Mallory Read online

  Mallory

  Leonard Richardson

  Published: 2008

  Type(s): Short Fiction, Science Fiction

  Source: http://futurismic.com/category/fiction/

  About Richardson:

  Leonard Richardson somehow parlayed an interest in minutiae into a career as a hacker and author. His work includes the Python library Beautiful Soup, and two nonfiction books published by O’Reilly and Associates. He lives in New York City.

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  License

  "Futurismic is a free science fiction webzine specialising in the fact and fiction of the near future - the ever-shifting line where today becomes tomorrow. We publish original short stories by up-and-coming science fiction writers, as well as providing a blog that watches for science fictional news stories, and non-fiction columns on subjects as diverse as literary criticism, transhumanism and the philosophy of design. Come and imagine tomorrow, today."

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  Mallory

  Vijay had been playing video games his whole life, but he’d never really become addicted to one until the first incarnation of Fuck Me. Adding an element of real-time strategy to the already-frenetic Gestalt Warrior combined construction, emergent behavior, and blob-themed violence in a way that both Vijay and the Selfish GAME found satisfying.

  Game addiction burns hot and fast, unless the game itself keeps changing. Having spawned Fuck Me, the Selfish GAME shuffled its pedigree and came out with Super Fuck Me. This led to Ms. Fuck Me, which begat Fuck Me Heels, Fuck Me Millennium Edition, Let’s Have A Meaningful Relationship, and other profane heralds of blob megadeath culminating in Fuck Me Harder, which was too complex for anyone not skilled at earlier iterations. Fuck Me Harder put Vijay’s brain through strange transformations and he did not do well on the phone while playing it.

  “Yes, hello, Rodney,” he said, cradling the fake cell phone against his neck. He reached for the laptop keyboard, waving away the dangling cord that connected the Sabertooth set to his real cell phone. “Is this a random call? ‘Cause I’m kind of busy.” Vijay had met Rodney at a conference he’d attended only to give a paper about the SimShitty fab layout program. Their only shared interest was making meaningless phone calls to fool NSA data miners.

  “Is that noise real?” asked Rodney. “It sounds like glitch metal.”

  “I’m playing a game,” said Vijay. The Selfish GAME did not understand soundtracks or sound effects, and the games it produced were noisefests. Vijay always left the sound on and tuned it out; there was nobody around to bother him about it.

  “You’re busy–what game sounds like that?”

  “Fuck Me Harder.”

  “Is that the name or…”

  “Yeah.” Vijay picked up a scroll and destroyed all blue blobs within a certain radius. He instantly regretted this since his own blue blobs had been playing an important role in a pincer movement.

  “So, no, it’s not an Entropy call. I called you to ask if you want to help me test the radio friendly unit shifter.”

  Vijay paused the game and stared at the frozen LCD, repeatedly projecting blob movements for the next few seconds before snapping back to the present. “The what now?”

  “My signal retransmitter, for Pyromancy. I’ve been posting about it on my anonoblog for months.”

  “Oh. I skipped those because I hate circuit diagrams.” Actually Vijay had been skipping most of what Rodney posted on his blogs.

  “Cretin! So I’m going to try it out on this call. It’ll sound like we’re talking through a vocoder.”

  “It’s an effects pedal for radio and phones? That’s going to get you into Pyromancy?”

  “Oh, it’s extremely illegal. It clobbers all sorts of FCC rules.”

  “But you could make a legal one, couldn’t you, that worked like the Sabertooth?”

  “Yes, I could, if I wanted to mess up my own calls. This one messes up other peoples’. You ready?”

  Vijay was neither ready nor un-. “Hmm, how is this possible? Doesn’t it use a lot of power?”

  “No more than your tiny cell phone needs to broadcast on the same frequencies. RTF circuit diagrams. Here we go!”

  Vijay reached for the keyboard again and played half a second of Fuck Me Harder before his headset bleated static even worse than the soundtrack to the game. He dropped the fake cell phone like a piece of bread he’d just discovered was moldy.

  The noise stopped. “Hey, you still there?” came Rodney’s voice from the Sabertooth.

  “Yeah, way to go, mister circuit diagram. You messed with an encrypted phone call and you turned it to garbage.”

  “No, this is actually good, because it demonstrates the value of voice encryption. I can’t overpower someone’s encrypted call and change what they’re saying. The Pyromancy guys love the public service angle.”

  “You still want to try it out?” asked Vijay. “Turn off the encryption on your end.” He held his thumb to the side of the Sabertooth.

  “You can’t just turn off encryption!” said Rodney, as if Vijay had suggested removing the condom.

  “Why not? You’re not going to say anything during the test. Mallory already knows you called me. Who cares if she hears unencrypted noise instead of encrypted noise?”

  “Forget it,” said Rodney. “I’ll buy two throwaway phones and call one with the other.”

  “Hey, whatever floats your boat. Let me know how it goes.”

  “Fine. Are you working on anything interesting?”

  Vijay took inventory. “I’m supposed to be fixing bugs for my boss. But he’s away at a Demo so I’m working on the game. Now that you mention it, I think it would make a good Pyromancy entry.”

  “You wrote this game? How can a game be illegal?”

  “It’s more a factory for games than one specific game.” Vijay was sinking into a game fugue, not interested in defending his nerd honor. With his free hand he swatted at an imaginary fly.

  But after Rodney hung up, Vijay sat back in his chair and let all his blobs die. He’d discovered common cause with Rodney (who was still annoying). Along with hundreds of other hackers and hobbyists, they were consumed by projects that could never be released, whose only possible futures were infamy or permanent nagging obscurity. Katamari Pyromancy offered a pu
rge of the mind, end-of-life with dignity.

  Vijay projected his own movements into the future. An abstract submitted to the Pyromancy organizers, then the laptop searching a day’s spam for the secret coordinates of its grave. Himself stepping off a plane, then out of a rental car, shedding technology like winter clothes. Nothing in his hands now but the two universal tools: the personal computer, and duct tape.

  He climbs a hill and sees his tribe below, assembled through a thousand anonymous transactions. Shy people turned social by the end of the world, showing off a crop of forbidden machines. He tells and hears the Demo. Rodney’s machine screws up some guy’s pirate radio software and everybody laughs. Some video installation that nobody understands, not even the artist. A girl with green hair, like the token girl in hacker movies, looks over Vijay’s shoulder all friendly like, and touches his arm.

  Maybe it gets wild, maybe not. Who knows if you can trust people’s Pyromancy stories when the whole point is deniability. There’s probably drugs but no sex: just what’s necessary to suppress your child-preservation instinct at the crucial moment. Vijay takes up the Selfish GAME one last time and migrates to the center with everyone else. He straps it to its brothers with duct tape, one panel on a big ball of creativity.

  He climbs that hill again, he and the hacker girl and Rodney and the guy who was in jail, all looking down. Then like that irrevocable moment when you decide this is it, you’re going to throw up — bam!, there goes everybody’s year in a big fireball. Artificial closure.

  Then back to the car to the plane to productivity. To a new laptop, sending innocent encrypted emails to the hacker that eventually peter out. Back to working for Keith and the Weyo entity, waiting for another idea to colonize the empty space in his brain.

  Except Vijay would never have another tenant after the Selfish GAME. As the years went by he’d decorate the shell with nostalgia: enlargements of that splendid explosion, an incendiary finger raised to Mallory’s spy satellites. Vijay had read his crypto diagrams and he knew the best you can do is evade Mallory, show her you know she’s watching. The thought of playing to win did not occur to him.

  Here’s how the Demo goes when Keith sings it:

  He spreads a towel over the table and dumps a bunch of toys onto the towel. A dining car for a model train, a covered bridge for same, some click-brick minifigs, a milled garnet sculpture, a grinning plastic tree person. One hundred miles away, his business partner has just decided to blow up his laptop.

  “A Demo is just a story,” says Keith, “and my Demo is about people who like to tell stories themselves. I brought some pieces of their stories to use as illustrations.

  “Let’s consider two Weyo customers, Alice and Bob. Alice plays in a shared virtual world, where she builds things and shows them off to her online friends. We at Weyo look at a virtual world and see a big, user-friendly CAD program.”

  Keith holds up the smiling tree-guy. “Here’s one of Alice’s virtual creations. She sends them to us and we print them out in 3D, so she can put them on her coffee table and show them off to her real-life friends.

  “On the other end of the spectrum we have Bob. Bob plays in the real world, but his hobby involves a lot of small custom parts. Maybe he’s a sculptor. Maybe he’s a wargamer who needs authentic-looking half-inch Panzers. Maybe he builds little robots and he needs custom casings. But in actuality, Bob does model train layouts, and he needs landscaping.” Keith holds up the dining car and the bridge.

  “Now, unlike with Alice, there’s no shortage of people selling items for Bob’s coffee table. There are whole stores full of this stuff. The problem is that none of it is exactly what Bob has in mind, and most of it is pretty poor-quality molded plastic. Bob has put up with this for years, kitbashing and scraping off and repainting. Weyo’s 3D printing gives him precisely what he wants at much better resolution. Now Bob can build the model train layout of his dreams.

  “Bob’s friend Charlie has a similar hobby: he builds complex structures out of toy click-bricks. Whenever he needs a custom brick or a new color, he draws it up in a CAD program and prints it out with Weyo. As you can see, he’s made a little figure of Bob to inhabit his creations.”

  Keith holds up one of the click-brick humanoids, and sure enough it’s Keith, polo shirt and everything. He laughs bashfully, a skill retained from high school. “I guess now’s a good time to admit that Bob is me.” They kind of smile. Good enough.

  “There are hundreds of stories like these, all with the same basic pattern. People have ideas and landscapes in their heads; Weyo turns them into products. We can do it dirt cheap in plastic, resin, foam, or pressed wood. For a little more we can do it in metal or semiprecious stone. The big expense is shipping. We’ve been profitable in this market since day one, and we’re looking to expand. Yes.”

  Keith points at one of the VCs, who was about to ask a question anyway. The Demo is a story but it’s also a video game. You can’t say your piece and walk off. It requires agility and the all-important hand-eye coordination.

  “It seems like your business is pretty well-established. Why are you looking for investment money?” This is level one: dodgeball.

  “Right now we’re a profitable small company. We want to be a profitable large company. Hobbyists are always on the cutting edge; they’ll pay more for less. That won’t last long.

  “We want to bring create-on-demand to the mass market, so everyone prints things out instead of buying them pre-made. We want everything to be customized: guitar bodies, pool tiles, even furniture. If you’re missing a part, you just print one out. With more money we can improve our processes and get new fabbers for large, complex objects.” Large here being the size and mass of a loaf of bread; no furniture yet.

  “Don’t Pixelstub and Artifactory already do large-scale custom fabbing?” Level two: ritual arena combat.

  “They make one-off prototypes. We make the real thing, and we keep the design around so you can make one whenever you want. We even have a marketplace set up so you can sell your designs to other people with your hobby. When hobbyists start getting their own fabbers at home instead of using ours, that marketplace is where the money will be.”

  Keith’s getting grilled and he likes it. But as cute as they are, he needs to pull those click-brick figures from the Demo, because they look just like the click-bricks made by a large Scandinavian company, and that triggers the worry in the back of every VC’s mind. Here it comes now.

  “What,” says the guy Keith’s age, “what’s to stop people from using your service to duplicate copyrighted images? Let’s say they reproduced an action figure and started selling it as original.”

  Always some nerd fouls up Keith’s Demo world of smiling Alices and Bobs. Today it’s spiky-hair Chad here. Probably the youth liaison, VP for strategic keeping it real. Instead of a fairly easy level three, Keith is warped straight to a confrontation with the final boss, Mallory.

  Mallory owns all the copyrights and trademarks, she makes the plastic toys around here, and she’s mad about people butting in on her territory. She’s always poking her nose into Alice’s business and Bob’s, firing off swarms of cease-and-desist letters. One day she’ll notice Weyo and brush it aside with her big lizard tail.

  “You wouldn’t get many takers for an action figure at three times the market price,” says Keith weakly. He can’t find the boss’s weak spot. With his towel spread out on the table, he looks like a kid running away from home with his toys in a knapsack.

  Keith’s only hope when he sings the Demo is to rack up the highest possible score before Mallory clobbers him; then maybe he can finally get some money. A belief not much different from one he held years ago: that if he got really good at Mutant’s Revenge, Paul Harriman would want to make out with him.

  “But the possibility’s there,” says Chad. Always the possibility with Mallory, always the precaution, the timidity before power. “If anyone can print out anything, there’s bound to be abuse. It would only tak
e one lawsuit to shut you down. Even if you were legally in the right, you couldn’t afford it.”

  Frickin’ Mallory. “Well, first, we’ve had zero complaints so far. But if we ever do get complaints from a copyright owner, we’ll handle them in good faith on a case-by-case basis. That’s the best we can do.”

  Keith’s overpowered PDA pops up a notice. This is the worst possible time, thinks Keith, but he’s defeated anyway. He pulls it off the table.

  “Sorry,” he says. “Excuse me a minute. I have to make a phone call.”

  Keith ducks out into the hall. Behind his back he’s sure the VCs are smirking, guy has to go make a phone call, frickin’ amateur. The notice on his PDA shows a Bible text and a phone number he’s never seen before. It’s time for Keith to do his part to defeat the NSA. He plugs in his Sabertooth and dials the number.

  “Yello?” It’s male, a smoker’s voice, Midwestern.

  “Entropy calling,” says Keith. “Some random text for you. Psalms 32:8. ‘I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my eye upon you.’”

  “Hey, you know what I hate?” says the voice on the other end, desperate for company.

  Human contact is the last thing Keith needs right now. “‘Do not be like the horse or the mule, which have no understanding…’” He finishes the 32nd Psalm and starts on the 33rd. After one minute and fourteen seconds, he hangs up and goes back into the conference room.

  “You been talkin’ about me?” he asks. Just trying to lighten the mood a little.

  Vijay came in to to work late that evening to make a custom glow-in-the-dark logo for his laptop. He snuck the design into an after-hours batch and was waiting on the printer when Keith saw him and decided it was a good time to give him a new assignment.

  “Now is not a good time,” said Vijay. “I’m just finishing up a personal project for Katamari Pyromancy. I think I have a really good chance of being the one who gets arrested.”