TRSF – Read Now and Download Mobi
Contents
COMMUNICATIONS
BY CORY DOCTOROW
ENERGY
BY VANDANA SINGH
COMPUTING
By KEN LIU
COMPUTING
By JOE HALDEMAN
ROBOTICS
By MA BOYONG
BIOMEDICINE
By PAT CADIGAN
MATERIALS
The Surface of Last Scattering
By KEN MACLEOD
WEB
Specter-Bombing the Beer Goggles
By PAUL DI FILIPPO
ENERGY
By TOBIAS BUCKELL
COMMUNICATIONS
The Flame Is Roses, The Smoke Is Briars
By GWYNETH JONES
SPACEFLIGHT
By GEOFFREY A. LANDIS
BIOMEDICINE
By ELIZABETH BEAR
Introduction
Welcome to the 2011 TRSF, the first annual anthology of original science fiction stories from MIT’s Technology Review. With stories set in the near future from celebrated masters and emerging authors, TRSF is our contribution to the tradition of “hard” science fiction. It’s a tradition that stretches all the way back to Jules Verne, in which writers draw from the cutting edges of engineering and science, and try to portray how technology might advance in a way that futurists, economists, and other down-to-earth pundits can’t.
Because of its emphasis on technical plausibility, hard science fiction has been accused in the past—not always unfairly—of neglecting plot and character development in favor of breathless exposition about some flashy gadget or astronomical phenomenon. But the stories in these pages prove that you don’t have to sacrifice great writing to say something interesting about how the future might work. Hard science fiction has also been accused—again, not always unfairly—of being the jealously guarded preserve of mostly American men. So, striving for a richer spectrum of viewpoints, we have chosen male and female authors who come from around the world, including one writer whose work is appearing for the first time in English.
Inspired by the real-world technological breakthroughs covered online and in print by Technology Review, these authors bring you 12 visions of tomorrow, looking at how the Internet, computing, energy, biotechnology, spaceflight, and more might develop, and how those developments might affect the people who have to live with them. What do you think of these visions? What technologies do you believe are going to profoundly transform how we live, and would deserve to be the inspiration for a story in next year’s TRSF? Let us know online at www.technologyreview.com/sf.
—Stephen Cass
About the artist
CHRIS FOSS has produced some of the most iconic and recognizable images in science fiction. In a career stretching over 40 years, he has illustrated the covers of books for Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, and many more. In his early career, Foss produced two to three paintings a week, relying on art directors for guidance about content and tone rather than reading manuscripts (once, for an Asimov title, one director simply asked Foss to give him “a green one.”) The resulting cover would sometimes prove to be more memorable than the actual book; Foss can evoke an entire story with a single scene. His spacecraft and buildings often display signs of wear and damage, conjuring up histories of better days and hours of hard use. TRSF has reproduced six of these classic images.
The illustrations that follow in the TRSF are originally from the following books: Ancient My Enemy (Gordon R. Dickson, 1978); The Bloodstar Conspiracy (Smith and Goldin, 1978); Norman Conquest 2066 (J.I. McIntosh, 1976); Deepwater (Alex Finer, 1985); Conquests (Poul Anderson, 1981); and Earth is Room Enough (Isaac Asimov, 1986).
With the publication this year of Hardware: The Definitive SF Works of Chris Foss (Titan Books), Foss is enjoying a revival, and he continues to paint and experiment with new techniques; for the cover of TRSF, his first major recent U.S. commission, he developed a style that combines collage with oil painting. To learn more about the creation of the cover, visit www.technologyreview.com/sf. To see more of Foss’s work, visit his website at www.chrisfossart.com.
Journalist, co-editor of the Boing Boing blog, and science fiction author, London-based Cory Doctorow won the 2004 Locus Award for Best First Novel for Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. He was a finalist for the 2009 Hugo Award and won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award that year. Doctorow’s stories often take a wry look at the digital zeitgeist, and this story is no exception.
COMMUNICATIONS
The Brave
Little Toaster
BY CORY DOCTOROW
One day, Mister Toussaint came home to find an extra 300 euros’ worth of groceries on his doorstep. So he called up Miz Rousseau, the grocer, and said, “Why have you sent me all this food? My fridge is already full of delicious things. I don’t need this stuff and besides, I can’t pay for it.”
But Miz Rousseau told him that he had ordered the food. His refrigerator had sent in the list, and she had the signed order to prove it.
Furious, Mister Toussaint confronted his refrigerator. It was mysteriously empty, even though it had been full that morning. Or rather, it was almost empty: there was a single pouch of energy drink sitting on a shelf in the back. He’d gotten it from an enthusiastically smiling young woman on the metro platform the day before. She’d been giving them to everyone.
“Why did you throw away all my food?” he demanded. The refrigerator hummed smugly at him.
“It was spoiled,” it said.
BUT THE FOOD hadn’t been spoiled. Mister Toussaint pored over his refrigerator’s diagnostics and logfiles, and soon enough, he had the answer. It was the energy beverage, of course.
“Row, row, row your boat,” it sang. “Gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, I’m offgassing ethylene.” Mister Toussaint sniffed the pouch suspiciously.
“No you’re not,” he said. The label said that the drink was called LOONY GOONY and it promised ONE TRILLION TIMES MORE POWERFUL THAN ESPRESSO!!!!!ONE11! Mister Toussaint began to suspect that the pouch was some kind of stupid Internet of Things prank. He hated those.
He chucked the pouch in the rubbish can and put his new groceries away.
THE NEXT DAY, Mister Toussaint came home and discovered that the overflowing rubbish was still sitting in its little bag under the sink.
The can had not cycled it through the trapdoor to the chute that ran to the big collection-point at ground level, 104 storeys below.
“Why haven’t you emptied yourself?” he demanded. The trash can told him that toxic substances had to be manually sorted. “What toxic substances?”
So he took out everything in the bin, one piece at a time. You’ve probably guessed what the trouble was.
“Excuse me if I’m chattery, I do not mean to nattery, but I’m a mercury battery!” LOONY GOONY’s singing voice really got on Mister Toussaint’s nerves.
“No you’re not,” Mister Toussaint said.
MISTER TOUSSAINT tried the microwave. Even the cleverest squeezy-pouch couldn’t survive a good nuking. But the microwave wouldn’t switch on.
“I’m no drink and I’m no meal,” LOONY GOONY sang. “I’m a ferrous lump of steel!”
The dishwasher wouldn’t wash it (“I don’t mean to annoy or chafe, but I’m simply not dishwasher safe!”). The toilet wouldn’t flush it (“I don’t belong in the bog, because down there I’m sure to clog!”). The windows wouldn’t retract their safety screen to let it drop, but that wasn’t much of a surprise.
“I hate you,” Mister Toussaint said to LOONY GOONY, and he stuck it in his coat pocket. He’d throw it out in a trash can on the way to work.
THEY ARRESTED Mister Toussaint at the 678th Street station. They were waiting for him on the platform, and they cuffed him just as soon as he stepped off the train. The entire station had been evacuated and the police wore full biohazard containment gear. They’d even shrinkwrapped their machine-guns.
“You’d better wear a breather and you’d better wear a hat, I’m a vial of terrible deadly hazmat,” LOONY GOONY sang.
When they released Mister Toussaint the next day, they made him take LOONY GOONY home with him. There were lots more people with LOONY GOONYs to process.
MISTER TOUSSAINT paid the rush-rush fee that the storage depot charged to send over his container. They forklifted it out of the giant warehouse under the desert and zipped it straight to the cargo-bay in Mister Toussaint’s building. He put on old, stupid clothes and clipped some lights to his glasses and started sorting.
Most of the things in the container were stupid. He’d been throwing away stupid stuff all his life, because the smart stuff was just so much easier. But then his Grandpa had died and they’d cleaned out his little room at the pensioner’s ward and Mister Toussaint had just shoved it all in the container and sent it out to the desert.
From time to time, he’d thought of the eight cubic meters of stupidity he’d inherited and sighed a put-upon sigh. He’d loved Grandpa, but he wished the old man had used some of the ample spare time from the tail end of his life to replace his junk with stuff that could more gracefully reintegrate with the materials stream.
How inconsiderate!
The house chattered enthusiastically at the toaster when he plugged it in, but the toaster said nothing back. It couldn’t. It was stupid. Its bread-slots were crusted over with carbon residue and it dribbled crumbs from the ill-fitting tray beneath it. It had been designed and built by cavemen who hadn’t ever considered the advantages of networked environments.
It was stupid, but it was brave. It would do anything Mister Toussaint asked it to do.
“It’s getting hot and sticky and I’m not playing any games, you’d better get me out before I burst into flames!” LOONY GOONY sang loudly, but the toaster ignored it.
“I don’t mean to endanger your abode, but if you don’t let me out, I’m going to explode!” The smart appliances chattered nervously at one another, but the brave little toaster said nothing as Mister Toussaint depressed its lever again.
“You’d better get out and save your ass, before I start leaking poison gas!” LOONY GOONY’s voice was panicky. Mister Toussaint smiled and depressed the lever.
Just as he did, he thought to check in with the flat’s diagnostics. Just in time, too! Its quorum-sensors were redlining as it listened in on the appliances’ consternation. Mister Toussaint unplugged the fridge and the microwave and the dishwasher.
THE COOKER and trash can were hard-wired, but they didn’t represent a quorum.
THE FIRE DEPARTMENT took away the melted toaster and used their axes to knock huge, vindictive holes in Mister Toussaint’s walls. “Just looking for embers,” they claimed. But he knew that they were pissed off because there was simply no good excuse for sticking a pouch of independently powered computation and sensors and transmitters into an antique toaster and pushing down the lever until oily, toxic smoke filled the whole 104th floor.
Mister Toussaint’s neighbors weren’t happy about it either.
But Mister Toussaint didn’t mind. It had all been worth it, just to hear LOONY GOONY beg and weep for its life as its edges curled up and blackened.
He argued mightily, but the firefighters refused to let him keep the toaster. ■
Born and raised in New Delhi, Singh now lives in Massachusetts, where she is an assistant professor of physics at Framingham State University. She has been publishing science fiction stories since the mid-2000s, and her work has been included in several “Best Of” anthologies.
ENERGY
Indra’s Web
BY VANDANA SINGH
Mahua ran over the familiar, rock-studded pathway under the canopy of acacia trees, her breath coming fast and ragged. She would have to stop soon, she wasn’t as young as she used to be, and there was a faint, persistent pain in her right knee—but she loved this physicality: heart thumping, sweat running down her face in rivulets, the forest smelling of sap and animal dung, grit on her lips from the dust. The forest was where she got her best ideas; it was an eternal source of inspiration. It was why her work was getting recognition across the world. But the forest didn’t care about fame or fortune—here she was just another animal: breath and flow, a kite on the wing, a deer running.
Running, she liked to have the net chatter going on in the Shell in her ear: Salman monitoring the new grid, Varun and Ali reporting on the fish stocks in the artificial marshland by the river, Doctor Sabharwal’s monitor relaying Mahua’s grandmother’s condition at the hospital: stable, stable, stable, still on life support. Thinking about her grandmother’s stroke made Mahua feel like she was about to fall into a pit of despair; she distracted herself with the reminder that she had promised Namita she would try out the myconet music app during this morning’s run. “It’s just for fun, Mahua-di, but try it, you’ll like it.” They were so anxious about her, these young people, knowing she was not quite herself these days. Moved and perversely annoyed by their concern, she had spent some hours with them in the biosystems lab learning the app…
There is a fungal network, a myconet, a secret connection between the plants of the forest. They talk to each other, the acacia and the shisham and the gulmohar tree, in a chemical tongue. They communicate about pests, food sources, the weather, all through the flow of biomolecules through the fungal hyphae. Through this network, large trees have even been known to share nutrients with saplings of the same species. Mahua’s protégé, Namita, is part of the team that helped decipher (to the extent that humans can) this subtle language. In the forest they have planted sensors in the soil to catch some of the chemical exchanges between plants. The signals are fed back into the interpreter and then analyzed. Some members of the team have made music from the signals: convert the concentration of a certain biochemical transmitter changing in real time into a succession of notes where the duration indicates the strength of the transmitter. Add a few other transmitter signals as sounds of a slightly different frequency and you’ll get a sometimes musical chatter that is at once soothing and intriguing. Mahua is new to this and she’s never tried it out in the forest before. She’s always encouraged play in their research—it is not only fun, but important, she tells them—play leads to new insights, shakes up pre-conceived notions… And now they need the relief of play, after having spent the past few months calculating and putting in place Ashapur’s first smart energy grid, the Suryanet, modeled on the myconet itself.
Mahua turned on the app. As she ran she picked up information from the closest few sensors so that she had a “picture” that changed in time and space. At first she heard nothing but the soothing semi-music of the various tones. Then the surprise came, a peculiar sensation rather like vertigo, a kind of slippage, as though she was leaving her human self behind, dissolving into something infinitely vast. It was like looking up at the Milky Way from the top of a high mountain on a clear night. She had always been quick to discern webs of relationships—it was her particular skill, after all—but this was different. A feeling like an electric shock coursed through her, a long moment of recognition, as though her deepest mind already knew this pattern. The effect was so startling that she stumbled over a tree root. Then the Shell beeped urgently in her ear, and the spell broke.
It was Salman, calling out an alert: Suntower 1 had failed. There were random fluctuations going on all over the new energy grid that nobody could explain, Salman said, breathless. It seemed likely that the Suryanet, so painstakingly put in place over the past few months, the result of years of effort, on which everyone was depending for the survival of Ashapur and maybe of the biosphere itself—the Suryanet could be a spectacular failure.
ONE OF THE things Mahua had learned from her grandmother was that when trouble struck, unless it needed immediate attention, it was good to slow down and meander a little. So she wandered to the top of the ridge, where the height enabled her to see Ashapur in all its glory.
A former slum, it used to lie on the edge of Delhi like a sore. In the last ten years the Ashapur project had transformed it. The hutments of cardboard and tin had been replaced by dwelling houses built mostly by the residents themselves with traditional materials: a hard mixture of mud, straw, rice husk, surfaced with a lime-based plaster. In use for thousands of years, then forgotten, and revived in the 20th century by visionary architects like Laurie Baker, the material had so far survived nearly ten years of baking heat and monsoon rains. The majority of the residents were the original slum inhabitants, climate refugees from the drowned villages of Bangladesh, their homes transformed by the Ashapur project. When Mahua looked at Ashapur from this height she saw mostly an uneven carpet of green and silver—rooftop gardens broken by the gleam of solar panels, and corridors of native trees, neem, khejri, gulmohar, running down the hill from her forest like green arteries through the settlement.
Above this vista rose the suntowers like a surrealist’s dream: four functioning, and a fifth under construction, their tops capped by sun-tracking petals of biomimetic material containing tiny, environmentally benign artificial cells, the suryons, that drank up photons. The largest, oldest facility was Suntower 1, now mysteriously moribund. Ashapur was nearly self-sufficient in food and energy, and with the new grid, the Suryanet, they should have been able to donate power to the Delhi grid, thereby silencing the naysayers and establishing the need for a thousand Ashapurs. Four solar plants making hydrogen from the breakdown of water; sewage-fed biogas plants; enormous energy savings from building construction and layout—none of the buildings needed air conditioning; numerous rooftops with solar panels; even greater energy savings from the fact that these former villagers were traditionally energy-efficient, living in clusters, throwing away nothing, re-using almost everything. And all the energy sources were now connected on the Suryanet. Yet…
She took the long way to Suntower 1. She always found it calming to walk through Ashapur. The narrow roads were not built on a rectangular pattern but instead curved, moving obligingly around an ancient peepul tree or dwelling. Her designers had kept the street pattern of the original slum but had improved on it, allowing room for people to congregate in front of this chai-house or in that niche, so that old women could gossip and mind the little ones, and the wandering cows and pariah dogs had room to rest. Here, right at the corner she was passing now, between an Internet café and an agricultural research center—here’s where a potential foreign funder had stopped her six years ago. “I don’t understand,” he’d said, “why this town is so untidy. There’s no order, no proper grid for the streets. It looks very inefficient. And the roads are too narrow for traffic flow! Where are your cars?”
In response to this sort of thing her grant-writing team had developed a slide show—apparently some of these potential funders could only understand things if they were in a powerpoint presentation—to show how optimal city function could be best achieved by having connectivity at multiple scales. Large, coarse, fewer pathways for cars; smaller, more dense ones for people. And for other animals as well as people, the green corridors that branched into the city, maintaining biodiversity and the psychological benefits of closeness to nature, while providing Ashapur with cooler summers, seasonal supplies of fruit and nuts, and raw material for a new cottage industry in crafts.
Now she entered Energy Central, the building below Suntower 1. It was cool here—the thick mud-based walls ensured that—and the curving stairway with its murals gave no hint of the troubles of Suntower 1, rising high above the roof. At the lab door there was the familiar sign that Salman had installed by encouraging a vivid green moss to grow on an earthboard so that it spelled out the motto of the Biomimetic Energy Materials Lab—“To Learn from Nature, not to Exploit Her.” His colleagues had teased Salman about the irony of exploiting a moss to write these noble words, but the moss seemed to have decided things for itself. It spelled “To learm from Natur, not to Explod,” which still made her smile.
Inside there was a dim coolness and the glow of multiple terminals. A meeting was in progress, chaotic and impassioned as usual. Arguments and discussions in Hindi, English and Bangla: Salman, deep in agitated conversation with Namita and Ayush, Hamid, a young trainee who had once begged on the streets as a child, patiently explaining the situation to the boy who had brought the tea. Mahua stayed just inside the door, unnoticed, letting the words flow around her, sensing the web of ideas and feelings raging through the room.
“... no guarantee that modeling the Suryanet on the myconet was going to work—why risk everything on one crazy idea?”
“… calculations, have you forgotten we did the entire constructal analysis? Besides, scale-free networks are everywhere…”
“Nobody’s networked a suryon-based system before or allowed it to self-regulate! There were safer ways of doing this, better ways! But no, you have to go on about minimal control! It’s centralized control systems that make everything work!”
“Yaar, stop being a control freak, OK? We’re just mimicking the natural control systems that exist in nature. Stop panicking… obviously there’s a bug in the system somewhere…”
“… oldest suntower, beta version of the suryons, it’s bound to fail…”
“… not this quickly, idiot…”
Chanchal, from one of the terminals:
“Salman, look at what’s happening to the other suntowers! Energy collection is now above average by seven percent in 2, 3 and 4! But… dekho, boss! These numbers! More inflow than outflow. There’s a major bug somewhere!”
“Or energy is no longer conserved,” someone said, as there was a mass movement to the terminal.
Mahua found herself curiously detached from the mayhem. A signal sounded repetitively in the lab like the beep of the monitor in her grandmother’s hospital room.
She remembers the first time seeing these young people in various colleges and universities, nearly a decade ago. They are bound for brilliant careers as engineers, managers, CEOs, their upturned faces curious, skeptical, polite. She has nothing to offer them so she gives it all she has.
“I come to you with empty hands,” she says. “I can’t offer you much money. I can’t offer you big houses, two cars, five air conditioners. Nor the jet-setting lifestyle with its cross-continental board meetings, the wife or husband who will ultimately cheat on you, the children who will drive you crazy. What I can give you is a chance to be part of a revolution. A revolution that might just save our earth from the climate crisis. One that comes up with not just new technologies, but new ways to live that are more whole and deep and satisfying than anything you’ve known. Most of you have enjoyed being in college. You are the best of the lot, the ones who get high on learning, and on the company of like minds. The Ashapur project is like college, except that you have the chance to learn by doing, and to do more good than you ever could with the life now laid out for you. We will take care of your housing and health care, and you will get as much salary as I do. Which isn’t saying very much. But you’ll get up every morning knowing that by the end of the day you would have made a new discovery, a new friend, a new way of looking at the world. You will blow old paradigms out of existence on a near-daily basis. I promise you that. Are you with me?”
Some of the faces look incredulous, even mocking, but there are others who light up. She’s struck a chord deep inside them. She lets out a deep breath of relief.
Now she thinks: had she betrayed them after all? Would they forgive her, if this turned out to be the disaster she had always feared?
Finally they noticed her, surrounded her, pulled her before the screens, presented their arguments before her. “Look,” she said at last. “You know how to check everything according to the protocols. Do that. Then come up with some wild theories and shake up the possibilities, but don’t panic. We can survive a couple of power failures; it isn’t as though we haven’t grown up with them. The hospital seems to have enough power right now; so do most key-need places. Make sure backup generators are working and just wait.”
MAHUA, was named by her long-dead mother because she was born under a mahua tree on the way to Delhi. The two of them—mother and grandmother—had migrated from their village in Bihar after her father died. She grew up in the slums, where her mother died when Mahua was eleven, only three months before their fortunes changed.
So it’s been Mahua and her grandmother, who now lies in a hospital bed after a stroke, kept alive by the machines that surround her. The woman with the temper and the loud laugh, who always had something to say, now looks at Mahua with wide, frightened eyes. She can’t speak but she can croak a little. Sometimes she lies peacefully while Mahua holds her hand, but at other times she seems to be trying to tell Mahua something. Mahua, who can discern connections with a skill that frightens her sometimes, cannot tell what her grandmother is trying to say. She tries to reassure her—there are all kinds of new techniques the surgeons want to try. There’s hope.
When she was a child Mahua used to follow ants as they moved purposefully across the dirt floor of the room. She wanted to know where they were going in such a hurry, and whether their abrupt pauses and frantically waving antennae had some hidden significance. Later she came to realize that the ants followed invisible trails across the floor—that the world was full of secret communication channels, like the electric wires between poles that rose above the tenements. It was as though some inner sense within her had opened because following this realization she was suddenly aware of walking through a tangled spider’s web of relationships. The gossiping old women who sat around her mother’s sewing machine, jabbering about this and that, speaking as much with meaningful glances and shakes of the fist as with their cracked voices—the way people looked at each other, signifying feelings and relations, how people spoke as much with their silences as with words. Even the winds that brought the monsoon rains had some sort of pattern or cycle, a network in both time and space. She was delighted with this discovery but she didn’t understand it then.
The narrow little lanes of the slum are like spider webs, intersecting at odd angles, curving around hutments, like a stream of water. Everywhere there are people and smells and here and there an Internet café or a soda stand or a chaatwala. In this mess and confusion someone’s placed a computer in a niche on a wall and the street kids play with it between school and errands and work. After a long time she’s found the courage to go up to the shiny, inviting screen, the keyboard, where the letters are in Hindi—thank goodness she can read—but the screen itself has a number of floating objects, tumbling and combining when they meet. She stares at it, mesmerized, and after a while she tries a hesitant tap on the keyboard. Three days later she’s learnt that she can save the game in her own name. She keeps playing. In a strange way it makes sense the way the slum itself makes sense. It’s pattern and rhythm, although she will not know those words for a long time. At the end of this period there is a person at her door, and a scholarship to go to a really good school with housing for herself and her grandmother, and guidance from the Slum Children’s Education Trust which is inhabited by kindly aunties.
At thirteen Mahua fell ill. She diagnosed the malady herself as anxiety brought on by acute apophenia. Becoming sensitive to networks and relationships, she saw connections everywhere, even when they weren’t actually present. This drove her crazy but she didn’t want to take medicines to suppress her ability for pattern recognition. Instead she resolved to train her mind to distinguish between false apparent connections and real ones—the only way to do that was to study the world. With this determination, her new school, with its snooty, unfriendly girls and regimented routine, became a matter of finding the grain in the chaff, the flashes of joy in the misery.
For instance: Mrs. Khosla introducing the concept of energy in her usual monotone. A classroom full of bored children, and only Mahua sitting up, recognizing that she has just been handed the golden key, the central concept, that through which the entire universe interacted, the currency of all communication. Energy! And its conservation law. All real systems were governed by fundamental laws that acted as constraints. That is how you differentiated apparent relationships from real ones!
But as she stands in the hospital room looking at her grandmother (the old woman is made almost alien by the tubes and wires of the life-support system), she feels that she has failed after all. What good is it to be able to sense patterns and relationships when she can’t tell what her own grandmother wants to say? Tomorrow they’ll try once more to work with the eyelids to see if her grandmother can learn to communicate thus. But the old woman, always contrary, has apparently refused to cooperate. What does she want? Not death, surely, not before exploring all the options. Her grandmother has such a zest for life. She’d opened a small business of her own at the age of seventy-three, making simmerpots. This is a pot is made of mud and straw rather like the walls of the dwellings but in different proportions—and it is one reason why energy usage is so low in Ashapur. You cook your stew or curry on the stove for two minutes, until it is simmering nicely, and then you take it off the heat and put it inside the simmerpot. The simmerpot is such a good insulator that the food keeps cooking in there for hours afterwards. Not her grandmother’s invention—it had been in use in her village for centuries. But here only her grandmother and a handful of trainees know how to make it, and when you walk around Ashapur you see simmerpots everywhere, on kitchen window-sills and in the large community dining rooms. And the woman who made it popular and indispensable, who had such vivacity at eighty-one that she could gossip non-stop with her neighbors until three in the morning, now lies hooked up to machines like a captive, with death in her eyes.
Mahua has finally seen it. Her grandmother wants to die.
THAT EVENING Mahua goes walking down the lanes of Ashapur, following a hunch.
There before her is Suntower 5. While physically connected to the grid, it is still under construction; only the skeletal frames of the petals are complete, the tubing through which the suryon-embedded substratum will eventually be pumped up. There is a sleepy boy in the control room, one of the former street urchins assigned to do some after-hours caretaking. Tousling his hair and sending him off for some tea, Mahua sits before the computer. Suntower 5 is the newest design; the suryon distribution architecture is so complex and bug-ridden that it will take a while to implement. Since the work began on the grid so many months ago, nobody has been able to attend to Suntower 5.
It doesn’t take Mahua long to zoom into an image of a petal atop the tower. At first she sees just the skeleton, but there, between the supports is a new, delicate, lace-like integument. The suryons are distributing themselves, filling in the empty spaces. Somehow the Suryanet has not only decided that Suntower 5 should be functional, but has allocated resources to it, which is why Suntower 1—the oldest, and least efficient—has shut itself down. Temporarily, perhaps, but who knows? Does a sufficiently complex network give rise to its own wisdom? She sends a hint to the team at Suntower 1. By the morning they will have figured it out. She sips her tea, talks to the sleepy attendant. At last she goes back into the night, thinking about the networks in which she exists, and how tomorrow a major node on which her very life depends will be taken off-line forever. She thinks of the forest on the ridge. The forest lives on because it accepts death—with every twig that falls, with every ant that meets its annihilation, a thousand life-forms come into being. Danger walks there and so its denizens learn adaptation; here, too, we must rebuild ourselves, define ourselves anew with each loss, each encounter. She remembers a story her grandmother once told her about Indra’s Web, the ultimate cosmic network in which every node mirrors the whole…
In the twilight hush there are sleepy sounds of birds settling in the trees; a family of rhesus monkeys chatter softly in a rooftop garden above her head. A radio is playing an old film song, very softly. It is a warm night; someone has a khas-khas cooler working, the sound of the fan almost drowning out the steady drip of water. If she wants, her Shell unit can pick up energy data from the sensors in each dwelling place. She loves this marriage of the traditional and the new, the forest and the city, this great experiment, this marvel that is Ashapur, City of Hope. ■
Boston-based Ken Liu has worked as a programmer and as a lawyer, which he says are “surprisingly similar” professions. He has been regularly publishing science fiction short stories since 2003. He’s currently co-writing his first novel with his wife, and has translated a number of Chinese stories into English, one of which, by Ma Boyong, appears in this collection.
COMPUTING
Real Artists
BY KEN LIU
“You’ve done well,” Creative Director Len Palladon said, looking over Sophia’s résumé.
Sophia squinted in the golden California sun that fell on her through the huge windows of the conference room. She wanted to pinch herself to be sure she wasn’t dreaming. She was here, really here, on the hallowed campus of Semaphore Pictures, in an interview with the legendary Palladon.
She licked her dry lips. “I’ve always wanted to make movies.” She choked back for Semaphore. She didn’t want to seem too desperate.
Palladon was in his thirties, dressed in a pair of comfortable shorts and a plain gray T-shirt whose front was covered with the drawing of a man swinging a large hammer over a railroad spike. A pioneer in computer-assisted movie making, he had been instrumental in writing the company’s earliest software and was the director of The Mesozoic, Semaphore’s first film.
He nodded and went on, “You won the Zoetrope screenwriting competition, earned excellent grades in both technology and liberal arts, and got great recommendations from your film studies professors. It couldn’t have been easy.”
To Sophia, he seemed a bit pale and tired, as though he had been spending all his time indoors, not out in the golden California sun. She imagined that Palladon and his animators must have been working overtime to meet a deadline: probably to finish the new film scheduled to be released this summer.
“I believe in working hard,” Sophia said. What she really wanted was to tell him that she knew what it meant to stay up all night in front of the editing workstation and wait for the rendering to complete, all for the chance to catch the first glimpse of a vision coming to life on the screen. She was ready.
Palladon took off his reading glasses, smiled at Sophia, and took out a tablet from behind him. He touched its screen and slid it across the table to Sophia. A video was playing on it.
“There was also this fan film, which you didn’t put on your résumé. You made it out of footage cut and spliced from our movies, and it went viral. Several million views in two weeks, right? You gave our lawyers quite a headache.”
Sophia’s heart sank. She had always suspected that this might become a problem. But when the invitation to interview at Semaphore came in her email, she had whooped and hollered, and dared to believe that somehow the executives at Semaphore had missed that little film.
SOPHIA REMEMBERED going to The Mesozoic. She was seven. The lights dimmed, her parents stopped talking, the first few bars of Semaphore’s signature tune began to play, and she became still.
Over the next two hours, as she sat there in the dark theater, mesmerized by the adventure of the digital characters on that screen, she fell in love. She didn’t know it then, but she would never love a person as much as she loved the company that made her cry and laugh, the company that made The Mesozoic.
A Semaphore movie meant something: no, not merely technological prowess in digital animation and computer graphics that were better than life. Sure, these accomplishments were impressive, but it was Semaphore’s consistent ability to tell a great story, to make movies with heart, to entertain and move the six-year old along with the sixteen-year old and the sixty-year old, that truly made it an icon, a place worthy of being loved.
Sophia saw each of Semaphore’s films hundreds of times. She bought them multiple times, in successive digital formats: discs, compressed downloads, lossless codecs, enhanced and re-enhanced and super-enhanced.
She knew each scene down to the second, could recite every line of dialogue from memory. She didn’t even need the movies themselves any more; she could play them in her head.
She took film studies classes and began to make her own shorts, and she yearned to make them feel as great as the Semaphore classics. Advances in digital filmmaking equipment made it possible for her to achieve some spectacular effects on a small budget. But no matter how many times she rewrote her scripts or how late she stayed in the editing labs, the results of her efforts were laughable, embarrassing, ridiculous. She could not bear to watch them herself, much less show them to others.
“Don’t be discouraged,” a professor told her, when he saw her slumped over in despair. “You got into this because you wanted to make something beautiful. But it takes time, lots of time, to be good at any creative work. The fact that you hate your own work right now so much just means that you have good taste. And great taste is the most valuable tool of a great artist. Keep at it. Someday you’ll be as good as the best. Someday you’ll make something beautiful enough even for you.”
She went back to the Semaphore films, picked them apart and put them back together, trying to discover their secret. Now she was no longer viewing them as a mere fan, but as a reverse-engineer.
Gradually, because she did have great taste, she could not help but begin to see tiny flaws in them. The Semaphore films were not quite as perfect as she had thought. There were small things here and there that could be improved. And sometimes even big things.
She went into seedy corners of the web to find out how to break the encryption codes on her digital-rights-managed Semaphore movie files, imported them into the editing stations, and modified them to suit her new vision.
And then she sat back in the darkness, at her computer, and watched her edited version of The Mesozoic again. She cried when she was done. It was better. She had made a great film even greater, closer to perfection.
In some way, she felt as if the perfect Semaphore film had always been there, but hidden in places under the veil that was the released version. She had simply walked in and revealed the beauty underneath.
How could she not share this vision with the world? She was in love with the beauty of Semaphore, and beauty wanted to be free.
“I… I…” Sophia realized now that she had been engaging in denial. She had refused to think about how she had likely broken the law just by putting that edited version on the web. She had no good answer. “I love Semaphore’s movies so much…” Her voice trailed off.
Palladon held up a hand and laughed. “Relax. I think it was brilliant. I told the recruiting department to fly you out not because of your application or résumé, but because of your unauthorized re-edit.”
“You liked it?” Sophia could hardly believe her ears.
Palladon nodded. “Tell me what you think was your best change?”
Sophia did not hesitate. This question she had thought about a lot. “Semaphore’s films are wonderful, but they’re fantastic if you’re a boy. I changed The Mesozoic so that it was fantastic for girls too.”
Palladon stared at Sophia, deep in thought. Sophia held her breath.
“That makes sense,” Palladon finally said. “Most of us working here are men. I’ve been saying for years that we needed more women in the process. I was right about you: a real artist will do whatever it takes to make a great vision come true, even if she has to work with someone else’s art.”
“ALL DONE?”
Sophia nodded and handed the stack of signed legal documents back to Palladon. He had explained that before he could give her an offer, he wanted to show her a bit of the Semaphore creative process so she would know what she was getting into. She had to sign some pretty draconian NDAs to protect Semaphore’s trade secrets.
Sophia didn’t hesitate for even one second. Getting a peek at how Semaphore made its magic was a lifelong dream.
Palladon took her down a long series of hallways lined with closed doors. Sophia looked around, imagining what lay behind them: bright, open workspaces where each employee was free to decorate her cubicle to express her creativity? Legendary conference rooms filled with colorful Lego blocks and Japanese toys to get the creative juices of the artists and engineers flowing? Server rooms filled with the proprietary computing hardware that made all the magic possible? Creative, talented artists reclining in bean bag chairs tossing around the germ of an idea, each adding and polishing until it shone full and lustrous as a pearl?
The doors remained closed.
Finally, Palladon stopped in front of a door and unlocked it with a key. He and Sophia walked into the darkness beyond.
THEY WERE in the projection booth overlooking a small theater. Sophia looked through the booth window and counted about sixty seats below, about half of which were filled. The audience was completely absorbed by the movie playing on the big screen in front. The humming from the projectors filled the booth.
“Is that… ?” Sophia pressed her nose up against the window. Her heart pounded in her ears. She forgot to finish the question.
“Yes,” Palladon said. “That’s an early version of our next film: The Mesozoic Again. It’s a story about a boy meeting a dinosaur, and learning timeless lessons about friendship and family.”
Sophia watched the bright figures on the screen, wishing she were down there, among the rapt audience.
“So this is a test screening?”
“No, this is how the film is made.”
“I don’t understand.”
Palladon walked over to a bank of displays on the other side of the projection booth and pulled out two chairs. “Sit down. I’ll explain.”
The monitors showed bundles of lines of different colors moving slowly across the screen, like the lines traced by heart monitors or seismographs.
“You know, of course, that a movie is an intricate emotion-generating machine.”
Sophia nodded.
“During the span of two hours, it must lead the audience by the nose on an emotional roller coaster: moments of laughter are contrasted with occasions for pity, exhilarating highs followed by terrifying and precipitous drops. The emotional curve of a film is its most abstract representation as well as the most primal. It’s the only thing that lingers in the audience’s mind after they leave the theater.”
Sophia nodded again. This was all just basic film theory.
“So how do you know that the audience is following the curve you want?”
“I guess you do what every storyteller does,” Sophia said, hesitant, feeling lost. “You try to empathize with the audience.”
Palladon waited, his expression unchanged.
“And maybe you try to do test screenings and tweak things a bit at the end,” Sophia added. Actually she didn’t believe in test screenings. She thought focus groups and audience reaction surveys were why the other studios produced such pap. But she didn’t know what else to say.
“Aha,” Palladon said, clapping his hands together. “But how do you get test audiences to give you useful feedback? If you survey them after, you’ll only get very crude answers, and people lie, telling you what they think you want to hear. If you try to get people to give real-time feedback by pressing buttons as they watch the film, they become too self-conscious, and people aren’t always good at understanding their own emotions.”
SIXTY CAMERAS were suspended from the ceiling of the theater, each trained on a single seat below.
As the film played, the cameras relayed their feeds to a bank of powerful computers, where each feed was put through a series of pattern-recognition algorithms.
By detecting microscopic shifts in each face caused by the expansion and contraction of blood vessels below the skin, the computers monitored each audience member’s blood pressure, pulse, and level of excitement.
Other algorithms tracked the expressions on each face: smiling, smirking, crying, impatience, annoyance, disgust, anger, or just boredom and apathy. By measuring how much certain key points on a face moved—corners of the mouth, the eyes, ends of eyebrows—the software could make fine distinctions, like that between a smile out of amusement and a smile due to affection.
The data, collected in real time, could be plotted against each frame of the film, showing each audience member’s emotional curve as they experienced the movie.
“SO YOU CAN tune your movies a little better than other studios with test screenings. Is that your secret?”
Palladon shook his head. “Big Semi is the greatest auteur in the history of filmmaking. It doesn’t just ‘tune.’”
MORE THAN seven thousand processors were wired together into a computing grid in the basement of the Semaphore campus. This was where Big Semi lived—the “semi” was short for either “semiotics” or “semantics,” no one knew for sure anymore. Big Semi was The Algorithm, Semaphore’s real secret.
Every day, Big Semi generated kernels for high-concept movies by randomly picking out seemingly incongruous ideas out of a database: cowboys and dinosaurs, WWII tactics in space, a submarine film transposed onto Mars, a romantic comedy starring a rabbit and a greyhound.
In the hands of less-skilled artists, these ideas would have gone nowhere, but Big Semi, based on Semaphore’s record, had access to the emotional curves of proven hits in each genre. It could use these as templates.
Taking the high-concept kernel, Big Semi generated a rough plot using more random elements taken from a database of classic films augmented with trending memes in the zeitgeist gathered from web search statistics. It then rendered a rough film based on that plot, using stock characters and stock dialogue, and screened the result for a test audience.
The initial attempt was usually laughably bad. The audience response curves would be all over the place, but nowhere near the target. But that was no big deal for Big Semi. Nudging responses to fit a known curve was nothing more than an optimization problem, and computers were very good at those.
Big Semi turned art into engineering.
Say that the beat at ten minutes in should be a moment of poignancy. If the hero saving a nest of baby dinosaurs didn’t do it, then Big Semi would substitute in a scene of the hero saving a family of furry proto-otters and see if the response curves on the next test screening moved any closer to the ideal.
Or say that the joke that ended act one needed to get the audience into a particular mood. If a variation on a line taken from a classic didn’t do it, then Big Semi would try a pop culture reference, a physical gag, or even change the scene into an impromptu musical number—some of these alternatives were things no human director would ever think of—but Big Semi had no preconceptions, no taboos. It would attempt all alternatives and pick the best one based on results alone.
Big Semi sculpted actors, built sets, framed shots, invented props, refined dialogue, composed music, and devised special effects—all digitally, of course. It treated everything as levers to nudge the response curves.
Gradually, the stock characters came to life, the stock dialogue gained wit and pathos, and a work of art emerged from random noise. On average, after a hundred thousand iterations of this process, Big Semi would have a film that elicited from the audience the desired emotional response curve.
Big Semi did not work with scripts and storyboards. It did not give any thought to themes, symbols, homages, or any other words you might find in a film studies syllabus. It did not complain of having to work with digital actors and digital sets because it knew of no other way. It simply evaluated each test screening to see where the response curves still deviated from the target, made big changes and small tweaks and tested it again. Big Semi did not think. It had no pet political cause, no personal history, no narrative obsession or idée fixe that it wanted to push into its films.
Indeed Big Semi was the perfect auteur. Its only concern was to create an artifact as meticulously crafted as a Swiss watch that precisely pulled the audience along the exact emotional curve guaranteed to make them laugh and cry in the right places. After they left the theater, they would give the film great word-of-mouth, the only form of marketing that worked consistently, that always got through people’s ad-blockers.
Big Semi made perfect films.
“SO WHAT would I do?” Sophia asked. She felt her face flush and her heart beating fast. She wondered if any cameras were in the booth, observing her. “What do you do? It sounds like Big Semi is the only creative one around here.”
“Why, you’ll be a member of the test audience, of course,” Palladon said. “Isn’t that obvious? We can’t let the secret out, and Big Semi requires audiences to do its work.”
“You just sit there all day and watch movies? You can do that with anybody off the street!”
“No, we can’t,” Palladon said. “We do need some non-artists in the audience to be sure we’re not out of touch, but we need even more people with great taste. Some of us have much more knowledge about the history of film, finer senses of empathy, broader emotional ranges, more discerning eyes and ears for details, deeper capacities for feeling—Big Semi needs our feedback to avoid trite clichés and cheap laughs, mawkish sentiment and insincere catharsis. And as you’ve already discovered on your own, the composition of the audience determines how good a film Big Semi can make.”
I’ve been saying for years that we needed more women in the process.
“It is only by trying out his skill against the finest palate that a chef can design the best dishes. Big Semi needs the best audience to make the best film the world has ever seen.”
And great taste is the most valuable tool of a great artist.
SOPHIA SAT numbly in the conference room, alone.
“Are you all right?” A secretary passing by poked her head in.
“Yes. I just need a moment.”
Palladon had explained to her that there would be eye drops and facial massages to combat the physical fatigue. There would also be drugs to induce short-term memory loss so that everyone could forget the film they had just seen and sit through the next screening again, tabulae rasae. The forgetting was necessary to ensure that Big Semi got accurate feedback.
Palladon had gone on to say many other things, but Sophia didn’t remember any of them.
So this is what it’s like to fall out of love.
“YOU HAVE to let us know within two weeks,” Palladon said, as he walked Sophia down the long driveway to the campus gate.
Sophia nodded. The drawing on the front of Palladon’s T-shirt caught her attention. “Who is that?”
“John Henry,” Palladon said. “He was a laborer on the railroads in the nineteenth century. When the owners brought in steam-powered hammers to take jobs away from the driving crews, John challenged a steam hammer to a race to see who could work faster.”
“Did he win?”
“Yes. But as soon as the race was over, he died of exhaustion. He was the last man to challenge the steam hammers because the machines got faster every year.”
Sophia stared at the drawing. Then she looked away.
Keep at it. Someday you’ll be as good as the best.
She would never be as good as Big Semi, who got better every year.
The golden California sun was so bright and warm, but Sophia shivered.
She closed her eyes and remembered how she felt in that dark theater as a little girl. She was transported to another world. That was the point of great art. Watching a perfect movie was like living a whole other life.
“A real artist will do whatever it takes to make a great vision come true,” Palladon said, “even if it’s just sitting still in a dark room.” ■
One of the masters of science fiction, Joe Haldeman is best known for his 1974 book, The Forever War, which won the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Living in Florida, he also teaches writing at MIT and continues to be an active author, winning the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 2005 for Camouflage.
COMPUTING
Complete
Sentence
BY JOE HALDEMAN
The cell was spotless white and too bright and smelled of chlorine bleach.
“So I’ve had it, is what you’re saying.” Charlie Draper sat absolutely still on the cell bunk. “I didn’t kill Maggie. You know that better than anybody.”
His lawyer nodded slowly and looked at him with no expression. She was beautiful, and that sometimes helped with a jury, though evidently not this time.
“We’ve appealed, of course.” Her voice was a fraction of a second out of synch with her mouth. “It’s automatic.”
“And meaningless. I’ll be out before they open the envelope.”
“Well.” She stepped over to the small window and looked down at the sea. “We went over the pluses and minuses before you opted for virtual punishment.”
“So I serve a hundred years in one day—”
“Less than a day. Overnight.”
“—and then sometime down the pike some other jury decides I’m innocent, or at least not guilty, and then what? They give me back the hundred years I sat here?”
He was just talking, of course; he knew the answer. There might be compensation for wrongful imprisonment. A day’s worth, though, or a century? Nobody had yet been granted it; virtual sentencing was too new.
“You have to leave now, counselor,” a disembodied voice said. She nodded, opened her mouth to say something, and disappeared.
That startled him. “It’s already started?”
The door rattled open, and an unshaven trusty in an orange jumpsuit shambled in with a tray. Behind him was a beefy guard with a shotgun.
“WHAT’S WITH the gun?” he said to the trusty. “This isn’t real; I can’t escape.”
“Don’t answer him,” the guard said. “You’ll wind up in solitary, too.”
“Oh, bullshit. Neither of you are real people.”
The guard stepped forward, reversed the weapon, and thumped him hard on the sternum. “Not real?” He hit the wall behind him and slid to the floor, trying to breathe, pain radiating from the center of his chest.
AS THE cell walls and Draper faded, a nurse gently wiggled the helmet until it came off her head. It was like a light bicycle helmet, white. With a warm gloved hand, she helped her sit up on the gurney.
She looked over at Draper, lying on the gurney next to hers. His black helmet was more complicated, a thick cable and lots of small wires. The same blue hospital gown as she was wearing. But he had a catheter, and there was a light black cable around his chest, hardly a restraint, held in place by a small lock with a tag she had signed.
The nurse set her white helmet down carefully on a table. “You don’t want to drive or anything for a couple of hours.” She had a sour expression, lips pursed.
“No problem. I have Autocar.”
She nodded microscopically. Rich bitch. “I’ll take you to where your things are.”
“Okay. Thank you.” As she scrunched off the gurney, the gown slid open, and she reached back to hold it closed, feeling silly. She followed the woman as she stalked through the door. “I take it you don’t approve.”
“No, ma’am. He serves less than one day for murdering his wife.”
“A, he didn’t murder her, and B, it will feel like a hundred years.”
“That’s what they say.” The nurse turned with eyes narrowing. “They all say they didn’t do it. And they say it feels like a long time. What would you expect them to say? ‘I beat the system and was in and out in a day?’ Here.”
As soon as the door clicked shut, she opened the locker and lifted out her neatly folded suit, the charcoal grey one she had appeared to be wearing in the cell a few minutes before.
THE BLOW had knocked the wind out of him. By the time he got his voice back, they were gone.
The tray had a paper plate with something like cold oatmeal on it. He picked up the plastic spoon and tasted the stuff. Grits. They must have known he hated grits.
“They didn’t say anything about solitary. What, I’m going to sit here like this for a hundred years?” No answer.
He carried the plate over to the barred window. It was open to the outside. A fall of perhaps a hundred feet to an ocean surface. He could hear faint surf but, leaning forward, couldn’t see the shore, even with the cold metal bars pressing against his forehead. The air smelled of seaweed, totally convincing.
He folded the paper plate and threw it out between the bars. The grits sprayed out and the plate dipped and twirled realistically, and fell out of sight.
He studied the waves. Were they too regular? That would expose their virtuality. He had heard that if you could convince yourself that it wasn’t real—completely convince your body that this wasn’t happening—the time might slip quickly away in meditation. Time might disappear.
But it was hard to ignore the throbbing in his chest. And there were realistic irregularities in the waves. In the trough between two waves, a line of pelicans skimmed along with careless grace.
Maybe the illusion was only maintained at that level when he was concentrating. He closed his eyes and tried to think of nothing.
Zen trick: four plain tiles. Make each one disappear. The no-thing that is left is just as real. Exactly as real. After a while, he opened his eyes again.
The pelicans came back. Did that mean anything?
Maybe he shouldn’t have thrown away the grits. You probably get hungry in virtual reality. But you couldn’t starve to death, not overnight. No matter how long it seemed.
He gave the iron bar a jerk. It squeaked.
He tugged on it twice, and it seemed to move a fraction of a millimeter each time. Was that possible? He looked closely, and indeed the hole the bar was seated in had slightly enlarged. He could wiggle it.
“Trusty?” he shouted. Nothing. He walked to the steel door and shouted through the little hole. “Hey! Your goddamn jail’s already falling apart!” He peered through the small peephole. Nothing but darkness.
He sniffed at the hole, and it smelled of drilled metal. “Hey! I know you’re out there!”
But what did he really know?
SHE POPPED her umbrella against the afternoon shower and was almost to the parking place when a young man came running out. “Ms. Hartley!” He was waving a piece of paper. “Ms. Hartley!” She stepped toward him and let him get under the umbrella.
“Your objection was approved. You can bring him out any time!”
She glanced at her watch. He’d only been in VR for about twenty minutes, counting the time she’d spent dressing. “Let’s go!” Two months passing each minute.
Security at the courthouse door took an agonizing five minutes. But the young man raced on ahead to make sure the room was ready.
She crashed through a door and rushed up the single flight of stairs rather than wait for the elevator. The sour-faced woman was blocking the entrance to the VR room.
“Get out of the way. Every second, he spends a day in that awful cell.”
“You know this won’t work if he doesn’t believe in his own innocence. If he blames himself in any way.”
“He wasn’t even there when his wife was murdered!” The woman’s eyes searched the lawyer’s face. “Look! I’ve been a defense attorney for eighteen years. I know when someone’s lying to me. He didn’t kill her!”
She pushed on in and the young man was standing by a chair, next to the gurney that Charlie Draper lay on, holding the white helmet. “Here. You don’t have to lie down. Just put this on.”
CRAPPY SYSTEM can’t even make an illusion that works.
He went back to the iron bar and rotated it squeaking in its concrete socket, and gave it a good rattle. Concrete dust sifted down. He seized it in both hands and gave it all he had. “Bitch!” He squeezed it as hard as he had Maggie’s neck, and jerked, with the strength that had snapped it and killed her.
The bar came free in his hands. A piece of concrete fell to the floor with a solid thunk.
“You call this a…”
A large crack crawled up and down from floor to ceiling. With a loud growl, half the wall tilted and fell piecemeal into the sea.
“Wait.” A fine powder was drifting down. He looked up to see the ceiling disappear. “No.” All four walls crumbled into gravel and showered to the sea.
WHEN THEY took the helmet off her, there was an older man, dressed like a doctor, standing there.
“It’s a temporary thing,” he said. “He’s resisting coming out of it. For some reason.”
“I didn’t go to the cell. I didn’t go anywhere,” she said, peering inside the helmet. “It was all just white, and white noise, static.”
“You’re out of the circuit. The electronics do test out. But he’s not letting you make contact.”
She looked into her client’s vacant eyes. She touched his cheek gently and he didn’t respond. “Has this happened before?”
“Not with people who know and trust each other. But we’ll get through to him.”
“Meanwhile…every ten hours is a hundred years?”
“That’s a safe assumption.” The doctor opened the manila folder in his hand and looked at the single piece of paper within. “He signed a waiver—”
“I know. I was there.” She lifted her client’s hand and let it drop back onto the sheet.
“HE’S A… social kind of guy. I hope he’s not too lonely.”
THERE WAS only the floor and the iron door. He touched the door and it fell away. It turned end over end once, and slid flawlessly into the water, like an Olympic diver.
Above him, a perfect cloudless sky that somehow had no sun. Below, the waves marched from one horizon to the opposite. A line of pelicans appeared.
He tried to throw himself into the water, but he hit something soft and invisible, and fell gently back.
He screamed until he was hoarse. Then he tried to sleep. But the noise of the waves kept him awake. ■
Ma Boyong is a popular Beijing-based writer of short stories and novels. He fuses western conventions with traditional Chinese elements. Published here for the first time in English (translated by Ken Liu, whose own work also appears in this collection), Ma introduces a liberal dose of the satire for which he is well known in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
ROBOTICS
The Mark
Twain Robots
BY MA BOYONG
“I must warn you: giving robots a sense of humor is dangerous.”
Professor White, the famous roboticist, put down his pipe and stared severely at Kevin, a young researcher whose hair was dyed a careless shade of blond.
But Kevin, unintimidated, continued calmly, “Right now, competition in the market is intense. We have to differentiate our robots somehow. Marketing research shows that the public is sick and tired of metal faces that never change their expressions. They crave robots with personality, a human touch.”
“But is this even possible? Can robots tell jokes just like humans?” another Director of the Board asked.
“Technically, it’s not difficult,” Kevin replied. “My group has already developed a whole set of algorithms, which, combined with our joke database, can generate all kinds of jokes suitable for every occasion.” He paused meaningfully before going on. “Indeed, our simulations almost passed the Turing Test.”
The Directors were suitably impressed. They were optimistic about the market potential of humorous robots. Kevin’s group received a large budget boost to support the integration of the humor module, nicknamed “Mark Twain,” with production models.
Of the entire Board only Professor White held onto his original objection. After the meeting, the old man stubbornly insisted, “You’re going to have a real problem on your hands. This is not a good idea.”
THE INCIDENT took place in one of the company’s test labs. There, the first robot equipped with the Mark Twain module malfunctioned for no apparent reason and shut itself down. The next few test models also suffered random shutdowns in similar fashion. Not a single one completed the test routines.
The researchers were puzzled. They went over the circuit diagrams and the code printouts again and again, even testing each individual screw. They discovered no flaws.
But the robots continued to malfunction. And the way each robot failed was different: some failed on the first test during the quality assurance process, others lasted until the team was just about ready to declare victory—this made tracking down the problem very difficult.
Having run out of options, the team sought the advice of Professor White. After the Professor looked over the testing records, he called a team meeting.
“Have you noticed the common element in all these malfunctions? The robots all failed when they interacted with humans.”
Professor White pointed to a recorded video: An engineer in an orange suit walked up to a freshly assembled robot and briefly spoke to it.
“He was just talking to the robot to see if the Mark Twain module was functioning correctly,” Kevin said.
“Final assembler, mechanical beautician, test engineer, packaging engineer, logistics engineer…” The Professor counted them off. “From the time a robot comes off the assembly line to the time it’s loaded onto a truck, it will encounter a dozen or so humans. I gather that during these times the robot is free to interact with any of the humans? All of the malfunctions occur during these interactions.”
Kevin was puzzled. “You’re saying we shouldn’t allow such encounters? But the set up is deliberate. These workers all have different social backgrounds, educational profiles, and personalities. We need to test the ability of the Mark Twain module to adapt to different environments and interact with different kinds of people. What’s wrong with that?”
Professor White shook his head. “I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with your procedure, which is well-designed. But the problem is deeper—do you remember the Three Laws of Robotics? All robots must obey them.”
Everyone laughed, thinking the Professor was joking. Each member of the research group had a Ph.D. in robotics. The “Three Laws” were so basic that even children could recite them. How could they offer any insight into the mysterious malfunctions here?
Professor White sighed, knowing that they did not understand. He played another recorded video. This one showed the entire process, from assembly to malfunction, of the sixth prototype robot equipped with the Mark Twain module.
Number Six was transported from the end of the assembly line to a designated location. The artificial skin hadn’t been applied yet, and the undecorated metal composite skeleton seemed cold and forbidding. A test engineer walked up to it and turned on the microphone so that the conversation could be recorded and be heard by other engineers in the lab.
“Number Six, can you understand me?”
“Of course. I’m made right here in this country.” It paused, then added, “You know that those women at that bar were only pretending to be foreign so they didn’t have to talk to you, right?”
Everyone laughed. The engineer, satisfied, checked off a box on his clipboard.
“Number Six, my name is Wiesel. I’ll be doing your testing.”
“Show me your educational credentials first. I’m not some cheap knock-off that any unqualified idiot can operate.”
“Hey!” Wiesel was taken aback. “Are you insulting me? I’m going to report you to the company.”
“To produce a robot like me requires at least a million dollars. To hire an engineering intern from a third-rate college costs only eighty thousand a year. Whose side do you think the company will take?” The robot rolled its naked eyeballs—the eyelids hadn’t been installed yet. Others in the lab who overheard the exchange laughed and whistled.
Wiesel looked awkward, and chuckled once. He put a big checkmark on his clipboard and left quietly. Number Six stared after him as he walked away, shoulders slumped.
Five minutes later, Number Six short-circuited and shut down.
Professor White rewound the recording to the point where Wiesel was leaving. He pointed at the screen. “Look at the expression on this man. His feelings were hurt.”
“But it was only a joke,” one of the researchers said.
“Maybe for those watching, but not him. This is the real reason for the malfunctions. The First Law of Robotics clearly states: ‘A robot may not injure a human being.’ That joke clearly touched a sore point with Weisel, an insecurity. Number Six detected this, and so its fail-safe systems kicked in to shut it down.”
“But that was not a real injury.”
“When you are made fun of by others, doesn’t your chest feel tight? When a woman dumps you, don’t you find food to be tasteless and sleep hard to come by? When a person’s feelings are hurt, the injury will manifest itself in physiological reactions. From a robot’s perspective, a mental injury and a physical one are equivalent.”
Professor White played a few more recordings. Now that the researchers understood what they were looking for, the pattern became clear. Without exception, the Mark Twain robots’ jokes went too far and hurt the feelings of some interlocutor. The First Law then kicked in and caused the robot to self-destruct.
“Humor is in large measure an art based on derision and put-downs. It’s in the nature of jokes to hurt some people. This is incompatible with the First Law. That’s why from the start I told you it was a dangerous idea.”
The team fell silent.
“Is there really no way to make the humor module compatible with the Three Laws?” Kevin asked, pitifully.
Professor White was now their only hope. He cogitated for a while, and then said, “It’s not impossible. There are some jokes that offend no one. If we adjust the joke database and the filtering algorithms so that the robots pick only jokes that are safe for all humans, then theoretically it’s possible to avoid the First Law.”
These words rekindled hope in everyone, but the Professor’s next sentence sent them back into the depths of suffering. “But I don’t know if this sort of neutered—please excuse me for using this word—speech can still be called humor.”
But the research group had no choice. They had to try it.
Following Professor White’s advice, they set about the task of designing appropriate filters. But this turned to require a much more complex set of algorithms than generating good jokes in the first place.
Since the Board intended the new robots for the global market, the research group had to eliminate the possibility of the Mark Twain module generating jokes that would offend or hurt anyone. But human society was so complicated. It was difficult to find jokes that would not offend some segment of the population. The research group had to sift through the joke database again and again and compare its contents with the constant stream of media reports of people taking offense at various things to select only joke topics that were as safe as possible.
After the modified Mark Twain 2.0 module was completed, the self-destruction of robots did stop. The robots were now able to follow the First Law. But there was a new problem: the robots were no longer funny.
“It tells jokes like a human resources specialist,” a test engineer complained.
“I’d rather drink liquid nitrogen than listen to this pap,” another worker said.
The Board held an emergency meeting. After the Directors watched a Mark Twain 2.0 robot perform for ten minutes, they unanimously agreed that this product could not be released to market. A humorous robot that was not funny at all was worse than useless.
But all was not lost. A brilliant salesman had the idea of selling the dozen or so Mark Twain 2.0 prototypes to a certain country in the Far East. There, every spring, a great variety show was broadcast to the entire country, and the people in charge loved the jokes told by the Mark Twain 2.0 robots.
The hapless audience there cursed the bland robot comedians in private and turned off their TVs, but the people in charge were pleased and used the robots for every public occasion. Safe entertainment was important for a harmonious society.
After abandoning the useless Mark Twain 2.0 prototypes, the research group locked themselves in a conference room and vowed to come up with a solution before coming out. Suggestion after suggestion was debated and then rejected. The team squeezed out every last ounce of brainpower to try to solve this problem.
Hope dawned on the third day.
One of the engineers stood up and announced: “There is one type of humor that can make others laugh without injuring them. I think we should focus our research in that direction.”
“What do you mean?” Kevin asked.
Among all the researchers on the team, the man who had spoken had the least prestigious educational credentials. He was always dealing with subtle digs and exclusion by the other researchers who formed little cliques. In order to improve his social standing, he had developed a habit of telling embarrassing stories about himself to others.
“Self-mockery,” the man said, and blushed.
After further discussion, everyone realized the brilliance of this suggestion: a robot that constantly made fun of itself would entertain the human user, but wouldn’t offend anyone. This would get around the First Law and the blandness of Mark Twain 2.0 at the same time.
Following this path, they quickly developed Mark Twain 3.0. This would be the research group’s final chance. After the first Mark Twain 3.0 prototype came off the assembly line, the whole team crowded around it.
Kevin began the testing. “Tell us a joke.”
“You really want to hear a robot tell a joke?” The robot’s tone was so serious that all the researchers had to hold back their smiles.
“Yes. For example, what do you think of the way you look?” Kevin asked.
The robot glanced at its reflection in a nearby chrome panel. “There’s nothing good to say about my appearance. It’s just a bunch of broken wires taped together like a mummy.” The robot shrugged its shoulders. “I was probably a lawn mower trying to cross the highway who didn’t make it.”
Everyone laughed. But amidst the laughter, white smoke came out of the body of the Mark Twain 3.0 robot, and it collapsed in a heap on the ground.
“WHAT HAPPENED?” The Directors asked. They had already decided to abandon the project and write off all the investment, but they still wanted to understand the details.
Kevin was too dejected to say anything. Professor White stood up and answered for him. “In order to make others laugh, the Mark Twain module forced the robot to posit the following: ‘I = a bunch of broken wires.’ This had to be accepted by the robot’s self-awareness routines as a fact. But the self-awareness routines were also fed the following: ‘I = expensive Mark Twain 3.0 prototype robot.’ This was also accepted as a fact. Since the two ‘facts’ could not be made compatible, the logical subsystems failed as though there were a division by zero. The whole system then collapsed.”
“Can you explain it in simpler terms?” One of the Directors, who had little technical background, begged.
Professor White waved his arms. “Self-mockery led to irreversible logical errors for the robot. This is because Mark Twain 3.0 violates the Third Law of Robotics: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.”
Professor White then looked around the table with a serious expression, and continued, “You can also try to understand it this way: for a robot equipped with Mark Twain 3.0, the only alternative to hurting someone or hurting itself was to tell the bland jokes of version 2.0. But even a robot has too much self respect to speak the way a Mark Twain 2.0 robot is forced to speak.” ■
Pat Cadigan is an American author who has settled in England. Best known for her cyberpunk fiction, she won the 1988 Locus Award for Best Short Story, and another Locus Award in 1990 for Best Collection. In 1992 and 1995 she won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for two of her novels and continues to have her short stories regularly featured in anthologies.
BIOMEDICINE
Cody
BY PAT CADIGAN
“Common wisdom has it,” said LaDene from where she was stretched out on the queen-sized bed, “that anyone with a tattoo on their face goes crazy within five years.”
Cody paused in his examination of his jawline in the mirror over the desk to give her a look. “You see any tattoos on this example of manly beauty?”
“Can’t see the moon from here, either. Or the TV remote,” she added as she sat up and looked around. Cody found it on the desk and tossed it to her. “Thanks. You know, carnies would call you a marked man.”
“Carnies?” He gave a short laugh. “Don’t tell me you threw over the bright lights of the midway to keep a low profile in budget accommodations.”
“Higher-end budget accommodations.” She put on the TV and began channel-surfing. “For the discerning yet financially-savvy business traveller. Don’t you ever read the brochures?”
He made a polite noise that could have been “yes” or “no” and was neither. The hotspot that had come up over two hours ago was still there, midway between his chin and the point of his jaw, and as far as he could tell, it hadn’t faded even a little. The medic had assured him there was nothing to worry about unless it started to spread and it hadn’t. It wouldn’t have bothered him except he hadn’t had a hotspot in years. Rookies got hotspots.
The sudden recurrence could have been down to any number of things, the medic had said, the mostly likely being the attack of hayfever he had suffered on arrival. But he’d never had hayfever in his life, he’d told the medic. He’d never been to Kansas City in late August, she’d replied, chuckling.
Technically, he still hadn’t. The airport was thirty miles north of the city and the car they’d sent had taken him to an industrial park about as far to the west on the Kansas side of the state line, which apparently ran right through the middle of town. The most he’d seen of Kansas City proper was a distant cluster of skyscrapers, briefly glimpsed through the tinted window as the driver negotiated a complicated interchange of highway ramps. After that it was generic highway scenery all the way to a generic suburban industrial park, full of angular, antiseptic office buildings surrounded by patches of green landscaped and manicured in extremis, some with a koi pond or a fountain. The access road meandered through it so much that Cody thought there had to be an extra mile of travel. Albeit a very pretty mile; perhaps it was so people coming and going could see at least in passing the flowers they didn’t have time to stop and smell. Cody could have done without it. By the time they’d reached their destination, he had actually begun to feel carsick.
“Yo!” A pillow hit him in the head, making him jump. “And I thought I was vain,” LaDene laughed. “Are you really that fascinating?”
“I was woolgathering,” he said as he threw the pillow back at her. “Thinking, in case you don’t know what that means.”
“I know what it means,” she said. “I also know you’ve got a hotspot. Unclench, honey, I’ve got one, too.” She lifted her shirt and pointed at her navel.
“Oh, very funny.”
“Oh, very for-real.” She was up off the bed and had his face in her hands before he could say anything. “Ah, got it, right there.” She patted his cheek and pulled up her shirt again, exposing her midriff. “Mine’s hotter. Feel.”
Her bellybutton was only inches away from his nose. Cody drew back and started to protest as she grabbed his hand and pressed it against her skin. His discomfort turned to surprise. “I sit corrected,” he said, extricating himself from her grip. “Yours is hotter.”
“Told you,” she said, plumping down on the bed to stretch out again. “It’s probably the ragweed and who knows what else in the air. Man, I hate KC this time of year.”
“You’ve been here before?”
“I’m from here.” She laughed at his surprised expression. “You couldn’t tell?”
“How could I? We just met.”
“I knew you weren’t from around here, soon as I saw you. No antihistamines.”
He chuckled a bit ruefully. “I thought I was dying of a head cold I caught on the plane.”
She started to channel-surf again, then changed her mind and shut the TV off. “If you get cold symptoms a lot when you fly, it’s probably an allergy.”
“Oh?” He gave a short skeptical laugh. “Is there a lot of ragweed on airplanes?”
She shrugged. “Lots of other stuff—mold, dust, newsprint. Somebody’s cheap cologne. Even expensive cologne.”
“Newsprint?”
“Believe it or leave it. You know how if something exists, there’s porn of it? Well, there’s also someone allergic to it.”
“Newsprint,” Cody said again, still skeptical.
“If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’.” LaDene raised one hand solemnly, then let it fall. “Okay, that was fun. Now whaddaya wanna do?”
Cody leaned over and scooped the remote control up so he could turn the TV back on, mainly to forestall the possibility of her wanting to compare hotspots again. The screen lit up to show a dark-haired, olive-skinned woman speaking directly to the camera with an earnest sincerity that made his own brow furrow in sympathy.
“... found flayed and burned in a midtown Kansas City, Missouri parking garage have now positively been identified as August Fiore, AKA Little Augie Flowers, fifty-one, and Coral Oh, twenty-nine, of Liberty, Missouri. Fiore went missing two weeks ago from an FBI safe house where he was being held pending the start of the trial of Carmine Nesparini on racketeering charges. The FBI has steadfastly refused to comment on allegations that Fiore was Nesparini’s personal ‘master key’ but sources close to the investigation say that Fiore’s cooperation would have given authorities an unprecedented level of access to mob records.
“Fiore’s attorneys refused to comment, except to say that they were unaware of any escape plans and had no knowledge of Fiore’s whereabouts. Whether Fiore left the safe house voluntarily may never be known. FBI technicians are still working on the sabotaged surveillance system but experts believe there is little chance they can salvage enough data to be useful.
“Coral Oh’s connection to Fiore still has not been established. Oh worked for the Kansas City Convention Bureau for fifteen years as an event coordinator, for the last three in a supervisory position. Co-workers described her as intelligent and well-liked. She was last seen ten days ago in her office by two of her subordinates, who had been working late with her.”
The woman was suddenly replaced by a video of a very young man who looked as if he hadn’t slept for at least that long. The slightly wobbly graphic at the bottom of the screen said he was Akule Velasquez. “She told us to go home, she’d finish up,” he said in a husky voice to someone just off-camera to the left. “We’d’ve stayed but she was all—” he made small shooing gestures with both hands. “‘No, get outa here, I’ll finish, bring me some fancy coffee tomorrow.’ She was like that. I tried to stay anyway but she kept telling me no. I wish I hadn’t listened.”
The woman in the studio reappeared, looking more earnest and sincere than ever. “The mayor’s office issued a statement saying that this unfortunate and tragic incident should not overshadow the fact that criminal activity in the area has been steadily declining for the past twelve months thanks to new policing initiatives—”
LaDene snatched the remote out of his hand and turned off the TV. “Well, that wasn’t fun. Now what do you wanna do?”
“Hey, I was watching that.” Cody reached for the remote but she threw it across the room where it bounced off the wall and fell neatly into a small waste basket.
“She shoots, she scores! A three-pointer, the crowd goes wild!” LaDene made crowd noises as he stalked over to retrieve the control. The impact had knocked the batteries out and it took him two tries to put them back in properly. “Oh, come on. What do you wanna scare the shit out of yourself for?”
But the news had moved on; now a man was standing near the edge of an empty swimming pool, blinking in bright sunlight as he talked about levels of chlorine. “Oh, well.” Cody dropped the remote on the bed and sat down on the chair by desk again. “I wasn’t trying to scare myself.”
“Who were you trying to scare—me?”
“No. I just want to pay attention.”
“Set a news alert on your phone.” She was channel-surfing again. “It’s probably all bullshit anyway. ‘Little Augie Flowers,’ for God’s sake. Who goes around calling themselves ‘Little Augie Flowers’? For a minute there, I thought they were talking about some old Grand Theft Auto module. ‘Gay Tony Meets Little Augie Flowers, bullets will fly, heads will roll!’ Oh, hey, I love this!” she added, sitting up suddenly.
Cody barely had to look at the screen to know what it was. “I’ve seen it.” He rested an elbow on the desk and cupped his face in his hand. The hotspot was still there. “Several times.”
“So have I but I like to watch it whenever it’s on. That guy’s so cool.”
“He is?” If he didn’t leave the goddam hotspot alone, he told himself, it was never going to fade. He shifted so he was leaning the upper part of his cheek against his hand; as if it had a will of its own, his thumb slid down to feel his jawline. Annoyed with himself, he straightened up, grabbed the TV listings off the desk and paged through them without seeing anything.
“Okay, he’s all wrong and he probably knew it,” LaDene was saying. She punched the pillows behind her into a more supportive position for her lower back and casually folded her legs into a half-lotus, making Cody wince. “But so what? The whole movie’s wrong.”
“Well, it’s a pretty old movie,” he said, shrugging.
“Not that old. Not ancient.”
“No, but BCI didn’t even exist when this came out and people were still using floppy disks. This big.” He held his hands three feet apart. She gave him a Look and he moved them so they were only a foot apart. “Okay, this big. TVs were dumb terminals and a cloud was a fluffy white thing in the sky. So the idea of people giving up memories to store data in their brains—”
LaDene waved one hand dismissively. “I was referring to the cell phones.”
He frowned. “What cell phones?”
“Exactly!” She laughed. “How the hell did they miss cell phones?”
As if on cue, there was a sound like a ray-gun in a scifi movie and the ring on her right hand lit up with tiny flashing lights. She cocked her head, listening, then bounced off the bed. “My ride’s here. See you around—” her grin was sheepish.
“Cody,” he said.
“Right.” She paused, one eyebrow raised, the other down low, something Cody had never been able to manage no matter how hard he’d tried. “That’s really your name.”
“LaDene’s really yours?” he said evenly.
“I grew up in Tonganoxie, Kansas. Of course it’s really my name.”
The two statements seemed unrelated to him but he nodded anyway. She pulled her suitcase out of the closet, extended the handle and then paused again, one hand on the doorknob. “Where are you from?”
“I used to know but I rented that out for a database back-up.”
He heard her laughing all the way down the hall.
HE ATE ALONE in the dining room. The waitress gave him a table by a window that made the most of the hotel’s location atop a rocky promontory, so he could enjoy his chicken Caesar salad with a scenic view of three other hotels and the six-lane highway running between them.
While it may not have been classic postcard material, he had to admit the view was actually rather nice. Kansas wasn’t as flat as most people seemed to think, at least not in this locale. Here the landscape was gently rolling, punctuated by flat stretches usually occupied by malls or apartment complexes. In the distance, he could see the top of a mall that had to be the size of an airplane hangar and, not far from that, a crane surrounded by a framework suggesting future apartments or condos.
But it was the highway that drew his eye more than anything. He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen so many private cars. Well, the travel agent had told him this was one of the last bastions of the autonomous commuter. Cody couldn’t imagine what it was like to spend an hour or more of every weekday driving. He’d had a license himself once, but only briefly. After it had expired, he hadn’t bothered renewing it and didn’t miss it.
Perhaps if he were driving now, he’d be too busy to keep worrying at that stupid hotspot. Annoyed with himself, he pulled the complimentary library up on the table-top and checked out the local newspaper.
The waitress tried to talk him into dessert every time she refilled his iced tea. After his third glass, he swiped his keycard through the table-top reader, left an overly generous cash tip, and went back up to the room. It seemed a lot emptier now that LaDene was gone. Even the pillows she had piled against the headboard looked forlorn. He hadn’t been thrilled to find her there when he’d checked in. She had apologized profusely—some kind of travel-plan fiasco. Having been through a few of those himself, he was sympathetic. As it turned out, she’d been good company—better than he’d realized. His newly-recovered privacy felt lonely.
He stretched out in the place where she had been and put the TV on again. It was only one night, and as LaDene had pointed out, this was a higher-end budget hotel. The complimentary coffee service was a drip pot with pouches of a gourmet blend rather than merely a kettle and two envelopes of instant. The minibar was well stocked with a wide variety of refreshments and if all of it cost ten times what it would in a grocery store, at least the cans of mixed nuts were a bit larger than average.
And then there was the television. Twenty channels including sports and movies, not counting the on-demand you had to pay extra for. Most places didn’t offer half that. Maybe it was their way of compensating people like him, who were stuck there without a car.
Although that wasn’t quite true. A chat with the desk clerk had revealed that they were less than a mile away from what she referred to as a shopping village, which he quickly figured out was a clever euphemism for strip mall. It wasn’t much, she’d said in a politely cautioning tone meant to discourage any ideas of a foray on foot—a discount electronics outlet, a hardware store, an indoor playground, and three fast-food joints. Cody decided he could live without seeing it.
“Good choice,” the clerk had said approvingly. “Because you’d be taking your life in your hands—no sidewalks.”
“No sidewalks where?” he’d asked, puzzled.
“Between here and the shopping village.”
“Then where do people walk?”
“They don’t. People have to drive to get out here. They park, do whatever they came to do, then drive home again. I mean, you don’t walk on the interstate, either.”
Cody had been tempted to ask if she ever went for walks herself and if so, where, but decided against it. She was twenty-two at most, about to go from merely young and pretty to eye-catching as the last of her adolescent puppy-fat disappeared. She might have thought he was hitting on her and if he were honest, he might have had a hard time denying it.
He found a 24-hour news channel, turned the volume down to a murmur, and then used the remote to shut off the lights.
THE NEXT THING he knew, someone was sitting on his chest.
He could see nothing in the dark except a darker shadow looming over him, blocking out the flickering light from the television. He tried to yell but his mouth refused to open and he only made a sort of high-pitched grunt. Something pressed hard against his windpipe as whoever had him pinned bent over to speak close to his ear.
“You want to lie very still and not make a sound,” said a male voice, just above a whisper. “Then do exactly what I tell you. I don’t want to hurt you. I’m not here to hurt you. But I will if I have to.”
His heart was beating hard and fast, as if it were trying to pound its way out of his chest. The pressure on his windpipe eased but didn’t go away entirely. He swallowed, wincing.
As the man straightened up, Cody made out long graying hair, possibly tied back, and thick-framed glasses. “First, don’t try to open your mouth. You’re short-circuited and you’ll only give yourself a headache. Once I know you’re gonna behave yourself, I’ll consider letting you chew gum.”
He tried to make a conciliatory noise; the pressure on his windpipe increased again.
“I said, don’t make a sound.”
Cody sucked air through his nose, feeling himself jerk helplessly as his body fought to cough even though his mouth wouldn’t open. His throat clenched, knotted, and tried to turn itself inside out. Then all at once, his mouth did open, just long enough for him to let out a few explosive coughs before his jaw snapped shut again.
“Better?”
Cody nodded, breathing in hungrily through his nose.
“You understand now to do exactly what I say?”
He nodded again.
“After I let you up, you’re gonna change your clothes. Then you’ll be taken out of here in a wheelchair. You’re gonna sit quiet and stare at your lap. You’re not gonna look up. If anyone speaks to you, you’ll act like you didn’t hear anything. There’s a van waiting out front. You’ll be put into it, chair and all, and we’ll drive away.
“Now, it’s important you remember everything I just said and do exactly that because an associate of mine is having a chat with the night clerk. Nice older man, a grandfather, in fact. If, while we pass through the lobby, he should get the idea that you need help, my associate will hurt him, badly. Unlike me, my associate doesn’t mind hurting anyone. You don’t want to harm innocent bystanders, do you?”
Cody shook his head from side to side.
“Very good. Now, when I let you up, you’re going to strip naked and put on what I’ve brought for you.”
The man climbed off him and stood back. Cody moved more slowly as he slid over to the edge of the bed and began to unbutton his shirt with shaky fingers.
“A little faster, please,” the man said, staring at the television with his arms folded. Cody wanted to comply but he was so unsteady he was off-balance even sitting down. He shoved his trousers down, extricating his ankles one at a time, socks and all. Next to him was a small neat pile of clothing folded into squares. Trembling, he picked up the top item; it was a hospital gown.
“Ties in back,” the man said, casually matter-of-fact, as if he were remarking on the weather. He never looked away from the television.
Cody couldn’t have tied his shoelaces. He decided it didn’t matter; the second item was a bathrobe. He put it on sitting down, then pushed himself carefully to his feet.
The man turned from the television to give him an up-and-down. “I told you to strip naked. Lose the tidy-whiteys.”
Cody fell over on the bed in the rush to gets his shorts off. The man waited with a put-upon air till he was done, then took hold of his upper arm and pulled him up. Cody winced; his grip was unnaturally strong, well out of proportion for a slight, older man almost a head shorter than he was.
The man waiting in the hallway with the wheelchair was a lot taller and huskier, dressed in a dark blue coverall; there was a patch on his left breast pocket showing a picture of a first-aid kit and the words County EMS. He said nothing as Cody stumbled over the foot-rests and fell into the seat. The frame was lightweight and all the wheels were small. The gray-haired man bent over him and Cody saw he was wearing the same uniform.
“You remember what I told you,” he said and Cody noticed how little his rather pasty face moved, as if he’d Botoxed it into submission. And out here, up close and personal in much brighter light, the gray hair looked like a wig, ponytail and all. “Think of that poor man’s family. Whether he goes home when his shift is over is all down to you.” He stared into Cody’s eyes as if he expected to see some response there, then chuckled and patted his cheek. “And seriously, relax your jaw. I’m not kidding about the headache.” Cody started to rub the side of his face but the man caught his hand and put it firmly in his lap. “You don’t move till we’re out of here. Can you manage that or should I help you?”
Cody bowed his head.
“By George, I think he’s got it.”
Despite the carpeting, the ride was bumpy—the chair had a wobbly wheel, like every supermarket shopping cart Cody had ever used. But he stared fixedly at the slightly threadbare material covering his knees as they went down in the elevator. When they reached the lobby, he bowed his head a little more and squeezed his eyes shut, afraid they’d kill the desk clerk anyway. Having seen their faces, he’d be able to give a description to the police, which didn’t bode well for his survival.
Or for his own.
The thought was a cold electric shock running down his back as the automatic doors hummed open in front of him. He heard the desk clerk tell someone to have a good night and a woman responded I surely will, you too! in a cheerful, friendly tone.
Then he was outside, rattling toward a white van the same County EMS painted on the open side door. A tall woman waited beside a wheelchair lift.
CODY HAD no idea how long they had been on the road before the gray-haired man reached over and touched something to a spot under his cheekbone near the hinge of his jaw. He was in the middle of a huge yawn almost before it registered on him that he could open his mouth again. The muscles on either side of his face felt overworked and sore, including some he had never actually known were there. He worked his jaw for a while, knowing the gray-haired man was watching him and trying not to care.
He was sitting in a fold-down seat on Cody’s right, facing backwards. The husky guy had anchored the wheelchair against a padded backstop and strapped him in before taking the seat on his left. The tall woman was up front, next to the driver. The woman who had been talking to the night clerk was behind him, along with at least one other person he had neither seen nor heard and who apparently wanted to keep it that way. Unbidden, the idea came to him that it was LaDene; he put it quickly out of his mind. Paranoia wasn’t going to help.
Cody rested his head against the backstop and closed his eyes, wondering if he actually could go to sleep. Under the circumstances, there wasn’t anything else he could do. But his mind was as alert as if he were in the middle of a busy day, which he supposed he was. Pretending to be asleep was a waste of time, thanks to the hospital gown; he figured they’d souped it up to where it could practically read his mood.
He opened his eyes and saw the gray-haired man watching him. Almost reflexively, he was overwhelmed by another huge yawn.
“You know the situation,” the gray-haired man said, when his yawn had passed.
Cody nodded. “And you know I don’t know anything.”
“You don’t have to,” the man said.
“I’m a courier,” Cody added. “Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t access anything—”
“We know,” the other man said, sounding short.
“—I have no knowledge of the quantity or nature of any data—”
“Yes, we’re aware—”
“—nor am I responsible if any attempts at access cause damage, in whole or in part, to that data or any hardware or software—”
“We already know that—” He was openly impatient now.
“—my safe return cannot not indemnify any party against criminal charges of kidnapping and false imprisonment,” Cody went on, trying not to enjoy the man’s irritation too much as he talked over him, “which are brought by the state and not by companies or individuals.” He said the last couple of words through another yawn. “Whew. Excuse me. I’m obligated by the terms of my employment to apprise you of those facts. I can also write it all down for you and sign it.”
The man on his left perked up. “Seriously? Like, if you don’t say all that, they’d fire you?” Cody nodded. The man thought it over for a second. “What if we all claimed you didn’t?”
“Shut up,” the gray-haired man said, raising his voice.
Cody pretended not to hear. “I’d tell them I did.”
“And they’d just believe you?”
“I’m level-four bonded,” Cody replied. “On the job, I’m permanently under oath. If I lie, it’s perjury.”
“Shut your face or I’ll shut it for you,” said the gray-haired man, triggering Cody’s urge to yawn again. The man waited till he was done, then added: “Anything else in the way of legal disclaimers? Health warnings? Household hints?”
Cody gave his head a quick shake and dropped his gaze to his lap. They traveled in silence for some unmeasured amount of time. Abruptly, the man on his left straightened up. “I just can’t get my head around anyone just taking this guy’s word about anything,” he blurted.
“When we get where we’re going, you can look it up on Wikipedia,” the gray-haired man said acidly. “Last warning—shut your mouth.”
Cody hardly dared to look up after that; whenever he did, the grey-haired man always seemed to be watching him. He stared into the darkness, listening to the thrum of the tires and air rushing past. No one said anything about a rest stop and he doubted there was any point in asking—the gray-haired guy would probably offer him a Coke bottle. He shifted in the chair and concentrated on making himself relax. He had said what he had to say; his best course of action now was to avoid further antagonizing the gray-haired man.
It was just starting to grow lighter outside when he finally dozed off.
HE WOKE from an unpleasant dream of many hands grabbing at him to find the big man unstrapping the chair while the gray-haired man poked his shoulder, telling him over and over to wake up. Exhaustion overwhelmed him, weighed him down so that just getting his eyes open was a major effort and when he finally did, they wouldn’t stay open for longer than half a second. Then he was wheeled onto the lift and the humid heat that had not yet permeated the van’s still-cool interior hit him in the face and seemed to suck all the air from his lungs.
Groggy, almost gasping, he noticed the van was now green and brown, bearing the logo of a large national rental company. More unsettling was seeing that they were in a parking garage. The gray-haired man leaned over him, looking pastier and more impassive than ever. “This will be less unpleasant if we don’t have to force you. Not that it’s a party. But if I have to short your circuits, it’ll only be more of an ordeal.”
Cody wasn’t sure how to respond or even if he should.
“Good,” the man said and made a let’s-go gesture at the guy pushing his wheelchair.
The escort surrounding him blocked his view of everything that wasn’t straight ahead but he saw enough to know it was definitely underground and it was mostly empty. Which didn’t mean anything, he told himself. The country was lousy with underground parking garages, it was just a coincidence he’d seen that item on the news. LaDene had been right, he’d just been scaring himself. He wasn’t a mobster, he was a courier, just a goddam courier. People didn’t go around killing couriers. Nobody wanted that kind of trouble, the couriers’ union was too well-connected and too powerful.
A car engine started suddenly and the sound made him jump. The gray-haired man didn’t even glance at him but the others moved in a little closer, hiding him from view. They stayed close, even after he heard the car pass, until they reached a bank of elevators. One was roped off with a sign that said it was out of service. The gray-haired man pressed the call button and twisted; it popped open on a hinge and he inserted a plain metal key.
The elevator doors opened and Cody caught a strong whiff of antiseptic mixed with something flowery. His stomach turned over as they rolled him into the car, facing the back so he couldn’t see what floor they were going to. There was no voice announcement or even a chime but he could make out a series of faint, airy thumps—possibly just the motor running after a long period of disuse but Cody counted them anyway, noting when the air quality changed from rainforest to refrigerated, and estimated they stopped on the fourteenth or fifteenth floor.
The place looked like a fancy clinic, right down to the immaculate receptionist at the immaculate, shiny white desk. The gray-haired man gave her a brisk wave as he strode past, walking very quickly now as he led the way through a maze of corridors to a room with a gurney and the machine they were going to use on him.
“Take your robe off and get comfortable,” the gray-haired man said, jerking a thumb at the gurney.
Cody obeyed, a bit surprised at how quickly everyone else had vanished, leaving him alone with the man. He held onto the robe, turning it sideways to use like a blanket. “You mind? I’m kinda cold.”
“Already?” The man was doing something with the machine; he gave a small, humourless laugh. “Maybe we should get you some mitts and booties.”
“You could turn down the air conditioning,” Cody said.
No answer. Three people in white uniforms came in with a cart. Cody settled down with a sigh of resignation and closed his eyes so he wouldn’t have to see the cannulas going in.
SETTING UP seemed to take forever, although as far as he could tell, the hardware was up-to-date and they were all competent enough. Whoever had put the cannulas in his arm and leg was genuinely talented; it had been almost painless. The blood-pressure cuff on his other arm was actually more uncomfortable. He didn’t know why they needed that anyway, when the hospital gown would tell them whatever they needed to know about his vitals. But he supposed under the circumstances they wanted both a belt and suspenders. They even made a business of verifying his blood-type and his DNA before they finally began the process of filtering his blood.
Once they got going, he felt a little lightheaded, as always, and colder than usual. He curled up as much as he could, huddling under the robe. There was very little conversation, all too low for him to make out; no one spoke to him. Eventually, he dozed off, mostly from boredom, and woke to find a pair of woolly socks on his feet. He didn’t really feel any warmer but he was touched by the gesture all the same.
Just for something to do, he tried to guess who had done it, watching them surreptitiously as they moved around, checking read-outs from him, from the machine, from his blood. The black woman with shoulder-length braids looked like she could have been someone’s mother; if so, it was someone very young. Parents of young children were usually good for a kind deed. Or it might have been the Chinese guy who, like Cody, seemed to be in his late thirties.
He couldn’t decide about the older black woman. She checked his vitals more often than anyone else but that didn’t necessarily mean she was more concerned about his welfare. For all he knew, the socks had come from old Gray Ponytail himself. Hadn’t he mentioned something about booties before they’d even started? Or it was one of the other people he’d barely glimpsed, busily working with his blood somewhere behind him. Maybe between separating blood cells from plasma and pumping it back into him, someone had paused to think he might be cold.
It went on for hours. Cody dozed, woke, dozed again. His stomach growled and subsided as hunger pangs threatened to turn into queasiness. How much longer, he wondered, irritable with boredom and lack of food. If they didn’t call a halt soon, he was going to have some kind of major blood sugar episode.
Almost as if he’d caught something of Cody’s thoughts, the gray-haired man tapped him on the shoulder. “Are you supposed to eat something? Something in particular,” he added, a bit impatiently.
“Food,” Cody said, not caring how petulant he sounded.
“Not bread or sugar?”
“Just food. I don’t suppose you’ll give me any.”
“What if we tried insulin instead?” There was an edge in the man’s voice. In his peripheral vision, Cody saw the younger woman and the Chinese guy look up from a tablet they’d been studying together, obviously startled.
“Risky,” Cody said. “I’m not diabetic. But you knew that.”
The man gazed at him for some unmeasured period of time. He was worn out, tired and frustrated, Cody realized with a surge of spiteful joy; they all were but him most of all, because he was on the hook for whatever went wrong.
Abruptly, he blew out an exasperated breath and turned away. “We can’t keep him any longer. Shut it down, give him lunch, and let’s get him out of here.”
LUNCH TURNED out to be a can of nutrient with a straw; Cody was too hungry to feel more than a vague, momentary disappointment. The gray-haired man sat and glared at him. Hoping Cody would give up the goods somehow at the last minute? Or just being a sore loser?
“How old are you?” the man asked suddenly.
Cody paused and wiped his mouth. Considering how long they’d run his blood, he must have known, and a lot more besides. “Thirty-seven. Why?”
“Don’t you think that’s a little old to be a decoy?”
“I’m a courier.” He went back to the drink.
“You’re a decoy. A zero. A nothing. Less than nothing.”
Cody had no response for that; he kept drinking
“The one that sold you out, she was probably the real courier. Wasn’t she?”
“Who?” But even as he asked, he knew. Her name was on the tip of his tongue but he managed not to say it aloud.
“I’m right, aren’t I? You’re just—what? A day-laborer who doesn’t mind needles and won’t faint at the sight of blood? She’s carrying. LaVerne or LaRue, whatever her name is.”
Cody pressed his lips together briefly. Whether the guy was telling the truth or fishing for a keyword, it wouldn’t hurt not to give it to him. “Roughly ten percent of the population faints at the sight of blood,” he said chattily. “It’s a physical reaction, they can’t help it. Nothing to do with their character or anything.”
“Thank you for that piece of enlightenment.” Despite his obvious irritation, his face was more impassive than ever, not to mention pastier. Now there were small flakes of what looked like dry skin around the man’s hairline. The disguise was starting to break down, the wig parting company with the silicone mask. Everything probably should have been removed hours ago but the guy had kept nursing it along with touch-ups. Because he’d expected it would all by over by now, data extracted and delivered, payment collected and he’d be on his way to his next case, already forgetting what Cody looked like.
Instead he was sitting in a small, cold room with nothing to show for his effort but a spray-on about to peel off his face and nothing to look forward to except the displeasure of whoever he was working for, the loss of his fee, and a crew he had to pay anyway.
Cody finished the drink and set the empty can down beside him on the gurney. Well, that wasn’t fun. Whaddaya wanna do next?
It was the last thought he had for a while.
SOUNDS NUDGED him gradually toward awareness, until he understood the voices and various other noises were real, not lingering fragments of dreams, or dream-like flashes from lost hours, possibly days. Eyes still closed, he rolled over, turning his face away from the bright light overhead and smelled clean sheets, along with alcohol, powder, and cleanser. Hospital emergency room, he thought with cautious relief; there were worse places to wake up.
His memory was patchy but he knew the basics of what had happened. As soon as his captors had been sure they wouldn’t find anything in his blood, they no longer had to worry about contamination and dosed Cody’s so-called lunch. Pretty heavily, if the lead-balloon sensation in his head was any indication. Just by way of kicking his ass for having nothing of value.
Once the lunch had taken effect, they had dressed him up and dumped him someplace where he could sleepwalk indefinitely without attracting attention. Like, say, a large mall. Or a shopping village; one with a multi-screen cineplex. Cody wondered how long he had been aimlessly roaming before anyone noticed something odd about him. There were all kinds of stories. Everybody in the union knew one about a courier who had woken up to find she’d wandered into a house and spent five days with people who’d thought she was a long-lost relative. Cody suspected that one was apocryphal.
TWO DAYS LATER, he was in a DC-area suburb, although he wasn’t sure exactly which state. State-line ambiguity was getting to be a habit with him.
“How’d you like Oklahoma City?” asked the medic from where she sat at the lighting panel. She was a slightly plump woman with one brown eye and one blue eye; the difference was made more noticeable by the port wine stain covering that side of her face from hairline to the corner of her mouth.
“I only saw a parking garage, a clinic, and part of a hospital.” Cody finished undressing and stood with his back to the plain white wall. “Ready when you are.”
“Ah, you’ve done this before. I don’t even have to tell you to close your eyes and hold perfectly still.”
He took a breath and held it. Sometimes he imagined he could sense the UV light change as the scanning line traveled over his body. Years ago, when he had first become a courier, they’d showed him a video of himself being scanned. He’d thought he’d looked like a fantasy creature—one of Lewis Carroll’s fabulous monsters that had wandered out of the looking glass into a high-tech lab.
Blaschko’s Lines, a doctor had told him, years ago. Only visible under certain kinds of UV light.
He’d done research on his own, wondered about lesions or the possibility of waking up one morning to find himself permanently piebald. He would dream that the lines running up and down his arms and legs, traveling in waves on his torso, looping on his back, swirling all over his head would appear spontaneously and without warning in normal light; sometimes they were permanent. Other times, they’d flash on and off like a warning light.
He hadn’t had that kind of anxiety dream in a long time. They’d faded away with the hotspots. Maybe now they were both coming back.
“Done,” the medic called.
Relieved, Cody took a deep breath and stepped away from the wall to get dressed again. The medic asked his permission before she swabbed the inside of his cheek, and again before scraping a few skin cells from his lower back, his hip, and his knee. He was immensely grateful for the courtesy. It was always nice when someone treated a courier like a human being in a demanding profession rather than merely a meat-bag for data.
The guy who escorted him to his room for the night was wearing the standard gopher attire—a multi-pocketed vest over plain T-shirt, jeans, and running shoes—but had a military bearing that he didn’t even try to hide. Cody wasn’t surprised to find someone waiting for him when he got there. It had been a while since the last sales pitch.
“We’re all very glad to have you back safe.” The woman in the swivel chair by the desk was dark-haired and dark-skinned and her voice had the faint but unmistakable lilt that Hindi speakers never lose completely. He had seen her before a few times, dressed as she was now in a black jacket and trousers, but only in passing. She was one of those people who gave the impression of being taller because of the way she carried herself. Not military-style like his friend now standing at obvious parade rest between himself and the door, just with authority. In Charge. The touches of gray in her hair suggested she was older than he was, though he couldn’t have said how much—more than ten, less than thirty.
“I’m glad to be back,” he said, feeling a little awkward as he stood in front of her. She gestured for him to sit down on the bed, the only other furniture in the room, unless you counted the forty-inch screen in the wall.
“You automatically get a week of recuperation but we’ll sign off on two or even three.” She shrugged. “Or four.”
“Thank you.”
“This wasn’t the first time for you, was it?”
As if she didn’t know, he thought, careful to keep a straight face. Then he realized she was actually waiting for an answer. “No,” he said quickly. “It wasn’t.”
“I hope that it wasn’t especially bad for you.”
He shook his head. His memory was still quite spotty—his clearest recollection was of an older man with a ponytail and having to lie very still in a cold room while his blood was pumped out of his body and back in again. He also had the idea that there had been someone in the hotel room with him before he’d been kidnapped but that didn’t seem likely. Considering how heavily he’d been drugged, he was probably lucky he still remembered his childhood.
Unless I rented it out for a database. Another of those left-field thoughts that had been popping into his head for the last few days. They’d probably meant something once.
“... sure you will be happy to know that your kidnappers came away with nothing,” the woman was saying, “thanks to your unique... ah, condition.”
He smiled a little. “I never thought of being a chimera as a condition like, oh, excessive perspiration. Or psoriasis.”
“It does make you uniquely suited for deep encryption. Even if your kidnappers had thought to use your DNA to activate your blood, they wouldn’t know you have more than one kind of DNA, much less that they needed to scan you under UV for the entire key.”
His kidnappers; the way she said it made it sound almost as if they belonged to him in some way. Or like they were his personal problem—his condition.
“Eventually, that’ll occur to someone. If someone else doesn’t sell it to them first,” he added. The memory of a woman’s name LaRue or LaDene, and an old movie flickered in his brain and was gone.
“Such optimism.” She gave a short laugh. “The average merc can’t afford to rent a full sequencer, let alone personnel to run it who would be smart enough to figure out you had two kinds of DNA, or that they’d need both for decryption.” She gave another slightly heartier laugh. “Contrary to what you may have heard, the evil genius is mostly mythical. Nobody turns to crime because of their towering intellect.
“But that’s neither here nor there. We still want you to work solely for us. I know that someone has made you this offer before—a few times, yes? As an employee, you would be paid substantially more, along with bonuses for crisis situations—”
“‘Crisis situations?’ Is that anything like ‘hazardous duty’?”
She barely hesitated as she acknowledged his interruption. “Occupational benefits are also quite generous. Health coverage, vacation time, paternity leave—”
“Dental?”
Now she paused to give him a look. “And optical. Even a clothing allowance.”
He was tempted to comment on how she had used hers but decided not to get personal.
“We can also be very flexible in terms of your cover,” she went on. “Some sort of independent, low-key profession, like an accountant or a transcriber or—” she floundered suddenly and he could tell it wasn’t something that happened to her very often.
“Software engineer,” he suggested, then smiled sheepishly. “Kidding.”
“That could work, as long as it’s something nice and ordinary. Wedding albums, family albums, baby pictures, that sort of thing—”
“I really was kidding,” he said. “Software mystifies me.”
“You could even be semi-retired—”
“No.” He shook his head, apologetic but firm. “If I go to work for you, I’m no longer a courier. I’m a government employee in a highly sensitive area under military jurisdiction. Once I lose my union membership, all bets are off. All I have is you.”
“That’s quite a lot,” the woman said reprovingly. “You have no idea how much.”
Actually, I do, he thought at her, but if I’m flayed and hung up in a parking garage, I won’t care about the cover story. He shook his head again.
“If we take you into the fold, we can tell you more about what you’re doing. Don’t you want to know—”
“No.” It came out louder and more emphatic than he’d intended but he wasn’t sorry. “I don’t. You’ve got me this much. I agreed to cooperate because I don’t need to be in the fold to be an encryption key. I’ll keep the secret but I don’t want to be the secret.”
The woman shook her head. “Please. You went over that line a long time ago.”
“Not quite,” he insisted. “My body, yes. But not me.”
She stood up, stretching a little. “We’ll talk again. This government doesn’t give up that easily.”
“Oh?” He raised his eyebrows. “Which government is that, anyway?”
The question caught her off-guard and for a moment she stared at him, open-mouthed. Then she threw back her head and laughed. “Oh, very good,” she said, as the man opened the door for her. “Very, very good.” She started to leave, then hesitated. “And that’s really your name: Cody.”
“Yeah. My name’s really Cody.” Something flickered in his memory again but it was gone before he could think about it. He lay down on the bed and found the remote under one of the pillows.
“Well, that was fun,” he said, to no one and to whatever bugs might be listening, and turned on the TV. “Now whaddaya wanna do?” ■
Ken MacLeod is a Scottish writer whose work often deals with political and class issues. His books and short stories have been nominated for the Hugo, Arthur C. Clarke, and British Science Fiction Association Awards numerous times, and The Night Sessions won the BSFA Award for Best Novel in 2008.
MATERIALS
The Surface
of Last
Scattering
BY KEN MACLEOD
I have no memories of my father. He left our lives when I was three and a half years old. My earliest recollection—my mother’s red coat, me on a swing—is from about six months later. Nothing remarkable in that: childhood amnesia is almost universal. All I have of him, from my earliest years, is a photograph. And that is remarkable.
I walk into Glasgow Queen Street Station with a good half hour to spare, buy a coffee, and settle on a steel bench as far back from the ticket barriers as possible. This isn’t very far. I have a clear view of the platform where the train will come in from Carstairs, and where in twenty minutes my father will step off and come through, looking for me. I have no idea what he looks like, and he—as far as I know—has none of me. It’s our phones that will, discreetly, recognize each other. The Prison Service has helpfully set that up, and has been likewise helpful in releasing him an unpublicized couple of months before the end of his sentence. Even their refusal to give me a picture of him has been well-intentioned—they don’t want the smallest possibility of a hack or a leak. They want to give him a chance. His face was once the best-known in the world. In a way, that works in his favor. Everyone knows his appearance at the time of his trial. Nobody has seen a picture of him since. Even the screws and lags have been prevailed upon not to give anyone as much as a sketch. He’ll have changed a lot in fifteen years (minus sixty-one days). Of course, anyone can run an app to predict his current appearance. But still, he has a chance of at least a breathing space, of some days or weeks to find his feet before he’s recognized and the media siege begins.
Fifteen years. My God! For most of these years, I didn’t even know about him. I didn’t know that the guy my mother was married to, and who’d been around almost as long as I can remember, wasn’t my father. Not that I have any complaints about Joe, he’s been a good parent and everything, I love the guy I suppose, but he’s not my father. I don’t blame him or my mother for not telling me until I was fourteen and old enough to take the truth.
If indeed I had been old enough. Looking back with all the maturity of my eighteen years, adulthood practically, I wonder if I haven’t been obsessed.
I pop the top of the plastic cup and look for a place to dispose of the wet lid. No bins within reach, as usual, and I don’t want to lose my seat. I place the lid furtively between my feet, and sit back a little to sniff and sip the hot java. The bench’s back seems (and, now I come to think of it, may quite rationally have been) designed to be uncomfortable, angled so you can’t lean against it without its edge pressing painfully against your spine. I sit up straight. My gaze drifts upward to the station’s domed roof. It was famous once. Twenty-odd years ago, it was among the first pieces of architecture to use a light-bending metamaterial to create public art. The first such dome—in Bilbao, I think—showed the stars and planets and satellites above, night and day, far more sharply and abundantly than you could actually see them from the city streets, even on a clear night. So did the second, the more famous one at Shinzen. The starry sky was in danger of becoming a cliché. The next big dome was of the radio sky, and that, in turn… Glasgow’s city council went for something different.
That’s why, above me, the domed roof shows a shifting, fuzzy pattern of false color, mostly shades of gray, with a few glimmers of red and yellow here and there. It seems to hang in the air: you can’t see the dome itself, just the image it forms.
It was a sensation, for a while. But now, I’m the only person looking up at it. No one else spares it a glance. No wonder. It’s impressive as a concept, and if you know what it is: the part of the cosmic microwave background in the sky directly overhead. You’re looking back in time as far as it’s possible to look, almost to the point where the photons first escaped. And it’s real, extracted by the subtle warp of the metamaterial from the radiation that filters through the atmosphere, somewhat distorted but the real deal: the afterglow of the Big Bang, the first light from fourteen point whatever billion years ago. But visually, it’s just like a cloudy sky, with a little sunshine breaking through. Typical Glasgow summer weather, in other words. The dome might as well have been transparent.
I look again at the Arrivals board. Twelve minutes to go. I keep wondering if I’ll recognize my father. I can’t help myself—I reach into my inside jacket pocket and pull out the old photograph. The laminating plastic is a little scuffed, and the pigments have faded, but it’s still clear enough. A young man with longish curly brown hair, a fuzzy beard, and glasses, looking into the face of a baby cradled in his arm. The man is smiling and the baby is looking straight back into his eyes.
“That’s a cool device,” says an interested, amused female voice at my shoulder. I turn sharply. Coffee, fortunately no longer scalding, splashes on the back of my hand. The girl’s about my age or maybe a year or two younger. Her face is not exactly pretty but lively, and carefully made-up, framed by short black hair. She’s wearing a sort of creamy-colored shiny smock with frilly shoulders, over black long-sleeved top and leggings. She has tats on her wrists and piercings in her earlobes and a black nylon bag at her feet.
Now I know—from bitter experience of past missed opportunities—that when a lassie sits down beside you and says something out of the blue, she very probably fancies you. I also know, with a likewise bitter certainty, that this is going to be another missed opportunity.
“Uh, it’s not a device,” I say, letting her see it, wishing I could hide it. “It’s a printed photo laminated in plastic. That’s why it hasn’t…”
“Oh!” she says. “Like, on paper? Wow! I’ve never seen one. I really did think it was a phone or something.”
“It’s just a photo,” I say, sounding surly even to myself. I make to slip it back in my inside pocket, but she catches hold of the edge.
“It’s a sweet picture,” she says. “And it’s from before the Rot, so it must be—oh! That’s you, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I admit. I ease the photo from her grip and put it away. She looks a bit hurt and puzzled. I say something to ease my embarrassment.
“So now you’ve seen my baby picture.”
Now she’s the one who looks embarrassed. She looks away. I glance again at the display above the ticket barrier. (Funny how we still call them ‘ticket’ barriers.) The train is due in five minutes.
“I can see you’re waiting for someone,” she says, getting up. “Sorry to bother you.”
“No, wait…”
But she’s off, towards the mall that semi-circles the station’s perimeter. In a moment her back has vanished in the contra-flow of hurry. And I don’t even know her name, let alone her number. I sigh, drain the cup, crush it and drop it. I wonder if she’s guessed that I’m waiting for someone from Carstairs. The place is no longer a secure mental hospital. It’s just a long-stay, high-security prison, but it still has that sinister reputation. Anyone who’s been in Carstairs is deemed to be a psychopath or worse. I take out my phone and flick through the document folders (another of those archaic, pre-Rot terms…) of background and evidence. My father has never replied to my e-mails with all these heavy attachments, and never shown any interest in using what I sent him to appeal. But surely, now that he’s out…
Two minutes. I stand up and take a dozen strides forward, to where I can see along the platform but I’m not in the way of people going on. The train pulls in. Hundreds of people flood towards the exit gates. I feel very self-conscious as my eyes flick from one hurrying man to another. Some of them give me a curious look back, and I look away. Then, to my surprise, I recognize my father. He’s lost the beard. Thin, crop-haired, balding, early forties. New suit, rolling case. He’s not in a hurry; he’s looking around, taking things in. His eyes don’t meet mine. He saunters through the barrier with a wave of his plastic, steps out of the flow on the other side, and stands on the station concourse, a few meters away. He pats a pocket, takes out a phone, glances down and then at me. My own phone buzzes at the same moment.
A smile. I nod. We dodge through the still-emerging passengers, and converge. Handshakes, awkward one-arm-around-the-shoulders hug. He steps back and looks at me.
“Conal! How great to see you! Thanks for coming.”
“Good to see you, uh, father.”
I can’t call him “Dad.” I’ve called Joe that for too long.
“‘Keith’ is fine,” he says. He glances around.
“Hasn’t changed much,” he says. “Except… ah, the departure board displays.” He gazes up at these as if in wonder, nods, then turns back to me.
“Coffee, somewhere nearby, posh, bit of privacy?”
I gesture towards the semi-circular mall.
“Naseby’s?” I suggest.
“That’ll do. I’ve got an hour.”
The café has ambient music, low lighting, and cloth napkins. Keith wants a cappuccino, I want (another) Americano; he doesn’t want a sandwich. He insists on paying. We find a booth with a SoundScreen at the back of the coffee shop, and sit down facing each other across the table.
He asks after my mother and my half-brother and half-sister, none of whom have sent greetings, though I pretend they have. We do some more catching up, and run out of small talk. Keith takes an e-cig from his pocket and sucks on it, sighs out vapor.
“Bad habit I picked up in the clink,” he says.
“No problem,” I say.
“Well,” he says. “Here we are.”
“Yes,” I say.
“Why did you come? I mean, I’m grateful, happy to see you, but…” His voice trails off. He shrugs one shoulder. “I don’t understand why you’d want to see me.”
“Why didn’t you write back?” I ask.
“I did,” he says.
“‘Dear Conal, Please don’t write to me any more about this, yours sincerely, Keith,’” I quote back at him, derisively, accurately, and comprehensively.
He looks abashed. “I didn’t want you involved.”
“That was my choice.”
“Yes, when you were, what, fifteen? You have better things to do at that age. Your studies, for a start.”
“I did them,” I said. “I’m doing all right. I’m starting at Glasgow Uni in September.”
“Congratulations,” he says. A wry smile. “Not law, I hope.”
“English.”
“Good, good.” He sucks hard on his nicotine stick. “Speaking of law… I did read the documents you sent. You made quite a strong case—or at least, one that an actual lawyer could have turned into a sound basis for an appeal.”
“Why didn’t you?’ I ask. ‘I showed… I showed…”
I can’t go on.
“You showed the conviction wasn’t safe,” says Keith. “Well, like I say, you showed how a good brief could have shown it wasn’t safe. And you were right.”
“I was?”
“Oh yes. Any number of other people could have done what I was accused of. If that line of defense had been taken in the first place, instead of that it could have been an accident…” His gaze wanders. “Who knows?”
“So why didn’t you use what I found to appeal?”
“Go through all that just to get out a couple of years sooner? That’s what it would have amounted to, at the most.”
“Two years might not matter to you,” I say. “But they mattered to me. And you would have cleared your name. And I wouldn’t have wasted my time.”
I’m not sure which of these burns more.
He gives me a lid-lowered look.
“I told you not to.”
“Look, Dad,” I find myself saying, rather to my surprise, “I’ve found out much more since then. Look at this.”
I take out my phone and unfold it, spreading it out to a half-meter square on the table. I jiggle my finger across it, pulling up documents, highlighting, making connections in dotted and heavy lines.
“Harkins, Singh, McCulloch, right? All of them had the same access as you did. I haven’t found anything on Harkins, but the other two—! Singh got his first degree in Kerala, and back then he was definitely involved in the peasant movement—arrested and interrogated on suspicion of terrorism—”
“Which he made no secret of,” Keith interjects. “And he was released after a week, which in those days took some doing, I can tell you.”
“Yes—but whose doing? That’s what I wonder. And then there’s James McCulloch, the technician. Evangelical fundamentalist Christian; wrote endless screeds on his personal website and for the church magazine about how the variant texts of the scriptures were all forged by the Vatican and by various heretics and how the King James Version was based on the best manuscripts. He was a complete obsessive on the subject.”
Keith laughs. “Not at work, he wasn’t. Nice chap, scholarly. He worked as a technician to support his real calling, he said. But Jim was an excellent technician.” He peers closer at the spread-out screen. “Dead now, I see. Shame. What’s this got to do with anything?”
“Don’t you see? Means, motive, opportunity! He had them all.”
Keith snorts. “That’s ridiculous! I remember him banging on about the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus, and you know what? They’re still intact, because they’re on parchment, not paper. As McCulloch well knew! Only the very oldest fragments are on papyrus, and McCulloch rated them highly, as evidence of how early the New Testament was. So he didn’t have any motive to release the Rot, even supposing he would do such a thing.”
“But—”
Keith leans back, shaking his head. “Conal, you’re young, you don’t—now please don’t take this the wrong way—you don’t have much experience of people, or you wouldn’t even think of that scenario. You have this prejudice of the fundamentalist as terrorist, as book-burner. No. That’s not how it was, and it wasn’t how Jim was. As for Dr. Singh…” He shakes his head, again. “You can go and meet him, you know that? He’s a Head of Department now, still at Strathclyde University, probably sitting in his office right this minute, not five hundred metres away.” He takes out his phone. “Want me to call him?”
“No, no, no need,” I say, hastily, taken aback. Somehow I hadn’t thought of my suspects as real, as living rather than as shadowy, reconstructed figures in my mind.
“I thought not,” says Keith. He puts away the phone. “Look, Conal, I understand why you’re doing this. I appreciate it. It does you credit. But it’s not going to help me, or you. Because…” He takes a deep breath. “I’ve never said this before. I’ll never say it again. But I know these guys were innocent, because I did it.”
For a moment, it’s like there’s been a power-supply glitch and an earth tremor. I press my hands on the edge of the table. My mouth is dry.
“And it wasn’t an accident,” he adds.
I’m feeling nauseous. There have been worse crimes, but none worse or more consequential was ever committed by one person acting alone. Set aside the deaths: I know these are almost all indirect, statistical, speculative, and disputable. Think about the books, the documents, the letters, the photographs, the notes, the archives… all gone to dust because of the Rot. So many things we’ll never know, now. So many questions that’ll never be settled.
I have only one question left.
“Why?”
He puffs on the e-cig. “It had to be done. History was killing us—or rather, we were killing each other over history. Every day I got the train in from Dumbarton, and walked through this station and up the road to the university, and every week there’d be a bomb scare. If it wasn’t one lot it was another. Islamists, Irish dissidents, the bloody Prods even. And one day I realized that every one of them had been brought up on some version of history—”
“Oral history! Songs and stories. Isn’t that enough for these people? And radical websites! So what—?”
Keith shakes his head. “No, in the long run they need written history. Behind every cause you’ll find historians. Bloody archive rats. Without the authority of original documents, every text becomes shit someone said on the Internet. And the songs: the songs become fiddle-de-de. I mean, do you know where the fields of Athenry even were? That day, I looked up at the station roof—it was new, then—and thought, that’s what we need! The surface of last scattering, a time you can’t look farther back than. A clean break, a new start. A new beginning of history. And I realized I had exactly what was needed, in the GM fungi we were working on to recycle paper. Just a few tweaks to the genome, that’s all it would take.” He folds his finger-tips back to his thumb, flicks them out, blows. “A handful of spores on the wind, from the roof of the building. That’s how I did it.”
“Why didn’t you plead guilty?”
He shrugs. “I thought maybe I could get off, that they couldn’t pin it on me, but I didn’t want to lie about anything. So I said nothing. I let the lawyer come up with the best defense he could. Not good enough, as it turned out.”
“Jesus.” I stare at him, still feeling sick. “How could you…?”
“I’ve often asked myself that,” he says. “And I know I’ve messed up your life, and Clara’s, but… the truth is—I was thinking of the world you were going to grow up in. I was thinking of you.”
My fists clench. “Don’t bring me into it!”
“It’s not an excuse. But face it, Conal. It’s not such a bad world, now. We look to the future, not the past. Speaking of which…” He glances at his watch. “I have a train to catch, and a plane.”
“Where to?” I ask, numbed to idle curiosity.
“Far away,” he says. “The Arctic, if you must know. I got a job on the rigs.” He stands, slaps my shoulder. “Keep in touch.”
He goes out, the rolling case trundling behind him. I think of running after him, of demanding more explanation or apology, and I think better of it. After a while I get up and go out of the dim clattering café to the bright busy concourse. In a few minutes it’s going to be even busier. Trains whose journey started in Paris, or Shanghai, or Cape Town are coming in. I walk to a dead alcove between the toilet entrance and the Burger King, face into the wall, and take the old laminated photo from my inside jacket pocket. From my trouser pocket I take a penknife, and open it.
“Don’t do it,” says a voice behind me.
I turn. It’s the girl who spoke to me earlier. She’s looking at me with concern.
“I wasn’t going to slit my wrists or anything,” I say. I show her my hands, with the knife and the picture. “I was just going to cut this open.”
“I know,” she says. She lays a hand on my arm. “I guessed… your dad was in prison a long time. I knew you’d be upset after meeting him. So I kept an eye out for you. He’s gone now. You don’t have to do that. No matter what he did, that moment happened. He must have had some goodness in him then, you can see it on his face. You should keep it.”
“You’re right,” I say, “except… he was always a good man. He still is. And that’s why I’m doing this.”
Moving slowly and carefully, I prick the laminated surface with the tip of the blade, and slice along the edges, then peel back the plastic. Within seconds, the first tiny black spot has appeared, as one of the invisible, omnipresent spores of the Rot settles and begins its work. Within an hour, the whole picture will be dust.
The next moment, and without my being able to stop her, the girl has flashed her phone over my hand, and taken a picture of the picture.
“Just in case you change your mind,” she says.
I frown at her, shaking my head. “I won’t,” I say, “but, if I did, how would I find you?”
“Do you ever get the feeling,” she says, “that there are times when you’re really stupid?”
“Yes,” I say.
She nods. “This is one of them,” she says. ■
Paul Di Filippo began publishing science fiction in the 1970s and has written hundreds of stories since. Based in Rhode Island, Di Filippo has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, British Science Fiction Association, and Philip K. Dick awards.
WEB
Specter-
Bombing the
Beer Goggles
BY PAUL DI FILIPPO
Firpo Manzello was looking to get lucky. He hadn’t had sex in three weeks, and was beginning to fear he never would again. Yotta-toxic, serkku!
Part of the carnal drought involved Firpo’s job. He worked for the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in their Public Works Department, Sewer Division, Rogue Transgenic Squad. Firpo’s job involved descending into the subterranean labyrinth of utility tunnels with his team each morning and cleaning up whatever escaped the filters and traps of the numerous biotech plants in the city. Most days, the team’s quarry was nothing more challenging than some errant slime mold or motile vat-cortex. But from time to time, more complex organisms got loose. Firpo still bore crosshatched scars on his ankles and calves from tangling with a pride of anomalocaris. Believe me, serkku, those things could bite! What the hell had the fabbers been thinking when they endowed the monster shrimps with that pincer equipment? Lots of good eating there in the grabbers, but still—
Firpo’s job description itself wasn’t the actual problem. Some women actually found his duties sexy. Great White Hunter/Urban Superhero Guardian and all that. No, the hard nut was how Firpo smelled after a day at work. Heavy aromatics in those sewers! Even industrial-strength odor-remediation ribozymes from TraumaTech failed to eliminate every molecule of stench. Hard to get close to a babe when you reeked even faintly of seaweed-fermenting yeast strains.
But a liberal dose of Hack’s Bodyspray could generally mask Firpo’s signature smell at least long enough for him to make a love connection. The other, greater part of his problem was his erotic selectivity.
Firpo had developed a kink, hardwired now in his neurons by way, way too much gameplay in the online universe of ElfQuest. (A geezer at age twenty-eight, Firpo had preferred the old-fashioned platform over the augmented reality live-action version.) SAD, the experts called Firpo’s kink. Sympathetic Avatar Dysmorphia, brought on by excessive somatic identification with one’s virtual self and peers. Although he managed to kick his gamer addiction, now he could only get turned on by women who looked like elves. Needless to say, such real-life women were a tiny minority on the dating scene. True, there was a small community of modded and cosplay elves at MIT. But Firpo had kinda aged out of that scene, and dramatically burned some bridges too.
That left him only one choice really if he wanted to get laid.
He was going to have to download the Beer Goggles app.
The Beer Goggles app was a piece of augmented reality software that ran on your memtax. It changed the user’s visual perception of other humans, overlaying onto them whatever physical parameters the user dictated. Beer Goggles would allow Firpo to perceive every woman as an elf. Or so he had been assured by the vendor’s sales pitch. He had not actually used the app yet. Before today, the thought of downloading it into his phone felt too much like defeat, giving in to his neurosis and carrying around a talisman of his deviance. He kept telling himself that he could beat his kink and get normal. But three celibate weeks had proved he was too weak to defeat his kink.
So, eager to be loved again, Firpo took the decisive step.
First he popped in a new pair of memtax. The brief interval when his naked eyes beheld the world, when unmediated photons struck his rods and cones, seemed weird and incomplete, as if he had been stripped of one of his senses.
Memtax were living contact lenses built out of jellyfish proteins laced with graphene circuitry and an RGB chromatophore micromatrix. They subsisted by drinking the wearer’s tears, lasted forty-eight hours, and a year’s supply came free with most annual phone contracts. Possessing only minimal memory and processing power (about as much as a turn of the century PC), they had just one function: painting the user’s retinas with high-res real time imagery. Oh, yeah: their outward-facing side replicated the user’s iris and pupil—or any other image the user chose.
The memtax were übertoothed to Firpo’s phone, which in turn rode the cognitive E3 cellular network to the vast global cloud.
After losing his expensive smartphone several times in the sewers, even when secured in a supposedly failsafe holster, Firpo had invested in a wearable phone, now strapped to his wrist. The size of a sports watch, the phone ran on a thermopile that converted Firpo’s excess body heat to electricity. It also served as a body monitor with continuous transdermal monitoring, sending telemetry back to the squad’s HQ while Firpo squelched through the sewers, wearing his memtax, übertoothed earbuds, and a piezoelectric conduction mic strung on an innocuous locket around Firpo’s throat.
Firpo’s haptic bling—a smartring on each finger—completed his toolkit.
The memtax settled into place and booted up. The Apple-Asustek app store icon hovered in the upper left corner of Firpo’s field of vision, seemingly as real as the rest of his kitchen. He spread the icon open with a two-fingered gesture, his Haptic User Interface rings providing the tactile sensation of cutting a trough in a bowl of porridge. He quickly found Beer Goggles, and, for €3.99, downloaded it.
He started the little augie program running and directed it to the ElfQuest MMORPG site for its templates. The game had ten million players, over half of whom were women with distinct avatars. With that many images to choose from, the AI in Beer Goggles would certainly be able to overlay all the women Firpo could possibly meet in his lifetime with non-repeating masks.
The neat thing about Beer Goggles was that it only came online when the user got drunk, as determined by his phone’s measurement of the ethanol levels in his sweat. The app said it was operative now, but of course Firpo wasn’t drunk. Yet he wanted to test it, so he overrode its defaults to bring it immediately online. Then he looked outside.
Rents were too high in Cambridge for Firpo to afford living there, and the city did not demand residence within its borders as a term of his employment, so he lived in a cheap neighborhood in Charlestown. His quarters were a leaky, drafty houseboat moored at a louche marina protruding practically from the base of the Bunker Hill Monument. Connected to the hungry sea, the rising waters of the Charles and Mystic Rivers had reached partway up Breed’s Hill, drowning the old street-level neighborhood. The repurposed district had a certain gritty charm. Firpo always enjoyed watching the scuba divers below his boat, circulating through the drowned tenements in search of archaeological tidbits.
A Duck Tour was offloading a group of sightseers at an adjacent commercial dock. Judging by the snatches of excited conversation that drifted to him through his open window and by the appearance of the men, Firpo suspected the tourists hailed from Singapore or Malaysia. But judging by the women—old, young, fat, lithe, tall, short—the group hailed from Abode, exotic world of two moons, Wolfriders and Sun Folk. Long pointy ears, big slanted lantern eyes, golden skin, heart-shaped delicate faces.
Firpo hurriedly dropped the shade, his sudden arousal painfully pressing against his pants. He took Beer Goggles offline, and then brought up the active lifestreams of three of his posse from the Rogue Transgenic Squad, teleking them and arranging to meet them at the Cantab that evening.
Plenty of time to elven-ify the female world when he reached the bar.
THE HOUSE BAND at the Cantab Lounge, Jasmine Mofongo, pounded out their bhangra-bachata so loud that Firpo had to recalibrate his earbuds to filter out most of the music before he could hear his friends talk. Illumined like a cross between a hospital ward and a Victorian opium den, the Cantab was old, grotty and cramped, its staff rude and capricious, but the place felt like home to Firpo and his squad mates. They often came here straight from the showers after work, and had never once been called out for being a tad whiffy. The patrons were simply grateful for the protection from roaming sewer shoggoths, a popular urban legend. (One excessively wasted female patron claimed to have been attacked once by a pseudopod emerging from the Cantab toilets.)
Being a Saturday inching toward midnight, the joint was jamming. Firpo and his three friends had been lucky to get stools at the long scarred bar. A score of booty-shakers thronged the small dance floor. Balky heat pumps chuffed to chill the place, to little effect. The early June temps had averaged high nineties all week, and now the heat was baked into the building’s old skeleton, mere prelude to August torture.
Firpo was drinking a cocktail called “Important Intangible Cultural Property Number 86-1,” whose main component was the South Korean liquor munbaeju. The stuff was potent, and this was his second one. But he knew he wasn’t clinically drunk yet, because Beer Goggles had not kicked in one hundred percent. But the app’s stealthy oncoming seepage, an unadvertised surprise feature to Firpo, was tantalizing.
The app was using morphing algorithms to bring every woman closer to divine elfdom by degrees, the drunker Firpo got. Right now, all the females in the place looked like sixty-forty hybrids, with a preponderance of fey. Imbibing a third “Important Intangible Cultural Property Number 86-1,” should provide the tipping point.
Glancing to his right at Ellie Salo, Firpo jumped a hair to see how his co-worker had been transformed. Uncanny, serkku! Her familiar pleasantly wide mouth, squarish chin and broad nose seemed to have been shaved down and resculpted by an invisible plastic surgeon, and her olive skin was assuming amber tones. The upper curve of her ear was trending Spock-wise.
Sight of the partially elven-ified Ellie left Firpo feeling confused. He didn’t want to hit on Ellie, or even consider her as an erotic object. Sex with co-workers was generally a bad idea—imagine having a lover’s spat in the stenchy subterranean dark while some unknown critter was stalking you—and he knew Ellie too well to harbor any romantic notions. But if her transformation continued, he’d be unable to keep his hands off her. And more alarmingly, she might not object to his attentions.
Firpo said, “Scuse me a minute,” and got up to head to the john. Once there, opened the Beer Goggles app’s preferences. Much to his relief, he found a blacklist option and entered Ellie’s phone number. He returned to his stool and gave a small sigh to find Ellie looking completely like her baseline self. He downed another gulp of cocktail, and was rewarded with an intensification of estrogen elvishness everywhere else.
“So like I was saying,” Ellie continued, “I hear that Celexion has brought a tankful of space squids online.”
On the far side of Ellie hunkered Ismail Bazzy, a nervous scarecrow in Carhartt coveralls trimmed with nutria-fur accents. Ismail lived on the edge of constant worry and collapse, but this very hair-trigger, tripwire state had saved their bacon more than once.
“Oh, great,” Ismail said. “Now we can expect to encounter krakens. I’m putting in for a raise.”
From Firpo’s left, Alun Lovat spoke up. An unflappable and dapper British ex-pat out of demi-drowned Liverpool, Alun seemed the antimatter counterpart to Ismail. And yet his sangfroid had proven equally valuable in the trenches. “Oh, come now, Izzy, they’re only small chaps.”
“Yeah, sure, now they are. But once they escape into that devil’s broth—and you know damn well they will—then you just wait and see—”
“What’s Celexion doing with the squids anyhow?” Firpo asked, while he tried to ignore the increasing allure of the bevy of pub-crawling, beer-swigging, gyrating Galadriels circulating all around.
Ellie answered. “They’re extracting some kind of useful lipids from their synaptic vesicles. The cosmic-ray-induced mutations did something really weird to those orbital cephalopods.”
Firpo’s third drink had arrived, and he downed a slug.
That was all it took. Within seconds, every woman in the Cantab went full-bore elf. The effect was like when black-and-white Kansas turned to Technicolor Oz.
Firpo slid jerkily off his stool like an untrained robot fresh from the factory. Ellie looked quizzical. “You okay?”
“Uh, yeah, fine, swell. It’s just—I think I see somebody I know over there and I wanna say hello.”
Firpo wasn’t lying. The woman he saw across the room was a creature he had long been familiar with from his dreams. He began to make a beeline in her direction.
Alun chuckled. “Do nothing not in my playbook, my lad.” Ismail said, “Be careful!” Ellie, sounding slightly disappointed, said, “We’ll see you before we leave.”
Firpo just nodded absentmindedly. Jasmine Mofongo launched into their big hit, “Mi Dulce de Hyderabad,” a song Firpo always loved, but he never heard a note.
THE SPACE between Firpo and the elf woman he had singled out disappeared without his conscious volition. Standing with her female pals, nursing a drink, she had watched Firpo approach with a wry and knowing amusement. Now within her intoxicating personal space, he found himself momentarily unable to utter a sound.
Although her squad of buddies all exhibited elvish allure in differing proportions, the Beer Goggles had created something special in this one woman, perhaps having had a superior baseline body to map onto. But there also existed something authentically vibrant in her stance and attitude, the way she comported herself. Facially, she looked exactly like Leetah of the Sun Folk: masses of wavy red hair through which poked enormous lynx-like ears; pool-like canted eyes, their green-painted lids echoing their emerald depths; arrowhead chin and complexion of buttery copper.
“Um,” Firpo stumbled. “Can I buy you a drink?”
“Got one.”
“Okay. Wanna dance?”
“Sure.”
Leetah handed off her glass to a pal, who sniffed discourteously (or was she whiffing Firpo’s eau de cloaca?), and they squished themselves into the sardine-thick dance floor pack.
Jasmine Mofongo segued into “You Say Somosa, I Say Pastelito,” perfect tune for a slow dance. Firpo took Leetah into his arms. He longed to stroke her impossibly tall and curvaceous ears, to see how well the haptic feedback matched the visuals, but he refrained.
After a few moments of sweaty shuffling more or less in place, Leetah said, “I’m just curious—what are you seeing when you look at me?”
Busted! Could he deny—?
“Don’t try to fool me. I saw from across the room how you went all googly when some kind of app kicked in. What is it?”
Why’d he have to pick a sharp, smart elf? Firpo resigned himself to starting over again, with some lesser goddess. But before he ditched her, he owed Leetah an answer, so he explained.
“Hmmm, well that’s not as icky as what I imagined.”
Firpo untensed. Maybe this could still go somewhere. “What about you? What are you seeing when you look at me?”
“The real you.”
“Not likely.”
“Fosho. I don’t do Ay-Are. No memtax.”
This perverse luddite revelation shocked Firpo more than getting caught out using Beer Goggles. Did he really want to get involved with such a modern primitive?
Undecided, and the song ending just then, he let Leetah lead him to a relatively quiet pocket in the room, near the entrance.
“No Ay-Are? How do you function?”
“Oh, I manage. But sometimes it is inconvenient. Like right now, for instance, you could save me a few steps if you order me another drink.”
Firpo teleked the Cantab’s bartender, and soon they had fresh cold glasses in hand via the Boston Dynamics servebot. Just in time, for Leetah was reverting gradually to human. Firpo boosted his blood alcohol, and she popped back to Rivendell.
“Hey, by the way, I’m Firpo Manzello.”
“Vicky Licorice.”
“Fosho?”
“It’s my pen name, but I’ve gotten to like it.”
“Would I have seen any of your stuff?”
“Only if you have a pre-schooler at home. Little Lost Dino Escapes the Vat? Little Lost Dino in Manhattan? Little Lost Dino Saves the Great Barrier Reef?”
“Sorry.”
“That’s okay. I can hardly stand to read them myself once they’re published.”
An hour or so of amiable, intermittently teasing conversation ensued—although hearing a beautiful elf discourse about Cambridge city politics was slightly disconcerting—and around midnight Firpo felt ready to try for a kiss.
Unfortunately, that was the exact moment when all hell broke loose.
Days later, crowdsourced and media reports had comprehensively pinned down the nature of the event, which came to be labeled “Apparition Eve.”
A coalition of monkeywrenchers—everyone from The Universal Grammar of Hate to Tragedians of the Commons—had hacked into augiespace with specter-bombing malware. Insidiously, their strikes arrived not all at once, but in a timed cascade where each new incident fed on prior confusion and chaos.
And one of the first, smaller assaults was against Firpo’s new app, Beer Goggles.
Leaning forward boozily to kiss a receptive Vicky Licorice, Firpo experienced instant yotta-terror as a gunshot boomed in his ears and he watched Vicky’s head disintegrate in a bloody mist. He even had haptic feedback of a spasming body.
Firpo screamed like a pitchforked pig. For an infinite span of nauseous seconds, he was utterly convinced someone had randomly assassinated the woman in his arms.
But the non-reaction of the immediate bystanders—as well as Vicky’s own confused exclamations, issuing from the ruins of her face—alerted him otherwise. However realistic, it had all happened only in AR.
Elsewhere around the bar, other apparent Beer Goggles users—not all of them males—were showing similar distress.
An augie intruder popped up in Firpo’s vision. The badass female warrior-type said, “Happy date-rape, bastard! Beer Goggles promotes violence to women! This has been a message from The Sisters of Lysistrata.”
The specter dissolved in a spray of unicorn sparkles, but Vicky’s ruined countenance remained. Firpo couldn’t stand the horrible sight. Even as he awkwardly thumbed out his memtax, cursing, he found space to wonder how blowing up the heads of women could serve as the best possible anti-violence message.
The actual Vicky of course looked nothing like Leetah. A concerned expression filled a charming Latina face.
“What the fuck was that all about?”
His pulse slowing, Firpo told her. The other victims were calming down as well, and reconnecting with those they had seen killed.
Then the next attack struck.
A subset of the crowd shrieked and reared back from something invisible and threatening in the center of the Cantab. One woman screamed, “It’s hell! Hell’s opening up!” Another person yelled, “The teeth, the teeth!”
The shrieking of the damned filled Firpo’s earbuds, and he plucked those out too. Now he felt truly insensate. Without his own connection to augiespace, Firpo had no notion of what the horrified patrons were seeing or why they had been selected out of the crowd. He felt bewildered and helpless.
People were beginning to surge toward the narrow exit. A stampede seemed imminent.
Vicky took charge. She grabbed Firpo’s hand and pulled him outside.
The hot night air hit Firpo like a wool-padded sledgehammer. “My friends! They’re still in there!”
Firpo attempted to re-enter the Cantab, but the sound of exploding stacks of amplifiers stopped him. Specters must have tricked Jasmine Mofongo into some kind of “turn it to 11” mistake with their equipment. Suddenly a copious outflow of other fleeing patrons carried Firpo and Vicky out onto Massachusetts Avenue.
Dodging wild-eyed pedestrians, they regained the curb just in time. The orderly, scant flow of late-night vehicular traffic was disintegrating. Whatever specters the passing drivers were experiencing—children in the road, sudden sinkholes, giant kaiju, their dashboard telemetry red-lining—were causing them to swerve wildly and crash into lamposts, buildings and unfortunate pedestrians. The din was terrific: bending metal, fleshy impacts, sirens and screams.
Vicky pulled Firpo into the doorway of a shuttered store. “Your friends will have to manage on their own. The first responders will be here soon. We can’t do anything. We’ve got to get someplace safe. Where do you live?”
“Charlestown.”
“You’re closer. I’m way out in Waltham. Let’s go.”
Regaining a little more composure, Firpo took a step out from their sheltering niche, then stopped.
“What’s the matter?” Vicky said.
“I have no idea how to get home. I always followed the augie trail here.”
Vicky took some kind of antique handheld device out of her purse.
“What’s that?”
“GPS unit.”
“That must be fifty years old! It still works?”
“No memtax, you get creative. C’mon!”
They did not dare use the subway. The sound of titanic crashes emanating from underfoot was persuasion to stay aboveground. Even as cautious pedestrians, they ran into plenty of dangers. One of the worst was plummeting bodies, as baffled, specter-tormented victims were led to step from high windows and off rooftops that must have appeared to them as safe paths. Smoky fires contributed to the Dante’s Inferno atmosphere of a city in upheaval. Were other places under attack as well? Firpo had no way of knowing.
But eventually, after a few hours, Vicky and Firpo reached the relative safety of his houseboat and collapsed wearily into bed. After a few mumbled endearments, they both fell asleep.
And in the morning light, amidst the humbled wreckage of the city, augmented and physical, even without Beer Goggles, using just his naked eyes, a grateful Firpo discovered that Vicky looked plenty beautiful enough to drive all thoughts of Leetah and her kin forever from his mind. ■
Born and raised on boats in the Caribbean, Tobias Buckell now lives in Ohio. A finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 2007 for Ragamuffin, Buckell is also a prolific short story author, including having two stories published in Nature. As with the following, many of his stories are set in futures where societies are forced to adapt to the consequences of the environmental damage happening today.
ENERGY
Lonely
Islands
BY TOBIAS BUCKELL
You know the city, now. Twenty thousand people, many of them trapped in rustbelt Ohio. For generations.
You saw the footage of the super-tornado. Saw that seven story building downtown with its facade peeling off into the air like wheat chaff. Rows of houses ripped up with nothing but bare earth behind: the storm’s grim harvest.
But sometimes in destruction is a chance to change direction. To do something creative that wasn’t possible before.
These Ohioans declared independence. Solar roofs. Wind turbines. Bike lanes.
When they outlawed cars, though, shit hit the fan.
TO BE honest I didn’t want to go document the riots, even though I was offered the gig.
BUT THERE was a woman.
THERE ARE these algorithms that run in the background of my life. Track my buying habits, geographic migrations, peer groups, information consumption, and within a few points these mysterious daemons in the background can predict tastes.
Train them with some reinforcement and they get spooky predictive.
I’ve unleashed them to pick new restaurants, places to rent, and even hunt for new assignments. Occasionally, the software recommends friends.
It recommended I meet Sarah.
OUR SELECTION software worked together to find the one restaurant in the small city that would interest us: a tiny Thai place on the edge of town.
“What are you doing here?” we eventually asked each other, as picketers passed the windows.
“Say no to anti-car fascists,” one large sign read.
AS WE ATE, a hundred miles away in Columbus, Ohio, the sitting governor was crafting legislature to make it illegal to deny an automobile passage through any town in the state.
“We build cars,” the governor had said in a statement earlier. “We supply parts and build them. And have done so for over a hundred years. This is an attack on our way of life.”
The opposition pointed out that people could save ten thousand a year by walking or biking to work, if the environs supported it. Helluva tax break for a working stiff.
THIS IS NOT the first rustbelt city devastated by heavy weather. Incidences keep creeping up. Insurance companies are throwing actuary tables out windows and turning to supercomputers and climate scientists.
SARAH’S TATTOOS run up the side of her arm. Flames and exhaust pipes. She’s a Maker. Tinkers with speed. Builds some of the fastest cars and races them.
Software’s right. She’s dangerous and passionate. I grew up around here. The idea to settle back in and root twitches deep inside me.
WHEN SHE asks what I do, I say:
I love people on fire: the ones who’re so imbued by a passion that they glow when they talk. The ones that veer into near transcendence. Like her.
And no, I’m not talking about the dogmatics: the preachers and fire-and-brimstone types.
I’m talking about the type of person who looks like their insides have been hollowed out and a bulb plugged in so that the light of powerful ideas seep out from their eyes, mouths, and pores every time they shift and move.
My goal in life was always to try and show the world that light I saw.
The last guy I interviewed like this: he was the guy who banned all cars on a Caribbean island.
A PERFECT test bed: an island. Just like this rustbelt city was an island amid the corn.
Energy is expensive on an island. So they tested out a no-car environment, showed how the transportation savings were stimulatory to the economy. Shocked the world. Some say they led the way.
Inspiring enough that Midwestern cities were trying it. All these old pockets of density, created by forefathers back in the early 1900s. Politicians talked about “main street.” No one made those anymore.
SHE WAS UPSET to find out I was here to document the experiment. Even more that I admired the man who had sparked this flame. She was here, after all, to protest.
How could she not be?
They were going to rip the heart out of what she loved. Gear and smoke and incredible machines.
SUCH A thin line between love and hate. I notified the algorithms later that night. ■
English author Gwyneth Jones has been a leading feminist voice in science fiction for decades. She won the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Short Story in 1998 for “Las Cenerantola,” while Jones’s novels have been nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award seven times, winning in 2002 for Bold As Love. Her novel Life won the Philip K. Dick Award in 2004.
COMMUNICATIONS
The Flame
Is Roses,
The Smoke
Is Briars
BY GWYNETH JONES
Only the images are real: the scraps of video-painting, each of them ripe with the power to recall a whole lost world; etched in patterns of firing and partially-firing neurons. These are primary records, the rest is verbiage and confabulation. Everyone says I remember it well, but everyone is lying. People who have the innate ability to know what is primary, who can read and write in the code of that hidden fire, are rare and hard to find. Em was not a natural, her trained brain had to try hard.
A sleek gray-brown beast, running low, filled the capture frame right now. A miniature river on the world’s stage, but still the embodiment of departure, flowing away. A white egret rose, and settled again on the mud. I came back, but rivers don’t return, thought Em. I’m not the little girl who left—a puzzled flush of emotion, hopefully enhancing the P response: attention! Tom was telling her a story.
“There was a once a kid who believed she could read minds. Not always, but sometimes. She kept this totally secret.”
“Wow. That would have taken its toll.”
Dune grass, blue-green, bent to brush gold-gray sand. She climbed a shifting hollow and there was the ocean, the cool long length of it, silver and blue and green, a silk scarf endlessly rolling, folding in on itself and rolling. Em sat down, took off her shoes and poured sand back onto sand. What else could she look at, offer to him? The shore was unexpectedly featureless: not a rock broke the tide. The sky a cloudless blank, brilliant sun dead overhead.
She was supposed to be sending him images. Screen dumps. If you couldn’t see anything, why would anyone want a “head-worm,” when you could talk face to face by cell? It had to be Em who did the sending, because it was Tom who had the hyper-sensitive processing: but nothing was happening. She was a clumsy seeing-eye puppy, a Martian Rover failing to interface with Mission Control, using software that didn’t yet exist. Like a new baby they had to do it by accident first, then figure out how it could be done by method. It should work: nobody in “neuro-coms” ever went broke taking advice from Mother Nature. But lab conditions are deceptive, and faith is something you call truth until you’ve lost it.
“She grew up, she went to college, and it was too much. She’d been a quiet girl, staying in the family circle. Among her peers she was just getting bombarded. She couldn’t hide her distress. They sent her to a therapist, who decided there was something unusual going on. The young woman ended up agreeing to be tested for genuine telepathy, and she came good.”
“Fantastic for the Paranormal Research guys.”
The silk scarf rolled over and over, bubbles roaring and sunlight scintillating. It was important to talk, behind closed lips: keep those pathways open. In some kinds of brain surgery the patient has to be conscious.
“Dynamite. So that meant a lot more, tougher testing. She was taken apart, mentally and physically—”
“Ouch. Not literally.”
“Not literally, and she wore it well. Just when they were breaking out the champagne, something clicked… a stupid possibility that hadn’t been checked. She heard voices, you see. That’s how her ‘mind-reading’ worked. It turned out she had fantastically acute hearing, to which she’d adapted, and was completely unaware of it. All her life she’d been picking up on people unconsciously subvocalizing, as many of us often do. D’you know the punchline?”
“Missed the episode. Was this the original X Files? Or some other series?”
“No, Em, this was real life.”
She felt a shock, a jolt on the graph—
“Okay, go on, hit me. What happened?”
“Mental breakdown. She never recovered. May have killed herself in the end, I’m not sure. Ironic, eh? She’d managed to live with her secret psychic power, and even the scientific scrutiny. It was okay being a troubled superhero. When her ‘weird ability’ became a medical condition, shorn of the envelope of miracle, it was simply torture.”
A tiny starburst in the corner of Em’s eye warned that the signal had faded, not strong enough for what they were attempting. Like primitive cell phones, mind to mind was randomly flakey. They both sighed, maybe with relief.
“I was about to log off, anyway,” he said. “Try and get some work done.” Tom’s work was not going well, he was blocked. Writer’s block.
“How about this afternoon, my time?”
“Fine, I guess. Call me.”
Em licked the tip of her little finger, and applied it to the outer corner of her left eye. The worm, beckoned by chemical messengers in her saliva, slipped out obediently and clung to her skin, a bright fluorescent droplet, an exquisitely powerful piece of futuristic tech. But the worm itself was nothing—a cell phone you insert into your eye-socket, a “gadget” that creeps through bone to pick up phonemes from a center in the brain, instead of capturing them from the air. Not yet big business, but already to those on the edge merely a new toy. What Tom and Em were trying to do was worlds beyond—
Suddenly she realized, dumb scientist!, that she’d missed the point of Tom’s story. She set the worm back in her eye at once and called her mother, also in New York; the instigator of all this. She got through but the boss was busy, her response dismissive. Tom had left the building, not that he was ever in the building. The experimental subject didn’t need to be strapped down and hooked up, no electrodes thrust deep into the gray matter. (Not yet!) But at least Jane was in the same city.
“Mom, you’re not listening. I’m sure he made up the story about the pseudo-telepath who committed suicide. He was talking about himself. I’ve had a feeling this was getting very rough on him. I’m frightened. He’s a poet—”
“He’s a grown man, Emily,” said Jane, as if she were warning her daughter not to get too fond of a cute, genetically engineered white mouse. “He’s not some freak, which makes a pleasant change! He’s a highly respected writer who came to us of his own free will, out of intellectual curiosity.”
“That’s the problem,” said Em. “That’s what I didn’t get, but now I do.”
“Darling, could this wait? I’m sure Tom is fine, and I have a meeting.”
The tiny English lanes bewildered her, like falling into a tangled ball of yarn. As she drove back to the village she could see the wrapped church nearly the whole time—a shard of diamond poised up on its headland, sometimes ahead, sometimes on her left, sometimes on her right; even glimpsed behind her, in the rear mirror. As if it couldn’t decide to settle in the future or the past, or in some parallel universe. Luckily the hire car was a good navigator.
She was in England to observe an experiment—not directly related to her work with Tom, which was unaffected, ongoing, opportunistic. The archaeologists had sent her away when she arrived, advising her to visit the seaside. But candy floss, donkey rides, fish and chips in newspaper must be elsewhere. In a theme park, probably. They’d made progress while she was gone. The church’s giant isolation chamber—dulled from diamond to translucent gray by gathering clouds as Em left her car—was now peripheral. Final preparations for the descent had begun.
Ralph Dewey, a gaunt professor in a hairy tweed jacket, introduced her to the two other “neuronauts” (Ralph liked that word) who’d be making the actual scan with him: Lesley Hall, the high-powered British science TV presenter, and i/space expert Chris Jones, someone Em knew quite well; whose views she didn’t share. Then Em was scanned herself, in a tiny booth like a bathtub stood on end, a makeshift prop for Doctor Who—captured and copied, stripped down to the 0s and 1s, so they’d be able to “eliminate her from their inquiries,” as Dewey jovially put it. He showed her the latest results shaken out of the remote-sensing data, while around them the team fizzed with anticipation, fussed over last-minute details. The present church building was mainly early medieval, Eleventh to Twelfth century. The Void, detected deep under St. Michael’s Sanctuary during work on the ancient foundations, was around four thousand years older.
“You’re sure it’s a tomb?” asked Em, politely.
Thickset shadows stood around her, projected in 3D from the remote imaging feed. Bowed under a weight of darkness they looked over her shoulders, brooding.
“Almost certainly a Portal Tomb, a Megalithic construction, though as yet there’s no evidence of burials. It would have been covered by a mound back then, visible for great distances. Imagine burial rituals. Oracle consultation. But we don’t know. No one has ever known. This is fantastically important, Emily. An undisturbed Portal Tomb. We’re on the brink of knowing. Not guessing, not constructing from inference, but knowing what went on in the most enigmatic of ancient European cultures. We’ll be reading their minds!”
The Command Shack was linked to the church by a wobbly umbilical tube. Em crossed over, and watched the i/bits model on its flatbed, dancing in place at the west end of the nave. It was fascinating, in a way, though most of what the scan had detected was modern, of course: dross to be discarded. Wisps of the Eighteenth century drifted in the rooftree; medieval prayer murmured in an alcove. Em thought of knapped flints, fossil sea urchins. Randomly resistant fragments, turned up from a vast silt made of the same stuff as themselves; of information, the stuff of time and space transformed, over and over.
A skinny, fashionable post-doc gopher called Flossy had come with her, and stood offering commentary. The incredible number crunching that had already been done, the still-puzzling anomalies. “It’s just amazing,” she said. “The model was an exercise, test-bed for the Void. We’re leaving it here, the public will have access—”
“I hope they’re interested. It’s a shame i/bits don’t usually make a good recording medium. There must be way better history books in the local library.”
Florence stared at her. “But it’s cool, isn’t it? Hey, you have a head-worm. Gives a whole new meaning to the word tele-phone, doesn’t it?”
Causing Em to smile thinly, nod wryly. Nothing was going to happen for an hour or so: this time she sent herself away. Chris Jones, and jokes about telepathy phones, was a combination she didn’t need. Leaving her car at the church she walked down to the village, and followed a finger-posted path across pasture.
The archaeologists didn’t care. They had a powerful new tool for digging up the past and they were going to use it, like a stick, to open the can, stir the jam. It didn’t bother them at all if the science behind the gadgets said the past does not exist. Journalists asked Em, Is “Information Space” the Theory of Everything… ? Have we finally found the ultimate building blocks of the universe… ? After the roller coaster, and the derision, of the last couple of years she answered those questions as blandly as humanly possible. The model seems to work, she would say. Already we have new technologies. Gadgets based on i/space theory that could be ubiquitous as cell phones, as digital computing. We don’t as yet know what it all means—
Sending images by head-worm was a joke to many: to Em it was huge. If what she did with Tom worked, it would prove the many-worlds superposition. Imagine the universe as a single, staggeringly convoluted object. A diamond as big as “the sum of all histories…” What, hanging in nothingness? Hanging in nothing would never be an issue, you’re always inside, everything is always inside. This object is made of many, many times and spaces. Factor-in human consciousness, each mind a world. Think of the superposition as these many, insanely many, interpenetrating worlds. All folded into one, every bit of information in this geometry contiguous with every other.
If that were a good model of reality, tech-mediated “telepathy”—the power to send actual information, the immaterial stuff the universe is made of, from mind to mind, ought to be a no-brainer. It should just fall out of the equations.
Her grass path turned aside where it met a barrier of iron railings, but there was a gate. It shifted easily, rusted metal fitting a groove that cut through dark leaf-litter; she went straight on. Tom had picked up the moment she called, he was letting her bounce her frustrations off him; he was a good listener.
“I’ll never get on with the Brits. I left England with my mother, in blissful ignorance of the impending divorce. My dad lives in France with his second family now: we get on fine, I don’t see him. My parents didn’t tell me, back then: I didn’t know, so forever I hear the accent and I feel betrayed—”
“I’ll see your irrational racism and raise you, Em. Listen, if a guy who looks like an Arab comes towards me down the street, I flinch. I’m not a good person. I swallow up all the shit on the daily news and add my own. That’s what people buy in me. They’re excited and praising me because I speak through this gagging, clogging mouthful of shit—”
She was in a landscaped garden, overgrown, desolate and enticing. She was probably trespassing but birdsong beckoned onwards.
“Is that what your writer’s block’s about?”
“Yeah. I have a blocked toilet in my mouth—”
“You’re just innately, brutally honest. It’s what we hired you for.”
“Hired? Did you say hired? I didn’t know I was getting paid!”
“Ooops. Figure of speech, sorry.”
They laughed together, and laughter arises differently from speech, so what they shared was not the sound but the feeling of laughter. “Tom, I wanted to tell you something. You always knew, but I realized today that what we’re trying to do is awful, in a way. Terrifying, could drive a person crazy, like you said. Dumb scientist, I miss the big picture. So, I wanted to say, if it’s getting unbearable, if you’ve had enough of playing with fire—”
Immediately she could have kicked herself.
Silence from Tom. She passed through a mossy tunnel of leaves and stone into a rose garden. Climbers trained along the walls had come loose from their moorings, and lay in Sleeping-Beauty sheaves. Specimen bushes, vividly in bloom, struggled with cohorts of briars. Suddenly she had an immense feeling of immanent presence. Something was in this enclosed space with her, fugitive and enormous. Shadows, shoulders bowed under the overwhelming, stood around her, and right where the knot of the visual cortex flares she stared at flame-red roses; she tasted almost, but if she even thought, it’s here, now—
—It was gone.
Like a stitch coming undone, an adhesion ripping apart.
“Tom? Did something just happen?”
Nothing. She thought the connection had broken.
“No” he said at last, sounding tired, sounding terminally disheartened. “Not a thing. What could be terrifying, Em? We’re just talking. Collecting a lot of data on coming up empty. I’m logging off now.”
Em returned to St. Michael’s, preempting Ralph Dewey’s summons; which reached her as she crossed the buttercup-studded pasture. In the midst of the Command Shack’s boundless excitement she finally couldn’t stop herself from calling New York. She told her mother she was afraid Tom had decided to quit—
“He’s done it,” answered Jane, wearily. “He called me and quit, about twenty minutes ago. Don’t blame yourself, darling, I’m sure it wasn’t your fault.”
Based on the tone of Mom’s voice, Em knew there was more. Had there been a spike, a Wow spike: a false positive? But Tom was gone, and they wouldn’t be able to investigate. They’d have to start again, if they could even find another rare mind.
So it was true, she had lost him.
Professor Dewey was in front of her, beaming. “We’re ready, Emily!”
The vertical shaft went down, through layer-cake strata of dark dirt and ancient builders’ spoil, to a surprisingly large excavation. It quickly filled with bodies. The entrance to the tomb had not been breached: the neuronauts would enter obliquely, through a narrow slit opened between two of the upright slabs. Here, in glaring underground lamplight, they donned the cabled, goggled helmets they would use for the i/scan. There was a reserve helmet, which Dewey offered to Em, but she turned it down. She didn’t want to take out her head-worm, she was still hoping Tom would call her, to explain; or at least to say goodbye.
One by one, they crept and stooped into the virgin dark.
“We are now making the dive,” intoned Dewey (for the TV crew outside the excavation). “These funky deep-sea diver helmets are allowing us to plunge into the depths of time. As we stand here our perceptions are virtually, so to speak, falling through the aeons, collecting data from five thousand years ago—”
Garbage, thought Em. Time doesn’t exist in i/space, which is the only faint reason this stunt makes any sense… The tomb was room-sized, roughly circular, the roof a huge tablestone supported on five big irregular slabs, packed earth between. The air was fresh; the room was completely empty. Lamps on the scanning helmets showed a smooth, featureless earth floor, the pale rough slabs with no trace of marks or carving. If she reached up, Em could have touched the underside of the table.
The neuronauts were taking up poses dictated by a mapping grid, mediated by the helmets, that Em couldn’t see. They had an air of ritual awe, as if they could literally see five thousand-year-old ghosts—although it would take some heavy number crunching to win any “pure” Megalithic traces out of the data. Em moved aside, almost struggling with laughter, and then something happened in her brain.
She felt her hands move, without conscious volition.
“Oh my God, look!” shouted Lesley Hall. “Look at Emily!”
“Fire!,” howled Professor Dewey. “Oh, incredible! Sacrificial blood!”
Em saw the flame-red petals, filling her outstretched open hands.
“No,” she gasped astonished. “No, it’s not fire, it’s roses—”
The next moment the sending was gone. Roses indeed, made of fire indeed, the fire in the neurons. Why the time lag? She had no idea, they’d never thought of a lag. Something to disentangle there. Her mouth was stretched by an enormous grin, her mind a babble of incoherent triumph—
We did it!
In the Command Shack, later, she managed to escape and call Tom. The Brits, once they’d grasped what had happened, had reacted generously—although they’d insisted on getting Em and her illicit device out of the tomb and completing their scan, before breaking out the champagne. Everyone was full of questions, of course. How big a breakthrough was this, Lesley wondered? Hadn’t “sending” small bundles of i/bits become commonplace in US research? Em answered as vaguely as possible. She knew Mom would kill her, if she blabbed before the debriefing—
He picked up. “Hi Em. I guess your mother told you. I’m sorry.”
“Told me what? I just wanted to say thank you for the roses.”
Stunned silence reached her, echo of the brilliant explosion in her brain.
“You got them?”
“Just now! And wait, it’s better, the Brits got them too. Independently verified, by Chris Jones, among others! It’s all on record!”
“My God! Fantastic! Em! That moment, I thought, that was it. Or never, and you didn’t get it, so… Hey, Em, you should’ve had some kind of 3D bio-printer. You could have fed the i/bits into it, and had roses to put in a vase!”
“Next project, absolutely. Tom, it’s fantastic but it’s only a measurement. A single measurement.”
“Yeah, yeah. One small step, okay. But we did it! Today we entered the Information Space Age—!”
“I’ll be home in a day or two.” She took the plunge. “How about meeting in the real? We could have a coffee?”
“In the real? That’s a bold idea. But I don’t like coffee.”
“You can have skinny latte decaf. Or green tea. I won’t judge.”
“Deal.”
As she drove away from St. Michael’s, the ball-of-yarn lanes were awash and shining. She drew up, and looked out over the flat saltmarsh, to the river’s mouth and the dunes. The world shivered, it looked pixelated, unreal. This wasn’t the first time a whole new communications tech had sprung into being, born from some punishingly strange new science. You’d have had no transistors without quantum mechanics. Yet still she wondered, did we destroy a universe today? Is there a lag, will we wink out of existence?
But everything seemed fine, so she drove on. ■
By day, Geoffrey A. Landis works at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Ohio on technology for space missions. As a science fiction author, he won the 1989 Nebula Award for his short story “Ripples in the Dirac Sea,” the 1992 Hugo Award for “A Walk in The Sun,” and the 2003 Hugo for “Falling Onto Mars.” His novel Mars Crossing won the 2001 Locus Award for Best First Novel.
SPACEFLIGHT
Private
Space
BY GEOFFREY A. LANDIS
Kayla first met Zak and Saladin when they were planning on jumping off the Green Building in her sophomore year at MIT. That was the start of it.
Kayla was a night owl. At two in the morning, she liked to sit outside the science library with a booklight and her books; she could study in quiet, and then, when she wanted to, just gaze up at the sky.
There weren’t that many stars to see—in the middle of Cambridge, even at two the skies were washed out by city lights—but she watched whichever planets happened to be above the horizon, or the moon.
She was staring out across the darkened campus when she noticed two figures crossing over to the Green Building, carrying some bulky articles between them. Clearly, students embarked on some sort of hack, but what?
She caught up with them on the nineteenth floor, as they were distracted dealing with a door. Both of them were about her age. The Indian boy (Indian? Lebanese? She wasn’t good with nationalities. In fact, he was Arabic, she discovered later) was slightly taller, with unruly hair, wearing a black T-shirt with the legend “Prisoners of Gravity.” The other boy was blond, although deeply tanned, with a wispy beard and a dark blue Hawaiian shirt.
“Hi, guys,” she said. “Planning a hack?”
They both straightened up with a start. “No, we’re just, ah, working,” the Indian one said.
“Sure,” Kayla said. “What you’ve got to work on is your story; that one’s not very plausible at two AM. Hey, I’m here. Can I help?”
“Uh, no, thanks,” the first one said, while at the same time, the other one said, “Sure.”
“Outstanding,” she said. “I’m Mikayla Jaime Jennison. Call me Kayla.”
“Izak Cerny,” the blond one said. “Call me Zak, everybody does. And he’s Saladin.”
“So,” Kayla said, looking at the packs filled with pulleys and coils of nylon rope. “What are you doing?”
Zak smiled. “We are,” he said, “going to be the first students to bungee jump from the top of the Green Building.”
Kayla looked at him. “I believe,” she said, “that you are totally insane.”
Saladin solemnly nodded his head.
She picked up one of the backpacks. “Well, I don’t know how long you expect to stand here before the campus police show up. Let’s get moving.”
They were certainly crazy, but not entirely insane. On this expedition they would only be dropping sandbags, carefully loaded to Zak’s weight. A light-intensified webcam across the courtyard would be streaming video to hard disk; they would analyze how far the bungee stretched and how high it bounced.
“Then for real?” Kayla asked.
Zak nodded, but Saladin just said, “We’ll see.”
“So, where’s the sandbags?” Kayla asked.
“Down at the bottom,” Zak said.
“If you need somebody to haul them up twenty-one flights of stairs, don’t look at me.”
“No need,” Saladin said. “We brought a winch.”
WHILE SALADIN set up the winch, Kayla and Zak walked to the edge of the roof, looked out across the river at the lights of Boston. He was from Philadelphia, she learned, and Saladin from New Jersey.
The winch motor squealed. “You ever hear of lubricant?” Kayla shouted, and Saladin yelled back, “No worry, it always sounds like that.” The line grew taut and began to wind in; Saladin watched to make sure it didn’t scrape the concrete.
“Where you from?” Zak said.
She was from Minnesota, Kayla said, and in course sixteen—Aeronautics and Astronautics. Zak and Saladin were both physics, but Zak was a tremendous fan of space, and his only reason for going into physics, he claimed, was because he planned to build a laser-launched rocket to open up the space frontier. His other plans included being the first person to hang-glide off of Mount Everest, developing a cargo-transportation system using stratospheric balloons, and studying the theory of relativity for clues to antigravity.
The laser-launched rocket was something he’d read about in a science fiction story, “but it’s real. I mean, not yet, but it could be. The physics are there. Needs somebody to take the initiative and actually do it, you know?”
“Sure,” she said.
They looked out across the rooftops of the Institute. Most of the windows were dark, but occasional clusters of lights in labs and offices formed unrecognizable constellations. “I could use some help here,” Saladin called out. “That is, if you’re done chatting up your girlfriend over there.”
“Hey,” Zak said. “Shut up.”
The three of them hauled plastic garbage bags half-filled with dirt over the parapet. “Dirt from the construction on Mem Drive,” Zak said. “I couldn’t find sand.”
Saladin pulled loops of bungee cord from a backpack. He laid it out in neat coils on the gravel near the edge of the roof.
“Ready?” he asked.
Zak clipped the cord to the harness with carabiners. He tugged to verify it was secure. “Ready as I’m going to be,” he said. He turned to Kayla. “In the operational mode, we’ll have a cantilever beam to get distance from the building, but this is just a bungee test.”
“Don’t think you better test the beam, too?” Kayla said.
Zak shrugged. “Haven’t got that far.” He turned back to Saladin. “What are we waiting for? Let’s get this puppy flying.”
“Falling,” Saladin said. The two of them picked up the bundle. “On three. One, two—”
Kayla leaned out over the edge for a good view.
“Three!”
Saladin released his end straight down, but Zak’s side had a slight push away from the building. It spun slightly as it fell outward, three strands of bungee cord twisting like a spiral of DNA behind it. The bags sailed out and down, and then curved around to the side. As the bungee began to catch, the bag suddenly jerked unevenly to the left and then back against the building. Kayla couldn’t see it hit the windows, but she could hear it, a whap whap whap like flags snapping in a sharp breeze. “Holy shit,” Saladin said. With a sound like ripping newspaper, the bags tore open. Kayla saw dirt spray through the puddle of light cast by the courtyard lamps below.
For a moment there was silence, and then the bungee cords came whipping up over the edge, snapping as they tangled and hit the parapet.
Zak was laughing like a madman. “Did you see that? I don’t believe it. Did you freaking see that?”
“Wind shear,” Saladin said. “I think what happened was—”
“Hey, guys?” Kayla said. “You guys? Company coming.”
Below them, flashing red and blue lights were pulling up. Not good.
Saladin looked over the edge. “Holy shit,” he said. He began to frantically gather up bungee cord.
“Leave it,” Zak said. Saladin looked up. “Out of here, pronto, or we’re toast.”
Kayla was already opening the door. Behind her, she could hear Saladin say, “My winch—” but she didn’t loiter to find out what happened to it.
NONE OF THE windows of the Green Building got cracked; they had done nothing more than spray the courtyard with dirt. The story didn’t even make The Tech.
Zak gave up on bungee-jumping the Green Building, and other than building a monster trebuchet during the summer, mostly calmed down. The trebuchet could fling a hundred-and-fifty pound boulder half a mile across a field in Acton, but Zak’s talk about adapting it to launch a parachute-equipped human into the air never got farther than sketches on napkins. Zak and Saladin both kibitzed on her senior project, a wind-tunnel model of a design for an emergency escape capsule for the space station, built from foam and carbon fiber.
When they graduated, Saladin went up the river to study string theory at Harvard, while Zak found a job with a start-up working on defense contracts. Kayla had a commitment from her ROTC scholarship, and moved to Albuquerque as an Air Force lieutenant.
She wondered, sometimes, what happened to them, but after a few e-mails right after graduation, despite promises none of them turned out to be very good at keeping up connections.
IT WAS YEARS later that Kayla’s phone rang, a Warren Zevon chord indicating a number not on her phone.
Zak’s voice hadn’t changed. “Kayla! It’s you!”
“Of course it’s me. Who else?” It was just after one. “It’s three AM on the East Coast. What’s up?”
“I just started a company,” he said. “Want a job?”
She looked around her apartment. Her time at the Air Force had been boring—her eyesight hadn’t been good enough for her to make pilot, and she had ended up managing airplane maintenance. She’d left when her commitment was finished. She had a job at Sandia now, one that paid well, but she wasn’t sure she liked office politics enough to move up the promotion ladder. About the only thing in her apartment worth keeping were her books.
And the books could be shipped. “I could be convinced,” she said.
BRIGHT IDEA, read the banner posted with duct tape over a cinderblock building that looked to Kayla like a three-car garage, but with less charm.
“Great name for a laser company, right?” Zak said.
“Sure,” she said. “As long as you got the ideas. So, give. You called, and I came. So, what idea?”
“I already told you.”
“Yeah? I missed it.”
“Yeah! First time we met. I told you I was going to build a laser launcher.”
“Ah,” Kayla said. She thought for a moment. “Cargo launcher?”
“Hell, no. Well, maybe. At least, I guess that may kinda be what we told NASA. And maybe DARPA. But, really, who wants to fly cargo? Boring. We’re going to fly people.”
“You think maybe sandbags ought to fly first?” she said.
Zak laughed. “Well… Maybe for the test flight.”
“Still crazy,” Kayla said.
“Crazier than three cats and a kangaroo,” said a voice behind her.
She turned. “Saladin!” She walked over and hugged him. “I should have known.”
“Somebody has to keep this madman’s feet on the ground,” he said, grinning.
“Hell, no fun staying on the ground,” Zak said.
Zak was wearing his usual Hawaiian shirt and jeans, but Saladin was in a three-piece suit with an electric-blue tie. He wore it as if he’d been born to it.
Kayla looked him over. The scruffy “physicist who was too busy to pay attention to his appearance” look was gone. “OMG, Saladin, you actually blow dry your hair now? And trim your beard.”
His smile was the same old Saladin. “Yeah. You like it?”
She nodded. “Looks good. So, string theory must have agreed with you.”
He shook his head. “Gave that up years ago. I like experiments too much, and after a while I said, let the kids who still believe in Santa Claus have it. So, I got myself seduced by the dark side.”
“He means Wall Street,” Zak said. “He’s my CEO. And our money guru. He knows everybody who’s got money, and what they want to shake some of it loose. Gave up his scooter for a Mercedes, he did.”
“Hey, I still have the scooter.”
“Sweet,” Kayla said. “So, you got the crazy idea, Saladin gets the money—so, what do I do?”
“You, my lovely girl,” Zak said, “are going to build us a spaceship.”
KAYLA WASN’T SURE about being called a lovely girl—although she thought maybe she was more flattered than insulted—but the job was interesting. Bright Idea cut corners on unimportant stuff—lunches were peanut butter sandwiches, and the water cooler ran tap water—but the design software was the best, and they had a state-of-the-art facility for laying up composite structures, with two mechanics that knew how to run it. “From an aerospace startup that had big ideas but no idea how to run a company,” Saladin said. “Ran out of cash.”
“Like us?”
“I’ll worry about that. You just make the thing work. We hired you for your skill, not your looks.”
“Looks were just a bonus,” Zak said.
The idea was straightforward. Conventional rockets are limited by the energy in chemical fuel. You could get more push out of your propellant if you could put more energy in it, but there’s only so much energy you can get out of a chemical reaction.
“So, leave the power supply on the ground,” Zak said. “Beam the energy to the rocket. Lasers.”
“Must need pretty big lasers,” Kayla said.
“Honking big lasers,” Saladin said.
Zak smiled. “That’s the picture.”
The test rocket they flew took away a lot of her doubts. They drove out to the beach one evening, Zak’s battered pickup truck hauling a trailer with a portable laser, Saladin’s Mercedes towing another with the power supply, Kayla and two student interns from Stony Brook with the electronics and the models. In late September, it was dark by seven. It took them all night, working on a deserted lot next to the marshes, to get everything set up.
Dawn was breaking over the Atlantic before Kayla was ready to pressurize the rocket and load it in the tube.
She turned it over in her hand. An aluminum cylinder the size of a soda can, with a rounded nose on one end stolen from a plastic Easter egg. It was no sturdier than it had to be, with tiny fins on one end to keep it stable. The only high-tech element was the diamond-turned mirror that would concentrate the laser light onto the sapphire nozzle. She watched the gauge and listened to the wok-wok-wok of the compressor. Not so different from the sound of a bungee cord hitting the side of a building.
“Not too much,” Zak said. “It’s not a balloon.”
“She knows,” Saladin said. “She designed it.”
“So let’s get that puppy in the tube.”
The propellant—tap water—was already in the tank. Kayla closed the valve and unclipped the hose. She verified the onboard electronics, loaded the rocket into the air cannon, and did a final check of the wireless readouts.
“Ready,” she said.
“Better wake the kiddies,” Saladin said. “They’d hate to miss it.”
“Air traffic?” Kayla said.
“We’re clear,” Saladin said.
They all put on safety goggles, making them look like extras in some ancient science fiction movie, and Saladin began the countdown. “Ten,” he said. “Nine—”
“Skip that,” Zak said, “Just do it.” With one hand he brushed all the switches on the board up. He put his toe on the doorbell button that fired the cannon. “Onetwothreego.” He pushed the button.
The solenoid opened with a click, and the air cannon fired with a tremendous whomp. The rocket shot out the barrel, a glistening streak arcing up and out over the marsh too quickly to focus on.
For a moment there was silence.
“That it?” one of the interns asked.
“Keep your goggles on!” Kayla said. Behind her she could hear the servos as the mirror swiveled to track the target.
Then the laser fired.
Kayla had hoped for a light show, but the beam was too far in the infrared, and she saw only saw the faintest spark in the sky, where the laser sparked the propellant into plasma.
“One one thousand, two—” Saladin counted.
The laser clicked off, and the spark winked out.
The laser crackled slightly as it began to cool down. Kayla continued to stare into the sky, although the projectile was far too distant to see.
“Thirty-eight gees!” Zak said. “We were cooking!”
“That’s it?” the intern asked.
“That’s it,” Saladin said. He was looking at the data stream sent to his phone. “Two seconds. That’s what we asked for, that’s what we got.” Noticing the look of disappointment from the intern, he added, “Next one will be longer.”
“Longer, hell,” Zak said. “Next one’s going to orbit.”
KAYLA HADN’T yet found an apartment to rent, and for now was living in an apartment over Zak’s garage. She didn’t need much room, and Zak’s living room served as a spare office and conference room for the company, with its own cluster of CAD machines. Zak offered to share his bed as well—he was charmingly shy about making the offer—but she declined; she hadn’t quite sorted out how she felt about that.
She had a salary, but the main part of her pay was in the form of equity in the company. Zak and Saladin were putting all of their earnings back into the company. “Incentive,” Zak called it.
But the company was growing. The laser launcher wasn’t their only project; Zak wrote proposals for small business innovative research work, everything from developing amplifiers for fiber optic cables to testing whether a laser beam would work as a lightning rod. NASA had paid for some of the initial laser launch research, but they had run through that money long ago. Saladin was looking for more money, but so far all the offers, he said, had too many strings attached.
But Zak still had Kayla designing the vehicle. “It will happen,” he said. “Count on it.”
One day he came into the office and spread some papers across the desk. “Here it is.”
Kayla looked up. “Here what is?”
“Our salvation,” he said. He called Saladin over. “Take a look at this.”
Saladin wandered over and picked up the top sheet.
“DARPA prize,” he said. “Two million dollars. Interesting.”
“That’s us! Take a look—payload 100 kilograms into orbit, any orbit, any launch site, not using conventional rockets.”
“Two million isn’t very much,” Saladin said.
“We do it,” Zak said, “and it’s just starter money. Win the prize, we’re golden. The money will flow in. You know it.”
“Maybe,” Saladin said. He stirred the papers around with a fingertip. “We’re going to have to borrow more money.”
“We’re golden,” Zak said. “Solid gold.”
“WE’RE IN trouble,” Saladin said.
“Money again?” Zak asked.
Saladin shook his head.
“What, then?”
“When we started, we were going to launch from the equator,” Saladin said. “Remember that?”
“Sure,” Zak said. “Still the plan. We get this demo launch done, and then start looking for an equatorial site. I have some contacts in Brazil—”
Saladin shook his head. “In South America, you can bribe people. Here, not so easy. You realize how much it costs to get all the clearances and a permit to launch? How long it takes? More than we’ve got. More money. More time.”
Zak looked at him. “We did the test flight.”
“That was undoubtedly illegal, too,” Saladin said.
“Well, we don’t have time, and we don’t have money. I say we just launch.” Zak thought for a moment. “Boy Scouts do high-altitude balloons. They go up where airliners fly. So why can’t we?”
“That’s different,” Saladin said. “For balloons, they just have to contact ATC, verify no air traffic, and issue a notice to airmen.”
“Groovy,” Zak said. He walked over to where Kayla was working on the structure. “Every spaceship needs a name.” He picked up a red Sharpie and wrote on the nose, the writing almost invisible against the shiny black graphite, and then said, “I christen you HMS Balloon.”
He turned to Saladin. “So, we call the tower and say we’ll be doing a balloon launch.”
Saladin chewed his lip. “Think that’ll keep us out of jail?”
“Maybe a fine. No prob.”
Kayla spoke up. “What does the HMS mean?”
“Why, it stands for ‘Her Magnificent Spaceship,’ of course.” He turned to her, bowed, and—recognizing a good exit line—walked out.
Saladin shook his head. “He’s crazy. Really.”
TWO IN THE morning. Most of the other workers had gone home, and Kayla liked working without the distraction. The shop was dark, and she wandered over to the high bay, where the structural frame was being put together, a dark carbon latticework looking more like a pencil drawing of a spaceship than a real object. She was admiring it, when Saladin’s voice came from behind her.
“It going to work?”
She didn’t turn around. “My part will. If you can get the laser, and if Zak’s engine is as good as he thinks it is, it’ll work.”
“It better.”
“It’s a success if we find out what works and what doesn’t. It’s a test model.”
“No, it’s the only model. It doesn’t get to orbit, it’s all over.”
She turned to look at him. He was little more than a silhouette in the dark. After a moment, she said, “What, afraid if it doesn’t work you’ll have to sell the Mercedes?”
He shook his head. “You don’t notice that I’m driving in on the scooter? I sold the Mercedes to pay salaries a month ago.”
“We’re broke?”
“We’re…” he hesitated. “Leveraged. Highly leveraged.”
“That means?”
“Everything’s mortgaged. If this doesn’t work, we won’t even own a roll of toilet paper.”
He seemed in need of comforting. Impulsively, she walked over and put her arms around him. He was older than the boy she remembered, more serious. More worried. He felt nice.
“Are you worried they’ll send you back to where you came from?”
“In my case, that would be Jersey,” Saladin said. “Of course I’m worried.”
“It’ll work,” she said.
THERE WERE a lot of changes to be made, right up to the last minute. None of the parts ever worked together quite as predicted, and Kayla worried into the night about trying to keep some margin in the design. It wasn’t easy. When the final shell went on, she vetoed Zak’s proposal to paint it plum crazy—there just wasn’t the mass. Zak came up with a department-store mannequin somewhere, to fly along with the instrumentation package, and Kayla weighed it, to make sure the payload was not a gram over the required 100 kilograms. They still had margin—but not very much.
Saladin showed up with the laser in two semitrailers, and supervised the team installing it and connecting cooling water. “Sweet,” Zak said, looking it over. “I knew you’d come through on the funding.”
“Don’t get too attached, it’s rented,” Saladin said. “And don’t break it, you don’t want to know how much it costs.”
And then, almost before Kayla was ready, it was time.
Balloon sat on the pad, blackly iridescent as a beetle’s carapace, surrounded by mirrors like metallic sunflowers. Unlike other rockets, there was no danger in walking right up to it, and Zak was all around it, snapping pictures. “History,” he said.
They couldn’t actually watch it launch; stray reflections would be far too dangerous. They retreated to the building.
“Let’s do this one by the checklist, okay?” Saladin said. “Everybody?”
“Right,” Zak said.
Kayla was in front of her computer. “Armed and ready.”
“We’re clear,” Saladin said.
A small window in the corner of her screen showed the camera view, but most of her screen was taken up by engineering data. She could take manual control if the software crashed, but she sincerely hoped she wouldn’t need to.
“Energize,” Saladin said.
Even from the next room, she could hear the transformers hum as the power level in the lasers ramped up. “Green on all seven rods,” Zak said.
“Three!” said Saladin. He clicked his mouse.
On Kayla’s screen, the rocket shuddered, and began to move. She watched, suddenly terrified that the reaction thrusters wouldn’t hold it steady, but it jittered slightly and remained pointed upright. The exhaust was invisible, but clouds of steam began billowing all around. It crawled upward until it was about twenty feet in the air. “Full power now,” Zak said.
It leaped into the air, and in an instant shot off her screen. Somewhere cameras were following it, but Kayla put her full attention onto her monitors, now worrying whether it would hold together through the sonic transition, then worrying whether the lasers would continue to track as it pitched over. “Engines are underperforming,” she said.
“Trouble?” Saladin asked.
“Still within margin.”
“Laser power’s down,” Zak said. “One of the rods is bad.”
In her monitor, Kayla watched the two outboard fuel tanks empty and then drop away into the ocean. She relaxed microscopically. One more critical event over.
“For God’s sake, don’t let the laser overheat,” Saladin said.
“It is overheating,” Zak said. “Still okay, so far.”
The trajectory Kayla had programmed could deal with the reduced power; it would require a slightly longer engine burn, but they would still make orbit. But it was eating into their fuel margin at an alarming rate.
“Definitely overheating,” Zak said. From the laser room behind them came a tremendous bang. Saladin sucked in his breath sharply. “Down to six rods.”
“Can we still make orbit?”
Kayla stared at her screen. “Maybe. I think.” She turned to Zak. “Can you power it up any more?”
“Already have,” Zak said. “More, and the other rods will shatter.”
“Blowing that laser rod just cost us two million dollars,” Saladin said. “For God’s sake—”
“For God’s sake, we’re committed,” Zak snapped. “We’re flying this thing, whatever it takes.”
They could smell ozone and burnt plastic from the laser room now. It wasn’t just the laser; the transformers and even the wiring were smoking.
“Thirty seconds more,” Kayla said. “Twenty. We’re—”
With the quietest of snaps, the hum of the transformers stopped. On her monitor, she watched the thrust drop to zero.
“Engine cut-off,” she said.
“Are we in orbit?”
She looked at the numbers. Altitude was still rising, but the critical number, the horizontal component of the velocity, was settling down to 7800 meters per second. She projected the path forward to where it intersected the atmosphere.
“Negative.”
There was silence in the room. “That’s it, then,” Zak said.
Saladin got up. “We’ve got to turn off the laser cooling water.”
“Why bother?” Zak said.
“If they cool too fast, they’ll shatter,” he said. “That’s twenty million dollars worth of laser.”
Zak shrugged. “So? Let them. We’re dead.”
PIECES OF THE rocket burned up in the atmosphere from eastern Colorado all the way across northern Kansas. One fragment of nose cone even landed, according to a Twitter report, in a field outside of Cedar Rapids, battered but with “—oon” still faintly legible.
“My magnificent spacecraft,” Kayla said. “Not much of it left.”
It was not quite dawn of the next day. In an hour, the creditors would start arriving, and Bright Idea would be history.
Zak handed Kayla her last paycheck. “Better get to a bank fast,” he said. “This won’t be good for very long.”
“What next?”
Zak shrugged. “If we’d succeeded—success would have excused a lot of rule breaking. As it is…”
“It was a success,” she said. “We learned a lot.”
Zak nodded, but without enthusiasm. “Yeah. Maybe people will see it that way. Sure.”
“We did prove the technology,” Kayla said.
Saladin was on his scooter. He started the engine. “We’d better get that paycheck cashed,” he said.
Kayla climbed on the back of the scooter and put her arms around him. Zak said, “You two going to be okay?”
Saladin said, “We’ll be fine. I can find a job somewhere. Or, if people have too long memories, at least Kayla can.”
“We’re okay,” Kayla said. “How about you? Are you okay?”
Zak smiled, and for a moment Kayla saw the boy that he had been. “We did prove the technology, didn’t we? You know, someone will pick it up. It’s not ours any more, I guess, but I suppose, in the long run it wouldn’t be anyway. It belongs to the world.”
In another few moments the sun would rise. Only the brightest stars were still visible, along with Venus, shining high in a pale sky.
“Yeah,” Saladin said. “It belongs to the world now.” ■
Connecticut-based Elizabeth Bear came to prominence in the mid-2000s, winning the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2005, followed by many other awards, including the 2006 Locus Award for Best First Novel for Hammered, the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 2008 for “Tideline,” and the Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 2009 for “Shoggoths in Bloom.” She has published eight science fiction novels since 2005, as well as two collections of short stories.
BIOMEDICINE
Gods of
the Forge
BY ELIZABETH BEAR
SMASH TO:
SCENE I:
INT: A TRENDY NIGHTCLUB - 1 AM
MEN AND WOMEN bump and grind. Loud music thumps and lasers flash, while a smoke machine lends an air of unreality to everything. We follow a young woman through the crowd to the bar. She’s pretty, but obviously nervous. She can’t catch the bartender’s eye. When she finally turns away, frustrated, there’s a space around her: on every side, men and women are talking intently, obviously getting to know one another better.
YOUNG WOMAN’S POV:
A couple kisses.
INT: NIGHT CLUB
Reaction shot off the young woman, who slumps against the bar.
V/O
Lonely? Lost?
A Beautiful Mind can help!
We use state of the art protocols
to turn you into the person
you always wished you were.
SCENE II:
INT: THE TRENDY NIGHTCLUB - 1 AM
THE SAME young woman walks up to the bar. This time, she strides with confidence, and every eye turns to follow her.
SMASH TO:
TITLE CARD
V/O
A Beautiful Mind
Because confidence is sexy.
BRIGID KEATING leaned forward under the weight of her pack and took another stride up the wooded mountain. The humidity was already stifling. The heat wasn’t so bad, yet—but that would change as the sun rose over the cliff. The concentrated breathing and off-rhythm scuff of her colleague and climbing partner Val McKeen’s footsteps rose through the sun-dappled air.
As they came to the top of the steepest part of the slope, Brigid straightened her shoulders, eased the pack straps out of their grooves, and heaved a sigh.
“This used to be easier.”
Val was sarcastic, sharp, daring. Not much for observing societal rules and social controls. His voice rough with exertion, he said, “You said that last year.”
“I mean it more now.”
Just one more good push, no more than thirty meters or so. She stepped forward.
At the bottom of the cliff, she dumped her pack, pulled out a chiller bottle, and drank a few grateful swallows. Condensation from the outside ran down her arm to drip from her elbow as she tilted the bottle to her mouth. Her teeth ached slightly in the cold.
When she lowered the water and sealed the top, Val was already partway down the path along the cliff base, staring up speculatively. She trotted behind, catching up in a few quick strides, careful of rough footing. These traprock cliffs were a kind of basalt that left a litter of sharp-edged red-black stone at their bottoms. Val’s wiry dark shape slipped confidently among ankle-munching boulders and pebbles, sweat from the climb beading on the caramel-colored skin below his hairline, soft morning light blurring the detail on his prosthetic leg.
It was barely after sunrise, and they were alone at the cliff. In the misty cool, Brigid scanned the wall she passed under, examining climbing routes skinned over it. She’d shut off her mail, phone, other skins, and texting—she had no family anymore, and nobody had her emergency override codes except Val and her immediate superior—and was reveling in the blessed lack of connectivity. But it was still useful to know exactly where the route went up the cliff. The logged comments of other climbers didn’t hurt, either.
Suddenly, Val stopped. The route he was eyeing highlighted in green.
“How do you feel about the 5.11?”
Brigid’s stomach constricted looking up at it. It’s just fear. It can’t hurt you.
More in sensations than words, a more atavistic part of her brain responded, No, but the thing that you’re afraid of can.
“Not confident,” she admitted.
Val said, “Want to try a warmup first?”
She did, desperately. She wanted an excuse not to climb this at all. But if she started making those excuses, that was exactly what would happen.
She said, “After the approach, I’m warm enough.”
They retrieved gear and slithered into their harnesses, checking buckles and straps. Brigid slung the clanking belt of cams and nuts around her waist and wriggled her feet into arch-bottomed, high-friction climbing slippers. They were exquisitely uncomfortable.
Val said, “You leading it?” He began flaking the rope–laying it out on a tarp so it was coiled easily and would not tangle. Brigid tied herself in while Val clipped the other end through his belay device.
She pulled on her helmet and gecko gloves. Fingerless mitts with microscopic carbon filaments on the palms, they wouldn’t hold up a person’s weight all by themselves but could support an iffy foot placement.
As Val moved up to spot her, Brigid laid her hands against the stone, verbally checked his belay status, and began to climb.
She left the beta on, her interface contacts projecting highlights over the holds that one climber or another had found useful over the years. Val stood below her, his hands upraised, ready to not so much break her fall (should she fall) as guide her to a safe landing position—if possible. The rope dragged below her—no use yet, and no help.
She traced the holds—awkward, fingertip-thin, usable only with delicate balance and finger pressure—to the crack where she meant to place her first protection. A painful, pinching grip held her to the overhanging rock as she slipped an irregular hexagonal nut into the crack and wedged it against stone. A carabiner dangled from the pro on a twisted cable.
She found the rope by feel, the woven sheath bumpy-smooth. If she slipped now, a ground fall was inevitable.
The line went into the biner and the gate snapped shut.
“Take.”
The slight pressure of him pulling in slack put some air back into her lungs.
The rock was smoothed from many years of handling, slick and soapy against her palms and fingertips. Chalky palmprints and finger smudges of previous climbers matched the holds marked by her skins. The trick was finding the ones you could use, and having the technique and strength to use them.
Every climb was different for everybody.
The cams and nuts on her equipment sling clinked. This is too scary. Too hard. I can’t make it happen.
Contextual fear conditioning, she told herself scornfully. If somebody had thought to shoot you up with a glucocorticoid antagonist before you got yourself orphaned, you wouldn’t be having this problem now. So get the hell over it.
Resentment tautened her throat. It was only her cowardly endocrine system holding her back, weakening her muscles, crushing her resolve. Look at Val: missing half a leg and still hiking, still climbing, utterly fearless. And here she was scared shaking of a little trad climb.
Irritation with herself gave her strength. She clicked the line through another carabiner gate. Higher now, aware of the tension in her limbs, the balance, the way her body used opposition and leverage to take strain off her hands and biceps. Night-cool rock gritted against her fingertips, moist in the corners and cracks. She briefly forgot the anxious squeeze of her heart in the accomplishment of moving up.
One more piece of pro—a sketchy placement—before she faced a long runout: four and a half meters of sustained hard and technical moves with no good place to set. This was where she’d quailed the last time, and the time before.
When you didn’t trust your pro, you got conservative. She wasn’t a good enough climber to manage a 5.11 without exceeding her range of confidence—and you didn’t get to be a better climber by staying within your limits. She’d climbed this route behind Val, so she knew she could get past the rock.
Getting past herself was something else again.
It was slick-looking face climbing, a little overhung. She knew there were ledges up there, flakes, side pulls, fingertip crimpers. She just had to reach them—and having reached them, she had to use them. If she fell at the top of the runout, the rope stretch might let her toetips brush the earth, but it still wouldn’t be a ground fall—as long as that top piece of protection held. If the nut popped out of the crack when her weight hit it, though, she could go all the way down onto the rocks below.
“This is not a bomber set,” she called down.
“So don’t fall on it,” Val yelled back.
Belayers were always so helpful.
One at a time, she dipped her hands into the chalk bag that hung against her butt. The chalk would soak up the sweat that slicked her hands. A nice thing about the humidity: she could pretend that she didn’t know it was fear sweat.
Go, she told herself.
And she went.
Left foot up, test. Feel the high-friction rubber stick the rock, the tight pinch of the shoe compressing her foot. The hold was too high to stand up on, but she had techniques for that. She managed a fingertip grip, awkwardly off to the left, and supported it with the pressure of the palm shoving the gecko glove into the rock.
Her right palm contacting a little rippled bump in the rock face, she levered herself up onto the left foot. Her right foot flagged out, a counterweight, and she held the precarious position by balance and the friction of her left hand and left foot against stone. Breathing shallowly, belly against the rock, she maintained her balance. She brought her right hand up on a sweeping arc, reaching for the ledge her skinned perceptions hinted at, just above. Two centimeters of crimp snagged her fingertips. She latched on, her arms stretched on a wide diagonal, her right foot still swinging free. Strain across her shoulders, now, the pull through tendons and lats and rotators.
She was a meter and a half above her last nut. Her heart stammered. She concentrated on her breathing, on moving smoothly, on turning her head slowly to search out a ledge, a pocket, anything she could get her toe against. There was a little overhang next, which would put her four meters above the nut.
Which translated to eight meters of fall before you took rope stretch into account. For every meter she fell, she’d fall faster than the one before, and when her sixty-three kilos hit that nut whose placement she wasn’t too secure about—
“Come on, Bridge,” she muttered under her breath. “If Val can do it on a leg and a half, what’s your excuse?”
She gathered herself, looked up to judge the distance to the roof, and then turned her head aside to increase the length of her reach and went for it. Foot up, swing, and lunge. Below her, Val cheered loudly. She felt the tug of the rope’s weight, the solid pressure of her toe edged on a flake that was far more secure than it looked.
Trust your feet. Trust your feet and go.
Her body a tensile line of strength between hand and foot, she strained up, reached, found the edge. Her fingers gripped; slowly she transferred weight to the hand. Slowly, she eased herself onto the hold—
Her right foot popped off the wall and all her weight fell on her fingertip grip at full arm extension. Pain lanced through her shoulder and the palm of her hand; she swung for a moment, clinging reflexively, and then her own momentum pulled her from the wall.
As she dropped, she tucked. She hit that sketchy placement, and she heard the nut screech loose. She had just enough time for an unformulated hope that the rest of the pro wouldn’t zipper out of the rock when she felt the next piece catch her, and the rope stretch, and she struck the dirt and stones below with disorienting force.
[PAID CONTENT]
Have you considered what happens to convicted criminals when their term of incarceration is up?
Traditional methods of rehabilitation do not work, and result in the release of hardened criminals into society with insufficient safety nets.
When you throw the book at them, who gets hit?
Support HB-7513
Access to mental health services for the incarcerated.
A Beautiful Mind
Because a prison is not forever.
BRIGID HADN’T finished bouncing when Val was beside her, crouched down as well as his prosthesis would allow, running hands across her legs and arms.
“Lie still,” he said, even as she reached to push his hands away.
“Back up,” she wheezed. “Let me get some air. I’m fine. I’m fine.”
Rope stretch had taken most of her weight and she was more embarrassed than hurt, but residual adrenaline left her shaking and weak. She batted his hands away, and Val held his arms wide, recognizing her autonomy even if he didn’t agree with it.
“You might have a spinal injury,” he said.
Carefully, she wiggled her fingers and toes. “No,” she said. “It wasn’t as bad as it looked. My damn foot popped. And then my tendons—”
“How bad?” he asked.
She wiggled her fingers. “Think I maybe strained a pulley tendon. And the rotator cuff. I don’t think anything is torn.”
She looked up and sighed before continuing, “And I said that placement wasn’t any good—”
“Well,” he answered. “You were right.”
Shakily, achily, Brigid got her feet under her and rolled onto them.
“You didn’t commit,” Val said. “You could have had it if you’d trusted the foot a little more.”
“Tentative.” Brigid shook her head. “I’m such a damn coward.”
Val shrugged and began unclipping the belay. “It’s a tough route. Give yourself a little credit.”
THE DAWN SHANE SHOW
06 June 2051
TRANSCRIPT
CALLER (Dorothea from New York): “I know you find the ads offensive. But don’t you think this kind of rightminding could save a lot of marriages?”
DAWN SHANE: “What I find offensive is that they’re aimed so strongly at women. There’s a subtextual message that women need to change in order to support a relationship—”
CALLER: “Okay, every relationship demands compromise.”
DAWN SHANE: “Every relationship does demand compromise. But why can’t men compromise, too? Why aren’t we seeing ads about turning off your urge to philander when you’re elected to the Senate?”
[Audience laughter]
CALLER: “Maybe it could be made mandatory under law.”
[Audience laughter]
DAWN SHANE: “Thanks for an interesting perspective, caller, even if it’s one I don’t agree with. And on to Kevin from South Dakota! Kevin, you’re on the air!”
THEY STARTED up again, this time with Val leading. He got up the thing like a damned mountain goat, edging on the rubber peg of his specialized prosthesis. He was sharp and confident and a little flashy, and Brigid loved watching him climb. But most of all, she envied him the grace and fearlessness with which he met every challenge the rock could provide. It must be easier, she thought, when you aren’t terrified. Watching him climb was like watching Nijinsky dance: he was made for it, and nothing seemed to give him pause.
Even the moves that were too hard for him—of which, admittedly, there weren’t any on the current climb. He’d just hit them, try, and fail undaunted. Until he found the way past whatever was slowing him down.
With the rope above her and Val on top belay, so she couldn’t possibly fall more than a few feet, Brigid sent the route without a single glitch.
“Dammit,” she said at the clifftop, staring down the ninety meters to the dirt below.
“You’re just scared of it,” Val said, rigging a rappel to descend. He’d be easier to resent if he wasn’t so damned nice. “A little more practice.”
“It’s a sophipathology,” Brigid admitted. “I could get my brain hacked. Call it buy in. Employee discount.” She spent enough time developing rightminding protocols—chemical, cognitive, behavioral, and surgical strategies to assist in the development of a mentally healthy population—that it wasn’t much of a stretch.
She continued, “All I want to do is just turn down my amygdala a little.”
“You are hacking your brain.” He tested the rig, leaning some weight on it before trusting it to lower him to the dirt below. “The old fashioned way. Come on, let’s get down off this rock and find a nice 5.10 you can lead.”
FADE IN
INT: A CHEERY MODERN KITCHEN - MORNING
IT IS SUNLIT and spotlessly clean. Two attractive women sit at the table sharing coffee, a bowl of daffodils between them.
CHLOE:
It’s not what it used to be.
Do you know what I mean?
MAUDE:
You and Bobby?
CHLOE makes a face.
CHLOE:
You could say that.
CHLOE looks aside guiltily and sips her coffee.
MAUDE:
The same thing happened with Ajit and me, you know.
CHLOE:
Really?
MAUDE:
[lowering voice]
I just wasn’t interested in sex anymore.
I’d come home from work, and it seemed like
he never helped out around the house.
I got so frustrated.
CHLOE:
But it seems like you have a great relationship!
MAUDE:
We do. Now.
CHLOE:
What did you do?
MAUDE:
I finally realized that I couldn’t change Ajit.
But I could change myself.
CHLOE:
You saw a counselor?
MAUDE:
Oh, no. Something much more effective.
I went to A Beautiful Mind.
They helped me bring my expectations in line with reality,
and I’ve never been happier.
[whispering]
And our sex life is fantastic!
SMASH TO:
TITLE CARD
V/O:
A Beautiful Mind
Because you deserve to be happy.
ON THE DRIVE back to New London Brigid was exhausted and mostly happy. She still fretted slightly at the edges of her inability to lead the 5.11, but she had the sense to keep it to herself—and to try to enjoy the warm post-exercise glow of all the routes she had sent. Brigid told herself it was human to fret about one failure in the face of many successes. She told herself that telling herself that helped.
“If you’re not falling off,” Val said, interpreting her silence correctly, “you’re not climbing hard enough.”
She shot him a sideways look.
He grinned. “Eyes on the road.”
As if the car wasn’t driving itself, anyway. Brigid dropped Val off and returned the ZIPcar to the charging station. The nearest tram stop was transmitting a half-hour wait, so she retrieved a community bicycle to take her and her backpack full of gear back to her aptblock.
It was a twenty-minute ride, pedaling slowly under the weight of rope, pro, and other gear balanced across the bike’s panniers. The evening was summer-soft, a breeze off the waters relieving the humidity that had made the hike up Ragged Mountain such dripping misery. Brigid cruised past the salvage sites where workers were disassembling the uninhabitable old buildings doomed to be consumed by the rising waters of Long Island Sound. Brick by brick, stone by stone, beam by beam, the ante-Peak materials would be repurposed and reused.
In the cooler evening, the streets were busy with pedestrians, cyclists, pedicabs, trams, and a few automobiles. About half of the people on the street were privacy-shielded, skinned tight against curious eyes. The bike, fortunately, kept track of their locations for her, limiting the potential for collisions.
Brigid passed the waterfront Jay Street market just as the farmers were closing up shop for the evening. Her skins told her what was available. She paused and bought a melon, greens, and some farmer’s cheese. With pasta, it would make supper—even after a day of climbing.
Her block was a reconstructed building, originally built in the 1800s. The old pale granite façade remained, ornate with a band of archlike engraving below the roofline—but the roof itself had been retrofitted to a modern green farm, the huge old apartments broken up into modern convertibles, and the whole building enclosed in a sunfarm shell. The leaves of the sunflowers were furling for the night as Brigid returned her bike to the rack across the street.
She shouldered her pack with a sigh. The straps had dug bruised spots across the tops of her shoulders. Her calves ached with tiredness as she climbed broad, dished front steps.
Brigid’s apt was on the third floor. Normally, she’d run up. Today, her exhaustion and the weight of her rope made each step an exercise in concentration. But her door opened to the touch of her hand on the security pad. She dropped her climbing gear in the narrow hall closet and kicked her shoes in after.
Padding barefoot across the apt’s soft grass, she carried her dinner to the corner still set as a kitchenette and placed it on the counter. She started water boiling before heading to the bathroom, kicking balled clothes towards the cleanser. Five minutes under warm mist and sonics and she was fit to live in her own skin.
Her apt was spacious: close to seventy square meters of living space, still set for sleeping since she’d left in a predawn hurry. There was no point in putting it back now. Instead, she took her dinner out to the balcony in her pajamas, plate balanced on one hand and her Omni in the other. She should pay attention to the food, but by the time she was done eating odds were she’d fall into bed almost without cleaning her teeth, and the need to research nagged at her.
This was her life now: her body completely recovered from the sailing accident in her teens that had cost her both fathers but her mind still fighting the post-traumatic urges to play it safe, to limit her futures and her horizons. Twenty years ago was not long enough; not as far as the fear was concerned.
Sometimes she could still see the black water tossing below the tilting rail, taste salt and wind and hear her Papa Kevin’s voice loud and forced-calm, saying Just swing over. If you fall, it’s only into the sea. That was hardwired in, now, locked into her memory through a series of neurological adaptations that she’d spent twelve years educating herself about.
She knew how trauma response and traumatic memory formation worked. She knew how cognitive tactics worked. Using the latter to control the former should have been child’s play, right?
All she had to do was keep climbing. Even though it scared her. And keep trying to trust people, even though they always went away.
Someday, maybe she’d even get on a boat again.
And of course, she thought, that has nothing to do with why you share this great big space with exactly nobody, and all you have to do on a Sunday night is catch up on the journals.
She set the pad down on a table, tapped it on, summoned up a virtual interface—left-handed, so she could eat with the right—and began using the Omni’s touchscreen to flick research windows into the air. She started in the public cloud, looking for popular overviews and opinion—working in a field could mean you lost touch with public perceptions, and public perceptions were part of what she needed to know.
She didn’t stay there long. Her work permissions included deep access to ABM’s research files, and she subscribed to a series of research aggregators such as Science, Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine, Technology Review, Neurology Journal, Applied Neuromechanics, and half a dozen other technical publications, the cost of each averaging a cool 327.5 revals per annum. Even with the venerable Scientific American in there—and who could miss their “50, 100, 150, and 200 years ago” cloudfeature?—to bring the cost-per-journal down, it was a little daunting.
She cruised through pages, skimming and flipping, indexing for keywords and metatagging for later perusal. She thought she’d get an overview tonight, sleep on it to integrate, and come back fresh in the morning. She could sleep in. While Brigid had one of the few jobs that still meant reporting to work in the morning—centrifuges and neurosurgery suites didn’t grow in AR—she certainly didn’t need to go into the office every day. A lot of her job was assimilating, synthesizing, and actualizing.
And only the actualizing took place in the lab.
She kept thinking that until her search cluster turned up a paper by a Dr. Ionita in the ABM proprietary database. It was fascinating, and troubling, and she didn’t realize she wasn’t supposed to be reading it until she was a few thousand words in.
FADE IN
EXT: FOREST GLADE WITH BIRDS SINGING - MORNING
V/O
Are you riddled by guilt because of your
inability to sustain a healthy relationship?
Do you find yourself raising your voice—or your fists—
to your loved ones every week?
Every day?
SOMETIMES it’s hard to know what’s appropriate and inappropriate behavior in the home. If you find yourself unable to control your temper, striking your loved ones, or using physical or verbal coercion to control them, we can help.
TITLE CARD WITH CONTACT INFORMATION FOR HARTFORD INTERVAL HOUSE
V/O
Domestic Violence.
It’s all in your mind.
The preceding has been a public service
announcement.
PEOPLE WERE human. Accidents happened.
So Brigid told herself, her hands trembling with adrenaline reaction as she sat back in her chair.
It wasn’t a management honey trap: she had every right to be running this search. And every right to be reading the documents that turned up in response.
With the exception of this one, which detailed how physiological primate social control mechanisms such as shame and the community urge might be hardwired to reinforce submission to authority.
Her access of the file was already logged. But since its author had backed it up to the wrong virtual, her access was perfectly legit as far as the watchbots were concerned. There was nothing to trip a flag.
Nothing. Unless human eyes went over the log and realized that Brigid Keating wasn’t affiliated with the Military Research division. And that she had no reason to be reading up—not just on ABM’s treatment of post traumatic stress and combat anxiety, which was well within her purview—but… other military and social applications. At first she assumed that the paper of Dr. Ionita’s she was reading was speculative, theoretical—until she skimmed back to the abstract, and then found the appended data.
At that point, she couldn’t stop reading. But nor could she continue: the access log would show how long she’d had the file open. Of course, she had a lot of files open, floating all around her headspace. But there was a cutoff for plausible deniability.
She mirrored it to her secure space and closed the original file.
And continued reading.
Rightminding applications had been in development for treating post-traumatic stress since the nineties and noughties. Their early successes and failures—along with those of techniques for managing obsessive compulsive disorder and other neurological imbalances—were the source from which the modern discipline of rightminding sprang.
But Ionita’s research wasn’t concerned with making soldiers immune to battlefield panic, or keeping them from freezing up in a crisis, or amending the damage done to human psyches by exposure to violence—or worse, by the creation of it. What Brigid read now—tea cooling, fork forgotten on the edge of her plate, shoulders hunched forward in a manner that would lead to pain in the morning—was a far more unsettling plan. This program, she realized, would create soldiers who could not disobey orders.
And workers who could not disobey their superiors.
That’s ridiculous, Brigid thought. Her first urge was to go scurrying off seeking confirmation, but too-eager googling would leave a trail she suddenly didn’t want behind her. Hard to say she’d opened the mis-saved file by innocent accident if she’d promptly run off in pursuit of what it revealed.
Military organizations relied on the ability of soldiers to refuse an illegal order. Far too many of them never would, even under ordinary circumstances. The pressure to conform was great, the training to bow to authority even greater.
And, according to this file, one of her colleagues was having success removing the remaining reserves of that ability. This struck Brigid as not just ethically bad, but practically bad.
Brigid was agnostic on the topic of the existence of free will. She considered it a null argument, arising from a spurious and archaic distinction between conscious and unconscious minds. But even leaving aside for the moment the ongoing debate of what exactly free will was, and if it existed at all, order-following robots wasn’t what you wanted if you were trying to create a well-disciplined military, part of whose strength was in each soldier’s trained judgment and ability to think for her or himself.
But ABM did not work solely for the military. And Brigid could think of plenty of less enlightened corporate leaders that would reward yes-men, and those who could create yes-men.
As if the emotional pressures of primate social controls weren’t enough to enforce groupthink in most circumstances. Ethical rightminding applications increased individuality and autonomy. This was…
… not that.
Brigid sat back. She was already soaked in perfectly normal sweat from the heat of the evening. It didn’t stop her breaking out in chills.
FX:
A shattering, swirling, migraine-aura blot of jagged red and green and yellow images, sucked down into a dark singularity at the center. Occasional bright yellow-white flashes briefly wash out the whole of the image.
V/O:
In the benighted 20th century, normal human response to trauma was treated as a moral failure. Soldiers and others suffering from trauma-related biological changes to the brain were called neurotic, cowards, or worse.
We know better now.
As a result of traumatic experiences
beyond your control,
do you suffer from:
nightmares
anxiety
hypervigilance
sadness
flashbacks
feelings of intense distress
loss of joy
the inability to trust your loved ones
numbness
or other symptoms of trauma-related endocrine and neurological disorders?
FX:
The chaotic swirling begins to resolve towards
soothing blues and whites.
V/O:
Cure pathological trauma response.
Proven success.
A Beautiful Mind
You don’t have to be afraid anymore.
MONDAY MORNING, Brigid cycled in to the lab to confront the usual straggle of anti-rightminding protestors. Signs floated in virtual space around them—a few of them funny, most badly designed and punctuated. Someone jeered as she pedaled past. Brigid spared a moment to her habitual longing for the future day when she could telecommute completely—except for occasional Partnership Days—as so many of the paper pushers did. Remote surgery by robot and waldo was what she did now, and it shouldn’t be too much harder to do it from across town than from the next room.
The management was conservative, however, and Brigid suspected that they had the sort of mindset that supposed anyone who wasn’t under constant, direct supervision spent most of their time goofing off. As far as Brigid was concerned, this said more about the management than their employees. Most of the researchers she knew had to be told when to stop working—and have the edict enforced.
Normally, the sight of the lab lowered her blood pressure, rather than elevating it. But on most days, she wasn’t carrying the remnant neurochemical and fatigue poison cocktail of a stressed, sleepless night in her bloodstream. She’d finally had to dose herself with a regulator just to be able to lie down. But she’d thrashed in her bead, kicking at the sweat-wicking covers while sleep eluded her for hours afterward and the implications of what she’d read chased each other’s tails through her weary mind.
She’d finally been able to doze when she’d decided what she would do. Dr. Ionita had obviously made an error in his or her backups. Brigid probably should report it to management—it was a security breach, and while she knew ABM’s security was a joke, the suits still took it seriously. Paternalistically so, in her opinion.
Perhaps she’d mention it to Ionita, and let him or her decide what to do. Who was she to destroy somebody else’s career over a simple error?
But she didn’t know Ionita, who worked in a different area of the building and—from a brief survey of Brigid’s contacts—seemed to be the sort who lived most of his or her existence behind privacy filters. And there was the content of the research...
It’s none of your business, Brigid told herself.
The lab was a modern green building, elevated on stilts above the climate-risen waters of New London Harbor so it could easily use temperature differentials and wave energy for its massive electrical needs. The building itself was greened, every surface shielded by taro plants suited to the warm temperate climate of modern Connecticut. Broad, heart-shaped leaves tossed in the sea breeze, revealing a gorgeous variety of greens—from pale and speckled to a color bordering on black. An elevated causeway led from the shore, above the sparkling clean waters of the harbor, to the lab’s shaded veranda. Spectacular, and certain to impress visiting venture capitalists… but it did mean there was only one approach.
A bored police woman kept that approach clear, but Brigid still had to run the gauntlet of shouted insults. Her stomach contracted to a chilly lump as she approached.
They can’t hurt you.
But social disapproval was a pain of its own. Hardwired in, from an era of human evolution when ostracism equaled death. And worse, when you had already lost a family.
Eyes front, spine straight, Brigid passed through the protestors, wondering as she did so how anyone could be so wedded to their pain, their neurosis that they’d want to defend it. Or maybe that was an adaptive response gone haywire, too? You defend the trauma response, because the trauma response keeps you away from things that can destroy you.
Trauma response could lead to the expectation of a limited life. No belief in a future, marriage, children, a decent job, a fulfilling career. It could lock you into a cage of anhedonia and self-fulfilling prophecies. If the person who hurt you was someone you loved and trusted, doubly so.
It could happen, Brigid thought, even if the person who hurt you would have done anything other than hurt you, if they could. Even if they had hurt you by saving your life, and not their own.
She thought about Val, and wondered. He had—as far as she knew—a good home life. His boyfriend was delightful. Sometimes Brigid wasn’t sure which of them she envied more. And there was that locked feeling in her own heart, that sense that if she reached out past it, ever, she would shatter.
Maybe I should get a cat.
Brigid locked her bike into the (internal, secured) bike rack, passed through the usual security theater dance, and climbed the stairs to her lab. Six flights: she was on the top floor. She trotted up them. All that time under a pack paid off.
It also helped manage her neurochemistry. It just couldn’t get rid of the cowardice.
Val would tell her that she was applying an unreasonable standard to herself, that societal expectations—in this, as in so many things—were bankrupt and unrealistic. Intellectually, she could find it in herself to agree with him. But the understanding and the internalized perceptions—those were in direct conflict on this, as on so many things. It made her understand why so many people drew a bright line between aspects of the self, even if she didn’t agree with them.
Like everyone else in the world, she had some baggage of her own.
Brigid was relatively confident that in the future—when rightminding gained cultural acceptance and became something people did as a matter of course to be happier and more productive—regular, appropriate exercise was going to be a big part of it. (And do you also, she asked herself, believe in the Easter Bunny?)
She put a hand on the wall at the top landing, dizzied by a reflexive wall of frustrated rage—at herself, at humanity, at weakness. A future where everybody was not acting out of their trauma and anxiety all the time seemed bitterly like an unachievable utopia.
Inside her office, she showered quickly, changed to clothes not soaked in sweat from the humid ride in, and clicked her Omni to work shell. She checked her ration status and ordered a cup of coffee and a bagel with smoked North Atlantic cod. The fisheries were on her list of things that might recover reasonably well, if human beings could just be converted into the rational actors that economists had for too long imagined them to be. Not a race of Vulcans—Brigid saw no percentage in removing emotion. That was a primitive idea, which had been replaced since the late 20th century with the idea that emotion was at the root of a good deal of cognition, and rightfully so.
The trick, Brigid thought, was figuring out how to work it so it was healthy emotion driving people’s choices, and not atavistic fear response.
Sometimes, she thought of fear as a personified thing, an actual enemy. In both her personal and professional lives.
She felt her attention veering off again after the question of Dr. Ionita’s research. That’s fear too, she thought. Fear of the other, fear of not having utter control over every aspect of the world we live in. It was a fear that had bankrupted the 20th century—that race to get ahead, to be the strongest. The most defended.
Sophipathological. Suffering from an illness of the thought.
She reined herself in and submitted her breakfast order. The delivery ’bot Rover would bring the bagel up on its rounds.
Brigid sat down in her chair and began sorting her environments into the air around her. ABM’s corporate logo was an abstract line drawing of Athena holding her owl. Athena, the goddess of wisdom, had been born from the head of the god Zeus after the lame god of the forge, Hephaestus, smashed it open with an axe to relieve a blinding headache.
What that said about getting any kind of sense out of Zeus, Brigid left as an exercise to the class.
What it said about the symbolism ABM’s founders had in mind—wisdom arising out of the shattered ruins of an intemperate brain—was the sort of thing you laughed about over beers. And how appropriate was it that they employed a one-legged sysadmin? Not that anybody in their right mind would call Val lame.
As if Val had known she’d be thinking of him, a tap came on the open sixth-story window behind her. The first time he’d done that, Brigid had found herself on her feet, reaching for a weapon—a box of culture dishes, as it happened. Now, she flicked the environmental controls panel on her Omni and let the window crack open. The question was whether she was getting better in general, or whether she was just getting acclimated to Val’s hijinks.
She turned around to see Val slithering his slender lower body through the casement. He wasn’t wearing his climbing leg, but he didn’t need it for buildering something as easy as the ABM labs. But he also wasn’t wearing a rope, which made Brigid tilt her head and glower.
“Think of the devil,” she said. “You could at least rig a self-belay.”
“Takes too long.” He shrugged. “The trick is to get inside before somebody spots you.”
Because of the birds and animals attracted by the green structure, ABM didn’t have external motion or pressure sensors. They’d be going off all day and night if it did, triggered by a heron or a feral cat.
She didn’t bother reprimanding him for breach of security. It was as pointless as telling a cat off for jumping on the table—Val would go where Val wanted to go, and if that was in and out of people’s safes or computer systems, or up the walls themselves, no amount of fussing would change it. ABM had done everything in their power short of firing him—and he was simply too brilliant to fire.
A ferret-like curiosity drove him. He didn’t take anything, or even read files, as near as Brigid could tell. He just couldn’t bear a locked door, no matter which side of it he was on.
And suddenly she realized that he was exactly the person she needed to talk to about Dr. Ionita.
She didn’t know Ionita’s race or sex—even his or her first name beyond the obligatory publication initial. He or she wasn’t one of the people who was enough of an exhibitionist—or casual enough about privacy—that she had ever seen them around the office with their filters down.
But Val knew all sorts of things.
He usually didn’t share them, because he was an ethical cat burglar. But he knew them. And he was as anti-authoritarian as they came. In a case like this, when ethics were already out the window, he might be induced to spill some information.
Where do you draw a line?
She hadn’t had time to plan her approach, though, and when she opened her mouth, what she said was, “There are sensible reasons to start a war.”
He blinked and said, “Are there?”
One hand on her Omni, Brigid dropped out of work shell and offered him a privacy handshake. He accepted; when she blinked to clear his face into the encrypted space he tilted his head quizzically and said, “Oh, I bet this is good.”
“Let me flash you a file.”
He nodded; she transmitted. He skimmed. For long moments, she watched him assimilating. He didn’t have time to have gotten through much more than the abstract, but in his credit—and, of course, primed by her concern—he must have twigged much faster than she had.
When his eyes stopped moving rapidly left to right, he paused for a moment. He took a deep, nervous breath, shook himself, and brought his attention back. Her frame around the app lit up as he foregrounded her. “What are you going to do about that?”
“What can I do?”
“You showed it to me.” He leaned back against a counter. “You must be thinking of doing something.”
“Approaching Ionita. Letting him or her—”
“Her,” he said, wincing with discomfort at revealing that much private information.
She nodded and raised an eyebrow. He shrugged. “—know she misfiled it? Report the breach to corporate?”
“Or?”
She shook her head, but she didn’t look down. Muckraking ABM was not exactly the fast track to promotion. “I’d lose my job.”
“You can get another.”
“Right.”
“Or go on Subsistence.”
She turned away, facing out the window. Her interface kept his window lit, but she didn’t look at it.
If she hadn’t wanted to be pushed into doing something about it, she wouldn’t have asked Val.
“I’ll become a dirtbag,” she said. “If I climb every day, that’s like rightminding, isn’t it? Good endorphins. Work through fear.”
Val sighed and came up behind her. “The future is running out. Winding down. We’re falling into tighter and tighter spirals—”
“Why?” she asked. “Because you can’t hop on a jet plane and take off to Australia for a price that would be completely ridiculous if environmental impact were taken into account? That’s not contraction, Val. Not when I can telepresence all over the world.”
“It’s not the same as being able to go climbing in Norway.”
“No,” she said. “But it’s not worse.”
That silenced him. When she turned back, he was studying his nails, considering. He looked up at her. “So what are you going to do? You can’t hang ABM with just this document. Too easily forged—”
It wasn’t until he calmly accepted that she was about to engage in industrial espionage and muckraking that she realized that was what she’d meant to do all along. Once the decision was made, it felt natural, true.
The right choice.
She knew the neurology, the brain chemistry behind it. That didn’t change the very physical sensation of a weight being lifted from the center of her chest.
She straightened up and let her neck fall back, rolling it side to side to crack the vertebrae. When she was done, she bit her lip and looked at Val again.
“No,” she said. “I’d need research notes. Experimental protocols. Workfiles. Video images. You know Ionita.”
“She works on my floor. I’ve seen her, though she usually keeps her shields up. You want me to—”
“It’d be worth your job,” she said. “Just leave a window open and forget to log out?”
With his admin privileges, she could get everything in Ionita’s workspace.
He met her eyes for a moment before glancing at the open window. “It’s an easy climb.”
“I know.”
“And if it doesn’t work? What’s your plan B?”
She didn’t look down. “There is no plan B.”
In today’s competitive world,
it’s too easy for minor childhood behavioral
problems to blossom into
life-limiting events.
Ensure educational success.
Give your child every advantage.
A Beautiful Mind
Because every childhood should be magical
IT’S AN EASY CLIMB, Brigid told herself.
Which was true.
The problem was, it wasn’t an easy fall.
Brigid tried to keep that thought from preying at her as, in the dark, with the mist rolling in, she walked down the rocky beach a few hundred meters from the lab building. There was enough light caught in the fog for dark-adapted eyes to make out the worst hazards of terrain, so she didn’t need a light to pick her way along the strand. Ghostly veils of mist dragged at her arms and legs like damp tulle, leaving her feeling as if she walked through the ruins of a shredded wedding dress.
Waves hissed around the lab’s pilings and amongst the stones as she approached, but the shadow of the building hid her. It wouldn’t help her get up the well-lit and observed causeway, though, and swimming out to the back pylons would have left her drenched. If she didn’t fancy the climb dry and rested, she liked her odds even less with wet hands and heavy wet clothes and muscles worn out from fighting the surf.
But she’d had the sense to wait until the tide was out. Half the lab was still at sea, but the other half hovered over rocks. And so she walked out under the deck, the lab building suspended over her head like a mothership. She found a piling on the back side of the building, by the edge of the receding water, and leaned against it to pull on her climbing shoes.
The piling itself was easy enough. It’d been designed to provide moorings for sea life, which meant it was rough-surfaced and more or less like a very, very vertical stepladder. The trick was not slashing her hands open on a cluster of mussels, or grabbing for a slick handful of seaweed that would tear away under her weight.
She went up it like a squirrel up the pole of a squirrel-proof birdfeeder. And then, like that squirrel, she faced a dilemma.
If the piling wasn’t so bad, the pull around the overhang on to the deck was terrifying. On a cliff, she’d have felt for handholds, footholds, pressed herself over the edge with her feet. Here, there was no such option. She got a hand around the edge, found the rail, and locked her fingers on it. Her heart hammered, a nauseating chill of weakness seething in her stomach, making her muscles feel frail.
If you fall, she told herself, it’s only into the sea.
It was a lie. It was as much of a lie as it had been the first time—for a different reason. Not because this sea was a thrashing black monster that would crush down on her head, but because there wasn’t enough water down there to keep her from breaking her leg—or her pelvis—and lying helpless until the tide rolled back in. That cheerful thought kept her company as she shifted her weight over one foot, freeing the other to move. But she couldn’t move it. Her weight was off it, her body poised to curve sideways from the hip and give her room and flexibility—
The foot stayed where it was, brushing the edge on the piling, as if shifting its weight were not even just hard but simply impossible. As if her motor nerves had been severed, and it would never move again.
If you fall, she lied to herself, it’s only into the sea.
She told herself the lie again, and this time the lie worked. Just a little. She held that image, the safety of the splashing cushion below, and felt… not good. Not secure. But better.
Better enough to edge her other hand up, grab another rail, and heave one leg up for a heel-hook at the height of her shoulder. It was an all-or-nothing move, maximal effort for minimal return—and the only option that had any chance of success. Val was probably strong enough to haul himself over the edge on upper body strength alone.
Brigid knew she’d exhaust herself trying.
The ridged, high-friction heelcap of her shoe scraping on the edge of the platform, she breathed slow and deep, gathering herself, her arms locked out at full extension to put her weight on the bones rather than her biceps. She tensed her core, tightened calf and thigh, put as much of her full weight as possible onto the hooked heel, and pulled. Fingers slipping on salty metal, hair blowing into her eyes, damp with mist. Heaving, pulling with everything that was in her. That sharp pain in her palm stabbed again; she hoped she wasn’t rupturing the pulley tendon this time.
It didn’t matter: do or die. Now. Now.
She levered her right toe up, settled it on the edge of the deck, and got her weight over it.
And now she was crouching, one leg out to the side, her fingers knotted around the bars so tight she could no longer feel the edges pressing into her flesh.
She rose and slung a leg over the bar. She looked up, chest heaving, and wiped the sweat from her hands. It wasn’t blood; it just felt like it. Among the greenery and scaffolding, the window on which Val would have disabled the lock was just visible.
It looked like a cinch, from here on in. She figured that the climbing part, at least, probably would be.
Welcome to BEAMZINE
STORIES THAT MAY INTEREST YOU:
ANTI-RIGHTMINDING PROTESTS CONTINUE IN NEW LONDON
[click for video]
IN THE WAKE of evidence released by Wikileaks and other online muckraking sites, protestors insisting that the new technology of so-called “Rightminding” is being used for mind control gathered outside the labs of A Beautiful Mind, Inc. again today.
CHYRON: CARYE SMITH, PROTESTOR
CARYE SMITH:
What about the soul, that’s what I want to know. Where does the soul come into this?
CHYRON: BRADLEY BLAKE, M.D.
ABM REPRESENTATIVE
BRADLEY BLAKE:
“Well, yes. If by mind control, you mean instituting clarity and rationality of thought, and bringing people peace and well-being. Accident or injury—or just genetics—can have a profound negative effect on the structure of the brain. We’re here to repair that. Nothing else.”
BRIGID SNAPPED her Omni off with unnecessary violence and stood, moving toward her balcony—hers for as long as she had it, anyway.
She’d thought that she wouldn’t get away with it. And if she got away with it, that getting away with it would be the easy part.
But every day she didn’t get caught out as the source of the leak was another day she had to have the same argument with herself: was it ethically bankrupt to keep taking ABM’s money when she knew what they were doing behind her back?
But there was rightminding, and all its potential as a useful social tool. A world-saving tool, perhaps. Or a world-destroying one.
Val was there, his ankle kicked up on the opposite knee, leaned back in a chair behind the little table. He looked up from his own device, shaking his head to shut off his interface and make his eyes focus. By his amused expression, he’d been texting his boyfriend. Brigid bit her lip on the sting of envy.
Someday. She thought. Maybe.
“So,” he said. “Turns out you didn’t need the rightminding after all.”
Her hands curled against her thighs in memory. “I wasn’t not scared.”
“There are different kinds of courage,” Val said. “Taking on ABM is one of them.”
“I still want the procedure,” she said. “I still believe in the value of rightminding. Things being misused does not make them evil, and there is no innate virtue in things being hard.”
“That’s why you climb?”
She snorted.
“Hey,” he said. “Fear is a gift.”
Maybe she nodded. Maybe she was just ducking her head to get the glare of the sun out of her eyes. “Easy for you to say. You don’t have any.”
“Don’t I?”
She shrugged. “Maybe that was unfair,” she said.
His eyebrows drew together. A grin split his face. “Maybe?”
“Maybe,” she said, pulling out the other chair. “But only a little." ■
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Table of Contents
The Surface of Last Scattering
Specter-Bombing the Beer Goggles
The Flame Is Roses, The Smoke Is Briars
