sleep afterwards. ~#
+
+Douglas Rushkoff ~#
+
+Author of /{Cyberia}/ and /{Media Virus!}/ ~#
+
+“Wow! Disney imagineering meets nanotechnology, the reputation economy, and Ray Kurzweil's transhuman future. As much fun as Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, and as packed with mind bending ideas about social changes cascading from the frontiers of science.” ~#
+
+Tim O'Reilly ~#
+
+Publisher and Founder, O'Reilly and Associates ~#
+
+Doctorow has created a rich and exciting vision of the future, and then wrote a page-turner of a story in it. I couldn't put the book down. ~#
+
+Bruce Schneier ~#
+
+Author, /{Secrets and Lies}/ ~#
+
+Cory Doctorow is one of our best new writers: smart, daring, savvy, entertaining, ambitious, plugged-in, and as good a guide to the wired world of the twenty-first century that stretches out before us as you're going to find. ~#
+
+Gardner Dozois ~#
+
+Editor, /{Asimov's SF}/ ~#
+
+Cory Doctorow's “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” tells a gripping, fast-paced story that hinges on thought-provoking extrapolation from today's technical realities. This is the sort of book that captures and defines the spirit of a turning point in human history when our tools remake ourselves and our world. ~#
+
+Mitch Kapor ~#
+
+Founder, Lotus, Inc., co-founder Electronic Frontier Foundation ~#
+
+1~prologue PROLOGUE
+
+I lived long enough to see the cure for death; to see the rise of the Bitchun Society, to learn ten languages; to compose three symphonies; to realize my boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World; to see the death of the workplace and of work.
+
+I never thought I'd live to see the day when Keep A-Movin' Dan would decide to deadhead until the heat death of the Universe.
+
+Dan was in his second or third blush of youth when I first met him, sometime late-XXI. He was a rangy cowpoke, apparent 25 or so, all rawhide squint-lines and sunburned neck, boots worn thin and infinitely comfortable. I was in the middle of my Chem thesis, my fourth Doctorate, and he was taking a break from Saving the World, chilling on campus in Toronto and core-dumping for some poor Anthro major. We hooked up at the Grad Students' Union—the GSU, or Gazoo for those who knew—on a busy Friday night, summer-ish. I was fighting a coral-slow battle for a stool at the scratched bar, inching my way closer every time the press of bodies shifted, and he had one of the few seats, surrounded by a litter of cigarette junk and empties, clearly encamped.
+
+Some duration into my foray, he cocked his head at me and raised a sun-bleached eyebrow. “You get any closer, son, and we're going to have to get a pre-nup.”
+
+I was apparent forty or so, and I thought about bridling at being called son, but I looked into his eyes and decided that he had enough realtime that he could call me son anytime he wanted. I backed off a little and apologized.
+
+He struck a cig and blew a pungent, strong plume over the bartender's head. “Don't worry about it. I'm probably a little over accustomed to personal space.”
+
+I couldn't remember the last time I'd heard anyone on-world talk about personal space. With the mortality rate at zero and the birth-rate at non-zero, the world was inexorably accreting a dense carpet of people, even with the migratory and deadhead drains on the population. “You've been jaunting?” I asked—his eyes were too sharp for him to have missed an instant's experience to deadheading.
+
+He chuckled. “No sir, not me. I'm into the kind of macho shitheadery that you only come across on-world. Jaunting's for play; I need work.” The bar-glass tinkled a counterpoint.
+
+I took a moment to conjure a HUD with his Whuffie score on it. I had to resize the window—he had too many zeroes to fit on my standard display. I tried to act cool, but he caught the upwards flick of my eyes and then their involuntary widening. He tried a little aw-shucksery, gave it up and let a prideful grin show.
+
+“I try not to pay it much mind. Some people, they get overly grateful.” He must've seen my eyes flick up again, to pull his Whuffie history. “Wait, don't go doing that—I'll tell you about it, you really got to know.
+
+“Damn, you know, it's so easy to get used to life without hyperlinks. You'd think you'd really miss 'em, but you don't.”
+
+And it clicked for me. He was a missionary—one of those fringe-dwellers who act as emissary from the Bitchun Society to the benighted corners of the world where, for whatever reasons, they want to die, starve, and choke on petrochem waste. It's amazing that these communities survive more than a generation; in the Bitchun Society proper, we usually outlive our detractors. The missionaries don't have such a high success rate—you have to be awfully convincing to get through to a culture that's already successfully resisted nearly a century's worth of propaganda—but when you convert a whole village, you accrue all the Whuffie they have to give. More often, missionaries end up getting refreshed from a backup after they aren't heard from for a decade or so. I'd never met one in the flesh before.
+
+“How many successful missions have you had?” I asked.
+
+“Figured it out, huh? I've just come off my fifth in twenty years—counterrevolutionaries hidden out in the old Cheyenne Mountain NORAD site, still there a generation later.” He sandpapered his whiskers with his fingertips. “Their parents went to ground after their life's savings vanished, and they had no use for tech any more advanced than a rifle. Plenty of those, though.”
+
+He spun a fascinating yarn then, how he slowly gained the acceptance of the mountain-dwellers, and then their trust, and then betrayed it in subtle, beneficent ways: introducing Free Energy to their greenhouses, then a gengineered crop or two, then curing a couple deaths, slowly inching them toward the Bitchun Society, until they couldn't remember why they hadn't wanted to be a part of it from the start. Now they were mostly off-world, exploring toy frontiers with unlimited energy and unlimited supplies and deadheading through the dull times en route.
+
+“I guess it'd be too much of a shock for them to stay on-world. They think of us as the enemy, you know—they had all kinds of plans drawn up for when we invaded them and took them away; hollow suicide teeth, booby-traps, fall-back-and-rendezvous points for the survivors. They just can't get over hating us, even though we don't even know they exist. Off-world, they can pretend that they're still living rough and hard.” He rubbed his chin again, his hard calluses grating over his whiskers. “But for me, the real rough life is right here, on-world. The little enclaves, each one is like an alternate history of humanity—what if we'd taken the Free Energy, but not deadheading? What if we'd taken deadheading, but only for the critically ill, not for people who didn't want to be bored on long bus-rides? Or no hyperlinks, no ad-hocracy, no Whuffie? Each one is different and wonderful.”
+
+I have a stupid habit of arguing for the sake of, and I found myself saying, “Wonderful? Oh sure, nothing finer than, oh, let's see, dying, starving, freezing, broiling, killing, cruelty and ignorance and pain and misery. I know I sure miss it.”
+
+Keep A-Movin' Dan snorted. “You think a junkie misses sobriety?”
+
+I knocked on the bar. “Hello! There aren't any junkies anymore!”
+
+He struck another cig. “But you know what a junkie /{is}/, right? Junkies don't miss sobriety, because they don't remember how sharp everything was, how the pain made the joy sweeter. We can't remember what it was like to work to earn our keep; to worry that there might not be /{enough}/, that we might get sick or get hit by a bus. We don't remember what it was like to take chances, and we sure as shit don't remember what it felt like to have them pay off.”
+
+He had a point. Here I was, only in my second or third adulthood, and already ready to toss it all in and do something, /{anything}/, else. He had a point—but I wasn't about to admit it. “So you say. I say, I take a chance when I strike up a conversation in a bar, when I fall in love… and what about the deadheads? Two people I know, they just went deadhead for ten thousand years! Tell me that's not taking a chance!” Truth be told, almost everyone I'd known in my eighty-some years were deadheading or jaunting or just /{gone}/. Lonely days, then.
+
+“Brother, that's committing half-assed suicide. The way we're going, they'll be lucky if someone doesn't just switch 'em off when it comes time to reanimate. In case you haven't noticed, it's getting a little crowded around here.”
+
+I made pish-tosh sounds and wiped off my forehead with a bar-napkin—the Gazoo was beastly hot on summer nights. “Uh-huh, just like the world was getting a little crowded a hundred years ago, before Free Energy. Like it was getting too greenhousey, too nukey, too hot or too cold. We fixed it then, we'll fix it again when the time comes. I'm gonna be here in ten thousand years, you damn betcha, but I think I'll do it the long way around.”
+
+He cocked his head again, and gave it some thought. If it had been any of the other grad students, I'd have assumed he was grepping for some bolstering factoids to support his next sally. But with him, I just knew he was thinking about it, the old-fashioned way.
+
+“I think that if I'm still here in ten thousand years, I'm going to be crazy as hell. Ten thousand years, pal! Ten thousand years ago, the state-of-the-art was a goat. You really think you're going to be anything recognizably human in a hundred centuries? Me, I'm not interested in being a post-person. I'm going to wake up one day, and I'm going to say, ‘Well, I guess I've seen about enough,’ and that'll be my last day.”
+
+I had seen where he was going with this, and I had stopped paying attention while I readied my response. I probably should have paid more attention. “But why? Why not just deadhead for a few centuries, see if there's anything that takes your fancy, and if not, back to sleep for a few more? Why do anything so /{final}/?”
+
+He embarrassed me by making a show of thinking it over again, making me feel like I was just a half-pissed glib poltroon. “I suppose it's because nothing else is. I've always known that someday, I was going to stop moving, stop seeking, stop kicking, and have done with it. There'll come a day when I don't have anything left to do, except stop.”
+
+On campus, they called him Keep-A-Movin' Dan, because of his cowboy vibe and because of his lifestyle, and he somehow grew to take over every conversation I had for the next six months. I pinged his Whuffie a few times, and noticed that it was climbing steadily upward as he accumulated more esteem from the people he met.
+
+I'd pretty much pissed away most of my Whuffie—all the savings from the symphonies and the first three theses—drinking myself stupid at the Gazoo, hogging library terminals, pestering profs, until I'd expended all the respect anyone had ever afforded me. All except Dan, who, for some reason, stood me to regular beers and meals and movies.
+
+I got to feeling like I was someone special—not everyone had a chum as exotic as Keep-A-Movin' Dan, the legendary missionary who visited the only places left that were closed to the Bitchun Society. I can't say for sure why he hung around with me. He mentioned once or twice that he'd liked my symphonies, and he'd read my Ergonomics thesis on applying theme-park crowd-control techniques in urban settings, and liked what I had to say there. But I think it came down to us having a good time needling each other.
+
+I'd talk to him about the vast carpet of the future unrolling before us, of the certainty that we would encounter alien intelligences some day, of the unimaginable frontiers open to each of us. He'd tell me that deadheading was a strong indicator that one's personal reservoir of introspection and creativity was dry; and that without struggle, there is no real victory.
+
+This was a good fight, one we could have a thousand times without resolving. I'd get him to concede that Whuffie recaptured the true essence of money: in the old days, if you were broke but respected, you wouldn't starve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum could buy you security and peace. By measuring the thing that money really represented—your personal capital with your friends and neighbors—you more accurately gauged your success.
+
+And then he'd lead me down a subtle, carefully baited trail that led to my allowing that while, yes, we might someday encounter alien species with wild and fabulous ways, that right now, there was a slightly depressing homogeneity to the world.
+
+On a fine spring day, I defended my thesis to two embodied humans and one prof whose body was out for an overhaul, whose consciousness was present via speakerphone from the computer where it was resting. They all liked it. I collected my sheepskin and went out hunting for Dan in the sweet, flower-stinking streets.
+
+He'd gone. The Anthro major he'd been torturing with his war-stories said that they'd wrapped up that morning, and he'd headed to the walled city of Tijuana, to take his shot with the descendants of a platoon of US Marines who'd settled there and cut themselves off from the Bitchun Society.
+
+So I went to Disney World.
+
+In deference to Dan, I took the flight in realtime, in the minuscule cabin reserved for those of us who stubbornly refused to be frozen and stacked like cordwood for the two hour flight. I was the only one taking the trip in realtime, but a flight attendant dutifully served me a urine-sample-sized orange juice and a rubbery, pungent, cheese omelet. I stared out the windows at the infinite clouds while the autopilot banked around the turbulence, and wondered when I'd see Dan next.
+
+1~ CHAPTER 1
+
+My girlfriend was 15 percent of my age, and I was old-fashioned enough that it bugged me. Her name was Lil, and she was second-generation Disney World, her parents being among the original ad-hocracy that took over the management of Liberty Square and Tom Sawyer Island. She was, quite literally, raised in Walt Disney World and it showed.
+
+It showed. She was neat and efficient in her every little thing, from her shining red hair to her careful accounting of each gear and cog in the animatronics that were in her charge. Her folks were in canopic jars in Kissimmee, deadheading for a few centuries.
+
+On a muggy Wednesday, we dangled our feet over the edge of the Liberty Belle's riverboat pier, watching the listless Confederate flag over Fort Langhorn on Tom Sawyer Island by moonlight. The Magic Kingdom was all closed up and every last guest had been chased out the gate underneath the Main Street train station, and we were able to breathe a heavy sigh of relief, shuck parts of our costumes, and relax together while the cicadas sang.
+
+I was more than a century old, but there was still a kind of magic in having my arm around the warm, fine shoulders of a girl by moonlight, hidden from the hustle of the cleaning teams by the turnstiles, breathing the warm, moist air. Lil plumped her head against my shoulder and gave me a butterfly kiss under my jaw.
+
+“Her name was McGill,” I sang, gently.
+
+“But she called herself Lil,” she sang, warm breath on my collarbones.
+
+“And everyone knew her as Nancy,” I sang.
+
+I'd been startled to know that she knew the Beatles. They'd been old news in my youth, after all. But her parents had given her a thorough—if eclectic—education.
+
+“Want to do a walk-through?” she asked. It was one of her favorite duties, exploring every inch of the rides in her care with the lights on, after the horde of tourists had gone. We both liked to see the underpinnings of the magic. Maybe that was why I kept picking at the relationship.
+
+“I'm a little pooped. Let's sit a while longer, if you don't mind.”
+
+She heaved a dramatic sigh. “Oh, all right. Old man.” She reached up and gently tweaked my nipple, and I gave a satisfying little jump. I think the age difference bothered her, too, though she teased me for letting it get to me.
+
+“I think I'll be able to manage a totter through the Haunted Mansion, if you just give me a moment to rest my bursitis.” I felt her smile against my shirt. She loved the Mansion; loved to turn on the ballroom ghosts and dance their waltz with them on the dusty floor, loved to try and stare down the marble busts in the library that followed your gaze as you passed.
+
+I liked it too, but I really liked just sitting there with her, watching the water and the trees. I was just getting ready to go when I heard a soft /{ping}/ inside my cochlea. “Damn,” I said. “I've got a call.”
+
+“Tell them you're busy,” she said.
+
+“I will,” I said, and answered the call subvocally. “Julius here.”
+
+“Hi, Julius. It's Dan. You got a minute?”
+
+I knew a thousand Dans, but I recognized the voice immediately, though it'd been ten years since we last got drunk at the Gazoo together. I muted the subvocal and said, “Lil, I've got to take this. Do you mind?”
+
+“Oh, /{no}/, not at all,” she sarcased at me. She sat up and pulled out her crack pipe and lit up.
+
+“Dan,” I subvocalized, “long time no speak.”
+
+“Yeah, buddy, it sure has been,” he said, and his voice cracked on a sob.
+
+I turned and gave Lil such a look, she dropped her pipe. “How can I help?” she said, softly but swiftly. I waved her off and switched the phone to full-vocal mode. My voice sounded unnaturally loud in the cricket-punctuated calm.
+
+“Where you at, Dan?” I asked.
+
+“Down here, in Orlando. I'm stuck out on Pleasure Island.”
+
+“All right,” I said. “Meet me at, uh, the Adventurer's Club, upstairs on the couch by the door. I'll be there in—” I shot a look at Lil, who knew the castmember-only roads better than I. She flashed ten fingers at me. “Ten minutes.”
+
+“Okay,” he said. “Sorry.” He had his voice back under control. I switched off.
+
+“What's up?” Lil asked.
+
+“I'm not sure. An old friend is in town. He sounds like he's got a problem.”
+
+Lil pointed a finger at me and made a trigger-squeezing gesture. “There,” she said. “I've just dumped the best route to Pleasure Island to your public directory. Keep me in the loop, okay?”
+
+I set off for the utilidor entrance near the Hall of Presidents and booted down the stairs to the hum of the underground tunnel-system. I took the slidewalk to cast parking and zipped my little cart out to Pleasure Island.
+
+I found Dan sitting on the L-shaped couch underneath rows of faked-up trophy shots with humorous captions. Downstairs, castmembers were working the animatronic masks and idols, chattering with the guests.
+
+Dan was apparent fifty plus, a little paunchy and stubbled. He had raccoon-mask bags under his eyes and he slumped listlessly. As I approached, I pinged his Whuffie and was startled to see that it had dropped to nearly zero.
+
+“Jesus,” I said, as I sat down next to him. “You look like hell, Dan.”
+
+He nodded. “Appearances can be deceptive,” he said. “But in this case, they're bang-on.”
+
+“You want to talk about it?” I asked.
+
+“Somewhere else, huh? I hear they ring in the New Year every night at midnight; I think that'd be a little too much for me right now.”
+
+I led him out to my cart and cruised back to the place I shared with Lil, out in Kissimmee. He smoked eight cigarettes on the twenty minute ride, hammering one after another into his mouth, filling my runabout with stinging clouds. I kept glancing at him in the rear-view. He had his eyes closed, and in repose he looked dead. I could hardly believe that this was my vibrant action-hero pal of yore.
+
+Surreptitiously, I called Lil's phone. “I'm bringing him home,” I subvocalized. “He's in rough shape. Not sure what it's all about.”
+
+“I'll make up the couch,” she said. “And get some coffee together. Love you.”
+
+“Back atcha, kid,” I said.
+
+As we approached the tacky little swaybacked ranch-house, he opened his eyes. “You're a pal, Jules.” I waved him off. “No, really. I tried to think of who I could call, and you were the only one. I've missed you, bud.”
+
+“Lil said she'd put some coffee on,” I said. “You sound like you need it.”
+
+Lil was waiting on the sofa, a folded blanket and an extra pillow on the side table, a pot of coffee and some Disneyland Beijing mugs beside them. She stood and extended her hand. “I'm Lil,” she said.
+
+“Dan,” he said. “It's a pleasure.”
+
+I knew she was pinging his Whuffie and I caught her look of surprised disapproval. Us oldsters who predate Whuffie know that it's important; but to the kids, it's the /{world}/. Someone without any is automatically suspect. I watched her recover quickly, smile, and surreptitiously wipe her hand on her jeans. “Coffee?” she said.
+
+“Oh, yeah,” Dan said, and slumped on the sofa.
+
+She poured him a cup and set it on a coaster on the coffee table. “I'll let you boys catch up, then,” she said, and started for the bedroom.
+
+“No,” Dan said. “Wait. If you don't mind. I think it'd help if I could talk to someone… younger, too.”
+
+She set her face in the look of chirpy helpfulness that all the second-gen castmembers have at their instant disposal and settled into an armchair. She pulled out her pipe and lit a rock. I went through my crack period before she was born, just after they made it decaf, and I always felt old when I saw her and her friends light up. Dan surprised me by holding out a hand to her and taking the pipe. He toked heavily, then passed it back.
+
+Dan closed his eyes again, then ground his fists into them, sipped his coffee. It was clear he was trying to figure out where to start.
+
+“I believed that I was braver than I really am, is what it boils down to,” he said.
+
+“Who doesn't?” I said.
+
+“I really thought I could do it. I knew that someday I'd run out of things to do, things to see. I knew that I'd finish some day. You remember, we used to argue about it. I swore I'd be done, and that would be the end of it. And now I am. There isn't a single place left on-world that isn't part of the Bitchun Society. There isn't a single thing left that I want any part of.”
+
+“So deadhead for a few centuries,” I said. “Put the decision off.”
+
+“No!” he shouted, startling both of us. “I'm /{done}/. It's /{over}/.”
+
+“So do it,” Lil said.
+
+“I /{can't}/,” he sobbed, and buried his face in his hands. He cried like a baby, in great, snoring sobs that shook his whole body. Lil went into the kitchen and got some tissue, and passed it to me. I sat alongside him and awkwardly patted his back.
+
+“Jesus,” he said, into his palms. “Jesus.”
+
+“Dan?” I said, quietly.
+
+He sat up and took the tissue, wiped off his face and hands. “Thanks,” he said. “I've tried to make a go of it, really I have. I've spent the last eight years in Istanbul, writing papers on my missions, about the communities. I did some followup studies, interviews. No one was interested. Not even me. I smoked a lot of hash. It didn't help. So, one morning I woke up and went to the bazaar and said good bye to the friends I'd made there. Then I went to a pharmacy and had the man make me up a lethal injection. He wished me good luck and I went back to my rooms. I sat there with the hypo all afternoon, then I decided to sleep on it, and I got up the next morning and did it all over again. I looked inside myself, and I saw that I didn't have the guts. I just didn't have the guts. I've stared down the barrels of a hundred guns, had a thousand knives pressed up against my throat, but I didn't have the guts to press that button.”
+
+“You were too late,” Lil said.
+
+We both turned to look at her.
+
+“You were a decade too late. Look at you. You're pathetic. If you killed yourself right now, you'd just be a washed-up loser who couldn't hack it. If you'd done it ten years earlier, you would've been going out on top—a champion, retiring permanently.” She set her mug down with a harder-than-necessary clunk.
+
+Sometimes, Lil and I are right on the same wavelength. Sometimes, it's like she's on a different planet. All I could do was sit there, horrified, and she was happy to discuss the timing of my pal's suicide.
+
+But she was right. Dan nodded heavily, and I saw that he knew it, too.
+
+“A day late and a dollar short,” he sighed.
+
+“Well, don't just sit there,” she said. “You know what you've got to do.”
+
+“What?” I said, involuntarily irritated by her tone.
+
+She looked at me like I was being deliberately stupid. “He's got to get back on top. Cleaned up, dried out, into some productive work. Get that Whuffie up, too. /{Then}/ he can kill himself with dignity.”
+
+It was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard. Dan, though, was cocking an eyebrow at her and thinking hard. “How old did you say you were?” he asked.
+
+“Twenty-three,” she said.
+
+“Wish I'd had your smarts at twenty-three,” he said, and heaved a sigh, straightening up. “Can I stay here while I get the job done?”
+
+I looked askance at Lil, who considered for a moment, then nodded.
+
+“Sure, pal, sure,” I said. I clapped him on the shoulder. “You look beat.”
+
+“Beat doesn't begin to cover it,” he said.
+
+“Good night, then,” I said.
+
+1~ CHAPTER 2
+
+Ad-hocracy works well, for the most part. Lil's folks had taken over the running of Liberty Square with a group of other interested, compatible souls. They did a fine job, racked up gobs of Whuffie, and anyone who came around and tried to take it over would be so reviled by the guests they wouldn't find a pot to piss in. Or they'd have such a wicked, radical approach that they'd ouster Lil's parents and their pals, and do a better job.
+
+It can break down, though. There were pretenders to the throne—a group who'd worked with the original ad-hocracy and then had moved off to other pursuits—some of them had gone to school, some of them had made movies, written books, or gone off to Disneyland Beijing to help start things up. A few had deadheaded for a couple decades.
+
+They came back to Liberty Square with a message: update the attractions. The Liberty Square ad-hocs were the staunchest conservatives in the Magic Kingdom, preserving the wheezing technology in the face of a Park that changed almost daily. The newcomer/old-timers were on-side with the rest of the Park, had their support, and looked like they might make a successful go of it.
+
+So it fell to Lil to make sure that there were no bugs in the meager attractions of Liberty Square: the Hall of the Presidents, the Liberty Belle riverboat, and the glorious Haunted Mansion, arguably the coolest attraction to come from the fevered minds of the old-time Disney Imagineers.
+
+I caught her backstage at the Hall of the Presidents, tinkering with Lincoln II, the backup animatronic. Lil tried to keep two of everything running at speed, just in case. She could swap out a dead bot for a backup in five minutes flat, which is all that crowd-control would permit.
+
+It had been two weeks since Dan's arrival, and though I'd barely seen him in that time, his presence was vivid in our lives. Our little ranch-house had a new smell, not unpleasant, of rejuve and hope and loss, something barely noticeable over the tropical flowers nodding in front of our porch. My phone rang three or four times a day, Dan checking in from his rounds of the Park, seeking out some way to accumulate personal capital. His excitement and dedication to the task were inspiring, pulling me into his over-the-top-and-damn-the-torpedoes mode of being.
+
+“You just missed Dan,” she said. She had her head in Lincoln's chest, working with an autosolder and a magnifier. Bent over, red hair tied back in a neat bun, sweat sheening her wiry freckled arms, smelling of girl-sweat and machine lubricant, she made me wish there were a mattress somewhere backstage. I settled for patting her behind affectionately, and she wriggled appreciatively. “He's looking better.”
+
+His rejuve had taken him back to apparent 25, the way I remembered him. He was rawboned and leathery, but still had the defeated stoop that had startled me when I saw him at the Adventurer's Club. “What did he want?”
+
+“He's been hanging out with Debra—he wanted to make sure I knew what she's up to.”
+
+Debra was one of the old guard, a former comrade of Lil's parents. She'd spent a decade in Disneyland Beijing, coding sim-rides. If she had her way, we'd tear down every marvelous rube goldberg in the Park and replace them with pristine white sim boxes on giant, articulated servos.
+
+The problem was that she was /{really good}/ at coding sims. Her Great Movie Ride rehab at MGM was breathtaking—the Star Wars sequence had already inspired a hundred fan-sites that fielded millions of hits.
+
+She'd leveraged her success into a deal with the Adventureland ad-hocs to rehab the Pirates of the Caribbean, and their backstage areas were piled high with reference: treasure chests and cutlasses and bowsprits. It was terrifying to walk through; the Pirates was the last ride Walt personally supervised, and we'd thought it was sacrosanct. But Debra had built a Pirates sim in Beijing, based on Chend I Sao, the XIXth century Chinese pirate queen, which was credited with rescuing the Park from obscurity and ruin. The Florida iteration would incorporate the best aspects of its Chinese cousin—the AI-driven sims that communicated with each other and with the guests, greeting them by name each time they rode and spinning age-appropriate tales of piracy on the high seas; the spectacular fly-through of the aquatic necropolis of rotting junks on the sea-floor; the thrilling pitch and yaw of the sim as it weathered a violent, breath-taking storm—but with Western themes: wafts of Jamaican pepper sauce crackling through the air; liquid Afro-Caribbean accents; and swordfights conducted in the manner of the pirates who plied the blue waters of the New World. Identical sims would stack like cordwood in the space currently occupied by the bulky ride-apparatus and dioramas, quintupling capacity and halving load-time.
+
+“So, what's she up to?”
+
+Lil extracted herself from the Rail-Splitter's mechanical guts and made a comical moue of worry. “She's rehabbing the Pirates—and doing an incredible job. They're ahead of schedule, they've got good net-buzz, the focus groups are cumming themselves.” The comedy went out of her expression, baring genuine worry.
+
+She turned away and closed up Honest Abe, then fired her finger at him. Smoothly, he began to run through his spiel, silent but for the soft hum and whine of his servos. Lil mimed twiddling a knob and his audiotrack kicked in low: “All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa /{combined}/ could not, by force, make a track on the Blue Ridge, nor take a drink from the Ohio. If destruction be our lot, then we ourselves must be its author—and its finisher.” She mimed turning down the gain and he fell silent again.
+
+“You said it, Mr. President,” she said, and fired her finger at him again, powering him down. She bent and adjusted his hand-sewn period topcoat, then carefully wound and set the turnip-watch in his vest-pocket.
+
+I put my arm around her shoulders. “You're doing all you can—and it's good work,” I said. I'd fallen into the easy castmember mode of speaking, voicing bland affirmations. Hearing the words, I felt a flush of embarrassment. I pulled her into a long, hard hug and fumbled for better reassurance. Finding no words that would do, I gave her a final squeeze and let her go.
+
+She looked at me sidelong and nodded her head. “It'll be fine, of course,” she said. “I mean, the worst possible scenario is that Debra will do her job very, very well, and make things even better than they are now. That's not so bad.”
+
+This was a 180-degree reversal of her position on the subject the last time we'd talked, but you don't live more than a century without learning when to point out that sort of thing and when not to.
+
+My cochlea struck twelve noon and a HUD appeared with my weekly backup reminder. Lil was maneuvering Ben Franklin II out of his niche. I waved good-bye at her back and walked away, to an uplink terminal. Once I was close enough for secure broadband communications, I got ready to back up. My cochlea chimed again and I answered it.
+
+“Yes,” I subvocalized, impatiently. I hated getting distracted from a backup—one of my enduring fears was that I'd forget the backup altogether and leave myself vulnerable for an entire week until the next reminder. I'd lost the knack of getting into habits in my adolescence, giving in completely to machine-generated reminders over conscious choice.
+
+“It's Dan.” I heard the sound of the Park in full swing behind him—children's laughter; bright, recorded animatronic spiels; the tromp of thousands of feet. “Can you meet me at the Tiki Room? It's pretty important.”
+
+“Can it wait for fifteen?” I asked.
+
+“Sure—see you in fifteen.”
+
+I rung off and initiated the backup. A status-bar zipped across a HUD, dumping the parts of my memory that were purely digital; then it finished and started in on organic memory. My eyes rolled back in my head and my life flashed before my eyes.
+
+1~ CHAPTER 3
+
+The Bitchun Society has had much experience with restores from backup—in the era of the cure for death, people live pretty recklessly. Some people get refreshed a couple dozen times a year.
+
+Not me. I hate the process. Not so much that I won't participate in it. Everyone who had serious philosophical conundra on that subject just, you know, /{died}/, a generation before. The Bitchun Society didn't need to convert its detractors, just outlive them.
+
+The first time I died, it was not long after my sixtieth birthday. I was SCUBA diving at Playa Coral, near Veradero, Cuba. Of course, I don't remember the incident, but knowing my habits at that particular dive-site and having read the dive-logs of my SCUBA-buddies, I've reconstructed the events.
+
+I was eeling my way through the lobster-caves, with a borrowed bottle and mask. I'd also borrowed a wetsuit, but I wasn't wearing it—the blood-temp salt water was balm, and I hated erecting barriers between it and my skin. The caves were made of coral and rocks, and they coiled and twisted like intestines. Through each hole and around each corner, there was a hollow, rough sphere of surpassing, alien beauty. Giant lobsters skittered over the walls and through the holes. Schools of fish as bright as jewels darted and executed breath-taking precision maneuvers as I disturbed their busy days. I do some of my best thinking under water, and I'm often slipping off into dangerous reverie at depth. Normally, my diving buddies ensure that I don't hurt myself, but this time I got away from them, spidering forward into a tiny hole.
+
+Where I got stuck.
+
+My diving buddies were behind me, and I rapped on my bottle with the hilt of my knife until one of them put a hand on my shoulder. My buddies saw what was up, and attempted to pull me loose, but my bottle and buoyancy-control vest were firmly wedged. The others exchanged hand signals, silently debating the best way to get me loose. Suddenly, I was thrashing and kicking, and then I disappeared into the cave, minus my vest and bottle. I'd apparently attempted to cut through my vest's straps and managed to sever the tube of my regulator. After inhaling a jolt of sea water, I'd thrashed free into the cave, rolling into a monstrous patch of spindly fire-coral. I'd inhaled another lungful of water and kicked madly for a tiny hole in the cave's ceiling, whence my buddies retrieved me shortly thereafter, drowned-blue except for the patchy red welts from the stinging coral.
+
+In those days, making a backup was a lot more complicated; the procedure took most of a day, and had to be undertaken at a special clinic. Luckily, I'd had one made just before I left for Cuba, a few weeks earlier. My next-most-recent backup was three years old, dating from the completion of my second symphony.
+
+They recovered me from backup and into a force-grown clone at Toronto General. As far as I knew, I'd laid down in the backup clinic one moment and arisen the next. It took most of a year to get over the feeling that the whole world was putting a monstrous joke over on me, that the drowned corpse I'd seen was indeed my own. In my mind, the rebirth was figurative as well as literal—the missing time was enough that I found myself hard-pressed to socialize with my pre-death friends.
+
+I told Dan the story during our first friendship, and he immediately pounced on the fact that I'd gone to Disney World to spend a week sorting out my feelings, reinventing myself, moving to space, marrying a crazy lady. He found it very curious that I always rebooted myself at Disney World. When I told him that I was going to live there someday, he asked me if that would mean that I was done reinventing myself. Sometimes, as I ran my fingers through Lil's sweet red curls, I thought of that remark and sighed great gusts of contentment and marveled that my friend Dan had been so prescient.
+
+The next time I died, they'd improved the technology somewhat. I'd had a massive stroke in my seventy-third year, collapsing on the ice in the middle of a house-league hockey game. By the time they cut my helmet away, the hematomae had crushed my brain into a pulpy, blood-sotted mess. I'd been lax in backing up, and I lost most of a year. But they woke me gently, with a computer-generated precis of the events of the missing interval, and a counselor contacted me daily for a year until I felt at home again in my skin. Again, my life rebooted, and I found myself in Disney World, methodically flensing away the relationships I'd built and starting afresh in Boston, living on the ocean floor and working the heavy-metal harvesters, a project that led, eventually, to my Chem thesis at U of T.
+
+After I was shot dead at the Tiki Room, I had the opportunity to appreciate the great leaps that restores had made in the intervening ten years. I woke in my own bed, instantly aware of the events that led up to my third death as seen from various third-party POVs: security footage from the Adventureland cameras, synthesized memories extracted from Dan's own backup, and a computer-generated fly-through of the scene. I woke feeling preternaturally calm and cheerful, and knowing that I felt that way because of certain temporary neurotransmitter presets that had been put in place when I was restored.
+
+Dan and Lil sat at my bedside. Lil's tired, smiling face was limned with hairs that had snuck loose of her ponytail. She took my hand and kissed the smooth knuckles. Dan smiled beneficently at me and I was seized with a warm, comforting feeling of being surrounded by people who really loved me. I dug for words appropriate to the scene, decided to wing it, opened my mouth and said, to my surprise, “I have to pee.”
+
+Dan and Lil smiled at each other. I lurched out of the bed, naked, and thumped to the bathroom. My muscles were wonderfully limber, with a brand-new spring to them. After I flushed I leaned over and took hold of my ankles, then pulled my head right to the floor, feeling the marvelous flexibility of my back and legs and buttocks. A scar on my knee was missing, as were the many lines that had crisscrossed my fingers. When I looked in the mirror, I saw that my nose and earlobes were smaller and perkier. The familiar crow's-feet and the frown-lines between my eyebrows were gone. I had a day's beard all over—head, face, pubis, arms, legs. I ran my hands over my body and chuckled at the ticklish newness of it all. I was briefly tempted to depilate all over, just to keep this feeling of newness forever, but the neurotransmitter presets were evaporating and a sense of urgency over my murder was creeping up on me.
+
+I tied a towel around my waist and made my way back to the bedroom. The smells of tile-cleaner and flowers and rejuve were bright in my nose, effervescent as camphor. Dan and Lil stood when I came into the room and helped me to the bed. “Well, this /{sucks}/,” I said.
+
+I'd gone straight from the uplink through the utilidors—three quick cuts of security cam footage, one at the uplink, one in the corridor, and one at the exit in the underpass between Liberty Square and Adventureland. I seemed bemused and a little sad as I emerged from the door, and began to weave my way through the crowd, using a kind of sinuous, darting shuffle that I'd developed when I was doing field-work on my crowd-control thesis. I cut rapidly through the lunchtime crowd toward the long roof of the Tiki Room, thatched with strips of shimmering aluminum cut and painted to look like long grass.
+
+Fuzzy shots now, from Dan's POV, of me moving closer to him, passing close to a group of teenaged girls with extra elbows and knees, wearing environmentally controlled cloaks and cowls covered with Epcot Center logomarks. One of them is wearing a pith helmet, from the Jungle Traders shop outside of the Jungle Cruise. Dan's gaze flicks away, to the Tiki Room's entrance, where there is a short queue of older men, then back, just as the girl with the pith helmet draws a stylish little organic pistol, like a penis with a tail that coils around her arm. Casually, grinning, she raises her arm and gestures with the pistol, exactly like Lil does with her finger when she's uploading, and the pistol lunges forward. Dan's gaze flicks back to me. I'm pitching over, my lungs bursting out of my chest and spreading before me like wings, spinal gristle and viscera showering the guests before me. A piece of my nametag, now shrapnel, strikes Dan in the forehead, causing him to blink. When he looks again, the group of girls is still there, but the girl with the pistol is long gone.
+
+The fly-through is far less confused. Everyone except me, Dan and the girl is grayed-out. We're limned in highlighter yellow, moving in slow-motion. I emerge from the underpass and the girl moves from the Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse to the group of her friends. Dan starts to move towards me. The girl raises, arms and fires her pistol. The self-guiding smart-slug, keyed to my body chemistry, flies low, near ground level, weaving between the feet of the crowd, moving just below the speed of sound. When it reaches me, it screams upwards and into my spine, detonating once it's entered my chest cavity.
+
+The girl has already made a lot of ground, back toward the Adventureland/Main Street, USA gateway. The fly-through speeds up, following her as she merges with the crowds on the street, ducking and weaving between them, moving toward the breezeway at Sleeping Beauty Castle. She vanishes, then reappears, forty minutes later, in Tomorrowland, near the new Space Mountain complex, then disappears again.
+
+“Has anyone ID'd the girl?” I asked, once I'd finished reliving the events. The anger was starting to boil within me now. My new fists clenched for the first time, soft palms and uncallused fingertips.
+
+Dan shook his head. “None of the girls she was with had ever seen her before. The face was one of the Seven Sisters—Hope.” The Seven Sisters were a trendy collection of designer faces. Every second teenage girl wore one of them.
+
+“How about Jungle Traders?” I asked. “Did they have a record of the pith helmet purchase?”
+
+Lil frowned. “We ran the Jungle Traders purchases back for six months: only three matched the girl's apparent age; all three have alibis. Chances are she stole it.”
+
+“Why?” I asked, finally. In my mind's eye, I saw my lungs bursting out of my chest, like wings, like jellyfish, vertebrae spraying like shrapnel. I saw the girl's smile, an almost sexual smirk as she pulled the trigger on me.
+
+“It wasn't random,” Lil said. “The slug was definitely keyed to you—that means that she'd gotten close to you at some point.”
+
+Right—which meant that she'd been to Disney World in the last ten years. That narrowed it down, all right.
+
+“What happened to her after Tomorrowland?” I said.
+
+“We don't know,” Lil said. “Something wrong with the cameras. We lost her and she never reappeared.” She sounded hot and angry—she took equipment failures in the Magic Kingdom personally.
+
+“Who'd want to do this?” I asked, hating the self-pity in my voice. It was the first time I'd been murdered, but I didn't need to be a drama-queen about it.
+
+Dan's eyes got a far-away look. “Sometimes, people do things for reasons that seem perfectly reasonable to them, that the rest of the world couldn't hope to understand. I've seen a few assassinations, and they never made sense afterwards.” He stroked his chin. “Sometimes, it's better to look for temperament, rather than motivation: who /{could}/ do something like this?”
+
+Right. All we needed to do was investigate all the psychopaths who'd visited the Magic Kingdom in ten years. That narrowed it down considerably. I pulled up a HUD and checked the time. It had been four days since my murder. I had a shift coming up, working the turnstiles at the Haunted Mansion. I liked to pull a couple of those shifts a month, just to keep myself grounded; it helped to take a reality check while I was churning away in the rarified climate of my crowd-control simulations.
+
+I stood and went to my closet, started to dress.
+
+“/{What}/ are you doing?” Lil asked, alarmed.
+
+“I've got a shift. I'm running late.”
+
+“You're in no shape to work,” Lil said, tugging at my elbow. I jerked free of her.
+
+“I'm fine—good as new.” I barked a humorless laugh. “I'm not going to let those bastards disrupt my life any more.”
+
+/{Those bastards}/? I thought—when had I decided that there was more than one? But I knew it was true. There was no way that this was all planned by one person: it had been executed too precisely, too thoroughly.
+
+Dan moved to block the bedroom door. “Wait a second,” he said. “You need rest.”
+
+I fixed him with a doleful glare. “I'll decide that,” I said. He stepped aside.
+
+“I'll tag along, then,” he said. “Just in case.”
+
+I pinged my Whuffie. I was up a couple percentiles—sympathy Whuffie—but it was falling: Dan and Lil were radiating disapproval. Screw 'em.
+
+I got into my runabout and Dan scrambled for the passenger door as I put it in gear and sped out.
+
+“Are you sure you're all right?” Dan said as I nearly rolled the runabout taking the corner at the end of our cul-de-sac.
+
+“Why wouldn't I be?” I said. “I'm as good as new.”
+
+“Funny choice of words,” he said. “Some would say that you /{were}/ new.”
+
+I groaned. “Not this argument again,” I said. “I feel like me and no one else is making that claim. Who cares if I've been restored from a backup?”
+
+“All I'm saying is, there's a difference between /{you}/ and an exact copy of you, isn't there?”
+
+I knew what he was doing, distracting me with one of our old fights, but I couldn't resist the bait, and as I marshalled my arguments, it actually helped calm me down some. Dan was that kind of friend, a person who knew you better than you knew yourself. “So you're saying that if you were obliterated and then recreated, atom-for-atom, that you wouldn't be you anymore?”
+
+“For the sake of argument, sure. Being destroyed and recreated is different from not being destroyed at all, right?”
+
+“Brush up on your quantum mechanics, pal. You're being destroyed and recreated a trillion times a second.”
+
+“On a very, very small level—”
+
+“What difference does that make?”
+
+“Fine, I'll concede that. But you're not really an atom-for-atom copy. You're a clone, with a copied /{brain}/—that's not the same as quantum destruction.”
+
+“Very nice thing to say to someone who's just been murdered, pal. You got a problem with clones?”
+
+And we were off and running.
+
+The Mansion's cast were sickeningly cheerful and solicitous. Each of them made a point of coming around and touching the stiff, starched shoulder of my butler's costume, letting me know that if there was anything they could do for me… I gave them all a fixed smile and tried to concentrate on the guests, how they waited, when they arrived, how they dispersed through the exit gate. Dan hovered nearby, occasionally taking the eight minute, twenty-two second ride-through, running interference for me with the other castmembers.
+
+He was nearby when my break came up. I changed into civvies and we walked over the cobbled streets, past the Hall of the Presidents, noting as I rounded the corner that there was something different about the queue-area. Dan groaned. “They did it already,” he said.
+
+I looked closer. The turnstiles were blocked by a sandwich board: Mickey in a Ben Franklin wig and bifocals, holding a trowel. “Excuse our mess!” the sign declared. “We're renovating to serve you better!”
+
+I spotted one of Debra's cronies standing behind the sign, a self-satisfied smile on his face. He'd started off life as a squat, northern Chinese, but had had his bones lengthened and his cheekbones raised so that he looked almost elfin. I took one look at his smile and understood—Debra had established a toehold in Liberty Square.
+
+“They filed plans for the new Hall with the steering committee an hour after you got shot. The committee loved the plans; so did the net. They're promising not to touch the Mansion.”
+
+“You didn't mention this,” I said, hotly.
+
+“We thought you'd jump to conclusions. The timing was bad, but there's no indication that they arranged for the shooter. Everyone's got an alibi; furthermore, they've all offered to submit their backups for proof.”
+
+“Right,” I said. “Right. So they just /{happened}/ to have plans for a new Hall standing by. And they just /{happened}/ to file them after I got shot, when all our ad-hocs were busy worrying about me. It's all a big coincidence.”
+
+Dan shook his head. “We're not stupid, Jules. No one thinks that it's a coincidence. Debra's the sort of person who keeps a lot of plans standing by, just in case. But that just makes her a well-prepared opportunist, not a murderer.”
+
+I felt nauseated and exhausted. I was enough of a castmember that I sought out a utilidor before I collapsed against a wall, head down. Defeat seeped through me, saturating me.
+
+Dan crouched down beside me. I looked over at him. He was grinning wryly. “Posit,” he said, “for the moment, that Debra really did do this thing, set you up so that she could take over.”
+
+I smiled, in spite of myself. This was his explaining act, the thing he would do whenever I fell into one of his rhetorical tricks back in the old days. “All right, I've posited it.”
+
+“Why would she: one, take out you instead of Lil or one of the real old-timers; two, go after the Hall of Presidents instead of Tom Sawyer Island or even the Mansion; and three, follow it up with such a blatant, suspicious move?”
+
+“All right,” I said, warming to the challenge. “One: I'm important enough to be disruptive but not so important as to rate a full investigation. Two: Tom Sawyer Island is too visible, you can't rehab it without people seeing the dust from shore. Three, Debra's coming off of a decade in Beijing, where subtlety isn't real important.”
+
+“Sure,” Dan said, “sure.” Then he launched an answering salvo, and while I was thinking up my answer, he helped me to my feet and walked me out to my runabout, arguing all the way, so that by the time I noticed we weren't at the Park anymore, I was home and in bed.
+
+With all the Hall's animatronics mothballed for the duration, Lil had more time on her hands than she knew what to do with. She hung around the little bungalow, the two of us in the living room, staring blankly at the windows, breathing shallowly in the claustrophobic, superheated Florida air. I had my working notes on queue management for the Mansion, and I pecked at them aimlessly. Sometimes, Lil mirrored my HUD so she could watch me work, and made suggestions based on her long experience.
+
+It was a delicate process, this business of increasing throughput without harming the guest experience. But for every second I could shave off of the queue-to-exit time, I could put another sixty guests through and lop thirty seconds off total wait-time. And the more guests who got to experience the Mansion, the more of a Whuffie-hit Debra's people would suffer if they made a move on it. So I dutifully pecked at my notes, and found three seconds I could shave off the graveyard sequence by swiveling the Doom Buggy carriages stage-left as they descended from the attic window: by expanding their fields-of-vision, I could expose the guests to all the scenes more quickly.
+
+I ran the change in fly-through, then implemented it after closing and invited the other Liberty Square ad-hocs to come and test it out.
+
+It was another muggy winter evening, prematurely dark. The ad-hocs had enough friends and family with them that we were able to simulate an off-peak queue-time, and we all stood and sweated in the preshow area, waiting for the doors to swing open, listening to the wolf-cries and assorted boo-spookery from the hidden speakers.
+
+The doors swung open, revealing Lil in a rotting maid's uniform, her eyes lined with black, her skin powdered to a deathly pallor. She gave us a cold, considering glare, then intoned, “Master Gracey requests more bodies.”
+
+As we crowded into the cool, musty gloom of the parlor, Lil contrived to give my ass an affectionate squeeze. I turned to return the favor, and saw Debra's elfin comrade looming over Lil's shoulder. My smile died on my lips.
+
+The man locked eyes with me for a moment, and I saw something in there—some admixture of cruelty and worry that I didn't know what to make of. He looked away immediately. I'd known that Debra would have spies in the crowd, of course, but with elf-boy watching, I resolved to make this the best show I knew how.
+
+It's subtle, this business of making the show better from within. Lil had already slid aside the paneled wall that led to stretch-room number two, the most recently serviced one. Once the crowd had moved inside, I tried to lead their eyes by adjusting my body language to poses of subtle attention directed at the new spotlights. When the newly remastered soundtrack came from behind the sconce-bearing gargoyles at the corners of the octagonal room, I leaned my body slightly in the direction of the moving stereo-image. And an instant before the lights snapped out, I ostentatiously cast my eyes up into the scrim ceiling, noting that others had taken my cue, so they were watching when the UV-lit corpse dropped from the pitch-dark ceiling, jerking against the noose at its neck.
+
+The crowd filed into the second queue area, where they boarded the Doom Buggies. There was a low buzz of marveling conversation as we made our way onto the moving sidewalk. I boarded my Doom Buggy and an instant later, someone slid in beside me. It was the elf.
+
+He made a point of not making eye contact with me, but I sensed his sidelong glances at me as we rode through past the floating chandelier and into the corridor where the portraits' eyes watched us. Two years before, I'd accelerated this sequence and added some random swivel to the Doom Buggies, shaving 25 seconds off the total, taking the hourly throughput cap from 2365 to 2600. It was the proof-of-concept that led to all the other seconds I'd shaved away since. The violent pitching of the Buggy brought me and the elf into inadvertent contact with one another, and when I brushed his hand as I reached for the safety bar, I felt that it was cold and sweaty.
+
+He was nervous! /{He}/ was nervous. What did /{he}/ have to be nervous about? I was the one who'd been murdered—maybe he was nervous because he was supposed to finish the job. I cast my own sidelong looks at him, trying to see suspicious bulges in his tight clothes, but the Doom Buggy's pebbled black plastic interior was too dim. Dan was in the Buggy behind us, with one of the Mansion's regular castmembers. I rang his cochlea and subvocalized: “Get ready to jump out on my signal.” Anyone leaving their Buggy would interrupt an infrared beam and stop the ride system. I knew I could rely on Dan to trust me without a lot of explaining, which meant that I could keep a close watch on Debra's crony.
+
+We went past the hallway of mirrors and into the hallway of doors, where monstrous hands peeked out around the sills, straining against the hinges, recorded groans mixed in with pounding. I thought about it—if I wanted to kill someone on the Mansion, what would be the best place to do it? The attic staircase-- the next sequence—seemed like a good bet. A cold clarity washed over me. The elf would kill me in the gloom of the staircase, dump me out over the edge at the blind turn toward the graveyard, and that would be it. Would he be able to do it if I were staring straight at him? He seemed terribly nervous as it was. I swiveled in my seat and looked him straight in the eye.
+
+He quirked half a smile at me and nodded a greeting. I kept on staring at him, my hands balled into fists, ready for anything. We rode down the staircase, facing up, listening to the clamour of voices from the cemetery and the squawk of the red-eyed raven. I caught sight of the quaking groundkeeper animatronic from the corner of my eye and startled. I let out a subvocal squeal and was pitched forward as the ride system shuddered to a stop.
+
+“Jules?” came Dan's voice in my cochlea. “You all right?”
+
+He'd heard my involuntary note of surprise and had leapt clear of the Buggy, stopping the ride. The elf was looking at me with a mixture of surprise and pity.
+
+“It's all right, it's all right. False alarm.” I paged Lil and subvocalized to her, telling her to start up the ride ASAP, it was all right.
+
+I rode the rest of the way with my hands on the safety bar, my eyes fixed ahead of me, steadfastly ignoring the elf. I checked the timer I'd been running. The demo was a debacle—instead of shaving off three seconds, I'd added thirty. I wanted to cry.
+
+I debarked the Buggy and stalked quickly out of the exit queue, leaning heavily against the fence, staring blindly at the pet cemetery. My head swam: I was out of control, jumping at shadows. I was spooked.
+
+And I had no reason to be. Sure, I'd been murdered, but what had it cost me? A few days of “unconsciousness” while they decanted my backup into my new body, a merciful gap in memory from my departure at the backup terminal up until my death. I wasn't one of those nuts who took death /{seriously}/. It wasn't like they'd done something /{permanent}/.
+
+In the meantime, I /{had}/ done something permanent: I'd dug Lil's grave a little deeper, endangered the ad-hocracy and, worst of all, the Mansion. I'd acted like an idiot. I tasted my dinner, a wolfed-down hamburger, and swallowed hard, forcing down the knob of nausea.
+
+I sensed someone at my elbow, and thinking it was Lil, come to ask me what had gone on, I turned with a sheepish grin and found myself facing the elf.
+
+He stuck his hand out and spoke in the flat no-accent of someone running a language module. “Hi there. We haven't been introduced, but I wanted to tell you how much I enjoy your work. I'm Tim Fung.”
+
+I pumped his hand, which was still cold and particularly clammy in the close heat of the Florida night. “Julius,” I said, startled at how much like a bark it sounded. /{Careful}/, I thought, /{no need to escalate the hostilities.}/ “It's kind of you to say that. I like what you-all have done with the Pirates.”
+
+He smiled: a genuine, embarrassed smile, as though he'd just been given high praise from one of his heroes. “Really? I think it's pretty good—the second time around you get a lot of chances to refine things, really clarify the vision. Beijing—well, it was exciting, but it was rushed, you know? I mean, we were really struggling. Every day, there was another pack of squatters who wanted to tear the Park down. Debra used to send me out to give the children piggyback rides, just to keep our Whuffie up while she was evicting the squatters. It was good to have the opportunity to refine the designs, revisit them without the floor show.”
+
+I knew about this, of course—Beijing had been a real struggle for the ad-hocs who built it. Lots of them had been killed, many times over. Debra herself had been killed every day for a week and restored to a series of prepared clones, beta-testing one of the ride systems. It was faster than revising the CAD simulations. Debra had a reputation for pursuing expedience.
+
+“I'm starting to find out how it feels to work under pressure,” I said, and nodded significantly at the Mansion. I was gratified to see him look embarrassed, then horrified.
+
+“We would /{never}/ touch the Mansion,” he said. “It's /{perfect}/!”
+
+Dan and Lil sauntered up as I was preparing a riposte. They both looked concerned—now that I thought of it, they'd both seemed incredibly concerned about me since the day I was revived.
+
+Dan's gait was odd, stilted, like he was leaning on Lil for support. They looked like a couple. An irrational sear of jealousy jetted through me. I was an emotional wreck. Still, I took Lil's big, scarred hand in mine as soon as she was in reach, then cuddled her to me protectively. She had changed out of her maid's uniform into civvies: smart coveralls whose micropore fabric breathed in time with her own respiration.
+
+“Lil, Dan, I want you to meet Tim Fung. He was just telling me war stories from the Pirates project in Beijing.”
+
+Lil waved and Dan gravely shook his hand. “That was some hard work,” Dan said.
+
+It occurred to me to turn on some Whuffie monitors. It was normally an instantaneous reaction to meeting someone, but I was still disoriented. I pinged the elf. He had a lot of left-handed Whuffie; respect garnered from people who shared very few of my opinions. I expected that. What I didn't expect was that his weighted Whuffie score, the one that lent extra credence to the rankings of people I respected, was also high—higher than my own. I regretted my nonlinear behavior even more. Respect from the elf—/{Tim}/, I had to remember to call him Tim—would carry a lot of weight in every camp that mattered.
+
+Dan's score was incrementing upwards, but he still had a rotten profile. He had accrued a good deal of left-handed Whuffie, and I curiously backtraced it to the occasion of my murder, when Debra's people had accorded him a generous dollop of props for the levelheaded way he had scraped up my corpse and moved it offstage, minimizing the disturbance in front of their wondrous Pirates.
+
+I was fugueing, wandering off on the kind of mediated reverie that got me killed on the reef at Playa Coral, and I came out of it with a start, realizing that the other three were politely ignoring my blown buffer. I could have run backwards through my short-term memory to get the gist of the conversation, but that would have lengthened the pause. Screw it. “So, how're things going over at the Hall of the Presidents?” I asked Tim.
+
+Lil shot me a cautioning look. She'd ceded the Hall to Debra's ad-hocs, that being the only way to avoid the appearance of childish disattention to the almighty Whuffie. Now she had to keep up the fiction of good-natured cooperation—that meant not shoulder-surfing Debra, looking for excuses to pounce on her work.
+
+Tim gave us the same half-grin he'd greeted me with. On his smooth, pointed features, it looked almost irredeemably cute. “We're doing good stuff, I think. Debra's had her eye on the Hall for years, back in the old days, before she went to China. We're replacing the whole thing with broadband uplinks of gestalts from each of the Presidents' lives: newspaper headlines, speeches, distilled biographies, personal papers. It'll be like having each President /{inside}/ you, core-dumped in a few seconds. Debra said we're going to /{flash-bake}/ the Presidents on your mind!” His eyes glittered in the twilight.
+
+Having only recently experienced my own cerebral flash-baking, Tim's description struck a chord in me. My personality seemed to be rattling around a little in my mind, as though it had been improperly fitted. It made the idea of having the gestalt of 50-some Presidents squashed in along with it perversely appealing.
+
+“Wow,” I said. “That sounds wild. What do you have in mind for physical plant?” The Hall as it stood had a quiet, patriotic dignity cribbed from a hundred official buildings of the dead USA. Messing with it would be like redesigning the stars-and-bars.
+
+“That's not really my area,” Tim said. “I'm a programmer. But I could have one of the designers squirt some plans at you, if you want.”
+
+“That would be fine,” Lil said, taking my elbow. “I think we should be heading home, now, though.” She began to tug me away. Dan took my other elbow. Behind her, the Liberty Belle glowed like a ghostly wedding cake in the twilight.
+
+“That's too bad,” Tim said. “My ad-hoc is pulling an all-nighter on the new Hall. I'm sure they'd love to have you drop by.”
+
+The idea seized hold of me. I would go into the camp of the enemy, sit by their fire, learn their secrets. “That would be /{great}/!” I said, too loudly. My head was buzzing slightly. Lil's hands fell away.
+
+“But we've got an early morning tomorrow,” Lil said. “You've got a shift at eight, and I'm running into town for groceries.” She was lying, but she was telling me that this wasn't her idea of a smart move. But my faith was unshakeable.
+
+“Eight a.m. shift? No problem—I'll be right here when it starts. I'll just grab a shower at the Contemporary in the morning and catch the monorail back in time to change. All right?”
+
+Dan tried. “But Jules, we were going to grab some dinner at Cinderella's Royal Table, remember? I made reservations.”
+
+“Aw, we can eat any time,” I said. “This is a hell of an opportunity.”
+
+“It sure is,” Dan said, giving up. “Mind if I come along?”
+
+He and Lil traded meaningful looks that I interpreted to mean, /{If he's going to be a nut, one of us really should stay with him}/. I was past caring—I was going to beard the lion in his den!
+
+Tim was apparently oblivious to all of this. “Then it's settled! Let's go.”
+
+On the walk to the Hall, Dan kept ringing my cochlea and I kept sending him straight to voicemail. All the while, I kept up a patter of small-talk with him and Tim. I was determined to make up for my debacle in the Mansion with Tim, win him over.
+
+Debra's people were sitting around in the armchairs onstage, the animatronic presidents stacked in neat piles in the wings. Debra was sprawled in Lincoln's armchair, her head cocked lazily, her legs extended before her. The Hall's normal smells of ozone and cleanliness were overridden by sweat and machine-oil, the stink of an ad-hoc pulling an all-nighter. The Hall took fifteen years to research and execute, and a couple of days to tear down.
+
+She was au-naturel, still wearing the face she'd been born with, albeit one that had been regenerated dozens of times after her deaths. It was patrician, waxy, long, with a nose that was made for staring down. She was at least as old as I was, though she was only apparent 22. I got the sense that she picked this age because it was one that afforded boundless reserves of energy.
+
+She didn't deign to rise as I approached, but she did nod languorously at me. The other ad-hocs had been split into little clusters, hunched over terminals. They all had the raccoon-eyed, sleep-deprived look of fanatics, even Debra, who managed to look lazy and excited simultaneously.
+
+/{Did you have me killed}/? I wondered, staring at Debra. After all, she'd been killed dozens, if not hundreds of times. It might not be such a big deal for her.
+
+“Hi there,” I said, brightly. “Tim offered to show us around! You know Dan, right?”
+
+Debra nodded at him. “Oh, sure. Dan and I are pals, right?”
+
+Dan's poker face didn't twitch a muscle. “Hello, Debra,” he said. He'd been hanging out with them since Lil had briefed him on the peril to the Mansion, trying to gather some intelligence for us to use. They knew what he was up to, of course, but Dan was a fairly charming guy and he worked like a mule, so they tolerated him. But it seemed like he'd violated a boundary by accompanying me, as though the polite fiction that he was more a part of Debra's ad-hoc than Lil's was shattered by my presence.
+
+Tim said, “Can I show them the demo, Debra?”
+
+Debra quirked an eyebrow, then said, “Sure, why not. You'll like this, guys.”
+
+Tim hustled us backstage, where Lil and I used to sweat over the animatronics and cop surreptitious feels. Everything had been torn loose, packed up, stacked. They hadn't wasted a moment—they'd spent a week tearing down a show that had run for more than a century. The scrim that the projected portions of the show normally screened on was ground into the floor, spotted with grime, footprints and oil.
+
+Tim showed me to a half-assembled backup terminal. Its housing was off, and any number of wireless keyboards, pointers and gloves lay strewn about it. It had the look of a prototype.
+
+“This is it—our uplink. So far, we've got a demo app running on it: Lincoln's old speech, along with the civil-war montage. Just switch on guest access and I'll core-dump it to you. It's wild.”
+
+I pulled up my HUD and switched on guest access. Tim pointed a finger at the terminal and my brain was suffused with the essence of Lincoln: every nuance of his speech, the painstakingly researched movement tics, his warts and beard and topcoat. It almost felt like I /{was}/ Lincoln, for a moment, and then it passed. But I could still taste the lingering coppery flavor of cannon-fire and chewing tobacco.
+
+I staggered backwards. My head swam with flash-baked sense-impressions, rich and detailed. I knew on the spot that Debra's Hall of the Presidents was going to be a hit.
+
+Dan took a shot off the uplink, too. Tim and I watched him as his expression shifted from skepticism to delight. Tim looked expectantly at me.
+
+“That's really fine,” I said. “Really, really fine. Moving.”
+
+Tim blushed. “Thanks! I did the gestalt programming—it's my specialty.”
+
+Debra spoke up from behind him—she'd sauntered over while Dan was getting his jolt. “I got the idea in Beijing, when I was dying a lot. There's something wonderful about having memories implanted, like you're really working your brain. I love the synthetic clarity of it all.”
+
+Tim sniffed. “Not synthetic at all,” he said, turning to me. “It's nice and soft, right?”
+
+I sensed deep political shoals and was composing my reply when Debra said: “Tim keeps trying to make it all more impressionistic, less computer-y. He's wrong, of course. We don't want to simulate the experience of watching the show—we want to /{transcend it}/.”
+
+Tim nodded reluctantly. “Sure, transcend it. But the way we do that is by making the experience /{human}/, a mile in the presidents' shoes. Empathy-driven. What's the point of flash-baking a bunch of dry facts on someone's brain?”
+
+1~ CHAPTER 4
+
+One night in the Hall of Presidents convinced me of three things:
+
+_1 That Debra's people had had me killed, and screw their alibis,
+
+_1 That they would kill me again, when the time came for them to make a play for the Haunted Mansion,
+
+_1 That our only hope for saving the Mansion was a preemptive strike against them: we had to hit them hard, where it hurt.
+
+Dan and I had been treated to eight hours of insectile precision in the Hall of Presidents, Debra's people working with effortless cooperation born of the adversity they'd faced in Beijing. Debra moved from team to team, making suggestions with body language as much as with words, leaving bursts of inspired activity in her wake.
+
+It was that precision that convinced me of point one. Any ad-hoc this tight could pull off anything if it advanced their agenda. Ad-hoc? Hell, call them what they were: an army.
+
+Point two came to me when I sampled the Lincoln build that Tim finished at about three in the morning, after intensive consultation with Debra. The mark of a great ride is that it gets better the second time around, as the detail and flourishes start to impinge on your consciousness. The Mansion was full of little gimcracks and sly nods that snuck into your experience on each successive ride.
+
+Tim shuffled his feet nervously, bursting with barely restrained pride as I switched on public access. He dumped the app to my public directory, and, gingerly, I executed it.
+
+God! God and Lincoln and cannon-fire and oratory and ploughs and mules and greatcoats! It rolled over me, it punched through me, it crashed against the inside of my skull and rebounded. The first pass through, there had been a sense of order, of narrative, but this, this was gestalt, the whole thing in one undifferentiated ball, filling me and spilling over. It was panicky for a moment, as the essence of Lincolness seemed to threaten my own personality, and, just as it was about to overwhelm me, it receded, leaving behind a rush of endorphin and adrenaline that made me want to jump.
+
+“Tim,” I gasped. “Tim! That was…” Words failed me. I wanted to hug him. What we could do for the Mansion with this! What elegance! Directly imprinting the experience, without recourse to the stupid, blind eyes; the thick, deaf ears.
+
+Tim beamed and basked, and Debra nodded solemnly from her throne. “You liked it?” Tim said. I nodded, and staggered back to the theatre seat where Dan slept, head thrown back, snores softly rattling in his throat.
+
+Incrementally, reason trickled back into my mind, and with it came ire. How dare they? The wonderful compromises of technology and expense that had given us the Disney rides—rides that had entertained the world for two centuries and more—could never compete head to head with what they were working on.
+
+My hands knotted into fists in my lap. Why the fuck couldn't they do this somewhere else? Why did they have to destroy everything I loved to realize this? They could build this tech anywhere—they could distribute it online and people could access it from their living rooms!
+
+But that would never do. Doing it here was better for the old Whuffie—they'd make over Disney World and hold it, a single ad-hoc where three hundred had flourished before, smoothly operating a park twice the size of Manhattan.
+
+I stood and stalked out of the theater, out into Liberty Square and the Park. It had cooled down without drying out, and there was a damp chill that crawled up my back and made my breath stick in my throat. I turned to contemplate the Hall of Presidents, staid and solid as it had been since my boyhood and before, a monument to the Imagineers who anticipated the Bitchun Society, inspired it.
+
+I called Dan, still snoring back in the theater, and woke him. He grunted unintelligibly in my cochlea.
+
+“They did it—they killed me.” I knew they had, and I was glad. It made what I had to do next easier.
+
+“Oh, Jesus. They didn't kill you—they offered their backups, remember? They couldn't have done it.”
+
+“Bullshit!” I shouted into the empty night. “Bullshit! They did it, and they fucked with their backups somehow. They must have. It's all too neat and tidy. How else could they have gotten so far with the Hall so fast? They knew it was coming, they planned a disruption, and they moved in. Tell me that you think they just had these plans lying around and moved on them when they could.”
+
+Dan groaned, and I heard his joints popping. He must have been stretching. The Park breathed around me, the sounds of maintenance crews scurrying in the night. “I do believe that. Clearly, you don't. It's not the first time we've disagreed. So now what?”
+
+“Now we save the Mansion,” I said. “Now we fight back.”
+
+“Oh, shit,” Dan said.
+
+I have to admit, there was a part of me that concurred.
+
+My opportunity came later that week. Debra's ad-hocs were showboating, announcing a special preview of the new Hall to the other ad-hocs that worked in the Park. It was classic chutzpah, letting the key influencers in the Park in long before the bugs were hammered out. A smooth run would garner the kind of impressed reaction that guaranteed continued support while they finished up; a failed demo could doom them. There were plenty of people in the Park who had a sentimental attachment to the Hall of Presidents, and whatever Debra's people came up with would have to answer their longing.
+
+“I'm going to do it during the demo,” I told Dan, while I piloted the runabout from home to the castmember parking. I snuck a look at him to gauge his reaction. He had his poker face on.
+
+“I'm not going to tell Lil,” I continued. “It's better that she doesn't know—plausible deniability.”
+
+“And me?” he said. “Don't I need plausible deniability?”
+
+“No,” I said. “No, you don't. You're an outsider. You can make the case that you were working on your own—gone rogue.” I knew it wasn't fair. Dan was here to build up his Whuffie, and if he was implicated in my dirty scheme, he'd have to start over again. I knew it wasn't fair, but I didn't care. I knew that we were fighting for our own survival. “It's good versus evil, Dan. You don't want to be a post-person. You want to stay human. The rides are human. We each mediate them through our own experience. We're physically inside of them, and they talk to us through our senses. What Debra's people are building—it's hive-mind shit. Directly implanting thoughts! Jesus! It's not an experience, it's brainwashing! You gotta know that.” I was pleading, arguing with myself as much as with him.
+
+I snuck another look at him as I sped along the Disney back-roads, lined with sweaty Florida pines and immaculate purple signage. Dan was looking thoughtful, the way he had back in our old days in Toronto. Some of my tension dissipated. He was thinking about it—I'd gotten through to him.
+
+“Jules, this isn't one of your better ideas.” My chest tightened, and he patted my shoulder. He had the knack of putting me at my ease, even when he was telling me that I was an idiot. “Even if Debra was behind your assassination—and that's not a certainty, we both know that. Even if that's the case, we've got better means at our disposal. Improving the Mansion, competing with her head to head, that's smart. Give it a little while and we can come back at her, take over the Hall—even the Pirates, that'd really piss her off. Hell, if we can prove she was behind the assassination, we can chase her off right now. Sabotage is not going to do you any good. You've got lots of other options.”
+
+“But none of them are fast enough, and none of them are emotionally satisfying. This way has some goddamn /{balls}/.”
+
+We reached castmember parking, I swung the runabout into a slot and stalked out before it had a chance to extrude its recharger cock. I heard Dan's door slam behind me and knew that he was following behind.
+
+We took to the utilidors grimly. I walked past the cameras, knowing that my image was being archived, my presence logged. I'd picked the timing of my raid carefully: by arriving at high noon, I was sticking to my traditional pattern for watching hot-weather crowd dynamics. I'd made a point of visiting twice during the previous week at this time, and of dawdling in the commissary before heading topside. The delay between my arrival in the runabout and my showing up at the Mansion would not be discrepant.
+
+Dan dogged my heels as I swung towards the commissary, and then hugged the wall, in the camera's blindspot. Back in my early days in the Park, when I was courting Lil, she showed me the A-Vac, the old pneumatic waste-disposal system, decommissioned in the 20s. The kids who grew up in the Park had been notorious explorers of the tubes, which still whiffed faintly of the garbage bags they'd once whisked at 60 mph to the dump on the property's outskirts, but for a brave, limber kid, the tubes were a subterranean wonderland to explore when the hypermediated experiences of the Park lost their luster.
+
+I snarled a grin and popped open the service entrance. “If they hadn't killed me and forced me to switch to a new body, I probably wouldn't be flexible enough to fit in,” I hissed at Dan. “Ironic, huh?”
+
+I clambered inside without waiting for a reply, and started inching my way under the Hall of Presidents.
+
+My plan had covered every conceivable detail, except one, which didn't occur to me until I was forty minutes into the pneumatic tube, arms held before me and legs angled back like a swimmer's.
+
+How was I going to reach into my pockets?
+
+Specifically, how was I going to retrieve my HERF gun from my back pants-pocket, when I couldn't even bend my elbows? The HERF gun was the crux of the plan: a High Energy Radio Frequency generator with a directional, focused beam that would punch up through the floor of the Hall of Presidents and fuse every goddamn scrap of unshielded electronics on the premises. I'd gotten the germ of the idea during Tim's first demo, when I'd seen all of his prototypes spread out backstage, cases off, ready to be tinkered with. Unshielded.
+
+“Dan,” I said, my voice oddly muffled by the tube's walls.
+
+“Yeah?” he said. He'd been silent during the journey, the sound of his painful, elbow-dragging progress through the lightless tube my only indicator of his presence.
+
+“Can you reach my back pocket?”
+
+“Oh, shit,” he said.
+
+“Goddamn it,” I said, “keep the fucking editorial to yourself. Can you reach it or not?”
+
+I heard him grunt as he pulled himself up in the tube, then felt his hand groping up my calf. Soon, his chest was crushing my calves into the tube's floor and his hand was pawing around my ass.
+
+“I can reach it,” he said. I could tell from his tone that he wasn't too happy about my snapping at him, but I was too wrapped up to consider an apology, despite what must be happening to my Whuffie as Dan did his slow burn.
+
+He fumbled the gun—a narrow cylinder as long as my palm—out of my pocket. “Now what?” he said.
+
+“Can you pass it up?” I asked.
+
+Dan crawled higher, overtop of me, but stuck fast when his ribcage met my glutes. “I can't get any further,” he said.
+
+“Fine,” I said. “You'll have to fire it, then.” I held my breath. Would he do it? It was one thing to be my accomplice, another to be the author of the destruction.
+
+“Aw, Jules,” he said.
+
+“A simple yes or no, Dan. That's all I want to hear from you.” I was boiling with anger—at myself, at Dan, at Debra, at the whole goddamn thing.
+
+“Fine,” he said.
+
+“Good. Dial it up to max dispersion and point it straight up.”
+
+I heard him release the catch, felt a staticky crackle in the air, and then it was done. The gun was a one-shot, something I'd confiscated from a mischievous guest a decade before, when they'd had a brief vogue.
+
+“Hang on to it,” I said. I had no intention of leaving such a damning bit of evidence behind. I resumed my bellycrawl forward to the next service hatch, near the parking lot, where I'd stashed an identical change of clothes for both of us.
+
+We made it back just as the demo was getting underway. Debra's ad-hocs were ranged around the mezzanine inside the Hall of Presidents, a collection of influential castmembers from other ad-hocs filling the pre-show area to capacity.
+
+Dan and I filed in just as Tim was stringing the velvet rope up behind the crowd. He gave me a genuine smile and shook my hand, and I smiled back, full of good feelings now that I knew that he was going down in flames. I found Lil and slipped my hand into hers as we filed into the auditorium, which had the new-car smell of rug shampoo and fresh electronics.
+
+We took our seats and I bounced my leg nervously, compulsively, while Debra, dressed in Lincoln's coat and stovepipe, delivered a short speech. There was some kind of broadcast rig mounted over the stage now, something to allow them to beam us all their app in one humongous burst.
+
+Debra finished up and stepped off the stage to a polite round of applause, and they started the demo.
+
+Nothing happened. I tried to keep the shit-eating grin off my face as nothing happened. No tone in my cochlea indicating a new file in my public directory, no rush of sensation, nothing. I turned to Lil to make some snotty remark, but her eyes were closed, her mouth lolling open, her breath coming in short huffs. Down the row, every castmember was in the same attitude of deep, mind-blown concentration. I pulled up a diagnostic HUD.
+
+Nothing. No diagnostics. No HUD. I cold-rebooted.
+
+Nothing.
+
+I was offline.
+
+Offline, I filed out of the Hall of Presidents. Offline, I took Lil's hand and walked to the Liberty Belle load-zone, our spot for private conversations. Offline, I bummed a cigarette from her.
+
+Lil was upset—even through my bemused, offline haze, I could tell that. Tears pricked her eyes.
+
+“Why didn't you tell me?” she said, after a hard moment's staring into the moonlight reflecting off the river.
+
+“Tell you?” I said, dumbly.
+
+“They're really good. They're better than good. They're better than us. Oh, God.”
+
+Offline, I couldn't find stats or signals to help me discuss the matter. Offline, I tried it without help. “I don't think so. I don't think they've got soul, I don't think they've got history, I don't think they've got any kind of connection to the past. The world grew up in the Disneys—they visit this place for continuity as much as for entertainment. We provide that.” I'm offline, and they're not—what the hell happened?
+
+“It'll be okay, Lil. There's nothing in that place that's better than us. Different and new, but not better. You know that—you've spent more time in the Mansion than anyone, you know how much refinement, how much work there is in there. How can something they whipped up in a couple weeks possibly be better that this thing we've been maintaining for all these years?”
+
+She ground the back of her sleeve against her eyes and smiled. “Sorry,” she said. Her nose was red, her eyes puffy, her freckles livid over the flush of her cheeks. “Sorry—it's just shocking. Maybe you're right. And even if you're not—hey, that's the whole point of a meritocracy, right? The best stuff survives, everything else gets supplanted.
+
+“Oh, shit, I hate how I look when I cry,” she said. “Let's go congratulate them.”
+
+As I took her hand, I was obscurely pleased with myself for having improved her mood without artificial assistance.
+
+Dan was nowhere to be seen as Lil and I mounted the stage at the Hall, where Debra's ad-hocs and a knot of well-wishers were celebrating by passing a rock around. Debra had lost the tailcoat and hat, and was in an extreme state of relaxation, arms around the shoulders of two of her cronies, pipe between her teeth.
+
+She grinned around the pipe as Lil and I stumbled through some insincere compliments, nodded, and toked heavily while Tim applied a torch to the bowl.
+
+“Thanks,” she said, laconically. “It was a team effort.” She hugged her cronies to her, almost knocking their heads together.
+
+Lil said, “What's your timeline, then?”
+
+Debra started unreeling a long spiel about critical paths, milestones, requirements meetings, and I tuned her out. Ad-hocs were crazy for that process stuff. I stared at my feet, at the floorboards, and realized that they weren't floorboards at all, but faux-finish painted over a copper mesh—a Faraday cage. That's why the HERF gun hadn't done anything; that's why they'd been so casual about working with the shielding off their computers. With my eye, I followed the copper shielding around the entire stage and up the walls, where it disappeared into the ceiling. Once again, I was struck by the evolvedness of Debra's ad-hocs, how their trial by fire in China had armored them against the kind of bush-league jiggery-pokery that the fuzzy bunnies in Florida—myself included—came up with.
+
+For instance, I didn't think there was a single castmember in the Park outside of Deb's clique with the stones to stage an assassination. Once I'd made that leap, I realized that it was only a matter of time until they staged another one—and another, and another. Whatever they could get away with.
+
+Debra's spiel finally wound down and Lil and I headed away. I stopped in front of the backup terminal in the gateway between Liberty Square and Fantasyland. “When was the last time you backed up?” I asked her. If they could go after me, they might go after any of us.
+
+“Yesterday,” she said. She exuded bone-weariness at me, looking more like an overmediated guest than a tireless castmember.
+
+“Let's run another backup, huh? We should really back up at night and at lunchtime—with things the way they are, we can't afford to lose an afternoon's work, much less a week's.”
+
+Lil rolled her eyes. I knew better than to argue with her when she was tired, but this was too crucial to set aside for petulance. “You can back up that often if you want to, Julius, but don't tell me how to live my life, okay?”
+
+“Come on, Lil—it only takes a minute, and it'd make me feel a lot better. Please?” I hated the whine in my voice.
+
+“No, Julius. No. Let's go home and get some sleep. I want to do some work on new merch for the Mansion—some collectible stuff, maybe.”
+
+“For Christ's sake, is it really so much to ask? Fine. Wait while I back up, then, all right?”
+
+Lil groaned and glared at me.
+
+I approached the terminal and cued a backup. Nothing happened. Oh, yeah, right, I was offline. A cool sweat broke out all over my new body.
+
+Lil grabbed the couch as soon as we got in, mumbling something about wanting to work on some revised merch ideas she'd had. I glared at her as she subvocalized and air-typed in the corner, shut away from me. I hadn't told her that I was offline yet—it just seemed like insignificant personal bitching relative to the crises she was coping with.
+
+Besides, I'd been knocked offline before, though not in fifty years, and often as not the system righted itself after a good night's sleep. I could visit the doctor in the morning if things were still screwy.
+
+So I crawled into bed, and when my bladder woke me in the night, I had to go into the kitchen to consult our old starburst clock to get the time. It was 3 a.m., and when the hell had we expunged the house of all timepieces, anyway?
+
+Lil was sacked out on the couch, and complained feebly when I tried to rouse her, so I covered her with a blanket and went back to bed, alone.
+
+I woke disoriented and crabby, without my customary morning jolt of endorphin. Vivid dreams of death and destruction slipped away as I sat up. I preferred to let my subconscious do its own thing, so I'd long ago programmed my systems to keep me asleep during REM cycles except in emergencies. The dream left a foul taste in my mind as I staggered into the kitchen, where Lil was fixing coffee.
+
+“Why didn't you wake me up last night? I'm one big ache from sleeping on the couch,” Lil said as I stumbled in.
+
+She had the perky, jaunty quality of someone who could instruct her nervous system to manufacture endorphin and adrenaline at will. I felt like punching the wall.
+
+“You wouldn't get up,” I said, and slopped coffee in the general direction of a mug, then scalded my tongue with it.
+
+“And why are you up so late? I was hoping you would cover a shift for me—the merch ideas are really coming together and I wanted to hit the Imagineering shop and try some prototyping.”
+
+“Can't.” I foraged a slice of bread with cheese and noticed a crumby plate in the sink. Dan had already eaten and gone, apparently.
+
+“Really?” she said, and my blood started to boil in earnest. I slammed Dan's plate into the dishwasher and shoved bread into my maw.
+
+“Yes. Really. It's your shift—fucking work it or call in sick.”
+
+Lil reeled. Normally, I was the soul of sweetness in the morning, when I was hormonally enhanced, anyway. “What's wrong, honey?” she said, going into helpful castmember mode. Now I wanted to hit something besides the wall.
+
+“Just leave me alone, all right? Go fiddle with fucking merch. I've got real work to do—in case you haven't noticed, Debra's about to eat you and your little band of plucky adventurers and pick her teeth with the bones. For God's sake, Lil, don't you ever get fucking angry about anything? Don't you have any goddamned passion?”
+
+Lil whitened and I felt a sinking feeling in my gut. It was the worst thing I could possibly have said.
+
+Lil and I met three years before, at a barbecue that some friends of her parents threw, a kind of castmember mixer. She'd been just 19—apparent and real—and had a bubbly, flirty vibe that made me dismiss her, at first, as just another airhead castmember.
+
+Her parents—Tom and Rita—on the other hand, were fascinating people, members of the original ad-hoc that had seized power in Walt Disney World, wresting control from a gang of wealthy former shareholders who'd been operating it as their private preserve. Rita was apparent 20 or so, but she radiated a maturity and a fiery devotion to the Park that threw her daughter's superficiality into sharp relief.
+
+They throbbed with Whuffie, Whuffie beyond measure, beyond use. In a world where even a zeroed-out Whuffie loser could eat, sleep, travel and access the net without hassle, their wealth was more than sufficient to repeatedly access the piffling few scarce things left on earth over and over.
+
+The conversation turned to the first day, when she and her pals had used a cutting torch on the turnstiles and poured in, wearing homemade costumes and name tags. They infiltrated the shops, the control centers, the rides, first by the hundred, then, as the hot July day ticked by, by the thousand. The shareholders' lackeys—who worked the Park for the chance to be a part of the magic, even if they had no control over the management decisions—put up a token resistance. Before the day was out, though, the majority had thrown in their lots with the raiders, handing over security codes and pitching in.
+
+“But we knew the shareholders wouldn't give in as easy as that,” Lil's mother said, sipping her lemonade. “We kept the Park running 24/7 for the next two weeks, never giving the shareholders a chance to fight back without doing it in front of the guests. We'd prearranged with a couple of airline ad-hocs to add extra routes to Orlando and the guests came pouring in.” She smiled, remembering the moment, and her features in repose were Lil's almost identically. It was only when she was talking that her face changed, muscles tugging it into an expression decades older than the face that bore it.
+
+“I spent most of the time running the merch stand at Madame Leota's outside the Mansion, gladhanding the guests while hissing nasties back and forth with the shareholders who kept trying to shove me out. I slept in a sleeping bag on the floor of the utilidor, with a couple dozen others, in three hour shifts. That was when I met this asshole”—she chucked her husband on the shoulder—“he'd gotten the wrong sleeping bag by mistake and wouldn't budge when I came down to crash. I just crawled in next to him and the rest, as they say, is history.”
+
+Lil rolled her eyes and made gagging noises. “Jesus, Rita, no one needs to hear about that part of it.”
+
+Tom patted her arm. “Lil, you're an adult—if you can't stomach hearing about your parents' courtship, you can either sit somewhere else or grin and bear it. But you don't get to dictate the topic of conversation.”
+
+Lil gave us adults a very youthful glare and flounced off. Rita shook her head at Lil's departing backside. “There's not much fire in that generation,” she said. “Not a lot of passion. It's our fault—we thought that Disney World would be the best place to raise a child in the Bitchun Society. Maybe it was, but…” She trailed off and rubbed her palms on her thighs, a gesture I'd come to know in Lil, by and by. “I guess there aren't enough challenges for them these days. They're too cooperative.” She laughed and her husband took her hand.
+
+“We sound like our parents,” Tom said. “'When we were growing up, we didn't have any of this newfangled life-extension stuff—we took our chances with the cave bears and the dinosaurs!'” Tom wore himself older, apparent 50, with graying sidewalls and crinkled smile-lines, the better to present a non-threatening air of authority to the guests. It was a truism among the first-gen ad-hocs that women castmembers should wear themselves young, men old. “We're just a couple of Bitchun fundamentalists, I guess.”
+
+Lil called over from a nearby conversation: “Are they telling you what a pack of milksops we are, Julius? When you get tired of that, why don't you come over here and have a smoke?” I noticed that she and her cohort were passing a crack pipe.
+
+“What's the use?” Lil's mother sighed.
+
+“Oh, I don't know that it's as bad as all that,” I said, virtually my first words of the afternoon. I was painfully conscious that I was only there by courtesy, just one of the legion of hopefuls who flocked to Orlando every year, aspiring to a place among the ruling cliques. “They're passionate about maintaining the Park, that's for sure. I made the mistake of lifting a queue-gate at the Jungleboat Cruise last week and I got a very earnest lecture about the smooth functioning of the Park from a castmember who couldn't have been more than 18. I think that they don't have the passion for creating Bitchunry that we have—they don't need it—but they've got plenty of drive to maintain it.”
+
+Lil's mother gave me a long, considering look that I didn't know what to make of. I couldn't tell if I had offended her or what.
+
+“I mean, you can't be a revolutionary after the revolution, can you? Didn't we all struggle so that kids like Lil wouldn't have to?”
+
+“Funny you should say that,” Tom said. He had the same considering look on his face. “Just yesterday we were talking about the very same thing. We were talking—” he drew a breath and looked askance at his wife, who nodded—“about deadheading. For a while, anyway. See if things changed much in fifty or a hundred years.”
+
+I felt a kind of shameful disappointment. Why was I wasting my time schmoozing with these two, when they wouldn't be around when the time came to vote me in? I banished the thought as quickly as it came—I was talking to them because they were nice people. Not every conversation had to be strategically important.
+
+“Really? Deadheading.” I remember that I thought of Dan then, about his views on the cowardice of deadheading, on the bravery of ending it when you found yourself obsolete. He'd comforted me once, when my last living relative, my uncle, opted to go to sleep for three thousand years. My uncle had been born pre-Bitchun, and had never quite gotten the hang of it. Still, he was my link to my family, to my first adulthood and my only childhood. Dan had taken me to Gananoque and we'd spent the day bounding around the countryside on seven-league boots, sailing high over the lakes of the Thousand Islands and the crazy fiery carpet of autumn leaves. We topped off the day at a dairy commune he knew where they still made cheese from cow's milk and there'd been a thousand smells and bottles of strong cider and a girl whose name I'd long since forgotten but whose exuberant laugh I'd remember forever. And it wasn't so important, then, my uncle going to sleep for three milliennia, because whatever happened, there were the leaves and the lakes and the crisp sunset the color of blood and the girl's laugh.
+
+“Have you talked to Lil about it?”
+
+Rita shook her head. “It's just a thought, really. We don't want to worry her. She's not good with hard decisions—it's her generation.”
+
+They changed the subject not long thereafter, and I sensed discomfort, knew that they had told me too much, more than they'd intended. I drifted off and found Lil and her young pals, and we toked a little and cuddled a little.
+
+Within a month, I was working at the Haunted Mansion, Tom and Rita were invested in Canopic jars in Kissimee with instructions not to be woken until their newsbots grabbed sufficient interesting material to make it worth their while, and Lil and I were a hot item.
+
+Lil didn't deal well with her parents' decision to deadhead. For her, it was a slap in the face, a reproach to her and her generation of twittering Polyannic castmembers.
+
+For God's sake, Lil, don't you ever get fucking angry about anything? Don't you have any goddamned passion?
+
+The words were out of my mouth before I knew I was saying them, and Lil, 15 percent of my age, young enough to be my great-granddaughter; Lil, my lover and best friend and sponsor to the Liberty Square ad-hocracy; Lil turned white as a sheet, turned on her heel and walked out of the kitchen. She got in her runabout and went to the Park to take her shift.
+
+I went back to bed and stared at the ceiling fan as it made its lazy turns, and felt like shit.
+
+1~ CHAPTER 5
+
+When I finally returned to the Park, 36 hours had passed and Lil had not come back to the house. If she'd tried to call, she would've gotten my voicemail—I had no way of answering my phone. As it turned out, she hadn't been trying to reach me at all.
+
+I'd spent the time alternately moping, drinking, and plotting terrible, irrational vengeance on Debra for killing me, destroying my relationship, taking away my beloved (in hindsight, anyway) Hall of Presidents and threatening the Mansion. Even in my addled state, I knew that this was pretty unproductive, and I kept promising that I would cut it out, take a shower and some sober-ups, and get to work at the Mansion.
+
+I was working up the energy to do just that when Dan came in.
+
+“Jesus,” he said, shocked. I guess I was a bit of a mess, sprawled on the sofa in my underwear, all gamy and baggy and bloodshot.
+
+“Hey, Dan. How's it goin'?”
+
+He gave me one of his patented wry looks and I felt the same weird reversal of roles that we'd undergone at the U of T, when he had become the native, and I had become the interloper. He was the together one with the wry looks and I was the pathetic seeker who'd burned all his reputation capital. Out of habit, I checked my Whuffie, and a moment later I stopped being startled by its low score and was instead shocked by the fact that I could check it at all. I was back online!
+
+“Now, what do you know about that?” I said, staring at my dismal Whuffie.
+
+“What?” he said.
+
+I called his cochlea. “My systems are back online,” I subvocalized.
+
+He started. “You were offline?”
+
+I jumped up from the couch and did a little happy underwear dance. “I /{was}/, but I'm not /{now}/.” I felt better than I had in days, ready to beat the world—or at least Debra.
+
+“Let me take a shower, then let's get to the Imagineering labs. I've got a pretty kickass idea.”
+
+The idea, as I explained it in the runabout, was a preemptive rehab of the Mansion. Sabotaging the Hall had been a nasty, stupid idea, and I'd gotten what I deserved for it. The whole point of the Bitchun Society was to be more reputable than the next ad-hoc, to succeed on merit, not trickery, despite assassinations and the like.
+
+So a rehab it would be.
+
+“Back in the early days of the Disneyland Mansion, in California,” I explained, “Walt had a guy in a suit of armor just past the first Doom Buggy curve, he'd leap out and scare the hell out of the guests as they went by. It didn't last long, of course. The poor bastard kept getting punched out by startled guests, and besides, the armor wasn't too comfortable for long shifts.”
+
+Dan chuckled appreciatively. The Bitchun Society had all but done away with any sort of dull, repetitious labor, and what remained—tending bar, mopping toilets—commanded Whuffie aplenty and a life of leisure in your off-hours.
+
+“But that guy in the suit of armor, he could /{improvise}/. You'd get a slightly different show every time. It's like the castmembers who spiel on the Jungleboat Cruise. They've each got their own patter, their own jokes, and even though the animatronics aren't so hot, it makes the show worth seeing.”
+
+“You're going to fill the Mansion with castmembers in armor?” Dan asked, shaking his head.
+
+I waved away his objections, causing the runabout to swerve, terrifying a pack of guests who were taking a ride on rented bikes around the property. “No,” I said, flapping a hand apologetically at the white-faced guests. “Not at all. But what if all of the animatronics had human operators—telecontrollers, working with waldoes? We'll let them interact with the guests, talk with them, scare them… We'll get rid of the existing animatronics, replace 'em with full-mobility robots, then cast the parts over the Net. Think of the Whuffie! You could put, say, a thousand operators online at once, ten shifts per day, each of them caught up in our Mansion… We'll give out awards for outstanding performances, the shifts'll be based on popular vote. In effect, we'll be adding another ten thousand guests to the Mansion's throughput every day, only these guests will be honorary castmembers.”
+
+“That's pretty good,” Dan said. “Very Bitchun. Debra may have AI and flash-baking, but you'll have human interaction, courtesy of the biggest Mansion-fans in the world—”
+
+“And those are the very fans Debra'll have to win over to make a play for the Mansion. Very elegant, huh?”
+
+The first order of business was to call Lil, patch things up, and pitch the idea to her. The only problem was, my cochlea was offline again. My mood started to sour, and I had Dan call her instead.
+
+We met her up at Imagineering, a massive complex of prefab aluminum buildings painted Go-Away Green that had thronged with mad inventors since the Bitchun Society had come to Walt Disney World. The ad-hocs who had built an Imagineering department in Florida and now ran the thing were the least political in the Park, classic labcoat-and-clipboard types who would work for anyone so long as the ideas were cool. Not caring about Whuffie meant that they accumulated it in plenty on both the left and right hands.
+
+Lil was working with Suneep, AKA the Merch Miracle. He could design, prototype and produce a souvenir faster than anyone—shirts, sculptures, pens, toys, housewares, he was the king. They were collaborating on their HUDs, facing each other across a lab-bench in the middle of a lab as big as a basketball court, cluttered with logomarked tchotchkes and gabbling away while their eyes danced over invisible screens.
+
+Dan reflexively joined the collaborative space as he entered the lab, leaving me the only one out on the joke. Dan was clearly delighted by what he saw.
+
+I nudged him with an elbow. “Make a hardcopy,” I hissed.
+
+Instead of pitying me, he just airtyped a few commands and pages started to roll out of a printer in the lab's corner. Anyone else would have made a big deal out of it, but he just brought me into the discussion.
+
+If I needed proof that Lil and I were meant for each other, the designs she and Suneep had come up with were more than enough. She'd been thinking just the way I had—souvenirs that stressed the human scale of the Mansion. There were miniature animatronics of the Hitchhiking Ghosts in a black-light box, their skeletal robotics visible through their layers of plastic clothing; action figures that communicated by IR, so that placing one in proximity with another would unlock its Mansion-inspired behaviors—the raven cawed, Mme. Leota's head incanted, the singing busts sang. She'd worked up some formal attire based on the castmember costume, cut in this year's stylish lines.
+
+It was good merch, is what I'm trying to say. In my mind's eye, I was seeing the relaunch of the Mansion in six months, filled with robotic avatars of Mansion-nuts the world 'round, Mme. Leota's gift cart piled high with brilliant swag, strolling human players ad-libbing with the guests in the queue area…
+
+Lil looked up from her mediated state and glared at me as I pored over the hardcopy, nodding enthusiastically.
+
+“Passionate enough for you?” she snapped.
+
+I felt a flush creeping into face, my ears. It was somewhere between anger and shame, and I reminded myself that I was more than a century older than her, and it was my responsibility to be mature. Also, I'd started the fight.
+
+“This is fucking fantastic, Lil,” I said. Her look didn't soften. “Really choice stuff. I had a great idea—” I ran it down for her, the avatars, the robots, the rehab. She stopped glaring, started taking notes, smiling, showing me her dimples, her slanted eyes crinkling at the corners.
+
+“This isn't easy,” she said, finally. Suneep, who'd been politely pretending not to listen in, nodded involuntarily. Dan, too.
+
+“I know that,” I said. The flush burned hotter. “But that's the point—what Debra does isn't easy either. It's risky, dangerous. It made her and her ad-hoc better—it made them sharper.” /{Sharper than us, that's for sure}/. “They can make decisions like this fast, and execute them just as quickly. We need to be able to do that, too.”
+
+Was I really advocating being more like Debra? The words'd just popped out, but I saw that I'd been right—we'd have to beat Debra at her own game, out-evolve her ad-hocs.
+
+“I understand what you're saying,” Lil said. I could tell she was upset—she'd reverted to castmemberspeak. “It's a very good idea. I think that we stand a good chance of making it happen if we approach the group and put it to them, after doing the research, building the plans, laying out the critical path, and privately soliciting feedback from some of them.”
+
+I felt like I was swimming in molasses. At the rate that the Liberty Square ad-hoc moved, we'd be holding formal requirements reviews while Debra's people tore down the Mansion around us. So I tried a different tactic.
+
+“Suneep, you've been involved in some rehabs, right?”
+
+Suneep nodded slowly, with a cautious expression, a nonpolitical animal being drawn into a political discussion.
+
+“Okay, so tell me, if we came to you with this plan and asked you to pull together a production schedule—one that didn't have any review, just take the idea and run with it—and then pull it off, how long would it take you to execute it?”
+
+Lil smiled primly. She'd dealt with Imagineering before.
+
+“About five years,” he said, almost instantly.
+
+“Five years?” I squawked. “Why five years? Debra's people overhauled the Hall in a month!”
+
+“Oh, wait,” he said. “No review at all?”
+
+“No review. Just come up with the best way you can to do this, and do it. And we can provide you with unlimited, skilled labor, three shifts around the clock.”
+
+He rolled his eyes back and ticked off days on his fingers while muttering under his breath. He was a tall, thin man with a shock of curly dark hair that he smoothed unconsciously with surprisingly stubby fingers while he thought.
+
+“About eight weeks,” he said. “Barring accidents, assuming off-the-shelf parts, unlimited labor, capable management, material availability…” He trailed off again, and his short fingers waggled as he pulled up a HUD and started making a list.
+
+“Wait,” Lil said, alarmed. “How do you get from five years to eight weeks?”
+
+Now it was my turn to smirk. I'd seen how Imagineering worked when they were on their own, building prototypes and conceptual mockups—I knew that the real bottleneck was the constant review and revisions, the ever-fluctuating groupmind consensus of the ad-hoc that commissioned their work.
+
+Suneep looked sheepish. “Well, if all I have to do is satisfy myself that my plans are good and my buildings won't fall down, I can make it happen very fast. Of course, my plans aren't perfect. Sometimes, I'll be halfway through a project when someone suggests a new flourish or approach that makes the whole thing immeasurably better. Then it's back to the drawing board… So I stay at the drawing board for a long time at the start, get feedback from other Imagineers, from the ad-hocs, from focus groups and the Net. Then we do reviews at every stage of construction, check to see if anyone has had a great idea we haven't thought of and incorporate it, sometimes rolling back the work.
+
+“It's slow, but it works.”
+
+Lil was flustered. “But if you can do a complete revision in eight weeks, why not just finish it, then plan another revision, do /{that}/ one in eight weeks, and so on? Why take five years before anyone can ride the thing?”
+
+“Because that's how it's done,” I said to Lil. “But that's not how it /{has}/ to be done. That's how we'll save the Mansion.”
+
+I felt the surety inside of me, the certain knowledge that I was right. Ad-hocracy was a great thing, a Bitchun thing, but the organization needed to turn on a dime—that would be even /{more}/ Bitchun.
+
+“Lil,” I said, looking into her eyes, trying to burn my POV into her. “We have to do this. It's our only chance. We'll recruit hundreds to come to Florida and work on the rehab. We'll give every Mansion nut on the planet a shot at joining up, then we'll recruit them again to work at it, to run the telepresence rigs. We'll get buy-in from the biggest super-recommenders in the world, and we'll build something better and faster than any ad-hoc ever has, without abandoning the original Imagineers' vision. It will be unspeakably Bitchun.”
+
+Lil dropped her eyes and it was her turn to flush. She paced the floor, hands swinging at her sides. I could tell that she was still angry with me, but excited and scared and yes, passionate.
+
+“It's not up to me, you know,” she said at length, still pacing. Dan and I exchanged wicked grins. She was in.
+
+“I know,” I said. But it was, almost—she was a real opinion-leader in the Liberty Square ad-hoc, someone who knew the systems back and forth, someone who made good, reasonable decisions and kept her head in a crisis. Not a hothead. Not prone to taking radical switchbacks. This plan would burn up that reputation and the Whuffie that accompanied it, in short order, but by the time that happened, she'd have plenty of Whuffie with the new, thousands-strong ad-hoc.
+
+“I mean, I can't guarantee anything. I'd like to study the plans that Imagineering comes through with, do some walk-throughs—”
+
+I started to object, to remind her that speed was of the essence, but she beat me to it.
+
+“But I won't. We have to move fast. I'm in.”
+
+She didn't come into my arms, didn't kiss me and tell me everything was forgiven, but she bought in, and that was enough.
+
+My systems came back online sometime that day, and I hardly noticed, I was so preoccupied with the new Mansion. Holy shit, was it ever audacious: since the first Mansion opened in California in 1969, no one had ever had the guts to seriously fuxor with it. Oh, sure, the Paris version, Phantom Manor, had a slightly different storyline, but it was just a minor bit of tweakage to satisfy the European market at the time. No one wanted to screw up the legend.
+
+What the hell made the Mansion so cool, anyway? I'd been to Disney World any number of times as a guest before I settled in, and truth be told, it had never been my absolute favorite.
+
+But when I returned to Disney World, live and in person, freshly bored stupid by the three-hour liveheaded flight from Toronto, I'd found myself crowd-driven to it.
+
+I'm a terrible, terrible person to visit theme-parks with. Since I was a punk kid snaking my way through crowded subway platforms, eeling into the only seat on a packed car, I'd been obsessed with Beating The Crowd.
+
+In the early days of the Bitchun Society, I'd known a blackjack player, a compulsive counter of cards, an idiot savant of odds. He was a pudgy, unassuming engineer, the moderately successful founder of a moderately successful high-tech startup that had done something arcane with software agents. While he was only moderately successful, he was fabulously wealthy: he'd never raised a cent of financing for his company, and had owned it outright when he finally sold it for a bathtub full of money. His secret was the green felt tables of Vegas, where he'd pilgrim off to every time his bank balance dropped, there to count the monkey-cards and calculate the odds and Beat The House.
+
+Long after his software company was sold, long after he'd made his nut, he was dressing up in silly disguises and hitting the tables, grinding out hand after hand of twenty-one, for the sheer satisfaction of Beating The House. For him, it was pure brain-reward, a jolt of happy-juice every time the dealer busted and every time he doubled down on a deckfull of face cards.
+
+Though I'd never bought so much as a lottery ticket, I immediately got his compulsion: for me, it was Beating The Crowd, finding the path of least resistance, filling the gaps, guessing the short queue, dodging the traffic, changing lanes with a whisper to spare—moving with precision and grace and, above all, /{expedience}/.
+
+On that fateful return, I checked into the Fort Wilderness Campground, pitched my tent, and fairly ran to the ferry docks to catch a barge over to the Main Gate.
+
+Crowds were light until I got right up to Main Gate and the ticketing queues. Suppressing an initial instinct to dash for the farthest one, beating my ferrymates to what rule-of-thumb said would have the shortest wait, I stepped back and did a quick visual survey of the twenty kiosks and evaluated the queued-up huddle in front of each. Pre-Bitchun, I'd have been primarily interested in their ages, but that is less and less a measure of anything other than outlook, so instead I carefully examined their queuing styles, their dress, and more than anything, their burdens.
+
+You can tell more about someone's ability to efficiently negotiate the complexities of a queue through what they carry than through any other means—if only more people realized it. The classic, of course, is the unladen citizen, a person naked of even a modest shoulderbag or marsupial pocket. To the layperson, such a specimen might be thought of as a sure bet for a fast transaction, but I'd done an informal study and come to the conclusion that these brave iconoclasts are often the flightiest of the lot, left smiling with bovine mystification, patting down their pockets in a fruitless search for a writing implement, a piece of ID, a keycard, a rabbit's foot, a rosary, a tuna sandwich.
+
+No, for my money, I'll take what I call the Road Worrier anytime. Such a person is apt to be carefully slung with four or five carriers of one description or another, from bulging cargo pockets to clever military-grade strap-on pouches with biometrically keyed closures. The thing to watch for is the ergonomic consideration given to these conveyances: do they balance, are they slung for minimum interference and maximum ease of access? Someone who's given that much consideration to their gear is likely spending their time in line determining which bits and pieces they'll need when they reach its headwaters and is holding them at ready for fastest-possible processing.
+
+This is a tricky call, since there are lookalike pretenders, gear-pigs who pack /{everything}/ because they lack the organizational smarts to figure out what they should pack—they're just as apt to be burdened with bags and pockets and pouches, but the telltale is the efficiency of that slinging. These pack mules will sag beneath their loads, juggling this and that while pushing overloose straps up on their shoulders.
+
+I spied a queue that was made up of a group of Road Worriers, a queue that was slightly longer than the others, but I joined it and ticced nervously as I watched my progress relative to the other spots I could've chosen. I was borne out, a positive omen for a wait-free World, and I was sauntering down Main Street, USA long before my ferrymates.
+
+Returning to Walt Disney World was a homecoming for me. My parents had brought me the first time when I was all of ten, just as the first inklings of the Bitchun society were trickling into everyone's consciousness: the death of scarcity, the death of death, the struggle to rejig an economy that had grown up focused on nothing but scarcity and death. My memories of the trip are dim but warm, the balmy Florida climate and a sea of smiling faces punctuated by magical, darkened moments riding in OmniMover cars, past diorama after diorama.
+
+I went again when I graduated high school and was amazed by the richness of detail, the grandiosity and grandeur of it all. I spent a week there stunned bovine, grinning and wandering from corner to corner. Someday, I knew, I'd come to live there.
+
+The Park became a touchstone for me, a constant in a world where everything changed. Again and again, I came back to the Park, grounding myself, communing with all the people I'd been.
+
+That day I bopped from land to land, ride to ride, seeking out the short lines, the eye of the hurricane that crowded the Park to capacity. I'd take high ground, standing on a bench or hopping up on a fence, and do a visual reccy of all the queues in sight, try to spot prevailing currents in the flow of the crowd, generally having a high old obsessive time. Truth be told, I probably spent as much time looking for walk-ins as I would've spent lining up like a good little sheep, but I had more fun and got more exercise.
+
+The Haunted Mansion was experiencing a major empty spell: the Snow Crash Spectacular parade had just swept through Liberty Square en route to Fantasyland, dragging hordes of guests along with it, dancing to the JapRap sounds of the comical Sushi-K and aping the movements of the brave Hiro Protagonist. When they blew out, Liberty Square was a ghost town, and I grabbed the opportunity to ride the Mansion five times in a row, walking on every time.
+
+The way I tell it to Lil, I noticed her and then I noticed the Mansion, but to tell the truth it was the other way around.
+
+The first couple rides through, I was just glad of the aggressive air conditioning and the delicious sensation of sweat drying on my skin. But on the third pass, I started to notice just how goddamn cool the thing was. There wasn't a single bit of tech more advanced than a film-loop projector in the whole place, but it was all so cunningly contrived that the illusion of a haunted house was perfect: the ghosts that whirled through the ballroom were /{ghosts}/, three-dimensional and ethereal and phantasmic. The ghosts that sang in comical tableaux through the graveyard were equally convincing, genuinely witty and simultaneously creepy.
+
+My fourth pass through, I noticed the /{detail}/, the hostile eyes worked into the wallpaper's pattern, the motif repeated in the molding, the chandeliers, the photo gallery. I began to pick out the words to “Grim Grinning Ghosts,” the song that is repeated throughout the ride, whether in sinister organ-tones repeating the main theme troppo troppo or the spritely singing of the four musical busts in the graveyard.
+
+It's a catchy tune, one that I hummed on my fifth pass through, this time noticing that the overaggressive AC was, actually, mysterious chills that blew through the rooms as wandering spirits made their presence felt. By the time I debarked for the fifth time, I was whistling the tune with jazzy improvisations in a mixed-up tempo.
+
+That's when Lil and I ran into each other. She was picking up a discarded ice-cream wrapper—I'd seen a dozen castmembers picking up trash that day, seen it so frequently that I'd started doing it myself. She grinned slyly at me as I debarked into the fried-food-and-disinfectant perfume of the Park, hands in pockets, thoroughly pleased with myself for having so completely /{experienced}/ a really fine hunk of art.
+
+I smiled back at her, because it was only natural that one of the Whuffie-kings who were privileged to tend this bit of heavenly entertainment should notice how thoroughly I was enjoying her work.
+
+“That's really, really Bitchun,” I said to her, admiring the titanic mountains of Whuffie my HUD attributed to her.
+
+She was in character, and not supposed to be cheerful, but castmembers of her generation can't help but be friendly. She compromised between ghastly demeanor and her natural sweet spirit, and leered a grin at me, thumped through a zombie's curtsey, and moaned “Thank you—we /{do}/ try to keep it /{spirited}/.”
+
+I groaned appreciatively, and started to notice just how very cute she was, this little button of a girl with her rotting maid's uniform and her feather-shedding duster. She was just so clean and scrubbed and happy about everything, she radiated it and made me want to pinch her cheeks—either set.
+
+The moment was on me, and so I said, “When do they let you ghouls off? I'd love to take you out for a Zombie or a Bloody Mary.”
+
+Which led to more horrifying banter, and to my taking her out for a couple at the Adventurer's Club, learning her age in the process and losing my nerve, telling myself that there was nothing we could possibly have to say to each other across a century-wide gap.
+
+While I tell Lil that I noticed her first and the Mansion second, the reverse is indeed true. But it's also true—and I never told her this—that the thing I love best about the Mansion is:
+
+It's where I met her.
+
+Dan and I spent the day riding the Mansion, drafting scripts for the telepresence players who we hoped to bring on-board. We were in a totally creative zone, the dialog running as fast as he could transcribe it. Jamming on ideas with Dan was just about as terrific as a pass-time could be.
+
+I was all for leaking the plan to the Net right away, getting hearts-and-minds action with our core audience, but Lil turned it down.
+
+She was going to spend the next couple days quietly politicking among the rest of the ad-hoc, getting some support for the idea, and she didn't want the appearance of impropriety that would come from having outsiders being brought in before the ad-hoc.
+
+Talking to the ad-hocs, bringing them around—it was a skill I'd never really mastered. Dan was good at it, Lil was good at it, but me, I think that I was too self-centered to ever develop good skills as a peacemaker. In my younger days, I assumed that it was because I was smarter than everyone else, with no patience for explaining things in short words for mouth-breathers who just didn't get it.
+
+The truth of the matter is, I'm a bright enough guy, but I'm hardly a genius. Especially when it comes to people. Probably comes from Beating The Crowd, never seeing individuals, just the mass—the enemy of expedience.
+
+I never would have made it into the Liberty Square ad-hoc on my own. Lil made it happen for me, long before we started sleeping together. I'd assumed that her folks would be my best allies in the process of joining up, but they were too jaded, too ready to take the long sleep to pay much attention to a newcomer like me.
+
+Lil took me under her wing, inviting me to after-work parties, talking me up to her cronies, quietly passing around copies of my thesis-work. And she did the same in reverse, sincerely extolling the virtues of the others I met, so that I knew what there was to respect about them and couldn't help but treat them as individuals.
+
+In the years since, I'd lost that respect. Mostly, I palled around with Lil, and once he arrived, Dan, and with net-friends around the world. The ad-hocs that I worked with all day treated me with basic courtesy but not much friendliness.
+
+I guess I treated them the same. When I pictured them in my mind, they were a faceless, passive-aggressive mass, too caught up in the starchy world of consensus-building to ever do much of anything.
+
+Dan and I threw ourselves into it headlong, trolling the Net for address lists of Mansion-otakus from the four corners of the globe, spreadsheeting them against their timezones, temperaments, and, of course, their Whuffie.
+
+“That's weird,” I said, looking up from the old-fashioned terminal I was using—my systems were back offline. They'd been sputtering up and down for a couple days now, and I kept meaning to go to the doctor, but I'd never gotten 'round to it. Periodically, I'd get a jolt of urgency when I remembered that this meant my backup was stale-dating, but the Mansion always took precedence.
+
+“Huh?” he said.
+
+I tapped the display. “See these?” It was a fan-site, displaying a collection of animated 3-D meshes of various elements of the Mansion, part of a giant collaborative project that had been ongoing for decades, to build an accurate 3-D walkthrough of every inch of the Park. I'd used those meshes to build my own testing fly-throughs.
+
+“Those are terrific,” Dan said. “That guy must be a total /{fiend}/.” The meshes' author had painstakingly modeled, chained and animated every ghost in the ballroom scene, complete with the kinematics necessary for full motion. Where a “normal” fan-artist might've used a standard human kinematics library for the figures, this one had actually written his own from the ground up, so that the ghosts moved with a spectral fluidity that was utterly unhuman.
+
+“Who's the author?” Dan asked. “Do we have him on our list yet?”
+
+I scrolled down to display the credits. “I'll be damned,” Dan breathed.
+
+The author was Tim, Debra's elfin crony. He'd submitted the designs a week before my assassination.
+
+“What do you think it means?” I asked Dan, though I had a couple ideas on the subject myself.
+
+“Tim's a Mansion nut,” Dan said. “I knew that.”
+
+“You knew?”
+
+He looked a little defensive. “Sure. I told you, back when you had me hanging out with Debra's gang.”
+
+Had I asked him to hang out with Debra? As I remembered it, it had been his suggestion. Too much to think about.
+
+“But what does it mean, Dan? Is he an ally? Should we try to recruit him? Or is he the one that'd convinced Debra she needs to take over the Mansion?”
+
+Dan shook his head. “I'm not even sure that she wants to take over the Mansion. I know Debra, all she wants to do is turn ideas into things, as fast and as copiously as possible. She picks her projects carefully. She's acquisitive, sure, but she's cautious. She had a great idea for Presidents, and so she took over. I never heard her talk about the Mansion.”
+
+“Of course you didn't. She's cagey. Did you hear her talk about the Hall of Presidents?”
+
+Dan fumbled. “Not really… I mean, not in so many words, but—”
+
+“But nothing,” I said. “She's after the Mansion, she's after the Magic Kingdom, she's after the Park. She's taking over, goddamn it, and I'm the only one who seems to have noticed.”
+
+I came clean to Lil about my systems that night, as we were fighting. Fighting had become our regular evening pastime, and Dan had taken to sleeping at one of the hotels on-site rather than endure it.
+
+I'd started it, of course. “We're going to get killed if we don't get off our asses and start the rehab,” I said, slamming myself down on the sofa and kicking at the scratched coffee table. I heard the hysteria and unreason in my voice and it just made me madder. I was frustrated by not being able to check in on Suneep and Dan, and, as usual, it was too late at night to call anyone and do anything about it. By the morning, I'd have forgotten again.
+
+From the kitchen, Lil barked back, “I'm doing what I can, Jules. If you've got a better way, I'd love to hear about it.”
+
+“Oh, bullshit. I'm doing what I can, planning the thing out. I'm ready to /{go}/. It was your job to get the ad-hocs ready for it, but you keep telling me they're not. When will they be?”
+
+“Jesus, you're a nag.”
+
+“I wouldn't nag if you'd only fucking make it happen. What are you doing all day, anyway? Working shifts at the Mansion? Rearranging deck chairs on the Great Titanic Adventure?”
+
+“I'm working my fucking /{ass}/ off. I've spoken to every goddamn one of them at least twice this week about it.”
+
+“Sure,” I hollered at the kitchen. “Sure you have.”
+
+“Don't take my word for it, then. Check my fucking phone logs.”
+
+She waited.
+
+“Well? Check them!”
+
+“I'll check them later,” I said, dreading where this was going.
+
+“Oh, no you /{don't}/,” she said, stalking into the room, fuming. “You can't call me a liar and then refuse to look at the evidence.” She planted her hands on her slim little hips and glared at me. She'd gone pale and I could count every freckle on her face, her throat, her collarbones, the swell of her cleavage in the old vee-neck shirt I'd given her on a day-trip to Nassau.
+
+“Well?” she asked. She looked ready to wring my neck.
+
+“I can't,” I admitted, not meeting her eyes.
+
+“Yes you can—here, I'll dump it to your public directory.”
+
+Her expression shifted to one of puzzlement when she failed to locate me on her network. “What's going on?”
+
+So I told her. Offline, outcast, malfunctioning.
+
+“Well, why haven't you gone to the doctor? I mean, it's been /{weeks}/. I'll call him right now.”
+
+“Forget it,” I said. “I'll see him tomorrow. No sense in getting him out of bed.”
+
+But I didn't see him the day after, or the day after that. Too much to do, and the only times I remembered to call someone, I was too far from a public terminal or it was too late or too early. My systems came online a couple times, and I was too busy with the plans for the Mansion. Lil grew accustomed to the drifts of hard copy that littered the house, to printing out her annotations to my designs and leaving them on my favorite chair—to living like the cavemen of the information age had, surrounded by dead trees and ticking clocks.
+
+Being offline helped me focus. Focus is hardly the word for it—I obsessed. I sat in front of the terminal I'd brought home all day, every day, crunching plans, dictating voicemail. People who wanted to reach me had to haul ass out to the house, and /{speak}/ to me.
+
+I grew too obsessed to fight, and Dan moved back, and then it was my turn to take hotel rooms so that the rattle of my keyboard wouldn't keep him up nights. He and Lil were working a full-time campaign to recruit the ad-hoc to our cause, and I started to feel like we were finally in harmony, about to reach our goal.
+
+I went home one afternoon clutching a sheaf of hardcopy and burst into the living room, gabbling a mile-a-minute about a wrinkle on my original plan that would add a third walk-through segment to the ride, increasing the number of telepresence rigs we could use without decreasing throughput.
+
+I was mid-babble when my systems came back online. The public chatter in the room sprang up on my HUD.
+
+/{And then I'm going to tear off every stitch of clothing and jump you.}/
+
+/{And then what?}/
+
+/{I'm going to bang you till you limp.}/
+
+/{Jesus, Lil, you are one rangy cowgirl.}/
+
+My eyes closed, shutting out everything except for the glowing letters. Quickly, they vanished. I opened my eyes again, looking at Lil, who was flushed and distracted. Dan looked scared.
+
+“What's going on, Dan?” I asked quietly. My heart hammered in my chest, but I felt calm and detached.
+
+“Jules,” he began, then gave up and looked at Lil.
+
+Lil had, by that time, figured out that I was back online, that their secret messaging had been discovered.
+
+“Having fun, Lil?” I asked.
+
+Lil shook her head and glared at me. “Just go, Julius. I'll send your stuff to the hotel.”
+
+“You want me to go, huh? So you can bang him till he limps?”
+
+“This is my house, Julius. I'm asking you to get out of it. I'll see you at work tomorrow—we're having a general ad-hoc meeting to vote on the rehab.”
+
+It was her house.
+
+“Lil, Julius—” Dan began.
+
+“This is between me and him,” Lil said. “Stay out of it.”
+
+I dropped my papers—I wanted to throw them, but I dropped them, /{flump}/, and I turned on my heel and walked out, not bothering to close the door behind me.
+
+Dan showed up at the hotel ten minutes after I did and rapped on my door. I was all-over numb as I opened the door. He had a bottle of tequila—/{my}/ tequila, brought over from the house that I'd shared with Lil.
+
+He sat down on the bed and stared at the logo-marked wallpaper. I took the bottle from him, got a couple glasses from the bathroom and poured.
+
+“It's my fault,” he said.
+
+“I'm sure it is,” I said.
+
+“We got to drinking a couple nights ago. She was really upset. Hadn't seen you in days, and when she /{did}/ see you, you freaked her out. Snapping at her. Arguing. Insulting her.”
+
+“So you made her,” I said.
+
+He shook his head, then nodded, took a drink. “I did. It's been a long time since I…”
+
+“You had sex with my girlfriend, in my house, while I was away, working.”
+
+“Jules, I'm sorry. I did it, and I kept on doing it. I'm not much of a friend to either of you.
+
+“She's pretty broken up. She wanted me to come out here and tell you it was all a mistake, that you were just being paranoid.”
+
+We sat in silence for a long time. I refilled his glass, then my own.
+
+“I couldn't do that,” he said. “I'm worried about you. You haven't been right, not for months. I don't know what it is, but you should get to a doctor.”
+
+“I don't need a doctor,” I snapped. The liquor had melted the numbness and left burning anger and bile, my constant companions. “I need a friend who doesn't fuck my girlfriend when my back is turned.”
+
+I threw my glass at the wall. It bounced off, leaving tequila-stains on the wallpaper, and rolled under the bed. Dan started, but stayed seated. If he'd stood up, I would've hit him. Dan's good at crises.
+
+“If it's any consolation, I expect to be dead pretty soon,” he said. He gave me a wry grin. “My Whuffie's doing good. This rehab should take it up over the top. I'll be ready to go.”
+
+That stopped me. I'd somehow managed to forget that Dan, my good friend Dan, was going to kill himself.
+
+“You're going to do it,” I said, sitting down next to him. It hurt to think about it. I really liked the bastard. He might've been my best friend.
+
+There was a knock at the door. I opened it without checking the peephole. It was Lil.
+
+She looked younger than ever. Young and small and miserable. A snide remark died in my throat. I wanted to hold her.
+
+She brushed past me and went to Dan, who squirmed out of her embrace.
+
+“No,” he said, and stood up and sat on the windowsill, staring down at the Seven Seas Lagoon.
+
+“Dan's just been explaining to me that he plans on being dead in a couple months,” I said. “Puts a damper on the long-term plans, doesn't it, Lil?”
+
+Tears streamed down her face and she seemed to fold in on herself. “I'll take what I can get,” she said.
+
+I choked on a knob of misery, and I realized that it was Dan, not Lil, whose loss upset me the most.
+
+Lil took Dan's hand and led him out of the room.
+
+/{I guess I'll take what I can get, too}/, I thought.
+
+1~ CHAPTER 6
+
+Lying on my hotel bed, mesmerized by the lazy turns of the ceiling fan, I pondered the possibility that I was nuts.
+
+It wasn't unheard of, even in the days of the Bitchun Society, and even though there were cures, they weren't pleasant.
+
+I was once married to a crazy person. We were both about 70, and I was living for nothing but joy. Her name was Zoya, and I called her Zed.
+
+We met in orbit, where I'd gone to experience the famed low-gravity sybarites. Getting staggering drunk is not much fun at one gee, but at ten to the neg eight, it's a blast. You don't stagger, you /{bounce}/, and when you're bouncing in a sphere full of other bouncing, happy, boisterous naked people, things get deeply fun.
+
+I was bouncing around inside a clear sphere that was a mile in diameter, filled with smaller spheres in which one could procure bulbs of fruity, deadly concoctions. Musical instruments littered the sphere's floor, and if you knew how to play, you'd snag one, tether it to you and start playing. Others would pick up their own axes and jam along. The tunes varied from terrific to awful, but they were always energetic.
+
+I had been working on my third symphony on and off, and whenever I thought I had a nice bit nailed, I'd spend some time in the sphere playing it. Sometimes, the strangers who jammed in gave me new and interesting lines of inquiry, and that was good. Even when they didn't, playing an instrument was a fast track to intriguing an interesting, naked stranger.
+
+Which is how we met. She snagged a piano and pounded out barrelhouse runs in quirky time as I carried the main thread of the movement on a cello. At first it was irritating, but after a short while I came to a dawning comprehension of what she was doing to my music, and it was really /{good}/. I'm a sucker for musicians.
+
+We brought the session to a crashing stop, me bowing furiously as spheres of perspiration beaded on my body and floated gracefully into the hydrotropic recyclers, she beating on the 88 like they were the perp who killed her partner.
+
+I collapsed dramatically as the last note crashed through the bubble. The singles, couples and groups stopped in midflight coitus to applaud. She took a bow, untethered herself from the Steinway, and headed for the hatch.
+
+I coiled my legs up and did a fast burn through the sphere, desperate to reach the hatch before she did. I caught her as she was leaving.
+
+“Hey!” I said. “That was great! I'm Julius! How're you doing?”
+
+She reached out with both hands and squeezed my nose and my unit simultaneously—not hard, you understand, but playfully. “Honk!” she said, and squirmed through the hatch while I gaped at my burgeoning chub-on.
+
+I chased after her. “Wait,” I called as she tumbled through the spoke of the station towards the gravity.
+
+She had a pianist's body—re-engineered arms and hands that stretched for impossible lengths, and she used them with a spacehand's grace, vaulting herself forward at speed. I bumbled after her best as I could on my freshman spacelegs, but by the time I reached the half-gee rim of the station, she was gone.
+
+I didn't find her again until the next movement was done and I went to the bubble to try it out on an oboe. I was just getting warmed up when she passed through the hatch and tied off to the piano.
+
+This time, I clamped the oboe under my arm and bopped over to her before moistening the reed and blowing. I hovered over the piano's top, looking her in the eye as we jammed. Her mood that day was 4/4 time and I-IV-V progressions, in a feel that swung around from blues to rock to folk, teasing at the edge of my own melodies. She noodled at me, I noodled back at her, and her eyes crinkled charmingly whenever I managed a smidge of tuneful wit.
+
+She was almost completely flatchested, and covered in a fine, red downy fur, like a chipmunk. It was a jaunter's style, suited to the climate-controlled, soft-edged life in space. Fifty years later, I was dating Lil, another redhead, but Zed was my first.
+
+I played and played, entranced by the fluidity of her movements at the keyboard, her comical moues of concentration when picking out a particularly kicky little riff. When I got tired, I took it to a slow bridge or gave her a solo. I was going to make this last as long as I could. Meanwhile, I maneuvered my way between her and the hatch.
+
+When I blew the last note, I was wrung out as a washcloth, but I summoned the energy to zip over to the hatch and block it. She calmly untied and floated over to me.
+
+I looked in her eyes, silvered slanted cat-eyes, eyes that I'd been staring into all afternoon, and watched the smile that started at their corners and spread right down to her long, elegant toes. She looked back at me, then, at length, grabbed ahold of my joint again.
+
+“You'll do,” she said, and led me to her sleeping quarters, across the station.
+
+We didn't sleep.
+
+Zoya had been an early network engineer for the geosynch broadband constellations that went up at the cusp of the world's ascent into Bitchunry. She'd been exposed to a lot of hard rads and low gee and had generally become pretty transhuman as time went by, upgrading with a bewildering array of third-party enhancements: a vestigial tail, eyes that saw through most of the RF spectrum, her arms, her fur, dogleg reversible knee joints and a completely mechanical spine that wasn't prone to any of the absolutely inane bullshit that plagues the rest of us, like lower-back pain, intrascapular inflammation, sciatica and slipped discs.
+
+I thought I lived for fun, but I didn't have anything on Zed. She only talked when honking and whistling and grabbing and kissing wouldn't do, and routinely slapped upgrades into herself on the basis of any whim that crossed her mind, like when she resolved to do a spacewalk bare-skinned and spent the afternoon getting tin-plated and iron-lunged.
+
+I fell in love with her a hundred times a day, and wanted to strangle her twice as often. She stayed on her spacewalk for a couple of days, floating around the bubble, making crazy faces at its mirrored exterior. She had no way of knowing if I was inside, but she assumed that I was watching. Or maybe she didn't, and she was making faces for anyone's benefit.
+
+But then she came back through the lock, strange and wordless and her eyes full of the stars she'd seen and her metallic skin cool with the breath of empty space, and she led me a merry game of tag through the station, the mess hall where we skidded sloppy through a wobbly ovoid of rice pudding, the greenhouses where she burrowed like a gopher and shinnied like a monkey, the living quarters and bubbles as we interrupted a thousand acts of coitus.
+
+You'd have thought that we'd have followed it up with an act of our own, and truth be told, that was certainly my expectation when we started the game I came to think of as the steeplechase, but we never did. Halfway through, I'd lose track of carnal urges and return to a state of childlike innocence, living only for the thrill of the chase and the giggly feeling I got whenever she found some new, even-more-outrageous corner to turn. I think we became legendary on the station, that crazy pair that's always zipping in and zipping away, like having your party crashed by two naked, coed Marx Brothers.
+
+When I asked her to marry me, to return to Earth with me, to live with me until the universe's mainspring unwound, she laughed, honked my nose and my willie and shouted, “YOU'LL /{DO}/!”
+
+I took her home to Toronto and we took up residence ten stories underground in overflow residence for the University. Our Whuffie wasn't so hot earthside, and the endless institutional corridors made her feel at home while affording her opportunities for mischief.
+
+But bit by bit, the mischief dwindled, and she started talking more. At first, I admit I was relieved, glad that my strange, silent wife was finally acting normal, making nice with the neighbors instead of pranking them with endless honks and fanny-kicks and squirt guns. We gave up the steeplechase and she had the doglegs taken out, her fur removed, her eyes unsilvered to a hazel that was pretty and as fathomable as the silver had been inscrutable.
+
+We wore clothes. We entertained. I started to rehearse my symphony in low-Whuffie halls and parks with any musicians I could drum up, and she came out and didn't play, just sat to the side and smiled and smiled with a smile that never went beyond her lips.
+
+She went nuts.
+
+She shat herself. She pulled her hair. She cut herself with knives. She accused me of plotting to kill her. She set fire to the neighbors' apartments, wrapped herself in plastic sheeting, dry-humped the furniture.
+
+She went nuts. She did it in broad strokes, painting the walls of our bedroom with her blood, jagging all night through rant after rant. I smiled and nodded and faced it for as long as I could, then I grabbed her and hauled her, kicking like a mule, to the doctor's office on the second floor. She'd been dirtside for a year and nuts for a month, but it took me that long to face up to it.
+
+The doc diagnosed nonchemical dysfunction, which was by way of saying that it was her mind, not her brain, that was broken. In other words, I'd driven her nuts.
+
+You can get counseling for nonchemical dysfunction, basically trying to talk it out, learn to feel better about yourself. She didn't want to.
+
+She was miserable, suicidal, murderous. In the brief moments of lucidity that she had under sedation, she consented to being restored from a backup that was made before we came to Toronto.
+
+I was at her side in the hospital when she woke up. I had prepared a written synopsis of the events since her last backup for her, and she read it over the next couple days.
+
+“Julius,” she said, while I was making breakfast in our subterranean apartment. She sounded so serious, so fun-free, that I knew immediately that the news wouldn't be good.
+
+“Yes?” I said, setting out plates of bacon and eggs, steaming cups of coffee.
+
+“I'm going to go back to space, and revert to an older version.” She had a shoulderbag packed, and she had traveling clothes on.
+
+/{Oh, shit.}/ “Great,” I said, with forced cheerfulness, making a mental inventory of my responsibilities dirtside. “Give me a minute or two, I'll pack up. I miss space, too.”
+
+She shook her head, and anger blazed in her utterly scrutable hazel eyes. “No. I'm going back to who I was, before I met you.”
+
+It hurt, bad. I had loved the old, steeplechase Zed, had loved her fun and mischief. The Zed she'd become after we wed was terrible and terrifying, but I'd stuck with her out of respect for the person she'd been.
+
+Now she was off to restore herself from a backup made before she met me. She was going to lop 18 months out of her life, start over again, revert to a saved version.
+
+Hurt? It ached like a motherfucker.
+
+I went back to the station a month later, and saw her jamming in the sphere with a guy who had three extra sets of arms depending from his hips. He scuttled around the sphere while she played a jig on the piano, and when her silver eyes lit on me, there wasn't a shred of recognition in them. She'd never met me.
+
+I died some, too, putting the incident out of my head and sojourning to Disney World, there to reinvent myself with a new group of friends, a new career, a new life. I never spoke of Zed again—especially not to Lil, who hardly needed me to pollute her with remembrances of my crazy exes.
+
+If I was nuts, it wasn't the kind of spectacular nuts that Zed had gone. It was a slow, seething, ugly nuts that had me alienating my friends, sabotaging my enemies, driving my girlfriend into my best friend's arms.
+
+I decided that I would see a doctor, just as soon as we'd run the rehab past the ad-hoc's general meeting. I had to get my priorities straight.
+
+I pulled on last night's clothes and walked out to the Monorail station in the main lobby. The platform was jammed with happy guests, bright and cheerful and ready for a day of steady, hypermediated fun. I tried to make myself attend to them as individuals, but try as I might, they kept turning into a crowd, and I had to plant my feet firmly on the platform to keep from weaving among them to the edge, the better to snag a seat.
+
+The meeting was being held over the Sunshine Tree Terrace in Adventureland, just steps from where I'd been turned into a road-pizza by the still-unidentified assassin. The Adventureland ad-hocs owed the Liberty Square crew a favor since my death had gone down on their turf, so they had given us use of their prize meeting room, where the Florida sun streamed through the slats of the shutters, casting a hash of dust-filled shafts of light across the room. The faint sounds of the tiki-drums and the spieling Jungle Cruise guides leaked through the room, a low-key ambient buzz from two of the Park's oldest rides.
+
+There were almost a hundred ad-hocs in the Liberty Square crew, almost all second-gen castmembers with big, friendly smiles. They filled the room to capacity, and there was much hugging and handshaking before the meeting came to order. I was thankful that the room was too small for the /{de rigueur}/ ad-hoc circle-of-chairs, so that Lil was able to stand at a podium and command a smidge of respect.
+
+“Hi there!” she said, brightly. The weepy puffiness was still present around her eyes, if you knew how to look for it, but she was expert at putting on a brave face no matter what the ache.
+
+The ad-hocs roared back a collective, “Hi, Lil!” and laughed at their own corny tradition. Oh, they sure were a barrel of laughs at the Magic Kingdom.
+
+“Everybody knows why we're here, right?” Lil said, with a self-deprecating smile. She'd been lobbying hard for weeks, after all. “Does anyone have any questions about the plans? We'd like to start executing right away.”
+
+A guy with deliberately boyish, wholesome features put his arm in the air. Lil acknowledged him with a nod. “When you say ‘right away,’ do you mean—”
+
+I cut in. “Tonight. After this meeting. We're on an eight-week production schedule, and the sooner we start, the sooner it'll be finished.”
+
+The crowd murmured, unsettled. Lil shot me a withering look. I shrugged. Politics was not my game.
+
+Lil said, “Don, we're trying something new here, a really streamlined process. The good part is, the process is /{short}/. In a couple months, we'll know if it's working for us. If it's not, hey, we can turn it around in a couple months, too. That's why we're not spending as much time planning as we usually do. It won't take five years for the idea to prove out, so the risks are lower.”
+
+Another castmember, a woman, apparent 40 with a round, motherly demeanor said, “I'm all for moving fast—Lord knows, our pacing hasn't always been that hot. But I'm concerned about all these new people you propose to recruit—won't having more people slow us down when it comes to making new decisions?”
+
+/{No}/, I thought sourly, /{because the people I'm bringing in aren't addicted to meetings}/.
+
+Lil nodded. “That's a good point, Lisa. The offer we're making to the telepresence players is probationary—they don't get to vote until after we've agreed that the rehab is a success.”
+
+Another castmember stood. I recognized him: Dave, a heavyset, self-important jerk who loved to work the front door, even though he blew his spiel about half the time. “Lillian,” he said, smiling sadly at her, “I think you're really making a big mistake here. We love the Mansion, all of us, and so do the guests. It's a piece of history, and we're its custodians, not its masters. Changing it like this, well…” he shook his head. “It's not good stewardship. If the guests wanted to walk through a funhouse with guys jumping out of the shadows saying ‘booga-booga,’ they'd go to one of the Halloween Houses in their hometowns. The Mansion's better than that. I can't be a part of this plan.”
+
+I wanted to knock the smug grin off his face. I'd delivered essentially the same polemic a thousand times—in reference to Debra's work—and hearing it from this jerk in reference to /{mine}/ made me go all hot and red inside.
+
+“Look,” I said. “If we don't do this, if we don't change things, they'll get changed /{for}/ us. By someone else. The question, /{Dave}/, is whether a responsible custodian lets his custodianship be taken away from him, or whether he does everything he can to make sure that he's still around to ensure that his charge is properly cared for. Good custodianship isn't sticking your head in the sand.”
+
+I could tell I wasn't doing any good. The mood of the crowd was getting darker, the faces more set. I resolved not to speak again until the meeting was done, no matter what the provocation.
+
+Lil smoothed my remarks over, and fielded a dozen more, and it looked like the objections would continue all afternoon and all night and all the next day, and I felt woozy and overwrought and miserable all at the same time, staring at Lil and her harried smile and her nervous smoothing of her hair over her ears.
+
+Finally, she called the question. By tradition, the votes were collected in secret and publicly tabulated over the data-channels. The group's eyes unfocussed as they called up HUDs and watched the totals as they rolled in. I was offline and unable to vote or watch.
+
+At length, Lil heaved a relieved sigh and smiled, dropping her hands behind her back.
+
+“All right then,” she said, over the crowd's buzz. “Let's get to work.”
+
+I stood up, saw Dan and Lil staring into each other's eyes, a meaningful glance between new lovers, and I saw red. Literally. My vision washed over pink, and a strobe pounded at the edges of my vision. I took two lumbering steps towards them and opened my mouth to say something horrible, and what came out was “Waaagh.” My right side went numb and my leg slipped out from under me and I crashed to the floor.
+
+The slatted light from the shutters cast its way across my chest as I tried to struggle up with my left arm, and then it all went black.
+
+I wasn't nuts after all.
+
+The doctor's office in the Main Street infirmary was clean and white and decorated with posters of Jiminy Cricket in doctors' whites with an outsized stethoscope. I came to on a hard pallet under a sign that reminded me to get a check-up twice a year, by gum! and I tried to bring my hands up to shield my eyes from the over bright light and the over-cheerful signage, and discovered that I couldn't move my arms. Further investigation revealed that this was because I was strapped down, in full-on four-point restraint.
+
+“Waaagh,” I said again.
+
+Dan's worried face swam into my field of vision, along with a serious-looking doctor, apparent 70, with a Norman Rockwell face full of crow'sfeet and smile-lines.
+
+“Welcome back, Julius. I'm Doctor Pete,” the doctor said, in a kindly voice that matched the face. Despite my recent disillusion with castmember bullshit, I found his schtick comforting.
+
+I slumped back against the pallet while the doc shone lights in my eyes and consulted various diagnostic apparati. I bore it in stoic silence, too confounded by the horrible Waaagh sounds to attempt more speech. The doc would tell me what was going on when he was ready.
+
+“Does he need to be tied up still?” Dan asked, and I shook my head urgently. Being tied up wasn't my idea of a good time.
+
+The doc smiled kindly. “I think it's for the best, for now. Don't worry, Julius, we'll have you up and about soon enough.”
+
+Dan protested, but stopped when the doc threatened to send him out of the room. He took my hand instead.
+
+My nose itched. I tried to ignore it, but it got worse and worse, until it was all I could think of, the flaming lance of itch that strobed at the tip of my nostril. Furiously, I wrinkled my face, rattled at my restraints. The doc absentmindedly noticed my gyrations and delicately scratched my nose with a gloved finger. The relief was fantastic. I just hoped my nuts didn't start itching anytime soon.
+
+Finally, the doctor pulled up a chair and did something that caused the head of the bed to raise up so that I could look him in the eye.
+
+“Well, now,” he said, stroking his chin. “Julius, you've got a problem. Your friend here tells me your systems have been offline for more than a month. It sure would've been better if you'd come in to see me when it started up.
+
+“But you didn't, and things got worse.” He nodded up at Jiminy Cricket's recriminations: Go ahead, see your doc! “It's good advice, son, but what's done is done. You were restored from a backup about eight weeks ago, I see. Without more tests, I can't be sure, but my theory is that the brain-machine interface they installed at that time had a material defect. It's been deteriorating ever since, misfiring and rebooting. The shut-downs are a protective mechanism, meant to keep it from introducing the kind of seizure you experienced this afternoon. When the interface senses malfunction, it shuts itself down and boots a diagnostic mode, attempts to fix itself and come back online.
+
+“Well, that's fine for minor problems, but in cases like this, it's bad news. The interface has been deteriorating steadily, and it's only a matter of time before it does some serious damage.”
+
+“Waaagh?” I asked. I meant to say, /{All right, but what's wrong with my mouth?}/
+
+The doc put a finger to my lips. “Don't try. The interface has locked up, and it's taken some of your voluntary nervous processes with it. In time, it'll probably shut down, but for now, there's no point. That's why we've got you strapped down—you were thrashing pretty hard when they brought you in, and we didn't want you to hurt yourself.”
+
+/{Probably shut down}/? Jesus. I could end up stuck like this forever. I started shaking.
+
+The doc soothed me, stroking my hand, and in the process pressed a transdermal on my wrist. The panic receded as the transdermal's sedative oozed into my bloodstream.
+
+“There, there,” he said. “It's nothing permanent. We can grow you a new clone and refresh it from your last backup. Unfortunately, that backup is a few months old. If we'd caught it earlier, we may've been able to salvage a current backup, but given the deterioration you've displayed to date… Well, there just wouldn't be any point.”
+
+My heart hammered. I was going to lose two months—lose it all, never happened. My assassination, the new Hall of Presidents and my shameful attempt thereon, the fights with Lil, Lil and Dan, the meeting. My plans for the rehab! All of it, good and bad, every moment flensed away.
+
+I couldn't do it. I had a rehab to finish, and I was the only one who understood how it had to be done. Without my relentless prodding, the ad-hocs would surely revert to their old, safe ways. They might even leave it half-done, halt the process for an interminable review, present a soft belly for Debra to savage.
+
+I wouldn't be restoring from backup.
+
+I had two more seizures before the interface finally gave up and shut itself down. I remember the first, a confusion of vision-occluding strobes and uncontrollable thrashing and the taste of copper, but the second happened without waking me from deep unconsciousness.
+
+When I came to again in the infirmary, Dan was still there. He had a day's growth of beard and new worrylines at the corners of his newly rejuvenated eyes. The doctor came in, shaking his head.
+
+“Well, now, it seems like the worst is over. I've drawn up the consent forms for the refresh and the new clone will be ready in an hour or two. In the meantime, I think heavy sedation is in order. Once the restore's been completed, we'll retire this body for you and we'll be all finished up.”
+
+Retire this body? Kill me, is what it meant.
+
+“No,” I said. I thrilled in my restraints: my voice was back under my control!
+
+“Oh, really now.” The doc lost his bedside manner, let his exasperation slip through. “There's nothing else for it. If you'd come to me when it all started, well, we might've had other options. You've got no one to blame but yourself.”
+
+“No,” I repeated. “Not now. I won't sign.”
+
+Dan put his hand on mine. I tried to jerk out from under it, but the restraints and his grip held me fast. “You've got to do it, Julius. It's for the best,” he said.
+
+“I'm not going to let you kill me,” I said, through clenched teeth. His fingertips were callused, worked rough with exertion well beyond the normal call of duty.
+
+“No one's killing you, son,” the doctor said. Son, son, son. Who knew how old he was? He could be 18 for all I knew. “It's just the opposite: we're saving you. If you continue like this, it will only get worse. The seizures, mental breakdown, the whole melon going soft. You don't want that.”
+
+I thought of Zed's spectacular transformation into a crazy person. /{No, I sure don't}/. “I don't care about the interface. Chop it out. I can't do it now.” I swallowed. “Later. After the rehab. Eight more weeks.”
+
+The irony! Once the doc knew I was serious, he sent Dan out of the room and rolled his eyes up while he placed a call. I saw his gorge work as he subvocalized. He left me bound to the table, to wait.
+
+No clocks in the infirmary, and no internal clock, and it may have been ten minutes or five hours. I was catheterized, but I didn't know it until urgent necessity made the discovery for me.
+
+When the doc came back, he held a small device that I instantly recognized: a HERF gun.
+
+Oh, it wasn't the same model I'd used on the Hall of Presidents. This one was smaller, and better made, with the precise engineering of a surgical tool. The doc raised his eyebrows at me. “You know what this is,” he said, flatly. A dim corner of my mind gibbered, /{he knows, he knows, the Hall of Presidents}/. But he didn't know. That episode was locked in my mind, invulnerable to backup.
+
+“I know,” I said.
+
+“This one is high-powered in the extreme. It will penetrate the interface's shielding and fuse it. It probably won't turn you into a vegetable. That's the best I can do. If this fails, we will restore you from your last backup. You have to sign the consent before I use it.” He'd dropped all kindly pretense from his voice, not bothering to disguise his disgust. I was pitching out the miracle of the Bitchun Society, the thing that had all but obsoleted the medical profession: why bother with surgery when you can grow a clone, take a backup, and refresh the new body? Some people swapped corpuses just to get rid of a cold.
+
+I signed. The doc wheeled my gurney into the crash and hum of the utilidors and then put it on a freight tram that ran to the Imagineering compound, and thence to a heavy, exposed Faraday cage. Of course: using the HERF on me would kill any electronics in the neighborhood. They had to shield me before they pulled the trigger.
+
+The doc placed the gun on my chest and loosened my restraints. He sealed the cage and retreated to the lab's door. He pulled a heavy apron and helmet with faceguard from a hook beside the door.
+
+“Once I am outside the door, point it at your head and pull the trigger. I'll come back in five minutes. Once I am in the room, place the gun on the floor and do not touch it. It is only good for a single usage, but I have no desire to find out I'm wrong.”
+
+He closed the door. I took the pistol in my hand. It was heavy, dense with its stored energy, the tip a parabolic hollow to better focus its cone.
+
+I lifted the gun to my temple and let it rest there. My thumb found the trigger-stud.
+
+I paused. This wouldn't kill me, but it might lock the interface forever, paralyzing me, turning me into a thrashing maniac. I knew that I would never be able to pull the trigger. The doc must've known, too—this was his way of convincing me to let him do that restore.
+
+I opened my mouth to call the doc, and what came out was “Waaagh!”
+
+The seizure started. My arm jerked and my thumb nailed the stud, and there was an ozone tang. The seizure stopped.
+
+I had no more interface.
+
+The doc looked sour and pinched when he saw me sitting up on the gurney, rubbing at my biceps. He produced a handheld diagnostic tool and pointed it at my melon, then pronounced every bit of digital microcircuitry in it dead. For the first time since my twenties, I was no more advanced than nature had made me.
+
+The restraints left purple bruises at my wrists and ankles, where I'd thrashed against them. I hobbled out of the Faraday cage and the lab under my own power, but just barely, my muscles groaning from the inadvertent isometric exercises of my seizure.
+
+Dan was waiting in the utilidor, crouched and dozing against the wall. The doc shook him awake and his head snapped up, his hand catching the doc's in a lightning-quick reflex. It was easy to forget Dan's old line of work here in the Magic Kingdom, but when he smoothly snagged the doc's arm and sprang to his feet, eyes hard and alert, I remembered. My old pal, the action hero.
+
+Quickly, Dan released the doc and apologized. He assessed my physical state and wordlessly wedged his shoulder in my armpit, supporting me. I didn't have the strength to stop him. I needed sleep.
+
+“I'm taking you home,” he said. “We'll fight Debra off tomorrow.”
+
+“Sure,” I said, and boarded the waiting tram.
+
+But we didn't go home. Dan took me back to my hotel, the Contemporary, and brought me up to my door. He keycarded the lock and stood awkwardly as I hobbled into the empty room that was my new home, as I collapsed into the bed that was mine now.
+
+With an apologetic look, he slunk away, back to Lil and the house we'd shared.
+
+I slapped on a sedative transdermal that the doc had given me, and added a mood-equalizer that he'd recommended to control my “personality swings.” In seconds, I was asleep.
+
+1~ CHAPTER 7
+
+The meds helped me cope with the next couple of days, starting the rehab on the Mansion. We worked all night erecting a scaffolding around the facade, though no real work would be done on it—we wanted the appearance of rapid progress, and besides, I had an idea.
+
+I worked alongside Dan, using him as a personal secretary, handling my calls, looking up plans, monitoring the Net for the first grumblings as the Disney-going public realized that the Mansion was being taken down for a full-blown rehab. We didn't exchange any unnecessary words, standing side by side without ever looking into one another's eyes. I couldn't really feel awkward around Dan, anyway. He never let me, and besides we had our hands full directing disappointed guests away from the Mansion. A depressing number of them headed straight for the Hall of Presidents.
+
+We didn't have to wait long for the first panicked screed about the Mansion to appear. Dan read it aloud off his HUD: “Hey! Anyone hear anything about scheduled maintenance at the HM? I just buzzed by on the way to the new H of P's and it looks like some big stuff's afoot—scaffolding, castmembers swarming in and out, see the pic. I hope they're not screwing up a good thing. BTW, don't miss the new H of P's—very Bitchun.”
+
+“Right,” I said. “Who's the author, and is he on the list?”
+
+Dan cogitated a moment. “/{She}/ is Kim Wright, and she's on the list. Good Whuffie, lots of Mansion fanac, big readership.”
+
+“Call her,” I said.
+
+This was the plan: recruit rabid fans right away, get 'em in costume, and put 'em up on the scaffolds. Give them outsized, bat-adorned tools and get them to play at construction activity in thumpy, undead pantomime. In time, Suneep and his gang would have a batch of telepresence robots up and running, and we'd move to them, get them wandering the queue area, interacting with curious guests. The new Mansion would be open for business in 48 hours, albeit in stripped-down fashion. The scaffolding made for a nice weenie, a visual draw that would pull the hordes that thronged Debra's Hall of Presidents over for a curious peek or two. Buzz city.
+
+I'm a pretty smart guy.
+
+Dan paged this Kim person and spoke to her as she was debarking the Pirates of the Caribbean. I wondered if she was the right person for the job: she seemed awfully enamored of the rehabs that Debra and her crew had performed. If I'd had more time, I would've run a deep background check on every one of the names on my list, but that would've taken months.
+
+Dan made some small talk with Kim, speaking aloud in deference to my handicap, before coming to the point. “We read your post about the Mansion's rehab. You're the first one to notice it, and we wondered if you'd be interested in coming by to find out a little more about our plans.”
+
+Dan winced. “She's a screamer,” he whispered.
+
+Reflexively, I tried to pull up a HUD with my files on the Mansion fans we hoped to recruit. Of course, nothing happened. I'd done that a dozen times that morning, and there was no end in sight. I couldn't seem to get lathered up about it, though, nor about anything else, not even the hickey just visible under Dan's collar. The transdermal mood-balancer on my bicep was seeing to that—doctor's orders.
+
+“Fine, fine. We're standing by the Pet Cemetery, two cast members, male, in Mansion costumes. About five-ten, apparent 30. You can't miss us.”
+
+She didn't. She arrived out of breath and excited, jogging. She was apparent 20, and dressed like a real 20 year old, in a hipster climate-control cowl that clung to and released her limbs, which were long and double-kneed. All the rage among the younger set, including the girl who'd shot me.
+
+But the resemblance to my killer ended with her dress and body. She wasn't wearing a designer face, rather one that had enough imperfections to be the one she was born with, eyes set close and nose wide and slightly squashed.
+
+I admired the way she moved through the crowd, fast and low but without jostling anyone. “Kim,” I called as she drew near. “Over here.”
+
+She gave a happy shriek and made a beeline for us. Even charging full-bore, she was good enough at navigating the crowd that she didn't brush against a single soul. When she reached us, she came up short and bounced a little. “Hi, I'm Kim!” she said, pumping my arm with the peculiar violence of the extra-jointed. “Julius,” I said, then waited while she repeated the process with Dan.
+
+“So,” she said, “what's the deal?”
+
+I took her hand. “Kim, we've got a job for you, if you're interested.”
+
+She squeezed my hand hard and her eyes shone. “I'll take it!” she said.
+
+I laughed, and so did Dan. It was a polite, castmembery sort of laugh, but underneath it was relief. “I think I'd better explain it to you first,” I said.
+
+“Explain away!” she said, and gave my hand another squeeze.
+
+I let go of her hand and ran down an abbreviated version of the rehab plans, leaving out anything about Debra and her ad-hocs. Kim drank it all in greedily. She cocked her head at me as I ran it down, eyes wide. It was disconcerting, and I finally asked, “Are you recording this?”
+
+Kim blushed. “I hope that's okay! I'm starting a new Mansion scrapbook. I have one for every ride in the Park, but this one's gonna be a world-beater!”
+
+Here was something I hadn't thought about. Publishing ad-hoc business was tabu inside Park, so much so that it hadn't occurred to me that the new castmembers we brought in would want to record every little detail and push it out over the Net as a big old Whuffie collector.
+
+“I can switch it off,” Kim said. She looked worried, and I really started to grasp how important the Mansion was to the people we were recruiting, how much of a privilege we were offering them.
+
+“Leave it rolling,” I said. “Let's show the world how it's done.”
+
+We led Kim into a utilidor and down to costuming. She was half-naked by the time we got there, literally tearing off her clothes in anticipation of getting into character. Sonya, a Liberty Square ad-hoc that we'd stashed at costuming, already had clothes waiting for her, a rotting maid's uniform with an oversized toolbelt.
+
+We left Kim on the scaffolding, energetically troweling a water-based cement substitute onto the wall, scraping it off and moving to a new spot. It looked boring to me, but I could believe that we'd have to tear her away when the time came.
+
+We went back to trawling the Net for the next candidate.
+
+By lunchtime, there were ten drilling, hammering, troweling new castmembers around the scaffolding, pushing black wheelbarrows, singing “Grim Grinning Ghosts” and generally having a high old time.
+
+“This'll do,” I said to Dan. I was exhausted and soaked with sweat, and the transdermal under my costume itched. Despite the happy-juice in my bloodstream, a streak of uncastmemberly crankiness was shot through my mood. I needed to get offstage.
+
+Dan helped me hobble away, and as we hit the utilidor, he whispered in my ear, “This was a great idea, Julius. Really.”
+
+We jumped a tram over to Imagineering, my chest swollen with pride. Suneep had three of his assistants working on the first generation of mobile telepresence robots for the exterior, and had promised a prototype for that afternoon. The robots were easy enough—just off-the-shelf stuff, really—but the costumes and kinematics routines were something else. Thinking about what he and Suneep's gang of hypercreative super-geniuses would come up with cheered me up a little, as did being out of the public eye.
+
+Suneep's lab looked like it had been hit by a tornado. Imagineer packs rolled in and out with arcane gizmos, or formed tight argumentative knots in the corners as they shouted over whatever their HUDs were displaying. In the middle of it all was Suneep, who looked like he was barely restraining an urge to shout Yippee! He was clearly in his element.
+
+He threw his arms open when he caught sight of Dan and me, threw them wide enough to embrace the whole mad, gibbering chaos. “What wonderful flumgubbery!” he shouted, over the noise.
+
+“Sure is,” I agreed. “How's the prototype coming?”
+
+Suneep waved absently, his short fingers describing trivialities in the air. “In due time, in due time. I've put that team onto something else, a kinematics routine for a class of flying spooks that use gasbags to stay aloft—silent and scary. It's old spy-tech, and the retrofit's coming tremendously. Take a look!” He pointed a finger at me and, presumably, squirted some data my way.
+
+“I'm offline,” I reminded him gently.
+
+He slapped his forehead, took a moment to push his hair off his face, and gave me an apologetic wave. “Of course, of course. Here.” He unrolled an LCD and handed it to me. A flock of spooks danced on the screen, rendered against the ballroom scene. They were thematically consistent with the existing Mansion ghosts, more funny than scary, and their faces were familiar. I looked around the lab and realized that they'd caricatured various Imagineers.
+
+“Ah! You noticed,” Suneep said, rubbing his hands together. “A very good joke, yes?”
+
+“This is terrific,” I said, carefully. “But I really need some robots up and running by tomorrow night, Suneep. We discussed this, remember?” Without telepresence robots, my recruiting would be limited to fans like Kim, who lived in the area. I had broader designs than that.
+
+Suneep looked disappointed. “Of course. We discussed it. I don't like to stop my people when they have good ideas, but there's a time and a place. I'll put them on it right away. Leave it to me.”
+
+Dan turned to greet someone, and I looked to see who it was. Lil. Of course. She was raccoon-eyed with fatigue, and she reached out for Dan's hand, saw me, and changed her mind.
+
+“Hi, guys,” she said, with studied casualness.
+
+“Oh, hello!” said Suneep. He fired his finger at her—the flying ghosts, I imagined. Lil's eyes rolled up for a moment, then she nodded exhaustedly at him.
+
+“Very good,” she said. “I just heard from Lisa. She says the indoor crews are on-schedule. They've got most of the animatronics dismantled, and they're taking down the glass in the Ballroom now.” The Ballroom ghost effects were accomplished by means of a giant pane of polished glass that laterally bisected the room. The Mansion had been built around it—it was too big to take out in one piece. “They say it'll be a couple days before they've got it cut up and ready to remove.”
+
+A pocket of uncomfortable silence descended on us, the roar of the Imagineers rushing in to fill it.
+
+“You must be exhausted,” Dan said, at length.
+
+“Goddamn right,” I said, at the same moment that Lil said, “I guess I am.”
+
+We both smiled wanly. Suneep put his arms around Lil's and my shoulders and squeezed. He smelled of an exotic cocktail of industrial lubricant, ozone, and fatigue poisons.
+
+“You two should go home and give each other a massage,” he said. “You've earned some rest.”
+
+Dan met my eye and shook his head apologetically. I squirmed out from under Suneep's arm and thanked him quietly, then slunk off to the Contemporary for a hot tub and a couple hours of sleep.
+
+I came back to the Mansion at sundown. It was cool enough that I took a surface route, costume rolled in a shoulderbag, instead of riding through the clattering, air-conditioned comfort of the utilidors.
+
+As a freshening breeze blew across me, I suddenly had a craving for /{real}/ weather, the kind of climate I'd grown up with in Toronto. It was October, for chrissakes, and a lifetime of conditioning told me that it was May. I stopped and leaned on a bench for a moment and closed my eyes. Unbidden, and with the clarity of a HUD, I saw High Park in Toronto, clothed in its autumn colors, fiery reds and oranges, shades of evergreen and earthy brown. God, I needed a vacation.
+
+I opened my eyes and realized that I was standing in front of the Hall of Presidents, and that there was a queue ahead of me for it, one that stretched back and back. I did a quick sum in my head and sucked air between my teeth: they had enough people for five or six full houses waiting here—easily an hour's wait. The Hall /{never}/ drew crowds like this. Debra was working the turnstiles in Betsy Ross gingham, and she caught my eye and snapped a nod at me.
+
+I stalked off to the Mansion. A choir of zombie-shambling new recruits had formed up in front of the gate, and were groaning their way through “Grim Grinning Ghosts,” with a new call-and-response structure. A small audience participated, urged on by the recruits on the scaffolding.
+
+“Well, at least that's going right,” I muttered to myself. And it was, except that I could see members of the ad-hoc looking on from the sidelines, and the looks weren't kindly. Totally obsessive fans are a good measure of a ride's popularity, but they're kind of a pain in the ass, too. They lipsynch the soundtrack, cadge souvenirs and pester you with smarmy, show-off questions. After a while, even the cheeriest castmember starts to lose patience, develop an automatic distaste for them.
+
+The Liberty Square ad-hocs who were working on the Mansion had been railroaded into approving a rehab, press-ganged into working on it, and were now forced to endure the company of these grandstanding megafans. If I'd been there when it all started—instead of sleeping!—I may've been able to massage their bruised egos, but now I wondered if it was too late.
+
+Nothing for it but to do it. I ducked into a utilidor, changed into my costume and went back onstage. I joined the call-and-response enthusiastically, walking around to the ad-hocs and getting them to join in, reluctantly or otherwise.
+
+By the time the choir retired, sweaty and exhausted, a group of ad-hocs were ready to take their place, and I escorted my recruits to an offstage break-room.
+
+Suneep didn't deliver the robot prototypes for a week, and told me that it would be another week before I could have even five production units. Though he didn't say it, I got the sense that his guys were out of control, so excited by the freedom from ad-hoc oversight that they were running wild. Suneep himself was nearly a wreck, nervous and jumpy. I didn't press it.
+
+Besides, I had problems of my own. The new recruits were multiplying. I was staying on top of the fan response to the rehab from a terminal I'd had installed in my hotel room. Kim and her local colleagues were fielding millions of hits every day, their Whuffie accumulating as envious fans around the world logged in to watch their progress on the scaffolding.
+
+That was all according to plan. What wasn't according to plan was that the new recruits were doing their own recruiting, extending invitations to their net-pals to come on down to Florida, bunk on their sofas and guest-beds, and present themselves to me for active duty.
+
+The tenth time it happened, I approached Kim in the break-room. Her gorge was working, her eyes tracked invisible words across the middle distance. No doubt she was penning yet another breathless missive about the magic of working in the Mansion. “Hey, there,” I said. “Have you got a minute to meet with me?”
+
+She held up a single finger, then, a moment later, gave me a bright smile.
+
+“Hi, Julius!” she said. “Sure!”
+
+“Why don't you change into civvies, we'll take a walk through the Park and talk?”
+
+Kim wore her costume every chance she got. I'd been quite firm about her turning it in to the laundry every night instead of wearing it home.
+
+Reluctantly, she stepped into a change-room and switched into her cowl. We took the utilidor to the Fantasyland exit and walked through the late-afternoon rush of children and their adults, queued deep and thick for Snow White, Dumbo and Peter Pan.
+
+“How're you liking it here?” I asked.
+
+Kim gave a little bounce. “Oh, Julius, it's the best time of my life, really! A dream come true. I'm meeting so many interesting people, and I'm really feeling creative. I can't wait to try out the telepresence rigs, too.”
+
+“Well, I'm really pleased with what you and your friends are up to here. You're working hard, putting on a good show. I like the songs you've been working up, too.”
+
+She did one of those double-kneed shuffles that was the basis of any number of action vids those days and she was suddenly standing in front of me, hand on my shoulder, looking into my eyes. She looked serious.
+
+“Is there a problem, Julius? If there is, I'd rather we just talked about it, instead of making chitchat.”
+
+I smiled and took her hand off my shoulder. “How old are you, Kim?”
+
+“Nineteen,” she said. “What's the problem?”
+
+Nineteen! Jesus, no wonder she was so volatile. /{What's my excuse, then?}/
+
+“It's not a problem, Kim, it's just something I wanted to discuss with you. The people you-all have been bringing down to work for me, they're all really great castmembers.”
+
+“But?”
+
+“But we have limited resources around here. Not enough hours in the day for me to stay on top of the new folks, the rehab, everything. Not to mention that until we open the new Mansion, there's a limited number of extras we can use out front. I'm concerned that we're going to put someone on stage without proper training, or that we're going to run out of uniforms; I'm also concerned about people coming all the way here and discovering that there aren't any shifts for them to take.”
+
+She gave me a relieved look. “Is /{that}/ all? Don't worry about it. I've been talking to Debra, over at the Hall of Presidents, and she says she can pick up any people who can't be used at the Mansion—we could even rotate back and forth!” She was clearly proud of her foresight.
+
+My ears buzzed. Debra, one step ahead of me all along the way. She probably suggested that Kim do some extra recruiting in the first place. She'd take in the people who came down to work the Mansion, convince them they'd been hard done by the Liberty Square crew, and rope them into her little Whuffie ranch, the better to seize the Mansion, the Park, the whole of Walt Disney World.
+
+“Oh, I don't think it'll come to that,” I said, carefully. “I'm sure we can find a use for them all at the Mansion. More the merrier.”
+
+Kim cocked quizzical, but let it go. I bit my tongue. The pain brought me back to reality, and I started planning costume production, training rosters, bunking. God, if only Suneep would finish the robots!
+
+“What do you mean, ‘no’?” I said, hotly.
+
+Lil folded her arms and glared. “No, Julius. It won't fly. The group is already upset that all the glory is going to the new people, they'll never let us bring more in. They also won't stop working on the rehab to train them, costume them, feed them and mother them. They're losing Whuffie every day that the Mansion's shut up, and they don't want any more delays. Dave's already joined up with Debra, and I'm sure he's not the last one.”
+
+Dave—the jerk who'd pissed all over the rehab in the meeting. Of course he'd gone over. Lil and Dan stood side by side on the porch of the house where I'd lived. I'd driven out that night to convince Lil to sell the ad-hocs on bringing in more recruits, but it wasn't going according to plan. They wouldn't even let me in the house.
+
+“So what do I tell Kim?”
+
+“Tell her whatever you want,” Lil said. “You brought her in—you manage her. Take some goddamn responsibility for once in your life.”
+
+It wasn't going to get any better. Dan gave me an apologetic look. Lil glared a moment longer, then went into the house.
+
+“Debra's doing real well,” he said. “The net's all over her. Biggest thing ever. Flash-baking is taking off in nightclubs, dance mixes with the DJ's backup being shoved in bursts into the dancers.”
+
+“God,” I said. “I fucked up, Dan. I fucked it all up.”
+
+He didn't say anything, and that was the same as agreeing.
+
+Driving back to the hotel, I decided I needed to talk to Kim. She was a problem I didn't need, and maybe a problem I could solve. I pulled a screeching U-turn and drove the little runabout to her place, a tiny condo in a crumbling complex that had once been a gated seniors' village, pre-Bitchun.
+
+Her place was easy to spot. All the lights were burning, faint conversation audible through the screen door. I jogged up the steps two at a time, and was about to knock when a familiar voice drifted through the screen.
+
+Debra, saying: “Oh yes, oh yes! Terrific idea! I'd never really thought about using streetmosphere players to liven up the queue area, but you're making a lot of sense. You people have just been doing the /{best}/ work over at the Mansion—find me more like you and I'll take them for the Hall any day!”
+
+I heard Kim and her young friends chatting excitedly, proudly. The anger and fear suffused me from tip to toe, and I felt suddenly light and cool and ready to do something terrible.
+
+I padded silently down the steps and got into my runabout.
+
+Some people never learn. I'm one of them, apparently.
+
+I almost chortled over the foolproof simplicity of my plan as I slipped in through the cast entrance using the ID card I'd scored when my systems went offline and I was no longer able to squirt my authorization at the door.
+
+I changed clothes in a bathroom on Main Street, switching into a black cowl that completely obscured my features, then slunk through the shadows along the storefronts until I came to the moat around Cinderella's castle. Keeping low, I stepped over the fence and duck-walked down the embankment, then slipped into the water and sloshed across to the Adventureland side.
+
+Slipping along to the Liberty Square gateway, I flattened myself in doorways whenever I heard maintenance crews passing in the distance, until I reached the Hall of Presidents, and in a twinkling I was inside the theater itself.
+
+Humming the Small World theme, I produced a short wrecking bar from my cowl's tabbed pocket and set to work.
+
+The primary broadcast units were hidden behind a painted scrim over the stage, and they were surprisingly well built for a first generation tech. I really worked up a sweat smashing them, but I kept at it until not a single component remained recognizable. The work was slow and loud in the silent Park, but it lulled me into a sleepy reverie, an autohypnotic swing-bang-swing-bang timeless time. To be on the safe side, I grabbed the storage units and slipped them into the cowl.
+
+Locating their backup units was a little trickier, but years of hanging out at the Hall of Presidents while Lil tinkered with the animatronics helped me. I methodically investigated every nook, cranny and storage area until I located them, in what had been a break-room closet. By now, I had the rhythm of the thing, and I made short work of them.
+
+I did one more pass, wrecking anything that looked like it might be a prototype for the next generation or notes that would help them reconstruct the units I'd smashed.
+
+I had no illusions about Debra's preparedness—she'd have something offsite that she could get up and running in a few days. I wasn't doing anything permanent, I was just buying myself a day or two.
+
+I made my way clean out of the Park without being spotted, and sloshed my way into my runabout, shoes leaking water from the moat.
+
+For the first time in weeks, I slept like a baby.
+
+Of course, I got caught. I don't really have the temperament for Machiavellian shenanigans, and I left a trail a mile wide, from the muddy footprints in the Contemporary's lobby to the wrecking bar thoughtlessly left behind, with my cowl and the storage units from the Hall, forgotten on the back seat of my runabout.
+
+I whistled my personal jazzy uptempo version of “Grim Grinning Ghosts” as I made my way from Costuming, through the utilidor, out to Liberty Square, a few minutes before the Park opened.
+
+Standing in front of me were Lil and Debra. Debra was holding my cowl and wrecking bar. Lil held the storage units.
+
+I hadn't put on my transdermals that morning, and so the emotion I felt was unmuffled, loud and yammering.
+
+I ran.
+
+I ran past them, along the road to Adventureland, past the Tiki Room where I'd been killed, past the Adventureland gate where I'd waded through the moat, down Main Street. I ran and ran, elbowing early guests, trampling flowers, knocking over an apple cart across from the Penny Arcade.
+
+I ran until I reached the main gate, and turned, thinking I'd outrun Lil and Debra and all my problems. I'd thought wrong. They were both there, a step behind me, puffing and red. Debra held my wrecking bar like a weapon, and she brandished it at me.
+
+“You're a goddamn idiot, you know that?” she said. I think if we'd been alone, she would've swung it at me.
+
+“Can't take it when someone else plays rough, huh, Debra?” I sneered.
+
+Lil shook her head disgustedly. “She's right, you are an idiot. The ad-hoc's meeting in Adventureland. You're coming.”
+
+“Why?” I asked, feeling belligerent. “You going to honor me for all my hard work?”
+
+“We're going to talk about the future, Julius, what's left of it for us.”
+
+“For God's sake, Lil, can't you see what's going on? They /{killed}/ me! They did it, and now we're fighting each other instead of her! Why can't you see how /{wrong}/ that is?”
+
+“You'd better watch those accusations, Julius,” Debra said, quietly and intensely, almost hissing. “I don't know who killed you or why, but you're the one who's guilty here. You need help.”
+
+I barked a humorless laugh. Guests were starting to stream into the now-open Park, and several of them were watching intently as the three costumed castmembers shouted at each other. I could feel my Whuffie hemorrhaging. “Debra, you are purely full of shit, and your work is trite and unimaginative. You're a fucking despoiler and you don't even have the guts to admit it.”
+
+“That's /{enough}/, Julius,” Lil said, her face hard, her rage barely in check. “We're going.”
+
+Debra walked a pace behind me, Lil a pace before, all the way through the crowd to Adventureland. I saw a dozen opportunities to slip into a gap in the human ebb and flow and escape custody, but I didn't try. I wanted a chance to tell the whole world what I'd done and why I'd done it.
+
+Debra followed us in when we mounted the steps to the meeting room. Lil turned. “I don't think you should be here, Debra,” she said in measured tones.
+
+Debra shook her head. “You can't keep me out, you know. And you shouldn't want to. We're on the same side.”
+
+I snorted derisively, and I think it decided Lil. “Come on, then,” she said.
+
+It was SRO in the meeting room, packed to the gills with the entire ad-hoc, except for my new recruits. No work was being done on the rehab, then, and the Liberty Belle would be sitting at her dock. Even the restaurant crews were there. Liberty Square must've been a ghost town. It gave the meeting a sense of urgency: the knowledge that there were guests in Liberty Square wandering aimlessly, looking for castmembers to help them out. Of course, Debra's crew might've been around.
+
+The crowd's faces were hard and bitter, leaving no doubt in my mind that I was in deep shit. Even Dan, sitting in the front row, looked angry. I nearly started crying right then. Dan—oh, Dan. My pal, my confidant, my patsy, my rival, my nemesis. Dan, Dan, Dan. I wanted to beat him to death and hug him at the same time.
+
+Lil took the podium and tucked stray hairs behind her ears. “All right, then,” she said. I stood to her left and Debra stood to her right.
+
+“Thanks for coming out today. I'd like to get this done quickly. We all have important work to get to. I'll run down the facts: last night, a member of this ad-hoc vandalized the Hall of Presidents, rendering it useless. It's estimated that it will take at least a week to get it back up and running.
+
+“I don't have to tell you that this isn't acceptable. This has never happened before, and it will never happen again. We're going to see to that.
+
+“I'd like to propose that no further work be done on the Mansion until the Hall of Presidents is fully operational. I will be volunteering my services on the repairs.”
+
+There were nods in the audience. Lil wouldn't be the only one working at the Hall that week. “Disney World isn't a competition,” Lil said. “All the different ad-hocs work together, and we do it to make the Park as good as we can. We lose sight of that at our peril.”
+
+I nearly gagged on bile. “I'd like to say something,” I said, as calmly as I could manage.
+
+Lil shot me a look. “That's fine, Julius. Any member of the ad-hoc can speak.”
+
+I took a deep breath. “I did it, all right?” I said. My voice cracked. “I did it, and I don't have any excuse for having done it. It may not have been the smartest thing I've ever done, but I think you all should understand how I was driven to it.
+
+“We're not /{supposed}/ to be in competition with one another here, but we all know that that's just a polite fiction. The truth is that there's real competition in the Park, and that the hardest players are the crew that rehabbed the Hall of Presidents. They /{stole}/ the Hall from you! They did it while you were distracted, they used /{me}/ to engineer the distraction, they /{murdered}/ me!” I heard the shriek creeping into my voice, but I couldn't do anything about it.
+
+“Usually, the lie that we're all on the same side is fine. It lets us work together in peace. But that changed the day they had me shot. If you keep on believing it, you're going to lose the Mansion, the Liberty Belle, Tom Sawyer Island—all of it. All the history we have with this place—all the history that the billions who've visited it have—it's going to be destroyed and replaced with the sterile, thoughtless shit that's taken over the Hall. Once that happens, there's nothing left that makes this place special. Anyone can get the same experience sitting at home on the sofa! What happens then, huh? How much longer do you think this place will stay open once the only people here are /{you?}/”
+
+Debra smiled condescendingly. “Are you finished, then?” she asked, sweetly. “Fine. I know I'm not a member of this group, but since it was my work that was destroyed last night, I think I would like to address Julius's statements, if you don't mind.” She paused, but no one spoke up.
+
+“First of all, I want you all to know that we don't hold you responsible for what happened last night. We know who was responsible, and he needs help. I urge you to see to it that he gets it.
+
+“Next, I'd like to say that as far as I'm concerned, we are on the same side—the side of the Park. This is a special place, and it couldn't exist without all of our contributions. What happened to Julius was terrible, and I sincerely hope that the person responsible is caught and brought to justice. But that person wasn't me or any of the people in my ad-hoc.
+
+“Lil, I'd like to thank you for your generous offer of assistance, and we'll take you up on it. That goes for all of you—come on by the Hall, we'll put you to work. We'll be up and running in no time.
+
+“Now, as far as the Mansion goes, let me say this once and for all: neither me nor my ad-hoc have any desire to take over the operations of the Mansion. It is a terrific attraction, and it's getting better with the work you're all doing. If you've been worrying about it, then you can stop worrying now. We're all on the same side.
+
+“Thanks for hearing me out. I've got to go see my team now.”
+
+She turned and left, a chorus of applause following her out.
+
+Lil waited until it died down, then said, “All right, then, we've got work to do, too. I'd like to ask you all a favor, first. I'd like us to keep the details of last night's incident to ourselves. Letting the guests and the world know about this ugly business isn't good for anyone. Can we all agree to do that?”
+
+There was a moment's pause while the results were tabulated on the HUDs, then Lil gave them a million-dollar smile. “I knew you'd come through. Thanks, guys. Let's get to work.”
+
+I spent the day at the hotel, listlessly scrolling around on my terminal. Lil had made it very clear to me after the meeting that I wasn't to show my face inside the Park until I'd “gotten help,” whatever that meant.
+
+By noon, the news was out. It was hard to pin down the exact source, but it seemed to revolve around the new recruits. One of them had told their net-pals about the high drama in Liberty Square, and mentioned my name.
+
+There were already a couple of sites vilifying me, and I expected more. I needed some kind of help, that was for sure.
+
+I thought about leaving then, turning my back on the whole business and leaving Walt Disney World to start yet another new life, Whuffie-poor and fancy-free.
+
+It wouldn't be so bad. I'd been in poor repute before, not so long ago. That first time Dan and I had palled around, back at the U of T, I'd been the center of a lot of pretty ambivalent sentiment, and Whuffie-poor as a man can be.
+
+I slept in a little coffin on-campus, perfectly climate controlled. It was cramped and dull, but my access to the network was free and I had plenty of material to entertain myself. While I couldn't get a table in a restaurant, I was free to queue up at any of the makers around town and get myself whatever I wanted to eat and drink, whenever I wanted it. Compared to 99.99999 percent of all the people who'd ever lived, I had a life of unparalleled luxury.
+
+Even by the standards of the Bitchun Society, I was hardly a rarity. The number of low-esteem individuals at large was significant, and they got along just fine, hanging out in parks, arguing, reading, staging plays, playing music.
+
+Of course, that wasn't the life for me. I had Dan to pal around with, a rare high-net-Whuffie individual who was willing to fraternize with a shmuck like me. He'd stand me to meals at sidewalk cafes and concerts at the SkyDome, and shoot down any snotty reputation-punk who sneered at my Whuffie tally. Being with Dan was a process of constantly reevaluating my beliefs in the Bitchun Society, and I'd never had a more vibrant, thought-provoking time in all my life.
+
+I could have left the Park, deadheaded to anywhere in the world, started over. I could have turned my back on Dan, on Debra, on Lil and the whole mess.
+
+I didn't.
+
+I called up the doc.
+
+1~ CHAPTER 8
+
+Doctor Pete answered on the third ring, audio-only. In the background, I heard a chorus of crying children, the constant backdrop of the Magic Kingdom infirmary.
+
+“Hi, doc,” I said.
+
+“Hello, Julius. What can I do for you?” Under the veneer of professional medical and castmember friendliness, I sensed irritation.
+
+/{Make it all good again}/. “I'm not really sure. I wanted to see if I could talk it over with you. I'm having some pretty big problems.”
+
+“I'm on-shift until five. Can it wait until then?”
+
+By then, I had no idea if I'd have the nerve to see him. “I don't think so—I was hoping we could meet right away.”
+
+“If it's an emergency, I can have an ambulance sent for you.”
+
+“It's urgent, but not an emergency. I need to talk about it in person. Please?”
+
+He sighed in undoctorly, uncastmemberly fashion. “Julius, I've got important things to do here. Are you sure this can't wait?”
+
+I bit back a sob. “I'm sure, doc.”
+
+“All right then. When can you be here?”
+
+Lil had made it clear that she didn't want me in the Park. “Can you meet me? I can't really come to you. I'm at the Contemporary, Tower B, room 2334.”
+
+“I don't really make house calls, son.”
+
+“I know, I know.” I hated how pathetic I sounded. “Can you make an exception? I don't know who else to turn to.”
+
+“I'll be there as soon as I can. I'll have to get someone to cover for me. Let's not make a habit of this, all right?”
+
+I whooshed out my relief. “I promise.”
+
+He disconnected abruptly, and I found myself dialing Dan.
+
+“Yes?” he said, cautiously.
+
+“Doctor Pete is coming over, Dan. I don't know if he can help me—I don't know if anyone can. I just wanted you to know.”
+
+He surprised me, then, and made me remember why he was still my friend, even after everything. “Do you want me to come over?”
+
+“That would be very nice,” I said, quietly. “I'm at the hotel.”
+
+“Give me ten minutes,” he said, and rang off.
+
+He found me on my patio, looking out at the Castle and the peaks of Space Mountain. To my left spread the sparkling waters of the Seven Seas Lagoon, to my right, the Property stretched away for mile after manicured mile. The sun was warm on my skin, faint strains of happy laughter drifted with the wind, and the flowers were in bloom. In Toronto, it would be freezing rain, gray buildings, noisome rapid transit (a monorail hissed by), and hard-faced anonymity. I missed it.
+
+Dan pulled up a chair next to mine and sat without a word. We both stared out at the view for a long while.
+
+“It's something else, isn't it?” I said, finally.
+
+“I suppose so,” he said. “I want to say something before the doc comes by, Julius.”
+
+“Go ahead.”
+
+“Lil and I are through. It should never have happened in the first place, and I'm not proud of myself. If you two were breaking up, that's none of my business, but I had no right to hurry it along.”
+
+“All right,” I said. I was too drained for emotion.
+
+“I've taken a room here, moved my things.”
+
+“How's Lil taking it?”
+
+“Oh, she thinks I'm a total bastard. I suppose she's right.”
+
+“I suppose she's partly right,” I corrected him.
+
+He gave me a gentle slug in the shoulder. “Thanks.”
+
+We waited in companionable silence until the doc arrived.
+
+He bustled in, his smile lines drawn up into a sour purse and waited expectantly. I left Dan on the patio while I took a seat on the bed.
+
+“I'm cracking up or something,” I said. “I've been acting erratically, sometimes violently. I don't know what's wrong with me.” I'd rehearsed the speech, but it still wasn't easy to choke out.
+
+“We both know what's wrong, Julius,” the doc said, impatiently. “You need to be refreshed from your backup, get set up with a fresh clone and retire this one. We've had this talk.”
+
+“I can't do it,” I said, not meeting his eye. “I just can't—isn't there another way?”
+
+The doc shook his head. “Julius, I've got limited resources to allocate. There's a perfectly good cure for what's ailing you, and if you won't take it, there's not much I can do for you.”
+
+“But what about meds?”
+
+“Your problem isn't a chemical imbalance, it's a mental defect. Your /{brain}/ is /{broken}/, son. All that meds will do is mask the symptoms, while you get worse. I can't tell you what you want to hear, unfortunately. Now, If you're ready to take the cure, I can retire this clone immediately and get you restored into a new one in 48 hours.”
+
+“Isn't there another way? Please? You have to help me—I can't lose all this.” I couldn't admit my real reasons for being so attached to this singularly miserable chapter in my life, not even to myself.
+
+The doctor rose to go. “Look, Julius, you haven't got the Whuffie to make it worth anyone's time to research a solution to this problem, other than the one that we all know about. I can give you mood-suppressants, but that's not a permanent solution.”
+
+“Why not?”
+
+He boggled. “You /{can't}/ just take dope for the rest of your life, son. Eventually, something will happen to this body—I see from your file that you're stroke-prone—and you're going to get refreshed from your backup. The longer you wait, the more traumatic it'll be. You're robbing from your future self for your selfish present.”
+
+It wasn't the first time the thought had crossed my mind. Every passing day made it harder to take the cure. To lie down and wake up friends with Dan, to wake up and be in love with Lil again. To wake up to a Mansion the way I remembered it, a Hall of Presidents where I could find Lil bent over with her head in a President's guts of an afternoon. To lie down and wake without disgrace, without knowing that my lover and my best friend would betray me, /{had}/ betrayed me.
+
+I just couldn't do it—not yet, anyway.
+
+Dan—Dan was going to kill himself soon, and if I restored myself from my old backup, I'd lose my last year with him. I'd lose /{his}/ last year.
+
+“Let's table that, doc. I hear what you're saying, but there're complications. I guess I'll take the mood-suppressants for now.”
+
+He gave me a cold look. “I'll give you a scrip, then. I could've done that without coming out here. Please don't call me anymore.”
+
+I was shocked by his obvious ire, but I didn't understand it until he was gone and I told Dan what had happened.
+
+“Us old-timers, we're used to thinking of doctors as highly trained professionals—all that pre-Bitchun med-school stuff, long internships, anatomy drills... Truth is, the average doc today gets more training in bedside manner than bioscience. ‘Doctor’ Pete is a technician, not an MD, not the way you and I mean it. Anyone with the kind of knowledge you're looking for is working as a historical researcher, not a doctor.
+
+“But that's not the illusion. The doc is supposed to be the authority on medical matters, even though he's only got one trick: restore from backup. You're reminding Pete of that, and he's not happy to have it happen.”
+
+I waited a week before returning to the Magic Kingdom, sunning myself on the white sand beach at the Contemporary, jogging the Walk Around the World, taking a canoe out to the wild and overgrown Discovery Island, and generally cooling out. Dan came by in the evenings and it was like old times, running down the pros and cons of Whuffie and Bitchunry and life in general, sitting on my porch with a sweating pitcher of lemonade.
+
+On the last night, he presented me with a clever little handheld, a museum piece that I recalled fondly from the dawning days of the Bitchun Society. It had much of the functionality of my defunct systems, in a package I could slip in my shirt pocket. It felt like part of a costume, like the turnip watches the Ben Franklin streetmosphere players wore at the American Adventure.
+
+Museum piece or no, it meant that I was once again qualified to participate in the Bitchun Society, albeit more slowly and less efficiently than I once may've. I took it downstairs the next morning and drove to the Magic Kingdom's castmember lot.
+
+At least, that was the plan. When I got down to the Contemporary's parking lot, my runabout was gone. A quick check with the handheld revealed the worst: my Whuffie was low enough that someone had just gotten inside and driven away, realizing that they could make more popular use of it than I could.
+
+With a sinking feeling, I trudged up to my room and swiped my key through the lock. It emitted a soft, unsatisfied _bzzz_ and lit up, “Please see the front desk.” My room had been reassigned, too. I had the short end of the Whuffie stick.
+
+At least there was no mandatory Whuffie check on the monorail platform, but the other people on the car were none too friendly to me, and no one offered me an inch more personal space than was necessary. I had hit bottom.
+
+I took the castmember entrance to the Magic Kingdom, clipping my name tag to my Disney Operations polo shirt, ignoring the glares of my fellow castmembers in the utilidors.
+
+I used the handheld to page Dan. “Hey there,” he said, brightly. I could tell instantly that I was being humored.
+
+“Where are you?” I asked.
+
+“Oh, up in the Square. By the Liberty Tree.”
+
+In front of the Hall of Presidents. I worked the handheld, pinged some Whuffie manually. Debra was spiked so high it seemed she'd never come down, as were Tim and her whole crew in aggregate. They were drawing from guests by the millions, and from castmembers and from people who'd read the popular accounts of their struggle against the forces of petty jealousy and sabotage—i.e., me.
+
+I felt light-headed. I hurried along to costuming and changed into the heavy green Mansion costume, then ran up the stairs to the Square.
+
+I found Dan sipping a coffee and sitting on a bench under the giant, lantern-hung Liberty Tree. He had a second cup waiting for me, and patted the bench next to him. I sat with him and sipped, waiting for him to spill whatever bit of rotten news he had for me this morning—I could feel it hovering like storm clouds.
+
+He wouldn't talk though, not until we finished the coffee. Then he stood and strolled over to the Mansion. It wasn't rope-drop yet, and there weren't any guests in the Park, which was all for the better, given what was coming next.
+
+“Have you taken a look at Debra's Whuffie lately?” he asked, finally, as we stood by the pet cemetery, considering the empty scaffolding.
+
+I started to pull out the handheld but he put a hand on my arm. “Don't bother,” he said, morosely. “Suffice it to say, Debra's gang is number one with a bullet. Ever since word got out about what happened to the Hall, they've been stacking it deep. They can do just about anything, Jules, and get away with it.”
+
+My stomach tightened and I found myself grinding my molars. “So, what is it they've done, Dan?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
+
+Dan didn't have to respond, because at that moment, Tim emerged from the Mansion, wearing a light cotton work-smock. He had a thoughtful expression, and when he saw us, he beamed his elfin grin and came over.
+
+“Hey guys!” he said.
+
+“Hi, Tim,” Dan said. I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.
+
+“Pretty exciting stuff, huh?” he said.
+
+“I haven't told him yet,” Dan said, with forced lightness. “Why don't you run it down?”
+
+“Well, it's pretty radical, I have to admit. We've learned some stuff from the Hall that we wanted to apply, and at the same time, we wanted to capture some of the historical character of the ghost story.”
+
+I opened my mouth to object, but Dan put a hand on my forearm. “Really?” he asked innocently. “How do you plan on doing that?”
+
+“Well, we're keeping the telepresence robots—that's a honey of an idea, Julius—but we're giving each one an uplink so that it can flash-bake. We've got some high-Whuffie horror writers pulling together a series of narratives about the lives of each ghost: how they met their tragic ends, what they've done since, you know.
+
+“The way we've storyboarded it, the guests stream through the ride pretty much the way they do now, walking through the preshow and then getting into the ride-vehicles, the Doom Buggies. But here's the big change: we /{slow it all down}/. We trade off throughput for intensity, make it more of a premium product.
+
+“So you're a guest. From the queue to the unload zone, you're being chased by these ghosts, these telepresence robots, and they're really scary—I've got Suneep's concept artists going back to the drawing board, hitting basic research on stuff that'll just scare the guests silly. When a ghost catches you, lays its hands on you—wham! Flash-bake! You get its whole grisly story in three seconds, across your frontal lobe. By the time you've left, you've had ten or more ghost-contacts, and the next time you come back, it's all new ghosts with all new stories. The way that the Hall's drawing 'em, we're bound to be a hit.” He put his hands behind his back and rocked on his heels, clearly proud of himself.
+
+When Epcot Center first opened, long, long ago, there'd been an ugly decade or so in ride design. Imagineering found a winning formula for Spaceship Earth, the flagship ride in the big golf ball, and, in their drive to establish thematic continuity, they'd turned the formula into a cookie-cutter, stamping out half a dozen clones for each of the “themed” areas in the Future Showcase. It went like this: first, we were cavemen, then there was ancient Greece, then Rome burned (cue sulfur-odor FX), then there was the Great Depression, and, finally, we reached the modern age. Who knows what the future holds? We do! We'll all have videophones and be living on the ocean floor. Once was cute—compelling and inspirational, even—but six times was embarrassing. Like everyone, once Imagineering got themselves a good hammer, everything started to resemble a nail. Even now, the Epcot ad-hocs were repeating the sins of their forebears, closing every ride with a scene of Bitchun utopia.
+
+And Debra was repeating the classic mistake, tearing her way through the Magic Kingdom with her blaster set to flash-bake.
+
+“Tim,” I said, hearing the tremble in my voice. “I thought you said that you had no designs on the Mansion, that you and Debra wouldn't be trying to take it away from us. Didn't you say that?”
+
+Tim rocked back as if I'd slapped him and the blood drained from his face. “But we're not taking it away!” he said. “You /{invited}/ us to help.”
+
+I shook my head, confused. “We did?” I said.
+
+“Sure,” he said.
+
+“Yes,” Dan said. “Kim and some of the other rehab cast went to Debra yesterday and asked her to do a design review of the current rehab and suggest any changes. She was good enough to agree, and they've come up with some great ideas.” I read between the lines: the newbies you invited in have gone over to the other side and we're going to lose everything because of them. I felt like shit.
+
+“Well, I stand corrected,” I said, carefully. Tim's grin came back and he clapped his hands together. /{He really loves the Mansion}/, I thought. /{He could have been on our side, if we had only played it all right.}/
+
+Dan and I took to the utilidors and grabbed a pair of bicycles and sped towards Suneep's lab, jangling our bells at the rushing castmembers. “They don't have the authority to invite Debra in,” I panted as we pedaled.
+
+“Says who?” Dan said.
+
+“It was part of the deal—they knew that they were probationary members right from the start. They weren't even allowed into the design meetings.”
+
+“Looks like they took themselves off probation,” he said.
+
+Suneep gave us both a chilly look when we entered his lab. He had dark circles under his eyes and his hands shook with exhaustion. He seemed to be holding himself erect with nothing more than raw anger.
+
+“So much for building without interference,” he said. “We agreed that this project wouldn't change midway through. Now it has, and I've got other commitments that I'm going to have to cancel because this is going off-schedule.”
+
+I made soothing apologetic gestures with my hands. “Suneep, believe me, I'm just as upset about this as you are. We don't like this one little bit.”
+
+He harrumphed. “We had a deal, Julius,” he said, hotly. “I would do the rehab for you and you would keep the ad-hocs off my back. I've been holding up my end of the bargain, but where the hell have you been? If they replan the rehab now, I'll /{have}/ to go along with them. I can't just leave the Mansion half-done—they'll murder me.”
+
+The kernel of a plan formed in my mind. “Suneep, we don't like the new rehab plan, and we're going to stop it. You can help. Just stonewall them—tell them they'll have to find other Imagineering support if they want to go through with it, that you're booked solid.”
+
+Dan gave me one of his long, considering looks, then nodded a minute approval. “Yeah,” he drawled. “That'll help all right. Just tell 'em that they're welcome to make any changes they want to the plan, /{if}/ they can find someone else to execute them.”
+
+Suneep looked unhappy. “Fine—so then they go and find someone else to do it, and that person gets all the credit for the work my team's done so far. I just flush my time down the toilet.”
+
+“It won't come to that,” I said quickly. “If you can just keep saying no for a couple days, we'll do the rest.”
+
+Suneep looked doubtful.
+
+“I promise,” I said.
+
+Suneep ran his stubby fingers through his already crazed hair. “All right,” he said, morosely.
+
+Dan slapped him on the back. “Good man,” he said.
+
+It should have worked. It almost did.
+
+I sat in the back of the Adventureland conference room while Dan exhorted.
+
+“Look, you don't have to roll over for Debra and her people! This is /{your}/ garden, and you've tended it responsibly for years. She's got no right to move in on you—you've got all the Whuffie you need to defend the place, if you all work together.”
+
+No castmember likes confrontation, and the Liberty Square bunch were tough to rouse to action. Dan had turned down the air conditioning an hour before the meeting and closed up all the windows, so that the room was a kiln for hard-firing irritation into rage. I stood meekly in the back, as far as possible from Dan. He was working his magic on my behalf, and I was content to let him do his thing.
+
+When Lil had arrived, she'd sized up the situation with a sour expression: sit in the front, near Dan, or in the back, near me. She'd chosen the middle, and to concentrate on Dan I had to tear my eyes away from the sweat glistening on her long, pale neck.
+
+Dan stalked the aisles like a preacher, eyes blazing. “They're /{stealing}/ your future! They're /{stealing}/ your /{past}/! They claim they've got your support!”
+
+He lowered his tone. “I don't think that's true.” He grabbed a castmember by her hand and looked into her eyes. “Is it true?” he said so low it was almost a whisper.
+
+“No,” the castmember said.
+
+He dropped her hand and whirled to face another castmember. “Is it true?” he demanded, raising his voice, slightly.
+
+“No!” the castmember said, his voice unnaturally loud after the whispers. A nervous chuckle rippled through the crowd.
+
+“Is it true?” he said, striding to the podium, shouting now.
+
+“No!” the crowd roared.
+
+“NO!” he shouted back.
+
+“You don't /{have to}/ roll over and take it! You can fight back, carry on with the plan, send them packing. They're only taking over because you're letting them. Are you going to let them?”
+
+“NO!”
+
+Bitchun wars are rare. Long before anyone tries a takeover of anything, they've done the arithmetic and ensured themselves that the ad-hoc they're displacing doesn't have a hope of fighting back.
+
+For the defenders, it's a simple decision: step down gracefully and salvage some reputation out of the thing—fighting back will surely burn away even that meager reward.
+
+No one benefits from fighting back—least of all the thing everyone's fighting over. For example:
+
+It was the second year of my undergrad, taking a double-major in not making trouble for my profs and keeping my mouth shut. It was the early days of Bitchun, and most of us were still a little unclear on the concept.
+
+Not all of us, though: a group of campus shit-disturbers, grad students in the Sociology Department, were on the bleeding edge of the revolution, and they knew what they wanted: control of the Department, oustering of the tyrannical, stodgy profs, a bully pulpit from which to preach the Bitchun gospel to a generation of impressionable undergrads who were too cowed by their workloads to realize what a load of shit they were being fed by the University.
+
+At least, that's what the intense, heavyset woman who seized the mic at my Soc 200 course said, that sleepy morning mid-semester at Convocation Hall. Nineteen hundred students filled the hall, a capacity crowd of bleary, coffee-sipping time-markers, and they woke up in a hurry when the woman's strident harangue burst over their heads.
+
+I saw it happen from the very start. The prof was down there on the stage, a speck with a tie-mic, droning over his slides, and then there was a blur as half a dozen grad students rushed the stage. They were dressed in University poverty-chic, wrinkled slacks and tattered sports coats, and five of them formed a human wall in front of the prof while the sixth, the heavyset one with the dark hair and the prominent mole on her cheek, unclipped his mic and clipped it to her lapel.
+
+“Wakey wakey!” she called, and the reality of the moment hit home for me: this wasn't on the lesson-plan.
+
+“Come on, heads up! This is /{not}/ a drill. The University of Toronto Department of Sociology is under new management. If you'll set your handhelds to ‘receive,’ we'll be beaming out new lesson-plans momentarily. If you've forgotten your handhelds, you can download the plans later on. I'm going to run it down for you right now, anyway.
+
+“Before I start though, I have a prepared statement for you. You'll probably hear this a couple times more today, in your other classes. It's worth repeating. Here goes:
+
+“We reject the stodgy, tyrannical rule of the profs at this Department. We demand bully pulpits from which to preach the Bitchun gospel. Effective immediately, the University of Toronto Ad-Hoc Sociology Department is /{in charge}/. We promise high-relevance curriculum with an emphasis on reputation economies, post-scarcity social dynamics, and the social theory of infinite life-extension. No more Durkheim, kids, just deadheading! This will be /{fun}/.”
+
+She taught the course like a pro—you could tell she'd been drilling her lecture for a while. Periodically, the human wall behind her shuddered as the prof made a break for it and was restrained.
+
+At precisely 9:50 a.m. she dismissed the class, which had hung on her every word. Instead of trudging out and ambling to our next class, the whole nineteen hundred of us rose, and, as one, started buzzing to our neighbors, a roar of “Can you believe it?” that followed us out the door and to our next encounter with the Ad-Hoc Sociology Department.
+
+It was cool, that day. I had another soc class, Constructing Social Deviance, and we got the same drill there, the same stirring propaganda, the same comical sight of a tenured prof battering himself against a human wall of ad-hocs.
+
+Reporters pounced on us when we left the class, jabbing at us with mics and peppering us with questions. I gave them a big thumbs-up and said, “Bitchun!” in classic undergrad eloquence.
+
+The profs struck back the next morning. I got a heads-up from the newscast as I brushed my teeth: the Dean of the Department of Sociology told a reporter that the ad-hocs' courses would not be credited, that they were a gang of thugs who were totally unqualified to teach. A counterpoint interview from a spokesperson for the ad-hocs established that all of the new lecturers had been writing course-plans and lecture notes for the profs they replaced for years, and that they'd also written most of their journal articles.
+
+The profs brought University security out to help them regain their lecterns, only to be repelled by ad-hoc security guards in homemade uniforms. University security got the message—anyone could be replaced—and stayed away.
+
+The profs picketed. They held classes out front attended by grade-conscious brown-nosers who worried that the ad-hocs' classes wouldn't count towards their degrees. Fools like me alternated between the outdoor and indoor classes, not learning much of anything.
+
+No one did. The profs spent their course-times whoring for Whuffie, leading the seminars like encounter groups instead of lectures. The ad-hocs spent their time badmouthing the profs and tearing apart their coursework.
+
+At the end of the semester, everyone got a credit and the University Senate disbanded the Sociology program in favor of a distance-ed offering from Concordia in Montreal. Forty years later, the fight was settled forever. Once you took backup-and-restore, the rest of the Bitchunry just followed, a value-system settling over you.
+
+Those who didn't take backup-and-restore may have objected, but, hey, they all died.
+
+The Liberty Square ad-hocs marched shoulder to shoulder through the utilidors and, as a mass, took back the Haunted Mansion. Dan, Lil and I were up front, careful not to brush against one another as we walked quickly through the backstage door and started a bucket-brigade, passing out the materials that Debra's people had stashed there, along a line that snaked back to the front porch of the Hall of Presidents, where they were unceremoniously dumped.
+
+Once the main stash was vacated, we split up and roamed the ride, its service corridors and dioramas, the break-room and the secret passages, rounding up every scrap of Debra's crap and passing it out the door.
+
+In the attic scene, I ran into Kim and three of her giggly little friends, their eyes glinting in the dim light. The gaggle of transhuman kids made my guts clench, made me think of Zed and of Lil and of my unmediated brain, and I had a sudden urge to shred them verbally.
+
+No.
+
+No. That way lay madness and war. This was about taking back what was ours, not punishing the interlopers. “Kim, I think you should leave,” I said, quietly.
+
+She snorted and gave me a dire look. “Who died and made you boss?” she said. Her friends thought it very brave, they made it clear with double-jointed hip-thrusts and glares.
+
+“Kim, you can leave now or you can leave later. The longer you wait, the worse it will be for you and your Whuffie. You blew it, and you're not a part of the Mansion anymore. Go home, go to Debra. Don't stay here, and don't come back. Ever.”
+
+Ever. Be cast out of this thing that you love, that you obsess over, that you worked for. “Now,” I said, quiet, dangerous, barely in control.
+
+They sauntered into the graveyard, hissing vitriol at me. Oh, they had lots of new material to post to the anti-me sites, messages that would get them Whuffie with people who thought I was the scum of the earth. A popular view, those days.
+
+I got out of the Mansion and looked at the bucket-brigade, followed it to the front of the Hall. The Park had been open for an hour, and a herd of guests watched the proceedings in confusion. The Liberty Square ad-hocs passed their loads around in clear embarrassment, knowing that they were violating every principle they cared about.
+
+As I watched, gaps appeared in the bucket-brigade as castmembers slipped away, faces burning scarlet with shame. At the Hall of Presidents, Debra presided over an orderly relocation of her things, a cheerful cadre of her castmembers quickly moving it all offstage. I didn't have to look at my handheld to know what was happening to our Whuffie.
+
+By evening, we were back on schedule. Suneep supervised the placement of his telepresence rigs and Lil went over every system in minute detail, bossing a crew of ad-hocs that trailed behind her, double- and triple-checking it all.
+
+Suneep smiled at me when he caught sight of me, hand-scattering dust in the parlor.
+
+“Congratulations, sir,” he said, and shook my hand. “It was masterfully done.”
+
+“Thanks, Suneep. I'm not sure how masterful it was, but we got the job done, and that's what counts.”
+
+“Your partners, they're happier than I've seen them since this whole business started. I know how they feel!”
+
+My partners? Oh, yes, Dan and Lil. How happy were they, I wondered. Happy enough to get back together? My mood fell, even though a part of me said that Dan would never go back to her, not after all we'd been through together.
+
+“I'm glad you're glad. We couldn't have done it without you, and it looks like we'll be open for business in a week.”
+
+“Oh, I should think so. Are you coming to the party tonight?”
+
+Party? Probably something the Liberty Square ad-hocs were putting on. I would almost certainly be persona non grata. “I don't think so,” I said, carefully. “I'll probably work late here.”
+
+He chided me for working too hard, but once he saw that I had no intention of being dragged to the party, he left off.
+
+And that's how I came to be in the Mansion at 2 a.m. the next morning, dozing in a backstage break room when I heard a commotion from the parlor. Festive voices, happy and loud, and I assumed it was Liberty Square ad-hocs coming back from their party.
+
+I roused myself and entered the parlor.
+
+Kim and her friends were there, pushing hand-trucks of Debra's gear. I got ready to shout something horrible at them, and that's when Debra came in. I moderated the shout to a snap, opened my mouth to speak, stopped.
+
+Behind Debra were Lil's parents, frozen these long years in their canopic jars in Kissimmee.
+
+1~ CHAPTER 9
+
+Lil's parents went into their jars with little ceremony. I saw them just before they went in, when they stopped in at Lil's and my place to kiss her goodbye and wish her well.
+
+Tom and I stood awkwardly to the side while Lil and her mother held an achingly chipper and polite farewell.
+
+“So,” I said to Tom. “Deadheading.”
+
+He cocked an eyebrow. “Yup. Took the backup this morning.”
+
+Before coming to see their daughter, they'd taken their backups. When they woke, this event—everything following the backup—would never have happened for them.
+
+God, they were bastards.
+
+“When are you coming back?” I asked, keeping my castmember face on, carefully hiding away the disgust.
+
+'We'll be sampling monthly, just getting a digest dumped to us. When things look interesting enough, we'll come on back.” He waggled a finger at me. “I'll be keeping an eye on you and Lillian—you treat her right, you hear?”
+
+“We're sure going to miss you two around here,” I said.
+
+He pishtoshed and said, “You won't even notice we're gone. This is your world now—we're just getting out of the way for a while, letting you-all take a run at it. We wouldn't be going down if we didn't have faith in you two.”
+
+Lil and her mom kissed one last time. Her mother was more affectionate than I'd ever seen her, even to the point of tearing up a little. Here in this moment of vanishing consciousness, she could be whomever she wanted, knowing that it wouldn't matter the next time she awoke.
+
+“Julius,” she said, taking my hands, squeezing them. “You've got some wonderful times ahead of you—between Lil and the Park, you're going to have a tremendous experience, I just know it.” She was infinitely serene and compassionate, and I knew it didn't count.
+
+Still smiling, they got into their runabout and drove away to get the lethal injections, to become disembodied consciousnesses, to lose their last moments with their darling daughter.
+
+They were not happy to be returned from the dead. Their new bodies were impossibly young, pubescent and hormonal and doleful and kitted out in the latest trendy styles. In the company of Kim and her pals, they made a solid mass of irate adolescence.
+
+“Just what the hell do you think you're doing?” Rita asked, shoving me hard in the chest. I stumbled back into my carefully scattered dust, raising a cloud.
+
+Rita came after me, but Tom held her back. “Julius, go away. Your actions are totally indefensible. Keep your mouth shut and go away.”
+
+I held up a hand, tried to wave away his words, opened my mouth to speak.
+
+“Don't say a word,” he said. “Leave. Now.”
+
+“/{Don't stay here and don't come back. Ever}/,” Kim said, an evil look on her face.
+
+“No,” I said. “No goddamn it no. You're going to hear me out, and then I'm going to get Lil and her people and they're going to back me up. That's not negotiable.”
+
+We stared at each other across the dim parlor. Debra made a twiddling motion and the lights came up full and harsh. The expertly crafted gloom went away and it was just a dusty room with a fake fireplace.
+
+“Let him speak,” Debra said. Rita folded her arms and glared.
+
+“I did some really awful things,” I said, keeping my head up, keeping my eyes on them. “I can't excuse them, and I don't ask you to forgive them. But that doesn't change the fact that we've put our hearts and souls into this place, and it's not right to take it from us. Can't we have one constant corner of the world, one bit frozen in time for the people who love it that way? Why does your success mean our failure?
+
+“Can't you see that we're carrying on your work? That we're tending a legacy you left us?”
+
+“Are you through?” Rita asked.
+
+I nodded.
+
+“This place is not a historical preserve, Julius, it's a ride. If you don't understand that, you're in the wrong place. It's not my goddamn fault that you decided that your stupidity was on my behalf, and it doesn't make it any less stupid. All you've done is confirm my worst fears.”
+
+Debra's mask of impartiality slipped. “You stupid, deluded asshole,” she said, softly. “You totter around, pissing and moaning about your little murder, your little health problems—yes, I've heard—your little fixation on keeping things the way they are. You need some perspective, Julius. You need to get away from here: Disney World isn't good for you and you're sure as hell not any good for Disney World.”
+
+It would have hurt less if I hadn't come to the same conclusion myself, somewhere along the way.
+
+I found the ad-hoc at a Fort Wilderness campsite, sitting around a fire and singing, necking, laughing. The victory party. I trudged into the circle and hunted for Lil.
+
+She was sitting on a log, staring into the fire, a million miles away. Lord, she was beautiful when she fretted. I stood in front of her for a minute and she stared right through me until I tapped her shoulder. She gave an involuntary squeak and then smiled at herself.
+
+“Lil,” I said, then stopped. /{Your parents are home, and they've joined the other side}/.
+
+For the first time in an age, she looked at me softly, smiled even. She patted the log next to her. I sat down, felt the heat of the fire on my face, her body heat on my side. God, how did I screw this up?
+
+Without warning, she put her arms around me and hugged me hard. I hugged her back, nose in her hair, woodsmoke smell and shampoo and sweat. “We did it,” she whispered fiercely. I held onto her. /{No, we didn't}/.
+
+“Lil,” I said again, and pulled away.
+
+“What?” she said, her eyes shining. She was stoned, I saw that now.
+
+“Your parents are back. They came to the Mansion.”
+
+She was confused, shrinking, and I pressed on.
+
+“They were with Debra.”
+
+She reeled back as if I'd slapped her.
+
+“I told them I'd bring the whole group back to talk it over.”
+
+She hung her head and her shoulders shook, and I tentatively put an arm around her. She shook it off and sat up. She was crying and laughing at the same time. “I'll have a ferry sent over,” she said.
+
+I sat in the back of the ferry with Dan, away from the confused and angry ad-hocs. I answered his questions with terse, one-word answers, and he gave up. We rode in silence, the trees on the edges of the Seven Seas Lagoon whipping back and forth in an approaching storm.
+
+The ad-hoc shortcutted through the west parking lot and moved through the quiet streets of Frontierland apprehensively, a funeral procession that stopped the nighttime custodial staff in their tracks.
+
+As we drew up on Liberty Square, I saw that the work-lights were blazing and a tremendous work-gang of Debra's ad-hocs were moving from the Hall to the Mansion, undoing our teardown of their work.
+
+Working alongside of them were Tom and Rita, Lil's parents, sleeves rolled up, forearms bulging with new, toned muscle. The group stopped in its tracks and Lil went to them, stumbling on the wooden sidewalk.
+
+I expected hugs. There were none. In their stead, parents and daughter stalked each other, shifting weight and posture to track each other, maintain a constant, sizing distance.
+
+“What the hell are you doing?” Lil said, finally. She didn't address her mother, which surprised me. It didn't surprise Tom, though.
+
+He dipped forward, the shuffle of his feet loud in the quiet night. “We're working,” he said.
+
+“No, you're not,” Lil said. “You're destroying. Stop it.”
+
+Lil's mother darted to her husband's side, not saying anything, just standing there.
+
+Wordlessly, Tom hefted the box he was holding and headed to the Mansion. Lil caught his arm and jerked it so he dropped his load.
+
+“You're not listening. The Mansion is /{ours}/. /{Stop}/. /{It}/.”
+
+Lil's mother gently took Lil's hand off Tom's arm, held it in her own. “I'm glad you're passionate about it, Lillian,” she said. “I'm proud of your commitment.”
+
+Even at a distance of ten yards, I heard Lil's choked sob, saw her collapse in on herself. Her mother took her in her arms, rocked her. I felt like a voyeur, but couldn't bring myself to turn away.
+
+“Shhh,” her mother said, a sibilant sound that matched the rustling of the leaves on the Liberty Tree. “Shhh. We don't have to be on the same side, you know.”
+
+They held the embrace and held it still. Lil straightened, then bent again and picked up her father's box, carried it to the Mansion. One at a time, the rest of her ad-hoc moved forward and joined them.
+
+This is how you hit bottom. You wake up in your friend's hotel room and you power up your handheld and it won't log on. You press the call-button for the elevator and it gives you an angry buzz in return. You take the stairs to the lobby and no one looks at you as they jostle past you.
+
+You become a non-person.
+
+Scared. I trembled when I ascended the stairs to Dan's room, when I knocked at his door, louder and harder than I meant, a panicked banging.
+
+Dan answered the door and I saw his eyes go to his HUD, back to me. “Jesus,” he said.
+
+I sat on the edge of my bed, head in my hands.
+
+“What?” I said, what happened, what happened to me?
+
+“You're out of the ad-hoc,” he said. “You're out of Whuffie. You're bottomed-out,” he said.
+
+This is how you hit bottom in Walt Disney World, in a hotel with the hissing of the monorail and the sun streaming through the window, the hooting of the steam engines on the railroad and the distant howl of the recorded wolves at the Haunted Mansion. The world drops away from you, recedes until you're nothing but a speck, a mote in blackness.
+
+I was hyperventilating, light-headed. Deliberately, I slowed my breath, put my head between my knees until the dizziness passed.
+
+“Take me to Lil,” I said.
+
+Driving together, hammering cigarette after cigarette into my face, I remembered the night Dan had come to Disney World, when I'd driven him to my—/{Lil's}/—house, and how happy I'd been then, how secure.
+
+I looked at Dan and he patted my hand. “Strange times,” he said.
+
+It was enough. We found Lil in an underground break-room, lightly dozing on a ratty sofa. Her head rested on Tom's lap, her feet on Rita's. All three snored softly. They'd had a long night.
+
+Dan shook Lil awake. She stretched out and opened her eyes, looked sleepily at me. The blood drained from her face.
+
+“Hello, Julius,” she said, coldly.
+
+Now Tom and Rita were awake, too. Lil sat up.
+
+“Were you going to tell me?” I asked, quietly. “Or were you just going to kick me out and let me find out on my own?”
+
+“You were my next stop,” Lil said.
+
+“Then I've saved you some time.” I pulled up a chair. “Tell me all about it.”
+
+“There's nothing to tell,” Rita snapped. “You're out. You had to know it was coming—for God's sake, you were tearing Liberty Square apart!”
+
+“How would you know?” I asked. I struggled to remain calm. “You've been asleep for ten years!”
+
+“We got updates,” Rita said. “That's why we're back—we couldn't let it go on the way it was. We owed it to Debra.”
+
+“And Lillian,” Tom said.
+
+“And Lillian,” Rita said, absently.
+
+Dan pulled up a chair of his own. “You're not being fair to him,” he said. At least someone was on my side.
+
+“We've been more than fair,” Lil said. “You know that better than anyone, Dan. We've forgiven and forgiven and forgiven, made every allowance. He's sick and he won't take the cure. There's nothing more we can do for him.”
+
+“You could be his friend,” Dan said. The light-headedness was back, and I slumped in my chair, tried to control my breathing, the panicked thumping of my heart.
+
+“You could try to understand, you could try to help him. You could stick with him, the way he stuck with you. You don't have to toss him out on his ass.”
+
+Lil had the good grace to look slightly shamed. “I'll get him a room,” she said. “For a month. In Kissimmee. A motel. I'll pick up his network access. Is that fair?”
+
+“It's more than fair,” Rita said. Why did she hate me so much? I'd been there for her daughter while she was away—ah. That might do it, all right. “I don't think it's warranted. If you want to take care of him, sir, you can. It's none of my family's business.”
+
+Lil's eyes blazed. “Let me handle this,” she said. “All right?”
+
+Rita stood up abruptly. “You do whatever you want,” she said, and stormed out of the room.
+
+“Why are you coming here for help?” Tom said, ever the voice of reason. “You seem capable enough.”
+
+“I'm going to be taking a lethal injection at the end of the week,” Dan said. “Three days. That's personal, but you asked.”
+
+Tom shook his head. /{Some friends you've got yourself}/, I could see him thinking it.
+
+“That soon?” Lil asked, a throb in her voice.
+
+Dan nodded.
+
+In a dreamlike buzz, I stood and wandered out into the utilidor, out through the western castmember parking, and away.
+
+I wandered along the cobbled, disused Walk Around the World, each flagstone engraved with the name of a family that had visited the Park a century before. The names whipped past me like epitaphs.
+
+The sun came up noon high as I rounded the bend of deserted beach between the Grand Floridian and the Polynesian. Lil and I had come here often, to watch the sunset from a hammock, arms around each other, the Park spread out before us like a lighted toy village.
+
+Now the beach was deserted, the Wedding Pavilion silent. I felt suddenly cold though I was sweating freely. So cold.
+
+Dreamlike, I walked into the lake, water filling my shoes, logging my pants, warm as blood, warm on my chest, on my chin, on my mouth, on my eyes.
+
+I opened my mouth and inhaled deeply, water filling my lungs, choking and warm. At first I sputtered, but I was in control now, and I inhaled again. The water shimmered over my eyes, and then was dark.
+
+I woke on Doctor Pete's cot in the Magic Kingdom, restraints around my wrists and ankles, a tube in my nose. I closed my eyes, for a moment believing that I'd been restored from a backup, problems solved, memories behind me.
+
+Sorrow knifed through me as I realized that Dan was probably dead by now, my memories of him gone forever.
+
+Gradually, I realized that I was thinking nonsensically. The fact that I remembered Dan meant that I hadn't been refreshed from my backup, that my broken brain was still there, churning along in unmediated isolation.
+
+I coughed again. My ribs ached and throbbed in counterpoint to my head. Dan took my hand.
+
+“You're a pain in the ass, you know that?” he said, smiling.
+
+“Sorry,” I choked.
+
+“You sure are,” he said. “Lucky for you they found you—another minute or two and I'd be burying you right now.”
+
+/{No}/, I thought, confused. /{They'd have restored me from backup}/. Then it hit me: I'd gone on record refusing restore from backup after having it recommended by a medical professional. No one would have restored me after that. I would have been truly and finally dead. I started to shiver.
+
+“Easy,” Dan said. “Easy. It's all right now. Doctor says you've got a cracked rib or two from the CPR, but there's no brain damage.”
+
+“No /{additional}/ brain damage,” Doctor Pete said, swimming into view. He had on his professionally calm bedside face, and it reassured me despite myself.
+
+He shooed Dan away and took his seat. Once Dan had left the room, he shone lights in my eyes and peeked in my ears, then sat back and considered me. “Well, Julius,” he said. “What exactly is the problem? We can get you a lethal injection if that's what you want, but offing yourself in the Seven Seas Lagoon just isn't good show. In the meantime, would you like to talk about it?”
+
+Part of me wanted to spit in his eye. I'd tried to talk about it and he'd told me to go to hell, and now he changes his mind? But I did want to talk.
+
+“I didn't want to die,” I said.
+
+“Oh no?” he said. “I think the evidence suggests the contrary.”
+
+“I wasn't trying to die,” I protested. “I was trying to—” What? I was trying to… /{abdicate}/. Take the refresh without choosing it, without shutting out the last year of my best friend's life. Rescue myself from the stinking pit I'd sunk into without flushing Dan away along with it. That's all, that's all.
+
+“I wasn't thinking—I was just acting. It was an episode or something. Does that mean I'm nuts?”
+
+“Oh, probably,” Doctor Pete said, offhandedly. “But let's worry about one thing at a time. You can die if you want to, that's your right. I'd rather you lived, if you want my opinion, and I doubt that I'm the only one, Whuffie be damned. If you're going to live, I'd like to record you saying so, just in case. We have a backup of you on file—I'd hate to have to delete it.”
+
+“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I'd like to be restored if there's no other option.” It was true. I didn't want to die.
+
+“All right then,” Doctor Pete said. “It's on file and I'm a happy man. Now, are you nuts? Probably. A little. Nothing a little counseling and some RandR wouldn't fix, if you want my opinion. I could find you somewhere if you want.”
+
+“Not yet,” I said. “I appreciate the offer, but there's something else I have to do first.”
+
+Dan took me back to the room and put me to bed with a transdermal soporific that knocked me out for the rest of the day. When I woke, the moon was over the Seven Seas Lagoon and the monorail was silent.
+
+I stood on the patio for a while, thinking about all the things this place had meant to me for more than a century: happiness, security, efficiency, fantasy. All of it gone. It was time I left. Maybe back to space, find Zed and see if I could make her happy again. Anywhere but here. Once Dan was dead—God, it was sinking in finally—I could catch a ride down to the Cape for a launch.
+
+“What's on your mind?” Dan asked from behind me, startling me. He was in his boxers, thin and rangy and hairy.
+
+“Thinking about moving on,” I said.
+
+He chuckled. “I've been thinking about doing the same,” he said.
+
+I smiled. “Not that way,” I said. “Just going somewhere else, starting over. Getting away from this.”
+
+“Going to take the refresh?” he asked.
+
+I looked away. “No,” I said. “I don't believe I will.”
+
+“It may be none of my business,” he said, “but why the fuck not? Jesus, Julius, what're you afraid of?”
+
+“You don't want to know,” I said.
+
+“I'll be the judge of that.”
+
+“Let's have a drink, first,” I said.
+
+Dan rolled his eyes back for a second, then said, “All right, two Coronas, coming up.”
+
+After the room-service bot had left, we cracked the beers and pulled chairs out onto the porch.
+
+“You sure you want to know this?” I asked.
+
+He tipped his bottle at me. “Sure as shootin',” he said.
+
+“I don't want refresh because it would mean losing the last year,” I said.
+
+He nodded. “By which you mean ‘my last year,’” he said. “Right?”
+
+I nodded and drank.
+
+“I thought it might be like that. Julius, you are many things, but hard to figure out you are not. I have something to say that might help you make the decision. If you want to hear it, that is.”
+
+What could he have to say? “Sure,” I said. “Sure.” In my mind, I was on a shuttle headed for orbit, away from all of this.
+
+“I had you killed,” he said. “Debra asked me to, and I set it up. You were right all along.”
+
+The shuttle exploded in silent, slow moving space, and I spun away from it. I opened and shut my mouth.
+
+It was Dan's turn to look away. “Debra proposed it. We were talking about the people I'd met when I was doing my missionary work, the stone crazies who I'd have to chase away after they'd rejoined the Bitchun Society. One of them, a girl from Cheyenne Mountain, she followed me down here, kept leaving me messages. I told Debra, and that's when she got the idea.
+
+“I'd get the girl to shoot you and disappear. Debra would give me Whuffie—piles of it, and her team would follow suit. I'd be months closer to my goal. That was all I could think about back then, you remember.”
+
+“I remember.” The smell of rejuve and desperation in our little cottage, and Dan plotting my death.
+
+“We planned it, then Debra had herself refreshed from a backup—no memory of the event, just the Whuffie for me.”
+
+“Yes,” I said. That would work. Plan a murder, kill yourself, have yourself refreshed from a backup made before the plan. How many times had Debra done terrible things and erased their memories that way?
+
+“Yes,” he agreed. “We did it, I'm ashamed to say. I can prove it, too—I have my backup, and I can get Jeanine to tell it, too.” He drained his beer. “That's my plan. Tomorrow. I'll tell Lil and her folks, Kim and her people, the whole ad-hoc. A going-away present from a shitty friend.”
+
+My throat was dry and tight. I drank more beer. “You knew all along,” I said. “You could have proved it at any time.”
+
+He nodded. “That's right.”
+
+“You let me…” I groped for the words. “You let me turn into…” They wouldn't come.
+
+“I did,” he said.
+
+All this time. Lil and he, standing on /{my}/ porch, telling me I needed help. Doctor Pete, telling me I needed refresh from backup, me saying no, no, no, not wanting to lose my last year with Dan.
+
+“I've done some pretty shitty things in my day,” he said. “This is the absolute worst. You helped me and I betrayed you. I'm sure glad I don't believe in God—that'd make what I'm going to do even scarier.”
+
+Dan was going to kill himself in two days' time. My friend and my murderer. “Dan,” I croaked. I couldn't make any sense of my mind. Dan, taking care of me, helping me, sticking up for me, carrying this horrible shame with him all along. Ready to die, wanting to go with a clean conscience.
+
+“You're forgiven,” I said. And it was true.
+
+He stood.
+
+“Where are you going” I asked.
+
+“To find Jeanine, the one who pulled the trigger. I'll meet you at the Hall of Presidents at nine a.m..”
+
+I went in through the Main Gate, not a castmember any longer, a Guest with barely enough Whuffie to scrape in, use the water fountains and stand in line. If I were lucky, a castmember might spare me a chocolate banana. Probably not, though.
+
+I stood in the line for the Hall of Presidents. Other guests checked my Whuffie, then averted their eyes. Even the children. A year before, they'd have been striking up conversations, asking me about my job here at the Magic Kingdom.
+
+I sat in my seat at the Hall of Presidents, watching the short film with the rest, sitting patiently while they rocked in their seats under the blast of the flash-bake. A castmember picked up the stageside mic and thanked everyone for coming; the doors swung open and the Hall was empty, except for me. The castmember narrowed her eyes at me, then recognizing me, turned her back and went to show in the next group.
+
+No group came. Instead, Dan and the girl I'd seen on the replay entered.
+
+“We've closed it down for the morning,” he said.
+
+I was staring at the girl, seeing her smirk as she pulled the trigger on me, seeing her now with a contrite, scared expression. She was terrified of me.
+
+“You must be Jeanine,” I said. I stood and shook her hand. “I'm Julius.”
+
+Her hand was cold, and she took it back and wiped it on her pants.
+
+My castmember instincts took over. “Please, have a seat. Don't worry, it'll all be fine. Really. No hard feelings.” I stopped short of offering to get her a glass of water.
+
+/{Put her at her ease}/, said a snotty voice in my head. /{She'll make a better witness. Or make her nervous, pathetic—that'll work, too; make Debra look even worse}/.
+
+I told the voice to shut up and got her a cup of water.
+
+By the time I came back, the whole gang was there. Debra, Lil, her folks, Tim. Debra's gang and Lil's gang, now one united team. Soon to be scattered.
+
+Dan took the stage, used the stageside mic to broadcast his voice. “Eleven months ago, I did an awful thing. I plotted with Debra to have Julius murdered. I used a friend who was a little confused at the time, used her to pull the trigger. It was Debra's idea that having Julius killed would cause enough confusion that she could take over the Hall of Presidents. It was.”
+
+There was a roar of conversation. I looked at Debra, saw that she was sitting calmly, as though Dan had just accused her of sneaking an extra helping of dessert. Lil's parents, to either side of her, were less sanguine. Tom's jaw was set and angry, Rita was speaking angrily to Debra. Hickory Jackson in the old Hall used to say, /{I will hang the first man I can lay hands on from the first tree I can find}/.
+
+“Debra had herself refreshed from backup after we planned it,” Dan went on, as though no one was talking. “I was supposed to do the same, but I didn't. I have a backup in my public directory—anyone can examine it. Right now, I'd like to bring Jeanine up, she's got a few words she'd like to say.”
+
+I helped Jeanine take the stage. She was still trembling, and the ad-hocs were an insensate babble of recriminations. Despite myself, I was enjoying it.
+
+“Hello,” Jeanine said softly. She had a lovely voice, a lovely face. I wondered if we could be friends when it was all over. She probably didn't care much about Whuffie, one way or another.
+
+The discussion went on. Dan took the mic from her and said, “Please! Can we have a little respect for our visitor? Please? People?”
+
+Gradually, the din decreased. Dan passed the mic back to Jeanine. “Hello,” she said again, and flinched from the sound of her voice in the Hall's PA. “My name is Jeanine. I'm the one who killed Julius, a year ago. Dan asked me to, and I did it. I didn't ask why. I trusted—trust—him. He told me that Julius would make a backup a few minutes before I shot him, and that he could get me out of the Park without getting caught. I'm very sorry.” There was something off-kilter about her, some stilt to her stance and words that let you know she wasn't all there. Growing up in a mountain might do that to you. I snuck a look at Lil, whose lips were pressed together. Growing up in a theme park might do that to you, too.
+
+“Thank you, Jeanine,” Dan said, taking back the mic. “You can have a seat now. I've said everything I need to say—Julius and I have had our own discussions in private. If there's anyone else who'd like to speak—”
+
+The words were barely out of his mouth before the crowd erupted again in words and waving hands. Beside me, Jeanine flinched. I took her hand and shouted in her ear: “Have you ever been on the Pirates of the Carribean?”
+
+She shook her head.
+
+I stood up and pulled her to her feet. “You'll love it,” I said, and led her out of the Hall.
+
+1~ CHAPTER 10
+
+I booked us ringside seats at the Polynesian Luau, riding high on a fresh round of sympathy Whuffie, and Dan and I drank a dozen lapu-lapus in hollowed-out pineapples before giving up on the idea of getting drunk.
+
+Jeanine watched the fire-dances and the torch-lighting with eyes like saucers, and picked daintily at her spare ribs with one hand, never averting her attention from the floor show. When they danced the fast hula, her eyes jiggled. I chuckled.
+
+From where we sat, I could see the spot where I'd waded into the Seven Seas Lagoon and breathed in the blood-temp water, I could see Cinderella's Castle, across the lagoon, I could see the monorails and the ferries and the busses making their busy way through the Park, shuttling teeming masses of guests from place to place. Dan toasted me with his pineapple and I toasted him back, drank it dry and belched in satisfaction.
+
+Full belly, good friends, and the sunset behind a troupe of tawny, half-naked hula dancers. Who needs the Bitchun Society, anyway?
+
+When it was over, we watched the fireworks from the beach, my toes dug into the clean white sand. Dan slipped his hand into my left hand, and Jeanine took my right. When the sky darkened and the lighted barges puttered away through the night, we three sat in the hammock.
+
+I looked out over the Seven Seas Lagoon and realized that this was my last night, ever, in Walt Disney World. It was time to reboot again, start afresh. That's what the Park was for, only somehow, this visit, I'd gotten stuck. Dan had unstuck me.
+
+The talk turned to Dan's impending death.
+
+“So, tell me what you think of this,” he said, hauling away on a glowing cigarette.
+
+“Shoot,” I said.
+
+“I'm thinking—why take lethal injection? I mean, I may be done here for now, but why should I make an irreversible decision?”
+
+“Why did you want to before?” I asked.
+
+“Oh, it was the macho thing, I guess. The finality and all. But hell, I don't have to prove anything, right?”
+
+“Sure,” I said, magnanimously.
+
+“So,” he said, thoughtfully. “The question I'm asking is, how long can I deadhead for? There are folks who go down for a thousand years, ten thousand, right?”
+
+“So, you're thinking, what, a million?” I joked.
+
+He laughed. “A /{million}/? You're thinking too small, son. Try this on for size: the heat death of the universe.”
+
+“The heat death of the universe,” I repeated.
+
+“Sure,” he drawled, and I sensed his grin in the dark. “Ten to the hundred years or so. The Stelliferous Period—it's when all the black holes have run dry and things get, you know, stupendously dull. Cold, too. So I'm thinking—why not leave a wake-up call for some time around then?”
+
+“Sounds unpleasant to me,” I said. “Brrrr.”
+
+“Not at all! I figure, self-repairing nano-based canopic jar, mass enough to feed it—say, a trillion-ton asteroid—and a lot of solitude when the time comes around. I'll poke my head in every century or so, just to see what's what, but if nothing really stupendous crops up, I'll take the long ride out. The final frontier.”
+
+“That's pretty cool,” Jeanine said.
+
+“Thanks,” Dan said.
+
+“You're not kidding, are you?” I asked.
+
+“Nope, I sure ain't,” he said.
+
+They didn't invite me back into the ad-hoc, even after Debra left in Whuffie-penury and they started to put the Mansion back the way it was. Tim called me to say that with enough support from Imagineering, they thought they could get it up and running in a week. Suneep was ready to kill someone, I swear. /{A house divided against itself can}/ not /{stand}/, as Mr. Lincoln used to say at the Hall of Presidents.
+
+I packed three changes of clothes and a toothbrush in my shoulderbag and checked out of my suite at the Polynesian at ten a.m., then met Jeanine and Dan at the valet parking out front. Dan had a runabout he'd picked up with my Whuffie, and I piled in with Jeanine in the middle. We played old Beatles tunes on the stereo all the long way to Cape Canaveral. Our shuttle lifted at noon.
+
+The shuttle docked four hours later, but by the time we'd been through decontam and orientation, it was suppertime. Dan, nearly as Whuffie-poor as Debra after his confession, nevertheless treated us to a meal in the big bubble, squeeze-tubes of heady booze and steaky paste, and we watched the universe get colder for a while.
+
+There were a couple guys jamming, tethered to a guitar and a set of tubs, and they weren't half bad.
+
+Jeanine was uncomfortable hanging there naked. She'd gone to space with her folks after Dan had left the mountain, but it was in a long-haul generation ship. She'd abandoned it after a year or two and deadheaded back to Earth in a support-pod. She'd get used to life in space after a while. Or she wouldn't.
+
+“Well,” Dan said.
+
+“Yup,” I said, aping his laconic drawl. He smiled.
+
+“It's that time,” he said.
+
+Spheres of saline tears formed in Jeanine's eyes, and I brushed them away, setting them adrift in the bubble. I'd developed some real tender, brother-sister type feelings for her since I'd watched her saucer-eye her way through the Magic Kingdom. No romance—not for me, thanks! But camaraderie and a sense of responsibility.
+
+“See you in ten to the hundred,” Dan said, and headed to the airlock. I started after him, but Jeanine caught my hand.
+
+“He hates long good-byes,” she said.
+
+“I know,” I said, and watched him go.
+
+The universe gets older. So do I. So does my backup, sitting in redundant distributed storage dirtside, ready for the day that space or age or stupidity kills me. It recedes with the years, and I write out my life longhand, a letter to the me that I'll be when it's restored into a clone somewhere, somewhen. It's important that whoever I am then knows about this year, and it's going to take a lot of tries for me to get it right.
+
+In the meantime, I'm working on another symphony, one with a little bit of “Grim Grinning Ghosts,” and a nod to “It's a Small World After All,” and especially “There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow.”
+
+Jeanine says it's pretty good, but what does she know? She's barely fifty.
+
+We've both got a lot of living to do before we know what's what.
+
+1~acknowledgements Acknowledgements:
+
+I could never have written this book without the personal support of my friends and family, especially Roz Doctorow, Gord Doctorow and Neil Doctorow, Amanda Foubister, Steve Samenski, Pat York, Grad Conn, John Henson, John Rose, the writers at the Cecil Street Irregulars and Mark Frauenfelder.
+
+I owe a great debt to the writers and editors who mentored and encouraged me: James Patrick Kelly, Judith Merril, Damon Knight, Martha Soukup, Scott Edelman, Gardner Dozois, Renee Wilmeth, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Claire Eddy, Bob Parks and Robert Killheffer.
+
+I am also indebted to my editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden and my agent Donald Maass, who believed in this book and helped me bring it to fruition.
+
+Finally, I must thank the readers, the geeks and the Imagineers who inspired this book.
+
+Cory Doctorow
+
+San Francisco
+
+September 2002
+
+1~note-2004 A note about this book, February 12, 2004:
+
+As you will see, when you read the text beneath this section, I released this book a little over a year ago under the terms of a Creative Commons license that allowed my readers to freely redistribute the text without needing any further permission from me. In this fashion, I enlisted my readers in the service of a grand experiment, to see how my book could find its way into cultural relevance and commercial success. The experiment worked out very satisfactorily.
+
+When I originally licensed the book under the terms set out in the next section, I did so in the most conservative fashion possible, using CC's most restrictive license. I wanted to dip my toe in before taking a plunge. I wanted to see if the sky would fall: you see writers are routinely schooled by their peers that maximal copyright is the only thing that stands between us and penury, and so ingrained was this lesson in me that even though I had the intellectual intuition that a "some rights reserved" regime would serve me well, I still couldn't shake the atavistic fear that I was about to do something very foolish indeed.
+
+It wasn't foolish. I've since released a short story collection ( { A Place So Foreign and Eight More }http://craphound.com/place and a second novel ( { Eastern Standard Tribe }http://craphound.com/est ) in this fashion, and my career is turning over like a goddamned locomotive engine. I am thrilled beyond words (an extraordinary circumstance for a writer!) at the way that this has all worked out.
+
+And so /{now}/ I'm going to take a little bit of a plunge. Today, in coincidence with my talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference ( { Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books }http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2004/view/e_sess/4693 ).
+
+I am re-licensing this book under a far less restrictive Creative Commons license, the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. This is a license that allows you, the reader, to noncommercially "remix" this book -- you have my blessing to make your own translations, radio and film adaptations, sequels, fan fiction, missing chapters, machine remixes, you name it. A number of you assumed that you had my blessing to do this in the first place, and I can't say that I've been at all put out by the delightful and creative derivative works created from this book, but now you have my explicit blessing, and I hope you'll use it.
+
+Here's the license in summary:
+
+http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/
+
+You are free:
+
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+
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+
+_1 * Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the author. Your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above.
+
+And here is the license in full:
+
+_1 Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0
+
+_1 CREATIVE COMMONS CORPORATION IS NOT A LAW FIRM AND DOES NOT PROVIDE LEGAL SERVICES. DISTRIBUTION OF THIS DRAFT LICENSE DOES NOT CREATE AN ATTORNEY-CLIENT RELATIONSHIP. CREATIVE COMMONS PROVIDES THIS INFORMATION ON AN "AS-IS" BASIS. CREATIVE COMMONS MAKES NO WARRANTIES REGARDING THE INFORMATION PROVIDED, AND DISCLAIMS LIABILITY FOR DAMAGES RESULTING FROM ITS USE.
+
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+
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+
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+_1 6. Limitation on Liability. EXCEPT TO THE EXTENT REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW, AND EXCEPT FOR DAMAGES ARISING FROM LIABILITY TO A THIRD PARTY RESULTING FROM BREACH OF THE WARRANTIES IN SECTION 5, IN NO EVENT WILL LICENSOR BE LIABLE TO YOU ON ANY LEGAL THEORY FOR ANY SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR EXEMPLARY DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THIS LICENSE OR THE USE OF THE WORK, EVEN IF LICENSOR HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
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+
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+
+_1 8. Miscellaneous
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+_2 1. Each time You distribute or publicly digitally perform the Work or a Collective Work, the Licensor offers to the recipient a license to the Work on the same terms and conditions as the license granted to You under this License.
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+_2 2. Each time You distribute or publicly digitally perform a Derivative Work, Licensor offers to the recipient a license to the original Work on the same terms and conditions as the license granted to You under this License.
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+_2 3. If any provision of this License is invalid or unenforceable under applicable law, it shall not affect the validity or enforceability of the remainder of the terms of this License, and without further action by the parties to this agreement, such provision shall be reformed to the minimum extent necessary to make such provision valid and enforceable.
+
+_2 4. No term or provision of this License shall be deemed waived and no breach consented to unless such waiver or consent shall be in writing and signed by the party to be charged with such waiver or consent.
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+
+1~note-2003 A note about this book, January 9, 2003:
+
+“Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” is my first novel. It's an actual, no-foolin' words-on-paper book, published by the good people at Tor Books in New York City. You can buy this book in stores or online, by following links like this one:
+
+http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0765304368/downandoutint-20
+
+So, what's with this file? Good question.
+
+I'm releasing the entire text of this book as a free, freely redistributable e-book. You can download it, put it on a P2P net, put it on your site, email it to a friend, and, if you're addicted to dead trees, you can even print it.
+
+Why am I doing this thing? Well, it's a long story, but to shorten it up: first-time novelists have a tough row to hoe. Our publishers don't have a lot of promotional budget to throw at unknown factors like us. Mostly, we rise and fall based on word-of-mouth. I'm not bad at word-of-mouth. I have a blog, Boing Boing ( http://boingboing.net ), where I do a /{lot}/ of word-of-mouthing. I compulsively tell friends and strangers about things that I like.
+
+And telling people about stuff I like is /{way}/, /{way}/ easier if I can just send it to 'em. Way easier.
+
+What's more, P2P nets kick all kinds of ass. Most of the books, music and movies ever released are not available for sale, anywhere in the world. In the brief time that P2P nets have flourished, the ad-hoc masses of the Internet have managed to put just about /{everything}/ online. What's more, they've done it for cheaper than any other archiving/revival effort ever. I'm a stone infovore and this kinda Internet mishegas gives me a serious frisson of futurosity.
+
+Yeah, there are legal problems. Yeah, it's hard to figure out how people are gonna make money doing it. Yeah, there is a lot of social upheaval and a serious threat to innovation, freedom, business, and whatnot. It's your basic end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenario, and as a science fiction writer, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenaria are my stock-in-trade.
+
+I'm especially grateful to my publisher, Tor Books ( http://www.tor.com/ ) and my editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden ( http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite ) for being hep enough to let me try out this experiment.
+
+All that said, here's the deal: I'm releasing this book under a license developed by the Creative Commons project ( http://creativecommons.org/ ). This is a project that lets people like me roll our own license agreements for the distribution of our creative work under terms similar to those employed by the Free/Open Source Software movement. It's a great project, and I'm proud to be a part of it.
+
+Here's a summary of the license:
+
+http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0
+
+_* Attribution. The licensor permits others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work. In return, licensees must give the original author credit.
+
+_* No Derivative Works. The licensor permits others to copy, distribute, display and perform only unaltered copies of the work—not derivative works based on it.
+
+_* Noncommercial. The licensor permits others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work. In return, licensees may not use the work for commercial purposes—unless they get the licensor's permission.
+
+And here's the license itself:
+
+http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0-legalcode
+
+_1 THE WORK (AS DEFINED BELOW) IS PROVIDED UNDER THE TERMS OF THIS CREATIVE COMMONS PUBLIC LICENSE (“CCPL” OR “LICENSE”). THE WORK IS PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT AND/OR OTHER APPLICABLE LAW. ANY USE OF THE WORK OTHER THAN AS AUTHORIZED UNDER THIS LICENSE IS PROHIBITED.
+
+_1 BY EXERCISING ANY RIGHTS TO THE WORK PROVIDED HERE, YOU ACCEPT AND AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THIS LICENSE. THE LICENSOR GRANTS YOU THE RIGHTS CONTAINED HERE IN CONSIDERATION OF YOUR ACCEPTANCE OF SUCH TERMS AND CONDITIONS.
+
+_1 Definitions
+
+_2 “Collective Work” means a work, such as a periodical issue, anthology or encyclopedia, in which the Work in its entirety in unmodified form, along with a number of other contributions, constituting separate and independent works in themselves, are assembled into a collective whole. A work that constitutes a Collective Work will not be considered a Derivative Work (as defined below) for the purposes of this License.
+
+_2 “Derivative Work” means a work based upon the Work or upon the Work and other pre-existing works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which the Work may be recast, transformed, or adapted, except that a work that constitutes a Collective Work will not be considered a Derivative Work for the purpose of this License.
+
+_2 “Licensor” means the individual or entity that offers the Work under the terms of this License.
+
+_2 “Original Author” means the individual or entity who created the Work.
+
+_2 “Work” means the copyrightable work of authorship offered under the terms of this License.
+
+_2 “You” means an individual or entity exercising rights under this License who has not previously violated the terms of this License with respect to the Work, or who has received express permission from the Licensor to exercise rights under this License despite a previous violation.
+
+_1 2. Fair Use Rights. Nothing in this license is intended to reduce, limit, or restrict any rights arising from fair use, first sale or other limitations on the exclusive rights of the copyright owner under copyright law or other applicable laws.
+
+_1 3. License Grant. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, Licensor hereby grants You a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright) license to exercise the rights in the Work as stated below:
+
+_2 1. to reproduce the Work, to incorporate the Work into one or more Collective Works, and to reproduce the Work as incorporated in the Collective Works;
+
+_2 2. to distribute copies or phonorecords of, display publicly, perform publicly, and perform publicly by means of a digital audio transmission the Work including as incorporated in Collective Works;
+
+_1 The above rights may be exercised in all media and formats whether now known or hereafter devised. The above rights include the right to make such modifications as are technically necessary to exercise the rights in other media and formats. All rights not expressly granted by Licensor are hereby reserved.
+
+_1 4. Restrictions. The license granted in Section 3 above is expressly made subject to and limited by the following restrictions:
+
+_2 1. You may distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform the Work only under the terms of this License, and You must include a copy of, or the Uniform Resource Identifier for, this License with every copy or phonorecord of the Work You distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform. You may not offer or impose any terms on the Work that alter or restrict the terms of this License or the recipients' exercise of the rights granted hereunder. You may not sublicense the Work. You must keep intact all notices that refer to this License and to the disclaimer of warranties. You may not distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform the Work with any technological measures that control access or use of the Work in a manner inconsistent with the terms of this License Agreement. The above applies to the Work as incorporated in a Collective Work, but this does not require the Collective Work apart from the Work itself to be made subject to the terms of this License. If You create a Collective Work, upon notice from any Licensor You must, to the extent practicable, remove from the Collective Work any reference to such Licensor or the Original Author, as requested.
+
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+
+_1 5. Representations, Warranties and Disclaimer
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+_2 1. By offering the Work for public release under this License, Licensor represents and warrants that, to the best of Licensor's knowledge after reasonable inquiry:
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+
+_1 6. Limitation on Liability. EXCEPT TO THE EXTENT REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW, AND EXCEPT FOR DAMAGES ARISING FROM LIABILITY TO A THIRD PARTY RESULTING FROM BREACH OF THE WARRANTIES IN SECTION 5, IN NO EVENT WILL LICENSOR BE LIABLE TO YOU ON ANY LEGAL THEORY FOR ANY SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR EXEMPLARY DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THIS LICENSE OR THE USE OF THE WORK, EVEN IF LICENSOR HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+_1 7. Termination
+
+_2 1. This License and the rights granted hereunder will terminate automatically upon any breach by You of the terms of this License. Individuals or entities who have received Collective Works from You under this License, however, will not have their licenses terminated provided such individuals or entities remain in full compliance with those licenses. Sections 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, and 8 will survive any termination of this License.
+
+_2 Subject to the above terms and conditions, the license granted here is perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright in the Work). Notwithstanding the above, Licensor reserves the right to release the Work under different license terms or to stop distributing the Work at any time; provided, however that any such election will not serve to withdraw this License (or any other license that has been, or is required to be, granted under the terms of this License), and this License will continue in full force and effect unless terminated as stated above.
+
+_1 8. Miscellaneous
+
+_2 1. Each time You distribute or publicly digitally perform the Work or a Collective Work, the Licensor offers to the recipient a license to the Work on the same terms and conditions as the license granted to You under this License.
+
+_2 2. If any provision of this License is invalid or unenforceable under applicable law, it shall not affect the validity or enforceability of the remainder of the terms of this License, and without further action by the parties to this agreement, such provision shall be reformed to the minimum extent necessary to make such provision valid and enforceable.
+
+_2 3. No term or provision of this License shall be deemed waived and no breach consented to unless such waiver or consent shall be in writing and signed by the party to be charged with such waiver or consent.
+
+_2 4. This License constitutes the entire agreement between the parties with respect to the Work licensed here. There are no understandings, agreements or representations with respect to the Work not specified here. Licensor shall not be bound by any additional provisions that may appear in any communication from You. This License may not be modified without the mutual written agreement of the Licensor and You.
+
+
+1~bio About the author:
+
+Cory Doctorow is Outreach Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, www.eff.org, and maintains a personal site at www.craphound.com. He is the co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing at www.boingboing.net, with more than 250,000 visitors a month. He won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer at the 2000 Hugo Awards. Born and raised in Toronto, he now lives in San Francisco. He enjoys using Google to look up interesting facts about long walks on the beach.
+
+1~other_works Other books by Cory Doctorow:
+
+/{A Place So Foreign and Eight More}/
+
+– short story collection, forthcoming from Four Walls Eight Windows in fall 2003, with an introduction by Bruce Sterling
+
+/{Essential Blogging}/, O'Reilly and Associates, 2002
+
+– with Rael Dornfest, J. Scott Johnson, Shelley Powers, Benjamin Trott and Mena G. Trott
+
+/{The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction}/, Alpha Books, 2000
+
+– co-written with Karl Schroeder
+
+% <!-- <rdf:RDF xmlns="http://web.resource.org/cc/" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"> <Work rdf:about="http://craphound.com/down">
+
+Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
+2003-1-9
+A novel by Cory Doctorow:
+
+Jules is a young man barely a century old. He's lived long enough to see the cure for death and the end of scarcity, to learn ten languages and compose three symphonies...and to realize his boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World.
+
+Disney World! The greatest artistic achievement of the long&#45;ago twentieth century. Now in the care of a network of volunteer "ad&#45;hocs" who keep the classic attractions running as they always have, enhanced with only the smallest high&#45;tech touches.
+
+Now, though, it seems the "ad hocs" are under attack. A new group has taken over the Hall of the Presidents and is replacing its venerable audioanimatronics with new, immersive direct&#45;to&#45;brain interfaces that give guests the illusion of being Washington, Lincoln, and all the others. For Jules, this is an attack on the artistic purity of Disney World itself. Worse: it appears this new group has had Jules killed. This upsets him. (It's only his fourth death and revival, after all.) Now it's war: war for the soul of the Magic Kingdom, a war of ever&#45;shifting reputations, technical wizardry, and entirely unpredictable outcomes.
+
+Bursting with cutting-edge speculation and human insight, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom reads like Neal Stephenson meets Nick Hornby: a coming-of-age romantic comedy and a kick-butt cybernetic tour de force.
diff --git a/data/samples/generic/for_the_win.cory_doctorow.sst b/data/samples/generic/for_the_win.cory_doctorow.sst
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5e25761
--- /dev/null
+++ b/data/samples/generic/for_the_win.cory_doctorow.sst
@@ -0,0 +1,7222 @@
+% SiSU 4.0
+
+@title: For the Win
+
+@creator:
+ :author: Doctorow, Cory
+
+@date:
+ :modified: 2010-09-16
+
+@rights:
+ :copyright: 2010 Cory Doctorow
+ :license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. That means, you are free: \\ to Share -- to copy, distribute and transmit the work; \\ to Remix -- to adapt the work; \\ Under the following conditions: \\ * Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). \\ * Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. \\ * Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one. \\ For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link http://craphound.com/ftw \\ Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get my permission. More info here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ See the end of this document for the complete legalese.
+
+@classify:
+ :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:novel;book:novel:fiction:counterculture|young adult|science fiction
+ :subject: novel
+
+@identifier:
+ :oclc: 468976621
+ :isbn: 9780765322166
+
+@notes:
+ :description: A group of teens from around the world find themselves drawn into an online revolution arranged by a mysterious young woman known as Big Sister Nor, who hopes to challenge the status quo and change the world using her virtual connections.
+
+@links:
+ { For the Win home }http://craphound.com/ftw
+ { @ Wikipedia }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_The_Win_(Cory_Doctorow_novel)
+ { @ Amazon.com }http://www.amazon.com/Win-Cory-Doctorow/dp/0765322161
+ { @ Barnes & Noble }http://search.barnesandnoble.com/For-the-Win/Cory-Doctorow/e/9780765322166
+
+@make:
+% :headings: none; none; none; scene #;
+ :num_top: 1
+ :breaks: new=:C; break=1
+ :home_button_text: {For the Win}http://craphound.com/ftw; {Cory Doctorow}http://www.doctorow.com
+ :footer: {For the Win}http://craphound.com/ftw; {Cory Doctorow}http://www.doctorow.com
+
+:A~ @title @author
+
+1~introduction- INTRODUCTION
+
+/{For the Win}/ is my second young adult novel, and, like my 2008 book /{Little Brother}/, it is meant to do more than tell a story. /{For the Win}/ is a book about economics (a subject that suddenly got a lot more relevant about halfway through the writing of this book, when the world's economy slid unceremoniously into the toilet and got stuck there), justice, politics, games and labor. /{For the Win}/ connects the dots between the way we shop, the way we organize, and the way we play, and why some people are rich, some are poor, and how we seemed to get stuck there.
+
+I hope that readers of this book will be inspired to dig deeper into the subjects of "behavioral economics" (and related subjects like "neuroeconomics") and to start asking hard questions about how we end up with the stuff we own, and what it costs our human brothers and sisters to make those goods, and why we think we need them.
+
+But it's a poor politics that can only express itself by choosing to buy or not buy something. Sometimes (often!), you need to organize to make a difference.
+
+This is the golden age of organizing. If there's one thing the Internet's changed forever, it's the relative difficulty and cost of getting a bunch of people in the same place, working for the same goal. That's not always good (thugs, bullies, racists and loonies never had it so good), but it is fundamentally /{game-changing}/.
+
+It's hard to remember just how difficult this organizing stuff used to be: how hard it was to do something as trivial as getting ten friends to agree on dinner and a movie, let alone getting millions of people together to raise money for a political candidate, get the vote out, protest corruption, or save an endangered and beloved institution.
+
+The net doesn't solve the problem of injustice, but it solves the first hard problem of righting wrongs: getting everyone together and keeping them together. You still have to do the even /{harder}/ work of risking life, limb, personal fortune, reputation,
+
+Every wonderful thing in our world has fight in its history. Our rights, our good fortune, our happiness and all that is sweet was paid for, once upon a time, by principled people who risked everything to change the world for the better. Those risks are not diminished one iota by the net. But the rewards are every bit as sweet.
+
+1~audiobook- AUDIOBOOK
+
+The good folks at Random House Audio produced a /{fantastic}/ audio edition of this book. You can buy it on CD, or you can buy the MP3 version from a variety of online booksellers. { I also sell it myself on my site }http://craphound.com/?cat=10
+
+Unfortunately, you can't buy this book from the world's most popular audiobook vendors: Apple's iTunes and Amazon's Audible. That's because neither store would allow me to sell the audiobook on terms that I believe are fair and just.
+
+Specifically, Apple refused to carry the book unless it had "digital rights management" on it. This is the technology that locks music to Apple's devices. It's illegal to move DRM-crippled files to devices that Apple hasn't blessed, which means that if I encourage you to buy my works through Apple, I lose the ability to choose to continue to sell to you from Apple's competition at some later date in the future. That seems like a bad deal for both of us.
+
+To its credit, Audible (which supplies all of the audiobooks on iTunes) /{was}/ willing to sell this book without DRM, but they insisted on including their extremely onerous "end user license agreement," which /{also}/ prohibits moving my book to a device that Audible hasn't approved. To make it easy for them, I offered to simply record a little intro that said, "Cory Doctorow and Random House Audio grant you permission to use this book in any way that does not violate copyright law." That way, they wouldn't have to make /{any}/ changes to their site or the agreements you have to click through to use it. But Audible refused.
+
+I wouldn't sell this book through Wal-Mart if they insisted that you could only shelve it on a Wal-Mart bookcase and I won't sell it through any online retailer that imposes the same requirement on your virtual bookshelves. That's also why you won't find my books for sale for the Kindle or iPad stores -- both stores insist on the right to lock you into terms that I believe are unfair and bad for both of us.
+
+I'm pretty bummed about this. For the record, I would gladly sell through both Apple and Audible if they'd let me sell it without DRM, and under the world's shortest EULA ("Don't violate copyright law.") In the meantime, I thank you in advance for patronizing online audiobook sellers who respect the rights of both authors and audiences. And I am especially grateful to Random House Audio for backing me in this fight to get a fair deal for all of us.
+
+1~copyright- THE COPYRIGHT THING
+
+The Creative Commons license at the top of this file probably tipped you off to the fact that I've got some pretty unorthodox views about copyright. Here's what I think of it, in a nutshell: a little goes a long way, and more than that is too much.
+
+I like the fact that copyright lets me sell rights to my publishers and film studios and so on. It's nice that they can't just take my stuff without permission and get rich on it without cutting me in for a piece of the action. I'm in a pretty good position when it comes to negotiating with these companies: I've got a great agent and a decade's experience with copyright law and licensing (including a stint as a delegate at WIPO, the UN agency that makes the world's copyright treaties). What's more, there's just not that many of these negotiations -- even if I sell fifty or a hundred different editions of /{For the Win}/ (which would put it in top millionth of a percentile for fiction), that's still only a hundred negotiations, which I could just about manage.
+
+I /{hate}/ the fact that fans who want to do what readers have always done are expected to play in the same system as all these hotshot agents and lawyers. It's just /{stupid}/ to say that an elementary school classroom should have to talk to a lawyer at a giant global publisher before they put on a play based on one of my books. It's ridiculous to say that people who want to "loan" their electronic copy of my book to a friend need to get a /{license}/ to do so. Loaning books has been around longer than any publisher on Earth, and it's a fine thing.
+
+Copyright laws are increasingly passed without democratic debate or scrutiny. In Great Britain, where I live, Parliament has just passed the Digital Economy Act, a complex copyright law that allows corporate giants to disconnect whole families from the Internet if anyone in the house is accused (without proof) of copyright infringement; it also creates a "Great Firewall of Britain" that is used to censor any site that record companies and movie studios don't like. This law was passed without any serious public debate in Parliament, rushed through using a dirty process through which our elected representatives betrayed the public to give a huge, gift-wrapped present to their corporate pals.
+
+It gets worse: around the world, rich countries like the US, the EU and Canada have been negotiating a secret copyright treaty called "The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement" (ACTA) that has all the problems that the Digital Economy Act had and then some. The plan is to agree to this in secret, without public debate, and then force the world's poorest countries to sign up for it by refusing to allow them to sell goods to rich countries unless the do. In America, the plan is to pass it without Congressional debate, using the executive power of the President. Though this began under Bush, the Obama administration has pursued it with great enthusiasm.
+
+So if you're not violating copyright law right now, you will be soon. And the penalties are about to get a lot worse. As someone who relies on copyright to earn my living, this makes me sick. If the big entertainment companies set out to destroy copyright's mission, they couldn't do any better than they're doing now.
+
+So, basically, /{screw that}/. Or, as the singer, Wobbly and union organizer Woody Guthrie so eloquently put it:
+
+"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin' it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."
+
+1~donations- DONATIONS AND A WORD TO TEACHERS AND LIBRARIANS
+
+Every time I put a book online for free, I get emails from readers who want to send me donations for the book. I appreciate their generous spirit, but I'm not interested in cash donations, because my publishers are really important to me. They contribute immeasurably to the book, improving it, introducing it to audiences I could never reach, helping me do more with my work. I have no desire to cut them out of the loop.
+
+But there has to be some good way to turn that generosity to good use, and I think I've found it.
+
+Here's the deal: there are lots of teachers and librarians who'd love to get hard-copies of this book into their kids' hands, but don't have the budget for it (teachers in the US spend around $1,200 out of pocket each on classroom supplies that their budgets won't stretch to cover, which is why I sponsor a classroom at Ivanhoe Elementary in my old neighborhood in Los Angeles; you can adopt a class yourself { here }http://www.adoptaclassroom.org/ ).
+
+There are generous people who want to send some cash my way to thank me for the free ebooks.
+
+I'm proposing that we put them together.
+
+If you're a teacher or librarian and you want a free copy of /{For the Win}/, email freeftwbook@gmail.com with your name and the name and address of your school. It'll be posted to http://craphound.com/ftw/donate/ by my fantastic helper, Olga Nunes, so that potential donors can see it.
+
+If you enjoyed the electronic edition of /{For the Win}/ and you want to donate something to say thanks, go to http://craphound.com/ftw/donate/ and find a teacher or librarian you want to support. Then go to Amazon, BN.com, or your favorite electronic bookseller and order a copy to the classroom, then email a copy of the receipt (feel free to delete your address and other personal info first!) to freeftwbook@gmail.com so that Olga can mark that copy as sent. If you don't want to be publicly acknowledged for your generosity, let us know and we'll keep you anonymous, otherwise we'll thank you on the donate page.
+
+I've done this with three of my titles now, and gotten more than a thousand books into the hands of readers through your generosity. I am more grateful than words can express for this -- one of my readers called it "paying your debts forward with instant gratification." That's a heck of a thing, isn't it?
+
+1~dedications- ABOUT THE BOOKSTORE DEDICATIONS
+
+Many scenes in this file have been dedicated to bookstores: stores that I love, stores that have helped me discover books that opened my mind, stores that have helped my career along. The stores didn't pay me anything for this -- I haven't even told them about it -- but it seems like the right thing to do. After all, I'm hoping that you'll read this ebook and decide to buy the paper book, so it only makes sense to suggest a few places you can pick it up!
+
+1~dedication- Dedication:
+
+For Poesy: Live as though it were the early days of a better nation.
+
+:B~ Part I: The gamers and their games, the workers at their work
+
+1~ scene # ~#
+
+_1 /{ This scene is dedicated to BakkaPhoenix Books in Toronto, Canada. Bakka is the oldest science fiction bookstore in the world, and it made me the mutant I am today. I wandered in for the first time around the age of 10 and asked for some recommendations. Tanya Huff (yes, }/ the /{Tanya Huff, but she wasn't a famous writer back then!) took me back into the used section and pressed a copy of H. Beam Piper's "Little Fuzzy" into my hands, and changed my life forever. By the time I was 18, I was working at Bakka -- I took over from Tanya when she retired to write full time -- and I learned life-long lessons about how and why people buy books. I think every writer should work at a bookstore (and plenty of writers have worked at Bakka over the years! For the 30th anniversary of the store, they put together an anthology of stories by Bakka writers that included work by Michelle Sagara (AKA Michelle West), Tanya Huff, Nalo Hopkinson, Tara Tallan --and me!) }/
+
+_1 {~^ BakkaPhoenix Books }http://www.bakkaphoenixbooks.com/: 697 Queen Street West, Toronto ON Canada M6J1E6, +1 416 963 9993
+
+In the game, Matthew's characters killed monsters, as they did every single night. But tonight, as Matthew thoughtfully chopsticked a dumpling out of the styrofoam clamshell, dipped it in the red hot sauce and popped it into his mouth, his little squadron did something extraordinary: they began to /{win}/.
+
+There were eight monitors on his desk, arranged in two ranks of four, the top row supported on a shelf he'd bought from an old lady scrap dealer in front of the Dongmen market. She'd also sold him the monitors, shaking her head at his idiocy: at a time when everyone wanted giant, 30" screens, why did he want this collection of dinky little 9" displays?
+
+/{So they'd all fit on his desk}/.
+
+Not many people could play eight simultaneous games of Svartalfaheim Warriors. For one thing, Coca Cola (who owned the game), had devoted a lot of programmer time to preventing you from playing more than one game on a single PC, so you had to somehow get eight PCs onto one desk, with eight keyboards and eight mice on the desk, too, and room enough for your dumplings and an ashtray and a stack of Indian comic books and that stupid war-axe that Ping gave him and his notebooks and his sketchbook and his laptop and --
+
+It was a crowded desk.
+
+And it was noisy. He'd set up eight pairs of cheap speakers, each glued to the appropriate monitor, turned down low to the normal hum of Svartalfaheim -- the clash of axes, the roar of ice-giants, the eldritch music of black elves (which sounded a lot like the demo programs on the electric keyboards his mother had spent half her life manufacturing). Now they were all making casino noise, /{pay off}/ noises, as his raiding party began to clean up. The gold rolled into their accounts. He was playing trolls -- it was trolls versus elves in Svartalfaheim, though there was an expansion module with light elves and some kind of walking tree -- and he'd come through an instanced dungeon that was the underground lair of a minor dark elvish princeling. The lair was only medium hard, with a lot of crappy little monsters early on, then a bunch of dark elf cannon-fodder to be mown down, some traps, and then the level-boss, a wizard who had to be taken out by the spell-casters in Matthew's party while the healers healed them and the tanks killed anything that tried to attack them.
+
+So far, so good. Matthew had run and mapped the dungeon on his second night in-world, a quick reccy that showed that he could expect to do about 400 gold's worth of business there in about 20 minutes, which made it a pretty poor way to earn a living. But Matthew kept /{very}/ good notes, and among his notes was the fact that the very last set of guards had dropped some mareridtbane, which was part of the powerful Living Nightmare spell in the new expansion module. There were players all over Germany, Switzerland and Denmark who were buying mareridtbane for 800 gold per plant. His initial reccy had netted him /{five}/ plants. That brought the total expected take from the dungeon up to 4,400 gold for 20 minutes, or 13,200 gold per hour -- which, at the day's exchange, was worth about $30, or 285 Renminbi.
+
+Which was -- he thought for a second -- more than 71 bowls of dumplings.
+
+/{Jackpot.}/
+
+His hands flew over the mice, taking direct control over the squad. He'd work out the optimal path through the dungeon now, then head out to the Huoda internet cafe and see who he could find to do runs with him at this. With any luck, they could take -- his eyes rolled up as he thought again -- a /{million}/ gold out of the dungeon if they could get the whole cafe working on it. They'd dump the gold as they went, and by the time Coca Cola's systems administrators figured out anything was wrong, they'd have pulled almost $3000 out of the game. That was a year's rent, for one night's work. His hands trembled as he flipped open a notebook to a new page and began to take notes with his left hand while his right hand worked the game.
+
+He was just about to close his notebook and head for the cafe -- he needed more dumplings on the way, could he stop for them? Could he afford to? But he needed to eat. And coffee. Lots of coffee -- when the door splintered and smashed against the wall bouncing back before it was kicked open again, admitting the cold fluorescent light from outside into his tiny cave of a room. Three men entered his room and closed the door behind them, restoring the dark. One of them found the lightswitch and clicked it a few times without effect, then cursed in Mandarin and punched Matthew in the ear so hard his head spun around on his neck, contriving to bounce off the desk. The pain was blinding, searing, sudden.
+
+"Light," one of the men commanded, his voice reaching Matthew through the high-pitched whine of his ringing ear. Clumsily, he fumbled for the desk-lamp behind the Indian comics, knocked it over, and then one of the men seized it roughly and turned it on, shining it full on Matthew's face, making him squint his watering eyes.
+
+"You have been warned," the man who'd hit him said. Matthew couldn't see him, but he didn't need to. He knew the voice, the unmistakable Wenjhou accent, almost impossible to understand. "Now, another warning." There was a /{snick}/ of a telescoping baton being unfurled and Matthew flinched and tried to bring his arms up to shield his head before the weapon swung. But the other two had him by the arms now, and the baton whistled past his ear.
+
+But it didn't smash his cheekbone, nor his collarbone. Rather, it was the screen before him that smashed, sending tiny, sharp fragments of glass out in a cloud that seemed to expand in slow motion, peppering his face and hands. Then another screen went. And another. And another. One by one, the man dispassionately smashed all eight screens, letting out little smoker's grunts as he worked. Then, with a much bigger, guttier grunt, he took hold of one end of the shelf and tipped it on its edge, sending the smashed monitors on it sliding onto the floor, taking the comics, the clamshell, the ashtray, all of it sliding to the narrow bed that was jammed up against the desk, then onto the floor in a crash as loud as a basketball match in a glass factory.
+
+Matthew felt the hands on his shoulders tighten and he was lifted out of his chair and turned to face the man with the accent, the man who had worked as the supervisor in Mr Wing's factory, almost always silent. But when he spoke, they all jumped in their seat, never sure of whether his barely contained rage would break, whether someone would be taken off the factory floor and then returned to the dorm that night, bruised, cut, sometimes crying in the night for parents left behind back in the provinces.
+
+The man's face was calm now, as though the violence against the machines had scratched the unscratchable itch that made him clench and unclench his fists at all times. "Matthew, Mr Wing wants you to know that he thinks of you as a wayward son, and bears you no ill will. You are always welcome in his home. All you need to do is ask for his forgiveness, and it will be given." It was the longest speech Matthew had ever heard the man give, and it was delivered with surprising tenderness, so it was quite a surprise when the man brought his knee up into Matthew's balls, hard enough that he saw stars.
+
+The hands released him and he slumped to the floor, a strange sound in his ears that he realized after a moment must have been his voice. He was barely aware of the men moving around his tiny room as he gasped like fish, trying to get air into his lungs, air enough to scream at the incredible, radiant pain in his groin.
+
+But he did hear the horrible electrical noise as they tasered the box that held his computers, eight PCs on eight individual boards, stuck in a dented sheet-metal case he'd bought from the same old lady. The ozone smell afterwards sent him whirling back to his grandfather's little flat, the smell of the dust crisping on the heating coil that the old man only turned on when he came to visit. He did hear them gather up his notebooks and tread heavily on the PC case, and pull the shattered door shut behind them. The light from the desklamp painted a crazy oval on the ceiling that he stared at for a long time before he got to his feet, whimpering at the pain in his balls.
+
+The night guard was standing at the end of the corridor when he limped out into the night. He was only a boy, even younger than Matthew -- sixteen, in a uniform that was two sizes too big for his skinny chest, a hat that was always slipping down over his eyes, so he had to look up from under the brim like a boy wearing his father's hat.
+
+"You OK?" the boy said. His eyes were wide, his face pale.
+
+Matthew patted himself down, wincing at the pain in his ear, the shooting stabbing feeling in his neck.
+
+"I think so," he said.
+
+"You'll have to pay for the door," the guard said.
+
+"Thanks," Matthew said. "Thanks so much."
+
+"It's OK," the boy said. "It's my job."
+
+Matthew clenched and unclenched his fists and headed out into the Shenzhen night, limping down the stairs and into the neon glow. It was nearly midnight, but Jiabin Road was still throbbing with music, food and hawkers and touts, old ladies chasing foreigners down the street, tugging at their sleeves and offering them "beautiful young girls" in English. He didn't know where he was going, so he just walked, fast, fast as he could, trying to walk off the pain and the enormity of his loss. The computers in his room hadn't cost much to build, but he hadn't had much to begin with. They'd been nearly everything he owned, save for his comics, a few clothes -- and the war-axe. Oh, the war-axe. That was an entertaining vision, picking it up and swinging it over his head like a dark elf, the whistle of its blade slicing the air, the meaty /{thunk}/ as it hit the men.
+
+He knew it was ridiculous. He hadn't been in a fight since he was ten years old. He'd been a /{vegetarian}/ until last year! He wasn't going to hit anyone with a war axe. It was as useless as his smashed computers.
+
+Gradually, he slowed his pace. He was out of the central area around the train station now, in the outer ring of the town center, where it was dark and as quiet as it ever got. He leaned against the steel shutters over a grocery market and put his hands on his thighs and let his sore head droop.
+
+Matthew's father had been unusual among their friends -- a Cantonese who succeeded in the new Shenzhen. When Premier Deng changed the rules so that the Pearl River Delta became the world's factory, his family's ancestral province had filled overnight with people from the provinces. They'd "jumped into the sea" -- left safe government factory jobs to seek their fortune here on the south Chinese coast -- and everything had changed for Matthew's family. His grandfather, a Christian minister who'd been sent to a labor camp during the Cultural Revolution -- had never made the adjustment, a problem that struck many of the native Cantonese, who seemed to stand still as the outsiders raced past them to become rich and powerful.
+
+But not Matthew's father. The old man had started off as a driver for a shoe-factory boss -- learning to drive on the job, nearly cracking up the car more than once, though the owner didn't seem to mind. After all, he'd never ridden in a car before he'd made it big in Shenzhen. But he got his break one day when the pattern-maker was too sick to work and all production ceased while the girls who worked on the line argued about the best way to cut the leather for a new order that had come in.
+
+Matthew's father loved to tell this story. He'd heard the argument go back and forth for a day as the line jerked along slowly, and he'd sat on his chair and thought, and thought, and then he'd stood up and closed his eyes and pictured the calm ocean until the thunder of his heartbeat slowed to a normal beat. Then he'd walked into the owner's office and said, "Boss, I can show you how to cut those hides."
+
+It was no easy task. The hides were all slightly different shapes -- cows weren't identical, after all -- and parts of them were higher grade than others. The shoe itself, an Italian men's loafer, needed six different pieces for each side, and only some of them were visible. The parts that were inside the shoe didn't need to come from the finest leather, but the parts outside did. All this Matthew's father had absorbed while sitting in his chair and listening to the arguments. He'd always loved to draw, always had a good head for space and design.
+
+And before his boss could throw him out of the office, he'd plucked up his courage and seized a pen off the desk and rooted a crumpled cigarette package out of the trash -- expensive foreign cigarettes, affected by all the factory owners as a show of wealth -- torn it open and drawn a neat cowhide, and quickly shown how the shoes could be fit to the hide with a minimum of wastage, a design that would get ten pairs of shoes per hide.
+
+"Ten?" the boss said.
+
+"Ten," Matthew's father said, proudly. He knew that the most that Master Yu, the regular cutter, ever got out of a hide was nine. "Eleven, if you use a big hide, or if you're making small shoes."
+
+"You can cut this?"
+
+Now, before that day, Matthew's father had never cut a hide in his life, had no idea how to slice the supple leather that came back from the tanner. But that morning he'd risen two hours early, before anyone else was awake, and he'd taken his leather jacket, a graduation present from his own father that he'd owned and treasured for ten years, and he'd taken the sharpest knife in the kitchen, and he'd sliced the jacket to ribbons, practicing until he could make the knife slice the leather in the same reliable, efficient arcs that his eyes and mind could trace over them.
+
+"I can try," he said, with modesty. He was nervous about his boldness. His boss wasn't a nice man, and he'd fired many employees for insubordination. If he fired Matthew's father, he would be out a job and a jacket. And the rent was due, and the family had no savings.
+
+The boss looked at him, looked at the sketch. "OK, you try."
+
+And that was the day that Matthew's father stopped being Driver Fong and became Master Fong, the junior cutter at the Infinite Quality Shoe Factory. Less than a year later, he was the head cutter, and the family thrived.
+
+Matthew had heard this story so many times growing up that he could recite it word-for-word with his father. It was more than a story: it was the family legend, more important than any of the history he'd learned in school. As stories went, it was a good one, but Matthew was determined that his own life would have an even better story still. Matthew would not be the second Master Fong. He would be Boss Fong, the first -- a man with his own factory, his own fortune.
+
+And like his father, Matthew had a gift.
+
+Like his father, Matthew could look at a certain kind of problem and /{see}/ the solution. And the problems Matthew could solve involved killing monsters and harvesting their gold and prestige items, better and more efficiently than anyone else he'd ever met or heard of.
+
+Matthew was a gold farmer, but not just one of those guys who found themselves being approached by an Internet cafe owner and offered seven or eight RMB to keep right on playing, turning over all the gold they won to the boss, who'd sell it on by some mysterious process. Matthew was Master Fong, the gold farmer who could run a dungeon once and tell you exactly the right way to run it again to get the maximum gold in the minimum time. Where a normal farmer might make 50 gold in an hour, Matthew could make 500. And if you watched Matthew play, you could do it too.
+
+Mr Wing had quickly noticed Matthew's talent. Mr Wing didn't like games, didn't care about the legends of Iceland or England or India or Japan. But Mr Wing understood how to make boys work. He displayed their day's take on big boards at both ends of his factory, treated the top performers to lavish meals and baijiu parties in private rooms at his karaoke club where there were beautiful girls. Matthew remembered these evenings through a bleary haze: a girl on either side of him on a sofa, pressed against him, their perfume in his nose, refilling his glass as Mr Wing toasted him for a hero, extolling his achievements. The girls oohed and aahed and pressed harder against him. Mr Wing always laughed at him the next day, because he'd pass out before he could go with one of the girls into an even /{more}/ private room.
+
+Mr Wing made sure all the other boys knew about this failing, made sure that they teased "Master Fong" about his inability to hold his liquor, his shyness around girls. And Matthew saw exactly what Boss Wing was doing: setting Matthew up as a hero, above his friends, then making sure that his friends knew that he wasn't /{that}/ much of a hero, that he could be toppled. And so they all farmed gold harder, for longer hours, eating dumplings at their computers and shouting at each other over their screens late into the night and the cigarette haze.
+
+The hours had stretched into days, the days had stretched into months, and one day Matthew woke up in the dorm room filled with farts and snores and the smell of 20 young men in a too-small room, and realized that he'd had enough of working for Boss Wing. That was when he decided that he would become his own man. That was when he set out to be Boss Fong.
+
+#
+
+1~ scene # ~#
+
+_1 /{ This scene is dedicated to Amazon.com, the largest Internet bookseller in the world. Amazon is }/ amazing /{-- a "store" where you can get practically any book ever published (along with practically everything else, from laptops to cheese-graters), where they've elevated recommendations to a high art, where they allow customers to directly communicate with each other, where they are constantly inventing new and better ways of connecting books with readers. Amazon has always treated me like gold -- the founder, Jeff Bezos, even posted a reader-review for my first novel! -- and I shop there like crazy (looking at my spreadsheets, it appears that I buy something from Amazon approximately every}/ six days /{). Amazon's in the process of reinventing what it means to be a bookstore in the twenty-first century and I can't think of a better group of people to be facing down that thorny set of problems.}/
+
+_1 {~^ Amazon }http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0765322161/downandoutint-20
+
+Wei-Dong Goldberg woke one minute before his alarm rang, the glowing numbers showing 12:59. 1AM in Los Angeles, 6PM in China, and it was time to go raiding.
+
+He wiped the sleep out of his eyes and climbed out of his narrow bed -- his mom still put his goddamned Spongebob sheets on it, so he'd drawn beards and horns and cigarettes on all the faces in permanent marker -- and crossed silently to his school-bag and retrieved his laptop, then felt around on his desk for the little Bluetooth earwig, screwing it into his ear.
+
+He made a pile of pillows against the headboard and sat cross-legged against them, lifting the lid and firing up his gamespy, looking for his buds, all the way over there in Shenzhen. As the screen filled with names and the games they could be found in, he smiled to himself. It was time to play.
+
+Three clicks later and he was in Savage Wonderland, spawning on his clockwork horse with his sword in his hand, amid the garden of talking, hissing flowers, ready to do battle. And there were his boys, riding up alongside of him, their clockwork mounts snorting and champing for battle.
+
+"Ni hao!" he said into his headset, in as loud a whisper as he dared. His father had a bladder problem and he got up all night long and never slept very deeply. Wei-Dong couldn't afford that. If his parents caught him at it one more time, they'd take away his computer. They'd ground him. They'd send him to a military academy where they shaved your head and you got beaten up in the shower because it built character. He'd been treated to all these threats and more, and they'd made an impression on him.
+
+Not enough of an impression to get him to stop playing games in the middle of the night, of course.
+
+"Ni hao!" he said again. There was laughter, distant and flanged by network churn.
+
+"Hello, Leonard," Ping said. "You are learning your Chinese well, I see." Ping still called him /{Leonard}/, but at least he was talking in Mandarin to him now, which was a big improvement. The guys normally liked to practice their English on him, which meant he couldn't practice his Chinese on /{them}/.
+
+"I practice," he said.
+
+They laughed again and he knew that he'd gotten something wrong. The intonation. He was always getting it wrong. He'd say, "I'll go aggro those demons and you buff the cleric," and it would come out, "I am a bowl of noodles, I have beautiful eyelashes." But he was getting better. By the time he got to China, he'd have it nailed.
+
+"Are we raiding?" he said.
+
+"Yes!" Ping said, and the others agreed. "We just need to wait for the gweilo." Wei-Dong loved that he wasn't the gweilo anymore. Gweilo meant "foreign devil," and technically, he qualified. But he was one of the raiders now, and the gweilos were the paying customers who shelled out good dollars or euros or rupees or pounds to play alongside of them.
+
+Here was the gweilo now. You could tell because he frequently steered his horse off the path and into the writhing grasp of the living plants, having to stop over and over to hack away their grasping vines. After watching this show for a minute or two, he rode out and cast a protection spell around them both, and the vines sizzled on the glowing red bubble that surrounded them both.
+
+"Thanks," the gweilo said.
+
+"No problem," he said.
+
+"Woah, you speak English?" The gweilo had a strong New Jersey accent.
+
+"A little," Wei-Dong said, with a smile. /{Better than you, dummy}/, he thought.
+
+"OK, let's do this thing," the gweilo said, and the rest of the party caught up with them.
+
+The gweilo had paid them to raid an instance of The Walrus's Garden, a pretty hard underwater dungeon that had some really good drops in it -- ingredients for potions, some pretty good weapons, and, of course, lots of gold. There were a couple prestige items that dropped there, albeit rarely -- you could get a vorpal blade and helmet if you were very lucky. The deal was, the gweilo paid them to run the instance with him, and he could just hang back and let the raiders do all the heavy lifting, but he'd come forward to deal the coup de grace to any big bosses they beat down, so he'd get the experience points. He got to keep the gold, the weapons, the prestige items, all of it -- and all for the low, low cost of $75. The raiders got the cash, the gweilo got to level up fast and pick up a ton of treasure.
+
+Wei-Dong often wondered what kind of person would pay strangers to help them get ahead in a game? The usual reason that gweilos gave for hiring raiders was that they wanted to play with their friends, and their friends were all more advanced than them. But Wei-Dong had joined games after his friends and being the noob in his little group, he'd just asked his buds to take him raiding with them, twinking him until his character was up to their level. So if this gweilo had so many pals in this game that he wanted to level up to meet them, why couldn't he get them to power-level his character up with them? Why was he paying the raiders?
+
+Wei-Dong suspected that it was because the guy had no friends.
+
+"Go d /{damn}/ would you look at that?" It was at least the tenth time the guy had said it in ten minutes as they rode to the seashore. This time it was the tea-party, a perpetual melee that was a blur of cutlery whistling through the air, savage chairs roaming in packs, chasing luckless players who happened to aggro them, and a crazy-hard puzzle in which you had to collect and arrange the crockery just so, stunning each piece so that it wouldn't crawl away before you were done with it. It was pretty cool, Wei-Dong had to admit (he'd solved the puzzle in two days of hard play, and gotten the teapot for his trouble, which he could use to summon genies in moments of dire need). But the gweilo was acting like he'd never seen computer graphics, ever.
+
+They rode on, chattering in Chinese on a private channel. Mostly, it was too fast for Wei-Dong to follow, but he caught the gist of it. They were talking about work -- the raids they had set up for the rest of the night, the boss and his stupid rules, the money and what they'd do with it. Girls. They were always talking about girls.
+
+At last they were at the seaside, and Wei-Dong cast the Red Queen's Air Pocket, using up the last of his oyster shells to do so. They all dismounted, flapping their gills comically as they sloshed into the water ("Go d /{damn}/," breathed the gweilo).
+
+The Walrus's Garden was a tricky raid, because it was different every time you ran it, the terrain regenerating for each party. As the spellcaster, Wei-Dong's job was to keep the lights on and the air flowing so that no matter what came, they'd see it in time to prepare and vanquish it. First came the octopuses, rising from the bottom with a puff of sand, sailing through the water toward them. Lu, the tank, positioned himself between the party and the octopuses, and, after thrashing around and firing a couple of missiles at them to aggro them, went totally still as, one after another, they wrapped themselves around him, crushing him with their long tentacles, their faces crazed masks of pure malevolence.
+
+Once they were all engrossed in the tank, the rest of the party swarmed them, the four of them drawing their edged weapons with a watery /{clang}/ and going to work in a writhing knot. Wei-Dong kept a close eye on the tank's health and cast his healing spells as needed. As each octopus was reduced to near death, the raiders pulled away and Wei-Dong hissed into his mic, "Finish him!" The gweilo fumbled around for the first two beasts, but by the end, he was moving efficiently to dispatch them.
+
+"That was /{sick}/," the gweilo said. "Totally badass! How'd that guy absorb all that damage, anyway?"
+
+"He's a tank," Wei-Dong said. "Fighter class, heavy armor. Lots of buffs. And I was keeping up the healing spells the whole time."
+
+"I'm fighter class, aren't I?"
+
+/{You don't know?}/ This guy had a /{lot}/ more money than brains, that was for sure.
+
+"I just started playing. I'm not much of a gamer. But you know, all my friends --"
+
+/{I know}/, Wei-Dong thought. /{All the cool kids you knew were doing it, so you decided you had to keep up with them. You don't have any friends -- yet. But you think you will, if you play.}/ "Sure," he said. "Just stick close, you're doing fine. You'll be leveled up by breakfast time." That was another mark against the gweilo: he had the money to pay for a power-levelling session with their raiding guild, but he wasn't willing to pay the premium to do it in a decent American timezone. That was good news for the rest of the guild, sure -- it saved them having to find somewhere to do the run during daylight hours in China, when the Internet cafes were filled with straights -- but it meant that Wei-Dong had to be up in the middle of the night and then drag his butt around school all the next day.
+
+Not that it wasn't worth it.
+
+Now they were into the crags and caves of the garden, dodging the eels and giant lobsters that surged out of their holes as they passed. Wei-Dong found some more oyster shells and surreptitiously picked them up. Technically, they were the gweilo's to have first refusal over, but they were needed if he was going to keep on casting the Air Pocket, which he might have to do if they kept up at this slow pace. And the gweilo didn't notice, anyway.
+
+"You're not in China, are you?" the gweilo asked.
+
+"Not exactly," he said, looking out the window at the sky over Orange County, the most boring ZIP code in California.
+
+"Where are you guys?"
+
+"They're in China. Where I live, you can see the Disneyland fireworks show every night."
+
+"Go d /{damn}/," the gweilo said. "Ain't you got better things to do than help some idiot level up in the middle of the night?"
+
+"I guess I don't," he said. Mixed in behind were the guys laughing and catcalling in Chinese on their channel. He grinned to hear them.
+
+"I mean, hell, I can see why someone in China'd do a crappy job for a rotten 75 bucks, but if you're in America, dude, you should have some /{pride}/, get some real work!"
+
+"And why would someone in China want to do a crappy job?" The guys were listening in now. They didn't have great English, but they spoke enough to get by.
+
+"You know, it's /{China}/. There's /{billions}/ of 'em. Poor as dirt and ignorant. I don't blame 'em. You can't blame 'em. It's not their fault. But hell, once you get out of China and get to America, you should /{act}/ like an American. We don't do that kind of work."
+
+"What makes you think I 'got out of China'?"
+
+"Didn't you?"
+
+"I was born here. My parents were born here. Their parents were born here. Their parents came here from Russia."
+
+"I didn't know they had Chinese in Russia."
+
+Wei-Dong laughed. "I'm not Chinese, dude."
+
+"You aren't? Well, go d /{damn}/ then, I'm sorry. I figured you were. What are you, then, the boss or something?"
+
+Wei-Dong closed his eyes and counted to ten. When he opened them again, the carpenters had swum out of the wrecked galleon before them, their T-squares and saws at the ready. They moved by building wooden boxes and gates around themselves, which acted as barricades, and they worked /{fast}/. On the land, you could burn their timbers, but that didn't work under the sea. Once they had you boxed in, they drove long nails through boards around you. It was a grisly, slow way to die.
+
+Of course, they had the gweilo surrounded in a flash, and they all had to pile on to fight them free. Xiang summoned his familiar, a boar, and Wei-Dong spelled it its own air bubble and it set to work, tearing up the planks with its tusks. When at last the carpenters managed to kill it, it turned into a baby and floated, lifeless, to the ocean's surface, accompanied by a ghostly weeping. Savage Wonderland /{looked}/ like it was all laughs, but it was really grim when you got down to it, and the puzzles were hard and the big bosses were /{really}/ hard.
+
+Speaking of bosses: they put down the last of the carpenters and as they did, a swirling current disturbed the sea-bottom, kicking up sand that settled slowly, revealing the vorpal blade and armor, encrusted in barnacles. And the gweilo gave a whoop and a holler and dove for it clumsily, as they all shouted at once for him to stop, to wait, and then --
+
+And then he triggered the trap that they all knew was there.
+
+And then there was /{trouble.}/
+
+The Jabberwock did indeed have eyes of flame, and it did make a "burbling" sound, just like it said in the poem. But the Jabberwock did a lot more than give you dirty looks and belch. The Jabberwock was /{mean}/, it soaked up a lot of damage, and it gave as good as it got. It was fast, too, faster than the carpenters, so one minute you could be behind it and then it would do a barrel roll -- its tail like a whip, cracking and knocking back anything that got in its way -- and it would be facing you, rearing up with its spindly claws splayed, its narrow chest heaving. The jaws that bite, the claws that catch -- and once they'd caught you, the Jabberwock would beat you against the hardest surface in reach, doing insane damage while you squirmed to get free. And the burbling? Not so much like burping, really: more like the sound of meat going through a grinder, a nasty sound. A /{bloody}/ sound.
+
+The first time Wei-Dong had managed to kill a Jabberwock -- after a weekend's continuous play -- he'd crashed hard and had nightmares about that sound.
+
+"Nice going, jackass," Wei-Dong said as he hammered on his keyboard, trying to get all his spells up and running without getting disemboweled by the nightmare beast before them. It had Lu and was beating the everloving piss out of him, but that was OK, it was just Lu, his job was to get beaten up. Wei-Dong cast his healing spells at Lu while he swam back as fast as he could.
+
+"Now, that's not nice," the gweilo said. "How the hell was I supposed to know --"
+
+"You weren't. You didn't know. You don't know. That's the /{point}/. That's why you hired /{us}/. Now we're going to use up all our spells and potions fighting this thing --" he broke off for a second and hit some more keys "-- and it's going to take /{days}/ to get it all back, just because you couldn't wait at the back like you were /{supposed}/ to."
+
+"I don't have to take this," the gweilo said. "I'm a customer, dammit."
+
+"You want to be a /{dead}/ customer, buddy?" Wei-Dong said. He'd barely had any time to talk with his guildies on the whole raid, he'd been stuck talking to this dumb English speaker. Now the guy was mouthing off to him. It made him want to throw his computer against the wall. See what being nice gets you?
+
+If the gweilo replied, Wei-Dong didn't hear it, because the Jabberwock was really pouring on the heat. He was out of potions and healing spells and Lu wasn't going to last much longer. Oh, /{crap}/. It had Ping in its other claw now, and it was worrying at his armor with a long fang, trying to peel him like a grape. He tabbed over to his voice-chat controller and dialled up the Chinese channel to full, tuning out the gweilo.
+
+It was a chaos of fast, profane dialect, slangy Chinese that mixed in curse-words from Japanese comics and Indian movies. The boys were all hollering, too fast for him to get more than the sense of things.
+
+There was Ping, though, calling for him. "Leonard! Healing!"
+
+"I'm out!" he said, hating how this was all going. "I'm totally empty. Used it all up on Lu!"
+
+"That's it, then," Ping said. "We're dead." They all howled with disappointment. In spite of himself, Wei-Dong grinned. "You think he'll reschedule, or are we going to have to give him his money back?"
+
+Wei-Dong didn't know, but he had a feeling that this goober wasn't going to be very cooperative if they told him that he'd gotten up in the middle of the night for nothing. Even if it was his fault.
+
+He sucked in some whistling breaths through his nose and tried to calm down. It was almost 2AM now. In the house around him, all was silent. A car revved its engine somewhere far away, but the night was so quiet the sound carried into his bedroom.
+
+"OK," he said. "OK, let me do something about this."
+
+Every game had a couple of BFGs, Big Friendly Guns (or at least /{some}/ kind of Big Gun), that were nearly impossible to get and nearly impossible to resist. In Savage Wonderland, they were also nearly impossible to re-load: the rare monster blunderbuss that you had to spend /{months}/ gathering parts for fired huge loads of sharpened cutlery from the Tea Party, and just collecting enough for a single load took eight or nine hours of gameplay. Impossible to get -- impossible to load. Practically no one had one.
+
+But Wei-Dong did. Ignoring the shouting in his headset, he backed off to the edge of the blunderbuss's range and began to arm it, a laborious process of dumping all that cutlery into the muzzle. "Get in front of it," he said. "In front of it, now!"
+
+His guildies could see what he was doing now and they were whooping triumphantly, arraying their toons around its front, occupying its attention, clearing his line of fire. All he needed was one...more...second.
+
+He pulled the trigger. There was a snap and a hiss as the powder in the pan began to burn. The sound made the Jabberwock turn its head on its long, serpentine neck. It regarded him with its burning eyes and it dropped Ping and Lu to the oceanbed. The powder in the pan flared -- and died.
+
+/{Misfire}/!
+
+/{Ohcrapohcrapohcrap,}/ he muttered, hammering, /{hammering}/ on the re-arm sequence, his fingers a blur on the mouse-buttons. "Crapcrapcrapcrap."
+
+The Jabberwock smiled, and made that wet meaty sound again. /{Burble burble, little boy, I'm coming for you}/. It was the sound from his nightmare, the sound of his dream of heroism dying. The sound of a waste of a day's worth of ammo and a night's worth of play. He was a dead man.
+
+The Jabberwock did one of those whipping, rippling barrel-rolls that were its trademark. The currents buffeted him, sending him rocking from side to side. He corrected, overcorrected, corrected again, hit the re-arm button, the fire button, the re-arm button, the fire button --
+
+The Jabberwock was facing him now. It reared back, flexing its claws, clicking its jaws together. In a second it would be on him, it would open him from crotch to throat and eat his guts, any second now --
+
+/{Crash!}/ The sound of the blunderbuss was like an explosion in a pots-and-pans drawer, a million metallic clangs and bangs as the sea was sliced by a rapidly expanding cone of lethal, screaming metal tableware.
+
+The Jabberwock /{dissolved}/, ripped into a slowly rising mushroom of meat and claws and leathery scales. The left side of its head ripped toward him and bounced off him, settling in the sand. The water turned pink, then red, and the death-screech of the Jabberwock seemed to carom off the water and lap back over him again and again. It was a /{fantastic}/ sound.
+
+His guildies were going nuts, seven thousand miles away, screaming his name, and not /{Leonard,}/ but /{Wei-Dong}/, chanting it in their Internet Cafe off Jiabin Road in Shenzhen. Wei-Dong was grinning ferociously in his bedroom, basking in it.
+
+And when the water cleared, there again were the vorpal blade and helmet in their crust of barnacles, sitting innocently on the ocean floor. The gweilo -- the gweilo, he'd forgotten all about the gweilo! -- moved clumsily toward it.
+
+"I don't think so," said Ping, in pretty good English. His toon moved so fast that the gweilo probably didn't even see him coming. Ping's sword went snicker-snack, and the gweilo's head fell to the sand, a dumb, betrayed expression on its face.
+
+"What the --"
+
+Wei-Dong dropped him from the chat.
+
+"That's your treasure, brother," Ping said. "You earned it."
+
+"But the money --"
+
+"We can make the money tomorrow night. That was /{killer, dude}/!" It was one of Ping's favorite English phrases, and it was the highest praise in their guild. And now he had a vorpal blade and helmet. It was a good night.
+
+They surfaced and paddled to shore and conjured up their mounts again and rode back to the guild-hall, chatting all the way, dispatching the occasional minor beast without much fuss. The guys weren't too put out at being 75 bucks' poorer than they'd expected. They were players first, business people second. And that had been /{fun}/.
+
+And now it was 2:30 and he'd have to be up for school in four hours, and at this rate, he was going to be lying awake for a /{long}/ time. "OK, I'm going to go guys," he said, in his best Chinese. They bade him farewell, and the chat channel went dead. In the sudden silence of his room, he could hear his pulse pounding in his ears. And another sound -- a tread on the floor outside his door. A hand on the doorknob --
+
+/{Crapcrapcrap}/
+
+He manged to get the lid of the laptop down and his covers pulled up before the door opened, but he was still holding the machine under the sheets, and his father's glare from the doorway told him that he wasn't fooling anyone. Wordlessly, still glaring, his father crossed the room and delicately removed the earwig from Wei-Dong's ear. It glowed telltale blue, blinking, looking for the laptop that was now sleeping under Wei-Dong's artistically redecorate Spongebob sheets.
+
+"Dad --" he began.
+
+"Leonard, it's 2:30 in the morning. I'm not going to discuss this with you right now. But we're going to talk about it in the morning. And you're going to have a long, long time to think about it afterward." He yanked back the sheet and took the laptop out of Wei-Dong's now-limp hand.
+
+"Dad!" he said, as his father turned and left the room, but his father gave no indication he'd heard before he pulled the bedroom door firmly and authoritatively shut.
+
+#
+
+1~ scene # ~#
+
+_1 /{ This scene is dedicated to Borderlands Books, San Francisco's magnificent independent science fiction bookstore. Borderlands is not just notorious for its brilliant events, signings, book clubs and such, but also for its amazing hairless Egyptian cat, Ripley, who likes to perch like a buzzing gargoyle on the computer at the front of the store. Borderlands is about the friendliest bookstore you could ask for, filled with comfy places to sit and read, and staffed by incredibly knowledgeable clerks who know everything there is to know about science fiction. Even better, they've always been willing to take orders for my book (by net or phone) and hold them for me to sign when I drop into the store, then they ship them within the US for free! }/
+
+_1 {~^ Borderlands Books }http://www.borderlands-books.com/: 866 Valencia Ave, San Francisco CA USA 94110 +1 888 893 4008
+
+Mala missed the birdcalls. When they'd lived in the village, there'd been birdsong every morning, breaking the perfect peace of the night to let them know that the sun was rising and the day was beginning. That was when she'd been a little girl. Here in Mumbai, there were some sickly rooster calls at dawn, but they were nearly drowned out by the neverending trafficsong: the horns, the engines revving, the calls late in the night.
+
+In the village, there'd been the birdcalls, the silence, and peace, times when everyone wasn't always watching. In Mumbai, there was nothing but the people, the people everywhere, so that every breath you breathed tasted of the mouth that had exhaled it before you got it.
+
+She and her mother and her brother slept together in a tiny room over Mr Kunal's plastic-recycling factory in Dharavi, the huge squatter's slum at the north end of the city. During the day, the room was used to sort plastic into a dozen tubs -- the plastic coming from an endless procession of huge rice-sacks that were filled at the shipyards. The ships went to America and Europe and Asia filled with goods made in India and came back filled with garbage, plastic that the pickers of Dharavi sorted, cleaned, melted and reformed into pellets and shipped to the factories so that they could be turned into manufactured goods and shipped back to America, Europe and Asia.
+
+When they'd arrived at Dharavi, Mala had found it terrifying: the narrow shacks growing up to blot out the sky, the dirt lanes between them with gutters running in iridescent blue and red from the dye-shops, the choking always-smell of burning plastic, the roar of motorbikes racing between the buildings. And the eyes, eyes from every window and roof, all watching them as mamaji led her and her little brother to the factory of Mr Kunal, where they were to live now and forevermore.
+
+But barely a year had gone by and the smell had disappeared. The eyes had become friendly. She could hop from one lane to another with perfect confidence, never getting lost on her way to do the marketing or to attend the afternoon classes at the little school-room over the restaurant. The sorting work had been boring, but never hard, and there was always food, and there were other girls to play with, and mamaji had made friends who helped them out. Piece by piece, she'd become a Dharavi girl, and now she looked on the newcomers with a mixture of generosity and pity.
+
+And the work -- well, the work had gotten a lot better, just lately.
+
+It started when she was in the games-cafe with Yasmin, stealing an hour after lessons to spend a few Rupees of the money she'd saved from her pay-packet (almost all of it went to the family, of course, but mamaji sometimes let her keep some back and advised her to spend it on a treat at the cornershop). Yasmin had never played Zombie Mecha, but of course they'd both seen the movies at the little filmi house on the road that separated the Muslim and the Hindu sections of Dharavi. Mala /{loved}/ Zombie Mecha, and she was good at it, too. She preferred the PvP servers where players could hunt other players, trying to topple their giant mecha-suits so that the zombies around them could swarm over it, crack open its cockpit cowl and feast on the av within.
+
+Most of the girls at the game cafe came in and played little games with cute animals and trading for hearts and jewels. But for Mala, the action was in the awesome carnage of the multiplayer war games. It only took a few minutes to get Yasmin through the basics of piloting her little squadron and then she could get down to /{tactics}/.
+
+That was it, that was what none of the other players seemed to understand: /{tactics}/ were /{everything}/. They treated the game like it was a random chaos of screeching rockets and explosions, a confusion to be waded into and survived, as best as you could.
+
+But for Mala, the confusion was something that happened to other people. For Mala, the explosions and camera-shake and the screech of the zombies were just minor details, to be noted among the Big Picture, the armies arrayed on the battlefield in her mind. On that battlefield, the massed forces took on a density and a color that showed where their strengths and weaknesses were, how they were joined to each other and how pushing one this one, over here, would topple that one over there. You could face down your enemies head on, rockets against rockets, guns against guns, and then the winner would be the luckier one, or the one with the most ammo, or the one with the best shields.
+
+But if you were /{smart}/, you didn't have to be lucky, or tougher. Mala liked to lob rockets and grenades /{over}/ the opposing armies, to their left and right, creating box-canyons of rubble and debris that blocked their escape. Meanwhile, a few of her harriers would be off in the weeds aggroing huge herds of zombies, getting them /{really}/ mad, gathering them up until they were like locusts, blotting out the ground in all directions, leading them ever closer to that box canyon.
+
+Just before they'd come into view, her frontal force would peel off, running away in a seeming act of cowardice. Her enemies would be buoyed up by false confidence and give chase -- until they saw the harriers coming straight for them, with an unstoppable, torrential pestilence of zombies hot on their heels. Most times, they were too shocked to do /{anything}/, not even fire at the harriers as they ran straight for their lines and /{through}/ them, into the one escape left behind in the box-canyon, blowing the crack shut as they left. Then it was just a matter of waiting for the zombies to overwhelm and devour your opponents, while you snickered and ate a sweet and drank a little tea from the urn by the cashier's counter. The sounds of the zombies rending the armies of her enemies and gnawing their bones was /{particularly}/ satisfying.
+
+Yasmin had been distracted by the zombies, the disgusting entrails, the shining rockets. But she'd seen, oh yes, she'd /{seen}/ how Mala's strategies were able to demolish much larger opposing armies and she got over her squeamishness.
+
+And so on they played, drawing an audience: first the hooting derisive boys (who fell silent when they watched the armies fall before her, and who started to call her "General Robotwalla" without even a hint of mockery), and then the girls, shy at first, peeking over the boys' shoulders, then shoving forward and cheering and beating their fists on the walls and stamping their feet for each dramatic victory.
+
+It wasn't cheap, though. Mala's carefully hoarded store of Rupees shrank, buffered somewhat by a few coins from other players who paid her a little here and there to teach them how to really play. She knew she could have borrowed the money, or let some boy spend it on her -- there was already fierce competition for the right to go over the road to the drinkswalla and buy her a masala Coke, a fizzing, foaming spicy explosion of Coke and masala spice and crushed ice that soothed the rawness at the back of her throat that had been her constant companion since they'd come to Dharavi.
+
+But nice girls from the village didn't let boys buy them things. Boys wanted something in return. She knew that, knew it from the movies and from the life around her. She knew what happened to girls who let boys take care of their needs. There was always a reckoning.
+
+When the strange man first approached her, she thought about nice girls and boys and what they expected, and she wouldn't talk to him or meet his eye. She didn't know what he wanted, but he wasn't going to get it from her. So when he got up from his chair by the cashier as she came into the cafe, rose and crossed to intercept her with his smart linen suit and good shoes and short, neatly oiled hair, and small moustache, she'd stepped around him, stepped past him, pretended she didn't hear him say, "Excuse me, miss," and "Miss? Miss? Please, just a moment of your time."
+
+But Mrs Dibyendu, the owner of the cafe, shouted at her, "Mala, you listen to this man, you listen to what he has to say to you. You don't be rude in my shop, no you don't!" And because Mrs Dibyendu was also from a village, and because her mother had said that Mala could play games but only in Mrs Dibyendu's cafe, Mrs Dibyendu being the sort of person you could trust not to allow improper doings, or drugs, or violence, or criminality, Mala stopped and turned to the man, silent, expecting.
+
+"Ah," he said. "Thank you." He nodded to Mrs Dibyendu. "Thank you." He turned back to her, and to the army of boys and girls who'd gathered around her, /{her}/ army, the ones who called her General Robotwallah and meant it.
+
+"I hear that you are a very good player," he said. Mala waggled her chin back and forth, half-closing her eyes, letting her chin say, /{Yes, I'm a good player, and I'm good enough that I don't need to boast about it.}/
+
+"Is she a good player?"
+
+Mala turned to her army, who had the discipline to remain silent until she gave them the nod. She waggled her chin at them: /{go on}/.
+
+And they erupted in an enthused babble, extolling the virtues of their General Robotwallah, the epic battles they'd fought and won against impossible odds.
+
+"I have some work for good players."
+
+Mala had heard rumors of this. "You represent a league?"
+
+The man smiled a little smile and shook his head. He smelled of citrusy cologne and betel, a sweet combination of smells she'd never smelled before. "No, not a league. You know that in the game, there are players who don't play for fun? Players who play to make money?"
+
+"The kind of money you're offering to us?"
+
+His chin waggled and he chuckled. "No, not exactly. There are players who play to build up game-money, which they sell on to other players who are too lazy to do the playing for themselves."
+
+Mala thought about this for a moment. The containers went out of India filled with goods and came back filled with garbage for Dharavi. Somewhere out there, in the America of the filmi shows, there was a world of people with unimaginable wealth. "We'll do it," she said. "I've already got more credits than I can spend. How much do they pay for them?"
+
+Again, the chuckle. "Actually," he said, then stopped. Her army was absolutely silent now, hanging on his every word. From the machines came the soft crashing of the wars, taking place in the world inside the network, all day and all night long. "Actually, that's not exactly it. We want you and your friends to destroy them, kill their avs, take their fortunes."
+
+Mala thought for another instant, puzzled. Who would want to kill these other players? "You're a rival?"
+
+The man waggled his chin. /{Maybe yes, maybe no.}/
+
+She thought some more. "You work for the game!" she said. "You work for the game and you don't want --"
+
+"Who I work for isn't important," the man said, holding up his fingers. He wore a wedding ring on one hand, and two gold rings on the other. He was missing the top joints on three of his fingers, she saw. That was common in the village, where farmers were always getting caught in the machines. Here was a man from a village, a man who'd come to Mumbai and become a man in a neat suit with a neat mustache and gold rings glinting on what remained of his fingers. Here was the reason her mother had brought them to Dharavi, the reason for the sore throat and the burning eyes and the endless work over the plastic-sorting tubs.
+
+"What's important is that we would pay you and your friends --"
+
+"My army," she said, interrupting him without thinking. For a moment his eyes flashed dangerously and she sensed that he was about to slap her, but she stood her ground. She'd been slapped plenty before. He snorted once through his nose, then went on.
+
+"Yes, Mala, your army. We would pay you to destroy these players. You'd be told what sort of mecha they were piloting, what their player-names were, and you'd have to root them out and destroy them. You'd keep all their wealth, and you'd get Rupees, too."
+
+"How much?"
+
+He made a pained expression, like he had a little gas. "Perhaps we should discuss that in private, later? With your mother present?"
+
+Mala noticed that he didn't say, "Your parents," but rather, "Your mother." Mrs Dibyendu and he had been talking, then. He knew about Mala, and she didn't know about him. She was just a girl from the village, after all, and this was the world, where she was still trying to understand it all. She was a general, but she was also a girl from the village. General Girl From the Village.
+
+So he'd come that night to Mr Kunal's factory, and Mala's mother had fed him thali and papadams from the women's papadam collective, and they'd boiled chai in the electric kettle and the man had pretended that his fine clothes and gold belonged here, and had squatted back on his heels like a man in the village, his hairy ankles peeking out over his socks. No one Mala knew wore socks.
+
+"Mr Banerjee," mamaji said, "I don't understand this, but I know Mrs Dibyendu. If she says you can be trusted..." She trailed off, because really, she didn't know Mrs Dibyendu. In Dharavi, there were many hazards for a young girl. Mamaji would fret over them endlessly while she brushed out Mala's hair at night, all the ways a girl could find herself ruined or hurt here. But the money.
+
+"A lakh of rupees every month," he said. "Plus a bonus. Of course, she'll have to pay her 'army' --" he'd given Mala a little chin waggle at that, /{see, I remember}/ "-- out of that. But how much would be up to her."
+
+"These children wouldn't have any money if it wasn't for my Mala!" mamaji said, affronted at their imaginary grasping hands. "They're only playing a game! They should be glad just to play with her!" Mamaji had been furious when she discovered that Mala had been playing at the cafe all these afternoons. She thought that Mala only played once in a while, not with every rupee and moment she had spare. But when the man -- Mr Banerjee -- had mentioned her talent and the money it could earn for the family, suddenly mamaji had become her daughter's business manager.
+
+Mala saw that Mr Banerjee had known this would happen and wondered what else Mrs Dibyendu had told him about their family.
+
+"Mamaji," she said, quietly, keeping her eyes down in the way they did in the village. "They're my army, and they need paying if they play well. Otherwise they won't be my army for long."
+
+Mamaji looked hard at her. Beside them, Mala's little brother Gopal took advantage of their distraction to sneak the last bit of eggplant off Mala's plate. Mala noticed, but pretended she hadn't, and concentrated on keeping her eyes down.
+
+Mamaji said, "Now, Mala, I know you want to be good to your friends, but you have to think of your family first. We will find a fair way to compensate them -- maybe we could prepare a weekly feast for them here, using some of the money. I'm sure they could all use a good meal."
+
+Mala didn't like to disagree with her mother, and she'd never done so in front of strangers, but --
+
+But this was her army, and she was their general. She knew what made them tick, and they'd heard Mr Banerjee announce that she would be paid in cash for their services. They believed in fairness. They wouldn't work for food while she worked for a lakh (a /{lakh}/ -- /{100,000}/ rupees! The whole family lived on 200 rupees a day!) of cash.
+
+"Mamaji," she said, "it wouldn't be right or fair." It occurred to Mala that Mr Banerjee had mentioned the money in front of the army. He could have been more discreet. Perhaps it was deliberate. "And they'd know it. I can't earn this money for the family on my own, Mamaji."
+
+Her mother closed her eyes and breathed through her nose, a sign that she was trying to keep hold of her temper. If Mr Banerjee hadn't been present, Mala was sure she would have gotten a proper beating, the kind she'd gotten from her father before he left them, when she was a naughty little girl in the village. But if Mr Banerjee wasn't here, she wouldn't have to talk back to her mother, either.
+
+"I'm sorry for this, Mr Banerjee," Mamaji said, not looking at Mala. "Girls of this age, they become rebellious -- impossible."
+
+Mala thought about a future in which instead of being General Robotwallah, she had to devote her life to begging and bullying her army into playing with her so that she could keep all the money they made for her family, while their families went hungry and their mothers demanded that they come home straight from school. When Mr Banerjee mentioned his gigantic sum, it had conjured up a vision of untold wealth, a real house, lovely clothes for all of them, Mamaji free to spend her afternoons cooking for the family and resting out of the heat, a life away from Dharavi and the smoke and the stinging eyes and sore throats.
+
+"I think your little girl is right," Mr Banerjee said, with quiet authority, and Mala's entire family stared at him, speechless. An adult, taking Mala's side over her mother? "She is a very good leader, from what I can see. If she says her people need paying, I believe that she is correct." He wiped at his mouth with a handkerchief. "With all due respect, of course. I wouldn't dream of telling you how to raise your children, of course."
+
+"Of course..." Mamaji said, as if in a dream. Her eyes were downcast, her shoulders slumped. To be spoken to this way, in her own home, by a stranger, in front of her children! Mala felt terrible. Her poor mother. And it was all Mr Banerjee's fault: he'd mentioned the money in front of her army, and then he'd brought her mother to this point --
+
+"I will find a way to get them to fight without payment, Mamaji --" But she was cut short by her mother's hand, coming up, palm out to her.
+
+"Quiet, daughter," she said. "If this man, this /{gentleman}/, says you know what you're doing, well, then I can't contradict him, can I? I'm just a simple woman from the village. I don't understand these things. You must do what this gentleman says, of course."
+
+Mr Banerjee stood and smoothed his suit back into place with the palms of his hands. Mala saw that he'd gotten some chana on his shirt and lapel, and that made her feel better somehow, like he was a mortal and not some terrible force of nature who'd come to destroy their little lives.
+
+He made a little namaste at Mamaji, hands pressed together at his chest, a small hint of a bow. "Good night, Mrs Vajpayee. That was a lovely supper. Thank you." he said. "Good night, General Robotwallah. I will come to the cafe tomorrow at three o'clock to talk more about your missions. Good night, Gopal," he said, and her brother looked up at him, guiltily, eggplant still poking out of the corner of his mouth.
+
+Mala thought that Mamaji might slap her once the man had left, but they all went to bed together without another word, and Mala snuggled up to her mother the same as she did every night, stroking her long hair. It had been shining and black when they left the village, but a year later, it was shot through with grey and it felt wiry. Mamaji's hand caught hers and stilled it, the callouses on her fingers rough.
+
+"Sleep, daughter," she murmured. "You have an important job, now. You need your sleep."
+
+The next morning, they avoided one another's eyes, and things were hard for a week, until she brought home her first pay-packet, folded carefully in the sole of her shoe. Her army had carved through the enemy forces like the butcher's cleaver parting heads from chickens. There had been a large bonus in their pay-packet, and even after she'd paid Mrs Dibyendu and bought everyone masala Coke at the Hotel Hajj next door, and paid the army their wages, there was almost 2,000 rupees left, and she took Mamaji into the smallest sorting room in the loft of the factory, up the ladder. Mamaji's eyes lit up when she saw the money, and she'd kissed Mala on the forehead and taken her in the longest, fiercest hug of their lives together.
+
+And now it was all wonderful between them. Mamaji had begun to look for a place for them further towards the middle of Dharavi, the old part where the tin and scrap buildings had been gradually replaced with brick ones, where the potters' kilns smoked a clean woodsmoke instead of the dirty, scratchy plastic smoke near Mr Kunal's factory. Mala had new school-clothes, new shoes, and so did Gopal, and Mamaji had new brushes for her hair and a new sari that she wore after her work-day was through, looking pretty and young, the way Mala remembered her from the village.
+
+And the battles were /{glorious}/.
+
+She entered the cafe out of the melting, dusty sun of late day and stood in the doorway. Her army was already assembled, practicing on their machines, passing gupshup in the shadows of the dark, noisy room, or making wet eyes at one another through the dim. She barely had time to grin and then hide the grin before they noticed her and climbed to their feet, standing straight and proud, saluting her.
+
+She didn't know which one of them had begun the saluting business. It had started as a joke, but now it was serious. They vibrated at attention, all eyes on her. They had on better clothes, they looked well-fed. General Robotwallah was leading her army to victory and prosperity.
+
+"Let's play," she said. In her pocket, her handphone had the latest message from Mr Banerjee with the location of the day's target. Yasmin was at her usual place, at Mala's right hand, and at her left sat Fulmala, who had a bad limp from a leg that she'd broken and that hadn't healed right. But Fulmala was smart and fast, and she grasped the tactics better than anyone in the cafe except Mala herself. And Yasmin, well, Yasmin could make the boys behave, which was a major accomplishment, since left to their own they liked to squabble and one-up each other, in a reckless spiral that always ended badly. But Yasmin could talk to them in a way that was stern like an older sister, and they'd fall into line.
+
+Mala had her army, her lieutenants, and her mission. She had her machine, the fastest one in the cafe, with a bigger monitor than any of the others, and she was ready to go to war.
+
+She touched up her displays, rolled her head from side to side, and led her army to battle again.
+
+#
+
+1~ scene # ~#
+
+_1 /{ This scene is dedicated to Barnes and Noble, a US national chain of bookstores. As America's mom-and-pop bookstores were vanishing, Barnes and Noble started to build these gigantic temples to reading all across the land. Stocking tens of thousands of titles (the mall bookstores and grocery-store spinner racks had stocked a small fraction of that) and keeping long hours that were convenient to families, working people and others potential readers, the BandN stores kept the careers of many writers afloat, stocking titles that smaller stores couldn't possibly afford to keep on their limited shelves. BandN has always had strong community outreach programs, and I've done some of my best-attended, best-organized signings at BandN stores, including the great events at the (sadly departed) BandN in Union Square, New York, where the mega-signing after the Nebula Awards took place, and the BandN in Chicago that hosted the event after the Nebs a few years later. Best of all is that BandN's "geeky" buyers really Get It when it comes to science fiction, comics and manga, games and similar titles. They're passionate and knowledgeable about the field and it shows in the excellent selection on display at the stores. }/
+
+_1 {~^ Barnes and Noble, nationwide }http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Little-Brother/Cory-Doctorow/e/9780765322166/?itm=6
+
+Gold. It's all about gold.
+
+But not regular gold, the sort of thing you dig out of the ground. That stuff was for the last century. There's not enough of it, for one thing: all the gold ever dug out of the ground in the history of the world would only amount to a cube whose sides were the length of a tennis court. And curiously, there's also too much of it: all the certificates of gold ownership issued into the world add up to a cube twice that size. Some of those certificates don't amount to anything -- and no one knows which ones. No one has independently audited Fort Knox since 1956 FCK. For all we know, it's empty, the gold smuggled out and sold, put in a vault, sold as certificates, then stolen again and put into another vault, used as the basis for more certificates.
+
+Not regular gold.
+
+/{Virtual}/ gold.
+
+Call it what you want: in one game it's called "Credits," in another, "Volcano Bucks." There are groats, Disney Dollars, cowries, moolah, and Fool's Gold, and a million other kinds of gold out there. Unlike real gold, there's no vault of reserves backing the certificates. Unlike money, there's no government involved in their issue.
+
+Virtual gold is issued by companies. Game companies. Game companies who declare, "So many gold pieces can buy this piece of armor," or "So many credits can buy this space ship" or "So much Jools can buy this zeppelin." And because they say it, it is true. Countries and their banks have to mess around with the ugly business of convincing citizens to believe what they say: the government may say, "This social security check will provide for all your needs in a month," but that doesn't mean that the merchants who supply those needs will agree.
+
+Companies don't have this problem. When Coca Cola says that 76 groats will buy you one dwarvish axe in Svartalfaheim Warriors, that's it: the price of an axe is 76 groats. Don't like it? Go play somewhere else.
+
+Virtual money isn't backed by gold or governments: it's backed by /{fun}/. So long as a game is fun, players somewhere will want to buy into it, because as fun as the game is, it's always more fun if you're one of the haves, with all the awesome armor and killer weapons, than if you're some lowly noob have-not with a dagger, fighting your way up to your first sword.
+
+But where there's money to be spent, there's money to be made. For some players, the most fun game of all is the game that carves them out a slice of the pie. Not all the action belongs to the giant companies up on their tall offices and the games they make. Plenty of us can get in on the action from down below, where the grubby little people are.
+
+Of course, this makes the companies /{bonkers}/. They're big daddy, they know what's best for their worlds. They are /{in control}/. They design the levels and the difficulty to make it all perfectly balanced. They design the puzzles. They decree that light elves can't talk to dark elves, that players on Russian servers can't hop onto the Chinese servers, that it would take the average player 32 hours to attain the Von Klausewitz drive and 48 hours to earn the Order of the Armored Penguin. If you don't like it, you're supposed to /{leave}/: you're not supposed to just /{buy}/ your way out of it. Or if you do, you should have the decency to buy it from /{them}/.
+
+And here's a little something they won't tell you, these Gods of the Virtual: they /{can't}/ control it. Kids, crooks, and weirdos all over the world have riddled their safe little terrarrium worlds with tunnels leading to the great outdoors. There are multiple, competing interworld exchanges: want to swap out your Zombie Mecha wealth for a fully loaded spaceship and a crew of jolly space-pirates to crew it? Ten different gangs want your business -- they'll fix you right up with someone else's spaceship and take your mecha, arms and ammo into inventory for the next person who wants to immigrate to Zombie Mecha from some other magical world.
+
+And the Gods are powerless to stop it. For every barrier they put up, there are hundreds of smart, motivated players of the Big Game who will knock it down.
+
+You'd think it'd be impossible, wouldn't you? After all, these aren't mere games of cops and robbers, played out in real cities filled with real people. They don't need an all-points bulletin to find a fugitive at large: every person in the world is in the database, and they own the database. They don't need a search warrant to find the contraband hiding under your floorboards: the floorboards, the contraband, the house and you are all in the database -- and they own the database.
+
+It should be impossible, but it isn't, and here's why: the biggest sellers of gold and treasure, levels and experience in the worlds /{are the game companies themselves}/. Oh, they don't /{call}/ it power-levelling and gold-farming -- they package it with prettier, more palatable names, like "accelerated progress bonus pack" and "All Together Now(TM)" and lots of other redonkulous names that don't fool anyone.
+
+But the Gods aren't happy with merely turning a buck on players who are too lazy to work their way up through the game. They've got a much, much weirder game in play. They sell gold to people /{who don't even play the game}/. That's right: if you're a bigshot finance guy and you're looking for somewhere to stash a million bucks where it will do some good, you can buy a million dollars' worth of virtual gold, hang onto it as the game grows and becomes more and more fun, as the value of the gold rises and rises, and then you can sell it back for real money through the official in-game banks, pocketing a chunky profit for your trouble.
+
+So while you're piloting your mecha, swinging your axe or commanding your space fleet, there's a group of weird old grownups in suits in fancy offices all over the world watching your play eagerly, trying to figure out if the value of in-game gold is going to go up or down. When a game starts to suck, everyone rushes to sell out their holdings, getting rid of the gold as fast as they can before its value it obliterated by bored gamers switching to a competing service. And when the game gets /{more}/ fun, well, that's an even bigger frenzy, as the bidding wars kick up to high gear, every banker in the world trying to buy the same gold for the same world.
+
+Is it any wonder that eight of the 20 largest economies in the world are in virtual countries? And is it any wonder that playing has become such a serious business?
+
+#
+
+1~ scene # ~#
+
+_1 /{ This scene is dedicated to Secret Headquarters in Los Angeles, my drop-dead all-time favorite comic store in the world. It's small and selective about what it stocks, and every time I walk in, I walk out with three or four collections I'd never heard of under my arm. It's like the owners, Dave and David, have the uncanny ability to predict exactly what I'm looking for, and they lay it out for me seconds before I walk into the store. I discovered about three quarters of my favorite comics by wandering into SHQ, grabbing something interesting, sinking into one of the comfy chairs, and finding myself transported to another world. When my second story-collection, OVERCLOCKED, came out, they worked with local illustrator Martin Cenreda to do a free mini-comic based on Printcrime, the first story in the book. I left LA about a year ago, and of all the things I miss about it, Secret Headquarters is right at the top of the list. }/
+
+_1 {~^ Secret Headquarters }http://www.thesecretheadquarters.com/: 3817 W. Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90026 +1 323 666 2228
+
+Matthew stood outside the door of the Internet cafe, breathing deeply. On the walk over, he'd managed to calm down a little, but as he drew closer, he became more and more convinced that Boss Wing's boys would be waiting for him there, and all his friends would be curled up on the ground, beaten unconscious. He'd brought four of the best players with him out of Boss Wing's factory, and he knew that Boss Wing wasn't happy about that /{at all}/.
+
+He was hyperventilating, his head swimming. He still hurt. It felt like he had a soccer ball-sized red sun of pain burning in his underwear and one of the things he wanted most and least to do was to find a private spot to have a look in there. There was a bathroom in the cafe, so that was that, it was time to go inside.
+
+He walked up the four flights of stairs painfully, passing under the gigantic murals from gamespace, avoiding the plastic plants on each landing that reeked of piss from players who didn't want to wait for the bathroom. From the third floor up, he was enveloped in the familiar cloud of body odor, cigarette smoke and cursing that told him he was on his way to his true home.
+
+In the doorway, he paused and peered around, looking for any sign of Boss Wing's goons, but it was business as usual: rows and rows of tables with PCs on them, a few couples sharing machines, but mostly, it was boys playing, skinny, with their shirts rolled up over their bellies to catch any breeze that might happen through the room. There were no breezes, just the eddies in the smoke caused by the growl of all those PC fans whining as they sucked particulate-laden smoky air over the superheated motherboards and monster video cards.
+
+He slunk past the sign-in desk, staffed tonight by a new kid, someone else just arrived from the provinces to find his fortune here in bad old Shenzhen. Matthew wanted to grab the kid and carry him to the city limits, explaining all the way that there was no fortune to be found here anymore, it all belonged to men like Boss Wing. /{Go home,}/ he thought at the boy, /{Go home, this place is done.}/
+
+His boys were playing at their usual table. They had made a pyramid from alternating layers of Double Happiness cigarette packs and empty coffee cups. They looked up as he neared them, smiling and laughing at some joke. Then they saw the look on his face and they fell silent.
+
+He sat down at a vacant chair and stared at their screens. They'd been playing, of course. They were always playing. When they worked in Boss Wing's factory, they'd pull an 18 hour shift and then they'd relax by playing some more, running their own characters through the dungeons they'd been farming all day long. It's why Boss Wing had such an easy time recruiting for his factory: the pitch was seductive. "Get paid to play!"
+
+But it wasn't the same when you worked for someone else.
+
+He tried to find the words to start and couldn't.
+
+"Matthew?" It was Yo, the oldest of them. Yo actually had a family, a wife and a young daughter. He'd left Boss Wing's factory and followed Matthew.
+
+Matthew stared at his hands, took a deep breath, and made a decision: "Sorry, I just had a little fight on the way over here. I've got good news, though: I've got a way to make us all very rich in a very short time." And, from memory, Master Fong described the way he'd found into the rich dungeon of Svartalfaheim Warriors. He commandeered a computer and showed them, showed them how to shave the seconds off the run, where to make sure to stop and grab and pick up. And then they each took up a machine and went to work.
+
+In time, the ache in his pants faded. Someone gave him a cigarette, then another. Someone brought him some dumplings. Master Fong ate them without tasting them. He and his team were at work, and they were making money, and someday soon, they'd have a fortune that would make Boss Wing look like a small-timer.
+
+Sometime during the shift, his phone rang. It was his mother. She wanted to wish him a happy birthday. He had just turned 17.
+
+#
+
+1~ scene # ~#
+
+_1 /{ This scene is dedicated to Powell's Books, the legendary "City of Books" in Portland, Oregon. Powell's is the largest bookstore in the world, an endless, multi-storey universe of papery smells and towering shelves. They stock new and used books on the same shelves -- something I've always loved -- and every time I've stopped in, they've had a veritable mountain of my books, and they've been incredibly gracious about asking me to sign the store-stock. The clerks are friendly, the stock is fabulous, and there's even a Powell's at the Portland airport, making it just about the best airport bookstore in the world for my money! }/
+
+_1 {~^ Powell's Books }http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?isbn=9780765322166: 1005 W Burnside, Portland, OR 97209 USA +1 800 878 7323
+
+Wei-Dong's game-suspension lasted all of 20 minutes. That's how long it took him to fake a migraine, get a study-pass, sneak into the resource center, beat the network filter and log on. It was getting very late back in China, but that was OK, the boys stayed up late when they were working, and they were glad to have him.
+
+Wei-Dong's real name wasn't Wei-Dong, of course. His real name was Leonard Goldberg. He'd chosen Wei-Dong after looking up the meanings of Chinese names and coming up with Strength of the East, which he liked the sound of. This system for picking names worked well for the Chinese kids he knew -- when their parents immigrated to the States, they'd just pick some English name and that was it. Why not? Why was it better to pick a name because your grandfather had it than because you liked the sound of it?
+
+He'd tried to explain this to his parents, but it didn't make much of an impression on them. They were cool with him being interested in other cultures, but that didn't mean he could get out of having a Bar-Mitzvah or that they would call him Wei-Dong. And it didn't mean that they approved of him being up all night with his buds in China, making money.
+
+Wei-Dong knew that this could all be seen as very lame, an outcast kid so desperate to make friends that he abandoned his high school altogether and sucked up to someone in another hemisphere with free labor instead. But it wasn't like that. Wei-Dong had plenty of friends at Ronald Regan Secondary School. Plenty of kids thought that China was the most interesting place in the world, loved the movies and the food and the comics and the games. And there were lots of Chinese kids in school too and while a couple clearly thought he was weird, lots more got it. After all, most of them were into India the way he was into China, so they had that in common.
+
+And so what if he was skipping a class? It was Social Studies, ferchrissakes! They were supposed to be studying China, but Wei-Dong knew about ten times more about the subject than the teacher did. As he whispered in Mandarin into his earwig, he thought that this was like an independent study project. His teachers should be giving him bonus marks.
+
+"Now what?" he said. "What's the mission?"
+
+"We were thinking of running the Walrus's Garden a few more times, now that we've got it fresh in our heads. Maybe we could pick up another vorpal blade." That's what the guys did when there weren't any paying gweilos -- they went raiding for prestige items. It wasn't the most exciting thing of all, but you never knew what might happen.
+
+"I'm into it," he said. He had a free period after this one, then lunch, so technically he could play for three hours solid. They'd all be ready to log off and go to bed by then, anyway.
+
+"You're a good gweilo, you know?" Wei-Dong knew Ping was kidding. He didn't care if the guys called him gweilo. It wasn't a racist term, not really, not like "chink" or "slant-eye." Just a term of affection. And as nicknames went, "Foreign ghost" was actually kind of cool.
+
+So they hit the Garden and ran it and they did pretty well, and they went and put the money in the guild bank and went back for more. Then they did it again. Somewhere in there, the bell rang. Somewhere in there, some of his friends came and talked to him and he muted the earwig and said some things back to them, but he didn't really know what he'd said. Something.
+
+Then, on the third run, the bad thing happened. They were almost to the shore, and they'd banished their mounts. Wei-Dong was prepping the Queen's Air Pocket, dipping into the monster supply of oyster shells he'd built up on the previous runs.
+
+And out they came, a dozen knights on huge, fearsome black steeds, rising out of the water in unison, rending the air with the angry chorus of their mounts and their battle-cries. The water fountained up around them and they fell upon Wei-Dong and his guildies.
+
+He shouted something into his earwig, a warning, and all around him in the resource center, kids looked up from their conversations to stare at him. He'd become a dervish, hammering away at his keyboard and mousing furiously, his eyes fixed on the screen.
+
+The black riders moved with eerie synchrony. Either they were monsters -- monsters such as Wei-Dong had never encountered -- or they were the most practiced, cooperative raiding party he'd ever seen. He had his vorpal blade out now, and his guildies were all fighting as well. In his earwig, they cursed in the Chinese dialects of six different provinces. Under other circumstances, Wei-Dong would have taken notes, but now he was fighting for his life.
+
+Lu had bravely taken the point between the riders and the party, the huge tank standing fast with his mace and broadsword, engaging all twelve of the knights without regard for his own safety. Wei-Dong poured healing spells on him as he attempted to make his own mark on the riders with the vorpal blade, three times as long as he was.
+
+The vorpal blade could do incredible damage, but it wasn't easy to use. Twice, Wei-Dong accidentally sliced into members of his own party, though not badly -- thank God, or he'd never hear the end of it -- but he couldn't get a cut in on the black knights, who were too fast for him.
+
+Then Lu fell, going down on one knee, pierced through the throat by a pike wielded by a rider whose steed's eyes were the icy blue of the Caterpillar's mist. The rider lifted Lu into the air, his feet kicking limply, and another knight beheaded him with a contemptuous swing of his sword. Lu fell in two pieces to the gritty beach sand and in the earwig, he cursed them, using an expression that Wei-Dong had painstakingly translated into "Screw eight generations of your ancestors."
+
+With Lu down, the rest of them were practically helpless. They fought valiantly, coordinating their attacks, pouring on fire from their magic items and best spells, but the black knights were unbeatable. Before he died, Wei-Dong managed to hit one with the vorpal blade and had the momentary satisfaction of watching the knight stagger and clutch at his chest, but then the fighter closed with him, drawing a pair of short swords that he spun like a magician doing knife tricks. There was no question of parrying him, and seconds later, Wei-Dong was in the sand, watching the knight's spiked boot descend on his face, hearing the crunch of his cheekbones and nose shattering under the weight. Then he was respawning in the distant Lake of Tears, naked and unarmed, and he had to corpse-run to the body of his toon before the bastards got his vorpal blade.
+
+He heard his guildies dying in the earwig, one after another, as he ran, ghostly and ethereal, across the hills and dales of Wonderland. He reached his corpse just in time to watch the knights loot the body, and the bodies of his teammates. He rose up again, helpless and unarmed and made flesh by the body of his toon, vulnerable.
+
+One of the knights sent him a chat-request. He clicked it, silencing the background noises from Shenzhen.
+
+"You farmers aren't welcome here anymore, Comrade," the voice said. It had an accent he didn't recognize. Maybe Russian? And the speaker was just a kid! "We're patrolling now. You come back again, we'll hunt and kill you again, and again, and again. You understand me, Chinee?" Not just a kid: a /{girl}/ -- a little girl, threatening him from somewhere in the world.
+
+"Who put you in charge, /{missy}/?" he said. "And what makes you think I'm Chinese, anyway?"
+
+There was a nasty laugh. "Missy, huh? I'm in charge because I just kicked your ass, and because I can kick it again, as many times as I need to. And I don't care if you're in China, Vietnam, Indonesia -- it doesn't make a difference. We'll kill you and all the farmers in Wonderland. This game isn't farmable anymore. I'm done talking to you now." And the black knight decapitated him with contemptuous ease.
+
+He flipped back to the guild channel, ready to tell them about what had just happened, his mind reeling, and that's when he looked up into the face of his father, standing over him, with a look on his face that could curdle milk.
+
+"Get up, Leonard," he said. "And come with me."
+
+He wasn't alone. There was Mr Adams, the vice-principal, and the school's rent-a-cop, Officer Turner, and the guidance counsellor, Ms Ramirez. They presented him with the stony faces of Mount Rushmore, faces without a hint of mercy. His father reached over and took the earwig out of his ear, gently, carefully. Then, with exactly the same care, he dropped the earwig to the polished concrete floor of the resource centre and brought his heel down on it, the /{crunch}/ loud in the perfectly silent room.
+
+Leonard stood up. The room was full of kids pretending not to look at him. They were all looking at him. He followed his father into the hallway and as the door swung shut, he heard, unmistakably, the sound of a hundred giggles in unison.
+
+They boxed him in on the walk to the vice-principal's office, trapping him. Not that he'd run -- he had nowhere to run /{to}/, but it still made him feel claustrophobic. This was not good. This was very, very bad.
+
+Here's how bad it was: "You're going to send me to /{military school}/?"
+
+"Not military school," Ms Ramirez said. She said it with that maddening, patronizing guidance-counsellor tone. "The Martindale Academy has no military or martial component. It's merely a very structured, supervised environment. They have a fantastic track record in helping students like you concentrate on grades and pull themselves out of academic troubles. They've got a beautiful campus in a beautiful location, and Martindale boys go on to fill many important --"
+
+And on and on. She'd swallowed the sales brochure like a burrito and now it was rebounding on her. He tuned her out and looked at his father. Benny Rosenbaum wasn't the sort of person you could read easily. The people who worked for him at Rosenbaum Shipping and Logistics called him The Wall, because you couldn't get anything past him, under him, through him, or over him. Not that he was a hardcase, but he couldn't be swayed by emotional arguments: if you tried to approach him with anything less than fully computerized logic, you might as well forget it.
+
+But there were little tells, little ways you could figure out what the weather was like in old Benny. That thing he was doing with his watch strap, working at the catch, that was one of them. So was the little jump in the hinge of his jaw, like he was chewing an invisible wad of gum. Combine those with the fact that he was away from his work in the middle of the day, when he should be making sure that giant steel containers were humming around the globe -- well, for Leonard, it meant that the lava was pretty close to the surface of Mount Benny this afternoon.
+
+He turned to his dad. "Shouldn't we be talking about this as a family, Dad? Why are we doing this here?"
+
+Benny regarded him, fiddled with his watch strap, nodded at the guidance counsellor and made a little "go-on" gesture that betrayed nothing.
+
+"Leonard," she said. "Leonard, you need to understand just how serious this has become. You're one term paper away from flunking two of your subjects: history and biology. You've gone from being an A student in math, English and social studies to a C-minus. At this rate, you'll have blown the semester by Thanksgiving. Put it this way: you've gone from being in the ninetieth percentile of Ronald Regan Secondary School Sophomores to the /{twelfth}/. This is a signal, Leonard, from you to us, and it's signalling, S-O-S, S-O-S."
+
+"We thought you were on drugs," his father said, absolutely calm. "We actually tested a hair follicle from your pillow. I had a guy follow you around. Near as I can tell, you smoke a little pot with your friends, but you don't actually see your friends anymore, do you?"
+
+"You tested my hair?"
+
+His father made that go-on gesture of his, an old favorite of his. "And had you followed. Of course we did. We're in charge of you. We're responsible for you. We don't own you, but if you screw up so bad that you end up spending the rest of your life as a bum, it'll be down to us, and we'll have to bail you out. You understand that, Leonard? We're responsible for you, and we'll do whatever we have to in order to make sure you don't screw up your life."
+
+Leonard bit back a retort. The sinking feeling that had started with the crushing of his earwig had sunk as low as it would go. Now his palms were sweating, his heart was racing, and he had no idea what would come out of his mouth the next time we spoke.
+
+"We used to call this an intervention, when I was your age," the vice-principal said. He still looked like the real-estate agent he'd been before he switched to teaching, the last time the market had crashed. He was affable, inoffensive, his eyes wide and trustworthy. They called him Babyface Adams in the halls. But Leonard knew about salesmen, knew that no matter how friendly they appeared, they were always on the lookout for weaknesses to exploit. "And we'd do it for drug addicts. But I don't think you're addicted to drugs. I think you're addicted to games."
+
+"Oh come /{on}/," Leonard said. "There's no such thing. I can show you the research papers. Game addiction? That's just something they thought up to sell newspapers. Dad, come on, you don't really believe this stuff, do you?"
+
+His dad pointedly refused to meet his gaze, directing his attention to the Vice-Principal.
+
+"Leonard, we know you're a very smart young man, but no one is so smart as to never need help. I don't want to argue definitions of addictions with you --"
+
+"/{Because you'll lose.}/" Leonard spat it out, surprising himself with the vehemence. Old Babyface smiled his affable, salesman's smile: /{Oh yes, good sir, you're certainly right there, very clever of you. Now, may I show you something in a mock-Tudor split-level with a three-car garage and an above-ground pool?}/
+
+"You're a very smart young man, Leonard. It doesn't matter if you're medically addicted, psychologically dependent, or just --" he waved his hands, looking for the right words -- "or if you just spend too darn much time playing games and not enough time in the real world. None of that matters. What matters is that you're in trouble. And we're going to help you with that. Because we care about you and we want to see you succeed."
+
+It suddenly sank in. Leonard knew how these things went. Somewhere, right now, Officer Turner was cleaning out his locker and loading its contents into a couple of paper Trader Joe's grocery sacks. Somewhere, some secretary was taking his name off of the rolls of each of his classes. Right now, his mother was packing his suitcase back at home, filling it with three or four changes of clothes, a fresh toothbrush -- and nothing else. When he left this room, he'd disappear from Orange County as thoroughly as if he'd been snatched off the street by serial killers.
+
+Only it wouldn't be his mutilated body that would surface in a few months time, decomposed and grisly, an object lesson to all the kiddies of Ronald Reagan High to be on the alert for dangerous strangers. It would be his mutilated /{personality}/ that would surface, a slack-jawed pod-person who'd been crammed into the happy-well-adjusted-citizen mold that would carry him through an adulthood as a good, trouble-free worker-bee in the hive.
+
+"Dad, come /{on}/. You can't just do this to me! I'm your son! I deserve a chance to pull my grades up, don't I? Before you send me off to some brainwashing center?"
+
+"You had your chance to pull your grades up, Leonard," Ms Ramirez said, and the Vice-Principal nodded vigorously. "You've had all semester. If you plan on graduating and going on to university, this is the time to do something drastic to make sure that happens."
+
+"It's time to go," his father said, ostentatiously checking his watch. Honestly, who still wore a watch? He had a phone, Leonard knew, just like all normal people. An old-fashioned wind-up watch was about as useful in this day and age as an ear-trumpet or a suit of chain-mail. He had a whole case full of them -- dozens of them. His father could have all the ridiculous affectations and hobbies he wanted, spend a small fortune on them, and no one wanted to send /{him}/ off to the nuthouse.
+
+It was so goddamned /{unfair}/. He wanted to shout it as they led him out to his father's impeccable little Huawei Darter. He bought new one every year, getting a chunky discount straight from the factory, who loaded his personal car into its own container and craned it into one of Dad's big ships in port in Guangzhou. The car smelled of the black licorice sweets that Dad sucked on, and of the giant steel thermos-cup of coffee that Dad slipped into the cup-holder every morning, refilling through the day at a bunch of diners where they called him by his first name and let him run a tab.
+
+And outside the windows, through the subtle grey tint, the streets of Anaheim whipped past, rows of identical houses branching off of a huge, divided arterial eight-lane road. He'd known these streets all his life, he'd walked them, met the panhandlers that worked the tourist trade, the footsore Disney employees who'd missed the shuttle, hiking the mile to the cast-member parking, the retired weirdos walking their dogs, the other larval Orange County pod-people who were still too young or poor or unlucky to have a car.
+
+The sky was that pure blue that you got in OC, no clouds, a postcard smiley-face sun nearly at noontime high, perfect for tourist shots. Leonard saw it all for the first time, really /{saw}/ it, because he knew he was seeing it for the last time.
+
+"It's not so bad," his dad said. "Stop acting like you're going to prison. It's a swanky boarding school, for chrissakes. And not one of those schools where they beat you down in the bathroom or anything. They're practically hippies up there. Your mother and I aren't sending you to the gulag, kid."
+
+"It doesn't matter what you say, Dad. Just forget it. Here's the facts: you've kidnapped me from my school and you're sending me away to some place where they're supposed to 'fix' me. You haven't given me any say in this. You haven't consulted me. You can say how much you love me, how much it's for my own good, talk and talk and talk, but it won't change those facts. I'm sixteen years old, Dad. I'm as old as Zaidy Shmuel was when he married Bubbie and came to America, you know that?"
+
+"That was during the war --"
+
+"Who cares? He was your grandfather, and he was old enough to start a family. You can bet your ass he wouldn't have stood still for being kidnapped --" His father snorted. "/{Kidnapped}/ because his hobbies weren't his parents' idea of a good time. God! What the hell is the matter with you? I always knew you were kind of a prick, but --"
+
+His father calmly steered the car to the curb and pulled over, changing three lanes smoothly, with a shoulder-check before each, weaving through the tourist traffic and gardeners' pickup trucks without raising a single horn. He popped the emergency brake with one hand and his seatbelt with the other, twisting in his seat to bring his face right up to Leonard's.
+
+"You are on thin goddamned ice, kid. You can make me the villain if you want to, if you need to, but you know, somewhere in that hormone-addled teenaged brain of yours, that this was /{your}/ doing. How many times, Leonard? How many times have we talked to you about balance, about keeping your grades up, taking a little time out of your game? How many chances did you get before this?"
+
+Leonard laughed hotly. There were tears of rage behind his eyes, trying to get out. He swallowed hard. "Kidnapped," he said. "Kidnapped and shipped away because you don't think I'm getting good enough grades in math and English. Like any of it matters -- when was the last time you solved a quadratic equation Dad? Who /{cares}/ if I get into a good university? What am I going to get a degree in that will help me survive the next twenty years? What did you get your degree in, again, Dad? Oh, that's right, /{Ancient Languages.}/ Bet /{that}/ comes up a lot when you're shipping giant containers of plastic garbage from China, huh?"
+
+His father shook his head. Behind them, cars were braking and honking at each other as they maneuvered around the stopped Huawei. "This isn't about me, son. This is about you -- about pissing away your life on some stupid game. At least speaking Latin helps me understand Spanish. What are you going to make of all your hours and years of killing dragons?"
+
+Leonard fumed. He knew the answer to this, somewhere. The games were taking over the world. There was money to be made there. He was learning to work on teams. All this and more, these were the reasons for playing, and none of them were as important as the most important reason: it just /{felt right}/, adventuring in-world --
+
+There was a particularly loud shriek of brakes from behind them, and it kept coming, getting louder and louder, and there was a blare of horns, too, and the sound didn't stop, got louder than you could have imagined it getting. He turned his head to look over his shoulder and --
+
+/{Crash}/
+
+The car seemed to leap into the air, rising up first on its front tires in a reverse-wheelie and then the front wheels spun and the car shot forward ten yards in a second. There was the sound of crumpling metal, his father's curse, and then a clang like temple bells as his head bounced off the dashboard. The world went dark.
+
+#
+
+1~ scene # ~#
+
+_1 /{ This scene is dedicated to New York City's Books of Wonder, the oldest and largest kids' bookstore in Manhattan. They're located just a few blocks away from Tor Books' offices in the Flatiron Building and every time I drop in to meet with the Tor people, I always sneak away to Books of Wonder to peruse their stock of new, used and rare kids' books. I'm a heavy collector of rare editions of Alice in Wonderland, and Books of Wonder never fails to excite me with some beautiful, limited-edition Alice. They have tons of events for kids and one of the most inviting atmospheres I've ever experienced at a bookstore. }/
+
+_1 {~^ Books of Wonder }http://www.booksofwonder.com/: 18 West 18th St, New York, NY 10011 USA +1 212 989 3270
+
+Mala was in the world with a small raiding party, just a few of her army. It was late -- after midnight -- and Mrs Dibyendu had turned the cafe over to her idiot nephew to run things. These days, the cafe stayed open when Mala and her army wanted to use it, day or night, and there were always soldiers who'd vie for the honor of escorting General Robotwallah home afterwards. Mamaji -- Mamaji had a new fine flat, with two complete rooms, and one of them was all for Mamaji alone, hers to sleep in without the snuffling and gruffling of her two children. There were places in Dharavi where ten or fifteen might have shared that room, sleeping on coats -- or each other. Mamaji had a mattress, brought to her by a strong young man from Chor Bazaar, carried with him on the roof of the Marine Line train through the rush hour heat and press of bodies.
+
+Mamaji didn't complain when Mala played after midnight.
+
+"More, just there," Sushant said. He was two years older than her, the tallest of them all, with short hair and a crazy smile that reminded her of the face of a dog that has had its stomach rubbed into ecstasy.
+
+And there they were, three mecha in a triangle, methodically clubbing zombies in the head, spattering their rotten brains and dropping them into increasing piles. Eventually, the game would send out ghouls to drag away the bodies, but for now, they piled waist deep around the level one mechas.
+
+"I have them," Yasmin said, her scopes locking on. This was a new kind of mission for them, wiping out these little trios of mecha who were grinding endlessly against the zombies. Mr Banerjee had tasked them to this after the more aggressive warriors had been hunted to extinction by their army. According to Mr Banerjee, these were each played by a single person, someone who was getting paid to level up basic mecha to level four or five, to be sold at auction to rich players. Always in threes, always grinding the zombies, always in this part of the world, like vermin.
+
+"Fire," she said, and the pulse weapons fired concentric rings of force into the trio. They froze, systems cooked, and as Mala watched, the zombies swarmed over the mechas, toppling them, working relentlessly at them, until they had found their way inside. A red mist fountained into the sky as they dismembered the pilots.
+
+"Nice one," she said, arching her back over her chair, slurping the dregs of a cup of chai that had grown cold at her side. Mrs Dibyendu's idiot nephew was standing barefoot in the doorway of the cafe, spitting betel into the street, the sweet smell wafting back to her. The sleep was gathering in her mind, waiting to pounce on her, so it was time to go. She turned to tell her army so when her headphones filled with the thunder of incoming mechas, and /{lots}/ of them.
+
+She slammed her bottom down into the seat and spun around, fingers flying to the keyboard, eyes on the screen. The enemy mecha were coming in locked in a megamecha configurations, fifteen -- no /{twenty}/ -- of them joined together to form a bot so huge that she looked like a gnat next to it.
+
+"To me!" she cried, and "Formation," and her soldiers came to their keyboard, her army initiating their own megamecha sequence, but it took too long and there weren't enough of them, and though they fought bravely, the giant enemy craft tore them to pieces, lifting each warbot and peering inside its cowl as it ripped open the armor and dropped the squirming pilot to the surging zombie tide at its feet. Too late, Mala remembered her strategy, remembered what it had been like when she had /{always}/ commanded the weaker force, the defensive footing she should have put her army on as soon as she saw how she was outmatched.
+
+Too late. An instant later, her own mecha was in the enemy's clutches, lifted to its face, and as she neared it, the lights on her console changed and a soft klaxon sounded: the bot was attempting to infiltrate her own craft's systems, to interface with them, to pwn them. That was another game within this game, the hack-and-be-hacked game, and she was very good at it. It involved solving a series of logic puzzles, solving them faster than the foe, and she clicked and typed as she figured out how to build a bridge using blocks of irregular size, as she figured out how to open a lock whose tumblers had to be clicked just so to make the mechanism work, as she figured out --
+
+She wasn't fast enough. Her army gathered around her as her console locked up, the enemy inside her mecha now, running it from bootloader to flamethrower.
+
+"Hello," a voice said in her headphones. That was something you could do, when you controlled another player's armor -- you could take over its comms. She thought of yanking out the headphones and switching to speaker so that her army could listen in too, but some premonition stayed her hand. This enemy had gone to some trouble to talk to her, personally, so she would hear what it had to say.
+
+"My name is Big Sister Nor," she said, and it /{was}/ a she, a woman's voice, no, a /{girl's}/ voice -- maybe something in between. Her Hindi was strangely accented, like the Chinese actors in the filmi shows she'd seen. "It's been a pleasure to fight you. Your guild did very well. Of course, we did better." Mala heard a ragged cheer and realized that there were dozens of enemies on the chat channel, all listening in. What she had mistaken for static on the channel was, in fact, dozens of enemies, somewhere in the world, all breathing into their microphones as this woman spoke.
+
+"You are very good players," Mala said, whispering it so that only her mic heard.
+
+"I'm not just a player, and neither are you, my dear." There was something sisterly in that voice, none of the gloating competitiveness that Mala felt for the players she'd bested in the game before. In spite of herself, Mala found she was smiling a little. She rocked her chin from side to side -- /{Oh, you're a clever one, do go on}/ -- and her soldiers around her made the same gesture.
+
+"I know why you fight. You think you're doing an honest job of work, but have you ever stopped to consider why someone would pay you to attack other workers in the game?"
+
+Mala shooed away her army, making a pointed gesture toward the door. When she was alone, she said, "Because they muck up the game for the real players. They interfere."
+
+The giant mecha shook its head slowly. "Are you really so blind? Do you think the syndicate that pays you does so because they care about whether the game is /{fun}/? Oh, dear."
+
+Mala's mind whirred. It was like solving one of those puzzles. Of course Mr Banerjee didn't care about the other players. Of course he didn't work for the game. If he worked for the game, he could just suspend the accounts of the players Mala fought. Cleaner and neater. The solution loomed in her mind's eye. "They're business rivals, then?"
+
+"Oh yes, you are as clever as I thought you must be. Yes indeed. They are business rivals. Somewhere, there is a group of players just like them, being paid to level up mecha, or farm gold, or acquire land, or do any of the other things that can turn labor into money. And who do you suppose the money goes to?"
+
+"To my boss," she said. "And his bosses. That's how it goes." Everyone worked for someone.
+
+"Does that sound fair to you?"
+
+"Why not?" Mala said. "You work, you make something or do something, and the person you do it for pays you something for your work. That's the world, that's how it works."
+
+"What does the person who pays you do to earn his piece of your labor?"
+
+Mala thought. "He figures out how to turn the labor into money. He pays me for what I do. These are stupid questions, you know."
+
+"I know," Big Sister Nor said. "It's the stupid questions that have some of the most surprising and interesting answers. Most people never think to ask the stupid questions. Do you know what a union is?"
+
+Mala thought. There were unions all over Mumbai, but none in Dharavi. She'd heard many people speak of them, though. "A group of workers," she said. "Who make their bosses pay them more." She thought about all she'd heard. "They stop other workers from taking their jobs. They go on strike."
+
+"That's what unions /{do}/, all right. But it's not much of a sense of what they are. Tell me this: if you went to your boss and asked for more money, shorter hours, and better working conditions, what do you think he'd say?"
+
+"He'd laugh at me and send me away," Mala said. It was an unbelievably stupid question.
+
+"You're almost certainly right. But what if all the workers he went to said the same thing? What if, everywhere he went, there were workers saying, 'We are worth so much,' and 'We will not be treated this way,' and 'You cannot take away our jobs unless there is a just reason for doing so'? What if all workers, everywhere, demanded this treatment?"
+
+Mala found she was shaking her head. "It's a ridiculous idea. There's always someone poor who'll take the job. It doesn't matter. It won't work." She found that she was furious. "Stupid!"
+
+"I admit that it's all rather improbable," the woman said, and there was an unmistakable tone of amusement in her voice. "But think for a moment about your employer. Do you know where his employers are? Do you know where the players you're fighting are? Where their customers are? Do you know where I am?"
+
+"I don't see why that matters --"
+
+"Oh, it matters. It matters because although all these people are all over the world, there's no real distance between them. We chat here like neighbors, but I am in Singapore, and you are in India. Where? Delhi? Kolkata? Mumbai?"
+
+"Mumbai," she admitted.
+
+"You don't sound like Mumbai," she said. "You have a lovely accent. Uttar Pradesh?"
+
+Mala was surprised to hear the state of her birth and her village guessed so easily. "Yes," she said. She was a girl from the village, she was General Robotwallah and this woman had taken the measure of her very quickly.
+
+"This game is headquartered in America, in a city called Atlanta. The corporation is registered in Cyprus, in Europe. The players are all over the world. These ones that you've been fighting are in Vietnam. We'd been having a lovely conversation before you came and blew them all to pieces. We are everywhere, but we are all here. Anyone your boss ever hired to do your job would end up here, and we could find that worker and talk to them. Wherever your boss goes, his workers will all come and work here. And we will have a chat like this with them, and talk to them about what a world we could have, if all workers cooperated to protect each others' interests."
+
+Mala was still shaking her head. "They'd just blow you away. Hire an army like me. It's a stupid idea."
+
+The giant metamecha lifted her up to its face, where its giant teeth champed and clanged. "Do you think there's an army that could best us?"
+
+Mala thought that maybe her army could, if they were in force, if they were prepared. Then she thought of how much successful war you'd have to persecute to win one of these giant beasts. "Maybe not. Maybe you can do what you say you can do." She thought some more. "But in the meantime, we wouldn't have any work."
+
+The giant metal face nodded. "Yes, that's true. At first you may not find yourself with your wages. And maybe your fellow workers would contribute a little to help you out. That's another thing unions do -- it's called strike pay. But eventually, you, and me, and all of us, would enjoy a world where we are paid a living wage, and where we labor under livable conditions, and where our workplaces are fair and decent. Isn't that worth a little sacrifice?"
+
+There it was, "You ask me to make a sacrifice. Why should I sacrifice? We are poor. We fight for a very little, because we have even less. Why do you think that we should sacrifice? Why don't /{you}/ sacrifice?"
+
+"Oh, sister, we've all sacrificed. I understand that this is all very new to you, and that it will take some getting used to. I'm sure we'll see each other again, someday. After all, we all play in the same world here, don't we?"
+
+Mala realized that the breathing she'd heard, the other voices on the chat channel, had all fallen silent. For a short time, it had just been Mala and this woman who called her "sister."
+
+"What is your name?"
+
+"I'm Nor-Ayu," she said. "But they call me 'Big Sister Nor.' All over the world, they call me this. What do I call you?"
+
+Mala's name was on the tip of her tongue, but she did not say it. Instead, she said, "General Robotwallah."
+
+"A very good name," Big Sister Nor said. "It was my pleasure to meet you." With that, the giant mecha dropped her and turned and lumbered away, crushing zombies under its feet.
+
+Mala stood up and felt the many pops and snaps of her spine and muscles. She had been sitting for, oh, hours and hours.
+
+She rolled her head from side to side on her neck, working out the stiffness there and she saw Mrs Dibyendu's idiot nephew watching her. His lip was pouched with reeking betel saliva, and he was staring at her with a frankness that made her squirm right to the pit of her stomach.
+
+"You stayed behind for me," he said, a huge grin on his face. His teeth were brown. He wasn't really an idiot -- not soft in the head, anyway. But he was very thick and very slow, with a brutal strength that Mrs Dibyendu always described as his "special fortitude." Mala thought he was just a thug. She'd seen him walking in the narrow streets of Dharavi. He never shifted for women or old people, making them go around him even when it meant stepping into mud or worse. And he chewed betel all the time. Lots of people chewed betel, it was like smoking, but her mother detested the habit and had told her so many times that it was a "low" habit and dirty that she couldn't help but think less of betel chewers.
+
+He regarded her with his bloodshot eyes. She suddenly felt very vulnerable, the way she'd felt all the time, when they'd first come to Dharavi. She took a step to the right and he took a step to the right as well. That was a line crossed: once he blocked her exit, he'd announced his intention to hurt her. That was basic military strategy. He had made the first move, so he had the initiative, but he'd also showed his hand quickly, so --
+
+She feinted left and he fell for it. She lowered her head like a bull and butted it into the middle of his chest. Already off-balance, he went down on his back. She didn't stop moving, didn't look back, just kept going, thinking of that charging bull, running over him as she made for the doorway without stopping. One heel came down on his ribcage, the next on his face, mashing his lips and nose. She wished that something had gone /{crunch}/ but nothing did.
+
+She was out the door in an instant and into the cool air of the dark, dark Dharavi night. Around her, the sound of rats running over the roofs, the distant sounds of the roads, snoring. And many other, less identifiable sounds, sounds that might have been lurkers hiding in the shadows around them. Muffled speech. A distant train.
+
+Suddenly, sending her army away didn't seem like such a good idea.
+
+Behind her, she heard a much clearer sound of menace. The idiot nephew crashing through the door, his shoes on the packed earth road. She slipped back into an alley between two buildings, barely wider than her, her feet splashing through some kind of warm liquid that wafted an evil stench up to her nose. The idiot nephew lumbered past into the night. She stayed put. He lumbered back, looking in all directions for her.
+
+There she stood, waiting for him to give up, but he would not. Back and forth he charged. He'd become the bull, enraged, tireless, stupid. She heard his voice rasping in his chest. She had her mobile phone in her hand, her other hand cupped over it, shielding the treacherous light it gave off from its tiny screen. It was 12:47 now, and she had never been alone at this hour in all her 14 years.
+
+She could text someone in her army -- they would come to get her, wouldn't they? If they were awake, or if their phones' chirps woke them. No one was awake at this hour, though. And how to explain? What to say?
+
+She felt like an idiot. She felt ashamed. She should have predicted this, should have been the general, should have employed strategy. Instead, she'd gotten boxed in.
+
+She could wait. All night, if necessary. No need to let her army know of her weakness. Idiot nephew would tire or the sun would rise, it was all the same to her.
+
+Through the thin walls of the houses on either side of her, the sound of snoring. The evil smell rose up from the liquid below her in the ditch, and something slimy was squishing between her toes. It burned at her skin. The rats scampered overhead, sounding like rain on the tin roofs. Stupid, stupid, stupid, it was her mantra, over and over in her mind.
+
+The bull was tiring. The next time he passed, his breath came in terrible wheezes that blew the stink of betel before him like sweet rot. She could wait for his next pass, then run.
+
+It was a good plan. She hated it. He had -- He'd threatened her. He'd scared her. He should /{pay}/. She was the General Robotwallah, not merely some girl from the village. She was from Dharavi, tough. Smart.
+
+He wheezed past and she slipped out of the alley, her feet coming free of the muck with audible /{plops}/. He was facing away from her still, hadn't heard her yet, and he had his back to her. The stupid boys in her army only fought face to face, talked about the "honor" of hitting from behind. Honor was just stupid boy-things. Victory beat honor.
+
+She braced herself and ran toward him, both arms stiff, hands at shoulder-height. She hit him high and kept moving, the way he had before, and down he fell again, totally unprepared for the assault from the rear. The sound he made on the dirt was like the sound of a goat dropping at the butcher's block. He was trying to roll over and she turned around and ran at him, jumping up in the air and landing with both muddy feet on his head, driving his face into the mud. He shouted in pain, the sound muffled by the dirt, and then lay, stunned.
+
+She went back to him then, and knelt at his head, his hairy earlobe inches from her lips.
+
+"I wasn't waiting for you at the cafe. I was minding my own business," she said. "I don't like you. You shouldn't chase girls or the girls might turn around and catch you. Do you understand me? Tell me you understand me before I rip out your tongue and wipe your ass with it." They talked like this on the chat-channels for the games all the time, the boys did, and she'd always disapproved of it. But the words had power, she could feel it in her mouth, hot as blood from a bit tongue.
+
+"Tell me you understand me, idiot!" she hissed.
+
+"I understand," he said, and the words came mashed, from mashed lips and a mashed nose.
+
+She turned on her heel and began to walk away. He groaned behind her, then called out, "Whore! Stupid whore!"
+
+She didn't think, she just acted. Turned around, ran at his still-prone body, indistinct in the dusk, one step, two step, like a champion footballer coming in for a penalty kick and then she /{did}/ kick him, the foetid water spraying off her shoe's saturated toe as it connected with his big, stupid ribcage. Something snapped in there -- maybe several somethings, and oh, didn't that feel /{wonderful}/?
+
+He was every man who'd scared her, who'd shouted filthy things after her, who'd terrorized her mother. He was the bus driver who'd threatened to put them out on the roadside when they wouldn't pay him a bribe. Everything and everyone that had ever made her feel small and afraid, a girl from the village. All of them.
+
+She turned around. He was clutching at his side and blubbering now, crying stupid tears on his stupid cheeks, luminous in the smudgy moonlight that filtered through the haze of plastic smoke that hung over Dharavi. She would up and took another pass at him, one step, two step, /{kick}/, and /{crunch}/, that satisfying sound from his ribs again. His sobs caught in his chest and then he took a huge, shuddering breath and /{howled}/ like a wounded cat in the night, screamed so loud that here in Dharavi, the lights came on and voices came to the windows.
+
+It was as though a spell had been broken. She was shaking and drenched in sweat, and there were people peering at her in the dark. Suddenly she wanted to be home as fast as possible, if not faster. Time to go.
+
+She ran. Mala had loved to run through the fields as a little girl, hair flying behind her, knees and arms pumping, down the dirt roads. Now she ran in the night, the reek of the ditch water smacking her in the nose with each squelching step. Voices chased her through the night, though they came filtered through the hammer of her pulse in her ears and later she could not say whether they were real or imagined.
+
+But finally she was home and pelting up the steps to the third-floor flat she had rented for her family. Her thundering footsteps raised cries from the downstairs neighbors, but she ignored them, fumbled with her key, let herself in.
+
+Her brother Gopal looked up at her from his mat, blinking in the dark, his skinny chest bare. "Mala?"
+
+"It's OK," she said. "Nothing. Sleep, Gopal."
+
+He slumped back down. Mala's shoes stank. She peeled them off, using just the tips of her fingers, and left them outside the door. Perhaps they would be stolen -- though you would have to be desperate indeed to steal those shoes. Now her feet stank. There was a large jug of water in the corner, and a dipper. Carefully, she carried the dipper to the window, opened the squealing shutter, and poured the water slowly over the her feet, propping first one and then the other on the windowsill. Gopal stirred again. "Be quiet," he said, "it's sleep-time."
+
+She ignored him. She was still out of breath, and the reality of what she'd done was setting in for her. She had kicked the idiot nephew -- how many times? Two? Three? And something in his body had gone /{crack}/ each time. Why had he blocked her? Why had he followed her into the night? What was it that made the big and the strong take such sport in terrorizing the weak? Whole groups of boys would do this to girls and even grown women sometimes -- follow them, calling after them, touching them, sometimes it even led to rape. They called it "Eve-teasing" and they treated it like a game. It wasn't a game, not if you were the victim.
+
+Why did they make her do it? Why did all of them make her do it? The sound of the crack had been so satisfying then, and it was so sickening now. She was shaking, though the night was so hot, one of those steaming nights where everything was slimy with the low-hanging, soupy moisture.
+
+And she was crying, too, the crying coming out without her being able to control it, and she was ashamed of that, too, because that's what a girl from the village would do, not brave General Robotwallah.
+
+Calloused hands touched her shoulders, squeezed them. The smell of her mother in her nose: clean sweat, cooking spice, soap. Strong, thin arms encircled her from behind.
+
+"Daughter, oh daughter, what happened to you?"
+
+And she wanted to tell Mamaji everything, but all that came out were cries. She turned her head to her mother's bosom and heaved with the sobs that came and came and came in waves, feeling like they'd turn her inside out. Gopal got up and moved into the next room, silent and scared. She noticed this, noticed all of it as from a great distance, her body sobbing, her mind away somewhere, cool and remote.
+
+"Mamaji," she said at last. "There was a boy."
+
+Her mother squeezed her harder. "Oh, Mala, sweet girl --"
+
+"No, Mamaji, he didn't touch me. He tried to. I knocked him down. Twice. And I kicked him and kicked him until I heard things breaking, and then I ran home."
+
+"Mala!" her mother held her at arm's length. "Who was he?" Meaning, /{Was he someone who can come after us, who can make trouble for us, who could ruin us here in Dharavi?}/
+
+"He was Mrs Dibyendu's nephew, the big one, the one who makes trouble all the time."
+
+Her mothers fingers tightened on her arms and her eyes went wide.
+
+"Oh, Mala, Mala -- oh, no."
+
+And Mala knew exactly what her mother meant by this, why she was consumed with horror. Her relationship with Mr Banerjee came from Mrs Dibyendu. And the flat, their lives, the phone and the clothes they wore -- they all came from Mr Banerjee. They balanced on a shaky pillar of relationships, and Mrs Dibyendu was at the bottom of it, all resting on her shoulders. And the idiot nephew could convince her to shrug her shoulders and all would come tumbling down -- the money, the security, all of it.
+
+That was the biggest injustice of all, the injustice that had driven her to kick and kick and kick -- this oaf of a boy knew that he could get away with his grabbing and intimidation because she couldn't afford to stop him. But she had stopped him and she could not -- would not -- be sorry.
+
+"I can talk with Mr Banerjee," she said. "I have his phone number. He knows that I'm a good worker -- he'll make it all better. You'll see, Mamaji, don't worry."
+
+"Why, Mala, why? Couldn't you have just run away? Why did you have to hurt this boy?"
+
+Mala felt some of the anger flood back into her. Her mother, her own mother --
+
+But she understood. Her mother wanted to protect her, but her mother wasn't a general. She was just a girl from the village, all grown up. She had been beaten down by too many boys and men, too much hurt and poverty and fear. This was what Mala was destined to become, someone who ran from her attackers because she couldn't afford to anger them.
+
+She wouldn't do it.
+
+No matter what happened with Mr Banerjee and Mrs Dibyendu and her stupid idiot nephew, she was not going to become that person.
+
+#
+
+1~ scene # ~#
+
+_1 /{ This scene is dedicated to Borders, the global bookselling giant that you can find in cities all over the world -- I'll never forget walking into the gigantic Borders on Orchard Road in Singapore and discovering a shelf loaded with my novels! For many years, the Borders in Oxford Street in London hosted Pat Cadigan's monthly science fiction evenings, where local and visiting authors would read their work, speak about science fiction and meet their fans. When I'm in a strange city (which happens a lot) and I need a great book for my next flight, there always seems to be a Borders brimming with great choices -- I'm especially partial to the Borders on Union Square in San Francisco. }/
+
+_1 {~^ Borders worldwide }http://www.bordersstores.com/locator/locator.jsp
+
+If you want to get rich without making anything or doing anything that anyone needs or wants, you need to be /{fast}/.
+
+The technical term for this is /{arbitrage}/. Imagine that you live in an apartment block and it's snowing so hard out that no one wants to dash out to the convenience store. Your neighbor to the right, Mrs Hungry, wants a banana and she's willing to pay $0.50 for it. Your neighbor to the left, Mr Full, has a whole cupboard full of bananas, but he's having a hard time paying his phone bill this month, so he'll sell as many bananas as you want to buy for $0.30 apiece.
+
+You might think that the neighborly thing to do here would be to call up Mrs Hungry and tell her about Mr Full, letting them consummate the deal. If you think that, forget getting rich without doing useful work.
+
+If you're an arbitrageur, then you think of your neighbors' regrettable ignorance as an opportunity. You snap up all of Mr Full's bananas, then scurry over to Mrs Hungry's place with your hand out. For every banana she buys, you pocket $0.20. This is called arbitrage.
+
+Arbitrage is a high-risk way to earn a living. What happens if Mrs Hungry changes her mind? You're stuck holding the bananas, that's what.
+
+Or what happens if some other arbitrageur beats you to Mrs Hungry's door, filling her apartment with all the bananas she could ever need? Once again, you're stuck with a bunch of bananas and nowhere to put them (though a few choice orifices do suggest themselves here).
+
+In the real world, arbitrageurs don't drag around bananas -- they buy and sell using networked computers, surveying all the outstanding orders ("bids") and asks, and when they find someone willing to pay more for something than someone else is paying for it, they snap up that underpriced item, mark it up, and sell it.
+
+And this happens very, very quickly. If you're going to beat the other arbitrageurs with the goods, if you're going to get there before the buyer changes her mind, you've got to move faster than the speed of thought. Literally. Arbitrage isn't a matter of a human being vigilantly watching the screens for price-differences.
+
+No, arbitrage is all done by automated systems. These little traderbots rove the world's networked marketplaces, looking for arbitrage opportunities, buying something and selling it in less than a microsecond. A good arbitrage house conducts a /{billion}/ or more trades every day, squeezing a few cents out of each one. A billion times a few cents is a lot of money -- if you've got a fast computer cluster, a good software engineer, and a blazing network connection, you can turn out /{ten or twenty million}/ dollars a day.
+
+Not bad, considering that all you're doing is exploiting the fact that there's a person over here who wants to buy something and a person over there who wants to sell it. Not bad, considering that if you and all your arbitraging buddies were to vanish tomorrow, the economy and the world wouldn't even notice. No one needs or wants your "service" but it's still a sweet way to get rich.
+
+The best thing about arbitrage is that you don't need to know a single, solitary thing about the stuff you're buying and selling in order to get rich off of it. Whether it's bananas or a vorpal blade, all you need to know about the things you're buying is that someone over /{here}/ wants to buy them for more than someone over /{there}/ wants to sell them for. Good thing, too -- if you're closing the deal in less than a microsecond, there's no time to sit down and google up a bunch of factoids about the merchandise.
+
+And the merchandise is pretty weird. Start with the fact that a lot of this stuff doesn't even exist -- vorpal blades, grabthar's hammers, the gold of a thousand imaginary lands.
+
+Now consider that people trade more than gold: the game Gods sell all kinds of funny money. How about this one:
+
+Offered: Svartalfaheim Warriors bonds, worth 100,000 gold, payable six months from now. This isn't even /{real}/ fake gold -- it's the promise of real fake gold at some time in the future. Stick that into the market for a couple months, baby, and watch it go. Here's a trader who'll pay five percent more than it was worth yesterday -- he's betting that the game will get more popular some time between now and six months from now, and so the value of goods in the game will go up at the same time.
+
+Or maybe he's betting that the game Gods will just raise the price on everything and make it harder to clobber enough monsters to raise the gold to get it, driving away all but the hardest-core players, who'll pay anything to get their hands on the dough.
+
+Or maybe he's an idiot.
+
+Or maybe he thinks /{you're}/ an idiot and you'll give him ten percent tomorrow, figuring that he knows something you don't.
+
+And if you think that's weird, here's an even better one!
+
+Coca-Cola sells you a six-month Svartalfaheim Warriors 100,000 gold bond, but you're worried that it's going to fall in value between now and D-Day, when the bond matures. So you find another trader and you ask him for some insurance: you offer him $1.50 to insure your bond. If the bond goes up in value, he gets to keep the $1.50 and you get to keep the profits from the bond. If the bond goes down in value, he has to pay you the difference. If that's more than $1.50, he's losing money.
+
+This is basically an insurance policy. If you go to a life-insurance company and ask them for a policy on your life, they'll make a bet on how likely it is that you're going to croak, and charge you enough that, on average, they make a profit (providing they're guessing accurately at your chances of dying). So if the trader you're talking to thinks that Svartalfaheim Warriors is going to tank, he might charge you $10, or $100.
+
+So far, so good, right?
+
+Now, here's where it gets even weirder. Follow along.
+
+Imagine that there's a third party to this transaction, some guy sitting on the sidelines, holding onto a pot of money, trying to figure out what to do with it. He watches you go to the trader and buy an insurance policy for $1.50 -- if Svartalfaheim Warriors gets better, you're out $1.50, if it gets worse, the trader has to make up the difference.
+
+After you've sealed your deal, this third party, being something of a ghoul, goes up to the same trader and says, "Hey, how about this? I want to place the same bet you've just placed with that guy. I'll give you $1.50 and if his bond goes up, you keep it. If his bond goes down, you pay me /{and}/ him the difference." Essentially, this guy is betting that your bond is junk, and so maybe he finds a taker.
+
+Now he's got this bet, which is worth nothing if your bond goes up, and worth some unknown amount if your bond craters. And you know what he does with it?
+
+/{He sells it}/.
+
+He packages it up and finds some sucker who wants to buy his $1.50 bet on your bond for more than the $1.50 he'll have to cough up if your bond goes up. And the sucker buys it and then /{he}/ sells it. And then another sucker buys it and /{he}/ sells it. And before you know it, the 100,000 gold-piece bond you bought for $15 has $1,000 worth of bets hanging off of it.
+
+And /{this}/ is the kind of thing an arbitrageur is buying and selling. He's not carrying bananas from Mr Full to Mrs Hungry -- he's buying and selling bets on insurance policies on promises of imaginary gold.
+
+And this is what he calls an honest day's work.
+
+Nice work if you can get it.
+
+#
+
+1~ scene # ~#
+
+_1 /{ This scene is dedicated to Compass Books/Books Inc, the oldest independent bookstore in the western USA. They've got stores up and down California, in San Francisco, Burlingame, Mountain View and Palo Alto, but coolest of all is that they run a killer bookstore in the middle of Disneyland's Downtown Disney in Anaheim. I'm a stone Disney park freak (see my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom if you don't believe it), and every time I've lived in California, I've bought myself an annual Disneyland pass, and on practically every visit, I drop by Compass Books in Downtown Disney. They stock a brilliant selection of unauthorized (and even critical) books about Disney, as well as a great variety of kids books and science fiction, and the cafe next door makes a mean cappuccino. }/
+
+_1 {~^ Compass Books/Books Inc }http://www.booksinc.net/NASApp/store/Product;jsessionid=abcF-ch09-pbU6m7ZRrLr?s=showproductandisbn=0765322166
+
+Matthew Fong and his employees raided through the night and into the next day, farming as much gold as they could get out of their level while the getting was good. They slept in shifts, and they co-opted anyone who made the mistake of asking what they were up to, dragooning them into mining the dungeon with them.
+
+All the while, Master Fong was getting the gold out of their accounts as fast as it landed in them. He knew that once the game Gods got wind of his operation, they'd swoop in, suspend everyone's accounts, and seize any gold they had in their inventory. The trick was to be sure that there wasn't anything for them to seize.
+
+So he hopped online and hit the big brokerage message-boards. These weren't just grey-market, they were blackest black, and you needed to know someone heavy to get in on them. Matthew's heavy was a guy from Sichuan, skinny and shaky, with several missing teeth. He called himself "Cobra," and he'd been the one who'd introduced Matthew to Boss Wing all those months before. Cobra worked for someone who worked for someone who worked for one of the big cartels, tough criminal organizations that had all the markets for turning game-gold into cash sewn up.
+
+Cobra had given him a login and a briefing on how to do deals on the brokernet. Now as the night wore on, he picked his way through the interface, listing his gold and setting an asking price that was half of the selling price listed on the white, above-ground gold-store that gweilos used to buy the game gold from the brokers.
+
+He waited, and waited, and waited, but no one bought his gold. Every game world was divided into local servers and shards, and when you signed up, you needed to set which server you wanted to play on. Once you'd picked a server, you were stuck there -- your toon couldn't just wander between the parallel universes. This made buying and selling gold all the more difficult: if a gweilo wanted to buy gold for his toon on server A, he needed to find a farmer who had mined his gold on server A. If you mined all your gold on server B, you were out of luck.
+
+That's where the brokers came in. They bought gold from everyone, and held it in an ever-shifting network of accounts, millions of toons who fanned out all over the worlds and exchanged small amounts of gold at irregular intervals, to fool the anti-laundering snoops in the game logic that relentlessly hunted for farmers and brokers to bust.
+
+Avoiding those filters was a science, one that had been hammered together over decades in the real world before it migrated to the games. If a big pension fund in the real world wanted to buy half a billion dollars' worth of stock in Google, the last thing they want to do is tip off everyone else that they're about to sink that much cash into Google. If they did, everyone else would snap up Google stock before they could get to it, mark it up, and gouge them on it.
+
+So anyone who wants to buy a lot of anything -- who wants to move a lot of money around -- has to know how to do it in a way that's invisible to snoops. They have to be statistically insignificant, which means that a single big trade has to be broken up into millions of little trades that look like ordinary suckers buying and selling a little stock for the hell of it.
+
+No matter what secrets you're trying to keep and no matter who you're trying to keep them from, the techniques are the same. In every game world there were thousands of seemingly normal characters doing seemingly normal things, giving each other seemingly normal sums of money, but at the end of the day, it all added up to millions of gold in trade, taking place right under the noses of the game Gods.
+
+Matthew down-priced his gold, seeking the price at which a broker would deign to notice him and take it off of him. All the trading took place in slangy, rapid Chinese -- that was one of the ways the brokers kept their hold on the market, since there weren't that many Russians and Indonesians and Indians who could follow it and play along -- replete with insults and wheedles. Eventually, Matthew found the magic price. It was lower than he'd hoped for, but not by much, and now that he'd found it, he was able to move the team's gold as fast as they could accumulate it, shuttling dummy players in and out of the dungeon they were working to take the cash to bots run by the brokers.
+
+Finally, it dried up. First, the amount of gold in the dungeon sharply decreased, with the gold dropping from 12,000 per hour to 8,000, then 2,000, then a paltry 100. The mareridtbane disappeared next, which was a pity, because he was able to sell that directly, hawking it in the big towns, pasting and pasting and pasting his offer into the chat where the real players could see it. And then in came the cops, moderators with special halos around them who dropped canned lectures into the chat, stern warnings about having violated the game's terms of service.
+
+And then the account suspensions, the games vanishing from one screen after another, popping like soap bubbles. They were all dropped back to the login screens and they slumped, grinning crazy and exhausted, in their seats, looking at each other in exhausted relief. It was over, at last.
+
+"How much?" Lu asked, flung backwards over his chair, not opening his eyes or lifting his head. "How much, Master Fong?"
+
+Matthew didn't have his notebooks anymore, so he'd been keeping track on the insides of Double Happiness cigarette packages, long, neat tallies of numbers. His pen flickered from sheet to sheet, checking the math one final time, then, quietly, "$3,400."
+
+There was a stunned silence. "How much?" Lu had his eyes open now.
+
+Matthew made a show of checking the figures again, but that's all it was, a show. He knew that the numbers were right. "Three thousand, four hundred and two dollars and fourteen cents." It was double the biggest score they'd ever made for Boss Wing. It was the most money any of them had ever made. His share of it was more than his father made in a month. And he'd made it in one night.
+
+"Sorry, /{how much}/?"
+
+"8,080 bowls of dumplings, Lu. That much."
+
+The silence was even thicker. That was a lot of dumplings. That was enough to rent their own place to use as a factory, a place with computers and a fast internet connection and bedrooms to sleep in, a place where they could earn and earn, where they could grow rich as any boss.
+
+Lu leapt out of his chair and whooped, a sound so loud that the entire cafe turned to look at them, but they didn't care, they were all out of their seats now, whooping and dancing around and hugging each other.
+
+And now it was the day, a new day, the sun had come up and gone down and risen in their long labor in the cafe, and they had won. It was a new day for them and for everyone around them.
+
+They stepped out into the sun and there were people on the streets, throngs buying and selling, touts hustling, pretty girls in good clothes walking arm in arm under a single parasol. The heat of the day was like a blast furnace after the air-conditioned cool of the cafe, but that was good, too -- it baked out the funk of cigarette-mouth, coffee-mouth, no-food-mouth. Suddenly, none of them were sleepy. They all wanted to eat.
+
+So Matthew took them out for breakfast. They were his team, after all. They took over the back table at an Indian restaurant near the train station, a place he'd overheard his uncle Yiu-Yu telling his parents about, bragging about some business associate who took him there. Very sophisticated. And he'd read so much about Indian food in his comics, he couldn't wait to try some.
+
+All the other customers in there were either foreigners or Hong Kong people, but they didn't let that get to them. The boys sat at their back table and played with their forks and ate plate after plate of curry and fresh hot flatbreads called naan, and it was delicious and strange and the perfect end to what had turned out to be the perfect night.
+
+Halfway through the dessert -- delicious mango ice-cream -- the sleeplessness finally caught up with them all. They sat on their seats in their torpor, hands over their bellies, eyes half-open, and Matthew called for the check.
+
+They stepped out again into the light. Matthew had decided to go to his parents' place, to sleep on the sofa for a little while, before figuring out what to do about his smashed room with its smashed door.
+
+As they blinked in the light, a familiar Wenjhou accented voice said, "You aren't a very smart boy, are you?"
+
+Matthew turned. Boss Wing's man was there, and three of his friends. They rushed forward and grabbed the boys before they could react, one of them so big that he grabbed a boy in each hand and nearly lifted them off their feet.
+
+His friends struggled to get free, but Boss Wing's man methodically slapped them until they stopped.
+
+Matthew couldn't believe that this was happening -- in broad daylight, right here next to the train station! People crossed the street to avoid them. Matthew supposed he would have done so too.
+
+Boss Wing's man leaned in so close Matthew could smell the fish he'd had for lunch on his breath. "Why are you a stupid boy, Matthew? You didn't seem stupid when you worked for Boss Wing. You always seemed smarter than these children." He flapped his hand disparagingly at the boys. "But Boss Wing, he trained you, sheltered you, fed you, paid you -- do you think it's honorable or fair for you to take all that investment and run out the door with it?"
+
+"We don't owe Boss Wing anything!" Lu shouted. "You think you can make us work for him?"
+
+Boss Wing's man shook his head. "What a little hothead. No one wants to force you to do anything, child. We just don't think it's fair for you to take all the training and investment we made in you and run across the street and start up a competing business. It's not right, and Boss Wing won't stand for it."
+
+The curry churned in Matthew's stomach. "We have the right to start our own business." The words were braver than he felt, but these were /{his}/ boys, and they gave him bravery. "If Boss Wing doesn't like the competition, let him find another line of work."
+
+Boss Wing's man didn't give him any forewarning before he slapped Matthew so hard his head rang like a gong. He stumbled back two steps, then tripped over his heels and fell on his ass, landing on the filthy sidewalk. Boss Wing's man put a foot on his chest and looked down at him.
+
+"Little boy, it doesn't work like that. Here's the deal -- Boss Wing understands if you don't want to work at his factory, that's fine. He's willing to sell you the franchise to set up your own branch operation of his firm. All you have to do is pay him a franchise fee of 60 percent of your gross earnings. We watched your gold-sales from Svartalfaheim. You can do as much of that kind of work as you like, and Boss Wing will even take care of the sales end of things for you, so you'll be free to concentrate on your work. And because it's your firm, you get to decide how you divide the money -- you can pay yourself anything you like out of it."
+
+Matthew burned with shame. His friends were all looking at him, goggle eyed, scared. The weight from the foot on his chest increased until he couldn't draw a breath.
+
+Finally, he gasped out, "/{Fine}/," and the pressure went away. Boss Wing's man extended a hand, helped him to his feet.
+
+"Smart," he said. "I knew you were a smart boy." He turned to Matthew's friends. "Your little boss here is a smart man. He'll take you places. You listen to him now."
+
+Then, without another word, he turned on his heel and walked away, his men following him.
+
+#
+
+1~ scene # ~#
+
+_1 /{ This scene is dedicated to Anderson's Bookshops, Chicago's legendary kids' bookstore. Anderson's is an old, old family-run business, which started out as an old-timey drug-store selling some books on the side. Today, it's a booming, multi-location kids' book empire, with some incredibly innovative bookselling practices that get books and kids together in really exciting ways. The best of these is the store's mobile book-fairs, in which they ship huge, rolling bookcases, already stocked with excellent kids' books, direct to schools on trucks -- voila, instant book-fair! }/
+
+_1 {~^ Anderson's Bookshops }http://site.booksite.com/5156/search/?q=for%20the%20win%20doctorowandsearch=yesandcustcat=: 123 West Jefferson, Naperville, IL 60540 USA +1 630 355 2665
+
+The car that had plowed into Wei-Dong's father's car was driven by a very exasperated, very tired British man, fat and bald, with two angry kids in the back seat and an angry wife in the front seat.
+
+He was steadily, quietly cursing in British, which was a lot like cursing in American, but with a lot more "bloodies" in it. He paced the sidewalk beside the wrecked Huawei, his wife calling at him from inside the car to get back in the bloody car, Ronald, but Ronald wasn't having any of it.
+
+Wei-Dong sat on the narrow strip of grass between the road and the sidewalk, dazed in the noon sun, waiting for his vision to stop swimming. Benny sat next to him, holding a wad of kleenex to staunch the bleeding from his broken nose, which he'd bounced off of the dashboard. Wei-Dong brought his hands up to his forehead to finger the lump there again. His hands smelled of new plastic, the smell of the airbag that he'd had to punch his way out of.
+
+The fat man crouched next to him. "Christ, son, you look like you've been to the wars. But you'll be all right, right? Could have been much worse."
+
+"Sir," Benny Rosenbaum said, in a quiet voice muffled by the kleenex. "Please leave us alone now. When the police come, we can all talk, all right?"
+
+"'Course, 'course." His kids were screaming now, hollering from the back seat about getting to Disneyland, when were they getting to Disneyland? "Shut it, you monsters," he roared. The sound made Wei-Dong flinch back. He wobbled to his feet.
+
+"Sit down, Leonard," his father said. "You shouldn't have gotten out of the car, and you certainly shouldn't be walking around now. You could have a concussion or a spinal injury. Sit down," he repeated, but Wei-Dong needed to get off the grass, needed to walk off the sick feeling in his stomach.
+
+Uh-oh. He barely made it to the curb, hands braced on the crumpled, flaking rear section of the Huawei, before he started to barf, a geyser of used food that shot straight out of his guts and flew all over the wreck of the car. A moment later, his father's hands were on his shoulders, steadying him. Angrily, he shook them off.
+
+There were sirens coming now, and the fat man was talking intensely to old Benny, though it was quiet enough that Wei-Dong could only make out a few words -- /{insurance, fault, vacation}/ -- all in a wheedling tone. His father kept trying to get a word in, but the guy was talking over him. Wei-Dong could have told him that this wasn't a good strategy. Nothing was surer to make Volcano Benny blow. And here it came.
+
+"/{Shut your mouth for a second, all right? Just SHUT IT.}/"
+
+The shout was so loud that even the kids in the back seat went silent.
+
+"YOU HIT US, you goddamned idiot! We're not going to go halves on the damage. We're not going to settle this for cash. I don't /{care}/ if you're jetlagged, I don't /{care}/ if you didn't buy the extra insurance on your rental car, I don't /{care}/ if this will ruin your vacation. You could have killed us, you understand that, moron?"
+
+The man held up his hands and cringed behind them. "You were parked in the middle of the road, mate," he said, a note of pleading in his voice.
+
+Everyone was watching them, the kids and the guy's wife, the rubberneckers who slowed down to see the accident. The two men were totally focused on each other.
+
+In other words, no one was watching Wei-Dong.
+
+He thought about the sound his earwig made, crunching under his father's steel-toed shoe, heard the sirens getting closer, and...
+
+He...
+
+Left.
+
+He sidled away toward the shrubs that surrounded a mini-mall and gas-station, nonchalant, clutching his school-bag, like he was just getting his bearings, but he was headed toward a gap there, a narrow one that he just barely managed to squeeze through. He popped through into the parking lot around the mini-mall, filled with stores selling $3 t-shirts and snow-globes and large bottles of filtered water. On this side of the shrubs, the world was normal and busy, filled with tourists on their way to or from Disneyland.
+
+He picked up his pace, keeping his face turned away from the stores and the CCTV cameras outside of them. He felt in his pocket, felt the few dollars there. He had to get away, far away, fast, if he was going to get away at all.
+
+And there was his salvation, the tourist bus that rolled through the streets of the Anaheim Resort District, shuttling people from hotels to restaurants to the parks, crowded with sugared-up kids and conventioneers with badges hanging around their necks, and it was trundling to the stop just a few yards away. He broke into a run, stumbled from the pain that seared through his head like a lightning bolt, then settled for walking as quickly as he could. The sirens were very, very loud now, right there on the other side of the shrubs, and he was almost at the bus and there was his father's voice, calling his name and there was the bus and --
+
+-- his foot came down on the bottom step, his back foot came up to join it, and the impatient driver closed the doors behind him and released the air-brake with a huge sigh and the bus lurched forward.
+
+"Wei-Dong Rosenbaum," he whispered to himself, "you've just escaped a parental kidnapping to a military school, what are you going to do now?" He grinned. "I'm going to Disneyland!"
+
+The bus trundled down Katella, heading for the bus-entrance, and then it disgorged its load of frenetic tourists. Wei-Dong mingled with them, invisible in the mass of humanity skipping past the huge, primary-colored traffic pylons. He was on autopilot, remained on autopilot as he unslung his school-bag to let the bored security goon paw through it.
+
+He'd had a Disneyland annual pass since he was old enough to ride the bus. All the kids he knew had them too -- it beat going to the mall after school, and even though it got boring after a while, he could think of no better place to disappear into while thinking through his next steps.
+
+He walked down Main Street, heading for the little pink castle at the end of the road. He knew that there were secluded benches on the walkways around the castle, places where he could sit down and think for a moment. His head felt like it was full of candy floss.
+
+First thing he did after sitting down was check his phone. The ringer had been off -- school rules -- but he'd felt it vibrating continuously in his pocket. Fifteen missed calls from his father. He dialled up his voicemail and listened to his dad rant about coming back /{right now}/ and all the dire things that would happen to him if he didn't.
+
+"Kid, whatever you think you're doing, you're wrong about it. You're going to come home eventually. The sooner you call me back, the less trouble we're going to have. And the longer you wait -- /{you listen to this, Leonard}/ -- the longer you wait, /{the worse it's going to be}/. There are worse things than boarding school, kid. Much, much worse."
+
+He stared vacantly at the sky, listening to this, and then he dropped the phone as though he'd been scorched by it.
+
+/{It had a GPS in it}/. They were always using phones to find runaways and bad guys and lost hikers. He picked the phone up off the pavement and slid the back out and removed the battery, then put it in his jacket pocket, returning the phone to his jeans. He wasn't much of a fugitive.
+
+The police had been on the way to the accident when he left. They'd arrived minutes later. The old man had decided that he'd run away, so he'd be telling the cops that. He was a minor, and truant, and he'd been in a car accident, and hell, face it, his family was rich. That meant that the police would pay attention to his dad, which meant that they'd be doing everything they could to locate him. If they hadn't yet figured out where his phone was, they'd know soon enough -- they'd run the logs and find the call from Disneyland to his voicemail.
+
+He started moving, shoving his way through the crowds, heading back up Main Street. He ducked around behind a barbershop quartet and realized that he was standing in front of an ATM. They'd be shutting down his card any second, too -- or, if they were smart, they'd leave the card live and use it to track him. He needed cash. He waited while a pair of German tourists fumbled with the machine and then jammed his card into it and withdrew $500, the most the machine would dispense. He hit it again for another $500, self-conscious now of the inch-thick wad of twenties in his hand. He tried for a third withdrawal, but the machine told him he'd gone to his daily limit. He didn't think he had much more than $1,000 in the bank, anyway -- that was several years' worth of birthday money, plus a little from his summer job working at a Chinese PC repair shop at a mini-mall in Irvine.
+
+He folded the wad and stuck it in his pocket and headed out of the park, not bothering with the hand-stamp. He started to head for the street, but then he turned on his heel and headed toward the Downtown Disney shopping complex and the hotels that attached to it. There were cheap tour-buses that went from there up to LA, down to San Diego, to all the airports. There was no easier, cheaper way to get far from here.
+
+The lobby of the Grand Californian Hotel soared to unimaginable heights, giant beams criss-crossing through the cavernous space. Wei-Dong had always liked this place. It always seemed so /{rendered}/, like an imaginary place, with the intricate marble inlays on the floor, the ten-foot-high stained-glass panels set into the sliding doors, the embroidered upholstery on the sofas. Now, though, he just wanted to get through it and onto a bus to --
+
+Where?
+
+Anywhere.
+
+He didn't know what he was going to do next, but one thing he did know, he wasn't going to be sent away to some school for screwups, kicked off the Internet, kicked off the games. His father wouldn't have allowed anyone to do this to /{him}/, no matter what problems he was having. The old man would never let himself be pushed around and shaken up like this.
+
+His mother would worry -- but she always worried, didn't she? He'd send her email once he got somewhere, an email every day, let her know that he was OK. She was good to him. Hell, the old man was good to him, come to that. Mostly. But he was seventeen now, he wasn't a kid, he wasn't a broken toy to be shipped back to the manufacturer.
+
+The man behind the concierge desk didn't bat an eye when Wei-Dong asked for the schedule for the airport shuttles, just handed it over. Wei-Dong sat down in the darkest corner by the stone fireplace, the most inconspicuous place in the whole hotel. He was starting to get paranoid now, he could recognize the feeling, but it didn't help soothe him as he jumped and stared at every Disney cop who strolled through the lobby, doubtless he was looking as guilty as a mass-murderer.
+
+The next bus was headed for LAX, and the one after, for the Santa Monica airport. Wei-Dong decided that LAX was the right place to go. Not so he could get on a plane -- if his dad had called the cops, he was sure they'd have some kind of trace on at the ticket-sales windows. He didn't know exactly how that worked, but he understood how bottlenecks worked, thanks to gaming. Right now, he could be anywhere in LA, which meant that they'd have to devote a gigantic amount of effort in order to find him. But if he tried to leave by airplane, there'd be a much smaller number of places they'd have to check to catch him -- the airline counters at four or five airports in town -- and that was a lot more practical.
+
+But LAX also had cheap buses to /{everywhere}/ in LA, buses that went to every hotel and neighborhood. It would take a long time, sure -- an hour and a half from Disneyland to LAX, another hour or two to get back to LA, but that was fine. He needed time -- time to figure out what he was going to do next.
+
+Because when he was totally honest with himself, he had to admit that he had no freaking idea.
+
+#
+
+1~ scene # ~#
+
+_1 /{ This scene is dedicated to the University Bookstore at the University of Washington, whose science fiction section rivals many specialty stores, thanks to the sharp-eyed, dedicated science fiction buyer, Duane Wilkins. Duane's a real science fiction fan -- I first met him at the World Science Fiction Convention in Toronto in 2003 -- and it shows in the eclectic and informed choices on display at the store. One great predictor of a great bookstore is the quality of the "shelf review" -- the little bits of cardboard stuck to the shelves with (generally hand-lettered) staff-reviews extolling the virtues of books you might otherwise miss. The staff at the University Bookstore have clearly benefited from Duane's tutelage, as the shelf reviews at the University Bookstore are second to none. }/
+
+_1 {~^ The University Bookstore }http://www4.bookstore.washington.edu/_trade/ShowTitleUBS.taf?ActionArg=TitleandISBN=9780765322166 4326 University Way NE, Seattle, WA 98105 USA +1 800 335 READ
+
+Mala woke early, after a troubled sleep. In the village, she'd often risen early, and listened to the birds. But there was no birdsong when her eyes fluttered open, only the sussuration of Dharavi -- cars, rats, people, distant factory noises, goats. A rooster. Well, that was a kind of bird. A little smile touched her lips, and she felt slightly better.
+
+Not much, though. She sat up and rubbed her eyes, stretched her arms. Gopal still slept, snoring softly, lying on his stomach the way he had when he was a baby. She needed the toilet, and, as it was light out, she decided that she would go out to the communal one a little ways away, rather than using the covered bucket in the room. In the village, they'd had a proper latrine, deep dug, with a pot of clean water outside of it that the women kept filled all the time. Here in Dharavi, the communal toilet was a much more closed-in, reeking place, never very clean. The established families in Dharavi had their own private toilets, so the public ones were only used by newcomers.
+
+It wasn't so bad this morning. There were ladies who got up even earlier than her to slosh it out with water hauled from the nearby communal tap. By nightfall, the reek would be eye-watering.
+
+She loitered in the street in front of the house. It wasn't too hot yet, or too crowded, or too noisy. She wished it was. Maybe the noise and the crowds would drown out the worry racing through her mind. Maybe the heat would bake it out.
+
+She'd brought her mobile out with her. It danced with notifiers about new things she could pay to see -- shows and cartoons and political messages, sent in the night. She flicked them away impatiently and scrolled through her address-book, stopping at Mr Banerjee's name and staring at it. Her finger poised over the send button.
+
+It was too early, she thought. He'd be asleep. But he never was, was he? Mr Banerjee seemed to be awake at all hours, messaging her with new targets to take her army to. He'd be awake. He'd have been up all night, talking to Mrs Dibyendu.
+
+Her finger hovered over the Send button.
+
+The phone rang.
+
+She nearly dropped it in surprise, but she managed to settle it in her hand and switch off the ringer, peer at the face. Mr Banerjee, of course, as though he'd been conjured into her phone by her thoughts and her staring anxiety.
+
+"Hello?" she said.
+
+"Mala," he said. He sounded grave.
+
+"Mr Banerjee." It came out in a squeak.
+
+He didn't say anything else. She knew this trick. She used it with her army, especially on the boys. Saying nothing made a balloon of silence in your opponent's head, one that swelled to fill it, until it began to echo with their anxieties and doubts. It worked very well. It worked very well, even if you knew how it worked. It was working well on her.
+
+She bit her lip. Otherwise she would have blurted something, maybe /{He was going to hurt me}/ or /{He had it coming}/ or /{I did nothing wrong}/.
+
+Or, /{I am a warrior and I am not ashamed}/.
+
+/{There}/. There was the thought, though it wanted to slip away and hide behind /{He was going to hurt me}/, that was the thought she needed, the platoon she needed to bring to the fore. She marshalled the thought, chivvied it, turned it into an orderly skirmish line and marched it forward.
+
+"Mrs Dibyendu's idiot nephew tried to assault me last night, in case you haven't heard." She waited a beat. "I didn't let him do it. I don't think he'll try it again."
+
+There was a snort, very faint, down the phone line. A suppressed laugh? Barely contained anger? "I heard about it, Mala. The boy is in the hospital."
+
+"Good," she said, before she could stop herself.
+
+"One of his ribs broke and punctured his lung. But they say he'll live. Still, it was quite close."
+
+She felt sick. Why? Why did it have to be this way? Why couldn't he have left her alone? "I'm glad he'll live."
+
+"Mrs Dibyendu called me in the night to tell me that her sister's only son had been attacked. That he'd been attacked by a vicious gang of your friends. Your 'army'."
+
+Now /{she}/ snorted. "He says it because he's embarrassed to have been so badly beaten by me, just me, just a girl."
+
+Again, the silence ballooned in the conversation. /{He's waiting for me to say I'm sorry, that I'll make it up somehow, that he can take it from my wages.}/ She swallowed. /{I won't do it. The idiot made me attack him, and he deserved what he got.}/
+
+"Mrs Dibyendu," he began, then stopped. "There are expenses that come from something like this, Mala. Everything has a cost. You know that. It costs you to play at Mrs Dibyendu's cafe. It costs me to have you do it. Well, this has a cost, too."
+
+Now it was her turn to be quiet, and to think at him, as hard as she can, /{Oh yes, well, I think I already exacted payment from idiot nephew. I think he's paid the cost.}/
+
+"Are you listening to me?"
+
+She made a grunt of assent, not trusting herself to open her mouth.
+
+"Good. Listen carefully. The next month, you work for /{me}/. Every rupee is mine, and I make this bad thing that you've brought down on yourself go away."
+
+She pulled the phone away from her head as if it had gone red hot and burned her. She stared at the faceplate. From very far away, Mr Banerjee said, "/{Mala?}/ /{Mala?}/" She put the phone back to her head.
+
+She was breathing hard now. "It's impossible," she said, trying to stay calm. "The army won't fight without pay. My mother can't live without my pay. We'll lose our home. No," she repeated, "it's not possible."
+
+"Not possible? Mala, it had better be possible. Whether or not you work for me, I will have to make this right with Mrs Dibyendu. It's my duty, as your employer, to do this. And that will cost money. You have incurred a debt that I must settle for you, and that means that you have to be prepared to settle with /{me}/."
+
+"Then don't settle it," she said. "Don't give her one rupee. There are other places we can play. Her nephew brought it on himself. We can play somewhere else."
+
+"Mala, did anyone /{see}/ this boy lay his hands on you?"
+
+"No," she said. "He waited until we were alone."
+
+"And why were you alone with him? Where was your army?"
+
+"They'd already gone home. I'd stayed late." She thought of Big Sister Nor and her metamecha, of the union. Mr Banerjee would be even angrier if she told him about Big Sister Nor. "I was studying tactics," she said. "Practicing on my own."
+
+"You stayed alone with this boy, in the middle of the night. What happened, really, Mala? Did you want to see what it was like to kiss him like a fillum star, and then it got out of control? Is that how it happened?"
+
+"/{No!}/" She shouted it so loud that she heard people groaning in their beds, calling sleepily out from behind their open windows. "I stayed late to practice, he tried to stop me. I knocked him down and he chased me. I knocked him down and then I taught him why he shouldn't have chased me."
+
+"Mala," he said, and she thought he was trying to sound fatherly now, stern and old and masculine. "You should have known better than to put yourself in that position. A general knows that you win some fights by not getting into them at all. Now, I'm not an unreasonable man. Of course, you and your mother and your army all need my money if you're going to keep fighting. You can borrow a wage-packet from me during this month, something to pay everyone with, and then you can pay it back, little by little, over the next year or so. I'll take five in twenty rupees for 12 months, and we'll call it even."
+
+It was hope, terrible, awful hope. A chance to keep her army, her flat, her respect. All it would cost her was one quarter of her earnings. She'd have three quarters left. Three quarters was better than nothing. It was better than telling Mamaji that it was all over.
+
+"Yes," she said. "All right, fine. But we don't play at Mrs Dibyendu's cafe anymore."
+
+"Oh, no," he said. "I won't hear of it. Mrs Dibyendu will be glad to have you back. You'll have to apologize to her, of course. You can bring her the money for her nephew. That will make her feel better, I'm sure, and heal any wounds in your friendship."
+
+"Why?" There were tears on her cheeks now. "Why not let us go somewhere else? Why does it matter?"
+
+"Because, Mala, I am the boss and you are the worker and that is the factory you work in. That's why." His voice was hard now, all the lilt of false concern gone away, leaving behind a grinding like rock on rock.
+
+She wanted to put the phone down on him, the way they did in the movies when they had their giant screaming rows, and threw their phones into the well or smashed them on the wall. But she couldn't afford to destroy her phone and she couldn't afford to make Mr Banerjee angry.
+
+So she said, "All right," in a quiet little voice that sounded like a mouse trying not to be noticed.
+
+"Good girl, Mala. Smart girl. Now, I've got your next mission for you. Are you ready?"
+
+Numbly, she memorized the details of the mission, who she was going to kill and where. She thought that if she did this job quickly, she could ask him for another one, and then another -- work longer hours, pay off the debt more quickly.
+
+"Smart girl, good girl," he said again, once she'd repeated the details back to him, and then he put the phone down.
+
+She pocketed her phone. Around her, Dharavi had woken, passing by her like she was a rock in a river, pressing past her on either side. Men with shovels and wheelbarrows, boys with enormous rice-sacks on each shoulder, filled with grimy plastic bottles on their way to some sorting house, a man with a long beard and kufi skullcap and kurta shirt hanging down to his knees leading a goat with a piece of rope. A trio of women in saris, their midriffs stretched and striated with the marks of the babies they'd borne, carrying heavy buckets of water from the communal tap. There were cooking smells in the air, a sizzle of dhal on the grill and the fragrant smell of chai. A boy passed by her, younger than Gopal, wearing flapping sandals and short pants, and he spat a stream of sickly sweet betel at her feet.
+
+The smell made her remember where she was and what had happened and what she had to do now.
+
+She went past the Das family on the ground floor and trudged up the stairs to their flat. Mamaji and Gopal were awake and bustling. Mamaji had fetched the water and was making the breakfast over the propane burner, and Gopal had his school uniform shirt and knee-trousers on. The Dharavi school he attended lasted for half the day, which gave him a little time to play and do homework and then a few more hours to work alongside of Mamaji in the factory.
+
+"Where have you been?" Mamaji said.
+
+"On the phone," she said, patting the little pocket sewn of her tunic. "With Mr Banerjee." She waggled her chin from side to side, saying /{I've had business}/.
+
+"What did he say?" Mamaji's voice was quiet and full of false nonchalance.
+
+Mamaji didn't need to know what transpired between Mr Banerjee and her. Mala was the general and she could manage her own affairs.
+
+"He said that all was forgiven. The boy deserved it. He'll make it fine with Mrs Dibyendu, and it will be fine." She waggled her chin from side to side again -- /{It's all fine. I've taken care of it}/.
+
+Mamaji stared into the pan and the food sizzling in it and nodded to herself. Though she couldn't see, Mala nodded back. She was General Robotwallah and she could make it all good.
+
+#
+
+1~ scene # ~#
+
+_1 /{ This scene is dedicated to Forbidden Planet, the British chain of science fiction and fantasy book, comic, toy and video stores. Forbidden Planet has stores up and down the UK, and also sports outposts in Manhattan and Dublin, Ireland. It's dangerous to set foot in a Forbidden Planet -- rarely do I escape with my wallet intact. Forbidden Planet really leads the pack in bringing the gigantic audience for TV and movie science fiction into contact with science fiction books -- something that's absolutely critical to the future of the field. }/
+
+_1 {~^ Forbidden Planet, UK, Dublin and New York City }http://www.forbiddenplanet.co.uk/
+
+Wei-Dong had been to downtown LA once, on a class trip to the Disney Concert Hall, but then they'd driven in, parked, and marched like ducklings into the hall and then out again, without spending any time actually wandering around. He remembered watching the streets go by from the bus window, faded store windows and slow-moving people, check-cashing places and liquor stores. And Internet cafes. Lots and lots of Internet cafes, especially in Koreatown, where every strip mall had a garish sign advertising "PC Baang" -- Korean for net-cafe.
+
+But he didn't know exactly where Koreatown was, and he needed an Internet cafe to google it, and so he caught the LAX bus to the Disney Concert Hall, thinking he could retrace the bus-route and find his way to those shops, get online, talk to his homies in Guangzhou, figure out the next thing.
+
+But Koreatown turned out to be harder to find and farther than he'd thought. He asked the bus-driver for directions, who looked at him like he was crazy and pointed downhill. And so he started walking, and walking, and walking for block after dusty block. From the window of the school-bus, downtown LA had looked slow-moving and faded, like a photo left too long in a window.
+
+On foot, it was frenetic, the movement of the buses, the homeless people walking or wheeling or hobbling past him, asking him for money. He had $1000 in his front jeans pocket, and it seemed to him that the bulge must be as obvious as a boner at the blackboard in class. He was sweating, and not just from the heat, which seemed ten degrees hotter than it had been in Disneyland.
+
+And now he wasn't anywhere near Koreatown, but had rather found his way to Santee Alley, the huge, open-air pirate market in the middle of LA. He'd heard about the place before, you saw it all the time in news-specials about counterfeit goods busts, pictures of Mexican guys being led away while grimly satisfied cops in suits or uniform baled up mountains of fake shirts, fake DVDs, fake jeans, fake games.
+
+Santee Alley was a welcome relief from the streets around it. He wandered deep into the market, the storefronts all blaring their technobrega and reggaton at him, the hawkers calling out their wares. It was like the real market on which all the hundreds of in-game markets he'd visited had been based upon and he found himself slowing down and looking in at the gangster clothes and the bad souvenir junk and the fake electronics. He bought a big cup of watermelon drink and a couple of empanadas from a stall, carefully drawing a single twenty from his pocket without bringing out the whole thing.
+
+Then he'd found an Internet cafe, filled with Guatemalans chatting with their families back home, wearing slick and tiny earwigs. The girl behind the counter -- barely older than him -- sold him one that claimed to be a Samsung for $18, and then rented him a PC to use it with. The fake earwig fit as well as his real one had, though it had a rough seam of plastic running around its length while his had been as smooth as beach-glass.
+
+But it didn't matter. He had his network connection, he had his earwig, and he had his game. What more could he need?
+
+Well, his posse, for starters. They were nowhere to be found. He checked his new watch and pressed the button that flipped it to the Chinese timezone. 5AM. Well, that explained it.
+
+He checked his inventory, checked the guild-bank. He hadn't been able to do the corpse run after he'd been snatched out of the game by his father and the Ronald Reagan High Thought Police, so he didn't expect to have his vorpal blade still, but he did, which meant that one of the gang had rescued it for him, which was awfully thoughtful. But that was just what guildies did for each other, after all.
+
+It was coming up to dinner-time on the east coast, which meant that Savage Wonderland was starting to fill up with people getting home from work. He thought about the black riders who slaughtered them that morning and wondered who they'd been. There were plenty of people who hunted gold farmers, either because they worked for the game or for a rival gold-farm clan, or because they were bored rich players who hated the idea of poor people invading "their" space and working where they played.
+
+He knew he should flip to his email and check for messages from his parents. He didn't like using email, but his parents were addicted to it. No doubt they were freaking out by now, calling out the army and navy and the national guard to find their wayward son. Well, they could freak out all they wanted. He wasn't going to go back and he didn't need to go back.
+
+He had $1000 in his pocket, he was nearly 18 years old, and there were lots of ways to get by in the big city that didn't involve selling drugs or your body. His guildies had shown him that. All you needed to earn a living was a connection to the net and a brain in your head. He looked around the cafe at the dozens of Guatemalans talking to home on their earwigs, many not much older than him. If they could earn a living -- not speaking the language, not legal to work, no formal education, hardly any idea of how to use technology beyond the little bit of knowledge necessary to call home on the cheap -- then surely he could. His grandfather had come to America and found a job when he was Wei-Dong's age. It was a family tradition, practically.
+
+It wasn't that he didn't love his parents. He did. They were good people. They loved him in their way. But they lived in a bubble of unreality, a bubble called Orange County, where they still had rows of neat identical houses and neat identical lives, while around them, everything was collapsing. His father couldn't see it, even though hardly a day went by that he didn't come home and complain bitterly about the containers that had fallen off his ship in yet another monster storm, about the price of diesel sailing through the stratosphere, about the plummeting dollar and the skyrocketing Renminbi and the ever-tightening belts of Americans whose orders for goods from South China were clobbering his business.
+
+Wei-Dong had figured all this out because he paid attention and he saw things as they were. Because he talked to China, and China talked back to him. The fat and comfortable world he'd grown up in was not permanent; scratched in the sand, not carved in stone. His friends in China could see it better than anyone else could. Lu had worked as a security guard in a factory in Shilong New Town, a city that made appliances for sale in Britain. It had taken Wei-Dong some time to understand this: the entire city, four million people, did nothing but make appliances for sale in Britain, a country with eighty million people.
+
+Then, one day, the factories on either side of Lu's had closed. They had all made goods for a few different companies, employing armies of young women to run the machines and assemble the pieces that came out of them. Young women always got the best jobs. Bosses liked them because they worked hard and didn't argue so much -- at least, that's what everyone said. When Lu left his village in Sichuan province to come to south China, he'd talked to one of the girls who had come home from the factories for the Mid-Autumn Festival, a girl who'd left a few years before and found wealth in Dongguan, who'd bought her parents a fine new two-storey house with her money, who came home every year for the Festival in fine clothes with a new mobile phone in a designer bag, looking like an alien or a model stepped fresh out of a magazine ad.
+
+"If you go to a factory and it's not full of young girls, don't take a job there," was her advice. "Any place that can't attract a lot of young girls, there's something wrong with it." But the factory that Lu worked at -- all the factories in Shilong New Town -- were filled with young girls. The only jobs for men were as drivers, security guards, cleaners and cooks. The factories boomed, each one a small city itself, with its own kitchens, its own dormitories, its own infirmary and its own customs checkpoint where every vehicle and visitor going in or out of the wall got checked and inspected.
+
+And these indomitable cities had crumbled. The Highest Quality Dishwasher Company factory closed on Monday. The Boundless Energy Enterprises hot-water heater plant went on Wednesday. Every day, Lu saw the bosses come in and out in their cars, waving them through after they'd flicked their IDs at him. One day, he steeled his nerve and leaned in the window, his face only inches from that of the man who paid his wages every month.
+
+"We're doing better than the neighbors, eh, Boss?" He tried for a jovial smile, the best he could muster, but he knew it wasn't very good.
+
+"We do fine," the boss had barked. He had very smooth skin and a smart sport-coat, but his shoulders were dusted with dandruff. "And no one says otherwise!"
+
+"Just as you say, boss," Lu said, and leaned out of the window, trying to keep his smile in place. But he'd seen it in the boss's face -- the factory would close.
+
+The next day, no bus came to the bus-stop. Normally, there would have been fifty or sixty people waiting for the bus, mostly young men, the women mostly lived in the dorms. Security guards and janitors didn't rate dorm rooms. That morning, there were eight people waiting when he arrived at the bus-stop. Ten minutes went by and a few more trickled to the stop, and still no bus came. Thirty minutes passed -- Lu was now officially late for work -- and still no bus came. He canvassed his fellow waiters to see if anyone was going near his factory and might want to share a taxi -- an otherwise unthinkable luxury, but losing his job even was more unthinkable.
+
+One other guy, with a Shaanxi accent, was willing, and that's when they noticed that there didn't seem to be any taxis cruising on the road either. So Lu, being Lu, walked to work, fifteen kilometers in the scorching, melting, dripping heat, his security guard's shirt and coat over his arm, his undershirt rolled up to bare his belly, the dust caking up on his shoes. And when he arrived at the Miracle Spirit condenser dryer factory and found himself in a mob of thousands of screeching young women in factory-issue smocks, crowded around the fence and the double-padlocked rattling it and shouting at the factory's darkened doors. Many of the girls had small backpacks or duffel-bags, overstuffed and leaking underwear and makeup on the ground.
+
+"What's going on?" he shouted at one, pulling her out of the mob.
+
+"The bastards shut the factory and put us out. They did it at shift-change. Pulled the fire-alarm and screamed 'Fire' and 'Smoke' and when we were all out here, they ran out and padlocked the gate!"
+
+"Who?" He'd always thought that if the factory were going to shut down, they'd use the security guards to do it. He'd always thought that he, at least, would get one last paycheck out of the company.
+
+"The bosses, six of them. Mr Dai and five of his supervisors. They locked the front gate and then they drove off through the back gate, locking it behind them. We're all locked out. All my things are in there! My phone, my money, my clothes --"
+
+Her last paycheck. It was only three days to payday, and, of course, the company had kept their first eight weeks' wages when they all started working. You had to ask your boss's permission if you wanted to change jobs and keep the money -- otherwise you'd have to abandon two months' pay.
+
+Around Lu, the screams rose in pitch and small, feminine fists flailed at the air. Who were they shouting at? The factory was empty. The factory was empty. If they climbed the fence, cutting the barbed wire at the top, and then broke the locks on the factory doors, they'd have the run of the place. They couldn't carry out a condenser dryer -- not easily, anyway -- but there were plenty of small things: tools, chairs, things from the kitchen, the personal belongings of the girls who hadn't thought to bring them with when the fire alarm sounded. Lu knew about all the things that could be smuggled out of the factory. He was a security guard. Or had been. Part of his job had been to search the other employees when they left to make sure they weren't stealing. His supervisor, Mr Chu, had searched /{him}/ at the end of each shift, in turn. He wasn't sure who, if anyone, searched Mr Chu.
+
+He had a small multitool that he clipped to his belt every morning. Having a set of pliers, a knife, and a screwdriver on you all the time changed the way you saw the world -- it became a place to be cut, sliced, pried and unscrewed.
+
+"Is that your only jacket?" he shouted into the ear of the girl he'd been talking to. She was a little shorter than him, with a large mole on her cheek that he rather liked.
+
+"Of course not!" she said. "I have three others inside."
+
+"If I get you those three, can I use this one?" He unfolded the pliers on his multitool. They were joined by a set of cogs that compounded the leverage of a squeezing palm, and the jaws of the plier were inset with a pair of wicked-sharp wire-cutters. The girl in his village had worked for a time in the SOG factory in Dongguan and she'd given him a pair and wished him good luck in South China.
+
+The girl with three more jackets looked up at the barbed wire. "You'll be cut to ribbons," she said.
+
+He grinned. "Maybe," he said. "I think I can do it, though."
+
+"Boys," she hollered in his ear. He could smell her breakfast congee on her breath, mixed with toothpaste. It made him homesick. "All right. But be careful!" She shrugged out of the jacket, revealing a set of densely muscled arms, worked to lean strength on the line. He wrapped it around his left hand, then wrapped his own coat around that, so that his hand looked like a cartoon boxing-glove, trailing sleeves flapping down beneath it.
+
+It wasn't easy to climb the fence with one hand wrapped in a dozen thicknesses of fabric, but he'd always been a great climber, even in the village, a daring boy who'd gotten a reputation for climbing anything that stood still: trees, houses, even factories. He had one good hand, two feet, and one bandaged hand, and that was enough to get up the fifteen feet to the top. Once there, he gingerly wrapped his left hand around the razorwire, careful to pull straight down on it and not to saw from side to side. He had a vision of himself slipping and falling, the razorwire slicing his fingers from his hand so that they fell to the other side of the fence, wriggling like worms in the dust as he clutched his mangled hand and screamed, geysering blood over the girls around him.
+
+/{Well, you'd better not slip, then}/, he thought grimly, carefully unfolding the multitool with his other hand, flipping it around like a butterfly knife (a move he'd often practiced, playing gunfighter in his room or when no one else was around at the gate). He gingerly slid it around the first coil of wire and squeezed down, watching the teeth on the gears mesh and strain at one another, turning the leverage of his right hand into hundreds of pounds of pressure bearing down right at the cutting edge of the pliers. They bit into the wire, caught, and then parted it.
+
+The coil of wire sprang free with a /{twoingggg}/ sound, and he ducked away just in time to avoid having his nose -- and maybe his ear and eye -- sliced off by the wire.
+
+But now he could transfer his left hand to the top of the fence, and put more weight on it, and reach for the second coil of wire with the cutters, hanging way out from the fence, as far as he could, to avoid the coil when it sprang free. Which it did, parting just as easily as the other coil had, and flying directly at him, and it was only by releasing his feet and dangling one-handed from the fence, slamming his body into it, that he avoided having his throat cut. As it was, the wire made a long scratch in the back of his scalp, which began to bleed freely down his back. He ignored it. Either it was shallow and would stop on its own, or it was deep and he'd need medical attention, but either way, he was going to clear the fencetop.
+
+All that remained now were three strands of barbed wire, and they were tougher to cut than the razorwire had been, but the barbs were widely spaced and the wire itself was less prone to crazy twanging whipsaws than the coiled razorwire. As each one parted, there was a roar of approval from the girls below him, and even though his scalp was stinging fiercely, he thought this might just be his finest hour, the first time in his life that he'd been something more than a security guard who'd left his backwards town to find insignificance in Guandong province.
+
+And now he was able to unwind the jackets from around his hand and simply hop over the fence and clamber down the other side like a monkey, grinning all the way at the horde of young girls who were coming up the other side in a great wave. It wasn't long before the girl with three more jackets caught him up. He shook out her jacket -- sliced through in four or five places -- like a waiter offering a lady her coat, and she delicately slid those muscular arms into it and then she turned him around and poked at his scalp.
+
+"Shallow," she said. "It'll bleed a lot, but you'll be OK." She planted a sisterly kiss on his cheek. "You're a good boy," she said, and then ran off to join the stream of girls who were entering the factory through a smashed door.
+
+Shortly, he found himself alone in the factory yard, amid the neat gravel pathways and the trimmed lawns. He let himself into the factory but he couldn't actually bring himself to take anything, though they owed him nearly three months' wages. Somehow, it seemed to him that the girls who'd used the tools should have their pick of the tools, that the men who'd cooked the meals should have their pick of the things from the kitchens.
+
+Finally, he settled on one of the communal bicycles that were neatly parked near the factory gates. These were used by all the employees equally, and besides, he needed to get home and walking back with a scalp wound in the mid-day heat didn't sound like much of a plan.
+
+On the way home, the world seemed much changed. He'd become a criminal, for one thing, which seemed to him to be quite a distance from a security guard. But it was more than that: the air seemed clearer (later, he read that the air /{was}/ clearer, thanks to all the factories that had shut down and the buses that had stayed parked). Most of the shops seemed closed and the remainder were tended by listless storekeepers who sat on their stoops or played Mah-Jongg on them, though it was the middle of the day. All the restaurants and cafes were shut. At a train-crossing, he watched an intercity train shoot past, every car jammed with young women and their bags, leaving Shilong New Town to find their way somewhere else where there was still work.
+
+Just like that, in the space of just a week or two, this giant city had died. It had all seemed so incredibly powerful when he'd arrived, new paved roads and new stores and new buildings, and the factories soaring against the sky wherever you looked.
+
+By the time he reached home -- dizzy from the aching cut on his scalp, sweaty, hungry -- he knew that the magical city was just a pile of concrete and a mountain of workers' sweat, and that it had all the permanence of a dream. Somewhere, in a distant land he barely knew the name of, people had stopped buying washing machines, and so his city had died.
+
+He thought he'd lie down for just the briefest of naps, but by the time he got up and gathered a few things into a duffel-bag and got back on his bike, not bothering to lock the door of his apartment behind him, the train station was barricaded, and there was a long line of refugees slogging down the road to Shenzhen, two days' walk away at least. He was glad he'd taken the bicycle then. Later, he found a working ATM and drew out some cash, which was more reassuring than he'd anticipated. For a while there, it had seemed like the world had come to an end. It was a relief to find out that it was just his little corner.
+
+In Shenzhen, he'd started hanging out in Internet cafes, because they were the cheapest places to sit indoors, out of the heat, and because they were filled with young men like him, scraping by. And because he could talk to his parents from there, telling them made-up stories about his non-existent job-search, promising that he'd start sending money home soon.
+
+And that was where the guild found him, Ping and his friends, and they had this buddy on the other side of the planet, this Wei-Dong character who'd hung rapt on every turn of his tale, who'd told him that he'd written it up for a social studies report at school, which made them all laugh. And he'd found happiness and work, and he'd found a truth, too: the world wasn't built on rock, but rather on sand, and it would shift forever.
+
+Wei-Dong didn't know how much longer his father's business would last. Maybe thirty years -- but he thought it would be a lot less than that. Every day, he woke in his bedroom under his Spongebob sheets and thought about which of these things he could live without, just how /{basic}/ his life could get.
+
+And here it was, the chance to find out. When his great-grandparents had been his age, they'd been war-refugees, crossing the ocean on a crowded boat, travelling on stolen papers, an infant in his great-grandmother's arms and another in her belly. If they could do it, Wei-Dong could do it.
+
+He'd need a place to stay, which meant money, which meant a job. The guild would cut him in for his share of the money from the raids, but that wasn't enough to survive in America. Or was it? He wondered how much the Guatemalans around him earned at their illegal dishwashing and cleaning and gardening jobs.
+
+In any event, he wouldn't have to find out, because he had something they didn't have: a Social Security Number. And yes, that meant that eventually his parents would be able to find him, but in another month, he'd be 18 and it'd be too late for them to do anything about it if he didn't want to cooperate.
+
+In those hours where he'd planned for the demise of his family's fortune, he'd settled quickly on the easiest job he could step into: Mechanical Turk.
+
+The Turks were an army of workers in gamespace. All you had to do was prove that you were a decent player -- the game had the stats to know it -- and sign up, and then log in whenever you wanted a shift. The game would ping you any time a player did something the game didn't know how to interpret -- talked too intensely to a non-player character, stuck a sword where it didn't belong, climbed a tree that no one had bothered to add any details too -- and you'd have to play spot-referee. You'd play the non-player character, choose a behavior for the stabbed object, or make a decision from a menu of possible things you might find in a tree.
+
+It didn't pay much, but it didn't take much time, either. Wei-Dong had calculated that if he played two computers -- something he was sure he could keep up -- and did a new job every twenty seconds on each, he could make as much as the senior managers at his father's company. He'd have to do it for ten hours a day, but he'd spent plenty of weekends playing for 12 or even 14 hours a day, so hell, it was practically money in the bank.
+
+So he used the rented PC to sign onto his account and started filling in the paperwork to apply for the job. All the while, he was conscious of his rarely-used email account and of the messages from his parents that surely awaited him. The forms were long and boring, but easy enough, even the little essay questions where you had to answer a bunch of hypothetical questions about what you'd do if a player did this or said that. And that email from his parents was lurking, demanding that he download it and read it --
+
+He flipped to a browser and brought up his email. It had been weeks since he'd last checked it and it was choked with hundreds of spams, but there, at the top:
+
+RACHEL ROSENBAUM -- WHERE ARE YOU???
+
+Of course his mother was the one to send the email. It was always her on email, sending him little encouraging notes through the school day, reminding him of his grandparents' and cousins' and father's birthdays. His father used email when he had to, usually at two in the morning when he couldn't sleep for worry about work and he needed to bawl out his managers without waking them up on the phone. But if the phone was an option, Dad would take it.
+
+WHERE ARE YOU???
+
+The subject-line said it all, didn't it?
+
+/{Leonard, this is crazy. If you want to be treated like an adult, start acting like one. Don't sneak around behind our backs, playing games in the middle of the night. Don't run off to God-knows-where to sulk.}/
+
+/{We can negotiate this like family, like grownups, but first you'll have to COME HOME and stop behaving like a SPOILED BRAT. We love you, Leonard, and we're worried about you, and we want to help you. I know when you're 17 it's easy to feel like you have all the answers --}/
+
+He stopped reading and blew hot air out his nostrils. He hated it when adults told him he only felt the way he did because he was /{young}/. As if being young was like being insane or drunk, like the convictions he held were hallucinations caused by a mental illness that could only be cured by waiting five years. Why not just stick him in a box and lock it until he turned 22?
+
+He began to hit reply, then realized that he was logged in without going through an anonymizer. His guildies were big into these -- they were servers that relayed your traffic, obscuring your identity and the addresses you were trying to avoid. The best ones came from Falun Gong, the weird religious cult that the Chinese government was bent on stamping out. Falun Gong put new relays online every hour or so, staying a hop ahead of the Great Firewall of China, the all-seeing, all-knowing, all-controlling server-farm that was supposed to keep 1.6 billion Chinese people from looking at the wrong kind of information.
+
+No one in the guild had much time for Falun Gong or its quirky beliefs, but everyone agreed that they ran a tight ship when it came to punching holes in the Great Firewall. A quick troll through the ever-rotating index-pages for Falun Gong relays found Wei-Dong a machine that would take his traffic. /{Then}/ he replied to his Mom. Let her try to run his backtrail -- it would dead-end with a notorious Chinese religious cult. That'd give her something to worry about all right!
+
+/{Mom, I'm fine. I'm acting like an adult (taking care of myself, making my own decisions). It might have been wrong to lie to you guys about what I was doing with my time, but kidnapping your son to military school is about as non-adult as you can get. I'll be in touch when I get a chance. I love you two. Don't worry, I'm safe.}/
+
+Was he, really? As safe as his great-grandparents had been, stepping off the ship in New York. As safe as Lu had been, bicycling the cracked road to Shenzhen.
+
+He'd find a place to stay -- he could google "cheap hotel downtown los angeles" as well as the next kid. He had money. He had a SSN. He had a job -- two jobs, counting the guild work -- and he had plenty of practice missions he'd have to run before he'd start earning. And it was time to get down to it.
+
+#
+
+:B~ Part II: Hard work at play
+
+1~ scene # ~#
+
+_1 /{ This scene is dedicated to the incomparable Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego, California. The Mysterious Galaxy folks have had me in to sign books every time I've been in San Diego for a conference or to teach (the Clarion Writers' Workshop is based at UC San Diego in nearby La Jolla, CA), and every time I show up, they pack the house. This is a store with a loyal following of die-hard fans who know that they'll always be able to get great recommendations and great ideas at the store. In summer 2007, I took my writing class from Clarion down to the store for the midnight launch of the final Harry Potter book and I've never seen such a rollicking, awesomely fun party at a store. }/
+
+_1 {~^ Mysterious Galaxy }http://www.mystgalaxy.com/book/9780765322166: 7051 Clairemont Mesa Blvd., Suite #302 San Diego, CA USA 92111 +1 858 268 4747
+
+They came for the workers in the game and in the real world, a coordinated assault that left Big Sister Nor's organization in tatters.
+
+On that fateful night, she'd taken up the back room of Headshot, a PC Baang in the Geylang district in Singapore, a neighborhood that throbbed all night long from the roaring sex-trade from the legal brothels and the illegal street-hookers. Any time after dark, the Geylang's streets were choked with people, from adventurous diners eating in the excellent all-night restaurants (almost all of them halal, which always made her smile) to guest workers and Singaporeans on the prowl for illicit thrills to the girls dashing out on their breaks to the all-night supermarkets to do their shopping.
+
+The Geylang was as unbuttoned as Singapore got, one of the few places where you could be "out of bounds" -- doing something that was illegal, immoral, unmentionable, or bad for social harmony -- without attracting too much attention. Headshot strobed all night long with networked poker games, big shoot-em-up tournaments, guestworkers phoning home on the cheap, shouting over the noise-salad of all those games, and, on that night, Big Sister Nor and her clan.
+
+They called themselves the Webblies, which was an obscure little joke that pleased Big Sister Nor an awful lot. Nearly a century ago, a group of workers had formed a union called the Industrial Workers of the World, the first union that said that all workers needed to stick up for each other, that every worker was welcome no matter the color of his skin, no matter if the worker was a woman, no matter if the worker did "skilled" or "unskilled" work. They called themselves the Wobblies.
+
+Information about the Wobblies was just one of the many "out of bounds" subjects that were blocked on the Singaporean Internet, and so of course Big Sister Nor had made it her business to find out more about them. The more she read, the more sense this group from out of history made for the world of /{right now}/ -- everything that the IWW had done needed doing /{today}/, and what's more, it would be easier today than it had been.
+
+Take organizing workers. Back then, you'd have to actually get into the factory or at least stand at its gates to talk to workers about signing a union card and demanding better conditions, higher wages and shorter hours. Now you could reach those same people online, from anywhere in the world. Once they were members, they could talk to all the other members, using the same tools.
+
+She'd decided to call her little group the Industrial Workers of the World Wide Web, the IWWWW, and that was another of those jokes that pleased her an awful lot. And the IWWWW had grown and grown and grown. Gold farmers were easy pickings: working in terrible conditions all over the world, for terrible wages, hated by the game-runners and the rich players alike. They already understood about working in teams, they'd already formed their own little guilds -- and they were better at using the Internet than their bosses would ever be.
+
+Now, a year later, the IWWWW had over 20,000 members signed up in six countries, paying dues and filling up a fat strike fund that had finally been called into use, in Shenzhen, the last place Big Sister Nor had ever expected to see a walkout.
+
+But they had, they had! The boss, some character named Wing, had declared a lock-in at three of his "factories" -- Internet cafes that he'd taken over to support his burgeoning army of workers -- in order to take advantage of a sploit in Mushroom Kingdom, a Mario-based MMO that had a huge following in Brazil. One of his workers had found a way to triple the gold they took out of one of the dungeons, and he wanted to extract every penny he could before Nintendo-Sun caught on to it.
+
+The next thing she knew, her phone was rattling with urgent messages relayed from her various in-game identities to tell her that the workers had knocked aside the factory management and guards and stormed out, climbing the sides of the buildings or the utility poles and cutting the cafes' network links. They'd formed up out front and begun to chant impromptu slogans -- mostly adapted from their in-game battle-cries. And now they wanted to know what to do.
+
+"It's a wildcat strike," Big Sister Nor said to her lieutenants, The Mighty Krang and Justbob, the former a small Chinese guy with frosted purple tips in his hair, the latter a Tamil girl in a beautiful, immaculate sari and silk slippers -- a girl who had previously run with one of the most notorious girl-gangs in Asia and spent three years in prison for her trouble. "They've walked out in Shenzhen." She forwarded the tweets and blips and alerts off her phone, then showed them her screen while they waited for the forwards to land on their devices.
+
+"It's crazy," The Mighty Krang said, dancing from foot to foot, excitedly. "It's crazy, it's crazy, it's --"
+
+"Wonderful," Justbob said, planting her palms on his shoulders and bringing him back to the earth. "And overdue. I predicted this. I predicted it from the start. As soon as you start collecting dues for a 'strike fund,' someone's going to go on strike. And la-la, here we are, wildcatting the night away."
+
+The next step was to head for headquarters, the back room at Headshot, to slam themselves into their chairs and to hit the worlds, spreading the word to all 20,000 members about the first-ever strike. Big Sister Nor went to work on a plan:
+
+1. Spread the word to the rank-and-file
+
+2. Recruit in-world pickets to block the work-site so that Boss Wing couldn't bring in scabs -- replacement workers -- to get the job done
+
+3. Get the strike-leaders on the phone and talk about human-rights lawyers, strike-pay, sleeping quarters for any workers who relied on the factory for dorm-beds
+
+4. Get footage and real-time reports from the strikers out to the human rights wires, get the strike-leaders on interviews with the press
+
+She'd done this before, in real life, on the other side of things, as a wildcat strike leader walking off the line when the bosses at her weaving factory in Taman Makmur announced pay cuts because their big European distributor had cut its orders. It happened every year, but it made her so angry -- the workers didn't get bonuses, sharing in the good fortune when distributors increased their orders, but they were made to share the burden when orders went down. Well, forget it, enough was enough. She'd stood up in the middle of the factory floor and denounced the bosses for the greedy, immoral bastards they were, and when the security moved in to take her, she'd stood proud and strong, ready to be beaten for her insolence.
+
+Instead, her fellow workers had risen to her defense, the young women around her getting to their feet and surrounding her, cheering her, ululating cries shouting around waggling tongues that bounced off the ceiling and filled the room and her heart, making them all brave, so that the security men moved back, and they'd taken over the factory, blocking the gates, shutting it down, and then someone from the Malaysian Union of Textile Employees had been there to get them to sign cards, and someone had made her picket captain and then --
+
+And then it had all come crashing down around them, police vans moving in, the police forming a line and ordering them to disperse, to get back to work, to stop this foolishness before someone got hurt, barking the orders through a bullhorn, glaring at them from beneath their riot helmets, banging their truncheons on their shields, spraying them with teargas.
+
+Their line wavered, disintegrated, retreated. But they reformed in an alley near the factory, amid a gang of staring children, and the women from the MUTE collared the children and sent them running to get milk -- cow's milk, goat's milk, anything they could find, and the MUTE organizers had rinsed their eyes with the milk, holding their faces still while they coughed and gagged. The fat-soluble CS gas rinsed away, leaving them teary but able to see, and the coughs dispersed, and someone produced a bag of charcoal-filter cycling masks, and someone else had a bag of swimming goggles, and the women put them on and pulled their hijabs over their noses, over the masks, so that they looked like some species of snouted animal, and they reformed their line and marched back, chanting their slogans.
+
+The police gassed them again, but this time, the picket captains were able to hold the line, to send brave women forward to grab the smoking cannisters and throw them back over police lines. For a moment, it looked like the police would charge, but the strikers and the organizers had been feeding a photostream to the Internet using mobile phones that tunneled through the national firewall, getting them up on the human rights wires, and so the Ministry of Labour was getting phone calls from the foreign press, and they were on the phone to the Ministry of Justice, and the police withdrew.
+
+The first skirmish was over, and the strikers settled in for a long siege. No one got in or out of the factory without being harangued by hundreds of young women, shoving literature detailing their working conditions and grievances and demands through the windows of their cars and buses. Some replacement workers got in, some picked fights, some turned around and left. A unionized trucker refused to cross their line, and wouldn't take away the load he'd been charged with picking up, so it just sat there on the docks.
+
+The days turned into weeks, and they fed their families as best as they could with the strike pay, which came to a third of what they'd earned in the plant, but the factory owners -- a subsidiary of a Dutch company -- were hurting too. The MUTE organizers explained that the parent company had to release its quarterly statement to its shareholders, who would demand to know why this major factory was sitting idle instead of making money. The organizers offered confident reassurances that when this happened, the workers' demands would be met, the strike settled, and they could get back to work.
+
+So they hung in there, keeping their spirits up on the line, and then --
+
+The factory closed.
+
+Big Sister Nor found out about it one night as she was playing Theater of War VII, a game she'd played since she was a little girl. One of her guildies was a girl whose brother had passed by the factory on his way home from school, and he'd seen them moving the machines out of the plant, driving away in huge lorries.
+
+She'd texted everyone she knew, /{Get to the factory now}/, but by the time they got there, the factory was dead, empty, the gates chained shut. No one from the union met them. None of them answered her calls.
+
+And the women she'd called sister, the women who'd saved her when she'd said /{enough}/, they all looked to her and said, /{What do we do now?}/
+
+And she hadn't known. She'd managed to hold the tears in until she got home, but then they'd flowed, and her parents -- who'd doubted her and harangued her every step of the way -- scolded her for her foolishness, told her it was her fault that all her friends were jobless.
+
+She'd lain in bed that night, miserable, and had been woken by the soft chirp of her phone.
+
+/{I'm outside.}/ It was Affendi, the MUTE organizer she'd been closest to. /{Come to the door}/.
+
+She'd crept outside on cat's feet and barely had time to make out Affendi's outline before she collapsed into Nor's arms. She had been beaten bloody, her eyes blacked, two of her fingers broken, her lips mashed and one of her teeth missing. She managed a mangled smile and whispered, "It's all part of the job."
+
+The cheap hotel where the four organizers had shared a room was raided just after dinner, the police taking them away. They'd been prepared for this, had lawyers standing by to help them when it happened, but they didn't get to call lawyers. They didn't go to the jailhouse. Instead, they'd been taken to a shantytown behind the main train-station and three policemen had stood guard while a group of private security forces from the plant had taken turns beating them with truncheons and fists and boots, screaming insults at them, calling them whores, tearing at their clothes, beating their breasts and thighs.
+
+It only stopped when one of the women fell unconscious, bleeding from a head-wound, eyelids fluttering. The men had fled then, after taking their money and identity papers, leaving them weeping and hurt. Affendi had managed to hide her spare mobile phone -- a tiny thing the size of a matchbook -- in the elastic of her underpants, and that had enabled her to call the MUTE headquarters for help. Once the ambulance was on its way, she'd come to get Nor.
+
+"They'll probably come for you, too," she said. "They usually try to make an example of the workers who start trouble."
+
+"But you told me that they were going to have to give in because of their shareholders --"
+
+Affendi held up a broken hand. "I thought they would. But they decided to leave. We think they're probably going to Indonesia. The new laws there make it much harder to organize the workers. That's how it goes, sometimes." She shrugged, then winced and sucked air over her teeth. "We thought they'd want to stay put here. The provincial government gave them too much to come here -- tax breaks, new roads, free utilities for five years. But there are new Special Economic Zones in Indonesia that have even better deals." She shrugged again, winced again. "You may be all right here, of course. Maybe they'll just move on. But I thought you should be given the chance to get somewhere safe with us, if you wanted to."
+
+Nor shook her head. "I don't understand. Somewhere safe?"
+
+"The union has a safe-house across the provincial line. We can take you there tonight. We can help you find work, get set up. You can help us unionize another factory."
+
+A light rain fell, pattering off the palms that lined her street and splashing down in wet, fat drops, bringing an earthy smell up from the soil. A fat drop slid off an unseen leaf overhead and spattered on Nor's neck, reminding her that she'd gone out of the house without her hijab, something she almost never did. It seemed to her an omen, like her life was changing in every single way.
+
+"Where are we going?"
+
+"You find out when we get there. I don't know either. That's why it's a safe house -- no one knows where it is unless they have to. MUTE organizers have been murdered, you understand."
+
+/{Why didn't you tell me this when all this started?}/ She wanted to say. But her parents /{had}/ told her. Management had warned them, through bullhorns, that they were risking everything. She'd laughed at them, filled with the feeling of sisterhood and safety, of /{power}/. That feeling was gone now.
+
+And she'd gone with Affendi, and she'd worked in a factory that was much like the factory she'd left, and there had been a union fight much like the one she'd fought, but this time, they were better prepared and the workers had called Nor "Big Sister," a term of endearment that had scared her a little, coming from the mouths of women much older than her, coming from young girls who could never appreciate the danger.
+
+And this time, the owners hadn't fled, the workers had won better conditions, and Big Sister Nor found that she didn't want to make textiles anymore. She found that she had a taste for the fight.
+
+Now there was a young man, someone called Matthew Fong, in Shenzhen, and he was relying on her to help him win his dignity, fair wages, and a safe and secure workplace. And he was doing it in China, where unofficial unions were illegal and where labor organizers sometimes disappeared into prison for years.
+
+The Mighty Krang could speak a beautiful Mandarin as well as his native Cantonese, so he was in charge of giving soundbites to the foreign Chinese press, that network of news-resources serving the hundreds of millions of people of Chinese ancestry living abroad. They were key, because they were intimately connected to the whole sprawling enterprise of imports and exports, and when they spoke, the bureaucrats in Beijing listened. And The Mighty Krang could put on a voice that was so smoothly convincing you'd swear it was a newscaster.
+
+Justbob was in charge of moral support for the strikers, talking to them in broken Cantonese and Singlish and gamer-speak on conference calls, keeping their morale up. She could work three phones and two computers like a human octopus, her attention split across a dozen conversations without losing the thread in any of them.
+
+And Big Sister Nor? She was in-world, in several worlds, rallying Webblies to the site of the Mushroom Kingdom, finding gamers converging from all over Asia -- where it was night -- and from Europe -- where it was day -- and America -- where it was morning. Management had wasted no time moving replacement workers in. There were always desperate subcontractors out in the provinces of China, ten kids in a dead industrial town in Dongbei who'd been lured to computers with pretty talk about getting paid to play. Across a dozen different shards of the same Mushroom Kingdom world, a dozen alternate realities, they came, and Big Sister Nor played general in a skirmish against them, as strikers blocked the entrance to the dungeon and sent a stream of pro-union chats and URLs to them even as they fought them to keep them out of the dungeon.
+
+The battle wasn't much of a fight, not at first. The replacement workers were there to kill dumb non-player characters in a boring, predictable way that wouldn't trigger the Mechanical Turks and bring their operation to the attention of Nintendo-Sun. They were all seasoned gamers, and they were used to teamplay, and many of the Webblies had never fought side-by-side before. But the Webblies were fighting for the movement, and the replacement workers -- they called them "scabs," another old word from out of history -- were fighting because they didn't know what else to do.
+
+It was a rout. The scabs were sent back to their respawn points by the thousand, unable to return to work until they'd done their corpse runs, and the Webblies raised their swords and shot fireballs into the sky and cheered in a dozen languages.
+
+The news was good from Shenzhen, too, judging from what Justbob was saying into her headsets and typing onto her screens. The strike-line was holding, and while the police were there, they hadn't moved in -- in fact, it sounded like they'd moved to hold back the private factory security!
+
+Silently, Big Sister Nor thanked Matthew Fong for picking a fight that -- seemingly -- they'd be able to win. She shouted up to Ezhil in the front of Headshot, calling for ginseng bubble-tea all around, the ginseng root would give them all a little shot of energy. Couldn't live on caffeine and taurine alone!
+
+"Ezhil!" she shouted a minute later, looking up from her mouse. "Bubble tea!" If she'd been paying attention, she would have noticed the squeak in his voice as he promised right away, right away.
+
+But her attention was fixed on her screens, because that's where it was all suddenly going very wrong indeed. What she'd taken for strikers' victorious fireballs launched into the sky were landing among the players now, inflicting major damage. Just as she was noticing this, a volley of skidding, spiked turtle-shells came sliding in from offscreen, in twelve worlds at once.
+
+/{Ambush!}/
+
+She barked the word into her headset in Mandarin, then Cantonese, then Hindi, then English. The cry was taken up by the players and they rallied, forming battle-squares, healers in the middle, tanks on the outside, nimble thieves and scouts spreading out into the mushroom forests, looking for the ambush.
+
+This would work much better if they were a regular guild, all playing on the side of the evil Bowser or of the valiant Princess Peach, because if you were all on the same side, the game would coordinate your movements for you, give you radar for where and how all the other players were moving. But the strikers were from both sides of Mushroom Kingdom's moral coin, and as far as the game was concerned, they were sworn enemies. Their IMs were unintelligible to one another, and the default option for any "opposing" av you clicked on was ATTACK, leading to a lot of accidental skirmishes.
+
+But gold farmers knew all about playing their own game, one that lived on top of the game that the companies wanted them to play. The game's communications tools were powerful and easy, but nothing (apart from the ridiculous "agreement" you had to click every time you started up the game) kept you from using anything you wanted. They favored free chat systems developed to help corporate work-groups collaborate; since these services always had free demo-versions available, hoping to snag some office-person into buying 30,000 licenses for their mega-corp. These systems even allowed them to stream screen-caps from their own computers, and Big Sister Nor saw to it that these were arranged sequentially, forming a huge, panoramic view of the entire battlefield.
+
+She flicked through the battlescenes and the communications hub, fingers flying on the keyboard. They had a Koopa Turbo Hammer in seven of the worlds, a huge, whirling god-hammer that could clobber a score of attackers on a single throw, and she had it brought forward, using the scouts' screencaps to pinpoint the enemies' positions, conferring them to the hammer-throwers, a passel of hulking Kongs with protruding fangs and enormous, hairy chests.
+
+That was seven battles down; in the remaining five, she ordered the Peaches to form up with their umbrellas at the ready, then had two Bowsers "bounce" each of them, sticking to them while doing minimum damage. The Peaches unfurled their umbrellas and sailed into the air, taking their Bowsers with them, to drop behind enemy lines, ready to breathe fire and stomp the opposing forces. This was a devastating attack, one that was only possible if you played the farmers' game, cooperating through a side-channel -- normally, Bowsers and Princess Peaches were on the opposite sides of the Great War that was at the center of the Mushroom Kingdom story.
+
+It should have worked -- the hammers, the Bowsers, the skilled players of a dozen guilds, bristling with armament and armor, spelling and firing and skirmishing.
+
+It should have worked -- but it hadn't.
+
+The mysterious attackers -- she'd branded them "Pinkertons" in her mind, after the strike-breaking goons from the Pinkerton Detective Agency who'd been the old Wobblies' worst enemies -- had seemingly endless numbers, and every attack they launched seemed to do maximum damage. Meanwhile, they were able to pull off incredible dodges and defenses against the strikers' attacks. And their aim! Every fireball, every turtle, every sound-bomb, every flung axe found its target with perfect accuracy.
+
+It was almost as though they were --
+
+-- Cheating!
+
+That had to be it. They were using aimhacks, dodgehacks, all the prohibited add-on software that the game was supposed to be able to spot and disable. Somehow, they'd gotten past the game's defenses. It didn't matter. The game was always stacked against gold farmers.
+
+"Pull back!" she shouted. "Retreat!" This was going to have to be guerrilla war, jungle war, hiding in the bushes and sniping at them as they'd sniped at her. She'd lure them into the clearing that marked the dungeon's entrance and then they'd slip around them into the mushroom forest, using their superior coordination to trump the hacks and numbers the Pinkertons had on their side. In her headset, she heard the ragged breathing, the curses in six languages, the laughter and shouting of players all over the world, listening to her rap out commands in all the different versions of Mushroom Kingdom that they were fighting in.
+
+She found that she was grinning. This was /{fun.}/ This was a /{lot}/ more fun than being tear-gassed.
+
+It had been Big Sister Nor's idea to use the games for organizing. Why risk your neck in the factory or standing at its gates when you could slip right in among the workers, no matter where they were in the world, and talk to them about joining up? Plenty of the MUTE old guard had thought she was crazy, but there was lots of support, too -- especially when Nor showed them that they could reach the Indonesian textile workers who'd inherited her job when her factory had closed up and moved on, simply by logging into Spirals of the Golden Snail, a game that had taken the whole Malay peninsula by storm.
+
+It didn't matter where you fought, it mattered whether you won. And the more she thought about it, the more she realized that they could win in-game. The bosses were better at firing teargas at them, but they were better at lobbing fireballs, pulsed energy weapons, photon torpedoes and savage flying fish -- and they always would be. What's more, a striker who lost a skirmish in-game merely had to re-spawn and do a corpse-run, possibly losing a little inventory in the process. A striker who lost a skirmish AFK -- away from keyboard -- might end up dead.
+
+Big Sister Nor lived in perpetual fear of having someone's death on her hands.
+
+The battle was turning again. The Pinkertons had all fallen for her gambit, letting them rush past and back into the mushroom forest, effectively trading places. Now they were digging in the woods, laying little ambushes, fortifying positions and laying down withering fire from all directions. The breathing, gasping, triumphant muttering voices in her head and the hastily clattered in-game chat gave her a feeling like the battle was resting delicately balanced on her fingertips, every shift and change dancing felt as a tremor against the sensitive pads of her fingers.
+
+Big Sister Nor called for her bubble tea again, realizing that a very long time indeed had gone by since she'd first ordered it. This time, no one answered. The skin on the back of her neck prickled and she slipped her headphones off her head. Justbob and The Mighty Krang caught on a second later, removing their earwigs. There was no noise at all from the front of Headshot, none of the normal hyperactive calling of gamer-kids, or the shouts of guestworkers phoning home on cheap earwigs.
+
+Big Sister Nor stood up quietly and quickly and backed up against the wall, motioning to the others to do the same. On her screen, she saw another rally by the Pinkertons, who'd taken advantage of the sudden lack of strategic leadership to capture several of the small striker strongholds. She inched her way toward the door and very, very, /{very}/ slowly tilted her head to see around the frame, then whipped it back as quick as she could.
+
+/{RUN}/, she mouthed to her lieutenants, and they broke for the rear entrance, the escape hatch that Big Sister Nor always made sure of before she holed up to do union work.
+
+On their heels came the Pinkertons, the real world Pinkertons, Malay men in workers' clothes, poor men, men armed with stout sticks and a few chains, men who'd been making their way to the door when Big Sister Nor chanced to look around it.
+
+They shouted after them now, excited and tight voices, like the catcalls of drunken boys on streetcorners when they were feeling the bravery of numbers and hormones and liquor. That was a dangerous sound. It was the sound of fools egging each other on.
+
+Big Sister Nor hit the crashbar on the rear door with both palms, slamming into it with the full weight of her body. The door's gas-lift was broken, so it swung back like a mousetrap, and it was a good thing it did, because it moved so fast that the two Pinkertons waiting to bar their exit didn't have time to get out of the way. One was knocked over on his ass, the other was slammed into the cinderblock wall with a jarring thud that Big Sister Nor felt in her palms.
+
+The door rebounded into her, knocking her back into The Mighty Krang, who caught her, pushed her on, hands on her shoulderblades, breath ragged in her ears.
+
+They were in a dark, narrow, stinking alley behind that connected two of the Lorangs, the small streets that ran off Geylang Road, and it was time to R and G -- to run and gun, what you did when all your other plans collapsed. Big Sister Nor had thought this through far enough to make sure they had a back door, but no farther than that.
+
+The Pinkertons were close behind, but they were all squeezed down into the incredibly narrow confines of the alleyway, and no one could really run or move faster than a desperate shuffle.
+
+But then they broke free into the next Lorang, and Big Sister Nor broke left, hoping to make it far enough up the road to get into sight of the diners at the all-night restaurants.
+
+She didn't make it.
+
+One of the men threw his truncheon at her and it hit her square between her shoulders, knocking the breath from her and causing her to go down on one knee. Justbob twined one hand in her blouse and hauled her to her feet with a sound of tearing cloth, and dragged her on, but they'd lost a step to her fall, and now the men were on them.
+
+Justbob whirled around, snarling, shouting a worldless cry, using the movement as inertia for a wild roundhouse kick that connected with one of the Pinkertons, a man with sleepy eyes and a thick mustache. Justbob's foot caught him in the side, and they all heard the sound of his ribs breaking under the toe of her demure sandal with its fake jewels. The sandal flew on and clattered to the road with the cheap sound of paste gems.
+
+The men hadn't expected that, and there was a moment when they stopped in their tracks, staring at their fallen comrade, and in that instant, Big Sister Nor thought that -- just maybe -- they could get away. But Justbob's chest was heaving, her face contorted in rage, and she /{leapt}/ at the next man, a fat man in a sweaty sportcoat, thumbs aiming at his eyes, and as she reached him, the man beside him lifted his truncheon and brought it down, glancing off her high, fine cheekbone and then smashing against her collarbone.
+
+Justbob howled like a wounded dog and fell back, landing a hard punch in her attacker's groin as she fell back.
+
+But now the Pinkertons were on them, and their arms were raised, their truncheons held high, and as the first one swung into Big Sister Nor's left breast, she cried out and her mind was filled with Affendi and her broken fingers, her unrecognizably bruised face. Somewhere, just a few tantalizing meters up the Lorang, night people were eating a huge feast of fish and goat in curry, the smells in the air. But that was there. Here, Big Siter Nor was infinitely far from them, and the truncheons rose and fell and she curled up to protect her head, her breasts, her stomach, and in so doing exposed her tender kidneys, her delicate short-ribs, and there she lay, enduring a season in hell that went on for an eternity and a half.
+
+#
+
+1~ scene # ~#
+
+_1 /{ This scene is dedicated to Chapters/Indigo, the national Canadian megachain. I was working at Bakka, the independent science fiction bookstore, when Chapters opened its first store in Toronto and I knew that something big was going on right away, because two of our smartest, best-informed customers stopped in to tell me that they'd been hired to run the science fiction section. From the start, Chapters raised the bar on what a big corporate bookstore could be, extending its hours, adding a friendly cafe and lots of seating, installing in-store self-service terminals and stocking the most amazing variety of titles. }/
+
+_1 {~^ Chapters/Indigo }http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/For-The-Win-Cory-Doctorow/9780765322166-item.html
+
+Connor Prikkel sometimes thought of math as a beautiful girl, the kind of girl that he'd dreamt of wooing, dating, even marrying, while sitting in the back of any class that wasn't related to math, daydreaming. A beautiful girl like Jenny Rosen, who'd had classes with him all through high-school, who always seemed to know the answer no matter what the subject, who had a light dusting of freckles around her nose and a quirky half-smile. Who dressed in jeans that she'd tailored herself, in t-shirts she'd modded, stitching multiple shirts together to make tight little half-shirts, elaborate shawls, mock turtelnecks.
+
+Jenny Rosen had seemed to have it all: beauty and brains and, above all, rationality: she didn't like the way that store-bought jeans fit, so she hacked her own. She didn't like the t-shirts that everyone wore, so she changed the shirts to suit her taste. She was funny, she was clever, and he'd been completely, head-over-heels in love with her from sophomore English right through to senior American History.
+
+They'd been friendly through that time, though not really friends. Connor’s friends were into gaming and computers, Jenny's friends were jocks and school-paper kids. But friendly, sure, enough to say hello in the hallway, enough to become lab partners in sophomore physics (she was a careful taker of notes, and her hair-stuff smelled /{amazing}/, and their hands brushed against each other a hundred times that semester).
+
+And then, in senior year, he'd asked her out to a movie. Then she'd asked him to a track rally. Then he'd asked her to work with him on an American History project on Chinese railway workers that involved going to Chinatown after school, and there they'd had a giant dim sum meal and then sat in a park and talked for hours, and then they'd stopped talking and started kissing.
+
+And one thing led to another, and the kissing led to more kissing, and then their friends all started to whisper, "Did you hear about Connor and Jenny?" and she met his parents and he met hers. And it had all seemed perfect.
+
+But it wasn't perfect. Anything but.
+
+In the four months, two weeks and three days that they were officially a couple, they had approximately 2,453,212 arguments, each more blazing than the last. Theoretically, he understood everything he needed to about her. She loved sports. She loved to use her mind. She loved humor. She loved silly comedies and slow music without words.
+
+And so he would go away and plan out exactly how to deliver all these things to her, plugging in her loves like variables into an equation, working out elaborate schemes to deliver them to her.
+
+But it never worked. He'd work it out so that they could go to a ball game at ATandT Park and she'd want to go see a concert at Cow Palace instead. He'd take her to see a new wacky comedy and she'd want to go home and work on an overdue assignment. No matter how hard he tried to get her reality and his theory to match up, he always failed.
+
+In his heart of hearts, he knew it wasn't her fault. He knew that he had some deficiency that caused him to live in the imaginary world he sometimes thought of as "theory-land," the country where everything behaved as it was supposed to.
+
+After graduation, through his bachelor's degree in pure math at Berkeley, his Masters in Signal Processing at Caltech, and the first year of a PhD in economics at Stanford, he had occasion to date lots of beautiful women, and every time, he found himself ground to pulp between the gears of real-world and theory-land. He gave up on women and his PhD on a fine day in October, telling the prof who was supposed to be his advisor that he could find someone else to teach his freshman math courses, grade his papers, and answer his email.
+
+He walked off the Stanford campus and into the monied streets of Palo Alto, and he packed up his car and drove to his new job, as chief economist for Coca Cola's games division, and finally, he found a real world that matched the beautiful elegance of theory-land.
+
+Coca Cola ran or franchised anywhere from a dozen to thirty game-worlds at any given time. The number of games went up or down according to the brutal, elegant logic of the economics of fun:
+
+a certain amount of difficulty
+
+plus
+
+a certain amount of your friends
+
+plus
+
+a certain amount of interesting strangers
+
+plus
+
+a certain amount of reward
+
+plus
+
+a certain amount of opportunity
+
+equalled
+
+fun
+
+.
+
+That was the equation that had come to him one day early in his second semester of the PhD grind, a bolt of inspiration like the finger of god reaching down into his brain. The magic was that equals sign, just before the fun, because once you could express fun as a function of other variables, you could establish its relationship to those variables -- if we reduce the difficulty and the number of your friends playing, can we increase the reward and make the fun stay the same?
+
+This line of thought drove him to phone in a sick-call to his advisor and head straight home, where he typed and drew and scribbled and thought and thought and thought, and he phoned in sick the next day, and the next -- and then it was the weekend, and he let his phone run down, shut off his email and IM, and worked, eating when he had to.
+
+By the time he found himself shoving fingerloads of butter into his mouth, having emptied the fridge of all else, he knew he was onto something.
+
+He called them the Prikkel equations, and they described in elegant, pure, abstract math the relationship between all the variables that went into fun, and how fun equalled money, inasmuch as people would pay to play fun games, and would pay more for items that had value in those games.
+
+Technically, he should have sent the paper to his advisor. He'd signed a contract when he was accepted to the University giving ownership of all his ideas to the school forever, in exchange for the promise of someday adding "PhD" to his name. It hadn't seemed like a good idea at the time, but the alternative was the awesomely craptacular job-market, and so he'd signed it.
+
+But he wasn't going to give this to Stanford. He wasn't going to /{give}/ it to anybody. He was going to /{sell}/ it.
+
+He didn't go back to campus after that, but rather plunged into a succession of virtual worlds, plotting the time in hours it took him to achieve different tasks, and comparing that to the price of gold in the black-, grey- and white-market exchanges for in-game wealth.
+
+Each number slotted in perfectly, just where he'd expected it to go. His equations /{fit}/, and the world fit his equations. He'd finally found a place where the irrational was rendered comprehensible. And what's more, he could /{manipulate}/ the world using his equations.
+
+He decided to do a little fantasy trading: working from his equations, he'd predicted that the gold in MAD Magazine's Shlabotnik's Curse was wildly undervalued. It was an incredibly fun game -- or at least, it satisfied the fun equation -- but for some reason, game money and elite items were going for peanuts. Sure enough, in 36 hours, his imaginary MAD Money was worth $130 in imaginary real money.
+
+Then he took his $130 stake and sank it into four other game currencies, spreading out his bets. Three of the four hit the jackpot, bringing his total up to $200 in imaginary dollars. Now he decided to spend some real money -- he already knew that he wasn't going back to campus, so that meant his grad student grant would vanish shortly. He'd need to pay the rent while he searched for a buyer for his equations.
+
+He'd already proven to his own satisfaction that he could predict the movement of game currencies, but now he wanted to branch out into the weirder areas of game economics: elite items, the rare prestige items that were insanely difficult to acquire in-game. Some of them had a certain innate value -- powerful weapons and armor, ingredients for useful spells -- but others seemed to hold value by sheer rarity or novelty. Why should a purple suit of armor cost ten times as much as the red one, given that both suits of armor had exactly the same play value?
+
+Of course, the purple one was much harder to come by. You had to either buy it with unimaginable mountains of gold -- so players who saw your av sporting it would assume that you had played your ass off to earn for it -- or pull off some fantastic stunt to get it, like doing a 60-player raid on a nigh-unkillable boss. Like a designer label on an otherwise unimpressive article of clothing, these items were valuable because people who saw them assumed they had to cost a lot or be hard to get, and thought more of the owner for having them. In other words, they cost a lot because...they cost a lot!
+
+So far, so good -- but could you use Prikkel's Equations to predict /{how much}/ they'd cost? Connor thought so. He thought you could use a formula that combined the fun quotient of the game and the number of hours needed to get the item, and derive the "value" of any elite item from purple armor to gold pinstripes on your spaceship to a banana-cream pie the size of an apartment block.
+
+Yes, it would work. Connor was sure of it. He started to calculate the true value of various elite items, casting about for undervalued items. What he discovered surprised him: while virtual currency tended to rest pretty close to its real value, plus or minus five percent, the value-gap in elite items was /{gigantic}/. Some items routinely traded for two or three hundred percent of their real value -- as predicted by his Equations, anyway -- and some traded at a pittance.
+
+Never for a moment did he doubt his equations, though a more humble or more cautious person might have. No, Connor looked at this paradoxical picture and the first thing that came into his head wasn't "Oops." It was /{BUY}/!
+
+And he bought. Anything that was undervalued, he bought, in great storehouses, so much that he had to create alts and secondaries in many worlds, because his primary characters couldn't /{carry}/ all the undervalued junk he was buying. He spent a hundred dollars -- two hundred -- three hundred, snapping up assets, spreadsheeting their nominal value. On paper, he was incredibly, unspeakably rich. On paper, he could afford to move out of his one-bedroom apartment that was a little too close to the poor and scary East Palo Alto for his suburban tastes, buy a McMansion somewhere on the peninsula, and go into business full time, spending his days buying magic armor and zeppelins and flaming hamburgers, and his evening opening checks.
+
+In reality, he was going broke. The theory said that these assets were wildly undervalued. The marketplace said otherwise. He'd cornered the market on several kinds of marvellous gew-gaws, but no one seemed to actually want to buy them from him. He remembered Jenny Rosen, and all the crushing ways that theory and reality could sometimes stop communicating with one another.
+
+When the first red bills came in, he stuck them under his keyboard and kept buying. He didn't need to pay his cell phone bill. He didn't need his cell-phone to buy magic lizards. His student loans? He wasn't a student anymore, so he didn't see why he should worry about them -- they couldn't kick him out of school. Car payments? Let them repo it (and they did, one night, at 2AM, and he waved goodbye to the little hunk of junk as the repo man drove it away, then turned back to his keyboard). Credit card bills? So long as there was one card that was still good, one card he could use to pay the subscription fees for his games, that was all that mattered.
+
+Living close to East Palo Alto had its advantages: for one thing, there were food-banks there, places where he could line up with other poor people to get giant bricks of government cheese, bags of day-old bread, boxes of irregular and unlovely root-vegetables. He fried all the latter in an all-day starch festival and froze them, and then he proceeded to live off of cheese and potato sandwiches, and one morning, he realized that his entire body and everything that came out of it -- breath, burps, farts, even his urine -- smelled of cheese sandwiches. He didn't care. There were ostrich plumes to buy.
+
+Disaster struck: he lost track of which credit card he was ignoring and had half of his accounts suspended when his monthly subscription fees bounced. Half his wealth, wiped out. And the other card wasn't far behind.
+
+He thought he could probably call his parents and grovel a bit and get a bus ticket to Petaluma, hole up in his folks' basement and lick his wounds and be yet another small-town failure who came home with his tail between his legs. He'd need a roll of quarters and a payphone, of course, because his cellphone was now an inert, unpaid, debt-haunted brick. Lucky for him, East Palo Alto was the kind of place where you got lots of people who were too poor even to go into debt with a cell-phone, people who also needed to use payphones.
+
+He tucked himself into his grimy bed on a Wednesday morning and thought, /{Tomorrow, tomorrow I will call them.}/
+
+But tomorrow he didn't. And Friday he didn't, though he was now out of government cheese and wasn't eligible for more until Monday. He could eat potato sandwiches. He couldn't buy assets anymore, but he was still tracking them, watching them trade and identifying the bargains he /{would}/ buy, if only he had a little more liquidity, a little more cashish.
+
+Saturday, he brushed his teeth, because he remembered to do that sometimes, and his gums bled and there were sores on the insides of his mouth and /{now}/ he was ready to call his parents, but it was 11PM somehow, how did the day shoot past, and they went to bed at 9 every night. He'd call them on Sunday.
+
+And on Sunday -- on Sunday -- on that magical, wonderful Sunday, on Sunday --
+
+THE MARKET MOVED!
+
+There he was, pricing assets, recording their values in his spreadsheet, and he realized that the asset he was booking -- a steampunk leather gasmask adorned with a cluster of huge leathery ear-trumpets and brass cogs and rivets (no better than a standard gasmask in the blighted ecotastrophe world that was Rising Seas, but infinitely cooler) -- had already been entered onto his sheet, weeks before. Indeed, he'd booked the mask when its real world cash value was about $0.18, against the $4.54 the Equations predicted. And now he was booking it at $1.24, which meant that the 750 of them he had in inventory had just jumped from $135 to $930, a profit of $795.
+
+There was a strange sound. He realized after a moment that it was his stomach, growling for food. He could flip his gasmasks now, take the $795 onto one of his PayPal debit cards, and eat like a king. He might even be able to buy back some of his lost accounts and recover his assets.
+
+But Connor did not consider doing this, even for a second. He dashed to the sink and filled up three cooking pots with water and brought them back to his desk, along with a cup. He filled the cup and drank it, filled it and drank it, filling his stomach with water until it stopped demanding to be filled. This was California, after all, where people paid good money to go to "retreats" for "liquid fasting" and "detox." So he could wait out food for a day or two... After all, his Equations predicted that these things should go to $3,405. He was just getting started.
+
+And now the gasmasks were rising. He'd get up, go to the bathroom -- his kidneys were certainly getting a workout! -- and return to check the listings on the official exchange sites and the black-market ones where the gold-farmers hung out. He had a little formula for calculating the real price, using these two prices as a kind of beacon. No matter how he calculated it, his gasmasks were rising.
+
+And yes, some of his other assets were rising, too. A robot dog, up from $1.32 to $1.54, still pretty far off from the $8.17 he'd predicted, but he owned a thousand of the things, which meant that he'd just made $1,318.46 here, and he was just getting started.
+
+Up and up the prices went, as asset after asset attained liftoff, and he began to suspect that his asset-buying spree had coincided with an inter-world depression across all virtual economies, which accounted for the huge quantities of undervalued assets he'd found lying around. There was probably an interesting cause for all those virtual economies slumping at once, but that was something to study another day. As it was, he was more interested in the fact that the economies were bouncing back while he was sitting on mountains of dirt-cheap imaginary gewgaws, knickknacks, tchotchkes and white-elephants, and that their values were taking off like crazy.
+
+And now it was time to convert some of those assets to money and some of that money to food, rent, and paid-off bills. His collection of articulated tentacles from Nemo's Adventures on the Ocean Floor were maturing nicely -- he'd bought them at $0.22, priced them at $3.21, and now they were trading at $3.27 -- so he dumped them, and regretted that he'd only bought 400 of them. Still, he managed to dump them for a handy $1150 profit (by the time he'd sold 300 of them, the price had started to tip down again, as the supply of tentacles increased and the demand diminished).
+
+The money dribbled into his PayPal account and he used that to order three pizzas, a gallon of orange juice and ten boxes of salad, paid off his suspended accounts, and sent $400 to his landlord against the $3500 he owed for two months' rent, along with a begging letter promising to pay the rest off within a day or two.
+
+While he waited for the pizzas to arrive, he decided he'd better shower and shave and try to do something about his hair, which had started to go into dreadlocks from a month without seeing a hairbrush. In the end, he just cut the tangles out, and got dressed in something other than his filthy housecoat for the first time in a week -- marvelling at how his jeans hungoff his prominent hips, how his t-shirt clung to his wasted chest, his ribs like a xylophone through the pale skin. He opened all the windows, aware of the funk of body-odor and stale computer-filtered air in his apartment, and realized as he did that it was morning, and thanked his lucky stars that he lived in a college town, where you could get a pizza delivered at 8:30AM.
+
+He barfed after eating the first pizza, getting most of it into the big pot he'd used to hold his drinking water, big chunks of crust and pepperoni, reeking of sour stomach-acid. He didn't let that put him off. His PayPal account was now bulging, up to $50,000, and he was just getting started. He switched to salads and juice, figuring it would take a little while to get used to food again, and not having the time just now to take a long bio-break. His body would have to wait. He ordered an urn of coffee from a place that catered corporate meetings, the kind of thing that held 80 cups' worth, and threw in a plate of sliced veggie and some pastries.
+
+Selling was getting easier now. The economies were bouncing back, and from the tone of the thank-you messages he got from his buyers, he understood that there was a kind of reverse-panic in the air, a sense that players all over the world were starting to worry that if they didn't buy this junk now, they'd never be able to buy it, because the prices would go up and up and up forever.
+
+And it was then that he had his second great flash, the second time that the finger of God reached down and touched his mind, with a force that shook him out of his chair and set him to pacing his living room like a tiger, muttering to himself.
+
+Once, when he'd been working on his Masters, he'd participated in a study for a pal in the economics department. They'd locked twenty five grad students into a room and given each of them a poker chip. "You can do whatever you want with those chips," the experimenter had said. "But you might want to hang onto them. Every hour, on the hour, I'm going to unlock this door and give you twenty dollars for each poker chip you're holding. I'll do this eight times, for the next eight hours. Then I'll unlock the door for a final time and you can go home and your poker chips will be worthless -- though you'll be able to keep all the money you've acquired over the course of the experiment."
+
+He'd snorted and rolled his eyes at the other grad students, who were mostly doing the same. It was going to be a loooong eight hours. After all, everyone knew what the value of the poker chips were: $160 in the first hour, $140 in the next, $120 in the next and so on. What would be the point of trading a poker chip to anyone else for anything less than it was worth?
+
+For the first hour, they all sat around and griped about how boring it all was. Then, the experimenter walked back into the room with a tray of sandwiches and 25 $20 bills. "Poker chips, please," he said, and they dutifully held out their chips, and one by one, each received a crisp new $20 bill.
+
+"One down, seven to go," someone said, once the experimenter had left. The sandwiches were largely untouched. They waited. They flirted in a bored way, or made small talk. The hour ticked past.
+
+Then, at 55 minutes past the hour, one guy, a real joker with red hair and mischievous freckles, got out of the beat-up old orange sofa turned to the prettiest girl in the room, a lovely Chinese girl with short hair and homemade clothes that reminded Connor of Jenny's fashion, and said, "Rent me your poker chip for five minutes? I'll pay you $20."
+
+That cracked the entire room up. It was the perfect demonstration of the absurdity of sitting around, waiting for the $20 hour. The Chinese girl laughed, too, and they solemnly traded. In came the grad student, five minutes later, with another wad of twenties and a cooler filled with smoothies in tetrapaks. "Poker chips, please," he said, and the joker held up his two chips. They all grinned at one another, like they'd gotten one over on the student, and he grinned a little too and handed two twenties to the redhead. The Chinese girl held up her extra twenty, showing that she had the same as everyone else. Once he'd gone, Red gave her back her chip. She pocketed it and went back to sitting in one of the dusty old armchairs.
+
+They drank their smoothies. There were murmured conversations, and it seemed like a lot of people were trading their chips back and forth. Connor laughed to see this, and he wasn't the only one, but it was all in fun. Twenty dollars was the going rate for an hour's rental, after all -- the exactly and perfectly rational sum.
+
+"Give me your poker-chip for 20 minutes for $5?" The asker was at the young end of the room, about 22, with a soft, cultured southern accent. She was also very pretty. He checked the clock on the wall: "It's only half past," he said. "What's the point?"
+
+She grinned at him. "You'll see."
+
+A five dollar bill was produced and the poker-chip left his custody. The pretty southern girl talked with another girl, and after a moment, $10 traded hands, rather conspicuously. "Hey," he began, but the southern girl tipped him a wink, and he fell silent.
+
+Anxiously, he watched the clock, waiting for the 20 minutes to tick past. "I need the chip back," he said, to the southern girl.
+
+She shrugged. "You need to talk to her," she said, jerking her thumb over her shoulder, then she ostentatiously pulled a paperback novel -- /{The Fountainhead}/ -- out of her backpack and buried her nose in it. He felt a complicated emotion: he wanted to laugh, and he wanted to shout at the girl. He chose laughter, conscious of all the people watching him, and approached the other girl, who was tall and solidly built, with a no-nonsense look that went perfectly with her no-nonsense clothes and haircut.
+
+"Yes?" she said, when he approached her.
+
+"You've got my chip," he said.
+
+"No," she said. "I do not."
+
+"But the chip she sold you, I'd only rented it to her."
+
+"You need to take it up with her," the girl who had his chip said.
+
+"But it's my chip," he said. "It wasn't hers to sell to you." He didn't want to say, /{I'm also pretty intimidated by anyone who has the gall to pull a stunt like that.}/ Was it his imagination, or was the southern girl smiling to herself, a smug little smile?
+
+"Not my problem, I'm afraid," she said. "Too bad."
+
+Now /{everyone}/ was watching very closely and he felt himself blushing, losing his cool. He swallowed and tried to put on a convincing smile. "Yeah, I guess I really should be more careful who I trust. Will you sell me my chip?"
+
+"My chip," she said, flipping it in the air. He was tempted to try and grab it out of the air, but that might have led to a wrestling match right here, in front of everyone. How embarrassing!
+
+"Yeah," he said. "Your chip."
+
+"OK," she said. "$15."
+
+"Deal," he said, thinking, /{I've already earned $45 here, I can afford to let go of $15.}/
+
+"In seven minutes," she said. He looked at the clock: it was 11:54. In seven minutes, she'd have gotten his $20. Correction: /{her}/ $20.
+
+"That's not fair," he said.
+
+She raised one eyebrow at him, hoisting it so high it seemed like it'd touch her hairline. "Oh really? I think that this chip is worth $120. $15 seems like a bargain to you."
+
+"I'll give you $20," the redhead said.
+
+"$25," said someone else, laughing.
+
+"Fine, fine," Connor said, hastily, now blushing so hard he actually felt light-headed. "$15."
+
+"Too late," she said. "The price is now $25."
+
+He heard the room chuckle, felt it preparing to holler out a new price -- $40? $60? -- and he quickly snapped, "$25" and dug out his wallet.
+
+The girl took his money -- how did he know she would give him the chip? He felt like an idiot as soon as it had left his hand -- and then the experimenter came in. "Lunch!" he called out, wheeling in a cart laden with boxed salads, vegetarian sushi, and a couple buckets of fried chicken. "Poker chips!" The twenties were handed around.
+
+The girl with his money spent an inordinate amount of time picking out her lunch, then, finally, turned to him with a look of fakey surprise, and said, "Oh right, here," and handed him his chip. The guy with the red hair snickered.
+
+Well, that was the beginning of the game, the thing that turned the next five hours into one of the most intense, emotional experiences he'd ever taken part in. Players formed buying factions, bought out other players, pooled their wealth. Someone changed the wall clock, sneakily, and then they all spent 30 minutes arguing about who's watch or phone was more accurate, until the researcher came back in with a handful of twenties.
+
+In the sixth hour of the experiment, Connor suddenly realized that he was in the minority, an outlier among two great factions: one of which controlled nearly all the poker chips, the other of which controlled nearly all the cash. And there was only two hours left, which meant that his single chip was worth $40.
+
+And something began to gnaw at his belly. Fear. Envy. Panic. The certainty that, when the experiment ended, he'd be the only poor one, the only one without a huge wad of cash. The savvy traders around them had somehow worked themselves into positions of power and wealth, while he'd been made tentative by his bad early experience and had stood pat while everyone else created the market.
+
+So he set out to buy more chips. Or to sell his chip. He didn't care which -- he just wanted to be rich.
+
+He wasn't the only one: after the seventh hour, the entire marketplace erupted in a fury of buying and selling, which made /{no damned sense}/ because now, /{now}/ the chips were all worth exactly $20 each, and in just a few minutes, they'd be absolutely worthless. He kept telling himself this, but he also found himself bidding, harder and harder, for chips. Luckily, he wasn't the most frightened person in the room. That turned out to be the redhead, who went after chips like a crackhead chasing a rock, losing all the casual cool he'd started with and chasing chips with money, IOUs.
+
+Here's the thing, cash should have been /{king}/. The cash would still be worth something in an hour. The poker chips were like soap bubbles, about to pop. But those holding the chips were the kings and queens of the game, of the market. In seven short hours, they'd been conditioned to think of the chips as ATMs that spat out twenties, and even though their rational minds knew better, their hearts were all telling them to corner the chip.
+
+At 4:53, seven minutes before his chip would have its final payout, he sold it to the Fountainhead lady for $35, smirking at her until she turned around and sold it to the redhead for $50. The researcher came into the room, handed out his twenties, thanked them for their time, and sent them on their way.
+
+No one met anyone else's eye as they departed. No one offered anyone else a phone number or email address or IM. It was as if they'd all just done something they were ashamed of, like they'd all taken part in a mob beating or a witch-burning, and now they just wanted to get away. Far away.
+
+For years, Connor had puzzled over the mania that had seized that room full of otherwise sane people, that had found a home in his own heart, had driven him like an addiction. What had brought him to that shameful place?
+
+Now, as he watched the value of his virtual assets climb and climb and climb, climb higher than his Equations predicted, higher than any sane person should be willing to spend on them, he /{understood}/.
+
+The emotion that had driven them in that experimenter's lab, that was driving the unseen bidders around the world: it wasn't greed.
+
+It was /{envy}/.
+
+Greed was predictable: if one slice of pizza is good, it makes sense that your intuition will tell you that five or ten slices would be even better.
+
+But envy wasn't about what was good: it was about what someone else thought was good. It was the devil who whispered in your ear about your neighbor's car, his salary, his clothes, his girlfriend -- better than yours, more expensive than yours, more beautiful than yours. It was the dagger through your heart that could drive you from happiness to misery in a second without changing a single thing about your circumstances. It could turn your perfect life into a perfect mess, just by comparing it to someone who had more/better/prettier.
+
+Envy is what drove that flurry of buying and selling in the lab. The redhead, writing IOUs and emptying his wallet: he'd been driven by the fear that he was missing out on what the rest of them were getting. Connor had sold his chip in the last hour because everyone else seemed to have gotten rich selling theirs. He could have kept his chip to himself for eight hours and walked out $160 richer, and used the time to study, or snooze, or do yoga in the back. But he'd felt that siren call: /{Someone else is getting rich, why aren't you?}/
+
+And now the markets were running and /{everything}/ was shooting up in value: his collection of red oxtails (useful in the preparation of the Revelations spell in Endtimes) should have been selling at $4.21 each. He'd bought them for $2.10 each. They were presently priced at /{$14.51 each}/.
+
+It was insane.
+
+It was wonderful.
+
+Connor knew it couldn't last. Eventually, there would be a marketwide realization that these were overpriced -- just as the market had recently realized that they had been underpriced. Bidding would cease. The last, most scared person who bought an overpriced game asset would be unable to flip it, would have to pay for it.
+
+Rationally, he supposed he should sell at his Equation-predicted number. Anything higher was just a bet on someone else's irrationality. But still -- would he really be better off flipping his 50 oxtails for $200, when he could wait a few minutes and sell them for $700? It didn't have to be all or nothing. He divided his assets up into two groups; the ones he'd bought most cheaply, he set aside to allow to rise as far as they could. They represented his lowest-risk inventory, the cheapest losses to absorb. The remaining assets, he flipped at the second they reached the value predicted by his Equations.
+
+He quickly sold out of the second group, leaving him to watch the speculative assets climb higher and higher. He had a dozen games open on his computer, flipping from one to the next, monitoring the chatter and their associated websites and marketplaces, getting a sense for where they were going. Filtering the tweets and the status messages on the social networks, he felt a curious sense of familiarity: they were going nuts out there in a way that was almost identical to the craziness that had swept over the group in the poker-chip experiment. In their hearts, everyone knew that peacock plumes and purple armor were vastly overvalued, but they also knew that some people were getting rich off of them, and that if the prices kept climbing that they'd never be able to own one themselves.
+
+Nevermind that they never wanted to own one /{before}/, of course! The important thing wasn't what they needed or loved, it was the idea that someone else would have something that they couldn't have.
+
+Connor had made his second great discovery: Envy, not greed, was the most powerful force in any economy.
+
+(Later, when Connor was writing articles about this for glossy magazines and travelling all over the world to talk about it, plenty of people from marketing departments would point out that they'd known this for generations had spent centuries producing ads that were aimed squarely at envy's solar plexus. It was true, he had to admit -- but it was also true that practically every economist he'd ever met had considered marketing people to be a bunch of shallow, foolish court jesters with poor math skills and had therefore largely ignored them)
+
+He watched the envy mount, and tried to get a feel for it all, to track the sentiments as they bubbled up. It was hard -- practically impossible, honestly -- because it was all spread out and no one had written the chat programs and the games and the social networks and the twitsites to track this kind of thing. He ended up with a dozen browsers open, each with dozens of tabs, flipping through them in a high speed blur, not reading exactly, but skimming, absorbing the /{sense}/ of how things were going. He could feel the money and the thoughts and the goods all balanced on his fingertips, feel their weight shifting back and forth.
+
+And so he felt it when things started to go wrong. It was a bunch of subtle indicators, a blip in prices in this market, a joyous tweet from a player who'd just discovered an easy-to-kill miniboss with a huge storehouse stuffed with peacock feathers. The envy bubble was collapsing. Someone had popped it and the air was whooshing out.
+
+SELL!
+
+At that moment, his speculative assets were theoretically worth over /{four hundred thousand dollars}/, but ten minutes later, it was $250,000 and falling like a rock. He knew this one too -- fear -- fear that everyone else got out while the getting was good, that the musical chairs had all been filled, that you were the most scared person in a chain of terrorized people who bought overpriced junk because someone even more scared would buy it off of you.
+
+But Connor could rise above the fear, fly over it, flip his assets in a methodical, rapidfire way. He got out with over $120,000 in cash, plus the $80,000 he'd gotten from his "rationally priced" assets, and now his PayPal accounts were bulging with profits and it was all over.
+
+Except it wasn't.
+
+One by one, his game accounts began to shut down, his characters kicked out, his passwords changed. He was limp with exhaustion, his hands trembling as he typed and re-typed his passwords. And then he noticed the new email, from the four companies that controlled the twelve games he'd been playing: they'd all cut him off for violating their Terms of Service. Specifically, he'd "Interfered with the game economy by engaging in play that was apt to cause financial panic."
+
+"What the hell does that mean?" he shouted at his computer, resisting the urge to hurl his mouse at the wall. He'd been awake for over 48 hours now, had made hundreds of thousands of dollars in a mere weekend, and had been graced with a thunderbolt of realization about the way that the world's economy ran. Oh, and he'd validated his Equations.
+
+He could solve this problem later.
+
+He didn't even make it into bed. He curled up on the floor, in a nest of pizza boxes and blankets, and slept for 18 hours, until he was awoken by the bailiff who came to evict him for being three months behind on the rent.
+
+#
+
+1~ scene # ~#
+
+_1 /{ This scene is dedicated to San Francisco's Booksmith, ensconced in the storied Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, just a few doors down from the Ben and Jerry's at the exact corner of Haight and Ashbury. The Booksmith folks really know how to run an author event -- when I lived in San Francisco, I used to go down all the time to hear incredible writers speak (William Gibson was unforgettable). They also produce little baseball-card-style trading cards for each author -- I have two from my own appearances there. }/
+
+_1 {~^ Booksmith }http://thebooksmith.booksense.com/: 1644 Haight St. San Francisco CA 94117 USA +1 415 863 8688
+
+Yasmin didn't see Mala anymore. If you weren't in the gang, "General Robotwallah" didn't want to talk to you.
+
+And Yasmin didn't want to be in the gang.
+
+She, too, had had a visit from Big Sister Nor. The woman had made sense. They did all the work, they made almost none of the money. Not just in games, either -- her parents had spent their whole lives toiling for others, and those others had gotten wealthier and wealthier, and they'd stayed in Dharavi.
+
+Mr Banerjee had paid Mala's army more than any other slum-child could earn, it was true, and they were getting paid for playing their game, which had felt like a miracle -- at first. But the more Yasmin thought about it, the less miraculous it became. Big Sister Nor showed her pictures, in-game, of the workers whose jobs they'd been disrupting. Some had been in Indonesia, some had been in Thailand, some had been in Malaysia, some had been in China. And lots of them had been in India, in Sri Lanka, in Pakistan, and in Bangladesh, where her parents had come from. They looked like her. They looked like her friends.
+
+And /{they}/ were just trying to earn money, too. They were just trying to help their families, the way Mala's army had. "You don't have to hurt other workers to survive," Big Sister Nor told her. "We can all thrive together."
+
+Day after day, Yasmin had snuck into Mrs Dibyendu's Internet cafe before the Army met -- not at Mrs Dibyendu's, but at a new Internet shop a little further down the road, near the women's papadam collective -- and chatted with Big Sister Nor and listened to her stories of how it could be.
+
+She'd never talked about it with anyone else in the army. As far as they knew, she was Mala's loyal lieutenant, sturdy and dependable. She had to enforce discipline in the ranks, which meant keeping the boys from fighting too much and keeping the girls from ganging up on one another with hissing, whispered rumors. To them, she was a stern, formidable fighter, someone to obey unconditionally in battle. She couldn't approach them to say, "Have you ever thought about fighting for workers instead of fighting against them?"
+
+No matter how much Big Sister Nor wanted her to.
+
+"Yasmin, they listen to you, la, they love you and look up to you. You say it yourself." Her Hindi was strangely accented and peppered with English and Chinese words. But there were lots of funny accents in Dharavi, dialects and languages from across Mother India.
+
+Finally, she agreed to do it. Not to talk to the soldiers, but to talk to Mala, who had been her friend since Yasmin had found her carrying a huge sack of rice home from Mr Bhatt's shop with her little brother, looking lost and scared in the alleys of Dharavi. She and Mala had been inseparable since then, and Yasmin had always been able to tell her anything.
+
+"Good morning, General," she said, falling into step beside Mala as she trekked to the community tap with a water-can in each hand. She took one can from Mala and took her now free hand and gave it a sisterly squeeze.
+
+Mala grinned at her and squeezed back, and the smile was like the old Mala, the Mala from before General Robotwallah had come into being. "Good morning, Lieutenant." Mala was pretty when she smiled, her serious eyes filled with mischief, her square small teeth all on display. When she smiled like this, Yasmin felt like she had a sister.
+
+They talked in low voices as they waited for the tap, passing gupshup about their families. Mala's mother had met a man at Mr Bhatt's factory, a man whose parents had come to Mumbai a generation before, but from the same village. He'd grown up on stories about life in the village, and he could listen to Mala's mamaji tell stories of that promised land all day long. He was gentle and had a big laugh, and Mala approved. Yasmin's Nani, her grandmother, had been in touch with a matchmaker in London, and she was threatening to find Yasmin a husband there, though her parents were having none of it.
+
+Once they had the water, Yasmin helped Mala carry it back to her building, but stopped her before they got there, in the lee of an overhanging chute that workers used to dump bundled cardboard from a second-story factory down to carriers on the ground. The factory hadn't started up yet, so it was quiet now.
+
+"Big Sister Nor asked me to talk to you, Mala."
+
+Mala stiffened and her smile faded. They weren't talking as sisters anymore. The hard look, the General Robotwallah look, was in her eyes. "What did she say to you?"
+
+"The same she said to you, I imagine. That the people we fight against are also workers, like us. Children, like us. That we can live without hurting others. That we can work with them, with workers everywhere --"
+
+Mala held up her hand, the General's command for silence in the war-room. "I've heard it, I've heard it. And what, you think she's right? You want to give it all up and go back to how we were before? Back to school, back to work, back to no money and no food and being afraid all the time?"
+
+Yasmin didn't remember being afraid all the time, and school hadn't been that bad, had it? "Mala," she said, placatingly. "I just wanted to talk about this with you. You've saved us, all of us in the Army, brought us out of misery and into riches and work. But we work and work for Mr Banerjee, for his bosses, and our parents work for bosses, and the children we fight in the game work for bosses, and I just think --" She drew in a breath. "I think I have more in common with the workers than I do with the bosses. That maybe, if we all come together, we can demand a better deal from all of them --"
+
+Mala's eyes blazed. "You want to lead the Army, is that it? You want to take us on this mission of yours to make /{friends}/ with everyone, to join with them to fight Mr Banerjee and the bosses, Mr Bhatt who owns the factory and the people who own the game? And how will you fight, little Yasmin? Are you going to upset the entire world so that it's finally /{fair}/ and /{kind}/ to everyone?"
+
+Yasmin shrank back, but she took a deep breath and looked into the General's terrible eyes. "What's so wrong with kindness, Mala? What's so terrible about surviving without harming other people?"
+
+Mala's lip curled up in a snarl of pure disgust. "Don't you know by now, Yasmin? Haven't you figured it out yet? Look around us!" She waved her water can wildly, nearly clubbing an old woman who was inching past, bearing her own water cans. "Look around! You know that there are people all over the world who have fine cars and fine meals, servants and maids? There are people all over the world who have /{toilets}/, Yasmin, and /{running water}/, and who get to each have their own bedroom with a fine bed to sleep in! Do you think those people are going to give up their fine beds and their fine houses and cars for /{you}/? And if they don't give it up, where will it come from? How many beds and cars are there? Are there enough for all of us? In this world, Yasmin, there just isn't enough. That means that there are going to be losers and winners, just like in any game, and you get to decide if you want to be a winner or a loser."
+
+Yasmin mumbled something under her breath.
+
+"What?" Mala shouted at her. "What are you saying, girl? Speak up so I can hear you!"
+
+"I don't think it's like that. I think we can be kind to other people and that they will be kind to us. I think that we can stick together, like a team, like the army, and we can all work together to make the world a better place."
+
+Mala laughed, but it sounded forced, and Yasmin thought she saw tears starting in her friend's eyes. "You know what happens when you act like that, Yasmin? They find a way to destroy you. To force you to become an animal. Because /{they're}/ animals. They want to win, and if you offer them your hand, they'll slice off your fingers. You have to be an animal to survive."
+
+Yasmin shook her head, negating everything. "It's not true, Mala! Our neighbors here, they're not animals. They're people. They're good people. We have nothing and yet we all cooperate. We help each other --"
+
+"Oh fine, maybe you can make a little group of friends here, people who would have to look you in the eye if they did you a dirty trick. But it's a big world. Do you think that Big Sister Nor's friends in Singapore, in China, in America, in Russia -- do you think /{they'll}/ think twice before they destroy you? In Africa, in --" She waved her arm, taking in all the countries she didn't know the names of, filled with teeming masses of predatory workers, ready to take their jobs from them. "Listen: do you really care so much for Chinese and Russians and all those other people? Will you take bread out of your mouth to give it to them? For a bunch of /{foreigners}/ who wouldn't spit on you if you were on fire?"
+
+Yasmin thought she knew her friend, but this was like nothing she'd ever heard from Mala before. Where had all this Indian patriotism come from? "Mala, it's foreigners who own all the games we're playing. Who cares if they're foreigners? Isn't the fact that they're people enough? Didn't you used to rage about the stupid caste system and say that everyone deserved equality?"
+
+"Deserved!" Mala spat the word out like a curse. "Who cares what you deserve, if you don't get it. Fill your belly with deserve. Sleep on a bed of deserve. See what you get from deserve!"
+
+"So your army is about taking whatever they can get, even if it hurts someone else?"
+
+Mala stood up very straight. "That's right, it's /{my}/ army, Yasmin. My army! And you're not a part of it anymore. Don't bother coming around again, because, because --"
+
+"Because I'm not your friend or your lieutenant anymore," Yasmin said. "I understand, General Mala Robotwallah. But your army won't last forever and our sisterhood might have, if you'd only valued it more. I'm sorry you are making this decision, General Robotwallah, but it's yours to make. Your karma." She set down the water-can and turned on her heel and started away, back stiff, waiting for Mala to jump on her back and wrestle her into the mud, waiting for her to run up and hug her and beg her for forgiveness. She got to the next corner, a narrow laneway between more plastic recycling factories, and contrived to look back over her shoulder as she turned, pretending to be dodging to avoid a pair of goats being led by an old Tamil man.
+
+Mala was standing tall as a soldier, eyes burning into her, and they transfixed her for a moment, froze her in her tracks, so that she really /{did}/ have to dodge around the goats. When she looked back again, the General had departed, her skinny arms straining with her water-cans.
+
+Big Sister Nor told her to be understanding.
+
+"She's still your friend," the woman said, her voice emanating from the gigantic robot that stood guard over a group of Webbly gold-farmers who were methodically raiding an old armory, clearing out the zombies and picking up the cash and weapon-drops that appeared every time they ran the dungeon. "She may not know it, but she's on the side of workers. The other side -- the boss's side -- they'll use her services, but they'll never let her into their camp. The best she can hope for is to be a cherished pet, a valuable bit of hired muscle. I don't think she'll stay put for that, do you?"
+
+But it wasn't much comfort. In one morning, Yasmin had lost her best friend and her occupation. She started going to school again, but she'd fallen behind in the work in the six months she'd been away and now the master wanted her to stay back a year and sit with the grade four students, which was embarrassing. She'd always been a good student and it galled her to sit with the younger kids -- and to make things worse, she was tall for her age and towered over them. Gradually, she stopped attending the school.
+
+Her parents were outraged, of course. But they'd been outraged when Yasmin had joined the army, too, and her father had beaten her for ten days running, while she refused to cry, refused to have her will broken. In the end, they'd been won over by her stubbornness. And, of course, by the money she brought home.
+
+Yasmin could handle her parents.
+
+Mrs Dibyendu's Internet Cafe was a sad place now that the Army had moved on. Mala had forced that on Mr Banerjee, and had counted it as a great show of her strength when she prevailed. But Yasmin thought she never would have won the argument if Mrs Dibyendu hadn't been so eager to get rid of the Army.
+
+Yasmin doubted that Mrs Dibyendu had anticipated the effect that the Army's departure would have on her little shop, though. Once the Army had gone, every kid in Dharavi had moved with them -- no one under the age of 30 would set foot in the cafe. No one except Yasmin, who now sat there all day long, fighting for the workers.
+
+"You are very good at this," Justbob told her. She was Big Sister Nor's lieutenant, and her Hindi was terrible, so they got by in a broken English that each could barely understand. Nevertheless, Justbob's play was aggressive and just this side of reckless, utterly fearless, and she screamed out fearsome battle-cries in Tamil and Chinese when she played, which made Yasmin laugh even as the hairs on her arms stood up. Justbob liked to put Yasmin in charge of strategy while she led the armies of defenders from around the world who played on their side, defending workers from people like Mala.
+
+"Thank you," Yasmin said, and dispatched a squadron to feint at the left flank of a twenty-cruiser unit of rusting battle-cars that bristled with bolted-on machine-guns and grenade launchers. She mostly played Mad Max: Autoduel and Civilization these days, avoiding Zombie Mecha and the other games that Mala and her Army ruled in. Autoduel was huge now, linked to a reality TV show in which crazy white people fought each other in the deserts in Australia with killer cars just like the ones in the game.
+
+The opposing army bought the feint, turning in a wide arc to present their forward guns to her zippy little motorcycle scouts who must have looked like easy pickings -- the fast dirt-bikes couldn't support any real arms or armor, so each driver was limited to hand-weapons, mostly Uzis on full auto, spraying steel-jacketed rounds toward the heavily armored snouts of the enemy, who returned withering fire with tripod-mounted machine-guns and grenades.
+
+But as they turned, they rolled into a double-row of mines Yasmin had laid by stealth at the start of the battle, and then, as the cars rocked and slammed into each other and spun out of control, Justbob's dragoons swept in from the left, and their splendid battle-wagon came in from the right -- a lumbering two-storey RV plated with triple-thick armor, pierced with gun-slits for a battery of flame-throwers and automatic ballistic weapons, mostly firing depleted uranium rounds that cut through the enemy cars like butter. It wasn't hard to outrun the battle-wagon, but there was nowhere for the enemy to go, and a few minutes later, all that was left of the enemy were oily petrol fires and horribly mutilated bodies.
+
+Yasmin zoomed out and booted her command-trike around a dune to where the work-party continued to labor, doing their job, excavating a buried city full of feral mutants and harvesting its rich ammo-dumps and art-treasures for the tenth time that day. Yasmin couldn't really talk to them -- they were from somewhere in China called Fujian, and besides, they were busy. They'd left their boss and formed a worker's co-op that split the earnings evenly, but they'd had to go heavily into debt to buy the computers to do it, and from what Yasmin understood, their families could be hurt or even killed if they missed a payment, since they'd had to borrow the money from gangsters.
+
+It would have been nice if they'd had access to a better source of money, but it certainly wouldn't be Yasmin. Her Army money had run out a few weeks after she'd left Mala, and though the IWWWW paid her a little money to guard union shops, it didn't come to much, especially compared to the money Mr Banerjee had to throw around.
+
+At least she wasn't hurting other poor people to survive. The goons she'd just wiped out would get paid even though they'd lost. And she had to admit it: this was /{fun}/. There was a real thrill in playing the game, playing it well, getting this army of people to follow her lead to cooperate and become an unstoppable weapon.
+
+Then, Justbob was gone. Not even a hastily typed "gtg," she just wasn't on the end of her mic. And there were crashing sounds, shouts in a language Yasmin didn't speak. Distant screaming.
+
+Yasmin flipped over to Minerva, the social networking site that the Webblies favored, as she did a thousand times a day. Minerva had been developed for gamers, and it had all kinds of nice dashboards that showed you what worlds all your friends were in, what kind of battles they were fighting and so on. It was easy to get lost in Minerva, falling into a clicktrance of screencaps of famous battles, trash-talking between guilds, furious arguments about the best way to run a level -- and the endless rounds of gold-farmer bashing. One thing she loved about Minerva was the auto-translate feature, whose database included all kinds of international gamer shorthands and slangs, knowing that Kekekekeke was Korean for LOL and a million other bits of vital dialects. This made Minerva especially useful for the Webblies' global network of guilds, worker co-ops, locals and clans.
+
+Her dashboard was going /{crazy}/. Webblies from all over the world were tweeting about something happening in China, a big strike from a group of gold-farmers who'd walked out on their boss, and were now picketing outside of their factories. Players from all over the world were rushing to a site in Mushroom Kingdom to blockade some sploit that they'd been mining before they walked out. Yasmin hadn't ever played Mushroom Kingdom and she wouldn't be any use there -- you had to know a lot about a world's weapons and physics and player-types before you could do any damage. But judging from the status ticker zipping past, there were plenty of Webblies available on every shard to fill the gap.
+
+She followed the messages as they went by, watched the rallies and the retreats, the victories and defeats, and waited on tenterhooks for the battle to end when the GMs discovered what they were up to and banned everyones' accounts. That was the secret weapon in all these battles: anyone who snitched to the employees of the companies that ran the worlds could destroy both teams, wiping out their accounts and loot in an instant. No one could afford that -- and no one could afford to fight in battles that were so massive that they caught the eye of the GMs, either.
+
+And yet, here were the Webblies, hundreds of them, all risking their accounts and their livelihoods to beat back goons who were trying to break a strike. Yasmin's blood sang -- this was it, this was what Big Sister Nor was always talking about: Solidarity! An injury to one is an injury to all! We're all on the same team -- and we stay together.
+
+There were videos and pictures streaming from the strike, too -- skinny Chinese boys blinking owlishly in the daylight, on busy streets in a distant land, standing with arms linked in front of glass doorways, chanting slogans in Chinese. Passers-by goggled at them, or pointed, or laughed. Mostly they were girls, older than Yasmin, in their late teens and early twenties, very well-dressed, with fashionable haircuts and short skirts and ironed blouses and shining hair. They stared and some of them talked with the boys, who basked in the attention. Yasmin knew about boys and girls and the way they made each other act -- hadn't she seen and used that knowledge when she was Mala's lieutenant?
+
+And now more and more of the girls were joining the boys -- not exactly joining, but crowding around them, standing in clumps, talking amongst themselves. And there were police coming in too, lots of pictures of the police filling in and Yasmin's heart sank. She could see, with her strategist's eye, how the police positions would work in planning a rush at the strikers, shutting off their escape routes, boxing them in and trapping them when the police swept in.
+
+Now the photos slowed, now the videos stopped. Gloved hands reached up and snatched away cameras, covering lenses. The last audiofeed was shouts, angry, scared, hurt --
+
+And now the ticker at the bottom of her screen was going even crazier, messages from the pickets in China about the police rush, and there was a moment of unreality as Yasmin felt that she was reading about an in-game battle again, set in some gameworld modelled on industrial China, a place that seemed as foreign to her as Zombie Mecha or Mad Max. But these were real people, skirmishing with real police, being clubbed with real truncheons. Yasmin's imagination supplied images of people screaming, writhing, trampling each other with all the vividness of one of her games. It was a familiar scene, but instead of zombies, it was young, pale Chinese boys and beautiful, fashionable Chinese girls caught in the crush, falling beneath the truncheons.
+
+And then the messages died away, as everyone on the scene fell silent. The ticker still crawled with other Webblies around the world, someone saying that the Chinese police could shut down all the mobile devices in a city or a local area if they wanted. So maybe the people were still there, still recording and writing it down. Maybe they hadn't all been arrested and taken away.
+
+Yasmin buried her face in her hands and breathed heavily. Mrs Dibyendu shouted something at her, maybe concerned. It was impossible to tell over the song of the blood in her ears and the hammer of the blood in her chest.
+
+Out there, Webblies all over the world were fighting for a better deal for poor people, and what did it matter? How could her solidarity help those people in China? How could they help /{her}/ when she needed it? Where were Big Sister Nor and Justbob and The Mighty Krang now that she needed them?
+
+She stumbled out into the light, blinking, thinking of those skinny Chinese boys and the police in their strategic positions around them. Suddenly, the familiar alleys and lanes of Dharavi felt sinister and claustrophobic, as though people were watching her from every angle, getting ready to attack her. And after all, she was just a girl, a little girl, and not a mighty warrior or a general.
+
+Her treacherous feet had led her down the road, around a corner, behind the yard where the women's baking co-op set out their papadams in the sun, and past the new cafe where Mala and her army fought. They were in there now, the sound of their boisterous play floating out on the air like smoke, like the mouthwatering temptation smells of cooking food.
+
+What were they shouting about? Some battle they'd fought -- a battle in Mushroom Kingdom. A battle against the Webblies. Of course. They were the best. Who else would you hire to fight the armies of the Webblies? She felt a sick lurch in her gut, a feeling of the earth dropping away from beneath her feet. She was alone now, truly alone, the enemy of her former friends. There was no one on her side except for some distant people in a distant land whom she'd never met -- whom she'd probably never meet.
+
+Dispirited, she turned away and headed for home. Her father was away for a few days, travelling to Pune to install a floor for work. He worked in an adhesive tile plant where they printed out fake stone designs on adhesive-backed squares of durable vinyl that could be easily laid in the office towers of Pune's industrial parks. There were always tiles around their home, and Yasmin had never paid them much attention until she started to game with Mala, and then she'd noticed with a shock one day that the strange, angular blurring around the edges of the fine "marble" veins in the tiles were the same compression smears you got when the game's graphics started to choke, "JPEG artifacts," they called them in the message boards. It was as though the little imperfections that make the games slightly unreal were creeping into the real world.
+
+That feeling was with her now as she ghosted away from the cafe, but she was brought back to reality by a tap on her shoulder. She whirled around, startled, feeling, for some reason, like she was about to be punched.
+
+But it was Sushant, the tallest boy in Mala's army, who had never blustered and fought like the other boys, but had stared intently at his screen as though he wished he could escape into it. Yasmin found herself staring straight down his eyes, and he waggled his chin apologetically and smiled shyly at her.
+
+"I thought I saw you passing by," he said. "And I thought --" He dropped his eyes.
+
+"You thought what?" she said. It came out harshly, an anger she hadn't known she'd been feeling.
+
+"I thought I'd come out and..." He trailed off.
+
+"What? What did you think, Sushant?" Her own chin was wagging from side to side now, and she leaned her face down toward his, noses just barely apart. She could smell his lunch of spinach bahji on his breath.
+
+He shrank back, winced. Yasmin realized that he was terrified. Realized that he had probably risked quite a lot just by coming out to talk to her. Discipline was everything in Mala's army. Hadn't Yasmin been in charge of enforcing discipline?
+
+"I'm sorry," she said, backing away. "It's nice to see you again, Sushant. Have you eaten?" It was a formality, because she knew he had, but it was what one friend said to another in Dharavi, in Mumbai -- maybe in all of India, for all Yasmin knew.
+
+He smiled again, a faltering little shy smile. It was heartbreaking to see. Yasmin realized that she'd never said much to him when she was Mala's lieutenant. He'd never needed cajoling or harsh words to get down to work, so she'd practically ignored him. "I thought I'd come out and say hello because we've all missed you. I hoped that maybe you and Mala could --" Again he faltered, and Yasmin felt her own chin jutting out involuntarily in a stubborn, angry way.
+
+"Mala and I have chosen different roads," she said, making a conscious effort to sound calm. "That's final. Does it go well for her and you?"
+
+He nodded. "We win every battle."
+
+"Congratulations."
+
+"But now -- lately -- I've been thinking --"
+
+She waited for him to say more. The moment stretched. Grownups bumped past them and she realized that they probably thought they were courting, being a boy and a girl together. If news of that got back to her father --
+
+But it didn't matter to her anymore. Her father was off installing JPEG artifacts in an IT park in Pune. She was out of the army and out of friends and out of school. What could anything matter.
+
+"I talk to your friends," he said at last.
+
+"My friends?" She didn't know she had any.
+
+"The Webblies. Your new army. They come to me while I fight, send me private messages. At first I ignored them, but lately I've been on drogue, and I have a lot of time to think. And they sent me pictures -- the people I was hurting. Kids like you and me, all over the world. And it made me think." He paused, licked his lips. "About karma. About hurting people to live. About all the things that they say. I don't think I want to do this forever. Or that I can do it forever."
+
+Yasmin was at a loss for words. Were there really other people, right here in Dharavi, right here in Mala's army, who felt as she did? She'd never imagined such a thing, somehow. But here he was.
+
+"You know that Mala's army pays ten times what you can get with the Webblies, right?"
+
+"For now," he said. "That's the point, right? Chee! If we fight now, we can raise the wages of everyone who works for a living instead of owning things for a living, right?"
+
+"I never thought of the division that way. Owning things for a living, I mean."
+
+His shyness receded. He was clearly enjoying having someone to talk to about this. "It all comes down to owning versus working. Someone has to do the organizing, I guess -- there wouldn't be a Zombie Mecha if someone didn't get a lot of people together, working to make all that code. Someone has to pay the game-masters and do all of that. I understand that part. It makes sense to me. My mother works in Mrs Dotta's fabric-dyeing shop. Someone has to buy the dyes, get the cloth, buy the vats and the tools, arrange to sell it once it's done, otherwise, my mother wouldn't have a job. I always stopped there, thinking, all right, if Mrs Dotta does all that work, and makes a job for my mother, why shouldn't she get paid for it?
+
+"But now I think that there's no reason that Mrs Dotta's job is more important than my mother's job. Mamaji wouldn't have a job without Mrs Dotta's factory, but Mrs Dotta wouldn't have a factory without mamaji's work, right?" He waggled his chin defiantly.
+
+"That's right," Yasmin said. She was nervous about being in public with this boy, but she had to admit that it was exciting to hear this all from him.
+
+"So why should Mrs Dotta have the right to fire my mother, but my mother not have the right to fire Mrs Dotta? If they depend on each other, why should one of them always have the power to demand and the other one always have to ask for favors?"
+
+Yasmin felt his excitement, but she knew that there had to be more to it than this. "Isn't Mrs Dotta taking all the risk? Doesn't she have to find the money to start the factory, and doesn't she lose it if the factory closes?"
+
+"Doesn't mamaji risk losing her job? Doesn't Mamaji risk growing sick from the fumes and the chemicals in the dyes? There's nothing eternal or perfect or natural about it! It's just something we all agreed to -- bosses get to be in charge, instead of just being another kind of worker who contributes a different kind of work!"
+
+"And that's what you think you'll get from the Webblies? An end to bosses?"
+
+He looked down, blushing. "No," he said. "No, I don't think so. I think that it's too much to ask for. But maybe the workers can get a better deal. That's what Big Sister Nor talks about, isn't it? Good pay, good places to work, fairness? Not being fired just because you disagree with the boss?"
+
+/{Or the general}/, Yasmin thought. Aloud, she said, "So you'll leave the army? You want to be a Webbly?"
+
+Now he looked down further. "Yes," he said, at last. "Eventually. It all keeps going around and around in my mind. I don't know if I'm ready yet." He risked a look up at her. "I don't know if I'm as brave as you."
+
+Anger surged through her, hot and irrational. How /{dare}/ he talk about her "bravery"? He was just using that as an excuse to go on getting rich in Mala's army. He understood /{so well}/ what was wrong and what needed to be done. Understood it better than Yasmin! But he didn't want to give up his comfort and friendships. That wasn't cowardice, it was /{greed}/. He was too greedy to give it up.
+
+He must have seen this in her face, because he took a step back and held up his hands. "It's not that I won't do it someday -- but I don't know what good it would do for me to do this today, on my own. What would change if I stopped fighting for Mala's army? She's just one general with one army among hundreds all over the world, and I'm just one fighter in the army. I --" He faltered. "What's the sense in giving up so much if it won't make a difference?"
+
+Yasmin's anger boiled in her, ate at her like acid, but she bit her tongue, because that little voice inside her was saying, "You're mostly angry because you thought you had a comrade, someone who'd keep you company, and it turned out that all he wanted to do was confess to you and have you forgive him. And it was true. She was far more upset by her loneliness than by his cowardice, or greed, or whatever it was.
+
+"I. Need. To. Go. Now," she said, biting on the words, keeping the anger out of her voice by sheer force of will.
+
+She didn't wait for him to raise his eyes, just turned on her heel and walked and walked and walked, through the familiar alleys of Dharavi, not going anywhere but trying to escape anyway, like a chained animal pacing off its patch. She was chained -- chained by birth and by circumstance. Her family might have been rich. They might have been high-caste. She might be in another country -- in America, in China, in Singapore, all the distant lands. But she was here, and she had no control over that. There was a whole world out there and this was where fate had put her.
+
+She wouldn't be changing the world. She wouldn't be going to any of those places. She hadn't even left Dharavi, except once with her mother, when she took Yasmin and her brothers on a train to see a beach where it had been hot and sandy and the water had been too dangerous to swim in, so they'd stood on the shore and then walked down a road of smart shops where they couldn't afford to shop, and then they'd waited for the bus again and gone home. Yasmin had seen the multiverses of the games, but she hadn't even seen Mumbai.
+
+Now where? She was tired and hungry, angry and exhausted. Home? It was still afternoon, so her mother and brothers were all out working or in school. That emptiness... It scared her. She wasn't used to being alone. It wasn't a natural state in Dharavi. She was very thirsty, the wind was blowing plastic smoke into her eyes and face, making her nostrils and sinuses and throat raw. Mrs Dibyendu's cafe would have chai, and Mrs Dibyendu would give her a cup of it and some computer time on credit, because Mrs Dibyendu was desperate to save her cafe from bankruptcy now that the army had abandoned it.
+
+Mrs Dibyendu's idiot nephew doled her out a cup of chai grudgingly. He hadn't learned a thing from the savage beating that Mala had laid on him. He still stood too close, still went out Eve teasing with his gang of badmashes. Yasmin knew that he would have loved to take revenge on Mala, and that Mala never went out after dark without three or four of the biggest boys from the army. It made her furious. No matter how much Mala had hurt her, she had the right to go around her home without fearing this idiot. His upper lip was curled in a permanent sneer, thanks to the scar Mala's feet had left behind.
+
+She sat down to a computer, logged in. She was sure that the idiot nephew used all kinds of badware to spy on what they did on the computers, but she'd bought a login fob from one of the shops at the edge of Dharavi, and it did magic, logging her in with a different password every time she sat down, so that her PayPal and game accounts were all safe.
+
+Mindlessly, she plunged back into her usual routine. Login to Minerva, check for Webbly protection missions in the worlds she played. But there were no missions waiting. The Webbly feeds were all afire with chatter about the strike in Shenzhen, rumors of the numbers arrested, rumors of shootings. She watched it tick past helplessly, wondering where all these rumors came from. Everyone seemed to know something that she didn't know. How did they know?
+
+A direct message popped up on her screen. It was from a stranger, but it was someone in the inner Webbly affinity group, which meant that Big Sister Nor, The Mighty Krang, or Justbob had manually approved her. Anyone could join the outer Webblies, but there were very few inner Webblies.
+
+&gt; Hello, can you read this?
+
+It was a full sentence, with punctuation, and the question was as daft as you could imagine. It was the kind of message her father might send. She knew immediately that she was communicating with an adult, and one who didn't game.
+
+&gt; yes
+
+&gt; Our mutual friend B.S.N. has asked me to contact you. You are in Mumbai, correct?
+
+She had a moment's hesitation. This was a very grownup, very non-gamer way to type. Maybe this was someone working for the other side? But Mumbai was as huge as the world. "In Mumbai" was only slightly more specific than "In India" or "On Earth."
+
+&gt; yes
+
+&gt; Where are you? Can I come and get you? I must talk with you.
+
+&gt; talking now lol
+
+&gt; What? Oh, I see. No, I must TALK with you. This is official business. B.S.N. specifically said I must make contact with you.
+
+She swallowed a couple times, drained the dregs of her chai.
+
+&gt; ok
+
+&gt; Splendid. Where shall I come and get you from?
+
+She swallowed again. When they'd gone to the beach, her mother had been very clear on this: /{Don't tell anyone you are from Dharavi. For Mumbaikars, Dharavi is like Hell, the place of eternal torment, and those who dwell here are monsters.}/ This grown up sounded very proper indeed. Perhaps he would think that Dharavi was Hell and would leave her be.
+
+&gt; dharavi girl
+
+&gt; One moment.
+
+There was a long pause. She wondered if he was trying to get in touch with Big Sister Nor, to tell her that her warrior was a slum-child, to find someone better to help.
+
+&gt; You know this place?
+
+It was a picture of the Dharavi Mosque, tall and imposing, looming over the whole Muslim quarter.
+
+&gt; course!!
+
+&gt; I'll be there in about an hour. This is me.
+
+Another picture. It wasn't the middle-aged man in a suit she'd been expecting, but a young man, barely older than a teenager, short gelled hair and a leather jacket, stylish blue-jeans and black motorcycle boots.
+
+&gt; Can you give me your phone number? I will call you when I'm close.
+
+&gt; lol
+
+&gt; I'm sorry?
+
+&gt; dharavi girl -- no phone for me
+
+She'd had a phone, when she was in Mala's army. They all had phones. But it was the first thing to go when she quit the army. She still had it in a drawer, couldn't bear to sell it, but it didn't work as a phone anymore, though she sometimes used it as a calculator (all the games had turned themselves off right after the service was disconnected, to her disappointment).
+
+&gt; Sorry, sorry. Of course. Meet you there in about an hour then.
+
+Her heart thudded in her chest. Meeting a strange man, going on a secret errand -- it was the sort of thing that always ended in terrible tragedy, defilement and murder, in the stories. And an hour from now would be --
+
+&gt; cant meet at the mosque
+
+It would be right in the middle of 'Asr, afternoon prayers, and the Mosque would be mobbed by her father's friends. All it would take would be for one of them to see her with a strange man, with gelled hair, a Hindu judging from the rakhi on his wrist, poking free of the leather jacket. Her father would go /{insane}/.
+
+&gt; meet me at mahim junction station instead by the crash barriers
+
+It would take her an hour to walk there, but it would be safe.
+
+There was a pause. Then another picture: two boys straddling one of the huge cement barriers in front of the station. It was where she and her brothers had waited while their mother queued up for the tickets.
+
+&gt; Here?
+
+&gt; yes
+
+&gt; OK then. I'll be on a Tata 620 scooter.
+
+Another picture of a lovingly polished little bike, a proud purple gas-tank on its skeletal chromed frame. There were thousands of these in Dharavi, driven by would-be badmashes who'd saved up a little money for a pair of wheels.
+
+&gt; ill be there
+
+She handed her cup to idiot nephew, not even seeing the grimace on his face as she dashed past him, out into the roadway, back home to change and put some few things in a bag before her mother or brothers came home. She didn't know where she was going or how long she'd be away, and the last thing she wanted was to have to explain this to her mother. She would leave a note, one of her brothers would read it to her mother. She'd just say, "Away on union business. Back soon. Love you." And that would have to be enough -- because, after all, it was all she knew.
+
+On the long walk to Mahim Junction station, she alternated between nervous excitement and nervous dread. This was foolish, to be sure, but it was also all she had left. If Big Sister Nor vouched for this man -- chee! she didn't even know his name! -- then who was Yasmin to doubt him?
+
+As she got closer to the edge of Dharavi, the laneways widened to streets, wide enough for skinny, shoeless boys to play ditch-cricket in. They shouted things at her, "offending decency," as the schoolteacher, Mr Hossain, had always said when the badmashes gathered outside the school to call things to the girls as they left the classroom. But she knew how to ignore them, and besides, she had picked up her brother Abdur's lathi, using it as a walking stick, having tied a spare hijab underscarf to the top to make it seem more innocuous. They'd played gymnastics games in the schoolyard with sticks like lathis, but without the iron binding on the tip. Still, she felt sure she could swing it fearsomely enough to scare off any badmash who got in her way on this fateful day. It was only at the station that she realized she had no idea how they would carry it on the little scooter.
+
+She'd brought her phone along, just to tell the time with, and now an hour had gone by and there was no sign of the man with the short gelled hair. Another twenty minutes ticked past. She was used to this: nothing in Dharavi ran on precise time except for the calls to prayer from the mosque, the rooster crows in the morning, and the calls to muster in Mala's army, which were always precisely timed, with fierce discipline for stragglers who showed up late for battle.
+
+Trains came in and trains came out. She saw some men she recognized: friends of her father who worked in Mumbai proper, who would have recognized her if she hadn't been wearing her hijab pulled up to her nose and pinned there. She was acutely aware of the Hindu boys' stare. Hindus and Muslims didn't get along, officially. Unofficially, of course, she knew as many Hindus as Muslims in Dharavi, in the army, in school. But on the impersonal, grand scale, she was always /{other}/. They were "Mumbaikars" -- "real" people from Mumbai. Her parents insisted on calling the city "Bombay," the old name of the city from before the fierce Hindu nationalists had changed it, proclaiming that India was for Hindus and Hindus alone. She and her people could go back to Bangladesh, to Pakistan, to one of the Muslim strongholds where they were in the majority, and leave India to the real Indians.
+
+Mostly, it didn't touch her, because mostly, she only met people who knew her and whom she knew -- or people who were entirely virtual and who cared more about whether she was an Orc or a Fire Elf than if she was a Muslim. But here, on the edge of the known world, she was a girl in a hijab, an eye-slit and a long, modest dress and a stout stick, and they were all /{staring}/ at her.
+
+She kept herself amused by thinking about how she would attack or defend the station using a variety of games' weapons-systems. If they were all zombies, she'd array the mechas here, here and here, using the railway bed as a channel to lure combatants into flamethrower range. If they were fighting on motorcycles, she'd circle that way with her cars, this way with her motorcycles, and pull the death-lorry in there. It brought a smile to her face, safely hidden behind the hijab.
+
+And here was the man, pulling into the lot on his green motorcycle, wiping the road dust off his glasses with his shirt-tail before tucking it back into his jacket. He looked around nervously at the people outside the station -- working people streaming back and forth, badmashes and beggars loitering and sauntering and getting in everyone's way. Several beggars were headed toward him now, children with their hands outstretched, some of them carrying smaller children on their hips. Even over the crowd noises, Yasmin could hear their sad, practiced cries.
+
+She reached under her chin and checked the pin holding her hijab in place, then approached the rider, moving through the beggars as though they weren't there. They shied away from her lathi like flies dodging a raised hand. He was so disconcerted by the beggars that it took him a minute to notice the veiled young girl standing in front of him, clutching a meter-and-a-half long stick bound in iron.
+
+"Yasmin?" His Hindi was like a fillum star's. Up close, he was very handsome, with straight teeth and a neatly trimmed little mustache and a strong nose and chin.
+
+She nodded.
+
+He looked at her lathi. "I have some bungee cables," he said. "I think we can attach that to the side of the bike. And I brought you a helmet."
+
+She nodded again. She didn't know what to say. He moved to the locked carrier-box on the back of his bike, pushing away a little beggar-boy who'd been fingering the lock, and pushed his thumb into the locking mechanism's print-reader. It sprang open and he fished inside, coming up with a helmet that looked like something out of a manga cartoon, streamlined, with intricate designs etched into its surface in hot yellow and pink. On the front of the helmet was a sticker depicting Sai Baba, the saint that both Muslims and Hindus agreed upon. Yasmin thought this was a good omen -- even if he was a Hindu boy, he'd brought her a helmet that she could wear without defiling Islam.
+
+She took the manga Sai Baba helmet from him, noting that the sticker was holographic and that Sai Baba turned to look her straight in the eye as she hefted it. It was heavier than it looked, with thick padding inside. No one in Dharavi wore crash-helmets on motorcycles -- and the boy wasn't wearing one, either. But as she contemplated the narrow saddle, she thought about falling off at 70 kilometers per hour on some Mumbai road and decided that she was glad he'd brought it. So she nodded a third time and lifted it over her head. It went on slowly, her head pushing its way in like a hand caught in a tangled sleeve, pushing to displace the fabric, which slowly gave way. Then she was inside it, and the sounds around her were dead and distant, the sights all tinted yellow through the one-way mirrored eye-visor. She felt tentatively at her head -- which felt like it would loll forward under the helmet's weight if she turned her face too quickly -- and found the visor's catch and lifted it up. The sound got a little brighter and sharper.
+
+Meanwhile, the boy had been affixing the lathi along the bike's length, to the amusement of the beggar children, who offered laughing advice and mockery. He had a handful of bungee cords that he'd extracted from the bike's box, and he wrapped them again and again around the pole, finding places on the bike's skeletal chrome to fix the hooks, testing the handlebars to ensure that he could still steer. At last he grunted, stood, dusted his hands off on his jeans and turned to her.
+
+"Ready?"
+
+She drew in a deep breath, spoke at last. "Where are we going?"
+
+"Andheri," he said. "Near the film studios."
+
+She nodded as though she knew where that was. In a way, of course, she did: there were plenty of movies about, well, the golden age of making movies, when Andheri had been /{the}/ place to be, glamorous and bustling. But most of those movies had been about how Andheri's sun had set, with all the big filmi production places moving away. What would it be like today?
+
+"And when will we come back?"
+
+He waggled his chin, thinking. "Tonight, certainly. I'll make sure of that. And some union people can come back with us and make sure you get to your door safely. I've thought of everything."
+
+"And what is your name?"
+
+He stared at her for a moment, his jaw hanging open in surprise. "OK, I didn't think of everything! I'm Ashok. Do you know how to ride a scooter?"
+
+She shook her head. She'd seen plenty of people riding on motorcycles and scooters, in twos and even in threes and fours -- sometimes a whole family, with children on mothers' laps on the back -- but she'd never gotten on one. Standing next to it now, it seemed insubstantial and well, /{slippery}/, the kind of thing that was easier to fall off of than to stay on.
+
+"OK," he said, waggling his chin, considering her clothing. "It's harder with the dress," he said. "You'll have to sit side-saddle." He climbed up on the bike's saddle and demonstrated, keeping his knees together and pressed against the bike's side, twisting his body around. "You'll have to hold onto me very tight." He grinned his movie-star grin.
+
+Yasmin realized what a mistake this had all been. This strange man. His motorcycle. Going off to Mumbai, away from Dharavi, to a strange place, for a strange reason. And he had her lathi, which wasn't even hers, and if she turned on her heel and went back into Dharavi, she'd still have to explain the missing lathi to her brother, and the note to her mother. And now she was going to get killed in Mumbai traffic with a total stranger on the way to Bollywood's favorite ghost-town.
+
+But as hopeless as it was, it wasn't as hopeless as being alone, not in the army, not in school, not in the Webblies. Not as hopeless as being poor Yasmin, the Dharavi girl, born in Dharavi, bred in Dharavi.
+
+She levered herself sidesaddle onto the bike and Ashok climbed over the saddle and sat down, his leather jacket pressed up against her side. She tried to square her hips to face forward, and found herself in such a precarious position that she nearly tipped over backwards.
+
+"You have to hold on," Ashok said, and the beggar children jeered and made rude gestures. Shutting her eyes, she put her arms around his waist, feeling how skinny he was under that fancy jacket, and interlaced her fingers around his stomach. It was less precarious now, but she still felt as though she would fall at any second -- and they weren't even moving yet!
+
+Ashok kicked back the bike's stand and revved the engine. A cloud of biodiesel exhaust escaped from the tailpipe, smelling like old cooking oil -- it probably started out as old cooking oil, of course -- spicy and stale. Yasmin's stomach gurgled and she blushed beneath her hijab, sure he could feel the churning of her empty stomach. But he just turned his head and said, "Ready?"
+
+"Yes," she said, but her voice came out in a squeak.
+
+They barely made it fifty meters before she shouted "Stop! Stop!" in his ear. She had never been more afraid in all her life. She forced her fingers to unlace themselves and drew her trembling hands back into her lap.
+
+"What's wrong?"
+
+"I don't want to die!" she shouted. "I don't want to die on your maniac bike in this maniac traffic!"
+
+He waggled his chin. "It's the dress," he said. "If you could only straddle the seat."
+
+Yasmin patted her thighs miserably, then she hiked up her dress, revealing the salwar -- loose trousers -- she wore beneath it. Ashok nodded. "That'll do," he said. "But you need to tie up the legs, so they don't get caught in the wheel. He flipped open his cargo box again and passed her two plastic zip-strips which she used to tie up each ankle.
+
+"Right, off we go," he said, and she straddled the bike, putting her arms around his waist again. He smelled of his hair gel and of leather, and of sweat from the road. She felt like she'd gone to another planet now, even though she could still see Mahim Junction behind her. She squeezed his waist for dear life as he revved the engine and maneuvered the bike back into traffic.
+
+She realized that he'd been taking it easy for her sake before, driving relatively slowly and evenly in deference to her precarious position. Now that she was more secure, he drove like the baddest badmash she'd ever seen in any action film. He gunned the little bike up the edge of the ditch, beside the jerky, slow traffic, always on the brink of tipping into the stinking ditch, being killed by a swerving driver or a door opening suddenly so the driver could spit out a stream of betel; or running over one of the beggars who lined the road's edge, tapping on the windows and making sad faces at the trapped motorists.
+
+She'd piloted a million virtual vehicles in her career as a gamer, at high speeds, through dangerous terrain. It wasn't remotely the same, even with the helmet's reality-filtering padding and visor. She could hear her own whimpering in her head. Every nerve in her body was screaming /{Get off this thing while you can}/! But her rational mind kept on insisting that this boy clearly rode his bike through Mumbai every day and managed to survive.
+
+And besides, there was so much Mumbai to see as they sped down the road, and that was much more interesting than worrying about imminent death. As they sped down the causeway, they neared a huge suspension bridge, eight lanes wide, all white concrete and steel cables, proudly proclaimed to be the Bandra-Worli Sea Link by an intricate sign in Hindi and English. They sped up the ramp to it, riding close to the steel girders that lined the bridge's edge, and beneath them, the sea sparkled blue and seemed so close that she could reach down and skim her fingertips in the waves. The air smelled of salt and the sea, the choking traffic fumes whipped away by a wind that ruffled her dress and trousers, pasting them to her body. Her fear ebbed away as they crossed the bridge, and did not come back as they rolled off of it, back into Mumbai, back into the streets all choked with traffic and people. They swerved around saddhus, naked holy men covered in paint. They swerved around dabbahwallahs, men who delivered home-cooked lunches from wives to husbands all over the city, in tiffin pails arranged in huge wooden frames, balanced upon their heads.
+
+She knew they were almost at Andheri when they passed the gigantic Infinity Mall, and then turned alongside a high, ancient brick wall that ran for hundreds of meters, fencing in a huge estate that had to be one of the film studios. Outside the wall, along the drainage ditch, was a bustling market of hawkers, open-air restaurants, beggars, craftsmen, and, among them, film-makers in smart suits with dark glasses, clutching mobile phones as they picked their way along. The bike swerved through all this, avoiding a long line of expensive, spotless dark cars that ran the length of the wall in an endless queue to pass through the security checkpoint at the gatehouse.
+
+She took all this in as they sped down the length of the wall, cornering sharply at the end, following it along to a much narrower gate. Two guards with rifles attached to their belts by chains stood before it, and they hefted their guns as Ashok drew nearer. Then he drew closer still and the guards recognized him and stepped away, revealing the narrow gap in the wall that was barely wide enough for the bike to pass through, though Ashok took it at speed, and Yasmin gasped when her billowing sleeves rasped against the ancient, pitted brick.
+
+Passing through the gate was like passing into another world. Before them, the studios spread forever, the farthest edge lost in the pollution haze. Roads and pathways mazed the grounds, detouring around the biggest buildings Yasmin had ever seen, huge buildings that looked like train stations or airplane hangars from war films. The grounds were all manicured grass, orderly fruit trees, and workmen going back and forth on mysterious errands with toolbelts jangling around their waists, carrying huge bundles of pipe and lumber and cloth.
+
+Ashok drove them past the hangars -- those must be the sound-stages where they shot the movies, there was a good studio-map in Zombie Mecha where you could fight zombies through a series of wood-backed film scenery -- and toward a series of low-slung trailers that hugged the wall to their left. Each one had a miniature fence in front of it, and a small flower-garden, so neat and tidy that at first she thought the flowers must be fake.
+
+Finally, Ashok slowed the bike and then coasted to a stop, killing the engine. The engine noise still hummed in her ears, though, and she continued to feel the thrum of the bike in her legs and bum. She unlocked her hands from around Ashok's waist, prying her fingers apart, and stepped off the bike, catching her toe on the lathi and falling to the grass. Blushing, she got to her feet, unsteady but upright.
+
+Ashok grinned at her. "You all right there, sister?"
+
+She wanted to say something sharp and cutting in response, but nothing came. The words had been beaten out of her by the ride. Suddenly, she felt as though she could hardly breathe, and the fabric of her hijab seemed filled with road dust that it released into her nose and mouth with every inhalation. She carefully undid the pin and moved her hijab so that it no longer covered her face.
+
+Ashok stared at her in horror. "You -- you're just a little girl!"
+
+She bridled and the words came to her again. "I am /{14}/ -- there were girls my age with husbands and babies in Dharavi! I'm a skilled fighter and commander. I'm no little girl!"
+
+He blushed a purple color and clasped his hands at his chest apologetically. "Forgive me," he said. "But -- Well, I assumed you were 18 or 19. You're tall. I've brought you all this way and you're, well, you're a child! Your parents will be mad with worry!"
+
+She gave him her best steely glare, the one she used to make the boys in the Army behave when they were getting too, well, /{boyish}/. "I left them a note. And I'll be back tonight. And I'm old enough to worry about this sort of thing on my own account, thank you very much. Now, you've dragged me halfway across India for some mysterious purpose, and I'm sure that it wasn't just to have me stand around here talking about my family life."
+
+He recovered himself and grinned again. "Sorry, sorry. Right, we're here for a meeting. It's important. The Webblies have never had much contact with real unions, but now that Nor is in trouble, she's asked me to take up her cause with the unions here. There's meetings like this happening all over the world today -- in China and Indonesia, in Pakistan and Mexico and Guatemala. The people waiting for us inside -- they're labor leaders, representatives of the garment-workers' union, the steelworkers' union, even the Transport and Dock Workers' union -- the biggest unions in Mumbai. With their support, the Webblies can have access to money, warm bodies for picket lines, influence and power. But they don't know anything about what you do -- they've never played a game. They think that the Internet is for email and pornography. So you're here -- /{we're}/ here -- to explain this to them."
+
+She swallowed a few times. There was so much in all that she didn't understand -- and what she /{did}/ understand, she wasn't very happy about. For example, this /{real}/ union business -- the Webblies were a real union! But there was more pressing business than her irritation, for example: "What do you mean /{we're here to explain}/? Are you a gamer?"
+
+He shook his head ruefully. "Haven't got the patience for it. I'm an economist. Labor economist. I've spent a lot of time with BSN, working out strategy with her."
+
+She wasn't exactly certain what an economist was, but she also felt that admitting this might further undermine her credibility with this man who had called her a child. "I need my lathi," she said.
+
+"You don't need a lathi in this meeting," he said. "No one will attack us."
+
+"Someone will steal it," she said.
+
+"This isn't Dharavi," he said. "No one will steal it."
+
+That did it. She could talk about the problems in Dharavi. /{She}/ was a Dharavi girl. But this stranger had no business saying bad things about her home. "I need my lathi in case I have to beat your brains out with it for rubbishing my home," she said, between gritted teeth.
+
+"Sorry, sorry." He squatted down beside the bike and began to unravel the bungee cords from around the lathi. She also went down on one knee and began to worry at the zipstraps that tied up her trouser legs at the ankles, but they only went in one direction, and once they'd locked tight, they wouldn't loosen. Ashok looked up from the bungee cords.
+
+"You need to cut them off," he said. "Here, one moment." He fished in his trouser-pocket and came up with a wicked flick-knife that he snapped open. He took gentle hold of the strap on her right ankle and slid the blade between it and her leg. She held her breath as he sliced through the strap, then flicked the knife closed, turned to her other leg, and, grasping her ankle, cut away the other strap. He looked up at her. Their eyes met, then she looked away.
+
+"Be careful," she said, though he'd finished. He handed her the lathi. She gripped it with numb fingers, nearly dropped it, gripped it.
+
+"OK," he said. "OK." He shook his head. "The people in there don't know anything about you or what you do. They are a little, you know, old fashioned." He smiled and seemed to be remembering something. "Very old fashioned, in some cases. And they're not very good with children. Young people, I mean." He held up his hands as she raised her lathi. "I only mean to warn you." He considered her. "Maybe you could cover your face again?"
+
+Yasmin considered this for a moment. Of course, she didn't want to cover her face. She wanted to just go in as herself. Why shouldn't she be able to? But wearing the hijab had some advantages, and one was that no one would ask you why you were covering your face. Ashok had clearly believed she was much older until she'd undraped it.
+
+Wordlessly, she unpinned the fabric, brought it across her face, and repinned it. He gave her a happy thumbs up and said, "All right! They're good people, you know. Very good people. They want to be on our side." He swallowed, thought some, rocked his chin from side to side. "But perhaps they don't know that yet."
+
+He marched to the door, which was made of heavy metal screen over glass, and opened it, then gestured inside with a grand sweep of his arm. Trying to look as dignified as possible, she stepped into the gloom of the trailer, where it was cool and smelled of betel and chai and bleach, and where a lazy ceiling fan beat the air, trailing long snot-trails of dust.
+
+This was what she noticed first, and not the people sitting around the room on sofas and easy-chairs. Those people were sunk deep into their chairs and sitting silently, their eyes lost in shadow. But after a moment, they began to shift minutely, staring at her. Ashok entered behind her and said, "Hello! Hello! I'm glad you could all make it!"
+
+And then they stood, and they were all much older than her, much older than Ashok. The youngest was her mother's age, and he was fat and sleek and had great jowls and short hair in a fringe around his ears. There were three others, another man in kurta pyjamas with a Muslim skull cap and two very old women in sarees that showed the wrinkled skin on their bellies.
+
+Ashok introduced them around, Mr Phadkar of the steelworkers' union, Mr Honnenahalli of the transport and dock workers' union, and Mrs Rukmini and Mrs Muthappa, both from the garment workers' union. "These good people are interested in Big Sister Nor's work and so she asked me to bring you round to talk to them. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Yasmin, a trusted activist within the IWWWW organization. She is here to answer your questions."
+
+They all greeted her politely, but their smiles never reached their eyes. Ashok busied himself in a corner where there was a chai pot and cups, pouring out masala chai for everyone and bringing it around on a tray. "I will be your chaiwallah," he said. "You just all talk."
+
+Yasmin's throat was terribly dry, but she was veiled, and so she passed on the chai, but quickly regretted it as the talk began.
+
+"I understand that your 'work' is just playing games, is that right?" said Mr Honnenahalli, the fat man who worked with the Transport and Dock Workers' union.
+
+"We work in the games, yes," Yasmin said.
+
+"And so you organize people who play games. How are they workers? They sound like players to me. In the transport trade, we work."
+
+Yasmin rocked her chin from side to side and was glad of her veil. She remembered her talk with Sushant. "We work the way anyone works, I suppose. We have a boss who asks us to do work, and he gets rich from our work."
+
+That made the two old aunties smile, and though it was dark in the room, she thought it was a genuine one.
+
+"Sister," said Mr Phadkar, he in the skullcap, "tell us about these games. How are they played?"
+
+So she told them, starting with Zombie Mecha, aided by the fact that Mr Phadkar had actually seen one of the many films based on the game. But as she delved into character classes, leveling up, unlocking achievements, and so on, she saw that she was losing them.
+
+"It all sounds very complicated," Mr Honnenahalli said, after she had spoken for a good thirty minutes, and her throat was so dry it felt like she had eaten a mouthful of sand and salt. "Who plays these games? Who has time?"
+
+This was something she often heard from her father, and so she told Mr Honnenahalli what she always told him. "Millions of people, rich and poor, men and women, boys and girls, all over the world. They spend crores and crores of rupees, and thousands of hours. It's a game, yes, but it's also as complicated as life in some ways."
+
+Mr Honnenahalli twisted his face up into a sour lemon expression. "People in life /{make}/ things that matter. They don't just --" He flapped a hand, miming some kind of pointless labor. "They don't just press buttons and play make believe."
+
+She felt her cheeks coloring and was glad again of the veil. Ashok held up a hand. "If a humble chai-wallah may intervene here." Mr Honnenahalli gave him a hostile look, but he nodded. "'Pressing buttons and playing make believe' describes several important sectors of the economy, not least the entire financial industry. What is banking, if not pressing buttons and asking everyone to make believe that the outcomes have value?"
+
+The old aunties smiled and Mr Honnenahalli grunted. "You're a clever bugger, Ashok. You can always be clever, but clever doesn't feed people or get them a fair deal from their employers."
+
+Ashok nodded as though this point had never occurred to him, though Yasmin was pretty certain from his smile that he'd expected this, too. "Mr Honnenahalli, there are over 9,000,000 people working in this industry, and it turns over 500 crore rupees every year. It's averaging six percent quarterly growth. And eight of the 20 largest economies in the world are not countries, they're games, issuing their own currency, running their own fiscal policies, and setting their own labor laws."
+
+Mr Honnenahalli scowled, making his jowls wobble, and raised his eyebrows. "They have labor policies in these games?"
+
+"Oh yes," Ashok said. "Their policy is that no one may work in their worlds without their permission, that they have absolute power to set wages, hire and fire, that they can exile you if they don't like you or for any other reason, and that anyone caught violating the rules can be stripped of all virtual property and expelled without access to a trial, a judge, or elected officials."
+
+That got their attention. Yasmin filed away that description. She'd heard Big Sister Nor say similar things, but this was better put than any previous rendition. And there was no denying its effect on the room -- they jolted as if they'd been shocked and all opened their mouths to say something, then closed them.
+
+Finally, one of the aunties said, "Tell me, you say that nine million people work in these places: where? Bangalore? Pune? Kolkata?" These were the old IT cities, where the phone banks and the technology companies were.
+
+Ashok nodded, "Some of them there. Some right here in Mumbai." He looked at Yasmin, clearly waiting for her to say something.
+
+"I work in Dharavi," she said. And did she imagine it, or did their noses all wrinkle up a little, did they all subtly shift their weight away from her, as though to escape the shit-smell of a Dharavi girl?
+
+"She works in Dharavi," Ashok said. "But only a million or two work here in India. The majority are in China, or Indonesia, or Vietnam. Some are in South America, some are in the United States. Wherever there is IT, there are people who work in the games."
+
+Now the auntie sat back. "I see," she said. "Well, that's very interesting, Ashok, but what do we have to do with China? We're not in China."
+
+Yasmin shook her head. "The game isn't in China," she said, as though explaining something to a child. "The game is everywhere. The players are all in the same place."
+
+Mr Phadkar said, "You don't understand, sister. Workers in these places compete with our workers. The big companies go wherever the work is cheapest and most unorganized. Our members lose jobs to these people, because they don't have the self-respect to stand up for a fair wage. We can't compete with the Chinese or the Indonesians or the Vietnamese -- even the beggars here expect better wages than they command!"
+
+Mr Honnenahalli patted his belly and nodded. "We are Indian workers. We represent them. These workers, what happens to them -- it's none of our affair."
+
+Ashok nodded. "Well, that's fine for your unions and your members. But the union that Yasmin works for --"
+
+Mr Honnenahalli snorted, and his jowls shook. "It's not a union," he said. "It's a gang of kids playing games!"
+
+"It's tens of thousands of organized workers in solidarity with one another," Ashok said, mildly, as though he was a teacher correcting a student. "In 14 countries. Look, these players, they're already organized in guilds. That's practically unions already. You worry that union jobs in India might become non-union jobs in Vietnam -- well, here's how you can organize the workers in Vietnam, too! The companies are multinational -- why should labor still stick to borders? What does a border mean, anyway?"
+
+"Plenty, if the border is with Pakistan. People /{die}/ for borders, sonny. You can sit there, with your college education, and talk about how borders don't matter, but all that means is that you're totally out of touch with the average Indian worker. Indian workers want Indian jobs, not jobs for Chinese or what-have-you. Let the Chinese organize the Chinese."
+
+"They /{are}/," Yasmin broke in. "They're striking in China right now! A whole factory walked out, and the police beat them down. And I helped them with their picket line!"
+
+Mr Honnenahalli prepared to bluster some more, but one of the old aunties laid a frail hand on his forearm. "How did you help with a picket-line in China from Dharavi, daughter?"
+
+And so Yasmin told them the story of the battle of Mushroom Kingdom, and the story of the battle of Shenzhen, and what she'd seen and heard.
+
+"Wildcat strikes," Mr Honnenahalli said. "Craziness. No strategy, no organization. Doomed. Those workers may never see the light of day again."
+
+"Not unless their comrades rally to them," Ashok said. "Comrades like Yasmin and her group. You want to see something workers are prepared to fight for? You need to get to an internet cafe and see. See who is out of touch with workers. You can talk all you want about 'Indian workers,' but until you find solidarity with /{all}/ workers, you'll never be able to protect your precious /{Indian workers}/." He was losing his temper now, losing that schoolmasterish cool. "Those workers got bad treatment from their employer so they went out. Their jobs can just be moved -- to Vietnam, to Cambodia, to Dharavi -- and their strike broken. Can't you /{see it}/? /{We finally have the same tools as the bosses}/! For a factory owner, all places are the same, and it's no difference whether the shirts are sewn here or there, so long as they can be loaded onto a shipping container when it's done. But now, for us, all places are the same too! We can go anywhere just by sitting down at a computer. For forty years, things have gotten harder and harder for workers -- now it's time to change that."
+
+Yasmin felt herself grinning beneath the veil. That's it, Ashok, give it to him! But then she saw the faces of the old people in the room: stony and heartless.
+
+"Those are nice words," one of the aunties said. "Honestly. It's a beautiful vision. But my workers don't have computers. They don't go to Internet cafes. They dye clothing all day. When their jobs go abroad, they can't chase them with your computers."
+
+"They can be part of the Webblies too!" Yasmin said. "That's the beauty of it. The ones who work in games, we can go anywhere, organize anywhere, and wherever your workers are, we are too! We can go anywhere, no one can keep us out. We can organize dyers anywhere, through the gamers."
+
+Mr Honnenahalli nodded. "I thought so. And when this is all done, the Webblies organize all the workers in the world, and our unions, what happens to them? They melt away? Or they're absorbed by you? Oh yes, I understand very well. A very neat deal all around. You certainly do play games over there at the Webblies."
+
+Ashok and Yasmin both started to speak at once, then both stopped, then exchanged glances. "It's not like that," Yasmin said. "We're offering to help. We don't want to take over."
+
+Mr Honnenahalli said, "Perhaps you don't, but perhaps someone else does. Can you speak for everyone? You say you've never met this Big Sister Nor of yours, nor her lieutenants, the Mighty Whatever and Justbob."
+
+"I've met them dozens of times," Yasmin said quietly.
+
+"Oh, certainly. In the game. What is the old joke from America? On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. Perhaps these friends of yours are old men or little children. Perhaps they're in the next Internet cafe in Dharavi. The Internet is full of lies and tricks and filth, little sister --" Her back stiffened. It was one thing to be called 'sister,' but 'little sister' wasn't friendly. It was a dismissal. "And who's to say you haven't fallen for one of these tricks?"
+
+Ashok held up a hand. "Perhaps this is all a dream, then. Perhaps you are all figments of my imagination. Why should we believe in anything, if this is the standard all must rise to? I've spoken to Big Sister Nor many times, and to many other members of the IWWWW around the world. You represent two million construction workers -- how many of them have /{you}/ met? How are we to know that /{they}/ are real?"
+
+"This is getting us all nowhere," one of the aunties said. "You were very kind to come and visit with us, Ashok, and you, too, Yasmin. It was very courteous for you to tell us what you were up to. Thank you."
+
+"Wait," Ashok said. "That can't be all! We came here to ask you for help -- for /{solidarity}/. We've just had our first strike, and our executive cell is offline and missing --" Yasmin turned her head at this. What did that mean? "And we need help: a strike fund, administrative support, legal assistance --"
+
+"Out of the question," Mr Honnenahalli said.
+
+"I'm afraid so," said Mr Phadkar. "I'm sorry, brother. Our charter doesn't allow us to intervene with other unions -- especially not the sort of organization you represent."
+
+"It's impossible," said one of the aunties, her mouth tight and sorry. "This just isn't the sort of thing we do."
+
+Ashok went to the kettle and set about making more chai. "Well, I'm sorry to have wasted your time," he said. "I'm sure we'll figure something out."
+
+They all stared at one another, then Mr Honnenahalli stood with a wheeze, picking up an overstuffed briefcase at his feet and leaving the little building. Mr Phadkar followed, smiling softly at the aunties and waving tentatively at Yasmin. She didn't meet his eye. One of the aunties got up and tried to say something to Ashok, but he shrugged her off. She went back to her partner and helped her to her old, uncertain feet. The pair of them squeezed Yasmin's shoulders before departing.
+
+Once the door had banged shut behind them, Ashok turned and hissed /{bainchoad}/ at the room. Yasmin had heard worse words than this every day in the alleys of Dharavi and in the game-room when the army was fighting, and hearing it from this soft boy almost made her giggle. But she heard the choke in his voice, like he was holding back tears, and she didn't want to smile anymore. She reached up and unhooked her hijab, repinning it around her neck, freeing her face to cool in the sultry air the fan whipped around them. She crossed to Ashok and took a cup of tea from him and sipped it as quickly as she could, relishing the warm wet against her dry, scratchy throat. Now that her face was clear of hijab, she could smell the strong reek of old betel spit, and saw that the baseboards of the scuffed walls were stained pink with old spittle.
+
+"Ashok," she said, using the voice she'd used to enforce discipline in the army. "Ashok, look at me. What was that -- that /{meeting}/ about? Why was I here?"
+
+He sat down in the chair that Mr Phadkar had just vacated and sipped at his chai.
+
+"Oh, I've made a bloody mess of it all, I have," he said.
+
+"Ashok," she said, that stern note in her voice. "Complain later. Talk now. What did you just drag me halfway across Mumbai for?"
+
+"I've been working on this meeting for months, ever since Big Sister Nor asked me to. I told her that I thought the trade unions here would embrace the Webblies, would see the power of a global labor movement that could organize everywhere all at once. She loved the idea, and ever since then, I've been sweet-talking the union execs here, trying to get them to see the potential. With their members helping us -- and with our members helping them -- we could change the world. Change it like that!" He snapped his fingers. "But then the strike broke out, and Big Sister Nor told me she needed help /{right now}/, otherwise those comrades would end up in jail forever, or worse. She said she thought you'd be able to help, and we were all going to talk about it before we came down, but then, when I was riding to get you --" He broke off, drank chai, stared out the grimy, screened in windows at the manicured grounds of the film studio. "I got a call from The Mighty Krang. They were beaten. Badly. All three of them, though Krang managed to escape. Big Sister Nor is in hospital, unconscious. The Mighty Krang said he thought it was one of the Chinese factory owners -- they've been getting meaner, sending in threats. And they've got lots of contacts in Singapore."
+
+Yasmin finished her chai. Her hair itched with dust and sweat, and she slid a finger up underneath it and scratched at a bead of sweat that was trickling down her head. "All right," she said. "What had you hoped for from those old people?"
+
+"Money," he said. "Support. They have the ear of the press. If their members demanded justice for the workers in Shenzhen, rallied at the Chinese consulates all around India..." He waved his hands. "I'm not sure, to be honest. It was supposed to happen weeks from now, after I'd done a lot more whispering in their ears, finding out what they wanted, what they could give, what we could give them. It wasn't supposed to happen in the middle of a strike." He stared miserably at the floor.
+
+Yasmin thought about Sushant, about his fear of leaving Mala's army. As long as soldiers like him fought for the other side, the Webblies wouldn't be able to blockade the strikes in-game. So. So she'd have to stop Mala's army. Stop all the armies. The soldiers who fought for the bosses were on the wrong side. They'd see that.
+
+"What if we helped ourselves?" she said. "What if we got so big that the unions had to join us?"
+
+"Yes, what if, what if. It's so easy to play what if. But I can't see how this will happen."
+
+"I think I can get more fighters in the games. We can protect any strike."
+
+"Well, that's fine for the games, but it doesn't help the players. Big Sister Nor is still in hospital. The Webblies in Shenzhen are still in jail."
+
+"All I can do is what I can do," Yasmin said. "What can you do? What do economists do?"
+
+He looked rueful. "We go to university and learn a lot of maths. We use the maths to try to predict what large numbers of people will do with their money and labor. Then we try to come up with recommendations for influencing it."
+
+"And this is what you do with your life?"
+
+"Yes, I suppose it all sounds bloody pointless, doesn't it? Maybe that's why I'm willing to take the games so seriously -- they're no less imaginary than anything else I do. But I became an economist because nothing made sense without it. Why were my parents poor? Why were our cousins in America so rich? Why would America send its garbage to India? Why would India send its wood to America? Why does anyone care about gold?
+
+"That was the really strange one. Gold is such a useless thing, you know? It's heavy, it's not much good for making things out of -- too soft for really long-wearing jewelry. Stainless steel is much better for rings." He tapped an intricate ring on his right hand on the arm of the chair. "There's not much of it, of course. All the gold we've ever dug out of the ground would form a cube with sides the length of a tennis court." Yasmin had seen pictures of tennis courts, but she wasn't clear how big this actually was. Not very large, she supposed. "We dig it out of one hole in the ground and then put it in another hole in the ground, some vault somewhere, and call it money. It seemed ridiculous.
+
+"But everyone /{knows}/ gold is valuable. How did they all agree on this? That's where I started to get really fascinated. Because gold and money are really closely related. It used to be that money was just an easy way of carrying around gold. The government would fill a hole in the ground with gold, and then print notes saying, 'This note is worth so many grams of gold.' So rather than carrying heavy gold around to buy things, we could carry around easy paper money.
+
+"It's funny, isn't it? We dig gold out of holes in the ground, weigh it, and then put it in another hole in the ground! What good is gold? Well, it puts a limit on how much money a government can make. If they want to make more money, they have to get more gold from somewhere. "
+
+"Why does it matter how much money a country prints?"
+
+"Well, imagine that the government decided to print a crore of rupees for every person in India. We'd all be rich, right?"
+
+Yasmin thought for a moment. "No, of course not. Everything would get more expensive, right?"
+
+He waggled his chin. He was sounding like a schoolteacher again. "Very good," he said. "That's inflation: more money makes everything more expensive. If inflation happened evenly, it wouldn't be so bad. Say your pay doubled overnight, and so did all the prices -- you'd be all right, because you could just buy as much as you could the day before, though it 'cost' twice as much. But there's a problem with this. Do you know what it is?"
+
+Yasmin thought. "I don't know." She thought some more. Ashok was nodding at her, and she felt like it was something obvious, almost visible. "I just don't know."
+
+"A hint," he said. "Savings."
+
+She thought about this some more. "Savings. If you had money saved, it wouldn't double along with wages, right?" She shook her head. "I don't see why that's such a problem, though. We've got some money saved, but it's just a few thousand rupees. If wages doubled, we'd get that back quickly from the new money coming in."
+
+He looked surprised, then laughed. "I'm sorry," he said. "Of course. But there are some people and companies and governments that have a /{lot}/ of savings. Rich people might save crores of rupees -- those savings would be cut in half overnight. Or a hospital might have many crores saved for a new wing. Or the government or a union might have crores in savings for pensions. What if you work all your life for a pension of two thousand rupees a month, and then, a year before you're supposed to start collecting it, it gets cut in half?"
+
+Yasmin didn't know anyone who had a pension, though she'd heard of them. "I don't know," she said. "You'd work, I suppose."
+
+"You're not making this easy," Ashok said. "Let me put it this way: there are a lot of powerful, rich people who would be very upset if inflation wiped out their savings. But governments are very tempted by inflation. Say you're fighting an expensive war, and you need to buy tanks and pay the soldiers and put airplanes in the sky and keep the missiles rolling out of the factories. That's expensive stuff. You have to pay for it somehow. You could borrow the money --"
+
+"Governments borrow money?"
+
+"Oh yes, they're shocking beggars! They borrow it from other governments, from companies -- even from their own people. But if you're not likely to win the war -- or if victory will wipe you out -- then it's unlikely anyone will voluntarily lend you the money to fight it. But governments don't have to rely on voluntary payments, do they?"
+
+Yasmin could see where this was going. "They can just tax people."
+
+"Correct," he said. "If you weren't such a clearly sensible girl, I'd suggest you try a career as an economist, Yasmin! OK, so governments can just raise taxes. But people who have to pay too much tax are unlikely to vote for you the next time around. And if you're a dictator, nothing gets the revolutionaries out in the street faster than runaway taxation. So taxes are only of limited use in paying for a war."
+
+"Which is why governments like inflation, right?"
+
+"Correct again! First, governments can print a lot of money that they can use to buy missiles and tanks and so on, all the while borrowing even more, as fast as they can. Then, when prices and wages all go up and up -- say, a hundred times -- then suddenly it's very easy to repay all that money they borrowed. Maybe it took a thousand workers' tax to add up to a crore of rupees before inflation, and now it just takes one. Of course, the person who loaned you the money is in trouble, but by that time, you've won the war, gotten reelected, and all without crippling your country with debt. Bravo."
+
+Yasmin turned this over. She found it surprisingly easy to follow -- all she had to do was think of what happened to the price of goods in the different games she played, going up and down, and she could easily see how inflation would work to some players' benefit and not others. "But governments don't have to use inflation just to win wars, do they?" She thought of the politicians who came through Dharavi, grubbing for the votes the people there might deliver. She thought of their promises. "You could use inflation to build schools, hospitals, that sort of thing. Then, when the debt caught up with you, you could just use inflation to wipe it out. You'd get a lot of votes that way, I'm quite sure."
+
+"Oh yes, that's the other side of the equation. Governments are always trying to get re-elected with guns or butter -- or both. You can certainly get a lot of votes by buying a lot of inflationary hospitals and schools, but inflation is like fatty food -- you always pay the price for it eventually. Once hyperinflation sets in, no one can pay the teachers or nurses or doctors, so the next election is likely to end your career.
+
+"But the temptation is powerful, very powerful. And that's where gold comes in. Can you think of how?"
+
+Yasmin thought some more. Gold, inflation; inflation, gold. They danced in her head. Then she had it. "You can't make more money unless you have more gold, right?"
+
+He beamed at her. "Gold star!" he said. "That's it exactly. That's what rich people like about gold. It is a disciplinarian, a policeman in the treasury, and it stops government from being tempted into funding their folly with fake money. If you have a lot of savings, you want to discipline the government's money-printing habits, because every rupee they print devalues your own wealth. But no government has enough gold to cover the money they've printed. Some governments fill their vaults with other valuable things, like other dollars or euros."
+
+"So dollars and euros are based on gold, then?"
+
+"Not at all!" No, they're backed by other currencies, and by little bits of metal, and by dreams and boasts. So at the end of the day, it's all based on nothing!"
+
+"Just like game-gold!" she said.
+
+"Another gold star! Even /{gold}/ isn't based on gold! Most of the time, if you buy gold in the real world, you just buy a certificate saying that you own some bar of gold in some vault somewhere in the world. The postman doesn't deliver a gold-brick through your mail-slot. And here's the dirty secret about gold: there is more gold available through certificates of deposit than has ever been dug out of the ground."
+
+"How is that possible?"
+
+"How do you think it's possible?"
+
+"Someone's printing certificates without having the gold to back them up?"
+
+"That's a good theory. Here's what I think happens. Say you have a vault full of gold in Hong Kong. Call it a thousand bars. You sell the thousand bars' worth of gold through the certificate market, and lock the door. Now, some time later, someone -- a security guard, an executive at the bank -- walks into the vault and walks out again with ten gold bars from the middle of the pile. These ten bars of gold are sold at a metals market, and they end up in a vault in Switzerland, which prints certificates for /{its}/ gold holdings and sells them on. Then, one day, an executive at the Swiss bank helps himself to ten bars from /{that}/ vault and they get sold on the metals market. Before you know it, your ten bars of gold have been sold to a hundred different people."
+
+"It's inflation!"
+
+He clapped. "Top pupil! Correct. There's a saying from physics, 'It's turtles all the way down.' Do you know it? It comes from a story about a British physicist, Bertrand Russell, who gave a lecture about the universe, how the Earth goes around the Sun and so on. And a little old granny in the audience says, 'It's all rubbish! The world is flat and rests on the back of a turtle!' And Russell says, 'If that's so, what does the turtle stand on?' And the granny says, 'You can't fool me, sonny, it's turtles all the way down!'" In other words, what lives under the illusion is yet another illusion, and under that one is another illusion again. Supposedly good currency is backed by gold, but the gold itself doesn't exist. Bad currency isn't backed by gold, it's backed by other currencies, and /{they}/ don't exist. At the end of the day, all that any of this is based on is, what, can you tell me?"
+
+"Belief," Yasmin said. "Or fear, yes? Fear that if you stop believing in the money, you won't be able to buy anything. It /{is}/ just like game-gold! I remember one time when Zombie Mecha started charging for buffs that used to be free and overnight, all the players left. The people who were left behind were so desperate, walking around, trying to hawk their gold and weapons, offering prices that were tiny compared to just a few days before. It was like everyone had stopped believing in Zombie Mecha and then it stopped existing! And then the game dropped its prices and people came back and the prices shot back up again."
+
+"We call it 'confidence'," Ashok said. "If you have 'confidence' in the economy, you can use its money. If you don't have confidence in the economy, you want to get away from it and get it away from you. And it's turtles all the way down. There's almost nothing that's worth /{anything}/, except for confidence. Go to a steel foundry here in Mumbai and you'll find men risking their lives, working in the fires of hell in their bare feet without helmets or gloves, casting steel to make huge round metal plates to cover the sewer entrances in America. Why do they do it? Because they are given rupees -- which are worth nothing unless you have confidence in them. And why are they given rupees? Because someone -- the boss -- thinks that he'll get dollars for his steel discs. What are dollars worth?"
+
+"Nothing?"
+
+"/{Nothing!}/ Unless you believe in them. And what about the discs -- what good are they? They're the wrong size for the sewer openings in Mumbai. You could melt them down and do something else with them, but apart from that, they're just bloody heavy biscuits that serve no useful purpose. So why does any of this happen?"
+
+Yasmin said, "Oh, that's simple. You really don't know?"
+
+"It's easy? Please, tell me. It's not easy for me and I've been studying it all my life."
+
+"It all happens because it's a /{game}/!"
+
+He looked offended. "Maybe it's a game for the rich and powerful -- but it's not any fun for the poor and the workers and the savers who get the wrong end of it."
+
+"Games don't need to be /{fun}/, they only have to be, I don't know, /{interesting}/? No, /{captivating}/! There are so many times when I find myself playing and playing and playing, and I can't stop even though it's all gotten very boring and repetitive. 'One more quest,' I tell myself. 'One more kill.' And then again, 'One more, one more, one more.' The important thing about a game isn't how fun it is, it's how easy it is to start playing and how hard it is to stop."
+
+"Aha. OK, that makes sense. What, specifically, makes it hard to stop?"
+
+"Oh, many little things. For example, in Zombie Mecha, if you stop playing without going to a mecha-base, you get 'fatigued.' So when you come back to the game, you play worse and earn fewer points for making the same kills and running the same dungeons. So you think, 'OK, I'm done for today, time to go back to a base.' And you run for a base, which is never very close to the quests, and on the way, you get a new quest, a short one that has a lot of good rewards. You do the quest. Now you head for the base again, but again, you find yourself on a quest, but this one is a little longer than it seemed, and now even more time has gone by. Finally, you reach the base, but you've played so much that you've almost levelled up, and it would be a pity to stop playing now when just a few random kills would get you to the next level and then you can buy some very good new weapons and training at the base, so you hunt down some of the biters around the base-entrance, and now you level up, and you get some good new weapons, and you've also just unlocked many new quests. These quests are given to you when you reach the base, and some of them look very interesting, and now some of your friends have joined you, so you can group with them and run the quests together, which will be much quicker and a lot more fun. And by the time you stop, it's been three, sometimes four hours more play than you thought you'd do."
+
+"This happens a lot?"
+
+"Oh yes. Many times a week for me. And I don't even play for points -- I play to help the union! The more play you do, the more sense it makes to keep on playing. All this business with gold and rupees and dollars and steel plates -- we play that game all the time, don't we? So of course it works. Everyone plays it because everyone has played it all their lives."
+
+"I can see why Big Sister Nor told me I must talk with you," he said. "You're a very clever girl."
+
+She looked down.
+
+"What do we do about Big Sister Nor?"
+
+"She thinks we need to find money and support for the strikers. I think she needs money and support for /{herself}/. She says she's fine, but she's in hospital and it sounds like she was badly beaten."
+
+"How do we get her support from here? They're so far away." Thinking: /{Mumbai's opposite corner is far away for me -- China might as well be the moon or the Mushroom Kingdom.}/ "And how do we know that Big Sister Nor will be safe where she is?"
+
+"Both good questions," he said. "It's frustrating. They're so close when we're all online, but so far when we need to do something that involves the physical world." He began to pace. "This is Big Sister Nor's department. She sees a way to tie up the virtual world and the real world, to move work and ideas and money from one to the other."
+
+"Maybe we should just concentrate on the games, then? They're the part we know how to use."
+
+"But these people are in trouble in the real world," Ashok said, balling his hands into fists.
+
+And Yasmin found herself giggling, and then laughing, really laughing. It was so obvious!
+
+"Oh, Ashok," she said, "oh, yes, they certainly are."
+
+And she knew just what to do about it.
+
+#
+
+1~ scene # ~#
+
+_1 /{ This scene is dedicated to Waterstone's, the national UK bookselling chain. Waterstone's is a chain of stores, but each one has the feel of a great independent store, with tons of personality, great stock (especially audiobooks!), and knowledgeable staff. Of particular note is the Manchester Deansgate store, which has an *{outstanding}* sf section. }/
+
+_1 {~^ Waterstones }http://www.waterstones.com/
+
+Lu didn't know where to go. Boss Wing's dormitories were out of the question, of course. And while he knew a dozen Internet cafes in Shenzhen where he could sit and log on to the game, he didn't really want to be playing just then. Not with everyone else in jail.
+
+But he had to sit down. He'd been hit hard in the head and on the shoulder and he was very dizzy. He'd thrown up once already, holding onto a bus-stop pole and leaning over the gutter, earning a disapproving cluck from an old woman who walked past hauling a huge barrow full of electronic waste.
+
+He had thought of texting Matthew and the others, to find out if the police had them in custody, but he was afraid that the police would track him back if he did, using the phone network to locate him and pick him up.
+
+It had all felt so /{wonderful}/. They'd stood up from their computers, chanting angrily, the war-chants from the games, which Boss Wing and his goons never played, and so it had all been totally perplexing to them. Their faces had gone from puzzlement to anger to fear as all the boys in the room stood together and marched out of the cafe, blocking the doorways so that no one could come in.
+
+And there had been girls, and old grannies, and young men stopping to admire them as they stood, shoulder to shoulder, chanting bravely at the cowardly goons from Boss Wing's factory, goons who'd been so tough just a few minutes before, willing to slap you in the head if you talked too much, ready to dock your pay, too. Ever since they'd tried to go out on their own, life had gotten steadily worse. Boss Wing had a huge operation, with plenty of in-game muscle to stand guard against rich players who hunted the gold farmers for sport, but he was cruel and cheap and you were lucky if you saw half the wages you'd earned after all the fines for "breaking rules" had been charged against your salary.
+
+Their phones rang and buzzed with photos from other Boss Wing factories where the workers had gone out too, and there were wars in Mushroom Kingdom as the Webblies kept anyone else from working their zone. And the police came and they'd stayed brave, Matthew and Ping and all his friends. They were workers, they were warriors, they were an army and their cause was just. They would not be intimidated.
+
+And then the gas came. And then the clubs started swinging. And then the screams had started. And then Lu had run, run through the stinging clouds of gas and the chaos of battle -- so like and so unlike the million battles he'd fought in the games -- and he'd thrown up and now --
+
+Now he had no idea where to go.
+
+And then his phone rang. The number was blanked out, which made his pulse hammer in his throat. Did the secret police blank out the number when they called you? But if the secret police knew he existed and had his phone number, they could just pick him up where he stood, using the phone's damned tracking function.
+
+It wasn't the police. With trepidation, he slid his finger over the talk button on the screen.
+
+"Wei?" he said, cautiously.
+
+"Lu? Is that you?" The call had the weird, echoey sound of a cheap net-calling service, the digital fuzz of packets that travelled third class on the global network. The accent was difficult, too, thick-tongued and off-kilter. He knew the sound and he knew the voice.
+
+"/{Wei-Dong}/?"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"Wei-Dong in /{America}/?" He hadn't heard from the strange gweilo since they'd gone to Boss Wing and Ping had had to kick him out of the guild. Boss Wing didn't allow them to raid with outside people, or even talk to them in game. He had spyware on all his PCs that told him when you broke those rules, and you lost a day's wages for the first offense, a week's wages for the second.
+
+"Lu, it's me! Look, did I just see you and Ping getting beaten up by the cops?"
+
+"I don't know, did you?" The disorientation from his head wound was fierce, and he wondered if he was really having this conversation. It was very strange.
+
+"I -- I just saw you getting beaten up on a video from Shenzhen. I think I did. Was it you?"
+
+"We just got beaten up," he said. "I'm hurt."
+
+"Are you badly hurt? I couldn't reach Ping, so I tried you." He was excited, his voice tight. "What happened?"
+
+Lu was still grappling with the idea that the gweilo had just called him from thousands of kilometers away. "You saw me on the Internet in America?"
+
+"Every gamer in the world saw you, Lu! You couldn't have timed it better! After dinner is the busiest time on the servers, and the word went around like nothing I've ever seen before. Everyone in every game was chatting about it, passing around links to the video streams and the photos. It was even on the real news! My neighbor banged on my wall and asked me if I knew anything about it. It was incredible!"
+
+"You saw me getting beaten up on the Internet?"
+
+"Dude, /{everyone}/ saw you getting beaten up on the Internet."
+
+Lu didn't know what to say. "Did I look good?"
+
+Wei-Dong laughed like a hyena. "You looked /{great}/!"
+
+A dam broke, Lu laughed and laughed and laughed, as all the tension flooded out of him. He finally stopped, knowing that if he didn't he'd throw up again. He was by the train station now, in the heavy foot-traffic, all kinds of people moving purposefully around him as he stood still, a woozy island in the rushing stream. He backed up to a stairwell in front of a beauty parlor and sank to his haunches, squatting and holding the phone to his head.
+
+"Wei-Dong?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Why are you calling me?"
+
+There was an uncomfortable silence on the line, broken by soft digital flanging. "I wanted to help you," he said at last. "Help the Webblies."
+
+"You know about the Webblies?" Lu had half-believed that Matthew had made them up, a fantasy army of thousands of imaginary friends who would fight for them.
+
+"Know about them? Lu, they're the ass-kickingest guild in the world! No one can beat them! Coca-Cola Games is sending us three memos a day about them!"
+
+"Why does Coca-Cola send you memos?"
+
+"Oh." More silence. "Didn't I tell you? I'm working for them now. I'm a Turk."
+
+"Oh," said Lu. He knew about the Turks, but he never really thought about what kind of people would work in ten second increments making up dialog for non-player characters or figuring out what happened when you shot an office chair with a blunderbuss. "That must be interesting."
+
+Wei-Dong made a wet noise. "It's miserable," he said. "I run four different sessions at once, and I'm barely earning enough to pay the rent. And they make so much money off of us! Last month, they announced quarterly profits and games with Turks are earning 30 percent more than the ones without. They're hiring more Turks as fast as they can -- it's all over the board here. But our wages aren't going up. So I've been thinking of the Webblies, you know..." He trailed off. "Like maybe you guys can help us if we help you? We all play for our money, right? So why shouldn't we be on the same side."
+
+"Sounds right to me," Lu said. He was still trying to comprehend the fact that the Webblies were apparently famous with American teenagers. "Wait," he said, playing back Wei-Dong's accented, ungrammatical speech. "You're paying rent?"
+
+"Yeah," Wei-Dong said. "Yeah! Living on my own now. It's great! I have a crappy room in a, not sure what you call it, a hotel, kind of. But for people who don't have any money. But I can get wireless here and I've got four machines and there's plenty of stuff I can walk to, at least compared to home --" He began to babble about his favorite restaurants and the clubs that had all-ages nights and a million tiny irrelevant details about Los Angeles, which might as well have been the Mushroom Kingdom for all that it mattered to Lu. He let it wash over him and tried to think of places he could go to recuperate. He fleetingly wished for his mother, who always knew some kind of traditional Chinese remedy for his ailments. They often didn't work, but sometimes they did, and his mother's gentle application of them worked their own magic.
+
+He was suddenly, nauseously, overwhelmingly homesick. "Wei-Dong," he said, interrupting the virtual tour of Los Angeles. "I need to think now. I don't know what to do. I'm hurt, I'm on the street, and I can't call anyone in case the police trace the call. What do I do?"
+
+"Oh. Well. I don't know exactly. I was hoping that you'd know what /{I}/ should do, to tell you the truth. I want to get involved!"
+
+"I think I want to get /{uninvolved}/." Lu's homesickness was turning to anger. Who was this /{boy}/ to call him from the other side of the world, demanding to "get involved?" Didn't he have enough problems of his own? "What can you do for me from there? What is any of this -- this /{garbage}/ worth? How will everyone going to jail make my life better? How will having my head beaten in help make things better? How?"
+
+"I don't know." Wei-Dong's voice was small and hurt. Lu struggled to control his anger. The gweilo wanted to help. It wasn't his fault he didn't know how to help. Lu didn't know how to help, either.
+
+"I don't know either," Lu said. "Why don't you think about how to help and call me back. I need to find somewhere to rest, maybe a nurse or a doctor. OK?"
+
+"Sure," the gweilo said. "Sure. Of course. I'll call you back soon, don't worry."
+
+Every time a Hong Kong train came into the Shenzhen Railway Station, it disgorged a massive crowd of people: Hong Kong people in sharp business styles, rich kids, foreigners, and workers from Shenzhen returning from contracts abroad, clutching backpacks. The dense group got broken up by the taxi-rank and the shopping mall, and emerged as a diffuse cloud onto the street where Lu had been talking. Now he worked his way back through this crowd, listening to snatches of hundreds of conversations about business, manufacturing -- and gold farming.
+
+It was on everyone's lips, talk about the strike, about the police action, about the farmers. Of course most people in China had heard of gold farming and all the stories about the money you could make by just playing video games, but you never heard this kind of business-person talking about it. Not smart, fancy people with obvious wealth and power, the kind of people who skipped back and forth between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, talking rapidly into their earwigs, telling other people what to do.
+
+What had the gweilo said? /{Everyone saw you getting beaten up on the Internet!}/ Were these people looking closely at him? Now it seemed they were. Of course, he was bloody, staring, red-eyed. Why wouldn't they stare at him? But maybe --
+
+"You're one of them, aren't you?" She was 22 or 23, with perfect fingernails on the hand she rested on his arm, coming on him from behind. He gave an involuntary squeak and jump, and she giggled a little. "You must be," she said. She held up her phone. "I watched the video five times on the train. You should see the commentary. So ugly!"
+
+He knew about this. Any time something that made the government look bad managed to find its way online, there was an army of commenters who'd tweet and post and comment about how the government was in the right, how the story was all wrong, how the people in it were guilty of all kinds of terrible things. Lu knew he shouldn't believe any of it, but it was impossible to read it all without feeling a little niggle of doubt, then a little more, and then, like an ice-cube on a bruise, the outrage he'd felt at first would go numb.
+
+The thought that he, himself, was at the center of one of these smear-storms made him feel like he was going to throw up again. The girl must have seen this, for she gave his arm a little squeeze. "Oh, don't look so serious. You looked great on the video. I'm sure no one believes all that rubbish!" She pursed her lips. "Well, of course, that's not true. I'm sure lots of people believe it. But they're fools. And so many more were inspired, I'm sure. I'm Jie."
+
+"Lu," Lu said, after trying and failing to come up with an alias. He was not cut out to be a fugitive. "It was nice to meet you," he said, and shrugged her hand off and set off deeper into the crowd.
+
+She grabbed his arm again. "Oh, please stop. We need to talk. Please?"
+
+He stopped. He didn't have much experience with girls, but something about her voice made him want to stay. "Why do we need to talk?"
+
+"I want to get your story," she said. "For my show."
+
+"Your /{show}/?"
+
+She leaned in close -- so close he could smell her perfume -- and whispered, "I'm Jiandi," she said.
+
+He looked at her blankly.
+
+She shook her head. "Jiandi," she hissed. "Jiandi! From the Factory Girl Show!"
+
+He shrugged. "What kind of show?"
+
+"Every night!" she said. "At 9PM! Twelve million factory workers listen to me! They phone me with their problems. We go out over the net, audio, through the, uh," she dropped her voice, "the Falun Gong proxies."
+
+"Oh," he said, and began to move away.
+
+"It's not religious," she said. "I just help them with their problems. The --" she dropped her voice "/{proxies}/ are just how we get the show into the factories. They try to block me because we tell the truth about the work conditions -- the girls who are sexually pressured by their bosses, the marketing rip-offs, the wage rip offs, lock-ins --"
+
+"OK," he said. "I get the picture. Thank you but no."
+
+"Come /{on}/," she said and looked deep into his eyes. Hers were dark and lined with thin, precise green eye-pencil, and her eyebrows were shaped into surprised, sophisticated arches. "You look like you need a place to clean up, and maybe a meal. I can get that for you."
+
+"You can?"
+
+"Lu, I'm /{famous}/! I have advertisers who pay a /{lot}/ to sponsor my show. I have millions of supporters all over Shenzhen, even in Guangzhou and Dongguan. Even in Shanghai and Beijing! I'm a hero to them, Lu. I can put your story into the ears of every worker in the Pearl River Delta like /{that}/!" She snapped her fingers in front of his nose, making him blink and start back again. She laughed. "You're cute," she said. "Come on, it'll be wonderful."
+
+"Where do we go?" he said, cautiously.
+
+"Oh, I have a place," she said.
+
+She grabbed his hand -- her fingers were dry and cool, and touched with cold spots where the rings she wore met his skin. She led him away through the crowd, which seemed to part magically before her. It had all become like a dream now, with the pain crowding Lu's vision into a hazy-edged tunnel. He wondered if she'd have something for the pain. He wondered if she knew any traditional medicine, if she'd mix him up a bitter tea with complicated scents and small bits of hard things floating in it. All this he wondered, and the streets and sidewalks slipped past beneath their feet like magic. You could automatically follow your guildies in game, just click on them and select follow, and the whole guild could do that when there was a lot of distance to cover, so that only one player had to pay attention on the long march across the world, while the others relaxed and smoked and ate and used the toilet, while their characters trailed like a string of pack-animals behind the leader.
+
+That's what this felt like, like he was a character whose player had stepped out for a cigarette and a piss-break and the character bumped along mindlessly behind the leader.
+
+"Do you live here?" he said as they reached the lobby of a tall apartment building. It was a "handshake building," so close to the building next to it that the tenants could lean out their windows and shake hands with their neighbors across the lane. The lobby smelled of cooking and sweat, but it was clean and there was a working intercom and lock at the door.
+
+"No," she said. "I do some of my shows from here. There are two or three of them, to confuse the jingcha." He thought it was funny to hear her use the gamer clan term for police. She saw it, and said, "Oh yes, the zengfu think I'm very biantai and they'd PK me if they could." He laughed at this, because it was nearly impenetrable slang -- the government think I'm a pervert so they want to "player-kill" -- destroy -- me if they can. It was one thing to hear a boy with his shirt rolled up over his belly and a cigarette hanging out of his face saying this, another to hear this delicate, preciously made-up girl.
+
+The elevator was broken, so she led him up five flights of stairs, the walls decorated with lavish graffiti: murals of curse-words, scenes of factory life, phone numbers you could call to buy fake identity papers, degrees, certificates. Lu's own dorm room was in a building that Boss Wing rented, and he climbed twice this many stairs every day, but this climb felt like it was going to kill him. On Jie’s floor, there was an old lady squatting by the stairway door, in the hall. She nodded at the two of them.
+
+"Mrs Yun," Jie said, "I would like you to meet Hui. He is a mechanic who has come to repair my air-conditioner." The old lady nodded curtly and looked away.
+
+Jie attacked one of the apartment doors with a key ring, opening four different locks with large, elaborate, thick keys and then putting her shoulder into the door, which swung heavily back, clanging against a door-stop with a metallic sound. She motioned him inside and closed the door, shooting the four bolts from the inside and slapping at several light-switches.
+
+The apartment had two big rooms, the living room in which they stood, and a connecting bedroom that he could see from the doorway. There was a little kitchen area against the wall beside them, and the rest of the room was taken up with a sofa and a large desk with chairs on either side of it, covered in a litter of recording gear: a mixer, several large sets of headphones, and a couple of skinny mics on stands. Every centimeter of wall-space was /{covered}/ in paper: newspaper clippings, letters, drawings -- all liberally sprinkled with stickers, hearts, cute animal doodles.
+
+Jie waved her hand at it: "My studio!" she said, and twirled around. "All my fan-mail and my press." She ran her fingers lightly over a wall. Peering more closely at it, Lu saw that every letter began "Dear Jiani" and that they were all written in neat, girlish hands. "I have a post-box in Macau. My friends send the letters there and they scan them and email them to me. All right under the zengfu's nose!"
+
+"And the old lady in the hall?"
+
+She flopped down on the sofa, her skirt riding up around her thighs, and kicked her shoes in expert arcs to the mat by the door. "Our building's answer to the bound-foot grannies' detective squad," she said, and he laughed again at the slang. Back in Nanjing, they'd used this term to talk about the little old ladies who were always snooping around, gossiping about who was doing something evil or wicked. They didn't really have bound feet -- the practice of binding little girls' feet to the point where they grew up unable to walk properly was dead, and he'd never seen a real bound foot outside of a museum, though the grannies would always exclaim over the girls' feet, passing evil remarks if a girl had large feet, cooing if she had small ones -- but they acted all pinched anyway.
+
+"And she'll believe that I'm a repairman? I don't have any tools!"
+
+"Oh, no," Jie laughed again. It was a pretty sound. Lu could see how she'd be a very popular netshow host. That laugh was infectious. "No, she'll think we're having sex!"
+
+He felt himself turning red and stammering. "Oh -- Uh --"
+
+Now she was howling with laughter, head flung back, hair fanned out over the sofa-cushions. "You should see your face! Look, so long as Grandma Mao out there thinks I'm just a garden-variety slut, she won't suspect that I'm really Jiandi, Scourge of the Politburo and Voice of the Pearl River Delta, all right? Now, get your shoes off and let's have a look at that head-wound."
+
+He did as he was bade, neatly lining his shoes up by the doorway and stepping gingerly onto the dusty wooden floor. Jia stood and led him by the shoulders to one of the rolling chairs by the desk and pushed him down on it, then leaned over him and stared intently at his scalp. "OK," she said. "First of all, you need to switch shampoo, you have very greasy hair, it's shameful. Second of all, you appear to have a pigeon's egg growing out of your head, which has got to sting a little. I'll tell you what, I'll get you something cold to hold on it for a few moments, then I want you to go have a shower and clean it out well. It looks like it bled a little, but not much, which is lucky for you, since scalp wounds usually bleed like crazy. Then, once we've got you into a more civilized state, I'll put you on the Internet and make you even more famous. Sound good?"
+
+He opened his mouth to object, but she was already spinning away and digging through the small fridge, crouching, hair falling over her shoulders in a way that Lu couldn't stop staring it. Now she had a bag of frozen Hahaomai chicken dumplings -- he recognized the packaging, it was what they ate for dinner most nights in Boss Wing's dormitory -- and was wrapping it in a tea-towel, and pressing it to his head. It felt like it weighed 500 kilos and had been cooled to absolute zero, but it also made his head stop throbbing almost immediately. He slumped in the chair and closed his eyes and held the dumplings to the spot where the zengfu -- the slang was infectious -- had given him a love-tap. He tracked Jia's movements around him by the sounds she made and the puffs of perfume and hair stuff whenever she passed close. This was not bad, he thought -- a lot better than things had been an hour ago when he'd been crouching in front of the station talking to the gweilo.
+
+"Right," she said, "take these." He opened his eyes and saw that she was holding out two chalky pills and a glass of water for him.
+
+"What are they?" he said, narrowing his eyes at the glare of the sunset light streaming in the window. He'd been nearly asleep.
+
+"Poison," she said. "I've decided to put you out of your misery. Take them."
+
+He took them.
+
+"The shower's through there," she said, pointing toward the bedroom. "There's a towel on the toilet-seat, and I found some pajamas that should fit you. We'll rinse out your clothes and put them on the heater to dry while we talk. No offense, Mr Labor Hero, but you smell like something long dead."
+
+He was blushing again, he could tell, and there was nothing for it but to duck and scurry through the bedroom -- he had a jumbled impression of a narrow bed with a thin blanket crumbled at the bottom, a litter of stuffed animals, and mounds of fake handbags overflowing with clothing and toiletries. Then he was in the bathroom, the sink-lip covered in mysterious pots and potions, all the oddments of a girl which a million billboards hinted at, but which he'd never seen in place, lids askew, powder spilling out. It was all so much less glamorous than it appeared on the billboards, where everything looked like it was slightly wet and glistening, but it was much more exciting.
+
+Every horizontal space in the shower seemed to support some kind of bottle. Lu bought big two liter jugs of shower gel that he could use as shampoo, too, but after squinting at the labels, he found one that appeared to be for bodies and another for hair, and made use of both. The water on his head felt like little sharp stones beating against it, and his shoulder began to throb as he rubbed the shampoo in. After the shower, he cleared the steam off the mirror and craned around to get a look at it, and could just make out the huge, raised bruise there, a club-shaped purple bruised line surrounded by a halo of greeny-yellow swelling.
+
+"There's something you can wear on the bed," Jia yelled from the other side of the door. He cautiously turned the knob and found that she'd drawn a curtain across the door to the bedroom, leaving him alone in naked semi-darkness. On the bed, neatly folded, a pair of track pants and a t-shirt for an employment bureau, the kind of thing they gave out to the people who stood in front of them all day long, paid for every person they brought in to apply for a job. It was a tight fit, but he got it on, and balled up his clothes, which really did stink, and peeked around the curtain.
+
+"Hello?"
+
+"Come on out here, beautiful!" she said, as he stepped out, his bare feet on the dusty tile. She leaned in and sniffed at him with a delicate little sniffle. "Mmmm, you chose the dang-gui shampoo. Very good. Very good for ladies' reproductive issues." She patted his stomach. "You'll have a little baby there in no time!"
+
+He now felt like he would faint from embarrassment, literally, the room spinning around him.
+
+She must have seen it in his face, for she stopped laughing and gave his hand a squeeze. "Don't worry," she said. "It's only teasing. Dang-gui is good for everything. Your mother must have given it to you." And yes, he realized now, that was where he knew that smell from -- he remembered wishing that his mother was there to give him some herbs, and that wish must have guided his hand among the many bottles in her shower.
+
+"Do you live here?" he said.
+
+"In this pit?" She made a face. "No, no! This is just one of my studios. It helps to have a lot of places where I can work. Makes life harder for the zengfu."
+
+"But the clothes, the bed?"
+
+"Just a few things I leave for the nights when I work late. My show can go all night, sometimes, depending on how many callers I have." She smiled again. She had dimples. He hadn't ever noticed a girl's dimples before. The head injury was making him feel woozy. Or maybe it was love.
+
+"And now?"
+
+"And now we talk to you about what you've seen," she said. "My show starts in --" she looked at the face of her phone -- "12 minutes. Just enough time for you to have a drink and get comfortable." She fished in her fridge and brought out a water filter jug and filled a glass from a small rack next to the tiny sink. He took it and drank it greedily and she fetched him the filter, setting it down on one side of the desk before settling into the chair on the other side.
+
+She began to click and type and furrow her brow in an adorable way, slipping on a set of huge headphones, positioning a mic. She waved to him and he settled into the opposite chair, refilling his glass.
+
+"What kind of show is this again?"
+
+"You are such a /{boy}/!" she said, looking up from her screen, fingers still punishing her keyboard with insectile clicks from her manicured fingernails.
+
+He looked down at himself. "I suppose I am," he said.
+
+"What I mean is, if you were a girl, you'd know all about this. Every factory girl listens to me, believe it. I start broadcasting after dinner, and they all log in and call in and chat and phone and tell me all their troubles and I tell them what they need to hear. Mostly, it comes down to this: if your boss wants to screw you, find another job, or be prepared to be screwed in more ways than one. If your boyfriend is a deadbeat who won't work and borrows money from you, get a new boyfriend, even if he is the 'love of your life.' If your girlfriends are talking trash about you, confront them, have a good cry, and start over. If your girlfriend is screwing your boyfriend, get rid of both of them. If you are screwing your girlfriend's boyfriend, stop -- dump him, confess to her, and don't do it again." She was ticking these off on her fingers like a shopping list.
+
+"It sounds a little repetitive," he said. He wondered if she was making it up, or possibly delusional. Could there really be a show that every factory girl listened to that he'd never heard of? He thought of how little the factory girls in Shilong New Town had talked to him when he worked as a security guard and decided that yes, it was totally possible.
+
+"It's very repetitive, but we all like it that way, my girls and me. Some problems are universal. Some things you just can't say too often. Anyway, that's not all there is to it. We have variety! We have you!"
+
+"Me," he said. "You're going to put me on a show with all these girls on it? Why? Won't that make the police want to get me even more?"
+
+"Darling, the police already want you. Remember the video. Your face is everywhere. The more famous you are, the harder it will be for them to arrest you. Trust me."
+
+"How can you be sure? Have you ever done this before?"
+
+"Every day," she said, eyes wide. "I'm my own case study. The police have been after me for two years now, and I've stayed out of their clutches. I do it by being too popular to catch!"
+
+"I don't think I understand how that works," he said.
+
+She looked at the face of her phone. "We've only got a minute. Here, quickly, I'll explain: if you're a fugitive, being poor is hard. Even harder than for non-fugitives. It's expensive being on the run. You need lots of places to live. Lots of different phones that you can abandon. You need to be able to pay li --" bribes -- "and you need to be able to move fast. Being famous means that you have access to money and favors from a lot of different people. My listeners keep me going, either through direct donations or through my advertisers."
+
+"You have ads? Who would buy an ad on a fugitive's radio show?"
+
+She shrugged. "The Taiwanese," she said. The island of Taiwan had considered itself separate from China since 1949 but China had never stopped laying claim to it -- without much success. "Falun Gong, sometimes." She saw the look of shock on his face. "Don't worry, /{I'm}/ not religious. But I'll take their money. They don't care if I make fun of them on the show, so long as I run their ads, too."
+
+He shook his head. "It's all too strange," he said.
+
+She held up her hand for silence and swung down a little mic from one of the headphones' earpieces. "Hello, girls!" she called into the mic, clicking her mouse. "It's your best friend here, Sister Jiandi, the friend you can always rely on, the friend who will never let you down, the friend you can confide all your secrets in -- provided you don't mind eight million factory girls finding out about it!" She giggled at her own joke. "Oh, sisters, it's going to be a good night, I can tell! I have a special surprise for you a little later, but first, let's talk! Tonight I'm using Amazon France chat, chat.amazon.fr, so go and sign up now. You'll get me at jiandi88888. Remember to use a couple of the latest FLG proxies before you make the call -- and it looks like the translation services at Yahoo.ru and 123india.in are both unblocked at the moment, which should make it easier to sign up. Well, what are you waiting for? Get signed up!"
+
+She clicked something and he heard a blaring ad for Falun Gong start in his headphone and he slipped one off the side of his head. Jie swung her mic away and pointed a finger at him. "Feeling the magic yet?"
+
+"This is it? This is your big show?"
+
+"Oh yes," she said. "We'll probably have to switch chats three or four times tonight, as they update the firewall. It's fun! Wait, you'll see." In his ear, the ad was wrapping up and he slipped the other headphone back into place.
+
+"Talk to me," Jie said, her voice full of warmth. It took him a moment to realize she was talking into her mic, to her audience, not to him. Her fingers were working the keyboard and mouse.
+
+"Hello?"
+
+"Yes, darling, hello. You're live. Talk, talk! We've only got all night!"
+
+"Oh, um --" The voice was female, with a strong Henan accent, and it was scared.
+
+"It's OK, sweetie, my heart, it's OK. Tell me." Jie's voice was a coo, a purr, a seduction. Her eyes were moist, her lips pursed in a gesture of pure caring. Lu wanted to tell her /{his}/ secrets.
+
+"It's just that --" The voice stopped. Crying noises. In the background, the sounds of a busy factory dorm, girlish calls and laughter and conversation. Jie made soothing shhh shhh sounds. "It's my boss," the girl said. "He was so /{nice}/ to me at first. He said he was taking an interest in me because we are both from Henan. He said that he would protect me. Show me around the city. We went to nice places. A restaurant in the stock exchange. He took me to the Windows on the World park and we dressed up like ancient warriors."
+
+"And he wanted something in return, didn't he?"
+
+"I knew he would. I listen to your show. But I thought it would be different for me. I thought he was different. But he --" She broke off. "After he kissed me, he told me he wanted to do more. Everything. He told me I owed it to him. That I'd understood that when I accepted his invitation, and that I would be cheating him if I didn't --" She began to cry.
+
+Jie made a face, twirled her finger in an impatient gesture. Lu was horrified by her callousness. But when the crying stopped, her voice was again full of compassion and understanding.
+
+"Oh, sweet child, you've been done badly, haven't you? Well, of course you knew it would happen, but the heart and the head don't always agree with each other, do they? The question isn't whether you acted like a fool -- because you did, you acted like a perfect fool -- the question is what you can do about it now. Am I right?"
+
+"Yes." The voice was so tiny and soft he could barely hear it. He pictured a girl shrunk to the size of a mouse, trembling in fear.
+
+"Well, that's simple. Not easy, but simple. Forfeit your last eight weeks' wages and walk out of the factory first thing tomorrow morning. Go down to a job-broker on Xi Li street and find something -- anything -- that can get you started again. Then you call your boss's wife -- is he married?"
+
+"Yes." The voice was a little bigger now.
+
+"Call his wife and tell her everything. Tell her what he did, what he said, what you said back. Tell her you're sorry, and tell her you're sorry her husband is such a sack of rotten, stinking garbage. Tell her you walked away on the pay he was holding back, and that you've left your job. And then you start to work again. And no matter what your new boss says or does, don't go out with him. Do you understand?"
+
+"Call his wife --"
+
+"Call his wife, walk away from your pay, and start over. There's nothing else that will work. You can't talk to this man. He has raped you -- that's what it is, you know, when someone in power coerces you into sex, it's rape, just rape -- and he'll do it again and again and again. He'll do it to the other girls in the factory. You tell as many as you can why you're leaving. In fact, you tell me what factory you work in and the name of your boss, right now, and then millions and millions of girls will know about it, too. They'll steer clear of this dog, and maybe you'll save a few souls with your bravery. What do you say?"
+
+"You want me to name my boss? Now? But I thought this was confidential --"
+
+"You don't /{have}/ to. But do you want another girl to go through what you just went through? What do you think would have happened if you had heard another girl speak his name on this show, last month, before you went out with him. What will you do? Will you save your sisters from the pain you're in? Or will you protect your bruised ego and let the next girl suffer, and the next?" She waited a moment. The girl on the phone said nothing, though the sounds of people moving around the dorm could still be faintly heard. Lu imagined her under her blanket on her bunk, hand over the mouthpiece of her phone, whispering her secrets to millions of girls. What a strange world. "Well?"
+
+"I'll do it," the girl said.
+
+"What's that? Say it loud!"
+
+"I'll do it!" the girl said, and let out a little laugh, and the laugh was echoed by the girlish voices near her, as the girls in her dorm realized that the confession they'd been listening into on their computers and phones and radios had been emanating from a bunk in their midst. There was a squeal of feedback as one of the radios got too close to the phone, and Jie's fingers clicked at the keyboard, squelching the feedback but somehow leaving the other squeals, the girlish squeals. They were cheering her, the girls in the dorm, cheering her and chanting her name, her real name, now on the radio, but it didn't matter, because the girl was laughing harder than ever.
+
+"It's Bau Peixiong," she said, laughing. "Bau Peixiong at the HuaXia sports factory." She laughed, a liberated sound.
+
+"OK, OK, girls," Jie said into her mic, in a commanding tone. The voices quieted. "Now, your sister has just made a sacrifice for all of you, so you need to help her. She needs money -- your pig of a boss won't give her the eight weeks' pay he's holding onto, especially not after she calls his wife. She needs help packing, help finding a job. Someone there is thinking of changing jobs, someone there knows where there's a job for this girl. Tell her. Help her move out. Help her find the new job. This is your duty to your sister. Promise me!"
+
+From the phone, a babble of girls saying, "I promise! I promise!"
+
+"Very good," Jie said. "Now, stay tuned friends, for soon I will be unveiling a wonderful surprise!" A mouseclick and then there was another ad, this time for a company that provided fake credentials for people looking for work, guaranteed to pass database lookups. Both of them slipped their headphones off and Jie drained her water-glass, a little trickle sliding down her chin and throat. Lu suppressed a groan. She was /{so}/ beautiful, and all that power and confidence --
+
+"That was a pretty good opener, wasn't it?" she said, raising her eyebrows at him.
+
+"Is it like this all the time?"
+
+"Oh, that was a particularly good one. But yes, most nights it goes like that. Six or seven hours' worth of it. You still think it'd get repetitious?"
+
+"I can see how that would stay interesting."
+
+"After all, you kill the same monsters over and over again all night long, don't you? That must be pretty dull."
+
+He considered this. "Not really," he said. "It's the teamwork, I guess. All of us working together, and it's not really the same every time -- the games vary the monster-spawning a lot. Sometimes you get really good drops, too -- that can be very exciting! You're going down a corridor you've cleared a dozen times, and you discover that this time it's filled with 200 vampires and then one of them drops an epic sword, and it's not boring at all anymore." He shrugged. "My guildie Matthew says it's intermittent reinforcement."
+
+She held up a finger and said, "Hold on to that," and clicked and started talking into her mic again, taking a call from another factory girl, this one more angry than sad. "I had a friend who was selling franchises for a line of herbal remedies," she said, and Jie rolled her eyes.
+
+"Go on," she said. "Sounds like a great opportunity." The sarcasm in her voice was unmistakable.
+
+"That's what I thought," the girl said. She sounded like she wanted to punch something. "At first I thought it was about selling the herbal remedies, and I liked that, because my mother always gave me herbs when I was sick as a girl, and I thought that a lot of the girls here would want to buy the remedies too because they missed home."
+
+"Yes," Jie said. "Who wouldn't want to remember her mommy?"
+
+"Exactly! Just what I thought. And my friend told me about how much money I could make, but not from selling the herbs! She said that selling the herbs would be my 'downliners' job, and that I would manage them. I would be a boss!"
+
+"Who wouldn't want to be a boss?"
+
+"Right! She said that she was recruiting me to be in the top layer of the organization, and that I would then go and recruit two of my friends to be my salespeople. They'd each pay me for the right to sign up more downliners, and that all the downliners would buy herbs from me and then I would get a share of all their profits. She showed me how if my two downliners signed up two more, and each of /{them}/ signed up two more, and so on, that I would have hundreds of downliners working for me in just a few days! And if I only got a few RMB from each one, I'd be making thousands every month, just for signing up two people."
+
+"A very generous friend," Jie said, and though she sounded like she was joking, she wasn't smiling.
+
+"Yes, yes! That's what I thought. And all I needed to do was pay her one small fee for the right to sell downline, and she would supply me with herbs and sales kits and everything else I needed. She said that she was signing me up because I was Fujianese, like her, and she wanted to take care of me. She said I should find girls who were still back in the village, girls I'd gone to school with, and call them and sign them up, because they needed to make money."
+
+"Why would girls in the village need herbal remedies? Wouldn't they have their mothers?"
+
+That stopped the angry, fast-talking girl. "I didn't think of that," she said, at last. "It seemed like I was going to be a hero for everyone, and like I would escape from the factory and get rich. My friend said she was going to quit in a few weeks and get her own apartment. I thought about moving out of the dorm, having money to send home --"
+
+"You dreamed about money and all that it could buy you, but you didn't devote the same attention to figuring out whether this thing could possibly work, right?"
+
+Another silence. "Yes," she said. "I have to say that this is true."
+
+"And then?"
+
+"It started OK. I sold a few downlines, but they were having trouble making their downline commitments. And then my friend, she started to ask me for her percentage of my income. When I told her I wasn't receiving the income my downliners owed me, she changed."
+
+"Go on." Jie's eyes were fixed on the wall behind Lu's head. She was in another world, it seemed, picturing the girl and her problem.
+
+"She got angry. She said that I had made a commitment to her, and that she had made commitments to her uplines based on this, and that I would have to pay her so that she could pay the people she owed. She made me feel like I'd betrayed her, betrayed the incredible opportunity. She said I was just a simple girl from a village, not fit to be a business-woman. She called me all day, over and over, screaming, 'Where's my money?'"
+
+"So what did you do?"
+
+"I finally went to her. I cried. I told her I didn't know what to do. And she told me that I knew, but that I didn't have the courage to do it. She told me I had to go to my downliners, get tough on them, get the money out of them. And if they wouldn't pay, I'd have to get the money some other way: from my parents, my friends, my savings. I could get new downliners next month."
+
+"And so you called up your downliners?"
+
+"I did." She drew in a heaving breath. "At first, I was gentle and kind to them, but my friend called me over and over again, and I got angry. Angry at them, not at her. It was their fault that I was having to spend all this time and energy, that I couldn't sleep or eat. And so I got meaner. I threatened them, begged them, shouted at them. These two girls, they were my old friends. I'd known them since we were little babies. I knew their secrets. I threatened to call my friend's father and tell him that she had let a boy take naked pictures of her when she was 15. I threatened to tell my other friend's sister that she had kissed her boyfriend."
+
+"Did they pay what they owed you?"
+
+"At first. The first month, they paid. The next month, though, I had to call them and shout at them some more. It was like I was sitting above myself, watching a crazy stranger say these terrible things to my old, old friends. But they paid again. And then, in the third month --" She stopped abruptly. The silence swelled. Lu felt it getting thicker, staticky.
+
+"What happened?"
+
+"Then one friend ate rat poison." Her voice was a tiny, far-away whisper. More silence. "I had told her that I would go to her father and -- and --" Silence. "It was how her mother had committed suicide when we were both small. The same kind of poison. Her father was a hard man, an Old One Hundred Names who had lived through the Cultural Revolution. He has no mercy on him. When she couldn't get the money, she stole it. Got caught. He was going to find out. And if he didn't, I would tell him about the photos she'd taken. And she couldn't face that. I drove her to kill herself. It was me. I killed her."
+
+"She killed herself," Jie said, her voice full of compassion. "It's the women's disease in China. We're the only country in the world where more women commit suicide than men. You can't take the blame for this." She paused. "Not all of it."
+
+"That's not all," the girl said, all the anger gone out of her voice now, nothing left behind but distilled despair.
+
+"Of course not," Jie said. "You still owe for this month. And next month, and the month after."
+
+"My friend, the one who brought me into this, she knows... /{things}/... about me. The kind of things I knew about my friends. Things that could cost me my job, my home, my boyfriend..."
+
+"Of course. That's how cuanxiao works." Lu had heard the term before. "Network sales," is what it meant. There was always someone trying to sell you something as part of a cuanxiao scheme. He used to laugh at it. Now it seemed a lot more serious. "And somewhere, upline from here, there's someone else in the cuanxiao, who has something on her. And there are preachers who can convince you that you'll make a fortune with cuanxiao, and that you just need to inspire your family and friends."
+
+"You know him? Mr Lee. My friend took me to a meeting. Mr Lee seemed like he was on fire, and he made me so sure that I would become rich if only --"
+
+"I don't know Mr Lee. But there are hundreds of Mr Lees in Guandong province. You know what we call them? Pharoahs, like the Egyptian kings they buried in pyramids. That's because they sit on top of a pyramid of fools like you. Beneath the pharoah, there's a pair of downliners, and beneath them, two pairs, and beneath them, two more pairs, and so on, all passing money up the power to some feudal idiot from the countryside who knows how to talk a good line and has never worked a day in his life. Did you ever study math?"
+
+"I got a gold medal in our canton's Math Olympiad!"
+
+"That's very good! Math is useful in this world. Let's do a little math. If each level of the pyramid has double the number of members of the previous level, how many members are there on the 10th level of the pyramid?"
+
+"What? Oh. Um. 2 to the 10. That's --" /{1024}/ Lu thought to himself. "1024, right?"
+
+"Exactly. How many on the 30th level?"
+
+"Um..."
+
+Lu pulled out his phone, used the calculator, did some figuring.
+
+"Um...."
+
+"Oh, just guess."
+
+"It's big. A hundred thousand? No! About five hundred thousand."
+
+"You should give your medal back, sister. It's over a billion." Jie tapped some numbers into her keyboard. "1,073,741,824 to be precise. There's 1.6 billion people in China. Your herb salespeople were supposed to recruit new downliners every two weeks. At that rate --" She typed some more. "It would be just over a year before every person in China was working in your pyramid, even the tiny babies and the oldest grannies."
+
+"Oh."
+
+"You know about network selling, you must have. What year are you?" Meaning, how many years since you left the village?
+
+"Four," the girl admitted. "I did know it. Of course. But I thought this was different. I thought because there was a real product and because it was only two people at a time --"
+
+"I don't think you thought about any of that, sister. I think you thought about having a big apartment and a lot of money. Isn't that right?"
+
+"There was money, though! It was working for weeks! My friend had made so much --"
+
+"What level of the pyramid was she on? 10? 20? When you're stealing from the new people to pay the old people, it's a good deal for the old people. Not so good for the new people. People like you or your downliners."
+
+"I'm a fool," the girl said. "I'm a monster! I destroyed my friends' lives!" She was sobbing now, screaming out the confession for millions of people to hear.
+
+"It's true," Jie said, mildly. "You're a fool and a monster, just like thousands of other people. Now what are you going to do about it?"
+
+"/{What can I do?}/"
+
+"You can stop snivelling and pull yourself together. Your friend, the one who recruited you? Someone's holding something over her, the way that she was holding something over you. Sit down with her, and do whatever it takes to get her out. The most evil thing about these pyramids is that they turn friend against friend, make us betray the people we love to keep from being betrayed ourselves. Even if you're one of the lucky few at the top who makes some money from it, you pay the price of your integrity, your friendships and your soul. The only way to win is not to play."
+
+"But --"
+
+"But, but, but! Listen, foolish girl! You called me tonight because your soul is stained with the evil that you did. Did you think I would just tell you that it's all right, you did what you had to do, no blame on you? No! You know me, I'm Jiandi. I don't grant absolution. I tell you what you must do to pay for your crimes. You don't get to confess, feel better and walk away. You have to do the hard work now -- you have to set things to right, help your friends, restore your integrity and conscience. Do you hear me?"
+
+"I hear you." Quiet, meek.
+
+"Say it louder." She snapped it like a general giving an order.
+
+"I hear you!"
+
+"LOUDER!"
+
+"I HEAR YOU!"
+
+"Good!" She laughed and rubbed at one ear. "I think they heard you in Macau! Good girl. Go and do right now!"
+
+And she clicked something and another ad rolled in Lu's headphones. He took them off, found that his eyes were moist with tears. "That poor girl," he said.
+
+"There's thousands more like her," Jie said. "It's a sickness, like gambling. It comes from not understanding numbers. They all win their little math medals, but they don't believe in the numbers. Now, you were about to tell me about some kind of reinforcement."
+
+"Intermittent reinforcement," he said. "My friend Matthew, he leads our guild, he told me about it. It comes from experiments with rats. Imagine that you have a rat who gets some food every time he pushes a lever. How often do you think he pushes the lever?"
+
+"As often as he's hungry, I suppose. I kept mice once -- they knew when it was time for food and they'd rush over to the corner of the cage that I dropped their seeds and cheese into."
+
+"Right. Now, what about a lever that gives food every fifth time they press the lever?"
+
+"I don't know -- less?"
+
+"About the same, actually, After a while, the rats figure out that they need five presses for a food pellet and every time they want feeding, they wander over and hit it five times. Now, what about a lever that gives food out at random? Sometimes one press, sometimes one hundred presses?"
+
+"They'd give up, right?"
+
+"Wrong! They press it like crazy, All day and all night. It's like someone who wins a little money in the lottery one week and then plays every week afterward, forever. The uncertainty drives them crazy, it's the most addictive system of all. Matthew says it's the most important part of game design -- one day you manage to kill a really hard NPC with a lucky swing, and it drops some incredibly epic item, and you make more money in ten seconds than you made all week, and you have to keep going back to that spot, looking for a monster like it, thinking it'll happen again."
+
+"But it's random, right?"
+
+"I'm not sure," he said. "Matthew says it is. I sometimes think that the game company deliberately messes up the odds so that when you're just about to quit, you get another jackpot." He shrugged. "That's what I'd do, anyway."
+
+"If it's random, it shouldn't make any difference what you do and where you play. If you flip a coin ten times and it comes up heads ten times in a row, you've got exactly the same chance of it coming up heads an eleventh time than if it had come up all tails, or half and half."
+
+"Matthew says stuff like that all the time. He says that although it may be unlikely that you'll get ten heads in a row, each flip has exactly the same chance."
+
+"Matthew sounds like he knows his math."
+
+"He does. You should meet him sometime." He swallowed. "If he ever gets out of jail, that is."
+
+"Oh, we'll have to do something about that."
+
+She handled six more calls, running the show for another two hours, breaking for commercials and promising all her listeners the most exciting event of their lifetime if they just hung in. At first, Lu listened attentively, but his head hurt and he was so tired, and eventually he slumped in his seat and dozed, drifting in and out of dreams as he listened to Jie berating the foolish factory girls of South China.
+
+He woke to a sprinkle of ice-water on his face, gasped and sat up, opening his eyes just in time to see Jie dancing back away from him, laughing, her face glowing with excitement. "I /{love}/ doing this show!" she said. "You're up next, handsome!"
+
+He looked at his phone and realized that he'd dozed for an hour more, and that it was well past supper time. His stomach rumbled. Jie had taken off her shoes and socks and unbuttoned the top two buttons on her red blouse. Her hair was down and her makeup was smudged. She looked like she was having the time of her life.
+
+"Wha?" his head throbbed and it tasted like something had used his mouth for a toilet.
+
+"Come /{on}/," she said, and moved close again, snapping his headphones on. "It's coming up on 8PM. This is when my listenership peaks. They're back from dinner, they're finished gossiping, and they're all sitting on their beds, tuning in on their computers and phones and radios. And I've been hyping you for /{hours}/. Every pretty girl in the Pearl River Delta is waiting to meet you, are you ready?"
+
+"I -- I --" He suddenly couldn't find his tongue. "Yes!" he managed.
+
+"Get your headset on," she called, dashing around to her side of the desk and pouncing on her seat. "We're live in 10, 9, 8..."
+
+He fumbled with his headset, swung the mic down, reached for the water glass and gulped down too much, choked, tried to keep it in, choked more, spilled water all down his front. Jie laughed aloud, gulping it down as she spoke into her mic.
+
+"We're back, we're back, we're back, and now sisters, I have the special surprise I've been promising you all night! A knight of the people, a hero of the factory, a killer who has hunted pirates in space and dragons in the hills, a professional gold-farmer named --" She broke off. "What name shall I call you by, hero?"
+
+"Oh!" He thought for a second. "Tank," he said. "It's the kind of player I am, the tank."
+
+"A tank!" She giggled. "That's just perfect. Oh, sisters, if only you could see this big, muscled tank I have sitting here in my studio. Let me tell you about Tank. I was watching a little video this afternoon, and like many of you, I found myself watching something amazing: dozens of boys, lined up outside an Internet cafe, blinking and pale as newborn mice in the daylight. It seemed that they were a different kind of factory boy, the legendary gold farmers of Shenzhen, and they were demanding a better job, better pay, better conditions, and an end to their vicious, greedy bosses. Does that sound familiar, sisters?
+
+"The police arrived, the dirty jingcha, with their helmets and clubs and gas, cowards with their faces hidden and their brutal weapons in hand to fight these boys who only wanted justice. But did the boys flee? No! Did they go back to their jobs and apologize to their bosses? No! The mouse army stood its ground, claimed their workplace as their rightful home, the place their work paid for. And what did the jingcha do? Tell me, Tank, what did they do?"
+
+Lu looked at her like she was crazy. She made urgent hand-gestures at him as the silence stretched. "I, that is, they beat us up!"
+
+"They certainly did! Sisters, download this video now, please! Watch as the jingcha charge the boys of Shenzhen, breaking their heads, gassing them, clubbing them. And now, focus on one brave lad off to the left, right at the 14:22 mark. Strong chin, wide eyes, a little freckles over his nose, hair in disarray. See him stand his ground through the charge with his comrades by his side? See the jingcha with his club who comes upon the boy from behind and hits him in the shoulder, knocking him down? See the club come up again and land on the poor boy's head, the blood that flies from the wound?
+
+"That, sisters, is Tank, the boy sitting across from me, bloodied but unbowed, brave and strong, standing up for the rights of workers --" She dissolved into giggles. Lu giggled too, he couldn't help it. "Oh, sorry, sorry. Look, he's a very nice boy, and not bad to look at, and the jingcha laid into his head and shoulder like they were tenderizing a steak, and all he was doing was insisting that he had the right to work like a person and not an animal. And he's not alone. They call it 'The People's Republic of China,' but the people don't get any say in the way it's run. It's all corruption and exploitation.
+
+"I thought the video was amazing, a real inspiration. And then I saw him, our Tank, wandering dazed and bloody through --" she broke off. "Through a location I will not disclose, so that the jingcha won't know which video footage they need to review. I saw him and I told him I wanted to introduce him to you, my friends, and then he told me the most amazing story I've heard, and you /{know}/ I hear a lot of amazing stories here every night. A story about a global movement to improve the lot of workers everywhere, and I hope that's the story he'll tell us tonight. So, Tank, darling, start with your injuries. Could you describe them to our friends out there?"
+
+And Lu did, and then he found himself going from there into the story of how he came to be a gold farmer, what life was like for him, the stories Matthew had told him about how Boss Wing had forced him and his friends to go back to work in his factory, talking and talking until the water was gone and his mouth was dry, and mercifully, she called for another commercial.
+
+He sagged into his chair while she got him some more water. "You should see the chat rooms," she said. "They're all in love with you, 'Tank'. The way you rescued those girls' belongings in Shilong New Town! You're their hero. There are dozens of them who claim that they were there on that day, that they saw you climbing the fence. Listen to this, 'His muscles rippled like iron bands as he clambered up the fence like a mighty jungle creature...'" He snorted water up his sinuses, and Jie gave his bicep a squeeze. "You need to work out some more, Jungle Creature, your muscles have gone all soft!"
+
+"How do you have message boards? Don't they block them?"
+
+"Oh, that's easy," she said. "We just pick a random blog out there on the net, usually one that no one has posted to in a year or two, and we take over the comment board on one of its posts. Once they block it -- or the server crashes -- we switch to another one. It's easy -- and fun!"
+
+He laughed and shook his head, which set his headache going again. He winced and squeezed his head between his hands. "Sheer genius!"
+
+Now the commercial was ending, and they both sat down quickly in their chairs and swung their mics into place. Lu was getting good at this now, the talk coming to him the way it did when he was chatting with his guildies. He'd always been the storyteller of the bunch.
+
+And the story went on -- he told of how the Webblies had come to him and his guildies in game, had talked to them about the need for solidarity and mutual aid to protect themselves from bosses, from players who hunted gold-farmers, from the game company.
+
+"They want to unite Chinese workers," Jie said, nodding sagely.
+
+"No!" He surprised himself with his vehemence. "Uniting Chinese workers would be useless. With gold farming, the work can just move to Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, India -- anywhere workers aren't organized. It's the same with all work now -- your job can move in no time at all to anywhere you can build a factory and dock a container ship. There's no such thing as 'Chinese' workers anymore. Just workers! And so the Webblies organize all of us, everywhere!"
+
+"That's a lot of workers," she said. "How many have you got?"
+
+He hung his head. "Jiandi," he said. "We can all see the counter, and we all cheer when it goes up by a few hundred, but we're a long way off."
+
+"Oh, Tank," she said. "Don't be discouraged. Tens of thousands of people! That's fantastic -- and I'm sure we can get a few members for you. How can my listeners join up?"
+
+"Eh? Oh!" He struggled to remember the procedure for this. "You need to get at least 50 percent of your co-workers to agree to sign up, and then we certify the union for your whole factory."
+
+"Ay-yah! 50 percent! The big factories have 50,000 workers! How do you do that?"
+
+He shrugged. "I'm not sure," he said. "We've been mostly signing up small game-factories, there's not many bigger than 200 workers. It has to be possible, though. Trade unions all over the world have organized factories of every size." He swallowed, understanding how lame he sounded. "Look, this is usually Matthew's side of things. He understands all of it. I'm just the tank, you understand? I stand in the front and soak up all the damage. And you can't talk to Matthew because he's in jail."
+
+"Ah yes, jail. Tell us about what happened today."
+
+So he told them the story of the battle, all those millions of girls out there in the towns of Guangdong, and he found himself...transported. Taken away back to the cafe, the shouting, the police and the screams, his voice drifting to his ears from a long way off through the remembered shouts in his ears. When he stopped, he snapped back to reality and found Jie staring at him with wet eyes and parted lips. He looked at his phone. It was nearly midnight.
+
+He shrugged, dry mouthed. "I -- Well, that's it, I suppose."
+
+"Wow," Jie breathed, and cued up another commercial. "Are you OK?"
+
+"My head feels like it's being crushed between two heavy rocks," he said. He shifted his butt in his chair and winced. "And my shoulder's on fire."
+
+"I've really kept you up," she said. "We're almost done here, though. You're a really tough bastard, you know that?"
+
+He didn't feel tough. Truth be told, he felt pretty terrible about the fact that he'd gotten away while his guildies had all been locked up. Logically he knew that they wouldn't benefit from him being jailed alongside of them, but that was logic, not feelings.
+
+"OK," she said. "We're back. What a /{story}/! Sisters, didn't I tell you I had something special tonight? Alas, it's nearly time to go -- we all need some sleep before we go back to work in the morning, don't we? Just one more thing: /{what are we going to do about this?}/"
+
+Suddenly, she wasn't sleepy and soothing. Her eyes were wide, and she was gripping the edge of her desk tightly. "We come here from our villages looking to do an honest job for decent pay so that we can help our families, so that we can live and survive. What do we get? Slimy perverts who screw us on the job and off! Bastard criminals who destroy anyone who challenges their rackets! Cops who beat us and put us in jail if we dare to challenge the status quo!"
+
+"Sisters, it /{can't go on}/! Tank here said there's no such thing as a Chinese worker anymore, just a worker. I hadn't heard of these Webblies of his before tonight, and I don't know if they're any better than your boss or the thief running the network sales rip-off next door, and I don't care. If there are workers around the world organizing for a better deal, I want to be a part of it, and so do you!
+
+"I'll tell you what's going to happen next. Tank and I are going to find the Webblies and we're going to plan something big. Something /{huge}/! I don't know what it will be, but it's going to change things. There's /{millions}/ of us! Anything we do is /{big}/.
+
+"I have a confession to make." Her voice got quieter. "A sin to confess. I do this show because it makes me money. A lot of money. I have to spend a lot to stay ahead of the zengfu, but there's plenty left over. More than you make, I have to confess. It's been a long time since I was as poor as a factory girl. I'm practically rich. Not boss-rich, but rich, you understand?
+
+"But I'm with you. I didn't start this show to get rich. I started it because I was a factory girl and I cared about my sisters. We've been coming to Guangdong Province since Deng Xiaoping changed the rules and made the factories here grow. It's been generations, sisters, and we come, we poor mice from the country, and we are ground up by the factories we slave in. For every Yuan we send home, our bosses put a hundred in their pockets. And when we're done, then what? We become one of the old grannies begging by the road.
+
+"So listen in tomorrow. We're going to find out more about these Webblies, we're going to make a plan, and we're going to bring it to you. In the meantime, don't take any crap off your bosses. Don't let the cops push you or your sisters and brothers around. And be good to each other -- we're all on the same side."
+
+She clicked her mouse and flipped the lid down on her laptop.
+
+"Whew!" she said. "What a /{night}/!"
+
+"Is your show like this every night?"
+
+"Not this good, Tank. You certainly improved things. I'm glad I kidnapped you from the train station."
+
+"I am too," he said. He was so tired. "I guess I'll call you tomorrow about the next show? Maybe we could meet in the morning and try to reach the Webblies or find a way to try to call my guildies and see if they're all still in jail?"
+
+"Call me? Don't be stupid, Tank. I'm not letting you out of my sight."
+
+"It's OK," he said. "I can find somewhere to sleep." When he'd first arrived in Shenzhen, he'd spent a couple nights sleeping in parks. He could do that again. It wasn't so bad, if it didn't rain in the night. Had there been clouds that day? He couldn't remember.
+
+"You certainly can -- right through that doorway, right there." She pointed to the bedroom.
+
+He was suddenly wide awake. "Oh, I couldn't --"
+
+"Shut up and go to bed. You've got a head injury, stupid. And you've just given me hours of great radio show. So you need it and you've earned it. Bed. Now."
+
+He was too tired to argue. He stumbled a little on the way to bed, and she swept the clothes and toys and handbags from the bed onto the floor just ahead of him. She pulled the sheet over him and kissed him on the forehead as he settled in. "Sleep, Tank," she whispered in his ear.
+
+He wondered dimly where she would sleep, as she left the room and he heard her typing on her computer again. He fell asleep with the sound of the keys in his ears.
+
+He barely woke when she slid under the covers with him, snuggled up to him and began to snore softly in his ear.
+
+But he was wide awake an hour later when ten police cars pulled up out front of Houhai's buildings, sirens blaring, and a helicopter spotlight bathed the entire building in light as white as daylight. She went rigid beside him under the covers and then practically levitated out of the bed.
+
+"Twenty seconds," she barked. "Shoes, your phone, anything else you need. We won't come back here."
+
+Lu felt obscurely proud of how calm he felt as he stood up and, in an unhurried, calm fashion, picked up his shoes -- factory workers' tennis shoes, cheap and ubiquitous -- and laced them up, then pulled on his jacket, then moved efficiently into the living room, where Jie was hosing solvent over all the flat surfaces in the room. The smell was as sharp as his headache, and intensified it.
+
+She nodded once at him, and then nodded at another pressure-bottle of solvent and said, "You do the bathroom and the bedroom." He did, working quickly. He guessed that this would wipe away anything like a fingerprint or a distinctive kind of dirt. He was done in a minute, or maybe, less, and she was at his elbow with a ziploc baggie full of dust. "Vacuumed out of the seas of the Hong Kong-Shenzhen train," she said. "Skin cells from a good million people. Spread it evenly, please. Quickly now."
+
+The dust got up his nose and made him sneeze, and sunk into the creases of his palms, and it was all a little icky, but his head was clear and full of the sirens and the helicopter's thunder. As he scattered the genetic material throughout, he watched Jie popping the drive out of her computer and dropping the slender stick down her cleavage, and /{that}/ finally broke through his cool. Suddenly, he realized that he'd spent the night sleeping next to this beautiful girl, and he hadn't even /{kissed}/ her, much less touched those mysterious and intriguing breasts that now warmly embraced an extremely compromising piece of storage media, a sliver of magnetic media that could put them both in jail forever.
+
+She looked around and ticked off a mental checklist on her finger. Then she snapped a decisive nod and said, "All right, let's go." She led him out into the corridor, which was brightly lit and empty, leaving him feeling very exposed. She pulled a short prybar out of her purse and expertly pried open the steel door on a fuse-panel by the elevators, revealing neat rows of black plastic breaker switches. She fished in her handbag again and came out with a disposable butane lighter, which she lit, applying the flame to a little twist of white vinyl or shiny paper protruding like a pull-tab from an unobtrusive seam in the panel. It sizzled and flashed and a twist of black smoke rose from it and then the paper burned away, the spark disappearing into the panel.
+
+A second later, the entire panel-face erupted in a shower of sparks, smoke and flame. Jie regarded it with satisfaction as black smoke poured out of the plate. Then all the lights went out and the smoke alarms began to toll, a bone-deep dee-dah dee-dah that drowned out the helicopter, the sirens.
+
+She clicked a little red LED light to life and it bathed her face in demonic light. She looked very satisfied with herself. It made Lu feel calm.
+
+"Now what?" he said.
+
+"Now we stroll out with everyone else who'se running away from the fire alarms."
+
+All through the building, doors were opening, bleary families were emerging, and smoke was billowing, black and acrid. They headed for the staircase, just behind the Bound-Foot Granny who they'd met the day before. In the stairwell, they met hundreds, then thousands more refugees from the building, all carrying armloads of precious possessions, babies, elderly family members.
+
+At the bottom, the police tried to corral them into an orderly group in front of the building, but there were too many people, too much confusion. In the end, it was simple to slip through the police lines and mingle with the crowd of gawkers from nearby buildings who'd turned out to watch.
+
+#
+
+1~ scene # ~#
+
+_1 /{ This scene is dedicated to Vancouver's multilingual Sophia Books, a diverse and exciting store filled with the best of the strange and exciting pop culture worlds of many lands. Sophia was around the corner from my hotel when I went to Van to give a talk at Simon Fraser University, and the Sophia folks emailed me in advance to ask me to drop in and sign their stock while I was in the neighborhood. When I got there, I discovered a treasure-trove of never-before-seen works in a dizzying array of languages, from graphic novels to thick academic treatises, presided over by good-natured (even slapstick) staff who so palpably enjoyed their jobs that it spread to every customer who stepped through the door. }/
+
+_1 {~^ Sophia Books }http://www.sophiabooks.com/: 450 West Hastings St., Vancouver, BC Canada V6B1L1 +1 604 684 0484
+
+Whether you're a revolutionary, a factory owner, or a little-league hockey organizer, there's one factor you can't afford to ignore: the CoaseCost.
+
+Ronald Coase was an American economist who changed everything with a paper he published in 1937 called "The Theory of the Firm." Coase's paper argued that the real business of /{any}/ organization was getting people organized. A religion is a system for organizing people to pray and give money to build churches and pay priests or ministers or rabbis; a shoe factory is a system for organizing people to make shoes. A revolutionary conspiracy is a system for organizing people to overthrow the government.
+
+Organizing is a kind of tax on human activity. For every minute you spend /{doing stuff}/, you have to spend a few seconds making sure that you're not getting ahead or behind or to one side of the other people you're doing stuff with. The seconds you tithe to an organization is the CoaseCost, the tax on your work that you pay for the fact that we're human beings and not ants or bees or some other species that manages to all march in unison by sheer instinct.
+
+Oh, you can beat the CoaseCost: just stick to doing projects that you don't need anyone else's help with. Like, um...Tying your shoes? (Nope, not unless you're braiding your own shoelaces). Toasting your own sandwich (not unless you gathered the wood for the fire and the wheat for the bread and the milk for the cheese on your own).
+
+The fact is, everything you do is collaborative -- somewhere out there, someone else had a hand in it. And part of the cost of what you're doing is spent on making sure that you're coordinating right, that the cheese gets to your fridge and that the electricity hums through its wires.
+
+You can't eliminate Coase costs, but you can lower it. There's two ways of doing this: get better organizational techniques (say, "double-entry book-keeping," an Earth-shattering 13th-century invention that is at the heart of every money-making organization in the world, from churches to corporations to governments), or get better technology.
+
+Take going out to the movies. It's Friday night, and you're thinking of seeing a movie, but you don't want to go alone. Imagine that the year was 1950 -- how would you solve this problem?
+
+Well, you'd have to find a newspaper and see what's playing. Then you'd have to call all your friends' houses (no cellular phones, remember!) and leave messages for them. Then you'd have to wait for some or all of them to call you back and report on their movie preferences. Then you'd have to call them back in ones and twos and see if you could convince a critical mass of them to see the same movie. Then you'd have to get to the theater and locate each other and hope that the show wasn't sold out.
+
+How much does this cost? Well, first, let's see how much the movie is worth: one way to do that is to look at how much someone would have to pay you to convince you to give up on going to the movies. Another is to raise the price of the tickets steadily until you decide not to see a movie after all.
+
+Once you have that number, you can calculate your CoaseCost: you could ask how much it would cost you to pay someone else to make the arrangements for you, or how much you could earn at an after-school job if you weren't playing phone tag with your friends.
+
+You end up with an equation that looks like this:
+
+[Value of the movie] - [Cost of getting your friends together to see it] = [Net value of an evening out]
+
+That's why you'll do something less fun (stay in and watch TV) but simple, rather than going out and doing something more fun but more complicated. It's not that movies aren't fun -- but if it's too much of a pain in the ass to get your friends out to see them, then the number of movies you go to see goes way down.
+
+Now think of an evening out at the movies these days. It's 6:45PM on a Friday night and the movies are going to all start in the next 20-50 minutes. You pull out your phone and google the listings, sorted by proximity to you. Then you send out a broadcast text-message to your friends -- if your phone's very smart, you can send it to just those friends who are in the neighborhood -- listing the movies and the films. They reply-all to one another, and after a couple volleys, you've found a bunch of people to see a flick with. You buy your tickets on the phone.
+
+But then you get there and discover that the crowds are so huge you can't find each other. So you call one another and arrange to meet by the snack bar and moments later, you're in your seats, eating popcorn.
+
+So what? Why should anyone care how much it costs to get stuff done? Because the CoaseCost is the price of being /{superhuman}/.
+
+Back in the old days -- the very, very old days -- your ancestors were solitary monkeys. They worked in singles or couples to do everything a monkey needed, from gathering food to taking care of kids to watching for predators to building nests. This had its limitations: if you're babysitting the kids, you can't gather food. If you're gathering food, you might miss the tiger -- and lose the kids.
+
+Enter the tribe: a group of monkeys that work together, dividing up the labor. Now they're not just solitary monkeys, they're groups of monkeys, and they can do more than a single monkey could do. They have transcended monkeyness. They are /{supermonkeys}/.
+
+Being a supermonkey isn't easy. If you're an individual supermonkey, there are two ways to prosper: you can play along with all your monkey pals to get the kids fed and keep an eye out for tigers, or you can hide in the bushes and nap, pretending to work, only showing up at mealtimes.
+
+From an individual perspective, it makes sense to be the lazy-jerk-monkey. In a big tribe of monkeys, one or two goof-offs aren't going to bankrupt the group. If you can get away with napping instead of working, and still get fed, why not do it?
+
+But if /{everyone}/ does it, so much for supermonkeys. Now no one's getting the fruit, no one's taking care of the kids, and damn, I thought /{you}/ were looking out for the tigers! Too many lazy monkeys plus tigers equals lunch.
+
+So monkeys -- and their hairless descendants like you -- need some specialized hardware to detect cheaters and punish them before the idea catches on and the tigers show up. That specialized hardware is a layer of tissue wrapped around the top of your brain called the neo-cortex -- the "new bark." The neo-cortex is in charge of keeping track of the monkeys. It's the part of your brain that organizes people, checks in on them, falls in love with them, establishes enmity with them. It's the part of your brain that gets thoroughly lit up when you play with Facebook or other social networking sites, and it's the part of your brain that houses the local copies of the people in your life. It's where the voice of your mother telling you to brush your teeth emanates from.
+
+The neocortex is the CoaseCost as applied to the brain. Every sip of air you breathe, every calorie you ingest, every lubdub of your heart goes to feed this new bark that keeps track of the other people in your group and what they're doing, whether they're in line or off the reservation.
+
+The CoaseCost is the limit of your ability to be superhuman. If the CoaseCost of some activity is lower than the value that you'd get out of it, you can get some friends together and /{do it}/, transcend the limitations that nature has set on lone hairless monkeys and /{become a superhuman}/.
+
+So it follows that high Coase costs make you less powerful and low Coase costs make you more powerful. What's more, big institutions with a lot of money and power can overcome high Coase costs: a government can put 10,000 soldiers onto the battlefield with tanks and food and medics; you and your buddies cannot. So high Coase costs can limit /{your}/ ability to be superhuman while leaving the rich and powerful in possession of super-powers that you could never attain.
+
+And that's the real reason the powerful fear open systems and networks. If anyone can set up a free voicecall to anyone else in the world, using the net, then we can all communicate with the same ease that's standard for the high and mighty. If anyone can create and sell virtual wealth in a game, then we're all in the same economic shoes as the multinational megacorps that start the games.
+
+And if any worker, anywhere, can communicate with any other worker, anywhere, for free, instantaneously, without her boss's permission, then, brother, look out, because the CoaseCost of demanding better pay, better working conditions and a slice of the pie just got a /{lot}/ cheaper. And the people who have the power aren't going to sit still and let a bunch of grunts take it away from them.
+
+#
+
+1~ scene # ~#
+
+_1 /{ This scene is dedicated to the MIT Press Bookshop, a store I've visited on every single trip to Boston over the past ten years. MIT, of course, is one of the legendary origin nodes for global nerd culture, and the campus bookstore lives up to the incredible expectations I had when I first set foot in it. In addition to the wonderful titles published by the MIT press, the bookshop is a tour through the most exciting high-tech publications in the world, from hacker zines like 2600 to fat academic anthologies on video-game design. This is one of those stores where I have to ask them to ship my purchases home because they don't fit in my suitcase. }/
+
+_1 {~^ MIT Press Bookstore }http://web.mit.edu/bookstore/www/: Building E38, 77 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA USA 02139-4307 +1 617 253 5249
+
+Coca Cola Games Command Central had been designed by one of the world's leading film-set designers. The brief had called for a room that looked like you could use it to run an evil empire, launch an intergalactic explorer vessel, or command a high-tech mercenary army. Everything was curved and brushed steel and spotlit and what wasn't chrome was black, except for accents of cracked, worn-out black leather harvested from vintage motorcycle jackets. There were screens everywhere, built into the tables, rolled up in the ceiling or floor, even one on the back of the door. Any wall could be drawn on with special pens that used RFIDs and accelerometers to track their motions and transmit them to a computer that recorded it all and splashed it across wireless multitouch screens that were velcroed up all around the room.
+
+Slick photos of Command Central graced the Coca Cola Games recruiting site and featured in a series of vanity documentaries CCG had commissioned about itself, looking designer-fresh, filled with fit, intense, laughing young people in smart clothes doing intelligent things.
+
+Coca Cola Games Command Central was a lie.
+
+Ten seconds after the game-runners moved into Command Central, every multitouch had been broken or stolen. The recessed terminals set into the tables were obsolete before they were installed and now they suffered an ignominious fate: serving as stands for cutting-edge laptops equipped with graphics cards that ran so hot, their fans sounded like jet-engines.
+
+Fifteen seconds later, every flat surface had been covered with junk-food wrappers, pizza boxes, energy-drink cans, vintage sci-fi novels, used kleenexes, origami orc-helmets folded out of post-it notes, snappy hats, and the infinitely varied junky licensed crap that CCG made from the game, from Pez dispensers to bicycle valve-caps to trading cards to flick-knives.
+
+Twenty seconds after that, the room acquired the game-runner funk, a heady mix of pizza-grease strained through armpit pores, cheap cologne, unwashed hair, vintage Japanese denim, and motor oil.
+
+And now the sleek supergenius lair had become the exclusive meeting-cave for a tribe of savage, hyper-competitive, extremely well-paid game-runners, who holed up in there, gnashing their teeth and shouting at each other for every hour that God sent. No cleaner would enter the room, and even the personal assistants would only go so far as the doorway, where they plaintively called out their bosses' names and dodged the disgusting food-wrappers that were hurled at their heads by the game-runners, who did not take kindly to having their work interrupted.
+
+Connor Prikkel had found His People. Technically he was a vice-president, but no one reported to him, except for a PA whose job it was to fish him out of Command Central a couple times a month, steam-clean him in the corporate gym, stick him in the corporate jet, and fire him into crowds of players and press around the world to explain -- with a superior smirk -- just how Coca Cola Games managed to oversee three of the twenty largest economies in the world.
+
+The rest of the time, Connor's job was to work on his fingerspitzengefuhl. That was a useful word. It was a German word, of course. The Germans had words for /{everything}/, created by the simple expedient of bashing as many smaller words as you needed together until you got one monster mouth-murderer like fingerspitzengefuhl that exactly and precisely conveyed something no other language could even get close to.
+
+Fingerspitzengefuhl means "fingertip feel" -- that feeling you get when you've got the world resting against the thick cushion of nerve-endings on the tips of your fingers. That feeling when you've got a basketball held lightly in your hands, and you know precisely where the next bounce will take it when you let it go. That feeling you get when you're holding onto a baby and you can feel whether she's falling asleep now, or waking up. That feeling you get when your hands are resting lightly on the handlebars of your bike, bouncing down a steep hillside, gentle pressure on the brakes, riding the razor-edged line between doing an end-over and reaching the bottom safely.
+
+Proprioception is your ability to sense where your body is in space relative to everything else. It's a sixth sense, and you don't even know you have it until you lose it -- like when you intertwine your fingers and thread your hands through your arms and find that you wiggle your left finger when you mean to move your right; or when you step on a ghost step at the top of a staircase and your foot lands on nothing.
+
+Fingerspitzengefuhl is proprioception for the world, an extension of your sixth sense into everything around you. You have fingerspitzengefuhl when you can tell, just by the way the air feels, that your class is in a bad mood, or that your teammate is upcourt and waiting for you to pass the ball.
+
+Connor's fingerspitzengefuhl meant that he could feel /{everything}/ that was happening in the games he ran. He could tell when there was a run on gold in Svartalfaheim Warriors, or when Zombie Mecha's credits take a dive. He could tell when there was a huge raiding guild making a run at Odin's Fortress, six hundred humans embodied in six hundred avs, coordinated by generals and captains and lieutenants. He could tell when there was a traffic jam on the Brooklyn Bridge in Zombie Mecha as too many ronin tried to enter Manhattan to clear out the Flatiron Building and complete the Publishing Quest.
+
+All this knowledge came to him through his ever-rotating, ever-changing feeds -- charts, chat-transcripts, server logs, bars representing load and memory and failover and rate of subscriber churn and every other bit of changing information from in the game. They flickered past in a colorful roll, on the display of his monster widescreen laptop, opacity dialled down to 10 percent in the windows that sat over his playscreens in which he ran four avs in both games.
+
+Every gamerunner had a different way of attaining fingerspitzengefuhl, as personal as the thought you follow to go to sleep or the reason you fall in love. Some like a /{lot}/ of screens -- four or five. Some listened to a lot of read-aloud text and eavesdropped gamechat. Some only watched charts, some only logs, some only game-screens. Coca Cola Games had hired some industrial psychologists to try to come and unpick the game-runners' methods, try to create a system for reproducing and refining it. They'd lasted a day before being tossed out of Command Central amid a torrent of abuse and profanities.
+
+The game-runners didn't want to be systematized. They didn't want to be studied. To be a game-runner was to attain fingerspitzengefuhl and vice-versa. Game-runners didn't need shrinks to tell them when they had fingerspitzengefuhl. When you had fingerspitzengefuhl, you fell into a warm bath, a kind of hyper-alert coma, in which knowledge flowed in and out of every orifice at maximum speed. Fingerspitzengefuhl needed coffee and energy drinks, junk food and loud goddamned music, grunts of your co-workers. Fingerspitzengefuhl didn't need industrial psychology.
+
+Connor's fingerspitzengefuhl was the best. It guided the unconscious dance of his fingers on his laptop, guided him to eavesdrop on the right conversations, to monitor the right action, to spot the Webblies' fight with the Pinkertons as it began. He grunted that special grunt that alerted the rest of his tribe to danger, and stabbed at his screen with a fat finger greased with pizza-oil. The knowledge rippled through the room like a wave, bellies and chins wobbling as the whole tribe tuned into the fight.
+
+"We should pull the plug on this," said Fairfax, a designer who'd worked her way up to Command Central.
+
+"Forget it," said Kaden. "Twenty thousand gold on the Webblies."
+
+"Two-to-one?" said Palmer, the number two economist, who had earned his PhD but hadn't invented the Prikkel Equations.
+
+"No bets," Connor said. "Just watch the play."
+
+"You're such a combat freak," said Kaden. "You chose the wrong specialty. You should have been a military strategist."
+
+"Bad pay, stupid clothes, and you have to work for the government," Connor snapped, noting the stiffened spines of Kaden and Bill, both recruited out of the Pentagon's anti-terror Delta Force command to help analyze the big guilds' command-structures and figure out how to get more money out of them.
+
+"Look at 'em go!" Fairfax said. Connor had a lot of time for her, even though they often disagreed. She'd run big teams of level-designers, graphic artists, AI specialists, programmers, the whole thing, and she had a good top-down and bottom-up view of things.
+
+"They're good," Connor said. He clicked a little and colored each of the avs with a national flag representing the country the IP address of the player was registered to. "And it's a goddamned United Nations of players, look at that. What language are they speaking?" He clicked some more and took over the room's speakers, cleverly recessed into walls and floors, now buried under mountains of pizza-cardboard. The room filled with a gabble of heavily accented English mixed with Mandarin. His ear picked out Indian accents, Chinese, something else -- Malay? Indonesian? There were players from the whole Malay Peninsula in that mob.
+
+"And look at the Pinkertons," Fairfax said. She had a background in programming artificial intelligences, a trade that had changed an awful lot since the Mechanical Turks stepped in to backstop the AIs in game. But she had invented the idea of giving the game's soundtrack its own AI, capable of upping the drama-quotient in the music when momentous things were afoot, and that holistic view of gameplay had landed her a seat in Command Central. She was the one who ordered out for health food and giant salads instead of burgers by the sack and pints of icecream. "They're nearly in the same distribution as the Webblies! Look at this --" she zoomed in on a scrolling list of IP addresses, then pulled up another table, fiddled with their sort order. "Look! These Pinkertons are fighting from a netblock that's within 200 meters of these Webblies! They're neighbors! Oh, this is /{hella weird}/."
+
+It was true. Connor banged out a quick script to find and pair any players who were physically proximate to one another and to try for maps where they were available. Mostly they weren't -- he'd tried tracking down these rats before, tried to see where they lived, but ended up with a dead end. They didn't live on roads -- they lived in illegal squats, shantytowns in the world's slumzones. The best he could do was month-old sat photos of these mazes, revealing mountains of smoldering garbage, toxic open sewers, livestock pens... Connor felt like he should visit one of these places, fly a team of rats out to Command Central in the company jet, stick them in a lab and study them and learn how to exterminate them.
+
+Because there was one chart Connor didn't need to load, the chart showing overall stability of the game economy: his fingerspitzengefuhl was filling him in just fine. The game economy was /{hosed}/.
+
+"OK people, there's plenty to do here. No one else respawns on that shard. Create a new instance for the Caverns so any real players who hit them don't have to wade through that mess. Get every one of those accounts and freeze their assets." Esteban, who headed up customer service, groaned.
+
+"You /{know}/ they're mostly hacked," he said. "There's hundreds of them! We're going to be untangling the assets for /{months}/."
+
+Connor knew it. The legit players whose accounts had been stolen by the warring clans of third-world rip-off artists didn't deserve to have their assets frozen. What's more, there'd be plenty of them whose assets were part of a larger guild bank that might have the wealth of dozens or hundreds of players. Of course the Bad Guys knew this and depended on it, knew it would make the game-runners cautious and slow when it came time to shut down the accounts they were using to smuggle around their illicit wealth.
+
+He made eye-contact with Bill, head of security. They'd been going back and forth over whether it would be worth sucking some of Connor's budget into the security department to develop some forensic software that would ferret out the transaction histories of stolen accounts and figure out what assets the original player legitimately owned and where the dirty money ended up after it left his account. Connor hated to part with budget, especially when it involved Bill, who was a pompous ass who liked to act like he was some kind of super-cybercop rather than a glorified systems administrator.
+
+But sometimes you had to bite the bullet. "We'll handle it," he said. "Right, Bill?" The head of security nodded, and began to pound at his keyboard, no doubt hiring a bunch of his old hacker buddies to come on board for top dollar and write the code.
+
+"Yeah," Bill added. "Don't worry about it, we've got it covered."
+
+One by one, the combatants vanished as their accounts were shut down and frozen out. Some of the soldiers reappeared in the new instance -- a parallel universe containing an identical dungeon, but none of the same players -- using new avs, but they could tell who they were because they originated from the same IP addresses as the kicked accounts. "This is great," Connor said. "If they keep this up, we'll have all their accounts nuked by the end of the day."
+
+But the Pinkertons and Webblies must have had the same thought, because the logins dropped off to near-zero, then zero. The screens shifted, the eating sounds began anew, and Connor went back to his economic charts. As he'd felt, the price of assets, currency and derivatives had gone bonkers. The market somehow knew when there was trouble in Gold Farmer Land, and began to see-saw with the expectation that the price of goods was about to change.
+
+Connor's own holdings had dropped by 18 percent in 25 minutes, costing him a cool $321,498.18.
+
+He popped open a chat to Bill.
+
+&gt; This stuff you're commissioning with my budget
+
+&gt; Yeah?
+
+&gt; I want to use it to run every gold farmer to ground and throw him out of the game
+
+&gt; What?
+
+&gt; It'll be there, in the transaction history. Some kind of fingerprint in play-style and spending that'll let us auto-detect farmers and toss them out. We're going to have a perfect, controlled, farmer-free economy. The first of its kind
+
+&gt; Connor every complex ecosystem has parasites.
+
+&gt; Not this one
+
+&gt; It won't work
+
+&gt; Wanna bet? Let's make it $10K. I'll give you 2-1
+
+#
+
+1~ scene # ~#
+
+_1 /{ This scene is dedicated to The Tattered Cover, Denver's legendary independent bookstore. I happened upon The Tattered Cover quite by accident: Alice and I had just landed in Denver, coming in from London, and it was early and cold and we needed coffee. We drove in aimless rental-car circles, and that's when I spotted it, the Tattered Cover's sign. Something about it tingled in my hindbrain -- I knew I'd heard of this place. We pulled in (got a coffee) and stepped into the store -- a wonderland of dark wood, homey reading nooks, and miles and miles of bookshelves. }/
+
+_1 {~^ The Tattered Cover }http://www.tatteredcover.com/book/9780765322166 1628 16th St., Denver, CO USA 80202 +1 303 436 1070
+
+Ashok wove his pretty bike through the narrow alleys of Dharavi, his headlamp slicing through the night. Yasmin's mother would be rigid with worry and anger, and would probably beat her, but it was OK. She and Ashok had sat in that studio shed for hours, talking it through, getting meat on the bones of her idea, and he had left long, detailed messages for Big Sister Nor before getting them back on his bike.
+
+Yasmin tapped him on the shoulder at each junction, showing him which way to turn. Soon they were nearly at her family's house and shouted at him to stop, hollering through the helmet. He killed the engine and the headlight and her bum finally stopped vibrating, her legs complaining about the hours she'd spent gripping the bike with the insides of her thighs. She swung unsteadily off her bike and brought her hands up to her helmet.
+
+Her hands were on her helmet when she heard the voices.
+
+"Is that her?"
+
+"I can't tell."
+
+They were whispering loudly, and a trick of the grilles over the helmet's ear-coverings let her hear the sound as though it was originating from right beside her. She put a firm hand on Ashok's shoulder and squeezed.
+
+"It's her." The voice was Mala's, hard.
+
+Yasmin let go of Ashok's shoulder and brought her hand down to the cables tying the lathi to the bike, while her free hand moved to the helmet's visor, swinging it up. She'd repinned her hijab around her neck and now she was glad she had, as she had pretty good visibility. It had been a long time since she'd been in a physical fight, but she understood the principles of it well, knew her tactics.
+
+The lathi was really well anchored -- Ashok hadn't wanted it to go flying off while they were running down the motorway -- and now she brought her other hand down to work at it blind, keeping her eyes on the shadows around her, listening for the footsteps.
+
+"What about the man?"
+
+"Him too," Mala said.
+
+And then they charged, an army of them, coming from the shadows all around them. "GO!" she said to Ashok, trying to keep him from dismounting the bike, but he got to his feet, squared his shoulders, and faced away from her, to the soldiers who were charging him. A rock or lump of cement clanged off her helmet, making a sound like a cooking pot falling to the floor, and now she tugged as hard as she could at the lathi and at last it sprang free, the steel hooks on the tips of the bunjee cables whipping around and smacking painfully into her hands. She barely noticed, whirling with the two-meter stick held overhead like a cricket-bat.
+
+And pulled up short.
+
+The boy closest to her was Sushant. Sushant, who, that afternoon, had spoken of how he'd longed to join her cause. His face was a mask of terror in the weak light leaking out of the homes around them. The steel tip trembled over her shoulder as her wrists twitched. All she would need to do is unwind the swing, let the long pole and its steel end whistle through the air with all the whip-crack force penned up at the lathi's end and she would bash poor Sushant's head in.
+
+And why not? After all, that's what Mala's army was here for.
+
+All this thought in the blink of an eye, so fast she didn't even register that she'd thought it, but she did not swing the lathi through the air at Sushant's head. Instead, she swept it at his feet, pulling the swing so that it just knocked him backwards, flying into two more soldiers behind him, boys who had once taken orders from her.
+
+"Stand down!" she barked, in the voice of command, and swung the lathi back, sweeping it toward the army's feet like a broom. They took a giant step back in unison, eyes crazed and rolling in the weak light. Sushant was weeping. She'd heard bone break when the lathi's tip met his ankle. He was holding onto the shoulders of the two soldiers he'd knocked over, and they were struggling to keep him upright.
+
+No one said anything and there was just the collective breath of Dharavi, thousands and thousands of chests rising and falling in unison, breathing in each others' air, breathing in the stink of the tanners and the burning reek from the dye factories and the sting of the plastic smoke.
+
+Then Mala stepped forward. In her hand, she held -- what? A bottle?
+
+A bottle. With an oily rag hanging out of the end. A petrol bomb.
+
+"Mala!" she said, and she heard the shock in her own voice. "You'll burn the whole of Dharavi down!" It was the tone of voice you use when shouting into your headset at a guildie who was about to get the party killed by accidentally aggroing some giant boss. The tone that said, /{You're being an idiot, cut it out.}/
+
+It was the wrong tone to use with Mala. She stiffened up and her other hand worked at the wheel of a disposable lighter -- /{snzz}/ /{snzz}/.
+
+Again, she moved before she thought, two running steps while she brought the lathi up over her shoulder, feeling it thunk against something behind her as it sliced up, then slicing it back down again, in that savage, cutting arc, down at Mala's skinny legs, sweeping them with the whole force of her body, and Mala skipped backwards, away from the lathi, stumbled, went over backwards --
+
+-- and the lathi /{connected}/, a solid blow that made a sound like the butcher's knife parting a goat's head from its neck, and Mala's scream was so terrible that it actually brought people to their windows (normally a scream in the night would make them stay back from it). There was bone sticking out of her leg, glinting amid the blood that fountained from the wound.
+
+And still she had the petrol bomb, and still she had the lighter, and now the lighter was lit. Yasmin drew back her foot for a footballer's kick, knowing as she wound up that she could cripple Mala's hand with a good kick, ending her career as General Robotwallah.
+
+Afterwards, she remembered the voice that had chased itself around her head as she drew back for that kick:
+
+/{Do it, do it and end your troubles. Do it because she would do it to you. Do it because it will scare her army out of fighting you and the Webblies. Do it because she betrayed you. Do it because it will keep you safe.}/
+
+And she lowered her foot and instead /{leapt}/ on Mala, pinning her arms with her body. The lighter's flame licked at her arm, burning her, and she ground it out. She could feel Mala's breath, snorting and pained, on her throat. She grabbed Mala's left wrist, shook the hand that held the bomb, smashed it against the ground until it broke and spilled out the stinking petrol into the ditch that ran alongside the shacks. She stood up.
+
+Mala's face was ashen, even in the bad light. The blood smell and the petrol smell were everywhere.
+
+Yasmin looked to Ashok. "You need to take her to the hospital," she said.
+
+"Yes," he said. He was holding onto the side of his head, eye squeezed shut. "Yes, of course."
+
+"What happened to you?"
+
+He shrugged. "Got too close to your lathi," he said and tried for a brave smile. She remembered the /{thunk}/ as she'd drawn back for her swing.
+
+"Sorry," she said.
+
+Mala's army stood at a distance, staring.
+
+"Go!" Yasmin said. "Go. This was a disaster. It was stupid and evil and wrong. I'm not your enemy, you idiots. GO!"
+
+They went.
+
+"We have to splint her," Ashok said. "Make a stretcher, too. Can't move her like that."
+
+Yasmin looked at him, raised an eyebrow.
+
+"My father's a doctor," he said.
+
+Yasmin went into the flat, climbed the stairs. Her mother sat up as she entered the room and opened her mouth to say something, but Yasmin raised on hand to her and, miraculously, she shut up. Yasmin looked around the room, took the chair that sat in one corner, an armload of rags from the bundle they used to keep the room clean, and left, without saying a word.
+
+Ashok broke the chair into splints by smashing it against a nearby wall. It was a cheap thing and went to pieces quickly. Yasmin knelt by Mala and took her hand. Her breathing was shallow, labored.
+
+Mala squeezed her hand weakly. Then she opened her eyes and looked around, confused. Her eyes settled on Yasmin. They looked at each other. Mala tried to pull her hand away. Yasmin didn't let go. The hand was strong, nimble. It had dispatched innumerable zombies and monsters.
+
+Mala stopped struggling, closed her eyes. Ashok brought over the splints and rags and hunkered down beside them.
+
+Just before he began to work on her, Mala said something. Yasmin couldn't quite make it out, but she thought it might be, /{Forgive me.}/
+
+#
+
+1~ scene # ~#
+
+_1 /{ This scene is dedicated to Hudson Booksellers, the booksellers that are in practically every airport in the USA. Most of the Hudson stands have just a few titles (though those are often surprisingly diverse), but the big ones, like the one in the AA terminal at Chicago's O'Hare, are as good as any neighborhood store. It takes something special to bring a personal touch to an airport, and Hudson's has saved my mind on more than one long Chicago layover. }/
+
+_1 {~^ Hudson Booksellers }http://www.hudsongroup.com/HudsonBooksellers_s.html
+
+Wei-Dong couldn't get Lu off his mind. A barbarian stabbed a pumpkin and he decided that the sword would be stuck for three seconds and then play a standard squashing sound from his soundboard. He couldn't get Lu off his mind. A pickpocket tried to steal a phoenix's tailfeather, and he made the phoenix turn around and curse the player out, spitting flames, shouting at him in Mandarin, his voice filtered through a gobble-phaser so that it sounded birdy. He couldn't get Lu off his mind. A zombie horde-leader tried to batter his way into a barricaded mini-mall, attempting to go through a "Going out of business" signboard that was only a texture mapped onto an exterior surface that had no interior. Wei-Dong liked the guy's ingenuity, so he decided that it would take 3,000 zombie-minutes to break it down, and when it fell, it would map to the interior of the sporting-goods store where there were some nice clubs, crossbows and machetes.
+
+And he couldn't get Lu off his mind.
+
+He'd always liked Lu. Of all the guys, Lu was the one who really got /{into}/ the games. He didn't just love the money, or the friendship: he loved to /{play}/. He loved to solve puzzles, to take down the big bosses on a huge raid, to unlock new lands and achievements for his avs. Sometimes, as Wei-Dong worked his long shifts making tiny decisions for the game, he thought about how much better it would be to play, thanks to the work he was doing, and imagined the Lu would approve of the artistry. It was nice to be on the other side of the game, making the fun instead of just consuming it. The job was long, it was hard, it didn't pay well, but he was /{part of the show}/.
+
+But this wasn't a show anymore.
+
+His phone started vibrating in his pocket. He took it out, looked at the face, put it on his desk. It was his mom. He'd relented and given her his new number once he turned 18, justifying it to himself on the ground that he was an adult now and she couldn't have him tracked down and dragged back. But really, it was because he couldn't face spending his 18th birthday alone. But he didn't want to talk to her now. He bumped her to voicemail.
+
+She called back. The phone buzzed. He bumped it to voicemail. A second later, the phone buzzed again. He reached to turn it off and then he stopped and answered it.
+
+"Hi, Mom?"
+
+"Leonard," she said. "It's your father."
+
+"What?"
+
+She took a deep breath, let it out. "A heart attack. A big one. They took him to --" She stopped, took in a deep breath. "They took him to the Hoag Center. He's in the ICU. They say it's the best --" Another breath. "It's supposed to be the best."
+
+Wei-Dong's stomach dropped away from him, sinking to a spot somewhere beneath his chair. His head felt like it might fly away. "When?"
+
+"Yesterday," she said.
+
+He didn't say anything. /{Yesterday?}/ He wanted to shriek it. His father had been in the hospital since /{yesterday}/ and no one had told him?
+
+"Oh, Leonard," she said. "I didn't know what to do. You haven't spoken to him since you left. And --"
+
+/{And}/?
+
+"I'll come and see him," he said. "I can get a taxi. It'll take about an hour, I guess."
+
+"Visiting hours are over," she said. "I've been with him all day. He isn't conscious very much. I... They don't let you use your phone there. Not in the ICU."
+
+For months, Wei-Dong had been living as an adult, living a life he would have described as ideal, before the phone rang. He knew interesting people, went to exciting places. He /{played games all day}/, for a living. He knew the secrets of gamespace.
+
+Now he understood that a feeling of intense loneliness had been lurking beneath his satisfaction all along, a bubbling pit of despair that stank of failure and misery. Wei-Dong loved his parents. He wanted their approval. He trusted their judgment. That was why he'd been so freaked out when he discovered that they'd been plotting to send him away. If he hadn't cared about them, none of it would have mattered. Somewhere in his mind, he'd had a cut-scene for his reunion with his parents, inviting them to a fancy, urban restaurant, maybe one of those raw food places in Echo Park that he read about all the time in Metroblogs. They'd have a cultured, sophisticated conversation about the many amazing things he'd learned on his own, and his father would have to scrape his jaw off his plate to keep up his end of the conversation. Afterwards, he'd get on his slick Tata scooter, all tricked out with about a thousand coats of lacquer over thin bamboo strips, and cruise away while his parents looked at each other, marvelling at the amazing son they'd spawned.
+
+It was stupid, he knew it. But the point was, he'd always treated this time as a holiday, a little interlude in his family life. His vision quest, when he went off to become a man. A real Bar-Mitzvah, one that meant something.
+
+The thought that he might never see his father again, never make up with him -- it hit him like a a blow, like he'd swung a hammer at a nail and smashed his hand instead.
+
+"Mom --" His voice came out in a croak. He cleared his throat. "Mom, I'm going to come down tomorrow and see you both. I'll get a taxi."
+
+"OK, Leonard. I think your father would like to see you."
+
+He wanted her to say something about how selfish he'd been to leave them behind, what a bad son he'd been. He wanted her to say something /{unfair}/ so that he could be angry instead of feeling this terrible, awful guilt.
+
+But she said, "I love you, Leonard. I can't wait to see you. I've missed you."
+
+And so he went to bed with a million self-hating thoughts chanting in unison in his mind, and he lay there in his bed in the flophouse hotel for hours, listening to the thoughts and the shouting bums and clubgoers and the people having sex in other rooms and the music floating up from car windows, for hours and hours, and he'd barely fallen asleep when his alarm woke him up. He showered and scraped off his little butt-fluff mustache with a disposable razor and ate a peanut butter sandwich and made himself a quadruple espresso using the nitrous-powered hand-press he'd bought with his first paycheck and called a cab and brushed his teeth while he waited for it.
+
+The cabbie was Chinese, and Wei-Dong asked him, in his best Mandarin, to take him down to Orange County, to his parents' place. The man was clearly amused by the young white boy who spoke Chinese, and they talked a little about the weather and the traffic and then Wei-Dong slept, dozing with his rolled-up jacket for a pillow, sleeping through the caffeine jitter of the quad-shot as the early morning LA traffic crawled down the 5.
+
+And he paid the cabbie nearly a day's wages and took his keys out of his jacket pocket and walked up the walk to his house and let himself in and his mother was sitting at the kitchen table in her housecoat, eyes red and puffy, just staring into space.
+
+He stood in the doorway and looked at her and she looked back at him, then stood uncertainly and crossed to him and gave him a hug that was tight and trembling and there was wetness on his neck where her tears streaked it.
+
+"He went," she breathed into his ear. "This morning, about 3 AM. Another heart attack. Very fast. They said it was practically instant." She cried some more.
+
+And Wei-Dong knew that he would be moving home again.
+
+#
+
+The hospital discharged Big Sister Nor and The Mighty Krang and Justbob two days early, just to be rid of them. For one thing, they wouldn't stay in their rooms -- instead, they kept sneaking down to the hospital's cafeteria where they'd commandeer three or four tables, laboriously pushing them together, moving on crutches and wheelchairs, then spreading out computers, phones, notepads, macrame projects, tiny lead miniatures that The Mighty Krang was always painting with fine camel-hair brushes, cards, flowers, chocolates and shortbread sent by Webbly supporters.
+
+To top it off, Big Sister Nor had discovered that three of the women on her ward were Filipina maids who'd been beaten by their employers, and was holding consciousness-raising meetings where she taught them how to write official letters of complaint to the Ministry of Manpower. The nurses loved them -- they'd voted in a union the year before -- and the hospital administration /{hated}/ them with the white-hot heat of a thousand suns.
+
+So less than two weeks after being beaten within an inch of their lives, Big Sister Nor, The Mighty Krang, and Justbob stepped, blinking, into the choking heat of mid-day in Singapore, wrapped in bandages, splints and casts. Their bodies were broken, but their spirits were high. The beating had been, well, /{liberating}/. After years of living in fear of being jumped and kicked half-to-death by goons working for the bosses, they'd been through it and survived. They'd thrived. Their fear had been burned out.
+
+As they looked at one another, hair sticky and faces flushed from the steaming heat, they began to smile. Then to giggle. Then to laugh, as loud and as deep as their injuries would allow.
+
+Justbob swept her hair away from the eyepatch that covered the ruin of her left eye, scratched under the cast on her arm, and said, "They should have killed us."
+
+:B~ Part III: Ponzi
+
+1~ scene # ~#
+
+_1 /{ This scene is dedicated to the Harvard Bookstore, a wonderful and eclectic bookshop in the heart of one of the all-time kick-ass world-class bookshopping neighborhoods, the stretch of Mass Ave that runs between Harvard and MIT. The last time I visited the store, they'd just gotten in an Espresso print-on-demand book machine that was hooked up to Google's astonishing library of scanned public-domain books and they could print and bind practically any out of print book from the whole of human history for a few dollars in a few minutes. To plumb the unimaginable depths of human creativity this represented, the store had someone whose job it was to just mouse around and find wild titles from out of history to print and stick on the shelves around the machine. I have rarely felt the presence of the future so strongly as I did that night. }/
+
+_1 {~^ Harvard Bookstore }http://www.harvard.com/: 1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge MA 02138 USA, +1 (617) 661-1515
+
+The inside of the shipping container was a lot worse than Wei-Dong had anticipated. When he'd decided to smuggle himself into China, he'd done a lot of reading on the subject, starting with searches on human trafficking -- which was all horror stories about 130 degree noontimes in a roasting box, crammed in with thirty others -- and then into the sustainable housing movement, where architects were vying to outdo one another in their simple and elegant retrofits of containers into cute little apartments.
+
+Why no one had thought to merge the two disciplines was beyond him. If you're going to smuggle people across the ocean, why not avail yourself of a cute little kit to transform their steel box into a cozy little camper? Was he missing something?
+
+Nope. Other than the fact that people-smugglers were all criminal dirtbags, he couldn't find any reason why a smuggle-ee couldn't enjoy the ten days at sea in high style. Especially if the smuggle-ee was now co-owner of a huge shipping and logistics company based in Los Angeles, with the run of the warehouse and a Homeland Security all-access pass for the port.
+
+It had taken Wei-Dong three weeks to do the work on the container. The mail-order conversion kit said that it could be field-assembled by two unskilled laborers in a disaster area with hand tools in two days. It took him two weeks, which was a little embarrassing, as he'd always classed himself as "skilled" (but there you go).
+
+And he had special needs, after all. He'd read up on port security and knew that there'd be sensors looking for the telltale cocktail of gasses given off by humans: acetone, isoprene, alpha pinene and lots of other exotic exhaust given off with every breath in a specific ratio. So he built a little container inside the container, an airtight box that would hold his gasses in until they were at sea -- he figured he could survive in it for a good ten hours before he used up all the air, provided he didn't exercise too much. The port cops could probe his container all they wanted, and they'd get the normal mix of volatiles boiling off of the paint on the inside of the shipping container, untainted by human exhaust. Provided they didn't actually open his container and then get too curious about the hermetically sealed box inside, he'd be golden.
+
+Anyway, by the time he was done, he had a genuinely kick-ass little nest. He'd loaded up his Dad's Huawei with an entire apartment's worth of IKEA furniture and then he'd hacked it and nailed it and screwed it and glued it into the container's interior, making a cozy ship's cabin with a king-sized bed, a chemical toilet, a microwave, a desk, and a play area. Once they were at sea, he could open his little hatch and string out his WiFi receiver -- tapping into the on-board WiFi used by the crew would be simple, as they didn't devote a lot of energy to keeping out freeloaders while they were in the middle of the ocean -- and his solar panel. He had some very long wires for both, because he'd fixed the waybills so that his container would be deep in the middle of the stack alongside one of the gaps that ran between them, rather than on the outside edge: one percent of shipping containers ended up at the bottom of the sea, tossed overboard in rough waters, and he wanted to minimize the chance of dying when his container imploded from the pressure of hundreds of atmospheres' worth of deep ocean.
+
+Inheritances were handier than he'd suspected. He was able to click onto Huawei's website and order ten power-packs for their all-electric runabouts, each one rated for 80 miles' drive. They were delivered directly to the pier his shipping container was waiting on (he considered the possibility that the power-packs had been shipped to America in the same container he was installing them in, but he knew the odds against it were astronomical -- there were a /{lot}/ of shipping containers arriving on America's shores every second). They stacked neatly at one end of the container, with a barcoded waybill pasted to them that said they were being returned as defective. They arrived charged, and he was pretty sure that he'd be able to keep them charged between the Port of Los Angeles and Shenzhen, using the solar sheets he was going to deploy on the top of the container stack. He'd tested the photovoltaic sheets on his father's Huawei and found that he could fully charge it in six hours, and he'd calculated that he should be able to run his laptop, air conditioner, and water pumps for four days on each stack. 16 days' power would be more than enough to complete the crossing, even if they got hit by bad weather, but it was good to know that recharging was an option.
+
+Water had given him some pause. Humans consume a /{lot}/ of water, and while there was plenty of room in his space capsule -- as he'd come to think of the container -- he thought there had to be a better way to manage his liquid needs on the voyage than simply moving three or four tons of water into the box. He was deep in thought when he realized that the solar sheets were all water-proof and could be easily turned into a funnel that would feed a length of PVC pipe that he could snake from the top of the container stack into the space-capsule, where a couple of sterile hollow drums would hold the water until he was ready to drink it or shower in it. Afterwards, his waste water could just be pumped out onto the ship's deck, where it would wash overboard with all the other water that fell on the ship. If he packed enough water to keep him going on minimal showers and cooking for a week, the odds were good that they'd hit a rainstorm and he'd be topped up -- and if they didn't he could ration his remaining water and arrive in China a little smellier than he'd started.
+
+He loved this stuff. The planning was exquisite fun, a real googlefest of interesting HOWTOs and advice. Lots of parts of the problem of self-sufficiency at sea had been considered before this, though no one had given much thought to the problem of travelling in style and secrecy in a container. He was a pioneer. He was making notes and planning to publish them when the adventure was over.
+
+Of course, he wouldn't mention the /{reason}/ he needed to smuggle himself into China, rather than just applying for a tourist visa.
+
+Wei-Dong's mother didn't know what to make of her son. His father's death had shattered her, and half the time she seemed to be speaking to him from behind a curtain of gauze. He found the anti-depressants her doctor had prescribed and looked up the side-effects and decided that his mother probably wouldn't be in any shape to notice that he was up to something weird. Mostly she just seemed relieved to have him home, and industriously involved in the family business. She hadn't even blinked when he told her he was going to take a road trip up the coast, a nice long drive up to Alaska with minimal net-access, phone activity and so on.
+
+The last cargo to go into the space-capsule was three cardboard boxes, small enough to load into the trunk of the Huawei, which he put in long-term parking and double-locked after he'd loaded them up. Each one was triple-wrapped in water-proof plastic, and inside them were twenty-five thousand-odd prepaid game-cards for various MMOs. The face-value of these cards was in excess of $200,000, though no money changed hands when he collected them, in lots of a few hundred, from Chinese convenience stores all over Los Angeles and Orange County. It had taken three days to get the whole load, and it had been the hairiest part of the gig so far. The cards were part of a regular deal whereby the big gold-farmers used networks of overseas retailers to snaffle up US playtime and ship it back to China, so that their employees could get online using the US servers.
+
+Technically, that meant that all the convenience store clerks he visited were part of a vast criminal underground, but none of them seemed all that dangerous. Still, if any one of them had been suspicious about the white kid with the bad Mandarin accent who was doing the regular pickup, who knew what might happen?
+
+It hadn't, though. Now he had the precious cargo, the boxes of untraceable, non-sequential game-credit that would let him earn game-gold. It was all so weird, now that he sat there on his red leather Ikea sofa, sipping an iced tea and munching a power bar and contemplating his booty.
+
+Under their scratch-off strips, these cards contained unique numbers produced by a big random-number generator on a server in America, then printed in China, then shipped back to America, now destined for China again. He thought about how much simpler it would have been to come up with the random numbers in China in the first place, and chuckled and put his feet up on the boxes.
+
+Of course, if they'd done that, he wouldn't have had any excuse to build the space-capsule and smuggle himself into China.
+
+#
+
+1~ scene # ~#
+
+_1 /{ This scene is dedicated to London's Clerkenwell Tales, located around the corner from my office in Clerkenwell, a wonderful and eclectic neighborhood in central London. Peter Ho, the owner, is a veteran of Waterstone's, and has opened up exactly the kind of small, expertly curated neighborhood store that every bookish person yearns to have in the vicinity. Peter makes a point of stocking small handmade editions from local printers, and as a result, I'm forever dropping in to say hello over my lunch break and leaving with an armload of exquisite and gorgeous books. It's lethal. In a good way. }/
+
+_1 {~^ Clerkenwell Tales }http://www.clerkenwell-tales.co.uk/: 30 Exmouth Market EC1R 4QE London +44 (0)20 7713 8135
+
+Ashok did his best thinking on paper, big sheets of it. He knew that it was ridiculous. The smart thing to do would be to keep all the files digital, encrypted on a shared drive on the net where all the Webblies could get at it. But the numbers made so much more sense when they were written neatly on flip-chart paper and tacked up all around the walls of his "war-room" -- the back room at Mrs Dibyendu's cafe, rented by Mala out of the army's wages from Mr Bannerjee.
+
+Oh yes, Mala was still drawing wages from Mr Bannerjee and her soldiers were still fighting the missions he sent them on. But afterwards, in their own time, they fought their own missions, in Mrs Dibyendu's shop. Mrs Dibyendu was lavishly welcoming to them, grateful for the business in her shop, which had been in danger of drying up and blowing away. Idiot nephew had been sent back to Uttar Pradesh to live with his parents, limping home with his tail between his legs and leaving Mrs Dibyendu to tend her increasingly empty shop on her own.
+
+Mrs Dibyendu didn't mind the big sheets of paper. She /{loved}/ Ashok, smartly dressed and well turned out, and clearly thought that he and Yasmin had something going on. Ashok tried gently to disabuse her of this, but she wasn't having any of it. She brought him sweet chai all day and all night, as he labored over his sheets.
+
+"Ashok," Mala called, limping toward him through the empty cafe, leaning on the trestle-tables that supported the long rows of gasping PCs.
+
+He stood up from the table, wiping the chai from his chin with his hand, wiping his hand on his trousers. Mala made him nervous. He'd visited her in the hospital, with Yasmin, and sat by her bed while she refused to look at either of them. He'd picked her up when she was discharged, and she'd fixed him with that burning look, like a holy woman, and she'd nodded once at him, and asked him how her Army could help.
+
+"Mala," he said. "You're early."
+
+"Not much fighting today," she said, shrugging. "Fighting Webblies is like fighting children. Badly organized children. We knocked over twenty jobsites before lunch and I had to call a break. The Army was getting bored. I've got them on training exercises, fighting battles against each other."
+
+"You're the commander, General Robotwallah, I'm sure you know best."
+
+She had a very pretty smile, Mala did, though you rarely got to see it. Mostly you saw her ugly smiles, smiles that seemed to have too many sharp teeth in them. But her pretty smile was like the sun. It changed the whole room, made your heart glow. He understood how a girl like this could command an Army. He stared at the pretty smile for a minute and his tongue went dry and thick in his mouth.
+
+"I want to talk to you, Ashok. You're sitting here with your paper and your figures, and you keep telling us to wait, wait a little, and you'll explain everything. It's been months, Ashok, and still you say wait, explain. I'm tired of waiting. The Army is tired of waiting. Being double agents was amusing for a little while, and it's fun to fight real Pinkertons at night, but they're not going to wait around forever."
+
+Ashok held his hands out in a placating gesture that often worked on Mala. She needed to know that she was the boss. "Look, it's not a simple matter. If we're going to take on four virtual worlds at once, everything has to run like clockwork, each piece firing after the other. In the meantime --"
+
+She waved at him dismissively. "In the meantime, Bannerjee grows more and more suspicious. The man is an idiot, not a moron. He will eventually figure out that something is going wrong. Or his masters will. And then --"
+
+"And then we'll have to placate him, or misdirect him. General, this is a confidence game, a scam, running on four virtual worlds and twenty real nations, with hundreds of confederates. Confidence games require planning and cunning. It's not enough to go in, guns blazing --"
+
+"You think we don't understand planning? You think we don't understand /{cunning}/? Ashok, you have never fought. You should fight. It would help you understand this business you've gotten into. You think that we're thugs, idiot muscle. Running a battle requires as much skill as anything you do -- I don't have a fine education, I am just a girl from the village, I am just a Dharavi rat, but I am /{smart}/ Ashok, and don't you ever forget it."
+
+The worst part was, she was right. He /{did}/ often think of her as a thug. "Mala, I want to play, but playing would take me away from planning."
+
+"You can't plan if you don't play. I'm the general, and I'm ordering it. You'll join the junior platoon on maneuvers tomorrow at 10AM. There's skirmishing, then theory, then a couple of battles overseen by the senior platoon when they arrive. It will be good for you. They will rag you some, because you are new, but that will be good for you, too."
+
+That look in her eyes, the fiery one, told him that he didn't dare disagree. "Yes, General," he said.
+
+"And you will explain this business to me, now. You will learn my world, I will learn yours."
+
+"Mala --"
+
+"I know, I know. I came in and shouted at you because you were taking too long and now I insist that you take longer." She gave him that smile. She wasn't pretty -- her features were too sharp for pretty -- but she was beautiful when she smiled. She was going to be a heart-breaker when she grew up. /{If}/ she grew up.
+
+"Yes, General."
+
+"Chai!" she called to Mrs Dibyendu, who brought it round quickly, averting her eyes from Mala.
+
+"All right, let's start with the basic theory of the scam. Who is easiest to trick?"
+
+"A fool," she said at once.
+
+"Wrong," he said. "Fools are often suspicious, because they've been taken advantage of. The easiest person to trick is a successful person, the more successful the better. Why is that?"
+
+Mala thought. "They have more money, so it's worth tricking them?"
+
+Ashok waggled his chin. "No, sorry -- by that reasoning, they should be /{more}/ suspicious, not less."
+
+Mala scraped a chair over the floor and sat down and made a face at him. "I give up, tell me."
+
+"It's because if a man is successful at doing one thing, he's apt to assume that he'll be successful at anything. He believes he's a Brahmin, divinely gifted with the wisdom and strength of character to succeed. He can't bear the thought that he just got lucky, or that his parents just got lucky and left him a pile of Rupees. He can't stand the thought that understanding physics or computers or cameras doesn't make him an expert on economics or beekeeping or cookery.
+
+"And his intelligence and his pride work together to make him /{easier}/ to trick. His pride, naturally, but his intelligence, too: he's smart enough to understand that there are lots of ways to get rich. If you tell him a complex tale about how some market works and can be tricked, he can follow along over rough territory that would lose a dumber man.
+
+"And there's a third reason that successful men are easier to trick than fools: they dread being shown up as a fool. When you trick them, you can trick them again, make them believe that the scheme fell through. They don't want to go to the police or tell their friends, because if word gets out that some mighty and powerful man was tricked, he stands to lose his reputation, without which he cannot recover his fortune."
+
+Mala waggled her chin. "It all makes sense, I suppose."
+
+"It does," Ashok said.
+
+"I am a successful and powerful person," she said. Her eyes were cat-slits.
+
+"You are," Ashok said, more cautiously.
+
+"So I would be easier to fool than any of the fools in my army?"
+
+Ashok laughed. "You are so sharp, General, it's a wonder you don't cut yourself. Yes, it's possible that all of this is a giant triple-twist bluff, aimed at fooling you. But what would I want to fool you for? As rich as your Army has made you, you must know that I could be just as rich by working as a junior lecturer in economics at IIT. But General, at the end of the day, you either trust me or you don't. I can't prove to you that you're inside the scheme rather than its target. If you want out, that's fine. It will hurt the plan, but it won't be its death. There's a lot of people involved here."
+
+Mala smiled her sunny smile. "You are a clever man," she said. "And for now, I will trust you. Go on."
+
+"Let's step back a little. Do you want to learn some history?"
+
+"Will it help me understand why you're taking so long?"
+
+"I think so," he said. "I think it's a bloody good story, in any case."
+
+She made a go-on gesture and sipped her chai, her back very erect, her bearing regal.
+
+"Back in the 1930s, the biggest confidence jobs were called 'The Big Store.' They were little stage plays in which there was only one audience-member, the 'mark' or victim. /{Everyone else}/ was in the play. The mark would meet a 'roper' on a train, who would feel him out to see if he had any money. He'd sometimes give him a little taste of the money to be made -- maybe they'd share some mysterious 'found' money that he'd planted. That sort of thing makes the mark trust you more, and also puts him in your power, because now you know that he's willing to cheat a little.
+
+"Once the train pulled into the strange city and the mark got off, every single person he met or talked with would be part of the trick. If the mark was good at finance, the roper would hand him off to a partner, the 'inside man' who would tell him about a scam he had for winning horse races; if the mark was good at horse races, the scam would be about fixing the stock market -- in other words, whatever the mark knew the least about, that was the center of the game.
+
+"The mark would be shown a betting parlor or a stock-broker's office filled with bustling, active people -- so many people that it was impossible to believe that they could /{all}/ be part of a scam. Then he'd have the deal explained to him: the brokerage house or betting parlor got its figures from a telegraph office -- this was before computers -- that would phone in the results. The mark would then be shown the 'telegraph office' -- another totally fake business -- and meet a 'friend' of the inside man who was willing to delay the results by a few minutes, giving them to the roper and the market just quick enough to let them get their bets or buys down. They'd know the winners before the office did, so they'd be betting on a sure thing.
+
+"And they'd try it -- and it would work! The mark could put a few dollars down and walk away with a few hundred. It was an eye-popping experience, a real thrill. The mark's imagination would start to work on him. If he could turn a few dollars into hundreds, imagine what he could do if he could put down /{all}/ his money, along with whatever money he could steal from his business, his family, his friends -- everyone. It wouldn't even be stealing, because he'd be able to pay everyone back once he won big. And he'd go and get all the money he could lay hands on, and he'd lay his bet and he'd lose!
+
+"And it would be his fault. The inside man wouldn't be able to believe it, he'd said, 'Bet on this horse in the first race,' not 'Bet on this horse for first place' or some similar misunderstanding. The mark's bad hearing had cost them everything, all of them. There is a giant scene, and before you know it, the police are there, ready to arrest everyone. Someone shoots the policeman, there's blood and screaming, the place empties out, and the mark counts himself lucky to have escaped with his life. Of course, all the blood and shooting are fakes, too -- so is the policeman. He's got a little blood in a bag in his mouth; they called it a 'cackle-bladder': a fine word, no?
+
+"Now, at this stage, it may be that the mark is completely, totally broke, not one paisa to his name. If that's the case, he gets away and never hears from the roper or the inside man again. He spends the rest of his life broke and broken, hating himself for having misheard the instruction at the critical moment. And he never, ever tells anyone, because if he did, it would expose this great man for a fool.
+
+"But if there's any chance he can get more money -- a friend he hasn't cleaned out, a company bank account he can access -- they may contact him /{again}/ and offer him the chance to 'get even'. You can bet he will -- after all, he's a king among men, destined to rule, who made his fortune because he's better than everyone else. Why wouldn't he play again, since the only reason he lost last time was that he misheard an instruction. Surely that won't happen again!"
+
+"But it does," she said. Her eyes were shining.
+
+"Oh yes, indeed. And again, and again --"
+
+"And again. until he's been bled dry."
+
+"You've learned the first lesson," Ashok said. "Now, onto advanced subjects. You know how a pyramid scheme works, yes?"
+
+She waved dismissively. "Of course."
+
+"Now, the pyramid scheme is just a kind of skeleton, and like a skeleton, you can hang a lot of different bodies off of it. It can look like a plan to sell soap, or a plan to sell vitamins, or something else altogether. But the important thing is, whatever it's selling, it has to seem like a good deal. Think back on the big store -- how do you make something seem like a good deal?"
+
+Mala thought carefully. Ashok could practically see the gears spinning in her head. Wah! She was /{smart}/, this Dharavi girl!
+
+"OK," she said. "OK -- it should be something the mark doesn't know much about."
+
+"Got it in one!" Ashok said. "If the mark is smart and accomplished, she'll assume that she knows everything about everything. Dangle some bait for her that she doesn't really understand and she'll come along. But there's a way to make even familiar subjects unfamiliar. Here, look at this." He typed at the disused computer on a corner of his desk, googled an image of a craps table at a casino.
+
+"This is a gambling game, craps. They play it with dice."
+
+"I've seen men playing it in the street," Mala said.
+
+"This is the casino version. See all the lines and markings?"
+
+She nodded.
+
+"These marks represent different bets -- double if it comes up this way, triple if it comes up that way. The bets can get very, very complicated.
+
+"Now, dice aren't that complicated. There are only 36 ways that a roll can come up: one-one, one-two, one-three, and so on, all that way up to six-six. It should be easy to tell whether a bet is any good: take the chance of rolling two sixes, twice in a row: the odds are 36 times 36 to one. If the bet pays less than those odds, then you will eventually lose money. If the bet pays more than those odds, then you will eventually win money."
+
+Mala shook her head. "I don't really understand."
+
+"Imagine flipping a coin." He took out his wallet and opened a flap and pulled out an old brass Chinese coin, pierced in the center with a square. "One side is heads, one side is tails. Assuming the coin is 'fair' -- that is, assuming that both sides of the coin weigh the same and have the same wind resistance, then the chances of a coin landing with either face showing are 50-50, or 1-in-1, or just 'even'.
+
+"Now we play a fair game. I toss the coin, you call out which side you think it'll land on. If you guess right, you double your bet; if not, I take your money. If we play this game long enough, we'll both have the same amount of money as we started with -- it's a boring game.
+
+"But what if instead I paid you triple if it landed on heads, provided you took the heads-bet? All you need to do is keep putting money on heads, and eventually you'll end up with all my money: when it comes up tails, I win a little; when it comes up heads, you win a lot. Over time, you'll take it all. So if I offered you this proposition, you should take it."
+
+"All right," Mala said.
+
+"But what if it was a very complicated bet? What if there were two coins, and the payout depended on a long list of factors; I'll pay you triple for any double-head or double-tails, provided that it isn't the same outcome as the last time, unless it is the /{third}/ duplicate outcome. Is that a good bet or a bad one?"
+
+Mala shrugged.
+
+"I don't know either -- I'd have to calculate the odds with pen and paper. But what about this: what if I'll pay you /{300 to one}/ if you win according to the rules I just set up. You lay down ten rupees and win, I'll give you /{3,000}/ back?"
+
+Mala cocked her head. "I'd probably take the bet."
+
+"Most people would. It's a fantastic cocktail: mix one part confusing rules and one part high odds, and people will lay down their money all day. Now, tell me this: would you bet ten rupees on rolling the dice double-sixes, thirty times in a row?"
+
+"No!" Mala said. "That's practically impossible."
+
+Ashok spread his hands. "And now you have the second lesson: everyone has some intuition about odds, even if they are, excuse me, a girl who has never studied statistics." Mala colored, but she held her tongue. It was true, after all. "Most people won't bet on nearly impossible things, not even if you give brilliant odds. But you can disguise the nearly impossible by making it do a lot of acrobatics -- making the rules of the game very complicated -- and then lots of people, even smart people, will place bets on propositions that are every bit as unlikely as thirty double-sixes in a row. In fact, smart people are /{especially}/ likely to place those bets --"
+
+Mala held up her hand. "Because they're so smart they think they know everything."
+
+Ashok clapped. "Star pupil! You should have been a con-artist or an economist, if only you weren't such a fine General, General." She grinned. Ashok knew that she loved to hear how good a general she was. He didn't blame her: if he was a Dharavi girl who'd outsmarted the slum and made a life, he'd be a little insecure too. It was just one more thing to like about Mala and her scowling, hard brilliance. "Now, my star pupil, put it all together for me."
+
+She began to recite, counting off on her fingers, like a schoolgirl recounting a lesson. "To make a Ponzi scheme that works, that really works, you need to have
+
+smart people
+
+who are surrounded by con-artists
+
+who are given a chance to bet on something complicated
+
+in a way that they're not good at understanding."
+
+Ashok clapped and Mala gave a small, ironic bow from her seat.
+
+"So that is what I am doing back here. Devising the scheme that will take the economies of four entire worlds hostage, make them ours to smash as we see fit. In order to do that, I need to do some very fine work."
+
+Mala pointed at a chart that was dense with scribbled equations and notations. "Explain," she commanded.
+
+"That is an entirely different sort of lesson," Ashok said. "For a different day. Or perhaps a year."
+
+Mala's eyes narrowed.
+
+"My dear general," Ashok said, laying it on so thick that they both knew he was doing it, and he saw the corners of Mala's lips tremble as they tried to hold back her smile, "If I asked you to explain the order of battle to me, you could do two things: either you could confer some useful, philosophical principles for commanding a force; or you could vomit up a lifetime's statistics and specifics about every weapon, every character class, every technique and tip. The chances are that I'd never memorize a tenth of what you had to tell me. I don't have the background for it. And, having memorized it, I would never be able to put it to use because I wouldn't have had the hard labor that you've put in -- jai ho! -- and so I won't have the skeleton in my mind on which I might lay the flesh of your teaching, my guru." He checked to see if he'd laid it on too thickly, decided he hadn't, grinned and namasted to her, just to ice the biscuit.
+
+Mala nodded regally, keeping her straight face on for as long as she could, but as she left the room, hobbling on her cane, he was sure he heard a girlish peal of giggles from her.
+
+#
+
+Matthew's first plate of dumplings tasted so good he almost choked on the saliva that flooded his mouth. After two months in the labor camp, eating chicken's feet and rice and never enough of either, freezing at night and broiling during the day, he thought that he had perfectly reconstructed the taste of dumplings in his mind. On days when he was digging, each bite of the shovel's tip into the earth was like the moment that his teeth pierced a dumpling's skin, letting the steam and oil escape, the meat inside releasing an aroma that wafted up into his nostrils. On days when he was hammering, the round stones were the tender dumplings in a mountain, the worn ground was the squeaking styrofoam tray. Dumplings danced in his thoughts as he lay on the floor between two other prisoners; they were in his mind when he rose in the morning. The only time he didn't think about dumplings was when he was eating chicken's feet and rice, because they were so awful that they alone had the power to drive the ghost of dumplings from his imagination.
+
+Those were the times he thought about what he was going to do when he got out of jail. What he was going to do in the game. What the Webblies were planning, and how he would play his part in that plan.
+
+The prison official that released him assumed that he was one of the millions of illegal workers with forged papers who'd gone to Canton, to the Pearl River Delta, to seek his fortune. He was half-way through a stern, barked lecture about staying out of trouble and going back to his village in Gui-Zhou or Sichuan or whatever impoverished backwater he hailed from, before the man actually looked down at his records and saw that Matthew was, indeed, Cantonese -- and that he would shortly be transported, at government expense, back to Shenzhen. The man had fallen silent, and Matthew, overcome with the comedy of the moment, couldn't help but thank him profusely -- in Cantonese.
+
+There were dumplings on the train, sold by grim men and women with deep lines cut into their faces by years and worry and hunger and misery. This was the provinces, the outer territories, the mysterious China that had sent millions of girls and boys to Canton to earn their fortunes in the Pearl River Delta. Matthew knew all their strange accents, he spoke their strange Mandarin language, but he was Cantonese, and this was not his people.
+
+Those were not his dumplings.
+
+It wasn't until he debarked at the outskirts of Shenzhen and transferred to a metro subway that he started to feel at home. It wasn't until then that he started to think about dumplings. The girls on the metro were as he remembered them, beautiful and polished and laughing and well fed. Skulking in the doorway of the train, watching his reflection in the dark glass, he saw what an awful skeleton-person he'd become. He had been a young man when he went in, a boy, really. Now he looked five years older, and he was shifty and sunken, and there was a scrub of wispy beard on his cheeks, accentuating their hollowness. He looked like one of the mass of criminals and grifters and scumbags who hung around the train station and the street corners -- tough and desperate as a sewer rat. Unpredictable.
+
+Why not? Sewer rats got lots of dumplings. They had sharp teeth and sharp wits. They were /{fast}/. Matthew grinned at his reflection and the girls on the train gave him a wide berth when they pulled into the next station.
+
+Lu met him at Guo Mao station, up on the street level, where the men and women in brisk suits with brisk walks came and went from the stock exchange, a perfect crowd of people to get lost in. Lu took both of his hands in a long, soulful, silent shake and led them away toward the stock exchange, where the identity counterfeiters were.
+
+These people kept Shenzhen and all of Guandong province running. They could make you any papers you needed: working permits allowing a farm girl to move from Xi'an to Shenzhen and make iPods; papers saying you were a lawyer, a doctor, an engineer; driver's licenses, vendor's licenses -- even pilot's licenses, according to the card one of them gave him. They were old ladies, the friendly face of criminal empires run by hard men with perpetual cigarettes and dandruff on the shoulders of their dark suits.
+
+They walked in silence through the shouting grabbing crowds, the flurries of cards advertising fake documents shoved in their hands by grannies on all sides of them. Lu stopped in front of one granny and bent and whispered in her ear. She nodded once and went back to waving her cards, but she must have signalled a confederate somehow, because a moment later, a young man got up off a bench and wandered into a gigantic electronics mall and they followed him, threading their way through stall after stall of parts for mobile phones -- keyboards, screens, dialpads, diodes -- up an escalator to another floor of parts, up another escalator and another floor, and one more to a floor that was completely deserted. Even the electrical outlets were empty, bare wires dangling from the receptacles, waiting to be hooked up to plugs.
+
+The boy was 100 meters ahead of them, and they trailed after him, slipping into a hallway that led toward the emergency stairs. A little side door was slightly ajar and Lu pushed it open. The boy wasn't there -- he must have taken the stairs -- but there was another boy, younger than Lu or Matthew, sitting in front of a computer, intently playing Mushroom Kingdom. Matthew smiled -- it was always so strange to see a Chinese person playing a game just for the fun of it, rather than as a job. He looked up and nodded at the two of them. Wordlessly, Lu passed him a bundle that the boy counted carefully, mixed Hong Kong dollars and Chinese renminbi. He made the money disappear with a nimble-fingered gesture, then pointed at a stool in a corner of the room with a white screen behind it. Matthew sat -- still without a word -- and saw that there was a little webcam positioned on the boy’s desk, pointing at him. He composed his features in an expression of embarrassed seriousness, the kind of horrible facial expression that all ID carried, and the boy clicked his mouse and gestured at the door. "One hour," he said.
+
+Lu held the door for Matthew and led him down the fire-stairs, back into the mall, back onto the street, back among the counterfeiters, and a short way to a noodle stall that was thronged with people, and that's when Matthew's mouth began to generate so much saliva that he had to surreptitiously blot the corners of his lips on the sleeve of his cheap cotton jacket.
+
+Moment later, he was eating. And eating. And eating. The first bowl was pork. Then beef. Then prawn. Then some Shanghai dumplings, filled with pork. And still he ate. His stomach stretched and the waistband of his jeans pinched him, and he undid the top button and ate some more. Lu goggled at him all the while, fetching more bowls of dumplings as needed, bringing back chili sauce and napkins. He sent and received some texts, and Matthew looked up from his work of eating at those moments to watch Lu's fierce concentration as he tapped on his phone's keypad.
+
+"Who is she?" Matthew asked, as he leaned back and allowed the latest layer of dumplings to settle in his stomach.
+
+Lu ducked his head and blushed. "A friend. She's great. She organized, you know --" He waved his chopsticks in the direction of the counterfeiters' market. "She's -- I don't know what I would have done without her. She's why I'm not in jail."
+
+Matthew smiled wryly. "You'd have gotten out by now." He plucked at his loose shirt. "Though you might be a few sizes smaller."
+
+Lu showed Matthew a picture of a South China girl on his phone. She looked like the perfect model of South China womanhood -- fashionable clothes and hair, a carefully made up double-eyelid, an expression of mischief and, what, power? That sense of being on top of her world and the world in general. Matthew nodded appreciatively. "Lucky Lu," he said.
+
+Lu dropped his voice. "She's amazing," he whispered. "She got me papers, cancelled my phone, let the number go dead, then scooped it up again with a different identity, then forwarded it through a --" he looked around dramatically and pitched his voice even lower -- "Falun Gong switchboard in Macau, then back to this phone. That's why you were able to call me. It's incredible -- I'm still in touch with everyone, but it's all through so many blinds that the zengfu have no idea where I am or how to trace me."
+
+"How does she know all this?" Matthew asked, gently, the dumplings settling like rocks in his stomach. He was a dead man. "How do you know she isn't police herself?"
+
+"She can't be," Lu said. "You'll see why, once we meet up with her. This much I'm sure of."
+
+But Matthew couldn't shake the knowledge that this girl would be taking him back to prison. In prison, everyone had been an informant. If you informed on your fellow prisoners, you got more food, more sleep, lighter duty. The best informants were like little bosses, and the other prisoners courted their favor like they were on the outside, giving them the equivalent of the "3 Gs" -- golf, girls and gambling -- with whatever they could scrape up from the prison's walls. Matthew had never informed and had never been informed upon. He always chose the games he played, and he never played a game he couldn't win.
+
+And so he was numb when he met Jie, who smelled wonderful and had fantastic manners and a twinkling smile. She had his new identity papers, with the right picture, but a different name and identity number, and a fingerprint that he was sure wasn't his own on the back. She chatted amiably as they walked, about inconsequentialities, the weather and the food, football scores and gossip about celebrities, a too-perfect empty-head that made him even more suspicious of this girl and her impeccable acting.
+
+She led them to a small, run-down handshake building in the old Cantonese part of town. This was where Matthew had grown up, the "city-within-a-city" that the Cantonese had been squeezed into as South China ceased to be merely a place and had become a symbol for the New China, the world's factory. Being back in these familiar streets made him even more prickly, giving him the creeping certainty that he would be recognized any second, that some poor boyhood friend of his would be marked by this secret policewoman and sent to prison with him. He steeled himself to keep walking, though with each step he wanted to turn and bolt.
+
+The flat she led them to had once been half of a tiny apartment; now it was reduced to a single, tiny room with piles of girly clothes and shoes, several computers perched on cheap desks, a sink whose rim was covered in cosmetics, and a screened-off area that presumably hid the toilet. The shower was next to the stove and sink, a tiled square in the corner with a drain set into the floor, a shower-head anchored to the wall, a curtain rail bolted to the ceiling.
+
+Once the door was closed, Lu's girlfriend changed demeanour so abruptly, it was as though she had removed a mask. Her face was now animated with keen intelligence, her bearing aggressive and keen. "We need to get you new clothes," she said. "A shave, a haircut, some money --"
+
+One thing Matthew had learned in prison was the importance of not getting carried along by other people's scripts. A forceful person could do that: write a script, spin it out for you, put you in a role, and before you knew it, you were smuggling sealed packages from one part of the prison to another. Once someone else was writing the script, you were all but helpless.
+
+"Wait," he said. "Just stop." She looked at him mildly. Lu was less calm -- Matthew could tell at a glance that he was completely in this woman's power. "Madame, I don't mean to be rude, but who the hell are you, and why should I trust you?"
+
+She laughed. "You want to know if I'm zengfu," she said. Lu looked scandalized, but she was taking it well. "Of course you do. I've got money, apartments, I know where to get good ID papers --"
+
+"And you're very bossy," Matthew said.
+
+"I certainly am!" she said. "Now, have you ever heard of Jiandi?"
+
+He /{had}/ heard that name. He thought about it for a moment, casting his mind back to the distant, dreamlike time before prison. "The radio lady?" he said, slowly. "The one who talks to the factory girls?"
+
+"Yes," she said. "That's the one."
+
+"OK," he said. "I've heard of her."
+
+Lu grinned. "And now you've met her!"
+
+Matthew thought about this for a moment, staring into the girl's carefully made-up eyes, fringed with long, dark lashes. Finally he said, "No offense, but anyone can claim to be someone who no one has ever seen."
+
+Lu started to speak, but she held her hand up and silenced him. "He's right," she said. "Tank, the only reason I'm walking around free, still broadcasting, is that I am a very paranoid lady. Your friend's paranoia is just good sense. Have you ever considered that you've never /{listened}/ to me broadcasting, Tank? You've been here plenty for the broadcasts, but you've never tuned in. For all you know, I /{am}/ zengfu, infiltrating your ranks with a giant, elaborate counterfeit that has other cops calling in, pretending to be listeners to a show that never goes any farther than the room I'm sitting in." Lu's mouth opened and shut, opened and shut. She laughed at him. "Don't worry, I'm no cop. I'm just pointing out that you're a very trusting sort of boy. Maybe too trusting. Your friend here is a little more cautious, that's all. I thoroughly approve."
+
+Matthew found himself hoping that this girl wasn't a cop for the simple reason that he was starting to like her. Not to mention that if she was a cop, he'd go straight back to jail, but now that his panic was receding, he was able to consider what she would be like as a comrade. He liked the idea.
+
+"OK," he said. "So, if you're Jiandi, then it should be easy for you to prove it. Just do a show, and I'll tune in and listen to it."
+
+"How do you know Jiandi isn't a cop?" She had a twinkle in her eye.
+
+"Not even the cops are that devious," he said. "They couldn't stand to have all those Falun Gong ads and all that seditious talk about the party -- it wouldn't last a week, let alone years and years."
+
+She nodded. "I think so, too. Lu, do you agree?"
+
+Lu, still miserable looking, nodded glumly.
+
+"Cheer up," she said. "You get to have a little solo time with your friend!"
+
+They ended up at a new game cafe, far off on the metro line, by the Windows on the World theme-park. Matthew's father had taken him there once, and he'd gotten to dress up in ancient battle-armor, fire arrows at targets while a man with a Cantonese accent dressed like an American Indian gave him pointers. It had been fun, but nothing so nice as the games that Matthew was already playing.
+
+The metro let them off just around the corner from it, in front of a giant, run-down hotel that had been closed the last time Matthew came through here. The game cafe was in the former restaurant, something pirate themed with a huge fake pirate ship on the roof. Inside, it was choked with smoke and the tables had been formed into the usual long stretches with a PC every meter or so. About half of them were occupied, and in one corner of the restaurant there were fifty or sixty gamers who were clearly gold-farmers, working under the watchful eye of an older goon with a hard face and a cigarette in one corner of his mouth. It was incredibly hot inside the cafe, twenty degrees hotter than outside, and it was as dark and dank as a cave. Matthew felt instantly at home.
+
+Lu shoved some folded up bills at the old man behind the counter, an evil-looking, toothless grandfather with a pronounced hump and two missing fingers on one hand. Lu looked back at Matthew, then ordered a plate of dumplings as well. The man drew a styrofoam tray out of a chest freezer, punctured the film on top, and put it in the microwave beside him at the reception desk. "Go," he croaked, "I'll bring them to you."
+
+Matthew and Lu sat down at adjacent PCs far from the rest of the crowd, next to a picture window that had been covered over with newspapers. Matthew put his eye up to a rip in the paper and peeked out at the ruins of an elaborate, nautical-themed swimming pool outside, complete with twisting water-slides and fountains, now gone green and scummy. "Nice hotel," he said.
+
+Lu was mousing his way over to Jiandi's web-page, weaving the connection through a series of proxies, looking up the latest addresses for her stream mirrors, finding one that worked. "I think we'll have 45 minutes at least before anyone notices that this PC is doing something out-of-bounds. I trust that will be plenty of time for you to satisfy your suspicious mind."
+
+Matthew saw that Lu was really angry, and he swallowed his own anger -- something else he'd had plenty of practice at in prison. "I just want to be safe, Lu. This isn't a game." Then he heard his own words and grinned. "OK, it /{is}/ a game. But it's also real life. It has consequences." He plucked at the shirt that hung loose on his skinny body. "It wouldn't hurt you to be more careful."
+
+Lu said nothing, but his lips were pursed and white. The old man brought them their dumplings and they ate them in silence. They were miserable dumplings, filled with something that tasted like shredded paper, but they were still better than prison chicken's feet.
+
+Matthew looked at the boy. He was always thoughtful -- a strange thing for a tank to be -- and considerate, and brave. He hadn't been in Matthew's original guild, but when Boss Wing had put him in charge of the whole elite squad, they'd come willingly, seeing in Matthew a strategist who could lead them to victory. And when Matthrew had started whispering to them about the Webblies, Lu had been as excited as anyone. All that seemed so long ago, a different life and different time, before a policeman's baton had knocked him down, before he had gone to prison, before he'd turned into the man he was now. But Matthew was back in the world now, and Lu had been living on his wits for months, and --
+
+"I owe you an apology," he said, setting down hs chopsticks. "I still don't know if I can trust your friend, but I could have been a little smarter about how I said it. It's been a strange day -- 36 hours ago, I was wearing a prison uniform."
+
+Lu stared at him, and then a little smile snuck into the corners of his mouth. "It's all right," he said. "Here, she's starting." He popped out his earwig, already paired with the computer's sound-system, wiped it on his sleeve, and handed it to Matthew. Matthew screwed it into his ear.
+
+"Hello, sisters," came the familiar voice. "It's a little early, I know, but this is a short and special broadcast for you lucky ladies who have the day off, are sick in the infirmary, or happen to have snuck headphones into the factory. Hello, hello, hello. Shall we take a phone call or two?"
+
+Lu grinned at Matthew and stood and walked out of the cafe. Matthew touched the earwig, thought about going after him, decided not to. A moment later, Jiandi said, "There we go, hello, hello."
+
+"Hello Jiandi," said Lu. Matthew put his eye back up to the gap in the newspaper-covered glass and found himself staring at a grinning Lu, standing behind the building, phone to his head.
+
+"Tank!" she squealed. "How fantastic to hear from you again. It's been ages since you came on my show! Tell me, Tank, what's on your mind today?"
+
+"Justice," Lu/Tank said. Matthew found himself laughing quietly, and he ducked his head so as not to draw attention. "Justice for working people. We come to Guanddong Province because they say that we will be rich. But when we get here, we have bad working conditions, bad pay, and everything is stacked against us. No one can get real papers to live here, so we all buy fakes, and the police know they can stop us at any time and put us in jail or send us away because we don't have real documents. Our bosses know it, so they lock us in, or beat us, or steal our pay. I have been here for five years now, and I see how it works: the rich get richer, the poor get used up and sent back to the village, ruined. The corrupt government runs on bribes, not justice, and any attempt by working people to organize for a better deal is met with violence and war. The corrupt businessmen buy corrupt policemen who work for corrupt government.
+
+"I've had enough! It's time for working people to organize -- one of us is nothing. Together, we can't be stopped. China's revolutions have come and gone, and still, the few are rich and the many are poor. It's time for a worldwide revolution: workers in China, India, America -- all over -- have to fight together. We will use the Internet because we are better at the Internet than our bosses are. The Internet is shaped like a worker's organization: chaotic, spread out, without a few leaders making all the decisions. We know how to interface with it. Our bosses only understand the Internet when they can make it shaped like them, forcing all our clicks through a few bottlenecks that they can own and control. We can't be controlled. We can't be stopped. We will win!"
+
+Jiandi laughed into the mic, a throaty, sexy sound. "Oh, Tank! So serious! You make us all feel like silly children with your talk!
+
+"But he's right sisters, you know he is. We worry about our little problems, our bosses trying to screw us or cheat us; police chasing us, our networks infected and spied on, but we never ask /{why}/, what's the system /{for}/?" She drew in a deep breath. "We never ask what we can do."
+
+A long silence. Matthew clicked on the computer, verified that he was indeed tuned into the Factory Girl Show. He felt an unnameable emotion inside his chest, in his belly. She was what she said she was. Not a cop. Not a spy.
+
+Well, either that or the whole thing was a huge setup, and the police had been running this woman's operation for years now, deceiving millions, just to have this insider. That was an incredibly weird idea. But sometimes the politburo was incredibly weird.
+
+"We'll know what to do. Soon enough, sisters, have no fear. Keep listening -- tune in tonight for our regular show -- and someday /{very soon}/ we'll tell you what you can do. Wait and wait.
+
+"And you policemen and government bureaucrats and bosses listening now? Be afraid."
+
+Her voice clicked off, and a cheerful lunatic started saying crazy things about how great Falun Gong was, the traditional junk advertising he'd heard on Jiandi's show before.
+
+He thoughtfully chewed another newspaper dumpling and waited for Lu to make his way back into the cafe. He'd been out of prison for less than two days and his life was a million times more interesting than it had been just a few hours before. And he had dumplings. Things were happening -- big things.
+
+Lu shook his hand again, and the two of them left quickly, heading for the metro entrance. As they ran down the stairs, Lu leaned over and said, quietly, "Wait until you hear what we've got planned." His voice was tight, excited. Almost gleeful.
+
+"I can't wait," Matthew said. There was a hopeful feeling bubbling up inside him now. When was the last time he'd felt hopeful? Oh yes. It was when he quit Boss Wing's gold farm, taking his guildies with him, and set up his own business. That hadn't ended well, of course. But the hope had been /{delicious}/. It was delicious now.
+
+#
+
+Justbob had her whole network online. These were the best fighters in the IWWWW, passionate and committed. They'd been fighting off Pinkertons and dodging game-security for a year, and it had made them hard. Some of them had been beaten in real life, just like Justbob and Krang and BSN, and it was quite a badge of honor to replace your user-icon with a picture of your injuries -- an x-ray full of shattered bones, a close up of a grisly row of stitches.
+
+She loved her fighters. And they loved her.
+
+"Hello, pretties," she cooed into her earwig, adjusting the icepack she'd wedged between her tailbone and the chair. They were operating out of a new cafe now, still in the Geylang, which was the best place to be in Singapore if you wanted to be a little out of bounds without attracting too much police attention. "Ready for the latest word?"
+
+There was a chorus of cheers from all around the world. Justbob spoke Malay, Indonesian, English, Tamil, and a little Mandarin and Hindi, but they tended to do things in English, which everyone spoke a little of. There was a back-channel, of course, a text-chat where people helped out with translations. They had to speak slow, but it worked.
+
+"We are going to take on four worlds, all at the same time: Mushroom Kingdom, Zombie Mecha, Svartalfaheim Warriors, and Magic of Hogwarts." She watched the backchannel, waited until the translations were all sorted out. "What do I mean by 'take on?' I mean /{take over}/. We're going to seize control of the economies of all four worlds: the majority of the gold, prestige items, and power. We're going to do it fast. We're going to be unstoppable: whenever an operation is disrupted, we will have three more standing by. We're going to control the destiny of every boss whose workers toil in those worlds. We're going to rock their corporate masters. We're going to fight off every Pinkerton, either converting them to our cause or beating them so badly that they change careers.
+
+"To do this, we're going to need many thousands of players working in coordination. Mostly that means doing what they do best: making gold. But we also expect heavy resistance once word gets out about what we're up to. We'll need fighters to defend our lines from Pinkertons, of course, but we also need a lot of distraction and interference, all over, including -- no, /{especially}/ -- in worlds where we're /{not}/ going for it. We want game management thoroughly confused until its too late. You will need proxies, /{lots of them}/, and as many avs as you can level up. That's your number one task right now -- level as many avs as you can, so that you can switch accounts and jump into a new fighter the second an old one gets disconnected." She watched the backchatter for a second, then added, "Yes, of course, we're working on that now. In a day or so, we'll have prepaid account cards for all of you. They'll need US proxies to run, so make sure you've got a good list of them."
+
+She watched the chatter for another moment. "Of course, yes, they will try to shut down the proxies, but if they do, there will be /{howls}/ from their American players. Do you know how many Americans sneak out of their work networks to play during the day using those proxies? If they start blocking proxies, they'll be blocking some of their best customers. And of course, many Mechanical Turks are on school networks, using proxies to log in to their jobs. They can't afford to block all those proxies -- not for long!"
+
+The back-channel erupted. They liked that. It was good strategy, like when you aggroed a boss and then found a shelter that put some low-level baddies between you and it, and provoked a fight where they all fought each other instead of you. Justbob wished she could say more about this, because the deviousness of it all had given her an all-day, all-week, all-month smile when they'd worked it out in one of the high-level cell meetings. But she understood the need for secrecy. It was a sure bet that some of the fighters on this conference were working for the other side; after all, some of /{their}/ spies were inside the companies, weren't they?
+
+"All right," she said, "all right. Enough talk-talk. Let's kill something." Her headphone erupted in ragged cheering and she skirmished with her commanders for a happy hour until The Mighty Krang came and dragged her away so that she could eat dinner.
+
+Big Sister Nor waited until she was seated, with food on her plate -- sizzling cha kway teow and fried Hokkien noodles, smelling like heaven-- before she started speaking. "All right," she said. "Our man's landing in Shenzhen tomorrow. We've got people who'll help get him out of the port safely, and he says he's got our cargo, no problems there. He's been logging in on the voyage, he says he can get us hundreds of Turks."
+
+The Mighty Krang waved his chopsticks at her. "Do you believe him?"
+
+Big Sister Nor chewed and swallowed thoughtfully. "I think I do," she said. "He's all enthusiasm, that one. He's one of those kids who absolutely /{loves}/ gaming and wanted to be part of the 'magic,' but discovered that he was working every hour God sent, and there were always hidden rules that ended up docking his pay." The other two nodded vigorously -- they recognized the pattern, it was the template for sweatshops all over the world. "His employers told him to be grateful to have such a wonderful opportunity and didn't he know that there were plenty more who'd have his job if he didn't want it?"
+
+"OK, so he's upset -- what makes you think he can deliver lots of other upset people?"
+
+She shrugged and speared a prawn. "He's a natural networker, a real do-er. You should hear him talk about that shipping container of his! It's a real hotel on the high seas. Very ingenious. And his guildies say he's bloody sociable. A nice guy. The kind of guy you listen to."
+
+"The kind of guy you follow?" asked Justbob, scratching at her scarred eye-socket. She could forget about the itch and the ache from the side of her face when she was in conference with her warriors, but she lost that precious distraction the rest of the time. And her dreams were full of phantom aches from the ruined socket, and she sometimes woke with tears on her face.
+
+Big Sister Nor said, "That's what I think."
+
+The Mighty Krang drank some watermelon juice and drew glyphs in the table with the condensation. The waitress -- a pretty Tamil girl -- scowled at him with mock theatricality and wiped it away. All the waitresses had crushes on The Mighty Krang. Even Justbob had to admit that he was pretty. "I don't like the idea," he said. "This is about, you know, /{workers}/."
+
+Big Sister Nor fixed him with a level stare. "You mean 'he's white, I don't trust him.' He's a worker, too -- even though he works for the game. We're /{all}/ workers. That's the point of the Webblies. All workers in one big union -- solidarity. Start making differences between workers who deserve the union and workers who don't and the next thing you know, your job will be handed over to the workers you left out of your little private clubhouse. Krang, if you're not clear on this, you're in the wrong place. Absolutely the wrong place. Do I make myself clear?"
+
+This was a different Big Sister Nor than the one they usually knew, the motherly, patient, understanding one. Her voice was brittle and stern, her stare piercing. Krang visibly wilted under its glare. "Fine," he said, without much conviction. "Sorry." Justbob felt embarrassed for him, but not sympathetic. He knew better.
+
+They finished the meal in silence. Big Sister Nor's phone buzzed at her. She looked at the face, saw the number, put it back down again. There was a rule: no taking calls during "family dinners" between the three of them. But BSN was visibly anxious to get to this one. She began to eat faster, as fast as she could with her twisted hand.
+
+"Who was it?" Justbob asked.
+
+"China," she said. "Urgent. Our boy from America."
+
+#
+
+Ping didn't like the port. Too many cops. He had good papers, but not even the best papers would stand up long to a cop who actually radioed in the ID and asked about it. The counterfeiters claimed that they used good identities for the fakes, real people who weren't in any kind of trouble, but who knew whether to believe them?
+
+Anyway, it was just crazy. The gweilo was supposed to wait until the ship came into dock, change into a set of clean clothes, pin on ID from his father's company, and just /{walk out}/ of the port, flashing his identification at anyone who bothered to ask the skinny white kid what he was doing, carrying two heavy cardboard boxes out of the secure region. Once he made it clear of the port, Ping could take him away, make him disappear into the mix of foreigners, merchants, and business-people thronging the region.
+
+Ping had asked around, found a Webbly who's brother had worked as a hauler the year before, gotten information about where Leonard would most likely emerge, and had emailed all that info to Leonard as he trundled across the ocean.
+
+But there weren't supposed to be /{this many}/ cops, were there? There were hundreds of them, it seemed like, and not just uniforms. There were plenty of especially tall men with brush-cuts and earpieces, dressed like civilians, but moving with far too much coordination and purpose. Ping walked past the entrance twice, the first time conducting an imaginary argument with someone over his phone, trying to exude an aura of distraction that would make him seem harmless. The second time he walked past while staring intently at a tourist map, trying to maintain the show of helplessness. In between, he checked his watch, saw that Leonard was an hour late, sent a message back to Lu and asked him to see if he could email Big Sister Nor and find out what was going on. This was the trickiest moment, since the ship's satellite link was down while it was in dock, and so Leonard's stolen network connection was down with it. Once he was clear of the port, they'd give him a prepaid phone, get him back on the grid, but until then...
+
+He nearly dropped the tourist map when his phone went off. A nearby cop, the tallest man he'd ever seen, looked hard at him and he smiled sheepishly and withdrew his phone and tried to control the shaking in his hands as he touched it to life, hoping the noise hadn't aggroed him.
+
+"Is he with you?" Big Sister Nor's Mandarin was heavily accented, but good. He recognized the voice instantly from many late-night chat sessions and raids.
+
+"Hi!" he said, in a bright, brittle voice, trying to sound like he was talking to a girlfriend or sister. "It's great to hear from you!"
+
+"You haven't seen him yet?"
+
+"That's right!" he said, pasting a fake grin on his face for the benefit of the security man.
+
+"Shit. He was due out hours ago." Big Sister Nor went quiet. "OK, here's the thing. Whatever happened to him, we need those boxes." She cursed in some other language. "I should have just had him put the boxes in the container. He wanted to come see you all so badly, though --" She broke off.
+
+"OK!" he said, walking as casually as he could away from the cop. There was a spot, a doorway in front of a closed grocery store down the road. He could go there, sit down, talk this through.
+
+"A lot of cops where you are, huh? Don't answer. Listen, Ping, I need to know -- can you get into the port? If he doesn't make it out?"
+
+He swallowed. "I don't think so," he whispered. He was almost to his doorway now.
+
+"What if you have to?"
+
+He was a raid leader, a master strategist. He was no Matthew, but still, he understood how to get in and out of tight places. And he'd been a pretty good climber a few years ago, before he'd found gold-farming. Maybe he could go over the fence? He felt like throwing up at the thought. There were so many cameras, so many cops, the fence was /{so high}/.
+
+"I'd try," he said. "But I would almost certainly go to jail." He'd been held for three days in the local lockup along with most of the strikers and then released. It had been bad enough -- not as bad as Matthew's stories -- and he never wanted to go back. "You have to see this place, Nor, it's like a fortress."
+
+She sighed. "I know what ports look like," she said. "OK, tell you what -- you wait another hour, see if you can find him. I'll work on something else here, and call you."
+
+"OK," he said.
+
+Casually, he drifted back along the length of the high fence that guarded the port, keenly aware of the cameras drilling into the back of his neck. How many times could he pass by before someone decided to figure out what he was doing there? They should have brought a whole party, half a dozen of the gang who could trade off looking for the stupid gweilo. Ping shook his head in disgust. It had been fun to know Leonard when he was a kid in California and they were five kids in China -- exotic, even. No one else partied with exotic foreigners with bad accents.
+
+It was even exciting when the gweilo had turned into a smuggler for the cause, crossing the ocean with his booty of hard-earned prepaid game-cards that would let them all fly under the game companies' radar.
+
+But it was no longer exciting now that he was about to go to jail because some dumb kid from across the ocean couldn't figure out how to get his ass out of the port of Shenzhen.
+
+#
+
+It had gone better than Wei-Dong had any right to expect. After they took to the sea, he'd cut the freighter's WiFi like butter and hopped onto their satellite link. It was slow -- too slow for gaming -- but it was OK for messaging and staying in touch with both the Webblies and the cell of Turks he'd pieced together from the best people he knew. He'd let himself out of the container on the first night and climbed up to the top of the stack, trailing his solar rig and water collector behind him, and affixed both to an inconspicuous spot on the outside face of the topmost containers, where no crewmember could spot them. Again, the operation went off without a hitch.
+
+By day three, he was wishing for some trouble. There was only so much time he could spend watching the planning emerge on the Webbly boards, especially since so many of the pieces of the plan were closely guarded secrets, visible only as blank spots in his understanding of where he was going and why he was going there. A thousand times a day, he was struck with the absolute madness of his position -- a smuggler on the high seas, going to make revolution in Asia, at the tender age of 18! It was fabulous and terrifying, depending on what mood he was in.
+
+Mostly that mood was /{bored}/.
+
+There was nothing to do, and by day five, he was snaffling up all the traffic on the boat, watching the lovesick crew of six Filipino sailors sending long-distance romantic notes to their pining girlfriends. It was entertaining enough downloading a Tagalog dictionary so he could look up some of the phrases they dropped into the letters, but after a while, that paled too.
+
+And there were still /{days}/ to go, and the rains had come and filled up his reservoirs, and so he had water to drink and cook with, and so he didn't even have itchy skin or malnutrition to keep him distracted, and so he'd started to do stupid things.
+
+He'd started to sneak around.
+
+Oh, only at night, of course, and at first, only among the containers, where the crew rarely ventured. But there wasn't much to see in the container spaces, just the unbroken, ribbed expanses of containers, radio tagged and painted with huge numbers, stickered over and locked tight.
+
+So then he started to sneak over to the crew's quarters.
+
+He knew what they'd look like. You can book passage on a freighter, take a long, weird holiday drifting from port to port around the world. The travel agents who sell these lonely, no-frills cruises had plenty of online photos and videos and panoramas of the accommodations and common rooms. They looked like institutional rooms everywhere, with big scratched flat-panel displays, worn and stained carpet, sagging sofas, scuffed tables and chairs. The difference being that shipside, all that stuff was bolted down.
+
+But after days stuck inside his little secret fortress of solitude, any change of scenery sounded like a trip to Disneyland and a half. And so that's how he found himself strolling into the ship's kitchen at 2AM ship's time -- they were living on Pacific time, and he'd shifted to Chinese time after they put to sea, so this wasn't much of a hardship. In the fridge, sandwich fixings, Filipino single-serving ice cream cones, pre-made boba tea with huge pearls of tapioca in it, and cans of Starbucks frappucino. He helped himself, snitching it all into a shoulder-bag he'd brought along, scurrying back to his den to scarf it down.
+
+That was the first night. The second night, he ate his snack in the TV room, watching a bootleg DVD of a current-release comedy movie that opened the day he left LA. He kept the sound low, and even used the bathroom outside the common room on the corridor that led to the crew's quarters. He crept around on tiptoe, and muted the TV every time the ship creaked, his heart thundered as his eyes darted to each corner of the room, seeking out a nonexistent hiding spot among the bolted-down furniture.
+
+It was the best night of the trip so far.
+
+So the next night, he had to go further. After having a third pig out and watching a Bollywood science fiction comedy movie about a turbanned robot that attacked Bangalore, only to be vanquished by IT nerds, he snuck down into the engine rooms.
+
+Now /{this}/ was a change of scenery. The door to the engine room was bolted but not locked, just like all the other doors on the ship that he'd tried. After all, they were in the middle of the damned ocean -- it wasn't like they had to worry about cat-burglars, right? (Present company excepted, of course!).
+
+The big diesel engines were as loud as jets. He found a pair of greasy soundproof earmuffs and slipped them over his ears, cutting the noise down somewhat, but it still vibrated up through the soles of his sneakers, making his bones shake. Everything down here was fresh and gleaming, polished, oiled and painted. He trailed his fingers over the control panels, gauges, shut-off valves, raised his arms to tickle the flexi-hoses that coiled overhead. He'd gamed a couple of maps set in rooms like this, but the experience in real life was something else. He was actually /{inside}/ the machine, inside an engine so powerful it could move thousands of tons of steel and cargo halfway around the world.
+
+Cool.
+
+As he slipped his muffs off and carefully re-hung them, he noticed something he really should have spotted on the way in: a little optical sensor by the engine-room door at the top of the steel crinkle-cut nonskid stairs, and beside it, a pin-sized camera ringed with infrared LEDs. Which meant...
+
+Which meant that he had tripped an invisible alarm when he entered the room and broke the beam, and that he'd been recorded ever since he arrived. Which meant...
+
+Which meant he was /{doomed}/.
+
+His fingers trembled as he worked the catch on the door and slipped out into the steel shed that guarded the engine-room entrance at the crew end of the deck. He looked left and right, waiting for a spotlight to slice through the pitchy night, waiting for a siren to cut through the roar of the ocean as they sliced it in two with the boat's mighty prow.
+
+It was quiet. It was dark. For now. The ship only had one night watch-officer and one night-pilot, and from his network spying, he knew the duty was an excuse to send email and download pornography, so it may have been that neither of them had noticed the alert -- yet.
+
+He crept back among the containers, moving as fast as he dared, painfully aware of how vividly he would stand out to anyone who even casually glanced down from the ship's bridge atop the superstructure. Once he reached the containers, he slipped onto the narrow walkway that ringed the outside of the ship and took off running, racing for his nest. As he went, he made a mental checklist of the things he would have to do once he got there, reeling in his solar panels and antennas, his water collectors. He'd button down his container as tight as a frog's ass, and they could search for months before they'd get to his -- meanwhile, he'd be in Shenzhen in a couple days. Then it would just be a matter of evading the port security -- who'd be on high alert, once the crew alerted them to the stowaway. Argh. He was /{such}/ an idiot. It was all going to crash and burn, just because he got /{bored}/.
+
+Cursing himself, hyperventilating, running, he skidded out on the deck and faceplanted into the painted, bird-streaked steel. The pain was insane. Blood poured from his nose, which he was sure he'd broken. And now the ship was rocking and pitching hard, and holy crap, look at those clouds streaking across the sky!
+
+This was not going well. He cornered wobbily around the container stack, had a hairy, one-foot-in-the-sky moment as the huge ship rolled beneath him and his hand flailed wildly for the guardrail, then he caught himself and finished the turn, racing to his container. Once there, he scrambled along the runs that marked the course of the life-support tentacles trailing from his box, and he disconnected each one, working with shaking hands. Hugging the flexi-hose, cabling, solar cells and antenna to his chest, he spidered down the container-faces and slipped inside just as another roll sent him sprawling on his ass.
+
+He undogged the hatches on his airtight inner sanctum and let himself in. The ship was rocking hard now, and his kitchen stuff, carelessly left lying around, was rattling back and forth. He ignored it at first, diving for his laptop and punching up the traffic-logs from the ship's network, but after a can of tuna beaned him in the cheek, raising a welt, he set the computer down and velcroed it into place, then gathered up everything that was loose and dumped it into his bolted-down chests. Then he went back to his traffic dumps, looking for anything that sounded like an official notice of his discovery.
+
+The night-time traffic was always light, some telemetry, the flirty emails from the skeleton crew. Tonight was no exception. The file stopped dead at the point that he'd reeled in his antenna, but it probably wouldn't have lasted much longer anyway. The rain was pounding down now, a real frog-strangler, sounding like a barrage of gravel on the steel containers all around him. After a few minutes of this, he found himself wishing he'd taken the earmuffs. A few minutes later and he'd forgotten all about the earmuffs, and he was grabbing for a bag to heave up his stolen food into. The barfing and the rolling didn't stop, just kept going on and on, his stomach empty, trying to turn itself inside-out, slimy puke-smears everywhere in the tiny cabin. He tried to remember what you were supposed to do for sea-sickness. Watch the horizon, right? No horizon in the container, just pitching walls and floor and unsteady light from the battery-powered LED fixtures he'd glued to the ceiling. The shadows jumped and loomed, increasing the disorientation.
+
+It was the most miserable he'd ever been. It seemed like it would never end. At a certain point, he found himself thinking of what it would be like to be crammed in with 10 or 20 other people, in the pitch dark, with no chemical toilet, just a bucket that might overturn on the first pitch and roll. Crammed in and locked in, the door not due to be opened for days yet, and no way to know what might greet you at the other side --
+
+Suddenly, he didn't feel nearly so miserable. He roused himself to look at his computer a little more, but staring at the screen instantly brought back his sea-sickness. He remembered packing some ginger tablets that were supposed to be good for calming the stomach -- he'd read about them on a FAQ page for people going on their first ocean cruise -- and searching for them in the rocking box distracted him for a while. He gobbled two of them with water, noting that the tank was only half full and resolving to save every drop now that his collector was shut down.
+
+He wasn't sure, but it seemed like the storm was letting up. He drank a little more water, checked in with his nausea -- a little better -- and got back to the screen. It was a minor miracle, but there was no report at all of him being spotted, no urgent communique back to corporate HQ about the stowaway. Maybe they hadn't noticed? Maybe they had been focused on the storm?
+
+And there the storm was again, back and even more fierce than it had been. The rocking built, and built, and built. It wasn't sickening anymore -- it was /{violent}/. At one point, Wei-Dong found himself hanging on to his bed with both hands and feet, his laptop clamped between his chest and the mattress, as the entire ship rolled to port and hung there, teetering at an angle that felt nearly horizontal, before crashing back and rocking in the /{other}/ direction. Once, twice more the ship rolled, and Wei-Dong clenched his teeth and fists and eyes and prayed to a nameless god that they wouldn't tip right over and sink to the bottom of the ocean. Container ships didn't go down very often, but they /{did}/ go down. And not only that -- about half a percent of containers were lost at sea, gone over the side in rough water. His father always took that personally. One percent didn't sound like a lot, but, as Wei-Dong's father liked to remind him, that was 20,000 containers, enough to build a high-rise out of. And the number went up every year, as the seas got rougher and the weather got harder to predict.
+
+All this went through Wei-Dong's head as he clung for dear life to his bolted-down bed, battered from head to toe by loose items that he'd missed when he'd packed everything into his chest. The ship groaned and strained and then there was a deep metallic grating noise that he felt all the way to his balls, and then --
+
+-- the container /{moved}/.
+
+It was a long moment and it seemed like everything had gone silent, as the sensation of sliding across the massive deck tunneled through his inner ear and straight into the fear center of his brain. In that moment, he knew that he was about to die. About to sink and sink and sink in a weightless eternity as the pressure of the ocean all around him mounted, until the container imploded and smeared him across its crumpled walls, dissipating in red streamers as the container fell to the bottom of the sea.
+
+And then, the ship righted itself. There were tears in his eyes, and a dampness from his crotch. He'd pissed himself. The rocking slowed, slowed. Stopped. Now the ship was bobbing as normal, and Wei-Dong knew that he would live.
+
+His hidey-hole was a wreck. His clothes, his toys, his survival gear -- all tossed to the four corners. Thankfully, the chemical toilet had stayed put, with its lid dogged down tight. That would have been /{messy}/. Puke, water, other spills slicked every available surface. According to his watch, it was 4AM on his personal clock. That made it, uh, 11AM ship's time, which was set to Los Angeles. If he'd done the math right, it was about 6AM in their latitude, which should be just about directly in line with New Zealand. Which meant the sun would be up, and the crew would no doubt be swarming on deck, surveying the damage and securing the remaining containers as best as they could with the ship's little crane and tractors. And /{that}/ meant that he'd have to stay put, amid the sick and the bad air and the mess, wait until that ship's night or maybe even the next night. And he had no WiFi, either.
+
+Shit.
+
+He'd brought along some sleeping pills, just in case, as part of his everything-and-the-kitchen-sink first-aid box. He found the sealed plastic chest still bungied to one of the wire shelving units, beside the precious two boxes of prepaid cards, still securely lashed to the frame. As he broke the blisterpack and poured a stingy sip of water into his tin cup, he had a moment's pause: what if they discovered his container while he was drugged senseless?
+
+Well, what if they discovered it while he was wide awake? It's not like he could /{run away}/.
+
+What an idiot he was.
+
+He ate the pills, then set about cleaning up his place as best as he could, using old t-shirts as rags. He flipped over the mattress to expose the unpissed-upon side, and wondered when the pills would take effect. And then he found that he was too tired to do another thing except for lying down with his cheek on the bare mattress and falling into a deep and dreamless sleep.
+
+The pills were supposed to be a "non-drowsy" formula, but he woke feeling like his head was wrapped in foam rubber. Maybe that was the near-death experience. It was now the middle of ship's night, and real night. Theoretically, it would be dark outside, and he could sneak out, survey the damage, maybe rig up his WiFi antenna and find out whether he was about to be arrested when they made port. But when he climbed gingerly out of his inner box and tried to open the door of his container, he discovered that it had been wedged shut. Not just sticky, or bent at the hinge, but properly jammed up against the next container, with several tons of cargo on the other side of the door for him to muscle out of the way. Or not.
+
+He sat down. He had his headlamp on, as the inside of the container was dark as the inside of a can of Coke. It splashed crazy shadows on the walls, the stack of batteries, (he praised his own foresight at using triple layers of steel strapping to keep them in place) the hatch leading to his inner sanctum.
+
+By his reckoning, they were only three days out of Shenzhen, plus or minus whatever course-corrections they'd have to make now that the storm had passed. Theoretically, he could make it. He had the water, the food, the electricity, provided that he rationed all three. But the Webblies would be expecting him to check in before then, and the boredom would drive him loopy.
+
+He thought about trying to saw through the steel container. It was possible -- the container-converter message boards were full of talk about what it took to cut up a container and use it for other purposes. But nothing in his toolkit could manage it. The closest he could come would be to drill a hole in the skin with his cordless drill. He'd used it to assemble his nest, he had a couple spare boxes of high-speed bits in his toolchest. His biggest bit, a small circular saw, would punch a hole as big as his thumb, but only after he'd drilled a guide-hole through the steel. 14 gauge steel, several times thicker than the support-struts he'd drilled out when doing his interior work.
+
+It would make an unholy racket, but he was on the cargo deck, well away from the deckhouse. Assuming no one was patrolling the deck, there was no way he'd be heard over the sound of the sea and the rumble of the diesels. He told himself that it was worth the risk of discovery, since getting a hole would mean getting an antenna out, and therefore getting onto the network and finding out whether he'd be safe once they got to China.
+
+No time like the present. He found the toolchest, inside a bigger, bolted-down box, and recovered the drill. He had a spare charger for it, with an inverter that would run off the battery stack, and he plugged it in and got it charging. He'd need a lot of batteries to get through the ceiling.
+
+Several hours later, he realized that the ceiling might have been a mistake. His shoulders, arms, and chest all burned and ached. He found himself taking more and more frequent breaks, windmilling his arms, but the ache wouldn't subside. His ears hurt too, from the echoey whining racket of the drill, a hundred nightmares of the dentist's chair. He kept an eye on his watch, telling himself he'd just work until the morning shift came on duty, to reduce the risk that the sound would be heard. But it was still an hour away from shift change when the battery on his drill died, and he discovered that the last time he'd switched batteries, he'd neglected to push the dead one all the way into the charger, and now both his batteries were dead.
+
+That was as good an excuse as any to stop. He fingered the dent he'd made in the sheet steel through all his hours of drilling. His fingertip probed it, but barely seemed to sink in at all. He detached a chair from its anchors and dragged it over, stood on it, and put an eye to it, and saw a pinprick of dirty grey light, the first light of dawn, glimmering at the bottom of his drill-hole.
+
+Sleep did not help his arms. If anything, it just made them worse. It took him five minutes just to get to the point where he could lift his arms over his face, working them back and forth. He had a little pot of Tiger Balm, the red, smelly Chinese muscle rub, in his first-aid box, and he worked it into his arms, shoulders, chest and neck, thinking, as he did, /{This stuff isn't doing anything}/. A few minutes later, a new burning spread across his skin, a fiery, minty feeling, hot and cold at the same time. It was alarming at first, but a few seconds later, it was /{incredible}/, like his muscles were all letting go of their tension at once. He took up his drill, checked his watch -- middle of the first shift, but screw it, the engines were groaning, no one would hear it -- and went to work.
+
+He punched through five minutes later. Five minutes! He'd been so close! He put his eye to the hole again, saw sky, clouds, the shadows of other containers nearby. His wireless antenna awaited. It had a big heavy magnetic base, powerful rare-earth magnets that he'd used to attach it to its earlier spot. They'd worked so well that he'd had to plant both feet on either side of it and heave, like he was pulling up a stubborn carrot. Now he didn't need the base, just the willowy wand of the antenna itself. He disassembled the antenna, reattached it to the bare wire-ends, and then gently, gingerly, fed it through his dime-sized hole.
+
+He had a moment's pause as he fed it up, picturing it sticking up among the even, smooth surfaces of the container-tops, as obvious as a boner at the chalkboard, but he'd been drilling for so long, it seemed crazy to stop now. A voice in his head told him that getting caught was even crazier, but he shut that voice up by telling it to shut up, since getting information on the ship's status would be vital to completing his mission. And then the antenna was up.
+
+He grabbed his laptop and logged into the network and began snaffling up traffic. He could watch it in realtime -- his sniffer would helpfully group intercepted emails, clicks, pages, search terms and IMs into their own reporting panels -- but that was just frustrating, like watching a progress bar creep across the screen.
+
+Instead he went inside his sanctum and made himself a cup of instant ramen noodles, using a little more of his precious electricity and water, and then opened up a can of green tea with soymilk to wash it down. He ate as slowly as he could, trying to savor every bite and tell his stomach that food was OK, despite the rock and roll of the past day. During the meal, he heard footsteps near his container, the grumble of heavy machinery working at the containers, and his mouth went dry at the thought of his antenna sticking up there.
+
+Why had he put it there? Because he couldn't bear the thought of sitting, bored and restless, in his box for days more. Why was he doing any of it? Why was he on his way to China? Why had he left home to be a gamer? Why had he learned Chinese in the first place? Trapped with his own thoughts, he found himself confronting some pretty ugly answers. He hadn't wanted to be like all the other kids. He'd wanted to stand out, be special. Different. To know and understand and be skilled at things that his father didn't know anything about. To triumph. To be a part of something bigger than himself, but to be an /{important}/ part. To be romantic and special. To care about a justice that his friends didn't even know existed.
+
+It made him all feel sad and pathetic and needy. It made him want to go plug into his laptop and get away from his thoughts.
+
+It worked. What he found on his laptop was nothing short of amazing. First there was a haul of photos emailed from the captain back to the shipping company, showing the cargo deck of the ship looking like a tumbled Jenga tower, containers scattered everywhere, on their sides, on their backs, at crazy angles. It looked as if the entire top layer of boxes had slipped into the ocean, and then several more layers' worth on the port side. He looked more closely. His container was on the starboard side, and the container from the corresponding position on the other side appeared to be gone. He looked up the ship's manifest, found the serial number of the container, matched it to a list of overboard boxes, swallowed. It had been pure random chance that put his box on the starboard side. If he'd gone the other way, he'd be raspberry jam in a crushed tin can at the bottom of the ocean.
+
+He scanned the email traffic for information about the mysterious stowaway, but it looked as though the storm had literally blown any concern over him overboard. The manifest he had listed the value for customs of all the containers on the ship. Most of them were empty, or at least partially empty, as there wasn't much that America had that China needed, except empty containers to fill with more goods to ship to America. Still, the total value of the missing containers went into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. He winced. That was going to be a huge insurance bill.
+
+Now it was time to get /{his}/ email, something that he'd been putting off, because that was even riskier; if the ship's own administrators were wiretapping their own network, they'd see his traffic. Oh, it wouldn't look like email from him to Big Sister Nor and his guildies and the Turks back in America. It'd look like gigantic amounts of random junk, originating on an internal address that didn't correspond to any known machine on the ship. Its destination was unclear -- it hopped immediately into TOR, The Onion Router, which bounced it like a pea in a maraca around the globe's open relays. He was counting on the ship's lax IT security and the fact that the crew were always connecting up new devices like phones and handheld games they picked up in port to help him slide past the eyes of the network. Still, if they were looking for a stowaway, they might think of looking at the network traffic.
+
+He sat at his keyboard, fingers poised, and debated with himself. Deep down, he knew how this debate would end. He could no more stay off the network and away from his friends than he could stay cooped up in the tin can without poking his antenna off the ship.
+
+So he did it. Sent emails, watched the network traffic, held his breath. So far, so good. Then: a rumble and a clatter and a pair of thunderous /{clangs}/ from above. His heart thudded in his ears and more metallic sounds crashed through the confined space. What was it? He placed the noises, connected them to the pictures he'd seen earlier. The crew had the forklift and tractor out, and the crane swinging, and they were rearranging the containers for stability and trim. He yanked his antenna in and dove for the inner sanctum, dogging his hatch and throwing all loose objects into the lockers before flinging himself over the bed and grabbing hold of the post and clinging to it with fingers and toes as the container rocked and rolled for the second time in 24 hours.
+
+#
+
+"So where'd you end up?" Ping asked, passing Wei-Dong another parcel of longzai rice and chicken folded in a lotus leaf. Ping had wanted to go to the Pizza Hut, but Wei-Dong had looked so hurt and offended at the suggestion, and had been so insistent on eating something "real" that he'd taken the gweilo to a cafe in the Cantonese quarter, near the handshake buildings. Wei-Dong had loved it from the moment they'd sat down, and had ordered confidently, impressing both Ping and the waiter with his knowledge of South Chinese food.
+
+Wei-Dong chewed, made a face. "On the bloody top of the stack, three high!" he said. "With more containers sandwiched in on every side of me, except the door side, thankfully! But I couldn't climb down the stack with these." He thumped the dirty, beat up cardboard boxes beside the table. "So I had to transfer the cards to my backpack and then climb up and down that stack, over and over again, until I had it all on the ground. Then I threw down the collapsed cardboard boxes, climbed to the bottom, and boxed everything up again."
+
+Ping's jaw dropped. "You did all that in the /{port}/?" He thought of all the guards he'd seen, all the cameras.
+
+Wei-Dong shook his head. "No," he said. "I couldn't take the chance. I did it at night, in relays, the night before we got in. And I covered it all in some plastic sheeting I had, which is a good thing because it rained yesterday. There was a lot of water on the deck and some of it leaked through the plastic, but the boxes seem OK. Let's hope the cards are still readable. I figure they must be -- they're in plastic-wrapped boxes inside."
+
+"But what about the crew seeing you?"
+
+Wei-Dong laughed. "Oh, I was shitting bricks the whole time over that, I promise! I was in full sight of the wheelhouse most of the time, though thankfully there wasn't any moon out. But yeah, that was pretty freaky."
+
+Ping looked at the gweilo, his skinny arms, the fuzz of pubescent moustache, the shaggy hair, the bad smell. When the boy had finally emerged from the gate, confidently flashing some kind of badge at the guard, Ping had wanted to strangle him for being so late and for looking so /{relaxed}/ about it. Now, though, he couldn't help but admire his old guildie. He said so.
+
+Wei-Dong actually blushed, and his chest inflated, and he looked so proud that Ping had to say it again. "I'm in awe," he said. "What a story!"
+
+"I just did what I had to do," Wei-Dong said with an unconvincing, nonchalant shrug. His Mandarin was better than Ping remembered it. Maybe it was just being face to face rather than over a fuzzy, unreliable net-link, the ability to see the whole body, the whole face.
+
+All of Ping's earlier worry and irritation melted away. He was overcome by a wave of affection for this kid who had travelled thousands of kilometers to be part of the same big guild. "Don't take this the wrong way," he said, "but I have to tell you this. A few hours ago, I was very upset with you. I thought it was just ego or stupidity, your coming all this way with the boxes. I wanted to strangle you. I thought you were a stupid, spoiled --" He saw the look on Wei-Dong's face, pure heartbreak and stopped, held up his hands. "Wait! What I'm trying to say is, I thought all this, but then I met you and heard your story, and I realized that you want this just as much as I do, and have as much at stake now. That you're a real, a real /{comrade}/." The word was funny, an old communist word that had been leached of color and meaning by ten million hours of revolutionary song-singing in school. But it fit.
+
+And it worked. Wei-Dong's chest swelled up even bigger, like a balloon about to sail away, and his cheeks glowed like red coals. He fumbled for words, but his Chinese seemed to have fled him, so Ping laughed and handed him another lotus leaf, this one filled with seafood.
+
+"Eat!" he said. "Eat!" He checked the time on his phone, read the coded messages there from Big Sister Nor. "You've got 10 minutes to finish and then we have to get to the guild-house for the big call!"
+
+#
+
+You're in a strange town, or a strange part of town. A little disoriented already, that's key. Maybe it's just a strange time to be out, first thing in the morning in the business district, or very late at night in clubland, or the middle of the day in the suburbs, and no one else is around.
+
+A stranger approaches you. He's well-dressed, smiling. His body-language says, /{I am a friend, and I'm slightly out of place, too.}/ He's holding something. It's a pane of glass, large, fragile, the size of a road atlas or a Monopoly board. He's struggling with it. It's heavy? Slippery? As he gets closer, he says, with a note of self-awareness at the absurdity of this all, "Can you please hold this for a second?" He sounds a little desperate too, like he's about to drop it.
+
+You take hold of it. Fragile. Large. Heavy. Very awkward.
+
+And, still smiling, the stranger methodically and quickly plunges his hands into your pockets and begins to transfer your keys, wallet and cash into his own pockets. He never breaks eye-contact in the ten or 15 seconds it takes him to accomplish the task, and then he turns on his heel and walks away (he doesn't run, that's important) very quickly, for a dozen steps, and /{then}/ he breaks into a wind-sprint of a run, powering up like Daffy Duck splitting on Elmer Fudd.
+
+You're still holding onto the pane of glass.
+
+Why are you holding onto that pane of glass?
+
+What else are you going to do with it? Drop it and let it break on the strange pavement? Set it down carefully?
+
+Tell you one thing you're not going to do. You're not going to run with it. Running with a ten kilo slab of sharp-edged glass in your hands is even dumber than taking hold of it in the first place.
+
+#
+
+"What's at work here?" Big Sister Nor was on the video-conference window, with The Mighty Krang and Justbob to either side of her, heads down on their screens, keeping the back-channel text-chat running while Big Sister Nor lectured. She was speaking Mandarin, then Hindi. The text-chat was alive in three alphabets and five languages, and machine-translations appeared beneath the words. English for Wei-Dong, Chinese for his guildies. There were a couple thousand people logged in direct, and tens of thousands due to check in later when they finished their shifts.
+
+"Dingleberry in K-L says 'Disorientation,'" The Mighty Krang said, without looking up.
+
+Big Sister Nor nodded. "And?"
+
+"'Social Contract,'" said Justbob. "That's MrGreen in Singapore."
+
+BSN showed her teeth in a hard grin. "Singapore, where they know all about the social contract! Yes, yes! That's just it. A person comes up to you and asks you for help, you help; it's in our instincts, it's in our upbringing. It's what keeps us all civilized."
+
+And then she told them a story of a group of workers in Phenom Penh, gold farmers who worked for someone who was supposed to be very kindly and good to them, took them out for lunch once a week, brought in good dinners and movies to show when they worked late, but who always seemed to make small... /{mistakes}/... in their pay-packets. Not much, and he was always embarrassed when it happened and paid up, and he was even more embarrassed when he "forgot" that it was pay day and was a day, two days, three days late paying them. But he was their friend, their good friend, and they had an unwritten contract with him that said that they were all good friends and you don't call your good friend a thief.
+
+And then he disappeared.
+
+They came to work one day -- three days after pay-day, and they hadn't been paid yet, of course -- and the man who ran the Internet cafe had simply shrugged and said he had no idea where this boss had gone. A few of the workers had even worked through the day, and even the next, because their good friend must be about to show up someday soon! And then their accounts stopped working; all the accounts, all the characters they'd been levelling, the personal characters they used for the big rare-drop raids, everything.
+
+Some of them went home, some of them found other jobs. And eventually, some of them ran into their old boss again. He was running a new gold farm, with new young men working for him. The boss was so apologetic, he even cried and begged their forgiveness; his creditors had called in their loans and he'd had to flee to escape them, but he wanted to make it up to the workers, his friends, whom he'd loved as sons. He'd put them to work as senior members of his new farm, at double their old wages, just give him another chance.
+
+The first pay-day was late. One day. Two days. Three days. Then, the boss didn't come to work at all. Some of the younger, newer workers wanted to work some more, because, after all, the boss was their dear friend. And the old hands, the ones who'd just been taken for a second time, they finally admitted to their fellow workers what they'd known all along: the boss was a crook, and he'd just robbed them all.
+
+"That's how it works. You violate the social contract, the other person doesn't know what to do about it. There's no script for it. There's a moment where time stands still, and in that moment, you can empty out his pockets."
+
+There were more stories like this, and they made everyone laugh, sprinkles of "kekekekeke" in the chat, but when it was over, Wei-Dong felt his first tremor of doubt.
+
+"What is it?" Jie asked him. She was very beautiful, and from what he could understand, she was a very famous radio person, some kind of local hero for the factory girls. It was clear that Lu was head-over-heels in love with her, and everyone else deferred to her as well. When she turned her attention on him, the whole room turned with her. The room -- a flat in a strange old part of town -- was crowded with people, hot and loud with the fans from the computers.
+
+"It's just," he said, waved his hands. He was suddenly very tired. He hadn't had a nap or even a shower since sneaking out of the port, and meeting all these people, having the videoconference with Big Sister Nor, it was all so much. His Chinese fled him and he found himself fumbling for the words. He swallowed, thought it through. "Look," he said. "I want to help all the workers get a better deal, the Turks, the farmers, the factory girls." They all nodded cautiously. "But is that what we're doing here? Are we going to win any rights by, you know, by being crooks? By ripping people off?"
+
+The group erupted into speech. Apparently he'd opened up an old debate, and the room was breaking into its traditional sides. The Chinese was fast and slangy, and he lost track of it very quickly, and then the magnitude of what he'd done finally, really /{hit him}/. Here he was, thousands of miles from home, an illegal immigrant in a country where he stood out like a sore thumb. He was about to get involved in a criminal enterprise -- hell he was /{already}/ involved in it -- that was supposed to rock the world to its foundations. And he was only 18. He felt two inches tall and as flat as a pancake.
+
+"Wei-Dong," one of the boys said, in his ear. It was Matthew, who had a funny, leathery, worn look to him, but whose eyes twinkled with intelligence. "Come on, let's get you out of here. They'll be at this for hours."
+
+He looked Matthew up and down. Technically, they were guildies, but who knew what that meant anymore? What sort of social contract did they /{really}/ have, these strangers and him?
+
+"Come on," Matthew said, and his face was kind and caring. "We'll get you somewhere to sleep, find you some clothes."
+
+That offer was too good to pass up. Matthew led him out of the apartment, out of the building, and out in the streets. The sun had set while they were conferenced in, and the heat had gone out of the air. Matthew led him up and down several maze-like alleys, through some giant housing blocks, and then into another building, this one even more run-down than the last one. They went up nine flights of stairs, and by the time they reached the right floor, Wei-Dong felt like he would collapse. His thighs burned, his chest heaved and ached, and the sweat was coursing down his face and neck and back and butt and thighs.
+
+"I had the same question as you," Matthew said. "When I got out of jail."
+
+Wei-Dong willed himself not to edge away from Matthew. The apartment was filled with thin mattresses, covering nearly the entire floor like some kind of crazy, thick carpet. They sat on adjacent beds, shoes off. Wei-Dong must have made some sign of his surprise, because Matthew smiled a sad smile. "I went to jail for going on strike with other Webblies. I'm not a murderer, Wei-Dong."
+
+Wei-Dong felt himself blushing. He mumbled and apology.
+
+"I had a long talk with Big Sister Nor. Here's what she told me: she said that a traditional strike, where you take your labor away from the bosses and demand a better deal, that it wouldn't work here. That we needed to do that, but that we also needed to be able to show everyone who has us at their mercy that they've overrated their power. When the bosses say, 'We'll beat you up,' or when the police say, 'We'll put you in jail,' or when the game companies say, 'We'll throw you out," we need to be able to say, 'Oh no you won't!'"
+
+The sheer delight he put into this last phrase made Wei-Dong smile, even though he was so tired he could barely move his face.
+
+He scrubbed at his eyes with the backs of his hands and said, "Look, I think my emotions are on trampolines today. It's been a very big day." Matthew chuckled. "You understand."
+
+"I understand. I just wanted to let you know that this isn't just about being a crook. It's about changing the power dynamics in the battle. You're a fighter, you understand that, don't you? I hear you play healers. You know what a raid is like with and without a healer?"
+
+Wei-Dong nodded. "It's a very different fight," he said. "Different tactics, different feel."
+
+"A different dynamic. There's math to describe it, you know? I found a research paper on it. It's fascinating. I'll email you a copy. What we're doing here, we're changing the dynamic, the balance of power, for workers everywhere. You'll see."
+
+Wei-Dong yawned and waved his fist over his mouth weakly.
+
+"You need to sleep," Matthew said. "Good night, comrade."
+
+Wei-Dong woke once in the night, and every mattress was filled, and everyone was snoring and breathing and snuffling and scratching. There must have been twenty guys in the room with him, a human carpet of restless energy, cigarette-and-garlic breath, foot-odor, body-odor, and muffled grumbles. It was so utterly unlike the ship, unlike his room in the Cecil Hotel in LA, unlike his parents' home in Orange County... The ground actually felt like it was sloping away for a minute, like the storm-tossed deck of a container ship, and he thought for a wild, disoriented minute that there was an earthquake, and pictured the highrise buildings he'd seen clustered together on the way over crashing into one another like dominoes. Then the land righted itself again and the panic dissipated.
+
+He thought of his mother and knew that he'd have to find a PC and give her a call the next day. They'd exchanged a lot of email while he was on the ship, a lot of reminisces about his dad, and he'd felt closer to her than he had in years.
+
+Thinking of his mother gave him an odd feeling of peace, not the homesick he'd half-expected, and he drifted off again amid the farts and the grunts and the human sounds of the human people he'd put himself among.
+
+#
+
+Connor's fingerspitzengefuhl was going crazy. Like all the game-runners, he had a sizeable portfolio of game assets and derivatives. It wasn't exactly fair -- betting on the future of game-gold when you got a say in that future put you at a sizeable advantage over the people on the other side of the bets. But screw 'em if they can't take a joke.
+
+Besides, his portfolio was so big and complex that he couldn't manage it himself. Like everyone else, he had a broker, a guy who worked for one of the big houses, a company that had once been an auto-manufacturer before it went bankrupt, got bailed out, wrung out, twisted and financialized until the only thing left of any value in it was the part of the company that had packaged up and sold off the car-loans suckers had taken out on its clunkermobiles.
+
+And his broker /{loved}/ him, because whenever Connor phoned in an order for a certain complex derivative -- say, a buy-order for $300,000 worth of insurance policies on six-month gatling gun futures from Zombie Mecha -- then it was a good bet that there were going to be a lot fewer gatling guns in Zombie Mecha in six months (or that the gatling gun would get a power-up, maybe depleted uranium ammo that could rip through ten zombies before stopping), driving the price of the guns way, way up. The broker, in turn, could make money on that prediction by letting his best clients in on the deal, buying gatling gun insurance policies, or even gatling gun futures, or futures on gatling gun insurance, raking in fat commissions and getting everyone else rich at the same time.
+
+So Connor had an advantage. So who was complaining? Who did it hurt?
+
+And in turn, Connor's broker liked to call him up with hot tips on other financial instruments he might want to consider, financial instruments that came to him from his other clients, a diverse group of highly placed people who were privy to all sorts of secrets and insider knowledge. Every day this week, the broker, Ira, had called up Connor and had a conversation that went like this:
+
+Ira: "Hey, man, is this a good time?"
+
+Connor (distractedly, locked in battle with his many screens and their many feeds): "I've always got time for you, buddy. You've got my money."
+
+Ira: "Well, I appreciate it. I'll try to be quick. We've got a new product we're getting behind this week, something that kinda took us by surprise. It's from Mushroom Kingdom, which is weird for us, because Nintendo tends to play all that stuff very close and tight, leaving nothing on the table for the rest of us. But we've got a line on a fully hedged, no-risk package that I wanted to give you first crack at, because we're in limited supply..."
+
+And from there it descended into an indecipherable babble of banker-ese, like a bunch of automated text generated by searching the web for "fully hedged" (meaning, we've got a bet that pays out if you win and another that pays out if you lose, so no matter what, you come out ahead, something that everyone promised and no one ever delivered) and blowing around the text that came up in the search-result snippets, like a verbal whirlwind with "fully hedged" in the middle of it.
+
+The thing was, Connor was /{really good}/ at speaking banker-ese, and this just didn't add up. The payoff was gigantic, 15 percent in a single quarter, up to 45 percent in the ideal scenario, and that was in a tight market where most people were happy to be taking in one or two percent. This was the kind of promise he associated with crazy, high-risk ventures, not anything "fully hedged."
+
+He stopped Ira's enthusiastically sputtering explanation, said, "You said no-risk there, buddy?"
+
+Ira drew in a breath. "Did I say that?"
+
+"Yup."
+
+"Well, you know, /{everything}/'s got a risk. But yeah, I'm putting my own money into this." He swallowed. "I don't want to pressure you --"
+
+Connor couldn't help himself, he snorted. Ira had many things going for him, but he was a pushy son of a bitch.
+
+"Really!" But he sounded contrite. "OK, let me be straight with you. I didn't believe it myself, either. None of us did. You know what bond salesmen are like, we've seen it all. But there were kids in the office, straight out of school. These kids, they have a lot more time to play than we do --" Connor repressed the snort, but just barely. The last time Ira played a game, it had been World of Warcraft, in the dawn of time. He was a competent, if unimaginative broker, but he was no gamer. That's OK, he also wasn't a pork-farmer, but he could still buy pork-futures. "-- and they were hearing about this stuff from other players. They'd started buying in for themselves, using their monthly bonuses, you know, it's kind of a tradition to treat that bonus money as pennies from heaven and spend it on long-shot bets. Anyway, they started to clean up, and clean up, and clean up."
+
+"So how do you know it's not tapped out?"
+
+"That's the thing. A couple of the old timers bought into it and you know, they started to clean up too. And then I got in on it --"
+
+"How long ago?"
+
+"Two months ago," he said, sheepishly. "It's paying a monthly coupon of 16 percent on average. I've started to move my long-term savings into it too."
+
+"Two months? How many of your other clients have you brought in on this deal?" He felt a curious mixture of anger and elation -- how dare Ira keep this to himself, and how fine that he was about to share it!
+
+"None!" Ira was speaking quickly now. "Look, Connor, all my cards on the table now. You're the best customer I got. Without you, hell, my take home pay'd probably be cut in half. The only reason I haven't brought this to you before now is, you know, there wasn't any more to go around! Any time there was an offer on these things, they'd be snapped up in a second."
+
+"So what happened? Did all your greedy pals get their fill?"
+
+Ira laughed. "Not hardly! But you know how it goes, as soon as something takes off like these vouchers, there's a lot of people trying to figure out how to make more of them. Turns out there's a bank, one of these offshore ones that's some Dubai prince's private fortune, and the Prince is a doubter. The bank's selling very long bets against these bonds on great terms. They're one-year coupons and they pay off /{big}/ if the bonds don't crash. So now there's some uncertainty in the pool and some people are flipping, betting that the Prince knows something they don't, buying his paper and selling their bonds. We've gone one better: we've got a floating pool of hedged-off packages that balance out the Prince's bets and these bonds, so no matter what happens, you're in the green. We buy or sell every day based on the rates on each. It's --"
+
+"Risk free?"
+
+"Virtually risk free. Absolutely."
+
+Connor's mouth was dry. There was something going on here, something big. His mind was at war with itself. Finance was a game, the biggest game, and the rules were set by the players, not by a designer. Sometimes the rules went crazy and you got a little pocket of insanity, where a small bet could give you unimaginable wins. He knew how this worked. Of course he did. Hadn't he been chasing gold farmers up and down nine worlds, trying to find their own little high-return pockets and turn them inside out? At the same time, there was just no such thing as a free lunch. Something that looked too good to be true probably was too good to be true. All that and all the other sayings he'd grown up with, all that commonsense that his simple parents had gifted him with, them with their small-town house and no mortgage and sensible retirement funds that would have them clipping coupons and going to two-for-one sales for the rest of their lives.
+
+"Twenty grand," he blurted. It was a lot, but he could handle it. He'd made more than that on his investments in the past 90 days. He could make it up in the next 90 days if --
+
+"/{Twenty}/? Are you kidding? Connor, look, this is the kind of thing comes along once in a lifetime! I came to you /{first}/, buddy, so you could get in big. Shit, buddy, I'll sell you twenty grand's worth of these things, but I tell you what --"
+
+It made him feel small, even though he knew it was /{supposed}/ to make him feel small. It was like there were two Connors, a cool, rational one and an emotional one, bitterly fighting over control of his body. Rational won, though it was a hard-fought thing.
+
+"Twenty's all I've got in cash right now," he lied, emotional Connor winning this small concession. "If I could afford more --"
+
+"Oh!" Ira said, and Connor could hear the toothy smile in his voice. "Connor, pal, I don't do this very often, and I'd appreciate it if you'd keep this to yourself, but how about if I promise you that your normal trades for today will pick up an extra, uh, make it 20 more, for a total of 40 thousand. Would you want to plow that profit into these puppies?"
+
+Connor's mouth went dry. He knew how this worked, but he'd long ago given up on being a part of it. It was the oldest broker-scam in the world: every day, brokers made a number of "off-book" trades, buying stocks and bonds and derivatives on the hunch that they'd go up. Being "off-book" meant that these trades weren't assigned to any particular client's account; the money to buy them came out of the general account for the brokerage house.
+
+At the end of the day, some -- maybe all -- of those trades would have come out ahead. Some -- maybe all -- would have come out behind. And that's when the magic began. By back-dating the books, the broker could assign the shitty trades to shitty customers, cheapskates, or big, locked-in, slow-moving customers, like loosely-managed estates for long-dead people whose wealth was held in trust. The gains could be written to the broker's best customers, like some billionaire that the broker was hoping to do more business with. In this way, every broker got a certain amount of discretion every day in choosing who would make money and who would lose it. It was just a larger version of the barista at the coffee shop slipping her regulars a large instead of a medium every now and again, without charging for the upgrade. The partners who ran the brokerages knew that this was going on, and so did many of the customers. It was impossible to prove that you'd lost money or gained money this way -- unless your broker told you at 9:15 on a Tuesday morning that your account would have an extra $20,000 in it by 5PM.
+
+Ira had just taken a big risk in telling Connor what he was going to do for him. Now that he had this admission, he could, theoretically, have Ira arrested for securities fraud. That is, until and unless he gave Ira the go-ahead, at which point they'd /{both}/ be guilty, in on it together.
+
+And there rational and emotional Connor wrestled, on the knife-edge between wealth and conspiracy and pointless, gainless honesty. They tumbled onto the conspiracy side. After all, Connor and the broker bent the rules every time Connor ordered a trade on one of Coca Cola Games's futures. This was just the same thing, only moreso.
+
+"Do it," he said. "Thanks, Ira."
+
+Ira's breath whooshed out over the phone, and Connor realized that the broker had been holding his breath and waiting on his reply, waiting to find out if he'd gone too far. The salesman really wanted to sell him this package.
+
+Later, in Command Central, Connor watched his feeds and thought about it, and something felt... /{hinky}/. Why had Ira been so eager? Because Connor was such a great customer and Ira thought if he made Connor a ton of money, Connor would give it back to him to continue investing, making more and more money for him, and more and more commissions for the broker?
+
+And now that his antennae were up, he started to see all kinds of ghosts in his feeds, little hints of gold and elite items changing hands in funny ways, valued too high or not high enough, all out of whack with the actual value in-game. Of course, who knew what the in-game value of anything could really be? Say the game-runners decided to make the Zombie Mecha gatling guns fire depleted uranium ammo, starting six months from now. The easy calculation had gatling guns shooting up in value in six months, because it would make it possible for the Mechas to wade through giant hordes of zombies without being overpowered. But what if that made the game /{too}/ easy, and lots of players left? Once your buddies went over to Anthills and Hives and started team-playing huge, warring hive-intelligences, would you want to hang around Zombie Mecha, alone and forlorn, firing your gatling gun at the zombies? Would the zombies stop being fun objectives and start being mere collections of growling pixels?
+
+It took the subtle fingerspitzengefuhl of a fortune-teller to really predict what would happen to the game when you nerfed or buffed one character class or weapon or monster. Every change like this was watched closely by game-runners for weeks, around the clock, and they'd tweak the characteristics of the change from minute to minute, trying to get the game into balance.
+
+The feeds told the story. Out there in gameland, there was a hell of a lot of activity, trades back and forth, and it worried him. He started to ask the other game-runners if they noticed anything out of the ordinary but then something else leapt out of his feeds: there! Gold-farmers!
+
+He'd been looking for them everywhere, and finding them. Gold farming had a number of signatures that you could spot with the right feed. Any time someone logged in from a mysterious Asian IP address, walked to the nearest trading post, stripped off every scrap of armor and bling and sold it, then took all the resulting cash and the entire contents of her guild bank and turned it over to some level one noob on a free trial account that had only started an hour before, who, in turn, turned the money over to a series of several hundred more noobs who quickly scattered and deposited it in their own guild banks, well, that was a sure bet you'd found some gold farmer who was hacking accounts. Hell, half the time you could tell who the farmers were just by looking at the names they gave their guilds: real players either went for the heroic ("Savage Thunder") or the ironic ("The Nerf Herders") or the eponymous ("Jim's Raiders") but they rarely went by "asdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdf2329" or, God help him, 707A55DF0D7E15BBB9FB3BE16562F22C026A882E40164C7B149B15DE7137ED1A.
+
+But as soon as he tweaked his feeds to catch them, the farmers figured out how to dodge them. The guilds got good names, the hacked players started behaving more plausibly -- having half-assed dialogue with the toons they were buffing with all their goods -- and the gangs that converged on any accidental motherlode in the game did a lot of realistic milling about and chatting in broken English. Increasingly, the players were logging in with prepaid cards diverted from the US over American proxies, making them indistinguishable from the lucrative American kid trade, who were apt to start playing by buying some prepaid cards along with their Cokes and gum at the convenience store. Those kids had the attention spans of gnats, and if you knocked them offline after mistaking them for a gold farmer, they left and went straight to a competing world and never again showed up in your game or on your balance sheet.
+
+It was amazing how fast information spread among these creeps. Well, not amazing. After all, information spread among normal players faster than you'd believe too -- it was great, you hardly had to lift a finger or spend a penny on marketing when you released some new elite items or unveiled a new world. The players would talk it up for you, spreading the word at the speed of gossip. And the same jungle telegraph ran through the farmers' underground, he could see it at work.
+
+And there were more of them, a little guild of twenty, all grinding and grinding the same campaign. They were fresh characters, created two days before, and they'd been created by players who knew what they were doing -- it was just the perfect balance between rezzers and tanks and casters, a good mix of AOE and melee weapons. They'd levelled damned fast -- he pulled up some forensics on some of the toons, felt his fingerspitzengefuhl tingle as the game guttered like a flame in a breeze. He'd installed the forensics packages over the howls of protest from the admin team who'd shown him chart after chart about what running the kind of history he wanted to see would do to server performance. He'd gotten his forensics, but only after promising to use them sparingly.
+
+And there it was: the players had levelled each other by going into a PvP -- Player versus Player -- tournament area and repeatedly killing one another. As soon as one of them dinged up a level, he would stand undefended and let the other player kill him quickly. The game gave megapoints for killing a higher level player. Once player two dinged, they switched places, and laddered, one after the other, up to heights that normal players would take forever to attain.
+
+The campaign they were running was simple: scrounging a mix of earth-fairy wings and certain mushroom caps, giving them over to a potion-master who would pay them in gold. It wasn't anything special and it was a little below their levels, but when he charted out the returns in gold and experience per hour, he saw that someone had carelessly created a mission that would pay out nearly triple what the regular campaign was supposed to deliver. He shook his head. /{How the hell did they figure this stuff out?}/ You'd need to chart every single little finicky mission in the game and there were /{tens of thousands}/ of missions, created by designers who used software algorithms to spin a basic scenario into hundreds of variants.
+
+And there they were, happily collecting their mushroom caps and killing the brown fairies and plucking their wings. Every now and again they'd happen on a bigger monster that wandered into their aggro zone and they'd dispatch it with cool ease.
+
+His finger trembled over the macro that would suspend their accounts and boot them off the server. It didn't move.
+
+He admired them, that was the problem. They were doing something efficiently, quietly and well, with a minimum of fuss. They understood the game nearly as well as he did, without the benefit of Command Central and its many feeds. He --
+
+He logged in.
+
+He picked an av he'd buffed up to level 43, halfway up the ladder to the maximum, which was 90. Regulus was an elf healer, tall and whip-thin, with a huge rucksack bulging with herbs and potions. He was a nominal member of one of the mid-sized player guilds, one of the ones that would accept even any player for a small fee, which offered training courses, guild-banking, scheduled events, all with the glad sanction of Coca Cola. The right sort of people.
+
+&gt; Hello
+
+Two months before, the players would have kept on running their mission, blithely ignoring him. But that was one of the tell-tales his feeds looked for to pick out the farmers. Instead, these toons all waved at him and did little emotes, some of which were quite good custom jobs including dance-moves, elaborate mime and other gestures. If his feeds hadn't picked these jokers out as farmers, he'd have pegged them as hardcore players. But they hadn't actually spoken or chatted him anything. They were almost certainly Chinese and English would be hard for them.
+
+&gt; Wanna group?
+
+He offered them a really plum quest, one that had a crazy-high gold and experience reward for a relatively nearby objective: retrieving Dvalinn's runes from a deep cave that they'd have to fight their way into, killing a bunch of gimpy dwarves and a couple of decent bosses on the way. The quest was chained to one that led to a fight with Fenrisulfr, one of the biggest bosses in Svartalfaheim Warriors, a megaboss that you needed a huge party to take down, but which rewarded you with enormous treasure. The whole thing was farmer-bait he'd cooked up specifically for this kind of mission.
+
+After a decent interval -- short, but long enough for the players to be puzzling through a machine-translation of the quest-text -- they gladly joined, sending simple thanks over text.
+
+He pretended he saw nothing weird about their silence as they progressed toward the objective, but in the meantime, he concentrated on observing them closely, trying to picture them around a table in a smoky cafe in China or Vietnam or Cambodia or Malaysia, twenty skinny boys with oily hair and zits, cigarettes in the corners of their mouths, squinting around the curl of smoke. Maybe they were in more than one place, two or even three groups. They almost certainly had some kind of back-channel, be it voice, text, or simply shouting at each other over the table, because they moved with good coordination, but with enough individualism that it seemed unlikely that this was all one guy running twenty bots.
+
+&gt; Where you from?
+
+He had to be aware that they were probably trying to figure out if he was from the game, and if he made things too easy for them, he might tip them off.
+
+One player, an ogre caster with a huge club and a bandoleer of mystic skulls etched with runes, replied
+
+&gt; We're Chinese, hope that's OK with you
+
+This was more frank than he'd expected. Other groups he'd approached with the same gimmick had been much more close-lipped, claiming to come from unlikely places in the midwest like Sioux Falls, places that seemed to have been chosen by randomly clicking on a map of the USA.
+
+&gt; China!
+
+he typed,
+
+&gt; You seem pretty good with English then!
+
+The ogre -- Prince Simon, according to his stats -- emoted a little bow.
+
+&gt; I studied in school. My guildies aren't same good.
+
+Connor thought about who he was pretending to be: a young player in a big American city like LA. What would he say to these people?
+
+&gt; Is it late there?
+
+&gt; Yes, after dinner. We always play after dinner.
+
+&gt; Sounds like a lot of fun! I wish I had a big group of friends who were free after dinner. It's always homework homework homework
+
+Connor's fictional persona was sharpening up for him now, a lonely high-school kid in La Jolla or San Deigo, somewhere on the ocean, somewhere white and middle class and isolated. Somewhere without sidewalks. The kind of kid who might come across a plum quest live Dvalinn's runes and have to go and round up a group of strangers to run it with him.
+
+&gt; It's a good time
+
+the ogre said. A pause.
+
+&gt; My friend wants to know what you're studying?
+
+His persona floated an answer into his head.
+
+&gt; I'm about to graduate. I've applied for civil engineering at a couple of schools. Hope I get in!
+
+The ogre said,
+
+&gt; I was a civil engineer before I left home. I designed bridges, five bridges. For a high-speed train system.
+
+Connor mentally revised his image of the boys into young men, adults.
+
+&gt; When did you leave home?
+
+&gt; 2 years. No more work. I will go home soon though I think. I have a family there. A little son, only 3
+
+The ogre messaged him an image. A grinning Chinese boy in a sailor suit, toothy, holding a drippy ice cream cone like a baton, waving it like a conductor.
+
+Connor's fictional 17 year old didn't have any reaction to the picture, but his 36-year-old self did. A father leaving his son behind, plunging off to find work. Connor hadn't ever had to support someone, but he'd thought about it a lot. In Connor's world, where people's motives were governed by envy and fear, the picture of this baby was seismic, an earthquake shaking things up and making the furnishings fall to the floor and shatter. He struggled to find his character.
+
+&gt; Cute! You must miss him
+
+&gt; A lot. It's like being in the army. I will do this for a few years, then go home.
+
+What a world! Here was this civil engineer, accomplished, in love, a father, living far away, working all day to amass virtual treasures, playing cat-and-mouse with Connor and his people.
+
+&gt; So what advice do you have for someone going into civil engineering?
+
+The ogre emoted a big laugh.
+
+&gt; Don't try to find work in China
+
+Connor emoted a big laugh too -- and led the party to Dvalinn's runes, losing himself in the play even as he struggled to remain clinical and observant. Some of his fellow gamerunners looked over his shoulder now and again, watched them run the mission, made little cutting remarks. Among the gamerunners, the actual game itself was slightly looked down upon, something for the marks to play. The real game, the big game was the game of designing the game, the game of tweaking all the variables in the giant hamster cage that all the suckers were paying to run through.
+
+But Connor never forgot how he came to the game, where his equations had come from: from /{play}/, thousands of hours in the worlds, absorbing their physics and reality through his fingers and ears and eyes. As far as he was concerned, you couldn't do your job in the game unless you played it too. He marked the snotty words, noticed who delivered them, and took down his mental estimation of each one by a few pegs.
+
+Now they were in the dungeon, which he'd just slapped together, but which he nevertheless found himself really enjoying. As a raiding guild, the Chinese were superb: coordinated, slick, smart. He had a tendency to think of gold farmers as mindless droids, repeating a task set for them by some boss who showed them how to use the mouse and walked away. But of course the gold farmers played all day, every day, even more than the most hardcore players. They /{were}/ hardcore players. Hardcore players he'd sworn to eliminate, but he couldn't let himself forget that they /{were}/ hardcore.
+
+They fought their way through to the big boss, and the team were so good that Connor couldn't help himself -- he reached into the game's guts and buffed the hell out of the boss, upping his level substantially and equipping him with a bunch of special attacks from the library of Nasties that he kept in his private workspace. Now the boss was incredibly intimidating, a challenge that would require flawless play from the whole team.
+
+&gt; Oh no
+
+he typed.
+
+&gt; What are we going to do?
+
+And the ogre sprang into action, and the players formed two ranks, those with melee attacks in the vanguard, spellcasters, healers, ranged attackers and AOE attackers in the back, seeking out ledges and other high places out of range of the boss, a huge dire wolf with many ranged spells as well as a vicious bite and powerful paws that could lash out and pin a player until the wolf could bring its jaws to bear on him.
+
+The boss had a bunch of smaller fighters, dwarves, who streamed out of the caves leading to the central cavern in great profusion, harassing the back rank and intercepting the major attacks the forward guard assembled. As a healer and rezzer, Connor ran to and fro, looking for safe spots to sit down, meditate, and cast healing energy at the fighters in the fore who were soaking up incredible damage from the big boss and his minions. He lost concentration for a second and two of the dwarves hit him with thrown axes, high and low, and he found himself incapped, sprawled on the cave floor, with more bad guys on the way.
+
+His heart was thundering, that old feeling that reminded him that his body couldn't tell the difference between excitement on screen and danger in the real world, and when another player, one of the Chinese whom he had not spoken with at all, rescued him, he felt a surge of gratitude that was totally genuine, originating in his spine and stomach, not his head.
+
+In the end, 12 of the 20 players were irreversibly killed in the battle, respawned at some distant point too far away to reach them before the battle ended. The boss finally howled, a mighty sound that made stalactites thunder down from the ceiling and shatter into sprays of sharp rock that dealt minor damage to the survivors of their party, damage that they flinched away from anyway, as they were all running in the red. The experience points were incredible -- he dinged up a full level -- and there were several very good drops. He almost reached for his workspace to add a few more to reward his comrades for their skill and bravery, forcibly reminding himself that he was /{not on their side}/, that this was research and infiltration.
+
+&gt; You guys are great!
+
+The ogre emoted a bow and a little victory dance, another custom number that was graceful and funny at once.
+
+&gt; You play well. Good luck with your studies.
+
+Connor's fingers hovered over the keys.
+
+&gt; I hope you get to see your family soon
+
+The ogre emoted a quick hug, and it made Connor feel momentarily ashamed of what he did next. But he did it. He added the entire guild to his watchlist, so that every message and move would be logged, machine-translated into English. Every transaction they made -- all the gold they sold or gave away -- would be traced and traced again as part of Connor's efforts to unravel the complex, multi-thousand-party networks that were used to warehouse, convert and distribute game-goods. He had hundreds of accounts in the database already, and at the rate he was going, he'd have thousands by the end of the week -- and it was already Wednesday.
+
+#
+
+The police raided Jie's studio while she and Lu were out eating dumplings and staring into each others' eyes. It was one of her backup studios, but they'd worked out of it two days in a row, and had been about to work out of it for a third. This was a violation of basic security, but Jie's many apartments were fast filling up with Webblies who had quit their farming jobs in frustration and joined the full-time effort to amass gold and treasure for the plan.
+
+The dumpling shop was run by a young woman who looked after her two year old son and her sister's four year old daughter, but she was nevertheless always cheerful when they came in, if prone to making suggestive remarks about young love and the dangers of early parenthood.
+
+She was just handing them the bill -- Lu once again made a show of reaching for it, though not so fast that Jie coudn't snatch it from him and pay it herself, as she was the one with all the money in the relationship -- when his phone went crazy.
+
+He pulled it out, looked at its face, saw that it was Big Sister Nor, calling from a number that she wasn't supposed to be using for another 24 hours according to protocol. That means that she worried her old number had been compromised, which meant that things were bad. Turning to the wall and covering the receiver with his hand, he answered.
+
+"Wei?"
+
+"You've been burned." It was The Mighty Krang, whose Taiwanese accent was instantly recognizable. "We're watching the webcams in the studio now. Ten cops, tearing the place apart."
+
+"Shit!" he said it so loudly that the four year old cackled with laughter and dumpling lady scowled at him. Jie slid close to him and put her cheek next to his -- he instantly felt a little better for her company -- and whispered, "What is it?"
+
+"You're all secure, right?"
+
+He thought about it for a second. All their disks were encrypted, and they self-locked after ten minutes of idle time. The police wouldn't be able to read anything off any of the machines. He had two sets of IDs on him, the current one, which was due to be flushed later that day according to normal procedure, and the next set, hidden in a pocket sewn into the inside of his pants-leg. Ditto for his current and next SIMs, one loaded in his current phone and a pouch of new ones in order of planned usage inserted into a slit in his belt. He covered the mouthpiece and whispered to Jie: "The studio's gone." She sucked air past her teeth. "Are you all buttoned-up?"
+
+She clicked her tongue. "Don't worry about me, I've been doing this for a lot longer than you." She began to methodically curse under her breath, digging through her purse and switching out IDs and cracking open her phone to swap the SIM. "I had really nice stuff in that place," she said. "Good clothes. My favorite mic. We are such idiots. Never should have recorded there twice in a row."
+
+The Mighty Krang must have heard, because he chuckled. "Sounds like you're both OK?"
+
+"Well, Jiandi won't be able to go on the air tonight," he said.
+
+"Screw that," Jie said. She took the phone from him. "Tell Big Sister Nor that we're going on air at the usual time tonight. Normal service, no interruptions."
+
+Lu didn't hear the reply, but he could see from Jie's grimly satisfied expression that The Mighty Krang had praised her. It had been Big Sister Nor's idea to rig all the studios with webcams all the Webblies could access, just in the front rooms. It was a little weird, trying to ignore the all-seeing eye of the webcam screwed in over the door. But when you're sleeping 20 to a room, it's easy to let go of your ideas about privacy -- but all the same, Lu and Jie now sat far apart when broadcasting, and snuck into the bathroom to make out afterward.
+
+And now the webcams had paid off. He took the phone back and listened as The Mighty Krang narrated a play-back of the video, cops breaking the door down, securing the space. Then an evidence team that spliced batteries into the computers' power cables so they could be unplugged without shutting down (Lu was grateful that Big Sister Nor had decreed that all their hardware had to be configured to unmount and re-encrypt the drives when they were idle), took prints and DNA. They already had Lu's DNA, of course, because they'd sniffed out one of Jie's other apartments. But Jie had been way ahead of this: she had a little pocket vacuum cleaner, intended for clearing crumbs and gunk out of keyboards, and she surreptitiously vacuumed out the seats whenever she took a train or a bus, sucking up the random DNA of thousands of people, which she carefully scattered around her apartments when she got in. He'd laughed at the ingenuity of this, and she told him she'd read about it in a novel.
+
+The evidence team brought in a panoramic camera and set it in the middle of the room and the police cleared out momentarily as it swept around in a tight, precise mechanical circle, producing a wraparound high-resolution image of the room. Then the cops swept back in, minus their paper overshoes, and put every scrap of paper and every piece of optical and magnetic media into more bags, and then they destroyed the place.
+
+Working with wrecking bars and wicked little knifes, and starting from the corner under the front door, they methodically smashed every single stick of furniture, every floor tile, every gyprock wall, turning it all into pieces no bigger than playing-cards, heaping it behind them as they went. They worked in near silence, without rushing, and didn't appear to relish the task. This wasn't vandalism, it was absolute annihilation. The policemen had the regulation brushcut short hair, identical blue uniforms, paper face-masks, kevlar gloves. One drew closer and closer to the webcam, spotted it -- a little pinhead with a peel-away adhesive backing stuck up in a dusty corner -- and peeled it away. His face loomed large in it for a moment, his pores, a stray hair poking out of his nostrils, his eyes dead and predatory. Then chaos, and nothing.
+
+"He stamped on it, we think," The Mighty Krang said. "So much for the webcams. It'll be the first thing they look for next time. Still, saved your ass, didn't it?"
+
+The description had momentarily taken away Lu's breath. All his things, his spare clothes, the comics he'd been reading, a half-chewed pack of energy gum he'd bought the day before, disappeared into the bowels of the implacable authoritarian state. It could have been him.
+
+"We're going to move on to the next safe-house," he said. "We'll find somewhere to broadcast from tonight."
+
+"You're bloody right we will," said Jie, from his side.
+
+They gave the old building a wide berth as they made their way down into the Metro, and consciously forced themselves not to flinch every time a police siren wailed past them. When they came back up to street level, Jie took Lu's hand and said, out of the corner of her mouth, "All right, Tank, what do we do now?"
+
+He shrugged. "I don't know. That was, uh, /{close}/." He swallowed. "Don't be mad if I say something?"
+
+She squeezed his fingers. "Say it."
+
+"You don't need to do this," he said. She stopped and looked at him, her face white. Before they'd ever kissed, he always felt a void between them, an invisible force-field he had to push his way through in order to tell her how he felt. Once they'd become a couple, the force-field had thinned, but not vanished, and every time he said or did something stupid, he felt it pushing him away. It was back in force now. He spoke quickly, hoping his words would batter their way through it: "I mean, this is /{crazy}/. We're probably all going to go to jail or get killed." She was still staring at him. "You're just --" He swallowed. "You're /{good}/ at this stuff, is what I'm trying to say. You could probably broadcast your show for ten more years without getting caught and retire a rich woman. You don't need to throw it away on us."
+
+Her eyes narrowed. "Did I promise not to get mad?"
+
+He tried a little nervous smile. "Sort of?"
+
+She looked back and forth. "Let's walk," she said. "We stand out here." They walked. Her fingers were limp in his hand, and then slipped out. The force-field grew stronger. He felt more afraid than he had when The Mighty Krang had described the action from the studio camera. "You think I'm doing this all for money? I could have more money if I wanted to. I could take dirtier advertisers. I could start a marketing scheme for my girls and ask them to send me money -- there's millions of them, if each one only sent me a few RMB, I'd be so rich I could retire."
+
+The handshake buildings loomed around them, and she broke off as they found themselves walking single file down a narrow alley between two buildings. She caught up with him and leaned in close, speaking so softly it was almost a whisper. "I could just be another dirty con-artist who comes to South China, steals all she can, and goes back home to the countryside. I'm /{not}/ doing that. Do you know why?"
+
+He fumbled for the words and she dug her fingernails into his palm. He fell silent.
+
+"It's a rhetorical question," she said. "I'm doing it because /{I believe in this}/. I was telling my girls to fight back against their bosses before you ever played your first game. With or without you, I'll be telling them to fight back. I like your group, I like the way they cross borders so easily, even more easily than I get back and forth from Hong Kong. So I'm supporting your friends, and telling my girls to support them too. The problem you have is a /{worker's}/ problem, not a Chinese problem, not a gamer's problem. The factory girls are workers and they want a good deal just as much as you and your gamer friends do."
+
+She was breathing heavily, Lu noticed, angry little snorts through her nose.
+
+He tried to say something, but all that came out was a mumble.
+
+"What?" she said, her fingernails digging in again.
+
+"I'm sorry," he said. "I just didn't want you to get hurt."
+
+"Oh, Tank," she said. "You don't need to be my big, strong protector. I've been taking care of myself since I left home and came to South China. It may come as a huge surprise to you, but girls don't need big, strong boys to look after them."
+
+He was silent for a moment. They were almost at the entrance of the safe house. "Can I just admit that I'm an idiot and we'll leave it at that?"
+
+She pretended to think it over for a moment. "That sounds OK to me," she said. And she kissed him, a warm, soft kiss that made his feet sweaty and the hairs on his neck stand up. She chewed his lower lip for a moment before letting go, then made a rude gesture at the boys who were calling down at them from a high balcony overhead.
+
+"OK," she said, "Let's go do a broadcast."
+
+#
+
+It had all been so neatly planned. They would wait until after monsoon season with its torrential rains; after Diwali with its religious observances and firecrackers; after Mid-Autumn Festival when so many workers would be back in their villages, where the surveillance was so much less intense. They would wait until the big orders came in for the US Thanksgiving season, when sweaty-palmed retailers hoped to make their years profitable with huge sales on goods made and shipped from the whole Pacific Rim.
+
+That had been a good plan. Everyone liked it. Wei-Dong, the boy who'd crossed the ocean with their prepaid game-cards, had just about wet his pants at the brilliance of it. "You'll have them over a barrel," he kept repeating. "They'll /{have}/ to give in, and /{fast}/."
+
+The in-game project was running very well. That Ashok fellow in Mumbai had worked out a very clever plan for signalling the vigor of their various "investment vehicles" and the analysts who watched this were eating it up. They were selling more bad paper than they could print. It had surprised everyone, even Ashok, and they'd actually had to pull some Webblies off sales-duty: it turned out that a surprising number of people would believe any rumor they heard on an investment board or in-game canteen.
+
+The Mighty Krang and Big Sister Nor were likewise very happy with the date and had stuck a metaphorical pin in it, and began to plan. Justbob was fine with this, but she was a warrior and so she understood that /{the first casualty of any battle is the plan of attack.}/ So while Big Sister Nor and Krang and the other lieutenants in China and Indonesia and Singapore and Vietnam and Cambodia were beavering away making plans for the future, Justbob was leading skirmishers in exercises, huge, world-spanning battles where her warriors ran their armies up against one another by the thousand.
+
+Big Sister Nor hated it, said it was too high-profile, that it would tip off the game-runners that there were armies massing in gamespace, and then they would naturally wonder what the players were massing /{for}/ and it would all unravel. Justbob thought it was a lot more likely that the gold-farmers and the elaborate cons would tip them off, seeing as how armies were about as common in gamespace as onions were in a stir-fry. She didn't try to tell this to Big Sister Nor, who hardly played games at all any more. Instead, she obediently agreed to take it easy, to be careful, and so on.
+
+And then she sent her armies against one another again.
+
+It wasn't like any other game anyone had ever played. The armies were vast, running to the thousands and growing every day. She drilled them for hours, and the generals and leaders and commandants and whatever they called themselves dreamt up their best strategy and tactics, devised nightmare ambushes and sneaky guerilla wars, and they sharpened their antlers against one another.
+
+As Big Sister Nor's complaints grew more serious, Justbob presented her with statistics on the number of high-level characters the Webblies now had at their disposal, as the skirmishing was a fast way to level up. She had players who controlled five or six absolute top-level toons, each associated with its own prepaid account, each accessed via a different proxy and untraceable to the others. Big Sister Nor warned her again to be careful, and The Mighty Krang took her aside and told her how irresponsible she was to endanger the whole effort with her warring. She took off her eyepatch and scratched at the oozing scars over the ruined socket, a disconcerting trick that never failed to send The Mighty Krang packing with a greenish face.
+
+Justbob tried to keep the smile off her face when Big Sister Nor woke her in the middle of the night to tell her that the plan was dead, and the action had started, right then, in the middle of monsoon season, in the middle of Diwali, with only weeks to go before Mid-Autumn Festival.
+
+"What did it?" she said, as she pulled on a long dress and wound her hijab around her head. She'd spent most of her life in western dress, dressing to shock and for easy getaways, but since she'd gone straight, she'd opted for the more traditional dress. What it lacked in mobility it made up for in coolness, anonymity, and the disorienting effect it had on the men who had once threatened her (though it hadn't stopped the thugs who'd cost her her eye).
+
+"Another strike in Dongguan. This time in Guangzhou. It's big."
+
+#
+
+The room was stuffy. These rooms always were. But the September heat had pushed the temperature up to stratospheric heights, so that the cafe smouldered like the caldera of a dyspeptic volcano. The cafe's owner, a scarred old man whom everyone knew to be a front for some heavy gangsters, had sent a technician around with a screwdriver to remove all the cases from the PCs so that the heat could dissipate more readily from the sweating motherboards and those monster-huge graphics cards that bristled with additional fans and glinted with copper heatsinks. This might have been better for the computers, but it made the room even hotter and filled it with a jet-engine roar that was so loud the players couldn't even use noise-cancelling headsets to chat: they had to confine all their communications to text.
+
+The cafe had once catered to gamers from off the street, along with love-sick factory girls who spent long nights chatting with their virtual boyfriends, homesick workers who logged in to spin lies about their wonderful lives in South China for the people back home, as well as the occasional lost tourist who was hoping to get a little online time to keep up with friends and find cheap hotel rooms. But for the past two years, it had exclusively housed an ever-growing cadre of gold-farmers sent there by their bosses, who oversaw a dozen shifting, interlocked businesses that formed and dissolved overnight, every time a little trouble blew their way and it became convenient to roll up the store and disappear like a genie.
+
+The boys in the cafe that night were all young, not a one over 17. All the older boys had been purged the month before, when they'd demanded a break after a 22-hour lock-in to meet a huge order from an upstream supplier. Getting rid of those troublemakers had two nice effects for their bosses: it let them move in a cheaper workforce and it let them avoid paying for all those locked-in hours. There were always more boys who'd play games for a living.
+
+And these boys could /{play}/. After a 12-hour shift, they'd hang around and do four or five more hours' worth of raiding /{for fun}/. The room was a cauldron in which boys, heat, noise, dumplings and network connections were combined to make a neverending supply of stew of wealth for some mostly invisible older men.
+
+Ruiling knew that there had been some other boys working there before, older boys who'd had some kind of dispute with the bosses. He didn't think about them much but when he did, he pictured slow, greedy fools who didn't want to really work for a living. Lamers whose asses he could kick back to Sichuan province or whatever distant place they'd snuck to the Pearl River Delta from.
+
+Ruiling was a hell of a player. His speciality was PvP -- player versus player -- because he had the knack of watching another player's movements for a few seconds and then building up a near-complete view of that player's idiosyncracies and weak spots. He couldn't explain it -- the knowledge simply shone through at him, like an arrow in the eye-socket. The upshot of this was that no one could level a character faster than Ruiling. He'd simply wander around a game with a Chinese name, talking in Chinese to the players he met. Eventually, one of them -- some rich, fat, stupid westerner who wanted to play vigilante -- would start calling him names and challenge him to a fight. He'd accept. He would kick ass. He'd gain points.
+
+It was amazing how satisfying this was.
+
+Ruiling had just finished twelve hours of this and had ordered in a tray of pork dumplings and doused them in hot Vietnamese rooster red sauce and chopsticked them into his mouth as fast as he could chew, and now he was ready to relax with some after-work play. For this, he always used his own toon, a char he'd started playing with when he was a boy in Gansu. In some ways, this toon was /{him}/, so long had he lived with it, lovingly buffing it, training it, dressing it in the rarest of treasures. He had trained up innumerable toons and seen them sold off, but Ruiling was /{his}/.
+
+Tonight, Ruiling partied with some other farmers he knew from other parts of China, some of whom he'd known back in his village, some of whom he'd never met. They were a ferocious nightly raiding guild that pulled off the hardest missions in the worlds, the cream of the crop. Word had gotten round and now every night he had an audience of players who'd just been hired on, watching in awe as he kicked fantastic quantities of ass. He loved that, loved answering their questions after he was done playing, helping the whole team get better. And you know, they loved him too, and that was just as great.
+
+They ran Buri's fortress, the palace of a long-departed god, the father of gods, the powerful, elemental force that had birthed Svartalfaheim and the universe in which it lay. It had fearsome guardians, required powerful spells just to reach, and had never been fully run in the history of Svartalfaheim. Just the kind of mission Ruiling loved to try. This would be his sixth crack at it, and he was prepared to raid for six hours straight if that's what it took, and so was the rest of his party.
+
+And then he got Fenrir's Tooth. It was the rarest and most legendary drop in all of Svartalfaheim Warriors, a powerful talisman that would turn any wolf-pack or enthral them to the Tooth's holder. The message boards had been full of talk about it, and several times there'd been fraudulent auctions for it, but no one had ever seen it before.
+
+After Ruiling picked it up -- it had come from an epic battle with an army of Sky Giants, in which the entire raiding party had been killed -- he was so stunned by it that he couldn't speak for a moment. He just pointed at the screen while his mouth opened and shut for a moment.
+
+The players watching him fell silent, too, following his gaze and his finger, slowly realizing what had just happened. A murmur built through the crowd, picking up steam, picking up volume, turning into a /{roar}/, a triumphant shout that brought the entire cafe over to see. Over the fans' noise they buzzed excitedly, a hormone-drenched triumphant tribal chest-beating exercise that swept them all up. Every boy imagined what it would be like to go questing with Fenrir's Tooth, able to defeat any force with a flick of the mouse that would send the wolf packs against your enemies. Every boy's heart thudded in his chest.
+
+But there was another sound, getting louder and more insistent. An older voice, raspy with a million cigarettes, a hard voice. "Sit down! Sit down! Back to work! Everyone back to work!"
+
+It was Huang the foreman, shouting with a fearsome Fujianese accent. He was rumored to be an ex-Snakehead, thrown out of the human smuggling gang for killing too many migrants with rough treatment. Usually, he sat lizardlike and motionless in the corner, smoking a succession of cheap Chinese Class-D fake Marlboros, harsh and unfiltered, a lazy curl of smoke giving him a permanent squint on one side of his face. Sometimes players would forget he was there and their shouting and horseplay would get a little out of control and then he would steal up behind them on cat-silent feet and deliver a hard blow to the ear that would send them reeling. It was enough of an object lesson -- "Don't make the Snakehead mad or he'll lay a beating on you that you won't forget" -- that he hardly ever had to repeat it.
+
+Now, though, he was clouting boys left and right, bellowing orders in a loud, hoarse voice. The boys retreated to their computers in a shoving rush, leaving Ruiling alone in his seat, an uncertain smile on his face.
+
+"Boss," he said, "you see what I've done?" He pointed to his screen.
+
+Huang's face was as impassive as ever. He put a hard, heavy hand on Ruiling's shoulder and leaned in to read the screen, his head wreathed in smoke. Finally, he straightened. "Fenrir's Tooth," he said. He nodded. "A bonus for you, Ruiling. Very good."
+
+Ruiling shrank back. "Boss," he said, respectfully, speaking loudly to be heard over the computer fans. "Boss, that is my character. I am not working now. It's my personal character."
+
+Huang turned to look at him, his eyes hard and his expression flat. "A bonus," he said again. "Well done."
+
+"It's /{my}/ character," Ruiling said, speaking more loudly. "No bonus. It's /{mine}/! /{I}/ earned it, personally, on my own time."
+
+He didn't even see the blow, it was that fast. One minute he was hotly declaring that Fenrir's Tooth was his, the next he was sprawled on his ass on the floor, his head ringing like a gong. The foreman put one foot on his throat.
+
+The man said, "No bonus," clearly and distinctly, so that everyone around could hear. Then he hawked up a huge mouthful of poisonous green spit from the tar-soaked depths of his blackened lungs and carefully spat in Ruiling's face.
+
+From the age of four, Ruiling had practised wushu, training with a man in the village whom all the adults deferred to. The man had been sent north during the Cultural Revolution, denounced and beaten and starved, but he never broke. He was as gentle and patient as a grandmother, and he was as old as the hills, and he could send an attacker flying through the air with a flick of the wrist; break a board with his old hands, kick you into the next life with one old, gnarled foot. For 12 years, Ruiling had gone three times a week to train with the old man. All the boys had. It was just part of life in the village. He hadn't practised since he came to South China, had all but forgotten that relic of a different China.
+
+But now he remembered every lesson, remembered it deep in his muscles. He gripped the ankle of the foot that was on his throat, twisted just /{slightly}/ to gain maximum leverage, and applied a small, controlled bit of pressure and /{threw}/ the foreman into the air, sending him sailing in a perfect, graceful arc that terminated when his head /{cracked}/ against the side of one of the long trestle-tables, knocking it over and sending a dozen flatscreens tumbling to the ground, the crash audible over the computer fans.
+
+Ruiling stood, carefully, and faced the foreman. The man was groaning on the ground, and Ruiling couldn't keep the small grin off his face. That had felt /{good}/. He found that he was standing in a ready stance, weight balanced evenly on each foot, feet spread for stability, body side-on to the man on the ground, presenting a smaller target. His hands were loosely held up, one before the other, ready to catch a punch and lock the arm and throw the attacker, ready to counterstrike high or low. The boys around him were cheering, chanting his name, and Ruiling smiled more broadly.
+
+The foreman picked himself up off the floor, no expression at all on his face, a terrible blankness, and Ruiling felt his first inkling of fear. Something about how the man held himself as he stood, not anything like the stance in the martial arts games he'd played in the village. Something altogether more serious. Ruiling heard a high whining noise and realized it was coming from his own throat.
+
+He lowered his hands slightly, extended one in a friendly, palm up way. "Come on now," he said. "Let's be adults about this."
+
+And that's when the foreman reached under the shoulder of his ill-fitting, rumpled, dandruff-speckled suit-jacket and pulled out a cheap little pistol, pointed it at Ruiling, and shot him square in the forehead.
+
+Even before Ruiling hit the ground, one eye open, the other shut, the boys around him began to roar. The foreman had one second to register the sound of a hundred voices rising in anger before the boys boiled over, clambering over one another to reach him. Too late, he tried to tighten his finger on the trigger of the gun he'd carried ever since leaving behind Fujian province all those years before. By then, three boys had fastened themselves to his arm and forced it down so that the gun was aiming into the meat of his old thigh, and the .22 slug he squeezed off drilled itself into the big femur before flattening on the shattered bone, spreading out like a lead coin.
+
+When he opened his mouth to scream, fingers found their way into his cheeks, viciously tearing at them even as other hands twined themselves in his hair, fastened themselves to his feet and his arms, even yanked at his ears. Someone punched him hard in the balls, twice, and he couldn't breathe around the hands in his mouth, couldn't scream as he tumbled down. The gun was wrenched from his hand at the same instant that two fists drilled into his eyes, and then it was dark and painful and infinite, a moment that stretched off into his unconsciousness and then into -- annihilation.
+
+#
+
+"So now what?" Justbob slurped at her congee, which they'd sent out for, along with strong coffee and a plate of fresh rolls. At 3AM in the Geylang, food choices were slightly limited, but they never went away altogether.
+
+The Mighty Krang pulled up a video, waited for it to buffer, then scrolled it past, fast. "Three of the boys caught the shooting -- the /{execution}/ -- on their phones. The goon who went down, well, he doesn't look so good." A shot from inside the dark room, now abandoned, the foreman on his back amid a wreck of broken computers and monitors, motionless, both arms broken at the elbows, face a ruin of jelly and blood. "We assume he's dead, but the strikers aren't letting anyone in."
+
+"Strikers," Justbob said, and The Mighty Krang clicked another video. This one took longer to load, some server somewhere groaning under the weight of all the people trying to access it at once. That never happened any more, it had been years since it had happened, and it made Justbob realize how fast this thing must be spreading. The realization scythed through her grogginess, made her eye spring open, the other ruin work behind its patch.
+
+The video loaded. Hundreds of boys, gathered in front of an anonymous multi-story building, the kind of place you pass by the thousand. They'd tied their shirts around their faces, and they were pumping their fists in the air and more people were coming out to join them. Boys, old people, girls --
+
+"Girls?"
+
+"Factory girls. Jiandi. She did a special broadcast. Stupid. She nearly got caught, chased out of another safe house. She’s running out of bolt holes. But she got the word out."
+
+"Did we know?"
+
+Big Sister Nor's face was a thundercloud, ominous and dark. "Of course not. If we'd known, we would have told her not to do it. Chill out. Hold off. We have a schedule, lots of moving parts."
+
+"The dead boy?"
+
+"There --" Krang said, and pointed his mouse at the edge of the video. A trestle table, set up beside the boys, with the dead boy draped on it. Looking closely, she could see the bullet hole in his forehead, the streak of blood running down the side of his face.
+
+"Aha," Justbob said. "Well, we're not going to cool anything out now."
+
+Big Sister Nor said, "We don't know that. There's still a chance --"
+
+"There's no chance," Justbob said, and her finger stabbed at the screen. "There are /{thousands}/ of them out there. What's happening in world?"
+
+"It's a disaster," Krang said. "Every gold-farming operation is in chaos. Webblies are attacking them by the thousands. And it gets worse as the day goes by. They're just waking up in China, so fresh forces should be coming in --"
+
+Justbob swallowed. "That's not a disaster," she said. "That's battle. And they'll win. And they'll keep on winning. From this moment forward, I'd be surprised to see if /{any}/ new gold comes onto the markets, in any game. We can change logins as fast as the gamerunners shut down accounts, and what's more, there are plenty of regular players who've been skirmishing with us for the fun of it who'll shout bloody murder if they lose their accounts. We've got the games sewn up." She kept her face impassive, reached for a cup of tea, sipped it, set it down.
+
+Big Sister Nor stared at her for a long time. They had been friends for a long time, but unlike Krang, Justbob wasn't in worshipful love with Nor. She knew just how human Big Sister Nor could be, had seen her screw up in small and big ways. Big Sister Nor knew it, too and had the strength of character to listen to Justbob even when she was saying things that Nor didn't want to hear.
+
+Krang looked back and forth between the two young women, feeling shut out as always, trying not to let it show, failing. He got up from the table, muttering something about going out for more coffee, and neither woman took any notice.
+
+"You think that we're ready?" Big Sister Nor said after the safe-house door clicked shut.
+
+"I think we have to be," said Justbob. "The first casualty of any battle..."
+
+"I know, I know," Big Sister Nor said. "You can stop saying that now."
+
+When The Mighty Krang came back, he saw immediately how things had gone. He distributed the coffee and got to work.
+
+#
+
+Mrs Dibyendu's cafe was locked up tight, shutters drawn over the windows and doors.
+
+"Hey!" called Ashok, rapping on the door. "Hey, Mrs Dibyendu! It's Ashok! Hey!" It was nearly 7AM, and Mrs Dibyendu always had the cafe open by 6:30, catching some of the early morning trade as the workers who had jobs outside of Dharavi walked to their bus-stops or the train station. It was unheard of for her to be this late. "Hey!" he called again and used his key-ring to rap on the metal shutter, the sound echoing through the tin frame of the building.
+
+"Go away!" called a male voice. At first Ashok assumed it came from one of the two rooms above the cafe, where Mrs Dibyendu rented to a dozen boarders -- two big families crammed into the small spaces. He craned his neck up, but the windows there were shuttered too.
+
+"Hey!" he banged on the door again, loud in the early morning street.
+
+Someone threw the bolts on the other side of the door and pushed it open so hard it bounced off his toe and the tip of his nose, making both sting. He jumped back out of the way and the door opened again. There was a boy, 17 or 18, with a huge, pitted machete the length of his forearm. The boy was skinny to the point of starvation, bare-chested with ribs that stood out like a xylophone. He stared at Ashok from red-rimmed, stoned eyes, pushed lanky, greasy hair off his forehead with the back of the hand that wasn't holding the machete. He brandished it in Ashok's face.
+
+"Didn't you hear me?" he said. "Are you deaf? Go away!" The machete wobbled in his hand, dancing in the air before his face, so close it made him cross his eyes.
+
+He stepped back and the boy held his arm out further, keeping the machete close to his face.
+
+"Where's Mrs Dibyendu?" Ashok said, keeping his voice as calm as he could, which wasn't very. It cracked.
+
+"She's gone. Back to the village." The boy smiled a crazy, evil smile. "Cafe is closed."
+
+"But --" he started. The boy took another step forward, and a wave of alcohol and sweat-smell came with him, a strong smell even amid Dharavi's stew of smells. "I have papers in there," Ashok said. "They're mine. In the back room."
+
+There were other stirring sounds from the cafe now, more skinny boys showing up in the doorway. More machetes. "You go now," the lead boy said, and he spat a stream of pink betel-stained saliva at Ashok's feet, staining the cuffs of his jeans. "You go while you can go."
+
+Ashok took another step back. "I want to speak to Mrs Dibyendu. I want to speak to the owner!" he said, mustering all the courage he could not to turn on his heel and run. The boys were filing out into the little sheltered area in front of the doorway now. They were smiling.
+
+"The owner?" the boy said. "I'm his representative. You can tell me."
+
+"I want my papers."
+
+"My papers," the boy said. "You want to buy them?"
+
+The other boys were chuckling now, hyena sounds. Predator sounds. All those machetes. Every nerve in Ashok's body screaming /{go}/. "I want to speak with the owner. You tell him. I'll be back this afternoon. To talk with him."
+
+The bravado was unconvincing even to him and to these street hoods it must have sounded like a fart in a windstorm. They laughed louder, and louder still when the boy took another rushing step toward him, swinging the machete, just missing him, blade whistling past him with a terrifying whoosh as he backpedaled another step, bumped into a man carrying a home-made sledgehammer on his way to work, squeaked, actually /{squeaked}/, and ran.
+
+Mala's mother answered his knock after a long delay, eyeing him suspiciously. She'd met him on two other occasions, when he'd walked "the General" home from a late battle, and she hadn't liked him either time. Now she glared openly and blocked the doorway. "She's not dressed," she said. "Give her a moment."
+
+Mala pushed past her, hair caught in a loose ponytail, her gait an assertive, angry limp. She aimed a perfunctory kiss at her mother's cheek, missing by several centimeters, and gestured brusquely down the stairs. Ashok hurried down, through the lower room with its own family, bustling about and getting ready for work, then down another flight to the factory floor, and then out into the stinging Dharavi air. Someone was burning plastic nearby, the stench stronger than usual, an instant headache of a smell.
+
+"What?" she said, all business.
+
+He told her about the cafe.
+
+"Bannerjee," she said. "I wondered if he'd try this." She got out her phone and began sending out texts. Ashok stood beside her, a head taller than her, but feeling somehow smaller than this girl, this ball of talent and anger in girl form. Dharavi was waking now, and the muzzein's call to prayer from the big mosque wafted over the shacks and factories. Livestock sounds -- roosters, goats, a cowbell and a big bovine sneeze. Babies crying. Women struggled past with their water jugs.
+
+He thought about how unreal all this was for most of the people he knew, the union leaders he'd grown up with, his own family. When he talked with them about Webbly business, they mocked the unreality of life in games, but what about the unreality of life in Dharavi? Here were a million people living a life that many others couldn't even conceive of.
+
+"Come on," she said. "We're meeting at the Hotel U.P.."
+
+When he'd come to Dharavi, the "hotels" on the main road in the Kumbharwada neighborhood had puzzled him, until he found out that "hotel" was just another word for restaurant. The Webblies liked the Hotel U.P., a workers' co-op staffed entirely by women who'd come from villages in the poor state of Uttar Pradesh. It was mutual, the women enjoying the chance to mother these serious children while they spoke in their impenetrable jargon, a blend of Indian English, gamerspeak, Chinese curses, and Hindi, the curious dialect that he thought of as /{Webbli}/, as in /{Hindi}/.
+
+The Webblies, roused from their beds early in the morning, crowded in sleepily, demanding chai and masala Cokes and dhosas and aloo poories. The ladies who owned the restaurant shuttled pancakes and fried potato popovers to them in great heaps, Mala paying for them from a wad of greasy rupees she kept in a small purse she kept before her. Ashok sat beside her on her left hand, and Yasmin sat on her right, eyes half-lidded. The army had been out late the night before, on a group trip to a little filmi palace in the heart of Dharavi, to see three movies in a row as a reward for a run of genuinely excellent play. Ashok had begged off, even though he'd been training with the army on Mala's orders. He liked the Webblies, but he wasn't quite like them. He wasn't a gamer, and it would ever be thus, no matter how much fighting he did.
+
+"OK," Mala said. "Options. We can find another cafe. There is the 1000 Palms, where we used to fight --" she nodded at Yasmin, leaving the rest unsaid, /{when we were still Pinkertons, still against the Webblies}/. "But Bannerjee has something on the owner there, I've seen it with my own eyes."
+
+"Bannerjee has something on every cafe in Dharavi," Sushant said. He had been very adventurous in scouting around for other places for them to play, on Yasmin's orders. Everyone in the army knew that he had a crush on Yasmin, except Yasmin, who was seemingly oblivious to it.
+
+"And what about Mrs Dibyendu?" Yasmin said. "What about her business, all the work she put into it?"
+
+Mala nodded. "I've called her three times. She doesn't answer. Perhaps they scared her, or took her phone off of her. Or..." Again, she didn't need to say it, /{or she is dead.}/ The stakes were high, Ashok knew. Very high. "And there's something else. The strike has started."
+
+Ashok jumped a little. /{What?}/ It was too early -- weeks too early! There was still so much planning to do! He pulled out his phone, realized that he'd left it switched off, powered it up, stared impatiently at the boot-screen, listening to the hubub of soldiers around him. There were /{dozens}/ of messages waiting for him, from Big Sister Nor and her lieutenants, from the special operatives who'd been working on the scam with him, from the American boy who'd been coordinating with the Mechanical Turks. There had been fighting online and off, through the night, and the Chinese were thronging the streets, running from cops, regrouping. Gamespace was in chaos. And he'd been arguing with drunken thug-boys at the cafe, eating aloo poories and guzzling chai as though it was just another day. His heart began to race.
+
+"We need to get online," he said. "Urgently."
+
+Mala broke off an intense discussion of the possibility of getting PCs into a flat somewhere and bringing in a network link to look at him. "Bad as that?"
+
+He held up his phone. "You've seen, you know."
+
+"I haven't looked since you came to my place. I knew that there was nothing we could do until we found a place to work. It is bad, then." It wasn't a question.
+
+They were all hanging on him. "They need our help," he said.
+
+"All right," Mala said. "All right. So. We go and we take over Mrs Dibyendu's place again. Bannerjee doesn't own it. Everyone in her road knows that. They will take our side. They must."
+
+Ashok gulped. "Force?" He remembered the boy: drunk, fearless, eyes flat, the sharp machete trembling.
+
+The gaze Mala turned on him was every bit as flat. She could transform like that, in a second, in an /{instant}/. She could go from pretty young girl, charismatic, open, clever and laughing to stone-faced General Robotwallah, ferocious and uncompromising. Her flat eyes glittered.
+
+"Force if necessary, always," she said. "Force. Enough force that they go away and don't come back. Hit them hard, scare them back to their holes." Around the table, thirty-some Webblies stared at her, their expressions mirrors of hers. She was their general, and before she came into their lives, they had been Dharavi rats, working in factories sorting plastic, going to school for a few hours every day to share books with four other students. Now they were royalty, with more money than their parents earned, jobs and respect. They'd follow her off a cliff. They'd follow her /{into the Sun}/.
+
+But Yasmin cleared her throat. "Force if we must," she said. "But surely no more than is necessary, and not even that if we can help it."
+
+Mala turned to her, back rigid, neck corded, jaw set. Yasmin met her gaze with calm eyes and then... /{smiled}/, a small and sweet and genuine smile. "If the General agrees, of course."
+
+And Mala melted, the tension going out of her, and she returned Yasmin's smile. Something had changed between them since the night Mala had attacked them, something had changed for the better. Now Yasmin could defuse Mala with a look, a smile, a touch, and the army respected it, treating Yasmin with reverence, sometimes going to her with their grievances.
+
+"Of course," Mala said. "No more force than is absolutely necessary." She picked up her cane -- topped with a silver skull, a gift from her troops -- and made a few vicious swipes in the air, executed with the grace of a fencer. He knew that there was a lead weight in the foot of the cane, and he'd seen her knock holes in brick with a swing. Her densely muscled forearms hardly trembled as she wielded the cane. Behind her, one of the ladies who ran the restaurant looked on with heartbreaking sorrow, and Ashok wondered how many young people she'd seen ruined in her village and here in the city.
+
+"We go," Mala said, and scraped her chair back. Ashok fell in beside her and the army marched down the main road three abreast, causing scooters and motorcycles and goats and three-wheeled auto-rickshaws to part around them. Many times Ashok had seen swaggering gangs of badmashes on the street, had gotten out of their way. Now he was in one, a collection of kids, just kids, the youngest a mere 13, the eldest not yet 20, led by a limping girl with a long neck and hair in a loose ponytail, and around them, people reacted with just the same fear. It swelled Ashok's heart, the power and the fear, and he felt ashamed and exhilarated.
+
+Before the door of Mrs Dibyendu, Mala stooped and pried a rock from the crumbling pavement with her fingers, unmindful of the filth that slimed it. She threw it with incredible accuracy, bowling it like a cricket ball, /{crash}/, into the sheet-tin door of the cafe. Immediately, she bent to pick up another rock, prying it loose before the echoes of the first one had died down. Around them, in the narrow street, heads appeared from windows and doorways, and curious pedestrians stopped to look on.
+
+The door banged open and there was the boy who had threatened Ashok earlier, eyes bloodshot and pink even from a safe distance. He held his machete up like a sword, a snarl on his lips. It died as he contemplated the 30 soldiers arrayed before him. Many had produced lengths of wood or iron, or picked up rocks of their own. They stared, unwavering, at the boy.
+
+"What is it?" He was trying for bravado, but it came out with a squeak at the end. The machete trembled.
+
+"Careful," whispered Ashok, to himself, to Mala, to anyone who would listen. A scared bully was even less predictable than a confident one.
+
+"Mrs Dibyendu asked us to come re-open her cafe for her," Mala said, gesturing with her phone, held in her free hand. "You can go now."
+
+"The new owner asked us to watch /{his}/ cafe," the boy said, and everyone on the street heard both lies, Mala's and the boy's. Ashok tried to figure out how old the boy was. 14? 15? Young, dumb, drunk and angry and armed.
+
+"Careful," he whispered again.
+
+Mala pocketed her phone and hefted her rock, eyes never leaving the boy.
+
+"Five," she said.
+
+He grinned at her and spat a stream of pink, betel saliva toward her feet. She didn't move. No one moved.
+
+"Four."
+
+He raised the machete, point aimed straight at her. She didn't seem to notice.
+
+"Three."
+
+Silence rang over the alley. Someone on a motorbike tried to push through the crowd, then stopped, cutting the engine.
+
+"Two."
+
+The boy's eyes cut left, right, left again. He whistled then, hard and loud, and there was a scrabble of bare feet from the cafe behind him.
+
+"One," Mala said. and raised the rock, winding up like a cricket bowler again, whole body coiled, and Ashok thought, /{I have to do something. Have to stop them. It's insane.}/ But his mouth and his hands and his feet had other ideas. He remained frozen in place.
+
+The boy raised his machete across his chest, and the hand that held it trembled even more. Abruptly, Mala threw. The rock flew so fast it made a sizzling sound in the hot, wet morning air, but it didn't smash the boy's head in, but rather dashed itself to pieces against the door-frame behind him, visibly denting it. The boy flinched as shattered rock bounced off his bare face and chest and arm and back, a few stray pieces pinging off the machete.
+
+"Leave," Mala said. Behind the boy, five more boys, crowding out of the doorway, each with his machete. They raised their arms.
+
+"Fight!" hissed one of the boys, the smallest one. There was something wrong with his head, a web of scar and patchy hair running down the left side as though he'd had his head bashed in or been dragged. Ashok couldn't look away from this little boy. He had a cousin that size, a little boy who liked to play games in the living room and run around with his friends. A little boy with shoes and clear eyes and three meals a day and a mother who would tuck him up every night with a kiss on the forehead.
+
+Mala fixed the boy with her gaze. "Don't fight," she said. "If you fight, you lose. Get hurt. Run." The army raised their weapons, made a low rumbling sound that raised to a growl. One of the boys was on his phone, whispering urgently into it. Ashok saw their fear and felt a featherweight of relief, these ones would go, not fight. "Run!" Mala said, and stamped forward. The boys all flinched.
+
+And some of the army snickered at them, a hateful sound that he'd heard a thousand times while in-game, a taunting sound that spread through the ranks like a snake slithering around their feet, and the fear in the boys' faces changed. Became anger.
+
+The moment balanced on a thread as fine as spider's silk, the snickering soldiers, the boiling boys, the machetes, the clubs and sticks, the rocks --
+
+The moment broke. The smallest boy held his machete over his head and charged them, screaming something wordless, howling, really, a sound Ashok had never heard a boy make. He got three steps before two rocks caught him, one in the arm and the second in the face, a spray of blood and a crunch of bone and a tooth that flew high in the air as the boy fell backwards as if poleaxed.
+
+And the moment shattered. Machetes raised, the remaining five boys ran for the army, a crazy look in their faces. Ashok had time to wonder if the little boy lying motionless on the ground was the smaller brother of one of the remaining badmashes and then the fight was joined. The tallest boy, the one who'd answered the door that morning and spat at him, hacked his way through two soldiers, dealing out deep cuts to their chests and arms -- Ashok's face coated with a fine mist of geysering arterial blood -- face contorted with rage. He was coming for Mala, standing centimeters from Ashok, and the blood ran off his machete and down his arm.
+
+Mala seemed frozen in place, and Ashok thought that he was about to die, to watch her die first, and he tensed, blood roaring in his ears so loudly it drowned out the terrible screams of the fighters around him, desperate and about to grab for the boy. But as he shifted his weight, Mala barked "NO!" at him, never shifting her eyes from the leader, and he checked himself, stumbling a half-step forward. The boy with the machete looked at him for the briefest of instants and Mala /{whirled}/, uncoiling herself, using the weighted skull-tipped cane to push herself off, then whipping out the arm, the gesture he'd seen her mime countless times in battle lessons, and the weighted tip crashed into the boy's forearm with a crack he heard over the battle-sounds, a crack that he'd last heard that night so many months before, when Mala and her army had come for him and Yasmin in the night. Ashok the doctor's son knew exactly what that crack meant.
+
+A blur of fabric as Yasmin danced before him, stooping gracefully to take the machete up, and the boy just watched, eyes glazed, shock setting in already. Yasmin delicately and deliberately kicked him in the kneecap, a well-aimed kick with the toe of her sandal, coming in from the side, and the boy went down, crying in a little boy's voice, calling out for his mother with a sound as plaintive as a baby bird that's fallen from the nest.
+
+It had been mere seconds, but it was already over. Two of the boys were running away, one was sobbing through a bloody mouth, two were unconscious. Ashok looked for wounded soldiers. Three had been cut with machetes, including the two he'd seen hurt by the leader as he ran for Mala. Remembering the arterial blood, red and rich, Ashok found its owner first, lying on the ground, eyes half open, breath labored. He pushed his hands over the injury, a deep cut on the left arm that spurted with each of the hammering beats of the boy's chest and he shouted, "A shirt, anything, a bandage," and someone pressed a shirt into his bloody hands and he applied hard pressure, staunching the blood. "Someone call for a doctor," he said, making eye-contact with Anam, a soldier he had hardly spoken to before. "You have a phone?" The girl was shivering slightly, but she nodded and patted a handbag at her side, absentmindedly swinging the length of iron in her hand. She dropped it. "You call the doctor, you understand?" She nodded. "What will you do?"
+
+"Call the doctor," she said, dreamily, but she began to dial. He turned and grabbed the hand that had passed him the shirt, and he saw that it was attached to Mala, who had stripped it off of another boy in her army. Her chest was heaving, but her gaze was calm.
+
+"Hold here," he ordered, without a moment's scruple about dictating to the general. This was first aid, it was what he had been trained for by his father, long before he studied economics, and it brooked no argument. He pressed her hand against the bloody rag and stood, not hearing the crackle of his joints. He turned and found the next injured person, and the next.
+
+And then he came to the boy, the little boy whose misshapen head had caught his attention. The boy who'd been hit high and low with two hard-flung rocks. The whole front of his jaw was crushed, a nightmare of whitish bone and tooth fragments swimming in a jelly of semi-clotted blood. When Ashok peeled back each eyelid, he saw that the left pupil was as wide as a sewer entrance, and did not contract when he moved away and let the sun shine full on it. "Concussion," he muttered to the air, and Yasmin answered, "Is that bad?"
+
+"His brain is bleeding," Ashok said. "If it bleeds too much, he will die." He said it simply, as if reading from a textbook. The boy smelled terrible, and there were sores on his arms and chest and ankles, swollen, overscratched and infected insect-bites and boils. "He has to see a doctor." He looked back to the bleeding soldier. "Him too."
+
+He found the girl who'd promised to call a doctor. "Where is the doctor?" He had no idea how much time had passed since he'd told her to call. It could have been ten minutes or two hours.
+
+She looked confused. "The ambulance," she began. She looked around helplessly. "It will come, they said."
+
+And now that he listened for it, he heard it, a distant dee-dah, dee-dah. The narrow lane that housed Mrs Dibyendu's cafe would never admit an ambulance. Without speaking, Yasmin ran for the main road, to hail it. And now that Ashok was listening, he could hear: neighbors with their heads stuck out of their windows and doorways, passing furious opinion and gupshup. They cheered on Mala's army, rained curses down on the badmashes with their machetes, lamented Mrs Dibyendu's departure, chattered like tropical birds about how she had been forced out, weeping, and chased down the road in the dark of night.
+
+Ashok was covered in blood. It covered his hands, his arms, his chest, his face. His lips were covered in dried blood, and there was a coppery taste in his mouth. His shirt and trousers -- soaked. He straightened and looked around the crowded lane, up at the chatterers, blinking owlishly. Around him, the soldiers and the wounded.
+
+Mala was whispering urgently in Sushant's ear, the boy listening intently. Then he began to move among the soldiers, urging them inside. The Webblies had work to do. The police would come soon, and the people inside the building would have the moral authority to claim it was theirs. The boys with their machetes, injured or gone, would have no claim. Ashok wondered if he would be arrested, and, if he was, whether he'd be able to get out. Maybe his father could take care of it. An important man, a doctor, he could take care --
+
+Two ambulance technicians arrived, bearing heavy bags and collapsed stretchers. They were locals, with Dharavi accents, sent from the Lokmanya Tilak hospital, a huge pile with a good reputation. Quickly, he described the injuries to the men, and they split up to look at the most serious cases, the deep arterial cut and the concussion. Ashok stayed near the small boy, feeling somehow responsible for him, more responsible than for his own teammate, watched as the technician fitted the boy with a neck-brace and then triggered the air-cannister that filled it, immobilizing his head. Carefully, the technician seated a plastic ring in the donut-hole center of the brace, over the boy's ruined jaw and nose, so that the plastic wouldn't interfere with his breathing. He unfurled his stretcher, snapped its braces to rigidity and looked at Ashok.
+
+"You know the procedure?"
+
+Instead of answering, Ashok positioned himself at the boy's skinny hips, putting a hand on each, ready to roll him up at the same time as the medic, keeping his whole body in line to avoid worsening any spinal injuries. The medic slid the stretcher in place, and Ashok rolled the boy back. For one brief moment, he was supporting nearly all the boy's weight in his hands and the child seemed to weigh nothing, nothing at all, as though he was hollow. Ashok found that he was crying, silent tears that slid down his face, collecting blood, slipping into his mouth, doubly salty blood and tear mixture.
+
+Mala silently slipped her arm in his. She was very warm in the oppressive heat of the morning. There would be a rain soon, the humidity couldn't stay this high all day, the water would come together soon and then the blood would wash away into the rough gutters that ran the laneway's length.
+
+"He was a brave kid," Mala said.
+
+Ashok couldn't find a reply.
+
+"I think he thought that if he charged us with that knife, sliced one of us up, we'd be so scared we'd go away forever."
+
+"You really understand him, then?" Ashok saw Yasmin steal over to them, slip her fingers into Mala's.
+
+Mala didn't answer.
+
+Yasmin said, "Everyone thinks that you can win the fight by striking first." Mala's arm tightened on Ashok's arm. "But sometimes you win the fight by not fighting."
+
+Mala said, "We should call you General Gandhiji."
+
+"It'd be an honor, but I couldn't live up to Gandhi. He was a great man."
+
+Ashok said, "Gandhi admitted to beating his wife. He was a great man, but not a saint." He swallowed. "No one mentions that Gandhi had all that violence inside him. I think it makes him better, because it means that his way wasn't just some natural instinct he was born with. It was something he battled for, in his own mind, every day." He looked down at the top of Mala's head, startled for a moment to realize that she was shorter than him. He had a tendency to think of her as towering, larger than life.
+
+Mala looked up at him and it seemed that her dark eyes were glowing in the hot, steamy air, staring out from under her long lashes. "Controlling yourself is overrated," she said. "There's plenty to be said for letting go."
+
+There were so many eyes on them, so many people watching from every corner of the road, and Ashok felt suddenly very self-conscious.
+
+Inside, the cafe was hardly recognizable. It stank like the den of some sick animal that had gone to ground, and one corner had been used as a toilet. Many of the computers had been carelessly moved, disconnecting their wires, and one screen was in fragments on the floor. There were betel-spit streaks around the floor, and empty bottles of cheap, fiery booze so awful even the old drunks in the streets wouldn't drink it.
+
+But there was also a photo, much-creased and folded, of a worn but still pretty woman, formally posed, holding a baby and a slightly larger boy, whom Ashok remembered from the melee. The baby, he thought, must have been that younger boy, and he wondered what had become of the woman, and how she was separated from the sons she held with so much love. And the more he wondered, the more numb and sorrowful he felt, until the sorrow welled over him in black waves, like a tide coming in, until he buckled at the knees and went down to the floor, and if any of the soldiers saw him hold himself and cry, no one said a word.
+
+His papers were intact, mostly, in the back room where he'd worked, and the network connection was still up, and the garbage was all swept out the door and the windows were flung open and soon the sound of joyous combat and soldierly high spirits filled Mrs Dibyendu's, as it had for so many days before. Ashok fell into the numbers and the sheets, seeing how he could work them with the new dates, and he was so engrossed that he didn't even notice the sudden silence in the cafe that marked the arrival of a policeman.
+
+The policeman -- fat, corrupt, an old Dharavi rat himself, and more a creature of the slum than the children -- had already gotten an account from the neighbors, heard that the machete-wielding badmashes had been the invaders here, and he wasn't about to get exercised on behalf of six little nobodies like them. But when there was a death, there had to be paperwork...
+
+"Death?" Ashok said.
+
+"The small one. Dead by the time he reached the hospital."
+
+Ashok felt as though the floor was dropping away from him and the only thing that distracted him and kept him from falling with it was the gasp of dismay from Yasmin behind him, a sound that started off as an exhalation of breath but turned into a drawn out whimper. He turned and saw that she had gone so pale that she was actually green, and the doctor's son in him noticed that her pupils had shrunk to pinpricks.
+
+The fat policeman looked at her, and his lips twisted into a wet, sarcastic smile. "Everything all right, miss?"
+
+"She's fine," Mala said, flatly. She was standing closer to the policeman than was strictly necessary, too short to stare him in the eye, but still she seemed to be looking down. Unconsciously, the policeman shifted his weight back, then took a step back, then turned.
+
+"Good bye, then," he said, brandishing his notebook, containing Ashok's identity card number; all the soldiers had claimed that they were never registered for the card, which Ashok really doubted, but which the policeman didn't question, as the air whistled out of his nostrils and he sweated in his uniform. The rains had finally come, the skies opening like floodgates, the rain falling in sheets the color of the pollution they absorbed on their fall from the heavens. The clatter on the tin walls and roof was like a firefight in some cheap game where the guns all made metallic /{pong}/ and /{ping}/ sounds.
+
+Ashok watched as Yasmin drifted away into Mrs Dibyendu's little "office," the room where she made the chai over a small gas burner; watched as Mala followed her. He tried to work on his calculations, but he couldn't concentrate until he saw Mala emerge, face slammed shut into her General Robotwallah expression, but there were still tracks from the tears on her cheeks. She looked straight through him and started to bark orders to her soldiers, who had been setting the cafe to rights and getting all the systems running again. A moment later, they were all clicking, shouting, headsets on, shoulders tight, in another world, and the battle was joined.
+
+Ashok found his way into Mrs Dibyendu's office, found Yasmin squatting by the wall, heels flat on the ground, hands before her. She stared silently into those hands, twining them around each other like snakes.
+
+"Yasmin," he whispered. "Yasmin?"
+
+She looked at him. There were no tears in her eyes, only an expression of bottomless sorrow. "I threw the rock," she said. "The rock that hit that little boy. I threw it. The one that hit him in the mouth. He was..." She swallowed.
+
+"He was running at us with a machete," Ashok said. "He would have killed us --"
+
+She chopped her hand through the air, a gesture full of uncharacteristic violence. "We /{put ourselves in that position}/, in the position where we'd have to kill him! It was Mala. Mala, she always wants to win before the battle is fought, win by /{annihilating the enemy.}/ And then to talk of /{Gandhi}/?" She looked like she was going to punch something, small hands balled in fists and then, abruptly, she pitched forward and threw up, copiously, a complete ejection of the entire contents of her stomach, more vomit than Ashok had ever seen emerge from a human throat. In between convulsions, he half-led, half-carried her out of the cafe, into the all-pounding rain, and let her throw up into the laneway, which had become a rushing river, the rain overflowing the narrow ditches on either side of it. The water ran right up to the cracked slab of cement that served as Mrs Dibyendu's doorstep, and Yasmin's hijab was instantly soaked as she leaned out to spatter the water's turbulent surface with poories and chai and bile. Her long dress clung to her narrow back and shoulders, and it heaved with them as she labored for breath. Ashok was soaked too, the blood-taste in his mouth again as the water washed the dried blood down his face. The rain made talking impossible so he didn't have to worry about soothing words.
+
+At last Yasmin straightened and then sagged against him. He put his arm around her, grateful for the feeling of another human being, that contact that penetrated his numbness. Something passed between them, carried on the thudding of their hearts, transmitted by their skin, and for a moment, he felt as though here, here at last, was someone who understood everything about him and here was someone he understood. The moment ended, ebbing away, until they were standing in an embarrassed, awkward half-hug, and they wordlessly disentangled and went back in. Someone had mopped up the vomit, using the rags that the badmashes had left behind and then kicking them in a reeking ball in the corner. Yasmin sat down at a computer and logged in, listening intently to the chatter around her, catching the order of battle, while Ashok went to his computer and got ready to talk to Big Sister Nor.
+
+#
+
+The day the strike started, Wei-Dong was in the midst of his second special assignment -- the first one had been to bring over the box of prepaid cards, which had been handed off into the Webbly network to be scratched off and then keyed in and sent to Big Sister Nor so she could portion them out to the fighters.
+
+The second assignment was harder in some ways: he was charged with finding other Mechanical Turks who might be sympathetic to the strikers' cause and recruit them. Wei-Dong had never thought of himself as much of a leader -- he'd always been a loner in school -- but Big Sister Nor had talked to him at length about all the ways in which he might convince his fellow Turks to consider joining this strange enterprise.
+
+Technically, it was simple enough to accomplish. As a Turk, he had access to the leaderboards of Turk activity, which Coca-Cola Online made a big deal out of, updating them every ten minutes. The leaderboards listed each Turk by name and showed which parts of the game he or she hung out in, how many queries she or he handled per hour, how highly rated the Turk's rulings and role-play were rated by the players who were randomly surveyed by a satisfaction-bot that gave out rare badges to any player who would fill in an in-game questionnaire. The idea was to inspire the Turks by showing them how much better their peers were doing. It worked, too -- Wei-Dong had spent many a night trying to pump his stats so that he could get ahead of the other Turks, scaling to the highest heights before being knocked down by someone else's all-night run. And, of course, when you pulled ahead of another Turk, you got to leave a public "message of encouragement" for them, no more than 140 characters so that it could be tweeted and texted straight to them, and these messages had pushed the boundaries of extremely terse profanity and boasting.
+
+Wei-Dong had a new use for the boards: he was using them to figure out which players were likely to switch sides. The game-runners had created a facility for bulk-downloading historical data from them, and Turks were encouraged to make crazy mash-ups and visualizations showing whose play was the best. Wei-Dong had a different idea.
+
+For weeks now, he'd been downloading gigantic amounts of data from the boards, piping it all into a database that Matthew had helped him build and now he could run some very specialized queries on it, queries like, "Show me Turks who used to lead the pack but have fallen off, despite long hours of work." Or "Show me Turks who use a lot of profanity when they're filling in the dialog for non-player characters." And especially, "Show me Turks who have a below-average level of ratting out gold-farmers to the bosses." This last one was a major enterprise among Turks, who got a big bonus every time they busted a farmer. Most of the Turks went "de-lousing" pretty often, looking to rack up the extra cash. But a significant minority never, ever hunted the farmers, and these were Wei-Dong's natural starting point.
+
+He had a long list of leads, and for each one, he had a timetable of the Turk's habitual login hours and the parts of the world that the Turk worked most often. Then it was only a matter of logging in using one of the Webblies many, many toons, heading to that part of the world, and invoking the Turk and hoping the right person showed up. It would be easier to just use the Turk message boards, but if he did, he'd be busted and fired in seconds. This way was less efficient but it was a lot safer.
+
+Now he was in the Goomba's Star-Fields, a cloudscape in Mushroom Kingdom where the power-up stars were cultivated in endless rows. Players could quest here, taking jobs with comical farmers who'd put them to work weeding the star patches and pulling up the ripe ones. It was good for training up your abilities; a highly ranked Star Farmer could get more power-up out of his stars.
+
+And here was the farmer, chewing a corn-stalk and puttering around his barn, which was also made from clouds. He offered Wei-Dong a quest -- low-level, just pulling up weeds from some of the easier-to-reach clouds, the ones that weren't patrolled by hostile Lakitus. Wei-Dong accepted the quest, and then opened a chat with the farmer: "How long have you owned this farm?"
+
+"Oh, youngster, I've been working this farm since I was but a boy -- and my pappy worked it before me and his pappy before him. Yep, I guess you could say that we're a farming family, hee hee!"
+
+This was canned dialog, of course. No Turk could ever bring himself to type anything that hokey. The farmer NPC had a whole range of snappy answers to stupid questions. The trick to invoking a Turk was to get outside the box.
+
+"Do you like farming?"
+
+"Ay-yuh, you might say I do. It's a good living -- when the sun shines! Hee hee!"
+
+Wei-Dong rolled his eyes. Who /{wrote}/ this stuff? "What problems do you have as a farmer?"
+
+"Oh, it's a good living -- when the sun shines! Hee hee!"
+
+Wei-Dong smiled a little. Once the NPC started repeating itself, a Turk would be summoned. The farmer seemed to twitch a little.
+
+"Do you have any problems apart from lack of sunshine?"
+
+"Oh, youngster, you don't want to hear an old farmer's complaints. Many and many a day I have toiled in these fields and my hands are tired. Let's speak of more pleasant things, if you please." That was more like it. The dialog was the kind of thing an enthusiastic role-playing Turk would come up with, and that fit the profile of the Turk he was after.
+
+"Is your name Jake Snider?" he typed.
+
+The character didn't move for a second. "I ken not this Jake Snider, youngster. You'd best be on with your chores, now."
+
+"I think you /{are}/ Jake Snider and I think you know that you're not getting a fair deal out of Coke. You're pulling down more hours than ever, but your pay is way down. Why do you suppose that is? Did you know that Coca-Cola Games just had its best quarter, ever? And that the entire executive group got a 20 percent raise? Did you know that Coke systematically rotates Turks who make too much money out of duty, replacing them with newbies who don't know how to maximize their revenue?"
+
+The farmer started to walk away, rake over his shoulder. Wei-Dong followed.
+
+"Wait! Here's the thing. It /{doesn't have to be this way}/! Workers can organize and demand a better deal from their bosses. Workers /{are}/ organizing. You give it two more months and you'll be out on the street. Isn't your pay and your dignity worth fighting for?
+
+The farmer was headed into his house. Wei-Dong thought for a second that he was talking to the NPC again, that the Turk had logged out. But no, there was a little clumsiness in the farmer's movements, a little hesitation. There was still someone home. "I know you can't talk to me in-game. Here's an email address -- D9FA754516116E89833A5B92CE055E19BCD2FA7@gmail.com. Send me a message and we'll talk in private."
+
+He held his breath. The Turk could have been ratting him out to game management, in which case his toon would be nuked in a matter of minutes and the Webblies would be out one more character and one more prepaid card. But the NPC went into his house and nothing happened. Wei-Dong felt a flutter in his chest, and then another, a few minutes later, when his email pinged.
+
+&gt; Tell me more
+
+It was unsigned, but he knew who it came from.
+
+#
+
+"You should go to Hong Kong," Lu said to Jie, holding her hand tightly and staring into her eyes. "You can do the show from there. It's safer."
+
+Jie turned her head and blew out a stream of air. She squeezed his hand. "I know that you mean the best, Tank, but I won't do it and I want you to stop talking about it. I'm a Webbly, just like you, just like everyone here. Sure, I can broadcast from Hong Kong, /{technically}/, but what would I broadcast /{about}/? I'm a journalist, Tank. I need to be here to see what's going on, to report on it. I can't do that from HK."
+
+"But it's not safe --"
+
+She cut him off with a chopping gesture. "Of course it's not safe! I haven't been interested in safety since the day I went on the air. You're not safe. My factory girls aren't safe. The Webblies on the picket lines aren't safe. Why should I be safe?"
+
+Lu bit down on the words: /{because I love you}/. Secretly, he was relieved. He didn't know what he'd do if Jie was in Hong Kong and he was in Shenzhen. The last of her safe-houses, another flat in a handshake building, was crowded with Webblies, forty boys all studiously ignoring them, but he knew they were listening in. They slept in shifts here, forty at a time, while eighty more went out to work at friendly net-cafes, taking care never to send more than two or three into any one cafe lest they draw attention to themselves. Just the day before, two boys had been followed out of a cafe by a couple of anonymous hard men who methodically kicked the everloving crap out of them, right on the public street, sending one to the hospital.
+
+"You know it's only a matter of time until this place is blown," is what Lu said. "Someone will get careless and be followed home, or one of the neighbors will start to talk about all the boys who trek in and out of the flat at all hours, and then --"
+
+"And then we'll move to another one," she said. "I have been renting and blowing off apartments for longer than you've been killing trolls. So long as the advertising keeps on paying, I'll keep on earning, and if I keep on earning, I can keep on renting."
+
+"How long will the advertisers pay for you to spend three hours every night telling factory girls to fight back against their bosses?"
+
+A smile played over her lips, the secret, confident smile that always melted his heart. "Oh, Tank," she said. "The advertisers don't care what I talk about, so long as the factory girls are listening, and they are /{listening}/."
+
+She patted his hands. "Now, I want you to go and find me a Webbly to interview tonight, someone who can tell me how it's all going. Any more protests?"
+
+He shook his head. "Not the noisy kind. Too many arrests." There were over a hundred Webblies in jail, all over south China. "But you heard about Dongguan?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"The Webblies there have a new kind of demonstration. Instead of making a lot of noise and shouting slogans, they all walk very slowly around the bus-station, right in the middle of town, eating ice cream."
+
+"Ice-cream?"
+
+He grinned. "Ice-cream. After the jingcha started to arrest anyone who even /{looked}/ like he was going to protest, they started posting these very public notices: 'show up at such-and-such a place and buy an ice-cream.' Dozens, then hundreds of them, eating ice-cream, grinning like maniacs, and the police were there, staring at each other like mannequins, like, /{Are we going to arrest these boys for eating ice-cream?}/ And then someone got the bright idea of buying /{two}/ ice-creams and giving one away to someone random passing by. It's the easiest recruitment tool you can imagine!"
+
+She laughed so long and hard that tears ran down her face. "I love you guys," she said. "I can't /{wait}/ to talk about this on tonight's show."
+
+"If they get arrested for eating ice-cream, they're going to switch to getting together and /{smiling}/ at each other. Can you imagine? /{Are we going to arrest these boys for smiling?}/"
+
+Her laughter broke through the invisible wall that separated them from the lounging, off-shift Webblies, who demanded to know what was so funny. Not all of them knew about the ice-cream -- they were too busy patrolling the worlds, keeping the gold-farms from being run with replacement workers -- but everyone agreed that it was pure genius.
+
+Soon they were downloading videos of the ice-cream eating, and then another shift of boys trickled in and wanted to be let in on the joke, and before they knew it, they were planning their own ice-cream eating festival, and the general hilarity continued until Jie and Lu slipped away to 'cast her show for the night, grabbing a couple of hysterical Webblies to interview in between the calls from the factory girls.
+
+As Lu put his head down on his pillow and draped his arm around Jie's narrow shoulders and put his face in her thick, fragrant hair, he had a moment's peace and joy, real joy, knowing that they couldn't possibly lose.
+
+#
+
+The strike was entering its second week when the empire struck back. Connor had known about the strike for days, but he hadn't taken action right away. At first he wasn't sure he /{wanted}/ to take action. The parasites were keeping each other busy, after all, and the strikers were doing a better job of shutting down the gold markets than he ever had (much as it hurt to admit it). Plus there was something /{fascinating}/ about the organization of these characters -- they all came in through proxies, but by watching their sleep schedules and sniffing their chatter he knew that they were scattered all across the Pacific Rim and the subcontinent. Sitting there in his god's eye, in Command Central, he felt like he had a front-row seat to an amazing and savage flea circus in which exotic, armored insects fought each other endlessly, moving in precise regimented lines that spoke of military discipline.
+
+But he couldn't leave them to do this forever. He wasn't the only one in Command Central who'd noticed that this was going on, and the derivative markets were starting to pick up on the news, yo-yo-ing so crazily that even the mainstream press had begun to sniff around. Game-gold markets had been an exotic, silly-season news-story a couple years back but these days the only people who paid attention to them were players: high-volume traders controlling huge fortunes that bought and sold game gold and its many sub-species in a too-fast-to-follow blur. Until, of course, word started to leak out about these Webblies and their pitched battles, their ice-cream socials, their global span -- and now corporate PR was calling Command Central five times a day, trying to get a meeting so they could agree on what to tell the press.
+
+So first thing on Monday morning, he gathered all of Command Central, along with some of the cooler -- that is, less neurotically paranoid -- lawyers and a couple of the senior PR people in one of Coke's secure board-rooms for a long session with the white-board.
+
+"We should just exterminate these parasites," Bill said. "You can have the ten grand." Connor and Bill's bet had become a running joke in Command Central, but Connor and Bill knew that it was deadly serious. They were both part of the financial markets, and they knew that a bet was just another kind of financial transaction, and had to be honored.
+
+Connor's smile was grim. He hadn't known whether the security chief would come over to his side; he was such a pragmatist about these things. Maybe they'd get something done after all. "You know I'm with you, but the question is, how high a price are we prepared to pay to get rid of these people?"
+
+"No price is too high," said Kaden, who prided himself on being the most macho guy in Command Central -- the kind of guy who won't shut up about his gun collection and his karate prowess. Kaden might have been a black belt 20 years ago, but five years in Command Central had made him lavishly, necklessly fat, and unable to go up a flight of stairs without losing his breath.
+
+Bill -- no lightweight himself -- craned his head around to stare fishily at Kaden. He made a dismissive grunt and said, "Oh, really?"
+
+Kaden -- called out in front of a room full of people -- colored, dug in. "Goddamned right. These crooks are in /{our}/ worlds. We can outspend and outmanoeuvre them. We just have to have the balls to do what it takes, instead of pussying out the way we always do."
+
+Bill grunted again, a sound like a cement-mixer with indigestion. "No price is too high?"
+
+"Nope."
+
+"How about shutting down the game? Is that price too high?"
+
+"Don't be stupid."
+
+"I don't think I'm the one being stupid. There's an upper limit on how much this company can afford to spend on these jerks. If removing them from the game costs us more than leaving them there, we're just shooting ourselves in the head. So let's stop talking about 'pussying out' and 'no cost is too high' and set some parameters that we can turn into action, all right?"
+
+"I just mean to say --"
+
+Bill got out of his seat and turned all the way around to face Kaden, fixing him with a withering stare. "Go," he said. "Just go. You're a pretty good level designer, but I've seen better. And as a person, you're a total waste. You've got nothing useful to add to this discussion except for stupid slogans. We've heard the stupid slogans. Go buff your paladin or something and let the grownups get on with it."
+
+Silence descended on the meeting room. Connor, standing at the front of the room, thought about telling Bill to back off, but the thing was, he was right, Kaden was a total ass, and letting him talk would just distract them all from getting the job done.
+
+Kaden sat, mouth open and fishlike, for a moment, then looked around for support. He found none. Bill made a condescending little shooing gesture. Kaden's face went from red to purple.
+
+"Just go," Connor said, and that broke the moment. Kaden slunk out of the room like a whipped dog and they all turned back to Connor.
+
+"OK," Connor said. "Here's the thing: this has to be about solving the problem, not posturing or thumping our chests. So let's stick to the problem." He nodded at Bill.
+
+Bill stood, turned around to face the audience. "Here's what doesn't work: IP addresses. They're coming in from proxies all over the US, and they can find proxies faster than we can blacklist them. Plus we've got tons of legit customers -- expats, mostly -- who live in China and around Asia and use these proxies to escape their local network blocks. But even if we were willing to throw those customers under a bus to stop the gold-farmers, we couldn't.
+
+"Also doesn't work: payment tracing. These accounts are bought on legit prepaid cards. The farmers are all paying customers, in other words. We could shut off the prepaid cards and insist on credit cards, but they'd just get prepaid credit cards. And every kid in America and Canada and Europe who pays for her account with prepaid cards from the corner store would be out of luck. That's a lot of customers to throw under the bus -- and they'll just move on to one of our competitors. Plus, those prepaid cards are /{gold}/. Kids buy them and half the time they don't use them -- they're free money for us.
+
+"Finally doesn't work: Behavioral profiling. Yes, these characters have some stereotypical behaviors, like running the same grinding tasks for hours, or engaging in these giant, epic battles. But this is also characteristic of a huge number of normal players -- again, these are people we don't want to throw under the bus.
+
+"So what will work?"
+
+Connor nodded. "One thing I know we can do is get more mileage out of the busts we make. Once we positively identify a farmer, we should be able to take out his whole network by backtracking the people he's chatted with, the ones he's partied with, his guildies."
+
+Bill was shaking his head and made a rumbling sound. "That's the sound of your bus running over more legit players. These cats can easily blow that strategy just by recruiting normal players for their raids and fights. Hell, we /{designed it}/ that way."
+
+"The money'll be easier to trace," said Fairfax, interrupting them. She looked from one to the other. "I mean, these farmer types have to dispose of their gold, and if we take it back from any player that bought it --"
+
+"They'd go crazy," Connor said.
+
+"It's against the terms of service," she said. "They know they're cheating. It'd be justice. On what basis could they complain? They agree to the terms every time they log on."
+
+Connor sighed. The terms of service were 18 screens long and required a law degree to understand. They prohibited every conceivable in-game activity, up to and including having fun. Technically, every player violated the terms every day, which meant that if they wanted to, they could kick off anyone at any time (of course, this too was allowed in the terms: "Coca-Cola Games, Ltd reserves the right to terminate your account at any time, for any reason"). "The problem is that too many players think that buying gold is all right. We sell gold, after all, on our own exchanges, all the time. If you nuked every account involved in a gold-farming buy, we'd depopulate the world by something like 80 percent. We can't afford it."
+
+"80 percent? No way --"
+
+"Look," he said. "I've been going after the farmers now for months. It's the first time we've ever tried to be systematic about them, instead of just slapping them down when the activity gets a little too intense. I can show you the numbers if you want, show you how I worked this out, but for now, let's just say that I'm the expert on this subject and I'm not making this up."
+
+Fairfax looked chastened. "Fine," she said. "So you want to go after the known associates of the farmers we bust, even though we can all see how easy it will be to defeat."
+
+Connor shrugged. "OK, sure. They'll get around it, eventually. But we'll have some time to get on them."
+
+Bill cleared his throat, shook his head again. "You have any idea how much transactional data we're going to have to store to keep a record of every person every player has ever talked to or fought with? And then someone will have to go over all those transactions, one by one, every time we bust a player, to make sure we're getting real confederates and not innocent by-standers. Where are all those people going to come from?"
+
+Someone in the audience -- it was Baird, the lawyer Connor hated the least -- said, "What about the Mechanical Turks?"
+
+Connor and Bill stared at each other, mouths open. The lawyer looked slightly nervous. "I mean --"
+
+"Of /{course}/," Connor said. "And we could do it for free. Just let the Turks keep any gold from the accounts of busted players."
+
+One of the other economists was young Palmer, and he reminded Connor of himself a few years back. Connor hated him. His eager hand shot up. "I thought the point was to keep all that gold out of the market," he said. "How can we control the monetary supply if these goombas are allowed to flood the market with cheap money?"
+
+Connor waved his hands. "Yes, theoretically these cats are outside our monetary planning, but even going flat out, they just don't move the market that much. And if they do, we can restrict the supply at our side, or adjust the basic in-game costs up or down... And it's not as if the Turks will turn around and spend the gold right away, or dump it through one of the official exchanges, especially if we keep the exchange rate low through that period."
+
+Young Palmer opened his mouth again and Connor stopped him. "Look, this is all model-able. Let's stipulate that we can take care of the monetary supply and move on." In the back of his mind, he knew that he was dismissing a potentially explosive issue with a lot more cavalier abandon than was really warranted, but the fact was this was his chance to take care of the gold farmers once and for all, with the full weight of the company behind him, and if that screwed up the economy a little, well, they'd fix it later. They controlled the economy, after all.
+
+Later, at his desk in Command Central, he looked up from his feeds and saw a room full of the smartest, toughest people in the company -- in the world -- bent to the same task, ferreting out the parasites that he'd been chasing for months. And if he himself had once been a kind of gold-farmer, a speculator of in-game assets, well, so what? He graduated to something better.
+
+The fact was, there wasn't room on earth for a couple million gold-farmers to turn into high-paid video-game executives. The fact was, if you had to slice the pie into enough pieces to give one to everyone, you'd end up slicing them so thin you could see through them. "When 30,000 people share an apple, no one benefits -- especially not the apple." It was a quote one of his economics profs had kept written in the corner of his white-board, and any time a student started droning on about compassion for the poor, the old prof would just tap the board and say, "Are you willing to share your lunch with 30,000 people?"
+
+And hell, there were at least three million gold-farmers in the world. Let them get their own goddamned apples.
+
+#
+
+"Sea-level" is a term that refers to the average level of all the world's oceans. Think of the world as a giant bed-pan, filled halfway with water. You can blow on one part of the surface and induce some tiny waves whose crests are higher than the rest of the water. You can tip the bed-pan from side to side and cause the water to slosh around, making it higher at one end than another. But overall, there's a single level to that water, a surface height that you can easily discern.
+
+Same with the oceans. Though the tides may drag the water from one edge of the sea to the other -- and really, there's only one sea, a single, continuous jigsaw-puzzle-piece-shaped body of water that wraps around all the continents -- though the storms may blow up waves here and there, in the end, there's only so much water in the ocean, and it more or less comes to an easily agreed-upon height. Sea level.
+
+Same with money. There's only so much value in the world: only so much stuff to buy. If you got all the money in the world, you could exchange it for all the stuff on earth (at least all the stuff there is for sale). It doesn't matter, really, whether the money is in dollars or gold pieces or mushrooms or ringgits or euros or yen. Add it all together and what you've got is the ocean. What you've got is sea level.
+
+So what happens if someone just prints a lot more money? What happens if you just double the amount of money in circulation? Will the monetary seas rise, drowning the land?
+
+No.
+
+Printing more money doesn't make more money. Printing more money is like measuring the ocean in liters instead of gallons. Converting 343 quintillion gallons of ocean into 1.6 sextillion liters (give or take) doesn't give you any more water. Gallons and liters are measurements of water, not water itself.
+
+And dollars are measures of value, not value itself. If you double the amount of currency in circulation, you double the price of everything on Earth. The amount of stuff is fixed, the amount of currency isn't. That's called inflation, and it can be savage.
+
+Say you're a dictator of a tin-pot republic. For decades, you've lined your pockets at the peoples' expenses, taxing the crap out of everyone and embezzling it into your secret off-shore bank-account in Honduras. Eventually, you've moved so much wealth out of the country that people are ready to eat their shoes. They start to get angry. At you.
+
+Normally, you'd just have your soldiers go and make examples of a few hundred dissidents and leave their grisly, carved up remains by the roadside in shallow graves as a means of informing your loyal subjects of what they can expect if they keep this kind of thing up.
+
+But soldiers -- even the real retarded sadists -- don't work for free. They want paying. And if you've taken all the money out of the country and put it in your bank account, you need something to pay them with.
+
+No problem. You're a dictator. Just call up the treasury department and order them to print up a couple trillion ducats or gold certificates or wahoonies or whatever you call your money, and you start paying the troops. It works -- for a while. The troops take their dough into town and use it to buy drinks and snazzy clothes and big meals. They send it home to their families, who use it to buy lumber and tile and steel and cement to improve their houses, or to buy farm implements and pay the hired hands to help them bring up the next crop.
+
+But as the amount of money in circulation grows, it gradually becomes worth less. The bar raises its drink prices because the landlord has raised the rent. The landlord has raised the rent because the cost of feeding his family has gone up, because the farmer isn't willing to sell his crops for the old prices, because she's paying double for diesel for the tractor and triple for water.
+
+And then the soldiers show up at the dictator's palace and explain, pointedly, with bayonets (if necessary), why their old wages are no longer sufficient.
+
+No problem. Just call up the treasury and order up another trillion wahoonies. And watch it all happen again.
+
+This is called inflation, and it's the cheap sugar high of governments. Like a cramming student sucking down energy beverages, a government can only print money for so long before they have to pay the price. It's not pretty, either. Families that carefully saved all their lives for their retirement suddenly find their tidy nest-egg is insufficient to cover the price of a dinner out. Every penny of savings is wiped out in the blink of an eye, and suddenly you need a lot more soldiers on the job to keep your loyal subject from gutting you like a fish and hanging you upside down from your own palace's tallest chimney.
+
+If you're a /{very}/ cheeky dictator, you'll go one further: take all the savings in the banks that are denominated in real money -- euros or dollars or yen -- and convert them into wahoonies at today's exchange rate. Use all that real money to pay the army for a day or two more, but you'd better save enough to pay for airfare to some place very, very far away.
+
+If you think inflation is scary, try /{deflation}/. As people get poorer -- as less and less money is in circulation -- the value of money goes up. This is good news for savers: the wahoonie you banked last year is worth twice as much this year. But it's bad news for everyone else: only an idiot borrows money in deflationary times, since the wahoonie you borrow today will be worth twice as much next year when you repay it. Deflation is uneven, too: the cost of food may crash because of some amazing new fertilizer, which means you can buy twice as much cassava per wahoonie. But this means that farmers are only earning half as much, and won't pay as much for cable TV. The cable company hasn't had /{its}/ costs go down, though, so the reduced payment means less profits. Businesses start to fail, which means more people have less money, which drives prices down and down and down. Before long, no one can afford to make or buy /{anything}/.
+
+In other words, the amount of money in circulation is a big deal. Theoretically, this amount is watched carefully by clever, serious economists. In practice, all the world's money is in one big swirling, whirling pool. Dollars and ducats and wahoonies and euros, blended together willy nilly, and when one government goes to the press and starts to churn out bales of bank-notes, everyone gets the sugar high. And when things crash, and peoples' savings go up in smoke, the deflationary death-spiral kicks in, and prices sink, and more companies fail -- and governments go back to the printing press.
+
+So in practice, this big engine that determines how much food is grown, whether you'll have to sell your kidneys to feed your family, whether the factory down the road will make Zeppelins, whether the restaurant on the corner can afford the coffee beans, all this important stuff has /{no one in charge of it}/. It is a runaway train, the driver dead at the switch, the passengers clinging on for dear life as their possessions go flying off the freight-cars and out the windows, and each curve in the tracks threatens to take it off the rails altogether.
+
+There is a small number of people in the back of the train who fiercely argue about when it will go off the rails, and whether the driver is really dead, and whether the train can be slowed down by everyone just calming down and acting as though everything was all right. These people are the economists, and some of the first-class passengers pay them very well for their predictions about whether the train is doing all right and which side of the car they should lean into to prevent their hats from falling off on the next corner.
+
+Everyone else ignores them.
+
+#
+
+"Hey, Connor!" his broker said, his voice tight and nervous, his cheer transparently false.
+
+"What's wrong?"
+
+"Cut to the chase, huh, man?" Ira's voice was so tight it twanged. "You're such a straight-shooter. It's why you're my favorite customer."
+
+"What's /{wrong}/, Ira?" Command Central roared around him, a buzz of shouts and conversations and profanity.
+
+"So, you remember those bonds we took you into?"
+
+Connor's chest tightened. He forced himself to stay calm. "I remember them."
+
+"Well, they were paying out really well -- you saw the statements. Eight percent last month --"
+
+"I saw the statements."
+
+"Well."
+
+"Ira," Connor said. "Stop being such a goddamned salesman and tell me what the hell is going on, or I'm going to hang up this phone and call your boss."
+
+"Connor," Ira said, his voice hurt. "Look, we're buddies --"
+
+"We're not buddies. You're a salesman. I'm your customer. I'm hanging up now."
+
+"Wait! Come on, wait! OK, here it is. There's a little...liquidity crisis in the underlying assets."
+
+Connor translated the broker-speak into English. "They don't have any money."
+
+"They don't have any money /{this month}/," he said. "Look, the coupon on this contract has been through the roof for more than a year. Ultimately, it can't lose, either, because of how we've packaged it with a credit-default swap. But right now, this instant, they're having a tough one-time-only squeeze."
+
+After the first month's interest had paid out, Connor had liquidated several other holdings and bought more of the bonds, bought big. So big that the brokerage had FedExxed him a bottle of Champagne. He'd lost track of how much he had tied up with Ira's "fully hedged" scheme, but he knew it was at least $150,000. That had seemed like such a good bet --
+
+"What kind of one-time-only squeeze?"
+
+"Nintendo," the broker said. "They've loosened up their monetary policy lately. The star-farmers in Mushroom Kingdom are bringing up huge crops, and so Mario coins are dropping off in cost. But the word is that this is just a temporary gambit because they've had such a huge rush of new players who can't afford to keep up with the old-timers, so they're trying to lower commodity prices to keep those players onboard. But once those players catch up and start demanding more power-ups, the prices'll bounce back."
+
+It sounded plausible to Connor. After all, they'd done similar things in their own games. The experienced players howled as inflation lowered the value of their savings, but a player who'd been honing his toon for two years wasn't going to quit over something like that. The new blood was vital to keeping the game on track, replacements for the players who got old, or bored, or poor -- any of the reasons behind the churn that caused some players to resign every month.
+
+Churn was one of his biggest economic problems. You could minimize it in lots of sneaky ways: email a former player to tell him that you were about to delete the toon he hadn't touched in a year and there was a one-in-three chance that he'd sign up to play again, rather than doom this forgotten avatar to the bit-bucket. But ultimately some players would leave, and the only thing for it was to bring new players in.
+
+The broker was still droning on. " -- so really, we expect a huge surge in four to eight weeks, more than enough to make up for the drop. And if things go bad enough, there's always the prince and his bets --"
+
+"What's the bottom line?" Connor said.
+
+"Bottom line," Ira said. "Bottom line is that there's no coupon this month. The underlying bonds are selling at a 20 percent discount off face value." He swallowed audibly. "That's sixty percent off what you paid for them in this package. But if things get bad enough, you'll recoup with the insurance --"
+
+Connor tried to keep listening, but his breath was coming in tight little gasps. Sixty percent! He'd just had more than half his net worth vanish into thin air. The worst part was that he had other obligations -- a mortgage, payments due on some of the little startups he'd bought into, money to pay the contractors who were fixing up the holiday cottage he'd bought as a rental property in Bermuda. Without the cash he'd been expecting from these investments, he could lose it all.
+
+Oblivious, the broker kept talking. "-- which is why our recommendation today is to buy. Double down."
+
+"Excuse me?" Connor said, loud enough that the people closest to him in Command Central looked up from their feeds to stare at him. He scowled at them until they looked away. "Did you say /{buy}/?"
+
+"There's never been a better time," the salesman said. Connor pictured him in his cubicle, a short-haired middle-aged guy in an old suit that had once been tailor made, a collection of bad habits glued to a phone, chewed-down fingernails and twitching knees, a trashcan beside him filled with empty coffee cups, screens everywhere around him flickering like old silent films. "Look, any idiot can buy when the market is up, but how much higher does the market go when it's already at the top? The only way to make real money, big money, is to bet against the herd. When everyone else is dumping their holdings, that's the time to buy, when it's all down in the basement."
+
+Connor knew that this made sense. It was the basis of his Prikkel equations, it was the basis of all the fortunes he'd amassed to date. Buying stuff that everyone else wanted was a safe, uninteresting bet that paid practically nothing. Buying into the things that everyone else was too dumb to want -- that was how you got /{rich}/.
+
+"Ira," Connor said, "I hear what you're saying, but you've seen my accounts. I can't afford to double down. I'm maxxed out."
+
+"Connor, pal," he said, and Connor heard the smile in his voice and he smiled himself, a reflex he couldn't tamp down even if he'd wanted to. "You're not tapped out. You've got a liquidity problem. You have a relationship with this brokerage. That's worth something. Hell, that's worth /{everything}/. We got you into this problem, and we'll get you out of it. If you need some credit, that's absolutely do-able. Let me talk to our credit department and get back to you. I'm sure we can make it all work."
+
+Connor was overcome by an eerie, schizophrenic sensation. It was as if his brain had split into two pieces. One piece was shaking its head vigorously, saying /{Oh no, you're out of your mind, there's no way I'm putting more money into this thing. No, no, no, Christ, no!}/
+
+But there was another part of his mind that was saying /{He's right, the best time to buy is at the bottom of the market. These things have been paying out big-time. The explanation makes sense. Just think of how you'll feel when you don't buy in and the security bounces back, all that money you'll miss out on. Think of how you'll feel if you clean up and can buy a bigger house, another income property, a new car. Think of how all these jerks will drool with envy when you make a killing}/.
+
+And his mouth opened and the words that came out of it were, "All right, that sounds great. I'll take as much as you can sell me on margin." On margin: that was when you bought securities with borrowed money, because you were sure that the bets would pay off before you had to pay the money back. It was a dangerous game: if the margin call came before the bets paid off -- or if they never paid off -- it could wipe you out.
+
+But these were not bets, really. The way that the brokerage had packaged them, they were fully hedged. The worse the underlying bonds did, the more the bets against them from the Prince paid off. There might be some minor monthly variations, but when it was all said and done, he just couldn't lose.
+
+"Buy," he said. "Buy, buy, buy."
+
+Through the rest of the day, he was so preoccupied with worry over his precarious position that he didn't even notice when every other executive in Command Central had a nearly identical conversation with /{their}/ brokers.
+
+#
+
+Wei-Dong's mother was the perfect reality check when it came to games and the Webblies. He'd never appreciated it before he left home, but once he'd gone to work as a Turk, his mom had tried to re-establish contact by clipping stories about games and gamers and emailing them to him. It was always stuff he'd absorbed through his pores months before, being reported to outsiders with big screaming OMG WTF headlines that made him snicker.
+
+But he came to appreciate his mom's clippings as a glimpse into a parallel universe of non-gamers, people who just didn't get how important all this had become. The best ones were from the financial press, trying to explain to weirdos who invested in game-gold exactly what they had bought.
+
+And those clippings were even more important now that he'd come to China. Mom still thought he was in Alaska, and he made sure to pepper his occasional emails to her with references to the long nights and short days, the wilderness, the people -- a lot of it cut-and-pasted verbatim from the tweets of actual Alaska tourists.
+
+Today, three weeks into the strike, she sent him this:
+
+A UNION FOR VIDEO-GAMERS?
+
+They call themselves the Industrial Workers of the World Wide Web, and they claim that there are over 100,000 of them today, up from 20,000 just a few weeks ago. They spend their days and nights in multiplayer video-games, toiling to extract wealth from the game-engines, violating the game companies' exclusive monopoly over game-value. The crops these "gold farmers" raise are sold on to rich players in America, Europe and the rest of the developed world, and the companies that control the games say that this has the potential to disrupt the carefully balanced internal economies --
+
+Wei-Dong spacebarred through the article, skimming down. It was interesting to see one of his mother's feeds talking about Webblies, but they were so... /{old school}/ about it. Explaining everything.
+
+Then he stopped, scrolled back up.
+
+...mysterious, influential pirate radio host who calls herself Jiandi, whose audience is rumored to be in the tens of millions, creating a rare and improbable alliance between traditional factory workers and the gamers. This phenomenon is reportedly repeating itself around the Pacific Rim, in Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia and Vietnam, though it's unclear whether the "IWWWW" chapters in these countries are mere copycats or whether they're formally affiliated, under a single command.
+
+Wei-Dong looked up from his screen at the mattress where Lu and Jie had collapsed after staggering in from the latest broadcast, Jie's face so much younger in repose. Could she really be this famous DJ that Mom -- /{Mom}/, all the way across the world in Los Angeles -- was reading about?
+
+There was more, screens and screens more, but what really caught his attention was the mention of the "market turmoil" that was sending bond and stock prices skittering up and down. He didn't understand that stuff very well -- every time someone had attempted to explain it to him, his eyes had glazed over -- but it was clear that the things that they were doing here were having an effect, a /{massive}/ effect, all over the world.
+
+He almost laughed aloud, but caught himself. Matthew was sleeping all of six inches from where he sat, and he'd run the picket-skirmishes for 22 hours straight before keeling over. Wei-Dong had fought too, but he'd been mostly tasked to recruiting more Turks to his little list of friendly operatives, a much less intense kind of game. Still, he should be sleeping, not pecking at his laptop. In six hours, he'd be back on shift, with only a bowl of congee and a plate of dumplings to start the day.
+
+He folded down his laptop's lid and stretched his arms over his head, noting as he did the rank smell of his armpits. The single shower -- ringed with a scary-looking electrical heater that warmed up the water as it passed through the showerhead -- wasn't sufficient for all the Webblies who slept in the flat, and he'd skipped bathing for two days in a row. He wasn't the only one. The apartment smelled like the locker rooms at school or like the homeless shelter near Santee Alley that he used to pass when he went out for groceries.
+
+He heard a little chirp from somewhere nearby, the cricket-soft buzz of a mobile phone ringing. He watched as Jie sleepily pawed at the little purse by her pillow, its strap already looped around her arm, and extracted a phone, blearily answered it: "Wei?"
+
+Her sleepy eyes sprang open with such force that he actually heard her eyelids crinkling. Her bloodshot eyes showed her whole iris, and she leapt up, shouting in slangy Chinese that came so fast he couldn't understand her at first.
+
+But then he caught it: "Police! Outside! GO GO GO!"
+
+There were 58 Webblies sleeping in the safe-house, and in an instant they all shot out of their blankets, most of them already dressed, and jammed their toes into their shoes and grabbed little shoulder-bags containing their data and personal possessions and crowded into the doorway. They worked in near-silence, the only sound urgent whispers and curses as they stepped on each others' shoes. Some made for the window, leaping out to grab the balcony of the opposite handshake building, and now there was shouting from the street as the oncoming police spotted them.
+
+He joined the crush of bodies, pushing grimly into the narrow hallway, then sprinting in the opposite direction to most of the Webblies, for he had seen Jie running that way, holding tight to Lu's hand, and Jie seemed to have the survival instincts of a city rat. If she was running that way, he'd run that way too.
+
+But she'd gotten ahead of him, and when he skidded around the corner and found himself looking at a short length of corridor ending with an unmarked door, neither she nor Lu were anywhere to be seen. He paused for a second, then the unmistakable sound of a gunshot and a rising wave of panicked screams drove him forward, hurtling for the unmarked door, hand stretched out to turn the knob --
+
+-- which was locked!
+
+He bounced off the door, stunned, and went on his ass, and shouted a single, panicked "Shit!" as he cracked his head on the dirty tile floor. As he struggled back into a seated position, he saw the door crack open. Jie's bloodshot eye peeked out at him, and she swore in imaginative, slangy Chinese. "Gweilo," she hissed, "quickly!"
+
+He got to his feet quickly and reached the door in two quick steps. Her long fingernails dug into his arm as she dragged him inside the dimly lit space, which he saw now was a kind of supply closet that someone had converted into sleeping quarters, with a rolled up bed in one corner and a corner of one shelf cleared of cleaning products and disinfectant and piled with a meager stack of clothes and collection of toiletries and a small vanity mirror.
+
+"The matron," Jie said, whispering so quietly that Wei-Dong could barely hear her. "She gets to live in here for free. She and I have an arrangement." Lu was on his hands and knees behind her, silently rearranging the crowded space, working with a small LED flashlight clamped between his teeth. He was breathing heavily, his skinny arms trembling as he hefted the giant bottles of bleach and strained to set them down without making a sound.
+
+"Can I help?" Wei-Dong whispered.
+
+Jie rolled her eyes. "Does it look like there's room to help?" she said. She was so close to him that he could see her individual eyelashes, the downy hair on her earlobes. If he took a deep breath, he'd probably crush her.
+
+He shook his head minutely. "Sorry."
+
+Lu made a satisfied grunt and detached the entire bottom shelf from its bracket. Wei-Dong could see that he'd uncovered an access-hatch set into the wall, and it showered dust and paint-chips onto the floor in a cockroach-wing patter as he worked it loose. He passed it back and Jie tried to grab it, but there wasn't room to maneuver it in the small space.
+
+From the other side of the door, he heard the tromp, tromp, tromp of heavy boots, heard the thudding and pounding on the doors, the muffled and frightened conversations of people roused from their beds in the middle of the night.
+
+With a low, frustrated, frightened sound Jie grabbed the hatch cover and moved it out of the way, bashing him so hard in the nose that he had to stuff his fist in his mouth to stop from crying out. She gave him a contemptuous look and shoved the hatch into his hands. It was about 30 inches square, filthy, awkward, made from age-softened plywood.
+
+Lu had passed through the hatch already, and now Jie was following, her bare legs flashing in the half-light of the room, and then Wei-Dong was alone, and the tromp of the boots was louder. Someone was scuffling in the hallway, a man, shouting in outrage; a woman, screaming in terror; a baby, howling.
+
+Wei-Dong knelt down and peered into the tiny opening. It was pitch dark in there. He carefully leaned the cover up against the wall beside the opening and then climbed in. The floor on the other side was unfinished concrete, gritty and dusty. He couldn't see a thing as he pulled himself forward on his elbows, commando-style, his breath rasping in his ears. He inched forward, feeling cautiously ahead for obstructions and then discovered that he was holding something soft and pliant and warm. Jie's breast.
+
+She hissed like a snake and swiped his hand away with sudden violence. He began to stammer an apology, but she hissed again: "Shhh!"
+
+He bit back the words.
+
+"Close up the grating," she said. He cautiously began to turn around. The little space was a mere meter high and he repeatedly smashed his head into the ceiling, which had several unforgiving metal pipes running along it that bristled with vicious joints and tees. And he kicked both Jie and Lu several times.
+
+But he eventually found himself with his head and arms outside the hatch, and he desperately fitted his fingers to the inside of the grill and inched it into place. It was nearly impossible to manoeuvre it into the tight space, but he managed, his fingers white -- and all the while, the sounds from the corridor grew louder and louder.
+
+"Got it," he gasped and slithered away. There were voices from just outside the door now, deep, impatient male voices and an angry, shrill woman's voice telling them that this was the stupid broom closet and to stop being so stupid. Someone shook the doorknob and then put a shoulder into the door, which shuddered.
+
+Wei-Dong bit his tongue to hold in the squeak and pushed back even more, the fear on him know, a live thing in his chest. Jie and Lu pushed at him as he collided with them, but he barely felt it. All he felt was the fear, fear of the armed men on the other side of the door, about to come through and see the closet and the obvious gap on the bottom shelf where things had been shoved aside. Wei-Dong was suddenly and painfully aware of how far he was from home, an illegal immigrant with no rights in a country where no one else had rights, either. He would have cried if he hadn't been scared to make a sound.
+
+"Come on," Jie whispered, a sound barely audible as another crash rocked the door. Someone had a key in the lock now, jiggling it. She clicked a tiny red LED to life and it showed him the shape of the space: a long, low plumbing maintenance area. The pipes above them gurgled and whooshed softly as the water sluiced through them.
+
+Lu was beside him, Jie ahead of them, and she was arm-crawling to the opposite side of the area. He followed as quickly as he could, ears straining for any sound from behind him.
+
+Jie swore under her breath.
+
+"What?" Lu said.
+
+"I can't find the other grating," she said. "I thought it was right here, but --"
+
+Wei-Dong understood now. The maintenance area occupied a dead-space between their building and the one behind it, and somewhere around here, there was a grating like the one they'd come through, a little wormhole into another level of the game. Jie's survival instincts were incredibly sharp, that much had been obvious, so he wasn't altogether surprised to discover that she had a back door prepared.
+
+He peered into the darkness, his whole body slicked with sweat and grimed with the ancient dust covering the floor.
+
+"The last time, there was a light on the other side. It was easy to find," she said, her voice near panic. He heard the unmistakable sound of the police entering the utility closet behind them, then voices.
+
+"We need to search the whole wall," Lu said. "Split up."
+
+So Wei-Dong found himself squirming over Jie's bare calves, tearing his jeans on one of the low pipes as he did so. He patted the wall blindly, feeling around. Away from the small red light, it was pitch black, disorienting, frightening. Nearby, he heard the sounds of Jie and Lu searching too.
+
+And then, he found it, his baby fingertip slipping into a grating hole, then he patted around it, felt its full extent. "Here, here!" he whispered loudly, and the other two began to struggle his way. He jiggled the grating, trying to find the trick that would make it come away, but it appeared to be screwed in. Increasingly desperate, he shook the grating, causing a rain of dust and dried paint to fall on his hands. He was gripping the metal so hard he could feel it cutting into one finger, a trickle of blood turning into mud as it mixed with the dirt.
+
+"Light," he said. "Can't see anything."
+
+A hand patted the length of his leg, feeling its way up his body, to his arm, then pressed the little light into his hand. Jie's hand, slim and girlish. He clicked the red light to life and peered intently at the grating. It wasn't screwed in, but it needed to be pushed slightly forward before it would lift out. He stuck the light's handle between his teeth and /{pushed}/ and /{lifted}/ and the grating popped free.
+
+Just as it did, a long cone of light sliced through the crawlspace, and then a martial voice demanded "Halt!" The light bathed him, making him squint, and Jie thumped him in the thigh and said, "GO!"
+
+He went, commando crawling again, Jie's slim hands pushing him to hurry him along. He emerged into a tiled space, dirty and dark, the floor wet and slimy. He stood up cautiously, worried about hitting his head again, then stooped to help Jie through. There were more shouts coming from the other side of the grating now, and the light spilled out of it and painted the greenish scum on the old, cracked grey tile floor. "Halt!" again, and "Halt" once more, as Jie finished wriggling through and he bent to grab Lu, peering into the now-brilliantly-lit crawlspace. Lu had been searching for the grating at the other end of the crawlspace and he was going as fast as he could, his face a mask of determination and fear, lips skinned back from his teeth, blood flowing freely from a scalp wound.
+
+"Halt!" again, and Lu put on a burst of speed, and there was the unmistakable sound of a gun being cocked. Lu's eyes grew wide and he flung his arms out before him and dug his hands into the ground and pulled himself along, scrambling with his toes.
+
+"Come on," Wei-Dong begged, practically in tears. "Come on, Lu!"
+
+A gunshot, that flat sound he'd heard in the distance when he was living in downtown LA, but with an alarming set of whining aftertones as the bullet bounced from one pipe to another. Water began to gush onto the floor, and Lu was still too far away. Wei-Dong went down on his belly and crawled halfway into the space, holding his arms out: "Come on, come on," crooning it now, not sure if he was speaking English or Chinese.
+
+And Lu came, and: "HALT!" and another gunshot, then two more, and the water was everywhere, and the whining ricochets were everywhere and then --
+
+Lu /{screamed}/, a sound like nothing Wei-Dong had ever heard. The closest he'd heard was the wail of a cat that he'd once seen hit by a car in front of his house, a cat that had lain in the street with its spine broken for an eternity, screaming almost like a human, a wail that made his skin prickle from his ankles to his earlobes. Then, Lu /{stopped}/. Lay stock still. Wei-Dong bit his tongue so hard he felt blood fill his mouth. Lu's eyes narrowed, the pupils contracting. He opened his mouth as though he had just had the most profound insight of his life, and then blood sloshed out of his mouth, over his lips, and down his chin.
+
+"Lu!" Wei-Dong called, and was torn between the impulse to go forward and get him and the impulse to back out and run as fast as he could, all the way to California if he could --
+
+And then, "STAY WHERE YOU ARE," in that barking, brutal Chinese, and the gun was cocked again. He smelled the blood from his own mouth and from Lu, and Lu slumped forward. Then a gunpowder smell. Then --
+
+-- another shot, which whined and bounced with a deadly sound that left his ears ringing.
+
+"STAY WHERE YOU ARE," the voice said, and Wei-Dong scrambled backwards as fast as he could.
+
+Jie yanked him to his feet, her face grimed with dust and streaked with tears. "Lu?" she said.
+
+He shook his head, all his Chinese gone for a moment, no words at all available to him.
+
+Then Jie did an extraordinary thing. She closed her eyes, drew in a deep breath, drew it in and in, squeezed her fists and her arms and her neck muscles so that they all stood out, corded and taut.
+
+And then she blew it all out, unclenched her fists, relaxed her neck, and opened her eyes.
+
+"Let's go," she said, and, with a single smooth motion, turned to the door behind her and shot the bolt, turned the knob and opened it into another apartment-building corridor, smelling of cooking spices and ancient, ground-in body-odor and mold. The dim light from the hallway felt bright compared to the twilight he'd been in since diving through the bolt-hole, and he saw that he was in a disused communal shower, the walls green with old mold and slime.
+
+Jie dug a pair of strappy sandals out of her purse and calmly and efficiently slipped them on. She produced two sealed packets of wet-wipes, handed one to Wei-Dong and used the other's contents to wipe her face, her hands, her bare legs, working with brisk strokes. Though Wei-Dong's heart was hammering and the adrenalin was surging through his body, he forced himself to do the same, shoving the dirty wipes in his pocket until there were no more. There were more shouts from the grating behind them, and distant sounds from the street below, and Wei-Dong knew it was hopeless, knew that they were cornered.
+
+But if Jie was going to march on, he would too. Lu was behind him, with the coppery blood smell, the bonfire smell of the gunpowder. Ahead of him was China, all of China, the country he'd dreamed of for years, not a dream anymore, but a brutal reality.
+
+Jie began to walk briskly, her arm waving back and forth like a metronome as she crossed the length of the building and opened the door to the stairway without breaking stride. Wei-Dong struggled to keep up. They pelted down three flights of stairs, the grimy, barred windows allowing only a grey wash of light. It was dawn outside.
+
+Only one flight remained, and Jie pulled up abruptly, wheeled on her heel and looked him in the eye. Her eyes were limned with red, but her face was composed. "Why do you have to be white?" she said. "You stand out so much. Walk five paces behind me, three paces to the side, and if they catch you, I won't stop."
+
+He swallowed. Tried to swallow. His mouth was too dry. Lu was dead upstairs. The police were outside the door -- he heard calls, radio-chatter, engines, sirens, shouts -- and they were murderous.
+
+He wanted to say, /{Wait, don't, don't open the door, let's hide here.}/ But he didn't say it. They were doomed in here. The police knew which building they'd entered. The longer they waited, the sooner it would be before they sealed the exits and searched every corner and nook.
+
+"Understood," he managed, and made his face into a smooth mask.
+
+One more flight.
+
+Jie cracked the door and the dawn light was rosy on her face. She put her eye to the crack for a moment, then opened it a little wider and slipped out. Wei-Dong counted to three, slowly, making his breath as slow as the count, then went out the door himself.
+
+Chaos.
+
+The street was a little wider than most of the lanes near the handshake buildings, a main road that was just big enough to admit a car. A car idled at one end of it, two policemen outside it. Three more police were just entering the building he'd come out of, using a glass door a few yards away. The blue police-car bubble-lights painted the walls around them with repeating patterns of blue and black. Somewhere nearby, shouting. Lots of shouting. Boyish yells of terror and agony, the thud of clubs, screaming from the balconies, no words, just the wordless slaughterhouse soundtrack of dozens of Webblies being beaten. Beaten, while Lu lay dead or dying in the crawlspace.
+
+He turned left, the direction that Jie had gone, just in time to see her disappearing down a narrow laneway, turning sideways to pass into it. He wasn't sure how he could follow her injunction to stay to one side of her in a space that narrow, but he decided he didn't care. He wasn't going to try to make his own way out of the labyrinth of Cantonese-town.
+
+As soon as he entered the alley, though, he regretted it. A policeman who happened to look down the alley would see him instantly and he'd be a sitting target, impossible to miss. He looked over his shoulder so much as he inched along that he tripped and nearly went over, only stopping himself from falling to the wet, stinking concrete between the buildings by digging his hands into the walls on either side of him. Ahead of him, Jie cleared the other end of the alley and cut right. He hurried to catch her.
+
+Just as he cleared the alley-mouth himself, he heard three more gunshots, then a barrage of shots, so many he couldn't count them. He froze, but the sounds had been further away, back where the Webblies had emerged from their safe house. It could only mean one thing. He bit his cheek and swallowed the sick feeling rising in his throat and scrambled to keep up with Jie.
+
+Jie walked quickly -- too quickly; he almost lost her more than once. But eventually she turned into a metro station and he followed her down. He'd used the ticket-buying machines before -- they were labelled in Chinese and English -- and he bought a fare to take him to the end of the line, feeding in some RMB notes from his wallet. The machine dropped a plastic coin like a poker chip into its hopper and he took it and rubbed it on the turnstile's contact-point and clattered down the stairs with the sparse crowd of workers headed for early shifts.
+
+He positioned himself by one of the doors and reached into his pocket for a worn tourist guide to Shenzhen, taken from the free stack at the info-booth at the train-station. It was perfect camouflage, a kind of invisibility. There was always a gweilo or two puzzling over a tourist map on the metro, being studiously ignored by the flocks of perfectly turned-out factory girls who avoided them as probable perverts and definite sources of embarrassment.
+
+Jie got off four stops later, and he jumped off at the last minute. As he did, he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the glass of the car-doors and saw that one side of his hair was matted with dried blood which had also run down his neck and dried there. He cursed himself for his smugness. Invisible! He was probably the most memorable thing the metro riders saw all that day, a grimy, bloody gweilo on the train.
+
+He followed Jie up the escalator and saw her pointedly nod toward a toilet door. He went and jiggled the handle, but it was locked. He turned to go, and the door opened. Behind it was an ancient grandmother, with a terrible hump that bent her nearly double.
+
+She gave him a milky stare, pursed her lips and began to close the door.
+
+"Wait!" he said in urgent, low Chinese.
+
+"You speak Chinese?"
+
+He nodded. "Some," he said. "I need to use the bathroom."
+
+"10 RMB," she said. He was pretty sure that she wasn't the official bathroom-minder, but he wasn't going to argue with her. He dug in his pocket and found two crumpled fives and passed them to her. It came to $1.25 and he was pretty sure it was an insane amount of money to pay for the use of the bathroom, but he didn't care at this point.
+
+The bathroom was tiny and cramped with the old woman's possessions bundled into huge vinyl shopping bags. He positioned himself by the sink and stared at his reflection in the scratched mirror. He looked like he'd been through a blender, head-first. He ran the water and used his cupped hands to splash it ineffectually on his hair and neck, soaking his t-shirt in the process.
+
+"That's no way to do it," the old woman shouted from behind him. She twisted off the faucet with her arthritic hand. He looked silently at her. He didn't want to get into an argument with this weird old crone.
+
+"Shirt off," she said, in a stern voice. When he hesitated, she gave his wrist an impatient slap. "Off!" she said. "Shirt off, lean forward, hair under the tap. Honestly!"
+
+He did as he was bade, bending deeply at the waist to get his hair under the faucet in the small, dirty sink. She cranked the tap full open and used her trembling hands to wash out his hair and scrub at his bloody neck. When he made to stand up, she slapped his back and said, "Stay!"
+
+He stayed. Eventually, she let him up, and dug through her bags until she found a tattered old men's shirt that she handed to him. "Dry," she said.
+
+The shirt smelled of must and city, but was cleaner than anything he was wearing. He towelled at his hair, careful of the tender cut on his scalp.
+
+"It's not deep," she said. "I was a nurse, you'll be OK. A stitch or two, if you don't want the scar."
+
+"Thank you," Wei-Dong managed. "Thank you very, very much."
+
+"Ten RMB," she said, and smiled at him, practically toothless. He gave her two more fives and put his t-shirt on. It smelled terrible, a thick reek of BO and blood, but it was a black tee with a picture of a charging orc and it didn't show the blood.
+
+"Go," she said. "No more fighting."
+
+He left, dazed, and found his way into the station, looking for Jie. She was waiting by the escalator to the surface, fixing her makeup in a small mirror that just happened to give her a view of the bathroom door. She snapped the compact shut and ascended to the surface. He followed.
+
+#
+
+"Forty two dead," Big Sister Nor said to Justbob and The Mighty Krang. "Forty two dead in Shenzhen. A bloodbath."
+
+"War," Justbob said.
+
+"War," The Mighty Krang said, with a viciousness that neither of them had ever heard from him before. He saw their looks, balled his fists, glared. "War," he said, again.
+
+"Not a war," Big Sister Nor said. "A strike."
+
+#
+
+"A strike," General Robotwallah announced to her troops. "No more gold gets in or out of any of our games."
+
+"Forty two dead," Yasmin said, in a voice leaden with sorrow.
+
+/{Forty three}/, Ashok thought, remembering the boy, and sure enough, Yasmin mouthed /{Forty three}/ as she sat down.
+
+"We'll need defense here," General Robotwallah said. "Bannerjee will find more badmashes to try to take us out of this place."
+
+Sushant stood up and held up a machete that the boys had left behind. "We took this place. We'll hold it," he said, all teen bravado. Ashok felt like he would be sick.
+
+Yasmin and the General looked intensely at one another, a silent conversation taking place.
+
+"No more violence," the General said, in the voice of command.
+
+Sushant deflated, looked humiliated. "But what if they come for us with knives and clubs and guns?" he said, defiant.
+
+Yasmin stood up and walked to stand next to her general. "We make sure they don't," she said.
+
+Ashok stood and went to his little back room and began to place phone calls.
+
+#
+
+"Sisters!" Jie said, throwing her head back and clenching her fists. She'd been calm enough as she sat down in the basement of the Internet cafe, a private room the owner rented out discreetly to porno freelancers who needed a network connection away from the public eye. But now it seemed as if all the sorrow and pain she had shoved down into herself when Lu was shot was pouring out.
+
+"/{SISTERS!}/" she said again, and it was a howl, as horrible as the noise Lu had made, as horrible as the noise that half-dead cat had made in the street in front of Wei-Dong's house.
+
+The cafe was in the shuttered Intercontinental hotel, in the theme-restaurant that sported a full-size pirate ship sticking out of the roof, its sails in tatters. The man behind the desk had negotiated briskly with Jie for the space, studiously ignoring Wei-Dong lurking a few steps behind her. She'd motioned him along with a jerk of her head and led him to the private room, which had once been a restaurant store-room.
+
+Once the door clicked shut behind them, she produced a bootable USB stick and restarted the computer from it, fitted an elegant, slender earwig to her ear and passed one to Wei-Dong, which he screwed into his own ear. After some futzing with the computer she signalled to him that they were live and commenced to howl like a wounded thing.
+
+"/{Sisters! My sisters!}/" she said, and tears coursed down her face. "They killed him tonight. Poor Tank, my Tank. His name, his real name was Zha Yue Lu, and I loved him and he never harmed another human being and the only thing he was guilty of was demanding decent pay, decent working conditions, vacation time, job security -- the things we all want from our jobs. The things our /{bosses}/ take for granted.
+
+"They raided us last night, the vicious jingcha, working for the bosses as they always have and always will. They beat down the door and the boys ran like the wind, but they caught them and they caught them and they caught them. Lu and I tried to escape through the back way and they --" She broke then, tears coursing down her face, a sob bigger than the room itself escaping her chest. The mixer-readouts on the computer screen spiked red from the burst of sound. "They shot him like a dog, shot him dead."
+
+She sobbed again, and the sobs didn't stop coming. She beat her fists on the table, tore at her hair, screamed like she was being cut with knives, screamed until Wei-Dong was sure that someone would burst the door down expecting to find a murder in progress.
+
+Tentatively, he uncrossed his legs and got to his feet and crossed to her and caught her beating fists in his hands. She looked at him, unseeing, and stuck her face into his chest, the hot tears soaking through his t-shirt, the cries coming and coming. She pulled away for a moment, gasped, "I'm sorry, I'll be back in a few minutes," and clicked something, and the mixer levels on the screen flatlined.
+
+On and on she cried, and soon Wei-Dong was crying too -- crying for his father, crying for Lu, crying for all the gunshots he'd heard on the way out of the handshake buildings. They rocked and cried together like that for what seemed like an eternity, and then Jie gently disengaged herself and turned back to her computer and clicked some more.
+
+"Sisters," she said, "for years now I've sat at this mic, talking to you about love and family and dreams and work. So many of us came here looking to get away from poverty, looking to find a decent wage for a decent day's work, and instead found ourselves beating off perverted bosses, being robbed by marketing schemes, losing our wages and being tossed out into the street when the market shifts.
+
+"No more," she said, breathing it so low that Wei-Dong had to strain to hear it. "No more," she said, louder. "NO MORE!" she shouted and stood up and began to pace, gesturing as she did.
+
+"No more asking permission to go to the bathroom! No more losing our pay because we get sick! No more lock-ins when the big orders come in. No more overtime without pay. No more burns on our arms and hands from working the rubber-molding machinery -- how many of you have the idiotic logo of some stupid company branded into your flesh from an accident that could have been prevented with decent safety clothes?
+
+"No more missing eyes. No more lost fingers. No more scalps torn away from a screaming girl's head as her hair is sucked into some giant machine with the strength of an ox and the brains of an ant. NO MORE!"
+
+"Tomorrow, no one works. No one. Sisters, it's time. If one of you refuses to work, they just fire you and the machines grind on. If you all refuse to work, /{the machines stop}/.
+
+"If one factory shuts down, they send the police to open it again, soldiers with guns and clubs and gas. If /{all the factories}/ shut down, there aren't enough police in the world to open them again."
+
+She looked at her screen. It was going crazy. She clicked in a call. Wei-Dong heard it in his earpiece.
+
+"Jiandi," a breathy, girly voice said. "Is this Jiandi?"
+
+"Yes, sister, it is," she said. "Who else?" She smiled a thin smile.
+
+"Have you heard about the other deaths, in the Cantonese quarter in Shenzhen? The boys they shot?"
+
+Wei-Dong felt like he was falling. The girl was still speaking.
+
+"-- 42 of them, is what we heard. There were pictures, sent from phone to phone. Google for 'the fallen 42' and you'll find them. The police said it was lies, and just now, they said that they were a criminal gang, but I recognized some of those boys from the strike before, the one you told us about --"
+
+Wei-Dong dug out his phone and began to google, typing so quickly he mashed the keys and had to retype the query three times, a process made all the more cumbersome by the need to use proxies to get around the blocks on his phone's network connections. But then he got it, and the photos dribbled into his phone's browser as slow as glaciers, and soon he was looking at shot after shot of fallen boys, lying in the narrow lanes, arms thrown out or held up around their faces, legs limp. The cam-phone photos were a little out of focus, and the phone's small screen made them even less distinct, but the sight still hit him like a hammerblow.
+
+The girl was still speaking. "We've all seen them and the girls in my dorm are scared, and now you're telling us to walk out of our jobs. How do you know we won't be shot too?"
+
+Jie's mouth was opening and closing like a fish. She held her hand out and snapped her fingers at Wei-Dong, who passed her his phone. Her face was terrible, her lips pulled away from her teeth, which clicked rhythmically as she looked at the photos.
+
+"Oh," she said, as if she hadn't heard the girl's question. "Oh," she said, as if she'd just realized some deep truth that had evaded her all her life.
+
+"Jiandi?" the girl said.
+
+"You might be shot," Jie said, slowly, as if explaining something to a child. "I might be shot. But they can't shoot us all."
+
+She paused, considering. Tears rolled off her chin, stained the collar of her shirt.
+
+"Can they?"
+
+She clicked something and a commercial started.
+
+"I can't finish this," she said in a dead voice. "I can't finish this at all. I should go home."
+
+Wei-Dong looked down at his hands. "I don't think that would be safe."
+
+She shook her head. "/{Home}/," she said. "The village. Go back. There's a little money left. I could go home and my parents could find some boy for me to marry and I could be just another girl in the village, growing old. Have my one baby and pray it's a boy. Swallow pesticide when it gets to be too much." She looked into his eyes and he had to steel himself to keep from flinching away. "Do you know that China is the only country where more women commit suicide than men?"
+
+Wei-Dong spoke, his voice trembling. "I can't pretend that I know what your life is like, Jie, but I can't believe that you want to do that. There are 42 dead. I don't think we can stop here." Thinking /{I am so far from home and don't know how I'll get back.}/ Thinking, /{If she goes, I'll be all alone.}/ And then thinking, /{Coward}/ and wanting to hit his head against something until the thoughts stopped.
+
+She reached for the keyboard and he knew enough about her work environment to see that she was getting ready to shut down.
+
+"Wait!" he said. "Come on, stop." He fished for the words. In the weeks since he'd arrived in China, he'd begun to think in Chinese, even dream in it sometimes, but now it failed him. "I --" He beat his fists on his thighs in frustration. "It won't stop now," he said. "If you go home to the village, it will keep going, but it won't have you. It won't have Jiandi, the big sister to all the factory girls. When Lu told me about you, I thought he was crazy, thought there was no way you could possibly have that many listeners. He thought you were some kind of god, or a queen, a leader of an army of millions. He told me he thought you didn't understand how important you are. How you --" He paused, gathered the words. "You're shiny. That's what he said. You shine, you're like this bright, shiny thing that people just want to chase after, to follow. Everyone who meets you, everyone who hears you, they trust you, they want you to be their friend.
+
+"If you go, the Webblies will still fight, but without you, I think they'll lose."
+
+She glared at him. "They'll probably lose with me, too. Do you have any idea what a terrible burden you put on me? You /{all}/ put on me? It's absolutely unfair. I'm not your god, I'm not your queen. I'm a broadcaster!"
+
+The heat rose in Wei-Dong. "That's right! You're a broadcaster. You don't work for some government channel like CCTV, though, do you? You're underground, criminal. You spent years telling factory girls to stand up for their rights, years living in safe-houses and carrying fake IDs. You set yourself up to be where you are now. I can't believe that you didn't dream about this. Look me in the eye and tell me that you didn't /{dream}/ about being a leader of millions, about having them all follow you and look up to you! Tell me!"
+
+She did something absolutely unexpected. She laughed. A little laugh, a broken laugh, a laugh with jagged shards of glass in it, but it was a laugh anyway. "Yes," she said. "Yes, of course. With a hairbrush for a microphone, in front of my parents' mirror, pretending to be the DJ that they all listened to. Of course. What else?"
+
+Her smile was so sad and radiant it made Wei-Dong weak in the knees. "I never thought I'd end up here, though. I thought I'd be a pretty girl on television, recognized in the street. Not a fugitive."
+
+Wei-Dong shrugged, back on familiar territory. "The future's a weirder place than we thought it would be when we were little kids. Look at gold-farming, how weird is that?"
+
+She grinned. "No weirder than making rubber bananas for Swedish department-store displays. That was my first job when I came here, you know?" She rolled up her sleeves and showed him her arms. They were crisscrossed with old burn-scars. "Then making cheap beads for something called 'Mardi Gras.' Boss Chan liked me, liked how I worked with the hot plastic. No complaining, even though we didn't have masks, even though I was burned over and over again." She twisted her forearm and he saw that she had the Nike logo branded backwards, in bubbled, wrinkled scar there. "Afterwards, I worked on the same kind of machine, in a shoe factory. You see the logo? Many of us have it. It's like we were cattle, and the factory branded us one at a time."
+
+"Are you going to talk to the people again?"
+
+She slumped. Slipped in her earwig. Began to prod at the computer. "Yes," she said. "Yes, I must. As long as they'll listen, I must."
+
+#
+
+Matthew wept as he walked, pacing the streets without seeing. He'd been one of the first ones out of the building when the police raided, and he'd slipped through the cordon before they'd tightened it, slipping into another handshake building, one he'd played in as a boy, and running up the stairs to the roof, where he'd lain on his belly amid the broken glass and pebbles, staring down at the street below as the police chased down and caught his friends, one after the other, a line of Webblies face-down on the ground, groaning from the occasional kick or punch when they violated the silence and tried to speak with one another.
+
+The police began to methodically cuff and hood them, starting at one end, working in threes -- one to cuff, one to hood, and one to stand guard with his rifle. It seemed to go on forever, and Matthew saw that he was far from the only person observing the sick spectacle: the laundry-hung balconies of the handshake buildings shivered as people piled out onto them, their mobile phones aimed at the laneway below. Matthew got out his own phone, zooming in methodically on each face, trying to get a picture of each Webbly before he was hooded, thinking vaguely of putting the images on the big Webbly boards, sending them to the foreign press, the dissident bloggers who used their offshore servers.
+
+Then, sudden movement. Ping was thrashing on the ground, limbs flailing, head cracking against the pavement hard enough to be heard from Matthew's perch six stories up. Matthew knew with hopeless certainty that it was one of his friend's epileptic seizures, which didn't come on very often, but which were violent and terrifying for those around him. The cops tried to grab his arms and legs, and one of them got a hard kick in the knee for his trouble, and then Ping's arm cracked the hooded prisoner beside him, who rolled away, stumbled to his feet, and the cops waded in, rifle-butts raised and ready.
+
+What happened next seemed to take forever, an eternity during which Matthew struggled not to scream, struggled on the edge of indecision, of impotence, of being driven to run to the street below for his comrades and of being too scared to move from the spot.
+
+A policeman cracked the hooded Webbly who was on his feet across the kidneys, and the boy screeched and staggered and happened to catch hold of the rifle-butt. The two grappled for the gun while the boys on the pavement shouted, other policemen closing in, and then one of them unholstered his revolver and calmly shot the hooded boy in the head, the hood spattered and red as the boy fell.
+
+That was it. The boys leapt to their feet and /{charged}/, warriors screaming their battle-cries, unarmed children scared and brave and stupid, and the police guns fired, and fired, and fired.
+
+The cordite smell overpowered his senses, a smell like the fireworks he and his friends used to set off on New Year's. Mingled with it, the blood smell, the shit smell of boys whose bowels had let go. Matthew cried silently as he aimed his phone at the carnage, shooting and shooting, and then a policeman looked up at the crowd observing the massacre and shouted something indistinct, the camera lens on his helmet glinting in the dawn light, and Matthew ducked back as the rest of the policemen looked up, and then he heard the screaming, screaming from all around, from all the balconies.
+
+He pelted across the roof, headed for the next building, vaulting the narrow gap between the two with ease. Twice more he leapt from building to building, running on sheer survival instinct, his mind a blank. Then he found himself on the street, with no memory of having descended any stairs, walking briskly, headed for the center of town, the streets with the fancy shops and the pimps, the businessmen and the Internet cafes filled with screaming boys killing orcs and blowing space-pirates out of the sky and vanquishing evil super-villains.
+
+The tears coursed down his cheeks, and the early morning rush of people on their way to work gave him a wide berth. He wasn't the first boy to walk the streets of Shenzhen in tears, and he wouldn't be the last. He randomly boarded a bus and paid the fare and sat down, burying his face in his hands, choking back the sobs. He'd ridden the bus for a full hour before he bothered to look up and see where he was headed.
+
+Then he had to smile. Somehow, he'd boarded a bus headed for Dafen, the "oil painting village," where thousands of painters working in small factories turned out millions of paintings. He'd gone there once with Ping and the boys, on a rare day off, to wander the narrow streets and marvel at the canvasses hung everywhere, in outdoor stalls and in open shops and in huge galleries. The paintings were mostly in European style, old fashioned, depicting life in ancient European cities, or the tortured Jesus (these made Matthew squirm and remember his father's stories of persecution) or perfect fruit sitting on tables. Some of the shops and stalls had painters working at them, copying paintings out of books, executing deft little brushstrokes and closing out the rest of the world. The books themselves were printed in Dongguan -- Matthew knew a factory girl who worked at the printer -- and something about the whole scene had filled Matthew with an unnameable emotion at the thought of all these painters creating work with their artist's eyes and hands for use by foreigners who'd never come to China, never imagine the faces and hands of the painters who made the work.
+
+And here they were, pulling up at the five-meter-tall sculpture of a hand holding a brush, disgorging dozens of passengers by the side of the road. All around him rose the tall housing blocks and long factory buildings, the air scented with breakfast and oil paint and turpentine.
+
+Matthew came out of his funk enough to notice that many of his fellow passengers wore paint-stained work-clothes and carried wooden paint-boxes, and he joined the general throng that snaked into Dafen, amid the murmur of conversation as workers greeted friends and passed the gossip.
+
+The time he'd visited Dafen, he'd wandered into a gallery that sold contemporary paintings by Chinese painters, showing Chinese settings. He'd never had much use for art, but he'd been poleaxed by these ones. One showed four factory girls, beautiful and young, holding mobile phones and designer bags, walking down a rural village street at Mid-Autumn Festival, the house-fronts and shop-windows hung with lanterns. The village was old and poor, the street broken, the people watching from the doorways with seamed peasant faces, pinched and dried up. The four girls were glamorous aliens from another world, children who'd been sent away to find their fortunes, who'd come back changed into a different species altogether.
+
+And there'd been a picture of an old grandmother sleeping in a Dongguan bus-shelter, toothless mouth thrown open, huddled under a fake designer coat that was streaked with grime and torn. And a picture of a Cantonese man on a ladder between two handshake buildings, hanging up an illegal cable-wire. The images had been poignant and painful and beautiful, and he'd stood there looking at them until the gallery owner chased him out. These were for people with money, not people like him.
+
+Now, passing by the same shop, he felt a jolt of recognition as he saw the picture of the four factory girls, arms around each others' shoulders, in the shop's windows. It hadn't sold -- or maybe the painter turned them out by the truckload. Maybe there was a factory full of painters devoted to making copies of this painting.
+
+He became conscious of a distant hubbub, an indistinct roar of angry voices. He thought he'd been hearing it for some time now, but it had been subsumed in the sound of the people around him. Now it was growing louder, and he wasn't the only one who'd noticed it. It was a chant, thunderous and relentless, with tramping, rhythmic feet. The crowd craned their necks around to locate the disturbance, and he joined them.
+
+Then they turned the corner and he saw what it was: a group of young men and women, paint-stained, holding up sheets of paper with beautifully calligraphed slogans: "NON-FORMULA PAINTING FACTORY UNFAIR!" "WE DEMAND WAGES!" "BOSS SIU IS CORRUPT!" The signs were decorated with artistic flourishes, and he saw that at the far end of the picket there was a trio of painters crouched over a pile of paper, brushes working furiously. A new sign went up: "REMEMBER THE 42!" and then one that simply said "IWWWW" in the funny Western script, and Matthew felt a surge of elation.
+
+"Who are the 42?" he asked one of the painters, a pretty young woman with several prominent moles on her face. She pushed her hair behind her ears. "It was three hours ago," she said, then looked at the time on her phone. "Four hours ago." She shook her head, brought up some pictures on her phone. "The police executed 42 boys in Cantonese town. They say that the boys were criminals, but the neighbors say they were just gold-farmers." She showed him the pictures. His friends, on the ground, heads in hoods, being shot by policemen, reeling back under the fire. The policemen anonymous behind their masks. The girl saw the expression on his face and nodded. "Terrible, isn't it? Just terrible. And the things the fifty-cent army have been saying about them --" The fifty-cent army was the huge legion of bloggers paid fifty cents -- 4 RMB -- to write patriotic comments and posts about the government.
+
+He found that he was sitting on the dirty sidewalk, holding the girl's phone. She knelt down with him and said, "Hey, mister, are you all right?"
+
+He nodded his head automatically, then shook it. Because he wasn't all right. Nothing was all right. "No," he said.
+
+The girl looked at the sign she'd been painting and then at him. She turned her back on the painting and took his chin, tilted his face up. "Are you hurt?"
+
+"Not hurt," he said. "But." He shook his head. Pointed at her phone. Drew out his own. Brought up the photos he'd taken while trembling on the roof.
+
+"The same photos?" she said. Then looked closer. "Different photos. Where'd you get them?"
+
+He said, "I took them," and it came out in a rasp. "They were my friends."
+
+She jolted as if shocked, then bit her lip and paged through the photos. She smelled of turpentine and her fingers were very long and elegant. She reminded Matthew of an elf. "You were there?" It was only half a question, but he nodded anyway. "Oh, oh, oh," she said, handing him back the phone and giving him a strong, sisterly hug. "You poor boy," she said.
+
+"We heard about it an hour ago, while we were settling in to work. We gathered to discuss it, leaving our canvasses, and our boss, Boss Siu, came by and demanded that we all get back to work. He wouldn't let us tell him why we were gathered. He never does. It's like Jiandi says on her radio show -- he controls our bathroom breaks, docks our wages for talking or sometimes just for looking up for too long. And when he told us we were all being docked, one of the girls stood up and shouted a slogan, something like 'Boss Siu is unfair!' and though it was funny, it was also so /{real}/, straight from her heart, and we all stood up too and then --" She gestured at the line.
+
+Matthew remembered the day they'd walked out, a million years ago, remembered the police arriving and taking them to jail, remembered his vow never to go to jail again. And then he picked up the sign she'd been making and gripped it by the corners and joined the line. He wasn't the only one. He shouted the slogans, and his voice wasn't hoarse anymore, it was strong and loud.
+
+And when the police finally did come, something miraculous happened: the huge crowd of painters and other workers who'd gathered at the factory joined ranks with the picketers and picked up their slogans. They held their phones aloft and photographed the police as they advanced, with masks and helmets and shields and batons.
+
+They held their ground.
+
+The police fired gas cannisters.
+
+Painters with big filter masks from the factories seized the cannisters and calmly threw them through the factory windows, smoking out the bosses and security men who'd been cowering there, and they came coughing and weeping and wheezing.
+
+The crowd expanded, moved /{toward}/ the police instead of /{away}/ from it, and a policeman darted forward out of his line, club raised, mouth and eyes open very wide behind his facemask, and three factory girls sidestepped him, tripped him, and the crowd closed over him. The police line trembled as the man disappeared from view, and just as it seemed like they would charge, the mob backed away, and the man was there, moving a little but painfully, lying on the ground. His helmet, truncheon and shield were gone, as was his utility belt with its gun and its gas and its bundle of plastic cuffs.
+
+/{Now we have a gun}/, Matthew thought, and from a far distance observed that he was thinking like a tactician again, not like a terrorized boy, and he knew which way the police should come from next, that alley over there, if they took it they'd control all the entrances to the square, trapping the picketers.
+
+"We need people over there," he shouted to the painter girl, whose name was Mei, and who had stood by his side, her fine slender arm upraised as she called the slogans with him. "There and there. Lots of them. If the police seal those areas off --"
+
+She nodded and pushed off through the crowd, tapping people on the shoulder and shouting in their ears over the roar of the mob and the police sirens and the oncoming chopper. That chopper made Matthew's hands sweaty. If it dropped something on them -- /{gas, surely, not bombs, surely not bombs}/ he thought like a prayer -- there'd be nowhere to hide. Protesters moved off to defend the alleyways he'd pointed to, armed with bricks and rocks and cameraphones. The same funnel-shaped alley-mouths that would make those alleys so deadly in the hands of their enemies would make them easier to defend.
+
+The chopper was coming on now, and the cameraphones pointed at the sky, and then the helicopter veered off and headed in a different direction altogether. As Matthew raised his own phone to photograph it, he saw that he'd missed several calls. A number he didn't recognize, overseas. He dialled it back, crouching down low in the forest of stamping feet to get out of the noise.
+
+"Hello?" a woman's voice said, in English.
+
+"Do you speak Chinese?" he said, in Cantonese.
+
+There was a pause, then the phone was handed off to someone else. "Who is this?" a man's voice said in Mandarin.
+
+"My name is Matthew," he said. "You called me?"
+
+"You're one of the Shenzhen group?" the man said.
+
+"Yes," he said.
+
+"We've got another survivor!" he called out and sounded genuinely elated.
+
+"Who is this?"
+
+"This is The Mighty Krang," the man said. "I work for Big Sister Nor. We are so happy to hear from you, boy! Are you OK, are you safe?"
+
+"I'm in the middle of a strike," he said. "Thousands of painters in Dafen. That's a village in Shenzhen, where they paint --"
+
+"You're in Dafen? We've been seeing pictures out of there, it looks insane. Tell me what's going on."
+
+Without thinking, just acting, Matthew scaled a park bench and stood up very tall and dictated a compact, competent situation report to the The Mighty Krang, whom he'd seen on plenty of video-conferences with Big Sister Nor and Justbob, snickering and clowning in the background. Now he sounded absolutely serious and intent, asking Matthew to repeat some details to ensure he had them clear.
+
+"And have you seen the other strikes?"
+
+"Other strikes?"
+
+"All around you," he said. "Lianchuang, Nanling and Jianying Gongyequ. There's a factory on fire in Jianying Gongyequ. That's bad business. Wildcatters -- if they'd talked to us first, we would have told them not to. Still." He paused. "Those photos were something. The 42."
+
+"I have more."
+
+"Where'd you get them?"
+
+"I was there."
+
+"Oh."
+
+A long pause.
+
+"Matthew, are you safe where you are?"
+
+Matthew stood up again. The police line had fallen back, the demonstration had taken on something of a carnival air, the artists laughing and talking intensely. Some had instruments and were improvising music.
+
+"Safe," he said.
+
+"OK, send me those photos. And stay safe."
+
+Two more helicopters now, not headed for them. Headed, he guessed, for the burning factory in Jianying Gongyequ. He hoped no one was in it.
+
+#
+
+Mr Bannerjee came for them that night, with another group of thugs, but these weren't skinny badmashes, but grown adults, dirty men with knives and clubs, men who smelled of betel and sweat and smoke and fiery liquor, a smell that preceded them like a messenger shouting "beware, beware." They came calling and joking through Dharavi, a mob that the Webblies heard from a long way off. Mrs Dibyendu's neighbors came to their windows and clucked worriedly and sent their children to lie down on the floor.
+
+Mr Bannerjee led the procession, in his pretty suit, the mud sucking at his fine shoes. He stood in the laneway before the door to Mrs Dibyendu's cafe and put his hands on his hips and lit a cigarette, making a show of it, all nonchalance as he puffed it to life and blew a stream into the hot, wet air.
+
+He waited.
+
+Mala limped to the door and opened it. Behind her, the cafe was dark and not a thing moved.
+
+Neither said a word. The neighbors looked on in worried silence.
+
+"Mala," Mr Bannerjee said, spreading his hands. "Be reasonable."
+
+Mala stepped onto the porch of the cafe and sat down, awkwardly folding her legs beneath her. In a clear, loud voice, she said, "I work here. This is my job. I demand the right to safe working conditions, decent wages, and a just and fair workplace."
+
+Mr Bannerjee snorted. The men behind him laughed. He took a step forward, then stopped.
+
+One by one, Mala's army filed out of the cafe, in a disciplined, military rank. Each one sat down, until the little porch was crowded with children, sitting down.
+
+Mr Bannerjee snorted again, then laughed. "You can't be serious," he said. "You want, you want, you want. When I found you, you were a Dharavi rat, no money, no job, no hope. I gave you a good job, good wages, and now you want and want and want?" He made a dismissive noise and waved his hand at her. "You will remove yourself from my cafe and take your schoolchums with you, or you will be hurt. Very badly."
+
+The neighbors made scandalized clucking noises at that and Mr Bannerjee ignored them.
+
+"You won't hurt us," Mala said. "You will go back to your fine house and your fine friends and you will leave us alone to control our destiny."
+
+Mr Bannerjee said nothing, only smoked his cigarette in the night and stared at them, considering them like a scientist who's discovered a new species of insects.
+
+"You are making mischief, Mala. I know what you are up to. You are disrupting things that are bigger than you. I tell you one more time. Remove yourself from my cafe."
+
+Mala made a very soft spitting sound, full of contempt.
+
+Mr Bannerjee raised his hand and his mob fell silent, prepared themselves.
+
+And then there was a sound. A sound of footsteps, hundreds of them. Thousands of them. An army marching down the laneway from both sides, and then they were upon them. Ashok leading the column from the left, old Mrs Rukmini and Mr Phadkar leading the column from the right.
+
+The columns themselves were composed of union workers -- textile workers, steel workers, train workers. Ashok's phonecalls and photos and stories had paid off. Hundreds of text messages were sent and workers were roused from their beds and they hastily dressed and gathered to be picked up by union busses and driven all across Mumbai to Dharavi, guided in to Mrs Dibyendu's shop by Ashok, who had whispered his thanks to the leaders who had given him their support.
+
+The workers halted, just a few paces from the gangsters and their evil smells. Ashok looked at the two groups, the sitting army and the standing mob, and he deliberately and slowly sat down.
+
+The exquisitely elderly ladies leading the other column did the same. The sitting spread, moving back through the group, and if any worker thought of his trousers or her sari before sitting in the grime of the Dharavi lane, none said a word and none hesitated.
+
+Bannerjee swallowed audibly. One of the neighbors leaning out of a window snickered. Bannerjee glared up at the windows. "Houses in slums like this burn down all the time," he said, but his voice quavered. The neighbor who'd snickered -- a young shirtless man with burns up and and down his bare chest from some old accident -- closed his shutters. A moment later, he was on the street. He walked up to Bannerjee, looked him in the eye, and then, deliberately, folded his legs and sat down before him. Bannerjee raised his leg as if to kick and the crowd /{growled}/, a low, savage sound that made the hair on the back of Mala's neck stand up, even as she made it herself. It sounded as though all of Dharavi was an angry dog, straining at its leash, threatening to lunge.
+
+More neighbors drifted into the street -- old and young, men and women. They'd known Mrs Dibyendu for years. They'd seen her driven from her home and business. They were making the same noise. They sat too.
+
+Mr Bannerjee looked at Mala and opened his mouth as if to say something, then stopped. She stared at him with utter calm, and then smiled broadly. "Boo," she said, softly, and he took a step back.
+
+His own men laughed at this and he went purple in the dim light of the street. Mala bit her tongue to keep from laughing. He looked so comical!
+
+He turned with great dignity to look at his men, who were so tense they practically vibrated. Mala watched in stupefied awe as he grabbed one at random and slapped him, hard, across the face, a sound that rang through the narrow laneway. It was the single dumbest act of leadership she'd ever seen, so perfectly stupid you could have put it in a jar and displayed it for people to come and marvel at.
+
+The man regarded Bannerjee for a moment, his eyes furious, his fists bunched. He was shorter than Bannerjee, but he was carrying a length of wood and the muscles in his bare forearms jerked and bunched like a basketful of snakes. Deliberately, the man spat a glob of evil, pink, betel-stained saliva into Bannerjee's face, turned on his heel and walked away, delicately picking his way through the sitting Webblies and workers and neighbors. After a moment, the rest of Bannerjee's mob followed.
+
+Bannerjee stood alone. The saliva slid down his face. Mala thought /{If he takes out a gun and starts blazing away, it wouldn't surprise me in the least.}/ He was totally beaten, humiliated before children and the poor of Dharavi, and there were so many cameraphone flashes dancing in the night it was like a disco in a movie.
+
+But perhaps Bannerjee didn't have a gun, or perhaps he had more self-control than Mala believed. In any case, he, too, turned on his heel and walked away. At the end of the alley, he turned back and said, in a voice that could be heard above the buzz of conversation that sprang up in his wake, "I know where your parents live, Mala," and then he walked away altogether into the night.
+
+The crowd roared with triumph as he disappeared. Ashok helped her stand, his hand lingering in hers for longer than was strictly necessary. She wanted to hug him, but she settled for hugging Yasmin, who was crying, happy tears like the ones they'd shared so many times before. Yasmin was as thin as a piece of paper but her arms were strong, and oh, it did feel good to be held for a moment, instead of holding everyone else up.
+
+She let go at last and turned to Ashok. "They came," she said.
+
+Instead of answering, he led her to two tiny old ladies, and a man with a skullcap and a beard. "Mr Phadkar, Mrs Rukmini and Mrs Muthappa," he said. "This is Mala. They call her General Robotwallah. Her workers have been defending the strike. They are unbeatable, so long as they have a place to work."
+
+Mr Phadkar looked fierce. "You will always have a place to work, General," he said, in a voice that was pitched to carry to the workers who gathered around them, excitedly passing whispered accounts of the historic meeting back through their ranks.
+
+The old ladies rolled their eyes at one another, which made Mala smile. They each took one of her hands in their calloused, dry old hands and squeezed. "You were very brave," one said. "Please, introduce us to your comrades."
+
+They chatted all night, and the women's papadam collective brought them food, and there was chai, and as there were far too many people to fit in the little cafe, the party occupied the whole of the laneway and then out into the street. Mala and her fighters fought on through the night in shifts, stepping out on their breaks to mingle, making friends, bringing them into the cafe to explain what they did and how they did it.
+
+And there were reporters asking questions, and the gupshup flew up and down the streets and lanes of Dharavi, picking up steam as the roosters began to call and the first of the early risers walked to the toilets and the taps and had their ears bent. The bravery of the children, the valor of the workers, the evil of the sinister Bannerjee in his suit and the thugs he'd brought with him -- it was a story straight off the movie screen, and every new ear it entered was attached to a mouth that was anxious to spread it.
+
+Mala and Yasmin's parents came to see them the next morning, as they sat groggy after a night like no other night, on the porch of Mrs Dibyendu's cafe. The parents didn't know what to make of their strange daughters, but they were visibly proud of them, even Yasmin's father, which clearly surprised Yasmin, who'd looked like she expected a beating.
+
+As their mothers gathered them into their bosoms, Mala looked at Yasmin, and saw the haunted look in Yasmin's eye and knew, just /{knew}/ that she was thinking of the little boy who'd died.
+
+How did she know? Because Mala herself had never stopped thinking of him, and thinking of how she'd taken the actions that led to his death. And because Mala herself knew that no amount of sitting down peacefully and braving thugs with her moral force instead of her army would ever wipe the stain of that boy's death off her karma.
+
+And then Mamaji kissed Mala's forehead and murmured many things in her ear, and her little brother emerged from behind her skirts and demanded to be shown how it all worked and stared at her with so much admiration that she thought he'd burst and for a moment, it was all golden.
+
+Ashok looked on from his little office, meeting with the union leaders, talking to Big Sister Nor. Something big was brewing with him, she knew, something even bigger than this miracle that he'd pulled off. She fobbed her brother off on a group of boys who were eager to teach him some of the basics and bask in the pure hero-worship radiating off of him, then slipped back into Ashok's room and perched at his side on a stool, moving a pile of papers away first.
+
+"That was incredible," she said. "Absolutely incredible." She said it quietly, with conviction. "You're our saviour."
+
+He snorted through his nose, then scrubbed at his eyes with his fists. "Mala, my general, you do a hundred incredible things every day. The only reason all those people came out is because I could show them what you'd done, explain how you had organized these children, these slum-rats, into a disciplined force that was committed to justice."
+
+She squirmed on her seat. "I'm just bloodthirsty," she said. "I'm just one of those people who fights all the time." Thinking again of the boy, the dead boy. His blood was still under Ashok's fingernails.
+
+He turned and, just for an instant, touched her arm. The gesture was gentle, tender. No one had ever touched her quite like that. It broke something in her, some flood-dam that had safely contained all the pain and fear and shame, and she had to turn and run blindly out into the lane and around a corner to weep and weep biting her lip to keep from screaming out her grief. Though she heard some of the others looking for her, she kept silent and did not let them find her. Then she realized she was hiding in the same place in which she'd hidden from Mrs Dibyendu's idiot nephew, and that broke another dam and it was quite some time before she could get herself under control and head back into the laneway again.
+
+She didn't get very far. Out front of dozens of businesses, there were small groups of people boisterously shouting rhymed chants about working conditions and pay. Crowds gathered to talk to each other, and there were arguments, laughter, a fistfight. She stood in the middle of the road and thought, /{How can this be?}/
+
+And at that moment, she realized that she was not alone. All over Dharavi, all over the world, there were people like her who wanted more, /{demanded}/ more, with a yearning that was always just there, beneath the skin, and it only took the lightest scratch to let it out.
+
+She didn't go back to Mrs Dibyendu's cafe. Instead, she took her walking stick and limped all around Dharavi, up and down the streets where the tiny factories would normally have been hives of activity. Many of them were, but many were not -- many had workers and crowds out front, and it was like a virus that was spreading through the streets and lanes and alleys, and now it was as if all the crying had lightened her so that her feet barely touched the ground, as though she might fly away at any instant.
+
+She was just turning to go back to her army and maybe a few hours' sleep when they grabbed her, hit her very hard on the head, and dragged her into a tiny, stinking room.
+
+#
+
+Confidence is a funny thing. When lots of people believe something is valuable, it becomes valuable. So if you're selling game-gold and people think game-gold is valuable, they buy it.
+
+But it's better than that. If there's a wide-spread belief that Svartalfaheim Warriors swords are valuable, then even people who /{don't}/ think they're valuable will buy them, because they believe they can sell them to people who /{do}/ believe that they're valuable.
+
+And when people who buy to sell to others start to bid on Svartalfaheim swords, the price of the swords goes up. Of course it does: the more buyers there are for something, the higher the price goes. And the higher the price goes, the more buyers there are, because hey, if the price is high, there must be plenty of suckers who'll take the swords off your hands in a little while for an even higher price.
+
+Confidence makes value. Value makes more value, which makes more confidence. Which makes more value.
+
+But it's not infinite. Think of a cartoon character who runs off a cliff and keeps running madly in place, able to stay there until someone points out that he's dancing on air, at which point he plummets to the sharp rocks beneath him.
+
+For so long as everyone believes in the value of a Svartalfaheim sword, the sword will be valuable, and get more valuable. As the pool of people who might buy a Svartalfaheim sword grows -- say, because they're getting calls from their brokers offering to sell them elaborate, complex sword futures (a contract to buy a sword at a later date), or because their smart-ass nieces and nephews are talking them up -- the likelihood that someone will say, "Are you /{kidding me?}/ This is a /{sword}/ in a /{video game}/!" goes up.
+
+Indeed, this doubter might have other choice observations, like this: "If /{everyone}/ has these swords, doesn't that mean that there's more swords than anyone could possibly use? Doesn't that mean that they're not valuable, but /{valueless}/?"
+
+Or if the doubter is impossibly old fashioned, he might even say: "What if the people who run this Fartenstein game decide to change the number of swords available by just /{deleting}/ a ton of them? Or by printing up a kazillion more? Or change the swords into toothpicks?"
+
+Oh, the sword-speculators will reply, they'll /{never}/ do that, it would ruin the game, they can't afford to do that. And here's the thing: they're half-right. So long as the game-runners believe that messing around with the swords will piss off all these people who own, speculate on, buy and sell swords, they can't afford to do it.
+
+These cartoon characters run in place on air, shouting that the swords will always go up in value, shouting that the game-runners will never nerf or otherwise bork them, and they can stay there, up in the air, waving their swords, being joined by others who are convinced by their arguments and the incontrovertible fact that they are indeed not falling, until...
+
+Until...
+
+Until there's enough widespread confidence in the proposition that they will fall. Until the press starts to publish wide-eyed stories about the absurdity of ever believing in the value of these swords, pointing out that the fall is inevitable, that it was pre-ordained from the moment the first speculator bought his first sword.
+
+Think of the belief in infallible swords as a solar system. In the center, there's the sun, gigantic and white-hot, exerting gravity on the planets and asteroids that spin around and around it. At the outer edge is the dandruff of planetesimals and asteroids, weakly caught in the gravity, only halfway committed to being part of the system. As the sun begins to cool off, begins to shrink with the force of disbelief, these outer hangers-on fly away. These are the tasters, the people who bought one or two little swords or sword-futures or "fully hedged complex sword derived securities" because everyone else was doing it. They hear that this thing is too good to be true and see the prices start to drop and so they sell off what they've got, take a small loss, and tell their friends.
+
+Well, now there's a bunch of people saying that swords aren't really that valuable. Less confidence equals lower prices. And there's more swords on the market. More swords equals lower prices. The larger planets, closer in, the investors with a fair bit of money in imaginary cutlery, these folks see the prices dip and continue to fall. They hear the brokers and analysts scurrying around saying, "No, no, the sun will burn bright forever, the sun will never dim! Prices will come up again. This is temporary."
+
+Here's the thing: if the brokers and analysts can convince these bigger investors that they're right, /{they will be right}/. If these bigger investors hold on to their swords, the market will stay healthy for a while longer.
+
+But if they aren't convincing enough, if these bigger investors lose confidence and start selling, they'll never stop. That's because the /{first}/ seller to get out of the sword-market will get the highest price for his goods. But once he gets out, his swords will be on the market (remember, more swords equals lower prices) and everyone else will get a lower price. And when /{they}/ sell, the prices will go down further, panicking more investors, putting more swords on the market, forcing the prices down further.
+
+Somewhere in there, the game-runners are apt to have a minor freak-out and then a major one. They'll start to mess with the sword-supply. They'll take swords out of the market, or put swords in, or nerf swords, or buff the hell out of them, anything to keep the fun from collapsing out of the game.
+
+And that'll probably make things worse, because this isn't an exact science, it's a bunch of guesswork, and there are ten zillion ways to get this wrong and so few ways to get it right.
+
+The sun gets smaller, and dimmer, and the close-in planets are feeling the tug of oblivion now, the call of deep space that says, "Spin away, spin away to forever, for the sun is dying!"
+
+They don't want to spin away. They want to hang on. They have so many swords in the bank, they're practically /{made}/ of swords. They've made a fortune buying and selling swords. Of course, they spent the fortune on more swords. Or different swords. Or axes. But whatever they've spent it on, it's basically the same thing, because every broker knows that you won't get in trouble for recommending that people buy things that have always been profitable.
+
+If the sword market collapses, these planets -- these major, committed investors -- will die. They will be wiped out. They have pledged their lives and love and immortal souls to magic swords, and if the swords break their hearts, they will never recover. So as the market for swords gets crummier and crummier and crummier and crummier, they grow more and more insistent that everything is fine, just fine, it'll all be back to "normal" any day now. They can't afford to lose confidence, because they aren't going to fly off into space. They're going to fall into the dying sun and will be incinerated in its glowing heart.
+
+But denial only works for so long. The sun is dying. No one wants your swords. Your swords are worthless. Even the people who need a sword to kill some elves or orcs or random wildlife critters are faintly embarrassed by the fact, because worthless swords are now the subject of numerous jokes about idiotic investment schemes and corrupt brokerages and loony investors who got swept up in the heat of the moment. These people go and kill monsters with bows and clubs for a while, because everyone knows how much swords suck.
+
+How low can the value of a sword go? Subzero, as it turns out. Not only can a sword become worthless, it can actually cost you money to get rid of it. Oh, not the sword itself, of course, but the /{derivatives}/ of the swords. The bets on swords. Where someone else has made a bet on whether your sword will go up or down in value, and then packaged it up with a bunch of other bets, just figuring out which bets are in which packages can cost so much money that you end up losing money, even on winning bets.
+
+Confidence is great, but it isn't everything. Reality catches up with everyone, eventually. All suns extinguish themselves. All cartoon characters eventually plummet to the bottom of the canyon. And every sword is eventually worthless.
+
+#
+
+Command Central was bedlam. The game-runners snarled at each other like bad-tempered, huge-bellied dinosaurs, and ate like dinosaurs, too, sending out for burgers, pizza, buckets of chicken, huge thick shakes Anything they could scarf down one-handed while they labored over their screens and shouted insults at one another.
+
+Connor hardly noticed. He was deep in his feeds. Bill's new security subroutines let him run every player's actions backwards and forwards like a video, branching off into other players' timelines every time they crossed paths in a party, a PvP combat session, a trade, or a conversation. It was an ocean of information, containing every secret of every player in every game that Coke ran.
+
+It was too much information. He was looking for something very precise -- the identities of gold-farmers -- but what he had was every damned thing ever uttered or done in-game. It was a wondrous toy and an infinite distraction, and practically every spare moment Connor could muster was spent writing scripts and filters to help him make sense of it.
+
+Just now he was watching a feed of every player who had PvP killed another player, where the dead player's toon had earned more than 1000 Mario coins in the previous hour. This was turning out to be a rich vein of potential gold-farmers and Webblies. He was just trying to figure out how to write a script that would also grab the player IDs of anyone who was /{nearby}/ during one of these fights, when he realized that Command Central had gotten even noisier than usual, devolving into raw chaos.
+
+He looked up. "What's wrong?" he said, even as his fingers moved to call up general feeds showing the overall health of the game and its systems. And even before anyone answered he saw what was wrong. Server load had spiked across every game-shard, redlining the server-clusters seated in air-conditioned freight containers all over the world. It seemed as though every single metric for server-load was at peak -- calculations per second, memory usage, disk churn. But on closer examination, he saw that this wasn't quite true: network load was down. Way down. Somehow, these vast arrays of computing power were all being made to work so hard they were in danger of collapsing, but it was all happening without anyone talking very much to the servers.
+
+Indeed, network load was /{so}/ low that it seemed that hardly anyone could be logged into these servers -- and yes, there it was, the number of players logged in was low and falling -- a million players, then 800,000, then 500,000, then 300,000, and finally the games stabilized at about 40,000 sessions. Another click revealed why: the system was kicking off players as the load increased, trying to make room in memory and on the CPUs for whatever monster process was tearing through the frigid shipping containers.
+
+"What the hell is going on?" he said, shouting into the general din. Kaden was on the phone with ops, shouting at the systems administrators to get on it, trace every process on the boxes, identify whatever species of strangler vine was loose in the machines, choking them to death.
+
+Bill, meanwhile, had set loose /{his}/ special team of grey-hat hackers to try and figure out if there were any of their black-hat brethren loose on the systems, crackers who'd broken in to steal corporate secrets, amass virtual wealth, or simply crash the thing, either to benefit a competitor, seek ransom or simply destroy for the pleasure of destruction.
+
+Connor's money was on hackers. Each cluster was built and tested at Coke Games HQ in Austin, burned in for three solid weeks after it was all bolted into place in the shipping container. Once it had been green-lighted, it was loaded onto a flatbed truck and shipped to a data-center somewhere cold, preferably near a geothermal vent, tide-farm or wind-farm. There were plenty of sites in Newfoundland and Alaska, and some very good ones in Iceland and Norway, a few in Belgium and some in Siberia. The beauty of using standard shipping containers for their systems is that they were easy to ship (duh). The beauty of sticking the containers somewhere cold was that the main cost of running the systems was cooling off the machines as they relentlessly rubbed electrons against each other, bouncing them through the pinball-machine guts of the chips within them. On a cold day when the wind was blowing, they could knock the cost of running one of those containers in half.
+
+Coke bought their data-center slots in threes, keeping one empty. When a new container arrived, it was slotted into the empty bay, run for a week to make sure nothing had been hurt in transit, and then the oldest container in a Coke-slot was yanked, loaded back onto a train, or ship, or flatbed truck, and sent back to Austin, detouring at Mumbai or Shenzhen or Lagos to drop off the computers within, stripped by work crews who sent them off to the used server markets to be torn to pieces and salvaged.
+
+The containers were all specialized, only handling local traffic, to keep down network lag. But if one was overwhelmed, it could start offloading on its brothers around the planet -- better to face a laggy play experience than to be knocked off altogether. It was inconceivable that every server on the planet would suddenly get a spike in players and hit capacity and not be able to offer some support to the others. Inconceivable, unless someone had sabotaged them.
+
+In the meantime, Connor had his feeds, his forensics, his gigantic haystacks and their hidden needles. Let the others worry about the downtime. He had bigger fish to fry.
+
+He plunged back in, writing ever-more-refined scripts to try to catch the bad guys. He had a growing file of suspects to look into in more depth, using another set of scripts and filters he'd been drafting in the back of his mind. He already knew how he'd do it: he'd build his files of bad guys, make it big and deep, follow them around the game, see who else they knew, get thousands and thousands of accounts and then:
+
+Destroy them.
+
+In one second, one /{instant}/, he'd delete every single one of their accounts, make their gold and elite items vanish, toss every single one out for terms-of-service violations. That part would be /{easy}/. The terms of service were so ridiculously strict and yet maddeningly vague that simply playing the game necessarily involved violating them. He'd obliterate them from gamespace and send them all back to their mommies crying. Thinking this kind of thing made him feel dirty and good at the same time.
+
+He was deep in meditation when a fat, hairy hand reached over his shoulder and slammed his laptop lid down so hard he heard the screen crack, and then the hand reversed its course and slapped him so hard in the back of the head that his face bounced off the table in front of him.
+
+Command Central fell perfectly silent as Connor straightened up, feeling and then tasting the blood pouring out of his nose. His ears were ringing. He turned his head slowly, because his eyes wouldn't focus properly and his head felt like it was barely attached to his neck. Standing over him, snorting like freight engine, stood Kaden, the head of ops, wearing a two-day beard and smelling of rancid sweat.
+
+"What --"
+
+The man drew back his beefy fist again, cocking it for another blow to Connor's head and Connor flinched away involuntarily. He hadn't been in a fight since his schoolyard days, and he couldn't believe that this actual adult man had actually hit him with his actual fists. Something was growing in his chest, bubbling over, headed into his arms and legs. His breath came in short pants, every inhale bringing blood into his mouth. His heart thudded. He stood up abruptly, knocking his chair over backwards and --
+
+Leapt!
+
+He pushed off with both legs, throwing his own considerable bulk into Kaden's huge, protruding midsection. It was like a medicine ball, hard and unyielding, and he rebounded off it, just as Kaden's fist clobbered him again, getting him with a hard hammerblow in the back of the neck that knocked him to the ground.
+
+He hit the ground with a thud that he felt in every bone in his body, his head caroming off a table-leg. He got his palms underneath him and shot to his feet again, coming all the way up, bringing his knee up into Kaden's balls as he did, doubling the fat man over. His hands were already in awkward fists and it was natural as anything to begin to beat the man's head with them, hitting so hard the skin over his knuckles split.
+
+It had only taken a few seconds, and now the rest of Command Central reacted. Big hands grabbed his arms, waist, legs, pulled him away. Across from him, four game-runners had Kaden pinned as well, shouting at him to calm down, just calm the hell down, all right?
+
+He did, a little. Someone handed Connor a wad of pizza-parlor napkins to press against his nose and someone else handed him an ice-cold can of Coke from the huge cooler at the side of the room to press against his aching neck.
+
+"What the hell is wrong with you?" he choked, glaring at Kaden, still held fast by four beefy game-runners.
+
+"You goddamned /{idiot}/! You brought down the whole goddamned network. You and your stupid scripts! Do you have any /{idea}/ how much you've cost us with your little fishing-expedition?"
+
+Connor's anger and shock morphed into fear.
+
+"What are you talking about?"
+
+"Who ever wrote those damned forensics programs didn't have a /{clue}/. They clobbered the servers so hard, taking priority over every other job, until the system had to kick all the players off the games so that it could tell /{you}/ what they were doing. I'll tell you what they were doing, Connor: /{they were trying to connect to the server}/."
+
+Connor shot a look at Bill, who had written the scripts, and saw that the head of security had gone pale. Connor dimly remembered him saying that the scripts were experimental and to use them sparingly, but they had been so /{rewarding}/, it had given him such a thrill to sit like a recording angel over the worlds, like Santa Claus detecting everyone who was naughty and everyone who'd been nice --
+
+The enormity of what he'd done hit him almost as hard as Kaden's fist had. He had shut down three of the twenty largest economies in the world for a period of hours. Coke ran games that turned over more money than Portugal, Poland or Peru. That was just the P's. If Coke's games had been real countries, it would have been an act of war, or treason.
+
+It was easily the biggest screwup of his career. Of his life. Possibly the biggest screwup /{in the entire history of the Coca Cola corporation}/.
+
+Command Central seemed to recede, as if the room was rushing away from him. Distantly, he heard the game runners hiss explanations to one another, explaining the magnitude of his all-encompassing legendary world-beating FAIL.
+
+Connor had never had a failure like this before. He'd screwed up here and there on the way. But he'd never, ever, never, never --
+
+He shook his head. The hands restraining him loosened. Stiffly, he bent to pick up his laptop. Slivers of plastic and glass rained down as he lifted it. He couldn't meet anyone's eyes as he let himself out of the room.
+
+He wasn't sure how he'd gotten home. His car was in the driveway, so that implied that he'd driven himself, but he had no recollection of doing so. And here he was, sitting at his dining-room table -- grand and dusty, he ate his meals over the sink when he bothered to eat at home at all -- and his phone was ringing from a long way off.
+
+Absently, he patted himself down, noticing as he did that he was holding his car keys, which bolstered his hypothesis that he had driven himself home. He found his phone and answered it.
+
+"Connor," Ira said, "Connor, I don't know how to tell you this --"
+
+Connor grunted. These were words you never wanted to hear from your broker.
+
+"Connor are you there?"
+
+He grunted again. Somewhere, his brain was finding some space in which to be even more alarmed.
+
+"Connor, listen. Are you listening? Connor, it's like this. Mushroom Kingdom gold is /{collapsing,}/ falling through the floor. There's no bottom in sight."
+
+"Oh," Connor said. It came out in a breathless squeak.
+
+The broker sighed. He sounded half-hysterical. "It's worse than that, though. That Prince in Dubai? Turns out he was writing paper that he couldn't honor. He's broke, too."
+
+"He is," Connor said. A million miles away, a furious gorilla was bearing its teeth and beating its hairy fists against the insides of his skull, screeching something that sounded like /{You said it was risk-free!}/
+
+"He isn't saying so, of course." Now the broker sounded more than half-hysterical. He giggled, a laugh that ran up and down several octaves like a drunk sliding his fingers up and down a piano's keyboard."He's saying things like, 'We are experiencing temporary cash-flow difficulties that have caused us to defer on some of our financial obligations, due to overall instability in the market.' But Connor --" He giggled again. "I've been around the block. I know what financial BS sounds like. The prince is b-r-o-k-e."
+
+"He is," Connor said. /{You said it was risk-free! You said it was risk-free!}/
+
+"And there's something else."
+
+Connor made a tiny sound like a whimper. The broker plunged on. "This is my last day at Paglia and Kennedy. Actually, this may be Paglia and Kennedy's last day. We just got our notices. Paglia and Kennedy sank a /{lot}/ of money into these bonds and their derivatives.
+
+"Everyone else ran off to steal some office supplies but I thought I would stand here on the deck of the Titanic and make some phone calls to my best clients. I put nearly everything into Mushroom Kingdom gold. Not at first, you understand. But over time, bit by bit, the returns were just so good --"
+
+"It was risk-free," Connor said, louder than he'd planned to.
+
+"Yeah," Ira said. "OK, Connor, buddy, OK. I have other calls to make." Connor could tell the poor guy expected him to be grateful. He thought he was making up for costing Connor -- how much? A hundred and eighty thousand? Two hundred thousand? Connor didn't even know anymore.
+
+"Thanks for calling," he said. "Thanks, Ira. Take care of yourself." He could barely choke the words out, but once he had, he actually felt a little better.
+
+He hung up the phone and dropped it on the table, letting it clatter. Somewhere out there, Coke's gameworlds were flickering back to life, players logging in again, along with gold-farmers, Webblies, Pinkertons, the whole crew. Not Connor, though. Connor had lived in a game-world of one kind or another since he was seven years old, and now he was willing to believe that he'd never visit one again.
+
+Any second now, he would be fired, he was quite sure. And maybe arrested. And he was broke. Worse than broke -- he'd bought the last round of securities from Paglia and Kennedy on margin, on borrowed money, and he owed it back. Though with the brokerage going under they may never come and ask for it.
+
+He drew in a deep breath and closed his eyes. Some smell -- the sweat that soaked his shirt, the blood that caked his face, the musty smell of the house -- triggered a strong memory of his place in Palo Alto, near the Stanford campus, and the long, long time he'd spent there, buying virtual assets, teetering on the brink of financial ruin and even starvation. And just like that, he was free.
+
+Free of the terror of losing his job. Free of the terror of being broke. Free of the rage at the gold-farmers. Free of the shouting, roiling anger that was Command Central and free, finally free of his fingerspitzengefuhl. The world was tumbling free and uncontrolled and there wasn't a single thing he could do about it and wasn't that /{fine}/?
+
+There was an old song that went /{Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose}/ and Connor suddenly understood what it all meant.
+
+When he was eight years old, he'd decided to work on video games. It was one of those ridiculous kid-things, like deciding to be an astronaut or a ballerina or a cowboy or a deep-sea diver. Most kids outgrow their dreams, go on to do something normal and boring. But Connor had held onto it, finding his way into gamespace through the most curious of means, and he had trapped himself there. Until today.
+
+Now the eight-year-old who'd sent him on a quest had finally released him from it.
+
+He took a shower and iced his nose some more and put on a t-shirt and a pair of baggy shorts he'd bought on holiday in the Bahamas the year before (he'd spent most of the trip in his room, online, logged into gamespace, keeping the fingerspitzengefuhl alive) and opened his door.
+
+Outside it was Atlanta. He'd lived in the city for seven years, gone to its movie theaters and eaten at its restaurants, taken his parents around to its tourist sites when they visited, but he had never really /{lived}/ there. It was like he'd been on an extended, seven-year visit. He kicked on a pair of flip-flops he normally wore when he had to go outside to get the mail and stepped out his door.
+
+He walked into the baking afternoon sun of Atlanta, breathing in the humid air that was so wet it seemed like it might condense on the roof of his mouth and drip onto his tongue. He got to the end of his walk and looked up and down the street he'd lived on for all these years, with its giant houses and spreading trees and disused basketball hoops and he started walking. No one except maids and gardeners walked anywhere in this neighborhood. Connor couldn't understand why. The spreading trees smelled great, there were birds singing, even a snail inching its way across the sidewalk. In half an hour, Connor saw more interesting new things than he had in a month.
+
+Oh, the feeling of it all! A lightness in his head, an openness in his chest. Old pains in his back and shoulders that had been there so long he'd forgotten about them disappeared, leaving behind a comfortable feeling as striking as the quiet after a refrigerator's compressor shuts off, leaving behind unexpected silence.
+
+He was sweating freely, but he didn't mind. It just made the occasional breath of wind feel that much better.
+
+Eventually, his bladder demanded that he head home, so he ambled back, waving at the suspicious neighbors who peered at him from between the curtains of their vast living-room windows. As he opened his door, he heard his phone ringing. A momentary feeling of worry arced from his throat to his balls, like a streak of lightning, but he forced himself to relax again and headed for the bathroom. Whomever was calling would leave a message. There, the voicemail had picked it up. He had to pee.
+
+He peed.
+
+The phone started ringing again.
+
+He went into the kitchen and rummaged in his freezer. There was a loaf of brown bread there -- he never could get through a whole loaf before it went moldy, so now he bought a dozen loaves at a time and froze them. He chipped off two slices and put them in the toaster. There was peanut butter from the health-food store, crunchy-style, with nothing added. While the bread was toasting, he stirred the peanut butter with a knife, mixing the oil that was floating on top with the ground peanuts below. He had honey, but it had crystallized. No problem -- twenty seconds in the microwave and it was liquid again. What he really wanted was bananas, but there weren't any (the phone was ringing again) and he was hungry and wanted a sandwich now. He'd get bananas later.
+
+The sandwich was (the phone was ringing again) delicious. He needed fresh bread though, he'd get some of that when he picked up the bananas. Throw out the frozen (there it was again) bread. He'd eat fresh from now on, and relish (and again) every bite.
+
+Up until the moment that his finger pressed the green button, he believed that he was going to switch his phone off. But his finger came down on the green button and the anxiety sizzled up his arm and spread out from his shoulder to his whole body as the distant voice from the phone's earpiece said, "Hello? Connor?"
+
+Connor watched as his hand wrapped itself around his phone and lifted it to his ear.
+
+"Yes?" his mouth said, in the old, tight Connor voice.
+
+"It's Bill," the head of security said. "Can you come into the office?"
+
+Connor heaved a sigh. "I'll courier over my badge. You can pack up my desk and ship it back. If you want to sue me, you'll have to hire a process server and have him come out here."
+
+Bill's laugh was bitter and mirthless. "We're not suing you, Connor. We're not firing you. We need your help."
+
+Connor swallowed. This was the one thing he hadn't anticipated: that his life might come back and suck him into it again. "What the hell are you talking about?"
+
+"We think it's your gold-farmers," Bill said. "They've got us by the balls, and they're squeezing."
+
+Connor changed into his work clothes like a condemned man dressing for his own hanging. He prayed that his car wouldn't start, but it was a new car -- he bought a new one every year, just like everyone else in Command Central -- and its electric motor hummed to life as he eyeballed the retina-scanner in the sun-visor.
+
+He drove down his street again, seeing it all through the smoked glass of his car, the rolled up windows and air-conditioning drowning out the birdsong and shutting out the smells of the trees and the nodding flowers. Too fast to spot a snail or a bird.
+
+He headed back to work.
+
+#
+
+They came for Big Sister Nor and The Mighty Krang and Justbob in the dead of night, and this time they brought the police. The three of them watched the police break down the door, accompanied by a pair of sour Chinese men with the look of mainland gangsters, the kind who came to Singapore on easy two-week tourist visas. Nor and her friends watched the door be broken down from two Lorongs -- side-streets -- down, using a webcam and streaming the video live to the Webblies' network and a bunch of journalists they'd woken up as soon as they'd bugged out of the old place, warned by a sympathetic grocer at the top of Geylang Road.
+
+The fallback house wasn't nearly as nice as the one they'd vacated, naturally, but the two quickly came into balance as the police methodically smashed every piece of furniture in the place to splinters. The Mighty Krang drew real-time annotations on the screen as the police worked, sometimes writing in the dollar value of the furniture being smashed, sometimes just drawing mustaches and eye-patches on the police in the video. When the Chinese men took out their dicks and began to piss on the wreckage, he leapt to his trackpad, circled the members in question, drew arrows pointing to them, and wrote "TINY!" in three languages before they'd finished.
+
+They watched as one of the policemen answered his phone, listened in as he said, "Hello?" and "What?" and "Where?" and then "Here?" "Here?" feeling around the place where the wall met the ceiling, until he found the video camera. The look on his face -- a mixture of horror and fury -- as he disconnected it was priceless.
+
+"Priceless," The Mighty Krang said, and turned to his companions, who were far less amused than he was.
+
+"Oh, do lighten up," he said. "They didn't catch us. The strikers are striking. Mumbai and Guandong are going crazy. The New York Times is sending us about ten emails a minute. The Financial Times, too. And the Times of London. That's just the English papers. Germans, French... And the Times of India, of course, they've got a reporter in Dharavi, and so do the Mumbai tabloids. We're six of the top twenty YouTube videos. I've got --" he looked down, moused some -- "82,361 emails from people to the membership address."
+
+Justbob glowered at him with her good eye. "Matthew is trapped in Dafen. 42 are dead. We don't know where Jie and the white boy, Wei-Dong, are."
+
+Big Sister Nor reached out her hands and they each took one of hers. "Comrades," she said, "comrades. This is the moment, the one we planned for. We've been hurt. Our friends have been hurt. More will be hurt when this is over.
+
+"But people like us get hurt /{every single day}/. We get caught in machines, we inhale poison vapors, we are beaten or drugged or raped. Don't forget that. Don't forget what we go through, what we've been through. We're going to fight this battle with everything we have, and we will probably lose. But then we will fight it again, and we will lose a little less, for this battle will win us many supporters. And then we'll lose /{again}/. And /{again}/. And we will fight on. Because as hard as it is to win by fighting, it's impossible to win by doing nothing."
+
+An alert popped up on Krang's screen, reminding him to switch a new prepaid SIM card into his mobile phone. A second later, the same alert came up on Big Sister Nor and Justbob's screens.
+
+Big Sister Nor smiled. "OK," she said. "Back to work."
+
+They swapped SIMs, pulling new ones out of dated envelopes they carried in money-belts under their clothes. They powered up their phones. Both Justbob and The Mighty Krang's phones rang as soon as they powered up.
+
+The Mighty Krang looked down at the number. "It's Wei-Dong," he said. "Told you he was safe."
+
+Justbob looked at her phone. "Ashok," she said.
+
+They both answered their phones.
+
+#
+
+Ashok knew that this time would come. For months, he'd slaved over models of economic destruction: how much investment in junk game-securities would it take to put the game-runners into a position of total vulnerability? He'd modelled it a thousand ways, tried many variables in his equations, sweated over it, woken in the night to pace or ride his motorcycle around until the doubts left his mind.
+
+Somewhere out there, some distant follower of Big Sister Nor's had convinced the Mechanical Turks to go to work selling his funny securities. It had been easy enough to package them -- there were so many companies that would let you roll your own custom security packages together and market them, and all it took was to figure out which one was most lax with its verification procedures and create an account there and invent a ton of virtual wealth through it. Then he logged into less-sloppy competitors and repackaged the junk he'd created, making something that seemed a little more legit. Working his way up the food chain, he'd gone from packager to packager, steadily accumulating a shellac of respectability overtop of his financial turds.
+
+Once they had acquired this sheen, brokers came hunting for his funny money. And since the Webblies were diverting a sizeable chunk of game-wealth into the underlying pool, he was able to make everything seem as though it was growing at breakneck speed -- and it was. After all, all those traders swapping the derivatives were driving up the prices every time they completed a sale.
+
+Once, at about two in the morning, as Ashok watched the trading proceed, he realized that he could simply quit the Webblies, sell the latest batch of funny money, and retire. But he was never tempted. He'd always known that it was possible to get rich by trampling on the people around you, by treating them as suckers to be ripped off. He couldn't do it.
+
+Of course, here he was, /{doing it}/, but this was different. His little financial game could end well if all went according to plan, and now it was time to see if the plan would go the way it was supposed to.
+
+Justbob took his call in her fractured English, which was better than her Hindi, limited as it was to orders of battle and military cursing. He told her that he needed to speak to Big Sister Nor, and she asked him to wait a moment, as BSN was on the phone with someone else at the time.
+
+In the background, he heard Big Sister Nor conversing in a mix of Chinese and English, flipping back and forth in a way that reminded him of his buddies at university and the way they'd have fun mixing up English and Hindi words, turning out puns and obscurely dirty phrases that nevertheless sounded innocent.
+
+He looked at the clock in the corner of his screen. It was 5AM and outside, he could hear the birds singing. In the next room, Mala's army fought on in tireless shifts, defending the strike. They slept in shifts on the floor now, and there were fifty or sixty steel and garment workers prowling the street out front, visiting other striking sites around Dharavi with sign-up sheets, trying to organize the workers of little five- or ten-person shops into their unions.
+
+He realized he was falling asleep. How long had it been since he'd last slept for more than an hour or so? Days. He jerked his head up and forced his eyes open and there was Yasmin before him, raccoon-eyed beneath the hijab across her forehead. She was frowning, her mouth bracketed by deep worry lines, another one above the bridge of her nose. She was holding her lathi.
+
+"Yasmin?" he said.
+
+She bit her lip. "Mala is gone," she said. "No one's seen her for hours. Twelve, maybe fourteen."
+
+He started to say something but then Big Sister Nor spoke on the phone, "Ashok, sorry to keep you waiting."
+
+He looked to Yasmin, then back at his screen. "One second," he said to the phone.
+
+"Yasmin, she's probably gone home to sleep --"
+
+Yasmin shook her head once, emphatically. He felt a jolt of fear.
+
+"Ashok?" Big Sister Nor's voice in his ear.
+
+"Come in," he said to Yasmin, "come here. Close the door."
+
+He stood up and held his chair out to Yasmin and dropped into a squat beside her, heels on the ground. He pressed the speaker button on the phone.
+
+"Nor," he said. He always felt faintly ridiculous calling this woman "Big Sister," though the Webblies seemed to relish it in the same way they loved saying /{General Robotwallah}/. "I have Yasmin with me here. She tells me that Mala is missing, has been missing for some hours."
+
+There was a momentary pause. "Ashok," Nor said, "that's terrible news. But I thought you were calling about the other thing --"
+
+He looked at Yasmin, whose eyes were steady on him. He never talked about the work he did for Big Sister Nor, but everyone knew he was up to something back here.
+
+"Yes," he said. "The other thing. I need to talk to you about that. But Yasmin is here and she tells me that Mala is missing."
+
+Big Sister Nor seemed to hear the gravity in his voice. She took a deep breath, spoke in a patient voice: "You know Dharavi better than I do. What do you think has happened?"
+
+He nodded to Yasmin. "I think that Bannerjee has her," she said. "I think that he will hurt her, if he hasn't already."
+
+From the phone, The Mighty Krang's voice broke in. "I have Bannerjee's phone number," he said. "From one of our people in Guzhen. He emailed us a list of everyone in his boss's address book."
+
+Ashok found his hands were in fists. He'd only met Bannerjee once, but that was enough. The man looked like he was capable of anything, one of those aliens who could look at a fellow human being as nothing more than an opportunity to make money. Yasmin's eyes were wide.
+
+"You want to phone him?"
+
+"Sure," The Mighty Krang sounded calm, even flippant, just as he did in the inspirational videos he posted to the Webbly boards and YouTube. "It's worth a try. Maybe he wants to ransom her."
+
+"Are you joking?"
+
+The light tone left his voice. "No, Yasmin, I'm not joking. Look, the Webblies are powerful. Men like Bannerjee understand that. Once I got Bannerjee's number, I used it to get a full workup on him. We have some leverage over him. It's possible that we can make him see reason. And if we can't --" He trailed off.
+
+"We're no worse off than before," Big Sister Nor finished.
+
+"When will we call him?"
+
+"Oh, now would be good. Negotiations are always best in the small hours. Hang on, I'll get the number." The Mighty Krang typed some. "OK, let's do this."
+
+"OK," Yasmin said in a tiny voice.
+
+"OK," Ashok said.
+
+"I'll keep you two muted for him, but live for me. Remember that -- if you talk over him, I'll hear both, which might confuse me."
+
+"We'll mute our end," Ashok said. He saw that his battery was low and fished around on his desk for a power-cable and plugged it in. Then he muted the phone. He and Yasmin unconsciously leaned their heads together over it, so that he could smell his sour breath and hers, which smelled of vomit. She had been sick. He closed his eyes and it felt as though there was sandpaper on the insides of his eyelids.
+
+After a few rings, a sleepy voice mumbled "Victory to Rama," in Hindi, the traditional phone salutation. It made Ashok snort derisively. A man like Bannerjee was about as pious as a turnip. As a jackal.
+
+"Mr Bannerjee," Big Sister Nor said in accented Hindi. "Good morning."
+
+"Who is it?" He had switched to English.
+
+"The Webblies," Big Sister Nor said.
+
+"For a Webbly," Bannerjee grunted, still sounding half-asleep, "you sound an awful lot like an underage Chinese whore. Where are you calling from, China-Doll? A brothel in Hong Kong?"
+
+"2,500 kilometers from HK, actually. And I'm Indonesian."
+
+Bannerjee grunted again. "But you /{are}/ a whore, aren't you?"
+
+"Mr Bannerjee, I am a busy woman --"
+
+"A /{popular}/ whore!"
+
+Yasmin hissed at the phone and Ashok double-checked that the mute was on. It was.
+
+"-- a busy woman. I've called to make you an offer."
+
+"I have all the whores I need," he said. "Goodbye."
+
+"Mr Bannerjee! I'm calling to arrange for the release of Mala," Big Sister Nor spoke quickly. "And I'm sure if you think about it for just a moment, you'll realize that there's plenty I can offer you for her safe return."
+
+Bannerjee said, "Mala is missing?" in a tone that could have won a medal in the unconvincing Olympics.
+
+"Stop playing games, please. You know that we're not the police. We're not going to have you arrested. We just want her back."
+
+"I'm sure you do. She's a delightful girl."
+
+Yasmin was grasping her opposite elbows so hard her knuckles were white. Ashok had his fists bunched in the fabric of his trouser-legs. He made himself loosen them. But Big Sister Nor just continued on, as though she hadn't heard.
+
+"I'm sure you've seen what's happened to the gold markets. Prices are on fire. No one can get any gold out of the gold farms, thanks to my Webblies. If you could promise a farmer access to one spot, without harassment, just think of what you could charge."
+
+Bannerjee chuckled. "And all I have to do is find Mala for you and give her to you and you will guarantee this to me, is that right?"
+
+"That's the shape and size of it."
+
+"You will, of course, honor your end of the bargain once I've found her for you."
+
+"Of course."
+
+There was a long silence. Finally, Big Sister Nor spoke again.
+
+"I understand your scepticism. I can give you my word of honor."
+
+Bannerjee made a rude sound, like a wet fart. "How about this: I get the gold out of the game, then I find Mala for you."
+
+Ashok hated this game he was playing, pretending that he didn't have Mala, but he could somehow find her. He wanted to crawl through the phone and strangle the man.
+
+"How about if we just get you some gold?" It was The Mighty Krang speaking.
+
+"Oh, there's more of you? Are you also an Indonesian whore 2500 kilometers from Hong Kong, or are you dialled in from some other exotic locale?"
+
+"We can get the gold out of the game faster than anyone you could hire. All the best gold farmers are in the union. The scabs they've got working in the shops right now are so crap they'll probably screw up and get themselves banned." Ashok loved that Krang wasn't playing Bannerjee's taunting game either.
+
+Bannerjee snorted. "That's not bad," he said.
+
+"We could use an escrow service, one we both agree on." The gold-markets ran on escrow services, trustworthy parties that would hold gold and cash while a deal was closing, working for a small percentage.
+
+"And you would return Mala to us?"
+
+"I would do everything I could to find the poor girl and get her into your hands." Gold, silver and bronze medals in the 100-yard slime.
+
+They dickered over price and timing -- Mala ended up promising him a 300,000 Svartalfaheim runestones -- and Krang disconnected Bannerjee.
+
+"Brilliant," Ashok said, trying to force some enthusiasm into his voice, while inside he was quavering at the thought of Mala in the hands of Bannerjee.
+
+"Very good," Yasmin said.
+
+"Yes, yes," Big Sister Nor said. "And your team will get the runestones for us, and I'm sure you'll do it quickly and well because she is your general. All our problems should be that easy to solve. Now, Ashok, how have you done with your complicated problem?"
+
+Ashok looked at Yasmin, who showed no signs of leaving.
+
+"I think we're there. The trick was to create a situation where they /{can't}/ put things back together without our help. Our accounts control the gold underneath so many of these securities that if they kick us all off, they'll create a massive crash, both in-game and out-of-game. At the same time, they can't afford to leave us running around freely, because there's a hundred ways we could crash the system, too, from resigning in a huge group all at once to repeating the Mushroom Kingdom job." Crashing the Mushroom Kingdom securities had been easy -- Mushroom Kingdom was already riddled with scams that had been flying under the radar of Nintendo's incompetent economist and security teams. Ashok had used Webblies and some of the Mechanical Turks that Big Sister Nor had supplied through her mysterious contact on the inside, building up a catalog of all the other scams and then giving them a nudge here and a shove there, using Webblies to produce gold on demand when necessary.
+
+He'd gone into it thinking that he'd never manage to take on the Mushroom Kingdom economy, believing that the security would be all-knowing and all-powerful. But in truth, it had all been held together with twine and wishful thinking, straining at the seams, and it had only taken a little pushing and pulling to first make it swell to unheard-of heights, and then to explode gloriously.
+
+"But we couldn't afford to repeat the Mushroom Kingdom job. There was no way we could have pulled that one out of the nosedive, once it started. It was doomed from the start. With Coca-Cola's games, we have to be able to promise to put it all back together again if they play cricket with us." Talking about his work made him forget momentarily about Mala, let the iron bands around his chest loosen, just a little.
+
+"If we had kept things on schedule, it would have been much easier. But you know, with things all chaotic, I had to rush things. I've been dumping our gold reserves on the market for hours now, which has sent the market absolutely crazy, especially after they had that crash. How on Earth did you manage that?"
+
+Big Sister Nor snorted. "It wasn't me. We're not sure if they got hacked, or some kind of big crash. It /{was}/ well-timed, though."
+
+"Would you tell me if you /{had}/ caused it?"
+
+Yasmin looked faintly shocked.
+
+"Ashok," BSN said, with mock sternness, "I tell everyone anything I think they need to know, and I usually tell them anything /{they}/ think they need to know. We're not in the secrets business around here."
+
+That made Ashok pause. He'd always thought of the operation as being shrouded in secrecy. Certainly Big Sister Nor had never volunteered any details about her contact with the Mechanical Turks -- but then, he'd never asked, had he? Nor had he ever asked if he could discuss his project with Mala's army. He shook his head. What if the secrecy had been all in his mind?
+
+"OK," he said. "Fine. The problem is this: if I had enough time -- if I had the time we'd planned on -- I'd be in a position to take Svartalfaheim right up to the brink of collapse and then either save it or let it collapse. It all comes down to how much gold we had in our reserves, and how much of the trading we controlled.
+
+"But I've had to rush the schedule, which means that I can't give you both. I can bring the economy to the brink of ruin, but when I do, I need to know in advance whether we're going to let it blow up, or whether we're going to let it recover. I can't decide later." He swallowed. "I think that means we have to destroy it. I still have Zombie Mecha and Clankers underway. We can show them our force by taking out Svartalfaheim and then threaten to take out the other two."
+
+"Why do you want to do it that way?"
+
+He shook his head, realized she couldn't see him. "Listen, they're not going to give in to you. You're going to go in there and start giving them orders and they're going to assume you're some ridiculous third-world crook. They're going to tell you to get lost. If you make a threat and you can't make good on it, that'll be the last time you hear from them. They'll never take you seriously after that."
+
+Big Sister Nor clucked her tongue. "Are we so easy to dismiss?"
+
+"Yes," Ashok said. "/{I}/ know what the Webblies can do. But they don't. And they won't, until we show them."
+
+"We have Mushroom Kingdom for that."
+
+That stopped him. "Yes, that's true of course. But that was so /{easy}/ --"
+
+"They don't know that. They don't know anything about us, as you point out. So yes, maybe they'll assume we're weak and maybe they'll assume we're strong. But one thing I know is, if they give us what we want and /{then}/ we destroy their game, they'll never trust us again."
+
+"So you're saying you want me to set this all up so that we can't make good on our threat?"
+
+"If we have to choose --"
+
+"We do."
+
+"Then yes, that's just what I want, Ashok. I'll just have to be sure that whatever happens, we don't need to carry out our threat."
+
+"OK," Ashok said. "I can do that."
+
+"Good. And Ashok?"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"I need you to speak with them," she said. "With who ever they get to talk to us. I'll be on the call, too, of course. But you need to talk to them, to explain to them what we've done and what we can do."
+
+Ashok swallowed. "I'm not good at that sort of talk --"
+
+Yasmin made a rude noise. "Don't listen to him," she said. "You talked the steelworkers and the garment-workers into coming to Dharavi!"
+
+"I did," he said. "I didn't think it would work -- they'd never listened before. But once I explained what kind of situation you were all in, the thugs, the violence, told them that all of Dharavi would know if they came down --"
+
+"Once you really believed in it," Big Sister Nor said. "That's the difference. I've heard you talk about the things you love, Ashok. You are very convincing when it comes to that. The difference between all the conversations you had with them before and the last one is that you came to them as a Webbly last time, not as someone who was playing a game to make himself feel like he was doing something important." The criticism took him off guard and pierced him. He /{had}/ been playing a game at first, taken with his own cleverness at the vision of kids all over the world running circles around the tired old unions he'd hung around with all his life. But now, it wasn't a game anymore. Or rather, it /{was}/ a game, but it was one that he took deadly serious.
+
+"OK," he said. "I'll talk to them."
+
+#
+
+Now it was Jie's turn to watch Wei-Dong, as he typed furiously at his keyboard, reaching out to hundreds of Mechanical Turks who'd said, "Yes, yes, we're on your side; yes, we're tired of the crummy pay and of always having the threat of being fired over our heads." He reached out to them and what he told them all was:
+
+/{Now}/
+
+Now it begins, now we are ready, now we move. He sent them links to the YouTube videos of the protests in China, the picket lines in India, the workers who'd begun to walk off the job in Indonesia and Vietnam and Cambodia, saying, "Us too, us all together, us too."
+
+Only it wasn't working the way it was supposed to. The Mechanical Turks had been happy enough to seed a little disinformation, to pass on some weird-sounding stock-tips or to look the other way when the Webblies were fighting the Pinkertons, but they balked at going to Coke and saying, "We demand, we want, we are all one." Just from their typing, he could feel their fear, the terror that they might find themselves without a job next month, that they might be the only ones who stood up.
+
+But not all of them. First one, then five, then fifty, and finally over a hundred of his Turks were with him, ready to put their names to a list of dues-paying Webblies who wanted to bargain as a group with Coke for a better deal. That was only 20 percent of what he'd bargained for, but they still accounted for 35 of the top fifty performers on the Webbly leaderboards.
+
+He kept up a running account for Jie, muttering in Chinese to her between messages and quick voice calls.
+
+"Now what?" she said. She was jammed up in a corner of the room, resting on her sweater, which she'd spread out over the filthy mattress, eyes barely open.
+
+"Now I call Coke," he said. He had talked this over with Big Sister Nor a dozen times, iterating through the plan, even role-playing it with The Mighty Krang playing the management on the other end. But that didn't mean that he was calm -- anything but, he felt like he might throw up at any instant.
+
+"How is that supposed to work?"
+
+He closed his eyes, which were burning with exhaustion and dried tears. "Are you hungry?"
+
+She nodded. "I was thinking of going upstairs for some dumplings," she said.
+
+"Bring me some?"
+
+She got up and walked unsteadily to the door. She pulled a compact out of her purse and looked at herself, made a face, then said, "Tea?"
+
+He'd drunk tea for years, but right now he needed coffee, no matter how American that made him feel. "Coffee," he said. "Two coffees."
+
+She smiled a sad little smile. "Of course. I'll bring a syringe, too."
+
+But he was already back at his computer, screwing in his borrowed earwig, dialling in on the employee-only emergency number.
+
+"Co' Cola Games level two support, this is Brianna speaking," the voice was flat, American, bored, female, Hispanic.
+
+"I need to speak to someone in operations," he said. "This is Leonard Goldberg, Turk number 4446E764."
+
+"Hello, Leonard. Can I have the fifth letter of your security code?"
+
+He had to think hard for a moment. Like the name Leonard Goldberg, like his entire American life, the security code he used to communicate with his employers seemed like it was in a distant fairytale land. "K for kilo," he said. "No, wait, Z for Zulu."
+
+"And the second letter?"
+
+"A for alpha."
+
+"OK, Leonard, what can I do for you?"
+
+"I need to speak to someone in operations," he said. "Level four, please."
+
+"What do you need to speak to operations about, please?" He could hear her clicking away at her screen, looking up the escalation procedures. Technically it wasn't supposed to be possible to go from level two support to level four without going through level three. But the entire escalations manual was available in the private discussion forums on the unofficial Turk groups if you knew where to look for them.
+
+"I, uh, I think I found someone, who was, like, a pedophile? Like he might have been trying to get some kids to give him their RL addresses?" Kid-diddlers, mafia, terrorists or pirates, the four express tickets to level four support. Anything that meant calling in the federal cops or the international ones. He figured that a potential pedophile would have just the right amount of ick to get him escalated without the call being sent straight to the cops.
+
+Brianna typed something, read something, muttered "Just a minute, hon," read some more. "OK, level four it is." She parked him on hold.
+
+Jie came back with a styrofoam clamshell brimming over with steaming dumplings and a bottle of nuclear-hot Vietnamese rooster sauce and a pair of chopsticks. She picked one up, blew on it, dipped it in the sauce and held it out to him. He popped it into his mouth and chewed it, blowing out at the same time to try to cool off the scalding pork inside. They shared a smile, then the call started up again.
+
+"Hello, Coca Cola Games, level four ops, Gordon speaking, your name please."
+
+Leonard went through the authentication routine with Gordon again, his password coming more easily to him this time.
+
+"All right, Leonard, I hear you found a pedophile? One moment while I pull up your interaction history --"
+
+"Don't bother," Wei-Dong said, his pulse going so fast he felt like he was going to explode. "I made that up."
+
+"Did you." It wasn't really a question.
+
+"I need to speak to Command Central," he said. "It's urgent."
+
+"I see."
+
+Wei-Dong waited. This Gordon character was supposed to get angry or sarcastic, not quiet. The pause stretched until he felt he /{had}/ to fill it. "It's about the Webblies, I have a message for Command Central."
+
+"Uh huh."
+
+Oh, for Christ's sake. "Gordon, listen. I know you think I'm just a kid and you probably think I'm full of crap, but I /{need to speak to Command Central right now.}/ I promise you, if you don't connect me with them, you'll regret it."
+
+"I will, will I? Well, listen, Leonard, I've been looking at your interaction history and you certainly seem like an efficient worker, so I'm going to go easy on you. /{You}/ can't talk to Command Central. Period. Tell me what you want, and I'll see that someone gets back to you."
+
+/{This}/ was something Wei-Dong had prepared for. "Gordon, please relay the following to Command Central. Do you have a pen?"
+
+"Oh, this is /{all}/ being recorded." There was the sarcasm he'd been waiting for. He was getting under his skin. Right.
+
+"Tell them that I represent the Industrial Workers of the World Wide Web, Local 56, and that we need to speak with Coca Cola Games's Chief Economist immediately in order to avert a collapse on the scale of the Mushroom Kingdom disaster. Tell them that we have two hours to act before the collapse takes place. Did you get that?"
+
+"What? You're kidding --"
+
+"I'm serious. I'll hold while you tell them." He muted the connection and immediately dialled back to Singapore and told Justbob what had happened. She assured him that they'd get their economist on the line as quickly as possible and put him on hold. He bridged both calls into his earpiece but isolated them so that they wouldn't be able to hear him, then told Jie what had just happened.
+
+"When can I interview you about this for the radio show?"
+
+He swallowed. "I think maybe never. Part of this story can probably never be publicly told. We'll ask BSN, OK?"
+
+She made a face, but nodded. And now there was Gordon.
+
+"Leonard, you there, buddy?"
+
+"I'm here," he said.
+
+"You're logging in from a lot of proxies lately. Where exactly are you located? We have you in LA."
+
+"I'm not in LA," Wei-Dong said, grinning. "I'm a little ways off from there. You don't need to know where. How's it coming with Command Central, Gordon? Time's a-wastin'." Keep the pressure up, that was a critical part of the plan. Don't give them time to think. Get them to run around like headless chickens.
+
+"I'm on it," Gordon said. He swallowed audibly. "Look, you're not serious, are you?"
+
+"You saw what happened to Mushroom Kingdom, right?"
+
+"I saw."
+
+"OK then," Wei-Dong said. He'd been warned not to admit to any wrongdoing personally.
+
+"You're serious?"
+
+"You know, 15 minutes have gone by already."
+
+Another swallow. "I'll be right back."
+
+A new line cut in, different background noise, chaotic, lots of chatter. Gordon had probably been a teleworker sitting in his underwear in his living room. This was different. This was a room filled with angry, arguing people who were typing on keyboards like machineguns.
+
+"This is William Vaughan, head of security for Coca Cola Games. Hello, Leonard."
+
+"Hello, Mr Vaughan." Leonard said. Be polite. That was part of the plan, too. Real operators were grownups, polite, businesslike. "May I speak with Connor Prikkel, please?" Prikkel's name had been easy enough to google. Wei-Dong had spent some time watching videos of the man at conferences. He seemed like an awkward, super-brainy academic type run to fat. He typed a quick one-handed message to Justbob: /{Got cmd ctnrl, where r u?}/
+
+"Mr Prikkel is away from the office. I have been asked to speak with you in his stead."
+
+He had prepped for this, too. "I'm afraid that I need to talk with Connor Prikkel personally."
+
+"That's not possible," Vaughan said, sounding like he was barely holding onto his temper.
+
+"Mr Vaughan," Wei-Dong said. He hadn't spoken this much English for weeks. It was weird. He'd started to think in Chinese, to dream in it. "I don't know if uh, Gordon told you what I told him --"
+
+"Yes, he did. That's why you're talking to me now."
+
+"Mr Prikkel is qualified to evaluate what I have to say to him. I'm not qualified to understand it. And no offense, I don't think you are either."
+
+"I'll be the judge of that."
+
+Justbob sent him a message back: /{5 min}/.
+
+"I've got a better idea," Wei-Dong said. "You get Mr Prikkel and call me back. I'll leave you a voice-chat ID. You can listen in on the call."
+
+"How about if I just trace where you're calling /{us}/ from and we call the police? Leonard, kid, you are working on my last good nerve and I'm about to lose it with you. Fair warning."
+
+Wei-Dong tisked. He was starting to enjoy this. "Mr Vaughan, here's the thing. In --" he looked at the clock -- "about ten minutes, you’re going to see total chaos in your gold markets. All those contracts that Coke Games has written for gold futures are going to start to slide into oblivion. You can spend the next ten minutes trying to trace me, but you're not going to find me, and even if you do, you're not going to be able to do anything about it, because I am an ocean away from the nearest police force that will give you the time of day." The security man started to choke out a response, but Wei-Dong kept talking. "I'd prefer /{not}/ to destroy the game. I love it. I love playing all these games. You have my record there, you know it. We all feel that way, all the Webblies. It's where we go to work every day. We /{want}/ it to succeed. But we want that to happen on terms that are fair to us. So believe me when I tell you that I am calling to strike a bargain that you can afford, that we can live with and that will save the game and get everything back on track by the end of the day." He looked at the clock again, did some mental arithmetic. "By tomorrow morning, your time, that is."
+
+He could almost hear the gears turning in Vaughan's head. "You're in Asia, somewhere?"
+
+"Is that the only thing that you got from that?"
+
+He made a little conciliatory snort. "You're a long way from home, kid. Ten minutes, huh?"
+
+Wei-Dong said, "Eight, now. Give or take."
+
+"That's some pretty impressive economic forecasting."
+
+"When you've got 400,000 gold farmers working with a few thousand Mechanical Turks, you can do some pretty impressive things." The numbers were all inflated. But Vaughan would assume they were. If Wei-Dong had given him the real numbers, he'd have underestimated their strength. He liked how this was going.
+
+/{2 min more}/ from Justbob.
+
+"OK, Vaughan, here's how Mr Prikkel can reach me. Sooner, rather than later." He named the ID and the service, one that was run out of the Mangalore Special Economic Zone. It was pretty reliable and easy to sign up for, and they supported strong crypto and didn't log connections. He'd heard that it was a favorite with diplomats from poor countries that couldn't run their own servers.
+
+"Wait --"
+
+"Call me!" he said, and gave him the details once more.
+
+/{They'll call me back}/ he typed to Justbob. /{Our guy wasn't there.}/
+
+Justbob called him right away, and he heard The Mighty Krang and Big Sister Nor holding another conversation in the background. "You hung up?"
+
+"It wasn't the right guy. I think he was away, maybe on holidays or something. They'll get him on the phone. no worries." But Justbob sounded worried, and he didn't like that. He shrugged mentally. He'd done the best he could, using his best judgement. He'd been shot at, seen his friend killed. He'd smuggled himself halfway around the world. He'd earned some autonomy.
+
+He ate some of the now-cold dumplings and tried not to worry as the time stretched out. Ten minutes, fifteen minutes. Justbob sent more and more impatient notes. Jie fell asleep on the disgusting mattress, her sweater spread out beneath her head, her face girlish and sad in repose.
+
+Then his computer rang.
+
+"Hello?" Texting, /{Phone.}/
+
+"This is Connor Prikkel. I understand you needed to speak to me?"
+
+/{Now}/ he texted and clicked the button that pulled Justbob and her economist onto the call.
+
+#
+
+No one in Command Central would meet Connor's eye when he came back into the office, his nose swollen and his eyes red and puffy. He grabbed a spare computer from the shelves by the door -- smashed laptops weren't exactly unheard-of in the high-tension environment of Command Central -- and plugged it in and powered it up.
+
+"The markets are going crazy," Bill said in a low voice, while around them, Command Central's denizens -- minus Kaden, who seemed to have been removed for his own good -- made a show of pretending not to listen in. "Huge amounts of gold have hit the market in the past ten minutes, and the price is whipsawing down."
+
+Connor nodded. "Sure, our normal monetary policy has had to assume that a certain amount of gold would be entering the system from these characters. When they stopped the flow a couple weeks ago, we had to pick up production to keep inflation down. I had assumed that they were too busy fighting to mine any more gold, but it looks like they spent that time building up their reserves. Now that they're dumping it --"
+
+"Can you do something about it?"
+
+Connor thought. All the peace and serenity he'd attained just an hour ago, when he was a man with nothing to lose, was melting away. He had the curious sensation of his muscles returning to their habitual, knotted states. But a new clarity descended on him. He'd been thinking of the Webblies as a pack of gang-kids, fighting a gang-war with their former bosses. This business, though, was sophisticated beyond anything that some gangsters would kick up. It was an act of sophisticated economic sabotage.
+
+"I'd better talk to this kid," he said, quickly paging through the data, setting up feeds, feeling the return of his fingerspitzengefuhl.
+
+Bill made a sour face. "You think they're for real?"
+
+"I think we can't afford to assume they aren't." The voice was someone else's. He recognized it: the voice of a company man doing the company's business.
+
+A few minutes later, he said, "This is Connor Prikkel. I understand you needed to speak to me?"
+
+"Mr Prikkel, it is very good to speak with you." The voice had a heavy Indian accent, and the background was flavored with the unmistakable sound of gamers at their games, shooting, shouting.
+
+Bill, listening in with his own earpiece, shook his head. "That's not the kid."
+
+"I'm here too." This voice was young, unmistakably American. When it cut in, the background changed, no gamers, no shouting. These two were in different rooms. He had an intuition that they might be in different /{countries}/, and he remembered all the battles he'd spied upon in which the sides were from all over Asia and even Eastern Europe, South America and Africa.
+
+"Mr Prikkel -- Doctor Prikkel," Connor supressed a laugh. The PhD was purely honorary, and he never used it. "My name is Ashok Balgangadhar Tilak. Allow me to begin by saying that, having read your publications and watched dozens of your presentations, I consider you to be one of the great economics thinkers of our age."
+
+"Thank you, Mr Tilak," Connor said. "But --"
+
+"So it is somewhat brash of me to say what I am about to say. Nevertheless, I will say it: We own your games. We control the underlying assets against which a critical mass of securities have been written; further, we control the substantial number of those securities and can sell them as we see fit, through a very large number of dummy accounts. Finally, we have orders in ourselves for many of the sureties that you have used to hedge this deal, orders that will automatically execute should you try to float more to absorb the surplus."
+
+Connor typed furiously. "You don't expect me to take your word for this?"
+
+"Naturally not. I expect you to look to the example of Mushroom Kingdom. And to the turmoil in Svartalfaheim Warriors. Then I'd suggest that you cautiously audit the books for Zombie Mecha and Clankers."
+
+"I will." Again, that company man's voice, from so far away. The feeds were confirming it, though, the trading volume was insane, but underneath it all there was a sense of /{directedness}/, as though someone were making it all happen.
+
+"Very good."
+
+"Now, I suppose there's something coming here. Blackmail, I'm guessing. Cash."
+
+"Nothing of the sort," said the Indian man, sounding affronted. "All we're after is peace."
+
+"Peace."
+
+"Exactly. I can undo everything we've done, put the markets back together again, stop the bleeding by unwinding the trades very carefully and very gently, working with you to make a soft landing for everyone. The markets will dip, but they'll recover, especially when you make the announcement."
+
+"The announcement that we've made peace with you."
+
+"Oh yes," Ashok said. "Of course. Your employers expect that you can run your economy like a toy train set, on neat rails. But we know better. Gold-farming is an inevitable consequence of your marketplace, and that pushes the train off the rails. But imagine this: what if your employer were to recognize the legitimacy of gold farming as a practice, allowing our workers to participate as legitimate actors in a large and complex economy. Our exchanges would move above-ground, where you could monitor them, and we would meet regularly with you to discuss our membership's concerns and you would tell us about your employers' concerns. There would still be underground traders, of course, but they would be pushed off into the margins. Every decent farmer in the world wants to join the Webblies, for we represent the best players and everyone knows it. And we'll be at every non-union farm-site in every game, talking to the workers about the deal they will get if they band with us."
+
+"And all we have to do is... what?"
+
+"Cooperate. Union gold that comes out of Coke's games will be legitimate and freely usable. We'll have a cooperative that buys and sells, just like today's exchange markets, but it will all be above-board, transparently governed by elected managers who will be subject to recall if they behave badly."
+
+"So we replace one cartel with another one?"
+
+"Dr Prikkel, I wouldn't ever ask such a thing of you. No, of course not. We don't object to other unionized operations in the space. I have colleagues here from the Transport and Dock Workers' Union who are interested in organizing some of these workers. Let there be as many gold exchanges as the market can bear, all certified by you, all run by the workers who create them."
+
+"What about the /{players}/, Mr Tilak? Do they get a say in this?"
+
+"Oh, I think the players have already had their say. After all, whom do you suppose is /{buying}/ all this gold?"
+
+"And you expect me to make all this happen in an hour?"
+
+The American kid broke in. "45 minutes now."
+
+"Of course not. Today, all we seek is an agreement /{in principle}/. Obviously, this is the kind of thing that Coca Cola Games's board of directors will have to approve. However, we are of the impression that the board is likely to pay close attention to any recommendations brought to it by its chief economist, especially one of your standing."
+
+Connor found himself grinning. These kids -- not just kids, he reminded himself -- were gutsy. And what's more, they were /{gamers}/, something that was emphatically /{not}/ true of CCG's board, who were as boring a bunch of mighty captains of industry as you could hope to find. "Is that it?"
+
+"No." It was the American kid again. He consulted his notes. Leonard Goldberg. In LA. Except Bill was pretty sure this kid was in Asia somewhere. He suspected there was a story in there.
+
+"Hello, Leonard."
+
+"Hi, Connor. I'm emailing you a list of names right now."
+
+"I see it." The message popped up in his public account, the one that was usually filtered by an intern before he saw it. He grabbed it, saw that it had been encrypted to his public key, decrypted it. It was a list of names, with numbers beside them. "OK, go ahead."
+
+"That's the names of Turks who've joined the Webblies."
+
+"You've got Turks who want to moonlight as gold farmers?"
+
+"No." The boy said, speaking as though to an idiot. "I've got Turks who want to join a union."
+
+"The Webblies."
+
+"The Webblies."
+
+Connor snorted. "I see. And is this union certified under US labor law? Have you considered the fact that you are all independent contractors and not employees?"
+
+The boy cut in. "Yes, yes, all of that. But these are your best Turks, and they're Webblies, and we're all in it together."
+
+"You know, they'll never go for it."
+
+"Your teamsters are unionized. Your /{janitors}/ are unionized. Now your Mechanical Turks are --"
+
+"Son, you're not a union. Under US law, you're nothing."
+
+The Indian man cleared his voice. "That is all true, but this is likewise true of IWWWW members around the world in all their respective countries. Many countries prohibit /{all}/ unions. And we ask you to recognize these workers' rights."
+
+"We're not those workers' employers."
+
+"You claim you're not /{our}/ employers either," said the boy, with a maddening note of triumph in his voice. "Remember? We're 'independent contractors', right?"
+
+"Exactly."
+
+"Dr Prikkel, let me explain. The IWWWW is open to all workers, regardless of nationality or employment, and it will work for all those workers' rights, in solidarity. Our gold farmers will stand up for our Mechanical Turks, and vice versa."
+
+"Goddamned right," said the boy. "An insult to one --"
+
+"Is an insult to all. The gold farmers have a modest set of demands: modest benefits, job security, a pension plan. All the same things that we plan on asking our farmers' employers for. Nothing your division can't afford."
+
+"Are you saying that your demands are contingent on recognizing the demands from Mr Goldberg's friends."
+
+"Precisely."
+
+"And you will destroy the economy of Svartalfaheim Warriors in 45 minutes --"
+
+"38 minutes," said the kid.
+
+"Unless I agree /{in principle}/ that we will do this?"
+
+"You have summed it all up admirably," said the Indian economist. "Well done."
+
+"Can you give me a minute?"
+
+"I can give you 38 minutes."
+
+"37," said the kid.
+
+He muted them, and he and Bill stared at each other for a long time.
+
+"Is this as crazy as it sounds?"
+
+"Actually, the crazy part is that it's not all that crazy. Impossible, but not crazy. We already let lots of third parties play with our economies -- independent brokers, the people who buy and sell their instruments. There's no technical reason these characters can't be a part of our planning. Hell, if they can do what they say, we'll be way more profitable than we are now.
+
+"For one thing, we won't need to crash the servers tracking them all down."
+
+Connor grimaced. "Right. But then there's the impossible part. Leaving out the whole thing about the Turks, which is just /{crazy}/, there's the fact that the board will never, ever, never, never --"
+
+Bill held a hand up. "Now, that's where I disagree with you. When you meet with the board, you're always trying to sell them on some weird-ass egghead financial idea that makes them worry that they're going to lose their life's savings. When I go to them, it's to ask them for some leeway to fight scammers and hackers. They understand scammers and hackers, and they say yes. If we were to ask them together --"
+
+"You think this is a good idea?"
+
+"It's a better idea than chasing these kids around gamespace like Captain Ahab chasing the white whale. The formal definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly but expecting a different outcome. It's time we tried something different."
+
+"What about the Turks?"
+
+"What about them?"
+
+"They're looking for --"
+
+"They're looking to take about half a percent out of the company's bottom line, if that. We spend more on your first-class plane tickets to economics conferences every year than they want. Big freakin' deal."
+
+"But if we give in on this thing, they'll ask for more."
+
+"And if we don't give in on this, we're going to spend the next hundred years chasing Chinese and Indian kids around gamespace instead of devoting our energy to fighting /{real}/ ripoffs and hacker creeps. Security is always about choosing your battles. Every complex ecosystem has parasites. You've got ten times more bacteria cells than blood cells in your body. The trick with parasites is to figure out how to co-exist with them."
+
+"I can't believe I'm hearing you say this."
+
+"That's because I'm not a gamer. I don't care who wins. I don't care who loses. I'm a security expert. I care about what the costs are to secure the systems that I'm in charge of. We can let these kids 'win' some little battles, pay the cost for that, and save ten times as much by not having to chase 'em."
+
+Connor shook his head. "What about them?" he said, rolling his eyes around the room to encompass the rest of Command Central, most of whom were openly eavesdropping now.
+
+Bill turned to them. "Hands up: who wants to make and run totally kick-ass games that make us richer than hell?" Every hand shot up. "Who wants to spend their time chasing a bunch of skinny poor kids around instead of just finding a way to neutralize them?" A few hands stayed defiantly in the air, among them Kaden, who had come back into the room while Connor was on the phone and was now glaring at both of them. Bill turned back to Connor. "I think we'll be OK," he said. He jerked his head over his shoulder and said, loudly, "Those goons are so ornery they'd say no if you asked them whether they wanted a lifetime's supply of free ice-cream."
+
+#
+
+300,000 runestones hadn't seemed like much when Yasmin started. After all, the gold was for Mala, and Mala was all she could think of. And she had Mala's army on her side, all of them working together.
+
+But it had been days since she'd slept properly, and there were reporters every few minutes, pushing into Mrs Dibyendu's cafe with their cameras and recorders and pads and asking her all sorts of mad questions and she had to keep her temper and speak modestly and calmly with them when every nerve in her body was shrieking /{Can't you see how busy I am? Can't you see what I have to do?}/ But the army covered itself with glory and not one soldier lost his or her temper, and the press all marvelled at them and their curious work.
+
+At least the steelworkers and garment workers had the sense not to interrupt them, and they were mostly busy with their organizing adventures in Dharavi to bother them anyway. The story of how they'd saved this gang of Dharavi children from bad men with weapons had spread to every corner, and the workers they'd inspired to walk off the job were half in awe of them.
+
+Piece by piece, though, they were able to build the fortune. Yasmin found them an instanced mission with a decent payoff, one that three or four players could run at a time, and she directed them all into it, sending them down the caverns after the dwarves and ogres below in gangs, prowling up and down the narrow, blisteringly hot aisles between the machines, pointing out ways of getting the work done faster, noting each player's total, until, after a seeming eternity, they had it all.
+
+"Ashok," she said, banging unannounced into his office. He was bent over his keyboard, earwig screwed in, muttering in English to his Dr Prikkel in America. He held up a hand and asked the man to excuse him -- she hated how subservient he sounded, but had to admit that he'd been very cool when the negotiations had been underway -- and put him on mute.
+
+"Yasmin?"
+
+"We have Mala's ransom," she said.
+
+"Yes," he said, "of course." He sent a quick message to the central cell in Singapore and got Bannerjee's number, then quickly dialled it on speaker. Bannerjee answered, this time in a much less fuzzy and sleep-addled voice.
+
+"Victory to Rama!"
+
+"We have your money," Ashok said. "Our team are delivering it to the escrow's hut now. You can check for yourself."
+
+"So serious, so businesslike. It's only a game, friend -- relax!"
+
+Yasmin felt like she might throw up. The man was so... /{evil}/. What made a man that bad? She understood, really understood, how Mala must feel all the time. A feeling like there were people who /{needed}/ to be /{punished}/ and she was the person who must do it. She pushed the feeling down.
+
+"All right, good. I see that it is there. I will tell you where to find your friend when you tell the escrow agent to release the money, yes?"
+
+Ashok waggled his chin at the phone, thinking hard. Yasmin suddenly realized something she should have understood from the beginning: escrow agent or no, either they were going to have to trust Bannerjee to let Mala go after they released the money, or Bannerjee would have to trust them to release the money after he gave them Mala. Escrow services worked for cash trades, not for ransoms. She felt even sicker.
+
+"You release Mala first and --"
+
+"Oh, come on. Why on Earth would I do that? You hold me in so much contempt, there's no way you'll give me what you've promised. After all, you can always spend 300,000 runestones. I, on the other hand, have no particular use for a disrespectful little girl. Why wouldn't I tell you where to find her?"
+
+Ashok and Yasmin locked eyes. She remembered the last time she'd seen Mala, how tired she had been, how thin, how pained her limp. "Do it," she said, covering the mic with her hand.
+
+"The passphrase for the escrow is 'Victory to Rama'," Ashok said, his tone wooden.
+
+Bannerjee laughed loudly, then put them on hold, cutting them off. After a moment, Ashok looked at his screen, watching the alerts. "He's taken the money." They waited a minute longer. Another minute. Ashok redialled Bannerjee."
+
+"Victory to Rama," the man said, with a mocking voice. Right away, Yasmin knew that he wouldn't give them Mala.
+
+"Mala," Ashok said.
+
+"Piss off," Bannerjee said.
+
+"Mala," Ashok said.
+
+"One million runestones," Bannerjee said.
+
+"Mala," Ashok said. "Or else."
+
+"Or else what?"
+
+"Or else I take everything."
+
+"Oh yes?"
+
+"I will take 30,000 now. And I will take 30,000 more every five minutes until you give us Mala."
+
+Bannerjee began to laugh again, and Ashok cut him off again, then transferred back to his American at Coca Cola.
+
+"Dr Prikkel," he said. "I know we're busy rescuing the economy from ruin, but I have a small but important favor to ask of you."
+
+The American's voice was bemused. "Go ahead."
+
+Ashok gave him the name of the toon that Bannerjee had sent to the escrow house. "He has kidnapped a friend of ours and won't give her back."
+
+"Kidnapped?"
+
+"Taken her into captivity."
+
+"In the game?"
+
+"In the world."
+
+"Jesus."
+
+"And Rama too. We paid the ransom but --"
+
+Yasmin stopped listening. Ashok clearly thought he was the cleverest man who ever walked God's Earth, but she'd had enough of games. She sank down on her heels and regarded the dirty floor, her eyes going in and out of focus from lack of sleep and food.
+
+Gradually, she became aware that Ashok was talking to Bannerjee again.
+
+"She is at Lokmanya Tilak Municipal General. She was brought to the casualty ward earlier today, without any name. She should still be there."
+
+"How do you know she hasn't gone?"
+
+"She won't have gone," Bannerjee said. "Now get out of my bank account or I will come down there and blow your balls off."
+
+It took Yasmin a moment to understand how Bannerjee could be so sure that Mala hadn't left the hospital -- she must have been so badly injured that she couldn't leave. She found that she was wailing, making a sound like a cat in the night, a terrible sound that she couldn't contain. Mala's army came running and she tried to stop so that she could explain it to them, but she couldn't.
+
+In the end, they all walked to LT hospital together, a solemn procession through the streets of Dharavi. A few people scurried forward to ask what was going on, and once they were told, they joined. More and more people joined until they arrived at the hospital in a huge mob of hundreds of silent people. Ashok and Yasmin and Sushant went to the counter and told the shocked ward sister why they were there. She paged through her record-book for an eternity before saying, "It must be this one." She looked at them sternly. "But you can't all go. Who is the girl's mother?"
+
+Ashok and Yasmin looked back at the crowd. Neither of them had thought to fetch Mala's mother. They were Mala's family. She was their general. "Take us to her, please," Yasmin said. "We will bring her mother."
+
+The sister looked like she would not let them pass, but Ashok jerked his head over his shoulder. "They won't leave until we see her, you know." He waggled his chin good-naturedly and smiled and for a moment Yasmin remembered how handsome he'd been when she'd first met him on his motorcycle.
+
+The sister blew out an exasperated sigh. "Come with me," she said.
+
+They wouldn't have recognized Mala if she hadn't told them which bed was hers. Her head had been shaved and bandaged, and one side of her face was a mass of bruises. Her left arm was in a sling.
+
+Yasmin let out an involuntary groan when she saw her, and the ward sister beside her squeezed her arm. "She wasn't raped," the woman whispered in her ear. "And the doctor says there was no brain-damage."
+
+Yasmin cried now, really cried, the way she hadn't let herself cry before, the cry from her soul and her stomach, the cry that wouldn't let go, the cry that drove her to her knees as though she were being beaten with a lathi. She curled up into a ball and cried and cried, and the ward sister led her to a seat and tried to put a pill between her lips but she wouldn't let it in. She needed to be alert and awake, needed to stop crying, needed --
+
+Ashok squatted against the wall beside her, clenching and unclenching his fists. "I'll ruin him," he muttered over and over again, ignoring the stares of the other patients on the ward with their visitors. "I'll /{destroy}/ him."
+
+This got through to Yasmin. "How?"
+
+"Every piaster, ever runestone, every gold piece that man takes out of a game we will take away from him. He is finished."
+
+"He'll find some other way to survive, some other way of hurting people to get by."
+
+Ashok shook his head. "Fine. I'll find a way to ruin that, too. He is powerful and strong and ruthless, but we are smart and fast and there are /{so many}/ of us."
+
+#
+
+Dafen was full of choking smoke. Matthew pushed his way through the crowds. He'd tried to bring the painter girl, Mei, with him, but she had run into a group of her friends and had gone off with them, stopping to kiss him hard on the lips, then laughing at his surprised expression and kissing him again. The second time, he had the presence of mind to kiss her back and for a second he actually managed to forget he was in the middle of a riot. Mei's friends hooted and called at them and she gave his bottom a squeeze and took his phone out of his fingers and typed her number into it, hit SAVE. The phone network had died an hour before, when the police retreated from Dafen and fell back to a defensive cordon around the whole area.
+
+And then he was alone, making his way back toward the huge statue of the hand holding the brush, the entrance to Dafen. Painters thronged the streets, carrying beautifully made signs, singing songs, drinking fiery, cheap baijiu whose smells mixed with the smoke and the oil paint and the turpentine.
+
+The police line bristled as he peered around the corner of a cafe at the edge of Dafen. He wasn't the only one eyeing them nervously -- there was a little group of white tourists cowering in the cafe, clutching their cameras and staring incredulously at their dead phones. Matthew listened in on their conversation, straining to understand the rapid English, and gathered that they'd been brought here by a driver from their hotel, a Hilton in Jiabin Road.
+
+"Hello," he said, trying his English out. He wished that the gweilo, Wei-Dong, had let him practice more. "You need help?" He was intensely self-conscious about how bad he must sound, his accent and grammar terrible. Matthew prided himself on how well-spoken he was in Chinese.
+
+The eldest tourist, a woman with wrinkled arms and neck showing beneath a top with thin straps, looked hard at him. She removed her oversized sunglasses and assayed a little Chinese. "We are fine," she said, her accent no better than Matthew's, which he found oddly comforting. She was with three others, a man he took to be her husband and two young men, about Matthew's age, who looked like a cross between her and the husband: sons.
+
+"Please," he said. "I take you out, find taxi. You tell --" he tried to find the word for policemen, couldn't remember it, found himself searching through his game-vocabulary. "Knights? Paladins? Soldiers. You tell soldiers I am guide. We all go."
+
+The boys grinned at him and he thought they must be gamers, because they'd really perked up at /{paladins}/, and he tried grinning back at them, though truth be told he didn't feel like doing anything. They conferred in hushed voices.
+
+"No thank you," the older man said. "We're all right."
+
+He squeezed his eyes shut. He had to get somewhere that his phone would work, had to check in with Big Sister Nor and find out where the others were, what the plan was. He'd have to get new papers, maybe go to one of the provinces or try to sneak into Hong Kong. "You help me," he managed. "I no go without you. Without, uh, foreigners." He gestured at the police, at their shields. "They not hurt foreigners."
+
+The older man's eyes widened in comprehension. They spoke again among themselves. He caught the word "criminal."
+
+"I not criminal," he said. But he knew it was a lie and felt like they must know it too. He was a criminal and a former prisoner, and he would never be anything but, for his whole life; just like his grandfather.
+
+They all stared at him, then looked away.
+
+"Please," he said, looking at each one in turn. He jerked his head at the police. "They hurt people soon."
+
+The woman drew in a deep breath, turned to the man, said, "We need to get out of here anyway. It will be good to have a local."
+
+The taller of the two boys said, "What do you play?"
+
+"Svartalfaheim Warriors, Zombie Mecha, Mushroom Kingdom, Clankers, Big Smoke, Toon," he said, ticking them off on his fingers.
+
+"All of them?" The boys boggled at him.
+
+He nodded. "All."
+
+They laughed and he laughed too, small sounds in the roar of the crowds and the thunder of the choppers overhead.
+
+"You are sure about this?" the woman said. Adding, "Certain?" in Chinese. He nodded twice.
+
+"Come with me," he said and drew in a deep breath and led them out toward the police lines.
+
+#
+
+Wei-Dong didn't want to wake Jie, but he needed to sleep. He finally curled up on the floor next to the mattress, using his shoulderbag as a pillow to get his face off of the filthy carpet. At first he lay rigid in the brightly lit room, his mind swirling with all he'd seen and done, but then he must have fallen asleep and fallen hard, because the next thing he knew, he was swimming up from the depths of total oblivion as Jie shook his shoulder and called his name. He opened his eyes to slits and peered at her.
+
+"Wha?" he managed, then realized he was talking English and said, "What?" in Chinese.
+
+"Time to go," she said. "Big Sister Nor says we have to move."
+
+He sat up. His mouth was full of evil-tasting salty paste, a stale residue of dumplings and sleep. Self consciously, he breathed through his nose.
+
+"Where?"
+
+"Hong Kong," she said. "Then..." She shrugged. "Taiwan, maybe? Somewhere we can tell the story of the dead without being arrested. That's the most important thing."
+
+"How are we going to cross the border? I don't have a Chinese visa in my passport."
+
+She grinned. "That part is easy. We go to my counterfeiter."
+
+It was as good a plan as any. Wei-Dong had watched the Webblies change papers again and again. Shenzhen was full of counterfeiters. He rode the Metro apart from her again, staring at his stupid guide map and trying to look like a stupid tourist, invisible. It was easier this time around, because there was so much else going on -- factory girls talking about Jie's radio show and "the 42," policemen prowling the cars and demanding the papers of any group of three or more people, searching bags and, once, confiscating a banner painted on a bedsheet. Wei-Dong didn't see what it said, but the police took four screaming, kicking girls off the train at the next station. Shenzhen was in chaos.
+
+They got off the train at the stock market station, and he followed Jie, leaving a hundred yards between them. But he came up against her when they got to the surface. The last time he'd been here, it had been thronged with counterfeiters and touts handing out fliers advertising their services, scrap-buyers with scales lining the sidewalks, hawkers selling fruit and ices. Now it was wall-to-wall police, a cordon formed around the entrance to the stock-market. Officers were stationed every few yards on the street, too, checking papers.
+
+Jie picked up her phone and pretended to talk into it, but Wei-Dong could see she just didn't want to look suspicious. He got out his tourist-map and pretended to study it. Gradually, they both made their way back into the station. She joined him at a large map of the surrounding area.
+
+"Now what?" he whispered, trying not to move his mouth.
+
+"How were you going to get out of here?" she said.
+
+His stomach tightened. "I hadn't really thought about it much," he said.
+
+She hissed in frustration. "You must have had some idea. How about the way you got in?"
+
+He hadn't told anyone the details of his transoceanic voyage. It would have felt weird to admit that he was part owner of a giant shipping company. Besides, he didn't really /{feel}/ like it was his. It was his father's.
+
+Two policemen passed by, grim-faced, moving quickly, an urgent, insectile buzz coming from their earpieces.
+
+"Really?"
+
+"If we could get into the port," he said. "I think I could get us anywhere."
+
+She smiled, and it was the first real smile he'd seen on her face since -- since before the shooting had started.
+
+"But I need to call my mother."
+
+#
+
+The policemen that questioned Matthew were so tense they practically vibrated, but the tourist lady put on a big show of being offended that they were being stopped and demanded that they be allowed to go, practically shouting in English. Matthew translated every word, speaking over the policemen as they tried to ask him more questions about how he'd come to be there and what had happened to get his clothes so dirty with paint and mud.
+
+The tourist lady took out her camera and aimed it at the policemen, and that ended the friendly discussion. Before she could bring the screen up to her face, a policeman's gloved hand had closed around the lens. The two boys moved forward and it looked like someone would start shoving soon, and the man was shouting in English, and all the noise was enough to attract the attention of an officer who gave the cops a blistering tongue lashing for wasting everyone's time and waved them on with a stern gesture.
+
+Matthew could hardly believe he was free. The tourists seemed to think it was all a game as he urged them down the road a way, out of range of the police cordon and away from the shouting. They walked up the shoulder of the Shenhui Highway, staying right on the edge as huge trucks blew past them so fast it sucked the breath out of their lungs.
+
+"Taxi?" the woman asked him.
+
+He shook his head. "I no think taxi today," he said. "Private car, maybe."
+
+She seemed to understand. He began to wave at every car that passed them by, and eventually one stopped, a Chang’an sedan that had seen better days, its trunk held shut with a bungee cord that allowed the lid to bang as the car rolled to a stop. It was driven by a man in a dirty chauffeur's uniform. Matthew leaned in and said, "100 RMB to take us to Jiabin Road." It was high, but he was sure the tourists could afford it.
+
+"No, too far," the man said. "I have another job --"
+
+"200," Matthew said.
+
+The man grinned, showing a mouthfull of steel teeth. "OK, everyone in."
+
+They were on the road for a mere five minutes before his phone chirped to let him know that he had voicemail waiting for him. It was Justbob, from Big Sister Nor.
+
+#
+
+"Mom?"
+
+"Leonard?"
+
+"Hi, Mom." He tried to ignore Jie who was looking at him with an expression of mingled hilarity and awe. She had an encyclopedic knowledge of gamer cafes with private rooms, and had brought them to this one in the ground floor of a youth hostel that catered to foreigners and had a room set off for karaoke and net-access.
+
+"It's been so long since I've heard your voice, Leonard."
+
+"I know, Mom."
+
+"How's your trip?"
+
+"Um, fine." He tried to remember where he told her he'd be. Portland? San Francisco?
+
+"Oh, Leonard," she said, and he heard that she was crying. It was what, 8PM back in LA, and she was crying and alone. He felt so homesick at that moment he thought he would split in two and he felt the tears running down his own cheeks.
+
+"I love you, Mom," he blubbered.
+
+And they both cried for a long time, and when he risked a look at Jie, she was crying too.
+
+"Mom," he said, choking back snot. "I have a favor to ask of you. A big favor."
+
+"You're in trouble."
+
+"Yes." There was no point in denying it. "I'm in trouble. And I can't explain it right now."
+
+"You're in China, aren't you?"
+
+He didn't know what to say. "You knew."
+
+"I suspected. It's that gamer thing, isn't it? I did the math on when you answered my messages, when you called."
+
+"You knew?"
+
+"I'm not stupid, Leonard." She wasn't crying anymore. "I thought I knew, but I didn't want to say anything until you told me."
+
+"I'm sorry, Mom."
+
+She didn't say anything.
+
+"Are you coming home?"
+
+He looked at Jie. "I don't know. Eventually. I have something I have to do here, first."
+
+"And you need my help with that."
+
+"Mom, I need you to order a shipment from Shenzhen to Mumbai." Big Sister Nor had suggested it, and Jie had shrugged and said that it was fine with her, one place was as good as any other. "I'll give you the container number. And you have to have Mr Alford call the port authority here and tell them that I'm authorized to access it."
+
+"No, Leonard. I'll call the embassy, I'll get you home, but this is --" He could picture her hand flapping around her head. "It's crazy, is what it is."
+
+"Mom --"
+
+"No."
+
+"Mom, /{listen}/. This is about a lot more than just me. There are people here, friends, whose lives are at stake. You can call the embassy all you want but I won't go there. If you don't help me, I'll have to do this on my own, and I have to be honest with you, Mom, I don't think I'll be able to do it. But I can't abandon my friends."
+
+She was crying again.
+
+"I'm going to be at the port in --" he checked the screen of his phone -- "in three hours. I've got my passport with me, that'll get me inside, /{if}/ you've got it squared away with the port authority. The container number is WENU432134. It's at the western port. Do you have that?"
+
+"Leonard, I won't do it."
+
+"WENU432134," he said, very slowly, and hung up.
+
+#
+
+There were five of them in all. Matthew, Jie, Wing, Shirong, and Wei-Dong. They'd stopped at a 7-11 on the way to the train station and bought as much food as they could carry, asking the bemused clerk to pack it in boxes and seal them with packing tape.
+
+As they approached the port, they stopped talking, walking slowly and deliberately. Wei-Dong steeled himself and walked to the guard's booth. He hadn't called his mother back. There hadn't been time. Shenzhen was in chaos, police-checks and demonstrations everywhere, some riots, spirals of black smoke heading into the sky.
+
+He motioned for Wing to join him. They had agreed that he would play interpreter, to make Wei-Dong seem like more of a hopeless gweilo, above suspicion. They'd found him some cheap fake Chinese Nike gear to wear, a ridiculous track suit that reminded him of the Russian gangsters he'd see around Santee Alley.
+
+Wordlessly, he handed his passport -- his real passport, held safely all this time -- to the young man on the gate. "WENU432134," he said. "Goldberg Logistics container."
+
+He waited for Wing to translate, watched him sketch out the English letters on his palm.
+
+The security guard looked over his shoulder at the two policemen in the booth with him. He picked up a scratched tablet and prodded at it with a blunt finger, squinting at Wei-Dong's passport. Wei-Dong hoped that he wouldn't try something clever, like riffling its pages looking for a Chinese visa.
+
+He began to shake his head, said "I don't see it --"
+
+Wei-Dong felt sweat run down his butt-crack and over his thighs. He craned his neck to see the screen. There it was, but the number had been entered wrong, WENU432144. He pointed to it and said, "Tell him that this is the one." He sent a silent thanks to his mother. The guard compared the number to the one he'd entered and then seemed about to let them pass. Then one of the policeman said, "Wait."
+
+The cop shouldered the security guard out of the way, took the passport from him, examined it closely, holding a page up to the light to see the watermark. "What are you bringing?"
+
+Wei-Dong waited for Wing to translate.
+
+"Samples," he said. "Clothes."
+
+He opened up the box at his feet and pulled out a folded tee-shirt emblazoned with some Chinese characters that said "I'm stupid enough to think that this shirt looks cool." Jie had found them from one of the few stubborn peddlers left on the street outside of the Metro entrance near the train station. The cop snorted and said, "Does he know what this says?"
+
+Wing nodded. "Yes," he said. "But he thinks that other Americans won't. If they like it, they will order twenty thousand from us!" He laughed, and after a moment, the cop and the security guard joined in. The cop slapped Wei-Dong on the shoulder and Wei-Dong forced a laugh out as well.
+
+"OK," the cop said, handing back his papers. The security guard gave them directions. "But you'll have to use the north gate to leave. We're closing this one for the evening in half an hour."
+
+Wing made a show of translating for Wei-Dong, who had the presence of mind to pretend to listen, but he was rocking on his heels, almost at the point of collapse from lack of sleep and food.
+
+They walked in total silence to the container, and Wei-Dong managed to only look over his shoulder once. Jie caught his eye when he did and waggled a finger at him. He smiled wryly and looked ahead, following the directions.
+
+The container was just as he'd left it, and his key fit the padlock. The four marvelled at the cleverness of his work inside as they efficiently unpacked their food.
+
+"Three nights, huh?" said Jie, as he pulled the door shut behind them.
+
+"After they load us."
+
+"When will that be?"
+
+He sighed. "I need to call my mother to find out." He pulled out his phone and Jie handed him her last SIM and a calling card.
+
+#
+
+Big Sister Nor, The Mighty Krang and Justbob had no warning this time. Three men, small-time crooks working on contract for a man in Dongguan who owned one of the big gold-exchanges, worked silently and efficiently. They followed Justbob back from a Malaysian satay restaurant that they were known to frequent, back to the latest safe-house, a room over a massage-parlor on Changi Road, where the Webblies could tap into the wireless from a nearby office building. They waited patiently outside for all the windows to go dark.
+
+Then they methodically attached bicycle locks to each doorway. It was nearly 5AM and the few passers-by paid them no particular attention. Once they had locked each door, they hurled petrol bombs through windows on the ground floor. They stayed just long enough to make sure that the fires were burning cheerily before they got into two cars parked around the corner and sped off. The next morning, they crossed into Kuala Lumpur and did not return to Singapore for eight months, drawing a small salary from the man in Dongguan while they laid low.
+
+Big Sister Nor was the first one awake, roused by the sound of three windows smashing in close succession. She smelled the greasy smoke a moment later and began to shout, in her loudest voice, "Fire! Fire!" just as she had practiced in a thousand dreams.
+
+Justbob and The Mighty Krang were up an instant later. Justbob went to the stairs and ventured halfway down toward the massage-parlor before the flames forced her up again. The Mighty Krang broke out the window with a chair -- it had been painted shut -- and leaned way out, far enough to see the lock that had been added to the door. He breathlessly but calmly reported this to Big Sister Nor, who had already popped the drives out of their control machines. She handed them to him, listened to Justbob's assessment of the staircase and nodded.
+
+They could hear the screams from the floor below them as the girls from the massage parlor broke out their own windows and called for help. A girl emerged, legs first, from one of the massage parlor's small, high windows. She was screaming, on fire, rolling on the ground. A few people were in the street below, talking into their phones -- the fire department would be here soon. It wouldn't be soon enough. Choking smoke was already filling the room, and they were forced to their knees.
+
+"Out the window," Big Sister Nor gasped. "You'll probably break a leg, but that's better than staying here."
+
+"You first," The Mighty Krang said.
+
+"Me last," she said, in a voice that brooked no argument. "After you two are out." She managed a small smile. "Try to catch me, OK?"
+
+Justbob grabbed The Mighty Krang's arm and pulled him toward the window. He got as far as the sill, then balked. "Too far!" he said, dropping back to his belly. Justbob gave him a withering look, then hauled herself over the sill, dropped so she was hanging by her arms, then allowed herself to drop the rest of the way. If she made a sound, it was lost in the roar of the flames that were just outside the door now. The floor was too hot to touch.
+
+"GO!" Big Sister Nor said.
+
+"You're our leader, our Big Sister Nor," he said, and grabbed her arm. "We're all nothing without you!" She shook his hand off.
+
+"No, you idiot," she said. "I am nothing more than the switchboard. You all lead yourselves. Remember that!" She grabbed the waistband of his jeans, just over his butt, and practically threw him out the window. The air whistled past him for an instant, and then there was a tremendous, jarring impact, and then blackness.
+
+Big Sister Nor was on fire, her loose Indian cotton trousers, her long black hair. The room was all smoke now, and every breath was fire, too. She smelled her own nose-hairs singe as a breath of scalding air passed into her lungs, which froze and refused to work anymore. She stood and took one step to the window, standing for a moment like a flaming avatar of some tragic god in the window before she faltered, went down on one knee, then the flames engulfed her.
+
+And below, the crowd on the street began to cry. Justbob cried too, from the pavement where she was being tended by a passerby who knew some first aid and was applying pressure to the ruin of her left leg. The Mighty Krang was unconscious, with a broken arm and three broken ribs.
+
+But he remembered what Big Sister Nor told him, and he wrote those words down, typing them with his left hand in English, Malay, Hindi and Chinese, recording them with his smoke-ruined voice from his hospital bed.
+
+His words -- Big Sister Nor's words -- went out all over the world, spreading from phone to message board to site to site. You lead yourselves.
+
+The words were heard by factory girls all over South China, back on the job after a few short days of energetic chaos, mass firings and mass arrests. They were heard by factory boys all over Cambodia and Vietnam. They were heard in the alleys of Dharavi and in the living rooms of Mechanical Turks all over Europe, the US and Canada. They were published in many languages on the cover of many newspapers and aired on many broadcasts.
+
+These last treated the words as a report from a distant world -- "Did you know that these strange games and the people who played them took it all so seriously?" But for the people who needed to hear them, the words were heard.
+
+They were heard by five friends who downloaded them over the achingly slow network connection on the container ship, a day out of Shenzhen port. Five friends who wept to hear them. Five friends who took strength from them.
+
+#
+
+They hid in the inner container when the ship entered the Mumbai Harbor, heading for the Mumbai Port Trust. Wei-Dong had googled the security procedures at Mumbai Port, and he didn't think they were using gas chromatograph to detect smuggled people, but they didn't want to take any chances. It was crowded, and the toilet had stopped working, and they had only managed to gather enough water for one brief shower each on the three day passage.
+
+They fell against one-another, then clung to the floor as the container was lifted on a crane and set down again. They heard the outer door open, then shut, and muffled conversations. Then they were rolling.
+
+Cautiously, they opened the inner door. The smell of Mumbai -- spicy, dusty, hot and wet -- filled the container. Light streamed in from the little holes Wei-Dong had drilled an eternity ago on the passage to Shenzhen.
+
+Now they heard the sound of horns, many, many horns. Lots of motorcycle engines, loud. Diesel exhaust. The huge, bellowing air-horn of the truck their container had been placed upon. The truck stopped and started many times, made a few slow, lumbering turns, then stopped. A moment later, the engines stopped too.
+
+The five of them held their breaths, listened to the footsteps outside, listened to a conversation in Hindi, adult male voices. Listened to the scrape of the catch on the container's big rear doors.
+
+And then sunlight -- dusty, hot, with swirling clouds of dust and the pong of human urine -- flooded into the container. They shielded their eyes and looked into the faces of two grinning Indian men, with fierce mustaches and neatly pressed shirts. The men held out their hands and helped them down, one at a time, into a narrow alley that was entirely filled by the truck, which neatly shielded them from view. Wei-Dong couldn't imagine backing a truck into a space this narrow.
+
+The men gestured at the interior of the container, miming, /{Do you have everything?}/ Wei-Dong and Jie made sure everyone was clear and then nodded. The men waggled their chins at them, shook Wei-Dong and Jie's hands, brief and dry, and edged their way back along the space between the truck and the alley's walls. The engine roared to life, a cloud of diesel blew into their face, and the truck pulled away, lights glowing over a handpainted sign on the bumper that read HORN PLEASE.
+
+The truck blew its horn once as it cleared the alley-mouth and turned an impossibly tight right turn. The alley was flooded with light and noise from the street, and then they saw a man and a girl walking down it, toward them.
+
+They drew close. The girl was wearing some kind of headscarf with a veil that covered most of her face. The man had short, gelled hair and was dressed in a pressed white shirt tucked into black slacks. The two groups stood and looked at one another for a long moment, then the man held his hand out.
+
+"Ashok Balgangadhar Tilak," he said.
+
+"Leonard Goldberg," Leonard said. They shook. It was another short, dry handshake.
+
+The girl held her hand out. "Yasmin Gardez," she said.
+
+She barely took his hand, and the shake was brief.
+
+"We all lead ourselves," Leonard said. He hadn't planned on saying it, but it came out just the same, and Wing understood it and translated it into Chinese, and for a moment, no one needed to say anything more.
+
+"We have places for you to stay in Dharavi," Yasmin said. Leonard translated. "We all want to hear what you have to tell us. And we have work for you, if you want."
+
+"We want to work," Wing said.
+
+"That's good," Ashok said, and they struck out.
+
+They emerged beside a hotel. The street before them thronged with people, more than they could comprehend, and cars, and three-wheelers, and bicycles, and trucks of all sizes. It was a hive of activity that made even Shenzhen seem sedate. For a moment none of them said anything.
+
+"Mumbai is a busy place," Yasmin said.
+
+"We have friends in the Transport and Dock Workers' Union," Ashok said, casually, setting off down the crowded pavement, ignoring the children who approached them, begging, holding their hands out, tugging at their sleeves. Leonard felt as though he was walking through an insane dream. "They were glad to help."
+
+The street ended at the ocean, a huge, shimmering harbor dotted with ferries and other craft. Ahead of them spread an enormous plaza, the size of several football fields stitched together, covered in gardens, and, where it met the ocean, an enormous archway topped with minarets and covered with intricate carvings, and all around them, thousands of people, talking, walking, selling, begging, sleeping, running, riding.
+
+The five of them stopped and gaped. Three days locked in a container with nothing to see that was more than a few yards away had robbed them of the ability to easily focus on large, far-away objects, and it took a long while to get it all into their heads. Yasmin and Ashok indulged them, smiling a little.
+
+"The Gateway of India," Yasmin said, and Leonard translated absently.
+
+To one side stood a hotel as big as the giant conference center hotels near Disneyland, done up like some kind of giant temple, vast and ungainly. Leonard looked at it for a moment, then shooed away the beggars that had approached them. Yasmin scolded them in Hindi and they smiled at her and backed off a few paces, saying something clearly insulting that Yasmin ignored.
+
+"It's incredible," Leonard said.
+
+"Mumbai is..." Ashok waved his hand. "It's amazing. Even where we're going -- the other end of the Harbour Line, our humble home, is incredible. I love it here."
+
+Wing said, "I loved it in China." He looked grave.
+
+"I hope that you can go back again some day," Ashok said. "All of you. All of us. Anywhere we want."
+
+Jie said, "They put down the strikes in China." Leonard translated.
+
+Yasmin and Ashok nodded solemnly. "There will be other strikes," Yasmin said.
+
+A man was approaching them. A white man, pale and obvious among the crowds, trailing a comet-tail of beggars. Leonard saw him first, then Ashok turned to follow his gaze and whispered "Oh, my, this /{is}/ interesting."
+
+The man drew up to them. He was fat, racoon-eyed, hair a wild mess around his head. He was wearing a polo shirt emblazoned with the Coca-Cola Games logo and a pair of blue-jeans that didn't fit him well, and Birkenstocks. He wouldn't have looked more American if he was holding up the Statue of Liberty's torch and singing "Star Spangled Banner."
+
+Ashok held his hand out. "Dr Prikkel, I presume."
+
+"Mr Tilak." They shook. He turned to Leonard. "Leonard, I believe."
+
+Leonard gulped and took the man's hand. He had a firm, American handshake. The four Chinese Webblies were talking among themselves. Leonard whispered to them, explaining who the man was, explaining that he had no idea what he was doing there.
+
+"You'll have to forgive me for the dramatics," Connor Prikkel said. "I knew that I would have to come to Mumbai to meet with you and your extraordinary friends, curiosity demanded it. But once we put our competitive intelligence people onto your organization, it wasn't hard to find a hole in your mail server, and from there we intercepted the details of this meeting. I thought it would make an impression if I came in person."
+
+"Are you going to call the police?" Wing said, in halting English.
+
+Prikkel smiled. "Shit, no, son. What good would that do? There's thousands of you Webbly bastards. No, I figure if Coca Cola Games is going to be doing business with you, it'd be worth sitting down and chatting. Besides, I had some vacation days I needed to use before the end of the year, which meant I didn't have to convince my boss to let me come out here."
+
+They were blocking the sidewalk and getting jostled every few seconds as someone pushed past them. One of them nearly knocked Prikkel into a zippy three-wheeled cab and Ashok caught his arm and steadied him.
+
+"Are you going to fire me?" Leonard said.
+
+Prikkel made a face. "Not my department, but to be totally honest, I think that's probably a good bet. You and the other ones who signed your little petition." He shrugged. "I can do stuff like take money out of that bastard's account when your friend's life is at stake -- it's not like he's gonna complain, right? But how Coke Games contracts with its workforce? Not my department."
+
+Yasmin's eyes blazed. "You can't -- we won't let you."
+
+"That's a rather interesting proposition," he said, and two men holding a ten-foot-long tray filled with round tin lunchpails squeezed past him, knocking him into Jie. "One I think we could certainly have a good time discussing." He gestured toward the huge wedding-cake hotel. "I'm staying at the Taj. Care to join me for lunch?"
+
+Ashok looked at Yasmin, and something unspoken passed between them. "Let us take /{you}/ out for lunch," Ashok said. "As our guest. We know a wonderful place in Dharavi. It's only a short train journey."
+
+Prikkel looked at each of them in turn, then shrugged. "You know what? I'd be honored."
+
+They set off for the train station. Jie snorted. "I can't /{wait}/ to broadcast this." Leonard grinned. He couldn't wait either.
+
+1~acknowledgements- Acknowledgements
+
+Thanks to Russell Galen, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and my beautiful and enormously patient wife Alice -- I couldn't have written this without you three.
+
+Thanks to the Silklisters, Rishab Ghosh, and Ashok Banker and Yoda, Keyan Bowes, Rajeev Suri, Sachin Janghel, Vishal Gondal, Sushant Bhalerao and Menyu Singhfor all your assistance in Mumbai.
+
+Thanks to LemonED, Andrew Lih, Paul Denlinger, Bunnie Huang, Kaiser Kuo, Anne Stevenson-Yang, Leslie Chang, Ethan Zuckerman, John Kennedy, Marilyn Terrell, Peter Hessler, Christine Lu, Jon Phillips, Henry Oh, for invaluable aid in China.
+
+Thanks to Julian Dibbell, Ge Jin, Matthew Chew, James Seng, Jonas Luster, Steven Davis, Dan Kelly and Victor Pineiro for help with the gold farmers.
+
+Thanks to Max Keiser, Alan Wexelblat and Mark Soderstrom for economics advice.
+
+Thanks to Thomas "CmdLn" Gideon, Dan McDonald, Kurt Von Finck, Canonical, Inc, and Ken Snider for tech support!
+
+Thanks to MrBrown and the Singapore bloggers for unforgettable street-dinners.
+
+Thanks also to JP Rangaswami and Marilyn Tyrell.
+
+Many thanks to Ken Macleod for letting me use IWWWW and "Webbly."
+
+1~biography- Bio
+
+GPG key fingerprint: 0BC4 700A 06E2 072D 3A77 F8E2 9026 DBBE 1FC2 37AF
+
+{ Gallery of publicity photos }http://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/sets/72157622138315932/
+
+Cory Doctorow (doctorow@craphound.com / craphound.com ) is the author of several science fiction novels. Some are for adults, others are for young people and adults. He's also the author of a book of essays (/{Content}/, Tachyon Books), a graphic novel (/{Cory Doctorow's Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now}/, IDW) and two collections of short stories, both currently in print from Thunder's Mouth Press.
+
+Born in 1971 in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in London, England with his wonderful wife, Alice, and his scrumptious two year old daughter, Poesy. He formerly served as European Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is a fellow of that organization. He is also affiliated with the Open University Faculty of Computer Science (UK) and the University of Waterloo Independent Studies Program (Canada).
+
+He is the co-editor and co-owner of the widely read blog Boing Boing (boingboing.net) and writes columns for /{The Guardian}/ newspaper, /{Publishers Weekly}/, /{Locus Magazine}/, and /{Make Magazine}/.
+
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+
+{For the Win }http://craphound.com/ftw by Cory Doctorow is licensed under a { Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States }http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ License.
+
diff --git a/data/samples/generic/free_as_in_freedom_2.richard_stallman_and_the_free_software_revolution.sam_williams.richard_stallman.sst b/data/samples/generic/free_as_in_freedom_2.richard_stallman_and_the_free_software_revolution.sam_williams.richard_stallman.sst
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..529f42e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/data/samples/generic/free_as_in_freedom_2.richard_stallman_and_the_free_software_revolution.sam_williams.richard_stallman.sst
@@ -0,0 +1,2549 @@
+% SiSU 4.0
+
+@title: Free as in Freedom (2.0)
+ :subtitle: Richard Stallman and the Free Software Revolution
+
+@creator:
+ :author: Williams, Sam; Stallman, Richard M.
+
+@date:
+ :published: 2010
+
+@rights:
+ :copyright: Copyright (C) Sam Williams 2002; Copyright 2010 Richard M. Stallman
+ :license: Published under the GNU Free Documentation License. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License."
+
+@classify:
+ :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:biography;book:biography;copyright;GNU/Linux:GPL|copyleft|free software;free software;Software:Software Libré;GPL;Linux:GNU|Software Libré;programming
+
+@links:
+ { Home and Source }http://faifzilla.org/
+ { @ Wikipedia }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_as_in_Freedom:_Richard_Stallman%27s_Crusade_for_Free_Software
+ { @ Amazon.com }http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596002874
+ { @ Barnes & Noble }http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0596002874
+
+@make:
+% :headings: none; none; none; Chapter;
+ :breaks: new=:A,:B,:C,1
+ :home_button_text: {Free as in Freedom 2.0}http://stallman.org/; {Free Software Foundation}http://www.fsf.org
+ :footer: {Free as in Freedom 2.0}http://stallman.org/; {Free Software Foundation}http://www.fsf.org
+
+% http://static.fsf.org/nosvn/faif-2.0.pdf
+% http://www.scribd.com/doc/55232810/Free-as-in-Freedom-Richard-Stallman
+
+:A~ @title, Sam Williams, Second Edition Revisions by Richard M. Stallman
+
+1~pre2 [Publisher Information] -#
+
+This is /{Free as in Freedom 2.0: Richard Stallman and the Free Soft-ware Revolution}/ , a revision of /{Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software}/. -#
+
+Copyright c 2002, 2010 Sam Williams \\ Copyright c 2010 Richard M. Stallman -#
+
+Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation;with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNUFree Documentation License." -#
+
+Published by the Free Software Foundation \\
+51 Franklin St., Fifth Floor \\
+Boston, MA 02110-1335 \\
+USA -#
+
+ISBN: 9780983159216 -#
+
+The cover photograph of Richard Stallman is by Peter Hinely. The PDP-10 photograph in Chapter 7 is by Rodney Brooks. The photo-graph of St. IGNUcius in Chapter 8 is by Stian Eikeland -#
+
+1~  Foreword by Richard M. Stallman
+
+I have aimed to make this edition combine the advantages of my knowledge and Williams' interviews and outside viewpoint. The reader can judge to what extent I have achieved this.
+
+I read the published text of the English edition for the first time in 2009 when I was asked to assist in making a French translation of /{Free as in Freedom}/. It called for more than small changes.
+
+Many facts needed correction, but deeper changes were also needed. Williams, a non-programmer, blurred fundamental technical and legal distinctions, such as that between modifying an existing program's code, on the one hand, and implementing some of its ideas in a new program, on the other. Thus, the first edition said that both Gosmacs and GNU Emacs were developed by modifying the original PDP-10 Emacs, which in fact neither one was. Likewise, it mistakenly described Linux as a "version of Minix." SCO later made the same false claim in its infamous lawsuit against IBM, and both Torvalds and Tanenbaum rebutted it.
+
+The first edition over dramatized many events by projecting spurious emotions into them. For instance, it said that I "all but shunned" Linux in 1992, and then made a "a dramatic about-face" by deciding in 1993 to sponsor Debian GNU/Linux. Both my interest in 1993 and my lack of interest in 1992 were pragmatic means to pursue the same end: to complete the GNU system. The launch of the GNU Hurd kernel in 1990 was also a pragmatic move directed at that same end.
+
+For all these reasons, many statements in the original edition were mistaken or incoherent. It was necessary to correct them, but not straightforward to do so with integrity short of a total rewrite, which was undesirable for other reasons. Using explicit notes for the corrections was suggested, but in most chapters the amount of change made explicit notes prohibitive. Some errors were too pervasive or too in-grained to be corrected by notes. Inline or footnotes for the rest would have overwhelmed the text in some places and made the text hard to read; footnotes would have been skipped by readers tired of looking down for them. I have therefore made corrections directly in the text.
+
+However, I have not tried to check all the facts and quotations that are outside my knowledge; most of those I have simply carried forward on Williams' authority.
+
+Williams' version contained many quotations that are critical of me. I have preserved all these, adding rebuttals when appropriate.I have not deleted any quotation, except in chapter 11where I have deleted some that were about open source and did not pertain to my life or work. Likewise I have preserved (and sometimes commented on) most of Williams' own interpretations that criticized me, when they did not represent misunderstanding of facts or technology, but I have freely corrected inaccurate assertions about my work and my thoughts and feelings. I have preserved his personal impressions when presented as such, and "I" in the text of this edition always refers to Williams except in notes labeled "RMS:".
+
+In this edition, the complete system that combines GNU and Linux is always "GNU/Linux," and "Linux" by itself always refers to Torvalds' kernel, except in quotations where the other usage is marked with "[sic]". \\ See http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html for more explanation of why it is erroneous and unfair to call the whole system "Linux."
+
+I would like to thank John Sullivan for his many useful criticisms and suggestions.
+
+1~ Preface by Sam Williams
+
+This summer marks the 10th anniversary of the email exchange that set in motion the writing of /{Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software}/ and, by extension, the work prefaced here, /{Richard Stallman and the Free Software Revolution}/.
+
+Needless to say, a lot has changed over the intervening decade.
+
+Originally conceived in an era of American triumphalism, the book's main storyline - about one man's Jeremiah-like efforts to enlighten fellow software developers as to the ethical, if not economic, shortsightedness of a commercial system bent on turning the free range intellectual culture that gave birth to computer science into a rude agglomeration of proprietary gated communities - seems almost nostalgic, a return to the days when the techno-capitalist system seemed to be working just fine, barring the criticism of a few outlying skeptics.
+
+Now that doubting the system has become almost a common virtue,it helps to look at what narrative threads, if any, remained consistent over the last ten years.
+
+While I don't follow the software industry as closely as I once did, one thing that leaps out now, even more than it did then, is the ease with which ordinary consumers have proven willing to cede vast swaths of private information and personal user liberty in exchange for riding a top the coolest technology "platform" or the latest networking trend.
+
+A few years ago, I might have dubbed this the "iPod Effect," a shorthand salute to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs' unrivaled success in getting both the music industry and digital music listeners to put aside years of doubt and mutual animosity to rally around a single, sexy device - the Apple iPod - and its restrictive licensing regime, iTunes. Were I pitching the story to a magazine or newspaper nowadays, I'd probably have to call it the "iPad Effect" or maybe the "Kindle Effect" both in an attempt to keep up with the evolving brand names and to acknowledge parallel, tectonic shifts in the realm of daily journalism and electronic book publishing.
+
+Lest I appear to be gratuitously plugging the above-mentioned brand names, RMS suggests that I offer equal time to a pair of websites that can spell out their many disadvantages, especially in the realm of software liberty. I have agreed to this suggestion in the spirit of equal time. The web sites he recommends are DefectiveByDesign.org and BadVista.org.
+
+Regardless of title, the notion of corporate brand as sole guarantor of software quality in a swiftly changing world remains a hard one to dislodge, even at a time when most corporate brands are trading at or near historic lows.
+
+Ten years ago, it wasn't hard to find yourself at a technology conference listening in on a conversation (or subjected to direct tutelage) in which some old-timer, Richard Stallman included, offered a compelling vision of an alternate possibility. It was the job of these old-timers, I ultimately realized, to make sure we newbies in the journalism game recognized that the tools we prided ourselves in finally knowing how to use - Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Internet Explorer, just to name a few popular offerings from a single oft-cited vendor - were but a pale shadow of towering edifice the original architects of the personal computer set out to build.
+
+Nowadays, it's almost as if the opposite situation is at hand. The edifice is now a sprawling ecosystem, a jungle teeming with ideas but offering only a few stable niches for sustainable growth. While one can still find plenty of hackers willing to grumble about, say, Vista's on going structural flaws, Apple's dictatorial oversight of the iPhoneApp Store or Google's shifting definition of the word "evil" - each year brings with it a fresh crop of "digital native" consumers willing to trust corporate guidance in this Hobbesian realm. Maybe that's because many of the problems that once made using your desktop computer such a teeth-grinding experience have largely been paved over with the help of free software.
+
+Whatever. As consumer software reliability has improved, the race to stay one step ahead of consumer taste has put application developers in an even tighter embrace with moneyed interests. I'm not saying that the hacker ethos no longer exists or that it has even weakened in any noticeable way. I'm just saying that I doubt the programmer who generated the Facebook algorithm that rewrites the "info" pages so that each keyword points to a sponsored page, with an 80-percent semantic error rate to boot, spends much time in his new Porsche grousing about what the program really could have achieved if only the "suits" hadn't gotten in the way.
+
+True, millions of people now run mostly free software on their computers with many running free software exclusively. From an ordinary consumer perspective, however, terms like "software" and "computer" have become increasingly distant. Many 2010-era cell phones could give a 2000-era laptop a run for its money in the functionality department. And yet, when it comes time to make a cell phone purchase, how many users lend any thought to the computer or software operating system making that functionality possible? The vast majority of modern phone users base their purchasing decisions almost entirely on the number of applications offered, the robustness of the network and, most important of all, the monthly service plan. Getting a consumer in this situation to view his or her software purchase through the lens of personal liberty, as opposed to personal convenience, is becoming, if not more difficult, certainly a more complex endeavor.
+
+Given this form of pessimistic introduction, why should anyone want go on and read this book?
+
+I can offer two major reasons.
+
+The first reason is a personal one. As noted in the Epilogue of /{Free as in Freedom}/, Richard and I parted on less than cordial terms shortly before the publication of that book. The fault, in large part, was mine. Having worked with Richard to make sure that my biographical sketch didn't run afoul of free software principles - an effort that, I'm proud to say, made /{Free as in Freedom}/ one of the first works to employ the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) as a copyright mechanism - I abruptly ended the cooperative relationship when it came time to edit the work and incorporate Richard' lengthy list of error corrections and requests for clarification.
+
+Though able to duck behind my own principles of authorial independence and journalistic objectivity, I have since come to lament not begging the book's publisher - O'Reilly and Associates - for additional time. Because O'Reilly had already granted my one major stipulation - the GFDL - and had already put up with a heavy stream of last-minute changes on my part, however, I was hesitant to push my luck.
+
+In the years immediately following the publication of /{Free as in Freedom}/, I was able to justify my decision by noting that the GFDL, just like the GNU General Public License in the software realm, makes it possible for any reader to modify the book and resell it as a competitive work. As Ernest Hemingway once put it, "the first draft of anything is shit." If Stallman or others within the hacker community saw /{Free as in Freedom}/ as a first draft at best, well, at least I had spared them the time and labor of generating their own first draft.
+
+Now that Richard has indeed delivered what amounts to a significant rewrite, I can only but remain true to my younger self and endorse the effort. Indeed, I salute it. My only remaining hope is that, seeing as how Richard's work doesn't show any sign of slowing, additional documentation gets added to the mix.
+
+Before moving on to the next reason, I should note that one of the pleasant by-products of this book is a re-opening of email communication channels between Richard and myself. The resulting communication has reacquainted me with the razor-sharp Stallman writing style.
+
+An illustrative and perhaps amusing anecdote for anyone out there who has wrangled with Richard in text: In the course of discussing the passage in which I observe and document the process of Richard losing his cool amid the rush hour traffic of Kihei, Maui, a passage that served as the basis for Chapter 7 ("A Brief Journey through Hacker Hell") in the original book, I acknowledged a common complaint among the book's reviewers - namely, that the episode seemed out of place, a fragment of magazine-style profile interrupting a book-length biography. I told Richard that he could discard the episode for that reason alone but noted that my decision to include it was based on two justifications. First, it offered a glimpse of the Stallman temper, something I'd been warned about but had yet to experience in a first hand manner. Second, I felt the overall scene possessed a certain metaphorical value. Hence the chapter title. Stallman, to my surprise, agreed on both counts. His concern lay more in the two off-key words. At one point I quote him accusing the lead driver of our two-vehicle caravan with "deliberately" leading us down a dead-end street, an accusation that, if true, suggested a level of malice outside the bounds of the actual situation. Without the benefit of a recorded transcript - I only had a notebook at the time, I allowed that it was likely I'd mishandled Stallman's actual wording and had made it more hurtful than originally intended.
+
+On a separate issue, meanwhile, Stallman questioned his quoted use of the word "fucking." Again, I didn't have the moment on tape, but I wrote back that I distinctly recalled an impressive display of profanity, a reminder of Richard's New York roots, and was willing to stand by that memory.
+
+An email response from Richard, received the next day, restated the critique in a way that forced me to go back and re-read the first message. As it turned out, Stallman wasn't so much objecting to the "fuck" as the "-ing" portion of the quote.
+
+"Part of the reason I doubt [the words] is that they involve using fucking as an adverb," Stallman wrote. "I have never spoken that way. So I am sure the words are somewhat altered."
+
+"Touch'e".
+
+The second reason a person should feel compelled to read this book cycles back to the opening theme of this preface - how different a future we face in 2010 compared to the one we were still squinting our eyes to see back in 2000. I ll be honest: Like many Americans (and non-Americans), my world view was altered by the events of September 11, 2001, so much so that it wasn't much longer after the publication of /{Free as in Freedom}/ that my attention drifted sharply away from the free software movement and Stallman's efforts to keep it on course. While I have managed to follow the broad trends and major issues, the day-to-day drama surrounding software standards, software copyrights and software patents has become something I largely skip over - the Internet news equivalent of the Water Board notes in the local daily newspaper, in other words.
+
+[RMS: The September 2001 attacks, not mentioned later in the book, deserve brief comment here. Far from "changing everything," as many proclaim, the attacks have, in fact, changed very little in the U.S.: There are still scoundrels in power who hate our freedoms. The only major difference is that they can now cite "terrorists" as an excuse for laws to take them away. See the political notes on stallman.org for more about this.]
+
+This is a lamentable development in large part because, ten years in, I finally see the maturing 21st century in what I believe to be a clear light. Again, if this were a pitch letter to some editor, I'd call it "The Process Century."
+
+By that I mean I we stand at a rare point in history where, all cynicism aside, the power to change the world really does delegate down to the ordinary citizen's level. The catch, of course, is that the same power that belongs to you also belongs to everyone else. Wherein past eras one might have secured change simply by winning the sympathies of a few well-placed insiders, today's reformer must bring into alignment an entire vector field of competitive ideas and interests. In short, being an effective reformer nowadays requires more than just titanic stamina and a willingness to cry out in the wilderness for a decade or more, it requires knowing how to articulate durable, scalable ideas, how to beat the system at its own game.
+
+On all counts, I would argue that Richard M. Stallman, while maybe not the archetype, is at the very least an ur-type of the successful reformer just described.
+
+While some might lament a future in which every problem seems to take a few decades of committee meetings and sub-committee hearings just to reach the correction stage, I, for one, see the alternative - a future so responsive to individual or small group action that some self-appointed actor finally decides to put that responsiveness to the test- as too chilling to contemplate.
+
+In short, if you are the type of person who, like me, hopes to seethe 21st century follow a less bloody course than the 20th century, the Water Board - in its many frustrating guises - is where that battle is currently being fought. As hinted by the Virgil-inspired epigraph introducing the book's first chapter, I've always held out hope that this book might in some way become a sort of epic poem for the Internet Age. Built around a heroic but flawed central figure, its authorial stamp should be allowed to blur with age.
+
+On that note, I would like to end this preface the same way I always end this preface - with a request for changes and contributions from any reader wishing to improve the text. Appendix B - GNU Free Documentation License offers a guide on your rights as a reader to submit changes, make corrections, or even create your own spin-off version of the book. If you prefer to simply run the changes through Richard or myself, you can find the pertinent contact information on the Free Software Foundation web site. In the meantime, good luck and enjoy the book!
+
+group{
+
+Sam Williams
+Staten Island,
+USA
+
+}group
+
+1~ Chapter 1 - For Want of a Printer
+
+code{
+
+I fear the Greeks. Even when they bring gifts.
+                                     ---Virgil
+                                    The Aeneid
+
+}code
+
+The new printer was jammed, again.
+
+Richard M. Stallman, a staff software programmer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AI Lab), discovered the malfunction the hard way. An hour after sending off a 50-page file to the office laser printer, Stallman, 27, broke off a productive work session to retrieve his documents. Upon arrival, he found only four pages in the printer's tray. To make matters even more frustrating, the four pages belonged to another user, meaning that Stallman's print job and the unfinished portion of somebody else's print job were still trapped somewhere within the electrical plumbing of the lab's computer network.
+={AI Lab (Artificial Intelligence Laboratory);MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology}
+
+Waiting for machines is an occupational hazard when you're a software programmer, so Stallman took his frustration with a grain of salt. Still, the difference between waiting for a machine and waiting on a machine is a sizable one. It wasn't the first time he'd been forced to stand over the printer, watching pages print out one by one. As a person who spent the bulk of his days and nights improving the efficiency of machines and the software programs that controlled them, Stallman felt a natural urge to open up the machine, look at the guts, and seek out the root of the problem.
+
+Unfortunately, Stallman's skills as a computer programmer did not extend to the mechanical-engineering realm. As freshly printed documents poured out of the machine, Stallman had a chance to reflect on other ways to circumvent the printing jam problem.
+
+How long ago had it been that the staff members at the AI Lab had welcomed the new printer with open arms? Stallman wondered. The machine had been a donation from the Xerox Corporation. A cutting edge prototype, it was a modified version of a fast Xerox photocopier. Only instead of making copies, it relied on software data piped in over a computer network to turn that data into professional-looking documents. Created by engineers at the world-famous Xerox Palo Alto Research Facility, it was, quite simply, an early taste of the desktop-printing revolution that would seize the rest of the computing industry by the end of the decade.
+={Xerox Corporation+10:Palo Alto Research Center}
+
+Driven by an instinctual urge to play with the best new equipment, programmers at the AI Lab promptly integrated the new machine into the lab's sophisticated computing infrastructure. The results had been immediately pleasing. Unlike the lab's old printer, the new Xerox machine was fast. Pages came flying out at a rate of one per second, turning a 20-minute print job into a 2-minute print job. The new machine was also more precise. Circles came out looking like circles, not ovals. Straight lines came out looking like straight lines, not low-amplitude sine waves.
+
+It was, for all intents and purposes, a gift too good to refuse.
+
+Once the machine was in use, its flaws began to surface. Chief among the drawbacks was the machine's susceptibility to paper jams. Engineering-minded programmers quickly understood the reason behind the flaw. As a photocopier, the machine generally required the direct oversight of a human operator. Figuring that these human operators would always be on hand to fix a paper jam, if it occurred, Xerox engineers had devoted their time and energies to eliminating other pesky problems. In engineering terms, user diligence was built into the system.
+
+In modifying the machine for printer use, Xerox engineers had changed the user-machine relationship in a subtle but profound way. Instead of making the machine subservient to an individual human operator, they made it subservient to an entire networked population of human operators. Instead of standing directly over the machine, a human user on one end of the network sent his print command through an extended bucket brigade of machines, expecting the desired content to arrive at the targeted destination and in proper form. It wasn't until he finally went to check up on the final output that he realized how little of it had really been printed.
+
+Stallman was hardly the only AI Lab denizen to notice the problem, but he also thought of a remedy. Years before, for the lab's previous printer, Stallman had solved a similar problem by modifying the software program that regulated the printer, on a small PDP-11machine, as well as the Incompatible Timesharing System that ran on the main PDP-10 computer. Stallman couldn't eliminate paper jams, but he could insert software code that made the PDP-11 check the printer periodically, and report jams back to the PDP-10. Stallman also inserted code on the PDP-10 to notify every user with a waiting print job that the printer was jammed. The notice was simple, something along the lines of "The printer is jammed, please fix it," and because it went out to the people with the most pressing need to fix the problem, chances were that one of them would fix it forthwith.
+={PDP-10 computer;PDP-11 computer}
+
+As fixes go, Stallman's was oblique but elegant. It didn't fix the mechanical side of the problem, but it did the next best thing by closing the information loop between user and machine. Thanks to a few additional lines of software code, AI Lab employees could eliminate the 10 or 15 minutes wasted each week in running back and forth to check on the printer. In programming terms, Stallman's fix took advantage of the amplified intelligence of the overall network.
+
+"If you got that message, you couldn't assume somebody else would fix it," says Stallman, recalling the logic. "You had to go to the printer. A minute or two after the printer got in trouble, the two or three people who got messages arrive to fix the machine. Of those two or three people, one of them, at least, would usually know how to fix the problem."
+
+Such clever fixes were a trademark of the AI Lab and its indigenous population of programmers. Indeed, the best programmers at the AI Lab disdained the term programmer, preferring the more slangy occupational title of hacker instead. The job title covered a host of activities - everything from creative mirth making to the improvement of existing software and computer systems. Implicit within the title, however, was the old-fashioned notion of Yankee ingenuity. For a hacker, writing a software program that worked was only the beginning. A hacker would try to display his cleverness (and impress other hackers) by tackling an additional challenge: to make the program particularly fast, small, powerful, elegant, or somehow impressive in a clever way.~{ For more on the term "hacker," see Appendix A - Hack, Hackers, and Hacking. }~
+
+Companies like Xerox made it a policy to donate their products(and software) to places where hackers typically congregated. If hackers used these products, they might go to work for the company later on. In the 60s and early 70s, they also sometimes developed programs that were useful for the manufacturer to distribute to other customers.
+={hackers:philosophy of donating software+7;software:companies donating;source code:Xerox Corporation publishing+32}
+
+When Stallman noticed the jamming tendency in the Xerox laser printer, he thought of applying the old fix or "hack" to this printer. In the course of looking up the Xerox laser-printer software, however, Stallman made a troubling discovery. The printer didn't have any software, at least nothing Stallman or a fellow programmer could read. Until then, most companies had made it a form of courtesy to publish source-code files-readable text files that documented the individual software commands that told a machine what to do. Xerox, in this instance, had provided software files only in compiled, or binary, form. If programmers looked at the files, all they would see was an endless stream of ones and zeroes - gibberish.
+={Xerox Corporation:source code, publishing+31;text file source code, publishing;binary files}
+
+There are programs, called "disassemblers," to convert the ones and zeroes into low-level machine instructions, but figuring out what those instructions actually "do" is a long and hard task, known as "reverse engineering." To reverse engineer this program could have taken more time than five years' worth of jammed printouts. Stallman wasn't desperate enough for that, so he put the problem aside.
+
+Xerox's unfriendly policy contrasted blatantly with the usual practices of the hacker community. For instance, to develop the program for the PDP-11 that ran the old printer, and the program for another PDP-11 that handled display terminals, the AI Lab needed a cross-assembler program to build PDP-11 programs on the PDP-10 main computer. The lab's hackers could have written one, but Stallman, a Harvard student, found such a program at Harvard's computer lab. That program was written to run on the same kind of computer, the PDP-10, albeit with a different operating system. Stallman never knew who had written the program, since the source code did not say. But he brought a copy back to the AI Lab. He then altered the source code to make it run on the AI Lab's Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS). With no muss and little fuss, the AI Lab got the program it needed for its software infrastructure. Stallman even added a few features not found in the original version, making the program more powerful. "We wound up using it for several years," Stallman says.
+={Harvard University:computer labs+2;AI Lab (Artificial Intelligence Laboratory):borrowing source code for}
+
+From the perspective of a 1970s-era programmer, the transaction was the software equivalent of a neighbor stopping by to borrow a power tool or a cup of sugar from a neighbor. The only difference was that in borrowing a copy of the software for the AI Lab, Stallman had done nothing to deprive anyone else of the use of the program. If anything, other hackers gained in the process, because Stallman had introduced additional features that other hackers were welcome to borrow back. For instance, Stallman recalls a programmer at the private engineering firm, Bolt, Beranek & Newman, borrowing the program. He made it run on Twenex and added a few additional features, which Stallman eventually reintegrated into the AI Lab's own source-code archive. The two programmers decided to maintain a common version together, which had the code to run either on ITSor on Twenex at the user's choice.
+={Bolt, Beranek & Newman engineering firm}
+
+"A program would develop the way a city develops," says Stallman, recalling the software infrastructure of the AI Lab. "Parts would get replaced and rebuilt. New things would get added on. But you could always look at a certain part and say, 'Hmm, by the style, I see this part was written back in the early 60s and this part was written in themid-1970s.'"
+
+Through this simple system of intellectual accretion, hackers at the AI Lab and other places built up robust creations. Not every programmer participating in this culture described himself as a hacker, but most shared the sentiments of Richard M. Stallman. If a program or software fix was good enough to solve your problems, it was good enough to solve somebody else's problems. Why not share it out of a simple desire for good karma?
+
+This system of cooperation was being undermined by commercial secrecy and greed, leading to peculiar combinations of secrecy and co-operation. For instance, computer scientists at UC Berkeley had built up a powerful operating system called BSD, based on the Unix system they had obtained from AT&T. Berkeley made BSD available for the cost of copying a tape, but would only give these tapes to schools that could present a $50,000 source license obtained from AT&T. The Berkeley hackers continued to share as much as AT&T let them, but they had not perceived a conflict between the two practices.
+={AT&T;Multics operating system;UC Berkeley:building Unix;Unix operating system;BSD}
+
+Likewise, Stallman was annoyed that Xerox had not provided the source-code files, but not yet angry. He never thought of asking Xerox for a copy. "They had already given us the laser printer," Stallman says. "I could not say they owed us something more. Besides, I took for granted that the absence of source code reflected an intentional decision, and that asking them to change it would be futile."
+
+Good news eventually arrived: word had it that a scientist at the computer-science department at Carnegie Mellon University had a copy of the laser printer source code.
+={Carnegie Mellon University+17}
+
+The association with Carnegie Mellon did not augur well. In 1979, Brian Reid, a doctoral student there, had shocked the community by refusing to share his text-formatting program, dubbed Scribe. This text formatter was the first to have mark-up commands oriented to-wards the desired semantics (such as "emphasize this word" or "this paragraph is a quotation") rather than low-level formatting details("put this word in italics" or "narrow the margins for this paragraph"). Instead Reid sold Scribe to a Pittsburgh-area software company called Unilogic. His graduate-student career ending, Reid says he simply was looking for a way to unload the program on a set of developers that would take pains to keep it from slipping into the public domain.(Why one would consider such an outcome particularly undesirable is not clear.) To sweeten the deal, Reid also agreed to insert a set of time-dependent functions - "time bombs" in software-programmer parlance - that deactivated freely copied versions of the program after a 90-day expiration date. To avoid deactivation, users paid the software company, which then issued a code that defused the internal time-bomb anti-feature.
+={Unilogic software company+1;time bombs, in software;Scribe text-formatting program+1;anti-feature}
+
+For Stallman, this was a betrayal of the programmer ethos, pure and simple. Instead of honoring the notion of share-and-share alike, Reid had inserted a way for companies to compel programmers to pay for information access. But he didn't think deeply about the question, since he didn't use Scribe much.
+
+Unilogic gave the AI Lab a gratis copy to use, but did not remove or mention the time bomb. It worked, for a while; then one day a user reported that Scribe had stopped working. System hacker Howard Cannon spent hours debugging the binary until he found the time-bomb and patched it out. Cannon was incensed, and wasn't shy about telling the other hackers how mad he was that Unilogic had wasted his time with an intentional bug.
+
+Stallman had a Lab-related reason, a few months later, to visit the Carnegie Mellon campus. During that visit, he made a point of looking for the person reported to have the printer software source code. By good fortune, the man was in his office.
+
+In true engineer-to-engineer fashion, the conversation was cordial but blunt. After briefly introducing himself as a visitor from MIT, Stallman requested a copy of the laser-printer source code that he wanted to modify. To his chagrin, the researcher refused.
+
+"He told me that he had promised not to give me a copy," Stallman says.
+
+Memory is a funny thing. Twenty years after the fact, Stallman's mental history tape is blank in places. Not only does he not remember the motivating reason for the trip or even the time of year during which he took it, he also has no recollection of who was on the other end of the conversation. According to Reid, the person most likely to have fielded Stallman's request is Robert Sproull, a former Xerox PARC researcher and current director of Sun Laboratories, a research division of the computer-technology conglomerate Sun Microsystems. During the 1970s, Sproull had been the primary developer of the laser-printer software in question while at Xerox PARC. Around 1980, Sproull took a faculty research position at Carnegie Mellon where he continued his laser-printer work amid other projects.
+={Xerox Corporation:PARC|Palo Alto Research Center;Sproull, Robert (Xerox PARC researcher);Sun Laboratories}
+
+When asked directly about the request, however, Sproull draws a blank. "I can't make a factual comment," writes Sproull via email. "I have absolutely no recollection of the incident."
+
+"The code that Stallman was asking for was leading-edge, state-of-the-art code that Sproull had written in the year or so before going to Carnegie Mellon," recalls Reid. If so, that might indicate a mis-understanding that occurred, since Stallman wanted the source for the program that MIT had used for quite some time, not some newer version. But the question of which version never arose in the brief conversation.
+
+In talking to audiences, Stallman has made repeated reference to the incident, noting that the man's unwillingness to hand over the source code stemmed from a nondisclosure agreement, a contractual agreement between him and the Xerox Corporation giving the signatory access to the software source code in exchange for a promise of secrecy. Now a standard item of business in the software industry, the nondisclosure agreement, or NDA, was a novel development at the time, a reflection of both the commercial value of the laser printer to Xerox and the information needed to run it. "Xerox was at the time trying to make a commercial product out of the laser printer," recalls Reid. "They would have been insane to give away the source code."
+={NDAs (nondisclosure agreements): for source code+13;nondisclosure agreements (NDAs):for source code+13}
+
+For Stallman, however, the NDA was something else entirely. It was a refusal on the part of some CMU researcher to participate in a society that, until then, had encouraged software programmers to regard programs as communal resources. Like a peasant whose centuries-old irrigation ditch had grown suddenly dry, Stallman had followed the ditch to its source only to find a brand-spanking-new hydroelectric dam bearing the Xerox logo.
+
+For Stallman, the realization that Xerox had compelled a fellow programmer to participate in this newfangled system of compelled secrecy took a while to sink in. In the first moment, he could only seethe refusal in a personal context. "I was so angry I couldn't think of a way to express it. So I just turned away and walked out without another word," Stallman recalls. "I might have slammed the door. Who knows? All I remember is wanting to get out of there. I went to his office expecting him to cooperate, so I had not thought about how I would respond if he refused. When he did, I was stunned speechless as well as disappointed and angry."
+
+Twenty years after the fact, the anger still lingers, and Stallman presents the event as one that made him confront an ethical issue, though not the only such event on his path. Within the next few months, a series of events would befall both Stallman and the AI Lab hacker community that would make 30 seconds worth of tension in a remote Carnegie Mellon office seem trivial by comparison. Nevertheless, when it comes time to sort out the events that would transform Stallman from a lone hacker, instinctively suspicious of centralized authority, to a crusading activist applying traditional notions of liberty, equality, and fraternity to the world of software development, Stallman singles out the Carnegie Mellon encounter for special attention.
+
+"It was my first encounter with a nondisclosure agreement, and it immediately taught me that nondisclosure agreements have victims," says Stallman, firmly. "In this case I was the victim. [My lab and I]were victims."
+
+Stallman later explained, "If he had refused me his cooperation for personal reasons, it would not have raised any larger issue. I might have considered him a jerk, but no more. The fact that his refusal was impersonal, that he had promised in advance to be uncooperative, not just to me but to anyone whatsoever, made this a larger issue."
+
+Although previous events had raised Stallman's ire, he says it wasn't until his Carnegie Mellon encounter that he realized the events were beginning to intrude on a culture he had long considered sacrosanct. He said, "I already had an idea that software should be shared, but I wasn't sure how to think about that. My thoughts weren't clear and organized to the point where I could express them in a concise fashion to the rest of the world. After this experience, I started to recognize what the issue was, and how big it was."
+
+As an elite programmer at one of the world's elite institutions, Stallman had been perfectly willing to ignore the compromises and bargains of his fellow programmers just so long as they didn't interfere with his own work. Until the arrival of the Xerox laser printer, Stallman had been content to look down on the machines and programs other computer users grimly tolerated.
+
+Now that the laser printer had insinuated itself within the AI Lab's network, however, something had changed. The machine worked fine, barring the paper jams, but the ability to modify software according to personal taste or community need had been taken away. From the viewpoint of the software industry, the printer software represented a change in business tactics. Software had become such a valuable asset that companies no longer accepted the need to publicize source code, especially when publication meant giving potential competitors a chance to duplicate something cheaply. From Stallman's viewpoint, the printer was a Trojan Horse. After a decade of failure, software that users could not change and redistribute - future hackers would use the term "proprietary" software - had gained a foothold inside the AI Lab through the sneakiest of methods. It had come disguised as a gift.
+={proprietary software}
+
+That Xerox had offered some programmers access to additional gifts in exchange for secrecy was also galling, but Stallman takes pains to note that, if presented with such a quid pro quo bargain at a younger age, he just might have taken the Xerox Corporation up on its offer. The anger of the Carnegie Mellon encounter, however, had a firming effect on Stallman's own moral lassitude. Not only did it give him the necessary anger to view such future offers with suspicion, it also forced him to turn the situation around: what if a fellow hacker dropped into Stallman's office someday and it suddenly became Stallman's job to refuse the hacker's request for source code?
+
+"When somebody invited me to betray all my colleagues in that way, I remembered how angry I was when somebody else had done that to me and my whole lab," Stallman says. "So I said, 'Thank you very much for offering me this nice software package, but I can't accept it on the conditions that you're asking for, so I'm going to do without it.'"
+
+It was a lesson Stallman would carry with him through the tumultuous years of the 1980s, a decade during which many of his MIT colleagues would depart the AI Lab and sign nondisclosure agreements of their own. They may have told themselves that this was a necessary evil so they could work on the best projects. For Stallman, however, the NDA called the moral legitimacy of the project into question. What good is a technically exciting project if it is meant to be withheld from the community?
+
+As Stallman would quickly learn, refusing such offers involved more than personal sacrifice. It involved segregating himself from fellow hackers who, though sharing a similar distaste for secrecy, tended to express that distaste in a more morally flexible fashion. Refusing another's request for source code, Stallman decided, was not only a betrayal of the scientific mission that had nurtured software development since the end of World War II, it was a violation of the Golden Rule, the baseline moral dictate to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
+
+Hence the importance of the laser printer and the encounter that resulted from it. Without it, Stallman says, his life might have followed a more ordinary path, one balancing the material comforts of a commercial programmer with the ultimate frustration of a life spent writing invisible software code. There would have been no sense of clarity, no urgency to address a problem others weren't addressing. Most importantly, there would have been no righteous anger, an emotion that, as we soon shall see, has propelled Stallman's career as surely as any political ideology or ethical belief.
+
+"From that day forward, I decided this was something I could never participate in," says Stallman, alluding to the practice of trading personal liberty for the sake of convenience - Stallman's description of the NDA bargain - as well as the overall culture that encouraged such ethically suspect deal-making in the first place. "I decided never to make other people victims as I had been a victim."
+
+1~ Chapter 2 - 2001: A Hacker's Odyssey
+
+The New York University computer-science department sits inside Warren Weaver Hall, a fortress-like building located two blocks east of Washington Square Park. Industrial-strength air-conditioning vents create a surrounding moat of hot air, discouraging loiterers and solicitors alike. Visitors who breach the moat encounter another formidable barrier, a security check-in counter immediately inside the building's single entryway.
+={Warren Weaver Hall+2;New York University computer science department+44}
+
+Beyond the security checkpoint, the atmosphere relaxes somewhat. Still, numerous signs scattered throughout the first floor preach the dangers of unsecured doors and propped-open fire exits. Taken as a whole, the signs offer a reminder: even in the relatively tranquil confines of pre-September 11, 2001, New York, one can never be too careful or too suspicious.
+
+The signs offer an interesting thematic counterpoint to the growing number of visitors gathering in the hall's interior atrium. A few look like NYU students. Most look like shaggy-haired concert-goers milling outside a music hall in anticipation of the main act. For one brief morning, the masses have taken over Warren Weaver Hall, leaving the nearby security attendant with nothing better to do but watch Ricki Lake on TV and shrug her shoulders toward the nearby auditorium whenever visitors ask about "the speech."
+
+Once inside the auditorium, a visitor finds the person who has forced this temporary shutdown of building security procedures. The person is Richard M. Stallman, founder of the GNU Project, original president of the Free Software Foundation, winner of the 1990 MacArthur Fellowship, winner of the Association of Computing Machinery's Grace Murray Hopper Award (also in 1990), co-recipient of the Takeda Foundation's 2001 Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment, and former AI Lab hacker. As announced over a host of hacker-related web sites, including the GNU Project's own http://www.gnu.org site, Stallman is in Manhattan, his former hometown, to deliver a much anticipated speech in rebuttal to the Microsoft Corporation's recent campaign against the GNU General Public License.
+={Free Software Foundation (FSF)+1;FSF (Free Software Foundation);GNU General Public License+1;GNU Project:web site for;GPL+1;MacArthur Fellowship Program;Microsoft Corporation+8}
+
+The subject of Stallman's speech is the history and future of the free software movement. The location is significant. Less than a month before, Microsoft senior vice president Craig Mundie appeared at the nearby NYU Stern School of Business, delivering a speech blasting the GNU General Public License, or GNU GPL, a legal device originally conceived by Stallman 16 years before. Built to counteract the growing wave of software secrecy overtaking the computer industry - a wave first noticed by Stallman during his 1980 troubles with the Xerox laser printer - the GPL has evolved into a central tool of the free software community. In simplest terms, the GPL establishes a form of communal ownership - what today's legal scholars now call the "digital commons" - through the legal weight of copyright. The GPL makes this irrevocable; once an author gives code to the community in this way, that code can't be made proprietary by anyone else. Derivative versions must carry the same copyright license, if they use a substantial amount of the original source code. For this reason, critics of the GPL have taken to calling it a "viral" license, suggesting inaccurately that it spreads itself to every software program it touches.~{ Actually, the GPL's powers are not quite that potent: just putting your code in the same computer with a GPL-covered program does not put your code under the GPL. "To compare something to a virus is very harsh," says Stallman. "A spider plant is a more accurate comparison; it goes to another place if you actively take a cutting." For more information on the GNU General Public License, \\ visit http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html. }~
+={Mundie, Craig+2;NYU Stern School of Business;Stern School of Business (NYU)}
+
+In an information economy increasingly dependent on software and increasingly beholden to software standards, the GPL has become the proverbial "big stick." Even companies that once derided it as "software socialism" have come around to recognize the benefits. Linux, the kernel developed by Finnish college student Linus Torvalds in 1991, is licensed under the GPL, as are most parts of the GNU system: GNU Emacs, the GNU Debugger, the GNU C Compiler, etc. Together, these tools form the components of the free software GNU/Linux operating system, developed, nurtured, and owned by the worldwide hacker community. Instead of viewing this community as a threat, high-tech companies like IBM, Hewlett Packard, and Sun Microsystems have come to rely upon it, selling software applications and services built to ride atop the ever-growing free software infrastructure.~{ Although these applications run on GNU/Linux, it does not follow that they are themselves free software. On the contrary, most of them applications are proprietary software, and respect your freedom no more than Windows does. They may contribute to the success of GNU/Linux, but they don't contribute to the goal of freedom for which it exists. }~
+={C Compiler (GNU);GNU Debugger (GDB);GDB (GNU Debugger);Debugger;Emacs text editor;GNU Emacs;GNU C Compiler (GCC)+9;GCC (GNU C Compiler);Hewlett Packard:free software community and;IBM:free software community and;Linux;Torvalds, Linus;Sun Microsystems: free software community and}
+
+They've also come to rely upon it as a strategic weapon in the hacker community's perennial war against Microsoft, the Redmond, Washington-based company that has dominated the PC-software marketplace since the late 1980s. As owner of the popular Windows operating system, Microsoft stands to lose the most in an industry-wide shift to the GPL license. Each program in the Windows colossus is covered by copyrights and contracts (End User License Agreements, or EULAs) asserting the proprietary status of the executable, as well as the underlying source code that users can't get anyway. Incorporating code protected by the "viral" GPL into one of these programs is forbidden; to comply with the GPL's requirements, Microsoft would be legally required to make that whole program free software. Rival companies could then copy, modify, and sell improved versions of it, taking away the basis of Microsoft's lock over the users.
+={Windows (Microsoft):source code and;open source:software development, approach to;Redmond (Washington)}
+
+Hence the company's growing concern over the GPL's rate of adoption. Hence the recent Mundie speech blasting the GPL and the "open source" approach to software development and sales. (Microsoft does not even acknowledge the term "free software," preferring to use its attacks to direct attention towards the apolitical "open source" camp described in chapter 11, and away from the free software movement.) And hence Stallman's decision to deliver a public rebuttal to that speech on the same campus here today.
+
+20 years is a long time in the software industry. Consider this: in 1980, when Richard Stallman was cursing the AI Lab's Xerox laser printer, Microsoft, which dominates the worldwide software industry, was still a privately held startup. IBM, the company then regarded as the most powerful force in the computer hardware industry, had yet to introduce its first personal computer, thereby igniting the current low-cost PC market. Many of the technologies we now take for granted - the World Wide Web, satellite television, 32-bit video-game consoles - didn't even exist. The same goes for many of the companies that now fill the upper echelons of the corporate establishment, companies like AOL, Sun Microsystems, Amazon.com, Compaq, and Dell. The list goes on and on.
+={Amazon.com;AOL (America OnLine);Compaq computers;Dell computers;PCs (personal computers);personal computers (PCs)}
+
+Among those who value progress above freedom, the fact that the high-technology marketplace has come so far in such little time is cited both for and against the GNU GPL. Some argue in favor of the GPL, pointing to the short lifespan of most computer hardware platforms. Facing the risk of buying an obsolete product, consumers tend to flock to companies with the best long-term survival. As a result, the software marketplace has become a winner-take-all arena.~{ See Shubha Ghosh, "Revealing the Microsoft Windows Source Code," Gi-galaw.com (January, 2000), \\ http://www.gigalaw.com/. }~ The proprietary software environment, they say, leads to monopoly abuse and stagnation. Strong companies suck all the oxygen out of the marketplace for rival competitors and innovative startups. Others argue just the opposite. Selling software is just as risky, if not more risky, than buying software, they say. Without the legal guarantees provided by proprietary software licenses, not to mention the economic prospects of a privately owned "killer app" (i.e., a break-through technology that launches an entirely new market),~{ Killer apps don't have to be proprietary. Still, I think the reader gets the point: the software marketplace is like the lottery. The bigger the potential pay-off, the more people want to participate. For a good summary of the killer-app phenomenon, see Philip Ben-David, "Whatever Happened to the 'Killer App'?", e-Commerce News (December 7, 2000), \\ http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/5893.html. }~ companies lose the incentive to participate. Once again, the market stagnates and innovation declines. As Mundie himself noted in his May 3rd address on the same campus, the GPL's "viral" nature "poses a threat" to any company that relies on the uniqueness of its software as a competitive asset. Added Mundie:
+={Mundie, Craig+3}
+
+_1 It also fundamentally undermines the independent commercial software sector because it effectively makes it impossible to distribute software on a basis where recipients pay for the product rather than just the cost of distribution.~{ See Craig Mundie, "The Commercial Software Model," senior vice president, Microsoft Corp., excerpted from an online transcript of Mundie's May 3, 2001, speech to the New York University Stern School of Business, \\ http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/craig/05-03sharedsource.asp. }~
+
+The mutual success of GNU/Linux and Windows over the last 10years suggests that both sides on this question are sometimes right. However, free software activists such as Stallman think this is a side issue. The real question, they say, isn't whether free or proprietary software will succeed more, it's which one is more ethical.
+
+Nevertheless, the battle for momentum is an important one in the software industry. Even powerful vendors such as Microsoft rely on the support of third-party software developers whose tools, programs, and computer games make an underlying software platform such as Windows more attractive to the mainstream consumer. Citing the rapid evolution of the technology marketplace over the last 20 years, not to mention his own company's impressive track record during that period, Mundie advised listeners to not get too carried away by the free software movement's recent momentum:
+={GNU Project:Linux and, mutual success of;Linux:GNU Project and;third-party software developers supporting Microsoft}
+
+_1 Two decades of experience have shown that an economic model that protects intellectual property and a business model that recoups research and development costs can create impressive economic benefits and distribute them very broadly.~{ /{Ibid.}/ }~
+
+Such admonitions serve as the backdrop for Stallman's speech today. Less than a month after their utterance, Stallman stands with his back to one of the chalk boards at the front of the room, edgy to begin.
+
+If the last two decades have brought dramatic changes to the software marketplace, they have brought even more dramatic changes to Stallman himself. Gone is the skinny, clean-shaven hacker who once spent his entire days communing with his beloved PDP-10. In his place stands a heavy-set middle-aged man with long hair and rabbinical beard, a man who now spends the bulk of his time writing and answering email, haranguing fellow programmers, and giving speeches like the one today. Dressed in an aqua-colored T-shirt and brown polyester pants, Stallman looks like a desert hermit who just stepped out of a Salvation Army dressing room.
+
+The crowd is filled with visitors who share Stallman's fashion and grooming tastes. Many come bearing laptop computers and cellular modems, all the better to record and transmit Stallman's words to a waiting Internet audience. The gender ratio is roughly 15 males to 1 female, and 1 of the 7 or 8 females in the room comes in bearing a stuffed penguin, the official Linux mascot, while another carries a stuffed teddy bear.
+
+Agitated, Stallman leaves his post at the front of the room and takes a seat in a front-row chair, tapping commands into an already-opened laptop. For the next 10 minutes Stallman is oblivious to the growing number of students, professors, and fans circulating in front of him at the foot of the auditorium stage.
+
+Before the speech can begin, the baroque rituals of academic formality must be observed. Stallman's appearance merits not one but two introductions. Mike Uretsky, co-director of the Stern School's Center for Advanced Technology, provides the first.
+={Uretsky, Mike+5}
+
+"The role of a university is to foster debate and to have interesting discussions," Uretsky says. "This particular presentation, this seminar falls right into that mold. I find the discussion of open source particularly interesting."
+
+Before Uretsky can get another sentence out, Stallman is on his feet waving him down like a stranded motorist.
+
+"I do free software," Stallman says to rising laughter. "Open source is a different movement.
+
+"The laughter gives way to applause. The room is stocked with Stallman partisans, people who know of his reputation for verbal exactitude, not to mention his much publicized 1998 falling out with the open source software proponents. Most have come to anticipate such outbursts the same way radio fans once waited for Jack Benny's trademark, "Now cut that out!" phrase during each radio program.
+
+Uretsky hastily finishes his introduction and cedes the stage to Edmond Schonberg, a professor in the NYU computer-science department. As a computer programmer and GNU Project contributor, Schonberg knows which linguistic land mines to avoid. He deftly summarizes Stallman's career from the perspective of a modern-day programmer.
+={Schonberg, Ed.+2}
+
+"Richard is the perfect example of somebody who, by acting locally, started thinking globally [about] problems concerning the un-availability of source code," says Schonberg. "He has developed a coherent philosophy that has forced all of us to reexamine our ideas of how software is produced, of what intellectual property means, and of what the software community actually represents."~{ If this were to be said today, Stallman would object to the term "intellectual property" as carrying bias and confusion. \\ See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html. }~
+
+Schonberg welcomes Stallman to more applause. Stallman takes a moment to shut off his laptop, rises out of his chair, and takes the stage.
+
+At first, Stallman's address seems more Catskills comedy routine than political speech. "I'd like to thank Microsoft for providing me the opportunity to be on this platform," Stallman wisecracks. "For the past few weeks, I have felt like an author whose book was fortuitously banned somewhere."
+
+For the uninitiated, Stallman dives into a quick free software warm-up analogy. He likens a software program to a cooking recipe. Both provide useful step-by-step instructions on how to complete a desired task and can be easily modified if a user has special desires or circumstances. "You don't have to follow a recipe exactly," Stallman notes. "You can leave out some ingredients. Add some mushrooms, 'cause you like mushrooms. Put in less salt because your doctor said you should cut down on salt - whatever."
+
+Most importantly, Stallman says, software programs and recipes are both easy to share. In giving a recipe to a dinner guest, a cook loses little more than time and the cost of the paper the recipe was written on. Software programs require even less, usually a few mouse-clicks and a modicum of electricity. In both instances, however, the person giving the information gains two things: increased friendship and the ability to borrow interesting recipes in return.
+
+"Imagine what it would be like if recipes were packaged inside black boxes," Stallman says, shifting gears. "You couldn't see what ingredients they're using, let alone change them, and imagine if you made a copy for a friend. They would call you a pirate and try to put you in prison for years. That world would create tremendous outrage from all the people who are used to sharing recipes. But that is exactly what the world of proprietary software is like. A world in which common decency towards other people is prohibited or prevented."
+
+With this introductory analogy out of the way, Stallman launches into a retelling of the Xerox laser-printer episode. Like the recipe analogy, the laser-printer story is a useful rhetorical device. With its parable-like structure, it dramatizes just how quickly things can change in the software world. Drawing listeners back to an era before Amazon.com one-click shopping, Microsoft Windows, and Oracle databases, it asks the listener to examine the notion of software ownership free of its current corporate logos.
+
+Stallman delivers the story with all the polish and practice of a local district attorney conducting a closing argument. When he gets to the part about the Carnegie Mellon professor refusing to lend him a copy of the printer source code, Stallman pauses.
+
+"He had betrayed us," Stallman says. "But he didn't just do it to us. Chances are he did it to you."
+
+On the word "you," Stallman points his index finger accusingly at an unsuspecting member of the audience. The targeted audience member's eyebrows flinch slightly, but Stallman's own eyes have moved on. Slowly and deliberately, Stallman picks out a second listener to nervous titters from the crowd. "And I think, mostly likely, he did it to you, too," he says, pointing at an audience member three rows behind the first.
+
+By the time Stallman has a third audience member picked out, the titters have given away to general laughter. The gesture seems a bit staged, because it is. Still, when it comes time to wrap up the Xerox laser-printer story, Stallman does so with a showman's flourish. "He probably did it to most of the people here in this room - except a few, maybe, who weren't born yet in 1980," Stallman says, drawing more laughs. "[That's] because he had promised to refuse to cooperate with just about the entire population of the planet Earth."
+
+Stallman lets the comment sink in for a half-beat. "He had signed a nondisclosure agreement," Stallman adds.
+
+Richard Matthew Stallman's rise from frustrated academic to political leader over the last 20 years speaks to many things. It speaks to Stallman's stubborn nature and prodigious will. It speaks to the clearly articulated vision and values of the free software movement Stallman helped build. It speaks to the high-quality software programs Stallman has built, programs that have cemented Stallman's reputation as a programming legend. It speaks to the growing momentum of the GPL, a legal innovation that many Stallman observers see as his most momentous accomplishment.
+
+Most importantly, it speaks to the changing nature of political power in a world increasingly beholden to computer technology and the software programs that power that technology.
+
+Maybe that's why, even at a time when most high-technology stars are on the wane, Stallman's star has grown. Since launching the GNU Project in 1984,~{ The acronym GNU stands for "GNU's not Unix." In another portion of the May 29, 2001, NYU speech, Stallman summed up the acronym's origin: \\ We hackers always look for a funny or naughty name for a program, because naming a program is half the fun of writing the program. We also had a tradition of recursive acronyms, to say that the program that you're writing is similar to some existing program... I looked for a recursive acronym for Something Is Not UNIX. And I tried all 26 letters and discovered that none of them was a word. I decided to make it a contraction. That way I could have a three-letter acronym, for Something's Not UNIX. And I tried letters, and I came across the word "GNU." That was it. \\ Although a fan of puns, Stallman recommends that software users pronounce the "g" at the beginning of the acronym (i.e., "gah-new").Not only does this avoid confusion with the word "gnu," the name of the African antelope, Connochaetes gnou, it also avoids confusion with the adjective "new." "We've been working on it for 17 years now, so it is not exactly new any more," Stallman says. \\ Source: author notes and online transcript of "Free Software: Freedom and Cooperation," Richard Stallman's May 29, 2001, speech at New York University, \\  http://www.gnu.org/events/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt. }~ Stallman has been at turns ignored, satirized, vilified, and attacked-both from within and without the free software movement. Through it all, the GNU Project has managed to meet its milestones, albeit with a few notorious delays, and stay relevant in a software marketplace several orders of magnitude more complex than the one it entered 18 years ago. So too has the free software ideology, an ideology meticulously groomed by Stallman himself.
+
+To understand the reasons behind this currency, it helps to examine Richard Stallman both in his own words and in the words of the people who have collaborated and battled with him along the way. The Richard Stallman character sketch is not a complicated one. If any person exemplifies the old adage "what you see is what you get," it's Stallman.
+
+"I think if you want to understand Richard Stallman the human being, you really need to see all of the parts as a consistent whole," advises Eben Moglen, legal counsel to the Free Software Foundation and professor of law at Columbia University Law School. "All those personal eccentricities that lots of people see as obstacles to getting to know Stallman really 'are' Stallman: Richard's strong sense of personal frustration, his enormous sense of principled ethical commitment, his inability to compromise, especially on issues he considers fundamental. These are all the very reasons Richard did what he did when he did."
+={Columbia University;Moglen, Eben+2}
+
+Explaining how a journey that started with a laser printer would eventually lead to a sparring match with the world's richest corporation is no easy task. It requires a thoughtful examination of the forces that have made software ownership so important in today's society. It also requires a thoughtful examination of a man who, like many political leaders before him, understands the malleability of human memory. It requires an ability to interpret the myths and politically laden codewords that have built up around Stallman over time. Finally, it requires an understanding of Stallman's genius as a programmer and his failures and successes in translating that genius to other pursuits.
+
+When it comes to offering his own summary of the journey, Stallman acknowledges the fusion of personality and principle observed by Moglen. "Stubbornness is my strong suit," he says. "Most people who attempt to do anything of any great difficulty eventually get discouraged and give up. I never gave up."
+
+He also credits blind chance. Had it not been for that run-in over the Xerox laser printer, had it not been for the personal and political conflicts that closed out his career as an MIT employee, had it not been for a half dozen other timely factors, Stallman finds it very easy to picture his life following a different career path. That being said, Stallman gives thanks to the forces and circumstances that put him in the position to make a difference.
+
+"I had just the right skills," says Stallman, summing up his decision for launching the GNU Project to the audience. "Nobody was there but me, so I felt like, 'I'm elected. I have to work on this. If not me, who?'"
+
+1~ Chapter 3 - A Portrait of the Hacker as a Young Man
+={Stallman, Richard M.:childhood+61}
+
+Richard Stallman's mother, Alice Lippman, still remembers the moment she realized her son had a special gift.
+={Lippman, Alice+60}
+
+"I think it was when he was eight," Lippman recalls.
+
+The year was 1961, and Lippman, a recently divorced single mother, was whiling away a weekend afternoon within the family's tiny one-bedroom apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Leafing throug ha copy of Scientific American, Lippman came upon her favorite section, the Martin Gardner-authored column titled "Mathematical Games." A substitute art teacher at the time, Lippman enjoyed Gardner's column for the brain-teasers it provided. With her son already ensconced in a book on the nearby sofa, Lippman decided to take a crack at solving the week's feature puzzle.
+
+"I wasn't the best person when it came to solving the puzzles," she admits. "But as an artist, I found they really helped me work through conceptual barriers."
+
+Lippman says her attempt to solve the puzzle met an immediate brick wall. About to throw the magazine down in disgust, Lippman was surprised by a gentle tug on her shirt sleeve.
+
+"It was Richard," she recalls, "He wanted to know if I needed any help."
+
+Looking back and forth, between the puzzle and her son, Lippman says she initially regarded the offer with skepticism. "I asked Richard if he'd read the magazine," she says. "He told me that, yes, he had and what's more he'd already solved the puzzle. The next thing I know, he starts explaining to me how to solve it."
+
+Hearing the logic of her son's approach, Lippman's skepticism quickly gave way to incredulity. "I mean, I always knew he was a bright boy," she says, "but this was the first time I'd seen anything that suggested how advanced he really was."
+
+Thirty years after the fact, Lippman punctuates the memory with a laugh. "To tell you the truth, I don't think I ever figured out how to solve that puzzle," she says. "All I remember is being amazed he knew the answer."
+
+Seated at the dining-room table of her second Manhattan apartment - the same spacious three-bedroom complex she and her son moved to following her 1967 marriage to Maurice Lippman, now deceased - Alice Lippman exudes a Jewish mother's mixture of pride and bemusement when recalling her son's early years. The nearby dining-room credenza offers an eight-by-ten photo of Stallman glowering in full beard and doctoral robes. The image dwarfs accompanying photos of Lippman's nieces and nephews, but before a visitor can make too much of it, Lippman makes sure to balance its prominent placement with an ironic wisecrack."
+={Lippman, Maurice}
+
+Richard insisted I have it after he received his honorary doctorate at the University of Glasgow," says Lippman. "He said to me, 'Guess what, mom? It's the first graduation I ever attended.'"~{ One of the major background sources for this chapter was the interview "Richard Stallman: High School Misfit, Symbol of Free Software, MacArthur-Certified Genius" by Michael Gross, author of the 1999 book Talking About My Generation , a collection of interviews with notable personalities from the so-called "Baby Boom" generation. Although Stallman did not make it into the book, Gross published the interview as an online supplement to the book's web site. The URL for the interview has changed several times since I first came across it. According to various readers who have gone searching for it, you can now find the interview at \\ http://www.mgross.com/MoreThgsChng/interviews/stallman1.html. }~
+={University of Glasgow}
+
+Such comments reflect the sense of humor that comes with raising a child prodigy. Make no mistake, for every story Lippman hears and reads about her son's stubbornness and unusual behavior, she can deliver at least a dozen in return.
+
+"He used to be so conservative," she says, throwing up her hands in mock exasperation. "We used to have the worst arguments right here at this table. I was part of the first group of public city school teachers that struck to form a union, and Richard was very angry with me. He saw unions as corrupt. He was also very opposed to social security. He thought people could make much more money investing it on their own. Who knew that within 10 years he would become so idealistic? All I remember is his stepsister coming to me and saying, 'What is he going to be when he grows up? A fascist?'"~{ RMS: I don't remember telling her this. All I can say is I strongly disagree with those views now. When I was in my teens, I lacked compassion for the difficulties most people encounter in life; my problems were different. I did not appreciate how the wealthy will reduce most people to poverty unless we organize at all levels to stop them. I did not understand how hard it is for most people to resist social pressure to do foolish things, such as spend all their money instead of saving, since I hardly even noticed the pressure myself. In addition, unions in the 60s, when they were very powerful, were sometimes arrogant or corrupt. But they are much weaker today, and the result is that economic growth, when it occurs, benefits mainly the rich. }~
+
+As a single parent for nearly a decade - she and Richard's father, Daniel Stallman, were married in 1948, divorced in 1958, and split custody of their son afterwards - Lippman can attest to her son's aversion to authority. She can also attest to her son's lust for knowledge. It was during the times when the two forces intertwined, Lippman says, that she and her son experienced their biggest battles.
+={Stallman, Daniel}
+
+"It was like he never wanted to eat," says Lippman, recalling the behavior pattern that set in around age eight and didn't let up until her son's high-school graduation in 1970. "I'd call him for dinner, and he'd never hear me. I'd have to call him 9 or 10 times just to get his attention. He was totally immersed."
+
+Stallman, for his part, remembers things in a similar fashion, albeit with a political twist.
+
+"I enjoyed reading," he says. "If I wanted to read, and my mother told me to go to the kitchen and eat or go to sleep, I wasn't going to listen. I saw no reason why I couldn't read. No reason why she should be able to tell me what to do, period. Essentially, what I had read about, ideas such as democracy and individual freedom, I applied to myself. I didn't see any reason to exclude children from these principles."
+
+The belief in individual freedom over arbitrary authority extended to school as well. Two years ahead of his classmates by age 11, Stallman endured all the usual frustrations of a gifted public-school student. It wasn't long after the puzzle incident that his mother attended the first in what would become a long string of parent-teacher conferences.
+
+"He absolutely refused to write papers," says Lippman, recalling an early controversy. "I think the last paper he wrote before his senior year in high school was an essay on the history of the number system in the west for a fourth-grade teacher." To be required to choose a specific topic when there was nothing he actually wanted to write about was almost impossible for Stallman, and painful enough to make him go to great lengths to avoid such situations.
+
+Gifted in anything that required analytical thinking, Stallman gravitated toward math and science at the expense of his other studies. What some teachers saw as single-mindedness, however, Lippman saw as impatience. Math and science offered simply too much opportunity to learn, especially in comparison to subjects and pursuits for which her son seemed less naturally inclined. Around age 10 or 11, when the boys in Stallman's class began playing a regular game of touch football, she remembers her son coming home in a rage. "He wanted to play so badly, but he just didn't have the coordination skills," Lippman recalls. "It made him so angry."
+
+The anger eventually drove her son to focus on math and science all the more. Even in the realm of science, however, her son's impatience could be problematic. Poring through calculus textbooks by age seven, Stallman saw little need to dumb down his discourse for adults. Sometime, during his middle-school years, Lippman hired a student from nearby Columbia University to play big brother to her son. The student left the family's apartment after the first session and never came back. "I think what Richard was talking about went over his head," Lippman speculates.
+
+Another favorite maternal memory dates back to the early 1960s, shortly after the puzzle incident. Around age seven, two years after the divorce and relocation from Queens, Richard took up the hobby of launching model rockets in nearby Riverside Drive Park. What started as aimless fun soon took on an earnest edge as her son began recording the data from each launch. Like the interest in mathematical games,the pursuit drew little attention until one day, just before a major NASA launch, Lippman checked in on her son to see if he wanted to watch.
+
+"He was fuming," Lippman says. "All he could say to me was, 'But I'm not published yet.' Apparently he had something that he really wanted to show NASA." Stallman doesn't remember the incident, but thinks it more likely that he was anguished because he didn't have anything to show.
+
+Such anecdotes offer early evidence of the intensity that would become Stallman's chief trademark throughout life. When other kids came to the table, Stallman stayed in his room and read. When other kids played Johnny Unit as, Stallman played spaceman. "I was weird," Stallman says, summing up his early years succinctly in a 1999 interview. "After a certain age, the only friends I had were teachers."~{ /{Ibid.}/ }~ Stallman was not ashamed of his weird characteristics, distinguishing them from the social ineptness that he did regard as a failing. However, both contributed together to his social exclusion.
+
+Although it meant courting more run-ins at school, Lippman decided to indulge her son's passion. By age 12, Richard was attending science camps during the summer and private school during the school year. When a teacher recommended her son enroll in the Columbia Science Honors Program, a post-Sputnik program designed for gifted middle- and high-school students in New York City, Stallman added to his extracurriculars and was soon commuting uptown to the Columbia University campus on Saturdays.
+={Columbia University;Science Honors Program (Columbia)+2}
+
+Dan Chess, a fellow classmate in the Columbia Science Honors Program, recalls Richard Stallman seeming a bit weird even among the students who shared a similar lust for math and science. "We were all geeks and nerds, but he was unusually poorly adjusted," recalls Chess, now a mathematics professor at Hunter College. "He was also smart as shit. I've known a lot of smart people, but I think he was the smartest person I've ever known."
+={Chess, Dan;Hunter College}
+
+Seth Breidbart, a fellow Columbia Science Honors Program alumnus, offers bolstering testimony. A computer programmer who has kept in touch with Stallman thanks to a shared passion for science fiction and science-fiction conventions, he recalls the 15-year-old, buzz-cut-wearing Stallman as "scary," especially to a fellow 15-year-old.
+={Breidbart, Seth+1}
+
+"It's hard to describe," Breidbart says. "It wasn't like he was unapproachable. He was just very intense. [He was] very knowledgeable but also very hardheaded in some ways."
+
+Such descriptions give rise to speculation: are judgment-laden adjectives like "intense" and "hardheaded" simply a way to describe traits that today might be categorized under juvenile behavioral disorder? A December, 2001, /{Wired}/ magazine article titled "The Geek Syndrome" paints the portrait of several scientifically gifted children diagnosed with high-functioning autism or Asperger Syndrome. In many ways, the parental recollections recorded in the /{Wired}/ article are eerily similar to the ones offered by Lippman. Stallman also speculates about this. In the interview for a 2000 profile for the /{Toronto Star}/, Stallman said he wondered if he were "borderline autistic." The article inaccurately cited the speculation as a certainty.~{ See Judy Steed, Toronto Star, BUSINESS, (October 9, 2000): C03. His vision of free software and social cooperation stands in stark contrast to the isolated nature of his private life. A Glenn Gould-like eccentric, the Canadian pianist was similarly brilliant, articulate, and lonely. Stallman considers himself afflicted, to some degree, by autism: a condition that, he says, makes it difficult for him to interact with people. }~
+={Asperger Syndrome+1;autism+5;Geek Syndrome, The (Silberman)+1;Wired magazine;Toronto Star;Silberman, Steve+1;Stallman, Richard M.:behavioral disorders+1}
+
+Such speculation benefits from the fast and loose nature of most so-called "behavioral disorders" nowadays, of course. As Steve Silberman, author of "The Geek Syndrome," notes, American psychiatrists have only recently come to accept Asperger Syndrome as a valid umbrella term covering a wide set of behavioral traits. The traits range from poor motor skills and poor socialization to high intelligence and an almost obsessive affinity for numbers, computers, and ordered systems.~{ See Steve Silberman, "The Geek Syndrome," Wired (December, 2001), \\ http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aspergers_pr.html. }~
+={Stallman, Richard M.:childhood, behavioral disorders}
+
+"It's possible I could have had something like that," Stallman says. "On the other hand, one of the aspects of that syndrome is difficulty following rhythms. I can dance. In fact, I love following the most complicated rhythms. It's not clear cut enough to know." Another possibility is that Stallman had a "shadow syndrome" which goes someway in the direction of Asperger's syndrome but without going beyond the limits of normality.~{ See John Ratey and Catherine Johnson, "Shadow Syndromes." }~
+
+Chess, for one, rejects such attempts at back-diagnosis. "I never thought of him [as] having that sort of thing," he says. "He was just very unsocialized, but then, we all were."
+={Chess, Dan}
+
+Lippman, on the other hand, entertains the possibility. She recalls a few stories from her son's infancy, however, that provide fodder for speculation. A prominent symptom of autism is an over-sensitivity to noises and colors, and Lippman recalls two anecdotes that stand out in this regard. "When Richard was an infant, we'd take him to the beach," she says. "He would start screaming two or three blocks before we reached the surf. It wasn't until the third time that we figured out what was going on: the sound of the surf was hurting his ears." She also recalls a similar screaming reaction in relation to color: "My mother had bright red hair, and every time she'd stoop down to pick him up, he'd let out a wail."
+
+In recent years, Lippman says she has taken to reading books about autism and believes that such episodes were more than coincidental. "I do feel that Richard had some of the qualities of an autistic child," she says. "I regret that so little was known about autism back then."
+
+Over time, however, Lippman says her son learned to adjust. By age seven, she says, her son had become fond of standing at the front window of subway trains, mapping out and memorizing the labyrinthian system of railroad tracks underneath the city. It was a hobby that relied on an ability to accommodate the loud noises that accompanied each train ride. "Only the initial noise seemed to bother him," says Lippman. "It was as if he got shocked by the sound but his nerves learned how to make the adjustment."
+
+For the most part, Lippman recalls her son exhibiting the excitement, energy, and social skills of any normal boy. It wasn't until after a series of traumatic events battered the Stallman household, she says, that her son became introverted and emotionally distant.
+
+The first traumatic event was the divorce of Alice and Daniel Stallman, Richard's father. Although Lippman says both she and her ex-husband tried to prepare their son for the blow, she says the blow was devastating nonetheless. "He sort of didn't pay attention when we first told him what was happening," Lippman recalls. "But the reality smacked him in the face when he and I moved into a new apartment. The first thing he said was, 'Where's Dad's furniture?'"
+={divorce of Alice and Daniel Stallman;Stallman, Daniel}
+
+For the next decade, Stallman would spend his weekdays at his mother's apartment in Manhattan and his weekends at his father's home in Queens. The shuttling back and forth gave him a chance to study a pair of contrasting parenting styles that, to this day, leaves Stallman firmly opposed to the idea of raising children himself. Speaking about his father, a World War II vet who died in early 2001, Stallman balances respect with anger. On one hand, there is the man whose moral commitment led him to learn French just so he could be more helpful to Allies when they'd finally fight the Nazis in France. On the other hand, there was the parent who always knew how to craft a put-down for cruel effect.~{ Regrettably, I did not get a chance to interview Daniel Stallman for this book. During the early research for this book, Stallman informed me that his father suffered from Alzheimer's. When I resumed research in late 2001, I learned, sadly, that Daniel Stallman had died earlier in the year. }~
+
+"My father had a horrible temper," Stallman says. "He never screamed, but he always found a way to criticize you in a cold, designed-to-crush way."
+
+As for life in his mother's apartment, Stallman is less equivocal. "That was war," he says. "I used to say in my misery, 'I want to go home,' meaning to the nonexistent place that I'll never have."
+
+For the first few years after the divorce, Stallman found the tranquility that eluded him in the home of his paternal grandparents. One died when he was 8, and the other when he was 10. For Stallman, the loss was devastating. "I used to go and visit and feel I was in a loving, gentle environment," Stallman recalls. "It was the only place I ever found one, until I went away to college."
+
+Lippman lists the death of Richard's paternal grandparents as the second traumatic event. "It really upset him," she says. He was very close to both his grandparents. Before they died, he was very outgoing, almost a leader-of-the-pack type with the other kids. After they died, he became much more emotionally withdrawn.
+
+From Stallman's perspective, the emotional withdrawal was merely an attempt to deal with the agony of adolescence. Labeling his teenage years a "pure horror," Stallman says he often felt like a deaf person amid a crowd of chattering music listeners.
+
+"I often had the feeling that I couldn't understand what other people were saying," says Stallman, recalling his sense of exclusion. "I could understand the words, but something was going on underneath the conversations that I didn't understand. I couldn't understand why people were interested in the things other people said."
+
+For all the agony it produced, adolescence would have an encouraging effect on Stallman's sense of individuality. At a time when most of his classmates were growing their hair out, Stallman preferred to keep his short. At a time when the whole teenage world was listening to rock and roll, Stallman preferred classical music. A devoted fan of science fiction, /{Mad}/ magazine, and late-night TV, Stallman came to have a distinctly off-the-wall personality that met with the incomprehension of parents and peers alike.
+
+"Oh, the puns," says Lippman, still exasperated by the memory of her son's teenage personality. "There wasn't a thing you could say at the dinner table that he couldn't throw back at you as a pun."
+
+Outside the home, Stallman saved the jokes for the adults who tended to indulge his gifted nature. One of the first was a summer-camp counselor who lent Stallman a manual for the IBM 7094 computer during his 8th or 9th year. To a pre teenager fascinated with numbers and science, the gift was a godsend.~{ Stallman, an atheist, would probably quibble with this description. Suffice it to say, it was something Stallman welcomed. See Gross (1999): "As soon as I heard about computers, I wanted to see one and play with one." }~ Soon, Stallman was writing out programs on paper in the instructions of the 7094. There was no computer around to run them on, and he had no real applications to use one for, but he yearned to write a program - any program whatsoever. He asked the counselor for arbitrary suggestions of something to code.
+={IBM 7094 computer+1}
+
+With the first personal computer still a decade away, Stallman would be forced to wait a few years before getting access to his first computer. His chance finally came during his senior year of high school. The IBM New York Scientific Center, a now-defunct research facility in downtown Manhattan, offered Stallman the chance to try to write his first real program. His fancy was to write a pre-processor for the programming language PL/I, designed to add the tensor algebra summation convention as a feature to the language. "I first wrote it in PL/I, then started over in assembler language when the compiled PL/I program was too big to fit in the computer," he recalls.
+={assembler language;IBM:New York Scientific Center;IBM New York Scientific Center;PL/I programming language;Stallman, Richard M.:childhood, first computer program}
+
+For the summer after high-school graduation, the New York Scientific Center hired him. Tasked with writing a numerical analysis program in Fortran, he finished that in a few weeks, acquiring such a distaste for the Fortran language that he vowed never to write any-thing in it again. Then he spent the rest of the summer writing a text-editor in APL.
+
+Simultaneously, Stallman had held a laboratory-assistant position in the biology department at Rockefeller University. Although he was already moving toward a career in math or physics, Stallman's analytical mind impressed the lab director enough that a few years after Stallman departed for college, Lippman received an unexpected phone call. "It was the professor at Rockefeller," Lippman says. "He wanted to know how Richard was doing. He was surprised to learn that he was working in computers. He'd always thought Richard had a great future ahead of him as a biologist."
+={Rockefeller University}
+
+Stallman's analytical skills impressed faculty members at Columbia as well, even when Stallman himself became a target of their ire. "Typically once or twice an hour [Stallman] would catch some mistake in the lecture," says Breidbart. "And he was not shy about letting the professors know it immediately. It got him a lot of respect but not much popularity."
+
+Hearing Breidbart's anecdote retold elicits a wry smile from Stallman. "I may have been a bit of a jerk sometimes," he admits. "But I found kindred spirits among teachers, because they, too, liked to learn. Kids, for the most part, didn't. At least not in the same way."
+={Breidbart, Seth}
+
+Hanging out with the advanced kids on Saturday nevertheless encouraged Stallman to think more about the merits of increased socialization. With college fast approaching, Stallman, like many in his Columbia Science Honors Program, had narrowed his list of desired schools down to two choices: Harvard and MIT. Hearing of her son's desire to move on to the Ivy League, Lippman became concerned. As a 15-year-old high-school junior, Stallman was still having run-ins with teachers and administrators. Only the year before, he had pulled straight A's in American History, Chemistry, French, and Algebra, but a glaring F in English reflected the ongoing boycott of writing assignments. Such miscues might draw a knowing chuckle at MIT, but at Harvard, they were a red flag.
+={Harvard University+7;MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology}
+
+During her son's junior year, Lippman says she scheduled an appointment with a therapist. The therapist expressed instant concern over Stallman's unwillingness to write papers and his run-ins with teachers. Her son certainly had the intellectual wherewithal to succeed at Harvard, but did he have the patience to sit through college classes that required a term paper? The therapist suggested a trial run. If Stallman could make it through a full year in New York City public schools, including an English class that required term papers, he could probably make it at Harvard. Following the completion of his junior year, Stallman promptly enrolled in public summer school downtown and began making up the mandatory humanities classes he had shunned earlier in his high-school career.
+={Louis D. Brandeis High School+3}
+
+By fall, Stallman was back within the mainstream population of New York City high-school students, at Louis D. Brandeis High School on on West 84th Street. It wasn't easy sitting through classes that seemed remedial in comparison with his Saturday studies at Columbia, but Lippman recalls proudly her son's ability to toe the line.
+
+"He was forced to kowtow to a certain degree, but he did it," Lippman says. "I only got called in once, which was a bit of a miracle. It was the calculus teacher complaining that Richard was interrupting his lesson. I asked how he was interrupting. He said Richard was always accusing the teacher of using a false proof. I said, 'Well, is he right?' The teacher said, 'Yeah, but I can't tell that to the class. They wouldn't understand.'"
+
+By the end of his first semester at Brandeis High, things were falling into place. A 96 in English wiped away much of the stigma of the 60 earned 2 years before. For good measure, Stallman backed it up with top marks in American History, Advanced Placement Calculus, and Microbiology. The crowning touch was a perfect 100 in Physics. Though still a social outcast, Stallman finished his 10 months at Brandeis as the fourth-ranked student in a class of 789.
+
+Outside the classroom, Stallman pursued his studies with even more diligence, rushing off to fulfill his laboratory-assistant duties at Rockefeller University during the week and dodging the Vietnam protesters on his way to Saturday school at Columbia. It was there, while the rest of the Science Honors Program students sat around discussing their college choices, that Stallman finally took a moment to participate in the preclass bull session.
+
+Recalls Breidbart, "Most of the students were going to Harvard and MIT, of course, but you had a few going to other Ivy League schools. As the conversation circled the room, it became apparent that Richard hadn't said anything yet. I don't know who it was, but somebody got up the courage to ask him what he planned to do."
+={Breidbart, Seth+1}
+
+Thirty years later, Breidbart remembers the moment clearly. As soon as Stallman broke the news that he, too, would be attending Harvard University in the fall, an awkward silence filled the room. Almost as if on cue, the corners of Stallman's mouth slowly turned upward into a self-satisfied smile. Says Breidbart, "It was his silent way of saying, 'That's right. You haven't got rid of me yet.'"
+
+1~ Chapter 4 - Impeach God
+
+Although their relationship was fraught with tension, Richard Stallman would inherit one noteworthy trait from his mother: a passion for progressive politics.
+
+It was an inherited trait that would take several decades to emerge, however. For the first few years of his life, Stallman lived in what he now admits was a "political vacuum."~{ See Michael Gross, "Richard Stallman: High School Misfit, Symbol of Free Software, Mac Arthur-certified Genius" (1999). }~ Like most Americans during the Eisenhower age, the Stallman family spent the Fifties trying to recapture the normalcy lost during the wartime years of the 1940s.
+
+"Richard's father and I were Democrats but happy enough to leave it at that," says Lippman, recalling the family's years in Queens. "We didn't get involved much in local or national politics."
+={Lippman, Alice:political identity of+11}
+
+That all began to change, however, in the late 1950s when Alice divorced Daniel Stallman. The move back to Manhattan represented more than a change of address; it represented a new, independent identity and a jarring loss of tranquility.
+={Stallman, Daniel}
+
+"I think my first taste of political activism came when I went to the Queens public library and discovered there was only a single book on divorce in the whole library," recalls Lippman. "It was very controlled by the Catholic church, at least in Elmhurst, where we lived. I think that was the first inkling I had of the forces that quietly control our lives."
+={Elmhurst (New York);Queens public library}
+
+Returning to her childhood neighborhood, Manhattan's Upper West Side, Lippman was shocked by the changes that had taken place since her departure to Hunter College a decade and a half before. The sky-rocketing demand for post-war housing had turned the neighborhood into a political battleground. On one side stood the pro-development city-hall politicians and businessmen hoping to rebuild many of the neighborhood's blocks to accommodate the growing number of white-collar workers moving into the city. On the other side stood the poor Irish and Puerto Rican tenants who had found an affordable haven in the neighborhood.
+={Hunter College}
+
+At first, Lippman didn't know which side to choose. As a new resident, she felt the need for new housing. As a single mother with minimal income, however, she shared the poorer tenants' concern over the growing number of development projects catering mainly to wealthy residents. Indignant, Lippman began looking for ways to combat the political machine that was attempting to turn her neighborhood into a clone of the Upper East Side.
+
+Lippman says her first visit to the local Democratic party headquarters came in 1958. Looking for a day-care center to take care of her son while she worked, she had been appalled by the conditions encountered at one of the city-owned centers that catered to low-income residents. "All I remember is the stench of rotten milk, the dark hallways, the paucity of supplies. I had been a teacher in private nursery schools. The contrast was so great. We took one look at that room and left. That stirred me up."
+={Democratic party+3}
+
+The visit to the party headquarters proved disappointing, however. Describing it as "the proverbial smoke-filled room," Lippman says she became aware for the first time that corruption within the party might actually be the reason behind the city's thinly disguised hostility toward poor residents. Instead of going back to the headquarters, Lippman decided to join up with one of the many clubs aimed at reforming the Democratic party and ousting the last vestiges of the Tammany Hall machine. Dubbed the Woodrow Wilson/FDR Reform Democratic Club, Lippman and her club began showing up at planning and city-council meetings, demanding a greater say.
+={Woodrow Wilson/FDR Reform Democratic Club;Tammany Hall+1}
+
+"Our primary goal was to fight Tammany Hall, Carmine DeSapio and his henchman,"~{ Carmine DeSapio holds the dubious distinction of being the first Italian-American boss of Tammany Hall, the New York City political machine. For more information on DeSapio and the politics of post-war New York, see John Davenport, "Skinning the Tiger: Carmine DeSapio and the End of the Tammany Era," New York Affairs (1975): 3:1. }~ says Lippman. "I was the representative to the city council and was very much involved in creating a viable urban-renewal plan that went beyond simply adding more luxury housing to the neighborhood."
+={DeSapio, Carmine}
+
+Such involvement would blossom into greater political activity during the 1960s. By 1965, Lippman had become an "outspoken" supporter for political candidates like William Fitts Ryan, a Democrat elected to Congress with the help of reform clubs and one of the first U.S. representatives to speak out against the Vietnam War.
+={Vietnam War+10;Ryan, William Fitts}
+
+It wasn't long before Lippman, too, was an outspoken opponent of U.S. involvement in Indochina. "I was against the Vietnam War from the time Kennedy sent troops," she says. "I had read the stories by reporters and journalists sent to cover the early stages of the conflict. I really believed their forecast that it would become a quagmire."
+={Indochina}
+
+Such opposition permeated the Stallman-Lippman household. In 1967, Lippman remarried. Her new husband, Maurice Lippman, a major in the Air National Guard, resigned his commission to demonstrate his opposition to the war. Lippman's stepson, Andrew Lippman, was at MIT and temporarily eligible for a student deferment. Still, the threat of induction should that deferment disappear, as it eventually did, made the risk of U.S. escalation all the more immediate. Finally, there was Richard who, though younger, faced the prospect of being drafted as the war lasted into the 1970s.
+={Lippman, Andrew;Lippman, Maurice;MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology}
+
+"Vietnam was a major issue in our household," says Lippman. "We talked about it constantly: what would we do if the war continued, what steps Richard or his stepbrother would take if they got drafted. We were all opposed to the war and the draft. We really thought it was immoral."
+
+For Stallman, the Vietnam War elicited a complex mixture of emotions: confusion, horror, and, ultimately, a profound sense of political impotence. As a kid who could barely cope in the mild authoritarian universe of private school, Stallman experienced a shiver whenever the thought of Army boot camp presented itself. He did not think he could get through it and emerge sane.
+={draft (Vietnam War)+6}
+
+"I was devastated by the fear, but I couldn't imagine what to do and didn't have the guts to go demonstrate," recalls Stallman, whose March 16th birthday earned him a low number in the dreaded draft lottery. This did not affect him immediately, since he had a college deferment, one of the last before the U.S. stopped granting them; but it would affect him in a few years. "I couldn't envision moving to Canada or Sweden. The idea of getting up by myself and moving somewhere. How could I do that? I didn't know how to live by myself. I wasn't the kind of person who felt confident in approaching things like that."
+
+Stallman says he was impressed by the family members who did speak out. Recalling a sticker, printed and distributed by his father, likening the My Lai massacre to similar Nazi atrocities in World War II, he says he was "excited" by his father's gesture of outrage. "I admired him for doing it," Stallman says. "But I didn't imagine that I could do anything. I was afraid that the juggernaut of the draft was going to destroy me."
+
+However, Stallman says he was turned off by the tone and direction of much of that movement. Like other members of the Science Honors Program, he saw the weekend demonstrations at Columbia as little more than a distracting spectacle.~{ Chess, another Columbia Science Honors Program alum, describes the protests as "background noise." "We were all political," he says, "but the SHP was important. We would never have skipped it for a demonstration." }~ Ultimately, Stallman says, the irrational forces driving the anti-war movement became indistinguishable from the irrational forces driving the rest of youth culture. Instead of worshiping the Beatles, girls in Stallman's age group were suddenly worshiping firebrands like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. To a kid already struggling to comprehend his teenage peers, slogans like "make love not war" had a taunting quality. Stallman did not want to make war, at least not in Southeast Asia, but nobody was inviting him to make love either.
+={Beatles;Hoffman, Abbie;Rubin, Jerry;Science Honors Program (Columbia)}
+
+"I didn't like the counter culture much," Stallman recalls. "I didn't like the music. I didn't like the drugs. I was scared of the drugs. I especially didn't like the anti-intellectualism, and I didn't like the prejudice against technology. After all, I loved a computer. And I didn't like the mindless anti-Americanism that I often encountered. There were people whose thinking was so simplistic that if they disapproved of the conduct of the U.S. in the Vietnam War, they had to support the North Vietnamese. They couldn't imagine a more complicated position, I guess."
+
+Such comments underline a trait that would become the key to Stallman's own political maturation. For Stallman, political confidence was directly proportionate to personal confidence. By 1970, Stallman had become confident in few things outside the realm of math and science. Nevertheless, confidence in math gave him enough of a foundation to examine the extremes of the anti-war movement in purely logical terms. Doing so, Stallman found the logic wanting. Although opposed to the war in Vietnam, Stallman saw no reason to disavow war as a means for defending liberty or correcting injustice.
+
+In the 1980s, a more confident Stallman decided to make up for his past inactivity by participating in mass rallies for abortion rights in Washington DC. "I became dissatisfied with my earlier self for failing in my duty to protest the Vietnam War," he explains.
+
+In 1970, Stallman left behind the nightly dinnertime conversations about politics and the Vietnam War as he departed for Harvard. Looking back, Stallman describes the transition from his mother's Manhattan apartment to life in a Cambridge dorm as an "escape." At Harvard, he could go to his room and have peace whenever he wanted it. Peers who watched Stallman make the transition, however, saw little to suggest a liberating experience.
+={Harvard University+22}
+
+"He seemed pretty miserable for the first while at Harvard," recalls Dan Chess, a classmate in the Science Honors Program who also matriculated at Harvard. "You could tell that human interaction was really difficult for him, and there was no way of avoiding it at Harvard. Harvard was an intensely social kind of place."
+={Chess, Dan;Science Honors Program (Columbia)+1}
+
+To ease the transition, Stallman fell back on his strengths: math and science. Like most members of the Science Honors Program, Stallman breezed through the qualifying exam for Math 55, the legendary "boot camp" class for freshman mathematics "concentrators" at Harvard. Within the class, members of the Science Honors Program formed a durable unit. "We were the math mafia," says Chess with a laugh. "Harvard was nothing, at least compared with the SHP."
+={Math 55 (Harvard University)+9}
+
+To earn the right to boast, however, Stallman, Chess, and the other SHP alumni had to get through Math 55. Promising four years worth of math in two semesters, the course favored only the truly devout. "It was an amazing class," says David Harbater, a former "math mafia" member and now a professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. "It's probably safe to say there has never been a class for beginning college students that was that intense and that advanced. The phrase I say to people just to get it across is that, among other things, by the second semester we were discussing the differential geometry of Banach manifolds. That's usually when their eyes bug out, because most people don't start talking about Banach manifolds until their second year of graduate school."
+={Harbater, David+2;University of Pennsylvania}
+
+Starting with 75 students, the class quickly melted down to 20by the end of the second semester. Of that 20, says Harbater, "only 10 really knew what they were doing." Of that 10, 8 would go on to become future mathematics professors, 1 would go on to teach physics.
+
+"The other one," emphasizes Harbater, "was Richard Stallman." Seth Breidbart, a fellow Math 55 classmate, remembers Stallman distinguishing himself from his peers even then.
+={Breidbart, Seth+14}
+
+"He was a stickler in some very strange ways," says Breidbart. There is a standard technique in math which everybody does wrong. It's an abuse of notation where you have to define a function for something and what you do is you define a function and then you prove that it's well defined. Except the first time he did and presented it, he defined a relation and proved that it's a function. It's the exact same proof, but he used the correct terminology, which no one else did. That's just the way he was."
+
+It was in Math 55 that Richard Stallman began to cultivate a reputation for brilliance. Breidbart agrees, but Chess, whose competitive streak refused to yield, says the realization that Stallman might be the best mathematician in the class didn't set in until the next year. "It was during a class on Real Analysis," says Chess, now a math professor at Hunter College. "I actually remember in a proof about complex valued measures that Richard came up with an idea that was basically a metaphor from the calculus of variations. It was the first time I ever saw somebody solve a problem in a brilliantly original way."
+={Hunter College}
+
+For Chess, it was a troubling moment. Like a bird flying into a clear glass window, it would take a while to realize that some levels of insight were simply off limits.
+
+"That's the thing about mathematics," says Chess. "You don't have to be a first-rank mathematician to recognize first-rate mathematical talent. I could tell I was up there, but I could also tell I wasn't at the first rank. If Richard had chosen to be a mathematician, he would have been a first-rank mathematician."~{ Stallman doubts this, however. "One of the reasons I moved from math and physics to programming is that I never learned how to discover anything new in the former two. I only learned to study what others had done. In programming, I could do something useful every day." }~
+
+For Stallman, success in the classroom was balanced by the same lack of success in the social arena. Even as other members of the math mafia gathered to take on the Math 55 problem sets, Stallman preferred to work alone. The same went for living arrangements. On the housing application for Harvard, Stallman clearly spelled out his preferences. "I said I preferred an invisible, inaudible, intangible roommate," he says. In a rare stroke of bureaucratic foresight, Harvard's housing office accepted the request, giving Stallman a one-room single for his freshman year.
+
+Breidbart, the only math-mafia member to share a dorm with Stallman that freshman year, says Stallman slowly but surely learned how to interact with other students. He recalls how other dorm mates, impressed by Stallman's logical acumen, began welcoming his input whenever an intellectual debate broke out in the dining club or dorm commons."
+
+We had the usual bull sessions about solving the world's problems or what would be the result of something," recalls Breidbart. "Say somebody discovers an immortality serum. What do you do? What are the political results? If you give it to everybody, the world gets overcrowded and everybody dies. If you limit it, if you say everyone who's alive now can have it but their children can't, then you end up with an underclass of people without it. Richard was just better able than most to see the unforeseen circumstances of any decision."
+
+Stallman remembers the discussions vividly. "I was always in favor of immortality," he says. "How else would we be able to see what the world is like 200 years from now?" Curious, he began asking various acquaintances whether they would want immortality if offered it. "I was shocked that most people regarded immortality as a bad thing." Many said that death was good because there was no use living a decrepit life, and that aging was good because it got people prepared for death, without recognizing the circularity of the combination.
+
+Although perceived as a first-rank mathematician and first-rate in-formal debater, Stallman shied away from clear-cut competitive events that might have sealed his brilliant reputation. Near the end of fresh-man year at Harvard, Breidbart recalls how Stallman conspicuously ducked the Putnam exam, a prestigious test open to math students throughout the U.S. and Canada. In addition to giving students ac hance to measure their knowledge in relation to their peers, the Putnam served as a chief recruiting tool for academic math departments. According to campus legend, the top scorer automatically qualified for a graduate fellowship at any school of his choice, including Harvard.
+={Putnam exam+1}
+
+Like Math 55, the Putnam was a brutal test of merit. A six-hour exam in two parts, it seemed explicitly designed to separate the wheat from the chaff. Breidbart, a veteran of both the Science Honors
+
+Program and Math 55, describes it as easily the most difficult test he ever took. "Just to give you an idea of how difficult it was," says Breidbart, "the top score was a 120, and my score the first year was in the 30s. That score was still good enough to place me 101st in the country."
+
+Surprised that Stallman, the best student in the class, had skipped the test, Breidbart says he and a fellow classmate cornered him in the dining common and demanded an explanation. "He said he was afraid of not doing well," Breidbart recalls.
+
+Breidbart and the friend quickly wrote down a few problems from memory and gave them to Stallman. "He solved all of them," Breidbart says, " leading me to conclude that by not doing well, he either meant coming in second or getting something wrong."
+
+Stallman remembers the episode a bit differently. "I remember that they did bring me the questions and it's possible that I solved one of them, but I'm pretty sure I didn't solve them all," he says. Nevertheless, Stallman agrees with Breidbart's recollection that fear was the primary reason for not taking the test. Despite a demonstrated willingness to point out the intellectual weaknesses of his peers and professors in the classroom, Stallman hated and feared the notion of head-to-head competition - so why not just avoid it?
+
+"It's the same reason I never liked chess," says Stallman. "Whenever I'd play, I would become so consumed by the fear of making a single mistake and losing that I would start making stupid mistakes very early in the game. The fear became a self-fulfilling prophecy." He avoided the problem by not playing chess.
+
+Whether such fears ultimately prompted Stallman to shy away from a mathematical career is a moot issue. By the end of his freshman year at Harvard, Stallman had other interests pulling him away from the field. Computer programming, a latent fascination throughout Stallman's high-school years, was becoming a full-fledged passion. Where other math students sought occasional refuge in art and history classes, Stallman sought it in the computer-science laboratory.
+
+For Stallman, the first taste of real computer programming at the IBM New York Scientific Center had triggered a desire to learn more. "Toward the end of my first year at Harvard school, I started to have enough courage to go visit computer labs and see what they had. I'd ask them if they had extra copies of any manuals that I could read." Taking the manuals home, Stallman would examine the machine specifications to learn about the range of different computer designs.
+
+One day, near the end of his freshman year, Stallman heard about a special laboratory near MIT. The laboratory was located on the ninth floor of a building in Tech Square, the mostly-commercial office park MIT had built across the street from the campus. According to the rumors, the lab itself was dedicated to the cutting-edge science of artificial intelligence and boasted the cutting-edge machines and software to match.
+={artificial intelligence;MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology:first visit to+2}
+
+Intrigued, Stallman decided to pay a visit.
+
+The trip was short, about 2 miles on foot, 10 minutes by train, but as Stallman would soon find out, MIT and Harvard can feel like opposite poles of the same planet. With its maze-like tangle of inter-connected office buildings, the Institute's campus offered an aestheticy in to Harvard's spacious colonial-village yang. Of the two, the maze of MIT was much more Stallman's style. The same could be said for the student body, a geeky collection of ex-high school misfits known more for its predilection for pranks than its politically powerful alumni.
+
+The yin-yang relationship extended to the AI Lab as well. Unlike Harvard computer labs, there was no grad-student gatekeeper, no clipboard waiting list for terminal access, no atmosphere of "look but don't touch." Instead, Stallman found only a collection of open terminals and robotic arms, presumably the artifacts of some AI experiment. When he encountered a lab employee, he asked if the lab had any spare manuals it could loan to an inquisitive student. "They had some, but a lot of things weren't documented," Stallman recalls. "They were hackers, after all," he adds wryly, referring to hackers' tendency to move on to a new project without documenting the last one.
+={AI Lab (Artificial Intelligence Laboratory)+40}
+
+Stallman left with something even better than a manual: A job. His first project was to write a PDP-11 simulator that would run on a PDP-10. He came back to the AI Lab the next week, grabbing an available terminal, and began writing the code.
+
+Looking back, Stallman sees nothing unusual in the AI Lab's willingness to accept an unproven outsider at first glance. "That's the way it was back then," he says. "That's the way it still is now. I'll hire somebody when I meet him if I see he's good. Why wait? Stuffy people who insist on putting bureaucracy into everything really miss the point. If a person is good, he shouldn't have to go through a long, detailed hiring process; he should be sitting at a computer writing code."
+
+To get a taste of "bureaucratic and stuffy," Stallman need only visit the computer labs at Harvard. There, access to the terminals was doled out according to academic rank. As an undergrad, Stallman sometimes had to wait for hours. The waiting wasn't difficult, but it was frustrating. Waiting for a public terminal, knowing all the while that a half dozen equally usable machines were sitting idle inside professors' locked offices, seemed the height of irrational waste. Although Stallman continued to pay the occasional visit to the Harvard computer labs, he preferred the more egalitarian policies of the AI Lab. "It was a breath of fresh air," he says. "At the AI Lab, people seemed more concerned about work than status."
+={Harvard University:computer labs}
+
+Stallman quickly learned that the AI Lab's first-come, first-served policy owed much to the efforts of a vigilant few. Many were holdovers from the days of Project MAC, the Department of Defense-funded re-search program that had given birth to the first time-share operating systems. A few were already legends in the computing world. There was Richard Greenblatt, the lab's in-house Lisp expert and author of MacHack, the computer chess program that had once humbled AI critic Hubert Dreyfus. There was Gerald Sussman, original author of the robotic block-stacking program HACKER. And there was Bill Gosper, the in-house math whiz already in the midst of an 18-month hacking bender triggered by the philosophical implications of the computer game LIFE.~{ See Steven Levy, Hackers (Penguin USA [paperback], 1984): 144. Levy devotes about five pages to describing Gosper's fascination with LIFE, a math-based software game first created by British mathematician John Conway. I heartily recommend this book as a supplement, perhaps even a prerequisite, to this one. }~
+={Dreyfus, Hubert;Gosper, Bill;Greenblat, Richard;LIFE mathematical game;LISP programming language;MacHack;Project MAC;Sussman, Gerald+2}
+
+Members of the tight-knit group called themselves "hackers." Overtime, they extended the "hacker" description to Stallman as well. In the process of doing so, they inculcated Stallman in the ethical traditions of the "hacker ethic." In their fascination with exploring the limits of what they could make a computer do, hackers might sit at a terminal for 36 hours straight if fascinated with a challenge. Most importantly, they demanded access to the computer (when no one else was using it) and the most useful information about it. Hackers spoke openly about changing the world through software, and Stallman learned the instinctual hacker disdain for any obstacle that prevented a hacker from fulfilling this noble cause. Chief among these obstacles were poor software, academic bureaucracy, and selfish behavior.
+={ethics of hacking;hackers+7:ethics of}
+
+Stallman also learned the lore, stories of how hackers, when presented with an obstacle, had circumvented it in creative ways. This included various ways that hackers had opened professors' offices to "liberate" sequestered terminals. Unlike their pampered Harvard counterparts, MIT faculty members knew better than to treat the AI Lab's limited stock of terminals as private property. If a faculty member made the mistake of locking away a terminal for the night, hackers were quick to make the terminal accessible again - and to remonstrate with the professor for having mistreated the community. Some hackers did this by picking locks ("lock hacking"), some by removing ceiling tiles and climbing over the wall. On the 9th floor, with its false floor for the computers' cables, some spelunked under it. "I was actually shown a cart with a heavy cylinder of metal on it that had been used to break down the door of one professor's office,"~{ Gerald Sussman, an MIT faculty member and hacker whose work at the AI Lab predates Stallman's, disputes this story. According to Sussman, the hackers never broke any doors to retrieve terminals. }~ Stallman says.
+={AI Lab (Artificial Intelligence Laboratory):lock hacking at+31}
+
+The hackers' insistence served a useful purpose by preventing the professors from egotistically obstructing the lab's work. The hackers did not disregard people's particular needs, but insisted that these be met in ways that didn't obstruct everyone else. For instance, professors occasionally said they had something in their offices which had to be protected from theft. The hackers responded, "No one will object if you lock your office, although that's not very friendly, as long as you don't lock away the lab's terminal in it."
+
+Although the academic people greatly outnumbered the hackers in the AI Lab, the hacker ethic prevailed. The hackers were the lab staff and students who had designed and built parts of the computers, and written nearly all the software that users used. They kept everything working, too. Their work was essential, and they refused to be downtrodden. They worked on personal pet projects as well as features users had asked for, but sometimes the pet projects revolved around improving the machines and software even further. Like teenage hot-rodders, most hackers viewed tinkering with machines as its own form of entertainment.
+
+Nowhere was this tinkering impulse better reflected than in the operating system that powered the lab's central PDP-10 computer. Dubbed ITS, short for the Incompatible Time Sharing system, the operating system incorporated the hacking ethic into its very design. Hackers had built it as a protest to Project MAC's original operating system, the Compatible Time Sharing System, CTSS, and named it accordingly. At the time, hackers felt the CTSS design too restrictive, limiting programmers' power to modify and improve the program's own internal architecture if needed. According to one legend passed down by hackers, the decision to build ITS had political overtones as well. Unlike CTSS, which had been designed for the IBM 7094, ITS was built specifically for the PDP-6. In letting hackers write the system themselves, AI Lab administrators guaranteed that only hackers would feel comfortable using the PDP-6. In the feudal world of academic research, the gambit worked. Although the PDP-6 was co-owned in conjunction with other departments, AI researchers soon had it to themselves. Using ITS and the PDP-6 as a foundation, the Lab had been able to declare independence from Project MAC shortly before Stallman's arrival.~{ Ibid. }~
+={Compatible Time Sharing System (CTSS);CTSS (Compatible Time Sharing System);IBM 7094 computer;Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS)+5;PDP-6 computer+1;Project MAC:Incompatible Time Sharing system and}
+
+By 1971, ITS had moved to the newer but compatible PDP-10, leaving the PDP-6 for special stand-alone uses. The AI PDP-10 had a very large memory for 1971, equivalent to a little over a megabyte;in the late 70s it was doubled. Project MAC had bought two other PDP-10s; all were located on the 9th floor, and they all ran ITS. The hardware-inclined hackers designed and built a major hardware addition for these PDP-10s, implementing paged virtual memory, a feature lacking in the standard PDP-10.~{ I apologize for the whirlwind summary of ITS' genesis, an operating system many hackers still regard as the epitome of the hacker ethos. For more information on the program's political significance, see Simson Garfinkel, Architects of the Information Society: Thirty-Five Years of the Laboratory for Computer Science at MIT (MIT Press, 1999). }~
+
+As an apprentice hacker, Stallman quickly became enamored with ITS. Although forbidding to some non-hackers, ITS boasted features most commercial operating systems wouldn't offer for years (or even to this day), features such as multitasking, applying the debugger immediately to any running program, and full-screen editing capability.
+
+"ITS had a very elegant internal mechanism for one program to examine another," says Stallman, recalling the program. "You could examine all sorts of status about another program in a very clean, well-specified way." This was convenient not only for debugging, but also for programs to start, stop or control other programs.
+
+Another favorite feature would allow the one program to freeze an-other program's job cleanly, between instructions. In other operating systems, comparable operations might stop the program in the middle of a system call, with internal status that the user could not see and that had no well-defined meaning. In ITS, this feature made sure that monitoring the step-by-step operation of a program was reliable and consistent.
+
+"If you said, 'Stop the job,' it would always be stopped in user mode. It would be stopped between two user-mode instructions, and everything about the job would be consistent for that point," Stallman says. "If you said, 'Resume the job,' it would continue properly. Not only that, but if you were to change the (explicitly visible) status of the job and continue it, and later change it back, everything would be consistent. There was no hidden status anywhere."
+
+Starting in September 1971, hacking at the AI Lab had become a regular part of Stallman's weekly school schedule. From Sunday through Friday, Stallman was at Harvard. As soon as Friday afternoon arrived, however, he was on the subway, heading down to MIT for the weekend. Stallman usually made sure to arrive well before the ritual food run. Joining five or six other hackers in their nightly quest for Chinese food, he would jump inside a beat-up car and head across the Harvard Bridge into nearby Boston. For the next hour or so, he and his hacker colleagues would discuss everything from ITS to the internal logic of the Chinese language and pictograph system. Following dinner, the group would return to MIT and hack code until dawn, or perhaps go to Chinatown again at 3 a.m.
+
+Stallman might stay up all morning hacking, or might sleep Saturday morning on a couch. On waking he would hack some more, have another Chinese dinner, then go back to Harvard. Sometimes he would stay through Sunday as well. These Chinese dinners were not only delicious; they also provided sustenance lacking in the Harvard dining halls, where on the average only one meal a day included anything he could stomach. (Breakfast did not enter the count, since he didn't like most breakfast foods and was normally asleep at that hour.)
+
+For the geeky outcast who rarely associated with his high-school peers, it was a heady experience to be hanging out with people who shared the same predilection for computers, science fiction, and Chinese food. "I remember many sunrises seen from a car coming back from Chinatown," Stallman would recall nostalgically, 15 years after the fact in a speech at the Swedish Royal Technical Institute. "It was actually a very beautiful thing to see a sunrise, 'cause that's such a calm time of day. It's a wonderful time of day to get ready to go to bed. It's so nice to walk home with the light just brightening and the birds starting to chirp; you can get a real feeling of gentle satisfaction, of tranquility about the work that you have done that night."~{ See Richard Stallman, "RMS lecture at KTH (Sweden)," (October 30, 1986), \\ http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.html. }~
+={Swedish Royal Technical Institute}
+
+The more Stallman hung out with the hackers, the more he adopted the hacker world view. Already committed to the notion of personal liberty, Stallman began to infuse his actions with a sense of communal duty. When others violated the communal code, Stallman was quick to speak out. Within a year of his first visit, Stallman was the one opening locked offices to recover the sequestered terminals that belonged to the lab community as a whole. In true hacker fashion, Stallman also sought to make his own personal contribution to the art. One of the most artful door-opening tricks, commonly attributed to Greenblatt, involved bending a stiff wire into several right angles and attaching a strip of tape to one end. Sliding the wire under the door, a hacker could twist and rotate the wire so that the tape touched the inside doorknob. Provided the tape stuck, a hacker could turn the doorknob by pulling the handle formed from the outside end of the wire.
+={Greenblat, Richard:lock-hacking and}
+
+When Stallman tried the trick, he found it hard to execute. Getting the tape to stick wasn't always easy, and twisting the wire in a way that turned the doorknob was similarly difficult. Stallman thought about another method: sliding away ceiling tiles to climb over the wall. This always worked, if there was a desk to jump down onto, but it generally covered the hacker in itchy fiberglass. Was there a way to correct that flaw? Stallman considered an alternative approach. What if, instead of slipping a wire under the door, a hacker slid away two ceiling panels and reached over the wall with a wire?
+
+Stallman took it upon himself to try it out. Instead of using a wire, Stallman draped out a long U-shaped loop of magnetic tape with a short U of adhesive tape attached sticky-side-up at the base. Reaching across over the door jamb, he dangled the tape until it looped under the inside doorknob. Lifting the tape until the adhesive stuck, he then pulled on one end of the tape, thus turning the doorknob. Sure enough, the door opened. Stallman had added a new twist to the art of getting into a locked room.
+
+"Sometimes you had to kick the door after you turned the doorknob," says Stallman, recalling a slight imperfection of the new method. "It took a little bit of balance to pull it off while standing on a chair on a desk."
+
+Such activities reflected a growing willingness on Stallman's part to speak and act out in defense of political beliefs. The AI Lab's spirit of direct action had proved inspirational enough for Stallman to breakout of the timid impotence of his teenage years. Opening up an office to free a terminal wasn't the same as taking part in a protest march, but it was effective in a way that most protests weren't: it solved the problem at hand.
+
+By the time of his last years at Harvard, Stallman was beginning to apply the whimsical and irreverent lessons of the AI Lab back at school .
+
+"Did he tell you about the snake?" his mother asks at one point during an interview. "He and his dorm mates put a snake up for student election. Apparently it got a considerable number of votes.
+
+"The snake was a candidate for election within Currier House, Stallman's dorm, not the campus-wide student council. Stallman does re-member the snake attracting a fair number of votes, thanks in large part to the fact that both the snake and its owner both shared the same last name. "People may have voted for it because they thought they were voting for the owner," Stallman says. "Campaign posters said that the snake was 'slithering for' the office. We also said it was an 'at large' candidate, since it had climbed into the wall through the ventilating unit a few weeks before and nobody knew where it was."
+
+Stallman and friends also "nominated" the house master's 3-year-old son. "His platform was mandatory retirement at age seven," Stallman recalls. Such pranks paled in comparison to the fake-candidate pranks on the MIT campus, however. One of the most successful fake-candidate pranks was a cat named Woodstock, which actually managed to outdraw most of the human candidates in a campus-wide election. "They never announced how many votes Woodstock got, and they treated those votes as spoiled ballots," Stallman recalls. "But the large number of spoiled ballots in that election suggested that Woodstock had actually won. A couple of years later, Woodstock was suspiciously run over by a car. Nobody knows if the driver was working for the MIT administration." Stallman says he had nothing to do with Woodstock's candidacy, "but I admired it."~{ In an email shortly after this book went into its final edit cycle, Stallman says he drew political inspiration from the Harvard campus as well. "In my first year of Harvard, in a Chinese History class, I read the story of the first revolt against the Qin dynasty," he says. (That's the one whose cruel founder burnt all the books and was buried with the terra cotta warriors.) "The story is not reliable history, but it was very moving." }~
+
+At the AI Lab, Stallman's political activities had a sharper-edged tone. During the 1970s, hackers faced the constant challenge of faculty members and administrators pulling an end-run around ITS and its hacker-friendly design. ITS allowed anyone to sit down at a console and do anything at all, even order the system to shut down in five minutes. If someone ordered a shutdown with no good reason, some other user canceled it. In the mid-1970s some faculty members (usually those who had formed their attitudes elsewhere) began calling for a file security system to limit access to their data. Other operating systems had such features, so those faculty members had become accustomed to living under security, and to the feeling that it was protecting them from something dangerous. But the AI Lab, through the insistence of Stallman and other hackers, remained a security-free zone.
+={Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS)+1}
+
+Stallman presented both ethical and practical arguments against adding security. On the ethical side, Stallman appealed to the AI Lab community's traditions of intellectual openness and trust. On the practical side, he pointed to the internal structure of ITS, which was built to foster hacking and cooperation rather than to keep every user under control. Any attempt to reverse that design would require a major overhaul. To make it even more difficult, he used up the last empty field in each file's descriptor for a feature to record which user had most recently changed the file. This feature left no place to store file security information, but it was so useful that nobody could seriously propose to remove it.
+={security (computer), opposition to}
+
+"The hackers who wrote the Incompatible Timesharing System decided that file protection was usually used by a self-styled system manager to get power over everyone else," Stallman would later explain. "They didn't want anyone to be able to get power over them that way, so they didn't implement that kind of a feature. The result was, that whenever something in the system was broken, you could always fix it" (since access control did not stand in your way).~{ See Richard Stallman (1986). }~
+
+Through such vigilance, hackers managed to keep the AI Lab's machines security-free. In one group at the nearby MIT Laboratory for Computer Sciences, however, security-minded faculty members won the day. The DM group installed its first password system in 1977. Once again, Stallman took it upon himself to correct what he saw as ethical laxity. Gaining access to the software code that controlled the password system, Stallman wrote a program to decrypt the encrypted passwords that the system recorded. Then he started an email campaign, asking users to choose the null string as their passwords. If the user had chosen "starfish," for example, the email message looked something like this:
+={password-based systems, hacking into+5}
+
+_1 I see you chose the password "starfish". I suggest that you switch to the password "carriage return", which is what I use. It's easier to type, and also opposes the idea of passwords and security.
+
+The users who chose "carriage return" - that is, users who simply pressed the Enter or Return button, entering a blank string instead of a unique password - left their accounts accessible to the world at large, just as all accounts had been, not long before. That was the point: by refusing to lock the shiny new locks on their accounts, they ridiculed the idea of having locks. They knew that the weak security implemented on that machine would not exclude any real intruders, and that this did not matter, because there was no reason to be concerned about intruders, and that no one wanted to intrude anyway, only to visit.
+
+Stallman, speaking in an interview for the 1984 book /{Hackers}/, proudly noted that one-fifth of the LCS staff accepted this argument and employed the null-string password.~{ See Steven Levy, Hackers (Penguin USA [paperback], 1984): 417. }~
+={Hackers (Levy)}
+
+Stallman's null-string campaign, and his resistance to security in general, would ultimately be defeated. By the early 1980s, even the AI Lab's machines were sporting password security systems. Even so, it represented a major milestone in terms of Stallman's personal and political maturation. Seen in the context of Stallman's later career, it represents a significant step in the development of the timid teenager, afraid to speak out even on issues of life-threatening importance, into the adult activist who would soon turn needling and cajoling into a full-time occupation.
+
+In voicing his opposition to computer security, Stallman drew on many of the key ideas that had shaped his early life: hunger for knowledge, distaste for authority, and frustration over prejudice and secret rules that rendered some people outcasts. He would also draw on the ethical concepts that would shape his adult life: responsibility to the community, trust, and the hacker spirit of direct action. Expressed in software-computing terms, the null string represents the 1.0 version of the Richard Stallman political world view - incomplete in a few places but, for the most part, fully mature.
+={computer security, opposition to}
+
+Looking back, Stallman hesitates to impart too much significance to an event so early in his hacking career. "In that early stage there were a lot of people who shared my feelings," he says. "The large number of people who adopted the null string as their password was a sign that many people agreed that it was the proper thing to do. I was simply inclined to be an activist about it."
+
+Stallman does credit the AI Lab for awakening that activist spirit, however. As a teenager, Stallman had observed political events with little idea as to how he could do or say anything of importance. As a young adult, Stallman was speaking out on matters in which he felt supremely confident, matters such as software design, responsibility to the community, and individual freedom. "I joined this community which had a way of life which involved respecting each other's freedom," he says. "It didn't take me long to figure out that that was a good thing. It took me longer to come to the conclusion that this was a moral issue."
+
+Hacking at the AI Lab wasn't the only activity helping to boost Stallman's esteem. At the start of his junior year at Harvard, Stallman began participating in a recreational international folk dance group which had just been started in Currier House. He was not going to try it, considering himself incapable of dancing, but a friend pointed out, "You don't know you can't if you haven't tried." To his amazement, he was good at it and enjoyed it. What started as an experiment became another passion alongside hacking and studying; also, occasionally, away to meet women, though it didn't lead to a date during his college career. While dancing, Stallman no longer felt like the awkward, un-coordinated 10-year-old whose attempts to play football had ended in frustration. He felt confident, agile, and alive. In the early 80s, Stallman went further and joined the MIT Folk Dance Performing Group. Dancing for audiences, dressed in an imitation of the traditional garb of a Balkan peasant, he found being in front of an audience fun, and discovered an aptitude for being on stage which later helped him in public speaking.
+={folk dancing;Stallman, Richard M.:folk dancing}
+
+Although the dancing and hacking did little to improve Stallman's social standing, they helped him overcome the sense of exclusion that had clouded his pre-Harvard life. In 1977, attending a science-fiction convention for the first time, he came across Nancy the Button maker, who makes calligraphic buttons saying whatever you wish. Excited, Stallman ordered a button with the words "Impeach God" emblazoned on it.
+
+For Stallman, the "Impeach God" message worked on many levels. An atheist since early childhood, Stallman first saw it as an attempt to start a "second front" in the ongoing debate on religion. "Back then everybody was arguing about whether a god existed," Stallman recalls. "'Impeach God' approached the subject from a completely different viewpoint. If a god was so powerful as to create the world and yet did nothing to correct the problems in it, why would we ever want to worship such a god? Wouldn't it be more just to put it on trial?"
+
+At the same time, "Impeach God" was a reference to the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, in effect comparing a tyrannical deity to Nixon. Watergate affected Stallman deeply. As a child, Stallman had grown up resenting authority. Now, as an adult, his mistrust had been solidified by the culture of the AI Lab hacker community. To the hackers, Watergate was merely a Shakespearean rendition of the daily power struggles that made life such a hassle for those without privilege. It was an out sized parable for what happened when people traded liberty and openness for security and convenience.
+
+Buoyed by growing confidence, Stallman wore the button proudly. People curious enough to ask him about it received a well-prepared spiel. "My name is Jehovah," Stallman would say. "I have a secret plan to end injustice and suffering, but due to heavenly security reasons I can't tell you the workings of my plan. I see the big picture and you don't, and you know I'm good because I told you so. So put your faith in me and obey me without question. If you don't obey, that means you're evil, so I'll put you on my enemies list and throw you in a pit where the Infernal Revenue Service will audit your taxes every year for all eternity."
+
+Those who interpreted the spiel as a parody of the Watergate hearings only got half the message. For Stallman, the other half of the message was something only his fellow hackers seemed to be hearing. One hundred years after Lord Acton warned about absolute power corrupting absolutely, Americans seemed to have forgotten the first part of Acton's truism: power, itself, corrupts. Rather than point out the numerous examples of petty corruption, Stallman felt content voicing his outrage toward an entire system that trusted power in the first place.
+
+"I figured, why stop with the small fry," says Stallman, recalling the button and its message. "If we went after Nixon, why not go after Mr. Big? The way I see it, any being that has power and abuses it deserves to have that power taken away."
+
+1~ Chapter 5 - Puddle of Freedom
+
+[RMS: In this chapter, I have corrected statements about facts, including facts about my thoughts and feelings, and removed some gratuitous hostility in descriptions of events. I have preserved Williams' statements of his own impressions, except where noted.]
+
+Ask anyone who's spent more than a minute in Richard Stallman's presence, and you'll get the same recollection: forget the long hair. Forget the quirky demeanor. The first thing you notice is the gaze. One look into Stallman's green eyes, and you know you're in the presence of a true believer.
+
+To call the Stallman gaze intense is an understatement. Stallman's eyes don't just look at you; they look through you. Even when your own eyes momentarily shift away out of simple primate politeness, Stallman's eyes remain locked-in, sizzling away at the side of your head like twin photon beams.
+
+Maybe that's why most writers, when describing Stallman, tend to go for the religious angle. In a 1998 Salon.com article titled "The Saint of Free Software," Andrew Leonard describes Stallman's green eyes as "radiating the power of an Old Testament prophet."1~{ See Andrew Leonard, "The Saint of Free Software," Salon.com (August 1998), \\ http://www.salon.com/21st/feature/1998/08/cov_31feature.html. }~ A 1999 Wired magazine article describes the Stallman beard as "Rasputin-like,"~{ See Leander Kahney, "Linux's Forgotten Man," Wired News (March 5, 1999), \\ http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,18291,00.html. }~ while a London Guardian profile describes the Stallman smile as the smile of "a disciple seeing Jesus."~{ See "Programmer on moral high ground; Free software is a moral issue for Richard Stallman believes in freedom and free software," London Guardian (November 6, 1999), \\ http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/1999/nov/06/andrewbrown. \\ These are just a small sampling of the religious comparisons. To date, the most extreme comparison has to go to Linus Torvalds, who, in his autobiography - see Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2001): 58 - writes, "Richard Stallman is the God of Free Software." Honorable mention goes to Larry Lessig, who, in a footnote description of Stallman in his book - see Larry Lessig, The Future of Ideas (Random House, 2001): 270 - likens Stallman to Moses:... \\ as with Moses, it was another leader, Linus Torvalds, who finally carried the movement into the promised land by facilitating the development of the final part of the OS puzzle. Like Moses, too, Stallman is both respected and reviled by allies within the movement. He is[an] unforgiving, and hence for many inspiring, leader of a critically important aspect of modern culture. I have deep respect for the principle and commitment of this extraordinary individual, though I also have great respect for those who are courageous enough to question his thinking and then sustain his wrath. \\ In a final interview with Stallman, I asked him his thoughts about the religious comparisons. "Some people do compare me with an Old Testament prophet, and the reason is Old Testament prophets said certain social practices were wrong. They wouldn't compromise on moral issues. They couldn't be bought off, and they were usually treated with contempt." }~
+={Wired magazine;Leonard, Andrew;London Guardian;Salon.com}
+
+Such analogies serve a purpose, but they ultimately fall short. That's because they fail to take into account the vulnerable side of the Stallman persona. Watch the Stallman gaze for an extended period of time, and you will begin to notice a subtle change. What appears at first to be an attempt to intimidate or hypnotize reveals itself upon second and third viewing as a frustrated attempt to build and maintain contact. If his personality has a touch or "shadow" of autism or Asperger's Syndrome, a possibility that Stallman has entertained from time to time, his eyes certainly confirm the diagnosis. Even at their most high-beam level of intensity, they have a tendency to grow cloudy and distant, like the eyes of a wounded animal preparing to give up the ghost.
+={Asperger Syndrome;autism}
+
+My own first encounter with the legendary Stallman gaze dates back to the March, 1999, LinuxWorld Convention and Expo in San Jose, California. Billed as a "coming out party" for the "Linux" software community, the convention also stands out as the event that reintroduced Stallman to the technology media. Determined to push for his proper share of credit, Stallman used the event to instruct spectators and reporters alike on the history of the GNU Project and the project's overt political objectives.
+={GNU Project:GNOME 1.0+1;Linux+6;LinuxWorld+8}
+
+As a reporter sent to cover the event, I received my own Stallman tutorial during a press conference announcing the release of GNOME 1.0, a free software graphic user interface. Unwittingly, I push an entire bank of hot buttons when I throw out my very first question to Stallman himself: "Do you think GNOME's maturity will affect the commercial popularity of the Linux operating system?"
+={GNOME 1.0}
+
+"I ask that you please stop calling the operating system Linux," Stallman responds, eyes immediately zeroing in on mine. "The Linux kernel is just a small part of the operating system. Many of the software programs that make up the operating system you call Linux were not developed by Linus Torvalds at all. They were created by GNU Project volunteers, putting in their own personal time so that users might have a free operating system like the one we have today. To not acknowledge the contribution of those programmers is both impolite and a misrepresentation of history. That's why I ask that when you refer to the operating system, please call it by its proper name, GNU/Linux."
+={GNU Project:Linux and|kernel;Torvalds, Linus+3}
+
+Taking the words down in my reporter's notebook, I notice an eerie silence in the crowded room. When I finally look up, I find Stallman's unblinking eyes waiting for me. Timidly, a second reporter throws out a question, making sure to use the term "GNU/Linux" instead of Linux. Miguel de Icaza, leader of the GNOME project, fields the question. It isn't until halfway through de Icaza's answer, however, that Stallman's eyes finally unlock from mine. As soon as they do, a mild shiver rolls down my back. When Stallman starts lecturing another reporter over a perceived error in diction, I feel a guilty tinge of relief. At least he isn't looking at me, I tell myself.
+={de Icaza, Miguel;GNU/Linux}
+
+For Stallman, such face-to-face moments would serve their purpose. By the end of the first LinuxWorld show, most reporters know better than to use the term "Linux" in his presence, and Wired.com is running a story comparing Stallman to a pre-Stalinist revolutionary erased from the history books by hackers and entrepreneurs eager to downplay the GNU Project's overly political objectives.~{ See Leander Kahney (1999). }~ Other articles follow, and while few reporters call the operating system GNU/Linux in print, most are quick to credit Stallman for launching the drive to build a free software operating system 15 years before.
+
+I won't meet Stallman again for another 17 months. During the interim, Stallman will revisit Silicon Valley once more for the August, 1999 LinuxWorld show. Although not invited to speak, Stallman does manage to deliver the event's best line. Accepting the show's Linus Torvalds Award for Community Service - an award named after Linux creator Linus Torvalds - on behalf of the Free Software Foundation, Stallman wisecracks, "Giving the Linus Torvalds Award to the Free Software Foundation is a bit like giving the Han Solo Award to the Rebel Alliance."
+
+This time around, however, the comments fail to make much of a media dent. Midway through the week, Red Hat, Inc., a prominent GNU/Linux vendor, goes public. The news merely confirms what many reporters such as myself already suspect: "Linux" has become a Wall Street buzzword, much like "e-commerce" and "dot-com" before it. With the stock market approaching the Y2K rollover like a hyperbola approaching its vertical asymptote, all talk of free software or open source as a political phenomenon falls by the wayside.
+={Red Hat Inc.:going public}
+
+Maybe that's why, when LinuxWorld follows up its first two shows with a third LinuxWorld show in August, 2000, Stallman is conspicuously absent.
+
+My second encounter with Stallman and his trademark gaze comes shortly after that third LinuxWorld show. Hearing that Stallman is going to be in Silicon Valley, I set up a lunch interview in Palo Alto, California. The meeting place seems ironic, not only because of his absence from the show but also because of the overall backdrop. Outside of Redmond, Washington, few cities offer a more direct testament to the economic value of proprietary software. Curious to see how Stallman, a man who has spent the better part of his life railing against our culture's predilection toward greed and selfishness, is coping in a city where even garage-sized bungalows run in the half-million-dollar price range, I make the drive down from Oakland.
+={Redmond (Washington);Palo Alto (California);Silicon Valley+1}
+
+I follow the directions Stallman has given me, until I reach the headquarters of Art.net, a nonprofit "virtual artists collective." Located in a hedge-shrouded house in the northern corner of the city, the Art.net headquarters are refreshingly run-down. Suddenly, the idea of Stallman lurking in the heart of Silicon Valley doesn't seem so strange after all.
+={Art.net}
+
+I find Stallman sitting in a darkened room, tapping away on his gray laptop computer. He looks up as soon as I enter the room, giving me a full blast of his 200-watt gaze. When he offers a soothing "Hello," I offer a return greeting. Before the words come out, however, his eyes have already shifted back to the laptop screen.
+
+"I'm just finishing an article on the spirit of hacking," Stallman says, fingers still tapping. "Take a look."
+
+I take a look. The room is dimly lit, and the text appears as greenish-white letters on a black background, a reversal of the color scheme used by most desktop word-processing programs, so it takes my eyes a moment to adjust. When they do, I find myself reading Stallman's account of a recent meal at a Korean restaurant. Before the meal, Stallman makes an interesting discovery: the person setting the table has left six chopsticks instead of the usual two in front of Stallman's place setting. Where most restaurant goers would have ignored the redundant pairs, Stallman takes it as challenge: find away to use all six chopsticks at once. Like many software hacks, the successful solution is both clever and silly at the same time. Hence Stallman's decision to use it as an illustration.
+
+As I read the story, I feel Stallman watching me intently. I look over to notice a proud but child-like half smile on his face. When I praise the essay, my comment barely merits a raised eyebrow.
+
+"I'll be ready to go in a moment," he says.
+
+Stallman goes back to tapping away at his laptop. The laptop is gray and boxy, not like the sleek, modern laptops that seemed to be a programmer favorite at the recent LinuxWorld show. Above the keyboard rides a smaller, lighter keyboard, a testament to Stallman's aging hands. During the mid 1990s, the pain in Stallman's hands became so unbearable that he had to hire a typist. Today, Stallman relies on a keyboard whose keys require less pressure than a typical computer keyboard.
+
+Stallman has a tendency to block out all external stimuli while working. Watching his eyes lock onto the screen and his fingers dance, one quickly gets the sense of two old friends locked in deep conversation.
+
+The session ends with a few loud keystrokes and the slow disassembly of the laptop.
+
+"Ready for lunch?" Stallman asks.
+
+We walk to my car. Pleading a sore ankle, Stallman limps along slowly. Stallman blames the injury on a tendon in his left foot. The injury is three years old and has gotten so bad that Stallman, a huge fan of folk dancing, has been forced to give up all dancing activities."I love folk dancing intensely," Stallman laments. "Not being able to dance has been a tragedy for me."
+={folk dancing;Stallman, Richard M.:folk dancing}
+
+Stallman's body bears witness to the tragedy. Lack of exercise has left Stallman with swollen cheeks and a pot belly that was much less visible the year before. You can tell the weight gain has been dramatic, because when Stallman walks, he arches his back like a pregnant woman trying to accommodate an unfamiliar load.
+
+The walk is further slowed by Stallman's willingness to stop and smell the roses, literally. Spotting a particularly beautiful blossom, he strokes the innermost petals against his nose, takes a deep sniff, and steps back with a contented sigh.
+
+"Mmm, rhinophytophilia," he says, rubbing his back.~{ At the time, I thought Stallman was referring to the flower's scientific name. Months later, I would learn that rhino phytophilia was in fact a humorous reference to the activity - i.e., Stallman's sticking his nose into a flower and enjoying the moment - presenting it as the kinky practice of nasal sex with plants. For another humorous Stallman flower incident, \\ visit: http://www.stallman.org/articles/texas.html. }~
+
+The drive to the restaurant takes less than three minutes. Upon recommendation from Tim Ney, former executive director of the Free Software Foundation, I have let Stallman choose the restaurant. While some reporters zero in on Stallman's monk-like lifestyle, the truth is, Stallman is a committed epicure when it comes to food. One of the fringe benefits of being a traveling missionary for the free software cause is the ability to sample delicious food from around the world. "Visit almost any major city in the world, and chances are Richard knows the best restaurant in town," says Ney. "Richard also takes great pride in knowing what's on the menu and ordering for the entire table." (If they are willing, that is.)
+={Ney, Tim}
+
+For today's meal, Stallman has chosen a Cantonese-style dim sum restaurant two blocks off University Avenue, Palo Alto's main drag. The choice is partially inspired by Stallman's recent visit to China, including a stop in Hong Kong, in addition to Stallman's personal aversion to spicier Hunanese and Szechuan cuisine. "I'm not a big fan of spicy," Stallman admits.
+
+We arrive a few minutes after 11 a.m. and find ourselves already subject to a 20-minute wait. Given the hacker aversion to lost time, I hold my breath momentarily, fearing an outburst. Stallman, contrary to expectations, takes the news in stride.
+
+"It's too bad we couldn't have found somebody else to join us," he tells me. "It's always more fun to eat with a group of people."
+
+During the wait, Stallman practices a few dance steps. His moves are tentative but skilled. We discuss current events. Stallman says his only regret about not attending LinuxWorld was missing out on a press conference announcing the launch of the GNOME Foundation. Backed by Sun Microsystems and IBM, the foundation is in many ways a vindication for Stallman, who has long championed that free software and free-market economics need not be mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, Stallman remains dissatisfied by the message that came out.
+
+"The way it was presented, the companies were talking about Linux with no mention of the GNU Project at all," Stallman says.
+={GNU Project:Linux and;Linux:GNU Project and}
+
+Such disappointments merely contrast the warm response coming from overseas, especially Asia, Stallman notes. A quick glance at the Stallman 2000 travel itinerary bespeaks the growing popularity of the free software message. Between recent visits to India, China, and Brazil, Stallman has spent 12 of the last 115 days on United States soil. His travels have given him an opportunity to see how the free software concept translates into different languages of cultures.
+
+"In India many people are interested in free software, because they see it as a way to build their computing infrastructure without spending a lot of money," Stallman says. "In China, the concept has been much slower to catch on. Comparing free software to free speech is harder to do when you don't have any free speech. Still, the level of interest in free software during my last visit was profound."
+
+The conversation shifts to Napster, the San Mateo, California software company, which has become something of a media cause c'el'ebre in recent months. The company markets a controversial software tool that lets music fans browse and copy the music files of other music fans. Thanks to the magnifying powers of the Internet, this so-called "peer-to-peer" program has evolved into a de facto online jukebox, giving ordinary music fans a way to listen to MP3 music files over the computer without paying a royalty or fee, much to record companies' chagrin.
+={Napster+4;San Mateo (California)+2}
+
+Although based on proprietary software, the Napster system draws inspiration from the long-held Stallman contention that once a work enters the digital realm - in other words, once making a copy is less a matter of duplicating sounds or duplicating atoms and more a matter of duplicating information - the natural human impulse to share a work becomes harder to restrict. Rather than impose additional restrictions, Napster execs have decided to take advantage of the impulse. Giving music listeners a central place to trade music files, the company has gambled on its ability to steer the resulting user traffic toward other commercial opportunities.
+
+The sudden success of the Napster model has put the fear in traditional record companies, with good reason. Just days before my Palo Alto meeting with Stallman, U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Patel granted a request filed by the Recording Industry Association of America for an injunction against the file-sharing service. The in-junction was subsequently suspended by the U.S. Ninth District Court of Appeals, but by early 2001, the Court of Appeals, too, would find the San Mateo-based company in breach of copyright law,~{ See Cecily Barnes and Scott Ard, "Court Grants Stay of Napster Injunction," News.com (July 28, 2000), \\ http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-2376465.html. }~ a decision RIAA spokesperson Hillary Rosen would later proclaim a "clear victory for the creative content community and the legitimate online marketplace."~{ See "A Clear Victory for Recording Industry in Napster Case," RIAA press release (February 12, 2001), \\ http://www.riaa.com/PR_story.cfm?id=372. }~
+
+For hackers such as Stallman, the Napster business model is troublesome in different ways. The company's eagerness to appropriate time-worn hacker principles such as file sharing and communal information ownership, while at the same time selling a service based on proprietary software, sends a distressing mixed message. As a person who already has a hard enough time getting his own carefully articulated message into the media stream, Stallman is understandably reticent when it comes to speaking out about the company. Still, Stallman does admit to learning a thing or two from the social side of the Napster phenomenon.
+
+"Before Napster, I thought it might be [sufficient] for people to privately redistribute works of entertainment," Stallman says. "The number of people who find Napster useful, however, tells me that the right to redistribute copies not only on a neighbor-to-neighbor basis, but to the public at large, is essential and therefore may not be taken away."
+
+No sooner does Stallman say this than the door to the restaurant swings open and we are invited back inside by the host. Within a few seconds, we are seated in a side corner of the restaurant next to a large mirrored wall.
+
+The restaurant's menu doubles as an order form, and Stallman is quickly checking off boxes before the host has even brought water to the table. "Deep-fried shrimp roll wrapped in bean-curd skin," Stallman reads. "Bean-curd skin. It offers such an interesting texture. I think we should get it."
+
+This comment leads to an impromptu discussion of Chinese food and Stallman's recent visit to China. "The food in China is utterly exquisite," Stallman says, his voice gaining an edge of emotion for the first time this morning. "So many different things that I've never seen in the U.S., local things made from local mushrooms and local vegetables. It got to the point where I started keeping a journal just to keep track of every wonderful meal."
+
+The conversation segues into a discussion of Korean cuisine. During the same June, 2000, Asian tour, Stallman paid a visit to South Korea. His arrival ignited a mini-firestorm in the local media thanks to a Korean software conference attended by Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates that same week. Next to getting his photo above Gates's photo on the front page of the top Seoul newspaper, Stallman says the best thing about the trip was the food. "I had a bowl of naeng myun, which is cold noodles," says Stallman. "These were a very interesting feeling noodle. Most places don't use quite the same kind of noodles for your naeng myun, so I can say with complete certainty that this was the most exquisite naeng myun I ever had."
+={Gates, Bill;South Korea}
+
+The term "exquisite" is high praise coming from Stallman. I know this, because a few moments after listening to Stallman rhapsodize about naeng myun, I feel his laser-beam eyes singeing the top of my right shoulder.
+
+"There is the most exquisite woman sitting just behind you," Stallman says.
+
+I turn to look, catching a glimpse of a woman's back. The woman is young, somewhere in her mid-20s, and is wearing a white sequined dress. She and her male lunch companion are in the final stages of paying the check. When both get up from the table to leave the restaurant, I can tell without looking, because Stallman's eyes suddenly dim in intensity.
+
+"Oh, no," he says. "They're gone. And to think, I'll probably never even get to see her again."
+
+After a brief sigh, Stallman recovers. The moment gives me a chance to discuss Stallman's reputation vis-'a-vis the fairer sex. The reputation is a bit contradictory at times. A number of hackers report Stallman's predilection for greeting females with a kiss on the back of the hand.~{ See Mae Ling Mak, "A Mae Ling Story" (December 17, 1998), \\ http://crackmonkey.org/pipermail/crackmonkey/1998-December/001777.html. So far, Mak is the only person I've found willing to speak on the record in regard to this practice, although I've heard this from a few other female sources. Mak, despite expressing initial revulsion at it, later managed to put aside her misgivings and dance with Stallman at a 1999 LinuxWorld show. }~ A May 26, 2000 Salon.com article, meanwhile, portrays Stallman as a bit of a hacker lothario. Documenting the free software-free love connection, reporter Annalee Newitz presents Stallman as rejecting traditional family values, telling her, "I believe in love, but not monogamy."~{ See Annalee Newitz, "If Code is Free Why Not Me?", Salon.com (May 26,2000), \\ http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/05/26/free_love/print.html. }~
+={Newitz, Annalee;Salon.com}
+
+Stallman lets his menu drop a little when I bring this up. "Well, most men seem to want sex and seem to have a rather contemptuous attitude towards women," he says. "Even women they're involved with. I can't understand it at all."
+
+I mention a passage from the 1999 book /{Open Sources}/ in which Stallman confesses to wanting to name the GNU kernel after a girl-friend at the time. The girlfriend's name was Alix, a name that fit perfectly with the Unix developer convention of putting an "x" at the end names of operating systems and kernels - e.g., "Linux." Alix was a Unix system administrator, and had suggested to her friends, "Someone should name a kernel after me." So Stallman decided to name the GNU kernel "Alix" as a surprise for her. The kernel's main developer renamed the kernel "Hurd," but retained the name "Alix" for part of it. One of Alix's friends noticed this part in a source snapshot and told her, and she was touched. A later redesign of the Hurd eliminated that part.~{ See Richard Stallman, "The GNU Operating System and the Free Software Movement," Open Sources (O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 1999): 65. [RMS: Williams interpreted this vignette as suggesting that I am a hopeless romantic, and that my efforts were meant to impress some as-yet-unidentified woman. No MIT hacker would believe this, since we learned quite young that most women wouldn't notice us, let alone love us, for our programming. We programmed because it was fascinating. Meanwhile, these events were only possible because I had a thoroughly identified girlfriend at the time. If I was a romantic, at the time I was neither a hopeless romantic nor a hopeful romantic, but rather temporarily a successful one. On the strength of that naive interpretation, Williams went on to compare meto Don Quijote. For completeness' sake, here's a somewhat inarticulate quote from the first edition: "I wasn't really trying to be romantic. It was more of a teasing thing. I mean, it was romantic, but it was also teasing, you know? It would have been a delightful surprise."] }~
+={HURD kernel;Open Sources (DiBona, et al)}
+
+For the first time all morning, Stallman smiles. I bring up the hand kissing. "Yes, I do do that," Stallman says. "I've found it's a way of offering some affection that a lot of women will enjoy. It's a chance to give some affection and to be appreciated for it."
+
+Affection is a thread that runs clear through Richard Stallman's life, and he is painfully candid about it when questions arise. "There really hasn't been much affection in my life, except in my mind," he says. Still, the discussion quickly grows awkward. After a few one-word replies, Stallman finally lifts up his menu, cutting off the inquiry.
+
+"Would you like some shu mai?" he asks.
+
+When the food comes out, the conversation slaloms between the arriving courses. We discuss the oft-noted hacker affection for Chinese food, the weekly dinner runs into Boston's Chinatown district during Stallman's days as a staff programmer at the AI Lab, and the underlying logic of the Chinese language and its associated writing system. Each thrust on my part elicits a well-informed parry on Stallman's part.
+
+"I heard some people speaking Shanghainese the last time I was in China," Stallman says. "It was interesting to hear. It sounded quite different [from Mandarin]. I had them tell me some cognate words in Mandarin and Shanghainese. In some cases you can see the resemblance, but one question I was wondering about was whether tones would be similar. They're not. That's interesting to me, because there's a theory that the tones evolved from additional syllables that got lost and replaced. Their effect survives in the tone. If that's true, and I've seen claims that that happened within historic times, the dialects must have diverged before the loss of these final syllables."
+
+The first dish, a plate of pan-fried turnip cakes, has arrived. Both Stallman and I take a moment to carve up the large rectangular cakes, which smell like boiled cabbage but taste like potato latkes fried in bacon.
+
+I decide to bring up the outcast issue again, wondering if Stallman's teenage years conditioned him to take unpopular stands, most notably his uphill battle since 1994 to get computer users and the media to replace the popular term "Linux" with "GNU/Linux."
+
+"I believe [being an outcast] did help me [to avoid bowing to popular views]," Stallman says, chewing on a dumpling. "I have never understood what peer pressure does to other people. I think the reason is that I was so hopelessly rejected that for me, there wasn't anything to gain by trying to follow any of the fads. It wouldn't have made any difference. I'd still be just as rejected, so I didn't try."
+
+Stallman points to his taste in music as a key example of his contrarian tendencies. As a teenager, when most of his high school classmates were listening to Motown and acid rock, Stallman preferred classical music. The memory leads to a rare humorous episode from Stallman's middle-school years. Following the Beatles' 1964 appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, most of Stallman's classmates rushed out to purchase the latest Beatles albums and singles. Right then and there, Stallman says, he made a decision to boycott the Fab Four.
+={Beatles+2;music+4}
+
+"I liked some of the pre-Beatles popular music," Stallman says. "But I didn't like the Beatles. I especially disliked the wild way people reacted to them. It was like: who was going to have a Beatles assembly to adulate the Beatles the most?"
+
+When his Beatles boycott failed to take hold, Stallman looked for other ways to point out the herd-mentality of his peers. Stallman says he briefly considered putting together a rock band himself dedicated to satirizing the Liverpool group.
+
+"I wanted to call it Tokyo Rose and the Japanese Beetles."
+
+Given his current love for international folk music, I ask Stallman if he had a similar affinity for Bob Dylan and the other folk musicians of the early 1960s. Stallman shakes his head. "I did like Peter, Paul and Mary," he says. "That reminds me of a great filk."
+={Dylan, Bob;Peter, Paul and Mary}
+
+When I ask for a definition of "filk," Stallman explains that the term is used in science fiction fandom to refer to the writing of new lyrics for songs. (In recent decades, some filkers write melodies too.) Classic filks include "On Top of Spaghetti," a rewrite of "On Top of Old Smokey," and "Yoda," filk-master "Weird" Al Yankovic's Star Wars-oriented rendition of the Kinks tune, "Lola."
+
+Stallman asks me if I would be interested in hearing the filk. As soon as I say yes, Stallman's voice begins singing in an unexpectedly clear tone, using the tune of "Blowin' in the Wind":
+
+poem{
+
+    How much wood could a woodchuck chuck,
+    f a woodchuck could chuck wood?
+    How many poles could a polak lock,
+    If a polak could lock poles?
+    How many knees could a negro grow,
+    If a negro could grow knees?
+    The answer, my dear,
+    is stick it in your ear.
+    The answer is, stick it in your ear...
+
+}poem
+
+The singing ends, and Stallman's lips curl into another child-like half smile. I glance around at the nearby tables. The Asian families enjoying their Sunday lunch pay little attention to the bearded alto in their midst.~{ For Stallman's own filks, \\ visit http://www.stallman.org/doggerel.html . To hear Stallman singing "The Free Software Song," \\ visit http://www.gnu.org/music/free-software-song.html. }~ After a few moments of hesitation, I finally smile too.
+
+"Do you want that last cornball?" Stallman asks, eyes twinkling. Before I can screw up the punch line, Stallman grabs the corn-encrusted dumpling with his two chopsticks and lifts it proudly. "Maybe I'm the one who should get the cornball," he says.
+
+The food gone, our conversation assumes the dynamics of a normal interview. Stallman reclines in his chair and cradles a cup of tea in his hands. We resume talking about Napster and its relation to the free software movement. Should the principles of free software be extended to similar arenas such as music publishing? I ask.
+
+"It's a mistake to transfer answers from one thing to another," says Stallman, contrasting songs with software programs. "The right approach is to look at each type of work and see what conclusion you get."
+
+When it comes to copyrighted works, Stallman says he divides the world into three categories. The first category involves "functional" works - e.g., software programs, dictionaries, and textbooks. The second category involves works that might best be described as "testimonial" - e.g., scientific papers and historical documents. Such works serve a purpose that would be undermined if subsequent readers or authors were free to modify the work at will. It also includes works of personal expression - e.g., diaries, journals, and autobiographies. To modify such documents would be to alter a person's recollections or point of view, which Stallman considers ethically unjustifiable. The third category includes works of art and entertainment.
+={copyrighted works, categories of}
+
+Of the three categories, the first should give users the unlimited right to make modified versions, while the second and third should regulate that right according to the will of the original author. Regardless of category, however, the freedom to copy and redistribute non-commercially should remain unabridged at all times, Stallman insists. If that means giving Internet users the right to generate a hundred copies of an article, image, song, or book and then email the copies to a hundred strangers, so be it. "It's clear that private occasional redistribution must be permitted, because only a police state can stop that," Stallman says. "It's antisocial to come between people and their friends. Napster has convinced me that we also need to permit, must permit, even noncommercial redistribution to the public for the fun of it. Because so many people want to do that and find it so useful."
+={Napster}
+
+When I ask whether the courts would accept such a permissive outlook, Stallman cuts me off.
+
+"That's the wrong question," he says. "I mean now you've changed the subject entirely from one of ethics to one of interpreting laws. And those are two totally different questions in the same field. It's useless to jump from one to the other. How the courts would interpret the existing laws is mainly in a harsh way, because that's the way these laws have been bought by publishers."
+
+The comment provides an insight into Stallman's political philosophy: just because the legal system currently backs up businesses' ability to treat copyright as the software equivalent of land title doesn't mean computer users have to play the game according to those rules. Freedom is an ethical issue, not a legal issue. "I'm looking beyond what the existing laws are to what they should be," Stallman says. "I'm not trying to draft legislation. I'm thinking about what should the law do? I consider the law prohibiting the sharing of copies with your friend the moral equivalent of Jim Crow. It does not deserve respect."
+
+The invocation of Jim Crow prompts another question. How much influence or inspiration does Stallman draw from past political leaders? Like the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, his attempt to drive social change is based on an appeal to timeless values: freedom, justice, and fair play.
+
+Stallman divides his attention between my analogy and a particularly tangled strand of hair. When I stretch the analogy to the point where I'm comparing Stallman with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Stallman, after breaking off a split end and popping it into his mouth, cuts me off.
+
+"I'm not in his league, but I do play the same game," he says, chewing.
+
+I suggest Malcolm X as another point of comparison. Like the former Nation of Islam spokesperson, Stallman has built up a reputation for courting controversy, alienating potential allies, and preaching a message favoring self-sufficiency over cultural integration.
+
+Chewing on another split end, Stallman rejects the comparison. "My message is closer to King's message," he says. "It's a universal message. It's a message of firm condemnation of certain practices that mistreat others. It's not a message of hatred for anyone. And it's not aimed at a narrow group of people. I invite anyone to value freedom and to have freedom."
+
+Many criticize Stallman for rejecting handy political alliances; some psychologize this and describe it as a character trait. In the case of his well-publicized distaste for the term "open source," the unwillingness to participate in recent coalition-building projects seems understand-able. As a man who has spent the last two decades stumping on the behalf of free software, Stallman's political capital is deeply invested in the term. Still, comments such as the "Han Solo" comparison at the 1999 LinuxWorld have only reinforced Stallman's reputation, amongst those who believe virtue consists of following the crowd, as a disgruntled mossback unwilling to roll with political or marketing trends.
+
+"I admire and respect Richard for all the work he's done," says Red Hat president Robert Young, summing up Stallman's paradoxical political conduct. "My only critique is that sometimes Richard treats his friends worse than his enemies."
+={Young, Robert;Red Hat Inc.}
+
+[RMS: The term "friends" only partly fits people such as Young, and companies such as Red Hat. It applies to some of what they did, and do: for instance, Red Hat contributes to development of free software, including some GNU programs. But Red Hat does other things that work against the free software movement's goals - for instance, its versions of GNU/Linux contain non-free software. Turning from deeds to words, referring to the whole system as "Linux" is unfriendly treatment of the GNU Project, and promoting "open source" instead of "free software" rejects our values. I could work with Young and Red Hat when we were going in the same direction, but that was not often enough to make them possible allies.]
+
+Stallman's reluctance to ally the free software movement with other political causes is not due to lack of interest in them. Visit his offices at MIT, and you instantly find a clearinghouse of left-leaning news articles covering civil-rights abuses around the globe. Visit his personal web site, stallman.org, and you'll find attacks on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the War on Drugs, and the World Trade Organization. Stallman explains, "We have to be careful of entering the free software movement into alliances with other political causes that substantial numbers of free software supporters might not agree with. For instance, we avoid linking the free software movement with any political party because we do not want to drive away the supporters and elected officials of other parties."
+={Digital Millennium Copyright Act;War on Drugs;World Trade Organization}
+
+Given his activist tendencies, I ask, why hasn't Stallman sought a larger voice? Why hasn't he used his visibility in the hacker world as a platform to boost his political voice? [RMS: But I do - when I see a good opportunity. That's why I started stallman.org. ]
+
+Stallman lets his tangled hair drop and contemplates the question for a moment. [RMS: My quoted response doesn't fit that question. It does fit a different question, "Why do you focus on free software rather than on the other causes you believe in?" I suspect the question I was asked was more like that one.]
+
+"I hesitate to exaggerate the importance of this little puddle of freedom," he says. "Because the more well-known and conventional areas of working for freedom and a better society are tremendously important. I wouldn't say that free software is as important as they are. It's the responsibility I undertook, because it dropped in my lap and I saw a way I could do something about it. But, for example, to end police brutality, to end the war on drugs, to end the kinds of racism we still have, to help everyone have a comfortable life, to protect the rights of people who do abortions, to protect us from theocracy, these are tremendously important issues, far more important than what I do. I just wish I knew how to do something about them."
+
+Once again, Stallman presents his political activity as a function of personal confidence. Given the amount of time it has taken him to develop and hone the free software movement's core tenets, Stallman is hesitant to believe he can advance the other causes he supports. 
+
+"I wish I knew how to make a major difference on those bigger issues, because I would be tremendously proud if I could, but they're very hard and lots of people who are probably better than I am have been working on them and have gotten only so far," he says. "But as I see it, while other people were defending against these big visible threats, I saw another threat that was unguarded. And so I went to defend against that threat. It may not be as big a threat, but I was the only one there [to oppose it]."
+
+Chewing a final split end, Stallman suggests paying the check. Be-fore the waiter can take it away, however, Stallman pulls out a white-colored dollar bill and throws it on the pile. The bill looks so clearly counterfeit, I can't help but pick it up and read it. Sure enough, it did not come from the US Mint. Instead of bearing the image of a George Washington or Abe Lincoln, the bill's front side bears the image of a cartoon pig. Instead of the United States of America, the banner above the pig reads, "Untied Status of Avarice." The bill is for zero dollars,~{ RMS: Williams was mistaken to call this bill "counterfeit." It is legal tender, worth zero dollars for payment of any debt. Any U.S. government office will convert it into zero dollars' worth of gold. }~ and when the waiter picks up the money, Stallman makes sure to tug on his sleeve.
+
+"I added an extra zero to your tip," Stallman says, yet another half smile creeping across his lips.
+
+The waiter, uncomprehending or fooled by the look of the bill, smiles and scurries away.
+
+"I think that means we're free to go," Stallman says.
+
+1~ Chapter 6 - The Emacs Commune
+={Emacs Commune+52;Stallman, Richard M.:AI Lab, as a programmer+18;Stallman, Richard M.:Emacs Commune and+52}
+
+The AI Lab of the 1970s was by all accounts a special place. Cutting-edge projects and top-flight researchers gave it an esteemed position in the world of computer science. The internal hacker culture and its anarchic policies lent a rebellious mystique as well. Only later, when many of the lab's scientists and software superstars had departed, would hackers fully realize the unique and ephemeral world they had once inhabited.
+
+"It was a bit like the Garden of Eden," says Stallman, summing up the lab and its software-sharing ethos in a 1998 /{Forbes}/ article. "It hadn't occurred to us not to cooperate."~{ See Josh McHugh, "For the Love of Hacking," Forbes (August 10, 1998), \\ http://www.forbes.com/forbes/1998/0810/6203094a.html. }~
+
+Such mythological descriptions, while extreme, underline an important fact. The ninth floor of 545 Tech Square was more than a workplace for many. For hackers such as Stallman, it was home.
+
+The word "home" is a weighted term in the Stallman lexicon. In a pointed swipe at his parents, Stallman, to this day, refuses to acknowledge any home before Currier House, the dorm he lived in during his days at Harvard. He has also been known to describe leaving that home in tragicomic terms. Once, while describing his years at Harvard, Stallman said his only regret was getting kicked out. It wasn't until I asked Stallman what precipitated his ouster, that I realized I had walked into a classic Stallman setup line.
+={Currier House (Harvard University)}
+
+"At Harvard they have this policy where if you pass too many classes they ask you to leave," Stallman says.
+
+With no dorm and no desire to return to New York, Stallman followed a path blazed by Greenblatt, Gosper, Sussman, and the many other hackers before him. Enrolling at MIT as a grad student, Stallman rented a room in an apartment in nearby Cambridge but soon viewed the AI Lab itself as his de facto home. In a 1986 speech, Stallman recalled his memories of the AI Lab during this period:
+={Gosper, Bill;Greenblat, Richard;Sussman, Gerald}
+
+_1 I may have done a little bit more living at the lab than most people, because every year or two for some reason or other I'd have no apartment and I would spend a few months living at the lab. And I've always found it very comfortable, as well as nice and cool in the summer. But it was not at all uncommon to find people falling asleep at the lab, again because of their enthusiasm; you stay up as long as you possibly can hacking, because you just don't want to stop. And then when you're completely exhausted, you climb over to the nearest soft horizontal surface. A very informal atmosphere.~{ See Stallman (1986). }~
+
+The lab's home-like atmosphere could be a problem at times. What some saw as a dorm, others viewed as an electronic opium den. In the 1976 book /{Computer Power and Human Reason}/, MIT researcher Joseph Weizenbaum offered a withering critique of the "computer bum," Weizenbaum's term for the hackers who populated computer rooms such as the AI Lab. "Their rumpled clothes, their unwashed hair and unshaved faces, and their uncombed hair all testify that they are oblivious to their bodies and to the world in which they move," Weizenbaum wrote. "[Computer bums] exist, at least when so engaged, only through and for the computers."~{ See Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation (W. H. Freeman, 1976): 116. }~
+={computer bums;Computer Power and Human Reason (Weizenbaum);Weizenbaum, Joseph+1}
+
+Almost a quarter century after its publication, Stallman still bristles when hearing Weizenbaum's "computer bum" description, discussing it in the present tense as if Weizenbaum himself was still in the room. "He wants people to be just professionals, doing it for the money and wanting to get away from it and forget about it as soon as possible," Stallman says. "What he sees as a normal state of affairs, I see as a tragedy."
+
+Hacker life, however, was not without tragedy. Stallman characterizes his transition from weekend hacker to full-time AI Lab denizen as a series of painful misfortunes that could only be eased through the euphoria of hacking. As Stallman himself has said, the first misfortune was his graduation from Harvard. Eager to continue his studies in physics, Stallman enrolled as a graduate student at MIT. The choice of schools was a natural one. Not only did it give Stallman the chance to follow the footsteps of great MIT alumni: William Shockley ('36), Richard P. Feynman ('39), and Murray Gell-Mann ('51), it also put him two miles closer to the AI Lab and its new PDP-10 computer. "My attention was going toward programming, but I still thought, well, maybe I can do both," Stallman says.
+={Feynman, Richard;Gell-Mann, Murray;Harvard University:graduation from;Shockley, William}
+
+Toiling in the fields of graduate-level science by day and programming in the monastic confines of the AI Lab by night, Stallman tried to achieve a perfect balance. The fulcrum of this geek teeter-totter was his weekly outing with the Folk-Dance Club, his one social outlet that guaranteed at least a modicum of interaction with the opposite sex. Near the end of that first year at MIT, however, disaster struck. A knee injury forced Stallman to stop dancing. At first, Stallman viewed the injury as a temporary problem; he went to dancing and chatted with friends while listening to the music he loved. By the end of the summer, when the knee still ached and classes reconvened, Stallman began to worry. "My knee wasn't getting any better," Stallman recalls," which meant I had to expect to be unable to dance, permanently. I was heartbroken."
+
+With no dorm and no dancing, Stallman's social universe imploded. Dancing was the only situation in which he had found success in meeting women and occasionally even dating them. No more dancing ever was painful enough, but it also meant, it seemed, no more dates ever.
+
+"I felt basically that I'd lost all my energy," Stallman recalls. "I'd lost my energy to do anything but what was most immediately tempting. The energy to do something else was gone. I was in total despair."
+
+Stallman retreated from the world even further, focusing entirely on his work at the AI Lab. By October, 1975, he dropped out of MIT and out of physics, never to return to studies. Software hacking, once a hobby, had become his calling.
+
+Looking back on that period, Stallman sees the transition from full-time student to full-time hacker as inevitable. Sooner or later, he believes, the siren's call of computer hacking would have overpowered his interest in other professional pursuits. "With physics and math, I could never figure out a way to contribute," says Stallman, recalling his struggles prior to the knee injury. "I would have been proud to advance either one of those fields, but I could never see a way to do that. I didn't know where to start. With software, I saw right away how to write things that would run and be useful. The pleasure of that knowledge led me to want to do it more."
+
+Stallman wasn't the first to equate hacking with pleasure. Many of the hackers who staffed the AI Lab boasted similar, incomplete academic resumes. *** Most had come in pursuing degrees in math or electrical engineering only to surrender their academic careers and professional ambitions to the sheer exhilaration that came with solving problems never before addressed. Like St. Thomas Aquinas, the scholastic known for working so long on his theological summae that he sometimes achieved spiritual visions, hackers reached transcendent internal states through sheer mental focus and physical exhaustion. Although Stallman shunned drugs, like most hackers, he enjoyed the "high" that came near the end of a 20-hour coding bender.
+={Thomas Aquinas, saint}
+
+Perhaps the most enjoyable emotion, however, was the sense of personal fulfillment. When it came to hacking, Stallman was a natural. A childhood's worth of late-night study sessions gave him the ability to work long hours with little sleep. As a social outcast since age 10, he had little difficulty working alone. And as a mathematician with a built-in gift for logic and foresight, Stallman possessed the ability to circumvent design barriers that left most hackers spinning their wheels.
+
+"He was special," recalls Gerald Sussman, an AI Lab faculty member and (since 1985) board member of the Free Software Foundation. Describing Stallman as a "clear thinker and a clear designer," Sussman invited Stallman to join him in AI research projects in 1973 and 1975, both aimed at making AI programs that could analyze circuits the way human engineers do it. The project required an expert's command of Lisp, a programming language built specifically for AI applications, as well as understanding (supplied by Sussman) of how a human might approach the same task. The 1975 project pioneered an AI technique called dependency-directed backtracking or truth maintenance, which consists of positing tentative assumptions, noticing if they lead to contradictions, and reconsidering the pertinent assumptions if that occurs.
+={LISP programming language;Sussman, Gerald}
+
+When he wasn't working on official projects such as these, Stallman devoted his time to pet projects. It was in a hacker's best interest to improve the lab's software infrastructure, and one of Stallman's biggest pet projects during this period was the lab's editor program TECO.
+={TECO editor program+23}
+
+The story of Stallman's work on TECO during the 1970s is inextricably linked with Stallman's later leadership of the free software movement. It is also a significant stage in the history of computer evolution, so much so that a brief recapitulation of that evolution is necessary. During the 1950s and 1960s, when computers were first appearing at universities, computer programming was an incredibly abstract pursuit. To communicate with the machine, programmers created a series of punch cards, with each card representing an individual software command. Programmers would then hand the cards over to a central system administrator who would then insert them, one by one, into the machine, waiting for the machine to spit out a new set of punch cards, which the programmer would then decipher as output. This process, known as "batch processing," was cumbersome and time consuming. It was also prone to abuses of authority. One of the motivating factors behind hackers' inbred aversion to centralization was the power held by early system operators in dictating which jobs held top priority.
+={batch processing;Free Software Foundation (FSF):TECO text-editor and;punch cards, for batch processing}
+
+In 1962, computer scientists and hackers involved in MIT's Project MAC, an early forerunner of the AI Lab, took steps to alleviate this frustration. Time-sharing, originally known as "time stealing," made it possible for multiple programs to take advantage of a machine's operational capabilities. Teletype interfaces also made it possible to communicate with a machine not through a series of punched holes but through actual text. A programmer typed in commands and read the line-by-line output generated by the machine.
+={Project MAC;teletype interfaces vs. batch processing+3}
+
+During the late 1960s, interface design made additional leaps. In a famous 1968 lecture, Doug Engelbart, a scientist then working at the Stanford Research Institute, unveiled a prototype of the modern graphical interface. Rigging up a television set to the computer and adding a pointer device which Engelbart dubbed a "mouse," the scientist created a system even more interactive than the time-sharing system developed at MIT. Treating the video display like a high-speed printer, Engelbart's system gave a user the ability to move the cursor around the screen and see the cursor position updated by the computer in real time. The user suddenly had the ability to position text anywhere on the screen.
+={Engelbart, Doug;graphial interfaces;mice, as video pointers;Stanford Research Institute}
+
+Such innovations would take another two decades to make their way into the commercial marketplace. Still, by the 1970s, video screens had started to replace teletypes as display terminals, creating the potential for full-screen - as opposed to line-by-line - editing capabilities.
+={display terminals, replacing teletypes;video screens}
+
+One of the first programs to take advantage of this full-screen capability was the MIT AI Lab's TECO. Short for Text Editor and COrrector, the program had been upgraded by hackers from an old teletype line editor for the lab's PDP-6 machine.~{ According to the Jargon File, TECO's name originally stood for Tape Editor and Corrector. \\ See http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/T/TECO.html. }~
+
+TECO was a substantial improvement over old editors, but it still had its drawbacks. To create and edit a document, a programmer had to enter a series of commands specifying each edit. It was an abstract process. Unlike modern word processors, which update text with each keystroke, TECO demanded that the user enter an extended series of editing instructions followed by an "end of command string" sequence just to change the text. Over time, a hacker grew proficient enough to make large changes elegantly in one command string, but as Stallman himself would later point out, the process required "a mental skill like that of blindfold chess."~{ See Richard Stallman, "EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable, Display Editor," AI Lab Memo (1979). An updated HTML version of this memo, from which I am quoting, is available at \\ http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html. }~
+
+To facilitate the process, AI Lab hackers had built a system that displayed both the text and the command string on a split screen. Despite this innovative hack, editing with TECO still required skill and planning.
+
+TECO wasn't the only full-screen editor floating around the computer world at this time. During a visit to the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1976, Stallman encountered an edit program named E. The program contained an internal feature, which allowed a user to update display text after each command keystroke. In the language of 1970s programming, E was one of the first rudimentary WYSIWYG editors. Short for "what you see is what you get," WYSIWYG meant that a user could manipulate the file by moving through the displayed text, as opposed to working through a back-end editor program."~{ See Richard Stallman, "Emacs the Full Screen Editor" (1987), \\ http://www.lysator.liu.se/history/garb/txt/87-1-emacs.txt. }~
+={E edit program;Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory}
+
+Impressed by the hack, Stallman looked for ways to expand TECO's functionality in similar fashion upon his return to MIT. He found a TECO feature called Control-R, written by Carl Mikkelson and named after the two-key combination that triggered it. Mikkelson's hack switched TECO from its usual abstract command-execution mode to a more intuitive keystroke-by-keystroke mode. The only flaws were that it used just five lines of the screen and was too inefficient for real use. Stallman reimplemented the feature to use the whole screen efficiently, then extended it in a subtle but significant way. He made it possible to attach TECO command strings, or "macros," to keystrokes. Advanced TECO users already saved macros in files; Stallman's hack made it possible to call them up fast. The result was a user-programmable WYSIWYG editor. "That was the real breakthrough," says Guy Steele, a fellow AI Lab hacker at the time.~{ Ibid. }~
+={macro modes, adding to TECO+11;Steele, Guy+13}
+
+By Stallman's own recollection, the macro hack touched off an explosion of further innovation. "Everybody and his brother was writing his own collection of redefined screen-editor commands, a command for everything he typically liked to do," Stallman would later recall. "People would pass them around and improve them, making them more powerful and more general. The collections of redefinitions gradually became system programs in their own right."~{ Ibid. }~
+
+So many people found the macro innovations useful and had incorporated it into their own TECO programs that the TECO editor had become secondary to the macro mania it inspired. "We started to categorize it mentally as a programming language rather than as an editor," Stallman says. Users were experiencing their own pleasure tweaking the software and trading new ideas.~{ Ibid. }~
+
+Two years after the explosion, the rate of innovation began to exhibit inconvenient side effects. The explosive growth had provided an exciting validation of the collaborative hacker approach, but it had also led to incompatibility. "We had a Tower of Babel effect," says Guy Steele.
+
+The effect threatened to kill the spirit that had created it, Steele says. Hackers had designed ITS to facilitate programmers' ability to share knowledge and improve each other's work. That meant being able to sit down at another programmer's desk, open up a programmer's work and make comments and modifications directly within the software. "Sometimes the easiest way to show somebody how to program or debug something was simply to sit down at the terminal and do it for them," explains Steele.
+
+The macro feature, after its second year, began to foil this capability. In their eagerness to embrace the new full-screen capabilities, hackers had customized their versions of TECO to the point where a hacker sitting down at another hacker's terminal usually had to spend the first hour just figuring out what macro commands did what.
+
+Frustrated, Steele took it upon himself to solve the problem. He gathered together the four different macro packages and began assembling a chart documenting the most useful macro commands. In the course of implementing the design specified by the chart, Steele say she attracted Stallman's attention.
+
+"He started looking over my shoulder, asking me what I was doing," recalls Steele.
+
+For Steele, a soft-spoken hacker who interacted with Stallman infrequently, the memory still sticks out. Looking over another hacker's shoulder while he worked was a common activity at the AI Lab. Stallman, the TECO maintainer at the lab, deemed Steele's work "interesting" and quickly set off to complete it.
+
+"As I like to say, I did the first 0.001 percent of the implementation, and Stallman did the rest," says Steele with a laugh.
+
+The project's new name, Emacs, came courtesy of Stallman. Short for "editing macros," it signified the evolutionary transcendence that had taken place during the macros explosion two years before. It also took advantage of a gap in the software programming lexicon. Noting a lack of programs on ITS starting with the letter "E," Stallman chose Emacs, making it natural to reference the program with a single letter. Once again, the hacker lust for efficiency had left its mark.~{ Ibid. }~
+={Emacs text editor+11;GNU Emacs+11}
+
+Of course, not everyone switched to Emacs, or not immediately. Users were free to continue maintaining and running their own TECO-based editors as before. But most found it preferable to switch to Emacs, especially since Emacs was designed to make it easy to replace or add some parts while using others unchanged.
+
+"On the one hand, we were trying to make a uniform command set again; on the other hand, we wanted to keep it open ended, because the programmability was important," recalls Steele.
+
+Stallman now faced another conundrum: if users made changes but didn't communicate those changes back to the rest of the community, the Tower of Babel effect would simply emerge in other places. Falling back on the hacker doctrine of sharing innovation, Stallman embedded a statement within the source code that set the terms of use. Users were free to modify and redistribute the code on the condition that they gave back all the extensions they made. Stallman called this "joining the Emacs Commune." Just as TECO had become more than a simple editor, Emacs had become more than a simple software program. To Stallman, it was a social contract. In a 1981 memo documenting the project, Stallman spelled out the contract terms. "EMACS," he wrote, "was distributed on a basis of communal sharing, which means that all improvements must be given back to me to be incorporated and distributed."~{ See Stallman (1979): #SEC34. }~
+={Emacs Commune}
+
+The original Emacs ran only on the PDP-10 computer, but soon users of other computers wanted an Emacs to edit with. The explosive innovation continued throughout the decade, resulting in a host of Emacs-like programs with varying degrees of cross-compatibility. The Emacs Commune's rules did not apply to them, since their code was separate. A few cited their relation to Stallman's original Emacs with humorously recursive names: Sine (Sine is not Emacs), Eine (Eine isnot Emacs), and Zwei (Zwei was Eine initially). A true Emacs had to provide user-programmability like the original; editors with similar keyword commands but without the user-programmability were called "ersatz Emacs." One example was Mince (Mince is Not Complete Emacs).
+={Eine (Eine is not Emacs) text editor;Zwei (Zwei was Eine initially) text editor;Sine (Sine is not Emacs) text editor}
+
+While Stallman was developing Emacs in the AI Lab, there were other, unsettling developments elsewhere in the hacker community. Brian Reid's 1979 decision to embed "time bombs" in Scribe, making it possible for Unilogic to limit unpaid user access to the software, was a dark omen to Stallman. "He considered it the most Nazi thing he ever saw in his life," recalls Reid. Despite going on to later Internet fame as the co-creator of the Usenet /{alt}/ hierarchy, Reid says he still has yet to live down that 1979 decision, at least in Stallman's eyes. "He said that all software should be free and the prospect of charging money for software was a crime against humanity."~{ In a 1996 interview with online magazine MEME , Stallman cited Scribe's sale as irksome, but declined to mention Reid by name. "The problem was nobody censured or punished this student for what he did," Stallman said. "The result was other people got tempted to follow his example." See MEME 2.04, \\ http://memex.org/meme2-04.html. }~
+={Reid, Brian+1;Unilogic software company;time bombs, in software;Scribe text-formatting program}
+
+Although Stallman had been powerless to head off Reid's sale, he did possess the ability to curtail other forms of behavior deemed contrary to the hacker ethos. As central source-code maintainer for the original Emacs, Stallman began to wield his power for political effect. During his final stages of conflict with the administrators at the Laboratory for Computer Science over password systems, Stallman initiated a software "strike," refusing to send lab members the latest version of Emacs until they rejected the security system on the lab's computers.~{ See Steven Levy, Hackers (Penguin USA [paperback], 1984): 419. }~ This was more gesture than sanction, since nothing could stop them from installing it themselves. But it got the point across: putting passwords on an ITS system would lead to condemnation and reaction.
+={security (computer), opposition to;strike, at the Laboratory for Computer Science}
+
+"A lot of people were angry with me, saying I was trying to hold them hostage or blackmail them, which in a sense I was," Stallman would later tell author Steven Levy. "I was engaging in violence against them because I thought they were engaging in violence to everyone at large."~{ Ibid. }~
+
+Over time, Emacs became a sales tool for the hacker ethic. The flexibility Stallman had built into the software not only encouraged collaboration, it demanded it. Users who didn't keep abreast of the latest developments in Emacs evolution or didn't contribute their contributions back to Stallman ran the risk of missing out on the latest breakthroughs. And the breakthroughs were many. Twenty years later, users of GNU Emacs (a second implementation started in 1984)have modified it for so many different uses - using it as a spreadsheet, calculator, database, and web browser - that later Emacs developers adopted an overflowing sink to represent its versatile functionality. "That's the idea that we wanted to convey," says Stallman. "The amount of stuff it has contained within it is both wonderful and awful at the same time."
+
+Stallman's AI Lab contemporaries are more charitable. Hal Abelson, an MIT grad student who worked with Sussman during the 1970sand would later assist Stallman as a charter board member of the FreeSoftware Foundation, describes Emacs as "an absolutely brilliant creation." In giving programmers a way to add new software libraries and features without messing up the system, Abelson says, Stallman paved the way for future large-scale collaborative software projects. "Its structure was robust enough that you'd have people all over the world who were loosely collaborating [and] contributing to it," Abelson says. "I don't know if that had been done before."~{ In writing this chapter, I've elected to focus more on the social significance of Emacs than the software significance. To read more about the software side, I recommend Stallman's 1979 memo. I particularly recommend the section titled "Research Through Development of Installed Tools" (#SEC27). Not only is it accessible to the nontechnical reader, it also sheds light on how closely inter-twined Stallman's political philosophies are with his software-design philosophies. A sample excerpt follows:EMACS could not have been reached by a process of careful design, because such processes arrive only at goals which are visible at the outset, and whose desirability is established on the bottom line at the outset. Neither I nor anyone else visualized an extensible editor until I had made one, nor appreciated its value until he had experienced it. EMACS exists because I felt free to make individually useful small improvements on a path whose end was not in sight. }~
+={Abelson, Hal}
+
+Guy Steele expresses similar admiration. Currently a research scientist for Sun Microsystems, he remembers Stallman primarily as a "brilliant programmer with the ability to generate large quantities of relatively bug-free code." Although their personalities didn't exactly mesh, Steele and Stallman collaborated long enough for Steele to get a glimpse of Stallman's intense coding style. He recalls a notable episode in the late 1970s when the two programmers banded together to write the editor's "pretty print" feature. Originally conceived by Steele, pretty print was another keystroke-triggered feature that reformatted Emacs' source code so that it was both more readable and took up less space, further bolstering the program's WYSIWYG qualities. The feature was strategic enough to attract Stallman's active interest, and it wasn't long before Steele wrote that he and Stallman were planning an improved version.
+={Steele, Guy+3;Sun Microsystems}
+
+"We sat down one morning," recalls Steele. "I was at the keyboard, and he was at my elbow," says Steele. "He was perfectly willing to let me type, but he was also telling me what to type.
+
+The programming session lasted 10 hours. Throughout that entire time, Steele says, neither he nor Stallman took a break or made any small talk. By the end of the session, they had managed to hack the pretty print source code to just under 100 lines. "My fingers were on the keyboard the whole time," Steele recalls, "but it felt like both of our ideas were flowing onto the screen. He told me what to type, and I typed it."
+
+The length of the session revealed itself when Steele finally left the AI Lab. Standing outside the building at 545 Tech Square, he was surprised to find himself surrounded by nighttime darkness. Asa programmer, Steele was used to marathon coding sessions. Still, something about this session was different. Working with Stallman had forced Steele to block out all external stimuli and focus his entire mental energies on the task at hand. Looking back, Steele says he found the Stallman mind-meld both exhilarating and scary at the same time. "My first thought afterward was [that] it was a great experience, very intense, and that I never wanted to do it again in my life."
+
+1~ Chapter 7 - A Stark Moral Choice
+={Stallman, Richard M.:GNU Project+72}
+
+On September 27, 1983, computer programmers logging on to the Usenet newsgroup net.unix-wizards encountered an unusual message. Posted in the small hours of the morning, 12:30 a.m. to be exact, and signed by rms@mit-oz, the message's subject line was terse but attention-grabbing. "New UNIX implementation," it read. Instead of introducing a newly released version of Unix, however, the message's opening paragraph issued a call to arms:
+={GNU Project:new UNIX implementation;net.unix-wizards newsgroup}
+
+_1 Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu's Not Unix), and give it away free to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money, programs and equipment are greatly needed.~{ See Richard Stallman, "Initial GNU Announcement" (September 1983). }~
+={Unix operating system:GNU system and}
+
+To an experienced Unix developer, the message was a mixture of idealism and hubris. Not only did the author pledge to rebuild the already mature Unix operating system from the ground up, he also proposed to improve it in places. The new GNU system, the author predicted, would carry all the usual components - a text editor, a shell program to run Unix-compatible applications, a compiler, "and a few other things."~{ Ibid. }~ It would also contain many enticing features that other Unix systems didn't yet offer: a graphic user interface based on the Lisp programming language, a crash-proof file system, and networking protocols built according to MIT's internal networking system.
+={LISP programming language:GNU system and}
+
+"GNU will be able to run Unix programs, but will not be identical to Unix," the author wrote. "We will make all improvements that are convenient, based on our experience with other operating systems."
+
+Anticipating a skeptical response on some readers' part, the author made sure to follow up his operating-system outline with a brief biographical sketch titled, "Who am I?":
+
+_1 I am Richard Stallman, inventor of the original much-imitated EMACS editor, now at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT. I have worked extensively on compilers, editors, debuggers, command interpreters, the Incompatible Timesharing System and the Lisp Machine operating system. I pioneered terminal-independent display support in ITS. In addition I have implemented one crash proof file system and two window systems for Lisp machines.~{ Ibid. }~
+
+As fate would have it, Stallman's fanciful GNU Project missed its Thanksgiving launch date. By January, 1984, however, Stallman made good on his promise and fully immersed himself in the world of Unix software development. For a software architect raised on ITS, it was like designing suburban shopping malls instead of Moorish palaces. Even so, building a Unix-like operating system had its hidden advantages. ITS had been powerful, but it also possessed an Achilles' heel: MIT hackers had written it specifically to run on the powerful DEC-built PDP-10 computer. When AI Lab administrators elected to phase out the lab's PDP-10 machine in the early 1980s, the operating system that hackers once likened to a vibrant city became an instant ghost town. Unix, on the other hand, was designed for portability, which made it immune to such dangers. Originally developed by junior scientists at AT&T, the program had slipped out under corporate-management radar, finding a happy home in the cash-strapped world of academic computer systems. With fewer resources than their MIT brethren, Unix developers had customized the software to ride atop a motley assortment of hardware systems, primarily the 16-bit PDP-11 - a machine considered fit for only small tasks by most AI Lab hackers - but later also 32-bit mainframes such as the VAX 11/780. By 1983, a few companies, most notably Sun Microsystems, were developing a more powerful generation of desktop computers, dubbed "workstations," to take advantage of that increasingly ubiquitous operating system on machines comparable in power to the much older PDP-10.
+={AT&T;Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS)+5;VAX 11/780;PDP-10 computer;PDP-11 computer;Sun Microsystems:developing workstations}
+
+To facilitate portability, the developers of Unix had put an extra layer of abstraction between the software and the machine. Rather than writing it in the instructions of a specific machine type - as the AI Lab hackers had done with ITS and the PDP-10 - Unix developers wrote in a high-level language, called C. Focusing more on the inter-locking interfaces and specifications that held the operating system's many subcomponents together, rather than the actual components themselves, they created a system that could be quickly modified to run on any machine. If a user disliked a certain component, the interface specifications made it possible to pull out an individual subcomponent and either fix it or replace it with something better. Simply put, the Unix approach promoted flexibility and economy, hence its rapid adoption.~{ See Marshall Kirk McKusick, "Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix," Open Sources (O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 1999): 38. }~
+={abstraction:designing Unix;Unix operating system:adoption through flexibility}
+
+Stallman's decision to start developing the GNU system was triggered by the end of the ITS system that the AI Lab hackers had nurtured for so long. The demise of ITS, and the AI Lab hacker community which had sustained it, had been a traumatic blow to Stallman. If the Xerox laser printer episode had taught him to recognize the in- justice of proprietary software, the community's death forced him to choose between surrendering to proprietary software and opposing it.
+={AI Lab (Artificial Intelligence Laboratory):ITS demise+3}
+
+Like the software code that composed it, the roots of ITS' demise stretched way back. By 1980, most of the lab's hackers were working on developing the Lisp Machine and its operating system.
+
+Created by artificial-intelligence research pioneer John McCarthy, a MIT artificial-intelligence researcher during the late 1950s, Lisp is an elegant language, well-suited for writing complex programs to operate on data with irregular structure. The language's name is a shortened version of LISt Processing. Following McCarthy's departure to the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT hackers refined the language into a local dialect dubbed MACLISP. The "MAC" stood for Project MAC, the DARPA-funded research project that gave birth to the AI Lab and the Laboratory for Computer Science. Led by AI Labarch-hacker Richard Greenblatt, the AI Lab hackers during the late 1970s designed a computer specialized for running Lisp efficiently and conveniently, the Lisp Machine, then developed an entire Lisp-based operating system for it.
+
+By 1980, two rival groups of hackers had formed two companies to manufacture and sell copies of the Lisp Machine. Greenblatt started Lisp Machines Incorporated. He planned to avoid outside investment and make a "hacker company." Most of the hackers joined Symbolics, a conventional startup. In 1982 they entirely ceased to work at MIT.
+
+With few hackers left to mind the shop, programs and machines took longer to fix - or were not fixed at all. Even worse, Stallman says, the lab began to undergo a "demographic change." The hackers who had once formed a vocal minority within the AI Lab were almost gone while "the professors and the students who didn't really love the [PDP-10] were just as numerous as before."~{ See Richard Stallman (1986). }~
+={PDP-10 computer+4}
+
+In 1982, the AI Lab received the replacement for its main computer, the PDP-10, which was over 12 years old. Digital's current model, the Dec system 20, was compatible for user programs but would have re-quired a drastic rewrite or "port" of ITS if hackers wanted to continue running the same operating system. Fearful that the lab had lost its critical mass of in-house programming talent, AI Lab faculty members pressed for Twenex, a commercial operating system developed by Digital. Outnumbered, the hackers had no choice but to comply.
+
+"Without hackers to maintain the system, [faculty members] said,'We're going to have a disaster; we must have commercial software,'" Stallman would recall a few years later. "They said, 'We can expect the company to maintain it.' It proved that they were utterly wrong, but that's what they did."~{ Ibid. }~
+
+At first, hackers viewed the Twenex system as yet another authoritarian symbol begging to be subverted. The system's name itself was a protest. Officially dubbed TOPS-20 by DEC, it was named as a successor to TOPS-10, a proprietary operating system DEC distributed for the PDP-10. But TOPS-20 was not based on TOPS-10. It was derived from the Tenex system which Bolt Beranek Newmanhad developed for the PDP-10.~{ Multiple sources: see Richard Stallman interview, Gerald Sussman email, and Jargon File 3.0.0 at \\ http://catb.org/jargon/html/T/TWENEX.html. }~ Stallman, the hacker who coined the Twenex term, says he came up with the name as a way to avoid using the TOPS-20 name. "The system was far from tops, so there was noway I was going to call it that," Stallman recalls. "So I decided to insert a 'w' in the Tenex name and call it Twenex."
+={DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation);TOPS-20 operating system+1;KL-10 mainframe+11;Twenex operating systems+4}
+
+{free_as_in_freedom_2_01_pdp_1_processor_with_kl_10.png 302x203 "PDP-1 processor with KL-10 (a PDP-10 similar to that of the AI Lab), Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 1979." }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_stallman
+
+The machine that ran the Twenex/TOPS-20 system had its own derisive nickname: Oz. According to one hacker legend, the machine got its nickname because it required a smaller PDP-11 machine to power its terminal. One hacker, upon viewing the KL-10-PDP-11setup for the first time, likened it to the wizard's bombastic on screen introduction in the Wizard of Oz. "I am the great and powerful Oz," the hacker intoned. "Pay no attention to the PDP-11 behind that console."~{ See http://www.as.cmu.edu/~geek/humor/See_Figure_1.txt. }~
+={Oz+8;PDP-11 computer}
+
+If hackers laughed when they first encountered the KL-10, their laughter quickly died when they encountered Twenex. Not only did Twenex boast built-in security, but the system's software engineers had designed the tools and applications with the security system in mind. What once had been a cat-and-mouse game over passwords in the case of the Laboratory for Computer Science's security system, now became an out-and-out battle over system management. System administrators argued that without security, the Oz system was more prone to accidental crashes. Hackers argued that crashes could be better prevented by overhauling the source code. Unfortunately, the number of hackers with the time and inclination to perform this sort of overhaul had dwindled to the point that the system-administrator argument prevailed.
+={security (computer), opposition to:Twenex operating systems and}
+
+The initial policy was that any lab member could have the "wheel privilege" to bypass security restrictions. But anyone who had the "wheel privilege" could take it away from anyone else, who would then be powerless to restore it. This state of affairs tempted a small group of hackers to try to seize total control by canceling the "wheel privilege" for all but themselves.
+
+Cadging passwords, and applying the debugger during startup, Stallman successfully foiled these attempts. After the second foiled" /{coup d'état}/," Stallman issued an alert to all the AI Lab personnel.~{ See Richard Stallman (1986). }~
+
+"There has been another attempt to seize power," Stallman wrote. "So far, the aristocratic forces have been defeated." To protect his identity, Stallman signed the message "Radio Free OZ."
+
+The disguise was a thin one at best. By 1982, Stallman's aversion to passwords and secrecy had become so well known that users outside the AI Laboratory were using his account from around the ARPAnet - the research-funded computer network that would serve as a foundation for today's Internet. One such "tourist" during the early 1980s was Don Hopkins, a California programmer who learned through the hacking grapevine that all an outsider needed to do to gain access to MIT's vaunted ITS system was to log in under the initials RMS and enter the same three-letter monogram when the system requested a password.
+={ARPAnet+2;Hopkins, Don}
+
+"I'm eternally grateful that MIT let me and many other people use their computers for free," says Hopkins. "It meant a lot to many people."
+
+This so-called "tourist" policy, which had been openly tolerated by MIT management during the ITS years,~{ See "MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy," \\ http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/tourist-policy.html. }~ fell by the wayside when Oz became the lab's primary link to the ARPAnet. At first, Stallman continued his policy of repeating his login ID as a password so outside users could have access through his account. Over time, however, Oz's fragility prompted administrators to bar outsiders who, through sheer accident or malicious intent, might bring down the system. When those same administrators eventually demanded that Stall-man stop publishing his password, Stallman, citing personal ethics, instead ceased using the Oz system altogether.~{ See Richard Stallman (1986). }~
+
+"[When] passwords first appeared at the MIT AI Lab I [decided] to follow my belief that there should be no passwords," Stallman would later say. "Because I don't believe that it's really desirable to have security on a computer, I shouldn't be willing to help uphold the security regime."~{ Ibid. }~
+
+Stallman's refusal to bow before the great and powerful Oz symbolized the growing tension between hackers and AI Lab management during the early 1980s. This tension paled in comparison to the conflict that raged within the hacker community itself. By the time the Dec system 20 arrived, the hacker community was divided into two camps, LMI and Symbolics.
+={Symbolics+15;LISP programming language+1}
+
+Symbolics, with its outside investment, recruited various AI Lab hackers and set some of them working on improving parts of the Lisp Machine operating system outside the auspices of the AI Lab. By the end of 1980, the company had hired 14 AI Lab staffers as part-time consultants to develop its version of the Lisp Machine. The remaining few, apart from Stallman, worked for LMI.~{ See Steve Levy, Hackers, page 423. }~ Stallman, preferring the unpressured life at the AI Lab and not wishing to take a side, chose to join neither company.
+={AI Lab (Artificial Intelligence Laboratory):Symbolics and+10}
+
+At first, the other hackers continued spending some of their time at MIT, and contributed to MIT's Lisp Machine operating system. Both LMI and Symbolics had licensed this code from MIT. The license required them to return their changes to MIT, but did not require them to let MIT redistribute these changes. However, through 1981 they adhered to a gentleman's agreement to permit that, so all their system improvements were included in the MIT version and thus shared with all Lisp Machine users. This situation allowed those still at MIT to remain neutral.
+
+On March 16, 1982, a date Stallman remembers well because it was his birthday, Symbolics executives ended the gentleman's agreement. The motive was to attack LMI. LMI had fewer hackers, and fewer staff in general, so the Symbolics executives thought that LMI was getting the main benefit of sharing the system improvements. By ending the sharing of system code, they hoped to wipe out LMI. So they decided to enforce the letter of the license. Instead of contributing their improvements to the MIT version of the system, which LMI could use, they provided MIT with a copy of the Symbolics version of the system for users at MIT to run. Anyone using it would provide the service of testing only to Symbolics, and if he made improvements, most likely they too would only be useful for Symbolics.
+
+As the person responsible (with help from Greenblatt for the first couple of months) for keeping up the lab's Lisp Machine system, Stallman was incensed. The Symbolics hackers had left the system code with hundreds of half-made changes that caused errors. Viewing this announcement as an "ultimatum," he retaliated by disconnecting Symbolics' microwave communications link to the laboratory. He then vowed never to work on a Symbolics machine, and pledged to continue the development of MIT's system so as to defend LMI from Symbolics. "The way I saw it, the AI Lab was a neutral country, like Belgium in World War II," Stallman says. "If Germany invades Belgium, Belgium declares war on Germany and sides with Britain and France."
+={DARPA;Greenblat, Richard;LISP programming language:operating system for+4;MACLISP language;McCarthy, John;Project MAC;Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory}
+
+When Symbolics executives noticed that their latest features were still appearing in the MIT Lisp Machine system and, by extension, the LMI Lisp machine, they were not pleased. Stallman knew what copyright law required, and was rewriting the features from scratch.He took advantage of the opportunity to read the source code Symbolics supplied to MIT, so as to understand the problems and fixes, and then made sure to write his changes in a totally different way. But the Symbolics executives didn't believe this. They installed a "spy" program on Stallman's computer terminal looking for evidence against him. However, when they took their case to MIT administration, around the start of 1983, they had little evidence to present: a dozen places in the sources where both versions had been changed and appeared similar.
+={Brain Makers: Genius, Ego, and Greed in the Quest for Machines that Think, The Newquist;Newquist, Harvey}
+
+When the AI Lab administrators showed Stallman Symbolics' supposed evidence, he refuted it, showing that the similarities were actually held over from before the fork. Then he turned the logic around:if, after the thousands of lines he had written, Symbolics could produce no better evidence than this, it demonstrated that Stallman's diligent efforts to avoid copying were effective. The AI Lab approved Stallman's work, which he continued till the end of 1983.~{ The Brain Makers by H. P. Newquist says inaccurately that the AI Lab told Stallman to stay away from the Lisp Machine project. }~
+
+Stallman did make a change in his practices, though. "Just to be ultra safe, I no longer read their source code [for new features and major changes]. I used only the documentation and wrote the code from that." For the biggest new features, rather than wait for Symbolics to release documentation, he designed them on his own; later, when the Symbolics documentation appeared, he added compatibility with Symbolics' interface for the feature. Then he read Symbolics' source code changes to find minor bugs they had fixed, and fixed each of them differently.
+
+The experience solidified Stallman's resolve. As Stallman designed replacements for Symbolics' new features, he also enlisted members of the AI Lab to keep using the MIT system, so as to provide a continuous stream of bug reports. MIT continued giving LMI direct access to the changes. "I was going to punish Symbolics if it was the last thing I did," Stallman says. Such statements are revealing. Not only do they shed light on Stallman's non pacifist nature, they also reflect the intense level of emotion triggered by the conflict.
+
+The level of despair owed much to what Stallman viewed as the "destruction" of his "home" - i.e., the demise of the AI Lab's close-knit hacker subculture. In a later email interview with Levy, Stall-man would liken himself to the historical figure Ishi, the last surviving member of the Yahi, a Pacific Northwest tribe wiped out during the Indian wars of the 1860s and 1870s. The analogy casts Stallman's survival in epic, almost mythical, terms.~{ Steven Levy in Hackers had this period in mind when he described Stallman as the "last of the true hackers," but his intended meaning was not what you might think. Levy used the term "true hackers" to distinguish the MIT hacker community from two other hacker communities described later in the book, to which he gave other names. When this community had dissolved, leaving only Stallman, he therefore became the last of the "true hackers." Levy did not mean that nobody else was truly a hacker, but people tend to interpret his words that way, especially those who see them without reading the explanations in Levy's book. Stallman has never described himself using those words of Levy's. }~ The hackers who worked for Symbolics saw it differently. Instead of seeing Symbolics as an ex-terminating force, many of Stallman's colleagues saw it as a belated bid for relevance. In commercializing the Lisp Machine, the company pushed hacker principles of engineer-driven software design out of the ivory-tower confines of the AI Lab and into the corporate market place where manager-driven design principles held sway. Rather than viewing Stallman as a holdout, many hackers saw him as the representative of an obsolete practice.
+={Ishi;Yahi}
+
+Personal hostilities also affected the situation. Even before Symbolics hired away most of the AI Lab's hacker staff, Stallman says many of the hackers who later joined Symbolics were shunning him. "I was no longer getting invited to go to Chinatown," Stallman recalls. "The custom started by Greenblatt was that if you went out to dinner, you went around or sent a message asking anybody at the lab if they also wanted to go. Sometime around 1980-1981, I stopped getting asked. They were not only not inviting me, but one person later confessed that he had been pressured to lie to me to keep their going away to dinner without me a secret."
+={Greenblat, Richard}
+
+Although Stallman felt hurt by this petty form of ostracism, there was nothing to be done about it. The Symbolics ultimatum changed the matter from a personal rejection to a broader injustice. When Symbolics excluded its source changes from redistribution, as a means to defeat its rival, Stallman determined to thwart Symbolics' goal. By holing up in his MIT offices and writing equivalents for each new software feature and fix, he gave users of the MIT system, including LMI customers, access to the same features as Symbolics users.
+
+It also guaranteed Stallman's legendary status within the hacker community. Already renowned for his work with Emacs, Stallman's ability to match the output of an entire team of Symbolics programmers - a team that included more than a few legendary hackers itself - still stands as one of the major human accomplishments of the Information Age, or of any age for that matter. Dubbing it a "master hack" and Stallman himself a "virtual John Henry of computer code," author Steven Levy notes that many of his Symbolics-employed rivals had no choice but to pay their idealistic former comrade grudging respect. Levy quotes Bill Gosper, a hacker who eventually went to work for Symbolics in the company's Palo Alto office, expressing amazement over Stallman's output during this period:
+={Gosper, Bill}
+
+_1 I can see something Stallman wrote, and I might decide it was bad (probably not, but somebody could convince me it was bad), and I would still say, "But wait a minute - Stallman doesn't have anybody to argue with all night over there. He's working alone! It's incredible anyone could do this alone!"~{ See Steven Levy, Hackers (Penguin USA [paperback], 1984): 426 }~
+
+For Stallman, the months spent playing catch up with Symbolics evoke a mixture of pride and profound sadness. As a dyed-in-the-wool liberal whose father had served in World War II, Stallman is no pacifist. In many ways, the Symbolics war offered the rite of passage toward which Stallman had been careening ever since joining the AI Lab staff a decade before. At the same time, however, it coincided with the traumatic destruction of the AI Lab hacker culture that had nurtured Stallman since his teenage years. One day, while taking a break from writing code, Stallman experienced a traumatic moment passing through the lab's equipment room. There, Stallman encountered the hulking, unused frame of the PDP-10 machine. Startled by the dormant lights, lights that once actively blinked out a silent code indicating the status of the internal program, Stallman says the emotional impact was not unlike coming across a beloved family member's well-preserved corpse.
+={PDP-10 computer}
+
+"I started crying right there in the machine room," he says. "Seeing the machine there, dead, with nobody left to fix it, it all drove home how completely my community had been destroyed."
+
+Stallman would have little opportunity to mourn. The Lisp Ma-chine, despite all the furor it invoked and all the labor that had gone into making it, was merely a sideshow to the large battles in the technology marketplace. The relentless pace of computer miniaturization was bringing in newer, more powerful microprocessors that would soon incorporate the machine's hardware and software capabilities like a modern metropolis swallowing up an ancient desert village.
+
+Riding atop this microprocessor wave were hundreds - thousands- of proprietary software programs, each protected by a patchwork of user licenses and nondisclosure agreements that made it impossible for hackers to review or share source code. The licenses were crude and ill-fitting, but by 1983 they had become strong enough to satisfy the courts and scare away would-be interlopers. Software, once a form of garnish most hardware companies gave away to make their expensive computer systems more flavorful, was quickly becoming the main dish. In their increasing hunger for new games and features, users were putting aside the traditional demand to review the recipe after every meal.
+
+Nowhere was this state of affairs more evident than in the realm of personal computer systems. Companies such as Apple Computer and Commodore were minting fresh millionaires selling machines with built-in operating systems. Unaware of the hacker culture and its distaste for binary-only software, many of these users saw little need to protest when these companies failed to attach the accompanying source-code files. A few anarchic adherents of the hacker ethic helped propel that ethic into this new marketplace, but for the most part, the marketplace rewarded the programmers speedy enough to write new programs and savvy enough to write End User License Agreements to lock them up tight.
+={Apple Computers; Commodore computers;software+10}
+
+One of the most notorious of these programmers was Bill Gates, a Harvard dropout two years Stallman's junior. Although Stallman didn't know it at the time, seven years before sending out his message to the net.unix-wizards newsgroup, Gates, a budding entrepreneur and general partner with the Albuquerque-based software firm Micro-Soft, later spelled as Microsoft, had sent out his own open letter to the software-developer community. Written in response to the PC users copying Micro-Soft's software programs, Gates' "Open Letter to Hobbyists" had excoriated the notion of communal software development.
+={Gates, Bill+2;Micro-Soft;net.unix-wizards newsgroup;Open Letter to Hobbyists (Gates)+1}
+
+"Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?" asked Gates. "What hobbyist can put three man-years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product, and distributing it for free?"~{ See Bill Gates, "An Open Letter to Hobbyists" (February 3, 1976). To view an online copy of this letter, \\ go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists. }~
+
+Although few hackers at the AI Lab saw the missive, Gates' 1976 letter nevertheless represented the changing attitude toward software both among commercial software companies and commercial software developers. Why treat software as a zero-cost commodity when the market said otherwise? As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, selling software became more than a way to recoup costs; it became a political statement. At a time when the Reagan Administration was rushing to dismantle many of the federal regulations and spending programs that had been built up during the half century following the Great Depression, more than a few software programmers saw the hacker ethic as anticompetitive and, by extension, un-American. At best, it was a throwback to the anti-corporate attitudes of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Like a Wall Street banker discovering an old tie-dyed shirt hiding between French-cuffed shirts and double-breasted suits, many computer programmers treated the hacker ethic as an embarrassing reminder of an idealistic age.
+
+For a man who had spent the entire 1960s as a throwback to the 1950s, Stallman didn't mind living out of step with his peers. As a programmer used to working with the best machines and the best software, however, Stallman faced what he could only describe as a "stark moral choice": either swallow his ethical objection for "proprietary" software - the term Stallman and his fellow hackers used to describe any program that carried copyright terms or an end-user license that restricted copying and modification - or dedicate his life to building an alternate, non-proprietary system of software programs. After his two-year battle with Symbolics, Stallman felt confident enough to undertake the latter option. "I suppose I could have stopped working
+={proprietary software+3}
+
+on computers altogether," Stallman says. "I had no special skills, but I'm sure I could have become a waiter. Not at a fancy restaurant, probably, but I could've been a waiter somewhere."
+
+Being a waiter - i.e., dropping out of programming altogether -would have meant completely giving up an activity, computer programming, that had given him so much pleasure. Looking back on his life since moving to Cambridge, Stallman finds it easy to identify lengthy periods when software programming provided the only pleasure. Rather than drop out, Stallman decided to stick it out.
+
+An Atheist, Stallman rejects notions such as fate, karma, or a divine calling in life. Nevertheless, he does feel that the decision to shun proprietary software and build an operating system to help others do the same was a natural one. After all, it was Stallman's own personal combination of stubbornness, foresight, and coding virtuosity that led him to consider a fork in the road most others didn't know existed. In his article, "The GNU Project," Stallman affirms agreement with the ideals encapsulated in the words of the Jewish sage Hillel:
+={Hillel+1;Open Sources (DiBona, et al)+1}
+
+% ### group --> ? compare earlier version
+
+_1 If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?~{ See http://www.gnu.org/gnu/the-gnu-project.html. Stallman adds his own footnote to this statement, writing, "As an Atheist, I don't follow any religious leaders, but I sometimes find I admire something one of them has said. }~
+
+Speaking to audiences, Stallman avoids the religious route and ex-presses the decision in pragmatic terms. "I asked myself: what could I, an operating-system developer, do to improve the situation? It wasn't until I examined the question for a while that I realized an operating-system developer was exactly what was needed to solve the problem."
+
+Once he recognized that, Stallman says, everything else "fell into place." In 1983, MIT was acquiring second-generation Lisp Machines from Symbolics, on which the MIT Lisp Machine system could not possibly run. Once most of the MIT machines were replaced, he would be unable to continue maintaining that system effectively for lack of users' bug reports. He would have to stop. But he also wanted to stop. The MIT Lisp Machine system was not free software: even though users could get the source code, they could not redistribute it freely. Meanwhile, the goal of continuing the MIT system had already been achieved: LMI had survived and was developing software on its own.
+
+Stallman didn't want to spend his whole life punishing those who had destroyed his old community. He wanted to build a new one. He decided to denounce software that would require him to compromise his ethical beliefs, and devote his life to the creation of programs that would make it easier for him and others to escape from it. Pledging to build a free software operating system "or die trying - of old age, of course," Stallman quips, he resigned from the MIT staff in January, 1984, to build GNU.
+
+The resignation distanced Stallman's work from the legal auspices of MIT. Still, Stallman had enough friends and allies within the AI Lab to continue using the facilities, and later his own office. He also had the ability to secure outside consulting gigs to underwrite the early stages of the GNU Project. In resigning from MIT, however, Stallman negated any debate about conflict of interest or Institute ownership of the software. The man whose early adulthood fear of social isolation had driven him deeper and deeper into the AI Lab's embrace was now building a legal firewall between himself and that environment.
+={GNU Project}
+
+For the first few months, Stallman operated in isolation from the Unix community as well. Although his announcement to the net.unix-wizards group had attracted sympathetic responses, few volunteers signed on to join the crusade in its early stages.
+={net.unix-wizards newsgroup}
+
+"The community reaction was pretty much uniform," recalls Rich Morin, leader of a Unix user group at the time. "People said, 'Oh, that's a great idea. Show us your code. Show us it can be done.'"
+
+Aware that the job was enormous, Stallman decided to try to reuse existing free software wherever possible. So he began looking for existing free programs and tools that could be converted into GNU programs and tools. One of the first candidates was a compiler named VUCK, which converted programs written in the popular C programming language into machine-runnable code. Translated from the Dutch, the program's acronym stood for the Free University Compiler Kit. Optimistic, Stallman asked the program's author if the program was free. When the author informed him that the words "Free University" were a reference to the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, and that the program was not free, Stallman was chagrined.
+
+"He responded derisively, stating that the university was free but the compiler was not," recalls Stallman. He had not only refused to help - he suggested Stallman drop his plan to develop GNU, and instead write some add-ons to boost sales of VUCK, in return for a share of the profits. "I therefore decided that my first program for the GNU Project would be a multi-language, multi-platform compiler."
+19~{ See Richard Stallman, "The GNU Operating System and the Free Software Movement," Open Sources (O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 1999): 65. }~
+
+Instead of VUCK, Stallman found the Pastel compiler ("off-color Pascal"), written by programmers at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. According to what they said when they gave him a copy, the compiler was free to copy and modify. Unfortunately, the program was unsuitable for the job, because its memory requirements were enormous. It parsed the entire input file in core memory, then retained all the internal data until it finished compiling the file. On mainframe systems this design had been forgivable. On Unix systems it was a crippling barrier, since even 32-bit machines that ran Unix were often unable to provide so much memory to a program. Stallman made substantial progress at first, building a C-compatible front end to the compiler and testing it on the larger Vax, whose system could handle large memory spaces. When he tried porting the system to the 68010, and investigated why it crashed, he discovered the memory size problem, and concluded he would have to build a totally new compiler from scratch. Stallman eventually did this, producing the GNU C Compiler or GCC. But it was not clear in 1984 what to do about the compiler, so he decided to let those plans gel while turning his attention to other parts of GNU.
+={C programming language:VUCK compiler for;VUCK compiler}
+
+In September of 1984, thus, Stallman began development of a GNU version of Emacs, the replacement for the program he had been supervising for a decade. Within the Unix community, the two native editor programs were vi, written by Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, and ed, written by Bell Labs scientist (and Unix co-creator) Ken Thompson. Both were useful and popular, but neither offered the endlessly expandable nature of Emacs.
+={Bell Labs;Emacs text editor:rewriting for Unix+2;GNU Emacs:rewriting for Unix+2;Joy, Bill;vi text editor;Thompson, Ken}
+
+Looking back, Stallman says he didn't view the decision in strategic terms. "I wanted an Emacs, and I had a good opportunity to develop one."
+
+Once again, Stallman had found existing code with which he hoped to save time. In writing a Unix version of Emacs, Stallman was soon following the footsteps of Carnegie Mellon graduate student James Gosling, author of a C-based version dubbed Gosling Emacs or Gosmacs. Gosling's version of Emacs included an interpreter for a simplified offshoot of the Lisp language, called Mocklisp. Although Gosling had put Gosmacs under copyright and had sold the rights to UniPress, a privately held software company, Stallman received the assurances of a fellow developer who had participated in early Gosmacs development. According to the developer, Gosling, while a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon, had given him permission by email to distribute his own version of Gosmacs in exchange for his contribution to the code.
+={Carnegie Mellon University;Gosling, James+3;GOSMACS (Gosling Emacs);interpreters for LISP+1;LISP programming language:EMACS and+1;MOCKLISP language;UniPress software company+1}
+
+At first Stallman thought he would change only the user-level commands, to implement full compatibility with the original PDP-10Emacs. However, when he found how weak Mocklisp was in comparison with real Lisp, he felt compelled to replace it with a true Lisp system. This made it natural to rewrite most of the higher-level code of Gosmacs in a completely different way, taking advantage of the greater power and flexible data structures of Lisp. By mid-1985, in GNU Emacs as released on the Internet, only a few files still had code remaining from Gosmacs.
+
+Then UniPress caught wind of Stallman's project, and denied that the other developer had received permission to distribute his own version of Gosmacs. He could not find a copy of the old email to defend his claim. Stallman eliminated this problem by writing replacements for the few modules that remained from Gosmacs.
+
+Nevertheless, the notion of developers selling off software rights - indeed, the very notion of developers having such powers to sell in the first place - rankled Stallman. In a 1986 speech at the Swedish Royal Technical Institute, Stallman cited the UniPress incident as yet another example of the dangers associated with proprietary software.
+={proprietary software:Emacs and+4;Swedish Royal Technical Institute}
+
+"Sometimes I think that perhaps one of the best things I could do with my life is find a gigantic pile of proprietary software that was a trade secret, and start handing out copies on a street corner so it wouldn't be a trade secret any more," said Stallman. "Perhaps that would be a much more efficient way for me to give people new free software than actually writing it myself; but everyone is too cowardly to even take it."~{ See Richard Stallman (1986). }~
+
+Despite the stress it generated, the dispute over Gosling's code would assist both Stallman and the free software movement in the longterm. It would force Stallman to address the weaknesses of the Emacs Commune and the informal trust system that had allowed problematic offshoots to emerge. It would also force Stallman to sharpen the free software movement's political objectives. Following the release of GNU Emacs in 1985, Stallman issued /{The GNU Manifesto}/, an expansion of the original announcement posted in September, 1983. Stallman included within the document a lengthy section devoted to the many arguments used by commercial and academic programmers to justify the proliferation of proprietary software programs. One argument, "Don't programmers deserve a reward for their creativity," earned a response encapsulating Stallman's anger over the recent Gosling Emacs episode:
+={Emacs Commune:proprietary software and;Emacs text editor;GNU Emacs;GNU Manifesto}
+
+"If anything deserves a reward, it is social contribution," Stallman wrote. "Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far [ sic ] as society is free to use the results. If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs."~{ See Richard Stallman, The GNU Manifesto (1985), \\ http://www.gnu.org/gnu/ manifesto.html. }~
+
+With the release of GNU Emacs, the GNU Project finally had code to show. It also had the burdens of any software-based enterprise. As more and more Unix developers began playing with the software, money, gifts, and requests for tapes began to pour in. To address the business side of the GNU Project, Stallman drafted a few of his colleagues and formed the Free Software Foundation (FSF), a non-profit organization dedicated to speeding the GNU Project towards its goal. With Stallman as president and various friends and hacker allies as board members, the FSF helped provide a corporate face for the GNU Project.
+={Free Software Foundation (FSF):GNU Project and;GNU Project:Emacs, release of}
+
+Robert Chassell, a programmer then working at Lisp Machines, Inc., became one of five charter board members at the Free Software Foundation following a dinner conversation with Stallman. Chassell also served as the organization's treasurer, a role that started small but quickly grew.
+={Chassell, Robert+6;LISP Machines Inc. (LMI);LMI (LISP Machines Inc.)}
+
+"I think in '85 our total expenses and revenue were something in the order of $23,000, give or take," Chassell recalls. "Richard had his office, and we borrowed space. I put all the stuff, especially the tapes, under my desk. It wasn't until sometime later LMI loaned us some space where we could store tapes and things of that sort."
+
+In addition to providing a face, the Free Software Foundation provided a center of gravity for other disenchanted programmers. The Unix market that had seemed so collegial even at the time of Stallman's initial GNU announcement was becoming increasingly competitive. In an attempt to tighten their hold on customers, companies were starting to deny users access to Unix source code, a trend that only speeded the number of inquiries into ongoing GNU software projects.
+
+The Unix wizards who once regarded Stallman as a noisy kook were now beginning to see him as a software prophet or a software Cassandra, according as they felt hope or despair over escaping the problem she identified.
+
+"A lot of people don't realize, until they've had it happen to them, how frustrating it can be to spend a few years working on a software program only to have it taken away," says Chassell, summarizing the feelings and opinions of the correspondents writing in to the FSF during the early years. "After that happens a couple of times, you start to say to yourself, 'Hey, wait a minute.'"
+
+For Chassell, the decision to participate in the Free Software Foundation came down to his own personal feelings of loss. Prior to LMI, Chassell had been working for hire, writing an introductory book on Unix for Cadmus, Inc., a Cambridge-area software company. When Cadmus folded, taking the rights to the book down with it, Chassell says he attempted to buy the rights back with no success.
+
+"As far as I know, that book is still sitting on a shelf somewhere, unusable, uncopyable, just taken out of the system," Chassell says. "It was quite a good introduction if I may say so myself. It would have taken maybe three or four months to convert [the book] into a perfectly usable introduction to GNU/Linux today. The whole experience, aside from what I have in my memory, was lost."
+
+Forced to watch his work sink into the mire while his erstwhile employer struggled through bankruptcy, Chassell says he felt a hint of the anger that drove Stallman to fits of apoplexy. "The main clarity, for me, was the sense that if you want to have a decent life, you don't want to have bits of it closed off," Chassell says. "This whole idea of having the freedom to go in and to fix something and modify it, whatever it may be, it really makes a difference. It makes one think happily that after you've lived a few years that what you've done is worthwhile. Because otherwise it just gets taken away and thrown out or abandoned or, at the very least, you no longer have any relation to it. It's like losing a bit of your life."
+
+1~ Chapter 8 - St. Ignucius
+={Ignucius, (St.);St. Ignucius}
+
+The Maui High Performance Computing Center is located in a single-story building in the dusty red hills just above the town of Kihei. Framed by million-dollar views and the multi-million dollar real estate of the Silversword Golf Course, the center seems like the ultimate scientific boondoggle. Far from the boxy, sterile confines of Tech Square or even the sprawling research metropolises of Argonne, Illinois and Los Alamos, New Mexico, the MHPCC seems like the kind of place where scientists spend more time on their tans than their post-doctoral research projects.
+={Argonne (Illinois);Los Alamos (New Mexico);Maui High Performance Computing Center (MHPCC);MHPCC (Maui High Performance Computing Center)}
+
+The image is only half true. Although researchers at the MHPCC do take advantage of the local recreational opportunities, they also take their work seriously. According to { Top500.org }http://top500.org, a web site that tracks the most powerful supercomputers in the world, the IBMSP Power3 supercomputer housed within the MHPCC clocks in at 837 billion floating-point operations per second, making it one of 25most powerful computers in the world. Co-owned and operated by the University of Hawaii and the U.S. Air Force, the machine divides its computer cycles between the number crunching tasks associated with military logistics and high-temperature physics research.
+={IBM SP Power3 supercomputer;U.S Air Force;University of Hawaii;Top500.org}
+
+Simply put, the MHPCC is a unique place, a place where the brainy culture of science and engineering and the laid-back culture of the Hawaiian islands coexist in peaceful equilibrium. A slogan on the lab's 2000 web site sums it up: "Computing in paradise."
+
+It's not exactly the kind of place you'd expect to find Richard Stallman, a man who, when taking in the beautiful view of the nearby Maui Channel through the picture windows of a staffer's office, mutters a terse critique: "Too much sun." Still, as an emissary from one computing paradise to another, Stallman has a message to deliver, even if it means subjecting his hacker eyes to painful solar glare.
+
+The conference room is already full by the time I arrive to catch Stallman's speech. The gender breakdown is a little better than at the New York speech, 85% male, 15% female, but not by much. About half of the audience members wear khaki pants and logo-encrusted golf shirts. The other half seems to have gone native. Dressed in the gaudy flower-print shirts so popular in this corner of the world, their faces area deep shade of ochre. The only residual indication of geek status are the gadgets: Nokia cell phones, Palm Pilots, and Sony VAIO laptops.
+
+Needless to say, Stallman, who stands in front of the room dressed in plain blue T-shirt, brown polyester slacks, and white socks, sticks out like a sore thumb. The fluorescent lights of the conference room help bring out the unhealthy color of his sun-starved skin.~{ RMS: The idea that skin can be "sun-starved" or that paleness is "unhealthy"is dangerous misinformation; staying out of the sun can't hurt you as long as you have enough Vitamin D. What damages the skin, and can even kill you, is excessive exposure to sunlight. }~ His beard and hair are enough to trigger beads of sweat on even the coolest Hawaiian neck. Short of having the words "mainlander" tattooed on his forehead, Stallman couldn't look more alien if he tried. [RMS: Is there something bad about looking different from others?]
+
+As Stallman putters around the front of the room, a few audience members wearing T-shirts with the logo of the Maui FreeBSD Users Group (MFUG) race to set up camera and audio equipment. FreeBSD, a free software offshoot of the Berkeley Software Distribution, the venerable 1970s academic version of Unix, is technically a competitor to the GNU/Linux operating system. Still, in the hacking world, Stallman speeches are documented with a fervor reminiscent of the Grateful Dead and its legendary army of amateur archivists. As the local free software heads, it's up to the MFUG members to make sure fellow programmers in Hamburg, Mumbai, and Novosibirsk don't miss out on the latest pearls of RMS wisdom.
+={Berkely Software Distribution (BSD);BSD (Berkely Software Distribution);Grateful Dead, The+1;Maui FreeBSD Users Group}
+
+The analogy to the Grateful Dead is apt. Often, when describing the business opportunities inherent within the free software model, Stallman has held up the Grateful Dead as an example. In refusing to restrict fans' ability to record live concerts, the Grateful Dead became more than a rock group. They became the center of a tribal community dedicated to Grateful Dead music. Over time, that tribal community became so large and so devoted that the band shunned record contracts and supported itself solely through musical tours and live appearances. In 1994, the band's last year as a touring act, the Grateful Dead drew $52 million in gate receipts alone.~{ See "Grateful Dead Time Capsule: 1985-1995 North American Tour Grosses," \\ http://www.dead101.com/1197.htm. }~
+
+While few software companies have been able to match that success, the tribal aspect of the free software community is one reason many in the latter half of the 1990s started to accept the notion that publishing software source code might be a good thing. Hoping to build their own loyal followings, companies such as IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Hewlett Packard have come to accept the letter, if not the spirit, of the Stallman free software message. Describing the GPL as the information-technology industry's /{Magna Carta}/, ZDNet software columnist Evan Leibovitch sees the growing affection for all things GNU as more than just a trend. "This societal shift is letting users take back control of their futures," Leibovitch writes. "Just as the /{Magna Carta}/ gave rights to British subjects, the GPL enforces consumer rights and freedoms on behalf of the users of computer software."~{ See Evan Leibovitch, "Who's Afraid of Big Bad Wolves," /{ZDNet}/ Tech Update (December 15, 2000), \\ http://www.zdnet.com/news/whos-afraid-of-the-big-bad-wolves/298394. }~
+={Hewlett Packard;IBM;Sun Microsystems}
+
+The tribal aspect of the free software community also helps explain why 40-odd programmers, who might otherwise be working on physics projects or surfing the Web for windsurfing buoy reports, have packed into a conference room to hear Stallman speak.
+
+Unlike the New York speech, Stallman gets no introduction. He also offers no self-introduction. When the FreeBSD people finally get their equipment up and running, Stallman simply steps forward, starts speaking, and steamrolls over every other voice in the room.
+={FreeBSD}
+
+"Most of the time when people consider the question of what rules society should have for using software, the people considering it are from software companies, and they consider the question from a self-serving perspective," says Stallman, opening his speech. "What rules can we impose on everybody else so they have to pay us lots of money? I had the good fortune in the 1970s to be part of a community of programmers who shared software. And because of this I always like to look at the same issue from a different direction to ask: what kind of rules make possible a good society that is good for the people who are in it? And therefore I reach completely different answers."
+
+Once again, Stallman quickly segues into the parable of the Xerox laser printer, taking a moment to deliver the same dramatic finger-pointing gestures to the crowd. He also devotes a minute or two to the GNU/Linux name.
+
+"Some people say to me, 'Why make such a fuss about getting credit for this system? After all, the important thing is the job is done, not whether you get recognition for it.' Well, this would be wise advice if it were true. But the job wasn't to build an operating system; the job is to spread freedom to the users of computers. And to do that we have to make it possible to do everything with computers in freedom."~{ For narrative purposes, I have hesitated to go in-depth when describing Stallman's full definition of software "freedom." The GNU Project web site lists four fundamental components: \\ _* The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0). \\ _* The freedom to study the program's source code, and change it so that the program does what you wish (freedom 1). \\ _* The freedom to redistribute copies of the program so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2). \\ _* The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions, so that the whole community can benefit from them (freedom 3). For more information, please visit "The Free Software Definition" at \\ http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html. }~
+
+Adds Stallman, "There's a lot more work to do."
+
+For some in the audience, this is old material. For others, it's a little arcane. When a member of the golf-shirt contingent starts dozing off, Stallman stops the speech and asks somebody to wake the person up.
+
+"Somebody once said my voice was so soothing, he asked if I was some kind of healer," says Stallman, drawing a quick laugh from the crowd. "I guess that probably means I can help you drift gently into a blissful, relaxing sleep. And some of you might need that. I guess I shouldn't object if you do. If you need to sleep, by all means do."
+
+The speech ends with a brief discussion of software patents, a growing issue of concern both within the software industry and within the free software community. Like Napster, software patents reflect the awkward nature of applying laws and concepts written for the physical world to the frictionless universe of information technology.
+
+Copyright law and patent law work differently, and have totally different effects in the software field. The copyright on a program controls the copying and adaptation of that program's code, and it belongs to the program's developer. But copyright does not cover ideas. In other words, a developer is free, under copyright, to implement in his own code features and commands he has seen in existing programs. Those aspects are ideas, not expression, and thus outside the scope of copyright law.
+
+It is likewise lawful - though hard work - to decode how a binary program works, and then implement the same ideas and algorithms indifferent code. This practice is known as "reverse engineering."
+
+Software patents work differently. According to the U.S. Patent Office, companies and individuals can obtain patents for computing ideas that are innovative (or, at least, unknown to the Patent Office). In theory, this allows the patent-holder to trade off disclosure of the technique for a specific monopoly lasting a minimum of 20 years after the patent filing. In practice, the disclosure is of limited value to the public, since the operation of the program is often self-evident, and could in any case be determined by reverse engineering. Unlike copyright, a patent gives its holder the power to forbid the independent development of software programs which use the patented idea.
+={U.S. Patent Office}
+
+In the software industry, where 20 years can cover the entire life cycle of a marketplace, patents take on a strategic weight. Where companies such as Microsoft and Apple once battled over copyright and the "look and feel" of various technologies, today's Internet companies use patents as a way to stake out individual applications and business models, the most notorious example being Amazon.com's 2000 attempt to patent the company's "one-click" on line shopping process. For most companies, however, software patents have become a defensive tool, with cross-licensing deals balancing one set of corporate patents against another in a tense form of corporate detente. Still, in a few notable cases of computer encryption and graphic imaging algorithms, software vendors have successfully stifled rival developments. For instance, some font-rendering features are missing from free soft-ware because of patent threats from Apple.
+
+For Stallman, the software-patent issue dramatizes the need for eternal hacker vigilance. It also underlines the importance of stressing the political benefits of free software programs over the competitive benefits. Stallman says competitive performance and price, two areas where free software operating systems such as GNU/Linux and FreeBSD already hold a distinct advantage over their proprietary counterparts, are side issues compared to the large issues of user and developer freedom.
+={FreeBSD+2}
+
+This position is controversial within the community: open source advocates emphasize the utilitarian advantages of free software over the political advantages. Rather than stress the political significance of free software programs, open source advocates have chosen to stress the engineering integrity of the hacker development model. Citing the power of peer review, the open source argument paints programs such as GNU/Linux or FreeBSD as better built, better inspected and, by extension, more trustworthy to the average user.
+
+That's not to say the term "open source" doesn't have its political implications. For open source advocates, the term open source serves two purposes. First, it eliminates the confusion associated with the word "free," a word many businesses interpret as meaning "zero cost." Second, it allows companies to examine the free software phenomenon on a technological, rather than ethical, basis. Eric Raymond, co-founder of the Open Source Initiative and one of the leading hackers to endorse the term, explained his refusal to follow Stallman's political path in a 1999 essay, titled "Shut Up and Show Them the Code":
+={OSI (Open Source Initiative);Open Source Initiative (OSI);Raymond, Eric;Shut Up and Show Them the Code (Raymond)+1}
+
+_1 RMS's rhetoric is very seductive to the kind of people we are. We hackers are thinkers and idealists who readily resonate with appeals to "principle" and "freedom" and "rights." Even when we disagree with bits of his program, we want RMS's rhetorical style to work; we think it ought to work; we tend to be puzzled and disbelieving when it fails on the 95% of people who aren't wired like we are.~{ See Eric Raymond, "Shut Up and Show Them the Code," online essay, (June28, 1999), \\ http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/shut-up-and-show-them.html. }~
+
+Included among that 95%, Raymond writes, are the bulk of business managers, investors, and non-hacker computer users who, through sheer weight of numbers, tend to decide the overall direction of the commercial software marketplace. Without a way to win these people over, Raymond argues, programmers are doomed to pursue their ideology on the periphery of society:
+
+_1 When RMS insists that we talk about "computer users' rights," he's issuing a dangerously attractive invitation to us to repeat old failures. It's one we should reject - not because his principles are wrong, but because that kind of language, applied to software, simply does not persuade anybody but us. In fact, it confuses and repels most people outside our culture.~{ Ibid. }~
+
+Stallman, however, rejects Raymond's premises:
+
+_1 Raymond's attempt to explain our failure is misleading because we have not failed. Our goal is large, and we have a long way to go, but we have also come a long way.
+
+_1 Raymond's pessimistic assertion about the values of non-hackers is an exaggeration. Many non-hackers are more concerned with the political issues we focus on than with the technical advantages that open source emphasizes. This often includes political leaders too, though not in all countries.
+
+_1 It was the ethical ideals of free software, not "better software," which persuaded the presidents of Ecuador and Brazil to move government agencies to free software. They are not geeks, but they understand freedom.
+
+But the principal flaw in the open source argument, according to Stallman, is that it leads to weaker conclusions. It convinces many users to run some programs which are free, but does not offer the many reason to migrate entirely to free software. This partially gives them freedom, but does not teach them to recognize it and value it as such, so they remain likely to let it drop and lose it. For instance, what happens when the improvement of free software is blocked by a patent?
+
+Most open source advocates are equally, if not more, vociferous as Stallman when it comes to opposing software patents. So too are most proprietary software developers, since patents threaten their projects too. However, pointing to software patents' tendency to put areas of software functionality off limits, Stallman contrasts what the free software idea and the open source idea imply about such cases.
+
+"It's not because we don't have the talent to make better software," says Stallman. "It's because we don't have the right. Somebody has prohibited us from serving the public. So what's going to happen when users encounter these gaps in free software? Well, if they have been persuaded by the open source movement that these freedoms are good because they lead to more-powerful reliable software, they're likely to say, 'You didn't deliver what you promised. This software's not more powerful. It's missing this feature. You lied to me.' But if they have come to agree with the free software movement, that the freedom is important in itself, then they will say, 'How dare those people stop me from having this feature and my freedom too.' And with that kind of response, we may survive the hits that we're going to take as these patents explode."
+
+Watching Stallman deliver his political message in person, it is hard to see anything confusing or repellent. Stallman's appearance may seem off-putting, but his message is logical. When an audience member asks if, in shunning proprietary software, free software proponents lose the ability to keep up with the latest technological advancements, Stallman answers the question in terms of his own personal beliefs. "I think that freedom is more important than mere technical advance," he says. "I would always choose a less advanced free program rather than a more advanced non free program, because I won't give up my freedom for something like that [advance]. My rule is, if I can't share it with you, I won't take it."
+
+In the minds of those who assume ethics means religion, such answers reinforce the quasi-religious nature of the Stallman message. However, unlike a Jew keeping kosher or a Mormon refusing to drink alcohol, Stallman is not obeying a commandment, but simply refusing to cede his freedom. His speech explains the practical requisites for doing so: a proprietary program takes away your freedom, so if you want freedom, you need to reject the program.
+
+Stallman paints his decision to use free software in place of proprietary in the color of a personal belief he hopes others will come to share. As software evangelists go, Stallman avoids forcing those beliefs down listeners' throats. Then again, a listener rarely leaves a Stallman speech not knowing where the true path to software righteousness lies.
+
+As if to drive home this message, Stallman punctuates his speech with an unusual ritual. Pulling a black robe out of a plastic grocery bag, Stallman puts it on. Then he pulls out a reflective brown computer disk and places it on his head. The crowd lets out a startled laugh.
+
+"I am St. IGNUcius of the Church of Emacs," says Stallman, raising his right hand in mock-blessing. "I bless your computer, my child."
+={Ignucius, (St.);St. Ignucius}
+
+The laughter turns into full-blown applause after a few seconds. As audience members clap, the computer disk on Stallman's head catches the glare of an overhead light, eliciting a perfect halo effect. In the blink of an eye, Stallman resembles a Russian religious icon.
+
+{free_as_in_freedom_2_02_rms_st_ignucius.png 254x240 "Stallman dressed as St. IGNUcius. The photo was taken by Stian Eikeland in Bergen, Norway on February 19, 2009." }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_stallman
+
+"Emacs was initially a text editor," says Stallman, explaining the getup. "Eventually it became a way of life for many and a religion for some. We call this religion the Church of Emacs."
+={Church of Emacs+8;Emacs text editor+11;GNU Emacs+11}
+
+The skit is a lighthearted moment of self-parody, a humorous return-jab at the many people who might see Stallman's form of software asceticism as religious fanaticism in disguise. It is also the sound of the other shoe dropping - loudly. It's as if, in donning his robe and halo, Stallman is finally letting listeners off the hook, saying, "It's OK to laugh. I know I'm weird." [RMS: To laugh at someone for being weird is boorish, and it is not my intention to excuse that. But I hope people will laugh at my St. IGNUcius comedy routine.]
+
+Discussing the St. IGNUcius persona afterward, Stallman says he first came up with it in 1996, long after the creation of Emacs but well before the emergence of the "open source" term and the struggle for hacker-community leadership that precipitated it. At the time, Stallman says, he wanted a way to "poke fun at himself," to remind listeners that, though stubborn, Stallman was not the fanatic some made him out to be. It was only later, Stallman adds, that others seized the persona as a convenient way to play up his reputation as software ideologue, as Eric Raymond did in an 1999 interview with the Linux.com web site:
+={linux.com;Raymond, Eric:St. Ignucius and+2}
+
+_1 When I say RMS calibrates what he does, I'm not belittling or accusing him of insincerity. I'm saying that like all good communicators he's got a theatrical streak. Sometimes it's conscious - have you ever seen him in his St. IGNUcius drag, blessing software with a disk platter on his head? Mostly it's unconscious; he's just learned the degree of irritating stimulus that works, that holds attention without (usually) freaking people out.~{ See "Guest Interview: Eric S. Raymond," /{Linux.com}/ (May 18, 1999), \\ http://www.linux.com/interviews/19990518/8/. }~
+
+Stallman takes issue with the Raymond analysis. "It's simply my way of making fun of myself," he says. "The fact that others see it as anything more than that is a reflection of their agenda, not mine."
+
+That said, Stallman does admit to being a ham. "Are you kidding?" he says at one point. "I love being the center of attention." To facilitate that process, Stallman says he once enrolled in Toastmasters, an organization that helps members bolster their public-speaking skills and one Stallman recommends highly to others. He possesses a stage presence that would be the envy of most theatrical performers and feels a link to vaudevillians of years past. A few days after the Maui High Performance Computing Center speech, I allude to the 1999 LinuxWorld performance and ask Stallman if he has a Groucho Marx complex - i.e., the unwillingness to belong to any club that would have him as a member.~{ RMS: Williams misinterprets Groucho's famous remark by treating it as psychological. It was intended as a jab at the overt antisemitism of many clubs, which was why they would refuse him as a member. I did not understand this either until my mother explained it to me. Williams and I grew up when bigotry had gone underground, and there was no need to veil criticism of bigotry in humor as Groucho did. }~ Stallman's response is immediate: "No, but I admire Groucho Marx in a lot of ways and certainly have been in some things I say inspired by him. But then I've also been inspired in some ways by Harpo."
+={Marx, Groucho+1}
+
+The Groucho Marx influence is certainly evident in Stallman's lifelong fondness for punning. Then again, punning and wordplay are common hacker traits. Perhaps the most Groucho-like aspect of Stallman's personality, however, is the deadpan manner in which the puns are delivered. Most come so stealthily - without even the hint of a raised eyebrow or upturned smile - you almost have to wonder if Stal-man's laughing at his audience more than the audience is laughing at him.
+
+Watching members of the Maui High Performance Computer Center laugh at the St. IGNUcius parody, such concerns evaporate. While not exactly a standup act, Stallman certainly possesses the chops to keep a roomful of engineers in stitches. "To be a saint in the Church of Emacs does not require celibacy, but it does require making a commitment to living a life of moral purity," he tells the Maui audience. "You must exorcise the evil proprietary operating systems from all your computers, and then install a wholly [holy] free operating system. And then you must install only free software on top of that. If you make this commitment and live by it, then you too will be a saint in the Church of Emacs, and you too may have a halo."
+
+The St. IGNUcius skit ends with a brief inside joke. On most Unix systems and Unix-related offshoots, the primary competitor program to Emacs is vi, pronounced vee-eye, a text-editing program developed by former UC Berkeley student and current Sun Microsystems chief scientist, Bill Joy. Before doffing his "halo," Stallman pokes fun at the rival program. "People sometimes ask me if it is a sin in the Church of Emacs to use vi," he says. "Using a free version of vi is not a sin;it is a penance. So happy hacking."~{ The service of the Church of Emacs has developed further since 2001. Users can now join the Church by reciting the Confession of the Faith: "There is no system but GNU, and Linux is one of its kernels." Stallman sometimes mentions the religious ceremony known as the Foobar Mitzvah, the Great Schism between various rival versions of Emacs, and the cult of the Virgin of Emacs (which refers to any person that has not yet learned to use Emacs). In addition, "vi vi vi" has been identified as the Editor of the Beast. }~
+={Joy, Bill;vi text editor:as an Emacs competitor;UC Berkeley;Sun Microsystems}
+
+After a brief question-and-answer session, audience members gather around Stallman. A few ask for autographs. "I'll sign this," says Stallman, holding up one woman's print out of the GNU General Public License, "but only if you promise me to use the term GNU/Linux instead of Linux" (when referring to the system), "and tell all your friends to do likewise."
+={GNU General Public License;GPL}
+
+The comment merely confirms a private observation. Unlike other stage performers and political figures, Stallman has no "off" mode. Aside from the St. IGNUcius character, the ideologue you see on stage is the ideologue you meet backstage. Later that evening, during a dinner conversation in which a programmer mentions his affinity for "open source" programs, Stallman, between bites, upbraids his table-mate: "You mean free software. That's the proper way to refer to it."
+
+During the question-and-answer session, Stallman admits to playing the pedagogue at times. "There are many people who say, 'Well, first let's invite people to join the community, and then let's teach them about freedom.' And that could be a reasonable strategy, but what we have is almost everybody's inviting people to join the community, and hardly anybody's teaching them about freedom once they come in."
+
+The result, Stallman says, is something akin to a third-world city. "You have millions of people moving in and building shantytowns, but nobody's working on step two: getting them out of those shantytowns. If you think talking about software freedom is a good strategy, please join in doing step two. There are plenty working on step one. We need more people working on step two."
+
+Working on "step two" means driving home the issue that freedom, not acceptance, is the root issue of the free software movement. Those who hope to reform the proprietary software industry from the inside are on a fool's errand. "Change from the inside is risky," Stallman stays. "Unless you're working at the level of a Gorbachev, you're going to be neutralized."
+
+Hands pop up. Stallman points to a member of the golf shirt-wearing contingent. "Without patents, how would you suggest dealing with commercial espionage?"
+
+"Well, those two questions have nothing to do with each other, really," says Stallman.
+
+"But I mean if someone wants to steal another company's piece of software."
+
+Stallman's recoils as if hit by a poisonous spray. "Wait a second," Stallman says. "Steal? I'm sorry, there's so much prejudice in that statement that the only thing I can say is that I reject that prejudice." Then he turns to the substance of the question. "Companies that develop non-free software and other things keep lots and lots of trade secrets, and so that's not really likely to change. In the old days -even in the 1980s - for the most part programmers were not aware that there were even software patents and were paying no attention to them. What happened was that people published the interesting ideas, and if they were not in the free software movement, they kept secret the little details. And now they patent those broad ideas and keep secret the little details. So as far as what you're describing, patents really make no difference to it one way or another."
+
+"But if it doesn't affect their publication," a new audience member jumps in, his voice trailing off almost as soon as he starts speaking.
+
+"But it does," Stallman says. "Their publication is telling you that this is an idea that's off limits to the rest of the community for 20 years. And what the hell good is that? Besides, they've written it in such a hard way to read, both to obfuscate the idea and to make the patent as broad as possible, that it's basically useless looking at the published information [in the patent] to learn anything anyway. The only reason to look at patents is to see the bad news of what you can't do."
+
+The audience falls silent. The speech, which began at 3:15, is now nearing the 5:00 whistle, and most listeners are already squirming in their seats, antsy to get a jump start on the weekend. Sensing the fatigue, Stallman glances around the room and hastily shuts things down. "So it looks like we're done," he says, following the observation with an auctioneer's "going, going, gone" to flush out any last-minute questioners. When nobody throws their hand up, Stallman signs off with a traditional exit line.
+
+"Happy hacking," he says.
+
+1~ Chapter 9 - The GNU General Public License
+={GNU General Public License+82;GPL+82;Stallman, Richard M.:childhood:GNU General Public License+82}
+
+By the spring of 1985, Richard Stallman had produced the GNU Project's first useful result - a Lisp-based version of Emacs for Unix-like operating systems. To make it available to others as free software, he had to develop the way to release it - in effect, the follow-on for the Emacs Commune.
+={Emacs Commune+7;Emacs text editor:Lisp-based free software version;GNU Emacs:List-based free software version}
+
+The tension between the freedom to modify and authorial privilege had been building before Gosmacs. The Copyright Act of 1976 had overhauled U.S. copyright law, extending the legal coverage of copyright to software programs. According to Section 102(b) of the Act, individuals and companies could copyright the "expression" of a software program but not the "actual processes or methods embodied in the program."~{ See Hal Abelson, Mike Fischer, and Joanne Costello, "Software and Copyright Law," updated version (1997), \\ http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/int-prop/software-copyright.html. }~
+={Copyright Act of 1976;copyright laws;GOSMACS (Gosling Emacs);software:copyright laws on}
+
+Translated, this treated a program much like an algebra textbook:its author can claim copyright on the text but not on the mathematical ideas of algebra or the pedagogical technique employed to explain it. Thus, regardless of what Stallman said about using the code of the original Emacs, other programmers were legally entitled to write their own implementations of the ideas and commands of Emacs, and they did. Gosmacs was one of 30-odd imitations of the original Emacs developed for various computer systems.
+
+The Emacs Commune applied only to the code of the original Emacs program written by Stallman himself. Even if it had been legally enforced, it would not have applied to separately developed imitations such as Gosmacs. Making Gosmacs non-free was unethical according to the ethical ideas of the free software movement, because(as proprietary software) it did not respect its users' freedom, but this issue had nothing to do with where the ideas in Gosmacs came from.
+
+Under copyright, programmers who wanted to copy code from an existing program (even with changes) had to obtain permission from the original developer. The new law applied copyright even in the absence of copyright notices - though hackers generally did not know this - and the copyright notices too began appearing.
+
+Stallman saw these notices as the flags of an invading, occupying army. Rare was the program that didn't borrow source code from past programs, and yet, with a single stroke of the president's pen, the U.S. government had given programmers and companies the legal power to forbid such reuse. Copyright also injected a dose of formality into what had otherwise been an informal system. Simply put, disputes that had once been settled hacker-to-hacker were now to be settled lawyer-to-lawyer. In such a system, companies, not hackers, held the automatic advantage. Some saw placing one's name in a copyright notice as taking responsibility for the quality of the code, but the copyright notice usually has a company's name, and there are other ways for individuals to say what code they wrote.
+={source code:copy rights for}
+
+However, Stallman also noticed, in the years leading up to the GNU Project, that copyright allowed an author to grant permission for certain activities covered by copyright, and place conditions on them too. "I had seen email messages with copyright notices plus simple 'verbatim copying permitted' licenses," he recalls. "Those definitely were [an] inspiration." These licenses carried the condition not to remove the license. Stallman's idea was to take this a few steps further. For example, a permission notice could allow users to redistribute even modified versions, with the condition that these versions carry the same permission.
+
+Thus Stallman concluded that use of copyright was not necessarily unethical. What was bad about software copyright was the way it was typically used, and designed to be used: to deny the user essential freedoms. Most authors imagined no other way to use it. But copyright could be used in a different way: to make a program free and assure its continued freedom.
+
+By GNU Emacs 16, in early 1985, Stallman drafted a copyright-based license that gave users the right to make and distribute copies. It also gave users the right to make and distribute modified versions, but only under the same license. They could not exercise the unlimited power of copyright over those modified versions, so they could not make their versions proprietary as Gosmacs was. And they had to make the source code available. Those conditions closed the legal gap that would otherwise allow restricted, non-free versions of GNU Emacs to emerge.
+={Emacs text editor:copyrights and|GNU Emacs License and;GNU Emacs:copyrights and|GNU Emacs License and;GOSMACS (Gosling Emacs):copyrights and;licenses+15}
+
+Although helpful in codifying the social contract of the Emacs Commune, the early GNU Emacs license remained too "informal" for its purpose, Stallman says. Soon after forming the Free Software Foundation he began working on a more airtight version, consulting with the other directors and with the attorneys who had helped to set it up.
+
+Mark Fischer, a Boston copyright attorney who initially provided Stallman's legal advice, recalls discussing the license with Stallman during this period. "Richard had very strong views about how it should work," Fischer says, "He had two principles. The first was to make the software absolutely as open as possible." (By the time he said this, Fischer seems to have been influenced by open source supporters; Stallman never sought to make software "open.") "The second was to encourage others to adopt the same licensing practices." The requirements in the license were designed for the second goal.
+={Fischer, Mark+2}
+
+The revolutionary nature of this final condition would take a while to sink in. At the time, Fischer says, he simply viewed the GNU Emacs license as a simple trade. It put a price tag on GNU Emacs' use. Instead of money, Stallman was charging users access to their own later modifications. That said, Fischer does remember the license terms as unique.
+
+"I think asking other people to accept the price was, if not unique, highly unusual at that time," he says.
+
+In fashioning the GNU Emacs license, Stallman made one major change to the informal tenets of the old Emacs Commune. Where he had once demanded that Commune members send him all the changes they wrote, Stallman now demanded only that they pass along source code and freedom whenever they chose to redistribute the program. In other words, programmers who simply modified Emacs for private use no longer needed to send the source-code changes back to Stallman. In a rare alteration of free software doctrine, Stallman slashed the "price tag" for free software. Users could innovate without Stallman looking over their shoulders, and distribute their versions only when they wished, just so long as all copies came with permission for their possessors to develop and redistribute them further.
+
+Stallman says this change was fueled by his own dissatisfaction with the Big Brother aspect of the original Emacs Commune social contract. As much as he had found it useful for everyone to send him their changes, he came to feel that requiring this was unjust. "It was wrong to require people to publish all changes," says Stallman.
+
+"It was wrong to require them to be sent to one privileged developer. That kind of centralization and privilege for one was not consistent with a society in which all had equal rights."
+
+The GNU Emacs General Public License made its debut on a version of GNU Emacs in 1985. Following the release, Stallman welcomed input from the general hacker community on how to improve the license's language. One hacker to take up the offer was future software activist John Gilmore, then working as a consultant to Sun Microsystems. As part of his consulting work, Gilmore had ported Emacs over to SunOS, the company's in-house version of Unix. In the process of doing so, Gilmore had published the changed version under the GNU Emacs license. Instead of viewing the license as a liability, Gilmore saw it as clear and concise expression of the hacker ethos. "Up until then, most licenses were very informal," Gilmore recalls.
+={Gilmore, John+6;SunOS:porting Emacs to;Sun Microsystems}
+
+As an example of this informality, Gilmore cites the mid-1980s copyright license of trn, a news reader program written by Larry Wall, a hacker who could go onto later fame as the creator of both the Unix "patch" utility and the Perl scripting language. In the hope of striking a balance between common hacker courtesy and an author's right to dictate the means of commercial publication, Wall used the program's accompanying copyright notice as an editorial sounding board.
+={Wall, Larry+1;patches, inserting into source code;Perl programming language;source code:patches}
+
+_1 Copyright (c) 1985, Larry Wall \\ You may copy the trn kit in whole or in part as long as you don't try to make money off it, or pretend that you wrote it.~{ See Trn Kit README, \\ http://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/project/trn/src/trn-3.6/README. }~
+
+Such statements, while reflective of the hacker ethic, also reflected the difficulty of translating the loose, informal nature of that ethic into the rigid, legal language of copyright. In writing the GNU Emacs license, Stallman had done more than close up the escape hatch that permitted proprietary offshoots. He had expressed the hacker ethic in a manner understandable to both lawyer and hacker alike.
+
+It wasn't long, Gilmore says, before other hackers began discussing ways to "port" the GNU Emacs license over to their own programs. Prompted by a conversation on Usenet, Gilmore sent an email to Stallman in November, 1986, suggesting modification:
+
+_1 You should probably remove "EMACS" from the license and replace it with "SOFTWARE" or something. Soon, we hope, Emacs will not be the biggest part of the GNU system, and the license applies to all of it.~{ See John Gilmore, quoted from email to author. }~
+
+Gilmore wasn't the only person suggesting a more general approach. By the end of 1986, Stallman himself was at work with GNU Project's next major milestone, the source-code debugger GDB. To release this, he had to modify the GNU Emacs license so it applied to GDB instead of GNU Emacs. It was not a big job, but it was an opening for possible errors. In 1989, Stallman figured out how to remove the specific references to Emacs, and express the connection between the program code and the license solely in the program's source files. This way, any developer could apply the license to his program without changing the license. The GNU General Public License, GNU GPL for short, was born. The GNU Project soon made it the official license of all existing GNU programs.
+={GNU Debugger (GDB)+1;GDB (GNU Debugger);Debugger+1}
+
+In publishing the GPL, Stallman followed the software convention of using decimal numbers to indicate versions with minor changes and whole numbers to indicate versions with major changes. The first version, in 1989, was labeled Version 1.0. The license contained a preamble spelling out its political intentions:
+
+_1 The General Public License is designed to make sure that you have the freedom to give away or sell copies of free software, that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things.
+
+_1 To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it.~{ See Richard Stallman, et al., "GNU General Public License: Version 1,"(February, 1989), \\ http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-1.0.html. }~
+
+As hacks go, the GPL stands as one of Stallman's best. It created a system of communal ownership within the normally proprietary confines of copyright law. More importantly, it demonstrated the intellectual similarity between legal code and software code. Implicit within the GPL's preamble was a profound message: instead of viewing copyright law with suspicion, hackers should view it as a dangerous system that could be hacked.
+% ={Emacs Commune+1}
+
+"The GPL developed much like any piece of free software with a large community discussing its structure, its respect or the opposite in their observation, needs for tweaking and even to compromise it mildly for greater acceptance," says Jerry Cohen, another attorney who advised Stallman after Fischer departed. "The process worked very well and GPL in its several versions has gone from widespread skeptical and at times hostile response to widespread acceptance."
+
+In a 1986 interview with /{BYTE}/ magazine, Stallman summed up the GPL in colorful terms. In addition to proclaiming hacker values, Stallman said, readers should also "see it as a form of intellectual ju-jitsu, using the legal system that software hoarders have set up against them."~{ See David Betz and Jon Edwards, "Richard Stallman discusses his public-domain [ sic ] Unix-compatible software system with BYTE editors," BYTE (July, 1986). (Reprinted on the GNU Project web site: \\ http://www.gnu.org/gnu/byte-interview.html .) \\ This interview offers an interesting, not to mention candid, glimpse at Stallman's political attitudes during the earliest days of the GNU Project. It is also helpful in tracing the evolution of Stallman's rhetoric. \\ Describing the purpose of the GPL, Stallman says, "I'm trying to change the way people approach knowledge and information in general. I think that to try to own knowledge, to try to control whether people are allowed to use it, or to try to stop other people from sharing it, is sabotage." \\ Contrast this with a statement to the author in August 2000: "I urge you not to use the term 'intellectual property' in your thinking. It will lead you to misunderstand things, because that term generalizes about copyrights, patents, and trademarks. And those things are so different in their effects that it is entirely foolish to try to talk about them at once. If you hear somebody saying something' about intellectual property,' without [putting it in] quotes, then he's not thinking very clearly and you shouldn't join." \\ [RMS: The contrast it shows is that I've learned to be more cautious in generalizing. I probably wouldn't talk about "owning knowledge" today, since it's a very broad concept. But "owning knowledge" is not the same generalization as "intellectual property," and the difference between those three laws is crucial to understanding any legal issue about owning knowledge. Patents are direct monopolies over using specific knowledge; that really is one form of "owning knowledge." Copyrights are one of the methods used to stop the sharing of works that embody or explain knowledge, which is a very different thing. Meanwhile, trademarks have very little to do with the subject of knowledge.] }~ Years later, Stallman would describe the GPL's creation in less hostile terms. "I was thinking about issues that were in a sense ethical and in a sense political and in a sense legal," he says. "I had to try to do what could be sustained by the legal system that we're in. In spirit the job was that of legislating the basis for a new society, but since I wasn't a government, I couldn't actually change any laws. I had to try to do this by building on top of the existing legal system, which had not been designed for anything like this."
+={Byte magazine}
+
+About the time Stallman was pondering the ethical, political, and legal issues associated with free software, a California hacker named Don Hopkins mailed him a manual for the 68000 microprocessor. Hopkins, a Unix hacker and fellow science-fiction buff, had borrowed the manual from Stallman a while earlier. As a display of gratitude, Hopkins decorated the return envelope with a number of stickers obtained at a local science-fiction convention. One sticker in particular caught Stallman's eye. It read, "Copyleft (L), All Rights Reversed." Stallman, inspired by the sticker, nicknamed the legal technique employed in the GNU Emacs license (and later in the GNU GPL) "Copyleft," jocularly symbolized by a backwards "C" in a circle. Over time, the nickname would become general Free Software Foundation terminology for any copyright license "making a program free software and requiring all modified and extended versions of the program to be free software as well."
+={copyleft;Hopkins, Don}
+
+The German sociologist Max Weber once proposed that all great religions are built upon the "routinization" or "institutionalization" of charisma. Every successful religion, Weber argued, converts the charisma or message of the original religious leader into a social, political, and ethical apparatus more easily translatable across cultures and time.
+={Weber, Max}
+
+While not religious per se, the GNU GPL certainly qualifies as an interesting example of this "routinization" process at work in the modern, decentralized world of software development. Since its unveiling, programmers and companies who have otherwise expressed little loyalty or allegiance to Stallman have willingly accepted the GPL bargain at face value. Thousands have also accepted the GPL as a preemptive protective mechanism for their own software programs. Even those who reject the GPL conditions as too limiting still credit it as influential.
+
+One hacker falling into this latter group was Keith Bostic, a University of California employee at the time of the GPL 1.0 release. Bostic's department, the Computer Systems Research Group (SRG), had been involved in Unix development since the late 1970s and was responsible for many key parts of Unix, including the TCP/IP networking protocol, the cornerstone of modern Internet communications. By the late 1980s, AT&T, the original owner of the Unix software, began to focus on commercializing Unix and began looking to the Berkeley Software Distribution, or BSD, the academic version of Unix developed by Bostic and his Berkeley peers, as a key source of commercial technology.
+={AT&T+1;Berkely Software Distribution (BSD)+6;Bostic, Keith+5;BSD (Berkely Software Distribution)+6;Computer Systems Research Group;University of California+4;TCP/IP}
+
+The code written by Bostic and friends was off limits to nearly everyone, because it was intermixed with proprietary AT&T code. Berkeley distributions were therefore available only to institutions that already had a Unix source license from AT&T. As AT&T raised its license fees, this arrangement, which had at first seemed innocuous (to those who thought only of academia) became increasingly burdensome even there. To use Berkeley's code in GNU, Stallman would have to convince Berkeley to separate it from AT&T's code and release it as free software. In 1984 or 1985 he met with the leaders of the BSD effort, pointing out that AT&T was not a charity and that for a university to donate its work (in effect) to AT&T was not proper. He asked them to separate out their code and release it as free software.
+={licenses:AT&T UNIX source code and+2}
+
+Hired in 1986, Bostic had taken on the personal project of porting the latest version of BSD to the PDP-11 computer. It was during this period, Bostic says, that he came into close interaction with Stallman during Stallman's occasional forays out to the west coast. "I remember vividly arguing copyright with Stallman while he sat at borrowed workstations at CSRG," says Bostic. "We'd go to dinner afterward and continue arguing about copyright over dinner."
+={PDP-11 computer}
+
+The arguments eventually took hold, although not in the way Stallman would have preferred. In June, 1989, Berkeley had separated its networking code from the rest of the AT&T-owned operating system and began distributing it under a copyright-based free license. The license terms were liberal. All a licensee had to do was give credit to the university in advertisements touting derivative programs.~{ The University of California's "obnoxious advertising clause" would later prove to be a problem. Looking for a permissive alternative to the GPL, some hackers used the original BSD license, replacing "University of California" with their own names or the names of their institutions. The result: free software systems using many of these programs would have to cite dozens of names in advertisements. In 1999, after a few years of lobbying on Stallman's part, the University of California agreed to drop this clause. See "The BSD License Problem" at \\ http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html. }~ In contrast to the GPL, this license permitted proprietary offshoots. One problem limited the use of the BSD Networking release: it wasn't a complete operating system, just the network-related parts of one. While the code would be a major contribution to any free operating system, it could only be run at that time in conjunction with other, proprietary-licensed code.
+={AT&T+1}
+
+Over the next few years, Bostic and other University of California employees worked to replace the missing components and turn BSD into a complete, freely redistributable operating system. Although delayed by a legal challenge from Unix Systems Laboratories - the AT&T spin-off that retained ownership of the Unix code - the effort would finally bear fruit in the early 1990s. Even before then, however, many of the Berkeley network utilities would make their way into Stallman's GNU system.
+
+"I think it's highly unlikely that we ever would have gone as strongly as we did without the GNU influence," says Bostic, looking back. "It was clearly something where they were pushing hard and we liked the idea."
+
+By the end of the 1980s, the GPL was beginning to exert a gravitational effect on the free software community. A program didn't have to carry the GPL to qualify as free software - witness the case of the BSD network utilities - but putting a program under the GPL sent a definite message. "I think the very existence of the GPL inspired people to think through whether they were making free software, and how they would license it," says Bruce Perens, creator of Electric Fence, a popular Unix utility, and future leader of the Debian GNU/Linux development team. A few years after the release of the GPL, Perens says he decided to discard Electric Fence's homegrown license in favor of Stallman's lawyer-vetted copyright. "It was actually pretty easy to do," Perens recalls.
+={Perens, Bruce}
+
+Rich Morin, the programmer who had viewed Stallman's initial GNU announcement with a degree of skepticism, recalls being impressed by the software that began to gather under the GPL umbrella. As the leader of a SunOS user group, one of Morin's primary duties during the 1980s had been to send out distribution tapes containing the best freeware or free software utilities. The job often mandated calling up original program authors to verify whether their programs were copyrighted or whether they had been consigned to the public domain. Around 1989, Morin says, he began to notice that the best software programs typically fell under the GPL license. "As a software distributor, as soon as I saw the word GPL, I knew I was home free,"recalls Morin.
+={SunOS}
+
+To compensate for the prior hassles that went into compiling distribution tapes to the Sun User Group, Morin had charged recipients a convenience fee. Now, with programs moving over to the GPL, Morin was suddenly getting his tapes put together in half the time, turning a tidy profit in the process. Sensing a commercial opportunity, Morin rechristened his hobby as a business: Prime Time Freeware.
+={Sun User Group}
+
+Such commercial exploitation was completely consistent with the free software agenda. "When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price," advised Stallman in the GPL's preamble. By the late 1980s, Stallman had refined it to a more simple mnemonic: "Don't think free as in free beer; think free as in free speech."
+
+For the most part, businesses ignored Stallman's entreaties. Still, for a few entrepreneurs, the freedom associated with free software was the same freedom associated with free markets. Take software ownership out of the commercial equation, and you had a situation where even the smallest software company was free to compete against the IBMs and DECs of the world.
+
+One of the first entrepreneurs to grasp this concept was Michael Tiemann, a software programmer and graduate student at Stanford University. During the 1980s, Tiemann had followed the GNU Project like an aspiring jazz musician following a favorite artist. It wasn't until the release of the GNU C Compiler, or GCC, in 1987, however, that he began to grasp the full potential of free software. Dubbing GCC a "bombshell," Tiemann says the program's own existence underlined Stallman's determination as a programmer.
+={C Compiler (GNU)+9;GNU C Compiler (GCC)+9;GCC (GNU C Compiler)+9;Tiemann, Michael+8;Stanford University}
+
+"Just as every writer dreams of writing the great American novel, every programmer back in the 1980s talked about writing the great American compiler," Tiemman recalls. "Suddenly Stallman had done it. It was very humbling."
+
+"You talk about single points of failure, GCC was it," echoes Bostic. "Nobody had a compiler back then, until GCC came along."
+
+Rather than compete with Stallman, Tiemann decided to build on top of his work. The original version of GCC weighed in at 110,000 lines of code, but Tiemann recalls the program as surprisingly easy to understand. So easy in fact that Tiemann says it took less than five days to master and another week to port the software to a new hardware platform, National Semiconductor's 32032 microchip. Over the next year, Tiemann began playing around with the source code, creating the first "native" or direct compiler for the C++ programming language, by extending GCC to handle C++ as well as C. (The existing, proprietary implementation of the C++ language worked by converting the code to the C language, then feeding the result to a C compiler.) One day, while delivering a lecture on the program at Bell Labs, Tiemann ran into some AT&T developers struggling to pull off the same thing.
+={C+ programming language}
+
+"There were about 40 or 50 people in the room, and I asked how many people were working on the native code compiler," Tiemann recalls. "My host said the information was confidential but added that if I took a look around the room I might get a good general idea."
+
+It wasn't long after, Tiemann says, that the light bulb went off in his head. "I had been working on that project for six months," Tiemann says. I just thought to myself, whether it's me or the code, this is a level of efficiency that the free market should be ready to reward."
+
+Tiemann found added inspiration in the /{GNU Manifesto}/: while excoriating the greed of proprietary software vendors, it also encourages companies, as long as they respect users freedom, to use and redistribute free software in their commercial activities. By removing the power of monopoly from the commercial software question, the GPL makes it possible for even small companies to compete on the basis of service, which extends from simple tech support to training to extending free programs for specific clients' needs.
+={GNU Manifesto}
+
+In a 1999 essay, Tiemann recalls the impact of Stallman's /{Manifesto}/. "It read like a socialist polemic, but I saw something different. I saw a business plan in disguise."~{ See Michael Tiemann, "Future of Cygnus Solutions: An Entrepreneur's Account," Open Sources (O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 1999): 139, \\ http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/tiemans.html. }~
+
+This business plan was not new; Stallman supported himself in the late 80s by doing this on a small scale. But Tiemann intended to take it to a new level. Teaming up with John Gilmore and David Vinayak Wallace, Tiemann launched a software consulting service dedicated to customizing GNU programs. Dubbed Cygnus Support (informally, "Cygnus" was a recursive acronym for "Cygnus, Your GNU Support"), the company signed its first development contract in February, 1990. By the end of the year, the company had $725,000 worth of support and development contracts.
+={Gilmore, John}
+
+The complete GNU operating system Stallman envisioned required more than software development tools. In the 1990s, GNU also developed a command line interpreter or "shell," which was an extended replacement for the Bourne Shell (written by FSF employee Brian Fox, and christened by Stallman the Bourne Again Shell, or BASH), as well as the PostScript interpreter Ghostscript, the documentation browser platform Texinfo, the C Library which C programs need in order to run and talk to the system's kernel, the spreadsheet Oleo ("better for you than the more expensive spreadsheet"), and even a fairly good chess game. However, programmers were typically most interested in the GNU programming tools.
+
+GNU Emacs, GDB, and GCC were the "big three" of developer-oriented tools, but they weren't the only ones developed by the GNU Project in the 80s. By 1990, GNU had also generated GNU versions of the build-controller Make, the parser-generator YACC (rechristened Bison), and awk (rechristened gawk); as well as dozens more. Like GCC, GNU programs were usually designed to run on multiple systems, not just a single vendor's platform. In the process of making programs more flexible, Stallman and his collaborators often made them more useful as well.
+
+Recalling the GNU universalist approach, Prime Time Freeware's Morin points to a useless but vitally important software package called GNU Hello, which serves as an example to show programmers how to properly package a program for GNU. "It's the hello world program which is five lines of C, packaged up as if it were a GNU distribution," Morin says. "And so it's got the Texinfo stuff and the configure stuff. It's got all the other software engineering goo that the GNU Project has come up with to allow packages to port to all these different environments smoothly. That's tremendously important work, and it affects not only all of [Stallman's] software, but also all of the other GNU Project software."
+
+According to Stallman, improving technically on the components of Unix was secondary to replacing them with free software. "With each piece I may or may not find a way to improve it," said Stallman to /{BYTE}/. "To some extent I am getting the benefit of reimplementation, which makes many systems much better. To some extent it's because I have been in the field a long time and worked on many other systems. I therefore have many ideas [which I learned from them] to bring to bear."~{ See Richard Stallman, BYTE (1986). }~
+={Byte magazine}
+
+Nevertheless, as GNU tools made their mark in the late 1980s, Stallman's AI Lab-honed reputation for design fastidiousness soon became legendary throughout the entire software-development community.
+
+Jeremy Allison, a Sun user during the late 1980s and programmer destined to run his own free software project, Samba, in the 1990s, recalls that reputation with a laugh. During the late 1980s, Allison began using Emacs. Inspired by the program's community-development model, Allison says he sent in a snippet of source code only to have it rejected by Stallman.
+={Allison, Jeramy+1}
+
+"It was like the /{Onion}/ headline," Allison says. "'Child's prayers to God answered: No.'"
+={Onion, The}
+
+As the GNU Project moved from success to success in creation of user-level programs and libraries, it postponed development of the kernel, the central "traffic cop" program that controls other programs' access to the processor and all machine resources.
+
+As with several other major system components, Stallman sought a head-start on kernel development by looking for an existing program to adapt. A review of GNU Project "GNUs letters" of the late 1980s reveals that this approach, like the initial attempt to build GCC out of Pastel, had its problems. A January, 1987 GNUs letter reported the GNU Project's intention to overhaul TRIX, a kernel developed at MIT. However, Stallman never actually tried to do this, since he was working on GCC at the time; later he concluded that TRIX would require too much change to be a good starting point. By February of 1988, according to a newsletter published that month, the GNU Project had shifted its kernel plans to Mach, a lightweight "micro-kernel" developed at Carnegie Mellon. Mach was not then free software, but its developers privately said they would liberate it; when this occurred, in 1990, GNU Project kernel development could really commence.~{ See "Hurd History," \\ http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/history.html. }~
+
+The delays in kernel development were just one of many concerns weighing on Stallman during this period. In 1989, Lotus Development Corporation filed suit against rival software companies, Paperback Software International and Borland, for copying menu commands from Lotus' popular 1-2-3 Spreadsheet program. Lotus' suit, coupled with the Apple-Microsoft "look and feel" battle, endangered the future of the GNU system. Although neither suit directly attacked the GNU Project, both threatened the right to develop software compatible with existing programs, as many GNU programs were. These lawsuits could impose a chilling effect on the entire culture of software development. Determined to do something, Stallman and a few professors put an ad in /{The Tech}/ (the MIT student newspaper) blasting the lawsuits and calling for a boycott of both Lotus and Apple. He then followed up the ad by helping to organize a group to protest the corporations filing the suit. Calling itself the League for Programming Freedom, the group held protests outside the offices of Lotus, Inc.
+={Apple Computers;Lotus Development Corp.;Microsoft Corporation:Apple Computer lawsuit;Paperback Software International}
+
+The protests were notable.~{ According to a League for Programming Freedom press release at \\ http://progfree.org/Links/prep.ai.mit.edu/demo.final.release, the protests were no-table for featuring the first hexadecimal protest chant: \\ 1-2-3-4, toss the lawyers out the door \\ 5-6-7-8, innovate don't litigate \\ 9-A-B-C, 1-2-3 is not for me \\ D-E-F-O, look and feel have got to go }~
+
+They document the evolving nature of the software industry. Applications had quietly replaced operating systems as the primary corporate battleground. In its unfinished quest to build a free software operating system, the GNU Project seemed hopelessly behind the times to those whose primary values were fashion and success. Indeed, the very fact that Stallman had felt it necessary to put together an entirely new group dedicated to battling the "look and feel" lawsuits led some observers to think that the FSF was obsolete.
+
+However, Stallman had a strategic reason to start a separate organization to fight the imposition of new monopolies on software development: so that proprietary software developers would join it too. Extending copyright to cover interfaces would threaten many proprietary software developers as well as many free software developers. These proprietary developers were unlikely to endorse the Free Soft-ware Foundation, but there was, intentionally, nothing in the League for Programming Freedom to drive them away. For the same reason, Stallman handed over leadership of LPF to others as soon as it was feasible.
+
+In 1990, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation certified Stallman's genius status when it granted Stallman a Mac Arthur fellowship, the so-called "genius grant," amounting in this case to$240,000 over 5 years. Although the Foundation does not state a reason for its grants, this one was seen as an award for launching the GNU Project and giving voice to the free software philosophy. The grant relieved a number of short-term concerns for Stallman. For instance, it enabled him to cease the consulting work through which he had obtained his income in the 80s and devote more time to the free software cause.
+
+The award also made it possible for Stallman to register normally to vote. In 1985 a fire in the house where Stallman lived left him without an official domicile. It also covered most of his books with ash, and cleaning these "dirty books" did not yield satisfying results. From that time he lived as a "squatter" at 545 Technology Square, and had to vote as a "homeless person."~{ See Reuven Lerner, "Stallman wins $240,000 MacArthur award," MIT, The Tech (July 18, 1990), \\ http://the-tech.mit.edu/V110/N30/rms.30n.html. }~ "[The Cambridge Election Commission] didn't want to accept that as my address," Stallman would later recall. "A newspaper article about the MacArthur grant said that, and then they let me register."~{ See Michael Gross, "Richard Stallman: High School Misfit, Symbol of Free Software, Mac Arthur-certified Genius" (1999). }~
+
+Most importantly, the MacArthur fellowship gave Stallman press attention and speaking invitations, which he used to spread the word about GNU, free software, and dangers such as "look and feel" lawsuits and software patents.
+
+Interestingly, the GNU system's completion would stem from one of these trips. In April 1991, Stallman paid a visit to the Polytechnic University in Helsinki, Finland. Among the audience members was 21-year-old Linus Torvalds, who was just beginning to develop the Linux kernel - the free software kernel destined to fill the GNU system's main remaining gap.
+={Helsinki, Finland+3;Polytechnic University (Finland);Torvalds, Linus+16}
+
+A student at the nearby University of Helsinki at the time, Torvalds regarded Stallman with bemusement. "I saw, for the first time in my life, the stereotypical long-haired, bearded hacker type," recalls Torvalds in his 2001 autobiography /{Just for Fun}/. "We don't have much of them in Helsinki."~{ See Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (Harper Collins Publishers, Inc., 2001): 58-59. Although presumably accurate in regard to Torvalds' life, what the book says about Stallman is sometimes wrong. For instance, it says that Stallman "wants to make everything open source," and that he "complains about other people not using the GPL." In fact, Stallman advocates free software, not open source. He urges authors to choose the GNU GPL, in most circumstances, but says that all free software licenses are ethical. }~
+
+While not exactly attuned to the "socio political" side of the Stallman agenda, Torvalds nevertheless appreciated one aspect of the agenda's underlying logic: no programmer writes error-free code. Even when users have no wish to adapt a program to their specific preferences, any program can use improvement. By sharing software, hackers put a program's improvement ahead of individual motivations such as greed or ego protection.
+
+Like many programmers of his generation, Torvalds had cut his teeth not on mainframe computers like the IBM 7094, but on a motley assortment of home-built computer systems. As a university student, Torvalds had made the step up from PC programming to Unix, using the university's MicroVAX. This ladder-like progression had given Torvalds a different perspective on the barriers to machine access. For Stallman, the chief barriers were bureaucracy and privilege. For Torvalds, the chief barriers were geography and the harsh Helsinki winter. Forced to trek across the University of Helsinki just to log in to his Unix account, Torvalds quickly began looking for a way to log in from the warm confines of his off-campus apartment.
+={IBM 7094 computer;MicroVAX+1}
+
+Torvalds was using Minix, a lightweight non-free system developed as an instructional example by Dutch university professor Andrew Tanenbaum.~{ It was non-free in 1991. Minix is free software now. }~ It included the non-free Free University Compiler Kit, plus utilities of the sort that Tanenbaum had contemptuously invited Stallman in 1983 to write.~{ Tanenbaum describes Minix as an "operating system" in his book, Operating System Design and Implementation , but what the book discusses is only the part of the system that corresponds to the kernel of Unix. There are two customary usages of the term "operating system," and one of them is what is called the "kernel" in Unix terminology. But that's not the only terminological complication in the subject. That part of Minix consists of a microkernel plus servers that run on it, a design of the same kind as the GNU Hurd plus Mach. The microkernel plus servers are comparable to the kernel of Unix. But when that book says "the kernel," it refers to the microkernel only. See Andrew Tanenbaum, Operating System Design and Implementation , 1987. }~
+={Minix operating system+2;Unix operating system:Minix and;Tanenbaum, Andrew}
+
+Minix fit within the memory confines of Torvalds' 386 PC, but it was intended more to be studied than used. The Minix system also lacked the facility of terminal emulation, which would mimic a typical display terminal and thus enable Torvalds to log in to the MicroVAX from home.
+
+Early in 1991, Torvalds began writing a terminal emulation program. He used Minix to develop his emulator, but the emulator didn't run on Minix; it was a stand-alone program. Then he gave it features to access disk files in Minix's file system. Around then, Torvalds referred to his evolving work as the "GNU/Emacs of terminal emulation programs."~{ See Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (Harper Collins Publishers, Inc., 2001): 78. }~
+
+Since Minix lacked many important features. Torvalds began extending his terminal emulator into a kernel comparable to that of Minix, except that it was monolithic. Feeling ambitious, he solicited a Minix newsgroup for copies of the POSIX standards, the specifications for a Unix-compatible kernel.~{ POSIX was subsequently extended to include specifications for many command-line features, but that did not exist in 1991. }~ A few weeks later, having put his kernel together with some GNU programs and adapted them to work with it, Torvalds was posting a message reminiscent of Stallman's original 1983 GNU posting:
+
+_1 Hello everybody out there using minix-
+
+_1 I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386 (486) AT clones. This has been brewing since April, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things). I've currently ported bash (1.08) and gcc(1.40)...~{ Ibid, p. 85. }~
+
+The posting drew a smattering of responses and within a month, Torvalds had posted a 0.01 version of his kernel - i.e., the earliest possible version fit for outside review - on an Internet FTP site. In the course of doing so, Torvalds had to come up with a name for the new kernel. On his own PC hard drive, Torvalds had saved the program as Linux, a name that paid its respects to the software convention of giving each Unix variant a name that ended with the letter X. Deeming the name too "egotistical," Torvalds changed it to Freax, only to have the FTP site manager change it back.
+={Freax}
+
+Torvalds said he was writing a free operating system, and his comparing it with GNU shows he meant a complete system. However, what he actually wrote was a kernel, pure and simple. Torvalds had no need to write more than the kernel because, as he knew, the other needed components were already available, thanks to the developers of GNU and other free software projects. Since the GNU Project wanted to use them all in the GNU system, it had perforce made them work together. While Torvalds continued developing the kernel, he (and later his collaborators) made those programs work with it too.
+
+Initially, Linux was not free software: the license it carried did not qualify as free, because it did not allow commercial distribution. Torvalds was worried that some company would swoop in and take Linux away from him. However, as the growing GNU/Linux combination gained popularity, Torvalds saw that sale of copies would be useful for the community, and began to feel less worried about a possible takeover.~{ Ibid, p. 94-95. }~ This led him to reconsider the licensing of Linux.
+
+Neither compiling Linux with GCC nor running GCC with Linux required him legally to release Linux under the GNU GPL, but Torvalds' use of GCC implied for him a certain obligation to let other users borrow back. As Torvalds would later put it: "I had hoisted myself up on the shoulders of giants."~{ Ibid, p. 95-97. }~ Not surprisingly, he began to think about what would happen when other people looked to him for similar support. A decade after the decision, Torvalds echoes the Free Software Foundation's Robert Chassell when he sums up his thoughts at the time:
+={C Compiler (GNU):Linux development and+3;GNU C Compiler (GCC):Linux development and;GCC (GNU C Compiler):Linux development and}}
+
+_1 You put six months of your life into this thing and you want to make it available and you want to get something out of it, but you don't want people to take advantage of it. I wanted people to be able to see [Linux], and to make changes and improvements to their hearts' content. But I also wanted to make sure that what I got out of it was to see what they were doing. I wanted to always have access to the sources so that if they made improvements, I could make those improvements myself.~{ See Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (Harper Collins Publishers, Inc., 2001): 94-95. }~
+
+When it was time to release the 0.12 version of Linux, the first to operate fully with GCC, Torvalds decided to throw his lot in with the free software movement. He discarded the old license of Linux and replaced it with the GPL. Within three years, Linux developers were offering release 1.0 of Linux, the kernel; it worked smoothly with the almost complete GNU system, composed of programs from the GNU Project and elsewhere. In effect, they had completed the GNU operating system by adding Linux to it. The resulting system was basically GNU plus Linux. Torvalds and friends, however, referred to it confusingly as "Linux."
+
+By 1994, the amalgamated system had earned enough respect in the hacker world to make some observers from the business world wonder if Torvalds hadn't given away the farm by switching to the GPL in the project's initial months. In the first issue of /{Linux Journal}/, publisher Robert Young sat down with Torvalds for an interview. When Young asked the Finnish programmer if he felt regret at giving up private ownership of the Linux source code, Torvalds said no. "Even with 20/20 hindsight," Torvalds said, he considered the GPL "one of the very best design decisions" made during the early stages of the Linux project.~{ See Robert Young, "Interview with Linus, the Author of Linux," Linux Journal (March 1, 1994), \\ http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2736. }~
+={Young, Robert}
+
+That the decision had been made with zero appeal or deference to Stallman and the Free Software Foundation speaks to the GPL's growing portability. Although it would take a couple of years to be recognized by Stallman, the explosiveness of Linux development conjured flashbacks of Emacs. This time around, however, the innovation triggering the explosion wasn't a software hack like Control-R but the novelty of running a Unix-like system on the PC architecture. The motives may have been different, but the end result certainly fit the ethical specifications: a fully functional operating system composed entirely of free software.
+={Control-R (^R)}
+
+As his initial email message to the comp.os.minix newsgroup indicates, it would take a few months before Torvalds saw Linux as anything more than a holdover until the GNU developers delivered on the Hurd kernel. As far as Torvalds was concerned, he was simply the latest in a long line of kids taking apart and reassembling things just for fun. Nevertheless, when summing up the runaway success of a project that could have just as easily spent the rest of its days on an abandoned computer hard drive, Torvalds credits his younger self for having the wisdom to give up control and accept the GPL bargain. "I may not have seen the light," writes Torvalds, reflecting on Stallman's 1991 Polytechnic University speech and his subsequent decision to switch to the GPL. "But I guess something from his speech sunk in."~{ See Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (Harper Collins Publishers, Inc., 2001): 59. }~
+={HURD kernel}
+
+1~ Chapter 10 - GNU/Linux
+={GNU/Linux+45;Linux+45;Stallman, Richard M.:GNU Linux+46}
+
+By 1993, the free software movement was at a crossroads. To the optimistically inclined, all signs pointed toward success for the hacker culture. /{Wired}/ magazine, a funky, new publication offering stories on data encryption, Usenet, and software freedom, was flying off magazine racks. The Internet, once a slang term used only by hackers and research scientists, had found its way into mainstream lexicon. Even President Clinton was using it. The personal computer, once a hobbyist's toy, had grown to full-scale respectability, giving a whole new generation of computer users access to hacker-built software. And while the GNU Project had not yet reached its goal of a fully intact, free GNU operating system, users could already run the GNU/Linux variant.
+={Internet+3;Wired magazine;PCs (personal computers)+2;personal computers (PCs)+2}
+
+Any way you sliced it, the news was good, or so it seemed. After a decade of struggle, hackers and hacker values were finally gaining acceptance in mainstream society. People were getting it.
+
+Or were they? To the pessimistically inclined, each sign of acceptance carried its own troubling countersign. Sure, being a hacker was suddenly cool, but was cool good for a community that thrived on alienation? Sure, the White House was saying nice things about the Internet, even going so far as to register its own domain name, white-house.gov, *** but it was also meeting with the companies, censorship advocates, and law-enforcement officials looking to tame the Internet's Wild West culture. Sure, PCs were more powerful, but in commoditizing the PC marketplace with its chips, Intel had created a situation in which proprietary software vendors now held the power. For every new user won over to the free software cause via GNU/Linux, hundreds, perhaps thousands, were booting up Microsoft Windows for the first time. GNU/Linux had only rudimentary graphical interfaces, so it was hardly user-friendly. In 1993, only an expert could use it. The GNU Project's first attempt to develop a graphical desktop had been abortive.
+={Intel}
+
+Then there was the political situation. Copyrighting of user interfaces was still a real threat - the courts had not yet rejected the idea. Meanwhile, patents on software algorithms and features were a growing danger that threatened to spread to other countries.
+
+Finally, there was the curious nature of GNU/Linux itself. Unrestricted by legal disputes (such as BSD faced), GNU/Linux's high-speed evolution had been so unplanned, its success so accidental, that programmers closest to the software code itself didn't know what to make of it. More compilation album than unified project, it was comprised of a hacker medley of greatest hits: everything from GCC, GDB, and glibc (the GNU Project's newly developed C Library) toX (a Unix-based graphic user interface developed by MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science) to BSD-developed tools such as BIND (the Berkeley Internet Naming Daemon, which lets users substitute easy-to-remember Internet domain names for numeric IP addresses) and TCP/IP. In addition, it contained the Linux kernel - itself designed as a replacement for Minix. Rather than developing a new operating system, Torvalds and his rapidly expanding Linux development team had plugged their work into this matrix. As Torvalds himself would later translate it when describing the secret of his success: "I'm basically a very lazy person who likes to take credit for things other people actually do."~{ Torvalds has offered this quote in many different settings. To date, however, the quote's most notable appearance is in the Eric Raymond essay, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" (May, 1997), \\ http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/. }~
+={BIND (Berkely Internet Naming Daemon);Berkely Internet Naming Daemon (BIND);C programming language:glibc;GNU Debugger (GDB):Linux and;GDB (GNU Debugger): Linux and;glibc (GNU C Library);GNU C Library (glibc);kernel (Linux);X graphic user interface;Laboratory for Computer Science:X, developing;Minix operating system:kernel, used for Linux;TCP/IP;Torvalds, Linus:Minix, reworking for Linux+2}
+
+Such laziness, while admirable from an efficiency perspective, was troubling from a political perspective. For one thing, it underlined the lack of an ideological agenda on Torvalds' part. Unlike the GNU developers, Torvalds hadn't built his kernel out of a desire to give his fellow hackers freedom; he'd built it to have something he himself could play with. So what exactly was the combined system, and which philosophy would people associate it with? Was it a manifestation of the free software philosophy first articulated by Stallman in the /{GNU Manifesto}/? Or was it simply an amalgamation of nifty software tools that any user, similarly motivated, could assemble on his own home system?
+={GNU Manifesto}
+
+By late 1993, a growing number of GNU/Linux users had begun to lean toward the latter definition and began brewing private variations on the theme. They began to develop various "distributions" of GNU/Linux and distribute them, sometimes gratis, sometimes for a price. The results were spotty at best.
+
+"This was back before Red Hat and the other commercial distributions," remembers Ian Murdock, then a computer science student at Purdue University. "You'd flip through Unix magazines and find all these business card-sized ads proclaiming 'Linux.' Most of the companies were fly-by-night operations that saw nothing wrong with slipping a little of their own [proprietary] source code into the mix."
+={Murdock, Ian+38;Red Hat Inc.;Purdue University}
+
+Murdock, a Unix programmer, remembers being "swept away" by GNU/Linux when he first downloaded and installed it on his home PC system. "It was just a lot of fun," he says. "It made me want to get involved." The explosion of poorly built distributions began to dampen his early enthusiasm, however. Deciding that the best way to get involved was to build a version free of additives, Murdock set about putting a list of the best free software tools available with the intention of folding them into his own distribution. "I wanted something that would live up to the Linux name," Murdock says.
+
+In a bid to "stir up some interest," Murdock posted his intentions on the Internet, including Usenet's comp.os.linux newsgroup. One of the first responding email messages was from rms@ai.mit.edu. As a hacker, Murdock instantly recognized the address. It was Richard M. Stallman, founder of the GNU Project and a man Murdock knew even back then as "the hacker of hackers." Seeing the address in his mail queue, Murdock was puzzled. Why on Earth would Stallman, a person leading his own operating-system project, care about Murdock's gripes over "Linux" distributions?
+
+Murdock opened the message.
+
+"He said the Free Software Foundation was starting to look closely at Linux and that the FSF was interested in possibly doing a Linux [sic] system, too. Basically, it looked to Stallman like our goals were in line with their philosophy."
+={Free Software Foundation (FSF):Linux and+3}
+
+Not to over dramatize, the message represented a change in strategy on Stallman's part. Until 1993, Stallman had been content to keep his nose out of Linux affairs. After first hearing of the new kernel, Stallman asked a friend to check its suitability. Recalls Stallman, "Here ported back that the software was modeled after System V, which was the inferior version of Unix. He also told me it wasn't portable."
+={System V}
+
+The friend's report was correct. Built to run on 386-based machines, Linux was firmly rooted to its low-cost hardware platform. What the friend failed to report, however, was the sizable advantage Linux enjoyed as the only free kernel in the marketplace. In other words, while Stallman spent the next year and a half listening to progress reports from the Hurd developer, reporting rather slow progress, Torvalds was winning over the programmers who would later uproot and replant Linux and GNU onto new platforms.
+
+By 1993, the GNU Project's failure to deliver a working kernel was leading to problems both within the GNU Project and in the free software movement at large. A March, 1993, /{Wired}/ magazine article by Simson Garfinkel described the GNU Project as "bogged down" despite the success of the project's many tools.~{ See Simson Garfinkel, "Is Stallman Stalled?" /{Wired}/ (March, 1993). }~ Those within the project and its nonprofit adjunct, the Free Software Foundation, remember the mood as being even worse than Garfinkel's article let on. "It was very clear, at least to me at the time, that there was a window of opportunity to introduce a new operating system," says Chassell. "And once that window was closed, people would become less interested. Which is in fact exactly what happened."~{ Chassell's concern about there being a 36-month "window" for a new operating system is not unique to the GNU Project. During the early 1990s, free software versions of the Berkeley Software Distribution were held up by Unix System Laboratories' lawsuit restricting the release of BSD-derived software. While many users consider BSD offshoots such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD to be demonstrably superior to GNU/Linux both in terms of performance and security, the number of FreeBSD and OpenBSD users remains a fraction of the total GNU/Linux user population. To view a sample analysis of the relative success of GNU/Linux in relation to other free software operating systems, see the essay by New Zealand hacker, Liam Greenwood, "Why is Linux Successful" (1999), \\ http://www.freebsddiary.org/linux.php. }~
+={Garfinkel, Simson;GNU Project:kernel;Wired magazine:GNU Project and}
+
+Much has been made about the GNU Project's struggles during the 1990-1993 period. While some place the blame on Stallman for those struggles, Eric Raymond, an old friend of Stallman's who supported the GNU Project lukewarmly, says the problem was largely institutional. "The FSF got arrogant," Raymond says. "They moved away from the goal of doing a production-ready operating system to doing operating-system research." Even worse, "They thought nothing outside the FSF could affect them."
+={HURD kernel+4;Raymond, Eric}
+
+Murdock adopts a more charitable view. "I think part of the problem is they were a little too ambitious and they threw good money after bad," he says. "Micro-kernels in the late 80s and early 90s were a hot topic. Unfortunately, that was about the time that the GNU Project started to design their kernel. They ended up with a lot of baggage and it would have taken a lot of backpedaling to lose it."
+
+Stallman responds, "Although the emotions Raymond cites come from his imagination, he's right about one cause of the Hurd's delay:the Hurd developer several times redesigned and rewrote large parts of the code based on what he had learned, rather than trying to make the Hurd run as soon as possible. It was good design practice, but it wasn't the right practice for our goal: to get something working ASAP."
+
+Stallman cites other issues that also caused delay. The Lotus and Apple lawsuits claimed much of his attention; this, coupled with hand problems that prevented him from typing for three years, mostly excluded Stallman from programming. Stallman also cites poor communication between various portions of the GNU Project. "We had to do a lot of work to get the debugging environment to work," he recalls." And the people maintaining GDB at the time were not that cooperative." They had given priority to supporting the existing platforms of GDB's current users, rather than to the overall goal of a complete GNU system.
+
+Most fundamentally, however, Stallman says he and the Hurd developers underestimated the difficulty of developing the Unix kernel facilities on top of the Mach microkernel. "I figured, OK, the [Mach]part that has to talk to the machine has already been debugged," Stallman says, recalling the Hurd team's troubles in a 2000 speech. "With that head start, we should be able to get it done faster. But instead, it turned out that debugging these asynchronous multi-threaded programs was really hard. There were timing bugs that would clobber the files, and that's no fun. The end result was that it took many, many years to produce a test version."~{ See Maui High Performance Computing Center Speech. In subsequent emails, I asked Stallman what exactly he meant by the term "timing bugs." Stallman said "timing errors" was a better way to summarize the problem and offered an elucidating technical information of how a timing error can hamper an operating system's performance: \\ "Timing errors" occur in an asynchronous system where jobs done in parallel can theoretically occur in any order, and one particular order leads to problems. \\ Imagine that program A does X, and program B does Y, where both X and Y are short routines that examine and update the same data structure. Nearly always the computer will do X before Y, or do Y before X, and then there will be no problem. On rare occasions, by chance, the scheduler will let program A run until it is in the middle of X, and then run B which will do Y. Thus, Y will be done while Xis half-done. Since they are updating the same data structure, they will interfere. For instance, perhaps X has already examined the data structure, and it won't notice that there was a change. There will be an unreproducible failure, unreproducible because it depends on chance factors (when the scheduler decides to run which program and how long). \\ The way to prevent such a failure is to use a lock to make sure X and Y can't run at the same time. Programmers writing asynchronous systems know about the general need for locks, but sometimes they overlook the need for a lock in a specific place or on a specific data structure. Then the program has a timing error. }~
+
+Over time, the growing success of GNU together with Linux made it clear that the GNU Project should get on the train that was leaving and not wait for the Hurd. Besides, there were weaknesses in the community surrounding GNU/Linux. Sure, Linux had been licensed under the GPL, but as Murdock himself had noted, the desire to treat GNU/Linux as a purely free software operating system was far from unanimous. By late 1993, the total GNU/Linux user population had grown from a dozen or so enthusiasts to somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000.~{ GNU/Linux user-population numbers are sketchy at best, which is why I've provided such a broad range. The 100,000 total comes from the Red Hat "Milestones" site, \\ http://www.redhat.com/about/corporate/milestones.html. }~ What had once been a hobby was now a marketplace ripe for exploitation, and some developers had no objection to exploiting it with non-free software. Like Winston Churchill watching Soviet troops sweep into Berlin, Stallman felt an understandable set of mixed emotions when it came time to celebrate the GNU/Linux "victory."~{ I wrote this Winston Churchill analogy before Stallman himself sent me his own unsolicited comment on Churchill: \\ World War II and the determination needed to win it was a very strong memory as I was growing up. Statements such as Churchill's, "We will fight them in the landing zones, we will fight them on the beaches... we will never surrender," have always resonated for me. }~
+
+Although late to the party, Stallman still had clout. As soon as the FSF announced that it would lend its money and moral support to Murdock's software project, other offers of support began rolling in. Murdock dubbed the new project Debian - a compression of his and his wife, Deborah's, names - and within a few weeks was rolling out the first distribution. "[Richard's support] catapulted Debian almost overnight from this interesting little project to something people within the community had to pay attention to," Murdock says.
+={Debian+19}
+
+In January of 1994, Murdock issued the
+/{Debian Manifesto}/. Written in the spirit of Stallman's /{GNU Manifesto}/ from a decade before, it explained the importance of working closely with the Free Software Foundation. Murdock wrote:
+={Debian Manifesto+3;Free Software Foundation (FSF):Debian Manifesto and;GNU Manifesto:Debian Manifesto and}
+
+_1 The Free Software Foundation plays an extremely important role in the future of Debian. By the simple fact that they will be distributing it, a message is sent to the world that Linux [sic] is not a commercial product and that it never should be, but that this does not mean that Linux will never be able to compete commercially. For those of you who disagree, I challenge you to rationalize the success of GNU Emacs and GCC, which are not commercial software but which have had quite an impact on the commercial market regardless of that fact.
+
+_1 The time has come to concentrate on the future of Linux[sic] rather than on the destructive goal of enriching one-self at the expense of the entire Linux community and its future. The development and distribution of Debian may not be the answer to the problems that I have outlined in the /{Manifesto}/, but I hope that it will at least attract enough attention to these problems to allow them to be solved.~{ See Ian Murdock, /{A Brief History of Debian}/, (January 6, 1994): Appendix A, "The Debian Manifesto," \\ http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ap-manifesto.en.html. }~
+
+Shortly after the /{Manifesto's}/ release, the Free Software Foundation made its first major request. Stallman wanted Murdock to call its distribution "GNU/Linux." At first, Stallman proposed the term "Lignux" - combining the names Linux and GNU - but the initial reaction was very negative, and this convinced Stallman to go with the longer but less criticized GNU/Linux.
+={Lignux (Linux with GNU)}
+
+Some dismissed Stallman's attempt to add the "GNU" prefix as a belated quest for credit, never mind whether it was due, but Murdock saw it differently. Looking back, Murdock saw it as an attempt to counteract the growing tension between the GNU Project's developers and those who adapted GNU programs to use with the Linux kernel. "There was a split emerging," Murdock recalls. "Richard was concerned."
+={C programming language:glibc+3;glibc (GNU C Library)+3;GNU C Library (glibc)+3}
+
+By 1990, each GNU program had a designated maintainer-in-charge. Some GNU programs could run on many different systems, and users often contributed changes to port them to another system. Often these users knew only that one system, and did not consider how to keep the code clean for other systems. To add support for the new system while keeping the code comprehensible, so it could be maintained reliably for all systems, then required rewriting much of the changes. The maintainer-in-charge had the responsibility to critique the changes and tell their user-authors how to redo parts of the port. Generally they were eager to do this so that their changes would be integrated into the standard version. Then the maintainer-in-charge would edit in there worked changes, and take care of them in future maintenance. For some GNU programs, this had happened dozens of times for dozens of different systems.
+
+The programmers who adapted various GNU programs to work with the kernel Linux followed this common path: they considered only their own platform. But when the maintainers-in-charge asked them to help clean up their changes for future maintenance, several of them were not interested. They did not care about doing the correct thing, or about facilitating future maintenance of the GNU packages they had adapted. They cared only about their own versions and were inclined to maintain them as forks.
+
+In the hacker world, forks are an interesting issue. Although the hacker ethic permits a programmer to do anything he wants with a given program's source code, it is considered correct behavior to offer to work with the original developer to maintain a joint version. Hackers usually find it useful, as well as proper, to pour their improvements into the program's principal version. A free software license gives every hacker the right to fork a program, and sometimes it is necessary, but doing so without need or cause is considered somewhat rude.
+={forks (code)+3;tree (source code)}
+
+As leader of the GNU Project, Stallman had already experienced the negative effects of a software fork in 1991. Says Stallman, "Lucid hired several people to write improvements to GNU Emacs, meant to be contributions to it; but the developers did not inform me about the project. Instead they designed several new features on their own. As you might expect, I agreed with some of their decisions and disagreed with others. They asked me to incorporate all their code, but when I said I wanted to use about half of it, they declined to help me adapt that half to work on its own. I had to do it on my own." The fork had given birth to a parallel version, Lucid Emacs, and hard feelings all around.~{ Jamie Zawinski, a former Lucid programmer who would go on to head the Mozilla development team, has a web site that documents the Lucid/GNU Emacs fork, titled, "The Lemacs/FSFmacs Schism.", at \\ http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html. Stallman's response to those accusations is in \\ http://stallman.org/articles/xemacs.origin. }~
+={Emacs text editor:Lucid software company and;GNU Emacs:Lucid software company and;Lucid software company}
+
+Now programmers had forked several of the principal GNU packages at once. At first, Stallman says he considered the forks to be a product of impatience. In contrast to the fast and informal dynamics of the Linux team, GNU source-code maintainers tended to be slower and more circumspect in making changes that might affect a program's long-term viability. They also were unafraid of harshly critiquing other people's code. Over time, however, Stallman began to sense that there was an underlying lack of awareness of the GNU Project and its objectives when reading Linux developers' emails.
+
+"We discovered that the people who considered themselves 'Linux users' didn't care about the GNU Project," Stallman says. "They said, 'Why should I bother doing these things? I don't care about the GNU Project. It [the program]'s working for me. It's working for us Linux users, and nothing else matters to us.' And that was quite surprising, given that people were essentially using a variant of the GNU system, and they cared so little. They cared less than anybody else about GNU." Fooled by their own practice of calling the combination "Linux," they did not realize that their system was more GNU than Linux.
+
+For the sake of unity, Stallman asked the maintainers-in-charge to do the work which normally the change authors should have done. In most cases this was feasible, but not in glibc. Short for GNU C Library, glibc is the package that all programs use to make "system calls" directed at the kernel, in this case Linux. User programs on a Unix-like system communicate with the kernel only through the C library.
+
+The changes to make glibc work as a communication channel between Linux and all the other programs in the system were major and ad-hoc, written without attention to their effect on other platforms. For the glibc maintainer-in-charge, the task of cleaning them up was daunting. Instead the Free Software Foundation paid him to spend most of a year reimplementing these changes from scratch, to make glibc version 6 work "straight out of the box" in GNU/Linux.
+
+Murdock says this was the precipitating cause that motivated Stallman to insist on adding the GNU prefix when Debian rolled out its software distribution. "The fork has since converged. Still, at the time, there was a concern that if the Linux community saw itself as a different thing as the GNU community, it might be a force for disunity."
+
+While some viewed it as politically grasping to describe the combination of GNU and Linux as a "variant" of GNU, Murdock, already sympathetic to the free software cause, saw Stallman's request to call Debian's version GNU/Linux as reasonable. "It was more for unity than for credit," he says.
+
+Requests of a more technical nature quickly followed. Although Murdock had been accommodating on political issues, he struck a firmer pose when it came to the design and development model of the actual software. What had begun as a show of solidarity soon became a running disagreement.
+
+"I can tell you that I've had my share of disagreements with him," says Murdock with a laugh. "In all honesty Richard can be a fairly difficult person to work with." The principal disagreement was over debugging. Stallman wanted to include debugging information in all executable programs, to enable users to immediately investigate any bugs they might encounter. Murdock thought this would make the system files too big and interfere with distribution. Neither was willing to change his mind.
+
+In 1996, Murdock, following his graduation from Purdue, decided to hand over the reins of the growing Debian project. He had already been ceding management duties to Bruce Perens, the hacker best known for his work on Electric Fence, a Unix utility released under the GPL. Perens, like Murdock, was a Unix programmer who had become enamored of GNU/Linux as soon as the operating system's Unix-like abilities became manifest. Like Murdock, Perens sympathized with the political agenda of Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, albeit from afar.
+={Electric Fence Unix utility; Perens, Bruce+3}
+
+"I remember after Stallman had already come out with the /{GNU Manifesto}/, GNU Emacs, and GCC, I read an article that said he was working as a consultant for Intel," says Perens, recalling his first brush with Stallman in the late 1980s. "I wrote him asking how he could be advocating free software on the one hand and working for Intel on the other. He wrote back saying, 'I work as a consultant to produce free-software.' He was perfectly polite about it, and I thought his answer made perfect sense."
+
+As a prominent Debian developer, however, Perens regarded Murdock's design battles with Stallman with dismay. Upon assuming leadership of the development team, Perens says he made the command decision to distance Debian from the Free Software Foundation. "I decided we did not want Richard's style of micro-management," he says.
+
+According to Perens, Stallman was taken aback by the decision but had the wisdom to roll with it. "He gave it some time to cool off and sent a message that we really needed a relationship. He requested that we call it GNU/Linux and left it at that. I decided that was fine. I made the decision unilaterally. Everybody breathed a sigh of relief."
+
+Over time, Debian would develop a reputation as the hacker's version of GNU/Linux, alongside Slackware, another popular distribution founded during the same 1993-1994 period. However, Slackware contained some non-free programs, and Debian after its separation from GNU began distributing non-free programs too.~{ Debian Buzz in June 1996 contained non-free Netscape 3.01 in its Contrib section. }~ Despite labeling them as "non-free" and saying that they were "not officially part of Debian," proposing these programs to the user implied a kind of endorsement for them. As the GNU Project became aware of these policies, it came to recognize that neither Slackware nor Debian was a GNU/Linux distro it could recommend to the public.
+={Gilmore, John; Young, Robert+2;Red Hat Inc.;Teimann, Michael;Slackware}
+
+Outside the realm of hacker-oriented systems, however, GNU/Linux was picking up steam in the commercial Unix marketplace. In North Carolina, a Unix company billing itself as Red Hat was revamping its business to focus on GNU/Linux. The chief executive officer was Robert Young, the former /{Linux Journal}/ editor who in 1994 had put the question to Linus Torvalds, asking whether he had any regrets about putting the kernel under the GPL. To Young, Torvalds' response had a "profound" impact on his own view toward GNU/Linux. Instead of looking for a way to corner the GNU/Linux market via traditional software tactics, Young began to consider what might happen if a company adopted the same approach as Debian - i.e., building an operating system completely out of free software parts. Cygnus Solutions, the company founded by Michael Tiemann and John Gilmore in 1990, was already demonstrating the ability to sell free software based on quality and customizability. What if Red Hat took the same approach with GNU/Linux?
+
+"In the western scientific tradition we stand on the shoulders of giants," says Young, echoing both Torvalds and Sir Isaac Newton before him. "In business, this translates to not having to reinvent wheels as we go along. The beauty of [the GPL] model is you put your code into the public domain.~{ Young uses the term "public domain" loosely here. Strictly speaking, it means "not copyrighted." Code released under the GNU GPL cannot be in the public domain, since it must be copyrighted in order for the GNU GPL to apply. }~ If you're an independent software vendor and you're trying to build some application and you need a modem-dialer, well, why reinvent modem dialers? You can just steal PPP off of Red Hat [GNU/]Linux and use that as the core of your modem-dialing tool. If you need a graphic tool set, you don't have to write your own graphic library. Just download GTK. Suddenly you have the ability to reuse the best of what went before. And suddenly your focus as an application vendor is less on software management and more on writing the applications specific to your customer's needs." However, Young was no free software activist, and readily included non-free programs in Red Hat's GNU/Linux system.
+
+Young wasn't the only software executive intrigued by the business efficiencies of free software. By late 1996, most Unix companies were starting to wake up and smell the brewing source code. The GNU/Linux sector was still a good year or two away from full commercial breakout mode, but those close enough to the hacker community could feel it: something big was happening. The Intel 386 chip, the Internet, and the World Wide Web had hit the marketplace like a set of monster waves; free software seemed like the largest wave yet.
+
+For Ian Murdock, the wave seemed both a fitting tribute and a fitting punishment for the man who had spent so much time giving the free software movement an identity. Like many Linux aficionados, Murdock had seen the original postings. He'd seen Torvalds' original admonition that Linux was "just a hobby." He'd also seen Torvalds' admission to Minix creator Andrew Tanenbaum: "If the GNU kernel had been ready last spring, I'd not have bothered to even start my project."~{ This quote is taken from the much publicized Torvalds-Tanenbaum "flame war" following the initial release of Linux. In the process of defending his choice of a non-portable monolithic kernel design, Torvalds says he started working on Linux as a way to learn more about his new 386 PC. "If the GNU kernel had been ready last spring, I'd not have bothered to even start my project." See Chris DiBona et al., /{Open Sources}/ (O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 1999): 224. }~ Like many, Murdock knew that some opportunities had been missed. He also knew the excitement of watching new opportunities come seeping out of the very fabric of the Internet.
+={Tanenbaum, Andrew}
+
+"Being involved with Linux in those early days was fun," recalls Murdock. "At the same time, it was something to do, something to pass the time. If you go back and read those old [comp.os.minix]exchanges, you'll see the sentiment: this is something we can play with until the Hurd is ready. People were anxious. It's funny, but in a lot of ways, I suspect that Linux would never have happened if the Hurd had come along more quickly."
+
+By the end of 1996, however, such "what if" questions were already moot, because Torvalds' kernel had gained a critical mass of users. The 36-month window had closed, meaning that even if the GNU Project had rolled out its Hurd kernel, chances were slim anybody outside the hard-core hacker community would have noticed. Linux, by filling the GNU system's last gap, had achieved the GNU Project's goal of producing a Unix-like free software operating system. However, most of the users did not recognize what had happened: they thought the whole system was Linux, and that Torvalds had done it all. Most of them installed distributions that came with non-free software; with Torvalds as their ethical guide, they saw no principled reason to reject it. Still, a precarious freedom was available for those that appreciated it.
+={HURD kernel}
+
+1~ Chapter 11 - Open Source
+={GNU Project:open source movement and+59;open source+59;Stallman, Richard M.:open source and+59}
+
+[RMS: In this chapter only, I have deleted some quotations. The material deleted was about open source and didn't relate to my life or my work.]
+
+In November, 1995, Peter Salus, a member of the Free Software Foundation and author of the 1994 book, /{A Quarter Century of Unix}/, issued a call for papers to members of the GNU Project's "system-discuss" mailing list. Salus, the conference's scheduled chairman, wanted to tip off fellow hackers about the upcoming Conference on Freely Redistributable Software in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Slated for February, 1996, and sponsored by the Free Software Foundation, the event promised to be the first engineering conference solely dedicated to free software and, in a show of unity with other free software programmers, welcomed papers on "any aspect of GNU, Linux, NetBSD, 386BSD, FreeBSD, Perl, Tcl/tk, and other tools for which the code is accessible and redistributable." Salus wrote:
+={Free Software Foundation (FSF);FSF (Free Software Foundation);FreeBSD;Conference on Freely Redistributable Software+1;Linux;NetBSD;Perl programming language;386BSD;Salus, Peter+4}
+
+_1 Over the past 15 years, free and low-cost software has become ubiquitous. This conference will bring together implementers of several different types of freely redistributable software and publishers of such software (on various media). There will be tutorials and refereed papers, as well as keynotes by Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman.~{ See Peter Salus, "FYI-Conference on Freely Redistributable Software, 2/2, Cambridge" (1995) (archived by Terry Winograd), \\ http://bat8.inria.fr/~lang/hotlist/free/licence/fsf96/call-for-papers.html. }~
+
+Among the recipients of Salus' email was conference committee member Eric S. Raymond. Although not the leader of a project or company like the various other members of the list, Raymond had built a tidy reputation within the hacker community for some software projects and as editor of /{The New Hacker's Dictionary}/, a greatly enlarged version of /{The Hacker's Dictionary}/ published a decade earlier by Guy Steele.
+={New Hacker Dictionary, The;Raymond, Eric:open source and+56}
+
+For Raymond, the 1996 conference was a welcome event. Although he did not thoroughly support the free software movement's ideas, he had contributed to some GNU programs, in particular to GNU Emacs. Those contributions stopped in 1992, when Raymond demanded authority to make changes in the official GNU version of GNU Emacs without discussing them with Stallman, who was directly in charge of Emacs development. Stallman rejected the demand, and Raymond accused Stallman of "micro-management." "Richard kicked up a fuss about my making unauthorized modifications when I was cleaning up the Emacs LISP libraries," Raymond recalls. "It frustrated me so much that I decided I didn't want to work with him anymore."
+
+Despite the falling out, Raymond remained active in the free software community. So much so that when Salus suggested a conference pairing Stallman and Torvalds as keynote speakers, Raymond eagerly seconded the idea. With Stallman representing the older, wiser contingent of ITS/Unix hackers and Torvalds representing the younger, more energetic crop of Linux hackers, the pairing indicated a symbolic show of unity that could only be beneficial, especially to ambitious younger (i.e., below 40) hackers such as Raymond. "I sort of had afoot in both camps," Raymond says.
+
+By the time of the conference, the tension between those two camps had become palpable. Both groups had one thing in common, though:the conference was their first chance to meet the Finnish /{wunderkind}/ in the flesh. Surprisingly, Torvalds proved himself to be a charming, affable speaker. Possessing only a slight Swedish accent, Torvalds surprised audience members with his quick, self-effacing wit.~{ Although Linus Torvalds is Finnish, his mother tongue is Swedish. "The Rampantly Unofficial Linus FAQ" at \\ http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/linus/ offers a brief explanation:Finland has a significant (about 6%) Swedish-speaking minority population. They call themselves finlands svensk or finlands svenskar and consider themselves Finns; many of their families have lived in Finland for centuries. Swedish is one of Finland's two official languages. }~
+
+Even more surprising, says Raymond, was Torvalds' equal willingness to take potshots at other prominent hackers, including the most prominent hacker of all, Richard Stallman. By the end of the conference, Torvalds' half-hacker, half-slacker manner was winning over older and younger conference-goers alike.
+
+"It was a pivotal moment," recalls Raymond. "Before 1996, Richard was the only credible claimant to being the ideological leader of the entire culture. People who dissented didn't do so in public. The person who broke that taboo was Torvalds."
+
+The ultimate breach of taboo would come near the end of the show. During a discussion on the growing market dominance of Microsoft Windows or some similar topic, Torvalds admitted to being a fan of Microsoft's PowerPoint slideshow software program. From the perspective of old-line software purists, it was like bragging about one's slaves at an abolitionist conference. From the perspective of Torvalds and his growing band of followers, it was simply common sense. Why shun convenient proprietary software programs just to make a point? They didn't agree with the point anyway. When freedom requires a sacrifice, those who don't care about freedom see the sacrifice as self-denial, rather than as a way to obtain something important. Being a hacker wasn't about self-denial, it was about getting the job done, and "the job," for them, was defined in practical terms.
+={Windows (Microsoft);Microsoft Corporation+3;PowerPoint (Microsoft)+3;proprietary software:Torvalds, Linus and;Torvalds, Linus:PowerPoint and+3}
+
+"That was a pretty shocking thing to say," Raymond remembers. "Then again, he was able to do that, because by 1995 and 1996, he was rapidly acquiring clout."
+
+Stallman, for his part, doesn't remember any tension at the 1996conference; he probably wasn't present when Torvalds made that statement. But he does remember later feeling the sting of Torvalds' celebrated "cheekiness." "There was a thing in the Linux documentation which says print out the GNU coding standards and then tear them up," says Stallman, recalling one example. "When you look closely, what he disagreed with was the least important part of it, the recommendation for how to indent C code."
+
+"OK, so he disagrees with some of our conventions. That's fine, bu the picked a singularly nasty way of saying so. He could have just said,'Here's the way I think you should indent your code.' Fine. There should be no hostility there."
+
+For Raymond, the warm reception other hackers gave to Torvalds' comments confirmed a suspicion: the dividing line separating Linux developers from GNU developers was largely generational. Many Linux hackers, like Torvalds, had grown up in a world of proprietary software. They had begun contributing to free software without perceiving any injustice in non-free software. For most of them, nothing was at stake beyond convenience. Unless a program was technically inferior, they saw little reason to reject it on licensing issues alone. Some day hackers might develop a free software alternative to PowerPoint. Until then, why criticize PowerPoint or Microsoft; why not use it?
+
+This was an example of the growing dispute, within the free software community, between those who valued freedom as such, and those who mainly valued powerful, reliable software. Stallman referred to the two camps as political parties within the community, calling the former the "freedom party." The supporters of the other camp did not try to name it, so Stallman disparagingly called it the "bandwagon party" or the "success party," because many of them presented "more users" as the primary goal.
+
+In the decade since launching the GNU Project, Stallman had built up a fearsome reputation as a programmer. He had also built up a reputation for intransigence both in terms of software design and people management. This was partly true, but the reputation provided a convenient excuse that anyone could cite if Stallman did not do as he wished. The reputation has been augmented by mistaken guesses.
+
+For example, shortly before the 1996 conference, the Free Software Foundation experienced a full-scale staff defection. Brian Youmans, a current FSF staffer hired by Salus in the wake of the resignations, recalls the scene: "At one point, Peter [Salus] was the only staff member working in the office." The previous staff were unhappy with the executive director; as Bryt Bradley told her friends in December, 1995:
+
+_1 [name omitted] (the Executive Director of the FSF) decided to come back from Medical/Political Leave last week. The office staff (Gena Bean, Mike Drain, and myself) decided we could not work with her as our supervisor because of the many mistakes she had made in her job tasks prior to her taking a leave. Also, there had been numerous instances where individuals were threatened with inappropriate firing and there were many instances of what we felt were verbal abuse from her to ALL members of the office staff. We requested (many times) that she not come back as our supervisor, but stated that we were willing to work with her as a co-worker. Our requests were ignored. We quit.
+
+The executive director in question then gave Stallman an ultimatum: give her total autonomy in the office or she would quit. Stallman, as president of the FSF, declined to give her total control over its activities, so she resigned, and he recruited in Peter Salus to replace her.
+
+When Raymond, an outsider, learned that these people had left the FSF, he presumed Stallman was at fault. This provided confirmation for his theory that Stallman's personality was the cause of any and all problems in the GNU Project.
+
+Raymond had another theory: recent delays such as the Hurd and recent troubles such as the Lucid-Emacs schism reflected problems normally associated with software project management, not software code development.
+
+Shortly after the Freely Redistributable Software Conference, Raymond began working on his own pet software project, a mail utility called "fetchmail." Taking a cue from Torvalds, Raymond issued his program with a tacked-on promise to update the source code as early and as often as possible. When users began sending in bug reports and feature suggestions, Raymond, at first anticipating a tangled mess, found the resulting software surprisingly sturdy. Analyzing the success of the Torvalds approach, Raymond issued a quick analysis: using the Internet as his "petri dish" and the harsh scrutiny of the hacker community as a form of natural selection, Torvalds had created an evolutionary model free of central planning.
+={fetchmail;FreeBSD;Conference on Freely Redistributable Software;Internet}
+
+What's more, Raymond decided, Torvalds had found a way around Brooks' Law. First articulated by Fred P. Brooks, manager of IBM's OS/360 project and author of the 1975 book, /{The Mythical Man-Month}/, Brooks' Law held that adding developers to a project only resulted in further project delays. Believing as most hackers that software, like soup, benefits from a limited number of cooks, Raymond sensed something revolutionary at work. In inviting more and more cooks into the kitchen, Torvalds had actually found a way to make the resulting software /{better}/.~{ Brooks' Law is the shorthand summary of the following quote taken from Brooks' book:Since software construction is inherently a systems effort - an exercise in complex interrelationships - communication effort is great, and it quickly dominates the decrease in individual task time brought about by partitioning. Adding more men then lengthens, not shortens, the schedule. See Fred P. Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month (Addison Wesley Publishing, 1995). }~
+={Brooks, Fred P.;Mythical Man-Month, The (Brooks)}
+
+Raymond put his observations on paper. He crafted them into a speech, which he promptly delivered before a group of friends and neighbors in Chester County, Pennsylvania. Dubbed "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," the speech contrasted the "Bazaar" style originated by Torvalds with the "Cathedral" style generally used by everyone else.
+={Cathedral and the Bazaar, The (Raymond)+10;Linux Kongress+6}
+
+Raymond says the response was enthusiastic, but not nearly as enthusiastic as the one he received during the 1997 Linux Kongress, a gathering of GNU/Linux users in Germany the next spring.
+
+"At the Kongress, they gave me a standing ovation at the end of the speech," Raymond recalls. "I took that as significant for two reasons. For one thing, it meant they were excited by what they were hearing. For another thing, it meant they were excited even after hearing the speech delivered through a language barrier."
+
+Eventually, Raymond would convert the speech into a paper, also titled "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." The paper drew its name from Raymond's central analogy. Previously, programs were "cathedrals," impressive, centrally planned monuments built to stand the test of time. Linux, on the other hand, was more like "a great babbling bazaar," a software program developed through the loose decentralizing dynamics of the Internet.
+
+Raymond's paper associated the Cathedral style, which he and Stallman and many others had used, specifically with the GNU Project and Stallman, thus casting the contrast between development models as a comparison between Stallman and Torvalds. Where Stallman was his chosen example of the classic cathedral architect - i.e., a programming "wizard" who could disappear for 18 months and return with something like the GNU C Compiler - Torvalds was more like a genial dinner-party host. In letting others lead the Linux design discussion and stepping in only when the entire table needed a referee, Torvalds had created a development model very much reflective of his own laid-back personality. From Torvalds' perspective, the most important managerial task was not imposing control but keeping the ideas flowing.
+
+Summarized Raymond, "I think Linus's cleverest and most consequential hack was not the construction of the Linux kernel itself, but rather his invention of the Linux development model."~{ See Eric Raymond, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" (1997). }~
+
+If the paper's description of these two styles of development was perceptive, its association of the Cathedral model specifically with Stallman (rather than all the others who had used it, including Raymond himself) was sheer calumny. In fact, the developers of some GNU packages including the GNU Hurd had read about and adopted Torvalds' methods before Raymond tried them, though without analyzing them further and publicly championing them as Raymond's paper did. Thousands of hackers, reading Raymond's article, must have been led to a negative attitude towards GNU by this smear.
+
+In summarizing the secrets of Torvalds' managerial success, Raymond attracted the attention of other members of the free software community for whom freedom was not a priority. They sought to interest business in the use and development of free software, and to do so, decided to cast the issue in terms of the values that appeal to business: powerful, reliable, cheap, advanced. Raymond became the best-known proponent of these ideas, and they reached the management of Netscape, whose proprietary browser was losing market share to Microsoft's equally proprietary Internet Explorer. Intrigued by a speech by Raymond, Netscape executives took the message back to corporate headquarters. A few months later, in January, 1998, the company announced its plan to publish the source code of its flagship Navigator web browser in the hopes of enlisting hacker support in future development.
+={Netscape+8;source code:Netscape+4}
+
+% ={Monterey (California);O'Reilly, Tim;O'Reilly & Associates}
+% ={Apache web server;BIND (Berkely Internet Naming Daemon);Berkely Internet Naming Daemon (BIND);Wall, Larry;Perl programming language;Python programming language;sendmail Unix mail program}
+% ={Mountain View (California);Netscape+8}
+
+When Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale cited Raymond's "Cathedral and the Bazaar" essay as a major influence upon the company's decision, the company instantly elevated Raymond to the level of hacker celebrity. He invited a few people including Larry Augustin, founder of VA Research which sold workstations with the GNU/Linux operating system pre-installed; Tim O'Reilly, founder of the publisher O'Reilly& Associates; and Christine Peterson, president of the Foresight Institute, a Silicon Valley think tank specializing in nano technology, to talk. "The meeting's agenda boiled down to one item: how to take advantage of Netscape's decision so that other companies might follow suit?"
+={Augustin, Larry;Foresight Institute;VA Research;Peterson, Christine+4;Barksdale, Jim}
+
+Raymond doesn't recall the conversation that took place, but he does remember the first complaint addressed. Despite the best efforts of Stallman and other hackers to remind people that the word "free" in free software stood for freedom and not price, the message still wasn't getting through. Most business executives, upon hearing the term for the first time, interpreted the word as synonymous with "zero cost," tuning out any follow-up messages in short order. Until hackers found a way to get past this misunderstanding, the free software movement faced an uphill climb, even after Netscape.
+
+Peterson, whose organization had taken an active interest in advancing the free software cause, offered an alternative: "open source."
+
+Looking back, Peterson says she came up with the "open source" term while discussing Netscape's decision with a friend in the public relations industry. She doesn't remember where she came upon the term or if she borrowed it from another field, but she does remember her friend disliking the term.~{ See Malcolm Maclachlan, "Profit Motive Splits Open Source Movement," Tech-Web News (August 26, 1998), \\ http://www.techweb.com/article/showArticle?articleID=29102344. }~
+
+At the meeting, Peterson says, the response was dramatically different. "I was hesitant about suggesting it," Peterson recalls. "I had no standing with the group, so started using it casually, not highlighting it as a new term." To Peterson's surprise, the term caught on. By the end of the meeting, most of the attendees, including Raymond, seemed pleased by it.
+
+Raymond says he didn't publicly use the term "open source" as a substitute for "free software" until a day or two after the Mozilla launch party, when O'Reilly had scheduled a meeting to talk about free-software. Calling his meeting "the Freeware Summit," O'Reilly says he wanted to direct media and community attention to the other deserving projects that had also encouraged Netscape to release Mozilla. "All these guys had so much in common, and I was surprised they didn't all know each other," says O'Reilly. "I also wanted to let the world know just how great an impact the free software culture had already made. People were missing out on a large part of the free-software tradition."
+={Freeware Summit;O'Reilly, Tim:open source and+8}
+
+In putting together the invite list, however, O'Reilly made a decision that would have long-term political consequences. He decided to limit the list to west-coast developers such as Wall, Eric Allman, creator of send mail, and Paul Vixie, creator of BIND. There were exceptions, of course: Pennsylvania-resident Raymond, who was already in town thanks to the Mozilla launch, earned an quick invite. So did Virginia-resident Guido van Rossum, creator of Python. "Frank Willison, my editor in chief and champion of Python within the company, invited him without first checking in with me," O'Reilly recalls. "I was happy to have him there, but when I started, it really was just a local gathering."
+={van Rossum, Guido;Python programming language;BIND (Berkely Internet Naming Daemon);Berkely Internet Naming Daemon (BIND);Wall, Larry;Perl programming language;Python programming language;sendmail Unix mail program}
+
+For some observers, the unwillingness to include Stallman's name on the list qualified as a snub. "I decided not to go to the event because of it," says Perens, remembering the summit. Raymond, who did go, says he argued for Stallman's inclusion to no avail. The snub rumor gained additional strength from the fact that O'Reilly, the event's host, had feuded publicly with Stallman over the issue of software-manual copyrights. Prior to the meeting, Stallman had argued that free software manuals should be as freely copyable and modifiable as free software programs. O'Reilly, meanwhile, argued that a value-added market for non-free books increased the utility of free software by making it more accessible to a wider community. The two had also disputed the title of the event, with Stallman insisting on "Free Software" rather than "Freeware." The latter term most often refers to programs which are available gratis, but which are not free software because their source code is not released.
+
+Looking back, O'Reilly doesn't see the decision to leave Stallman's name off the invite list as a snub. "At that time, I had never met Richard in person, but in our email interactions, he'd been inflexible and unwilling to engage in dialogue. I wanted to make sure the GNU tradition was represented at the meeting, so I invited John Gilmore and Michael Tiemann, whom I knew personally, and whom I knew were passionate about the value of the GPL but seemed more willing to engage in a frank back-and-forth about the strengths and weaknesses of the various free software projects and traditions. Given all the later brouhaha, I do wish I'd invited Richard as well, but I certainly don't think that my failure to do so should be interpreted as a lack of respect for the GNU Project or for Richard personally."
+={Gilmore, John;Tiemann, Michael+7}
+
+Snub or no snub, both O'Reilly and Raymond say the term "open-source" won over just enough summit-goers to qualify as a success. The attendees shared ideas and experiences and brainstormed on how to improve free software's image. Of key concern was how to point out the successes of free software, particularly in the realm of Internet infrastructure, as opposed to playing up the GNU/Linux challenge to Microsoft Windows. But like the earlier meeting at VA, the discussion soon turned to the problems associated with the term "free software." O'Reilly, the summit host, remembers a comment from Torvalds, a summit attendee.
+
+"Linus had just moved to Silicon Valley at that point, and he explained how only recently that he had learned that the word 'free' had two meanings - free as in 'libre' and free as in 'gratis' - in English."
+
+Michael Tiemann, founder of Cygnus, proposed an alternative to the troublesome "free software" term: sourceware. "Nobody got too excited about it," O'Reilly recalls. "That's when Eric threw out the term 'open source.'"
+
+Although the term appealed to some, support for a change in offcial terminology was far from unanimous. At the end of the one-day conference, attendees put the three terms - free software, open source, or sourceware - to a vote. According to O'Reilly, 9 out of the 15 attendees voted for "open source." Although some still quibbled with the term, all attendees agreed to use it in future discussions with the press. "We wanted to go out with a solidarity message," O'Reilly says.
+
+The term didn't take long to enter the national lexicon. Shortly after the summit, O'Reilly shepherded summit attendees to a press conference attended by reporters from the /{New York Times}/, the /{Wall Street Journal}/, and other prominent publications. Within a few months, Torvalds' face was appearing on the cover of /{Forbes}/ magazine, with the faces of Stallman, Perl creator Larry Wall, and Apache team leader Brian Behlendorf featured in the interior spread. Open source was open for business.
+={Wall, Larry}
+
+For summit attendees such as Tiemann, the solidarity message was the most important thing. Although his company had achieved a fair amount of success selling free software tools and services, he sensed the difficulty other programmers and entrepreneurs faced.
+
+"There's no question that the use of the word free was confusing in a lot of situations," Tiemann says. "Open source positioned itself as being business friendly and business sensible. Free software positioned itself as morally righteous. For better or worse we figured it was more advantageous to align with the open source crowd.
+
+Raymond called Stallman after the meeting to tell him about the new term "open source" and ask if he would use it. Raymond says Stallman briefly considered adopting the term, only to discard it. "I know because I had direct personal conversations about it," Raymond says.
+
+Stallman's immediate response was, "I'll have to think about it." The following day he had concluded that the values of Raymond and O'Reilly would surely dominate the future discourse of "open source," and that the best way to keep the ideas of the free software movement in public view was to stick to its traditional term.
+
+Later in 1998, Stallman announced his position: "open source," while helpful in communicating the technical advantages of free software also encouraged speakers to soft-pedal the issue of software freedom. It avoided the unintended meaning of "gratis software" and the intended meaning of "freedom-respecting software" equally. As a means for conveying the latter meaning, it was therefore no use. In effect, Raymond and O'Reilly had given a name to the non-idealistic political party in the community, the one Stallman did not agree with.
+
+In addition, Stallman thought that the ideas of "open source" led people to put too much emphasis on winning the support of business. While such support in itself wasn't necessarily bad in itself, he expected that being too desperate for it would lead to harmful compromises. "Negotiation 101 would teach you that if you are desperate to get someone's agreement, you are asking for a bad deal," he says. "You need to be prepared to say no." Summing up his position at the 1999 LinuxWorld Convention and Expo, an event billed by Torvalds himself as a "coming out party" for the "Linux" community, Stallman implored his fellow hackers to resist the lure of easy compromise.
+={LinuxWorld Conventions+2}
+
+"Because we've shown how much we can do, we don't have to be desperate to work with companies or compromise our goals," Stallman said during a panel discussion. "Let them offer and we'll accept. We don't have to change what we're doing to get them to help us. You can take a single step towards a goal, then another and then more and more and you'll actually reach your goal. Or, you can take a half measure that means you don't ever take another step, and you'll never get there."
+
+Even before the LinuxWorld show, however, Stallman was showing an increased willingness to alienate open source supporters. A few months after the Freeware Summit, O'Reilly hosted its second annual Perl Conference. This time around, Stallman was in attendance. During a panel discussion lauding IBM's decision to employ the free software Apache web server in its commercial offerings, Stallman, taking advantage of an audience microphone, made a sharp denunciation of panelist John Ousterhout, creator of the Tcl scripting language. Stallman branded Ousterhout a "parasite" on the free software community for marketing a proprietary version of Tcl via Ousterhout's startup company, Scriptics. Ousterhout had stated that Scriptics would contribute only the barest minimum of its improvements to the free version of Tcl, meaning it would in effect use that small contribution to win community approval for much a larger amount of non-free software development. Stallman rejected this position and denounced Scriptics' plans. "I don't think Scriptics is necessary for the continued existenceof Tcl," Stallman said to hisses from the fellow audience members.~{ Ibid. }~
+={Apache web server;IBM:Apache web server and;Ousterhout, John;Tcl scripting language+1;Scriptics}
+
+"It was a pretty ugly scene," recalls Prime Time Freeware's Rich Morin. "John's done some pretty respectable things: Tcl, Tk, Sprite. He's a real contributor." Despite his sympathies for Stallman and Stallman's position, Morin felt empathy for those troubled by Stallman's discordant words.
+={Morin, Rich+1;Prime Time Freeware;Sprite}
+
+Stallman will not apologize. "Criticizing proprietary software isn't ugly - proprietary software is ugly. Ousterhout had indeed made real contributions in the past, but the point is that Scriptics was going to be nearly 100% a proprietary software company. In that conference, standing up for freedom meant disagreeing with nearly everyone. Speaking from the audience, I could only say a few sentences. The only way to raise the issue so it would not be immediately forgotten was to put it in strong terms."
+
+"If people rebuke me for 'making a scene' when I state a serious criticism of someone's conduct, while calling Torvalds 'cheeky' for saying nastier things about trivial matters, that seems like a double standard to me."
+
+Stallman's controversial criticism of Ousterhout momentarily alienated a potential sympathizer, Bruce Perens. In 1998, Eric Raymond proposed launching the Open Source Initiative, or OSI, an organization that would police the use of the term "open source" and provide a definition for companies interested in making their own programs. Raymond recruited Perens to draft the definition.~{ See Bruce Perens et al., "The Open Source Definition," The Open Source Initiative (1998), \\ http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.html. }~
+={OSI (Open Source Initiative);Open Source Initiative (OSI);Perens, Bruce+1}
+
+Perens would later resign from the OSI, expressing regret that the organization had set itself up in opposition to Stallman and the FSF. Still, looking back on the need for a free software definition outside the Free Software Foundation's auspices, Perens understands why other hackers might still feel the need for distance. "I really like and admire Richard," says Perens. "I do think Richard would do his job better if Richard had more balance. That includes going away from free-software for a couple of months."
+
+Stallman's energies would do little to counteract the public-relations momentum of open source proponents. In August of 1998, when chip-maker Intel purchased a stake in GNU/Linux vendor Red Hat, an accompanying /{New York Times}/ article described the company as the product of a movement "known alternatively as free software and opensource."~{ See Amy Harmon, "For Sale: Free Operating System," New York Times (September 28, 1998), \\ http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/98/09/biztech/articles/28linux.html. }~ Six months later, a John Markoff article on Apple Computerwas proclaiming the company's adoption of the "open source" Apache server in the article headline.~{ See John Markoff, "Apple Adopts 'Open Source' for its Server Computers," New York Times (March 17, 1999), \\ http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/03/biztech/articles/17apple.html. }~
+={Apache web server;Apple Computers:open source software and;Intel;Markoff, John;Red Hat Inc.:success of+1}
+
+Such momentum would coincide with the growing momentum of companies that actively embraced the "open source" term. By August of 1999, Red Hat, a company that now eagerly billed itself as "opensource," was selling shares on Nasdaq. In December, VA Linux -formerly VA Research - was floating its own IPO to historic effect. Opening at $30 per share, the company's stock price exploded past the $300 mark in initial trading only to settle back down to the $239 level. Shareholders lucky enough to get in at the bottom and stay until the end experienced a 698% increase in paper wealth, a Nasdaq record. Eric Raymond, as a board member, owned shares worth $36 million. However, these high prices were temporary; they tumbled when the dot-com boom ended.
+={VA Linux+1;VA Research}
+
+The open source proponents' message was simple: all you need, to sell the free software concept, is to make it business-friendly. They saw Stallman and the free software movement as fighting the market;they sought instead to leverage it. Instead of playing the role of high-school outcasts, they had played the game of celebrity, magnifying their power in the process.
+
+These methods won great success for open source, but not for the ideals of free software. What they had done to "spread the message" was to omit the most important part of it: the idea of freedom as an ethical issue. The effects of this omission are visible today: as of 2009, nearly all GNU/Linux distributions include proprietary programs, Torvalds' version of Linux contains proprietary firmware programs, and the company formerly called VA Linux bases its business on proprietary software. Over half of all the world's web servers run some version of Apache, and the usual version of Apache is free software, but many of those sites run a proprietary modified version distributed by IBM.
+
+"On his worst days Richard believes that Linus Torvalds and I conspired to hijack his revolution," Raymond says. "Richard's rejection of the term open source and his deliberate creation of an ideological fissure in my view comes from an odd mix of idealism and territoriality. There are people out there who think it's all Richard's personal ego. I don't believe that. It's more that he so personally associates himself with the free software idea that he sees any threat to that as a threat to himself."
+
+Stallman responds, "Raymond misrepresents my views: I don't think Torvalds 'conspired' with anyone, since being sneaky is not his way. However, Raymond's nasty conduct is visible in those statements themselves. Rather than respond to my views (even as he claims they are) on their merits, he proposes psychological interpretations for them. He attributes the harshest interpretation to unnamed others, then 'defends' me by proposing a slightly less derogatory one. He has often 'defended' me this way."
+
+Ironically, the success of open source and open source advocates such as Raymond would not diminish Stallman's role as a leader - but it would lead many to misunderstand what he is a leader of. Since the free software movement lacks the corporate and media recognition of open source, most users of GNU/Linux do not hear that it exists, let alone what its views are. They have heard the ideas and values of opensource, and they never imagine that Stallman might have different ones. Thus he receives messages thanking him for his advocacy of "open source," and explains in response that he has never been a supporter of that, using the occasion to inform the sender about free-software.
+
+Some writers recognize the term "free software" by using the term "FLOSS," which stands for "Free/Libre and Open Source Software." However, they often say there is a single "FLOSS" movement, which is like saying that the U.S. has a "Liberal/Conservative" movement, and the views they usually associate with this supposed single movement are the open source views they have heard.
+
+Despite all these obstacles, the free software movement does make its ideas heard sometimes, and continues to grow in absolute terms. By sticking to its guns, and presenting its ideas in contrast to those of open source, it gains ground. "One of Stallman's primary character traits is the fact he doesn't budge," says Ian Murdock. "He'll wait up to a decade for people to come around to his point of view if that's what it takes."
+
+Murdock, for one, finds that un-budgeable nature both refreshing and valuable. Stallman may no longer be the solitary leader of the free software movement, but he is still the polestar of the free software community. "You always know that he's going to be consistent in his views," Murdock says. "Most people aren't like that. Whether you agree with him or not, you really have to respect that."
+
+1~ Chapter 12 - A Brief Journey through Hacker Hell
+
+[RMS: In this chapter my only change is to add a few notes labeled like this one.]
+
+Richard Stallman stares, unblinking, through the windshield of a rental car, waiting for the light to change as we make our way through downtown Kihei.
+={Kihei (Hawaii)+15}
+
+The two of us are headed to the nearby town of Pa'ia, where we are scheduled to meet up with some software programmers and their wives for dinner in about an hour or so.
+={Pa'ia (Hawaii)+2}
+
+It's about two hours after Stallman's speech at the Maui High Performance Center, and Kihei, a town that seemed so inviting before the speech, now seems profoundly uncooperative. Like most beach cities, Kihei is a one-dimensional exercise in suburban sprawl. Driving down its main drag, with its endless succession of burger stands, realty agencies, and bikini shops, it's hard not to feel like a steel-coated morsel passing through the alimentary canal of a giant commercial tapeworm. The feeling is exacerbated by the lack of side roads. With nowhere to go but forward, traffic moves in spring-like lurches. 200 yards ahead, a light turns green. By the time we are moving, the light is yellow again.
+
+For Stallman, a lifetime resident of the east coast, the prospect of spending the better part of a sunny Hawaiian afternoon trapped in slow traffic is enough to trigger an embolism. [RMS: Since I was driving, I was also losing time to answer my email, and that's a real pain since I can barely keep up anyway.] Even worse is the knowledge that, with just a few quick right turns a quarter mile back, this whole situation easily could have been avoided. Unfortunately, we are at the mercy of the driver ahead of us, a programmer from the lab who knows the way and who has decided to take us to Pa'ia via the scenic route instead of via the nearby Pilani Highway.
+
+"This is terrible," says Stallman between frustrated sighs. "Why didn't we take the other route?"
+
+Again, the light a quarter mile ahead of us turns green. Again, we creep forward a few more car lengths. This process continues for another 10 minutes, until we finally reach a major crossroad promising access to the adjacent highway.
+
+The driver ahead of us ignores it and continues through the intersection.
+
+"Why isn't he turning?" moans Stallman, throwing up his hands in frustration. "Can you believe this?"
+
+I decide not to answer either. I find the fact that I am sitting in a car with Stallman in the driver seat, in Maui no less, unbelievable enough. Until two hours ago, I didn't even know Stallman knew how to drive. Now, listening to Yo-Yo Ma's cello playing the mournful bass notes of "Appalachian Journey" on the car stereo and watching the sunset pass by on our left, I do my best to fade into the upholstery.
+
+When the next opportunity to turn finally comes up, Stallman hits his right turn signal in an attempt to cue the driver ahead of us. No such luck. Once again, we creep slowly through the intersection, coming to a stop a good 200 yards before the next light. By now, Stallman is livid.
+
+"It's like he's deliberately ignoring us," he says, gesturing and pantomiming like an air craft carrier landing-signals officer in a futile attempt to catch our guide's eye. The guide appears unfazed, and for the next five minutes all we see is a small portion of his head in the rear-view mirror.
+
+I look out Stallman's window. Nearby Kahoolawe and Lanai Islands provide an ideal frame for the setting sun. It's a breathtaking view, the kind that makes moments like this a bit more bearable if you're a Hawaiian native, I suppose. I try to direct Stallman's attention to it, but Stallman, by now obsessed by the inattentiveness of the driver ahead of us, blows me off.
+={Lanai Islands (Hawaii)}
+
+When the driver passes through another green light, completely ignoring a "Pilani Highway Next Right," I grit my teeth. I remember an early warning relayed to me by BSD programmer Keith Bostic. "Stallman does not suffer fools gladly," Bostic warned me. "If somebody says or does something stupid, he'll look them in the eye and say, 'That's stupid.'"
+={Bostic, Keith}
+
+Looking at the oblivious driver ahead of us, I realize that it's the stupidity, not the inconvenience, that's killing Stallman right now.
+
+"It's as if he picked this route with absolutely no thought on how to get there efficiently," Stallman says.
+
+The word "efficiently" hangs in the air like a bad odor. Few things irritate the hacker mind more than inefficiency. It was the inefficiency of checking the Xerox laser printer two or three times a day that triggered Stallman's initial inquiry into the printer source code. It was the inefficiency of rewriting software tools hijacked by commercial software vendors that led Stallman to battle Symbolics and to launch the GNU Project. If, as Jean Paul Sartre once opined, hell is other people, hacker hell is duplicating other people's stupid mistakes, and it's no exaggeration to say that Stallman's entire life has been an attempt to save mankind from these fiery depths.
+={Sartre, Jean Paul}
+
+This hell metaphor becomes all the more apparent as we take in the slowly passing scenery. With its multitude of shops, parking lots, and poorly timed street lights, Kihei seems less like a city and more like a poorly designed software program writ large. Instead of rerouting traffic and distributing vehicles through side streets and expressways, city planners have elected to run everything through a single main drag. From a hacker perspective, sitting in a car amidst all this mess is like listening to a CD rendition of nails on a chalkboard at full volume.
+
+"Imperfect systems infuriate hackers," observes Steven Levy, another warning I should have listened to before climbing into the car with Stallman. "This is one reason why hackers generally hate driving cars - the system of randomly programmed red lights and oddly laid out one-way streets causes delays which are so goddamn /{unnecessary}/ [Levy's emphasis] that the impulse is to rearrange signs, open up traffic-light control boxes . . . re-design the entire system."~{ See Steven Levy, /{Hackers}/ (Penguin USA [paperback], 1984): 40. }~
+
+More frustrating, however, is the duplicity of our trusted guide. Instead of searching out a clever shortcut - as any true hacker would do on instinct - the driver ahead of us has instead chosen to play along with the city planners' game. Like Virgil in Dante's /{Inferno}/, our guide is determined to give us the full guided tour of this hacker hell whether we want it or not.
+
+Before I can make this observation to Stallman, the driver finally hits his right turn signal. Stallman's hunched shoulders relax slightly, and for a moment the air of tension within the car dissipates. The tension comes back, however, as the driver in front of us slows down. "Construction Ahead" signs line both sides of the street, and even though the Pilani Highway lies less than a quarter mile off in the distance, the two-lane road between us and the highway is blocked by a dormant bulldozer and two large mounds of dirt.
+
+It takes Stallman a few seconds to register what's going on as our guide begins executing a clumsy five-point U-turn in front of us. When he catches a glimpse of the bulldozer and the "No Through Access" signs just beyond, Stallman finally boils over.
+
+"Why, why, why?" he whines, throwing his head back. "You should have known the road was blocked. You should have known this way wouldn't work. You did this deliberately." [RMS: I meant that he chose the slow road deliberately. As explained below, I think these quotes are not exact.]
+
+The driver finishes the turn and passes us on the way back toward the main drag. As he does so, he shakes his head and gives us an apologetic shrug. Coupled with a toothy grin, the driver's gesture reveals a touch of mainlander frustration but is tempered with a protective dose of islander fatalism. Coming through the sealed windows of our rental car, it spells out a succinct message: "Hey, it's Maui; what are you gonna do?"
+
+Stallman can take it no longer.
+
+"Don't you fucking smile!" he shouts, fogging up the glass as he does so. "It's your fucking fault. This all could have been so much easier if we had just done it my way." [RMS: These quotes appear to be inaccurate, because I don't use "fucking" as an adverb. This was not an interview, so Williams would not have had a tape recorder running. I'm sure things happened overall as described, but these quotations probably reflect his understanding rather than my words.]
+
+Stallman accents the words "my way" by gripping the steering wheel and pulling himself towards it twice. The image of Stallman's lurching frame is like that of a child throwing a temper tantrum in a car seat, an image further underlined by the tone of Stallman's voice. Halfway between anger and anguish, Stallman seems to be on the verge of tears.
+
+Fortunately, the tears do not arrive. Like a summer cloudburst, the tantrum ends almost as soon as it begins. After a few whiny gasps, Stallman shifts the car into reverse and begins executing his own U-turn. By the time we are back on the main drag, his face is as impassive as it was when we left the hotel 30 minutes earlier.
+
+It takes less than five minutes to reach the next cross-street. This one offers easy highway access, and within seconds, we are soon speeding off toward Pa'ia at a relaxing rate of speed. The sun that once loomed bright and yellow over Stallman's left shoulder is now burning a cool orange-red in our rear-view mirror. It lends its color to the gauntlet wili wili trees flying past us on both sides of the highway.
+={Pa'ia (Hawaii)}
+
+For the next 20 minutes, the only sound in our vehicle, aside from the ambient hum of the car's engine and tires, is the sound of a cello and a violin trio playing the mournful strains of an Appalachian folktune.
+
+1~ Chapter 13 - Continuing the Fight
+
+For Richard Stallman, time may not heal all wounds, but it does provide a convenient ally.
+
+Four years after "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," Stallman still chafes over the Raymond critique. He also grumbles over Linus Torvalds' elevation to the role of world's most famous hacker. He recalls a popular T-shirt that began showing at Linux tradeshows around 1999. Designed to mimic the original promotional poster for Star Wars, the shirt depicted Torvalds brandishing a light-saber like Luke Skywalker, while Stallman's face rides atop R2D2. The shirt still grates on Stallman's nerves not only because it depicts him as Torvalds' sidekick, but also because it elevates Torvalds to the leadership role in the free-software community, a role even Torvalds himself is loath to accept. "It's ironic," says Stallman mournfully. "Picking up that sword is exactly what Linus refuses to do. He gets everybody focusing on him as the symbol of the movement, and then he won't fight. What good is it?"
+={Cathedral and the Bazaar, The (Raymond);Luke Skywalker;R2D2;Torvalds, Linus+1;Star Wars}
+
+Then again, it is that same unwillingness to "pick up the sword," on Torvalds' part, that has left the door open for Stallman to bolster his reputation as the hacker community's ethical arbiter. Despite his grievances, Stallman has to admit that the last few years have been quite good, both to himself and to his organization. Relegated to the periphery by the ironic success of the GNU/Linux system because users thought of it as "Linux," Stallman has nonetheless successfully recaptured the initiative. His speaking schedule between January 2000and December 2001 included stops on six continents and visits to countries where the notion of software freedom carries heavy overtones -China and India, for example.
+
+Outside the bully pulpit, Stallman has taken advantage of the leverage of the GNU General Public License (GPL), of which he remains the steward. During the summer of 2000, while the air was rapidly leaking out of the 1999 Linux IPO bubble, Stallman and the Free Software Foundation scored two major victories. In July, 2000, Troll tech, a Norwegian software company and developer of Qt, a graphical interface library that ran on the GNU/Linux operating system, announced it was licensing its software under the GPL. A few weeks later, Sun Microsystems, a company that, until then, had been warily trying to ride the open source bandwagon without actually contributing its code, finally relented and announced that it, too, was dual licensing its new OpenOffice~{ Sun was compelled by a trademark complaint to use the clumsy name "OpenOffice.org." }~ application suite under the Lesser GNU Public License(LGPL) and the Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL).
+={Free Software Foundation (FSF):QT graphic tools and;GNU General Public License:QT graphics tools and;Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL);OpenOffice application suite+4;Qt+1;Troll Tech+1;SISSL (Sun Industry Standards Source Licence);Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL);Sun Microsystems:OpenOffice application suite}
+
+In the case of Trolltech, this victory was the result of a protracted effort by the GNU Project. The non-freeness of Qt was a serious problem for the free software community because KDE, a free graphical desktop environment that was becoming popular, depended on it. Qt was non-free software but Trolltech had invited free software projects(such as KDE) to use it gratis. Although KDE itself was free software, users that insisted on freedom couldn't run it, since they had to reject Qt. Stallman recognized that many users would want a graphical desktop on GNU/Linux, and most would not value freedom enough to reject the temptation of KDE, with Qt hiding within. The danger was that GNU/Linux would become a motor for the installation of KDE, and therefore also of non-free Qt. This would undermine the freedom which was the purpose of GNU.
+
+To deal with this danger, Stallman recruited people to launch two parallel counter projects. One was GNOME, the GNU free graphical desktop environment. The other was Harmony, a compatible free replacement for Qt. If GNOME succeeded, KDE would not be necessary; if Harmony succeeded, KDE would not need Qt. Either way, users would be able to have a graphical desktop on GNU/Linux without non-free Qt.
+
+In 1999, these two efforts were making good progress, and the management of Trolltech were starting to feel the pressure. So Trolltech released Qt under its own free software license, the QPL. The QPL qualified as a free license, but Stallman pointed out the drawback of incompatibility with the GPL: in general, combining GPL-covered code with Qt in one program was impossible without violating one license or the other. Eventually the Trolltech management recognized that the GPL would serve their purposes equally well, and released Qt with dual licensing: the same Qt code, in parallel, was available under the GNU GPL and under the QPL. After three years, this was victory.
+
+Once Qt was free, the motive for developing Harmony (which wasn't complete enough for actual use) had disappeared, and the developers abandoned it. GNOME had acquired substantial momentum, so its development continued, and it remains the main GNU graphical desktop.
+
+Sun desired to play according to the Free Software Foundation's conditions. At the 1999 O'Reilly Open Source Conference, Sun Microsystems co-founder and chief scientist Bill Joy defended his company's "community source" license, essentially a watered-down compromise letting users copy and modify Sun-owned software but not sell copies of said software without negotiating a royalty agreement with Sun. (With this restriction, the license did not qualify as free, nor for that matter as open source.) A year after Joy's speech, Sun Microsystems vice president Marco Boerries was appearing on the same stage spelling out the company's new licensing compromise in the case of OpenOffice, an office-application suite designed specifically for the GNU/Linux operating system.
+={Boerries, Marco+2;community source, license of Sun Microsystems;Joy, Bill;O'Reilly & Associates:Open Source Conferences}
+
+"I can spell it out in three letters," said Boerries. "GPL."
+
+At the time, Boerries said his company's decision had little to do with Stallman and more to do with the momentum of GPL-protected programs. "What basically happened was the recognition that different products attracted different communities, and the license you use depends on what type of community you want to attract," said Boerries. "With [OpenOffice], it was clear we had the highest correlation with the GPL community."~{ Marco Boerries, interview with author (July, 2000). }~ Alas, this victory was incomplete, since OpenOffice recommends the use of non-free plug-ins.
+
+Such comments point out the under-recognized strength of the GPL and, indirectly, the political genius of the man who played the largest role in creating it. "There isn't a lawyer on earth who would have drafted the GPL the way it is," says Eben Moglen, Columbia University law professor and Free Software Foundation general counsel. "But it works. And it works because of Richard's philosophy of design."
+={Columbia University;Moglen, Eben+35}
+
+A former professional programmer, Moglen traces his pro bono work with Stallman back to 1990 when Stallman requested Moglen's legal assistance on a private affair. Moglen, then working with encryption expert Phillip Zimmerman during Zimmerman's legal battles with the federal government, says he was honored by the request.~{ For more information on Zimmerman's legal travails, read Steven Levy's /{Crypto}/, p. 287-288. In the original book version of /{Free as in Freedom}/, I reported that Moglen helped defend Zimmerman against the National Security Agency. According to Levy's account, Zimmerman was investigated by the U.S. Attorney's office and U.S. Customs, not the NSA. }~
+={Zimmerman, Phillip;National Security Administration}
+
+"I told him I used Emacs every day of my life, and it would take an awful lot of lawyering on my part to pay off the debt."
+
+Since then, Moglen, perhaps more than any other individual, has had the best chance to observe the crossover of Stallman's hacker philosophies into the legal realm. Moglen says Stallman's approach to legal code and his approach to software code are largely the same. "I have to say, as a lawyer, the idea that what you should do with a legal document is to take out all the bugs doesn't make much sense," Moglen says. "There is uncertainty in every legal process, and what most lawyers want to do is to capture the benefits of uncertainty for their client. Richard's goal is the complete opposite. His goal is to remove uncertainty, which is inherently impossible. It is inherently impossible to draft one license to control all circumstances in all legal systems all over the world. But if you were to go at it, you would have to go at it his way. And the resulting elegance, the resulting simplicity in design almost achieves what it has to achieve. And from there a little lawyering will carry you quite far."
+
+As the person charged with pushing the Stallman agenda, Moglen understands the frustration of would-be allies. "Richard is a man who does not want to compromise over matters that he thinks of as fundamental," Moglen says, "and he does not take easily the twisting of words or even just the seeking of artful ambiguity, which human society often requires from a lot of people."
+
+In addition to helping the Free Software Foundation, Moglen has provided legal aid to other copyright defendants, such as Dmitry Sklyarov, and distributors of the DVD decryption program deCSS.
+={Sklyarov, Dmitri+1}
+
+Sklyarov had written and released a program to break digital copy-protection on Adobe e-Books, in Russia where there was no law against it, as an employee of a Russian company. He was then arrested while visiting the US to give a scientific paper about his work. Stallman eagerly participated in protests condemning Adobe for having Sklyarov arrested, and the Free Software Foundation denounced the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as "censorship of software," but it could not intervene in favor of Sklyarov's program because that was non-free. Thus, Moglen worked for Sklyarov's defense through the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The FSF avoided involvement in the distribution of deCSS, since that was illegal, but Stallman condemned the U.S. government for prohibiting deCSS, and Moglen worked as direct counsel for the defendants.
+={Electronic Frontier Foundation}
+
+Following the FSF's decision not to involve itself in those cases, Moglen has learned to appreciate the value of Stallman's stubbornness. "There have been times over the years where I've gone to Richard and said, 'We have to do this. We have to do that. Here's the strategic situation. Here's the next move. Here's what he have to do.' And Richard's response has always been, 'We don't have to do anything.'Just wait. What needs doing will get done."
+
+"And you know what?" Moglen adds. "Generally, he's been right."
+
+Such comments disavow Stallman's own self-assessment: "I'm not good at playing games," Stallman says, addressing the many unseen critics who see him as a shrewd strategist. "I'm not good at looking ahead and anticipating what somebody else might do. My approach has always been to focus on the foundation [of ideas], to say 'Let's make the foundation as strong as we can make it.'"
+
+The GPL's expanding popularity and continuing gravitational strength are the best tributes to the foundation laid by Stallman and his GNU colleagues. While Stallman was never the sole person in the world releasing free software, he nevertheless can take sole credit for building the free software movement's ethical framework. Whether or not other modern programmers feel comfortable working inside that framework is immaterial. The fact that they even have a choice at all is Stallman's greatest legacy.
+
+Discussing Stallman's legacy at this point seems a bit premature. Stallman, 48 at the time of this writing, still has a few years left to add to or subtract from that legacy. Still, the momentum of the free software movement makes it tempting to examine Stallman's life outside the day-to-day battles of the software industry and within a more august, historical setting.
+
+To his credit, Stallman refuses all opportunities to speculate about this. "I've never been able to work out detailed plans of what the future was going to be like," says Stallman, offering his own premature epitaph. "I just said 'I'm going to fight. Who knows where I'll get?'"
+
+There's no question that in picking his fights, Stallman has alienated the very people who might otherwise have been his greatest champions, had he been willing to fight for their views instead of his own. It is also a testament to his forthright, ethical nature that many of Stallman's erstwhile political opponents still manage to put in a few good words for him when pressed. The tension between Stallman the ideologue and Stallman the hacker genius, however, leads a biographer to wonder: how will people view Stallman when Stallman's own personality is no longer there to get in the way?
+
+In early drafts of this book, I dubbed this question the "100 year" question. Hoping to stimulate an objective view of Stallman and his work, I asked various software-industry luminaries to take themselves out of the current time-frame and put themselves in a position of a historian looking back on the free software movement 100 years in the future. From the current vantage point, it is easy to see similarities between Stallman and past Americans who, while somewhat marginal during their lifetime, have attained heightened historical importance in relation to their age. Easy comparisons include Henry David Thoreau, transcendentalist philosopher and author of /{Civil Disobedience}/, and John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club and progenitor of the modern environmental movement. It is also easy to see similarities in men like William Jennings Bryan, a.k.a. "The Great Commoner," leader of the populist movement, enemy of monopolies, and a man who, though powerful, seems to have faded into historical insignificance.
+={Bryan, Willliam Jennings;Muir, John;On Civil Disobedience (Thoreau);Thoreau, Henry David;Sierra Club}
+
+Although not the first person to view software as public property, Stallman is guaranteed a footnote in future history books thanks to the GPL. Given that fact, it seems worthwhile to step back and examine Richard Stallman's legacy outside the current time frame. Will the GPL still be something software programmers use in the year 2102, or will it have long since fallen by the wayside? Will the term "free-software" seem as politically quaint as "free silver" does today, or will it seem eerily prescient in light of later political events?
+
+Predicting the future is risky sport. Stallman refuses, saying that asking what people will think in 100 years presumes we have no influence over it. The question he prefers is, "What should we do to make a better future?" But most people, when presented with the predictive question, seemed eager to bite.
+
+"One hundred years from now, Richard and a couple of other people are going to deserve more than a footnote," says Moglen. "They're going to be viewed as the main line of the story."
+
+The "couple of other people" Moglen nominates for future textbook chapters include John Gilmore, who beyond contributing in various ways to free software has founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Theodor Holm Nelson, a.k.a. Ted Nelson, author of the 1982book, /{Literary Machines}/. Moglen says Stallman, Nelson, and Gilmore each stand out in historically significant, non-overlapping ways. He credits Nelson, commonly considered to have coined the term "hypertext," for identifying the predicament of information ownership in the digital age. Gilmore and Stallman, meanwhile, earn notable credit for identifying the negative political effects of information control and building organizations - the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the case of Gilmore and the Free Software Foundation in the case of Stallman - to counteract those effects. Of the two, however, Moglen sees Stallman's activities as more personal and less political in nature.
+={Electronic Frontier Foundation;Gilmore, John;Nelson, Theodor Holm+2;Nelson, Ted+2}
+
+"Richard was unique in that the ethical implications of un-free software were particularly clear to him at an early moment," says Moglen. "This has a lot to do with Richard's personality, which lots of people will, when writing about him, try to depict as epiphenomenal or even a drawback in Richard Stallman's own life work."
+
+Gilmore, who describes his inclusion between the erratic Nelson and the irascible Stallman as something of a "mixed honor," nevertheless seconds the Moglen argument. Writes Gilmore:
+
+_1 My guess is that Stallman's writings will stand up as well as Thomas Jefferson's have; he's a pretty clear writer and also clear on his principles... Whether Richard will be as influential as Jefferson will depend on whether the abstractions we call "civil rights" end up more important a hundred years from now than the abstractions that we call "software" or "technically imposed restrictions."
+={Jefferson, Thomas}
+
+Another element of the Stallman legacy not to be overlooked, Gilmore writes, is the collaborative software-development model pioneered by the GNU Project. Although flawed at times, the model has nevertheless evolved into a standard within the software-development industry. All told, Gilmore says, this collaborative software-development model may end up being even more influential than the GNU Project, the GPL License, or any particular software program developed by Stallman:
+
+_1 Before the Internet, it was quite hard to collaborate over distance on software, even among teams that know and trust each other. Richard pioneered collaborative development of software, particularly by disorganized volunteers who seldom meet each other. Richard didn't build any of the basic tools for doing this (the TCP protocol, email lists, diff and patch, tar files, RCS or CVS or remote-CVS), but he used the ones that were available to form social groups of programmers who could effectively collaborate.
+
+Stallman thinks that evaluation, though positive, misses the point. "It emphasizes development methods over freedom, which reflects the values of open source rather than free software. If that is how future users look back on the GNU Project, I fear it will lead to a world in which developers maintain users in bondage, and let them aid development occasionally as a reward, but never take the chains off them."
+
+Lawrence Lessig, Stanford law professor and author of the 2001 book, /{The Future of Ideas}/, is similarly bullish. Like many legal scholars, Lessig sees the GPL as a major bulwark of the current so-called "digital commons," the vast agglomeration of community-owned software programs, network and telecommunication standards that have triggered the Internet's exponential growth over the last three decades. Rather than connect Stallman with other Internet pioneers, men such as Vannevar Bush, Vinton Cerf, and J. C. R. Licklider who convinced others to see computer technology on a wider scale, Lessig sees Stallman's impact as more personal, introspective, and, ultimately, unique:
+={Future of Ideas, The (Lessig)}
+
+_1 [Stallman] changed the debate from "is" to "ought." He made people see how much was at stake, and he built a device to carry these ideals forward... That said, I don't quite know how to place him in the context of Cerf or Licklider. The innovation is different. It is not just about a certain kind of code, or enabling the Internet. [It's] much more about getting people to see the value in a certain kind of Internet. I don't think there is anyone else in that class, before or after.
+
+Not everybody sees the Stallman legacy as set in stone, of course. Eric Raymond, the open source proponent who feels that Stallman's leadership role has diminished significantly since 1996, sees mixed signals when looking into the 2102 crystal ball:
+
+_1 I think Stallman's artifacts (GPL, Emacs, GCC) will be seen as revolutionary works, as foundation-stones of the information world. I think history will be less kind to some of the theories from which RMS operated, and not kind at all to his personal tendency towards territorial, cult-leader behavior.
+
+As for Stallman himself, he, too, sees mixed signals:
+
+_1 What history says about the GNU Project, twenty years from now, will depend on who wins the battle of freedom to use public knowledge. If we lose, we will be just a footnote. If we win, it is uncertain whether people will know the role of the GNU operating system - if they think the system is "Linux," they will build a false picture of what happened and why.
+
+_1 But even if we win, what history people learn a hundred years from now is likely to depend on who dominates politically.
+
+Searching for his own 19th-century historical analogy, Stallman summons the figure of John Brown, the militant abolitionist regarded as a hero on one side of the Mason Dixon line and a madman on the other.
+
+John Brown's slave revolt never got going, but during his subsequent trial he effectively roused national demand for abolition. During the Civil War, John Brown was a hero; 100 years after, and for much of the 1900s, history textbooks taught that he was crazy. During the era of legal segregation, while bigotry was shameless, the U.S. partly accepted the story that the South wanted to tell about itself, and history textbooks said many untrue things about the Civil War and related events.
+
+Such comparisons document both the self-perceived peripheral nature of Stallman's current work and the binary nature of his current reputation. It's hard to see Stallman's reputation falling to the same level of infamy as Brown's did during the post-Reconstruction period. Stallman, despite his occasional war-like analogies, has done little to inspire violence. Still, it is easy to envision a future in which Stallman's ideas wind up on the ash-heap.~{ RMS: Sam Williams' further words here, "In fashioning the free software cause not not as a mass movement but as a collection of private battles against the forces of proprietary temptation," do not fit the facts. Ever since the first announcement of the GNU Project, I have asked the public to support the cause. The free software movement aims to be a mass movement, and the only question is whether it has enough supporters to qualify as "mass." As of 2009, the Free Software Foundation has some 3000 members that pay the hefty dues, and over 20,000 subscribers to its monthly e-mail newsletter. }~
+
+Then again, it is that very will that may someday prove to be Stallman's greatest lasting legacy. Moglen, a close observer over the last decade, warns those who mistake the Stallman personality as counter-productive or epiphenomenal to the "artifacts" of Stallman's life. Without that personality, Moglen says, there would be precious few artifacts to discuss. Says Moglen, a former Supreme Court clerk:
+
+_1 Look, the greatest man I ever worked for was Thurgood Marshall. I knew what made him a great man. I knew why he had been able to change the world in his possible way. I would be going out on a limb a little bit if I were to make a comparison, because they could not be more different: Thurgood Marshall was a man in society, representing an outcast society to the society that enclosed it, but still a man in society. His skill was social skills. But he was all of a piece, too. Different as they were in every other respect, the person I now most compare him to in that sense - of a piece, compact, made of the substance that makes stars, all the way through - is Stallman.
+={Marshall, Thurgood}
+
+In an effort to drive that image home, Moglen reflects on a shared moment in the spring of 2000. The success of the VA Linux IPO was still resonating in the business media, and a half dozen issues related to free software were swimming through the news. Surrounded by a swirling hurricane of issues and stories each begging for comment, Moglen recalls sitting down for lunch with Stallman and feeling like a castaway dropped into the eye of the storm. For the next hour, he says, the conversation calmly revolved around a single topic: strengthening the GPL.
+={VA Linux}
+
+"We were sitting there talking about what we were going to do about some problems in Eastern Europe and what we were going to do when the problem of the ownership of content began to threaten free software," Moglen recalls. "As we were talking, I briefly thought about how we must have looked to people passing by. Here we are, these two little bearded anarchists, plotting and planning the next steps. And, of course, Richard is plucking the knots from his hair and dropping them in the soup and behaving in his usual way. Anybody listening in on our conversation would have thought we were crazy, but I knew: I knew the revolution's right here at this table. This is what's making it happen. And this man is the person making it happen."
+
+Moglen says that moment, more than any other, drove home the elemental simplicity of the Stallman style.
+
+"It was funny," recalls Moglen. "I said to him, 'Richard, you know, you and I are the two guys who didn't make any money out of this revolution.' And then I paid for the lunch, because I knew he didn't have the money to pay for it."~{ RMS: I never refuse to let people treat me to a meal, since my pride is not based on picking up the check. But I surely did have the money to pay for lunch. My income, which comes from around half the speeches I give, is much less than a law professor's salary, but I'm not poor. }~
+
+1~ Epilogue from Sam Williams: Crushing Loneliness
+
+[RMS: Because this chapter is so personally from Sam Williams, I have indicated all changes to the text with square brackets or ellipses, and I have made such changes only to clear up technical or legal points,and to remove passages that I found to be hostile and devoid of information. I have also added notes labeled 'RMS:' to respond to certain points. Williams has also changed the text of this chapter; changes made by Williams are not explicitly indicated.]
+
+Writing the biography of a living person is a bit like producing a play. The drama in front of the curtain often pales in comparison to the drama backstage.
+
+In /{The Autobiography of Malcolm X}/, Alex Haley gives readers a rare glimpse of that backstage drama. Stepping out of the ghostwriter role, Haley delivers the book's epilogue in his own voice. The epilogue explains how a freelance reporter originally dismissed as a "tool" and"spy" by the Nation of Islam spokesperson managed to work through personal and political barriers to get Malcolm X's life story on paper.
+={Autobiography of Malcolm X, The (Haley)+1;Haley, Alex}
+
+While I hesitate to compare this book with /{The Autobiography of Malcolm X}/, I do owe a debt of gratitude to Haley for his candid epilogue. Over the last 12 months, it has served as a sort of instruction manual on how to deal with a biographical subject who has built an entire career on being disagreeable. [RMS: I have built my career on saying no to things others accept without much question, but if I sometimes seem or am disagreeable, it is not through specific intention.] From the outset, I envisioned closing this biography with a similar epilogue, both as an homage to Haley and as a way to let readers know how this book came to be.
+
+The story behind this story starts in an Oakland apartment, winding its way through the various locales mentioned in the book - Silicon Valley, Maui, Boston, and Cambridge. Ultimately, however, it is a tale of two cities: New York, New York, the book-publishing capital of the world, and Sebastopol, California, the book-publishing capital of Sonoma County.
+
+The story starts in April, 2000. At the time, I was writing stories for the ill-fated web site BeOpen.com. One of my first assignments was a phone interview with Richard M. Stallman. The interview went well, so well that Slashdot (http://www.slashdot.org), the popular "news for nerds" site owned by VA Software, Inc. (formerly VA LinuxSystems and before that, VA Research), gave it a link in its daily list of feature stories. Within hours, the web servers at BeOpen were heating up as readers clicked over to the site.
+={BeOpen.com+3;VA Linux;VA Research;VA Software, Inc.;Slashdot}
+
+For all intents and purposes, the story should have ended there. Three months after the interview, while attending the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in Monterey, California, I received the following email message from Tracy Pattison, foreign-rights manager at a large New York publishing house:
+={Monterey (California);O'Reilly & Associates:Open Source Conferences;Pattison, Tracy}
+
+% poem or group what follows ?
+
+poem{
+
+To: sam@BeOpen.com
+
+Subject: RMS Interview Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2000 15:56:37 - 0400
+
+Dear Mr. Williams,
+
+I read your interview with Richard Stallman on BeOpen
+with great interest. I've been intrigued by RMS and his
+work for some time now and was delighted to find your
+piece which I really think you did a great job of capturing
+some of the spirit of what Stallman is trying to do with
+GNU-Linux and the Free Software Foundation.
+
+What I'd love to do, however, is read more - and I don't
+think I'm alone. Do you think there is more information
+and/or sources out there to expand and update your
+interview and adapt it into more of a profile of Stallman?
+Perhaps including some more anecdotal information about
+his personality and background that might really interest
+and enlighten readers outside the more hardcore
+programming scene?
+
+}poem
+
+Tracy ended the email with a request that I give her a call to discuss the idea further. I did just that. Tracy told me her company was launching a new electronic book line, and it wanted stories that appealed to an early-adopter audience. The e-book format was 30,000words, about 100 pages, and she had pitched her bosses on the idea of profiling a major figure in the hacker community. Her bosses liked the idea, and in the process of searching for interesting people to profile,she had come across my BeOpen interview with Stallman. Hence her email to me.
+
+That's when Tracy asked me: would I be willing to expand the interview into a full-length feature profile?
+
+My answer was instant: yes. Before accepting it, Tracy suggested I put together a story proposal she could show her superiors. Two days later, I sent her a polished proposal. A week later, Tracy sent me a follow up email. Her bosses had given it the green light.
+
+I have to admit, getting Stallman to participate in an e-book project was an afterthought on my part. As a reporter who covered the open source beat, I knew Stallman was a stickler. I'd already received a half dozen emails at that point upbraiding me for the use of "Linux" instead of "GNU/Linux."
+
+Then again, I also knew Stallman was looking for ways to get his message out to the general public. Perhaps if I presented the project to him that way, he would be more receptive. If not, I could always rely upon the copious amounts of documents, interviews, and recorded online conversations Stallman had left lying around the Internet and do an unauthorized biography.
+
+During my research, I came across an essay titled "Freedom - Or Copyright?" Written by Stallman and published in the June, 2000,edition of the MIT /{Technology Review}/, the essay blasted e-books for an assortment of software sins. Not only did readers have to use proprietary software programs to read them, Stallman lamented, but the methods used to prevent unauthorized copying were overly harsh. Instead of downloading a transferable HTML or PDF file, readers downloaded an encrypted file. In essence, purchasing an e-book meant purchasing a nontransferable key to unscramble the encrypted content. Any attempt to open a book's content without an authorized key constituted a criminal violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the 1998 law designed to bolster copyright enforcement on the Internet. Similar penalties held for readers who converted a book's content into an open file format, even if their only intention was to read the book on a different computer in their home. Unlike a normal book, the reader no longer held the right to lend, copy, or resell an e-book. They only had the right to read it on an authorized machine, warned Stallman:
+={Digital Millennium Copyright Act}
+
+_1 We still have the same old freedoms in using paper books.But if e-books replace printed books, that exception will do little good. With "electronic ink," which makes it possible to download new text onto an apparently printed piece of paper, even newspapers could become ephemeral. Imagine:no more used book stores; no more lending a book to your friend; no more borrowing one from the public library - no more "leaks" that might give someone a chance to read without paying. (And judging from the ads for Microsoft Reader, no more anonymous purchasing of books either.)This is the world publishers have in mind for us.~{ See "Freedom - Or Copyright?" (May, 2000), \\ http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/stallman0500.asp. }~
+
+Needless to say, the essay caused some concern. Neither Tracy nor I had discussed the software her company would use nor had we discussed the type of copyright [license] that would govern the e-book's usage. I mentioned the /{Technology Review}/ article and asked if she could give me information on her company's e-book policies. Tracy promised to get back to me.
+
+Eager to get started, I decided to call Stallman anyway and mention the book idea to him. When I did, he expressed immediate interest and immediate concern. "Did you read my essay on e-books?" he asked.
+
+When I told him, yes, I had read the essay and was waiting to hear back from the publisher, Stallman laid out two conditions: he didn't want to lend support to an e-book licensing mechanism he fundamentally opposed, and he didn't want to come off as lending support. "I don't want to participate in anything that makes me look like a hypocrite," he said.
+
+For Stallman, the software issue was secondary to the copyright issue. He said he was willing to ignore whatever software the publisher or its third-party vendors employed just so long as the company specified within the copyright that readers were free to make and distribute verbatim copies of the e-book's content. Stallman pointed to Stephen King's /{The Plant}/ as a possible model. In June, 2000, King announced on his official web site that he was self-publishing /{The Plant}/ in serial form. According to the announcement, the book's total cost would be $13, spread out over a series of $1 installments. As long as at least 75% of the readers paid for each chapter, King promised to continue releasing new installments. By August, the plan seemed to be working, as King had published the first two chapters with a third on the way.
+={King, Stephen;open source+4;Plant, The (King)}
+
+"I'd be willing to accept something like that," Stallman said. "As long as it also permitted verbatim copying." [RMS: As I recall, I also raised the issue of encryption; the text two paragraphs further down confirms this. I would not have agreed to publish the book in a way that /{required}/ a non-free program to read it.]
+
+I forwarded the information to Tracy. Feeling confident that she and I might be able to work out an equitable arrangement, I called up Stallman and set up the first interview for the book. Stallman agreed to the interview without making a second inquiry into the status issue. Shortly after the first interview, I raced to set up a second interview (this one in Kihei), squeezing it in before Stallman headed off on a 14-day vacation to Tahiti. [RMS: That was not a pure vacation; I gave a speech there too.]
+={Kihei (Hawaii)}
+
+It was during Stallman's vacation that the bad news came from Tracy. Her company's legal department didn't want to adjust its [license] notice on the e-books. Readers who wanted to make their books transferable would [first have to crack the encryption code, to be able to convert the book to a free, public format such as HTML. This would be illegal and they might face criminal penalties.]
+
+With two fresh interviews under my belt, I didn't see any way to write the book without resorting to the new material. I quickly set up a trip to New York to meet with my agent and with Tracy to see if there was a compromise solution.
+
+When I flew to New York, I met my agent, Henning Guttman. It was our first face-to-face meeting, and Henning seemed pessimistic about our chances of forcing a compromise, at least on the publisher's end. The large, established publishing houses already viewed the e-book format with enough suspicion and weren't in the mood to experiment with copyright language that made it easier for readers to avoid payment. As an agent who specialized in technology books, however,Henning was intrigued by the novel nature of my predicament. I told him about the two interviews I'd already gathered and the promise not to publish the book in a way that made Stallman "look like a hypocrite." Agreeing that I was in an ethical bind, Henning suggested we make that our negotiating point.
+={Guttman, Henning}
+
+Barring that, Henning said, we could always take the carrot-and-stick approach. The carrot would be the publicity that came with publishing an e-book that honored the hacker community's internal ethics. The stick would be the risks associated with publishing an e-book that didn't. Nine months before Dmitry Sklyarov became an Internet /{cause célèbre}/, we knew it was only a matter of time before an enterprising programmer revealed how to hack e-books. We also knew that a major publishing house releasing an [encrypted] e-book on Richard M. Stallman was the software equivalent of putting "Steal This E-Book" on the cover.
+={Sklyarov, Dmitri}
+
+After my meeting with Henning, I called Stallman. Hoping to make the carrot more enticing, I discussed a number of potential compromises. What if the publisher released the book's content under a[dual] license, something similar to what Sun Microsystems had done with Open Office, the free software desktop applications suite? The publisher could then release DRM-restricted~{ RMS: Williams wrote "commercial" here, but that is a misnomer, since it means "connected with business." All these versions would be commercial if a company published them. }~ versions of the e-book under [its usual] format, taking advantage of all the bells and whistles that went with the e-book software, while releasing the copyable version under a less aesthetically pleasing HTML format.
+
+Stallman told me he didn't mind the [dual-license] idea, but he did dislike the idea of making the freely copyable version inferior to the restricted version. Besides, he said [on second thought, this case was different precisely because he had] a way to control the outcome. He could refuse to cooperate.
+
+[RMS: The question was whether it would be wrong for me to agree to the restricted version. I can endorse the free version of Sun's Open Office, because it is free software and much better than nothing,while at the same time I reject the non-free version. There is no self- contradiction here, because Sun didn't need or ask my approval for the non-free version; I was not responsible for its existence. In this case, if I had said yes to the non-freely-copyable version, the onus would fall on me.]
+
+I made a few more suggestions with little effect. About the only thing I could get out of Stallman was a concession [RMS: i.e., a further compromise] that the e-book's [license] restrict all forms of file sharing to "noncommercial redistribution."
+
+Before I signed off, Stallman suggested I tell the publisher that I'd promised Stallman that the work would be [freely sharable]. I told Stallman I couldn't agree to that statement [RMS: though it was true,since he had accepted my conditions at the outset] but that I did view the book as unfinishable without his cooperation. Seemingly satisfied,Stallman hung up with his usual sign-off line: "Happy hacking."
+
+Henning and I met with Tracy the next day. Tracy said her company was willing to publish copyable excerpts in a unencrypted format but would limit the excerpts to 500 words. Henning informed her that this wouldn't be enough for me to get around my ethical obligation to Stallman. Tracy mentioned her own company's contractual obligation to online vendors such as Amazon.com. Even if the company decided to open up its e-book content this one time, it faced the risk of its partners calling it a breach of contract. Barring a change of heart in the executive suite or on the part of Stallman, the decision was up tome. I could use the interviews and go against my earlier agreement with Stallman, or I could plead journalistic ethics and back out of the verbal agreement to do the book.
+={Amazon.com}
+
+Following the meeting, my agent and I relocated to a pub on Third Ave. I used his cell phone to call Stallman, leaving a message when nobody answered. Henning left for a moment, giving me time to collect my thoughts. When he returned, he was holding up the cell phone.
+
+"It's Stallman," Henning said.
+
+The conversation got off badly from the start. I relayed Tracy's comment about the publisher's contractual obligations.
+
+"So," Stallman said bluntly. "Why should I give a damn about their contractual obligations?"
+
+Because asking a major publishing house to risk a legal battle with its vendors over a 30,000-word e-book is a tall order, I suggested. [RMS: His unstated premise was that I couldn't possibly refuse this deal for mere principle.]
+
+"Don't you see?" Stallman said. "That's exactly why I'm doing this. I want a signal victory. I want them to make a choice between freedom and business as usual."
+
+As the words "signal victory" echoed in my head, I felt my attention wander momentarily to the passing foot traffic on the sidewalk. Coming into the bar, I had been pleased to notice that the location was less than half a block away from the street corner memorialized in the 1976 Ramones song, "53rd and 3rd," a song I always enjoyed playing in my days as a musician. Like the perpetually frustrated street hustler depicted in that song, I could feel things falling apart as quickly as they had come together. The irony was palpable. After weeks of gleefully recording other people's laments, I found myself in the position of trying to pull off the rarest of feats: a Richard Stallman compromise. When I continued hemming and hawing, pleading the publisher's position and revealing my growing sympathy for it,Stallman, like an animal smelling blood, attacked.
+
+"So that's it? You're just going to screw me? You're just going to bend to their will?"
+
+[RMS: The quotations show that Williams' interpretation of this conversation was totally wrong. He compares me to a predator, but I was only saying no to the deal he was badgering me to accept.I had already made several compromises, some described above; I just refused to compromise my principles entirely away. I often do this; people who aren't satisfied say I "refused to compromise at all, "but that is an exaggeration; \\ see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/compromise.html. Then I feared he was going to disregard the conditions he had previously agreed to, and publish the book with DRM despite my refusal. What I smelled was not his "blood" but possible betrayal.]
+
+I brought up the issue of a dual-copyright again.
+
+"You mean license," Stallman said curtly.
+
+"Yeah, license. Copyright. Whatever," I said, feeling suddenly like a wounded tuna trailing a rich plume of plasma in the water.
+
+"Aw, why didn't you just fucking do what I told you to do!" he shouted. [RMS: I think this quotation was garbled, both because using "fucking" as an adverb was never part of my speech pattern, and because the words do not fit the circumstances. The words he quotes are a rebuke to a disobedient subordinate. I felt he had an ethical obligation, but he was not my subordinate, and I would not have spoken to him as one. Using notes rather than a recorder, he could not reliably retain the exact words.]
+
+I must have been arguing on behalf of the publisher to the very end, because in my notes I managed to save a final Stallman chestnut: "I don't care. What they're doing is evil. I can't support evil. Goodbye." [RMS: It sounds like I had concluded that he would never take no for an answer, and the only way to end the conversation without accepting his proposition was to hang up on him.]
+
+As soon as I put the phone down, my agent slid a freshly poured Guinness to me. "I figured you might need this," he said with a laugh. "I could see you shaking there towards the end."
+
+I was indeed shaking. The shaking wouldn't stop until the Guinness was more than halfway gone. It felt weird, hearing myself characterized as an emissary of "evil." [RMS: My words as quoted criticize the publisher, not Williams personally. If he took it personally, perhaps that indicates he was starting to take ethical responsibility for the deal he had pressed me to accept.] It felt weirder still, knowing that three months before, I was sitting in an Oakland apartment trying to come up with my next story idea. Now, I was sitting in a part of the world I'd only known through rock songs, taking meetings with publishing executives and drinking beer with an agent I'd never even laid eyes on until the day before. It was all too surreal, like watching my life reflected back as a movie montage.
+
+About that time, my internal absurdity meter kicked in. The initial shaking gave way to convulsions of laughter. To my agent, I must have looked like a another fragile author undergoing an untimely emotional breakdown. To me, I was just starting to appreciate the cynical beauty of my situation. Deal or no deal, I already had the makings of a pretty good story. It was only a matter of finding a place to tell it. When my laughing convulsions finally subsided, I held up my drink in a toast.
+
+"Welcome to the front lines, my friend," I said, clinking pints with my agent. "Might as well enjoy it."
+
+If this story really were a play, here's where it would take a momentary, romantic interlude. Disheartened by the tense nature of our meeting, Tracy invited Henning and me to go out for drinks with her and some of her coworkers. We left the bar on Third Ave., headed down to the East Village, and caught up with Tracy and her friends.
+
+Once there, I spoke with Tracy, careful to avoid shop talk. Our conversation was pleasant, relaxed. Before parting, we agreed to meet the next night. Once again, the conversation was pleasant, so pleasant that the Stallman e-book became almost a distant memory.
+
+When I got back to Oakland, I called around to various journalist friends and acquaintances. I recounted my predicament. Most upbraided me for giving up too much ground to Stallman in the pre-interview negotiation. [RMS: Those who have read the whole book know that I would never have dropped the conditions.] A former j-school professor suggested I ignore Stallman's "hypocrite" comment and just write the story. Reporters who knew of Stallman's media-savviness ex-pressed sympathy but uniformly offered the same response: it's your call.
+
+I decided to put the book on the back burner. Even with the interviews, I wasn't making much progress. Besides, it gave me a chance to speak with Tracy without running things past Henning first.By Christmas we had traded visits: she flying out to the west coast once, me flying out to New York a second time. The day before New Year's Eve, I proposed. Deciding which coast to live on, I picked New York. By February, I packed up my laptop computer and all my research notes related to the Stallman biography, and we winged our way to JFK Airport. Tracy and I were married on May 11. So much for failed book deals.
+
+During the summer, I began to contemplate turning my interview notes into a magazine article. Ethically, I felt in the clear doing so,since the original interview terms said nothing about traditional print media. To be honest, I also felt a bit more comfortable writing about Stallman after eight months of radio silence. Since our telephone conversation in September, I'd only received two emails from Stallman.Both chastised me for using "Linux" instead of "GNU/Linux" in a pair of articles for the web magazine /{Upside Today}/. Aside from that, I had enjoyed the silence. In June, about a week after the New York University speech, I took a crack at writing a 5,000-word magazine-length story about Stallman. This time, the words flowed. The distance had helped restore my lost sense of emotional perspective, I suppose.
+={Upside Today web magazine}
+
+In July, a full year after the original email from Tracy, I got a call from Henning. He told me that O'Reilly & Associates, a publishing house out of Sebastopol, California, was interested in the running the Stallman story as a biography. [RMS: I have a vague memory that I suggested contacting O'Reilly, but I can't be sure after all these years.] The news pleased me. Of all the publishing houses in the world, O'Reilly, the same company that had published Eric Raymond's /{The Cathedral and the Bazaar}/, seemed the most sensitive to the issues that had killed the earlier e-book. As a reporter, I had relied heavily on the O'Reilly book /{Open Sources}/ as a historical reference. I also knew that various chapters of the book, including a chapter written by Stallman, had been published with [license] notices that permitted redistribution. Such knowledge would come in handy if the issue of electronic publication ever came up again.
+={Cathedral and the Bazaar, The (Raymond);O'Reilly & Associates;Open Sources (DiBona, et al)+2;Raymond, Eric}
+
+Sure enough, the issue did come up. I learned through Henning that O'Reilly intended to publish the biography both as a book and as part of its new Safari Tech Books Online subscription service. The Safari user license would involve special restrictions,~{ See "Safari Tech Books Online; Subscriber Agreement: Terms of Service" \\ http://my.safaribooksonline.com/termsofservice. As of December, 2009, the see-books require non-free reader software, so people should refuse to use them. }~ Henning warned, but O'Reilly was willing to allow for a copyright that permitted users to copy and share the book's text regardless of medium. Basically, as author, I had the choice between two licenses: the Open Publication License or the GNU Free Documentation License.
+={Open Publication License (OPL)+8;OPL (Open Publication License)+8;Safari Tech Books Online subscription service}
+
+I checked out the contents and background of each license. The Open Publication License (OPL)~{ See "The Open Publication License: Draft v1.0" (June 8, 1999), \\ http://opencontent.org/openpub/. }~ gives readers the right to reproduce and distribute a work, in whole or in part, in any medium "physical or electronic," provided the copied work retains the Open Publication License. It also permits modification of a work, provided certain conditions are met. Finally, the Open Publication License includes a number of options, which, if selected by the author, can limit the creation of "substantively modified" versions or book-form derivatives without prior author approval.
+
+The GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), meanwhile, permits the copying and distribution of a document in any medium, provided the resulting work carries the same license.~{ See "The GNU Free Documentation License: Version 1.3" (November, 2008), \\ http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html. }~
+={GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License)+1;GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)+1}
+
+It also permits the modification of a document provided certain conditions. Unlike the OPL, however, it does not give authors the option to restrict certain modifications. It also does not give authors the right to reject modifications that might result in a competitive book product. It does require certain forms of front - and back-cover information if a party other than the copyright holder wishes to publish more than 100 copies of a protected work, however.
+
+In the course of researching the licenses, I also made sure to visit the GNU Project web page titled "Various Licenses and Comments About Them."~{ See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html. }~
+
+On that page, I found a Stallman critique of the Open Publication License. Stallman's critique related to the creation of modified works and the ability of an author to select either one of the OPL's options to restrict modification. If an author didn't want to select either option, it was better to use the GFDL instead, Stallman noted, since it minimized the risk of the non-selected options popping up in modified versions of a document.
+
+The importance of modification in both licenses was a reflection of their original purpose - namely, to give software-manual owners a chance to improve their manuals and publicize those improvements to the rest of the community. Since my book wasn't a manual, I had little concern about the modification clause in either license. My only concern was giving users the freedom to exchange copies of the book or make copies of the content, the same freedom they would have enjoyed if they purchased a hardcover book. Deeming either license suitable for this purpose, I signed the O'Reilly contract when it came to me.
+
+Still, the notion of unrestricted modification intrigued me. In my early negotiations with Tracy, I had pitched the merits of a GPL-style license for the e-book's content. At worst, I said, the license would guarantee a lot of positive publicity for the e-book. At best, it would encourage readers to participate in the book-writing process. As an author, I was willing to let other people amend my work just so long as my name always got top billing. Besides, it might even be interesting to watch the book evolve. I pictured later editions looking much like online versions of the /{Talmud}/, my original text in a central column surrounded by illuminating, third-party commentary in the margins.
+
+My idea drew inspiration from Project Xanadu (http://www.xanadu.com), the legendary software concept originally conceived by Ted Nelson in 1960. During the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in 1999, I had seen the first demonstration of the project's [free] offshoot Udanax and had been wowed by the result. In one demonstration sequence, Udanax displayed a parent document and a derivative work in a similar two-column, plain-text format. With a click of the button, the program introduced lines linking each sentence in the parent to its conceptual offshoot in the derivative. An e-book biography of Richard M. Stallman didn't have to be Udanax-enabled, but given such technological possibilities, why not give users a chance to play around?~{ Anybody willing to "port" this book over to Udanax, the free software version of Xanadu, will receive enthusiastic support from me. To find out more about this intriguing technology, \\ visit http://www.udanax.com. }~
+={Nelson, Ted;O'Reilly & Associates:Open Source Conferences;Project Xanadu;Udanax}
+
+When Laurie Petrycki, my editor at O'Reilly, gave me a choice be-tween the OPL or the GFDL, I indulged the fantasy once again. By September of 2001, the month I signed the contract, e-books had become almost a dead topic. Many publishing houses, Tracy's included,were shutting down their e-book imprints for lack of interest. I had to wonder. If these companies had treated e-books not as a form of publication but as a form of community building, would those imprints have survived?
+={GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License)+1;GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)+1;Petrycki, Laurie}
+
+After I signed the contract, I notified Stallman that the book project was back on. I mentioned the choice O'Reilly was giving me between the Open Publication License and the GNU Free Documentation License. I told him I was leaning toward the OPL, if only for the fact I saw no reason to give O'Reilly's competitors a chance to print the same book under a different cover. Stallman wrote back, arguing in favor of the GFDL, noting that O'Reilly had already used it several times in the past. Despite the events of the past year, I suggested a deal. I would choose the GFDL if it gave me the possibility to do more interviews and if Stallman agreed to help O'Reilly publicize the book. Stallman agreed to participate in more interviews but said that his participation in publicity-related events would depend on the content of the book. Viewing this as only fair, I set up an interview for December 17, 2001 in Cambridge.
+
+I set up the interview to coincide with a business trip my wife Tracy was taking to Boston. Two days before leaving, Tracy suggested I invite Stallman out to dinner.
+
+"After all," she said, "he is the one who brought us together."I sent an email to Stallman, who promptly sent a return email accepting the offer. When I drove up to Boston the next day, I met Tracy at her hotel and hopped the T to head over to MIT. When we got to Tech Square, I found Stallman in the middle of a conversation just as we knocked on the door.
+
+"I hope you don't mind," he said, pulling the door open far enough so that Tracy and I could just barely hear Stallman's conversational counterpart. It was a youngish woman, mid-20s I'd say, named Sarah.
+
+"I took the liberty of inviting somebody else to have dinner with us," Stallman said, matter-of-factly, giving me the same catlike smile he gave me back in that Palo Alto restaurant.
+
+To be honest, I wasn't too surprised. The news that Stallman had a new female friend had reached me a few weeks before, courtesy of Stallman's mother. "In fact, they both went to Japan last month when Richard went over to accept the Takeda Award," Lippman told me at the time.~{ Alas, I didn't find out about the Takeda Foundation's decision to award Stallman, along with Linus Torvalds and Ken Sakamura, with its first-ever award for"Techno-Entrepreneurial Achievement for Social/Economic Well-Being" until after Stallman had made the trip to Japan to accept the award. For more information about the award and its accompanying $1 million prize, visit the Takeda site, \\ http://www.takeda-foundation.jp. }~
+={Takeda Awards}
+
+On the way over to the restaurant, I learned the circumstances of Sarah and Richard's first meeting. Interestingly, the circumstances were very familiar. Working on her own fictional book, Sarah said she heard about Stallman and what an interesting character he was. She promptly decided to create a character in her book on Stallman and,in the interests of researching the character, set up an interview with Stallman. Things quickly went from there. The two had been dating since the beginning of 2001, she said.
+
+"I really admired the way Richard built up an entire political movement to address an issue of profound personal concern," Sarah said,explaining her attraction to Stallman.
+
+My wife immediately threw back the question: "What was the issue?" "Crushing loneliness." During dinner, I let the women do the talking and spent most of the time trying to detect clues as to whether the last 12 months had softened Stallman in any significant way. I didn't see anything to suggest they had. Although more flirtatious than I remembered,Stallman retained the same general level of prickliness. At one point,my wife uttered an emphatic "God forbid" only to receive a typical Stallman rebuke.
+
+"I hate to break it to you, but there is no God," Stallman said.[RMS: I must have been too deadpan. He could justly accuse me of being a wise guy, but not of rebuking.]
+
+Afterwards, when the dinner was complete and Sarah had departed, Stallman seemed to let his guard down a little. As we walked to a nearby bookstore, he admitted that the last 12 months had dramatically changed his outlook on life. "I thought I was going to be alone forever," he said. "I'm glad I was wrong."
+
+Before parting, Stallman handed me his "pleasure card," a business card listing Stallman's address, phone number, and favorite pastimes("sharing good books, good food and exotic music and dance") so that I might set up a final interview.
+
+The next day, over another meal of dim sum, Stallman seemed even more lovestruck than the night before. Recalling his debates with Currier House dorm maters over the benefits and drawbacks of an immortality serum, Stallman expressed hope that scientists might some day come up with the key to immortality. "Now that I'm finally starting to have happiness in my life, I want to have [a longer life]," he said.
+
+When I mentioned Sarah's "crushing loneliness" comment, Stallman failed to see a connection between loneliness on a physical or spiritual level and loneliness on a hacker level. "The impulse to share code is about friendship but friendship at a much lower level," he said. Later, however, when the subject came up again, Stallman did admit that loneliness, or the fear of perpetual loneliness [RMS: at the hacker-to-hacker, community level, that is], had played a major role in fueling his determination during the earliest days of the GNU Project.
+
+"My fascination with computers was not a consequence of anything else," he said. "I wouldn't have been less fascinated with computers if I had been popular and all the women flocked to me. However, it's certainly true the experience of feeling I didn't have a home, finding one and losing it, finding another and having it destroyed, affected me deeply. The one I lost was the dorm. The one that was destroyed was the AI Lab. The precariousness of not having any kind of home or community was very powerful. It made me want to fight to get it back."
+
+After the interview, I couldn't help but feel a certain sense of emotional symmetry. Hearing Sarah describe what attracted her to Stallman and hearing Stallman himself describe the emotions that prompted him to take up the free software cause, I was reminded of my own reasons for writing this book. Since July, 2000, I have learned to appreciate both the seductive and the repellent sides of the Richard Stallman persona. Like Eben Moglen before me, I feel that dismissing that persona as epiphenomenal or distracting in relation to the overall free software movement would be a grievous mistake. In many ways the two are so mutually defining as to be indistinguishable.
+
+[RMS: Williams objectifies his reactions, both positive and negative, as parts of me, but they are functions also of his own attitudes about appearance, conformity, and business success.]
+
+While I'm sure not every reader feels the same level of affinity for Stallman...I'm sure most will agree [that] few individuals offer as singular a human portrait as Richard M. Stallman. It is my sincere hope that, with this initial portrait complete and with the help of the GFDL, others will feel a similar urge to add their own perspective to that portrait.
+
+Endnotes
+
+1~ Appendix A - Hack, Hackers and Hacking
+={hackers+18}
+
+To understand the full meaning of the word "hacker," it helps to examine the word's etymology over the years.
+
+/{The New Hacker Dictionary}/, an online compendium of software-programmer jargon, officially lists nine different connotations of the word "hack" and a similar number for "hacker." Then again, the same publication also includes an accompanying essay that quotes Phil Agre, an MIT hacker who warns readers not to be fooled by the word's perceived flexibility. "Hack has only one meaning," argues Agre. "An extremely subtle and profound one which defies articulation." Richard Stallman tries to articulate it with the phrase, "Playful cleverness."
+={Agre, Phil;New Hacker Dictionary, The}
+
+Regardless of the width or narrowness of the definition, most modern hackers trace the word back to MIT, where the term bubbled upas popular item of student jargon in the early 1950s. In 1990 the MIT Museum put together a journal documenting the hacking phenomenon.According to the journal, students who attended the institute during the fifties used the word "hack" the way a modern student might use the word "goof." Hanging a jalopy out a dormitory window was a "hack," but anything harsh or malicious - e.g., egging a rival dorm's windows or defacing a campus statue - fell outside the bounds. Implicit within the definition of "hack" was a spirit of harmless, creative fun.
+={MIT Museum}
+
+This spirit would inspire the word's gerund form: "hacking." A 1950s student who spent the better part of the afternoon talking on the phone or dismantling a radio might describe the activity as "hacking." Again, a modern speaker would substitute the verb form of "goof" -"goofing" or "goofing off" - to describe the same activity.
+
+As the 1950s progressed, the word "hack" acquired a sharper, more rebellious edge. The MIT of the 1950s was overly competitive, and hacking emerged as both a reaction to and extension of that competitive culture. Goofs and pranks suddenly became a way to blow off steam, thumb one's nose at campus administration, and indulge creative thinking and behavior stifled by the Institute's rigorous undergraduate curriculum. With its myriad hallways and underground steam tunnels, the Institute offered plenty of exploration opportunities for the student undaunted by locked doors and "No Trespassing"signs. Students began to refer to their off-limits explorations as "tunnel hacking." Above ground, the campus phone system offered similar opportunities. Through casual experimentation and due diligence, students learned how to perform humorous tricks. Drawing inspiration from the more traditional pursuit of tunnel hacking, students quickly dubbed this new activity "phone hacking."
+
+The combined emphasis on creative play and restriction-free exploration would serve as the basis for the future mutations of the hacking term. The first self-described computer hackers of the 1960s MIT campus originated from a late 1950s student group called the Tech Model Railroad Club. A tight clique within the club was the Signals and Power (S&P) Committee - the group behind the railroad club's electrical circuitry system. The system was a sophisticated assortment of relays and switches similar to the kind that controlled the local cam-pus phone system. To control it, a member of the group simply dialed in commands via a connected phone and watched the trains do his bidding.
+={Tech Model Railroad Club;S&P (Signals and Power) Committee+2;Signals and Power (S&P) Committee+2}
+
+The nascent electrical engineers responsible for building and maintaining this system saw their activity as similar in spirit to phone hacking. Adopting the hacking term, they began refining it even further. From the S&P hacker point of view, using one less relay to operate a particular stretch of track meant having one more relay for future play. Hacking subtly shifted from a synonym for idle play to a synonym for idle play that improved the overall performance or efficiency of the club's railroad system at the same time. Soon S&P committee members proudly referred to the entire activity of improving and reshaping the track's underlying circuitry as "hacking" and to the people who did it as "hackers."
+
+Given their affinity for sophisticated electronics - not to mention the traditional MIT-student disregard for closed doors and "No Trespassing" signs - it didn't take long before the hackers caught wind of a new machine on campus. Dubbed the TX-0, the machine was one of the first commercially marketed computers. By the end of the 1950s, the entire S&P clique had migrated en masse over to the TX-0 control room, bringing the spirit of creative play with them.The wide-open realm of computer programming would encourage yet another mutation in etymology. "To hack" no longer meant soldering unusual looking circuits, but cobbling together software programs with little regard to "official" methods or software-writing procedures. It also meant improving the efficiency and speed of already-existing pro-grams that tended to hog up machine resources. True to the word's roots, it also meant writing programs that served no other purpose than to amuse or entertain.
+={TX-0 computer}
+
+A classic example of this expanded hacking definition is the game Spacewar, the first computer-based video game. Developed by MIT hackers in the early 1960s, Spacewar had all the traditional hacking definitions: it was goofy and random, serving little useful purpose other than providing a nightly distraction for the dozen or so hackers who delighted in playing it. From a software perspective, however,it was a monumental testament to innovation of programming skill.It was also completely free. Because hackers had built it for fun,they saw no reason to guard their creation, sharing it extensively with other programmers. By the end of the 1960s, Spacewar had become a diversion for programmers around the world, if they had the (then rather rare) graphical displays.
+
+This notion of collective innovation and communal software ownership distanced the act of computer hacking in the 1960s from the tunnel hacking and phone hacking of the 1950s. The latter pursuits tended to be solo or small-group activities. Tunnel and phone hackers relied heavily on campus lore, but the off-limits nature of their activity discouraged the open circulation of new discoveries. Computer hackers, on the other hand, did their work amid a scientific field biased toward collaboration and the rewarding of innovation. Hackers and "official" computer scientists weren't always the best of allies, but in the rapid evolution of the field, the two species of computer programmer evolved a cooperative - some might say symbiotic - relationship.
+
+Hackers had little respect for bureaucrats' rules. They regarded computer security systems that obstructed access to the machine as just another bug, to be worked around or fixed if possible. Thus,breaking security (but not for malicious purposes) was a recognized aspect of hacking in 1970, useful for practical jokes (the victim might say, "I think someone's hacking me") as well as for gaining access to the computer. But it was not central to the idea of hacking. Where there was a security obstacle, hackers were proud to display their wits in surmounting it; however, given the choice, as at the MIT AI Lab,they chose to have no obstacle and do other kinds of hacking. Where there is no security, nobody needs to break it.
+
+It is a testament to the original computer hackers' prodigious skill that later programmers, including Richard M. Stallman, aspired to wear the same hacker mantle. By the mid to late 1970s, the term"hacker" had acquired elite connotations. In a general sense, a computer hacker was any person who wrote software code for the sake of writing software code. In the particular sense, however, it was a testament to programming skill. Like the term "artist," the meaning carried tribal overtones. To describe a fellow programmer as a hacker was a sign of respect. To describe oneself as a hacker was a sign of immense personal confidence. Either way, the original looseness of the computer-hacker appellation diminished as computers became more common.
+
+As the definition tightened, "computer" hacking acquired additional semantic overtones. The hackers at the MIT AI Lab shared many other characteristics, including love of Chinese food, disgust for tobacco smoke, and avoidance of alcohol, tobacco and other addictive drugs. These characteristics became part of some people's under-standing of what it meant to be a hacker, and the community exerted an influence on newcomers even though it did not demand conformity. However, these cultural associations disappeared with the AI Lab hacker community. Today, most hackers resemble the surrounding society on these points.
+
+As the hackers at elite institutions such as MIT, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon conversed about hacks they admired, they also considered the ethics of their activity, and began to speak openly of a "hacker ethic": the yet-unwritten rules that governed a hacker's day-to-day behavior. In the 1984 book /{Hackers}/, author Steven Levy, after much research and consultation, codified the hacker ethic as five core hacker tenets.
+={Hackers (Levy)+1}
+
+In the 1980s, computer use expanded greatly, and so did security breaking. Mostly it was done by insiders with criminal intent, who were generally not hackers at all. However, occasionally the police and administrators, who defined disobedience as evil, traced a computer "intrusion" back to a hacker whose idea of ethics was "Don't hurt people." Journalists published articles in which "hacking" meant breaking security, and usually endorsed the administrators' view of the matter. Although books like /{Hackers}/ did much to document the original spirit of exploration that gave rise to the hacking culture, for most newspaper reporters and readers the term "computer hacker"became a synonym for "electronic burglar."
+
+By the late 1980s, many U.S. teenagers had access to computers.Some were alienated from society; inspired by journalists' distorted picture of "hacking," they expressed their resentment by breaking computer security much as other alienated teens might have done it by breaking windows. They began to call themselves "hackers," but they never learned the MIT hackers' principle against malicious behavior.As younger programmers began employing their computer skills to harmful ends - creating and disseminating computer viruses, breaking into computer systems for mischief, deliberately causing computers to crash - the term "hacker" acquired a punk, nihilistic edge which attracted more people with similar attitudes.
+
+Hackers have railed against this perceived mis-usage of their self-designator for nearly two decades. Stallman, not one to take things lying down, coined the term "cracking" for "security breaking" so that people could more easily avoid calling it "hacking." But the distinction between hacking and cracking is often misunderstood. These two descriptive terms are not meant to be exclusive. It's not that "Hacking is here, and cracking is there, and never the twain shall meet." Hacking and cracking are different attributes of activities, just as "young"and "tall" are different attributes of persons.
+
+Most hacking does not involve security, so it is not cracking. Most cracking is done for profit or malice and not in a playful spirit, so it is not hacking. Once in a while a single act may qualify as cracking and as hacking, but that is not the usual case. The hacker spirit includes irreverence for rules, but most hacks do not break rules. Cracking is by definition disobedience, but it is not necessarily malicious or harmful. The computer security field distinguishes between "black hat"and "white hat" crackers - i.e., crackers who turn toward destructive,malicious ends versus those who probe security in order to fix it.
+
+The hacker's central principle not to be malicious remains the primary cultural link between the notion of hacking in the early 21st century and hacking in the 1950s. It is important to note that, as the idea of computer hacking has evolved over the last four decades,the original notion of hacking - i.e., performing pranks or exploring underground tunnels - remains intact. In the fall of 2000, the MIT Museum paid tribute to the Institute's age-old hacking tradition with a dedicated exhibit, the Hall of Hacks. The exhibit includes a number of photographs dating back to the 1920s, including one involving amock police cruiser. In 1993, students paid homage to the original MIT notion of hacking by placing the same police cruiser, lights flashing, atop the Institute's main dome. The cruiser's vanity license plate read IHTFP, a popular MIT acronym with many meanings. The most noteworthy version, itself dating back to the pressure-filled world of MIT student life in the 1950s, is "I hate this fucking place." In 1990,however, the Museum used the acronym as a basis for a journal on the history of hacks. Titled /{The Journal of the Institute for Hacks,Tomfoolery, and Pranks}/, it offers an adept summary of the hacking.
+={Hall of Hacks}
+
+"In the culture of hacking, an elegant, simple creation is as highly valued as it is in pure science," writes /{Boston Globe}/ reporter Randolph Ryan in a 1993 article attached to the police car exhibit. "A Hack differs from the ordinary college prank in that the event usually requires careful planning, engineering and finesse, and has an under-lying wit and inventiveness," Ryan writes. "The unwritten rule holds that a hack should be good-natured, non-destructive and safe. In fact,hackers sometimes assist in dismantling their own handiwork."
+={Boston Globe;Ryan, Randolph}
+
+The urge to confine the culture of computer hacking within the same ethical boundaries is well-meaning but impossible. Although most software hacks aspire to the same spirit of elegance and simplicity,the software medium offers less chance for reversibility. Dismantling a police cruiser is easy compared with dismantling an idea, especially an idea whose time has come.
+
+Once a vague item of obscure student jargon, the word "hacker" has become a linguistic billiard ball, subject to political spin and ethical nuances. Perhaps this is why so many hackers and journalists enjoy using it. We cannot predict how people will use the word in the future.We can, however, decide how we will use it ourselves. Using the term "cracking" rather than "hacking," when you mean "security breaking,"shows respect for Stallman and all the hackers mentioned in this book,and helps preserve something which all computer users have benefited from: the hacker spirit.
+={crackers}
+
+1~ Appendix B - GNU Free Documentation License
+={GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License)+64;GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)+64}
+
+Version 1.3, 3 November 2008
+
+Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002, 2007, 2008 Free Software Foundation
+
+http://fsf.org/
+
+Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
+
+2~ Preamble
+
+The purpose of this License is to make a manual, textbook, or other functional and useful document "free" in the sense of freedom:to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it,with or without modifying it, either commercially or non-commercially.Secondarily, this License preserves for the author and publisher a way to get credit for their work, while not being considered responsible for modifications made by others.
+
+This License is a kind of "copyleft", which means that derivative works of the document must themselves be free in the same sense.It complements the GNU General Public License, which is a copyleft license designed for free software.
+
+We have designed this License in order to use it for manuals for free software, because free software needs free documentation: a free program should come with manuals providing the same freedoms that the software does. But this License is not limited to software manuals;it can be used for any textual work, regardless of subject matter or whether it is published as a printed book. We recommend this License principally for works whose purpose is instruction or reference.
+
+2~ 1. APPLICABILITY AND DEFINITIONS
+
+This License applies to any manual or other work, in any medium,that contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it can be distributed under the terms of this License. Such a notice grants a world-wide, royalty-free license, unlimited in duration, to use that work under the conditions stated herein. The "!{Document}!", below,refers to any such manual or work. Any member of the public is a licensee, and is addressed as "!{you}!". You accept the license if you copy, modify or distribute the work in a way requiring permission under copyright law.
+
+A "!{Modified Version}!" of the Document means any work containing the Document or a portion of it, either copied verbatim, or with modifications and/or translated into another language.
+
+A "!{Secondary Section}!" is a named appendix or a front-matter section of the Document that deals exclusively with the relationship of the publishers or authors of the Document to the Document's overall subject (or to related matters) and contains nothing that could fall directly within that overall subject. (Thus, if the Document is in part a textbook of mathematics, a Secondary Section may not explain any mathematics.) The relationship could be a matter of historical connection with the subject or with related matters, or of legal, commercial,philosophical, ethical or political position regarding them.
+
+The "!{Invariant Sections}!" are certain Secondary Sections whose titles are designated, as being those of Invariant Sections, in the notice that says that the Document is released under this License. If a section does not fit the above definition of Secondary then it is not allowed to be designated as Invariant. The Document may contain zero Invariant Sections. If the Document does not identify any Invariant Sections then there are none.
+
+The "!{Cover Texts}!" are certain short passages of text that are listed, as Front-Cover Texts or Back-Cover Texts, in the notice that says that the Document is released under this License. A Front-Cover Text may be at most 5 words, and a Back-Cover Text may be at most 25 words.
+
+A "!{Transparent}!" copy of the Document means a machine-readable copy, represented in a format whose specification is available to the general public, that is suitable for revising the document straight forwardly with generic text editors or (for images composed of pixels) generic paint programs or (for drawings) some widely available drawing editor, and that is suitable for input to text formatters or for automatic translation to a variety of formats suitable for input to text formatters. A copy made in an otherwise Transparent file format whose markup, or absence of markup, has been arranged to thwart or discourage subsequent modification by readers is not Transparent. An image format is not Transparent if used for any substantial amount of text. A copy that is not "Transparent" is called "!{Opaque}!".
+
+Examples of suitable formats for Transparent copies include plain ASCII without markup, Texinfo input format, LaTeX input format, SGML or XML using a publicly available DTD, and standard-conforming simple HTML, PostScript or PDF designed for human modification. Examples of transparent image formats include PNG, XCF and JPG. Opaque formats include proprietary formats that can be read and edited only by proprietary word processors, SGML or XML for which the DTD and/or processing tools are not generally available, and the machine-generated HTML, PostScript or PDF produced by some word processors for output purposes only.
+
+The "!{Title Page}!" means, for a printed book, the title page itself,plus such following pages as are needed to hold, legibly, the material this License requires to appear in the title page. For works in formats which do not have any title page as such, "Title Page" means the text near the most prominent appearance of the work's title, preceding the beginning of the body of the text.
+
+The "!{publisher}!" means any person or entity that distributes copies of the Document to the public.
+
+A section "!{Entitled XYZ}!" means a named subunit of the Document whose title either is precisely XYZ or contains XYZ in parentheses following text that translates XYZ in another language. (Here XYZ stands for a specific section name mentioned below, such as"!{Acknowledgements}!", "!{Dedications}!", "!{Endorsements}!", or "!{History}!".)
+
+To "!{Preserve the Title}!" of such a section when you modify the Document means that it remains a section "Entitled XYZ" according to this definition.
+
+The Document may include Warranty Disclaimers next to the notice which states that this License applies to the Document. These Warranty Disclaimers are considered to be included by reference in this License, but only as regards disclaiming warranties: any other implication that these Warranty Disclaimers may have is void and has no effect on the meaning of this License.
+
+2~ 2. VERBATIM COPYING
+
+You may copy and distribute the Document in any medium, either commercially or non-commercially, provided that this License, the copyright notices, and the license notice saying this License applies to the Document are reproduced in all copies, and that you add no other conditions whatsoever to those of this License. You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute. However, you may accept compensation in exchange for copies. If you distribute a large enough number of copies you must also follow the conditions in section 3.
+
+You may also lend copies, under the same conditions stated above,and you may publicly display copies.
+
+
+2~ 3. COPYING IN QUANTITY
+
+If you publish printed copies (or copies in media that commonly have printed covers) of the Document, numbering more than 100, and the Document's license notice requires Cover Texts, you must enclose the copies in covers that carry, clearly and legibly, all these Cover Texts: Front-Cover Texts on the front cover, and Back-Cover Texts on the back cover. Both covers must also clearly and legibly identify you as the publisher of these copies. The front cover must present the full title with all words of the title equally prominent and visible. You may add other material on the covers in addition. Copying with changes limited to the covers, as long as they preserve the title of the Document and satisfy these conditions, can be treated as verbatim copying in other respects.
+
+If the required texts for either cover are too voluminous to fit legibly, you should put the first ones listed (as many as fit reasonably) on the actual cover, and continue the rest onto adjacent pages.
+
+If you publish or distribute Opaque copies of the Document numbering more than 100, you must either include a machine-readable Transparent copy along with each Opaque copy, or state in or with each Opaque copy a computer-network location from which the general network-using public has access to download using public-standard network protocols a complete Transparent copy of the Document, free of added material. If you use the latter option, you must take reasonably prudent steps, when you begin distribution of Opaque copies in quantity, to ensure that this Transparent copy will remain thus accessible at the stated location until at least one year after the last time you distribute an Opaque copy (directly or through your agents or retailers) of that edition to the public.
+
+It is requested, but not required, that you contact the authors of the Document well before redistributing any large number of copies, to give them a chance to provide you with an updated version of the Document.
+
+2~ 4. MODIFICATIONS
+
+You may copy and distribute a Modified Version of the Document under the conditions of sections 2 and 3 above, provided that you release the Modified Version under precisely this License, with the Modified Version filling the role of the Document, thus licensing distribution and modification of the Modified Version to whoever possesses a copy of it. In addition, you must do these things in the Modified Version:
+
+A. Use in the Title Page (and on the covers, if any) a title distinct from that of the Document, and from those of previous versions (which should, if there were any, be listed in the History section of the Document). You may use the same title as a previous version if the original publisher of that version gives permission.
+
+B. List on the Title Page, as authors, one or more persons or entities responsible for authorship of the modifications in the Modified Version, together with at least five of the principal authors of the Document (all of its principal authors, if it has fewer than five), unless they release you from this requirement.
+
+C. State on the Title page the name of the publisher of the Modified Version, as the publisher.
+
+D. Preserve all the copyright notices of the Document.
+
+E. Add an appropriate copyright notice for your modifications adjacent to the other copyright notices.
+
+F. Include, immediately after the copyright notices, a license notice giving the public permission to use the Modified Version under the terms of this License, in the form shown in the Addendum below.
+
+G. Preserve in that license notice the full lists of Invariant Sections and required Cover Texts given in the Document's license notice.
+
+H. Include an unaltered copy of this License.
+
+I. Preserve the section Entitled "History", Preserve its Title, and add to it an item stating at least the title, year, new authors,and publisher of the Modified Version as given on the Title Page.If there is no section Entitled "History" in the Document, create one stating the title, year, authors, and publisher of the Document as given on its Title Page, then add an item describing the Modified Version as stated in the previous sentence.
+
+J. Preserve the network location, if any, given in the Document for public access to a Transparent copy of the Document, and likewise the network locations given in the Document for previous versions it was based on. These may be placed in the "History" section. You may omit a network location for a work that was published at least four years before the Document itself, or if the original publisher of the version it refers to gives permission.
+
+K. For any section Entitled "Acknowledgements" or "Dedications",Preserve the Title of the section, and preserve in the section all the substance and tone of each of the contributor acknowledgements and/or dedications given therein.
+
+
+L. Preserve all the Invariant Sections of the Document, unaltered in their text and in their titles. Section numbers or the equivalent are not considered part of the section titles.
+
+M. Delete any section Entitled "Endorsements". Such a section may not be included in the Modified Version.
+
+N. Do not re-title any existing section to be Entitled "Endorsements"or to conflict in title with any Invariant Section.
+
+O. Preserve any Warranty Disclaimers.
+
+If the Modified Version includes new front-matter sections or appendices that qualify as Secondary Sections and contain no material copied from the Document, you may at your option designate some or all of these sections as invariant. To do this, add their titles to the list of Invariant Sections in the Modified Version's license notice. These titles must be distinct from any other section titles.
+
+You may add a section Entitled "Endorsements", provided it contains nothing but endorsements of your Modified Version by various parties-for example, statements of peer review or that the text has been approved by an organization as the authoritative definition of a standard.
+
+You may add a passage of up to five words as a Front-Cover Text, and a passage of up to 25 words as a Back-Cover Text, to the end of the list of Cover Texts in the Modified Version. Only one passage of Front-Cover Text and one of Back-Cover Text may be added by (or through arrangements made by) any one entity. If the Document already includes a cover text for the same cover, previously added by you or by arrangement made by the same entity you are acting on behalf of, you may not add another; but you may replace the old one, on explicit permission from the previous publisher that added the old one.
+
+The author(s) and publisher(s) of the Document do not by this License give permission to use their names for publicity for or to assert or imply endorsement of any Modified Version.
+
+2~ 5. COMBINING DOCUMENTS
+
+You may combine the Document with other documents released under this License, under the terms defined in section 4 above for modified versions, provided that you include in the combination all of the Invariant Sections of all of the original documents, unmodified, and list them all as Invariant Sections of your combined work in its license notice, and that you preserve all their Warranty Disclaimers.
+
+The combined work need only contain one copy of this License, and multiple identical Invariant Sections may be replaced with a single copy. If there are multiple Invariant Sections with the same name but different contents, make the title of each such section unique by adding at the end of it, in parentheses, the name of the original author or publisher of that section if known, or else a unique number. Make the same adjustment to the section titles in the list of Invariant Sections in the license notice of the combined work.
+
+In the combination, you must combine any sections Entitled "History" in the various original documents, forming one section Entitled "History"; likewise combine any sections Entitled "Acknowledgements", and any sections Entitled "Dedications". You must delete all sections Entitled "Endorsements".
+
+2~ 6. COLLECTIONS OF DOCUMENTS
+
+You may make a collection consisting of the Document and other documents released under this License, and replace the individual copies of this License in the various documents with a single copy that is included in the collection, provided that you follow the rules of this License for verbatim copying of each of the documents in all other respects.
+
+You may extract a single document from such a collection, and distribute it individually under this License, provided you insert a copy of this License into the extracted document, and follow this License in all other respects regarding verbatim copying of that document.
+
+2~ 7. AGGREGATION WITH INDEPENDENT WORKS
+
+A compilation of the Document or its derivatives with other separate and independent documents or works, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an "aggregate" if the copyright resulting from the compilation is not used to limit the legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit.When the Document is included in an aggregate, this License does not apply to the other works in the aggregate which are not themselves derivative works of the Document.
+
+If the Cover Text requirement of section 3 is applicable to these copies of the Document, then if the Document is less than one half of the entire aggregate, the Document's Cover Texts may be placed on covers that bracket the Document within the aggregate, or the electronic equivalent of covers if the Document is in electronic form.Otherwise they must appear on printed covers that bracket the whole aggregate.
+
+2~ 8. TRANSLATION
+
+Translation is considered a kind of modification, so you may distribute translations of the Document under the terms of section 4.Replacing Invariant Sections with translations requires special permission from their copyright holders, but you may include translations of some or all Invariant Sections in addition to the original versions of these Invariant Sections. You may include a translation of this License,and all the license notices in the Document, and any Warranty Disclaimers, provided that you also include the original English version of this License and the original versions of those notices and disclaimers.In case of a disagreement between the translation and the original version of this License or a notice or disclaimer, the original version will prevail.
+
+If a section in the Document is Entitled "Acknowledgements","Dedications", or "History", the requirement (section 4) to Preserve its Title (section 1) will typically require changing the actual title.
+
+2~ 9. TERMINATION
+
+You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Document except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute it is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License.
+
+However, if you cease all violation of this License, then your license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated (a) provisionally, unless and until the copyright holder explicitly and finally terminates your license, and (b) permanently, if the copyright holder fails to notify you of the violation by some reasonable means prior to 60 days after the cessation.
+
+Moreover, your license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated permanently if the copyright holder notifies you of the violation by some reasonable means, this is the first time you have received notice of violation of this License (for any work) from that copyright holder, and you cure the violation prior to 30 days after your receipt of the notice.
+
+Termination of your rights under this section does not terminate the licenses of parties who have received copies or rights from you under this License. If your rights have been terminated and not permanently reinstated, receipt of a copy of some or all of the same material does not give you any rights to use it.
+
+2~ 10. FUTURE REVISIONS OF THIS LICENSE
+
+The Free Software Foundation may publish new, revised versions of the GNU Free Documentation License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns. \\ See http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/.
+
+Each version of the License is given a distinguishing version number. If the Document specifies that a particular numbered version of this License "or any later version" applies to it, you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that specified version or of any later version that has been published (not as a draft) by the Free Software Foundation. If the Document does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any version ever published(not as a draft) by the Free Software Foundation. If the Document specifies that a proxy can decide which future versions of this License can be used, that proxy's public statement of acceptance of a version permanently authorizes you to choose that version for the Document.
+
+2~ 11. RELICENSING
+
+"Massive Multi-author Collaboration Site" (or "MMC Site") means any World Wide Web server that publishes copyrightable works and also provides prominent facilities for anybody to edit those works. A public wiki that anybody can edit is an example of such a server. A"Massive Multi-author Collaboration" (or "MMC") contained in the site means any set of copyrightable works thus published on the MMC site.
+
+"CC-BY-SA" means the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license published by Creative Commons Corporation, a not-for-profit corporation with a principal place of business in San Francisco,California, as well as future copyleft versions of that license published by that same organization.
+
+"Incorporate" means to publish or republish a Document, in whole or in part, as part of another Document.An MMC is "eligible for relicensing" if it is licensed under this License, and if all works that were first published under this License somewhere other than this MMC, and subsequently incorporated in whole or in part into the MMC, (1) had no cover texts or invariant sections, and (2) were thus incorporated prior to November 1, 2008.
+
+The operator of an MMC Site may republish an MMC contained in the site under CC-BY-SA on the same site at any time before August 1, 2009, provided the MMC is eligible for relicensing.
+
+2~ ADDENDUM: How to use this License for your documents
+
+To use this License in a document you have written, include a copy of the License in the document and put the following copyright and license notices just after the title page:
+
+_1 Copyright © YEAR YOUR NAME. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".
+
+If you have Invariant Sections, Front-Cover Texts and Back-Cover Texts, replace the "with ... Texts." line with this:
+
+_1 with the Invariant Sections being LIST THEIR TITLES,with the Front-Cover Texts being LIST, and with the Back-Cover Texts being LIST.
+
+If you have Invariant Sections without Cover Texts, or some other combination of the three, merge those two alternatives to suit the situation.
+
+If your document contains nontrivial examples of program code,we recommend releasing these examples in parallel under your choice of free software license, such as the GNU General Public License, to permit their use in free software.
+
+1~ Colophon
+
+The front and back covers of this book were designed and produced by Rob Myers using Inkscape, the free software vector graphics program. Jeanne Rasata also contributed to the cover design.
+
+The typsetting was done by John Sullivan at the Free Software Foundation using LATEX, GNU Emacs, Evince, and the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). The primary font is 10-point Computer Modern.
+
+Digital versions of the book, including the LATEX source code, are available at http://www.fsf.org/faif. Improvements are welcome,and can be sent to sales@gnu.org.
diff --git a/data/samples/generic/free_culture.lawrence_lessig.sst b/data/samples/generic/free_culture.lawrence_lessig.sst
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b41f064
--- /dev/null
+++ b/data/samples/generic/free_culture.lawrence_lessig.sst
@@ -0,0 +1,3596 @@
+% SiSU 4.0
+
+@title: Free Culture
+ :subtitle: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity
+
+@creator:
+ :author: Lessig, Lawrence
+
+@date:
+ :published: 2004-03-25
+ :created: 2004-03-25
+ :issued: 2004-03-25
+ :available: 2004-03-25
+ :valid: 2004-03-25
+ :modified: 2004-03-25
+
+@rights:
+ :copyright: Copyright (C) Lawrence Lessig, 2004.
+ :license: Free Culture is Licensed under a Creative Commons License. This License permits non-commercial use of this work, so long as attribution is given. For more information about the license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/1.0/
+
+@classify:
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+
+@identifier:
+ :isbn: 9781594200069
+ :oclc: 53324884
+
+% :isbn: 1594200068
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+ {Free Culture}http://www.free-culture.cc
+ {Remixes}http://www.free-culture.cc/remixes/
+ {@ Wikipedia}http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_%28book%29
+ {@ Amazon.com}http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1594200068
+ {@ Barnes & Noble}http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=1594200068
+
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+ :home_button_image: {freeculture.home.png }http://www.free-culture.cc
+ :home_button_text: {Free Culture}http://www.free-culture.cc; {Lawrence Lessig}http://www.lessig.org
+ :footer: {Free Culture}http://www.free-culture.cc; {Lawrence Lessig}http://www.lessig.org
+ :pot_master: free_culture.lawrence_lessig.sst
+
+:A~ @title @author
+
+1~attribution Attribution~#
+
+To Eric Eldred - whose work first drew me to this cause, and for whom it continues still.~#
+
+:B~ PREFACE
+
+1~preface [Preface]-#
+
+!_ At the end
+of his review of my first book, /{Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace}/, David Pogue, a brilliant writer and author of countless technical and computer- related texts, wrote this:
+
+_1 Unlike actual law, Internet software has no capacity to punish. It doesn't affect people who aren't online (and only a tiny minority of the world population is). And if you don't like the Internet's system, you can always flip off the modem.~{ David Pogue, "Don't Just Chat, Do Something," /{New York Times,}/ 30 January 2000. }~
+
+Pogue was skeptical of the core argument of the book - that software, or "code," functioned as a kind of law - and his review suggested the happy thought that if life in cyberspace got bad, we could always "drizzle, drazzle, druzzle, drome"- like simply flip a switch and be back home. Turn off the modem, unplug the computer, and any troubles that exist in /{that}/ space wouldn't "affect" us anymore.
+
+Pogue might have been right in 1999 - I'm skeptical, but maybe. But even if he was right then, the point is not right now: /{Free Culture}/ is about the troubles the Internet causes even after the modem is turned off. It is an argument about how the battles that now rage regarding life on-line have fundamentally affected "people who aren't online." There is no switch that will insulate us from the Internet's effect.
+
+But unlike /{Code}/, the argument here is not much about the Internet itself. It is instead about the consequence of the Internet to a part of our tradition that is much more fundamental, and, as hard as this is for a geek-wanna-be to admit, much more important.
+
+That tradition is the way our culture gets made. As I explain in the pages that follow, we come from a tradition of "free culture" - not "free" as in "free beer" (to borrow a phrase from the founder of the free-software movement, ~{ Richard M. Stallman, /{Free Software, Free Societies}/ 57 ( Joshua Gay, ed. 2002). }~ but "free" as in "free speech," "free markets," "free trade," "free enterprise," "free will," and "free elections." A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain /{as free as possible}/ from the control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free culture is a "permission culture" - a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past.
+
+If we understood this change, I believe we would resist it. Not "we" on the Left or "you" on the Right, but we who have no stake in the particular industries of culture that defined the twentieth century. Whether you are on the Left or the Right, if you are in this sense disinterested, then the story I tell here will trouble you. For the changes I describe affect values that both sides of our political culture deem fundamental.
+
+We saw a glimpse of this bipartisan outrage in the early summer of 2003. As the FCC considered changes in media ownership rules that would relax limits on media concentration, an extraordinary coalition generated more than 700,000 letters to the FCC opposing the change. As William Safire described marching "uncomfortably alongside CodePink Women for Peace and the National Rifle Association, between liberal Olympia Snowe and conservative Ted Stevens," he formulated perhaps most simply just what was at stake: the concentration of power. And as he asked,
+={power, concentration of+2}
+
+_1 Does that sound unconservative? Not to me. The concentration of power - political, corporate, media, cultural - should be anathema to conservatives. The diffusion of power through local control, thereby encouraging individual participation, is the essence of federalism and the greatest expression of democracy."~{ William Safire, "The Great Media Gulp," /{New York Times,}/ 22 May 2003. }~
+
+This idea is an element of the argument of /{Free Culture}/, though my focus is not just on the concentration of power produced by concentrations in ownership, but more importantly, if because less visibly, on the concentration of power produced by a radical change in the effective scope of the law. The law is changing; that change is altering the way our culture gets made; that change should worry you - whether or not you care about the Internet, and whether you're on Safire's left or on his right.
+
+!_ The inspiration
+for the title and for much of the argument of this book comes from the work of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation. Indeed, as I reread Stallman's own work, especially the essays in /{Free Software, Free Society}/, I realize that all of the theoretical insights I develop here are insights Stallman described decades ago. One could thus well argue that this work is "merely" derivative.
+
+I accept that criticism, if indeed it is a criticism. The work of a lawyer is always derivative, and I mean to do nothing more in this book than to remind a culture about a tradition that has always been its own. Like Stallman, I defend that tradition on the basis of values. Like Stallman, I believe those are the values of freedom. And like Stallman, I believe those are values of our past that will need to be defended in our future. A free culture has been our past, but it will only be our future if we change the path we are on right now.
+
+Like Stallman's arguments for free software, an argument for free culture stumbles on a confusion that is hard to avoid, and even harder to understand. A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid, is anarchy, not freedom. Anarchy is not what I advance here.
+
+Instead, the free culture that I defend in this book is a balance between anarchy and control. A free culture, like a free market, is filled with property. It is filled with rules of property and contract that get enforced by the state. But just as a free market is perverted if its property becomes feudal, so too can a free culture be queered by extremism in the property rights that define it. That is what I fear about our culture today. It is against that extremism that this book is written.
+
+:B~ INTRODUCTION
+
+1~intro [Intro]-#
+
+!_ On December 17, 1903,
+on a windy North Carolina beach for just shy of one hundred seconds, the Wright brothers demonstrated that a heavier-than-air, self- propelled vehicle could fly. The moment was electric and its importance widely understood. Almost immediately, there was an explosion of interest in this newfound technology of manned flight, and a gaggle of innovators began to build upon it.
+={Wright brothers+1}
+
+At the time the Wright brothers invented the airplane, American law held that a property owner presumptively owned not just the surface of his land, but all the land below, down to the center of the earth, and all the space above, to "an indefinite extent, upwards."~{ St. George Tucker, /{Blackstone's Commentaries}/ 3 (South Hackensack, N.J.: Rothman Reprints, 1969), 18. }~ For many years, scholars had puzzled about how best to interpret the idea that rights in land ran to the heavens. Did that mean that you owned the stars? Could you prosecute geese for their willful and regular trespass?
+={air traffic, land ownership vs.+8;land ownership, air traffic and+8;property rights: air traffic vs.+8}
+
+Then came airplanes, and for the first time, this principle of American law - deep within the foundations of our tradition, and acknowledged by the most important legal thinkers of our past - mattered. If my land reaches to the heavens, what happens when United flies over my field? Do I have the right to banish it from my property? Am I allowed to enter into an exclusive license with Delta Airlines? Could we set up an auction to decide how much these rights are worth?
+
+In 1945, these questions became a federal case. When North Carolina farmers Thomas Lee and Tinie Causby started losing chickens because of low-flying military aircraft (the terrified chickens apparently flew into the barn walls and died), the Causbys filed a lawsuit saying that the government was trespassing on their land. The airplanes, of course, never touched the surface of the Causbys' land. But if, as Blackstone, Kent, and Coke had said, their land reached to "an indefinite extent, upwards," then the government was trespassing on their property, and the Causbys wanted it to stop.
+={Causby, Thomas Lee;Causby, Tinie}
+
+The Supreme Court agreed to hear the Causbys' case. Congress had declared the airways public, but if one's property really extended to the heavens, then Congress's declaration could well have been an unconstitutional "taking" of property without compensation. The Court acknowledged that "it is ancient doctrine that common law ownership of the land extended to the periphery of the universe." But Justice Douglas had no patience for ancient doctrine. In a single paragraph, hundreds of years of property law were erased. As he wrote for the Court,
+={Douglas, William O.+2;Supreme Court, U.S.: on airspace vs. land rights+4}
+
+_1 [The] doctrine has no place in the modern world. The air is a public highway, as Congress has declared. Were that not true, every transcontinental flight would subject the operator to countless trespass suits. Common sense revolts at the idea. To recognize such private claims to the airspace would clog these highways, seriously interfere with their control and development in the public interest, and transfer into private ownership that to which only the public has a just claim."~{ United States v. Causby, U.S. 328 (1946): 256, 261. The Court did find that there could be a "taking" if the government's use of its land effectively destroyed the value of the Causbys' land. This example was suggested to me by Keith Aoki's wonderful piece, "(Intellectual) Property and Sovereignty: Notes Toward a Cultural Geography of Authorship," /{Stanford Law Review}/ 48 (1996): 1293, 1333. See also Paul Goldstein, /{Real Property}/ (Mineola, N.Y.: Foundation Press, 1984), 1112-13. }~
+
+"Common sense revolts at the idea."
+
+This is how the law usually works. Not often this abruptly or impatiently, but eventually, this is how it works. It was Douglas's style not to dither. Other justices would have blathered on for pages to reach the conclusion that Douglas holds in a single line: "Common sense revolts at the idea." But whether it takes pages or a few words, it is the special genius of a common law system, as ours is, that the law adjusts to the technologies of the time. And as it adjusts, it changes. Ideas that were as solid as rock in one age crumble in another.
+
+Or at least, this is how things happen when there's no one powerful on the other side of the change. The Causbys were just farmers. And though there were no doubt many like them who were upset by the growing traffic in the air (though one hopes not many chickens flew themselves into walls), the Causbys of the world would find it very hard to unite and stop the idea, and the technology, that the Wright brothers had birthed. The Wright brothers spat airplanes into the technological meme pool; the idea then spread like a virus in a chicken coop; farmers like the Causbys found themselves surrounded by "what seemed reasonable" given the technology that the Wrights had produced. They could stand on their farms, dead chickens in hand, and shake their fists at these newfangled technologies all they wanted. They could call their representatives or even file a lawsuit. But in the end, the force of what seems "obvious" to everyone else - the power of "common sense" - would prevail. Their "private interest" would not be allowed to defeat an obvious public gain.
+={Causby, Thomas Lee;Causby, Tinie;Wright brothers}
+
+!_ Edwin Howard Armstrong
+is one of America's forgotten inventor geniuses. He came to the great American inventor scene just after the titans Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. But his work in the area of radio technology was perhaps the most important of any single inventor in the first fifty years of radio. He was better educated than Michael Faraday, who as a bookbinder's apprentice had discovered electric induction in 1831. But he had the same intuition about how the world of radio worked, and on at least three occasions, Armstrong invented profoundly important technologies that advanced our understanding of radio.
+={Armstrong, Edwin Howard+14;Bell, Alexander Graham;Edison, Thomas;Faraday, Michael;radio:FM spectrum of+12}
+
+On the day after Christmas, 1933, four patents were issued to Armstrong for his most significant invention - FM radio. Until then, consumer radio had been amplitude-modulated (AM) radio. The theorists of the day had said that frequency-modulated (FM) radio could never work. They were right about FM radio in a narrow band of spectrum. But Armstrong discovered that frequency-modulated radio in a wide band of spectrum would deliver an astonishing fidelity of sound, with much less transmitter power and static.
+
+On November 5, 1935, he demonstrated the technology at a meeting of the Institute of Radio Engineers at the Empire State Building in New York City. He tuned his radio dial across a range of AM stations, until the radio locked on a broadcast that he had arranged from seventeen miles away. The radio fell totally silent, as if dead, and then with a clarity no one else in that room had ever heard from an electrical device, it produced the sound of an announcer's voice: "This is amateur station W2AG at Yonkers, New York, operating on frequency modulation at two and a half meters."
+
+The audience was hearing something no one had thought possible:
+
+_1 A glass of water was poured before the microphone in Yonkers; it sounded like a glass of water being poured. ... A paper was crumpled and torn; it sounded like paper and not like a crackling forest fire. ... Sousa marches were played from records and a piano solo and guitar number were performed. ... The music was projected with a live-ness rarely if ever heard before from a radio 'music box.' "~{ Lawrence Lessing, /{Man of High Fidelity: Edwin Howard Armstrong}/ (Philadelphia: J. B. Lipincott Company, 1956), 209. }~
+
+As our own common sense tells us, Armstrong had discovered a vastly superior radio technology. But at the time of his invention, Armstrong was working for RCA. RCA was the dominant player in the then dominant AM radio market. By 1935, there were a thousand radio stations across the United States, but the stations in large cities were all owned by a handful of networks.
+={RCA+9;media:ownership concentration in+9}
+
+RCA's president, David Sarnoff, a friend of Armstrong's, was eager that Armstrong discover a way to remove static from AM radio. So Sarnoff was quite excited when Armstrong told him he had a device that removed static from "radio." But when Armstrong demonstrated his invention, Sarnoff was not pleased.
+={Sarnoff, David}
+
+_1 I thought Armstrong would invent some kind of a filter to remove static from our AM radio. I didn't think he'd start a revolution - start up a whole damn new industry to compete with RCA."~{ See "Saints: The Heroes and Geniuses of the Electronic Era," First Electronic Church of America, at www.webstationone.com/fecha, available at link #1. }~
+
+Armstrong's invention threatened RCA's AM empire, so the company launched a campaign to smother FM radio. While FM may have been a superior technology, Sarnoff was a superior tactician. As one author described,
+={FM radio+5}
+
+_1 The forces for FM, largely engineering, could not overcome the weight of strategy devised by the sales, patent, and legal offices to subdue this threat to corporate position. For FM, if allowed to develop unrestrained, posed ... a complete reordering of radio power ... and the eventual overthrow of the carefully restricted AM system on which RCA had grown to power."~{ Lessing, 226. }~
+
+RCA at first kept the technology in house, insisting that further tests were needed. When, after two years of testing, Armstrong grew impatient, RCA began to use its power with the government to stall FM radio's deployment generally. In 1936, RCA hired the former head of the FCC and assigned him the task of assuring that the FCC assign spectrum in a way that would castrate FM - principally by moving FM radio to a different band of spectrum. At first, these efforts failed. But when Armstrong and the nation were distracted by World War II, RCA's work began to be more successful. Soon after the war ended, the FCC announced a set of policies that would have one clear effect: FM radio would be crippled. As Lawrence Lessing described it,
+={FCC: on FM radio+2;Lessig, Lawrence+1}
+
+_1 The series of body blows that FM radio received right after the war, in a series of rulings manipulated through the FCC by the big radio interests, were almost incredible in their force and deviousness."~{ Lessing, 256. }~
+
+To make room in the spectrum for RCA's latest gamble, television, FM radio users were to be moved to a totally new spectrum band. The power of FM radio stations was also cut, meaning FM could no longer be used to beam programs from one part of the country to another. (This change was strongly supported by AT&T, because the loss of FM relaying stations would mean radio stations would have to buy wired links from AT&T.) The spread of FM radio was thus choked, at least temporarily.
+={AT&T}
+
+Armstrong resisted RCA's efforts. In response, RCA resisted Armstrong's patents. After incorporating FM technology into the emerging standard for television, RCA declared the patents invalid - baselessly, and almost fifteen years after they were issued. It thus refused to pay him royalties. For six years, Armstrong fought an expensive war of litigation to defend the patents. Finally, just as the patents expired, RCA offered a settlement so low that it would not even cover Armstrong's lawyers' fees. Defeated, broken, and now broke, in 1954 Armstrong wrote a short note to his wife and then stepped out of a thirteenth- story window to his death.
+
+This is how the law sometimes works. Not often this tragically, and rarely with heroic drama, but sometimes, this is how it works. From the beginning, government and government agencies have been subject to capture. They are more likely captured when a powerful interest is threatened by either a legal or technical change. That powerful interest too often exerts its influence within the government to get the government to protect it. The rhetoric of this protection is of course always public spirited; the reality is something different. Ideas that were as solid as rock in one age, but that, left to themselves, would crumble in another, are sustained through this subtle corruption of our political process. RCA had what the Causbys did not: the power to stifle the effect of technological change.
+={Causby, Thomas Lee;Causby, Tinie}
+
+!_ There's no
+single inventor of the Internet. Nor is there any good date upon which to mark its birth. Yet in a very short time, the Internet has become part of ordinary American life. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 58 percent of Americans had access to the Internet in 2002, up from 49 percent two years before.~{ Amanda Lenhart, "The Ever-Shifting Internet Population: A New Look at Internet Access and the Digital Divide," Pew Internet and American Life Project, 15 April 2003: 6, available at link #2. }~ That number could well exceed two thirds of the nation by the end of 2004.
+={Internet: development of+2}
+
+As the Internet has been integrated into ordinary life, it has changed things. Some of these changes are technical - the Internet has made communication faster, it has lowered the cost of gathering data, and so on. These technical changes are not the focus of this book. They are important. They are not well understood. But they are the sort of thing that would simply go away if we all just switched the Internet off. They don't affect people who don't use the Internet, or at least they don't affect them directly. They are the proper subject of a book about the Internet. But this is not a book about the Internet.
+
+Instead, this book is about an effect of the Internet beyond the Internet itself: an effect upon how culture is made. My claim is that the Internet has induced an important and unrecognized change in that process. That change will radically transform a tradition that is as old as the Republic itself. Most, if they recognized this change, would reject it. Yet most don't even see the change that the Internet has introduced.
+
+We can glimpse a sense of this change by distinguishing between commercial and noncommercial culture, and by mapping the law's regulation of each. By "commercial culture" I mean that part of our culture that is produced and sold or produced to be sold. By "noncommercial culture" I mean all the rest. When old men sat around parks or on street corners telling stories that kids and others consumed, that was noncommercial culture. When Noah Webster published his "Reader," or Joel Barlow his poetry, that was commercial culture.
+={Barlow, Joel;culture:commercial vs. noncommercial+6;Webster, Noah}
+
+At the beginning of our history, and for just about the whole of our tradition, noncommercial culture was essentially unregulated. Of course, if your stories were lewd, or if your song disturbed the peace, then the law might intervene. But the law was never directly concerned with the creation or spread of this form of culture, and it left this culture "free." The ordinary ways in which ordinary individuals shared and transformed their culture - telling stories, reenacting scenes from plays or TV, participating in fan clubs, sharing music, making tapes - were left alone by the law.
+
+The focus of the law was on commercial creativity. At first slightly, then quite extensively, the law protected the incentives of creators by granting them exclusive rights to their creative work, so that they could sell those exclusive rights in a commercial marketplace.~{ This is not the only purpose of copyright, though it is the overwhelmingly primary purpose of the copyright established in the federal constitution. State copyright law historically protected not just the commercial interest in publication, but also a privacy interest. By granting authors the exclusive right to first publication, state copyright law gave authors the power to control the spread of facts about them. See Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis, "The Right to Privacy," /{Harvard Law Review}/ 4 (1890): 193, 198-200. }~ This is also, of course, an important part of creativity and culture, and it has become an increasingly important part in America. But in no sense was it dominant within our tradition. It was instead just one part, a controlled part, balanced with the free.
+={Copyright infringement lawsuits:commercial creativity as primary purpose of+2}
+
+This rough divide between the free and the controlled has now been erased.~{ 9. See Jessica Litman, /{Digital Copyright}/ (New York: Prometheus Books, 2001), ch. 13. }~ The Internet has set the stage for this erasure and, pushed by big media, the law has now affected it. For the first time in our tradition, the ordinary ways in which individuals create and share culture fall within the reach of the regulation of the law, which has expanded to draw within its control a vast amount of culture and creativity that it never reached before. The technology that preserved the balance of our history - between uses of our culture that were free and uses of our culture that were only upon permission - has been undone. The consequence is that we are less and less a free culture, more and more a permission culture.
+={free culture: permission culture vs.;permission culture: free culture vs.}
+
+This change gets justified as necessary to protect commercial creativity. And indeed, protectionism is precisely its motivation. But the protectionism that justifies the changes that I will describe below is not the limited and balanced sort that has defined the law in the past. This is not a protectionism to protect artists. It is instead a protectionism to protect certain forms of business. Corporations threatened by the potential of the Internet to change the way both commercial and noncommercial culture are made and shared have united to induce lawmakers to use the law to protect them. It is the story of RCA and Armstrong; it is the dream of the Causbys.
+={Causby, Thomas Lee;Causby, Tinie;protection of artists vs. business interests}
+
+For the Internet has unleashed an extraordinary possibility for many to participate in the process of building and cultivating a culture that reaches far beyond local boundaries. That power has changed the marketplace for making and cultivating culture generally, and that change in turn threatens established content industries. The Internet is thus to the industries that built and distributed content in the twentieth century what FM radio was to AM radio, or what the truck was to the railroad industry of the nineteenth century: the beginning of the end, or at least a substantial transformation. Digital technologies, tied to the Internet, could produce a vastly more competitive and vibrant market for building and cultivating culture; that market could include a much wider and more diverse range of creators; those creators could produce and distribute a much more vibrant range of creativity; and depending upon a few important factors, those creators could earn more on average from this system than creators do today - all so long as the RCAs of our day don't use the law to protect themselves against this competition.
+
+Yet, as I argue in the pages that follow, that is precisely what is happening in our culture today. These modern-day equivalents of the early twentieth-century radio or nineteenth-century railroads are using their power to get the law to protect them against this new, more efficient, more vibrant technology for building culture. They are succeeding in their plan to remake the Internet before the Internet remakes them.
+
+It doesn't seem this way to many. The battles over copyright and the Internet seem remote to most. To the few who follow them, they seem mainly about a much simpler brace of questions - whether "piracy" will be permitted, and whether "property" will be protected. The "war" that has been waged against the technologies of the Internet - what Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) president Jack Valenti calls his "own terrorist war"~{ Amy Harmon, "Black Hawk Download: Moving Beyond Music, Pirates Use New Tools to Turn the Net into an Illicit Video Club," /{New York Times,}/ 17 January 2002. }~ - has been framed as a battle about the rule of law and respect for property. To know which side to take in this war, most think that we need only decide whether we're for property or against it.
+={Valenti, Jack: on creative property rights}
+
+If those really were the choices, then I would be with Jack Valenti and the content industry. I, too, am a believer in property, and especially in the importance of what Mr. Valenti nicely calls "creative property." I believe that "piracy" is wrong, and that the law, properly tuned, should punish "piracy," whether on or off the Internet.
+
+But those simple beliefs mask a much more fundamental question and a much more dramatic change. My fear is that unless we come to see this change, the war to rid the world of Internet "pirates" will also rid our culture of values that have been integral to our tradition from the start.
+
+These values built a tradition that, for at least the first 180 years of our Republic, guaranteed creators the right to build freely upon their past, and protected creators and innovators from either state or private control. The First Amendment protected creators against state control. And as Professor Neil Netanel powerfully argues,~{ Neil W. Netanel, "Copyright and a Democratic Civil Society," /{Yale Law Journal}/ 106 (1996): 283. }~ copyright law, properly balanced, protected creators against private control. Our tradition was thus neither Soviet nor the tradition of patrons. It instead carved out a wide berth within which creators could cultivate and extend our culture.
+={Constitution, U.S.:First Amendment to;Copyright law:as protection of creators;First Amendment;Netanel, Neil Weinstock}
+
+Yet the law's response to the Internet, when tied to changes in the technology of the Internet itself, has massively increased the effective regulation of creativity in America. To build upon or critique the culture around us one must ask, Oliver Twist - like, for permission first. Permission is, of course, often granted - but it is not often granted to the critical or the independent. We have built a kind of cultural nobility; those within the noble class live easily; those outside it don't. But it is nobility of any form that is alien to our tradition.
+
+The story that follows is about this war. Is it not about the "centrality of technology" to ordinary life. I don't believe in gods, digital or otherwise. Nor is it an effort to demonize any individual or group, for neither do I believe in a devil, corporate or otherwise. It is not a morality tale. Nor is it a call to jihad against an industry.
+
+It is instead an effort to understand a hopelessly destructive war inspired by the technologies of the Internet but reaching far beyond its code. And by understanding this battle, it is an effort to map peace. There is no good reason for the current struggle around Internet technologies to continue. There will be great harm to our tradition and culture if it is allowed to continue unchecked. We must come to understand the source of this war. We must resolve it soon.
+
+!_ Like the Causbys'
+battle, this war is, in part, about "property." The property of this war is not as tangible as the Causbys', and no innocent chicken has yet to lose its life. Yet the ideas surrounding this "property" are as obvious to most as the Causbys' claim about the sacredness of their farm was to them. We are the Causbys. Most of us take for granted the extraordinarily powerful claims that the owners of "intellectual property" now assert. Most of us, like the Causbys, treat these claims as obvious. And hence we, like the Causbys, object when a new technology interferes with this property. It is as plain to us as it was to them that the new technologies of the Internet are "trespassing" upon legitimate claims of "property." It is as plain to us as it was to them that the law should intervene to stop this trespass.
+={Causby, Thomas Lee+1;Causby, Tinie+1;intellectual property rights+8}
+
+And thus, when geeks and technologists defend their Armstrong or Wright brothers technology, most of us are simply unsympathetic. Common sense does not revolt. Unlike in the case of the unlucky Causbys, common sense is on the side of the property owners in this war. Unlike the lucky Wright brothers, the Internet has not inspired a revolution on its side.
+={Wright brothers}
+
+My hope is to push this common sense along. I have become increasingly amazed by the power of this idea of intellectual property and, more importantly, its power to disable critical thought by policy makers and citizens. There has never been a time in our history when more of our "culture" was as "owned" as it is now. And yet there has never been a time when the concentration of power to control the /{uses}/ of culture has been as unquestioningly accepted as it is now.
+={power, concentration of}
+
+The puzzle is, Why?
+
+Is it because we have come to understand a truth about the value and importance of absolute property over ideas and culture? Is it because we have discovered that our tradition of rejecting such an absolute claim was wrong?
+
+Or is it because the idea of absolute property over ideas and culture benefits the RCAs of our time and fits our own unreflective intuitions?
+
+Is the radical shift away from our tradition of free culture an instance of America correcting a mistake from its past, as we did after a bloody war with slavery, and as we are slowly doing with inequality? Or is the radical shift away from our tradition of free culture yet another example of a political system captured by a few powerful special interests?
+
+Does common sense lead to the extremes on this question because common sense actually believes in these extremes? Or does common sense stand silent in the face of these extremes because, as with Armstrong versus RCA, the more powerful side has ensured that it has the more powerful view?
+
+I don't mean to be mysterious. My own views are resolved. I believe it was right for common sense to revolt against the extremism of the Causbys. I believe it would be right for common sense to revolt against the extreme claims made today on behalf of "intellectual property." What the law demands today is increasingly as silly as a sheriff arresting an airplane for trespass. But the consequences of this silliness will be much more profound.
+={Causby, Thomas Lee;Causby, Tinie}
+
+!_ The struggle
+that rages just now centers on two ideas: "piracy" and "property." My aim in this book's next two parts is to explore these two ideas.
+
+My method is not the usual method of an academic. I don't want to plunge you into a complex argument, buttressed with references to obscure French theorists' however natural that is for the weird sort we academics have become. Instead I begin in each part with a collection of stories that set a context within which these apparently simple ideas can be more fully understood.
+
+The two sections set up the core claim of this book: that while the Internet has indeed produced something fantastic and new, our government, pushed by big media to respond to this "something new," is destroying something very old. Rather than understanding the changes the Internet might permit, and rather than taking time to let "common sense" resolve how best to respond, we are allowing those most threatened by the changes to use their power to change the law - and more importantly, to use their power to change something fundamental about who we have always been.
+
+We allow this, I believe, not because it is right, and not because most of us really believe in these changes. We allow it because the interests most threatened are among the most powerful players in our depressingly compromised process of making law. This book is the story of one more consequence of this form of corruption - a consequence to which most of us remain oblivious.
+
+:B~ "PIRACY"
+
+1~intro_piracy [Intro]-#
+
+!_ Since the inception
+of the law regulating creative property, there has been a war against "piracy." The precise contours of this concept, "piracy," are hard to sketch, but the animating injustice is easy to capture. As Lord Mansfield wrote in a case that extended the reach of English copyright law to include sheet music,
+={Copyright law:English;Mansfield, William Murray, Lord;music publishing;sheet music}
+
+_1 A person may use the copy by playing it, but he has no right to rob the author of the profit, by multiplying copies and disposing of them for his own use."~{ /{Bach v. Longman,}/ 98 Eng. Rep. 1274 (1777) (Mansfield). }~
+
+Today we are in the middle of another "war" against "piracy." The Internet has provoked this war. The Internet makes possible the efficient spread of content. Peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing is among the most efficient of the efficient technologies the Internet enables. Using distributed intelligence, p2p systems facilitate the easy spread of content in a way unimagined a generation ago.
+={Internet: efficient content distribution on;peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing:efficiency of+1}
+
+_{This}_ efficiency does not respect the traditional lines of copyright. The network doesn't discriminate between the sharing of copyrighted and uncopyrighted content. Thus has there been a vast amount of sharing of copyrighted content. That sharing in turn has excited the war, as copyright owners fear the sharing will "rob the author of the profit."
+
+The warriors have turned to the courts, to the legislatures, and increasingly to technology to defend their "property" against this "piracy." A generation of Americans, the warriors warn, is being raised to believe that "property" should be "free." Forget tattoos, never mind body piercing - our kids are becoming thieves!
+
+There's no doubt that "piracy" is wrong, and that pirates should be punished. But before we summon the executioners, we should put this notion of "piracy" in some context. For as the concept is increasingly used, at its core is an extraordinary idea that is almost certainly wrong.
+
+The idea goes something like this:
+
+_1 Creative work has value; whenever I use, or take, or build upon the creative work of others, I am taking from them something of value. Whenever I take something of value from someone else, I should have their permission. The taking of something of value from someone else without permission is wrong. It is a form of piracy."
+
+This view runs deep within the current debates. It is what NYU law professor Rochelle Dreyfuss criticizes as the "if value, then right" theory of creative property~{ See Rochelle Dreyfuss, "Expressive Genericity: Trademarks as Language in the Pepsi Generation," /{Notre Dame Law Review}/ 65 (1990): 397. }~ - if there is value, then someone must have a right to that value. It is the perspective that led a composers' rights organization, ASCAP, to sue the Girl Scouts for failing to pay for the songs that girls sang around Girl Scout campfires.~{ Lisa Bannon, "The Birds May Sing, but Campers Can't Unless They Pay Up," /{Wall Street Journal,}/ 21 August 1996, available at link #3; Jonathan Zittrain, "Calling Off the Copyright War: In Battle of Property vs. Free Speech, No One Wins," /{Boston Globe,}/ 24 November 2002. }~ There was "value" (the songs) so there must have been a "right" - even against the Girl Scouts.
+={ASCAP;Dreyfus, Rochelle;Girl Scouts;creative property: "if value, then right" theory of+1;if value, then right, theory+1}
+
+% note bad sort: ={"if value, then right" theory}
+
+This idea is certainly a possible understanding of how creative property should work. It might well be a possible design for a system of law protecting creative property. But the "if value, then right" theory of creative property has never been America's theory of creative property. It has never taken hold within our law.
+
+Instead, in our tradition, intellectual property is an instrument. It sets the groundwork for a richly creative society but remains subservient to the value of creativity. The current debate has this turned around. We have become so concerned with protecting the instrument that we are losing sight of the value.
+={copyright law:on republishing vs. transformation of original work+1;creativity:legal restrictions on+3}
+
+The source of this confusion is a distinction that the law no longer takes care to draw - the distinction between republishing someone's work on the one hand and building upon or transforming that work on the other. Copyright law at its birth had only publishing as its concern; copyright law today regulates both.
+
+Before the technologies of the Internet, this conflation didn't matter all that much. The technologies of publishing were expensive; that meant the vast majority of publishing was commercial. Commercial entities could bear the burden of the law - even the burden of the Byzantine complexity that copyright law has become. It was just one more expense of doing business.
+
+But with the birth of the Internet, this natural limit to the reach of the law has disappeared. The law controls not just the creativity of commercial creators but effectively that of anyone. Although that expansion would not matter much if copyright law regulated only "copying," when the law regulates as broadly and obscurely as it does, the extension matters a lot. The burden of this law now vastly outweighs any original benefit - certainly as it affects noncommercial creativity, and increasingly as it affects commercial creativity as well. Thus, as we'll see more clearly in the chapters below, the law's role is less and less to support creativity, and more and more to protect certain industries against competition. Just at the time digital technology could unleash an extraordinary range of commercial and noncommercial creativity, the law burdens this creativity with insanely complex and vague rules and with the threat of obscenely severe penalties. We may be seeing, as Richard Florida writes, the "Rise of the Creative Class."~{ In /{The Rise of the Creative Class}/ (New York: Basic Books, 2002), Richard Florida documents a shift in the nature of labor toward a labor of creativity. His work, however, doesn't directly address the legal conditions under which that creativity is enabled or stifled. I certainly agree with him about the importance and significance of this change, but I also believe the conditions under which it will be enabled are much more tenuous. }~ Unfortunately, we are also seeing an extraordinary rise of regulation of this creative class.
+={copyright law:creativity impeded by;Florida, Richard;Rise of the Creative Class, The (Florida)}
+
+These burdens make no sense in our tradition. We should begin by understanding that tradition a bit more and by placing in their proper context the current battles about behavior labeled "piracy."
+
+1~ Chapter One: Creators
+
+!_ In 1928,
+a cartoon character was born. An early Mickey Mouse made his debut in May of that year, in a silent flop called /{Plane Crazy}/. In November, in New York City's Colony Theater, in the first widely distributed cartoon synchronized with sound, /{Steamboat Willie}/ brought to life the character that would become Mickey Mouse.
+={animated cartoons+15;cartoon films+16;films:animated+15;Steamboat Willie+9;Mikey Mouse+9}
+
+Synchronized sound had been introduced to film a year earlier in the movie /{The Jazz Singer}/. That success led Walt Disney to copy the technique and mix sound with cartoons. No one knew whether it would work or, if it did work, whether it would win an audience. But when Disney ran a test in the summer of 1928, the results were unambiguous. As Disney describes that first experiment,
+={Disney, Walt+5}
+
+_1 A couple of my boys could read music, and one of them could play a mouth organ. We put them in a room where they could not see the screen and arranged to pipe their sound into the room where our wives and friends were going to see the picture.
+
+_1 The boys worked from a music and sound-effects score. After several false starts, sound and action got off with the gun. The mouth organist played the tune, the rest of us in the sound department bammed tin pans and blew slide whistles on the beat. The synchronization was pretty close.
+
+_1 The effect on our little audience was nothing less than electric. They responded almost instinctively to this union of sound and motion. I thought they were kidding me. So they put me in the audience and ran the action again. It was terrible, but it was wonderful! And it was something new!"~{ Leonard Maltin, /{Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons}/ (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), 34-35. }~
+
+Disney's then partner, and one of animation's most extraordinary talents, Ub Iwerks, put it more strongly: "I have never been so thrilled in my life. Nothing since has ever equaled it."
+={Iwerks, Ub.}
+
+Disney had created something very new, based upon something relatively new. Synchronized sound brought life to a form of creativity that had rarely - except in Disney's hands - been anything more than filler for other films. Throughout animation's early history, it was Disney's invention that set the standard that others struggled to match. And quite often, Disney's great genius, his spark of creativity, was built upon the work of others.
+
+This much is familiar. What you might not know is that 1928 also marks another important transition. In that year, a comic (as opposed to cartoon) genius created his last independently produced silent film. That genius was Buster Keaton. The film was /{Steamboat Bill, Jr.}/
+={Keaton, Buster+2;Steamboat Bill, Jr.+2}
+
+Keaton was born into a vaudeville family in 1895. In the era of silent film, he had mastered using broad physical comedy as a way to spark uncontrollable laughter from his audience. Steamboat Bill, Jr. was a classic of this form, famous among film buffs for its incredible stunts. The film was classic Keaton - wildly popular and among the best of its genre.
+
+/{Steamboat Bill, Jr.}/ appeared before Disney's cartoon /{Steamboat Willie}/. The coincidence of titles is not coincidental. Steamboat Willie is a direct cartoon parody of Steamboat Bill,~{ I am grateful to David Gerstein and his careful history, described at link #4. According to Dave Smith of the Disney Archives, Disney paid royalties to use the music for five songs in /{Steamboat Willie:}/ "Steamboat Bill," "The Simpleton" (Delille), "Mischief Makers" (Carbonara), "Joyful Hurry No. 1" (Baron), and "Gawky Rube" (Lakay). A sixth song, "The Turkey in the Straw," was already in the public domain. Letter from David Smith to Harry Surden, 10 July 2003, on file with author. }~ and both are built upon a common song as a source. It is not just from the invention of synchronized sound in /{The Jazz Singer}/ that we get /{Steamboat Willie}/. It is also from Buster Keaton's invention of Steamboat Bill, Jr., itself inspired by the song "Steamboat Bill," that we get Steamboat Willie, and then from Steamboat Willie, Mickey Mouse.
+={derivative works: piracy vs.+4;piracy:derivative work vs.+4}
+
+This "borrowing" was nothing unique, either for Disney or for the industry. Disney was always parroting the feature-length mainstream films of his day.~{ He was also a fan of the public domain. See Chris Sprigman, "The Mouse that Ate the Public Domain," Findlaw, 5 March 2002, at link #5. }~ So did many others. Early cartoons are filled with knockoffs - slight variations on winning themes; retellings of ancient stories. The key to success was the brilliance of the differences. With Disney, it was sound that gave his animation its spark. Later, it was the quality of his work relative to the production-line cartoons with which he competed. Yet these additions were built upon a base that was borrowed. Disney added to the work of others before him, creating something new out of something just barely old.
+={creativity:by transforming previous works+3;Disney, Inc.+6}
+
+Sometimes this borrowing was slight. Sometimes it was significant. Think about the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. If you're as oblivious as I was, you're likely to think that these tales are happy, sweet stories, appropriate for any child at bedtime. In fact, the Grimm fairy tales are, well, for us, grim. It is a rare and perhaps overly ambitious parent who would dare to read these bloody, moralistic stories to his or her child, at bedtime or anytime.
+={Grimm fairy tales+1}
+
+Disney took these stories and retold them in a way that carried them into a new age. He animated the stories, with both characters and light. Without removing the elements of fear and danger altogether, he made funny what was dark and injected a genuine emotion of compassion where before there was fear. And not just with the work of the Brothers Grimm. Indeed, the catalog of Disney work drawing upon the work of others is astonishing when set together: /{Snow White}/ (1937), /{Fantasia}/ (1940), /{Pinocchio}/ (1940), /{Dumbo}/ (1941), /{Bambi}/ (1942), /{Song of the South}/ (1946), /{Cinderella}/ (1950), /{Alice in Wonderland}/ (1951), /{Robin Hood}/ (1952), /{Peter Pan}/ (1953), /{Lady and the Tramp}/ (1955), /{Mulan}/ (1998), /{Sleeping Beauty}/ (1959), /{101 Dalmatians}/ (1961), /{The Sword in the Stone}/ (1963), and /{The Jungle Book}/ (1967) - not to mention a recent example that we should perhaps quickly forget, /{Treasure Planet}/ (2003). In all of these cases, Disney (or Disney, Inc.) ripped creativity from the culture around him, mixed that creativity with his own extraordinary talent, and then burned that mix into the soul of his culture. Rip, mix, and burn.
+
+This is a kind of creativity. It is a creativity that we should remember and celebrate. There are some who would say that there is no creativity except this kind. We don't need to go that far to recognize its importance. We could call this "Disney creativity," though that would be a bit misleading. It is, more precisely, "Walt Disney creativity" - a form of expression and genius that builds upon the culture around us and makes it something different.
+
+In 1928, the culture that Disney was free to draw upon was relatively fresh. The public domain in 1928 was not very old and was therefore quite vibrant. The average term of copyright was just around thirty years - for that minority of creative work that was in fact copy-righted.~{ Until 1976, copyright law granted an author the possibility of two terms: an initial term and a renewal term. I have calculated the "average" term by determining the weighted average of total registrations for any particular year, and the proportion renewing. Thus, if 100 copyrights are registered in year 1, and only 15 are renewed, and the renewal term is 28 years, then the average term is 32.2 years. For the renewal data and other relevant data, see the Web site associated with this book, available at link #6. }~ That means that for thirty years, on average, the authors or copyright holders of a creative work had an "exclusive right" to control certain uses of the work. To use this copyrighted work in limited ways required the permission of the copyright owner.
+={copyright:duration of+2;public domain:defined+2|traditional term for conversion to+2}
+
+At the end of a copyright term, a work passes into the public domain. No permission is then needed to draw upon or use that work. No permission and, hence, no lawyers. The public domain is a "lawyer-free zone." Thus, most of the content from the nineteenth century was free for Disney to use and build upon in 1928. It was free for anyone - whether connected or not, whether rich or not, whether approved or not - to use and build upon.
+
+This is the ways things always were - until quite recently. For most of our history, the public domain was just over the horizon. From 1790 until 1978, the average copyright term was never more than thirty-two years, meaning that most culture just a generation and a half old was free for anyone to build upon without the permission of anyone else. Today's equivalent would be for creative work from the 1960s and 1970s to now be free for the next Walt Disney to build upon without permission. Yet today, the public domain is presumptive only for content from before the Great Depression.
+
+!_ Of course,
+Walt Disney had no monopoly on "Walt Disney creativity." Nor does America. The norm of free culture has, until recently, and except within totalitarian nations, been broadly exploited and quite universal.
+={Disney, Walt}
+
+Consider, for example, a form of creativity that seems strange to many Americans but that is inescapable within Japanese culture: /{manga}/, or comics. The Japanese are fanatics about comics. Some 40 percent of publications are comics, and 30 percent of publication revenue derives from comics. They are everywhere in Japanese society, at every magazine stand, carried by a large proportion of commuters on Japan's extraordinary system of public transportation.
+={comics, Japanese+8;derivative works: piracy vs.+18;Japanese comics+8;manga+8;piracy:derivative work vs.+18}
+
+Americans tend to look down upon this form of culture. That's an unattractive characteristic of ours. We're likely to misunderstand much about manga, because few of us have ever read anything close to the stories that these "graphic novels" tell. For the Japanese, manga cover every aspect of social life. For us, comics are "men in tights." And anyway, it's not as if the New York subways are filled with readers of Joyce or even Hemingway. People of different cultures distract themselves in different ways, the Japanese in this interestingly different way.
+
+But my purpose here is not to understand manga. It is to describe a variant on manga that from a lawyer's perspective is quite odd, but from a Disney perspective is quite familiar.
+
+This is the phenomenon of /{doujinshi}/. Doujinshi are also comics, but they are a kind of copycat comic. A rich ethic governs the creation of doujinshi. It is not doujinshi if it is /{just}/ a copy; the artist must make a contribution to the art he copies, by transforming it either subtly or significantly. A doujinshi comic can thus take a mainstream comic and develop it differently - with a different story line. Or the comic can keep the character in character but change its look slightly. There is no formula for what makes the doujinshi sufficiently "different." But they must be different if they are to be considered true doujinshi. Indeed, there are committees that review doujinshi for inclusion within shows and reject any copycat comic that is merely a copy.
+={creativity:by transforming previous works+14;doujinshi comics+8}
+
+These copycat comics are not a tiny part of the manga market. They are huge. More than 33,000 "circles" of creators from across Japan produce these bits of Walt Disney creativity. More than 450,000 Japanese come together twice a year, in the largest public gathering in the country, to exchange and sell them. This market exists in parallel to the mainstream commercial manga market. In some ways, it obviously competes with that market, but there is no sustained effort by those who control the commercial manga market to shut the doujinshi market down. It flourishes, despite the competition and despite the law.
+={Disney, Walt+1}
+
+The most puzzling feature of the doujinshi market, for those trained in the law, at least, is that it is allowed to exist at all. Under Japanese copyright law, which in this respect (on paper) mirrors American copyright law, the doujinshi market is an illegal one. Doujinshi are plainly "derivative works." There is no general practice by doujinshi artists of securing the permission of the manga creators. Instead, the practice is simply to take and modify the creations of others, as Walt Disney did with /{Steamboat Bill, Jr}/. Under both Japanese and American law, that "taking" without the permission of the original copyright owner is illegal. It is an infringement of the original copyright to make a copy or a derivative work without the original copyright owner's permission.
+={copyright law: Japanese+1;Steamboat Bill, Jr.}
+
+Yet this illegal market exists and indeed flourishes in Japan, and in the view of many, it is precisely because it exists that Japanese manga flourish. As American graphic novelist Judd Winick said to me, "The early days of comics in America are very much like what's going on in Japan now. ... American comics were born out of copying each other. ... That's how [the artists] learn to draw - by going into comic books and not tracing them, but looking at them and copying them" and building from them.~{ For an excellent history, see Scott McCloud, /{Reinventing Comics}/ (New York: Perennial, 2000). }~
+={Winick, Judd+1}
+
+American comics now are quite different, Winick explains, in part because of the legal difficulty of adapting comics the way doujinshi are allowed. Speaking of Superman, Winick told me, "there are these rules and you have to stick to them." There are things Superman "cannot" do. "As a creator, it's frustrating having to stick to some parameters which are fifty years old."
+={Superman comics}
+
+The norm in Japan mitigates this legal difficulty. Some say it is precisely the benefit accruing to the Japanese manga market that explains the mitigation. Temple University law professor Salil Mehra, for example, hypothesizes that the manga market accepts these technical violations because they spur the manga market to be more wealthy and productive. Everyone would be worse off if doujinshi were banned, so the law does not ban doujinshi.~{ See Salil K. Mehra, "Copyright and Comics in Japan: Does Law Explain Why All the Comics My Kid Watches Are Japanese Imports?" /{Rutgers Law Review}/ 55 (2002): 155, 182. "[T]here might be a collective economic rationality that would lead manga and anime artists to forgo bringing legal actions for infringement. One hypothesis is that all manga artists may be better off collectively if they set aside their individual self-interest and decide not to press their legal rights. This is essentially a prisoner's dilemma solved." }~
+={copyright law: Japanese+1;comics, Japanese;Mehra, Salil+1}
+
+The problem with this story, however, as Mehra plainly acknowledges, is that the mechanism producing this laissez faire response is not clear. It may well be that the market as a whole is better off if doujinshi are permitted rather than banned, but that doesn't explain why individual copyright owners don't sue nonetheless. If the law has no general exception for doujinshi, and indeed in some cases individual manga artists have sued doujinshi artists, why is there not a more general pattern of blocking this "free taking" by the doujinshi culture?
+
+I spent four wonderful months in Japan, and I asked this question as often as I could. Perhaps the best account in the end was offered by a friend from a major Japanese law firm. "We don't have enough lawyers," he told me one afternoon. There "just aren't enough resources to prosecute cases like this."
+
+This is a theme to which we will return: that regulation by law is a function of both the words on the books and the costs of making those words have effect. For now, focus on the obvious question that is begged: Would Japan be better off with more lawyers? Would manga be richer if doujinshi artists were regularly prosecuted? Would the Japanese gain something important if they could end this practice of uncompensated sharing? Does piracy here hurt the victims of the piracy, or does it help them? Would lawyers fighting this piracy help their clients or hurt them?
+
+!_ Let's pause
+for a moment.
+
+If you're like I was a decade ago, or like most people are when they first start thinking about these issues, then just about now you should be puzzled about something you hadn't thought through before.
+
+We live in a world that celebrates "property." I am one of those celebrants. I believe in the value of property in general, and I also believe in the value of that weird form of property that lawyers call "intellectual property."~{ The term /{intellectual property}/ is of relatively recent origin. See Siva Vaidhyanathan, /{Copyrights and Copywrongs,}/ 11 (New York: New York University Press, 2001). See also Lawrence Lessig, /{The Future of Ideas}/ (New York: Random House, 2001), 293 n. 26. The term accurately describes a set of "property" rights - copyright, patents, trademark, and trade-secret - but the nature of those rights is very different. }~ A large, diverse society cannot survive without property; a large, diverse, and modern society cannot flourish without intellectual property.
+
+But it takes just a second's reflection to realize that there is plenty of value out there that "property" doesn't capture. I don't mean "money can't buy you love," but rather, value that is plainly part of a process of production, including commercial as well as noncommercial production. If Disney animators had stolen a set of pencils to draw Steamboat Willie, we'd have no hesitation in condemning that taking as wrong - even though trivial, even if unnoticed. Yet there was nothing wrong, at least under the law of the day, with Disney's taking from Buster Keaton or from the Brothers Grimm. There was nothing wrong with the taking from Keaton because Disney's use would have been considered "fair." There was nothing wrong with the taking from the Grimms because the Grimms' work was in the public domain.
+={Disney, Walt+5;Grimm fairy tales+1;Keaton, Buster}
+
+Thus, even though the things that Disney took - or more generally, the things taken by anyone exercising Walt Disney creativity - are valuable, our tradition does not treat those takings as wrong. Some things remain free for the taking within a free culture, and that freedom is good.
+={free culture: derivative works based on+6}
+
+The same with the doujinshi culture. If a doujinshi artist broke into a publisher's office and ran off with a thousand copies of his latest work - or even one copy - without paying, we'd have no hesitation in saying the artist was wrong. In addition to having trespassed, he would have stolen something of value. The law bans that stealing in whatever form, whether large or small.
+={copyright law: Japanese+1;comics, Japanese;doujinshi comics+1;Japanese comics+1;manga+1}
+
+Yet there is an obvious reluctance, even among Japanese lawyers, to say that the copycat comic artists are "stealing." This form of Walt Disney creativity is seen as fair and right, even if lawyers in particular find it hard to say why.
+
+It's the same with a thousand examples that appear everywhere once you begin to look. Scientists build upon the work of other scientists without asking or paying for the privilege. ("Excuse me, Professor Einstein, but may I have permission to use your theory of relativity to show that you were wrong about quantum physics?") Acting companies perform adaptations of the works of Shakespeare without securing permission from anyone. (Does /{anyone}/ believe Shakespeare would be better spread within our culture if there were a central Shakespeare rights clearinghouse that all productions of Shakespeare must appeal to first?) And Hollywood goes through cycles with a certain kind of movie: five asteroid films in the late 1990s; two volcano disaster films in 1997.
+={Shakespeare, William}
+
+Creators here and everywhere are always and at all times building upon the creativity that went before and that surrounds them now. That building is always and everywhere at least partially done without permission and without compensating the original creator. No society, free or controlled, has ever demanded that every use be paid for or that permission for Walt Disney creativity must always be sought. Instead, every society has left a certain bit of its culture free for the taking - free societies more fully than unfree, perhaps, but all societies to some degree.
+
+The hard question is therefore not /{whether}/ a culture is free. All cultures are free to some degree. The hard question instead is "/{How}/ free is this culture?" How much, and how broadly, is the culture free for others to take and build upon? Is that freedom limited to party members? To members of the royal family? To the top ten corporations on the New York Stock Exchange? Or is that freedom spread broadly? To artists generally, whether affiliated with the Met or not? To musicians generally, whether white or not? To filmmakers generally, whether affiliated with a studio or not?
+
+Free cultures are cultures that leave a great deal open for others to build upon; unfree, or permission, cultures leave much less. Ours was a free culture. It is becoming much less so.
+
+1~ Chapter Two: "Mere Copyists"
+
+!_ In 1839,
+Louis Daguerre invented the first practical technology for producing what we would call "photographs." Appropriately enough, they were called "daguerreotypes." The process was complicated and expensive, and the field was thus limited to professionals and a few zealous and wealthy amateurs. (There was even an American Daguerre Association that helped regulate the industry, as do all such associations, by keeping competition down so as to keep prices up.)
+={Daguerre, Louis;photography+13}
+
+Yet despite high prices, the demand for daguerreotypes was strong. This pushed inventors to find simpler and cheaper ways to make "automatic pictures." William Talbot soon discovered a process for making "negatives." But because the negatives were glass, and had to be kept wet, the process still remained expensive and cumbersome. In the 1870s, dry plates were developed, making it easier to separate the taking of a picture from its developing. These were still plates of glass, and thus it was still not a process within reach of most amateurs.
+={Talbot, William}
+
+The technological change that made mass photography possible didn't happen until 1888, and was the creation of a single man. George Eastman, himself an amateur photographer, was frustrated by the technology of photographs made with plates. In a flash of insight (so to speak), Eastman saw that if the film could be made to be flexible, it could be held on a single spindle. That roll could then be sent to a developer, driving the costs of photography down substantially. By lowering the costs, Eastman expected he could dramatically broaden the population of photographers.
+={Eastman, George+12;camera technology+6}
+
+Eastman developed flexible, emulsion-coated paper film and placed rolls of it in small, simple cameras: the Kodak. The device was marketed on the basis of its simplicity. "You press the button and we do the rest."~{ Reese V. Jenkins, /{Images and Enterprise}/ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 112. }~ As he described in /{The Kodak Primer}/:
+={Kodak cameras+4;Kodak Primer, The (Eastman)+1}
+
+_1 The principle of the Kodak system is the separation of the work that any person whomsoever can do in making a photograph, from the work that only an expert can do. ... We furnish anybody, man, woman or child, who has sufficient intelligence to point a box straight and press a button, with an instrument which altogether removes from the practice of photography the necessity for exceptional facilities or, in fact, any special knowledge of the art. It can be employed without preliminary study, without a darkroom and without chemicals."~{ Brian Coe, /{The Birth of Photography}/ (New York: Taplinger Publishing, 1977), 53. }~
+={Coe, Brian}
+
+For $25, anyone could make pictures. The camera came preloaded with film, and when it had been used, the camera was returned to an Eastman factory, where the film was developed. Over time, of course, the cost of the camera and the ease with which it could be used both improved. Roll film thus became the basis for the explosive growth of popular photography. Eastman's camera first went on sale in 1888; one year later, Kodak was printing more than six thousand negatives a day. From 1888 through 1909, while industrial production was rising by 4.7 percent, photographic equipment and material sales increased by 11 percent.~{ Jenkins, 177. }~ Eastman Kodak's sales during the same period experienced an average annual increase of over 17 percent.~{ Based on a chart in Jenkins, p. 178. }~
+
+The real significance of Eastman's invention, however, was not economic. It was social. Professional photography gave individuals a glimpse of places they would never otherwise see. Amateur photography gave them the ability to record their own lives in a way they had never been able to do before. As author Brian Coe notes, "For the first time the snapshot album provided the man on the street with a permanent record of his family and its activities. ... For the first time in history there exists an authentic visual record of the appearance and activities of the common man made without [literary] interpretation or bias."~{ Coe, 58. }~
+={Coe, Brian}
+
+In this way, the Kodak camera and film were technologies of expression. The pencil or paintbrush was also a technology of expression, of course. But it took years of training before they could be deployed by amateurs in any useful or effective way. With the Kodak, expression was possible much sooner and more simply. The barrier to expression was lowered. Snobs would sneer at its "quality"; professionals would discount it as irrelevant. But watch a child study how best to frame a picture and you get a sense of the experience of creativity that the Kodak enabled. Democratic tools gave ordinary people a way to express themselves more easily than any tools could have before.
+={democracy:in technologies of expression;expression, technologies of:democratic}
+
+What was required for this technology to flourish? Obviously, Eastman's genius was an important part. But also important was the legal environment within which Eastman's invention grew. For early in the history of photography, there was a series of judicial decisions that could well have changed the course of photography substantially. Courts were asked whether the photographer, amateur or professional, required permission before he could capture and print whatever image he wanted. Their answer was no.~{ For illustrative cases, see, for example, /{Pavesich v. N.E. Life Ins. Co.,}/ 50 S.E. 68 (Ga. 1905); /{Foster-Milburn Co. v. Chinn,}/ 123090 S.W. 364, 366 (Ky. 1909); /{Corliss v. Walker,}/ 64 F. 280 (Mass. Dist. Ct. 1894). }~
+={permissions:photography exempted from+5}
+
+The arguments in favor of requiring permission will sound surprisingly familiar. The photographer was "taking" something from the person or building whose photograph he shot - pirating something of value. Some even thought he was taking the target's soul. Just as Disney was not free to take the pencils that his animators used to draw Mickey, so, too, should these photographers not be free to take images that they thought valuable.
+={Disney, Walt+1;images, ownership of+4}
+
+On the other side was an argument that should be familiar, as well. Sure, there may be something of value being used. But citizens should have the right to capture at least those images that stand in public view. (Louis Brandeis, who would become a Supreme Court Justice, thought the rule should be different for images from private spaces.~{ Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis, "The Right to Privacy," /{Harvard Law Review}/ 4 (1890): 193. }~) It may be that this means that the photographer gets something for nothing. Just as Disney could take inspiration from /{Steamboat Bill, Jr.}/ or the Brothers Grimm, the photographer should be free to capture an image without compensating the source.
+={Brandeis, Louis;Steamboat Bill, Jr.;camera technology+2}
+
+Fortunately for Mr. Eastman, and for photography in general, these early decisions went in favor of the pirates. In general, no permission would be required before an image could be captured and shared with others. Instead, permission was presumed. Freedom was the default. (The law would eventually craft an exception for famous people: commercial photographers who snap pictures of famous people for commercial purposes have more restrictions than the rest of us. But in the ordinary case, the image can be captured without clearing the rights to do the capturing.~{ See Melville B. Nimmer, "The Right of Publicity," /{Law and Contemporary Problems}/ 19 (1954): 203; William L. Prosser, "Privacy," /{California Law Review}/ 48 (1960) 398-407; /{White v. Samsung Electronics America, Inc.,}/ 971 F. 2d 1395 (9th Cir. 1992), cert. denied, 508 U.S. 951 (1993). }~)
+
+We can only speculate about how photography would have developed had the law gone the other way. If the presumption had been against the photographer, then the photographer would have had to demonstrate permission. Perhaps Eastman Kodak would have had to demonstrate permission, too, before it developed the film upon which images were captured. After all, if permission were not granted, then Eastman Kodak would be benefiting from the "theft" committed by the photographer. Just as Napster benefited from the copyright infringements committed by Napster users, Kodak would be benefiting from the "image-right" infringement of its photographers. We could imagine the law then requiring that some form of permission be demonstrated before a company developed pictures. We could imagine a system developing to demonstrate that permission.
+={Kodak cameras;Napster}
+
+But though we could imagine this system of permission, it would be very hard to see how photography could have flourished as it did if the requirement for permission had been built into the rules that govern it. Photography would have existed. It would have grown in importance over time. Professionals would have continued to use the technology as they did - since professionals could have more easily borne the burdens of the permission system. But the spread of photography to ordinary people would not have occurred. Nothing like that growth would have been realized. And certainly, nothing like that growth in a democratic technology of expression would have been realized.
+={camera technology+6;democracy:in technologies of expression;expression, technologies of:democratic}
+
+!_ If you drive
+through San Francisco's Presidio, you might see two gaudy yellow school buses painted over with colorful and striking images, and the logo "Just Think!" in place of the name of a school. But there's little that's "just" cerebral in the projects that these busses enable. These buses are filled with technologies that teach kids to tinker with film. Not the film of Eastman. Not even the film of your VCR. Rather the "film" of digital cameras. Just Think! is a project that enables kids to make films, as a way to understand and critique the filmed culture that they find all around them. Each year, these busses travel to more than thirty schools and enable three hundred to five hundred children to learn something about media by doing something with media. By doing, they think. By tinkering, they learn.
+={digital cameras;Just Think!+2}
+
+These buses are not cheap, but the technology they carry is increasingly so. The cost of a high-quality digital video system has fallen dramatically. As one analyst puts it, "Five years ago, a good real-time digital video editing system cost $25,000. Today you can get professional quality for $595."~{ H. Edward Goldberg, "Essential Presentation Tools: Hardware and Software You Need to Create Digital Multimedia Presentations," cadalyst, 1 February 2002, available at link #7. }~ These buses are filled with technology that would have cost hundreds of thousands just ten years ago. And it is now feasible to imagine not just buses like this, but classrooms across the country where kids are learning more and more of something teachers call "media literacy."
+={education:in media literacy+19;media literacy+19;expression, technologies of:media literacy and+19}
+
+"Media literacy," as Dave Yanofsky, the executive director of Just Think!, puts it, "is the ability ... to understand, analyze, and deconstruct media images. Its aim is to make [kids] literate about the way media works, the way it's constructed, the way it's delivered, and the way people access it."
+={Yanofsky, Dave}
+
+This may seem like an odd way to think about "literacy." For most people, literacy is about reading and writing. Faulkner and Hemingway and noticing split infinitives are the things that "literate" people know about.
+
+Maybe. But in a world where children see on average 390 hours of television commercials per year, or between 20,000 and 45,000 commercials generally,~{ Judith Van Evra, /{Television and Child Development}/ (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1990); "Findings on Family and TV Study," /{Denver Post,}/ 25 May 1997, B6. }~ it is increasingly important to understand the "grammar" of media. For just as there is a grammar for the written word, so, too, is there one for media. And just as kids learn how to write by writing lots of terrible prose, kids learn how to write media by constructing lots of (at least at first) terrible media.
+={advertising;commercials;television:advertising on}
+
+A growing field of academics and activists sees this form of literacy as crucial to the next generation of culture. For though anyone who has written understands how difficult writing is - how difficult it is to sequence the story, to keep a reader's attention, to craft language to be understandable - few of us have any real sense of how difficult media is. Or more fundamentally, few of us have a sense of how media works, how it holds an audience or leads it through a story, how it triggers emotion or builds suspense.
+
+It took filmmaking a generation before it could do these things well. But even then, the knowledge was in the filming, not in writing about the film. The skill came from experiencing the making of a film, not from reading a book about it. One learns to write by writing and then reflecting upon what one has written. One learns to write with images by making them and then reflecting upon what one has created.
+
+This grammar has changed as media has changed. When it was just film, as Elizabeth Daley, executive director of the University of Southern California's Annenberg Center for Communication and dean of the USC School of Cinema- Television, explained to me, the grammar was about "the placement of objects, color, ... rhythm, pacing, and texture."~{ Interview with Elizabeth Daley and Stephanie Barish, 13 December 2002. }~ But as computers open up an interactive space where a story is "played" as well as experienced, that grammar changes. The simple control of narrative is lost, and so other techniques are necessary. Author Michael Crichton had mastered the narrative of science fiction. But when he tried to design a computer game based on one of his works, it was a new craft he had to learn. How to lead people through a game without their feeling they have been led was not obvious, even to a wildly successful author.~{ See Scott Steinberg, "Crichton Gets Medieval on PCs," E!online, 4 November 2000, available at link #8; "Timeline," 22 November 2000, available at link #9. }~
+={Daley, Elizabeth+6;Crichton, Michael;computer games}
+
+This skill is precisely the craft a filmmaker learns. As Daley describes, "people are very surprised about how they are led through a film. [I]t is perfectly constructed to keep you from seeing it, so you have no idea. If a filmmaker succeeds you do not know how you were led." If you know you were led through a film, the film has failed.
+
+Yet the push for an expanded literacy - one that goes beyond text to include audio and visual elements - is not about making better film directors. The aim is not to improve the profession of filmmaking at all. Instead, as Daley explained,
+
+_1 From my perspective, probably the most important digital divide is not access to a box. It's the ability to be empowered with the language that that box works in. Otherwise only a very few people can write with this language, and all the rest of us are reduced to being read-only."
+
+"Read-only." Passive recipients of culture produced elsewhere. Couch potatoes. Consumers. This is the world of media from the twentieth century.
+
+The twenty-first century could be different. This is the crucial point: It could be both read and write. Or at least reading and better understanding the craft of writing. Or best, reading and understanding the tools that enable the writing to lead or mislead. The aim of any literacy, and this literacy in particular, is to "empower people to choose the appropriate language for what they need to create or express."~{ Interview with Daley and Barish. }~ It is to enable students "to communicate in the language of the twenty-first century."~{ Ibid. }~
+
+As with any language, this language comes more easily to some than to others. It doesn't necessarily come more easily to those who excel in written language. Daley and Stephanie Barish, director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at the Annenberg Center, describe one particularly poignant example of a project they ran in a high school. The high school was a very poor inner-city Los Angeles school. In all the traditional measures of success, this school was a failure. But Daley and Barish ran a program that gave kids an opportunity to use film to express meaning about something the students know something about - gun violence.
+={Barish, Stephanie+2}
+
+The class was held on Friday afternoons, and it created a relatively new problem for the school. While the challenge in most classes was getting the kids to come, the challenge in this class was keeping them away. The "kids were showing up at 6 A.M. and leaving at 5 at night," said Barish. They were working harder than in any other class to do what education should be about - learning how to express themselves.
+
+Using whatever "free web stuff they could find," and relatively simple tools to enable the kids to mix "image, sound, and text," Barish said this class produced a series of projects that showed something about gun violence that few would otherwise understand. This was an issue close to the lives of these students. The project "gave them a tool and empowered them to be able to both understand it and talk about it," Barish explained. That tool succeeded in creating expression - far more successfully and powerfully than could have been created using only text. "If you had said to these students, 'you have to do it in text,' they would've just thrown their hands up and gone and done something else," Barish described, in part, no doubt, because expressing themselves in text is not something these students can do well. Yet neither is text a form in which /{these}/ ideas can be expressed well. The power of this message depended upon its connection to this form of expression.
+
+"But isn't education about teaching kids to write?" I asked. In part, of course, it is. But why are we teaching kids to write? Education, Daley explained, is about giving students a way of "constructing meaning." To say that that means just writing is like saying teaching writing is only about teaching kids how to spell. Text is one part - and increasingly, not the most powerful part - of constructing meaning. As Daley explained in the most moving part of our interview,
+={Daley, Elizabeth+3}
+
+_1 What you want is to give these students ways of constructing meaning. If all you give them is text, they're not going to do it. Because they can't. You know, you've got Johnny who can look at a video, he can play a video game, he can do graffiti all over your walls, he can take your car apart, and he can do all sorts of other things. He just can't read your text. So Johnny comes to school and you say, "Johnny, you're illiterate. Nothing you can do matters." Well, Johnny then has two choices: He can dismiss you or he [can] dismiss himself. If his ego is healthy at all, he's going to dismiss you. [But i]nstead, if you say, "Well, with all these things that you can do, let's talk about this issue. Play for me music that you think reflects that, or show me images that you think reflect that, or draw for me something that reflects that." Not by giving a kid a video camera and ... saying, "Let's go have fun with the video camera and make a little movie." But instead, really help you take these elements that you understand, that are your language, and construct meaning about the topic. ...
+
+_1 That empowers enormously. And then what happens, of course, is eventually, as it has happened in all these classes, they bump up against the fact, "I need to explain this and I really need to write something." And as one of the teachers told Stephanie, they would rewrite a paragraph 5, 6, 7, 8 times, till they got it right.
+={Barish, Stephanie}
+
+_1 Because they needed to. There was a reason for doing it. They needed to say something, as opposed to just jumping through your hoops. They actually needed to use a language that they didn't speak very well. But they had come to understand that they had a lot of power with this language."
+
+!_ When two planes
+crashed into the World Trade Center, another into the Pentagon, and a fourth into a Pennsylvania field, all media around the world shifted to this news. Every moment of just about every day for that week, and for weeks after, television in particular, and media generally, retold the story of the events we had just witnessed. The telling was a retelling, because we had seen the events that were described. The genius of this awful act of terrorism was that the delayed second attack was perfectly timed to assure that the whole world would be watching.
+={September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks of+2;World Trade Center;news coverage+21}
+
+These retellings had an increasingly familiar feel. There was music scored for the intermissions, and fancy graphics that flashed across the screen. There was a formula to interviews. There was "balance," and seriousness. This was news choreographed in the way we have increasingly come to expect it, "news as entertainment," even if the entertainment is tragedy.
+
+But in addition to this produced news about the "tragedy of September 11," those of us tied to the Internet came to see a very different production as well. The Internet was filled with accounts of the same events. Yet these Internet accounts had a very different flavor. Some people constructed photo pages that captured images from around the world and presented them as slide shows with text. Some offered open letters. There were sound recordings. There was anger and frustration. There were attempts to provide context. There was, in short, an extraordinary worldwide barn raising, in the sense Mike Godwin uses the term in his book /{Cyber Rights}/, around a news event that had captured the attention of the world. There was ABC and CBS, but there was also the Internet.
+={Cyber Rights (Godwin);Godwin, Mike;Internet:news events on+3}
+
+I don't mean simply to praise the Internet - though I do think the people who supported this form of speech should be praised. I mean instead to point to a significance in this form of speech. For like a Kodak, the Internet enables people to capture images. And like in a movie by a student on the "Just Think!" bus, the visual images could be mixed with sound or text.
+={Just Think!}
+
+But unlike any technology for simply capturing images, the Internet allows these creations to be shared with an extraordinary number of people, practically instantaneously. This is something new in our tradition - not just that culture can be captured mechanically, and obviously not just that events are commented upon critically, but that this mix of captured images, sound, and commentary can be widely spread practically instantaneously.
+
+September 11 was not an aberration. It was a beginning. Around the same time, a form of communication that has grown dramatically was just beginning to come into public consciousness: the Web-log, or blog. The blog is a kind of public diary, and within some cultures, such as in Japan, it functions very much like a diary. In those cultures, it records private facts in a public way - it's a kind of electronic /{Jerry Springer}/, available anywhere in the world.
+={September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks of;blogs (Web-logs)+2;Internet:blogs on+2;Web-logs (blogs)+2}
+
+But in the United States, blogs have taken on a very different character. There are some who use the space simply to talk about their private life. But there are many who use the space to engage in public discourse. Discussing matters of public import, criticizing others who are mistaken in their views, criticizing politicians about the decisions they make, offering solutions to problems we all see: blogs create the sense of a virtual public meeting, but one in which we don't all hope to be there at the same time and in which conversations are not necessarily linked. The best of the blog entries are relatively short; they point directly to words used by others, criticizing with or adding to them. They are arguably the most important form of unchoreographed public discourse that we have.
+={political discourse;Internet:public discourse conducted on+15}
+
+That's a strong statement. Yet it says as much about our democracy as it does about blogs. This is the part of America that is most difficult for those of us who love America to accept: Our democracy has atrophied. Of course we have elections, and most of the time the courts allow those elections to count. A relatively small number of people vote in those elections. The cycle of these elections has become totally professionalized and routinized. Most of us think this is democracy.
+={democracy:in technologies of expression+5;elections+1;expression, technologies of:democratic+5}
+
+But democracy has never just been about elections. Democracy means rule by the people, but rule means something more than mere elections. In our tradition, it also means control through reasoned discourse. This was the idea that captured the imagination of Alexis de Tocqueville, the nineteenth-century French lawyer who wrote the most important account of early "Democracy in America." It wasn't popular elections that fascinated him - it was the jury, an institution that gave ordinary people the right to choose life or death for other citizens. And most fascinating for him was that the jury didn't just vote about the outcome they would impose. They deliberated. Members argued about the "right" result; they tried to persuade each other of the "right" result, and in criminal cases at least, they had to agree upon a unanimous result for the process to come to an end.~{ See, for example, Alexis de Tocqueville, /{Democracy in America,}/ bk. 1, trans. Henry Reeve (New York: Bantam Books, 2000), ch. 16. }~
+={Tocqueville, Alexis de;democracy:public discourse in+4;jury system}
+
+Yet even this institution flags in American life today. And in its place, there is no systematic effort to enable citizen deliberation. Some are pushing to create just such an institution.~{ Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin, "Deliberation Day," /{Journal of Political Philosophy}/ 10 (2) (2002): 129. }~ And in some towns in New England, something close to deliberation remains. But for most of us for most of the time, there is no time or place for "democratic deliberation" to occur.
+
+More bizarrely, there is generally not even permission for it to occur. We, the most powerful democracy in the world, have developed a strong norm against talking about politics. It's fine to talk about politics with people you agree with. But it is rude to argue about politics with people you disagree with. Political discourse becomes isolated, and isolated discourse becomes more extreme.~{ Cass Sunstein, /{Republic.com}/ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 65-80, 175, 182, 183, 192. }~ We say what our friends want to hear, and hear very little beyond what our friends say.
+={political discourse+11}
+
+Enter the blog. The blog's very architecture solves one part of this problem. People post when they want to post, and people read when they want to read. The most difficult time is synchronous time. Technologies that enable asynchronous communication, such as e-mail, increase the opportunity for communication. Blogs allow for public discourse without the public ever needing to gather in a single public place.
+={blogs (Web-logs)+10;e-mail;Internet:blogs on+10;Web-logs (blogs)+10}
+
+But beyond architecture, blogs also have solved the problem of norms. There's no norm (yet) in blog space not to talk about politics. Indeed, the space is filled with political speech, on both the right and the left. Some of the most popular sites are conservative or libertarian, but there are many of all political stripes. And even blogs that are not political cover political issues when the occasion merits.
+
+The significance of these blogs is tiny now, though not so tiny. The name Howard Dean may well have faded from the 2004 presidential race but for blogs. Yet even if the number of readers is small, the reading is having an effect.
+={Dean, Howard}
+
+One direct effect is on stories that had a different life cycle in the mainstream media. The Trent Lott affair is an example. When Lott "misspoke" at a party for Senator Strom Thurmond, essentially praising Thurmond's segregationist policies, he calculated correctly that this story would disappear from the mainstream press within forty-eight hours. It did. But he didn't calculate its life cycle in blog space. The bloggers kept researching the story. Over time, more and more instances of the same "misspeaking" emerged. Finally, the story broke back into the mainstream press. In the end, Lott was forced to resign as senate majority leader.~{ Noah Shachtman, "With Incessant Postings, a Pundit Stirs the Pot," /{New York Times,}/ 16 January 2003, G5. }~
+={Lott, Trent;Thurmond, Storm;media:blog pressure on+1;Internet:news events on+4}
+
+This different cycle is possible because the same commercial pressures don't exist with blogs as with other ventures. Television and newspapers are commercial entities. They must work to keep attention. If they lose readers, they lose revenue. Like sharks, they must move on.
+={media:commercial imperatives of+1}
+
+But bloggers don't have a similar constraint. They can obsess, they can focus, they can get serious. If a particular blogger writes a particularly interesting story, more and more people link to that story. And as the number of links to a particular story increases, it rises in the ranks of stories. People read what is popular; what is popular has been selected by a very democratic process of peer-generated rankings.
+={Internet:peer-generated rankings on}
+
+There's a second way, as well, in which blogs have a different cycle from the mainstream press. As Dave Winer, one of the fathers of this movement and a software author for many decades, told me, another difference is the absence of a financial "conflict of interest." "I think you have to take the conflict of interest" out of journalism, Winer told me. "An amateur journalist simply doesn't have a conflict of interest, or the conflict of interest is so easily disclosed that you know you can sort of get it out of the way."
+={journalism+3;Winer, Dave+4}
+
+These conflicts become more important as media becomes more concentrated (more on this below). A concentrated media can hide more from the public than an unconcentrated media can - as CNN admitted it did after the Iraq war because it was afraid of the consequences to its own employees.~{ Telephone interview with David Winer, 16 April 2003. }~ It also needs to sustain a more coherent account. (In the middle of the Iraq war, I read a post on the Internet from someone who was at that time listening to a satellite uplink with a reporter in Iraq. The New York headquarters was telling the reporter over and over that her account of the war was too bleak: She needed to offer a more optimistic story. When she told New York that wasn't warranted, they told her that /{they}/ were writing "the story.")
+={CNN;media:commercial imperatives of;democracy:in technologies of expression+3;expression, technologies of:democratic+3;Iraq war;media:ownership concentration in}
+
+Blog space gives amateurs a way to enter the debate - "amateur" not in the sense of inexperienced, but in the sense of an Olympic athlete, meaning not paid by anyone to give their reports. It allows for a much broader range of input into a story, as reporting on the Columbia disaster revealed, when hundreds from across the southwest United States turned to the Internet to retell what they had seen.~{ John Schwartz, "Loss of the Shuttle: The Internet; A Wealth of Information Online," /{New York Times,}/ 2 February 2003, A28; Staci D. Kramer, "Shuttle Disaster Coverage Mixed, but Strong Overall," Online Journalism Review, 2 February 2003, available at link #10. }~ And it drives readers to read across the range of accounts and "triangulate," as Winer puts it, the truth. Blogs, Winer says, are "communicating directly with our constituency, and the middle man is out of it" - with all the benefits, and costs, that might entail.
+
+Winer is optimistic about the future of journalism infected with blogs. "It's going to become an essential skill," Winer predicts, for public figures and increasingly for private figures as well. It's not clear that "journalism" is happy about this - some journalists have been told to curtail their blogging.~{ See Michael Falcone, "Does an Editor's Pencil Ruin a Web Log?" /{New York Times,}/ 29 September 2003, C4. ("Not all news organizations have been as accepting of employees who blog. Kevin Sites, a CNN correspondent in Iraq who started a blog about his reporting of the war on March 9, stopped posting 12 days later at his bosses' request. Last year Steve Olafson, a /{Houston Chronicle}/ reporter, was fired for keeping a personal Web log, published under a pseudonym, that dealt with some of the issues and people he was covering.") }~ But it is clear that we are still in transition. "A lot of what we are doing now is warm-up exercises," Winer told me. There is a lot that must mature before this space has its mature effect. And as the inclusion of content in this space is the least infringing use of the Internet (meaning infringing on copyright), Winer said, "we will be the last thing that gets shut down."
+
+This speech affects democracy. Winer thinks that happens because "you don't have to work for somebody who controls, [for] a gate-keeper." That is true. But it affects democracy in another way as well. As more and more citizens express what they think, and defend it in writing, that will change the way people understand public issues. It is easy to be wrong and misguided in your head. It is harder when the product of your mind can be criticized by others. Of course, it is a rare human who admits that he has been persuaded that he is wrong. But it is even rarer for a human to ignore when he has been proven wrong. The writing of ideas, arguments, and criticism improves democracy. Today there are probably a couple of million blogs where such writing happens. When there are ten million, there will be something extraordinary to report.
+={democracy:public discourse in}
+
+!_ John Seely Brown
+is the chief scientist of the Xerox Corporation. His work, as his Web site describes it, is "human learning and ... the creation of knowledge ecologies for creating ... innovation."
+={Brown, John Seely+13}
+
+Brown thus looks at these technologies of digital creativity a bit differently from the perspectives I've sketched so far. I'm sure he would be excited about any technology that might improve democracy. But his real excitement comes from how these technologies affect learning.
+
+As Brown believes, we learn by tinkering. When "a lot of us grew up," he explains, that tinkering was done "on motorcycle engines, lawn-mower engines, automobiles, radios, and so on." But digital technologies enable a different kind of tinkering - with abstract ideas though in concrete form. The kids at Just Think! not only think about how a commercial portrays a politician; using digital technology, they can take the commercial apart and manipulate it, tinker with it to see how it does what it does. Digital technologies launch a kind of bricolage, or "free collage," as Brown calls it. Many get to add to or transform the tinkering of many others.
+={advertising;Just Think!+5;commercials;education:tinkering as means of+11}
+
+The best large-scale example of this kind of tinkering so far is free software or open-source software (FS/{OSS). FS}/OSS is software whose source code is shared. Anyone can download the technology that makes a FS/OSS program run. And anyone eager to learn how a particular bit of FS/OSS technology works can tinker with the code.
+={free software/open-source software (FS/OSS)}
+
+This opportunity creates a "completely new kind of learning platform," as Brown describes. "As soon as you start doing that, you ... unleash a free collage on the community, so that other people can start looking at your code, tinkering with it, trying it out, seeing if they can improve it." Each effort is a kind of apprenticeship. "Open source becomes a major apprenticeship platform."
+
+In this process, "the concrete things you tinker with are abstract. They are code." Kids are "shifting to the ability to tinker in the abstract, and this tinkering is no longer an isolated activity that you're doing in your garage. You are tinkering with a community platform. ... You are tinkering with other people's stuff. The more you tinker the more you improve." The more you improve, the more you learn.
+
+This same thing happens with content, too. And it happens in the same collaborative way when that content is part of the Web. As Brown puts it, "the Web [is] the first medium that truly honors multiple forms of intelligence." Earlier technologies, such as the typewriter or word processors, helped amplify text. But the Web amplifies much more than text. "The Web ... says if you are musical, if you are artistic, if you are visual, if you are interested in film ... [then] there is a lot you can start to do on this medium. [It] can now amplify and honor these multiple forms of intelligence."
+
+Brown is talking about what Elizabeth Daley, Stephanie Barish, and Just Think! teach: that this tinkering with culture teaches as well as creates. It develops talents differently, and it builds a different kind of recognition.
+={Barish, Stephanie;Daley, Elizabeth}
+
+Yet the freedom to tinker with these objects is not guaranteed. Indeed, as we'll see through the course of this book, that freedom is increasingly highly contested. While there's no doubt that your father had the right to tinker with the car engine, there's great doubt that your child will have the right to tinker with the images she finds all around. The law and, increasingly, technology interfere with a freedom that technology, and curiosity, would otherwise ensure.
+
+These restrictions have become the focus of researchers and scholars. Professor Ed Felten of Princeton (whom we'll see more of in chapter 10) has developed a powerful argument in favor of the "right to tinker" as it applies to computer science and to knowledge in general.~{ See, for example, Edward Felten and Andrew Appel, "Technological Access Control Interferes with Noninfringing Scholarship," /{Communications of the Association for Computer Machinery}/ 43 (2000): 9. }~ But Brown's concern is earlier, or younger, or more fundamental. It is about the learning that kids can do, or can't do, because of the law.
+={Felten, Ed}
+
+"This is where education in the twenty-first century is going," Brown explains. We need to "understand how kids who grow up digital think and want to learn."
+
+"Yet," as Brown continued, and as the balance of this book will evince, "we are building a legal system that completely suppresses the natural tendencies of today's digital kids. ... We're building an architecture that unleashes 60 percent of the brain [and] a legal system that closes down that part of the brain."
+
+We're building a technology that takes the magic of Kodak, mixes moving images and sound, and adds a space for commentary and an opportunity to spread that creativity everywhere. But we're building the law to close down that technology.
+
+"No way to run a culture," as Brewster Kahle, whom we'll meet in chapter 9, quipped to me in a rare moment of despondence.
+={Kahle, Brewster}
+
+1~ Chapter Three: Catalogs
+
+!_ In the fall of 2002,
+Jesse Jordan of Oceanside, New York, enrolled as a freshman at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, New York. His major at RPI was information technology. Though he is not a programmer, in October Jesse decided to begin to tinker with search engine technology that was available on the RPI network.
+={Jordan, Jesse;Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI)+2:computer network search engine of+10;search engines+10;university computer networks, p2p sharing on+20;Internet: search engines used on+6}
+
+RPI is one of America's foremost technological research institutions. It offers degrees in fields ranging from architecture and engineering to information sciences. More than 65 percent of its five thousand undergraduates finished in the top 10 percent of their high school class. The school is thus a perfect mix of talent and experience to imagine and then build, a generation for the network age.
+
+RPI's computer network links students, faculty, and administration to one another. It also links RPI to the Internet. Not everything available on the RPI network is available on the Internet. But the network is designed to enable students to get access to the Internet, as well as more intimate access to other members of the RPI community.
+
+Search engines are a measure of a network's intimacy. Google brought the Internet much closer to all of us by fantastically improving the quality of search on the network. Specialty search engines can do this even better. The idea of "intranet" search engines, search engines that search within the network of a particular institution, is to provide users of that institution with better access to material from that institution. Businesses do this all the time, enabling employees to have access to material that people outside the business can't get. Universities do it as well.
+={Google+1}
+
+These engines are enabled by the network technology itself. Microsoft, for example, has a network file system that makes it very easy for search engines tuned to that network to query the system for information about the publicly (within that network) available content. Jesse's search engine was built to take advantage of this technology. It used Microsoft's network file system to build an index of all the files available within the RPI network.
+={Jordan, Jesse+16;Microsoft:network file system of+1}
+
+Jesse's wasn't the first search engine built for the RPI network. Indeed, his engine was a simple modification of engines that others had built. His single most important improvement over those engines was to fix a bug within the Microsoft file-sharing system that could cause a user's computer to crash. With the engines that existed before, if you tried to access a file through a Windows browser that was on a computer that was off-line, your computer could crash. Jesse modified the system a bit to fix that problem, by adding a button that a user could click to see if the machine holding the file was still on-line.
+
+Jesse's engine went on-line in late October. Over the following six months, he continued to tweak it to improve its functionality. By March, the system was functioning quite well. Jesse had more than one million files in his directory, including every type of content that might be on users' computers.
+
+Thus the index his search engine produced included pictures, which students could use to put on their own Web sites; copies of notes or research; copies of information pamphlets; movie clips that students might have created; university brochures - basically anything that users of the RPI network made available in a public folder of their computer.
+
+But the index also included music files. In fact, one quarter of the files that Jesse's search engine listed were music files. But that means, of course, that three quarters were not, and - so that this point is absolutely clear - Jesse did nothing to induce people to put music files in their public folders. He did nothing to target the search engine to these files. He was a kid tinkering with a Google-like technology at a university where he was studying information science, and hence, tinkering was the aim. Unlike Google, or Microsoft, for that matter, he made no money from this tinkering; he was not connected to any business that would make any money from this experiment. He was a kid tinkering with technology in an environment where tinkering with technology was precisely what he was supposed to do.
+={Google;education:tinkering as means of}
+
+On April 3, 2003, Jesse was contacted by the dean of students at RPI. The dean informed Jesse that the Recording Industry Association of America, the RIAA, would be filing a lawsuit against him and three other students whom he didn't even know, two of them at other universities. A few hours later, Jesse was served with papers from the suit. As he read these papers and watched the news reports about them, he was increasingly astonished.
+={copyright infringement lawsuits:in recording industry+11;copyright infringement lawsuits:against student file sharing+11;recording industry:copyright infringement lawsuits of+11;Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA):copyright infringement lawsuits filed by+11}
+
+"It was absurd," he told me. "I don't think I did anything wrong. ... I don't think there's anything wrong with the search engine that I ran or ... what I had done to it. I mean, I hadn't modified it in any way that promoted or enhanced the work of pirates. I just modified the search engine in a way that would make it easier to use" - again, a /{search engine}/, which Jesse had not himself built, using the Windows file-sharing system, which Jesse had not himself built, to enable members of the RPI community to get access to content, which Jesse had not himself created or posted, and the vast majority of which had nothing to do with music.
+
+But the RIAA branded Jesse a pirate. They claimed he operated a network and had therefore "willfully" violated copyright laws. They demanded that he pay them the damages for his wrong. For cases of "willful infringement," the Copyright Act specifies something lawyers call "statutory damages." These damages permit a copyright owner to claim $150,000 per infringement. As the RIAA alleged more than one hundred specific copyright infringements, they therefore demanded that Jesse pay them at least $15,000,000.
+={copyright infringement lawsuits:exaggerated claims of|statutory damages of|individual defendants intimidated by+6;statutory damages;Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA):intimidation tactics of+6}
+
+Similar lawsuits were brought against three other students: one other student at RPI, one at Michigan Technical University, and one at Princeton. Their situations were similar to Jesse's. Though each case was different in detail, the bottom line in each was exactly the same: huge demands for "damages" that the RIAA claimed it was entitled to. If you added up the claims, these four lawsuits were asking courts in the United States to award the plaintiffs close to $100 /{billion}/ - six times the /{total}/ profit of the film industry in 2001.~{ Tim Goral, "Recording Industry Goes After Campus P-2-P Networks: Suit Alleges $97.8 Billion in Damages," /{Professional Media Group LCC}/ 6 (2003): 5, available at 2003 WL 55179443. }~
+={Michigan Technical University;Princeton University}
+
+Jesse called his parents. They were supportive but a bit frightened. An uncle was a lawyer. He began negotiations with the RIAA. They demanded to know how much money Jesse had. Jesse had saved $12,000 from summer jobs and other employment. They demanded $12,000 to dismiss the case.
+
+The RIAA wanted Jesse to admit to doing something wrong. He refused. They wanted him to agree to an injunction that would essentially make it impossible for him to work in many fields of technology for the rest of his life. He refused. They made him understand that this process of being sued was not going to be pleasant. (As Jesse's father recounted to me, the chief lawyer on the case, Matt Oppenheimer, told Jesse, "You don't want to pay another visit to a dentist like me.") And throughout, the RIAA insisted it would not settle the case until it took every penny Jesse had saved.
+={Oppenheimer, Matt}
+
+Jesse's family was outraged at these claims. They wanted to fight. But Jesse's uncle worked to educate the family about the nature of the American legal system. Jesse could fight the RIAA. He might even win. But the cost of fighting a lawsuit like this, Jesse was told, would be at least $250,000. If he won, he would not recover that money. If he won, he would have a piece of paper saying he had won, and a piece of paper saying he and his family were bankrupt.
+={legal system, attorney costs in}
+
+So Jesse faced a mafia-like choice: $250,000 and a chance at winning, or $12,000 and a settlement.
+
+The recording industry insists this is a matter of law and morality. Let's put the law aside for a moment and think about the morality. Where is the morality in a lawsuit like this? What is the virtue in scapegoatism? The RIAA is an extraordinarily powerful lobby. The president of the RIAA is reported to make more than $1 million a year. Artists, on the other hand, are not well paid. The average recording artist makes $45,900.~{ Occupational Employment Survey, U.S. Dept. of Labor (2001) (27-2042 - Musicians and Singers). See also National Endowment for the Arts, /{More Than One in a Blue Moon}/ (2000). }~ There are plenty of ways for the RIAA to affect and direct policy. So where is the morality in taking money from a student for running a search engine?~{ Douglas Lichtman makes a related point in "KaZaA and Punishment," /{Wall Street Journal,}/ 10 September 2003, A24. }~
+={artists:recording industry payments to;recording industry:artist remuneration in;Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA):lobbying power of}
+
+On June 23, Jesse wired his savings to the lawyer working for the RIAA. The case against him was then dismissed. And with this, this kid who had tinkered a computer into a $15 million lawsuit became an activist:
+
+_1 I was definitely not an activist [before]. I never really meant to be an activist. ... [But] I've been pushed into this. In no way did I ever foresee anything like this, but I think it's just completely absurd what the RIAA has done."
+
+Jesse's parents betray a certain pride in their reluctant activist. As his father told me, Jesse "considers himself very conservative, and so do I. ... He's not a tree hugger. . . . I think it's bizarre that they would pick on him. But he wants to let people know that they're sending the wrong message. And he wants to correct the record."
+
+1~ Chapter Four: "Pirates"
+={piracy:in development of content industry+43}
+
+!_ If "piracy" means
+using the creative property of others without their permission - if "if value, then right" is true - then the history of the content industry is a history of piracy. Every important sector of "big media" today - film, records, radio, and cable TV - was born of a kind of piracy so defined. The consistent story is how last generation's pirates join this generation's country club - until now.
+={creative property: "if value, then right" theory of;if value, then right, theory}
+
+% note bad sort: ={"if value, then right" theory}
+
+2~ Film
+
+The film industry of Hollywood was built by fleeing pirates.~{ I am grateful to Peter DiMauro for pointing me to this extraordinary history. See also Siva Vaidhyanathan, /{Copyrights and Copywrongs,}/ 87-93, which details Edison's "adventures" with copyright and patent. }~ Creators and directors migrated from the East Coast to California in the early twentieth century in part to escape controls that patents granted the inventor of filmmaking, Thomas Edison. These controls were exercised through a monopoly "trust," the Motion Pictures Patents Company, and were based on Thomas Edison's creative property - patents. Edison formed the MPPC to exercise the rights this creative property gave him, and the MPPC was serious about the control it demanded. As one commentator tells one part of the story,
+={Film industry:patent piracy at the inception of+4;Motion Pictures Patents Company (MPPC)+2;Hollywood film industry+3;patents:on film technology+4}
+
+_1 A January 1909 deadline was set for all companies to comply with the license. By February, unlicensed outlaws, who referred to themselves as independents protested the trust and carried on business without submitting to the Edison monopoly. In the summer of 1909 the independent movement was in full-swing, with producers and theater owners using illegal equipment and imported film stock to create their own underground market.
+
+_1 With the country experiencing a tremendous expansion in the number of nickelodeons, the Patents Company reacted to the independent movement by forming a strong-arm subsidiary known as the General Film Company to block the entry of non-licensed independents. With coercive tactics that have become legendary, General Film confiscated unlicensed equipment, discontinued product supply to theaters which showed unlicensed films, and effectively monopolized distribution with the acquisition of all U.S. film exchanges, except for the one owned by the independent William Fox who defied the Trust even after his license was revoked."~{ J. A. Aberdeen, /{Hollywood Renegades: The Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers}/ (Cobblestone Entertainment, 2000) and expanded texts posted at "The Edison Movie Monopoly: The Motion Picture Patents Company vs. the Independent Outlaws," available at link #11. For a discussion of the economic motive behind both these limits and the limits imposed by Victor on phonographs, see Randal C. Picker, "From Edison to the Broadcast Flag: Mechanisms of Consent and Refusal and the Propertization of Copyright" (September 2002), University of Chicago Law School, James M. Olin Program in Law and Economics, Working Paper No. 159. }~
+={Fox, William; General Film Company}
+
+The Napsters of those days, the "independents," were companies like Fox. And no less than today, these independents were vigorously resisted. "Shooting was disrupted by machinery stolen, and 'accidents' resulting in loss of negatives, equipment, buildings and sometimes life and limb frequently occurred."~{ Marc Wanamaker, "The First Studios," /{The Silents Majority,}/ archived at link #12. }~ That led the independents to flee the East Coast. California was remote enough from Edison's reach that film- makers there could pirate his inventions without fear of the law. And the leaders of Hollywood filmmaking, Fox most prominently, did just that.
+={Edison, Thomas+5}
+
+Of course, California grew quickly, and the effective enforcement of federal law eventually spread west. But because patents grant the patent holder a truly "limited" monopoly (just seventeen years at that time), by the time enough federal marshals appeared, the patents had expired. A new industry had been born, in part from the piracy of Edison's creative property.
+={patents:duration of}
+
+2~ Recorded Music
+={composers, copyright protections of+10;copyright law:on music recordings+10;recording industry:copyright protections in+10|piracy in+10}
+
+The record industry was born of another kind of piracy, though to see how requires a bit of detail about the way the law regulates music.
+
+At the time that Edison and Henri Fourneaux invented machines for reproducing music (Edison the phonograph, Fourneaux the player piano), the law gave composers the exclusive right to control copies of their music and the exclusive right to control public performances of their music. In other words, in 1900, if I wanted a copy of Phil Russel's 1899 hit "Happy Mose," the law said I would have to pay for the right to get a copy of the musical score, and I would also have to pay for the right to perform it publicly.
+={Fourneaux, Henri+1;phonograph+2;player pianos+1;Russel, Phil}
+
+But what if I wanted to record "Happy Mose," using Edison's phonograph or Fourneaux's player piano? Here the law stumbled. It was clear enough that I would have to buy any copy of the musical score that I performed in making this recording. And it was clear enough that I would have to pay for any public performance of the work I was recording. But it wasn't totally clear that I would have to pay for a "public performance" if I recorded the song in my own house (even today, you don't owe the Beatles anything if you sing their songs in the shower), or if I recorded the song from memory (copies in your brain are not - yet - regulated by copyright law). So if I simply sang the song into a recording device in the privacy of my own home, it wasn't clear that I owed the composer anything. And more importantly, it wasn't clear whether I owed the composer anything if I then made copies of those recordings. Because of this gap in the law, then, I could effectively pirate someone else's song without paying its composer anything.
+
+The composers (and publishers) were none too happy about this capacity to pirate. As South Dakota senator Alfred Kittredge put it,
+={Kittredge, Alfred+1;music publishing+2}
+
+_1 Imagine the injustice of the thing. A composer writes a song or an opera. A publisher buys at great expense the rights to the same and copyrights it. Along come the phonographic companies and companies who cut music rolls and deliberately steal the work of the brain of the composer and publisher without any regard for [their] rights.~{ To Amend and Consolidate the Acts Respecting Copyright: Hearings on S. 6330 and H.R. 19853 Before the (Joint) Committees on Patents, 59th Cong. 59, 1st sess. (1906) (statement of Senator Alfred B. Kittredge, of South Dakota, chairman), reprinted in /{Legislative History of the 1909 Copyright Act,}/ E. Fulton Brylawski and Abe Goldman, eds. (South Hackensack, N.J.: Rothman Reprints, 1976). }~
+={copyright law:authors vs. composers+7;creative property:of authors vs. composers+7;recording industry:composers' rights vs. producers' rights in}
+
+The innovators who developed the technology to record other people's works were "sponging upon the toil, the work, the talent, and genius of American composers,"~{ To Amend and Consolidate the Acts Respecting Copyright, 223 (statement of Nathan Burkan, attorney for the Music Publishers Association). }~ and the "music publishing industry" was thereby "at the complete mercy of this one pirate."~{ To Amend and Consolidate the Acts Respecting Copyright, 226 (statement of Nathan Burkan, attorney for the Music Publishers Association). }~ As John Philip Sousa put it, in as direct a way as possible, "When they make money out of my pieces, I want a share of it."~{ To Amend and Consolidate the Acts Respecting Copyright, 23 (statement of John Philip Sousa, composer). }~
+={Sousa, John Philip}
+
+These arguments have familiar echoes in the wars of our day. So, too, do the arguments on the other side. The innovators who developed the player piano argued that "it is perfectly demonstrable that the introduction of automatic music players has not deprived any composer of anything he had before their introduction." Rather, the machines increased the sales of sheet music.~{ To Amend and Consolidate the Acts Respecting Copyright, 283-84 (statement of Albert Walker, representative of the Auto-Music Perforating Company of New York). }~ In any case, the innovators argued, the job of Congress was "to consider first the interest of [the public], whom they represent, and whose servants they are." "All talk about 'theft,'" the general counsel of the American Graphophone Company wrote, "is the merest claptrap, for there exists no property in ideas musical, literary or artistic, except as defined by statute."~{ To Amend and Consolidate the Acts Respecting Copyright, 376 (prepared memorandum of Philip Mauro, general patent counsel of the American Graphophone Company Association). }~
+={American Graphophone Company;player pianos;sheet music;Congress, U.S.:on copyright laws+4|on recording industry+4;copyright law:statutory licenses in+6;recording industry:statutory license system in+6}
+
+The law soon resolved this battle in favor of the composer /{and}/ the recording artist. Congress amended the law to make sure that composers would be paid for the "mechanical reproductions" of their music. But rather than simply granting the composer complete control over the right to make mechanical reproductions, Congress gave recording artists a right to record the music, at a price set by Congress, once the composer allowed it to be recorded once. This is the part of copyright law that makes cover songs possible. Once a composer authorizes a recording of his song, others are free to record the same song, so long as they pay the original composer a fee set by the law.
+={cover songs}
+
+American law ordinarily calls this a "compulsory license," but I will refer to it as a "statutory license." A statutory license is a license whose key terms are set by law. After Congress's amendment of the Copyright Act in 1909, record companies were free to distribute copies of recordings so long as they paid the composer (or copyright holder) the fee set by the statute.
+={compulsory license+4;statutory licenses+4}
+
+This is an exception within the law of copyright. When John Grisham writes a novel, a publisher is free to publish that novel only if Grisham gives the publisher permission. Grisham, in turn, is free to charge whatever he wants for that permission. The price to publish Grisham is thus set by Grisham, and copyright law ordinarily says you have no permission to use Grisham's work except with permission of Grisham.
+={Grisham, John+1}
+
+But the law governing recordings gives recording artists less. And thus, in effect, the law /{subsidizes}/ the recording industry through a kind of piracy - by giving recording artists a weaker right than it otherwise gives creative authors. The Beatles have less control over their creative work than Grisham does. And the beneficiaries of this less control are the recording industry and the public. The recording industry gets something of value for less than it otherwise would pay; the public gets access to a much wider range of musical creativity. Indeed, Congress was quite explicit about its reasons for granting this right. Its fear was the monopoly power of rights holders, and that that power would stifle follow-on creativity.~{ Copyright Law Revision: Hearings on S. 2499, S. 2900, H.R. 243, and H.R. 11794 Before the ( Joint) Committee on Patents, 60th Cong., 1st sess., 217 (1908) (statement of Senator Reed Smoot, chairman), reprinted in /{Legislative History of the 1909 Copyright Act,}/ E. Fulton Brylawski and Abe Goldman, eds. (South Hackensack, N.J.: Rothman Reprints, 1976). }~
+={Beatles}
+
+While the recording industry has been quite coy about this recently, historically it has been quite a supporter of the statutory license for records. As a 1967 report from the House Committee on the Judiciary relates,
+
+_1 the record producers argued vigorously that the compulsory license system must be retained. They asserted that the record industry is a half-billion-dollar business of great economic importance in the United States and throughout the world; records today are the principal means of disseminating music, and this creates special problems, since performers need unhampered access to musical material on nondiscriminatory terms. Historically, the record producers pointed out, there were no recording rights before 1909 and the 1909 statute adopted the compulsory license as a deliberate anti-monopoly condition on the grant of these rights. They argue that the result has been an outpouring of recorded music, with the public being given lower prices, improved quality, and a greater choice."~{ Copyright Law Revision: Report to Accompany H.R. 2512, House Committee on the Judiciary, 90th Cong., 1st sess., House Document no. 83, 66 (8 March 1967). I am grateful to Glenn Brown for drawing my attention to this report. }~
+
+By limiting the rights musicians have, by partially pirating their creative work, the record producers, and the public, benefit.
+
+2~ Radio
+={recording industry:radio broadcast and+7}
+
+Radio was also born of piracy.
+
+When a radio station plays a record on the air, that constitutes a "public performance" of the composer's work.~{ See 17 /{United States Code,}/ sections 106 and 110. At the beginning, record companies printed "Not Licensed for Radio Broadcast" and other messages purporting to restrict the ability to play a record on a radio station. Judge Learned Hand rejected the argument that a warning attached to a record might restrict the rights of the radio station. See /{RCA Manufacturing Co. v. Whiteman,}/ 114 F. 2d 86 (2nd Cir. 1940). See also Randal C. Picker, "From Edison to the Broadcast Flag: Mechanisms of Consent and Refusal and the Propertization of Copyright," /{University of Chicago Law Review}/ 70 (2003): 281. }~ As I described above, the law gives the composer (or copyright holder) an exclusive right to public performances of his work. The radio station thus owes the composer money for that performance.
+
+But when the radio station plays a record, it is not only performing a copy of the /{composer's}/ work. The radio station is also performing a copy of the /{recording artist's}/ work. It's one thing to have "Happy Birthday" sung on the radio by the local children's choir; it's quite another to have it sung by the Rolling Stones or Lyle Lovett. The recording artist is adding to the value of the composition performed on the radio station. And if the law were perfectly consistent, the radio station would have to pay the recording artist for his work, just as it pays the composer of the music for his work.
+={artists:recording industry payments to+3;radio:music recordings played on+3;recording industry:artist remuneration in+3}
+
+But it doesn't. Under the law governing radio performances, the radio station does not have to pay the recording artist. The radio station need only pay the composer. The radio station thus gets a bit of something for nothing. It gets to perform the recording artist's work for free, even if it must pay the composer something for the privilege of playing the song.
+
+This difference can be huge. Imagine you compose a piece of music. Imagine it is your first. You own the exclusive right to authorize public performances of that music. So if Madonna wants to sing your song in public, she has to get your permission.
+={Madonna+1}
+
+Imagine she does sing your song, and imagine she likes it a lot. She then decides to make a recording of your song, and it becomes a top hit. Under our law, every time a radio station plays your song, you get some money. But Madonna gets nothing, save the indirect effect on the sale of her CDs. The public performance of her recording is not a "protected" right. The radio station thus gets to /{pirate}/ the value of Madonna's work without paying her anything.
+
+No doubt, one might argue that, on balance, the recording artists benefit. On average, the promotion they get is worth more than the performance rights they give up. Maybe. But even if so, the law ordinarily gives the creator the right to make this choice. By making the choice for him or her, the law gives the radio station the right to take something for nothing.
+
+2~ Cable TV
+={cable television+12}
+
+Cable TV was also born of a kind of piracy.
+
+When cable entrepreneurs first started wiring communities with cable television in 1948, most refused to pay broadcasters for the content that they echoed to their customers. Even when the cable companies started selling access to television broadcasts, they refused to pay for what they sold. Cable companies were thus Napsterizing broadcasters' content, but more egregiously than anything Napster ever did - Napster never charged for the content it enabled others to give away.
+={Napster;television:cable vs. broadcast+10}
+
+Broadcasters and copyright owners were quick to attack this theft. Rosel Hyde, chairman of the FCC, viewed the practice as a kind of "unfair and potentially destructive competition."~{ Copyright Law Revision - CATV: Hearing on S. 1006 Before the Subcommittee on Patents, Trademarks, and Copyrights of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 89th Cong., 2nd sess., 78 (1966) (statement of Rosel H. Hyde, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission). }~ There may have been a "public interest" in spreading the reach of cable TV, but as Douglas Anello, general counsel to the National Association of Broadcasters, asked Senator Quentin Burdick during testimony, "Does public interest dictate that you use somebody else's property?"~{ Copyright Law Revision - CATV, 116 (statement of Douglas A. Anello, general counsel of the National Association of Broadcasters). }~ As another broadcaster put it,
+={Anello, Douglas;Burdick, Quentin;Hyde, Rosel;copyright law:on cable television rebroadcasting+9}
+
+_1 The extraordinary thing about the CATV business is that it is the only business I know of where the product that is being sold is not paid for."~{ Copyright Law Revision - CATV, 126 (statement of Ernest W. Jennes, general counsel of the Association of Maximum Service Telecasters, Inc.). }~
+
+Again, the demand of the copyright holders seemed reasonable enough:
+
+_1 All we are asking for is a very simple thing, that people who now take our property for nothing pay for it. We are trying to stop piracy and I don't think there is any lesser word to describe it. I think there are harsher words which would fit it."~{ Copyright Law Revision - CATV, 169 (joint statement of Arthur B. Krim, president of United Artists Corp., and John Sinn, president of United Artists Television, Inc.). }~
+
+These were "free-ride[rs]," Screen Actor's Guild president Charlton Heston said, who were "depriving actors of compensation."~{ Copyright Law Revision - CATV, 209 (statement of Charlton Heston, president of the Screen Actors Guild). }~
+={Screen Actors Guild;Heston, Charlton}
+
+But again, there was another side to the debate. As Assistant Attorney General Edwin Zimmerman put it,
+={Zimmerman, Edwin+1}
+
+_1 Our point here is that unlike the problem of whether you have any copyright protection at all, the problem here is whether copyright holders who are already compensated, who already have a monopoly, should be permitted to extend that monopoly. ... The question here is how much compensation they should have and how far back they should carry their right to compensation."~{ Copyright Law Revision - CATV, 216 (statement of Edwin M. Zimmerman, acting assistant attorney general). }~
+
+Copyright owners took the cable companies to court. Twice the Supreme Court held that the cable companies owed the copyright owners nothing.
+={Supreme Court, U.S.:on cable television}
+
+It took Congress almost thirty years before it resolved the question of whether cable companies had to pay for the content they "pirated." In the end, Congress resolved this question in the same way that it resolved the question about record players and player pianos. Yes, cable companies would have to pay for the content that they broadcast; but the price they would have to pay was not set by the copyright owner. The price was set by law, so that the broadcasters couldn't exercise veto power over the emerging technologies of cable. Cable companies thus built their empire in part upon a "piracy" of the value created by broadcasters' content.
+={Congress, U.S.:on cable television|on copyright laws}
+
+!_ These separate stories
+sing a common theme. If "piracy" means using value from someone else's creative property without permission from that creator - as it is increasingly described today~{ See, for example, National Music Publisher's Association, /{The Engine of Free Expression: Copyright on the Internet - The Myth of Free Information,}/ available at link #13. "The threat of piracy"the use of someone else's creative work without permission or compensation - has grown with the Internet." }~ - then /{every}/ industry affected by copyright today is the product and beneficiary of a certain kind of piracy. Film, records, radio, cable TV. ... The list is long and could well be expanded. Every generation welcomes the pirates from the last. Every generation - until now.
+
+1~ Chapter Five: "Piracy"
+={piracy:commercial+20}
+
+!_ There is piracy
+of copyrighted material. Lots of it. This piracy comes in many forms. The most significant is commercial piracy, the unauthorized taking of other people's content within a commercial context. Despite the many justifications that are offered in its defense, this taking is wrong. No one should condone it, and the law should stop it.
+
+But as well as copy-shop piracy, there is another kind of "taking" that is more directly related to the Internet. That taking, too, seems wrong to many, and it is wrong much of the time. Before we paint this taking "piracy," however, we should understand its nature a bit more. For the harm of this taking is significantly more ambiguous than outright copying, and the law should account for that ambiguity, as it has so often done in the past.
+
+2~ Piracy I
+
+All across the world, but especially in Asia and Eastern Europe, there are businesses that do nothing but take others people's copyrighted content, copy it, and sell it - all without the permission of a copyright owner. The recording industry estimates that it loses about $4.6 billion every year to physical piracy~{ See IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry), /{The Recording Industry Commercial Piracy Report 2003,}/ July 2003, available at link #14. See also Ben Hunt, "Companies Warned on Music Piracy Risk," /{Financial Times,}/ 14 February 2003, 11. }~ (that works out to one in three CDs sold worldwide). The MPAA estimates that it loses $3 billion annually worldwide to piracy.
+={Asia, commercial piracy in+3;piracy:in Asia+3;CDs:foreign piracy of+3;copyright law:international compliance with+6;international law+5;piracy:international+7;recording industry:international piracy in;Motion Pictures Patents Company (MPPC)}
+
+% check reference, MPAA appears to be indexed to Motion Pictures Patents Company (MPPC) which is referred to elsewhere in text as "Motion Pictures _Patent_ Company"
+
+This is piracy plain and simple. Nothing in the argument of this book, nor in the argument that most people make when talking about the subject of this book, should draw into doubt this simple point: This piracy is wrong.
+
+Which is not to say that excuses and justifications couldn't be made for it. We could, for example, remind ourselves that for the first one hundred years of the American Republic, America did not honor foreign copyrights. We were born, in this sense, a pirate nation. It might therefore seem hypocritical for us to insist so strongly that other developing nations treat as wrong what we, for the first hundred years of our existence, treated as right.
+={developing countries, foreign patent costs in+3}
+
+That excuse isn't terribly strong. Technically, our law did not ban the taking of foreign works. It explicitly limited itself to American works. Thus the American publishers who published foreign works without the permission of foreign authors were not violating any rule. The copy shops in Asia, by contrast, are violating Asian law. Asian law does protect foreign copyrights, and the actions of the copy shops violate that law. So the wrong of piracy that they engage in is not just a moral wrong, but a legal wrong, and not just an internationally legal wrong, but a locally legal wrong as well.
+
+True, these local rules have, in effect, been imposed upon these countries. No country can be part of the world economy and choose not to protect copyright internationally. We may have been born a pirate nation, but we will not allow any other nation to have a similar childhood.
+
+If a country is to be treated as a sovereign, however, then its laws are its laws regardless of their source. The international law under which these nations live gives them some opportunities to escape the burden of intellectual property law.~{ See Peter Drahos with John Braithwaite, /{Information Feudalism: Who Owns the Knowledge Economy?}/ (New York: The New Press, 2003), 10-13, 209. The Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement obligates member nations to create administrative and enforcement mechanisms for intellectual property rights, a costly proposition for developing countries. Additionally, patent rights may lead to higher prices for staple industries such as agriculture. Critics of TRIPS question the disparity between burdens imposed upon developing countries and benefits conferred to industrialized nations. TRIPS does permit governments to use patents for public, noncommercial uses without first obtaining the patent holder's permission. Developing nations may be able to use this to gain the benefits of foreign patents at lower prices. This is a promising strategy for developing nations within the TRIPS framework. }~ In my view, more developing nations should take advantage of that opportunity, but when they don't, then their laws should be respected. And under the laws of these nations, this piracy is wrong.
+
+Alternatively, we could try to excuse this piracy by noting that in any case, it does no harm to the industry. The Chinese who get access to American CDs at 50 cents a copy are not people who would have bought those American CDs at $15 a copy. So no one really has any less money than they otherwise would have had.~{ For an analysis of the economic impact of copying technology, see Stan Liebowitz, /{Rethinking the Network Economy}/ (New York: Amacom, 2002), 144-90. "In some instances ... the impact of piracy on the copyright holder's ability to appropriate the value of the work will be negligible. One obvious instance is the case where the individual engaging in pirating would not have purchased an original even if pirating were not an option." Ibid., 149. }~
+={Asia, commercial piracy in;piracy:in Asia;CDs:foreign piracy of;copyright law:statutory licenses in}
+
+This is often true (though I have friends who have purchased many thousands of pirated DVDs who certainly have enough money to pay for the content they have taken), and it does mitigate to some degree the harm caused by such taking. Extremists in this debate love to say, "You wouldn't go into Barnes & Noble and take a book off of the shelf without paying; why should it be any different with on-line music?" The difference is, of course, that when you take a book from Barnes & Noble, it has one less book to sell. By contrast, when you take an MP3 from a computer network, there is not one less CD that can be sold. The physics of piracy of the intangible are different from the physics of piracy of the tangible.
+={DVDs:piracy of;piracy:of intangible property}
+
+This argument is still very weak. However, although copyright is a property right of a very special sort, it /{is}/ a property right. Like all property rights, the copyright gives the owner the right to decide the terms under which content is shared. If the copyright owner doesn't want to sell, she doesn't have to. There are exceptions: important statutory licenses that apply to copyrighted content regardless of the wish of the copyright owner. Those licenses give people the right to "take" copyrighted content whether or not the copyright owner wants to sell. But where the law does not give people the right to take content, it is wrong to take that content even if the wrong does no harm. If we have a property system, and that system is properly balanced to the technology of a time, then it is wrong to take property without the permission of a property owner. That is exactly what "property" means.
+={statutory licenses}
+
+Finally, we could try to excuse this piracy with the argument that the piracy actually helps the copyright owner. When the Chinese "steal" Windows, that makes the Chinese dependent on Microsoft. Microsoft loses the value of the software that was taken. But it gains users who are used to life in the Microsoft world. Over time, as the nation grows more wealthy, more and more people will buy software rather than steal it. And hence over time, because that buying will benefit Microsoft, Microsoft benefits from the piracy. If instead of pirating Microsoft Windows, the Chinese used the free GNU/Linux operating system, then these Chinese users would not eventually be buying Microsoft. Without piracy, then, Microsoft would lose.
+={Asia, commercial piracy in;piracy:in Asia;free software/open-source software (FS/OSS);GNU/Linux operating system;Linux operating system;Microsoft:competitive strategies of;Windows;Microsoft:international software piracy of|Windows operating system of}
+
+This argument, too, is somewhat true. The addiction strategy is a good one. Many businesses practice it. Some thrive because of it. Law students, for example, are given free access to the two largest legal databases. The companies marketing both hope the students will become so used to their service that they will want to use it and not the other when they become lawyers (and must pay high subscription fees).
+={law:databases of case reports in}
+
+Still, the argument is not terribly persuasive. We don't give the alcoholic a defense when he steals his first beer, merely because that will make it more likely that he will buy the next three. Instead, we ordinarily allow businesses to decide for themselves when it is best to give their product away. If Microsoft fears the competition of GNU/Linux, then Microsoft can give its product away, as it did, for example, with Internet Explorer to fight Netscape. A property right means giving the property owner the right to say who gets access to what - at least ordinarily. And if the law properly balances the rights of the copyright owner with the rights of access, then violating the law is still wrong.
+={Netscape;Internet Explorer}
+
+Thus, while I understand the pull of these justifications for piracy, and I certainly see the motivation, in my view, in the end, these efforts at justifying commercial piracy simply don't cut it. This kind of piracy is rampant and just plain wrong. It doesn't transform the content it steals; it doesn't transform the market it competes in. It merely gives someone access to something that the law says he should not have. Nothing has changed to draw that law into doubt. This form of piracy is flat out wrong.
+
+But as the examples from the four chapters that introduced this part suggest, even if some piracy is plainly wrong, not all "piracy" is. Or at least, not all "piracy" is wrong if that term is understood in the way it is increasingly used today. Many kinds of "piracy" are useful and productive, to produce either new content or new ways of doing business. Neither our tradition nor any tradition has ever banned all "piracy" in that sense of the term.
+
+This doesn't mean that there are no questions raised by the latest piracy concern, peer-to-peer file sharing. But it does mean that we need to understand the harm in peer-to-peer sharing a bit more before we condemn it to the gallows with the charge of piracy.
+={peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing:piracy vs.;piracy:profit reduction as criterion of|p2p file sharing vs.}
+
+For (1) like the original Hollywood, p2p sharing escapes an overly controlling industry; and (2) like the original recording industry, it simply exploits a new way to distribute content; but (3) unlike cable TV, no one is selling the content that is shared on p2p services.
+
+These differences distinguish p2p sharing from true piracy. They should push us to find a way to protect artists while enabling this sharing to survive.
+
+2~ Piracy II
+={peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing:piracy vs.+53;piracy:profit reduction as criterion of+23|p2p file sharing vs.+53}
+
+The key to the "piracy" that the law aims to quash is a use that "rob[s] the author of [his] profit."~{ /{Bach v. Longman,}/ 98 Eng. Rep. 1274 (1777). }~ This means we must determine whether and how much p2p sharing harms before we know how strongly the law should seek to either prevent it or find an alternative to assure the author of his profit.
+
+Peer-to-peer sharing was made famous by Napster. But the inventors of the Napster technology had not made any major technological innovations. Like every great advance in innovation on the Internet (and, arguably, off the Internet as well~{ See Clayton M. Christensen, /{The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary National Bestseller That Changed the Way We Do Business}/ (New York: HarperBusiness, 2000). Professor Christensen examines why companies that give rise to and dominate a product area are frequently unable to come up with the most creative, paradigm-shifting uses for their own products. This job usually falls to outside innovators, who reassemble existing technology in inventive ways. For a discussion of Christensen's ideas, see Lawrence Lessig, /{Future,}/ 89-92, 139. }~), Shawn Fanning and crew had simply put together components that had been developed independently.
+={Fanning, Shawn;innovation;Internet:music files downloaded from+8;peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing:participation levels of;technology:innovative improvements in;Napster+1}
+
+The result was spontaneous combustion. Launched in July 1999, Napster amassed over 10 million users within nine months. After eighteen months, there were close to 80 million registered users of the system.~{ See Carolyn Lochhead, "Silicon Valley Dream, Hollywood Nightmare," /{San Francisco Chronicle,}/ 24 September 2002, A1; "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide," /{New Scientist,}/ 6 July 2002, 42; Benny Evangelista, "Napster Names CEO, Secures New Financing," /{San Francisco Chronicle,}/ 23 May 2003, C1; "Napster's Wake-Up Call," /{Economist,}/ 24 June 2000, 23; John Naughton, "Hollywood at War with the Internet" (London) /{Times,}/ 26 July 2002, 18. }~ Courts quickly shut Napster down, but other services emerged to take its place. (Kazaa is currently the most popular p2p service. It boasts over 100 million members.) These services' systems are different architecturally, though not very different in function: Each enables users to make content available to any number of other users. With a p2p system, you can share your favorite songs with your best friend - or your 20,000 best friends.
+={Kazaa;Napster:number of registrations on|replacement of}
+
+According to a number of estimates, a huge proportion of Americans have tasted file-sharing technology. A study by Ipsos-Insight in September 2002 estimated that 60 million Americans had downloaded music - 28 percent of Americans older than 12.~{ See Ipsos-Insight, /{TEMPO: Keeping Pace with Online Music Distribution}/ (September 2002), reporting that 28 percent of Americans aged twelve and older have downloaded music off of the Internet and 30 percent have listened to digital music files stored on their computers. }~ A survey by the NPD group quoted in /{The New York Times}/ estimated that 43 million citizens used file-sharing networks to exchange content in May 2003.~{ Amy Harmon, "Industry Offers a Carrot in Online Music Fight," /{New York Times,}/ 6 June 2003, A1. }~ The vast majority of these are not kids. Whatever the actual figure, a massive quantity of content is being "taken" on these networks. The ease and inexpensiveness of file-sharing networks have inspired millions to enjoy music in a way that they hadn't before.
+
+Some of this enjoying involves copyright infringement. Some of it does not. And even among the part that is technically copyright infringement, calculating the actual harm to copyright owners is more complicated than one might think. So consider - a bit more carefully than the polarized voices around this debate usually do - the kinds of sharing that file sharing enables, and the kinds of harm it entails.
+
+File sharers share different kinds of content. We can divide these different kinds into four types.
+={peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing:four types of+4;Napster:range of content on}
+
+_1 A. There are some who use sharing networks as substitutes for purchasing content. Thus, when a new Madonna CD is released, rather than buying the CD, these users simply take it. We might quibble about whether everyone who takes it would actually have bought it if sharing didn't make it available for free. Most probably wouldn't have, but clearly there are some who would. The latter are the target of category A: users who download instead of purchasing.
+
+_1 B. There are some who use sharing networks to sample music before purchasing it. Thus, a friend sends another friend an MP3 of an artist he's not heard of. The other friend then buys CDs by that artist. This is a kind of targeted advertising, quite likely to succeed. If the friend recommending the album gains nothing from a bad recommendation, then one could expect that the recommendations will actually be quite good. The net effect of this sharing could increase the quantity of music purchased.
+={advertising}
+
+_1 C. There are many who use sharing networks to get access to copyrighted content that is no longer sold or that they would not have purchased because the transaction costs off the Net are too high. This use of sharing networks is among the most rewarding for many. Songs that were part of your childhood but have long vanished from the marketplace magically appear again on the network. (One friend told me that when she discovered Napster, she spent a solid weekend "recalling" old songs. She was astonished at the range and mix of content that was available.) For content not sold, this is still technically a violation of copyright, though because the copyright owner is not selling the content anymore, the economic harm is zero - the same harm that occurs when I sell my collection of 1960s 45-rpm records to a local collector.
+={recording industry:out-of-print music of}
+
+_1 D. Finally, there are many who use sharing networks to get access to content that is not copyrighted or that the copyright owner wants to give away.
+
+How do these different types of sharing balance out?
+
+Let's start with some simple but important points. From the perspective of the law, only type D sharing is clearly legal. From the perspective of economics, only type A sharing is clearly harmful.~{ See Liebowitz, /{Rethinking the Network Economy,}/ 148-49. }~ Type B sharing is illegal but plainly beneficial. Type C sharing is illegal, yet good for society (since more exposure to music is good) and harmless to the artist (since the work is not otherwise available). So how sharing matters on balance is a hard question to answer - and certainly much more difficult than the current rhetoric around the issue suggests.
+
+Whether on balance sharing is harmful depends importantly on how harmful type A sharing is. Just as Edison complained about Hollywood, composers complained about piano rolls, recording artists complained about radio, and broadcasters complained about cable TV, the music industry complains that type A sharing is a kind of "theft" that is "devastating" the industry.
+={Edison, Thomas}
+
+While the numbers do suggest that sharing is harmful, how harmful is harder to reckon. It has long been the recording industry's practice to blame technology for any drop in sales. The history of cassette recording is a good example. As a study by Cap Gemini Ernst & Young put it, "Rather than exploiting this new, popular technology, the labels fought it."~{ See Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, /{Technology Evolution and the Music Industry's Business Model Crisis}/ (2003), 3. This report describes the music industry's effort to stigmatize the budding practice of cassette taping in the 1970s, including an advertising campaign featuring a cassette-shape skull and the caption "Home taping is killing music." \\ At the time digital audio tape became a threat, the Office of Technical Assessment conducted a survey of consumer behavior. In 1988, 40 percent of consumers older than ten had taped music to a cassette format. U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, /{Copyright and Home Copying: Technology Challenges the Law,}/ OTA-CIT-422 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, October 1989), 145-56. }~ The labels claimed that every album taped was an album unsold, and when record sales fell by 11.4 percent in 1981, the industry claimed that its point was proved. Technology was the problem, and banning or regulating technology was the answer.
+={cassette recording+1;recording industry:new technology opposed by+2;technology:established industries threatened by changes in+2}
+
+Yet soon thereafter, and before Congress was given an opportunity to enact regulation, MTV was launched, and the industry had a record turnaround. "In the end," Cap Gemini concludes, "the 'crisis' ... was not the fault of the tapers" who did not [stop after MTV came into being] - but had to a large extent resulted from stagnation in musical innovation at the major labels."~{ U.S. Congress, /{Copyright and Home Copying,}/ 4. }~
+={MTV}
+
+But just because the industry was wrong before does not mean it is wrong today. To evaluate the real threat that p2p sharing presents to the industry in particular, and society in general - or at least the society that inherits the tradition that gave us the film industry, the record industry, the radio industry, cable TV, and the VCR - the question is not simply whether type A sharing is harmful. The question is also /{how}/ harmful type A sharing is, and how beneficial the other types of sharing are.
+
+We start to answer this question by focusing on the net harm, from the standpoint of the industry as a whole, that sharing networks cause. The "net harm" to the industry as a whole is the amount by which type A sharing exceeds type B. If the record companies sold more records through sampling than they lost through substitution, then sharing networks would actually benefit music companies on balance. They would therefore have little /{static}/ reason to resist them.
+
+Could that be true? Could the industry as a whole be gaining because of file sharing? Odd as that might sound, the data about CD sales actually suggest it might be close.
+={CDs:sales levels of+3;recording industry:CD sales level in+3;Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA):on CD sales decline+3}
+
+In 2002, the RIAA reported that CD sales had fallen by 8.9 percent, from 882 million to 803 million units; revenues fell 6.7 percent.~{ See Recording Industry Association of America, /{2002 Yearend Statistics,}/ available at link #15. A later report indicates even greater losses. See Recording Industry Association of America, /{Some Facts About Music Piracy,}/ 25 June 2003, available at link #16: "In the past four years, unit shipments of recorded music have fallen by 26 percent from 1.16 billion units in 1999 to 860 million units in 2002 in the United States (based on units shipped). In terms of sales, revenues are down 14 percent, from $14.6 billion in 1999 to $12.6 billion last year (based on U.S. dollar value of shipments). The music industry worldwide has gone from a $39 billion industry in 2000 down to a $32 billion industry in 2002 (based on U.S. dollar value of shipments)." }~ This confirms a trend over the past few years. The RIAA blames Internet piracy for the trend, though there are many other causes that could account for this drop. SoundScan, for example, reports a more than 20 percent drop in the number of CDs released since 1999. That no doubt accounts for some of the decrease in sales. Rising prices could account for at least some of the loss. "From 1999 to 2001, the average price of a CD rose 7.2 percent, from $13.04 to $14.19."~{ Jane Black, "Big Music's Broken Record," BusinessWeek online, 13 February 2003, available at link #17. }~ Competition from other forms of media could also account for some of the decline. As Jane Black of /{BusinessWeek}/ notes, "The soundtrack to the film /{High Fidelity}/ has a list price of $18.98. You could get the whole movie [on DVD] for $19.99."~{ Ibid. }~
+={Black, Jane;CDs:prices of;DVDs:price of}
+
+But let's assume the RIAA is right, and all of the decline in CD sales is because of Internet sharing. Here's the rub: In the same period that the RIAA estimates that 803 million CDs were sold, the RIAA estimates that 2.1 billion CDs were downloaded for free. Thus, although 2.6 times the total number of CDs sold were downloaded for free, sales revenue fell by just 6.7 percent.
+={piracy:of intangible property+1}
+
+There are too many different things happening at the same time to explain these numbers definitively, but one conclusion is unavoidable: The recording industry constantly asks, "What's the difference between downloading a song and stealing a CD?" - but their own numbers reveal the difference. If I steal a CD, then there is one less CD to sell. Every taking is a lost sale. But on the basis of the numbers the RIAA provides, it is absolutely clear that the same is not true of downloads. If every download were a lost sale - if every use of Kazaa "rob[bed] the author of [his] profit" - then the industry would have suffered a 100 percent drop in sales last year, not a 7 percent drop. If 2.6 times the number of CDs sold were downloaded for free, and yet sales revenue dropped by just 6.7 percent, then there is a huge difference between "downloading a song and stealing a CD."
+={Kazaa}
+
+These are the harms - alleged and perhaps exaggerated but, let's assume, real. What of the benefits? File sharing may impose costs on the recording industry. What value does it produce in addition to these costs?
+={peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing:benefits of+8}
+
+One benefit is type C sharing - making available content that is technically still under copyright but is no longer commercially available. This is not a small category of content. There are millions of tracks that are no longer commercially available.~{ By one estimate, 75 percent of the music released by the major labels is no longer in print. See Online Entertainment and Copyright Law - Coming Soon to a Digital Device Near You: Hearing Before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 107th Cong., 1st sess. (3 April 2001) (prepared statement of the Future of Music Coalition), available at link #18. }~ And while it's conceivable that some of this content is not available because the artist producing the content doesn't want it to be made available, the vast majority of it is unavailable solely because the publisher or the distributor has decided it no longer makes economic sense /{to the company}/ to make it available.
+={recording industry:out-of-print music of+3}
+
+In real space - long before the Internet - the market had a simple response to this problem: used book and record stores. There are thousands of used book and used record stores in America today.~{ While there are not good estimates of the number of used record stores in existence, in 2002, there were 7,198 used book dealers in the United States, an increase of 20 percent since 1993. See Book Hunter Press, /{The Quiet Revolution: The Expansion of the Used Book Market}/ (2002), available at link #19. Used records accounted for $260 million in sales in 2002. See National Association of Recording Merchandisers, "2002 Annual Survey Results," available at link #20. }~ These stores buy content from owners, then sell the content they buy. And under American copyright law, when they buy and sell this content, /{even if the content is still under copyright}/, the copyright owner doesn't get a dime. Used book and record stores are commercial entities; their owners make money from the content they sell; but as with cable companies before statutory licensing, they don't have to pay the copyright owner for the content they sell.
+={books:free on-line releases of+4;books:out of print+3;books:resales of+2;peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing:of books+4;used record sales}
+
+Type C sharing, then, is very much like used book stores or used record stores. It is different, of course, because the person making the content available isn't making money from making the content available. It is also different, of course, because in real space, when I sell a record, I don't have it anymore, while in cyberspace, when someone shares my 1949 recording of Bernstein's "Two Love Songs," I still have it. That difference would matter economically if the owner of the 1949 copyright were selling the record in competition to my sharing. But we're talking about the class of content that is not currently commercially available. The Internet is making it available, through cooperative sharing, without competing with the market.
+={Bernstein, Leonard;Internet:books on+4}
+
+It may well be, all things considered, that it would be better if the copyright owner got something from this trade. But just because it may well be better, it doesn't follow that it would be good to ban used book stores. Or put differently, if you think that type C sharing should be stopped, do you think that libraries and used book stores should be shut as well?
+
+Finally, and perhaps most importantly, file-sharing networks enable type D sharing to occur - the sharing of content that copyright owners want to have shared or for which there is no continuing copyright. This sharing clearly benefits authors and society. Science fiction author Cory Doctorow, for example, released his first novel, /{Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom}/, both free on-line and in bookstores on the same day. His (and his publisher's) thinking was that the on-line distribution would be a great advertisement for the "real" book. People would read part on-line, and then decide whether they liked the book or not. If they liked it, they would be more likely to buy it. Doctorow's content is type D content. If sharing networks enable his work to be spread, then both he and society are better off. (Actually, much better off: It is a great book!)
+={Doctorow, Cory;Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (Doctorow)}
+
+Likewise for work in the public domain: This sharing benefits society with no legal harm to authors at all. If efforts to solve the problem of type A sharing destroy the opportunity for type D sharing, then we lose something important in order to protect type A content.
+={public domain:p2p sharing of works in}
+
+The point throughout is this: While the recording industry understandably says, "This is how much we've lost," we must also ask, "How much has society gained from p2p sharing? What are the efficiencies? What is the content that otherwise would be unavailable?"
+
+For unlike the piracy I described in the first section of this chapter, much of the "piracy" that file sharing enables is plainly legal and good. And like the piracy I described in chapter 4, much of this piracy is motivated by a new way of spreading content caused by changes in the technology of distribution. Thus, consistent with the tradition that gave us Hollywood, radio, the recording industry, and cable TV, the question we should be asking about file sharing is how best to preserve its benefits while minimizing (to the extent possible) the wrongful harm it causes artists. The question is one of balance. The law should seek that balance, and that balance will be found only with time.
+
+"But isn't the war just a war against illegal sharing? Isn't the target just what you call type A sharing?"
+={piracy:profit reduction as criterion of}
+
+You would think. And we should hope. But so far, it is not. The effect of the war purportedly on type A sharing alone has been felt far beyond that one class of sharing. That much is obvious from the Napster case itself. When Napster told the district court that it had developed a technology to block the transfer of 99.4 percent of identified infringing material, the district court told counsel for Napster 99.4 percent was not good enough. Napster had to push the infringements "down to zero."~{ See Transcript of Proceedings, In Re: Napster Copyright Litigation at 34- 35 (N.D. Cal., 11 July 2001), nos. MDL-00-1369 MHP, C 99-5183 MHP, available at link #21. For an account of the litigation and its toll on Napster, see Joseph Menn, /{All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning's Napster}/ (New York: Crown Business, 2003), 269-82. }~
+={copyright infringement lawsuits:zero tolerance in+2;Napster:infringing material blocked by+1;peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing:infringement protections in+1}
+
+If 99.4 percent is not good enough, then this is a war on file-sharing technologies, not a war on copyright infringement. There is no way to assure that a p2p system is used 100 percent of the time in compliance with the law, any more than there is a way to assure that 100 percent of VCRs or 100 percent of Xerox machines or 100 percent of handguns are used in compliance with the law. Zero tolerance means zero p2p. The court's ruling means that we as a society must lose the benefits of p2p, even for the totally legal and beneficial uses they serve, simply to assure that there are zero copyright infringements caused by p2p.
+
+Zero tolerance has not been our history. It has not produced the content industry that we know today. The history of American law has been a process of balance. As new technologies changed the way content was distributed, the law adjusted, after some time, to the new technology. In this adjustment, the law sought to ensure the legitimate rights of creators while protecting innovation. Sometimes this has meant more rights for creators. Sometimes less.
+
+So, as we've seen, when "mechanical reproduction" threatened the interests of composers, Congress balanced the rights of composers against the interests of the recording industry. It granted rights to composers, but also to the recording artists: Composers were to be paid, but at a price set by Congress. But when radio started broadcasting the recordings made by these recording artists, and they complained to Congress that their "creative property" was not being respected (since the radio station did not have to pay them for the creativity it broadcast), Congress rejected their claim. An indirect benefit was enough.
+={artists:recording industry payments to;composers, copyright protections of;Congress, U.S.:on copyright laws+3|on recording industry+1;copyright law:on music recordings+2|statutory licenses in+2;radio:music recordings played on;recording industry:artist remuneration in|copyright protections in|radio broadcast and;statutory licenses:composer's rights vs. producers' rights in}
+
+Cable TV followed the pattern of record albums. When the courts rejected the claim that cable broadcasters had to pay for the content they rebroadcast, Congress responded by giving broadcasters a right to compensation, but at a level set by the law. It likewise gave cable companies the right to the content, so long as they paid the statutory price.
+={cable television+1;Congress, U.S.:on cable television+1;copyright law:on cable television rebroadcasting+1;television:cable vs. broadcast+1}
+
+This compromise, like the compromise affecting records and player pianos, served two important goals - indeed, the two central goals of any copyright legislation. First, the law assured that new innovators would have the freedom to develop new ways to deliver content. Second, the law assured that copyright holders would be paid for the content that was distributed. One fear was that if Congress simply required cable TV to pay copyright holders whatever they demanded for their content, then copyright holders associated with broadcasters would use their power to stifle this new technology, cable. But if Congress had permitted cable to use broadcasters' content for free, then it would have unfairly subsidized cable. Thus Congress chose a path that would assure /{compensation}/ without giving the past (broadcasters) control over the future (cable).
+={copyright law:innovative freedom balanced with fair compensation in|two central goals of;innovation:copyright profit balanced with|industry establishment opposed to+7;player pianos}
+
+In the same year that Congress struck this balance, two major producers and distributors of film content filed a lawsuit against another technology, the video tape recorder (VTR, or as we refer to them today, VCRs) that Sony had produced, the Betamax. Disney's and Universal's claim against Sony was relatively simple: Sony produced a device, Disney and Universal claimed, that enabled consumers to engage in copyright infringement. Because the device that Sony built had a "record" button, the device could be used to record copyrighted movies and shows. Sony was therefore benefiting from the copyright infringement of its customers. It should therefore, Disney and Universal claimed, be partially liable for that infringement.
+={Betamax+2;cassette recording:VCRs+2;copyright infringement lawsuits:distribution technology targeted in+12;Disney, Inc.:Sony Betamax technology opposed by+6;film industry:VCR taping facility opposed by+6;Sony:Betamax technology developed by+2;television:VCR taping of+2;VCRs+2;Universal Pictures+8}
+
+There was something to Disney's and Universal's claim. Sony did decide to design its machine to make it very simple to record television shows. It could have built the machine to block or inhibit any direct copying from a television broadcast. Or possibly, it could have built the machine to copy only if there were a special "copy me" signal on the line. It was clear that there were many television shows that did not grant anyone permission to copy. Indeed, if anyone had asked, no doubt the majority of shows would not have authorized copying. And in the face of this obvious preference, Sony could have designed its system to minimize the opportunity for copyright infringement. It did not, and for that, Disney and Universal wanted to hold it responsible for the architecture it chose.
+
+MPAA president Jack Valenti became the studios' most vocal champion. Valenti called VCRs "tapeworms." He warned, "When there are 20, 30, 40 million of these VCRs in the land, we will be invaded by millions of 'tapeworms,' eating away at the very heart and essence of the most precious asset the copyright owner has, his copyright."~{ Copyright Infringements (Audio and Video Recorders): Hearing on S. 1758 Before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 97th Cong., 1st and 2nd sess., 459 (1982) (testimony of Jack Valenti, president, Motion Picture Association of America, Inc.). }~ "One does not have to be trained in sophisticated marketing and creative judgment," he told Congress, "to understand the devastation on the after-theater marketplace caused by the hundreds of millions of tapings that will adversely impact on the future of the creative community in this country. It is simply a question of basic economics and plain common sense."~{ Copyright Infringements (Audio and Video Recorders), 475. }~ Indeed, as surveys would later show, 45 percent of VCR owners had movie libraries of ten videos or more~{ /{Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Sony Corp. of America,}/ 480 F. Supp. 429, 438 (C.D. Cal., 1979). }~ - a use the Court would later hold was not "fair." By "allowing VCR owners to copy freely by the means of an exemption from copyright infringement without creating a mechanism to compensate copyright owners," Valenti testified, Congress would "take from the owners the very essence of their property: the exclusive right to control who may use their work, that is, who may copy it and thereby profit from its reproduction."~{ Copyright Infringements (Audio and Video Recorders), 485 (testimony of Jack Valenti). }~
+={Congress, U.S.:on copyright laws+3|on VCR technology;Valenti, Jack:on VCR technology+1}
+
+It took eight years for this case to be resolved by the Supreme Court. In the interim, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Hollywood in its jurisdiction - leading Judge Alex Kozinski, who sits on that court, refers to it as the "Hollywood Circuit" - held that Sony would be liable for the copyright infringement made possible by its machines. Under the Ninth Circuit's rule, this totally familiar technology - which Jack Valenti had called "the Boston Strangler of the American film industry" (worse yet, it was a /{Japanese}/ Boston Strangler of the American film industry) - was an illegal technology.~{ /{Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Sony Corp. of America,}/ 659 F. 2d 963 (9th Cir. 1981). }~
+={Court of Appeals:Ninth Circuit;Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals;Supreme Court, U.S.:on VCR technology+3;Kozinski, Alex}
+
+But the Supreme Court reversed the decision of the Ninth Circuit. And in its reversal, the Court clearly articulated its understanding of when and whether courts should intervene in such disputes. As the Court wrote,
+={Supreme Court, U.S.:on balance of interests in copyright law+2}
+
+_1 Sound policy, as well as history, supports our consistent deference to Congress when major technological innovations alter the market for copyrighted materials. Congress has the constitutional authority and the institutional ability to accommodate fully the varied permutations of competing interests that are inevitably implicated by such new technology."~{ /{Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc.,}/ 464 U.S. 417, 431 (1984). }~
+={innovative freedom balanced with fair compensation in+12;innovation:copyright profit balanced with+12}
+
+Congress was asked to respond to the Supreme Court's decision. But as with the plea of recording artists about radio broadcasts, Congress ignored the request. Congress was convinced that American film got enough, this "taking" notwithstanding.
+={cassette recording:VCRs+3;Congress, U.S.:on copyright laws+4|on VCR technology+3;VCRs+3}
+
+If we put these cases together, a pattern is clear:
+
+table{~h c4; 10; 30; 30; 30;
+
+CASE
+WHOSE VALUE WAS "PIRATED"
+RESPONSE OF THE COURTS
+RESPONSE OF CONGRESS
+
+Recordings
+Composers
+No Protection
+Statutory License
+
+Radio
+Recording Artists
+N/A
+Nothing
+
+Cable TV
+Broadcasters
+No Protection
+Statutory License
+
+VCR
+Film Creators
+No Protection
+Nothing
+
+}table
+
+In each case throughout our history, a new technology changed the way content was distributed.~{ These are the most important instances in our history, but there are other cases as well. The technology of digital audio tape (DAT), for example, was regulated by Congress to minimize the risk of piracy. The remedy Congress imposed did burden DAT producers, by taxing tape sales and controlling the technology of DAT. See Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 (Title 17 of the /{United States Code}/), Pub. L. No. 102-563, 106 Stat. 4237, codified at 17 U.S.C. §1001. Again, however, this regulation did not eliminate the opportunity for free riding in the sense I've described. See Lessig, /{Future,}/ 71. See also Picker, "From Edison to the Broadcast Flag," /{University of Chicago Law Review}/ 70 (2003): 293-96. }~ In each case, throughout our history, that change meant that someone got a "free ride" on someone else's work.
+
+In /{none}/ of these cases did either the courts or Congress eliminate all free riding. In /{none}/ of these cases did the courts or Congress insist that the law should assure that the copyright holder get all the value that his copyright created. In every case, the copyright owners complained of "piracy." In every case, Congress acted to recognize some of the legiti macy in the behavior of the "pirates." In each case, Congress allowed some new technology to benefit from content made before. It balanced the interests at stake.
+
+When you think across these examples, and the other examples that make up the first four chapters of this section, this balance makes sense. Was Walt Disney a pirate? Would doujinshi be better if creators had to ask permission? Should tools that enable others to capture and spread images as a way to cultivate or criticize our culture be better regulated? Is it really right that building a search engine should expose you to $15 million in damages? Would it have been better if Edison had controlled film? Should every cover band have to hire a lawyer to get permission to record a song?
+={Disney, Walt;Edison, Thomas}
+
+We could answer yes to each of these questions, but our tradition has answered no. In our tradition, as the Supreme Court has stated, copyright "has never accorded the copyright owner complete control over all possible uses of his work."~{ /{Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc.,}/ 464 U.S. 417, 432 (1984). }~ Instead, the particular uses that the law regulates have been defined by balancing the good that comes from granting an exclusive right against the burdens such an exclusive right creates. And this balancing has historically been done /{after}/ a technology has matured, or settled into the mix of technologies that facilitate the distribution of content.
+={Supreme Court, U.S.:on balance of interests in copyright law}
+
+We should be doing the same thing today. The technology of the Internet is changing quickly. The way people connect to the Internet (wires vs. wireless) is changing very quickly. No doubt the network should not become a tool for "stealing" from artists. But neither should the law become a tool to entrench one particular way in which artists (or more accurately, distributors) get paid. As I describe in some detail in the last chapter of this book, we should be securing income to artists while we allow the market to secure the most efficient way to promote and distribute content. This will require changes in the law, at least in the interim. These changes should be designed to balance the protection of the law against the strong public interest that innovation continue.
+
+This is especially true when a new technology enables a vastly superior mode of distribution. And this p2p has done. P2p technologies can be ideally efficient in moving content across a widely diverse network. Left to develop, they could make the network vastly more efficient. Yet these "potential public benefits," as John Schwartz writes in /{The New York Times}/, "could be delayed in the P2P fight."~{ John Schwartz, "New Economy: The Attack on Peer-to-Peer Software Echoes Past Efforts," /{New York Times,}/ 22 September 2003, C3. }~
+={peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing:benefits of+1;Schwartz, John}
+
+!_ Yet when anyone
+begins to talk about "balance," the copyright warriors raise a different argument. "All this hand waving about balance and incentives," they say, "misses a fundamental point. Our content," the warriors insist, "is our /{property}/. Why should we wait for Congress to 'rebalance' our property rights? Do you have to wait before calling the police when your car has been stolen? And why should Congress deliberate at all about the merits of this theft? Do we ask whether the car thief had a good use for the car before we arrest him?"
+
+"It is /{our property}/," the warriors insist. "And it should be protected just as any other property is protected."
+
+:B~ "PROPERTY"
+
+1~intro_property [Intro]-#
+
+!_ The copyright warriors
+are right: A copyright is a kind of property. It can be owned and sold, and the law protects against its theft. Ordinarily, the copyright owner gets to hold out for any price he wants. Markets reckon the supply and demand that partially determine the price she can get.
+={copyright:as property+5;property rights:copyright vs.+5}
+
+% would have placed index links on heading above, but is an un-numbered heading
+
+But in ordinary language, to call a copyright a "property" right is a bit misleading, for the property of copyright is an odd kind of property. Indeed, the very idea of property in any idea or any expression is very odd. I understand what I am taking when I take the picnic table you put in your backyard. I am taking a thing, the picnic table, and after I take it, you don't have it. But what am I taking when I take the good /{idea}/ you had to put a picnic table in the backyard - by, for example, going to Sears, buying a table, and putting it in my backyard? What is the thing I am taking then?
+
+The point is not just about the thingness of picnic tables versus ideas, though that's an important difference. The point instead is that in the ordinary case - indeed, in practically every case except for a narrow range of exceptions - ideas released to the world are free. I don't take anything from you when I copy the way you dress - though I might seem weird if I did it every day, and especially weird if you are a woman. Instead, as Thomas Jefferson said (and as is especially true when I copy the way someone else dresses), - He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."~{ Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson (13 August 1813) in /{The Writings of Thomas Jefferson,}/ vol. 6 (Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, eds., 1903), 330, 333-34. }~
+={Jefferson, Thomas}
+
+The exceptions to free use are ideas and expressions within the reach of the law of patent and copyright, and a few other domains that I won't discuss here. Here the law says you can't take my idea or expression without my permission: The law turns the intangible into property.
+={property rights:intangibility of}
+
+But how, and to what extent, and in what form - the details, in other words - matter. To get a good sense of how this practice of turning the intangible into property emerged, we need to place this "property" in its proper context.~{ As the legal realists taught American law, all property rights are intangible. A property right is simply a right that an individual has against the world to do or not do certain things that may or may not attach to a physical object. The right itself is intangible, even if the object to which it is (metaphorically) attached is tangible. See Adam Mossoff, "What Is Property? Putting the Pieces Back Together," /{Arizona Law Review}/ 45 (2003): 373, 429 n. 241. }~
+
+My strategy in doing this will be the same as my strategy in the preceding part. I offer four stories to help put the idea of "copyright material is property" in context. Where did the idea come from? What are its limits? How does it function in practice? After these stories, the significance of this true statement - "copyright material is property" - will be a bit more clear, and its implications will be revealed as quite different from the implications that the copyright warriors would have us draw.
+
+1~ Chapter Six: Founders
+={books:English copyright law developed for+40;copyright law:development of+40|English+40;England, copyright laws developed in+40;United Kingdom:history of copyright law in+40}
+
+!_ William Shakespeare
+wrote /{Romeo and Juliet}/ in 1595. The play was first published in 1597. It was the eleventh major play that Shakespeare had written. He would continue to write plays through 1613, and the plays that he wrote have continued to define Anglo-American culture ever since. So deeply have the works of a sixteenth-century writer seeped into our culture that we often don't even recognize their source. I once overheard someone commenting on Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of Henry V: "I liked it, but Shakespeare is so full of clichés."
+={Branagh, Kenneth;Henry V.;Shakespeare, William;Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare)+2}
+
+In 1774, almost 180 years after /{Romeo and Juliet}/ was written, the "copy-right" for the work was still thought by many to be the exclusive right of a single London publisher, Jacob Tonson.~{ Jacob Tonson is typically remembered for his associations with prominent eighteenth-century literary figures, especially John Dryden, and for his handsome "definitive editions" of classic works. In addition to /{Romeo and Juliet,}/ he published an astonishing array of works that still remain at the heart of the English canon, including collected works of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Milton, and John Dryden. See Keith Walker, "Jacob Tonson, Bookseller," /{American Scholar}/ 61:3 (1992): 424-31. }~ Tonson was the most prominent of a small group of publishers called the Conger~{ Lyman Ray Patterson, /{Copyright in Historical Perspective}/ (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968), 151-52. }~ who controlled bookselling in England during the eighteenth century. The Conger claimed a perpetual right to control the "copy" of books that they had acquired from authors. That perpetual right meant that no one else could publish copies of a book to which they held the copyright. Prices of the classics were thus kept high; competition to produce better or cheaper editions was eliminated.
+={Conger;Tonson, Jacob+1}
+
+Now, there's something puzzling about the year 1774 to anyone who knows a little about copyright law. The better-known year in the history of copyright is 1710, the year that the British Parliament adopted the first "copyright" act. Known as the Statute of Anne, the act stated that all published works would get a copyright term of fourteen years, renewable once if the author was alive, and that all works already published by 1710 would get a single term of twenty-one additional years.~{ As Siva Vaidhyanathan nicely argues, it is erroneous to call this a "copyright law." See Vaidhyanathan, /{Copyrights and Copywrongs,}/ 40. }~ Under this law, /{Romeo and Juliet}/ should have been free in 1731. So why was there any issue about it still being under Tonson's control in 1774?
+={British Parliament;copyright:duration of+1|renewability of;Statute of Anne (1710)}
+
+The reason is that the English hadn't yet agreed on what a "copyright" was - indeed, no one had. At the time the English passed the Statute of Anne, there was no other legislation governing copyrights. The last law regulating publishers, the Licensing Act of 1662, had expired in 1695. That law gave publishers a monopoly over publishing, as a way to make it easier for the Crown to control what was published. But after it expired, there was no positive law that said that the publishers, or "Stationers," had an exclusive right to print books.
+={law:common vs. positive+1;positive law;Licensing Act (1662)}
+
+There was no /{positive}/ law, but that didn't mean that there was no law. The Anglo-American legal tradition looks to both the words of legislatures and the words of judges to know the rules that are to govern how people are to behave. We call the words from legislatures "positive law." We call the words from judges "common law." The common law sets the background against which legislatures legislate; the legislature, ordinarily, can trump that background only if it passes a law to displace it. And so the real question after the licensing statutes had expired was whether the common law protected a copyright, independent of any positive law.
+={common law}
+
+This question was important to the publishers, or "booksellers," as they were called, because there was growing competition from foreign publishers. The Scottish, in particular, were increasingly publishing and exporting books to England. That competition reduced the profits of the Conger, which reacted by demanding that Parliament pass a law to again give them exclusive control over publishing. That demand ultimately resulted in the Statute of Anne.
+={Conger;British Parliament+2;Scottish publishers;Statute of Anne (1710)+1}
+
+The Statute of Anne granted the author or "proprietor" of a book an exclusive right to print that book. In an important limitation, however, and to the horror of the booksellers, the law gave the bookseller that right for a limited term. At the end of that term, the copyright "expired," and the work would then be free and could be published by anyone. Or so the legislature is thought to have believed.
+={copyright:as narrow monopoly right+33}
+
+Now, the thing to puzzle about for a moment is this: Why would Parliament limit the exclusive right? Not why would they limit it to the particular limit they set, but why would they limit the right /{at all?}}/
+
+For the booksellers, and the authors whom they represented, had a very strong claim. Take /{Romeo and Juliet}/ as an example: That play was written by Shakespeare. It was his genius that brought it into the world. He didn't take anybody's property when he created this play (that's a controversial claim, but never mind), and by his creating this play, he didn't make it any harder for others to craft a play. So why is it that the law would ever allow someone else to come along and take Shakespeare's play without his, or his estate's, permission? What reason is there to allow someone else to "steal" Shakespeare's work?
+={Shakespeare, William;Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare)}
+
+The answer comes in two parts. We first need to see something special about the notion of "copyright" that existed at the time of the Statute of Anne. Second, we have to see something important about "booksellers."
+={Statute of Anne (1710)}
+
+First, about copyright. In the last three hundred years, we have come to apply the concept of "copyright" ever more broadly. But in 1710, it wasn't so much a concept as it was a very particular right. The copyright was born as a very specific set of restrictions: It forbade others from reprinting a book. In 1710, the "copy-right" was a right to use a particular machine to replicate a particular work. It did not go beyond that very narrow right. It did not control any more generally how a work could be /{used}/. Today the right includes a large collection of restrictions on the freedom of others: It grants the author the exclusive right to copy, the exclusive right to distribute, the exclusive right to perform, and so on.
+={usage restrictions attached to}
+
+So, for example, even if the copyright to Shakespeare's works were perpetual, all that would have meant under the original meaning of the term was that no one could reprint Shakespeare's work without the permission of the Shakespeare estate. It would not have controlled anything, for example, about how the work could be performed, whether the work could be translated, or whether Kenneth Branagh would be allowed to make his films. The "copy-right" was only an exclusive right to print - no less, of course, but also no more.
+={Branagh, Kenneth;Shakespeare, William}
+
+Even that limited right was viewed with skepticism by the British. They had had a long and ugly experience with "exclusive rights," especially "exclusive rights" granted by the Crown. The English had fought a civil war in part about the Crown's practice of handing out monopolies - especially monopolies for works that already existed. King Henry VIII granted a patent to print the Bible and a monopoly to Darcy to print playing cards. The English Parliament began to fight back against this power of the Crown. In 1656, it passed the Statute of Monopolies, limiting monopolies to patents for new inventions. And by 1710, Parliament was eager to deal with the growing monopoly in publishing.
+={Henry VIII, King of England;monopoly, copyright as+27;Statue of Monopolies (1656)}
+
+Thus the "copy-right," when viewed as a monopoly right, was naturally viewed as a right that should be limited. (However convincing the claim that "it's my property, and I should have it forever," try sounding convincing when uttering, "It's my monopoly, and I should have it forever.") The state would protect the exclusive right, but only so long as it benefited society. The British saw the harms from special-interest favors; they passed a law to stop them.
+
+Second, about booksellers. It wasn't just that the copyright was a monopoly. It was also that it was a monopoly held by the booksellers. Booksellers sound quaint and harmless to us. They were not viewed as harmless in seventeenth-century England. Members of the Conger were increasingly seen as monopolists of the worst kind - tools of the Crown's repression, selling the liberty of England to guarantee themselves a monopoly profit. The attacks against these monopolists were harsh: Milton described them as "old patentees and monopolizers in the trade of book-selling"; they were "men who do not therefore labour in an honest profession to which learning is indetted."~{ Philip Wittenberg, /{The Protection and Marketing of Literary Property}/ (New York: J. Messner, Inc., 1937), 31. }~
+={Milton, John;booksellers, English+25;Conger;copyright:duration of+25}
+
+Many believed the power the booksellers exercised over the spread of knowledge was harming that spread, just at the time the Enlightenment was teaching the importance of education and knowledge spread generally. The idea that knowledge should be free was a hallmark of the time, and these powerful commercial interests were interfering with that idea.
+={Enlightenment;knowledge, freedom of}
+
+To balance this power, Parliament decided to increase competition among booksellers, and the simplest way to do that was to spread the wealth of valuable books. Parliament therefore limited the term of copyrights, and thereby guaranteed that valuable books would become open to any publisher to publish after a limited time. Thus the setting of the term for existing works to just twenty-one years was a compromise to fight the power of the booksellers. The limitation on terms was an indirect way to assure competition among publishers, and thus the construction and spread of culture.
+={British Parliament+4}
+
+When 1731 (1710 + 21) came along, however, the booksellers were getting anxious. They saw the consequences of more competition, and like every competitor, they didn't like them. At first booksellers simply ignored the Statute of Anne, continuing to insist on the perpetual right to control publication. But in 1735 and 1737, they tried to persuade Parliament to extend their terms. Twenty-one years was not enough, they said; they needed more time.
+={Statute of Anne (1710)+2;copyright:in perpetuity+2}
+
+Parliament rejected their requests. As one pamphleteer put it, in words that echo today,
+
+_1 I see no Reason for granting a further Term now, which will not hold as well for granting it again and again, as often as the Old ones Expire; so that should this Bill pass, it will in Effect be establishing a perpetual Monopoly, a Thing deservedly odious in the Eye of the Law; it will be a great Cramp to Trade, a Discouragement to Learning, no Benefit to the Authors, but a general Tax on the Publick; and all this only to increase the private Gain of the Booksellers."~{ A Letter to a Member of Parliament concerning the Bill now depending in the House of Commons, for making more effectual an Act in the Eighth Year of the Reign of Queen Anne, entitled, An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned (London, 1735), in Brief Amici Curiae of Tyler T. Ochoa et al., 8, /{Eldred v. Ashcroft,}/ 537 U.S. 186 (2003) (No. 01- 618). }~
+
+Having failed in Parliament, the publishers turned to the courts in a series of cases. Their argument was simple and direct: The Statute of Anne gave authors certain protections through positive law, but those protections were not intended as replacements for the common law. Instead, they were intended simply to supplement the common law. Under common law, it was already wrong to take another person's creative "property" and use it without his permission. The Statute of Anne, the booksellers argued, didn't change that. Therefore, just because the protections of the Statute of Anne expired, that didn't mean the protections of the common law expired: Under the common law they had the right to ban the publication of a book, even if its Statute of Anne copyright had expired. This, they argued, was the only way to protect authors.
+={common law;law:common vs. positive;positive law}
+
+This was a clever argument, and one that had the support of some of the leading jurists of the day. It also displayed extraordinary chutzpah. Until then, as law professor Raymond Patterson has put it, "The publishers ... had as much concern for authors as a cattle rancher has for cattle."~{ Lyman Ray Patterson, "Free Speech, Copyright, and Fair Use," /{Vanderbilt Law Review}/ 40 (1987): 28. For a wonderfully compelling account, see Vaidhyanathan, 37-48. }~ The bookseller didn't care squat for the rights of the author. His concern was the monopoly profit that the author's work gave.
+
+The booksellers' argument was not accepted without a fight. The hero of this fight was a Scottish bookseller named Alexander Donaldson.~{ For a compelling account, see David Saunders, /{Authorship and Copyright}/ (London: Routledge, 1992), 62-69. }~
+={Donaldson, Alexander+3;Patterson, Raymond;Scottish publishers+3}
+
+Donaldson was an outsider to the London Conger. He began his career in Edinburgh in 1750. The focus of his business was inexpensive reprints "of standard works whose copyright term had expired," at least under the Statute of Anne.~{ Mark Rose, /{Authors and Owners}/ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 92. }~ Donaldson's publishing house prospered and became "something of a center for literary Scotsmen." "[A]mong them," Professor Mark Rose writes, was "the young James Boswell who, together with his friend Andrew Erskine, published an anthology of contemporary Scottish poems with Donaldson."~{ Ibid., 93. }~
+={Statute of Anne (1710)+8;Conger+1;Boswell, James;Erskine, Andrew;Rose, Mark}
+
+When the London booksellers tried to shut down Donaldson's shop in Scotland, he responded by moving his shop to London, where he sold inexpensive editions "of the most popular English books, in defiance of the supposed common law right of Literary Property."~{ Lyman Ray Patterson, /{Copyright in Historical Perspective,}/ 167 (quoting Borwell). }~ His books undercut the Conger prices by 30 to 50 percent, and he rested his right to compete upon the ground that, under the Statute of Anne, the works he was selling had passed out of protection.
+={common law+3}
+
+The London booksellers quickly brought suit to block "piracy" like Donaldson's. A number of actions were successful against the "pirates," the most important early victory being /{Millar v. Taylor}/.
+={Millar v. Taylor+5}
+
+Millar was a bookseller who in 1729 had purchased the rights to James Thomson's poem "The Seasons." Millar complied with the requirements of the Statute of Anne, and therefore received the full protection of the statute. After the term of copyright ended, Robert Taylor began printing a competing volume. Millar sued, claiming a perpetual common law right, the Statute of Anne notwithstanding.~{ Howard B. Abrams, "The Historic Foundation of American Copyright Law: Exploding the Myth of Common Law Copyright," /{Wayne Law Review}/ 29 (1983): 1152. }~
+={Thomson, James+1;copyright:in perpetuity+1;Seasons, The (Thomson);Taylor, Robert}
+
+Astonishingly to modern lawyers, one of the greatest judges in English history, Lord Mansfield, agreed with the booksellers. Whatever protection the Statute of Anne gave booksellers, it did not, he held, extinguish any common law right. The question was whether the common law would protect the author against subsequent "pirates." Mansfield's answer was yes: The common law would bar Taylor from reprinting Thomson's poem without Millar's permission. That common law rule thus effectively gave the booksellers a perpetual right to control the publication of any book assigned to them.
+={Mansfield, William Murray, Lord+1}
+
+Considered as a matter of abstract justice - reasoning as if justice were just a matter of logical deduction from first principles - Mansfield's conclusion might make some sense. But what it ignored was the larger issue that Parliament had struggled with in 1710: How best to limit the monopoly power of publishers? Parliament's strategy was to offer a term for existing works that was long enough to buy peace in 1710, but short enough to assure that culture would pass into competition within a reasonable period of time. Within twenty-one years, Parliament believed, Britain would mature from the controlled culture that the Crown coveted to the free culture that we inherited.
+={British Parliament+2}
+
+The fight to defend the limits of the Statute of Anne was not to end there, however, and it is here that Donaldson enters the mix.
+={Donaldson, Alexander+5;Scottish publishers+5;Statute of Anne (1710)+2}
+
+Millar died soon after his victory, so his case was not appealed. His estate sold Thomson's poems to a syndicate of printers that included Thomas Beckett. ~{ Ibid., 1156. }~ Donaldson then released an unauthorized edition of Thomson's works. Beckett, on the strength of the decision in /{Millar}/, got an injunction against Donaldson. Donaldson appealed the case to the House of Lords, which functioned much like our own Supreme Court. In February of 1774, that body had the chance to interpret the meaning of Parliament's limits from sixty years before.
+={Thomson, James;Becket, Thomas;House of Lords+5;Supreme Court, U.S.:House of Lords vs.+2}
+
+As few legal cases ever do, /{Donaldson v. Beckett}/ drew an enormous amount of attention throughout Britain. Donaldson's lawyers argued that whatever rights may have existed under the common law, the Statute of Anne terminated those rights. After passage of the Statute of Anne, the only legal protection for an exclusive right to control publication came from that statute. Thus, they argued, after the term specified in the Statute of Anne expired, works that had been protected by the statute were no longer protected.
+={Donaldson v. Beckett+8;common law+3}
+
+The House of Lords was an odd institution. Legal questions were presented to the House and voted upon first by the "law lords," members of special legal distinction who functioned much like the Justices in our Supreme Court. Then, after the law lords voted, the House of Lords generally voted.
+
+The reports about the law lords' votes are mixed. On some counts, it looks as if perpetual copyright prevailed. But there is no ambiguity about how the House of Lords voted as whole. By a two-to-one majority (22 to 11) they voted to reject the idea of perpetual copyrights. Whatever one's understanding of the common law, now a copyright was fixed for a limited time, after which the work protected by copyright passed into the public domain.
+={copyright:in perpetuity+1;public domain:English legal establishment of+1}
+
+"The public domain." Before the case of /{Donaldson v. Beckett}/, there was no clear idea of a public domain in England. Before 1774, there was a strong argument that common law copyrights were perpetual. After 1774, the public domain was born. For the first time in Anglo- American history, the legal control over creative works expired, and the greatest works in English history - including those of Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, Johnson, and Bunyan - were free of legal restraint.
+={Bacon, Francis;Bunyan, John;Johnson, Samuel;Milton, John;Shakespeare, William}
+
+It is hard for us to imagine, but this decision by the House of Lords fueled an extraordinarily popular and political reaction. In Scotland, where most of the "pirate publishers" did their work, people celebrated the decision in the streets. As the /{Edinburgh Advertiser}/ reported, "No private cause has so much engrossed the attention of the public, and none has been tried before the House of Lords in the decision of which so many individuals were interested." "Great rejoicing in Edinburgh upon victory over literary property: bonfires and illuminations."~{ Rose, 97. }~
+={Scottish publishers}
+
+In London, however, at least among publishers, the reaction was equally strong in the opposite direction. The /{Morning Chronicle}/ reported:
+
+_1 By the above decision ... near 200,000 pounds worth of what was honestly purchased at public sale, and which was yesterday thought property is now reduced to nothing. The Booksellers of London and Westminster, many of whom sold estates and houses to purchase Copy-right, are in a manner ruined, and those who after many years industry thought they had acquired a competency to provide for their families now find themselves without a shilling to devise to their successors."~{ Ibid. }~
+
+"Ruined" is a bit of an exaggeration. But it is not an exaggeration to say that the change was profound. The decision of the House of Lords meant that the booksellers could no longer control how culture in England would grow and develop. Culture in England was thereafter /{free}/. Not in the sense that copyrights would not be respected, for of course, for a limited time after a work was published, the bookseller had an exclusive right to control the publication of that book. And not in the sense that books could be stolen, for even after a copyright expired, you still had to buy the book from someone. But /{free}/ in the sense that the culture and its growth would no longer be controlled by a small group of publishers. As every free market does, this free market of free culture would grow as the consumers and producers chose. English culture would develop as the many English readers chose to let it develop - chose in the books they bought and wrote; chose in the memes they repeated and endorsed. Chose in a /{competitive context}/, not a context in which the choices about what culture is available to people and how they get access to it are made by the few despite the wishes of the many.
+={House of Lords;free culture:English legal establishment of}
+
+At least, this was the rule in a world where the Parliament is anti-monopoly, resistant to the protectionist pleas of publishers. In a world where the Parliament is more pliant, free culture would be less protected.
+={British Parliament;}
+
+1~ Chapter Seven: Recorders
+={copyright law:fair use and+22;documentary film+22;Else, Jon+22;fair use:in documentary film+22;films:fair use of copyrighted material in+22}
+
+!_ Jon Else
+is a filmmaker. He is best known for his documentaries and has been very successful in spreading his art. He is also a teacher, and as a teacher myself, I envy the loyalty and admiration that his students feel for him. (I met, by accident, two of his students at a dinner party. He was their god.)
+
+Else worked on a documentary that I was involved in. At a break, he told me a story about the freedom to create with film in America today.
+
+In 1990, Else was working on a documentary about Wagner's Ring Cycle. The focus was stagehands at the San Francisco Opera. Stage- hands are a particularly funny and colorful element of an opera. During a show, they hang out below the stage in the grips' lounge and in the lighting loft. They make a perfect contrast to the art on the stage.
+={Wagner, Richard+1;San Francisco Opera}
+
+During one of the performances, Else was shooting some stage- hands playing checkers. In one corner of the room was a television set. Playing on the television set, while the stagehands played checkers and the opera company played Wagner, was /{The Simpsons}/. As Else judged it, this touch of cartoon helped capture the flavor of what was special about the scene.
+={Simpsons, The+16}
+
+Years later, when he finally got funding to complete the film, Else attempted to clear the rights for those few seconds of /{The Simpsons}/. For of course, those few seconds are copyrighted; and of course, to use copyrighted material you need the permission of the copyright owner, unless "fair use" or some other privilege applies.
+={films:multiple copyrights associated with}
+
+Else called /{Simpsons}/ creator Matt Groening's office to get permission. Groening approved the shot. The shot was a four-and-a-half-second image on a tiny television set in the corner of the room. How could it hurt? Groening was happy to have it in the film, but he told Else to contact Gracie Films, the company that produces the program.
+={Gracie Films+1;Groening, Matt+2}
+
+Gracie Films was okay with it, too, but they, like Groening, wanted to be careful. So they told Else to contact Fox, Gracie's parent company. Else called Fox and told them about the clip in the corner of the one room shot of the film. Matt Groening had already given permission, Else said. He was just confirming the permission with Fox.
+={Fox (film company)+1}
+
+Then, as Else told me, "two things happened. First we discovered ... that Matt Groening doesn't own his own creation - or at least that someone [at Fox] believes he doesn't own his own creation." And second, Fox "wanted ten thousand dollars as a licensing fee for us to use this four-point-five seconds of ... entirely unsolicited /{Simpsons}/ which was in the corner of the shot."
+
+Else was certain there was a mistake. He worked his way up to someone he thought was a vice president for licensing, Rebecca Herrera. He explained to her, "There must be some mistake here. ... We're asking for your educational rate on this." That was the educational rate, Herrera told Else. A day or so later, Else called again to confirm what he had been told.
+={Herrera, Rebecca+1}
+
+"I wanted to make sure I had my facts straight," he told me. "Yes, you have your facts straight," she said. It would cost $10,000 to use the clip of /{The Simpsons}/ in the corner of a shot in a documentary film about Wagner's Ring Cycle. And then, astonishingly, Herrera told Else, "And if you quote me, I'll turn you over to our attorneys." As an assistant to Herrera told Else later on, "They don't give a shit. They just want the money."
+={Wagner, Richard}
+
+Else didn't have the money to buy the right to replay what was playing on the television backstage at the San Francisco Opera.To reproduce this reality was beyond the documentary filmmaker's budget. At the very last minute before the film was to be released, Else digitally replaced the shot with a clip from another film that he had worked on, /{The Day After Trinity}/, from ten years before.
+={San Francisco Opera;Day After Trinity, The}
+
+!_ There's no doubt
+that someone, whether Matt Groening or Fox, owns the copyright to /{The Simpsons}/. That copyright is their property. To use that copyrighted material thus sometimes requires the permission of the copyright owner. If the use that Else wanted to make of the /{Simpsons}/ copyright were one of the uses restricted by the law, then he would need to get the permission of the copyright owner before he could use the work in that way. And in a free market, it is the owner of the copyright who gets to set the price for any use that the law says the owner gets to control.
+={Fox (film company)+2;Groening, Matt+2}
+
+For example, "public performance" is a use of /{The Simpsons}/ that the copyright owner gets to control. If you take a selection of favorite episodes, rent a movie theater, and charge for tickets to come see "My Favorite /{Simpsons}/," then you need to get permission from the copyright owner. And the copyright owner (rightly, in my view) can charge whatever she wants - $10 or $1,000,000. That's her right, as set by the law.
+
+But when lawyers hear this story about Jon Else and Fox, their first thought is "fair use."~{ For an excellent argument that such use is "fair use," but that lawyers don't permit recognition that it is "fair use," see Richard A. Posner with William F. Patry, "Fair Use and Statutory Reform in the Wake of /{Eldred}/" (draft on file with author), University of Chicago Law School, 5 August 2003. }~ Else's use of just 4.5 seconds of an indirect shot of a /{Simpsons}/ episode is clearly a fair use of /{The Simpsons}/ - and fair use does not require the permission of anyone.
+
+So I asked Else why he didn't just rely upon "fair use." Here's his reply:
+
+_1 The /{Simpsons}/ fiasco was for me a great lesson in the gulf between what lawyers find irrelevant in some abstract sense, and what is crushingly relevant in practice to those of us actually trying to make and broadcast documentaries. I never had any doubt that it was "clearly fair use" in an absolute legal sense. But I couldn't rely on the concept in any concrete way. Here's why:
+={fair use:legal intimidation tactics against+6}
+
+_1 1. Before our films can be broadcast, the network requires that we buy Errors and Omissions insurance. The carriers require a detailed "visual cue sheet" listing the source and licensing status of each shot in the film. They take a dim view of "fair use," and a claim of "fair use" can grind the application process to a halt.
+={Errors and Omissions insurance}
+
+_1 2. I probably never should have asked Matt Groening in the first place. But I knew (at least from folklore) that Fox had a history of tracking down and stopping unlicensed /{Simpsons}/ usage, just as George Lucas had a very high profile litigating /{Star Wars}/ usage. So I decided to play by the book, thinking that we would be granted free or cheap license to four seconds of /{Simpsons}/. As a documentary producer working to exhaustion on a shoestring, the last thing I wanted was to risk legal trouble, even nuisance legal trouble, and even to defend a principle.
+={Fox (film company)+1;Groening, Matt;Lucas, George;Star Wars}
+
+_1 3. I did, in fact, speak with one of your colleagues at Stanford Law School ... who confirmed that it was fair use. He also confirmed that Fox would "depose and litigate you to within an inch of your life," regardless of the merits of my claim. He made clear that it would boil down to who had the bigger legal department and the deeper pockets, me or them.
+
+_1 4. The question of fair use usually comes up at the end of the project, when we are up against a release deadline and out of money."
+
+In theory, fair use means you need no permission. The theory therefore supports free culture and insulates against a permission culture. But in practice, fair use functions very differently. The fuzzy lines of the law, tied to the extraordinary liability if lines are crossed, means that the effective fair use for many types of creators is slight. The law has the right aim; practice has defeated the aim.
+
+This practice shows just how far the law has come from its eighteenth-century roots. The law was born as a shield to protect publishers' profits against the unfair competition of a pirate. It has matured into a sword that interferes with any use, transformative or not.
+
+1~ Chapter Eight: Transformers
+={films:clips and collages of+37}
+
+!_ In 1993,
+Alex Alben was a lawyer working at Starwave, Inc. Starwave was an innovative company founded by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen to develop digital entertainment. Long before the Internet became popular, Starwave began investing in new technology for delivering entertainment in anticipation of the power of networks.
+={Alben, Alex+27;Allen, Paul;Microsoft;Starwave+7}
+
+Alben had a special interest in new technology. He was intrigued by the emerging market for CD-ROM technology - not to distribute film, but to do things with film that otherwise would be very difficult. In 1993, he launched an initiative to develop a product to build retrospectives on the work of particular actors. The first actor chosen was Clint Eastwood. The idea was to showcase all of the work of Eastwood, with clips from his films and interviews with figures important to his career.
+={artists:retrospective collections on+21;CD-ROMs, film clips used in+21;Eastwood, Clint+15}
+
+At that time, Eastwood had made more than fifty films, as an actor and as a director. Alben began with a series of interviews with Eastwood, asking him about his career. Because Starwave produced those interviews, it was free to include them on the CD.
+
+That alone would not have made a very interesting product, so Starwave wanted to add content from the movies in Eastwood's career: posters, scripts, and other material relating to the films Eastwood made. Most of his career was spent at Warner Brothers, and so it was relatively easy to get permission for that content.
+={permissions:for use of film clips+33;Warner Brothers}
+
+Then Alben and his team decided to include actual film clips. "Our goal was that we were going to have a clip from every one of East-wood's films," Alben told me. It was here that the problem arose. "No one had ever really done this before," Alben explained. "No one had ever tried to do this in the context of an artistic look at an actor's career."
+={films:multiple copyrights associated with+14}
+
+Alben brought the idea to Michael Slade, the CEO of Starwave. Slade asked, "Well, what will it take?"
+={Slade, Michael+2}
+
+Alben replied, "Well, we're going to have to clear rights from everyone who appears in these films, and the music and everything else that we want to use in these film clips." Slade said, "Great! Go for it."~{ Technically, the rights that Alben had to clear were mainly those of publicity"rights an artist has to control the commercial exploitation of his image. But these rights, too, burden "Rip, Mix, Burn" creativity, as this chapter evinces. }~
+
+The problem was that neither Alben nor Slade had any idea what clearing those rights would mean. Every actor in each of the films could have a claim to royalties for the reuse of that film. But CD-ROMs had not been specified in the contracts for the actors, so there was no clear way to know just what Starwave was to do.
+
+I asked Alben how he dealt with the problem. With an obvious pride in his resourcefulness that obscured the obvious bizarreness of his tale, Alben recounted just what they did:
+
+_1 So we very mechanically went about looking up the film clips. We made some artistic decisions about what film clips to include - of course we were going to use the "Make my day" clip from /{Dirty Harry}/. But you then need to get the guy on the ground who's wiggling under the gun and you need to get his permission. And then you have to decide what you are going to pay him.
+={Dirty, Harry}
+
+_1 We decided that it would be fair if we offered them the day-player rate for the right to reuse that performance. We're talking about a clip of less than a minute, but to reuse that performance in the CD-ROM the rate at the time was about $600.
+
+_1 So we had to identify the people - some of them were hard to identify because in Eastwood movies you can't tell who's the guy crashing through the glass - is it the actor or is it the stuntman? And then we just, we put together a team, my assistant and some others, and we just started calling people."
+
+Some actors were glad to help - Donald Sutherland, for example, followed up himself to be sure that the rights had been cleared. Others were dumbfounded at their good fortune. Alben would ask, "Hey, can I pay you $600 or maybe if you were in two films, you know, $1,200?" And they would say, "Are you for real? Hey, I'd love to get $1,200." And some of course were a bit difficult (estranged ex-wives, in particular). But eventually, Alben and his team had cleared the rights to this retrospective CD-ROM on Clint Eastwood's career.
+={Sutherland, Donald}
+
+It was one /{year}/ later - " and even then we weren't sure whether we were totally in the clear."
+
+Alben is proud of his work. The project was the first of its kind and the only time he knew of that a team had undertaken such a massive project for the purpose of releasing a retrospective.
+
+_1 Everyone thought it would be too hard. Everyone just threw up their hands and said, "Oh, my gosh, a film, it's so many copyrights, there's the music, there's the screenplay, there's the director, there's the actors." But we just broke it down. We just put it into its constituent parts and said, "Okay, there's this many actors, this many directors, ... this many musicians," and we just went at it very systematically and cleared the rights."
+
+And no doubt, the product itself was exceptionally good. Eastwood loved it, and it sold very well.
+
+But I pressed Alben about how weird it seems that it would have to take a year's work simply to clear rights. No doubt Alben had done this efficiently, but as Peter Drucker has famously quipped, "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."~{ U.S. Department of Commerce Office of Acquisition Management, /{Seven Steps to Performance-Based Services Acquisition,}/ available at link #22. }~ Did it make sense, I asked Alben, that this is the way a new work has to be made?
+={Drucker, Peter}
+
+For, as he acknowledged, "very few ... have the time and resources, and the will to do this," and thus, very few such works would ever be made. Does it make sense, I asked him, from the standpoint of what anybody really thought they were ever giving rights for originally, that you would have to go clear rights for these kinds of clips?
+
+_1 I don't think so. When an actor renders a performance in a movie, he or she gets paid very well. ... And then when 30 seconds of that performance is used in a new product that is a retrospective of somebody's career, I don't think that that person ... should be compensated for that."
+
+Or at least, is this /{how}/ the artist should be compensated? Would it make sense, I asked, for there to be some kind of statutory license that someone could pay and be free to make derivative use of clips like this? Did it really make sense that a follow-on creator would have to track down every artist, actor, director, musician, and get explicit permission from each? Wouldn't a lot more be created if the legal part of the creative process could be made to be more clean?
+
+_1 Absolutely. I think that if there were some fair-licensing mechanism - where you weren't subject to hold-ups and you weren't subject to estranged former spouses - you'd see a lot more of this work, because it wouldn't be so daunting to try to put together a retrospective of someone's career and meaningfully illustrate it with lots of media from that person's career. You'd build in a cost as the producer of one of these things. You'd build in a cost of paying X dollars to the talent that performed. But it would be a known cost. That's the thing that trips everybody up and makes this kind of product hard to get off the ground. If you knew I have a hundred minutes of film in this product and it's going to cost me X, then you build your budget around it, and you can get investments and everything else that you need to produce it. But if you say, "Oh, I want a hundred minutes of something and I have no idea what it's going to cost me, and a certain number of people are going to hold me up for money," then it becomes difficult to put one of these things together."
+
+Alben worked for a big company. His company was backed by some of the richest investors in the world. He therefore had authority and access that the average Web designer would not have. So if it took him a year, how long would it take someone else? And how much creativity is never made just because the costs of clearing the rights are so high?
+
+These costs are the burdens of a kind of regulation. Put on a Republican hat for a moment, and get angry for a bit. The government defines the scope of these rights, and the scope defined determines how much it's going to cost to negotiate them. (Remember the idea that land runs to the heavens, and imagine the pilot purchasing fly- through rights as he negotiates to fly from Los Angeles to San Francisco.) These rights might well have once made sense; but as circumstances change, they make no sense at all. Or at least, a well-trained, regulation-minimizing Republican should look at the rights and ask, "Does this still make sense?"
+={Republican Party}
+
+I've seen the flash of recognition when people get this point, but only a few times. The first was at a conference of federal judges in California. The judges were gathered to discuss the emerging topic of cyber-law. I was asked to be on the panel. Harvey Saferstein, a well-respected lawyer from an L.A. firm, introduced the panel with a video that he and a friend, Robert Fairbank, had produced.
+={Saferstein, Harvey;Fairbank, Robert}
+
+The video was a brilliant collage of film from every period in the twentieth century, all framed around the idea of a /{60 Minutes}/ episode. The execution was perfect, down to the sixty-minute stopwatch. The judges loved every minute of it.
+={60 Minutes}
+
+When the lights came up, I looked over to my copanelist, David Nimmer, perhaps the leading copyright scholar and practitioner in the nation. He had an astonished look on his face, as he peered across the room of over 250 well- entertained judges. Taking an ominous tone, he began his talk with a question: "Do you know how many federal laws were just violated in this room?"
+={Nimmer, David+1}
+
+For of course, the two brilliantly talented creators who made this film hadn't done what Alben did. They hadn't spent a year clearing the rights to these clips; technically, what they had done violated the law. Of course, it wasn't as if they or anyone were going to be prosecuted for this violation (the presence of 250 judges and a gaggle of federal marshals notwithstanding). But Nimmer was making an important point: A year before anyone would have heard of the word Napster, and two years before another member of our panel, David Boies, would defend Napster before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Nimmer was trying to get the judges to see that the law would not be friendly to the capacities that this technology would enable. Technology means you can now do amazing things easily; but you couldn't easily do them legally.
+={Alben, Alex;Boies, David;Court of Appeals:Ninth Circuit;Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals;Napster}
+
+!_ We live in
+a "cut and paste" culture enabled by technology. Anyone building a presentation knows the extraordinary freedom that the cut and paste architecture of the Internet created - in a second you can find just about any image you want; in another second, you can have it planted in your presentation.
+={technology:cut-and-paste culture enabled by+4}
+
+But presentations are just a tiny beginning. Using the Internet and its archives, musicians are able to string together mixes of sound never before imagined; filmmakers are able to build movies out of clips on computers around the world. An extraordinary site in Sweden takes images of politicians and blends them with music to create biting political commentary. A site called Camp Chaos has produced some of the most biting criticism of the record industry that there is through the mixing of Flash! and music.
+={Camp Chaos}
+
+All of these creations are technically illegal. Even if the creators wanted to be "legal," the cost of complying with the law is impossibly high. Therefore, for the law-abiding sorts, a wealth of creativity is never made. And for that part that is made, if it doesn't follow the clearance rules, it doesn't get released.
+
+To some, these stories suggest a solution: Let's alter the mix of rights so that people are free to build upon our culture. Free to add or mix as they see fit. We could even make this change without necessarily requiring that the "free" use be free as in "free beer." Instead, the system could simply make it easy for follow-on creators to compensate artists without requiring an army of lawyers to come along: a rule, for example, that says "the royalty owed the copyright owner of an unregistered work for the derivative reuse of his work will be a flat 1 percent of net revenues, to be held in escrow for the copyright owner." Under this rule, the copyright owner could benefit from some royalty, but he would not have the benefit of a full property right (meaning the right to name his own price) unless he registers the work.
+={copyright law:royalty proposal on derivative reuse in;derivative works:royalty system proposed for}
+
+Who could possibly object to this? And what reason would there be for objecting? We're talking about work that is not now being made; which if made, under this plan, would produce new income for artists. What reason would anyone have to oppose it?
+
+!_ In February 2003,
+DreamWorks studios announced an agreement with Mike Myers, the comic genius of /{Saturday Night Live}/ and Austin Powers. According to the announcement, Myers and DreamWorks would work together to form a "unique filmmaking pact." Under the agreement, DreamWorks "will acquire the rights to existing motion picture hits and classics, write new storylines and - with the use of state- of-the-art digital technology - insert Myers and other actors into the film, thereby creating an entirely new piece of entertainment."
+={DreamWorks+2;Myers, Mike+2;Saturday Night Live}
+
+The announcement called this "film sampling." As Myers explained, "Film Sampling is an exciting way to put an original spin on existing films and allow audiences to see old movies in a new light. Rap artists have been doing this for years with music and now we are able to take that same concept and apply it to film." Steven Spielberg is quoted as saying, "If anyone can create a way to bring old films to new audiences, it is Mike."
+={Spielberg, Steven+1;film sampling+3;rap music}
+
+Spielberg is right. Film sampling by Myers will be brilliant. But if you don't think about it, you might miss the truly astonishing point about this announcement. As the vast majority of our film heritage remains under copyright, the real meaning of the DreamWorks announcement is just this: It is Mike Myers and only Mike Myers who is free to sample. Any general freedom to build upon the film archive of our culture, a freedom in other contexts presumed for us all, is now a privilege reserved for the funny and famous - and presumably rich.
+
+This privilege becomes reserved for two sorts of reasons. The first continues the story of the last chapter: the vagueness of "fair use." Much of "sampling" should be considered "fair use." But few would rely upon so weak a doctrine to create. That leads to the second reason that the privilege is reserved for the few: The costs of negotiating the legal rights for the creative reuse of content are astronomically high. These costs mirror the costs with fair use: You either pay a lawyer to defend your fair use rights or pay a lawyer to track down permissions so you don't have to rely upon fair use rights. Either way, the creative process is a process of paying lawyers - again a privilege, or perhaps a curse, reserved for the few.
+={copyright law:fair use and;fair use:in sampling works}
+
+1~ Chapter Nine: Collectors
+={archives, digital+29;culture:archives of+29}
+
+!_ In April 1996,
+millions of "bots" - computer codes designed to "spider," or automatically search the Internet and copy content - began running across the Net. Page by page, these bots copied Internet-based information onto a small set of computers located in a basement in San Francisco's Presidio. Once the bots finished the whole of the Internet, they started again. Over and over again, once every two months, these bits of code took copies of the Internet and stored them.
+={bots+1;spider}
+
+By October 2001, the bots had collected more than five years of copies. And at a small announcement in Berkeley, California, the archive that these copies created, the Internet Archive, was opened to the world. Using a technology called "the Way Back Machine," you could enter a Web page, and see all of its copies going back to 1996, as well as when those pages changed.
+={Internet Archive+18;Way Back Machine}
+
+This is the thing about the Internet that Orwell would have appreciated. In the dystopia described in /{1984}/, old newspapers were constantly updated to assure that the current view of the world, approved of by the government, was not contradicted by previous news reports. Thousands of workers constantly reedited the past, meaning there was no way ever to know whether the story you were reading today was the story that was printed on the date published on the paper.
+={Orwell, George+1;1984 (Orwell)}
+
+It's the same with the Internet. If you go to a Web page today, there's no way for you to know whether the content you are reading is the same as the content you read before. The page may seem the same, but the content could easily be different. The Internet is Orwell's library - constantly updated, without any reliable memory.
+
+Until the Way Back Machine, at least. With the Way Back Machine, and the Internet Archive underlying it, you can see what the Internet was. You have the power to see what you remember. More importantly, perhaps, you also have the power to find what you don't remember and what others might prefer you forget.~{ The temptations remain, however. Brewster Kahle reports that the White House changes its own press releases without notice. A May 13, 2003, press release stated, "Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended." That was later changed, without notice, to "Major Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended." E-mail from Brewster Kahle, 1 December 2003. }~
+={Way Back Machine}
+
+!_ We take it
+for granted that we can go back to see what we remember reading. Think about newspapers. If you wanted to study the reaction of your hometown newspaper to the race riots in Watts in 1965, or to Bull Connor's water cannon in 1963, you could go to your public library and look at the newspapers. Those papers probably exist on microfiche. If you're lucky, they exist in paper, too. Either way, you are free, using a library, to go back and remember - not just what it is convenient to remember, but remember something close to the truth.
+={libraries:archival function of+1;newspapers:archives of+2}
+
+It is said that those who fail to remember history are doomed to repeat it. That's not quite correct. We /{all}/ forget history. The key is whether we have a way to go back to rediscover what we forget. More directly, the key is whether an objective past can keep us honest. Libraries help do that, by collecting content and keeping it, for schoolchildren, for researchers, for grandma. A free society presumes this knowledge.
+={history, records of}
+
+The Internet was an exception to this presumption. Until the Internet Archive, there was no way to go back. The Internet was the quintessentially transitory medium. And yet, as it becomes more important in forming and reforming society, it becomes more and more important to maintain in some historical form. It's just bizarre to think that we have scads of archives of newspapers from tiny towns around the world, yet there is but one copy of the Internet - the one kept by the Internet Archive.
+
+Brewster Kahle is the founder of the Internet Archive. He was a very successful Internet entrepreneur after he was a successful computer researcher. In the 1990s, Kahle decided he had had enough business success. It was time to become a different kind of success. So he launched a series of projects designed to archive human knowledge. The Internet Archive was just the first of the projects of this Andrew Carnegie of the Internet. By December of 2002, the archive had over 10 billion pages, and it was growing at about a billion pages a month.
+={Kahle, Brewster+20}
+
+The Way Back Machine is the largest archive of human knowledge in human history. At the end of 2002, it held "two hundred and thirty terabytes of material" - and was "ten times larger than the Library of Congress." And this was just the first of the archives that Kahle set out to build. In addition to the Internet Archive, Kahle has been constructing the Television Archive. Television, it turns out, is even more ephemeral than the Internet. While much of twentieth- century culture was constructed through television, only a tiny proportion of that culture is available for anyone to see today. Three hours of news are recorded each evening by Vanderbilt University - thanks to a specific exemption in the copyright law.That content is indexed, and is available to scholars for a very low fee. "But other than that, [television] is almost unavailable," Kahle told me. "If you were Barbara Walters you could get access to [the archives], but if you are just a graduate student?" As Kahle put it,
+={Library of Congress;Television Archive;Vanderbuilt University;Way Back Machine;libraries:archival function of;news coverage+6}
+
+_1 Do you remember when Dan Quayle was interacting with Murphy Brown? Remember that back and forth surreal experience of a politician interacting with a fictional television character? If you were a graduate student wanting to study that, and you wanted to get those original back and forth exchanges between the two, the /{60 Minutes}/ episode that came out after it ... it would be almost impossible. ... Those materials are almost unfindable. ..."
+={Quayle, Dan;60 Minutes}
+
+Why is that? Why is it that the part of our culture that is recorded in newspapers remains perpetually accessible, while the part that is recorded on videotape is not? How is it that we've created a world where researchers trying to understand the effect of media on nineteenth-century America will have an easier time than researchers trying to understand the effect of media on twentieth-century America?
+={newspapers:archives of}
+
+In part, this is because of the law. Early in American copyright law, copyright owners were required to deposit copies of their work in libraries. These copies were intended both to facilitate the spread of knowledge and to assure that a copy of the work would be around once the copyright expired, so that others might access and copy the work.
+={libraries:archival function of+2}
+
+These rules applied to film as well. But in 1915, the Library of Congress made an exception for film. Film could be copyrighted so long as such deposits were made. But the filmmaker was then allowed to borrow back the deposits - for an unlimited time at no cost. In 1915 alone, there were more than 5,475 films deposited and "borrowed back." Thus, when the copyrights to films expire, there is no copy held by any library. The copy exists - if it exists at all - in the library archive of the film company.~{ Doug Herrick, "Toward a National Film Collection: Motion Pictures at the Library of Congress," /{Film Library Quarterly}/ 13 nos. 2-3 (1980): 5; Anthony Slide, /{Nitrate Won't Wait: A History of Film Preservation in the United States}/ (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 1992), 36. }~
+={Library of Congress;films:archive of}
+
+The same is generally true about television. Television broadcasts were originally not copyrighted - there was no way to capture the broadcasts, so there was no fear of "theft." But as technology enabled capturing, broadcasters relied increasingly upon the law. The law required they make a copy of each broadcast for the work to be "copy-righted." But those copies were simply kept by the broadcasters. No library had any right to them; the government didn't demand them. The content of this part of American culture is practically invisible to anyone who would look.
+={Television Archive+1}
+
+Kahle was eager to correct this. Before September 11, 2001, he and his allies had started capturing television. They selected twenty stations from around the world and hit the Record button. After September 11, Kahle, working with dozens of others, selected twenty stations from around the world and, beginning October 11, 2001, made their coverage during the week of September 11 available free on- line. Anyone could see how news reports from around the world covered the events of that day.
+={September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks of}
+
+Kahle had the same idea with film. Working with Rick Prelinger, whose archive of film includes close to 45,000 "ephemeral films" (meaning films other than Hollywood movies, films that were never copyrighted), Kahle established the Movie Archive. Prelinger let Kahle digitize 1,300 films in this archive and post those films on the Internet to be downloaded for free. Prelinger's is a for- profit company. It sells copies of these films as stock footage. What he has discovered is that after he made a significant chunk available for free, his stock footage sales went up dramatically. People could easily find the material they wanted to use. Some downloaded that material and made films on their own. Others purchased copies to enable other films to be made. Either way, the archive enabled access to this important part of our culture. Want to see a copy of the "Duck and Cover" film that instructed children how to save themselves in the middle of nuclear attack? Go to archive.org, and you can download the film in a few minutes - for free.
+={films:archive of;archive.org:see also Internet Archive;Internet Archive;Movie Archive;Duck and Cover film;ephemeral films;Prelinger, Rick}
+
+Here again, Kahle is providing access to a part of our culture that we otherwise could not get easily, if at all. It is yet another part of what defines the twentieth century that we have lost to history. The law doesn't require these copies to be kept by anyone, or to be deposited in an archive by anyone. Therefore, there is no simple way to find them.
+
+The key here is access, not price. Kahle wants to enable free access to this content, but he also wants to enable others to sell access to it. His aim is to ensure competition in access to this important part of our culture. Not during the commercial life of a bit of creative property, but during a second life that all creative property has - a noncommercial life.
+={creative property:noncommercial second life of+4}
+
+For here is an idea that we should more clearly recognize. Every bit of creative property goes through different "lives." In its first life, if the creator is lucky, the content is sold. In such cases the commercial market is successful for the creator. The vast majority of creative property doesn't enjoy such success, but some clearly does. For that content, commercial life is extremely important. Without this commercial market, there would be, many argue, much less creativity.
+
+After the commercial life of creative property has ended, our tradition has always supported a second life as well. A newspaper delivers the news every day to the doorsteps of America. The very next day, it is used to wrap fish or to fill boxes with fragile gifts or to build an archive of knowledge about our history. In this second life, the content can continue to inform even if that information is no longer sold.
+
+The same has always been true about books. A book goes out of print very quickly (the average today is after about a year~{ Dave Barns, "Fledgling Career in Antique Books: Woodstock Landlord, Bar Owner Starts a New Chapter by Adopting Business," /{Chicago Tribune,}/ 5 September 1997, at Metro Lake 1L. Of books published between 1927 and 1946, only 2.2 percent were in print in 2002. R. Anthony Reese, "The First Sale Doctrine in the Era of Digital Networks," /{Boston College Law Review}/ 44 (2003): 593 n. 51. }~). After it is out of print, it can be sold in used book stores without the copyright owner getting anything and stored in libraries, where many get to read the book, also for free. Used book stores and libraries are thus the second life of a book. That second life is extremely important to the spread and stability of culture.
+={libraries:archival function of+1;books:out of print}
+
+Yet increasingly, any assumption about a stable second life for creative property does not hold true with the most important components of popular culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For these - television, movies, music, radio, the Internet - there is no guarantee of a second life. For these sorts of culture, it is as if we've replaced libraries with Barnes & Noble superstores. With this culture, what's accessible is nothing but what a certain limited market demands. Beyond that, culture disappears.
+
+!_ For most of
+the twentieth century, it was economics that made this so. It would have been insanely expensive to collect and make accessible all television and film and music: The cost of analog copies is extraordinarily high. So even though the law in principle would have restricted the ability of a Brewster Kahle to copy culture generally, the real restriction was economics. The market made it impossibly difficult to do anything about this ephemeral culture; the law had little practical effect.
+={technology:archival opportunity offered through+3}
+
+Perhaps the single most important feature of the digital revolution is that for the first time since the Library of Alexandria, it is feasible to imagine constructing archives that hold all culture produced or distributed publicly. Technology makes it possible to imagine an archive of all books published, and increasingly makes it possible to imagine an archive of all moving images and sound.
+={libraries:archival function of+4}
+
+The scale of this potential archive is something we've never imagined before. The Brewster Kahles of our history have dreamed about it; but we are for the first time at a point where that dream is possible. As Kahle describes,
+
+_1 It looks like there's about two to three million recordings of music. Ever. There are about a hundred thousand theatrical releases of movies, ... and about one to two million movies [distributed] during the twentieth century. There are about twenty-six million different titles of books. All of these would fit on computers that would fit in this room and be able to be afforded by a small company. So we're at a turning point in our history. Universal access is the goal. And the opportunity of leading a different life, based on this, is ... thrilling. It could be one of the things humankind would be most proud of. Up there with the Library of Alexandria, putting a man on the moon, and the invention of the printing press."
+={books:total number of;films:total number of;music recordings:total number of}
+
+Kahle is not the only librarian. The Internet Archive is not the only archive. But Kahle and the Internet Archive suggest what the future of libraries or archives could be. /{When}/ the commercial life of creative property ends, I don't know. But it does. And whenever it does, Kahle and his archive hint at a world where this knowledge, and culture, remains perpetually available. Some will draw upon it to understand it; some to criticize it. Some will use it, as Walt Disney did, to re-create the past for the future. These technologies promise something that had become unimaginable for much of our past - a future /{for}/ our past. The technology of digital arts could make the dream of the Library of Alexandria real again.
+={Internet Archive;creative property:noncommercial second life of;Disney, Walt;technology:archival opportunity offered through+1}
+
+Technologists have thus removed the economic costs of building such an archive. But lawyers' costs remain. For as much as we might like to call these "archives," as warm as the idea of a "library" might seem, the "content" that is collected in these digital spaces is also some-one's "property." And the law of property restricts the freedoms that Kahle and others would exercise.
+
+1~ Chapter Ten: "Property"
+
+!_ Jack Valenti
+has been the president of the Motion Picture Association of America since 1966. He first came to Washington, D.C., with Lyndon Johnson's administration - literally. The famous picture of Johnson's swearing-in on Air Force One after the assassination of President Kennedy has Valenti in the background. In his almost forty years of running the MPAA, Valenti has established himself as perhaps the most prominent and effective lobbyist in Washington.
+={Johnson, Lyndon;Kennedy, John F.;Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)+3;film industry:trade association of+3;television:industry association of+3;Valenti, Jack:background of}
+
+The MPAA is the American branch of the international Motion Picture Association. It was formed in 1922 as a trade association whose goal was to defend American movies against increasing domestic criticism. The organization now represents not only filmmakers but producers and distributors of entertainment for television, video, and cable. Its board is made up of the chairmen and presidents of the seven major producers and distributors of motion picture and television programs in the United States: Walt Disney, Sony Pictures Entertainment, MGM, Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal Studios, and Warner Brothers.
+={Disney, Inc.;MGM;Paramount Pictures;Twentieth Century Fox;Sony Pictures Entertainment;Universal Pictures;Warner Brothers}
+
+Valenti is only the third president of the MPAA. No president before him has had as much influence over that organization, or over Washington. As a Texan, Valenti has mastered the single most important political skill of a Southerner - the ability to appear simple and slow while hiding a lightning-fast intellect. To this day, Valenti plays the simple, humble man. But this Harvard MBA, and author of four books, who finished high school at the age of fifteen and flew more than fifty combat missions in World War II, is no Mr. Smith. When Valenti went to Washington, he mastered the city in a quintessentially Washingtonian way.
+={Valenti, Jack:background of+5}
+
+In defending artistic liberty and the freedom of speech that our culture depends upon, the MPAA has done important good. In crafting the MPAA rating system, it has probably avoided a great deal of speech-regulating harm. But there is an aspect to the organization's mission that is both the most radical and the most important. This is the organization's effort, epitomized in Valenti's every act, to redefine the meaning of "creative property."
+={film industry:rating system of;speech, freedom of:film-rating system vs.}
+
+In 1982, Valenti's testimony to Congress captured the strategy perfectly:
+={Valenti, Jack:on creative property rights+11}
+
+_1 No matter the lengthy arguments made, no matter the charges and the counter-charges, no matter the tumult and the shouting, reasonable men and women will keep returning to the fundamental issue, the central theme which animates this entire debate: /{Creative property owners must be accorded the same rights and protection resident in all other property owners in the nation}/. That is the issue. That is the question. And that is the rostrum on which this entire hearing and the debates to follow must rest."~{ Home Recording of Copyrighted Works: Hearings on H.R. 4783, H.R. 4794, H.R. 4808, H.R. 5250, H.R. 5488, and H.R. 5705 Before the Subcommittee on Courts, Civil Liberties, and the Administration of Justice of the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives, 97th Cong., 2nd sess. (1982): 65 (testimony of Jack Valenti). }~
+={creative property:other property rights vs.+25}
+
+The strategy of this rhetoric, like the strategy of most of Valenti's rhetoric, is brilliant and simple and brilliant because simple. The "central theme" to which "reasonable men and women" will return is this: "Creative property owners must be accorded the same rights and protections resident in all other property owners in the nation." There are no second-class citizens, Valenti might have continued. There should be no second-class property owners.
+
+This claim has an obvious and powerful intuitive pull. It is stated with such clarity as to make the idea as obvious as the notion that we use elections to pick presidents. But in fact, there is no more extreme a claim made by /{anyone}/ who is serious in this debate than this claim of Valenti's. Jack Valenti, however sweet and however brilliant, is perhaps the nation's foremost extremist when it comes to the nature and scope of "creative property." His views have /{no}/ reasonable connection to our actual legal tradition, even if the subtle pull of his Texan charm has slowly redefined that tradition, at least in Washington.
+={creative property:constitutional tradition on+9}
+
+While "creative property" is certainly "property" in a nerdy and precise sense that lawyers are trained to understand,~{ Lawyers speak of "property" not as an absolute thing, but as a bundle of rights that are sometimes associated with a particular object. Thus, my "property right" to my car gives me the right to exclusive use, but not the right to drive at 150 miles an hour. For the best effort to connect the ordinary meaning of "property" to "lawyer talk," see Bruce Ackerman, /{Private Property and the Constitution}/ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 26-27. }~ it has never been the case, nor should it be, that "creative property owners" have been "ac- corded the same rights and protection resident in all other property owners." Indeed, if creative property owners were given the same rights as all other property owners, that would effect a radical, and radically undesirable, change in our tradition.
+
+Valenti knows this. But he speaks for an industry that cares squat for our tradition and the values it represents. He speaks for an industry that is instead fighting to restore the tradition that the British overturned in 1710. In the world that Valenti's changes would create, a powerful few would exercise powerful control over how our creative culture would develop.
+
+I have two purposes in this chapter. The first is to convince you that, historically, Valenti's claim is absolutely wrong. The second is to convince you that it would be terribly wrong for us to reject our history. We have always treated rights in creative property differently from the rights resident in all other property owners. They have never been the same. And they should never be the same, because, however counterintuitive this may seem, to make them the same would be to fundamentally weaken the opportunity for new creators to create. Creativity depends upon the owners of creativity having less than perfect control.
+
+Organizations such as the MPAA, whose board includes the most powerful of the old guard, have little interest, their rhetoric notwithstanding, in assuring that the new can displace them. No organization does. No person does. (Ask me about tenure, for example.) But what's good for the MPAA is not necessarily good for America. A society that defends the ideals of free culture must preserve precisely the opportunity for new creativity to threaten the old.
+={Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA);film industry:trade association of}
+
+!_ To get
+just a hint that there is something fundamentally wrong in Valenti's argument, we need look no further than the United States Constitution itself.
+={Constitution, U.S.:on creative property+4}
+
+The framers of our Constitution loved "property." Indeed, so strongly did they love property that they built into the Constitution an important requirement. If the government takes your property - if it condemns your house, or acquires a slice of land from your farm - it is required, under the Fifth Amendment's "Takings Clause," to pay you "just compensation" for that taking. The Constitution thus guarantees that property is, in a certain sense, sacred. It cannot /{ever}/ be taken from the property owner unless the government pays for the privilege.
+={Constitution, U.S.:Fifth Amendment to|Takings Clause of+1;Fifth Amendment;Takings Clause+1;property rights:Takings Clause on+1}
+
+Yet the very same Constitution speaks very differently about what Valenti calls "creative property." In the clause granting Congress the power to create "creative property," the Constitution /{requires}/ that after a "limited time," Congress take back the rights that it has granted and set the "creative property" free to the public domain. Yet when Congress does this, when the expiration of a copyright term "takes" your copyright and turns it over to the public domain, Congress does not have any obligation to pay "just compensation" for this "taking." Instead, the same Constitution that requires compensation for your land requires that you lose your "creative property" right without any compensation at all.
+
+The Constitution thus on its face states that these two forms of property are not to be accorded the same rights. They are plainly to be treated differently. Valenti is therefore not just asking for a change in our tradition when he argues that creative-property owners should be accorded the same rights as every other property-right owner. He is effectively arguing for a change in our Constitution itself.
+
+Arguing for a change in our Constitution is not necessarily wrong. There was much in our original Constitution that was plainly wrong. The Constitution of 1789 entrenched slavery; it left senators to be appointed rather than elected; it made it possible for the electoral college to produce a tie between the president and his own vice president (as it did in 1800). The framers were no doubt extraordinary, but I would be the first to admit that they made big mistakes. We have since rejected some of those mistakes; no doubt there could be others that we should reject as well. So my argument is not simply that because Jefferson did it, we should, too.
+={Jefferson, Thomas+1;copyright law:innovative freedom balanced with fair compensation in+2;electoral college;Senate, U.S.;slavery}
+
+Instead, my argument is that because Jefferson did it, we should at least try to understand /{why}/. Why did the framers, fanatical property types that they were, reject the claim that creative property be given the same rights as all other property? Why did they require that for creative property there must be a public domain?
+
+To answer this question, we need to get some perspective on the history of these "creative property" rights, and the control that they enabled. Once we see clearly how differently these rights have been defined, we will be in a better position to ask the question that should be at the core of this war: Not /{whether}/ creative property should be protected, but how. Not /{whether}/ we will enforce the rights the law gives to creative-property owners, but what the particular mix of rights ought to be. Not /{whether}/ artists should be paid, but whether institutions designed to assure that artists get paid need also control how culture develops.
+
+To answer these questions, we need a more general way to talk about how property is protected. More precisely, we need a more general way than the narrow language of the law allows. In /{Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace}/, I used a simple model to capture this more general perspective. For any particular right or regulation, this model asks how four different modalities of regulation interact to support or weaken the right or regulation. I represented it with this diagram:
+={Code (Lessig);Lessig, Lawrence;free culture:four modalities of constraint on+20;regulation:four modalities of+20;copyright law:as ex post regulation modality+5;law:as constraint modality+5}
+
+{freeculture01.png 350x350 }http://www.free-culture.cc/
+
+At the center of this picture is a regulated dot: the individual or group that is the target of regulation, or the holder of a right. (In each case throughout, we can describe this either as regulation or as a right. For simplicity's sake, I will speak only of regulations.) The ovals represent four ways in which the individual or group might be regulated - either constrained or, alternatively, enabled. Law is the most obvious constraint (to lawyers, at least). It constrains by threatening punishments after the fact if the rules set in advance are violated. So if, for example, you willfully infringe Madonna's copyright by copying a song from her latest CD and posting it on the Web, you can be punished with a $150,000 fine. The fine is an ex post punishment for violating an ex ante rule. It is imposed by the state.
+={Madonna}
+
+Norms are a different kind of constraint. They, too, punish an individual for violating a rule. But the punishment of a norm is imposed by a community, not (or not only) by the state. There may be no law against spitting, but that doesn't mean you won't be punished if you spit on the ground while standing in line at a movie. The punishment might not be harsh, though depending upon the community, it could easily be more harsh than many of the punishments imposed by the state. The mark of the difference is not the severity of the rule, but the source of the enforcement.
+={norms, regulatory influence of+1}
+
+The market is a third type of constraint. Its constraint is effected through conditions: You can do X if you pay Y; you'll be paid M if you do N. These constraints are obviously not independent of law or norms - it is property law that defines what must be bought if it is to be taken legally; it is norms that say what is appropriately sold. But given a set of norms, and a background of property and contract law, the market imposes a simultaneous constraint upon how an individual or group might behave.
+={market constraints+1}
+
+Finally, and for the moment, perhaps, most mysteriously, "architecture" - the physical world as one finds it - is a constraint on behavior. A fallen bridge might constrain your ability to get across a river. Railroad tracks might constrain the ability of a community to integrate its social life. As with the market, architecture does not effect its constraint through ex post punishments. Instead, also as with the market, architecture effects its constraint through simultaneous conditions. These conditions are imposed not by courts enforcing contracts, or by police punishing theft, but by nature, by "architecture." If a 500-pound boulder blocks your way, it is the law of gravity that enforces this constraint. If a $500 airplane ticket stands between you and a flight to New York, it is the market that enforces this constraint.
+={architecture, constraint effected through}
+
+So the first point about these four modalities of regulation is obvious: They interact. Restrictions imposed by one might be reinforced by another. Or restrictions imposed by one might be undermined by another.
+={law:as constraint modality+5}
+
+The second point follows directly: If we want to understand the effective freedom that anyone has at a given moment to do any particular thing, we have to consider how these four modalities interact. Whether or not there are other constraints (there may well be; my claim is not about comprehensiveness), these four are among the most significant, and any regulator (whether controlling or freeing) must consider how these four in particular interact.
+
+So, for example, consider the "freedom" to drive a car at a high speed. That freedom is in part restricted by laws: speed limits that say how fast you can drive in particular places at particular times. It is in part restricted by architecture: speed bumps, for example, slow most rational drivers; governors in buses, as another example, set the maximum rate at which the driver can drive. The freedom is in part restricted by the market: Fuel efficiency drops as speed increases, thus the price of gasoline indirectly constrains speed. And finally, the norms of a community may or may not constrain the freedom to speed. Drive at 50 mph by a school in your own neighborhood and you're likely to be punished by the neighbors. The same norm wouldn't be as effective in a different town, or at night.
+={architecture, constraint effected through;market constraints;norms, regulatory influence of;driving speed, constraints on+1;speeding, constraints on+1}
+
+The final point about this simple model should also be fairly clear: While these four modalities are analytically independent, law has a special role in affecting the three.~{ By describing the way law affects the other three modalities, I don't mean to suggest that the other three don't affect law. Obviously, they do. Law's only distinction is that it alone speaks as if it has a right self-consciously to change the other three. The right of the other three is more timidly expressed. See Lawrence Lessig, /{Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace}/ (New York: Basic Books, 1999): 90-95; Lawrence Lessig, "The New Chicago School," /{Journal of Legal Studies,}/ June 1998. }~ The law, in other words, sometimes operates to increase or decrease the constraint of a particular modality. Thus, the law might be used to increase taxes on gasoline, so as to increase the incentives to drive more slowly. The law might be used to mandate more speed bumps, so as to increase the difficulty of driving rapidly. The law might be used to fund ads that stigmatize reckless driving. Or the law might be used to require that other laws be more strict - a federal requirement that states decrease the speed limit, for example" so as to decrease the attractiveness of fast driving.
+
+{freeculture02.png 540x350 }http://www.free-culture.cc/
+
+These constraints can thus change, and they can be changed. To understand the effective protection of liberty or protection of property at any particular moment, we must track these changes over time. A restriction imposed by one modality might be erased by another. A freedom enabled by one modality might be displaced by another.~{ Some people object to this way of talking about "liberty." They object because their focus when considering the constraints that exist at any particular moment are constraints imposed exclusively by the government. For instance, if a storm destroys a bridge, these people think it is meaningless to say that one's liberty has been restrained. A bridge has washed out, and it's harder to get from one place to another. To talk about this as a loss of freedom, they say, is to confuse the stuff of politics with the vagaries of ordinary life. I don't mean to deny the value in this narrower view, which depends upon the context of the inquiry. I do, however, mean to argue against any insistence that this narrower view is the only proper view of liberty. As I argued in /{Code,}/ we come from a long tradition of political thought with a broader focus than the narrow question of what the government did when. John Stuart Mill defended freedom of speech, for example, from the tyranny of narrow minds, not from the fear of government prosecution; John Stuart Mill, /{On Liberty}/ (Indiana: Hackett Publishing Co., 1978), 19. John R. Commons famously defended the economic freedom of labor from constraints imposed by the market; John R. Commons, "The Right to Work," in Malcom Rutherford and Warren J. Samuels, eds., /{John R. Commons: Selected Essays}/ (London: Routledge: 1997), 62. The Americans with Disabilities Act increases the liberty of people with physical disabilities by changing the architecture of certain public places, thereby making access to those places easier; 42 /{United States Code}/, section 12101 (2000). Each of these interventions to change existing conditions changes the liberty of a particular group. The effect of those interventions should be accounted for in order to understand the effective liberty that each of these groups might face. }~
+
+2~ Why Hollywood Is Right
+
+The most obvious point that this model reveals is just why, or just how, Hollywood is right. The copyright warriors have rallied Congress and the courts to defend copyright. This model helps us see why that rallying makes sense.
+={copyright:four regulatory modalities on+8}
+
+Let's say this is the picture of copyright's regulation before the Internet:
+
+{freeculture01.png 350x350 }http://www.free-culture.cc/
+
+There is balance between law, norms, market, and architecture. The law limits the ability to copy and share content, by imposing penalties on those who copy and share content. Those penalties are reinforced by technologies that make it hard to copy and share content (architecture) and expensive to copy and share content (market). Finally, those penalties are mitigated by norms we all recognize - kids, for example, taping other kids' records. These uses of copyrighted material may well be infringement, but the norms of our society (before the Internet, at least) had no problem with this form of infringement.
+={architecture, constraint effected through+1;law:as constraint modality;norms, regulatory influence of+1}
+
+Enter the Internet, or, more precisely, technologies such as MP3s and p2p sharing. Now the constraint of architecture changes dramatically, as does the constraint of the market. And as both the market and architecture relax the regulation of copyright, norms pile on. The happy balance (for the warriors, at least) of life before the Internet becomes an effective state of anarchy after the Internet.
+={Internet:copyright regulatory balance lost with+4;peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing:regulatory balance lost in;market constraints;MP3s}
+
+Thus the sense of, and justification for, the warriors' response. Technology has changed, the warriors say, and the effect of this change, when ramified through the market and norms, is that a balance of protection for the copyright owners' rights has been lost. This is Iraq after the fall of Saddam, but this time no government is justifying the looting that results.
+={technology:established industries threatened by changes in}
+
+{freeculture03.png 350x350 }http://www.free-culture.cc/
+
+Neither this analysis nor the conclusions that follow are new to the warriors. Indeed, in a "White Paper" prepared by the Commerce Department (one heavily influenced by the copyright warriors) in 1995, this mix of regulatory modalities had already been identified and the strategy to respond already mapped. In response to the changes the Internet had effected, the White Paper argued (1) Congress should strengthen intellectual property law, (2) businesses should adopt innovative marketing techniques, (3) technologists should push to develop code to protect copyrighted material, and (4) educators should educate kids to better protect copyright.
+={Commerce, U.S. Department of;regulation:as establishment protectionism+6}
+
+This mixed strategy is just what copyright needed - if it was to preserve the particular balance that existed before the change induced by the Internet. And it's just what we should expect the content industry to push for. It is as American as apple pie to consider the happy life you have as an entitlement, and to look to the law to protect it if something comes along to change that happy life. Homeowners living in a flood plain have no hesitation appealing to the government to rebuild (and rebuild again) when a flood (architecture) wipes away their property (law). Farmers have no hesitation appealing to the government to bail them out when a virus (architecture) devastates their crop. Unions have no hesitation appealing to the government to bail them out when imports (market) wipe out the U.S. steel industry.
+={farming;steel industry}
+
+Thus, there's nothing wrong or surprising in the content industry's campaign to protect itself from the harmful consequences of a technological innovation. And I would be the last person to argue that the changing technology of the Internet has not had a profound effect on the content industry's way of doing business, or as John Seely Brown describes it, its "architecture of revenue."
+={Brown, John Seely}
+
+But just because a particular interest asks for government support, it doesn't follow that support should be granted. And just because technology has weakened a particular way of doing business, it doesn't follow that the government should intervene to support that old way of doing business. Kodak, for example, has lost perhaps as much as 20 percent of their traditional film market to the emerging technologies of digital cameras.~{ See Geoffrey Smith, "Film vs. Digital: Can Kodak Build a Bridge?" BusinessWeek online, 2 August 1999, available at link #23. For a more recent analysis of Kodak's place in the market, see Chana R. Schoenberger, "Can Kodak Make Up for Lost Moments?" Forbes.com, 6 October 2003, available at link #24. }~ Does anyone believe the government should ban digital cameras just to support Kodak? Highways have weakened the freight business for railroads. Does anyone think we should ban trucks from roads /{for the purpose of}/ protecting the railroads? Closer to the subject of this book, remote channel changers have weakened the "stickiness" of television advertising (if a boring commercial comes on the TV, the remote makes it easy to surf ), and it may well be that this change has weakened the television advertising market. But does anyone believe we should regulate remotes to reinforce commercial television? (Maybe by limiting them to function only once a second, or to switch to only ten channels within an hour?)
+={advertising;television:advertising on;commercials;camera technology;digital cameras;Kodak cameras;railroad industry;remote channel changers}
+
+The obvious answer to these obviously rhetorical questions is no. In a free society, with a free market, supported by free enterprise and free trade, the government's role is not to support one way of doing business against others. Its role is not to pick winners and protect them against loss. If the government did this generally, then we would never have any progress. As Microsoft chairman Bill Gates wrote in 1991, in a memo criticizing software patents, "established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors."~{ Fred Warshofsky, /{The Patent Wars}/ (New York: Wiley, 1994), 170-71. }~ And relative to a startup, established companies also have the means. (Think RCA and FM radio.) A world in which competitors with new ideas must fight not only the market but also the government is a world in which competitors with new ideas will not succeed. It is a world of stasis and increasingly concentrated stagnation. It is the Soviet Union under Brezhnev.
+={free market, technological changes in+2;Brezhnev, Leonid;FM radio;radio:FM spectrum of;Gates, Bill;market competition;RCA}
+
+Thus, while it is understandable for industries threatened with new technologies that change the way they do business to look to the government for protection, it is the special duty of policy makers to guarantee that that protection not become a deterrent to progress. It is the duty of policy makers, in other words, to assure that the changes they create, in response to the request of those hurt by changing technology, are changes that preserve the incentives and opportunities for innovation and change.
+
+In the context of laws regulating speech - which include, obviously, copyright law - that duty is even stronger. When the industry complaining about changing technologies is asking Congress to respond in a way that burdens speech and creativity, policy makers should be especially wary of the request. It is always a bad deal for the government to get into the business of regulating speech markets. The risks and dangers of that game are precisely why our framers created the First Amendment to our Constitution: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech." So when Congress is being asked to pass laws that would "abridge" the freedom of speech, it should ask" carefully - whether such regulation is justified.
+={Constitution, U.S.:First Amendment to;First Amendment;speech, freedom of:constitutional guarantee of}
+
+My argument just now, however, has nothing to do with whether the changes that are being pushed by the copyright warriors are "justified." My argument is about their effect. For before we get to the question of justification, a hard question that depends a great deal upon your values, we should first ask whether we understand the effect of the changes the content industry wants.
+
+Here's the metaphor that will capture the argument to follow.
+
+In 1873, the chemical DDT was first synthesized. In 1948, Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Müller won the Nobel Prize for his work demonstrating the insecticidal properties of DDT. By the 1950s, the insecticide was widely used around the world to kill disease-carrying pests. It was also used to increase farm production.
+={Müller, Paul Hermann+3;DDT+6;insecticide, environmental consequences of+6;farming+4}
+
+No one doubts that killing disease-carrying pests or increasing crop production is a good thing. No one doubts that the work of Müller was important and valuable and probably saved lives, possibly millions.
+
+But in 1962, Rachel Carson published /{Silent Spring}/, which argued that DDT, whatever its primary benefits, was also having unintended environmental consequences. Birds were losing the ability to reproduce. Whole chains of the ecology were being destroyed.
+={Carson, Rachel;Silent Spring (Carson);environmentalism+4}
+
+No one set out to destroy the environment. Paul Müller certainly did not aim to harm any birds. But the effort to solve one set of problems produced another set which, in the view of some, was far worse than the problems that were originally attacked. Or more accurately, the problems DDT caused were worse than the problems it solved, at least when considering the other, more environmentally friendly ways to solve the problems that DDT was meant to solve.
+
+It is to this image precisely that Duke University law professor James Boyle appeals when he argues that we need an "environmentalism" for culture.~{ See, for example, James Boyle, "A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism for the Net?" /{Duke Law Journal}/ 47 (1997): 87. }~ His point, and the point I want to develop in the balance of this chapter, is not that the aims of copyright are flawed. Or that authors should not be paid for their work. Or that music should be given away "for free." The point is that some of the ways in which we might protect authors will have unintended consequences for the cultural environment, much like DDT had for the natural environment. And just as criticism of DDT is not an endorsement of malaria or an attack on farmers, so, too, is criticism of one particular set of regulations protecting copyright not an endorsement of anarchy or an attack on authors. It is an environment of creativity that we seek, and we should be aware of our actions' effects on the environment.
+={Boyle, James;copyright law:innovative freedom balanced with fair compensation in+1}
+
+My argument, in the balance of this chapter, tries to map exactly this effect. No doubt the technology of the Internet has had a dramatic effect on the ability of copyright owners to protect their content. But there should also be little doubt that when you add together the changes in copyright law over time, plus the change in technology that the Internet is undergoing just now, the net effect of these changes will not be only that copyrighted work is effectively protected. Also, and generally missed, the net effect of this massive increase in protection will be devastating to the environment for creativity.
+
+In a line: To kill a gnat, we are spraying DDT with consequences for free culture that will be far more devastating than that this gnat will be lost.
+
+2~ Beginnings
+
+America copied English copyright law. Actually, we copied and improved English copyright law. Our Constitution makes the purpose of "creative property" rights clear; its express limitations reinforce the English aim to avoid overly powerful publishers.
+={Constitution, U.S.:on creative property|copyright purpose established in+6|Progress Clause of+5;copyright:constitutional purpose of|duration of;creative property:constitutional tradition on+6;Progress Clause+5;copyright:duration of}
+
+The power to establish "creative property" rights is granted to Congress in a way that, for our Constitution, at least, is very odd. Article I, section 8, clause 8 of our Constitution states that:
+={Congress, U.S.:in constitutional Progress Clause+2}
+
+_1 Congress has the power to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
+
+We can call this the "Progress Clause," for notice what this clause does not say. It does not say Congress has the power to grant "creative property rights." It says that Congress has the power /{to promote progress}/. The grant of power is its purpose, and its purpose is a public one, not the purpose of enriching publishers, nor even primarily the purpose of rewarding authors.
+
+The Progress Clause expressly limits the term of copyrights. As we saw in chapter 6, the English limited the term of copyright so as to assure that a few would not exercise disproportionate control over culture by exercising disproportionate control over publishing. We can assume the framers followed the English for a similar purpose. Indeed, unlike the English, the framers reinforced that objective, by requiring that copyrights extend "to Authors" only.
+={copyright law:as protection of creators+2|history of American+22}
+
+The design of the Progress Clause reflects something about the Constitution's design in general. To avoid a problem, the framers built structure. To prevent the concentrated power of publishers, they built a structure that kept copyrights away from publishers and kept them short. To prevent the concentrated power of a church, they banned the federal government from establishing a church. To prevent concentrating power in the federal government, they built structures to reinforce the power of the states - including the Senate, whose members were at the time selected by the states, and an electoral college, also selected by the states, to select the president. In each case, a /{structure}/ built checks and balances into the constitutional frame, structured to prevent otherwise inevitable concentrations of power.
+={Senate, U.S.;Constitution, U.S.:structural checks and balances of;electoral college}
+
+I doubt the framers would recognize the regulation we call "copyright" today. The scope of that regulation is far beyond anything they ever considered. To begin to understand what they did, we need to put our "copyright" in context: We need to see how it has changed in the 210 years since they first struck its design.
+
+Some of these changes come from the law: some in light of changes in technology, and some in light of changes in technology given a particular concentration of market power. In terms of our model, we started here:
+={copyright:four regulatory modalities on}
+
+{freeculture01.png 350x350 }http://www.free-culture.cc/
+
+%% image 05 same as 01, renumber?
+
+We will end here:
+
+{freeculture04.png 310x350 }http://www.free-culture.cc/
+
+Let me explain how.
+
+2~ Law: Duration
+={copyright:duration of+14}
+
+When the first Congress enacted laws to protect creative property, it faced the same uncertainty about the status of creative property that the English had confronted in 1774. Many states had passed laws protecting creative property, and some believed that these laws simply supplemented common law rights that already protected creative authorship.~{ William W. Crosskey, /{Politics and the Constitution in the History of the United States}/ (London: Cambridge University Press, 1953), vol. 1, 485-86: "extinguish[ing], by plain implication of "the supreme Law of the Land," /{the perpetual rights which authors had, or were supposed by some to have, under the Common Law}/" (emphasis added). }~ This meant that there was no guaranteed public domain in the United States in 1790. If copyrights were protected by the common law, then there was no simple way to know whether a work published in the United States was controlled or free. Just as in England, this lingering uncertainty would make it hard for publishers to rely upon a public domain to reprint and distribute works.
+={Congress, U.S.:on copyright laws+2;Copyright Act (1790)+3;creative property:common law protections of;public domain:balance of U.S. content in+5}
+
+That uncertainty ended after Congress passed legislation granting copyrights. Because federal law overrides any contrary state law, federal protections for copyrighted works displaced any state law protections. Just as in England the Statute of Anne eventually meant that the copyrights for all English works expired, a federal statute meant that any state copyrights expired as well.
+={Statute of Anne (1710);law:federal vs. state+2}
+
+In 1790, Congress enacted the first copyright law. It created a federal copyright and secured that copyright for fourteen years. If the author was alive at the end of that fourteen years, then he could opt to renew the copyright for another fourteen years. If he did not renew the copyright, his work passed into the public domain.
+={copyright:renewability of+11}
+
+While there were many works created in the United States in the first ten years of the Republic, only 5 percent of the works were actually registered under the federal copyright regime. Of all the work created in the United States both before 1790 and from 1790 through 1800, 95 percent immediately passed into the public domain; the balance would pass into the pubic domain within twenty-eight years at most, and more likely within fourteen years.~{ Although 13,000 titles were published in the United States from 1790 to 1799, only 556 copyright registrations were filed; John Tebbel, /{A History of Book Publishing in the United States,}/ vol. 1, /{The Creation of an Industry, 1630- 1865}/ (New York: Bowker, 1972), 141. Of the 21,000 imprints recorded before 1790, only twelve were copyrighted under the 1790 act; William J. Maher, /{Copyright Term, Retrospective Extension and the Copyright Law of 1790 in Historical Context,}/ 7-10 (2002), available at link #25. Thus, the overwhelming majority of works fell immediately into the public domain. Even those works that were copyrighted fell into the public domain quickly, because the term of copyright was short. The initial term of copyright was fourteen years, with the option of renewal for an additional fourteen years. Copyright Act of May 31, 1790, §1, 1 stat. 124. }~
+
+This system of renewal was a crucial part of the American system of copyright. It assured that the maximum terms of copyright would be granted only for works where they were wanted. After the initial term of fourteen years, if it wasn't worth it to an author to renew his copyright, then it wasn't worth it to society to insist on the copyright, either.
+
+Fourteen years may not seem long to us, but for the vast majority of copyright owners at that time, it was long enough: Only a small minority of them renewed their copyright after fourteen years; the balance allowed their work to pass into the public domain.~{ Few copyright holders ever chose to renew their copyrights. For instance, of the 25,006 copyrights registered in 1883, only 894 were renewed in 1910. For a year-by-year analysis of copyright renewal rates, see Barbara A. Ringer, "Study No. 31: Renewal of Copyright," /{Studies on Copyright,}/ vol. 1 (New York: Practicing Law Institute, 1963), 618. For a more recent and comprehensive analysis, see William M. Landes and Richard A. Posner, "Indefinitely Renewable Copyright," /{University of Chicago Law Review}/ 70 (2003): 471, 498-501, and accompanying figures. }~
+
+Even today, this structure would make sense. Most creative work has an actual commercial life of just a couple of years. Most books fall out of print after one year.~{ See Ringer, ch. 9, n. 2. }~ When that happens, the used books are traded free of copyright regulation. Thus the books are no longer /{effectively}/ controlled by copyright. The only practical commercial use of the books at that time is to sell the books as used books; that use - because it does not involve publication - is effectively free.
+={books:resales of|out of print}
+
+In the first hundred years of the Republic, the term of copyright was changed once. In 1831, the term was increased from a maximum of 28 years to a maximum of 42 by increasing the initial term of copyright from 14 years to 28 years. In the next fifty years of the Republic, the term increased once again. In 1909, Congress extended the renewal term of 14 years to 28 years, setting a maximum term of 56 years.
+={Congress, U.S.:on copyright laws+6|copyright terms extended by+6;copyright law:term extensions in+6}
+
+Then, beginning in 1962, Congress started a practice that has defined copyright law since. Eleven times in the last forty years, Congress has extended the terms of existing copyrights; twice in those forty years, Congress extended the term of future copyrights. Initially, the extensions of existing copyrights were short, a mere one to two years. In 1976, Congress extended all existing copyrights by nineteen years. And in 1998, in the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, Congress extended the term of existing and future copyrights by twenty years.
+={Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998)+1;public domain:future patents vs. future copyrights in+4}
+
+The effect of these extensions is simply to toll, or delay, the passing of works into the public domain. This latest extension means that the public domain will have been tolled for thirty-nine out of fifty-five years, or 70 percent of the time since 1962. Thus, in the twenty years after the Sonny Bono Act, while one million patents will pass into the public domain, zero copyrights will pass into the public domain by virtue of the expiration of a copyright term.
+={patents:in public domain}
+
+The effect of these extensions has been exacerbated by another, little-noticed change in the copyright law. Remember I said that the framers established a two- part copyright regime, requiring a copyright owner to renew his copyright after an initial term. The requirement of renewal meant that works that no longer needed copyright protection would pass more quickly into the public domain. The works remaining under protection would be those that had some continuing commercial value.
+
+The United States abandoned this sensible system in 1976. For all works created after 1978, there was only one copyright term - the maximum term. For "natural" authors, that term was life plus fifty years. For corporations, the term was seventy-five years. Then, in 1992, Congress abandoned the renewal requirement for all works created before 1978. All works still under copyright would be accorded the maximum term then available. After the Sonny Bono Act, that term was ninety-five years.
+={Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998);copyright:of natural authors vs. corporations;corporations:copyright terms for}
+
+This change meant that American law no longer had an automatic way to assure that works that were no longer exploited passed into the public domain. And indeed, after these changes, it is unclear whether it is even possible to put works into the public domain. The public domain is orphaned by these changes in copyright law. Despite the requirement that terms be "limited," we have no evidence that anything will limit them.
+
+The effect of these changes on the average duration of copyright is dramatic. In 1973, more than 85 percent of copyright owners failed to renew their copyright. That meant that the average term of copyright in 1973 was just 32.2 years. Because of the elimination of the renewal requirement, the average term of copyright is now the maximum term. In thirty years, then, the average term has tripled, from 32.2 years to 95 years.~{ These statistics are understated. Between the years 1910 and 1962 (the first year the renewal term was extended), the average term was never more than thirty-two years, and averaged thirty years. See Landes and Posner, "Indefinitely Renewable Copyright," loc. cit. }~
+
+2~ Law: Scope
+={copyright:scope of+17}
+
+The "scope" of a copyright is the range of rights granted by the law. The scope of American copyright has changed dramatically. Those changes are not necessarily bad. But we should understand the extent of the changes if we're to keep this debate in context.
+
+In 1790, that scope was very narrow. Copyright covered only "maps, charts, and books." That means it didn't cover, for example, music or architecture. More significantly, the right granted by a copyright gave the author the exclusive right to "publish" copyrighted works. That means someone else violated the copyright only if he republished the work without the copyright owner's permission. Finally, the right granted by a copyright was an exclusive right to that particular book. The right did not extend to what lawyers call "derivative works." It would not, therefore, interfere with the right of someone other than the author to translate a copyrighted book, or to adapt the story to a different form (such as a drama based on a published book).
+={copyright law:on republishing vs. transformation of original work;derivative works:historical shift in copyright coverage of+2}
+
+This, too, has changed dramatically. While the contours of copyright today are extremely hard to describe simply, in general terms, the right covers practically any creative work that is reduced to a tangible form. It covers music as well as architecture, drama as well as computer programs. It gives the copyright owner of that creative work not only the exclusive right to "publish" the work, but also the exclusive right of control over any "copies" of that work. And most significant for our purposes here, the right gives the copyright owner control over not only his or her particular work, but also any "derivative work" that might grow out of the original work. In this way, the right covers more creative work, protects the creative work more broadly, and protects works that are based in a significant way on the initial creative work.
+
+At the same time that the scope of copyright has expanded, procedural limitations on the right have been relaxed. I've already described the complete removal of the renewal requirement in 1992. In addition to the renewal requirement, for most of the history of American copyright law, there was a requirement that a work be registered before it could receive the protection of a copyright. There was also a requirement that any copyrighted work be marked either with that famous © or the word /{copyright}/. And for most of the history of American copyright law, there was a requirement that works be deposited with the government before a copyright could be secured.
+={copyright:marking of+2;formalities+2;copyright law:registration requirement of+2}
+
+The reason for the registration requirement was the sensible understanding that for most works, no copyright was required. Again, in the first ten years of the Republic, 95 percent of works eligible for copyright were never copyrighted. Thus, the rule reflected the norm: Most works apparently didn't need copyright, so registration narrowed the regulation of the law to the few that did. The same reasoning justified the requirement that a work be marked as copyrighted - that way it was easy to know whether a copyright was being claimed. The requirement that works be deposited was to assure that after the copyright expired, there would be a copy of the work somewhere so that it could be copied by others without locating the original author.
+
+All of these "formalities" were abolished in the American system when we decided to follow European copyright law. There is no requirement that you register a work to get a copyright; the copyright now is automatic; the copyright exists whether or not you mark your work with a ©; and the copyright exists whether or not you actually make a copy available for others to copy.
+={copyright law:European}
+
+Consider a practical example to understand the scope of these differences.
+
+If, in 1790, you wrote a book and you were one of the 5 percent who actually copyrighted that book, then the copyright law protected you against another publisher's taking your book and republishing it without your permission. The aim of the act was to regulate publishers so as to prevent that kind of unfair competition. In 1790, there were 174 publishers in the United States.~{ See Thomas Bender and David Sampliner, "Poets, Pirates, and the Creation of American Literature," 29 /{New York University Journal of International Law and Politics}/ 255 (1997), and James Gilraeth, ed., Federal Copyright Records, 1790- 1800 (U.S. G.P.O., 1987). }~ The Copyright Act was thus a tiny regulation of a tiny proportion of a tiny part of the creative market in the United States - publishers.
+={Copyright Act (1790)+1}
+
+The act left other creators totally unregulated. If I copied your poem by hand, over and over again, as a way to learn it by heart, my act was totally unregulated by the 1790 act. If I took your novel and made a play based upon it, or if I translated it or abridged it, none of those activities were regulated by the original copyright act. These creative activities remained free, while the activities of publishers were restrained.
+={copyright law:on republishing vs. transformation of original work+8;derivative works:piracy vs.+3;piracy:derivative work vs.+6}
+
+Today the story is very different: If you write a book, your book is automatically protected. Indeed, not just your book. Every e-mail, every note to your spouse, every doodle, /{every}/ creative act that's reduced to a tangible form - all of this is automatically copyrighted. There is no need to register or mark your work. The protection follows the creation, not the steps you take to protect it.
+
+That protection gives you the right (subject to a narrow range of fair use exceptions) to control how others copy the work, whether they copy it to republish it or to share an excerpt.
+
+That much is the obvious part. Any system of copyright would control competing publishing. But there's a second part to the copyright of today that is not at all obvious. This is the protection of "derivative rights." If you write a book, no one can make a movie out of your book without permission. No one can translate it without permission. CliffsNotes can't make an abridgment unless permission is granted. All of these derivative uses of your original work are controlled by the copyright holder. The copyright, in other words, is now not just an exclusive right to your writings, but an exclusive right to your writings and a large proportion of the writings inspired by them.
+
+It is this derivative right that would seem most bizarre to our framers, though it has become second nature to us. Initially, this expansion was created to deal with obvious evasions of a narrower copyright. If I write a book, can you change one word and then claim a copyright in a new and different book? Obviously that would make a joke of the copyright, so the law was properly expanded to include those slight modifications as well as the verbatim original work.
+
+In preventing that joke, the law created an astonishing power within a free culture - at least, it's astonishing when you understand that the law applies not just to the commercial publisher but to anyone with a computer. I understand the wrong in duplicating and selling someone else's work. But whatever /{that}/ wrong is, transforming someone else's work is a different wrong. Some view transformation as no wrong at all - they believe that our law, as the framers penned it, should not protect derivative rights at all.~{ Jonathan Zittrain, "The Copyright Cage," /{Legal Affairs,}/ July/August 2003, available at link #26. }~ Whether or not you go that far, it seems plain that whatever wrong is involved is fundamentally different from the wrong of direct piracy.
+
+Yet copyright law treats these two different wrongs in the same way. I can go to court and get an injunction against your pirating my book. I can go to court and get an injunction against your transformative use of my book.~{ Professor Rubenfeld has presented a powerful constitutional argument about the difference that copyright law should draw (from the perspective of the First Amendment) between mere "copies" and derivative works. See Jed Rubenfeld, "The Freedom of Imagination: Copyright's Constitutionality," /{Yale Law Journal}/ 112 (2002): 1-60 (see especially pp. 53-59). }~ These two different uses of my creative work are treated the same.
+
+This again may seem right to you. If I wrote a book, then why should you be able to write a movie that takes my story and makes money from it without paying me or crediting me? Or if Disney creates a creature called "Mickey Mouse," why should you be able to make Mickey Mouse toys and be the one to trade on the value that Disney originally created?
+={Disney, Walt;Mickey Mouse}
+
+These are good arguments, and, in general, my point is not that the derivative right is unjustified. My aim just now is much narrower: simply to make clear that this expansion is a significant change from the rights originally granted.
+
+2~ Law and Architecture: Reach
+
+Whereas originally the law regulated only publishers, the change in copyright's scope means that the law today regulates publishers, users, and authors. It regulates them because all three are capable of making copies, and the core of the regulation of copyright law is copies.~{ This is a simplification of the law, but not much of one. The law certainly regulates more than "copies" - a public performance of a copyrighted song, for example, is regulated even though performance per se doesn't make a copy; 17 /{United States Code,}/ section 106(4). And it certainly sometimes doesn't regulate a "copy"; 17 /{United States Code,}/ section 112(a). But the presumption under the existing law (which regulates "copies;" 17 /{United States Code,}/ section 102) is that if there is a copy, there is a right. }~
+={copyright law:copies as core issue of+1|scope of+2}
+
+"Copies." That certainly sounds like the obvious thing for /{copy}/right law to regulate. But as with Jack Valenti's argument at the start of this chapter, that "creative property" deserves the "same rights" as all other property, it is the /{obvious}/ that we need to be most careful about. For while it may be obvious that in the world before the Internet, copies were the obvious trigger for copyright law, upon reflection, it should be obvious that in the world with the Internet, copies should /{not}/ be the trigger for copyright law. More precisely, they should not /{always}/ be the trigger for copyright law.
+={Valenti, Jack:on creative property rights;creative property:other property rights vs.+1}
+
+This is perhaps the central claim of this book, so let me take this very slowly so that the point is not easily missed. My claim is that the Internet should at least force us to rethink the conditions under which the law of copyright automatically applies,~{ Thus, my argument is not that in each place that copyright law extends, we should repeal it. It is instead that we should have a good argument for its extending where it does, and should not determine its reach on the basis of arbitrary and automatic changes caused by technology. }~ because it is clear that the current reach of copyright was never contemplated, much less chosen, by the legislators who enacted copyright law.
+
+We can see this point abstractly by beginning with this largely empty circle.
+
+{freeculture05.png 350x350 "uses" }http://www.free-culture.cc/
+
+Think about a book in real space, and imagine this circle to represent all its potential /{uses}/. Most of these uses are unregulated by copyright law, because the uses don't create a copy. If you read a book, that act is not regulated by copyright law. If you give someone the book, that act is not regulated by copyright law. If you resell a book, that act is not regulated (copyright law expressly states that after the first sale of a book, the copyright owner can impose no further conditions on the disposition of the book). If you sleep on the book or use it to hold up a lamp or let your puppy chew it up, those acts are not regulated by copyright law, because those acts do not make a copy.
+={books:three types of uses of+9;copyright law:copies as core issue of+16;Internet:copyright applicability altered by technology of+16;technology:copyright intent altered by+16;derivative works:piracy vs.+3;piracy:derivative work vs.+3}
+
+% piracy derivative work vs. in original index, not found, but included for page indicated
+
+{freeculture06.png 350x350 "unregulated" }http://www.free-culture.cc/
+
+Obviously, however, some uses of a copyrighted book are regulated by copyright law. Republishing the book, for example, makes a copy. It is therefore regulated by copyright law. Indeed, this particular use stands at the core of this circle of possible uses of a copyrighted work. It is the paradigmatic use properly regulated by copyright regulation (see first diagram on next page).
+
+Finally, there is a tiny sliver of otherwise regulated copying uses that remain unregulated because the law considers these "fair uses."
+={fair use+6;copyright law:fair use and+6}
+
+{freeculture07.png 350x350 }http://www.free-culture.cc/
+
+These are uses that themselves involve copying, but which the law treats as unregulated because public policy demands that they remain unregulated. You are free to quote from this book, even in a review that is quite negative, without my permission, even though that quoting makes a copy. That copy would ordinarily give the copyright owner the exclusive right to say whether the copy is allowed or not, but the law denies the owner any exclusive right over such "fair uses" for public policy (and possibly First Amendment) reasons.
+={Constitution, U.S.:First Amendment to;First Amendment}
+
+{freeculture08.png 450x350 }http://www.free-culture.cc/
+
+{freeculture09.png 350x350 }http://www.free-culture.cc/
+
+In real space, then, the possible uses of a book are divided into three sorts: (1) unregulated uses, (2) regulated uses, and (3) regulated uses that are nonetheless deemed "fair" regardless of the copyright owner's views.
+={copyright:usage restrictions attached to+8}
+
+Enter the Internet - a distributed, digital network where every use of a copyrighted work produces a copy.~{ I don't mean "nature" in the sense that it couldn't be different, but rather that its present instantiation entails a copy. Optical networks need not make copies of content they transmit, and a digital network could be designed to delete anything it copies so that the same number of copies remain. }~ And because of this single, arbitrary feature of the design of a digital network, the scope of category 1 changes dramatically. Uses that before were presumptively unregulated are now presumptively regulated. No longer is there a set of presumptively unregulated uses that define a freedom associated with a copyrighted work. Instead, each use is now subject to the copyright, because each use also makes a copy - category 1 gets sucked into category 2. And those who would defend the unregulated uses of copyrighted work must look exclusively to category 3, fair uses, to bear the burden of this shift.
+={books:on Internet+7;Internet:books on+7;fair use:Internet burdens on}
+
+So let's be very specific to make this general point clear. Before the Internet, if you purchased a book and read it ten times, there would be no plausible /{copyright}/-related argument that the copyright owner could make to control that use of her book. Copyright law would have nothing to say about whether you read the book once, ten times, or every night before you went to bed. None of those instances of use - reading - could be regulated by copyright law because none of those uses produced a copy.
+
+But the same book as an e-book is effectively governed by a different set of rules. Now if the copyright owner says you may read the book only once or only once a month, then /{copyright law}/ would aid the copyright owner in exercising this degree of control, because of the accidental feature of copyright law that triggers its application upon there being a copy. Now if you read the book ten times and the license says you may read it only five times, then whenever you read the book (or any portion of it) beyond the fifth time, you are making a copy of the book contrary to the copyright owner's wish.
+={e-books+5;derivative works:technological developments and+4}
+
+There are some people who think this makes perfect sense. My aim just now is not to argue about whether it makes sense or not. My aim is only to make clear the change. Once you see this point, a few other points also become clear:
+
+First, making category 1 disappear is not anything any policy maker ever intended. Congress did not think through the collapse of the presumptively unregulated uses of copyrighted works. There is no evidence at all that policy makers had this idea in mind when they allowed our policy here to shift. Unregulated uses were an important part of free culture before the Internet.
+
+Second, this shift is especially troubling in the context of transformative uses of creative content. Again, we can all understand the wrong in commercial piracy. But the law now purports to regulate /{any}/ transformation you make of creative work using a machine. "Copy and paste" and "cut and paste" become crimes. Tinkering with a story and releasing it to others exposes the tinkerer to at least a requirement of justification. However troubling the expansion with respect to copying a particular work, it is extraordinarily troubling with respect to transformative uses of creative work.
+={copyright law:on republishing vs. transformation of original work+1}
+
+Third, this shift from category 1 to category 2 puts an extraordinary burden on category 3 ("fair use") that fair use never before had to bear. If a copyright owner now tried to control how many times I could read a book on-line, the natural response would be to argue that this is a violation of my fair use rights. But there has never been any litigation about whether I have a fair use right to read, because before the Internet, reading did not trigger the application of copyright law and hence the need for a fair use defense. The right to read was effectively protected before because reading was not regulated.
+={fair use:Internet burdens on+1;copyright law:fair use and+1;derivative works:fair use vs.+1}
+
+This point about fair use is totally ignored, even by advocates for free culture. We have been cornered into arguing that our rights depend upon fair use - never even addressing the earlier question about the expansion in effective regulation. A thin protection grounded in fair use makes sense when the vast majority of uses are /{unregulated}/. But when everything becomes presumptively regulated, then the protections of fair use are not enough.
+
+The case of Video Pipeline is a good example. Video Pipeline was in the business of making "trailer" advertisements for movies available to video stores. The video stores displayed the trailers as a way to sell videos. Video Pipeline got the trailers from the film distributors, put the trailers on tape, and sold the tapes to the retail stores.
+={Video Pipeline+5;advertising+2;film industry:trailer advertisements of+2}
+
+The company did this for about fifteen years. Then, in 1997, it began to think about the Internet as another way to distribute these previews. The idea was to expand their "selling by sampling" technique by giving on-line stores the same ability to enable "browsing." Just as in a bookstore you can read a few pages of a book before you buy the book, so, too, you would be able to sample a bit from the movie on-line before you bought it.
+={browsing}
+
+In 1998, Video Pipeline informed Disney and other film distributors that it intended to distribute the trailers through the Internet (rather than sending the tapes) to distributors of their videos. Two years later, Disney told Video Pipeline to stop. The owner of Video Pipeline asked Disney to talk about the matter - he had built a business on distributing this content as a way to help sell Disney films; he had customers who depended upon his delivering this content. Disney would agree to talk only if Video Pipeline stopped the distribution immediately. Video Pipeline thought it was within their "fair use" rights to distribute the clips as they had. So they filed a lawsuit to ask the court to declare that these rights were in fact their rights.
+={Disney, Inc.+3;copyright law:fair use and;copyright law:copies as core issue of+3;fair use:legal intimidation tactics against+3}
+
+Disney countersued - for $100 million in damages. Those damages were predicated upon a claim that Video Pipeline had - willfully infringed" on Disney's copyright. When a court makes a finding of willful infringement, it can award damages not on the basis of the actual harm to the copyright owner, but on the basis of an amount set in the statute. Because Video Pipeline had distributed seven hundred clips of Disney movies to enable video stores to sell copies of those movies, Disney was now suing Video Pipeline for $100 million.
+={copyright:usage restrictions attached to+2;copyright infringement lawsuits:willful infringement findings in+2;willful infringement}
+
+Disney has the right to control its property, of course. But the video stores that were selling Disney's films also had some sort of right to be able to sell the films that they had bought from Disney. Disney's claim in court was that the stores were allowed to sell the films and they were permitted to list the titles of the films they were selling, but they were not allowed to show clips of the films as a way of selling them without Disney's permission.
+
+Now, you might think this is a close case, and I think the courts would consider it a close case. My point here is to map the change that gives Disney this power. Before the Internet, Disney couldn't really control how people got access to their content. Once a video was in the marketplace, the "first-sale doctrine" would free the seller to use the video as he wished, including showing portions of it in order to engender sales of the entire movie video. But with the Internet, it becomes possible for Disney to centralize control over access to this content. Because each use of the Internet produces a copy, use on the Internet becomes subject to the copyright owner's control. The technology expands the scope of effective control, because the technology builds a copy into every transaction.
+={first-sale doctrine}
+
+No doubt, a potential is not yet an abuse, and so the potential for control is not yet the abuse of control. Barnes & Noble has the right to say you can't touch a book in their store; property law gives them that right. But the market effectively protects against that abuse. If Barnes & Noble banned browsing, then consumers would choose other bookstores. Competition protects against the extremes. And it may well be (my argument so far does not even question this) that competition would prevent any similar danger when it comes to copyright. Sure, publishers exercising the rights that authors have assigned to them might try to regulate how many times you read a book, or try to stop you from sharing the book with anyone. But in a competitive market such as the book market, the dangers of this happening are quite slight.
+={Barnes & Noble;browsing;market competition}
+
+Again, my aim so far is simply to map the changes that this changed architecture enables. Enabling technology to enforce the control of copyright means that the control of copyright is no longer defined by balanced policy. The control of copyright is simply what private owners choose. In some contexts, at least, that fact is harmless. But in some contexts it is a recipe for disaster.
+
+2~ Architecture and Law: Force
+
+The disappearance of unregulated uses would be change enough, but a second important change brought about by the Internet magnifies its significance. This second change does not affect the reach of copyright regulation; it affects how such regulation is enforced.
+
+In the world before digital technology, it was generally the law that controlled whether and how someone was regulated by copyright law. The law, meaning a court, meaning a judge: In the end, it was a human, trained in the tradition of the law and cognizant of the balances that tradition embraced, who said whether and how the law would restrict your freedom.
+={copyright law:technology as automatic enforcer of;technology:copyright enforcement controlled by}
+
+There's a famous story about a battle between the Marx Brothers and Warner Brothers. The Marxes intended to make a parody of /{Casablanca}/. Warner Brothers objected. They wrote a nasty letter to the Marxes, warning them that there would be serious legal consequences if they went forward with their plan.~{ See David Lange, "Recognizing the Public Domain," /{Law and Contemporary Problems}/ 44 (1981): 172-73. }~
+={Marx Brothers+3;Warner Brothers+2;Casablanca+1}
+
+This led the Marx Brothers to respond in kind. They warned Warner Brothers that the Marx Brothers "were brothers long before you were."~{ Ibid. See also Vaidhyanathan, /{Copyrights and Copywrongs,}/ 1-3. }~ The Marx Brothers therefore owned the word /{brothers}/, and if Warner Brothers insisted on trying to control /{Casablanca}/, then the Marx Brothers would insist on control over /{brothers}/.
+
+An absurd and hollow threat, of course, because Warner Brothers, like the Marx Brothers, knew that no court would ever enforce such a silly claim. This extremism was irrelevant to the real freedoms anyone (including Warner Brothers) enjoyed.
+
+On the Internet, however, there is no check on silly rules, because on the Internet, increasingly, rules are enforced not by a human but by a machine: Increasingly, the rules of copyright law, as interpreted by the copyright owner, get built into the technology that delivers copyrighted content. It is code, rather than law, that rules. And the problem with code regulations is that, unlike law, code has no shame. Code would not get the humor of the Marx Brothers. The consequence of that is not at all funny.
+={books:on Internet+30;Internet:books on+28}
+
+Consider the life of my Adobe eBook Reader.
+={Adobe eBook Reader+2;copyright law:technology as automatic enforcer of+68;technology:copyright enforcement controlled by+68;e-books+27}
+
+An e-book is a book delivered in electronic form. An Adobe eBook is not a book that Adobe has published; Adobe simply produces the software that publishers use to deliver e-books. It provides the technology, and the publisher delivers the content by using the technology.
+
+On the next page is a picture of an old version of my Adobe eBook Reader.
+
+As you can see, I have a small collection of e-books within this e-book library. Some of these books reproduce content that is in the public domain: /{Middlemarch}/, for example, is in the public domain. Some of them reproduce content that is not in the public domain: My own book /{The Future of Ideas}/ is not yet within the public domain.
+={Future of Ideas, The (Lessig);Lessig, Lawrence;Middlemarch (Eliot)+1;public domain:e-book restrictions on+9}
+
+Consider /{Middlemarch}/ first. If you click on my e-book copy of /{Middlemarch}/, you'll see a fancy cover, and then a button at the bottom called Permissions.
+={Internet:copyright enforced through+46;permissions:coded controls vs.+23}
+
+{freeculture10.png 340x450 }http://www.free-culture.cc/
+
+If you click on the Permissions button, you'll see a list of the permissions that the publisher purports to grant with this book.
+
+{freeculture11.png 560x250 }http://www.free-culture.cc/
+
+According to my eBook Reader, I have the permission to copy to the clipboard of the computer ten text selections every ten days. (So far, I've copied no text to the clipboard.) I also have the permission to print ten pages from the book every ten days. Lastly, I have the permission to use the Read Aloud button to hear /{Middlemarch}/ read aloud through the computer.
+={Middlemarch (Eliot)}
+
+{freeculture12.png 310x410 }http://www.free-culture.cc/
+
+Here's the e-book for another work in the public domain (including the translation): Aristotle's /{Politics}/.
+={Aristotle;Politics (Aristotle)}
+
+According to its permissions, no printing or copying is permitted at all. But fortunately, you can use the Read Aloud button to hear the book.
+
+{freeculture13.png 560x220 }http://www.free-culture.cc/
+
+Finally (and most embarrassingly), here are the permissions for the original e- book version of my last book, /{The Future of Ideas}/:
+={Future of Ideas, The (Lessig);Lessig, Lawrence}
+
+{freeculture14.png 560x224 }http://www.free-culture.cc/
+
+No copying, no printing, and don't you dare try to listen to this book!
+
+Now, the Adobe eBook Reader calls these controls "permissions" - as if the publisher has the power to control how you use these works. For works under copyright, the copyright owner certainly does have the power - up to the limits of the copyright law. But for work not under copyright, there is no such copyright power.~{ In principle, a contract might impose a requirement on me. I might, for example, buy a book from you that includes a contract that says I will read it only three times, or that I promise to read it three times. But that obligation (and the limits for creating that obligation) would come from the contract, not from copyright law, and the obligations of contract would not necessarily pass to anyone who subsequently acquired the book. }~ When my e-book of /{Middlemarch}/ says I have the permission to copy only ten text selections into the memory every ten days, what that really means is that the eBook Reader has enabled the publisher to control how I use the book on my computer, far beyond the control that the law would enable.
+
+The control comes instead from the code - from the technology within which the e- book "lives." Though the e-book says that these are permissions, they are not the sort of "permissions" that most of us deal with. When a teenager gets "permission" to stay out till midnight, she knows (unless she's Cinderella) that she can stay out till 2 A.M., but will suffer a punishment if she's caught. But when the Adobe eBook Reader says I have the permission to make ten copies of the text into the computer's memory, that means that after I've made ten copies, the computer will not make any more. The same with the printing restrictions: After ten pages, the eBook Reader will not print any more pages. It's the same with the silly restriction that says that you can't use the Read Aloud button to read my book aloud - it's not that the company will sue you if you do; instead, if you push the Read Aloud button with my book, the machine simply won't read aloud.
+
+These are /{controls}/, not permissions. Imagine a world where the Marx Brothers sold word processing software that, when you tried to type "Warner Brothers," erased "Brothers" from the sentence.
+={Marx Brothers;Warner Brothers}
+
+This is the future of copyright law: not so much copyright /{law}/ as copyright /{code}/. The controls over access to content will not be controls that are ratified by courts; the controls over access to content will be controls that are coded by programmers. And whereas the controls that are built into the law are always to be checked by a judge, the controls that are built into the technology have no similar built-in check.
+
+How significant is this? Isn't it always possible to get around the controls built into the technology? Software used to be sold with technologies that limited the ability of users to copy the software, but those were trivial protections to defeat. Why won't it be trivial to defeat these protections as well?
+
+We've only scratched the surface of this story. Return to the Adobe eBook Reader.
+
+Early in the life of the Adobe eBook Reader, Adobe suffered a public relations nightmare. Among the books that you could download for free on the Adobe site was a copy of /{Alice's Adventures in Wonderland}/. This wonderful book is in the public domain. Yet when you clicked on Permissions for that book, you got the following report:
+={Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Caroll)+4;public domain:e-book restrictions on+4}
+
+{freeculture15.png 560x310 }http://www.free-culture.cc/
+
+Here was a public domain children's book that you were not allowed to copy, not allowed to lend, not allowed to give, and, as the "permissions" indicated, not allowed to "read aloud"!
+
+The public relations nightmare attached to that final permission. For the text did not say that you were not permitted to use the Read Aloud button; it said you did not have the permission to read the book aloud. That led some people to think that Adobe was restricting the right of parents, for example, to read the book to their children, which seemed, to say the least, absurd.
+
+Adobe responded quickly that it was absurd to think that it was trying to restrict the right to read a book aloud. Obviously it was only restricting the ability to use the Read Aloud button to have the book read aloud. But the question Adobe never did answer is this: Would Adobe thus agree that a consumer was free to use software to hack around the restrictions built into the eBook Reader? If some company (call it Elcomsoft) developed a program to disable the technological protection built into an Adobe eBook so that a blind person, say, could use a computer to read the book aloud, would Adobe agree that such a use of an eBook Reader was fair? Adobe didn't answer because the answer, however absurd it might seem, is no.
+
+The point is not to blame Adobe. Indeed, Adobe is among the most innovative companies developing strategies to balance open access to content with incentives for companies to innovate. But Adobe's technology enables control, and Adobe has an incentive to defend this control. That incentive is understandable, yet what it creates is often crazy.
+
+To see the point in a particularly absurd context, consider a favorite story of mine that makes the same point.
+
+Consider the robotic dog made by Sony named "Aibo." The Aibo learns tricks, cuddles, and follows you around. It eats only electricity and that doesn't leave that much of a mess (at least in your house).
+={Aibo robotic dog+6;robotic dog+6;Sony:Aibo robotic dog produced by+6}
+
+The Aibo is expensive and popular. Fans from around the world have set up clubs to trade stories. One fan in particular set up a Web site to enable information about the Aibo dog to be shared. This fan set up aibopet.com (and aibohack.com, but that resolves to the same site), and on that site he provided information about how to teach an Aibo to do tricks in addition to the ones Sony had taught it.
+={hacks+4}
+
+"Teach" here has a special meaning. Aibos are just cute computers. You teach a computer how to do something by programming it differently. So to say that aibopet.com was giving information about how to teach the dog to do new tricks is just to say that aibopet.com was giving information to users of the Aibo pet about how to hack their computer "dog" to make it do new tricks (thus, aibohack.com).
+
+If you're not a programmer or don't know many programmers, the word /{hack}/ has a particularly unfriendly connotation. Nonprogrammers hack bushes or weeds. Nonprogrammers in horror movies do even worse. But to programmers, or coders, as I call them, /{hack}/ is a much more positive term. /{Hack}/ just means code that enables the program to do something it wasn't originally intended or enabled to do. If you buy a new printer for an old computer, you might find the old computer doesn't run, or "drive," the printer. If you discovered that, you'd later be happy to discover a hack on the Net by someone who has written a driver to enable the computer to drive the printer you just bought.
+
+Some hacks are easy. Some are unbelievably hard. Hackers as a community like to challenge themselves and others with increasingly difficult tasks. There's a certain respect that goes with the talent to hack well. There's a well-deserved respect that goes with the talent to hack ethically.
+
+The Aibo fan was displaying a bit of both when he hacked the program and offered to the world a bit of code that would enable the Aibo to dance jazz. The dog wasn't programmed to dance jazz. It was a clever bit of tinkering that turned the dog into a more talented creature than Sony had built.
+
+I've told this story in many contexts, both inside and outside the United States. Once I was asked by a puzzled member of the audience, is it permissible for a dog to dance jazz in the United States? We forget that stories about the backcountry still flow across much of the world. So let's just be clear before we continue: It's not a crime anywhere (anymore) to dance jazz. Nor is it a crime to teach your dog to dance jazz. Nor should it be a crime (though we don't have a lot to go on here) to teach your robot dog to dance jazz. Dancing jazz is a completely legal activity. One imagines that the owner of aibopet.com thought, /{What possible problem could there be with teaching a robot dog to dance?}/
+
+Let's put the dog to sleep for a minute, and turn to a pony show - not literally a pony show, but rather a paper that a Princeton academic named Ed Felten prepared for a conference. This Princeton academic is well known and respected. He was hired by the government in the Microsoft case to test Microsoft's claims about what could and could not be done with its own code. In that trial, he demonstrated both his brilliance and his coolness. Under heavy badgering by Microsoft lawyers, Ed Felten stood his ground. He was not about to be bullied into being silent about something he knew very well.
+={Felten, Ed+11;Microsoft:government case against}
+
+But Felten's bravery was really tested in April 2001.~{ See Pamela Samuelson, "Anticircumvention Rules: Threat to Science," /{Science}/ 293 (2001): 2028; Brendan I. Koerner, "Play Dead: Sony Muzzles the Techies Who Teach a Robot Dog New Tricks," /{American Prospect,}/ 1 January 2002; "Court Dismisses Computer Scientists' Challenge to DMCA," /{Intellectual Property Litigation Reporter,}/ 11 December 2001; Bill Holland, "Copyright Act Raising Free-Speech Concerns," /{Billboard,}/ 26 May 2001; Janelle Brown, "Is the RIAA Running Scared?" Salon.com, 26 April 2001; Electronic Frontier Foundation, "Frequently Asked Questions about /{Felten and USENIX v. RIAA}/ Legal Case," available at link #27. }~ He and a group of colleagues were working on a paper to be submitted at conference. The paper was intended to describe the weakness in an encryption system being developed by the Secure Digital Music Initiative as a technique to control the distribution of music.
+={Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI)+5;encryption systems+5;Internet:encryption systems designed for+5}
+
+The SDMI coalition had as its goal a technology to enable content owners to exercise much better control over their content than the Internet, as it originally stood, granted them. Using encryption, SDMI hoped to develop a standard that would allow the content owner to say "this music cannot be copied," and have a computer respect that command. The technology was to be part of a "trusted system" of control that would get content owners to trust the system of the Internet much more.
+
+When SDMI thought it was close to a standard, it set up a competition. In exchange for providing contestants with the code to an SDMI-encrypted bit of content, contestants were to try to crack it and, if they did, report the problems to the consortium.
+
+Felten and his team figured out the encryption system quickly. He and the team saw the weakness of this system as a type: Many encryption systems would suffer the same weakness, and Felten and his team thought it worthwhile to point this out to those who study encryption.
+
+Let's review just what Felten was doing. Again, this is the United States. We have a principle of free speech. We have this principle not just because it is the law, but also because it is a really great idea. A strongly protected tradition of free speech is likely to encourage a wide range of criticism. That criticism is likely, in turn, to improve the systems or people or ideas criticized.
+={speech, freedom of:useful criticism fostered by}
+
+What Felten and his colleagues were doing was publishing a paper describing the weakness in a technology. They were not spreading free music, or building and deploying this technology. The paper was an academic essay, unintelligible to most people. But it clearly showed the weakness in the SDMI system, and why SDMI would not, as presently constituted, succeed.
+
+What links these two, aibopet.com and Felten, is the letters they then received. Aibopet.com received a letter from Sony about the aibopet.com hack. Though a jazz-dancing dog is perfectly legal, Sony wrote:
+={Aibo robotic dog+1;robotic dog+1;Sony:Aibo robotic dog produced by+1}
+
+_1 Your site contains information providing the means to circumvent AIBO-ware's copy protection protocol constituting a violation of the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act."
+={circumvention technologies;Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)+7;DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act)+7;copyright law:circumvention technology banned by+19;technology:of circumvention}
+
+And though an academic paper describing the weakness in a system of encryption should also be perfectly legal, Felten received a letter from an RIAA lawyer that read:
+={Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA):on encryption system critique+1}
+
+_1 Any disclosure of information gained from participating in the Public Challenge would be outside the scope of activities permitted by the Agreement and could subject you and your research team to actions under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA")."
+
+In both cases, this weirdly Orwellian law was invoked to control the spread of information. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made spreading such information an offense.
+
+The DMCA was enacted as a response to copyright owners' first fear about cyberspace. The fear was that copyright control was effectively dead; the response was to find technologies that might compensate. These new technologies would be copyright protection technologies - technologies to control the replication and distribution of copyrighted material. They were designed as /{code}/ to modify the original /{code}/ of the Internet, to reestablish some protection for copyright owners.
+
+The DMCA was a bit of law intended to back up the protection of this code designed to protect copyrighted material. It was, we could say, /{legal code}/ intended to buttress /{software code}/ which itself was intended to support the /{legal code of copyright}/.
+
+But the DMCA was not designed merely to protect copyrighted works to the extent copyright law protected them. Its protection, that is, did not end at the line that copyright law drew. The DMCA regulated devices that were designed to circumvent copyright protection measures. It was designed to ban those devices, whether or not the use of the copyrighted material made possible by that circumvention would have been a copyright violation.
+={circumvention technologies+13;fair use:circumvention technology ban and+1;technology:of circumvention+13}
+
+Aibopet.com and Felten make the point. The Aibo hack circumvented a copyright protection system for the purpose of enabling the dog to dance jazz. That enablement no doubt involved the use of copyrighted material. But as aibopet.com's site was noncommercial, and the use did not enable subsequent copyright infringements, there's no doubt that aibopet.com's hack was fair use of Sony's copyrighted material. Yet fair use is not a defense to the DMCA. The question is not whether the use of the copyrighted material was a copyright violation. The question is whether a copyright protection system was circumvented.
+={Felten, Ed+1;Aibo robotic dog;robotic dog;Sony:Aibo robotic dog produced by;copyright law:fair use and}
+
+The threat against Felten was more attenuated, but it followed the same line of reasoning. By publishing a paper describing how a copyright protection system could be circumvented, the RIAA lawyer suggested, Felten himself was distributing a circumvention technology. Thus, even though he was not himself infringing anyone's copyright, his academic paper was enabling others to infringe others' copyright.
+={Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA):on circumvention technology}
+
+The bizarreness of these arguments is captured in a cartoon drawn in 1981 by Paul Conrad. At that time, a court in California had held that the VCR could be banned because it was a copyright-infringing technology: It enabled consumers to copy films without the permission of the copyright owner. No doubt there were uses of the technology that were legal: Fred Rogers, aka "Mr. Rogers," for example, had testified in that case that he wanted people to feel free to tape /{Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood}/.
+={Conrad, Paul;Rogers, Fred;cassette recording:VCRs+10;VCRs+10;Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood;television:VCR taping of+8}
+
+_1 Some public stations, as well as commercial stations, program the "Neighborhood" at hours when some children cannot use it. I think that it's a real service to families to be able to record such programs and show them at appropriate times. I have always felt that with the advent of all of this new technology that allows people to tape the "Neighborhood" off-the-air, and I'm speaking for the "Neighborhood" because that's what I produce, that they then become much more active in the programming of their family's television life. Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others. My whole approach in broadcasting has always been "You are an important person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions." Maybe I'm going on too long, but I just feel that anything that allows a person to be more active in the control of his or her life, in a healthy way, is important."~{ /{Sony Corporation of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc.,}/ 464 U.S. 417, 455 fn. 27 (1984). Rogers never changed his view about the VCR. See James Lardner, /{Fast Forward: Hollywood, the Japanese, and the Onslaught of the VCR}/ (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 270-71. }~
+
+Even though there were uses that were legal, because there were some uses that were illegal, the court held the companies producing the VCR responsible.
+
+This led Conrad to draw the cartoon below, which we can adopt to the DMCA.
+={Conrad, Paul;Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)+2;DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act)+2}
+
+No argument I have can top this picture, but let me try to get close.
+
+The anticircumvention provisions of the DMCA target copyright circumvention technologies. Circumvention technologies can be used for different ends. They can be used, for example, to enable massive pirating of copyrighted material - a bad end. Or they can be used to enable the use of particular copyrighted materials in ways that would be considered fair use - a good end.
+
+A handgun can be used to shoot a police officer or a child. Most would agree such a use is bad. Or a handgun can be used for target practice or to protect against an intruder. At least some would say that such a use would be good. It, too, is a technology that has both good and bad uses.
+={guns+1;handguns+1}
+
+{freeculture16.png 425x500 }http://www.free-culture.cc/
+
+The obvious point of Conrad's cartoon is the weirdness of a world where guns are legal, despite the harm they can do, while VCRs (and circumvention technologies) are illegal. Flash: /{No one ever died from copyright circumvention}/. Yet the law bans circumvention technologies absolutely, despite the potential that they might do some good, but permits guns, despite the obvious and tragic harm they do.
+={Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA):on circumvention technology+1}
+
+The Aibo and RIAA examples demonstrate how copyright owners are changing the balance that copyright law grants. Using code, copyright owners restrict fair use; using the DMCA, they punish those who would attempt to evade the restrictions on fair use that they impose through code. Technology becomes a means by which fair use can be erased; the law of the DMCA backs up that erasing.
+={Conrad, Paul;Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA);DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act);Aibo robotic dog+1;robotic dog+1;copyright law:fair use and+1;fair use:technological restriction of+1}
+
+This is how /{code}/ becomes /{law}/. The controls built into the technology of copy and access protection become rules the violation of which is also a violation of the law. In this way, the code extends the law - increasing its regulation, even if the subject it regulates (activities that would otherwise plainly constitute fair use) is beyond the reach of the law. Code becomes law; code extends the law; code thus extends the control that copyright owners effect - at least for those copyright holders with the lawyers who can write the nasty letters that Felten and aibopet.com received.
+={Felten, Ed}
+
+There is one final aspect of the interaction between architecture and law that contributes to the force of copyright's regulation. This is the ease with which infringements of the law can be detected. For contrary to the rhetoric common at the birth of cyberspace that on the Internet, no one knows you're a dog, increasingly, given changing technologies deployed on the Internet, it is easy to find the dog who committed a legal wrong. The technologies of the Internet are open to snoops as well as sharers, and the snoops are increasingly good at tracking down the identity of those who violate the rules.
+
+For example, imagine you were part of a /{Star Trek}/ fan club. You gathered every month to share trivia, and maybe to enact a kind of fan fiction about the show. One person would play Spock, another, Captain Kirk. The characters would begin with a plot from a real story, then simply continue it.~{ For an early and prescient analysis, see Rebecca Tushnet, "Legal Fictions, Copyright, Fan Fiction, and a New Common Law," /{Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Journal}/ 17 (1997): 651. }~
+
+Before the Internet, this was, in effect, a totally unregulated activity. No matter what happened inside your club room, you would never be interfered with by the copyright police. You were free in that space to do as you wished with this part of our culture. You were allowed to build on it as you wished without fear of legal control.
+={Internet:copyright enforced through+1}
+
+But if you moved your club onto the Internet, and made it generally available for others to join, the story would be very different. Bots scouring the Net for trademark and copyright infringement would quickly find your site. Your posting of fan fiction, depending upon the ownership of the series that you're depicting, could well inspire a lawyer's threat. And ignoring the lawyer's threat would be extremely costly indeed. The law of copyright is extremely efficient. The penalties are severe, and the process is quick.
+={bots}
+
+This change in the effective force of the law is caused by a change in the ease with which the law can be enforced. That change too shifts the law's balance radically. It is as if your car transmitted the speed at which you traveled at every moment that you drove; that would be just one step before the state started issuing tickets based upon the data you transmitted. That is, in effect, what is happening here.
+
+2~ Market: Concentration
+
+So copyright's duration has increased dramatically - tripled in the past thirty years. And copyright's scope has increased as well - from regulating only publishers to now regulating just about everyone. And copyright's reach has changed, as every action becomes a copy and hence presumptively regulated. And as technologists find better ways to control the use of content, and as copyright is increasingly enforced through technology, copyright's force changes, too. Misuse is easier to find and easier to control. This regulation of the creative process, which began as a tiny regulation governing a tiny part of the market for creative work, has become the single most important regulator of creativity there is. It is a massive expansion in the scope of the government's control over innovation and creativity; it would be totally unrecognizable to those who gave birth to copyright's control.
+
+Still, in my view, all of these changes would not matter much if it weren't for one more change that we must also consider. This is a change that is in some sense the most familiar, though its significance and scope are not well understood. It is the one that creates precisely the reason to be concerned about all the other changes I have described.
+
+This is the change in the concentration and integration of the media. In the past twenty years, the nature of media ownership has undergone a radical alteration, caused by changes in legal rules governing the media. Before this change happened, the different forms of media were owned by separate media companies. Now, the media is increasingly owned by only a few companies. Indeed, after the changes that the FCC announced in June 2003, most expect that within a few years, we will live in a world where just three companies control more than 85 percent of the media.
+={FCC:media ownership regulated by+2;media:ownership concentration in+21}
+
+These changes are of two sorts: the scope of concentration, and its nature.
+
+Changes in scope are the easier ones to describe. As Senator John McCain summarized the data produced in the FCC's review of media ownership, "five companies control 85 percent of our media sources."~{ FCC Oversight: Hearing Before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, 108th Cong., 1st sess. (22 May 2003) (statement of Senator John McCain). }~ The five recording labels of Universal Music Group, BMG, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and EMI control 84.8 percent of the U.S. music market.~{ Lynette Holloway, "Despite a Marketing Blitz, CD Sales Continue to Slide," /{New York Times,}/ 23 December 2002. }~ The "five largest cable companies pipe programming to 74 percent of the cable subscribers nationwide."~{ Molly Ivins, "Media Consolidation Must Be Stopped," /{Charleston Gazette,}/ 31 May 2003. }~
+={BMG;cable television;EMI;McCain, John;recording industry:ownership concentration in;Sony Music Entertainment;Universal Music Group;Warner Music Group;television:ownership consolidation in}
+
+The story with radio is even more dramatic. Before deregulation, the nation's largest radio broadcasting conglomerate owned fewer than seventy-five stations. Today /{one}/ company owns more than 1,200 stations. During that period of consolidation, the total number of radio owners dropped by 34 percent. Today, in most markets, the two largest broadcasters control 74 percent of that market's revenues. Overall, just four companies control 90 percent of the nation's radio advertising revenues.
+={radio:ownership concentration in}
+
+Newspaper ownership is becoming more concentrated as well. Today, there are six hundred fewer daily newspapers in the United States than there were eighty years ago, and ten companies control half of the nation's circulation. There are twenty major newspaper publishers in the United States. The top ten film studios receive 99 percent of all film revenue. The ten largest cable companies account for 85 percent of all cable revenue. This is a market far from the free press the framers sought to protect. Indeed, it is a market that is quite well protected - by the market.
+={cable television+2;television:ownership consolidation in+2;film industry:consolidation of;newspapers:ownership consolidation of+2}
+
+Concentration in size alone is one thing. The more invidious change is in the nature of that concentration. As author James Fallows put it in a recent article about Rupert Murdoch,
+={Fallows, James+1;radio:ownership concentration in+2;Murdoch, Rupert+1}
+
+_1 Murdoch's companies now constitute a production system unmatched in its integration. They supply content - Fox movies ... Fox TV shows ... Fox-controlled sports broadcasts, plus newspapers and books. They sell the content to the public and to advertisers - in newspapers, on the broadcast network, on the cable channels. And they operate the physical distribution system through which the content reaches the customers. Murdoch's satellite systems now distribute News Corp. content in Europe and Asia; if Murdoch becomes DirecTV's largest single owner, that system will serve the same function in the United States."~{ James Fallows, "The Age of Murdoch," /{Atlantic Monthly}/ (September 2003): 89. }~
+={DirectTV;Fox (film company);News Corp}
+
+The pattern with Murdoch is the pattern of modern media. Not just large companies owning many radio stations, but a few companies owning as many outlets of media as possible. A picture describes this pattern better than a thousand words could do:
+
+{freeculture17.png 560x350 }http://www.free-culture.cc/
+
+Does this concentration matter? Will it affect what is made, or what is distributed? Or is it merely a more efficient way to produce and distribute content?
+={innovation:media conglomeration as disincentive for+13}
+
+My view was that concentration wouldn't matter. I thought it was nothing more than a more efficient financial structure. But now, after reading and listening to a barrage of creators try to convince me to the contrary, I am beginning to change my mind.
+
+Here's a representative story that begins to suggest how this integration may matter.
+
+In 1969, Norman Lear created a pilot for /{All in the Family}/. He took the pilot to ABC. The network didn't like it. It was too edgy, they told Lear. Make it again. Lear made a second pilot, more edgy than the first. ABC was exasperated. You're missing the point, they told Lear. We wanted less edgy, not more.
+={Lear, Norman+2;ABC+1;All in the Family;television:independent production for+7}
+
+Rather than comply, Lear simply took the show elsewhere. CBS was happy to have the series; ABC could not stop Lear from walking. The copyrights that Lear held assured an independence from network control.~{ Leonard Hill, "The Axis of Access," remarks before Weidenbaum Center Forum, "Entertainment Economics: The Movie Industry," St. Louis, Missouri, 3 April 2003 (transcript of prepared remarks available at link #28; for the Lear story, not included in the prepared remarks, see link #29). }~
+={CBS}
+
+The network did not control those copyrights because the law forbade the networks from controlling the content they syndicated. The law required a separation between the networks and the content producers; that separation would guarantee Lear freedom. And as late as 1992, because of these rules, the vast majority of prime time television - 75 percent of it - was "independent" of the networks.
+
+In 1994, the FCC abandoned the rules that required this independence. After that change, the networks quickly changed the balance. In 1985, there were twenty- five independent television production studios; in 2002, only five independent television studios remained. "In 1992, only 15 percent of new series were produced for a network by a company it controlled. Last year, the percentage of shows produced by controlled companies more than quintupled to 77 percent." "In 1992, 16 new series were produced independently of conglomerate control, last year there was one."~{ NewsCorp./DirecTV Merger and Media Consolidation: Hearings on Media Ownership Before the Senate Commerce Committee, 108th Cong., 1st sess. (2003) (testimony of Gene Kimmelman on behalf of Consumers Union and the Consumer Federation of America), available at link #30. Kimmelman quotes Victoria Riskin, president of Writers Guild of America, West, in her Remarks at FCC En Banc Hearing, Richmond, Virginia, 27 February 2003. }~ In 2002, 75 percent of prime time television was owned by the networks that ran it. "In the ten-year period between 1992 and 2002, the number of prime time television hours per week produced by network studios increased over 200%, whereas the number of prime time television hours per week produced by independent studios decreased 63%."~{ Ibid. }~
+={FCC:on television production studios}
+
+Today, another Norman Lear with another /{All in the Family}/ would find that he had the choice either to make the show less edgy or to be fired: The content of any show developed for a network is increasingly owned by the network.
+={Lear, Norman;All in the Family}
+
+While the number of channels has increased dramatically, the ownership of those channels has narrowed to an ever smaller and smaller few. As Barry Diller said to Bill Moyers,
+={Diller, Barry+1;Moyers, Bill}
+
+_1 Well, if you have companies that produce, that finance, that air on their channel and then distribute worldwide everything that goes through their controlled distribution system, then what you get is fewer and fewer actual voices participating in the process. [We u]sed to have dozens and dozens of thriving independent production companies producing television programs. Now you have less than a handful."~{ "Barry Diller Takes on Media Deregulation," /{Now with Bill Moyers,}/ Bill Moyers, 25 April 2003, edited transcript available at link #31. }~
+
+This narrowing has an effect on what is produced. The product of such large and concentrated networks is increasingly homogenous. Increasingly safe. Increasingly sterile. The product of news shows from networks like this is increasingly tailored to the message the network wants to convey. This is not the communist party, though from the inside, it must feel a bit like the communist party. No one can question without risk of consequence - not necessarily banishment to Siberia, but punishment nonetheless. Independent, critical, different views are quashed. This is not the environment for a democracy.
+={democracy:media concentration and}
+
+Economics itself offers a parallel that explains why this integration affects creativity. Clay Christensen has written about the "Innovator's Dilemma": the fact that large traditional firms find it rational to ignore new, breakthrough technologies that compete with their core business. The same analysis could help explain why large, traditional media companies would find it rational to ignore new cultural trends.~{ Clayton M. Christensen, /{The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary National Bestseller that Changed the Way We Do Business}/ (Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press, 1997). Christensen acknowledges that the idea was first suggested by Dean Kim Clark. See Kim B. Clark, "The Interaction of Design Hierarchies and Market Concepts in Technological Evolution," /{Research Policy}/ 14 (1985): 235- 51. For a more recent study, see Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan, /{Creative Destruction: Why Companies That Are Built to Last Underperform the Market - and How to Successfully Transform Them}/ (New York: Currency/Doubleday, 2001). }~ Lumbering giants not only don't, but should not, sprint. Yet if the field is only open to the giants, there will be far too little sprinting.
+={Christensen, Clayton M.;Innovator's Dilemma, The (Christensen)}
+
+I don't think we know enough about the economics of the media market to say with certainty what concentration and integration will do. The efficiencies are important, and the effect on culture is hard to measure.
+
+But there is a quintessentially obvious example that does strongly suggest the concern.
+
+In addition to the copyright wars, we're in the middle of the drug wars. Government policy is strongly directed against the drug cartels; criminal and civil courts are filled with the consequences of this battle.
+
+Let me hereby disqualify myself from any possible appointment to any position in government by saying I believe this war is a profound mistake. I am not pro drugs. Indeed, I come from a family once wrecked by drugs - though the drugs that wrecked my family were all quite legal. I believe this war is a profound mistake because the collateral damage from it is so great as to make waging the war insane. When you add together the burdens on the criminal justice system, the desperation of generations of kids whose only real economic opportunities are as drug warriors, the queering of constitutional protections because of the constant surveillance this war requires, and, most profoundly, the total destruction of the legal systems of many South American nations because of the power of the local drug cartels, I find it impossible to believe that the marginal benefit in reduced drug consumption by Americans could possibly outweigh these costs.
+={drugs:illegal+2;criminal justice system}
+
+You may not be convinced. That's fine. We live in a democracy, and it is through votes that we are to choose policy. But to do that, we depend fundamentally upon the press to help inform Americans about these issues.
+
+Beginning in 1998, the Office of National Drug Control Policy launched a media campaign as part of the "war on drugs." The campaign produced scores of short film clips about issues related to illegal drugs. In one series (the Nick and Norm series) two men are in a bar, discussing the idea of legalizing drugs as a way to avoid some of the collateral damage from the war. One advances an argument in favor of drug legalization. The other responds in a powerful and effective way against the argument of the first. In the end, the first guy changes his mind (hey, it's television). The plug at the end is a damning attack on the pro-legalization campaign.
+={advertising+4;commercials+4;television:advertising on+4;Nick and Norm anti-drug campaign}
+
+Fair enough. It's a good ad. Not terribly misleading. It delivers its message well. It's a fair and reasonable message.
+
+But let's say you think it is a wrong message, and you'd like to run a countercommercial. Say you want to run a series of ads that try to demonstrate the extraordinary collateral harm that comes from the drug war. Can you do it?
+
+Well,obviously, these ads cost lots of money. Assume you raise the money. Assume a group of concerned citizens donates all the money in the world to help you get your message out. Can you be sure your message will be heard then?
+
+No.You cannot. Television stations have a general policy of avoiding "controversial" ads. Ads sponsored by the government are deemed uncontroversial; ads disagreeing with the government are controversial. This selectivity might be thought inconsistent with the First Amendment, but the Supreme Court has held that stations have the right to choose what they run. Thus, the major channels of commercial media will refuse one side of a crucial debate the opportunity to present its case. And the courts will defend the rights of the stations to be this biased.~{ The Marijuana Policy Project, in February 2003, sought to place ads that directly responded to the Nick and Norm series on stations within the Washington, D.C., area. Comcast rejected the ads as "against [their] policy." The local NBC affiliate, WRC, rejected the ads without reviewing them. The local ABC affiliate, WJOA, originally agreed to run the ads and accepted payment to do so, but later decided not to run the ads and returned the collected fees. Interview with Neal Levine, 15 October 2003. These restrictions are, of course, not limited to drug policy. See, for example, Nat Ives, "On the Issue of an Iraq War, Advocacy Ads Meet with Rejection from TV Networks," /{New York Times,}/ 13 March 2003, C4. Outside of election-related air time there is very little that the FCC or the courts are willing to do to even the playing field. For a general overview, see Rhonda Brown, "Ad Hoc Access: The Regulation of Editorial Advertising on Television and Radio," /{Yale Law and Policy Review}/ 6 (1988): 449-79, and for a more recent summary of the stance of the FCC and the courts, see /{Radio-Television News Directors Association v. FCC,}/ 184 F. 3d 872 (D.C. Cir. 1999). Municipal authorities exercise the same authority as the networks. In a recent example from San Francisco, the San Francisco transit authority rejected an ad that criticized its Muni diesel buses. Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross, "Antidiesel Group Fuming After Muni Rejects Ad," SFGate.com, 16 June 2003, available at link #32. The ground was that the criticism was "too controversial." }~
+={Constitution, U.S.:First Amendment to;First Amendment;Supreme Court, U.S.:on television advertising bans;television:controversy avoided by}
+
+I'd be happy to defend the networks' rights, as well - if we lived in a media market that was truly diverse. But concentration in the media throws that condition into doubt. If a handful of companies control access to the media, and that handful of companies gets to decide which political positions it will allow to be promoted on its channels, then in an obvious and important way, concentration matters. You might like the positions the handful of companies selects. But you should not like a world in which a mere few get to decide which issues the rest of us get to know about.
+
+2~ Together
+={copyright:scope of+25}
+
+There is something innocent and obvious about the claim of the copyright warriors that the government should "protect my property." In the abstract, it is obviously true and, ordinarily, totally harmless. No sane sort who is not an anarchist could disagree.
+
+But when we see how dramatically this "property" has changed - when we recognize how it might now interact with both technology and markets to mean that the effective constraint on the liberty to cultivate our culture is dramatically different - the claim begins to seem less innocent and obvious. Given (1) the power of technology to supplement the law's control, and (2) the power of concentrated markets to weaken the opportunity for dissent, if strictly enforcing the massively expanded "property" rights granted by copyright fundamentally changes the freedom within this culture to cultivate and build upon our past, then we have to ask whether this property should be redefined.
+
+Not starkly. Or absolutely. My point is not that we should abolish copyright or go back to the eighteenth century. That would be a total mistake, disastrous for the most important creative enterprises within our culture today.
+
+But there is a space between zero and one, Internet culture notwithstanding. And these massive shifts in the effective power of copyright regulation, tied to increased concentration of the content industry and resting in the hands of technology that will increasingly enable control over the use of culture, should drive us to consider whether another adjustment is called for. Not an adjustment that increases copyright's power. Not an adjustment that increases its term. Rather, an adjustment to restore the balance that has traditionally defined copyright's regulation - a weakening of that regulation, to strengthen creativity.
+
+Copyright law has not been a rock of Gibraltar. It's not a set of constant commitments that, for some mysterious reason, teenagers and geeks now flout. Instead, copyright power has grown dramatically in a short period of time, as the technologies of distribution and creation have changed and as lobbyists have pushed for more control by copyright holders. Changes in the past in response to changes in technology suggest that we may well need similar changes in the future. And these changes have to be /{reductions}/ in the scope of copyright, in response to the extraordinary increase in control that technology and the market enable.
+
+For the single point that is lost in this war on pirates is a point that we see only after surveying the range of these changes. When you add together the effect of changing law, concentrated markets, and changing technology, together they produce an astonishing conclusion: /{Never in our history have fewer had a legal right to control more of the development of our culture than now}/.
+
+Not when copyrights were perpetual, for when copyrights were perpetual, they affected only that precise creative work. Not when only publishers had the tools to publish, for the market then was much more diverse. Not when there were only three television networks, for even then, newspapers, film studios, radio stations, and publishers were independent of the networks. /{Never}/ has copyright protected such a wide range of rights, against as broad a range of actors, for a term that was remotely as long. This form of regulation - a tiny regulation of a tiny part of the creative energy of a nation at the founding - is now a massive regulation of the overall creative process. Law plus technology plus the market now interact to turn this historically benign regulation into the most significant regulation of culture that our free society has known.~{ Siva Vaidhyanathan captures a similar point in his "four surrenders" of copyright law in the digital age. See Vaidhyanathan, 159-60. }~
+={copyright:in perpetuity}
+
+!_ This has been
+a long chapter. Its point can now be briefly stated.
+
+At the start of this book, I distinguished between commercial and noncommercial culture. In the course of this chapter, I have distinguished between copying a work and transforming it. We can now combine these two distinctions and draw a clear map of the changes that copyright law has undergone.
+={copyright law:history of American+10|on republishing vs. transformation of original work+16;culture:commercial vs. noncommercial+11;derivative works:historical shift in copyright coverage of+14;public domain:balance of U.S. content in+14}
+
+In 1790, the law looked like this:
+
+table{~h c3; 33; 33; 33;
+
+&nbsp;
+Publish
+Transform
+
+Commercial
+©
+Free
+
+Noncommercial
+Free
+Free
+
+}table
+
+The act of publishing a map, chart, and book was regulated by copyright law. Nothing else was. Transformations were free. And as copyright attached only with registration, and only those who intended to benefit commercially would register, copying through publishing of noncommercial work was also free.
+={copyright law:registration requirement of;copyright law:copies as core issue of+7}
+
+By the end of the nineteenth century, the law had changed to this:
+
+table{~h c3; 33; 33; 33;
+
+&nbsp;
+Publish
+Transform
+
+Commercial
+©
+©
+
+Noncommercial
+Free
+Free
+
+}table
+
+Derivative works were now regulated by copyright law - if published, which again, given the economics of publishing at the time, means if offered commercially. But noncommercial publishing and transformation were still essentially free.
+={derivative works:technological developments and+5;technology:of copying+5}
+
+In 1909 the law changed to regulate copies, not publishing, and after this change, the scope of the law was tied to technology. As the technology of copying became more prevalent, the reach of the law expanded. Thus by 1975, as photocopying machines became more common, we could say the law began to look like this:
+={photocopyring machines}
+
+table{~h c3; 33; 33; 33;
+
+&nbsp;
+Publish
+Transform
+
+Commercial
+©
+©
+
+Noncommercial
+©/Free
+Free
+
+}table
+
+The law was interpreted to reach noncommercial copying through, say, copy machines, but still much of copying outside of the commercial market remained free. But the consequence of the emergence of digital technologies, especially in the context of a digital network, means that the law now looks like this:
+
+table{~h c3; 33; 33; 33;
+
+&nbsp;
+Publish
+Transform
+
+Commercial
+©
+©
+
+Noncommercial
+©
+©
+
+}table
+
+Every realm is governed by copyright law, whereas before most creativity was not. The law now regulates the full range of creativity - commercial or not, transformative or not - with the same rules designed to regulate commercial publishers.
+
+Obviously, copyright law is not the enemy. The enemy is regulation that does no good. So the question that we should be asking just now is whether extending the regulations of copyright law into each of these domains actually does any good.
+={copyright:duration of+2}
+
+I have no doubt that it does good in regulating commercial copying. But I also have no doubt that it does more harm than good when regulating (as it regulates just now) noncommercial copying and, especially, noncommercial transformation. And increasingly, for the reasons sketched especially in chapters 7 and 8, one might well wonder whether it does more harm than good for commercial transformation. More commercial transformative work would be created if derivative rights were more sharply restricted.
+
+The issue is therefore not simply whether copyright is property. Of course copyright is a kind of "property," and of course, as with any property, the state ought to protect it. But first impressions notwithstanding, historically, this property right (as with all property rights~{ It was the single most important contribution of the legal realist movement to demonstrate that all property rights are always crafted to balance public and private interests. See Thomas C. Grey, "The Disintegration of Property," in /{Nomos XXII: Property,}/ J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman, eds. (New York: New York University Press, 1980). }~) has been crafted to balance the important need to give authors and artists incentives with the equally important need to assure access to creative work. This balance has always been struck in light of new technologies. And for almost half of our tradition, the "copyright" did not control /{at all}/ the freedom of others to build upon or transform a creative work. American culture was born free, and for almost 180 years our country consistently protected a vibrant and rich free culture.
+={copyright:as property+1;copyright law:fair use and+1|innovative freedom balanced with fair compensation in+2;fair use:legal intimidation tactics against+1;property rights:as balance of public good vs. private+2|copyright vs.+2}
+
+We achieved that free culture because our law respected important limits on the scope of the interests protected by "property." The very birth of "copyright" as a statutory right recognized those limits, by granting copyright owners protection for a limited time only (the story of chapter 6). The tradition of "fair use" is animated by a similar concern that is increasingly under strain as the costs of exercising any fair use right become unavoidably high (the story of chapter 7). Adding statutory rights where markets might stifle innovation is another familiar limit on the property right that copyright is (chapter 8). And granting archives and libraries a broad freedom to collect, claims of property notwithstanding, is a crucial part of guaranteeing the soul of a culture (chapter 9). Free cultures, like free markets, are built with property. But the nature of the property that builds a free culture is very different from the extremist vision that dominates the debate today.
+={archives:digital;culture:archives of;culture archives of;libraries:archival function of}
+
+Free culture is increasingly the casualty in this war on piracy. In response to a real, if not yet quantified, threat that the technologies of the Internet present to twentieth-century business models for producing and distributing culture, the law and technology are being transformed in a way that will undermine our tradition of free culture. The property right that is copyright is no longer the balanced right that it was, or was intended to be. The property right that is copyright has become unbalanced, tilted toward an extreme. The opportunity to create and transform becomes weakened in a world in which creation requires permission and creativity must check with a lawyer.
+={free culture:permission culture vs.;permission culture:free culture vs.}
+
+:B~ PUZZLES
+
+1~ Chapter Eleven: Chimera
+
+!_ In a well-known
+short story by H. G. Wells, a mountain climber named Nunez trips (literally, down an ice slope) into an unknown and isolated valley in the Peruvian Andes.~{ H. G. Wells, "The Country of the Blind" (1904, 1911). See H. G. Wells, /{The Country of the Blind and Other Stories,}/ Michael Sherborne, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). }~ The valley is extraordinarily beautiful, with "sweet water, pasture, an even climate, slopes of rich brown soil with tangles of a shrub that bore an excellent fruit." But the villagers are all blind. Nunez takes this as an opportunity. "In the Country of the Blind," he tells himself, "the One-Eyed Man is King." So he resolves to live with the villagers to explore life as a king.
+={Wells, H.G.+8;Country of the Blind, The (Wells)+8}
+
+Things don't go quite as he planned. He tries to explain the idea of sight to the villagers. They don't understand. He tells them they are "blind." They don't have the word /{blind}/. They think he's just thick. Indeed, as they increasingly notice the things he can't do (hear the sound of grass being stepped on, for example), they increasingly try to control him. He, in turn, becomes increasingly frustrated. "'You don't understand,' he cried, in a voice that was meant to be great and resolute, and which broke. 'You are blind and I can see. Leave me alone!'"
+
+The villagers don't leave him alone. Nor do they see (so to speak) the virtue of his special power. Not even the ultimate target of his affection, a young woman who to him seems "the most beautiful thing in the whole of creation," understands the beauty of sight. Nunez's description of what he sees "seemed to her the most poetical of fancies, and she listened to his description of the stars and the mountains and her own sweet white-lit beauty as though it was a guilty indulgence." "She did not believe," Wells tells us, and "she could only half understand, but she was mysteriously delighted."
+
+When Nunez announces his desire to marry his "mysteriously delighted" love, the father and the village object. "You see, my dear," her father instructs, "he's an idiot. He has delusions. He can't do anything right." They take Nunez to the village doctor.
+
+After a careful examination, the doctor gives his opinion. "His brain is affected," he reports.
+
+"What affects it?" the father asks.
+
+"Those queer things that are called the eyes ... are diseased ... in such a way as to affect his brain."
+
+The doctor continues: "I think I may say with reasonable certainty that in order to cure him completely, all that we need to do is a simple and easy surgical operation - namely, to remove these irritant bodies [the eyes]."
+
+"Thank Heaven for science!" says the father to the doctor. They inform Nunez of this condition necessary for him to be allowed his bride. (You'll have to read the original to learn what happens in the end. I believe in free culture, but never in giving away the end of a story.)
+
+!_ It sometimes
+happens that the eggs of twins fuse in the mother's womb. That fusion produces a "chimera." A chimera is a single creature with two sets of DNA. The DNA in the blood, for example, might be different from the DNA of the skin. This possibility is an underused plot for murder mysteries. "But the DNA shows with 100 percent certainty that she was not the person whose blood was at the scene. ..."
+={chimeras+7;twins, as chimera+2}
+
+Before I had read about chimeras, I would have said they were impossible. A single person can't have two sets of DNA. The very idea of DNA is that it is the code of an individual. Yet in fact, not only can two individuals have the same set of DNA (identical twins), but one person can have two different sets of DNA (a chimera). Our understanding of a "person" should reflect this reality.
+
+The more I work to understand the current struggle over copyright and culture, which I've sometimes called unfairly, and sometimes not unfairly enough, "the copyright wars," the more I think we're dealing with a chimera. For example, in the battle over the question "What is p2p file sharing?" both sides have it right, and both sides have it wrong. One side says, "File sharing is just like two kids taping each others' records - the sort of thing we've been doing for the last thirty years without any question at all." That's true, at least in part. When I tell my best friend to try out a new CD that I've bought, but rather than just send the CD, I point him to my p2p server, that is, in all relevant respects, just like what every executive in every recording company no doubt did as a kid: sharing music.
+={peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing:shoplifting vs.+4;piracy:of intangible property+6}
+
+But the description is also false in part. For when my p2p server is on a p2p network through which anyone can get access to my music, then sure, my friends can get access, but it stretches the meaning of "friends" beyond recognition to say "my ten thousand best friends" can get access. Whether or not sharing my music with my best friend is what "we have always been allowed to do," we have not always been allowed to share music with "our ten thousand best friends."
+={peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing:felony punishments for+4;peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing:total legalization of;copyright law:felony punishment for infringement of+2;Internet:music files downloaded from+12}
+
+Likewise, when the other side says, "File sharing is just like walking into a Tower Records and taking a CD off the shelf and walking out with it," that's true, at least in part. If, after Lyle Lovett (finally) releases a new album, rather than buying it, I go to Kazaa and find a free copy to take, that is very much like stealing a copy from Tower.
+={Kazaa;Lovett, Lyle}
+
+But it is not quite stealing from Tower. After all, when I take a CD from Tower Records, Tower has one less CD to sell. And when I take a CD from Tower Records, I get a bit of plastic and a cover, and something to show on my shelves. (And, while we're at it, we could also note that when I take a CD from Tower Records, the maximum fine that might be imposed on me, under California law, at least, is $1,000. According to the RIAA, by contrast, if I download a ten-song CD, I'm liable for $1,500,000 in damages.)
+={copyright infringement lawsuits:exaggerated claims of+2|in recording industry+2|against student file sharing+2;recording industry:copyright infringement lawsuits of+2;Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA):copyright infringement lawsuits filed by+2;copyright law:felony punishment for infringement of+2}
+
+The point is not that it is as neither side describes. The point is that it is both - both as the RIAA describes it and as Kazaa describes it. It is a chimera. And rather than simply denying what the other side asserts, we need to begin to think about how we should respond to this chimera. What rules should govern it?
+={Kazaa}
+
+We could respond by simply pretending that it is not a chimera. We could, with the RIAA, decide that every act of file sharing should be a felony. We could prosecute families for millions of dollars in damages just because file sharing occurred on a family computer. And we can get universities to monitor all computer traffic to make sure that no computer is used to commit this crime. These responses might be extreme, but each of them has either been proposed or actually implemented.~{ For an excellent summary, see the report prepared by GartnerG2 and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, "Copy- right and Digital Media in a Post-Napster World," 27 June 2003, available at link #33. Reps. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) and Howard L. Berman (D-Calif.) have introduced a bill that would treat unauthorized on-line copying as a felony offense with punishments ranging as high as five years imprisonment; see Jon Healey, "House Bill Aims to Up Stakes on Piracy," /{Los Angeles Times,}/ 17 July 2003, available at link #34. Civil penalties are currently set at $150,000 per copied song. For a recent (and unsuccessful) legal challenge to the RIAA's demand that an ISP reveal the identity of a user accused of sharing more than 600 songs through a family computer, see /{RIAA v. Verizon Internet Services (In re. Verizon Internet Services),}/ 240 F. Supp. 2d 24 (D.D.C. 2003). Such a user could face liability ranging as high as $90 million. Such astronomical figures furnish the RIAA with a powerful arsenal in its prosecution of file sharers. Settlements ranging from $12,000 to $17,500 for four students accused of heavy file sharing on university networks must have seemed a mere pittance next to the $98 billion the RIAA could seek should the matter proceed to court. See Elizabeth Young, "Downloading Could Lead to Fines," redandblack.com, 26 August 2003, available at link #35. For an example of the RIAA's targeting of student file sharing, and of the subpoenas issued to universities to reveal student file-sharer identities, see James Collins, "RIAA Steps Up Bid to Force BC, MIT to Name Students," /{Boston Globe,}/ 8 August 2003, D3, available at link #36. }~
+={university computer networks, p2p sharing on}
+
+Alternatively, we could respond to file sharing the way many kids act as though we've responded. We could totally legalize it. Let there be no copyright liability, either civil or criminal, for making copyrighted content available on the Net. Make file sharing like gossip: regulated, if at all, by social norms but not by law.
+={peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing:total legalization of}
+
+Either response is possible. I think either would be a mistake. Rather than embrace one of these two extremes, we should embrace something that recognizes the truth in both. And while I end this book with a sketch of a system that does just that, my aim in the next chapter is to show just how awful it would be for us to adopt the zero-tolerance extreme. I believe /{either}/ extreme would be worse than a reasonable alternative. But I believe the zero-tolerance solution would be the worse of the two extremes.
+={copyright infringement lawsuits:zero tolerance in+1;peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing:zero-tolerance of+7}
+
+Yet zero tolerance is increasingly our government's policy. In the middle of the chaos that the Internet has created, an extraordinary land grab is occurring. The law and technology are being shifted to give content holders a kind of control over our culture that they have never had before. And in this extremism, many an opportunity for new innovation and new creativity will be lost.
+={copyright law:technology as automatic enforcer of+4;recording industry:copyright protections in+2;technology:copyright enforcement controlled by+3}
+
+I'm not talking about the opportunities for kids to "steal" music. My focus instead is the commercial and cultural innovation that this war will also kill. We have never seen the power to innovate spread so broadly among our citizens, and we have just begun to see the innovation that this power will unleash. Yet the Internet has already seen the passing of one cycle of innovation around technologies to distribute content. The law is responsible for this passing. As the vice president for global public policy at one of these new innovators, eMusic.com, put it when criticizing the DMCA's added protection for copyrighted material,
+={copyright law:on music recordings+1;Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA);DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act);eMusic.com+4;peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing:infringement protections in+3}
+
+_1 eMusic opposes music piracy. We are a distributor of copyrighted material, and we want to protect those rights.
+
+_1 But building a technology fortress that locks in the clout of the major labels is by no means the only way to protect copyright interests, nor is it necessarily the best. It is simply too early to answer that question. Market forces operating naturally may very well produce a totally different industry model.
+
+_1 This is a critical point. The choices that industry sectors make with respect to these systems will in many ways directly shape the market for digital media and the manner in which digital media are distributed. This in turn will directly influence the options that are available to consumers, both in terms of the ease with which they will be able to access digital media and the equipment that they will require to do so. Poor choices made this early in the game will retard the growth of this market, hurting everyone's interests."~{ WIPO and the DMCA One Year Later: Assessing Consumer Access to Digital Entertainment on the Internet and Other Media: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Telecommunications, Trade, and Consumer Protection, House Committee on Commerce, 106th Cong. 29 (1999) (statement of Peter Harter, vice president, Global Public Policy and Standards, EMusic.com), available in LEXIS, Federal Document Clearing House Congressional Testimony File. }~
+
+In April 2001, eMusic.com was purchased by Vivendi Universal, one of "the major labels." Its position on these matters has now changed.
+={Vivendi Universal}
+
+Reversing our tradition of tolerance now will not merely quash piracy. It will sacrifice values that are important to this culture, and will kill opportunities that could be extraordinarily valuable.
+
+1~ Chapter Twelve: Harms
+
+!_ To fight
+"piracy," to protect "property," the content industry has launched a war. Lobbying and lots of campaign contributions have now brought the government into this war. As with any war, this one will have both direct and collateral damage. As with any war of prohibition, these damages will be suffered most by our own people.
+
+My aim so far has been to describe the consequences of this war, in particular, the consequences for "free culture." But my aim now is to extend this description of consequences into an argument. Is this war justified?
+
+In my view, it is not. There is no good reason why this time, for the first time, the law should defend the old against the new, just when the power of the property called "intellectual property" is at its greatest in our history.
+
+Yet "common sense" does not see it this way. Common sense is still on the side of the Causbys and the content industry. The extreme claims of control in the name of property still resonate; the uncritical rejection of "piracy" still has play.
+={piracy:uncritical rejection of+1}
+
+There will be many consequences of continuing this war. I want to describe just three. All three might be said to be unintended. I am quite confident the third is unintended. I'm less sure about the first two. The first two protect modern RCAs, but there is no Howard Armstrong in the wings to fight today's monopolists of culture.
+={Armstrong, Edwin Howard;RCA}
+
+2~ Constraining Creators
+={copyright law:creativity impeded by+14;creativity:legal restrictions on+14}
+
+In the next ten years we will see an explosion of digital technologies. These technologies will enable almost anyone to capture and share content. Capturing and sharing content, of course, is what humans have done since the dawn of man. It is how we learn and communicate. But capturing and sharing through digital technology is different. The fidelity and power are different. You could send an e-mail telling someone about a joke you saw on Comedy Central, or you could send the clip. You could write an essay about the inconsistencies in the arguments of the politician you most love to hate, or you could make a short film that puts statement against statement. You could write a poem to express your love, or you could weave together a string - a mash-up - of songs from your favorite artists in a collage and make it available on the Net.
+={technology:of digital capturing and sharing+2}
+
+This digital "capturing and sharing" is in part an extension of the capturing and sharing that has always been integral to our culture, and in part it is something new. It is continuous with the Kodak, but it explodes the boundaries of Kodak-like technologies. The technology of digital "capturing and sharing" promises a world of extraordinarily diverse creativity that can be easily and broadly shared. And as that creativity is applied to democracy, it will enable a broad range of citizens to use technology to express and criticize and contribute to the culture all around.
+={democracy:digital sharing within;Kodak cameras}
+
+Technology has thus given us an opportunity to do something with culture that has only ever been possible for individuals in small groups, isolated from others. Think about an old man telling a story to a collection of neighbors in a small town. Now imagine that same storytelling extended across the globe.
+
+Yet all this is possible only if the activity is presumptively legal. In the current regime of legal regulation, it is not. Forget file sharing for a moment. Think about your favorite amazing sites on the Net. Web sites that offer plot summaries from forgotten television shows; sites that catalog cartoons from the 1960s; sites that mix images and sound to criticize politicians or businesses; sites that gather newspaper articles on remote topics of science or culture. There is a vast amount of creative work spread across the Internet. But as the law is currently crafted, this work is presumptively illegal.
+={Internet:creative Web sites on}
+
+That presumption will increasingly chill creativity, as the examples of extreme penalties for vague infringements continue to proliferate. It is impossible to get a clear sense of what's allowed and what's not, and at the same time, the penalties for crossing the line are astonishingly harsh. The four students who were threatened by the RIAA (Jesse Jordan of chapter 3 was just one) were threatened with a $98 billion lawsuit for building search engines that permitted songs to be copied. Yet WorldCom - which defrauded investors of $11 billion, resulting in a loss to investors in market capitalization of over $200 billion - received a fine of a mere $750 million.~{ See Lynne W. Jeter, /{Disconnected: Deceit and Betrayal at WorldCom}/ (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2003), 176, 204; for details of the settlement, see MCI press release, "MCI Wins U.S. District Court Approval for SEC Settlement" (7 July 2003), available at link #37. }~ And under legislation being pushed in Congress right now, a doctor who negligently removes the wrong leg in an operation would be liable for no more than $250,000 in damages for pain and suffering.~{ The bill, modeled after California's tort reform model, was passed in the House of Representatives but defeated in a Senate vote in July 2003. For an overview, see Tanya Albert, "Measure Stalls in Senate: 'We'll Be Back,' Say Tort Reformers," amednews.com, 28 July 2003, available at link #38, and "Senate Turns Back Malpractice Caps," CBSNews.com, 9 July 2003, available at link #39. President Bush has continued to urge tort reform in recent months. }~ Can common sense recognize the absurdity in a world where the maximum fine for downloading two songs off the Internet is more than the fine for a doctor's negligently butchering a patient?
+={WorldCom;copyright infringement lawsuits:exaggerated claims of|individual defendants intimidated by+1|in recording industry;doctors malpractice claims against;Jordan, Jesse;legal system, attorney costs in+1;recording industry:copyright infringement lawsuits of;Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA):copyright infringement lawsuits filed by}
+
+The consequence of this legal uncertainty, tied to these extremely high penalties, is that an extraordinary amount of creativity will either never be exercised, or never be exercised in the open. We drive this creative process underground by branding the modern-day Walt Disneys "pirates." We make it impossible for businesses to rely upon a public domain, because the boundaries of the public domain are designed to be unclear. It never pays to do anything except pay for the right to create, and hence only those who can pay are allowed to create. As was the case in the Soviet Union, though for very different reasons, we will begin to see a world of underground art - not because the message is necessarily political, or because the subject is controversial, but because the very act of creating the art is legally fraught. Already, exhibits of "illegal art" tour the United States.~{ See Danit Lidor, "Artists Just Wanna Be Free," /{Wired,}/ 7 July 2003, available at link #40. For an overview of the exhibition, see link #41. }~ In what does their "illegality" consist? In the act of mixing the culture around us with an expression that is critical or reflective.
+={public domain:legal murkiness on;art, underground}
+
+Part of the reason for this fear of illegality has to do with the changing law. I described that change in detail in chapter 10. But an even bigger part has to do with the increasing ease with which infractions can be tracked. As users of file-sharing systems discovered in 2002, it is a trivial matter for copyright owners to get courts to order Internet service providers to reveal who has what content. It is as if your cassette tape player transmitted a list of the songs that you played in the privacy of your own home that anyone could tune into for whatever reason they chose.
+={copyright law:technology as automatic enforcer of+1;Internet:user identities released by service providers of;ISPs (Internet service providers), user identities revealed by;technology:copyright enforcement controlled by+1}
+
+Never in our history has a painter had to worry about whether his painting infringed on someone else's work; but the modern-day painter, using the tools of Photoshop, sharing content on the Web, must worry all the time. Images are all around, but the only safe images to use in the act of creation are those purchased from Corbis or another image farm. And in purchasing, censoring happens. There is a free market in pencils; we needn't worry about its effect on creativity. But there is a highly regulated, monopolized market in cultural icons; the right to cultivate and transform them is not similarly free.
+={images, ownership of}
+
+Lawyers rarely see this because lawyers are rarely empirical. As I described in chapter 7, in response to the story about documentary filmmaker Jon Else, I have been lectured again and again by lawyers who insist Else's use was fair use, and hence I am wrong to say that the law regulates such a use.
+={Else, Jon;copyright law:fair use and+2;fair use:legal intimidation tactics against+2;legal system, attorney costs in+5}
+
+But fair use in America simply means the right to hire a lawyer to defend your right to create. And as lawyers love to forget, our system for defending rights such as fair use is astonishingly bad - in practically every context, but especially here. It costs too much, it delivers too slowly, and what it delivers often has little connection to the justice underlying the claim. The legal system may be tolerable for the very rich. For everyone else, it is an embarrassment to a tradition that prides itself on the rule of law.
+={copyright infringement lawsuits:exaggerated claims of+4|individual defendants intimidated by+4}
+
+Judges and lawyers can tell themselves that fair use provides adequate "breathing room" between regulation by the law and the access the law should allow. But it is a measure of how out of touch our legal system has become that anyone actually believes this. The rules that publishers impose upon writers, the rules that film distributors impose upon filmmakers, the rules that newspapers impose upon journalists - these are the real laws governing creativity. And these rules have little relationship to the "law" with which judges comfort themselves.
+
+For in a world that threatens $150,000 for a single willful infringement of a copyright, and which demands tens of thousands of dollars to even defend against a copyright infringement claim, and which would never return to the wrongfully accused defendant anything of the costs she suffered to defend her right to speak - in that world, the astonishingly broad regulations that pass under the name "copyright" silence speech and creativity. And in that world, it takes a studied blindness for people to continue to believe they live in a culture that is free.
+
+As Jed Horovitz, the businessman behind Video Pipeline, said to me,
+={Horovitz, Jed+1;Video Pipeline}
+
+_1 We're losing [creative] opportunities right and left. Creative people are being forced not to express themselves. Thoughts are not being expressed. And while a lot of stuff may [still] be created, it still won't get distributed. Even if the stuff gets made ... you're not going to get it distributed in the mainstream media unless you've got a little note from a lawyer saying, "This has been cleared." You're not even going to get it on PBS without that kind of permission. That's the point at which they control it."
+
+2~ Constraining Innovators
+={copyright law:innovation hampered by+48;innovation:industry establishment opposed to+48;regulation:as establishment protectionism+48}
+
+The story of the last section was a crunchy-lefty story - creativity quashed, artists who can't speak, yada yada yada. Maybe that doesn't get you going. Maybe you think there's enough weird art out there, and enough expression that is critical of what seems to be just about everything. And if you think that, you might think there's little in this story to worry you.
+
+But there's an aspect of this story that is not lefty in any sense. Indeed, it is an aspect that could be written by the most extreme pro-market ideologue. And if you're one of these sorts (and a special one at that, 188 pages into a book like this), then you can see this other aspect by substituting "free market" every place I've spoken of "free culture." The point is the same, even if the interests affecting culture are more fundamental.
+={market constraints+1}
+
+The charge I've been making about the regulation of culture is the same charge free marketers make about regulating markets. Everyone, of course, concedes that some regulation of markets is necessary - at a minimum, we need rules of property and contract, and courts to enforce both. Likewise, in this culture debate, everyone concedes that at least some framework of copyright is also required. But both perspectives vehemently insist that just because some regulation is good, it doesn't follow that more regulation is better. And both perspectives are constantly attuned to the ways in which regulation simply enables the powerful industries of today to protect themselves against the competitors of tomorrow.
+
+This is the single most dramatic effect of the shift in regulatory strategy that I described in chapter 10. The consequence of this massive threat of liability tied to the murky boundaries of copyright law is that innovators who want to innovate in this space can safely innovate only if they have the sign-off from last generation's dominant industries. That lesson has been taught through a series of cases that were designed and executed to teach venture capitalists a lesson. That lesson - what former Napster CEO Hank Barry calls a "nuclear pall" that has fallen over the Valley - has been learned.
+={Barry, Hank;venture capitalists}
+
+Consider one example to make the point, a story whose beginning I told in /{The Future of Ideas}/ and which has progressed in a way that even I (pessimist extraordinaire) would never have predicted.
+={Future of Ideas, The (Lessig);Lessig, Lawrence}
+
+In 1997, Michael Roberts launched a company called MP3.com. MP3.com was keen to remake the music business. Their goal was not just to facilitate new ways to get access to content. Their goal was also to facilitate new ways to create content. Unlike the major labels, MP3.com offered creators a venue to distribute their creativity, without demanding an exclusive engagement from the creators.
+={MP3.com+8;my.mp3.com+8;Roberts, Michael}
+
+To make this system work, however, MP3.com needed a reliable way to recommend music to its users. The idea behind this alternative was to leverage the revealed preferences of music listeners to recommend new artists. If you like Lyle Lovett, you're likely to enjoy Bonnie Raitt. And so on.
+={Lovett, Lyle}
+
+This idea required a simple way to gather data about user preferences. MP3.com came up with an extraordinarily clever way to gather this preference data. In January 2000, the company launched a service called my.mp3.com. Using software provided by MP3.com, a user would sign into an account and then insert into her computer a CD. The software would identify the CD, and then give the user access to that content. So, for example, if you inserted a CD by Jill Sobule, then wherever you were - at work or at home - you could get access to that music once you signed into your account. The system was therefore a kind of music-lockbox.
+={CDs:preference data on+2}
+
+No doubt some could use this system to illegally copy content. But that opportunity existed with or without MP3.com. The aim of the my.mp3.com service was to give users access to their own content, and as a by-product, by seeing the content they already owned, to discover the kind of content the users liked.
+
+To make this system function, however, MP3.com needed to copy 50,000 CDs to a server. (In principle, it could have been the user who uploaded the music, but that would have taken a great deal of time, and would have produced a product of questionable quality.) It therefore purchased 50,000 CDs from a store, and started the process of making copies of those CDs. Again, it would not serve the content from those copies to anyone except those who authenticated that they had a copy of the CD they wanted to access. So while this was 50,000 copies, it was 50,000 copies directed at giving customers something they had already bought.
+
+Nine days after MP3.com launched its service, the five major labels, headed by the RIAA, brought a lawsuit against MP3.com. MP3.com settled with four of the five. Nine months later, a federal judge found MP3.com to have been guilty of willful infringement with respect to the fifth. Applying the law as it is, the judge imposed a fine against MP3.com of $118 million. MP3.com then settled with the remaining plaintiff, Vivendi Universal, paying over $54 million. Vivendi purchased MP3.com just about a year later.
+={Vivendi Universal+2;copyright infringement lawsuits:distribution technology targeted in|exaggerated claims of|in recording industry+3;recording industry:copyright infringement lawsuits of;Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA):copyright infringement lawsuits filed by;regulation:outsize penalties of}
+
+That part of the story I have told before. Now consider its conclusion.
+
+After Vivendi purchased MP3.com, Vivendi turned around and filed a malpractice lawsuit against the lawyers who had advised it that they had a good faith claim that the service they wanted to offer would be considered legal under copyright law. This lawsuit alleged that it should have been obvious that the courts would find this behavior illegal; therefore, this lawsuit sought to punish any lawyer who had dared to suggest that the law was less restrictive than the labels demanded.
+={copyright law:malpractice lawsuits against lawyers advising on+2;lawyers:malpractice suits against+2}
+
+The clear purpose of this lawsuit (which was settled for an unspecified amount shortly after the story was no longer covered in the press) was to send an unequivocal message to lawyers advising clients in this space: It is not just your clients who might suffer if the content industry directs its guns against them. It is also you. So those of you who believe the law should be less restrictive should realize that such a view of the law will cost you and your firm dearly.
+
+This strategy is not just limited to the lawyers. In April 2003, Universal and EMI brought a lawsuit against Hummer Winblad, the venture capital firm (VC) that had funded Napster at a certain stage of its development, its cofounder (John Hummer), and general partner (Hank Barry).~{ See Joseph Menn, "Universal, EMI Sue Napster Investor," /{Los Angeles Times,}/ 23 April 2003. For a parallel argument about the effects on innovation in the distribution of music, see Janelle Brown, "The Music Revolution Will Not Be Digitized," Salon.com, 1 June 2001, available at link #42. See also Jon Healey, "Online Music Services Besieged," /{Los Angeles Times,}/ 28 May 2001. }~ The claim here, as well, was that the VC should have recognized the right of the content industry to control how the industry should develop. They should be held personally liable for funding a company whose business turned out to be beyond the law. Here again, the aim of the lawsuit is transparent: Any VC now recognizes that if you fund a company whose business is not approved of by the dinosaurs, you are at risk not just in the marketplace, but in the courtroom as well. Your investment buys you not only a company, it also buys you a lawsuit. So extreme has the environment become that even car manufacturers are afraid of technologies that touch content. In an article in /{Business 2.0}/, Rafe Needleman describes a discussion with BMW:
+={Barry, Hank;copyright infringement lawsuits:distribution technology targeted in;BMW+1;cars, MP3 sound systems in+1;EMI;Hummer, John;Hummer Winblad;MP3 players;Napster:venture capital for;Needleman, Raffe+1;Universal Music Group;venture capitalists}
+
+_1 I asked why, with all the storage capacity and computer power in the car, there was no way to play MP3 files. I was told that BMW engineers in Germany had rigged a new vehicle to play MP3s via the car's built-in sound system, but that the company's marketing and legal departments weren't comfortable with pushing this forward for release stateside. Even today, no new cars are sold in the United States with bona fide MP3 players. ..."~{ Rafe Needleman, "Driving in Cars with MP3s," /{Business 2.0,}/ 16 June 2003, available at link #43. I am grateful to Dr. Mohammad Al-Ubaydli for this example. }~
+
+This is the world of the mafia - filled with "your money or your life" offers, governed in the end not by courts but by the threats that the law empowers copyright holders to exercise. It is a system that will obviously and necessarily stifle new innovation. It is hard enough to start a company. It is impossibly hard if that company is constantly threatened by litigation.
+
+The point is not that businesses should have a right to start illegal enterprises. The point is the definition of "illegal." The law is a mess of uncertainty. We have no good way to know how it should apply to new technologies. Yet by reversing our tradition of judicial deference, and by embracing the astonishingly high penalties that copyright law imposes, that uncertainty now yields a reality which is far more conservative than is right. If the law imposed the death penalty for parking tickets, we'd not only have fewer parking tickets, we'd also have much less driving. The same principle applies to innovation. If innovation is constantly checked by this uncertain and unlimited liability, we will have much less vibrant innovation and much less creativity.
+={market constraints+2;permission culture:transaction cost of+2;regulation:outsize penalties of;technology:legal murkiness on}
+
+The point is directly parallel to the crunchy-lefty point about fair use. Whatever the "real" law is, realism about the effect of law in both contexts is the same. This wildly punitive system of regulation will systematically stifle creativity and innovation. It will protect some industries and some creators, but it will harm industry and creativity generally. Free market and free culture depend upon vibrant competition. Yet the effect of the law today is to stifle just this kind of competition. The effect is to produce an overregulated culture, just as the effect of too much control in the market is to produce an overregulated-regulated market.
+
+The building of a permission culture, rather than a free culture, is the first important way in which the changes I have described will burden innovation. A permission culture means a lawyer's culture - a culture in which the ability to create requires a call to your lawyer. Again, I am not antilawyer, at least when they're kept in their proper place. I am certainly not antilaw. But our profession has lost the sense of its limits. And leaders in our profession have lost an appreciation of the high costs that our profession imposes upon others. The inefficiency of the law is an embarrassment to our tradition. And while I believe our profession should therefore do everything it can to make the law more efficient, it should at least do everything it can to limit the reach of the law where the law is not doing any good. The transaction costs buried within a permission culture are enough to bury a wide range of creativity. Someone needs to do a lot of justifying to justify that result.
+
+!_ The uncertainty
+of the law is one burden on innovation. There is a second burden that operates more directly. This is the effort by many in the content industry to use the law to directly regulate the technology of the Internet so that it better protects their content.
+={Internet:efficient content distribution on+4}
+
+The motivation for this response is obvious. The Internet enables the efficient spread of content. That efficiency is a feature of the Inter-net's design. But from the perspective of the content industry, this feature is a "bug." The efficient spread of content means that content distributors have a harder time controlling the distribution of content. One obvious response to this efficiency is thus to make the Internet less efficient. If the Internet enables "piracy," then, this response says, we should break the kneecaps of the Internet.
+
+The examples of this form of legislation are many. At the urging of the content industry, some in Congress have threatened legislation that would require computers to determine whether the content they access is protected or not, and to disable the spread of protected content.~{ "Copyright and Digital Media in a Post-Napster World," GartnerG2 and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School (2003), 33-35, available at link #44. }~ Congress has already launched proceedings to explore a mandatory "broadcast flag" that would be required on any device capable of transmitting digital video (i.e., a computer), and that would disable the copying of any content that is marked with a broadcast flag. Other members of Congress have proposed immunizing content providers from liability for technology they might deploy that would hunt down copyright violators and disable their machines.~{ GartnerG2, 26-27. }~
+={broadcast flag;Congress, U.S.:on copyright laws}
+
+In one sense, these solutions seem sensible. If the problem is the code, why not regulate the code to remove the problem. But any regulation of technical infrastructure will always be tuned to the particular technology of the day. It will impose significant burdens and costs on the technology, but will likely be eclipsed by advances around exactly those requirements.
+
+In March 2002, a broad coalition of technology companies, led by Intel, tried to get Congress to see the harm that such legislation would impose.~{ See David McGuire, "Tech Execs Square Off Over Piracy," Newsbytes, 28 February 2002 (Entertainment). }~ Their argument was obviously not that copyright should not be protected. Instead, they argued, any protection should not do more harm than good.
+={Congress, U.S.:on copyright laws+5;Intel}
+
+!_ There is one
+more obvious way in which this war has harmed innovation - again, a story that will be quite familiar to the free market crowd.
+
+Copyright may be property, but like all property, it is also a form of regulation. It is a regulation that benefits some and harms others. When done right, it benefits creators and harms leeches. When done wrong, it is regulation the powerful use to defeat competitors.
+
+As I described in chapter 10, despite this feature of copyright as regulation, and subject to important qualifications outlined by Jessica Litman in her book /{Digital Copyright}/,~{ Jessica Litman, /{Digital Copyright}/ (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2001). }~ overall this history of copyright is not bad. As chapter 10 details, when new technologies have come along, Congress has struck a balance to assure that the new is protected from the old. Compulsory, or statutory, licenses have been one part of that strategy. Free use (as in the case of the VCR) has been another.
+={cassette recording:VCRs;VCRs;Digital Copyright (Litman);Litman, Jessica;statutory licenses;copyright law:statutory licenses in}
+
+But that pattern of deference to new technologies has now changed with the rise of the Internet. Rather than striking a balance between the claims of a new technology and the legitimate rights of content creators, both the courts and Congress have imposed legal restrictions that will have the effect of smothering the new to benefit the old.
+
+The response by the courts has been fairly universal.~{ The only circuit court exception is found in /{Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) v. Diamond Multimedia Systems,}/ 180 F. 3d 1072 (9th Cir. 1999). There the court of appeals for the Ninth Circuit reasoned that makers of a portable MP3 player were not liable for contributory copyright infringement for a device that is unable to record or redistribute music (a device whose only copying function is to render portable a music file already stored on a user's hard drive). At the district court level, the only exception is found in /{Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd.,}/ 259 F. Supp. 2d 1029 (C.D. Cal., 2003), where the court found the link between the distributor and any given user's conduct too attenuated to make the distributor liable for contributory or vicarious infringement liability. }~ It has been mirrored in the responses threatened and actually implemented by Congress. I won't catalog all of those responses here.~{ For example, in July 2002, Representative Howard Berman introduced the Peer- to-Peer Piracy Prevention Act (H.R. 5211), which would immunize copyright holders from liability for damage done to computers when the copyright holders use technology to stop copyright infringement. In August 2002, Representative Billy Tauzin introduced a bill to mandate that technologies capable of rebroadcasting digital copies of films broadcast on TV (i.e., computers) respect a "broadcast flag" that would disable copying of that content. And in March of the same year, Senator Fritz Hollings introduced the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act, which mandated copyright protection technology in all digital media devices. See GartnerG2, "Copyright and Digital Media in a Post-Napster World," 27 June 2003, 33-34, available at link #44. }~ But there is one example that captures the flavor of them all. This is the story of the demise of Internet radio.
+={Internet:radio on+18;radio:on Internet+18}
+
+As I described in chapter 4, when a radio station plays a song, the recording artist doesn't get paid for that "radio performance" unless he or she is also the composer. So, for example if Marilyn Monroe had recorded a version of "Happy Birthday" - to memorialize her famous performance before President Kennedy at Madison Square Garden - then whenever that recording was played on the radio, the current copyright owners of "Happy Birthday" would get some money, whereas Marilyn Monroe would not.
+={artists:recording industry payments to+1;copyright law:on music recordings+1;Kennedy, John F.;Monroe, Marilyn;radio:music recordings played on+1;recording industry:artist remuneration in+1;recording industry:copyright protections in}
+
+The reasoning behind this balance struck by Congress makes some sense. The justification was that radio was a kind of advertising. The recording artist thus benefited because by playing her music, the radio station was making it more likely that her records would be purchased. Thus, the recording artist got something, even if only indirectly. Probably this reasoning had less to do with the result than with the power of radio stations: Their lobbyists were quite good at stopping any efforts to get Congress to require compensation to the recording artists.
+
+Enter Internet radio. Like regular radio, Internet radio is a technology to stream content from a broadcaster to a listener. The broadcast travels across the Internet, not across the ether of radio spectrum. Thus, I can "tune in" to an Internet radio station in Berlin while sitting in San Francisco, even though there's no way for me to tune in to a regular radio station much beyond the San Francisco metropolitan area.
+
+This feature of the architecture of Internet radio means that there are potentially an unlimited number of radio stations that a user could tune in to using her computer, whereas under the existing architecture for broadcast radio, there is an obvious limit to the number of broadcasters and clear broadcast frequencies. Internet radio could therefore be more competitive than regular radio; it could provide a wider range of selections. And because the potential audience for Internet radio is the whole world, niche stations could easily develop and market their content to a relatively large number of users worldwide. According to some estimates, more than eighty million users worldwide have tuned in to this new form of radio.
+
+Internet radio is thus to radio what FM was to AM. It is an improvement potentially vastly more significant than the FM improvement over AM, since not only is the technology better, so, too, is the competition. Indeed, there is a direct parallel between the fight to establish FM radio and the fight to protect Internet radio. As one author describes Howard Armstrong's struggle to enable FM radio,
+={Armstrong, Edwin Howard+2;FM radio+2;radio:FM spectrum of+2}
+
+_1 An almost unlimited number of FM stations was possible in the shortwaves, thus ending the unnatural restrictions imposed on radio in the crowded longwaves. If FM were freely developed, the number of stations would be limited only by economics and competition rather than by technical restrictions. ... Armstrong likened the situation that had grown up in radio to that following the invention of the printing press, when governments and ruling interests attempted to control this new instrument of mass communications by imposing restrictive licenses on it. This tyranny was broken only when it became possible for men freely to acquire printing presses and freely to run them. FM in this sense was as great an invention as the printing presses, for it gave radio the opportunity to strike off its shackles.~{ Lessing, 239. }~
+
+This potential for FM radio was never realized - not because Armstrong was wrong about the technology, but because he underestimated the power of "vested interests, habits, customs and legislation"~{ Ibid., 229. }~ to retard the growth of this competing technology.
+
+Now the very same claim could be made about Internet radio. For again, there is no technical limitation that could restrict the number of Internet radio stations. The only restrictions on Internet radio are those imposed by the law. Copyright law is one such law. So the first question we should ask is, what copyright rules would govern Internet radio?
+
+But here the power of the lobbyists is reversed. Internet radio is a new industry. The recording artists, on the other hand, have a very powerful lobby, the RIAA. Thus when Congress considered the phenomenon of Internet radio in 1995, the lobbyists had primed Congress to adopt a different rule for Internet radio than the rule that applies to terrestrial radio. While terrestrial radio does not have to pay our hypothetical Marilyn Monroe when it plays her hypothetical recording of "Happy Birthday" on the air, /{Internet radio does}/. Not only is the law not neutral toward Internet radio - the law actually burdens Internet radio more than it burdens terrestrial radio.
+={artists:recording industry payments to+1;Congress, U.S.:on copyright laws;Congress, U.S.:on radio|on recording industry;recording industry:artist remuneration in+1;recording industry:radio broadcast and+1|Internet radio hampered by+9;Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA):on Internet radio fees+1|lobbying power of+1}
+
+This financial burden is not slight. As Harvard law professor William Fisher estimates, if an Internet radio station distributed ad-free popular music to (on average) ten thousand listeners, twenty-four hours a day, the total artist fees that radio station would owe would be over $1 million a year.~{ This example was derived from fees set by the original Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP) proceedings, and is drawn from an example offered by Professor William Fisher. Conference Proceedings, iLaw (Stanford), 3 July 2003, on file with author. Professors Fisher and Zittrain submitted testimony in the CARP proceeding that was ultimately rejected. See Jonathan Zittrain, Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings and Ephemeral Recordings, Docket No. 2000- 9, CARP DTRA 1 and 2, available at link #45. For an excellent analysis making a similar point, see Randal C. Picker, "Copyright as Entry Policy: The Case of Digital Distribution," /{Antitrust Bulletin}/ (Summer/Fall 2002): 461: "This was not confusion, these are just old- fashioned entry barriers. Analog radio stations are protected from digital entrants, reducing entry in radio and diversity. Yes, this is done in the name of getting royalties to copyright holders, but, absent the play of powerful interests, that could have been done in a media-neutral way." }~ A regular radio station broadcasting the same content would pay no equivalent fee.
+={Fisher, William}
+
+The burden is not financial only. Under the original rules that were proposed, an Internet radio station (but not a terrestrial radio station) would have to collect the following data from /{every listening transaction}/:
+
+group{
+
+    1. name of the service;
+
+    2. channel of the program (AM/FM stations use station ID);
+
+    3. type of program (archived/looped/live);
+
+    4. date of transmission;
+
+    5. time of transmission;
+
+    6. time zone of origination of transmission;
+
+    7. numeric designation of the place of the sound recording within the program;
+
+    8. duration of transmission (to nearest second);
+
+    9. sound recording title;
+
+    10. ISRC code of the recording;
+
+    11. release year of the album per copyright notice and in the case of compilation albums, the release year of the album and copyright date of the track;
+
+    12. featured recording artist;
+
+    13. retail album title;
+
+    14. recording label;
+
+    15. UPC code of the retail album;
+
+    16. catalog number;
+
+    17. copyright owner information;
+
+    18. musical genre of the channel or program (station format);
+
+    19. name of the service or entity;
+
+    20. channel or program;
+
+    21. date and time that the user logged in (in the user's time zone);
+
+    22. date and time that the user logged out (in the user's time zone);
+
+    23. time zone where the signal was received (user);
+
+    24. Unique User identifier;
+
+    25. the country in which the user received the transmissions.
+
+}group
+
+The Librarian of Congress eventually suspended these reporting requirements, pending further study. And he also changed the original rates set by the arbitration panel charged with setting rates. But the basic difference between Internet radio and terrestrial radio remains: Internet radio has to pay a /{type of copyright fee}/ that terrestrial radio does not.
+={Library of Congress}
+
+Why? What justifies this difference? Was there any study of the economic consequences from Internet radio that would justify these differences? Was the motive to protect artists against piracy?
+
+In a rare bit of candor, one RIAA expert admitted what seemed obvious to everyone at the time. As Alex Alben, vice president for Public Policy at Real Networks, told me,
+={Alben, Alex+2;Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA):on Internet radio fees+2;artists:recording industry payments to+2;recording industry:artist remuneration in+2}
+
+_1 The RIAA, which was representing the record labels, presented some testimony about what they thought a willing buyer would pay to a willing seller, and it was much higher. It was ten times higher than what radio stations pay to perform the same songs for the same period of time. And so the attorneys representing the webcasters asked the RIAA, ... "How do you come up with a rate that's so much higher? Why is it worth more than radio? Because here we have hundreds of thousands of webcasters who want to pay, and that should establish the market rate, and if you set the rate so high, you're going to drive the small webcasters out of business. ..."
+
+_1 And the RIAA experts said, "Well, we don't really model this as an industry with thousands of webcasters, /{we think it should be an industry with, you know, five or seven big players who can pay a high rate and it's a stable, predictable market.}/" (Emphasis added.)
+
+Translation: The aim is to use the law to eliminate competition, so that this platform of potentially immense competition, which would cause the diversity and range of content available to explode, would not cause pain to the dinosaurs of old. There is no one, on either the right or the left, who should endorse this use of the law. And yet there is practically no one, on either the right or the left, who is doing anything effective to prevent it.
+
+2~ Corrupting Citizens
+={copyright law:illegal behavior as broad response to+33;law:citizen respect for+33;prohibition, citizen rebellion against+33;regulation:rule of law degraded by excess of+33}
+
+Overregulation stifles creativity. It smothers innovation. It gives dinosaurs a veto over the future. It wastes the extraordinary opportunity for a democratic creativity that digital technology enables.
+
+In addition to these important harms, there is one more that was important to our forebears, but seems forgotten today. Overregulation corrupts citizens and weakens the rule of law.
+
+The war that is being waged today is a war of prohibition. As with every war of prohibition, it is targeted against the behavior of a very large number of citizens. According to /{The New York Times}/, 43 million Americans downloaded music in May 2002.~{ Mike Graziano and Lee Rainie, "The Music Downloading Deluge," Pew Internet and American Life Project (24 April 2001), available at link #46. The Pew Internet and American Life Project reported that 37 million Americans had downloaded music files from the Internet by early 2001. }~ According to the RIAA, the behavior of those 43 million Americans is a felony. We thus have a set of rules that transform 20 percent of America into criminals. As the RIAA launches lawsuits against not only the Napsters and Kazaas of the world, but against students building search engines, and increasingly against ordinary users downloading content, the technologies for sharing will advance to further protect and hide illegal use. It is an arms race or a civil war, with the extremes of one side inviting a more extreme response by the other.
+={Internet:music files downloaded from;copyright infringement lawsuits:individual defendants intimidated by+1|in recording industry+1;recording industry:copyright infringement lawsuits of+1;Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA):copyright infringement lawsuits filed by+1|intimidation tactics of+1}
+
+The content industry's tactics exploit the failings of the American legal system. When the RIAA brought suit against Jesse Jordan, it knew that in Jordan it had found a scapegoat, not a defendant. The threat of having to pay either all the money in the world in damages ($15,000,000) or almost all the money in the world to defend against paying all the money in the world in damages ($250,000 in legal fees) led Jordan to choose to pay all the money he had in the world ($12,000) to make the suit go away. The same strategy animates the RIAA's suits against individual users. In September 2003, the RIAA sued 261 individuals - including a twelve-year-old girl living in public housing and a seventy-year-old man who had no idea what file sharing was.~{ Alex Pham, "The Labels Strike Back: N.Y. Girl Settles RIAA Case," /{Los Angeles Times,}/ 10 September 2003, Business. }~ As these scapegoats discovered, it will always cost more to defend against these suits than it would cost to simply settle. (The twelve year old, for example, like Jesse Jordan, paid her life savings of $2,000 to settle the case.) Our law is an awful system for defending rights. It is an embarrassment to our tradition. And the consequence of our law as it is, is that those with the power can use the law to quash any rights they oppose.
+={Jordan, Jesse}
+
+Wars of prohibition are nothing new in America. This one is just something more extreme than anything we've seen before. We experimented with alcohol prohibition, at a time when the per capita consumption of alcohol was 1.5 gallons per capita per year. The war against drinking initially reduced that consumption to just 30 percent of its preprohibition levels, but by the end of prohibition, consumption was up to 70 percent of the preprohibition level. Americans were drinking just about as much, but now, a vast number were criminals.~{ Jeffrey A. Miron and Jeffrey Zwiebel, "Alcohol Consumption During Prohibition," /{American Economic Review}/ 81, no. 2 (1991): 242. }~ We have launched a war on drugs aimed at reducing the consumption of regulated narcotics that 7 percent (or 16 million) Americans now use.~{ National Drug Control Policy: Hearing Before the House Government Reform Committee, 108th Cong., 1st sess. (5 March 2003) (statement of John P. Walters, director of National Drug Control Policy). }~ That is a drop from the high (so to speak) in 1979 of 14 percent of the population. We regulate automobiles to the point where the vast majority of Americans violate the law every day. We run such a complex tax system that a majority of cash businesses regularly cheat.~{ See James Andreoni, Brian Erard, and Jonathon Feinstein, "Tax Compliance," /{Journal of Economic Literature}/ 36 (1998): 818 (survey of compliance literature). }~ We pride ourselves on our "free society," but an endless array of ordinary behavior is regulated within our society. And as a result, a huge proportion of Americans regularly violate at least some law.
+={alcohol prohibition+1;drugs:illegal+1;tax system+1}
+
+This state of affairs is not without consequence. It is a particularly salient issue for teachers like me, whose job it is to teach law students about the importance of "ethics." As my colleague Charlie Nesson told a class at Stanford, each year law schools admit thousands of students who have illegally downloaded music, illegally consumed alcohol and sometimes drugs, illegally worked without paying taxes, illegally driven cars. These are kids for whom behaving illegally is increasingly the norm. And then we, as law professors, are supposed to teach them how to behave ethically - how to say no to bribes, or keep client funds separate, or honor a demand to disclose a document that will mean that your case is over. Generations of Americans - more significantly in some parts of America than in others, but still, everywhere in America today - can't live their lives both normally and legally, since "normally" entails a certain degree of illegality.
+={ethics;law schools;Nesson, Charlie}
+
+The response to this general illegality is either to enforce the law more severely or to change the law. We, as a society, have to learn how to make that choice more rationally. Whether a law makes sense depends, in part, at least, upon whether the costs of the law, both intended and collateral, outweigh the benefits. If the costs, intended and collateral, do outweigh the benefits, then the law ought to be changed. Alternatively, if the costs of the existing system are much greater than the costs of an alternative, then we have a good reason to consider the alternative.
+
+My point is not the idiotic one: Just because people violate a law, we should therefore repeal it. Obviously, we could reduce murder statistics dramatically by legalizing murder on Wednesdays and Fridays. But that wouldn't make any sense, since murder is wrong every day of the week. A society is right to ban murder always and everywhere.
+
+My point is instead one that democracies understood for generations, but that we recently have learned to forget. The rule of law depends upon people obeying the law. The more often, and more repeatedly, we as citizens experience violating the law, the less we respect the law. Obviously, in most cases, the important issue is the law, not respect for the law. I don't care whether the rapist respects the law or not; I want to catch and incarcerate the rapist. But I do care whether my students respect the law. And I do care if the rules of law sow increasing disrespect because of the extreme of regulation they impose. Twenty million Americans have come of age since the Internet introduced this different idea of "sharing." We need to be able to call these twenty million Americans "citizens," not "felons."
+
+When at least forty-three million citizens download content from the Internet, and when they use tools to combine that content in ways unauthorized by copyright holders, the first question we should be asking is not how best to involve the FBI. The first question should be whether this particular prohibition is really necessary in order to achieve the proper ends that copyright law serves. Is there another way to assure that artists get paid without transforming forty-three million Americans into felons? Does it make sense if there are other ways to assure that artists get paid without transforming America into a nation of felons?
+
+This abstract point can be made more clear with a particular example.
+
+We all own CDs. Many of us still own phonograph records. These pieces of plastic encode music that in a certain sense we have bought. The law protects our right to buy and sell that plastic: It is not a copyright infringement for me to sell all my classical records at a used record store and buy jazz records to replace them. That "use" of the recordings is free.
+
+But as the MP3 craze has demonstrated, there is another use of phonograph records that is effectively free. Because these recordings were made without copy-protection technologies, I am "free" to copy, or "rip," music from my records onto a computer hard disk. Indeed, Apple Corporation went so far as to suggest that "freedom" was a right: In a series of commercials, Apple endorsed the "Rip, Mix, Burn" capacities of digital technologies.
+={Apple Corporation+1;Rip, Mix, Burn technologies+1;technology:cut-and-paste culture enabled by}
+
+This "use" of my records is certainly valuable. I have begun a large process at home of ripping all of my and my wife's CDs, and storing them in one archive. Then, using Apple's iTunes, or a wonderful program called Andromeda, we can build different play lists of our music: Bach, Baroque, Love Songs, Love Songs of Significant Others - the potential is endless. And by reducing the costs of mixing play lists, these technologies help build a creativity with play lists that is itself independently valuable. Compilations of songs are creative and meaningful in their own right.
+={Andromeda}
+
+This use is enabled by unprotected media - either CDs or records. But unprotected media also enable file sharing. File sharing threatens (or so the content industry believes) the ability of creators to earn a fair return from their creativity. And thus, many are beginning to experiment with technologies to eliminate unprotected media. These technologies, for example, would enable CDs that could not be ripped. Or they might enable spy programs to identify ripped content on people's machines.
+={CDs:mix technology and+1;technology:copyright enforcement controlled by+1;copyright law:technology as automatic enforcer of}
+
+If these technologies took off, then the building of large archives of your own music would become quite difficult. You might hang in hacker circles, and get technology to disable the technologies that protect the content. Trading in those technologies is illegal, but maybe that doesn't bother you much. In any case, for the vast majority of people, these protection technologies would effectively destroy the archiving use of CDs. The technology, in other words, would force us all back to the world where we either listened to music by manipulating pieces of plastic or were part of a massively complex "digital rights management" system.
+
+If the only way to assure that artists get paid were the elimination of the ability to freely move content, then these technologies to interfere with the freedom to move content would be justifiable. But what if there were another way to assure that artists are paid, without locking down any content? What if, in other words, a different system could assure compensation to artists while also preserving the freedom to move content easily?
+
+My point just now is not to prove that there is such a system. I offer a version of such a system in the last chapter of this book. For now, the only point is the relatively uncontroversial one: If a different system achieved the same legitimate objectives that the existing copyright system achieved, but left consumers and creators much more free, then we'd have a very good reason to pursue this alternative - namely, freedom. The choice, in other words, would not be between property and piracy; the choice would be between different property systems and the freedoms each allowed.
+={copyright law:commercial creativity as primary purpose of+1|as protection of creators+1}
+
+I believe there is a way to assure that artists are paid without turning forty-three million Americans into felons. But the salient feature of this alternative is that it would lead to a very different market for producing and distributing creativity. The dominant few, who today control the vast majority of the distribution of content in the world, would no longer exercise this extreme of control. Rather, they would go the way of the horse-drawn buggy.
+
+Except that this generation's buggy manufacturers have already saddled Congress, and are riding the law to protect themselves against this new form of competition. For them the choice is between forty-three million Americans as criminals and their own survival.
+
+It is understandable why they choose as they do. It is not understandable why we as a democracy continue to choose as we do. Jack Valenti is charming; but not so charming as to justify giving up a tradition as deep and important as our tradition of free culture.
+={Valenti, Jack}
+
+!_ There's one more
+aspect to this corruption that is particularly important to civil liberties, and follows directly from any war of prohibition. As Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Fred von Lohmann describes, this is the "collateral damage" that "arises whenever you turn a very large percentage of the population into criminals." This is the collateral damage to civil liberties generally.
+={civil liberties+11;Electronic Frontier Foundation;von Lohmann, Fred+2}
+
+"If you can treat someone as a putative lawbreaker," von Lohmann explains,
+
+_1 then all of a sudden a lot of basic civil liberty protections evaporate to one degree or another. ... If you're a copyright infringer, how can you hope to have any privacy rights? If you're a copyright infringer, how can you hope to be secure against seizures of your computer? How can you hope to continue to receive Internet access? ... Our sensibilities change as soon as we think, "Oh, well, but that person's a criminal, a lawbreaker." Well, what this campaign against file sharing has done is turn a remarkable percentage of the American Internet-using population into "law-breakers."
+={privacy rights+3}
+
+And the consequence of this transformation of the American public into criminals is that it becomes trivial, as a matter of due process, to effectively erase much of the privacy most would presume.
+
+Users of the Internet began to see this generally in 2003 as the RIAA launched its campaign to force Internet service providers to turn over the names of customers who the RIAA believed were violating copyright law. Verizon fought that demand and lost. With a simple request to a judge, and without any notice to the customer at all, the identity of an Internet user is revealed.
+={Internet:user identities released by service providers of+4;ISPs (Internet service providers), user identities revealed by+4;Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA):ISP user identities sought by+4;Verizon Internet Services}
+
+The RIAA then expanded this campaign, by announcing a general strategy to sue individual users of the Internet who are alleged to have downloaded copyrighted music from file-sharing systems. But as we've seen, the potential damages from these suits are astronomical: If a family's computer is used to download a single CD's worth of music, the family could be liable for $2 million in damages. That didn't stop the RIAA from suing a number of these families, just as they had sued Jesse Jordan.~{ See Frank Ahrens, "RIAA's Lawsuits Meet Surprised Targets; Single Mother in Calif., 12-Year-Old Girl in N.Y. Among Defendants," /{Washington Post,}/ 10 September 2003, E1; Chris Cobbs, "Worried Parents Pull Plug on File 'Stealing'; With the Music Industry Cracking Down on File Swapping, Parents are Yanking Software from Home PCs to Avoid Being Sued," /{Orlando Sentinel Tribune,}/ 30 August 2003, C1; Jefferson Graham, "Recording Industry Sues Parents," /{USA Today,}/ 15 September 2003, 4D; John Schwartz, "She Says She's No Music Pirate. No Snoop Fan, Either," /{New York Times,}/ 25 September 2003, C1; Margo Varadi, "Is Brianna a Criminal?" /{Toronto Star,}/ 18 September 2003, P7. }~
+={Jordan, Jesse;copyright infringement lawsuits:exaggerated claims of+3;peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing:regulatory balance lost in+6;Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA):intimidation tactics of+3}
+
+Even this understates the espionage that is being waged by the RIAA. A report from CNN late last summer described a strategy the RIAA had adopted to track Napster users.~{ See "Revealed: How RIAA Tracks Downloaders: Music Industry Discloses Some Methods Used," CNN.com, available at link #47. }~ Using a sophisticated hashing algorithm, the RIAA took what is in effect a fingerprint of every song in the Napster catalog. Any copy of one of those MP3s will have the same "fingerprint."
+={Napster:recording industry tracking users of+2}
+
+So imagine the following not-implausible scenario: Imagine a friend gives a CD to your daughter - a collection of songs just like the cassettes you used to make as a kid. You don't know, and neither does your daughter, where these songs came from. But she copies these songs onto her computer. She then takes her computer to college and connects it to a college network, and if the college network is "cooperating" with the RIAA's espionage, and she hasn't properly protected her content from the network (do you know how to do that yourself ?), then the RIAA will be able to identify your daughter as a "criminal." And under the rules that universities are beginning to deploy,~{ See Jeff Adler, "Cambridge: On Campus, Pirates Are Not Penitent," /{Boston Globe,}/ 18 May 2003, City Weekly, 1; Frank Ahrens, "Four Students Sued over Music Sites; Industry Group Targets File Sharing at Colleges," /{Washington Post,}/ 4 April 2003, E1; Elizabeth Armstrong, "Students 'Rip, Mix, Burn' at Their Own Risk," /{Christian Science Monitor,}/ 2 September 2003, 20; Robert Becker and Angela Rozas, "Music Pirate Hunt Turns to Loyola; Two Students Names Are Handed Over; Lawsuit Possible," /{Chicago Tribune,}/ 16 July 2003, 1C; Beth Cox, "RIAA Trains Antipiracy Guns on Universities," /{Internet News,}/ 30 January 2003, available at link #48; Benny Evangelista, "Download Warning 101: Freshman Orientation This Fall to Include Record Industry Warnings Against File Sharing," /{San Francisco Chronicle,}/ 11 August 2003, E11; "Raid, Letters Are Weapons at Universities," /{USA Today,}/ 26 September 2000, 3D. }~ your daughter can lose the right to use the university's computer network. She can, in some cases, be expelled.
+={university computer networks, p2p sharing on+1}
+
+Now, of course, she'll have the right to defend herself. You can hire a lawyer for her (at $300 per hour, if you're lucky), and she can plead that she didn't know anything about the source of the songs or that they came from Napster. And it may well be that the university believes her. But the university might not believe her. It might treat this "contraband" as presumptive of guilt. And as any number of college students have already learned, our presumptions about innocence disappear in the middle of wars of prohibition. This war is no different.
+
+Says von Lohmann,
+={von Lohmann, Fred+1}
+
+_1 So when we're talking about numbers like forty to sixty million Americans that are essentially copyright infringers, you create a situation where the civil liberties of those people are very much in peril in a general matter. [I don't] think [there is any] analog where you could randomly choose any person off the street and be confident that they were committing an unlawful act that could put them on the hook for potential felony liability or hundreds of millions of dollars of civil liability. Certainly we all speed, but speeding isn't the kind of an act for which we routinely forfeit civil liberties. Some people use drugs, and I think that's the closest analog, [but] many have noted that the war against drugs has eroded all of our civil liberties because it's treated so many Americans as criminals. Well, I think it's fair to say that file sharing is an order of magnitude larger number of Americans than drug use. ... If forty to sixty million Americans have become lawbreakers, then we're really on a slippery slope to lose a lot of civil liberties for all forty to sixty million of them."
+={driving speed, constraints on;speeding, constraints on;drugs:illegal}
+
+When forty to sixty million Americans are considered "criminals" under the law, and when the law could achieve the same objective - securing rights to authors - without these millions being considered "criminals," who is the villain? Americans or the law? Which is American, a constant war on our own people or a concerted effort through our democracy to change our law?
+
+:B~ BALANCES
+
+1~intro_balances [Intro]-#
+
+!_ So here's
+the picture: You're standing at the side of the road. Your car is on fire. You are angry and upset because in part you helped start the fire. Now you don't know how to put it out. Next to you is a bucket, filled with gasoline. Obviously, gasoline won't put the fire out.
+
+As you ponder the mess, someone else comes along. In a panic, she grabs the bucket. Before you have a chance to tell her to stop - or before she understands just why she should stop - the bucket is in the air. The gasoline is about to hit the blazing car. And the fire that gasoline will ignite is about to ignite everything around.
+
+!_ A war
+about copyright rages all around - and we're all focusing on the wrong thing. No doubt, current technologies threaten existing businesses. No doubt they may threaten artists. But technologies change. The industry and technologists have plenty of ways to use technology to protect themselves against the current threats of the Internet. This is a fire that if let alone would burn itself out.
+
+Yet policy makers are not willing to leave this fire to itself. Primed with plenty of lobbyists' money, they are keen to intervene to eliminate the problem they perceive. But the problem they perceive is not the real threat this culture faces. For while we watch this small fire in the corner, there is a massive change in the way culture is made that is happening all around.
+
+Somehow we have to find a way to turn attention to this more important and fundamental issue. Somehow we have to find a way to avoid pouring gasoline onto this fire.
+
+We have not found that way yet. Instead, we seem trapped in a simpler, binary view. However much many people push to frame this debate more broadly, it is the simple, binary view that remains. We rubberneck to look at the fire when we should be keeping our eyes on the road.
+
+This challenge has been my life these last few years. It has also been my failure. In the two chapters that follow, I describe one small brace of efforts, so far failed, to find a way to refocus this debate. We must understand these failures if we're to understand what success will require.
+
+1~ Chapter Thirteen: Eldred
+={Eldred, Eric+10}
+
+!_ In 1995,
+a father was frustrated that his daughters didn't seem to like Hawthorne. No doubt there was more than one such father, but at least one did something about it. Eric Eldred, a retired computer programmer living in New Hampshire, decided to put Hawthorne on the Web. An electronic version, Eldred thought, with links to pictures and explanatory text, would make this nineteenth-century author's work come alive.
+={Hawthorne, Nathaniel+3}
+
+It didn't work - at least for his daughters. They didn't find Hawthorne any more interesting than before. But Eldred's experiment gave birth to a hobby, and his hobby begat a cause: Eldred would build a library of public domain works by scanning these works and making them available for free.
+={libraries:of public-domain literature+4;public domain:library of works derived from+4}
+
+Eldred's library was not simply a copy of certain public domain works, though even a copy would have been of great value to people across the world who can't get access to printed versions of these works. Instead, Eldred was producing derivative works from these public domain works. Just as Disney turned Grimm into stories more accessible to the twentieth century, Eldred transformed Hawthorne, and many others, into a form more accessible - technically accessible - today.
+={Disney, Walt+1;Grimm fairy tales}
+
+Eldred's freedom to do this with Hawthorne's work grew from the same source as Disney's. Hawthorne's /{Scarlet Letter}/ had passed into the public domain in 1907. It was free for anyone to take without the permission of the Hawthorne estate or anyone else. Some, such as Dover Press and Penguin Classics, take works from the public domain and produce printed editions, which they sell in bookstores across the country. Others, such as Disney, take these stories and turn them into animated cartoons, sometimes successfully (/{Cinderella}/), sometimes not (/{The Hunchback of Notre Dame}/, /{Treasure Planet}/). These are all commercial publications of public domain works.
+={Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne)}
+
+The Internet created the possibility of noncommercial publications of public domain works. Eldred's is just one example. There are literally thousands of others. Hundreds of thousands from across the world have discovered this platform of expression and now use it to share works that are, by law, free for the taking. This has produced what we might call the "noncommercial publishing industry," which before the Internet was limited to people with large egos or with political or social causes. But with the Internet, it includes a wide range of individuals and groups dedicated to spreading culture generally.~{ There's a parallel here with pornography that is a bit hard to describe, but it's a strong one. One phenomenon that the Internet created was a world of noncommercial pornographers - people who were distributing porn but were not making money directly or indirectly from that distribution. Such a class didn't exist before the Internet came into being because the costs of distributing porn were so high. Yet this new class of distributors got special attention in the Supreme Court, when the Court struck down the Communications Decency Act of 1996. It was partly because of the burden on noncommercial speakers that the statute was found to exceed Congress's power. The same point could have been made about noncommercial publishers after the advent of the Internet. The Eric Eldreds of the world before the Internet were extremely few. Yet one would think it at least as important to protect the Eldreds of the world as to protect noncommercial pornographers. }~
+
+As I said, Eldred lives in New Hampshire. In 1998, Robert Frost's collection of poems /{New Hampshire}/ was slated to pass into the public domain. Eldred wanted to post that collection in his free public library. But Congress got in the way. As I described in chapter 10, in 1998, for the eleventh time in forty years, Congress extended the terms of existing copyrights - this time by twenty years. Eldred would not be free to add any works more recent than 1923 to his collection until 2019. Indeed, no copyrighted work would pass into the public domain until that year (and not even then, if Congress extends the term again). By contrast, in the same period, more than 1 million patents will pass into the public domain.
+={Congress, U.S.:copyright terms extended by+23;copyright:duration of+23;copyright law:term extensions in+23;Frost, Robert;New Hampshire (Frost);patents:in public domain|future patents vs. future copyrights in+1}
+
+This was the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA), enacted in memory of the congressman and former musician Sonny Bono, who, his widow, Mary Bono, says, believed that "copyrights should be forever."~{ The full text is: "Sonny [Bono] wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever. I am informed by staff that such a change would violate the Constitution. I invite all of you to work with me to strengthen our copyright laws in all of the ways available to us. As you know, there is also Jack Valenti's proposal for a term to last forever less one day. Perhaps the Committee may look at that next Congress," 144 Cong. Rec. H9946, 9951-2 (October 7, 1998). }~
+={Bono, Mary;Bono, Sonny;copyright:in perpetuity+5;Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998)+1}
+
+Eldred decided to fight this law. He first resolved to fight it through civil disobedience. In a series of interviews, Eldred announced that he would publish as planned, CTEA notwithstanding. But because of a second law passed in 1998, the NET (No Electronic Theft) Act, his act of publishing would make Eldred a felon - whether or not anyone complained. This was a dangerous strategy for a disabled programmer to undertake.
+={copyright law:felony punishment for infringement of;NET (No Electronic Theft) Act (1988);No Electronic Theft (NET) Act (1988);peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing:felony punishments for}
+
+It was here that I became involved in Eldred's battle. I was a constitutional scholar whose first passion was constitutional interpretation. And though constitutional law courses never focus upon the Progress Clause of the Constitution, it had always struck me as importantly different. As you know, the Constitution says,
+={Congress:constitutional powers of+3;Constitution, U.S.:Progress Clause of+2;Progress Clause+2;Lessig, Lawrence:Eldred case involvement of+2}
+
+_1 Congress has the power to promote the Progress of Science ... by securing for limited Times to Authors ... exclusive Right to their ... Writings. ..."
+
+As I've described, this clause is unique within the power-granting clause of Article I, section 8 of our Constitution. Every other clause granting power to Congress simply says Congress has the power to do something - for example, to regulate "commerce among the several states" or "declare War." But here, the "something" is something quite specific - to "promote ... Progress" - through means that are also specific - by "securing" "exclusive Rights" (i.e., copyrights) "for limited Times."
+
+In the past forty years, Congress has gotten into the practice of extending existing terms of copyright protection. What puzzled me about this was, if Congress has the power to extend existing terms, then the Constitution's requirement that terms be "limited" will have no practical effect. If every time a copyright is about to expire, Congress has the power to extend its term, then Congress can achieve what the Constitution plainly forbids - perpetual terms "on the installment plan," as Professor Peter Jaszi so nicely put it.
+={Jaszi, Peter}
+
+As an academic, my first response was to hit the books. I remember sitting late at the office, scouring on-line databases for any serious consideration of the question. No one had ever challenged Congress's practice of extending existing terms. That failure may in part be why Congress seemed so untroubled in its habit. That, and the fact that the practice had become so lucrative for Congress. Congress knows that copyright owners will be willing to pay a great deal of money to see their copyright terms extended. And so Congress is quite happy to keep this gravy train going.
+={Lessig, Lawrence:Eldred case involvement of}
+
+For this is the core of the corruption in our present system of government."Corruption" not in the sense that representatives are bribed. Rather, "corruption" in the sense that the system induces the beneficiaries of Congress's acts to raise and give money to Congress to induce it to act. There's only so much time; there's only so much Congress can do. Why not limit its actions to those things it must do - and those things that pay? Extending copyright terms pays.
+
+If that's not obvious to you, consider the following: Say you're one of the very few lucky copyright owners whose copyright continues to make money one hundred years after it was created. The Estate of Robert Frost is a good example. Frost died in 1963. His poetry continues to be extraordinarily valuable. Thus the Robert Frost estate benefits greatly from any extension of copyright, since no publisher would pay the estate any money if the poems Frost wrote could be published by anyone for free.
+={Frost, Robert+12}
+
+So imagine the Robert Frost estate is earning $100,000 a year from three of Frost's poems. And imagine the copyright for those poems is about to expire. You sit on the board of the Robert Frost estate. Your financial adviser comes to your board meeting with a very grim report:
+
+"Next year," the adviser announces, "our copyrights in works A, B, and C will expire. That means that after next year, we will no longer be receiving the annual royalty check of $100,000 from the publishers of those works.
+
+"There's a proposal in Congress, however," she continues, "that could change this. A few congressmen are floating a bill to extend the terms of copyright by twenty years. That bill would be extraordinarily valuable to us. So we should hope this bill passes."
+
+"Hope?" a fellow board member says. "Can't we be doing something about it?"
+
+"Well, obviously, yes," the adviser responds. "We could contribute to the campaigns of a number of representatives to try to assure that they support the bill."
+={Congress, U.S.:lobbying of+8}
+
+You hate politics. You hate contributing to campaigns. So you want to know whether this disgusting practice is worth it. "How much would we get if this extension were passed?" you ask the adviser. "How much is it worth?"
+
+"Well," the adviser says, "if you're confident that you will continue to get at least $100,000 a year from these copyrights, and you use the 'discount rate' that we use to evaluate estate investments (6 percent), then this law would be worth $1,146,000 to the estate."
+
+You're a bit shocked by the number, but you quickly come to the correct conclusion:
+
+"So you're saying it would be worth it for us to pay more than $1,000,000 in campaign contributions if we were confident those contributions would assure that the bill was passed?"
+
+"Absolutely," the adviser responds. "It is worth it to you to contribute up to the 'present value' of the income you expect from these copyrights. Which for us means over $1,000,000."
+
+You quickly get the point - you as the member of the board and, I trust, you the reader. Each time copyrights are about to expire, every beneficiary in the position of the Robert Frost estate faces the same choice: If they can contribute to get a law passed to extend copyrights, they will benefit greatly from that extension. And so each time copyrights are about to expire, there is a massive amount of lobbying to get the copyright term extended.
+
+Thus a congressional perpetual motion machine: So long as legislation can be bought (albeit indirectly), there will be all the incentive in the world to buy further extensions of copyright.
+
+In the lobbying that led to the passage of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, this "theory" about incentives was proved real. Ten of the thirteen original sponsors of the act in the House received the maximum contribution from Disney's political action committee; in the Senate, eight of the twelve sponsors received contributions.~{ Associated Press, "Disney Lobbying for Copyright Extension No Mickey Mouse Effort; Congress OKs Bill Granting Creators 20 More Years," /{Chicago Tribune,}/ 17 October 1998, 22. }~ The RIAA and the MPAA are estimated to have spent over $1.5 million lobbying in the 1998 election cycle. They paid out more than $200,000 in campaign contributions.~{ See Nick Brown, "Fair Use No More?: Copyright in the Information Age," available at link #49. }~ Disney is estimated to have contributed more than $800,000 to reelection campaigns in the 1998 cycle.~{ Alan K. Ota, "Disney in Washington: The Mouse That Roars," /{Congressional Quarterly This Week,}/ 8 August 1990, available at link #50. }~
+={Disney, Inc.;film industry:trade association of;Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA);Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA):lobbying power of;Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998);Congress, U.S.:copyright terms extended by+13}
+
+!_ Constitutional law
+is not oblivious to the obvious. Or at least, it need not be. So when I was considering Eldred's complaint, this reality about the never-ending incentives to increase the copyright term was central to my thinking. In my view, a pragmatic court committed to interpreting and applying the Constitution of our framers would see that if Congress has the power to extend existing terms, then there would be no effective constitutional requirement that terms be "limited." If they could extend it once, they would extend it again and again and again.
+={Lessig, Lawrence:Eldred case involvement of+1;Constitution, U.S.:Progress Clause of;Eldred, Eric;copyright law:term extensions in+12}
+
+It was also my judgment that /{this}/ Supreme Court would not allow Congress to extend existing terms. As anyone close to the Supreme Court's work knows, this Court has increasingly restricted the power of Congress when it has viewed Congress's actions as exceeding the power granted to it by the Constitution. Among constitutional scholars, the most famous example of this trend was the Supreme Court's decision in 1995 to strike down a law that banned the possession of guns near schools.
+={Congress, U.S.:Supreme Court restraint on+6;copyright law:Supreme Court case on term extension of+5;Supreme Court, U.S.:congressional actions restrained by+5|on copyright term extensions;guns+2;schools, gun possession near+2}
+
+Since 1937, the Supreme Court had interpreted Congress's granted powers very broadly; so, while the Constitution grants Congress the power to regulate only "commerce among the several states" (aka "interstate commerce"), the Supreme Court had interpreted that power to include the power to regulate any activity that merely affected interstate commerce.
+={commerce, interstate+3;Congress, U.S.:constitutional powers of+5;interstate commerce+4}
+
+As the economy grew, this standard increasingly meant that there was no limit to Congress's power to regulate, since just about every activity, when considered on a national scale, affects interstate commerce. A Constitution designed to limit Congress's power was instead interpreted to impose no limit.
+
+The Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Rehnquist's command, changed that in /{United States v. Lopez}/. The government had argued that possessing guns near schools affected interstate commerce. Guns near schools increase crime, crime lowers property values, and so on. In the oral argument, the Chief Justice asked the government whether there was any activity that would not affect interstate commerce under the reasoning the government advanced. The government said there was not; if Congress says an activity affects interstate commerce, then that activity affects interstate commerce. The Supreme Court, the government said, was not in the position to second-guess Congress.
+={Rehnquist, William H.+1;United States v. Lopez+1}
+
+"We pause to consider the implications of the government's arguments," the Chief Justice wrote.~{ /{United States v. Lopez,}/ 514 U.S. 549, 564 (1995). }~ If anything Congress says is interstate commerce must therefore be considered interstate commerce, then there would be no limit to Congress's power. The decision in /{Lopez}/ was reaffirmed five years later in /{United States v. Morrison}/.~{ /{United States v. Morrison,}/ 529 U.S. 598 (2000). }~
+={United States v. Morrison}
+
+If a principle were at work here, then it should apply to the Progress Clause as much as the Commerce Clause.~{ If it is a principle about enumerated powers, then the principle carries from one enumerated power to another. The animating point in the context of the Commerce Clause was that the interpretation offered by the government would allow the government unending power to regulate commerce - the limitation to interstate commerce notwithstanding. The same point is true in the context of the Copyright Clause. Here, too, the government's interpretation would allow the government unending power to regulate copyrights - the limitation to "limited times" notwithstanding. }~ And if it is applied to the Progress Clause, the principle should yield the conclusion that Congress can't extend an existing term. If Congress could extend an existing term, then there would be no "stopping point" to Congress's power over terms, though the Constitution expressly states that there is such a limit. Thus, the same principle applied to the power to grant copyrights should entail that Congress is not allowed to extend the term of existing copyrights.
+={Constitution, U.S.:Progress Clause of|Commerce Clause of;copyright:duration of;Supreme Court, U.S.:congressional actions restrained by+2}
+
+/{If}/, that is, the principle announced in /{Lopez}/ stood for a principle. Many believed the decision in /{Lopez}/ stood for politics - a conservative Supreme Court, which believed in states' rights, using its power over Congress to advance its own personal political preferences. But I rejected that view of the Supreme Court's decision. Indeed, shortly after the decision, I wrote an article demonstrating the "fidelity" in such an interpretation of the Constitution. The idea that the Supreme Court decides cases based upon its politics struck me as extraordinarily boring. I was not going to devote my life to teaching constitutional law if these nine Justices were going to be petty politicians.
+={Congress, U.S.:Supreme Court restraint on+3;United States v. Lopez}
+
+!_ Now let's pause
+for a moment to make sure we understand what the argument in /{Eldred}/ was not about. By insisting on the Constitution's limits to copyright, obviously Eldred was not endorsing piracy. Indeed, in an obvious sense, he was fighting a kind of piracy - piracy of the public domain. When Robert Frost wrote his work and when Walt Disney created Mickey Mouse, the maximum copyright term was just fifty-six years. Because of interim changes, Frost and Disney had already enjoyed a seventy-five-year monopoly for their work. They had gotten the benefit of the bargain that the Constitution envisions: In exchange for a monopoly protected for fifty-six years, they created new work. But now these entities were using their power - expressed through the power of lobbyists' money - to get another twenty-year dollop of monopoly. That twenty-year dollop would be taken from the public domain. Eric Eldred was fighting a piracy that affects us all.
+={Constitution, U.S.:copyright purpose established in;copyright:constitutional purpose of|duration of;Disney, Walt;Eldred, Eric+2;Frost, Robert;Mickey Mouse;public domain:protection of+2}
+
+Some people view the public domain with contempt. In their brief before the Supreme Court, the Nashville Songwriters Association wrote that the public domain is nothing more than "legal piracy."~{ Brief of the Nashville Songwriters Association, /{Eldred v. Ashcroft,}/ 537 U.S. 186 (2003) (No. 01-618), n.10, available at link #51. }~ But it is not piracy when the law allows it; and in our constitutional system, our law requires it. Some may not like the Constitution's requirements, but that doesn't make the Constitution a pirate's charter.
+={Eldred v. Ashcroft;Constitution, U.S.:copyright purpose established in+1;copyright:constitutional purpose of+1;Nashville Songwriters Association}
+
+As we've seen, our constitutional system requires limits on copyright as a way to assure that copyright holders do not too heavily influence the development and distribution of our culture. Yet, as Eric Eldred discovered, we have set up a system that assures that copyright terms will be repeatedly extended, and extended, and extended. We have created the perfect storm for the public domain. Copyrights have not expired, and will not expire, so long as Congress is free to be bought to extend them again.
+={Eldred, Eric;copyright:duration of+2}
+
+!_ It is valuable
+copyrights that are responsible for terms being extended. Mickey Mouse and "Rhapsody in Blue." These works are too valuable for copyright owners to ignore. But the real harm to our society from copyright extensions is not that Mickey Mouse remains Disney's. Forget Mickey Mouse. Forget Robert Frost. Forget all the works from the 1920s and 1930s that have continuing commercial value. The real harm of term extension comes not from these famous works. The real harm is to the works that are not famous, not commercially exploited, and no longer available as a result.
+={Mickey Mouse;Rhapsody in Blue (Gershwin);Frost, Robert}
+
+% added this Frost index reference
+
+If you look at the work created in the first twenty years (1923 to 1942) affected by the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, 2 percent of that work has any continuing commercial value. It was the copyright holders for that 2 percent who pushed the CTEA through. But the law and its effect were not limited to that 2 percent. The law extended the terms of copyright generally.~{ The figure of 2 percent is an extrapolation from the study by the Congressional Research Service, in light of the estimated renewal ranges. See Brief of Petitioners, /{Eldred v. Ashcroft,}/ 7, available at link #52. }~
+={Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998)}
+
+Think practically about the consequence of this extension - practically, as a businessperson, and not as a lawyer eager for more legal work. In 1930, 10,047 books were published. In 2000, 174 of those books were still in print. Let's say you were Brewster Kahle, and you wanted to make available to the world in your iArchive project the remaining 9,873. What would you have to do?
+={Kahle, Brewster;archives, digital;Internet Archive}
+
+Well, first, you'd have to determine which of the 9,873 books were still under copyright. That requires going to a library (these data are not on-line) and paging through tomes of books, cross-checking the titles and authors of the 9,873 books with the copyright registration and renewal records for works published in 1930. That will produce a list of books still under copyright.
+
+Then for the books still under copyright, you would need to locate the current copyright owners. How would you do that?
+
+Most people think that there must be a list of these copyright owners somewhere. Practical people think this way. How could there be thousands and thousands of government monopolies without there being at least a list?
+={copyright:no registration of works+5}
+
+But there is no list. There may be a name from 1930, and then in 1959, of the person who registered the copyright. But just think practically about how impossibly difficult it would be to track down thousands of such records - especially since the person who registered is not necessarily the current owner. And we're just talking about 1930!
+
+"But there isn't a list of who owns property generally," the apologists for the system respond. "Why should there be a list of copyright owners?"
+
+Well, actually, if you think about it, there /{are}/ plenty of lists of who owns what property. Think about deeds on houses, or titles to cars. And where there isn't a list, the code of real space is pretty good at suggesting who the owner of a bit of property is. (A swing set in your backyard is probably yours.) So formally or informally, we have a pretty good way to know who owns what tangible property.
+
+So: You walk down a street and see a house. You can know who owns the house by looking it up in the courthouse registry. If you see a car, there is ordinarily a license plate that will link the owner to the car. If you see a bunch of children's toys sitting on the front lawn of a house, it's fairly easy to determine who owns the toys. And if you happen to see a baseball lying in a gutter on the side of the road, look around for a second for some kids playing ball. If you don't see any kids, then okay: Here's a bit of property whose owner we can't easily determine. It is the exception that proves the rule: that we ordinarily know quite well who owns what property.
+
+Compare this story to intangible property. You go into a library. The library owns the books. But who owns the copyrights? As I've already described, there's no list of copyright owners. There are authors' names, of course, but their copyrights could have been assigned, or passed down in an estate like Grandma's old jewelry. To know who owns what, you would have to hire a private detective. The bottom line: The owner cannot easily be located. And in a regime like ours, in which it is a felony to use such property without the property owner's permission, the property isn't going to be used.
+={copyright law:felony for infringement of}
+
+The consequence with respect to old books is that they won't be digitized, and hence will simply rot away on shelves. But the consequence for other creative works is much more dire.
+
+Consider the story of Michael Agee, chairman of Hal Roach Studios, which owns the copyrights for the Laurel and Hardy films. Agee is a direct beneficiary of the Bono Act. The Laurel and Hardy films were made between 1921 and 1951. Only one of these films, /{The Lucky Dog}/, is currently out of copyright. But for the CTEA, films made after 1923 would have begun entering the public domain. Because Agee controls the exclusive rights for these popular films, he makes a great deal of money. According to one estimate, "Roach has sold about 60,000 videocassettes and 50,000 DVDs of the duo's silent films."~{ See David G. Savage, "High Court Scene of Showdown on Copyright Law," /{Los Angeles Times,}/ 6 October 2002; David Streitfeld, "Classic Movies, Songs, Books at Stake; Supreme Court Hears Arguments Today on Striking Down Copyright Extension," /{Orlando Sentinel Tribune,}/ 9 October 2002. }~
+={Agee, Michael+2;films:in public domain+12;Hal Roach Studios;Laurel and Hardy films;Lucky Dog, The;public domain:films in+12}
+
+Yet Agee opposed the CTEA. His reasons demonstrate a rare virtue in this culture: selflessness. He argued in a brief before the Supreme Court that the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act will, if left standing, destroy a whole generation of American film.
+={Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998)}
+
+His argument is straightforward. A tiny fraction of this work has any continuing commercial value. The rest - to the extent it survives at all - sits in vaults gathering dust. It may be that some of this work not now commercially valuable will be deemed to be valuable by the owners of the vaults. For this to occur, however, the commercial benefit from the work must exceed the costs of making the work available for distribution.
+
+We can't know the benefits, but we do know a lot about the costs. For most of the history of film, the costs of restoring film were very high; digital technology has lowered these costs substantially. While it cost more than $10,000 to restore a ninety-minute black-and-white film in 1993, it can now cost as little as $100 to digitize one hour of 8 mm film.~{ Brief of Hal Roach Studios and Michael Agee as Amicus Curiae Supporting the Petitoners, /{Eldred v. Ashcroft,}/ 537 U.S. 186 (2003) (No. 01- 618), 12. See also Brief of Amicus Curiae filed on behalf of Petitioners by the Internet Archive, /{Eldred v. Ashcroft,}/ available at link #53. }~
+={films:restoration of+4}
+
+Restoration technology is not the only cost, nor the most important. Lawyers, too, are a cost, and increasingly, a very important one. In addition to preserving the film, a distributor needs to secure the rights. And to secure the rights for a film that is under copyright, you need to locate the copyright owner.
+={films:multiple copyrights associated with+1}
+
+Or more accurately, /{owners}/. As we've seen, there isn't only a single copyright associated with a film; there are many. There isn't a single person whom you can contact about those copyrights; there are as many as can hold the rights, which turns out to be an extremely large number. Thus the costs of clearing the rights to these films is exceptionally high.
+
+"But can't you just restore the film, distribute it, and then pay the copyright owner when she shows up?" Sure, if you want to commit a felony. And even if you're not worried about committing a felony, when she does show up, she'll have the right to sue you for all the profits you have made. So, if you're successful, you can be fairly confident you'll be getting a call from someone's lawyer. And if you're not successful, you won't make enough to cover the costs of your own lawyer. Either way, you have to talk to a lawyer. And as is too often the case, saying you have to talk to a lawyer is the same as saying you won't make any money.
+
+For some films, the benefit of releasing the film may well exceed these costs. But for the vast majority of them, there is no way the benefit would outweigh the legal costs. Thus, for the vast majority of old films, Agee argued, the film will not be restored and distributed until the copyright expires.
+={Agee, Michael}
+
+But by the time the copyright for these films expires, the film will have expired. These films were produced on nitrate-based stock, and nitrate stock dissolves over time. They will be gone, and the metal canisters in which they are now stored will be filled with nothing more than dust.
+
+!_ Of all the
+creative work produced by humans anywhere, a tiny fraction has continuing commercial value. For that tiny fraction, the copyright is a crucially important legal device. For that tiny fraction, the copyright creates incentives to produce and distribute the creative work. For that tiny fraction, the copyright acts as an "engine of free expression."
+
+But even for that tiny fraction, the actual time during which the creative work has a commercial life is extremely short. As I've indicated, most books go out of print within one year. The same is true of music and film. Commercial culture is sharklike. It must keep moving. And when a creative work falls out of favor with the commercial distributors, the commercial life ends.
+={culture:commercial vs. noncommercial+1}
+
+Yet that doesn't mean the life of the creative work ends. We don't keep libraries of books in order to compete with Barnes & Noble, and we don't have archives of films because we expect people to choose between spending Friday night watching new movies and spending Friday night watching a 1930 news documentary. The noncommercial life of culture is important and valuable - for entertainment but also, and more importantly, for knowledge. To understand who we are, and where we came from, and how we have made the mistakes that we have, we need to have access to this history.
+
+Copyrights in this context do not drive an engine of free expression. In this context, there is no need for an exclusive right. Copyrights in this context do no good.
+
+Yet, for most of our history, they also did little harm. For most of our history, when a work ended its commercial life, there was no /{copyright-related use}/ that would be inhibited by an exclusive right. When a book went out of print, you could not buy it from a publisher. But you could still buy it from a used book store, and when a used book store sells it, in America, at least, there is no need to pay the copyright owner anything. Thus, the ordinary use of a book after its commercial life ended was a use that was independent of copyright law.
+
+The same was effectively true of film. Because the costs of restoring a film - the real economic costs, not the lawyer costs - were so high, it was never at all feasible to preserve or restore film. Like the remains of a great dinner, when it's over, it's over. Once a film passed out of its commercial life, it may have been archived for a bit, but that was the end of its life so long as the market didn't have more to offer.
+={films:restoration of}
+
+In other words, though copyright has been relatively short for most of our history, long copyrights wouldn't have mattered for the works that lost their commercial value. Long copyrights for these works would not have interfered with anything.
+
+But this situation has now changed.
+
+One crucially important consequence of the emergence of digital technologies is to enable the archive that Brewster Kahle dreams of. Digital technologies now make it possible to preserve and give access to all sorts of knowledge. Once a book goes out of print, we can now imagine digitizing it and making it available to everyone, forever. Once a film goes out of distribution, we could digitize it and make it available to everyone, forever. Digital technologies give new life to copyrighted material after it passes out of its commercial life. It is now possible to preserve and assure universal access to this knowledge and culture, whereas before it was not.
+={Kahle, Brewster+3;archives, digital+4;culture:archives of+4}
+
+And now copyright law does get in the way. Every step of producing this digital archive of our culture infringes on the exclusive right of copyright. To digitize a book is to copy it. To do that requires permission of the copyright owner. The same with music, film, or any other aspect of our culture protected by copyright. The effort to make these things available to history, or to researchers, or to those who just want to explore, is now inhibited by a set of rules that were written for a radically different context.
+
+Here is the core of the harm that comes from extending terms: Now that technology enables us to rebuild the library of Alexandria, the law gets in the way. And it doesn't get in the way for any useful /{copyright}/ purpose, for the purpose of copyright is to enable the commercial market that spreads culture. No, we are talking about culture after it has lived its commercial life. In this context, copyright is serving no purpose /{at all}/ related to the spread of knowledge. In this context, copyright is not an engine of free expression. Copyright is a brake.
+={libraries:archival function of+2}
+
+You may well ask, "But if digital technologies lower the costs for Brewster Kahle, then they will lower the costs for Random House, too. So won't Random House do as well as Brewster Kahle in spreading culture widely?"
+
+Maybe. Someday. But there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that publishers would be as complete as libraries. If Barnes & Noble offered to lend books from its stores for a low price, would that eliminate the need for libraries? Only if you think that the only role of a library is to serve what "the market" would demand. But if you think the role of a library is bigger than this - if you think its role is to archive culture, whether there's a demand for any particular bit of that culture or not - then we can't count on the commercial market to do our library work for us.
+
+I would be the first to agree that it should do as much as it can: We should rely upon the market as much as possible to spread and enable culture. My message is absolutely not antimarket. But where we see the market is not doing the job, then we should allow nonmarket forces the freedom to fill the gaps. As one researcher calculated for American culture, 94 percent of the films, books, and music produced between 1923 and 1946 is not commercially available. However much you love the commercial market, if access is a value, then 6 percent is a failure to provide that value.~{ Jason Schultz, "The Myth of the 1976 Copyright 'Chaos' Theory," 20 December 2002, available at link #54. }~
+
+!_ In January 1999,
+we filed a lawsuit on Eric Eldred's behalf in federal district court in Washington, D.C., asking the court to declare the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act unconstitutional. The two central claims that we made were (1) that extending existing terms violated the Constitution's "limited Times" requirement, and (2) that extending terms by another twenty years violated the First Amendment.
+={Eldred v. Ashcroft+126;Lessig, Lawrence:Eldred case involvement of+126;Congress, U.S.:copyright terms extended by+2;Constitution, U.S.:First Amendment to;First Amendment:copyright extension as violation of;Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998):Supreme Court challenge of+7;Supreme Court, U.S.:on copyright term extensions+126;copyright law:Supreme Court case on term extension of+126|term extensions in+126}
+
+The district court dismissed our claims without even hearing an argument. A panel of the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit also dismissed our claims, though after hearing an extensive argument. But that decision at least had a dissent, by one of the most conservative judges on that court. That dissent gave our claims life.
+
+Judge David Sentelle said the CTEA violated the requirement that copyrights be for "limited Times" only. His argument was as elegant as it was simple: If Congress can extend existing terms, then there is no "stopping point" to Congress's power under the Copyright Clause. The power to extend existing terms means Congress is not required to grant terms that are "limited." Thus, Judge Sentelle argued, the court had to interpret the term "limited Times" to give it meaning. And the best interpretation, Judge Sentelle argued, would be to deny Congress the power to extend existing terms.
+={Congress, U.S.:challenge of CTEA legislation of+124;Sentelle, David+2}
+
+We asked the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit as a whole to hear the case. Cases are ordinarily heard in panels of three, except for important cases or cases that raise issues specific to the circuit as a whole, where the court will sit "en banc" to hear the case.
+={Court of Appeals:D.C. Circuit+1;D.C. Court of Appeals+1}
+
+The Court of Appeals rejected our request to hear the case en banc. This time, Judge Sentelle was joined by the most liberal member of the D.C. Circuit, Judge David Tatel. Both the most conservative and the most liberal judges in the D.C. Circuit believed Congress had over-stepped its bounds.
+={Tatel, David}
+
+It was here that most expected /{Eldred v. Ashcroft}/ would die, for the Supreme Court rarely reviews any decision by a court of appeals. (It hears about one hundred cases a year, out of more than five thousand appeals.) And it practically never reviews a decision that upholds a statute when no other court has yet reviewed the statute.
+={Supreme Court, U.S.:annual docket of}
+
+But in February 2002, the Supreme Court surprised the world by granting our petition to review the D.C. Circuit opinion. Argument was set for October of 2002. The summer would be spent writing briefs and preparing for argument.
+
+!_ It is over
+a year later as I write these words. It is still astonishingly hard. If you know anything at all about this story, you know that we lost the appeal. And if you know something more than just the minimum, you probably think there was no way this case could have been won. After our defeat, I received literally thousands of missives by well-wishers and supporters, thanking me for my work on behalf of this noble but doomed cause. And none from this pile was more significant to me than the e-mail from my client, Eric Eldred.
+={Eldred, Eric}
+
+But my client and these friends were wrong. This case could have been won. It should have been won. And no matter how hard I try to retell this story to myself, I can never escape believing that my own mistake lost it.
+
+!_ The mistake
+was made early, though it became obvious only at the very end. Our case had been supported from the very beginning by an extraordinary lawyer, Geoffrey Stewart, and by the law firm he had moved to, Jones, Day, Reavis and Pogue. Jones Day took a great deal of heat from its copyright-protectionist clients for supporting us. They ignored this pressure (something that few law firms today would ever do), and throughout the case, they gave it everything they could.
+={Stewart, Gordon+1;Jones, Day, Reavis and Pogue (Jones Day)+1}
+
+There were three key lawyers on the case from Jones Day. Geoff Stewart was the first, but then Dan Bromberg and Don Ayer became quite involved. Bromberg and Ayer in particular had a common view about how this case would be won: We would only win, they repeatedly told me, if we could make the issue seem "important" to the Supreme Court. It had to seem as if dramatic harm were being done to free speech and free culture; otherwise, they would never vote against "the most powerful media companies in the world."
+={Ayer, Don;Bromberg, Dan}
+
+I hate this view of the law. Of course I thought the Sonny Bono Act was a dramatic harm to free speech and free culture. Of course I still think it is. But the idea that the Supreme Court decides the law based on how important they believe the issues are is just wrong. It might be "right" as in "true," I thought, but it is "wrong" as in "it just shouldn't be that way." As I believed that any faithful interpretation of what the framers of our Constitution did would yield the conclusion that the CTEA was unconstitutional, and as I believed that any faithful interpretation of what the First Amendment means would yield the conclusion that the power to extend existing copyright terms is unconstitutional, I was not persuaded that we had to sell our case like soap. Just as a law that bans the swastika is unconstitutional not because the Court likes Nazis but because such a law would violate the Constitution, so too, in my view, would the Court decide whether Congress's law was constitutional based on the Constitution, not based on whether they liked the values that the framers put in the Constitution.
+={Constitution, U.S.:First Amendment to;First Amendment:copyright extension as violation of;Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998):Supreme Court challenge of}
+
+In any case, I thought, the Court must already see the danger and the harm caused by this sort of law. Why else would they grant review? There was no reason to hear the case in the Supreme Court if they weren't convinced that this regulation was harmful. So in my view, we didn't need to persuade them that this law was bad, we needed to show why it was unconstitutional.
+
+There was one way, however, in which I felt politics would matter and in which I thought a response was appropriate. I was convinced that the Court would not hear our arguments if it thought these were just the arguments of a group of lefty loons. This Supreme Court was not about to launch into a new field of judicial review if it seemed that this field of review was simply the preference of a small political minority. Although my focus in the case was not to demonstrate how bad the Sonny Bono Act was but to demonstrate that it was unconstitutional, my hope was to make this argument against a background of briefs that covered the full range of political views. To show that this claim against the CTEA was grounded in /{law}/ and not politics, then, we tried to gather the widest range of credible critics - credible not because they were rich and famous, but because they, in the aggregate, demonstrated that this law was unconstitutional regardless of one's politics.
+={Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998):Supreme Court challenge of}
+
+The first step happened all by itself. Phyllis Schlafly's organization, Eagle Forum, had been an opponent of the CTEA from the very beginning. Mrs. Schlafly viewed the CTEA as a sellout by Congress. In November 1998, she wrote a stinging editorial attacking the Republican Congress for allowing the law to pass. As she wrote, "Do you sometimes wonder why bills that create a financial windfall to narrow special interests slide easily through the intricate legislative process, while bills that benefit the general public seem to get bogged down?" The answer, as the editorial documented, was the power of money. Schlafly enumerated Disney's contributions to the key players on the committees. It was money, not justice, that gave Mickey Mouse twenty more years in Disney's control, Schlafly argued.
+={Disney, Inc.;Eagle Forum+2;Mickey Mouse;Schlafy, Phyllis}
+
+In the Court of Appeals, Eagle Forum was eager to file a brief supporting our position. Their brief made the argument that became the core claim in the Supreme Court: If Congress can extend the term of existing copyrights, there is no limit to Congress's power to set terms. That strong conservative argument persuaded a strong conservative judge, Judge Sentelle.
+={Court of Appeals:D.C. Circuit;D.C. Court of Appeals;Sentelle, David}
+
+In the Supreme Court, the briefs on our side were about as diverse as it gets. They included an extraordinary historical brief by the Free Software Foundation (home of the GNU project that made GNU/ Linux possible). They included a powerful brief about the costs of uncertainty by Intel. There were two law professors' briefs, one by copyright scholars and one by First Amendment scholars. There was an exhaustive and uncontroverted brief by the world's experts in the history of the Progress Clause. And of course, there was a new brief by Eagle Forum, repeating and strengthening its arguments.
+={Free Software Foundation;GNU/Linux operating system;Linux operating system;Intel;Constitution, U.S.:Progress Clause of;Progress Clause}
+
+Those briefs framed a legal argument. Then to support the legal argument, there were a number of powerful briefs by libraries and archives, including the Internet Archive, the American Association of Law Libraries, and the National Writers Union.
+={American Association of Law Libraries;Internet Archive;National Writers Union}
+
+But two briefs captured the policy argument best. One made the argument I've already described: A brief by Hal Roach Studios argued that unless the law was struck, a whole generation of American film would disappear. The other made the economic argument absolutely clear.
+={Hal Roach Studios}
+
+This economists' brief was signed by seventeen economists, including five Nobel Prize winners, including Ronald Coase, James Buchanan, Milton Friedman, Kenneth Arrow, and George Akerlof. The economists, as the list of Nobel winners demonstrates, spanned the political spectrum. Their conclusions were powerful: There was no plausible claim that extending the terms of existing copyrights would do anything to increase incentives to create. Such extensions were nothing more than "rent-seeking" - the fancy term economists use to describe special- interest legislation gone wild.
+={Akerlof, George;Arrow, Kenneth;Buchanan, James;Coase, Ronald;Fridman, Milton+2}
+
+The same effort at balance was reflected in the legal team we gathered to write our briefs in the case. The Jones Day lawyers had been with us from the start. But when the case got to the Supreme Court, we added three lawyers to help us frame this argument to this Court: Alan Morrison, a lawyer from Public Citizen, a Washington group that had made constitutional history with a series of seminal victories in the Supreme Court defending individual rights; my colleague and dean, Kathleen Sullivan, who had argued many cases in the Court, and who had advised us early on about a First Amendment strategy; and finally, former solicitor general Charles Fried.
+={Jones, Day, Reavis and Pogue (Jones Day);Morrison, Alan;Sullivan, Kathleen;Fried, Charles+1;Public Citizen}
+
+Fried was a special victory for our side. Every other former solicitor general was hired by the other side to defend Congress's power to give media companies the special favor of extended copyright terms. Fried was the only one who turned down that lucrative assignment to stand up for something he believed in. He had been Ronald Reagan's chief lawyer in the Supreme Court. He had helped craft the line of cases that limited Congress's power in the context of the Commerce Clause. And while he had argued many positions in the Supreme Court that I personally disagreed with, his joining the cause was a vote of confidence in our argument.
+={Reagan, Ronald;Congress, U.S.:constitutional powers of;Constitution, U.S.:Commerce Clause of}
+
+The government, in defending the statute, had its collection of friends, as well. Significantly, however, none of these "friends" included historians or economists. The briefs on the other side of the case were written exclusively by major media companies, congressmen, and copyright holders.
+
+The media companies were not surprising. They had the most to gain from the law. The congressmen were not surprising either - they were defending their power and, indirectly, the gravy train of contributions such power induced. And of course it was not surprising that the copyright holders would defend the idea that they should continue to have the right to control who did what with content they wanted to control.
+
+Dr. Seuss's representatives, for example, argued that it was better for the Dr. Seuss estate to control what happened to Dr. Seuss's work - better than allowing it to fall into the public domain - because if this creativity were in the public domain, then people could use it to "glorify drugs or to create pornography."~{ Brief of Amici Dr. Seuss Enterprise et al., /{Eldred v. Ashcroft,}/ 537 U.S. 186 (2003) (No. 01-618), 19. }~ That was also the motive of the Gershwin estate, which defended its "protection" of the work of George Gershwin. They refuse, for example, to license /{Porgy and Bess}/ to anyone who refuses to use African Americans in the cast.~{ Dinitia Smith, "Immortal Words, Immortal Royalties? Even Mickey Mouse Joins the Fray," /{New York Times,}/ 28 March 1998, B7. }~ That's their view of how this part of American culture should be controlled, and they wanted this law to help them effect that control.
+={Gershwin, George+1;Porgy and Bess;pornography;Seuss, Dr.+1}
+
+This argument made clear a theme that is rarely noticed in this debate. When Congress decides to extend the term of existing copyrights, Congress is making a choice about which speakers it will favor. Famous and beloved copyright owners, such as the Gershwin estate and Dr. Seuss, come to Congress and say, "Give us twenty years to control the speech about these icons of American culture. We'll do better with them than anyone else." Congress of course likes to reward the popular and famous by giving them what they want. But when Congress gives people an exclusive right to speak in a certain way, that's just what the First Amendment is traditionally meant to block.
+={First Amendment:copyright extension as violation of;Constitution, U.S.:First Amendment to}
+
+We argued as much in a final brief. Not only would upholding the CTEA mean that there was no limit to the power of Congress to extend copyrights - extensions that would further concentrate the market; it would also mean that there was no limit to Congress's power to play favorites, through copyright, with who has the right to speak.
+={Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998):Supreme Court challenge of+64;Congress, U.S.:constitutional powers of+8}
+
+!_ Between February
+and October, there was little I did beyond preparing for this case. Early on, as I said, I set the strategy.
+
+The Supreme Court was divided into two important camps. One camp we called "the Conservatives." The other we called "the Rest." The Conservatives included Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justice O'Connor, Justice Scalia, Justice Kennedy, and Justice Thomas. These five had been the most consistent in limiting Congress's power. They were the five who had supported the /{Lopez/Morrison}/ line of cases that said that an enumerated power had to be interpreted to assure that Congress's powers had limits.
+={Kennedy, Anthony;O'Connor, Sandra Day;Rehnquist, William H.;Thomas, Clarence;United States v. Lopez;United States v. Morrison;Scalia, Antonin;Congress, U.S.:Supreme Court restraint on;Supreme Court, U.S.:congressional actions restrained by|factions of+3}
+
+The Rest were the four Justices who had strongly opposed limits on Congress's power. These four - Justice Stevens, Justice Souter, Justice Ginsburg, and Justice Breyer - had repeatedly argued that the Constitution gives Congress broad discretion to decide how best to implement its powers. In case after case, these justices had argued that the Court's role should be one of deference. Though the votes of these four justices were the votes that I personally had most consistently agreed with, they were also the votes that we were least likely to get.
+={Breyer, Stephen;Ginsburg, Ruth Bader;Stevens, John Paul;Souter, David}
+
+In particular, the least likely was Justice Ginsburg's. In addition to her general view about deference to Congress (except where issues of gender are involved), she had been particularly deferential in the context of intellectual property protections. She and her daughter (an excellent and well-known intellectual property scholar) were cut from the same intellectual property cloth. We expected she would agree with the writings of her daughter: that Congress had the power in this context to do as it wished, even if what Congress wished made little sense.
+
+Close behind Justice Ginsburg were two justices whom we also viewed as unlikely allies, though possible surprises. Justice Souter strongly favored deference to Congress, as did Justice Breyer. But both were also very sensitive to free speech concerns. And as we strongly believed, there was a very important free speech argument against these retrospective extensions.
+={Breyer, Stephen;Ginsburg, Ruth Bader;Souter, David}
+
+The only vote we could be confident about was that of Justice Stevens. History will record Justice Stevens as one of the greatest judges on this Court. His votes are consistently eclectic, which just means that no simple ideology explains where he will stand. But he had consistently argued for limits in the context of intellectual property generally. We were fairly confident he would recognize limits here.
+={Stevens, John Paul}
+
+This analysis of "the Rest" showed most clearly where our focus had to be: on the Conservatives. To win this case, we had to crack open these five and get at least a majority to go our way.Thus, the single overriding argument that animated our claim rested on the Conservatives' most important jurisprudential innovation - the argument that Judge Sentelle had relied upon in the Court of Appeals, that Congress's power must be interpreted so that its enumerated powers have limits.
+={Court of Appeals:D.C. Circuit;D.C. Court of Appeals;Sentelle, David}
+
+This then was the core of our strategy - a strategy for which I am responsible. We would get the Court to see that just as with the /{Lopez}/ case, under the government's argument here, Congress would always have unlimited power to extend existing terms. If anything was plain about Congress's power under the Progress Clause, it was that this power was supposed to be "limited." Our aim would be to get the Court to reconcile /{Eldred}/ with /{Lopez:}/ If Congress's power to regulate commerce was limited, then so, too, must Congress's power to regulate copyright be limited.
+={United States v. Lopez;commerce, interstate;interstate commerce;Congress, U.S.:in constitutional Progress Clause;Progress Clause;Congress, U.S.:copyright terms extended by+3;Constitution, U.S.:Progress Clause of}
+
+!_ The argument
+on the government's side came down to this: Congress has done it before. It should be allowed to do it again. The government claimed that from the very beginning, Congress has been extending the term of existing copyrights. So, the government argued, the Court should not now say that practice is unconstitutional.
+
+There was some truth to the government's claim, but not much. We certainly agreed that Congress had extended existing terms in 1831 and in 1909. And of course, in 1962, Congress began extending existing terms regularly - eleven times in forty years.
+
+But this "consistency" should be kept in perspective. Congress extended existing terms once in the first hundred years of the Republic. It then extended existing terms once again in the next fifty. Those rare extensions are in contrast to the now regular practice of extending existing terms. Whatever restraint Congress had had in the past, that restraint was now gone. Congress was now in a cycle of extensions; there was no reason to expect that cycle would end. This Court had not hesitated to intervene where Congress was in a similar cycle of extension. There was no reason it couldn't intervene here.
+
+!_ Oral argument
+was scheduled for the first week in October. I arrived in D.C. two weeks before the argument. During those two weeks, I was repeatedly "mooted" by lawyers who had volunteered to help in the case. Such "moots" are basically practice rounds, where wannabe justices fire questions at wannabe winners.
+
+I was convinced that to win, I had to keep the Court focused on a single point: that if this extension is permitted, then there is no limit to the power to set terms. Going with the government would mean that terms would be effectively unlimited; going with us would give Congress a clear line to follow: Don't extend existing terms. The moots were an effective practice; I found ways to take every question back to this central idea.
+
+One moot was before the lawyers at Jones Day. Don Ayer was the skeptic. He had served in the Reagan Justice Department with Solicitor General Charles Fried. He had argued many cases before the Supreme Court. And in his review of the moot, he let his concern speak:
+={Ayer, Don+2;Fried, Charles;Jones, Day, Reavis and Pogue (Jones Day);Reagan, Ronald}
+
+"I'm just afraid that unless they really see the harm, they won't be willing to upset this practice that the government says has been a consistent practice for two hundred years. You have to make them see the harm - passionately get them to see the harm. For if they don't see that, then we haven't any chance of winning."
+
+He may have argued many cases before this Court, I thought, but he didn't understand its soul. As a clerk, I had seen the Justices do the right thing - not because of politics but because it was right. As a law professor, I had spent my life teaching my students that this Court does the right thing - not because of politics but because it is right. As I listened to Ayer's plea for passion in pressing politics, I understood his point, and I rejected it. Our argument was right. That was enough. Let the politicians learn to see that it was also good.
+
+!_ The night before
+the argument, a line of people began to form in front of the Supreme Court. The case had become a focus of the press and of the movement to free culture. Hundreds stood in line for the chance to see the proceedings. Scores spent the night on the Supreme Court steps so that they would be assured a seat.
+
+Not everyone has to wait in line. People who know the Justices can ask for seats they control. (I asked Justice Scalia's chambers for seats for my parents, for example.) Members of the Supreme Court bar can get a seat in a special section reserved for them. And senators and congressmen have a special place where they get to sit, too. And finally, of course, the press has a gallery, as do clerks working for the Justices on the Court. As we entered that morning, there was no place that was not taken. This was an argument about intellectual property law, yet the halls were filled. As I walked in to take my seat at the front of the Court, I saw my parents sitting on the left. As I sat down at the table, I saw Jack Valenti sitting in the special section ordinarily reserved for family of the Justices.
+={Scalia, Antonin;Valenti, Jack}
+
+When the Chief Justice called me to begin my argument, I began where I intended to stay: on the question of the limits on Congress's power. This was a case about enumerated powers, I said, and whether those enumerated powers had any limit.
+={Congress, U.S.:constitutional powers of+3}
+
+Justice O'Connor stopped me within one minute of my opening. The history was bothering her.
+={O'Connor, Sandra Day+1}
+
+_1 JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Congress has extended the term so often through the years, and if you are right, don't we run the risk of upsetting previous extensions of time? I mean, this seems to be a practice that began with the very first act."
+
+She was quite willing to concede "that this flies directly in the face of what the framers had in mind." But my response again and again was to emphasize limits on Congress's power.
+
+_1 MR. LESSIG: Well, if it flies in the face of what the framers had in mind, then the question is, is there a way of interpreting their words that gives effect to what they had in mind, and the answer is yes."
+
+There were two points in this argument when I should have seen where the Court was going. The first was a question by Justice Kennedy, who observed,
+={Kennedy, Anthony+1}
+
+_1 JUSTICE KENNEDY: Well, I suppose implicit in the argument that the '76 act, too, should have been declared void, and that we might leave it alone because of the disruption, is that for all these years the act has impeded progress in science and the useful arts. I just don't see any empirical evidence for that.
+
+Here follows my clear mistake. Like a professor correcting a student, I answered,
+
+_1 MR. LESSIG: Justice, we are not making an empirical claim at all. Nothing in our Copyright Clause claim hangs upon the empirical assertion about impeding progress. Our only argument is this is a structural limit necessary to assure that what would be an effectively perpetual term not be permitted under the copyright laws."
+
+That was a correct answer, but it wasn't the right answer. The right answer was instead that there was an obvious and profound harm. Any number of briefs had been written about it. He wanted to hear it. And here was the place Don Ayer's advice should have mattered. This was a softball; my answer was a swing and a miss.
+={Ayer, Don}
+
+The second came from the Chief, for whom the whole case had been crafted. For the Chief Justice had crafted the /{Lopez}/ ruling, and we hoped that he would see this case as its second cousin.
+={United States v. Lopez}
+
+It was clear a second into his question that he wasn't at all sympathetic. To him, we were a bunch of anarchists. As he asked:
+
+_1 CHIEF JUSTICE: Well, but you want more than that. You want the right to copy verbatim other people's books, don't you?
+={Rehnquist, William H.}
+
+_1 MR. LESSIG: We want the right to copy verbatim works that should be in the public domain and would be in the public domain but for a statute that cannot be justified under ordinary First Amendment analysis or under a proper reading of the limits built into the Copyright Clause."
+
+Things went better for us when the government gave its argument; for now the Court picked up on the core of our claim. As Justice Scalia asked Solicitor General Olson,
+={Olson, Theodore B.+2;Scalia, Antonin+1}
+
+_1 JUSTICE SCALIA: You say that the functional equivalent of an unlimited time would be a violation [of the Constitution], but that's precisely the argument that's being made by petitioners here, that a limited time which is extendable is the functional equivalent of an unlimited time."
+
+When Olson was finished, it was my turn to give a closing rebuttal. Olson's flailing had revived my anger. But my anger still was directed to the academic, not the practical. The government was arguing as if this were the first case ever to consider limits on Congress's Copyright and Patent Clause power. Ever the professor and not the advocate, I closed by pointing out the long history of the Court imposing limits on Congress's power in the name of the Copyright and Patent Clause - indeed, the very first case striking a law of Congress as exceeding a specific enumerated power was based upon the Copyright and Patent Clause. All true. But it wasn't going to move the Court to my side.
+={Congress, U.S.:constitutional powers of+2}
+
+!_ As I left
+the court that day, I knew there were a hundred points I wished I could remake. There were a hundred questions I wished I had answered differently. But one way of thinking about this case left me optimistic.
+
+The government had been asked over and over again, what is the limit? Over and over again, it had answered there is no limit. This was precisely the answer I wanted the Court to hear. For I could not imagine how the Court could understand that the government believed Congress's power was unlimited under the terms of the Copyright Clause, and sustain the government's argument. The solicitor general had made my argument for me. No matter how often I tried, I could not understand how the Court could find that Congress's power under the Commerce Clause was limited, but under the Copyright Clause, unlimited. In those rare moments when I let myself believe that we may have prevailed, it was because I felt this Court - in particular, the Conservatives - would feel itself constrained by the rule of law that it had established elsewhere.
+
+!_ The morning
+of January 15, 2003, I was five minutes late to the office and missed the 7:00 A.M.call from the Supreme Court clerk. Listening to the message, I could tell in an instant that she had bad news to report.The Supreme Court had affirmed the decision of the Court of Appeals. Seven justices had voted in the majority. There were two dissents.
+
+A few seconds later, the opinions arrived by e-mail. I took the phone off the hook, posted an announcement to our blog, and sat down to see where I had been wrong in my reasoning.
+
+My /{reasoning}/. Here was a case that pitted all the money in the world against /{reasoning}/. And here was the last naïve law professor, scouring the pages, looking for reasoning.
+
+I first scoured the opinion, looking for how the Court would distinguish the principle in this case from the principle in /{Lopez}/. The argument was nowhere to be found. The case was not even cited. The argument that was the core argument of our case did not even appear in the Court's opinion.
+={United States v. Lopez+3}
+
+Justice Ginsburg simply ignored the enumerated powers argument. Consistent with her view that Congress's power was not limited generally, she had found Congress's power not limited here.
+={Ginsburg, Ruth Bader}
+
+Her opinion was perfectly reasonable - for her, and for Justice Souter. Neither believes in /{Lopez}/. It would be too much to expect them to write an opinion that recognized, much less explained, the doctrine they had worked so hard to defeat.
+={Souter, David}
+
+But as I realized what had happened, I couldn't quite believe what I was reading. I had said there was no way this Court could reconcile limited powers with the Commerce Clause and unlimited powers with the Progress Clause. It had never even occurred to me that they could reconcile the two simply /{by not addressing the argument}/. There was no inconsistency because they would not talk about the two together. There was therefore no principle that followed from the /{Lopez}/ case: In that context, Congress's power would be limited, but in this context it would not.
+
+Yet by what right did they get to choose which of the framers' values they would respect? By what right did they - the silent five - get to select the part of the Constitution they would enforce based on the values they thought important? We were right back to the argument that I said I hated at the start: I had failed to convince them that the issue here was important, and I had failed to recognize that however much I might hate a system in which the Court gets to pick the constitutional values that it will respect, that is the system we have.
+
+Justices Breyer and Stevens wrote very strong dissents. Stevens's opinion was crafted internal to the law: He argued that the tradition of intellectual property law should not support this unjustified extension of terms. He based his argument on a parallel analysis that had governed in the context of patents (so had we). But the rest of the Court discounted the parallel - without explaining how the very same words in the Progress Clause could come to mean totally different things depending upon whether the words were about patents or copyrights. The Court let Justice Stevens's charge go unanswered.
+={Breyer, Stephen+1;patents:duration of;Stevens, John Paul}
+
+Justice Breyer's opinion, perhaps the best opinion he has ever written, was external to the Constitution. He argued that the term of copyrights has become so long as to be effectively unlimited. We had said that under the current term, a copyright gave an author 99.8 percent of the value of a perpetual term. Breyer said we were wrong, that the actual number was 99.9997 percent of a perpetual term. Either way, the point was clear: If the Constitution said a term had to be "limited," and the existing term was so long as to be effectively unlimited, then it was unconstitutional.
+={copyright:in perpetuity}
+
+These two justices understood all the arguments we had made. But because neither believed in the /{Lopez}/ case, neither was willing to push it as a reason to reject this extension. The case was decided without anyone having addressed the argument that we had carried from Judge Sentelle. It was /{Hamlet}/ without the Prince.
+={Setnelle, David;United States v. Lopez+2}
+
+!_ Defeat brings depression.
+They say it is a sign of health when depression gives way to anger. My anger came quickly, but it didn't cure the depression. This anger was of two sorts.
+
+It was first anger with the five "Conservatives." It would have been one thing for them to have explained why the principle of /{Lopez}/ didn't apply in this case. That wouldn't have been a very convincing argument, I don't believe, having read it made by others, and having tried to make it myself. But it at least would have been an act of integrity. These justices in particular have repeatedly said that the proper mode of interpreting the Constitution is "originalism" - to first understand the framers' text, interpreted in their context, in light of the structure of the Constitution. That method had produced /{Lopez}/ and many other "originalist" rulings. Where was their "originalism" now?
+={Constitution, U.S.:originalist interpretation of;originalism}
+
+Here, they had joined an opinion that never once tried to explain what the framers had meant by crafting the Progress Clause as they did; they joined an opinion that never once tried to explain how the structure of that clause would affect the interpretation of Congress's power. And they joined an opinion that didn't even try to explain why this grant of power could be unlimited, whereas the Commerce Clause would be limited. In short, they had joined an opinion that did not apply to, and was inconsistent with, their own method for interpreting the Constitution. This opinion may well have yielded a result that they liked. It did not produce a reason that was consistent with their own principles.
+={Constitution, U.S.:Progress Clause of;Progress Clause;Constitution, U.S.:Commerce Clause of}
+
+My anger with the Conservatives quickly yielded to anger with myself. For I had let a view of the law that I liked interfere with a view of the law as it is.
+
+Most lawyers, and most law professors, have little patience for idealism about courts in general and this Supreme Court in particular. Most have a much more pragmatic view. When Don Ayer said that this case would be won based on whether I could convince the Justices that the framers' values were important, I fought the idea, because I didn't want to believe that that is how this Court decides. I insisted on arguing this case as if it were a simple application of a set of principles. I had an argument that followed in logic. I didn't need to waste my time showing it should also follow in popularity.
+={Ayer, Don}
+
+As I read back over the transcript from that argument in October, I can see a hundred places where the answers could have taken the conversation in different directions, where the truth about the harm that this unchecked power will cause could have been made clear to this Court. Justice Kennedy in good faith wanted to be shown. I, idiotically, corrected his question. Justice Souter in good faith wanted to be shown the First Amendment harms. I, like a math teacher, reframed the question to make the logical point. I had shown them how they could strike this law of Congress if they wanted to. There were a hundred places where I could have helped them want to, yet my stubbornness, my refusal to give in, stopped me. I have stood before hundreds of audiences trying to persuade; I have used passion in that effort to persuade; but I refused to stand before this audience and try to persuade with the passion I had used elsewhere. It was not the basis on which a court should decide the issue.
+={Souter, David;Kennedy, Anthony;Constitution, U.S.:First Amendment to;First Amendment:copyright extension as violation of}
+
+Would it have been different if I had argued it differently? Would it have been different if Don Ayer had argued it? Or Charles Fried? Or Kathleen Sullivan?
+
+My friends huddled around me to insist it would not. The Court was not ready, my friends insisted. This was a loss that was destined. It would take a great deal more to show our society why our framers were right. And when we do that, we will be able to show that Court.
+
+Maybe, but I doubt it. These Justices have no financial interest in doing anything except the right thing. They are not lobbied. They have little reason to resist doing right. I can't help but think that if I had stepped down from this pretty picture of dispassionate justice, I could have persuaded.
+
+And even if I couldn't, then that doesn't excuse what happened in January. For at the start of this case, one of America's leading intellectual property professors stated publicly that my bringing this case was a mistake. "The Court is not ready," Peter Jaszi said; this issue should not be raised until it is.
+={Jaszi, Peter}
+
+After the argument and after the decision, Peter said to me, and publicly, that he was wrong. But if indeed that Court could not have been persuaded, then that is all the evidence that's needed to know that here again Peter was right. Either I was not ready to argue this case in a way that would do some good or they were not ready to hear this case in a way that would do some good. Either way, the decision to bring this case - a decision I had made four years before - was wrong.
+
+!_ While the reaction
+to the Sonny Bono Act itself was almost unanimously negative, the reaction to the Court's decision was mixed. No one, at least in the press, tried to say that extending the term of copyright was a good idea. We had won that battle over ideas. Where the decision was praised, it was praised by papers that had been skeptical of the Court's activism in other cases. Deference was a good thing, even if it left standing a silly law. But where the decision was attacked, it was attacked because it left standing a silly and harmful law. /{The New York Times}/ wrote in its editorial,
+
+_1 In effect, the Supreme Court's decision makes it likely that we are seeing the beginning of the end of public domain and the birth of copyright perpetuity. The public domain has been a grand experiment, one that should not be allowed to die. The ability to draw freely on the entire creative output of humanity is one of the reasons we live in a time of such fruitful creative ferment."
+={copyright:in perpetuity}
+
+The best responses were in the cartoons. There was a gaggle of hilarious images" of Mickey in jail and the like. The best, from my view of the case, was Ruben Bolling's, reproduced on the next page. The "powerful and wealthy" line is a bit unfair. But the punch in the face felt exactly like that.
+={Bolling, Ruben+2}
+
+The image that will always stick in my head is that evoked by the quote from /{The New York Times}/. That "grand experiment" we call the "public domain" is over? When I can make light of it, I think, "Honey, I shrunk the Constitution." But I can rarely make light of it. We had in our Constitution a commitment to free culture. In the case that I fathered, the Supreme Court effectively renounced that commitment. A better lawyer would have made them see differently.
+
+{freeculture18.png 550x720 }http://www.free-culture.cc/
+={Scalia, Antonin}
+
+1~ Chapter Fourteen: Eldred II
+
+!_ The day
+/{Eldred}/ was decided, fate would have it that I was to travel to Washington, D.C. (The day the rehearing petition in /{Eldred}/ was denied - meaning the case was really finally over - fate would have it that I was giving a speech to technologists at Disney World.) This was a particularly long flight to my least favorite city. The drive into the city from Dulles was delayed because of traffic, so I opened up my computer and wrote an op-ed piece.
+
+It was an act of contrition. During the whole of the flight from San Francisco to Washington, I had heard over and over again in my head the same advice from Don Ayer: You need to make them see why it is important. And alternating with that command was the question of Justice Kennedy: "For all these years the act has impeded progress in science and the useful arts. I just don't see any empirical evidence for that." And so, having failed in the argument of constitutional principle, finally, I turned to an argument of politics.
+={Ayer, Don;Kennedy, Anthony}
+
+/{The New York Times}/ published the piece. In it, I proposed a simple fix: Fifty years after a work has been published, the copyright owner would be required to register the work and pay a small fee. If he paid the fee, he got the benefit of the full term of copyright. If he did not, the work passed into the public domain.
+={copyright law:registration requirement of+23}
+
+We called this the Eldred Act, but that was just to give it a name. Eric Eldred was kind enough to let his name be used once again, but as he said early on, it won't get passed unless it has another name.
+={Eldred, Eric;Eldred Act+23}
+
+Or another two names. For depending upon your perspective, this is either the "Public Domain Enhancement Act" or the "Copyright Term Deregulation Act." Either way, the essence of the idea is clear and obvious: Remove copyright where it is doing nothing except blocking access and the spread of knowledge. Leave it for as long as Congress allows for those works where its worth is at least $1. But for everything else, let the content go.
+
+The reaction to this idea was amazingly strong. Steve Forbes endorsed it in an editorial. I received an avalanche of e-mail and letters expressing support. When you focus the issue on lost creativity, people can see the copyright system makes no sense. As a good Republican might say, here government regulation is simply getting in the way of innovation and creativity. And as a good Democrat might say, here the government is blocking access and the spread of knowledge for no good reason. Indeed, there is no real difference between Democrats and Republicans on this issue. Anyone can recognize the stupid harm of the present system.
+={Democratic Party;Republican Party;Forbes, Steve}
+
+Indeed, many recognized the obvious benefit of the registration requirement. For one of the hardest things about the current system for people who want to license content is that there is no obvious place to look for the current copyright owners. Since registration is not required, since marking content is not required, since no formality at all is required, it is often impossibly hard to locate copyright owners to ask permission to use or license their work. This system would lower these costs, by establishing at least one registry where copyright owners could be identified.
+={copyright:no registration of works}
+
+As I described in chapter 10, formalities in copyright law were removed in 1976, when Congress followed the Europeans by abandoning any formal requirement before a copyright is granted.~{ Until the 1908 Berlin Act of the Berne Convention, national copyright legislation sometimes made protection depend upon compliance with formalities such as registration, deposit, and affixation of notice of the author's claim of copyright. However, starting with the 1908 act, every text of the Convention has provided that "the enjoyment and the exercise" of rights guaranteed by the Convention "shall not be subject to any formality." The prohibition against formalities is presently embodied in Article 5(2) of the Paris Text of the Berne Convention. Many countries continue to impose some form of deposit or registration requirement, albeit not as a condition of copyright. French law, for example, requires the deposit of copies of works in national repositories, principally the National Museum. Copies of books published in the United Kingdom must be deposited in the British Library. The German Copyright Act provides for a Registrar of Authors where the author's true name can be filed in the case of anonymous or pseudonymous works. Paul Goldstein, /{International Intellectual Property Law, Cases and Materials}/ (New York: Foundation Press, 2001), 153-54. }~ The Europeans are said to view copyright as a "natural right." Natural rights don't need forms to exist. Traditions, like the Anglo-American tradition that required copyright owners to follow form if their rights were to be protected, did not, the Europeans thought, properly respect the dignity of the author. My right as a creator turns on my creativity, not upon the special favor of the government.
+={copyright law:European}
+
+That's great rhetoric. It sounds wonderfully romantic. But it is absurd copyright policy. It is absurd especially for authors, because a world without formalities harms the creator. The ability to spread "Walt Disney creativity" is destroyed when there is no simple way to know what's protected and what's not.
+
+The fight against formalities achieved its first real victory in Berlin in 1908. International copyright lawyers amended the Berne Convention in 1908, to require copyright terms of life plus fifty years, as well as the abolition of copyright formalities. The formalities were hated because the stories of inadvertent loss were increasingly common. It was as if a Charles Dickens character ran all copyright offices, and the failure to dot an /{i}/ or cross a /{t}/ resulted in the loss of widows' only income.
+={Berne Convention (1908)}
+
+These complaints were real and sensible. And the strictness of the formalities, especially in the United States, was absurd. The law should always have ways of forgiving innocent mistakes. There is no reason copyright law couldn't, as well. Rather than abandoning formalities totally, the response in Berlin should have been to embrace a more equitable system of registration.
+
+Even that would have been resisted, however, because registration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was still expensive. It was also a hassle. The abolishment of formalities promised not only to save the starving widows, but also to lighten an unnecessary regulatory burden imposed upon creators.
+
+In addition to the practical complaint of authors in 1908, there was a moral claim as well. There was no reason that creative property should be a second-class form of property. If a carpenter builds a table, his rights over the table don't depend upon filing a form with the government. He has a property right over the table "naturally," and he can assert that right against anyone who would steal the table, whether or not he has informed the government of his ownership of the table.
+
+This argument is correct, but its implications are misleading. For the argument in favor of formalities does not depend upon creative property being second-class property. The argument in favor of formalities turns upon the special problems that creative property presents. The law of formalities responds to the special physics of creative property, to assure that it can be efficiently and fairly spread.
+
+No one thinks, for example, that land is second-class property just because you have to register a deed with a court if your sale of land is to be effective. And few would think a car is second-class property just because you must register the car with the state and tag it with a license. In both of those cases, everyone sees that there is an important reason to secure registration" both because it makes the markets more efficient and because it better secures the rights of the owner. Without a registration system for land, landowners would perpetually have to guard their property. With registration, they can simply point the police to a deed. Without a registration system for cars, auto theft would be much easier. With a registration system, the thief has a high burden to sell a stolen car. A slight burden is placed on the property owner, but those burdens produce a much better system of protection for property generally.
+
+It is similarly special physics that makes formalities important in copyright law. Unlike a carpenter's table, there's nothing in nature that makes it relatively obvious who might own a particular bit of creative property. A recording of Lyle Lovett's latest album can exist in a billion places without anything necessarily linking it back to a particular owner. And like a car, there's no way to buy and sell creative property with confidence unless there is some simple way to authenticate who is the author and what rights he has. Simple transactions are destroyed in a world without formalities. Complex, expensive, /{lawyer}/ transactions take their place.
+
+This was the understanding of the problem with the Sonny Bono Act that we tried to demonstrate to the Court. This was the part it didn't "get." Because we live in a system without formalities, there is no way easily to build upon or use culture from our past. If copyright terms were, as Justice Story said they would be, "short," then this wouldn't matter much. For fourteen years, under the framers' system, a work would be presumptively controlled. After fourteen years, it would be presumptively uncontrolled.
+={Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998):Supreme Court challenge of;Story, Joseph}
+
+But now that copyrights can be just about a century long, the inability to know what is protected and what is not protected becomes a huge and obvious burden on the creative process. If the only way a library can offer an Internet exhibit about the New Deal is to hire a lawyer to clear the rights to every image and sound, then the copyright system is burdening creativity in a way that has never been seen before /{because there are no formalities}/.
+
+The Eldred Act was designed to respond to exactly this problem. If it is worth $1 to you, then register your work and you can get the longer term. Others will know how to contact you and, therefore, how to get your permission if they want to use your work. And you will get the benefit of an extended copyright term.
+
+If it isn't worth it to you to register to get the benefit of an extended term, then it shouldn't be worth it for the government to defend your monopoly over that work either. The work should pass into the public domain where anyone can copy it, or build archives with it, or create a movie based on it. It should become free if it is not worth $1 to you.
+
+Some worry about the burden on authors. Won't the burden of registering the work mean that the $1 is really misleading? Isn't the hassle worth more than $1? Isn't that the real problem with registration?
+
+It is. The hassle is terrible. The system that exists now is awful. I completely agree that the Copyright Office has done a terrible job (no doubt because they are terribly funded) in enabling simple and cheap registrations. Any real solution to the problem of formalities must address the real problem of /{governments}/ standing at the core of any system of formalities. In this book, I offer such a solution. That solution essentially remakes the Copyright Office. For now, assume it was Amazon that ran the registration system. Assume it was one-click registration. The Eldred Act would propose a simple, one-click registration fifty years after a work was published. Based upon historical data, that system would move up to 98 percent of commercial work, commercial work that no longer had a commercial life, into the public domain within fifty years. What do you think?
+={Copyright Office;public domain:content industry opposition to+15}
+
+!_ When Steve Forbes
+endorsed the idea, some in Washington began to pay attention. Many people contacted me pointing to representatives who might be willing to introduce the Eldred Act. And I had a few who directly suggested that they might be willing to take the first step.
+={Forbes, Steve}
+
+One representative, Zoe Lofgren of California, went so far as to get the bill drafted. The draft solved any problem with international law. It imposed the simplest requirement upon copyright owners possible. In May 2003, it looked as if the bill would be introduced. On May 16, I posted on the Eldred Act blog, "we are close." There was a general reaction in the blog community that something good might happen here.
+={Lofgren, Zoe}
+
+But at this stage, the lobbyists began to intervene. Jack Valenti and the MPAA general counsel came to the congresswoman's office to give the view of the MPAA. Aided by his lawyer, as Valenti told me, Valenti informed the congresswoman that the MPAA would oppose the Eldred Act. The reasons are embarrassingly thin. More importantly, their thinness shows something clear about what this debate is really about.
+={Valenti, Jack:Eldred Act opposed by;film industry:trade association of+2;Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)+2}
+
+The MPAA argued first that Congress had "firmly rejected the central concept in the proposed bill" - that copyrights be renewed. That was true, but irrelevant, as Congress's "firm rejection" had occurred long before the Internet made subsequent uses much more likely. Second, they argued that the proposal would harm poor copyright owners - apparently those who could not afford the $1 fee. Third, they argued that Congress had determined that extending a copyright term would encourage restoration work. Maybe in the case of the small percentage of work covered by copyright law that is still commercially valuable, but again this was irrelevant, as the proposal would not cut off the extended term unless the $1 fee was not paid. Fourth, the MPAA argued that the bill would impose "enormous" costs, since a registration system is not free. True enough, but those costs are certainly less than the costs of clearing the rights for a copyright whose owner is not known. Fifth, they worried about the risks if the copyright to a story underlying a film were to pass into the public domain. But what risk is that? If it is in the public domain, then the film is a valid derivative use.
+={films:in public domain;public domain:films in}
+
+Finally, the MPAA argued that existing law enabled copyright owners to do this if they wanted. But the whole point is that there are thousands of copyright owners who don't even know they have a copyright to give. Whether they are free to give away their copyright or not - a controversial claim in any case - unless they know about a copyright, they're not likely to.
+
+!_ At the beginning
+of this book, I told two stories about the law reacting to changes in technology. In the one, common sense prevailed. In the other, common sense was delayed. The difference between the two stories was the power of the opposition - the power of the side that fought to defend the status quo. In both cases, a new technology threatened old interests. But in only one case did those interest's have the power to protect themselves against this new competitive threat.
+
+I used these two cases as a way to frame the war that this book has been about. For here, too, a new technology is forcing the law to react. And here, too, we should ask, is the law following or resisting common sense? If common sense supports the law, what explains this common sense?
+
+When the issue is piracy, it is right for the law to back the copyright owners. The commercial piracy that I described is wrong and harmful, and the law should work to eliminate it. When the issue is p2p sharing, it is easy to understand why the law backs the owners still: Much of this sharing is wrong, even if much is harmless. When the issue is copyright terms for the Mickey Mouses of the world, it is possible still to understand why the law favors Hollywood: Most people don't recognize the reasons for limiting copyright terms; it is thus still possible to see good faith within the resistance.
+
+But when the copyright owners oppose a proposal such as the Eldred Act, then, finally, there is an example that lays bare the naked self-interest driving this war. This act would free an extraordinary range of content that is otherwise unused. It wouldn't interfere with any copyright owner's desire to exercise continued control over his content. It would simply liberate what Kevin Kelly calls the "Dark Content" that fills archives around the world. So when the warriors oppose a change like this, we should ask one simple question:
+={Eldred Act+3;Kelly, Kevin}
+
+What does this industry really want?
+
+With very little effort, the warriors could protect their content. So the effort to block something like the Eldred Act is not really about protecting /{their}/ content. The effort to block the Eldred Act is an effort to assure that nothing more passes into the public domain. It is another step to assure that the public domain will never compete, that there will be no use of content that is not commercially controlled, and that there will be no commercial use of content that doesn't require /{their}/ permission first.
+
+The opposition to the Eldred Act reveals how extreme the other side is. The most powerful and sexy and well loved of lobbies really has as its aim not the protection of "property" but the rejection of a tradition. Their aim is not simply to protect what is theirs. /{Their aim is to assure that all there is is what is theirs}/.
+
+It is not hard to understand why the warriors take this view. It is not hard to see why it would benefit them if the competition of the public domain tied to the Internet could somehow be quashed. Just as RCA feared the competition of FM, they fear the competition of a public domain connected to a public that now has the means to create with it and to share its own creation.
+={radio:FM spectrum of;FM radio;RCA}
+
+What is hard to understand is why the public takes this view. It is as if the law made airplanes trespassers. The MPAA stands with the Causbys and demands that their remote and useless property rights be respected, so that these remote and forgotten copyright holders might block the progress of others.
+={Causby, Thomas Lee;Causby, Tinie;film industry:trade association of;Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)}
+
+All this seems to follow easily from this untroubled acceptance of the "property" in intellectual property. Common sense supports it, and so long as it does, the assaults will rain down upon the technologies of the Internet. The consequence will be an increasing "permission society." The past can be cultivated only if you can identify the owner and gain permission to build upon his work. The future will be controlled by this dead (and often unfindable) hand of the past.
+
+:B~ CONCLUSION
+
+1~conclusion [Conclusion]-#
+
+!_ There are more
+than 35 million people with the AIDS virus worldwide. Twenty-five million of them live in sub-Saharan Africa. Seventeen million have already died. Seventeen million Africans is proportional percentage-wise to seven million Americans. More importantly, it is seventeen million Africans.
+={Africa, medications for HIV patients in+15;AIDS medications+15;antiretroviral drugs+15;developing countries, foreign patent costs in+15;drugs:pharmaceutical+15;HIV/AIDS therapies+15}
+
+There is no cure for AIDS, but there are drugs to slow its progression. These antiretroviral therapies are still experimental, but they have already had a dramatic effect. In the United States, AIDS patients who regularly take a cocktail of these drugs increase their life expectancy by ten to twenty years. For some, the drugs make the disease almost invisible.
+
+These drugs are expensive. When they were first introduced in the United States, they cost between $10,000 and $15,000 per person per year. Today, some cost $25,000 per year. At these prices, of course, no African nation can afford the drugs for the vast majority of its population: $15,000 is thirty times the per capita gross national product of Zimbabwe. At these prices, the drugs are totally unavailable.~{ Commission on Intellectual Property Rights, "Final Report: Integrating Intellectual Property Rights and Development Policy" (London, 2002), available at link #55. According to a World Health Organization press release issued 9 July 2002, only 230,000 of the 6 million who need drugs in the developing world receive them - and half of them are in Brazuil. }~
+
+These prices are not high because the ingredients of the drugs are expensive. These prices are high because the drugs are protected by patents. The drug companies that produced these life-saving mixes enjoy at least a twenty-year monopoly for their inventions. They use that monopoly power to extract the most they can from the market. That power is in turn used to keep the prices high.
+={patents:on pharmaceuticals+14;pharmaceutical patents+14}
+
+There are many who are skeptical of patents, especially drug patents. I am not. Indeed, of all the areas of research that might be supported by patents, drug research is, in my view, the clearest case where patents are needed. The patent gives the drug company some assurance that if it is successful in inventing a new drug to treat a disease, it will be able to earn back its investment and more. This is socially an extremely valuable incentive. I am the last person who would argue that the law should abolish it, at least without other changes.
+
+But it is one thing to support patents, even drug patents. It is another thing to determine how best to deal with a crisis. And as African leaders began to recognize the devastation that AIDS was bringing, they started looking for ways to import HIV treatments at costs significantly below the market price.
+
+In 1997, South Africa tried one tack. It passed a law to allow the importation of patented medicines that had been produced or sold in another nation's market with the consent of the patent owner. For example, if the drug was sold in India, it could be imported into Africa from India. This is called "parallel importation," and it is generally permitted under international trade law and is specifically permitted within the European Union.~{ See Peter Drahos with John Braithwaite, /{Information Feudalism: Who Owns the Knowledge Economy?}/ (New York: The New Press, 2003), 37. }~
+={international law+11;parallel importation+1;South Africa, Republic of, pharmaceutical imports by+5}
+
+However, the United States government opposed the bill. Indeed, more than opposed. As the International Intellectual Property Association characterized it, "The U.S. government pressured South Africa ... not to permit compulsory licensing or parallel imports."~{ International Intellectual Property Institute (IIPI), /{Patent Protection and Access to HIV/AIDS Pharmaceuticals in Sub-Saharan Africa, a Report Prepared for the World Intellectual Property Organization}/ (Washington, D.C., 2000), 14, available at link #56. For a firsthand account of the struggle over South Africa, see Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources, House Committee on Government Reform, H. Rep., 1st sess., Ser. No. 106-126 (22 July 1999), 150-57 (statement of James Love). }~ Through the Office of the United States Trade Representative, the government asked South Africa to change the law - and to add pressure to that request, in 1998, the USTR listed South Africa for possible trade sanctions. That same year, more than forty pharmaceutical companies began proceedings in the South African courts to challenge the govern-ment's actions. The United States was then joined by other governments from the EU. Their claim, and the claim of the pharmaceutical companies, was that South Africa was violating its obligations under international law by discriminating against a particular kind of patent - pharmaceutical patents. The demand of these governments, with the United States in the lead, was that South Africa respect these patents as it respects any other patent, regardless of any effect on the treatment of AIDS within South Africa.~{ International Intellectual Property Institute (IIPI), /{Patent Protection and Access to HIV/AIDS Pharmaceuticals in Sub-Saharan Africa, a Report Prepared for the World Intellectual Property Organization}/ (Washington, D.C., 2000), 15. }~
+={United States Trade Representative (USTR)}
+
+We should place the intervention by the United States in context. No doubt patents are not the most important reason that Africans don't have access to drugs. Poverty and the total absence of an effective health care infrastructure matter more. But whether patents are the most important reason or not, the price of drugs has an effect on their demand, and patents affect price. And so, whether massive or marginal, there was an effect from our government's intervention to stop the flow of medications into Africa.
+
+By stopping the flow of HIV treatment into Africa, the United States government was not saving drugs for United States citizens. This is not like wheat (if they eat it, we can't); instead, the flow that the United States intervened to stop was, in effect, a flow of knowledge: information about how to take chemicals that exist within Africa, and turn those chemicals into drugs that would save 15 to 30 million lives.
+
+Nor was the intervention by the United States going to protect the profits of United States drug companies - at least, not substantially. It was not as if these countries were in the position to buy the drugs for the prices the drug companies were charging. Again, the Africans are wildly too poor to afford these drugs at the offered prices. Stopping the parallel import of these drugs would not substantially increase the sales by U.S. companies.
+
+Instead, the argument in favor of restricting this flow of information, which was needed to save the lives of millions, was an argument about the sanctity of property.~{ See Sabin Russell, "New Crusade to Lower AIDS Drug Costs: Africa's Needs at Odds with Firms' Profit Motive," /{San Francisco Chronicle,}/ 24 May 1999, A1, available at link #57 ("compulsory licenses and gray markets pose a threat to the entire system of intellectual property protection"); Robert Weissman, "AIDS and Developing Countries: Democratizing Access to Essential Medicines," /{Foreign Policy in Focus}/ 4:23 (August 1999), available at link #58 (describing U.S. policy); John A. Harrelson, "TRIPS, Pharmaceutical Patents, and the HIV/AIDS Crisis: Finding the Proper Balance Between Intellectual Property Rights and Compassion, a Synopsis," /{Widener Law Symposium Journal}/ (Spring 2001): 175. }~ It was because "intellectual property" would be violated that these drugs should not flow into Africa. It was a principle about the importance of "intellectual property" that led these government actors to intervene against the South African response to AIDS.
+
+Now just step back for a moment. There will be a time thirty years from now when our children look back at us and ask, how could we have let this happen? How could we allow a policy to be pursued whose direct cost would be to speed the death of 15 to 30 million Africans, and whose only real benefit would be to uphold the "sanctity" of an idea? What possible justification could there ever be for a policy that results in so many deaths? What exactly is the insanity that would allow so many to die for such an abstraction?
+
+Some blame the drug companies. I don't. They are corporations. Their managers are ordered by law to make money for the corporation. They push a certain patent policy not because of ideals, but because it is the policy that makes them the most money. And it only makes them the most money because of a certain corruption within our political system - a corruption the drug companies are certainly not responsible for.
+={corporations:in pharmaceutical industry+2}
+
+The corruption is our own politicians' failure of integrity. For the drug companies would love - they say, and I believe them - to sell their drugs as cheaply as they can to countries in Africa and elsewhere. There are issues they'd have to resolve to make sure the drugs didn't get back into the United States, but those are mere problems of technology. They could be overcome.
+
+A different problem, however, could not be overcome. This is the fear of the grandstanding politician who would call the presidents of the drug companies before a Senate or House hearing, and ask, "How is it you can sell this HIV drug in Africa for only $1 a pill, but the same drug would cost an American $1,500?" Because there is no "sound bite" answer to that question, its effect would be to induce regulation of prices in America. The drug companies thus avoid this spiral by avoiding the first step. They reinforce the idea that property should be sacred. They adopt a rational strategy in an irrational context, with the unintended consequence that perhaps millions die. And that rational strategy thus becomes framed in terms of this ideal - the sanctity of an idea called "intellectual property."
+={intellectual property rights:of drug patents+3}
+
+So when the common sense of your child confronts you, what will you say? When the common sense of a generation finally revolts against what we have done, how will we justify what we have done? What is the argument?
+
+A sensible patent policy could endorse and strongly support the patent system without having to reach everyone everywhere in exactly the same way. Just as a sensible copyright policy could endorse and strongly support a copyright system without having to regulate the spread of culture perfectly and forever, a sensible patent policy could endorse and strongly support a patent system without having to block the spread of drugs to a country not rich enough to afford market prices in any case. A sensible policy, in other words, could be a balanced policy. For most of our history, both copyright and patent policies were balanced in just this sense.
+
+But we as a culture have lost this sense of balance. We have lost the critical eye that helps us see the difference between truth and extremism. A certain property fundamentalism, having no connection to our tradition, now reigns in this culture - bizarrely, and with consequences more grave to the spread of ideas and culture than almost any other single policy decision that we as a democracy will make.
+
+!_ A simple idea
+blinds us, and under the cover of darkness, much happens that most of us would reject if any of us looked. So uncritically do we accept the idea of property in ideas that we don't even notice how monstrous it is to deny ideas to a people who are dying without them. So uncritically do we accept the idea of property in culture that we don't even question when the control of that property removes our ability, as a people, to develop our culture democratically. Blindness becomes our common sense. And the challenge for anyone who would reclaim the right to cultivate our culture is to find a way to make this common sense open its eyes.
+
+So far, common sense sleeps. There is no revolt. Common sense does not yet see what there could be to revolt about. The extremism that now dominates this debate fits with ideas that seem natural, and that fit is reinforced by the RCAs of our day. They wage a frantic war to fight "piracy," and devastate a culture for creativity. They defend the idea of "creative property," while transforming real creators into modern-day sharecroppers. They are insulted by the idea that rights should be balanced, even though each of the major players in this content war was itself a beneficiary of a more balanced ideal. The hypocrisy reeks. Yet in a city like Washington, hypocrisy is not even noticed. Powerful lobbies, complex issues, and MTV attention spans produce the "perfect storm" for free culture.
+
+!_ In August 2003,
+a fight broke out in the United States about a decision by the World Intellectual Property Organization to cancel a meeting.~{ Jonathan Krim, "The Quiet War over Open-Source," /{Washington Post,}/ 21 August 2003, E1, available at link #59; William New, "Global Group's Shift on 'Open Source' Meeting Spurs Stir," National Journal's Technology Daily, 19 August 2003, available at link #60; William New, "U.S. Official Opposes 'Open Source' Talks at WIPO," /{National Journal's Technology Daily,}/ 19 August 2003, available at link #61. }~ At the request of a wide range of interests, WIPO had decided to hold a meeting to discuss "open and collaborative projects to create public goods." These are projects that have been successful in producing public goods without relying exclusively upon a proprietary use of intellectual property. Examples include the Internet and the World Wide Web, both of which were developed on the basis of protocols in the public domain. It included an emerging trend to support open academic journals, including the Public Library of Science project that I describe in the Afterword. It included a project to develop single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), which are thought to have great significance in biomedical research. (That nonprofit project comprised a consortium of the Wellcome Trust and pharmaceutical and technological companies, including Amersham Biosciences, AstraZeneca, Aventis, Bayer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Hoffmann-La Roche, Glaxo- SmithKline, IBM, Motorola, Novartis, Pfizer, and Searle.) It included the Global Positioning System, which Ronald Reagan set free in the early 1980s. And it included "open source and free software."
+={academic journals;biomedical research;intellectual property rights:international organization on issues of+4;Internet:development of;PLoS (Public Library of Science);Public Library of Science (PLoS);public domain:public projects in;single nucleotied polymorphisms (SNPs);Wellcome Trust;World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)+4;World Wide Web;Global Positioning System;Reagan, Ronald}
+
+The aim of the meeting was to consider this wide range of projects from one common perspective: that none of these projects relied upon intellectual property extremism. Instead, in all of them, intellectual property was balanced by agreements to keep access open or to impose limitations on the way in which proprietary claims might be used.
+
+From the perspective of this book, then, the conference was ideal.~{ I should disclose that I was one of the people who asked WIPO for the meeting. }~ The projects within its scope included both commercial and noncommercial work. They primarily involved science, but from many perspectives. And WIPO was an ideal venue for this discussion, since WIPO is the preeminent international body dealing with intellectual property issues.
+={Lessig, Lawrence:in international debate on intellectual property+4}
+
+Indeed, I was once publicly scolded for not recognizing this fact about WIPO. In February 2003, I delivered a keynote address to a preparatory conference for the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). At a press conference before the address, I was asked what I would say. I responded that I would be talking a little about the importance of balance in intellectual property for the development of an information society. The moderator for the event then promptly interrupted to inform me and the assembled reporters that no question about intellectual property would be discussed by WSIS, since those questions were the exclusive domain of WIPO. In the talk that I had prepared, I had actually made the issue of intellectual property relatively minor. But after this astonishing statement, I made intellectual property the sole focus of my talk. There was no way to talk about an "Information Society" unless one also talked about the range of information and culture that would be free. My talk did not make my immoderate moderator very happy. And she was no doubt correct that the scope of intellectual property protections was ordinarily the stuff of WIPO. But in my view, there couldn't be too much of a conversation about how much intellectual property is needed, since in my view, the very idea of balance in intellectual property had been lost.
+={World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)+1}
+
+So whether or not WSIS can discuss balance in intellectual property, I had thought it was taken for granted that WIPO could and should. And thus the meeting about "open and collaborative projects to create public goods" seemed perfectly appropriate within the WIPO agenda.
+
+But there is one project within that list that is highly controversial, at least among lobbyists. That project is "open source and free software." Microsoft in particular is wary of discussion of the subject. From its perspective, a conference to discuss open source and free software would be like a conference to discuss Apple's operating system. Both open source and free software compete with Microsoft's software. And internationally, many governments have begun to explore requirements that they use open source or free software, rather than "proprietary software," for their own internal uses.
+={free software/open-source software (FS/OSS)+7;Apple Corporation;Microsoft:on free software+4}
+
+I don't mean to enter that debate here. It is important only to make clear that the distinction is not between commercial and noncommercial software. There are many important companies that depend fundamentally upon open source and free software, IBM being the most prominent. IBM is increasingly shifting its focus to the GNU/Linux operating system, the most famous bit of "free software" - and IBM is emphatically a commercial entity. Thus, to support "open source and free software" is not to oppose commercial entities. It is, instead, to support a mode of software development that is different from Microsoft's.~{ Microsoft's position about free and open source software is more sophisticated. As it has repeatedly asserted, it has no problem with "open source" software or software in the public domain. Microsoft's principal opposition is to "free software" licensed under a "copyleft" license, meaning a license that requires the licensee to adopt the same terms on any derivative work. See Bradford L. Smith, "The Future of Software: Enabling the Marketplace to Decide," /{Government Policy Toward Open Source Software}/ (Washington, D.C.: AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 2002), 69, available at link #62. See also Craig Mundie, Microsoft senior vice president, /{The Commercial Software Model,}/ discussion at New York University Stern School of Business (3 May 2001), available at link #63. }~
+={GNU/Linux operating system;Linux operating system;IBM}
+
+More important for our purposes, to support "open source and free software" is not to oppose copyright. "Open source and free software" is not software in the public domain. Instead, like Microsoft's software, the copyright owners of free and open source software insist quite strongly that the terms of their software license be respected by adopters of free and open source software. The terms of that license are no doubt different from the terms of a proprietary software license. Free software licensed under the General Public License (GPL), for example, requires that the source code for the software be made available by anyone who modifies and redistributes the software. But that requirement is effective only if copyright governs software. If copyright did not govern software, then free software could not impose the same kind of requirements on its adopters. It thus depends upon copyright law just as Microsoft does.
+={General Public License (GPL);GPL (General Public License)}
+
+It is therefore understandable that as a proprietary software developer, Microsoft would oppose this WIPO meeting, and understandable that it would use its lobbyists to get the United States government to oppose it, as well. And indeed, that is just what was reported to have happened. According to Jonathan Krim of the /{Washington Post}/, Microsoft's lobbyists succeeded in getting the United States government to veto the meeting.~{ Krim, "The Quiet War over Open-Source," available at link #64. }~ And without U.S. backing, the meeting was canceled.
+={intellectual property rights:international organization on issues of+11;World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)+11;Krim, Jonathan+2;Microsoft:WIPO meeting opposed by}
+
+I don't blame Microsoft for doing what it can to advance its own interests, consistent with the law. And lobbying governments is plainly consistent with the law. There was nothing surprising about its lobbying here, and nothing terribly surprising about the most powerful software producer in the United States having succeeded in its lobbying efforts.
+
+What was surprising was the United States government's reason for opposing the meeting. Again, as reported by Krim, Lois Boland, acting director of international relations for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, explained that "open-source software runs counter to the mission of WIPO, which is to promote intellectual-property rights." She is quoted as saying, "To hold a meeting which has as its purpose to disclaim or waive such rights seems to us to be contrary to the goals of WIPO."
+={Boland, Lois+10;Patent and Trademark Office, U.S.+15;intellectual property rights:U.S. Patent Office on private control of+15}
+
+% PTO range not properly identified, recheck
+
+These statements are astonishing on a number of levels.
+
+First, they are just flat wrong. As I described, most open source and free software relies fundamentally upon the intellectual property right called "copyright." Without it, restrictions imposed by those licenses wouldn't work. Thus, to say it "runs counter" to the mission of promoting intellectual property rights reveals an extraordinary gap in under- standing - the sort of mistake that is excusable in a first-year law student, but an embarrassment from a high government official dealing with intellectual property issues.
+
+Second, who ever said that WIPO's exclusive aim was to "promote" intellectual property maximally? As I had been scolded at the preparatory conference of WSIS, WIPO is to consider not only how best to protect intellectual property, but also what the best balance of intellectual property is. As every economist and lawyer knows, the hard question in intellectual property law is to find that balance. But that there should be limits is, I had thought, uncontested. One wants to ask Ms. Boland, are generic drugs (drugs based on drugs whose patent has expired) contrary to the WIPO mission? Does the public domain weaken intellectual property? Would it have been better if the protocols of the Internet had been patented?
+={World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS);drugs:pharmaceutical;generic drugs;patents:on pharmaceuticals}
+
+Third, even if one believed that the purpose of WIPO was to maximize intellectual property rights, in our tradition, intellectual property rights are held by individuals and corporations. They get to decide what to do with those rights because, again, they are /{their}/ rights. If they want to "waive" or "disclaim" their rights, that is, within our tradition, totally appropriate. When Bill Gates gives away more than $20 billion to do good in the world, that is not inconsistent with the objectives of the property system. That is, on the contrary, just what a property system is supposed to be about: giving individuals the right to decide what to do with /{their}/ property.
+={Gates, Bill}
+
+When Ms. Boland says that there is something wrong with a meeting "which has as its purpose to disclaim or waive such rights," she's saying that WIPO has an interest in interfering with the choices of the individuals who own intellectual property rights. That somehow, WIPO's objective should be to stop an individual from "waiving" or "dis-claiming" an intellectual property right. That the interest of WIPO is not just that intellectual property rights be maximized, but that they also should be exercised in the most extreme and restrictive way possible.
+
+There is a history of just such a property system that is well known in the Anglo-American tradition. It is called "feudalism." Under feudalism, not only was property held by a relatively small number of individuals and entities. And not only were the rights that ran with that property powerful and extensive. But the feudal system had a strong interest in assuring that property holders within that system not weaken feudalism by liberating people or property within their control to the free market. Feudalism depended upon maximum control and concentration. It fought any freedom that might interfere with that control.
+={feudal system+1;property rights:feudal system of+1}
+
+As Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite relate, this is precisely the choice we are now making about intellectual property.~{ See Drahos with Braithwaite, /{Information Feudalism,}/ 210-20. }~ We will have an information society. That much is certain. Our only choice now is whether that information society will be /{free}/ or /{feudal}/. The trend is toward the feudal.
+={Braithwait, John;Drahos, Peter}
+
+When this battle broke, I blogged it. A spirited debate within the comment section ensued. Ms. Boland had a number of supporters who tried to show why her comments made sense. But there was one comment that was particularly depressing for me. An anonymous poster wrote,
+={Lessig, Lawrence:in international debate on intellectual property+5}
+
+_1 George, you misunderstand Lessig: He's only talking about the world as it should be ("the goal of WIPO, and the goal of any government, should be to promote the right balance of intellectual- property rights, not simply to promote intellectual property rights"), not as it is. If we were talking about the world as it is, then of course Boland didn't say anything wrong. But in the world as Lessig would have it, then of course she did. Always pay attention to the distinction between Lessig's world and ours."
+
+I missed the irony the first time I read it. I read it quickly and thought the poster was supporting the idea that seeking balance was what our government should be doing. (Of course, my criticism of Ms. Boland was not about whether she was seeking balance or not; my criticism was that her comments betrayed a first-year law student's mistake. I have no illusion about the extremism of our government, whether Republican or Democrat. My only illusion apparently is about whether our government should speak the truth or not.)
+
+Obviously, however, the poster was not supporting that idea. Instead, the poster was ridiculing the very idea that in the real world, the "goal" of a government should be "to promote the right balance" of intellectual property. That was obviously silly to him. And it obviously betrayed, he believed, my own silly utopianism. "Typical for an academic," the poster might well have continued.
+
+I understand criticism of academic utopianism. I think utopianism is silly, too, and I'd be the first to poke fun at the absurdly unrealistic ideals of academics throughout history (and not just in our own country's history).
+
+But when it has become silly to suppose that the role of our government should be to "seek balance," then count me with the silly, for that means that this has become quite serious indeed. If it should be obvious to everyone that the government does not seek balance, that the government is simply the tool of the most powerful lobbyists, that the idea of holding the government to a different standard is absurd, that the idea of demanding of the government that it speak truth and not lies is just naïve, then who have we, the most powerful democracy in the world, become?
+
+It might be crazy to expect a high government official to speak the truth. It might be crazy to believe that government policy will be something more than the handmaiden of the most powerful interests. It might be crazy to argue that we should preserve a tradition that has been part of our tradition for most of our history - free culture.
+
+If this is crazy, then let there be more crazies. Soon.
+
+!_ There are moments
+of hope in this struggle. And moments that surprise. When the FCC was considering relaxing ownership rules, which would thereby further increase the concentration in media ownership, an extraordinary bipartisan coalition formed to fight this change. For perhaps the first time in history, interests as diverse as the NRA, the ACLU, Moveon.org, William Safire, Ted Turner, and CodePink Women for Peace organized to oppose this change in FCC policy. An astonishing 700,000 letters were sent to the FCC, demanding more hearings and a different result.
+={CodePink Women for Peace;FCC:media ownership regulated by+1;media:ownership concentration in+6;Safire, William;Turner, Ted}
+
+This activism did not stop the FCC, but soon after, a broad coalition in the Senate voted to reverse the FCC decision. The hostile hearings leading up to that vote revealed just how powerful this movement had become. There was no substantial support for the FCC's decision, and there was broad and sustained support for fighting further concentration in the media.
+={Senate, U.S.:FCC media ownership rules reversed by}
+
+But even this movement misses an important piece of the puzzle. Largeness as such is not bad. Freedom is not threatened just because some become very rich, or because there are only a handful of big players. The poor quality of Big Macs or Quarter Pounders does not mean that you can't get a good hamburger from somewhere else.
+
+The danger in media concentration comes not from the concentration, but instead from the feudalism that this concentration, tied to the change in copyright, produces. It is not just that there are a few powerful companies that control an ever expanding slice of the media. It is that this concentration can call upon an equally bloated range of rights - property rights of a historically extreme form - that makes their bigness bad.
+
+It is therefore significant that so many would rally to demand competition and increased diversity. Still, if the rally is understood as being about bigness alone, it is not terribly surprising. We Americans have a long history of fighting "big," wisely or not. That we could be motivated to fight "big" again is not something new.
+
+It would be something new, and something very important, if an equal number could be rallied to fight the increasing extremism built within the idea of "intellectual property." Not because balance is alien to our tradition; indeed, as I've argued, balance is our tradition. But because the muscle to think critically about the scope of anything called "property" is not well exercised within this tradition anymore.
+
+If we were Achilles, this would be our heel. This would be the place of our tragedy.
+
+!_ As I write
+these final words, the news is filled with stories about the RIAA lawsuits against almost three hundred individuals.~{ John Borland, "RIAA Sues 261 File Swappers," CNET News.com, 8 September 2003, available at link #65; Paul R. La Monica, "Music Industry Sues Swappers," CNN/Money, 8 September 2003, available at link #66; Soni Sangha and Phyllis Furman with Robert Gearty, "Sued for a Song, N.Y.C. 12-Yr-Old Among 261 Cited as Sharers," /{New York Daily News,}/ 9 September 2003, 3; Frank Ahrens, "RIAA's Lawsuits Meet Surprised Targets; Single Mother in Calif., 12-Year-Old Girl in N.Y. Among Defendants," /{Washington Post,}/ 10 September 2003, E1; Katie Dean, "Schoolgirl Settles with RIAA," /{Wired News,}/ 10 September 2003, available at link #67. }~ Eminem has just been sued for "sampling" someone else's music.~{ Jon Wiederhorn, "Eminem Gets Sued ... by a Little Old Lady," mtv.com, 17 September 2003, available at link #68. }~ The story about Bob Dylan "stealing" from a Japanese author has just finished making the rounds.~{ Kenji Hall, Associated Press, "Japanese Book May Be Inspiration for Dylan Songs," Kansascity.com, 9 July 2003, available at link #69. }~ An insider from Hollywood - who insists he must remain anonymous - reports "an amazing conversation with these studio guys. They've got extraordinary [old] content that they'd love to use but can't because they can't begin to clear the rights. They've got scores of kids who could do amazing things with the content, but it would take scores of lawyers to clean it first." Congressmen are talking about deputizing computer viruses to bring down computers thought to violate the law. Universities are threatening expulsion for kids who use a computer to share content.
+={Dylan, Bob;Eminem;university computer networks, p2p sharing on;copyright infringement lawsuits:individual defendants intimidated by|in recording industry;recording industry:copyright infringement lawsuits of;Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA):copyright infringement lawsuits filed by}
+
+Yet on the other side of the Atlantic, the BBC has just announced that it will build a "Creative Archive," from which British citizens can download BBC content, and rip, mix, and burn it.~{ "BBC Plans to Open Up Its Archive to the Public," BBC press release, 24 August 2003, available at link #70. }~ And in Brazil, the culture minister, Gilberto Gil, himself a folk hero of Brazilian music, has joined with Creative Commons to release content and free licenses in that Latin American country.~{ "Creative Commons and Brazil," Creative Commons Weblog, 6 August 2003, available at link #71. }~
+={BBC;Brazil, free culture in;Creative Commons;Gil, Gilberto;United Kingdom:public creative archive in}
+
+I've told a dark story. The truth is more mixed. A technology has given us a new freedom. Slowly, some begin to understand that this freedom need not mean anarchy. We can carry a free culture into the twenty-first century, without artists losing and without the potential of digital technology being destroyed. It will take some thought, and more importantly, it will take some will to transform the RCAs of our day into the Causbys.
+
+Common sense must revolt. It must act to free culture. Soon, if this potential is ever to be realized.
+
+:B~ AFTERWORD
+
+1~intro_afterword [Intro]-#
+
+!_ At least some
+who have read this far will agree with me that something must be done to change where we are heading. The balance of this book maps what might be done.
+={copyright:voluntary reform efforts on+3}
+
+I divide this map into two parts: that which anyone can do now, and that which requires the help of lawmakers. If there is one lesson that we can draw from the history of remaking common sense, it is that it requires remaking how many people think about the very same issue.
+
+That means this movement must begin in the streets. It must recruit a significant number of parents, teachers, librarians, creators, authors, musicians, filmmakers, scientists - all to tell this story in their own words, and to tell their neighbors why this battle is so important.
+
+Once this movement has its effect in the streets, it has some hope of having an effect in Washington. We are still a democracy. What people think matters. Not as much as it should, at least when an RCA stands opposed, but still, it matters. And thus, in the second part below, I sketch changes that Congress could make to better secure a free culture.
+={RCA}
+
+1~us US, NOW
+={copyright:voluntary reform efforts on+45}
+
+!_ Common sense
+is with the copyright warriors because the debate so far has been framed at the extremes - as a grand either/or: either property or anarchy, either total control or artists won't be paid. If that really is the choice, then the warriors should win.
+
+The mistake here is the error of the excluded middle. There are extremes in this debate, but the extremes are not all that there is. There are those who believe in maximal copyright - "All Rights Reserved" - and those who reject copyright - "No Rights Reserved." The "All Rights Reserved" sorts believe that you should ask permission before you "use" a copyrighted work in any way. The "No Rights Reserved" sorts believe you should be able to do with content as you wish, regardless of whether you have permission or not.
+
+When the Internet was first born, its initial architecture effectively tilted in the "no rights reserved" direction. Content could be copied perfectly and cheaply; rights could not easily be controlled. Thus, regardless of anyone's desire, the effective regime of copyright under the original design of the Internet was "no rights reserved." Content was "taken" regardless of the rights. Any rights were effectively unprotected.
+={Internet:development of+1|initial free character of+1}
+
+This initial character produced a reaction (opposite, but not quite equal) by copyright owners. That reaction has been the topic of this book. Through legislation, litigation, and changes to the network's design, copyright holders have been able to change the essential character of the environment of the original Internet. If the original architecture made the effective default "no rights reserved," the future architecture will make the effective default "all rights reserved." The architecture and law that surround the Internet's design will increasingly produce an environment where all use of content requires permission. The "cut and paste" world that defines the Internet today will become a "get permission to cut and paste" world that is a creator's nightmare.
+
+What's needed is a way to say something in the middle - neither "all rights reserved" nor "no rights reserved" but "some rights reserved" - and thus a way to respect copyrights but enable creators to free content as they see fit. In other words, we need a way to restore a set of freedoms that we could just take for granted before.
+
+2~ Rebuilding Freedoms Previously Presumed: Examples
+={free culture:restoration efforts on previous aspects of+22}
+
+If you step back from the battle I've been describing here, you will recognize this problem from other contexts. Think about privacy. Before the Internet, most of us didn't have to worry much about data about our lives that we broadcast to the world. If you walked into a bookstore and browsed through some of the works of Karl Marx, you didn't need to worry about explaining your browsing habits to your neighbors or boss. The "privacy" of your browsing habits was assured.
+={browsing+4;privacy rights+5}
+
+What made it assured?
+
+Well, if we think in terms of the modalities I described in chapter 10, your privacy was assured because of an inefficient architecture for gathering data and hence a market constraint (cost) on anyone who wanted to gather that data. If you were a suspected spy for North Korea, working for the CIA, no doubt your privacy would not be assured. But that's because the CIA would (we hope) find it valuable enough to spend the thousands required to track you. But for most of us (again, we can hope), spying doesn't pay. The highly inefficient architecture of real space means we all enjoy a fairly robust amount of privacy. That privacy is guaranteed to us by friction. Not by law (there is no law protecting "privacy" in public places), and in many places, not by norms (snooping and gossip are just fun), but instead, by the costs that friction imposes on anyone who would want to spy.
+
+Enter the Internet, where the cost of tracking browsing in particular has become quite tiny. If you're a customer at Amazon, then as you browse the pages, Amazon collects the data about what you've looked at. You know this because at the side of the page, there's a list of "recently viewed" pages. Now, because of the architecture of the Net and the function of cookies on the Net, it is easier to collect the data than not. The friction has disappeared, and hence any "privacy" protected by the friction disappears, too.
+={Amazon+1;cookies, Internet;Internet:privacy protection on+2}
+
+Amazon, of course, is not the problem. But we might begin to worry about libraries. If you're one of those crazy lefties who thinks that people should have the "right" to browse in a library without the government knowing which books you look at (I'm one of those lefties, too), then this change in the technology of monitoring might concern you. If it becomes simple to gather and sort who does what in electronic spaces, then the friction-induced privacy of yesterday disappears.
+={libraries:privacy rights in use of}
+
+It is this reality that explains the push of many to define "privacy" on the Internet. It is the recognition that technology can remove what friction before gave us that leads many to push for laws to do what friction did.~{ See, for example, Marc Rotenberg, "Fair Information Practices and the Architecture of Privacy (What Larry Doesn't Get)," /{Stanford Technology Law Review}/ 1 (2001): par. 6-18, available at link #72 (describing examples in which technology defines privacy policy). See also Jeffrey Rosen, /{The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age}/ (New York: Random House, 2004) (mapping tradeoffs between technology and privacy). }~ And whether you're in favor of those laws or not, it is the pattern that is important here. We must take affirmative steps to secure a kind of freedom that was passively provided before. A change in technology now forces those who believe in privacy to affirmatively act where, before, privacy was given by default.
+
+A similar story could be told about the birth of the free software movement. When computers with software were first made available commercially, the software - both the source code and the binaries - was free. You couldn't run a program written for a Data General machine on an IBM machine, so Data General and IBM didn't care much about controlling their software.
+={Data General;IBM;free software/open-source software (FS/OSS)+7}
+
+That was the world Richard Stallman was born into, and while he was a researcher at MIT, he grew to love the community that developed when one was free to explore and tinker with the software that ran on machines. Being a smart sort himself, and a talented programmer, Stallman grew to depend upon the freedom to add to or modify other people's work.
+={Stallman, Richard+6}
+
+In an academic setting, at least, that's not a terribly radical idea. In a math department, anyone would be free to tinker with a proof that someone offered. If you thought you had a better way to prove a theorem, you could take what someone else did and change it. In a classics department, if you believed a colleague's translation of a recently discovered text was flawed, you were free to improve it. Thus, to Stallman, it seemed obvious that you should be free to tinker with and improve the code that ran a machine. This, too, was knowledge. Why shouldn't it be open for criticism like anything else?
+
+No one answered that question. Instead, the architecture of revenue for computing changed. As it became possible to import programs from one system to another, it became economically attractive (at least in the view of some) to hide the code of your program. So, too, as companies started selling peripherals for mainframe systems. If I could just take your printer driver and copy it, then that would make it easier for me to sell a printer to the market than it was for you.
+={proprietary code+1}
+
+Thus, the practice of proprietary code began to spread, and by the early 1980s, Stallman found himself surrounded by proprietary code. The world of free software had been erased by a change in the economics of computing. And as he believed, if he did nothing about it, then the freedom to change and share software would be fundamentally weakened.
+
+Therefore, in 1984, Stallman began a project to build a free operating system, so that at least a strain of free software would survive. That was the birth of the GNU project, into which Linus Torvalds's "Linux" kernel was added to produce the GNU/Linux operating system.
+={Torvalds, Linus;GNU/Linux operating system;Linux operating system}
+
+Stallman's technique was to use copyright law to build a world of software that must be kept free. Software licensed under the Free Software Foundation's GPL cannot be modified and distributed unless the source code for that software is made available as well. Thus, anyone building upon GPL'd software would have to make their buildings free as well. This would assure, Stallman believed, that an ecology of code would develop that remained free for others to build upon. His fundamental goal was freedom; innovative creative code was a byproduct.
+={Free Software Foundation;General Public License (GPL);GPL (General Public License)}
+
+Stallman was thus doing for software what privacy advocates now do for privacy. He was seeking a way to rebuild a kind of freedom that was taken for granted before. Through the affirmative use of licenses that bind copyrighted code, Stallman was affirmatively reclaiming a space where free software would survive. He was actively protecting what before had been passively guaranteed.
+
+Finally, consider a very recent example that more directly resonates with the story of this book. This is the shift in the way academic and scientific journals are produced.
+={academic journals+7;scientific journals+7}
+
+As digital technologies develop, it is becoming obvious to many that printing thousands of copies of journals every month and sending them to libraries is perhaps not the most efficient way to distribute knowledge. Instead, journals are increasingly becoming electronic, and libraries and their users are given access to these electronic journals through password-protected sites. Something similar to this has been happening in law for almost thirty years: Lexis and Westlaw have had electronic versions of case reports available to subscribers to their service. Although a Supreme Court opinion is not copyrighted, and anyone is free to go to a library and read it, Lexis and Westlaw are also free to charge users for the privilege of gaining access to that Supreme Court opinion through their respective services.
+={Lexis and Westlaw+1;law:databases of case reports in+1;libraries:journals in;Supreme Court, U.S.:access to opinions of}
+
+There's nothing wrong in general with this, and indeed, the ability to charge for access to even public domain materials is a good incentive for people to develop new and innovative ways to spread knowledge. The law has agreed, which is why Lexis and Westlaw have been allowed to flourish. And if there's nothing wrong with selling the public domain, then there could be nothing wrong, in principle, with selling access to material that is not in the public domain.
+={public domain:access fees for material in|license system for rebuilding of+22}
+
+But what if the only way to get access to social and scientific data was through proprietary services? What if no one had the ability to browse this data except by paying for a subscription?
+
+As many are beginning to notice, this is increasingly the reality with scientific journals. When these journals were distributed in paper form, libraries could make the journals available to anyone who had access to the library. Thus, patients with cancer could become cancer experts because the library gave them access. Or patients trying to understand the risks of a certain treatment could research those risks by reading all available articles about that treatment. This freedom was therefore a function of the institution of libraries (norms) and the technology of paper journals (architecture) - namely, that it was very hard to control access to a paper journal.
+={libraries:journals in+2}
+
+As journals become electronic, however, the publishers are demanding that libraries not give the general public access to the journals. This means that the freedoms provided by print journals in public libraries begin to disappear. Thus, as with privacy and with software, a changing technology and market shrink a freedom taken for granted before.
+
+This shrinking freedom has led many to take affirmative steps to restore the freedom that has been lost. The Public Library of Science (PLoS), for example, is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making scientific research available to anyone with a Web connection. Authors of scientific work submit that work to the Public Library of Science. That work is then subject to peer review. If accepted, the work is then deposited in a public, electronic archive and made permanently available for free. PLoS also sells a print version of its work, but the copyright for the print journal does not inhibit the right of anyone to redistribute the work for free.
+={PLoS (Public Library of Science);Public Library of Science (PLoS)}
+
+This is one of many such efforts to restore a freedom taken for granted before, but now threatened by changing technology and markets. There's no doubt that this alternative competes with the traditional publishers and their efforts to make money from the exclusive distribution of content. But competition in our tradition is presumptively a good - especially when it helps spread knowledge and science.
+
+2~ Rebuilding Free Culture: One Idea
+={free culture:Creative Commons license for recreation of+16;copyright:Creative Commons licenses for material in+16;Creative Commons+16}
+
+The same strategy could be applied to culture, as a response to the increasing control effected through law and technology.
+
+Enter the Creative Commons. The Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation established in Massachusetts, but with its home at Stanford University. Its aim is to build a layer of /{reasonable}/ copyright on top of the extremes that now reign. It does this by making it easy for people to build upon other people's work, by making it simple for creators to express the freedom for others to take and build upon their work. Simple tags, tied to human-readable descriptions, tied to bullet-proof licenses, make this possible.
+={Stanford University}
+
+/{Simple}/ - which means without a middleman, or without a lawyer. By developing a free set of licenses that people can attach to their content, Creative Commons aims to mark a range of content that can easily, and reliably, be built upon. These tags are then linked to machine-readable versions of the license that enable computers automatically to identify content that can easily be shared. These three expressions together - a legal license, a human-readable description, and machine-readable tags - constitute a Creative Commons license. A Creative Commons license constitutes a grant of freedom to anyone who accesses the license, and more importantly, an expression of the ideal that the person associated with the license believes in something different than the "All" or "No" extremes. Content is marked with the CC mark, which does not mean that copyright is waived, but that certain freedoms are given.
+
+These freedoms are beyond the freedoms promised by fair use. Their precise contours depend upon the choices the creator makes. The creator can choose a license that permits any use, so long as attribution is given. She can choose a license that permits only noncommercial use. She can choose a license that permits any use so long as the same freedoms are given to other uses ("share and share alike"). Or any use so long as no derivative use is made. Or any use at all within developing nations. Or any sampling use, so long as full copies are not made. Or lastly, any educational use.
+={copyright law:fair use and+1;fair use:creative Commons license vs.+1}
+
+These choices thus establish a range of freedoms beyond the default of copyright law. They also enable freedoms that go beyond traditional fair use. And most importantly, they express these freedoms in a way that subsequent users can use and rely upon without the need to hire a lawyer. Creative Commons thus aims to build a layer of content, governed by a layer of reasonable copyright law, that others can build upon. Voluntary choice of individuals and creators will make this content available. And that content will in turn enable us to rebuild a public domain.
+
+This is just one project among many within the Creative Commons. And of course, Creative Commons is not the only organization pursuing such freedoms. But the point that distinguishes the Creative Commons from many is that we are not interested only in talking about a public domain or in getting legislators to help build a public domain. Our aim is to build a movement of consumers and producers of content ("content conducers," as attorney Mia Garlick calls them) who help build the public domain and, by their work, demonstrate the importance of the public domain to other creativity.
+={Garlick, Mia}
+
+The aim is not to fight the "All Rights Reserved" sorts. The aim is to complement them. The problems that the law creates for us as a culture are produced by insane and unintended consequences of laws written centuries ago, applied to a technology that only Jefferson could have imagined. The rules may well have made sense against a background of technologies from centuries ago, but they do not make sense against the background of digital technologies. New rules - with different freedoms, expressed in ways so that humans without lawyers can use them - are needed. Creative Commons gives people a way effectively to begin to build those rules.
+={Jefferson, Thomas}
+
+Why would creators participate in giving up total control? Some participate to better spread their content. Cory Doctorow, for example, is a science fiction author. His first novel, /{Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom}/, was released on- line and for free, under a Creative Commons license, on the same day that it went on sale in bookstores.
+={Doctorow, Cory;Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (Doctorow)}
+
+Why would a publisher ever agree to this? I suspect his publisher reasoned like this: There are two groups of people out there: (1) those who will buy Cory's book whether or not it's on the Internet, and (2) those who may never hear of Cory's book, if it isn't made available for free on the Internet. Some part of (1) will download Cory's book instead of buying it. Call them bad-(1)s. Some part of (2) will download Cory's book, like it, and then decide to buy it. Call them (2)-goods. If there are more (2)-goods than bad-(1)s, the strategy of releasing Cory's book free on-line will probably /{increase}/ sales of Cory's book.
+={books:free on-line releases of+2;Internet:books on+2}
+
+Indeed, the experience of his publisher clearly supports that conclusion. The book's first printing was exhausted months before the publisher had expected. This first novel of a science fiction author was a total success.
+
+The idea that free content might increase the value of nonfree content was confirmed by the experience of another author. Peter Wayner, who wrote a book about the free software movement titled /{Free for All}/, made an electronic version of his book free on-line under a Creative Commons license after the book went out of print. He then monitored used book store prices for the book. As predicted, as the number of downloads increased, the used book price for his book increased, as well.
+={Wayner, Peter;Free for All (Wayner)}
+
+These are examples of using the Commons to better spread proprietary content. I believe that is a wonderful and common use of the Commons. There are others who use Creative Commons licenses for other reasons. Many who use the "sampling license" do so because anything else would be hypocritical. The sampling license says that others are free, for commercial or noncommercial purposes, to sample content from the licensed work; they are just not free to make full copies of the licensed work available to others. This is consistent with their own art - they, too, sample from others. Because the /{legal}/ costs of sampling are so high (Walter Leaphart, manager of the rap group Public Enemy, which was born sampling the music of others, has stated that he does not "allow" Public Enemy to sample anymore, because the legal costs are so high~{ /{Willful Infringement: A Report from the Front Lines of the Real Culture Wars}/ (2003), produced by Jed Horovitz, directed by Greg Hittelman, a Fiat Lucre production, available at link #72. }~), these artists release into the creative environment content that others can build upon, so that their form of creativity might grow.
+={Leaphart, Walter;Public Enemy}
+
+Finally, there are many who mark their content with a Creative Commons license just because they want to express to others the importance of balance in this debate. If you just go along with the system as it is, you are effectively saying you believe in the "All Rights Reserved" model. Good for you, but many do not. Many believe that however appropriate that rule is for Hollywood and freaks, it is not an appropriate description of how most creators view the rights associated with their content. The Creative Commons license expresses this notion of "Some Rights Reserved," and gives many the chance to say it to others.
+
+In the first six months of the Creative Commons experiment, over 1 million objects were licensed with these free-culture licenses. The next step is partnerships with middleware content providers to help them build into their technologies simple ways for users to mark their content with Creative Commons freedoms. Then the next step is to watch and celebrate creators who build content based upon content set free.
+
+These are first steps to rebuilding a public domain. They are not mere arguments; they are action. Building a public domain is the first step to showing people how important that domain is to creativity and innovation. Creative Commons relies upon voluntary steps to achieve this rebuilding. They will lead to a world in which more than voluntary steps are possible.
+
+Creative Commons is just one example of voluntary efforts by individuals and creators to change the mix of rights that now govern the creative field. The project does not compete with copyright; it complements it. Its aim is not to defeat the rights of authors, but to make it easier for authors and creators to exercise their rights more flexibly and cheaply. That difference, we believe, will enable creativity to spread more easily.
+
+1~them THEM, SOON
+={copyright law:government reforms proposed on+102}
+
+!_ We will
+not reclaim a free culture by individual action alone. It will also take important reforms of laws. We have a long way to go before the politicians will listen to these ideas and implement these reforms. But that also means that we have time to build awareness around the changes that we need.
+
+In this chapter, I outline five kinds of changes: four that are general, and one that's specific to the most heated battle of the day, music. Each is a step, not an end. But any of these steps would carry us a long way to our end.
+
+2~1 1. More Formalities
+={copyright law:formalities reinstated in+13;formalities+13}
+
+If you buy a house, you have to record the sale in a deed. If you buy land upon which to build a house, you have to record the purchase in a deed. If you buy a car, you get a bill of sale and register the car. If you buy an airplane ticket, it has your name on it.
+={property rights:formalities associated with+1}
+
+These are all formalities associated with property. They are requirements that we all must bear if we want our property to be protected.
+
+In contrast, under current copyright law, you automatically get a copyright, regardless of whether you comply with any formality. You don't have to register. You don't even have to mark your content. The default is control, and "formalities" are banished.
+={copyright:marking of+5}
+
+Why?
+
+As I suggested in chapter 10, the motivation to abolish formalities was a good one. In the world before digital technologies, formalities imposed a burden on copyright holders without much benefit. Thus, it was progress when the law relaxed the formal requirements that a copyright owner must bear to protect and secure his work. Those formalities were getting in the way.
+
+But the Internet changes all this. Formalities today need not be a burden. Rather, the world without formalities is the world that burdens creativity. Today, there is no simple way to know who owns what, or with whom one must deal in order to use or build upon the creative work of others. There are no records, there is no system to trace - there is no simple way to know how to get permission. Yet given the massive increase in the scope of copyright's rule, getting permission is a necessary step for any work that builds upon our past. And thus, the /{lack}/ of formalities forces many into silence where they otherwise could speak.
+
+The law should therefore change this requirement~{ The proposal I am advancing here would apply to American works only. Obviously, I believe it would be beneficial for the same idea to be adopted by other countries as well. }~ - but it should not change it by going back to the old, broken system. We should require formalities, but we should establish a system that will create the incentives to minimize the burden of these formalities.
+
+The important formalities are three: marking copyrighted work, registering copyrights, and renewing the claim to copyright. Traditionally, the first of these three was something the copyright owner did; the second two were something the government did. But a revised system of formalities would banish the government from the process, except for the sole purpose of approving standards developed by others.
+={copyright law:registration requirement of}
+
+3~ Registration and Renewal
+={copyright:renewability of+4;copyright law:registration requirement of+4}
+
+Under the old system, a copyright owner had to file a registration with the Copyright Office to register or renew a copyright. When filing that registration, the copyright owner paid a fee. As with most government agencies, the Copyright Office had little incentive to minimize the burden of registration; it also had little incentive to minimize the fee. And as the Copyright Office is not a main target of government policy- making, the office has historically been terribly underfunded. Thus, when people who know something about the process hear this idea about formalities, their first reaction is panic - nothing could be worse than forcing people to deal with the mess that is the Copyright Office.
+={Copyright Office}
+
+Yet it is always astonishing to me that we, who come from a tradition of extraordinary innovation in governmental design, can no longer think innovatively about how governmental functions can be designed. Just because there is a public purpose to a government role, it doesn't follow that the government must actually administer the role. Instead, we should be creating incentives for private parties to serve the public, subject to standards that the government sets.
+
+In the context of registration, one obvious model is the Internet. There are at least 32 million Web sites registered around the world. Domain name owners for these Web sites have to pay a fee to keep their registration alive. In the main top-level domains (.com, .org, .net), there is a central registry. The actual registrations are, however, performed by many competing registrars. That competition drives the cost of registering down, and more importantly, it drives the ease with which registration occurs up.
+={domain names;Internet:domain name registration on;Web sites, domain name registration of}
+
+We should adopt a similar model for the registration and renewal of copyrights. The Copyright Office may well serve as the central registry, but it should not be in the registrar business. Instead, it should establish a database, and a set of standards for registrars. It should approve registrars that meet its standards. Those registrars would then compete with one another to deliver the cheapest and simplest systems for registering and renewing copyrights. That competition would substantially lower the burden of this formality - while producing a database of registrations that would facilitate the licensing of content.
+={Copyright Office}
+
+3~ Marking
+={copyright:marking of+9}
+
+It used to be that the failure to include a copyright notice on a creative work meant that the copyright was forfeited. That was a harsh punishment for failing to comply with a regulatory rule - akin to imposing the death penalty for a parking ticket in the world of creative rights. Here again, there is no reason that a marking requirement needs to be enforced in this way. And more importantly, there is no reason a marking requirement needs to be enforced uniformly across all media.
+
+The aim of marking is to signal to the public that this work is copyrighted and that the author wants to enforce his rights. The mark also makes it easy to locate a copyright owner to secure permission to use the work.
+
+One of the problems the copyright system confronted early on was that different copyrighted works had to be differently marked. It wasn't clear how or where a statue was to be marked, or a record, or a film. A new marking requirement could solve these problems by recognizing the differences in media, and by allowing the system of marking to evolve as technologies enable it to. The system could enable a special signal from the failure to mark - not the loss of the copyright, but the loss of the right to punish someone for failing to get permission first.
+
+Let's start with the last point. If a copyright owner allows his work to be published without a copyright notice, the consequence of that failure need not be that the copyright is lost. The consequence could instead be that anyone has the right to use this work, until the copyright owner complains and demonstrates that it is his work and he doesn't give permission.~{ There would be a complication with derivative works that I have not solved here. In my view, the law of derivatives creates a more complicated system than is justified by the marginal incentive it creates. }~ The meaning of an unmarked work would therefore be "use unless someone complains." If someone does complain, then the obligation would be to stop using the work in any new work from then on though no penalty would attach for existing uses. This would create a strong incentive for copyright owners to mark their work.
+
+That in turn raises the question about how work should best be marked. Here again, the system needs to adjust as the technologies evolve. The best way to ensure that the system evolves is to limit the Copyright Office's role to that of approving standards for marking content that have been crafted elsewhere.
+={Copyright Office+1}
+
+For example, if a recording industry association devises a method for marking CDs, it would propose that to the Copyright Office. The Copyright Office would hold a hearing, at which other proposals could be made. The Copyright Office would then select the proposal that it judged preferable, and it would base that choice /{solely}/ upon the consideration of which method could best be integrated into the registration and renewal system. We would not count on the government to innovate; but we would count on the government to keep the product of innovation in line with its other important functions.
+={CDs:copyright marking of;copyright law:on music recordings|registration requirement of+3;recording industry:copyright protections in}
+
+Finally, marking content clearly would simplify registration requirements. If photographs were marked by author and year, there would be little reason not to allow a photographer to reregister, for example, all photographs taken in a particular year in one quick step. The aim of the formality is not to burden the creator; the system itself should be kept as simple as possible.
+
+The objective of formalities is to make things clear. The existing system does nothing to make things clear. Indeed, it seems designed to make things unclear.
+
+If formalities such as registration were reinstated, one of the most difficult aspects of relying upon the public domain would be removed. It would be simple to identify what content is presumptively free; it would be simple to identify who controls the rights for a particular kind of content; it would be simple to assert those rights, and to renew that assertion at the appropriate time.
+
+2~2 2. Shorter Terms
+={copyright:duration of+9}
+
+The term of copyright has gone from fourteen years to ninety-five years for corporate authors, and life of the author plus seventy years for natural authors.
+
+In /{The Future of Ideas}/, I proposed a seventy-five-year term, granted in five- year increments with a requirement of renewal every five years. That seemed radical enough at the time. But after we lost /{Eldred v. Ashcroft}/, the proposals became even more radical. /{The Economist}/ endorsed a proposal for a fourteen-year copyright term.~{ "A Radical Rethink," /{Economist,}/ 366:8308 (25 January 2003): 15, available at link #74. }~ Others have proposed tying the term to the term for patents.
+={Eldred v. Ashcroft;Future of Ideas, The (Lessig);Lessig, Lawrence+7;copyright:renewability of}
+
+I agree with those who believe that we need a radical change in copyright's term. But whether fourteen years or seventy-five, there are four principles that are important to keep in mind about copyright terms.
+
+_1 (1) /{Keep it short:}/ The term should be as long as necessary to give incentives to create, but no longer. If it were tied to very strong protections for authors (so authors were able to reclaim rights from publishers), rights to the same work (not derivative works) might be extended further. The key is not to tie the work up with legal regulations when it no longer benefits an author.
+
+_1 (2) /{Keep it simple:}/ The line between the public domain and protected content must be kept clear. Lawyers like the fuzziness of "fair use," and the distinction between "ideas" and "expression." That kind of law gives them lots of work. But our framers had a simpler idea in mind: protected versus unprotected. The value of short terms is that there is little need to build exceptions into copyright when the term itself is kept short. A clear and active "lawyer-free zone" makes the complexities of "fair use" and "idea/expression" less necessary to navigate.
+={copyright law:fair use and|lawyers as detriment to;lawyers:copyright cultural balance impeded by;fair use:fuzziness of}
+
+_1 (3) /{Keep it alive:}/ Copyright should have to be renewed. Especially if the maximum term is long, the copyright owner should be required to signal periodically that he wants the protection continued. This need not be an onerous burden, but there is no reason this monopoly protection has to be granted for free. On average, it takes ninety minutes for a veteran to apply for a pension. ~{ Department of Veterans Affairs, Veteran's Application for Compensation and/or Pension, VA Form 21-526 (OMB Approved No. 2900-0001), available at link #75. }~ If we make veterans suffer that burden, I don't see why we couldn't require authors to spend ten minutes every fifty years to file a single form.
+={veterans' pensions;copyright:renewability of}
+
+_1 (4) /{Keep it prospective:}/ Whatever the term of copyright should be, the clearest lesson that economists teach is that a term once given should not be extended. It might have been a mistake in 1923 for the law to offer authors only a fifty-six-year term. I don't think so, but it's possible. If it was a mistake, then the consequence was that we got fewer authors to create in 1923 than we otherwise would have. But we can't correct that mistake today by increasing the term. No matter what we do today, we will not increase the number of authors who wrote in 1923. Of course, we can increase the reward that those who write now get (or alternatively, increase the copyright burden that smothers many works that are today invisible). But increasing their reward will not increase their creativity in 1923. What's not done is not done, and there's nothing we can do about that now.
+
+These changes together should produce an /{average}/ copyright term that is much shorter than the current term. Until 1976, the average term was just 32.2 years. We should be aiming for the same.
+
+No doubt the extremists will call these ideas "radical." (After all, I call them "extremists.") But again, the term I recommended was longer than the term under Richard Nixon. How "radical" can it be to ask for a more generous copyright law than Richard Nixon presided over?
+={Nixon, Richard}
+
+2~3 3. Free Use Vs. Fair Use
+={copyright law:on republishing vs. transformation of original work+11}
+
+As I observed at the beginning of this book, property law originally granted property owners the right to control their property from the ground to the heavens. The airplane came along. The scope of property rights quickly changed. There was no fuss, no constitutional challenge. It made no sense anymore to grant that much control, given the emergence of that new technology.
+={property rights:air traffic vs.;land ownership, air traffic and}
+
+Our Constitution gives Congress the power to give authors "exclusive right" to "their writings." Congress has given authors an exclusive right to "their writings" plus any derivative writings (made by others) that are sufficiently close to the author's original work. Thus, if I write a book, and you base a movie on that book, I have the power to deny you the right to release that movie, even though that movie is not "my writing."
+={derivative works:reform copyright term and scope on+8;Congress, U.S.:on derivative rights+1|on copyright laws+1}
+
+Congress granted the beginnings of this right in 1870, when it expanded the exclusive right of copyright to include a right to control translations and dramatizations of a work.~{ Benjamin Kaplan, /{An Unhurried View of Copyright}/ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), 32. }~ The courts have expanded it slowly through judicial interpretation ever since. This expansion has been commented upon by one of the law's greatest judges, Judge Benjamin Kaplan.
+={Kaplan, Benjamin}
+
+_1 So inured have we become to the extension of the monopoly to a large range of so-called derivative works, that we no longer sense the oddity of accepting such an enlargement of copyright while yet intoning the abracadabra of idea and expression."~{ Ibid., 56. }~
+
+I think it's time to recognize that there are airplanes in this field and the expansiveness of these rights of derivative use no longer make sense. More precisely, they don't make sense for the period of time that a copyright runs. And they don't make sense as an amorphous grant. Consider each limitation in turn.
+={property rights:air traffic vs.;copyright:duration of+1}
+
+/{Term:}/ If Congress wants to grant a derivative right, then that right should be for a much shorter term. It makes sense to protect John Grisham's right to sell the movie rights to his latest novel (or at least I'm willing to assume it does); but it does not make sense for that right to run for the same term as the underlying copyright. The derivative right could be important in inducing creativity; it is not important long after the creative work is done.
+={Grisham, John;Congress, U.S.:on derivative rights|on copyright laws}
+
+/{Scope:}/ Likewise should the scope of derivative rights be narrowed. Again, there are some cases in which derivative rights are important. Those should be specified. But the law should draw clear lines around regulated and unregulated uses of copyrighted material. When all "reuse" of creative material was within the control of businesses, perhaps it made sense to require lawyers to negotiate the lines. It no longer makes sense for lawyers to negotiate the lines. Think about all the creative possibilities that digital technologies enable; now imagine pouring molasses into the machines. That's what this general requirement of permission does to the creative process. Smothers it.
+={copyright:scope of}
+
+This was the point that Alben made when describing the making of the Clint Eastwood CD. While it makes sense to require negotiation for foreseeable derivative rights - turning a book into a movie, or a poem into a musical score - it doesn't make sense to require negotiation for the unforeseeable. Here, a statutory right would make much more sense.
+={Alben, Alex;Eastwood, Clint;copyright:statutory licenses in}
+
+In each of these cases, the law should mark the uses that are protected, and the presumption should be that other uses are not protected. This is the reverse of the recommendation of my colleague Paul Goldstein.~{ Paul Goldstein, /{Copyright's Highway: From Gutenberg to the Celestial Jukebox}/ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 187-216. }~ His view is that the law should be written so that expanded protections follow expanded uses.
+={Goldstein, Paul}
+
+Goldstein's analysis would make perfect sense if the cost of the legal system were small. But as we are currently seeing in the context of the Internet, the uncertainty about the scope of protection, and the incentives to protect existing architectures of revenue, combined with a strong copyright, weaken the process of innovation.
+
+The law could remedy this problem either by removing protection beyond the part explicitly drawn or by granting reuse rights upon certain statutory conditions. Either way, the effect would be to free a great deal of culture to others to cultivate. And under a statutory rights regime, that reuse would earn artists more income.
+={copyright:statutory licenses in;statutory licenses}
+
+2~4 4. Liberate the Music - Again
+={peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing:reform proposals of copyright restraints on+41}
+
+The battle that got this whole war going was about music, so it wouldn't be fair to end this book without addressing the issue that is, to most people, most pressing - music. There is no other policy issue that better teaches the lessons of this book than the battles around the sharing of music.
+
+The appeal of file-sharing music was the crack cocaine of the Inter-net's growth. It drove demand for access to the Internet more powerfully than any other single application. It was the Internet's killer app-possibly in two senses of that word. It no doubt was the application that drove demand for bandwidth. It may well be the application that drives demand for regulations that in the end kill innovation on the network.
+
+The aim of copyright, with respect to content in general and music in particular, is to create the incentives for music to be composed, performed, and, most importantly, spread. The law does this by giving an exclusive right to a composer to control public performances of his work, and to a performing artist to control copies of her performance.
+
+File-sharing networks complicate this model by enabling the spread of content for which the performer has not been paid. But of course, that's not all the file-sharing networks do. As I described in chapter 5, they enable four different kinds of sharing:
+={peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing:four types of+5}
+
+_1 A. There are some who are using sharing networks as substitutes for purchasing CDs.
+
+_1 B. There are also some who are using sharing networks to sample, on the way to purchasing CDs.
+
+_1 C. There are many who are using file-sharing networks to get access to content that is no longer sold but is still under copyright or that would have been too cumbersome to buy off the Net.
+
+_1 D. There are many who are using file-sharing networks to get access to content that is not copyrighted or to get access that the copyright owner plainly endorses.
+
+Any reform of the law needs to keep these different uses in focus. It must avoid burdening type D even if it aims to eliminate type A. The eagerness with which the law aims to eliminate type A, moreover, should depend upon the magnitude of type B. As with VCRs, if the net effect of sharing is actually not very harmful, the need for regulation is significantly weakened.
+={cassette recording:VCRs;VCRs}
+
+As I said in chapter 5, the actual harm caused by sharing is controversial. For the purposes of this chapter, however, I assume the harm is real. I assume, in other words, that type A sharing is significantly greater than type B, and is the dominant use of sharing networks.
+
+Nonetheless, there is a crucial fact about the current technological context that we must keep in mind if we are to understand how the law should respond.
+
+Today, file sharing is addictive. In ten years, it won't be. It is addictive today because it is the easiest way to gain access to a broad range of content. It won't be the easiest way to get access to a broad range of content in ten years. Today, access to the Internet is cumbersome and slow - we in the United States are lucky to have broadband service at 1.5 MBs, and very rarely do we get service at that speed both up and down. Although wireless access is growing, most of us still get access across wires. Most only gain access through a machine with a keyboard. The idea of the always on, always connected Internet is mainly just an idea.
+={Internet:speed of access+3}
+
+But it will become a reality, and that means the way we get access to the Internet today is a technology in transition. Policy makers should not make policy on the basis of technology in transition. They should make policy on the basis of where the technology is going. The question should not be, how should the law regulate sharing in this world? The question should be, what law will we require when the network becomes the network it is clearly becoming? That network is one in which every machine with electricity is essentially on the Net; where everywhere you are - except maybe the desert or the Rockies - you can instantaneously be connected to the Internet. Imagine the Internet as ubiquitous as the best cell-phone service, where with the flip of a device, you are connected.
+
+In that world, it will be extremely easy to connect to services that give you access to content on the fly - such as Internet radio, content that is streamed to the user when the user demands. Here, then, is the critical point: When it is /{extremely}/ easy to connect to services that give access to content, it will be /{easier}/ to connect to services that give you access to content than it will be to download and store content /on the many devices you will have for playing content/. It will be easier, in other words, to subscribe than it will be to be a database manager, as everyone in the download-sharing world of Napster-like technologies essentially is. Content services will compete with content sharing, even if the services charge money for the content they give access to. Already cell-phone services in Japan offer music (for a fee) streamed over cell phones (enhanced with plugs for headphones). The Japanese are paying for this content even though "free" content is available in the form of MP3s across the Web.~{ See, for example, "Music Media Watch," The J@pan Inc. Newsletter, 3 April 2002, available at link #76. }~
+={cell phones, music streamed over}
+
+This point about the future is meant to suggest a perspective on the present: It is emphatically temporary. The "problem" with file sharing - to the extent there is a real problem - is a problem that will increasingly disappear as it becomes easier to connect to the Internet. And thus it is an extraordinary mistake for policy makers today to be "solving" this problem in light of a technology that will be gone tomorrow. The question should not be how to regulate the Internet to eliminate file sharing (the Net will evolve that problem away). The question instead should be how to assure that artists get paid, during this transition between twentieth-century models for doing business and twenty-first-century technologies.
+
+The answer begins with recognizing that there are different "problems" here to solve. Let's start with type D content - uncopyrighted content or copyrighted content that the artist wants shared. The "problem" with this content is to make sure that the technology that would enable this kind of sharing is not rendered illegal. You can think of it this way: Pay phones are used to deliver ransom demands, no doubt. But there are many who need to use pay phones who have nothing to do with ransoms. It would be wrong to ban pay phones in order to eliminate kidnapping.
+
+Type C content raises a different "problem." This is content that was, at one time, published and is no longer available. It may be unavailable because the artist is no longer valuable enough for the record label he signed with to carry his work. Or it may be unavailable because the work is forgotten. Either way, the aim of the law should be to facilitate the access to this content, ideally in a way that returns something to the artist.
+
+Again, the model here is the used book store. Once a book goes out of print, it may still be available in libraries and used book stores. But libraries and used book stores don't pay the copyright owner when someone reads or buys an out-of- print book. That makes total sense, of course, since any other system would be so burdensome as to eliminate the possibility of used book stores' existing. But from the author's perspective, this "sharing" of his content without his being compensated is less than ideal.
+={books:out of print|resales of}
+
+The model of used book stores suggests that the law could simply deem out-of-print music fair game. If the publisher does not make copies of the music available for sale, then commercial and noncommercial providers would be free, under this rule, to "share" that content, even though the sharing involved making a copy. The copy here would be incidental to the trade; in a context where commercial publishing has ended, trading music should be as free as trading books.
+
+Alternatively, the law could create a statutory license that would ensure that artists get something from the trade of their work. For example, if the law set a low statutory rate for the commercial sharing of content that was not offered for sale by a commercial publisher, and if that rate were automatically transferred to a trust for the benefit of the artist, then businesses could develop around the idea of trading this content, and artists would benefit from this trade.
+={copyright infringement lawsuits:statutory licenses in+1;statutory licenses+1}
+
+This system would also create an incentive for publishers to keep works available commercially. Works that are available commercially would not be subject to this license. Thus, publishers could protect the right to charge whatever they want for content if they kept the work commercially available. But if they don't keep it available, and instead, the computer hard disks of fans around the world keep it alive, then any royalty owed for such copying should be much less than the amount owed a commercial publisher.
+
+The hard case is content of types A and B, and again, this case is hard only because the extent of the problem will change over time, as the technologies for gaining access to content change. The law's solution should be as flexible as the problem is, understanding that we are in the middle of a radical transformation in the technology for delivering and accessing content.
+
+So here's a solution that will at first seem very strange to both sides in this war, but which upon reflection, I suggest, should make some sense.
+
+Stripped of the rhetoric about the sanctity of property, the basic claim of the content industry is this: A new technology (the Internet) has harmed a set of rights that secure copyright. If those rights are to be protected, then the content industry should be compensated for that harm. Just as the technology of tobacco harmed the health of millions of Americans, or the technology of asbestos caused grave illness to thousands of miners, so, too, has the technology of digital networks harmed the interests of the content industry.
+
+I love the Internet, and so I don't like likening it to tobacco or asbestos. But the analogy is a fair one from the perspective of the law. And it suggests a fair response: Rather than seeking to destroy the Internet, or the p2p technologies that are currently harming content providers on the Internet, we should find a relatively simple way to compensate those who are harmed.
+={recording industry:artist remuneration in+4;artists:recording industry payments to}
+
+The idea would be a modification of a proposal that has been floated by Harvard law professor William Fisher.~{ William Fisher, /{Digital Music: Problems and Possibilities}/ (last revised: 10 October 2000), available at link #77; William Fisher, /{Promises to Keep: Technology, Law, and the Future of Entertainment}/ (forthcoming) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), ch. 6, available at link #78. Professor Netanel has proposed a related idea that would exempt noncommercial sharing from the reach of copyright and would establish compensation to artists to balance any loss. See Neil Weinstock Netanel, "Impose a Noncommercial Use Levy to Allow Free P2P File Sharing," available at link #79. For other proposals, see Lawrence Lessig, "Who's Holding Back Broadband?" /{Washington Post,}/ 8 January 2002, A17; Philip S. Corwin on behalf of Sharman Networks, A Letter to Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr., Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 26 February 2002, available at link #80; Serguei Osokine, /{A Quick Case for Intellectual Property Use Fee (IPUF),}/ 3 March 2002, available at link #81; Jefferson Graham, "Kazaa, Verizon Propose to Pay Artists Directly," /{USA Today,}/ 13 May 2002, available at link #82; Steven M. Cherry, "Getting Copyright Right," IEEE Spectrum Online, 1 July 2002, available at link #83; Declan Mc-Cullagh, "Verizon's Copyright Campaign," CNET News.com, 27 August 2002, available at link #84. Fisher's proposal is very similar to Richard Stallman's proposal for DAT. Unlike Fisher's, Stallman's proposal would not pay artists directly proportionally, though more popular artists would get more than the less popular. As is typical with Stallman, his proposal predates the current debate by about a decade. See link #85. }~ Fisher suggests a very clever way around the current impasse of the Internet. Under his plan, all content capable of digital transmission would (1) be marked with a digital watermark (don't worry about how easy it is to evade these marks; as you'll see, there's no incentive to evade them). Once the content is marked, then entrepreneurs would develop (2) systems to monitor how many items of each content were distributed. On the basis of those numbers, then (3) artists would be compensated. The compensation would be paid for by (4) an appropriate tax.
+={Fisher, William+2;Promises to Keep (Fisher)+1}
+
+Fisher's proposal is careful and comprehensive. It raises a million questions, most of which he answers well in his upcoming book, /{Promises to Keep}/. The modification that I would make is relatively simple: Fisher imagines his proposal replacing the existing copyright system. I imagine it complementing the existing system. The aim of the proposal would be to facilitate compensation to the extent that harm could be shown. This compensation would be temporary, aimed at facilitating a transition between regimes. And it would require renewal after a period of years. If it continues to make sense to facilitate free exchange of content, supported through a taxation system, then it can be continued. If this form of protection is no longer necessary, then the system could lapse into the old system of controlling access.
+
+Fisher would balk at the idea of allowing the system to lapse. His aim is not just to ensure that artists are paid, but also to ensure that the system supports the widest range of "semiotic democracy" possible. But the aims of semiotic democracy would be satisfied if the other changes I described were accomplished - in particular, the limits on derivative uses. A system that simply charges for access would not greatly burden semiotic democracy if there were few limitations on what one was allowed to do with the content itself.
+={semiotic democracy;democracy:semiotic}
+
+No doubt it would be difficult to calculate the proper measure of "harm" to an industry. But the difficulty of making that calculation would be outweighed by the benefit of facilitating innovation. This background system to compensate would also not need to interfere with innovative proposals such as Apple's MusicStore. As experts predicted when Apple launched the MusicStore, it could beat "free" by being easier than free is. This has proven correct: Apple has sold millions of songs at even the very high price of 99 cents a song. (At 99 cents, the cost is the equivalent of a per-song CD price, though the labels have none of the costs of a CD to pay.) Apple's move was countered by Real Networks, offering music at just 79 cents a song. And no doubt there will be a great deal of competition to offer and sell music on-line.
+={Apple Corporation;MusicStore;Real Networks;CDs:prices of}
+
+This competition has already occurred against the background of "free" music from p2p systems. As the sellers of cable television have known for thirty years, and the sellers of bottled water for much more than that, there is nothing impossible at all about "competing with free." Indeed, if anything, the competition spurs the competitors to offer new and better products. This is precisely what the competitive market was to be about. Thus in Singapore, though piracy is rampant, movie theaters are often luxurious - with "first class" seats, and meals served while you watch a movie - as they struggle and succeed in finding ways to compete with "free."
+={cable television;television:cable vs. broadcast;Asia, commercial piracy in;piracy:in Asia;film industry:luxury theatres vs. video piracy in}
+
+This regime of competition, with a backstop to assure that artists don't lose, would facilitate a great deal of innovation in the delivery of content. That competition would continue to shrink type A sharing. It would inspire an extraordinary range of new innovators - ones who would have a right to the content, and would no longer fear the uncertain and barbarically severe punishments of the law.
+
+In summary, then, my proposal is this:
+
+The Internet is in transition. We should not be regulating a technology in transition. We should instead be regulating to minimize the harm to interests affected by this technological change, while enabling, and encouraging, the most efficient technology we can create.
+
+We can minimize that harm while maximizing the benefit to innovation by
+
+_1 1. guaranteeing the right to engage in type D sharing;
+
+_1 2. permitting noncommercial type C sharing without liability, and commercial type C sharing at a low and fixed rate set by statute;
+
+_1 3. while in this transition, taxing and compensating for type A sharing, to the extent actual harm is demonstrated.
+
+But what if "piracy" doesn't disappear? What if there is a competitive market providing content at a low cost, but a significant number of consumers continue to "take" content for nothing? Should the law do something then?
+
+Yes, it should. But, again, what it should do depends upon how the facts develop. These changes may not eliminate type A sharing. But the real issue is not whether it eliminates sharing in the abstract. The real issue is its effect on the market. Is it better (a) to have a technology that is 95 percent secure and produces a market of size /{x}/, or (b) to have a technology that is 50 percent secure but produces a market of five times /{x}/? Less secure might produce more unauthorized sharing, but it is likely to also produce a much bigger market in authorized sharing. The most important thing is to assure artists' compensation without breaking the Internet. Once that's assured, then it may well be appropriate to find ways to track down the petty pirates.
+
+But we're a long way away from whittling the problem down to this subset of type A sharers. And our focus until we're there should not be on finding ways to break the Internet. Our focus until we're there should be on how to make sure the artists are paid, while protecting the space for innovation and creativity that the Internet is.
+
+2~5 5. Fire Lots of Lawyers
+={copyright law:lawyers as detriment to+12;lawyers:copyright cultural balance impeded by+12;legal system, attorney costs in+12}
+
+I'm a lawyer. I make lawyers for a living. I believe in the law. I believe in the law of copyright. Indeed, I have devoted my life to working in law, not because there are big bucks at the end but because there are ideals at the end that I would love to live.
+
+Yet much of this book has been a criticism of lawyers, or the role lawyers have played in this debate. The law speaks to ideals, but it is my view that our profession has become too attuned to the client. And in a world where the rich clients have one strong view, the unwillingness of the profession to question or counter that one strong view queers the law.
+
+The evidence of this bending is compelling. I'm attacked as a "radical" by many within the profession, yet the positions that I am advocating are precisely the positions of some of the most moderate and significant figures in the history of this branch of the law. Many, for example, thought crazy the challenge that we brought to the Copyright Term Extension Act. Yet just thirty years ago, the dominant scholar and practitioner in the field of copyright, Melville Nimmer, thought it obvious.~{ Lawrence Lessig, "Copyright's First Amendment" (Melville B. Nimmer Memorial Lecture), /{UCLA Law Review}/ 48 (2001): 1057, 1069-70. }~
+={Nimmer, Melville;Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998):Supreme Court challenge of}
+
+However, my criticism of the role that lawyers have played in this debate is not just about a professional bias. It is more importantly about our failure to actually reckon the costs of the law.
+
+Economists are supposed to be good at reckoning costs and benefits. But more often than not, economists, with no clue about how the legal system actually functions, simply assume that the transaction costs of the legal system are slight.~{ A good example is the work of Professor Stan Liebowitz. Liebowitz is to be commended for his careful review of data about infringement, leading him to question his own publicly stated position - twice. He initially predicted that downloading would substantially harm the industry. He then revised his view in light of the data, and he has since revised his view again. Compare Stan J. Liebowitz, /{Rethinking the Network Economy: The True Forces That Drive the Digital Marketplace}/ (New York: Amacom, 2002), 173 (reviewing his original view but expressing skepticism) with Stan J. Liebowitz, "Will MP3s Annihilate the Record Industry?" working paper, June 2003, available at link #86. Liebowitz's careful analysis is extremely valuable in estimating the effect of file-sharing technology. In my view, however, he underestimates the costs of the legal system. See, for example, /{Rethinking,}/ 174-76. }~ They see a system that has been around for hundreds of years, and they assume it works the way their elementary school civics class taught them it works.
+
+But the legal system doesn't work. Or more accurately, it doesn't work for anyone except those with the most resources. Not because the system is corrupt. I don't think our legal system (at the federal level, at least) is at all corrupt. I mean simply because the costs of our legal system are so astonishingly high that justice can practically never be done.
+
+These costs distort free culture in many ways. A lawyer's time is billed at the largest firms at more than $400 per hour. How much time should such a lawyer spend reading cases carefully, or researching obscure strands of authority? The answer is the increasing reality: very little. The law depended upon the careful articulation and development of doctrine, but the careful articulation and development of legal doctrine depends upon careful work. Yet that careful work costs too much, except in the most high-profile and costly cases.
+
+The costliness and clumsiness and randomness of this system mock our tradition. And lawyers, as well as academics, should consider it their duty to change the way the law works - or better, to change the law so that it works. It is wrong that the system works well only for the top 1 percent of the clients. It could be made radically more efficient, and inexpensive, and hence radically more just.
+
+But until that reform is complete, we as a society should keep the law away from areas that we know it will only harm. And that is precisely what the law will too often do if too much of our culture is left to its review.
+
+Think about the amazing things your kid could do or make with digital technology - the film, the music, the Web page, the blog. Or think about the amazing things your community could facilitate with digital technology - a wiki, a barn raising, activism to change something. Think about all those creative things, and then imagine cold molasses poured onto the machines. This is what any regime that requires permission produces. Again, this is the reality of Brezhnev's Russia.
+
+The law should regulate in certain areas of culture - but it should regulate culture only where that regulation does good. Yet lawyers rarely test their power, or the power they promote, against this simple pragmatic question: "Will it do good?" When challenged about the expanding reach of the law, the lawyer answers, "Why not?"
+
+We should ask, "Why?" Show me why your regulation of culture is needed. Show me how it does good. And until you can show me both, keep your lawyers away.
+
+:B~ NOTES
+
+1~webnotes Notes~#
+
+Throughout this text, there are references to links on the World Wide Web. As anyone who has tried to use the Web knows, these links can be highly unstable. I have tried to remedy the instability by redirecting readers to the original source through the Web site associated with this book. For each link below, you can go to http://free-culture.cc/notes and locate the original source by clicking on the number after the # sign. If the original link remains alive, you will be redirected to that link. If the original link has disappeared, you will be redirected to an appropriate reference for the material.
+
+:B~ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
+
+1~acknowledgements [Acknowledgments]-#
+
+This book is the product of a long and as yet unsuccessful struggle that began when I read of Eric Eldred's war to keep books free. Eldred's work helped launch a movement, the free culture movement, and it is to him that this book is dedicated. I received guidance in various places from friends and academics, including Glenn Brown, Peter DiCola, Jennifer Mnookin, Richard Posner, Mark Rose, and Kathleen Sullivan. And I received correction and guidance from many amazing students at Stanford Law School and Stanford University. They included Andrew B. Coan, John Eden, James P. Fellers, Christopher Guzelian, Erica Goldberg, Robert Hall- man, Andrew Harris, Matthew Kahn, Brian Link, Ohad Mayblum, Alina Ng, and Erica Platt. I am particularly grateful to Catherine Crump and Harry Surden, who helped direct their research, and to Laura Lynch, who brilliantly managed the army that they assembled, and provided her own critical eye on much of this. Yuko Noguchi helped me to understand the laws of Japan as well as its culture. I am thankful to her, and to the many in Japan who helped me prepare this book: Joi Ito, Takayuki Matsutani, Naoto Misaki, Michihiro Sasaki, Hiromichi Tanaka, Hiroo Yamagata, and Yoshihiro Yonezawa. I am thankful as well as to Professor Nobuhiro Nakayama, and the Tokyo University Business Law Center, for giving me the chance to spend time in Japan, and to Tadashi Shiraishi and Kiyokazu Yamagami for their generous help while I was there. These are the traditional sorts of help that academics regularly draw upon. But in addition to them, the Internet has made it possible to receive advice and correction from many whom I have never even met. Among those who have responded with extremely helpful advice to requests on my blog about the book are Dr. Mohammad Al-Ubaydli, David Gerstein, and Peter DiMauro, as well as a long list of those who had specific ideas about ways to develop my argument. They included Richard Bondi, Steven Cherry, David Coe, Nik Cubrilovic, Bob Devine, Charles Eicher, Thomas Guida, Elihu M. Gerson, Jeremy Hunsinger, Vaughn Iverson, John Karabaic, Jeff Keltner, James Lindenschmidt, K. L. Mann, Mark Manning, Nora McCauley, Jeffrey McHugh, Evan McMullen, Fred Norton, John Pormann, Pedro A. D. Rezende, Shabbir Safdar, Saul Schleimer, Clay Shirky, Adam Shostack, Kragen Sitaker, Chris Smith, Bruce Steinberg, Andrzej Jan Taramina, Sean Walsh, Matt Wasserman, Miljenko Williams, "Wink," Roger Wood, "Ximmbo da Jazz," and Richard Yanco. (I apologize if I have missed anyone; with computers come glitches, and a crash of my e-mail system meant I lost a bunch of great replies.) Richard Stallman and Michael Carroll each read the whole book in draft, and each provided extremely helpful correction and advice. Michael helped me to see more clearly the significance of the regulation of derivitive works. And Richard corrected an embarrassingly large number of errors. While my work is in part inspired by Stallman's, he does not agree with me in important places throughout this book. Finally, and forever, I am thankful to Bettina, who has always insisted that there would be unending happiness away from these battles, and who has always been right. This slow learner is, as ever, grateful for her perpetual patience and love.
+
+1~about ABOUT THE AUTHOR
+
+{lessig.jpg 151x227 "Lawrence Lessig" }http://www.lessig.org/
+
+LAWRENCE LESSIG ( http://www.lessig.org ), professor of law and a John A. Wilson Distinguished Faculty Scholar at Stanford Law School, is founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society and is chairman of the Creative Commons ( http://creativecommons.org ). The author of The Future of Ideas (Random House, 2001) and Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace (Basic Books, 1999), Lessig is a member of the boards of the Public Library of Science, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Public Knowledge. He was the winner of the Free Software Foundation's Award for the Advancement of Free Software, twice listed in BusinessWeek's "e.biz 25," and named one of Scientific American's "50 visionaries." A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Cambridge University, and Yale Law School, Lessig clerked for Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.
+
+1~misc Other Works and REVIEWS of FreeCulture
+
+http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/001840.shtml
+
+http://www.free-culture.cc/reviews/
+
+1~jacket JACKET
+
+"FREE CULTURE is an entertaining and important look at the past and future of the cold war between the media industry and new technologies."
+
+-- Marc Andreessen, cofounder of Netscape
+
+"The twenty-first century could be the century of unprecedented creativity, but only if we embrace the brilliantly articulated messages in Lawrence Lessig's FREE CULTURE. This book is beautifully written, crisply argued, and deeply provocative. Please read it!"
+
+-- John Seely Brown, coauthor of THE SOCIAL LIFE OF INFORMATION and former Chief Scientist, Xerox PARC
+
+"America needs a national conversation about the way in which so-called 'intellectual property rights' have come to dominate the rights of scholars, researchers, and everyday citizens. A copyright cartel, bidding for absolute control over digital worlds, music, and movies, now has a veto over technological innovation and has halted most contributions to the public domain from which so many have benefited. The patent system has spun out of control, giving enormous power to entrenched interests, and even trademarks are being misused. Lawrence Lessig's latest book is essential reading for anyone who want to join this conversation. He explains how technology and the law are robbing us of the public domain; but for all his educated pessimism, Professor Lessig offers some solutions, too, because he recognizes that technology can be the catalyst for freedom. If you care about the future of innovation, read this book."
+
+-- Dan Gillmor, author of MAKING THE NEWS, an upcoming book on the collision of media and technology
+
+"FREE CULTURE goes beyond illuminating the catastrophe to our culture of increasing regulation to show examples of how we can make a different future. These new-style heroes and examples are rooted in the traditions of the founding fathers in ways that seem obvious after reading this book. Recommended reading to those trying to unravel the shrill hype around 'intellectual property.'"
+
+-- Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive
+
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+% SiSU 4.0
+
+@title: Free For All
+ :subtitle: How Linux and the Free Software Movement Undercut the High Tech Titans
+
+@creator:
+ :author: Wayner, Peter
+
+@date:
+ :published: 2002-12-22
+ :created: 2002-12-22
+ :issued: 2002-12-22
+ :available: 2002-12-22
+ :modified: 2002-12-22
+ :valid: 2002-12-22
+
+@rights:
+  :copyright: Copyright (C) Peter Wayner, 2000.
+  :license: Free For All is Licensed under a Creative Commons License. This License permits non-commercial use of this work, so long as attribution is given. For more information about the license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/1.0/
+
+@classify:
+ :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:discourse;
+  book:discourse:free software|open source software|Linux|Software Libré;
+  book:subject:Linux|Software Libré|technology;
+  GNU/Linux:GPL;free software;
+  open source software;
+  software license:GPL;
+  Linux:GNU|Software Libré
+
+@identifier:
+ :oclc: 43520955
+ :isbn: 9780066620503
+
+@links:
+ { The Original Authoritative and Updated Version of the Text available in pdf }http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa
+ { @ Amazon.com }http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0066620503
+ { @ Barnes & Noble }http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0066620503
+
+@make:
+ :num_top: 1
+ :breaks: new=:A,:B,:C,1
+ :home_button_image: {wayner.home.png }http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa/
+ :home_button_text: {Free For All}http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa/; {Peter Wayner}http://www.wayner.org
+ :footer: {Free For All}http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa/; {Peter Wayner}http://www.wayner.org
+
+:A~ @title @author
+
+1~acknowledgements Acknowledgments
+
+This is just a book about the free software movement. It wouldn't be possible without the hard work and the dedication of the thousands if not millions of people who like to spend their free time hacking code. I salute you. Thank you.
+
+Many people spoke to me during the process of assembling this book, and it would be impossible to cite them all. The list should begin with the millions of people who write and contribute to the various free software lists. The letters, notes, and postings to these lists are a wonderful history of the evolution of free software and an invaluable resource.
+
+The list should also include the dozens of journalists at places like Slashdot.org, LinuxWorld, Linux magazine, Linux Weekly News, Kernel Traffic, Salon, and the New York Times. I should specifically mention the work of Joe Barr, Jeff Bates, Janelle Brown, Zack Brown, Jonathan Corbet, Elizabeth Coolbaugh, Amy Harmon, Andrew Leonard, Rob Malda, John Markoff, Mark Nielsen, Nicholas Petreley, Harald Radke, and Dave Whitinger. They wrote wonderful pieces that will make a great first draft of the history of the open source movement. Only a few of the pieces are cited directly in the footnotes, largely for practical reasons. The entire body of websites like Slashdot, Linux Journal, Linux World, Kernel Notes, or Linux Weekly News should be required reading for anyone interested in the free software movement.
+
+There are hundreds of folks at Linux trade shows who took the time to show me their products, T-shirts, or, in one case, cooler filled with beer. Almost everyone I met at the conferences was happy to speak about their experiences with open source software. They were all a great source of information, and I don't even know most of their names.
+
+Some people went beyond the call of duty. John Gilmore, Ethan Rasiel, and Caroline McKeldin each read drafts when the book was quite unfinished. Their comments were crucial.
+
+Many friends, acquaintances, and subjects of the book were kind enough to read versions that were a bit more polished, but far from complete: L. David Baron, Jeff Bates, Brian Behlendorf, Alan Cox, Robert Dreyer, Theo de Raadt, Telsa Gwynne, Jordan Hubbard, James Lewis Moss, Kirk McKusick, Sam Ockman, Tim O'Reilly, Sameer Parekh, Bruce Perens, Eric Raymond, and Richard Stallman.
+
+There are some people who deserve a different kind of thanks. Daniel Greenberg and James Levine did a great job shaping the conception of the book. When I began, it was just a few ideas on paper. My editors, David Conti, Laureen Rowland, Devi Pillai, and Adrian Zackheim, were largely responsible for this transition. Kimberly Monroe suffered through my mistakes as she took the book through its production stages. They took a bunch of rambling comments about a social phenomenon and helped turn it into a book.
+
+Finally, I want to thank everyone in my family for everything they've given through all of my life. And, of course, Caroline, who edited large portions with a slavish devotion to grammar and style.
+
+Visit http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa/ for updates, corrections, and additional comments.
+
+1~edition Version Information
+
+FREE FOR ALL. Copyright 2000 by Peter Wayner.
+
+Some Rights Reserved:
+
+This is [a complete version of] the free electronic version of the book originally published by HarperCollins. The book is still protected by copyright and bound by a license granting you the limited rights to make complete copies for non-commercial purposes. You're welcome to read it in electronic form subject to these conditions:
+
+1) You may not make derivative works. You must reproduce the work in its entirety.
+
+2) You may not sell versions.
+
+3) You refer everyone receiving a copy to the website where they may get the latest corrected version. http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa/
+
+A full license developed by the Creative Commons (www.creativecommons.org) will be forthcoming. Please write p3@wayner.org if you have any questions or suggestions.
+
+See http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa/ for the FIRST PDF EDITION Page layout for this and the original paper edition designed by William Ruoto, see Not printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wayner, Peter, 1964 Free for all : how Linux and the free software movement undercut the high-tech titans / Peter Wayner. p. cm. ISBN 0-06-662050-3 1. Linux. 2. Operating systems (Computers) 3. Free computer software. I. Title. QA76.76.063 W394 2000 005.4'469 dc21 00-023919 00 01 02 03 04 V/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
+
+{ffa.png 93x140 "Free For All by Peter Wayner" }http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0066620503/
+
+*{Free For All}* may be purchased at Amazon.com
+
+1~ Battle
+
+The world where cash was king, greed was good, and money was power fell off its axis and stopped rotating, if only for a second, in January 1999. Microsoft, the great software giant and unstoppable engine of cash, was defending itself in a courtroom in Washington, D.C. The Department of Justice claimed that Microsoft was a monopoly and was using this power to cut off competitors. Microsoft denied it all and claimed that the world was hurling threat after competitive threat its way. They weren't a monopoly, they were just a very competitive company that managed to withstand the slings and arrows of other equally ruthless competitors out to steal its market share.
+
+The trial quickly turned into everyone's worst nightmare as the lawyers, the economists, and the programmers filled the courtroom with a thick mixture of technobabble and legal speak. On the stands, the computer nerds spewed out three-letter acronyms (TLAs) as they talked about creating operating systems. Afterward, the legal nerds started slicing them up into one-letter acronyms and testing to see just which of the three letters was really the one that committed the crime. Then the economists came forward and offered their theories on just when a monopoly is a monopoly. Were three letters working in collusion enough? What about two? Everyone in the courtroom began to dread spending the day cooped up in a small room as Microsoft tried to deny what was obvious to practically everyone.
+
+In the fall and early winter of 1998 and 1999, the Department of Justice had presented its witnesses, who explained how Microsoft had slanted contracts, tweaked software, and twisted arms to ensure that it and it alone got the lion's share of the computer business. Many watching the trial soon developed the opinion that Microsoft had adopted a mixture of tactics from the schoolyard bully, the local mob boss, and the mother from hell. The Department of Justice trotted out a number of witnesses who produced ample evidence that suggested the computer customers of the world will buy Microsoft products unless Microsoft decides otherwise. Competitors must be punished.
+
+By January, the journalists covering the trial were quietly complaining about this endless waste of time. The Department of Justice's case was so compelling that they saw the whole trial as just a delay in what would eventually come to be a ruling that would somehow split or shackle Microsoft.
+
+But Microsoft wasn't going to be bullied or pushed into splitting up. The trial allowed them to present their side of the story, and they had one ready. Sure, everyone seemed to use Microsoft products, but that was because they were great. It wasn't because there weren't any competitors, but because the competitors just weren't good enough.
+
+In the middle of January, Richard Schmalensee, the dean of the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, took the stand to defend Microsoft. Schmalensee had worked for the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice as an economist who examined the marketplace and the effects of anti-competitive behavior. He studied how monopolies behave, and to him Microsoft had no monopoly power. Now, he was being paid handsomely by Microsoft as an expert witness to repeat this view in court.
+
+Schmalensee's argument was simple: competitors are popping up all over the place. Microsoft, he said in his direct testimony, "is in a constant struggle for competitive survival. That struggle--the race to win and the victor's perpetual fear of being displaced--is the source of competitive vitality in the microcomputer software industry."
+
+Schmalensee even had a few competitors ready. "The iMac clearly competes directly and fiercely with Intel-compatible computers running Windows," he said without mentioning that Microsoft had bailed out Apple several months before with hundreds of millions of dollars in an investment. When Steve Jobs, the iCEO of Apple, announced the deal to a crowd of Mac lovers, the crowd booed. Jobs quieted them and tried to argue that the days of stiff competition with Microsoft were over. The scene did such a good job of capturing the total domination of Microsoft that the television movie The Pirates of Silicon Valley used it to illustrate how Bill Gates had won all of the marbles.
+
+After the announcement of the investment, Apple began shipping Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser as the preferred browser on its machines. Microsoft's competitor Netscape became just a bit harder to find on the iMac. After that deal, Steve Jobs even began making statements that the old sworn enemies, Apple and Microsoft, were now more partners than competitors. Schmalensee didn't focus on this facet of Apple's new attitude toward competition.
+
+Next, Schmalensee trotted out BeOS, an operating system made by Be, a small company with about 100 employees run by ex-Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassée. This company had attracted millions of dollars in funding, he said, and some people really liked it. That made it a competitor.
+
+Schmalensee didn't mention that Be had trouble giving away the BeOS operating system. Gassée approached a number of PC manufacturers to see if they would include BeOS on their machines and give users the chance to switch between two operating systems. Gassée found, to no one's real surprise, that Microsoft's contracts with manufacturers made it difficult, if not practically impossible, to get BeOS in customers' hands. Microsoft controlled much of what the user got to see and insisted on almost total control over the viewer's experience. Schmalensee didn't mention these details in his testimony. BeOS may have been as locked up as a prisoner in a windowless cell in a stone-walled asylum on an island in the middle of the ocean, but BeOS was still a competitor for the love of the fair maiden.
+
+The last competitor, though, was the most surprising to everyone. Schmalensee saw Linux, a program given away for free, as a big potential competitor. When he said Linux, he really meant an entire collection of programs known as "open source" software. These were written by a loose-knit group of programmers who shared all of the source code to the software over the Internet.
+
+Open source software floated around the Internet controlled by a variety of licenses with names like the GNU General Public License (GPL). To say that the software was "controlled" by the license is a bit of a stretch. If anything, the licenses were deliberately worded to prohibit control. The GNU GPL, for instance, let users modify the program and give away their own versions. The license did more to enforce sharing of all the source code than it did to control or constrain. It was more an anti-license than anything else, and its author, Richard Stallman, often called it a "copyleft."
+
+Schmalensee didn't mention that most people thought of Linux as a strange tool created and used by hackers in dark rooms lit by computer monitors. He didn't mention that many people had trouble getting Linux to work with their computers. He forgot to mention that Linux manuals came with subheads like "Disk Druid-like 'fstab editor' available." He didn't delve into the fact that for many of the developers, Linux was just a hobby they dabbled with when there was nothing interesting on television. And he certainly didn't mention that most people thought the whole Linux project was the work of a mad genius and his weirdo disciples who still hadn't caught on to the fact that the Soviet Union had already failed big-time. The Linux folks actually thought sharing would make the world a better place. Fat-cat programmers who spent their stock-option riches on Porsches and balsamic vinegar laughed at moments like this.
+
+Schmalensee didn't mention these facts. He just offered Linux as an alternative to Windows and said that computer manufacturers might switch to it at any time. Poof. Therefore, Microsoft had competitors. At the trial, the discourse quickly broke down into an argument over what is really a worthy competitor and what isn't. Were there enough applications available for Linux or the Mac? What qualifies as "enough"? Were these really worthy?
+
+Under cross-examination, Schmalensee explained that he wasn't holding up the Mac, BeOS, or Linux as competitors who were going to take over 50 percent of the marketplace. He merely argued that their existence proved that the barriers produced by the so-called Microsoft monopoly weren't that strong. If rational people were investing in creating companies like BeOS, then Microsoft's power wasn't absolute.
+
+Afterward, most people quickly made up their minds. Everyone had heard about the Macintosh and knew that back then conventional wisdom dictated that it would soon fail. But most people didn't know anything about BeOS or Linux. How could a company be a competitor if no one had heard of it? Apple and Microsoft had TV commercials. BeOS, at least, had a charismatic chairman. There was no Linux pitchman, no Linux jingle, and no Linux 30-second spot in major media. At the time, only the best-funded projects in the Linux community had enough money to buy spots on late-night community-access cable television. How could someone without money compete with a company that hired the Rolling Stones to pump excitement into a product launch?
+
+When people heard that Microsoft was offering a free product as a worthy competitor, they began to laugh even louder at the company's chutzpah. Wasn't money the whole reason the country was having a trial? Weren't computer programmers in such demand that many companies couldn't hire as many as they needed, no matter how high the salary? How could Microsoft believe that anyone would buy the supposition that a bunch of pseudo-communist nerds living in their weird techno-utopia where all the software was free would ever come up with software that could compete with the richest company on earth? At first glance, it looked as if Microsoft's case was sinking so low that it had to resort to laughable strategies. It was as if General Motors were to tell the world "We shouldn't have to worry about fixing cars that pollute because a collective of hippies in Ithaca, New York, is refurbishing old bicycles and giving them away for free." It was as if Exxon waved away the problems of sinking oil tankers by explaining that folksingers had written a really neat ballad for teaching birds and otters to lick themselves clean after an oil spill. If no one charged money for Linux, then it was probably because it wasn't worth buying.
+
+But as everyone began looking a bit deeper, they began to see that Linux was being taken seriously in some parts of the world. Many web servers, it turned out, were already running on Linux or another free cousin known as FreeBSD. A free webserving tool known as Apache had controlled more than 50 percent of the web servers for some time, and it was gradually beating out Microsoft products that cost thousands of dollars. Many of the web servers ran Apache on top of a Linux or a FreeBSD machine and got the job done. The software worked well, and the nonexistent price made it easy to choose.
+
+Linux was also winning over some of the world's most serious physicists, weapons designers, biologists, and hard-core scientists. Some of the nation's top labs had wired together clusters of cheap PCs and turned them into supercomputers that were highly competitive with the best machines on the market. One upstart company started offering "supercomputers" for $3,000. These machines used Linux to keep the data flowing while the racks of computers plugged and chugged their way for hours on complicated simulations.
+
+There were other indications. Linux users bragged that their system rarely crashed. Some claimed to have machines that had been running for a year or more without a problem. Microsoft (and Apple) users, on the other hand, had grown used to frequent crashes. The "Blue Screen of Death" that appears on Windows users' monitors when something goes irretrievably wrong is the butt of many jokes.
+
+Linux users also bragged about the quality of their desktop interface. Most of the uninitiated thought of Linux as a hacker's system built for nerds. Yet recently two very good operating shells called GNOME and KDE had taken hold. Both offered the user an environment that looked just like Windows but was better. Linux hackers started bragging that they were able to equip their girlfriends, mothers, and friends with Linux boxes without grief. Some people with little computer experience were adopting Linux with little trouble.
+
+Building websites and supercomputers is not an easy task, and it is often done in back rooms out of the sight of most people. When people began realizing that the free software hippies had slowly managed to take over a large chunk of the web server and supercomputing world, they realized that perhaps Microsoft's claim was viable. Web servers and supercomputers are machines built and run by serious folks with bosses who want something in return for handing out paychecks. They aren't just toys sitting around the garage.
+
+If these free software guys had conquered such serious arenas, maybe they could handle the office and the desktop. If the free software world had created something usable by the programmers' mothers, then maybe they were viable competitors. Maybe Microsoft was right.
+
+2~ Sleeping In
+
+While Microsoft focused its eyes and ears upon Washington, one of its biggest competitors was sleeping late. When Richard Schmalensee was prepping to take the stand in Washington, D.C., to defend Microsoft's outrageous fortune against the slings and arrows of a government inquisition, Alan Cox was still sleeping in. He didn't get up until 2:00 PM. at his home in Swansea on the south coast of Wales. This isn't too odd for him. His wife, Telsa, grouses frequently that it's impossible to get him moving each morning without a dose of Jolt Cola, the kind that's overloaded with caffeine.
+
+The night before, Cox and his wife went to see The Mask of Zorro, the latest movie that describes how Don Diego de la Vega assumed the secret identity of Zorro to free the Mexican people from the tyranny of Don Rafael Montero. In this version, Don Diego, played by Anthony Hopkins, chooses an orphan, Alejandro Murrieta, played by Antonio Banderas, and teaches him to be the next Zorro so the fight can continue. Its theme resonates with writers of open source software: a small band of talented, passionate warriors warding off the evil oppressor.
+
+Cox keeps an open diary and posts the entries on the web. "It's a nice looking film, with some great stunts and character play," he wrote, but
+
+_1 You could, however, have fitted the plot, including all the twists, on the back of a matchbox. That made it feel a bit ponderous so it only got a 6 out of 10 even though I'm feeling extremely smug because I spotted one of the errors in the film while watching it not by consulting imdb later.
+
+By the imdb, he meant the Internet Movie Database, which is one of the most complete listings of film credits, summaries, and glitches available on the Net. Users on the Internet write in with their own reviews and plot synopses, which the database dutifully catalogs and makes available to everyone. It's a reference book with thousands of authors.
+
+In this case, the big glitch in the film is the fact that one of the train gauges uses the metric system. Mexico converted to this system in 1860, but the film is set in 1841. Whoops. Busted.
+
+Telsa wrote in her diary, which she also posts to the Net under the title "The More Accurate Diary. Really."
+
+_1 Dragged him to cinema to see Zorro. I should have remembered he'd done some fencing and found something different. He also claimed he'd spotted a really obscure error. I checked afterward on IMDB, and was amazed. How did he see this?
+
+Cox is a big bear of a man who wears a long, brown wizard's beard. He has an agile, analytic mind that constantly picks apart a system and probes it for weaknesses. If he's playing a game, he plays until he finds a trick or a loophole that will give him the winning edge. If he's working around the house, he often ends up meddling with things until he fixes and improves them. Of course, he also often breaks them. His wife loves to complain about the bangs and crashes that come from his home office, where he often works until 6:30 in the morning.
+
+To his wife, this crashing, banging, and late-night hacking is the source of the halfhearted grousing inherent in every marriage. She obviously loves both his idiosyncrasies and the opportunity to discuss just how strange they can be. In January, Telsa was trying to find a way to automate her coffeepot by hooking it up to her computer.
+
+She wrote in her diary,
+
+_1 Alan is reluctant to get involved with any attempt to make a coffee-maker switch on via the computer now because he seems to think I will eventually switch it on with no water in and start a fire. I'm not the one who welded tinned spaghetti to the non-stick saucepan. Or set the wok on fire. More than once. Once with fifteen guests in the house. But there we are.
+
+To the rest of the world, this urge to putter and fiddle with machines is more than a source of marital comedy. Cox is one of the great threats to the continued dominance of Microsoft, despite the fact that he found a way to weld spaghetti to a nonstick pan. He is one of the core developers who help maintain the Linux kernel. In other words, he's one of the group of programmers who helps guide the development of the Linux operating system, the one Richard Schmalensee feels is such a threat to Microsoft. Cox is one of the few people whom Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, trusts to make important decisions about future directions. Cox is an expert on the networking guts of the system and is responsible for making sure that most of the new ideas that people suggest for Linux are considered carefully and integrated correctly. Torvalds defers to Cox on many matters about how Linux-based computers talk with other computers over a network. Cox works long and hard to find efficient ways for Linux to juggle multiple connections without slowing down or deadlocking.
+
+The group that works with Cox and Torvalds operates with no official structure. Millions of people use Linux to keep their computers running, and all of them have copies of the source code. In the 1980s, most companies began keeping the source code to their software as private as possible because they worried that a competitor might come along and steal the ideas the source spelled out. The source code, which is written in languages like C, Java, FORTRAN, BASIC, or Pascal, is meant to be read by programmers. Most companies didn't want other programmers understanding too much about the guts of their software. Information is power, and the companies instinctively played their cards close to their chests.
+
+When Linus Torvalds first started writing Linux in 1991, however, he decided to give away the operating system for free. He included all the source code because he wanted others to read it, comment upon it, and perhaps improve it. His decision was as much a radical break from standard programming procedure as a practical decision. He was a poor student at the time, and this operating system was merely a hobby. If he had tried to sell it, he wouldn't have gotten anything for it. He certainly had no money to build a company that could polish the software and market it. So he just sent out copies over the Internet.
+
+Sharing software had already been endorsed by Richard Stallman, a legendary programmer from MIT who believed that keeping source code private was a sin and a crime against humanity. A programmer who shares the source code lets others learn, and those others can contribute their ideas back into the mix. Closed source code leaves users frustrated because they can't learn about the software or fix any bugs. Stallman broke away from MIT in 1984 when he founded the Free Software Foundation. This became the organization that sponsored Stallman's grand project to free source code, a project he called GNU. In the 1980s, Stallman created very advanced tools like the GNU Emacs text editor, which people could use to write programs and articles. Others donated their work and the GNU project soon included a wide range of tools, utilities, and games. All of them were distributed for free.
+
+Torvalds looked at Stallman and decided to follow his lead with open source code. Torvalds's free software began to attract people who liked to play around with technology. Some just glanced at it. Others messed around for a few hours. Free is a powerful incentive. It doesn't let money, credit cards, purchase orders, and the boss's approval get in the way of curiosity. A few, like Alan Cox, had such a good time taking apart an operating system that they stayed on and began contributing back to the project.
+
+In time, more and more people like Alan Cox discovered Torvalds's little project on the Net. Some slept late. Others kept normal hours and worked in offices. Some just found bugs. Others fixed the bugs. Still others added new features that they wanted. Slowly, the operating system grew from a toy that satisfied the curiosity of computer scientists into a usable tool that powers supercomputers, web servers, and millions of other machines around the world.
+
+Today, about a thousand people regularly work with people like Alan Cox on the development of the Linux kernel, the official name for the part of the operating system that Torvalds started writing back in 1991. That may not be an accurate estimate because many people check in for a few weeks when a project requires their participation. Some follow everything, but most people are just interested in little corners. Many other programmers have contributed various pieces of software such as word processors or spreadsheets. All of these are bundled together into packages that are often called plain Linux or GNU/Linux and shipped by companies like Red Hat or more ad hoc groups like Debian.~{ /{Linux Weekly News}/ keeps a complete list of distributors. These range from the small, one- or two-man operations to the biggest, most corporate ones like Red Hat: Alzza Linux, Apokalypse, Armed Linux, Bad Penguin Linux, Bastille Linux, Best Linux (Finnish/Swedish), Bifrost, Black Cat Linux (Ukrainian/Russian), Caldera OpenLinux, CCLinux, Chinese Linux Extension, Complete Linux, Conectiva Linux (Brazilian), Debian GNU/Linux, Definite Linux, DemoLinux, DLD, DLite, DLX, DragonLinux, easyLinux, Enoch, Eridani Star System, Eonova Linux, e-smith server and gateway, Eurielec Linux (Spanish), eXecutive Linux, floppyfw, Floppix, Green Frog Linux, hal91, Hard Hat Linux, Immunix, Independence, Jurix, Kha0s Linux, KRUD, KSI-Linux, Laetos, LEM, Linux Cyrillic Edition, LinuxGT, Linux-Kheops (French), Linux MLD (Japanese), LinuxOne OS, LinuxPPC, LinuxPPP (Mexican), Linux Pro Plus, Linux Router Project, LOAF, LSD, Mandrake, Mastodon, MicroLinux, MkLinux, muLinux, nanoLinux II, NoMad Linux, OpenClassroom, Peanut Linux, Plamo Linux, PLD, Project Ballantain, PROSA, QuadLinux, Red Hat, Rock Linux, RunOnCD, ShareTheNet, Skygate, Slackware, Small Linux, Stampede, Stataboware, Storm Linux, SuSE, Tomsrtbt, Trinux, TurboLinux, uClinux, Vine Linux, WinLinux 2000, Xdenu, XTeamLinux, and Yellow Dog Linux. }~ While Torvalds only wrote the core kernel, people use his name, Linux, to stand for a whole body of software written by thousands of others. It's not exactly fair, but most let it slide. If there hadn't been the Linux kernel, the users wouldn't have the ability to run software on a completely free system. The free software would need to interact with something from Microsoft, Apple, or IBM. Of course, if it weren't for all of the other free software from Berkeley, the GNU project, and thousands of other garages around the world, there would be little for the Linux kernel to do.
+
+Officially, Linus Torvalds is the final arbiter for the kernel and the one who makes the final decisions about new features. In practice, the group runs like a loosely knit "ad-hocracy." Some people might care about a particular feature like the ability to interface with Macintoshes, and they write special code that makes this task easier. Others who run really big databases may want larger file systems that can store more information without limits.
+
+All of these people work at their own pace. Some work in their homes, like Alan Cox. Some work in university labs. Others work for businesses that use Linux and encourage their programmers to plug away so it serves their needs.
+
+The team is united by mailing lists. The Linux Kernel mailing list hooks up Cox in Britain, Torvalds in Silicon Valley, and the others around the globe. They post notes to the list and discuss ideas. Sometimes verbal fights break out, and sometimes everyone agrees. Sometimes people light a candle by actually writing new code to make the kernel better, and other times they just curse the darkness.
+
+Cox is now one of several people responsible for coordinating the addition of new code. He tests it for compatibility and guides Linux authors to make sure they're working together optimally. In essence, he tests every piece of incoming software to make sure all of the gauges work with the right system of measurement so there will be no glitches. He tries to remove the incompatibilities that marred Zorro.
+
+Often, others will duplicate Cox's work. Some new features are very popular and have many cooks minding the stew. The technology for speeding up computers with multiple CPUs lets each computer harness the extra power, so many list members test it frequently. They want the fastest machines they can get, and smoothing the flow of data between the CPUs is the best way to let the machines cooperate.
+
+Other features are not so popular, and they're tackled by the people who need the features. Some people want to hook their Linux boxes up to Macintoshes. Doing that smoothly can require some work in the kernel. Others may want to add special code to enable a special device like a high-speed camera or a strange type of disk drive. These groups often work on their own but coordinate their solutions with the main crowd. Ideally, they'll be able to come up with some patches that solve their problem without breaking some other part of the system.
+
+It's a very social and political process that unrolls in slow motion through e-mail messages. One person makes a suggestion. Others may agree. Someone may squabble with the idea because it seems inelegant, sloppy, or, worst of all, dangerous. After some time, a rough consensus evolves. Easy problems can be solved in days or even minutes, but complicated decisions can wait as the debate rages for years.
+
+Each day, Cox and his virtual colleagues pore through the lists trying to figure out how to make Linux better, faster, and more usable. Sometimes they skip out to watch a movie. Sometimes they go for hikes. But one thing they don't do is spend months huddled in conference rooms trying to come up with legal arguments. Until recently, the Linux folks didn't have money for lawyers, and that means they didn't get sidetracked by figuring out how to get big and powerful people like Richard Schmalensee to tell a court that there's no monopoly in the computer operating system business.
+
+2~ Suits Against Hackers
+
+Schmalensee and Cox couldn't be more different from each other. One is a career technocrat who moves easily between the government and MIT. The other is what used to be known as an absentminded professor--the kind who works when he's really interested in a problem. It just so happens that Cox is pretty intrigued with building a better operating system than the various editions of Windows that form the basis of Microsoft's domination of the computer industry.
+
+The battle between Linux and Microsoft is lining up to be the classic fight between the people like Schmalensee and the people like Cox. On one side are the armies of lawyers, lobbyists, salesmen, and expensive executives who are armed with patents, lawsuits, and legislation. They are skilled at moving the levers of power until the gears line up just right and billions of dollars pour into their pockets. They know how to schmooze, toady, beg, or even threaten until they wear the mantle of authority and command the piety and devotion of the world. People buy Microsoft because it's "the standard." No one decreed this, but somehow it has come to be.
+
+On the other side are a bunch of guys who just like playing with computers and will do anything to take them apart. They're not like the guy in the song by John Mellencamp who sings "I fight authority and authority always wins." Some might have an attitude, but most just want to look at the insides of their computers and rearrange them to hook up to coffee machines or networks. They want to fidget with the guts of their machines. If they weld some spaghetti to the insides, so be it.
+
+Normally, these battles between the suits and the geeks don't threaten the established order. There are university students around the world building solar-powered cars, but they don't actually pose a threat to the oil or auto industries. "21," a restaurant in New York, makes a great hamburger, but they're not going to put McDonald's out of business. The experimentalists and the perfectionists don't usually knock heads with the corporations who depend upon world domination for their profits. Except when it comes to software.
+
+Software is different from cars or hamburgers. Once someone writes the source code, copying the source costs next to nothing. That makes it much easier for tinkerers like Cox to have a global effect. If Cox, Stallman, Torvalds, and his chums just happen to luck upon something that's better than Microsoft, then the rest of the world can share their invention for next to nothing. That's what makes Cox, Torvalds, and their buddies a credible threat no matter how often they sleep late.
+
+It's easy to get high off of the idea alone. A few guys sleeping late and working in bedrooms aren't supposed to catch up to a cash engine like Microsoft. They aren't supposed to create a webserving engine that controls more than half of the web. They aren't supposed to create a graphical user interface for drawing windows and icons on the screen that's much better than Windows. They aren't supposed to create supercomputers with sticker prices of $3,000. Money isn't supposed to lose.
+
+Of course, the folks who are working on free software projects have advantages that money can't buy. These programmers don't need lawyers to create licenses, negotiate contracts, or argue over terms. Their software is free, and lawyers lose interest pretty quickly when there's no money around. The free software guys don't need to scrutinize advertising copy. Anyone can download the software and just try it. The programmers also don't need to sit in the corner when their computer crashes and complain about the idiot who wrote the software. Anyone can read the source code and fix the glitches.
+
+The folks in the free source software world are, in other words, grooving on freedom. They're high on the original American dream of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The founders of the United States of America didn't set out to create a wealthy country where citizens spent their days worrying whether they would be able to afford new sport utility vehicles when the stock options were vested. The founders just wanted to secure the blessings of liberty for posterity. Somehow, the wealth followed.
+
+This beautiful story is easy to embrace: a group of people started out swapping cool software on the Net and ended up discovering that their free sharing created better software than what a corporation could produce with a mountain of cash.
+
+The programmers found that unrestricted cooperation made it easy for everyone to contribute. No price tags kept others away. No stereotypes or biases excluded anyone. The software and the source code were on the Net for anyone to read.
+
+Wide-open cooperation also turned out to be wide-open competition because the best software won the greatest attention. The corporate weasels with the ear of the president could not stop a free source software project from shipping. No reorganization or downsizing could stop people from working on free software if they wanted to hack. The freedom to create was more powerful than money.
+
+That's an idyllic picture, and the early success of Linux, FreeBSD, and other free packages makes it tempting to think that the success will build. Today, open source servers power more than 50 percent of the web servers on the Internet, and that is no small accomplishment. Getting thousands, if not millions, of programmers to work together is quite amazing given how quirky programmers can be. The ease of copying makes it possible to think that Alan Cox could get up late and still move the world.
+
+But the 1960s were also an allegedly idyllic time when peace, love, and sharing were going to create a beautiful planet where everyone gave to everyone else in an eternal golden braid of mutual respect and caring. Everyone assumed that the same spirit that so quickly and easily permeated the college campuses and lovefests in the parks was bound to sweep the world. The communes were really happening, man. But somehow, the groovy beat never caught on beyond those small nests of easy caring and giving. Somehow, the folks started dropping back in, getting real jobs, taking on real mortgages, and buying back into the world where money was king.
+
+Over the years, the same sad ending has befallen many communes, utopian visions, and hypnotic vibes. Freedom is great. It allows brilliant inventors to work independently of the wheels of power. But capital is another powerful beast that drives innovation. The great communes often failed because they never converted their hard work into money, making it difficult for them to save and invest. Giving things away may be, like, really groovy, but it doesn't build a nest egg.
+
+Right now, the free software movement stands at a crucial moment in its history. In the past, a culture of giving and wide-open sharing let thousands of programmers build a great operating system that was, in many ways, better than anything coming from the best companies. Many folks began working on Linux, FreeBSD, and thousands of other projects as hobbies, but now they're waking up to find IBM, HewlettPackard, Apple, and all the other big boys pounding on their door. If the kids could create something as nice as Linux, everyone began to wonder whether these kids really had enough good stuff to go the distance and last nine innings against the greatest power hitters around.
+
+Perhaps the free software movement will just grow faster and better as more people hop on board. More users mean more eyes looking for bugs. More users mean more programmers writing new source code for new features. More is better.
+
+On the other hand, sharing may be neat, but can it beat the power of capital? Microsoft's employees may be just serfs motivated by the dream that someday their meager stock options will be worth enough to retire upon, but they have a huge pile of cash driving them forward. This capital can be shifted very quickly. If Bill Gates wants 1,000 programmers to create something, he can wave his hand. If he wants to buy 1,000 computers, it takes him a second. That's the power of capital.
+
+Linus Torvalds may be on the cover of magazines, but he can't do anything with the wave of a hand. He must charm and cajole the thousands of folks on the Linux mailing list to make a change. Many of the free software projects may generate great code, but they have to beg for computers. The programmers might even surprise him and come up with an even better solution. They've done it in the past. But no money means that no one has to do what anyone says.
+
+In the past, the free software movement was like the movies in which Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland put on a great show in the barn. That part won't change. Cool kids with a dream will still be spinning up great programs that will be wonderful gifts for the world.
+
+But shows that are charming and fresh in a barn can become thin and weak on a big stage on Broadway. The glitches and raw functionality of Linux and free software don't seem too bad if you know that they're built by kids in their spare time. Building real tools for real companies, moms, police stations, and serious users everywhere is another matter. Everyone may be hoping that sharing, caring, and curiosity are enough, but no one knows for certain. Maybe capital will end up winning. Maybe it won't. It's freedom versus assurance; it's wide-open sharing versus stock options; it's cooperation versus intimidation; it's the geeks versus the suits, all in one knockdown, hack-till-you-drop, winner-take-everything fight.
+
+1~ Lists
+
+While Alan Cox was sleeping late and Microsoft was putting Richard Schmalensee on the stand, the rest of the open source software world was tackling their own problems. Some were just getting up, others were in the middle of their day, and still others were just going to sleep. This is not just because the open source hackers like to work at odd times around the clock. Some do. But they also live around the globe in all of the different time zones. The sun never sets on the open source empire.
+
+On January 14, 1999, for instance, Peter Jeremy, an Australian, announced that he had just discovered a potential Y2K problem in the control software in the central database that helped maintain the FreeBSD source code. He announced this by posting a note to a mailing list that forwarded the message to many other FreeBSD users. The problem was that the software simply appended the two characters "19"
+to the front of the year. When the new millennium came about a year later, the software would start writing the new date as "19100." Oops. The problem was largely cosmetic because it only occurred in some of the support software used by the system.
+
+FreeBSD is a close cousin to the Linux kernel and one that predates it in some ways. It descends from a long tradition of research and development of operating systems at the University of California at Berkeley. The name BSD stands for "Berkeley Software Distribution," the name given to one of the first releases of operating system source code that Berkeley made for the world. That small package grew, morphed, and absorbed many other contributions over the years.
+
+Referring to Linux and FreeBSD as cousins is an apt term because they share much of the same source code in the same way that cousins share some of the same genes. Both borrow source code and ideas from each other. If you buy a disk with FreeBSD, which you can do from companies like Walnut Creek, you may get many of the same software packages that you get from a disk from Red Hat Linux. Both include, for instance, some of the GNU compilers that turn source code into something that can be understood by computers.
+
+FreeBSD, in fact, has some of its own fans and devotees. The FreeBSD site lists thousands of companies large and small that use the software. Yahoo, the big Internet directory, game center, and news operation, uses FreeBSD in some of its servers. So does Blue Mountain Arts, the electronic greeting card company that is consistently one of the most popular sites on the web. There are undoubtedly thousands more who aren't listed on the FreeBSD site. The software produced by the FreeBSD project is, after all, free, so people can give it away, share it with their friends, or even pretend they are "stealing" it by making a copy of a disk at work. No one really knows how many copies of FreeBSD are out there because there's no reason to count. Microsoft may need to count heads so they can bill everyone for using Windows, but FreeBSD doesn't have that problem.
+
+That morning, Peter Jeremy's message went out to everyone who subscribed to the FreeBSD mailing list. Some users who cared about the Y2K bug could take Jeremy's patch and use it to fix their software directly. They didn't need to wait for some central bureaucracy to pass judgment on the information. They didn't need to wait for the Y2K guy at FreeBSD to get around to vetting the change. Everyone could just insert the fix because they had all of the source code available to them.
+
+Of course, most people never use all their freedoms. In this case, most people didn't have to bother dealing with Jeremy's patch because they waited for the official version. The FreeBSD infrastructure absorbed the changes into its source code vaults, and the changes appeared in the next fully updated version. This new complete version is where most people first started using the fix. Jeremy is a programmer who created a solution that was easy for other programmers to use. Most people, however, aren't programmers, and they want their software to be easy to use. Most programmers aren't even interested in poking around inside their machines. Everyone wants the solution to either fix itself or come as close to that as possible.
+
+Jeremy's message was just one of the hundreds percolating through the FreeBSD community that day. Some fell on deaf ears, some drew snotty comments, and a few gathered some real attention. The mailing lists were fairly complex ecologies where ideas blossomed and grew before they faded away and died.
+
+Of course, it's not fair to categorize the FreeBSD world as a totally decentralized anarchy. There is one central team led by one man, Jordan Hubbard, who organizes the leadership of a core group of devoted programmers. The group runs the website, maintains an up-to-date version of FreeBSD, and sponsors dozens of lists devoted to different corners or features. One list focuses on hooking up the fast high-performance SCSI hard disks that are popular with people who demand high-performance systems. Another concentrates on building in enough security to keep out attackers who might try to sneak in through the Internet.
+
+That January 14, a man in Great Britain, Roger Hardiman, was helping a man in Switzerland, Reto Trachsel, hook up a Hauppauge video card to his system. They were communicating on the Multimedia mailing list devoted to finding ways to add audio and video functions to FreeBSD systems. Trachsel posted a note to the list asking for information on how to find the driver software that would make sure that the data coming out of the Hauppauge television receiver would be generally available to the rest of the computer. Hardiman pointed out a solution, but cautioned, "If your Hauppauge card has the MSP34xx Stereo Decoder audio chip, you may get no sound when watching TV. I should get this fixed in the next week or two."
+
+Solutions like these float around the FreeBSD community. Most people don't really care if they can watch television with their computer, but a few do. The easy access to source code and drivers means that the few can go off and do their own thing without asking some major company for permission. The big companies like Microsoft and Apple, for instance, have internal projects that are producing impressive software for creating and displaying multimedia extravaganzas on computers. But they have a strict view of the world: the company is the producer of high-quality tools that make their way to the consumer who uses them and pays for them in one way or another.
+
+The list ecology is more organic and anti-hierarchical. Everyone has access to the source code. Everyone can make changes. Everyone can do what they want. There is no need for the FreeBSD management to meet and decide "Multimedia is good." There is no need for a project team to prioritize and list action items and best-of-breed deliverables. Someone in Switzerland decides he wants to hook up a television receiver to his computer and, what do you know, someone in Great Britain has already solved the problem. Well, he's solved it if you don't have an MSP34xx stereo decoder chip in your card. But that should be fixed sooner or later, too.
+
+2~ Free Doesn't Mean Freeloading
+
+There are thousands of other mailing lists linking thousands of other projects. It's hard to actually put a number to them because the projects grow, merge, and fade as people's interests wax and wane. The best flourish, and the others just drift away.
+
+Life on the mailing lists is often a bit more brutal and short than life on earth. The work on the project needs to split up. The volunteers need to organize themselves so that great software can be written.
+
+On that January 14, a new member of the WINE list was learning just how volunteering works. The guy posted a note to the list that described his Diamond RIO portable music device that lets you listen to MP3 files whenever you want. "I think the WINE development team should drop everything and work on getting this program to work as it doesn't seem like Diamond wants to release a Linux utility for the Rio," he wrote.
+
+WINE stands for "WINE Is Not an Emulator," which is a joke that only programmers and free software lovers can get. It's first a play on the recursive acronym for the GNU project ("GNU is not UNIX"). It's also a bit of a political statement for programmers. An emulator is a piece of software that makes one computer act like another. A company named Connectix, for instance, sells an emulator that lets a Macintosh behave like a Windows PC so anyone can use their Windows software on the Mac. Emulators, however, are pretty slow because they're constantly translating information on the fly. Anyone who has tried to hold a conversation with someone who speaks a different language knows how frustrating it can be to require a translator.
+
+The WINE project is an ambitious attempt to knock out one of the most important structural elements of the Microsoft monopoly. Software written for Windows only functions when people buy a version of Windows from Microsoft. When you purchase a Connectix emulator for the Mac, you get a version of Windows bundled with it.
+
+The WINE project is a group of people who are trying to clone Windows. Well, not clone all of it. They just want to clone what is known as the Win32 API, a panoply of features that make it easier to write software for a Microsoft machine. A programmer who wants to create a new button for a Windows computer doesn't need to write all of the instructions for drawing a frame with three-dimensional shading. A Microsoft employee has already bundled those instructions into the Win32 API. There are millions of functions in these kits that help programmers. Some play audio files, others draw complex images or movies. These features make it easy for programmers to write software for Windows because some of the most repetitive work is already finished.
+
+The WINE clone of the Win32 is a fascinating example of how open source starts slowly and picks up steam. Bob Amstadt started the project in 1993, but soon turned it over to Alexandre Julliard, who has been the main force behind it. The project, although still far from finished, has produced some dramatic accomplishments, making it possible to run major programs like Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel on a Linux box without using Windows. In essence, the WINE software is doing a good enough job acting like Windows that it's fooling Excel and Word. If you can trick the cousins, that's not too bad.
+
+The WINE home page (www.winehq.com) estimates that more than 90,000 people use WINE regularly to run programs for Microsoft Windows without buying Windows. About 140 or more people regularly contribute to the project by writing code or fixing bugs. Many are hobbyists who want the thrill of getting their software to run without Windows, but some are corporate programmers. The corporate programmers want to sell their software to the broadest possible marketplace, but they don't want to take the time to rewrite everything. If they can get their software working well with WINE, then people who use Linux or BSD can use the software that was written for Microsoft Windows.
+
+The new user who wanted to get his RIO player working with his Linux computer soon got a rude awakening. Andreas Mohr, a German programmer, wrote back,
+
+_1 Instead of suggesting the WINE team to "drop everything" in order to get a relatively minor thing like PMP300 to work, would you please install WINE, test it, read documentation/bug reports and post a useful bug report here? There are zillions of very useful and impressing Windoze apps out there . . . (After all that's only my personal opinion, maybe that was a bit too harsh ;-)
+
+Most new free software users soon discover that freedom isn't always easy. If you want to get free software, you're going to have to put in some work. Sometimes you get lucky. The man in Switzerland who posted his note on the same day found out that someone in Britain was solving his problems for him. There was no one, however, working on the RIO software and making sure it worked with WINE.
+
+Mohr's suggestion was to file a bug report that ranks the usability of the software so the programmers working on WINE can tweak it. This is just the first step in the free software experience. Someone has to notice the problem and fix it. In this case, someone needs to hook up their Diamond RIO MP3 player to a Linux box and try to move MP3 files with the software written for Windows. Ideally, the software will work perfectly, and now all Linux users will be able to use RIO players. In reality, there might be problems or glitches. Some of the graphics on the screen might be wrong. The software might not download anything at all. The first step is for someone to test the product and write up a detailed report about what works and what doesn't.
+
+At the time of this writing, no one has stepped up to the plate. There are no reports about the Diamond player in the WINE database. Maybe the new user didn't have time. Maybe he wasn't technically sophisticated enough to get WINE running in the first place. It's still not a simple system to use. In any case, his bright idea fell by the wayside.
+
+The mailing lists buzz with idle chatter about neat, way-out ideas that never come to fruition. Some people see this as a limitation of the free software world. A corporation, however, is able to dispatch a team of programmers to create solutions. These companies have money to spend on polishing a product and making sure it works. Connectix, for instance, makes an emulator that lets Mac users play games written for the Sony PlayStation. The company employs a substantial number of people who simply play all the Sony games from beginning to end until all of the bugs are gone. It's a rough job, but someone has to do it.
+
+WINE can't pay anyone, and that means that great ideas sometimes get ignored. The free software community, however, doesn't necessarily see this as a limitation. If the RIO player were truly important, someone else would come along and pick up the project. Someone else would do the work and file a bug report so everyone could use the software. If there's no one else, then maybe the RIO software isn't that important to the Linux community. Work gets done when someone really cares enough to do it.
+
+These mailing lists are the fibers that link the open source community into the network of minds. Before e-mail, they were just a bunch of rebels haunting the moors and rattling around their basements inventing monstrous machines. Now they're smoothly tuned mechanisms coordinated by messages, notes, and missives. They're not madmen who roar at dinner parties about the bad technology from Borg-like corporations. They've got friends now. One person may be a flake, but a group might be on to something.
+
+1~ Image
+
+Consider this picture: Microsoft is a megalith built by one man with a towering ego. It may not be fair to lump all of the serfs in the corporate cubicle farms in Redmond into one big army of automatons, but it sure conjures a striking image that isn't altogether inaccurate. Microsoft employees are fiercely loyal and often more dedicated to the cause than the average worker bee. Bill Gates built the company from scratch with the help of several college friends, and this group maintains tight control over all parts of the empire. The flavor of the organization is set by one man with the mind and the ego to micromanage it all.
+
+Now consider the image of the members of the free software revolution. Practically every newspaper article and colorful feature describing the group talks about a ragtag army of scruffy, bearded programmers who are just a bit too pale from spending their days in front of a computer screen. The writers love to conjure up a picture of a group that looks like it came stumbling out of some dystopian fantasy movie like Mad Max or A Boy and His Dog. They're the outsiders. They're a tightly knit band of rebel outcasts who are planning to free the people from their Microsoft slavery and return to the people the power usurped by Mr. Gates. What do they want? Freedom! When do they want it? Now!
+
+There's only one problem with this tidy, Hollywood-ready image: it's far from true. While Microsoft is one big corporation with reins of control that keep everyone in line, there is no strong or even weak organization that binds the world of open source software. The movement, if it could be called that, is comprised of individuals, each one free to do whatever he wants with the software. That's the point: no more shackles. No more corporate hegemony. Just pure source code that runs fast, clean, and light, straight through the night.
+
+This doesn't mean that the image is all wrong. Some of the luminaries like Richard Stallman and Alan Cox have been known to sport long, Rip van Winkle-grade beards. Some folks are strikingly pale. A few could bathe a bit more frequently. Caffeine is a bit too popular with them. Some people look as if they were targets for derision by the idiots on the high school football team.
+
+But there are many counterexamples. Linus Torvalds drives a Pontiac and lives in a respectable home with a wife and two children. He works during the day at a big company and spends his evenings shopping and doing errands. His life would be perfectly categorized as late 1950s sitcom if his wife, Tove, weren't a former Finnish karate champion and trucks weren't driving up to his house to deliver top-of-the-line computers like a 200-pound monstrosity with four Xeon processors. He told VAR Business, "A large truck brought it to our house and the driver was really confused. He said, 'You don't have a loading dock?'" On second thought, those are the kind of shenanigans that drive most sitcoms.
+
+There's no easy way to classify the many free source code contributors. Many have children, but many don't. Some don't mention them, some slip in references to them, and others parade them around with pride. Some are married, some are not. Some are openly gay. Some exist in sort of a presexual utopia of early teenage boyhood. Some of them are still in their early teens. Some aren't.
+
+Some contributors are fairly described as "ragtag," but many aren't. Many are corporate droids who work in cubicle farms during the day and create free software projects at night. Some work at banks. Some work on databases for human resource departments. Some build websites. Everyone has a day job, and many keep themselves clean and ready to be promoted to the next level. Bruce Perens, one of the leaders of the Debian group, used to work at the Silicon Valley glitz factory Pixar and helped write some of the software that created the hit Toy Story.
+
+Still, he told me, "At the time Toy Story was coming out, there was a space shuttle flying with the Debian GNU/Linux distribution on it controlling a biological experiment. People would say 'Are you proud of working at Pixar?' and then I would say my hobby software was running on the space shuttle now. That was a turnaround point when I realized that Linux might become my career."
+
+In fact, it's not exactly fair to categorize many of the free software programmers as a loosely knit band of rebel programmers out to destroy Microsoft. It's a great image that feeds the media's need to highlight conflict, but it's not exactly true. The free software movement began long before Microsoft was a household word. Richard Stallman wrote his manifesto setting out some of the precepts in 1984. He was careful to push the notion that programmers always used to share the source code to software until the 1980s, when corporations began to develop the shrink-wrapped software business. In the olden days of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, programmers always shared. While Stallman has been known to flip his middle finger out at the name Bill Gates for the reporting pleasure of a writer from Salon magazine, he's not after Microsoft per se. He just wants to return computing to the good old days when the source was free and sharing was possible.
+
+The same holds for most of the other programmers. Some contribute source code because it helps them with their day job. Some stay up all night writing code because they're obsessed. Some consider it an act of charity, a kind of noblesse oblige. Some want to fix bugs that bother them. Some want fame, glory, and the respect of all other computer programmers. There are thousands of reasons why new open source software gets written, and very few of them have anything to do with Microsoft.
+
+In fact, it's a bad idea to see the free software revolution as having much to do with Microsoft. Even if Linux, FreeBSD, and other free software packages win, Microsoft will probably continue to fly along quite happily in much the same way that IBM continues to thrive even after losing the belt of the Heavyweight Computing Champion of the World to Microsoft. Anyone who spends his or her time focused on the image of a ragtag band of ruffians and orphans battling the Microsoft leviathan is bound to miss the real story.
+
+The fight is really just a by-product of the coming of age of the information business. The computer trade is rapidly maturing and turning into a service industry. In the past, the manufacture of computers and software took place on assembly lines and in cubicle farms. People bought shrink-wrapped items from racks. These were items that were manufactured. Now both computers and software are turning into dirtcheap commodities whose only source of profit is customization and handholding. The real money now is in service.
+
+Along the way, the free software visionaries stumbled onto a curious fact. They could give away software, and people would give back improvements to it. Software cost practically nothing to duplicate, so it wasn't that hard to just give it away after it was written. At first, this was sort of a pseudo-communist thing to do, but today it seems like a brilliant business decision. If the software is turning into a commodity with a price falling toward zero, why not go all the way and gain whatever you can by freely sharing the code? The profits could come by selling services like programming and education. The revolution isn't about defeating Microsoft; it's just a change in the whole way the world buys and uses computers.
+
+The revolution is also the latest episode in the battle between the programmers and the suits. In a sense, it's a battle for the hearts and minds of the people who are smart enough to create software for the world. The programmers want to write challenging tools that impress their friends. The suits want to rein in programmers and channel their energy toward putting more money in the pockets of the corporation. The suits hope to keep programmers devoted by giving them fat paychecks, but it's not clear that programmers really want the cash. The freedom to do whatever you want with source code is intrinsically rewarding. The suits want to keep software under lock and key so they can sell it and maximize revenues. The free software revolution is really about a bunch of programmers saying, "Screw the cash. I really want the source code."
+
+The revolution is also about defining wealth in cyberspace. Microsoft promises to build neat tools that will help us get wherever we want to go today--if we keep writing larger and larger checks. The open source movement promises software with practically no limitations. Which is a better deal? The Microsoft millionaires probably believe in proprietary software and suggest that the company wouldn't have succeeded as it did if it didn't provide something society wanted. They created good things, and the people rewarded them.
+
+But the open source movement has also created great software that many think is better than anything Microsoft has built. Is society better off with a computer infrastructure controlled by a big corporate machine driven by cash? Or does sharing the source code create better software? Are we at a point where money is not the best vehicle for lubricating the engines of societal advancement? Many in the free software world are pondering these questions.
+
+Anyone who tunes in to the battle between Microsoft and the world expecting to see a good old-fashioned fight for marketplace domination is going to miss the real excitement. Sure, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Mach, and the thousands of other free software projects are going to come out swinging. Microsoft is going to counterpunch with thousands of patents defended by armies of lawyers. Some of the programmers might even be a bit weird, and a few will be entitled to wear the adjective "ragtag." But the real revolution has nothing to do with whether Bill Gates keeps his title as King of the Hill. It has nothing to do with whether the programmers stay up late and work in the nude. It has nothing to do with poor grooming, extravagant beards, Coke-bottle glasses, black trench coats, or any of the other stereotypes that fuel the media's image.
+
+It's about the gradual commodification of software and hardware. It's about the need for freedom and the quest to create cool software. It's about a world just discovering how much can be accomplished when information can be duplicated for next to nothing.
+
+The real struggle is finding out how long society can keep hanging ten toes off the edge of the board as we get carried by the wave of freedom. Is there enough energy in the wave and enough grace in society to ride it all the way to the shore? Or will something wicked, something evil, or something sloppy come along and mess it up?
+
+1~ College
+
+2~ Speaking in Tongues
+
+I was part of the free software movement for many years, but I didn't know it. When I was a graduate student, I released the source code to a project. In 1991, that was the sort of thing to do in universities. Publishing the source code to a project was part of publishing a paper about it. And the academy put publishing pretty high on its list.
+
+My first big release came in May 1991 when I circulated a program that let people hide secret messages as innocuous text. My program turned any message into some cute play-by-play from a baseball game, like "No contact in Mudsville! It's a fastball with wings. No wood on that one. He's uncorking what looks like a spitball. Whooooosh! Strike!
+He's out of there." The secret message was encoded in the choices of phrases. "He's out of there" meant something different from "He pops it up to Orville Baskethands." The program enabled information to mutate into other forms, just like the shapeshifting monsters from The X-Files. I sent out an announcement to the influential newsgroup comp.risks and soon hundreds of people were asking for free copies of the software.
+
+I created this program because Senator Joe Biden introduced a bill into the Senate that would require the manufacturers of all computer networks to provide a way for the police to get copies of any message. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, among others, was afraid that they would have trouble obtaining evidence if people were able to encode data. My software illustrated how hard it would be to stop the flow of information.
+
+The best, and perhaps most surprising, part of the whole bloom of email came when a fellow I had never met, D. Jason Penney, converted the program from the fading Pascal into the more popular C. He did this on his own and sent the new, converted software back to me. When I asked him whether I could distribute his version, he said that it was my program. He was just helping out.
+
+I never thought much more about that project until I started to write this book. While two or three people a month would write asking for copies of the software, it never turned into more than a bit of research into the foundations of secret codes and a bit of a mathematical parlor trick. It was more an academic exercise than a prototype of something that could rival Microsoft and make me rich.
+
+In the past, I thought the project never developed into more than a cute toy because there was no market for it. The product wasn't readily useful for businesses, and no one starts a company without the hope that millions of folks desperately need a product. Projects needed programmers and programmers cost money. I just assumed that other free software projects would fall into the same chasm of lack of funding.
+
+Now, after investigating the free software world, I am convinced that my project was a small success. Penney's contribution was not just a strange aberration but a relatively common event on the Internet. People are quite willing to take a piece of software that interests them, modify it to suit their needs, and then contribute it back to the world. Sure, most people only have a few hours a week to work on such projects, but they add up. Penney's work made my software easier to use for many C programmers, thus spreading it further.
+
+In fact, I may have been subconsciously belittling the project. It took only three or four days of my time and a bit more of Penney's, but it was a complete version of a powerful encryption system that worked well. Yes, there was no money flowing, but that may have made it more of a success. Penney probably wouldn't have given me his C version if he knew I was going to sell it. He probably would have demanded a share. Lawyers would have gotten involved. The whole project would have been gummed up with contracts, release dates, distribution licenses, and other hassles that just weren't worth it for a neat way to hide messages. Sure, money is good, but money also brings hassles.
+
+2~ Cash Versus Sharing
+
+In the 1980s and 1990s, programmers in universities still shared heavily with the world. The notion of sharing source code with the world owes a great deal to the academic tradition of publishing results so others can read them, think about them, critique them, and ultimately extend them. Many of the government granting agencies like the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency fostered this sharing by explicitly requiring that people with grants release the source code to the world with no restrictions. Much of the Internet was created by people who gave out these kinds of contracts and insisted upon shared standards that weren't proprietary. This tradition has fallen on harder times as universities became more obsessed with the profits associated with patents and contract research, but the idea is so powerful that it's hard to displace.
+
+The free software movement in particular owes a great deal to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Richard Stallman, the man who is credited with starting the movement, began working in MIT's computer labs in the 1970s. He gets credit for sparking the revolution because he wrote the GNU Manifesto in 1984. The document spelled out why it's essential to share the source code to a program with others. Stallman took the matter to heart because he also practiced what he wrote about and contributed several great programs, including a text editor with thousands of features.
+
+Of course, Stallman doesn't take credit for coming up with the idea of sharing source code. He remembers his early years at MIT quite fondly and speaks of how people would share their source code and software without restrictions. The computers were new, complicated, and temperamental. Cooperation was the only way that anyone could accomplish anything. That's why IBM shared the source code to the operating systems on their mainframes though the early part of the 1960s.
+
+This tradition started to fade by the early 1980s as the microcomputer revolution began. Companies realized that most people just wanted software that worked. They didn't need the source code and all the instructions that only programmers could read. So companies quickly learned that they could keep the source code to themselves and keep their customers relatively happy while locking out competitors. They were kings who built a wall to keep out the intruders.
+
+The GNU Manifesto emerged as the most radical reaction to the trend toward locking up the source code. While many people looked at the GNU Manifesto with confusion, others became partial converts. They began donating code that they had written. Some tossed random utility programs into the soup, some offered games, and some sent in sophisticated packages that ran printers, networks, or even networks of printers. A few even became complete disciples and started writing code full-time for the GNU project. This growth was largely ignored by the world, which became entranced with the growth of Microsoft. More and more programmers, however, were spending more time mingling with the GNU project, and it was taking hold.
+
+In the early 1980s, an operating system known as UNIX had grown to be very popular in universities and laboratories. AT&T designed and built it at Bell Labs throughout the 1970s. In the beginning, the company shared the source code with researchers and computer scientists in universities, in part because the company was a monopoly that was only allowed to sell telephone service. UNIX was just an experiment that the company started to help run the next generation of telephone switches, which were already turning into specialized computers.
+
+In the beginning, the project was just an academic exercise, but all of the research and sharing helped create a nice operating system with a wide audience. UNIX turned out to be pretty good. When the phone company started splitting up in 1984, the folks at AT&T wondered how they could turn a profit from what was a substantial investment in time and money. They started by asking people who used UNIX at the universities to sign non-disclosure agreements.
+
+Stallman looked at this as mind control and the death of a great tradition. Many others at the universities were more pragmatic. AT&T had given plenty of money and resources to the university. Wasn't it fair for the university to give something back?
+
+Stallman looked at this a bit differently. Yes, AT&T was being nice when they gave grants to the university, but weren't masters always kind when they gave bowls of gruel to their slaves? The binary version AT&T started distributing to the world was just gruel for Stallman. The high priests and lucky few got to read the source code. They got to eat the steak and lobster spread. Stallman saw this central, controlling, corporate force as the enemy, and he began naming his work GNU, which was a recursive acronym that stood for "GNU's Not UNIX." The GNU project aimed to produce a complete working operating system that was going to do everything that UNIX did for none of the moral, emotional, or ethical cost. Users would be able to read the source code to Stallman's OS and modify it without signing a tough non-disclosure agreement drafted by teams of lawyers. They would be able to play with their software in complete freedom. Stallman notes that he never aimed to produce an operating system that didn't cost anything. The world may be entranced with the notion of a price tag of zero, but for Stallman, that was just a side effect of the unrestricted sharing.
+
+Creating a stand-alone system that would do everything with free software was his dream, but it was a long way from fruition, and Stallman was smart enough to start off with a manageable project. He began by producing a text editor known as GNU Emacs. The program was a big hit because it was highly customizable. Some people just used the program to edit papers, but others programmed it to accomplish fancier tasks such as reading their e-mail and generating automatic responses. One programmer was told by management that he had to include plenty of comments in his source code, so he programmed GNU Emacs to insert them automatically. One professor created a version of GNU Emacs that would automatically insert random praise into requests to his secretary.~{ "Where are those reports I asked you to copy? You're doing a great job. Thanks for all the help," on one day. "Are you ever going to copy those reports? You're doing a great job. Thanks for all the help," on the next. }~ Practically everything in Emacs could be changed or customized. If you didn't like hitting the delete key to fix a mistyped character, then you could arrange for the 6 key to do the same thing. This might make it hard to type numbers, but the user was free to mess up his life as much as he wanted.
+
+It took Microsoft years to catch up with Stallman's solution, and even then they implemented it in a dangerous way. They let people create little custom programs for modifying documents, but they forgot to prevent malicious code from crying havoc. Today, Microsoft Word allows little programs named macro viruses to roam around the planet. Open up a Word document, and a virus might be lurking.
+
+In the 1980s, the free software world devoted itself to projects like this. GNU Emacs became a big hit in the academic world where system administrators could install it for free and not worry about counting students or negotiating licenses. Also, smart minds were better able to appreciate the cool flexibility Stallman had engineered into the system. Clever folks wasted time by adding filters to the text editor that would scan their text and translate it into, like, Valley Girl talk or more urban jive.
+
+The GNU project grew by accepting contributions from many folks across the country. Some were fairly sophisticated, eye-catching programs like GNU Chess, a program that was quite competitive and as good as all but the best packages. Most were simple tools for handling many of the day-to-day chores for running a computer system. System administrators, students, and programmers from around the country would often take on small jobs because they felt compelled to fix something. When they were done, a few would kick the source code over to the GNU project.
+
+Stallman's biggest programming project for GNU during the 1980s was writing the GNU C compiler (GCC). This program was an important tool that converted the C source code written by humans into the machine code understood by computers. The GCC package was an important cornerstone for the GNU project in several ways. First, it was one of the best compilers around. Second, it could easily move from machine to machine. Stallman personally ported it to several different big platforms like Intel's x86 line of processors. Third, the package was free, which in the case of GNU software meant that anyone was free to use and modify the software.
+
+The GCC provided an important harmonizing effect to the GNU project. Someone could write his program on a machine built by Digital, compile it with GCC, and be fairly certain that it would run on all other machines with GCC. That allowed the GNU software to migrate freely throughout the world, from machine to machine, from Sun to Apollo to DEC to Intel.
+
+The GCC's license also attracted many developers and curious engineers. Anyone could use the source code for their projects, and many did. Over time, the compiler moved from machine to machine as users converted it. Sometimes a chip company engineer would rework the compiler to make it work on a new chip. Sometimes a user would do it for a project. Sometimes a student would do it when insomnia struck. Somehow, it moved from machine to machine, and it carried all of the other GNU software with it.
+
+The next great leap forward came in the early 1990s as people began to realize that a completely free operating system was a serious possibility. Stallman had always dreamed of replacing UNIX with something that was just as good and accompanied by the source code, but it was a large task. It was the reason he started the GNU project. Slowly but surely, the GNU project was assembling the parts to make it work. There were hundreds of small utilities and bigger tools donated to the GNU project, and those little bits were starting to add up.
+
+The free software movement also owes a great deal to Berkeley, or more precisely to a small group in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley. The group of hardcore hackers, which included professors, research associates, graduate students, and a few undergraduates, had developed a version of UNIX known as BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution). AT&T shared their version of UNIX with Berkeley, and the programmers at Berkeley fixed, extended, and enhanced the software. These extensions formed the core of BSD. Their work was part experimental and part practical, but the results were widely embraced. Sun Microsystems, one of Silicon Valley's UNIX workstation companies, used a version on its machines through the early 1990s when they created a new version known as Solaris by folding in some of AT&T's System V. Many feel that BSD and its approach remain the foundation of the OS.
+
+The big problem was that the team built their version on top of source code from AT&T. The folks at Berkeley and their hundreds, if not thousands, of friends, colleagues, and students who contributed to the project gave their source code away, but AT&T did not. This gave AT&T control over anyone who wanted to use BSD, and the company was far from ready to join the free software movement. Millions of dollars were spent on the research developing UNIX. The company wanted to make some money back.
+
+The team at Berkeley fought back, and Keith Bostic, one of the core team, began organizing people together to write the source code that could replace these bits. By the beginning of the 1990s, he had cajoled enough of his friends to accomplish it. In June 1991, the group produced "Networking Release 2," a version that included almost all of a complete working version of UNIX. All you needed to do was add six files to have a complete operating system.
+
+AT&T was not happy. It had created a separate division known as the UNIX Systems Laboratory and wanted to make a profit. Free source code from Berkeley was tough competition. So the UNIX Systems Laboratory sued.
+
+This lawsuit marked the end of universities' preeminent role in the development of free software. Suddenly, the lawsuit focused everyone's attention and made them realize that taking money from corporations came into conflict with sharing software source code. Richard Stallman left MIT in 1984 when he understood that a university's need for money would eventually trump his belief in total sharing of source code. Stallman was just a staff member who kept the computers running. He wasn't a tenured professor who could officially do anything. So he started the Free Software Foundation and never looked back. MIT helped him at the beginning by loaning him space, but it was clear that the relationship was near the end. Universities needed money to function. Professors at many institutions had quotas specifying how much grant money they needed to raise. Stallman wasn't bringing in cash by giving away his software.
+
+Meanwhile, on the other coast, the lawsuit tied up Berkeley and the BSD project for several years, and the project lost valuable energy and time by devoting them to the legal fight. In the meantime, several other completely free software projects started springing up around the globe. These began in basements and depended on machines that the programmer owned. One of these projects was started by Linus Torvalds and would eventually grow to become Linux, the unstoppable engine of hype and glory. He didn't have the money of the Berkeley computer science department, and he didn't have the latest machines that corporations gave them. But he had freedom and the pile of source code that came from unaffiliated, free projects like GNU that refused to compromise and cut intellectual corners. Although Torvalds might not have realized it at the time, freedom turned out to be most valuable of all.
+
+1~ Quicksand
+
+The story of the end of the university's preeminence in the free software world is a tale of greed and corporate power. While many saw an unhappy ending coming for many years, few could do much to stop the inevitable collision between the University of California at Berkeley and its former patron, AT&T.
+
+The lawsuit between AT&T and the University of California at Berkeley had its roots in what marriage counselors love to call a "poorly conceived relationship." By the end of the 1980s, the computer science department at Berkeley had a problem. They had been collaborating with AT&T on the UNIX system from the beginning. They had written some nice code, including some of the crucial software that formed the foundation of the Internet. Students, professors, scientists, and even Wall Street traders loved the power and flexibility of UNIX. Everyone wanted UNIX.
+
+The problem was that not everyone could get UNIX. AT&T, which had sponsored much of the research at Berkeley, kept an iron hand on its invention. If you wanted to run UNIX, then you needed to license some essential software from AT&T that sat at the core of the system. They were the supreme ruler of the UNIX domain, and they expected a healthy tithe for the pleasure of living within it.
+
+One of the people who wanted UNIX was the Finnish student Linus Torvalds, who couldn't afford this tithe. He was far from the first one, and the conflict began long before he started to write Linux in 1991.
+
+Toward the end of the 1980s, most people in the computer world were well aware of Stallman's crusade against the corporate dominance of AT&T and UNIX. Most programmers knew that GNU stood for "GNU's Not UNIX." Stallman was not the only person annoyed by AT&T's attitude toward secrecy and non-disclosure agreements. In fact, his attitude was contagious. Some of the folks at Berkeley looked at the growth of tools emerging from the GNU project and felt a bit used. They had written many pieces of code that found their way into AT&T's version of UNIX. They had contributed many great ideas. Yet AT&T was behaving as if AT&T alone owned it. They gave and gave, while AT&T took.
+
+Stallman got to distribute his source code. Stallman got to share with others. Stallman got to build his reputation. Programmers raved about Stallman's Emacs. People played GNU Chess at their offices. Others were donating their tools to the GNU project. Everyone was getting some attention by sharing except the folks at Berkeley who collaborated with AT&T. This started to rub people the wrong way.
+
+Something had to be done, and the folks at Berkeley started feeling the pressure. Some at Berkeley wondered why the professors had entered into such a Faustian bargain with a big corporation. Was the payoff great enough to surrender their academic souls? Just where did AT&T get off telling us what we could publish?
+
+Others outside of Berkeley looked in and saw a treasure trove of software that was written by academics. Many of them were friends. Some of them had studied at Berkeley. Some had even written some of the UNIX code before they graduated. Some were companies competing with AT&T. All of them figured that they could solve their UNIX problems if they could just get their hands on the source code. There had to be some way to get it released.
+
+Slowly, the two groups began making contact and actively speculating on how to free Berkeley's version of UNIX from AT&T's grip.
+
+2~ Breaking the Bond
+
+The first move to separate Berkeley's version of UNIX from AT&T's control wasn't really a revolution. No one was starting a civil war by firing shots at Fort Sumter or starting a revolution by dropping tea in the harbor. In fact, it started long before the lawsuit and Linux. In 1989, some people wanted to start hooking their PCs and other devices up to the Internet, and they didn't want to use UNIX.
+
+Berkeley had written some of the software known as TCP/IP that defined how computers on the Internet would communicate and share packets. They wrote the software for UNIX because that was one of the favorite OSs around the labs. Other companies got a copy of the code by buying a source license for UNIX from AT&T. The TCP/IP code was just part of the mix. Some say that the cost of the license reached $250,000 or more and required that the customer pay a per-unit fee for every product that was shipped. Those prices didn't deter the big companies like IBM or DEC. They thought of UNIX as an OS for the hefty workstations and minicomputers sold to businesses and scientists. Those guys had the budget to pay for big hardware, so it was possible to slip the cost of the UNIX OS in with the package.
+
+But the PC world was different. It was filled with guys in garages who wanted to build simple boards that would let a PC communicate on the Internet. These guys were efficient and knew how to scrounge up cheap parts from all over the world. Some of them had gone to Berkeley and learned to program on the VAXes and Sun workstations running Berkeley's version of UNIX. A few of them had even helped write or debug the code. They didn't see why they had to buy such a big license for something that non-AT&T folks had written with the generous help of large government grants. Some even worked for corporations that gave money to support Berkeley's projects. Why couldn't they get at the code they helped pay to develop?
+
+Kirk McKusick, one of the members of the Computer Systems Research Group at the time, remembers, "People came to us and said,
+'Look, you wrote TCP/IP. Surely you shouldn't require an AT&T license for that?' These seemed like reasonable requests. We decided to start with something that was clearly not part of the UNIX we got from AT&T. It seemed very clear that we could pull out the TCP/IP stack and distribute that without running afoul of AT&T's license."
+
+So the Berkeley Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) created what they called Network Release 1 and put it on the market for $1,000 in June 1989. That wasn't really the price because the release came with one of the first versions of what would come to be known as the BSD-style license. Once you paid the $1,000, you could do whatever you wanted with the code, including just putting it up on the Net and giving it away.
+
+"We thought that two or three groups would pay the money and then put the code on the Internet, but in fact, hundreds of sites actually paid the one thousand dollars for it," says McKusick and adds, "mostly so they could get a piece of paper from the university saying, 'You can do what you want with this.'"
+
+This move worked out well for Berkeley and also for UNIX. The Berkeley TCP/IP stack became the best-known version of the code, and it acted like a reference version for the rest of the Net. If it had a glitch, everyone else had to work around the glitch because it was so prevalent. Even today, companies like Sun like to brag that their TCP/IP forms the backbone of the Net, and this is one of the reasons to buy a Sun instead of an NT workstation. Of course, the code in Sun's OS has a rich, Berkeley-based heritage, and it may still contain some of the original BSD code for controlling the net.
+
+2~ In for a Penny, in for a Pound
+
+In time, more and more companies started forming in the Bay Area and more and more realized that Berkeley's version of UNIX was the reference for the Internet. They started asking for this bit or that bit.
+
+Keith Bostic heard these requests and decided that the Berkeley CSRG needed to free up as much of the source code as possible. Everyone agreed it was a utopian idea, but only Bostic thought it was possible to accomplish. McKusick writes, in his history of BSD, "Mike Karels [a fellow software developer] and I pointed out that releasing large parts of the system was a huge task, but we agreed that if he could sort out how to deal with re-implementing the hundreds of utilities and the massive C library, then we would tackle the kernel. Privately, Karels and I thought that would be the end of the discussion."
+
+Dave Hitz, a good friend of Bostic's, remembers the time. "Bostic was more of a commanding type. He just rounded up all of his friends to finish up the code. You would go over to his house for dinner and he would say, 'I've got a list. What do you want to do?' I think I did the cp command and maybe the look command." Hitz, of course, is happy that he took part in the project. He recently founded Network Appliance, a company that packages a stripped-down version of BSD into a file server that is supposed to be a fairly bulletproof appliance for customers. Network Appliance didn't need to do much software engineering when they began. They just grabbed the free version of BSD and hooked it up.
+
+Bostic pursued people far and wide to accomplish the task. He gave them the published description of the utility or the part of the library from the documentation and then asked them to reimplement it without looking at the source code. This cloning operation is known as a cleanroom operation because it is entirely legal if it takes place inside a metaphorical room where the engineers inside don't have any information about how the AT&T engineers built UNIX.
+
+This was not an easy job, but Bostic was quite devoted and pursued people everywhere. He roped everyone who could code into the project and often spent time fixing things afterward. The task took 18 months and included more than 400 people who received just notoriety and some thanks afterward. The 400-plus names are printed in the book he wrote with McKusick and Karels in 1996.
+
+When Bostic came close to finishing, he stopped by McKusick's office and asked how the kernel was coming along. This called McKusick and Karels's bluff and forced them to do some hard engineering work. In some respects, Bostic had the easier job. Writing small utility programs that his team used was hard work, but it was essentially preorganized and segmented. Many folks over the years created manual files that documented exactly what the programs were supposed to do. Each program could be assigned separately and people didn't need to coordinate their work too much. These were just dishes for a potluck supper.
+
+Cleaning up the kernel, however, was a different matter. It was much larger than many of the smaller utilities and was filled with more complicated code that formed a tightly coordinated mechanism. Sloppy work in one of the utility files would probably affect only that one utility, but a glitch in the kernel would routinely bring down the entire system. If Bostic was coordinating a potluck supper, McKusick and Karels had to find a way to create an entire restaurant that served thousands of meals a day to thousands of customers. Every detail needed to work together smoothly.
+
+To make matters more complicated, Berkeley's contributions to the kernel were mixed in with AT&T's contributions. Both had added on parts, glued in new features, and created new powers over the years. They were de facto partners on the project. Back in the good old days, they had both shared their source code without any long-term considerations or cares. But now that AT&T claimed ownership of it all, they had to find a way to unwind all of the changes and figure out who wrote what.
+
+McKusick says, "We built a converted database up line by line. We took every line of code and inserted it into the database. You end up finding pretty quickly where the code migrated to and then you decide whether it is sufficiently large enough to see if it needed recoding."
+
+This database made life much easier for them and they were able to plow through the code, quickly recoding islets of AT&T code here and there. They could easily pull up a file filled with source code and let the database mark up the parts that might be owned by AT&T. Some parts went quickly, but other parts dragged on. By late spring of 1991, they had finished all but six files that were just too much work.
+
+It would be nice to report that they bravely struggled onward, forgoing all distractions like movies, coffeehouses, and friends, but that's not true. They punted and tossed everything out the door and called it "Network Release 2."The name implied that this new version was just a new revision of their earlier product, Network Release 1, and this made life easier with the lawyers. They just grabbed the old, simple license and reused it. It also disguised the fact that this new pile of code was only about six files short of a full-grown OS.
+
+The good news about open source is that projects often succeed even when they initially fail. A commercial product couldn't ship without the complete functionality of the six files. Few would buy it. Plus, no one could come along, get a bug under his bonnet, and patch up the holes. Proprietary source code isn't available and no one wants to help someone else in business without compensation.
+
+The new, almost complete UNIX, however, was something different. It was a university project and so university rules of camaraderie and sharing seemed to apply. Another programmer, Bill Jolitz, picked up Network Release 2 and soon added the code necessary to fill the gap. He became fascinated with getting UNIX up and running on a 386 processor, a task that was sort of like trying to fit the latest traction control hardware and anti-lock brakes on a go-cart. At the time, serious computer scientists worked on serious machines from serious workstation and minicomputer companies. The PC industry was building toys. Of course, there was something macho to the entire project. Back then I remember joking to a friend that we should try to get UNIX running on the new air-conditioning system, just to prove it could be done.
+
+Jolitz's project, of course, found many people on the Net who didn't think it was just a toy. Once he put the source code on the Net, a bloom of enthusiasm spread through the universities and waystations of the world. People wanted to experiment with a high-grade OS and most could only afford relatively cheap hardware like the 386. Sure, places like Berkeley could get the government grant money and the big corporate donations, but 2,000-plus other schools were stuck waiting. Jolitz's version of 386BSD struck a chord.
+
+While news traveled quickly to some corners, it didn't reach Finland. Network Release 2 came in June 1991, right around the same time that Linus Torvalds was poking around looking for a high-grade OS to use in experiments. Jolitz's 386BSD came out about six months later as Torvalds began to dig into creating the OS he would later call Linux. Soon afterward, Jolitz lost interest in the project and let it lie, but others came along. In fact, two groups called NetBSD and FreeBSD sprang up to carry the torch.
+
+Although it may seem strange that three groups building a free operating system could emerge without knowing about each other, it is important to realize that the Internet was a very different world in 1991 and 1992. The World Wide Web was only a gleam in some people's eyes. Only the best universities had general access to the web for its students, and most people didn't understand what an e-mail address was. Only a few computer-related businesses like IBM and Xerox put their researchers on the Net. The community was small and insular.
+
+The main conduits for information were the USENET newsgroups, which were read only by people who could get access through their universities. This technology was an efficient way of sharing information, although quite flawed. Here's how it worked: every so often, each computer would call up its negotiators and swap the latest articles. Information traveled like gossip, which is to say that it traveled quickly but with very uneven distribution. Computers were always breaking down or being upgraded. No one could count on every message getting to every corner of the globe.
+
+The NetBSD and the FreeBSD forks of the BSD kernel continue to exist separately today. The folks who work on NetBSD concentrate on making their code run on all possible machines, and they currently list 21 different platforms that range from the omnipresent Intel 486 to the gone but not forgotten Commodore Amiga.
+
+The FreeBSD team, on the other hand, concentrates on making their product work well on the Intel 386. They added many layers of installation tools to make it easier for the average Joe to use, and now it's the most popular version of BSD code around.
+
+Those two versions used the latest code from Berkeley. Torvalds, on the other hand, didn't know about the 386BSD, FreeBSD, or NetBSD. If he had found out, he says, he probably would have just downloaded the versions and joined one of those teams. Why run off and reinvent the wheel?
+
+2~ AT&T Notices the Damage
+
+Soon after Network Release 2 hit the world, the real problems began for BSD. While AT&T didn't really notice 386BSD, NetBSD, or FreeBSD, they did notice a company called Berkeley Software Design Incorporated. This corporation created their own OS by taking Network Release 2 and adding their own versions of the missing six files, but they didn't release this for free on the Net. They started putting advertisements in the trade press offering the source code for $995, a price they claimed was a huge discount over AT&T's charge.
+
+The modern, post-Internet reader should find this hilarious. Two to three groups and countless splinter factions were distributing the BSD software over the Internet for free and this didn't seem to catch AT&T's attention, but the emergence of BSDI selling the same product for almost $1,000 rang alarm bells. That was the time, though, before the Internet infrastructure became ubiquitous. In the early 1990s, people only halfjoked that FedEx was the most efficient Internet Service Provider around. It was much faster to copy hundreds of megabytes of data onto a magnetic tape and drop it in FedEx than to actually try to copy it over the Internet. Back then only real nerds were on the Internet. Managers and lawyers wore suits and got their news from the trade press and advertisements.
+
+BSDI's cost-cutting was a major headache for AT&T. This small company was selling a product that AT&T felt it had shepherded, organized, and coordinated over time.
+
+AT&T started off by claiming UNIX as a trademark and threatening BSDI with infringing upon it. BSDI countered by changing the ads to emphasize that BSDI was a separate company that wasn't related to AT&T or the subsidiary AT&T created to market UNIX known as UNIX System Laboratories, or USL.
+
+That didn't work. USL saw its cash cow melting away and assumed folks would jump at the chance to buy a complete OS with all the source code for $995. The price seems outrageously high today, but that's only after the stiff price competition of the 1990s. It was still a good deal at the time. So USL sued BSDI for actually stealing proprietary source code from AT&T.
+
+This argument didn't work, either. BSDI turned around and waved the Network Release 2 license they got from Berkeley. They bought all but six of the files from Berkeley, and Berkeley claimed that all of the source code was theirs to sell. BSDI wrote the missing six files themselves and they were quite sure that they got no help from AT&T or USL. Therefore, BSDI didn't steal anything. If AT&T thought it was stolen, they should take it up with Berkeley. The judge bought BSDI's argument and narrowed the case to focus on the six files.
+
+This was a crucial moment in the development of the free software movement and its various kernels. AT&T found itself cornered. Backing down meant giving up its claim to UNIX and the wonderful stream of license fees that kept pouring in. Pressing ahead meant suing the University of California, its old friend, partner, and author of lots of UNIX code. Eventually, the forces of greed and omnipotent corporate power won out and AT&T's USL filed a lawsuit naming both BSDI and the University of California.
+
+Taking sides in this case was pretty easy for most folks in the academic and free software world. The CSRG at Berkeley did research. They published things. University research was supposed to be open and freely distributed. AT&T was trying to steal the work of hundreds if not thousands of students, researchers, professors, and others. That wasn't fair.
+
+In reality, AT&T did pay something for what they got. They sent their employees to Berkeley to get master's degrees, they shared the original Versions 5, 6, and 7 and 32/V source code, and they even sent some hardware to the computer science department. The original creators of UNIX lived and worked at Bell Labs drawing AT&T paychecks. Berkeley students got summer jobs at AT&T. There wasn't an official quid-pro-quo. It wasn't very well spelled out, but AT&T was paying something.
+
+Some folks on AT&T's side might even want to paint the CSRG at Berkeley as filled with academic freeloaders who worked hard to weasel money out of the big corporations without considering the implications. The folks at Berkeley should have known that AT&T was going to want something for its contributions. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
+
+There's something to this argument because running a high-rent research project at a top-notch school requires a fair amount of guile and marketing sophistication. By the 1990s, the top universities had become very good at making vague, unofficial promises with their pleas for corporate gifts. This sort of coquetry and teasing was bound to land someone in a fight. McKusick, for instance, says that the CSRG designed the BSD license to be very liberal to please the corporate donors. "Hewlett-Packard put in hundreds of thousands of dollars and they were doing so under the understanding that they were going to use the code," he said. If the BSD hadn't kept releasing code like Network Release 2 in a clear, easy-to-reuse legal form, he says, some of the funding for the group would have dried up.
+
+But there's also a bit of irony here. McKusick points out that AT&T was far from the most generous company to support the CSRG. "In fact, we even had to pay for our license to UNIX," he says before adding, "although it was only ninety-nine dollars at the time."
+
+AT&T's support of the department was hardly bountiful. The big checks weren't grants outright. They paid for the out-of-state tuition for AT&T employees who came to Berkeley to receive their master's degrees. While AT&T could have sent their employees elsewhere, there's no doubt that there are more generous ways to send money to researchers.
+
+McKusick also notes that AT&T didn't even send along much hardware. The only hardware he remembers receiving from them were some 5620 terminals and a Datakit circuit-based switch that he says "was a huge headache that really did us very little good." Berkeley was on the forefront of developing the packet-based standards that would dominate the Internet. If anything, the older circuit-based switch convinced the Berkeley team that basing the Internet on the old phone system would be a major mistake.
+
+To make matters worse, AT&T often wanted the BSD team to include features that would force all the BSD users to buy a newer, more expensive license from AT&T. In addition, license verification was never a quick or easy task. McKusick says, "We had a person whose fulltime job was to keep the AT&T licensing person happy."
+
+In the end, he concludes, "They paid us next to nothing and got a huge windfall."
+
+Choosing sides in this battle probably isn't worth the trouble at this point because Berkeley eventually won. The hard work of Bostic's hundreds of volunteers and the careful combing of the kernel by the CSRG paid off. AT&T's case slowly withered away as the University of California was able to show how much of the distribution came from innocent, non-AT&T sources.
+
+Berkeley even landed a few good blows of its own. They found that AT&T had stripped copyrights from Berkeley code that they had imported to System V and had failed to provide due credit to Berkeley. The BSD license is probably one of the least restrictive ones in the world. Companies like Apple use BSD source code all the time. The license has few requirements beyond keeping the copyright notice intact and including some credit for the University of California. AT&T didn't pay attention to this and failed to cite Berkeley's contributions in their releases. Oops. The CSRG countersued claiming that AT&T had violated a license that may be one of the least restrictive in the world.
+
+The battle raged in the courts for more than a year. It moved from federal to California state court. Judges held hearings, lawyers took depositions, clerks read briefs, judges heard arguments presented by briefs written by lawyers who had just held depositions. The burn rate of legal fees was probably larger than most Internet start-ups.
+
+Any grown-up should take one look at this battle and understand just how the free software movement got so far. While the Berkeley folks were meeting with lawyers and worrying about whether the judges were going to choose the right side, Linus Torvalds was creating his own kernel. He started Linux on his own, and that made him a free man.
+
+In the end, the University of California settled the lawsuit after the USL was sold to Novell, a company run by Ray Noorda. McKusick believes that Noorda's embrace of free competition made a big difference, and by January 1994 the legal fight was over. Berkeley celebrated by releasing a completely free and unencumbered 4.4BSD-Lite in June 1994.
+
+The terms of the settlement were pretty minor. Net Release 2 came with about 18,000 files. 4.4BSD-Lite contained all but three of them. Seventy of them included a new, expanded copyright that gave some credit to AT&T and USL, but didn't constrain anyone's right to freely distribute them. McKusick, Bostic, and the hundreds of volunteers did a great job making sure that Net Release 2 was clean. In fact, two people familiar with the settlement talks say that Berkeley just deleted a few files to allow USL's lawyers to save face. We'll never know for sure because the details of the settlement are sealed. McKusick and the others can't talk about the details. That's another great example of how the legal system fails the American people and inadvertently gives the free software world another leg up. There's no information in the record to help historians or give future generations some hints on how to solve similar disputes.
+
+1~ Outsider
+
+The battle between the University of California at Berkeley's computer science department and AT&T did not reach the court system until 1992, but the friction between the department's devotion to sharing and the corporation's insistence on control started long before.
+
+While the BSD team struggled with lawyers, a free man in Finland began to write his own operating system without any of the legal or institutional encumbrance. At the beginning he said it was a project that probably wouldn't amount to much, but only a few years later people began to joke about "Total World Domination." A few years after that, they started using the phrase seriously.
+
+In April 1991, Linus Torvalds had a problem. He was a relatively poor university student in Finland who wanted to hack in the guts of a computer operating system. Microsoft's machines at the time were the cheapest around, but they weren't very interesting. The basic Disk Operating System (DOS) essentially let one program control the computer. Windows 3.1 was not much more than a graphical front end to DOS featuring pretty pictures--icons--to represent the files. Torvalds wanted to experiment with a real OS, and that meant UNIX or something that was UNIX-like. These real OSs juggled hundreds of programs at one time and often kept dozens of users happy. Playing with DOS was like practicing basketball shots by yourself. Playing with UNIX was like playing with a team that had 5, 10, maybe as many as 100 people moving around the court in complicated, clockwork patterns.
+
+But UNIX machines cost a relative fortune. The high-end customers requested the OS, so generally only high-end machines came with it. A poor university student in Finland didn't have the money for a topnotch Sun Sparc station. He could only afford a basic PC, which came with the 386 processor. This was a top-of-the-line PC at the time, but it still wasn't particularly exciting. A few companies made a version of UNIX for this low-end machine, but they charged for it.
+
+In June 1991, soon after Torvalds~{ Everyone in the community, including many who don't know him, refers to him by his first name. The rules of style prevent me from using that in something as proper as a book. }~ started his little science project, the Computer Systems Research Group at Berkeley released what they thought was their completely unencumbered version of BSD UNIX known as Network Release 2. Several projects emerged to port this to the 386, and the project evolved to become the FreeBSD and NetBSD versions of today. Torvalds has often said that he might never have started Linux if he had known that he could just download a more complete OS from Berkeley.
+
+But Torvalds didn't know about BSD at the time, and he's lucky he didn't. Berkeley was soon snowed under by the lawsuit with AT&T claiming that the university was somehow shipping AT&T's intellectual property. Development of the BSD system came to a screeching halt as programmers realized that AT&T could shut them down at any time if Berkeley was found guilty of giving away source code that AT&T owned.
+
+If he couldn't afford to buy a UNIX machine, he would write his own version. He would make it POSIX-compatible, a standard for UNIX designers, so others would be able to use it. Minix was another UNIXlike OS that a professor, Andrew Tanenbaum, wrote for students to experiment with the guts of an OS. Torvalds initially considered using Minix as a platform. Tanenbaum included the source code to his project, but he charged for the package. It was like a textbook for students around the world.
+
+Torvalds looked at the price of Minix ($150) and thought it was too much. Richard Stallman's GNU General Public License had taken root in Torvalds's brain, and he saw the limitations in charging for software. GNU had also produced a wide variety of tools and utility programs that he could use on his machine. Minix was controlled by Tanenbaum, albeit with a much looser hand than many of the other companies at the time.
+
+People could add their own features to Minix and some did. They did get a copy of the source code for $150. But few changes made their way back into Minix. Tanenbaum wanted to keep it simple and grew frustrated with the many people who, as he wrote back then, "want to turn Minix into BSD UNIX."
+
+So Torvalds started writing his own tiny operating system for this 386. It wasn't going to be anything special. It wasn't going to topple AT&T or the burgeoning Microsoft. It was just going to be a fun experiment in writing a computer operating system that was all his. He wrote in January 1992," Many things should have been done more portably if it would have been a real project. I'm not making overly many excuses about it though: it was a design decision, and last April when I started the thing, I didn't think anybody would actually want to use it."
+
+Still, Torvalds had high ambitions. He was writing a toy, but he wanted it to have many, if not all, of the features found in full-strength UNIX versions on the market. On July 3, he started wondering how to accomplish this and placed a posting on the USENET newsgroup comp.os.minix, writing:
+
+_1 Hello netlanders, Due to a project I'm working on (in minix), I'm interested in the posix standard definition. Could somebody please point me to a (preferably) machine-readable format of the latest posix rules? Ftp-sites would be nice.
+
+Torvalds's question was pretty simple. When he wrote the message in 1991, UNIX was one of the major operating systems in the world. The project that started at AT&T and Berkeley was shipping on computers from IBM, Sun, Apple, and most manufacturers of higher-powered machines known as workstations. Wall Street banks and scientists loved the more powerful machines, and they loved the simplicity and hackability of UNIX machines. In an attempt to unify the marketplace, computer manufacturers created a way to standardize UNIX and called it POSIX. POSIX ensured that each UNIX machine would behave in a standardized way.
+
+Torvalds worked quickly. By September he was posting notes to the group with the subject line "What would you like to see most in Minix?" He was adding features to his clone, and he wanted to take a poll about where he should add next.
+
+Torvalds already had some good news to report. "I've currently ported bash(1.08) and GCC(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months," he said.
+
+At first glance, he was making astounding progress. He created a working system with a compiler in less than half a year. But he also had the advantage of borrowing from the GNU project. Stallman's GNU project group had already written a compiler (GCC) and a nice text user interface (bash). Torvalds just grabbed these because he could. He was standing on the shoulders of the giants who had come before him.
+
+The core of an OS is often called the "kernel," which is one of the strange words floating around the world of computers. When people are being proper, they note that Linus Torvalds was creating the Linux kernel in 1991. Most of the other software, like the desktop, the utilities, the editors, the web browsers, the games, the compilers, and practically everything else, was written by other folks. If you measure this in disk space, more than 95 percent of the code in an average distribution lies outside the kernel. If you measure it by user interaction, most people using Linux or BSD don't even know that there's a kernel in there. The buttons they click, the websites they visit, and the printing they do are all controlled by other programs that do the work.
+
+Of course, measuring the importance of the kernel this way is stupid. The kernel is sort of the combination of the mail room, boiler room, kitchen, and laundry room for a computer. It's responsible for keeping the data flowing between the hard drives, the memory, the printers, the video screen, and any other part that happens to be attached to the computer.
+
+In many respects, a well-written kernel is like a fine hotel. The guests check in, they're given a room, and then they can order whatever they need from room service and a smoothly oiled concierge staff. Is this new job going to take an extra 10 megabytes of disk space? No problem, sir. Right away, sir. We'll be right up with it. Ideally, the software won't even know that other software is running in a separate room. If that other program is a loud rock-and-roll MP3 playing tool, the other software won't realize that when it crashes and burns up its own room. The hotel just cruises right along, taking care of business.
+
+In 1991, Torvalds had a short list of features he wanted to add to the kernel. The Internet was still a small network linking universities and some advanced labs, and so networking was a small concern. He was only aiming at the 386, so he could rely on some of the special features that weren't available on other chips. High-end graphics hardware cards were still pretty expensive, so he concentrated on a text-only interface. He would later fix all of these problems with the help of the people on the Linux kernel mailing list, but for now he could avoid them.
+
+Still, hacking the kernel means anticipating what other programmers might do to ruin things. You don't know if someone's going to try to snag all 128 megabytes of RAM available. You don't know if someone's going to hook up a strange old daisy-wheel printer and try to dump a PostScript file down its throat. You don't know if someone's going to create an endless loop that's going to write random numbers all over the memory. Stupid programmers and dumb users do these things every day, and you've got to be ready for it. The kernel of the OS has to keep things flowing smoothly between all the different parts of the system. If one goes bad because of a sloppy bit of code, the kernel needs to cut it off like a limb that's getting gangrene. If one job starts heating up, the kernel needs to try to give it all the resources it can so the user will be happy. The kernel hacker needs to keep all of these things straight.
+
+Creating an operating system like this is no easy job. Many of the commercial systems crash frequently for no perceptible reason, and most of the public just takes it.~{ Microsoft now acknowledges the existence of a bug in the tens of millions of copies of Windows 95 and Windows 98 that will cause your computer to 'stop responding (hang)'--you know, what you call crash--after exactly 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes, and 47.296 seconds of continuous operation . . . . Why 49.7? days? Because computers aren't counting the days. They're counting the milliseconds. One counter begins when Windows starts up; when it gets to 232 milliseconds--which happens to be 49.7 days--well, that's the biggest number this counter can handle. And instead of gracefully rolling over and starting again at zero, it manages to bring the entire operating system to a halt."--James Gleick in the New York Times. }~ Many people somehow assume that it must be their fault that the program failed. In reality, it's probably the kernel's. Or more precisely, it's the kernel designer's fault for not anticipating what could go wrong.
+
+By the mid-1970s, companies and computer scientists were already experimenting with many different ways to create workable operating systems. While the computers of the day weren't very powerful by modern standards, the programmers created operating systems that let tens if not hundreds of people use a machine simultaneously. The OS would keep the different tasks straight and make sure that no user could interfere with another.
+
+As people designed more and more operating systems, they quickly realized that there was one tough question: how big should it be? Some people argued that the OS should be as big as possible and come complete with all the features that someone might want to use. Others countered with stripped-down designs that came with a small core of the OS surrounded by thousands of little programs that did the same thing.
+
+To some extent, the debate is more about semantics than reality. A user wants the computer to be able to list the different files stored in one directory. It doesn't matter if the question is answered by a big operating system that handles everything or a little operating system that uses a program to find the answer. The job still needs to be done, and many of the instructions are the same. It's just a question of whether the instructions are labeled the "operating system" or an ancillary program.
+
+But the debate is also one about design. Programmers, teachers, and the Lego company all love to believe that any problem can be solved by breaking it down into small parts that can be assembled to create the whole. Every programmer wants to turn the design of an operating system into thousands of little problems that can be solved individually. This dream usually lasts until someone begins to assemble the parts and discovers that they don't work together as perfectly as they should.
+
+When Torvalds started crafting the Linux kernel, he decided he was going to create a bigger, more integrated version that he called a "monolithic kernel." This was something of a bold move because the academic community was entranced with what they called "microkernels." The difference is partly semantic and partly real, but it can be summarized by analogy with businesses. Some companies try to build large, smoothly integr the steps of production. Others try to create smaller operations that subcontract much of the production work to other companies. One is big, monolithic, and all-encompassing, while the other is smaller, fragmented, and heterogeneous. It's not uncommon to find two companies in the same industry taking different approaches and thinking they're doing the right thing.
+
+The design of an operating system often boils down to the same decision. Do we want to build a monolithic core that handles all the juggling internally, or do we want a smaller, more fragmented model that should be more flexible as long as the parts interact correctly?
+
+In time, the OS world started referring to this core as the kernel of the operating system. People who wanted to create big OSs with many features wrote monolithic kernels. Their ideological enemies who wanted to break the OS into hundreds of small programs running on a small core wrote microkernels. Some of the most extreme folks labeled their work a nanokernel because they thought it did even less and thus was even more pure than those bloated microkernels.
+
+The word "kernel" is a bit confusing for most people because they often use it to mean a fragment of an object or a small fraction. An extreme argument may have a kernel of truth to it. A disaster movie always gives the characters and the audience a kernel of hope to which to cling.
+
+Mathematicians use the word a bit differently and emphasize the word's ability to let a small part define a larger concept. Technically, a kernel of a function f is the set of values, x<sub>1</sub>, x<sub>2</sub>, . . . x<sub>n</sub> such that f(x<sub>i</sub>)=1, or whatever the identity element happens to be. The action of the kernel of a function does a good job of defining how the function behaves with all the other elements. The algebraists study a kernel of a function because it reveals the overall behavior.~{ The kernel of f(x)=x<sub>2</sub> is (-1, 1) and it illustrates how the function has two branches. }~
+
+The OS designers use the word in the same way. If they define the kernel correctly, then the behavior of the rest of the OS will follow. The small part of the code defines the behavior of the entire computer. If the kernel does one thing well, the entire computer will do it well. If it does one thing badly, then everything will suffer.
+
+Many computer users often notice this effect without realizing why it ated operations where one company controls all exists. Most Macintosh computers, for instance, can be sluggish at times because the OS does not do a good job juggling the workload between processes. The kernel of the OS has not been completely overhauled since the early days when the machines ran one program at a time. This sluggishness will persist for a bit longer until Macintosh releases a new version known as MacOS X. This will be based on the Mach kernel, a version developed at Carnegie-Mellon University and released as open source software. Steve Jobs adopted it when he went to NeXT, a company that was eventually folded back into Apple. This kernel does a much better job of juggling different tasks because it uses preemptive multitasking instead of cooperative multitasking. The original version of the MacOS let each program decide when and if it was going to give up control of the computer to let other programs run. This low-rent version of juggling was called cooperative multitasking, but it failed when some program in the hotel failed to cooperate. Most software developers obeyed the rules, but mistakes would still occur. Bad programs would lock up the machine. Preemptive multitasking takes this power away from the individual programs. It swaps control from program to program without asking permission. One pig of a program can't slow down the entire machine. When the new MacOS X kernel starts offering preemptive multitasking, the users should notice less sluggish behavior and more consistent performance.
+
+Torvalds plunged in and created a monolithic kernel. This made it easier to tweak all the strange interactions between the programs. Sure, a microkernel built around a clean, message-passing architecture was an elegant way to construct the guts of an OS, but it had its problems. There was no easy way to deal with special exceptions. Let's say you want a web server to run very quickly on your machine. That means you need to treat messages coming into the computer from the Internet with exceptional speed. You need to ship them with the equivalent of special delivery or FedEx. You need to create a special exception for them. Tacking these exceptions onto a clean microkernel starts to make it look bad. The design starts to get cluttered and less elegant. After a few special exceptions are added, the microkernel can start to get confused.
+
+Torvalds's monolithic kernel did not have the elegance or the simplicity of a microkernel OS like Minix or Mach, but it was easier to hack. New tweaks to speed up certain features were relatively easy to add. There was no need to come up with an entirely new architecture for the message-passing system. The downside was that the guts could grow remarkably byzantine, like the bureaucracy of a big company.
+
+In the past, this complexity hurt the success of proprietary operating systems. The complexity produced bugs because no one could understand it. Torvalds's system, however, came with all the source code, making it much easier for application programmers to find out what was causing their glitch. To carry the corporate bureaucracy metaphor a bit further, the source code acted like the omniscient secretary who is able to explain everything to a harried executive. This perfect knowledge reduced the cost of complexity.
+
+By the beginning of 1992, Linux was no longer a Finnish student's part-time hobby. Several influential programmers became interested in the code. It was free and relatively usable. It ran much of the GNU code, and that made it a neat, inexpensive way to experiment with some excellent tools. More and more people downloaded the system, and a significant fraction started reporting bugs and suggestions to Torvalds. He rolled them back in and the project snowballed.
+
+2~ A Hobby Begets a Project that Begets a Movement
+
+On the face of it, Torvalds's decision to create an OS wasn't extraordinary. Millions of college-age students decide that they can do anything if they just put in a bit more elbow grease. The college theater departments, newspapers, and humor magazines all started with this impulse, and the notion isn't limited to college students. Millions of adults run Little League teams, build model railroads, lobby the local government to create parks, and take on thousands of projects big and small in their spare time.
+
+Every great idea has a leader who can produce a system to sustain it. Every small-town lot had kids playing baseball, but a few guys organized a Little League program that standardized the rules and the competition. Every small town had people campaigning for parks, but one small group created the Sierra Club, which fights for parks throughout the world.
+
+This talent for organizing the work of others is a rare commodity, and Torvalds had a knack for it. He was gracious about sharing his system with the world and he never lorded it over anyone. His messages were filled with jokes and self-deprecating humor, most of which were carefully marked with smiley faces (:-)) to make sure that the message was clear. If he wrote something pointed, he would apologize for being a "hothead." He was always gracious in giving credit to others and noted that much of Linux was just a clone of UNIX. All of this made him easy to read and thus influential.
+
+His greatest trick, though, was his decision to avoid the mantle of power. He wrote in 1992, "Here's my standing on 'keeping control,' in 2 words (three?): I won't. The only control I've effectively been keeping on Linux is that I know it better than anybody else."
+
+He pointed out that his control was only an illusion that was caused by the fact that he did a good job maintaining the system. "I've made my changes available to ftp-sites etc. Those have become effectively official releases, and I don't expect this to change for some time: not because I feel I have some moral right to it, but because I haven't heard too many complaints."
+
+As he added new features to his OS, he shipped new copies frequently. The Internet made this easy to do. He would just pop a new version up on a server and post a notice for all to read: come download the latest version.
+
+He made it clear that people could vote to depose him at any time.
+"If people feel I do a bad job, they can do it themselves." They could just take all of his Linux code and start their own version using Torvalds's work as a foundation.
+
+Anyone could break off from Torvalds's project because Torvalds decided to ship the source code to his project under Richard Stallman's GNU General Public License, or GPL. In the beginning, he issued it with a more restrictive license that prohibited any "commercial" use, but eventually moved to the GNU license. This was a crucial decision because it cemented a promise with anyone who spent a few minutes playing with his toy operating system for the 386. It stated that all of the source code that Torvalds or anyone else wrote would be freely accessible and shared with everyone. This decision was a double-edged sword for the community. Everyone could take the software for free,
+
+but if they started circulating some new software built with the code, they would have to donate their changes back to the project. It was like flypaper. Anyone who started working with the project grew attached to it. They couldn't run off into their own corner. Some programmers joke that this flypaper license is like sex. If you make one mistake by hooking up with a project protected by GPL, you pay for it forever. If you ever ship a version of the project, you must include all of the source code. It can be distributed freely forever.
+
+While some people complained about the sticky nature of the GPL, enough saw it as a virtue. They liked Torvalds's source code, and they liked the fact that the GPL made them full partners in the project. Anyone could donate their time and be sure it wasn't going to disappear. The source code became a body of work held in common trust for everyone. No one could rope it off, fence it in, or take control.
+
+In time, Torvalds's pet science project and hacking hobby grew as more people got interested in playing with the guts of machines. The price was right, and idle curiosity could be powerful. Some wondered what a guy in Finland could do with a 386 machine. Others wondered if it was really as usable as the big machines from commercial companies. Others wondered if it was powerful enough to solve some problems in the lab. Still others just wanted to tinker. All of these folks gave it a try, and some even began to contribute to the project.
+
+Torvalds's burgeoning kernel dovetailed nicely with the tools that the GNU project created. All of the work by Stallman and his disciples could be easily ported to work with the operating system core that Torvalds was now calling Linux. This was the power of freely distributable source code. Anyone could make a connection, and someone invariably did. Soon, much of the GNU code began running on Linux. These tools made it easier to create more new programs, and the snowball began to roll.
+
+Many people feel that Linus Torvalds's true act of genius was in coming up with a flexible and responsive system for letting his toy OS grow and change. He released new versions often, and he encouraged everyone to test them with him. In the past, many open source developers using the GNU GPL had only shipped new versions at major landmarks in development, acting a bit like the commercial developers. After they released version 1.0, they would hole up in their basements until they had added enough new features to justify version 2.0.
+
+Torvalds avoided this perfectionism and shared frequently. If he fixed a bug on Monday, then he would roll out a new version that afternoon. It's not strange to have two or three new versions hit the Internet each week. This was a bit more work for Torvalds, but it also made it much easier for others to become involved. They could watch what he was doing and make their own suggestions.
+
+This freedom also attracted others to the party. They knew that Linux would always be theirs, too. They could write neat features and plug them into the Linux kernel without worrying that Torvalds would yank the rug out from under them. The GPL was a contract that lasted long into the future. It was a promise that bound them together.
+
+The Linux kernel also succeeded because it was written from the ground up for the PC platform. When the Berkeley UNIX hackers were porting BSD to the PC platform, they weren't able to make it fit perfectly. They were taking a piece of software crafted for older computers like the VAX, and shaving off corners and rewriting sections until it ran on the PC.
+
+Alan Cox pointed out to me, "The early BSD stuff was by UNIX people for UNIX people. You needed a calculator and familiarity with BSD UNIX on big machines (or a lot of reading) to install it. You also couldn't share a disk between DOS/Windows and 386BSD or the early branches off it.
+
+"Nowadays FreeBSD understands DOS partitions and can share a disk, but at the time BSD was scary to install," he continued.
+
+The BSD also took certain pieces of hardware for granted. Early versions of BSD required a 387, a numerical coprocessor that would speed up the execution of floating point numbers. Cox remembers that the price (about $100) was just too much for his budget. At that time, the free software world was a very lean organization.
+
+Torvalds's operating system plugged a crucial hole in the world of free source software and made it possible for someone to run a computer without paying anyone for a license. Richard Stallman had dreamed of this day, and Torvalds came up with the last major piece of the puzzle.
+
+2~ A Different Kind of Trial
+
+During the early months of Torvalds's work, the BSD group was stuck in a legal swamp. While the BSD team was involved with secret settlement talks and secret depositions, Linus Torvalds was happily writing code and sharing it with the world on the Net. His life wasn't all peaches and cream, but all of his hassles were open. Professor Andy Tanenbaum, a fairly well-respected and famous computer scientist, got in a long, extended debate with Torvalds over the structure of Linux. He looked down at Linux and claimed that Linux would have been worth two F's in his class because of its design. This led to a big flame war that was every bit as nasty as the fight between Berkeley and AT&T's USL. In fact, to the average observer it was even nastier. Torvalds returned Tanenbaum's fire with strong words like "fiasco," "brain-damages," and "suck." He brushed off the bad grades by pointing out that Albert Einstein supposedly got bad grades in math and physics. The highpriced lawyers working for AT&T and Berkeley probably used very expensive and polite words to try and hide the shivs they were trying to stick in each other's back. Torvalds and Tanenbaum pulled out each other's virtual hair like a squawkfest on the Jerry Springer show.
+
+But Torvalds's flame war with Tanenbaum occurred in the open in an Internet newsgroup. Other folks could read it, think about it, add their two cents' worth, and even take sides. It was a wide-open debate that uncovered many flaws in the original versions of Linux and Tanenbaum's Minix. They forced Torvalds to think deeply about what he wanted to do with Linux and consider its flaws. He had to listen to the arguments of a critic and a number of his peers on the Net and then come up with arguments as to why his Linux kernel didn't suck too badly.
+
+This open fight had a very different effect from the one going on in the legal system. Developers and UNIX hackers avoided the various free versions of BSD because of the legal cloud. If a judge decided that AT&T and USL were right, everyone would have to abandon their work on the platform. While the CSRG worked hard to get free, judges don't always make the choices we want.
+
+The fight between Torvalds and Tanenbaum, however, drew people into the project. Other programmers like David Miller, Ted T'so, and Peter da Silva chimed in with their opinions. At the time, they were just interested bystanders. In time, they became part of the Linux brain trust. Soon they were contributing source code that ran on Linux. The argument's excitement forced them to look at Torvalds's toy OS and try to decide whether his defense made any sense. Today, David Miller is one of the biggest contributors to the Linux kernel. Many of the original debaters became major contributors to the foundations of Linux.
+
+This fight drew folks in and kept them involved. It showed that Torvalds was serious about the project and willing to think about its limitations. More important, it exposed these limitations and inspired other folks on the Net to step forward and try to fix them. Everyone could read the arguments and jump in. Even now, you can dig up the archives of this battle and read in excruciating detail what people were thinking and doing. The AT&T/USL-versus-Berkeley fight is still sealed.
+
+To this day, all of the devotees of the various BSDs grit their teeth when they hear about Linux. They think that FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD are better, and they have good reasons for these beliefs. They know they were out the door first with a complete running system. But Linux is on the cover of the magazines. All of the great technically unwashed are now starting to use "Linux" as a synonym for free software. If AT&T never sued, the BSD teams would be the ones reaping the glory. They would be the ones to whom Microsoft turned when it needed a plausible competitor. They would be more famous.
+
+But that's crying over spilled milk. The Berkeley CSRG lived a life of relative luxury in their world made fat with big corporate and government donations. They took the cash, and it was only a matter of time before someone called them on it. Yes, they won in the end, but it came too late. Torvalds was already out of the gate and attracting more disciples.
+
+McKusick says, "If you plot the installation base of Linux and BSD over the last five years, you'll see that they're both in exponential growth. But BSD's about eighteen to twenty months behind. That's about how long it took between Net Release 2 and the unencumbered 4.4BSD-Lite. That's about how long it took for the court system to do its job."
+
+1~ Growth
+
+Through the 1990s, the little toy operating system grew slowly and quietly as more and more programmers were drawn into the vortex. At the beginning, the OS wasn't rich with features. You could run several different programs at once, but you couldn't do much with the programs. The system's interface was just text. Still, this was often good enough for a few folks in labs around the world. Some just enjoyed playing with computers. Getting Linux running on their PC was a challenge, not unlike bolting an aftermarket supercharger onto a Honda Civic. But others took the project more seriously because they had serious jobs that couldn't be solved with a proprietary operating system that came from Microsoft or others.
+
+In time, more people started using the system and started contributing their additions to the pot. Someone figured out how to make MIT's free X Window System run on Linux so everyone could have a graphical interface. Someone else discovered how to roll in technology for interfacing with the Internet. That made a big difference because everyone could hack, tweak, and fiddle with the code and then just upload the new versions to the Net.
+
+It goes without saying that all the cool software coming out of Stallman's Free Software Foundation found its way to Linux. Some were simple toys like GNU Chess, but others were serious tools that were essential to the growth of the project. By 1991, the FSF was offering what might be argued were the best text editor and compiler in the world. Others might have been close, but Stallman's were free. These were crucial tools that made it possible for Linux to grow quickly from a tiny experimental kernel into a full-featured OS for doing everything a programmer might want to do.
+
+James Lewis-Moss, one of the many programmers who devote some time to Linux, says that GCC made it possible for programmers to create, revise, and extend the kernel. "GCC is integral to the success of Linux," he says, and points out that this may be one of the most important reasons why "it's polite to refer to it as GNU/Linux."
+
+Lewis-Moss points out one of the smoldering controversies in the world of free software: all of the tools and games that came from the GNU project started becoming part of what people simply thought of as plain "Linux."
+The name for the small kernel of the operating system soon grew to apply to almost all the free software that ran with it. This angered Stallman, who first argued that a better name would be"Lignux."When that failed to take hold, he moved to "GNU/Linux." Some ignored his pleas and simply used "Linux," which is still a bit unfair. Some feel that"GNU/Linux"is too much of a mouthful and, for better or worse, just plain Linux is an appropriate shortcut. Some, like Lewis-Moss, hold firm to GNU/Linux.
+
+Soon some people were bundling together CD-ROMs with all this software in one batch. The group would try to work out as many glitches as possible so that the purchaser's life would be easier. All boasted strange names like Yggdrasil, Slackware, SuSE, Debian, or Red Hat. Many were just garage projects that never made much money, but that was okay. Making money wasn't really the point. People just wanted to play with the source. Plus, few thought that much money could be made. The GPL, for instance, made it difficult to differentiate the product because it required everyone to share their source code with the world. If Slackware came up with a neat fix that made their version of Linux better, then Debian and SuSE could grab it. The GPL prevented anyone from constraining the growth of Linux.
+
+But only greedy businessmen see sharing and competition as negatives. In practice, the free flow of information enhanced the market for Linux by ensuring that it was stable and freely available. If one key CDROM developer gets a new girlfriend and stops spending enough time programming, another distribution will pick up the slack. If a hurricane flattened Raleigh, North Carolina, the home of Red Hat, then another supplier would still be around. A proprietary OS like Windows is like a set of manacles. An earthquake in Redmond, Washington, could cause a serious disruption for everyone.
+
+The competition and the GPL meant that the users would never feel bound to one OS. If problems arose, anyone could always just start a splinter group and take Linux in that direction. And they did. All the major systems began as splinter groups, and some picked up enough steam and energy to dominate. In time, the best splinter groups spun off their own splinter groups and the process grew terribly complicated.
+
+2~ The Establishment Begins to Notice
+
+By the mid-1990s, the operating system had already developed quite a following. In 1994, Jon Hall was a programmer for Digital, a company that was later bought by Compaq. Hall also wears a full beard and uses the name "maddog" as a nickname. At that time, Digital made workstations that ran a version of UNIX. In the early 1990s, Digital made a big leap forward by creating a 64-bit processor version of its workstation CPU chip, the Alpha, and the company wanted to make sure that the chip found widespread acceptance.
+
+Hall remembers well the moment he discovered Linux. He told Linux Today,
+
+_1 I didn't even know I was involved with Linux at first. I got a copy of Dr. Dobb's Journal, and in there was an advertisement for "get a UNIX operating system, all the source code, and run it on your PC." And I think it was $99. And I go, "Oh, wow, that's pretty cool. For $99, I can do that." So I sent away for it, got the CD. The only trouble was that I didn't have a PC to run it on. So I put it on my Ultrix system, took a look at the main pages, directory structure and stuff, and said, "Hey, that looks pretty cool." Then I put it away in the filing cabinet. That was probably around January of 1994.
+
+In May 1994, Hall met Torvalds at a DECUS (Digital Equipment Corporation User Society) meeting and became a big fan. Hall is a programmer's programmer who has written code for many different machines over the years, like the IBM 1130 and the DEC PDP-8. He started out as an electrical engineer in college, but took up writing software "after seeing a friend of mine fried by 13,600 volts and 400 amps, which was not a pretty sight." Hall started playing with UNIX when he worked at Bell Labs and fell in love with the OS.
+
+At the meeting, Torvalds helped Hall and his boss set up a PC with Linux. This was the first time that Hall actually saw Linux run, and he was pleasantly surprised. He said, "By that time I had been using UNIX for probably about fifteen years. I had used System V, I had used Berkeley, and all sorts of stuff, and this really felt like UNIX. You know . . . I mean, it's kind of like playing the piano. You can play the piano, even if it's a crappy piano. But when it's a really good piano, your fingers just fly over the keys. That's the way this felt. It felt good, and I was really impressed."
+
+This experience turned Hall into a true convert and he went back to Digital convinced that the Linux project was more than just some kids playing with a toy OS. These so-called amateurs with no centralized system or corporate backing had produced a very, very impressive system that was almost as good as the big commercial systems. Hall was an instant devotee. Many involved in the project recall their day of conversion with the same strength. A bolt of lightning peeled the haze away from their eyes, and they saw.
+
+Hall set out trying to get Torvalds to rewrite Linux so it would work well on the Alpha. This was not a simple task, but it was one that helped the operating system grow a bit more. The original version included some software that assumed the computer was designed like the Intel 386. This was fine when Linux only ran on Intel machines, but removing these assumptions made it possible for the software to run well on all types of machines.
+
+Hall went sailing with Torvalds to talk about the guts of the Linux OS. Hall told me, "I took him out on the Mississippi River, went up and down the Mississippi in the river boat, drinking Hurricanes, and I said to him, 'Linus, did you ever think about porting Linux to a 64-bit processor, like the Alpha?' He said, 'Well, I thought about doing that, but the Helsinki office has been having problems getting me a system, so I guess I'll have to do the PowerPC instead.'
+
+"I knew that was the wrong answer, so I came back to Digital (at the time), and got a friend of mine, named Bill Jackson, to send out a system to Linus, and he received it about a couple weeks after that. Then I found some people inside Digital who were also thinking about porting Linux to an Alpha. I got the two groups together, and after that, we started on the Alpha Linux project."
+
+This was one of the first times that a major corporation started taking note of what was happening in the garages and basements of hardcore computer programmers. It was also one of the first times that a corporation looked at an open source operating system and did not react with fear or shock. Sun was always a big contributor of open source software, but they kept their OS proprietary. Hall worked tirelessly at Digital to ensure that the corporation understood the implications of the GPL and saw that it was a good way to get more interested in the Alpha chip. He says he taught upper management at Digital how to "say the L-word."
+
+Hall also helped start a group called Linux International, which works to make the corporate world safe for Linux. "We help vendors understand the Linux marketplace," Hall told me. "There's a lot of confusion about what the GPL means. Less now, but still there's a lot of confusion. We helped them find the markets."
+
+Today, Linux International helps control the trademark on the name Linux and ensures that it is used in an open way. "When someone wanted to call themselves something like 'Linux University,' we said that's bad because there's going to be more than one. 'Linux University of North Carolina' is okay. It opens up the space."
+
+In the beginning, Torvalds depended heavily on the kindness of strangers like Hall. He didn't have much money, and the Linux project wasn't generating a huge salary for him. Of course, poverty also made it easier for people like Hall to justify giving him a machine. Torvalds wasn't rich monetarily, but he became rich in machines.
+
+By 1994, when Hall met Torvalds, Linux was already far from just a one-man science project. The floppy disks and CD-ROMs holding a version of the OS were already on the market, and this distribution mechanism was one of the crucial unifying forces. Someone could just plunk down a few dollars and get a version that was more or less ready to run. Many simply downloaded their versions for free from the Internet.
+
+2~ Making it Easy to Use
+
+In 1994, getting Linux to run was never really as simple as putting the CD-ROM in the drive and pressing a button. Many of the programs didn't work with certain video cards. Some modems didn't talk to Linux. Not all of the printers communicated correctly. Yet most of the software worked together on many standard machines. It often took a bit of tweaking, but most people could get the OS up and running on their computers.
+
+This was a major advance for the Linux OS because most people could quickly install a new version without spending too much time downloading the new code or debugging it. Even programmers who understood exactly what was happening felt that installing a new version was a long, often painful slog through technical details. These CDROMs not only helped programmers, they also encouraged casual users to experiment with the system.
+
+The CD-ROM marketplace also created a new kind of volunteer for the project. Someone had to download the latest code from the author. Someone had to watch the kernel mailing list to see when Torvalds, Cox, and the rest had minted a new version that was stable enough to release. Someone needed to check all the other packages like GNU Emacs or GNU CC to make sure they still worked correctly. This didn't require the obsessive programming talent that created the kernel, but it did take some dedication and devotion.
+
+Today, there are many different kinds of volunteers putting together these packages. The Debian group, for instance, is one of the best known and most devoted to true open source principles. It was started by Ian Murdock, who named it after himself and his girlfriend, Debra. The Debian group, which now includes hundreds of official members, checks to make sure that the software is both technically sound and politically correct. That is, they check the licenses to make sure that the software can be freely distributed by all users. Their guidelines later morphed into the official definition of open source software.
+
+Other CD-ROM groups became more commercial. Debian sold its disks to pay for Internet connection fees and other expenses, but they were largely a garage operation. So were groups with names like Slackware, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD. Other groups like Red Hat actually set out to create a burgeoning business, and to a large extent, they succeeded. They took the money and used it to pay programmers who wrote more software to make Linux easier to use.
+
+In the beginning, there wasn't much difference between the commercially minded groups like Red Hat and the more idealistic collectives like Debian. The marketplace was small, fragmented, and tribal. But by 1998, Red Hat had attracted major funding from companies like Intel, and it plowed more and more money into making the package as presentable and easy to use as possible. This investment paid off because more users turned instinctively to Red Hat, whose CD-ROM sales then exploded.
+
+Most of this development lived in its own Shangri-La. Red Hat, for instance, charged money for its disks, but released all of its software under the GPL. Others could copy their disks for free, and many did. Red Hat may be a company, but the management realized that they depended on thousands if not millions of unpaid volunteers to create their product.
+
+Slowly but surely, more and more people became aware of Linux, the GNU project, and its cousins like FreeBSD. No one was making much money off the stuff, but the word of mouth was spreading very quickly. The disks were priced reasonably, and people were curious. The GPL encouraged people to share. People began borrowing disks from their friends. Some companies even manufactured cheap rip-off copies of the CD-ROMs, an act that the GPL encouraged.
+
+At the top of the pyramid was Linus Torvalds. Many Linux developers treated him like the king of all he surveyed, but he was like the monarchs who were denuded by a popular constitutional democracy. He had always focused on building a fast, stable kernel, and that was what he continued to do. The rest of the excitement, the packaging, the features, and the toys, were the dominion of the volunteers and contributors.
+
+Torvalds never said much about the world outside his kernel, and it developed without him.
+
+Torvalds moved to Silicon Valley and took a job with the very secret company Transmeta in order to help design the next generation of computer chips. He worked out a special deal with the company that allowed him to work on Linux in his spare time. He felt that working for one of the companies like Red Hat would give that one version of Linux a special imprimatur, and he wanted to avoid that. Plus, Transmeta was doing cool things.
+
+In January 1999, the world caught up with the pioneers. Schmalensee mentioned Linux on the witness stand during the trial and served official notice to the world that Microsoft was worried about the growth of Linux. The system had been on the company's radar screen for some time. In October 1998, an internal memo from Microsoft describing the threat made its way to the press. Some thought it was just Microsoft's way of currying favor during the antitrust investigation. Others thought it was a serious treatment of a topic that was difficult for the company to understand.
+
+The media followed Schmalensee's lead. Everyone wanted to know about Linux, GNU, open source software, and the magical effects of widespread, unconditional sharing. The questions came in tidal waves, and Torvalds tried to answer them again and again. Was he sorry he gave it all away? No. If he charged anything, no one would have bought his toy and no one would have contributed anything. Was he a communist? No, he was rather apolitical. Don't programmers have to eat? Yes, but they will make their money selling a service instead of getting rich off bad proprietary code. Was Linux going to overtake Microsoft? Yes, if he had his way. World Domination Soon became the motto.
+
+But there were also difficult questions. How would the Linux world resist the embrace of big companies like IBM, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and maybe even Microsoft? These were massive companies with paid programmers and schedules to meet. All the open source software was just as free to them as anyone else. Would these companies use their strength to monopolize Linux?
+
+Some were worried that the money would tear apart the open source community. It's easy to get everyone to donate their time to a project when no one is getting paid. Money changes the equation. Would a gulf develop between the rich companies like Red Hat and the poor programmers who just gave away their hard work?
+
+Many wanted to know when Linux would become easier to use for nonprogrammers. Programmers built the OS to be easy to take apart and put back together again. That's a great feature if you like hacking the inside of a kernel, but that doesn't excite the average computer user. How was the open source community going to get the programmers to donate their time to fix the mundane, everyday glitches that confused and infuriated the nonprogrammers? Was the Linux community going to be able to produce something that a nonprogrammer could even understand?
+
+Others wondered if the Linux world could ever agree enough to create a software package with some coherence. Today, Microsoft users and programmers pull their hair out trying to keep Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT straight. Little idiosyncrasies cause games to crash and programs to fail. Microsoft has hundreds of quality assurance engineers and thousands of support personnel. Still, the little details drive everyone crazy.
+
+New versions of Linux appear as often as daily. People often create their own versions to solve particular problems. Many of these changes won't affect anyone, but they can add up. Is there enough consistency to make the tools easy enough to use?
+
+Many wondered if Linux was right for world domination. Programmers might love playing with source code, but the rest of the world just wants something that delivers the e-mail on time. More important, the latter are willing to pay for this efficiency.
+
+Such questions have been bothering the open source community for years and still have no easy answers today. Programmers need food, and food requires money. Making easy-to-use software requires discipline, and discipline doesn't always agree with total freedom.
+
+When the first wave of hype about free software swept across the zeitgeist, no one wanted to concentrate on these difficult questions. The high quality of free operating systems and their use at high-profile sites like Yahoo! was good news for the world. The success of unconditional cooperation was intoxicating. If free software could do so much with so little, it could overcome the difficult questions. Besides, it didn't have to be perfect. It just needed to be better than Microsoft.
+
+1~ Freedom
+
+The notion embodied by the word "free" is one of the great marketing devices of all time. Cereal manufacturers know that kids will slog through bowls of sugar to get a free prize. Stores know that people will gladly give them their names and addresses if they stand a chance of winning something for free. Car ads love to emphasize the freedom a new car will give to someone.
+
+Of course, Microsoft knows this fact as well. One of their big advertising campaigns stresses the freedom to create new documents, write long novels, fiddle with photographs, and just do whatever you want with a computer. "Where do you want to go today?" the Microsoft ads ask.
+
+Microsoft also recognizes the pure power of giving away something for free. When Bill Gates saw Netscape's browser emerging as a great competitive threat, he first bought a competing version and then wrote his own version of a web browser. Microsoft gave their versions away for free. This bold move shut down the revenue stream of Netscape, which had to cut its price to zero in order to compete. Of course, Netscape didn't have revenues from an operating system to pay the rent. Netscape cried foul and eventually the Department of Justice brought a lawsuit to decide whether the free software from Microsoft was just a plot to keep more people paying big bucks for their not-so-free Windows OS. The fact that Microsoft is now threatened by a group of people who are giving away a free OS has plenty of irony.
+
+The word "free" has a much more complicated and nuanced meaning within the free software movement. In fact, many people who give away their software don't even like the word "free" and prefer to use "open" to describe the process of sharing. In the case of free software, it's not just an ad campaign to make people feel good about buying a product. It's also not a slick marketing sleight of hand to focus people's attention on a free gift while the magician charges full price for a product. The word "free" is more about a way of life. The folks who write the code throw around the word in much the same way the Founding Fathers of the United States used it. To many of them, the free software revolution was also conceived in liberty and dedicated to certain principles like the fact that all men and women have certain inalienable rights to change, modify, and do whatever they please with their software in the pursuit of happiness.
+
+Tossing about the word "free" is easy to do. Defining what it means takes much longer. The Declaration of Independence was written in 1776, but the colonial governments fought and struggled with creating a free government through the ratification of the current United States Constitution in 1787. The Bill of Rights came soon afterward, and the Supreme Court is still continually struggling with defining the boundaries of freedom described by the document. Much of the political history of the United States might be said to be an extended argument about the meaning of the words "free country."
+
+The free software movement is no different. It's easy for one person to simply give their software away for free. It's much harder to attract and organize an army to take on Microsoft and dominate the world. That requires a proper definition of the word "free" so that everyone understands the rights and limitations behind the word. Everyone needs to be on the same page if the battle is to be won. Everyone needs to understand what is meant by "free software."
+
+The history of the free software world is also filled with long, extended arguments defining the freedom that comes bundled with the source code. Many wonder if it is more about giving the user something for nothing, or if is it about empowering him. Does this freedom come with any responsibilities? What should they be? How is the freedom enforced? Is freeloading a proper part of the freedom?
+
+In the early years of computers, there were no real arguments. Software was free because people just shared it with each other. Magazines like Creative Computing and BYTE published the source code to programs because that was an easy way to share information.
+
+People would even type in the data themselves. Computers cost money, and getting them to run was part of the challenge. Sharing software was just part of being neighborly. If someone needed to borrow your plow, you lent it to them when you weren't using it.
+
+This changed as corporations recognized that they could copyright software and start charging money for it. Most people loved this arrangement because the competition brought new packages and tools to market and people were more than willing to pay for them. How else are the programmers and the manual writers going to eat?
+
+A few people thought this was a disaster. Richard Stallman watched the world change from his office in the artificial intelligence labs of MIT. Stallman is the ultimate hacker, if you use the word in the classical sense. In the beginning, the word only described someone who knows how to program well and loves to poke around in the insides of computers. It only took on its more malicious tone later as the media managed to group all of those with the ability to wrangle computers into the same dangerous camp. Hackers often use the term "cracker" to refer to these people.
+
+Stallman is a model of the hacker. He is strident, super intelligent, highly logical, and completely honest. Most corporations keep their hackers shut off in a back room because these traits seem to scare away customers and investors who just want sweet little lies in their ears. Stallman was never that kind of guy. He looked at the burgeoning corporate control of software and didn't like it one bit. His freedom was slowly being whittled away, and he wasn't the type to simply sit by and not say anything.
+
+When Stallman left the AI lab in 1984, he didn't want to be controlled by its policies. Universities started adopting many of the same practices as the corporations in the 1980s, and Stallman couldn't be a special exception. If MIT was going to be paying him a salary, MIT would own his code and any patents that came from it. Even MIT, which is a much cooler place than most, couldn't accommodate him on staff. He didn't move far, however, because after he set up the Free Software Foundation, he kept an office at MIT, first unofficially and then officially. Once he wasn't "on the staff," the rules became different.
+
+Stallman turned to consulting for money, but it was consulting with a twist. He would only work for companies that wouldn't put any restrictions on the software he created. This wasn't an easy sell. He was insisting that any work he did for Corporation X could also be shared with Corporations Y and Z, even if they were direct competitors.
+
+This wasn't how things were done in the 1980s. That was the decade when companies figured out how to lock up the source code to a program by only distributing a machine-readable version. They hoped this would control their product and let them restrain people who might try to steal their ideas and their intellectual property. Stallman thought it was shutting down his ability to poke around inside the computer and fix it. This secrecy blocked him from sharing his thoughts and ideas with other programmers.
+
+Most programmers looked at the scheme of charging for locked-up binary versions of a program as a necessary evil. Sure, they couldn't play around with the guts of Microsoft Windows, but it also meant that no one could play around with the guts of the programs they wrote. The scheme locked doors and compartmentalized the world, but it also gave the creator of programs more power. Most programmers thought having power over their own creation was pretty neat, even if others had more power. Being disarmed is okay if everyone else is disarmed and locked in a cage.
+
+Stallman thought this was a disaster for the world and set out to convince the world that he was right. In 1984, he wrote the GNU Manifesto, which started his GNU project and laid out the conditions for his revolution. This document stood out a bit in the middle of the era of Ronald Reagan because it laid out Stallman's plan for creating a virtual commune where people would be free to use the software. It is one of the first cases when someone tried to set down a definition of the word "free" for software users. Sure, software and ideas were quite free long ago, but no one noticed until the freedom was gone.
+
+He wrote,
+
+_1 I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way. . . . So that I can continue to use computers without dishonor, I have decided to put together a sufficient body of free software so that I will be able to get along without any software that is not free.
+
+The document is a wonderful glimpse at the nascent free software world because it is as much a recruiting document as a tirade directed at corporate business practices. When the American colonies split off from England, Thomas Paine spelled out the problems with the English in the first paragraph of his pamphlet "Common Sense." In his manifesto, Stallman didn't get started using words like "dishonor" until the sixth paragraph. The first several paragraphs spelled out the cool tools he had developed already: "an Emacs text editor with Lisp for writing editor commands, a source level debugger, a yacc-compatible parser generator, a linker, and around 35 utilities." Then he pointed to the work he wanted to complete soon: "A new portable optimizing C compiler has compiled itself and may be released this year. An initial kernel exists but many more features are needed to emulate Unix." He was saying, in effect, that he already had a few juicy peaches growing on the trees of his commune.
+
+If this wasn't enough, he intended to do things a bit better than UNIX. His operating system was going to offer the latest, greatest ideas of computer science, circa 1984. "In particular, we plan to have longer file names, file version numbers, a crashproof file system, file name completion perhaps, terminal-independent display support, and perhaps eventually a Lisp-based window system through which several Lisp programs and ordinary Unix programs can share a screen." The only thing that was missing from every computer nerd's wish list was a secret submarine docking site in the basement grotto.
+
+The fifth paragraph even explained to everyone that the name of the project would be the acronym GNU, which stood for "GNU's Not UNIX," and it should be pronounced with a hard G to make sure that no one would get it confused with the word "new." Stallman has always cared about words, the way they're used and the way they're pronounced.
+
+In 1984, UNIX became the focus of Stallman's animus because its original developer, AT&T, was pushing to try to make some money back after paying so many people at Bell Labs to create it. Most people were somewhat conflicted by the fight. They understood that AT&T had paid good money and supported many researchers with the company's beneficence. The company gave money, time, and spare computers. Sure, it was a pain to pay AT&T for something and get only a long license drafted by teams of lawyers. Yes, it would be nice if we could poke around under the hood of UNIX without signing a non-disclosure agreement. It would be nice if we could be free to do whatever we want, but certainly someone who pays for something deserves the right to decide how it is used. We've all got to eat.
+
+Stallman wasn't confused at all. Licenses like AT&T's would constrict his freedom to share with others. To make matters worse, the software companies wanted him to pay for the privilege of getting software without the source code.
+
+Stallman explains that his feelings weren't focused on AT&T per se. Software companies were springing up all over the place, and most of them were locking up their source code with proprietary licenses. It was the 1980s thing to do, like listening to music by Duran Duran and Boy George.