Finity

by John Barnes

  “But you’re right, it doesn’t just apply to what happens in one brain, or even within one species. It could apply to any system in which creatures talk to each other, or try to.”

  Iphwin nodded, then stared into space for a moment, gently tapped himself behind the left ear a few times, and finally said, “Well, the senior staff think that’s a great answer to the question. They tell me that’s exactly what they came up with.” Looking at my startled expression, he smiled. “Yes, I have a small phone built into my skull. It insures that everything said to me is recorded. It’s a great convenience to a man with my many business affairs, but it does compel a certain strict virtue. Anyway, Lyle, that does end the interview officially; you’re hired and you will find the appropriate documents and information waiting for you by Monday morning. Plan on flying up here frequently for a few weeks, but you won’t be working out of this office as a permanent situation. We’ll get you set up in Auckland pretty soon.”

  “Thank you very much,” I said.

  Iphwin grinned at me. “Lyle, the pleasure is mine. I can’t tell you how glad I am that we have you for ConTech. You are accepting?”

  “Absolutely!” I said, standing up.

  “Good man. Always accept whenever you think the other person may be insane. You have no way of knowing how long an offer will stay on the table. This one, of course, would have stayed on the table quite a while, but you had no way of knowing that.” He grabbed my hand and pumped it up and down violently. “Thank you so much, so very very much. You are added to the team immediately, and you might have e-mail waiting for you when you get home. You can expect the first set of documents for your perusal, plus your first advance check to help you get organized for your-new job, to arrive by courier first thing Monday morning. Try to look them over before coming in on Tuesday. Till then, have a fine time this weekend, enjoy Saigon, and come back from it rested and ready to work.”

  Scarcely before I knew it I was downstairs filling out the innumerable forms that are conditions of employment everywhere, signing up for several kinds of insurance and savings plans, making sure that both the Dutch Reich and Her Majesty’s Inland Revenue got their appropriate cuts of what I would be making. I read through the contract, found it to be every bit as absurdly generous in its other terms as it was in salary and benefits, and signed it. In less than twenty minutes, my new friend, the limo who called everyone Mac, was picking me up from a garage in the pillar that held up the Big Sapphire. It was just past two, and my whole life had changed completely.

  “Hey, you, congratulations,” the limo said, as I got in. “We’re on the same team now. Back to your jump boat, Mac?”

  “That’ll be great.” It took me down the ramp and rose into hover mode as we reached the water.

  “I tell you what, Mac, shall I call Dr. Perdita and tell her the good news? She’s on one of our ConTech stratoliners on her way to Saigon right now.”

  “Much appreciated,” I agreed. “Sure, let her know that the news is good. It’ll give her more time to get the champagne and chill it.”

  “I’ll tell her just that, if you like, Mac. You want me to add anything sloppy and sentimental with that?”

  “Oh, the usual. I love her, I adore her, and I am not going to delay a moment till I can be with her.”

  Maybe it was just my imagination, but the robot seemed to have a trace of amusement in its voice when it said, a few minutes later, “Mac, she got the message, and the liner tells me she’s a happy girl.”

  By now we were hurtling along toward the shore. We whizzed between the two missile towers that guarded the harbor, heading straight in for the company pier this time. “Will it help you if I add more to your reference file?” I asked the cab.

  It made a strange, noncommittal noise that I thought must be its attempt to imitate a human grunt. “The reference you already gave was great, Mac, and I’m glad you’re still pleased. You science and technical types are the best friends we have. And Iphwin himself, of course. He spends a fortune every year defending us in court for defending ourselves against kids—attacks, blockades, graffiti, all that crap, no matter how much they’re breaking the law and no matter how careful and nonviolent the defense is, there’s always somebody suing and trying to have our accumulated personalities erased. I think every conscious machine in the world would like to work for Iphwin, Mac. He seems to treat his human help pretty good too, so—once again, welcome aboard, Mac, and may you ride in me many times in the years to come.”

  A few minutes later the limo ran up a ramp and made a hard U-turn, taking me back out on the pier to my jump boat. He departed with a friendly “Have a good one, Mac” and was gone before the jump boat finished waking up and got the gangplank out to me.

  “Mr. Peripart, things are in good order, but we are too low on fuel for a return to New Zealand,” the Skyjump said.

  “That’s bizarre,” I said. “We ought to have more than twice enough fuel. And anyway, we’re not going back to Enzy—we’re making a jump to Saigon next. That should have been in your memory as a next destination.”

  “Mr. Peripart, my record shows we’ve already been to Saigon and back. You went there just this morning, Mr. Peripart.”

  I was frozen with surprise. “Jump boat,” I said, to override the developed personality, “identify me.”

  “Voice print shows you are Mr. Lyle Peripart my owner and sole commander Mr. Peripart sir,” it said, in the flat monotone that happens in new machines, or when you have to override their acquired patterns.

  “Jump boat, did you fly to Saigon this morning? Give details.”

  “Yes Mr. Peripart Sir we arrived in Surabaya at 12:12 am local time and at 12:21 local time you ordered me into shutdown mode Mr. Peripart Sir at 12:40 you woke me up and you and an unknown passenger boarded Mr. Peripart Sir the unknown passenger did not speak during the entire trip so that I do not have a voice print Mr. Peripart Sir at 12:43 we moved out of the slip for a jump to Saigon Mr Peripart Sir you dropped off the unknown passenger at Their Most Catholic Majesties’ dock by the palace in Saigon 01:14 Saigon time which is the same as Surabaya time Mr. Peripart Sir then you immediately departed under a special clearance from the government at Saigon and returned here at 01:48 local time Mr. Peripart Sir at 01:56 you ordered me back into shutdown mode Mr. Peripart Sir you next arrived here at 02:21 pm Mr Peripart Sir.”

  The repeated “Mr. Peripart Sirs” were an annoying feature, but every robot, by Enzy law, arrives programmed to be excessively respectful, and the most deprogramming you can do is to give it a single address per speech, or every fifteen seconds, as a substitute. When you go back into the unmodified interface, as you must do to detect tampering or find out if your robot has begun to shade the truth excessively, you’re back to the locked-in formal address.

  What concerned me more was that whatever had happened— and if the fuel had been consumed, the likelihood that there had been an unauthorized trip to Saigon was considerable—the jump boat certainly thought it had made the trip, with me. This meant it had been spoofed by experts, the kind that usually are not joyriders or freeloaders, but people working for some government intelligence agency or other.

  I did the checkover manually, and it was absolutely clear that the jump boat had gone to Saigon and come back, just a few hours ago. Even the circulating coolant was still warm. “Did you have fuel delivered?” I asked the boat.

  “I don’t understand the question Mr. Peripart Sir,” the jump boat said.

  That was a bizarre response; usually you only hear it when children are playing nasty games like asking a robot the meaning of life or what’s the difference between a duck. “Was fuel delivered anytime after our arrival here this morning, either before or after your flight to Saigon?” It was a long shot, because the low tanks indicated probably not, but it was always just possible that whoever had been monkeying with my jump boat might have bought fuel and therefore created a traceable transaction.

  “I don’t understand the
question Mr. Peripart Sir,” the jump boat said, again.

  I was beginning to get a prickly feeling on the back of my neck. It’s one thing to think that your boat might have been used by a smuggler—you read about that stuff in the papers all the time. Or even a spy making an untraceable flight—everyone knew those happened. It would be annoying and frightening enough even if it had just been taken by someone who went somewhere with it and then brought it back, hoping I wouldn’t notice what had happened. But if so, why didn’t he top up the tank, and thus conceal the situation completely?

  This was something else again. They didn’t buy fuel to conceal their flight, and yet they had the resources to fake my voice print. Now it looked like they had tampered somehow with the robot’s memory, which meant they’d done a hell of a lot more than just take a joyride—and also meant I’d be checking this thing out for at least an hour before I could feel safe taking off. If I called the Dutch Reich port authorities, they had much better equipment than I did and could quickly get going on the problem of who had done what, and how much of it, to my jump boat’s brain.

  But this case was weird, and anywhere in the Twelve Reichs, presenting the cops with something weird was a very bad idea. They were apt to decide that everyone associated with it, most especially including you, needed to be held for sustained questioning, and that you must surely have done something or you wouldn’t be associated with anything weird. A century after Hitler’s death, the old Nazi ideal of absolute purity had faded into the easier notion of rigid conventionality. It made them easier to live with but no more attractive.

  Since I wasn’t going to the police, I was going to have to check out and overhaul the thing myself, and the sooner I started the sooner I’d be done. Naturally I began with the brain—if I could trust that, I could use it to check everything else out. Groaning with the thought of how long it would take, I pulled out the manual, sat down in a stool by the pilot’s chair, detached the chair, and opened up the half-dome that covered the protected inputs for the brain.

  Twenty minutes later I had established that whatever had been done had been done at the deep, hardcoded level, which is supposed to be impossible anywhere except the factory, and requires many specialized tools and a full set of hard-to-get access codes. Logically, then, as my hypothetical spy, robber, or joyrider, I had to imagine someone who had technical skills enough to steal any craft in the harbor but chose a middle-priced jump boat. Whoever it was then boldly took my boat for a joyride, and somehow forgot to gas up to cover what he’d done.

  An hour of hand-confirming each readout showed that the brain was just fine in its perceptions. I got the tank topped up by a robot tanker while I was working on the brain. Finally I recorded the recent memories, told the boat to do a restart—and found that it no longer remembered its side trip, or being refueled, or anything between landing here in the harbor and waking up just now. The unknown genius joyrider had covered his tracks with a restart-activated self-erasing memory editor— which had worked perfectly—but hadn’t bothered to buy two-thirds of a tank of fuel. It was one hell of an annoying anticlimax.

  At least, since the brain was now fine, it could run the other checkouts, so I had it do them. Now very late and exasperated, I was on the brink of buttoning the jump boat up and scheduling a departure when the phone rang. It was Helen. “I just heard,” she says. “This is wonderful!”

  “You really think so?”

  “You don’t sound happy.”

  I told her what had happened; the job offer, of course, but also the threatening note and the mystery joyride that someone had taken my jump boat on.

  “But...” she finally said. “But... Lyle, are you feeling all right?”

  “Why?”

  “Because early this morning, when my liner landed in Surabaya for a stopover, you called me up and said your interview with Iphwin wasn’t until later, so you offered to take me over to Saigon and drop me off at the imperial landing, by the shopping center. You said you had a standing permission to use it or something. So you flew me over here, and I’ve been shopping ever since, and when I got back to our hotel room—where I’m expecting you to turn up sooner or later, laddie—I found a message from Geoffrey Iphwin saying he’d hired you. So I called you up at once—he did hire you, didn’t he?”

  “He did,” I said, sitting back in the pilot’s chair. “And I called you on the liner to let you know.”

  “But I didn’t take the liner; you took me over here.”

  “Also, my meeting with him was at the regular time,” I continued.

  “Well, that isn’t true either, or anyway it isn’t what you said.”

  My head ached. “Anyway, you are at the Royal Saigon Hotel in Saigon, right?”

  “Right. We can sort it all out, I’m sure, as long as you’re all right. You haven’t been feeling dizzy or confused, or anything, have you?”

  “Not till just now.”

  I could tell she was worried about me, and so was I; it appeared that I had some kind of severe temporary amnesia— except that I couldn’t have been interviewing with Iphwin and running Helen over to Saigon at the same time. After we rang off I ran a quick check from the communication computer on board, and it was absolutely clear—I was hired at ConTech on exactly the terms Iphwin had specified, right at the time I remembered it happening.

  Oh, well, at least I would get to spend an interesting weekend. The Royal Saigon was eighty years old, built in the 1980s to commemorate the formal crowning of whichever junior branch of the Japanese Imperial line had just been picked to run Cochin-China, one of the many little chunks broken off of the old French colony of Indochina. The Imperial House had never been noted for its taste anyway, and perhaps the junior branches had even less esthetic judgment, for the Royal Saigon was as gaudy as possible, decorated with hundreds of statues and thousands of bas-reliefs of lions, absolutely none of which appeared to be even faintly Cochin-Chinese. There were Siamese lions, Bengal lions, Punjabi lions, Ceylonese lions—every kind of lion except anything from Cochin-China or Annam. But if you could endure the color and the busy sculpture, there were consolations— spectacularly sumptuous bedroom suites, the sort of place where you take a girl when you’re really hoping to do something stranger than you’ve ever done before, which might just be what would happen with Helen, given the way the weekend was going.

  I turned back to getting permission to pull out of the harbor. A voice from the hatchway above and behind me—a deep woman’s voice that sounded like she’d lived all her life on cheap whiskey and cheaper cigars—said, “Forget it. When Iphwin decides to fuck with your brain, he fucks it so hard that it never goes straight again.”

  My first thought was that the woman coming in through my upper hatch was a harbor whore looking to trade sex for a ride to somewhere—she had coarse bleached-blonde hair, bright red lipstick, the telltale scars of a facelift, near-black eye shadow. Her breasts had probably been modified too since they stuck out like torpedoes through her pink sweater. Her skirt, too short and too tight, revealed too much leg, making the varicose veins apparent. She had to be sixty, at least. She walked over to my chair, stood over me, and said, “May I come in?”

  The jump boat spoke up. “Person detected on board. No intrusion detected beforehand.”

  “I’m wearing my screen,” she said, her eyes staying focused on me. “Guess I called attention to myself as soon as I spoke.”

  “Unidentified person please name self.” When the woman didn’t speak her name, the jump boat spoke again, this time urgently. “Mr. Peripart please answer are you being held prisoner?”

  “Not so far,” I said, keeping a wary eye on the woman who stood over me. I wasn’t sure whether to try to get out of the pilot’s chair or not. “Who the hell are you?”

  “My name is Billie Beard, and if you’re going to make any jokes about the bearded lady I’ve heard ‘em all. Did you get my note this morning?”

  “The one in my newspaper? Yes.” I was irritated
more than alarmed; I remembered what Iphwin had told me about her. I hated traitors in general—I’d been nervous enough about dealing with someone who even operated in the Twelve Reichs, as Iphwin did—and the thought of an expat working for Nazi police made me sick. But I kept my voice carefully level, keeping in mind that the jump boat would be recording the conversation, and said, “So what is it you would like from me, Billie Beard?”

  “Just call me ma’am. Jump boat local legal ordinance requires you shut down now.” I heard the jump boat agreeing and saw the control panel go blank, but before I had an instant to protest, Billie Beard grabbed me by the shirt and yanked me out of my chair; even without the heels she was a good four inches taller than me, and easily strong enough to lift me right off the ground—which she did.

  “What?” I squeaked.

  “There’s a great deal we want to know. Starting with all the questions that Iphwin asked you when he interviewed you for your new job.”