Pwning Tomorrow: Short Fiction from the Electronic Frontier Read online

  Pwning Tomorrow:

  Short Fiction from the Electronic Frontier

  Edited by the Electronic Frontier Foundation

  Pwning Tomorrow: Short Fiction from the Electronic Frontier

  The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF champions user privacy, free expression, transparency, and innovation through impact litigation, activism, and technology. For more information, visit eff.org.

  Pwning Tomorrow:Short Fiction from the Electronic Frontier

  Published December 14, 2015

  ISBN 978-0-9966686-1-3

  Editing: Dave Maass

  Cover art: Hugh D’Andrade

  Formatting: Troy Mott, Backstop Media

  Publishing Consultant: Tessellate Media

  Legal: Mitch Stoltz

  Web development: Max Hunter

  With Assistance from:

  Kim Carlson, Cindy Cohn, Andrew Crocker, Alison Dame-Boyle, Cory Doctorow, Kelly Esguerra, Richard Esguerra, Eva Galperin, Annelyse Gelman, April Glaser, David Grant, David Greene, Karen Gullo, Elliot Harmon, Wafa Ben Hassine, Parker Higgins, Mark Jaycox, Rebecca Jeschke, Amul Kalia, Jeremy Malcolm, Tammy McMillen, Corynne McSherry, Danny O’Brien, Kurt Opsahl, Soraya Okuda, Nicole Puller, Cooper Quintin, Rainey Reitman, Cristina Rosales, Shari Steele, Noah Swartz, Jim Tyre, Kit Walsh, and Barak Weinstein

  Please support our work and spread the word about this collection.

  https://www.eff.org/pwning-tomorrow

  Electronic Frontier Foundation

  815 Eddy. St

  San Francisco, CA 94115

  415-436-9333 / [email protected]

  Find a typo, formatting issue, or other glitch? Report it here:

  https://www.eff.org/pwning-tomorrow-errata

  Pwning Tomorrow: Stories from the Electronic Frontier

  Pwning Tomorrow: Stories from the Electronic Frontier is distributed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International license. The cover and introduction are copyright © 2015 by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

  The stories in this collection are under copyright by their respective authors and distributed under the terms of the following Creative Commons licenses:

  Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

  “Business as Usual” © 2014 by Pat Cadigan

  “Nanolaw with Daughter” © 2011 by Paul Ford

  “I’ve Got the Music In Me” © 2003 by Charlie Jane Anders

  The license is available at:

  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

  Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial 4.0 International

  “Scroogled” © 2007 by Cory Doctorow

  “Declaration” © 2012 by James Patrick Kelly

  “Unclaimed” © 2014 by Annalee Newitz

  The license is available at:

  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

  Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

  “Be Seeing You” © 2016 by Madeline Ashby

  “The Gambler” © 2008 by Paolo Bacigalupi

  “Slipping” © by Lauren Beukes

  “The Smartest Mob” © 2012 by David Brin

  “Changes” © 2015 by Neil Gaiman

  “Hive Mind Man” © 2012 by Rudy Rucker and Eileen Gunn

  “Dance Dance Revolution” © by Charles Human

  “The Light Brigade” © by Kameron Hurley

  “Free Fall” - © 2012 by Carolyn Jewel

  Grey, SL “OMG GTFO” © Sarah Lotz and Louis Greenberg

  “Water” © 2013 by Ramez Naam

  “His Master’s Voice” © 2008 by Hannu Rajaniemi

  “Stompin’ at the Savoy” © 1985 by Flight Unlimited, Inc.

  “The Brain Dump” © 2014 by Bruce Sterling

  “RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: MICROWAVE IN THE BREAK ROOM DOING WEIRD THINGS TO FABRIC OF SPACE-TIME” © 2014 by Charles Yu

  The license is available at:

  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

  All stories, characters and incidents appearing in this collection are fictitious. Any resemblance to people or entities, living, dead, is purely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Be Seeing You ~ Madeline Ashby

  I’ve Got The Music In Me ~ Charlie Jane Anders

  The Gambler ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

  Slipping ~ Lauren Beukes

  The Smartest Mob ~ David Brin

  Business as Usual ~ Pat Cadigan

  Scroogled ~ Cory Doctorow

  Nanolaw with Daughter ~ Paul Ford

  Changes ~ Neil Gaiman

  The Light Brigade ~ Kameron Hurley

  Declaration ~ James Patrick Kelly

  Water ~ Ramez Naam

  Unclaimed ~ Annalee Newitz

  His Master’s Voice ~ Hannu Rajaniemi

  Hive Mind Man ~ Rudy Rucker and Eileen Gunn

  Stompin’ at the Savoy ~ Lewis Shiner

  The Brain Dump ~ Bruce Sterling

  RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: MICROWAVE IN THE BREAK ROOM DOING WEIRD THINGS TO FABRIC OF SPACE-TIME ~ Charles Yu

  Dance Dance Revolution ~ Charlie Human

  OMG GTFO ~ S.L. Grey

  Free Fall ~ Carolyn Jewel

  About EFF

  Introduction

  Let’s start with the end.

  The final work in this collection, Free Fall, is a novella by paranormal romance writer Carolyn Jewel. It’s a thriller in which a litigator (who happens to be a witch) partners up with her infosec expert witness (who happens to be a demon) for a passionate encounter, bookended by battles against a tyrannical dark force.

  A hacker and a lawyer with supernatural powers pairing up to fight the good fight? That’s a pretty fitting metaphor for the work we’ve done at EFF these last 25 years.

  Carolyn Jewel also happens to be the lead plaintiff in Jewel v. NSA, our years-long lawsuit to end warrantless, mass surveillance of our electronic communications. Long before Edward Snowden got the entire world paying attention, Carolyn—like so many other writers—knew what was going on and stood up against it. Today, the PEN American Center, the largest association of writers in the world, is also a plaintiff in a lawsuit against the NSA.

  Writers understand the threats to our freedom in the digital age, and they help the rest of us understand it. This is especially true of those who write speculative fiction.

  In an essay for Locus, Cory Doctorow once explained that science fiction writers give us the “narrative vocabularies by which futures can be debated, discussed, adopted, or discarded.” Over the decades, this vocabulary has become so very rich; where would we be without terms like “Orwellian” and “Kafkaesque” to describe government dystopias, without “pre-crime” and “Skynet” to describe emerging technology? The fantasy genre has also contributed to the digital rights lexicon with concepts like “Eye of Sauron” and “trolls.”

  Imagination is among the most powerful weapons in the battle for Internet freedom. When new policies are introduced, we try to imagine how they will impact civil liberties years, even decades from now. We use our creativity to generate campaigns to fight back and utilize our ingenuity to design technological countermeasures. Creativity gives us an edge in our fight against the well-funded institutions that are devising new ways to invade our p
rivacy and chill our speech every fiscal year.

  In the Internet freedom community, a love of genre fiction often goes hand in hand with a commitment to civil liberties, whether it’s Citizen Lab’s habit of naming malware investigations after James Bond films, Access Now’s rebranding of the nefarious Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act as the “Darth Vader” bill, or Public Knowledge Senior Vice President Harold Feld’s epic explainers that compare the politics of the unlicensed spectrum to “Game of Thrones.” Walk through EFF’s offices and you’ll see sci-fi everywhere you look: Babylon 5 DVDs in our general counsel’s office, mechanical tribbles on a technologist’s’ table, Van Gogh’s TARDIS Starry Night on our international rights director’s wall.

  That’s why we thought a story collection would be a great way to help celebrate our 25th anniversary, with two-dozen superstar writers speculating on the next 25 years and beyond.

  In this book, you’ll find a variety of stories. Some are brand new, like Madeline Ashby’s “Be Seeing You,” a story of a bodyguard whose employers insist on watching the world through her digital eyes, and some are older classics, such as Lewis Shiner’s 1985 adventure “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” featuring mutants, state secrets, and a robotic Santa Claus.

  We have stories that play with concepts of intellectual property, such as Charlie Jane Anders’ “I’ve Got the Music in Me,” a satire on overreaching anti-piracy legislation and Annalee Newitz’s “Unclaimed,” a hardboiled mystery about orphan works. Meanwhile, Paul Ford’s “Nanolaw with Daughter,” parodies how legal threats are increasingly becoming an automated process.

  The Internet of Things provided inspiration for “Business as Usual,” Pat Cadigan’s story of an interface designer’s relationship with a smart refrigerator. Other authors imagined what will happen when corporate marketing becomes even more pervasive and controlling, such as in Ramez Naam’s “Water,” and Rudy Rucker and Eileen Gunn’s collaboration, “Hive Mind Man.”

  In “The Smartest Mob,” David Brin explores the positive possibilities of crowdsourcing news and public safety, while Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Gambler,” goes the other way, examining how mainstream media pits tabloid sensationalism against investigative reporting. Several stories play with how digital augmentation will affect our concepts of ourselves, including Neil Gaiman’s “Changes,” Lauren Beukes’ “Slipping,” and Kameron Hurley’s “The Light Brigade.” Hannu Rajaniemi’s “His Master’s Voice” even has a cyborg dog and cat rescuing their owner, who was imprisoned for playing around with forbidden biotechnology.

  The authors yank today’s technologies forward with a surreal or unexpected twist. Charles Human’s “Dance Dance Revolution” wonders what would happen if drone warfare were paired with the dance rhythm arcade game. Cory Doctorow spoofs Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto in “Scroogled.” Sarah Lotz and Louis Greenberg (who collaborate under the pseudonym S.L. Grey) imagine how voices from beyond the grave would communicate via social media. Charles Yu’s story—the name of which is too long to reprint here—parodies how office technology can spiral out of control.

  Then there are stories about hackers, such as Bruce Sterling’s “The Brain Dump” about hacker culture in Ukraine, and, of course, Carolyn Jewel’s novella.

  Consider this your NSFW warning: Carolyn’s Free Fall is steamy. But that’s all the more reason to include it in this collection: in authoritarian regimes, graphic and unconventional depictions of romance are often among the first to be banned, along with any fiction that challenges the status quo.

  It’s worth noting that we don’t just love this stuff, some of us actually create it, too: two of the authors in this collection were once part of EFF’s team. Before founding io9.com and becoming tech culture editor at Ars Technica, Annalee Newitz analyzed policy and interfaced with the media at EFF. Cory Doctorow, who worked as EFF’s European Affairs Coordinator for four years, recently returned to help with our Apollo 1201 Project to defeat anti-circumvention measures—also known as digital rights management, or DRM. (Cory even invoked 2001: A Space Odyssey in the press release.)

  We would like to thank all of these authors for not only allowing us to publish their stories, but for making them available under Creative Commons licenses, so the collection can be shared among the likeminded and curious. We are especially grateful to Cory for his help reaching out to all these authors. In addition, we are thankful for Nick Harkaway’s feedback and encouragement, for Tessellate Media’s advice and assistance in e-publishing, O’Reilly Media, and Troy Mott’s assistance with formatting. Most of all, we thank our supporters for their continued dedication to our causes.

  We hope you are as inspired by these authors as we are. Please share it far and wide.

  — Dave Maass, EFF Investigative Researcher, 2015

  Be Seeing You

  by Madeline Ashby

  “Doesn’t it get, like, distracting? Hearing me breathing?” Hwa asked.

  “Only at first,” her boss said.

  Her feet pounded the pavement. She ducked under the trees that made up the Fitzgerald Causeway Arboretum. Without the rain pattering on the hood of her jacket, she could hear the edges of Síofra’s voice a little better. The implant made sure she got most of the bass tones as a rumble that trickled down her spine. Consonants and sibilants, though, tended to fizzle out.

  “You get up earlier than I do, so I’ve had to adjust.”

  Hwa rounded the corner to the Fitzgerald Hub. It swung out wide into the North Atlantic, the easternmost edge of the city, a ring of green on the flat grey sea. Here the view was best. Better even than the view from the top of Tower 5, where her boss had his office. Here you could forget the oil rig at the city’s core, the plumes of fire and smoke, the rusting honeycomb of containers that made up Tower One where Hwa lived. Here you couldn’t even see the train. It screamed along the track overhead, but she heard only the tail end of its wail as the rain diminished.

  “It’s better to get a run in before work. Better for the metabolism.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  Síofra had a perfect metabolism. It was a combination of deep brain stimulation that kept him from serotonin crashes, a vagus nerve implant that regulated his insulin production, and whatever gentle genetic optimization he’d had in utero. He ate everything he wanted. He fell asleep for eight hours a night, no interruptions. He was a regular goddamn Ubermensch.

  Hwa just had a regular old-fashioned human body. No permanent implants. No tweaking. She’d eaten her last slice of bread the day before joining the United Sex Workers of Canada as a bodyguard. Now that she worked for Lynch as the bodyguard for their heir apparent, the only thing that had changed about her diet was the amount of coffee she drank.

  “Look out your window,” she said.

  “Give me your eyes.”

  She shook her head. Could he see that? Maybe. She looked around for botflies. She couldn’t see any, but that didn’t mean anything. “I’m not wearing them.”

  “Why not?”

  “They’re expensive. I could slip and fall while I’m running.”

  “Then we would give you new ones.”

  “Wouldn’t that come out of my pay?”

  A soft laugh that went down to the base of her spine. “Those were the last owners of this city. Lynch is different.”

  Hwa wasn’t so sure about that. Lynch rode in on a big white copter and promptly funded a bunch of infrastructure improvement measures, but riggers were still leaving. Tower One was starting to feel like a ghost town.

  Then again, the Lynch family was building an alternative reactor, right in the same place where the milkshake straw poked deep into the Flemish Pass Basin and sucked up the black stuff. It was better insulated, they said, under all that water. It just meant the oil was going away.

  “All towns change, Hwa. Even company towns. We’re better for this community than the previous owners. You’ll see.”

  She rolled her neck until it popped. All the way over at the top
of Tower 5, her boss hissed in sympathy. “Look out your window,” she reminded him.

  “Fine, fine.” An intake of breath. He was getting up. From his desk, or from his bed? “Oh," he murmured.

  Hwa stared into the dawn behind the veil of rain. It was a line of golden fire on a dark sea, thinly veiled behind shadows of distant rain. “I time it like this, sometimes,” she said. “Part of why I get up early.”

  “I see.”

  She heard thunder roll out on the waves, and in a curious stereo effect, heard the same sound reverberating through whatever room Síofra was in.

  “May I join you, tomorrow?”

  Hwa’s mouth worked. She was glad he couldn’t see her. The last person she’d had a regular running appointment with was her brother. Which meant she hadn’t run with anyone in three years. Then again, maybe it would be good for Síofra to learn the city from the ground up. He spent too much time shut up behind the gleaming ceramic louvers of Tower Five. He needed to see how things were on the streets their employers had just purchased.

  She grinned. “Think you can keep up with me?”

  “Oh, I think I can manage.”

  ***

  Of course, Síofra managed just fine. He showed up outside Tower One at four-thirty in the morning bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as a cartoon mascot. Like everything else about him, even his running form was annoyingly perfect. He kept his chin up and his back straight throughout the run. He breathed evenly and smoothly and carried on a conversation without any issues. At no point did he complain of a stitch in his side, or a bonespur in his heel, or tension in his quads. Nor did suggest that they stretch their calves, first, or warm up, or anything like that. He just started running.

  A botfly followed them the entire way.

  “Do we really need that?” Hwa asked. “We can ping for help no problem, if something happens.” She gestured at the empty causeway. “Not that anything’s going to happen.”

  “What if you have a seizure?” her boss asked.

  Hwa almost pulled up short. It took real and sustained effort not to. She kept her eyes on the pavement, instead. They had talked about her condition only once. Most people never brought it up. Maybe that was a Canadian thing. After all, her boss had worked all over the world. They were probably a lot less polite in other places.