The Probability Broach, chapter 23
Win and his friends are sitting on the curb, dejected and humiliated, outside the children’s birthday party they just violently crashed. Win narrates that they later “settled out of court” to compensate the kids for the trauma of having guns pointed in their faces.
“Wait!” Something else clicked in my head. “I’ve just had another thought.”
“Did it hurt?” Lucy and Ed asked simultaneously. Clarissa grimaced and put a hand delicately over her mouth. I like loyalty in a woman.
“Okay, wise-asses. Burgess was regional head of the most important federal agency in the country. There were a couple thousand flunkies available to get their hands dirty for him on field operations. So why his personal involvement in this whole thing? Why did he return to the Meiss murder scene? Why did he follow me to Fort Collins? Why did he kill everyone who interfered with him: Meiss, MacDonald, all the attempts on me?”
Lucy nodded impatiently.
“He was up to something on his own,” I finished. “Something he didn’t want others—especially his bosses—horning in on.”
Win concludes that Burgess was most likely keeping the Probability Broach a secret even from the U.S. government, biding his time while he figured out how to exploit it for maximum personal gain. But since Win killed Burgess in a duel at the Continental Congress, Madison and his allies will have to reestablish contact with the other side before they can usher in their invasion force.
This is good news, because it means the North American Confederacy isn’t going to be nuked the day after tomorrow. However, they still have to figure out where the bad guys are hiding out.
Since it’s not in Fort Collins, Win suspects the next logical spot is in Denver, the regional headquarters of SecPol in his world. He calls up Deejay and Oolorie, the scientists who first built the Probability Broach. In an earlier chapter, they mentioned that they were developing a device that could detect when and where someone else is using one. He’s hoping they’ll have it ready by now, and Deejay obliges him:
“Win, I was just about to try your number again. I wanted—”
“We’ve been otherwise occupied,” I grimaced, outlining our recent humiliation and such conclusions as we’d reached. “You mentioned building a device to detect someone else’s use of a Broach?”
“But that’s why I’ve—We finished it this morning. A simple matter of harmonics. We could have saved you all the trouble you got into!”
Apparently, Deejay didn’t try doing anything with this device until Win called her up to ask about it. It’s like a video game, where NPCs with vital quest information just stand around like inanimate objects until the player approaches them and opens a dialog box.
(Side note: Do Deejay and Oolorie feel any sense of guilt, or at least responsibility, for inventing the device that’s the reason their civilization is threatened with nuclear annihilation? Do they have any sentiments similar to Oppenheimer’s famous quote? That’s a moral question that TPB never addresses.)
Deejay asks another pertinent question: once they find the bad guys, what are they going to do? Win says they’ll kick the door down and come in guns blazing, the way he was planning to do with the kids’ birthday party. But Oolorie the cetacean scientist has qualms (much like Lucy, who goes back and forth several times on this—first saying it’s immoral to break into someone else’s house no matter what, then assisting Win in doing so, then saying it’s immoral again):
“Have you not also reasoned that you will be violating their rights, as fully as they plan to violate ours? Would you—”
“Fuck all this philosophy jazz!” I shouted. “This is a matter of survival!”
“And importing unprincipled behavior is an aid to that end? My poor ignorant—”
“I agree, Win,” Deejay interrupted diplomatically. “It’s not only suicidal, but morally wrong, as well.”
“And unnecessary,” the principled porpoise added. “Nothing encourages ethical practices so well as a practical alternative to evil.”
Win asks what they mean by that, and Deejay says they’ve discovered an “interference factor”—a way for one Probability Broach device to scramble another one’s signal. If they can get close enough to where Madison and his henchmen are setting up, they can jam the bad guys’ Broach and prevent them from contacting anyone in Win’s world.
Now the heroes have a plan. But Deejay warns that they’ll have to get close, because it requires great precision. If their alignment is a tiny bit off, the two interfering Broach devices will go “concentric”—i.e., whatever goes into one comes out the other, even if they’re in the same universe. (Think this will be relevant later?)
I looked at Ed, then back at the Telecom. “How difficult would it be to set your machinery up somewhere else?”
She considered. “Providing we had sufficient power? All we’d need is a pinhole, and detection hardly requires—”
“Great! We’re all going on a little trip!”
In the penultimate chapter of this book, the expected deus ex machina has finally made its appearance.
As we’ve discussed, an anarchist world has no good way to counter either an invading army, or a homegrown mafia that tries to seize power over others. Because it doesn’t have a monopoly on force in its own territory, an anarchy can’t effectively defend itself against organized threats.
Despite being a right-wing anarchist himself, Smith seems to agree with this criticism. When his archvillain John Jay Madison made exactly this point, no one was able to think of a convincing response or come up with a plan to counter him. It’s remarkable that a utopian political novel intended to sing the praises of anarcho-capitalism instead gives a clear illustration of how it’s fatally flawed.
To rescue his political philosophy, Smith introduces a last-minute deus ex machina. By using the “interference factor” discovered by the scientists, the protagonists can foil Madison’s plot without having to come up with a way the NAC could defeat an armed invasion. But that doesn’t do anything to establish the plausibility of this philosophy in the real world, which doesn’t have such conveniently magical technology.
New reviews of The Probability Broach will go up every Friday on my Patreon page. Sign up to see new posts early and other bonus stuff!
Other posts in this series:
Idle thought: what if Win simply guns Madison and the other leaders down without even a duel?
He’s then bound over for trial … but assuming an honorable adjudicator, would they rule against him? There must be plenty of cases which aren’t “He came at me with his gun, I had no choice!” — stalking, threatening, sexual assault, robbery (my impression is that killing a thief is legit). The adjudicator might agree that shooting someone to stop an invasion is perfectly legit.
By the way I’m enjoying your Fountainhead reviews.
Spoiler warning, although this probably isn’t a huge spoiler: something comparable to this happens at the climax of the book.
As far as we’re told, Win never faces any kind of trial for causing the deaths of the villains. It seems as if the entire NAC just agrees to ignore it.
… the real world, which doesn’t have such conveniently magical technology.
Ya think so? Something’s keeping interdimensional invaders at bay!
This development explains a lot – libertarian technology has an inherent feature: it can’t be used for immoral purposes. A stray bullet in the bad state-run USA might easily kill a child in his bedroom, but in the NAC, bullets know better. Likewise, the broach technology comes with a way for good freedom-lovers to stop it from being used for invasions. I’m surprised Lucy doesn’t know that.
You know, I could easily buy that this world has computerized – excuse me, “paratronic” – guns which only fired if locked on a likely target. You could pull the trigger, and keep the trigger pulled, and the gun would only fire when it detected and calculated that it would have 99% chance of hitting a human target which wasn’t behind a wall. (Because whatever detection methods they used might be able to see through walls to an extent.) This way, you don’t need to be especially skilled unless you’re trying to shoot a hostage-taker without hitting a hostage. Also uses less munitions and does less collateral damage. I don’t know if anyone is currently working on that in the real world, and I don’t feel like researching at the moment, but there have been people making word noises in that general direction.
Detecting “bad guys” is a lot less plausible, obviously. You need to figure out who they are first and shoot only at them, but Broachworld seems to make that a lot harder than the real world. As for the Probability Broach itself, it’s basically magic, so you can just make up whatever about it.
As I mentioned in earlier posts, there are a couple of huge weaknesses this has as an author tract. One is that this is fundamentally an action-hero story, which is typically about how following the rules doesn’t always work and going outside them might be the only realistic way to save the day. (Assuming, of course, it’s not purely a gratuitous “beat some people up” plot.) This is very much on display in this book, which is at best a distraction from the supposed moral/legal superiority of the world he’s presenting, and is arguably a detraction from it. If things were really that great, you shouldn’t need to bypass how things normally work.
The other is that the only evidence that this is actually a better world than the real one is the accelerated technological development. There’s no explanation how the forming the NAC resulted in a continuous technological boom, it’s just assumed. That’s only going to be convincing to anyone who already believes that this is a likely consequence of society embracing Ancap philosophy, plus maybe a tiny number of highly ignorant and gullible people. And without something at least resembling an explanation, plausible or otherwise, it’s just magic. You might as well say that Broachworld came about by someone eating lots of bundt cake, or because it was invaded by unicorns, and it would be equally magical. It would be okay if this were the kind of social exploration or commentary which doesn’t actually need to know how things got the way they are, but it’s inexcusable here.