Losers in Space Read online

  From then on, humans would do only labor in which human beings were irreplaceable and had to be paid to do it. The short list of these occupations included:

  high-level work in the arts and competitive athletics

  human-relations-intensive fields like nursing and teaching

  roles that people wanted to watch, such as being a celebrity.

  One job that only humans could do still had to be restricted because too many people wanted to do it: making babies. Every baby registered for the social minimum is given a lifetime sterilizing implant, which can be switched on and off; switchoff permission is granted for three children per registered pair of people, or two per single.

  Seventy years later, at the time of this story, it has turned out that the slight extra effort required to have a child (the application process for a switchoff takes about a month on the calendar and about ten hours of interviews and filling out forms, and is good for only three months) has caused the birth rate to fall far below replacement. For three generations, the population has rapidly dwindled and the average age increased; by the time of this story the world population is at about 3 billion, less than half its 2010 level, and only about 7% of it is children and teenagers (in 2010, that percentage was 19%). It’s a world of very comfortable middle-aged and older people who mostly watch entertainment all day.

  PermaPaxPerity decrees that more than 96% of the global population are mineys—people who live on the social minimum, an income roughly comparable to two million dollars a year in 2010 dollars. Some mineys practice very elaborate hobbies that occupy nearly all their time (almost all scientists, scholars, and artists are mineys). Regardless of how they spend their time, they are not permitted to earn more than the social minimum.

  Most mineys, however, just consume entertainment for their entire lives, with a few years spent raising one or two children. About three-quarters of mineys elect at one time or another to switch their sterilization off and have a child; though most mineys have one, almost no one has more.

  Just over 3% of the population have the EE prefix, standing for eligible for employment, on their social minimum number. Over time EEnies became Eenies and finally just eenies. Eenies are celebrities whose image can be sold (celeb-eenies), or people who perform jobs that only people can do (talent-eenies), and earn incomes about 100 times as large as the mineys earn. Free training to qualify as a talent-eenie is restricted to the very small part of the population that achieves a very high score on the PotEvals (Potential Evaluation Examinations).

  Because only a small part of the population actually needs training beyond basic literacy, the colleges and universities are gone (just as, since there is almost no war, there are no real armies, just police forces for suppressing riots and terrorism). Many mineys are highly educated, but they teach themselves the things they want to know (using the net or finding mentors), learning it whenever they care to during their adult lives, and since there is no need to prove they learned it, there are no exams, degrees, or diplomas (except, again, for the specialists among the talent-eenies).

  Less than 1% of global population are meanies—violent chronic offenders, uncontrolled sociopaths, and various other people who must be locked up for public safety.

  It is a stated, sacred principle of PermaPaxPerity that everyone should have the same chance to qualify as an eenie. Children of eenies who do not qualify in their own right become mineys at twenty-one and cannot inherit money or property from their parents. As a practical matter, however, this law is enforceable only on the talent-eenies; celebrity babies, children, and families are popular in the news, and so celeb-eenies are very often able to make their children famous before the age of twenty-one.

  Thus elite schools, such as Excellence Shop, are in the business of helping eenie children qualify for permanent, adult eenie status. For the children with unusual talent and ability—the kind who would be at the very top of a gifted and talented program in 2010—this means preparing for the PotEvals, because a passing score on the PotEvals is required for admission to accredited professional training in any EE-class, paid occupation. For the children of celebrities, this means pretending to study for the PotEvals while actually networking and trying to draw media attention.

  In every elite school, some kids just give up. They know their talent is insufficient, they don’t want to work, their appearance is out of fashion, maybe they just have no confidence. Although in a few years they will stop living on their parents’ eenie-level salaries and have to live as mineys, they stop making the effort to become eenies. Since they are not incurably criminally insane, they won’t become meanies either. At every elite school, all over Earth, the moon, and Mars, these permanently defeated children make the same bitter joke; since they are not yet eenies, meanies, or mineys, they call themselves moes. It sounds better than “losers.”

  Derlock is staring right at me. God, he has eyes and a smile. I style a pose, letting him be my camera.

  He says, “Susan, it was really your idea.”

  “Oh, that.” I don’t know what he is talking about.

  “That day in the library when you were talking about being a real eenie, a celeb-eenie—”

  I sit up straight and shake my hair loose; he rewards me with a little smile, seeing that now we’re in this together.

  It’s amazing and wonderful how much of a lie that boy can pack into so few words. We did talk about it and it is something I think about a lot. But it wasn’t in the library; we had cut class and sneaked off for sex in his room.

  Derlock looks around the room, being gorgeous, styling charisma and leadership till it drips off that perfect cleft chin. “Every year some loser bastard who’s been sweating some art or sport for decades, just as a hobby, with no success, gets recognition somehow, and goes straight from miney to eenie.” He looks right at Marioschke. “Say people start reading her poetry.” Then at F.B. “Or he makes a major astronomical discovery. That’s one road to being an eenie that doesn’t involve passing the stupid PotEval exam, doing all that advanced training, and qualifying as a talent-eenie. Make it into enough popular meeds and you’re a celeb-eenie, no boring work—except for doing your art—required. Right?”

  “Hey, most of us aren’t stupid”—Stack focuses on F.B.—“we all know that.”

  Derlock rides right over him. “But teaching yourself to do great art or great science is even harder than passing the PotEvals to qualify for training. There’s a better way to get eenie.”

  Now, I’m listening. Derlock isn’t just any guy named Derlock, like so many guys are because the main guy on Always Sexy Vampires a couple generations ago was named Derlock. He’s Derlock Slabilis—son of Sir Penn Slabilis, the lawyer who pioneered the overriding media interest defense, which is one of a half dozen reasons why celeb-eenie is the only kind of eenie to be. His father could buy Excellence Shop out of his petty cash and make them declare Derlock the Most Popular and God-for-a-Month.

  Derlock winks at me. I puddle, and nod, as if he’s conducting me with a baton.

  The room is silent; we know something big is coming.

  He explains, “You have to start from being famous. Then whatever you do, people will want to see it, and that means you’re an eenie, it’s the way the rules work. Remember last year when Reynold Wells took a power saw and cut up his girlfriend? Till then he was like n-nillion other miney songwriters, ultra dark, ultra grim, ultra predictable, ultra just a hobby. But after he dropped the pieces of her off his balcony, people got interested in his songs. He became an eenie months before he was convicted.” He pauses to let the thought sink in. “Well, that’s the way you do it. Us moes only need to become famous for something, kick our recognition indexes up, and then people would want whatever we did afterward. Images or poetry or finger painting.”

  “Or astronomy,” F.B. says. “I’m going to be the most famous astronomer ever. Herschel was so famous after he found Uranus that—”

  “I bet what’s-his-name found Uranus.
And used it too,” Stack says, in his you-be-scared-now tone.

  “The trick is,” Derlock says, “it’s hard to get famous just for being an astronomer, but people will want to hear about your astronomy if you’re famous. If you have too much style and class to crawl around being a goody-goody, ‘maximizing your opportunities,’ always networking and ‘personally developing’ and studying all the time for the PotEvals like the pathetic scared little talenty-kids here at school, then the way to get to eenie—is to get famous. Then if you want to be a scientist, you’re an eenie scientist.”

  Scientists are usually happy being mineys; they do what they love and don’t worry about being famous. I learned that when Fleeta and I were sent around to visit dozens of scientists, back when we were best friends, and I was Crazy Science Girl. Fleeta and I had so much fun when we were twelve, winning science competitions, fast-tracked for elite science schools, all that sheeyeffinit. And those scientists just doing research because they loved it were probably the happiest people I’ve ever seen—except for Fleeta, now, since she has decided to be a happy moron forever.

  As for me, I grew boobs and an attitude and found out about boys and drugs, and I decided to get real about the way things work: Happy is nice; famous is what counts. That whole year I was running around being Crazy Science Girl with my best friend, I was only mentioned—not even splyctered into a hook, just mentioned—exactly four times in meeds that year.

  Notes for the Interested, #2

  MEEDS: the only art form that matters in 2129

  The word meed back-formed sometime after 2080 from the plural media. A meed is an arrangement of audio and visual tracks intended to be seen together. Television commercials, music videos, film scenes, and news segments would all be described, in 2129, as meeds—very old, slow meeds. Most people watch meeds on any available screen most of the time.

  A stream of meeds coming from a single source is called a face, probably short for interface; a face for meeds is what a URL is for Web content, a channel is for television, a station is for radio, or a magazine is for articles.

  Most meeds are made up of shots and images sampled from other meeds. The really popular parts of a 5-minute meed might be a few 1-second shots; these little very-popular shots are called hooks. When a creator pulls hooks out of a meed to use in a new meed, he splycters the original meed.

  For example, when making his porn meeds, Glisters takes a dozen porn scenes, which are each a few minutes long, and extracts and separates (splycters) his favorite little one- or two-second bursts (the hooks). Then he puts the hooks together into a meed of his own, which runs through dozens of hooks at very high speed.

  All over the world, hundreds of millions of hobbyists (and a few thousand professionals) splycter meeds into hooks and assemble new meeds out of the hooks. Then they upload their new meeds to the net. The overall system tracks every frame and sound back to its origin, counting every viewing of every one, so the more people who watch meeds that contain hooks that contain you, the more popular you are.

  A very small number of meeds account for almost all the hooks (just as only a small fraction of songs account for almost all the airplay, or 1% of actors make 95% of the money in Hollywood).

  Theoretically everyone is paid for every appearance in a hook on every screen, but the payments are tiny, and anyway they are deducted from your social minimum, so your social minimum payment is the same every week regardless of how popular you are—up to the magic tipping point that Susan, Derlock, and their friends are dreaming about.

  If 2 or more out of every 10,000 hooks that are splyctered within one month, by everyone worldwide, contain you, you are so popular that you are declared a celebrity and automatically upgraded to the EE prefix—you are famous enough to receive an eenie stipend, and your hook fees are paid on top of that, not deducted.

  Being splyctered into hooks is the only way to become either rich or famous under PermaPaxPerity. In the obsolete terminology of the 2010s, you are “being paid to entertain everyone else by appearing in very fast sampled clips pulled from your media appearances.”

  Average length of a meed: less than 10 minutes.

  Average original content in a meed: less than 2%.

  Average length of a hook: about 1.5 seconds.

  Hooks splyctered out of any one meed: almost none, usually

  So in my guise as Crazy Science Girl I was splyctered into four hooks in one year. That’s the same as not existing.

  The next year, just after I turned thirteen and got my chick-body, a whole eight-second meed of me was splyctered like crazy.

  The original meed ran on Ed Teach, which has the highest recognition score of any pirate face. Within a day, every single frame had been splyctered into five thousand other meeds. That eight-second hook hit number 45 in the top 100 for the Hot-Underage category. The two-second hook where you could see both boobs bouncing and one of my nipples stayed between number 26 and number 18 for 64 hours, and ran on over 300 different faces.

  Unfortunately it didn’t last long enough to get me my EE. You have to be that popular for at least a month. And you don’t stay popular if your hook is a joke, which mine turned into.

  Whoever put it up on Ed Teach clipped the original eight-second hook out of the Lunatic Club’s face, one of those club faces that’s nothing but camera feed from the dance floor. That eight-second hook that got splyctered so much showed me dancing, holding a drink, and kind of spilling it on my silk dress for some cling on one boob.

  Ed Teach’s synthesized voice-over said, “Susan Tervaille, daughter of classical actor Robert Tervaille, shows the values she learned at Restore the Family! rallies with her father.” People thought that was funny.

  It ultra destroyed any serious hotness, and turned the hook into just an excuse to embarrass Pop.

  He called me up and lectured me for a solid hour about how this was beneath me, my little titty show was unworthy. Like there is anything more unworthy than being stuck as a miney for life.

  When I came to Excellence Shop a month after that, I stayed in the advanced science and math classes because, well, why not, but I am not Crazy Science Girl anymore. Someday I’ll be seriously splyctered; hooks of me get splyctered every year, just nothing so far hits the levels I need.

  Till then, I’m a moe, looking to be an eenie.

  Which is why, aside from being hot, Derlock is taking my breath away. He’s so right. There’s a way. First be famous; then you can be a famous whatever-you-want.

  “Look,” Derlock says. “None of us has studied at all. We can’t possibly pass the PotEvals. But I have come up with a way that we can get famous, so it won’t matter that we can’t pass the PotEvals,” Derlock says, his perfect grin widening like a curtain coming up on a show. “It won’t matter that we don’t know shit.”

  His gaze on me is more intense than it was when he was pulling down my pants. Scary. People have left school because of things Derlock did. It would be so zoomed to have a boyfriend that scared me. If necessary, I can just dump Bari with no ceremony at all.

  Derlock explains, “For 78 more days—till we flunk the PotEvals and get expelled—we can just ask the Resource Office for go-anywhere-do-anything-as-long-as-it’s-a-learning-experience permissions. Now how do you suppose we can become famous with a learning-experience permission?” He is looking straight at me when he says, softly, “Let me give you a big hint . . Virgo is starting an Earthpass right now.” He lets them all digest that for a breath. “Susan,” he says, and my name sounds like his hand sliding up my thigh, “don’t you have an aunt on Virgo?”

  “My aunt Destiny. She’s an evalist.”

  “Why is she the evilest person?” Fleeta asks. “Being evil is bad.”

  Everyone laughs at her, which makes her happy and me sick. And it’s not like all of them know, either; they’re just enjoying laughing at Fleeta. So I explain: “E-v-a-l-i-s-t, not e-v-i-l-e-s-t. Aunt Destiny’s an expert at evas, which is what they call operations outside the s
hip. I’m not sure why they call it that, I think it used to be an abbreviation like scuba or laser, but an eva is a spacewalk, and Destiny’s a spacewalker.”

  Derlock’s smile makes everyone look at me differently than they ever have before, and that is ultra zoomed.

  His plan is to go up in a cap and visit Virgo during Earthpass, duck out of the return cap, and stow away to Mars. Since Virgo is an Aldrin cycler, it can’t turn around or even change course much more than the little precession it has to do in each cycle; Virgo will have to take us to Mars.

  To send us home, they’ll have to wait for Leo, the last down-cycler for this opposition, and that will give us almost three weeks on Mars.

  “This is so stupid I can’t believe we’re talking about it,” Emerald says, “but whatever. When we come out of hiding they’ll just charge our parents a big pile of money to cover the cost, then turn the ship around and bring us home. We’ll never even get close to Mars.”

  “That’s the beauty of it,” Derlock says. “They can’t do that.”

  Glisters is nodding enthusiastically. “Derlock is right. That option is not available at any price.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Emerald says. “Nothing really costs anything at all anymore, with PermaPaxPerity the Scarcity Age is over. They tell us that all the time. They might charge a ridiculous amount of money, but money is supposed to just keep people from using too much resources for stupid crappy reasons, it doesn’t ration things the way it did. That’s what they’ve said in every economics class I took. Turning a spaceship around is just one more thing you can buy, no matter how expensive it is.”

  “That’s what they say.” Wychee sounds like they say it just to hurt her feelings. “Why won’t they just spend the money to turn the ship around and bring us back to Earth?”