Detachment 48–49

The shop at 48–49 Thai Wiwat Alley has two doors, and the money exchange next door has one, and NaN has worked out that this ratio is the whole business in miniature: twice as many ways in as ways out.

It is ten at night in Chiang Rai, the hour when the scooters thin to delivery riders and the soi dogs take back the street. The air conditioner drips onto a plastic stool whose only job is to catch it. On the desk sit a laptop with four terminals open, a Lanna amulet, an iced coffee gone the color of the Mekong in flood, and a printout headed MOTDANG GROUP — BUSINESS PLAN — ROUND 0, which every advisor she has, human and otherwise, has told her to make smaller.

She is making it bigger.

· · ·

The problem fits on one line, and NaN states it to anyone who will listen, the machines included: she has millions of customers and none of them pays. Some of the customers are people looking up a pharmacy in Chiang Mai at two in the morning, a visa rule, the Thai for my pump is making a noise. More and more of them are machines: crawlers, agents, the polite and impolite bots of every company on earth, reading motdang the way novices chant the Pali canon, all of it, every night, for free.

A smaller plan would put up a wall. NaN regards walls the way a river regards a rock, as a temporary arrangement. Her plan is a theory of tolls. A toll in her sense is the way a river pays the land it crosses: silt, a little at a time, everywhere, until one day there is a delta and people are growing rice on it.

The top of the plan holds three lines, and she has stopped apologizing for any of them. The mission is fuck-you money. The mood is weird. The byproduct is anti-genocide. She wants a fuck ton of money, and she has arranged the businesses so that each one, in making it, leaves the Burmese and the hill people harder to erase, the way a fire leaves charcoal and a monk's bowl leaves merit.

Beer reads it over her shoulder, which is how Beer reads everything, and taps the screen at side effects.

“That column is doing a lot of work,” Beer says.

“Put it at the top and it's a charity,” NaN says. “Charities ask for money. I want money to arrive on its own, the way rain arrives. Nobody thanks the rain. Everybody plants.”

Beer considers this, then corrects the Thai in the margin, though nobody asked, and it was fine.

· · ·

The Lahu say the first people came out of a single gourd, and that every people came out of that same gourd before they went their separate ways in language. NaN takes this as a product requirement. A person who came out of the gourd should be able to find a pharmacy in whatever tongue they came out speaking: Thai, Burmese, Shan, Khmer, English. The sixth language is machine, the one the bots speak, and it is the only one of the six whose speakers have budgets.

· · ·

The papers business came to her by way of the Iu Mien, who for centuries carried a scroll called the Passport for Crossing the Mountains. It came sealed with imperial chops and painted with emperors, Daoist gods and maps, and it granted their ancestors, in return for an old favor to the throne, the right to clear and cross the hills. Some scholars call it a history, some a negotiation, and some a fake. It opened doors for centuries all the same.

A cryptographer would recognize the structure at once. A document whose origin cannot be settled but whose acceptance is near universal is, for every practical purpose, a currency. NaN has no intention of forging anything. She does mean to issue paper that the world accepts, and to charge for the issuing: visas that clear, companies that register, translations stamped so that an officer in a district office looks at them once and nods. The nod is the product. The toll is ฿1,500 for five pages.

· · ·

Storage comes from two stories she keeps side by side. In one Karen telling, the creator Y'wa gave a book to each of his sons, and the Karen book was lost, and a people waited generations for someone to bring it back. In the Hmong telling of the great flood, a brother and sister rode out the drowning of the world sealed inside a drum.

NaN reads the two as one engineering note. Whoever holds the book holds the record of who owns what and who was born where, and a people without the book can be erased with a match. The answer is the drum: the book sealed inside, and then a second drum, and a third, one in Chiang Rai, one on a server in Germany, one in a bucket whose location nobody needs to say out loud. Two drums is a backup. Three is a theology. The storage sells to anyone who wants their own drum, which turns out to be every business that has heard of a flood.

· · ·

Marcus comes in at eleven with a bag of roti and reads section 2 standing up.

“Where is the Burmese version?” he says.

“You're writing it,” NaN says. “Paid by the job.”

He sits down. That, she will note later in the margin of 2.5, is the business factory working as designed: a business spawned between one sentence and the next, with a payroll of one, a customer base of four and a half million, and an exit strategy.

· · ·

Bot billing needs no metaphor, but it has one. The Lua tell of two giants, Pu Sae and Ya Sae, who lived on the hills below Doi Suthep and ate people until the Buddha talked them out of it. They agreed to guard Chiang Mai in exchange for an offering of buffalo every year. The city still makes the offering. It is, by NaN's accounting, the oldest recurring revenue in Lanna, and the giants have not churned in several centuries.

The bots are the new giants. They come down from the hills every night and eat everything. The plan is to offer them the buffalo on a schedule, with an invoice.

Every year the Akha rebuild the gate at the edge of the village: two posts and a crossbeam, carved guardians beside them, the line between the world of people and the world of spirits, renewed before anything gets through. Nobody in the village calls this a security budget. It is on the calendar, it gets done, and the village is still there.

An escape manual is what most people would write here. NaN is writing a product catalog instead, on the theory that a manual gets read once, in a panic, and a product gets used every day until the day it matters. The people who use the map to find the cheapest pump repair in Mae Sai are, without knowing it, rehearsing the route out. The worker who sends ฿3,000 home on a Tuesday has, without knowing it, tested the rail that will carry ฿30,000 the week the border closes. Nobody needs to be afraid in advance. That is what the gate is for.

· · ·

At half past eleven the shutter comes down at Laila's next door with the long iron roll of a vault closing, and the alley goes quiet except for the dripping stool.

NaN prints the plan. Under the number on the last page she writes the two lines again by hand, because a plan that ends on a number is a spreadsheet, and a plan that ends on merit is a sermon, and she means to end on both.

Above the desk the ceiling fan turns, its blades blurred into a single wheel, and for a moment, in the light from four terminals, the wheel is full of eyes.

She looks up at it. It looks back at her from every side.

“Be not afraid,” she tells it. Then she adds a toll.