by Vernor Vinge
“Ah. I, I was wondering if I could ask you some questions.”
Bob hoped he didn’t look too surprised; this diffident approach was a first. He waved for his father to take a seat. “Sure.”
“At school today, I was talking to someone. Voice only. The caller could have been on the other side of the world, right?”
“Yes,” said Bob. “If it was from far away, you might notice.”
“Right. Jitter and latency.”
Is he just parroting jargon? Before he lost his mind, Dad had been a technical ignoramus. Bob remembered once in the days of very-dumb-phones when Dad insisted that his new cordless handset was a cheap substitute for a cellphone. Mother had proven him wrong by having Bob take the cordless down the street and try to call her home-business number. She’d rarely made mistakes like that; the old man had been hell on her for weeks afterward.
Dad was nodding to himself. “I suppose timing analysis could reveal a lot.”
“Yes. Your average high-school student is good at both sides of that game.” If you hadn’t ruined things, you could learn all this from Miri.
His old man looked away, introspective. Worried?
“Is someone hassling you at school, Dad?” The thought was boggling.
Robert gave one of his old malevolent chuckles. “Someone is trying to hassle me.”
“Um. Maybe you should talk to your teachers about this. You could show them your Epiphany log of the incident. This is a standard sort of problem they have to deal with.”
There was no return fire; the elder Gu just nodded seriously. “I know, I should. I will. But it’s hard, you know. And given your job, well, you’ve spent years working on life-and-death versions of these problems, right? You’d have the most expert possible answers.”
It was the first time in Bob’s life that his old man had said anything nice about his career. This must be a setup!
There was silence for a moment as the father waited with apparent patience, and the son tried to think what to say next. Finally, Bob gave a laugh. “Okay, but the military answers would be overkill, Dad. Not because we’re that much smarter than a billion teenagers, but because we have the Secure Hardware Environment. Down at the bottom we control all the hardware.” Leaving aside the moonshine fabs and the hardware abusers.
“The fellow I was talking to this afternoon styled himself ‘an all-encompassing cloud of knowingness.’ Is that bull? How much can he know about me?”
“If this jerk is willing to break some laws, he can find out a lot about you. That probably includes your medical history, maybe even what you’ve said to Reed Weber. As for spying on you moment to moment: He can usually watch you in public places, though that depends on your defaults and the density of local coverage. If he has confederates or zombies, he can learn what you do even in deadzones, though that information wouldn’t come to him in real time.”
“Zombies?”
“Corrupted systems. Remember what things were like when I was a kid? Almost any nastiness we had on home computers, we have on wearables now. The situation would be absolutely intolerable without the SHE.” Dad looked blank, or maybe he was Googling. “Don’t worry about it, Dad. Your Epiphany gear is about as secure as you’d be comfortable wearing. Just remember that other folks may not be so trustable.”
Robert seemed to be digesting what his son had said. “But aren’t there other possibilities? Maybe little gadgets the, ah, kids can stick on you?”
“Yes! The little dufuses are no different than I was, but they have more opportunities for mischief.” Last semester it had been the crawling-up-your-skirt spidercams. For a while, the gadgets had been a god-damned mechanical infestation. Miri had raged about the invasion for days, and then dropped the issue so abruptly that Bob suspected she’d wrought some terrible revenge. “That’s why you should always come into the house through the front hall. We have a good commercial bug trap there. Just you and I talking here is as private as your Epiphany can be…So what exactly is this fellow hitting you up for? You’re from so far outside the school scene, I can’t imagine you being successfully hassled.”
By God, Dad actually looks shifty! “I’m not really sure. I think it’s just the hazing a new kid gets”—he gave a little smile—“even when the new kid happens to be an old fart. Thanks for the advice, Son.”
“Sure thing.”
The old man sidled out of the room. Bob’s gaze followed him into the hall and up the stairs to the privacy of his room. Dad was definitely a man with things on his mind. Bob stared at the closed bedroom door for a moment, wondering at life’s inversions and wishing he and Alice were like some folks, the ones who snooped on their own miscellaneous dependents.
15
WHEN METAPHORS ARE REAL
For the next week Robert avoided UCSD, just to see if the Mysterious Stranger would react.
He was beginning to feel confident with Epiphany, although he might never be as skillful as kids who grew up wearing. Xiu Xiang was lagging behind him, mainly because of her self-doubts. She had refused to wear for three days after one particularly mistaken gesture had dumped her into—into she refused to say what, but Robert suspected it was some kind of porn view.
The language in the Gu/Orozco project, while not poetry, had risen above the level of egregious noise. Robert had a surprising amount of fun working with video effects and network jitter. If their project had been shown in the 1990s, it would have been taken as a work of genius. That was the power of the libraries of clichés and visual gimmicks that lay in their tools. Juan was properly afraid it wouldn’t count for much with Chumlig. “We need some added value or she’ll fred us.” He Googled up some high schools with manual music programs. “Those kids think it’s a tragic form of gaming,” he said. In the end, Robert chatted up student musicians in Boston and southern Chile—far enough apart to really exercise his network ideas.
Sharif had returned to Corvallis, but they had several more interviews. Some of the guy’s questions were a lot more intelligent than Robert would have expected from their first encounters.
He surfed the web a lot, to study up on security issues and—on occasion—to see what had become of literature. What was art, now that surface perfection was possible? Ah, serious literature was there. Most of it didn’t make much money, even with the microroyalty system. But there were men and women who could string words almost as well as the old Robert. Damn them!
Still silence from the Stranger. Either he had lost interest, or he understood his power over Robert. It is so easy to win when your victim is desperate. It had been a long time since anyone had beaten Robert Gu at a stare-down…but then one Saturday he skipped his session with Juan. Instead, he took a car to UCSD.
Sharif showed up on the way. “Thank you for accepting my call, Professor Gu.” The image sat down in the car seat, part of its butt disappearing into the cushions. Zulfi didn’t look nearly as well put together as recently. “It’s been hard to reach you lately.”
“I thought we covered a lot of ground on Thursday.”
Sharif looked pained.
Robert raised an eyebrow. “You’re complaining?”
“Not at all, not at all! But you see, Sir, it’s possible that perhaps I’ve allowed my wearable to become, um, perhaps somewhat corrupted. It’s possible that I’m subject to some degree of…hijacking.”
Robert thought back on some of his recent reading. “That’s like being a little bit pregnant, isn’t it?”
Sharif’s image shrank further into the upholstery. “Indeed, Sir. I take your point. But frankly, my systems are sometimes subject to a small degree of corruption. I wager that is true of most users. I had thought the situation was manageable, but things have reached the point where…well, you see, I did not interview you Thursday. Not at all.”
“Ah.” So the Mysterious Stranger had had it both ways: bludgeoning Robert with silence at the same time he carried on as another player.
Sharif waited a moment for Robert to say
more, then rushed forward with “Please, Professor, I do so very much wish to continue these interviews! Now that we know there is this problem, we can easily work around it. I beg you not to cut me off.”
“You could clean up your system.”
“Well, yes. In theory. I had to do that once in undergraduate school. Somehow, I ended up the zombie in a cheating conspiracy. Not my fault at all, but the University of Kolkata required me to fry-clean all my clothes.” He raised his hands up in open-palmed prayer. “I’ve never been very good about backups; the debacle cost me more than a semester of progress toward my degree. Please don’t make me do that again. It would be even worse now.”
Robert looked out at traffic. His car had turned onto Highway 56 and was tooling toward the coast. Up ahead were the first of the bio labs. And perhaps the Mysterious Stranger was there too. By comparison, Sharif was a known quantity. He looked back at the young fellow and said mildly. “Okay, Mr. Sharif. Carry on in your slightly corrupted state.” An old memory struck him, how the computer techs at Stanford had always badgered him about the latest antivirus updates. “We’ll simply rise above all the petty vandalism.”
“Quite so, Sir! Thank you so much.” Sharif paused, exuding profound relief. “And I’m more eager than ever to proceed. I have my questions here somewhere.” Hesitation and a blank stare as he changed mental gears. “Ah, yes. Has there been any progress on the revised Secrets of the Ages?”
“No,” Robert replied a little shortly. But this was the sort of question you’d expect of the authentic Zulfi Sharif. Robert mellowed his answer with some half truths: “I’m still doing high-level planning, you know.” He launched into a long discussion of how, even though Guian poetry was sparse, its creation required infinitely precise planning. He’d said things like that in the old days, but never laid it on quite as thickly as now. Sharif ate it up.
“So over the next few weeks, I’m going to be visiting my old friends—you know, in the library. That will give me some insights into the plight of the, er, vanquished aged. You’re welcome to come along. If you watch carefully, you may learn things about how I work. And afterwards, I’d be happy to critique your conclusions.”
The younger man nodded eagerly. “Wonderful. Thank you!”
Amazing the thrill it was to have someone look up to him, even if it was the sort of no-talent that he had shielded himself against all through his earlier life. This must be how poor Winnie worked it, using big words and pomposity to fool the even less inspired. Robert looked away from Sharif’s image, and tried to keep his smile from turning predatory. And when Sharif gets smarter, I’ll know it’s the Stranger.
THERE WERE NO demonstrators at the library today, but—surprise—there were lots of in-person students. This was heartwarmingly like his recollections of years past, with the library the center of the university’s intellectual life. What good things had happened in the last week? He and virtual Sharif walked through the glass doors and took the elevator to floor six. The building interior was not visible to Robert, even with his new access skills. Okay, look for recent news items…but by then he was on the fifth floor.
Lena --> Juan, Miri, Xiu:
Juan --> Lena, Miri, Xiu:
Miri --> Juan, Lena, Xiu:
Sharif had faded to a luminescent reddish blob. “I can’t see anymore,” he said. “And I’ll bet you’re the only person I can hear.”
Robert hesitated, then waved permissions in Sharif’s direction. Let’s see what the cabal makes of that.
Winnie and Carlos Rivera were sitting at the window wall. Tommie was hunched over his laptop.
“Nĭ hăo, Professor Gu!” said Rivera. “Thanks for coming.”
Tommie looked up from his laptop. “But I’m not sure we want your little friend.”
Sharif got support from an unexpected place. Winston Blount said, “Tommie, I think Sharif might be of some use.”
Tommie shook his head. “Not anymore. Now that UCSD is shredded—”
“What?” The stacks were still full of books. Robert stepped back and ran his hand across the spines. “These feel real to me,” he said.
“You didn’t see the propaganda on the lower floors?”
“No. I took the elevator, and so far I’m not very good at seeing through walls.”
Tommie shrugged. “We’re on the last unshredded floor. Like we figured, the administration was just waiting for the fuss to die down. Then one night they swooped in with extra shredders. They were done with two floors before we had a clue. By then it was too late.”
“Damn!” Robert settled into a chair. “So what’s the point of protesting now?”
Winnie said, “It’s true that we can’t save UCSD. In fact, the clever SOBs have twisted things around so that the Librareome Project is more popular with the students than before. But so far, UCSD has the only library that’s been shredded.”
Rivera burst into Mandarin, “Duì, dànshì tāmen xūyào huĭ diào qítāde túshūguăn, yīnwèi—” He hesitated, seemed to notice the blank looks. “S-sorry. I meant to say, they still need to destroy other libraries. For cross checking. The data reduction and virtual reassembly will be an ongoing project, tending ‘asymptotically toward perfect reproduction.’”
Robert noticed that Tommie Parker was watching with a faint smile. “So you do have a plan?”
“I ain’t saying nothing while Sharif is here.”
Winnie sighed. “Okay, Tommie. Go ahead and shut him down.”
Sharif’s rosy glow moved a little ways out from the stacks. “It’s all right. I don’t want to be a prob—” The glow vanished.
Tommie looked up from his laptop. “He’s gone. And I’ve deadzoned the sixth floor.” He pointed at an LED on the edge of his ancient-looking laptop.
Robert remembered some of Bob’s claims: “Even the Homeland Security hardware?”
“Don’t tell, Robert.” He patted his computer. “Genuine Paraguayan inside, shipped just before they shut the fabs down.” He gave them a shifty grin. “Now it’s just us, unless one of you is wearing dirty panties.”
Blount looked pointedly at Robert. “Or unless one of us is a fink.”
Robert sighed. “This isn’t Stanford, Winston.” But what if the Mysterious Stranger were actually a cop? That should have occurred to him before. He pushed the thought away. “So what’s your plan?”
“We’ve been reading the Economist,” said Rivera. “Huertas International is on shaky financial ground. Delays here at UCSD could force him to dump the whole project.” He stared at Robert through his thick spectacles. You could see images flickering around in the things.
“Even though they’ve shredded almost everything here?”
“Duì.” The young man leaned forward, and his T-shirt showed a torrent of worried faces. “It’s like this. The Librareome Project isn’t just the video capture of premillennium books. It’s not just the digitization. It goes beyond Google and company. Huertas intends to combine all classical knowledge into a single, object-situational database with a transparent fee structure.”
Object-situational database? This was beyond Robert’s newfound nerdliness. He stared over Rivera’s head, trying to look up the term. Nothing was coming back. Tommie’s deadzone, yeah.
Rivera took his stare as disbelief. “It’s really not that much data, Dr. Gu. A few petabytes. The main thing is that it’s very heterogeneous compared to similar-size datasets in most applications.”
“Of course. Your point?” From the corner of his eye, he saw a smile come to Winnie’s face. The guy knew Robert was blowing smoke.
“So,” Rivera continued, “the Huertas collection will contain almost all human knowledge up to about twenty years ago. All correlated and connected. It’s the reason Huertas is paying the State of California to let him commit this atrocity. Even the first rough compilation could be a gold
mine. From the project start six weeks ago, Huertas International has a six-month monopoly on the Librareome they’re creating. That’s six months with sole access to real insight on the past. There are dozens of questions that such a resource might resolve: who really ended the Intifada? who is behind the London art forgeries? where was the oil money really going in the latter part of the last century? Some answers will only interest obscure historical societies. But some will mean big bucks. And Huertas will have exclusive rights to this oracle for six months.”
“But he has to get the data put together,” said Winnie. “If Huertas loses a few weeks, there’ll be hundreds of organizations that decide they might as well wait till the monopoly runs out—when they can get an even more complete answer for free. It’s worse than that. Chinese Informagical has dibs on the British Museum and the British Library, using much better equipment than Huertas has. The Brits have shown more gumption than UCSD, but their digitization is due to begin any time now. If Huertas gets any further behind, he and the Chinese will be in a price war for the sale of first looks.”
“A regular death spiral!” Tommie’s amusement was without malice. He had always been fascinated by how things come apart. Robert remembered in the 1970 brush fires, teenaged Tommie had been out in East County, helping with communications—but also enjoying every minute of the disaster.
“So, unh…” Why does the Stranger want me in on this?
Blount chuckled. “Confused, Robert?”
Back at Stanford, Winnie wouldn’t have dared such an open gibe, at least not after the first year. But now, the only comebacks Robert could imagine were adolescent sarcasm. So he replied mildly, “Yes, I’m still in the dark.”
Blount hesitated, sensing one of the old-Robert traps. “The point is that we’re talking about doing Huertas and the Librareome Project serious harm. We’re past legal recourse, so anything that depends on delaying the enemy must involve criminal behavior. Got it?”
“Yes. We really are conspirators.”
Rivera nodded. “And that by itself is a felony.”