To Keep and Bear Arms

Posted on 15 July 2008 by Mike Reeves-McMillan

We’re watching the familiar stock footage from security cameras of the May 7 incident. In a federal building in New Mexico, people are going about their daily business: renewing permits, going to testify in court, collecting or dropping off parcels. Several Guplicates fan out among the crowd. Nobody pays them much attention.

The footage is mercifully interrupted just before the explosion, by a cut to Halwaz’s view of Jim Daji of the Bureau of Firearms and Explosives. He is short, stocky, balding in a ring pattern, and wears a Bureau windcheater jacket. There is a table in front of him with three items: an object that looks like a Techno-Cubist grain of rice, a laminated card, and a handgun.

“The designers of Gu,” he tells you, “are brilliant people, and were very careful to ensure that Gu would make a really poor weapon. For which we’re duly grateful. But what they didn’t think through was that something that isn’t itself a weapon can be used to carry a weapon. That’s what makes it militarily useful, and also what makes it useful to terrorists such as the May 7 bombers.”

“Because it’s difficult to stop?”

“Exactly, because it’s difficult for an unarmed civilian, without special equipment, to stop a Guplicate. Also, because it’s easy to conceal a weapon inside Gu. And finally, because you no longer need to recruit people fanatical enough to blow themselves up or advance into a hail of bullets. They can commit their crimes from locations where they are at no personal risk whatsoever, provided they don’t get caught.”

“Hence, the limiting laws on Guplicates.”

“Exactly. Which has led to a lovely constitutional headache over the right to bear arms.” He taps on the table next to the grain of techno-rice.

“This is the technology of the concealed-carry provisions which apply in most states,” he says. “This little gizmo is an implanted identity verifier, of course. No state mandates that all citizens must bear one of these, but practically all states which allow concealed carry of deadly weapons mandate them as a condition of a concealed-carry permit, which is what this is.” He taps the laminated card.

“Both the IDVIA – the identity verifying implantable autoresponder – and the permit contain RFID tags which return data when queried, as does the gun. The IDVIA and the gun both have different forms of biometric authentication so that they can’t be used by anyone except the registered owners, which is a safety feature as well, of course – an attacker can’t get your gun off you and use it against you. And throughout most settled areas are RFID readers which query the tags and post back to our database, where we do a three-way match. No three-way match, a flag goes up and a human gets involved. The codes are anonymized – it requires a search warrant to match our data with another database which would identify the person by name, and that would normally only be issued if there was a gun crime reported in the area. But we do expose the anonymized data as a web service to law enforcement agencies, so that they can spot if there’s a convergence of armed individuals in any particular area.

“So if a wide-band holography scan, as used in most sensitive or crowded areas these days, detects that you’re carrying, you better have a permit and a three-way match, or be prepared for some questions, which are likely to be asked by large police Guplicates appearing suddenly out of the floor on either side of you. Now, to most people all of this is quite sensible, though there are always the extremists who consider any form of gun monitoring to be the beginning of the apocalypse, even when it has a dozen safeguards built in so that someone carrying a gun for lawful self-defense has nothing to worry about. Where the real controversy comes in, though, is over whether your Guplicate can carry your gun. Just exactly because a Guplicate with a gun is much more dangerous than a person with a gun.”

Anthony Balboa is a constitutional lawyer, and looks it: sharp gray three-piece suit, bound books behind a big oak desk, retro glasses with built-in visual overlay tech. He leans toward you.

“The big constitutional issue,” he says, “is, does the individual’s right to bear arms – assuming that there is one, which is not an uncontroversial view – does it extend to one’s Guplicate, or not? On the one side, it’s argued that since crimes committed via Guplicate are prosecuted as if they were committed in person, the reverse also applies; rights which apply in person also apply via Guplicate. Against this, it’s argued that a Guplicate is merely a tool, that applying the right to bear arms to it is no different from applying it to, say, a remote-controlled aircraft.”

Cut to archive footage of the Supreme Court trial Jimson et al. v. State of Nebraska. Balboa is presenting his closing arguments.

“The pro-gun lobby has a saying,” he says in oratory tones. “‘Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.’ In other words, a gun is a tool, without moral culpability; moral culpability – and rights – belong to legal persons, not to tools. In exactly the same way, a Guplicate is a tool. It is not prosecuted for crimes; its operator is. And so, it does not have rights; its operator does. Its operator’s rights do not extend to it, and so I submit that this Court should rule that the right to bear arms as a natural person and a citizen does not extend to any Guplicate under that citizen’s control.”

Back to Balboa’s office. “We won Jimson,” he says. “But it’s still controversial. Farmers like Jimson want to be able to patrol their own properties with weapons if they expect attempted thefts, and they want to be able to do so in safety, which means, by Guplicate. On the face of it this isn’t unreasonable, but we had to make the constitutional point. It’s not acceptable in our society to have armed, privately owned Guplicates wandering about, particularly because there is no reliable way as yet to authenticate who is actually in control of them.”

Back to Daji.

“The May 7 terrorists were disgruntled ex-US military, mostly from Gulf War 3,” he says. “They were controlling their Guplicates from just a few streets away. But apart from a bit of satellite lag, there’s nothing to prevent someone in, oh, let’s say, to take a random example, Saudi Arabia or Yemen, doing exactly the same. Of course all Guplicates display standard metadata showing the location of their operators, but the system’s quite hackable by a determined professional; I’m not a cybercrime expert, obviously, but I understand that there’s only so much you can do to prevent that, and it’s never going to be enough. Our only protection is to forbid Guplicates from carrying any kind of offensive weaponry, and to be ready to spot them doing so and bring them down immediately. There’s only so much you can do to prevent them, but we do everything we can. I mean, there was that serial killer, the Cornell Suffocater, who covered his victims’ mouths and noses with Gu. How do you stop that? But it’s not going to be an effective terrorist tactic against a mass target, is it?”

Posted in Anthony Balboa, guns, Jim Daji, May 7, military applications | 2 Comments

Nerdreference

Posted on 14 July 2008 by Mike Reeves-McMillan

Allan Scott is back, dressed this time as Elminster from the Forgotten Realms novels – as a helpful metadata tag informs you.

“Nerdreference. That’s the technical term for what’s going on with a lot of Gu-related names,” he says. “Think back to the days when the English novel was written largely by and for Englishmen who had been classically educated at private schools. They were always replete with reference to classical tags in Latin and Greek, French bons mots, and quotations from the English classics – Shakespeare and the poets, mostly. P.G. Wodehouse plays around with the convention and pokes fun at it when he has Bertie Wooster come out with odds and ends of English literature, for which he often can’t remember the source.

“Today’s equivalent is nerdreference. It’s a way of connecting with your own group and, incidentally or otherwise, excluding those who aren’t part of it, of course; but it’s also a celebration of beloved material.

“And to a true hard-core technophile of a certain generation there are few things more beloved than Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, a novel about virtual reality which came out shortly before the advent of the World Wide Web and consequently managed to get almost everything about the future absolutely dead wrong, including what people would charge for and what they’d distribute for free. It didn’t coin the usage of the word ‘avatar’ to mean a figure that represents you in some kind of virtual way, but it did popularize it. And it gives us the names Clint and Brandy for the default male and female avatars.”

Halwaz is interviewing Serena Koslowski’s niece, Jenna Stewart, the original of “Brandy”. In a holovolume off to one side, the section of the scene at the Gu launch in which “Clint” and “Brandy” featured is looping.

“How do you feel about being the original of Brandy?” you ask.

Cut to Stewart’s viewpoint. She is quietly amused.

“Well, it’s done my career no harm. Gives people an association that they can connect me to, so they remember me. Of course, a lot of people have called me Brandy over the years, thinking it’s my name.”

“You never considered using it as a performing name or something?”

You snort with laughter. “Hardly. My friend Tom Harding, the original Clint, did call himself Clint for a while, but… I just don’t see myself as a Brandy, somehow.”

“How did it affect Tom’s life?”

“Well, we haven’t kept in touch, but it probably did him some good career-wise. I’m not sure whether that was a good thing for him personally, though. He might have done better with a slower rise that he had to fight for more. I know I got the speed-wobbles there for a while; took me a long time to pull myself together.” She stares into the distance for a moment, then shakes her head.

“You don’t get any royalties from the use of your image, is that right?”

“Right, although Aunt Serena did give us both some shares when Gu started to take off, which was good of her – all she’d promised us was a few hundred bucks for a one-time gig, after all. She had no obligation. So in a way I do profit from Brandy, since she’s preloaded with every Gupe-pack.”

“You still have your shares?”

“I still have my shares. They’ve split a few times and gained a lot of value; I’ve borrowed against them, spent the dividends, but I’d never sell them. I’m proud of my small part in the story of Gu and I want to keep a stake in it.” You gesture towards the holovolume and smile.

Back to Scott, Halwaz’s viewpoint.

“And then, driders. Driders are from Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, the iconic nerd game. They were originally conceived as partially-transformed dark elves that had offended the spider goddess, though they were adopted into other game settings as well with different backstories. So, when you have a Gupe shape that is humanoid on top and kind of arachnid at the bottom, naturally they get called driders. Nobody seems to know exactly who called them that, but there are plenty of gamers in the military – they’re not all nerds, by any means.”

Across his desktop strides an image of the original driders, which morphs into the military version with half the number of legs.

“And finally, there are comics. Spider-Man, of course, who’s such a great inspiration to the NYPD and their imitators, but also Reed Richards, Mr Fantastic of the Fantastic Four, who could stretch his body like rubber, the namesake of the Richards Reacher.”

Now Halwaz is talking to another veteran, an older one this time, who served in the Second Gulf War. His name is Billy Krantz. He’s a little sunburned, a little overweight, and wears a meshback cap and a plaid shirt; he’s sitting on the porch of his home in a battered armchair.

“Myup,” he says, “I got in the way of an IED. Roadside bomb. I seen all the generations of prosthetics, and I well could live to see them regrow me a whole new hand, they say, but I loves me my Richards Reacher.” He stretches out his right hand – and “stretches out” is the phrase. The arm elongates to about a meter and a half before the hand closes on a flyswatter, whips around and swats a lazily buzzing fly which probably didn’t even know Krantz was in the vicinity.

“Hee, hee, hee,” he chuckles. “I always git a kick out of that.” He grins and shows his pebbly teeth.

Krantz’s old buddy Jerry Morton is tall, thin and a little stooped, with hair turning imperceptibly from pale blond to white. He lost both legs above the knee in a roadside bomb attack. His wrinkled face is marked with concentration as he demonstrates “stilting”.

“All’s I do,” he says, “is I kind of bounce a little like this and I just tense my muscles just so, and…” his legs extend to almost twice their length. He bounces again, and they telescope back down.

“I manage a hardware store,” he says. “Don’t need no ladders or nothing to reach them high shelves. I’d druther have my legs that I could feel, some days, specially when the sockets hurt or when something reminds me of the day I lost ’em. But other days, I’m glad of these here. On’y drawback is, every time old Mrs Scranton’s cat gets herself stuck up a tree, guess who they’re calling to come git that dumb cat down? ‘Get Leggy Morton,’ that’s what they say.” He laughs. “Yip, it’s got so’s I always carry a pair of gloves so I don’t get clawed half to bits by that dang cat.”

Krantz and Morton’s former comrade Jo Pullman has all her limbs, but they were paralyzed when a vehicle she was in rolled in Afghanistan, and grayware and nerve-bridging have had limited success in restoring their function. She walks now in an exoskeleton of Gu.

“How do,” she says, shaking hands. Her grip is unusual; the flesh of her hands doesn’t feel right, it’s cold and in some way unresponsive, but the pressure is correct, mediated by the Gu wrapped around each finger. Her round, dark-skinned face has a wry smile as you glance down at the hand and then back up.

“No worse than you’ll get from a lot of people,” she comments. “And a damn sight better than I expected when I came back from Kabul.”

“The exo actually exercises your limbs, is that right?”

“That’s right, and the doctors say I’ll be the longer lived for it. Which with my third grandchild on the way is a damn good thing by me.” She leads you into her small, neat house. “I live alone here,” she says. “No-good man left me after, and I ain’t felt the want of another. Iced tea?”

You sit while she gets it, watching her move around her tiny kitchen. Her hands fumble a little – she takes longer than someone else would, is more careful – but she successfully takes the jug from the fridge, the glasses from the cabinet, adds ice, pours, returns the jug, and brings you the tea.

“I run a little business,” she says. “Lot of ladies round here make handcrafts. Well, I can’t do that so good, but I was a logistics sergeant. I can do inventory, take orders and fill and ship them. We have a co-op down to the town square. And I have my daughters and their little ones. I ain’t staring at no ceiling.”

You sip the tea. It’s good.

Posted in Allan Scott, Billy Krantz, Brandy and Clint, driders, Jenna Stewart, Jerry Morton, Jo Pullman, nerdreference, Serena Koslowski | 1 Comment

Spyders and Driders

Posted on 10 July 2008 by Mike Reeves-McMillan

Halwaz is interviewing a veteran of the Papuan “incident”. You don’t know his name. His slightly graying sandy hair retains a military cut, but he is dressed in casual, unremarkable civilian clothing. His posture, even in a comfortable Gu-chair, is stiff.

“You understand, there’s stuff I can’t talk about,” he says. “Non-disclosure agreements, you know. But I can describe what we did in general. We were never actually in Papua at any time – we were based in the Australian desert, in the left armpit of nowhere. Underground and air-conditioned, fortunately, because it’s just hot red dust and dry gray trees out there.

“We were in an operational center, joint international forces, us and the Aussies. We wanted the New Zealanders in on it too but they said no. We were co-located to build better interforce co-operation, or as the Aussies said, so we could get drunk together and bond. Only they put it more colorfully.

“We went in at night – same time zone, so it was night for us as well. Apparently there was intel about a base up in the highlands where all kinds of stuff was run from – spamming, money laundering, kiddie porn, and remote crimes using Gupes, like drug running and holdups and even intergang warfare. There was this big hydro generator and a satellite station and data centre. Sophisticated stuff, they’d shipped it all in by freight helicopter, I think, plunked it down there, shot a few of the locals to scare them off and it was up in the middle of the jungle, inaccessible as all hell. The Papuan government didn’t have a hope of shutting something like that down, but they weren’t going to admit it, so their official position was it didn’t exist. If it had been the Indonesians running it I think the Papuans would have at least tried, because they’re still bitter about when they used to be part of Indonesia, but it was some Chinese outfit. Which made it politically sensitive, of course. There was a possibility that China would intervene and take the place over, use it to increase influence in the region, and the Aussies weren’t up for that in their back yard. Nor were we, on principle.

“So our mission was to shut it down, take the operators into custody and – what was the term – ‘pragmatically extradite’ them. Means kidnap them and take them to somewhere they can be charged, like Papua New Guinea or, better yet, Australia.

“We went in using a drop-wing configuration, launched from a Sable SX-3, and glided down – we had full overlays of the target so the darkness was no problem. On a previous pass the SX-3 had dropped about six hundred spyders – that’s with a ‘y’. Little things, about as big as your hand, basically just a sensor package and some Gu with a little holo generator to run it, look just like a live spider or whatever the appropriate local lifeform is, and they run around and get in everywhere and then uplink back to your mothership, in this case the SX-3, and it rebroadcasts to base and the servers integrate the whole thing. Result is, you can see everything as clear as day – clearer, because you can see inside buildings and things wherever a spyder has got in. Multi-frequency, you see infra-red, radio, the lot. Which showed us exactly where we needed to go to shut down their comms, which was the first priority for team A. Team B, which I was with, went after the generator setup. All our units knew exactly where the mothership was, so all our comms were narrowcast, point-to-point. We set off a staticbomb – that’s a jamming device that fluctuates on a schedule that’s known to you but not to the enemy, so you can filter it digitally but they can’t. Then we went into drider configuration when we hit ground.”

“Sorry, I’ve seen drop-wings, but what’s a drider?”

“Like a big four-legged spider with a soldier’s torso at the top. Named after something in some novel, someone told me once, some fantasy thing. Sort of a centaur but with a big spider instead of the horse. It’s incredibly fast and agile over all kinds of terrain, because the four legs poke out at the corners of an imaginary square centered on the torso, so you can move in any direction. Usually you have two troops to a drider, one facing forwards and controlling the movement, one facing back that just covers that direction. Each with a weapon. All our weapons on that mission were sublethal munitions, but of course you can carry anything.

“The way it worked, we Americans were driving and our Aussie mates were covering our asses, which they joked about, saying that was how it always was, what did you expect? So we went in, and there was the whole complex laid out in front of us, hardly even anyone there, just a couple of caretakers really. I mean, the big bosses weren’t going to be there. In the middle of the jungle, when they could be well-fed and well-bedded in Shanghai or wherever? Not them. They had people for that.

“There were Gupe guards, naturally, but they were probably controlled from Shanghai too, and once we set off the staticbomb they were screwed. In, wreck the tech, out with the caretaker guys, it took us about an hour. By the time they had anything in the air headed for the site it was all over. Bar the shouting – the Papuans, the Chinese, other nations that were sheltering similar setups, they weren’t best pleased, and they got wind of it somehow – someone in the organization we’d given a bloody nose must have had some media savvy, is my guess. There was a big public blowup that far outlasted the mission itself. But not my problem.”

Colonel Nevin lectures in military history at West Point. Apart from his regulation haircut he looks more like an academic than a military officer; he doesn’t quite have corduroy patches on the elbows of his uniform jacket, but you get the impression it was a close thing. He is talking to Halwaz in his office.

“Gu,” he says, “changes the economics and politics of warfare. What I mean is: early in the century, the economics of US troops vs mujahideen favored the mujahideen. They were easy to recruit, cheap to train and equip, and every time one was killed, support for what they were doing increased. With the US troops, exactly the opposite.

“Gu shifts that equation, makes the playing field more level, simply because what’s officially called an MCRATC – multiple-configuration remote asset, troop controlled – a Gupe, to you, or McRatsy or Mickey Rat, to the troops – keeps soldiers from being killed. Which, oddly enough, often means that they don’t end up killing other people either, because they often don’t need to in order to attain their objectives. And, consequently, those objectives get attained more often.”

A visual here of a village in the Afghan-Pakistan border regions. Through clouds of dust come driders – looking bizarre and terrifying with their four jointless, arched, almost tentacular legs supporting a humanoid torso with a nearly featureless head. Shots from an automatic weapon ring out from behind the viewing angle and one drider shudders with the impact, goes stiffly motionless for a second, and then turns and fires a grenade towards the source of the firing. There is a dull “whump”, and the shots cease, replaced by the sound of yelling.

“Tear gas grenade,” says Nevin’s voice, commentating. “Did you see that moment when the shots hit its primary holocontroller and one of the secondaries took over? We have about ten of them per unit now. Makes them damn hard to put down.”

Two driders skitter – there’s no other word for it – forward and the view angle changes to follow them. They haul a coughing man in traditional dress to his feet and one of them ferries him off through the blowing dust, presumably to a staging area in their rear.

“But by the same token,” says Nevin, now back in view, “we aren’t winning any hearts and minds by sitting in a bunker in Arizona and deploying scary monsters into people’s villages. And we’re left with a huge number of prisoners that we don’t know what to do with, and that we have to feed and look after and prevent from being rescued. Frankly, it was easier when we shot them.” He smiles to show he’s joking, but it’s hard to be positive that he really is.

Posted in Colonel Nevin, driders, Papua, Sable SX-3, spyders | 1 Comment

Does Whatever a Spider/Frog/Gecko Can

Posted on 8 July 2008 by Mike Reeves-McMillan

Suddenly and shockingly, you are in explosive movement, leaping out of a crowd on a New York street to stick briefly to a wall, then shooting out a long thready limb to an overhead flagpole while in mid-leap high above the assorted vehicles (you glimpse palanquins, horses, dinosaurs and even more exotic conveyances among the traditional-style yellow taxis; they are all ghostly and transparent, as are the people). A figure with a flashing red outline runs, and you pursue, swinging on the line; a bar indicator in your peripheral vision drops rapidly and you let go exactly when it reaches zero, landing you on top of him. Most of you becomes a capture net, except for your head, which begins a Miranda litany: “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say…”

Cut to the office of New York’s Police Commissioner. A large holovolume on his desk repeatedly replays the scene you have just experienced from the third-person viewpoint of a number of cameras. The crime is a bag snatch from an old lady. An anonymous Guplicate in the crowd nearby suddenly morphs into a muscular figure, leaps with frog-like legs to the wall, sticks (presumably with gecko pads), fires the arm/line, grips, swings, and drops on the fugitive.

“That’s a real crime,” the Commissioner says. “Foiled by our Special Division.”

“That looked – kind of like Spider-Man,” you (as Halwaz) say.

“Well, don’t tell the comics company. Actually, we have kind of a deal with them, they figure it’ll help their sales rather than hurt them, but we don’t use any of their logos, you know? Just some of their ideas. New York has been the location of superheroes for what, over a century? We thought it was time to have some real ones.”

Cut to a room where Halwaz is interviewing an athletic-looking, dark-complexioned young man called Albert Romanos.

“I’m Special Division, yeah. It’s not like the superheroes in the comics, we show our faces like any police officer. Nobody trusts secret police, right?” He smiles dazzlingly. “But police shouldn’t be celebrities neither. We ain’t supposed to look for publicity. My boss had to give permission for this. We do a difficult job, but it ain’t dangerous, it’s all by remote control. It’s like a sport to us.”

“Can you show me your rig?”

“Sure, it’s a modified commercial console with a suspension harness. Here, put it on.”

With some encouragement, you allow Romanos to put you in the Gu rig, which suspends you above the ground and wraps around your whole body. You leave off the virtualizer helmet, since Halwaz has greyware. The floor rises to meet your feet, but clearly it can easily drop again to provide full three-dimensional movement through the air.

“I’ll switch you into one of the Brandys,” says Romanos.

You are walking, apparently on autopilot, along a New York street. Your heads-up display shows the surrounding people, vehicles and Guplicates as somewhat ghostly, and most of the buildings as solid, though some are partially ghostly and have ghostly people moving around inside, usually in the lobbies and other public areas.

Romanos’ voice comes into your head. “You’re in midtown, on East 27th. The solid walls are buildings that we can’t see the inside of. Not everyone wants a police camera in their room for some reason.

“What we do is, we switch between anonymous Brandys and Clints, that’s the generic female and male Guplicates, that walk around the main blocks. There’s always two or three near to any location. They look just like the ones the tourists hire.” He switches you a few times; you are walking along several different streets. Many of the Guplicates in sight are the silvery-grey figures, evidently based on Serena Koslowski’s niece and her fellow dance student. Their features are approximate, like the Academy Award statue’s younger brother and sister, if Oscar was silver.

“When a call comes in, or when one of us notices something, we go active. You need good balance, good reactions, you know? They test us on some of the toughest console game levels before they let us in – you got to be a console gamer to even apply. Plus you got to do the ordinary police tests.”

“What do New Yorkers think?”

“They love us. And it’s a show for the tourists, yeah? When crime is down we do training exercises, just so they get to see it.”

“It would be kind of an advertisement to the criminals too, I suppose? A warning?”

“Yeah, except the ones we can catch easy like this aren’t the ones you gotta worry about. It’s like the comic books – when you get superheroes you get supervillains, and when you get cops using Guplicates you get crims using Guplicates. They run them in here through three levels of indirection from somewhere with no extradition, steal some stuff, even if you catch them at it there’s nothing you can do except stop the crime. The real dangerous New York gangs are all operating out of what used to be Somalia now. I don’t deal with that stuff, they got computer guys that deal with that – electronic warfare, you know?”

Cut to the Mayor of New York, backed by an enormous electronic wall map and dressed in a well-cut, dark-blue silk suit. She sweeps her gray hair out of her eyes with her trademark gesture and says, “Street crime is down. Way, way down. Look at this. That’s street crime figures for the turn of the century.” The map sprouts red bars, perpendicular to it, indicating the levels of crime in different parts of the city. “Now let’s roll it forward.” The bars fluctuate, some going up, others down, shifting with the shifting fortunes of different boroughs, until they suddenly go down with a bump, when the time indicator stands at three years ago, and stay down.

“That’s when we introduced the Special Division. Our streets are among the safest of any major world city’s now, and most of the ones that are equal or ahead of us are using the same tactics.”

“Got to be good for in-person tourism?” you ask.

“Very much so, and as you know, in-person tourism is worth a lot more per tourist than tourism via Guplicate. It makes for a happy electorate, too, which is good for me.” She smiles.

“So, what about non-street crime? Drug running, extortion, all the traditional gang stuff?”

“Well, we can keep it off the streets, but we can’t change human nature, of course. There is a certain inevitable level of crime – we do all we can to reduce it, naturally, but we’ve done all the easy things; it’s down to hard things, more effort for the same improvement.”

“And is it true that a lot of this – background level of crime has shifted over to using Gu from remote locations, so it’s harder to prosecute?”

“There is some truth in that, yes. A lot of that is out of our hands; it’s down to negotiations at a federal level.” She smiles again, an automatic politician smile that says, “I’ve told you it’s not my fault, now go away.”

Cut to Washington, DC, the office of Senator Bruce Davis, chair of the Senate Committee on Remote Crime.

“Well, of course the diplomatic solution is our first port of call,” he is saying. “We encourage all sovereign states to sign up to the Remote Crime Limitation Protocols sponsored by the United Nations and Regions. Unfortunately in some areas of the globe either the will to implement the protocols is lacking, or they’re merely paid lip service by governments which will not or, more often, cannot enforce them.”

“And your fallback option is then what?”

“Well, that of course is outside my remit, and falls under the Secretary of State and the President. But historically where diplomacy has failed other means become necessary.”

“Do you mean invasion?”

“Really, I couldn’t comment on the specific implementations chosen, but…”

“For example, Senator, the invasion of Eritrea in order to seize the headquarters of several criminal gangs, the Congolese strike, the joint Australian-US ‘peacekeeping’ operation in Papua which arrested a number of remote gang leaders…”

“Well, as I say, Susan, I really can’t comment on matters outside my specific remit. Now, my next appointment has arrived early, so unless there is anything further…?”

Posted in Albert Romanos, Brandy and Clint, Bruce Davis, criminals, New York, police, Special Division, Spider-Man | 2 Comments

To Protect and to Serve

Posted on 1 July 2008 by Mike Reeves-McMillan

We’re back at the Gu launch again.

By now everyone has been served canapés. The attendees have twisted round in their seats and are watching the two Gu figures put down their trays at the back of the room, which has a gently raked audience seating area. They link arms, and abruptly dissolve into several hundred small spheres, which bounce and roll down among the audience. Most manage to grab one or two; those who don’t look disappointed, but the two dancers emerge from backstage and begin tossing the balls that reached the front to those who missed out, amid applause.

You’re still in Callie Arnold’s viewpoint, from which the room now resembles an unusually well-dressed kindergarten. You broadcast your attention request a couple of times, then put your fingers in your mouth, whistle loudly, and shout, “Oy!”. You smile, and subvocalize: They’re going to sell it for us.

The audience slowly settles enough for her to continue. There has been a complete transformation of the mood of the room, from resentment at being present to broad grins and a party atmosphere.

“You received a locked file on your way in,” you say. “Here’s the key.”

You don’t get the flowering of the data in the file; instead, you watch the reactions. You have a head-up display in your left visual field which is tracking a number of key technology stocks in real time; several of experience a sudden flurry of activity, and you smile to yourself. People’s eyes are unfocussed as they highload the data and start associating it, and their lips move slightly as they talk to their bosses – every head in the room now has a donkey over it (van der Plotz’s is Eeyore), the audience has multiplied by at least fivefold in the past ten minutes. A whisper comes to you in Serena’s voice: “Feeding frenzy, upcoming. Two or three people are feeding this live. You want me to alert the hotnodes, or just wait for it to happen?”

You subvocalize, “Hold off while I talk about the limitations.”

“Naturally, the technology is in a very early stage,” you say aloud, to less than complete attention from the room.

“Resolution is at the limits of vision – you can see a roughness if you squint – and response is in the sub-second range, just. The overall effect currently is somewhat 1950s-Japanese-monster-movie.” Laughter from those of the audience who are paying attention.

“These are not the only things we believe we can improve. Currently, the material is not highly robust and is, of course, expensive, since we are making it in laboratory lots rather than on an industrial scale. Color and texture are something like pale silvery rubber, all the time. It becomes less flexible the more you morph it. And so far, we can’t have internal discrete parts, such as wheels.

“I invite you, though, to look ten to fifteen years into the future. That’s about five product cycles. By that time, I confidently expect Gu to be controllable in the micrometer scale, quickly enough that the motion appears entirely natural. It will be extremely strong, perhaps almost as strong as steel, but much cheaper than steel weight-for-weight – within everyone’s budget. It will be able to change color and texture and convincingly imitate a wide range of other materials. It will have an operating life of years, and be able to take on a complex internal structure. Currently, any sensors and other electronics would have to be made of conventional materials and embedded; we believe we can eventually make them integral.”

A uniformed man at the back, large but not tall, is narrowcasting a continuous point-to-point speech request at you and looking increasingly unhappy. He is from the Pentagon, according to his metatags. You speak to him aloud.

“Colonel, you have a question?”

He stands. No cut to his viewpoint. If you interrogate the dex’s features menu you discover that he is now deceased, and as a former Pentagon employee his memories are naturally not publicly archived.

“Yes, Doctor, what thought have you given to the security implications of a substance such as this being commercially available?”

Arnold’s mental translation comes through clearly: Why shouldn’t I classify this and disappear you into a military lab for the term of your natural life?

“Good question, Colonel. I have several pieces of good news for you on that score, however. Safety was at the forefront of our thinking, and we’ve built several safety features in at the deepest level.

“Firstly, the faster a piece of Gu is moving, the softer and more absorbent of impact its internal structure becomes. Essential for any transport applications, as you’ll appreciate, but it also means that if you fire a Gu bullet at someone – which you couldn’t do out of a Gu gun, at least not with explosives – what will hit them will effectively be a small piece of foam rubber.

“Secondly, at least at its current level of development, Gu will not take much of a cutting edge. Not only does it make a terrible gun, it doesn’t even make a very good knife.

“And finally, because it is controlled by holographic projection, any item composed of Gu can be readily disrupted by shining a sufficiently strong laser beam on it. I believe the military has a number of strong laser beams it can use.” You smile broadly, not concealing your satisfaction. “Of course, this also means – unfortunately for you – that the military applications of the technology are relatively limited, though I’m sure you can find some. You’re very creative people that way. But it does mean that, with appropriate monitoring, terrorist use of it can also be limited, without keeping it off the shelves at Hardware King.” In your peripheral vision, several stocks in companies manufacturing lasers for military and security applications are showing activity.

The Colonel frowns, but your gaze moves elsewhere, dismissing him, and he reluctantly – you see out of the corner of your eye – sits down.

Cut to Halwaz’s viewpoint, interviewing Arnold, present day.

“You rather dismissed the poor Colonel’s concerns, didn’t you?”

“Yes, Susan, I did. At the time, we thought we’d done enough to make Gu safe and even militarily inapplicable, but of course we didn’t think like terrorists or military people or even criminals. Some military uses of Gu have points in their favor, of course. Using Guplicates to enter dangerous areas is just as applicable to aid workers, emergency personnel, miners or construction workers, for example.” Overlaid visual of Guplicate troops deploying in an urban setting, somewhere in Burma by the looks. “Exoskeletons for greater speed and power, well, they also help disabled people and the elderly and, again, construction workers.” A montage of images; troops running with exoskeleton assist, an old lady in an exo weeding her garden, the famous quadriplegic artist nMay walking down the street in her exo and working in her studio, a team of construction workers picking up heavy flagstones. “Espionage and surveillance, well, we knew more or less that it would be used for that, you can’t prevent it. We were already a watched society anyway, for better or worse. It’s just that now any passing cat may belong to the NSA, and keeping industrial secrets is even harder than it was before. And things like drop-wings, that’s a wonderful sport, I’ve done it myself.” A squadron of paratroopers glide in silence on albatross wings of Gu.

“But?” you say. The viewpoint shifts to Arnold’s. You are upset.

“But people are so damned ingenious about finding ways to hurt each other.” You look away from her, staring at the floor without seeing it. “I mean, I’m not quite a pacifist – I’m not that brave – but almost, and it cuts me up to see people using something I helped to invent against their fellow human beings. I just wish they’d apply the same ingenuity to learning to live in peace.”

“You’re thinking of the May 7 group?”

“May 7, yes. I mean, I know they would have found a way to do it without Gu, but they did it with Gu, and that bothers me. Bothers me a lot.”

Your eyes mist up with tears. Halwaz leaves a long silence before ending the scene.

Posted in Brandy and Clint, Callie Arnold, crime, drop-wings, espionage, exoskeletons, Guplicates, limitations, May 7, military applications, pacifism, Sally van der Plotz, security, terrorism | 3 Comments

Games People Play

Posted on 1 July 2008 by Mike Reeves-McMillan

Halwaz is talking to Ted Anderson, the main programmer on the original Gu development team, and now senior designer at the console game company Zoomorphic. He is still jowly, now in his mid-forties, and has a little less hair and a little more stomach, but his eyes are the same: light blue and intensely intelligent.

“I’ve been a gamer since I was just a little kid,” he says. “Of course, most people who know me would say that I still am a little kid. Which is one of the things I love about games. You can hold on to that sense of wonder.”

“Even in the industry?” asks Halwaz. The viewpoint switches to Anderson’s, and you grin.

“Even in the industry. Sure, there are a lot of money-men in suits, the usual marketing idiots who are afraid of anything genuinely different and just want the emperor’s new skins on last year’s breakout success – which succeeded because it was genuinely different – and there’s hard work and bitchiness and disappointment. You know, life.” You gesture largely. “But when it comes right down to it, it’s all about play. Our games sell because we haven’t forgotten that, not because we take out an overproduced six-page ad in GameWeek.” He leans forward over his stomach. “I like to think of my job as Vice-President of Keeping it Real. I game all the time, and not just console gaming – I do LARP, tabletop, board games, military miniatures, even card games. It’s all good.”

“You’re going to have to unpack a couple of those terms for me,” says Halwaz.

“What better way than by example? Here’s LARP – Live Action Role Play.”

You are still in Anderson’s body, but instead of being seated in an office chair you are outdoors in a field, riding a Gu dinosaur, clothed in Gu armor and wielding a Gu lance. Opposing you is a similarly equipped woman, and your supporters – both Gu constructs and other people armed and armored in Gu – are clashing on the ground around you.

The woman pulls a pistol and fires it at you; your armor spangs and dents, as if hit by a projectile rather than the laser beam which actually struck it. You wrest your steed under control again, couch your lance, and charge at the woman through a sudden gap. Gu troops go down under your mount’s claws. An opponent, made into a huge barbarian by Gu muscles on his arms and legs, bellows and strikes at you with a two-handed broadsword. It impacts with a soft thud, but you hear a metallic clang, your Gu rocks you off balance and you almost fall from your dinosaur. A red telltale appears, seen through your goggles, to show you’ve been wounded. You swing your lance into his head, and he goes down.

“It’s like the microparks,” says Halwaz.

“Yes and no. It’s out in the open, there’s no detailed script – it doesn’t try to channel you down a particular path – and a lot of it is player versus player. It’s been around since long before the microparks. Used to be, you just used foam rubber for your weapons, but Gu works even better. The harder you swing them, the softer they get, and yet they preserve more of the illusion in the way they feel and behave. It’s a lot of fun. Good exercise, too. Now, this is tabletop.”

A living room with packets of junk food and cans of various beverages strewn round. About half a dozen people are seated on pieces of furniture or the floor. A bearded man is speaking.

“OK, I want to resolve Esther’s issue with Damian – I reckon what they just went through should give me enough dice.”

“Roll for it, Issue Boy,” says a thin blond woman in a T-shirt with an elaborate Celtic dragon on it. They consult pieces of paper.

“I’m going to need six more dice,” says the man, “two d4s, a d6, two d8s and the big one.”

A fellow player manipulates a personal screen and six dice of various shapes, and hence various numbers of sides, fall out of a block of Gu in the middle of a coffee table. The bearded man scoops them up.

“Let’s see – green,” he says, touching two of the dice, which obligingly turn green, “blue, red, purple.”

“Purple?” asks the woman.

“Purple. You’ll see why.” He gathers the dice and several more which he already has in front of him and casts them. The players stare at the result, making noises of approval.

“I can’t beat that,” says the woman. “OK, Damian is willing to listen. What does she say to him?”

“See?” you say, speaking over the memory, as the bearded man begins a speech in character as Esther. “Very abstract, in some ways. Pure imagination, almost, modified and prompted by the game elements. If you can’t make something work in tabletop, don’t even think about any other medium. But still, you notice, a beneficiary of Gu. You could do the whole thing on computers, of course, including the dice rolls, but people don’t want to. They want the tactile pleasure of the dice.

“Board games and military miniatures, much the same. You no longer have to make all the parts out of stiffstuff. Your pawn can actually transform into a queen when it reaches the eighth rank, the board can change as you go through the game and you can have huge numbers of pieces, like in Dungeondelve.” Visuals of a game board which reveals new areas of an underground labyrinth as the players’ pieces advance, new levels as they descend stairs, and where dozens of different objects and monsters appear in the various rooms. “And you can download it – nobody needs to manufacture anything, which is what held a lot of board game developers back. You needed to be pretty sure your game was going to rock people’s socks and that they were going to stay rocked before you sunk the capital into making five hundred or a thousand copies. It’s led to a lot of crappy board games, of course, undertested and underthought, but we’ve seen some marvelous gems from unknown designers who would never have had the opportunity otherwise.

“And military miniatures – a lot of people love making terrain and painting the little figures, and they stick to the old ways, but me? I like that I can say, “Thermopylae” or “The Alamo” and instantly get the full terrain, all the figures in their starting positions, and I’m ready to play. The way they advance by themselves and fall over when they’re dead is cool too, of course.” The accompanying visual shows an American Civil War cavalry charge up a ridge; the little horses’ legs move and some of their riders fall off, shot. “You can do it all with holograms, but again, people like to touch.”

“So, with all these options, what is it that your console games give you?” asks Halwaz. You are back in Anderson’s office.

“I think the allure of the console games is this: You don’t have to go anywhere else, like you do in a LARP or a micropark. You don’t have to imagine the visuals, like in tabletop. You’re inside the action, and you don’t have to fiddle with any rules; the physics isn’t simulated by rules, it’s simulated by moving and touching things and throwing things and hitting things. You’re standing there in your bedroom – probably using the Gu from your bed – and yet you’re in Cimmeria, or Middle-Earth, or Fidlanth, or you’re on a Special Ops mission, or a pirate ship, or wherever you want to be. And you’re interacting with other real people who could be anywhere on earth. It’s even good for you, because you’re moving around – and we try very hard to make sure that they’re not just repetitive movements.”

The experience which accompanies his explanation is of Anderson himself moving around in his company’s latest release (at the time), Planetary II. The Gu moves under your feet, giving a convincing illusion of walking up a rough slope. You reach the top of the ridge and look out across the plains of an early-20th-century idea of Mars. Canals stripe the desert, and giant greyish creatures are moving across the sands. Suddenly, a four-armed, four-meter green tusked warrior leaps from behind a nearby rock and attacks you with a sword in each upper hand. You wrest your own sword from its scabbard and parry, feeling and hearing the blows land on the blade. You fence, but the greater reach and weight of the enormous creature throws you to the ground (which is soft). As it looms over you, preparing to impale you, a blast from a radium pistol rings out, and it slumps to the sand. The excitement is visceral; you’re gasping for breath.

“You can fight, pick things up, walk, run, even swim and fly. It’s an intensely kinaesthetic experience. Someday, I believe, we’ll see a game, or game platform, that combines the best of all games – the excitement and direct experience of console or LARP, the imaginative scope and ability to deal with real human issues that tabletop excels in, and the strategy and tactics of the board games and military miniatures. My part in that is to make the console experience the best it can be, and keep an eye open for the possibilities for fusion.”

You’re back in Halwaz’s viewpoint; Anderson’s eyes are flashing and dancing with enthusiasm. Like Denton, he clearly loves his job with a passion.

“I start to understand why you have a hands-on job despite your seniority, and despite all the money you must have made out of Gu,” you say.

He flashes a smile. “Yes, they told me I could take any job I wanted. So I did.”

Posted in console gaming, LARP, microparks, Ted Anderson, Zoomorphic | 1 Comment

Dream Micropark

Posted on 30 June 2008 by Mike Reeves-McMillan

Now Halwaz is talking to Cam Denton, the micropark designer. He is dressed entirely in black Gu, which extrudes pseudopods that gesture along with his constantly fidgeting hands and morph into little illustrative scenes as he speaks. This makes him look slightly plumper than he actually is.

“Disney? Nah,” he says. “Disney was old before the industry even started. My inspirations were fictional. Niven and Barnes’s Dream Park books, I read my dad’s copies over and over when I was a kid. They were just using holograms, but Dad had the boxed Star Trek series as well on – I think it was DVD in those days. Hard light, like in the holodeck. That’s what I dreamed of. And then Callie Arnold, bless her, came along and gave it to us, or just about.” Gu creeps up one of his cheeks and turns him briefly into a Borg.

“So Gu, to you, was the fulfillment of a childhood fantasy?”

“Yeah, well, greyware is fantastic, but it’s not a mass solution, is it? It’s always going to be a minority who can afford to have wires in their head, or who will want to.” His head briefly radiates wires. “But to have a mass-entertainment medium where anything can be real… Yeah, it was a dream come true. It was like you’re, I don’t know, someone who loves music but can’t sing, and all of a sudden they invent the guitar. Or the very early computer game designers, who never knew that was what they wanted to do until they saw their first computer. I grew up designing for a platform that didn’t exist until I was in my late teens.”

“So you designed 3D games using what tools you had, is that right?”

“Yeah, but I always wanted more. Haptic interfaces are where it lives, you know? It’s all very well to see things third-person, but to feel, to be in the world where things are touching you and you’re touching them – damn.” He is abruptly covered with hands, and they all gesture. “I mean, damn.”

“You and your friends from college are credited with creating the first micropark.”

“Yeah, although we didn’t know that’s what it was. It was just a cool thing to do, you know? We were at MIT, our professor was this cool guy, only a few years older than us, and his girlfriend at the time just loved theme parks and adventure rides. We all liked her, you know? She was cool. And her 30th birthday was coming up, and we were knocking around ideas for a project, and someone said, Why not build Tyla a theme park out of Gu? And so we looked into it, and arranged to borrow a space and borrow some Gu and spent a few weeks full-on designing, I mean, full on, you know? And she loved it. And all her guests loved it, and, hey, we’d had more fun than we’d ever had before, and so we said, why don’t we just do this? I mean, we wrote it up all formal as ‘a novel use of haptic morphmass-based interactive something-or-other as an entertainment medium’ and we got academic credit for it, but really, man, we were doing it for the buzz. And that’s never gone away.”

“The money helps?”

Denton’s many pseudopods make a gesture dismissing money. “Money’s cool. It’s nice not to wonder where the rent is coming from, yeah, but it’s what you can do with it that’s exciting. We’re running an early pre-release of eighth-generation Gu on our development project at the moment. The detail on that stuff – you can do thousands of textures, and the new dampness and temperature controls give a whole new dimension of reality.” He can’t stay seated any longer, his chair – which is part of his Gu – pushes him upright, and his pseudopods writhe until he looks as if he’s covered in sea anemones. “Damn, I love my job.”

Cut to Tyla McCann, the woman for whom the first micropark was created. She is in her mid-to-late thirties, presumably, but her freckles, the tomboy bob of her sandy hair and her perky energy make her seem much younger.

“Oh, Dent and the guys are great,” she says. “They get me in to ‘consult’, which means I get to play with all their new parks before they’re released. The horror ones are still my favourite – that’s what the first one was, my birthday is November first so it was kind of inevitable, really. They are doing some truly awesome slime these days.”

“What about the combat ones?”

“Hmm, more a guy thing, I know, but sometimes after a bad day, it’s good to be able to hit a few virtual mooks, right?” She grins. There is a slight gap in her front teeth and she looks like a 12-year-old who has never had a bad day in her life. “Good self-defence training, too, though of course if you did get mugged it would probably be by someone who’s been through a lot of parks as well.”

“Do you go to the opposition’s parks too?”

“Sometimes, to see what they’re doing. But I’m loyal to the boys. Besides, I have a lifetime pass that gets me and a friend in for free any time. I’m my nieces’ favorite aunt. And now that they’re getting past the purple unicorn petting zoo stage, I have great fun taking them.”

“Do you have a home console system?”

“Never felt the need, myself. But I can see why people do. I kind of like the shared experience aspect, though, you know? Being physically in the same space. I know the consoles are getting better and better, and soon you’ll hardly be able to tell the difference, but still. There’s nothing like being there with a group of your friends. Oh, and hey, do you know what the coolest thing is that the Flexible Dreams guys do? They still let people hire out their spaces and run their own park designs for special occasions, just like they did. I think that’s really classy, especially since most of their competitors got their start that way.”

“You’re aware of their critics, though?”

“Oh, of course. Whatever you build, there’ll always be someone to say you’re building it wrong.” She flashes the crooked front tooth again.

Cut now to Amber Rollins, president of Mothers against Microparks. She is in her late forties, thickening through the middle, serious and emphatic. Her dark-brown hair hangs in a braid down her back.

“We basically have three objections to microparks,” she says. “First, the themes of horror, crime, violence, danger and suggestiveness that are their staples. Disney isn’t perfect, but they do make an effort to keep the tone light and wholesome. The microparks just aren’t careful enough with their material, in our view. And their voluntary classification system – they don’t enforce it. We just hear too many stories of young children getting in and being traumatized or influenced into inappropriate behavior.

“Then there’s the training that these children are receiving. The so-called first-person fighter games. They’re marketed as teaching self-defense, but what you can use to defend yourself you can also use to attack others. We aren’t happy that a lot of young people are learning how to fight hand-to-hand and taking that out into the real world, where there are much more serious consequences for hitting someone.

“And then finally there is the cost. These micropark companies, Flexible Dreams and InAdventure and the rest, are making a fortune out of children, siphoning off the money that they could be saving for their future education. And some of them, of course, don’t get that money honestly. There are young muggers that have learned their violence in the microparks and steal from honest citizens to fund what has become a habit, almost an addiction.”

“The supporters of microparks,” you say as Halwaz, “point to the imaginative stimulation they provide, and claim they are a harmless outlet for energy and fantasy. What do you say to that?”

“Nonsense, is what I say. The imaginative stimulation is all from the imagination of the developers – not the participants. You don’t need any imagination any more, it’s all laid out in front of you. And the direction of that imagination is far from harmless. Much better to have children playing healthy games in the fresh air, or really exercising their imagination in creating something for themselves.”

Posted in Amber Rollins, Cam Denton, microparks, Tyla McCann | 1 Comment

Mickey Morph

Posted on 26 June 2008 by Mike Reeves-McMillan

Back to the launch memory now, from Callie Arnold’s viewpoint at the podium. Spreading from José Thomas like ripples from a stone, the realization that programmable matter is finally here rustles and mutters to the edges of the room. It surges again, higher, as the table under the remaining tray morphs into a muscular young male form (Serena’s niece’s fellow dance student) and begins to distribute to the left side of the room as the female form takes the right.

All over the room, donkey picts come on over people’s heads as they dial their bosses in to ride their greyware, seeing what they see, and – importantly in this case – feeling what they feel.

Cut to Halwaz’s viewpoint, present day, interviewing Vaclav Semyon, CEO of Disney-Fox at the time of the Gu launch.

“I knew straight away this was epoch-making,” he is saying in his trademark style. “Tangible magic! When Sally van der Plotz called me I dropped everything and greyghosted her.”

“Why was that, sir?”

“Because I knew Sally was a sensible woman.”

“So you trusted her judgement?”

“So I trusted that if she was taking the career risk of interrupting me it was for something that was worth seeing. I was an old-style CEO, command and control, and people didn’t just call me for no reason. If Sally said I had to see it she had better be darn sure. And she was.”

“Do you have the memory still, sir?”

“I do.”

This time Halwaz stays present in the memory, achieving her famous layered effect: You are getting Halwaz’s reaction to Semyon’s memory of greyghosting van der Plotz. Right in front of her/him/her/you, one of the younger executives tries to pinch the female figure on the rump, but the Gu springs back immediately into shape and she doesn’t appear to feel anything. “How are they doing that?” mutters Semyon, as if to himself. In response, van der Plotz runs a simplefish over the technical information given so far and squirts him a highload. It’s a strong simplefish; it gets the gist immediately.

“Holographic control from inside. That’s brilliant,” says Semyon. He’s smiling, and Halwaz finds his mood of happy wonder infectious. “No propagation lag, total control. Central control. I like it. We got to get us some of that.”

“Yes, sir,” subvocalizes Sally.

“And so, of course, we did,” says Semyon, present-day. The scene shifts back to his office, his viewpoint, Halwaz on an uncomfortable-looking stiffstuff chair in front of his large (also stiff) desk. “No more cramming park employees into stuffy suits with oversized heads. Toonotopia became one of our most popular attractions. Still is.”

“You were an early adopter of Gu for entertainment purposes,” says Halwaz. “Even before the game console makers. What was it like, being a part of that?”

“Well, Susan, it was magical,” you say. “It was a child’s dream come true – things coming to life, talking to you, interacting with you, and not just in virtuality, not just in an overlay that you can see but not touch – right there under your fingers and in front of your naked eyes. They say seeing is believing, but let me tell you, touching – touching is really believing.”

“You’re often credited with the idea for the Mobile Disneys, Mr Semyon. Is that true?”

“Well, as to who had the actual idea – I don’t think that was me. But I championed it, certainly. I remembered when the circus, one of the last of the old touring circuses, came to town when I was a child. I remember watching Dumbo, too. The circus train, the elephant parade… And when someone said “mobile Disney” – well, it just brought all that right back. It had to be done. And I made sure it was done. Twenty-six of them now, can you believe that? On every continent. And all they need is a big field where you can get power and water, and suddenly, there’s a theme park.”

Dissolve into footage of a mobile Disney setting up in the Ukraine. The long train arrives, and the Gu superstructure of each car morphs into dinosaurs, elephants, clowns, acrobats, and an assortment of Disney characters and forms a parade, leaving empty flatcars behind. A crowd of children and adults cheers the parade as it progresses down the street and into a large open space outside the town.

The dinosaurs and elephants begin morphing into rides, buildings and attractions. Already in place outside the field is a large billboard, in Ukrainian, announcing that the Disney will be there for a month and giving prices, a ticket sales net address, and the schedule of attractions: “Mondays, Frontierland; Tuesdays, Creature Country; Wednesdays, Adventureland; Thursdays, Retrofuturia; Fridays, World Park; Saturdays, Toonotopia; Sundays, Fantasyland.”

“It hasn’t harmed the popularity of the fixed-location parks, either – just the opposite, there have been two new fixed parks built since Mobile Disney started.”

“And, of course, it’s triggered a wave of imitators,” Halwaz puts in.

Semyon laughs. “Yes, but is a converted movie multiplex at the local mall really going to compete with the magic of Disney? Don’t get me wrong, we watched – I’m sure my successor still watches – the microparks with great interest. Most of our best hires started out as micropark designers. They come up with great innovative concepts, really novel stuff, pushing the frontiers of the medium. But the Disney rides are the classics, you know? There’s life in the old mouse yet.”

Posted in Disney, microparks, Sally van der Plotz, Vaclav Semyon | 1 Comment

Tumbleseeds

Posted on 24 June 2008 by Mike Reeves-McMillan

Outside Jill Kwan’s home – which is about the size of a cottage or a bus, little larger than the lounge you were just in – you are talking to some young people on semi-self-propelled Gu bicycles. They have some extra Gu with them, currently morphed into the form of a small burro. It is quite lifelike, and if it weren’t on rollerblades and standing entirely still you might think it was real.

“Yeah, we’re a band,” says Jorge, the oldest-looking one, who is perhaps 19. “We’re on tour, heading up to Brasilia, maybe further.”

“Why Brasilia?” you ask.

“My girlfriend Luisa lives there. I met her on the net.”

“Is she Brazilian?”

“Yeah. She sings with us, by gupe at the moment. We were a virtual band – Carlos is from Chile, me and my brother Alvaro are from Argentina, and Adriana” – indicating the only female member of the group – “is from just down the road in Uruguay. But we’ve connected up and we’re going to tour together for a while.”

“So you’re tumbleweeds too?”

“A kind of tumbleweed. Tumbleseeds, perhaps.” He laughs. “We see people like the Gu-Lady here go through all the time, sooner or later we start thinking, right? Why don’t we do that too? And we don’t need a big lot of Gu like her. Some of the people who come through, they have just their little bicycle with maybe some more Gu on the sides. We don’t want to be that uncomfortable, though.”

At this point, the front part of the donkey morphs into a slim young woman, and the back part into a large dog.

“Luisa!” says Jorge, and they kiss. “This lady is making a dex about the Tumbleweed Trail.”

“Hey,” says Adriana suddenly, “you’re that lady. You made the dex, what was it, Through the Americas.”

“Throughout the Americas,” you say. “My first dex. A trip from Alaska to Argentina with no equipment except 100 kilos of Gu per person. You’ve experienced it?”

“It was one of our inspirations,” says Adriana. “That’s about what we have. Of course, we don’t plan on being in the polar regions with it. We might not get north of Brazil. Or we might. We don’t know.”

“How do your parents feel about you going off on the Tumbleweed Trail?”

“They are too worried,” says Alvaro. “My father, he has hardly ever left our village, or his father either. They don’t know, everyone travels now. Yesterday we met a couple from Toronto, that is in Canada. They have traveled ten thousand kilometers, a quarter of the way round the world. She said the worst thing that happened to them is he tripped coming out of a museum in El Salvador and hurt his ankle.”

“Besides,” puts in Jorge, “we call them each night when we make camp. They can track where we are, even, we set up a map before we left, and they can see on their netphones. Our little brother knows how to work it, he helps them out.”

“What kind of music do you play?” you ask, and they grin. They have clearly been waiting for this question or one like it; they step off their bicycles, which morph into a keyboard (Alvaro), a drum set (Carlos), a traditional Uruguayan accordion (Adriana), and a guitar (Jorge).

“We call ourselves Los Lejanos, the Distants,” says Jorge, and they begin to play. It’s a fusion of styles, unsurprisingly, incorporating both local and world influences, but somehow it works, and works well. Luisa’s voice soars and dips over the music, singing of young love and hopefulness. They finish with a flourish.

“Will you make us famous?” asks Jorge.

“Of course,” you say, smiling. (There is a sidebar: Los Lejanos have distribution through their own site, and are making a living from their music. They are still touring, and have reached Bolivia. They plan to continue north.)

Cut to a village in Uruguay. A middle-aged woman who looks strikingly like an older version of Adriana is talking with Halwaz while cooking. This is Adriana’s mother, Beatriz.

“Well, you can’t stop her, can you?” she says. “I worry, but young people think they are made out of diamond. At least I know where she is and I can talk to her. If I had gone off as a young girl like that, my parents would not have heard back from me for months sometimes. And that Carlos, he is all right, he will take care of her, I suppose.” She sounds like she is trying to convince herself.

“Are many of the local young people traveling now?”

“Oh, yes, we see more and more of them. They come through here all the time. Perhaps one in ten, even, of the travelers we see are local now. People are a lot more mobile.”

“And what do you think of that?”

“Well, I wouldn’t want it for myself. I like the place where I was born, you know? I don’t need another place, or a hundred other places. People are the same wherever they come from, there are good ones and bad ones, and places I think are like that too. But what do I know? Nothing, according to Adriana.” She laughs.

Now you are interviewing Adriana’s father, who wears a uniform with the logo of the Tumbleweed Trail. He is a general troubleshooter and local point-of-contact for travelers, something like a sheriff or ranger but less official.

“I would stop her if I could, but if I told her ‘no’ she would just go anyway, and then she would not talk to us and tell us where she is. I learned from the experience of my cousin, he tried to stop his daughter from going away, that is what happened, for a year. Of course, she talked to Adriana and so we knew she was all right, but it was very bad for him.”

“You work on the Tumbleweed Trail, don’t you? Do you see many problems?”

“Oh, every day there are problems. This is what I try to tell Adriana, but she will not hear me. But we who work on the Trail, we know when trouble is coming. We keep in touch. We know the people who will try to cheat us or who cannot be trusted around the girls, you know? The people who start fights, the people who dump their waste where they shouldn’t – we have pictures, names, full descriptions from the other towns along the Trail before they even hardly have left. And most of the smarter ones know this and behave. A few, they are just bad, you can’t fix them. All you can do is watch and try to catch them so you can lock them up.”

“Wasn’t there a murder near here in the early days of the Trail, a few years ago?”

His face closes up. “Not all that near. It was over more towards Fray Bentos. Nothing like that happens here.”

Posted in Jill Kwan, nomads, tumbleweeds | 1 Comment

Guristas, Tumbleweeds and Syndicates

Posted on 22 June 2008 by Mike Reeves-McMillan

Back to Professor Scott, who is now dressed as Terry Pratchett’s Rincewind.

“Guristas, yes, a beautiful portmanteau word,” he says, having evidently watched the previous scene. “And let’s observe the terms that are used for different kinds of travelers. There are the guristas, who don’t interact much with the locals, who want to be able to experience without really experiencing, without immersion, without displacement from their own culture. That’s one. And then there are the tumbleweeds, the new nomads; occasionally high-end, but often very low-end travellers, equipped with varying quantities of Gu, from about enough for a bicycle which turns into a tent at night right up to a mobile mansion. Sometimes alone, but often in company; often welcome, but sometimes unwelcome; sometimes staying, but usually moving on; with no permanent address. Tumbleweeds.

“And the third kind are the old-fashioned travelers, who for whatever reason want to be present in person, but who own a home that they can go back to. They’re usually wealthy, often spend a lot of money in a place, and interestingly enough, I have yet to come across a special term for them in common usage. The ‘unmarked term’ is very significant, always, because it’s the norm that everything else is measured against. The closest thing I’ve found is the description of how they travel – by syndicates, pooling Gu to make an aircraft. So they’re occasionally called ‘syndicate travelers’, but it’s not anything like as common as the other two terms. I would venture that the good reception you got in Caracas, Susan, was a consequence of being a syndicate traveler.”

Cut to Jill Kwan. Halwaz is sitting comfortably in a spacious lounge, about the size of the inside of a bus, interviewing her. Outside the broad windows is a ground-level view of Uruguayan pampa. During the conversation, a small flock of rheas wanders past outside, pecking at the ground. Kwan wears a gold alpaca suit with aplomb and assured energy, and looks only about five years older than in Arnold’s 15-year-old memory.

“So,” you say, as Halwaz, “as well as being one of the key people to develop Gu, you were one of the first of the tumbleweeds.”

“That’s right, Susan. I started doing this pretty much as soon as it became possible – possible to someone with a lot of money and access to top-of-the-line Gu, that is. About ten years ago, in other words.”

“And now it’s becoming quite a phenomenon.”

“Yes – early days, of course, but I think nomadic lives are coming back on the table as a viable choice again, after thousands of years in which the trend was away from them.”

“Your own parents were – kind of pre-nomads, weren’t they?”

She laughs. “Pre-nomads, I like that. Yes, they worked internationally; I went to five different high schools on three different continents, and loved every minute of it. Well, not every minute, obviously, but I did enjoy seeing new places, meeting new people, experiencing the variety of life. I think I always wanted to be a nomad.”

“Do you have a plan, or do you just wander as the mood takes you?”

“Betwixt and between. The advantage of being involved with the development of Gu is that I can arrange to be in a major city when there’s an upgrade release scheduled, to take delivery. And I do have a general idea where I’m going: down the eastern side of the Americas, up the western side, eventually over the Bering Strait and down through coastal Asia – I love seafood. I suppose eventually I’ll go up through the Middle East and into Europe, and then it’ll be time to think about Africa. But it’s taken me ten years to get this far, and I’m in no particular hurry. Every place is interesting, and if it isn’t, then the next one probably will be.”

“What do you do in the places you pass through?”

“Well, I believe, along with a number of other tumbleweeds, that we shouldn’t just be weeds, taking nourishment from the communities we pass through and then moving on. We have a great network, by the way; as with so many things, the more information you share the more everyone benefits, so we know the best and worst places to stop, where the food’s good, where people are welcoming and where they are suspicious, and of course where they’re in need. You see a lot of need in these communities, particularly medical, and a number of us have trained as lay medics at netschool – enough so that we can deal with the most common things and call in a proper doctor if we think one’s needed. And we always pass on our old Gu to where we think it’ll do the most good. I upgrade all the time, so I’m always passing on penultimate-generation Gu. The economic stimulus helps, too, and the better-organized communities are realizing it and gearing themselves to encourage us to visit. There are towns on the main routes that practically make their living out of tumbleweeds now.”

“How does a community do that?”

“They offer facilities – food and water, mainly, power charge points. Good food, clean water and reasonably-priced power – usually from a Gu windmill or hydro generator, we show them how to make those if they don’t have one already. I’m a dawdler, so by the time I get to a place they usually do. Add a friendly reception, and they’re in business. Everything else we need is on the Net, and we can get satellite coverage everywhere these days.”

“In fact, you distribute satellite receivers as you go, don’t you?”

“Yes, it’s one of the things we do. My goodness, Susan, I have so much money, and the way I live costs almost nothing by comparison. Even though I buy clothes as well.” She gestures to her suit. “Callie and I talk about this a lot – we still get together socially as well as for business, and while I’m still on the same continent our timezones work pretty well together. We feel we have a moral responsibility to use our wealth for the common good. The natural way of things, with money as with network connections, is that whoever has the most finds it easiest to get more. It would be easy enough to cruise along accumulating it and die richer than Croesus, but completely unfulfilled. At least this way we feel like we’re doing something worthwhile.”

“This is your legacy?”

“If you like. I’ve never had children, and I’m not likely to now. But I feel like even if I haven’t helped raise the next generation I can at least do what I can to leave them a better world.”

“Do you think Gu has made a better world?”

“Taken by and large and all in all, yes. Callie gets the guilts about it, but I think what we did was for the best. We’re not yet in the promised postscarcity economy, but we’re well on the way – and of course that brings its own problems. Of course it does. Anything with humans involved is bound to have a downside, you figure that out fairly quickly in this life. But… yes. I’m glad we created Gu. I am.”

Posted in Allan Scott, guristas, Jill Kwan, nomads, syndicate travellers, tumbleweeds | 4 Comments