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  “Look,” said Turbiner. “I’ve got to hook this up right now. I can’t wait.” He had coiled the trophy cable into a loop around one hand; with the other, he knocked back the last of the coffee in his cup. He stood and moved toward the equipment rack against the wall. “Sorry to drop out of the conversation… but you know how it is.”

  McNihil shrugged. “Knock yourself out.”

  He watched as Turbiner powered down his stereo gear and pulled the rack out far enough to reach the connections behind. The old man knelt down, already oblivious to anyone else’s presence in the flat, and began unhooking the ordinary, non-trophy cable running from the amp to the massive, refrigerator-shaped subwoofer sitting between the two DQ-10’s. The recording of the Mahler Second had come to an end some time ago-it had been turned down so low that McNihil had barely been conscious of the silence becoming complete inside the flat. In absolute quiet, a combination of the flat’s double glazing and the acoustic interference waves pulsed out from around the windowsills, Turbiner busily unhooked from a monochannel power amp the two gold-plated spades of the cable running to the subwoofer cabinet. Beneath the cable’s clear plastic sheath were the smaller diameter wires of ordinary six-nines copper, insulated black and red, signal and ground; no human tissue involved. Disdain for the non-trophy cable was already showing on Turbiner’s creviced face as he popped loose the spades at the other end.

  “There we go.” Just as swiftly, Turbiner worked the screwdriver to tighten down the amp’s and subwoofer’s connectors onto the new cable. He stood up, slipping the screwdriver into his shirt pocket, then brushing his hands off. “Thus we approach audio nirvana.” Turbiner pushed the rack back into place-he had left the curve of the trophy out in front, a thin ribbon snaking across the carpet-then commenced the intricate sequence of powering up all the equipment in the proper order. A fiery glow came from inside the ranks of NOS Sovtek 65512’s, the dome-headed vacuum tubes lined up across the tops of the amps like combustible soldiers. “This oughta be good.”

  Turbiner didn’t bother putting in a new disc, but just started up the Mahler Second from the beginning. He settled back in the sweet-spot chair, its leather and underlying padding molded to his frame from long hours of listening. The upholstery was still sighing as the invisible cellos and basses, long distant in space and time, dug into the opening bars.

  For a few seconds, the music bore down like all the gears of the world grinding to a halt, the vast machinery of the cosmos snagging upon God’s trapped hand. De profundis outrage, the garments of the angels rippling into the time-stilled fabric of the universe.

  “That sounds pretty nice,” said McNihil.

  Turbiner made no reply. His crepe-paperish eyelids had lowered, leaving a narrow slit of unfocused vision beneath. In furious concentration, he leaned slightly forward, tension clicking into some deeper, slower state of existence. He looked like a desert turtle going into hibernation, all bodily functions shutting down, except for the tingle of nerves from his cochlea. His ears, everything beyond the stiff cartilage of his pinnae, were the youngest part of his body; McNihil knew that the old man had had cochlear implants put in about a decade ago. All in the service of the music, his only surviving love.

  It’ll be a while, McNihil told himself, before the old guy resurfaces. He’d been here before, when Turbiner had gone off into the zone of vibrating air molecules. Pushing himself up from the couch, McNihil wandered back into the flat’s kitchen area. He opened the cupboard over the sink, took out the half-empty bottle of Bruichladdich, and poured himself a shot.

  The music washed into the kitchen like a hammering tide. Leaning against the counter and taking a sip, McNihil could see the brown spots on the other man’s skull, lipofuscin deposits underneath the thinning silver hair. Alcohol on top of caffeine added another glow to McNihil’s mood. It didn’t matter-not really-that the new cable, the one with the would-be pirate kid’s brain essence smeared inside, was a bit of a shuck. It brought such obvious pleasure to the old guy; where was the harm?

  Of the shuckness of the agency’s trophies, McNihil was something of an expert. When he’d still been with the agency full-time, he’d been rotated out of the field for a while, back into the offices and a design team working on revamping and updating all the stuff that went out the doors. (He remembered thumbing the yes button during one feedback session, registering his professional opinion on the exact spooky snakeskin finish that graced the cable now running between Turbiner’s amp and subwoofer. McNihil felt a little proprietary surge whenever he spotted those glistening scales.) When he’d been on that duty, itching to get back outside and connect up lowlife copyright infringers, the Collection Agency’s top brass had decided on a full-out review of its signature gear, the trophies themselves. McNihil had ended up wading through an entire history of the desired objects, complete with a sideshow memo presentation, an art gallery of vengeful matter.

  Just looking at the cable forming an extended S across the flat’s carpet-the gift that McNihil had braved fire and heights to procure for the old man-the history of the Collection Agency’s compensation for larcenous copyright infringement turned slowly inside his head. Like a prismatic hologram, entire to itself and outside the flow of linear time that had produced it; the narrative didn’t need to be gone over by McNihil, not again, for him to know its detail and sequence:

  • When it was first determined that death was the appropriate punishment for copyright infringement, the reasoning went more or less along these lines:

  • The world had changed, in both the theory and the practice of its economy, to one in which people made their livings-put roofs over their heads and the heads of their children, bread in their and their children’s mouths-from intellectual property. Ideas and/or design and/or content-whatever word, name, label one wanted to use-if that was the most important thing in the world, that which determined whether you ate or starved-

  • Then why would it not be defended? How could the ownership of it not be important? The same rule of survival applied to big international corporations, to midlevel localized players and entrepreneurs, to scrabbling, scribbling little content creators, writers in their basement offices and musicians in their one-man-band back-bedroom studios and red-eyed video-makers slamming between cuts on their desktop editing rigs, all of them turning their brains inside out, turning the tiniest neural sparks into words and images, encoded, intelligible, transmittable-to-someone-else thoughts. If they were going to have something to sell, they had to own it-it being the product of their minds and creativity-in the first place.

  • And no utopian notions, no weird ’net-twit theorizing, propagandizing, self-serving merchandising of predictions, no half-baked amalgam of late-sixties Summer of Love and Handouts, Diggerish free food in the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park, and Stalinist collectivization, lining up the kulaks and shooting them ’cause they’re in the way of the new world order, nothing had been able to change that. The laws of economics were as immutable as those of physics; once the fringy out-there stuff was dismissed, it still remained that if one flapped one’s arms and jumped off the roof, one landed on one’s butt.

  • The arm-flapping maneuvers, the attempts to get around reality, had all burnt out and been discarded, one by one. The “gift-based” economy had been a hippie dream, nice for exchanging information of no value, worthless itself for selling and buying anything worth buying and selling.

  • Salvation hadn’t come from advertising revenues, either. The notion of giving away intellectual content, everything on the wire for nothing, like old reruns of Gilligan’s Island, all paid for by the companies sticking their ads all over the monitor screen-that had eventually evaporated like spit on an unventilated power supply as well. There had been no need for anything like ad-stripping programs, going right back to the classic forerunner Privnet IFF, peeling the advertisements off like soggy stick-’em stamps and dropping them into whatever electronic wastebasket caught unseen, never-seen, never-should’ve-b
othered bits and bytes. The evolution of the human brain had taken care of the situation. A filter is like an immune system, and vice versa; it hadn’t been too long before a benign mental cataract had been determined to exist, one that spread memelike through the species. Ad-blindness, linked to the refresh rates on visual display units. Any pitch other than hard copy in the real world never made it past the optic nerve.

  • If stuff was worth buying and selling-not just hard physical stuff, but intellectual property as well-then it was worth stealing, too. Thieves are always with us, as the mercantile bible might have warned of, but not blessed. For a while, the inchoate, not-yet-coalesced Internet had fostered the kind of informational darkness in which thieves prospered. The so-called anonymous remailing services pleaded an ideological agenda and served as a front for criminals and vandals. The first and most famous, anon.penet.fi, folded in 1996, its spine broken by Finnish court orders. The rest were hunted down and exterminated off the wires-it took a while-on the simple legal principle and mechanism that receiving stolen goods was as much a crime as the theft that produced them. That was what being a fence was all about: there was essentially no difference between a sleazoid pawnshop trafficking in hot, wire-dangling car stereos and an on-line service receiving a stolen, copyrighted piece, whether it was a song digitized into an audio file or a book with all its words OCR’d into zeroes and ones, then stripping off the transmission data that would identify the thief and routing the result to a prearranged buyer. It wasn’t just in the hypothesized merchant’s bible that facilitating theft was considered as much a crime as the theft itself. Christ, McNihil had thought before, you could find that much in the Koran. And in the hearts and minds of decent people everywhere-which was why:

  • Nobody really objected to the severe nature of the system, the Collection Agency and its attendant asp-heads, that was eventually set in place to take care of the remaining copyright infringers. (Nobody, that was, except the most foolishly tenderhearted and the irredeemably ideology-ridden, who persisted in confusing intellectual-property issues with censorship and limiting access to information.) A hard world, and getting harder; no sympathy went to a clown who interfered with somebody trying to make an honest buck. When to steal from someone was not to take some expendable, frivolous trinket off them, a van Gogh off the dining-room wall of some bloated plutocrat; but rather to lift some hard-pressed hustling sonuvabitch’s means of survival, the only way he had of turning the contents of his head into the filling of his stomach; when to steal from someone was the same as to murder them-then nobody cried when, through law and custom, executing thieves became the wholly proper thing to do.

  • With all intellectual property merchandised or archived on the wires, and accessible with a few keystrokes-it became obviously necessary to find a way to take thieves, copyright infringers, off-line for good. When survival is at stake, no second chances are allowed. Which was why, even back before the last century had ticked over into this one, a general maxim had gone the rounds:

  • There’s a hardware solution to intellectual-property theft. It’s called a.357 magnum. No better way for taking pirates off-line. Permanently. Properly applied to the head of any copyright-infringing little bastard, this works.

  • Once death was accepted as public policy-murder as the answer to murder, the solution to people who had problems with respecting copyright-then it had just been a matter of properly implementing it. To get the most out of it.

  “This sounds great,” said Turbiner. He had pulled himself up from his Mahler-driven, wordless meditations. He turned and looked back toward the flat’s kitchen area. “It was worth the wait, man.”

  “Glad you like it.” McNihil splashed a little more scotch into the glass on the counter; he knew Turbiner wouldn’t mind that he’d helped himself. “I’ll let the techs know, back at the agency, that it met with your approval.”

  Actually, it did sound better. McNihil had known there would be an improvement, but hadn’t been quite prepared for this order of magnitude. The bass coming out of the subwoofer was deep and clean, with no cheap-’n’-fuzzy boom-box reverb; the drum strokes hammering out from the back of the invisible orchestra were as tight as the heads on the timpani themselves. The old guy had had a good setup before, but now McNihil could sense the actual physical structure of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw responding in synch to the music, a nearly subliminal tremble coming up through the floorboards and into the soles of his shoes.

  Pretty good for a shuck, thought McNihil. Which it was:

  • For death to be effective public policy, it must be public. If the message to be gotten across is, Connect around with someone else’s copyrights and you die, an emotionally resonant depiction of that truth had to be created.

  • Witnessing the death of intellectual-property pirates-taping and broadcasting the various raids and apprehensions, getting the videocam lenses in close for the spattering blood, the wide-eyed look in some jerk’s eyes as the cold circle at the front of some large-caliber tannhäuser was set against the bridge of his nose, his stare going cross-eyed as he watched the trigger being slowly pulled back-that worked at the beginning. High ratings and message through-put, audience retention up above the ninetieth percentile.

  • Then the drop-off, wire share falling along with the novelty factor; after the first dozen or so punks have their brains removed out the backs of their skulls, after a few good raids on rogue Chinese factories, with the new, improved Smart-Enuff® bombs sniffing out illicit CD-ROM’s and then scattering polycarbonate and body parts with equal facility; after everybody had seen stuff like that, the message migrated to the subconscious level of people’s minds, instead of staying up top where the Collection Agency and its clients wanted it.

  • Plus there was the suicide factor involved. Various jerks, operating out of the same tired ideological agenda and hippie wish-fulfillment dream, who wanted to martyr themselves for the muddled and not-very-well-thought-out cause of “free” information; or the terminally and personally screwed-up, who saw the Collection Agency’s asp-heads as a neat and public way of bringing about their own demise-either way, the threat of death was in fact the promise of death for enough people to be a continuing trouble. Even if minor, it was still something that needed to be dealt with; the agency dealt in absolutes, its net tight enough to allow no one to wriggle through.

  • This called for a certain amount of rethinking on the Collection Agency’s part. Did death necessarily = punishment? The main problem with death as a negative motivational factor was that it was over too quickly, and not always painfully enough.

  • Obviously, what was needed was to stretch death out in time, take it from a point to an extended process. And pump up the pain and humiliation factors.

  Thus, thought McNihil, the creation of the trophy system. It worked even better.

  THIRTEEN

  A FLUTTERING MOTH IN THE DEVIL’S COIN-PURSE

  Here.” McNihil had poured a shot for his host; standing beside the sweet-spot chair, he handed the glass to Turbiner. “Maybe this’ll heighten the effect even more.”

  “Thanks.” The old man took the glass and sipped, then nodded in appreciation. He kept his gaze aimed straight ahead, at the place between the two main speakers. “You hear that?” He nodded toward the unseen orchestra. “You clean up the bass, the midrange sorts itself out, too. Just less audible crap in general.”

  McNihil placed himself back on the couch, careful not to spill his own refilled glass. From there, he could watch as the other man let himself be drawn back under the music’s engulfing tide. They were already at the third movement, In ruhig flieβender Bewegung. Warmed by the scotch, McNihil listened, admiring the way the new cable brought the subterranean rumble of the basses into the flat. Admiring, despite what he knew of the nature of such trophies:

  • The vindictive principle largely determined how the Collection Agency structured its compensation protocols. If someone stole from one of their clients-stole by way of in
fringing, pirating the client’s copyright-protected material-then the agency saw the pirate’s entire person as being essentially in forfeit to the client. If the client had a right to demand the pirate’s death, then why not the pirate’s life as well? The pirate as a living entity? And more to the purpose of providing an object lesson to anyone thinking about ripping off one of the agency’s clients-as a suffering entity as well.

  • Thus, an important evolution in the nature of trophies came about. At the beginning, when physical death was required-absolute physical death, with no parts surviving-trophies took form in less satisfying, less temporally extended ways. McNihil had read about these; they were slightly before his time in the agency-

  • One author of romance novels, living somewhere in the English Cotswolds with a posse of beloved felines, had the three on-wire and unauthorized purveyors of her old books delivered to her in the form of canned, vitamin-enhanced cat food, suitably minced and labeled, the bones powdered and stirred in for the extra calcium essential to a healthy animal’s diet;

  • A mystery writer in New York City, still maintaining his rooftop garden long after the depopulation of the buildings around him, had a CD-ROM packager-who’d been running a sideline of distributing out-of-print tides for which he hadn’t bothered to pay any royalties-delivered to him in the form of three sacks of bone meal and fertilizer. The roses did very well that year and the next.