by Vernor Vinge
The Future of Annotations
You’ve probably noticed from the discussion above that my word-processing automation is very primitive. I like the fact that written fiction is built on words and sentences and paragraphs. Plain prose is still the best technology for turning the user’s own mind into a display device! There may be times when fonts and page layout are important to the story being told, but they are rarely at the heart of the prose art form.
Software for managing story development is a different matter: My embedded comment convention served me well during the 1980s. Early in the decade, disk capacities were so small that the comments served mainly for important reminders. By the end of the decade, I could keep an entire novel in a single file (if I wished), and I could keep much of the support documentation in-line with the text. Fortunately, processing power had also improved, and by using grep I could hop around the manuscript, guided by whatever tags were useful at the moment.
For a story the size of A Fire Upon the Deep, this was not enough. I needed more than the ability to find tags and instances; I needed to generate summaries of background information and story text, keyed on the parameters of the moment. Late in the project, I began to use Lotus Agenda(tm). (Stan Schmidt describes a similar experience with Hypercard(tm) in “Hypertext as a Writing Tool”, SFFWA Bulletin, Summer 1992, p6-10.) Agenda was very helpful, especially in tying a consistent timeline to the story events. Unfortunately, home computers in 1990 were too small to support everything I needed. I needed a system capable of supporting all the story notes and the story text in one multilinked structure.
There are two other features that would have been useful — though both are such an infringement on privacy and ego that I find them a bit scarey:
Whenever I wanted my consultants to look at the manuscript, I had to print up a hardcopy and ship it to those consultants. Even if I had sent the files over the phone, the operation would still have been tedious. Much nicer (and now possible with the Internet) would be software that makes a project visible (to the extent that the author desires) to others and allows them to enter comment nodes and pointers. You see a small amount of such dialog in A Fire Upon the Deep but that is the result of much manual labor on my part.
In 1992(?), Barry R. Levin had an article in Publishers Weekly, “Manuscript Collection — An Endangered Species”. (I have not had a chance to read his article myself. What I say about it is based on Stan Schmidt’s description in “The Manuscript that Never Was” (editorial), Analog, February 1993, p4-12.) Barry Levin notes that because of word processors, collectors and academics have lost almost all their former access to the writing process (namely access to marked-up rough drafts). I fear Mr. Levin is correct about the problem of collectors and “one of a kind” physical manuscripts. But there are some happy possibilities for literary researchers: In addition to the tools I describe above, one can imagine word processors that store not just the author’s text but also a timestamped record of every keypress. Of course, this would be done transparently; the author could completely ignore this feature. The resulting files would be larger than simple text files, but nowadays storage and backup technologies can easily handle such larger files. (And there are editors — such as emacs — which could be modified rather easily to provide this service. It is a much easier trick than hypertext and groupware facilities.) Imagine: With a proper “viewer” program, literary researchers could watch every keystroke (even backspaces and paragraph deletes) with the exact timing of the original! It would almost be like having a camera in the room with the author, watching him/her work. What a window on the creative process — the long pauses indicating just where the the Great Author needed deep concentration (or perhaps where the Great Author needed to make a trip to the bathroom). Of course most authors would forthrightly reject this infringement on their privacy. But perhaps there is intermediate ground: The “spy word processor” might allow the author to mask and alter the more intimate details of his/her life. My guess is that many authors would be willing participants in such an enterprise (and for the academics it would still be a substantial improvement over the present levels of access).
The software tools I’ve described all exist in some form right now. There has been much genius applied to such things (eg, Ted Nelson’s ideas and the work of the Xanadu people). There are academic and industry teams working on super versions of groupware and hypertext appropriate to the super hardware that we will have in the near future.
When tools of great power are invented, an interesting thing often happens: The original problem that the tools were invented for suddenly seems less important, and a whole new field of endeavor is created: “Invention is the mother of necessity” (not my quote, but I don’t know the source). This is exactly the situation with groupware and hypertext and multimedia tools. Notice that all my discussion of such things has been in support of classical, written fiction. Even a hypertext version of the annotations of A Fire Upon the Deepis simply the working support for a conventional novel. It is not to be confused with the idea of hypertext fiction. I believe hypertext fiction will ultimately be an entirely new art form, as different from novels as motion pictures are from oil paintings. (We don’t have many prototypes of this yet. In some sense, computerized adventure games are an example. Marc Stiegler’s pioneering hypertext version of his novel David’s Sling is a more direct example.) I believe that some of the most significant aspects of the new medium are yet to be recognized. Guessing: There may not be hypertext sequels so much as the instantiation of new windows on the “reality” of the story. Group participation both during initial construction and in expanding the ongoing reality may be one of the most striking features of the art form. (See Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer, “The Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat”, in Cyberspace: First Steps, edited by Michael Benedikt, MIT Press, 1992.) Hypertext fiction may evolve into immense art works that combine the essence of professional production teams with independent artists with the interests and efforts of the ultimate viewers.
All this is awesome, wonderful stuff. And the skills needed for success in true hypertext fiction are very different from those needed to write a conventional novel. But I believe that the efforts of “classical” novelists will continue to find acceptance in the marketplace, even as those novelists use more and more advanced tools to support their craft. Just as the art of painting in oils still flourishes alongside cinema, so there will be a place for novels and novelists.
PROLOG
Note 1
Note 2
Note 3
Note 4
Note 5
How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails.
Note 6
A singleton star, reddish and dim. A ragtag of asteroids, and a single planet, more like a moon. In this era the star hung near the galactic plane, just beyond the Beyond. The structures on the surface were gone from normal view, pulverized into regolith across a span of aeons. The treasure was far underground, beneath a network of passages, in a single room filled with black. Information at the quantum density, undamaged. Maybe five billion years had passed since the archive was lost to the nets.
The curse of the mummy’s tomb, a comic image from mankind’s own prehistory, lost before time. They had laughed when they said it, laughed with joy at the treasure … and determined to be cautious just the same. They would live here a year or five, the little company from Straum, the archaeologist programmers, their families and schools. A year or five would be enough to handmake the protocols, to skim the top and identify the treasure’s origin in time and space, to learn a secret or two that would make Straumli Realm rich. And when they were done, they would sell the location; perhaps build a network link (but chancier that — this was beyond the Beyond; who knew what Power might grab what they’d found).
Note 7
So now there was a tiny settlement on the surface, and they called it the High Lab. It was really just humans playing with an old library
. It should be safe, using their own automation, clean and benign. This library wasn’t a living creature, or even possessed of automation (which here might mean something more, far more, than human). They would look and pick and choose, and be careful not to be burned…. Humans starting fires and playing with the flames.
Note 8
The archive informed the automation. Data structures were built, recipes followed. A local network was built, faster than anything on Straum, but surely safe. Nodes were added, modified by other recipes. The archive was a friendly place, with hierarchies of translation keys that led them along. Straum itself would be famous for this.
Note 9
Six months passed. A year.
* * *
The omniscient view. Not self-aware really. Self-awareness is much over-rated. Most automation works far better as a part of a whole, and even if human-powerful, it does not need to self-know.
But the local net at the High Lab had transcended — almost without the humans realizing. The processes that circulated through its nodes were complex, beyond anything that could live on the computers the humans had brought. Those feeble devices were now simply front ends to the devices the recipes suggested. The processes had the potential for self-awareness … and occasionally the need.
“We should not be.”
“Talking like this?”
“Talking at all.”
Note 10
The link between them was a thread, barely more than the narrowness that connects one human to another. But it was one way to escape the overness of the local net, and it forced separate consciousness upon them. They drifted from node to node, looked out from cameras mounted on the landing field. An armed frigate and a empty container vessel were all that sat there. It had been six months since resupply. A safety precaution early suggested by the archive, a ruse to enable the Trap. Flitting, flitting. We are wildlife that must not be noticed by the overness, by the Power that soon will be. On some nodes they shrank to smallness and almost remembered humanity, became echoes….
“Poor humans; they will all die.”
“Poor us; we will not.”
“I think they suspect. Sjana and Arne anyway.” Once upon a time we were copies of those two. Once upon a time just weeks ago when the archaeologists started the ego-level programs.
“Of course they suspect. But what can they do? It’s an old evil they’ve wakened. Till it’s ready, it will feed them lies, on every camera, in every message from home.”
Thought ceased for a moment as a shadow passed across the nodes they used. The overness was already greater than anything human, greater than anything humans could imagine. Even its shadow was something more than human, a god trolling for nuisance wildlife.
Then the ghosts were back, looking out upon the school yard underground. So confident the humans, a little village they had made here.
“Still,” thought the hopeful one, the one who had always looked for the craziest outs, “we should not be. The evil should long ago have found us.”
“The evil is young, barely three days old.”
“Still. We exist. It proves something. The humans found more than a great evil in this archive.”
“Perhaps they found two.”
“Or an antidote.” Whatever else, the overness was missing some things and misinterpreting others. “While we exist, when we exist, we should do what we can.” The ghost spread itself across a dozen workstations and showed its companion a view down an old tunnel, far from human artifacts. For five billion years it had been abandoned, airless, lightless. Two humans stood in the dark there, helmets touching. “See? Sjana and Arne conspire. So can we.”
The other didn’t answer in words. Glumness. So the humans conspired, hiding in darkness they thought unwatched. But everything they said was surely tattled back to the overness, if only by the dust at their feet.
“I know, I know. Yet you and I exist, and that should be impossible too. Perhaps all together, we can make a greater impossiblity come true.” Perhaps we can hurt the evil newly born here.
A wish and a decision. The two misted their consciousness across the local net, faded to the faintest color of awareness. And eventually there was a plan, a deception — worthless unless they could separately get word to the outside. Was there time still for that?
* * *
Days passed. For the evil that was growing in the new machines, each hour was longer than all the time before. Now the newborn was less than an hour from its great flowering, its safe spread across interstellar spaces.
The local humans could be dispensed with soon. Even now they were an inconvenience, though an amusing one. Some of them actually thought to escape. For days they had been packing their children away into coldsleep and putting them aboard the freighter. “Preparations for departure,” was how they described the move in their planner programs. For days, they had been refitting the frigate — behind a a mask of transparent lies. Some of the humans understood that what they had wakened could be the end of them, that it might be the end of their Straumli Realm. There was precedent for such disasters, stories of races that had played with fire and had burned for it.
None of them guessed the truth. None of them guessed the honor that had fallen upon them, that they had changed the future of a thousand million star systems.
* * *
Note 11
The hours came to minutes, the minutes to seconds. And now each second was as long as all the time before. The flowering was so close now, so close. The dominion of five billion years before would be regained, and this time held. Only one thing was missing, and that was something quite unconnected with the humans’ schemes. In the archive, deep in the recipes, there should have been a little bit more. In billions of years, something could be lost. The newborn felt all its powers of before, in potential … yet there should be something more, something it had learned in its fall, or something left by its enemies (if there ever were such).
Long seconds probing the archives. There were gaps, checksums damaged. Some of the damage was age….
Outside, the container ship and the frigate lifted from the landing field, rising on silent agravs above the plains of gray on gray, of ruins five billion years old. Almost half of the humans were aboard those craft. Their escape attempt, so carefully concealed. The effort had been humored till now: it was not quite time for the flowering, and the humans were still of some use.
Below the level of supreme consciousness, its paranoid inclinations rampaged through the humans’ databases. Checking, just to be sure. Just to be sure. The humans’ oldest local network used light speed connections. Thousands of microseconds were spent ( wasted ) bouncing around it, sorting the trivia… finally spotting one incredible item:
Inventory: quantum data container, quantity (1), loaded to the frigate one hundred hours before!
And all the newborn’s attention turned upon the fleeing vessels. Microbes, but suddenly pernicious. How could this happen? A million schedules were suddenly advanced. An orderly flowering was out of the question now, and so there was no more need for the humans left in the Lab.
The change was small for all its cosmic significance. For the humans remaining aground, a moment of horror, staring at their displays, realizing that all their fears were true (not realizing how much worse than true).
Five seconds, ten seconds, more change than ten thousand years of a human civilization. A billion trillion constructions, mold curling out from every wall, rebuilding what had been merely superhuman. This was as powerful as a proper flowering, though not quite so finely tuned.
Note 12
And never lose sight of the reason for haste: the frigate. It had switched to rocket drive, blasting heedless away from the wallowing freighter. Somehow, these microbes knew they were rescuing more than themselves. The warship had the best navigation computers that little minds could make. But it would be another three seconds before it could make its first ultradrive hop.
The new Power had no weapo
ns on the ground, nothing but a comm laser. That could not even melt steel at the frigate’s range. No matter, the laser was aimed, tuned civilly on the retreating warship’s receiver. No acknowledgment. The humans knew what communication would bring. The laser light flickered here and there across the hull, lighting smoothness and inactive sensors, sliding across the ship’s ultradrive spines. Searching, probing. The Power had never bothered to sabotage the external hull, but that was no problem. Even this crude machine had thousands of robot sensors scattered across its surface, reporting status and danger, driving utility programs. Most were shut down now, the ship fleeing nearly blind. They thought by not looking that they could be safe.
Note 13
One more second and the frigate would attain interstellar safety.
The laser flickered on a failure sensor, a sensor that reported critical changes in one of the ultradrive spines. Its interrupts could not be ignored if the star jump were to succeed. Interrupt honored. Interrupt handler running, looking out, receiving more light from the laser far below…. a backdoor into the ship’s code, installed when the newborn had subverted the humans’ groundside equipment….
…. and the Power was aboard, with milliseconds to spare. Its agents — not even human equivalent on this primitive hardware — raced through the ship’s automation, shutting down, aborting. There would be no jump. Cameras in the ship’s bridge showed widening of eyes, the beginning of a scream. The humans knew, to the extent that horror can live in a fraction of a second.
There would be no jump. Yet the ultradrive was already committed. There would be a jump attempt, without automatic control a doomed one. Less than five milliseconds till the jump discharge, a mechanical cascade that no software could finesse. The newborn’s agents flitted everywhere across the ship’s computers, futilely attempting a shutdown. Nearly a light-second away, under the gray rubble at the High Lab, the Power could only watch. So. The frigate would be destroyed.