After Martha, there had been other women eager enough to pay for his company. Sometimes he was merely arm-candy, most times he earned his way in private, but there was always another woman waiting. He had learned his lessons well, and he knew that his appeal, whatever it was, was something upon which he could depend.
He supposed he could have lived that life for a long time. But one can only lie in so many beds, drink so much expensive champagne, attend so many tuxedoed parties before those things begin to pall.
So Locke had turned to crime.
Not because he needed the money — his benefactors had been generous enough over the years, and he was well enough off that he could live on his investments. No, it was the challenge, the spike of adrenaline that let you know you were alive — but that death was coming up just behind you.
Locke’s talent here had not been in strong-arm robberies, but in setting up heists worth small fortunes. He traveled in circles wherein there were rich people with cash, jewelry, and art in their homes. That was the beginning. From there, Locke had gone on to bigger things: galleries, jewelry merchants, museums. He had scores all over the Orient, and even into Europe.
If one moves in certain circles, and becomes expert in them, word gets around. Even though Locke hadn’t been looking for a job, Wu had found him. Wu had a proposition. When he had put it to him, Locke had been surprised, but intrigued. What Wu could bring to the table made the venture not quite as impossible as it seemed on the face of it.
Locke had said he would consider it. He spent a week mulling it over, then went back to Wu. He was in.
And Wu had known that, too.
“What next?” Wu asked.
“France, then America,” Locke said. “Shing’s mastery of the virtual does not extend to the real world. There are things that must be seen in person to be known.”
Wu nodded. “Yes.”
“I will keep you apprised.”
Locke stood. The two men gave each other military bows. Locke made sure his gesture was deeper than Wu’s. The general would notice. Locke considered himself an equal in this project, not an employee, but it never hurt to be well mannered. Patricia had taught him that. Bless her, wherever she might be.
Charles Seurat exited the A-8 toward Sophia Antipolis, accelerating into a tight, controlled turn in the little Peugeot he’d rented at the airport in Nice. The car was a natural-gas /electric hybrid and had surprising power.
Still, he missed the larger engines and power afforded by
It would have been gauche to drive anything else to this particular meeting, however. It certainly wouldn’t do to drive up in one of his restored Porsches — particularly not when the meeting was in the very PC, cutting-edge environment of Sophia Antipolis.
The small town had started off as little more than a research park in the 1970s, and by the turn of the century had grown to be one of the largest tech centers in western Europe. With streets named after famous scientists and artists: Rue Albert Einstein, Rue Dostoievski, Rue Ludvig Von Beethoven, and the like, it was
So a PC car: French, and enviro-friendly. All for the movement.
The early morning sun painted the trees with golden light as he drove along the Route du Parc. A heavy cloud layer was coming in, but it didn’t look like rain yet. With any luck the weather would hold, and he could make an outdoor dinner this evening with some of CyberNation’s friends in Cannes, a little farther north on the A-8.
But first, business.
Today he would meet with Michael LeBathe, CEO of Azure Telecommunications. They manufactured new optical-gate switches and routers that could vastly improve throughput on CyberNation’s net backbones. And if his information was correct, LeBathe was a believer, one of the CyberNation faithful, even if the company he led remained publicly neutral.
He drove across a roundabout with some older statuary in the center, surrounded by lush flowers. The stone faces looked like they might have been prerevolution, possibly brought in from somewhere north, or taken from an old estate.
It was what he was about, the revolution of the world, its essence expressed by the slogans of two centuries past: liberty, equality, fraternity. Only this time it wasn’t just for France.
It was time for a change — the nations of the world continued to grow faster and faster, populations skyrocketing, and still they did not yet possess those three key traits. Fraternity, certainly not. Fighting in the Middle East continued, ethnic cleansing, religious rivalries. Liberty? Only in some countries, and even there, true freedom did not ring. Most nations traded freedoms for security, all to protect their territories, arbitrary lines on a map.
And of course there was no equality. The world had shrunk in this day of instant communication, the stage dominated by the greedy West, countries like the United States taking the role of a deranged Sun King, gobbling everything it could to keep its excessive lifestyle and feed its overweight children.
The parallels to the French Revolution were there if you but looked. Seurat had been looking since the early days of CyberNation.
He did not plot to take over the world, no. He did not need to. When CyberNation gained power, when they began to have the political clout they needed to give their citizens new freedoms, there would come a time when enough people were a part of things that there would simply be no need for any other government.
There would be no need for the seizing of a Bastille, le Guillotine, the Terror, or bloody guerrilla war. Instead, there would simply be a critical mass of desire, an acceptance of the equality of peoples from all over the world who could join an ideal world of no poverty, physical equality, and no language barriers by stepping into CyberNation. True liberty, equality, and fraternity.
Given this ultimate freedom, the ability to live in a world of platonic ideals, where everything could be the best, the most stylish, who would want to settle for less in their own homes and towns? Even dictators had to answer to the people at some point.
And that point was coming.
But first there was work to do.
As a child, Charles had studied the famous paintings of his distant ancestor, Georges Seurat, the Impressionist. The huge canvases were filled with static and serene images that had comforted him throughout his turbulent childhood. Because of his link to the artist, he’d looked beyond the paintings themselves, researching the techniques and methods by which the man had worked.
Months of preliminary painting on smaller canvases had gone into the creation of each great work, extrapolations of how colors would visually mix from a distance, the calculated effect of a tiny yellow dot and a tiny blue one side by side making green, the position of a figure lying down or standing up — all to a purpose.
This understanding had shown him a method for dealing with the complexities of the world through careful planning, research, execution, and a purpose.
Today, for instance.
LeBathe, the man he was going to see, was the CEO of a publicly traded company: He had to explain his decisions to shareholders, to justify his actions based on profits alone.
One of CyberNation’s key selling points to its erstwhile citizens had been the eventual cessation of taxes. The advertising from major corporations would pay for everything, and it would all be free.
Seurat knew this was more marketing than reality: No company would want to foot the bill for the web access of an entire nation. And for now, at least, there was no way he could extend any taxation benefits to a corporation, even if they did agree to join CyberNation as an entity.
But, like his ancestor, he had made careful studies and plans; there were other considerations.
He would offer LeBathe a possibility: supplying the switching gear for the entire CyberNation network. He
