The glow revealed the children.
“Madre de dios!” Belita exclaimed. “But what are Rick and Kelly doing out here? And where's Paul?”
“Save your breath!” Carlos was frantically escaping his safety belt. “Blast away on the horn! Rouse everyone you can! Call 911!”
“Carlos, don't do anything foolish—”
But he was already rushing towards the porch. Kelly and Rick recognized him and seemed to scowl and mutter. Suspicion burgeoned but he had no time. He reached the door.
It was locked. Suspicion grew brighter and fiercer like the fire within. But he still had no time. In the car he kept a baseball bat for security. He ran back for it. Thus armed, he smashed a glass panel alongside the door and managed to reach the inside lock.
By now lights were coming on, windows being flung open as the car horn shattered the night silence. Slamming shut the kitchen door, which he found open, gained Carlos a few more precious moments before heat and smoke made the stairway impassable. Three at a time he dashed up it.
The front door was not the only one that was locked.
Suspicion approached certainty, but still he had no time. He smashed the flimsy jamb, found Paul sleepily approaching the window, aroused by the horn, dragged him down the stairs and staggering into the garden.…
With seconds to spare. Like a puff of breath from a dragon, the gas cylinder burst and blew out all the house's doors and windows. Flame erupted through the ceiling under Paul's room.
Distant but closing fast, sirens wailed.
Paul collapsed, choking from a lungful of smoke, but Carlos managed to retain his feet. Gasping, he found himself confronting Rick and Kelly. Their faces were stony and frustrated. He whispered, “You knew, didn't you?”
Impassivity.
“Paul said you spent most of your time scrolling around the net. That must be how you found out. I guess the Thinkertoy display at the mall must have been pretty widely advertised. And like the guy said, the protection that was supposed to make the chips harmless could be easily erased.”
He stood back, hands on hips, ignoring Belita, who clearly wanted to fuss over the children. He barely registered that Paul was albeit unsteadily regaining his feet. Before his friend could speak:
“But why?” Carlos pleaded.
The children exchanged glances. At length Rick gave a shrug.
“He was driving.”
After which Belita's importunities could no longer be ignored.
Paul Walker was afraid of his children.
As those three words made clear, he had good reason.
Zoomers
GREGORY BENFORD
Gregory Benford is a science fiction fan who grew up to be an astrophysicist and a science fiction writer. He is the most significant hard-SF writer in the generation after Larry Niven, and one of the most eloquent and vocal advocates of hard SF today. In addition to the Nebula Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, he has been given the United Nations Medal in Literature. His most famous novel is Timescape; his most recent, Sailing Bright Eternity. Benford's sequel to Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, Foundation's Fear, was published in early 1997. His “Zoomers” is a cyberspace romp with a hard-SF attitude. It first appeared in an anthology edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Larry Segriff, Future Net, devoted to stories of the “networks of tomorrow” and in a computer magazine. It's a positive, upbeat story about competition.
She climbed into her yawning work pod, coffee barely getting her going. A warning light winked: her Foe was already up and running. Another day at the orifice.
The pod wrapped itself around her as tabs and inserts slid into place. This was the latest gear, a top of the line simulation suit immersed in a data-pod of beguiling comfort.
Snug. Not a way to lounge, but to fly.
She closed her eyes and let the sim-suit do its stuff.
May 16, 2046. She liked to start in real-space. Less jarring.
Images played directly upon her retina. The entrance protocol lifted her out of her Huntington Beach apartment and in a second she was zooming over rooftops, skating down the beach. Combers broke in soft white bands and red-suited surfers caught them in passing marriage.
All piped down from a satellite view, of course, sharp and clear.
Get to work, Myung, her Foe called. Sightsee later.
“I'm running a deep search,” she lied.
Sure.
“I'll spot you a hundred creds on the action,” she shot back.
You're on. Big new market opening today. A hint of mockery?
“Where?” Today she was going to nail him, by God. Right under our noses, the way I sniff it.
“In the county?”
Now, that would be telling.
Which meant he didn't know.
So: a hunt. Better than a day of shaving margins, at least.
She and her Foe were zoomers, ferrets who made markets more efficient. Evolved far beyond the primitivo commodity traders of the late TwenCen, they moved fast, high-flying for competitive edge.
They zoomed through spaces wholly insubstantial, but that was irrelevant. Economic pattern-spaces were as tricky as mountain crevasses. And even hard cash just stood for an idea.
Most people still dug coal and grew crops, ancient style grunt labor—but in Orange County you could easily forget that, gripped by the fever of the new.
Below her, the county was a sprawl, but a smart one. The wall-to-mall fungus left over from the TwenCen days was gone. High-rises rose from lush parks. Some even had orange grove skirts, a chic nostalgia. Roofs were eco-virtue white. Blacktop streets had long ago added a sandy-colored coating whose mica sprinkles winked up at her. Even cars were in light shades. All this to reflect sunlight, public advertisements that everybody was doing something about global warming.
The car-rivers thronged streets and freeways (still free—if you could get the license). When parked, cars were tucked underground. Still plenty of scurry-scurry, but most of it mental, not metal.
She sensed the county's incessant pulse, the throb of the Pacific Basin's hub, pivot point of the largest zonal economy on the planet.
Felt, not saw. Her chest was a map. Laguna Beach over her right nipple, Irvine over the left. Using neural plasticity, the primary sensory areas of her cortex “read” the county's electronic Mesh through her skin.
But this was not like antique serial reading at all. No flat data here. No screens.
She relaxed. The trick was to merge, not just observe.
Far better for a chimpanzeelike species to take in the world through its evolved, body-wrapping neural bed.
More fun, too. She detected economic indicators on her augmented skin. A tiny shooting pain spoke of a leveraged buyout. Was that uneasy sensation natural to her, or a hint from her subsystems about a possible lowering of the prime rate?
Gotcha! the Foe sent.
Myung glanced at her running index. She was eleven hundred creds down!
So fast? How could—?
Then she felt it: dancing data-spikes in alarm-red, prickly on her left leg. The Foe had captured an early indicator. Which?
Myung had been coasting toward the Anaheim hills, watching the pulse of business trading quicken as slanting sunshine smartly profiled the fashionable, post-pyramidal corporate buildings. So she had missed the opening salvo of weather data update, the first trading opportunity.
The Foe already had an edge and was shifting investments. How?
Ahead of her in the simulated air she could see the Foe skating to the south. All this was visual metaphor, of course, symbology for the directed attention of the data-eating programs.
A stain came spreading from the east into Mission Viejo. Not real weather, but economic variables.
Deals flickered beneath the data-thunderheads like sheet lightning. Pixels of packet-information fell as soft rains on her long-term investments.
The Foe was buying extra electrical power from Oxnard. Selling it to users to offset t
he low yields seeping up from San Diego.
Small stuff. A screen for something subtle. Myung close-upped the digital stream and glimpsed the deeper details.
Every day more water flowed in the air over southern California than streamed down the Mississippi. Rainfall projections changed driving conditions, affected tournament golf scores, altered yields of solar power, fed into agri-prod.
Down her back slid prickly-fresh commodity info, an itch she should scratch. A hint from her sniffer-programs? She willed a virtual finger to rub the tingling.
—and snapped back to real-space.
An ivory mist over Long Beach. Real, purpling water thunderclouds scooting into San Juan Cap from the south.
Ah—virtual sports. The older the population got, the more leery of weather. They still wanted the zing of adventure, though. Through virtual feedback, creaky bodies could air-surf from twenty kilometers above the Grand Canyon. Or race alongside the few protected Great White sharks in the Catalina Preserve.
High-resolution Virtuality stimulated lacy filigrees of electro-chem impulses throughout the cerebral cortex. Did it matter whether the induction came from the real thing or from the slippery arts of electronics?
Time for a bit of business.
Her prognosticator programs told her that with 0.87 probability, such oldies would cocoon-up across six states. So indoor virtual sports use, with electrostim to zing the aging muscles, would rise in the next day.
She swiftly exercised options on five virtual sites, pouring in some of her reserve computational capacity. But the Foe had already harvested the plums there. Not much margin left.
Myung killed her simulated velocity and saw the layers of deals the Foe was making, counting on the coming storm to shift the odds by fractions. Enough contracts-of-the-moment processed, and profits added up. But you had to call the slant just right.
Trouble-sniffing subroutines pressed their electronic doubts upon her: a warning chill breeze across her brow. She waved it away.
Myung dove into the clouds of event-space. Her skin did the deals for here, working with software that verged on mammal-level intelligence itself. She wore her suits of artificial-intelligence…and in a real sense, they wore her.
She felt her creds—not credits so much as credibilities, the operant currency in data-space—washing like hot air currents over her body.
Losses were chilling. She got cold feet, quite literally, when the San Onofre nuke piped up with a gush of clean power. A new substation, coming on much earlier than SoCalEd had estimated.
That endangered her energy portfolio. A quick flick got her out of the electrical futures market altogether, before the world-wide Mesh caught on to the implications.
Up, away. Let the Foe pick up the last few percentage points. Myung flapped across the digital sky, capital taking wing.
She lofted to a ten-mile-high perspective. Global warming had already made the county's south-facing slopes into cactus and tough grasslands. Coastal sage still clung to the north-facing slopes, seeking cooler climes. All the coast was becoming a “fog desert” sustained by vapor from lukewarm ocean currents. Dikes held back the rising warm ocean from Newport to Long Beach.
Pretty, but no commodity possibilities there any more.
Time to take the larger view.
She rose. Her tactile and visual maps expanded. She went to split-skin perception, with the real, matter-based landscape overlaid on the info-scape. Surreal, but heady.
From below she burst into the data-sphere of Investtainment, where people played upon the world's weather like a casino. Ever since rising global temperatures pumped more energy in, violent oscillations had grown.
Weather was now the hidden, wild-card lubricant of the world's economy. Tornado warnings were sent to street addresses, damage predictions shaded by the city block. Each neighborhood got its own rain forecast.
A sparrow's fall in Portugal could diddle the global fluid system so that, in principle, a thunderhead system would form over Fountain Valley a week later. Today, merging pressures from the south sent forking lightning over mid-California. That shut down the launch site of all local rocket-planes to the Orbital Hiltons. Hundreds of invest-programs had that already covered.
So she looked on a still larger scale. Up, again.
This grand world Mesh was N-dimensional. And even the number N changed with time, as parameters shifted in and out of application.
There was only one way to make sense of this in the narrow human sensorium. Every second, a fresh dimension sheared in over an older dimension. Freeze-framed, each instant looked like a ridiculously complicated abstract sculpture running on drug-driven overdrive. Watch any one moment too hard and you got a lancing headache, motion sickness and zero comprehension.
Augmented feedback, so useful in keeping on the financial edge, could also be an unforgiving bitch.
The Foe wasn't up here, hovering over the whole continent. Good. Time to think. She watched the N-space as if it were an entertainment, and in time came an extended perception, integrated by the long-suffering subconscious.
She bestrode the world. Total immersion.
She stamped and marched across the muddy field of chaotic economic interactions. Her boot heels left deep scars. These healed immediately: subprograms at work, like cellular repair. She would pay a passage price for venturing here.
A landscape opened like the welcome of a mother's lap.
Her fractal tentacles spread through the networks with blinding speed, penetrating the planetary spider web. Orange County was a brooding, swollen orb at the PacBasin's center.
Smelled it yet? came the Foe's taunt from below.
“I'm following some ticklers,” she lied.
“I'm way ahead of you.
“Then how come you're gabbing? And tracking me?”
Friendly competition—
“Forget the friendly part.” She was irked. Not by the Foe, but by failure. She needed something hot. Where?
'Fess up, you're smelling nothing.
“Just the stink of overdone expectations,” she shot back wryly.
Nothing promising in the swirling weather-space, working with prickly light below her. Seen this way, the planet's thirteen billion lives were like a field of grass waving beneath fitful gusts they could barely glimpse.
Wrong blind alley! sent her Foe maliciously.
Myung shot a glance at her indices. Down nineteen hundred!
And she had spotted him a hundred. Damn.
She shifted through parameter-spaces. There—like a carnival, neon-bright on the horizon of a black, cool desert: the colossal market-space of Culture.
She strode across the tortured seethe of global Mesh data.
In the archaic economy of manufacturing, middle managers were long gone. No more “just in time” manufacturing in blocky factories. No more one-size-fits-all. That had fallen to “right on time” production out of tiny shops, prefabs, even garages.
Anybody who could make a gizmo cheaper could send you a bid. They would make your very own custom gizmo, by direct Mesh order.
Around the globe, robotic prod-lines of canny intelligence stood ready in ill-lit shacks. Savvy software leaped into action at your Meshed demand, reconfiguring for your order like an obliging whore. Friction-free service. The mercantile millennium.
Seen from up here, friction-free marketism seemed the world's only workable ideology—unless you counted New Islam, but who did? Under it, middle managers had decades ago vanished down the sucking drain of evolving necessity. “Production” got shortened to prod—and prodded the market.
Of course the people shed by frictionless prod ended up with dynamic, fulfilling careers in dog-washing: valets, luxury servants, touchy-feely insulators for the harried prod-folk. And their bosses.
But not all was manufacturing. Even dog-dressers needed Culture Prod. Especially dog-dressers.
“My sniffers are getting it,” she said.
The Foe answered, You're on t
he scent—but late.
Something new…
She walked through the data-vaults of the Culture City. As a glittering representation of unimaginable complexities, it loomed: Global, intricate, impossible to know fully for even a passing instant. And thus, an infinite resource.
She stamped through streets busy with commerce. Ferrets and deal-making programs scampered like rodents under heel. Towers of the giga-conglomerates raked the skies.
None of this Big Guy stuff for her. Not today, thanks.
To beat her Foe, she needed something born of Orange County, something to put on the table.
And only her own sniffer-programs could find it for her. The web of connections in even a single county was so criss-crossed that no mere human could find her way.
She snapped back into the real world. Think.
Lunch eased into her bloodstream, fed by the pod when it sensed her lowering blood sugar. Myung tapped for an extra Kaff to give her some zip. Her medical worrier hovered in air before her, clucked and frowned. She ignored it.
—And back to Culture City.
Glassy ramparts led up into the citadels of the mega-Corps. Showers of speculation rained on their flanks. Rivulets gurgled off into gutters. Nothing new here, just the ceaseless hum of a market full of energy and no place to go.
Index check: sixteen hundred down!
The deals she had left running from the morning were pumping out the last of their dividends. No more help there.
Time's a-wastin', her Foe sent nastily. She could imagine his sneer and sardonic eyes.
Save your creds for the crunch, she retorted.
You're down thirteen hundred and falling.
He was right. The trouble with paired competition—the very latest market-stimulating twist—was that the outcome was starkly clear. No comforting self-delusions lasted long.
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