Shine by Jetse de Vries (ed) Page A

talked about the old days, and they'd admired his midcentury-style house in the distracted tones of people used to living on palatial estates.
    And every time, they had asked for a little more. Lower costs. Less total fuel used. Lower compensation for his nonessential personnel. Lower compensation for himself, even though he was in the bottom 10% of the CEO echelon. Each time, he had given them almost everything they'd asked.
    Everything except changing his schedule of launches or the circumlunar trajectory. Even though they'd put an end to all deep space exploration after the successful Europa lander and its bizarre signals, they still maintained instrumentation at Lagrange points; he argued that it would be too costly to reengineer his fleet to service only the Lagrange instrumentation; they suspected he was eavesdropping on the Europan signals, hoping for another string of primes or some other indication of intelligence.
    But they let him be, and he kept giving them what they wanted. For the moment, the equation was in balance.
    Roy spent the next hour in his office fully immersed in virtuality, interviewing new potential citizens of Hermes.
    Their software found fewer and fewer candidates these days, as people with multiple talents and high drive were snapped up early in their careers by Unified Sustainability or one of the other transnationals. Many more had skeins. Roy wanted nothing to do with skeins. There was no telling how smart a skein was.
    And then there were the genetically compromised. People outside the transnational-sponsored inoc-ulations were known to sometimes have long bouts with the flu and come out of it thinking, well, a little differently. Being more content with their lives. Or maybe just unable to reproduce. Rewriting some of the old aggression responses, genetic sterilization--they were old tricks, but they worked.
    And he knew what the transnationals would say. It is necessary. We had to do it. Too many people. Too few resources. Look at the population curve. We're blunting it. We're ensuring a future for mankind.
    And the needle keeps skipping at the end of the record , he thought.
    On a whim, Roy called Jasyn Torres, his head of household staff. His house was automated and intelligent and as biomimetic as possible. It didn't need a staff. But two years ago, US had made him take one household staff member per 100 square meters of floorspace. He usually let them fish the reefs; that seemed to be what they wanted to do.
    Jasyn came into the office. His face was slack, free of affect.
    "Do you know what a record is?"
    Jaysn looked at him blankly for a moment, then smiled. "A record is an entry in a database," he said. "Or, considering your age, you may be referring to an analog music storage medium."
    "Did you just read that off the net?"
    "Standard ambient context-based search," Jasyn said.
    "Can you talk to me like a person?"
    "I am speaking to you like a person."
    "No. Not with everything filtered and mediated. Can't you just talk to me, one on one, without everything going through your skein?"
    "No," Jasyn said.
    "Can you--be you?"
    Jasyn's expression went blank for a moment. Roy envisioned data flowing through the nanonetwork grown into his head, bouncing to the mainland and back, carrying many answers.
    "Yes," Jasyn said. "Most definitely."
    "Aren't you sad?"
    "No, not at all. We're living in the best times of the human race. We have reached post-scarcity. There is plenty for all."
    "But we aren't moving forward!"
    "Post-scarcity is stability," Jasyn said.
    "But this isn't post-scarcity."
    "Enough for all is post-scarcity." Smiling.
    Roy forced himself to mimic Jasyn's smile. "Thanks. You can go."
    Jasyn nodded and left. Roy sat at his desk and stared out into his large, brilliant house, seeing nothing. Beware the best of intentions. Especially when they make too much sense.
    "Skip, skip," he said softly.
    The Peace Pipe entered orbit around the Earth quietly and without drama, and began