The Probability Broach, chapter 12
[Content note: Mention of suicide.]
After their meeting with Bertram, Ed and Win pay a visit to their prisoner from the home invasion the other night, to see if he feels like talking:
First stop, Valentine Safe & Vault, where the thrifty shopper can get anything from a titanium can that’d hold both Thorneycrofts, to a tiny padlock smaller than a matchhead, guaranteed to withstand a full clip of .375s.
Most Confederate crooks post bond, not to assure appearance in court, but restitution to their victims.
How strangely gracious of them.
Consider the logic of this. If you’re accused of a crime, either you did it, in which case you obviously don’t care about the “laws”/customs of this society; or you didn’t, in which case you’re not going to have fond feelings toward the person who falsely accused you.
In either case, why would an accused criminal be so obliging as to put up a bond, when there’s no authority that can force them to do so? Apparently, L. Neil Smith expects us to believe that criminals in the North American Confederacy follow the rules and politely acknowledge, “It’s a fair cop” when they get arrested.
Valentine was in the hoosegow biz sort of by accident. Some client had ordered up a pair of cells, intended for the rare bird who wouldn’t make bond, then had gone bankrupt before the goods were delivered. Valentine had tried to make up the loss by renting them out.
Smith implies that if you’re accused of a crime and can’t or won’t post a bond, you’re jailed until the trial. That seems normal and familiar – until you think about it, because the North American Confederacy is an anarchist society with no laws, police or justice system. Yet he writes as if the legal regime he scorns is still in effect.
If you’re accused of a crime, who sets the bond amount? This is supposed to be a free society with no coercion, so on whose authority can you be locked up?
The apparent answer, as we saw in a previous chapter, is that the private security firm you hire to protect you also adjudicates disputes. This includes detaining you until trial, if it’s a criminal matter.
But what if you don’t have a security company, or you refuse to say what yours is? Do they have to let you go? Or can the person who caught you just kill you on the spot?
This also ignores, as I mentioned, the predictable consequence that wealthy people would have impunity, because these firms would always side with their paying customers. They’d give them a slap on the wrist, or let them off with no punishment at all. Even if some firms tried to be fair, they’d quickly lose all their customers to less-principled competitors that promised their clients sweetheart deals.
The reason this doesn’t happen in real life is because there’s a justice system that won’t let you stonewall forever. If you harm someone, you can be prosecuted or sued in a court with the power to enforce its judgments. If you have an insurance company that indemnifies you, they can be forced to pay up. But in Smith’s world, these companies are a law unto themselves. There’s no higher authority that can force them to do anything.
When Ed and Win arrive at the private, for-profit jail business (just try not to shudder at the thought of that!), they get some bad news. Like other fanatic cultists from fiction, their prisoner committed suicide rather than face interrogation:
Penology’s scarcely a science here, but Valentine hadn’t taken precautions any two-bit county calaboose would consider elementary. Our prisoner, subcontracted to Valentine’s by his insurance company, had torn up a bedsheet and hanged himself in the night.
“And this makes money for me?” I asked, unsure what Ed was talking about as we bellied up to the counter.
“It better. You put that bullet in his leg, so I listed him as your prisoner.” He fixed the manager with a frosty glare. “It’s just as if he’d escaped.”
Worse, the prisoner refused to give his name or address (and his insurer also refused to identify him – further evidence that security firms will do favors for their customers), so they have nothing to go on. Their investigation has hit another dead end.
The silver lining is that the proprietor of the lockup owes Win compensation for this inconvenience: three hundred and seventeen gold ounces’ worth, according to the text. Under Ed’s glare, he grudgingly agrees to pay up:
“Say, bud, where do you want this forfeit credited?”
“Good question. Ed, where do they send your money?”
“Mulligan’s. But hand them a second ‘Bear, Edward W.’ and I’ll never get balanced again!”
I felt around in a pocket for the Gallatin goldpiece. “Then how about the Laporte Industrial Bank?”
This is one of those little throwaway lines that has gigantic implications. Let’s analyze it.
“Mulligan’s” is presumably a reference to Midas Mulligan, the banker from Atlas Shrugged, but that’s not the line I was talking about.
I was referring to Ed Bear’s dismissive remark about something that’d actually be a big problem in this anarcho-capitalist society: How do they handle people with identical names?
It seems like the only means of identifying people is by name. There are no Social Security numbers, nor any other government ID scheme that could be used to disambiguate people. Biometrics would be an option, but that’s out too; remember, they don’t know about fingerprints in the NAC.
So, how do you handle it if you’re a banker and your bank has a thousand John Smiths as clients? How do you know which account to apply a credit or a debit to?
Again, the seemingly-obvious answer is that private companies could develop their own ID numbers and tracking schemes, like credit card numbers. But if that’s Smith’s solution, he never says so. As we just saw, Ed Bear believed that his bank wouldn’t be able to deal with two accountholders who had the same name.
This should be impossible. You can’t run a high-tech industrial capitalist economy on a first-name basis.
Dozens or hundreds of different companies, and thousands of workers, are needed to manufacture all the parts that go into making something sophisticated, like a computer or a jet plane. For this to work, you absolutely need ways to identify and keep track of people, so that goods, services and payments all get routed to the right places. Otherwise, the flows of commerce would seize up, accounting would be a nightmare, and long-distance trade would be inefficient to the point of impossibility. And just try to imagine how stock and bond trades could work!
As we saw last week, Smith handwaves all this complexity away. He claims that most Confederate citizens run small businesses out of their homes in their spare time, doing business with their neighbors on a handshake. Yet, somehow, they also live in a hyper-advanced, highly-organized society with interstate highways, interplanetary travel, immense skyscrapers, and massive scientific endeavors like transdimensional portals. It just doesn’t add up.
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Wow, I am genuinely amazed at the implication this system can’t handle two people of the same name (even if Smith played that off as a joke) because even before identification systems there were means of disambiguation. Have these people never heard of including both the name and dwelling? It wouldn’t be perfect, but come on, Smith.
Actually, I think these might be Smith’s (incompetent) way of giving his characters and society flaws. Like, he knows that if the investigation is too easy, the story won’t have any setbacks and won’t be interesting, so he randomly decides to make the people ignorant of practices that they really ought to have discovered through experience by now. That, or he wants to indicate that their society is so crime-free that they never had to develop these skills, despite this being incompatible with there being investigative companies and the rest in the first place. (If everyone is so law-abiding, how do these guys make a profit?) Not to mention the secret conspiracy which could only exist if there is massive discontent beneath the surface. So there is no sensible reason for the NAC to be ignorant of all Win’s suggestions. Maybe one or two so that he isn’t useless, but not everything.
Now, I’m trying to think of an incentive for an innocent to post bond, and best I’ve got is that it shows they are willing to cooperate and therefore didn’t do it. Of course, once the guilty start doing it to throw off the trail we’d seemingly be back to square one, except that those too poor to pay would always be suspicious. It just shows that for-profit justice can’t work even if steel-manned. Of course, in a real horizontal society where this kind of thing isn’t profit-based, they would still have some method of preventing “stonewalling”. But Smith doesn’t care about such things.
… a tiny padlock smaller than a matchhead, guaranteed to withstand a full clip of .375s.
sonofrojblake in the previous post asked where the NAC got their “unobtainium” required for 500-floor buildings – looks like we’re getting closer!
How does the padlock-maker machine this metal, anyhow?
And all a crook needs is a couple of rods made out of that metal and simple leverage should be able to break the padlock open, I think.
Perhaps like adamantium it’s something you mold before it takes on its indestructible qualities.
It’s a common trope in fiction to shoot off a lock – a trope (like so many others) that shows you the people who write fiction spent their lives and educations listening to artists and not paying attention in science class.
Listen up, humanities graduates, I’m going to pitch this at your level:
Some metals (e.g. iron) are HARD.
Some metals (e.g. lead) are SOFT.
LOCKS are typically made of metals that are HARD (e.g. iron) (I think deep down you kind of know this already)
BULLETS are typically made of metals that are SOFT (e.g. lead) (I think deep down you kind of know this already)
If you hit something HARD with something SOFT, the HARD thing doesn’t break. (I think deep down you kind of know this already).
Now all you have to do is put those three thoughts together to realise that… yes, that’s right, very good, SHOOTING LOCKS DOESN’T MAKE THEM BREAK.
People who paid attention in science class will mention armour-piercing bullets and the advantages and disadvantages of variations in ductility, but don’t you worry your pretty little artistic heads about such complications. Just know that basically any normal lock can’t be opened by shooting it with basically any normal bullet.
In fact, it’s worse than that – BY DEFINITION, any normal lock can be opened with a key in seconds. That is, after all, the entire point of the things – to allow access to someone who has a key. Unfortunately, that also means that with the right tools anyone with a reasonable degree of skill can pick that lock, often in seconds. I myself have gained access to:
– a tool locker at work
– a kit locker belonging to a colleague who’d lost his key during basic training
– a bicycle lock my stepbrother boasted couldn’t be cut with a hacksaw
all of them in a matter of seconds longer than it would have taken to find a keyring in your pocket, get the right key to the front, put it in the lock and turn it.
One thing that can reliably make a lock more difficult or even impossible to pick (OR open even with the key) is shooting it. The act of shooting it won’t OPEN the thing (see above) but what it can do is bugger up the finely-machined internal workings of the lock to the point that it simply won’t open at all and the only thing you can do is cut it off.
All of this of course is academic since the author of this work clearly has an understanding of the world that would be shameful for a twelve-year old. I mean, even my seven-year old son understands that some people have the same name as other people, which seems to be a concept beyond this author.
What this leads me on to is my envy of the guy, and people like him. I don’t mean this ironically or sarcastically, I’m absolutely serious. I’m a pretty intelligent person, it seems. Certainly when somebody offered to pay for my Mensa test when I was at university the result (167) seemed to indicate… something. Certainly my seven A levels, bachelors degree in chemical engineering, status as a chartered engineer as recognised by the Engineering Council and my thirty plus years of experience suggest I’m a reasonably bright boy. Yet I’m wracked with uncertainty. I couch my recommendations in caveats. I suffer, still, from imposter syndrome. Despite there being multiple functioning chemical plants on several different sites around the country that are there by MY design, I still want for full confidence in myself, professionally and personally.
This fucker, on the other hand, had the audacity not merely to write this garbage down, but to get it published and expect people to pay to read it. The confidence implicit in that action stuns me. Yes, I have written some books. But they were print-on-demand published – I had no actual expectation anyone would buy them. And they’re not fiction. I can’t imagine sending fiction I’ve written to a publisher – the hubris that would imply feels absolutely alien to me. I truly do envy the sheer self-belief this guy and people like him have, despite a complete lack of any discernible talent or value to society. I really wish I could have that level of delusion. I’m pretty sure it would be preferable to, y’know, knowing stuff.
Banks would have to identify people by ID, not name. To deposit money you tell somebody your bank ID and your account ID and they can put money in. It’s easy enough to imagine the banks setting up a trade association that maintains universal bank ID codes. Each bank is then free to hand out IDs that only mean something to that bank and overlaps between banks don’t matter. To do anything but deposit you need a password or other security.
That system would have to be complicated further for strong security but the idea is straightforward.
The weird thing is that these ID numbers wouldn’t even require central government, since banks today assign customers account numbers without ever worrying about compatibility with other banks, and it works fine. So I don’t understand why this “stateless” society doesn’t understand the concept.
I wonder if L. Neil Smith had some kind of ideological “I am not a number, I am a free man” belief that using numbers to identify people is dehumanizing and wrong. That’s the only thing I can think of to explain why his super-advanced utopia has space travel and dimensional portals but can’t seem to solve the problem of two people having the same name.
I wonder what he thought about hospitals. They have to assign every patient a unique medical record number because of the mere chance, however unlikely, that two patients would have the same full name and date of birth is too much to risk, but unrepeatable record numbers ensure that two patients don’t get mixed up.
Yeah… here in Canada, back when cheques were still everywhere, the MICR numbers on a cheque were always three (or four) part numbers:
– The first part was unique to the bank/corporation
– The second part (transit number) was unique to the particular branch of the bank
– The third part (account number) was unique to the particular account in question. This was often in a type-number format so whether an account was a savings or chequing account would be obvious.
Like the old pre-cell phone numbers with area codes and central office codes, the idea is that you could start reading at the beginning, and the further you were away from the destination, the fewer digits you had to read before realizing you had to hand this off to someone else for more detailed routing. And, frankly, this is exactly the sort of thing I can see being devised by a trade organization without needing government intervention, just because everybody wants their own stuff to be handled smoothly.
Now, ensuring that only the appropriate person is able to withdraw money from the account is a different question, and one you’d think banks would be willing to handle themselves, but we also have lots of case examples where a bank is very interested in the account integrity of a big account but will actively drag their feet on fixing problems if a small account gets money taken out of it illegitimately because they don’t want to admit to a mistake.
Wait. Ed had to give the manager “a frosty glare” before Win got his money? Does that mean that if Ed hadn’t been there, the manager would have stiffed Win out of the money he was owed? Sounds like managers of private prisons are a bit untrustworthy. Once again, Smith has given a hero something to do (glare at a reprobate) at the cost of undermining his made-up society.
I don’t have the book in front of me at the moment, but I recall the manager initially doesn’t want to pay because he argues that a prisoner committing suicide in custody isn’t the same as escaping. Ed has to browbeat him until he acquiesces to the point.
“Most Confederate crooks post bond, not to assure appearance in court, but restitution to their victims. ”
Your criticism of this point is valid. Like a lot of this book, the underlying assumption seems to be that with no government, everyone’s nicer and will do the right thing.
What Fraser said, and also this point: this anarchic society thrives on the motto “might makes right” and it’s up to the individual to be more Darwinistically fit than anyone else–and if someone is not the most fit, then it’s too-bad, so-sad for them and nobody will come to their aid.
So he’s given criminals in this world no reason to comply.
I’m stuck on “tiny padlock smaller than a matchhead”. How is such a tiny lock used? How do you attach it to anything? How do you find the frigging keyhole?
Yeah, I’m wondering about that too. A padlock that small would be even more useless than those quarter-sized padlocks that come with suitcases.
But, hey, I guess The Magic of the Marketplace would come up with a use for such things, if it weren’t for taxes…
I know there’s a later book, The American Zone, that reveals there is, in fact, an American government in North America, just occupying a small dystopian part of the continent. Is that completely a retcon because nothing we’ve seen so far suggests the Confederation doesn’t spread from see to shining sea.
It’s a retcon.
On my Patreon, I’m posting scans of the graphic novel version of TPB. One of them is a map of the North American Confederacy which depicts it as taking up the entire continent, from the Canadian Arctic to the Panama Canal. There’s no other political entity shown.