Re: Why I Don't Read SF Much Anymore

[Adam Shostack <adam@homeport.org>]

| >His, "Great Samolean Caper" for Time/Pathfinder was pure cryptoanarchy...

| I saved the whole magazine, I can copy it for you if you like.  I thought
| that I had the magazine in the dorm room but I can't seem to find it.

Once available at:
http://www.pathfinder.com/time/magazine/domestic/1995/special/special.toc.html

TIME Domestic

SPECIAL ISSUE, Spring 1995 Volume 145, No. 12

Return to Contents page 

FICTION
THE GREAT SIMOLEON CAPER
BY NEAL STEPHENSON

Hard to imagine a less attractive life-style for a young man just out
of college than going back to Bismarck to live with his parents -
unless it's living with his brother in the suburbs of Chicago, which,
naturally, is what I did. Mom at least bakes a mean cherry pie.  Joe,
on the other hand, got me into a permanent emotional headlock and
found some way, every day, to give me psychic noogies. For example,
there was the day he gave me the job of figuring out how many jelly
beans it would take to fill up Soldier Field.

Let us stipulate that it's all my fault; Joe would want me to be clear
on that point. Just as he was always good with people, I was always
good with numbers. As Joe tells me at least once a week, I should have
studied engineering. Drifted between majors instead, ended up with a
major in math and a minor in art - just about the worst thing you can
put on a job app.

Joe, on the other hand, went into the ad game. When the Internet and
optical fiber and HDTV and digital cash all came together and turned
into what we now call the Metaverse, most of the big ad agencies got
hammered - because in the Metaverse, you can actually whip out a gun
and blow the Energizer Bunny's head off, and a lot of people did. Joe
borrowed 10,000 bucks from Mom and Dad and started this clever young
ad agency. If you've spent any time crawling the Metaverse, you've
seen his work - and it's seen you, and talked to you, and followed you
around.

Mom and Dad stayed in their same little house in Bismarck, North
Dakota. None of their neighbors guessed that if they cashed in their
stock in Joe's agency, they'd be worth about $20 million. I nagged
them to diversify their portfolio - you know, buy a bushel basket of
Krugerrands and bury them in the backyard, or maybe put a few million
into a mutual fund. But Mom and Dad felt this would be a no-confidence
vote in Joe. "It'd be," Dad said, "like showing up for your kid's
piano recital with a Walkman."

Joe comes home one January evening with a magnum of champagne. After
giving me the obligatory hazing about whether I'm old enough to drink,
he pours me a glass. He's already banished his two sons to the Home
Theater. They have cranked up the set-top box they got for Christmas.
Patch this baby into your HDTV, and you can cruise the Metaverse,
wander the Web and choose from among several user-friendly operating
systems, each one rife with automatic help systems, customer-service
hot lines and intelligent agents. The theater's subwoofer causes our
silverware to buzz around like sheet-metal hockey players, and
amplified explosions knock swirling nebulas of tiny bubbles loose from
the insides of our champagne glasses. Those low frequencies must
penetrate the young brain somehow, coming in under kids' media-hip
radar and injecting the edfotainucational muchomedia bitstream direct
into their cerebral cortices.

"Hauled down a mother of an account today," Joe explains. "We hype
cars. We hype computers. We hype athletic shoes. But as of three hours
ago, we are hyping a currency."

"What?" says his wife Anne.

"Y'know, like dollars or yen. Except this is a new currency."

"From which country?" I ask. This is like offering lox to a dog: I've
given Joe the chance to enlighten his feckless bro. He hammers back
half a flute of Dom Perignon and shifts into full-on Pitch Mode.

"Forget about countries," he says. "We're talking Simoleons - the
smart, hip new currency of the Metaverse."

"Is this like E-money?" Anne asks.

"We've been doing E-money for e-ons, ever since automated-teller
machines." Joe says, with just the right edge of scorn. "Nowadays we
can use it to go shopping in the Metaverse. But it's still in U.S.
dollars. Smart people are looking for something better."

That was for me. I graduated college with a thousand bucks in savings.
With inflation at 10% and rising, that buys a lot fewer Leinenkugels
than it did a year ago.

"The government's never going to get its act together on the budget,"
Joe says. "It can't.  Inflation will just get worse. People will put
their money elsewhere."

"Inflation would have to get pretty damn high before I'd put my money
into some artificial currency," I say.

"Hell, they're all artificial," Joe says. "If you think about it,
we've been doing this forever.  We put our money in stocks, bonds,
shares of mutual funds. Those things represent real assets -
factories, ships, bananas, software, gold, whatever. Simoleons is just
a new name for those assets. You carry around a smart card and spend
it just like cash. Or else you go shopping in the Metaverse and spend
the money online, and the goods show up on your doorstep the next
morning."

I say, "Who's going to fall for that?"

"Everyone," he says. "For our big promo, we're going to give Simoleons
away to some average Joes at the Super Bowl. We'll check in with them
one, three, six months later, and people will see that this is a safe
and stable place to put their money."

"It doesn't inspire much confidence," I say, "to hand the stuff out
like Monopoly money."

He's ready for this one. "It's not a handout. It's a sweepstakes." And
that's when he asks me to calculate how many jelly beans will fill
Soldier Field.

Two hours later, I'm down at the local galaxy-class grocery store, in
Bulk: a Manhattan of towering Lucite bins filled with steel-cut rolled
oats, off-brand Froot Loops, sun-dried tomatoes, prefabricated
s'mores, macadamias, French roasts and pignolias, all dispensed into
your bag or bucket with a jerk at the handy Plexiglas guillotine. Not
a human being in sight, just robot restocking machines trundling back
and forth on a grid of overhead catwalks and surveillance cameras
hidden in smoked-glass hemispheres. I stroll through the gleaming
Lucite wonderland holding a perfect 6-in. cube improvised from duct
tape and cardboard. I stagger through a glitter gulch of Gummi fauna,
Boston baked beans, gobstoppers, Good & Plenty, Tart'n Tiny. Then,
bingo: bulk jelly beans, premium grade. I put my cube under the spout
and fill it.

Who guesses closest and earliest on the jelly beans wins the
Simoleons. They've hired a Big Six accounting firm to make sure
everything's done right. And since they can't actually fill the
stadium with candy, I'm to come up with the Correct Answer and supply
it to them and, just as important, to keep it secret.

I get home and count the beans: 3,101. Multiply by 8 to get the number
in a cubic foot: 24,808. Now I just need the number of cubic feet in
Soldier Field. My nephews are sprawled like pithed frogs before the
HDTV, teaching themselves physics by lobbing antimatter bombs onto an
offending civilization from high orbit. I prance over the black
zigzags of the control cables and commandeer a unit.

Up on the screen, a cartoon elf or sprite or something pokes its head
out from behind a window, then draws it back. No, I'm not a paranoid
schizophrenic - this is the much-hyped intelligent agent who comes
with the box. I ignore it, make my escape from Gameland and blunder
into a lurid district of the Metaverse where thousands of infomercials
run day and night, each in its own window. I watch an ad for Chinese
folk medicines made from rare-animal parts, genetically engineered and
grown in vats.  Grizzly-bear gallbladders are shown growing like
bunches of grapes in an amber fluid.

The animated sprite comes all the way out, and leans up against the
edge of the infomercial window. "Hey!" it says, in a goofy, exuberant
voice, "I'm Raster! Just speak my name - that's Raster - if you need
any help."

I don't like Raster's looks. It's likely he was wandering the streets
of Toontown and waving a sign saying WILL ANNOY GROWNUPS FOR FOOD
until he was hired by the cable company. He begins flying around the
screen, leaving a trail of glowing fairy dust that fades much too
slowly for my taste.

"Give me the damn encyclopedia!" I shout. Hearing the dread word, my
nephews erupt from the rug and flee.

So I look up Soldier Field. My old Analytic Geometry textbook, still
flecked with insulation from the attic, has been sitting on my thigh
like a lump of ice. By combining some formulas from it with the
encyclopedia's stats . . .

"Hey! Raster!"

Raster is so glad to be wanted that he does figure eights around the
screen. "Calculator!" I shout.

"No need, boss! Simply tell me your desired calculation, and I will do
it in my head!"

So I have a most tedious conversation with Raster, in which I estimate
the number of cubic feet in Soldier Field, rounded to the nearest
foot. I ask Raster to multiply that by 24,808 and he shoots back:
537,824,167,717.

A nongeek wouldn't have thought twice. But I say, "Raster, you have
Spam for brains. It should be an exact multiple of eight!" Evidently
my brother's new box came with one of those defective chips that makes
errors when the numbers get really big.

Raster slaps himself upside the head; loose screws and transistors
tumble out of his ears.  "Darn! Guess I'll have to have a talk with my
programmer!" And then he freezes up for a minute.

My sister-in-law Anne darts into the room, hunched in a don't-mind-me
posture, and looks around. She's terrified that I may have a date in
here. "Who're you talking to?"

"This goofy I.A. that came with your box," I say. "Don't ever use it
to do your taxes, by the way."

She cocks her head. "You know, just yesterday I asked it for help with
a Schedule B, and it gave me a recipe for shellfish bisque."

"Good evening, sir. Good evening, ma'am. What were those numbers
again?" Raster asks. Same voice, but different inflections - more
human. I call out the numbers one more time and he comes back with
537,824,167,720.

"That sounds better," I mutter.

Anne is nonplussed. "Now its voice recognition seems to be working
fine."

"I don't think so. I think my little math problem got forwarded to a
real human being.  When the conversation gets over the head of the
built-in software, it calls for help, and a human steps in and takes
over. He's watching us through the built-in videocam," I explain,
pointing at the fish-eye lens built into the front panel of the
set-top box, "and listening through the built-in mike."

Anne's getting that glazed look in her eyes; I grope for an analog
analogy. "Remember The Exorcist? Well, Raster has just been possessed,
like the chick in the flick. Except it's not just Beelzebub. It's a
customer-service rep."

I've just walked blind into a trap that is yawningly obvious to Anne.
"Maybe that's a job you should apply for!" she exclaims.

The other jaw of the trap closes faster than my teeth chomping down on
my tongue: "I can take your application online right now!" says
Raster.

My sister-in-law is the embodiment of sugary triumph until the next
evening, when I have a good news/bad news conversation with her. Good:
I'm now a Metaverse customer-service rep. Bad: I don't have a cubicle
in some Edge City office complex. I telecommute from home - from her
home, from her sofa. I sit there all day long, munching through my
dwindling stash of tax-deductible jelly beans, wearing an operator's
headset, gripping the control unit, using it like a puppeteer's rig to
control other people's Rasters on other people's screens, all over the
U.S. I can see them - the wide-angle view from their set-top boxes is
piped to a window on my screen. But they can't see me - just Raster,
my avatar, my body in the Metaverse.

Ghastly in the mottled, flattening light of the Tube, people ask me
inane questions about arithmetic. If they're asking for help with
recipes, airplane schedules, child-rearing or home improvement,
they've

already been turfed to someone else. My expertise is pure math only.

Which is pretty sleepy until the next week, when my brother's agency
announces the big Simoleons Sweepstakes. They've hired a knot-kneed
fullback as their spokesman. Within minutes, requests for help from
contestants start flooding in. Every Bears fan in Greater Chicago is
trying to calculate the volume of Soldier Field. They're all doing it
wrong; and even the ones who are doing it right are probably using the
faulty chip in their set-top box. I'm in deep conflict-of-interest
territory here, wanting to reach out with Raster's stubby,
white-gloved, three-fingered hand and slap some sense into these
people.

But I'm sworn to secrecy. Joe has hired me to do the calculations for
the Metrodome, Three Rivers Stadium, RFK Stadium and every other
N.F.L. venue. There's going to be a Simoleons winner in every city.

We are allowed to take 15-minute breaks every four hours. So I crank
up the Home Theater, just to blow the carbon out of its cylinders, and
zip down the main street of the Metaverse to a club that specializes
in my kind of tunes. I'm still "wearing" my Raster uniform, but I
don't care - I'm just one of thousands of Rasters running up and down
the street on their breaks.

My club has a narrow entrance on a narrow alley off a narrow side
street, far from the virtual malls and 3-D video-game amusement parks
that serve as the cash cows for the Metaverse's E-money economy.
Inside, there's a few Rasters on break, but it's mostly people
"wearing" more creative avatars. In the Metaverse, there's no part of
your virtual body you can't pierce, brand or tattoo in an effort to
look weirder than the next guy.

The live band onstage - jacked in from a studio in Prague - isn't very
good, so I duck into the back room where there are virtual racks full
of tapes you can sample, listening to a few seconds from each song. If
you like it, you can download the whole album, with optional
interactive liner notes, videos and sheet music.

I'm pawing through one of these racks when I sense another avatar,
something big and shaggy, sidling up next to me. It mumbles something;
I ignore it. A magisterial throat-clearing noise rumbles in the
subwoofer, crackles in the surround speakers, punches through cleanly
on the center channel above the screen. I turn and look: it's a
heavy-set creature wearing a T shirt emblazoned with a logo HACKERS
1111. It has very long scythe-like claws, which it uses to

grip a hot-pink cylinder. It's much better drawn than Raster; almost
Disney-quality.

The sloth speaks: "537,824,167,720."

"Hey!" I shout. "Who the hell are you?" It lifts the pink cylinder to
its lips and drinks. It's a can of Jolt. "Where'd you get that
number?" I demand. "It's supposed to be a secret."

"The key is under the doormat," the sloth says, then turns around and
walks out of the club.

My 15-minute break is over, so I have to ponder the meaning of this
through the rest of my shift. Then, I drag myself up out of the couch,
open the front door and peel up the doormat.

Sure enough, someone has stuck an envelope under there. Inside is a
sheet of paper with a number on it, written in hexadecimal notation,
which is what computer people use: 0A56 7781 6BE2 2004 89FF 9001 C782
- and so on for about five lines.

The sloth had told me that "the key is under the doormat," and I'm
willing to bet many Simoleons that this number is an encryption key
that will enable me to send and receive coded messages.

So I spend 10 minutes punching it into the set-top box. Raster shows
up and starts to bother me: "Can I help you with anything?"

By the time I've punched in the 256th digit, I've become a little
testy with Raster and said some rude things to him. I'm not proud of
it. Then I hear something that's music to my ears: "I'm sorry, I
didn't understand you," Raster chirps. "Please check your cable
connections - I'm getting some noise on the line."

A second figure materializes on the screen, like a digital genie: it's
the sloth again. "Who the hell are you?" I ask.

The sloth takes another slug of Jolt, stifles a belch and says, "I am
Codex, the Crypto-Anarchist Sloth."

"Your equipment requires maintenance," Raster says. "Please contact
the cable company."

"Your equipment is fine," Codex says. "I'm encrypting your back
channel. To the cable company, it looks like noise. As you fig

ured out, that number is your personal encryption key. No government
or corporation on earth can eavesdrop on us now."

"Gosh, thanks," I say.

"You're welcome," Codex replies. "Now, let's get down to biz. We have
something you want. You have something we want."

"How did you know the answer to the Soldier Field jelly-bean
question?"

"We've got all 27," Codex says. And he rattles off the secret numbers
for Candlestick Park, the Kingdome, the Meadowlands . . .

"Unless you've broken into the accounting firm's vault," I say,
"there's only one way you could have those numbers. You've been
eavesdropping on my little chats with Raster.  You've tapped the line
coming out of this set-top box, haven't you?"

"Oh, that's typical. I suppose you think we're a bunch of socially
inept, acne-ridden, high-IQ teenage hackers who play sophomoric pranks
on the Establishment."

"The thought had crossed my mind," I say. But the fact that the
cartoon sloth can give me such a realistic withering look, as he is
doing now, suggests a much higher level of technical sophistication.
Raster only has six facial expressions and none of them is very good.

"Your brother runs an ad agency, no?"

"Correct."

"He recently signed up Simoleons Corp.?"

"Correct."

"As soon as he did, the government put your house under full-time
surveillance."

Suddenly the glass eyeball in the front of the set-top box is looking
very big and beady to me. "They tapped our infotainment cable?"

"Didn't have to. The cable people are happy to do all the dirty work -
after all, they're beholden to the government for their monopoly. So
all those calculations you did using Raster were piped straight to the
cable company and from there to the government. We've got a mole in
the government who cc'd us everything through an anonymous remailer in
Jyvaskyla, Finland."

"Why should the government care?"

"They care big-time," Codex says. "They're going to destroy Simoleons.
And they're going to step all over your family in the process."

"Why?"

"Because if they don't destroy E-money," Codex says, "E-money will
destroy them."

The next afternoon I show up at my brother's office, in a groovily
refurbished ex-power plant on the near West Side. He finishes rolling
some calls and then waves me into his office, a cavernous space with a
giant steam turbine as a conversation piece. I think it's supposed to
be an irony thing.

"Aren't you supposed to be cruising the I-way for stalled motorists?"
he says.

"Spare me the fraternal heckling," I say. "We crypto-anarchists don't
have time for such things."

"Crypto-anarchists?"

"The word panarchist is also frequently used."

"Cute," he says, rolling the word around in his head. He's already
working up a mental ad campaign for it.

"You're looking flushed and satisfied this afternoon," I say. "Must
have been those two imperial pints of Hog City Porter you had with
your baby-back ribs at Divane's Lakeview Grill."

Suddenly he sits up straight and gets an edgy look about him, as if a
practical joke is in progress, and he's determined not to play the
fool.

"So how'd you know what I had for lunch?"

"Same way I know you've been cheating on your taxes."

"What!?"

"Last year you put a new tax-deductible sofa in your home office. But
that sofa is a hide-a-bed model, which is a no-no."

"Hackers," he says. "Your buddies hacked into my records, didn't
they?"

"You win the Stratolounger."

"I thought they had safeguards on these things now."

"The files are harder to break into. But every time information gets
sent across the wires - like, when Anne uses Raster to do the taxes -
it can be captured and decrypted. Because, my brother, you bought the
default data-security agreement with your box, and the default
agreement sucks."

"So what are you getting at?"

"For that," I say, "we'll have to go someplace that isn't under
surveillance."

"Surveillance!? What the . . . " he begins. But then I nod at the TV
in the corner of his office, with its beady glass eye staring out at
us from the set-top box.

We end up walking along the lakeshore, which, in Chicago in January,
is madness. But we hail from North Dakota, and we have all the
cold-weather gear it takes to do this. I tell him about Raster and the
cable company.

"Oh, Jesus!" he says. "You mean those numbers aren't secret?"

"Not even close. They've been put in the hands of 27 stooges hired by
the the government. The stooges have already FedEx'd their entry forms
with the correct numbers. So, as of now, all of your Simoleons - $27
million worth - are going straight into the hands of the stooges on
Super Bowl Sunday. And they will turn out to be your worst
public-relations nightmare. They will cash in their Simoleons for
comic books and baseball cards and claim it's safer. They will
intentionally go bankrupt and blame it on you. They will show up in
twos and threes on tawdry talk shows to report mysterious
disappearances of their Simoleons during Metaverse transactions. They
will, in short, destroy the image - and the business - of your client.
The result: victory for the government, which hates and fears private
currencies. And bankruptcy for you, and for Mom and Dad."

"How do you figure?"

"Your agency is responsible for screwing up this sweepstakes. Soon as
the debacle hits, your stock plummets. Mom and Dad lose millions in
paper profits they've never had a chance to enjoy. Then your big
shareholders will sue your ass, my brother, and you will lose. You
gambled the value of the company on the faulty data-security built
into your set-top box, and you as a corporate officer are personally
responsible for the losses."

At this point, big brother Joe feels the need to slam himself down on
a park bench, which must feel roughly like sitting on a block of dry
ice. But he doesn't care. He's beyond physical pain. I sort of
expected to feel triumphant at this point, but I don't.

So I let him off the hook. "I just came from your accounting firm," I
say. "I told them I had discovered an error in my calculations - that
my set-top box had a faulty chip. I supplied them with 27 new numbers,
which I worked out by hand, with pencil and paper, in a conference
room in their offices, far from the prying eye of the cable company. I
personally sealed them in an envelope and placed them in their vault."

"So the sweepstakes will come off as planned," he exhales. "Thank
God!"

"Yeah - and while you're at it, thank me and the panarchists," I shoot
back. "I also called Mom and Dad, and told them that they should sell
their stock - just in case the government finds some new way to
sabotage your contest."

"That's probably wise," he says sourly, "but they're going to get
hammered on taxes.  They'll lose 40% of their net worth to the
government, just like that."

"No, they won't," I say. "They aren't paying any taxes."

"Say what?" He lifts his chin off his mittens for the first time in a
while, reinvigorated by the chance to tell me how wrong I am. "Their
cash basis is only $10,000 - you think the IRS won't notice $20
million in capital gains?"

"We didn't invite the IRS," I tell him. "It's none of the IRS's damn
business."

"They have ways to make it their business."

"Not any more. Mom and Dad aren't selling their stock for dollars,
Joe."

"Simoleons? It's the same deal with Simoleons - everything gets
reported to the government."

"Forget Simoleons. Think CryptoCredits."

"CryptoCredits? What the hell is a CryptoCredit?" He stands up and
starts pacing back and forth. Now he's convinced I've traded the
family cow for a handful of magic beans.

"It's what Simoleons ought to be: E-money that is totally private from
the eyes of government."

"How do you know? Isn't any code crackable?"

"Any kind of E-money consists of numbers moving around on wires," I
say. "If you know how to keep your numbers secret, your currency is
safe. If you don't, it's not.  Keeping numbers secret is a problem of
cryptography - a branch of mathematics. Well, Joe, the
crypto-anarchists showed me their math. And it's good math. It's
better than the math the government uses. Better than Simoleons' math
too. No one can mess with CryptoCredits."

He heaves a big sigh. "O.K., O.K. - you want me to say it? I'll say
it. You were right. I was wrong. You studied the right thing in
college after all."

"I'm not worthless scum?"

"Not worthless scum. So. What do these crypto-anarchists want,
anyway?"

For some reason I can't lie to my parents, but Joe's easy. "Nothing,"
I say. "They just wanted to do us a favor, as a way of gaining some
goodwill with us."

"And furthering the righteous cause of World Panarchy?"

"Something like that."

Which brings us to Super Bowl Sunday. We are sitting in a skybox high
up in the Superdome, complete with wet bar, kitchen, waiters and big
TV screens to watch the instant replays of what we've just seen with
our own naked, pitiful, nondigital eyes.

The corporate officers of Simoleons are there. I start sounding them
out on their cryptographic protocols, and it becomes clear that these
people can't calculate their gas mileage without consulting Raster,
much less navigate the subtle and dangerous currents of cutting-edge
cryptography.

A Superdome security man comes in, looking uneasy. "Some, uh,
gentlemen here," he says. "They have tickets that appear to be
authentic."

It's three guys. The first one is a 300 pounder with hair down to his
waist and a beard down to his navel. He must be a Bears fan because he
has painted his face and bare torso blue and orange. The second one
isn't quite as introverted as the first, and the third isn't quite the
button-down conformist the other two are. Mr. Big is carrying an old
milk crate.  What's inside must be heavy, because it looks like it's
about to pull his arms out of their sockets.

"Mr. and Mrs. De Groot?" he says, as he staggers into the room. Heads
turn towards my mom and dad, who, alarmed by the appearance of these
three, have declined to identify themselves. The guy makes for them
and slams the crate down in front of my dad.

"I'm the guy you've known as Codex," he says. "Thanks for naming us as
your broker."

If Joe wasn't a rowing-machine abuser, he'd be blowing aneurysms in
both hemispheres about now. "Your broker is a half-naked
blue-and-orange crypto-anarchist?"

Dad devotes 30 seconds or so to lighting his pipe. Down on the field,
the two-minute warning sounds. Dad puffs out a cloud of

smoke and says, "He seemed like an honest sloth."

"Just in case," Mom says, "we sold half the stock through our broker
in Bismarck. He says we'll have to pay taxes on that."

"We transferred the other half offshore, to Mr. Codex here," Dad says,
"and he converted it into the local currency - tax free."

"Offshore? Where? The Bahamas?" Joe asks.

"The First Distributed Republic," says the big panarchist. "It's a
virtual nation-state. I'm the Minister of Data Security. Our official
currency is CryptoCredits."

"What the hell good is that?" Joe says.

"That was my concern too," Dad says, "so, just as an experiment, I
used my CryptoCredits to buy something a little more tangible."

Dad reaches into the milk crate and heaves out a rectangular object
made of yellow metal.  Mom hauls out another one. She and Dad begin
lining them up on the counter, like King and Queen Midas unloading a
carton of Twinkies.

It takes Joe a few seconds to realize what's happening. He picks up
one of the gold bars and gapes at it. The Simoleons execs crowd around
and inspect the booty.

"Now you see why the government wants to stamp us out," the big guy
says. "We can do what they do - cheaper and better."

For the first time, light dawns on the face of the Simoleons CEO.
"Wait a sec," he says, and puts his hands to his temples. "You can rig
it so that people who use E-money don't have to pay taxes to any
government? Ever?"

"You got it," the big panarchist says. The horn sounds announcing the
end of the first half.

"I have to go down and give away some Simoleons," the CEO says, "but
after that, you and I need to have a talk."

The CEO goes down in the elevator with my brother, carrying a box of
27 smart cards, each of which is loaded up with secret numbers that
makes it worth a million Simoleons. I go over and look out the skybox
window: 27 Americans are congregated down on the 50-yard line, waiting
for their mathematical manna to descend from heaven. They are just the
demographic cross section that my brother was hoping for. You'd never
guess they were all secretly citizens of the First Distributed
Republic.

The crypto-anarchists grab some Jolt from the wet bar and troop out,
so now it's just me, Mom and Dad in the skybox. Dad points at the
field with the stem of his pipe. "Those 27 folks down there," he says.
"They didn't get any help from you, did they?"

I've lied about this successfully to Joe. But I know it won't work
with Mom and Dad.  "Let's put it this way," I say, "not all
panarchists are long-haired, Jolt-slurping maniacs.  Some of them look
like you - exactly like you, as a matter of fact."

Dad nods; I've got him on that one.

"Codex and his people saved the contest, and our family, from
disaster. But there was a quid pro quo."

"Usually is," Dad says.

"But it's good for everyone. What Joe wants - and what his client
wants - is for the promotion to go well, so that a year from now,
everyone who's watching this broadcast today will have a high opinion
of the safety and stability of Simoleons. Right?"

"Right."

"If you give the Simoleons away at random, you're rolling the dice.
But if you give them to people who are secretly panarchists - who have
a vested interest in showing that E-money works - it's a much safer
bet."

"Does the First Distributed Republic have a flag?" Mom asks, out of
left field. I tell her these guys look like sewing enthusiasts. So,
even before the second half starts, she's sketched out a flag on the
back of her program. "It'll be very colorful," she says. "Like a jar
of jelly beans."

Copyright 1995 Time Inc. All rights reserved.