Distraction Read online

  From Bruce Sterling, bestselling author of Heavy Weather and Holy Fire, comes this startling, disturbing, and darkly comic vision of the future of America. It is the story of a once great nation coming apart at the seams while an unending spectacle of politics, science, sex, and corruption has everyone too busy to notice…

  D I S T R A C T I O N

  It’s November 2044, an election year, and the state of the Union is a farce. The federal government is broke, cities are privately owned, the military is shaking down citizens in the streets, and Wyoming is on fire. The last place anyone expects to find an answer is the nation’s capital.

  Washington has become a circus and no one knows that better than Oscar Valparaiso. A master political spin doctor, Oscar has been in the background for years, doing his best to put the proper spin on anything that comes up. Now he wants to do something quite unusual in politics. He wants to make a difference. But Oscar has a skeleton in his closet: a grotesque and unspeakable scandal that haunts his personal life.

  He has one unexpected ally: Dr. Greta Penninger. She is a gifted neurologist at the bleeding edge of the neural revolution. Together Oscar and Greta know the human mind inside and out. And they are about to use that knowledge to spread a very powerful message: that it’s a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. It’s an idea whose time has come…again. And once again so have its enemies: every technofanatic, government goon, and reactionary laptop assassin in America.

  Like all revolutionaries, Oscar and Greta might not survive to change the world, but they’re determined to put a new spin on it.

  ALSO BY BRUCE STERLING

  Novels

  THE ARTIFICIAL KID

  THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE

  (WITH WILLIAM GIBSON)

  HEAVY WEATHER

  INVOLUTION OCEAN

  ISLANDS IN THE NET

  SCHISMATRIX

  HOLY FIRE

  Stories

  CRYSTAL EXPRESS

  GLOBALHEAD

  Nonfiction

  THE HACKER CRACKDOWN:

  LAW AND DISORDER ON THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER

  Editor

  MIRRORSHADES: THE CYBERPUNK ANTHOLOGY

  DISTRACTION

  A Bantam Spectra Book / December 1998

  SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1998 by Bruce Sterling.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address: Bantam Books.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sterling, Bruce.

  Distraction / Bruce Sterling.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-553-10484-5

  I. Title.

  PS3569.T3876D57 1998

  813'.54—dc21

  98-20791

  CIP

  Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

  * * *

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

  * * *

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  BVG 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  For the fifty-first time (according to his laptop), Oscar studied the riot video from Worcester. This eight-minute chunk of jerky footage was Oscar’s current favorite object of professional meditation. It was a set of grainy photos, taken by a security camera in Massachusetts.

  The press called this event “the Worcester riot of May Day ’42.” This May Day event did not deserve the term “riot” in Oscar’s professional opinion, because although it was extremely destructive, there was nothing riotous about it.

  The first security shots showed a typical Massachusetts street crowd, people walking the street. Worcester was traditionally a rather tough and ugly town, but like many areas in the old industrial Northeast, Worcester had been rather picking up lately. Nobody in the crowd showed any signs of aggression or rage. Certainly nothing was going on that would provoke the attention of the authorities and their various forms of machine surveillance. Just normal people shopping, strolling. A line of bank customers doing business with a debit-card machine. A bus taking on and disgorging its passengers.

  Then, bit by bit, the street crowd became denser. There were more people in motion. And, although it was by no means easy to notice, more and more of these people were carrying valises, or knapsacks, or big jumbo-sized purses.

  Oscar knew very well that these very normal-looking people were linked in conspiracy. The thing that truly roused his admiration was the absolute brilliance of the way they were dressed, the utter dullness and nonchalance of their comportment. They were definitely not natives of Worcester, Massachusetts, but each and every one was a cunning distillation of the public image of Worcester. They were all deliberate plants and ringers, but they were uncannily brilliant forgeries, strangers bent on destruction who were almost impossible to notice.

  They didn’t fit any known demographic profile of a troublemaker, or a criminal, or a violent radical. Any security measure that would have excluded them would have excluded everyone in town.

  Oscar assumed that they were all radical proles. Dissidents, autonomen, gypsies, leisure-union people. This was a reasonable assumption, since a quarter of the American population no longer had jobs. More than half of the people in modern America had given up on formal employment. The modern economy no longer generated many commercial roles that could occupy the time of people.

  With millions of people structurally uprooted, there wasn’t any lack of recruiting material for cults, prole gangs, and street mobs. Big mobs were common enough nowadays, but this May Day organization was not a mob. They weren’t a standard street gang or militia either. Because they weren’t saluting one another. There were no visible orders given or taken, no colors or hand signs, no visible hierarchy. They showed no signs of mutual recognition at all.

  In fact—Oscar had concluded this only after repeated close study of the tape—they weren’t even aware of one another’s existence as members of the same group. He further suspected that many of them—maybe most of them—didn’t know what they were about to do.

  Then, they all exploded into action. It was startling, even at the fifty-first viewing.

  Smoke bombs went off, veiling the street in mist. Purses and valises and backpacks yawned open, and their owners removed and deployed a previously invisible arsenal of drills, and bolt cutters, and pneumatic jacks. They marched through the puffing smoke and set to their work as if they demolished banks every day.

  A brown van ambled by, a van that bore no license plates. As it drove down the street every other vehicle stopped dead. None of those vehicles would ever move again, because their circuits had just been stripped by a high-frequency magnetic pulse, which, not coincidentally, had ruined all the financial hardware within the bank.

  The brown van departed, never to return. It was shortly replaced by a large, official-looking, hook-wielding tow tr
uck. The tow truck bumped daintily over the pavement, hooked itself to the automatic teller machine, and yanked the entire armored machine from the wall in a cascade of broken bricks. Two random passersby deftly lashed the teller machine down with bungee cords. The tow truck then thoughtfully picked up a parked limousine belonging to a bank officer, and departed with that as well.

  At this point, the arm of a young man appeared in close-up. A strong brown hand depressed a button, and a can sprayed the lens of the security camera with paint. That was the end of the recorded surveillance footage.

  But it hadn’t been the end of the attack. The attackers hadn’t simply robbed the bank. They had carried off everything portable, including the security cameras, the carpets, the chairs, and the light and plumbing fixtures. The conspirators had deliberately punished the bank, for reasons best known to themselves, or to their unknown controllers. They had superglued doors and shattered windows, severed power and communications cables, poured stinking toxins into the wallspaces, concreted all the sinks and drains. In eight minutes, sixty people had ruined the building so thoroughly that it had to be condemned and later demolished.

  The ensuing criminal investigation had not managed to apprehend, convict, or even identify a single one of the “rioters.” Once fuller attention had been paid to the Worcester bank, a number of grave financial irregularities had surfaced. The scandal eventually led to the resignation of three Massachusetts state representatives and the jailing of four bank executives and the mayor of Worcester. The Worcester banking scandal had become a major issue in the ensuing U.S. Senate campaign.

  This event was clearly significant. It had required organization, observation, decision, execution. It was a gesture of brutal authority from some very novel locus of power. Someone had done all this with meticulous purpose and intent, but how? How did they compel the loyalty of those agents? How did they recruit them, train them, dress them, pay them, transport them? And—most amazing of all—how did they compel their silence, afterward?

  Oscar Valparaiso had once imagined politics as a chess game. His kind of chess game. Pawns, knights, and queens, powers and strategies, ranks and files, black squares and white squares. Studying this tape had cured him of that metaphor. Because this phenomenon on the tape was not a chess piece. It was there on the public chessboard all right, but it wasn’t a rook or a bishop. It was a wet squid, a swarm of bees. It was a new entity that pursued its own orthogonal agenda, and vanished into the silent interstices of a deeply networked and increasingly nonlinear society.

  Oscar sighed, shut his laptop, and looked down the length of the bus. His campaign staffers had been living inside a bus for thirteen weeks, in a slowly rising tide of road garbage. They were victorious now, decompressing from the heroic campaign struggle. Alcott Bambakias, their former patron, was the new U.S. Senator-elect from Massachusetts. Oscar had won his victory. The Bambakias campaign had been folded up, and sent away.

  And yet, twelve staffers still dwelled inside the Senator’s bus. They were snoring in their fold-down bunks, playing poker on the flip-out tables, trampling big promiscuous heaps of road laundry. On occasion, they numbly rifled the cabinets for snacks.

  Oscar’s sleeve rang. He reached inside it, retrieved a fabric telephone, and absently flopped his phone back into shape. He spoke into the mouthpiece. “Okay, Fontenot.”

  “You wanna make it to the science lab tonight?” said Fontenot.

  “That would be good.”

  “How much is it worth to you? We’ve got a roadblock problem.”

  “They’re shaking us down, is that it?” said Oscar, his brow creasing beneath his immaculate hair. “They want a bribe, straight across? Is it really that simple?”

  “Nothing is ever simple anymore,” said Fontenot. The campaign’s security man wasn’t attempting world-weary sarcasm. He was relating a modern fact of life. “This isn’t like our other little roadblock hassles. This is the United States Air Force.”

  Oscar considered this novel piece of information. It didn’t sound at all promising. “Why, exactly, is the Air Force blockading a federal highway?”

  “Folks have always done things differently here in Louisiana,” Fontenot offered. Through the phone’s flimsy earpiece, a distant background of car honks rose to a crescendo. “Oscar, I think you need to come see this. I know Louisiana, I was born and raised here, but I just don’t have the words to describe all this.”

  “Very good,” Oscar said. “I’ll be right there.” He stuffed the phone in his sleeve. He’d known Fontenot for over a year, and had never heard such an invitation from him. Fontenot never invited other people out to share the professional risks he took; to do that countered every instinct in a bodyguard. Oscar didn’t have to be asked twice.

  Oscar set his laptop aside and stood up to confront his entourage. “People, listen to me, here’s the deal! We have another little roadblock problem ahead.” Dismal groans. “Fontenot is on the situation for us. Jimmy, turn on the alarms.”

  The driver pulled off the road and activated the bus’s inbuilt defenses. Oscar gazed briefly at the window. Actually, the campaign bus had no windows. Seen from outside, the bus was a solid shell. Its large internal “windows” were panel screen displays, hooked to external cameras that scoped out their surroundings with pitiless intensity. The Bambakias campaign bus habitually videotaped everything that it perceived. When pressed, the bus also recorded and cataloged everything that it saw, exporting the data by satellite relay to an archival safe house deep in the Rocky Mountains. Alcott Bambakias’s campaign bus had been designed and built to be that kind of vehicle.

  At the moment, their bus was passively observing two tall green walls of murky pines, and a line of slumping fence posts with corroded barbed wire. They were parked on Interstate Highway 10, ten miles beyond the eldritch postindustrial settlement of Sulphur, Louisiana. Sulphur had attracted a lot of bemused attention from the krewe of staffers as their campaign bus flitted through town. In the curdled fog of winter, the Cajun town seemed to be one giant oil refinery, measled all over with tattered grass shacks and dented trailer homes.

  Now the fog had lifted, and on the far side of Sulphur the passing traffic was light.

  “I’m going out,” Oscar announced, “to assess the local situation.”

  Donna, his image consultant, brought Oscar a dress shirt. Oscar accepted silk braces, his dress hat, and his Milanese trench coat.

  As the stylist ministered to his shoes, Oscar gazed meditatively upon his krewe. Action and fresh air might improve their morale. “Who wants to do some face-time with the U.S. Air Force?”

  Jimmy de Paulo leaped from the driver’s seat. “Hey, man, I’ll go!”

  “Jimmy,” Oscar said gently, “you can’t. We need you to drive this bus.”

  “Oh yeah,” said Jimmy, collapsing crestfallen back into his seat.

  Moira Matarazzo sat up reluctantly in her bunk. “Is there some reason I should go?” This was Moira’s first extensive period off-camera, after months as the campaign’s media spokeswoman. The normally meticulous Moira now sported a ratted mess of hair, chapped lips, furry eyebrows, wrinkled cotton pajamas. The evil glitter under her champagne-puffed eyelids could have scared a water moccasin. “Because I will go if it’s required, but I don’t really see why I should,” Moira whined. “Roadblocks can be dangerous.”

  “Then you should definitely go.” This was Bob Argow, the campaign’s systems administrator. Bob’s level tone made it icily clear that he was nearing the point of emotional detonation. Bob had been drinking steadily ever since the Boston victory celebration. He’d begun his drinking in joyous relief, and as the miles rolled on and the bottles methodically emptied, Bob had plunged into classic post-traumatic depression.

  “I’ll go with you, Mr. Valparaiso,” Norman-the-Intern piped up. As usual, everyone ignored Norman.

  The twelve staffers were still officially on salary, mopping up the last of Bambakias’s soft campaign money. Officially, they w
ere all taking a richly deserved “vacation.” This was a typically generous gesture by Alcott Bambakias, but it was also a situation specifically arranged to gently part the campaign krewe from the vicinity of the new Senator-elect. Back in his ultramodern Cambridge HQ, the charismatic billionaire was busily assembling an entirely new krewe, the Washington staff that would help him to govern. After months of frenzied team labor and daunting personal sacrifice, the campaigners had been blown off with a check and a hearty handshake.

  Oscar Valparaiso had been Bambakias’s chief political consultant. He had also been the campaign’s Executive Director. From the spoils of victory, Oscar had swiftly won himself a new assignment. Thanks to rapid backstage string-pulling, Oscar had become a brand-new policy analyst for the U.S. Senate Science Committee. Senator Bambakias would soon be serving on that committee.

  Oscar possessed goals, a mission, options, tactics, and a future. The other campaign staffers lacked all these things. Oscar knew this. He knew all of these people only too well. During the past eighteen months, Oscar had recruited them, assembled them, paid them, managed them, flattered and cajoled them, welded them into a working unit. He’d rented their office space, overlooked their expense accounts, given them job titles, managed their access to the candidate, even mediated over substance-abuse problems and romantic entanglements. Finally, he’d led them all to victory.

  Oscar was still a locus of power, so his krewe was instinctively migrating in his wake. They were “on vacation,” professional political operatives hoping for something to turn up. But the esprit de corps in Oscar’s entourage had all the tensile strength of a fortune cookie.

  Oscar fetched his oxblood-leather shoulder satchel and, after mature consideration, tucked in a small nonlethal spraygun. Yosh Pelicanos, Oscar’s majordomo and bagman, passed him a fat debit card. Pelicanos was visibly tired, and still somewhat hungover from the prolonged celebration, but he was up and alert. As Oscar’s official second-in-command, Pelicanos always made it a point to be publicly counted on.