The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner Page B

certified—licensed to practice anywhere in North America.
     
    THE TANGLED WEB
     
    “Your first career went well for a while,” Freeman said. “But it came to an abrupt and violent end.”
    “Yes.” A harsh chuckle. “I was nearly shot by a woman I advised to go screw someone of a different color. The massed computers of half a continent were in agreement with me, but she wasn’t. I concluded I’d been overoptimistic and rethought myself.”
    “Which was when you became an instructor with a three-vee cassette college. I note that for your new post you dropped down to twenty-five, much nearer your real age, even though the bulk of the clientele was forty or over. I wonder why.”
    “The answer’s simple. Think what lured most of those clients on to the college’s reels. It was a sense of losing touch with the world. They were hungry for data supplied by people fifteen or twenty years younger, usually because they’d done what they thought best for their children and been repaid with rejection and insults. They were pathetic. What they wanted was not what they claimed to want. They wanted to be told yes, the world really is pretty much as it was when you were young, there aren’t any objective differences, there’s some magic charm you can recite and instantly the crazy moiling framework of the modern world will jell into fixed familiar patterns. … The third time a complaint was filed about my tapes I was surpled despite my rigorous proof that I was right. Being right was at a discount in that context, too.”
    “So you tried your skill as a full-time Delphi gambler.”
    “And made a fortune in next to no time and grew unspeakably bored. I did nothing that anybody else couldn’t do, once he realized the government manipulates Delphi odds to keep the social-mollification index high.”
    “Provided he had access to as much computer capacity as you did.”
    “But in theory everybody does, given a dollar to drop into a pay phone.”
    There was a pause. Freeman resumed in a brittle tone, “Did you have a clearly defined goal in mind which guided you in your choice of roles?”
    “You didn’t already dig that out of me?”
    “Yes, but when you were regressed. I want your contemporary conscious opinion.”
    “It’s still the same; I never hit on a better way of phrasing it. I was searching for a place to stand so that I could move the Earth.”
    “Did you ever consider going overseas?”
    “No. The one thing I suspected a 4GH might not be good for was a passport, so if I found the right spot it would have to be in North America.”
    “I see. That puts your next career into much clearer perspective. You spent a full year with a utopia-design consultancy.”
    “Yes. I was naïve. It took me that long to realize that only the very rich and the very stupid imagine happiness can be bought tailor-made. What’s more, I should have discovered right away that it was company policy to maximize variety from one project to the next. I designed three very interesting closed communities, and in fact the last I heard all were still operating. But trying to include in the next utopia what seemed to be most promising in the previous one was what got me redunded again. You know, I sometimes wonder what became of last century’s hypothetical life-style labs, where a serious effort was to be made to determine how best human beings can live together.”
    “Well, there are the simulation cities, not to mention the paid-avoidance zones.”
    “Sure, and there are the places like Trianon where you get a foretaste of tomorrow. But don’t bleat me. Trianon couldn’t exist if G2S didn’t subsidize it with a billion dollars a year. Simulation cities are only for the children of the rich—it costs nearly as much to send the kids back to the past for a year as it does to keep them at Amherst or Bennington. And the paid-avoidance areas were created as a way of economizing on public expenditure after the Great Bay Quake. It