Part 38 (2/2)

”Check out the Greeks. All those Greek plays, they end with the *deus ex machina* -- the playwright gets tired of writing, so he trots a G.o.d out on stage to simply point a finger at the players and make it all better. You can't do that in a story today, but back then, they didn't have the tools to help them observe and record the world, so as far as they could tell, that's how stuff worked!

”Today we understand a little more about the world, so our stories are about people figuring out what's causing their troubles and changing stuff so that those causes go away. Causal stories for a causal universe. Thinking about the world in terms of causes and effects makes you seek out causes and effects -- even where there are none. Watch how gamblers play, that weird cargo-cult feeling that the roulette wheel came up black a third time in a row so the next spin will make it red. It's not superst.i.tion, it's kind of the *opposite*

-- it's causality run amok.”

”So this is the story that has emerged from our collective unconscious?”

Lester laughed. ”That's a little pretentious, I think. It's more like those j.a.panese crabs.”

”Which j.a.panese crabs?”

”Weren't you there when Tjan was talking about this? Or was that in Russia? Anyway. There are these crabs in j.a.pan, and if they have anything that looks like a face on the backs of their sh.e.l.ls, the fishermen throw them back because it's bad luck to eat a crab with a face on its sh.e.l.l. So the crabs with face-like sh.e.l.ls have more babies. Which means that gradually, the crabs' sh.e.l.ls get more face-like, since all non-face-like sh.e.l.ls are eliminated from the gene-pool. This leads the fishermen to raise the bar on their selection criteria, so they will eat crabs with sh.e.l.ls that are a little face-like, but not *very* face-like. So all the slightly face-like crab-sh.e.l.ls are eliminated, leaving behind moderately face-like sh.e.l.ls. This gets repeated over several generations, and now you've got these crabs that have vivid faces on their sh.e.l.ls.

”We let our riders eliminate all the non-story-like elements from the ride, and so what's left behind is more and more story-like.”

”But the plus-one/minus-one lever is too crude for this, right? We should give them a pointer or something so they can specify individual elements they don't like.”

”You want to encourage this?”

”Don't you?”

Lester nodded vigorously. ”Of course I do. I just thought that you'd be a little less enthusiastic about it, you know, because so much of the New Work stuff is being de-emphasized.”

”You kidding? This is what the New Work was all about: group creation!

I couldn't be happier about it. Seriously -- this is so much cooler than anything that I could have built. And now with the network coming online soon -- wow. Imagine it. It's going to be so f.u.c.king weird, bro.”

”Amen,” Lester said. He looked at his watch and yelped. ”s.h.i.+t, late for a date! Can you get yourself home?”

”Sure,” Perry said. ”Brought my wheels. See you later -- have a good one.”

”She's amazing,” Lester said. ”Used to weigh 900 pounds and was shut in for ten years. Man has she got an imagination on her. She can do this thing --”

Perry put his hands over his ears. ”La la la I'm not listening to you. TMI, Lester. Seriously. Way way TMI.”

Lester shook his head. ”You are such a prude, dude.”

Perry thought about Hilda for a fleeting moment, and then grinned. ”That's me, a total puritan. Go. Be safe.”

”Safe, sound, and slippery,” Lester said, and got in his car.

Perry looked around at the shuttered market, rooftops glinting in the rosy tropical sunset. Man he'd missed those sunsets. He snorted up damp lungsful of the tropical air and smelled dinners cooking at the shantytown across the street. It was different and bigger and more elaborate every time he visited it, which was always less often than he wished.

There was a good barbecue place there, Dirty Max's, just a hole in the wall with a pit out back and the friendliest people. There was always a mob scene around there, locals greasy from the ribs in their hands, a big bucket overflowing with discarded bones.

Wandering towards it, he was amazed by how much bigger it had grown since his last visit. Most buildings had had two stories, though a few had three. Now almost all had four, leaning drunkenly toward each other across the streets. Power cables, network cables and clotheslines gave the overhead s.p.a.ces the look of a carelessly spun spider's web. The new stories were most remarkable because of what Francis had explained to him about the way that additional stories got added: most people rented out or sold the right to build on top of their buildings, and then the new upstairs neighbors in turn sold *their* rights on. Sometimes you'd get a third-storey dweller who'd want to build atop two adjacent buildings to make an extra-wide apartment for a big family, and that required negotiating with all of the ”owners” of each floor of both buildings.

Just looking at it made his head hurt with all the tangled property and owners.h.i.+p relations.h.i.+ps embodied in the high s.p.a.ces. He heard the easy chatter out the open windows and music and crying babies. Kids ran through the streets, laughing and chasing each other or bouncing b.a.l.l.s or playing some kind of networked RPG with their phones that had them peeking around corners, seeing another player and shrieking and running off.

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