Noir

Turbiner made no reply. His crepe-paperish eyelids had lowered, leaving a narrow slit of unfocused vision beneath. In furious concentration, he leaned slightly forward, tension clicking into some deeper, slower state of existence. He looked like a desert turtle going into hibernation, all bodily functions shutting down, except for the tingle of nerves from his cochlea. His ears, everything beyond the stiff cartilage of his pinnae, were the youngest part of his body; McNihil knew that the old man had had cochlear implants put in about a decade ago. All in the service of the music, his only surviving love.

It’ll be a while, McNihil told himself, before the old guy resurfaces. He’d been here before, when Turbiner had gone off into the zone of vibrating air molecules. Pushing himself up from the couch, McNihil wandered back into the flat’s kitchen area. He opened the cupboard over the sink, took out the half-empty bottle of Bruichladdich, and poured himself a shot.

The music washed into the kitchen like a hammering tide. Leaning against the counter and taking a sip, McNihil could see the brown spots on the other man’s skull, lipofuscin deposits underneath the thinning silver hair. Alcohol on top of caffeine added another glow to McNihil’s mood. It didn’t matter-not really-that the new cable, the one with the would-be pirate kid’s brain essence smeared inside, was a bit of a shuck. It brought such obvious pleasure to the old guy; where was the harm?

Of the shuckness of the agency’s trophies, McNihil was something of an expert. When he’d still been with the agency full-time, he’d been rotated out of the field for a while, back into the offices and a design team working on revamping and updating all the stuff that went out the doors. (He remembered thumbing the yes button during one feedback session, registering his professional opinion on the exact spooky snakeskin finish that graced the cable now running between Turbiner’s amp and subwoofer. McNihil felt a little proprietary surge whenever he spotted those glistening scales.) When he’d been on that duty, itching to get back outside and connect up lowlife copyright infringers, the Collection Agency’s top brass had decided on a full-out review of its signature gear, the trophies themselves. McNihil had ended up wading through an entire history of the desired objects, complete with a sideshow memo presentation, an art gallery of vengeful matter.

Just looking at the cable forming an extended S across the flat’s carpet-the gift that McNihil had braved fire and heights to procure for the old man-the history of the Collection Agency’s compensation for larcenous copyright infringement turned slowly inside his head. Like a prismatic hologram, entire to itself and outside the flow of linear time that had produced it; the narrative didn’t need to be gone over by McNihil, not again, for him to know its detail and sequence:

• When it was first determined that death was the appropriate punishment for copyright infringement, the reasoning went more or less along these lines:

• The world had changed, in both the theory and the practice of its economy, to one in which people made their livings-put roofs over their heads and the heads of their children, bread in their and their children’s mouths-from intellectual property. Ideas and/or design and/or content-whatever word, name, label one wanted to use-if that was the most important thing in the world, that which determined whether you ate or starved-

• Then why would it not be defended? How could the ownership of it not be important? The same rule of survival applied to big international corporations, to midlevel localized players and entrepreneurs, to scrabbling, scribbling little content creators, writers in their basement offices and musicians in their one-man-band back-bedroom studios and red-eyed video-makers slamming between cuts on their desktop editing rigs, all of them turning their brains inside out, turning the tiniest neural sparks into words and images, encoded, intelligible, transmittable-to-someone-else thoughts. If they were going to have something to sell, they had to own it-it being the product of their minds and creativity-in the first place.

• And no utopian notions, no weird ’net-twit theorizing, propagandizing, self-serving merchandising of predictions, no half-baked amalgam of late-sixties Summer of Love and Handouts, Diggerish free food in the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park, and Stalinist collectivization, lining up the kulaks and shooting them ’cause they’re in the way of the new world order, nothing had been able to change that. The laws of economics were as immutable as those of physics; once the fringy out-there stuff was dismissed, it still remained that if one flapped one’s arms and jumped off the roof, one landed on one’s butt.

• The arm-flapping maneuvers, the attempts to get around reality, had all burnt out and been discarded, one by one. The “gift-based” economy had been a hippie dream, nice for exchanging information of no value, worthless itself for selling and buying anything worth buying and selling.

• Salvation hadn’t come from advertising revenues, either. The notion of giving away intellectual content, everything on the wire for nothing, like old reruns of Gilligan’s Island, all paid for by the companies sticking their ads all over the monitor screen-that had eventually evaporated like spit on an unventilated power supply as well. There had been no need for anything like ad-stripping programs, going right back to the classic forerunner Privnet IFF, peeling the advertisements off like soggy stick-’em stamps and dropping them into whatever electronic wastebasket caught unseen, never-seen, never-should’ve-bothered bits and bytes. The evolution of the human brain had taken care of the situation. A filter is like an immune system, and vice versa; it hadn’t been too long before a benign mental cataract had been determined to exist, one that spread memelike through the species. Ad-blindness, linked to the refresh rates on visual display units. Any pitch other than hard copy in the real world never made it past the optic nerve.

• If stuff was worth buying and selling-not just hard physical stuff, but intellectual property as well-then it was worth stealing, too. Thieves are always with us, as the mercantile bible might have warned of, but not blessed. For a while, the inchoate, not-yet-coalesced Internet had fostered the kind of informational darkness in which thieves prospered. The so-called anonymous remailing services pleaded an ideological agenda and served as a front for criminals and vandals. The first and most famous, anon.penet.fi, folded in 1996, its spine broken by Finnish court orders. The rest were hunted down and exterminated off the wires-it took a while-on the simple legal principle and mechanism that receiving stolen goods was as much a crime as the theft that produced them. That was what being a fence was all about: there was essentially no difference between a sleazoid pawnshop trafficking in hot, wire-dangling car stereos and an on-line service receiving a stolen, copyrighted piece, whether it was a song digitized into an audio file or a book with all its words OCR’d into zeroes and ones, then stripping off the transmission data that would identify the thief and routing the result to a prearranged buyer. It wasn’t just in the hypothesized merchant’s bible that facilitating theft was considered as much a crime as the theft itself. Christ, McNihil had thought before, you could find that much in the Koran. And in the hearts and minds of decent people everywhere-which was why:

• Nobody really objected to the severe nature of the system, the Collection Agency and its attendant asp- heads, that was eventually set in place to take care of the remaining copyright infringers. (Nobody, that was, except the most foolishly tenderhearted and the irredeemably ideology-ridden, who persisted in confusing intellectual- property issues with censorship and limiting access to information.) A hard world, and getting harder; no sympathy went to a clown who interfered with somebody trying to make an honest buck. When to steal from someone was not to take some expendable, frivolous trinket off them, a van Gogh off the dining-room wall of some bloated plutocrat; but rather to lift some hard-pressed hustling sonuvabitch’s means of survival, the only way he had of turning the contents of his head into the filling of his stomach; when to steal from someone was the same as to murder them-then nobody cried when, through law and custom, executing thieves became the wholly proper thing to do.

• With all intellectual property merchandised or archived on the wires, and accessible with a few keystrokes-it became obviously necessary to find a way to take thieves, copyright infringers, off-line for good. When survival is at stake, no second chances are allowed. Which was why, even back before the last century had ticked over into this one, a general maxim had gone the rounds:

• There’s a hardware solution to intellectual-property theft. It’s called a.357 magnum. No better way for taking pirates off-line. Permanently. Properly applied to the head of any copyright-infringing little bastard, this works.

• Once death was accepted as public policy-murder as the answer to murder, the solution to people who had problems with respecting copyright-then it had just been a matter of properly implementing it. To get the most out of it.

“This sounds great,” said Turbiner. He had pulled himself up from his Mahler-driven, wordless meditations. He turned and looked back toward the flat’s kitchen area. “It was worth the wait, man.”