Analog Science Fiction and Fact - 2014-01

by Penny Publications

  Of course, Toby had anticipated something like this, so he'd set the meta-rules by which they'd have to operate. So, as Peter was excitedly touring him through the place, it came as no surprise when one of the sentry tanks failed to recognize Peter as the owner, and blew them both to smithereens with one blast of its ion cannon.

  It was more than a year before Toby was able to suggest (and Peter was able to hear), "Why don't you just build a world where nobody would have any reason to attack you?"

  This had never occurred to Peter; in fact, it had never occurred to him that violence might have reasons.

  Sometimes Toby had despaired of the lesson ever taking hold. But the revelation that there were Consensus game-worlds stored in the twentier's data block had him thinking a lot about the game. He hadn't yet summoned the courage to open any of them. They were from the years just after Toby's disappearance, and he was half-afraid of what might be in them. This didn't prevent Toby from seeing Consensus everywhere he went, though. As he and Orpheus strolled the rich upper levels of the city, he found himself staring around in amazement—and pride. The streets and stairs of the continent were nothing like Peter's paranoid cathedral, but now that he'd realized who this world's creator was, Toby could see his brother's hand in everything.

  Two days after Jay's visit, he was taking one of these strolls in the richer upper levels of the continent when suddenly Orpheus stuck his nose in the air, then took off. A virtual flag over his head signified he'd recognized something, or somebody. In seconds he'd scrambled up a drainpipe and was running along the edge of a roof.

  "Don't mind me," Toby shouted after him. "I'll just keep walking here, where it's slow."

  Orpheus had his own maps of the city. To Toby, a chair was for sitting on, a table was for sitting at, and a potted plant was for looking at. Orpheus might consider sitting on all three, so they all had the affordance of 'sit-ability' to him. It was the same with the tops of walls, with some of the narrow gaps between buildings; with banisters and tree limbs. To Orpheus, roof cornices were little balconies and drainpipes were subways.

  Toby was still getting used to this fact of denner life. It had been this way all along, not just for denners but also for cats and dogs. Humans had just never had the ability to see them the way animals did. Orpheus's interface gave Toby that ability.

  None of which helped him catch up to the denner. He jogged off in the direction he thought Orpheus had gone and, rounding a corner, nearly toppled over the young woman who was kneeling on the sidewalk and scratching Orpheus's chin.

  "Whoa!" He stumbled and stopped. She stood up, smiling.

  "Oh," he said stupidly. "Hello."

  "Hello again," she said. "I never got a chance to thank you the other day."

  "Thank me? Do I know..." This was the girl he'd saved from being hit by one of the pilgrims during that miniature riot. "Oh," he said. "Yes."

  Orpheus looked from Toby to the young lady, then back. He did it again.

  "I was happy to help," he said. "What... was that all about?"

  "My friends and I were just trying to exercise our right to free speech." She stuck out her hand for him to shake. "I'm Kirstana."

  "T-Toby." He'd been using an alias, but in the moment he completely forget to give it.

  She knelt again to scratch Orpheus's ears. "I think your denner likes me. What's his name?"

  "Orpheus. Yeah, he does seem to have latched onto you." Toby scowled at the denner, but Orpheus blithely ignored him.

  Kirstana put three fingers on the ground and leaned a bit, looking up askance at Toby. "What about you? You came out of the prep station, were you planning on going on pilgrimage?"

  "No, no," he said. "I was just touring around and walked into the middle of things."

  "Touring, huh? Following the tags in those awful city guides?" She waggled her fingers next to her eyes. Toby's touched the tourist glasses, which must be a dead giveaway. He grinned sheepishly, though he didn't know why he should be embarrassed.

  "They're hardly a substitute for a real local guide," she continued.

  "Well, I don't know anybody here."

  "You know me."

  Toby opened his mouth, then closed it. He'd never had this kind of a conversation with a girl— woman, for she was few years older than him. Was she flirting? Or just being friendly? He had no idea, just as he had no idea how old she thought he was.

  "Well," he said. "I, um—"

  The moment dragged.

  Suddenly Orpheus leaped up, claws extended, and scrambled up Toby to perch on his shoulder. "Ow, ow!" He batted at the creature. Kirstana laughed.

  "I could use a guide, sure," said Toby.

  Orpheus purred loudly in his ear.

  "You, I'll talk to later," he muttered.

  Chapter 9

  Late that evening, Toby found he couldn't sleep. Things were finally starting to go his way, as he explained to Orpheus. Kneeling on the floor, he frowned seriously at the denner and listed his accomplishments on his fingers. "One: I know Mom's on Destrier. I just have to get there. But, Two: I've figured out how to make money so I can get there. Three: I met a girl. Well, you met her, but we're going out together tomorrow!

  "And, four: Jaysir's unlocked this for me." He waggled the twentier's data block. "Shall we take a look inside?"

  There were two kinds of data in the block. It was mostly backups, which kind of made sense; what else would you stick in the bin of bot like this? The backups were in turn partly stuff he didn't recognize; but some were Consensus Empire worlds, dated after he'd left Sedna. Peter's work, then.

  He was as uneasy about opening these as he was about accessing the libraries-worth of information you could find online about his brother and sister. The way those library books took his family and turned their lives into dry discourses and reports, printed and categorized and cross-referenced.... it was supremely creepy. The idea that these Consensus backups might reveal some side of Peter that he didn't know was also unsettling.

  The second category of data in the block consisted of recordings made by the twentier itself. Shots of home: that seemed innocuous enough. So he linked the data block to his glasses and sat back against the bed.

  Orpheus came to curl up in his lap. "Okay," said Toby, "here we go." And he loaded the first of the twentier's own records.

  Ice, and a black sky. He was looking at the horizon of Sedna. The twentier was crawling forward across the reddish plains, along with five or six others. Its scanning software classified the rocks (actually rock-hard water ice) and sand (smaller chunks of the same) as it went, so virtual labels kept popping up to obscure the vista. A faint murmur of radio chatter between the bots sounded like crickets chirping.

  "Hmm." Toby fast-forwarded, getting a crazy zoom-view of crater rims, giant rocks and plains, and the legs of space-suited humans flicking back and forth. Then the horizon disappeared, and it was all about digging.

  "Well, crap." Digging. Then more digging. He zipped through hours and days and weeks of clawing, crumbling, heating, and zapping as the twentiers excavated the Sedna homestead. A couple of hundred meters below the surface, they hollowed out a vast circular cavern, and in this, other bots built a centrifuge. Sedna's gravity was miniscule, so they just pretended it didn't have any and made rotating habitats that spun to create centrifugal weight.

  Toby remembered this time, and despite the lack of human faces and voices in the images, he felt a strange sense of nostalgia. He knew that tunnel, and this rocky spire outside the entrance... wait, they were outside again. The twentiers were off to prospect.

  Fast-forward... more fast-forwarding... It was all stars and rocks, rocks and stars. He was just about to give up when suddenly light and sound burst on him. "Ah!" Everything was moving way too fast and he scrambled to back up the picture to where the change had happened.

  At first everything was a bright blur.

  Then came sound, a voice: "—Is it recording?"

  Toby sucked in a sharp breath. />
  The blur receded, sharpened, and became a face.

  "Yes, this makes us no better than our enemies," said Carter McGonigal, Toby's father, as he scowled into the twentier's little lenses. "But what choice do we have?

  "Let's get started."

  Both Toby's parents looked a little older than the last time he'd seen them. Mother, in particular, seemed careworn and tired. She was clutching a steaming coffee cup, and even though the twentier didn't record odors, Toby felt the pungency of its scent lighting up memories—so many of them!—of times she'd sat this way on Earth, and in the habitat.

  That wasn't where they were now. His parents had lit some lamps in one corner of the vehicle bay, outside the centrifuge and its meager comforts. Mother's backdrop was a wall of tools and machinery, and they both wore mud-smeared spacesuits.

  "It's not just that you're talking about spying on your own friends," Mother said now. "It's a slippery slope. Where's it going to end, Carter? Isn't this exactly how the trillionaires got to where they are? One little betrayal at a time?"

  "Yeah," said Father distractedly. He was poking at the air, obviously using an interface that probably connected to the twentier. "Same methods. Different goals."

  Toby stared at his parents, mesmerized by the little differences he could see in them. They were older—aged, for him, literally overnight. The change wasn't so drastic as in those pictures of Peter and Evayne, and that somehow made it all more real. It was a bit like seeing pictures of them from the time before he'd been born—equally strange and unimaginable, yet obviously real.

  Mother sighed. "So what do you want me to do?"

  "Well. These twentiers are right at the edge of the network. They're the bottom feeders of the colony, which makes them perfect. If the trillionaires really have planted a mole in our group—or more than one—then we can't trust the high-level network anymore. That's the first thing they're going to hack. So, the inter-net feeds, communications, entertainment... basically everything we use day-to-day in the habitats is suspect. That's why I want to build a secure network of our own out here. Using these guys, and the other infrastructure bots."

  She knelt down to peer into the twentier's eyes; to Toby it was disconcertingly like both his parents were examining him." What does that get us?"

  "Well, security, for one thing. If we've been hacked, the trillionaires could send a kill signal to some critical piece of life-support, and kill us all in our sleep. Then they move in and jump our claim."

  She reared back, obviously shocked. "You can't believe they'd do that?"

  "Of course they'd do that," Toby's father said impatiently. "In a heartbeat. Which is why we have to secure all the low-level infrastructure. Gas supplies, electricity. Heat. Hell, the circuits that open the doors. Route that stuff away from the top-level computers, and into our own network.

  "The second thing it gets us is spies. We can monitor them, like they're monitoring us. Only we'll use the most basic pieces of equipment as our bugs. Let 'em have the TVs and email."

  "I see you've thought this through." She frowned in thought. "How do we secure it?"

  "Turing-test biocrypto. Whoever issues a command to our equipment can't just have the right fingerprint, iris scans, or DNA. They'll have to have it all, and the personality markers, and more."

  "So," she said, "you, me, and who else?"

  "Peter and Evayne. Nobody outside the family. We don't know who the mole is."

  There was a momentary silence while he worked at his interface. Mother was staring at him.

  "... What about Toby?"

  Carter McGonigal froze, then slowly looked round at his wife. "Dear... if you want. We have his metrics. But... he's gone."

  She stood up, and her head left the frame of the picture. "He's missing," she said flatly. "Not the same. Not the same."

  Toby's mother walked away quickly, leaving his father staring into empty space, an angry expression on his face. After a long motionless minute, he stood up too, and walked away too; but in the opposite direction.

  The twentier sat staring at the wall, and the record didn't end until nearly a half hour later, when Toby's father came back and switched off the bot.

  There were many more records in the twentier's data block. Toby didn't have the heart to look at them—at least, not tonight.

  Even less able to sleep than before he'd accessed the record, he lay there in bed while Orpheus grumbled and shifted next to him. He thought about how the present had so suddenly become a distant past, and grew by turns tearful, self-pitying, angry and, at last, resigned.

  Here and now was where he was stuck, unless somebody had invented time travel while he'd been away. That meant he had a date tomorrow, and at the rate things were going, he was going to show up bleary-eyed and disheveled. That wouldn't do.

  "Get over yourself," he muttered, then turned on his side and mentally pushed away the past. "Tomorrow. Tomorrow..."

  Reciting that mantra worked, eventually. He slept.

  Toby caught one glimpse of Kirstana's house, but that was enough to tell him how important her family must be. She met him at her front door, wearing a combination of dark tunic and leggings, and a long dark cape whose hood was thrown back. The foyer behind her was actually a balcony at the top of a high open space; with a start he realized that the house clung to the outside of the local city sphere, and was shaped like a drop of water, frozen in mid-trickle down the aerostat's curve. Spiral stairways curled down to lower balconied levels within the drop. The big curving outer wall was one continuous sheet of glass-like graphene, so transparent that it seemed not to be there at all.

  "How are you?"

  "I'm good." Actually, he was; he had awoken feeling like he was doing the right things, however difficult it all was.

  Kirstana had stepped through the door and the large, hulking bot accompanying her closed it with a thump. "I hope you don't mind if I bring Barber," she said when she noticed Toby sizing up the bot. "After what happened the other day, my parents are giving me all kinds of grief for going out without a bodyguard."

  "Will he rip my arm off if I get too close?" Actually, Toby wasn't intimidated by the thing; he and the other kids had grown used to having similar devices around after Peter's kidnapping. It was remembering those days, not so long ago really, that had given him momentary pause.

  "Don't be silly." Kirstana set off with purpose down the street. "Meeting in person," she said as she walked. "One of those ancient customs that I just can't get used to. Back home, we'd be just as likely to send avatars and recover the memories later. After all, if you go yourself, you're, well, committing yourself to whatever experience you have in that place. That would have been so gauche where I come from."

  "And where, exactly, is that?"

  "Barsoom."

  He'd heard that puzzling name before. "I thought Barsoom was a storybook name for Mars."

  "Mars?" She rolled the word around in her mouth. "Maaaars. Never heard of it. Barsoom, though, that's the fourth planet of the solar system. Covered in ancient ruins and dried-out canals from all kinds of terraforming attempts. The water always drains away, but every thousand years or so drops another comet on it and tries again. The inside of the planet's getting quite wet at this point!"

  "... Right. And Barsoom's the new capital of the Lockstep?"

  "Well, that's the irony, isn't it?" She sighed. "Our family left because the place had become a backwater. It was dying. Again. But I remember it as a magical place. I'd get Barber to dig the sand away from some ancient doorway, and while he kept watch for the Tharks I'd crawl down in there with just a hand-lamp to find ancient hieroglyphs and barcodes. I'd wonder what kind of people had lived there, so long ago. If they were people, at all.

  "There was one faded hieroglyph I'd run into in a bunch of different ruins, but I could never find the translation to it. One day I came downstairs and my parents were sitting at the dinner table arguing over a holo. And in the middle of the holo was that glyph.


  "They told me it was one of the oldest symbols known—as old as the symbol for computer. The symbol meant lockstep. And a lock-step, they told me, was a place even older than Barsoom, older than nearly anything, but still alive! The locksteps had been forgotten on Barsoom for centuries, but there were stories if you knew where to dig them up. And those stories went back... dizzyingly far, from our civilization through the one before, from language to language, back all the way to the beginning. I fell in love with everything lockstep; and my parents noticed. They were glad, because they'd learned about another family that had moved away, and people said they'd gone to the McGonigal lockstep.

  "McGonigal!" Her eyes were shining as she said the name. "That name I'd heard, and I'd seen it too. It was written everywhere, in some of the oldest religious texts put down thousands upon thousands of years ago."

  "Religious texts..." He stopped, shoulders hunched, but Kirstana continued up the stairs, oblivious of his reaction. He hurried to catch up.

  The bubble-city Toby was staying in opened out onto another one at its top, and this one did the same to a third, higher one. Kirstana's house was near the top of this highest sphere, yet she'd been leading him upward since they left it. Now they were close enough to its sunlamps that big shades were needed to cool the stairs and galleries.

  "Are we going to an aircar platform?" he asked politely.

  Now she looked back and smiled, shrugged, and said, "What's the fun in sitting down in some vehicle while you fly? I can get us something much better."

  "What?"

  "Wings."

  The elevators and escalators continued on, until they reached a plaza—a broad balcony, really—that stuck out near the top city's solar lamps like a giant diving board. From here Toby could look out through the glass ceiling at the permanent storms, or down, through widening and converging rings of city and forest, through a gap to more of the same, down and down.