Another Now Page 4

  By early April, a Cerberus prototype was ready for testing. It would involve the destruction of a single strand of CREST’s subatomic trail in total and pristine isolation within a special chamber. The trick was to choose exactly the right amount. Too much might damage or even destroy CREST as a whole. Too little would fail to demonstrate Cerberus’ power.

  ‘I appreciate the agony,’ he wrote to Iris, ‘of the first medical researchers seeking the right dosage for the smallpox vaccine. To protect CREST from big tech’s greed, it appears I must risk destroying it.’

  But given that he could not un-discover CREST, he felt he had no choice. The date of Cerberus’ first scheduled test was set for 7 April 2025. As it drew closer, Costa’s belief in his chosen path grew only firmer.

  Diploma

  Uncreased are the vistas of tedious landscapes. But, as the unexpected results of Cerberus’ test so amply demonstrated, it is the convoluted, folded spaces where genius, intrigue and wonder are to be found.

  The idea of a fold in space–time, allowing instantaneous communication with or travel to another time and place via a wormhole, was first explained to us by Einstein. But fascination with folds and their power runs deep in our myths.

  When King Proetus of Argos decided to dispense with young Bellerophon, whom his wife had unsuccessfully tried to seduce, myth has it that he devised what should have been the perfect crime. Proetus summoned Bellerophon and gave him a vital top-secret mission. The young man’s task was to hand-deliver a letter to Ioabates, King of Lycia and Proetus’s father-in-law.

  ‘Under no circumstances should you show the letter to anyone or read it yourself,’ he ordered Bellerophon. ‘Were you to do so, your own safety and that of our kingdom would be jeopardized.’

  Eager to please his king, the young man gave his word that he would do as he instructed and under no circumstances open the letter. Satisfied, Proetus took out a papyrus and wrote on it his deadly instructions to the recipient: ‘Kill the bearer of this missive. If you fail to trust me and he lives, your kingdom is in peril.’

  Proetus then folded it carefully twice, sealed it, and handed the diploma – the Greek word for a piece of paper folded twice – to Bellerophon, then sent him on his way.

  But by folding the letter, Proetus unwittingly caused the un-dried ink to smudge, obscuring some of the words, so that when Ioabates unfolded the papyrus, all he could make out from it was the following: ‘If you…kill the bearer of this missive…your kingdom is in peril.’ Thus, Bellerophon was spared – and not until Einstein reinvented our view of the cosmos did a double fold have as much of an impact on Western civilization’s collective consciousness.

  By the end of the day on 7 April 2025, Cerberus appeared to have passed its test with flying colours. The subatomic trail had been fully scrambled without any discernible damage to CREST as a whole. Immensely satisfied with the preliminary results, Costa programmed HALPEVAM to run a complete diagnostic overnight, locked the door to his lab and went to bed, where for the first time in years he fell into a deep and unbroken sleep.

  On the morning of 8 April 2025, a Tuesday it was, he woke up in a fine mood, hopeful that Cerberus would soon be operational and that his wild scheme to liberate people might actually become a reality. With his mug of coffee still in his hand, he began reading the diagnostic data HALPEVAM had produced overnight.

  The data made no sense. Not that it was incomprehensible. On the contrary, it was completely legible and of a structure that he instantly recognized. In fact, the closer he looked, the more obvious it became. Reading through the stream of digits and machine-language printouts, he realized that what he was looking at was a message, encoded yes, but ultimately written in plain English and apparently addressed to him. He set to work deciphering it.

  ‘Who is this? And what do you want?’ it began.

  These were the precise questions he wanted answers to himself! Where on earth had this message come from? And who was the sender?

  Further tests provided the unfathomable but irrefutable answer that the message was coming from his exact same location, in San Francisco, sent by a person with his very own DNA. For a while he wondered whether he had gone mad, or if he had somehow written this message himself and forgotten. Had HALPEVAM taken on a life of its own, perhaps? But no, the tests showed that, impossibly, the message had arrived during the night, while he was asleep and the lab was locked. It had been written by him, in this very place, on the night of 7 April 2025, and yet he knew for a fact from the security log that the lab had not been opened until this morning, and as far he was concerned he had just enjoyed the best night’s sleep he’d had in years. It was as if the message had come from an alternative reality: from an alternative version of himself inhabiting another now.

  Though it took him almost a month of further tests and experimentation, it was the myth of Proetus, Bellerophon and the diploma that eventually gave Costa the clue he needed to resolve the puzzle. Somehow, incredibly, the energy involved in testing Cerberus and scrambling CREST had been enough to create a tiny fold in space–time, opening up an Einstein-Rosen wormhole, just as those scientists had predicted. Though no wider in diameter than a subatomic particle, this minuscule duct was sufficient to allow a stream of data to flow from one side to the other.

  Unlike Bellerophon’s diploma, which resulted in his marriage to a Lycian princess with whom he lived happily ever after, Costa’s precipitated a stream of messages that threw his already strained life into total turmoil. By the end of June Costa had worked out how to communicate with the person writing to him from the Other Now. Using 1970s batch-file messaging technology, so old it required only minuscule bandwidth, he was managing to send messages back through the wormhole, and receive replies, of several thousand characters – one at a time.

  Once the communication was established, Costa gave himself over to it utterly. All thought of HALPEVAM’s intended purpose was swept aside. Thanks to the irksome time lag between messages, progress was slow, but within less than four weeks, a remarkably detailed picture of this person – an alternative version of himself – and the world he inhabited was coming into view.

  By comparing notes backwards in time, Costa and Kosti (the name he had chosen for his self in the Other Now) concluded that their personal experiences and historical trajectories were identical but only up to a very specific point, at which their memories branched off, leading them to two starkly different realities. Until that point, historically, politically, socially and economically, the Other Now was identical to our own – and yet from that point onwards, drastic differences became apparent. The moment when divergence set in could be pinned down to the autumn of 2008 – at almost exactly the moment of the great financial crash.

  As he poured over Kosti’s dispatches, Costa’s initial shock at the mere fact of their existence was replaced with one of shock at what they contained. Costa’s long-standing assessment of the crash of 2008 was that it had been too good a crisis to waste, and yet waste it we did. It could have been used to transform society radically. Instead, we not only rebuilt the world as it had been before but, by bailing out the banks and making the working people pay off the debt, we had doubled down on it, instituting a global regime in which, effectively, political and economic power had been handed over wholesale to the most bankrupt of bankers. Costa had always believed that an alternative had been available to us. A road we never took. Now, it seemed, he had Kosti’s dispatches to prove it.

  Slowed down by the obligation to answer Kosti’s own queries regarding our sad reality, Costa took care to ask only the most pressing of questions. What had Kosti meant when he mentioned that the corporation he worked for had no boss? What did he mean when he said there were no longer any banks? That no one owned land or paid taxes? What had been the catalysts for such a momentous transformation in such a short space of time? With every reply received, Costa built up a treasure trove of information about the
Other Now. Meticulously he recorded his correspondence with Kosti, compiling and editing it into a single continuous dialogue in preparation for the day when he would be able to share all that he had discovered with Iris.

  3

  CORPO-SYNDICALISM

  No bosses, no wages, no problem

  ‘OK, here is how we do things,’ began Kosti’s account of the corporation in which he worked. ‘No one tells anyone what to do. We choose freely the persons or teams that we want to work with and also how much time to devote to competing projects. Everything in our company is in flux. Staff move about, new teams are formed, older projects die, new undertakings are concocted. No bosses to order anyone around. Spontaneous order and personal responsibility overcome the fear of chaos.’

  This constant flux was a design feature of corporate life in the Other Now, Kosti explained. When hierarchies are used to match people with particular roles and teams, the result is clumsy, inefficient, oppressive. Status anxiety and the need to satisfy one’s superiors make full transparency impossible. People are kept in the dark about the relative attractiveness or drawbacks of working with particular managers or colleagues, how happy or dysfunctional teams are, how rewarding or boring different projects. Hierarchies simply perpetuate and expand themselves, resulting in a terrible mismatch between a person’s standing and what they actually contribute. Even the hierarchy’s great advantage, of ensuring that all posts are staffed at all times, is a hidden loss.

  Under the flat management model, Kosti acknowledged, there are frequent gaps. But the fact that they are observable to all makes them useful. When people notice an empty spot where David’s desk used to be on the sixth floor, and then discover on the company’s intranet that he moved to the fourth floor to work with Tammy, Dick and Harriet, everybody learns something important about the value of the work being done in that nook on the fourth floor. With people voting freely with their feet, an ongoing collective assessment takes place of each project’s relative value. If unpredictability is the price of staff autonomy, it is a small one to pay, Kosti reported.

  ‘But surely there must be a hierarchy when it comes to recruitment?’ Costa asked. ‘Surely there are menial tasks that no one would choose to perform?’

  ‘No, no hierarchy is involved at any level – not even in recruitment or the assignment of shitty chores,’ replied Kosti. New staff are taken on informally, he explained, without the need for a personnel department. If Tammy and David need, say, a graphic designer to work with them but cannot find one within the firm, they post a notice on the intranet announcing themselves as the initial search committee, inviting others to join them if they wish. Once assembled, the impromptu committee places an ad on the company’s public website to solicit applications. The committee then compiles a shortlist and conducts interviews, which anyone in the company is entitled to witness either remotely, via the intranet, or in person. Finally, Tammy, David and the rest of the search team post their recommendation, and anyone who wants to is able to cast a vote either against or in favour of their chosen candidate.

  The same process is used, no matter the job, including for secretarial or run-of-the-mill accounting positions for example. New staff are recruited on the understanding that, once in the company, no one can force them to be secretaries or accountants. And indeed, Kosti explained, it is often the case that people recruited for these tasks eventually branch out into more creative roles in a way that no hierarchy would ever allow. But more often than not, perhaps out of a sense of moral obligation, they provide the services for which they were originally employed for sufficiently lengthy periods.

  ‘But what about pay?’ Costa was impressed but still incredulous. ‘Surely someone must decide who gets what?’

  ‘No, no hierarchy is involved in determining pay either,’ came Kosti’s answer. A company’s income is divided into five slices. One slice, 5 per cent of all revenues to be precise, is retained by the government. The remaining 95 per cent is divided into four: an amount to cover the firm’s fixed costs (such as equipment, licences, utility bills, rent and interest payments), an amount for R & D, a slice from which basic payments to staff are made and, lastly, a slice for bonuses.

  The relative size of those four slices is decided collectively on a one-person-one-vote basis. Anyone who wishes to propose a change in the current distribution has to put forward their new formula. For example, if they want an increase in the amount allocated to basic pay, they will need to say which other slice or slices will see the necessary reduction. If only a single alternative proposal for the following year’s distribution is put forward, a simple two-way referendum suffices. More often than not, though, many competing business plans are put forward, each accompanied by an intricate rationale. Here a more complicated voting system is used.

  Before voting, staff are given at least a month to read up on each proposal, to debate them and to form their preferences. They are then invited to rank the proposals in order of preference on an electronic ballot form. If no plan wins an absolute majority of first preferences, a process of elimination takes place. The plan with the fewest first preferences is knocked out and its first-preference votes are reallocated to the voters’ second preferences. This simple algorithmic process is repeated until a plan has acquired more than half the votes cast.

  Having determined the amounts of money the company will spend on the various slices, the basic pay slice is then divided equally among all staff – from those recently employed as secretaries to the firm’s star designers or engineers.

  Costa appreciated the simplicity of the system but could not see how the fifth slice, the bonuses, could be distributed democratically. ‘Surely any decision as to who gets what bonus must involve a hierarchy?’ he insisted.

  ‘Do you recall the Eurovision Song Contest?’ Kosti asked.

  Costa did remember that hideous celebration of kitsch.

  ‘Then you may recall the voting scheme at the end of all the awful singing: every participating country was given points to allocate to the songs of every other country, but not to its own song. The song that gained the most points won. We use essentially the same allocation system to determine the bonuses of each member of our corporation,’ Kosti explained.

  Every year, just before the New Year’s holidays, Kosti is given one hundred merit points to distribute among his colleagues. He can give all his one hundred merit points to a single colleague whom he thinks has done a uniquely exceptional job or he can spread them out more thinly among colleagues whom he thinks have made above-average contributions to the company. Meanwhile, all his colleagues do the same, resulting in each member of the company receiving a percentage of the total merit points, and it is this which determines the percentage of the bonus fund they receive. If, for example, Kosti collects 3 per cent of the total merit points, his personal bonus will be 3 per cent of the firm’s total bonus fund – whose size has already been determined via the preferential voting algorithm.

  Perhaps because of his Mediterranean background, Costa’s immediate concern was that such a system was open to abuse. ‘If that were a Greek or Italian company,’ he confided to Eva weeks later, ‘I have no doubt that most people would seek reciprocal agreements with their friends and allies: “I’ll award you my one hundred points if you return the favour.’ ” But when he put this to Kosti, he received an interesting answer.

  Actually, Kosti explained, this is not something that any one of his colleagues contemplates, but to help maintain the precious social norm, they rely on a special sort of artwork. In a large, dimly lit room, along with other artworks contributed by staff and friends, a laser-powered installation is kept on permanent display during the twelve months following the bonus allocation. This projects a hologram in which every member of staff is represented in the form of their chosen avatar. If they aren’t immediately visible or recognizable, a simple interface can be used to identify and locate them. Between the avatars th
ere are arrows of different thickness representing the flow of merit points between colleagues, with the thickness of the arrow in proportion to the number of merit points awarded. Any suspicious reciprocity is thus immediately apparent: when the thickest of arrows leaves Dave’s avatar heading towards Tammy’s, while Tammy’s equally thick arrow goes in precisely the opposite direction, Dave and Tammy will have a hell of a job in the tea room explaining to colleagues this remarkable coincidence of mutual appreciation.

  Costa was captivated. The corporation Kosti described had eliminated not only bosses and hierarchies but one of the crucial injustices of capitalism: that the owners of a company control its profits while those who work within it receive only a wage. The realization dawned on Costa that this was a company he would love to work for.

  One person, one share, one vote

  ‘None of us are free if one of us is chained.’ Costa often found himself humming this rhythm-and-blues song, which reminds us that individual freedom is impossible unless slavery is eradicated wholesale and in all its forms. And he knew that the worst form of slavery is that which people consent to for lack of any viable alternative.

  One summer in the early 1990s Costa had been holidaying in Thailand when he learned of a jeans factory nearby that had burned down in the middle of the night, incinerating almost the whole night shift. The reason so many died was that, to save money on security, management locked the building while the workers within toiled. To his horror, Costa learned that the workers had all signed forms giving their consent to this practice.