Jump 255 03 Geosynchron by David Louis Edelman

Author:David Louis Edelman [Edelman, David Louis]
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction - Science Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, General, Science Fiction, Science Fiction - General, Corporations, Fiction
ISBN: 9781591027928
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2010-02-23T00:00:00+00:00

Finally there comes a time, a few months after Natch's arrival in the colony, when he sits back and takes stock of his experiment.

He chose to focus on the Chomp cartels because it seemed like a goal within reach. Even if it is possible to completely rid the orbital colony of all the black code dealers, such a feat would be years in the making. Instead he sought to target a narrow area where he could definitively change the course of the colony, to find one place where he could shift a culture running in the red to one running in the black. He wanted to see if it could be done.

And now Natch has indeed rid the colony of all but one of the major suppliers of Chomp. Yet what has changed?

The junkies that haunt the corridors in between bodegas trading sex for black code have not dissipated; they've just moved from Chomp to other equally toxic varieties. He certainly did not expect all the retailers in 49th Heaven to begin accepting Vault credits overnight, but he had hoped to have some effect on the currency situation. Instead he has merely driven the value of Chomp canisters to stratospheric levels. Grub Town still exists and is still as heavily trafficked as ever. The drudges insist that, despite the perplexing drop in the Chomp trade, the incidence of missing persons in the colony has not changed. Even the boy Rodrigo, whom Natch saved from the clutches of Molloy, has recently been seen frequenting the bodegas on the lookout for Suffr-G.

Has Natch's crusade against the Chomp dealers had any impact on the quality of life in 49th Heaven? Has he stoppered the flow of misery through one pipeline, only to see it reemerge just as strong somewhere else?

He sits in his hotel room night after night, lights extinguished, meditating on the interlocking strands of causality between the different schemes he's running. He studies the leading economic indicators of 49th Heaven published on the Data Sea: stock and commodity prices, tourism numbers, numbers of arrests and convictions, murder rates. He walks up and down the colony's central corridor from Seventh Ring clear through to First Ring, studying the faces of those he passes. He sits in dark corners of the bodegas with Molloy eyeing the door, and he listens to the gossip of the OrbiCo workers who stop in for a drink.

And Natch concludes: yes, he has made a difference.

Just as the small bonus he helped provide to the OrbiCo workers on the Practical did not lift anyone out of poverty, so too his efforts on 49th Heaven are incremental at best. The gains he has made here are tenuous and constantly in danger of slipping away. But they are real.

There has been an ever-so-slight drop in the number of the colony's homicides over the past quarter. A legislator in the 49th Heaven LPRACG is garnering votes for a proposal to dismantle Grub Town. Natch can see a trivial rise in the number of ordinary families trekking through the outer rings.

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