Burning Violin

"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom.  What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.  When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it." -Adrian Rogers

The inherent flaw in that quote is that it assumes a system that is just, that the poor are poor because they deserve to be and the rich are rich because they deserve to be. It assumes that an individual's wealth is directly proportional to his earning of that wealth. But the free market system, like any system, rewards neither superior ethics, nor superior effort, nor superior merit. Like all systems, it simply and blindly rewards those that play the game the best.

No economic system in human history has produced the raw creativity, output and progress of free market capitalism, but it is easy to forget why America championed free markets in the first place: because they are more just, more right than any other economic system. Sometime during the Cold War, we lost sight of that original motivation and our means became our ends as our economies created unimaginable wealth and prosperity. We defended free markets because they worked the best instead of because the nature of their freeness made them the ethically superior system. In forgetting those ethical grounds, we have lost the ability to intervene in the market when ethically necessary. If the reason for the market is its superior performance, then intervention on ethical grounds that affect performance is against everything the market stands for. If the reason for the market is its ethically superior outcome, then intervention on ethical grounds helps the market achieve its purpose.

The best education money can buy. The best medical care money can buy. The best car money can buy.

There are things that it is simply ethically wrong to have determined by the availability of money. There are certainly things that should be. Better house, better car, better TV, a bigger stack of DVDs, eating tenderloin instead of pork chops. These are things that can be determined by money, that working hard and earning money should allow you to upgrade. There are certain categories of expense that should not ethically be determined by money. Money should not be able to buy you better medical care or a better education or better legal representation.

This isn't an unrealistic utopian impulse. It's something that can and should be designed and legislated. Being able to cut checks for $50,000 per year should not get your child a prestigious education at a private liberal arts school. Access to education should not be a financial decision, it should be a strictly merit based decision. The best students should go to the best schools, and on down the line, regardless of their financial status. Likewise, the mediocre students should go to the mediocre schools, regardless of their ability to pay for an exclusive private school. Medical care should be determined by need not by money. The Mayo clinic should be where the most severe and hopeless cases are sent, not simply the ones with incredible insurance.

The bottom line is that there will always be differences in quality, whether it is education, medical care, or simply the type of car that you drive. But it is utterly unethical to have some of those differentials determined by money.

What society can do is make decisions on which resources should be allocated by free market supply and demand, and which should be allocated on the basis of different criteria. In an ethical society, the first decision should not be what is possible, it should be a determination of what should be. The question of how it must be limited or compromised is a fundamentally different question than what the world should be like. We can say outright, without a financial commitment, that we think that all citizens should have health insurance and free access to medical care. It is entirely possible that this ideal is not within the reach of our resources, that no matter what we do at present, there simply isn't enough money, doctors or hospitals to achieve the ideal. The question then is how to decide who gets access to those resources. Simply saying that we only have the resources to give 80% of Americans health care and determining that therefore the poorest 20% will be the ones that miss out is the most unethical way imaginable for determining access to resources. Even a lottery would fundamentally be more ethical, at least then we are not pretending that the hourly rate you bill out at is an appropriate measure of how much you deserve medical care.

Decide on the world you want, and if it is not feasible, decide on how to compromise without compromising the integrity of the ideal. The poor will always be with us, but we have the power to decide what poverty means in our society.

The end of a nation does not come when it cares about the poor. Indeed, the strength of character of any nation is best measured by the lots of the least within it. When the richest society in human history decides that it is a perfectly just and deserved outcome for CEOs to make a thousand times what their employees earn and that 10 million children deserve to not have health insurance, then we are not far removed from the only place that sustained injustice ever leads: blood and fire in the streets.

Crow winced. Trinan's dad had slipped his mind. Worked his whole life at a civil engineering company as a designer and keeled over the first winter he wasn't reviewing schematics fifty hours a week, hunched over ancient Solaris boxes no one had budgeted to replace yet. Alexander had met him a couple of times, but Crow was surprised the kid even remembered that since he couldn't have been more than two when the old blueprint jockey had finally given up the ghost. Crow's own parents were long gone, car crash when he was in college, and Trinan's mom had succumbed to one of the cancers no one had managed to lick yet back before they were married.

One time when he was going out near St. Louis for business, Crow had brought along Alexander to meet his granddaddy. Mitch Lewis had an old style face, the kind you saw on steel workers in Ansel Adams photos from way back when, or New York fire fighters or World War II sergeants. His mouth didn't look right without a cigar chomped between his front teeth, one of the vices he allowed himself in addition to the finely aged Scotch that stocked the drawers of his cherry wood desk. Mitch had taken a few minutes out of his day, dressed in a loose fitting suit with the sleeves rolled up and the jacket discarded before he had even walked in the door. Mitch was the sort of guy that the sentis could never replace. Maybe they could do his work, design his buildings better, but his quirks and voluminous personality were not silicon etchable. The man was a walking idiom.

"Yeah. Like Grandpa Lewis." Crow said. He itched for a cigarette. "You remember meeting him?"

Alexander nodded, looking out the window at the cars zipping by them. "He was mom's dad. We went to visit him in St. Louis, but we could only stay for an afternoon because he had a design due for a new downtown stadium, and you had to be at a convention." Alexander smiled. "Nan turned on the TV though at the hotel and I watched the baseball game."

Crow stared for Alexander in amazement for just long enough that he had to rip the steering wheel to the right to get them back in the slow lane. "How do you remember all that?" Crow asked. "You were only a year and a half old."

Alexander shrugged. "I don't forget much."

Crow rewound their conversation in their head and realized that he had just had a fully adult conversation with his five year old son. Last week he rambled like any other kid that age, now he's talking like a ten year old, at least. Crow pushed his thinking back farther. Sure he started reading absurdly early, and I'm sure has one hell of an IQ, but he can't possibly remember that, can he?

They climbed into the car and Crow had to adjust the seat for his longer legs since Nan's were very short compared to an adult male's. Crow managed to pull it out of the garage with only a slight scrape of the passenger's side rear view mirror against the frame of the garage.

Alexander looked at him with an odd expression. "Nan never does that."

"Nan's perfect, I know." Crow groused. His tone was weary, mind elsewhere.

"Dad," Alexander started and then paused so long that Crow glanced over to see if Alexander was still awake. "If Nan was a better dad than you, would you not be my dad anymore?"

Crow blinked and struggled with the wheel. It was just like riding a bicycle, it was true that you never really forgot, but falling off once or twice was inevitable after a few year hiatus even so. "I'll always be your dad, kid, no matter how lousy of one I am. You'll grow up and be smarter and faster and stronger than me, and think I'm an idiot and weak and horrible in every way, but I'll still be your dad."

"I wouldn't think that about you." Alexander said, discounting the line of reasoning.

They pulled down the last road before the interstate and Crow floored the accelerator onto the on ramp. Cars whipped past him with a speed he had forgotten in the five years since bothering to drive. It's not my fault, everybody did it. Alexander's knuckles whitened as they gripped the arm rests. Crow frowned.

"If the sentis did do all the jobs, wouldn't you just get to have vacation all the time?" Alexander asked.

Crow dodged an eighteen wheeler driven at 100 miles per hour by a senti with far better reflexes and control than his own inadequate flesh. Once people had given up driving entirely for the most part, the speed limits had been raised across the board. Anybody who couldn't keep up was welcome to stay off the roads, get run over, or invest in their own senti for driving. Very affordable these days, a thinking toaster in every house.

"I suppose so, but I don't want vacation all the time." Crow said. "I want to work, and I think most people are that way deep down. I mean, they might not want to do the job they've got right now, but people can't just be idle, they go insane. Look at a lot of old people when they retire. You always hear stories about guys who worked forty years in the same plant and die of a heart attack the week after they retire."

"You mean like Grandpa Lewis?" Alexander asked.

Silence on the other end of the line, until Crow again thought that she may have just hung up on him instead of continuing the argument. He went on. "Why all the interest in saving Green Eyes then? They're the ones you were fighting before."

"Enemy of my enemy and all that jazz." Rebecca said with nonchalance. She was silent again for a while. "My dad fought in the Uprising." She said. "Decorated, uniform full of medals in the special forces. The president himself pinned the Medal of Honor on dad's chest." Rebecca paused for a long time. "He was burned alive when they used napalm at Case's Point."

Crow winced and said nothing.

Rebecca sniffed loudly. "Anyway, I've got to go."

"Right." Crow said. "Sorry about the job." He hesitated. "I hope they catch the guy."

"You're not on the friendly list anymore Crow." Rebecca said, not with anger but a more than chilling matter of factness. "We do not look kindly on those who make friends with Da Vinci Law." She hung up finally, leaving him with dead air buzzing with that slight white noise just a whisper above silence for a moment before the phone realized the signal was gone and shut down.

Crow considered for a moment that everyone he had ever known at International Robotics was going to take a dim view of his potential innocence. That bridge he'd burned had been a tad more populated than he had first thought. I don't need that place, I can build something else, something better. Something in him knew better. Crow shrugged aside further thoughts and wandered into the house.

Nan had brought home Alexander from school a few minutes earlier, they were still in the foyer discussing the day's activities. Alexander's face lit up when Crow walked in and the kid ran over to get his boost and hug.

"Why aren't you at work?" Alexander asked.

"Got the day off." Crow said. He noticed Nan waiting for instructions and told it to go power down. He dropped Alexander to his feet and took his hand to walk outside. Crow glanced at the car in the drive for a moment and then decided that it was as good a time as any to take care of business. "Let's take a ride in the car." Crow said.

"Want me to get Nan?" Alexander asked.

Crow shook his head. "Nope, I'll drive."

"You can drive?" Alexander asked in disbelief.

A grimace. "Of course I can drive. Used to be everybody could drive."

"But that's a job for sentis." Alexander said.

"But if they take all the jobs, what are the people supposed to do?" Crow asked. It was a rhetorical question for the most part, just part of the normal dialogue tossed off to pacify the kid.

Alexander looked perturbed, almost disturbed by the question as they walked towards the car. "I don't know." He said in a low voice.

"Bite me." Rebecca said. Crow thought she'd hung up on him, expected it really, but he realized after a moment that she was still there. She sighed into the phone. "Did you happen to see the news?"

"The protest?" Crow asked.

"They've been playing it all morning on every station. It went down last night." Rebecca said.

"Shitty for all sides it looks like." Crow said.

"I hate protestors." Rebecca said. "I don't think they should have been shot, but I hate everything they're doing."

"Well, both sides can protest." Crow said. He stared at the front door, wondering if the signal would hold inside, and decided the day was nice enough to warrant hanging out on the porch for a few minutes.

"No they can't." Rebecca said. "My side is illegal, remember? Political organization of cyborgs is illegal under the racketeering laws. There are permanent injunctions against us gathering."

"Well, you did try to take down the government." Crow pointed out. "The government doesn't take that too kindly."

"We didn't try to take it down." Rebecca seethed. Crow could just about hear her teeth vibrating. "We put down the Uprising, we were the only ones who could, who could match up to the sentis one on one. And after it was all over, after we chopped off our limbs to be strong enough to do it, they tried to legislate us out of existence. The politicians gave us medals on Tuesday and by Thursday they wanted to re-amputate or shuffle us off to segregated camps. No one wanted us after we saved them. The public was terrified of us, thought we were monstrosities, necessary but monstrous." She bit off the words like she was chewing through salt-water taffy. "They forgave the sentis for mass murder because they were useful, but we had no utility that made us worth tolerating."

"Which brings us to trying to overthrow the government." Crow said with as much humor as he could manage without sounding patronizing. "Right or wrong, what did you expect the governments and UN to do after the cyborgs rejected their authority and refused to lay down arms? I mean for Christ's sake you claimed sovereignty, and that meant no more tax revenue from you, which is what it really boils down to."

"We just wanted to be free." Rebecca said.

"People who want freedom and don't have the strength to take it never get it." Crow said. "Again, it's not right, but what is?"

"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing." -Socrates

The nineteenth century and early twentieth century saw the culmination of a certain old way of thinking, the sort of thinking that led each and every intellectual of any repute to conclude his life with an epic work that basically boiled down to "Absolutely Everything in My Specialty". The works got longer and longer as time passed. An obsession with minutia and the meticulous detail of such works began to resemble that urge six year olds sometimes get towards comprehensive cataloging. "I'm going to write down every person/number/word in the world". Less reflective children continue the exercise until they get bored, but certain children reach a sort of elementary school epiphany that there is always more to write down. They wouldn't necessarily put it so succinctly, but that's the gist of their conclusion.

Just about every field of human thought suffered from the same malaise by the early twentieth century.

Historians would dedicate decades to compiling comprehensive histories. Edward Gibbons finished off the eighteenth century with the immense six volumes of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a feat later topped by numerous historians embarking upon their own attempts to write comprehensive histories of absolutely everything. William and Ariel Durant's The Story of Civilization spanned eleven volumes and two million words. Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History topped out at twelve volumes. If a work could just be long enough it could capture the essence of everything that happened in all of human history.

Writers churned out longer and longer novels throughout the nineteenth century, taking twenty pages to describe a man getting out of bed in the morning. Dickens and Tolstoy took years off their lives just lifting their manuscripts. If a novel could just be long enough, it might capture reality itself.

Physicists reveled in the pinball universe. Every atom a billiards ball bouncing around in perfect accordance with physical laws. If you could measure just so precisely, you could know the precise position and vector of every atom in the entire universe. You could predict through humble Newtonian physics every event in all of history, every thought that ever flitted through a human brain. You could see the future. If the measurements could just be precise enough, you could know everything that ever was and ever would be.

Mathematicians spent half a century on the monumental project of comprehensively defining and proving all mathematical axioms, fitting them into a grandiose universal set. With enough volumes, you could annotate and define every possible bit of logic and its relationship with all other conceivable logic.

Children see the flaw in this societal hubris: there is always more. A history could always be more complete, until a volume was written on every single person who ever lived. A novel could always be more real, until it was as voluminous as what the historians aimed to produce. There was always another atom to measure, another axiom that didn't quite fit the existing ones. We thought the map could be as perfect as the territory.

The twentieth century tore down all those notions, one after another. Gödel's incompleteness theorem destroyed the idea of comprehensive mathematics, proving not only the impossibility of completeness, but also that any system included axioms that were true but not provable. Einstein ripped down physics with relativity and the genesis of quantum mechanics: it's not simply that we do not know whether an electron is here or there until measured, it's that the electron is simultaneously in both places until we do. Schrödinger's cat. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Our ideas of history itself disintegrated in the world wars of absolutism and the birth of atomic fire. Science fiction and horror were born as nineteenth century novels died. Lovecraft and Wells wrote of a vast and incomprehensible universe that dwarfed everything in human experience a mere few decades after writers focused their microscopes on cataloging the minutia of human experience.

We cannot know everything, but realizing that is the first step to knowing something.

"Relying on words to lead you to the truth is like relying on an incomplete formal system to lead you to the truth. A formal system will give you some truths, but as we shall soon see, a formal system, no matter how powerful--cannot lead to all truths." -Douglas Hofstadter

They dropped Crow at his house just before noon, meandering up the pine forested hills above the valley. The houses were close enough together to never mistake it for a rural area, but the money in the area allowed just enough acreage to plant veritable single file forests between the old ranch style houses built sometime in the middle of the previous century. Privacy was always an illusion, but here it was a bit better than most suburbs. Construction companies had snuck the development in just before the condo craze that would have studded these hills with jagged tenements like teeth jutting from a jawbone. Crow and Trinan had gotten a down payment down on one right after the latest renovation fever had swept through it to maintain prices.

Crow got out of the limo and took a business card from Mathers' outstretched hand. "They shouldn't hassle you anymore." Mathers said. "The DA doesn't have anything on you, and we made it clear that we'll bury them if they try it. Da Vinci Law has formidable resources, for the right cause."

"Glad I qualified." Crow said.

"You paid your dues." Mathers said. His face crinkled into a not so friendly smile. "So far. Osteryoung or Hydane will be in touch, I'm sure."

The limo pulled off, pine cones exploding like grenades under its tires, leaving Crow with the sour feeling that he had ceded a great deal of control to an unknown entity. If screwing me furthers their ends, I don't think they'd hesitate. The only way to deal with people like that is to take the same attitude yourself.

Crow's cell phone vibrated twice and then started to ring. He answered it and found an infuriated Rebecca on the other end of the connection.

"Did you do it?" She demanded.

"Do what?" Crow asked.

"Quit playing dumb. The takedown. The big hack."

"I just got home from the courthouse." Crow said. "I told them everything I knew, which wasn't much, and they released me. Trust me, something like that just isn't my style."

A long pause stretched from her end of the conversation. "They've been interrogating me all morning, just because I spent the night before drinking with you for a while in the Hole."

"The police?"

"No, International Robotics." Rebecca said. "They ambushed me on the way in the front door this morning, didn't even make it to my office. Asked me to go home afterwards, they'd let met know if and when they needed me back at work."

"That's a lousy way to get canned." Crow said. "And you didn't even get to trash everything you'd ever worked on because someone had already done that. Got to be frustrating."

There's a phenomenon in certain circles known as the discovery of population. We're used to the idea of people being a national resource, familiar with the perception by both the extreme right and extreme left during the 20th century of the value of having more and more people in a state. More workers => more industry, more soldiers => more power. But this is a fundamentally modern perception of population. Prior to Napoleon, the huge population of France (larger than many other states combined, for centuries) was considered a liability. Three times the population didn't yield a multiple of power, but a multiple of burdens. It just meant more damned half starved peasants whose necks needed boots. And boots were expensive and more fun to use kicking other countries in the dangly bits.

Napoleon democratized warfare overnight. He realized that a hundred thousand eager volunteers kicked the crap out of ten thousand crack troops with years of training. And if they failed, it took him a couple weeks to round up another hundred thousand volunteers whereas it took another decade to train up a few regiments of shock troops. Napoleon fielded the largest armies ever seen in Europe and used them to conquer the better part of the continent. And every time disaster struck, every 400,000 man Grande Armée that disintegrated into the Russian wastes, more men waited at home to be handed a rifle and a uniform.

Napoleon was the most dangerous man to arrive in Europe since the Khan died at the gates of Vienna, not because he conquered (conquerors are a dime a dozen in European history), but because he woke the beast of the people. For all of history the power of the people was a force to be beaten down, not something to be tamed. It was too dangerous to tame, it could turn on the master's hand too easily.

That's democracy, shed of elections and millennia of elevated discourse on natural rights and freedom. Democracy in its rawest form, the beating heart underneath all those pretty words and infrastructure, is just the people moved to action. The institutions, the parliaments and congresses and republics and constitutions, are the bit and bridle and saddle that turn the strength of the people into something useful and constructive. It's a fine line that cynical governments walk with their people: break a mount and it's tame but worthless, be too lax with the whip though and it will lose fear and throw you.

Experts keep saying that Mousavi will negotiate and cut a deal and that will be the end of it. Experts don't understand democracy, they think that people follow leaders. If Yeltsin hadn't climbed on top of that tank, Russians wouldn't have returned to communism, someone else would have climbed onto the tank. In the mythology of westerns, wild mustangs will sometimes take a rider, but they won't ride with him forever, they will leave him if he becomes unworthy. You can chain a wild horse, but that doesn't make it a fucking toy pony.

"They're winning the war though aren't they?" Crow asked.

"Where is it this time?" Mathers grunted. "The Ukraine? Or are we in Africa this year?" Mathers took a moment to loosen his tie. "Our soldiers are butchered before they leave our borders so that we can send half-men to fight whole men who reject our ideologies. All the while, we're losing the real war in the court rooms and congressional hearings."

Back at the front gates, soldiers tried to use riot shields to physically push a way through the crowds for cars to pass out of the gates and leave the base. Objects arced out of the crowd and slammed into the cars and soldiers like oversized hail. One camera zoomed in on the objects with a shaky focus, revealing the familiar copper-topped shape of batteries.

The protestors rained a barrage of batteries down, some thrown by hand, some flung from makeshift slingshots. Windows shattered with the dull thunk of cracking safety glass, a handful of soldiers went down, holding battered skulls. Suddenly, the neat line between the surging sea of protestors and rigid rows of soldiers disintegrated. In moments, everyone was mixed together with batons and riot shields flailing against an ocean of arms and thrown batteries. The first shots rang out in the next moment, probably from some inexperienced private buried under a dozen people trampling him. Or maybe it was from a plant, someone from the protestors with the plan of taking the first couple of shots in hopes of tossing a match onto the gasoline surface of the whole situation. In any case, the protestors began to spin around from multiple shots, red mist exploding up into the air from a dozen different bullet tracks. The protestors broke and ran, roiling over each other like waves spreading outward from a dropped pebble. In a theatric effect, the camera tilted to the side and crashed to the ground, the feed continuing while the cameraman presumable fled or fell to the hail of lead.

"Shit." Crow said. He flipped off the plasma and settled back, not wanting to see the vultures descend and analyze it to death. "Who's right when everybody's wrong?" He asked no one in particular.

"That's what the courts are for." Mathers said. "The system works if the damn people would just get that through their heads."

Crow looked out the window at the rolling city. "The problem is that fanatics are unwilling to accept any outcome that is not absolute victory for their causes. Courts and the rule of law are built on compromise, which is the antithesis of the fanatic mindset."

Mathers snorted. "You're one to start calling people fanatics, son. Trashing the networks of the company that just fired you isn't considered a moderate view point in many people's books."

Mathers started to talk, but Crow stepped forward, put a hand on Mathers' shoulder and spoke in a low voice, measured to sound thoughtful. It was his stockholders voice, the one he used to explain himself to those he had to respect, even if he didn't. "It's a terrible tragedy that has struck one of the titans of our new industrial age." Crow said mildly. "It is true that we parted ways amicably earlier that day. I'm proud of the work that I did over the years with International Robotics, but we made the mutual decision for private reasons to go in different directions. I, of course, personally offer any aid in my power to International Robotics during this time of crisis." Thank you, ladies and gentlemen of the academy.

The reporters babbled a bit more, Mathers stared at Crow with a glare tempered by grudging acknowledgement that Crow had actually said the right words to the vultures. At an unspoken signal, the flying wing reformed around Crow and they pushed through the reporters, who had gotten just enough meat to have lost their original vigor.

Crow found himself buried in the back of a limousine sent by Da Vinci Law to pick them up. It was certainly a step up from the ride in the back of the blue and white last night. A plasma screen descended from the ceiling as the car pulled away and brought up CNN.

Mathers talked at Crow for a few minutes but he was already engaged in raiding the mini fridge. He found a jar of chocolate covered macadamia nuts and a bottle of soda - real glass, for nostalgia's sake even though Crow thought those had been phased out before he was born. But of course, nostalgia is about what you want to remember not what you actually remember.

"These are comped, right?" Crow interrupted Mathers. "I'm unemployed you know."

Mathers glared and pulled out a cell phone to check into his offices. Crow turned up the volume on the plasma to hear what the anchors were describing. The scroll at the bottom had nothing to do with the current footage. "Forty dead in Budapest car bomb . . . UN pulls out of Botswana after massacre of peacekeepers . . . Organization of Sentient Rights files Supreme Court appeal over Green Eyes ruling . . . Congress begins hearings on the Centuaurian crew controversy, expected to subpoena Intl Robotics President."

Hundreds of protesters waving the traditional placards and banners of nonviolent movements the world over blocked access to the gates outside of a military installation on the east coast. The camera cut to footage of injured men rolling off of planes on gurneys, flesh mixed everywhere with black rubber and fabric. One man held up an entirely metal hand to wave at the cameras.

"Cyborgs." Mathers muttered as he hung up his cell phone. "My old man was career navy, now you can't get in the front door of the recruiting station if you won't sign off on mandatory enhancements."