Earth

“I like listening to people, watching people,” the codger explained as he sat cross-legged before them, displaying a surprising limberness.

“So what?” Roland shrugged. “All you geeks listen and watch. All the time.”

The old man shook his head. “No, they stare and record. That’s different. They were raised in a narcissistic age, thinking they’d live forever. Now they compensate for their failing bodies by waging a war of intimidation against youth.

“Oh, it started as a way to fight street crime — retired people staking out the streets with video cameras and crude beepers. And the seniors’ posse really worked, to the point where perps couldn’t steal anything or hurt anybody in public anymore without getting caught on tape.

“But after the crime rate plummeted, did that stop the paranoia?” He shook his gray head. “You see, it’s all relative. That’s how human psych works. Nowadays seniors — you call us geeks — imagine threats where there aren’t any anymore. It’s become a tradition, see. They’re so busy warning off potential trouble, challenging threats before they materialize, they almost dare young men like you—”

Roland interrupted. “Hey, gremper. We get all this in Tribes. What’s your point?”

The old man shrugged. “Maybe pretending there’s still a need for neighborhood watch makes them feel useful. There’s a saying I heard… geeks find their own uses for technology.”

“I wish nobody ever invented all this tech shit,” Remi muttered.

The war veteran shook his head. “The world would be dead, dead now, my young friend, if it weren’t for tech stuff. Want to go back to the farm? Send ten billion people back to subsistence farming? Feeding the world’s a job for trained experts now, boy. You’d only screw things up worse than they already are.

“Tech eventually solved the worst problems of cities, too: violence and boredom. It helps people have a million zillion low-impact hobbies—”

“Yeah, and helps ’em spy on each other, too! That’s one of the biggest hobbies, isn’t it? Gossip and snooping!”

The old man shrugged. “You might not complain so much if you’d lived through the alternative. Anyway, I wasn’t trying to catch you fellows in some infraction. I was just listening. I like listening to people. I like you guys.”

Crat and Roland laughed out loud at the absurdity of the remark. But Remi felt a queer chill. The geezer really seemed to mean it.

Of course Professor Jameson kept saying it was wrong to overgeneralize. “… because you are gang members, that will color your views of everything. Young males do that when engaged in us-versus-them group bonding. They have to stereotype their enemies, dehumanize them. The problem’s really bad here in this part of the city, where the young-old conflict has deteriorated …”

Everybody hated Jameson, all the girlie gangs and dudie gangs — staying in his class only because a pass was required for any hope of earning a self-reliance card… as if half the kids were ever going to qualify. Shit.

“I like you because I remember the way it was for me,” gremper went on, unperturbed. “I remember when I felt I could bend steel, topple empires, screw harems, burn cities…” He closed his wrinkled eyelids for a moment, and when he reopened them, Remi felt a sudden thrill tickle his spine. The old guy seemed to be looking faraway into space and time.

“I did burn cities, y’know,” he told them in a low, very distant voice. And Remi somehow knew he had to be remembering things far more vivid than anything to be found in his own paltry store of recollections. Suddenly, he felt awash in envy.

“But then, each generation’s got to have a cause, right?” the oldster continued, shaking free of reminiscence. “Ours was ending secrecy. It’s why we fought the bankers and the bureaucrats and mobsters, and all the damned socialists to bring everything out into the open, once and for all, to stop all the underhanded dealing and giga-cheating.

“Only now our solution’s causing other problems. That’s the way things go with revolutions. When I overheard you guys dreaming aloud of privacy — like it was something holy — Jesus, that took me back. Reminded me of my own dad! People used to talk that way back at the end of TwenCen, till my generation saw through the scam—”

“Privacy’s no scam!” Roland snapped. “It’s simple human dignity!”

“Yeah!” Crat added. “You got no right to follow guys’ every move…”

But the old man lifted one hand placatingly. “Hey, I agree! At least partly. What I’m trying to say is, I think my generation went too far. We overthrew the evils of secrecy — of numbered bank accounts and insider deals — but now you guys are rejecting our excesses, replacing them with some of your own.

“Seriously though, what would you boys do if you had your way? You can’t just ban True-Vu and other tech-stuff. You can’t rebottle the genie. The world had a choice. Let governments control surveillance tech… and therefore give a snooping monopoly to the rich and powerful… or let everybody have it. Let everyone snoop everyone else, including snooping the government! I mean it, fellows. That was the choice. There just weren’t any other options.”

“Come on,” Roland said.

“All right, tell me. Would you go back to the illusion of so-called privacy laws, which only gave the rich and powerful a monopoly on secrecy?”

Crat glowered. “Maybe. At least when they had a…

monopoly, they weren’t so dumpit rude! People could at least pretend they were being left alone.”

Remi nodded, impressed with Crat’s brief eloquence. “There’s something to that. Who was it said life’s just an illusion, anyway?”

The gremper smiled and answered dryly. “Only every transcendental philosopher in history.”

Remi lifted his shoulders. “Oh, yeah, him. It was on the tip of my tongue.”

The old man burst out laughing and slapped Remi on the knee. In an odd way, Remi felt warmed by the gesture, as if it didn’t matter that they disagreed in countless ways or that a gap of half a century yawned between them.

“Damn,” the gremper said. “I wish I could take you back to those days. The guys in my outfit… the guys would’ve liked you. We could’ve shown you some times.”

To his amazement, Remi believed him. After a momentary pause, he asked, “Tell us… tell us about the guys.”

The three of them deliberated later, some distance from the tree, as dusk shadows began stretching across the park. Of course the old man left his big-ear unplugged while they passed judgment. He looked up when they returned to squat before him.

“We decided on a penalty for the way you invaded our privacy,” Roland said, speaking for all.

“I’ll accept your justice, sirs,” he said, inclining his head.

Even Crat gri

The old man nodded — in acceptance and obvious pleasure. “My name is Joseph,” he said, holding out his hand. “And I’ll be here.”

Over the next few weeks he kept his promise. Joseph told them tales they had never imagined, even after watching a thousand hypervideos. About climbing the steep flanks of the Pe

He told them about the fall of Berne and the last gasp of the Gnomes, whose threat to “take the world down” with them turned out to be backed by three hundred cobalt-thorium bombs… which were defused only when Swiss draftees finally turned their rifles on their own officers and emerged from their shattered warrens, hands high over their heads, into a new day.