Bandwidth (Analog #1)

by Eliot Peper

He summoned his feed and saw exactly what he expected to see.

He had underestimated the cartels. Legalization had dried up the demand for black

market narcotics north of the border, wiping out their entire business model. Now drug lords with private armies and billions in offshore accounts were scrambling to reinvent themselves, seeking to monopolize that most potent and scrupulous of opiates, bandwidth.

Mexico, China, Thailand, Russia, Iceland, Ethiopia, and France sacrificed connectivity for control and ran their own internet pipes. Commonwealth countries accessed the feed with unsurpassed reliability and security, while user experience in the Prideful Seven varied according to local infrastructure.

Sensing

opportunity, ex–narco traffickers got into the network business, seizing domestic trunk lines and jealously defending against Com...

when the leading energy-industry lobbyist had snatched Dag up from a graduate seminar. Dag had worked his way into the fold and up the chain of command at Apex, careful not to let scruples cloud his ambition.

Now, finally, the

vaunted title of partner was his, along with the hefty profit share that afforded him luxuries he had never dared dream

But like so much else, the prize was diminishe...

right now, Dag’s commitment to the job that consumed his life seemed as fleeting as a half-remembered dream.

It was a rare sunny day. For once, the vast column of smoke from the smoldering inferno that was Southern California must be blowing in another direction. On his flight back from Mexico City this morning, he had peered through the window as the plane detoured around it, Tinseltown and its environs reduced to slag and embers. Years before, the conflict over water rights to the Colorado River had nearly exploded into civil war. Orange County residents fled their McMansions, refugees to wetter climes. The fire was still burning even now. But Northern California had been saved by a combination of Sierra Nevada snowpack and the liberal deployment of tech fortunes.

Tax reforms were starting to mitigate America’s economic inequality. Public funding for schools had finally outpaced that for prisons. Relaxed immigration and trade rules were reinvigorating a national economy that the West Coast’s successive technology revolutions had been shoring up. Washington was still the clusterfuck it always had been, but once in a while, things did get done.

In order to establish Commonwealth as the default infrastructure upon which the feed ran, Rachel had dedicated years and billions of dollars to assembling the best minds in cybersecurity to build what was less a command-line fortress than a resilient, living membrane around their bundle of services. The fact that the feed was so mundane and ubiquitous was a testament to Commonwealth’s success at providing a reliable and secure back end.

More than just a tech behemoth, Commonwealth was the world leader in corporate social responsibility and worked with local nonprofits the world over to address various social issues. Its reign may not have always been so benevolent, but in the lobby on that first visit, Dag hadn’t been able to resist a smile as he dodged schoolkids on field trips from two dozen countries. His smile had faded only when he considered his own reason for being there, to lubricate the will to power.

Dag’s elevated sensitivity to the details around him was shifting into a new kind of self-awareness. Without the murmur of his feed, there was nothing to dull the sharp edge of hypocrisy.

He was a knight defending the divine rights of wealth.

It was a clear night, and stars wheeled above the Salish Sea like pilgrims around the Kaaba. He was nothing. A short-lived speck on a meaningless rock orbiting an insignificant star in a forgotten galaxy in a universe bound by the unflinching laws of thermodynamics to descend into ultimate heat death. For a moment, the veneer of paranoia that laced this excursion fell away to reveal the unadulterated curiosity beneath. Whatever was at the center of this uncanny labyrinth, he wanted to press his face to the railing and stare.

The feed was your personal lens through which to gaze into the digital abyss, the algorithmic curator that delivered what you needed when you needed it from the surfeit. It was the permeable membrane through which you experienced and participated in culture, the arbiter of what you found when you searched and what you discovered when you dipped into the roiling, throbbing cosmos of global conversation.

Any individual voice or channel or vector was necessarily

partisan. But the feed itself . . . The feed was infrastructure. Plumbing didn’t know or care about a resident’s sexual preferences any more than sidewalks pondered the daydreams of pedestrians. Th...

Tapping someone’s feed was infinitely more intimate than breaking into their home. It was the cultural main line, the ever-present open connection between mind and net. Your feed was yours and yours alone, the system safeguarded by Commonwealth’s unprecedented and famously resilient security. That was the sacred covenant of the digital world, trust’s guarantor.

“This is a lot to take in,” Dag said to Emily. “You’re targeting influential individuals and manipulating their feeds in order to influence their worldview and decisions.”

By adjusting the lens, we help leaders see what’s really important and take

appropriate action.”

The scheme was nefarious and beautiful. Nudging decision makers in the right direction by having teams of psychologists personally curate their digital experiences. “And they don’t even realize it’s happening,” he said,...

Funny how we are so good at dreaming up fancy tech but can’t for the life of us figure out how to cooperate.”

if there’s one truism that’s worsened the impact of every human misstep, it’s that there’s profit in tragedy.”

What was capacity without conviction? Cynicism was as empty and fragile as shed snakeskin.

he couldn’t help but envy the staunch beliefs and pragmatic operations of the Island’s residents. That they had so effectively compromised his feed proved their otherwise preposterous claims to digital

omnipotence. That they had so efficiently dismantled his life demonstrated the intimate influence such power endowed. This must be the single biggest security exploit in Commonwealth history.

The unassailable stability of their internet infrastructure was the secret sauce that had secured their global monopoly. Emily and Javier had stolen the keys to the kingdom. And unlike empires of old, this dominion had the global re...

The wind ruffled the reflection of the Washington Monument in the pond at the center of Constitution Gardens. Dag’s gaze traveled up from the rippling water to the thing itself. Thrusting up from the National Mall like a patriotic phallus, the monument was the tallest obelisk on the planet and its tallest stone structure.

From this distance, Dag could barely make out the line a third of the way up that showed where construction was halted and later resumed with a different shade of marble. Twenty-three years the delays had lasted. Twenty-three years of insufficient funding, infighting over control of the commissioning society, and of course, the chaos resulting from the Civil War. It was Dag’s favorite symbol of America, a country that always fumbled but never quit trying to outdo the rest of the world.

Given how many people lamented the inevitability of climate change, it was surprising how few actually bet on it. But just like any other addiction, convincing yourself that you were smarter than everyone else was ultimately self-destructive.

Emily was right, and the intensity of her gaze was tangible even in memory. We might have invented chocolate and sent a woman to Mars, but humans still couldn’t figure out how to collaborate on fundamental things, like making sure our own planet would support future generations. Science had cut away technical problems like a hot scalpel through butter, but social problems persisted because there was no perfect solution, only the messy ongoing processes of commerce and politics.

If you couldn’t come to terms with those across the aisle, you lost your claim on the common good.

There’s a line, and we crossed it decades ago.” She shook her head sadly. “I wish that changing people’s minds was as simple as making a rational argument. Our species would have averted so many disasters if clear-headed analysis won the day.

Lowell’s industry had thrived for nearly two centuries, not just on the strength of its product but on the largess of taxpayers. Operators drilled on federal lands leased for cheap. Massive subsidies

supported their balance sheets like pylons. Thousands of tax loopholes guaranteed they needn’t contribute to the system they profited from.

A thousand questions pecked at his soul like crows in the heat of bloodlust. Was this new sense of conscience synthetic?

His feed was his interface with the digital universe, his point of access to all information, his conduit to the throbbing heart of human culture. It was an external organ, one that he only now realized had been genetically engineered. If every digital experience

had been carefully curated for years on end, then this soul-searching was simply the center of a mani...

He had been so ready to take advantage of the benefits the Island offered, without pausing to consider the human impact it created. And where were the ethics in that? True justice didn’t require a panopticon. If you made better policy via brainwashing, was that victory? Was that the world you wanted to live in?

What Emily was doing appeared hopeful at first blush. Not just hopeful, effective.

But the justice of their chosen causes belied a far deeper cynicism, a fundamental distrust in human integrity.

They won only by disenfranchising every person they touched, robbing them of their free will.

The only thing that mattered now was who he would become.