The Great Simoleon Caper - Neal Stephenson, ebook
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Neal Stephenson
Simoleon Caper
Copyright 1995
v1.1
TIME Domestic SPECIAL ISSUE, Spring 1995 Volume 145, No. 12
BY NEAL STEPHENSON
Hard to imagine a less attractive life-style for a young man just out of college than going back to
Bismarck to live with his parents -- unless it's living with his brother in the suburbs of Chicago, which,
naturally, is what I did. Mom at least bakes a mean cherry pie. Joe, on the other hand, got me into a
permanent emotional headlock and found some way, every day, to give me psychic noogies.
For example, there was the day he gave me the job of figuring out how many jelly beans it would take to
fill up Soldier Field.
Let us stipulate that it's all my fault; Joe would want me to be clear on that point. Just as he was always
good with people, I was always good with numbers. As Joe tells me at least once a week, I should have
studied engineering. Drifted between majors instead, ended up with a major in math and a minor in art --
just about the worst thing you can put on a job app.
Joe, on the other hand, went into the ad game. When the Internet and optical fiber and HDTV and
digital cash all came together and turned into what we now call the Metaverse, most of the big ad
agencies got hammered -- because in the Metaverse, you can actually whip out a gun and blow the
Energizer Bunny's head off, and a lot of people did. Joe borrowed 10,000 bucks from Mom and Dad
and started this clever young ad agency. If you've spent any time crawling the Metaverse, you've seen his
work -- and it's seen you, and talked to you, and followed you around.
Mom and Dad stayed in their same little house in Bismarck, North Dakota. None of their neighbors
guessed that if they cashed in their stock in Joe's agency, they'd be worth about $20 million. I nagged
them to diversify their portfolio -- you know, buy a bushel basket of Krugerrands and bury them in the
backyard, or maybe put a few million into a mutual fund. But Mom and Dad felt this would be a
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 no-confidence vote in Joe. "It'd be," Dad said, "like showing up for your kid's piano recital with a
Walkman."
Joe comes home one January evening with a magnum of champagne. After giving me the obligatory
hazing about whether I'm old enough to drink, he pours me a glass. He's already banished his two sons to
the Home Theater. They have cranked up the set-top box they got for Christmas. Patch this baby into
your HDTV, and you can cruise the Metaverse, wander the Web and choose from among several
user-friendly operating systems, each one rife with automatic help systems, customer-service hot lines
and intelligent agents. The theater's subwoofer causes our silverware to buzz around like sheet-metal
hockey players, and amplified explosions knock swirling nebulas of tiny bubbles loose from the insides of
our champagne glasses. Those low frequencies must penetrate the young brain somehow, coming in
under kids' media-hip radar and injecting the edfotainucational muchomedia bitstream direct into their
cerebral cortices.
"Hauled down a mother of an account today," Joe explains. "We hype cars. We hype computers. We
hype athletic shoes. But as of three hours ago, we are hyping a currency."
"What?" says his wife Anne.
"Y'know, like dollars or yen. Except this is a new currency."
"From which country?" I ask. This is like offering lox to a dog: I've given Joe the chance to enlighten his
feckless bro. He hammers back half a flute of Dom Perignon and shifts into full-on Pitch Mode.
"Forget about countries," he says. "We're talking Simoleons -- the smart, hip new currency of the
Metaverse."
"Is this like E-money?" Anne asks.
"We've been doing E-money for e-ons, ever since automated-teller machines." Joe says, with just the
right edge of scorn. "Nowadays we can use it to go shopping in the Metaverse. But it's still in U.S.
dollars. Smart people are looking for something better."
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 That was for me. I graduated college with a thousand bucks in savings. With inflation at 10% and rising,
that buys a lot fewer Leinenkugels than it did a year ago.
"The government's never going to get its act together on the budget," Joe says. "It can't. Inflation will just
get worse. People will put their money elsewhere."
"Inflation would have to get pretty damn high before I'd put my money into some artificial currency," I
say.
"Hell, they're all artificial," Joe says. "If you think about it, we've been doing this forever. We put our
money in stocks, bonds, shares of mutual funds. Those things represent real assets -- factories, ships,
bananas, software, gold, whatever. Simoleons is just a new name for those assets. You carry around a
smart card and spend it just like cash. Or else you go shopping in the Metaverse and spend the money
online, and the goods show up on your doorstep the next morning."
I say, "Who's going to fall for that?"
"Everyone," he says. "For our big promo, we're going to give Simoleons away to some average Joes at
the Super Bowl. We'll check in with them one, three, six months later, and people will see that this is a
safe and stable place to put their money."
"It doesn't inspire much confidence," I say, "to hand the stuff out like Monopoly money."
He's ready for this one. "It's not a handout. It's a sweepstakes." And that's when he asks me to calculate
how many jelly beans will fill Soldier Field. Two hours later, I'm down at the local galaxy-class grocery
store, in Bulk: a Manhattan of towering Lucite bins filled with steel-cut rolled oats, off-brand Froot
Loops, sun-dried tomatoes, prefabricated s'mores, macadamias, French roasts and pignolias, all
dispensed into your bag or bucket with a jerk at the handy Plexiglas guillotine. Not a human being in
sight, just robot restocking machines trundling back and forth on a grid of overhead catwalks and
surveillance cameras hidden in smoked-glass hemispheres. I stroll through the gleaming Lucite
wonderland holding a perfect 6-in. cube improvised from duct tape and cardboard. I stagger through a
glitter gulch of Gummi fauna, Boston baked beans, gobstoppers, Good & Plenty, Tart'n Tiny. Then,
bingo: bulk jelly beans, premium grade. I put my cube under the spout and fill it.
Who guesses closest and earliest on the jelly beans wins the Simoleons. They've hired a Big Six
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 accounting firm to make sure everything's done right. And since they can't actually fill the stadium with
candy, I'm to come up with the Correct Answer and supply it to them and, just as important, to keep it
secret.
I get home and count the beans: 3,101. Multiply by 8 to get the number in a cubic foot: 24,808. Now I
just need the number of cubic feet in Soldier Field. My nephews are sprawled like pithed frogs before the
HDTV, teaching themselves physics by lobbing antimatter bombs onto an offending civilization from high
orbit. I prance over the black zigzags of the control cables and commandeer a unit.
Up on the screen, a cartoon elf or sprite or something pokes its head out from behind a window, then
draws it back. No, I'm not a paranoid schizophrenic -- this is the much-hyped intelligent agent who
comes with the box. I ignore it, make my escape from Gameland and blunder into a lurid district of the
Metaverse where thousands of infomercials run day and night, each in its own window. I watch an ad for
Chinese folk medicines made from rare-animal parts, genetically engineered and grown in vats.
Grizzly-bear gallbladders are shown growing like bunches of grapes in an amber fluid.
The animated sprite comes all the way out, and leans up against the edge of the infomercial window.
"Hey!" it says, in a goofy, exuberant voice, "I'm Raster! Just speak my name -- that's Raster -- if you
need any help."
I don't like Raster's looks. It's likely he was wandering the streets of Toontown and waving a sign saying
WILL ANNOY GROWNUPS FOR FOOD until he was hired by the cable company. He begins flying
around the screen, leaving a trail of glowing fairy dust that fades much too slowly for my taste.
"Give me the damn encyclopedia!" I shout. Hearing the dread word, my nephews erupt from the rug and
flee.
So I look up Soldier Field. My old Analytic Geometry textbook, still flecked with insulation from the
attic, has been sitting on my thigh like a lump of ice. By combining some formulas from it with the
encyclopedia's stats . . .
"Hey! Raster!"
Raster is so glad to be wanted that he does figure eights around the screen.
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 "Calculator!" I shout.
"No need, boss! Simply tell me your desired calculation, and I will do it in my head!"
So I have a most tedious conversation with Raster, in which I estimate the number of cubic feet in
Soldier Field, rounded to the nearest foot. I ask Raster to multiply that by 24,808 and he shoots back:
537,824,167,717.
A nongeek wouldn't have thought twice. But I say, "Raster, you have Spam for brains. It should be an
exact multiple of eight!" Evidently my brother's new box came with one of those defective chips that
makes errors when the numbers get really big. Raster slaps himself upside the head; loose screws and
transistors tumble out of his ears. "Darn! Guess I'll have to have a talk with my programmer!" And then
he freezes up for a minute.
My sister-in-law Anne darts into the room, hunched in a don't-mind-me posture, and looks around.
She's terrified that I may have a date in here. "Who're you talking to?"
"This goofy I.A. that came with your box," I say. "Don't ever use it to do your taxes, by the way."
She cocks her head. "You know, just yesterday I asked it for help with a Schedule B, and it gave me a
recipe for shellfish bisque."
"Good evening, sir. Good evening, ma'am. What were those numbers again?" Raster asks. Same voice,
but different inflections -- more human. I call out the numbers one more time and he comes back with
537,824,167,720.
"That sounds better," I mutter.
Anne is nonplussed. "Now its voice recognition seems to be working fine."
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