Free The Duke Of Uranium by John Barnes Page A

anything nonathletic, and now that Sesh would have to depend on him, he was really afraid that his utter ineptitude at attention and memory would come shining through.
    Gweshira clicked her tongue impatiently. “Sib, you’ve just totally convinced him that no matter what, he’s going to be too bored to concentrate. Let me try, all right? Jak, I promise I won’t try to make you like the dullest parts by dwelling on them. Want me to try?”
     
    “It’s worth a shot,” Jak admitted. “And I was kind of afraid of what Uncle Sib might do. No hard feelings, please, Uncle Sib, but I think we should let Gweshira try.”
    “No hard feelings at all, whatever gets the job done,” Sib said, plopping himself into a chair to sulk.
    “All right,” Gweshira said, winking at Jak. “Now, to begin with, do you know the meaning of the shape and number designations for the social engineering zybots?”
    Jak thought for a moment. Social engineering was supposed to be a crime—basically conspiring against the rest of humanity. For hundreds of years, ever since the Wager had become the dominant religion/philosophy of the human species, and some of its implications had become clear, it had been theoretically possible that a small group of people, by using a mixture of every dirty trick ever invented for social domination, control, and manipulation, might be able to reshape society into whatever form it chose.
    Zybots, as those conspiracies were called, were known to use all sorts of appalling counter-Wager practices: propaganda, tailored drugs, assassination, networking, sabotage, brainwashing, banking, intimidation, marketing, charity, lobbying, and public-interest advocacy, among many others, and most people were willing to suspect them of piracy, slavery, and cannibalism to boot.
    That was standard school stuff. But back when Wat-nek, Redondo, and Riodow had done their pioneering work demonstrating the possibility of true social engineering, they had published everything, hoping that it would forestall the misuse of their discovery. The result was that there was not just one social engineering zybot working behind the scenes, but several hundred, each pushing society toward its particular Utopia, each thwarting the others, creating so many second-, third-, and tenth-order effects that Nakaski’s Law had set in: “The number of active social engineering zybots converges to the minimum number whose interactions make society too unpredictable to engineer,” or as Nakaski had informally put it, “One zybot is a clear and present danger, three are a menace, ten are a pack of annoying assholes, and a hundred are barely a nuisance.”
    That was as much as Jak could remember; many kids pretended to be loyal to one zybot or another, and would scrawl graffiti—a seven in a square, a one in a triangle, a two in an oval—in places where adults found it obnoxious, but he didn’t think they’d ever talked about the shape and number designations in class, or among his peers, and he didn’t think most of the kids scrawling the symbols had any idea what they meant.
    He realized that social engineering zybots were much more interesting in fiction than they were in school.
    “You know I love intrigueand-adventure stories,” Jak said after a moment. “Books, holo, flatscreen, viv, I love’em all. I know that in the stories every zybot— they’re always villains in the stories, there are never any good zybots, I bet that’s the censors making it that way?”
    “Safe bet,” Gweshira said.
     
    “Well, in the stories the zybots always have a name that’s a shape and a number, like Square Seven is a gang of malphs trying to take over the whole solar system in The Terrier Smashers. And there’s a zybot, Rhombus Two, selling an addictive aphrodisiac in Sex Pirates of Ceres. But I don’t know why they’re called those names.”
    “See, I told you,” Sib said, from his chair, not looking up. “The educational bureaucrats—that miserable