Nasty cynical old man

[hirez]

Grimley Henge Research Station
Tuesday

For immediate release

A group of scientists at a leading research establishment have discovered an as yet unheralded new energy source, according to preliminary findings released today. Dr. Eric Prebble, director of research was quoted as saying "Although it's early days, we're very excited by this line of enquiry. If follow-up research pans out, we may well have a remarkable new form of energy generation on our hands."

* * *

Dr Prebble peered over his glasses at the figure in the scorched white coat leaning on the other side of his desk. He imagined it made him look like a kindly headmaster. From her vantage point, Ashleigh Moser thought it made him look like her student bank manager, about to refuse her a usefully sized overdraft.

"Ash, my dear." said Prebble.

The name's Ashleigh and I'm not your dear, you sexist old git thought Ashleigh. She smiled and arched an eyebrow. She was left alone and given conveniently large research grants. Dealing with Prebble was an appropriate cost.

His mouth was still flapping.

"... and with that in mind, could you explain what you think you've found?"

"We think we can generate electricity from teenage angst" she said.

Prebble, who'd last been a teenager well before the discovery of angst and had probably had the sort of upbringing that involved regular beatings, compulsory rugger and a deal of scouting for boys, laughed heartily. To Ashleigh, it sounded like a fish barking up its gills. She scowled at Prebble until he calmed down.

"You must admit, my dear, that it does sound a little preposterous."

Swear to God, if you 'my dear' me again I'm feeding that hateful tie into the shredder with you still attached to it. she thought, trying not to grip the desk-edge too hard. She took a breath.

"It wasn't until the big social networking sites arrived that we could actually measure the effect. Of course once we knew what we were looking for, we discovered that Usenet could generate a similar although much smaller field. We've spent the last few months working on collecting and transmitting the energy field, and we think we've cracked the last problem now."

Prebble's eyes had started to glaze over at the mention of social networking. If it didn't involve eighteen holes, he was lost.

"Are you planning on great rooms of teenagers with colanders on their heads, all hooked up to the national grid?" He asked. He'd stopped his academic peering and was now sitting back and taking like a tabloid editor.

"No, we had a much better idea" said Ashleigh. She pulled what looked like a lumpy mobile phone from her lab-coat pocket and handed it to Prebble. He turned it over in his hands, inspecting it carefully as if it were a live hand-grenade.

Ashleigh pointed at the speaker-end of the device. "There's a phased antenna array in there. It's sensitive enough to focus on a vague sense of injustice from sixc metres away. From there we bounce the field to the nearest cell-tower, downconvert it to something the national grid can cope with and bish bash bosh."

Prebble handed her the phone. "Bish bash bosh?" he repeated.

"Sorted. Cushty. Safe... Bob's your uncle?"

Ashleigh's research had involved mixing with a lot of teenagers. She was quite happy to fail to understand their argots, rather than becoming come comically unhip youth-group leader.

"Ah, righto!" beamed Prebble. "Off you jolly well trot then. Go and build a pilot or whatever and don't come back until you've got a credit-note from the CEGB."

Ashleigh smiled triumphantly as she left his office. Today would not be a good day to acquaint Prebble with the number and nature of his sexist crimes.

Only one member of her team was in evidence when she returned to her lab. Tom handed her a fresh mug of coffee and folded himself into the sofa opposite hers.

"I assume from your expression of naked glee that the old man went for it." he said.

"Yep. He actually told me not to come back until the prototype was up and running." Ashleigh grinned over the top of her coffee.

Tom laughed.

"Oh, that's just too convenient. I'll enable the generators just after lunch."

* * *

The phones were only a modest hit to begin with - bought by the guilty-liberal eco apologists as carbon neutral sops for their energy-profligate offspring, by and large. That was until some wag coded up and Emo-meter for the device and released it for free on an unsuspecting internet. Given instant and accurate measurement of how much more Emo - or Goth or sXe or... Modifications to the basic angst-meter seemed to appear weekly, piggybacking on whichever teenage market segment was deemed most angstful - the individual was compared to its peer-group, the 3G capable portion of the planet's teenagers went for it like a pack of eyelinered rats.

The networks, reacting with their customary knack for divining popular opinion, ignored it.

That was until a couple of weblogs noted the fact that critical spending patterns amongst the 14-24 demographic had physically moved. People had been looking at the 3G coverage maps and had taken to spending their time where the signal was strongest. There was no point broadcasting your inner hurt where it couldn't be measured, after all. Google mapping hacks and geolocational weblogs became the hot new thing to know about. Malls and cafes in areas with good coverage were packed out. Those elsewhere kept their customer base of over 25s, but the youth were entirely absent.

The networks started to pay attention when an obscure 3G provider bought out a much larger network, junked their existing technology and began an 'aggressive rollout' of 3G kit. At that point it became officially Too Late.

* * *

Ashleigh found Tom elbow-deep in the entrails of the coffee machine. He glanced round on hearing her footsteps.

"Is this some deliberate attempt to destroy productivity?" She put a hand on one hip for dramatic emphasis.

"I'll have it back together in a couple of minutes" he said, selecting a pipe-wrench from the pile of tools by his knee.

"With some bits left over, I see."

Tom pulled his head out of the works and followed her gaze.

"Oh. That. Having the Java machine running a Java microcontroller was too recursive. I've replaced it with something that runs Linux, that way we can reprogram the thing on the fly, or run cron-jobs, or y'know, just give it a serial console."

Ashleigh laughed out loud.

"That's genius. Make sure you lock access down to our subnet, though."

Tom blushed and grinned.

"I learn at the feet of a master. Er, mistress. Literally in this case. Anyway, you were the one who hacked up the angst-meter. That was inspired. Are you still keeping track of the different versions?"

"Yes, when I have time. And it was about that matter that I came to see you. Some suits have created a problem and they'd like us to see about making it go away."

* * *

Ashleigh and Tom had paged through the presentation she'd been emailed and then sat and slurped coffee meditatively for a while.

Tom spoke first.

"So if I understand that bullet-pointed bottomspeak correctly, they've financed the build-out of that phone network with a series of guarantees to the west coast utility companies, and if there's even a tiny blip in the general level of angst abroad, the computer programs running the financial vehicles will throw a shit-fit, sell everything and it'll all go horribly wrong."

Ashleigh nodded. "That would be my estimation, too... But that event in itself would generate a lot of angst."

"True, but it would be the wrong sort. Stockbroker angst is nearly worthless. Those buggers could be leaping out of the windows and you'd get about enough juice to run the coffee machine." said Tom.

Ashleigh looked confused momentarily. "How do you... Oh, is that why you wanted to block-book the psych lab while I was in Vancouver?"

Tom nodded and looked slightly ashamed. "Guilty. We were at a bit of a loose end while you were off gallivanting, and I didn't want old man Prebble thinking he could find us something to do and it seemed like an interesting avenue for research, so..."

"I'm not sure I'd call presenting papers in front of uninterested Canadians 'gallivanting'... Anway, did you get any results, or did the ethics people come charging in before you could apply the electrodes?"

Tom grinned again.

"Nothing I'd want to publish, since we could only really test individuals, but I'm fairly sure about the worthlessness of stockbrokers..."

There was another coffee-swilling silence.

"You know" said Ashleigh "If we could find ways of artificially maintaining the levels of teenage anxiety..."

"What, like shuffling their favourite popstars in and out of rehab?"

"No, that's too... Shotgun debug. You'd want to engineer a crisis within the social networking sites and let the speed of gossip in a vacuum do the heavy lifting for you."

Tom opened his mouth to day something, seemed to think better of it, and then started again in an almost reverent tone.

"That's... Evil genius territory."

Ashleigh looked taken aback.

"Huh? What d'you mean?"

"I can't work out if you should call it psycho-hysteria or computational philosophy." said Tom.

"Oh. Jesus." Ashleigh now looked horrified.

"Come on. The corporates have been cranking out teen idols for years, and everyone knows that pop-songs are computer generated now. The fashion industry has better central planning than the Soviets and rebellion is watching a different music television channel than your peers. We're just talking about testing a few naive assumptions to see which way the numbers go, right?"

"Um. Oh, what the hell. If we get it wrong, we end up with a net increase in human happiness."

"A lose/lose situation. Like it."

Comments

[moral-vacuum.livejournal.com]

YES!

(Apologies for not being multisyllabic in my appreciation, its been a long day)

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Ta very much.

[sushidog.livejournal.com]

*grin* Top stuff.

And now I'm suddenly wondering if Gerard Way's recent *shock horror* marriage was actually a ploy to raise angst/productivity... It all begins to make sense!

[hirez.livejournal.com]

You see? And Strikeout/Fandomgate. It's all connected.

[sushidog.livejournal.com]

Which can only mean that Eliza Cutz is in fact an eminent computational philosopher and may well get the Nobel Prize next round. That's marvellous. What's even better is that when she's announced as a Nobel Prize winner, that in itself will raise levels of teenaged angst; it's simply genius.

Have I mentioned to you that I have long wanted a t-shirt emblazoned with the legend "I'd rather be having teenaged angst"?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I'd envisaged computational philosophy as an earnest and geeky calling, but of course now you mention it there are going to be highly trained agents provocateur undertaking such missions. And at that point it all goes a bit steampunk.

You hadn't.

I want one that reads 'hack the patriarchy' in a dot-matrix font.

[reddragdiva]

*wild applause*

Is it saleable?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Ta.

Probably not. It mentions current tech, so it's got a half-life of about three months.

[reddragdiva]

Cool! All you need is an editor who loves their gadgets but gets technofear from a pair of scissors.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

A mention on bOing^2 should do it. It's full of the right buzzwords.

[jenwrites.livejournal.com]

I work right across the street from a college, so I could totally use one of those phones :)

[eljaydaly.livejournal.com]

Oh, my god. That's fabulous! *_* Funny!

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I just have to get these ideas out of my head to make space for real work.

I wonder if it can be bashed into a shape that Escape Pod might like?

[eljaydaly.livejournal.com]

How about Andromeda Spaceways?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

They're still sitting on the Diner-thing, which I've been quiet about so as not to queer the pitch.

[reddragdiva]

Anything that you can claim as an actual sale for munny. Anything.

[nalsa.livejournal.com]

Hahahahahaha.

[aca.livejournal.com]

Splendidness. :)

[hazeii.livejournal.com]

Brilliant stuff!

[emzebel.livejournal.com]

Genius, my man!

Some friends and I created a performance piece in high school which was described by one of the evaluators as "self-masturbatory teen angst"
...being 17ish, we took to that mantle like ducks.

Ah, the good old days.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Ta very much.

[easterbunny.livejournal.com]

This is genius. Especially this:

It's sensitive enough to focus on a vague sense of injustice from six metres away.

I also love the java machine running on a java microcontroller. :)

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Thanks. The whole thing became filled with geek/hacker jokes more or less by accident.