The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (14 page)

This is weird, but I’d never shot any person before. I’d blown up wumpuses and taken out the mechas and their drivers in Detroit, but I’d never done
this
before. There was an immediacy to the way he twisted and fell, the way his lungs opened out like wings from the hole the slugs tore in his back. It froze me just as certainly as the child had.

That freeze gave the rest of them the chance they needed. They surrounded me, gliding out of the woods like they were on rollers. Dozens of them. Dozens and dozens of them. I reached for the controls, trying to set the mecha back on its automated path to the shaman. My finger never made it.

There was a blinding headache. It grew and grew, like a supernova. I didn’t know how it could hurt more. It hurt more.

It is possible to mindrape an immortal, I discovered, if you don’t care about the immortal’s mind when it’s all over.

Part 4: Turn Back, Turn Back

DAD HANDED ME THE DELICATE hydraulic piston, still warm from the printer.

“You know where this goes, right?” He was sweating in the June heat. Keeping all of Comerica Park air conditioned, even with the dome, was impossible, especially during one of those amazingly wet midwestern heat waves.

“I know, Dad,” I said. “I can fix this thing in my sleep, you know.”

He smiled at me, then switched to a mock frown. “Well, I
used
to think that, but given your recent treatment of one of my prize machines—” He gestured at the remains of the big mecha, blasted open in the Battle for Detroit.

“Oh, Dad!” I said. “What did you
want
me to do? Let them raid us? You know, I took down
eight
of them. Single-handedly.”

The flea bounced me, landing on my shoulders and leaping away. I staggered and would have dropped the piston, had Dad not caught me. “You had some help,” he said.

He gave me a hug. “It’s OK, you know. You were brave and amazing. I love you.”

“I love you, too,” I said. It was awkward saying it, but it felt good.

“Good,” he said. “Now, back to work, you! I’m not paying you to stand around.”

“You’re paying me?”

“When was the last time you paid rent? You’re getting it in trade.”

The Carousel sat in the middle of the field, where second base had been. We’d dug it in, sitting it flush to the ground, the way it was supposed to be. It looked great, but it made reaching the maintenance areas a bit of a pain, so we’d winched out the entire Jimmy’s Bedroom assembly and put it on the turf next to the Carousel.

Poor Jimmy. One of his arms hung to one side, jerking spastically when I powered him up. I unbuttoned his shirt, fumbling with the unfamiliar fasteners, and undressed him. The arm hydraulics were not easy to get at. Man, screws sucked. I tossed them in the air as I got them free, letting Ike and Mike fight to snatch them out of the sky.

“Aren’t you afraid you’ll lose one?”

I looked up from my work. Lacey looked prettier than ever, wearing a sleeveless shirt and a pair of shorts that showed off her hips, which had really changed shape in the past couple months, all for the better.

“Jeez,” I said. “Don’t sneak up on me like that, OK?”

She gave me a playful shove and I shoved her back and then she snuck me a kiss. I broke it off.

“Not in front of my dad,” I said, pleading.

“Your dad adores me, don’t you, Harv?”

I turned around and there he was, wiping his hands on his many-pocketed work-shorts, then tugging his shirt out of his belt-loop and pulling it on. “You’ll do,” he said.

I set down the piston carefully.

It sank a few inches below the surface. I tried to pretend it hadn’t happened.

Pepe flew over us, then swooped in for a landing. His aim was off, though. He swooped right at my chest. Right
through
my chest.

“Dammit,” I said.

“It’s OK,” Lacey said. “They’ll fix it. Let’s go for a walk.”

“I can’t,” I said. “I just can’t do it. If the spatial stuff isn’t working, I can’t believe it.”

“Debugging is a process. We’ll file a bug against it. They’ll have it fixed soon enough.”

“Look,” I said. “If the platform is so buggy that it can’t even keep track of collisions, how do we know it’s running
us
accurately?”

“Of course it’s not running us accurately,” she said. “Otherwise, you’d still hate my guts, your dad would still be dead”—Dad nodded—“and you’d be like four hundred years old. Can’t you just be happy for once?”

“You keep telling me that things will get better—”

“So forget about a great big, beautiful tomorrow, Jimmy,” Dad said. “Maybe they’ll never debug it. But tell me that now isn’t the best time of your life.”

I tried to argue. I couldn’t. Whether that was because there was a bug in me, or because he was right, I couldn’t say.

(Newly revised and condensed from his historic address to the 2010 World Science Fiction Convention in Melbourne, Australia)

THERE ARE THREE THINGS I want to cover in this talk. I tell you that because that way you’ll know how close I am to the end, as I will tell you each time I get to one of them.

Starting with the first: Anytime someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you and doesn’t give you a key, that lock is not there for your benefit. The lock I’m talking about here of course is digital rights management, or DRM—the so-called digital locks that are used to restrict copying and use of digital works. If you’ve ever bought a DVD from elsewhere that doesn’t play here in Australia, if someone’s ever given you a game that wouldn’t play in your game player, if you’ve ever gotten a movie and found that you couldn’t move it from one device to another, you’ve experienced DRM.

The biggest lie ever told to creative people is that DRM is there to help them and that it will contain their losses due to piracy. What DRM does primarily is stop authors and creators and publishers from authorizing audiences to follow them to new platforms.

Let me unpack that a little. Most countries—including Australia, since the U.S.-Australia Free Trade Agreement—have a law that prohibits breaking digital rights management technology, even if you’re not committing a copyright infringement. So, for example, if you bought a copy of your own work from Apple or Amazon or any other of the main DRM vendors, you yourself as the owner of that copyright can’t remove the DRM without their permission.

This obviously has no nexus with protecting copyright. We usually grant copyright to people who create things, not to corporations whose contribution to the enterprise is making electronics in Chinese sweatshops. But this is a way that copyright moves from creators to distributors. Practically what it amounts to is a way to lock creators into distribution platforms. Take the iPad or the Kindle or any of the other DRM platforms for distributing electronic books. If I were to sell a million dollars worth of eBooks through the iPad, all with DRM on it, I couldn’t authorize you, my reader, to follow me to, say, the Kindle. It’s as if every time you bought a book at Borders, you were locked into only shelving it in an IKEA bookcase. If you wanted to sell your books through the local independent bookseller down the road, your readers would have to throw away all the books they had bought and buy new copies to shelve on their new bookcases. Or maintain separate parallel libraries where their books would be shelved either on one case or another depending on whose DRM was on it.

This is clearly not useful for creators. Rather, this is a way that the negotiating leverage between the creators and distributors can be tipped toward distributors. So it ends up being used as a club with which to beat creators and the publishers of creative works.

For example, take the iPad or the iPhone, where the likelihood of any one app author getting rich is very small. One of the things Apple likes to tout is the success of the platform. Yes, there are hundreds of thousands of apps for the iPad and the iPhone, and there are millions of apps sold. But when you divide the second number by the first, you come out with an average that tells you that most app authors are making very little money. While a few have gotten rich, the majority of people who create for that platform don’t make much at all. But they can’t afford to go somewhere else without risking alienating all their customers. Because when they switch to, say, selling their apps on Android (where you might get a larger percentage of the money that the audience spends) you have to be willing to risk that your own customers will abandon their investment in the iPad or iPhone app and buy it again from Android. You’re kind of locked into Apple.

As a result, Apple gets to set terms that authors tend not to like. For example, they take 30 percent (ouch!) and they have a very rigorous set of contractual terms that amount to censorship. They prohibited a dictionary because it contained dirty words. They prohibited the Pulitzer Prize–winning editorial cartoons of Mark Fiore because they disparaged public figures. They prohibited a comic book adaptation of James Joyce’s
Ulysses
because it had penises in it.

In each of these cases, Apple backed off after a lot of public ridicule. This is free speech—provided enough people are offended enough when you are censored that they’ll take up your cause and make the company that censored you feel stupid.

While no publisher is obliged to carry your works, usually there’s multiplicity of publishers you can shop your works to. But not if you are locked into one platform or store.

The reason that DRM is a really bad deal for artists and developers of art is not just that it locks us into these platforms, but that it locks us in without delivering what it’s supposed to deliver. What we’re supposed to get out of the DRM bargain is that if we allow our works to be locked up by distributors, in exchange they’ll make sure our works aren’t copied. As a technical matter, this has been a complete failure. It has never really worked. Every computer scientist and cryptographer who
doesn’t
work for a DRM vendor will tell you that it will
never
work. The only engineers who will tell you it’s possible to make computers worse at copying are those who have a direct financial stake in selling you technology to make computers worse at copying.

Fundamentally the entertainment industry put out an RFP (request for proposals) for magic beans. They wanted magic beans that would make computers worse at copying. Anytime you say we have an unlimited budget to spend on magic beans, you will find magic bean vendors. That doesn’t mean the magic beans will work, right? The War on Terror precipitated hundreds of RFPs for magic beans that would automatically detect terrorists or automatically prevent airplanes from being blown up. And lo and behold, there were hundreds of people showing up with magic beans to sell to the military-industrial complex. The entertainment complex has found itself with unlimited magic bean vendors as well. So that’s the reality. The nonideological, empirical, fact-based reality is that all DRM is broken as soon as anyone decides it’s worth breaking.

Every lock can be picked, especially if it’s sitting in the lock-picker’s living room, or computer. DRM designers know this, but what do they care? They’re selling magic beans.

Publishers and distributors know this too. They’re not stupid. They’re not actually interested in slowing or stopping copying, they’re interested in getting the legal protection that stops copyright holders from going to their competitors. For example, when Apple shipped the iPad they shipped it with a DRM that was supposed to stop the piracy of iPad apps. That DRM lasted all of twenty-four hours; they weren’t even trying. What they wanted to secure was not the app but their control over the app. The DRM gave them the right to call on the infinite might of the state to intervene on their behalf should anyone try to compete with them and offer a better deal to their authors.

So extending these legal locks ends up decreasing every artist’s individual negotiating power with distributors. Extending copyright does the same thing between creators and publishers. One example is the extension of copyright over sampling. Copyright didn’t use to cover sampling—only verbatim copying or certain kinds of derivative works. Samples were considered a legal gray area. Most legal scholars thought they would come under fair use in the United States. Then the courts explicitly extended copyright over sampling.

But sampling has always been a part of creation; there’s a reason they call Brahms’s First Symphony “Beethoven’s Tenth.” Artists have been quoting one another as long as they’ve been making music; listen to the great jazz solos of Charlie Parker. If they had to get a license every time they wanted to quote a snatch of music, then music as we know it wouldn’t exist. Sampling has always been integral to the production of music, all the way down to rock ’n’ roll.
Sgt. Pepper, Pet Sounds,
the great concept albums are all built around this kind of reference sampling, clipping out, remaking. It’s part of our music ecosystem.

Then, in the name of protecting artists, we created this exclusive right to license (i.e, control) samples. Artists who sign label deals generally sign over the copyrights to their works to the labels, which means that if you want to sample music you don’t go to the artist but you have to deal with the label. If you are signed to one of the big four, a phone call will usually do it. “Bob, this is Fred, remember that deal we did last week when you sampled one of my artists? Well now one of my artists is sampling one of yours. I’m just going to change the names in the contract and send it back to you.” So it’s trivial. But if you’re an indie artist, it’s either difficult or impossible. No one will even take your call.

And when you add to this the recent expansion in the length of copyright, you end up with a situation where practically every sound that you may want to sample, virtually everything ever recorded, is owned by one of four companies. Which essentially means that you have to put yourself in harness to one of these labels in order to work in any one of the several genres of music that involves sampling. Or you have to break the law. So that’s part one.