Kiln People

by David Brin

  Meanwhile, I focused on the scene of his death.

  Outside the city, it’s like another world. A primitive realm of immense areas where vision is blurry, even nonexistent … unless you happen to be there in person, using your own eyes.

  Adult: If a tree falls in the forest with no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?

  A modern child: It depends. Let me check if any of the local cams had sonic or vibrational pickups.

  Cute. But in fact, most places on Earth still aren’t covered by any close-in cams at all! It’s a lot easier to disappear in the countryside, beyond any sign of habitation.

  Unfortunately, that’s where Maharal spent his last hours, and possibly days.

  I started with police images of the crash site, offering stunning holographic detail out to a diameter of two hundred meters surrounding Maharal’s wrecked vehicle — a big Chevford Huntsman with an extravagant methane engine. It lay crumpled and half-burned at the bottom of a ravine. The river was dry this time of year, but giant granite boulders testified to the smoothing effects of a torrent that scoured the streambed during some winters.

  The desert, I thought, glumly. Why did it have to be the damn desert?

  Overhead, spanning the gully, stood the highway viaduct where Maharal’s vehicle began its fatal plummet, the guardrail a twisted snake of shredded metal. I spent some time nosing around the scene, shifting and interpolating from one hovering copcam to the next. While emergency vehicles came and went, muscular dittos heaved at the wreck — sometimes with fancy tools, but then dropping them to use raw strength — striving to free the dead scientist’s corpse.

  The road made a sharp turn just before reaching this lonely site. Skid marks intersected the maimed guardrail … as if the driver had realized his peril suddenly, though too late. This, combined with results from Maharal’s autopsy, convinced authorities that he must have simply dozed off at the wheel.

  The tragedy never would have happened if he used the car’s auto-navigation system. Why would someone drive at night, in an unlit desert, with all safety features cut out?

  Well, I answered my own question, robot-piloting leaves a trace. You don’t use autonav when you’re worried about being followed. Maharal’s gray ditto had admitted that the good doctor spent his last days oscillating in and out of paranoia. This supported the story.

  Reversing the flow of time, I watched emergency vehicles converge backward and then disperse again, one by one, till just a solitary camview was available … a speckly image from the first sheriff’s cruiser to arrive on the scene. When I tried ratcheting still earlier, the fatal patch of desert not only went dark, it vanished from memory, like a blind spot you couldn’t even look at. It appeared only on maps. An abstraction. For all anyone knew for sure, it did not even exist during the time in question.

  Farm country would’ve been better. Agriculturalists use a lot of cameras to monitor crops. Anything irregular, like a stranger, might show up. But the hectare in question featured just a simple EPA toxicity detector, vigilant against illegal dumping. The nearest real lens was more than five klicks away — a habitat scanner programmed to count migrating desert tortoises and such.

  Still, I didn’t give up. There are ten thousand commercial and private spy-sats orbiting this planet, and even more robot aircraft cruising the high stratosphere, serving as phone relays and newscams. One of them might have been focused on this obscure place when the accident happened, recording a handy image of Maharal’s headlights, swerving and then spinning as the car plunged to its doom.

  I checked … and there was no such luck. All the high-resolution lenses were busy elsewhere that night, zooming onto busier sites. Tech-pundits keep promising we’ll have WorldOmniscient viewing in a few years, with close-ups of the whole Earth available to everyone, all the time. But right now, that’s just sci-fi stuff.

  My best bet was to try a little trick of my own, using the coarse data from a micro-climate orbiter. Not a true camera, the weathersat is assigned to track wind gusts across the southwest, using Doppler radar.

  Traffic stirs the air, especially in open countryside. Long ago I figured out that you can trace the passage of a single vehicle, if conditions are right. And if you’re lucky.

  Using special processing software, I massaged the weathersat’s recorded scan of the area near the viaduct, moments before the crash. Looking for very small patterns, I prodded and palped the Doppler elements till they were grainy, fluctuating at the edge of chaos.

  At first, it looked like nothing more than a storm of multicolored noise. Then I began picking out patterns.

  There!

  It looked like a trail of mini-cyclones, spinning along both sides of the desert road — a ghostly wake, barely perceptible against a background of noise-washed pixels. Pushing the clock slowly backward from the time of the crash, I followed that spectral trace as it writhed southward along the road, vanishing and then reappearing like a phantom snake, moving at the pace of a speeding car.

  This might work, I thought, so long as Maharal didn’t pass any other traffic … and assuming the air stayed quiet all that lonely night.

  Almost any outside disturbance could erase the wraithlike spoor.

  Comparing distance and time scales, I could tell one thing about Maharal’s condition that night as he sped toward his tryst with death — the Universal Kilns scientist sure must have had a bee up his shorts! He topped over a hundred and twenty klicks along most of that curvy road. The guy was just asking for trouble.

  Could someone have been following him? Chasing? The trail of cyclonic disturbance was too ragged and smeared to tell if it was made by one vehicle or two.

  I asked Nell to keep following the faint pattern as far back in time as she could.

  “Acknowledged,” my house computer answered, almost sounding human. “If you aren’t too busy, there are some other matters that have come up while you were immersed in work. Your colleague Malachai Montmorillin called several more times. I put him off, per your instructions.”

  I felt a little guilty. Poor Pal. “I’ll make it up to him tonight. Orders stand.”

  “Very well. I have also received a pneumatic shipment from Universal Kilns. Five new ditto blanks.”

  “Put them away. And please stop bothering me with trivia.”

  Nell went silent. I could see on one monitor that she was concentrating on following Maharal’s desert track. So I turned away to check on the cyber-avatar that I had unleashed in the city cam-web.

  The results looked gratifying!

  Purchased images and camera-posse reports were pouring in, providing a picture of where Yosil Maharal had spent much of the last few months, at least when he was in town. I skim-sampled the resulting movie at high speed, tailing the late researcher as he moved from one eyeview to the next … shopping in a fashionable arcade, for instance, or visiting his hygienist for a routine oral-symbiont upgrade. The mesh of spottings still amounted to only a couple of hours a day, on average. But after all, Maharal spent most of his time working in the lab at Universal Kilns, or at home.

  Except for those mysterious trips to the countryside, that is. It was essential to forge a link between his city trail and those cryptic sojourns out of town.

  Still, I felt content with progress so far. If the city mesh kept filling in at this rate, I should have something worthwhile to report to Ritu.

  A sharp twinge brought my hand to my right temple. One byproduct of all this work was a growing headache. Real neurons can only take so much holovideo input. Anyway, it was time I got up to relieve my bladder.

  Stopping at the chemsynth unit on my way back, I ordered a tension potion — something to ease the knot in my neck, but without any thought-dulling endorphins. I took the frothy concoction back to the study … only to find someone in my place! Somebody built like me, but with longer fingers and a disdainful expression that I seldom wear. At least I hope I don’t.

  The glossy, emulated skin was the color of deep sp
ace. Agile hands danced over my controller-array.

  “What are you doing?” I demanded. The ditto had its own cubbyhole.

  “Tidying up this mess while waiting for you to come out of the john. Your search avatar thinks that it’s tracked down most of Maharal’s missing in-town movements.”

  I glanced at the screen. “Yeah? Eighty-seven percent coverage ain’t bad … for the time Maharal wasn’t at home or the lab. What are you getting at?”

  Again, a sardonic smile.

  “Oh, nothing, maybe. Except that some of these so-called sightings may not be Dr. Yosil Maharal at all.”

  I gave the ditto a hollow look, which only invited more disdain.

  “Care to make a wager, Boss-me? I’ll bet my inload that Maharal’s got you fooled. In fact, he’s been tricking everybody for a very long time.”

  12

  Leggo My Echo

  … or how a green frankie seeks enlightenment …

  Out of politeness, I waited till the crippled purple preacher finished her sermon before I stood up to leave the Ephemerals. Unfortunately, the sweetly inspirational tone was marred by an altercation that broke out in the vestibule as I made my way outside. A man whose skin tone verged egregiously between golem-beige and human-brown shouted while waving a placard covered with in flowing, cursive script:

  You all miss the point.

  There’s a next step a’coming …

  Angry congregants milled, trying to nudge the interloper through an exit without shoving — on the offchance that he might be real. The uncertainty fostered by his ambiguous coloration was augmented by sunglasses, along with flaming red hair and a beard that could either be fake or genuine. The fellow was committing half a dozen misdemeanors just by looking this way — like some kind of ditto-human crossbreed — an effect he must have been aiming for.

  “You’re all a bunch of daisies!” he cried, as a dozen or so Ephemerals crowded him toward a side door. “Colored on the outside, but dull as flesh within! Don’t you know it takes blood to pull off a revolution? The protoplasm elite will never give way to the New Race without violence. They’ll cling to domination till they’re wiped off the face of the Earth! Only then can we progress to the next level!”

  I had to admit, standing there, that sometimes you just gotta admire the passion of the truly insane — a passion that bulls right past all sense or reason. I mean, was he really suggesting that dittos can exist, somehow, independently of organic originals who were woman-born? How was that even remotely logical? The variety of inventive ideas — and ideologies — that people can come up with never ceases to amaze me, especially when they’re stoked by the ultimate drug, self-righteousness.

  Turning and departing by the front door, I descended wide stone steps to the street with the fanatic’s words still ringing in my ears.

  “Get ready!” the crackpot yelled in a fervid voice that seemed to cling, even as I walked away.

  “A new age is coming for the ditsenfranchised … if you prepare!”

  Nobody wanted to talk about the waiter who caused a brief uproar last night, at La Tour Vanadium.

  When I arrived, most of the restaurant staff — contract specialdits from busboys to maître d’ — were darting about wordlessly, clearing away lunch and setting tables for the early dinner crowd. A few customers lingered while twin chartreuse waiters hovered nearby. Gym bags lay at the archies’ feet. A nice chardonnay can be just the thing after exercise, soaking warm neurons with a happy glow.

  Optimists predict that someday a real body may last as many decades as a ditto has hours. Well, far be it from me to begrudge this.

  Wearing cheap paper overalls from a vending machine, and still feeling throbs in my back from that hasty patch-up at the Ephemerals, I knew I wouldn’t impress the manager. One copper-colored eye narrowed behind a monocle-spex, scanning to verify my blurry copy of Albert Morris’s investigator license. He’d know in seconds if my maker had disowned me.

  Would Albert do that, just because I refused to clean his toilets? Could I already be on the hit list of some pervo hunt club? Worse, he might declare me a danger to society. A police exterminator could be swooping down, right now, like an avenging hawk …

  I was betting my life on Albert’s softheartedness, unable to renounce his first frankie.

  The manager flipped up his monocle, handing back the smudged ID. “As I told your house computer, there is nothing to investigate. You can’t seriously be interested in yesterday’s little accident! Since when is it a felony to spill some drinks and break a little glass? We obtained waivers from every customer, offering free meals in recompense.”

  “Generous, but—”

  “Is someone reneging? Is that why you’re here? We can call an online jury to watch recordings. Any reasonable panel—”

  “Please. I’m not here to plant a grudge lien. I just want the waiter.”

  “There’s nothing to extort. He was covered by our insurance, until we terminated his contract.”

  “So he was fired. Did he work here long?”

  “Two years. This morning he had the nerve to claim that last night’s incident wasn’t his fault. His ditto never made it home, so it must have been hijacked and replaced by an imposter!” The manager sniffed disdain. But if I had hackles, they’d have risen.

  “Give me contact info and I won’t bother you again.”

  He glared. It would be simple to snub a utility green. But what if Albert himself followed up?

  “Oh … all right.” His monocular flipped down as he signaled commands. Then, with a dismissive grunt, he turned away.

  Damn. Instead of speaking or writing the name, he sent an info-blip to Nell! I could phone her for it, but then maybe I’d have to talk to Albert, like a teen crawling back to Dad. Double-damn. Heading for the exit, I wondered about this obsession to solve one minor riddle before I expire. The matter seemed unimportant. Why worry about it?

  I stopped in the doorway, my cheap green senses adjusting to daylight, when something caught my eye. Literally. Like a gnat darting nearby, it came buzzing near my face. I swatted, deterring the pesky thing briefly. Then it came back.

  Premature ditto decay can attract scavengers, and there was plenty of damaged pseudoflesh hanging off my back. I swiped at it again. It tumbled — then streaked right at me, diving with uncanny speed!

  I fell back against a wall, clutching my eye. Worse than the pain were the explosions of color! Skyrocket flashes converged, forming shapes. Forming letters:

  No time

  Take a cab to Fairfax Park

  Pal

  13

  Doing Their Ditto Work

  … or how Tuesday’s second gray starts getting paranoid …

  Unconsciousness can be disturbing to a realperson.

  For a ditto, it’s like death. And wakening is akin to being born again.

  Where am I?

  A sideways glance tells me I’m still in Irene’s hive. Across a wide chamber, I glimpse the huge pale figure of her archetype body — the queen — tended by more than a dozen reddish mini-copies. Full-sized versions come and go swiftly on errands. Not one says a word. No one has to.

  In bleary contemplation, I envision an atom’s core and its surrounding fog of virtual particles. Irene-duplicates keep emanating from the maroon-colored mass to perform missions for the hive. Others — aged and experienced — spiral in bearing the modern nectar: knowledge to accumulate and share with more copies. And at the center, a realperson whose role it is to absorb and redistribute that knowledge, using imitation bodies to do everything else.

  I’ve got to admit, Irene is impressive. Her self is very large.

  Come on, Albert, focus.

  How long was I out? Feels like moments. They were going to repair me … fix the awful damage inflicted by those angry gladiators in the Rainbow Lounge.

  Did it work? There’s no pain, but that means nothing.

  Arms and hands all seem to work. Clasping my side now … my leg. />
  In place of gaping wounds, I feel lumpy ridges, like hard scar tissue. Beneath, large areas feel numb, senseless. But all limbs flex and stretch satisfactorily. Splendid work, for a quick splice and patch job.

  But then, if anyone would have advanced repair technology, you’d expect it to be Queen Irene.

  Sitting up, I find I’m clothed in generous gray cloth.

  “How do you feel?”

  It’s the high-quality Irene — dyed from a gray blank — standing alongside her associate, the male golem with plaid skin. Vic Collins.

  “Surprisingly good. What time is it?”

  “Almost two-thirty.”

  “Huh. That didn’t take long.”

  “We’ve automated the repair process considerably. Without much help from Universal Kilns, I might add.”

  “So you suspect them of suppressing this technology, too?”

  “As you can imagine, the company prefers that people buy lots of new blanks. Of course, fixing damaged dittos would be economical, ecological, merciful—”

  “Does this relate to your other concern? A breakthrough in extending ditto lifespans.”

  Vic Collins nods. “They are linked. You can hardly expect UK to be eager about sharing technologies that undercut their market. But the law says they must patent and publish advances or else lose them.”

  Hence the eagerness of this small consortium to do a little quasi-legal espionage. If they can get the goods on a suppressed or hoarded technology, the Whistle-blower Prize could be substantial. Up to thirty percent of the resulting patents. In this case, it could make them tycoons. I’m tempted to pursue the topic, but time can press when your remaining span on Earth is measured in hours. Unlike Irene, I have no rig to return home to. Not if I keep the deal we’ve made.

  “Speaking of UK,” I prompt.

  “Yes, we should be going, if you feel ready.”

  I hop off the table. Except for the unpleasant feeling of numbness under my scars, things appear to be okay. “Did you get the stuff?”