Chicken Little by Cory Doctorow

Chicken Little
    Cory Doctorow
    The first lesson Leon learned at the ad agency was: Nobody is your friend at the ad agency.
    Take today: Brautigan was going to see an actual vat, at an actual clinic, which housed an actual target consumer, and he wasn't taking Leon.
    "Don't sulk, it's unbecoming," Brautigan said, giving him one of those tight-lipped smiles where he barely got his mouth over those big, horsey, comical teeth of his. They were disarming, those pearly whites. "It's out of the question. Getting clearance to visit a vat in person, that's a one month, two month process. Background checks. Biometrics. Interviews with their psych staff. The physicals: they have to take a census of your microbial nation. It takes time, Leon. You might be a mayfly in a mayfly hurry, but the man in the vat, he's got a lot of time on his hands. No skin off his dick if you get held up for a month or two."
    "Bullshit," Leon said. "It's all a show. They've got a brick wall a hundred miles high around the front, and a sliding door around the back. There's always an exception in these protocols. There has to be."
    "When you're 180 years old and confined to a vat, you don't make exceptions. Not if you want to go on to 181."
    "You're telling me that if the old monster suddenly developed a rare, fast-moving liver cancer and there was only one oncologist in the whole goddamned world who could make it better, you're telling me that guy would be sent home to France or whatever, No thanks, we're OK, you don't have clearance to see the patient?"
    "I'm telling you the monster doesn't have a liver . What that man has, he has machines and nutrients and systems ."
    "And if a machine breaks down?"
    "The man who invented that machine works for the monster. He lives on the monster's private estate, with his family. Their microbial nations are identical to the monster's. He is not only the emperor of their lives, he is the emperor of the lives of their intestinal flora. If the machine that man invented stopped working, he would be standing by the vat in less than two minutes, with his staff, all in disposable, sterile bunny suits, murmuring reassuring noises as he calmly, expertly fitted one of the ten replacements he has standing by, the ten replacements he checks, personally , every single day, to make sure that they are working."
    Leon opened his mouth, closed it. He couldn't help himself, he snorted a laugh. "Really?"
    Brautigan nodded.
    "And what if none of the machines worked?"
    "If that man couldn't do it, then his rival, who also lives on the monster's estate, who has developed the second-most-exciting liver replacement technology in the history of the world, who burns to try it on the man in the vat -- that man would be there in ten minutes, and the first man, and his family --"
    "Executed?"
    Brautigan made a disappointed noise. "Come on, he's a quadrillionaire, not a Bond villain. No, that man would be demoted to nearly nothing, but given one tiny chance to redeem himself: invent a technology better than the one that's currently running in place of the vat-man's liver, and you will be restored to your fine place with your fine clothes and your wealth and your privilege."
    "And if he fails?"
    Brautigan shrugged. "Then the man in the vat is out an unmeasurably minuscule fraction of his personal fortune. He takes the loss, applies for a research tax-credit for it, and deducts it from the pittance he deigns to send to the IRS every year."
    "Shit."
    Brautigan slapped his hands together. "It's wicked, isn't it? All that money and power and money and money?"
    Leon tried to remember that Brautigan wasn't his friend. It was those teeth, they were so disarming . Who could be suspicious of a man who was so horsey you wanted to feed him sugar cubes? "It's something else."
    "You now know about ten thousand times more about the people in the vats than your average cit. But you haven't even got the shadow of the picture yet, buddy. It took decades of