i lived long enough to see the cure for death; to see the rise of the bitchunsociety, to learn ten languages; to compose three symphonies; to realizemy boyhood dream of taking up residence in disney world; to seethe death of the workplace and of work.
i never thought i’d live to see the day when keep a-movin’ danwould decide to deadhead until the heat death of the universe.
dan was in his second or third blush of youth when i first met him,sometime late-xxi. he was a rangy cowpoke, apparent 25 or so, allrawhide squint-lines and sunburned neck, boots worn thin and infinitelycomfortable. i was in the middle of my chem thesis, my fourth doctorate,and he was taking a break from saving the world, chilling on campusin toronto and core-dumping for some poor anthro major. wehooked up at the grad students’ union—the gsu, or gazoo for thosewho knew—on a busy friday night, spring-ish. i was fighting a coralslowbattle for a stool at the scratched bar, inching my way closer everytime the press of bodies shifted, and he had one of the few seats, surroundedby a litter of cigarette junk and empties, clearly encamped.
some duration into my foray, he cocked his head at me and raised asun-bleached eyebrow. “you get any closer, son, and we’re going to haveto get a pre-nup.”
i was apparent forty or so, and i thought about bridling at being calledson, but i looked into his eyes and decided that he had enough realtimethat he could call me son anytime he wanted. i backed off a little andapologized.
he struck a cig and blew a pungent, strong plume over the bartender’shead. “don’t worry about it. i’m probably a little over accustomed topersonal space.”
i couldn’t remember the last time i’d heard anyone on-world talkabout personal space. with the mortality rate at zero and the birth-rate atnon-zero, the world was inexorably accreting a dense carpet of people,even with the migratory and deadhead drains on the population.
“you’ve been jaunting?” i asked—his eyes were too sharp for him tohave missed an instant’s experience to deadheading.
he chuckled. “no sir, not me. i’m into the kind of macho shitheaderythat you only come across on-world. jaunting’s for play; i need work.”
the bar-glass tinkled a counterpoint.
11i took a moment to conjure a hud with his whuffie score on it. i hadto resize the window—he had too many zeroes to fit on my standard display.
i tried to act cool, but he caught the upwards flick of my eyes andthen their involuntary widening. he tried a little aw-shucksery, gave itup and let a prideful grin show.
“i try not to pay it much mind. some people, they get overly grateful.”
he must’ve seen my eyes flick up again, to pull his whuffie history.
“wait, don’t go doing that—i’ll tell you about it, you really got to know.
“damn, you know, it’s so easy to get used to life without hyperlinks.
you’d think you’d really miss ’em, but you don’t.”
and it clicked for me. he was a missionary—one of those fringedwellerswho act as emissary from the bitchun society to the benightedcorners of the world where, for whatever reasons, they want to die,starve, and choke on petrochem waste. it’s amazing that these communitiessurvive more than a generation; in the bitchun society proper,we usually outlive our detractors. the missionaries don’t have such ahigh success rate—you have to be awfully convincing to get through to aculture that’s already successfully resisted nearly a century’s worth ofpropaganda—but when you convert a whole village, you accrue all thewhuffie they have to give. more often, missionaries end up getting refreshedfrom a backup after they aren’t heard from for a decade or so. i’dnever met one in the flesh before.
“how many successful missions have you had?” i asked.
“figured it out, huh? i’ve just come off my fifth in twentyyears—counterrevolutionaries hidden out in the old cheyenne mountainnorad site, still there a generation later.” he sandpapered his whiskerswith his fingertips. “their parents went to ground after their life’s savingsvanished, and they had no use for tech any more advanced than arifle. plenty of those, though.”
he spun a fascinating yarn then, how he slowly gained the acceptanceof the mountain-dwellers, and then their trust, and then betrayed it insubtle, beneficent ways: introducing free energy to their greenhouses,then a gengineered crop or two, then curing a couple deaths, slowlyinching them toward the bitchun society, until they couldn’t rememberwhy they hadn’t wanted to be a part of it from the start. now they weremostly off-world, exploring toy frontiers with unlimited energy and unlimitedsupplies and deadheading through the dull times en route.
“i guess it’d be too much of a shock for them to stay on-world. theythink of us as the enemy, you know—they had all kinds of plans drawn12up for when we invaded them and took them away; hollow suicideteeth, booby-traps, fall-back-and-rendezvous points for the survivors.
they just can’t get over hating us, even though we don’t even know theyexist. off-world, they can pretend that they’re still living rough andhard.” he rubbed his chin again, his hard calluses grating over hiswhiskers. “but for me, the real rough life is right here, on-world. thelittle enclaves, each one is like an alternate history of humanity—what ifwe’d taken the free energy, but not deadheading? what if we’d takendeadheading, but only for the critically ill, not for people who didn’twant to be bored on long bus-rides? or no hyperlinks, no ad-hocracy, nowhuffie? each one is different and wonderful.”
i have a stupid habit of arguing for the sake of, and i found myselfsaying, “wonderful? oh sure, nothing finer than, oh, let’s see, dying,starving, freezing, broiling, killing, cruelty and ignorance and pain andmisery. i know i sure miss it.”
keep a-movin’ dan snorted. “you think a junkie misses sobriety?”
i knocked on the bar. “hello! there aren’t any junkies anymore!”
he struck another cig. “but you know what a junkie is, right? junkiesdon’t miss sobriety, because they don’t remember how sharp everythingwas, how the pain made the joy sweeter. we can’t remember what it waslike to work to earn our keep; to worry that there might not be enough,that we might get sick or get hit by a bus. we don’t remember what itwas like to take chances, and we sure as shit don’t remember what it feltlike to have them pay off.”
he had a point. here i was, only in my second or third adulthood, andalready ready to toss it all in and do something, anything, else. he had apoint—but i wasn’t about to admit it. “so you say. i say, i take a chancewhen i strike up a conversation in a bar, when i fall in love … and whatabout the deadheads? two people i know, they just went deadhead forten thousand years! tell me that’s not taking a chance!” truth be told, almosteveryone i’d known in my eighty-some years were deadheading orjaunting or just gone. lonely days, then.
“brother, that’s committing half-assed suicide. the way we’re going,they’ll be lucky if someone doesn’t just switch ’em off when it comestime to reanimate. in case you haven’t noticed, it’s getting a littlecrowded around here.”
i made pish-tosh sounds and wiped off my forehead with a bar-napkin—the gazoo was beastly hot on summer nights. “uh-huh, just like theworld was getting a little crowded a hundred years ago, before free13energy. like it was getting too greenhousey, too nukey, too hot or toocold. we fixed it then, we’ll fix it again when the time comes. i’m gonnabe here in ten thousand years, you damn betcha, but i think i’ll do it thelong way around.”
he cocked his head again, and gave it some thought. if it had been anyof the other grad students, i’d have assumed he was grepping for somebolstering factoids to support his next sally. but with him, i just knew hewas thinking about it, the old-fashioned way.
“i think that if i’m still here in ten thousand years, i’m going to becrazy as hell. ten thousand years, pal! ten thousand years ago, the stateof-the-art was a goat. you really think you’re going to be anything recognizablyhuman in a hundred centuries? me, i’m not interested in being apost-person. i’m going to wake up one day, and i’m going to say, ‘well, iguess i’ve seen about enough,’ and that’ll be my last day.”
i had seen where he was going with this, and i had stopped paying attentionwhile i readied my response. i probably should have paid moreattention. “but why? why not just deadhead for a few centuries, see ifthere’s anything that takes your fancy, and if not, back to sleep for a fewmore? why do anything so final?”
he embarrassed me by making a show of thinking it over again, makingme feel like i was just a half-pissed glib poltroon. “i suppose it’s becausenothing else is. i’ve always known that someday, i was going tostop moving, stop seeking, stop kicking, and have done with it. there’llcome a day when i don’t have anything left to do, except stop.”
on campus, they called him keep-a-movin’ dan, because of his cowboyvibe and because of his lifestyle, and he somehow grew to take overevery conversation i had for the next six months. i pinged his whuffie afew times, and noticed that it was climbing steadily upward as he accumulatedmore esteem from the people he met.
i’d pretty much pissed away most of my whuffie—all the savingsfrom the symphonies and the first three theses—drinking myself stupidat the gazoo, hogging library terminals, pestering profs, until i’d expendedall the respect anyone had ever afforded me. all except dan, who,for some reason, stood me to regular beers and meals and movies.
i got to feeling like i was someone special—not everyone had a chumas exotic as keep-a-movin’ dan, the legendary missionary who visitedthe only places left that were closed to the bitchun society. i can’t say for14sure why he hung around with me. he mentioned once or twice thathe’d liked my symphonies, and he’d read my ergonomics thesis onapplying theme-park crowd-control techniques in urban settings, andliked what i had to say there. but i think it came down to us having agood time needling each other.
i’d talk to him about the vast carpet of the future unrolling before us,of the certainty that we would encounter alien intelligences some day, ofthe unimaginable frontiers open to each of us. he’d tell me that deadheadingwas a strong indicator that one’s personal reservoir of introspectionand creativity was dry; and that without struggle, there is no realvictory.
this was a good fight, one we could have a thousand times withoutresolving. i’d get him to concede that whuffie recaptured the true essenceof money: in the old days, if you were broke but respected, youwouldn’t starve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum couldbuy you security and peace. by measuring the thing that money reallyrepresented—your personal capital with your friends and neighbors—you more accurately gauged your success.
and then he’d lead me down a subtle, carefully baited trail that led tomy allowing that while, yes, we might someday encounter alien specieswith wild and fabulous ways, that right now, there was a slightly depressinghomogeneity to the world.
on a fine spring day, i defended my thesis to two embodied humansand one prof whose body was out for an overhaul, whose consciousnesswas present via speakerphone from the computer where it was resting.
they all liked it. i collected my sheepskin and went out hunting for danin the sweet, flower-stinking streets.
he’d gone. the anthro major he’d been torturing with his war-storiessaid that they’d wrapped up that morning, and he’d headed to thewalled city of tijuana, to take his shot with the descendants of a platoonof us marines who’d settled there and cut themselves off from the bitchunsociety.
so i went to disney world.
in deference to dan, i took the flight in realtime, in the minuscule cabinreserved for those of us who stubbornly refused to be frozen andstacked like cordwood for the two hour flight. i was the only one takingthe trip in realtime, but a flight attendant dutifully served me a urinesample-sized orange juice and a rubbery, pungent, cheese omelet. i15stared out the windows at the infinite clouds while the autopilot bankedaround the turbulence, and wondered when i’d see dan next.
about doctorow:
cory doctorow (born july 17, 1971) is a blogger, journalist and sciencefiction author who serves as co-editor of the blog boing boing. he is infavor of liberalizing copyright laws, and a proponent of the creativecommons organisation, and uses some of their licenses for his books.
some common themes of his work include digital rights management,file sharing, disney, and post-scarcity economics. source: wikipedia2i could never have written this book without the personal support of myfriends and family, especially roz doctorow, gord doctorow and neildoctorow, amanda foubister, steve samenski, pat york, grad conn,john henson, john rose, the writers at the cecil street irregulars andmark frauenfelder.
i owe a great debt to the writers and editors who mentored and encouragedme: james patrick kelly, judith merril, damon knight, marthasoukup, scott edelman, gardner dozois, renee wilmeth, teresa nielsenhayden, claire eddy, bob parks and robert killheffer.
i am also indebted to my editor patrick nielsen hayden and my agentdonald maass, who believed in this book and helped me bring it tofruition.
finally, i must thank the readers, the geeks and the imagineers whoinspired this book.
cory doctorowsan franciscoseptember 20023a note about this book, february 12, 2004:
as you will see, when you read the text beneath this section, i releasedthis book a little over a year ago under the terms of a creative commonslicense that allowed my readers to freely redistribute the text withoutneeding any further permission from me. in this fashion, i enlisted myreaders in the service of a grand experiment, to see how my book couldfind its way into cultural relevance and commercial success. the experimentworked out very satisfactorily.
when i originally licensed the book under the terms set out in the nextsection, i did so in the most conservative fashion possible, using cc'smost restrictive license. i wanted to dip my toe in before taking a plunge.
i wanted to see if the sky would fall: you see writers are routinelyschooled by their peers that maximal copyright is the only thing thatstands between us and penury, and so ingrained was this lesson in methat even though i had the intellectual intuition that a "some rights reserved"regime would serve me well, i still couldn't shake the atavisticfear that i was about to do something very foolish indeed.
it wasn't foolish. i've since released a short story collection (a place soforeign and eight more and a second novel (eastern standard tribe) inthis fashion, and my career is turning over like a goddamned locomotiveengine. i am thrilled beyond words (an extraordinary circumstance for awriter!) at the way that this has all worked out.
and so now i'm going to take a little bit of a plunge. today, in coincidencewith my talk at the o'reilly emerging technology conference(ebooks: neither e, nor books).
i am re-licensing this book under a far less restrictive creative commonslicense, the attribution-noncommercial-sharealike license. this isa license that allows you, the reader, to noncommercially "remix" thisbook — you have my blessing to make your own translations, radio andfilm adaptations, sequels, fan fiction, missing chapters, machine remixes,you name it. a number of you assumed that you had my blessing to dothis in the first place, and i can't say that i've been at all put out by thedelightful and creative derivative works created from this book, but nowyou have my explicit blessing, and i hope you'll use it.
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10prologuei lived long enough to see the cure for death; to see the rise of the bitchunsociety, to learn ten languages; to compose three symphonies; to realizemy boyhood dream of taking up residence in disney world; to seethe death of the workplace and of work.
i never thought i’d live to see the day when keep a-movin’ danwould decide to deadhead until the heat death of the universe.
dan was in his second or third blush of youth when i first met him,sometime late-xxi. he was a rangy cowpoke, apparent 25 or so, allrawhide squint-lines and sunburned neck, boots worn thin and infinitelycomfortable. i was in the middle of my chem thesis, my fourth doctorate,and he was taking a break from saving the world, chilling on campusin toronto and core-dumping for some poor anthro major. wehooked up at the grad students’ union—the gsu, or gazoo for thosewho knew—on a busy friday night, spring-ish. i was fighting a coralslowbattle for a stool at the scratched bar, inching my way closer everytime the press of bodies shifted, and he had one of the few seats, surroundedby a litter of cigarette junk and empties, clearly encamped.
some duration into my foray, he cocked his head at me and raised asun-bleached eyebrow. “you get any closer, son, and we’re going to haveto get a pre-nup.”
i was apparent forty or so, and i thought about bridling at being calledson, but i looked into his eyes and decided that he had enough realtimethat he could call me son anytime he wanted. i backed off a little andapologized.
he struck a cig and blew a pungent, strong plume over the bartender’shead. “don’t worry about it. i’m probably a little over accustomed topersonal space.”
i couldn’t remember the last time i’d heard anyone on-world talkabout personal space. with the mortality rate at zero and the birth-rate atnon-zero, the world was inexorably accreting a dense carpet of people,even with the migratory and deadhead drains on the population.
“you’ve been jaunting?” i asked—his eyes were too sharp for him tohave missed an instant’s experience to deadheading.
he chuckled. “no sir, not me. i’m into the kind of macho shitheaderythat you only come across on-world. jaunting’s for play; i need work.”
the bar-glass tinkled a counterpoint.
11i took a moment to conjure a hud with his whuffie score on it. i hadto resize the window—he had too many zeroes to fit on my standard display.
i tried to act cool, but he caught the upwards flick of my eyes andthen their involuntary widening. he tried a little aw-shucksery, gave itup and let a prideful grin show.
“i try not to pay it much mind. some people, they get overly grateful.”
he must’ve seen my eyes flick up again, to pull his whuffie history.
“wait, don’t go doing that—i’ll tell you about it, you really got to know.
“damn, you know, it’s so easy to get used to life without hyperlinks.
you’d think you’d really miss ’em, but you don’t.”
and it clicked for me. he was a missionary—one of those fringedwellerswho act as emissary from the bitchun society to the benightedcorners of the world where, for whatever reasons, they want to die,starve, and choke on petrochem waste. it’s amazing that these communitiessurvive more than a generation; in the bitchun society proper,we usually outlive our detractors. the missionaries don’t have such ahigh success rate—you have to be awfully convincing to get through to aculture that’s already successfully resisted nearly a century’s worth ofpropaganda—but when you convert a whole village, you accrue all thewhuffie they have to give. more often, missionaries end up getting refreshedfrom a backup after they aren’t heard from for a decade or so. i’dnever met one in the flesh before.
“how many successful missions have you had?” i asked.
“figured it out, huh? i’ve just come off my fifth in twentyyears—counterrevolutionaries hidden out in the old cheyenne mountainnorad site, still there a generation later.” he sandpapered his whiskerswith his fingertips. “their parents went to ground after their life’s savingsvanished, and they had no use for tech any more advanced than arifle. plenty of those, though.”
he spun a fascinating yarn then, how he slowly gained the acceptanceof the mountain-dwellers, and then their trust, and then betrayed it insubtle, beneficent ways: introducing free energy to their greenhouses,then a gengineered crop or two, then curing a couple deaths, slowlyinching them toward the bitchun society, until they couldn’t rememberwhy they hadn’t wanted to be a part of it from the start. now they weremostly off-world, exploring toy frontiers with unlimited energy and unlimitedsupplies and deadheading through the dull times en route.
“i guess it’d be too much of a shock for them to stay on-world. theythink of us as the enemy, you know—they had all kinds of plans drawn12up for when we invaded them and took them away; hollow suicideteeth, booby-traps, fall-back-and-rendezvous points for the survivors.
they just can’t get over hating us, even though we don’t even know theyexist. off-world, they can pretend that they’re still living rough andhard.” he rubbed his chin again, his hard calluses grating over hiswhiskers. “but for me, the real rough life is right here, on-world. thelittle enclaves, each one is like an alternate history of humanity—what ifwe’d taken the free energy, but not deadheading? what if we’d takendeadheading, but only for the critically ill, not for people who didn’twant to be bored on long bus-rides? or no hyperlinks, no ad-hocracy, nowhuffie? each one is different and wonderful.”
i have a stupid habit of arguing for the sake of, and i found myselfsaying, “wonderful? oh sure, nothing finer than, oh, let’s see, dying,starving, freezing, broiling, killing, cruelty and ignorance and pain andmisery. i know i sure miss it.”
keep a-movin’ dan snorted. “you think a junkie misses sobriety?”
i knocked on the bar. “hello! there aren’t any junkies anymore!”
he struck another cig. “but you know what a junkie is, right? junkiesdon’t miss sobriety, because they don’t remember how sharp everythingwas, how the pain made the joy sweeter. we can’t remember what it waslike to work to earn our keep; to worry that there might not be enough,that we might get sick or get hit by a bus. we don’t remember what itwas like to take chances, and we sure as shit don’t remember what it feltlike to have them pay off.”
he had a point. here i was, only in my second or third adulthood, andalready ready to toss it all in and do something, anything, else. he had apoint—but i wasn’t about to admit it. “so you say. i say, i take a chancewhen i strike up a conversation in a bar, when i fall in love … and whatabout the deadheads? two people i know, they just went deadhead forten thousand years! tell me that’s not taking a chance!” truth be told, almosteveryone i’d known in my eighty-some years were deadheading orjaunting or just gone. lonely days, then.
“brother, that’s committing half-assed suicide. the way we’re going,they’ll be lucky if someone doesn’t just switch ’em off when it comestime to reanimate. in case you haven’t noticed, it’s getting a littlecrowded around here.”
i made pish-tosh sounds and wiped off my forehead with a bar-napkin—the gazoo was beastly hot on summer nights. “uh-huh, just like theworld was getting a little crowded a hundred years ago, before free13energy. like it was getting too greenhousey, too nukey, too hot or toocold. we fixed it then, we’ll fix it again when the time comes. i’m gonnabe here in ten thousand years, you damn betcha, but i think i’ll do it thelong way around.”
he cocked his head again, and gave it some thought. if it had been anyof the other grad students, i’d have assumed he was grepping for somebolstering factoids to support his next sally. but with him, i just knew hewas thinking about it, the old-fashioned way.
“i think that if i’m still here in ten thousand years, i’m going to becrazy as hell. ten thousand years, pal! ten thousand years ago, the stateof-the-art was a goat. you really think you’re going to be anything recognizablyhuman in a hundred centuries? me, i’m not interested in being apost-person. i’m going to wake up one day, and i’m going to say, ‘well, iguess i’ve seen about enough,’ and that’ll be my last day.”
i had seen where he was going with this, and i had stopped paying attentionwhile i readied my response. i probably should have paid moreattention. “but why? why not just deadhead for a few centuries, see ifthere’s anything that takes your fancy, and if not, back to sleep for a fewmore? why do anything so final?”
he embarrassed me by making a show of thinking it over again, makingme feel like i was just a half-pissed glib poltroon. “i suppose it’s becausenothing else is. i’ve always known that someday, i was going tostop moving, stop seeking, stop kicking, and have done with it. there’llcome a day when i don’t have anything left to do, except stop.”
on campus, they called him keep-a-movin’ dan, because of his cowboyvibe and because of his lifestyle, and he somehow grew to take overevery conversation i had for the next six months. i pinged his whuffie afew times, and noticed that it was climbing steadily upward as he accumulatedmore esteem from the people he met.
i’d pretty much pissed away most of my whuffie—all the savingsfrom the symphonies and the first three theses—drinking myself stupidat the gazoo, hogging library terminals, pestering profs, until i’d expendedall the respect anyone had ever afforded me. all except dan, who,for some reason, stood me to regular beers and meals and movies.
i got to feeling like i was someone special—not everyone had a chumas exotic as keep-a-movin’ dan, the legendary missionary who visitedthe only places left that were closed to the bitchun society. i can’t say for14sure why he hung around with me. he mentioned once or twice thathe’d liked my symphonies, and he’d read my ergonomics thesis onapplying theme-park crowd-control techniques in urban settings, andliked what i had to say there. but i think it came down to us having agood time needling each other.
i’d talk to him about the vast carpet of the future unrolling before us,of the certainty that we would encounter alien intelligences some day, ofthe unimaginable frontiers open to each of us. he’d tell me that deadheadingwas a strong indicator that one’s personal reservoir of introspectionand creativity was dry; and that without struggle, there is no realvictory.
this was a good fight, one we could have a thousand times withoutresolving. i’d get him to concede that whuffie recaptured the true essenceof money: in the old days, if you were broke but respected, youwouldn’t starve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum couldbuy you security and peace. by measuring the thing that money reallyrepresented—your personal capital with your friends and neighbors—you more accurately gauged your success.
and then he’d lead me down a subtle, carefully baited trail that led tomy allowing that while, yes, we might someday encounter alien specieswith wild and fabulous ways, that right now, there was a slightly depressinghomogeneity to the world.
on a fine spring day, i defended my thesis to two embodied humansand one prof whose body was out for an overhaul, whose consciousnesswas present via speakerphone from the computer where it was resting.
they all liked it. i collected my sheepskin and went out hunting for danin the sweet, flower-stinking streets.
he’d gone. the anthro major he’d been torturing with his war-storiessaid that they’d wrapped up that morning, and he’d headed to thewalled city of tijuana, to take his shot with the descendants of a platoonof us marines who’d settled there and cut themselves off from the bitchunsociety.
so i went to disney world.
in deference to dan, i took the flight in realtime, in the minuscule cabinreserved for those of us who stubbornly refused to be frozen andstacked like cordwood for the two hour flight. i was the only one takingthe trip in realtime, but a flight attendant dutifully served me a urinesample-sized orange juice and a rubbery, pungent, cheese omelet. i15stared out the windows at the infinite clouds while the autopilot bankedaround the turbulence, and wondered when i’d see dan next.