With a Little Help (43 page)

"Crashed the lottery. That's how I knew we'd done it. Lottery tickets fell by more than 80 percent. Wiped out."

"And then your friend beat your head in?"

"Well."

The suit was getting more uncomfortable by the second. Leon wondered if he'd get stuck if he waited too long, his overinflated suit incapable of moving. "I'm going to have to go, soon."

"Evolutionarily, bad risk-assessment is advantageous."

Leon nodded slowly. "OK, I'll buy that. Makes you entrepreneurial --"

"Drives you to colonize new lands, to ask out the beautiful monkey in the next tree, to have a baby you can't imagine how you'll afford."

"And your numerate Vulcans stopped?"

"Pretty much," he said. "But that's just normal shakedown. Like when people move to cities, their birthrate drops. And nevertheless, the human race is becoming more and more citified and still, it isn't vanishing. Social stuff takes time."

"And then your friend beat your head in?"

"Stop saying that."

Leon stood. "Maybe I should go and find Ria."

Buhle made a disgusted noise. "Fine. And ask her why she didn't finish the job? Ask her if she decided to do it right then, or if she'd planned it? Ask her why she used the coffee jug instead of the bread-knife? Because, you know, I wonder this myself."

Leon backpedaled, clumsy in the overinflated suit. He struggled to get into the airlock, and as it hissed through its cycle, he tried not to think of Ria straddling the old man's chest, the coffee urn rising and falling.

She was waiting for him on the other side, also overinflated in her suit. "Let's go," she said, and took his hand, the rubberized palms of their gloves sticking together. She half-dragged him through the many rooms of Buhle's body, tripping through the final door, then spinning him around and ripping, hard, on the release cord that split the suit down the back so that it fell into two lifeless pieces that slithered to the ground. He gasped out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding in as the cool air made contact with the thin layer of perspiration that filmed his body.

Ria had already ripped open her own suit and her face was flushed and sweaty, her hair matted. Small sweat-rings sprouted beneath her armpits. An efficient orderly came forward and began gathering up their suits. Ria thanked her impersonally and headed for the doors.

"I didn't think he'd do that," she said, once they were outside of the building -- outside the core of Buhle's body.

"You tried to kill him," Leon said. He looked at her hands, which had blunt, neat fingernails and large knuckles. He tried to picture the tendons on their backs standing out like sail-ropes when the wind blew, as they did the rhythmic work of raising and lowering the heavy silver coffee pot.

She wiped her hands on her trousers and stuffed them in her pockets, awkward now, without any of her usual self-confidence. "I'm not ashamed of that. I'm proud of it. Not everyone would have had the guts. If I hadn't, you and everyone you know would be --" She brought her hands out of her pockets, bunched into fists. She shook her head. "I thought he'd tell you what we like about your grad project. Then we could have talked about where you'd fit in here --"

"You never said anything about that," he said. "I could have saved you a lot of trouble. I don't talk about it."

Ria shook her head. "This is Buhle. You won't stop us from doing anything we want to do. I'm not trying to intimidate you here. It's just a fact of life. If we want to replicate your experiment, we can, on any scale we want --"

"But I won't be a part of it," he said. "That matters."

"Not as much as you think it does. And if you think you can avoid being a part of something that Buhle wants you for, you're likely to be surprised. We can get you what you want."

"No you can't," he said. "If there's one thing I know, it's that you can't do that."

#

Take one normal human being at lunch. Ask her about her breakfast. If lunch is great, she'll tell you how great breakfast is. If lunch is terrible, she'll tell you how awful breakfast was.

Now ask her about dinner. A bad lunch will make her assume that a bad dinner is forthcoming. A great lunch will make her optimistic about dinner.

Explain this dynamic to her and ask her again about breakfast. She'll struggle to remember the actual details of breakfast, the texture of the oatmeal, whether the juice was cold and delicious or slightly warm and slimy. She will remember and remember and remember for all she's worth, and then, if lunch is good, she'll tell you breakfast was good. And if lunch is bad, she'll tell you breakfast was bad.

Because you just can't help it. Even though you know you're doing it, you can't help it.

But what if you could?

#

"It was the parents," he said, as they picked their way through the treetops, along the narrow walkway, squeezing to one side to let the eager, gabbling researchers past. "That was the heartbreaker. Parents only remember the good parts of parenthood. Parents whose kids are grown remember a succession of sweet hugs, school triumphs, sports victories, and they simply forget the vomit, the tantrums, the sleep deprivation... It's the thing that lets us continue the species, this excellent facility for forgetting. That's what should have tipped me off."

Ria nodded solemnly. "But there was an upside, wasn't there?"

"Oh, sure. Better breakfasts, for one thing. And the weight-loss -- amazing. Just being able to remember how shitty you felt the last time you ate the chocolate bar or pigged out on fries. It was amazing."

"The applications do sound impressive. Just that weight-loss one --"

"Weight-loss, addiction counseling, you name it. It was all killer apps, wall to wall."

"But?"

He stopped abruptly. "You must know this," he said. "If you know about Clarity -- that's what I called it, Clarity -- then you know about what happened. With Buhle's resources, you can find out anything, right?"

She made a wry smile. "Oh, I know what history records. What I don't know is what
happened
. The official version, the one that put Ate onto you and got us interested --"

"Why'd you try to kill Buhle?"

"Because I'm the only one he can't bullshit, and I saw where he was going with his little experiment. The competitive advantage to a firm that knows about such a radical shift in human cognition -- it's massive. Think of all the products that would vanish if numeracy came in a virus. Think of all the shifts in governance, in policy. Just imagine an
airport
run by and for people who understand risk!"

"Sounds pretty good to me," Leon said.

"Oh sure," she said. "Sure. A world of eager consumers who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. Why did evolution endow us with such pathological innumeracy? What's the survival advantage in being led around by the nose by whichever witch-doctor can come up with the best scare-story?"

"He said that entrepreneurial things -- parenthood, businesses..."

"Any kind of risk-taking. Sports. No one swings for the stands when he knows that the odds are so much better on a bunt."

"And Buhle
wanted
this?"

She peered at him. "A world of people who understand risk are nearly as easy to lead around by the nose as a world of people who are incapable of understanding risk. The big difference is that the competition is at a massive disadvantage in the latter case, not being as highly evolved as the home team."

He looked at her, really looked at her for the first time. Saw that she was the face of a monster, the voice of a god. The hand of a massive, unknowable machine that was vying to change the world, remake it to suit its needs. A machine that was
good at it
.

"Clarity," he said. "Clarity." She looked perfectly attentive. "Do you think you'd have tried to kill Buhle if you'd been taking Clarity?"

She blinked in surprise. "I don't think I ever considered the question."

He waited. He found he was holding his breath.

"I think I would have succeeded if I'd been taking Clarity," she said.

"And if Buhle had been taking Clarity?"

"I think he would have let me." She blurted it so quickly it sounded like a belch.

"Is anyone in charge of Buhle?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean -- that vat-thing. Is it volitional? Does it steer this, this
enterprise
? Or does the enterprise tick on under its own power, making its own decisions?"

She swallowed. "Technically, it's a benevolent dictatorship. He's sovereign, you know that." She swallowed again. "Will you tell me what happened with Clarity?"

"Does he actually make decisions, though?"

"I don't think so," she whispered. "Not really. It's more like, like --"

"A force of nature?"

"An emergent phenomenon."

"Can he hear us?"

She nodded.

"Buhle," he said, thinking of the thing in the vat. "Clarity made the people who took it very angry. They couldn't look at advertisements without wanting to smash something. Going into a shop made them nearly catatonic. Voting made them want to storm a government office with flaming torches. Every test subject went to prison within eight weeks."

Ria smiled. She took his hands in hers -- warm, dry -- and squeezed them.

His phone rang. He took one hand out and answered it.

"Hello?"

"How much do you want for it?" Buhle's voice was ebullient. Mad, even.

"It's not for sale."

"I'll buy Ate, put you in charge."

"Don't want it."

"I'll kill your parents." The ebullient tone didn't change at all.

"You'll kill everyone if Clarity is widely used."

"You don't believe that. Clarity lets you choose the course that will make you happiest. Mass suicide won't make humanity happiest."

"You don't know that."

"Wanna bet?"

"Why don't you kill yourself?"

"Because dead, I'll never make things better."

Ria was watching intently. She squeezed the hand she held.

"Will you take it?"

There was a long pause.

Leon pressed on. "No deal unless you take it," he said.

"You have some?"

"I can make some. I'll need to talk to some lab-techs and download some of my research first."

"Will you take it with me?"

He didn't hesitate. "Never."

"I'll take it," Buhle said, and hung up.

Ria took his hand again. Leaned forward. Gave him a dry, firm kiss on the mouth. Leaned back.

"Thank you," she said.

"Don't thank me," he said. "I'm not doing you any favors."

She stood up, pulling him to his feet.

"Welcome to the team," she said. "Welcome to Buhle."

--

Afterword:

I wrote this story for a Frederic Pohl tribute anthology, inspired by
The Space Merchants,
the classic novel he co-wrote with CM Kornbluth. I've been on a real neuroeconomics bender lately, fascinated with the idea that happiness, perceived happiness, and predicted happiness can be completely disjoint. It raises an interesting question in an era like ours, where governments increasingly see their role as managing people, rather than representing them. If you can make people happier by changing the way they feel about their circumstances, isn't that easier and more likely to succeed than changing the circumstances themselves?