“Not proposing, exactly. But if you wanted, you could have all the info you needed to go walkaway in about ten minutes’ time, could be on the road tomorrow, living like it was the first days of a better nation—or a weirder one.”
Natalie looked at the darkening sky for a long time. “Billiam used to joke about walkaways. There’d always be a couple who’d show up at the Communist parties the next day and tweak this and that to make it run better. Didn’t talk to us at all, wouldn’t make eye contact, but they always left stuff running better than they found it. Billiam said we were all going to end up as walkaways.”
“He was a good friend of yours, huh?” Hubert, Etc felt stupid.
“I’d known him off and on for three years. He wasn’t my best friend, but we’d had fun together. He was a good person, though I’d seen him be a flaming asshole.”
Seth surprised Hubert, Etc by saying, “That’s not very nice.”
She made an impatient noise. “Bullshit. I’ve got zero tolerance for not speaking ill of the dead. Billiam was sixty percent good guy, forty percent utter prick. That puts him in the middle of humanity’s bell curve. He hated bullshit with heat from the center of the sun. He was my friend, not yours.”
Hubert, Etc felt tears, didn’t know why. He went into the bathroom, sat on the toilet lid with his eyes closed, then stared into the mirror screen, letting it cycle through his profiles and the back and top of his head. He looked like shit. His second thought, which came in a bolt of clarity, was that he looked like a normal human, among billions of humans, no more or less good or bad than anyone. He thought about Natalie’s talk of the bell curve and thought that he was within a sigma or two of normal on every axis.
He splashed cold water on his face and stepped out, trailing his hands along the finger-painted wall. Natalie and Seth looked at him with guilt or concern.
“You okay, buddy?” Seth said.
“Natalie,” he said, “I don’t think that the average person is sixty percent good and forty percent prick. I think that the average person sometimes kids himself that he’s the center of the universe, and it’s okay if he does something that he’d be pissed about if someone else did it to him, and tries not to think about it too hard.”
“Uh, okay—” Natalie said.
“And I think that the tragedy of human existence is our world is run by people who are really good at kidding themselves, like your father. Your dad manages to kid himself that he’s rich and powerful because he’s the cream and has risen to the top. But he’s not stupid. He knows he’s kidding himself. So underneath that top layer of bullshit is another, more aware belief system: the belief that everyone else would kid themselves the same way he does, if they had the chance.”
“That’s exactly right,” she said.
“His beliefs don’t start with the idea that it’s okay to kid yourself you’re a special snowflake who deserves more cookies than all the other kids. It starts with the idea that it’s human nature to kid yourself and take the last cookie, so if he doesn’t, someone else will, so he had better be the most lavishly self-deluded of all, the most prolific taker of cookies, lest someone more horrible, immoral, and greedy than he gets there first and eats all the cookies, takes the plate, and charges rent to drink the milk.”
Seth said: “Insert tragedy of the commons here.”
Natalie put her hands up. “You know, I’ve heard the term ‘tragedy of the commons’ like a thousand times and I’ve never actually looked it up. What is it? Something to do with poor people being tragic?”
“That’s commoners,” Hubert, Etc said. Something was awake and loose inside him now. He wanted to kick the pizza off the coffee table and use it for a stage. “Commons. Common land that belongs to no one. Villages had commons where anyone could bring their livestock for a day’s grazing. The tragedy part is that if the land isn’t anyone’s, then someone will come along and let their sheep eat until there’s nothing but mud. Everyone knows that that bastard is on the way, so they might as well be that bastard. Better that sheep belonging to a nice guy like you should fill their bellies than the grass going to some selfish dickhead’s sheep.”
“Sounds like bullshit to me.”
“Oh, it is,” Hubert, Etc said. The thing was moving in his guts, setting his balls and face tingling. “It’s more than mere bullshit. It’s searing, evil, world-changing bullshit. The solution to the tragedy of the commons isn’t to get a cop to make sure sociopaths aren’t overgrazing the land, or shunning anyone who does it, turning him into a pariah. The solution is to let a robber-baron own the land that used to be everyone’s, because once he’s running it for profit, he’ll take exquisite care to generate profit forever.”
“That’s the tragedy of the commons? A fairy tale about giving public assets to rich people to run as personal empires because that way they’ll make sure they’re better managed than they would be if we just made up some rules? God, my dad must love that story.”
“It’s the origin story of people like your dad,” Hubert, Etc said. “It’s obvious bullshit for anyone whose sweet deal doesn’t depend on it not being obvious.”
“Hear that, Dad?” she said, looking around the room. “Obvious to anyone whose sweet deal doesn’t depend on it not being obvious, you deluded sociopathic fuck.”
“He’s got you bugged?” Seth said.
“I’ve got an individual privacy filter on the house network. But of course the cameras are rolling, because if I get kidnapped or murdered, he’d review them. Of course that’s bullshit and he’s always been able to spoof the locks. He learned it from me, when he went through some audit logs and saw I was doing it. Now he’s locked me out but I’m goddamned certain there are times he’s gone through my footage.” She looked into the air in front of her face. “Yes, Dad, I know you’re listening. It’s pathetic.”
Hubert, Etc remembered looking at his reflection in the bathroom and wondered if there was long-term archiving of its feed. He knew plenty of people with bugged homes, but you couldn’t live as though you were being observed. When your infographics said you were fully patched, you had to trust them. That’s what made the panics about huge zero-day security ruptures such a fright: the sudden knowledge that everything might have been auto-pwned by a random crim or asshole who used a skin-detection algorithm to catch you masturbating, keywords to flag your embarrassing conversations, harvesting your biometrics for playback attacks on your finances and social nets.
Living with the knowledge that there were creeps inside your perimeter was creepy. Of all the weird things about being zottarich, this was the weirdest. So far.
“Sorry,” Hubert, Etc said. “Just getting my head around this. How often does he spy on you?”