Year Zero (39 page)

Another challenge arose when Earth’s force field collapsed again. This time the Guardians themselves knocked it down when they sent Paulie and Özzÿ through it to serve out their Enhanced Exiles on Earth (duh). Rather than rebuild the damned thing a third time, they just pushed out a Consummately Heartfelt Entreaty to every citizen of the Refined League demanding that they stay the fuck away from Earth—or else. Judy wrote it personally, so you don’t have to worry about flying saucers turning up at the next Bonnaroo.

With Earth safely sealed off behind a wall of fiery rhetoric, the big challenge now is to find—and to do something about—the beings who already snuck in. All we know is that nine “trespassers” came to Earth back before the Townshend Line was fully activated in the late seventies. But who (and what) are they? We naturally suspect Perfuffinites, because they can fit in so well among humans. But there are also eleven hundred other Refined species that could blend in to our environment to some degree. Since her Consummately
Heartfelt Entreaty went over so well, the Guardians asked Judy if she’d head up the effort to find them—and she agreed. I think it’s brave, and even kind of noble, of her to take this on (some of those guys might be armed, after all). But it embarrasses her when I say this, and she insists that she’s only doing it because she’s power-hungry and greedy.

There’s of course some truth to that—and there actually
is
a huge monetary dimension to Judy’s mission. The issue is that while every non–North Korean on Earth is now staggeringly rich (ten percent of the universe’s wealth carved up between us is a buttload of terra, exa, or zettadollars per head—I forget which), none of us can touch our loot until humanity becomes Refined. And we can’t become Refined until our technology starts advancing at a reasonable rate again. So for now, virtually no one on Earth knows a thing about what’s happening between us and the rest of the cosmos. And meanwhile, your money and mine (and, yes, Judy’s, too) is sitting out there in escrow someplace. Judy agreed to hunt down the trespassers in part because she suspected them of causing our technology slowdown. And it turns out that in the case of at least one of them, her instincts were spot-on.

I learned this not long ago, when I received an urgent email from Judy. It was early in the evening, and her message ordered me to grab Bootsy (her current name for Manda) and go home to await a visitor. I’ve found my first trespasser, her email said. It’s a Perfuffinite—and THIS IS THE BASTARD who’s behind all of our tech problems! The message went on to say that the Guardian Council had issued the guy a Most Heartfelt Entreaty to come to The Core and explain himself. But he had refused, and Judy expected
at least a month of bureaucratic handwringing before they got around to Dislocating him. He also wasn’t willing to meet with Judy for now (maybe he was already terrified of her). So after some negotiating, she had persuaded him to sit down for an initial deposition with me.

Right at seven, he knocked. “Let me get it,” Manda said. “You should be at our desk, looking magisterial.” As Manda headed to the door, I tried to look as magisterial as a guy can, sitting at a plywood desk covered with cheap rosewood veneer.
⁶

There was silence for at least three seconds after Manda opened the door. Then finally she said, “It’s … you?”

“In the flesh,” answered a nerdy voice that I didn’t recognize.

As my visitor entered, I twirled on our squeaky desk chair in a way that I hoped would come off as imperious. A trim, fifty-something guy with brown hair and glasses was standing just inside the doorway. “Bill … Gates?” I asked.

“In a manner of speaking,” he said. “You’re—an alien?”

“Please don’t tell me you’re surprised. Hey, nice cat!”

“Gggggggggh!”

“Have a seat,” Manda suggested, gesturing grandly at our couch. Bill Gates made himself at home.

“So,” I said, feigning nonchalance reasonably well. “You said that you’re only Bill Gates ‘in a manner of speaking.’ ”

“I did. When I came to Earth back in seventy-eight, I tracked down a guy who looked just like me, and kind of replaced him. He was the original Bill Gates. He’d already started Microsoft a few years before that, and it wasn’t going anywhere.”

“And what did you … do to him?”

“Several cruel experiments. Then I drained all the fluids from his body, put his brain in a jar, and buried the rest of him under this giant crop circle that I made about forty miles north of London.”

I gave him a horrified look.

“Ha—gotcha! Actually, I made friends with him, told him what was going on, and talked him into swapping places with me.”

“How’d you do that?”

“Oh, it was easy. He was a college dropout living in Albuquerque with a crap software company, no girlfriend, and a huge science fiction collection. And I was touring dozens of galaxies, doing this John Denver show that was packin’ ’em in. Hey, didja know that Johnny-D was born in Roswell? Anyway, I clinched the deal by telling him about the chicks.”

“What chicks?” Manda asked.

“You wouldn’t believe how easy Perfuffinite girls are,” Bill Gates said.

“Oh—I know,” I murmured, realizing an instant later what a truly idiotic thing this was to say in front of my girlfriend.

Manda shot me a withering look. “Wow,” she said to Bill Gates. “Fame, floozies, and money? Any man would love that. Why’d you give it all up?”

“I didn’t give anything up. I’m rich and famous here. And American girls are complete tramps. You should know—you are one.”

Manda wound up to hit him.

“Ha—gotcha! Actually, American girls are total prudes compared to Perfuffinites. But it was worth coming to Earth because I love your music more than anything else. And I knew your musical output would be in terrible jeopardy if I didn’t do something to slow your technical progress to a dead crawl.”

“Because of the Great Acceleration?” I asked.

“Exactly. Great Accelerations are lethal three out of four times. All this technical, biological, and nano know-how is suddenly available to almost anyone. So tiny groups of crazies can take out entire cities, instead of just buildings. Or border skirmishes between fifth-rate powers can kill off whole planets. Or a few hundred individuals behaving recklessly and selfishly can destroy an entire biosphere. And it’s hard to avoid a Great Acceleration—because a fundamental force of nature drives successful societies to ever-increasing levels of technical sophistication once they pass a certain threshold.”

“So how do you prevent one?” I asked.

“The messy way is to lobotomize a society, by killing off every educated person within it.”

“Sounds … unfriendly.”

Bill Gates nodded. “It is, but it works. Just ask anyone who lived under the Khmer Rouge. The gentler approach is to gum up the works, by causing billions of little time-sapping, schedule-wrecking, and train-of-thought derailing problems every year. Target them at the productive ranks of society, and you’ll stomp the brakes on its progress without really hurting anyone.”

As I was considering this odd notion, Manda suddenly said
“Whoa.”

We both looked at her.

“You’re talking about … 
Windows
, aren’t you?”

“Exactly. And DOS before that.”

“Wow,” I whispered as I processed this. “That … kind of makes sense.”

“It makes perfect sense,” Bill Gates said. “I mean, seriously. Now that you think about it, could Windows really be anything
but
an alien conspiracy?”

“No!” I said, chilled to the bone. “So how does it work?”

“This year I’ll knock about a hundred and eighty billion productive hours out of human society. That’s up from maybe a hundred and sixty-three last year. I like to keep the number somewhere between a hundred and twenty to a hundred and fifty hours per machine, per year.”

“You mean through … crashes or something?” That sounded like three or four full working weeks (for a sane nonlawyer), which seemed like a lot of crashes to me.

“Among lots of other things. I hit maybe one percent of you with catastrophic disc failures every several months. Get zapped, and you might be out hundreds of hours. But most people won’t get zapped this year. Other things are more evenly distributed, though. Like needless version compatibility issues. They eat up a couple hours per year, for most of you. Then I get everyone with those momentary screen freezes. They can total up to over twenty hours a year, for heavy users. I also snatch a couple hours from most of you by messing with your printers. Booting and rebooting grumpy systems varies a ton with the OS, but call it ten hours a year, on average. But the real bonanza is in my ingeniously designed user interfaces. Gratuitous complexity and
obtuseness can derail almost any creative or productive process, and that sucks up dozens and dozens of hours a year from every one of you. And people are so used to it, they don’t even notice.”

“But how does that stop society from advancing?” Manda asked. “Even a hundred fifty hours is just a fraction of the working year.”

Bill Gates chuckled. “True. But that’s just the raw hours that the software confiscates. I get most of my leverage from timing.”

“Meaning what?” I asked.

“My systems are thirty-eight times more likely to crash when you’re at the tail end of a major project. Haven’t you noticed? They’re also twenty-two times more likely to have a screen freeze
juuuuust
when you’ve finally come up with the exact right word to put into a document. And they’re almost sixty times more likely to drop off the network when you have a hugely urgent email to send, as opposed to when you’re just browsing porn on the off-hours.”

“That’s … fascinating,” Manda said.

“It is. I can’t really explain how I do it, because it involves higher dimensions, and some concepts that don’t even have words in English. But I call it ‘irony detection’ for short. I’m a big Alanis Morisette fan, see.”

“But how’s a hard drive crashing at the end of a big project
ironic
?” I asked. “That’s just … bad timing, isn’t it?”

“Like I said, I’m a big Alanis fan. Anyway—my irony detector also takes account of who’s doing the work. And a true genius can crash one of my systems just by looking at it.”

“So that keeps the best and brightest on abacuses,” Manda marveled.

Bill Gates nodded. “And much more important, it keeps you guys from Greatly Accelerating. Which keeps the great music coming for the rest of the universe. Of course, I haven’t ground your progress to a dead halt. I let a few technical goodies trickle into your society every so often, so you’ll think you’re still advancing.”

“Thanks for 4G,” Manda said respectfully.

“No problem.”

“And you had all of this figured out before you took over Microsoft?” I asked.

Bill Gates shook his head. “I had no plan whatsoever at first. I just needed to get to Earth before the Townshend Line went up. My next move was coming up with someone to swap places with, and the original Bill looked more like me than anyone else that I found. It was only then that I started developing a plan to use Microsoft to save the world. Step one was turning it into a juggernaut—which definitely wouldn’t have happened without me running the show.”

“I guess being Refined made it easy for you to outwit all your competitors,” I said.

“I didn’t outwit anybody,” Bill Gates joshed. “I
killed all
of them.”

“Another joke, right?”

“More of a pun,” he said with an impish smirk.

“Anyway,” I continued, “once Microsoft became a monopoly, I guess you used it … to hijack and pervert our entire tech industry?”

Bill Gates nodded. “I prefer to say ’embrace and extend,’ but you’ve got the gist.”

“But there are other computers,” Manda said. “There’s Macintoshes, and Linux. You may dominate the tech world,
but you don’t completely control it. So someone can still build a great machine independently of you, right?”

“You mean someone like Steve Jobs? Sure. And he was brilliant. But like every great talent, he needed great competitors to push him to his full potential. So early on I set the bar so low that it took less than ten percent of his creative capacity to make my stuff look like crap. You’re too young to remember DOS, but trust me on this. I upped the game a bit with Windows. But I was careful to never make him break a sweat.”

“But isn’t your own software starting to … suck less?” I asked. I’d heard a rumor to this effect.

“You mean Windows seven and eight?” Bill Gates chuckled. “I’m just going easy for a few years, because I got a bit carried away with Vista. That one was so bad that the real-life X-Files guys in the government started getting suspicious about me. But I’m gonna pour it on again with the next version of Windows. That one’ll set everything back by at least twenty years.”

“But the PC’s over, and it’s all about the Internet and mobile now, right?” Manda pressed. “Can’t companies like Google push things forward without you?”

He chuckled again, a little diabolically this time. “Like I said—wait for the next version of Windows. Anyway, I gotta hop. I told Melinda I’d meet her for supper at eight.”

“Hey, don’t let us stop you,” I said, standing up deferentially. Judy was going to kill me for being such a pushover with this guy. But while I seriously needed to think things over, everything he said really seemed to add up.

“And thanks for saving humanity,” Manda added politely.

“Hey, let’s not get carried away. You had a one-in-four
shot at making it through the Great Acceleration. So there’s a decent chance that I’m just screwing you over. But in case I am, I’m trying to make it up to you by putting all my money into saving lives these days.”

“That’s right—and thanks for that, too,” I said, opening the door for him. I’d heard many times that Gates’s wealth will save untold millions of lives eventually, given how meticulously and brilliantly he’s investing it to fight poverty and disease.

“Did I really just thank Bill Gates for using Windows to save humankind?” Manda asked, right after he left.

“You did. And it sounds like he actually did just that.”