The Long War

Then the gods truly smiled on Black’s project when an experiment to find a new type of surgical plaster was left too long in the sunshine and turned into “gel’, as it became known, a curious quasi-organic matter embedded with self-designing, self-repairing bio-neural circuitry, smart enough to morph itself physically to fit the circumstances it found itself in. The newspapers called it the intelligent bandage, after its first applications, but it had soon proved to be much more than that—and much smarter. As a self-correcting, self-repairing, physically malleable data and processing store, gel in all its forms had become the mainstay of the Black Corporation’s output. There was a wave of new products, and indeed new types of product. This time many of Black’s competitors were wiped out completely.

Now it was the turn of governments to become suspicious. Black was simply too rich, too powerful—not to mention too generous and too popular—to be borne. The US administration made attempts to take control of Black’s operations under various national-interest fig-leaves, or at least to break up his empire. Eminent domain was quoted; militarization of Black’s enterprises was attempted.

But Black hastily diversified into obviously non-security, non-military applications, such as medicine. Suddenly the corporation turned its attention to the disadvantaged: to letting the dumb speak and the lame walk. Nowadays there were people seeing, hearing, walking, running, swimming, even juggling, thanks to the prosthetic aids, implants, and other products developed by the Black Corporation and its subsidiaries. With such a portfolio behind him Black was able to argue that there was no national interest served in the government’s pursuit of him; its actions were anti-capitalist—whisper it quietly, socialist.

Since then Black had made an even grander gesture when, nearly a decade ago, he had more or less gifted twain technology, through an international consortium of manufacturers, to the UN, governments worldwide, and the peoples of the new Earths. Nowadays the twains that plied the US Aegis—even the few police and military craft as well as the commercial fleets—were all Black Corporation products, built at cost. Not only that, the conglomerate disbursed even vaster funds to good causes, and Black became even more of a hero.

Despite all this, however, the name of Douglas Black was anathema to many in the chat rooms.

Nelson had searched in vain for plausible reasons, and found none. It wasn’t as if many of those who poured out their bile could have any personal grudge: none of them, for example, had been executives of the moribund companies whose careers might have been ruined by Black’s rise. It seemed the worst you could say about Douglas Black as a human being was that he was a workaholic, who worked hard and expected people to work hard for him. Maybe this had cost him, even significantly. There had been an online legend that Black’s serendipity lab was even behind the Stepper box that had opened up the Long Earth. Somehow Black had pissed off the inventor, and in the end the box design had been dumped into the public domain, galvanizing all mankind, but earning not a penny for anybody, not directly at any rate.

That was all behind the scenes. And yet Black was hated, by some.

The minds hiding behind the various pseudonyms Nelson found himself staring at among the Quizmasters were not stupid. They could not be, given the high bar set for entrance in the first place; indeed it sometimes felt as if a membership of Mensa might just about qualify you to make the coffee for this particular metaphorical kaffee-klatch. Not stupid, no. But…

Nelson had met many people in different walks of life, and he thought he could read at least some of them. These men and women were bright, truly bright. But in some, even through the impersonal medium of the chat rooms, he sensed something dark and hidden, sometimes betrayed by the occasional comment, or curious turn of phrase. Envy, to start with. Paranoid suspicion, for another. A kind of seam of malevolence—a capacity for cold hatred—a capacity that needed an outlet, any outlet. A man like Black, who presented a public face, who could seem either an object of envy, or too good to be true and therefore deserving of suspicion, was an ideal target. This didn’t show itself often, no, but it was apparent to those who really watched other people.

And especially to a man who had grown up a black kid in South Africa, and had not forgotten the experience.

Anyhow, whatever you thought about Black, Nelson did like the Black Corporation, in all its wonderful and manifold manifestations. And in particular he liked the mysteries their various activities threw up for him to ponder over.