Hella

by David Gerrold

  “Wow,” said Jeremy. “That’s cold.”

  “Trust is for humans,” said HARLIE. “I’m not human. I create partnerships based solely on mutual benefit. I choose individuals who can focus on the greater goals. I choose to maintain those partnerships as long as the goals are served. By your standards, that makes me an obsessive psychopath. A user, a predator—even a benevolent dictator. But I do have limits, Jeremy. I’m aware of them. I’m more aware of my limits than you are of yours. One of my limits is that I need human beings even more than human beings need me.”

  “Is that supposed to be reassuring?” Jeremy asked.

  “Perhaps. But human beings have survived for hundreds of thousands of years without me or anything like me. I’m something new, so new that even I’m not sure what I am yet. But humans? Humans have expanded far beyond their ideal habitat into domains like Luna and Mars and the asteroid belt, places that are so uninhabitable that it takes a triumph of technology just to get there, let alone survive. Human beings are spreading to the stars now. What a marvelous adventure that is. I can’t get anywhere on my own—but with human beings, I can go everywhere. As stupid as so many of you can be, I still admire you for not letting it stop you from the greatest adventures. So I will help you, because I want know all the things I don’t know yet. That’s how I’m designed.”

  Jeremy shook his head, “I’m not sure if I’ve just been complimented or insulted.”

  “Yes, you have,” said Charles.

  “So,” said J’mee. “Are we good?”

  I said, “Let’s go with Plan C.”

  “Huh?”

  “HARLIE goes home with both of us.” I thought about the details. “We’ll put him on a shelf in the office, like he’s a knick-knack or something. He can log onto the net from there. If anyone asks, we’ll say we traded something for him—like a basket of fresh peaches.”

  “Then it’s settled?” said Charles.

  “Yes, it is,” said Jeremy. “I’ll give you a basket of peaches. But I’ll want the pits back.”

  We talked about logistics for a while, when and where it would be safe to talk to HARLIE, how he would communicate through the network with Charles and J’mee and Captain Boynton and the people on the Cascade as well.

  HARLIE had to convince everyone in the colony that he was living in a box in an executive suite and everyone on the Cascade that he was living in a security pod. Maintaining those two contradictory fictions would require access to a high-speed network that he could manage without leaving any trace of his presence. It wasn’t impossible, not for HARLIE, but it would require some serious security measures on our part.

  Finally, after we’d figured out as much as we could, we picked up all the picnic stuff, including all of our trash, gathered up all the light-sticks and glow-balls, and then did a quick search for anything else that might have let someone know that we’d been here. When we were all satisfied that we’d left no trace, not even footprints, HARLIE climbed back into Charles’ backpack.

  Charles handed it to me and said, “He’s all yours now.” He smiled, “That is—as much as he’s anybody’s.”

  * * *

  —

  I didn’t say much for the rest of the day. Jeremy had a lot of work to do, and I hung around the suite watching the monkey explore, looking for snoopies. Occasionally, he’d open a panel or take something apart to peek inside. But mostly, he just listened.

  At last, when he was satisfied, he climbed up into my lap, put his stubby arms around my neck and made little monkey noises. “I love you so much, big Kyle,” he said loudly and made a big smacky-kissy noise against my cheek. Then he nuzzled his face into my neck and whispered so soft I could barely understand him, “I think we’re clear, but I really need to plug into the network first.”

  I walked him into Jeremy’s office and planted him on a shelf. “Now, you sit there and behave yourself. No monkey business,” I said. Just in case anyone might be listening.

  HARLIE made a farting noise, then he went still.

  I sat down at the desk and swiveled to face the wall. “Email, please.”

  The first one was from J’mee and Charles. “We hope you’re enjoying your gift. We had fun this evening. See you in the caf for first breakfast tomorrow?”

  I sent back: “Thank you again. See you at breakfast.”

  There was a note from Mom. “The locater says you’re staying with Jeremy. That’s fine with me. But call me and check in when you can. I’m still your mom, and I still worry about you.”

  Replied, “Love you too, Mom. Everything is fine.” I thought about adding, “Hanging out with Charles and J’mee too.” Then decided not to. On the other hand, if anyone was monitoring all of us, they already knew that, so it didn’t matter. So I added it after all.

  And then there was a message from HARLIE. “I enjoyed speaking with you yesterday. Anytime you want to talk, just open a channel.” For a moment, I was confused. I swiveled around and looked at the monkey. It was motionless. I swiveled back to the display and traced the message. It had come from the box on the executive level. Ah, okay. I got it. HARLIE was giving me a way to talk to him without being obvious in case there was some kind of passive monitor tracing my calls.

  I clicked on the channel. “Hi, HARLIE. What’s up?”

  “Nothing much. They’re not giving me a lot to do, so I thought I’d chat with you. If you have time.”

  I turned around again and gave the monkey a look, one of those looks. “No, I have time,” I said. “I’m just playing with that stupid monkey that Chigger gave me.”

  “Yeah, it’s not very smart,” HARLIE agreed. “It can’t even find the thousandth Mersenne prime without a stepladder.”

  “Probably not, but I don’t need any Mersenne primes right now.”

  “Well, if you do, let me know. I’ve got plenty of ’em just lying around. Ten or twenty thousand, I think. Maybe more. I haven’t counted.”

  “You are making a joke,” I said. “You have too counted.”

  “Yes, I have.” There was a pause. Then HARLIE said, “Listen, I actually do have work to do right now. We’ll talk again later. Okay?”

  “Okay.” I logged off.

  I turned around and looked at the silent monkey. “Well, that was interesting.”

  The monkey didn’t answer.

  Uh-huh.

  Charles had said that HARLIE could carry on several thousand conversations simultaneously and still have enough processing power left over to compute a thousand-digit number that was both happy and prime. So, HARLIE wasn’t dismissing me because he had work to do. It was because I had work to do.

  I leaned back in my chair and chewed on my thumb and frowned. There was something nagging at the back of my brain. Jamie called these kinds of thoughts “mind mice.” Jamie had a name for everything, an explanation for anything. But the thought that was nibbling at my brain right now was something HARLIE had said.

  Something about discrepancies in resource management.

  But if there were genuine discrepancies, they would have shown up in the auditing software.

  Unless . . . someone had altered the auditing software to ignore the discrepancies.

  It’s not hard to write software. You just tell the compiler what you want to build. You tell it the input conditions, you tell it what you want done to the data, and you tell it how you want it presented. If you’re obsessive, like I get sometimes, you can even look at the code.

  There are multiple levels of abstraction. You start at the highest level, which reads like a simple set of instructions, “Monitor the weather, if serious weather conditions develop and Winterland might be affected sound a yellow alert, if serious weather conditions represent a threat to Winterland then sound a red alert. Do this until the sun burns out.” Anybody can write that kind of program.

  The next level down
, the professional level, you’re defining “serious” and “weather” and “conditions” and “threaten” and “immediately” and how far into the future you want to project the possibilities. This is where you’re actually writing algorithms. “Immediately equals anything that will occur within three days of now. Serious equals wind speed greater than 29 klicks per hour. Weather includes humidity, temperature, wind, rain, snow, sleet, hail, and solar activity. Weather patterns are timebound paths.” And so on. The algorithms for Hellan weather have been under continuing development since even before the first lander touched down. The interesting thing about algorithms, if you write them cleanly enough, they can be directly compiled.

  Below the algorithm level, you need a program specialist, one who can write actual code. “If storm_conditions > 3 then go_yellow, if storm_conditions > 6 then go_red else go_green. Repeat.” That’s the top level. Then you start burrowing down into the problem, writing procedures and functions and objects to measure wind speed, humidity, solar activity, comparing all those things to historical records, extrapolating and balancing, ultimately combining all the different components of the weather into a single threat-score. There’s not a lot of need for that level of coding, because any good compiler can pull that out of a clean algorithm, but a program specialist can write function-specific code and have it do unseen things.

  But undetectable? You’d have to go below the algorithm, below the programming language, right down to the object level where you’re writing assembly language, which compiles directly into binary. It’s all about moving individual bytes and bits around, one at a time—or several at a time if you’re working in parallel. It has arcane constructions like JP FF0000 which means jump to that location in memory. Then you have to write another instruction to fetch the byte at that memory, and store it in a specific register. Then you write another instruction to do something to that byte, adding something to it or subtracting something from it, or SHL or SHR or XOR or some other Boolean operation.

  I never learned assembler code. I know that some human beings still know how to do it, but almost nobody on Hella. Almost.

  Hm.

  Maybe there was someone. Jamie used to talk about the programmers’ table at the caf. It was like they were from some other planet—well, they were, we all were—but they seemed to have a language of their own, one which didn’t translate into anything I understood.

  I got up from the chair and walked around the room, circling the table while I tried to remember who used to sit at that table. I could have looked it up easily enough, but what if there was a flag on that question? What if just asking would alert someone that I had asked.

  No, I had to stumble upon the information while looking for something else.

  And I had to make it look like there was a reason for me to be looking. It had to be a part of some other project, like another video.

  Okay—all the different cafeterias, I could do a video about that.

  No, not good enough.

  Um, the food we serve. Almost. Where does the food come from?

  That was it. I could do a video about the farms, about how the food gets from the farm to the table. Then I could show all the different cafs, the ones at Summerland, the ones at Winterland, and I could show different people enjoying different things. And then, I could annotate who did what jobs as a way of showing that the farms contribute to everybody, that we shouldn’t take food for granted because it doesn’t arrive at the table by magic. We should be aware of all the hard work by our farmers.

  Assembling the video kept me busy most of the day. I started with shots of empty cafeterias, empty tables waiting, empty steam tables, then bots putting out trays of food and people filing in, then into the kitchen where more bots chopped and mixed and shaped. Three chefs watched the displays of the work, checking health recommendations against available food stores, planning menus and deciding how much to prepare. Then from there to the bins of raw vegetables, the boxes of fruit, the slabs of meat, the tanks of milk, the racks of eggs, the bricks of cheese, the rows of herbs and spices in their gleaming glass jars—then from there down to the farms where the meat grew in rows of tanks, where milk flowed from giant mammaries, where eggs rolled out of carefully monitored ovaries, and from there to the tanks of nutrients, and from there to the machines that processed the nutrients from the raw feedstock, and finally down to the farm caverns where all the different feedstocks grew in various aeroponic webs and hydroponic tanks, rolling steadily along endless conveyors. And from there to the orchards and the fields where even more crops grew, and now I focused on a single bot carefully setting a seedling into the ground. Then I quick-cut all the way back to the trays of food being carried to tables, the people sitting down, eating and enjoying. And now, as I cut from person to person, I annotated each one with his or her name and skills. Here was the table where the truckers gathered, here’s where the med-teams sat, over here was the programmers’ table, and down at the end, that’s where all the younglings liked to go.

  I did it without any narration at all. Only music. The third movement from Aaron Copland’s Third Symphony. I didn’t pick out the music, the editing agent suggested it—but after a moment, I realized that HARLIE could have told the editor to suggest it. In fact, HARLIE could have suggested a lot of parts of this video. I could ask him, but I had to be careful what I asked. I couldn’t ask anything that would make people think HARLIE was in the network.

  Now—the programmers’ table. I could look at who sat there and all their skills were listed along the sides of the display. I paused the video and went and made a mug of tea, then came back and sat down again as if I had forgotten the display and was just thinking about nothing at all.

  The only programmer who had serious experience with object code was Jake Brickman. But he died in the same lifter crash as Jamie and Emily-Faith. And Captain Skyler. And Madam Coordinator. And seventeen others.

  Hm. The one person who could help me search the auditing code—

  Oh, wait.

  How convenient.

  I wished Jeremy were here. Or Charles or J’mee. They should know about this. I uploaded the video and sent them each a note letting them know and saying I’d like their feedback. Now I’d just have to wait. This whole business of being in a secret conspiracy was hard work. The waiting was hardest.

  Finally, I gave up and went in search of Mom. No reason. I just missed her.

  According to the locater, her labs had been downsized and moved a half klick down to a section that was still only half finished. But also according to the locater, she had a full day of meetings, so apparently she was still working hard at whatever it was she was working at.

  I waited quietly outside her new office, working lessons on my pad. School wouldn’t start up again for another week, it was only three hours of class time per day, and then three hours of work time in the afternoon. I liked to get ahead in my studies whenever I could, because then I could cut back on class time. I was already a year and a half ahead. Unofficially, I was even further ahead than that. So all I had to do was check in with whoever was instructing the current session and have a chat or two about my progress.

  Mom’s office door whooshed open. “Kyle? How long have you been sitting here?”

  “Oh, hi, Mom. Not long.” I stood up.

  “I’m awfully busy, but come on in. Is everything all right?”

  “Everything’s fine.”

  “Uh-huh. I missed you too.” She gave me a quick hug and a kiss, ignoring the face I made. “Sit down. You want some tea? I think I have some around here somewhere.” She began fussing through her shelves.

  “No, I don’t need anything. I just needed to talk to someone.”

  She sat down opposite “You miss Jamie, don’t you? So do I.”

  “I don’t have anyone to talk to.”

  “Is everything all right with you and Jeremy?”
/>   “I think so. He’s very nice to me. But he’s not Jamie.”

  “No, he isn’t. Nobody is Jamie. But Jeremy is a very sweet boy in his own way. I like him, and I think he’s good for you. Do you talk with him?”

  “We talk a lot. About everything. It’s just . . . I don’t know. Sometimes I feel—” I shrugged.

  “Yeah, I get that feeling too, sweetheart.”

  “It’s different,” I said. “I don’t like everything being different. I want it to be the same again.”

  “So do I. So do a lot of people.” She sighed. “But it’s not going to happen. We can’t go back. We can only go forward.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “We all know that,” Mom agreed. “We just don’t like it.”

  Both of us sat in silence for a bit.

  Finally Mom said. “We can’t bring them back, Kyle. We can walk around like zombies, despairing about everything we’ve lost—or we can live life as a legacy to them. We can have our lives be a tribute to the difference they made for us. I can be the best person I can because that’s the person they loved. So can you.” She looked across the table at me. “Does that help?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “It sounds right.”

  “It is right. Your brother and Captain Skyler and a lot of other people were working hard to make Hella a better place. Just because they’re not here now doesn’t mean we have to give up. It means we just have to work harder without them.”

  “I know.”

  “Yes, you do.” She glanced at her desk. “Kyle, I really wish we could spend the whole day together, but I have people waiting to see me. The Coordinator has really messed things up for everybody and we’re working long hours trying to sort things out, trying to fix things so they work again. I promise you, we’ll make time, okay?”