With a Little Help (22 page)

"Close the door and sit down," she said.

He did, looking at her with so much hope that it made her eyes water.

"Here's my offer," she said. "You and I will lock ourselves in this office with the last draft of my bill. My staff will run interference for me with the Judiciary committee, and we will draft a version of my bill that we can both live with. We will jointly take it to Senators Beauchamp and Rittenhouse, with our blessings, and ask them to expedite it through
both
committees. Every Congresscritter on the Hill is sitting around with his thumb up his ass until the lights come back on. We can get this voted in by Tuesday."

He stared down at his hands. "I can't do it," he said. "My
job
is
not to compromise
. I just can't do it."

"Come on, Rainer, think outside the box for a minute here." Her heart was pounding. This could really be it. This could be the solution she'd been waiting for. "Even if the bill passes, there's going to be a long deliberation over the contours of the regulation, probably at the FCC. You'll be able to work on the bureau staffers and at the expert agencies, take ex-parte meetings and lobby on behalf of your employers. It's all we've ever asked for: an expert discussion where the public interest gets a hearing alongside of private enterprise and government."

But he was shaking his head, standing up to go. "You're probably right, Trish," he said. "I don't know. What I know is, I can't do what you're asking of me. They'd just fire me."

"If the Downtime continues, they won't be
able
to fire you -- they won't even know what you're up to until it's too late. And then they'll make the best that they can out of it. No one is better qualified to represent your side in the administrative agencies."

He put his ridiculous hat on and wrapped his scarf around his neck, and they looked each other in the eyes for a long moment. She waited for the involuntary smile that looking into his eyes inevitably evoked, but it didn't come.

"I don't understand you, Trish. You won this incredible victory for cooperation, for collective ownership of our intellectual infrastructure. Ant-networks demand the same cooperation from the nodes, that my phone pass your car's messages to his desk. Let's just set aside the professional politics for a second. Just you and me. Tell me: how can you
not
support this?" He looked at her out from under his brows, staring intensely. He swallowed and said, "It was the surfer, wasn't it?"

"What?" she said.

"The one who died. That's why you're doing this. You want to make up for him --"

She couldn't believe he'd said it. Taken such a cheap shot. "I'm surprised you didn't save that one for television, Rainer. Jesus. No, I'm doing this because it's
right
. In case you haven't noticed, your self-healing, uncorruptible network is
down
. People are suffering. The economy is tanking. The death toll is mounting. You won't even bend one
inch
, one
tenth of an inch
, because you're worried about losing your job."

"Trish," he said, "I'm sorry, I didn't mean --"

Her office door opened and there stood her embedded journalist. "I just got in from Manhattan," he said. "Can I set up in that corner there again?"

"Be my guest," she said, grateful for the distraction. Rainer looked at her, forehead scrunched, and then he left.

#

"It's a good thing you're not over him," the lawyer said, pouring her another victory whisky. The bill had passed the House with only one opposing and two abstentions, and had squeaked through the Senate by five seats, at five minutes to midnight on the eighth day of the Downtime. They were halfway to the bar (where the office manager had been feeding twenties to the bartender to stay open) when the grid came back up, crawls springing to life on every surface and cars suddenly zipping forward in the characteristic high-speed ballet of efficiently routed traffic. They'd laughed themselves stupid all the way to the bar and after a brief but intense negotiation between the lawyer and the barman, he'd produced a bottle of Irish that was nearly half as good as the stuff Trish kept at home.

"I'm going to pretend you didn't say that," Trish said, sipping tenderly at the booze.

"Come on, girl," the lawyer said, twirling her moustache. "Be serious. You two had so much sexual energy in that room, it's a wonder you didn't make the bulbs explode. It's how you got inside each other's heads. You weren't selling the committee, you were selling
him
, and that's what made you so effective. We're going to need that again at the FCC, too -- so no getting over him until after then."

Trish drank her whisky. She didn't know what to say to that. He'd looked ten years older tonight, in the corridors, whispering to his committee members, to his staffers, his face drooping and wilted. She supposed she didn't look any better. It had been, what, three days? since she'd had more than an hour's sleep.

"I don't get it," she said. "How could he be so dumb? I mean, it's obvious that the system is being gamed. Obvious that we're being targeted through it. Yet he sits there, insisting that white is black, that up is down, that the network is autonomous and immune to all corruption."

"It's like a religion for them," the lawyer said. "It doesn't need explaining. It's just right-living. It's the Law."

Trish thought back to the ceremony in the graveyard, the dirge and the prayers to a god no one believed in. Had Rainer really renounced his faith when he dropped out of Yeshiva?

"Here's to a human-readable world," Trish said, raising her glass. Around her, the staffers and borrowed staffers and hangers-on and even the barman raised their glasses and cheered. It was warm and the feeling swelled in her tummy and up her chest and through her face and she burst out in what felt like the biggest smile of her life.

#

She'd learned a long time ago never to send email while drunk, but it had been too much last night.

"What if, Rainer, what if -- what if the reason for the Downtimes is that someone is manipulating the network and that's breaking it. Did you ever wonder about that? Maybe the network
is
as good as you say it is -- until someone screws it up by trying to get preferential treatment for his pals.

"Wouldn't that be a kick in the teeth? We get five squillion percent increases in across-the-board routing efficiency, but in the end, it's never enough for people who can't be happy unless they're happier than someone else.

"The thing that saves the human race, but if we adopt it, it will destroy us. Irony sucks."

She'd signed it "Love," but even drunk, she'd had the sense to take that out before sending it. Saying "Love" would have been no more appropriate than saying, "You know, I
did
save your cousin's life." She'd called in no favors, she'd run no blackmail, and she'd won anyway.

He rang her doorbell at 5AM. She was barely able to drag herself out of bed.

"I figured you'd be getting up to deal with the press soon," he said, and she groaned. He was right. She'd earned some time off, but it'd be a month before she could take it. Too much press to do. She appreciated anew how much work it must have taken to be any of her old bosses from the copyright wars: the judge, the senator, the executive director of the PAC.

She was in her robe, and he was in jeans and a UCLA sweatshirt. He didn't have any gel in his hair, which was matted down by the knit cap he'd been wearing. He looked adorable.

"They fired me this morning," he said.

"Oh, hon --" she said.

"I would have quit," he said. "I'm outmatched."

She felt herself blush. Or was she flushing? She was suddenly aware of his smell, the boy smell, the smell that she could smell in his chest, in his scalp, in his tummy, lower... She straightened up and led him into the living room and started the coffee-maker going.

"When do you fly back, then?" she said.

He looked at her, smiling. "I don't know," he said. "I haven't booked a ticket."

She felt an answering smile at the corners of her mouth and turned into the fridge to fetch out some gourmet MREs. "Bacon and eggs or pancakes?" she said, then laughed. "I guess bacon is out," she said.

"Oh, I'm willing to bet that that bacon hasn't been anywhere near a pig," he said, "but I'll have the pancakes, if you don't mind."

She set everything to perking and went into the bedroom to pull on something smart and camera-friendly, but everything was in the hamper, so she settled for jeans and a decent shirt from last-year's wardrobe.

When she opened the door, he was standing right there, taller than her. "I think you're right," he said. "About the network. It's the best explanation I've heard so far."

She wrapped herself in silence again, waited for him to say more.

"You see, the
true
, neutral network is immune to corrupting influences and favoritism. So the existence of corruption and favoritism means that what we've got
isn't
a true network. Which means you're right! We need to have a hearing to get to the bottom of this, so that we can build the true network." He smiled bravely. "I thought maybe you could use an expert in your corner who'd say that in a hearing?"

"Thanks," she said, and slipped under his arm and back into the kitchen. Suddenly, she wanted very much to be back at her office, back with her staff, talking to reporters and overseeing a million details. "I'll think about it."

"I'm giving up my apartment at the end of the month -- next Monday. I won't be able to afford it without the Association's salary," he said.

Her place was big. A bedroom, a home office, a living room and a dining room. It was a serious deal for DC, even outside the beltway. It could easily accommodate a second person, even if they weren't sleeping together.

Her office -- her staff -- the press -- the bill -- her Board.

"Well," she said, "I've got to get going. I'll shower at the office. Got to get there in time to catch the Euro press-calls. Let me put your breakfast in a bag, OK?"

He looked whipsawed. "Uh, OK. Can I give you a ride?"

"No, I'll need my car this afternoon. Thanks, though." She kept her voice light, didn't meet his eyes. Kept thinking: her office -- her staff -- the bill.

"Well," he said. He turned for the door. Stopped. She tensed. He turned back to her. "Trish," he said.

"It's OK," she said. "It's OK. We just have religious differences, is all."

She slipped past him and into her car, and left him standing in her driveway. As she asked the car to plot a route for her back to the Hill, she dug through her purse for a pocket-knife. At the next red light, she took her lapel and slashed at it, opening a rent in her shirt that reflected a little of what her heart was feeling. It made her feel a little better to do it.

- For Alice

--

Afterword:

I wrote this story for Alice, who was then my girlfriend and is now my wife. Alice is smart as anything and I wanted to show off to her.

So I stole two ideas: Eric Bonabeau's ground-breaking work on "ant-colony optimisation" (the basis of his consulting firm Icosystem, built on work he did at the Santa Fe Institute) and Natalie Jeremijenko's provocative notion of "legible computing" -- that is, computing whose results can be interpreted by laypeople. Eric's handing the keys to the kingdom to emergent systems that are spookily good but can't be interrogated. Natalie wants a Protestant Reformation for computing in which we can all understand what's being discovered by our computer systems. These two ideas are both fantastic, but they can't peacefully coexist, or can they?

~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-